RTHK: 'No deal' looms as MPs fail to agree on Brexit MPs on Monday once again failed to find a majority on any alternative Brexit plan before them, leaving Britain's chaotic path towards leaving the EU mired in uncertainty less than two weeks before its departure date. Brussels has set Britain an April 12 deadline to agree to the divorce terms Prime Minister Theresa May has struck with the bloc, find an alternative or crash out of the European Union. MPs have already rejected the Brexit divorce deal three times, shredding May's authority. The failure to agree a deal made a chaotic departure with no deal "almost inevitable, according to one leading member of the European Parliament. Parliament's lower House of Commons seized the initiative last week by holding a first round of votes on eight alternative Brexit options but failed to find a majority on any of them. Refining them down to four, backbenchers voted again on Monday, hoping to find one solution that most of them could agree on. All four failed to find a majority although the result was close for proposals to hold a second referendum and negotiate a permanent customs union with the EU. Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay hinted the government could now bring its deal back for a fourth vote this week and avoid a longer delay to Brexit that would mean holding European Parliament elections in May. He warned that otherwise "the default legal position is the UK will leave the EU in just 11 days time" without a deal an option that experts have warned could cause huge economic disruption on both sides of the Channel. "The House of Commons again votes against all options. A hard Brexit becomes nearly inevitable," Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and head of the European Parliament's Brexit steering committee said. "On Wednesday, the UK has a last chance to break the deadlock or face the abyss," he tweeted. (AFP) ______________________________ Last updated: 2019-04-02 HKT 09:35 This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Cecilie_Arcurs/iStock(NEW YORK) -- Today, more than three months into 2019, is Equal Pay Day -- representing the number of extra days a woman had to work to in order to earn what her male colleagues made last year. The day calls to attention the continuing gender pay gap -- women make about 80 percent of what their male counterparts earn, according to the non-profit American Association of University Women (AAUW), which advocates for equality. Over the course of a career, that can mean around $1.2 million less in earnings on average for a woman who is a college graduate compared to her male peers. Women can help counter the systemic pay gap on an individual level by asking for the salary they deserve, experts say. ABC News' Good Morning America tapped two experts -- Work Party author Jaclyn Johnson and Gloria Blackwell, who leads salary negotiation workshops for women around the country -- to share their tips for women. The first tip is to recognize that, in the words of an infamous break-up line, it's not you, it's them. In this case, it's true. "Its not about fixing women or blaming women. Its about providing the skills and tools and resources to be educated and informed," said Blackwell, senior vice president of fellowships and programs for AAUW. "We know the problem is systemic and its bigger than any one woman and any one negotiation." Read below for Johnson and Blackwell's top six tips: 1. Negotiate after a first offer Women who say yes to the first salary offer they hear from a prospective employer are missing a big chance to score more money, the experts say. Johnson, also the founder of Create + Cultivate, recommends going back to the employer and saying, "Ive done my research and the going rate for this position is this and the reason I think I deserve more is because of x,y and z." If the employer is firm on their offer, regain control by telling them you'd like to re-negotiate your salary after your first three months on the job. Then, spend those three months proving your worth. "After three months, if you prove youre invaluable theyre going to want you to stay," Johnson said. 2. Do your research to know your worth Thanks to the Internet, it is a lot easier know for women to know how much others in comparable positions are making and what a reasonable salary is for their city or region. Johnson cited websites like Glassdoor.com and Fairygodboss.com as two great online resources. She also recommends women tap their networks to ask about salary expectations, especially with other women. "Women need to come together and understand its not competitive," she said. "You want to be making the same range if youre doing the same job. You have to be able to have those conversations and have an open dialogue to be able to figure it out." 3. Bring receipts to the negotiating table Don't go to your boss' office to ask for a raise without having solid examples of your work to back up your request, both Johnson and Blackwell say. Work examples include what Johnson refers to as both soft and hard data, i.e. you grew the company's social community by 20 percent and you also jumped in and worked on another account and went above and beyond, or you helped two coworkers grow in their positions. Bringing specific examples to the negotiation shows you are not shying away from your success. Also, don't think any task you did well is too small to be mentioned, Johnson advises. "Anything that is over and above the call of duty is important," she said. "Showing up [to work] doesnt seem important but if youre the first one in and the last one out every day thats something to include." 4. Keep a 'congrats' file for yourself Know the feeling when you have to file your taxes and you kick yourself for not keeping better track of everything throughout the year? Don't do that when it comes time to prepare for a salary request. Blackwell recommends creating a specific file or folder and filling it up throughout the year with your accomplishments, whether it's an email chain, your notes from a conversation with a client or coworker, a conference you spoke at, a development course you took -- anything that shows your value to your employer goes into that file. "When you have a consolidated picture of what it is you brought to the table, its a very powerful means of expression," Blackwell said. "Ive heard people say, 'When I see at the end everything that I had accomplished, it was really amazing to me and gave me the confidence to move forward.'" 5. Know how to deflect certain questions Nearly everyone has had the moment of freezing or stumbling when an employer asks in the interview process about your salary history or salary expectations. In fact, asking about salary history is illegal in some locations, like New York City. Still, the chances are high that some versions of those questions will come up in an interview, so Blackwell says to practice your answers ahead of time so you're not caught off guard. Here are some examples of replies she recommends using: "Id like to know more about the position and potential benefits before we start discussing a salary." "My current job is much different and Id just really love to learn more about the position." "Its really tough for me to give a number right now because there are so many things that go into this role." "This is a different position than I had before and based on my research ..." 6. Take into account more than your paycheck While the big figure of your salary often seems like the end-all and be-all, it shouldn't be, according to both experts. If your salary offer is lower than what you want, think about what Johnson calls the entire compensation package, pieces like health care, matching 401(k), flex time and the ability to work from home. In the same way, when asking for a salary increase, if your employer is not able to give you a bump, they may be able to offer you a bigger vacation package, the ability to telecommute or bonuses. At the very least, you can use the conversation with your boss to let them know where you want your salary to be in the next six months or year and agree on how you can get there. "Dont think that as employers we're thinking about the bottom line and not thinking about rewarding [employees]," Johnson said. She recalled one employee who came to the negotiating table at a year-end review with a presentation on what theyd done and also what they wanted to do in the future. "I wasn't able to give the full [salary] request, so what I said was, 'If youre going to keep performing and meeting these revenue goals, Ill give you a bonus for these revenue goals ,'" Johnson recalled. "Tie your bonus to it and thats on you, thats your hard work playing out." Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Counselor Wang Xinmin addresses journalists on March 27, 2019 in Freetown, Sierra Leones capital. Charge dAffairs of the Chinese Embassy in Sierra Leone, Counselor Wang Xinmin has pledged his countrys commitment to further strengthen the existing relationship between China and Sierra Leone on all development fronts. Addressing a news conference at the Embassy in Freetown on Wednesday, Counselor Wang highlighted some of the major cooperation plans between the two countries as well as the development prospects ahead. Speaking on the Fish Harbor Project, he recalled the signing of an agreement between the then Chinese Ambassador to Sierra Leone, His Excellency Wu Peng and Sierra Leones Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Dr. Alie Kabbah on behalf of the two, in January 2019. The agreement outlined the economic and technical cooperation between China and Sierra Leone. China agreed to provide Sierra Leone with 200 million yuan (around $30 million) to explore and implement the Fish Harbor Project. Currently, Chinese companies are negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Fisheries on the shore facilities investment. On the National Fibre Backbone Phase II project, Counselor Wang explained the plan to lay a 721.5-kilometer fiber-optic network covering 15 major cities in the northern, eastern and southern regions of Sierra Leone, with a project value of $30 million. Presently, he said China is waiting for the Sierra Leonean side to confirm the project and prepare relevant information at the request of the Export-Import Bank of China, at which time the Chinese side will continue to promote the follow-up work together with Sierra Leone. On Military Aid Gratis to the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF), the Charge dAffairs said it would be implemented to further develop the friendly relationship between the two countries armed forces, and added that the Chinese Ministry of Defense provided 50 million yuan military aid gratis to RSLAF. The gratis, he said, will be utilized for the refurbishment of military officers quarters among other things. China has also expressed its willingness to strengthen Sierra Leones Foreign Service Academy to provide better training services to career diplomats, for which the Sierra Leone government has proposed to construct a foreign Service Academy by using a Chinese government aided fund. As a partner who always acts swiftly to the requests of Sierra Leone, Wang said China is actively studying the project. Another major area of development is in the field of agriculture, which China recognizes as one of Sierra Leone governments top priorities under the New Direction Agenda. China, as a great agricultural country, is willing to share its experience and strengthen cooperation with Sierra Leone on agriculture development while actively studying agricultural cooperation projects in an investment + aid model, Wang remarked. Recently, a good number of Chinese companies have shown an interest in investing in the West African countrys agriculture sector, and a number of companies have signed agreements with Sierra Leones Agriculture Ministry. Under educational cooperation, more than 13, 000 Sierra Leoneans went to China for various training programmes in 2018 with the sponsorship of the Chinese government, and more than 100 Sierra Leonean students furthered their study in China through the Chinese Government scholarship programme. This years programme has already received a large number of applicants. uttara@tribuneindia.com Satya Prakash Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 2 Congress said on Tuesday it intended to amend the Constitution to make the Supreme Court a Constitutional Court that will hear and decide cases involving the interpretation of the Constitution and other cases of legal significance or national importance. In its election manifesto, released by party president Rahul Gandhi, Congress called for establishment of Courts of Appeal to hear appeals from judgments and orders of high courts. The Court of Appeal will sit in multiple Benches of three judges each in six locations, it said. Three-and-a-half-year after the Supreme Court declared the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) unconstitutional and revived the Collegium system under which judges appoint judges, Congress called for a National Judicial Commission (NJC) to appoint judges to the higher judiciary. The NJC will be comprised of judges, jurists and parliamentarians and will be serviced by a secretariat. Names of suitable candidates will be placed in the public domain and the reasons for selection will be published to ensure that the entire process is transparent, the Congress manifesto stated. All vacancies in the Supreme Court and high courts will be filled by NJC within two months, it promised. An independent Judicial Complaints Commission would be set up to investigate complaints of misconduct against judges and recommend suitable action to Parliament, the manifesto stated. The party also promised to enhance representation at all levels of the judiciary of women, SC, ST, OBC, minorities and other under-represented sections of society. It called for fixing uniform retirement age of judges of the Supreme Court, high courts and judicial members of tribunals at 65 years. This will prevent post-retirement assignments for serving judges and allow more opportunities for qualified persons to serve as judges or judicial members, the party said. Besides, it also promised to amend the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 to strike a balance between powers of security forces and human rights of citizens and to remove immunity for enforced disappearance, sexual violence and torture and bring in a law to prohibit custodial torture. Congress said if voted to power, it would repeal law on sedition and de-criminalise defamation. Interestingly, the Supreme Court had dismissed Rahul Gandhis petition seeking to declare unconstitutional Section 499 and Section 500 of IPCwhich criminalise defamation. shalender@tribune.com New Delhi, April 1 The Delhi High Court Monday dismissed a petition seeking stay on the release of Prime Minister Narendra Modis biopic till the General Election results are out. A Bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A J Bhambhani refused to entertain the Public Interest Litigation which had also sought to the Election Commission of India to act against the alleged violation of the model code of conduct by the makers of the movie. We are not going to interfere with it. You go to the censor board or the EC, the Bench said, dismissing the plea. The petitioner, a lawyer, sought directions to the movie producers to postpone the release till the declaration of LS polls results. The movie, PM Narendra Modi, is scheduled to hit theatres on April 5. Petitioner Sujeet Kumar Singh said in the plea that according to the election schedule announced by the EC on March 10, the voting will taken place in seven phases between April 11 and May 19 and with the announcement, the model code of conduct has come into force. It said the release of this biopic during the election time could be seen as nothing but a campaign strategy and will influence voters. It added the films release with this title was a clear violation of the model code and the movies title was same as the name of the contesting candidate from Varanasi. PTI laxmi@tribune.com Amir karim Tantray Tribune News Service Jammu, April 1 After it learnt that Jaish-e-Mohammad was behind the Pulwama terror attack, the police believe that the Hizbul Mujahideen could be behind the Banihal car blast which occurred on March 30. Preliminary investigations have revealed that the accused, Owais Amin, son of Muhammad Amin of Vail in Shopian, belonged to the Hizbul. He was arrested from Gund area of Banihal aboard a tipper on the national highway last evening while trying to flee to the Valley. He used a Santro car, the registration number and chassis number of which were tampered with, DGP Dilbag Singh told the media today. He said after gathering clues from the site and locals, the police launched a search with the help of the Army and other forces. The accused, with burn injuries received during the blast, fled after he failed to trigger another blast, hitting his vehicle into a CRPF vehicle on the highway, the DGP said. He called it a fidayeen attack similar to the one in Pulwama on February 14. We recovered two LPG cylinders, gelatin sticks and other ammunition from the site, he added. laxmi@tribune.com New Delhi, April 1 Tensions continue between India and Pakistan as the Indian Air Force on Monday scrambled two Sukhoi-30 fighter jets after sighting a Pakistani drone and a group of four F-16 fighter jets along the Indo-Pak border in the Khemkaran sector of Punjab. Though sources confirmed the development, the IAF spokesperson refused to comment on the matter. Sources said the Sukhoi-30 MKI jets were deployed soon after a Pakistani unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was seen hovering over the border, and the F-16s were close by. The drone retreated to the Pakistani side after the Indian jets were scrambled. Both sides continue to have combat air patrols, testing each others nerves. UAVs of both countries have been noticed hovering in enemy territory. Post the Balakot airstrikes on February 26 and the air duel a day later, there have been a series of incidents of Pakistani drones coming close to the Indo-Pak border. A UAV which intruded into Rajasthans Sriganganagar sector was shot down by the Army. Another drone was shot down in Bikaner sector. TNS rchopra@tribunemail.com Washington, April 2 India shooting down one of its own satellites was a terrible thing as it created about 400 pieces of orbital debris, the chief of NASA has said, warning that the risk of debris colliding with the International Space Station (ISS) has risen by 44 per cent since the weapon test. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on March 27 that India has achieved a historic feat by shooting down its own low-orbit satellite with a ground-to-space missile. Only the US, Russia and China have anti-satellite missile (ASAT) capabilities. National Aeronautics and Space Administration Administrator Jim Bridenstine said about 60 pieces of debris have been tracked so far, of which 24 are going above the apogee of ISS, the point of the space stations orbit farthest from the Earth. That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris and an apogee that goes above the space station. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight that we need to see, he said. Bridenstine said not all of the pieces were big enough to track and NASA is right now tracking objects 10 cm or bigger. The risk from small debris as a result of the ASAT test to ISS went up 44 per cent over 10 days. So, the good thing is its low enough that over time this will all dissipate, he told his NASA colleagues. Soon after the ASAT test, India said it was done in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris. Whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back onto the earth within weeks. By conducting the test, the Ministry of External Affairs said, India was not in violation of any international law or treaty. Interestingly, Bridenstine is the first top official from the Trump administration to come out in public against Indias ASAT test. A day after India successfully carried out its test, acting US defence secretary Patrick Shanahan warned that the event could create a mess in space but said Washington was still studying the impact. Bridenstine said NASA is learning more and more every hour that goes by about this orbital debris field that has been created from the anti-satellite test. We are charged with commercialising of low earth orbit. We are charged with enabling more activities in space than weve ever seen before for the purpose of benefiting the human condition, he said. All of those are placed at risk when these kinds of events happen, Bridenstine said as he feared Indias ASAT test could risk proliferation of such activities by other countries. He said a lot of debris from the 2007 direct ascent anti-satellite test by China is still in space. PTI amansharma@tribunemail.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 2 India had once again sought access to Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former Indian Navy officers jailed by Pakistan for alleged espionage. In a note verbale issued to Pakistan, India regretted deep concern over maltreatment and delays in repatriation of Indian prisoners besides seeking access for its diplomats to five jailed prisoners. The others, besides Jadhav, are Mohammad Javaid, Abdul Hakeem, Muhammad Ismail and Salfikar Ali. India has also asked Pakistan to expedite the grant of visas to the members of a medical team that can assess the mental condition of believed-to-be-Indian prisoners of unsound mind lodged in different jails of Pakistan. Further, there are 385 Indian fishermen, whose nationality has been confirmed and conveyed to Pakistan and who have been languishing in jails despite completing their sentences. India has requested urgent and concrete steps to repatriate them to India at the earliest, along with their boats. The note verbale also expressed serious concern on the delayed information of the death of an Indian fisherman despite the Indian High Commission repeatedly taking up the matter of his poor health condition. This is not the first such case. The information about the death of two more Indian fishermen was conveyed after inordinate delay. It also called for the immediate release and repatriation of 10 Indian civilian prisoners lodged in Pakistan jails who have already completed their sentence and whose nationality has been confirmed and conveyed to Pakistan. They include Babli Bhai, Jaspal, Mohammad Ismail, Musharraf Ali, Shoaib, Shamshuddin Alam, Murtaza Hussain, Vahid Khan, Muhammad Khalil, Ghulam Farid and Tilak Raj. The Ministry of External Affairs said it had been consistently raising with Pakistan its concern regarding missing Indian defence personnel, including Prisoners of War, believed to be in Pakistans custody. It again sought steps to locate, release and repatriate the missing Indian defence personnel believed to be held in Pakistan custody. laxmi@tribune.com Sandeep Dikshit Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 1 Iran is offering itself as cheaper destination for medical tourism to beat the debilitating impact of US-led sanctions on its mainstay of oil trade. The country is considering the easing of visa requirements for China and plans a major push in India to project itself as a reliable and inexpensive destination for medical treatment, including transplantation of organs, said senior Iranian Embassy officials here. Iran is already a go-to destination especially for eye and plastic surgeries for people from Iraq, Central Asia and Oman. This is part of a worldwide trend where only well-heeled are opting for old-style medical tourism of travelling to First World while the others scout for inexpensive foreign hospitals manned by professionals. On the general safety parameter, Iran ranks with the UK making it a magnet for general tourists. However, except for the Shia population, Iran holds few charms for other Indian tourists who prefer European and South East Asian destinations. Embassy officials said Iran in the recent past has been ranked by Bloomberg as among the top 30 most efficient healthcare systems of the world. Unlike oil trade, payment for medical tourism is yet to become a problem though western credit and debit cards such as Mastercard and Paypal do not function in Iran. The indigenous answer the MahCard provides the option of transferring money from the foreigners overseas bank account to an Iranian currency debit card. The Iranian expectation is that medical and general tourism can net $20 billion annually and help relieve the pressure on its exchequer after US President Donald Trump rescinded the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and instead announced a fresh round of sanctions. Iran also offers naturopathy with its bouquet of hot water springs, mineral water fountains and sweet and sour water lakes for treating several diseases at low cost and without any side effects. Officials say Iran has over 850 government and private hospitals with high quality standards which can provide best medical treatments in various specialties. Officials said four lakh medical tourists had travelled to Iran during 2017-18, earning it about $1.2 billion in precious foreign exchange. However, the move could pit the Iranian medical sector against the Indian medical corporates that are currently attracting medical tourists from countries that Tehran is targeting Central and West Asian countries. monicakchauhan@gmail.com Satya Prakash Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 2 Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Tuesday defended in the Supreme Court the construction of life-size statues of herself and her partys election symbolelephantin various parks in Uttar Pradesh. It an affidavit filed in the court, she said public money was spent in accordance with the law. She said the statues represented the will of the people and that there was nothing new about it. Funds for construction of the said memorials and installation of statues have been sanctioned through budgetary allocation after approval of the budget by the State Legislature and the passing of relevant Appropriation Act by the State Legislature in accordance with the Constitution of India and Rules, the BSP chief said. All the expenditure incurred for construction of Memorials and installation of the statutes forms part of the Appropriation Avt passed by the UP State Legislative Assembly after discussion and voting by the Members of the Legislative Assembly, the affidavit read. The Supreme Court had on February 8 said Mayawati had expressed its tentative view that she needed to refund to the state exchequer the public money spent on her statues partys symbol elephant at various parks in Lucknow and Noida. While hearing a 10-year-old petition by advocate Ravi Kant, the top court had asked her to file an affidavit. Contending that public money could not be spent on creating own statues and symbol of ones political party, petitioner Ravi Kant alleged that crores of rupees was spent during 2008-09 to glorify then chief minister Mayawati. He has also demanded a CBI probe into the matter. On Tuesday, she said the memorials and statues of herself and other leaders were intended to promote values and ideals of various saints, gurus, social reformers and leaders among the public and not intended to promote the symbol of BSP or to glorify herself. She said: I decided to dedicate my entire life for upliftment of the downtrodden society and for achieving this I also took a decision to remain unmarried. Mayawati said in her affidavit that her statues came into being as the will of the state legislature to represent the will of the people. She sought dismissal of the petition terming it politically motivated and a gross abuse of process of court of law. Maintaining that construction of memorials and installation of statues in India was not a new phenomenon, she pointed out: During the Congress regime, the agencies of the Central Government and the State Government have installed statues of various Congress leaders namely, Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao etc. across the country with public funds. She added that other political parties in power at the Centre and states had also done this. The former UP Chief Minister specifically mentioned the 182 meter tall statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patelthe Statue of Unityby the BJP government in Gujarat, 25-feet statue of former PM Atal Behari Vajpayee in Lucknow by the state government, and former Andhra Pradesh CM YS Rajsekhara Reddys statue by then Congress Government of the state. The Memorials, Sthals and Parks have been constructed by the State Government in the memory of social reformers and their statues have been installed to pay tributes to them. The memorials have been developed for the public to draw inspiration from the lives of great personalities of social reformers and leaders who devoted their lives for the upliftment of dalit, poor, oppressed and downtrodden sections of the society, she submitted. These memorials are intended to promote the values of ideals of various Saints, Gurus and social reformers and leaders among the public and not intended to promote the symbol of BSP or to glorify the answering respondent (Mayawati), the affidavit states. Denying that statues of elephants were installed to promote BSPs election symbols, Mayawati said elephants standing in welcome posture is part of Indian culture and the Election Commission has already decided the issue. The EC had on January 7, 2012, ordered that statues of Mayawati and elephants be covered during the state Assembly election. The top court had issued notice to the Uttar Pradesh government and Mayawati on May 29, 2009, on the PIL that highlighted the issue of misuse of public money for installing her statues and partys symbol at parks in Lucknow and Noida. shalender@tribune.com Shiv Kumar Tribune News Service Mumbai, April 1 Prime Minister Narendra Modi today kicked off the BJP-Shiv Senas election campaign in Maharashtra by directly playing the Hindu card. Addressing a rally in Gandhis district Wardha, Modi accused the Congress of defaming the majority Hindu community by coining the term Hindu terror. Is there one instance of Hindus committing an act of terror in thousands of years? But they have besmirched the name of peace-loving Hindus as terrorists. Now, they are afraid to contest elections in a constituency dominated by the majority population... They have to contest from a constituency where the majority is in a minority, Modi said in apparent reference to Congress president Rahul Gandhi opting to contest from Keralas Wayanad in addition to his traditional Amethi seat. Wardha and six other constituencies in Vidarbha go to the polls in the first phase of the Lok Sabha polls on April 11. Modi went on to allege that the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) were not patriotic enough as the two parties questioned the success of the Balakot airstrike. Do you want to vote for people who want to be heroes in Pakistan or heroes in India, Modi asked. The PM also hit out at the NCP for betraying the farmers. Sharad Pawar used to be a farmer earlier. Now, he has forgotten you (farmers), Modi said at the rally which was attended by a large number of farmers. He alleged that Pawar had backed out of contesting the Lok Sabha election after fearing defeat. Modi went on to say that he was a chokidaar of toilets. I am a chowkidar of toilets and I am proud of being called one. I am protecting the honour of crores of Hindustani women who can now use these toilets, he said. He then went on to congratulate the Indian Space Research Organisation for successfully launching the EMISAT satellite from the Sriharikota space station earlier today. monicakchauhan@gmail.com Ajay Banerjee Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 2 Indian Navy ex-chief Admiral L Ramdas has shot off a protest letter to the Chief Election Commissioner, Sunil Arora, against the remark Modi ji ki sena (Modis Army) made by Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath at an election rally on Sunday. The Armed Forces are not a private force belonging to any individual or political party, and therefore any suggestion to that effect is completely unacceptable, Admiral Ramdas said, asking the EC to take suitable action to arrest such irresponsible actions. Admiral Ramdas, who lives in Maharashtra, had some three weeks ago, expressed concerns about the growing politicisation of the armed forces by political parties. The EC had issued guidelines advising political parties to refrain from using pictures or images of armed forces in their campaigning for the forthcoming General Election. At a rally on Sunday, Adityanath, while campaigning for sitting MP and Union Minister VK Singh in Ghaziabad, said: Congress ke log aatank-wadiyon ko biryani khilate the aur Modi ji ki sena aatankwadiyon ko goli aur gola deti hai (Congress people would feed biryani to terrorists, while Modis Army gives them bullet or bomb). The remarks have also not gone down well with the military. This was exactly the kind of development I was fearing when I wrote to you last month, Admiral Ramdas said, adding as one of the senior most former chiefs of the Armed Forces, I consider it is my duty and responsibility to bring to your notice the fact that we, the armed forces of the country, owe our allegiance only to the Constitution of India. laxmi@tribune.com New Delhi, April 1 For the first time, Pakistan today admitted to having used F-16s in the February 27 air duel with IAF fighter jets, even as it claimed to having shot down two of Indian jets without losing any of its F-16s. We shot down two Indian jets in self-defence. India can assume any type of their choice, even F-16. Pakistan retains the right to use anything and everything in its legitimate self-defence, the Director General of Pakistans Inter Service Public Relations said. Some weeks ago, Pakistan had said it had not used an F-16. Indian Air Force spokesperson Group Captain Anupam Banerjee dismissed the fresh claim, saying: We had (on February 27) lost only one fighter jet piloted by Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman. The rest is a pack of lies. On February 27, the IAF and Pakistan Air Force were locked in a duel over Nowshera in J&K. A MiG-21 piloted by Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was lost, while the IAF shot down an F-16. On March 4, Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa, while speaking at a function at Sulur, Coimbatore, had said: Obviously, I think they have lost an F-16 aircraft in that combat. The Director General of Pakistans Inter Service Public Relations, in a statement today, said it was with reference to repeated Indian claims about the shooting down of a Pakistan F-16 by India and use of F-16 in an air battle on February 27. No Pakistani F16 was hit by Indian Air Force... Later, when two Indian jets crossed the Line of Control (LoC), they were shot down by Pakistan Air Force (PAF). Whether it was F-16 or JF-17 which shot down two Indian aircraft is immaterial, the ISPR said. As regards the PAF action across the LoC, it was done by JF-17 (a Chinese-origin plane) from within Pakistan airspace, the ISPR added. rchopra@tribunemail.com Satya Prakash Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 2 The Supreme Court on Tuesday set aside the bail granted to Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali by the Delhi High Court in a terror funding case filed against him by the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The order setting aside Watalis bail was passed by a Bench headed by Justice AM Khanwilkar. Watali is a businessman from Jammu and Kashmir. The Delhi High Court in September last year had granted bail to Watali, who was arrested for his alleged role in a terror-funding case involving Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed. He has been lodged in Delhis Tihar Jail after his arrest in August 2017. He could not be released as the Supreme Court had stayed the Delhi High Courts order granting him bail. The NIA had raided his premises in June and August 2017, and claimed to have found highly incriminating material pertaining to the receipt of funds by Watali from foreign sources, and its further distribution to terrorists and separatists in Kashmir Valley for anti-India activities. The raids were part of an investigation into the alleged militancy funding by Pakistan-based groups to stoke unrest in the Valley. Kashmir saw widespread violence after the security forces killed Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8, 2016. The NIA Special Court had earlier rejected his bail plea, which he challenged in the Delhi High Court. laxmi@tribune.com NEW DELHI, April 1 An Indian rocket on Monday placed domestic and foreign satellites in three different orbits on a single flight, a first for the nation and a low-cost option that could burnish its reputation for pioneering affordable options in space. The launch of a domestic intelligence satellite and 28 foreign ones came less than a week after India used an anti-satellite missile to take down one of its own satellites, demonstrating a capability only China, Russia and the United States had possessed previously. The state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said 24 satellites from the United States, two from Lithuania and one each from Spain and Switzerland were positioned in Mondays launch, in addition to Indias EMISAT satellite. This particular mission is very special for ISRO, its chairman, K Sivan, said after the launch from Andhra Pradesh. This is for the first time the PSLV is carrying out three orbital missions in a single flight, he said in a speech, referring to the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle family of rockets. Sivan, who previously told media the three-in-one launch would help cut costs, said the agency aimed to complete 30 more missions this year, including Indias second lunar exploration programme known as the Chandrayaan-2. Among the satellites in Mondays launch are 20 earth-imaging satellites of Planet Labs Inc, a private satellite operator based in San Francisco. Two of the satellites, one from Lithuania and another from Switzerland, will be used for the Internet of Things, or connecting physical devices to the Web, the agency added. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the agency on the launch and said his government was working on raising citizens interest in science and their respect for scientists. Today, PSLV C45 has successfuly injected ISRO made EMISAT in 748 kms orbit as well as 28 customer satellites in 504 kms orbit," ISRO chief K Sivan said at the Mission Control Centre. ISRO wants companies such as state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and Mumbai-based conglomerate Larsen & Toubro to build its rockets in future. Reuters SPY in the Sky monicakchauhan@gmail.com Aditi Tandon Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 2 In potentially controversial promises, the Congress manifesto has pledged to review the Armed Forces Special Powers and rework troop deployment in Jammu and Kashmir, besides abolishing the provision of sedition in the IPC, easing rules for bail, and limit the powers of the probe agencies to search, seize and arrest. The Congress also promised to enact an anti-hate crime law to address lynchings and non-engineered violence in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha. In other important provisions, the Congress said it would investigate the Rafale deal, make defamation a civil offence and amend laws that allow for detention without trial. The opposition party further said it would scrap electoral bonds and also the Niti Ayog and bring in a modern Planning Commission. The Congress also said it would amend the anti-defection law to provide for instant disqualification of defecting MPs and MLAs. The party also said it will probe circumstances under which a number of scamsters were allowed to leave the country. On Jammu and Kashmir, the Congress promised to resume unconditional dialogue with the people of the state, besides amending the AFSPA to strike a balance between the powers of armed forces and the human rights of people. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Chandigarh, April 1 Acting on a petition filed by the Income-Tax Department challenging a Ludhiana court order remanding back its complaint against Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh to the trial court for fresh order, the Punjab and Haryana High Court today put him and his son Raninder Singh on notice. The department through senior counsel Chetan Mittal submitted that information in the form of master sheets was received on July 22, 2011, by the Director-General of Income Tax (Investigation), thereby indicating association/connection of the family members of the accused with certain foreign entities. He added information in the shape of master sheets was originally received on June 28, 2011, in Paris by the Foreign Taxes and Tax Research Division of Central Board of Direct Taxes officially from the competent French authority. It was in the shape of USB pen drive. The documents, it was added, indicated that Raninder Singh had association with foreign trust, certain foreign business entities and banks. The process of inquiries was put into place by the competent authority of the department against Raninder Singh and other close relation and family. On perusal of the documents in possession, it was clearly established that Amarinder Singh, respondent/accused, is aware of these foreign assets/transactions and is party to the same. Consequently, summons was issued to seek documents pertaining to Jacaranda Trust and other foreign entities/assets..., it was added. The Bench was told that the trial court, after hearing the counsel for department, passed summoning order on April 24, 2017, against the respondent to face trial. The respondent, in turn, filed revision petition before Ludhiana Additional Sessions Judge against the summoning orders. The court remanded the case back to trial court with a direction to pass the fresh order. Challenging the order, Mittal told Justice Rajbir Sehrawats Bench that documents taken from pen drive supplied by the government of France could not be discarded on the ground that it was not accompanied by a proper certificate. Justice Sehrawat fixed April 25 as the next date of hearing. editorial@tribune.com Vishal Joshi Tribune News Service Saidpura Barwalia (Kurukshetra), April 1 The family of Sultan Singh (28) is in a state of shock after he was arrested and tagged as a suspected terrorist by the Punjab Police on Sunday. Sultan and four others have been arrested by the State Special Operation Cell for allegedly being the members of the banned Babbar Khalsa International. The Punjab Police called them highly radicalised youths who were allegedly planning to kill specific targets, including Hindu leaders and members of the controversial Dera Sacha Sauda. At Sultans village, about 40 km from the Kurukshetra district headquarter, his grandmother Gurmej Kaur broke into tears at the mention of his name. Talking to The Tribune, Sultans mother Manjit Kaur said her son was a religious man, who used to perform community service at gurdwaras in Saidpura and its adjoining villages. Last we spoke over the phone on March 30 evening. He was away for langar sewa at a gurdwara. When he did not return, our family members went looking for him and found his motorcycle locked near the tehsil office in the adjoining town of Shahabad Markanda. On Sunday, we came to know that Sultan was in police custody, she added. Sultans father Raghbir Singh is a farmer at Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh. Sultan used to work with his other family members on their land at Saidpura Barwalia. If we had known that Sultan was under bad influence, we would have helped him. He is being framed or the police have wrong information. We do not even have any influential contacts other than the management of the gurdwara where we visit regularly. We may approach them to ensure that justice is delivered to our family and Sultans life is not jeopardised, said suspects uncle Harmeet Singh. Sultans elder sister Rajinder Kaur said he had studied up to Class XII from a private school near the village. Sultan is married and has a daughter, but his wife is living with her parents in Chandigarh due to some marital conflict. Meanwhile, Kurukshetra SP Astha Modi said as per our records, Sultan had never been involved in any criminal activity in the past in the district. editorial@tribune.com GS Paul Tribune News Service Amritsar, April 1 Taking cognisance of the demolition of century-old Tarn Taran gurdwara Darbar Sahibs darshani deori (main entrance) by a group of kar sewaks, Akal Takht today directed the SGPC to thoroughly probe into matter. In a damage-control measure, the SGPC announced to reconstruct the damaged part of the deori and preserve of the historical structure. The darshani deori was constructed by Naunihal Singh, son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. With the passage of time, its crust developed cracks. A resolution was passed in July 12 last year by the SGPC to award the kar sewa of its repair and renovation to Tarn Taran-based Baba Jagtar Singh Kar Sewa Wale. But following objections from various quarters, the decision was put on hold on October 18. However, on the intervening night of March 30 and 31, of the four domes of the structure, three were demolished by kar sewaks allegedly without taking the SGPC into confidence. The further demolition was stopped after Sikh sangat raised alarm. Akal Takhts acting Jathedar Giani Harpreet Singh questioned the SGPC as to how could the kar sewa group take such a decision on its own? SGPC president Gobind Singh Longowal said, We are shocked at the development. The resolution of reconstructing the deori was revoked and status quo was maintained. It is yet to be ascertained as to what prompted the kar sewa group to start demolition, which has upset the entire community. We have formed a committee to probe the matter. We will hire technical experts to preserve the historical structure, he said. Meanwhile, a written apology was submitted by Baba Jagtar Singh sect, admitting that it was a reckless move. uttara@tribuneindia.com GS Paul Tribune News Service Amritsar, April 2 The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee has objected to the use of the Sikh holy mool mantar as background lyrics for a dance performance at a programme that President Ram Nath Kovind recently attended in Chile. SGPC was inundated with complaints from Sikhs across the world after a video clip of the performance, also uploaded on the Presidents official Twitter handle, went viral. SGPC chief secretary Roop Singh said Sikhs were offended with the use of the holy Sikh chant. In Sikhism, the mool mantar and Japji Sahib prayers hold immense significance and it ought to be recited with maryada (respect). Conducting a dance item on its rhythm could not be held valid under any circumstances. It was shocking that this video clip was posted on the official social media account of President of India. This move has hurt the Sikh sentiments, he said. Kovind is currently on an official tour to Chile. The performance was part of a welcome programme of a event the Indian Diaspora organised for the President. harinder@tribunemail.com IMPHAL, April 2 (PTI)-Security Forces have rushed to make an intensive combing operation of the dense jungles near Somdal in Ukhrul subdivision of Manipur following reports of infiltration by Issac Swus, former Foreign Secretary of the underground set-up along with 50 of his bodyguards into the ceasefire-bound area. The gang, which is back from China after receiving training as well arms, is reported to be carrying modern Chinese automatic weapons. Another group of over 100 China-trained Naga hostiles have moved into the ceasefire-bound Mao subdivision, terrorising the villagers for collection of money and ration. Army units have already started combing the area, it is officially learnt. Brigadier Thingoselie of the underground Army who led the first batch of the China-trained Naga hostiles into Nagaland is reported to be outside India, according to reports. The General Secretary is reported to be in London with the self-exiled Naga hostile leader, Mr. A.Z. Phizo. editorial@tribune.com Beijing, April 1 At least 30 persons, including 27 firefighters, were killed while battling a forest blaze in remote mountains in southwest China, the state media reported on Monday. The firefighters were sent to put out the fire which broke out on Saturday in Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, Southwest Chinas Sichuan province, China Daily quoted the PLA Daily, the official organ of the Chinese military as saying. About 30 persons have been unaccounted for since Sunday afternoon after a sudden change in wind direction caused a huge fireball, according to authorities in Sichuans Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. Local authorities have dispatched 689 persons to put out the blaze which broke out at about 6 pm at an altitude of about 3,800 meters. Firefighters are still trying to contain the blaze. A team sent by the Ministry of Emergency Management has arrived in Muli County in Liangshan to coordinate the rescue efforts. A separate forest fire in the northern province of Shanxi was brought under control on Sunday after burning for two days, the official Xinhua news agency said. No casualties were reported from that fire, but at least 9,000 persons were evacuated from their homes. PTI editorial@tribune.com Ankara, April 1 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans ruling party suffered a major upset on Monday after local election results showed it lost the capital Ankara and Istanbul after a decade and half in power. Losing the countrys two major cities will be a stunning defeat for Erdogan, a former Istanbul mayor himself, whose ability to win at the ballot box has been unparalleled in Turkish history. Erdogan campaigned hard, portraying Sundays vote for mayors and district councils as a fight for the nations survival, but the election became a test for his Justice and Development Party (AKP) after Turkey slipped into a recession for the first time in a decade. The opposition CHP party candidate for Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, was leading by nearly 28,000 votes with most ballot boxes counted, Supreme Election Board (YSK) chairman Sadi Guven said. Imamoglu won almost 4.16 million votes while the AKP candidate, former premier Binali Yildirim, won 4.13 million. Both claimed victory in the early hours following a tight race for the countrys largest city after results showing them in a dead heat. We want to start working as soon as possible to serve people, Imamoglu told reporters on Monday. We want to cooperate with all institutions of Turkey to quickly meet the needs of Istanbul. In Ankara, opposition mayoral candidate Mansur Yavas had 50.89 per cent of votes ahead of the AKPs Mehmet Ozhaseki on 47.06 per cent, Anadolu state agency reported, with 99 per cent of ballot boxes counted. Ankara has won. The loser in Ankara is Ozhaseki, dirty politics has lost, Yavas told supporters who were waving Turkish flags and setting off fireworks at a celebratory rally. But in a sign of possible turmoil ahead, AKP officials said they would challenge the alleged invalidation of tens of thousands of votes in both cities.AKP secretary general Fatoih Sahin said the party will appeal in Ankara, saying the gap between the candidates will narrow down and I believe it will eventually turn into a positive result for us. Speaking to supporters in Ankara after Sundays polls closed, Erdogan had said the election was a victory for the AKP, which along with its coalition partner, the rightwing Nationalist Movement Party, won more than 50 per cent of votes overall. The loss in Istanbul, analysts said, would be especially sensitive for Erdogan, who grew up in the citys working-class Kasimpasa neighbourhood, and liked to tell AKP rank-and-file that victory in the city was like winning all of Turkey. AFP Democracy eroded Rights activists and Turkeys Western allies say that democracy has been eroded under Erdogans leadership, particularly after a failed 2016 coup that led to tens of thousands of people being arrested. Fall in currency hurt households The AKP built its ballot box success on Erdogans perceived economic prowess, but before the vote, the Turkish lira was sliding again, provoking memories of a 2018 crisis that saw the currency fall 30 per cent and badly hurt Turkish households. editorial@tribune.com Islamabad, April 1 Pakistans former military dictator Pervez Musharraf was ordered to appear before a special court on May 2 by the Supreme Court in the high treason case and warned him that he would lose the right of defence if he failed to turn up. A special court indicted General Musharraf (retd) for high treason in March 2014. Musharraf (75), left for Dubai in 2016 to seek medical treatment and has not returned since. Last month, he was admitted to a hospital in Dubai after suffering a reaction from a rare disease for which he is already under treatment. A three-member Bench of the apex court headed by Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khosa was hearing a petition filed by a lawyer, who pointed out that the proceedings of the treason case being heard by a special court since 2014 had come to a halt as the former president Musharraf had not returned to the country since 2016. We cannot let the suspect avail the benefit of not appearing before the court deliberately. High-treason is not an ordinary crime, Chief Justice Khosa reminded the defence counsel. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government had filed the treason case against Musharraf over the presidents imposition of extra-constitutional emergency in November 2007. In the previous hearing of the petition, the top court had said it would intervene if the special court, in its next hearing, failed to make a decision on how to record the former presidents statement. The apex court today said that if Musharraf does not appear before the special court on May 2, he would lose his right to record a statement under Section 342 of the Code of Criminal Procedures. Musharrafs counsel told the court, We contacted Musharrafs wife. The former president had set the date for his return as May 13 and he does not want to record his statement . PTI Treason case A special court indicted General Musharraf (retd) for high treason in March 2014. Musharraf (75), left for Dubai in 2016 to seek medical treatment and has not returned since then laxmi@tribune.com Islamabad, April 1 Pakistans senior Muslim clerics and representatives from different religions have condemned forceful conversions, saying Islam doesnt allow such acts and Muslims must provide better environment to minorities in their areas, according to a media report. The remarks made during a joint meeting of the Mutahida Ulema Board (Punjab) and Pakistan Ulema Council on Sunday came amid the nationwide outrage over the alleged forced conversions of Hindu girls in Sindh province. Islam doesnt allow forceful conversion of non-Muslims, the religious leaders said. They agreed that the issue of alleged forced conversion and marriages of two teenage Hindu girls in Sindh province and other subsequent matters should be settled in accordance with the law and justice, the News reported. The meeting, presided over by chairman of the Board and Pakistan Ulema Council Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, underlined that Islam was a religion of peace, harmony, stability and its teachings had categorically defined rights for non-Muslims residing in Muslim countries. The senior religious leaders also condemned terror activities being carried out on account of Islamphobia and demanded constitution of a judicial commission to probe the killing of Bahawalpur professor to avert such extremist incidents in future, the paper said. A third-year student at Bahawalpurs Government Sadiq Egerton College last month allegedly stabbed a professor to death over what he vaguely described as the academics anti-Islam remarks. The meeting came days after a Hindu lawmaker from PM Imran Khans party moved two Bills in Parliament seeking enhancement of punishment for those involved in forced conversion and for making child marriage a cognisable offence. The five-point resolution called for immediate passage of the Bill against forced conversions from all the legislatures. PTI It is not allowed in ISlam "Islam doesnt allow forceful conversion of non-Muslims Islam is a religion of peace, harmony, stability and its teachings have categorically defined rights for non-Muslims residing in Muslim countries." Mutahida Ulema Board (Punjab) & Pakistan Ulema Council Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Four companies are to submit proposals by December 15 for the acquisition of the Petrotrin r Progressives in Denial as Mueller Clears Trump All the fanfare with the release of the Mueller Report three page summaries has the corporatist and defiance media in a tizzy. The deranged progressive zombies that follow every word that Rachel 'MAD' Maddow, bleeds out are wiping their own tears that the preordained narrative to bury the Trump movement is premature. Sorry, no celebration for the duped, delusional dregs in search of the most dangerous obstacle to their Marxist redistribution wonderland. The hate machine that trashes all things Trump has perfected the 'Big Lie'. Accepting all the news that is unfit to print or the social media trolls which reinforce the 'Fake News' propaganda that the enlightened leftist cable toadies read off their Teleprompters, is like overdosing on a feel good drug before the inevitable crash. For those who foster the repeated progressive psychedelic addiction, the only corporality comes from the every establishment elites that the "so called" leftist dissenters ingenuously lap up as gospel, have all been deceived. Now is a good time to take a refresher course in media dissemination. Reflect upon the definitive and unequivocal assessment of global power from the outstanding 1974 movie Network. Arthur Jensen Pitches Economic Determinism's New World Order to Howard Beale is the most revealing admission ever to be expressed on the silver screen for public consumption. "Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?" Well, the depressed brain cell cripples are Trump haters because they want to dismantle the traditions, heritage, institutions and fundamental values of the founding of America. They want an unrestrained and authoritarian centralized despotism. Evading their limited capacity to perceive the overwhelming power that dictates the "primal forces of nature" is a basic flaw in Leftist mindset. The Union Broadcasting System's lost credibility exemplifies any of the mainstream media. Only a ratings jump start with their prophet of the airwaves, Howard Beale and the infusion of the Tabloid TV format could get the attention of the uninformed audience. Trump TV is too hurtful for the snowflakes viewers. However, the smears and slander against the "Drain the Swamp" movement demands a manufactured fabrication 24/7 storyline. The authenticity deprived has little or no willingness to confront the real world. Lest one forgets, the lessons from Jonestown are ignored much in the same way as the programmed marionette hang from a lynching rope of one's own making. Daniel J. Flynn writes in the National Review, Drinking the Kool-Aid: Remember When Jim Jones Was a Hero to Democrats? The dogmatists followed their leader right into a cold grave. "Jim Jones, borrowing a concept from Huey Newton, called the mass murder of more than 900 member of the Peoples Temple in Guyana 40 years ago revolutionary suicide. His indoctrinated followers regarded their nihilistic coda a political act. One of the willing suicide cases announced on the death tape, No other way I would rather go than to give my life for socialism, Communism, and I thank Dad very, very much. But the first draft of history depicted the political fanatics as Christian fanatics, despite the groups explicit atheism and distribution of Bibles in Jonestown for bathroom use. The words fundamentalist Christianity were used in a New York Times article to describe Joness preaching. The Associated Press called the dead religious zealots. Specials on CBS and NBC at the time neglected to mention the Marxism that animated Peoples Temple. Beyond the ideology that inspired Peoples Temples demise, the media whitewashed the politicians who aided and abetted them." In today's world the refusal to accept the vindication of President Trump by one of their own Democrat cohorts in Robert Mueller, has endowed the resistance zealots of the current "Peoples Temple" with their own death wish. They rely upon the approved media for their indoctrinated news. Just Google any political topic and the results will return acceptable results from allowed sources. The rule of thumb to follow, if it appears in a Google search, it most likely will have a progressive bias, as most objective assessments are censored. Upon the acceptance of Donald Trump as the legitimate President of the United States, the recovery from progressive delusion can begin. Acknowledging that the liberal establishment media is based upon a fictional fairy tale, which broadcasts continual lies, is a necessary step in the healing process. The plutocrats that control the deceitful media message are the protegees of the Arthur Jensen's New World Order. The prodigy Pied Pipers of the talking heads news programming are the Jim Jones psychopaths of the progressive culture. Both serve the same master and their disciples are eager to crucify anyone who deviates from the orthodox Jacobin doctrines. As long as liberal fools remain in their delusional stupor, the prospects for a rational national dialogue on how to save America will never take place. Yet, it should be emphatically clear that the destruction of the republic is exactly what the radical lefties want. Restore the rule of law by indicting the Deep State turncoats for their criminal betrayal. SARTRE Source: http://www.batr.org/stupid/040219.html Discuss or comment about this essay on the BATR Forum http://www.batr.org "Many seek to become a Syndicated Columnist, while the few strive to be a Vindicated Publisher" 2019 Copyright BATR - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. Imagine theres a movie about a meteor heading toward Earth. It will be here in 12 years. Following Hollywood convention, once you got past the part where the maverick scientist or precocious kid discovering it struggles to convince the world about the threat, youd expect the president or the military to leap into action. Congress is usually left out of such plots, but its not a stretch to imagine that Congress would race to authorize a plan to send astronauts into space to prevent Armageddon or a planetary deep impact. (If you dont believe me, I refer you to the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact.) The initial rollout of the Green New Deal, a sweeping proposal to overhaul the U.S. economy and, taken seriously, society itself, was supposed to follow a script like this. The United Nations opened the bidding by announcing last year that we had twelve years to keep the pace of climate change from accelerating too fast to contain the damage. Like a high school game of telephone, this quickly became a blanket statement that we have twelve years to save the planet. Climate change is a real concern, but if we did absolutely nothing to stop it, the planet would still be here in a dozen years. So would the human race and many other living things. In fact, if America did virtually everything the Green New Dealers propose, global emissions of greenhouse gases wouldnt change that much unless China, India, Russia, and all the African nations followed suit. There are people who nonetheless believe that climate change is a world-threatening calamity and that exaggeration is a necessary tool to galvanize public opinion. If you Google the phrase twelve years to save the planet, youll find people who think its literally true. The problem is that weve heard these things before. In 1989, a U.N. official predicted entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. In 2008, Al Gore warned that the northern polar ice cap could be gone in five years. Melting polar ice is something to worry about, but its not gone. The reasons this is a political problem for climate-change warriors should be obvious. First, they are their own worst enemy when it comes to maintaining credibility. By working on the theory that they have to scare the bejeebus out of the public, they made it easy for people to dismiss them when their Chicken Little prophecies didnt materialize. Another problem, which compounds the first, is that they get greedy. Working on the premise that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, progressives have a long record of trying to throw other items on their wish list into the anti-climate-change shopping cart. The Green New Deal, as presented by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), includes high-quality health care for everyone, guaranteed jobs, paid vacations, a living wage, and retirement security. Indeed, its worth remembering that environmentalists targeted the fossil-fuel industry for early retirement long before concerns about global warming were on the agenda. The anti-oil campaign began with the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, back when concerns about another ice age were still taken seriously. You can believe that climate change is a real problem and also be forgiven for thinking progressives are trying to pull a fast one. This is especially so when you consider that proponents of the GND also favor phasing out nuclear power, which could provide vastly more electricity than wind or solar (and more efficiently). Which gets me back to where I started. Imagine there was a movie about an incoming meteor that could be stopped only with a nuclear warhead, and the heroes insisted that nuclear weapons are just too icky to use, even to save the planet. Audiences would scratch their heads. They might also think they missed a crucial plot point if the protagonists proposed a sweeping government effort to stop the meteor and then, when given the opportunity to vote for it, voted present in protest. Thats similar to what happened this week. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell brought the Green New Deal to the floor for a vote, and Democrats refused to vote for it. Instead, they harangued McConnell for pulling a stunt. They were right. It was a stunt. But sometimes it takes a stunt to expose an even bigger one. Jonah Goldberg holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute and is a senior editor of National Review. - The countrys media regulator accused the BBC of airing a false documentary - VOA was accused of employing a reporter who had opposed the government - Journalists were also banned from working for either organisation - Burundi ranks 159 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index 2018 In a move which has been described by campaigners and international broadcasters as a blow to press freedom, Burundi has banned the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and suspended the Voice of America (VOA) indefinitely. The BBC whose license was revoked was accused by the country's media regulator of airing an alleged false documentary which it claimed damaged the countrys reputation. READ ALSO: Siaya senator James Orengo outlines why Deputy President William Ruto should be impeached Since the countrys president, Pierre Nkurunziza, announced in 2015 that he would run for a third term, hundreds of Burundians have been killed in clashes. Photo: Pierre Nkurunzinza Source: UGC READ ALSO: Court slaps Makueni MCA with KSh 800k bond for posting hate messages on Facebook At the same time, Burundis media regulator accused VOA of employing a reporter who had once opposed the government even as it extended an existing suspension on the media organisation, Reuters reported. In the run-up to a referendum which Opposition leaders and activists said was designed to extend the presidents rule for at least a decade, both broadcasters were suspended for six months in 2018. At the time, the BBC and VOA were accused of unprofessional conduct and breaching press laws. Since then, they have both been off air. READ ALSO: Man reinstates father's land 23 years after taking law degree to protect the property The unwarranted decision of the Burundi government to ban the BBC and suspend indefinitely, Voice of America, strikes a serious blow against media freedom, and we strongly condemn it," said BBC. The veto came after the broadcaster aired a documentary about what it said were secret detention and torture sites in Burundi. The report was subsequently dismissed by the Burundian government but BBC stood by it. READ ALSO: Makueni Senator Mutula Kilonzo opposes court proposal to lower consent age to 16 Journalists were also banned from working for either organisation by the countrys media regulator. We are alarmed that reporters in Burundi are now forbidden to communicate with VOA and believe these continuing threats to our journalists undermine press freedom in the country," VOA director, Amanda Bennett, said "The withdrawal of the BBCs operating license and continued suspension of the VOA are further brazen efforts by the Burundian authorities to silence the media," Amnesty Internationals Sarah Jackson commented. READ ALSO: Burundi school girls detained for scribbling on President Pierre Nkurunziza's photo released Since the countrys president, Pierre Nkurunziza, announced in 2015 that he would run for a third term, hundreds of Burundians have been killed in clashes with security forces. The 2018 referendum overwhelmingly approved changes that could let Nkurunziza remain in power till 2034. The result was, however, rejected by the Opposition and the US said the process was marred by voter intimidation. Do you have a life-changing story you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news. Impregnated and forced to abort by my teacher Source: Tuko In Parliament today, there was an exchange of words between an Opposition MP and the Health The European Union says that the first round of the presidential elections in Ukraine, which took place on March 31, was held according to democratic principles and in compliance with international standards and procedures. In view of this, the EU expressed its firm support for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine. A respective statement was published on the website of the European External Action Service (EEAS). "According to the OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission the election was competitive, voters had a broad choice and turned out in high numbers. Fundamental freedoms were generally respected. Some shortcomings were noted by the OSCE/ODIHR, such as misuse of state resources and vote-buying. While the media landscape is diverse, the campaign coverage was often biased, and there was a lack of genuine political debate among the contestants," the statement reads. The EU recognized that the election day, which was peaceful, was assessed positively overall and paves the way to the second round. Voting was well-organized, smooth, transparent and efficient, and procedures were generally adhered to. In this regard, the European Union looks forward to a free, fair and transparent second round of the elections on April 21, held in accordance with international standards. According to the statement, it is important that all parties adhere to democratic principles, respecting the will of Ukrainian people and avoid provoking unnecessary tensions. "The EU remains unwavering in its support to the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders. We continue to support Ukraine's commitment to ensuring a stable, prosperous and democratic future for all its citizens, with the Association Agreement providing an overarching framework for our close cooperation," the statement reads. The presidential elections were held in Ukraine on March 31. op Incumbent Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and well-known actor Volodymyr Zelensky, who reach the second round of presidential elections, have equal chances of winning despite a significant gap between them in the first round. At the same time, regardless of who wins the struggle for the presidency, Ukraine will remain on the path of reforms that bring it closer to Western standards. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, who currently serves as director of the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, spoke about this in an interview with Ukrinform. The conversation with him took place on April 1, the day after the voting in Ukraine. CHANCES ARE EQUAL Question: After the first round of the presidential elections in Ukraine, we have two candidates with a significant difference in the ratings. What are their chances of victory, and what should both candidates do to win? Answer: I think they both have a good chance of winning. I don't think that'll be closer in the round two than it was in the round one. Q: What should they both focus their attention on to win? A: They may focus their attention on their own strengths and their opponent's weaknesses. So, for Zelensky the big issue is corruption, for Poroshenko the big issue is the national security. POROSHENKO IS A SHREWD POLITICIAN Q: Okay, if we suppose that Poroshenko wins, could we expect Ukraine to continue its current policy given the upcoming parliamentary elections, which will obviously change the current shape of political power in Kyiv? A: I think that Mr. Poroshenko is a very shrewd politician. He will adjust his policies to what is possible in the alignment in Ukraine - the political alignment in Ukraine - that emerges after the presidential election and the parliamentary election. That's assuming Poroshenko wins because we don't know yet. Q: Could we expect Russia to continue maintaining military pressure in Donbas and try to freeze the conflict if Poroshenko wins the election? A: Well, they're not freezing, they are keeping it live - a low-intensity conflict. This will continue until the Kremlin realizes that they cannot succeed with this policy. At some point, they will realize that, but they will not realize it until after the parliamentary elections in Ukraine. KREMLIN WILL PROVOKE ZELENSKY Q: And the opposite question. If Zelensky wins the election, what should we expect? A: Well, the one thing I would count on is the Kremlin will do some provocations to test him. Q: Today, there were a lot of talks regarding close ties between Zelensky and oligarch Kolomoisky, who's a strong adversary of the incumbent president. A: Right. Q: What does it mean for Ukraine if Zelensky wins the second round? A: We don't know. What we do know is that if Zelensky wins the presidency and he is seen as serving Kolomoisky's interest, his chair will be weakened substantially. Q: Today, many people discussed a statement by President Poroshenko that Zelensky is a puppet of Kolomoisky. What is your opinion on that? A: I have no reason to assume one thing or the other about that. WHAT SHOULD BE EXPECTED OF THE KREMLIN IN THE SECOND ROUND? Q: We all know the intentions of Russia to meddle in the Ukrainian elections. A: Right. Q: What is the major Russian interest in the second round of the presidential election in Ukraine? A: They would like to see instability in Ukraine. I know they don't want Poroshenko as president, but I don't know what they think about Zelensky. But for sure they will promote instability in round two. For example, they'll be hacking the Central Election Commission. Q: May Russia prefer someone between these two candidates? A: I just don't know the answer. I do know they don't like Poroshenko. But I don't know what their views on Zelensky are. UKRAINE'S COURSE WILL NOT CHANGE Q: Today you said that Ukraine would continue its course regardless of who wins the second round... A: I think so. Q: Could you explain why? A: Well, I think we'll see reforms continue, and I think we'll see a Western orientation. There may be differences obviously on specific questions. But the general course, I think, will be the same. Yaroslav Dovgopol, Washington The company is partially resuming deliveries to them but admits that it will have a chance to regain all its clients only when contracts for 2020 are signed. Russian aluminum giant Rusal has resumed supplies to the U.S. market and aims to win back customers it lost due to sanctions by about September when the industry seals supply contracts for 2020, its chief executive said. Last autumn, Rusal, the world's largest aluminum producer outside China, missed the traditional window for contracting sales for this year as it was still negotiating with the U.S. Treasury Department to be removed from a sanctions list, Reuters said. "We fulfilled all our obligations even during the period of sanctions, we did not allow ourselves a single failure. Therefore, some of our former partners are already coming back, new partners are coming," CEO Evgenii Nikitin said. Read alsoReuters: U.S. lifts sanctions on Rusal, other firms linked to Russia's Deripaska "We hope that we will be able to bring back our clients toward September, the contracting period for 2020," he added in an interview with Reuters. Rusal's nine months of talks with Washington ended successfully in late 2018. In January, Washington excluded Rusal from the sanctions list but kept founder Oleg Deripaska, who had to give up his control of the firm as part of the deal. During sanctions, Rusal lost some of its customers, including Novelis Corp, the world's biggest producer of rolled aluminum products. The company is partially resuming deliveries to them but admits that it will have a chance to regain all its clients only when contracts for 2020 are signed. "We expect to restore lost positions in all the traditional markets for the company, including Asia and America, with which difficulties arose last year. To date, we have already resumed deliveries to the American market," Nikitin said. Nikitin also said that there were no issues with Russia's alumina supplies from the Mykolaiv (Nikolayev) plant in Ukraine. Ukraine boosts farm produce exports by over 24% to US$3.5 bln agrarian ministry The share of agricultural and food products in Ukraine's total exports was 43.9%. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter The CEC has already counted 18,290,706 votes. Ukrainian presidential candidate, showman Volodymyr Zelensky has almost twice the votes cast for his nearest competitor, incumbent President Petro Poroshenko, 30.23% vs. 15.92%, respectively, after the Central Election Commission (CEC) has processed 97.10% of voting protocols of Ukraine's March 31 presidential election. Read alsoInternational Election Observation Mission: Presidential election in Ukraine was competitive (Video) Some 13.40% voted for Batkivshchyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko, according to an UNIAN correspondent. Co-chairman of the Opposition Platform For Life Party Yuriy Boyko had 11.63% of the vote. Some 6.93% of voters supported leader of the Civil Position Party Anatoliy Hrytsenko, while 6.03% voted for ex-chief of the SBU Security Service of Ukraine Ihor Smeshko. Leader of the Radical Party Oleh Liashko scored 5.48%, candidate from the Opposition Bloc Party of Peace and Development Oleksandr Vilkul got 4.17%, and candidate from the Svoboda Party Ruslan Koshulynsky had 1.63%. All other candidates received less than 1% of the vote. Some 1.18% of ballots were announced to be void. The CEC has already counted 18,290,706 votes. The first two candidates with the largest number of votes will face each other in a run-off. The second round of the election vote in Ukraine is scheduled for April 21. They called on the candidates to adhere to the relevant law in good faith. G7 Ambassadors have welcomed OSCE/ODIHR preliminary conclusions on Ukraine's March 31 presidential vote, saying it was competitive and peaceful. "G7 Ambassadors welcome the OSCE/ODIHR preliminary conclusions and note that the first round of the presidential elections in Ukraine on March 31, 2019, was competitive and held in a generally peaceful and secure atmosphere,"G7 Ambassadors said in a statement on April 1, posted on the Twitter account of the French Presidency of the G7 Ambassadors' Support Group in Kyiv. "Election day was assessed positively overall and paves the way to the second round," the statement quoted the conclusions. Read alsoInternational Election Observation Mission: Presidential election in Ukraine was competitive (Video) G7 Ambassadors also called on the candidates to adhere to the relevant law in good faith. "On the basis of the OSCE/ODIHR findings, G7 Ambassadors urge candidates and their teams to implement the relevant law in good faith in the run-up to and during the second round of the presidential elections," the statement said. As UNIAN reported, the International Election Observation Mission concluded that the March 31, 2019, presidential election in Ukraine was "competitive, voters had a broad choice and turned out in high number." The observers believe that election results are trustworthy. While there were a few instances of minor procedural violations, the International Republican Institutes (IRI) election observation mission noted a transparent and smooth voting process with Ukraines citizens demonstrating a strong commitment to democracy, according to the International Republican Institute delegation report. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, who observed the election as part of the National Democratic Institute team, believes that Ukraine elections keep getting better, according to the Voice of America. He says the main thing is to make sure the voice of Ukrainian voters is heard. Senator Rob Portman tweeted: "Encouraged by the peaceful and fair first round of presidential elections in Ukraine. Urge the candidates and international community to respect the electoral process." In turn, Senator Bob Menendez, a ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee issued a statement congratulating the people of Ukraine for a "successful election process on Sunday." "International election observers affirmed that voters were able to freely exercise their right to choose from a broad choice of candidates the polls, who were also able to campaign freely," he wrote, urging the two candidates set to compete in the runoff "to engage in a substantial dialogue with the Ukrainian people over the next few weeks so that voters can make the most informed choice for president." Read alsoG7 Ambassadors welcome OSCE/ODIHR preliminary conclusions on Ukraine's presidential vote "Among other pressing issues, they deserve to hear about the candidates views on the war with Russia and how they plan to seriously combat corruption," he wrote. The senator has noted that Ukraine once again demonstrated a "sharp contrast with its neighbor Russia where such an election would be unimaginable under Putin." The ultimate guarantor of Ukraines vote and democracy is the Ukrainian people who have a proven willingness and strong desire to defend their independence and safeguard their institutions against external threats from the Kremlin and the internal threat of corruption. I applaud their courage and remain strongly committed to U.S. policies and programs that strengthen Ukraines democratic process, Menendez wrote. Due to unscheduled technical maintenance carried out on two Air Mauritius aircraft over the weekend, and the snowball effect thereof, the following flight schedules have been amended as below. Operations have been further constrained due to the delayed delivery of the A330neo by Airbus. New timings were set based on aircraft availability in order to minimize inconveniences to our passengers. Air Mauritius apologizes for inconveniences caused. The company wishes to reiterate that the safety of its passengers and crew is its topmost priority. Partager et informez vous aussi...... 1 shares Share Tweet LinkedIn The diplomat stressed Ukraine and Georgia's close cooperation with NATO. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison has expressed hope that Ukraine and Georgia will one day become members of the Alliance. As the diplomat spoke at a Brussels briefing April 1, she whether NATO Allies were recognizing the progress of Ukraine and Georgia toward joining the Alliance. "Well most certainly we are," Hutchinson said. "We are in partnership with Ukraine and Georgia and I would hope that someday they will be able to be members of NATO." Read alsoUkraine elections keep getting better: U.S. officials assess first round of presidential vote "They are people that have reformed their countries, they have a spirit that is so important, and we have a close alliance with Ukraine and Georgia and we will continue to build on that," she said. As UNIAN reported, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the Alliance recognized Ukraines aspirations to become a member of the Organization, but noted the need to continue reform, including strengthening the fight against corruption in the defense and security sectors. Wadephul believes a high share of votes cast for Zelensky is an indicator of a decrease in public confidence in political elites. The Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) faction in Germany's Bundestag has commented on the victory of showman Volodymyr Zelensky in the first round of the Ukraine presidential election. "Over the next three weeks before the [runoff] vote, Zelensky must specify what he stands for and which team of politicians will support him. Ukraine cannot afford to rely on inexperienced leadership in the conflict with Russia and in its difficult economic and social situation," Chairman of the CDU/CSU faction Johann David Wadephul said in a statement. According to Wadephul, this will only play into the hands of Moscow "and encourage it to intensify its destabilization policies toward Ukraine." "Zelensky must also clarify how he wants to achieve his goal to deprive oligarchs of power, given that oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky largely supported his election campaign," the German politician said. Wadephul also believes that a high share of votes cast for Zelensky is an indicator of a decrease in public confidence in political elites and disappointment about the reform process carried out by President Petro Poroshenko. "Most of the population also hopes that Zelensky will decisively fight against corruption and the influence of oligarchs," he added. The CDU/CSU also recalled Yulia Tymoshenko. "Yulia Tymoshenko's new failure indicates that voters don't trust her incomprehensible domestic and foreign policy. First of all, she failed to convince voters of the benefits of her costly, but hardly financially feasible, election promises that would only worsen Ukraine's development," Wadephul said. Poland will closely monitor the election campaign ahead of the second round, Szczerski said. Warsaw says Poland has no favorites in Ukraine's presidential elections and that it will support any democratic choice of the Ukrainian people. "We, Polish politicians, especially here in the presidential palace, have no favorite [in the Ukrainian presidential elections] because we don't interfere in other countries' political decisions. We are pleased that the first round of elections in Ukraine testifies to the development of democratic institutions there," Head of the Polish President's Office Krzysztof Szczerski said, Ukrainian media outlet European Pravda reported on April 2 citing the Polish presidential office press service. Poland will closely monitor the election campaign ahead of the second round, according to the official. Szczerski considers it important that Ukraine continue to follow the path of reforms and changes that will allow the country getting close to the institutions of the Western world. He is convinced that, if the elections are held in line with democratic standards, no matter what the results are, this will testify to the preservation of the country's western course, which is extremely important for Warsaw. Read alsoUkraine elections keep getting better: U.S. officials assess first round of presidential vote The official added that, based on the results of the first round, it is difficult to predict the outcome of the runoff. "A completely different campaign is launching now, a completely different political rivalry between the two candidates. Therefore, this will mean a complete reorganization of the electorate and redistribution of their support," the head of the Polish President's Office stressed. "Elections should show that Ukraine is a country with a stabilized democratic procedure since this will be another argument in favor of bringing Ukraine closer to the West," Szczerski added. A total of 18,526,978 votes have been counted. The Central Election Commission has already processed 98.16% of the protocols of precinct election commissions in the first round of presidential elections held on Sunday, March 31. According to an UNIAN correspondent, showman Volodymyr Zelensky so far saw support of 30.24% of the voters. As of now, 15.93% of voters cast ballots for the incumbent head of state, Petro Poroshenko, and 13.39% voted for leader of the Batkivshchyna Party, Yulia Tymoshenko, which means that the latter has not made it to the runoffs. Read alsoCentral Election Commission announces final voter turnout on Ukraine's March 31 Election Day Co-chairman of the Opposition Platform For Life Party Yuriy Boyko had 11.66% of the vote. Some 6.93% of voters supported leader of the Civil Position Party Anatoliy Hrytsenko, while 6.03% voted for ex-chief of the SBU Security Service of Ukraine Ihor Smeshko. Leader of the Radical Party Oleh Liashko scored 5.47%, candidate from the Opposition Bloc Party of Peace and Development Oleksandr Vilkul got 4.16%, and candidate from the Svoboda Party Ruslan Koshulynsky had 1.63%. The remaining candidates gained under 1% of the votes. A total of 18,526,978 votes have been counted. He also told why Russian propaganda outlets are "throwing tantrums" regarding the Ukraine vote. Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion and a prominent Kremlin critic, has said an institution of competitive elections and the turnover of power was formed in Ukraine, which fundamentally distinguishes it from Russia. In an interview with Delfi.TV, he said the results of the first round of Ukrainian elections fully reflected sociology results of the previous weeks. "It became obvious that Ukraine had already completely passed into another dimension if we compare it with Russia. First Ukrainian President [Leonid] Kravchuk lost the election 25 years ago. And this clear trend has been recorded in Ukraine for 25 years that the supreme power is not something that is eternal, it must constantly fight for its survival. It has to prove that it was not there by chance, and that people, if they are disappointed in it, simply drive it away," the politician said. Read alsoKremlin refuses to answer directly whether Moscow set to recognize outcome of Ukraine elections Kasparov says if the authorities in Ukraine do not want to leave and negatively affect democratic institutions, this leads to the Maidan. "In this regard, I think, Ukraine has developed a stable understanding that the government is dependent on the people. It is very important. And this fundamentally distinguishes Ukraine from Russia today," he stressed. According to Kasparov, this is namely the reason for the "tantrums" the Kremlin propaganda is throwing regarding the elections in Ukraine. "The very fact that elections are being held in Ukraine is absolutely unacceptable. This is a demonstration, including for the citizens of Russia, that the power can actually be changed," he said. "... We have already forgotten what elections are. It seems to me that Russians cannot be taught 'how to vote' by those who have regularly 'pointed to the door' their presidents and prime ministers for 25 years. And I would recommend that everyone, both oppositional and pseudo-oppositional Russian leaders, just be silent and envy," the Russian politician said. Russia banned Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organization in 2003 but the group operates legally in Ukraine and much of Europe. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has condemned the recent arrests of 23 Crimean Tatars by Russian authorities, calling it an "unprecedented move to intensify pressure on a group largely critical" of Moscow's seizure of Ukraine's Crimea region. "The sweeping arrests in Crimea aim to portray politically active Crimean Tatars as terrorists as a way to silence them," said Rachel Denber, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at the New York-based watchdog, said in a statement on April 2, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty said. "This has been their approach for several years, and it should stop. These men should be released at once," Denber added. A Russia-controlled court in the Crimean capital, Simferopol, said on March 29 that since March 27, 23 Crimean Tatars had been arrested and placed in pretrial detention until May 15, on a charge of belonging to the Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamic group. Read alsoEU responds to new detentions of Crimean Tatars in Russian-occupied peninsula HRW said that one man has been charged in absentia and is wanted by Russian law enforcement. Russia banned Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organization in 2003 but the group operates legally in Ukraine and much of Europe. Russian authorities said that 20 of the men were arrested in Crimea, and the other three in a Russian city as part of the same operation. HRW quoted their lawyers as saying that their clients had been transported to the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, some 500 kilometers from Simferopol, where they were being held in isolation. They have been charged with organizing activities of a terrorist organization or with participating in such a terrorist organization, according to HRW. It said that 14 of the men arrested were active participants in the human rights group Crimean Solidarity, while the other 10 had been involved with some of the organization's activities such as attending trials. Rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they describe as a campaign of repression by the Russian-imposed authorities in Crimea who are targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar community and others who have spoken out against Moscow's takeover of the peninsula. Two invaders were killed and another six were wounded on Monday, intelligence reports say. Russia's hybrid military forces in the past 24 hours mounted 18 attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas, with three Ukrainian soldiers reported as wounded in action. "Three Ukrainian soldiers were wounded in the past day. According to intelligence reports, two invaders were killed and another six were wounded," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation said in an update published on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on April 2, 2019. What is more, Ukrainian troops destroyed an enemy infantry fighting vehicle. Read alsoUkraine forces destroy enemy military vehicle in Donbas (Video) During the period under review, the Russian occupation forces opened fire from 120mm and 82mm mortars, grenade launchers of various types, heavy machine guns, and small arms to attack the Ukrainian positions near the town of Avdiyivka, and the villages of Pisky, Novotroyitske, Lebedynske, Krymske, Novoluhanske, Zolote-4, Zaitseve, Khutir Vilniy, and Novotoshkivske. "Since Tuesday midnight, Russian-led forces have attacked Ukrainian positions near the village of Verkhniotoretske, using 120mm and 82mm mortars. There have been no casualties among the Ukrainian military," reads the report. The figures could be higher due to the efforts by Russian occupation forces to conceal their losses, the officer admits. Officer of the 53rd Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Anatoliy Shtefan, has disclosed the enemy death toll in Donbas in March 2019. "In March, some 56 occupiers who had been part of the units of Russian occupation forces of the so-called 'Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics' were killed in action, while about 85 mercenaries sustained injuries of varying severity," the officer wrote on Facebook. Read alsoUkraine forces hit enemy ammo depot in Donbas (Video) According to Shtefan, non-combat losses amounted to nine terrorists who died as a result of violations of safety measures, suicide, or murder. Sixteen more militants were injured off combat. According to the Ukrainian officer, the figures could be higher due to the efforts by Russian occupation forces to conceal their losses. Russian-led forces widely use banned weapons, namely 120mm mortars and 152mm artillery systems, to shell Ukrainian positions. Two members of Ukraine's Joint Forces have been killed in action and another two have been wounded in action amid 10 enemy attacks on Ukrainian positions in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, since Tuesday midnight. "As a result of the attacks, two members of the Joint Forces were killed and another two were wounded. The units under attack fired back, using available weapons. Information about enemy losses is being verified," the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) press center said on Facebook on Tuesday, April 2. Read alsoUkrainian officer reveals enemy death toll in Donbas in March (Photo) "Since the beginning of the day, the enemy has already mounted 10 attacks on our troops' positions, using proscribed weapons in ten instances," it added. In particular, Russia-led forces used 120mm and 82mm mortars to shell Ukrainian troops stationed near the village of Verkhniotoretske, grenade launchers were used near the town of Avdiyivka, the villages of Hnutove and Shyrokyne all four attacks were recorded in the JFO's Skhid (East) sector. Six attacks were reported in the JFO's Pivnich (North) sector: 152mm artillery systems, 120mm and 82mm mortars and small arms were used in three attacks near the village of Novozvanivka, 120mm mortars were used near the village of Katerynivka, and 120mm mortars and grenade launchers were twice used near the town of Popasna. According to the JFO press center, the situation in Donbas remains under control. The parties have recognized there are issues on NATO's eastern flank that the Alliance must address. Deputy Spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, Robert Palladino, said State Secretary Mike Pompeo had discussed with Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu and Spain's top diplomat Josep Borrell during their meeting in Washington on Monday Russian aggression in the Black Sea. The sides discussed cooperation with Romania, "a stalwart NATO Ally," recognizing that there are "challenges facing NATO on its eastern flank." Read alsoTrump, Merkel discuss NATO, Ukraine in phone call media "They specifically spoke about Russian aggression in the Black Sea and Romanias role in contributing to the security and stability of the Black Sea region," reads the statement. With Minister Borrell, Pompeo also discussed a number of regional and bilateral issues, including Russias aggression in the Black Sea. 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. 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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 Life is slowly returning to normal in areas affected by Cyclone Idai in three Southern African countries Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi two weeks after disaster struck. A Chinese medical team assist a Cyclone Idai victim in Mozambique. The major problem still confronting governments in all three countries is how to bring food relief to the millions of survivors who were literally cut off from the rest of the world after the cyclone destroyed roads and bridges. Repair of the roads and bridges has started in earnest, but the level of destruction means that it will take much longer than anticipated to assess the affected areas without any hindrances. In the meantime, with the help of other countries, including China, detours are being created to access the affected areas, while longer routes have also been opened to enable vehicles to take some food and other provisions to the survivors. The difficult and painful rebuilding process is expected to take some time. It is a mammoth task considering that the cyclone affected more than 2.6 million people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, leaving thousands dead, missing, injured or infected with diseases. In Mozambique, the death toll has reached nearly 500, with hundreds more missing and thousands injured, while in Zimbabwe 259 have been killed and hundreds of others are presumed dead after being declared missing. Chinese community provides Cyclone Idai emergency in Zimbabwe. In Malawi, the least affected country of the three, 56 people died, while 577 were injured. Rescuers are still combing the affected areas and retrieving more bodies from the rubble of destroyed infrastructure and under mud and huge stone boulders. The cyclone first hit Mozambique, before it reached Zimbabwe on March 15 with devastating consequences in the countrys eastern highlands. In the case of Zimbabwe, President Emmerson Mnangagwas government has managed to mobilise aid to bail out survivors, some of which live at gathering points where they can easily access help. Most of the areas in the affected district of Chimanimani in the east of the country are still inaccessible after roads and bridges were destroyed by the cyclone. Chinese Ambassador to Zimbabwe Guo Shaochun meets Zimbabwean Vice President Constantino Chiwenga. On March 20, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent his condolences to President Mnangagwa, President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique and President Peter Mutharika of Malawi. President Xi mourned the causalities and destruction caused by Cyclone Idai in the three countries in his condolence message. On behalf of the Chinese government and people, and in his own name, Xi expressed deep condolences over the loss of lives, and extended sincere sympathies to the families of the victims and the missing, as well as to the injured and all those in the disaster-hit areas. The Chinese people feel the pain of the three African countries, Xi said, adding that he is confident that under the strong leadership of their governments, the people of the three countries will prevail over the disaster and rebuild their homes soon. In Zimbabwe, the Chinese government gave $800,000 to the victims of Cyclone Idai, according to newly appointed Chinese Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Mr. Guo Shaochun. The Chinese Embassy in Zimbabwe is authorised to announce that the Chinese Government decided to donate $800,000 in cash as emergency humanitarian assistance to the Zimbabwean Government to help with its disaster relief and rebuilding effort, said Ambassador Guo. He said a Chinese medical team in Zimbabwe was set to visit the areas affected by the cyclone with medical supplies and carry out free treatment. We hope these efforts will help the Zimbabwean people gain confidence and strength in the fight against the disaster and we believe that under the leadership of President Mnangagwa, the Zimbabwean people will be able to recover from this disaster and rebuild their homes soon, said Ambassador Guo. Apart from the donation, China offered to help Zimbabwe rebuild infrastructure destroyed by the cyclone such as schools, roads, bridges, clinics and houses. Chinese Counselor to Zimbabwe Mr. Zhao Baogang said funds were available under the Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) to cater for such restoration of infrastructure. The destruction of Cyclone Idai in Mozambique. We will be very willing to join you in the reconstruction of the region in Chimanimani, said Mr. Zhao. Houses, clinics, schools were destroyed, and we can rebuild them; we can work together. The (Zimbabwean) Defence Minister can write to us and make a request under the framework of the Forum on China Africa Cooperation. Last year we had a successful summit and $60 billion was provided towards cooperation between China and African countries, including Zimbabwe. The Chinese government also handed over three truckloads of goods worth $200,000, including tents, water, mealie-meal and other essential commodities to the Zimbabwean government soon after disaster struck. The Zimbabwean government, through Defence Minister Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, expressed appreciation for the gesture made by the Chinese government and the Chinese community in Zimbabwe. This is a gesture that we cherish, and we know that this is being presented in the spirit of the relationship that we so much enjoy from the time that we were undertaking our revolution to liberate Zimbabwe, said Mrs. Muchinguri-Kashiri. We shared trenches with the Chinese during the struggle, and we continue to enjoy very cordial relations with them at international and at a bi-national level, and we are happy that today they are here in our midst. In Mozambique, the Chinese government offered similar help to the victims of Cyclone Idai. The Asian economic giant also sent a rescue team made up of 65 members to Mozambiques Beira region that was affected. The rescue team brought 20 tonnes of equipment and materials for search and rescue purposes, as well as for communication and medical treatment, reported Xinhua news agency. The Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management dispatched the rescue team with the approval of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council. It was dispatched at the request of the Mozambican government. The cyclone winds and floods that swept across south-eastern Africa, leaving the 2.6 million people stranded and thousands dead, raced at speeds of up to 170 kph (105 mph) from the Indian Ocean. Lovemore Chikova is the Assistant Editor at The Herald newspaper in Zimbabwe and a fellow of the China-Africa Press Centre email: [email protected] MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd April, 2019) Belarus will receive a $600 million loan from Russia and will be able to receive another $200 million loan tranche from the Russia-led Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development (EFSD) in late April, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Monday. "Russia will give Belarus a governmental financial loan in the amount of $600 million. The funds will be used to refinance the existing debt that Belarus has to Russia from previous loans," Siluanov said. The finance minister said that the loan documents were currently in preparation. "In addition, Belarus has met all of the requirements set out by the Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development to receive a seventh loan tranche in the amount of $200 million, which means that the fund's committee has reason to grant the loan request," Siluanov said. Siluanov added that Belarus could receive the seventh loan tranche to balance its budget by the end of this month. Belarus last received a loan from Russia in November 2018 for the about of $630 million and also used it to refinance its standing debt. Russia is a major trade and economic partner for Belarus, with a nearly 50-percent share in the country's trade. In January-October 2018, trade between the two countries amounted to 28.2 billion rubles ($412 million). According to reports, in May 2018, Belarus' debt to Russia was $6.3 billion. A haul of narcotics seized in Colombo was destroyed by the Sri Lanka Police Narcotics Bureau on April 1, 2019. The Archbishop of Colombo organized a march and protest against drug crimes on March 31. President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wikcremasinghe also addressed the participants. By Robin Gomes A prominent Catholic Churchman in Sri Lanka is urging the faithful to rally around the governments fight against the menace of drug abuse. It is "our duty to support the president in an effort to protect our children from the danger of drugs, said Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, at an anti-narcotics march and rally he promoted in the capital, Colombo, on Sunday, March 31. At the end of Sunday Mass, 3 parishes, including children studying the catechism, raised placards and banners and marched in silence and converged on Vystwyke Park in Kotahena for the rally. More than 2,000 people, including dozens of Catholics and Buddhists as well as local clergy, joined the initiative titled, Say no to drugs. President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wikcremasinghe were at his side on the stage in Vystwyke Park in Kotahena. Drug problem Recently, the president launched a campaign against drug trafficking, reintroducing the death penalty. "We are strengthening the laws and will go for strict punishments," the president said adding he would set a date for the resumption of execution. If we do not act immediately, the drug threat will enter our economic system, warned Card. Ranjith at the rally. Sirisena said a special event is being organized on April 3 for schoolchildren and others to pledge support for the battle against illicit drugs. Prime Minister Wikcremasinghe went further. "We need help from neighbouring countries. We cannot do this alone," he said. Card. Ranjith requested the "president to punish the culprits who are behind this drug mafia without fear." "Drug dealers target schoolchildren and the youth, so, he said, we should protect our future generations." The island nation has become a major transit point for traffickers and it suffers from widespread domestic drug addiction. Sri Lankan authorities destroyed over 769 kilograms of narcotics on Monday and earlier in January, US$108 million worth of drugs from a single intercepted shipment was burned. A phone hotline has been established for members of the public to report drug dealers. Cannabis and heroin are the most widely used drugs in Sri Lanka and authorities have expressed concern that the island nation could also become a major transit point for international traffickers. Police have arrested more than 50 people on trafficking charges since the middle of last year. Statistics of the National Dangerous Drugs Control Board show that arrests for drug crimes have soared in the past six years. The Church and the death penalty While supporting the fight against drug abuse and drug-related crimes, the Catholic Church teaching, however, is against the death penalty. In August last year, Pope Francis allowed a revision in the Catechism of the Catholic Church making capital punishment inadmissible. Earlier, the Catechism did not exclude recourse to the death penalty in very rare, if not practically nonexistent circumstances. Soon after the revision in the Catechism of the Catholic Church on capital punishment, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Sri Lanka (CBCSL) issued a statement fully endorsing the Church's stand while vowing to fight the menace of drug-related crimes. While capital punishment has not been implemented since 1976, there are about 1,300 prisoners on death row in Sri Lanka, including 48 for drug convictions. Religious leaders, including Catholic bishops, priests, nuns and laymen, have protested Sirisenas move to end a 43-year old moratorium on the death penalty. They have also condemned the increased use of illegal drugs among schoolchildren in Sri Lanka. In preparation for Sundays event, Card. Ranjith had urged all parishes and institutions to stage silent demonstrations denouncing all drug peddlers. (Source: UNANEWS, AsiaNews) Andrea Tornielli, the editorial director for the Dicastery of Communication, provides a detailed synthesis of the Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation "Christ is Alive!" Christ is alive Christ is alive! He is our hope, and in a wonderful way he brings youth to our world. The very first words, then, that I would like to say to every young Christian are these: Christ is alive and he wants you to be alive!. Thus begins the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Christus vivit , by Pope Francis, signed on Monday 25 March in the Holy House of Loreto and addressed to young people , and to the entire People of God. In the document, composed of nine chapters divided into 299 paragraphs, the Pope explains that he allowed himself to be inspired by the wealth of reflections and conversations of the Synod on Young People, celebrated in the Vatican in October 2018. Chapter one: What does the Word of God have to say about young people? Francis recalls that in an age when young people were not highly regarded, some texts show that God sees them differently (6). He briefly presents figures of young people from the Old Testament: Joseph, Gideon (7), Samuel (8), King David (9), Solomon and Jeremiah (10), the very young Jewish servant of Naaman, and the young Ruth (11). Then he moves on to the New Testament. The Pope recalls that Jesus, who is eternally young, wants to give us hearts that are ever young (13) and adds: Let us also keep in mind that Jesus had no use for adults who looked down on the young or lorded it over them. On the contrary, he insisted that the greatest among you must become like the youngest (Lk 22:26). For him age did not establish privileges, and being young did not imply lesser worth or dignity. Francis affirms: We should never repent of spending our youth being good, opening our heart to the Lord, and living differently (17). Chapter two: Jesus, ever young The Pope addresses the theme of Jesus youthful years and remembers the Gospel story that describes Jesus as an adolescent, when he had returned with his parents to Nazareth, after being lost and found in the Temple (26). We should not think, Francis writes, that Jesus was a withdrawn adolescent or a self-absorbed youth. His relationships were those of a young person who shared fully in the life of his family and his people, no one regarded him as unusual or set apart from others (28). The Pope points out that, thanks to the trust of his parents, the adolescent Jesus, can move freely and learn to journey with others (29). These aspects of Jesus life should not be ignored in youth ministry, lest we create projects that isolate young people from their family and the larger community, or turn them into a select few, protected from all contamination. Rather, we need projects that can strengthen them, accompany them and impel them to encounter others, to engage in generous service, in mission (30). Jesus does not teach you, young people, from afar or from without, but from within your very youth, a youth he shares with you and in him many aspects typical of young hearts can be recognized (31). With him at our side, we can drink from the true wellspring that keeps alive all our dreams, our projects, our great ideals, while impelling us to proclaim what makes life truly worthwhile (32); The Lord is calling us to enkindle stars in the night of other young people (33). Francis then speaks of the youth of the Church and writes: Let us ask the Lord to free the Church from those who would make her grow old, encase her in the past, hold her back or keep her at a standstill. But let us also ask him to free her from another temptation: that of thinking she is young because she accepts everything the world offers her, thinking that she is renewed because she sets her message aside and acts like everybody else. No! The Church is young when she is herself, when she receives ever anew the strength born of Gods word, the Eucharist, and the daily presence of Christ and the power of his Spirit in our lives (35). It is true that as members of the Church, we should not stand apart from others, yet at the same time, we must dare to be different, to point to ideals other than those of this world, testifying to the beauty of generosity, service, purity, perseverance, forgiveness, fidelity to our personal vocation, prayer, the pursuit of justice and the common good, love for the poor, and social friendship (36). The Church can be tempted to lose her enthusiasm and revert to seeking a false, worldly form of security. Young people can help keep her young (37). The Pope then goes back to one of the teachings most dear to him and, explaining that the figure of Jesus must be presented in an attractive and effective way, says: the Church should not be excessively caught up in herself but instead, and above all, reflect Jesus Christ. This means humbly acknowledging that some things concretely need to change (39). The Exhortation recognizes that there are young people who feel the presence of the Church a nuisance, even an irritant. This attitude that has its roots in serious and understandable reasons: sexual and financial scandals; a clergy ill-prepared to engage effectively with the sensitivities of the young; the passive role assigned to the young within the Christian community; the Churchs difficulty in explaining her doctrine and ethical positions to contemporary society (40). There are young people who want a Church that listens more, that does more than simply condemn the world. They do not want to see a Church that is silent and afraid to speak, but neither one that is always battling obsessively over two or three issues. To be credible to young people, there are times when she needs to regain her humility and simply listen, recognizing that what others have to say can provide some light to help her better understand the Gospel (41). For example, a Church that is too fearful can be constantly critical of efforts to defend the rights of women, and constantly point out the risks and the potential errors of those demands, while a Church that is a living Church, can react by being attentive to the legitimate claims of women, while not agreeing with everything some feminist groups propose (42). Francis then presents Mary, the young woman from Nazareth, and her Yes as that of someone willing to take a risk, ready to stake everything she had, with no more security than the certainty of knowing that she was the bearer of a promise. So I ask each one of you: do you see yourselves as the bearers of a promise? (44) For Mary, challenges were no reason to say no , and thus putting herself at stake, she became the influencer of God. The heart of the Church is also full of young saints. The Pope remembers Saint Sebastian, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Joan of Arc, Blessed Martyr Andrew Phu Yen, Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Saint Dominic Savio, Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus, Blessed Ceferino Namuncura, Blessed Isidoro Bakanja, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, Blessed Marcel Callo, the young Blessed Chiara Badano. Chapter three: You are the now of God We cannot just say that young people are the future of our world, says Pope Francis. They are its present; even now, they are helping to enrich it (64). For this reason it is necessary to listen to them even if there is a tendency to provide prepackaged answers and ready-made solutions, without allowing their real questions to emerge and facing the challenges they pose (65). Today, we adults can often be tempted to list all the problems and failings of todays young people But what would be the result of such an attitude? Greater distance, less closeness, less mutual assistance (66). Whoever is called to be a father, pastor and youth guide should have the ability to discern pathways where others only see walls, to recognize potential where others see only peril. That is how God the Father sees things; He knows how to cherish and nurture the seeds of goodness sown in the hearts of the young. Each young persons heart should thus be considered holy ground (67). Francis also invites us not to generalize, because the worlds of todays youth are so many (68). Speaking of what happens to young people, the Pope recalls those who live in contexts of war, those who are exploited, the victims of kidnappings, organized crime, human trafficking, slavery and sexual exploitation, rape. And also those who live by committing crimes and acts of violence (72). Many young people are taken in by ideologies, used and exploited as cannon fodder or a strike force to destroy, terrify or ridicule others. Worse yet, many of them end up as individualists, hostile and distrustful of others; in this way, they become an easy target for the brutal and destructive strategies of political groups or economic powers (73). Even more numerous are those who suffer forms of marginalization and social exclusion for religious, ethnic or economic reasons. Pope Francis cites adolescents and young people who become pregnant, the scourge of abortion, the spread of HIV, various forms of addiction (drugs, gambling, pornography and so forth), and the plight of street children without homes, families or economic resources (74), situations that are made doubly painful and difficult for women. As a Church, may we never fail to weep before these tragedies of our young. May we never become inured to them The worst thing we can do is adopt that worldly spirit whose solution is simply to anesthetize young people with other messages, with other distractions, with trivial pursuits (75). The Pope invites young people to learn to weep for their peers who are worse off than they are (76). It is true, Pope Francis explains, that people in power offer some assistance, but often it comes at a high price. In many poor countries, economic aid provided by some richer countries or international agencies is usually tied to the acceptance of Western views of sexuality, marriage, life or social justice. This ideological colonization is especially harmful to the young (78). The Pope also warns against todays culture that presents the youthful model of beauty and uses young bodies in advertising: it has very little to do with young people. It only means that adults want to snatch youth for themselves (79). Referring to desires, hurts, and longings, Pope Francis speaks about sexuality and its essential importance for young peoples lives and for their process of growth in identity. The Pope writes that: in a world that constantly exalts sexuality, maintaining a healthy relationship with ones body and a serene affective life is not easy. For this and other reasons, sexual morality often tends to be a source of incomprehension and alienation from the Church, inasmuch as she is viewed as a place of judgment and condemnation, despite the fact there are young people who want to discuss these issues (81). Faced with developments in science, biomedical technologies and neuroscience, the Pope recalls how these can make us forget that life is a gift, and that we are creatures with innate limits, open to exploitation by those who wield technological power (82). The Exhortation then turns to the theme of the digital world which has created a new way to communicate, and which can facilitate the circulation of independent information. In many countries, the web and social networks already represent a firmly established forum for reaching and involving young people (87). But they can also be a place of loneliness, manipulation, exploitation and violence, up to the extreme case of the dark web. Digital media can expose people to the risk of addiction, isolation and gradual loss of contact with concrete reality New forms of violence are spreading through social media, for example cyber-bullying. The internet is also a channel for spreading pornography and the exploitation of persons for sexual purposes or through gambling (88). It should not be forgotten that in the digital world there are huge economic interests, capable of creating mechanisms for the manipulation of consciences and of the democratic process. There are closed circuits that facilitate the spread of fake news and false information, fomenting prejudice and hate The reputation of individuals is put in jeopardy through summary trials conducted online. The Church and her pastors are not exempt from this phenomenon (89). In a document prepared by 300 young people from all over the world before the Synod it is stated that online relationships can become inhuman, and immersion in the virtual world has favored a kind of digital migration, involving withdrawal from their families and their cultural and religious values, and entrance into a world of loneliness (90). The Pope goes on to present migrants as an epitome of our time, and recalls the many young people involved in migration. The Churchs concern is focused especially on those fleeing from war, violence, political or religious persecution, from natural disasters including those caused by climate change, and from extreme poverty (91): they search for an opportunity, a dream of a better future. Other migrants are attracted by Western culture, sometimes with unrealistic expectations that expose them to grave disappointments. Unscrupulous traffickers, frequently linked to drug cartels or arms cartels, exploit the weakness of migrants... The particular vulnerability of migrants who are unaccompanied minors is worth noting In some host countries, migration causes fear and alarm, often fomented and exploited for political ends. This can lead to a xenophobic mentality, as people close in on themselves, and this needs to be addressed decisively (92). Young migrants often also experience a cultural and religious uprooting (93). Francis asks young people not to play into the hands of those who would set them against other young people, newly arrived in their countries, and who would encourage them to view the latter as a threat (94). The Pope also speaks of child abuse, makes the Synods commitment to the adoption of rigorous measures of prevention his own, and expresses gratitude to those who had the courage to report the evil they experienced (99). He recalls that, thank God, those who committed these horrible crimes are not the majority of priests, who carry out their ministry with fidelity and generosity. He asks young people, if they see a priest at risk because he has taken the wrong path, to have the courage to remind him of his commitment to God and to his people (100). Abuse, however, is not the only sin in the Church. Our sins are before the eyes of everyone; they appear all too clearly in the lines on the age-old face of the Church, our Mother and Teacher, but the Church does not resort to any cosmetic surgery, she is not afraid to reveal the sins of her members. Let us never forget that we must not abandon our Mother when she is wounded (101). but stand beside her, so that she can summon up all her strength and all her ability to begin ever anew. This dark moment, with the help of the young people, can truly be an opportunity for a reform of epoch-making significance, opening us to a new Pentecost (102). Pope Francis reminds young people that there is a way out in all dark and painful situations. He recalls the Good News given on the morning of the Resurrection. He explains that even though the digital world can expose us to many risks, there are young people who know how to be creative and brilliant in these areas. Like the Venerable Carlo Acutis, who knew how to use the new communication technologies to transmit the Gospel (105), he did not fall into the trap and said: Everyone is born as an original, but many people end up die as photocopies. Dont let that happen to you (106), warns the Pope. Dont let them rob you of hope and joy, or drug you into becoming a slave to their interests (107), seek the great goal of holiness. Being young is not only about pursuing fleeting pleasures and superficial achievements. If the years of your youth are to serve their purpose in life, they must be a time of generous commitment, whole-hearted dedication (108). If you are young in years, but feel weak, weary or disillusioned, ask Jesus to renew you (109). But always remember that it is very difficult to fight againstthe snares and temptations of the devil, and the selfishness of the worldif we grow too isolated (110). Thats when we need a life of community . Chapter four: A great message for all young people To all young people the Pope announces three great truths. A God who is love. God loves you, never doubt this (112). You can find security in the embrace of your heavenly Father (113). Pope Francis affirms that the memory of the Father is not a hard disk that saves and archives all our data. His memory is a heart filled with tender compassion, one that finds joy in deleting from us every trace of evil Because he loves you. Try to keep still for a moment and let yourself feel his love (115). His love is one that has to do more with raising up than knocking down, with reconciling than forbidding, with offering new changes than condemning, with the future than the past (116). The second truth is that Christ saves you. Never forget that He forgives us seventy times seven. Time and time again, He bears us on his shoulders (119). Jesus loves us and saves us because only what is loved can be saved. Only what is embraced can be transformed. The Lords love is greater than all our problems, frailties and flaws (120). And His forgiveness and salvation are not something we can buy, or that we have to acquire by our own works or efforts. He forgives us and sets us free without cost (121). The third truth is that He is alive!. We need to keep reminding ourselves of thisbecause we can risk seeing Jesus Christ simply as a fine model from the distant past, as a memory, as someone who saved us two thousand years ago. But that would be of no use to us: it would leave us unchanged, it would not set us free (124). If He lives, there can be no doubt that goodness will have the upper hand in your life then we can stop complaining and look to the future, for with him this is always possible (127). In these truths, the Father appears and Jesus appears. And where they are, there is also the Holy Spirit. Invoke the Holy Spirit each day You have nothing to lose, and He can change your life, fill it with light and lead it along a better path. He takes nothing away from you, but instead helps you to find all that you need, and in the best possible way (131). Chapter 5: Paths of Youth The love of God and our relationship with the living Christ do not hold us back from dreaming; they do not require us to narrow our horizons. On the contrary, that love elevates us, encourages us and inspires us to a better and more beautiful life. Much of the longing present in the hearts of young people can be summed up in the word restlessness (138). Thinking of a young person, the Pope sees him or her as someone who wants to fly on their two feet, always with one foot forward, ready to set out, to spring ahead. Always racing onward (139). Youth cannot remain on hold, because it is the age of choice in the professional, social, political spheres, and also in the choice of the partner or in having ones first children. Anxiety can work against us by making us give up whenever we do not see instant results. Our best dreams are only attained through hope, patience and commitment, and not in haste. At the same time, we should not be hesitant, afraid to take chances or make mistakes (142). Pope Francis invites young people not to observe life from the balcony, not to spend their lives in front of a screen, not to be reduced to abandoned vehicles and not to look at the world as tourists: Make a ruckus! Cast out the fears that paralyze youlive! (143) He invites them to live the present enjoying with gratitude every little gift of life without being insatiable and obsessively seeking new pleasures (146). In fact, living the present is not the same as embarking irresponsibly on a life of dissipation that can only leave us empty and perpetually dissatisfied (147). No matter how much you live the experience of these years of your youth, you will never know their deepest and fullest meaning unless you encounter each day your best friend, the friend who is Jesus (150) Friendship with Him is indissoluble because He does not abandon us (154). With a friend, we can speak and share our deepest secrets. With Jesus too, we can always have a conversation. When we pray, we open everything we do to him, and we give him room so that He can act, enter and claim victory (155). Do not deprive your youth of this friendship. You will be able to feel him at your side. That is what the disciples of Emmaus experienced (156). Saint Oscar Romero said: Christianity is not a collection of truths to be believed, rules to be followed, or prohibitions. Seen that way, it puts us off. Christianity is a person who loved me immensely, who demands and asks for my love. Christianity is Christ. The Pope, speaking of growth and maturity, indicates the importance of seeking a spiritual development, of seeking the Lord and keeping his Word, of maintaining the connection with Jesus... since you will not grow happy and holy by your own efforts and intelligence alone (158). Adults too must mature without losing the values of youth: In every moment of life we can renew and increase our youth. When I began my ministry as Pope, the Lord broadened my horizons and granted me renewed youth. The same can happen to a couple married for many years, or to a monk in his monastery (160). Growing older means preserving and cherishing the most precious things about our youth, but it also involves having to purify those things that are not good (161). But I would also remind you that you wont become holy and find fulfilment by copying others You have to discover who you are and develop your own way of being holy (162). Pope Francis proposes paths of fraternity to live the faith, remembering that the Holy Spirit wants to make us come out of ourselves, to embrace others That is why it is always better to live the faith together and to show our love by living in community (164), overcoming the temptation to dwell on ourselves and our problems, our hurt feelings and our grievances (166). God loves the joy of young people. He wants them especially to share in the joy of fraternal communion (167). The Pope then speaks of being young and committed, stating that young people can sometimes be tempted to withdraw into small groups They may feel that they are experiencing fraternity and love, but their small group may in fact become nothing other than an extension of their own ego. This is even more serious if they think of the lay vocation simply as a form of service inside the Church They forget that the lay vocation is directed above all to charity within the family and to social and political charity (168). Pope Francis proposes that young people go beyond their small groups and to build social friendship, where everyone works for the common good. Social enmity, on the other hand, is destructive. Families are destroyed by enmity. Countries are destroyed by enmity. The world is destroyed by enmity. And the greatest enmity of all is war. Today we see that the world is destroying itself by war because we are unable to sit down and speak (169). Social engagement and direct contact with the poor remain fundamental ways of finding or deepening ones faith and the discernment of ones vocation (170). The Pope cites the positive example of young people from parishes, schools and movements who often go out to spend time with the elderly and the infirm, or to visit poor neighbourhoods (171). Other young people take part in social programs that build houses for the homeless, or reclaim contaminated areas or offer various kinds of assistance to the needy. It would be helpful if this shared energy could be channeled and organized in a more stable way. University students can apply their knowledge in an interdisciplinary way, together with young people of other churches or religions (172). Pope Francis encourages young people to make this commitment: I have been following news reports of the many young people throughout the world who have taken to the streets to express the desire for a more just and fraternal society... The young want to be protagonists of change. Please, do not leave it to others to be protagonists of change! (174). Young people are called to be courageous missionaries, witnessing everywhere to the Gospel with their own lives, which does not mean speaking about the truth, but living it (175). The word, however, must not be silenced: Learn to swim against the tide, learn how to share Jesus and the faith he has given you (176). Where does Jesus send us? There are no borders, no limits: he sends us everywhere. The Gospel is for everyone, not just for some. It is not only for those who seem closer to us, more receptive, more welcoming. It is for everyone (177). And one cannot expect the mission to be soft and easy (178). Chapter six: Young people with roots Pope Francis says that it hurts him to see young people sometimes being encouraged to build a future without roots, as if the world were just starting now (179). If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future that he holds out, doesnt it then become easy to draw them along so that they only do what he tells them? He needs the young to be shallow, uprooted and distrustful, so that they can trust only in his promises and act according to his plans. That is how various ideologies operate: they destroy (or deconstruct) all differences so that they can reign unopposed (181). The manipulators also use the cult of youth: The youthful body becomes the symbol of this new cult; everything associated with that body is idolized and lusted after, while whatever is not young is despised. But this cult of youth is simply an expedient that ultimately proves degrading to the young (182). Dear young friends, do not let them exploit your youth to promote a shallow life that confuses beauty with appearances (183). Because there is beauty in the labourer who returns home grimy and unkempt, in the elderly wife who takes care of her sick husband, in the fidelity of couples who love each other in the autumn of life. Today instead we promote a spirituality without God, an affectivity without community or concern for those who suffer, a fear of the poor, viewed as dangerous and a variety of claims to offer a future paradise that nonetheless seems increasingly distant (184). The Pope invites young people not to allow themselves to be dominated by this ideology which leads to cultural colonization (185) which eradicates young people from the cultural and religious affiliations from which they come and tends to homogenize them by transforming them into a new line of malleable goods (186). Fundamental is your relationship with the elderly, says the Pope, which helps young people to discover the living richness of the past. The Word of God encourages us to remain close to the elderly, so that we can benefit from their experience (188). This does not mean having to agree with everything adults say or approving all their actions. It is really a matter of being open to receiving a wisdom passed down from generation to generation (190). The world has never benefitted, nor will it ever benefit, from a rupture between generations It is the lie that would have you believe that only what is new is good and beautiful (191). Speaking of dreams and visions, Pope Francis observes: When young and old alike are open to the Holy Spirit, they make a wonderful combination. The old dream dreams, and the young see visions (192). If young people sink roots in those dreams, they can peer into the future (193). That is why we need to take risks together, walking together, young and old. Roots are not anchors chaining us but a fixed point from which we can grow and meet new challenges (200). Chapter seven: Youth ministry The Pope explains that youth ministry has been affected by social and cultural changes and young people frequently fail to find in our usual programmes a response to their concerns, their needs, their problems and issues (202). The young people themselves are agents of youth ministry. Certainly they need to he helped and guided, but at the same time left free to develop new approaches, with creativity and a certain audacity. We need to help young people to use their insight, ingenuity and knowledge to address the issues and concerns of other young people in their own language (203). Youth ministry needs to be flexible, and it is necessary to invite young people to events or occasions that provide an opportunity not only for learning, but also for conversing, celebrating, singing, listening to real stories and experiencing a shared encounter with the living God (204). Youth ministry has to be synodal, that is, capable of shaping a journey together and this involves two broad lines of action: the first is outreach, the second is growth. For the first, Pope Francis trusts in the ability of young people themselves to find appealing ways to come together. They only have to be encouraged and given the freedom to be enthused. What is most important, though, is that each young person can be daring enough to sow the seed of the message on that fertile terrain that is the heart of another young person (210). Priority should be given to the language of closeness, the language of generous, relational and existential love that touches the heart. Young people need to be approached with the grammar of love, not by being preached at (211). As far as growth is concerned, Pope Francis warns against proposing to young people touched by an intense experience of God meetings of formation in which only doctrinal and moral questions are dealt with... The result is that many young people get bored, they lose the fire of their encounter with Christ and the joy of following Him (212). Any educational project or path of growth for young people must certainly include formation in Christian doctrine and morality, that must be centred on the kerygma, the foundational experience of encounter with God through Jesus death and resurrection, and on growth in fraternal love, community life and service (213). Therefore, youth ministry should always include occasions for renewing and deepening our personal experience of the love of God and the living Christ (214). It should help young people to live as brothers and sisters, to help one another, to build community, to be of service to others, to be close to the poor (215). Church institutions should therefore provide suitable environments, places young people can make their own, where they can come and go freely, feel welcome and readily meet other young people, whether at times of difficulty and frustration, or of joy and celebration (218). Pope Francis then describes Youth Ministry in educational institutions, affirming that schools are in urgent need of self-criticism. He recalls that some Catholic schools seem to be structured only for the sake of self-preservation A school that becomes a bunker, protecting its students from errors from without is a caricature of this tendency. When young people leave, they feel an insurmountable disconnect between what they were taught and the world in which they live, while one of the greatest joys that any educator can have is to see a student turn into a strong, well-integrated person (221). We cannot separate spiritual from cultural formation This, then, is your great challenge: to respond to the crippling refrains of cultural consumerism with thoughtful and firm decisions, with research, knowledge and sharing (223). Among the areas of pastoral development, the Pope indicates the importance of the arts (226), the potential of sports (227), and care for the environment (228). There is a need for popular youth ministry, broader and more flexible, which stimulates those natural guides and charisms which the Holy Spirit has already sown among young people, in the different places in which young people concretely move. It tries to avoid imposing obstacles, rules, controls and obligatory structures on these young believers who are natural leaders in their neighbourhoods and in other settings. We need only to accompany and encourage them (230). By focusing on a pure and perfect youth ministry, marked by abstract ideas, protected from the world and free of every flaw, we can turn the Gospel into a dull, meaningless and unattractive proposition. Such a youth ministry ends up completely removed from the world of young people and suited only to an elite Christian youth that sees itself as different, while living in an empty and unproductive isolation (232). Pope Francis invites us to be a Church with open doors. Nor does one have to accept fully all the teachings of the Church to take part in certain of our activities for young people (234). Room should also be made for all those who have other visions of life, who belong to other religions or who distance themselves from religion altogether (235). The icon for this approach is offered to us by the Gospel episode of the disciples at Emmaus: Jesus questions them, listens to them patiently, helps them to recognize what they are living, to interpret in the light of Scripture what they have lived, accepts to stay with them, enters their night. It is they themselves who choose to resume without delay the journey in the opposite direction (237). Always missionaries. For young people to become missionaries there is no need to make a long journey. A young person who makes a pilgrimage to ask Our Lady for help, and invites a friend or companion along, by that single gesture is being a good missionary (239). Youth ministry is always missionary (240). Young people need to have their freedom respected, yet they also need to be accompanied. The family should be the first place of accompaniment (242), and then the community. All should regard young people with understanding, appreciation and affection, and avoid constantly judging them or demanding of them a perfection beyond their years (243). There is a lack of experienced people dedicated to accompaniment (244) and some young women feel that there is a lack of leading female role models within the Church (245). The same young people described to us the qualities they hope to find in a mentor: being a faithful Christian who engages with the Church and the world; someone who constantly seeks holiness; someone who is a confidant without judgement. Similarly, someone who actively listens to the needs of young people and responds in kind; someone deeply loving and self-aware; someone who recognizes his or her limits and knows the joys and sorrows of the spiritual journey. An especially important quality in mentors is the acknowledgement of their own humanity the fact that they are human beings who make mistakes: not perfect people but forgiven sinners (246). They should know how to walk alongside them, respecting their freedom. Chapter eight: Vocation The first thing we need to discern and discover is this: Jesus wants to be a friend to every young person (250). Vocation is a call to missionary service to others, for our life on earth reaches full stature when it becomes an offering (254). To respond to our vocation, we need to foster and develop all that we are. This has nothing to do with inventing ourselves or creating ourselves out of nothing. It has to do with finding our true selves in the light of God and letting our lives flourish and bear fruit (257). This being there for others normally has to do with two basic issues: forming a new family and working (258). As for love and family, the Pope writes that: Young people intensely feel the call to love; they dream of meeting the right person with whom they can form a family (259). The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony envelops this love in the grace of God; it roots it in God Himself (260). God created us as sexual beings. He himself created sexuality, which is a marvellous gift. It is not taboo. It is a gift the Lord gives us. It has two purposes: to love and to generate life. It is passion True love is passionate (261). Pope Francis observes that the increase of separations, divorces can cause great suffering and a crisis of identity in young people. Sometimes they must take on responsibilities that are not proportioned to their age (262). Despite all the difficulties, it is worth your every effort to invest in the family; there you will find the best incentives to mature and the greatest joys to experience and share. Dont let yourselves be robbed of a great love (263). To think that nothing can be definitive is a deceptive lie I ask you, instead, to be revolutionaries, I ask you to swim against the tide (264). As for work, the Pope writes: I ask young people not to expect to live without working, depending on others for help. This is not good, because work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfilment. In this sense, helping the poor financially must always be a provisional solution in the face of pressing needs (269). After noting how young people in the world of work experience forms of exclusion and marginalization (270), the Pope affirms with regard to youth unemployment: This is a highly complex and sensitive issue that politics must make a priority, especially at present, when the speed of technological advances and the concern to reduce labour costs can lead quickly to the replacement of many jobs by machines (271). To young people he says: It is true that you cannot live without working, and that sometimes you have to accept whatever is available, but I ask you never to give up on your dreams, never completely bury a calling, and never accept defeat (272). Pope Francis concludes this chapter by talking about the vocation to special consecration. In discerning your vocation, do not dismiss the possibility of devoting yourself to God Why not? You can be sure that, if you do recognize and follow a call from God, there you will find complete fulfilment (276). Chapter nine: Discernment The Pope recalls that: Without the wisdom of discernment, we can easily become prey to every passing trend (279). A particular form of discernment involves the effort to discover our own vocation. Since this is a very personal decision that others cannot make for us, it requires a certain degree of solitude and silence (283). A vocation, while a gift, will undoubtedly also be demanding. Gods gifts are interactive; to enjoy them we have to be ready to take risks (289). Three sensitivities are required of those who help young people in their discernment. The first kind of sensitivity is directed to the individual. It is a matter of listening to someone who is sharing his very self in what he says (292). The second kind of sensitivity is marked by discernment. It tries to grasp exactly where grace or temptation is present (293). The third kind of sensitivity is the ability to perceive what is driving the other person, discerning the direction in which that person truly wants to move (294). When we listen to others in this way, at a certain moment we ourselves have to disappear in order to let the other person follow the path he or she has discovered. We have to vanish as the Lord did from the sight of his disciples in Emmaus (296). We need to encourage and accompany processes, without imposing our own roadmaps. For those processes have to do with persons who remain always unique and free. There are no easy recipes (297). The exhortation concludes with a wish from Pope Francis: Dear young people, my joyful hope is to see you keep running the race before you, outstripping all those who are slow or fearful. Keep running, attracted by the face of Christ, whom we love so much, whom we adore in the Holy Eucharist and acknowledge in the flesh of our suffering brothers and sisters. The Church needs your momentum, your intuitions, your faith And when you arrive where we have not yet reached, have the patience to wait for us. This mask could come straight from a horror film, originally it even had false teeth stitched into its mouth. It is made of leather, with real teeth fixed in the mouth and human hair attached to the forehead. The mask is today in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.This mask was first discovered in the 1840s in a cottage near Cumnock. Along with the wig and a sword it had just been handed down from generation to generation as a family heirloom. This grim mask dates from around 1660-1670 and was made to disguise the identity of Alexander Peden The Prophet of the Covenant. Also known simply as Sandy.Alexander Sandy Peden was born in Ayrshire, Scotland around 1626. He went to Glasgow University before becoming minister in New Luce in 1659. In 1662, Peden was one of the 300 ministers who were forced to leave their churches after the Restoration of Charles II and the beginning of the persecution. Immediately, he began preaching in the fields all over Southern and Central Scotland, and he soon became one of the best known field preachers.The fact that Peden was so well known however made him one of the most wanted men in Scotland by the government. He started wearing a mask when he was traveling about so that the soldiers wouldnt recognize him. Even this wasnt going to keep him safe forever though, so in 1670 he fled to Ireland where he stayed until 1673. He spent part of the time in Armagh. Peden preached to many, many people in the fields, and condemned the rest of the Presbyterian ministers in Ireland as sinful for not doing so themselves. Around this time, those Presbyterians who still held to the Solemn League and Covenant began to hold separate society meetings for fellowship. Peden came to Ireland often and his preaching helped strengthen these Irish Covenanters.When Peden returned to Scotland in 1673 he was arrested and spent the next four years imprisoned on the Bass Rock with forty other Covenanters. The year after he was released, he was back in Ireland for a short time, during which he again condemned the mainline Presbyterian ministers, this time because they sent letters to the government saying that they did not approve of the battle of Bothwell Bridge which the Covenanters in Scotland had just fought at.In 1682, he returned to Ireland where he hired himself out as a farm worker to a farmer called William Steel and his wife, who lived in Glenwherry, between Ballymena and Larne. After each days work, Peden would sleep in the barn with the Steels young servant boy. After two days of this however, the servant boy complained to his mistress that this new Scottish man didnt actually sleep, but instead spent all night praying by name for the suffering members of the Church of Scotland. At tea time that night she got her husband to ask Peden if he was a minister, and he said that he was, and that he wasnt ashamed of it. After this they didnt make him sleep in the barn or work in the fields again, but instead they got him to preach and minister to those in the surrounding area.Peden stayed at Glenwherry until 1685, before going back to Scotland, where he preached his final sermon. He died in January 1686. Forty days later, in a final attack on his memory, government troops were sent to dig up his body and bury it two miles away out of disrespect.(via National Museums Scotland and Reformation History AkzoNobel brings Orange ASEAN Factory to Vietnam in this April On April 1, AkzoNobel co-operated with the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ho Chi Minh City to host Orange ASEAN Factory in Vietnam for the first time. This is the sixth edition of the programme initiated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and the second time AkzoNobel has supported the initiative, focusing on improving skills and knowledge on sustainability for youngsters. This edition will take place from April 1 to 19, 2019 at AkzoNobels office in Ho Chi Minh City under the theme of Sustainable Urban Development. This is a chance for students, entrepreneurs, and young professionals to learn how to use entrepreneurial skills and innovative thinking to solve societal issues while delivering direct business value. Orange ASEAN Factory 2019 will function as a funnel, moving from societal issues to sustainable business solutions. There will be 30 Dutch and ASEAN students and young professionals from a variety of fields such as engineering, marketing, and sociology. During the three weeks, they will work in six dedicated teams to come up with business cases for real-life issues, designing innovative solutions for sustainability challenges in Vietnam and the region. There will be professional sustainability consultants, specialists, and designers to guide them to identify and prepare the groundwork for innovative solutions. Some of the key topics to be discussed are school hygiene, waste treatment, sustainable floating fish farming in the Mekong Delta, and solutions for the circular economy. Pamela Phua, general director of AkzoNobel Vietnam As the host and one of the mentors, AkzoNobel will share its experience and expertise in building a sustainable company inside-out. AkzoNobel wants to not only deliver sustainable products but also build a sustainable company in a sustainable economy and community for everyone. We already have sustainable products and services and work in co-operation with other sectors to raise awareness of the issue. However, we think those are on the top, the root is in the mindset of the young generation who will lead our economy in the coming years. Accompanying the sixth edition of Orange ASEAN Factory, we hope to sow the seeds of sustainable thinking and develop participants knowledge and skills, guiding them to make meaningful contributions to Vietnam and the region, said Pamela Phua, general director of AkzoNobel Vietnam. During the 2019 programme, AkzoNobel will take participants on a factory tour to give more practical knowledge about the sustainable production practices of a leading paints and coatings company. Carel Richter, consul general of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ho Chi Minh City, emphasised: It is good to see efforts from companies like AkzoNobel to encourage the young generation of Vietnam, the Netherlands, and the ASEAN region to find solutions to sustainability challenges. These young talented people will together develop innovative solutions to deal with waste, plastic, packaging, and many more issues. During the three weeks, these students will be hosted by AkzoNobel in their inspiring office building. I am proud of working together with AkzoNobel, an outstanding Dutch company in Vietnam contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. AkzoNobel is a major sponsor who helps look for potential talent and build capacity for the Vietnamese construction industry by offering annual scholarships for architecture students throughout the country. The participation in Orange ASEAN Factory 2019 underlines AkzoNobels efforts during the first months of 2019. Recently, AkzoNobel has launched AkzoNobel Cares, which includes the Community Programme, Lets Colour, Education Fund, and local activities which contribute to the community. Cho Chang Hyun, general director of Elentec Vietnam, and Man Chi Trung, general director of An Trung Industries, signed the contract The sweet fruits of massive efforts On March 31, An Trung Industries Joint Stock Company, a subsidiary of An Phat Holdings, signed a contract with Elentec Vietnam Co., Ltd. (which is mobile phone plastic component supplier for Samsung) to become the latters second-tier vendor. According to the contract, An Trung Industries has been supplying plastic components for Elentec since March 2019. These components will be installed on Samsung mobile phones, contributing to bringing Made in Vietnam products to customers all over the world. In order to get this achievement, An Trung Industries had to restructure its operations and invest in technology and human resources in order to meet the strict requirements of its partner on quality, price, and timely delivery. The company invested VND400 billion ($17.4 million) to develop a 13,000 square metre plant with 42 manufacturing lines imported from Japan and South Korea. Man Chi Trung, general director of An Trung Industries, said, We had to redouble our efforts to become a vendor of Samsung, which is the worlds leading mobile phone manufacturer with very strict quality requirements. The result shows that An Trung Industries products satisfy the global standards that Samsung issued for its vendors. It also means that the companys products are of a similar quality to products manufactured in South Korea, Japan, and Europe. Representatives of the two parties at the signing ceremony Cho Chang Hyun, general director of Elentec Vietnam, said, We highly appreciated An Phat Holdings investment in An Trung that enabled An Trung to obtain this achievement. At present, An Trung Industries is focusing on manufacturing technical plastic components with a capacity of 9 million products per months. Along with Samsung, the company is a partner to 10 other large-scale enterprises operating in the electronics and power sectors. The company plans to add coating and plating technology lines in order to meet its partners requirements. Ambition to become leader in plastic supporting industry In Vietnam, the number of plastic manufacturers is very large. However, most of them specialise in manufacturing household plastic items and only a few enterprises produce plastic to support industrial production due to barriers in investment capital and technology. Meanwhile, the supporting industry sector appeared in Vietnam over 20 years ago, after multi-national groups like Honda and Toyota opened their first plants and started looking for local vendors in order to save time and expenses. In reality, more and more enterprises appear on the selection lists of these large groups, especially Samsung, every year, but only a few can make it into the last selection round. In Samsungs case, the corporation assigns experts to nominee enterprises to advise and help them to improve their manufacturing capacity and management processes. At the final round, the general director of Samsung will visit the enterprises to decide whether the enterprise can become a vendor. Numerous local enterprises were removed from the final list after they failed to live up to Samsungs requirements. Local enterprises have to improve massively to become vendors for large groups, but more and more are willing to try as they see massive gains if they succeed. Notably, they will have the opportunity to receive technology transfer and access to global supply chains. Besides, their brands will be more famous and they will be able to have more large customers. An Phat Holdings invested in modern manufacturing lines to produce plastic components In An Phat Holdings case, the company took advantage of being a leading plastic manufacturer in Vietnam and Southeast Asia to expand its operation. In 2018, the company purchased Hanoi Plastic JSC (HPC) and entered into a co-operation with VinFast to establish VinFast-An Phat (VAPA) Ltd. Besides, the company expanded its investment in An Trung Industries. Via HPC, An Phat Holdings can take advantage of HPCs customer base which includes Toyota, Honda, and Piaggio to expand operations. Besides, HPCs advantage in manufacturing components for automobiles, scooters, and electronic will help An Phat Holdings realise its ambition to set its foot in the supporting industry. VAPA is a joint venture with VinFast, thus, it will contribute to dealing with the consumption for An Phat Holdings products. Finally, An Trung Industries becoming the second-tier vendor of Samsung helped An Phat Holdings affirm its brand in the market, while simultaneously providing an opportunity for the company to continue expanding its operations. Thus, after reviewing the operations of An Phat Holdings in the past year, it is easy to see that the general strategy of the company in the supporting industry is investing, expanding operations, and expanding its valuation via becoming a vendor for large groups. Cuong affirmed that An Trung Industries and HPC will be the two key cards to help the company establish a solid foothold in the supporting industry. Prof Raymond Gordon, president of BUV, speaking at the Open Day The introduction of the three new programmes was held at the BUV Open Day themed "Ignite Your Passion" at BUVs new campus in Ecopark, attracting nearly 2,000 high school students from Hanoi as well as neighbouring provinces and cities. In the journey to fulfill our mission, we always offer the latest opportunities that come with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We work closely with the government and business partners to ensure that our programmes provide students with the skills which employers are seeking, said Prof Raymond Gordon, president of BUV. After analysing recent reports, we realise that in the upcoming years, there will be impressive developments in the human resources demand for Computer Games Design and Programming, Innovation and Creativity, as well as Hospitality & Tourism. Our three new bachelor's degree programmes named Computer Games Design and Programming, Contemporary Creative Practice, and International Hospitality Management, together with the current programmes at BUV, will nurture the skills and passions of the young Vietnamese generation, as well as build the strength and confidence they need to build their careers. Throughout BUV Open Day, there was a series of seminars which are specially designed to help students gain an overview of the labour market and career prospects in each field. The speakers are all industry experts, holding leadership positions at the 5-star Intercontinental hotel chain and video game developer Gameloft, which are international partners of BUV. BUV was officially put into operation in 2010. Currently, British University Vietnam offers 10 Bachelors and Masters programmes, with degrees provided by British University Vietnam and its two prestigious partners, University of London and Staffordshire University. In February 2018, BUV launched a VND34 billion ($1.5 million) Scholarship Fund, with a wide range of scholarship opportunities up to full tuition fees for students who excel in academic and/or extracurricular activities. To meet the growing education demand, BUV opened its new campus in Ecopark of the northern province of Hung Yen in September 2018 after three years of construction. Covering 6.5 hectares, the $70 million new campus is able to accommodate 2,000 students. BUV and Maritime Bank partner up to offer wider access to British education British University Vietnam, the first and only university in Vietnam to offer bachelors degrees directly from the United Kingdom, and Vietnam Maritime Commercial Joint Stock ... British University Vietnam offically builds new campus in ecopark township British University Vietnam (BUV) officially commences its new campus construction in Ecopark Township in the northern provinced of Hung Yen. The State Bank of Vietnam giving its permission to virtual and crypto currency trading platforms is fake news. Nghiem Thanh Son, deputy head of the Payment Department under the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV), made the announcement during a press briefing hosted by the SBV in Hanoi on April 1. Son stated that the central bank giving its permission to virtual and crypto currency trading platforms is fake news. He noted that the SBV does not have the authority to grant such permission. He cited that in 2017 Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc assigned the central bank to scrutinize and draft legal regulations related to electronic money. With regard to virtual and crypto currencies, the cabinet leader requested that the Ministry of Justice develop a project that puts forward legal documents regulating virtual and crypto currencies. The project was submitted to the Government for approval. The Government then required relevant ministries and agencies, including the SBV, to scrutinise the project as well as fine-tune the legal framework soon, Son noted. Booming e-payment services Meanwhile, the central bank has given permission to 29 payment intermediaries, of which 26 specialize in e-wallet services, reported Nguoi Lao Dong (Labourers) newspaper. As of December 31 2018, authorized payment intermediaries have offered 4.24 million certified e-wallets in association with bank accounts. As many as 10,000 selling points and similar entities receive e-wallets. Last year, 214 million e-wallet transactions were handled via payment intermediary providers, a rise of 14.66 per cent against the previous year. E-payments at large also witnessed the same upbeat mood in recent years. As for 2018, inter-bank e-payment posted VND73 quadrillion (US$3.2 trillion), a surge of 25 per cent on year. The Boeing 737 MAX 8, operated by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed on March 10, southeast of Addis Ababa AFP/TONY KARUMBA No details were provided about exactly when the report would be released, or what it might contain. Foreign ministry spokesman Nebiat Getachew said the transport ministry would release "a preliminary report into its investigation" of the Mar 10 tragedy in which a Boeing 737 Max plane crashed shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa. The Boeing, which was operated by Ethiopian Airlines, was a 737 MAX 8 - the same model which crashed in October, killing 189 people on board an Indonesian Lion Air flight, prompting the aircraft to be grounded worldwide. It was also not clear if the preliminary report would be made public straight away, or if it would first be handed to the authorities, including the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The plane's black boxes were handed to France's BEA air safety agency, which is working with American and Ethiopian investigators to determine what went wrong. Families in 35 nations were left bereaved when the plane went down just minutes after takeoff from the highland capital on a flight south to neighbouring Kenya, crashing into a field. ANTI-STALL SYSTEM A source with knowledge of the investigation has said an anti-stall system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), was activated shortly before the crash. Boeing designed the MCAS system - which lowers the aircraft's nose if it detects a stall or loss of airspeed - for this particular model. The same system was implicated in the October crash of a 737 MAX 8 off Indonesia, with initial investigations finding that a sensor on the plane had transmitted incorrect information to the MCAS system. 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 takeoff, according to the flight data recorder. The pilot had tried repeatedly to regain control and pull the nose up but the plane crashed into the sea. Both the planes in Indonesia and in Ethiopia reportedly experienced erratic steep climbs and descents as well as fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff. The two crashes have been a major blow for Boeing, triggering the US manufacturer's biggest crisis in decades as the MAX 8 was grounded worldwide. Ethiopia has already said there were "clear similarities" between the two Max 8 crashes. Ethiopian Airlines is Africa's largest carrier and in many ways the international face of the nation. Around a dozen people were also in serious condition after suspected food poisoning lead to five deaths at a retirement home near Toulouse, southern France. (Photo: AFP/PHILIPPE LOPEZ) Twenty-two people at the privately-operated Cheneraie residence in Lherm, a town south of Toulouse, began showing symptoms including vomiting after dinner on Sunday, police said. Four deaths were initially announced by officials, and a source close to the inquiry later told AFP that a fifth person had died. The victims - four women and a man - were aged between 72 and 95. Toulouse prosecutor Dominique Alzeari said 19 of the 82 residents remained under supervision, 16 of whom were in very poor condition although their lives were not thought to be in danger. Alzeari said investigations into apparent cases of "involuntary homicide and unintentional injury" would be lengthy, and underscored the "serious" nature of the affair. The meals involved have been kept for analysis, the regional health agency said, and residents were being questioned about what they ate. The management company Korian, which runs the home that opened in 2006 under licence from the French government, said in a statement that it "produces meals onsite with its own kitchen teams." But the son of one of the women who died told reporters he had learned from the home's doctor that the meal concerned had been delivered from elsewhere. SHOCK AND ANGER "I am very angry. It is unacceptable," said Alain Lepeyre, noting his family paid "close to 3,000 (US$3,360) a month" for the home to look after his mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's. Marie, who rushed to check on her father, who was not affected, choked up as she recounted how "he was in shock, he collapsed when he saw me. "He was crying," she added, explaining he became aware of what happened after watching television in his room. Korian says it runs the largest network of retirement homes in Europe, with more than 800 sites in five countries, representing 78,000 beds. On the Paris stock market, Korian shares slumped more than 7.0 per cent at one stage Monday before recovering slightly. In January, the company announced its acquisition of the retirement home from Omega, a French group that operates 12 homes in France. "We learned yesterday of these four deaths and illnesses, and that there is suspected food poisoning, with an investigation and analyses under way, and we won't have any comment while awaiting the results," Korian said in a statement. "If food poisoning is determined, this situation nonetheless remains quite rare in a sector that is subject to strict oversight in terms of food security," the AD-PA association of retirement home directors said. "We suspect food poisoning because these events occurred after the meal," deputy prosecutor Marie-Paule Demiguel told BFM television, adding that kitchens at the residence would also be investigated. The grand-daughter of one woman who died, aged 95, said she had been served a Perigord salad, a regional speciality that includes duck, ham and foie gras, a duck liver pate. FOIE GRAS TO BLAME? "I still have the menu in my handbag and I know they had Perigord salad last night. What could that mean? Could it be the foie gras? They're going to do an autopsy in any case," the woman told the Depeche du Midi newspaper. The daughter of two other residents, who gave her name as Chantal, told journalists outside the home that "apparently the problem was with meals prepared specially for palliative care patients." The deaths come as the government prepares a bill on retirement financing for an ageing population of baby boomers that is expected to add 9 billion to the national health budget by 2030. Protesters marched in Hong Kong on Sunday to protest against the government's plans to approve extraditions with mainland China, Taiwan and Macau AFP/Dale DE LA REY Hong Kong property tycoon Joseph Lau is wanted in Macau where he was convicted in absentia for bribery in the gambling enclave in 2014. He remains a free man because Hong Kong and Macau do not currently have an extradition agreement. Hong Kong's government has recently announced plans to overhaul its extradition rules, allowing the transfer of fugitives with Taiwan, Macau and mainland China on a "case-basis" for the first time. The proposal has sparked large protests and mounting alarm within the city's business and legal communities who fear it will hammer the financial hub's international appeal and tangle people up in China's opaque courts. Lau has applied for leave to legally challenge the government's extradition proposal, according to a court application obtained by AFP, which also states that he has chosen to "exile himself from Hong Kong". "The bill, once enacted, would hang over those it affects like a cloud," Lau's lawyers wrote in the application filed in the city's High Court. "He has felt compelled to leave Hong Kong until there is more clarity on the extradition bill," lawyer Gerard McCoy told AFP. The application asks the court to declare that any extradition agreement cannot be applied retroactively and argues that the city's leader Carrie Lam is being granted too much discretionary power to decide cases under the proposal. PROTESTS AND ALARM Thousands of protesters hit the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday to demonstrate against the new extradition proposal, which will be discussed in the city's legislature on Wednesday. Even a number of pro-Beijing politicians and prominent businesspeople have joined a growing chorus of opposition, while Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said it may issue travel warnings if the extradition agreement included China. The proposal comes at a time of roiling distrust over how Beijing wields its authoritarian legal system -- and as two Canadian nationals languish in Chinese custody following the arrest of a top Huawei executive in Vancouver. The Hong Kong government backtracked last week under pressure and exempted nine primarily economic crimes from the list of offences that could be covered by the new extradition law. Critics fear any extradition agreement could leave both business figures and dissidents in Hong Kong vulnerable to China's politicised courts, fatally undermining a business hub that has thrived off its reputation for a transparent and independent judiciary. The sudden plan to overhaul Hong Kong's extradition agreement was sparked by a high-profile murder in Taiwan where a Hong Kong man allegedly strangled his pregnant girlfriend during a holiday trip and then fled. Historically Hong Kong has baulked at extraditing to the mainland because of the opacity of China's criminal justice system, and the death penalty - which has been abolished in Hong Kong. Lau made headlines in 2015 when he spent a combined US$76.9 million at auction to buy two rare diamonds for his young daughter. He argues his trial in Macau was unfair because he was unable to attend due to ill health and that the city has refused to grant him a right to a retrial. Femmes Dans La Foret by Alix Angele Marguerite Ayme sold for over US$151.200. Her lacquer paintings titled Femmes Dans La Foret (Women in the Forest) (150cm x 200cm) sold for over US$151,200, while her Liseuse A Cote De Lannamite (A Girl Reads on a Hill in Viet Nam) (46cm x 70cm) sold for $31,800. Liseuse A Cote De Lannamite by Alix Angele Marguerite Ayme Experts consider Femmes Dans La Foret a masterpiece of Vietnamese lacquer art. Born in France as Alix Angele Marguerite Hava, the artist married Professor Paul de Fautereau-Vassel in 1920. The couple then moved to Shanghai and later to Hanoi. In 1925-1926, she taught drawing at the French Lycee in Hanoi. The couple returned to France to live between 1926 and 1928 and had a son. She then separated from Fautereau-Vassel and returned to Indochina with her young son. In 1931 she remarried Colonel, later General, Georges Ayme, future deputy to Lieutenant-General Eugene Mordant, in command of the French Army in Indochina. She also travelled and painted in Laos, as she was familiar with the family of King Sisavang Vong, and her large frescos were displayed in the Royal Palace in Luang Prabang. She became a teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de lIndochine (School of Indochina Fine Arts), where she contributed to the birth of lacquer painting, according to fine arts experts. At the school, she inspired many painters to make lacquer paintings, including noted painter Nguyen Gia Tri (1908-1993). The lacquer painting Goldfish by Truong Van Thanh At the same auction sale on April 1 in Hong Kong, titled Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, the lacquer painting Goldfish (60cm x 100cm, 1953) by Truong Van Thanh sold for $22,000. A lacquer box by Pham Hau sold for $25.400 A lacquer box with an image of a countryside pond by Pham Hau (46cm x 23,5cm x 8,5cm, 1939-1940) sold for $25,400. Another painting by Pham Hau titled Lentree Du Village (121,5cm x 54cm) sold for $76,400. At an auction sale on March 31, a decorative folding screen by Pham Hau with drawings of nine carp (180cm x 198cm, 1939-1940) sold for $878,300. Dr. Le Net (left), Le Thanh Hieu (middle), and Vo Phuong Thao (right), lawyers at LNT & Partners Vietnam has a golden combination for developing wind power projects. The country has a booming economy that fuels the increasingly higher energy demand. It also has vast geographic advantages, with its long coastline and a high yearly average wind speed. Yet up to last year, Vietnam only has seven functional wind energy projects with total capacity of 190 megawatts (MW), falling far short of the countrys maximum potential. There are several large barriers to the development of wind power projects in Vietnam, especially larger-scale projects. These include overcapacity of electricity lines in key regions such as Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan; low power-buying price affecting the financial viability of the projects, especially in comparison with other countries in the region; and international non-bankability of the mandatory model power purchase agreement (Model PPA), deterring development of large-scale projects. Wind power barriers need removing, illustration photo / source Shutterstock New changes With Circular No.02/2019/TT-BCT which came into effect on February 28, the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) aims to rectify these issues and ultimately attract further investment into Vietnams wind energy market. Circular 02 is the latest regulation on the implementation and development of wind power ventures in Vietnam, replacing both Circular No.32/2012/TT-BCT and Circular No.06/2013/TT-BTC, previously the key regulations in this area. Under Section 3, Article 4 of Circular 02, the MoIT will firstly review the application for supplementation of wind power projects to the power development planning scheme. This review will be conducted after consultation with relevant ministries and sectors. After reviewing, the MoIT will send an official dispatch to the provincial peoples committees to request necessary revisions and submit a complete application. The application will then be appraised by the Electricity and Renewable Energy Authority, who will then subsequently submit documentation to the MoIT for a final review of the project. Besides the more detailed procedures, some key changes regarding requirements and conditions for the operation of wind power schemes are also include in Circular 02. Notably, this circular no longer requires signing of the connection agreement as a perquisite to the construction of the project. In addition, productivity of wind farms, which was to be no lower than 90 per cent in the expired circular, is no longer a compulsory requirement under Circular 02. However, some conditions have been tightened. Land area for use is now limited to 0.35 hectare per MW, which is remarkably lower than the previous threshold allowed by the expired Circular (0.5ha/MW). The procedural framework under Circular 02 has the advantage of being highly detailed, much more specific and is in line with other laws (for example the Law on Planning and Law on Investment). This should appeal to Investors, who will appreciate the increased procedural clarity. In addition, the government has recently approved the MoITs proposal to speed up development of electricity line and power stations projects in key areas such as Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan to release capacity of replaceable energy projects by 2020. It is believed that these measures will increase the speed by which wind power projects are approved and implemented and rectify the overcapacity of electricity lines issue. Regarding the buying price, the power purchase price from wind power projects under Circular 02 is 8.5 US cents/kWh for onshore projects, and 9.6 US cents/kWh for offshore projects. Circular 02 therefore maintained the same price under the recently enacted Decision No.39/2018/QD-TTg. This buying price is still relatively low when compared to countries in the region such as Thailand (up to 20 US cents/kWh) or Philippines (up to 29 US cents/kWh). Nevertheless, evidence shows that the pricing under Decision 39 and now Circular 02 have positively affected the market. In late January, early February 2019, the MoIT reported receiving at least three project supplementation requests with over 1,000MW in total planned capacity, notably the US-Bac Lieu wind farm project with proposed capacity of 608MW. Also, on March 27, 2018, the Enterprise Energy Group EE announced a $11.9 billion Ke Ga offshore wind farm with a total capacity of 3,400MW. The detailed proposal was already submitted to the MoIT, and the project is estimated to start launching by the end of 2022. Procedure for supplementing wind power projects pursuant to Circular No.02/2019/TT-BCT , (Source: Self-synthesis) Attractive enough? Circular 02 stipulated a substantially revised Model PPA. The PPA is a crucial to the bankability of any power scheme. The terms of the PPA are amongst the most crucial concerns of international lenders, as the PPA is the key document for securing payment streams for projects. Under Circular 02, use of the Model PPA is still mandatory requirement, and parties are still forbidden from making revisions that are contrary to the provisions of the Model PPA. Previously, the Model PPA under Circular 32 was widely accepted to be non-bankable internationally. Specifically, the Model PPA under this circular was heavily criticised as failing to adequately allocate dispatch risk by not imposing a take-or-pay provision on the purchaser. This risk arises most crucially where the purchaser cannot receive power due to a breakdown in the electricity grid, in which case the purchaser would not be bound to make payment. Other key issues affecting the international bankability of the Model PPA under Circular 32 include lack of protection for projects in the event that Electricity of Vietnam, the sole purchaser under the PPA, terminates the agreement; lack of provisions allocating politics-related force majeure events; the lack of freedom to choose a dispute resolution method; and Vietnamese law being the mandatory applicable law. The Model PPA under Circular 02 has not made any attempts to rectify these criticisms. Specifically, the new Model PPA still fails to (1) adequately allocate dispatch risk, still (2) lack any outstanding debt settlement mechanisms in events of termination by EVN; (3) it is still impossible to choose arbitration as the dispute resolution method; (4) and Vietnamese law is still mandatory governing law. It is therefore predicted that Circular 02 of Model PPA will still unlikely to be internationally bankable, unless some kind of guarantee mechanisms are in place, which can be difficult and costly to acquire. Whilst the changes brought about by Circular 02 were welcomed, especially the clearer procedural framework, the key barriers preventing the development of wind power projects in Vietnam have mostly not been dealt with by Circular 02. It is therefore predicted that Circular 02 will not result in any revolutionary development in the wind energy market. Nevertheless, Circular 02 is a welcoming development only leaving much to be desired. However, when adding the efforts of the government and EVN to construct more electricity transmission lines and power stations, and the reaction of investors to the increased pricing, we believe that it is possible to expect that 2019 will be a year of positive developments in the wind power project industry. Several packages of frozen chicken were carried outside from the kitchen of Great Global International Several days ago, on March 26, 2019, around 1,200 workers of Great Global International in Gian Khau Industrial Zone in the northern province of Ninh Binh refused to touch their lunch in protest after suspicions arose that the cooks used stinking chicken and cooking oil and spices of unknown origin. According to Dantri.com.vn, at this incident, around 1,200 workers of total 1,880 lunch registrar have ignored their lunch. The workers went to the kitchen to check the food and spices, and found that the spices were held in large containers without any labelling. Meanwhile, they detected that several packages of frozen-chicken were being carried away from the kitchen in haste. They held the packages back to be checked by the authorities. In the afternoon of March 26, the Ninh Binh Department of Food Safety and Hygiene arrived to the site to check documents and invoices related to the food and spices of EOC Vietnam Co., Ltd., which supplies the meals for Great Global International's workers, as well as took samples of the meals, cooking oil, and spices for testing. Thousands of Great Global International's workers ignored the lunch in protest Addressing the incident, chef Dong Van Su confirmed that the cooking oil and spices used for the meals were produced by Miwon and Freda. "The reason the frozen chicken was carried outside is that the food collectors mistook the defrosted chicken for the next lunch with the leftovers to be disposed of," he said, claiming that the meat was completely fine, even though he could not provide invoices or documents. The kitchen of Great Global International, where EOC Vietnam supplies food and spices, prepares around 2,200 meals a day valued at VND15,000 ($0.65). The representative of the Ninh Binh Department of Food Safety and Hygiene said that the test results would be announced within the next few days. Meanwhile, Great Global International also promised to compensate workers to the value of the meal, as well as recorded workers' comments to improve the quality of the meals, ensuring food safety and hygiene. A land rights activist who went missing for more than two months has turned up after being spotted in Preah Sihanouk province where he was working in construction, officials have claimed. Sum Moeuns disappearance prompted concern from rights groups including Human Rights Watch, who suspected Moeun had disappeared by state security forces over his activism. But the Preah Vihear locals reappearance appears to have put to bed the suggestion that the security forces were involved in his absence from public life. Officials say they launched an investigation into Moeuns alleged disappearance, only to discover he had been working temporary jobs in the coastal province. The authorities had previously claimed that Moeun had escaped detention in Preah Vihear province after he was held for opposing a local development project backed by the military. Am Sam Ath, a monitoring manager at local rights group Licadho, said on Monday that Moeun had met with rights groups and the United Nations on March 31. Its a surprising story, not only for civil society groups or the authorities, because it dragged on for two months and we didnt have any news from him, he said. Moeun had been involved in a land dispute in Preah Vihear province in which his son and several other activists were arrested. A report from Licadho on March 21 noted that Moeun was also detained by the authorities on January 20 by soldiers from Battalion 261 under Intervention Brigade 6 who were acting as private security guards for the Choam Ksan district concessionaire at the heart of the dispute. Witnesses reported that Moeun was beaten during his arrest Moeun was transferred to a local national park office before disappearing, with wildlife officials claiming he ran away. No charges have been filed against Moeun. He could not be reached for comment this week. Yong Kimhoeung, head of the Preah Vihear provincial cabinet office, declined to comment further on the circumstances of his disappearance. Chea Kimseng, the Choam Ksan district governor, also could not be reached. Authorities in Afghanistan say a military-led counteroffensive has evicted the Taliban from a strategically important district in northeastern Badakhshan province, inflicting heavy casualties on retreating insurgents. The Taliban had late last week overrun Arghanj Khwa, located in the vicinity of the provincial capital of Faizabad, disrupting links with at least 10 other districts in the mountainous Afghan province near the border with Pakistan and China. Interior Ministry spokesman Nasrat Rahimi said in a tweet the clearance operation in the district ended Tuesday, killing at least 14 insurgents and injuring several others. A provincial government spokesman, Naik Mohammad Nazari, told VOA airstrikes against Taliban positions forced the insurgents to retreat from the district. The Taliban claimed its fighters abandoned Arghanj Khwa and took new positions about a kilometer away after transferring all seized military-related equipment from the district. Enemy claims of retaking the district headquarters in a military operation and causing (Taliban) casualties is fabrications, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid asserted in a brief statement sent to journalists. The Taliban, which controls or contests more than 50 percent of Afghan territory, has stepped up attacks on Afghan forces across many provinces in recent weeks, reportedly killing or injuring hundreds of security forces in March. Two American special forces troops were also among the battlefield fatalities. Afghan officials cite preemptive counter-Taliban offensive operations this year ahead of spring fighting season for an intensification in clashes and increased casualties. The offensives, they say, have killed scores of insurgents. Continued Afghan hostilities are also causing record levels of civilian casualties after more than 3,800 Afghan civilians were killed in 2018, the highest number of fatalities in the past 10 years. US-Taliban talks The spike in violence comes as U.S. and Taliban representatives are expected to start a new round of negotiations later this month in search for a political settlement to the Afghan war. Both the sides reported progress at the end of the last round of talks concluded in early March. The issues in focus were a timeline for the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Talibans assurances to disallow terrorist groups from plotting international attacks from the country. "No date has been fixed for the next meeting (with the U.S. team) as of this moment. But we believe it would certainly happen because a continued dialogue process could only lead to a resolution of the problem, a senior Taliban official told VOA Tuesday. He spoke on condition of anonymity. "There is no other option because the other option is war and that has been going on for the past 18 years, said the insurgent official. U.S. chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad is visiting Kabul where he met with President Ashraf Ghani and prominent Afghan opposition leaders as well as civil society representatives to share with them details of his talks with the Taliban before his next meeting with insurgent negotiators. Khalilzad has emphasized that Afghan leaders in and outside of the government need to form an inclusive negotiating team for a peace dialogue with the Taliban. While Afghans alone will decide the composition of their delegation for talks, women must be at the table during all negotiations about peace and Afghanistans future, the Afghan-born U.S. diplomat tweeted Monday. Khalilzad has repeatedly said any final agreement with the Taliban will be linked to a comprehensive cease-fire and intra-Afghan talks. Meanwhile, Afghan opposition politicians, civil society, as well as youth representatives, and tribal elders, are also scheduled to hold another round of their unofficial talks with Taliban delegates in Qatar in mid-April. The last round of the intra-Afghan dialogue process was held in November in Moscow, but the Afghan government had boycotted the meeting and it is not clear whether Kabul will participate in the upcoming talks. Ghani insists any negotiations with the Taliban must be led by his government, but the insurgents refuse to engage in a peace process with the government, denouncing it as an illegitimate entity. The political situation in Algeria gets murky as Algeria's state news agency reports President Abdelaziz Bouteflika told a constitutional body Tuesday he is resigning. Feuding political and military factions appear to be waging a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war to determine the future of the government. Students continued to protest in the capital city, Algiers, against President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika and his government, despite the announcement that he would leave office before his term officially ends April 28. One young man in a track suit told Arab media the apparent decision by the president is not the best way to deal with ongoing protests. He says this is not a satisfactory response to the demands of the people and it is, in fact, an end run to circumvent their demands. Presidential adviser Ali Bou Ghazi even told journalists that he questioned the authenticity of the statement from Bouteflika's office. Ghazi says he has doubts as to whether Bouteflika actually issued the statement that was made in the president's name. Amid the apparent confusion among Algeria's political and military elite, it appeared clear that protesters, like this crowd heard here in the provincial town of Batna, were intent on continuing demonstrations which began almost five weeks ago. Algerian analyst Fatah Benhammou told Al Arabiya TV it has been reported by some media outlets, including the Al Khabr newspaper, that the army favors former President Lamine Zerwal as the country's interim head once Bouteflika steps down. Amateur video on social media purported to show Zerwal returning a few days ago to Algiers. Amid the uncertainty over what comes next, one-time Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Benbitour speculated about the legality of the coming phase of the country's political drama. He says Army Chief of Staff Ahmed Gaid Salah probably senses the people will not accept parliament speaker Abdel Qader Ben Salah as the interim leader and the Constitutional Council has not responded to a request that the president be declared unfit, according to Article 102 of the constitution. He says Army Chief of Staff Ahmed Gaid Salah probably senses the people will not accept parliament speaker Abdel Qader Ben Salah as the interim leader and the Constitutional Council has not responded to a request that the president be declared unfit, according to Article 102 of the constitution. Benbitour said the army chief is planning to avoid the Constitutional Council entirely and "make use of Articles 107 and 108 of the constitution," which refer to the "sovereignty of the people." At the same time, Algerian political leaders were questioning the legitimacy of the new government recently formed by new Prime Minister Noureddin Badawi. Tibi Rafiq of the Talayat al-Hurriyat party told Al Hurra TV that Badawi's government was unacceptable. Rafiq says the people oppose Badawi and alleges Badawi has been responsible for numerous acts of electoral fraud during his years as interior minister. Malek Ben Qassem of the ruling FLN party told Al Hurra TV, however, a political plan outlined by the army is a wise solution to the current crisis. He says the army has put forward a roadmap based on the constitution, and President Bouteflika has agreed to step down, sparing the country a political void. He says there will be a three-month period under an interim head of state, coinciding with national dialogue, followed by new elections under an independent electoral commission. Meanwhile, Islamist leaders, whose followers appear to be participating heavily in the ongoing demonstrations, are expressing disapproval of the army's interim plan. Abdallah Jaballah, head of the Islamist Justice and Development Party, was reported by Arab media as calling Monday's announcement "null and void." As he threatens to shut down the southern border, President Donald Trump is considering bringing on a "border'' or "immigration czar'' to coordinate immigration policies across various federal agencies, according to four people familiar with the discussions. Trump is weighing at least two potential candidates for the post: Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli two far-right conservatives with strong views on immigration, according to the people, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the conversations publicly. The planning comes as Trump is threatening anew to close the U.S.-Mexico border as soon as this week if Mexico does not completely halt illegal immigration into the U.S. And it serves as the latest sign that the president plans to continue to hammer his hardline immigration rhetoric and policies as he moves past the special counsel's Russia investigation and works to rally his base heading into his 2020 re-election campaign. Aides hope the potential appointment, which they caution is still in the planning stages, would be the administration's new "face'' of the immigration issue and would placate both the president and his supporters, showing he is serious about the issue and taking action. White House press aides, Kobach and Cuccinelli did not immediately respond Monday to requests for comment. Kobach previously served as vice chair of the president's short-lived election fraud commission, which was disbanded after finding little evidence of widespread fraud. Trump has often complained, both publicly and privately, about how he has not been able to do more to stop the tide of illegal immigration, which he has likened to an "invasion'' and labeled a national security crisis. Arrests along the southern border have skyrocketed in recent months and border agents are now on track to make 100,000 arrests or denials of entry there this month. More than half are families with children. Trump in December forced a government shutdown to try to pressure Congress to provide more money for his long-promised border wall and eventually signed an emergency declaration to circumvent them. He also moved Saturday to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where citizens are fleeing north and overwhelming U.S. resources at the southern border. That focus on immigration has touched on numerous government agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State, Defense and Justice. But not all of those departments are always on the same page. One of the most glaring examples came last summer, when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions instituted a "zero tolerance'' policy at the border without consulting others that caused a spike in the number of migrant children separated from their families. The separated children were placed in HHS custody, but there was no tracking system in place to link parents with their children until a federal judge ordered one, causing widespread fear and concern about whether families would ever see each other again. Homeland Security also has to coordinate with the Pentagon on space to detain migrants as well as on wall funding. It has yet to be decided whether the czar position, if Trump goes through with the plan, would be housed within Homeland Security or within the White House, which would not require Senate confirmation. A person positioned within the White House could coordinate immigration policy across various agencies, working closely with aides who are deeply involved in immigration policy, including Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, national security adviser John Bolton and Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary. Appointing a person who is based within Homeland Security could be trickier because the department's agency heads are all Senate-confirmed positions and, in the case of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are longtime immigration officials with decades of experience dealing with the border. While immigration officials would welcome an adviser focused specifically on policy across the varying agencies, the names being floated are likely to spark backlash and criticism. Kobach, an immigration hardliner, ran a failed bid for governor promising to drive immigrants living in the U.S. illegally out of the country and has recently been working for a nonprofit corporation, WeBuildtheWall Inc., which has been raising private money to build Trump's wall. Cuccinelli, meanwhile, has advocated for denying citizenship to American-born children of parents living in the U.S. illegally, limiting in-state tuition at public universities only to those who are citizens or legal residents, and allowing workers to file lawsuits when an employer knowingly hires someone living in the country illegally for taking a job from a "law abiding competitor.'' Thomas Homan, the former acting ICE director, has also been mentioned as a potential pick, according to one of the people familiar with the talks. A flurry of seemingly disconnected actions by the U.S. government to curb the involvement of Chinese technology firms in the U.S. economy over the past year reflects the Trump administrations intensifying concern that those firms could now or in the future abet espionage by Beijings intelligence services. The actions include tightening scrutiny of foreign investors in a broad range of industries, publicly warning allies about looming vulnerabilities, and blocking China-linked companies from buying American companies involves in key industries, like semiconductor design. For now, experts say it has largely been a patchwork approach to protecting industries seen as critical to U.S. national security. But there is also evidence that, behind the scenes, policymakers are racing to develop a more coherent approach to balancing commerce with China and national security interests. At the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, for example, efforts are underway to create secure supply chains for equipment either deemed essential to national security or that supports critical infrastructure within the U.S. I think theyll get their act together, its just that its such a new problem that it hasnt happened yet, said James Lewis, the director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. At the moment, though, it can be difficult to discern a strategy or locus of control. US regulator exercises new powers Last year, Congress passed measures expanding the authority of a Treasury Department committee (CFIUS) that investigates foreign investments in American industries. The new measures expand the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to scrutinize investment deals that would give foreign partners access to nonpublic technical information. Last week, CFIUS decided that it would order the Chinese gaming firm Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. to divest its ownership stake in the popular gay dating app Grindr. The reason, according to reports, was concern that the information captured by the app could be used to blackmail U.S. officials and contractors. In January, members of Congress began pressuring the District of Columbia to reconsider allowing a Chinese firm to manufacture new cars for its Metro system. Among the concerns they raised was the possibility that surveillance equipment or malicious software might be embedded within them. Back in October, the Commerce Department announced that it would bar the Chinese government-owned Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, which makes semiconductors, from purchasing key components from American firms, saying it poses a significant risk to national security. Hanging over all of this is the federal governments push to shut out Huawei, Chinas giant telecommunications hardware exporter, from participating in the worldwide rollout of new high-speed 5G mobile communications technology. At the same time, that U.S. officials press allies not to use Huaweis equipment, the Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against the company alleging theft of trade secrets and bank fraud, resulting in the firms CFO being arrested in Canada. Scattershot approach to growing problem If the U.S. approach seems a bit scattershot, thats because it is, said experts. While intelligence agencies have been warning about the potential danger of allowing Chinese technology firms to integrate themselves into U.S. infrastructure for more than a decade, its only in recent years that the issue has begun to feel urgent across the federal government. Three years ago, in the final years of the Obama administration, people were just beginning to realize this was a problem, Lewis explained. And in coming to that realization, he said, policymakers have also been forced to reckon with the fact that over the past two decades, the U.S. and Chinese economies have become so thoroughly interconnected that doing something about it is extremely difficult. There are technologies that the Chinese cant make, that they can only get from the Americans, Lewis said. The Americans buy a lot of technology from China because theyre cheap, so we didnt realize the scale of the problem, that all this stuff was so interwoven. The same concerns apply globally, particularly with regard to Huawei. The firms components are already installed all over the globe, making up the backbone of mobile networks in dozens of countries around the world, including many of the United States closest European allies. The U.S. approach to Huawei, said some experts, is indicative of how little organization there is in the federal policy making process. Theres no logical place in the U.S. government for that sort of debate to go on. So youve seen a lot of thrashing around, said Paul Triolo, practice head for Geo-Technology at the Eurasia Group and China Digital Economy Fellow at the New America Foundation. The U.S. policy on this has evolved quickly over the past year, but its been focused on the security side, not on the question, What do we do now? Whats the alternative to this? Huawei under pressure Kevin Wolf, an attorney with Akin Gump in Washington who served as assistant secretary of commerce for Export Administration from 2010 through 2017, said that by his count there are at least seven different current, pending, or potential actions the U.S. government is considering against Huawei, and authority for implementing them is located in almost as many government entities. The White House could issue an executive order barring Huawei from U.S. markets completely, or Congress could pass a law directing him to take similar action. The Department of Commerce has at least two alternatives under consideration. It could impose crippling export restrictions that would deny Huawei access to key components, or limit the companys ability to license key technology from U.S. firms. Other potential actions are being complicated by the departments of Treasury and Defense, and by the Federal Communications Commission. Each one could have dire economic consequences for both Huawei and U.S. firms that do business with the company. Nobody knows whats going to happen, said Wolf. Its all over the map. Theres no coherent authority, voice, or position, and there are lots and lots of different options, each one of which is effectively a nuclear option. Beyond enforcement actions against individual companies, serious efforts are being made within the government to clarify how the U.S. will handle technology imports while allaying concerns about potential intelligence breaches. The Pentagon last year launched an initiative grounded in a strategy called Deliver Uncompromised, which is meant to award defense contracts based on security assessments of individual contractors. The Department of Homeland Security, in November, launched a public-private Information and Communications Technology Supply Chain Risk Management Task Force. In announcing the formation of the task force, DHS Under Secretary Christopher Krebs said, By bringing together some of the nations leading telecom companies and government agencies, we have a unique ability to confront todays challenges by sharing information across government and industry in real-time and developing the ability to better plan for the risks of the future. But the ongoing efforts are not without complicating factors, the largest of which is that the U.S. and China are currently in tense negotiations right now to end a trade war that is costing both countries billions in lost revenue. Security threats complicate trade talks President Trump and members of his administration have, on multiple occasions, suggested that the future treatment of Huawei by the U.S. could be tied to the result of those talks a connecting of trade talks and national security issues that troubles many experts. Ive been doing this for 25 years. Its never been done that way. Its not how its supposed to work, said Wolf. You keep the two separate and the reason you do is so that you dont devalue the very national security and law enforcement purpose of what youre enforcing. If you start using it as a tool, then all youve done is politicize it. Once that happens, he said, any U.S. enforcement actions that affect trade will be viewed with suspicion. Thats credibility thats impossible to get back with foreign governments, when they just assume that the reason youre taking an enforcement action for foreign bribery or sanction violations or export control violations is to use as leverage for economic reasons, he said. Its going to be a very long time before we get back faith in the system, given the combining of those two variables. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's insistence that there is little wrong with how he is handling the worst crisis of his tenure is frustrating lawmakers and senior party figures who believe the approach could cost him re-election this October. Angry legislators are starting to push back against Trudeau and his team, opening up public divisions of the kind the ruling Liberals have not seen for almost 20 years. Trudeau has been under pressure over allegations that officials inappropriately leaned on then-Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould last year to try to ensure SNC-Lavalin Group avoid a corruption trial by paying a fine instead. Wilson-Raybould resigned on Feb. 12 after being demoted within the Cabinet, and a second minister, Jane Philpott, subsequently quit over the way the matter had been handled. The mood among senior advisers inside the prime minister's office has often been grim, according to two Liberals familiar with the matter. "The frustration is certainly more palpable than it was a couple of weeks ago ... it's not the happiest of places to spend much time," said one of the people, who like others cited in this story requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. Despite a sea of unfavorable headlines as well as opinion polls showing the Liberals are on track to lose October's federal election, Trudeau's approach has been to wait it out. His support for keeping the two former Cabinet ministers in caucus -- while indicating both could run again for the party in October - is also inexplicable to Liberal lawmakers who say it threatens party unity. Both Wilson-Raybould and Philpott say they are acting out of principle and that the scandal shows the Liberal Party needs to do better. Many lawmakers are furious that Trudeau's team did not do more to shut down the affair soon after it erupted on Feb. 7. In a sign of their anger, they look set to defy his wishes and expel at least Wilson-Raybould from caucus at its next scheduled meeting on Wednesday. "They have bungled this from the start. They should have issued an apology, promised to do better and moved on," said one of the party's most senior figures. Instead, Trudeau initially denied anyone in his office had inappropriately pressured Wilson-Raybould, only to have her publicly testify to the contrary. She released more documents on Friday, ensuring the story was kept alive. Some legislators complain that Trudeau's tight-knit team has kept them at a distance, that it can be hard to speak to the prime minister alone and that he has ignored people with experience. Trudeau, 47, came to power in 2015 with a small cadre of longtime intimates serving as a brain trust, including Gerald Butts, his close friend and top political adviser. Butts resigned in February amid the scandal. Members of the Trudeau team are pushing back against the criticism, arguing they are doing the best they can. "No one is claiming the outcome was handled well, but I'm not sure it would have gone any better had we tried something else," said a third Liberal, conceding that "perhaps there can be some recalibration" on improving relations with legislators. A government official, pressed on Trudeau's handling of the affair and criticism from Liberals, said the prime minister was "very proud of the team" and focusing on his agenda. 'Put Up or Shut Up' Trudeau has made small shifts in strategy, such as reaching out more to his members of parliament and slightly broadening his circle of advisers, but otherwise insists on staying the course. "He doesn't throw chairs against the wall or bang on tables. That's not his style," said the third Liberal. "But he can be very stubborn. Once he's decided on something, that's it." Trudeau told reporters last week that his team was "stronger and more united than ever before," but the splits are clear for all to see. Liberal legislator Judy Sgro urged Wilson-Raybould and Philpott to "either put up or shut up" and said they were being selfish. Ironically, Liberals say it was the Trudeau team's desire to prevent further outbreaks of intraparty hostility that helped exacerbate the current crisis. Unhappy Liberals complain Trudeau's closest advisers sidelined a raft of party veterans after the 2015 election who were associated with past infighting. They say that deprived Trudeau of the chance to consult people with previous experience of dealing with problems. "It's almost like 'we are not a continuation of the Liberal Party, we're new and different.' And by doing that, there's no question they don't have the same group to circle the wagons and defend them that they once had," said a fourth Liberal. As well, Trudeau, a self-avowed feminist who appointed a gender-balanced Cabinet, recruited star candidates like Wilson-Raybould and Philpott who veteran legislators complain had no experience of federal politics and therefore were unfamiliar with conventions on party loyalty and solidarity. While polls suggest an October election defeat, some insiders are less gloomy. That said, they concede the result could well be a minority government, which would leave the Liberals reliant on opposition parties to push through their agenda. Senior Liberals say there are signs the public is becoming bored of the tale, giving the prime minister the chance to grab hold of the news agenda and reduce the pressure on his inner circle. "The mood was terrible for a while, but it's getting better," said the third Liberal. When Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey introduced their Green New Deal resolution, Markey said it would be "the greatest blue-collar job creation program in a generation." President Donald Trump, on the other hand, said it would "put millions of Americans out of work." Battle lines have been drawn with the first major U.S. proposal to tackle climate change in nearly a decade: Does stopping global warming mean wrecking the economy? Or is failing to act worse? In the coming months, Voice of America will explore the prospects for salvaging the environment without killing off jobs. We will meet winners and losers in the energy transition. Our first stop will be in Markey's home state of Massachusetts, where an energy transition is well underway. We will visit a town where one of the state's last coal-fired power plants closed, shedding coal jobs but gaining a cutting-edge solar farm. We will see how Massachusetts' investments in the green economy are paying dividends in jobs and economic growth. Though the Senate has voted down Markey and Ocasio-Cortez's nonbinding Green New Deal resolution, the proposal has put climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions back on the agenda on Capitol HIll. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a steadfast opponent of measures to reduce carbon emissions, now acknowledges global warming is a real and human-induced threat. Trump, by contrast, has called climate change a hoax and sees unfettered production of coal, oil and natural gas as the path to economic expansion. Hotter, drier, wetter Pressure is growing on elected officials to do something. The impacts of climate change are increasingly obvious. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record have piled up in just the last decade. Hotter and drier conditions in California helped spread the wildfires that caused $24 billion in damage and claimed 106 lives last year. Those fires broke the record for area burned, a record that was set just the year before. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, making epic soakers like last year's Hurricane Florence more likely. That $24 billion disaster followed 2017's Hurricane Harvey, which did $127.5 billion in damage to Houston and the surrounding areas. And this is just the beginning. Scientists from 13 government agencies estimated that if emissions remain high, extreme heat would slice $155 billion annually from labor productivity by 2090 as more days are too hot to work. Dwindling water supplies for cities and industries would take a $316 billion toll each year. Annual health care costs for West Nile Virus, just one of several diseases expected to rise with warming temperatures, would be $3 billion higher. Polls show Americans feel the threat of a changing climate more strongly than ever. Seventy-three percent say global warming is happening, and 62 percent say it is mostly human-caused. Both figures are the highest since the Yale Program on Climate Communication started polling in 2008. Two-thirds say they are "worried" or "very worried" about global warming. For the first time, that includes a third of conservative Republicans. Meanwhile, the federal government is moving in the opposite direction. Trump has moved to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate treaty. His administration is working to loosen Obama administration regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and vehicles. That has left states, local governments and businesses to fill in the gap. But it will not be easy or cheap. Pricing pollution One possible tool: Put a price on the carbon pollution that is causing global warming in the first place. Raising the price reduces demand for more-polluting fuels and encourages companies and consumers to find cheaper, cleaner alternatives, economists say. Pricing carbon would also raise revenue that can be returned to taxpayers or invested in reducing emissions. Nine U.S. states price carbon through a cap-and-trade system, a market-based approach in which polluters buy permits for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. California has its own program. And economic growth in these states has continued as greenhouse gas emissions have declined. "There's a lot of rhetoric about how a carbon tax or a greenhouse gas tax would wreck the economy," said Brookings Institution economist Adele Morris. "There's absolutely no peer-reviewed evidence that supports that assertion." More from this series: But these policies are not politically popular. A national cap-and-trade proposal died in Congress in 2010. Last November, Washington state voters rejected a carbon tax. And they would not solve the problem on their own. Pledges the United States and others made in Paris will not achieve the ultimate goal of the accord: Keep global warming to "well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels." That would take a carbon price of at least $40 to $80 per ton, rising to $50 to $100 by 2030, according to a World Bank-backed commission. It's only about $15 per ton in California, and $5 in the nine-state market. "There's an open question whether politically, it's achievable to hit some of the temperature targets that scientists have recommended," Morris said. "That's the conundrum. What's the willingness to pay (in carbon taxes) of the American electorate? How far can we go before we hit a wall?" Filling the federal vacuum As Trump moves to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate treaty, many states are moving forward on their own. Most require power providers to source a percentage of their energy from renewable or zero-carbon sources. Several have recently increased these requirements. New Mexico recently joined California in aiming to be 100 percent renewable by mid-century. And the private sector is stepping up, as well. After Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris agreement, more than 2,000 businesses and investors declared that they continue to support the climate accord. A group of large investors managing more than $30 trillion in assets is pushing major corporations in their portfolios to get on board. "Any company that's a high-emitting sector, we need to work with them to radically change their emissions or divest from them," said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit. Ceres is a founding partner of the initiative known as Climate Action 100+. Under pressure from the group, oil giants Shell and BP recently said they will tie executives' bonuses to reaching climate goals. Major mining corporation Glencore agreed not to expand its coal mining business. For investors, Lubber says, the economic risk comes not from fighting climate change. "If we don't stop global warming, we wreck the economy," she said. President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador told radio stations on Tuesday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has "repeatedly violated" the terms of his asylum in the Andean nation's London embassy, where he has lived for nearly seven years. Moreno, interviewed by the Ecuadorean Radio Broadcasters' Association, said Assange does not have the right to "hack private accounts or phones" and cannot intervene in the politics of other countries, especially those that have friendly relations with Ecuador. Attorneys for Assange did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Moreno made the comments on Assange after private photographs of him and his family at a time years ago when they were living in Europe circulated on social media. Although Moreno stopped short of explicitly blaming Assange for the leak, the government said it believed the photos were shared by WikiLeaks. "Mr. Assange has violated the agreement we reached with him and his legal counsel too many times," Moreno said in the interview in the city of Guayaquil. "It is not that he cannot speak and express himself freely, but he cannot lie, nor much less hack private accounts or phones." Moreno did not say whether or not the government would take steps to remove Assange from the embassy. WikiLeaks said in an emailed statement that Moreno's remarks were in retribution for WikiLeaks having reported on corruption accusations against Moreno, who denies wrongdoing. "If President Moreno wants to illegally terminate a refugee publisher's asylum to cover up an offshore corruption scandal, history will not be kind," WikiLeaks said. Assange took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. That probe was later dropped, but Assange fears he could be extradited to face charges in the United States, where federal prosecutors are investigating WikiLeaks. Ecuador last year established new rules for Assange's behavior while in the embassy, which required him to pay his medical bills and clean up after his pet cat. He challenged the rules in local and international tribunals, arguing they violated his human rights. Both courts ruled against him. Last month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is linked to the Organization of American States, rejected Assange's request that Ecuador ease the conditions it has imposed on his residence in the London embassy. Assange says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and is putting pressure on him by isolating him from visitors and spying on him. Ecuador has said its treatment of Assange was in line with international law, but that his situation "cannot be extended indefinitely." Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party on Tuesday appealed election results in Istanbul and Ankara, claiming irregularities in the voting cost them mayorships in both cities. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a majority of votes throughout Turkey in Sunday's local elections, but trailed in Istanbul, the country's economic hub, and Ankara, the capital. If the initial outcomes hold, it would be a political setback for the Turkish leader, who campaigned extensively for his party's candidates. AKP's Istanbul chief, Bayram Senocak, said the party had filed objections about the voting in all 39 districts in the city. "We have identified irregularities and falsifications," he said. Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu claimed victory in the mayor's race in Istanbul by 28,000 votes over AKP's Binali Yildirim, a former Turkish premier. Imamoglu told reporters, "Had the other party won, I would have said 'Congratulations, Mr. Binali Yildirim,' which I do not say because I am the one who won. They are behaving like a kid who has been deprived of his toy." In Ankara, opposition CHP mayoral candidate Mansur Yavas was ahead of AKP's Mehmet Ozhaseki by nearly four percentage points, according to the state news agency Anadolu, but the AKP said it was contesting the results in 25 districts. Electoral authorities have two days to decide whether the claims of vote irregularities have any merit. European Union chief negotiator Michel Barnier said Tuesday that Britain is getting closer and closer to having its exit from the EU go forward with no deal in place on the terms of its withdrawal. Speaking in Brussels, Barnier said there is still hope to avoid a so-called no-deal Brexit. But he indicated Britain has limited options, with the only "orderly manner" being a scenario where the British parliament accepts the deal Prime Minister Theresa May's negotiators agreed to after two years of talks with the EU. To date, British lawmakers have rejected that agreement three times. May is expected to try to bring it back for a fourth vote. The prime minister is spending hours Tuesday holding Cabinet meetings in search of a way to finally resolve the Brexit crisis. Britain was originally due to leave the bloc by March 29, but May got approval from the EU for a short extension to give her government more time to find a solution parliament could support. While the process dragged on, parliament sought its own path forward, but in a series of votes Monday lawmakers struck down four possible paths forward. The closest that came to passing was a proposal to have Britain withdraw from the EU, but remain in a customs union. The latest deadline set by the European Union is April 12. If British leaders have still not agreed to a plan, then Barnier says the only choices at that point will be for it to exit with no deal or try to get the other EU members to agree to a longer extension. On April 4th, 2019, NATO members will mark the 70th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty part of a successful effort to contain Soviet expansionism and to cajole the war-torn nations of Western Europe to forsake ancient enmities and to forge solidarity. But for the transatlantic alliance to continue, Europe will have to make a greater contribution and share more of the burden, warn analysts. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO appeared uncertain about what part to play, but the return of Russian assertiveness under President Vladimir Putin has partly changed that and the alliances supporters say NATOs traditional role of collective security has never been more important. Nonetheless, the U.S.-European alliance has been shaken by President Donald Trumps episodic questioning of the very value of the transatlantic pact in periodically bruising encounters with European leaders and using tweets or brusque off-the-cuff remarks to do so. The resignation in December of U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis highlighted strained ties between the Trump administration and European allies. In his resignation letter, the outgoing defense secretary said: One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Weeks earlier, Trump suggested he might cut U.S. force levels in Europe, if the European allies didn't boost their military spending. They kill us with NATO, Trump said during a speech in Montana. They kill us, he repeated. Last July, during his visit to the annual summit of NATO allies in Brussels, President Trump expressed frustration with German Chancellor Angela Merkel over a planned Russia-to-Germany undersea gas pipeline, saying, Were supposed to protect you from Russia, but Germany is making pipeline deals with Russia. You tell me if thats appropriate. Explain that. There have also been sharp disagreements over Iran and the U.S. decision to withdraw from a landmark nuclear arms pact with Russia in reaction to alleged cheating by Moscow. Washington has also expressed growing frustration with European partners over what it sees as a lax attitude to Chinese security threats to the West. Such clashes have added to the uncertainty about the future of NATO, which is founded on a US security guarantee to Europe. Much of the media coverage on the current strains in the transatlantic relationship focus on President Trumps characteristically confrontational style. European newspapers have highlighted the U.S. leaders general distrust of multilateral organizations and his wanting a return of powerful, independent nation states that deal with each other bilaterally rather than via international organizations But some analysts say the problems with the alliance predate the current American incumbent and at the heart of the strains has been a European reluctance to help to rebalance NATO. The deeper reasons for the uncertainty go beyond him [Trump], argues Hans Kundnani of Britains Chatham House. He says Europe has failed to uphold its part of a bargain. Even before Trump was elected there was a consensus in Washington that, as the United States increasingly focuses on Asia, Europe needs to take more responsibility for its own security. Presidents before Trump, including his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, have also pressed the European members to increase their defense expenditure and to share more of a burden. It seems pretty clear that the only way the U.S. security guarantee to Europe might be made sustainable in the long term is for Europeans to make a greater contribution to their own security, Kundnani argues. And the U.S. President has his defenders when it comes to his table-thumping approach to NATO both in the U.S. and Europe who say Trump's confrontational style may be the only way to shake up the alliance's European members. Many in Britain's military and intelligence establishments have been supportive of Trump's complaints. A group of eight former British military and intelligence chiefs, who worry Britain could slip from being a tier one military power, argued in a newspaper advertisement that the U.S. leaders criticism of the Europeans (and Canadians) over burden-sharing was valid. They argued the threats the West faces demand increased military expenditure, even though Britain is one of only four European countries that already meets an agreed two percent of GDP in defense spending. Combat readiness across the board among European militaries is woefully inadequate. Last year, the German parliament's military commissioner issued a scathing report on the readiness of Germany's armed forces, noting that only a fraction of crucial weapons systems was operational. At the end of 2017, six out of six of the navy's submarines were out of commission and none of the air force's 14 large transport planes were available for deployment due to repairs. More than 20,000 officer and non-commissioned officer positions were unfilled. Many fighter jets, tanks and ships are outdated or in disrepair, the commissioner noted. The report urged the government to pursue reforms with greater urgency and to increase defense spending. In the face of U.S. complaints, a division has emerged among European policymakers between those who argue they must take into greater account U.S. interests in a bid to try to improve strained transatlantic relations and those officials and leaders who want to adopt a more aggressive Europe First strategy to counter Trumps America First approach. French President Emmanuel Macron has advocated ambitiously a Euro-army and talks of Europe needing to free itself from military dependence on America. But both Britain and Germany are deeply skeptical of Macrons idea for such an army. Skeptics say such an army could never make up for American military might and its importance for European defense. Others point out that it would end up with European governments having to increase their spending dramatically. Central European states much closer to Russia place greater faith in an American security guarantee than one from their Western neighbors for good historical reasons, they say. And despite Trumps sharp criticism of NATOs European members, they note, Washington remains committed to expanding a military presence in the Black Sea, the Baltic states and Poland and supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. On Monday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced an agreement to invest $260 million to fund a military storage site in central Poland in support of U.S. forces that operate in the region. This will fund storage and maintenance of pre-positioned military equipment which will speed up reinforcement for Europe, Stoltenberg said during a news conference at the alliances Brussels headquarters. This article originated in VOA's Persian Service. Iran endured its third wave of flash floods in the past two weeks on Monday, with a western province being the latest to see many areas submerged as heavy rains caused rivers and dams to overflow. Video clips verified by VOA Persian and received from social media users in Iran showed floodwaters overwhelming several towns in Lorestan province. Shown above are floods in Pol Dokhtar, Lorestan province, Iran on April 1, 2019. In one clip, a house can be seen collapsing in a raging river of muddy water in the town of Pol Dokhtar. Shown above are floods in Mamulan, Lorestan province, Iran on April 1, 2019. In another video, floodwaters submerge buildings almost up to their roofs in the town of Mamulan. A first wave of flash floods hit northeastern Iran on March 19, followed by a second wave in western and southwestern Iran on March 25. State media say at least 44 people have been killed. In a Monday report, state news agency IRNA quoted Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani-Fazli as saying the recent floods have inundated about 400 towns and villages in 15 provinces and forced the evacuations of around 60,000 families from their homes. A separate IRNA report also published on Monday quoted an Iranian provincial housing affairs official as saying the floods have destroyed at least 25,000 homes across the country, according to initial estimates. Meanwhile, the semi-official Fars news agency cited President Hassan Rouhani as ordering authorities in flood-hit regions of western and southern Iran to use "all available capacities" to save people's lives. In some of those areas, Iranian authorities have ordered emergency discharges of water from overflowing reservoirs. Rouhani and other Iranian officials have come under sharp criticism from Iranian social media users, who accused them of being aloof and too slow to respond to the first two waves of flash floods. Cantonese opera is an art form best known for elaborate make up, costumes and tales of long-dead heroes. But for four days this April, a Hong Kong theatre will take on a larger than life character from the modern day: U.S. President Donald Trump. Hong Kongs Sunbeam Theatre will stage a performance of Trump On Show, a three and a half hour comedic reimagining of the U.S. presidents life and that of his fictional twin brother who lives in China. The opera was written, directed and produced by Edward Li Kui-ming, a Feng shui master and film producer turned prolific playwright. The upcoming production is a follow-up to Lis successful and controversial Chairman Mao opera staged in 2016, which recounted three fictional romances of Chinas most famous leader, Mao Zedong. After the success of Chairman Mao, it seems to me in recent years everybody in the whole world are indulged in the name Donald Trump. Everyday, we are talking about Trump, Trump, Trump, Li said in an interview at his theatre. for which he donned traditional Chinese robes. It inspired me: why arent we doing an opera related with Donald Trump? Li said his operas were not meant to be political commentary rather works of black comedy but both Chairman Mao and Trump on Show touch on some of the most controversial topics in Chinese 20th century history, including the Cultural Revolution and Maos tenure as leader of China. It also does not shy away from lampooning famous leaders like Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, who was better known as Madame Mao, and the infamous chairman himself. Many of the characters from Chairman Mao will reappear in the Trump opera and in a wink to the audience, lead actor Loong Koon-tin will play both Mao as well as Trump. Li plans to complete the trilogy next year with a production about the Gang of Four, a powerful faction led by Madame Mao that dominated Chinese politics during the 1960s and 1970s. Such a light-hearted and humorous look at Chinese history is almost unthinkable in mainland China today, which resumed sovereignty of the former British colony in 1997. Hong Kong has more freedoms than China until 2047 under the "one country, two systems" model, although many residents and political leaders fear where the city will head when that period expires. Hong Kongs identity crisis, however, helped to renew interest in Cantonese opera in the the 1990s after a 30 year decline, according to renowned Cantonese opera scholar Chan Sau-yan. Today the industry is heavily supported by the Hong Kong government, which opened the $346 million Xiqu Centre in January to host performances. While most Cantonese operas staged in Hong Kong follow traditional themes, Lis productions are not the first to comment on political issues or veer away from tales of gods and antiquity. When Chinese opera first evolved in the 11th century, it was a social commentary exposing the misdemeanors of the literati and the officials, Chan said. My theory is Chinese opera has long been a form for the common people for the underrepresented people but then of course later in the Qing dynasty it has been turned into a royal form of art patronized by the royal families. During the 1930s, another tumultuous era in Chinese history, a number of Cantonese operas staged in Hong Kong and southern China featured contemporary settings and political themes, he said. For as much as it may poke fun at contemporary geopolitics, Trump on Show, however, has another agenda, according to Li. The opera will contain many lessons for the controversial U.S. president and includes a cathartic scene in which North Korean leader Kim Jong-un makes Trump a cheeseburger in the White House kitchen. In this opera we try to make everybody understand unity is the best way, love is the best way to solve all the best problems, Li said. He hopes as well that he can one day stage the performance for the U.S. president in Washington. Trump on Show runs from April 12 to 15 at the Sunbeam Theatre in Hong Kong. Irans foreign minister says sanctions imposed by the Trump administration last year have hampered rescue efforts in flood-stricken areas of the country, where nearly 60 people have died since mid-March, while the U.S. blamed the disaster on the Iranian governments own mismanagement. Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted late Monday that Americas maximum pressure policy on Iran is impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedCrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods. He said the sanctions have prevented Iran from acquiring badly needed equipment, including relief helicopters. This isnt just economic warfare; its economic TERRORISM, he tweeted. U.S. President Donald Trump restored crippling sanctions on Iran last year after withdrawing from Tehrans 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. The sanctions have worsened an economic crisis that has ignited sporadic anti-government protests over the past year. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday the floods show the level of Iranian regime mismanagement in urban planning and in emergency preparedness. The regime blames outside entities when, in fact, it is their mismanagement that has led to this disaster, he said. The United States stands ready to assist and contribute to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which would then direct the money through the Iranian Red Crescent for relief. Iran has seen major flooding for the past two weeks in hundreds of villages, towns and cities in the western half of the country, where in some places an emergency situation has been declared. The spokesman for the emergency department said 57 people have died in the flooding since mid-March. Mojtaba Khaledi was quoted by the state-run IRNA news agency on Tuesday as saying another 478 have been injured, with 19 still hospitalized. Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi told IRNA that because of the U.S. sanctions, all foreign bank accounts of the Iranian Red Crescent are closed and no foreign-based entity is able to transfer funds for those suffering from the floods. Local authorities in the stricken areas have repeatedly asked for more helicopters to reach remote locations. Iranian state media said Tuesday that dozens of military and Iranian Red Crescent helicopters are taking part in the relief operation. Britain and Germany have offered to send help, including boats and safety equipment. Iranian media say the floods have cut off some 80 intercity roads, as well as roads to nearly 2,200 villages, and that electricity and communications with many places have been cut. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei held an emergency meeting Tuesday on the flood response with top officials and army commanders, state TV reported. Authorities have already issued evacuation warnings and ordered emergency discharges from reservoirs. Emergency services are advising people to postpone travel to western and southern Iran, including the oil-rich Khuzestan province, which is expecting heavy flooding in the coming days from overflowing rivers that flow down to the province. Provincial Gov. Gholamreza Shariati told the semi-official Tasnim news agency that at least three towns with nearly 140,000 residents are on evacuation alert. Last year, at least 30 people were killed by flash floods in Irans East Azerbaijan province. More than a week after declaring victory over Islamic States self-declared caliphate, U.S.-backed forces are still trying to clear the terror groups last stronghold of its fighters. A spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces tweeted Tuesday that clearing operations in the northeastern Syrian town of Baghuz included an ongoing hunt for IS members who have yet to give up the fight. SDF combing the area in #Baghouz (sic) and its vicinity, spokesman Mustafa Bali said. "Therere still some terrorists hiding in the cave system in vicinity of mount Baghouz. Separately, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said its observers in Syria estimate there may be as many as 4,000 to 5,000 IS fighters and operatives in areas controlled by the SDF. SDF officials declared victory over the IS caliphate March 23 following several nights of heavy airstrikes against multiple clusters of several hundred fighters in Baghuz, that had refused to surrender following a protracted siege. Almost immediately, though, SDF troops shifted into clearing operations, a process coalition spokesman Col. Sean Ryan described as deliberate and thorough. Fight not over Top U.S. officials also warned the collapse of the IS caliphate would not mean an end to the fighting, noting U.S. intelligence estimates suggested that, at minimum, there are still tens of thousands of IS fighters spread across both Syria and Iraq. We've thought for quite a while at this point that ISIS' strategy was to conduct the clandestine insurgency in Iraq, a senior defense official said shortly before the SDF declared victory, using an alternate acronym for the terror group. There's every reason to believe that their intent would be to do the same on the Syria side, the official added. Our concern, I think, on the Syria side is there's a lot less of a capability to actually deal with them as there is in Iraq. Just last week, U.S. envoy for Syria James Jeffrey, echoed those sentiments. This is not the end of the fight against ISIS, he said. "They're reconstituting in small groups, operating in the shadows as a low-level insurgency. Much of the concern in Baghuz has centered around the caves, as well as what U.S. and SDF officials have described as an extensive network of tunnels, some of which are believed to run for several kilometers. Experts have also raised concerns about IS ability to conduct successful insurgent operations based on its history as an insurgent force prior to the declaration of its caliphate in 2014, as well as the ample time IS leaders had to plan for the caliphates collapse. When Kamala Harris made her much-heralded arrival in Washington as California's first black U.S. senator, she made a curious early decision. Within months of her swearing-in, she sponsored a bill urging states to eliminate cash bail, denouncing the system as a scourge on the poor and communities of color. That position would become a key part of her criminal justice reform platform. But her choice surprised some bail reform advocates back in California. In her seven years as a district attorney, and then six as attorney general, Harris was absent on the issue, they say. In fact, less than a year earlier, her office defended the cash bail system in a pair of federal court cases, shifting course only weeks before she entered the Senate. "For her entire career she used some of the highest money bail amounts in the country to keep people in jail cells and saddle poor families with financial debt," said Alec Karakatsanis, an attorney who has brought several legal challenges to California's bail system, "and as soon as she had no influence on that issue practically, she announces she has a different view on it." Now a presidential candidate, Harris is casting herself as a progressive who consistently leveraged her power in the justice system to further civil rights causes and advocate for the disadvantaged. She has pledged a wholesale overhaul of the country's fractured criminal justice system, arguing for marijuana legalization, bail reform and a moratorium on the death penalty. But when she had a chance to take a bold stand on these issues as a top law enforcement officer, Harris often opted for a careful approach or defended the status quo. Observers of her career note some of her key positions, like her opposition to cash bail, came at politically opportune moments, after public views had shifted on race, inequality and bias in the justice system. "I never had a sense she was forward thinking or reforming," said John Raphling, a bail reform advocate and senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who faced off against Harris's state Justice Department as a criminal defense attorney. "Bail reform is a trendy issue, and a lot of politicians are jumping on it and saying this is unfair. I don't have any evidence that Harris was seeing that unfairness back when she was attorney general but to her credit, we evolve, we learn, we see things." California Attorney General Harris' supporters say as a prosecutor she was tasked with upholding the law and, as attorney general, defending the state, not making policy. She had limited ability to effect change within the rigid structure of the courts, they argue. "Everyone who has experienced the criminal justice system knows it's broken," said Lateefah Simon, a civil rights activist who worked for Harris in San Francisco. "She would say, 'we're confined by the rules of the law, and in the areas where we have discretion, we are going to work to try to move justice.'" "I deeply know her convictions about what could be possible and what we needed to do, but also what the boundaries and limitations were," she said. Simon said Harris worked to hire more people of color as prosecutors. In her first year as San Francisco district attorney, she launched a re-entry program designed to keep low-level drug offenders from returning to prison. That same year she refused to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer, infuriating the Bay Area political establishment and creating friction with the law enforcement community. But in many cases throughout her career Harris embraced the traditional role of prosecutor. Her office defended wrongful convictions, fighting to keep behind bars those who judges determined should go free. She refused to take a position on a pair of sentencing reform ballot measures, arguing she must remain neutral because her office was responsible for preparing ballot text. She defended the death penalty in court, setting aside her personal opposition to capital punishment. In response to critics who've pushed her to use her power in the courts to usher in change, she told The New York Times in 2016, "I have a client, I don't get to choose my client." Moratorium on Death Penalty, Criminalizing Truancy Harris says she would call for a federal moratorium on the death penalty if elected president. Harris' law enforcement approach has at times put her out of step with California's activist community. When she pushed a controversial policy that criminalized truancy, threatening to jail parents of children who missed too much school, even Harris' staff "winced at the plan," she wrote in her first book released just in time for her campaign for attorney general in 2010. The program has since become a source of tension with criminal justice advocates, who see it as sign of Harris' outdated approach to dealing with problems that stem from poverty. In a recent NPR interview, Harris said her truancy initiative was not designed to punish vulnerable families, but "put a spotlight" on the problem and direct resources to needy families. Her campaign hails the effort as a success, and supporters have lauded Harris for prioritizing a child's education. "As a result of our initiative, which never resulted in any parent going to jail never because that was never the goal," Harris said. But Harris's legacy remains on the state's books: She authored a state-wide truancy law modeled after her San Francisco program. It has resulted in hundreds of parents in often less affluent and less politically liberal California counties being prosecuted. Harris' approach at the time was considered smart politics for a politician seeking to run statewide. Throughout her career, Harris worked to win over powerful police unions. She refused to support a bill requiring her office to investigate shootings involving law enforcement officers. In 2015, she declined to back statewide standards for body cameras, arguing that individual departments should decide how to use the technology. "If you offend all the police chiefs and sheriffs of California, you're probably not going to get re-elected as the attorney general of California, and if you're not elected, how do you engage in any of the reforms you want to do?" said Jim Bueermann, a former California police chief who worked on Harris' transition to the attorney general's office. From Law Enforcement to Legislating As Harris transitioned from law enforcement to legislating, the politics of criminal justice issues were changing fast. The deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police in 2014 and 2015 prompted outcry and spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. Democrats began rethinking their tough-on-crime strategies, focusing more on inequality and abuse in the system. Prosecutors and police came under increasing scrutiny for their roles. Harris' views appear to have been changing, too. In 2014, she was opposed to legalizing recreational marijuana, and when she ran against a Republican challenger for re-election as attorney general she took the more conservative view: He wanted to legalize. Harris laughed at the idea in a local television interview. But Harris's public tone changed as speculation grew about her running for president in 2020. Last year, Harris endorsed Democratic Rep. Cory Booker's bill for federal legalization of marijuana. She argued on Twitter that "making marijuana legal at the federal level is the smart thing to do and it's the right thing to do." She released a video declaring that "marijuana laws are not applied and enforced in the same way for all people." Last month, she went as far as acknowledging to a pair of morning radio hosts that she's used recreational marijuana: "I have, and I did inhale; that was a long time ago." For Ron Gold, the Republican who ran against her in 2014 and who supported recreational legalization when she did not, Harris' stance on marijuana is indicative of her tendency to take a position "that's popular, but not necessarily held strongly by the candidate, it's a position that curries favor with a segment of the population," he said. Some see a similar pattern when it comes to the call for bail reform. Shortly after announcing her presidential bid in January, Harris declared on Twitter: "It's long past time to address bail reform across the country." "This is a serious injustice," she wrote. Three years earlier, Harris's office was defending cash bail in a federal case. "Neither the bail law nor the bail schedule discriminate on the basis of wealth, poverty, or economic status of any kind," she wrote. In response to the notion that money bail schemes unfairly punish low-income defendants, Harris wrote, "the state is not constitutionally required to remove obstacles not of its own creation." Harris appears to have shifted her stance 10 months later. In December of 2016, Harris filed a motion in a case challenging the application of California's money bail laws saying the system is deserving "of intense scrutiny." She pledged not to defend any bail scheme that fails to take into account a defendant's ability to pay. Three weeks later she was sworn in to the Senate. Still, she asked the judge to toss the case, arguing that the laws were constitutional even if the way some counties implemented those laws was not. "The bail system at issue here does not categorically deny bail to any group of individuals," she wrote. The move perplexed bail reform advocates who say she could have used her position of power to do more as the top law enforcement official in the state, overseeing thousands of prosecutors who each day requested cash bail for those they charged with crimes. "I'm glad she's come to the right position now, but it's too late for tens of thousands of Californians, real human beings who have been detained in jail every day in California throughout the whole state, that the attorney general could have stopped," said Phil Telfeyan, one of the plaintiff's attorneys in the bail cases. Harris' campaign declined to answer questions about when and why Harris' views on marijuana and bail reform shifted. Campaign spokesman Ian Sams noted the political arena, not the courtroom, is the appropriate place to address policy problems. "As senator," he said, "she has aggressively confronted the policy question by proposing a bipartisan federal law to end cash bail." Simon, the civil rights advocate who worked with Harris, said she often say Harris spoke, privately, in frustration about cash bail and other elements of the criminal justice system while she was a prosecutor. But still, Harris had to work within its confines, Simon said. "Prosecutors and lawmakers are different," she said, "as a lawmaker, you actually get to make laws. As a prosecutor, you must follow them." Advocates say they're cautiously optimistic about Harris' legislative efforts, and are glad to see the issue in the political spotlight. But they note her bill, which she co-wrote with Republican Sen. Rand Paul, endorsed the use of controversial risk-assessment tools to determine who should be released from jail and who should remain behind bars. Raphling said Harris' office has been receptive to feedback. Still, he said she never indicated a progressive stance on the issue before and her commitment remains to be seen. "I give her credit for wanting to tackle bail reform, and people are listening," Raphling said. "The question is, and this is an open question, what kind of reform is she going to push?" Kenyas Garissa University is marking four years since an al-Shabab militant attack claimed nearly 150 lives, most of them students. While the Somali terrorist group has carried out numerous assaults since then, it remains their deadliest attack inside Kenya. Rael Ombuor reports from Nairobi. Twenty-four-year-old Vitalis Opiyo is a carpenter in Nairobi, but in 2015 he was studying to be a teacher at Garissa University when militants attacked. Opiyo says early on April 2 that year, he heard what sounded like gunshots, and after some minutes the sound of people screaming. His two roommates ran outside to see what was happening. It was the last time Opiyo saw them alive. "After they had dealt with the people outside, they started moving door to door, of which they got into my room. By then I had to hide behind the door. The way you open the door, I was at the back of the door, I just stood there still, so they got in. Maybe I was lucky or it was just by Gods grace I survived. They did not see me, Opiyo recalls. In all, al-Shabab terrorists killed 148 people at Garissa University, almost all of them students. The university took nine months to reopen, but now has 1,500 students, more than double the number in 2015. Vice Chancellor Ahmed Osman Warfa says they have healed from the tragedy. We have moved on because of resilience, because of our marketing strategies and because of what we have done that has brought a lot of students back to the university. We have put up a perimeter wall, we have established a police post, which houses 30 officers, Warfa said. After security increased at sites of their previous attacks, al-Shabab hit a softer target this year on January 15. The attack on Nairobis Dusit D2 hotel and office complex killed 21 people. But Kenyan security forces responded quickly and were given credit for keeping the death toll down, compared to previous attacks. Political analyst and lecturer at Aga Khan University in Nairobi, Sam Kamau, agreed. We used to see [an] uncoordinated response that used to take quite long, but with what happened recently with Dusit, even if we lost lives, the number of people who were rescued and the way the whole issue was handled in terms of communication, in terms of response, I think the security forces have learned important lessons, Kamau said. Despite improved security, for survivors like Opiyo, the threat of al-Shabab attacks remains a reality for which Kenya must always be prepared. The murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half brother at an airport in Malaysia was brazen, intricately orchestrated and, thanks to scores of security cameras, witnessed by millions around the world. The real masterminds behind the killing, however, may never be brought to justice. The murder charge was dropped against an Indonesian woman, who was freed last month. Her co-defendant, a Vietnamese woman who is the only suspect in custody, pleaded guilty - not to murder, but to the lesser charge of using a deadly weapon to cause injury - and will be freed as early as next month. Her guilty plea and sentencing on Monday concluded more than two years of legal proceedings. But it cleared up none of the mystery. Here's a look back at the crime, the missing masterminds and the ending. The crime On Feb. 13, 2017, when Kim Jong Nam appeared at a check-in counter at a Kuala Lumpur airport terminal, he was jumped by two women who smeared something on his face. He soon began to feel ill, found his way to a medical station and was taken by ambulance to a hospital. He was dead within a matter of hours. The women - Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam - were arrested soon afterward. Huong was seen on security video wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with ``LOL'' across the chest. The video, and video of the chubby, blue jean-clad victim staggering around before his death, went viral. From the start, this was obviously no ordinary crime. Aisyah and Huong were accused of using VX nerve agent, a poison developed for military use, and the victim was the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and half brother of current leader Kim Jong Un. For a time, Kim Jong Nam had been seen, at least by outside experts, as a potential heir to the country's leadership. But he was caught, and humiliated, trying to enter Japan in 1998 to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He ended up in de facto exile, spending most of his time in Macau, a Chinese territory famous for its casinos. By the time of his death, he wasn't part of the North Korean political scene. But his freedom to reside in Macau indicated he had some Chinese support. It's possible he was seen by some as a viable replacement if Kim Jong Un were ever to be removed from power. Soon after Kin Jong Nam's murder, his son, Kim Han Sol, appeared in a YouTube video in which he claimed he, his mother and sister were under the protective care of a group calling itself "Cheollima Civil Defense.'' The same group is believed to be behind an attack on the North Korean Embassy in Madrid last month in which 10 people allegedly shackled and gagged embassy staff before escaping with computers, hard drives and documents. The missing masterminds Malaysian officials have never officially accused North Korea of involvement in Kim's death. North Korea has denied any involvement. But prosecutors made it clear throughout the trial they suspected a North Korean connection. Four North Korean suspects were seen on airport security video discarding their belongings and changing their clothing after the attack. The North Korean Embassy has also been implicated, with an embassy official helping obtain flights out of Malaysia for the four men, and using the name of one of its citizens to buy a car that took the suspects to the airport. At Malaysia's request, Interpol issued a ``red notice'' for the four North Koreans wanted in connection with the killing. Investigators said the North Korean suspects met the women at the airport and were believed to have provided them with the VX nerve agent used in the murder. The North Koreans are suspected of scouting and training the women, who say they thought they were taking part in a candid camera-style prank show for television. Malaysian police believe the North Korean suspects flew out of the country the day of the killing and returned to Pyongyang. Investigations into Kim's death led to a diplomatic spat between Malaysia and North Korea. Malaysia scrapped visa-free entry for North Koreans and expelled North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol after he rejected Malaysia's investigation and insisted the victim was an ordinary citizen who died of a heart attack. Kang Chol also accused Kuala Lumpur of colluding with outside forces to defame North Korea. North Korea then banned Malaysians in its country from leaving, entrapping three diplomats and six of their family members. The nine Malaysians were only allowed to fly back after Malaysia released Kim's body to North Korea and allowed the North Koreans to leave, including an embassy official and a North Korean Air Koryo employee wanted by police for questioning over Kim's death. Following last year's summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Malaysia's government has said it may re-establish ties with North Korea and reopen its embassy in Pyongyang. The ending With the North Korean suspects missing, the two women were left to face the charges. After some high-level lobbying by Indonesia's government, the Malaysian attorney general decided to drop the murder case against Aisyah on March 11. Aisyah, 26, cried and hugged her Vietnamese co-defendant before leaving the courtroom. She was driven away in an Indonesian Embassy car and then flown back to Jakarta, where she thanked the president and other officials for their help. "I feel happy, very happy that I cannot express in words,'' she told reporters at Jakarta's airport. "After this I just want to gather with my family.'' Huong, 30, also sought to be released after Aisyah was freed, but prosecutors rejected her request. Both had faced a murder charge that carried the death penalty if they were convicted. Prosecutors on Monday said they were offering Huong a reduced charge, and High Court judge Azmi Ariffin sentenced her to three years and four months from the day she was arrested, telling her she was "very, very lucky'' and wishing her "all the best.'' Vietnamese officials in the courtroom cheered when the decision was announced. Her lawyer, Hisyam Teh Poh Teik, said she is expected to be freed by the first week of May, after a one-third reduction in her sentence for good behavior. He said four North Korean suspects still at large were the "real assassins.'' As she was being escorted out of the court building, Huong shouted to reporters: "It's very good. I love you.'' She told reporters earlier that she wants to "sing and act'' when she returns to Vietnam. Malawi has appealed for international aid for nearly a million people affected by floods from Cyclone Idai. Authorities say people in cyclone-affected areas are in dire need of food, water, shelter, and sanitation. The appeal is for aid targeting 162,000 households in areas worst hit by Cyclone Idai's flood waters. Official figures show the cyclone killed 60 people, injured more than 600 and displaced hundreds of thousands, many to temporary camps. Minister of Homeland Security in Malawi Nicholas Dausi said they are in dire need of food, shelter and sanitation. "Our intention is to tell the world that Malawi has a big problem regarding the natural disaster that has befallen us," he said. "It's an appeal to both monetary and humanitarian assistance to the international world even people of goodwill to come for an assistance. There is desperation in the camps." Malawi's Department of Disaster Management said the country needs about $43 million for cyclone relief. But authorities say they have secured less than half that amount. Catherine Bodza, a flood-displaced villager in Chikwawa district, said there are problems at the camp because of food shortages. She said they were initially given maize flour in a cup of water to cook porridge and later were given a plate of maize flour. Recently, she added, they have been given two basins of maize flour. But most of the time, she said they sleep without eating anything. Flood victim Paul Mwandiyamba said most of the assistance they have received is from politicians running for office in upcoming May elections. He said when they come with one bag of maize, they tell us to eat together in a group. This is not practical, he added, because some of us have four children and others have five children. It is still not enough. In many areas of Malawi's East Bank, providing cyclone relief aid is still a problem because of damaged roads and bridges. Maria Jose Torres, country coordinator for the United Nations Development Program, said efforts are being made to help Malawi meet the needs of flood-affected people. "The United Nations is working towards implementing the plan," she said. "We are already mobilizing from out [of] central emergency response funds. It's now pointing to [a] million dollars but we are acknowledging that actually it is not enough and will continue with the effort to bring more attention." Cyclone Idai hit central Mozambique in early March, swamping entire villages with heavy rains that flooded parts of southern Malawi and Zimbabwe. Malawi President Peter Mutharika in early March declared half the country's districts disaster areas. The United States and its allies are stepping up cooperation in response to Russian aggression, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday while playing down differences among members as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary. Foreign ministers from NATO countries are meeting in Washington this week for the occasion, determined to show a united front in the midst of a long military stalemate in Afghanistan and tensions with Russia returned to Cold War-era levels. But as NATO deploys thousands of troops and equipment to deter Russia and seeks solutions to fast-evolving new threats such as cyberattacks and hybrid warfare, its biggest challenge arguably lies within. Damaging infighting over defense spending and authoritarian tendencies exhibited by some allies undermine NATO's values, according to experts. "The strength of NATO is that despite these differences, we have always been able to unite around our core tasks. That is, to protect and defend each other," NATO chief Stoltenberg said in Brussels before the trip. Stoltenberg has talks with U.S. President Donald Trump planned for Tuesday. He is scheduled to address Congress on Wednesday. A big source of the internal strain is Trump's recurrent demand that countries devote an amount equal to at least 2 percent of GDP to defense spending though that metric takes no account of how well the money is spent as well as the U.S. president's reluctance to criticize strongmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin. "NATO's single greatest challenge is the absence of strong, principled American presidential leadership for the first time in its history," two former U.S. envoys to NATO, Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute, wrote in a report for the alliance anniversary. Trump, they said, is seen by allies as NATO's "most urgent, and often most difficult, problem." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified last week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. He was asked if he was familiar with the report by Burns and Lute. Pompeo said he hadn't read the report but he had known Lute since he was a young military office and had "great respect for him." But on the subject of Trump and NATO, Lute was "just simply wrong," Pompeo said. "If the conclusion he drew that President Trump is the biggest impediment to NATO, he's just simply wrong," he added. "We have worked diligently to make NATO stronger. I am convinced that we have done so." Trump made a memorable impression on leaders from Canada and European nations during his first NATO summit in May 2017. During a speech outside NATO's new Brussels headquarters, he publicly humiliated them. Trump also cast doubt on whether they could count on Washington to fulfill NATO's collective defense clause. The speech was delivered by a memorial made from a twisted piece of the World Trade Center towers felled by al-Qaida's airliner attacks on Sept. 11, 2011. Since the founding Washington Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, NATO has only once activated the clause stating that an attack on one member is an attack on them all, after the 9/11 attacks. Trump also delayed a summit last year with fresh demands on burden sharing. That time, at least, his dressing down about the U.S. spending more on defense than the other NATO members combined happened behind closed doors. Trump's routine tirades have fueled suspicion his aim mostly is to drum up business for the U.S. defense industry. But the attitude of Trump who walked away from the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate change agreement his allies in Europe value while making tariff threats against them also is similar to authoritarian or populist streaks showing up in NATO members Turkey, Hungary, Italy and Poland. "The political and trans-Atlantic unity that underpins NATO has been weakened. Only bad guys benefit from trans-Atlantic division and a U.S. retreat from its global leadership role," Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Stoltenberg's predecessor as NATO's top civilian official, said in an email exchange with The Associated Press. "We see the consequences of U.S. retreat, with autocrats and dictators filling the vacuum," he added, Burns and Lute say this retreat from democracy, individual freedoms and the rule of law is "a potentially cancerous threat." Still, NATO has survived formidable challenges over the decades, including the Cuban missile crisis and the missile race in Europe. It's also remained intact after internal divisions over the Suez Canal, the Iraq war, and France's departure from the alliance's command structure. Officials say they are confident NATO will endure now, too. The White House said last month in a statement about Stoltenberg's talks with Trump on Tuesday that the two would "discuss the unprecedented success of NATO, including the recent increased commitments on burden-sharing among European allies and ways to address the current, evolving challenges facing the alliance." Trump is not scheduled to appear at the upcoming talks of NATO foreign ministers, but he is expected to attend a leaders' summit in London in mid-December. "I hope we will not see a repeat of President Trump's antics in Brussels last year. It's time for the world's democracies to show their unity," Rasmussen said. NATO foreign ministers are gathering in Washington, D.C. this week to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. U.S. President Donald Trump has been critical of other alliance members for under-investing on defense and relying too heavily on the United States. We take a look at the alliance. What is NATO? The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an alliance of 29 countries bordering the North Atlantic Ocean. It was created in 1949 as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. Its purpose is to "guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means," according to its website. Who are the members? The initial alliance was entered into by 12 nations, including the United States, Britain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal. Seventeen others have joined the group since. Montenegro is the latest member, joining in 2017. According to Article 10 of the Washington Treaty, membership is open to any European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area. What is its aim? NATO's main aim is security and defense of its member nations. Article 5 of the treaty states that "an armed attack against one or more" member state "shall be considered an attack against them all." The collective defense principal at the heart of the treaty was invoked for the first time after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. NATO responded to a U.S. request for help in the war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan. It took the lead from August 2003 to December 2014. At its peak, it deployed 130,000 troops. Who funds NATO? Each member country pays a certain amount into the NATO budget based on an agreed upon formula. But, the United States has been bearing nearly two-thirds of the alliance's defense bill. The NATO charter requires member states to spend 2 percent of the nation's wealth on defense. According to NATO's most recent estimate, released in June 2017, six countries hit the 2 percent target: the United States, Greece, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Romania and Poland. NATO vs. Trump President Donald Trump has long been critical of U.S. involvement overseas. He has specifically railed against NATO members for not contributing more money to their own defense. In July, he went so far as to claim that the alliance owed the United States money. "Many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money from many years back, where they're delinquent, as far as I'm concerned, because the United States has had to pay for them," he said. "So if you go back 10 or 20 years, you'll just add it all up, it's massive amounts of money is owed." But that is not how the alliance's budget works. While not all member states are meeting their commitments, as explained above, more are expected to increase their contributions this year. Trump has also threatened to pull out of the treaty, which experts say would be a monumental mistake. The celebration of NATO's 70th anniversary was downgraded to a meeting of member foreign ministers, because diplomats feared Trump would use the occasion to mount renewed attacks on the alliance. Trump is not expected to address the meeting in Washington this week. Legislation aimed at tightening New Zealands gun laws in response to the deadly mass shootings at two mosques last month passed its first reading in parliament Tuesday. The bill, which passed 119-1, bans military-style semi-automatic rifles and automatic assault rifles like the weapons used in the March 15 attack on the al-Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch that left 50 worshippers dead. Police Minister Stuart Nash said the massacre revealed that far too many New Zealanders have access to dangerous guns. We dont ever want to see an attack like this in our country again, Nash told lawmakers. We are compelled to act. But conservative lawmaker David Seymour criticized the speed at which lawmakers were moving forward with the legislation in casting the lone dissenting vote. But Seymour missed a chance to stall the legislation when he showed up too late to a cast a procedural vote because he spent too much time talking to reporters about his opposition. The bill also bans high-capacity magazines, which can hold multiple rounds of ammunition, and accessories that can convert ordinary rifles into fast-acting assault rifles. It will face two more parliamentary votes before it becomes law. Authorities have charged 28-year-old Australian Brenton Harris Tarrant with murder in connection with the attacks. The self-proclaimed white nationalist, who did not enter a plea in his initial court appearance the day after the attack, will make his next court appearance on Friday. North Korea has called a daylight raid on its Madrid embassy in February a grave terrorist attack and called for a full investigation into the incident that took place the week preceding the second summit between its leader, Kim Jong Un, and U.S. President Donald Trump. The Norths comments about the raid on its Spanish diplomatic mission came more than a month after the February 22 incident as details from the official investigation began emerging. One possible reason for Pyongyangs late response was that North Korea was conducting its own investigation into the matter and trying to determine what happened, said Daniel Pinkston, a lecturer of international relations at Troy University in Seoul. The decision-making process takes some time in North Korea and has to rise up to the senior levels in a case like this. So I think that's why it took some time, he said. Park Won-gon, Dean of International Affairs at Handong Global University, added that the timing of the Hanoi summit may have also factored in Pyongyang's decision not to mention it sooner. After failing to reach an agreement in Hanoi, North Korea has received pressure from the U.S., so theyre now raising the issue or appealing to the U.S. [because of the perpetrators alleged contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation], he said. The Spanish government has identified 10 people who allegedly raided the embassy, linking them to Cheollima Civil Defense, also known as Free Joseon. Its a dissident organization that characterizes itself as a government-in-exile and dedicated to liberating North Korea. Adrian Hong has been alleged by authorities to be the leader of Cheollima Civil Defense and the individual who led the group which entered the Madrid embassy. Hong was a founding member of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a non-profit organization that helps North Koreans to defect, but currently serves as managing director of Pegasus Strategies. According to LiNK, Hong hasnt been involved with the organization for several years. Spain has issued at least two international arrest warrants for suspects in the raid. The raids effect on denuclearization talks Whatever the reason for the delayed public acknowledgment of the embassy incursion, Pinkston said the actions of Cheollima does not help denuclearization talks between North Korea and the United States. However, when speaking to members of his cabinet Monday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in remained optimistic that the process would continue in a positive direction. Both the United States and North Korea are demonstrating their willingness to continue the dialogue by managing the situation in order to prevent the tensions from escalating to the level of the past. In the midst of it all, my upcoming visit to the United States will take place as a result of the ROK-U.S. joint efforts to revive the momentum for dialogue in the near future, Moon said using South Koreas formal English acronym, the Republic of Korea. Moon also took issue with those seeking to derail the process he began nearly a year ago with the first inter-Korean summit. In some quarters, Moon said, there have been certain attempts to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington and reverse the tide of peace on the Korean Peninsula. Such attempts can be labeled truly irresponsible, especially when we recall the state of crisis we endured before dialogue was launched. If the ongoing dialogue ends in failure, the situation will deteriorate even further, he warned, adding that such actions were in no way helpful to our national interest or the future of the Korean Peninsula. Moon visits Washington April 10 Next week, Moon will meet President Trump in Washington. There he plans to engage in in-depth discussions with President Trump on how we can work together to advance the peace process on the Korean Peninsula. This includes resuming talks between Pyongyang and Washington and moving toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and the creation of a virtuous cycle of inter-Korean and U.S.-North Korea relations. Pinkston currently sees divergent interests between Washington and Pyongyang and says it will be difficult moving forward. Denuclearization should be sequenced and structured to bring about a result mutually agreeable and beneficial to both sides, said Pinkston. But that said, for it to be acceptable to the United States and its allies, it would require verified abandonment of North Korea's nuclear weapons and nuclear capability, he said. Ultimately, the complete denuclearization of North Korea will be a complicated and long process, according to Pinkston. That would require a change in the world view of the North Korean leadership but I don't see any sign that North Korea is prepared to do that, certainly under the present conditions, he added. Jung Dae-jin, a research professor with the Ajou Institute of Unification, said North Korea may now be exercising a form of strategic patience. He said that North Korea may be going through a cooling-off period following the Hanoi summit and may be ready to resume talks following the anniversary of the first inter-Korean summit on April 27. Lee Ju-hyun contributed to this report. Vice President Mike Pence said on Tuesday the United States would continue to pressure Venezuela's oil industry and those who support it with economic sanctions, citing world oil prices as low enough to allow for the measures. Oil prices hit their highest point since November on Tuesday, with Brent crude approaching $70 a barrel, based in part on fears that U.S. sanctions against OPEC members Iran and Venezuela would result in a cut to global supplies. "We recognize the importance of energy to the United States," Pence told reporters. "But the price of oil around the world has been quite low for some time, quite competitive for some time, and we're just going to continue to stand firm and bring even more pressure on this regime," he said. A White House official said while oil prices have crept up from historic lows recently, prices are still under last year's highs. Pence's comments stood in contrast to concerns that President Donald Trump has voiced about oil prices. As recently as last week, Trump called for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to boost production, saying on Twitter that the price of oil was "getting too high." Pence, who is helping lead the White House campaign to dislodge Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power, made his remarks in a meeting with family members of six executives jailed in Venezuela since 2017. The executives worked for Citgo Petroleum, the U.S. refinery division of Venezuelan state oil firm PDVSA. The United States and most other Western countries have backed Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who declared himself interim president in January, arguing that Maduro's 2018 reelection was illegitimate. Maduro has called Guaido a puppet of the United States. The United States slapped stiff sanctions on PDVSA in January, aimed at cutting Maduro's government off from oil revenues. Trump is considering expanding the measures with sanctions on foreign companies that do business with Venezuela, his national security adviser John Bolton said on Friday. "We're going to continue to bring pressure on the oil industry. We're going to continue to bring pressure on countries in this hemisphere who are supporting the dictatorship in Venezuela," Pence said. Pence also said the Trump administration was considering new measures to punish Cuba, which has close ties with Maduro. "We're looking at strong action against Cuba which continues to provide personnel and support for the dictatorship in Venezuela," he said. 'Worried for Their Life' Pence expressed sympathy to the family members of the six Citgo executives - five U.S. citizens and one legal permanent resident - who were arrested in Caracas during corporate meetings and accused of embezzlement and money laundering. Pence said the men had been "illegally detained" and that 16 court hearings had been canceled as the men languished in basement cells without enough food or medical treatment. He said the Trump administration was working for the prisoners' release. "We are just worried for their life and we just want them home as soon as possible," said Carlos Anez, who told Pence his father had worked for Citgo for more than 20 years before he was detained. The killing of rapper Nipsey Hussle involved a personal dispute with the gunman and was not gang violence, Los Angeles police Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday. Hussle and the suspect, Eric Holder, 29, knew each other, but Moore did not reveal how they were acquainted or any details about what the dispute involved. Hussle was fatally shot Sunday afternoon outside his South Los Angeles clothing store. Moore said Holder repeatedly approached Hussle and talked with him before returning with a gun and opening fire. Holder then fled in a waiting car driven by a woman, the chief said. Moore told reporters at a news conference televised live that he was certain Holder was watching and urged him to surrender. Moore and the president of the city's Police Commission had been scheduled to meet with Hussle on Monday to discuss the relationship between the police force and the inner city. The chief said he was devastated when he learned that Hussle had been killed. Mayor Eric Garcetti said Hussle's killing occurred during an upsurge of gun violence that followed significant decreases, and announced plans to deploy an array of resources to roll it back. Authorities urged that Hussle's killing not be followed by more violence. A disturbance at a memorial for Hussle Monday night left at least 19 people injured, including two people who were taken to local hospitals in critical condition. Dozens of police officers cleared the memorial site after a fight apparently broke out and a stampede ensued. At least one of the critically-injured persons was struck by a car and the other one had a ``penetrating injury, although it was unclear whether that person was stabbed or cut by broken glass, a fire department spokeswoman said. Two other people suffered serious injuries and 15 had injuries that were considered non-life threatening. An autopsy completed Monday showed that Hussle, 33, died after being shot in the head and torso. The rapper, whose real name was Ermias Asghedom, had recently purchased the strip mall where the shop is located and planned to redevelop it into a mixed-use commercial and residential complex. The plan was part of Hussle's broader ambitions to remake the neighborhood where he grew up and attempt to break the cycle of gang life that lured him in when he was younger. Health and humanitarian workers in war zones are facing unabated and increasing attacks "and the impact on civilians is nothing but catastrophic," the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross said Monday. Peter Maurer told an informal Security Council meeting that three years after the council adopted a landmark resolution urging all countries to take action to prevent violence and threats against medical and aid workers, "the evidence of meaningful change on the ground is scarce." "The taboo that warring parties would not attack aid workers has been trashed," he said. "We need strong leadership, political will and determined action to restore this taboo." Maurer said health services in conflict "must be protected in a neutral humanitarian space and not be part of military strategies to defeat the adversary." And he said "rhetoric and practices which exclude adversaries for example those labeled 'terrorists' from basic health services must stop," and "public health regulations must not be tainted by political and military considerations." U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock told the council that when he started working on these issues over 30 years ago "there was a broadly shared assumption that in most circumstances warring parties would not attack aid workers." In the last years, however, he said, "humanitarian and medical workers have systematically become targets of attack." Last year, Lowcock said, 317 attacks against aid workers resulted in 113 deaths, according to the aid worker security database. And 388 attacks against health personnel or facilities resulted in more than 300 deaths, according to the World Health Organization, he said. The undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs called for better equipment and vehicles to improve security especially for local staff, saying about "94 percent of aid workers who were wounded, killed or abducted in 2018 were nationals of the country in which they were working." Lowcock said cooperation between civilian and military authorities is also important, explaining that this has enabled U.N. humanitarian staff to run the world's biggest relief operation for between 8 million and 10 million people in Yemen in the last 12 months. Trust is essential, he added, but it can only be sustained if governments don't politicize assistance or criminalize engagement or aid to particular groups. Time for action David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, told the council that with increasing attacks on aid and health workers, it's time for action. He called for an immediate and independent investigation of every aid worker's death and urged governments to bring perpetrators to justice. Miliband asked the council a series of questions including: "Will you block attempts to criminalize our ability to engage with armed actors in the name of counterterror restrictions? ... Will you seek and speak the truth no matter how powerful the state, how sensitive the topic, or how uncomfortable the question?" Miliband said IRC staff are waiting for action in Syria where they face increasing attacks, in Congo "where we are working to control an Ebola outbreak amid relentless arson attacks against treatment centers," and in Yemen, "where Houthi [rebels'] land mines and [Saudi-led] coalition airstrikes mean humanitarians risk their lives with every movement." Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar released 12 years of tax returns Monday, saying "transparency and accountability are fundamental to good governance." The Minnesota senator was the latest 2020 contender to make her returns public. The tax returns date back to 2006, when she first became a candidate for federal office. The documents show Klobuchar and her husband, attorney and law school professor John Bessler, paid $62,787 in federal taxes on an adjusted gross income of $292,306 in 2017. Democrats have criticized President Donald Trump for refusing to disclose his tax returns. His financial dealings also have been the subject of investigations. Among the Democratic presidential hopefuls who've already released their returns are Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. Other candidates have said they plan to release their returns but have yet to do so. Klobuchar's returns show how the couple's income has grown since she was first elected to the Senate in 2006. At that time, Klobuchar was the lead prosecutor in Hennepin County, Minnesota's largest county, and Bessler was an attorney at a Minneapolis law firm. That year they reported $215,326 in adjusted gross income and paid $41,984 in federal taxes. Their highest reported income was in 2015, when Klobuchar reported earning $75,000 as a writer in addition to her Senate salary. Her book, "The Senator Next Door," was released that year. Bessler, who has written several books on capital punishment, reported 2015 income from the University of Baltimore Law School, where he is a professor, and from Rutgers and Georgetown universities. Their adjusted gross income for 2015 was $334,406, and they paid $79,819 in federal taxes. South Sudan's Arabic daily Al Watan has accused the country's media watchdog group, Media Authority, of targeting the newspaper after the regulatory agency suspended the publication for one month over alleged licensing issues. In a letter dated March 26 to Al Watan and seen by VOA's "South Sudan in Focus," Media Authority's managing director, Elijah Alier Kuai, said the paper has been operating for almost a year without a valid license. Al Watan editor-in-chief Michael Rial Christopher, who is currently in Egypt, told South Sudan in Focus that his paper is operating lawfully in South Sudan. "We, as a newspaper, our documentations are up to date. But the Media Authority as a regulator should contact all the newspapers (about licenses) and not just Al Watan." Al Watan warned The regulatory body warned Al Watan in a letter dated Jan. 7 not to report about antigovernment protests in neighboring Sudan. Christopher said Sudanese embassy officials complained to Media Authority about the paper's opinion articles on Sudan. Also on Jan. 7, another letter sent to Al Watan ordered the paper to publish an apology to the Embassy of Sudan in Juba within 72 hours of the letter's date. Christopher said he refused to comply because his paper did not write inaccurate reports about the protests in Sudan. He said his troubles started after the encounter with the regulatory group. Death threats received Christopher also told South Sudan in Focus he received several telephone death threats from unknown people in Juba before the media watchdog group suspended his paper. "I started receiving death threats and intimidations from unknown telephone numbers. Now, they have shut down the newspaper, but they have failed to kill me. But I am sure they will do that once I return to Juba," Christopher said. South Sudan's media regulator suspended all press associations in the country in 2017 and asked them to register for licenses to operate. The move caused South Sudanese journalists to raise concerns about a crackdown on independent media. Four news websites and blogs including the Dutch-backed radio station and website Radio Tamazuj have been blocked since 2017. Foreign correspondents have also faced difficulties in reporting from South Sudan, with at least 20 reporters being denied entry into the country since 2017. Most international journalists who want to cover South Sudan must obtain a press pass from Media Authority before applying for a visa to enter the country. A risky business Christopher said operating a newspaper in South Sudan is risky, characterized by threats and intimidation. South Sudan had 15 daily newspapers at one point, but the number has fallen to five, due to frequent harassment and interference from authorities. Christopher said he will return to South Sudan after completing a medical checkup in Egypt. Christopher also said he plans to complain to the Justice Ministry about the behavior of Media Authority officials. U.S. President Donald Trump offered mixed signals Tuesday on whether he plans to close the U.S. southern border with Mexico to thwart the surge of undocumented migrants trying to seek asylum in the United States. "After many years (decades), Mexico is apprehending large numbers of people at their Southern Border, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador," President Donald Trump said Tuesday on Twitter, days after he accused Mexico of doing nothing to stem the flow of migrants heading to the United States and threatening to close the border if it did not immediately step up enforcement. No border closing decision has been made, and Trump later said he is ready to close it if he feels he has to. "I'm totally prepared to do it," Trump said at the White House. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Monday that nearly $1.7 billion of goods and services flow across the U.S.-Mexico border each day, and nearly half a million legal workers, students, shoppers and tourists cross the dividing line between the two countries, as well. "Sure, it would have a negative effect on the economy," Trump said of a possible border closing. "But security is what's more important. Security is more important to me than trade." Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said U.S. officials are "looking at all options" whether to close entry ports from Mexico and what the impact would be. Sanders said the White House's Council of Economic Advisers is studying the impact of closing different ports of entry. She said U.S. officials see Mexico "stepping up and taking a greater sense of responsibility" for the surge of immigrants, about 100,000 last month, mostly from Central America, who entered the United States to request asylum to escape poverty and violence in their homelands. "They have started to do a significant amount more," Sanders said of Mexico. "We've seen them take a larger number of individuals" and hold those who have asylum claims in Mexico while they are being processed in the United States. "We've also seen them stop more people from coming across the border so that they aren't even entering into the United States," she said. "So those two things are certainly helpful and we'd like to see them continue." U.S. President Donald Trump is lashing out at the country's territory of Puerto Rico, contending that its leaders are incompetent, foolish and corrupt in overseeing its recovery from two devastating 2017 hurricanes. Trump complained Tuesday that the Caribbean island is getting $91 billion in government assistance to help it rebuild from hurricanes Irma and the more powerful Maria, which may have killed nearly 3,000 people, although the aid figure is a 20-year projection. About $11 billion has been spent on the island of $41 billion in announced federal government recovery funding. The U.S. leader claimed that Puerto Rico, whose 3.2 million residents are American citizens, has gotten "more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA." Trump assailed opposition Democratic lawmakers in the Senate for refusing to vote Monday for a $13 billion Republican natural disaster relief aid plan that included $600 million in food assistance to Puerto Rico, although the rest of the money would have gone for recovery efforts in mainland U.S. states hit by hurricanes, wildfires and flooding. "The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump," he said. "So many wonderful people, but with such bad Island leadership and with so much money wasted. Cannot continue to hurt our Farmers and States with these massive payments, and so little appreciation!" After the Senate failed to advance either the Republican disaster relief bill or a similar measure approved by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, Trump said Democratic lawmakers "killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any 'place' in history." He said money spent on Puerto Rico is "taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful!" He said, "Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government cant do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works." Trump said federal relief workers and the U.S. military "worked emergency miracles, but politicians like the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan (Carmen Yulin Cruz) have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health." Last week, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello, angered by Trump's complaints about relief aid to the island, told CNN, "If the bully gets close, I'll punch the bully in the mouth. It would be a mistake to confuse courtesy with courage." After Trump referred to the island as a "place," Rossello said, "Mr. President, this 'place' you refer to, #PuertoRico, is home to over three million proud Americans that are still recovering from the storm and in need of federal assistance. We are not your adversaries, we are your citizens." Cindy Saine at the State Department and Valeria Jegisman of VOA's Russian Service contributed to this report. U.S. President Donald Trump is warming toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), praising the alliance and its leader Tuesday during meetings with its secretary-general. "Tremendous progress has been made," Trump said of improved burden-sharing among the pact's 29 independent member countries, but stated that "Germany, honestly, is not paying their fair share." Trump reiterated his concern that while America spends a lot of money to protect Europe, "they're taking advantage of us on trade." Trump, alongside Jens Stoltenberg in front of the Oval Office fireplace, praised him for an excellent job running NATO. "We get along really well," Trump said of the former Norwegian prime minister. The president took credit for the turnaround of the alliance he had previously referred to as obsolete. "As you know when I came it wasn't so good, and now, they're catching up" to the goal of members spending two percent of their gross domestic product on defense. "But I think it should be higher," added Trump. Stoltenberg thanked the president for his "strong leadership on burden sharing," adding, "we have stepped up in our joint fight against terrorism and we are investing more." Trump was asked by a reporter about Russia, the Cold War nemesis that led to the alliance's creation. "I hope that it's not going to be a security threat. I think we'll get along with Russia," replied Trump, whose 2016 presidential campaign was the target of a two-year investigation by a special counsel for alleged ties to Moscow. In a subsequent expanded meeting in the Cabinet Room, Stoltenberg, sitting across from Trump, stated that Russia is violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, noting "NATO allies have supported the U.S. position on that strongly." WATCH: Trump on NATO Defense spending Since becoming president in 2017, Trump's threats to "do his own thing" if NATO states did not meet defense spending targets plunged the organization into crisis. Only seven of the 29 member states reached the GDP spending commitment in 2018, but that is considered an improvement from previous years. During Tuesday's expanded bilateral meeting, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton made note of the increased defense spending by NATO members. "Now we have the common challenge of making sure it's spent efficiently," said Bolton. 70th anniversary NATO is officially marking its 70th anniversary in Washington this week. But there is a bit less pomp than might have been expected as alliance partners downgraded the celebration to a meeting of foreign ministers to avert the risk of further verbal attacks from the U.S. president. NATO membership "remains an integral part of U.S. security strategy," a senior State Department official reassured reporters a few hours prior to Trump's meeting with Stoltenberg. As foreign ministers of NATO gather in Washington, foreign policy analysts are emphasizing it is one of the most successful military alliances in history and still relevant, pointing to its ability to adapt in dealing with a resurgent Russia, managing the crisis on the south of NATO's flank, and new threats such as cybersecurity. "NATO is adapting and allies are spending more on defense. And I think this administration is understanding more and more how critical NATO is to some of the challenges that it faces, including China," Mark Simakovsky of the Atlantic Council tells VOA. "So, in many ways, NATO is far from obsolete." Value of alliance Trump's comments, political upheaval in Europe including the impending British exit from the European Union and calls by some to kick Turkey out of NATO, can leave the impression, however, that the defense alliance is fracturing. "I don't think that's the case. The alliance is strong," Estonian Defense Minister Juri Luik tells VOA, pointing to increased political dialogues and military exercises among NATO's members, as well as more U.S. military equipment and troops being brought to Europe. "You're not giving the money to somebody else. You're not putting it into a NATO budget somewhere, you're spending it on yourselves," said McCain Institute Director Kurt Volker, who formerly served as U.S. ambassador to NATO. "But it is a demonstration of your commitment to your own security, which then gives NATO the confidence that this is a country that we can help defend as well, because they are committed to defense of their own territory." Others agree that defense spending is important, but they say the alliance is fundamentally about the members' ability to trust each other, and Trump has damaged that trust. "When an American president questions the value of the alliance, our enemies in Moscow and Beijing are now questioning whether or not NATO would come to the defense of some smaller NATO nations that the president has criticized as maybe not worthy of NATO's defense," said Simakovsky, a former Europe/NATO chief of staff in the policy office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. "But I don't think at this summit the administration is going to be announcing any departure of the United States." Brooking Institution's Robert Kagan is expressing concern that Trump's attitude toward the European Union and expressed hostility toward the defense alliance could bring more chaos to the continent. "Think of Europe today as an unexploded bomb, its detonator intact and functional, its explosives still live. If this is an apt analogy, then Trump is a child with a hammer, gleefully and heedlessly pounding away. What could go wrong?" wrote Kagan in an upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. The United Nations says climate change, conflict and economic instability created acute food insecurity for more than 113 million people around the globe last year. In its annual Global Report on Food Crisis, the world bodys Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) found that of the 53 nations suffering from a shortage of food, Yemen was in the most urgent need of food aid, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan. The FAO report says that 2018 was the third consecutive year in which the number of people facing all levels of food insecurity topped the 100 million mark, although it was slightly better than 2017s number of 124 million people. The study said some countries were less affected by severe weather events such as drought and flooding. The study found that many of those affected by food shortages were the huge number of refugees and migrants in Bangladesh, which is sheltering more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar amid a bloody military crackdown, and Middle Eastern nations hosting refugees from war-torn Syria. The FAO says it expects the number of displaced persons, refugees and migrants to increase if the current political and economic crisis in Venezuela persists. A U.S. House of Representatives committee is set to consider Tuesday whether to issue subpoenas to Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross seeking documents related to the Trump administration's decision to add a citizenship question to the country's 2020 census. Ross said last year he made the decision based on a request from the Justice Department to better enforce the Voting Rights Act. But states and rights groups have challenged the move, arguing it would discourage immigrants from participating, and thus result in undercounting how many people live in certain parts of the country. The census is meant to include every person in the United States at the time, no matter their citizenship or immigration status. An accurate count is important, with the results used for a number of purposes such as determining how many congressional representatives are apportioned to each state, how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending is allocated, and how local jurisdictions make decisions such as where to build a new road or school. The House Oversight Committee is discussing a resolution from Chairman Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, to subpoena from Barr and Ross documents and communications about the request to add a citizenship question from a period of time that includes roughly the first year Trump was in office. The Associated Press reported it obtained a letter from Michael Platt Jr., an assistant secretary at the Commerce Department, asking the committee to hold off on issuing subpoenas for now in order to allow "good-faith dialogue" on the matter to continue. Whatever the committee decides regarding its probe into the mechanics of how the decision to add the question was made, the larger question of whether the census will actually ask respondents about the citizenship status is expected to be decided by the Supreme Court in the coming months. A lower federal court ruled in January that the way Ross added the citizenship question violated federal law, and that the Census Bureau itself had objected on the grounds that the question would harm the data it is required to collect every 10 years. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in case on April 23. It goes into recess at the end of June, by which time Census officials hope to have a final answer so they can begin the process of producing their questionnaire in time to begin their count on April 1 next year. President Donald Trump has rejected objections to asking about people's citizenship status, something that has not appeared on the census since 1950. "Can you believe that the Radical Left Democrats want to do our new and very important Census Report without the all important Citizenship Question," he wrote Monday on Twitter. "Report would be meaningless and a waste of the $Billions (ridiculous) that it costs to put together!" Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham declined to address Trump's comments at a briefing with reporters marking one year before the start of the count, which this time will allow people to give their answers online and in an expanded number of languages. He instead stressed the importance of the census and obtaining a complete count. President Donald Trump is meeting Tuesday with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the White House, as the alliance of which Trump has been critical prepares to celebrate its 70th anniversary in Washington this week. Trump has frequently blasted other NATO members for under-investing on defense and relying too heavily on the United States. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he shocked many on both sides of the Atlantic by calling the alliance "obsolete." He cited what he said was a missing focus on terrorism, while repeatedly claiming the United States was shouldering too much of the cost. With NATO foreign ministers gathering for talks this week in Washington, most U.S. foreign policy experts say the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is one of the most successful military alliances in history and is far from obsolete. "It has showcased an ability to adapt to change in the past, from dealing with a resurgent Russia, to managing crisis in south of NATO's flank, to as well dealing with issues like cyber, so NATO is adapting and allies are spending more on defense," Mark Simakovsky of the Atlantic Council told VOA. WATCH: What is NATO? Core issue Military spending has been a core issue for Trump, who has frequently pressured European allies to increase their defense expenditures. "Everyone's agreed to substantially up their commitment, they are going to up it at levels they have never thought of before," Trump told reporters during a NATO summit last year. NATO guidelines say member states should spend at least two percent of their gross domestic product on the military each year. But only seven of the 29 member states reached that level in 2018. Some experts think the two percent rule is very important. WATCH: NATO ANNIVERSARY "You're not giving the money to somebody else, you're not putting it into a NATO budget somewhere, you're spending it on yourselves," said McCain Institute Director Kurt Volker, who formerly served as U.S. ambassador to NATO. "But it is a demonstration of your commitment to your own security, which then gives NATO the confidence that this is a country that we can help defend as well, because they are committed to defense of their own territory." Others agree that defense spending is important, but say the alliance is fundamentally about the members' ability to trust each other, and Trump has damaged that trust. "When an American president questions the value of the alliance, our enemies in Moscow and Beijing are now questioning whether or not NATO would come to the defense of some smaller NATO nations that the president has criticized as maybe not worthy of NATO's defense," said Simakovsky. "But I don't think at this summit the administration is going to be announcing any departure of the United States." Simakovsky said the partners agreed to downgrade the Washington meeting to a foreign minister's meeting to avert the risk of verbal attacks from Trump. U.S. lawmakers of both parties on Tuesday resolutely endorsed the Trump administrations decision to halt delivery of F-35 fighter equipment to Turkey over Ankaras decision to purchase a Russian surface-to-air missile system a possible first step to blocking Turkey from acquiring the stealth jet altogether. If Turkey goes through with the Russian system, there is no way in the world that we can justify training them [on the F-35] and going through with our commitment on the [delivery of] the two F-35s, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said. The two cant exist [together], the F-35 and the Russian system, said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who also serves on the panel. Were not going to allow that to happen. Both senators spoke with VOA moments before the committee heard from President Donald Trumps nominee to become NATO Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters. I concur with this committee's belief that the S-400 [Russian missile system] and the F-35 are not compatible, and if Turkey proceeds down a path to procure and operate the S-400, they should not get the F-35, Wolters said. Danger to F-35s Last week, Turkeys foreign minister reaffirmed his countrys commitment to a deal with Moscow to buy the S-400, a system Washington believes could imperil the F-35, an advanced radar-eluding fighter jet. U.S. officials have warned that Turkeys possession of both U.S. and Russian systems ultimately could help Moscow find ways to detect the F-35 and gain access to advanced American military technology. We cannot allow the technology of the F-35 to get into the hands of the Russians and our enemies, New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen told VOA. Shaheen and three other senators have introduced legislation prohibiting the transfer of F-35s to Turkey until the Trump administration certifies that Ankara will not accept delivery of the Russian air-defense system. It would be better if we were able to simply have them eliminate the S-400, South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds said of Turkeys planned purchase. Complicating the issue is Turkeys role in the supply chain for assembling the F-35, which is made by U.S. aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin. Component parts of the F-35 are produced in Turkey, so we have to examine all the options, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said. We need to really maximize our effort to achieve Plan A, which is that they dont purchase the Russian system. 'Mixed issues' with Turkey Inhofe suggested Turkeys role in F-35 production can be replaced. One time, they [Lockheed Martin] said, We cant make them without Turkey. We found that was not true, the chairman said. The Pentagon confirmed Inhofes assertion. The DoD [Department of Defense] has initiated steps necessary to ensure prudent program planning and resiliency of the F-35 supply chain, acting Chief Pentagon spokesperson Charles Summers said. "Secondary sources of supply for Turkish-produced parts are now in development." The disagreement over military systems is one of several points of tension that have arisen in recent years between Washington and Ankara. Theyre an ally, theyre a NATO ally, but weve got a lot of mixed issues with them, from our support for the Kurds in northern Syria, who have been an effective fighting force against ISIS, to this issue [of military acquisitions], Kaine told VOA. The senator added, But then again, we would not have been able to successfully prosecute the war against ISIS without using the Incirlik [Turkish military] base in Adana. So they have been a supportive ally in many ways. Asked how he would characterize Turkey as a U.S. ally, Manchin said, Cautiously, very cautiously. I put them in the same category as I would Pakistan [a major non-NATO U.S. ally]. VOA's Carla Babb contributed to this report from the Pentagon. Washington welcomed China's move on Monday to expand the range of all fentanyl-related substances it defines as controlled narcotics, after criticism from President Donald Trump for allowing the synthetic opioid to be shipped to the United States. The United States is battling an epidemic of opioid-related deaths, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has said he hopes to include China's commitments to curb the drug in any agreement to end the two countries' bitter trade war. "This significant development will eliminate Chinese drug traffickers' ability to alter fentanyl compounds to get around the law," the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in a statement. "We look forward to our continued collaboration with China to reduce the amount of this deadly poison coming into our country," the DEA statement said. Earlier on Monday, China had announced the expanded control of fentanyl-related substances at a press conference, even as it blamed U.S. culture for abuse of the drug. China said the addition of fentanyl-related substances to the supplementary list of controlled narcotic drugs will take effect on May 1. Fentanyl itself and its "analogues" had previously been listed and remain controlled. "Resolved. All resolved," Liu Yuejin, a senior public security ministry official and vice commissioner of the China National Narcotics Control Commission, told reporters when asked if U.S. concerns had been resolved. But Liu said the amount of fentanyl from China going to the United States was "extremely limited" and that U.S. criticisms of China being the main source of the drug "lack evidence." "We believe that the United States itself is the main factor in the abuse of fentanyl there," Liu said, adding that American culture was partly to blame. He said the United States had a long tradition of abusing prescription medicines and that enforcement and education about the dangers were not good enough. "Some people link drug consumption with freedom, individuality, and liberation," Liu said. "If the United States truly wants to resolve its fentanyl abuse problem, it needs to strengthen its domestic work." Chinese officials in the past year have vowed to step up cooperation with Washington on illegal drug production and sales, referring to it as a bright spot in relations. The White House said after a December meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Argentina to deescalate trade frictions that Xi had agreed to designate fentanyl as a controlled substance. U.S. Representative Chris Smith, a Republican, said enforcement is crucial. "We have heard soothing but empty rhetoric before from China's leaders ... so we must continue to monitor developments closely and hold Chinese officials and manufacturers accountable if they fail to take decisive action and enforce this new policy," he said in a statement. Trump has called on China to apply the death penalty for "distributors and pushers" of the synthetic opioid. The volume of drugs coming into the United States through the mail has grown in step with legitimate online shopping, U.S. customs agents say, as Americans have taken to ordering drugs from overseas via the dark web. A U.S. congressional probe into the use of fentanyl in the United States found in 2018 that the substance could easily be bought online from Chinese "labs" and mailed to the United States due to gaps in oversight in the U.S. Postal Service. Such imports of prescription medicines and controlled substances are illegal, and China has become the main source of fentanyl in the United States, the U.S. Department of Justice says. Margaret Besheer at the United Nations contributed to this report. Venezuela's chief justice is asking lawmakers to strip opposition leader Juan Guaido of his parliamentary immunity a move that could pave the way for him being jailed. Justice Maikel Moreno on Monday said Guaido should be jailed for violating a Supreme Court-imposed ban on leaving the country. Guaido, who has immunity from prosecution as head of the National Assembly, last month visited several South American countries to consolidate regional support as he seeks to oust President Nicolas Maduro. The Maduro government also accuses Guaido of inciting violence linked to street protests and receiving illicit funds from abroad. Guaido invoked the country's constitution to assume an interim presidency in January, arguing Maduro's 2018 re-election was illegitimate. He has been recognized by the United States and about 50 other countries as Venezuelas legitimate leader. The 35-year-old opposition leader, meanwhile, continued his calls for protests after Maduro announced a 30-day plan to ration electricity. Guaido said in a twitter post late Sunday, "We'll see each other in the streets tomorrow," adding, "we will not hide from the dictator." Maduro said in a speech Sunday on national television the rationing plan will help deal with power outages that have also affected the countrys water supply and communications. He said schools would remain closed and the length of the workday will be cut to conserve power during the 30-day period. In another development, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, told VOA on Monday that he hopes to go to the country soon. "I hope to visit Venezuela soon, and we are working on such a visit," he said in an interview. The ICRC already has teams in the country and in neighboring Colombia, and has been scaling up its humanitarian response. Maurer said the whole Red Cross and Red Crescent movement is doing their "best to fill gaps, to assist Venezuelans where needs are." On Friday, the International Federation of the Red Cross which along with the ICRC and national societies make up the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement announced that after meetings in Caracas, they had reached an agreement to scale up health activities across the country, where the healthcare system has been in crisis for months. Vanderpump Rules Fomo in Mexico Season 7 Episode 17 Editors Rating 3 stars * * * Previous Next Photo: Bravo If the Real Housewives Institute issued awards, its first award would be for the editors of Vanderpump Rules, who have had an amazing season, starting with when they turned the 80s-themed Pride celebration at SUR into a theme song appropriate for a sitcom of that era. Its just been hit after hit all season since then, culminating in two stellar moments this episode, one unmissable and the other subtle but devastating. The first is the fake commercial they made for FOMO, a.k.a. the fear of missing out, treating it like a disease that causes insatiable longing to be everywhere with everyone having all the fun. Tequila can help. Tequila is a medication used to treat FOMO and can ease symptoms. Tom Sandoval lists the various side effects of tequila, including memory loss, broken cell phones, stumbling, crying, getting horrible tattoos, embarrassing dance moves, regrettable make outs, blacking out, and full blown meltdowns. Each of these behaviors features flashback evidence of the clowns weve been following for seven years engaging in at least one of them. Its the most scathing yet hilarious thing this show has ever done. However, a small detail I love even more is one that anyone could have missed, but the very wise editors left in for us. At dinner Kristen takes her shoes off to sit down. When everyone gets a little grossed out she says, Ill even go barefoot in West Hollywood. Tom Schwartz immediately replies, Ew! Supermarket feet. Supermarket feet is the most withering own, because Im not entirely sure what it is but I know that it is bad. I dont know if he thinks she goes to the supermarket barefoot and he hates the thought of her tootsies on the cold linoleum of Ralphs, or if her walking barefoot around the streets and sidewalks of WeHo makes her feet gross like a supermarket. I dont know. This is not a phenomenon or metaphor that I have any previous knowledge of, but it is one that I will never forget. Kristen Supermarket Feet Doute will forever be lodged in my mind, and she should be entirely ashamed of herself, even more ashamed than she should be for that rambling, drunken speech she gave telling everyone not to get too wasted during this trip. That isnt the only thing that Kristen has to be embarrassed about. What about when all the girls go skinny dipping? (Mad props to Lala for being the only one brave enough to take off her panties knowing that shit would be blurred on Bravo.) Kristen cant even take two steps in the ocean without going head over supermarket feet? Shes sort of trying to hold her boobs up but also being buffeted by the surf, like an empty Mountain Dew bottle someone forgot at a bonfire. Or what about later, when Kristen says she doesnt forecast herself having any meltdowns on this trip? You mean she can see those coming and does nothing to prevent them? But I do have Kristens back on one thing, and thats that Jax needs to let Pillowgate go. At dinner Jax is reminded that last year in Mexico, Kristen and James were up late in his hot tub and when he woke up in the morning the pillows were positioned in a way that Jax thought meant they had sex in the hot tub. Both Kristen and James vigorously deny that. But, duh! Of course they would, especially if they were vigorously doing something the night before. When it comes up again, Jax tells everyone he still believes that Kristen had sex with James. Kristen hears this and hauls Jaxs ass out on the patio while theyre at a club so that he misses all the girls dancing to Lalas single on a box with a gyrating monkey that the locals call El Mono and who is an evil spirit that haunts the nightmares of children. Kristen tells Jax once again that she didnt sleep with James. I didnt do that shit, Kristen says. I made some bad mistakes, but I didnt do that. Jax still doesnt believe her. What upsets Kristen is that she has been stuck with the label Krazy Kristen, and even though shes made improvements to her life, no one will take them seriously. When is the hard work, the change, going to be enough to just be Kristen? she asks. Thats a good point. Though she regularly behaves badly (especially on trips), we havent seen her punch anyone, storm out of anywhere, or cheat on her man in years. Yes, shell fall over an ottoman after a day of wine tasting and shell kick her friends out of her house with a sage smudge, but is that really worse than what anyone else has done? What makes this really aggravating is that Jax still doesnt believe her and says, essentially, that based on everything shes done in the past she has no defense. This is the same Jax that hasnt cheated on his girlfriend excuse me, fiancee in like three weeks but thinks that he should be canonized as some saint of monogamy. What really galls is that Jax wont give her the forgiveness that he asks for himself. And if we arent to ever forgive Kristen or start to think better of her, when can we really start to think better of anyone? Jax does have a wonderfully redeeming moment with Stassi in the pool after they take ATVs to some wonderful waterfalls. (A shout-out to the productions insurance premiums, which have to be higher than Miley Cyrus in the Denver airport after putting this cast on ATVs.) Jax first pretends like he still has feelings for his ex, but they both get to laugh about that. Then he tells her that he really likes Beau, but that she needs to ease up on him a little bit, because her trust issues are going to drive him away. My favorite part is when he mentions how she can freak out on guys and tells her that guys like him and her other ex Patrick, the guys that ruined her for everyone else, deserve that, but good guy Beau doesnt. Everyone is telling Stassi not to fuck it up with Beau but, lo and behold, because of guys like Jax she is totally fucking it up with Beau. She is living under some false impression that they need to do absolutely everything together, including leaving the party and going to bed at the same time. I used to feel the same way too. If I was at a party, I wanted my man to be there with me until I was ready to go. Eventually, after enough of these same exact fights, I learned that its totally fine for him to leave me there and I can just crawl into bed with him after. Life is so much better when everyone gets what they want and no one has to sacrifice. It seems like Stassi is constantly testing Beau to see if hell fail one of these tests, and when he does she treats him like every other torn Swingers poster of a man shes dated in the past. This episode leaves them in a very bad place, with Stassi saying that she sees the warning signs with Beau that she ignored with guys in the past, but this isnt a warning sign. Its just a silly little squabble every couple has being magnified by tequila (the cure for FOMO!) and all the horrific bullshit shes experienced with dudes. Stassi, seriously, get yourself into some therapy. You pick bad guys for sure, but youre never going to get anyone but those guys until you figure yourself out. The girl I love the most this episode is Ariana, who gets so ham sandwiched at the club that she ends up lying on the floor of the hotel getting not only supermarket feet but supermarket ass, supermarket hands, supermarket back of the neck, supermarket everything. She had to have her vaginal area blurred repeatedly. You know your shit is messy when there is a roving crotch blur there to keep you company. She also gets so wasted at the club that she makes out with all of the girls, including Stassi, and touches Lalas vag. Cant Ariana just go full lez and move in with Kristen Stewart and become a really chic designer lesbian? That is the future I want for her. We would all miss her on this show, though. Just look at what she does for Lala when she pulls her aside at the group dinner. Ariana says shes worried about how angry Lala is getting lately and that Lala keeps using her dead father as an excuse. Ariana also lost her father while taping this show, but tells Lala she never used it as an excuse to behave badly. Lala tells her that she should have, that she should have stood up for herself more. Thats what Lala and her emotional Gemini DJ James Kennedy dont understand: There is a huge difference between sticking up for yourself and treating other people like shit. When Billie Lee accused Lala of using the dad card, she could have stood up for herself and told Billie that was a low blow and that she shouldnt talk about her like that. Instead she tells Billie that shes ugly and her mother dresses her funny. What people hate about Lala isnt that shes standing up for herself, its that shes meeting what she sees as nasty with equal amounts of nasty. The way to get a shit stain out of a white dress isnt to shit on it some more. I want to say that someone needs to teach these kids how to play nice, but then what would we all watch on Monday nights? Anderson Cooper 360? Reruns of The Big Bang Theory? PBS?! Speaking of shit stains, while the girls were all in the ocean skinny dipping, the guys were upstairs where Tom Sandoval was ripping such loud, beefy farts, they could have been sold at a Ruths Chris steak house. He even delivered one right into Jaxs mouth that made him get up and immediately brush his teeth, like that could get the stench and memory of methane out of his mouth. As Jax left, Toms Schwartz and Sandoval followed him into the bathroom for a drunken make-out session, as is their wont. Their kisses were sloppier than usual as the tequila raged through their livers. Schwartz grabbed Sandovals ass and gave it a tight squeeze, like palming a precious melon. Sandoval let another one rip, and they broke their embrace for a minute to laugh. Sandoval lunged back at Schwartzs mouth, but as he did, Schwartz let out his own fart. Schwartz slid his hands down Sandovals back, under the waist of his pants and underwear, and Sandoval tooted once again. Now they werent laughing, now they didnt break as they took turns, one passing gas and then the other, echoing each others bodies in the cramped bathroom until the smell became too much. A Minya criminal court sentenced a policeman to death on Tuesday for killing two Christians while he was guarding a church in December last year. Rabie Mostafa Khalifa, a police sergeant, was assigned to guard a Coptic church in Minya; he killed Emad Kamal and his son David in front of the church. According to investigations, Khalifa had argued a day prior to the incident with the two men, who were working on a construction site in front of the church. The murders stirred anger among Christians in the area. The criminal court issued a preliminary death sentence in February and asked Dar El-Ifta for its opinion on the sentence, in accordance with Egyptian law on capital cases. Dar El-Ifta upheld the court's sentence. The verdict may still be appealed within 60 days. Search Keywords: Short link: Continued sightings of bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Rome. There have been numerous sightings of dolphins off Rome's coast in recent days, including a group of 25 dolphins, described as "exceptional" by Oceanomare Delphis Onlus. The organisation is involved in the Delfini capitolini project which monitors and studies the presence of dolphins in the stretch of sea between Ostia and Fiumicino. Oceanomare said the 25 bottlenose dolphins were filmed by fishermen who were able to provide experts with detailed information including photographs, acoustic recordings and exact coordinates. The dolphins were sighted off the coast of Tenuta del Presidente, at Capocotta, to the south of Ostia, on 30 March. Since then there have been additional sightings of a group of seven dolphins, including two mothers and babies. Oceanomare said it was "fundamental" that the public continue to report sightings to assist experts in their ongoing research, according to Italian news agency ANSA. Mexico must use its very strong immigration laws to stop the many thousands of people trying to get into the USA, Trump tweeted Saturday. Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border! This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico! The probes, one for Hyundai and the other for Kia, cover noncrash fires in almost 3 million vehicles from the affiliated Korean automakers. The probes cover the 2011 through 2014 Hyundai Sonata and Santa Fe, the 2011 through 2014 Kia Optima and Sorento, and the 2010 through 2015 Kia Soul. The complaints came from consumers and from data provided by both automakers. In brief remarks, Trump on Tuesday again threatened to close the border but would not definitively say whether he would do so, and he has not divulged his plans even to some of his closest aides. But the White House is bracing for the possibility and internal planning has reached an advanced stage, according to the three people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the deliberations. The stronger story concerns Susans son, Sam. His parents are separated and he feels like his high schools biggest nerd. When Susan gives him the job of sorting Hazes columns for republication, Sam not only discovers his own interest in writing, he starts to communicate on a more adult level with his lonely, worried mother. He, like Haze (and perhaps Landvik), puzzles life out best through words. Sam starts writing to Haze, and, speaking of his fellow students, tells her, Your voice made us want to use ours better. This is a real tribute to all of the small-town, warmhearted, big-mouthed radical hags out there, and a truly fun read for them, too. Iwillnot, who spoke on the condition that I not use his real name, has been interested in stickers for about a decade. Stickering, like spray-painting graffiti, is against the law, punishable with a fine of up to $1,000 or up to 180 days in jail. (D.C. police say officers arrested 31 people for graffiti in 2017 and six in 2018. They arrested zero for posters, which includes stickering, in 2017 and five in 2018.) His trademark sticker each artist has one is a black-and-white line drawing of his left hand with I WILL NOT written below it. He often sticks it near businesses and buildings that, as he sees it, are contributing to gentrification, like cupcake shops and luxury apartment complexes. It shows my unwillingness to participate, he says. But before the month was out, payroll was late again, according to an email Farah sent to staff. His wife notified the staff that dental and vision insurance had been cut off. As the crisis worsened, Dunaway found another publisher for her book Restoring Americas Soul: Advancing Timeless Conservative Principles in a Wayward Culture. But not before telling Farah by email that I really am at a loss to understand this kind of treatment at the hands of someone I considered to be a brother in Christ. They requested details about schools participating in the program, including whether they are accredited, whether they are religiously affiliated, how much of their funding comes from the voucher program, whether they have tested drinking water for lead, how many students are disabled and English-language learners, and how many students did not graduate or transferred to another school. There are a lot of things we need to do to restore the public trust, and this is one of them, said council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1), who, with six other lawmakers, introduced the bill to ban outside jobs. Some people might choose to go on to a different field and not stay as long if they need more income. Public service is a sacrifice in many ways. The Virginian-Pilot reports that a review of documents related to the 80 license revocations between 1998 and 2018 found that at least 34, or about 43 percent, involved opioids. About half of the 46 revocations in the past decade fell into that category. Some coincided with other issues such as sexual misconduct or financial fraud. Manning was jailed three weeks ago by an Alexandria federal judge for refusing to participate in a grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website with which she shared classified information in 2010. Like other high-profile inmates, including Paul Manafort, she has been separated from the rest of the jail population and is confined to her cell for all but a couple hours a day. Were aware that the Park Service is ostensibly still going through public comments and making their decision on whether to implement these rules, and we wanted to make the point that we have our eye on them, and the best thing that could happen is for the National Park Service to withdraw them altogether, said Kate Ruane, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU. Smith has the authority now to approve [the proposals] if they come before him, and he also has the authority to withdraw them completely. Morroghs campaign manager, Kyle Shivers, said that Morrogh has been a reliable Democrat since the 1980s and that the previous commonwealths attorney under whom he had served had a policy of sometimes rejecting potential jurors over their political affiliations. Shivers said Morrogh did away with the practice when he was elected top prosecutor in 2007. It occurred near the 3600 block of Pennsy Drive, according to Mark E. Brady, the spokesman for the county fire department. The site is about a half mile south of the New Carrollton station. Officials said the cause of the fire is still under investigation, but Piringer said in a tweet that initial results indicated that it was likely related to a candle/incense or electrical issue and started in a bedroom. Piringer said the apartment had a large amount of household clutter but not to [the] level of hoarding. In November, the Trump administration released the fourth National Climate Assessment, which found Maryland faces shorter winters within 30 years. By 2040, the last freeze of spring will come two or three weeks earlier. The first freeze of fall will come two or three weeks later. The federal assessment also said rising sea levels risk drowning marshes and flooding low-lying areas such as the Annapolis City Dock. Average temperatures could rise 4 or 5 degrees by 2050, the assessment found. Opponents of the question say it is a political maneuver by the Trump administration, and that its inclusion, particularly at a time when noncitizens feel targeted by the government, will deter many immigrants and their family members from participating. A reduced response rate would threaten the counts accuracy and could harm people who live in areas with large immigrant populations. Census data is used to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding and to determine apportionment and redistricting. These dogs have been described by canine authorities as national symbols of the land south of the border, with lineage going back to the times before Columbus arrived in the New World. Amtrak greatly appreciates the continued work of the inspector general to assist us in ensuring we are good stewards of our real property, Amtrak spokeswoman Christina Leeds said. We have already started putting processes in place to further strengthen our controls, and are developing a long-term facility plan to ensure that decisions are consistent with the companys strategic goals. I want action from the Virginia legislature, Watson told interviewer Gayle King on CBS This Morning. There is no amount of money that could ever compensate what he did to me or what I live with every day. I want the people of Virginia to know the truth, and I would like the Virginia legislature to do the right thing. But he said he also believes in the ethical hunting of coyotes, though he conceded that definition may vary from hunter to hunter. He said for about $750, he will take hunters out on about 250 square miles of land, set up stands where hunters will wait and then call coyotes with sounds that bring them close before being shot. Surveillance footage showed many bikers running from the scene and ducking for cover after gunshots rang out. A smaller number could be seen pointing and firing weapons. Law enforcement officers recovered dozens of firearms, knives and other weapons from the restaurant and adjacent parking lot, many of which officers organized indiscriminately into piles on the pavement and in the back of a police vehicle, dash-cam video showed. There has been one death from cholera, Mozambiques health director announced, and 97 of the reported cases remain in treatment centers, with others released. The new figures are an indication that cholera is spreading but is being brought under control, health workers say. Ebola cases rising in eastern Congo, WHO says: The World Health Organization said Ebola is on the rise in eastern Congo in the wake of attacks on health facilities. Dozens of armed groups operate in the region. A WHO spokesman, Christian Lindmeier, said a record number of new cases in this outbreak have been registered in the past two weeks. The violence has hampered vaccination efforts and safe burials, so more people were exposed to the deadly virus. The spokesman said 73 new cases were reported last week, compared with 57 the week before. He simplified and blamed: The crisis that we are facing today is not complicated. . . . We have a government that ignores the needs of the working people . . . yet works overtime for wealthy campaign contributors and the 1 percent. He mocked those who questioned ideas such as Medicare-for-all (the establishment went crazy, media went nuts, still is), and he celebrated his prescience. He channeled rage at the vulgarity of a grotesque and corrupt system, the absolute hypocrisy of Republicans, corporations that lie and billionaires who buy elections. Of the wealthy, he said, Many of them are bandits, and he said if Republicans dont have the guts to participate in a free and fair election, they should get the hell out of politics. Ms. Newbold has shown great principle and courage in going public, and her account, as outlined by the committee, suggests that White House officials in higher positions have behaved cavalierly and carelessly. For example, in the case of Senior White House Official 1, as the committee described it, Ms. Newbold and another official judged that the clearance should be denied. They found the background check into the individual had unearthed several significant disqualifying factors, including possible vulnerability to foreign influence, outside employment activity, and personal conduct. But her boss, the director of the Personnel Security Office, overruled the determination on the simple grounds that the activities occurred prior to federal service. She detailed other examples, too, such as being told, after another senior official got a disqualifying recommendation, do not touch the case. The official then got a clearance. None of the officials are identified. Much will now depend on how Mr. Erdogan, who has grown increasingly intolerant during 15 years in power, responds to the stinging defeat. He could try to overturn the results, particularly in Istanbul; party leaders have asked for a reexamination of votes set aside as invalid. He could also use his powers to oust the elected mayors, as he has previously done in dozens of municipalities in Kurdish-populated areas. The wiser course would be to pragmatically address the issues that lifted the opposition, including an economy that has slipped into recession and repression of the media and civil society. On Tuesday, March 19, an armed man was arrested at a Leesburg high school after having freely entered the building. He was able to remain on the campus for more than an hour before he was apprehended. A week after the arrest, neither students nor parents had been given any explanation as to why a lockdown procedure was not performed, leaving people to speculate. Questions are still being asked. Congress established this committee in 1977 to provide unbiased external scientific advice on air-pollutant standards, which are revisited every five years. Congress requires the committee to have seven members, including one from a state agency. But it soon became clear that a seven-member committee would not have sufficient in-depth expertise to make a science-based recommendation. Accordingly, for more than 40 years, the committee has drawn on the expertise of external advisory subcommittees established for each pollutant of concern. These much larger committees openly review the EPAs own scientific analysis of the thousands of pertinent peer-reviewed papers and inform the committees members of their findings, which committee members then use to recommend health-based standards to the EPA administrator. All of this is rightly being looked at in a different light amid the #MeToo movement. Over the weekend, in an essay for New York magazines The Cut, former Nevada state legislator Lucy Flores claimed that Biden put his hands on her shoulders, sniffed her hair and kissed her on the back of the head at a 2014 rally for her lieutenant gubernatorial campaign. She wrote that the episode left her feeling shocked, confused and humiliated. Turnbull is right. Even if Huaweis risks seem manageable today, are our allies so confident theyll remain so in the future? Huawei doesnt operate independently of its government, but even if it did, it would still be subject to Chinese laws that require companies to fully cooperate with its intelligence services. If Huawei is directed by Chinese military or intelligence officials to compromise a foreign countrys 5G network, it will comply. This would allow the Chinese government to export all the worst excesses of its cutting-edge police state to free soil. High school students rating their female classmates is appalling. As a female who only recently graduated from high school, I condemn the actions of the boys and congratulate the young women on their endurance for justice. This is a prime example of our societys complicity in boys inappropriate actions as simply boys will be boys. Enough is enough. The Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School administrations reaction proves that societal expectations placed on boys and girls continue to be vastly different. And we, as adolescents, recognize these gender-based presumptions. The administrations original response was foolish, sexist and demeaning toward the girls who were affected by the list. I applaud these girls, who stood up and demanded a different approach. I am proud that girls today are empowered to fight for themselves, and I am hopeful for the progress that these actions will create. A third criticism is that NATO no longer contributes significantly to U.S. security in the world. Consider the facts: Canada and the European allies came to our defense on 9/11 and invoked the Article 5 mutual-defense clause of the treaty. They viewed Osama bin Ladens attack on the United States as an attack on them as well. NATO allies went into Afghanistan with us where they and partner nations have suffered more than 1,000 combat deaths. Most of those countries remain on the ground with our soldiers to this day. Ryan said that to know Youngstown, Ohio, is to understand the economic struggles of Appalachia and farm country. The congressman envisions a political coalition of Rust Belt and rural communities that would promote innovation to wrest the Midwest back from Trump in 2020. Ryan touted Iowa and Ohio as potential global leaders in renewable-energy production, and he cited progress in moving digital jobs to rural areas through partnerships with local community colleges. Democrats must show rural Americans that government can work for them, he said, because they are beginning to wake up to the Trump administrations policy toward them: Its a scam. First, never doubt that Trump can win. To be clear: The Clinton campaign did not take Trump lightly or take victory for granted. But many of us believed the United States would never elect someone as unfit, unstable and hateful as Trump, and surely that colored some aspects of the campaign, even if only subliminally. We know that it impacted others: Comey has said his unprecedented actions were based in part on his assumption that Trump would lose, and it seems likely that some of Trumps press coverage was similarly affected by the assumption that he would be good for ratings in October but gone by November. Though Cobain might not be the first name you think of when it comes to gay rights, his band was never shy about its politics, especially where LGBTQ issues were concerned. In 1992, Nirvana played a No on #9 benefit concert and issued a public statement opposing Measure 9, a statewide anti-gay citizen ballot initiative in Oregon that would have required all governments in the state to treat homosexuality as abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse. And in the liner notes of their album Incesticide, released that December, they warned: If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us leave us the f--- alone! Dont come to our shows and dont buy our records. The liner notes to their next album, In Utero, echoed that admonition: If youre a sexist, racist, homophobe or basically an a--hole, dont buy this CD. I dont care if you like me, I hate you. Castro says his plan is premised on the idea that the southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. The former head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and mayor of San Antonio would end border wall construction, allow deported veterans who honorably served to return to the United States, increase refugee quotas and make it easier for family members to be reunited with relatives who are U.S. residents. He would ask Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including young people who received protections under the Obama administration and those covered by the Temporary Protected Status program. The report will be used in putting together the final draft of the proposed amendments to Egypt's 2014 constitution A 13-member sub-committee will finish a report on proposed amendments to Egypt's constitution on Wednesday, according to Bahaaeddin Abu Shoqa, leader of the Wafd Party and chairman of parliament's legislative and constitutional affairs committee. In a meeting held on Sunday, Abu Shoqa indicated that a sub-committee headed by MP Ahmed Helmi El-Sherif, deputy chairman of the legislative affairs committee, will be entrusted with collecting all the remarks and comments which were sent to parliament in a written form or expressed in during the national dialogue held between 20 and 28 March. "The committee will finish its job on Wednesday 3 April, so that a report be prepared and made available to all MPs," said Abu Shoqa, adding that "it is not the job of the committee to give any opinion on the comments and remarks, but just to collect and classify them in a detailed report." "It is very important that ahead of the final vote in parliament all MPs take note of all the remarks and comments on the proposed constitutional amendments in a detailed report," said Abu Shoqa, also indicating that "this is the final step before the legislative and constitutional affairs committee meets next week to put together the final draft of the amendments, which will be a matter of vote in parliament when it reconvenes on 14 April." El-Sherif told reporters on Monday that the sub-committee is being mobilised to finish its report on Wednesday. "We are holding meetings every day so that we can prepare a report that will make it very easy for all MPs to read and review ahead of the final vote," said El-Sherif, adding that "for each article, all MPs will see in the report what kind of comments were introduced and by whom, and why." Members of the subcommittee include Nabil El-Gammal, Tharwat Bekheit, Salah Hassaballah, Mohamed Madina, Mostafa Selim, Sharie Saleh, Shadia Khodeir, Mohamed Salah Karim, Gihad Amer, Kamal Ahmed, Ihab El-Tamawy, and Mohamed Salah Khalifa. Abu Shoqa said the sub-committee's report will include copies of written comments and remarks on the proposed constitutional amendments. "We received comments and remarks from different state authorities, MPs, civil society organisations and public figures, and we want all MPs and the media to take note of these and to know who said what in the national dialogue because this goes in line with the principle of transparency, and because we have nothing to hide," said Abu Shoqa, indicating that "all the written comments have been sent to the committee over one month, or between 16 February and 16 March." On 3 February, the Support Egypt coalition, which is in the majority, submitted proposed amendments to Egypt's 2014 constitution to parliament. After getting a provisional approval in parliament in a plenary session on 14 February, the door was opened for all sectors of society to give their remarks and comments on the amendments. A series of national dialogue hearing sessions were also held between 20 and 28 March. Parliament is expected to take the final vote on the proposed amendments by the middle of April. A public referendum is also expected in the last week of April. The amendments aim to allocate a greater number of seats (25 percent) to women in parliament, reinstate the post of vice president, recreate a second house, and increase the presidential term from four to six years. Search Keywords: Short link: Joe Biden is one of the truly decent and compassionate men in all of American politics, McCain said. He has helped me through my fathers diagnosis, treatment and ultimate passing more than anyone of my fathers friends combined. I wish there was more empathy from our politicians not less. Stoltenberg held lengthy meetings with Trump at the White House on Tuesday, but only as an add-on to his invitation to address Congress on Wednesday. That invitation was issued jointly by Republicans and Democrats but was spearheaded by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). It was seen as an effort to counter Trumps lukewarm public endorsement of NATO and his continued assertion that the United States is being taken advantage of by allies who are not paying their fair share for the security umbrella they enjoy. According to prosecutors, Hayes sent a text message to Palmero in November 2017 suggesting that Lindberg make a contribution to the state party, and then Hayes would be able to funnel it wherever Lindberg wanted. Authorities said it was a way for Lindberg to circumvent the cap on how much an individual can donate to a candidate and by using the state party as a pass-through entity, Lindberg could keep his name out of the mix. I am the senator who voted the most against President Trump for his Cabinet nominees. I am going to stand up to him every chance I get because that is who I am, Gillibrand said. Will you fight with everything you have? Will you never give up? Will you never give in? Will you fight like your life depends upon it? Because the truth is, it does. He added that he does not believe that the majority of all transgender people are exploiting their gender identity but that there are some bad actors who could take advantage of the law for their own benefit. Official first-quarter fundraising numbers are not due until April 15, which means any numbers provided before then come directly from the campaign and are not yet subject to public scrutiny. But several of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls are likely to preview their numbers. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg reported $7 million in first-quarter fundraising Monday morning. Others have yet to do the same, leaving Harriss number as an early benchmark in a crowded field still sorting out its hierarchy. At the time of Lindhs sentencing, some of Spanns family members voiced displeasure with the agreement, which they said was unfairly lenient. They have spoken out in recent weeks in opposition to Lindhs early release, and Shelby sent a letter to Trump last week stating that members of Spanns family in Alabama had been in touch with him to voice their concerns. Hes hoping that Mexico will continue to step up, like weve seen them do over the last couple of weeks, Sanders said. We hope that that continues, and that we can work with them so we dont have to [close the border]. One former senior Republican official in Puerto Rico noted that Democrats would seek to use unforced political errors by Trump to hurt the GOPs chances in Florida in 2020. The official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that while Trump and a Republican-led Congress passed record funding for hurricane relief in 2017, the distribution of the funds has been extremely slow. The question for us is: Shall we try to renew the old Senate or retain what remains of it, or do we need to figure out what the Senate is in the modern era? Thats one of the questions that Ive been grappling with, Schatz said. But the new policy was written largely to respond to those very lawmakers, who have complained for years about how they are expected to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in party dues but, because they are rarely in a competitive general election contest, are unlikely to see any DCCC investment in their races. Its a particularly sore subject for many minority lawmakers, who argue it is more difficult to raise those dues in their relatively poor districts. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a DCCC finance co-chairman, said the hard feelings were understandable. Its really hard to go say . . . Please pay your $150,000 dues or your $300,000 dues, and we may use it to hire vendors who are going to run against you in a primary, he said. Thats an impossible ask to make. Many close observers expected Sanders to report a hefty first-quarter sum. He turned heads when he announced raising about $6 million in his first 24 hours as a presidential candidate, surprising some Democrats who were uncertain whether his loyal coalition of small-dollar donors would renew its support for him during his second run for president. My favorite part of the house is the open floor plan, Alvarado said of her new home. You can be in the living room but still be connected to the kitchen in the middle. And if youre upstairs, you dont hear anyone. Theres a nice separation between floors. In the split-level I used to live in, I heard voices from all the rooms. Salah added that there is no longer need to waste further time and that the constitutional measures to unseat Bouteflika should be undertaken immediately. Those remarks sharply increased pressure on the president to step down. On Tuesday, he officially notified the president of the countrys Constitutional Council of his decision to step down, said the state news agency. He is a vagabond who doesnt have a social media account and doesnt own a smartphone. He defied stereotypes: Shen is educated and eloquent, and he provides for himself. He is dubbed the Vagrant Master or Master Shen on the Chinese Internet, and his every word has been recorded by live-streamers, shared across social media in the form of 15-to-30-second videos and closely watched and analyzed by millions. The election came in the midst of an economic downturn that had focused voter anger on Erdogans handling of the crisis, analysts said. Urban voters may have also bristled at his caustic campaign rhetoric, they added, and his frequent attempts to link his political opponents to terrorism. He offered a reminder that those who committed these horrible crimes are not the majority of priests. Although Francis has previously acknowledged the power gap between abusers and victims, he wrote in this document that if you see a priest at risk, because he has lost the joy of his ministry, or seeks affective compensation, or is taking the wrong path, remind him of his commitment to God and his people, remind him of the Gospel and urge him to hold to his course. The United States is now in the third year of an overall slowdown in refugee numbers, despite a continuing crisis. Worldwide, 68 million people have been forcibly displaced, and more than 25 million are refugees. Groups that work with refugees say it is not that fewer people are seeking to come to the United States but that far fewer are able to gain admission. Foreign women and children are housed in a separate annex at the camp, where they are watched over by armed guards and must be escorted when they visit other areas of the camp. The segregation was imposed because of tensions between the foreign women, who are seen as more radical, and the camps Syrian and Iraqi residents, many of whom fled the Islamic State. Data from the first three months of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obradors administration shows little change in detentions from the same period a year earlier. Mexican officials detained 25,483 migrants in the three months that began in December 2018, according to the University of Texass Mexico Security Initiative, down only slightly from the 27,455 detained during the same three-month period the year before. People will be cut off from alternatives that offer them some hope and some sense that their future in El Salvador will be better, he said. Programs that contribute to reducing insecurity by strengthening the rule of law will disappear, and anti-corruption efforts that make investment and economic growth more viable will stall. Former Commonwealth Bank boss Ian Narev will make a much humbler return to corporate life this month as the second-in-charge at job search site Seek. Almost a year to the day after he departed the $126 billion bank, Seek announced Mr Narev would be joining the $6 billion company with no guarantee he would eventually get the top job, according to its co-founder and chief executive, Andrew Bassat. Ian Narev will be COO of Seek and will lead the company's Asia Pacific and Americas operations. Credit:Bloomberg Theres absolutely no masterplan beyond what weve said today," Mr Bassat said. "I think what has excited Ian and what has excited me is the opportunity to work together on the opportunity set that we have, so weve both made commitments to each other that we would be around for a while." Pilots of a Jetstar 787 Dreamliner encountered problems with both engines of their passenger plane as they came into land at the Japanese city of Osaka on Friday. Initial accounts of the mid-air incident indicate one of the Boeing 787's engines suffered an unexpected surge in speed during the crucial approach to landing at Osaka's Kansai International Airport. A Jetstar 787, similar to the one pictured, suffered engine problems while on descent into Osaka on Friday. A short time later, the other General Electric engine on Flight JQ15 briefly encountered the same problem, sources familiar with the matter said. The Jetstar 787-8 aircraft, which can carry as many as 335 passengers in economy and business class, was en route from Cairns. Jetstar's fleet of 11 Dreamliners are powered by GEnx engines, which are manufactured by General Electric subsidiary GE Aviation. The first official glimpse of Saudi Aramco's financial performance confirms the state-run oil giant can generate profit like no other company on Earth: net income last year was $US111.1 billion ($156.1 billion), easily outstripping US behemoths including Apple and Exxon Mobil. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is trying to prepare Saudi Arabia for the "post-oil age." Credit:Bloomberg But accounts published before the firm's debut in the international bond market also show Aramco -- an organisation that produces about 10 per cent of the world's crude -- doesn't generate as much cash per barrel as other leading oil companies like Royal Dutch Shell because of a heavy tax burden. The bond sale, being pitched to investors this week in a global roadshow, has forced Aramco to reveal secrets held close since the company's nationalisation in the late 1970s, casting a light on the relationship between the kingdom and its most important asset. Both Fitch Ratings and Moody's Investors Service assigned Aramco the fifth-highest investment grade, the same as Saudi sovereign debt, but lower than oil majors Exxon, Shell and Chevron. The company is preparing to raise debt in part to pay for the acquisition of a majority stake in domestic petrochemical group Sabic, worth about $US69 billion. The deal is a Plan B to generate money for Saudi Arabia's economic agenda after an IPO of Aramco was postponed. In effect, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is using the firm's pristine balance sheet to finance his ambitions. Lyft came back to Earth on its second day of trading. The ride-hailing company's stock shot up by nearly 25 per cent after it hit the open market on Friday. It then settled at $US78.29, or 9 per cent above its $US72 initial public offering price. After a glittering debut, Lyft shares tumbled below its IPO price on Monday. Credit:AP Monday was a different story. Lyft shares crashed in early trading - offering a sobering lesson on the risks of jumping in on the opening trading day of a hot company, and closed 11.9 per cent down at $US69.01, wiping around $US3 billion ($4.2 billion) off its market cap. "It's a good example of why people should approach IPO investing cautiously," said Kathleen Smith, a principal at Renaissance Capital, which manages IPO-focused exchange-traded funds. "This company has large losses and will not be profitable in the near future." The grieving parents of the two schoolboys found dead in a lake on Queensland's Fraser Island have remained dignified despite being "overwhelmed with sadness and shock". The bodies of the 16-year-olds were found in Lake McKenzie early on Saturday morning, after they went missing from a tour group on Friday evening. The Japanese students were visiting Queensland on a week-long exchange program, spending two days at the Caloundra City Private School, on the Sunshine Coast. CCPS principal Dirk Wellham met with the parents of both boys in Brisbane on Sunday morning. Happy 110th birthday: Agnes 'Nessie' Kluckhenn, right, and her 'baby' sister Williamina, 95. Credit:Eddie Jim Some people would be happy to have all their marbles at age 70, but on her 110th birthday, Nessie Kluckhenn was not just switched on, she was cheeky. Its time I was looking for a third husband, she declared to a roomful of amused relatives at Mayflower aged care home in Brighton on Monday. I feel fantastic. Mrs Kluckhenn, believed to be Australias oldest living person, held court behind posh Happy Birthday cards from the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Governor-General. Earlier a piper in a kilt played for her and she was presented with an enormous birthday cake. The 2019 budget will unveil good news for the ABC, with the Morrison government providing another three years of funding for the national broadcaster's "enhanced news-gathering" program. The broadcaster has been hit with hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts to its base funding since 2014 and management had been sweating over the future of the supplementary, local news-focused grant that has been in place for six years. The ABC has had its "enhanced news-gathering" program funded for another three years. Credit:Christopher Pearce Despite the ABC's long-held fears for the enhanced news-gathering initiative, the 2019 budget will renew its funding with $44 million committed over the next three years, according to multiple sources familiar with the decision. The program bolsters funding for regional and outer-suburban news gathering, national reporting teams and state-based digital news. A debate in literary circles is how many basic plots run through our books and films. From rags to riches (think Cinderella) to the voyage and return (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), academics and others have discussed how many standard ways there are to tell a story. When it comes to budget-in-reply speeches, however, there's no such debate. They either fly or they don't, they set out an agenda for a possible future government or they go unremarked, they excite voters or they are simply forgotten. Ultimately, the aim of budget reply speech - especially in an election year - is to set out how the Opposition could do a better job running the country than the government. That's the issue awaiting Bill Shorten when on Thursday evening he delivers his reply to Josh Frydenberg's budget speech. It's illustrative to look at three previous budget-in-reply speeches. The ones given by Kevin Rudd in 2007, Tony Abbott's in 2013 and Shorten's own effort in 2016. Fort Lauderdale: A woman carrying two Chinese passports, four mobile phones and a device containing computer malware lied to Secret Service agents and briefly gained admission to President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club over the weekend during his Florida visit, federal prosecutors allege in court documents. President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate is seen in Palm Beach, Florida. Credit:AP Yujing Zhang, 32, approached a Secret Service agent at a checkpoint outside the Palm Beach club early on Saturday afternoon and said she was a member who wanted to use the pool, court documents said. She showed the passports as identification. Agents say she wasn't on the membership list, but a club manager thought Zhang was the daughter of a member. Agents say that when they asked Zhang if the member was her father, she did not answer definitively but they thought it might be a language barrier and admitted her. 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 UNs head Antonio Guterres expressed solidarity with Muslims all over the world and denounced hate speech, racism, and anti-Semitism in Cairo on Tuesday, following a meeting with the head of Al-Azhar. The secretary-generals comments at Al-Azhar headquarters, Egypts leading institution of Sunni Islamic learning, come less than a month after a terrorist attack on two New Zealand mosques killed 50 worshippers. In this time of difficulties and division, we must stand together and protect each other. Nothing justifies terrorism, and it becomes particularly hideous when religion is invoked. We must uphold and promote human dignity and universal human rights,'' Guterres said following the meeting with Grand Imam Ahmed El-Tayyeb. Guterres said that Islam is currently a subject of an attack aimed at linking it with terrorism, although most of terrorisms victims are Arabs and Muslims. The UN secretary-general highlighted Al-Azhars role as a model reflecting the true face of Islam, referring to Al-Azhars initiatives to open a dialogue with other religious institutions around the world, especially the Vatican, to help consolidate peace and global coexistence, adding that the whole world, not only Muslims, need the grand imams voice of wisdom and peace. Guterres called on the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) to visit Al-Azhar and benefit from its pioneering expertise in promoting religious and civilisational coexistence. The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations is an initiative that aims to bridge divides and promote harmony among nations, all with a view toward preventing conflict and promoting social cohesion. El-Tayyeb expressed his appreciation for the sincere condolences offered by the UN secretary-general to the victims of the treacherous terrorist attack against Muslims in New Zealand, adding that Guterres previous work as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees allows him to understand the suffering of innocent, oppressed people around the world. The Al-Azhar chief expressed the institutions readiness to cooperate with the UN to consolidate their common goals of consolidating global peace and achieving equality among all human beings. El-Tayyeb reiterated Al-Azhars universal message of peace between human beings, confronting terrorism and establishing the principles of human fraternity, equality and justice. The grand imam referred to Al-Azhars efforts to strengthen dialogue with major religious institutions such as the Vatican and the World Council of Churches, in cooperation with the Muslim Council of Elders, to reach a document on human fraternity, which took a full year to prepare. In his capacity as chairman of the Council of Muslim Elders, the grand imam conveyed an official message to Guterres. He also handed the UN secretary-general a copy of the human fraternity document, signed by Al-Azhar and by Pope Francis during the Human Fraternity Global Conference held in Abu-Dhabi in February. The document, which is the fruit of over a one year and a half dialogue between Al-Tayyeb and Pope Francis, depicts the nature of relations among followers of different religions and highlights the role played by religions in the modern society. The UN secretary-general said that the document is of universal importance because it rejects extremism charges and clears Islam and Christianity of accusations of terrorism, pointing out that the UN will seek benefit from this document to promote world peace and security. Search Keywords: Short link: STAMFORD Biotech firm SpringWorks Therapeutics, which is developing treatments for severe rare diseases and cancer, announced Monday it had closed on $125 million in Series B financing. The funding would support the further development and intended commercialization of the two leading treatments of SpringWorks, which was spun off from Pfizer in 2017. Nirogacestat focuses on desmoid tumors, rare soft-tissue tumors that can cause pain, internal bleeding and disfigurement and limit patients physical motion. PD-0325901 responds to certain forms of Neurofibromatosis Type 1, a rare genetic disorder that can lead to severe pain, disfigurement, reduced mobility and shortened life span. Those therapies have not yet gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. By the end of the second quarter of this year, SpringWorks plans to start phase three clinical trials for nirogacestat and phase 2B testing for PD-0325901. This financing from a committed, knowledgeable and distinguished investor syndicate, which includes new and existing investors as well as key industry partners, underscores the progress weve made to advance our late-stage clinical programs towards pivotal studies, execute on our initial business development strategy and build upon our leading drug development operations, SpringWorks CEO Saqib Islam said in a statement. Manhattan-based biotech-investment firm Perceptive Advisors led the financing, according to SpringWorks. The size of Perceptives investment was not disclosed. We are excited to partner with SpringWorks Therapeutics as they build a differentiated rare disease and targeted oncology company, and we look forward to supporting the team as they work towards achieving product approvals over the coming years, Adam Stone, Perceptives chief investment officer, said in a statement. The new investors also included pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and several investment firms. An earlier Series A funding round raised $103 million for SpringWorks. Series A investors Pfizer, OrbiMed, Bain Capital, Pfizer and LifeArc also participated in the new financing. SpringWorks relocated last November to 100 Washington Blvd., in the Harbor Point neighborhood of Stamfords South End. It takes about 24,000 square feet in the waterfront office tower. About 20 work there. Theres clearly a revitalization effort going on in Stamford, Islam said in an interview earlier this year. Most of whats attracted us to it is this areas connectivity north and south, both getting to Manhattan and Boston, which are two major poles of influence in pharma and biotech. pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; twitter: @paulschott GREENWICH Work has begun in two locations in connection with a controversial new Eversource Energy substation in downtown Greenwich. Site prep on the underground line portion of the project is underway, Eversource said Monday morning. The underground line will eventually connect the new substation on Railroad Avenue to the existing one in Cos Cob. The work is the initial step of a construction project to install a new 115-kilovolt electric transmission line underground through 2 miles of local streets in Greenwichs south side from the downtown to Cos Cob, according to Eversource. There has been significant pushback from the town against the project, with residents arguing that it is not needed. They also say it uses technology that is not as advanced as other possible solutions for generating power. Town government officials have also objected, citing aesthetic and environmental impact concerns, especially when it comes to the work planned for Bruce Park. The town of Greenwich has filed a legal appeal against the Connecticut Siting Council for its decision in November 2017 to allow the substation to proceed. And while that appeal is still active, the town has been engaged in settlement talks with Eversource since last year. We have been working collaboratively with town officials for months and have made substantial progress in addressing the towns concerns and are close to reaching a final agreement, Eversource spokesman Frank Poirot said on Monday. We have briefed the other parties, the state Siting Council and Consumer Council. and are confident that we will deliver a solution that would be acceptable to them and reliably serve the towns energy needs. But First Selectman Peter Tesei said Monday that there were ongoing discussions. The Connecticut Siting Council has approved this project, Tesei said. The town and its appropriate authorities continue to work with Eversource to identify areas of concern and develop the appropriate precautions for Eversource to best address those issues, including environmental and traffic concerns. Last August, Tesei expressed hope that a settlement could be reached, saying at the time that he felt progress was being made. I like what Im seeing and what were receiving in terms of feedback to our requests, Tesei said last year. Town Director of Planning and Zoning Katie DeLuca could not immediately be reached for comment Monday. The first part of the work will be in Bruce Park and at the site of the soon-to-be-new substation at 290 Railroad Ave., the former site of a Pet Pantry. Poirot said that building will be demolished to make way for the new substation to be built. The underground work and the substation construction is expected to take place concurrently, he said. Despite the lack of a settlement between the town and Eversource, the company said work can begin on the initial steps under the Siting Councils approval. We are legally allowed to move forward on a portion of the project while we continue to collaborate with the town on the settlement agreement, Poirot said. Eversource has said that the new substation is a necessary part of its ongoing effort to further strengthen the electric distribution system in Greenwich. Throughout the process, Eversource has said that its electric infrastructure in Greenwich cannot handle the demand from customers. Breaking ground on this project is a significant step toward reinforcing the electric system in Greenwich to ensure our customers have reliable power during heat waves, severe cold snaps and other times of high energy use, Eversources Vice President of Project Management Steve Sullivan said in a statement Monday. More than 28,000 Greenwich customers rely on us to have energy for every moment of their lives and this upgrade project will allow us to meet their energy needs while being sensitive to neighborhood aesthetics. The work is expected to be complete by early 2020, Poirot said. The work will not interrupt electric service to local residential or business customers, and Eversource pledged to work closely with community leaders and property owners where work is being done to mitigate any potential impacts. We are committed to being a good neighbor and doing our work with respect for our residents and their properties, Poirot said. Neighbors were notified in advance of the work, he said. Anyone with questions could call 1-800-793-2202. kborsuk@greenwichtime.com GREENWICH When a roomful of Greenwich seniors was asked whether they had ever been approached by a scam artist, or knew someone who had, nearly half raised their hands. Thousands of older people in Connecticut fall victim to shady financial deals or scam operations every year, and law enforcement and advocates for seniors are getting the word out about fraud prevention. The Greenwich Senior Center hosted a panel discussion Tuesday afternoon on financial crimes targeting the elderly. Detective Mark Solomon, a financial-crime expert with the Greenwich Police Department, said scammers are tech-savvy and persistent. This is what they do every single day, and theyre very good at it, he said. One of the latest frauds to hit residents in Greenwich and the region involves the use of a fake caller ID coming up on a victims phone, with the name of a credit-card company appearing on the screen, the detective said. The scammer will say a suspicious transaction has been detected on the victims credit card then transfers the call to fraud-prevention specialist, who is actually another fraudster who carefully mimics the way a real credit-card representative would interact with a customer, gaining financial information, Solomon said. Never trust the caller ID function on a phone as reliable, he warned. As part of the forum, some seniors described the ways they had been scammed or contacted under false pretenses. One woman said her Facebook account had been hacked, and a false-account in her name was then used to solicit money. A senior spoke of a call threatening to shut down all her computer records if a payment wasnt sent. A third woman said she was contacted by a company that said it owed her money from a past fraud but she needed to provide personal information to get her restitution. Byron Peterson, a volunteer with the AARP who has researched the ways in which con artists target older people, ran through some of the typical scams and highlighted common tactics: coercion and a wily way of coaxing personal information from strangers on the phone. Scammers are also good at manipulation. They want you to get so excited, youre not thinking clearly. And be careful if someone calls and asks personal questions, Peterson said. Postal Inspector Lauren Vumbaco said only one out of 40 seniors who has been victimized by a financial crime comes forward to report it. It was imperative for everyone to report crimes to authorities for law enforcement to go after the fraudsters and to alert the public, she said. Solomon said seniors should never be embarrassed about reporting a financial crime, and he said he knows police officers who have been defrauded. There are 18-year-olds, and 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds who are scammed every single day. We want you to report this, he said. rmarchant@greenwichtime.com ANSONIA Gone are the Jersey barriers that closed the Pershing Drive shoulder, the speed bumps that slowed traffic and the patrol officer assigned to handle the traffic. Gone is the heavy equipment and the personnel that spent the past month digging, removing and replacing a broken sewer pipe more than 30 feet below the surface. Last will be seeding the area and covering it with hay. But replacing the pipe may be the easy part of the project. Now officials face the aftermath: bills, disgruntled officials and whether the arguments and anger over the replacement process will mean two city operations become one. The nearly 100-year-old pipe which services Pershing Drive and Howard and Clifton avenues broke Feb. 22, dumping raw sewage into the Lemko Club and threatening the Haddad building. Cost of repairing the break was estimated at $760,000. Who would pick up the amount the city or the Water Pollution Control Authority, became a matter of contention. The administration said it believes sewage line breaks are the WPCAs responsibility while back-ups fall under Public Works duties. Initially, city officials thought the problem was a back-up like the ones plaguing the North End in recent years. However after photographing the line, officials determined it was a major break. The Aldermen and WPCA hired Pepe Construction as general contractor for the repair on an emergency no-bid contract. These are 100-year-old pipes, said company owner Frank Pepe. Its probably one of the original ones. It pumped raw sewage into a lagoon (alongside the Naugatuck River) until cities were forced to build sewage treatment plants. Last month, the WPCA voted to use its surplus to pay the full cost. But the close 3-2 vote with one abstention angered Chairman Nunzio Parente, who objected to the payment and stormed out of the meeting. Pepe said the now completed work will total about $850,000. Thats for everything the equipment, the work from Brennan Construction... we even laid an extra 80 feet of pipe and uncovered another manhole no one even new existed, said Pepe, who has been on the site since Feb. 22. We saved about $200,000 by being able to truck in fill and gravel we had at Public Works, Mayor David Cassetti said. We probably used 1,100 cubic yards of fill. But still to be addressed is the $3,260 bill submitted by the Lemko Club for hiring JP Maguire to sanitize and clean up the basement after raw sewage backed up into it from the broken pipe. Their four-page estimate includes a dumpster for one to three tons of debris, pressurized cleaning with an application of an anti-microbial agent and enzyme cleaner in the basements storage room, closet, furnace room and an open area. Were going to be turning that over to our insurance company, said Cassetti. An official at the Lemko Social Club was unavailable to comment Tuesday morning. As a way to clear up disparities over who pays for what work in the future, the city has said it plans to adopt an ordinance that would combine the Public Works and Water Pollution Control Authority boards into one. The Board of Aldermens ordinance committee is expected to approve the proposal Wednesday night and send it to the full board for its April 9 meeting. City officials expect Parente, who never officially filed a resignation request, to chair the WPCAs Wednesday night meeting in City Hall. Parente could not be reached for comment Tuesday around 12:30 p.m. Prior to the 7 p.m. start of the meeting will be a public hearing on setting the 2019-20 fees homeowners and businesses will pay for the cost of the sewage treatment plant. That hearing is slated to start at 6:45 p.m. in city hall. Pepe said one of the problems hes been seeing in Ansonia and Derby is people are dumping everything down their toiletswipes, grease ... after awhile grease builds up and hardens into something like concrete when it cools. Derbys been sending out pamphlets to its residents advising them on what not to dump down their toilets. Ansonia did the same last year. The break was the third in Ansonia since December. One of the other lines was at the intersection of Wakelee Avenue and Mary Street and the other was at the intersection of Wakelee Avenue and Dwight Street. Officials said they believed those lines were damaged during the renovation of Wakelee Avenue. WESTPORT A local sushi shop charged with several labor abuses over the past year appeared to close suddenly on Monday. Matsu Sushi is currently closed for renovation, a sign posted on the door of the restaurant Monday stated. Matsu, a mainstay of downtown Westport for 17 years, thanked its loyal patrons for years of support in the sign. The night before, frequent Matsu customer Molly Alger wrote to the local blog 06880 to say she had dinner at Matsu on Sunday night and learned it was the restaurants last day in business. They tried to give us serving dishes and other things as well. I am so sorry to see this great restaurant close, Alger wrote. Matsus owners did not respond to call for comment. The dark cloud of labor violations at Matsu is related to its supposed closure, Sarah Ahn, an organizer with the Flushing Workers Center said. I see it as their attempt to wash their hands and not pay back what they owe these workers and try to wait them out or avoid responsibility, Ahn said. Ahn first became aware of the labor violations at Matsu when Liguo Ding and Jianming Jing, two former Matsu employees came to the Workers Center in December of 2017. Jiang and Ding, both residents of Queens, N.Y., were fired from Matsu Sushi in December 2017 after the restaurants owners Ziqiao Cao and Kim Ming Cheng terminated them for refusing to complete a 36-hour shift. With the help of the Workers Centers and James Bhandary-Alexander, an attorney with New Haven Legal Assistance Association, Inc., Jiang and Ding filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against Matsu. Jiang and Ding also filed a lawsuit against the restaurant along with two of their former Matsu co-workers for failure to pay minimum and overtime wages. In an Oct. 26 decision labor board Judge Kenneth W. Chu said Matsus owners discriminatory fired Ding and Jiang and ordered the owners to immediately reinstate the two workers, which as of April 1, Matsu had not. In June, Judge Stefan R. Underhill, a U.S. district judge for Connecticut, announced Matsu cannot sell the restaurant until it pays former workers for the unpaid minimum and overtime wages. Its commonly believed that you can escape from liability in this type of case but thats not true, Bhandary-Alexander said. He noted Matsus owners, the defendants in the case, could still be held liable if found guilty in district court because of Underhills decision and a $250,000 lien against the restaurant. Were going back to the courts to try to resolve some of this. Were definitely not throwing in the towel or letting them just do whatever they would like to. The fight is far from over, Ahn said. svaughan@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2638; @SophieCVaughan1 WESTPORT The Board of Education discussed options for reconfiguring the populations of Westport schools, especially the currently defunct Coleytown Middle School, at its meeting Monday night. Concurrent to the Coleytown Building Committees effort to restore the school, which closed due to issues with mold in September and is expected to reopen in August 2020, the education boards Teaching and Learning Committee undertook an analysis of the schools demographics to determine which students should return to Coleytown when the school comes back online. Westports two middle schools have a severe population imbalance. Because the district is reducing staff to account for decreased enrollment and the absence of Coleytown next year, Westport cannot return to the same pre-closure model when Coleytown reopens, BOE member and Teaching and Learning Chair Candi Savin said. At the start of the year, Coleytown had 457 students while Bedford housed over 400 more, with a total student population of 859. Using demographic projections and scenarios provided by the Cheshire-based civil engineering firm Milone & MacBroom, the board discussed the possibility of redistricting to balance the populations at the two middle schools. The option to turn Coleytown into a sixth grade academy, where all of towns sixth-graders would attend before heading off to seventh and eight grades at Bedford Middle School, was also considered. Savin said she was interested in the idea of a sixth-grade academy because it would create greater parity among all of towns middle school populations and end strife between Coleytown and Bedford parents concerned with the imbalance between the two schools. However, Savin noted she hasnt heard great support for the idea among residents, many of whom have said they want a return to two 6-8 schools in Westport. BOE member Elaine Whitney said she values the potential specialized programming at a sixth-grade academy, but raised concerns about putting students through two school transitions in the course of two years. With the recent resignation of Superintendent Colleen Palmer, board member Vik Muktavaram questioned how much change the district can take given the upcoming search for new leadership. The elephant in the room is we dont have a superintendent right now, BOE member Karen Kleine said. Kleine asked Assistant Superintendent Anthony Buono, who is filling in for Palmer in her absence, whether he had the capacity to oversee a move to a sixth-grade academy during the leadership transition period. I think were at a point, honestly, that if I was coming into a district as a superintendent they would be able to support whatever decisions made. And I think were at a point where were forced to make a decision, Buono said. Buono added the board should be cognizant of the amount of change it levies on the schools. A district community can only sustain so much change before it ends up having a negative impact on the overall performance, he said. Because of the tight timeline to rehabilitate Coleytown by August 2020, BOE member Jeannie Smith encouraged the board to make a decision soon about the future of the schools population. We have to do whats right regardless of how people feel about it. Im just needing to say that I value everybodys input and peoples input just depends on their own situation, so we have to think objectively as a board about what are we going to do when we reopen that school, Smith said. The board will continue discussing future demographic changes to Westport schools at future meetings, BOE Chair Mark Mathias said. svaughan@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2638; @SophieCVaughan1 WESTPORT Matsu Sushi, a downtown restaurant which appeared to close for good Sunday amid labor abuses, will reopen in a few weeks, Matsus lawyer said. Matsu is closed temporarily to undergo some renovation. We expect it to reopen in two to three weeks, Matsus lawyer, New York City based attorney Benjamin Xue said Tuesday. A sign posted on the door of the restaurant Monday stated Matsu Sushi is currently closed for renovation. However, frequent Matsu customer Molly Alger wrote to the local blog 06880 that she had dinner at Matsu on Sunday and was told the restaurant is closing permanently, which caused confusion about the shops status. After over 15 years in Westport, Matsu was not doing well and the restaurants owners, who were not available for comment, are planning to adjust the restaurants hours and may only serve dinner upon reopening, Xue said. In the past year, Matsu has been charged with several labor abuses, including firing two employees for refusing to complete a 36-hour shift. In October, National Labor Relations Board Judge Kenneth W. Chu said Matsus owners Ziqiao Cao and Kim Ming Cheng discriminatorily fired the two workers, and ordered they be reinstated and provided with backpay and other expenses related to their loss of employment. The two workers Jiang and Liguo Ding who submitted the complaint to the labor relations board, have not been reinstated to their positions or compensated. Jiang and Ding filed a lawsuit against the restaurant along with two of their former Matsu co-workers, for failure to pay minimum and overtime wages that is still making its way through the U.S. District Court of Connecticut. James Bhandary-Alexander, of the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, Inc., is representing the workers in court and said many restaurants attempt to close to avoid liability for labor violations by closing shop. But Matsus owners could still be held responsible for any labor violations even if they close because of a $250,000 lien against the restaurant and a court decision that preventing them from selling the restaurant until it compensates the workers, Bhandary-Alexander said. In the meantime, the fired workers and their supporters have been protesting regularly outside the restaurant, which Xue said is destroying Matsu by decreasing the restaurants goodwill in the community. The fired workers and organizers supporting them, however, say they believe the protests and litigation are helping bring justice to the workers. svaughan@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2638; @SophieCVaughan1 Theres a new name in Canadian financial services following the acquisition of Walmart Canada Bank. The new owners are a partnership of Stephen Smith - chairman, CEO and co-founder of First National Financial Corporation, Canada's largest non-bank mortgage lender - and affiliates of private investment firm Centerbridge Partners, L.P. "The Bank has a strong track record of achieving results and I look forward to growing the business as the Bank continues to work with Walmart in providing value for Canadians, through affordable financial products and services," said Stephen Smith. Walmart Canada bank will be rebranded as Duo Bank and will continue to provide a range of financial services products across Walmart Canadas footprint as part of a new agreement. "We are encouraged by the prospects ahead for the Bank and look forward to continuing to work together with the talented team there to help provide affordable financial products for our customers," said Lee Tappenden, president and CEO, Walmart Canada. Among the products and services that will be offered are credit cards, rewards, and related protection services. "The closing of this transaction represents a new and exciting phase for the Bank, our talented associates, and our customers," said Trudy Fahie, Chief Executive Officer of the Bank. "We look forward to working together with Stephen and the Centerbridge team, who bring deep financial services expertise, as we execute our long-term growth strategy for the Bank while continuing to stay true to our mission of providing value-driven financial products that are clear and simple." Canadas commercial real estate sector is being reshaped by the fast-growing technology and ecommerce industries. The first quarter of 2019 saw continued high demand for industrial units and offices with real estate firm CBRE reporting record highs in its Quarterly Statistics Report. Canadian office markets continue to gather momentum, in large part as a result of rapidly growing tech and co-working sectors. The remarkable office market momentum continues to build, but tenants have fewer and fewer options if they dont plan ahead, commented CBRE Canada Vice-Chairman Paul Morassutti. Downtown Toronto office vacancy tightened another 10 bps, dropping the rate to a new record low of 2.6% in the first quarter. Montreals downtown office vacancy now sits at 8.6%, the lowest it has been since Q4 2013, with tech company growth playing a key role in this decline. And in Calgary, there was 289,515 sq. ft. of positive net absorption of downtown office space in Q1 2019, the largest quarter of positive absorption since the oil downturn in 2014. Industrial demand The national industrial availability rate dropped to a new record low of 3.0% in Q1 2019. National industrial development is at its highest level since 2015 with 22.6 million sq. ft. of industrial space under construction; mostly in Toronto and Vancouver. Builders are working to meet user demand for taller clear heights, larger door counts, and specialized warehouse configurations. Industrial developers are responding to chronic space shortages with new construction, while tenants are opting to secure space prior to construction completion. In Toronto, all new supply delivered in Q1 2019 was pre-leased, and 77.6% of the 9.58 million sq. ft. under construction already has tenancies in place, added Morassutti. Among the highlights in Q1, 2019: Torontos industrial market, which has had 16 consecutive quarters of positive net absorption, saw its availability rate hit an all-time low of 1.5% in Q1, with 2.2 million sq. ft. of positive net absorption. Calgarys industrial market, which has logged nine consecutive quarters of positive net absorption, had a further 649,080 sq. ft. of space taken up in the first quarter of 2019. The Halifax industrial market had 50,465 sq. ft. of positive net absorption in Q1, the ninth straight quarter of positive net absorption for that city. In recent years, the Canadian real estate market had been somewhat polarized between areas of pronounced strength and areas facing challenges; however, this quarter showed more momentum for cities across the country, including hard-hit Alberta, said Morassutti. Its worth noting that while overall office vacancy has remained stable quarter over quarter in Edmonton and Calgary, the amount of sublet space on the market which serves as a bellwether for the office segment decreased by 25.1% and 8.6% respectively. This is a promising indication that Albertas CRE conditions look to be improving at long last. Finance Analyst, Geneva, Switzerland Organization: UNDP - United Nations Development Programme Country: Switzerland City: Geneva, Switzerland Office: UNDP Geneva Closing date: Friday, 12 April 2019 Job ID: 22405 Practice Area - Job Family: Management Vacancy End Date: (Midnight New York, USA) 12/04/2019 Duty Station: Geneva, Switzerland Education & Work Experience: I-Masters Level Degree - 2 year(s) experience Languages Required: Desired: English Grade: P2 Vacancy Type: TA International Posting Type: External Bureau: Development Policy Contract Duration: 6 months Background The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the UNs global development network, advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life, as envisaged by 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We are on the ground in more than 170 countries and territories, working with governments and people on their own solutions to global and national development challenges to help empower lives and build resilient nations. The Bureau and Policy and Programme (BPPS) has the responsibility for developing all relevant policy and guidance to support the results of UNDPs 2018-2021 Strategic Plan and help countries to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. UNDP is a founding cosponsor of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), a partner of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and a co-sponsor of several other international health partnerships. UNDPs work on HIV, health and development, as described in the HIV, Health and Development Strategy 2016-2021: Connecting the Dots, leverages UNDPs core strengths and mandates in human development, governance and capacity development to complement the efforts of specialist health-focused UN agencies. UNDP delivers three types of support to countries in HIV, health and development. First, UNDP helps countries to mainstream attention to HIV and health into action on gender, poverty and the broader effort to achieve and sustain the Sustainable Development Goals. Second, UNDP works with partners to address the interactions between governance, human rights and health responses. Sometimes this is done through focused or specialized programmes, such as promoting attention to the role of the law and legal environments in facilitating stronger HIV responses, including the use of flexibilities in intellectual property law to lower the cost of medicines and diagnostics. UNDP also works to empower and include marginalized populations who are disproportionately affected by HIV, such as sex workers, men who have sex with men and people living with HIV. Beyond these focused efforts, UNDP plays a role in ensuring attention to HIV and health within broader governance and rights initiatives, including support to municipal action on SDGs, sustainable responses for Health and HIV such as improving sustainability of AIDS financing, sustainable health procurement, strengthening of national human rights institutions and increasing access to justice for key populations. 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. Through Black Spruce is a movie that takes on a loaded subject missing and murdered aboriginal women. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 1/4/2019 (987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Through Black Spruce is a movie that takes on a loaded subject missing and murdered aboriginal women. MOVIE REVIEW Click to Expand Through Black Spruce Starring Tanaya Beatty and Brandon Oakes Polo Park 14A 111 minutes 2-1/2 stars out of five Behind the scenes, it took on more loaded questions about cultural appropriation, specifically about white writers and filmmakers telling Indigenous stories. The film is based on the novel by Joseph Boyden, the Canadian author whose claim to Indigenous background has come under scrutiny in the past couple of years. Also, the film is directed by Toronto actor-filmmaker Don McKellar, whose own directing credits have veered between terrific (Last Night) and godawful (Childstar). One thing is certain: Questions about the storytellers' right to tell Indigenous stories might feel less pertinent if the movie was especially good. It is certainly intriguing. The narrative bounces back and forth between the perspectives of Annie Bird (Tanaya Beatty) and her uncle Will (Brandon Oakes). Other voices Click to Expand The movie stands on its own merits, as a simmering whodunit where plot basics are secondary to personalities, thanks to a superb cast. Peter Howell, Toronto Star It's as self-effacing as directorial cameos get, but it's also a bit sad: if McKellar knows that both his material and his subject position are dodgy, why bother? Angelo Muredda, Cinema Scope Through Black Spruce is a disengaged slog that confines its poetry to a title that nonetheless remains appropriate in one key way: The film creaks like it's made of wood. Jessica Kiang, Variety Barbara Samuels's screenplay discards the book's shifting perspectives for a linear take on the narrative, flattening out the drama and leaving McKellar struggling to find the story's pulse. Norman Wilner, Now Toronto Annie is angered and unsettled by the mysterious disappearance of her estranged sister Suzanne, who flew the coop of a rough life in Moosonee, Ont., to become a fashion model in Toronto. When a friend offers to take Annie to Toronto to pursue the mystery, she begrudgingly accepts, only to find herself caught up in the same temptations that befell her sister. Back in Moosonee, Will is likewise in danger. He is considered a snitch wrongly as it turns out for talking to the police about the local drug lord Marius (Wesley French). Marius is also seeking information on Will's niece Suzanne and her sketchy boyfriend, who evidently made off with a substantial portion of the gang's drug cache. Marius is not coy about deploying his thuggish minions to harass Will at every turn. The double narrative feels at times like disparate halves of a double feature. Will's thread feels like a vigilante movie: How much violence can one man take before he snaps? (The fact that his story is apparently being told in flashback from a hospital bed is not a good sign.) Will (Brandon Oakes) in Through Black Spruce Suzanne's story is more of a psychological drama as Annie confronts the nature of her own sister as she follows in her footsteps, primarily by acting as the new muse to Jesse (Kiowa Gordon), an artist who saw Suzanne as a symbol of all Indigenous women. Beyond the appropriation question, this is a movie that you want to like. Beatty makes for an interesting heroine, a woman who has long kept her guard up and who finds herself simultaneously attracted to the traditional ways and the glitz of the big city. Oakes is likewise appealing, underplaying the role despite abundant opportunity for dramatic fireworks. His reaction to having a Molotov cocktail thrown through his window, for example, is a model of composure. Annie (Tanaya Beatty) and her mother Lisette (Tina Keeper) in Through Black Spruce. Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Also, the film employs a wealth of terrific Indigenous actors in smaller roles, including Graham Greene, Tantoo Cardinal and Tina Keeper, who also a producer of the film. But Through Black Spruce is less than the sum of its actorly parts. It lacks a feeling of real investment in these characters. The movie succumbs to its artsy chill, when the story might have been better served as a flat-out melodrama/revenge thriller. Ultimately, this is a movie where you feel the wide, windy gap between the people who created it and the people whose story it ostensibly tries to tell. randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing If you value coverage of Manitobas arts scene, help us do more. Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project. OTTAWA - Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand says Canada is not doing enough to combat climate change. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Julie Gelfand arrives for a news conference in Ottawa, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld OTTAWA - Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand says Canada is not doing enough to combat climate change. Gelfand delivered her final audits Tuesday before her five-year term expires, looking at fossil-fuel subsidies, invasive aquatic species and mining pollution. But her final conclusions as the country's environmental watchdog say it is Canada's slow action to deal with the warming planet that is most "disturbing" to her. "For decades, successive federal governments have failed to reach their targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, and the government is not ready to adapt to a changing climate," she said in a statement Tuesday morning. "This must change." Gelfand's rebuke came a day after Environment Canada scientists sounded an alarm that Canada is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world, causing irreversible changes to our climate. Gelfand said neither Liberal nor Conservative governments have hit their own targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Canada is not on track to hit its 2030 target, despite policies like the national price on carbon that took effect this week. Gelfand's audit says the Liberals are not keeping a promise to get rid of "inefficient" fossil-fuel subsidies, which are undermining efforts to combat climate change, encouraging wasteful consumption of fossil fuels and discouraging investments in cleaner energy sources. Canada has pledged to eliminate inefficient subsidies by 2025 as part of both the G20 and G7 economic groups of nations, and the Liberals also campaigned on a promise to get rid of them. Gelfand concludes that both Finance Canada and Environment Canada have defined "inefficient" so broadly they can't decide what subsidies fall into that category. Finance Canada's work on the subsidies focused exclusively on fiscal and economic considerations without giving any attention to the social and environmental issues at play. For its part, Environment and Climate Change Canada only looked at 23 out of more than 200 federal organizations when it compiled an inventory of potential subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry, Gelfand found. Last year Canada began a peer review with Argentina that sees each investigate and report on the other's fossil-fuel subsidies. Last week Environment Minister Catherine McKenna started a public consultation on the subsidies to aid that peer review. The draft assessment she released last week says her department has concluded that none of the federal non-tax subsidies for fossil fuels actually is "inefficient." The assessment identified just four subsidies, including support to help Indigenous communities keep electricity prices down; funding for electric and alternative-fuel vehicle infrastructure, such as charging stations; and funding for research on clean technologies for the oil-and-gas sector. Philip Gass, a senior energy researcher for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said Tuesday using the World Trade Organization definition of subsidies, his organization found several that could or should be phased out. Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The IISD list shows more than $1.2 billion in fossil-fuel subsidies from the federal government, and an even greater amount from provincial governments. Gelfand's audit looked only at federal subsidies. Gass said the government's report on fossil-fuel subsidies is a good step toward transparency but that the reasoning behind the conclusion there are no inefficient subsidies is still confusing. "We need a more ambitious approach and (to) have a better plan," he said. Gelfand's audit is the second attempt to audit Finance Canada's fossil-fuel subsidy programs. In 2017, the auditor general made an attempt but was blocked when the department refused to cough up the needed documents. Eventually the department gave in, resulting in the audits released Tuesday. Gelfand also looked at the current impact of invasive aquatic species, most of which are accidentally introduced to Canadian waters on the hulls of ships coming from international waters and many of which harm native marine life after arrival. She found that although Canada has made commitments to prevent invasive species from taking hold in Canadian waters, neither Fisheries and Oceans Canada nor the Canada Border Services Agency did what they promised to do. She says a lack of understanding of whether provincial or federal authorities are responsible is interfering with efforts to prevent invasive species from getting established. CHIANG MAI, Thailand - The air hanging over Thailand's far north has become so polluted, the prime minister went Tuesday to see in person what is being called a severe health crisis. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A thick layer of smog covers Wat Phra That Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai province, Thailand, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. The air hanging over Thailand's far north has become so polluted, the prime minister went Tuesday to see in person what's been called a severe health crisis. (AP Photo/Maytanan Merchant) CHIANG MAI, Thailand - The air hanging over Thailand's far north has become so polluted, the prime minister went Tuesday to see in person what is being called a severe health crisis. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha arrived by helicopter at an army base in Chiang Mai, a popular tourist destination where seasonal haze has been unusually bad and prolonged this year. The thick grey smoky air has largely hidden the forested mountains that surround the city, and many schools have closed. Pollution levels have soared into the hazardous zone and remained there for many weeks, putting the city at the top of the list of the world's most polluted cities on many days, although readings often fluctuate by time of day. Much of the current pollution has been caused by the burning of forest undergrowth by villagers to make it easier to gather mushrooms and other products for sale. The burning often occurs at night, lighting the sky but making it hard to catch the perpetrators. The city is especially vulnerable because the mountains that surround it trap the pollution. The problem has been worse this year because of a drier-than-usual dry season. In several weeks, farmers are expected to start burning corn fields to clear them for planting, prolonging the pollution. Prayuth handed out firefighting supplies such as hoes and told local military personnel and firefighters that he travelled to Chiang Mai to show his support. He met with representatives from eight northern provinces at an ad-hoc regional pollution monitoring centre and said the fires must be controlled within seven days. "We need to work on a long-term solution with understanding from the public," he said. "We need time to change the way we grow crops and farm. Tens of millions of people could be affected. It could create confusion and chaos. We will work on the immediate problems and plan for long-term solutions." There has been widespread criticism of the government's response so far, with about 40,000 people signing a Change.org petition calling for the governor's replacement. The local government has been hesitant to declare a state of emergency, in part because of the possible impact on tourism. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Levels of tiny airborne particulates known as PM2.5 in Chiang Mai and surrounding areas exceed 300 mcg. on many days, six times the Thai safety limit, and have peaked at about 700. PM2.5 particulates are small enough to be sucked deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, and can cause respiratory problems and over time may raise risks of cardiovascular disease and cancers. Khuanchai Supparatpinyo, director of the Research Institute of Health Sciences at Chiang Mai University, told The Associated Press that Chiang Mai province has endured the annual phenomenon known as "dust season" for more than a decade. The haze used to hit from about February to March, but Khuanchai said in recent years it can last up to five months due to worsening conditions such as drier air and industrial farming. In January, more than 400 schools in the capital, Bangkok, were shut for a week when the PM2.5 level was around 70 to 120 mcg. Bangkok's governor responded by declaring the city a "pollution control zone," allowing measures such as road closings and limits on diesel exhaust, outdoor burning and construction activities. Air quality in Bangkok, Thailand's largest city, has been mostly at moderate levels since then, a concern mainly for people with sensitivities such as existing lung conditions. ___ Tassanee reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writer Kaweewit Kaewjinda in Bangkok contributed to this report. ALGIERS, Algeria - Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika stepped down on Tuesday after 20 years in office, and six weeks of massive nationwide protests aimed at pushing him and his much-criticized inner circle from power to create a real democracy in the gas-rich nation. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. FILE - In this March 27, 2009 file photo Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika salutes the crowd while dressed in a traditional "Burnous" robe from the Kabyle ethnic minority in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria. Embattled Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika says he will step down before his fourth term ends on April 28. In a short statement issued on Monday April 1, 2019, the president's office said Bouteflika would take "important steps to ensure the continuity of the functioning of state institutions" during a transition period following his departure from the post he's held since 1999. ( AP Photo/Alfred de Montesquieu, file) ALGIERS, Algeria - Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika stepped down on Tuesday after 20 years in office, and six weeks of massive nationwide protests aimed at pushing him and his much-criticized inner circle from power to create a real democracy in the gas-rich nation. The announcement followed soon after a sternly-worded call from the powerful army chief for Bouteflika, 82 and ailing, to "immediately" bow out. Crowds celebrated peacefully in the capital Algiers soon after his announcement. Honking car horns, singing songs and waving Algerian flags, hundreds gathered Tuesday night at the central post office a plaza that has become a symbol of the protest movement. Police watched from the sidelines. The constitutional Council was expected to convene Wednesday to formalize his departure. Under the constitution, the president of the upper house, the Council of Nations, steps in as interim leader for a maximum of 90 days so that elections can be organized. The current upper house president is Abdelkader Bensalah, a Bouteflika ally and it's unclear whether protesters will abandon their fight for an overhaul of the entire power structure. An official in the president's office told The Associated Press that Bouteflika had resigned, and the official APS news agency said in a full-page headline that Bouteflika had notified the constitutional Council of his decision. Algerian students shouts as they march during a protest in Algiers, Algeria, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Algerian protesters and political leaders are expressing concerns that ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's departure will leave the country's secretive, distrusted power structure in place. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul) The move came a day after Bouteflika's office said he would leave by April 28, the official end of his fourth mandate but only after "important" changes were made to ensure institutional continuity. That gave rise to fears that his entourage would do all to preserve the interests of those who profited from his time in office. There was no word about what would happen to the presidential entourage, including younger brother Said Bouteflika, a top counsellor blamed by protesters for widespread corruption in the North African country with a high unemployment rate and drastic gap between the rich and poor. Earlier Tuesday, military chief of staff Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah convened a meeting of the top military hierarchy. That made clear that the army chief's call for Bouteflika to desist had the backing of the military among the most important on the African continent. In a communique, the Defence Ministry referred to Bouteflika's entourage as a "gang" and said it had made "fraud, embezzlement and duplicity its vocation." Bouteflika has rarely been seen in public since a 2013 stroke. His resignation caps six weeks of peaceful marches by protesters who wanted not just Bouteflika but the entire system to make an exit. As the protests escalated, Bouteflika announced two new governments and army chief Gaid Salah urged Bouteflika to submit to Article 102 of the Constitution, which would declare him unfit for office. Gaid Salah also called for the application of two more articles championed by protesters, notably Article 7, which stipulates that "the people are the source of power." Tensions had been mounting in recent days between the army chief and the president's entourage along with suspicions of a potential military coup. The Defence Ministry statement Tuesday appeared to be a final warning, and the catalyst for Bouteflika's resignation. Bouteflika was an independence fighter during Algeria's war against colonizer France in the 1950s and 1960s, and then went on to defend Third World interests at the height of the Cold War as Algeria's foreign minister. Bouteflika came to the presidency after Algeria's darkest period, the 1990s Islamic insurgency that left around 200,000 people dead. After taking power in 1999, Bouteflika managed to bring back stability to a country devastated by killings and distrust. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The insurgency then linked up with al-Qaida and metastasized into a Sahara-wide extremist movement. As president, however, age and illness took its toll, and corruption scandals dogged Bouteflika and associates. Bouteflika also failed to create an economy that could offer enough jobs for Algeria's growing youth population despite the nation's vast oil and gas wealth. In a country where secrecy surrounds the leadership, it has never been clear whether Bouteflika was fully in charge or whether the powerful army was pulling the strings. ___ Elaine Ganley reported from Paris. Thomas Adamson contributed from Paris. BOSTON - Massachusetts authorities created a false picture of the Sackler family's role in promoting OxyContin, the Sacklers said Tuesday in their first court response to allegations that individual family members not just their company, Purdue Pharma helped fuel the deadly opioid epidemic. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. FILE - In this Aug. 17, 2018 file photo, family and friends who have lost loved ones to OxyContin and opioid overdoses protest outside Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, Conn. The wealthy family who owns the company that makes OxyContin says Massachusetts got the facts wrong in a lawsuit. Legal papers made public Tuesday, April 2, 2019, represent the first time the Sackler family, who owns the Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, has responded in court to allegations about its role in the opioid crisis. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File) BOSTON - Massachusetts authorities created a false picture of the Sackler family's role in promoting OxyContin, the Sacklers said Tuesday in their first court response to allegations that individual family members not just their company, Purdue Pharma helped fuel the deadly opioid epidemic. The Sackler family says a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey that accuses Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma and the family of hiding the risks of opioids from doctors and patients is riddled with inaccurate and misleading statements. The Sacklers are accusing Healey of cherry picking from hundreds of internal documents in an attempt to wrongly vilify the family for the public health crisis. "We are confident the court will look past the inflammatory media coverage generated by the misleading complaint and apply the law fairly by dismissing all of these claims," they attorneys said in a statement. Among the statements the family says were misconstrued is Richard Sackler's remark that the 1996 OxyContin launch party would be "followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition." Attorneys for the family say Richard Sackler was alluding to the fact he was late for the event because of a blizzard. The Massachusetts lawsuit is one of some 2,000 filed in the past few years seeking to hold the drug industry responsible for a deadly national opioid crisis. Opioids, including illicit drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, were involved in a record 48,000 deaths in 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's more than the number of people killed in car crashes. Massachusetts' lawsuit accuses Purdue and the Sacklers of pushing to keep patients on the drug longer despite evidence that it was contributing to the opioid crisis in order to rake in billions of dollars in profits. Healey vowed Tuesday to continue working to "expose the conduct that hurt so many families in Massachusetts." "Our complaint makes clear the role that Purdue's executives and directors played in creating and profiting from the opioid crisis. Their motions are an attempt to avoid accountability," she said in a statement. Richard Sackler's comment about the "blizzard of prescriptions" was made public in legal documents filed in January by Healey's office, and since then in other filings including one made last week by the state attorney general in New York, to show that the family was pushing for big sales of OxyContin even though it knew the drug could pose an addiction danger. Massachusetts, the family says, "mischaracterizes and selectively quotes from the hundreds of documents it cites to create the false impression" that the Sacklers and others who have been on the board "micromanaged every aspect of Purdue's marketing strategy." The claim that Richard Sackler accompanied sales representatives pitching OxyContin to doctors, for instance, was untrue, the Sacklers say. The Sacklers also try to distance themselves from the workings of the company it owns, saying family members were being informed of Purdue Pharma's issues rather than controlling every detail of operations. For instance, Healey's lawsuit said the family considered a plan called Project Tango to get into the business of selling anti-addiction drugs as a way to further profit off a crisis it helped spark. The idea, the family said, was pitched by an outside investment firm encouraging Purdue to buy a company that already made the anti-addiction drug. The purchase of the company never happened. The lawyers say the directors were repeatedly told Purdue was fully complying with legal requirements. The family, one of the nation's wealthiest, argues that Massachusetts' claims should be dismissed because the facts don't support them. "Mischaracterizing facts does not change them," the attorneys wrote. Both the Massachusetts complaint and the family's response rely on documents that have not been made public. The family filing is also heavily redacted at the behest of court orders obtained by Purdue. Last week, the Sackler family agreed to pay $75 million over five years as part of Purdue's settlement with the state of Oklahoma, even though family members were not named in the suit. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Days later, the New York attorney general added the family to its lawsuit , asserting that some of the family's payments from the company at least $4 billion from 2007 through last year were fraudulent because Purdue knew about the potentially costly lawsuits it was facing. Purdue officials have considered bankruptcy as the potential liabilities from the lawsuits have grown. The public pressure on the Sacklers has mounted in other ways. Britain's Tate museums and New York's Guggenheim Museum, where the family has been major donors, announced they would stop taking gifts from the family. And Tufts University, which has a graduate school of biomedical sciences named for the family, said it was evaluating the relationship. ___ Mulvihill reported from New Jersey. Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://www.twitter.com/aedurkinricher and Geoff Mulvihill at http://www.twitter.com/geoffmulvihill OTTAWA - A third Canadian canola exporter has received a non-compliance notice from China over quality concerns, the federal agriculture minister said Tuesday, the latest development in an escalating feud with the Asian country. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Surrounded by colleagues, International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau and International Trade Diversification Minister James Carr respond to questions from the media about canola during a news conference in the Foyer of the House of Commons Monday April 1, 2019 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld OTTAWA - A third Canadian canola exporter has received a non-compliance notice from China over quality concerns, the federal agriculture minister said Tuesday, the latest development in an escalating feud with the Asian country. Marie-Claude Bibeau confirmed the Chinese government's complaint to a third, unnamed company as she testified before a parliamentary committee studying a trade dispute that has seen China suspend the canola-seed sale permits of two other Canadian firms. "We've been informed that there's a third company that received a non-compliance notification," Bibeau said, though she wouldn't name it. "It doesn't mean that they're suspended, either, at this time. So, we will obviously keep working with them and see how it goes." In recent weeks, citing concerns about pests, China has sent non-compliance notifications to Richardson International Ltd. and Viterra Inc., two major Canadian exporters of canola seed. Chinese officials also suspended their licences. China's moves to choke off Canadian canola-seed imports have been widely viewed as the superpower applying economic pressure on Canada after the December arrest of senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the behest of the United States. Late Tuesday, a spokesman for Bibeau said the third, unnamed company received its non-compliance complaint from China in early March, around the same time as Richardson was issued its notice. Oliver Anderson said it was important to make the distinction to show that it was not a more recent escalation by China. Curt Vossen, the CEO of Richardson, told another House of Commons committee Tuesday that canola products alone were just over 15 per cent of all of Canada's exports to China and, last year, were worth more than $4 billion. China imported $2.7 billion worth of Canadian canola seed last year, which ensures any prolonged feud would be felt by farmers, the industry and the broader economy. The seeds are the raw material for canola oil, which is widely used for cooking and in some industries. Vossen, whose Winnipeg-based company has been doing business in China for more than a century, said he cannot emphasize enough the importance of finding a solution to the feud and quickly. As the federal government searches for that solution, it's been trying to find new markets and cabinet ministers have been touting Canada's recently ratified trade deals with the Asia-Pacific region and the European Union. "If the current disruption continues over the longer term, we will have no choice but to find other markets for Canadian canola seed, however doing so will be no easy task," said Vossen. "While we are confident that we can eventually find other markets, it will not be a painless exercise." He urged the federal government to be "more aggressive" in defending the interests of Canada's agriculture exporters in China and around the world, where they're facing trade barriers in several jurisdictions. "To say that canola is important to Canada's trading relationship with China would be a gross understatement canola and, indeed, the entire grains and oilseeds complex is the foundation of Canada's trading relationship with China," he said, noting the disruption comes at a critical time right before seeding season, when farmers are deciding how much to grow. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The Liberal government has insisted it wants to find a scientific solution to the dispute and Bibeau has said she sent a letter to her Chinese counterpart with a request to send a delegation of experts to China to examine the issue. Officials are examining options to support farmers through the possible expansion of existing programs, Bibeau said. The federal Liberals have also established a working group that includes officials from Richardson and Viterra and representatives from the governments of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. On March 1, the same day China suspended Richardson's licence, Canada's Justice Department gave the go-ahead for the extradition case against Meng. It marked the formal start of the high-profile process that has thrust Canada into a highly uncomfortable position between China and the United States. In the days following Meng's arrest, China arrested Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig, a Canadian diplomat on leave, and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur, on allegations of engaging in activities that have endangered Chinese national security. Follow @AndyBlatchford on Twitter (Special) - Do you get stressed out at the thought of doing your income tax return each year? Well, if you do, you're probably not alone. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. (Special) - Do you get stressed out at the thought of doing your income tax return each year? Well, if you do, you're probably not alone. Tax experts recommend people start their tax preparation early by keeping good records and putting aside receipts throughout the year. Create an envelope or file for all of your receipts and expenses and make sure you have all your tax information slips so that you have everything you need when you come to sit down and prepare your return or turn your information over to a tax professional to do it for you. Rushing around to get receipts at the last minute will only add to your level of frustration and stress. It's probably a good idea to make a checklist of what you need before you start to prepare your return which might contain the following things like last year's return and notice of assessment. They can provide a wealth of information, serve as a guide for the current year's return and show things like unused RRSP contributions and unused amounts for tuition, losses, moving expenses and capital cost allowance. Along with your own personal information such as date of birth and social insurance number you also may need the same details for your spouse and/or dependants as well as their income if you will be claiming certain tax credits. Then you will want slips for all income sources such as employment, pension, investment and rental income, as well as a host of other things that could include child care payments, RRSP contributions, home office expenses, charitable donations, medical expenses, tuition fees, student loan interest, and spousal support payments made or received, among others. One of the easiest ways to boost your tax savings is to take advantage of all eligible tax credits and deductions from both provincial and federal governments. Tannis Dawson, vice-president of wealth advisory services with TD Bank, says a lot of Canadians could be missing out on the caregiver and/or disability credit because they don't know about them. If you support a spouse or common-law partner or a dependant with a physical or mental disability you may be eligible for a non-refundable tax credit of up to $8,235. The amount you can claim depends on your relationship to the person for whom you are claiming the credit, your circumstances, the person's net income and whether other credits are being claimed for that person. The credit transferred to a supporting person is the amount above what is needed to take the disabled person's tax to zero. The disabled individual must first prepare their tax return and then you will know the credit available to transfer to your return, but you do not need to send in any documents. Keep them in case the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) asks to see them. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The CRA will require a T2201 disability certificate to be on file with a signed statement from a medical practitioner showing when the impairment began and how long it is expected to last. For children under the age of 18 the statement should show that the child is and likely will continue to be dependent on others for an indefinite duration because of their impairment. There is another credit that may be called a caregiver credit of $6,986, which is income tested. If the dependent does not need the credit to reduce their taxes and their income is under $23,391, they can transfer it. The CRA may ask for a signed statement from a medical practitioner to indicate the impairment. Dawson says the CRA website has lots of information organized by topics like medical expenses. There are a number of good apps available for things like tracking expenses and car mileage and there are lots of easy-to-use software packages available to help you in preparing and filing your return. Seniors and students with low incomes also can file by telephone. If your tax situation is more complicated or you feel it is beyond your scope, getting a professional to do it for you might be the best option. What they save you in taxes or get for you in credits that you don't know about may make up for their professional fees. Talbot Boggs is a Toronto-based business communications professional who has worked with national news organizations, magazines and corporations in the finance, retail, manufacturing and other industrial sectors. Copyright 2019 Talbot Boggs HOUSTON - A tank holding a flammable chemical caught fire at a Texas plant Tuesday, killing one worker, critically injuring two others and sending panicked employees fleeing over a fence to safety. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. This photo taken by the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office shows the KMCO Chemical plant Tuesday, April 2, 2019, in Crosby, Texas. Authorities say one person is confirmed dead after a fire broke out at the chemical plant Tuesday near Houston. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says two other people were life-flighted. Gonzalez says preliminary information shows that the chemical isobutylene initially started the fire, and is still burning. (Harris County Fire Marshal's Office via AP) HOUSTON - A tank holding a flammable chemical caught fire at a Texas plant Tuesday, killing one worker, critically injuring two others and sending panicked employees fleeing over a fence to safety. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez confirmed the fatality in a tweet and said the two injured had been taken by helicopter to a hospital. The two injured were in critical condition, said Rachel Moreno, spokeswoman for the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office. Authorities shut down a roadway near Tuesday's fire at a KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, about 25 miles (40 kilometres) northeast of Houston, Gonzalez said. Fire crews battled the blaze for about 5 1/2 hours before they extinguished it, according to the fire marshal's office. All residents within a one-mile radius of the plant were ordered to stay indoors or shelter in place for about four hours. It was not immediately known how many residents were affected by the shelter in place. Crosby has about 2,300 residents. The fire sent a large black plume of smoke into the air. The fire erupted about two weeks after a March 17 blaze at a petrochemical storage facility in Deer Park , located about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Crosby. That fire at a facility owned by Intercontinental Terminals Company burned for days and triggered air quality warnings. Crosby also is where an Arkema chemical plant was inundated by water during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Some chemicals eventually caught fire and partially exploded. "It is disturbing and it is problematic that we're seeing this incident in a facility, especially on the heels of" the fire in Deer Park, said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county's top administrator. Samantha Galle lives less than a mile away from the plant and said she heard and felt an explosion Tuesday. A plume of smoke rises over the site of a fire at the KMCO plant Tuesday, April 2, 2019, in Crosby, northeast of Houston, Texas. A tank holding a flammable chemical caught fire at the Texas plant Tuesday. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez confirmed fatality in a tweet and said injured ones had been taken by helicopter to a hospital. (Godofredo A. Vasquez/Houston Chronicle via AP) "It shook everybody's house around here," the 23-year-old said. Gonzalez said a transfer line at the KMCO plant ignited in the area of a tank of isobutylene a flammable colorless gas used in the production of high octane gasoline which then caught on fire. The fire spread to a nearby warehouse where dry chemicals are stored. Moreno said the Environmental Protection Agency has been testing air samples from the area around the plant and has not found any harmful readings. Worker Justin Trahan told Houston television station KPRC that he heard "some panic on the radio" but no alarms sounding before the plant caught fire. "We didn't think anything of it we didn't think it was anything severe," he said. Trahan said employees began running after "the tank ignited." He said that he and other colleagues had to jump over a fence to escape because all the gates were locked. A plume of smoke rises over the site of chemical fire at the KMCO plant Tuesday, April 2, 2019, in Crosby, northeast of Houston, Texas. A tank holding a flammable chemical caught fire at the Texas plant Tuesday. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez confirmed fatality in a tweet and said injured ones had been taken by helicopter to a hospital. (Godofredo A. Vasquez/Houston Chronicle via AP) Pilar Davis, a product manager with KMCO, said none of the emergency evacuation points at the plant were blocked during the fire. At a news conference late Tuesday afternoon, John C. Foley, chief executive of KMCO, said a cause of the blaze is still being determined. "We will conduct a thorough investigation ... and take steps to ensure this doesn't happen again," Foley said. Davis said the fire initially ignited with isobutylene but was fueled by ethanol and ethyl acrylate. All three are chemicals and solvents used to make fuel additives at the plant. Davis declined to comment on the worker who was killed and the two who were injured, only saying they were part of KMCO's operations department. KMCO, which was founded in 1975, is a chemical company that offers coolant and brake fluid products and chemicals for the oilfield industry. The Crosby, Sheldon and Channelview school districts asked students and staff to shelter in place at all their campuses. But later Tuesday afternoon, all three districts lifted those orders to shelter in place. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said that it has dispatched emergency response personnel to conduct an initial assessment of the fire. Foley said his company's number one priority "is safety and compliance." "We have a long track record of investing in the people, the systems and the assets to operate safely," he said. Meanwhile, the Texas Attorney General's office filed a petition in state district court in Austin on behalf of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The petition seeks a permanent injunction, civil penalties and reasonable attorney fees, court costs, along with recovery of investigative costs. KMCO has had environmental violations in the past, according to a review of records. In 2016, KMCO's corporate agents pleaded guilty to a federal criminal charge of violating the Clean Air Act. A plea agreement document stated that a plant employee made false entries in logs of air testing of tanks that were known to be leaking chemicals. Another employee then used those falsified logs to submit reports to the federal and state environmental authorities. The document says the violation went on between 2008 and 2012. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. A year earlier, the EPA cited KMCO for failing to comply with regulations on its risk-management plan for the plant, but settled with the plant for a $2,700 penalty. Texas has served the plant with three notices of violation of a federal clean-air law since last August, the EPA website shows. Harris County had obtained an injunction against KMCO in 2009 that required the firm to pay $100,000 in civil penalties and give investigators easy access to the plant and prompt notification of releases. ___ Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant in Houston, Jake Bleiberg and Terry Wallace in Dallas, Jill Zeman in Little Rock, Arkansas, Adam Kealoha Causey in Oklahoma City and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report. ___ Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70 VANCOUVER - Home sales in Metro Vancouver in March plunged to levels not seen in more than three decades and real-estate experts blame government policies, not a lack of demand, for the dismal showing. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A real estate sign is pictured in Vancouver on June, 12, 2018. Home sales in Metro Vancouver in March plunged to levels not seen in more than three decades and real estate experts blame government policies, not a lack of demand for the dismal showing. THE CANADIAN PRESS Jonathan Hayward VANCOUVER - Home sales in Metro Vancouver in March plunged to levels not seen in more than three decades and real-estate experts blame government policies, not a lack of demand, for the dismal showing. The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reports 1,727 homes changed hands, a 31.4 per cent tumble from sales recorded for the same month last year. March 2019 sales were up just over 16 per cent when compared with February, but the real estate board says they were more than 46 per cent below the 10-year average for the month and the lowest total since 1986. A news release from board president Ashley Smith calls the trend largely induced by policy. She says governments at all levels have imposed new taxes and borrowing requirements on the housing market for three years. The board says the result is that housing sales are no longer aligned with the growing economy and low unemployment rates across Greater Vancouver and most of British Columbia. "What policy-makers are failing to recognize is that demand-side measures don't eliminate demand. They sideline potential home buyers in the short term," Smith says in the release. She warns that shelter needs are always present and a mortgage stress test, speculation tax and other levies can't relieve that pressure. "Using public policy to delay local demand in the housing market just feeds disruptive cycles that have been so well documented in our region." B.C. Finance Minister Carole James says changes both the provincial and federal government have made are starting to show a positive trend. She says real estate will always contribute to the economy of the province because people want to live in British Columbia. "But we need some kind of moderation when you have people who can't live in the community that they work in. When you have employers who can't attract workers, that's a crisis. That has an impact on our economy." She says a speculative real estate market is the worst thing for long term, sustainable economic growth in the province. Just under 13,000 homes are currently listed for sale in Metro Vancouver, a roughly 52 per cent increase when compared with March 2018, and a 10 per cent jump in one month. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Prices for homes of all types are falling. The board reports the composite benchmark price for all residential properties in Metro Vancouver is currently just over $1 million, down 7.7 per cent over the year and a 0.5 per cent decrease since February. The benchmark price for a detached home shows the greatest year-over-year slipped to $1.4 million, a decrease of 10.5 per cent since March 2018. Metro Vancouver condos had a benchmark price of just under $657,000 in March, a six per cent decrease in one year. Condos also recorded the sharpest sales chill, with a 35.3 per cent year-to-year drop. Townhouse sales were off 27 per cent from March 2018, while the benchmark price was down six per cent over the same period to $783,600. For all property types, real estate board data shows the sales-to-active listings ratio for March was 13.5 per cent. Analysts say downward pressure on home prices occurs when the ratio dips below 12 per cent for several months, while home prices often experience upward pressure when it surpasses 20 per cent over the same time frame. Marijuana has been legal for almost half a year, so Manitobans who have cottages in Ontario might reasonably expect easy access to some herbal relaxation this spring and summer. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 1/4/2019 (987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Marijuana has been legal for almost half a year, so Manitobans who have cottages in Ontario might reasonably expect easy access to some herbal relaxation this spring and summer. First Ontario cannabis stores open doors Customers lined up to purchase pot at Ontario's first brick-and-mortar cannabis stores on Monday, but fewer than half of the province's government-licensed outlets were ready to open. click to read more Customers lined up to purchase pot at Ontario's first brick-and-mortar cannabis stores on Monday, but fewer than half of the province's government-licensed outlets were ready to open. The Progressive Conservative government planned to have 25 private stores launch on April 1, but some were still working through a lengthy approval process. Premier Doug Ford defended his government's decision to hold a lottery to determine who could apply for store licences, saying more shops would be opening soon. "Over the next few weeks we'll get it done," he said. "If it means another week or two to get it right, let's do it." Recreational cannabis has so far only been available for purchase legally in Ontario through a government-run website. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission, which is overseeing the vetting process, said 10 stores were given the green light to open Monday three in Ottawa, two in Kingston and one each in Toronto, Brampton, Burlington, London, and St. Catharines. Ontario's Tory government had initially said there would be no cap on the number of retail shops after pot was legalized. In December, citing national supply issues, the government said it was issuing licences to just 25 stores. Stores that fail to open Monday face escalating penalties failing to open a store Monday results in a $12,500 draw down on a letter of credit, while not opening by the end of April means applicants risk losing their entire $50,000 letter of credit. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath slammed the government for the delays in store openings, saying it had time to put a proper system in place last fall but failed. "This lack of access we have today is squarely at the feet of Mr. Ford and his government," she said. Interim Liberal leader John Fraser said the black market will flourish because of the lack of legal stores. The previous Liberal government had planned to open as many as 40 government-run cannabis store before the Tories moved to a private store model. Green party Leader Mike Schreiner said the government plan is failing the public. "The competition here is between organized crime and private stores," he said. "Ten stores across the province is not going to put a dent in organized crime." The Canadian Press Close But on Ontario's first day of legal bricks-and-mortar cannabis stores, there are none to be found in northwestern Ontario's cottage country not in Kenora, not in Dryden, not in Fort Frances and not even in Thunder Bay or Sault Ste. Marie. Kenora council has already approved the possibility of legal cannabis stores, said mayor Dan Reynard. "It's now legal within Canada, so people are going to be looking for that outlet, so why not be a part of it?" he said. Kenora's council has approved the possibility of a legal cannabis store setting up in the city, but no licences were issued in the province west of Sudbury. (Brent Bellamy / Winnipeg Free Press files) Still, Reynard doesn't expect a licensed cannabis store the city this year. "But hopefully by late 2020, early 2021, we'll be able to move forward because I know there are individuals that have expressed a desire to open an operation in Kenora," he said. "If there isn't an outlet for people to legally purchase marijuana products it certainly won't do anything to curtail the illegal market within northern Ontario." After taking power last summer, Ontario's Progressive Conservative government threw out the previous Liberal government's plan to open provincially operated cannabis retail stores and started preparing for private cannabis outlets, but in December, the Ontario government said it would only issue 25 licences for private stores to open on April 1, citing a shortage of cannabis from government-regulated producers. Just two of those private store licences were assigned to Ontario's enormous northern region, which stretches from Kenora in the west to North Bay in the east. The two winners of a provincial lottery process to apply for those northern Ontario licences are both planning to open locations in Sudbury, a 16-hour drive east of Kenora. Neither licence has yet been issued by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario. Manitobans can bring their own marijuana to their cottages in Ontario, but have to make sure it is transported in a sealed bag not readily available to any person in the vehicle. (Tom Thomson / The Canadian Press files) Even with no physical locations to buy legal cannabis in northwestern Ontario, adult Manitobans who want to enjoy some weed at an Ontario cottage can still order online from the provincially operated Ontario Cannabis Store. They'll need a delivery address within Ontario, and will have to be present at that address to sign for the package when it arrives. But online cannabis shopping isn't for everyone, said lawyer David Wood, a partner with Borden Ladner Gervais who focuses on cannabis-related issues. "It's now legal within Canada, so people are going to be looking for that outlet, so why not be a part of it?" Kenora Mayor Dan Reynard "(No) interaction you're going to get over the internet is going to replace talking to a human being in person, especially with a product that is a lot more heterogeneous than most people think," said Wood, who has visited licensed cannabis stores in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan. Employees at those stores tend to be enthusiastic about helping shoppers choose an appropriate cannabis product, said Wood. "It makes it more difficult for people to choose regulated (cannabis) over illicit when there are no storefronts," he said. A customer smells a sample as she shops for cannabis Monday on the first morning of opening for Toronto's Hunny Pot, one of the retail stores licensed to sell cannabis in Ontario. (Chris Young / The Canadian Press) It is legal for Manitobans to bring their own stash across the provincial border into Ontario or any other province, Wood pointed out. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Up to 30 grams of legally acquired cannabis can be carried in public without breaking the law. Manitoba law requires that cannabis being transported in a vehicle be stored in the trunk or behind the back seats, where it isn't "readily accessible" to passengers. In Ontario, cannabis in a car must be packed in baggage that is "fastened closed or is not otherwise readily available to any person in the vehicle". As Kenora waits for its own cannabis store, Reynard expects the city's residents might actually turn to Winnipeg for legal marijuana. "Until there's an option in Kenora, I think you'll see people going and purchasing product in Manitoba." solomon.israel@freepress.mb.ca @sol_israel SEATTLE - When Washington and Colorado launched their pioneering marijuana industries in the face of U.S. government prohibition, they imposed strict rules in hopes of keeping the U.S. Justice Department at bay. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. In this photo taken Thursday, March 28, 2019, marijuana products line a locked cabinet at a marijuana shop in Seattle. When Washington and Colorado launched their pioneering marijuana industries in the face of U.S. government prohibition, they imposed strict rules in hopes of keeping the U.S. Justice Department at bay. Five years later, federal authorities have stayed away, but the industry says it has been stifled by over-regulation. Lawmakers in both states have heard the complaints and are moving to ease the rules. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) SEATTLE - When Washington and Colorado launched their pioneering marijuana industries in the face of U.S. government prohibition, they imposed strict rules in hopes of keeping the U.S. Justice Department at bay. Businesses would need to track plants and products with bar codes. Regulators would have to approve money invested to ensure it was not tied to criminals. Owners of pot operations would have to live in-state and pass background checks. Five years later, federal authorities have stayed away, but the industry says it has been stifled by over-regulation. Lawmakers in both states have heard the complaints and are moving to ease the rules. "There's a saying in the business world: 'Pioneers get slaughtered, and settlers get fat,'" said Greg James, publisher of industry magazine Marijuana Venture , based near Seattle. "These rules have made the entire industry very inefficient. We're going to get left in the dust unless we change some things pretty quickly." Since Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, eight others have joined them. California, Nevada, Oregon and Michigan are among the legal states that have taken a more permissive approach to out-of-state ownership and investment. In this photo taken Thursday, March 28, 2019, employees Dan Giroux, left, and Dustin Barrington ring up sales for customers at a marijuana shop in Seattle. When Washington and Colorado launched their pioneering marijuana industries in the face of U.S. government prohibition, they imposed strict rules in hopes of keeping the U.S. Justice Department at bay. Five years later, federal authorities have stayed away, but the industry says it has been stifled by over-regulation. Lawmakers in both states have heard the complaints and are moving to ease the rules. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) In Colorado, which already loosened its rules to allow licensed businesses to have up to 15 out-of-state owners, lawmakers from both parties want to further open the industry to include ownership by publicly traded companies and to limit background-check requirements. A similar measure was vetoed by former Gov. John Hickenlooper last year, but his replacement, Gov. Jared Polis, has indicated support. Washington lawmakers are considering a dual approach: easing financial restrictions while taking a more lenient view of rules violations, making it less likely businesses will lose their licenses for things like sloppy record-keeping. Three dozen have had their licenses cancelled since 2015, while 32 more face revocation notices, according to the state Liquor and Cannabis Board. One measure pending in the Democratic-led Legislature would open the industry to out-of-state ownership and allow businesses to become bigger, with a caveat: Any licensees hoping to take advantage would have to agree to let their workforce unionize. Those that do could have up to 40% of their ownership held outside of Washington. They would also be able to obtain two additional marijuana licenses, allowing them to have up to seven retail shops or up to five growing and processing licenses, said the main sponsor, Sen. Rebecca Saldana. Investors could hold up to 10% of the business without undergoing background checks, though their names would still need to be disclosed. "Banks don't give lines of credit in our space, so we're limited to private investors in the state of Washington," said Ryan Kunkel, chief executive of Have A Heart, a chain of marijuana stores that has agreed to let its workers unionize. "It's a tiny pool of investors, and it's stifling our ability to expand. Meanwhile, there's a massive industry expansion taking place in every other state." In this photo taken Thursday, March 28, 2019, store employee Adam Peckels retrieves products for customers at a marijuana shop in Seattle. When Washington and Colorado launched their pioneering marijuana industries in the face of U.S. government prohibition, they imposed strict rules in hopes of keeping the U.S. Justice Department at bay. Five years later, federal authorities have stayed away, but the industry says it has been stifled by over-regulation. Lawmakers in both states have heard the complaints and are moving to ease the rules.(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) Another proposal , a wide-ranging overhaul of Washington's regulatory enforcement, is a compromise between industry groups, including the Washington CannaBusiness Association , and the Liquor and Cannabis Board. The association has lobbied hard for the changes, arguing that the board's enforcement has been aggressive and uneven. Its director, Vicki Christophersen, went as far as helping organize an unsuccessful effort by lawmakers to have Russ Hauge, a former prosecutor, removed as one of the board's three members because he was seen as unfriendly to the industry. "The industry overall has made long strides in being a safe and fully regulated marketplace," Christophersen said. "The legislation stems out of several years of frustration, of folks feeling like they want to be regulated, they want to be taxed, they want to do the right thing, but they feel they're still being treated as criminal enterprises." The legislation would create a program where businesses could seek the board's advice on compliance issues without risking penalties, and it would require inspectors to give licensees time to fix a problem before issuing a citation, unless the violations concern public safety, sale to a minor or repeat offences. Businesses could face cancellation if they accumulate multiple violations for certain offences, such as failing to properly tag plants, over two years, rather than the current window of three years giving them a clean slate sooner. And the measure would make another crucial change: "True party of interest" rules, which require transparency in who owns, controls and profits from licensed marijuana businesses, would no longer come with automatic license cancellation. The rules have been a backbone of Washington's marijuana regulations and a key way for officials to ensure criminal organizations don't have a hand in the legal market, but even the board has acknowledged they're overly strict. In some cases, marijuana business owners struggling to make payroll infused personal money or investment from others into their business without having it vetted by the board, said Rick Garza, the board's director. That can lead to automatic cancellation, even if the money came from a clean source, Garza said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. When the board asked the businesses why they did it without notifying regulators, they said they didn't have time to wait months for the board to approve the money, he said. "We want to make sure the enforcement structure is fair," Garza said. "We started off really conservative, and you can see that over time that's made it difficult for some." ___ Gene Johnson is a member of AP's marijuana beat team. Follow him at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle . Find complete AP marijuana coverage at http://apnews.com/tag/LegalMarijuana . ___ This version corrects the name of the magazine, Marijuana Venture, not Marijuana Ventures. OTTAWA - Liberals are hoping to cauterize the SNC-Lavalin affair with the expulsions of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the governing party's fold. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA - Liberals are hoping to cauterize the SNC-Lavalin affair with the expulsions of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the governing party's fold. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced late Tuesday at a hastily called caucus meeting that he had informed the two former cabinet ministers he was kicking them out of the Liberal caucus and will not allow them to run as Liberal candidates in this fall's election. "The trust that previously existed between these two individuals and our team has been broken," he told Liberal MPs. "Whether it's taping conversations without consent or repeatedly expressing a lack of confidence in our government and in me personally as leader, it's become clear that Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Dr. Philpott can no longer remain part of our Liberal team." The SNC-Lavalin affair has engulfed the government for nearly two months and cost Trudeau his lead in public opinion polls; his most trusted adviser, Gerald Butts; and the country's top public servant, Michael Wernick in addition to the two former ministers who had symbolized his commitment to gender equality and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Liberals are now hoping the worst is over and they can finally move on to the agenda they hope will get them re-elected. Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Raybould leaves Parliament Hill after a short visit in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 2, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld Trudeau said the Liberals won the 2015 election "because we stood together as a team," whereas "the old Liberal party was notorious for infighting." "Civil wars within parties are incredibly damaging because they signal to Canadians that we care more about ourselves than about them. That's why I made the difficult decision to remove Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Dr. Philpott from the Liberal caucus." "I am angry, hurt, and frustrated because I feel and believe I was upholding the values that we all committed to. In giving the advice I did, and taking the steps I did, I was trying to help protect the prime minister and the government from a horrible mess." Jody WilsonRaybould Trudeau's announcement followed a day of meetings with the chairs of the various Liberal regional caucuses and discussions with MPs. The party's largest group, the Ontario caucus, met for 90 minutes earlier in the day to discuss the fates of the two former ministers. Philpott, who represents a Toronto-area riding, showed up for that meeting but left after less than 10 minutes. Jody Wilson-Raybould's letter to the Liberal caucus OTTAWA - As federal Liberal MPs prepared to debate whether former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and former health minister Jane Philpott should stay in their caucus, Wilson-Raybould wrote to them to explain her actions in the SNC-Lavalin affair and why she still wants to be a Liberal MP: I am writing to all of you, members of the Liberal Caucus, to share some of my thoughts and observations about recent events and what they mean for us as a Party. I hope they are helpful to you... click to read more OTTAWA - As federal Liberal MPs prepared to debate whether former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and former health minister Jane Philpott should stay in their caucus, Wilson-Raybould wrote to them to explain her actions in the SNC-Lavalin affair and why she still wants to be a Liberal MP: I am writing to all of you, members of the Liberal Caucus, to share some of my thoughts and observations about recent events and what they mean for us as a Party. I hope they are helpful to you. There were many reasons I ran for the Liberal Party of Canada in 2015, including commitments on addressing climate change, the challenges of our criminal justice system, Indigenous reconciliation, and building an economy that supported all Canadians. For me, and I believe for our Party, all of these progressive policy commitments had underlying them a firm belief in the need for a transformation in our political culture, and the pursuit of a more responsive, representative, and less partisan approach to the governing of the country. This commitment to a changed politics was not just about specific policies, such as proportional representation, but about every aspect of how we organize ourselves to govern, and the responsibilities that each of us carry. We committed to break old and cynical patterns of centralizing power in the hands of a few unelected staffers, the marginalization of hundreds of Members of Parliament with expertise and insights to offer, and the practice of governing in the shadows, out of sight of Canadians. I believed we were going to uphold the highest standards that support the public interest, and not simply make choices to create partisan advantage. As part of committing to this transformative and progressive path, we were also committing to a government and caucus that represented all Canadians. Diverse and inclusive, our Caucus was to be a microcosm of Canada not just geographically, but demographically. Indeed, I believe we understood that to build a stronger Canada, we needed to reflect that Canada. This includes the challenges, opportunities, tensions, and insights that arise when seeking to forge a common path and understanding in a context of real diversity and difference. This is a vision that reflects the future. Young people identify in dozens of different ways before they identify with a political party and they privilege diversity of experience, background, and belief and upholding the experiences of all, over simply following the paths laid out with those who claim to hold power. I still believe all of these things as I know all of you do, too. I believe it is what the country needs, and I believe our collective future well-being as a country demands action on such a vision. And indeed, one of the main reasons I had no hesitation to stand up for what I believed to be right and necessary for the country since September 2018 regarding SNC-Lavalin was because of my belief in that vision. In 2015, I believed the Liberal Party held such a vision, and I still believe the Liberals can and must advance such a vision. I do believe fundamentally that the Prime Minister also still shares this vision. Now I know many of you are angry, hurt, and frustrated. And frankly so am I, and I can only speak for myself. I am angry, hurt, and frustrated because I feel and believe I was upholding the values that we all committed to. In giving the advice I did, and taking the steps I did, I was trying to help protect the Prime Minister and the government from a horrible mess. I am not the one who tried to interfere in sensitive proceedings, I am not the one who made it public, and I am not the one who publicly denied what happened. But I am not going to go over all of the details here again. Enough has been said. Growing up as an Indigenous person in this country I learned long ago the lesson that people believing what they wish about you does not, and cannot ever, make it the truth rather than letting authority be the truth, let the truth be the authority. Indeed, if I had succumbed to interpreting the beliefs of others to be the truth, I never would have been able to push forward in the face of the racism and misogyny that far too many Indigenous women, and others, still experience every day. Ultimately the choice that is before you is about what kind of party you want to be a part of, what values it will uphold, the vision that animates it, and indeed the type of people it will attract and make it up. If indeed our caucus is to be a microcosm of the country it is about whether we are a caucus of inclusion or exclusion; of dialogue and searching for understanding or shutting out challenging views and perspectives; and ultimately of the old ways of doing business, or new ones that look to the future. As I have stated recently to the constituents of Vancouver Granville, it has been my great privilege to serve as their Member of Parliament over the past three and a half years and to continue to have their confidence. With the support, guidance, and participation of Canadians our government has accomplished much and, of course, there is important work yet to be done. My nomination has been confirmed and it is my intention to stand for re-election as the Liberal candidate for the 2019 federal election and to continue with this work. Respectfully, Hon. Jody Wilson-Raybould, P.C., Q.C., M.P. Member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville Close Wilson-Raybould, meanwhile, sent a letter to all Liberal MPs making an 11th-hour pitch for staying in caucus but making no apologies for going public with her contention that she was improperly pressured last fall to stop the criminal prosecution of Montreal engineering giant SNC-Lavalin. The company faces criminal charges over allegedly corrupt dealings in Libya. Wilson-Raybould had the authority as attorney general to divert the proceedings with a remediation agreement, a sort of plea-bargain that could spare the company the worst consequences of a conviction; that authority is new in Canadian law, it has never been used, and Wilson-Raybould has said she saw no reason to overrule a decision by the director of public prosecutions against seeking such an agreement. "There was a tone of the letter that had an exclusivity to it, that she had a monopoly on truth and that there was not a conversation to be had," said Toronto MP Rob Oliphant. "It was a strong first-person letter and politics is not about first person ... it's about 'we,' not about 'I.' " Former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould walks from West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld National caucus chair Francis Scarpaleggia, from Quebec, said there was "an overwhelming consensus" that the two had to go. Not all Liberals were happy with the decision. Toronto MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and New Brunswick MP Wayne Long, who had hoped for a way to accommodate the former ministers, said they were disappointed but respected the consensus view of caucus and the prime minister's decision. In a Facebook post, Philpott said her decision to resign from cabinet in early March, citing a lack of confidence in the government's handling of the SNC-Lavalin file, was not about "a lack of loyalty." Rather, she insisted both she and Wilson-Raybould were attempting to "protect" Trudeau from the consequences of "attempts to interfere with prosecutorial independence." Philpott said she will continue to serve her constituents in Markham-Stouffville "for the remainder of this term" which suggests she does not intend to run for re-election as an independent or candidate for another party. "Growing up as an Indigenous person in this country I learned long ago the lesson that people believing what they wish about you does not, and cannot ever, make it the truth rather than letting authority be the truth, let the truth be the authority." Jody WilsonRaybould Wilson-Raybould tweeted that she will take time to reflect on her next steps. "What I can say is that I hold my head high & that I can look myself in the mirror knowing I did what I was required to do and what needed to be done based on principles & values that must always transcend party. I have no regrets. I spoke the truth as I will continue to do," she said. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer wasted no time issuing what amounted to an invitation to the two former ministers and their supporters to join his party. Former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould enters a vehicle as she leaves West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick "If you believe that speaking truth to power should be rewarded, not punished, there is a place for you in the Conservative Party of Canada," he said in a statement. "The message (the Liberals) have sent today is clear: If you tell the truth, there is no room for you in the Liberal Party of Canada." Trudeau said he'd tried to be patient and understanding but nothing would satisfy the two ex-ministers. "We've taken every effort to address their concerns, and ultimately, if they can't honestly say that they have confidence in this team ... then they cannot be part of this team," Trudeau said. "Our political opponents win when Liberals are divided. We can't afford to make that mistake Canadians are counting on us." He concluded his speech with a campaign-style recitation of his government's accomplishments, including the assertion that: "We have always, always fought to create and protect jobs. We will never apologize for doing so." Trudeau and his staff have maintained throughout the SNC-Lavalin affair that they never improperly pressured Wilson-Raybould; they only wanted to ensure she had considered every lawful tool to avoid a criminal conviction that could cripple the company and potentially put thousands of employees out of work. Wilson-Raybould maintains she was moved out of the justice portfolio in a mid-January cabinet shuffle as punishment for refusing to comply. Last week, she released a surreptitiously recorded audio of a phone conversation with Privy Council clerk Wernick, the country's top bureaucrat, as part of additional evidence to bolster her claim of improper pressure. But that too seemed to backfire, galvanizing Liberal MPs in the belief that she could no longer be trusted. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a news conference in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Trudeau has kicked both former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and fellow ex-cabinet minister Jane Philpott out of the Liberal caucus. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld "If a politician secretly records a conversation with anyone, it's wrong," Trudeau said in explaining Wilson-Raybould's expulsion. "When that politician is a cabinet minister secretly recording a public servant, it's wrong. And when that cabinet minister is the attorney general of Canada, secretly recording the clerk of the Privy Council, it's unconscionable." In the call, Wernick repeatedly asked Wilson-Raybould why she was not using all the tools at her disposal on the SNC-Lavalin case. She pushed back, saying she would not override the decision of the director of public prosecutions. Wernick told her Trudeau was "quite determined" on the matter and would likely "find a way to get it done one way or another." NDP MP Jenny Kwan said Trudeau's move Tuesday was an extension of that attitude he'd decided he was going to get his way and threw two unco-operative women under the bus, she said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. In her appeal to her caucusmates, Wilson-Raybould did not mention the secret recording. She argued that she rejected the prime minister's pressure on SNC-Lavalin because she was standing up for Liberal values. "I know many of you are angry, hurt, and frustrated. And frankly so am I, and I can only speak for myself," Wilson-Raybould wrote. "I am angry, hurt, and frustrated because I feel and believe I was upholding the values that we all committed to. In giving the advice I did, and taking the steps I did, I was trying to help protect the prime minister and the government from a horrible mess. "I am not the one who tried to interfere in sensitive proceedings, I am not the one who made it public, and I am not the one who publicly denied what happened. But I am not going to go over all of the details here again. Enough has been said." Liberal MPs dismissed the letter as "too little, too late," as Toronto MP Judy Sgro put it. Oliphant acknowledged that ejecting two prominent former cabinet ministers both women, one a prominent Indigenous leader before she ran for Parliament will mean the party has to work on public perceptions of its commitments to equality and reconciliation. Trudeau will have to begin that immediately. His schedule Wednesday includes a speech before Daughters of the Vote, which takes 338 young women to Ottawa to promote their involvement in politics. It's followed by an appearance at a meeting of a committee of leaders working on Inuit-Crown relations. OTTAWA The Trudeau government is asking China to accept a delegation of federal and provincial scientists, with the goal of quelling the countrys claims about pests in Canadian canola, which few believe have any merit. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 1/4/2019 (987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA The Trudeau government is asking China to accept a delegation of federal and provincial scientists, with the goal of quelling the countrys claims about pests in Canadian canola, which few believe have any merit. "We're not looking for escalation, we are looking for resolution. The way to resolution is to have the scientific evidence on the table," International Trade Diversification Minister Jim Carr told reporters Monday. Its been a month since Winnipeg-based Richardson International lost its ability to export canola to China, due to the countrys unspecific claims of "dangerous pests," which have not been found in at least two tests of samples. China has since expanded its blockade to virtually all Canadian canola seed, 40 per cent of which is exported to that country. It appears no other countries have complained about pests recently. The federal Liberals have hinted at sending experts to China; on Monday they confirmed making a formal request to send the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, as well as scientists from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Those experts are also part of a new task force aimed at resolving the issue. "If impurities exist, we should work to resolve the problem. But if no impurities exist, we should move on," Carr said, without providing any example of what that might mean. "That is the most sensible way for us to proceed," the Winnipeg MP said. Carr and Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said the reason why Ottawas announced delegation didnt include any federal ministers is because China hasnt raised any political issues. "We strongly believe that this situation will find a science-based (solution)," Bibeau said. "What China is telling us is that they have found some kind of pest in our shipments. So we must pursue the discussion based on science." Bibeau has previously said she's waiting on China to decide on whether to issue visas for Canadian authorities. The canola issue will be discussed at length Tuesday on Parliament Hill. Richardson, industry groups and both Carr and Bibeau are scheduled to testify at the House agriculture and trade committees. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Jim Everson, head of the Canola Council of Canada, said he felt Ottawa was handling the issue as prudently as it could, given the risk of China escalating its blockade to other grains. "I think the government has really responded as quickly as they can," he said, adding many farmers are worried about cashflow. Bibeau said her government will assess whether existing farmers aid programs could compensate farmers who cant get their canola to market, and those selling it at a 10 per cent discount. Those programs might require a top-up, or a whole new funding stream. "I'm open to making some changes to these processes, but I have to go through due diligence," Bibeau said. Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives attempted to hold an emergency debate on the canola issue Monday afternoon, which the Liberals postponed. The Tories may attempt a late-night debate Tuesday evening. dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Drain cleaner, acid, red phosphorus, lab equipment, a pressure cooker, chemical suits and a self-contained breathing apparatus. Thats what greeted members of the Winnipeg Police Service clandestine lab team Saturday, after a chance discovery by a contractor at an Osborne Village apartment complex led authorities to an in-use methamphetamine facility. Its the first time police have discovered and dismantled such a lab in Winnipeg in 15 months. "December 2017 was the last lab we had encountered. It was far less sophisticated and not fully functioning. When we went into this lab (Saturday), the stove was on... the lab was in the process of a cook," WPS spokesman Const. Rob Carver said Tuesday. Police evacuated the apartment complex on the 100 block of Mayfair Avenue while the clandestine lab team set to work dismantling the equipment and securing and ventilating the suite. The Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service and the hazmat team were also called in to assist. Two Winnipeg Transit buses were brought to the scene to provide temporary shelter for residents. "The toxic chemicals used in these labs can produce gasses that could kill someone walking into the room very quickly. I know that some of the concerns are that exposure to the gas, even if youre removed, you could still risk death," Carver said. "They are incredibly dangerous. There are explosive concerns, as well. Those are coupled with the manner methamphetamine is produced, with heat and... uncontrolled chemical reactions." Police believe water had been dripping from the unit in question, which led a contractor to the suite to determine the source of the leak. They discovered the lab and called police. While officers were on scene, the tenant returned to the suite and was arrested. Conal Patrick Moran, 29, has been charged with multiple drug offences and two counts of mischief under $5,000. Hes been detained in custody. The allegations have not been proven in court. Police have repeatedly said the majority of methamphetamine on the streets of Winnipeg carries a cartel stamp and is being imported into the country. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "This city is facing a meth problem, a serious meth problem. The amount of meth on the streets is amazing to me in the morning when I go through the overnight stats," Carver said. "Theres a community concern when somebody tries to set up a (clandestine) lab, less because it impacts on the amount of meth on the streets and more because of the huge danger it poses to area residents," he said. "The training to be a part of our (clandestine) lab team is very detailed, long. They need to train all the time, much like our tactical support team, because an error made entering a (clandestine) lab could lead to somebody getting killed." Numerous samples taken from the suite have been sent to Health Canada for analysis and testing, police said. The other residents of the building have since returned home. ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @rk_thorpe Three Indigenous people accused of hunting at night in the Interlake more than three years ago were found not guilty on Tuesday. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Three Indigenous people accused of hunting at night in the Interlake more than three years ago were found not guilty on Tuesday. The decision comes as Manitoba's proposed legislative crackdown on night hunting has yet to come into effect. In October 2015, as they drove home after a day of hunting near Lake St. Martin, Harriet Sanderson, her partner Clinton Beardy and her brother Glenn Sanderson were stopped by a Manitoba conservation officer who saw them shining a light out the passenger window of their Dodge Ram pickup truck. They testified they weren't hunting after dark, and provincial court Judge Timothy Killeen believed them. "I dont think they were going to be hunting again that night. I think that they were not at that point searching for game, but rather using the light to see if anything was there, and the issue is whether the Crown has then proven beyond the reasonable doubt that that constitutes hunting within the definition (as set out in the provincial Wildlife Act)," Killeen said as he delivered his decision. "I believe that they had no intention of hunting for any further animals at night using lights or otherwise." On Tuesday, Harriet Sanderson and Beardy testified they had been hunting earlier in the day -- a freshly killed deer and ducks were in the back of the truck when they were pulled over, court heard. "We were preparing for winter, because we live off the land. We fish, we hunt we are preparing for winter, because were going to have our meat and freeze it," Harriet testified. After nightfall, Harriet was driving, her brother was in the backseat and Beardy was shining a spotlight out the window as they drove home along provincial road 513. Beardy said he put his rifle away after they shot the deer earlier in the day, and it was out of reach, unloaded, in a compartment that would have required lifting up the back seat to access. Beardy testified he was shining the light on a relative's property where he had already received verbal permission to hunt deer. He said he planned to see if there were deer there so they weren't "hunting blind" when they returned the next morning. Although Crown attorney Kevin Clayton argued that didn't make sense, the judge believed Beardy's explanation. Beardy told the prosecutor: "I dont know if youre a hunter or not. Theres certain areas that have bluffs that the deer will move into before the morning, so when you go hunting the next morning, you go to these said bluffs" to find the deer. "Its a matter of understanding the animals." The trial began in late 2017 in Gypsumville, where defence lawyer Bill Armstrong argued the search of the truck and seizure of the gun violated the accused's rights. Killeen ruled against that Charter challenge. Beardy forfeited his unregistered rifle after he was acquitted. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. It's not the first time a night hunting case has been challenged in court. Last year, two men lost their truck to Manitoba's criminal property forfeiture unit after they were convicted of night hunting near Waterhen, Man., in 2016. Their attempt to appeal and get the vehicle back was unsuccessful. Premier Brian Pallister made national headlines when he was quoted in late 2016 as saying he didnt want to see night hunting become a race war. New legislation that would put limits on Indigenous peoples' ability to hunt at night was introduced by the government last year, but has yet to be proclaimed. Winnipeg-based defence lawyer Bill Armstrong said Tuesday he expects to see these types of legal challenges in court even after the new bill is brought into force. "It's important for Indigenous people because they have certain well-ingrained rights in terms of hunting and fishing to supply food, and they are very concerned when those rights seem to get eroded." katie.may@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @thatkatiemay BEING harassed in public washrooms, accused of fraudulently using someone elses identification, and facing suspicious looks at medical clinics. Even applying for a passport is out of reach. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 1/4/2019 (987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. BEING harassed in public washrooms, accused of fraudulently using someone elses identification, and facing suspicious looks at medical clinics. Even applying for a passport is out of reach. Being forced to identify as male or female when youre not either is discriminatory in Canada, and goes well beyond feeling "misunderstood, invisible or unwelcome," a pangender individual testified at a Manitoba Human Rights Adjudication Panel hearing Monday. What T.A. under a publication ban, the individual can only be identified by their initials or by the pronouns they, them or their wants is the right to not use an "M" or an "F" on their birth certificate. T.A.s lawyer argues the provinces human rights code allows for the flexibility, but no one has ever challenged the practice of designating babies at birth as male or female in Manitoba. "This is about identity documents and how identity documents that include sex designations affect the transgender community," said T.A.s lawyer, Susan Ursel, with Toronto-based Ursel Phillips Fellows and Hopkinson LLP. "Were talking about the birth certificate in this case, and the birth certificate contains a sex designation of M or F. Its a binary identification. Our client doesnt identify in binary categories. Our client identifies as pangender and we say thats... their personal gender expression, which is protected under (the provinces human rights) code." The hearing was ordered by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, following a complaint filed in 2015. T.A. testified to a lifetime of struggles with depression, anxiety and related mental health issues dating to childhood; all of it rooted in a gender identity assigned at birth that didnt fit. "I was aware growing up about the binary assignment and for the most part I complied, but I felt uncomfortable with it," they said. "Whenever I would stray from that designation, I was frequently met with scorn, disdain and ridicule. "When Im required to produce a form of identification, if (its) perceived there is an incongruity, I have frequently been subject to invasive questioning. There have even been cases whether it is my rightful documentation, whether I have the right to possess my own documents." Others who identify as transgendered or pangendered in Canada lead lives of exclusion from social norms and often end up underemployed, unemployed, in poverty or homeless, the tribunal heard. T.A. has since left the province and obtained a drivers licence and a health card that recognizes neither the male or female sex designation. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Across Canada, provincial jurisdictions which issue health cards, drivers licences and basic fundamental identification papers such as birth certificates are finding gender designations under challenge. In Saskatchewan, a court in Regina last year ordered the province to allow for the removal of gender markers from birth certificates. After two human rights complaints in recent years, Ontario began adding X as a gender marker in addition to M or F on birth certificates in 2018. Alberta amended its legislation to allow for the non-binary markers, and both the Northwest Territories and Newfoundland-Labrador also allow for the non-binary designations on birth certificates. This case brings the issue to Manitoba. The hearing is scheduled to continue through Thursday. alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca Most people expected an electoral budget from the federal government late last month, and thats exactly what Canadians got. But for the agri-food sector, the budget was underwhelming at best and provided little hope for the near future. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion Most people expected an electoral budget from the federal government late last month, and thats exactly what Canadians got. But for the agri-food sector, the budget was underwhelming at best and provided little hope for the near future. Lets start with supply management. The Liberal government opted to do exactly what the previous Conservative government did in the middle of the last election campaign in 2015. The Conservatives announced an out-of-nowhere $4-billion compensation package for supply managed sectors, while signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, now known as Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Coming in the middle of an election campaign, the Conservatives program was largely improvised. Similarly, the Liberals have provided no hint about how they intend to make Canadas supply managed agriculture sectors more competitive. Moneys will be allocated based on speculation and presumptions, just to buy peace, since no timeline for the compensation was provided. This time, $3.9 billion in funding is budgeted, with $2.15 billion in direct compensation. Theres $1.5 billion for a quota value guarantee program to be applied on an on-demand basis when the quota has been sold. So Canadians will be acquiring back from farmers the quotas that were given to them years ago at no charge. The attempt to procure votes in Quebec is extremely obvious. To do this right, the budget should have looked beyond supply management to support other sectors that are similarly affected by trade. Instead, the Liberals have decided we will keep an outdated system while subsidizing farmers who have prided themselves for years on not accepting public subsidies. Compensating farmers without a plan for the future of supply management is the worst possible scenario for everyone, starting with the farmers. Farmers will only see their sector shrink further, especially in dairy, and many more farms will disappear with no strategy for less populous regions in the country, such as the Prairies and the Atlantic. This will be a slow and painful way to go. Nothing is planned for other commodities, including canola, pulses and others affected by quasi-embargoes and trade disputes. There is a small budget, at least, to deal with African swine fever, a disaster-in-waiting for the hog sector. Its just a matter of time before the disease hits North America. Once it does, well need to brace for another mad-cow type of scenario. The budgets supply management compensation program doesnt extend to concessions made under the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade. This is likely the Liberals way of saying the deal is damaging for many agricultural sectors and therefore stands little or no chance of being ratified. Its also probably the only thing that made sense for the agri-food sector in this budget. Some provisions were made in the budget for a food strategy. If we want to make good on the aspirations of our newly minted Canadas Food Guide, our agricultural landscape will need to change. We need to grow more fruits and vegetables in this country. However, a budget of $134 million over five years provides virtually no help. Quebec, with a population of about 8.4 million, has just adopted its own food strategy. Its spending more than double the federal amount this year alone. So essentially, Ottawa has no idea what it takes to give the country a robust food strategy. On the rural broadband internet front, the government intends to invest $1.7 billion in new infrastructure and satellite technology. This is obviously long overdue, but that sum will be spent over 10 years and requires support from the private sector. By 2030, who knows if the technology will be adequate for farmers to connect with the modern world? The food processing sector the largest manufacturing sector in the country was given peanuts. The budget offers $100 million to support innovation and plant upkeep projects. Given that the cradle of food innovation has always been food processing, thats almost insulting to the 250,000 people working in this sector. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. A total of $24 million is dedicated to food fraud, in support of Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) efforts to crack down on cheaters. Its estimated that food fraud costs the agri-food sector $10 billion to $30 billion a year. The problem is massive and CFIA needs all the help it can get. Largely forgotten in the budget were the export targets suggested by the Agriculture and Agri-Food Economic Strategy released last September. Shockingly, not one cent was allocated to support the sector reaching its ambitious $85-billion export goal by 2025. This budget doesnt accomplish much for agri-food other than admitting that the new trade agreement is bad. But everyone knew that already. It feels like the Liberals, an urban-focused government, are simply checking boxes to please a sector it barely understands. Canadians are smarter than that. Sylvain Charlebois is scientific director of the Canadian Agrifood Foresight Institute, a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University, and a senior fellow with the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies. Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in northern Alberta sent a delegation to Regina in February to speak in the case of the government of Saskatchewan against the federal government. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 1/4/2019 (987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in northern Alberta sent a delegation to Regina in February to speak in the case of the government of Saskatchewan against the federal government. The case involves the controversial carbon tax by the Trudeau government and interpretations of Canadas constitution. Saskatchewan alleges Ottawa has no right to impose the tax on provinces, while the federal government states climate change is a federal issue and must be dealt with by all Canadians at once. Provinces who failed to come up with a plan to deal with climate change became subject to a federal carbon tax on all fossil fuel-using activities (such as driving a car, warming a home, or taking a plane ride). This is exactly what happened April 1 to Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Manitoba who all either refused or failed to impose their own emissions limits and pricing. What does a First Nation in northern Alberta have to do with a battle between Saskatchewan and Canada? The issue, according to Adam, is this conversation is missing one of the most important constitutional considerations of all: Indigenous rights. According to Section 35(1) of Canadas constitution: "The existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Aboriginal people in Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed." This means, according to Canadian law, decisions that impact Indigenous rights must involve Indigenous peoples. And nothing nothing impacts Indigenous cultures, languages, and nations more than climate change. "We have a right to stand up and protect what is left here in the world," Allan said to the court. "When things happen on the land, we are the first to notice." Indigenous cultures are intertwined with the territories in which we live. The air, land, water and the beings who live in these places create our clan systems, ceremonies, and languages. For instance, spring is a time when we sing mukwag (bear songs), honouring the teachings and knowledge bears present us with. One is a reminder of how the land provides us with medicines and cycles of life. What do mother bears protect the most? Life. Their cubs. Sustainability. The same could be said about the cracking ice, budding trees, and returning geese. The land is our greatest teacher. Climate change, however, ends the lessons. There is no reason to sing bear songs if there are no bears. Bears like caribou, salmon, and orcas are rapidly disappearing as lands are flooded, streams become toxic, and sea temperatures rise as polar ice melts. Climate change is real, and its impact is being experienced first-hand by Indigenous peoples. This is why communities like Athabasca First Nation and the Fond du Lac Dene Nation (Saskatchewan) backed the federal governments plan to introduce a carbon tax. The simple premise is if you tax particular activities and charge citizens for their impacts, humans tend to reduce these activities. Its punitive, of course, but meant to discourage people from not taking more than their share. Its meant to remind everyone that when we leave the lights on, drive unnecessarily, or take from the land until it has nothing more to give, there is a cost. The cost, in this case, is money. For Indigenous peoples, however, the cost of climate change is death. Death to our animal relations. Death to our cultures and way of life. Death to diversity. A carbon tax may not be perfect, but for Indigenous peoples there is no other apparent solution. The issue is what is done with money collected from a carbon tax. The federal government says it will reduce other taxes in exchange, offer rebates, and invest in environmental initiatives. Skeptics might be suspicious of politicians in charge of money. But will Canadians change their lifestyle without an incentive? Most anti-carbon tax politicians argue it penalizes private, energy sector corporations, eventually resulting in less jobs, less investment, and less economy for communities. They argue corporations should be offered rebates and financial incentives instead. Forgive me if Im more suspicious about taxpayer money in the hands of shareholders and chief executive officers. (How much do they make again?) Until I see a tangible, realistic plan by private, extraction-based companies to stop climate change all we have really is politicians. And the people who put them there. For a long time, Canadians have lived in an unsustainable, exploitive, and environmentally devastating economy driven by profit. From stealing the land to building cities to creating companies that kill the bison and poison the water, this is the story of Canada and Indigenous peoples have paid the price. Values of unsustainability and exploitation dont work with our traditional values. While some Indigenous peoples have personally profited off exploitative economies, our cultures have not. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Our nations need healthy environments to survive. Canada needs this, too. In Anishinaabe culture we have a saying: what are we doing for those who come after us? We have a song that says this. We learned it from the bears. So, when paying four cents more a litre at the gas pump or listening to stump speeches by leaders in 4x4 trucks complaining about the carbon tax, think about the bears. Theyre thinking about you. niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca WASHINGTON - As former Vice-President Joe Biden's camp scrambles to contain any political damage over his past behaviour with women, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has some words of advice: Keep your distance. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. FILE - In this March 12, 2019, file photo, former Vice President Joe Biden speaks to the International Association of Firefighters at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington. Biden says he does not recall kissing a Nevada political candidate on the back of her head in 2014. The allegation was made in a New York Magazine article written by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor. Flores says BidenAos behavior Aumade me feel uneasy, gross, and confused.Au(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File) WASHINGTON - As former Vice-President Joe Biden's camp scrambles to contain any political damage over his past behaviour with women, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has some words of advice: Keep your distance. "Join the straight-arm club," Pelosi said at a breakfast hour Washington event on Tuesday. Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Biden Courage Awards Tuesday, March 26, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) In other words, keep your handshakes at arms' length and don't be touchy-feely. "Just pretend you have a cold and I have a cold," Pelosi said. President Donald Trump weighed in on the matter with a little more sarcasm. "Welcome to the world, Joe," Trump said at a fundraising dinner for Republican House races. "You having a good time, Joe?" Trump himself has denied multiple accusations of sexual misconduct on his part. Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Biden Courage Awards, Tuesday, March 26, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) Pelosi, D-Calif., said Biden "has to understand that in the world we are in now people's space is important to them and what's important is how they receive it, not necessarily how you intended it." Her remarks at an event sponsored by Politico came as Biden's aides are striking a more aggressive tone as he considers seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and faces scrutiny over his past behaviour toward women. In a statement Monday, Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted "right wing trolls" from "the dark recesses of the internet" for conflating images of Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends in his official capacity during swearing-in ceremonies with uninvited touching. Two women have said Biden touched them inappropriately in the past. Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, said Monday that Biden touched her face with both hands and rubbed noses in 2009. Former Nevada politician Lucy Flores penned a magazine essay last week in which she wrote that Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014. The developments underscored the challenge facing Biden should he decide to seek the White House. Following historic wins in the 2018 midterms, Democratic politics is dominated by energy from women. The allegations could leave the 76-year-old Biden, long known for his affectionate mannerisms, appearing out of touch with the party as the Democratic presidential primary begins. Lappos told The Associated Press that she and other Himes aides were helping out at a fundraiser in a private home in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2009 when Biden entered the kitchen to thank the group for pitching in. "After he finished speaking, he stopped to talk to us about how important a congressional staff is, which I thought was awesome," Lappos said. She said she was stunned as Biden moved toward her. "He wrapped both his hands around my face and pulled me in," said Lappos, who is now 43. "I thought, 'Oh, God, he's going to kiss me.' Instead, he rubbed noses with me." Biden said nothing, she said, then moved off. She said the experience left her feeling "weird and uncomfortable" and was "absolutely disrespectful of my personal boundaries." The Hartford Courant first reported Lappos' assertion. Russo, Biden's spokesman, didn't directly respond to Lappos, instead referring to a Sunday statement in which Biden said he doesn't believe he has acted inappropriately during his long public life. The former vice-president said in that statement: "We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will." Biden hasn't made a final decision on whether to run for the White House. But aides who weren't authorized to discuss internal conversations and spoke on the condition of anonymity said there were no signs that his team was slowing its preparations for a campaign. Asked on Monday by the AP about the accusations against Biden, Pelosi said, "I don't think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all." Biden's potential Democratic rivals haven't rushed to back him up. Sen. Kamala Harris of California said Tuesday that she believed his accusers but that it's up to Biden to decide whether to run. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Over the weekend, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said Biden "needs to give an answer" about what occurred. Another 2020 hopeful, Kirsten Gillibrand, said, "If Vice-President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic he'll have to engage on further." Ultraviolet, a women's advocacy group, tweeted: "Joe Biden cannot paint himself as a champion of women and then refuse to listen and learn from a woman who says his actions demeaned her. Good intentions don't matter if the actions are inappropriate. Do better, Joe. And thank you @LucyFlores for coming forward." ___ Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. AP Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace contributed to this report. ___ This story has been corrected to show the congressman's surname is Himes, not Hines. LONDON - With Britain racing toward a chaotic exit from the European Union within days, Prime Minister Theresa May veered away from the cliff-edge Tuesday, saying she would seek another Brexit delay and hold talks with the opposition to seek a compromise. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 1/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Anti-Brexit demonstrators near College Green at the Houses of Parliament in London, Monday, April 1, 2019. Britain's Parliament gets another chance Monday to offer a way forward on Britain's stalled divorce from the European Union, holding a series of votes on Brexit alternatives in an attempt to find the elusive idea that can command a majority. (Jonathan Brady/PA via AP) LONDON - With Britain racing toward a chaotic exit from the European Union within days, Prime Minister Theresa May veered away from the cliff-edge Tuesday, saying she would seek another Brexit delay and hold talks with the opposition to seek a compromise. May made the announcement after the EU's chief negotiator warned that a disruptive and costly Brexit was likely unless Britain broke the impasse that has paralyzed the government and Parliament. After failing repeatedly to win Parliament's backing for her Brexit blueprint, May said the country needed "national unity to deliver the national interest." FILE - In this Nov. 24, 2018 file photo, British Prime Minister Theresa May, left, walks ahead of European Union chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier at EU headquarters in Brussels. EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 that a no-deal exit of Britain becomes day after day more likely after the UK parliament again rejected alternatives to the government's unpopular European Union divorce deal. (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys, File) Following the defeat of the government's plan and a range of lawmaker-written alternatives, May said Britain would need a further delay to its EU departure, currently scheduled for April 12. She offered to hold talks with opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in an attempt to find a compromise solution. "This debate, this division, cannot drag on much longer," May said in a televised statement from 10 Downing St. after an all-day Cabinet meeting. European Council President Donald Tusk gave a cautious welcome to May's change of course. "Even if, after today, we don't know what the end result will be, let us be patient," he tweeted a suggestion the EU would wait for Britain to present a clear plan. European Union chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier arrives for a session at European Parliament in Brussels, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said on Tuesday that a no-deal exit of Britain becomes day after day more likely after the UK parliament again rejected alternatives to the government's unpopular European Union divorce deal. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco) Earlier, EU negotiator Michel Barnier offered a downbeat assessment of the situation. "As things stand now, the no-deal option looks likely. I have to tell you the truth," Barnier said in Brussels. Barnier said "we can still hope to avoid it" if London produced a breakthrough before an April 10 EU summit. The leaders of the EU's 27 remaining countries have given the U.K. until April 12 to leave the bloc or to come up with a new plan, after British lawmakers thrice rejected an agreement struck between the bloc and May late last year. European Union chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, right, talks to legislators during a session at European Parliament in Brussels, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Barnier said on Tuesday that a no-deal exit of Britain becomes day after day more likely after the UK parliament again rejected alternatives to the government's unpopular European Union divorce deal. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco) The House of Commons has also failed to find a majority for any alternative plan in two days of voting on multiple options. May's statement came after a seven-hour meeting of her fractious Cabinet, which is split between supporters of a "soft Brexit" that keeps close economic ties with the EU, and Brexiteers who believe a no-deal exit is better than compromising. May's words seemed to indicate that she was veering away from the possibility of a no-deal Brexit but also that she has not given up on her own unloved withdrawal agreement. Her plan is to seek approval for the legally binding agreement which sets out in detail the terms of Britain's departure from the EU after securing cross-party political support for a vision of future ties between the U.K. and the bloc. A supporter of Brexit holds a sign saying 'Just hoot, we voted leave' while others continue with their daily activities outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, ahead of the latest round of debates in the House of Commons concerning Brexit issues, Monday April 1, 2019. (Rebecca Brown/PA via AP) If she and Corbyn fail to reach agreement, May said Parliament would get to vote on a range of options and the government would be bound by the result. It is the first time she has committed to following the instruction of lawmakers. May didn't indicate how long an extension she would seek from the EU, though she said she hoped Britain could pass the agreement by May 22, in time to avoid participating in elections for the European Parliament. Corbyn said he would be "very happy" to sit down with May, even though "so far she hasn't shown much sign of compromise." Corbyn said Labour would present May with its conditions for Brexit, which include a close economic relationship with the bloc through a customs union, maintaining high environmental standards and protecting workers' rights. Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May walks to give a press conference outside Downing Street, in London, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. May said Tuesday that she will seek to further delay Britain's exit from the European Union and seek to make an accord with the political opposition in a bid to break the Brexit impasse. May made the announcement after the EU's chief negotiator warned that a chaotic and costly Brexit was likely in just 10 days unless Britain snapped out of the political crisis that has paralyzed the government and Parliament. (Jack Taylor/Pool Photo via AP) May's move infuriated pro-Brexit politicians, who say Britain must cut ties to the EU in order to forge an independent economic policy. "I think people will feel very short-changed," said former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, a prominent pro-Brexit voice in Parliament. But May's words brought relief for those who fear the effects of a no-deal Brexit, which would complicate trade and travel, with new checks on borders and new regulations on dealings between the EU and Britain. Businesses have warned that the economic impact in Britain could be devastating. Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May gives a press conference outside Downing Street, in London, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. May said Tuesday that she will seek to further delay Britain's exit from the European Union and seek to make an accord with the political opposition in a bid to break the Brexit impasse. May made the announcement after the EU's chief negotiator warned that a chaotic and costly Brexit was likely in just 10 days unless Britain snapped out of the political crisis that has paralyzed the government and Parliament. (Jack Taylor/Pool Photo via AP) Ford of Europe Chairman Steven Armstrong said "a no-deal Brexit would be a disaster for the automotive industry in the U.K." Edwin Morgan, interim director general of business group the Institute of Directors, said May's statement was "a welcome step towards compromise," though there remained obstacles ahead. "We urge the leader of the opposition to work with the prime minister to find a solution," he said. "Both sides must play ball." Britain's political paralysis and May's failure to get Parliament's approval for the withdrawal agreement she negotiated have exasperated EU leaders. French President Emmanuel Macron said that if Britain's politicians could not agree on a way forward, "they will de facto have chosen for themselves to leave without a deal." "We cannot avoid failure for them," Macron said before a meeting in Paris with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. But Varadkar stressed "there's still time" for May to come to the April 10 summit with "credible" proposals. Meanwhile, British lawmakers intent on avoiding a no-deal Brexit have drawn up plans to prevent Britain crashing out of the bloc, by accident or design. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "We are now in a really dangerous situation with a serious and growing risk of no deal," Labour Party legislator Yvette Cooper said. Cooper introduced legislation, which Parliament is set to consider, this week, that would compel May to seek to extend the Brexit process beyond April 12 in order to prevent a no-deal departure. ___ Raf Casert reported from Brussels. Mike Corder in Halfweg, Netherlands, contributed to this story. ___ Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit U.S.-backed Syrian fighters are battling the Islamic State group in eastern Syria 10 days after declaring victory over the extremists, an official with the Kurdish-led force said Tuesday. Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, said they are rooting out groups of militants who were hiding in caves in and near the village of Baghouz. He added that SDF experts are still removing mines and booby-traps in areas liberated in recent weeks. The SDF declared military victory over IS on March 23 after liberating what it said was the last pocket of territory held by the militants. The victory marked the end of the brutal self-styled caliphate the group carved out in large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The nearly five-year war left a swath of destruction across both countries and ended in Baghouz, a tiny village near the Iraqi border where the cornered militants made their last stand, under a grueling siege for weeks. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the U.S.-led coalition is still conducting airstrikes against IS. It says senior IS commanders and prisoners held by the extremists are believed to be in the caves on the east bank of the Euphrates River. The Observatory, which closely monitors the Syrian war through contacts on the ground, says scores of IS fighters and commanders who refused to surrender are still in the area. During the last weeks of fighting in Baghouz, thousands of civilians, IS fighters and their families were evacuated. Many were moved to al-Hol, a camp for the displaced in northeastern Syria, which now holds 70,000 people. An aid group said 31 deaths were recorded in the final week of March among people making their way out of Baghouz and toward the camp. The International Rescue Committee said the highest weekly death rate reflected the desperate conditions endured by those who left, mostly women and children. It said a total of 217 people died while evacuating Baghouz in the final weeks of the battle. Most were toddlers suffering from malnutrition. The IRC figures could not be independently confirmed. Search Keywords: Short link: Cate Blanchett only thinks about aging when someone else "brings it up". The 49-year-old star - who turns 50 in May this year - said there is a "spirit of being alive as a woman" which designers like Georgio Armani capture in their work, and she explained it features "a whole lot of dualities". Cate - who is an ambassador for the Italian fashion brand - told Vogue UK magazine: "I don't think about ageing at all until someone brings it up. [When] I think of some of the most inspiring faces, it's Louise Bourgeois and Georgia O'Keeffe. "I'm looking into the spirit of the woman and that's what I love. Like Mr Armani, who's really wanted to capture the spirit of being alive as a woman [in his work]. "You know, it can be sensual, but it can also be full of power, it can be fragile, but it can be wicked. It's a whole lot of dualities." The 'Ocean's 8' actress also opened up about the impact of feminism on the film industry, and how it means there is a more diverse collection of voices and characters being created as a result of greater equality in Hollywood. She explained: "I think there are now more women in the writer's room. There are more women at the center of narratives being optioned and there are more platforms on which to release stories. "There are certain stories, from the 1990s, about really interesting female lives but they were basically used to tell the same story about a woman. A woman in a man's world. "Whereas I feel now that the complexity and interest of these characters are being placed in very interesting backdrops and the stories that are being told about them are more sophisticated and complex. It excites me, as an actor but also as an audience member. You don't have to be in them to consume them." American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved. 326 E 8th St #105, Sioux Falls, SD 57103 | U.S. Based Support Team at [email protected] | (844) 978-6257 MarketBeat does not provide personalized financial advice and does not issue recommendations or offers to buy stock or sell any security. 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Ltd., Haceb Whirlpool Industrias S.A.S., Hefei Rongshida Sanyo Electric, Hefei Whirlpool Enterprise Management Service Co. Ltd., Hoover Comercial Limitada, IRE Beteiligungs GmbH, Indesit Argentina S.A., Indesit Company, Indesit Company Beyaz Esya Pazarlama A.S., Indesit Company Beyaz Esya Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., Indesit Company Ceska S.r.o., Indesit Company Domestic Appliances Hellas Mepe, Indesit Company International Business S.A., Indesit Company Luxembourg S.A., Indesit Company Magyarorszag Kft, Indesit Company Nordics AB, Indesit Company Polska Sp. zo.o., Indesit Company Singapore Pte. Ltd., Indesit Company UK Holdings Ltd., Indesit IP S.r.l., Indesit International ZAO, Indesit Ireland Ltd., Indesit Middle East FZE, Indesit Ukraine LLC, Industrias Acros Whirlpool S. de R.L. de C.V., Industrias Acros Whirlpool S.A. de C.V, Jackson Appliances Ltd., Joint-Stock Company Indesit International, KitchenAid, KitchenAid Australia Pty Ltd, KitchenAid Australia Pty Ltd., KitchenAid Delaware Inc., KitchenAid Europa Inc., KitchenAid Global, KitchenAid Global Inc., KitchenAid Inc., KitchenAid Korea Limited, KitchenAid Promotions, KitchenAid Promotions LLC, KitchenAid Trading Co., KitchenAid Trading Co. Ltd., LAWSA S.A., MLOG Armazem Geral Ltda., Maytag Corporation, Maytag Limited, Maytag Properties, Maytag Properties LLC, Maytag Sales, Maytag Sales Inc., Maytag Worldwide N.V., Merloni Domestic Appliances Ltd., Nineteen Hundred Corporation, Polar S.A., Qingdao EECON Electronic Controls and Appliances Co., Qingdao EECON Electronic Controls and Appliances Co. Ltd., South American Sales Partnership, THC Assets Corporation, Up Points Servicos Empresariais S.A., Vitromatic S.A. de C.V., WCGP Nova Scotia Co., WHirlpool EMEA Finanace S.a r.l., Whirlpool (Australia) Pty. Limited, Whirlpool (B.V.I.) Limited, Whirlpool (China) Co. Ltd., Whirlpool (China) Investment Co., Whirlpool (China) Investment Co. Ltd., Whirlpool (Hefei) Trading Co., Whirlpool (Hefei) Trading Co. Ltd, Whirlpool (Hong Kong) Limited, Whirlpool (Japan) Co. Ltd., Whirlpool (Thailand) Limited, Whirlpool ASEAN Co., Whirlpool America Holdings Corp., Whirlpool Argentina S.r.l., Whirlpool Asia B.V., Whirlpool Asia Holdings S.a r.l., Whirlpool Asia Inc., Whirlpool Asia LLP, Whirlpool Belux N.V./S.A., Whirlpool Bermuda Euro Ltd., Whirlpool Beyaz Esya Sanayi Ve Ticaret A.S., Whirlpool Bulgaria Ltd., Whirlpool CIS Ltd., Whirlpool CR, Whirlpool CR spol. s.r.o., Whirlpool CSA Holdings S.a r.l., Whirlpool Canada Co., Whirlpool Canada Co. (post 9/1/05 amalgamation company), Whirlpool Canada Holding Co, Whirlpool Canada Holding Co. (post 4/18/06 amalgamation company), Whirlpool Canada Investments S.a r.l., Whirlpool Canada LP, Whirlpool Canada Luxembourg Holdings S.a r.l., Whirlpool Chile Limitada, Whirlpool Colombia S.A.S., Whirlpool Comercial Ltda., Whirlpool Company Polska Sp. z o.o., Whirlpool Company Ukraine LLC, Whirlpool Croatia Ltd., Whirlpool EMEA S.p.A., Whirlpool Ecuador S.A., Whirlpool Eesti OU, Whirlpool El Salvador, Whirlpool El Salvador S.A. de C.V., Whirlpool Electrodomesticos S.A., Whirlpool Eletrodomesticos AM S.A., Whirlpool Enterprises, Whirlpool Enterprises LLC, Whirlpool Europe B.V., Whirlpool Europe Coordination Center, Whirlpool Europe Holdings Limited, Whirlpool Ev Aletleri Pazarlama Ve Ticaret A.S., Whirlpool Finance B.V., Whirlpool Finance Center Corp., Whirlpool Finance Luxembourg S.a r.l., Whirlpool Finance Overseas Ltd., Whirlpool Financial Corporation, Whirlpool Financial Corporation International, Whirlpool Floor Care Corp., Whirlpool France Holdings SAS, Whirlpool France SAS, Whirlpool Germany GmbH, Whirlpool Global B.V., Whirlpool Global Investments B.V., Whirlpool Greater China Inc., Whirlpool Guatemala, Whirlpool Guatemala S.A., Whirlpool Hellas S.A., Whirlpool Holdings Corporation, Whirlpool Home Appliances B.V., Whirlpool Home Appliances Limited Liability Company, Whirlpool Hungarian Trading Limited Liability Company, Whirlpool India Holdings Limited, Whirlpool Insurance Company, Whirlpool Insurance Company Ltd., Whirlpool Internacional S. de R.L. de C.V., Whirlpool International GmbH, Whirlpool International Holdings S.a r.l., Whirlpool International Manufacturing S.a r.l., Whirlpool Ireland Appliances Limited, Whirlpool Ireland Limited, Whirlpool Italia Holdings S.r.l., Whirlpool Italia S.r.l., Whirlpool Japan Co. Ltd., Whirlpool Japan Inc., Whirlpool Kazakhstan LLP, Whirlpool Latin America Corporation, Whirlpool Latvia S.I.A., Whirlpool Lietuva UAB, Whirlpool Ltd Belgrade, Whirlpool Luxembourg Holdings S.a r.l., Whirlpool Luxembourg Investments S.a r.l., Whirlpool Luxembourg S.a r.l., Whirlpool Luxembourg Ventures S.a r.l., Whirlpool MEEA DMCC, Whirlpool Magyarorszag Kereskedelmi Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Whirlpool Management Services S.a.g.l., Whirlpool Maroc S. a r.l., Whirlpool Mauritius Limited, Whirlpool Mexico Holdings LLC, Whirlpool Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Whirlpool Mexico S.A. de C.V., Whirlpool Mexico Ventures LLC, Whirlpool Microwave Products Development Limited, Whirlpool NAAG Holdings Corporation, Whirlpool NAR Holdings, Whirlpool NAR Holdings LLC, Whirlpool Nederland B.V., Whirlpool Nordic, Whirlpool Nordic A/S, Whirlpool Nordic AB, Whirlpool Nordic AS, Whirlpool Nordic OY, Whirlpool Oceania Inc., Whirlpool Overseas Holdings, Whirlpool Overseas Holdings LLC, Whirlpool Overseas Hong Kong Limited, Whirlpool Overseas Manufacturing S.ar.l., Whirlpool Peru S.R.L., Whirlpool Polska Appliances Sp. z o.o., Whirlpool Polska Sp. z o.o., Whirlpool Portugal, Whirlpool Portugal S.A., Whirlpool Product Development (Shenzhen) Company Limited, Whirlpool Properties, Whirlpool Properties Inc., Whirlpool Puntana S.A., Whirlpool R&D S.r.l., Whirlpool RUS LLC, Whirlpool Realty Corporation, Whirlpool Romania S.r.l., Whirlpool S.A., Whirlpool SSC Limited, Whirlpool Slovakia Home Appliances spol. s.r.o., Whirlpool Slovakia spol. s.r.o., Whirlpool South Africa (Proprietary) Limited, Whirlpool Southeast Asia Pte, Whirlpool Sweden Aktiebolag, Whirlpool Taiwan Co. Ltd., Whirlpool Technologies LLC, Whirlpool UK Appliances Limited, Whirlpool UK Pension Scheme Trustee Limited, Whirlpool Ukraine LLC, Whirlpool WW Holdings B.V., Whirlpool do Brasil Investements B.V., Whirlpool do Brasil Ltda., Whirlpool of India Limited, Whirlpool Osterreich GmbH, Whirlpool Osterreich GmbH, Xpelair, Xpelair Ltd., Yummly, Yummly Canada Ltd., and Yummly Inc.. 7 hours ago How Much Higher Can Broadcom Go? Double-Digit Gains In Store For Broadcom With shares of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) up sharply in the wake of the Q4 earnings and Q1 guidance investors and traders alike are surely wondering how much higher can the stock go? Based on our assessment of the report, the market fundamentals, and the chart we think this stock could go a lot higher. Read Article Bayer Aktiengesellschaft operates as a life science company worldwide. It operates through Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Health, and Crop Science segments. The Pharmaceuticals segment offers prescription products primarily for cardiology and women's health care; specialty therapeutics in the areas of oncology, hematology, and ophthalmology; and diagnostic imaging equipment and contrast agents, as well as cell and gene therapy. The Consumer Health segment markets nonprescription over-the-counter medicines, medical products, medicated skincare products, nutritional supplements, and self-care solutions in dermatology, nutritional supplements, pain and cardiovascular risk prevention, digestive health, allergy, and cold and cough. The Crop Science segment offers chemical and biological crop protection products, improved plant traits, seeds, digital solution, and pest and weed control products, as well as customer service for agriculture. This segment also provides breeding, propagation, and production/processing of seeds, including seed dressing. Bayer Aktiengesellschaft has a collaboration agreement with MD Anderson Cancer Center to develop oncology drugs; research and license agreement with Dewpoint Therapeutics, Inc. for the development of new treatments for cardiovascular and gynecological diseases; collaboration agreement with Exscientia Ltd, Foundation Medicine Inc., and Evotec AG; research collaboration with Arvinas Inc. and Forschungszentrum JAlich GmbH; strategic research partnership with University of Oxford to develop novel gynecological therapies; and research collaboration agreements with Haplogen GmbH and Kyoto University to identify new drugs candidates for the treatment of pulmonary diseases. The company distributes its products through wholesalers, pharmacies and pharmacy chains, supermarkets, online and other retailers, and hospitals, as well as directly to farmers. Bayer Aktiengesellschaft was founded in 1863 and is headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Becton, Dickinson and: (Bard Istanbul Healthcare Limited Company), Accuri Cytometers, Accuri Cytometers Inc., Adaptec Manufacturing Singapore, Alverix, Alverix Inc., Atto Bioscience, BD Holding S. de R.L. de C.V., BD Infection Prevention BV, BD Kiestra BV, BD Kiestra Total Lab Automation, BD Rapid Diagnostic (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., BD San Luis Potosi S.A. de C.V., BD Switzerland Sarl, BD Ventures LLC, BD West Africa Limited, BDX INO LLC, Bard (Thailand) Limited, Bard ASDI Inc., Bard Access Systems Inc., Bard Acquisition Sub Inc., Bard Australia Pty. Limited, Bard Benelux N.V., Bard Brachytherapy Inc., Bard Brasil Industria e Comercio de Produtos Para a Saude Ltda., Bard Canada Inc., Bard Chile S.p.A., Bard Czech Republic s.r.o., Bard Devices Inc., Bard Dublin ITC Limited, Bard EMEA Finance Center Sp.z o.o., Bard European Distribution Center N.V., Bard Finance B.V. & Co. KG., Bard Financial Services Ltd., Bard Finland OY, Bard France S.A.S., Bard Global Holdings I LLC, Bard Global Holdings II LLC, Bard Global Holdings III LLC, Bard Healthcare Inc., Bard Healthcare Science (Shanghai) Limited, Bard Hellas S.A., Bard Holding SAS, Bard Holdings Limited, Bard Holdings Netherlands B.V., Bard Hong Kong Limited, Bard IP Holdings Inc., Bard India Healthcare Pvt. Ltd., Bard International Holdings B.V., Bard International Inc., Bard Korea Ltd., Bard Limited, Bard MRL Acquisition Corp., Bard Malaysia Healthcare Sdn. Bhd., Bard Medica SA, Bard Medical Devices (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Bard Medical R&D (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Bard Medical SA (Proprietary) Limited, Bard Mexico Realty S. de R.L. de C.V., Bard Norden AB, Bard Norway AS, Bard Pacific Health Care Company Ltd., Bard Peripheral Vascular Inc., Bard Poland Sp. z.o.o., Bard Productos Plasticos e Medicos Ltda., Bard Reynosa S.A. de C.V., Bard S.r.l., Bard Sdn. Bhd., Bard Shannon Limited, Bard Singapore Private Limited, Bard Sourcing Office Singapore Pte. Ltd., Bard Sweden AB, Bard UK Newco Limited, Bard de Espana S.A., Becton Dickinson (Gibraltar) Holdings Ltd., Becton Dickinson (Gibraltar) Limited, Becton Dickinson (Gibraltar) Management Limited, Becton Dickinson (Mauritius) Limited, Becton Dickinson (Pty) Ltd., Becton Dickinson (Thailand) Limited, Becton Dickinson A.G., Becton Dickinson A/S, Becton Dickinson Argentina S.R.L., Becton Dickinson Asia Holdings Ltd., Becton Dickinson Asia Limited, Becton Dickinson Austria GmbH, Becton Dickinson Austria Holdings GmbH, Becton Dickinson B.V., Becton Dickinson B.V. Saudi Limited Company, Becton Dickinson Benelux N.V., Becton Dickinson Biosciences Systems and Reagents Inc., Becton Dickinson Canada Inc., Becton Dickinson Caribe Ltd., Becton Dickinson Croatia d.o.o., Becton Dickinson Czechia s.r.o., Becton Dickinson Dispensing Belgium BVBA, Becton Dickinson Dispensing Denmark A/S, Becton Dickinson Dispensing France SAS, Becton Dickinson Dispensing Ireland Limited, Becton Dickinson Dispensing Norway, Becton Dickinson Dispensing Spain S.L.U., Becton Dickinson Dispensing UK Ltd., Becton Dickinson Distribution Center N.V., Becton Dickinson East Africa Ltd., Becton Dickinson Euro Finance Sarl, Becton Dickinson Europe Holdings S.A.S., Becton Dickinson France S.A.S., Becton Dickinson GSA Beteilgungs GmbH, Becton Dickinson Global Holdings I Inc., Becton Dickinson Global Holdings II LLC, Becton Dickinson Global Holdings IV LLC, Becton Dickinson Global Holdings V LLC, Becton Dickinson Global Holdings VII LLC, Becton Dickinson Global Holdings VIII LLC, Becton Dickinson Global Services Centre Sdn. Bhd, Becton Dickinson GmbH, Becton Dickinson Guatemala S.A., Becton Dickinson Hellas S.A., Becton Dickinson Holdings Limited, Becton Dickinson Holdings Ltd., Becton Dickinson Holdings Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson Hungary Kft., Becton Dickinson India Private Limited, Becton Dickinson Industrias Cirurgicas Ltda., Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy AB, Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy Holdings UK Limited, Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy Systems Inc., Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy Systems Inc. S.A. de C.V., Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy UK, Becton Dickinson Insulin Syringe Ltd., Becton Dickinson International Holdings II Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson International Holdings III Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson International Holdings Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson Israel Ltd., Becton Dickinson Italia S.p.A., Becton Dickinson Ithalat Ihracat Limited Sirketi, Becton Dickinson Korea Holding Inc., Becton Dickinson Korea Ltd., Becton Dickinson Ltd., Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Finance S.a.r.L., Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Global Holdings Sarl, Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Holdings II S.a.r.L, Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Holdings III S.a.r.L, Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Holdings V S.a.r.L., Becton Dickinson Malaysia Inc., Becton Dickinson Management GmbH & Co. KG, Becton Dickinson Matrex Holdings Inc., Becton Dickinson Medical (S) Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson Medical Devices (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Medical Devices (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Medical Products Pte. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Medical Technology (Jiangsu) Co. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Netherlands Global Holdings II C.V., Becton Dickinson Netherlands Holdings B.V., Becton Dickinson Netherlands Holdings II B.V., Becton Dickinson Norway AS, Becton Dickinson O.Y., Becton Dickinson Overseas Services Ltd., Becton Dickinson Pakistan (Pvt) Ltd., Becton Dickinson Penel Limited, Becton Dickinson Philippines Inc., Becton Dickinson Polska Sp.z.o.o., Becton Dickinson Portugal Unipessoal Lda., Becton Dickinson Pty. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Research Centre Ireland Limited, Becton Dickinson Rowa Germany GmbH, Becton Dickinson Rowa Italy Srl, Becton Dickinson S.A., Becton Dickinson Sample Collection GmbH, Becton Dickinson Scot Financing L.L.P., Becton Dickinson Scot Financing L.P., Becton Dickinson Sdn. Bhd., Becton Dickinson Slovakia s.r.o., Becton Dickinson Sweden AB, Becton Dickinson Sweden Holdings AB, Becton Dickinson Switzerland Global Holdings SarL, Becton Dickinson Technology Campus India, Becton Dickinson U.K. Limited, Becton Dickinson UK Financing I Limited, Becton Dickinson UK Financing II Limited, Becton Dickinson Venezuela C.A., Becton Dickinson Venture LLC, Becton Dickinson Verwaltungs GmbH, Becton Dickinson Vostok LLC, Becton Dickinson Worldwide Investments Sa.r.L., Becton Dickinson Zambia Limited, Becton Dickinson and Company Ltd., Becton Dickinson de Colombia Ltda., Becton Dickinson de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Becton Dickinson del Uruguay S.A., Benex Ltd., Biometric Imaging, Bridger Biomed Inc., C. R. Bard, C. R. Bard (Portugal) - Produtos e Artigos Medicos e Farmaceuticos, C. R. Bard Do Brasil Productos Medicos Ltda., C. R. Bard GmbH, C. R. Bard Inc., C. R. Bard Netherlands Sales B.V., CME America LLC, CME Ltd., CME Medical (UK) Limited, CME UK (Holdings) Limited, CRISI Medical Systems, CRISI Medical Systems Inc., Caesarea Medical Electronics, Cardal II LLC, Care Fusion Development Private Limited, CareFusion, CareFusion (Barbados) SrL, CareFusion (Shanghai) Commercial and Trading Co. Limited, CareFusion 213 LLC, CareFusion 2200 Inc., CareFusion 2201 Inc., CareFusion 302 LLC, CareFusion 303 Inc., CareFusion Asia (HK) Limited, CareFusion BH 335 d.o.o. Cazin, CareFusion Corporation, CareFusion D.R. 203 Ltd., CareFusion France 309 S.A.S., CareFusion Israel 330 Ltd., CareFusion Italy 312 S.p.A., CareFusion Manufacturing LLC, CareFusion Mexico 215 S.A. de C.V., CareFusion Netherlands 328 B.V., CareFusion Netherlands 503 B.V., CareFusion Netherlands 504 B.V., CareFusion Netherlands Financing 283 C.V., CareFusion Resources LLC, CareFusion S.A. 319 (Proprietary) Limited, CareFusion Solutions LLC, CareFusion U.K. 244 Limited, CareFusion U.K. 305 Limited, CareFusion U.K. 306 Limited, Carmel Pharma AB, Carmel Pharma Inc, Cato Software Solutions, Cell Analysis Systems Inc, Cellular Research, Cellular Research Inc., Clearstream Technologies Group Limited, Clearstream Technologies Limited, Clontech Laboratories Inc, Corporativo BD de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Cubex, Cytopeia, DLD (Bermuda) Ltd., DVL Acquisition Sub Inc., Davol Inc., Davol International Limited, Davol Surgical Innovations S.A. de C.V., Difco Laboratories Incorporated, Distribuidora BD Mexico S.A. de C.V., Dutch American Manufacturers (D.A.M.) B.V., Dymax Corporation, Embo Medical Limited, Enturia de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Enturican Inc., FJ International Inc., FlowCardia Inc., FlowCardia LLC, FlowJo LLC, Franklin Lakes Enterprises L.L.C., GSL Solutions, Gamer Lasertechnik GmbH, GenCell Biosystems, GenCell Biosystems Ltd., GeneOhm Sciences, GeneOhm Sciences Canada ULC, Gentest Corporation, Gesco International Inc., Gesco International LLC, HandyLab Inc, HandyLab Inc., IBD Holdings LLC, Iontophoretics Corporation, JoHome LLC, Kabushiki Kaisha Medicon (Medicon Inc.), Liberator Health and Education Services Inc., Liberator Health and Wellness Inc., Liberator Medical Holdings Inc., Liberator Medical Supply Inc., LifeBond, Limited Liability Company Bard Rus, Loma Vista Medical Inc., Loma Vista Medical LLC, Lutonix Inc., Med-Design Corporation, Med-Design Investment Holdings Inc., Med-Safe Systems Inc., MedChem Products Inc., Medafor Inc., Medegen LLC, Medinservice.com Inc., Medivance Inc., NAT Diagnostics, NAT Diagnostics Inc., NOW Medical Distribution Inc., NOW Medical Distribution LLC, Navarre Biomedical LLC, Navarre Biomedical Ltd., Neomend Inc., Nippon Becton Dickinson Company Ltd., Omega Biosystems Incorporated, P.R.C. (Isialys) Societe a responsabilitie limitee (Societe a associe unique), PT Becton Dickinson Indonesia, PharMingen, PreAnalytiX GmbH, Pristine Access Technologies Inc., ProSeed Inc., Procesos para Esterilizacion S.A. de C.V., Productos Bard de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Productos Para el Cuidado de la Salud S.A. de C.V., Puls Medical Devices AS LC, PureWick Corporation, Roberts Laboratories Inc., Rochester Medical Corporation, Rochester Medical Ltd., Saf-T-Med, Safety Syringes, Safety Syringes Inc., Sendal S.L.U., SenoRx Inc., SenoRx LLC, Shield Healthcare Centers Inc., Sirigen, Sirigen II Limited, Sirigen Inc., Sistemas Medicos ALARIS S.A. de C.V., Specialized Cooperative Corporation, Specialized Health Products Inc., Specialized Health Products International Inc., Specialized Health Products International LLC, Staged Diabetes Management LLC, Straub Medical, Straub Medical AG, Surgical Site Solutions Inc., TVA Medical, TVA Medical Inc., Tepha, Tepha Inc., Tri-County Medical & Ostomy Supplies Inc., TriPath Imaging, TriPath Imaging Inc., Vas-Cath Incorporated, Vascular Pathways Inc., Velano Vascular, Velano Vascular Inc., Venetec International Inc., Venetec International LLC, Y-Med Inc., Y-Med LLC, and ZebraSci Inc.. iShares S&P 500 ETF's stock was trading at $275.41 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, IVV stock has increased by 69.6% and is now trading at $467.07. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. The following companies are subsidiares of Travelers Companies: 10762962 Canada Inc., 350 Market Street LLC, 8527512 Canada Inc., Aetna Life and Casualty Co, American Equity Insurance Company, American Equity Specialty Insurance Company, Aprilgrange Limited, Arch Street North LLC, Auto Hartford Investments LLC, Bayhill Restaurant II Associates, Camperdown Corporation, Constitution State Services LLC, Discover Property & Casualty Insurance Company, Discover Specialty Insurance Company, F&G UK Underwriters Limited, Farmington Casualty Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Underwriters Inc., First Floridian Auto and Home Insurance Company, Gulf Underwriters Insurance Company, IHP Capital Partners Fund VIII L.P., Northbrook Holdings Inc., Northfield Insurance Company, Northland Casualty Company, Northland Insurance Company, Phoenix UK Investments LLC, SPC Insurance Agency Inc., Select Insurance Company, Simply Business Holdings Inc., Simply Business Inc., St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company, St. Paul Guardian Insurance Company, St. Paul Mercury Insurance Company, St. Paul Protective Insurance Company, St. Paul Surplus Lines Insurance Company, Standard Fire Properties LLC, Standard Fire UK Investments LLC, TCI Global Services Inc., TPC Investments Inc., TPC U.K. Investments LLC, The Automobile Insurance Company of Hartford Connecticut, The Charter Oak Fire Insurance Company, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company, The Family Business Institute LLC, The Phoenix Insurance Company, The St. Paul Companies Inc., The Standard Fire Insurance Company, The Travelers Casualty Company, The Travelers Home and Marine Insurance Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company of America, The Travelers Indemnity Company of Connecticut, The Travelers Lloyds Insurance Company, TravCo Insurance Company, Travelers (Bermuda) Limited, Travelers Brazil Acquisition LLC, Travelers Brazil Holding LLC, Travelers Casualty Company of Connecticut, Travelers Casualty Insurance Company of America, Travelers Casualty UK Investments LLC, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of Europe Limited, Travelers Commercial Casualty Company, Travelers Commercial Insurance Company, Travelers Constitution State Insurance Company, Travelers Distribution Alliance Inc., Travelers Excess and Surplus Lines Company, Travelers Global Inc., Travelers Indemnity U.K. Investments LLC, Travelers Insurance Company Limited, Travelers Insurance Company of Canada, Travelers Insurance Designated Activity Company, Travelers Insurance Group Holdings Inc., Travelers Lloyds of Texas Insurance Company, Travelers London Limited, Travelers MGA Inc., Travelers Management Limited, Travelers Marine LLC, Travelers Participacoes em Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Personal Insurance Company, Travelers Personal Security Insurance Company, Travelers Property Casualty Company of America, Travelers Property Casualty Corp., Travelers Property Casualty Insurance Company, Travelers Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Syndicate Management Limited, Travelers Texas MGA Inc., Travelers Underwriting Agency Limited, Ultramar Travel Management, United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, Xbridge Limited, Zensurance Brokers Inc., and Zensurance Inc.. The following companies are subsidiares of Centene: APS Parent Inc., AWC of Syracuse Inc., Absolute Total Care Inc., AcariaHealth Inc., AcariaHealth Pharmacy #11 Inc., AcariaHealth Pharmacy #12 Inc., AcariaHealth Pharmacy #13 Inc., AcariaHealth Pharmacy #14 Inc., AcariaHealth Pharmacy Inc., AcariaHealth Solutions Inc., Access Medical Acquisition LLC, Access Medical Group of Florida City LLC, Access Medical Group of Hialeah LLC, Access Medical Group of Lakeland LLC, Access Medical Group of Miami LLC, Access Medical Group of North Miami Beach LLC, Access Medical Group of Opa-Locka LLC, Access Medical Group of Perrine LLC, Access Medical Group of Tampa II LLC, Access Medical Group of Tampa III LLC, Access Medical Group of Tampa LLC, Access Medical Group of Westchester LLC, Accountable Care Coalition Direct Contracting LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Chesapeake LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Community Health Centers II LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Community Health Centers LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Elite Providers II LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Elite Providers III LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Elite Providers IV LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Elite Providers LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Elite Providers V LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Elite Providers VI LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Elite Providers VII LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Florida Partners LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Georgia LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Maryland LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Maryland Primary Care LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Mississippi LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of New Jersey Inc., Accountable Care Coalition of North Texas LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Northeast Georgia LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Northeast Partners LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Northwest Florida LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Prime Health LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Quality Health II LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Quality Health III LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Quality Health LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Southeast Partners LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Southeast Physician Partners LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Southeast Texas Inc., Accountable Care Coalition of Southeast Wisconsin LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Tennessee LLC, Accountable Care Coalition of Texas Inc., Agate Resources Inc., AirLogix, Ambetter of Magnolia Inc., Ambetter of North Carolina Inc., Ambetter of Peach State Inc., America's 1st Choice California Holdings LLC, American Progressive Life and Health Insurance Company of New York, Apixio, Apixio Inc, Arch Personalized Medicine Initiative LLC, Arkansas Health & Wellness Health Plan Inc., Arkansas Total Care Holding Company LLC, Arkansas Total Care Inc., B2B Gestion Integra S.L.U., B2B Salud S.L.U., Bankers Reserve Life Insurance Company of Wisconsin, Blackcrow Asistencia Medica S.L, Bridgeway Health Solutions LLC, Bridgeway Health Solutions of Arizona Inc., Buckeye Community Health Plan Inc., Buckeye Health Plan Community Solutions Inc., CCTX Holdings LLC, CMC Real Estate Company LLC, CT Poprad s.r.o., CT Presov s.r.o., Calibrate Acquisition Company, California Health and Wellness Plan, Cantina Laredo Clayton LP, Cardium Health Services, Care 1st Health Plan of Arizona Inc., Care1st Health Plan Administrative Services Inc., Carolina Complete Health Holding Company Partnership, Carolina Complete Health Inc., Casenet LLC, Casenet S.R.O., CeltiCare Health Plan Holdings LLC, CeltiCare Health Plan of Massachusetts Inc., Celtic Group Inc., Celtic Insurance Company, Cenpatico Behavioral Health LLC, Cenpatico Behavioral Health of Arizona LLC, Cenpatico of Arizona Inc., Centene Center I LLC, Centene Center II LLC, Centene Center LLC, Centene Company of Texas LP, Centene Europe Finance Company Limited, Centene Health Plan Holdings Inc., Centene Institute for Advanced Health Education LLC, Centene International Ventures LLC, Centene Investments LLC, Centene Management Company LLC, Centene Venture Company Alabama Health Plan Inc., Centene Venture Company Florida Inc., Centene Venture Company Illinois Inc., Centene Venture Company Indiana Inc., Centene Venture Company Kansas Inc., Centene Venture Company Michigan Inc., Centene Venture Company Tennessee Inc., Centro Inmunologocia De La Comunidad Valenciana S.L., Centurion Correctional Healthcare of New Mexico LLC, Centurion Detention Health Services LLC, Centurion LLC, Centurion of Arizona LLC, Centurion of Delaware LLC, Centurion of Florida LLC, Centurion of Kansas LLC, Centurion of Minnesota LLC, Centurion of Mississippi LLC, Centurion of New Hampshire LLC, Centurion of Pennsylvania LLC, Centurion of Tennessee LLC, Centurion of Vermont LLC, Centurion of West Virginia LLC, Centurion of Wyoming LLC, Chrysalis Medical Services LLC, Clinica Santo Domingo De Lugo S.L., Collaborative Health Systems IPA LLC, Collaborative Health Systems LLC, Collaborative Health Systems of Maryland LLC, Collaborative Health Systems of Virginia LLC, Comfort Hospice of Missouri LLC, Comfort Hospice of Texas LLC, ComfortBrook Hospice LLC, Community Medical Group, Community Medical Holdings Corporation, Comprehensive Health Management Inc., Comprehensive Reinsurance Ltd., Coordinated Care Corporation, Coordinated Care of Washington Inc., Country Style Health Care LLC, Discare CZ a.s., District Community Care Inc., Dr Magnet s.r.o., Elche-Crevillente Salud, Envolve Benefits Options Inc., Envolve Captive Insurance Company Inc., Envolve Dental IPA of New York Inc., Envolve Dental Inc., Envolve Dental of Florida Inc., Envolve Dental of Texas Inc., Envolve Health, Envolve Holdings Inc., Envolve Inc., Envolve Optical Inc., Envolve PeopleCare Inc., Envolve Pharmacy IPA LLC, Envolve Pharmacy Solutions Inc., Envolve Total Vision Inc., Envolve Vision Benefits Inc., Envolve Vision IPA of New York Inc., Envolve Vision Inc., Envolve Vision of Florida Inc., Envolve Vision of Texas Inc., Essential Care Partners LLC, Exactus Pharmacy Solutions Inc., Family Nurse Care II LLC, Family Nurse Care LLC, Family Nurse Care of Ohio LLC, Fidelis Care, Forensic Health Services LLC, Foundation Care LLC, Godgrace Asistencia Medica S.L., Golden Triangle Physician Alliance, Grace Hospice of Austin LLC, Grace Hospice of Grand Rapids LLC, Grace Hospice of Illinois LLC, Grace Hospice of Indiana LLC, Grace Hospice of San Antonio LLC, Grace Hospice of Virginia LLC, Grace Hospice of Wisconsin LLC, Granite State Health Plan Inc., Growly Asistencia Sanitaria S.L., HHS Texas Management Inc., HHS Texas Management LP, Hallmark Life Insurance Company, Harmony Behavioral Health IPA Inc., Harmony Behavioral Health Inc., Harmony Health Management Inc., Harmony Health Plan Inc., Harmony Health Systems Inc., Health Care Enterprises LLC, Health Net Access Inc., Health Net Community Solutions Inc., Health Net Community Solutions of Arizona Inc., Health Net Federal Services LLC, Health Net Health Plan of Oregon Inc., Health Net LLC, Health Net Life Insurance Company, Health Net Life Reinsurance Company, Health Net Pharmaceutical Services, Health Net of Arizona Inc., Health Net of California Inc., Health Plan Real Estate Holdings Inc., HealthSmart Benefit Solutions Inc., HealthSmart Benefits Management LLC, HealthSmart Care Management Solutions LP, HealthSmart Information Systems Inc., HealthSmart Preferred Care II LP, HealthSmart Preferred Network II Inc., HealthSmart Primary Care Clinics LP, HealthSmart Rx Solutions Inc., Healthy Louisiana Holdings LLC, Healthy Missouri Holdings Inc., Healthy Washington Holdings Inc., Heritage Health Systems Inc., Heritage Health Systems of Texas Inc., Heritage Home Hospice LLC, Heritage Physician Networks, Home State Health Plan Inc., HomeScripts.com LLC, Hospice DME Company LLC, Hospinet S.L., Hospital Polusa S.A., Hospital Povisa S.A., Hudson Accountable Care LLC, IAH of Florida LLC, Illinois Health Practice Alliance LLC, Infraestructuras y Servicios de Alzira S. L., Integrated Care Network of Florida LLC, Integrated Mental Health Management LLC, Integrated Mental Health Services, Interpreta Holdings Inc., Interpreta Inc., Iowa Total Care Inc., Kentucky Spirit Health Plan Inc., LBB Industries Inc., LifeShare Management Group LLC, LiveHealthier Inc., Louisiana Healthcare Connections Inc., MH Services International Holdings (UK) Limited, MHM, MHM Correctional Services LLC, MHM Health Professionals LLC, MHM Services Inc., MHM Services of California LLC, MHM Solutions LLC, MHN Government Services LLC, MHN Services LLC, MHS Consulting International Inc., MHS Travel & Charter Inc., MR Centrum Melnick s.r.o., MR Poprad s.r.o., MR Zilina s.r.o., Magnolia Health Plan Inc., Managed Health Network, Managed Health Network LLC, Managed Health Services Insurance Corporation, Maryland Collaborative Care LLC, Maryland Collaborative Care Transformation Organization Inc., Mauli Ola Health and Wellness Inc., Medicina NZ spol s.r.o., Meridian Health Plan of Illinois Inc., Meridian Health Plan of Michigan Inc., Meridian Management Company LLC, Meridian Network Services LLC, MeridianRx IPA LLC, MeridianRx LLC, MeridianRx of Indiana LLC, Michigan Complete Health, Mid-Atlantic Collaborative Care LLC, Nebraska Total Care Inc., Network Providers LLC, New York Quality Healthcare Corporation, Next Door Neighbors Inc., Next Door Neighbors LLC., North Florida Health Services Inc., Northern Maryland Collaborative Care LLC, Novasys Health Inc., OB Care, OB Klinika, Ohana Health Plan Inc., Oklahoma Complete Health Inc., One Care by Care 1st Health Plans of Arizona Inc, Operose Health (Group) Ltd., Operose Health (Group) UK Ltd., Operose Health Ltd., OptiCare Health Systems - Managed Vision Business, PANTHERx Rare Pharmacy, Panther Pass Co LLC, Panther Specialty Holding Co LLC, Pantherx Access Services LLC, Pantherx Specialty LLC, Parker LP LLC, Peach State Health Plan Inc., Penn Marketing America LLC, Pennsylvania Health and Wellness Inc., Phoenix Home Health Care LLC, Pinnacle Home Care LLC, Pinnacle Senior Care of Illinois LLC, Pinnacle Senior Care of Indiana LLC, Pinnacle Senior Care of Kalamazoo LLC, Pinnacle Senior Care of Missouri LLC, Pinnacle Senior Care of Wisconsin LLC, Premier Marketing Group LLC, PrimeroSalud S.L., Pro Diagnostic Group A.S., Pro Magnet CZ s.r.o., Pro Magnet s.r.o, Pro RTG s.r.o, Progress Medical A.S., Prowl Holdings LLC, QCA Healthplan Inc., Qualchoice Life and Health Insurance Company, Quincy Coverage Corporation, R&C Healthcare LLC, RMED LLC, RX Direct Inc., Rapid Respiratory Services LLC, Ribera Lab S.L.U., Ribera Salud II, Ribera Salud Proyectos S.L., Ribera Salud S.A., Ribera Salud Tecnologias S.L.U., Ribera Slaud Infraestructuras S.L.U., Ribera-Quilpro UTE, Salus Administrative Services Inc., Salus IPA LLC, Secure Capital Solutions 2000 S.L.U., SelectCare Health Plans Inc., SelectCare of Texas Inc., Seniorcorps Peninsula LLC, Servicios De Mantenimiento Prevencor S.L.U., SilverSummit Healthplan Inc., Social Health Bridge LLC, Social Health Bridge Trust, Specialty Therapeutic Care GP LLC, Specialty Therapeutic Care Holdings, Specialty Therapeutic Care Holdings LLC, Specialty Therapeutic Care LP, Sunflower State Health Plan Inc., Sunshine Health Community Solutions Inc., Sunshine Health Holding LLC, Sunshine State Health Plan Inc., Superior HealthPlan Community Solutions Inc., Superior HealthPlan Inc., The Practice Properties Limited, The WellCare Management Group Inc., Torrejon Salud S.A., Torrevieja Salud S.L.U., Torrevieja Salud UTE, Traditional Home Health Services LLC, Trillium Community Health Plan Inc., U.S. Medical Management Holdings Inc., U.S. Medical Management LLC, UAM Agent Services Corp., US Script, USMM Accountable Care Partners LLC, Universal American Corp., Universal American Financial Services Inc., Universal American Holdings LLC, WCG Health Management Inc., WellCare Health Insurance Company of America, WellCare Health Insurance Company of Kentucky Inc., WellCare Health Insurance Company of Louisiana Inc., WellCare Health Insurance Company of Nevada Inc., WellCare Health Insurance Company of New Hampshire Inc., WellCare Health Insurance Company of New Jersey Inc., WellCare Health Insurance Company of Oklahoma Inc., WellCare Health Insurance Company of Washington Inc., WellCare Health Insurance Company of Wisconsin Inc., WellCare Health Insurance of Arizona Inc., WellCare Health Insurance of Connecticut Inc., WellCare Health Insurance of Hawaii Inc., WellCare Health Insurance of New York Inc., WellCare Health Insurance of North Carolina Inc., WellCare Health Insurance of Southwest Inc., WellCare Health Insurance of Tennessee Inc., WellCare Health Plans, WellCare Health Plans of Arizona Inc., WellCare Health Plans of California Inc., WellCare Health Plans of Kentucky Inc., WellCare Health Plans of Massachusetts Inc., WellCare Health Plans of Missouri Inc., WellCare Health Plans of New Jersey Inc., WellCare Health Plans of Rhode Island Inc., WellCare Health Plans of Tennessee Inc., WellCare Health Plans of Vermont Inc., WellCare Health Plans of Wisconsin Inc., WellCare National Health Insurance Company, WellCare Pharmacy Benefits Management Inc., WellCare Prescription Insurance Inc., WellCare of Alabama Inc., WellCare of Arkansas Inc., WellCare of California Inc., WellCare of Connecticut Inc., WellCare of Florida Inc., WellCare of Georgia Inc., WellCare of Illinois Inc., WellCare of Indiana Inc., WellCare of Kansas Inc., WellCare of Maine Inc., WellCare of Michigan Holding Company, WellCare of Mississippi Inc., WellCare of Missouri Health Insurance Company Inc., WellCare of New Hampshire Inc., WellCare of New York Inc., WellCare of North Carolina Inc., WellCare of Ohio Inc., WellCare of Oklahoma Inc., WellCare of Pennsylvania Inc., WellCare of Puerto Rico Inc., WellCare of South Carolina Inc., WellCare of Texas Inc., WellCare of Virginia Inc., WellCare of Washington Inc., Wellcare Health Plans Inc., Western Sky Community Care Inc., Windsor Health Group Inc., Winning Security S.L., Worlco Management Services, and nirvanaHealth LLC. Conifex Timber Inc. primarily manufactures and sells lumber products in the United States, China, Canada, Japan, and internationally. It is involved in the timber harvesting, reforestation, and forest management activities; manufacture of finished softwood lumber from spruce, pine, and fir logs; manufacture, sale, and distribution of dimension lumber; processing logs into lumber and wood chips, as well as by-products or residues, such as trim blocks, sawdust, shavings, and barks; and providing value added lumber finishing services. The company also develops bioenergy and bio products; and operates a 36 megawatt biomass power generation plant, which produces renewable energy for commercial sale. The company was formerly known as West Fourth Capital Inc. and changed its name to Conifex Timber Inc. in June 2010. Conifex Timber Inc. was incorporated in 2007 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Read More 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. Stantec Inc. provides professional consulting services in the area of infrastructure and facilities in Canada, the United States, and internationally. The company provides consulting services in engineering, architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, surveying, environmental sciences, project management, and project economics. It also offers water, transportation, and public works; transportation planning and traffic engineering; and resource assessment, mine development, reclamation, hydrology, and geotechnical and infrastructure engineering services, as well as urban planning, traffic assessments and optimization, environmental impact assessments, and public consultation services. In addition, the company provides structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and hydraulics engineering services. It serves urban regeneration, infrastructure, education, public and private sector, tourism and leisure, and waste and water sectors, as well as office and commercial, residential, and retail and town centers. The company was formerly known as Stanley Technology Group Inc. and changed its name to Stantec Inc. in October 1998. Stantec Inc. was founded in 1954 and is headquartered in Edmonton, Canada. Read More Nabors Industries Ltd. engages in the provision of platform work over and drilling rigs. It operates through the following segments: U.S. Drilling, Canada Drilling, International Drilling, Drilling Solutions, and Rig Technologies. The U.S. Drilling segment includes land drilling activities in the lower 48 states and Alaska, as well as offshore operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The Canada segment consists of land-based drilling rigs in Canada. The International segment focuses in maintaining a footprint in the oil and gas market, most notably in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Kazakhstan, and Venezuela. The Drilling Solutions segment offers drilling technologies, such as patented steering systems and rig instrumentation software systems that enhance drilling performance and wellbore placement. The Rig Technologies segment comprises Canrig, which manufactures and sells top drives, catwalks, wrenches, drawworks, and drilling related equipment, such as robotic systems and downhole tools. The company was founded by Clair Nabors in 1952 and is headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise: 3Com International Inc., 3PAR Inc., Apogee, Aruba Networks Inc., Aruba Networks International Cayman, Aruba Networks International Limited, BlueData Software, Cloud Cruiser, Cloud Technology Partners, Cloud Technology Partners Inc., Compaq Computer (Mauritius), Compaq Trademark B.V., Cray, Cray Inc., EDS World Corporation (Far East) LLC, EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc., H3C Holdings Limited, HP Enterprise Services Australia Pty Ltd, HP Financial Services (Australia) Pty Limited, HP Financial Services (Chile) Limitada, HP Financial Services (Japan) K.K., HP Financial Services Arrendamento Mercantil S.A., HP Financial Services Company (Korea), HP Financial Services International Holdings Company, HPE Government LLC, HPFS Global Holdings I LLC, HPFS Global Holdings II LLC, HPFS Rental S.R.L., Hangzhou H3C Technologies Co. Ltd, Hewlett Packard Caribe BV LLC, Hewlett Packard Colombia Ltda., Hewlett Packard Enterprise (China) Co. Ltd., Hewlett Packard Enterprise B.V., Hewlett Packard Enterprise B.V. Amstelveen Meyrin Branch, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Co., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Co. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Cie, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Costa Rica Limitada, Hewlett Packard Enterprise GlobalSoft Private Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise India Private Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Ireland Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Luxembourg SCA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Polska sp. z o.o., Hewlett Packard Pathfinder LLC, Hewlett Packard Taiwan Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (Israel) Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (M) Sdn. Bhd., Hewlett-Packard (Nigeria) Limited, Hewlett-Packard (Schweiz) GmbH, Hewlett-Packard (Tanzania) Limited, Hewlett-Packard (Thailand) Limited, Hewlett-Packard ApS, Hewlett-Packard Argentina S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Australia Pty Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Belgium SPRL/BVBA, Hewlett-Packard Bermuda Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Brasil Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Bulgaria EOOD, Hewlett-Packard Caribe B.V., Hewlett-Packard Caribe Y Andina B.V. LLC, Hewlett-Packard Chile Comercial Limitada, Hewlett-Packard Cyprus Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Egypt Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Financial Services (India) Private Limited, Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Canada Company, Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Company, Hewlett-Packard France SAS, Hewlett-Packard G1 SPV (Cayman) Company, Hewlett-Packard Gesellschaft mbH, Hewlett-Packard Ghana Limited, Hewlett-Packard GmbH, Hewlett-Packard Guatemala Limitada, Hewlett-Packard HK SAR Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Hellas EPE, Hewlett-Packard Holdings Ltd., Hewlett-Packard International Bank Designated Activity Company, Hewlett-Packard International Bank Public Limited Company, Hewlett-Packard International Sarl, Hewlett-Packard Italiana S.r.l., Hewlett-Packard Japan Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Korea Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Leasing Limited, Hewlett-Packard Limited, Hewlett-Packard Luxembourg Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Macau Limited, Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Marigalante Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Hewlett-Packard Middle East FZ-LLC, Hewlett-Packard Mocambique Limitada - Sociedada em Liquidacao, Hewlett-Packard Nederland B.V., Hewlett-Packard New Zealand, Hewlett-Packard Norge AS, Hewlett-Packard OY, Hewlett-Packard Operations Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Hewlett-Packard Peru S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Philippines Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Portugal Lda., Hewlett-Packard SARL, Hewlett-Packard SIA, Hewlett-Packard Servicios Espana S.L., Hewlett-Packard Singapore (Sales) Pte. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard South Africa (Proprietary) Limited, Hewlett-Packard Sverige AB, Hewlett-Packard Technology Center Inc., Hewlett-Packard Teknoloji Cozumleri Limited Sirketi, Hewlett-Packard The Hague B.V., Hewlett-Packard Venezuela S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Vision Limited, Hewlett-Packard d.o.o., Hewlett-Packard s.r.o., Limited Liability Company Hewlett Packard Enterprise, MapR Technologies, New H3C Technologies Co. Ltd., Niara Inc., Nimble Storage, Nimble Storage Inc., Nimble Storage Israel Ltd, Nimble Storage Japan GK, Nimble Storage UK Limited, Plexxi, RedPixie, SGI (Silicon Graphics), Sapphire Holding Co, Scytale, Shanghai Hewlett-Packard Co. Ltd., Silver Peak, SimpliVity, Sinope Holding B.V., Trilead, UAB ES Hague Lietuva, and Unis Huashan Technologies Co. Limited. The latest DoD financial survey gave servicemembers an edge in financial literacy compared with their civilian counterparts, but it also showed that about 3 in 10 servicemembers are facing some kind of financial unease. The survey is part of DoD's efforts to embed financial literacy in the service culture, rather than a separate program in family support centers. The mission is to expand literacy to the total force rather than focus on the junior enlisted population. A goal is to prevent financial problems and decrease the adverse personnel actions due to financial mismanagement. [RELATED: Life and Premium MOAA Members Can Download These Personal Finance Publications] About 20 percent of the 120,000 distributed surveys were filled out. Among the findings: Servicemembers scored 61 percent in financial literacy, compared with the 54 percent scored by the general public on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's National Financial Well-Being Survey. Approximately 70 percent of servicemember survey-takers consider themselves financially comfortable. The other 30 percent have some difficulty or are uncomfortable. Of servicemembers surveyed, 80 percent save regularly or save some each month. About 35 percent have no emergency savings, or less than a month's worth. The top three servicemember financial goals are preparing for retirement, building emergency savings, and being debt-free. The survey provides insight into the status of financial literacy among servicemembers. A recent law requires a robust DoD financial education program, and financial literacy is more critical in light of the new retirement program, the Blended Retirement System (BRS). The BRS reduces retired pay by 20 percent while establishing a 5 percent match for members contributing to the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). The BRS also provides a lump-sum retention bonus at the 8-to-12-year point and a lump-sum payout option at retirement for a reduced retired pay amount. Learn more about the BRS here. A MOAA mission is to enhance financial literacy. Efforts include conducting base classes, publishing books and articles, and providing counsel and consumer advice to our Premium and Life members. You can review our publications at www.moaa.org/publications. Invesco Quality Municipal Income Trust is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Invesco Ltd. The fund is co-managed by Invesco Advisers, Inc., INVESCO Asset Management Deutschland GmbH, INVESCO Asset Management Limited, INVESCO Asset Management (Japan) Limited, Invesco Hong Kong Limited, INVESCO Senior Secured Management, Inc., and Invesco Canada Ltd. It invests in the fixed income markets of the United States. The fund primarily invests in investment grade municipal securities which include municipal bonds, municipal notes, and municipal commercial paper. It employs fundamental analysis with bottom-up security selection approach to create its portfolio. The fund was previously known as Morgan Stanley Quality Municipal Income Trust. Invesco Quality Municipal Income Trust was formed on September 29, 1992 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Quest Diagnostics: AmeriPath, AmeriPath Cincinnati Inc. (OH), AmeriPath Cleveland Inc. (OH), AmeriPath Consolidated Labs Inc. (FL), AmeriPath Florida LLC (DE), AmeriPath Hospital Services Florida LLC (DE), AmeriPath Inc. (DE), AmeriPath Indianapolis PC (IN), AmeriPath Kentucky Inc. (KY), AmeriPath Lubbock 5.01(A) Corporation (TX), AmeriPath New York LLC (DE), AmeriPath Texas Inc. (DE), AmeriPath Tucson Inc. (AZ), American Medical Laboratories, American Medical Laboratories Incorporated (DE), Associated Clinical Laboratories L.P. (PA), Associated Clinical Laboratories of Pennsylvania L.L.C. (PA), Athena Diagnostics, Athena Diagnostics Inc. (DE), Blueprint Genetics, Blueprint Genetics FZ-LLC (UAE), Blueprint Genetics Inc. (DE), Blueprint Genetics Oy (Finland), California Laboratory Associates, Cape Cod Healthcare - Business, Celera, ClearPoint Diagnostic, Clearpoint Diagnostic Laboratories LLC (TX), Cleveland HeartLab, Cleveland HeartLab Inc. (DE), Clinical Laboratory Partners, Colorado Pathology Consultants P.C. (CO), ConVerge Diagnostic Services, Consolidated DermPath Inc. (DE), DFW 5.01(a) Corporation (TX), DGXWMT JV LLC (DE), Dermatopathology of Wisconsin S.C. (WI), Diagnostic Laboratory of Oklahoma LLC (OK), Diagnostic Pathology Services Inc. (OK), Diagnostic Reference Services Inc. (MD), ExamOne Canada Inc. (New Brunswick), ExamOne LLC (DE), ExamOne World Wide Inc. (PA), ExamOne World Wide of NJ Inc. (NJ), Focus Diagnostics, HemoCue, Hoffman M.D. Associated Pathologists Chartered (NV), Institute for Dermatopathology Inc. (PA), Isabella Street Urban Renewal LLC (NJ), Kailash B. Sharma M.D. Inc. (GA), Kilpatrick Pathology P.A. (NC), LabOne, LabOne LLC (MO), LabOne of Ohio Inc. (DE), Laboratorio de Analisis Biomedicos S.A. (Mexico), Lancet Labs, MACL, Med Fusion LLC (TX), Med fusion, MedPlus, Mid America Clinical Laboratories LLC (IN), Nomad Massachusetts Inc. (MA), Nuclear Medicine and Pathology Associates (GA), Ocmulgee Medical Pathology Association Inc. (GA), Pathology Building Partnership (MD) (gen. ptnrshp.), PeaceHealth Laboratories, PhenoPath Laboratories, PhenoPath Laboratories PLLC (WA), Q Squared Solutions Holdings LLC (DE), Q Squared Solutions Holdings Limited (UK), Quest Diagnostics (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. (China), Quest Diagnostics Brasil Holdings Ltd. (UK), Quest Diagnostics Clinical Laboratories, Quest Diagnostics Clinical Laboratories Inc. (DE), Quest Diagnostics Domestic Holder LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics HTAS India Private Limited (India), Quest Diagnostics Health & Wellness LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Holdings Incorporated (DE), Quest Diagnostics Holdings Ltd. (UK), Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (MD), Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (NV), Quest Diagnostics India Private Limited (India), Quest Diagnostics Infectious Disease Inc. (DE), Quest Diagnostics International Holdings Limited (UK), Quest Diagnostics International LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Investments LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Ireland Limited (Ireland), Quest Diagnostics LLC (CT), Quest Diagnostics LLC (IL), Quest Diagnostics LLC (MA), Quest Diagnostics Massachusetts LLC (MA), Quest Diagnostics Mexico Holding Company Trust (Mexico), Quest Diagnostics Mexico S de RL de CV (Mexico), Quest Diagnostics Nichols Institute (CA), Quest Diagnostics Nichols Institute Inc. (VA), Quest Diagnostics Receivables Inc. (DE), Quest Diagnostics Subsidiary Holdings Ltd. (UK), Quest Diagnostics TB LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Terracotta LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Venture LLC (PA), Quest Diagnostics Ventures LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics do Brasil Ltda. (Brazil), Quest Diagnostics of Pennsylvania Inc. (DE), Quest Diagnostics of Puerto Rico Inc. (PR), Quest HealthConnect LLC (CA), ReproSource, Reprosource Fertility Diagnostics Inc. (MA), Solstas Lab Partners, Sonora Quest Laboratories LLC (AZ), Specialty Laboratories Inc. (CA), Summit Health, UMass Memorial Medical Center - Anatomic Pathology Outreach Laboratory Business, Unilab Corporation, and Unilab Corporation (DE). The following companies are subsidiares of Banco Santander: 2 & 3 Triton Limited, A & L CF (Guernsey) Limited (f), A & L CF June (2) Limited, A & L CF June (3) Limited, A & L CF March (5) Limited, A & L CF September (4) Limited, AFB SAM Holdings S.L., ALIL Services Limited (b), AN (123) Limited, ANITCO Limited, Abbey Business Services (India) Private Limited, Abbey Covered Bonds (LM) Limited, Abbey National, Abbey National Beta Investments Limited, Abbey National Business Office Equipment Leasing Limited, Abbey National International Limited, Abbey National Nominees Limited, Abbey National PLP (UK) Limited, Abbey National Property Investments, Abbey National Treasury Services Investments Limited, Abbey National Treasury Services Overseas Holdings, Abbey National UK Investments, Abbey Stockbrokers (Nominees) Limited, Abbey Stockbrokers Limited, Ablasa Participaciones S.L., Administracion de Bancos Latinoamericanos Santander S.L., Aduro S.A., Aevis Europa S.L., Afisa S.A., Albert., Aljardi SGPS Lda., Alliance & Leicester, Alliance & Leicester Cash Solutions Limited, Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank Limited, Alliance & Leicester Investments (Derivatives) Limited, Alliance & Leicester Investments (No.2) Limited, Alliance & Leicester Investments Limited, Alliance & Leicester Limited, Alliance & Leicester Personal Finance Limited, Altamira Santander Real Estate S.A., Alternative Leasing FIL, Amazonia Trade Limited, Amherst Pierpont, Andaluza de Inversiones S.A., Aquanima Brasil Ltda., Aquanima Chile S.A., Aquanima Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Aquanima S.A., Arcaz - Sociedade Imobiliaria Portuguesa Lda., Argenline S.A. (b), Asto Digital Limited, Athena Corporation Limited, Atual - Fundo de Invest Multimercado Credito Privado Investimento no Exterior, Atual Servicos de Recuperacao de Creditos e Meios Digitais S.A., Autodescuento S.L., Autohaus24 GmbH, Auttar HUT Processamento de Dados Ltda., Aviacion Antares A.I.E., Aviacion Britanica A.I.E., Aviacion Centaurus A.I.E., Aviacion Comillas S.L. Unipersonal, Aviacion Intercontinental A.I.E., Aviacion Laredo S.L., Aviacion Oyambre S.L. Unipersonal, Aviacion Real A.I.E., Aviacion Santillana S.L., Aviacion Suances S.L., Aviacion Triton A.I.E., Aymore Credito Financiamento e Investimento S.A., BEN Beneficios e Servicos S.A., BRS Investments S.A., BZW Bank, Banca PSA Italia S.p.A., Banco Bandepe S.A., Banco Madesant - Sociedade Unipessoal S.A., Banco PSA Finance Brasil S.A., Banco Popular, Banco Santander (Brasil) S.A., Banco Santander (Mexico) S.A. Institucion de Banca Multiple Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico como Fiduciaria del Fideicomiso 100740, Banco Santander (Mexico) S.A. Institucion de Banca Multiple Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico como Fiduciaria del Fideicomiso 2002114, Banco Santander (Mexico) S.A. Institucion de Banca Multiple Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico como Fiduciaria del Fideicomiso GFSSLPT, Banco Santander - Chile, Banco Santander Consumer Portugal S.A., Banco Santander International, Banco Santander International SA, Banco Santander Mexico S.A. Institucion de Banca Multiple Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico, Banco Santander Peru S.A., Banco Santander Rio S.A., Banco Santander S.A., Banco Santander Totta S.A., Banco Santander de Negocios Colombia S.A., Banco de Albacete S.A., Bansa Santander S.A., CCAP Auto Lease Ltd., Canyon Multifamily Impact Fund IV LLC, Capital Street Delaware LP, Capital Street Holdings LLC, Capital Street REIT Holdings LLC, Capital Street S.A., Carfax (Guernsey) Limited (f), Carfinco Financial Group, Carfinco Financial Group Inc., Carfinco Inc., Casa de Bolsa Santander S.A. de C.V. Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico, Cater Allen Holdings Limited, Cater Allen International Limited, Cater Allen Limited, Cater Allen Lloyd's Holdings Limited, Cater Allen Syndicate Management Limited, Centro de Capacitacion Santander A.C., Certidesa S.L., Chrysler Capital Auto Funding I LLC, Chrysler Capital Auto Funding II LLC, Chrysler Capital Auto Receivables LLC, Chrysler Capital Master Auto Receivables Funding 2 LLC, Chrysler Capital Master Auto Receivables Funding 4 LLC, Chrysler Capital Master Auto Receivables Funding LLC, Cobranza Amigable S.A.P.I. de C.V., Community Development and Affordable Housing Fund LLC (g), Compagnie Generale de Credit Aux Particuliers - Credipar S.A., Compagnie Pour la Location de Vehicules - CLV, Comunidad Laboral Trabajando Argentina S.A., Comunidad Laboral Trabajando Iberica S.L. Unipersonal en liquidacion (b), Consulteam Consultores de Gestao Lda., Consumer Lending Receivables LLC, Crawfall S.A. (b), Cantabra de Inversiones S.A., Cantabro Catalana de Inversiones S.A., Darep Designated Activity Company, Decarome S.A.P.I. de C.V., Deva Capital Advisory Company S.L., Deva Capital Holding Company S.L., Deva Capital Investment Company S.L., Deva Capital Management Company S.L., Deva Capital Servicer Company S.L., Digital Procurement Holdings N.V., Diners Club Spain S.A., Direccion Estratega S.C., Dirgenfin S.L. en liquidacion (b), Ebury, El Corte Ingles, Elavon Mexico, Electrolyser S.A. de C.V., Entidad de Desarrollo a la Pequena y Micro Empresa Santander Consumo Peru S.A., Erestone S.A.S., Esfera Fidelidade S.A., Evidence Previdencia S.A., Financeira El Corte Ingles Portugal S.F.C. S.A., Financiera El Corte Ingles E.F.C. S.A., Finsantusa S.L. Unipersonal, First National Motor Business Limited, First National Motor Contracts Limited, First National Motor Facilities Limited, First National Motor Finance Limited, First National Motor Leasing Limited, First National Motor plc, First National Tricity Finance Limited, Fondos Santander S.A. Administradora de Fondos de Inversion (en liquidacion) (b), Fortensky Trading Ltd., Fosse Funding (No.1) Limited, Fosse Master Issuer plc, Fosse Trustee (UK) Limited, GTS El Centro Equity Holdings LLC, GTS El Centro Project Holdings LLC, Gamma Sociedade Financeira de Titularizacao de Creditos S.A., Gesban Mexico Servicios Administrativos Globales S.A. de C.V., Gesban Santander Servicios Profesionales Contables Limitada, Gesban Servicios Administrativos Globales S.L., Gesban UK Limited, Gestion de Instalaciones Fotovoltaicas S.L. Unipersonal, Gestion de Inversiones JILT S.A., Gestora de Procesos S.A. en liquidacion (b), Getnet Adquirencia e Servicos para Meios de Pagamento S.A., Global Vosgos S.L. Unipersonal, Grupo Empresarial Santander S.L., Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico S.A. de C.V., Grupo Financiero Santander SAB de CV, Guaranty Car S.A. Unipersonal, HQ Mobile Limited, Hispamer Renting S.A. Unipersonal, Holbah II Limited, Holbah Santander S.L. Unipersonal, Holmes Funding Limited, Holmes Master Issuer plc, Holmes Trustees Limited, Hyundai Capital Bank Europe GmbH, Iberica de Compras Corporativas S.L., Independence Community Bank Corp., Insurance Funding Solutions Limited, Interfinance Holanda B.V., Inversiones Capital Global S.A. Unipersonal, Inversiones Maritimas del Mediterraneo S.A., Isla de los Buques S.A., Klare Corredora de Seguros S.A., Landcompany 2020 S.L., Langton Funding (No.1) Limited, Langton Mortgages Trustee (UK) Limited, Langton Securities (2008-1) plc, Langton Securities (2010-1) PLC, Langton Securities (2010-2) PLC, Laparanza S.A., Liquidity Limited, Luri 1 S.A. en liquidacion (b) (e), Luri 6 S.A. Unipersonal, Master Red Europa S.L., Mata Alta S.L., Merciver S.L., Mercury TFS, Mercury Trade Finance Solutions S.A. de C.V., Mercury Trade Finance Solutions S.L., Mercury Trade Finance Solutions S.p.A., Moneybit S.L., Mortgage Engine Limited, Motor 2016-1 PLC, Motor 2017-1 PLC, Mouro Capital I LP, Multiplica SpA, NW Services CO., Naviera Mirambel S.L., Naviera Trans Gas A.I.E., Naviera Trans Iron S.L., Naviera Trans Ore A.I.E., Naviera Trans Wind S.L. (b), Naviera Transcantabrica S.L., Naviera Transchem S.L. Unipersonal, NeoAuto S.A.C., Norbest AS, Novimovest Fundo de Investimento Imobiliario, Open Bank Argentina S.A., Open Bank S.A., Open Digital Market S.L., Open Digital Services S.L., Operadora de Carteras Gamma S.A.P.I. de C.V., Optimal Investment Services SA, Optimal Multiadvisors Ireland Plc / Optimal Strategic US Equity Ireland Euro Fund, Optimal Multiadvisors Ireland Plc / Optimal Strategic US Equity Ireland US Dollar Fund, PBE Companies LLC, PECOH Limited, PI Distribuidora de Titulos e Valores Mobiliarios S.A., PSA Bank Deutschland GmbH, PSA Banque France, PSA Finance UK Limited, PSA Financial Services Nederland B.V., PSA Financial Services Spain E.F.C. S.A., PSA Renting Italia S.p.A., PagoFX Europe S.A., PagoFX HoldCo S.L., PagoFX UK Ltd, PagoNxt Merchant Solutions S.L., PagoNxt S.L., Parasant SA, Patagon.com, Pereda Gestion S.A., Pingham International S.A., Popular Spain Holding de Inversiones S.L.U., Portal Universia Argentina S.A., Portal Universia Portugal Prestacao de Servicos de Informatica S.A., Prime 16 Fundo de Investimentos Imobiliario, Punta Lima LLC, Punta Lima Wind Farm LLC, Retop S.A., Return Capital Servicos de Recuperacao de Creditos S.A., Return Gestao de Recursos S.A., Riobank International (Uruguay) SAIFE (b), Rojo Entretenimento S.A., SAM Asset Management S.A. de C.V. Sociedad Operadora de Fondos de Inversion, SAM Investment Holdings S.L., SAM UK Investment Holdings Limited (b), SANB Promotora de Vendas e Cobranca Ltda., SCF Eastside Locks GP Limited, SDMX Superdigital S.A. de C.V., SMPS Merchant Platform Solutions Mexico S.A de C.V, Sancap Investimentos e Participacoes S.A., Santander (CF Trustee Property Nominee) Limited, Santander (UK) Group Pension Schemes Trustees Limited, Santander Ahorro Inmobiliario 1 S.A., Santander Ahorro Inmobiliario 2 S.A., Santander Alternatives SICAV RAIF, Santander Asesorias Financieras Limitada, Santander Asset Finance (December) Limited, Santander Asset Finance plc, Santander Asset Management - S.G.O.I.C. S.A., Santander Asset Management Chile S.A., Santander Asset Management LLC, Santander Asset Management Luxembourg S.A., Santander Asset Management S.A. Administradora General de Fondos, Santander Asset Management S.A. S.G.I.I.C., Santander Asset Management UK Holdings Limited, Santander Asset Management UK Limited, Santander Back-Offices Globales Mayoristas S.A., Santander Banca de Inversion Colombia S.A.S., Santander Bank & Trust Ltd., Santander Bank National Association, Santander Bank Polska S.A., Santander Brasil Administradora de Consorcio Ltda., Santander Brasil Gestao de Recursos Ltda., Santander Brasil Tecnologia S.A., Santander Capital Desarrollo SGEIC S.A. Unipersonal, Santander Capital Structuring S.A. de C.V., Santander Capitalizacao S.A., Santander Cards Ireland Limited, Santander Cards Limited, Santander Cards UK Limited, Santander Chile Holding S.A., Santander Consulting (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Santander Consumer (UK) plc, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2013-B2 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2013-B3 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2018-L1 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2018-L3 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2018-L4 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2018-L5 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2019-B1 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2019-L2 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2019-L3 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2020-B1 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2020-L1 LLC, Santander Consumer Auto Receivables Funding 2020-L2 LLC, Santander Consumer Bank, Santander Consumer Bank AG, Santander Consumer Bank GmbH, Santander Consumer Bank S.A., Santander Consumer Bank S.p.A., Santander Consumer Banque S.A., Santander Consumer Credit Services Limited, Santander Consumer Finance Benelux B.V., Santander Consumer Finance Global Services S.L., Santander Consumer Finance Oy, Santander Consumer Finance S.A., Santander Consumer Finance Schweiz AG, Santander Consumer Financial Solutions Sp. z o.o., Santander Consumer Finanse Sp. z o.o. (b), Santander Consumer Holding Austria GmbH, Santander Consumer Holding GmbH, Santander Consumer International Puerto Rico LLC, Santander Consumer Leasing GmbH, Santander Consumer Mediacion Operador de Banca-Seguros Vinculado S.L., Santander Consumer Multirent Sp. z o.o., Santander Consumer Operations Services GmbH, Santander Consumer Receivables 10 LLC, Santander Consumer Receivables 11 LLC, Santander Consumer Receivables 3 LLC, Santander Consumer Receivables 7 LLC, Santander Consumer Receivables Funding LLC, Santander Consumer Renting S.L., Santander Consumer S.A., Santander Consumer S.A.S., Santander Consumer Services GmbH, Santander Consumer Services S.A., Santander Consumer Technology Services GmbH, Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc., Santander Consumer USA Inc., Santander Consumo S.A. de C.V. S.O.F.O.M. E.R. Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico, Santander Corredora de Seguros Limitada, Santander Corredores de Bolsa Limitada, Santander Corretora de Cambio e Valores Mobiliarios S.A., Santander Corretora de Seguros Investimentos e Servicos S.A., Santander Customer Voice S.A., Santander Digital Assets S.L., Santander Drive Auto Receivables LLC, Santander Equity Investments Limited, Santander Espana Merchant Services Entidad de Pago S.L. Unipersonal, Santander Espana Servicios Legales y de Cumplimiento S.L., Santander Estates Limited, Santander F24 S.A., Santander Facility Management Espana S.L., Santander Factoring S.A., Santander Factoring Sp. z o.o., Santander Factoring y Confirming S.A. E.F.C., Santander Finance 2012-1 LLC, Santander Financial Exchanges Limited, Santander Financial Services Inc., Santander Financial Services plc, Santander Finanse Sp. z o.o., Santander Fintech Holdings S.L., Santander Fintech Limited, Santander Fundo de Investimento SBAC Referenciado di Credito Privado, Santander Gestion de Recaudacion y Cobranzas Ltda., Santander Global Consumer Finance Limited, Santander Global Facilities S.A. de C.V., Santander Global Facilities S.L., Santander Global Operations S.A., Santander Global Services S.A. (b), Santander Global Sport S.A., Santander Global Technology Brasil Ltda., Santander Global Technology Chile Limitada, Santander Global Technology S.L., Santander Global Trade Platform Solutions S.L., Santander Guarantee Company, Santander Holding Imobiliaria S.A., Santander Holding Internacional S.A., Santander Holdings USA Inc., Santander ISA Managers Limited, Santander Inclusion Financiera S.A. de C.V. S.O.F.O.M. E.R. Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico, Santander Insurance Agency U.S. LLC, Santander Insurance Services UK Limited, Santander Intermediacion Correduria de Seguros S.A., Santander International Products Plc. (d), Santander Inversiones S.A., Santander Investment Bank Limited, Santander Investment Chile Limitada, Santander Investment I S.A., Santander Investment S.A., Santander Investment Securities Inc., Santander Investments GP 1 S.a.r.l., Santander Inwestycje Sp. z o.o., Santander Lease S.A. E.F.C., Santander Leasing LLC, Santander Leasing S.A., Santander Leasing S.A. Arrendamento Mercantil, Santander Lending Limited, Santander Mediacion Operador de Banca-Seguros Vinculado S.A., Santander Merchant Platform Operations S.A. de C.V., Santander Merchant Platform Services S.A. de C.V., Santander Merchant Platform Solutions Mexico S.A. de C.V., Santander Merchant Platform Solutions S.A., Santander Merchant Platform Solutions Uruguay S.A., Santander Merchant Platform SolucoesTecnologicas Brasil Ltda., Santander Merchant S.A., Santander Mortgage Holdings Limited, Santander Paraty Qif PLC, Santander Pensiones S.A. E.G.F.P., Santander Pensoes - Sociedade Gestora de Fundos de Pensoes S.A., Santander Private Banking Gestion S.A. S.G.I.I.C., Santander Private Banking UK Limited, Santander Private Banking s.p.a. in Liquidazione (b), Santander Private Real Estate Advisory & Management S.A., Santander Private Real Estate Advisory S.A., Santander Real Estate S.A., Santander Retail Auto Lease Funding LLC, Santander Rio Asset Management Gerente de Fondos Comunes de Inversion S.A., Santander Rio Trust S.A., Santander Rio Valores S.A., Santander S.A. Sociedad Securitizadora, Santander Secretariat Services Limited, Santander Securities LLC, Santander Seguros y Reaseguros Compania Aseguradora S.A., Santander Servicios Corporativos S.A. de C.V., Santander Servicios Especializados S.A. de C.V., Santander Technology USA LLC, Santander Tecnologia e Inovacao Ltda., Santander Tecnologia Argentina S.A., Santander Tecnologia Espana S.L.U., Santander Tecnologia Mexico S.A. de C.V., Santander Totta SGPS S.A., Santander Totta Seguros Companhia de Seguros de Vida S.A., Santander Towarzystwo Funduszy Inwestycyjnych S.A., Santander Trade Services Limited, Santander UK Group Holdings plc, Santander UK Investments, Santander UK Operations Limited, Santander UK Plc, Santander UK Technology Limited, Santander Wealth Management International SA, Santander de Titulizacion S.G.F.T. S.A., Santusa Holding S.L., Services and Promotions Delaware Corp., Services and Promotions Miami LLC, Servicio de Alarmas Controladas por Ordenador S.A., Servicios de Cobranza Recuperacion y Seguimiento S.A. De C.V., Sheppards Moneybrokers Limited, Shiloh III Wind Project LLC, Sociedad Integral de Valoraciones Automatizadas S.A., Sociedad Operadora de Tarjetas de Pago Santander Getnet Chile S.A., Socur S.A., Sol Orchard Imperial 1 LLC, Solarlaser Limited, Sovereign Community Development Company, Sovereign Delaware Investment Corporation, Sovereign Lease Holdings LLC, Sovereign REIT Holdings Inc., Sovereign Spirit Limited (f), Sterrebeeck B.V., Suleyado 2003 S.L. Unipersonal, Summer Empreendimentos Ltda., Super Pagamentos e Administracao de Meios Eletronicos S.A., Superdigital Argentina S.A.U., Superdigital Colombia S.A.S., Superdigital Holding Company S.L., Superdigital Peru S.A.C., Suzuki Servicios Financieros S.L., Swesant SA, TIMFin S.p.A., TOPSAM S.A de C.V., Taxagest Sociedade Gestora de Participacoes Sociais S.A., Teatinos Siglo XXI Inversiones S.A., The Alliance & Leicester Corporation Limited, The Best Specialty Coffee S.L. Unipersonal, Time Retail Finance Limited (b), Tonopah Solar I LLC, Toque Fale Servicos de Telemarketing Ltda., Tornquist Asesores de Seguros S.A. (b), Totta (Ireland) PLC, Totta Urbe - Empresa de Administracao e Construcoes S.A., Trabajando.com Mexico S.A. de C.V. en liquidacion (b), Trabajando.com Peru S.A.C., Trans Rotor Limited (b), Transolver Finance EFC S.A., Tresmares Growth Fund Santander SCR S.A., Tresmares Santander Direct Lending SICC S.A., Tuttle and Son Limited, Universia Brasil S.A., Universia Chile S.A., Universia Colombia S.A.S., Universia Espana Red de Universidades S.A., Universia Holding S.L., Universia Mexico S.A. de C.V., Universia Peru S.A., Universia Uruguay S.A., Uro Property Holdings SOCIMI S.A., WIM Servicios Corporativos S.A. de C.V., WTW Shipping Designated Activity Company, Wallcesa S.A., Wave Holdco S.L., Waypoint Insurance Group Inc., and Wirecard (Technological Assets). Its not every day that local college students get to work alongside technology development experts in the field of mobility.And its not every day that local college students get the opportunity to pitch their solutions for real world problems to top-level industry experts and corporate executives.And its certainly not every day that, should they win, they get a shot at a much-sought-after internship at a Fortune 150 company. And who knows where their careers could go from there?But thats just what happened at the third annual Lear Student Innovation Challenge on on Saturday, Feb. 23.The teams of students from a number of local colleges and universities--students of a variety of backgrounds, grades, and disciplines--gathered to pitch their ideas for innovation.This years theme? Solutions that capitalize on industry trends in shared mobility.While Lear wont divulge the winning pitch for confidentiality reasons, they will confirm that this years winner was Team Notio, which was comprised of Ibro Chundusu, College for Creative Studies; Shaily Fozdar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Joe Iaquinta, Macomb Community College.All three will be offered an internship at Lear to incubate their innovation concept, according to Jenny Gogan, marketing and communications manager for Lear Corporation.In total, this years participating universities include University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Michigan, Dearborn; Michigan State University; Michigan Technological University; Wayne State University; Oakland University; College for Creative Studies; and Macomb Community College.With this challenge, the students have the opportunity to provide a fresh perspective and insight on a current project, working with Lears top experts. The students also receive outstanding mentorship from Lears innovation team, learning how to develop the pitch and work together as a cross-functional team--both of which are essential to career development, says Robert Humphrey, director of innovation management for Lear Corporation.The Lear team also benefits from this experience by showcasing their dedication to working with students in the community and helping to establish great entrepreneurial talent for the future.The third annual Lear Student Innovation Challenge began with a two-day workshop starting Feb. 9. There, students received innovation training from industry experts and learned about Lears capabilities. The students were also presented a mobility challenge faced by Lear today. They then dispersed for a two-week period, incubating their ideas before the final event.On Saturday, Feb. 23, the students gathered in front of a panel of Lear executives and industry experts, pitching their innovative ideas in the style of the popular Shark Tank television program.In the end, it was Team Notio for the win.This is the first year that the Lear Student Innovation Challenge has tackled the topic of mobility, says Humphrey. In 2017, a team of students were awarded for presenting a solution to a problem with a Lear manufacturing process. In 2018, students were tasked with increasing vehicle occupant safety.This is our third year hosting the competition, and we have had great success with it in the past, Humphrey says.In the last two years weve had three incubation teams and submitted for a total of eight invention disclosures--which turned into four patent applications, with one of the projects underway and currently being implemented at Lear.Visit Driven and learn how the Detroit region is leading the world in next-generation mobility.Image courtesy of Lear Corporation. Patagonia Gold plc, a mining company, engages in the identification, acquisition, exploration, development, and exploitation of gold and silver mineral projects. The company's flagship projects include the Cap Oeste project that is located in Santa Cruz; and Calcatreu project, which is situated in Rio Negro, Argentina. It has mineral rights to approximately 220 properties in various provinces of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The company was formerly known as HPD Exploration Plc and changed its name to Patagonia Gold plc in January 2004. Patagonia Gold plc was incorporated in 2000 and is headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Read More Precision Drilling Corporation, an oilfield services company, provides oil and natural gas drilling and related products and services in North America and the Middle East. The company operates in two segments, Contract Drilling Services, and Completion and Production Services. The Contract Drilling Services segment offers onshore well drilling services to exploration and production companies in the oil and natural gas industry. This segment's services include land drilling, directional drilling, and turnkey drilling; and procurement and distribution of oilfield supplies, as well as manufacture, sale, and repair of drilling equipment. As of December 31, 2020, it operated 227 land drilling rigs, including 109 in Canada; 105 in the United States; 6 in Kuwait; 4 in Saudi Arabia; 2 in the Kurdistan region of Iraq; and 1 in the country of Georgia. The Completion and Production Services segment provides service rigs for well completion, workover, abandonment, maintenance, and re-entry preparation services; wellsite accommodations; oilfield surface equipment rentals; and camp and catering services to oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. This segment operated 123 well completion and workover service rigs, including 113 in Canada and 10 in the United States. It also had approximately 1,400 oilfield rental items, including surface storage, small-flow wastewater treatment, power generation, and solids control equipment; 113 wellsite accommodation units; 966 drill camp beds; 822 base camp beds; and three kitchen diners in Canada. Precision Drilling Corporation was incorporated in 1951 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada. Read More Targa Resources Corp. provides midstream natural gas and natural gas liquids services. It also provides gathering, storing, and terminaling crude oil and storing, terminaling, and selling refined petroleum products. It operates through the following business segments: Gathering and Processing, and Logistics and Transportation. The Gathering and Processing segment includes assets used in the gathering of natural gas produced from oil and gas wells and processing this raw natural gas into merchantable natural gas by extracting NGLs and removing impurities; and assets used for crude oil gathering and terminaling. The Logistics and Transportation segment includes all the activities necessary to convert mixed NGLs into NGL products and provides certain value added services such as storing, fractionating, terminaling, transporting and marketing of NGLs and NGL products, including services to LPG exporters; storing and terminaling of refined petroleum products and crude oil and certain natural gas supply and marketing activities in support of its other businesses. The company was founded on October 27, 2005 and is headquartered in Houston, TX. Read More 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 Waste Management: 635952 Ontario Inc., 8242348 Canada Inc., Acaverde S.A. de C.V., Access Computer Products, Advanced Environmental Technical Services L.L.C., Akron Regional Landfill Inc., Alliance Sanitary Landfill Inc., Alpharetta Transfer Station LLC, American Landfill Inc., American Oil Recovery LLC, Ameriwaste LLC, Anderson Landfill Inc., Anderson Rubbish Disposal, Antelope Valley Recycling and Disposal Facility Inc., Arden Landfill Inc., Atlantic Waste Disposal Inc., Automated Salvage Transport Co. L.L.C., Avalon South LLC, Azusa Land Reclamation Inc., B&B Landfill Inc., Big Dipper Enterprises Inc., Bluegrass Containment L.L.C., Burnsville Sanitary Landfill Inc., CA Newco L.L.C., CR Group LLC, CWM Chemical Services L.L.C., Cal Sierra Disposal, California Asbestos Monofill Inc., Canadian Waste Services Holdings Inc., Capels Landfill LLC, Capital Sanitation Company, Capitol Disposal Inc., Carolina Grading Inc., Cedar Ridge Landfill Inc., Central Disposal Systems Inc., Chadwick Road Landfill Inc., Chambers Clearview Environmental Landfill Inc., Chambers Development Company Inc., Chambers Development of Ohio Inc., Chambers of Georgia Inc., Chambers of Mississippi Inc., Chemical Waste Management Inc., Chemical Waste Management of Indiana L.L.C., Chemical Waste Management of the Northwest Inc., Chesser Island Road Landfill Inc., City Environmental Services Inc. of Waters, Cleburne Landfill Company Corp., Coast Waste Management Inc., Coastal Recyclers Landfill LLC, Connecticut Valley Sanitary Waste Disposal Inc., Conservation Services Inc., Coshocton Landfill Inc., Cougar Landfill Inc., Countryside Landfill Inc., Curtis Creek Recovery Systems Inc., Cuyahoga Landfill Inc., DHC Land LLC, Dafter Sanitary Landfill Inc., Dauphin Meadows Inc., Deep Valley Landfill Inc., Deer Track Park Landfill Inc., Deffenbaugh Disposal Inc., Deffenbaugh Group Holdings Inc., Deffenbaugh Industries Inc., Deffenbaugh Recycling Company L.L.C., Deffenbaugh of Arkansas LLC, Del Almo Landfill L.L.C., Delaware Recyclable Products Inc., Dickinson Landfill Inc., Disposal Service Incorporated, Dolphin Services & Chemicals LLC, Dolphin-One LLC, ELDA Landfill Inc., Earthmovers Landfill L.L.C., East Liverpool Landfill Inc., Eastern One Land Corporation, Eco-Vista LLC, Elk River Landfill Inc., Energy Injection Services of Mississippi LLC, EnviroSolutions Dulles LLC, EnviroSolutions Holdings Inc., EnviroSolutions Real Property Holdings Inc., Envirofil of Illinois Inc., Evergreen Landfill Inc., Evergreen Recycling and Disposal Facility Inc., Finch Waste Co LLC, Firetower Landfill LLC, Fred J. Eckert Sanitary Service Inc., Furnace Associates Inc., G.I. Industries, GA Landfills Inc., Gallia Landfill Inc., Garnet of Maryland Inc., Gateway Transfer Station LLC, Georgia Waste Systems Inc., Giordano Recycling L.L.C., Glades Landfill LLC, Glen's Sanitary Landfill Inc., Grand Central Sanitary Landfill Inc., Greenbow LLC, Greenleaf Compaction Inc., Greenstar Allentown LLC, Greenstar Georgia LLC, Greenstar LLC, Greenstar Managed Services - Connecticut LLC, Greenstar Managed Services - RLWM LLC, Greenstar Mid-America LLC, Greenstar New Jersey LLC, Greenstar Ohio LLC, Greenstar Paterson LLC, Greenstar Pittsburgh LLC, Greenstar Recycled Holdings LLC, Greenstar Recycling LLC, Guadalupe Mines Mutual Water Company, Guadalupe Rubbish Disposal Co. Inc., Ham Lake Haulers Inc., Harris Sanitation Inc., Harwood Landfill Inc., Hedco Landfill Limited, High Mountain Fuels LLC, Hillsboro Landfill Inc., Holyoke Sanitary Landfill Inc., IN Landfills L.L.C., Illini Disposal, International Environmental Management Inc., Jahner Sanitation Inc., Jay County Landfill L.L.C., K and W Landfill Inc., Keene Road Landfill Inc., Kelly Run Sanitation Inc., King George Landfill Inc., King George Landfill Properties LLC, Kirby Canyon Holdings LLC, L&K Group Holdings LLC, LCS Services Inc., Lakeville Recycling L.P., Land South Holdings LLC, Landfill Services of Charleston Inc., Laurel Highlands Landfill Inc., Liberty Landfill L.L.C., Liquid Logistics, Liquid Waste Management Inc., Longleaf C&D Disposal Facility Inc., Looney Bins Inc., Mac Land Disposal Inc. II, Mahoning Landfill Inc., Mass Gravel Inc., Mc Ginnes Industrial Maintenance Corporation, McDaniel Landfill Inc., McGill Landfill Inc., Meadowfill Landfill Inc., Michigan Environs Inc., Midwest One Land Corporation, Modesto Garbage Co. Inc., Moor Refuse Inc., Mordell, Mountain Indemnity Insurance Company, Mountainview Landfill Inc., Nassau Landfill L.L.C., National Guaranty Insurance Company of Vermont, New England CR L.L.C., New Milford Landfill L.L.C., New Orleans Landfill L.L.C., North Manatee Recycling and Disposal Facility L.L.C., Northwestern Landfill Inc., Nu-Way Live Oak Reclamation Inc., OAKLEAF Waste Management LLC, OGH Acquisition Corporation, Oak Grove Disposal Co. Inc., Oakleaf Global Holdings Inc., Oakleaf Waste Management Inc., Oakridge Landfill Inc., Oakwood Landfill Inc., Okeechobee Landfill Inc., Ozark Ridge Landfill Inc., P & R Environmental Industries L.L.C., Pacific Waste Management L.L.C., Pappy Inc., Peltz H.C. LLC, Pen-Rob Inc., People's Landfill Inc., Peterson Demolition Inc., Phoenix Resources Inc., Pine Grove Landfill Inc., Pine Tree Acres Inc., Prime Westport LLC, Quail Hollow Landfill Inc., Questquill Limited, R & B Landfill Inc., RAA Colorado L.L.C., RAA Trucking LLC, RCI Hudson Inc., RTS Landfill Inc., Recycle America Co. L.L.C., Recycle America Holdings Inc., Redwood Landfill Inc., Refuse Inc., Refuse Services Inc., Reliable Environmental Transport, Reliable Landfill L.L.C., Remote Landfill Services Inc., Reno Disposal Co., Resco Holdings L.L.C., Resource Control Composting Inc., Resource Control Inc., Richland County Landfill Inc., Riverbend Landfill Co., Rust Engineering & Construction Inc., Rust International Inc., S & J Landfill Limited Partnership, S & S Grading Inc., S&T Materials LLC, SC Holdings Inc., SF Land Acquisition LLC, Sanifill de Mexico (US) Inc., Sanifill de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Shade Landfill Inc., Shawnee Rock Company, Sierra Estrella Landfill Inc., Southern Alleghenies Landfill Inc., Southern One Land Corporation, Southern Waste Services L.L.C., Spruce Ridge Inc., Stony Hollow Landfill Inc., Suburban Landfill Inc., Summit Energy Services Inc, Swire Waste Management Limited, TN'T Sands Inc., TX Newco L.L.C., Texarkana Landfill L.L.C., Texas Pack Rat - Austin #1 LLC, Texas Pack Rat - Dallas #1 LLC, Texas Pack Rat - Houston #1 LLC, Texas Pack Rat - Houston #2 LLC, Texas Pack Rat - Houston #3 LLC, Texas Pack Rat - San Antonio #1 LLC, Texas Pack Rat Service Company LLC, The Peltz Group LLC, The Waste Management Charitable Foundation, The Woodlands of Van Buren Inc., Thermal Remediation Solutions L.L.C., Trail Ridge Landfill Inc., TransAmerican Waste Industries, Transamerican Waste Central Landfill Inc., Trash Hunters Inc., Twin Bridges Golf Club L.P., USA South Hills Landfill Inc., USA Valley Facility Inc., USA Waste Geneva Landfill Inc., USA Waste Landfill Operations and Transfer Inc., USA Waste Services of NYC Inc., USA Waste of California Inc., USA Waste of Texas Landfills Inc., USA Waste of Virginia Landfills Inc., USA Waste-Management Resources LLC, USA-Crinc L.L.C., USB LIHTC Fund 2010-1 LLC, UWS Barre Inc., United Waste Systems Leasing Inc., Valley Garbage and Rubbish Company Inc., Vern's Refuse Service Inc., Vickery Environmental Inc., Vista Landfill LLC, Voyageur Disposal Processing Inc., WM Avon Inc., WM Bagco LLC, WM Billerica Inc., WM Biloxi Hauling LLC, WM Biloxi Transfer Station LLC, WM Boston CORE Inc., WM CCP Solutions LLC, WM Conversion Fund LLC, WM Corporate Services Inc., WM Curbside LLC, WM DC 1 LLC, WM Emergency Employee Support Fund Inc., WM Energy Resources Inc., WM Energy Services Holdings LLC, WM Energy Services of Ohio LLC, WM Energy Solutions Inc., WM GTL Inc., WM GTL JV Holdings LLC, WM GTL LLC, WM Green Squad LLC, WM GreenOps LLC, WM Healthcare Solutions Inc., WM Illinois Renewable Energy L.L.C., WM Intellectual Property Holdings L.L.C., WM International Holdings Inc., WM KS Energy Resources LLC, WM LNG Inc., WM LampTracker Inc., WM Landfills of Ohio Inc., WM Landfills of Tennessee Inc., WM Leasing Services of Texas LLC, WM Leasing of Arizona L.L.C., WM Leasing of Texas L.P., WM Logistics India Private Limited, WM Logistics LLC, WM Mercury Waste Inc., WM Middle Tennessee Environmental Center L.L.C., WM Mobile Bay Environmental Center Inc., WM ND Energy Resources II LLC, WM ND Energy Resources LLC, WM Nevada Renewable Energy L.L.C., WM North Broward Inc., WM Organic Growth Inc., WM PA Holdings LLC, WM PRG L.L.C., WM Pack-Rat LLC, WM Pack-Rat of California LLC, WM Pack-Rat of Illinois LLC, WM Pack-Rat of Kentucky LLC, WM Pack-Rat of Maryland LLC, WM Pack-Rat of Massachusetts LLC, WM Pack-Rat of Michigan LLC, WM Pack-Rat of Nevada LLC, WM Pack-Rat of Ohio LLC, WM Pack-Rat of Rhode Island LLC, WM Partnership Holdings Inc., WM Phoenix Energy Resources LLC, WM Propane LLC, WM Quebec Inc., WM RA Canada Inc., WM Recycle America L.L.C., WM Recycle Europe L.L.C., WM Recycling Latin America LLC, WM Refined Coal LLC, WM Renewable Energy L.L.C., WM Resource Recovery & Recycling Center Inc., WM Resources Inc., WM Safety Services L.L.C., WM Security Services Inc., WM Storage II Inc., WM Storage Inc., WM TX Energy Resources II LLC, WM TX Energy Resources LLC, WM Texas Pack Rat LLC, WM Trash Monitor Plus L.L.C., WM WY Energy Resources II LLC, WM WY Energy Resources III LLC, WM WY Energy Resources LLC, WM of North Dakota Energy Disposal Solutions LLC, WMI Mexico Holdings Inc., WMNA Container Recycling L.L.C., WMRE of Kentucky LLC, WMRE of Michigan LLC, WMRE of Ohio LLC, WMRE of Ohio-American LLC, WMSALSA Inc., WTI Air Pollution Control Inc., WTI Rust Holdings Inc., Warner Company, Waste Away Group Inc., Waste Management Arizona Landfills Inc., Waste Management Buckeye L.L.C., Waste Management China Holdings Limited, Waste Management Collection and Recycling Inc., Waste Management Disposal Services of Colorado Inc., Waste Management Disposal Services of Maine Inc., Waste Management Disposal Services of Maryland Inc., Waste Management Disposal Services of Massachusetts Inc., Waste Management Disposal Services of Oregon Inc., Waste Management Disposal Services of Pennsylvania Inc., Waste Management Disposal Services of Virginia Inc., Waste Management Energy Services of Texas LLC, Waste Management Holdings Inc., Waste Management Inc. of Florida, Waste Management Inc. of Tennessee, Waste Management Indycoke L.L.C., Waste Management International Inc., Waste Management National Services Inc., Waste Management National Transportation Services Inc., Waste Management Partners Inc., Waste Management Recycling and Disposal Services of California Inc., Waste Management Recycling of New Jersey L.L.C., Waste Management Service Center Inc., Waste Management of Alameda County Inc., Waste Management of Alaska Inc., Waste Management of Arizona Inc., Waste Management of Arkansas Inc., Waste Management of California Inc., Waste Management of Canada Corporation, Waste Management of Carolinas Inc., Waste Management of Colorado Inc., Waste Management of Connecticut Inc., Waste Management of Delaware Inc., Waste Management of Fairless L.L.C., Waste Management of Five Oaks Recycling and Disposal Facility Inc., Waste Management of Georgia Inc., Waste Management of Hawaii Inc., Waste Management of Idaho Inc., Waste Management of Illinois Inc., Waste Management of Indiana Holdings One Inc., Waste Management of Indiana Holdings Two Inc., Waste Management of Indiana L.L.C., Waste Management of Iowa Inc., Waste Management of Kansas Inc., Waste Management of Kentucky Holdings Inc., Waste Management of Kentucky L.L.C., Waste Management of Leon County Inc., Waste Management of Londonderry Inc., Waste Management of Louisiana Holdings One Inc., Waste Management of Louisiana L.L.C., Waste Management of Maine Inc., Waste Management of Maryland Inc., Waste Management of Massachusetts Inc., Waste Management of Metro Atlanta Inc., Waste Management of Michigan Inc., Waste Management of Minnesota Inc., Waste Management of Mississippi Inc., Waste Management of Missouri Inc., Waste Management of Montana Inc., Waste Management of Nebraska Inc., Waste Management of Nevada Inc., Waste Management of New Hampshire Inc., Waste Management of New Jersey Inc., Waste Management of New Mexico Inc., Waste Management of New York L.L.C., Waste Management of North Dakota Inc., Waste Management of Ohio Inc., Waste Management of Oklahoma Inc., Waste Management of Oregon Inc., Waste Management of Pennsylvania Gas Recovery L.L.C., Waste Management of Pennsylvania Inc., Waste Management of Rhode Island Inc., Waste Management of South Carolina Inc., Waste Management of South Dakota Inc., Waste Management of Texas Holdings Inc., Waste Management of Texas Inc., Waste Management of Tunica Landfill Inc., Waste Management of Utah Inc., Waste Management of Virginia Inc., Waste Management of Washington, Waste Management of West Virginia Inc., Waste Management of Wisconsin Inc., Waste Management of Wyoming Inc., Western One Land Corporation, Western Waste Industries, Western Waste of Texas L.L.C., Westminster Land Acquisition LLC, Wheelabrator Technologies, Wheelabrator Technologies International Inc., White Lake Landfill Inc., Willow Oak Landfill LLC, and eCycling Services L.L.C.. The following companies are subsidiares of WESCO International: 1502218 Alberta Ltd., ALLNET Technologies Pty. Ltd., AXE Distribution Solutions Trinidad Ltd., Accu-Tech Corporation, Anixter (Barbados) SRL, Anixter (CIS) LLC, Anixter (Switzerland) Sarl, Anixter (U.K.) Limited, Anixter Argentina S.A., Anixter Asia Holdings Limited, Anixter Australia Pty. Ltd., Anixter Austria GmbH, Anixter Bahamas Limited, Anixter Belgium B.V.B.A., Anixter Cables y Manufacturas S.A. de C.V., Anixter Canada Inc., Anixter Canadian Holdings ULC, Anixter Chile S.A., Anixter Colombia S.A.S., Anixter Communications (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Anixter Communications (Shanghai) Co. Limited, Anixter Costa Rica S.A., Anixter Czech a.s., Anixter Danmark A/S, Anixter Deutschland GmbH, Anixter Distribuidor de Soluciones Empresariales e Industriales S.A., Anixter Distribution Ireland Limited, Anixter Dominicana SRL, Anixter Egypt LLC, Anixter Espana S.L., Anixter Eurotwo Holdings B.V., Anixter Fasteners Deutschland GmbH, Anixter Financial Inc., Anixter France SARL, Anixter Guatemala y Compania Limitada, Anixter Holdings Inc., Anixter Holdings Mexico LLC, Anixter Hong Kong Limited, Anixter Iletisim Sistemleri Pazarlama ve Ticaret A.S., Anixter Inc., Anixter India Private Limited, Anixter Information Systems LLC, Anixter International, Anixter Italia S.r.l., Anixter Jamaica Limited, Anixter Japan KK, Anixter Jorvex S.A.C., Anixter Limited, Anixter Logistica do Brasil LTDA, Anixter Logistica y Servicios S.A. de C.V., Anixter Magyarorszag Elektronikus Halozati Rendszer Kereskedelmi es Szolgaltato Kft, Anixter Mid Holdings B.V., Anixter Middle East FZE, Anixter Morocco SARL AU, Anixter Nederland B.V., Anixter New Zealand Limited, Anixter Norge A.N.S., Anixter Operaciones y Logistica s De RL De CV, Anixter Panama S.A., Anixter Pension Scheme Trustees Limited, Anixter Pension Trustees Limited, Anixter Peru S.A.C., Anixter Philippines Inc., Anixter Poland Sp.z.o.o., Anixter Portugal S.A., Anixter Power Solutions Canada Inc., Anixter Power Solutions Inc., Anixter Procurement Corporation, Anixter Puerto Rico Inc., Anixter Real-Estate LLC, Anixter Receivables Corporation, Anixter Saudi Arabia Limited, Anixter Singapore Pte. Ltd., Anixter Slovakia s.r.o., Anixter Sub Holdings B.V, Anixter Sverige AB, Anixter Thailand Inc., Anixter U.S. LLC, Anixter Venezuela Inc., Anixter de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Anixter do Brasil Ltda, Atlanta Electrical Distributors, Atlanta Electrical Distributors LLC, Atlas Gentech (NZ) Limited, Avon Electrical Supplies, B.E.L. Corporation, Brews Supply, Brown Wholesale Electric, Bruckner Supply, CBC LP Holdings LLC, CDW Holdco LLC, Calvert Wire & Cable Corporation, Carlton-Bates Company, Carlton-Bates Company (CBC), Carlton-Bates Company de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Carlton-Bates Company of Texas GP Inc, Central Security Distribution Pty. Ltd, Communication Cables LLC, Communications Supply Corporation, Communications Supply Corporation, Conney Investment Holdings LLC, Conney Safety Products, Conney Safety Products LLC, Distribuidora Materiales Electricos E-Supply Limitada, EECOL Electric, EECOL Electric Bolivia Ltda, EECOL Electric Corp., EECOL Electric Peru S.A.C, EECOL Industrial Electric (SudAmerica) Limitada, EECOL Industrial Electric Ecuador Limitada, EECOL Industrial Electric Limitada, EECOL Power S.A., EECOL Properties Corp, Eurinvest B.V., Eurinvest Cooperatief U.A., Fastec Industrial, HMH Pension Trustees Limited, Hazmasters, Hazmasters Inc., Herning Underground Supply, Hi-Line Utility Supply, Hi-Line Utility Supply Company LLC, Hill Country Electric Supply, Hill Country Electric Supply L.P., ICV GP Inc., Infast Group Limited, Inner Range Pty. Ltd, Itel Container Ventures Inc., Itel Corporation, Itel Rail Holdings Corporation, J-Mark Inc., LaPrairie, Liberty Wire & Cable Inc., Monti Electric Supply, Needham Electric Supply, Needham Electric Supply LLC, Obras Y Servicios Sunpark S.A.C., PT Anixter Indonesia, Potelcom Supply, Pro Canadian Holdings I ULC, RECO LLC, RS Electronics, Reily Electrical Supply, SASK Alta Holdings S.A., Services Voice Video and Data Distribution de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Servicios Anixter S.A. de C.V., Signal Capital Corporation, Signal Capital Projects Inc., Stone Eagle Electrical Supply GP Inc., Stone Eagle Electrical Supply Limited Partnership, TVC Communications, TVC Communications L.L.C., TVC Espana Distribucion y Venta De Equipos S.L., TVC International Holding L.L.C., TVC UK Holdings Limited, Tri-Ed Puerto Rico Ltd. Inc., Trydor Industries, Voice Video and Data Distribution de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., WDC Holding Inc., WDCH LP, WDCH US LP, WDI USVI LLC, WDI-Angola LDA, WDINESCO B.V., WDINESCO II B.V., WDINESCO III B.V., WEAS Company S. de R.L., WESCO (Suzhou) Trading Co. Ltd., WESCO Australia Pty Ltd, WESCO Canada GP Inc., WESCO Canada I LP, WESCO DC Holding I LP, WESCO DC Holding II LP, WESCO DC Holding III LP, WESCO DC Holding IV LP, WESCO Distribution Canada Co., WESCO Distribution Canada LP, WESCO Distribution HK Limited, WESCO Distribution II ULC, WESCO Distribution III ULC, WESCO Distribution IV Inc., WESCO Distribution Inc., WESCO Distribution Ireland Limited, WESCO Distribution NL B.V., WESCO Distribution Pte. Ltd., WESCO Distribution de Mexico S. de R.L., WESCO Distribution-International Limited, WESCO Enterprises Inc., WESCO Equity Corporation, WESCO Holdings LLC, WESCO Integrated Supply Inc., WESCO Integrated Supply Polska Spolka z o.o., WESCO Netherlands B.V., WESCO Nevada Ltd., WESCO Nigeria Inc., WESCO Procurement Canada ULC, WESCO Real Estate I LLC, WESCO Real Estate II LLC, WESCO Real Estate III LLC, WESCO Real Estate IV LLC, WESCO Receivables Corp., WESCO Services LLC, WESCO TLD Holdings Co. Ltd., WND Nigeria Limited, WireXpress Ltd., Xpress Connect Supply Hong Kong Limited, XpressConnect Holdings B.V., XpressConnect International B.V., XpressConnect Supply B.V.B.A., XpressConnect Supply Colombia S.A.S., XpressConnect Supply Inc., XpressConnect Supply Mexico S.A. de C.V., and XpressConnect Supply do Brasil Ltda. Danfoss, on the SUNY POLY campus, recently hit a significant milestone. "We have just finished about 10,000 units so far since we started, so we're running, starting to produce revenue, so, it's a good milestone," said President, Michael Hennessey, speaking about the modules used in pool pump applications the SUNY POLY site recently manufactured and shipped. Danfoss will add a new production line in early 2020. "We're getting ready to put in additional equipment for an automotive line, which goes for automotive and electric vehicle applications," said Hennessey. The new line will mean new jobs by the end of this year. "We think we're probably gonna add another 20 production people later on in the year as we bring up the 2nd technology line." Mohawk Valley EDGE held their April 2 board meeting at Danfoss. EDGE President, Steve DiMeo, says efforts to bring a chip fab plant to Marcy haven't subsided. "We've got ongoing discussions with multiple companies," said DiMeo, adding that interest in the site hasn't subsided. "It's steady, so we've got multiple companies. Couple of them have incentive proposals. Couple of them are new that we're having some initial discussions with." UTICA, N.Y. - After more than 15 years with the station, NEWSChannel 2 Evening Anchor Don Shipman has announced hes leaving WKTV later this month. Shipman will become an anchor/reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts. Shipman has been with WKTV since January 2004 and has held numerous positions with the station including News Producer and Weekend Anchor, before taking over the Evening Anchor duties from Bill Worden back in 2012. Working for my hometown news station has been an honor and privilege, Shipman said. Ive had an opportunity to work alongside and learn from some of my mentors as well as help teach young journalists as they start their careers at WKTV. Both Adam and I have made lifelong friendships with people who have become like family. I look back on my time at WKTV and living in Utica with nothing but fond memories and immense gratitude. Thank you. Dons been an integral part of the success here at NEWSChannel 2, and certainly left his mark on the station, said WKTV VP/GM Steve McMurray. With his diverse skill set, talent, and commitment to our viewers, hes certainly going to be missed. We wish him the best as he continues his broadcast journalism career in Springfield." Shipman is a West Winfield native who attended Herkimer College and Utica College before beginning his broadcast career. His last day at WKTV will be April 17. UTICA, N.Y.-- The Utica Police Department is becoming better equipped to understand and work with local refugees and immigrants. The Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees is providing cultural competency training for the entire police department, throughout the month. The officers are learning about all of the services the center provides, as well as the history of resettlement in the Utica area. Shelly Callahan, executive director of the center, said the goal is to provide officers with the knowledge and tools needed to interact and serve the diverse community in Utica. "We're able to teach the police department what some of the perceptions and experiences are of people that didn't grow up here," Callahan said. "So that they might understand why people might be more fearful of a police officer, or have someone in uniform, or to understand all the different languages spoken here and the resources we have to help them in any situation." The MVRCR plans to offer more training classes to other agencies in the future. For more information visit: www.mvrcr.org. JASPER COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI) - The Jasper County Sheriff's Office says a missing 15-year-old from Benton County has been found safe. Emily Schneider was last seen riding her bicycle in the area of I-65 at the Wolcott/Remington exit (201 mm) around 8 p.m. Monday. Authorities said Schneider's bicycle was found Monday, but she was not. Detectives did not say where Schneider was found. This tenement house at 176 River St. is slated for demolition this week. The odd, wedge-shaped house is something of an architectural novelty, according to one local historian, even though its not listed in any official register of historic properties. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Bangladesh, located in South Asia, is the worlds 8th most populous country as well as one of the world's most densely populated. Most of the country is covered by the Bengal Delta. The country is considered a middle power and a developing nation. It has the 43rd largest economy by nominal GDP and 29th largest by purchasing power parity. Since independence, the country has achieved a tremendous growth rate in its industrial production and economic growth. Bangladesh remains an important trade partner to the EU, the US, China, Japan, Singapore, and India. Its strategic location between South, Southeast, and East Asia makes it an important promoter of cooperation and regional connectivity. Here are the biggest industries in Bangladesh that have made it competitive in the international market. Textile Industry Bangladesh has the largest textile industry in the world. The industry remains the strongest root of the economy and the leading source of export earnings, accounting for about 80% of the total export. Bangladesh is the second-largest textile exporter behind China. This industry employs up to 3.5 million people, of which the majority (80%) are women, the highest female labor participation in the country. In 2009, Bangladesh exported US$ 120.1 billion worth of textile. About 60% of the textile is exported to Europe and about 40% to America. The major challenges faced by those working in the textile industry are low pay and not so ideal working conditions. The workers are prohibited from forming labor unions and striking. Farming Although the textile industry is the largest contributor to the countrys export earnings, agriculture is Bangladeshs largest employer. About 60% of the population work in agriculture and about 30% of the GDP also comes from agriculture. The performance of the agricultural sector has a direct impact on the several macroeconomic objectives such as poverty eradication, employment, food security, and human resource development. One of the main objectives of the government of Bangladesh is to fulfill its populations food requirements. Unfortunately, the government is yet to achieve the objective due to the frequent floods. The majority of the population earn their income from agriculture. Bangladesh's primary crops include rice, jute, tea, tobacco, wheat, tomato, and pulses. Because the country has fertile soil, rice can be grown and harvested three times a year. In 2000, it produced 35.8 million metric tons of rice, effectively making it the countrys principal crop. Due to Bangladeshs labor-intensive agriculture, it has increased its food grain production despite the frequent floods. The major problem faced by the agricultural sector is the growing population that has continued to place pressure on the productive capacity, leading to a food deficit. Underemployment also remains a serious problem and concern to the sector. Shipbuilding The shipbuilding industry is a growing industry in Bangladesh with great potential to become one of the largest in the country. The history of shipbuilding in the country dates back to the early modern era. However, the industry emerged in recent years when the locally made ships begun to be sold overseas. Today, the country has over 200 shipbuilding companies, mainly concentrated in Dhaka, Khulna, Narayanganj, Chittagong, and Barisal. The first shipbuilding and exporting company in Bangladesh was the Ananda Shipyard and Shipways Limited, founded in 1983. The company has since acquired several contracts, mostly from the EU countries. Other major shipbuilding companies in the country are the Khan Brothers Shipbuilding Limited and Western Marine Shipyard Bangladeshi potential for shipbuilding has made it be compared with the likes of China, South Korea, and Japan. Tourism In 2013, the World Travel and Tourism Council announced that the tourism industry in Bangladesh generated 1.2 million direct jobs the previous year (2012) or 1.8% of the workforce, ranking the country 157 out of 178 countries worldwide. The industry also generated an additional 1.5 million indirect jobs. While compared to other countries, the figures are low, but the tourism industry still plays a key role in the economic growth of Bangladesh. The country has a wide range of attractions including beaches, wildlife, picnic spots, and historical monuments. Information, Communication, and Technology Bangladeshs ICT sector is an example of what can be achieved if the government create and invests its skilled workforce in the sector. The sector started in nuclear research in the 1960s and over the years the large organizations have adopted the use of computers. Though the industry is yet to make a tangible contribution to the countrys economy, its growth cannot be overlooked. In a study conducted by the World Bank in 2008, Bangladeshs IT services and software are expected to grow by triple digit. It is not easy to precisely define an ideology as complex as fascism. Multiple valid definitions can be taken into consideration. Some define fascism as a type of mass movement; others see it as a political philosophy and also a set of politically motivated actions. While there is much debate around the fundamental traits of fascism, the relative consensus regarding the definition is that is it an authoritarian system that aims to promote extreme nationalism. Nationalism in The Service of Fascism Fascist governmental systems are centered around the ideas of anti-conservatism, anti-liberalism, and anti-communism, which makes them authoritarian governments rooted in nationalism. In many instances, the ideology gains extensive support by suggesting the need for a rebirth of the nation. The suggestion in this form implies that the current status of the country is of moral deterioration and loss of greatness; hence, it needs cleansing and reconstruction of societal norms. The nationalistic basis of fascism leaves the door open for the power center to press for a ruling of a single party. The rationalization is that it is a more efficient way of addressing potential threats and problems. This type of political ideology is typically associated with Nazi Germany and the post-World War I regimes that rampaged Italy. Spain, under the leadership of Francisco Franco and Argentina led by Juan Peron, is another two examples of fascist regimes. Historical Development of Fascism The early development of fascist theories originated in the 1880s. It coincided with the dissemination of the idea that society as a whole in need of saving. The movement continued to grow over the next couple of decades, spreading the values of anti-democracy, anti-materialism, and anti-rationalism. Finally, with the start of World War I, the first fascist political party emerged. Mussolini is credited for the coining of the term fascism in 1919 after making the switch from communism during the early days of WWI. The name itself is considered to connote a militant brotherhood. As the movement spread, Italy started with ethnic cleansing and military offenses, which caught the attention of Hitler in Germany and several other governments. In 1932 and 1933, the political system was adopted by Hungary and Romania, respectively. Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Greece dealt with semi-fascist governments. Brazil and Chile were also caught in the turmoil of the dissemination of fascist dogma. Fater the Second World War, the world witnessed the rise of neo-fascism, fragments of which exist in specific countries of the world to this day. Biological Racism and the Defense of Christianity Much like with other political and ideological systems, here are differences in implementation and degree of agreement among fascist groups. Various fascist movements have had differing stances in regards to their approval of racist ideas, anti-Semitism, support for nazism, and identification with Christian values. Even though not all those in favor of fascism were also proponents of biological racism, it was a central theme for those who were. Nazism in its core is, and was, extremely racist, in particular towards the Jewish population as they were identified as those responsible for everything that troubled Germany throughout history. The culmination of this hatred culminated in the Holocaust. It is interesting also that the majority of fascists represented themselves as keepers of Christian values, and their job was to defend them from anyone who is perceived as a potential threat. Even though the former was true for German and Italian fascists, their ideological foundation contained many components that conflicted with the beliefs of the traditional Christian church. This was especially true in connection to the Christian values that promote meekness and self-guilt, which was in direct opposition to the violent methods Nazis employed to achieve their racist goals. The Republic of Zaire was an independent state that existed in Central Africa from 1971 to 1997. It is currently known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Zaire was a one-party state that was governed as a totalitarian dictatorship by Mobutu Sese Seko who seized power in 1965 following a military coup preceded by a civil war. In the early 1990s, the Rwandan genocide destabilized eastern Zaire as rival factions began amassing weapons and preparing for ethnic violence. Laurent-Desire Kabila waged an anti-government rebellion in 1996 forcing Mobutu to seek exile in Morocco. Kabila assumed power and restored the name of the country to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Struggle for Independence The Belgians colonized Congo in 1885 and formed the Congo Free State under the rule of Leopold II of Belgium. The state lasted until 1908 when its name was changed to Belgium Congo. The rise of Pan-Africanism and the quest for self-rule led to an armed struggle for independence in 1959 forcing the Belgians to the negotiating table. On June 30, 1960, the state declared independence as the "Republic of the Congo". Patrice Lumumba became the prime minister while Joseph Kasa-Vumbu assumed the presidency. A few months later on August 15, 1960, the French colony of Middle Congo gained independence and acquired the name "Republic of the Congo". The countries shared the name but were differentiated by referring to them by their capital cities. The latter became known as Congo-Leopoldville while the former was referred to as Congo-Brazzaville. After the departure of the Belgians, the country became unstable as tribal leaders gained popularity over the central government. The Rise of Mobutu Sese Seko Rebel factions in Katanga and Kasai revolted against the government seeking secession from the Republic of Congo. Kasa-Vumbu dislodged Lumumba from office in September 1960, but Lumumba declared the president's action unconstitutional resulting in a crisis. On September 14, 1960, Mobutu Sese Seko supported by the Belgians and the Americans executed Lumumba. In 2001, the Belgian Parliament found the country responsible for Lumumba's death and gave an official apology for its role. The western powers further supported Mobutu in the 1965 coup that overthrew Kasa-Vumbu. Mobutu assumed control and the country was subsequently renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo." Africanization of Names Mobutu sought to Africanize every name in Congo and eliminate traces of the Belgian colonialization in the country. On October 27, 1971, he changed the name of the state to the Republic of Zaire and that of the military to Zairian Armed Forces. He dropped the name General Mobutu and adopted Mobutu Sese Seko as his official name. Cities in the country were also renamed from Leopoldville to Kinshasa, Stanleyville to Kisangani, and Elizabethville to Lubumbashi. Mobutu remained in office until he was overthrown in 1997 by Laurent Desire Kabila who changed the name of the country from Zaire back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Prime Minister Theresa May will set out how Britain wants to proceed with its departure from the European Union before a summit of the bloc's leaders on April 10 begins, her spokesman said on Tuesday. May is under pressure to either get her Brexit deal passed by the British parliament - something she has failed to do three times - or come up with an alternative strategy before the meeting next week. The EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, said Britain now faced three remaining options: accept the deal, pursue a no deal Brexit or face a long delay. "Certainly I think you would expect us to be setting out what we want to achieve in advance of the summit beginning but there is no fixed deadline I am aware of," the spokesman said. Search Keywords: Short link: "It's not the roadway, it's not the way it's lined, it's not the layout of it, it's not the engineering of it, it's not the traffic volume on it, it's not the trucks, it's not the speed limit. It's the people who are on the road, and we could all take a hint and do a little bit better at... It will take more than a year to determine the cause of a recent Amazon Air crash, according to Robert Sumwalt, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). This seems to be very much a mystery, but the NTSB has 52 years of experience solving such mysteries, and Im confident we will get to the bottom of this, Sumwalt told Flying magazine. Amazon Air was established several years ago as a way for Amazon, the Internet retail giant, to increase profits by cutting its growing shipping costs. In 2015, Amazon began leasing aircraft from companies that also provided employees to fly, maintain and insure them. Amazon owns no planes, and the pilots who deliver its cargo are not legally its employees. In the process of establishing Amazon Air, Amazon has shown its usual disregard for worker training and safety, maintaining its laser focus on the bottom line. The crash is the companys first. The accident occurred on February 23. Atlas Air-operated Flight 3591 from Miami to Houston crashed outside of Houston, killing all three people on board. Captain Ricky Blakely and First Officer Conrad Jules Aska were delivering cargo for Amazon and for the US Postal Service. Mesa Airlines Captain Sean Archuleta was riding in the jump seat as a commuter. After the plane encountered turbulence, its engines increased to maximum thrust and its nose turned upward. Alarmed, the crew pushed the nose down at a 49-degree angle, which caused an exceptionally steep descent. The plane accelerated and dropped from 6,525 feet to 3,025 feet in 30 seconds. This prompted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to issue an alert notice. To steady the aircraft, the pilots pulled it up to a 20-degree angle. Although they did not issue a distress call, they began communications consistent with loss of control of the plane, according to the NTSBs preliminary review. The plane went down approximately 30 miles southeast of Houstons George Bush International Airport. Speaking to the press, pilots have said that the crews maneuvers during the flight were unusual, and even counterintuitive. Obviously, going 49 degrees nose down is beyond a radical move. Thats not something an airplane should be doing, especially at that altitude, said Todd Curtis, a former safety engineer for Boeing, in an interview with the Associated Press. The accident is not the first for Atlas Air, which has had several irregularities over the past year. A cargo plane operated by an Atlas Air subsidiary swerved off the runway at the Northern Kentucky Airport in October 2018. Another Atlas Air plane had a hard landing in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in July 2018. The flight inspection subsequently found significant damage to the jet. Mere weeks before the deadly crash, pilots for Atlas Air and Air Transport Services Group (ATSG), which also contracts with Amazon Air, told Business Insider that an accident was inevitable. They said these companies paid so little, they were unable to attract experienced pilots, even though Amazon is requesting more and more flights. The pilots also said the training their companies provided was inadequate. Many pilots were overworked, fatigue was common and employee morale was low. Atlas Air and ATSG were grinding down their collective workforce before Amazon Air was founded, but the rapid expansion of the latter made the existing problems worse. The exponential growth of Amazon Air has forced pilots who are responsible for training new-hires and educating them about safety to work at reckless speeds. Business at Atlas Air and ATSG is booming as a result of Amazon, and safety standards are slipping. Veteran pilots are appalled at the companies hiring decisions. We have guys in the [first officer seats] who have no business flying airplanes, and certainly no business flying heavy jets, a pilot who has flown with ATSG for 23 years told Business Insider. The quality of training has been deteriorating, according to pilots. The FAA has at least twice warned ABX Air, which is owned by ATSG, about creating a disruptive and confrontational atmosphere during pilot training. In a letter to ABX, the FAA alleged that David Soaper, the companys president, recently interrupted a training session to shout at crew members. Unsurprisingly, one of the workers abruptly walked out of the session. Pilots for Amazon Air have reported that they do not have regular work schedules. Instead, they are often asked to work mere hours before their flights are due to depart. Pilots have been called in on their days off and forced to work overtime. One pilot for ABX reported that he was away from home for two months at a time in recent years. The schedules are so punishing that some pilots are worried about their peers mental health. Pilots who fly for Amazon Air have been involved in contract disputes with their employers for almost five years. They have not received a raise in almost 10 years, and their benefits have declined. The last contract for ABX and Atlas was finalized during the financial crisis that began in 2008 and includes many painful concessions. The workers endured a pay cut, lost vacation days, and the freezing of pension contributions and matched contributions to health care plans. On average, Amazon Air pilots with the most experience make approximately 33 percent less than pilots at UPS and FedEx who have the same experience and are flying the same aircraft. Yet the pay of the top four executives at ATSG increased by more than 100 percent from 2015 to 2017. The Airline Professionals Association, a division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, represents the pilots. For decades, the Teamsters union has collaborated with management at various companies to extract more labor and profit from its members. In October 2018, the union forced a contract with United Parcel Service on members who had rejected it by a vote of more than 62 percent. Union officials, meanwhile, have maintained their political influence and salaries that keep them in the top 5 or 10 percent of earners. Erik Prince, 49, former Navy SEAL-turned-founder of mercenary firm Blackwater and brother of current US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, was invited by the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a reactionary anti-socialist student organization, to speak at Beloit College on Wednesday, March 27. The small private liberal arts school in southern Wisconsin on the border with Illinois has an enrollment of approximately 1,800 students. However, at the time Princes speech was slated to begin, 7:30 p.m., the lectern remained empty, while every seat in the lecture hall was occupied and throngs of students packed the hallways. Campus security, along with a small contingent of Beloit Police officers were present outside the hall. Students who were participating in a protest of Prince staged an orderly walkout promptly at 7:30 p.m., respectfully registering their disgust, while other students attended counter-protests and events. After five minutes, neither Prince, nor any speaker from the YAF had taken to the podium as music and chants led by students asking Erik Prince, where are you? filled the hall. Following 30 minutes of intermittent clapping, singing and laughing, students began to stack chairs on the stage while others took to the front of the stage holding signs proclaiming Erik Prince = War Criminal. By 8:15 p.m. the event was declared canceled by the interim dean of students for safety reasons. Those in attendance dispersed peacefully and no arrests were made. Following the events official cancellation, Prince held a private meeting with a group of YAF members and supporters in which he denounced the president and administration at Beloit College for lacking, the moral courage to enforce free speech and to defend free speech. The hypocrisy of Prince, a billionaire war criminal, caterwauling about free speech while whistleblower Chelsea Manning is imprisoned and Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange remains confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London unable to communicate with the outside world, is laughable. Prince is routinely given space in the bourgeois press, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to lobby for war and his companys participation in future imperialistic spoils. On front pages, cable news stations and in opinion sections Prince has repeatedly touted his plans to privatize the Afghanistan invasion and replace US troops with thousands of private mercenaries under his control. President of Beloit College Scott Bierman released a statement the following morning. Bierman acknowledged that most of the protests were completely consistent with our principles, however, voices of dissent differ in fundamental ways from intentional disruption. Bierman continued, I condemn excessive disruptions unequivocally, I do so because they are debilitating to the mission of this college, a mission I love. How, or what is considered an excessive disruption, was not made clear by Bierman. As no one attempted to speak at the event it is hard to determine who exactly was disrupted. In the weeks leading up to the scheduled appearance several students posted on social media and wrote into the student newspaper the Round Table, noting their disapproval at the YAF and the college administration for inviting the war profiteer, with an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion, to the campus to lecture on national security challenges facing the U.S. Blackwater, the private military security firm founded by Prince, is notorious for war crimes committed overseas in the service of US imperialism, most infamous being the Nisour Square Massacre in 2007. In that instance Blackwater contractors guarding a US Embassy convoy fired on a crowd of Iraqi civilians killing 17 and wounding 20 others. Former employees of Princes have sworn in court that he, views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe, and that Princes companies encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. Prince has since sold Blackwater USA, which now operates under the name Academi, to private investors, while Prince has founded a new private security outfit, Frontier Services Group, based out of Hong Kong, China. It specializes in exploiting African resources for Chinese business interests. Following the murder of 50 people during the fascist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, perpetrated by white nationalist Brenton Tarrant, several students, including practicing Muslim students, posted in a private Beloit College Facebook group relaying how inappropriate, uncomfortable, and angry they were that the university would be hosting a speaker who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of Muslims throughout the world. Beloit College junior Nathaniel Acharya, took publicly to social media, beginning early in the morning on March 15, to register his opposition the YAF, specifically the student president of the organization, Andrew Collins, and its effort to bring Prince to campus. Acharya lamented that he was sick and tired of Muslims being gunned down in their places of worship and bombed to oblivion in their homes by the cult of violent reactionary filth [that YAF] worships. Acharya ended his first post with a call to action for the student body to protest Princes lecture, lest we be complicit in it and all that it represents. Acharyas follow-up posts on Facebook and Snapchat continued to denounce the YAF, fascists, and white supremacists. His final post, a Snapchat selfie with text underneath, expressed his dismay at message boards 4chan and 8pol where Nazi and fascist propaganda are posted and frequented by fascists such as Tarrant. In the early afternoon on the March 15, less than 18 hours after his first Facebook post, Acharya was detained by three campus security officers and interviewed by Beloit College Director of Safety and Security Bruce Heine, with a City of Beloit police officer present. His social media posts had been reported for violating Code #6 of the student handbook which concerns threatening social media posts. On Sunday, March 17, two days after his meeting with security, Acharya was hand-delivered a letter from the Beloit College Dean of Students Office, informing him that he was under investigation for acts of serious misconduct. He was informed that the process could last up to 20 days and that he was barred from campus until his hearing on March 19. In the meantime, the junior student was made temporarily homeless, forced to stay with friends and faculty. During the hearing it was determined that Acharya had violated the policy and would be sentenced to academic probation for the remainder of the semester, however he would be allowed to return and continue his studies. Hundreds of students, along with professors and faculty members, supported Acharya throughout the investigatory process, which many deemed unfair. After he was allowed to return to campus he remained resolute in his opposition to the YAFs invitation, telling the Round Table, bringing Erik Prince to campus here in the immediate aftermath of the [Christchurch] attack was not only very cold, but inflammatory as well. Yesterday evening, after six weeks of strikes and mass protests, the Algerian presidency set a deadline yesterday for the Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down as president. Its communique declared, The naming of a new government on 31 March 2019 by his Excellency Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of the Republic, will be followed by important decisions he will take, in line with the specifications of the constitution, to allow him to guarantee the continuity of the functioning of the institutions of the state during the transition period that will begin when he decides to resign. This resignation of the president of the Republic will take place before 28 April 2019, the date on which his electoral mandate ends. While this text promises that Bouteflika will leave office, it does not satisfy in any way the aspirations that have driven millions of Algerians into struggle since February. It is a maneuver of the regime that workers and youth are seeking to bring down, to protect itself from a revolution by getting rid of a hated figurehead. But the wealth that the regime has monopolized is not to be transferred to the working class, which produced it, and power is still in the hands of a sclerotic clique of generals and top officials who are violently hostile to the workers. The way forward is building rank-and-file organizations of the working class, independent of the state and its trade unions, to coordinate a revolutionary struggle against Algerias bloodstained capitalist dictatorship and the repression it is preparing. Many of the millions of workers and youth who have protested since February will reject this transparent attempt by the regime to hold on to power. Bouteflikas departure was prepared through violent internecine conflicts between the army brass and the presidency, since Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salahs unconstitutional intervention last week, pledging to invoke Article 102 of Algerias constitution to remove Bouteflika on grounds of his infirmity. The new government announced on Sunday precariously balances between the regimes various feuding factions. The new prime minister, Noureddine Bedoui, is the former interior minister and reportedly close to the Bouteflika family. The defense ministry and the command of the army will remain in Gaid Salahs hands, strengthening the position of the army even though the general is technically still the second-ranking figure in the government. Meanwhile, these same parasitical factions are embroiled in vicious infighting to determine who will control the wealth of the country, and on whom the ruling elite will try to pin the blame for the bankruptcy of Bouteflikas presidency. At 3 a.m. Sunday morning, Algerian customs arrested Ali Haddad, the head of the CEO Forum (FCE) business federation who is close to Bouteflika, at Oum Teboul on the Tunisian border. Yesterday, the El Kala court ordered he be transferred to detention in Algiers. Haddad allegedly presented customs with illegal papers and tried to cross the border with 5,000 in cash without declaring it, whereas Algerian law requires travelers to declare any cash sum over 1,000. Yesterday, the Algiers prosecutors office announced charges against a dozen other billionaire businessmen close to the Bouteflika clan: two of Haddads brothers, the Kouninef brothers, and Maihieddine Takhout and several of his relatives. Preliminary investigations are underway on charges of corruption and illicit capital transfers overseas, announced the prosecutors office. It added that in order to carry out its investigation, it had ordered a ban on travel overseas by certain individuals. The Algerian state also banned until April 30 all flights by private jets to prevent businessmen from fleeing Algerian soil. All private aircraft that are the property of Algerians and are registered either in Algeria or abroad, are banned from taking off or landing in Algerian air space, declared an official announcement published late Sunday. General Gaid Salah is also denouncing Algerian intelligence, whom he has accused of secret collaboration with French imperialism. According to Echourouk News, he declared at a general staff meeting on Saturday that there are ill-intentioned forces who aim to undermine the credibility of the army and evade the legitimate demands of the people. He claimed that a meeting took place between the presidents brother Said Bouteflika, the former head of the Department of Intelligence and Security (DRS) General Mohamed Mediene (Toufik), current DRS head General Athmane Tartag, and French officials. According to Gais Salah, this meeting led to the decision to create a certain anarchy in Algeria, organize the rejection of Article 102 of the Constitution and incite regionalisms. The army doubtless hopes to use such allegations to justify stepped-up law and order measures and the inciting of a climate of fear to facilitate repression within Algeria itself. Mediene published in Tout sur lAlgerie a reply to Gaid Salah, calling his accusations a grotesque manipulation. He added, Accusing me of meeting foreign agents to discuss subjects relevant to national sovereignty is a deliberate attempt to harm my reputation. I have never in any way deviated from the principle of defense of national sovereignty. It is an untouchable rule that I have always respected in my behavior and my actions. It is impossible to confirm or rule out any of the allegations made by top Algerian officials, whose byzantine quarrels are infamous for their obscurity. However, certain things can be said with certainty. The Algerian capitalist regime is collectively guilty of what its leaders are accusing each other of doing. It has misspent the hundreds of billions of dollars in natural gas revenues, pocketed by the families and relatives of top officials, while working closely with Washington, Paris and other NATO powers. It was thanks to collaboration with Algiers, which opened up Algerian airspace to French fighter-bombers, that Paris was able to invade and bomb Mali starting in 2013. The only way for workers to overthrow imperialist domination and take back the wealth they have created is to bring down the dictatorship and take power, in a revolutionary struggle carried out together with workers in France and internationally. This requires building a revolutionary vanguard, an Algerian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), offering revolutionary leadership and opposing the political parties who hide their support for Algerian capitalism behind tactical criticisms of the regime. The Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), linked to Frances discredited, big-business Socialist Party, deplored the regimes decision to ignore the legitimate and pressing demands of virtually the entire Algerian people and to continue recklessly heading straight into a wall. The FFS reaffirms its promise to remain mobilized until complete satisfaction is given to popular demands for liberty, democracy and self-determination. The Workers Party (PT) called Bedouis nomination a fruitless re-branding operation trying to get around the will of the vast majority to kick out an obsolete and outmoded system. The PT, which has worked closely with the regime for decades, warned that the new government would face the rejection of the vast majority of the population, as a hijacking of the objectives of the revolutionary process. The PT proposed instead a sovereign and national Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution for the existing Algerian capitalist state. Rewriting the Algerian constitution and redistributing the top offices among the regimes current top officials will resolve none of the problems that drove masses of workers and youth into struggle. The only way forward is the independent mobilization of the working class in a revolutionary struggle for political power. None of the four non-binding indicative votes on an alternative to Prime Minister Theresa Mays negotiated withdrawal agreement for Brexit secured a majority vote by MPs Monday night. The motion put forward by pro-European Union (EU) Conservative Ken Clarke, calling for an EU withdrawal agreement to have as a minimum a new customs union with the bloc, came closest to winning, with 273 votes for and 276 against. Just 37 Tory MPs backed Clarkes amendment and only 33 voted for a motion Common Market 2.0 tabled by Tory Remainer Nick Boles. This proposes that the UK remain within the EUs single market, have a customs union with the bloc and become a member of the European Free Trade Association alongside the small economies of Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein and Switzerland. Given how small the pro-EU faction of the Tory party is, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May is highly unlikely to make a concession to secure a soft-Brexit compromise. It is more probable that she will bring her current deal with the EU back for a fourth meaningful vote this week. Today, May will hold a five-hour Cabinet meeting to finalise her next moves. She may decide to put up her deal in a run-off against parliaments most favoured option. On its last vote, Mays EU Withdrawal Agreement lost by a majority of 58. While viewed as a compromise that could mobilise cross-party support, Boles refused to accede to demands that a peoples vote be attached to his solution. His motion was defeated with a majority of 21. He immediately resigned from the Tory party, which he condemned for refusing to compromise, and will sit as an independent. Boless motion won Labour and SNP backing, but the 11 Liberal Democrat MPs and the pro-Remain The Independent Groups 11 MPs both refused to back what was described as the softest Brexit motion on the basis that they do not support any plan to leave the EU. Motion G called for a revocation of the Article 50 legislation governing the UKs withdrawal if a deal is not agreed with the EU. Tabled by the Scottish National Partys Joanna Cherry, it secured 191 votes with 292 against after Labour refused to whip in its favour. Motion E, tabled by Labour MP Peter Kyle, called for a version of a second referendum by preventing any withdrawal agreement from being ratified without a confirmatory public vote. It received 280 votes, but lost narrowly by a majority of 12, with 15 Labour MPs abstaining. Cabinet ministers were once again instructed to abstain on all indicative votes. But the strength of the pro-Brexit Tory faction was made evident by the small number of soft-Brexit votes by Tory MPs and a letter signed by 174 MPs and ministers, handed to May on Sunday, opposing any form of soft Brexit and insisting she pursue a no-deal departure from the EU if her deal is rejected. Parliamentary Speaker John Bercow did not select the indicative option Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled last week, calling for a soft Brexit with access to a customs union, and the Labour Party backed the two soft-Brexit proposals. In a letter to Labour MPs Monday afternoon, Corbyn stated that the party seeks a permanent customs union, close alignment with the single market and dynamic alignment on rights and protections. He again refused to endorse outright a peoples vote, on either Mays deal or a deal that Labour could negotiate if it took office. With May staggering on in office and her government mired in crisis, Corbyn was on message to the ruling class in his response to the votes. Adopting his pose as a safe pair of hands and guardian of the national interest, he refused to call for a general election or to pledge a vote of no-confidence in the government, supporting instead the plan for parliament to meet again on Wednesday in another attempt to secure a compromise around a soft Brexit. Given the narrow three-vote defeat yesterday, Clarkes lowest common denominator proposal for a customs union is the most likely to pass. But pro-Remain MPs expressed optimism that they could secure backing for a second referendum to ratify or reject any deal. As they did ahead of last weeks Brexit votes, leading EU officials sought to put pressure on MPs to back an outcome resulting in the least damage to the bloc. The message from Europe was that if MPs backed an agreement including a customs union, this would be welcomed by Brussels and an overall deal could be finalised in as little as 48 hours. The EUs Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, said it would be really the best thing that could happen, On this basis, a new political statement can then be approved at a European summit on 10 April and then we will give the British the opportunity to formalise it in English legislation by 22 May. However, with just 10 days to go before the EUs deadline for reaching an agreement passes, and the real possibility of a no-deal outcome, Germanys EU minister, Michael Roth, said on Sunday, Brexit is a big shitshow, I say that now very undiplomatically. Mays impossible position means that a snap general election cannot be ruled out. Reflecting opposition to a general election within ruling circles is the pro-Brexit Sun, owned by billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch. The Sun editorialised Sunday that the Torys hard-Brexit wing must now swing behind Mrs May and push her deal over the line. An editorial Monday warned a general election could lead to a Labour victory under Corbyn et al who want to force their Marxist agenda down our throats. It warned, Its all very well for the Tories to simply assume that Jeremy Corbyn et al will never get near Downing Streetbut it would be criminally complacent. Weve more or less given up on the Brexiteers who refuse to vote for the PMs deal, even though their preferred no deal is essentially impossible. But those who are tempted to plump for a permanent customs union in todays ridiculous indicative vote process must also realise that they could very well trigger an election, with unknowable consequences. The depiction of Corbyns minimal reformist policies in revolutionary terms exposes how fearful Britains ruling elite are of a movement by millions of workers and youth being unleashed, demanding an end to austerity, militarism and war, which Labour would be unable to stem. The author also recommends: Class struggle and socialism are the only answer to the Brexit crisis [1 April 2019] Tens of thousands of school pupils, parents and students took to the streets of Berlin last Friday, under the slogan Fridays for future, to demonstrate against climate change. The protests began last August and have since mobilised increasing numbers of young people. On March 29 around 25,000 demonstrated in Berlin alone. The main speaker in Berlin was the initiator of the protests, Greta Thunberg from Sweden. The mood at the demonstration was political and militant. Many participants had brought homemade anti-capitalist banners. The problem is capitalism, one read. System change, not climate change stated another. The issue of climate protection is very topical today, because its about more than just the emission of pollutants. The situation has now progressed to the point where people who are not really radical are taking to the streets demanding radical solutions, Anke said. Anke was convinced that the current radicalisation would intensify as more people protest in opposition to the right wing and far right and the growth of militarism: Just take a look at the US. What is lacking is education and enlightenment, but nobody is doing that. If you explain questions to people and motivate them, then they will become much more radical. Like many other demo participants, Anke had no confidence in the established parties or the big business elites. We cannot wait until political and business leaders agree on any compromise. The broad masses have to come up with a solution, in opposition to the current policy. Manuel travelled with friends from the West German state of Schleswig-Holstein to participate in the demonstration. I am standing here today to ensure that the climate goals are finally met, he said. There are big concerns everywhere, which receive lots of money from the state and then go onto produce extreme levels of CO2. To implement these goals, however, it is important to work together internationally and not against one another, he added. Another demonstrator commented, We can all connect to the internet today. This protest was also organised over the internet. Unlike in the past, we are no longer restricted to one city, but can organise across Europe as we are doing today. Kim and Lian also saw international cooperation as a prerequisite for a successful climate policy. The major powers invested billions in military and trade war, while companies were adopting anti-climate policies, e.g. in the US, they said. We all have to work together internationally, no matter where we come from, irrespective of skin color, religion or origin. This is the only way to oppose trade wars. This was view was echoed by two pupils passing by with a poster saying, Tomorrow was yesterday. They had made the banner to criticise current policies and politicians, they explained. We deliberately left the wording open to provide food for thought for those who are not only concerned about the climate, but also about a policy to secure peace or social equality. An 18-year-old apprentice died and another construction worker was critically injured when 15 metres of scaffolding collapsed at a building site in the Sydney suburb of Macquarie Park yesterday. The tragedy is one of a spate of horrific incidents that has highlighted the dangerous conditions that prevail in the construction industry. Property developers, building contractors and the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) routinely enforce speedups and subordinate workers safety in order to complete jobs quickly and ensure high profit margins. The collapse occurred at around 12:30 pm on the site of a $220 million residential apartment development commissioned by Greenland Australia and being built primarily by construction company Ganellen. Between 300 and 350 workers were present at the time. Nine storeys of scaffolding and some concrete reportedly collapsed without warning. According to the trade union, several workers leapt to safety from the scaffolding. Footage showed others running from falling debris. Part of the site where the accident occurred Christopher Cassaniti, a formwork apprentice, and a 39-year-old colleague were trapped beneath scaffolding and piping. More than 15 workers tried to free the men. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired footage of workers angrily confronting police officers who attempted to prevent them from removing the debris. Emergency workers described the horrifying aftermath. Steven Vaughan, acting inspector of New South Wales Ambulance, told the media that paramedics arrived to an absolutely chaotic and emotionally charged scene, given the nature of the debris, the location of where it occurred and just the emotional state of all those who wanted to help their colleagues. Cassaniti was not freed until around 3pm. He was pronounced dead at the scene. His parents were present at the time. The injured worker was rushed to hospital and placed in an induced coma. According to media reports, he has not suffered brain or spinal cord damage, but sustained major injuries, including a broken pelvis. Little information has been released about the accident, but it raises many questions. These include, when the scaffolding was last inspected, whether it had been certified as safe and whether any other dangerous incidents have taken place at the site. Trade union officials joined Liberal-National and Labor Party leaders in hypocritically expressing sympathy for the families of Cassaniti and the injured worker, but they are all responsible for the widespread erosion of safety standards on building sites. CFMMEU assistant national secretary Dave Noonan told reporters yesterday: If scaffolding is erected, maintained and loaded properly, then this should not happen. His remarks pose the role of the union itself in facilitating the conditions that led to the accident. A number of workers on site were reportedly CFMMEU members and the organisations officials were rapidly on the scene after the incident. At large building sites covered by the CFMMEU, the union often has paid health and safety officers who are supposed to ensure that safe work practices are followed. They are able to order an end to work if unresolved issues jeopardise safety. In a bid to defuse workers anger, CFMMEU officials said they did not want to speculate on the cause of the incident. They promised a union inquiry and promoted illusions in an official investigation, to be conducted by SafeWork NSW, a pro-business government body. Construction has consistently ranked among the three most dangerous industries in Australia, measured by workplace fatalities. Including yesterdays accident, there have been five deaths in the sector this year already. Thirty-five construction workers were killed on the job in 2016, followed by another 30 deaths in 2017. Statistics for 2018 are not yet available, but 19 workers had died by September. In many of the fatalities, the CFMEU and the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), with which it amalgamated last year to form the CFMMEU, have been directly responsible for ensuring that work continued on sites despite known safety issues. In March 2017, Tim Macpherson, a 32-year-old rigger, was crushed to death on a wharf construction project at Barangaroo on Sydney Harbour. He was working on a barge at the site, when an unsecured concrete and metal beam was knocked by another beam being moved by a crane, and fell on his head and torso. Macpherson died instantly. The MUA had been informed the previous year that the barge did not comply with safety standards. The union claimed it demanded access the site, but was turned away. The MUA did nothing to address the dangers, and only raised them publicly after MacPhersons death. In 2013, Matthew Lopez-Linares, a 22-year-old Canadian backpacker, was killed after being struck on the head by a falling steel beam at a demolition site in Sydney. CFMEU officials declared they were not surprised by Lopez-Linares death. Two weeks earlier, workers had raised concerns with the union about the stability of slabs on the site and the demolition practices. After a perfunctory stoppage, the union allowed work to continue, creating the conditions for the death. In 2012, a fire broke out in a 65-metre hydraulic tower crane in the centre of Sydney, resulting in a 20-metre boom crashing onto a building site. The CFMEU had been aware of fuel leaks and other maintenance issues beforehand. Union officials later said it had been an accident waiting to happen, but they had done nothing to halt operations prior to the incident. The union functions as a thoroughly corporatised industrial police force for big business. For decades, via cosy enterprise agreements, the union has collaborated with the major corporations and successive governments in the dismantling of workers jobs, wages and conditions, while ensuring the privileges of the union officialdom. A 2015 royal commission into union corruption exposed extensive ties between the CFMEU and property developers. The following year, it was revealed that the union had received $700,000 from companies owned by George Alex, a developer who has been accused of underpaying workers and operating phoenix companieswhich are wound up owing entitlements and wages to workers, before being reborn under another name. Now, with a marked construction downturn and the unravelling of the speculative housing market, the union is intensifying its partnership with employers. Last year 40,000 jobs were eliminated across the construction sector, without any opposition from the union. The slump is prompting companies, assisted by the union, to further speed up operations, so as to finalise projects before a worse contraction. Under such conditions, further fatal accidents are inevitable. In Berlin and other German cities, including Nuremberg and Cologne, more than 5,000 people protested on Saturday against Interior Minister Horst Seehofers plans to further deprive refugees of their rights, treat them like criminals and criminalize their supporters. At the same time, they demanded the resumption of maritime rescues. The demonstration had been called by the pan-European initiative Seebrucke (Sea bridge). Its petition against Seehofers bill No Orderly Return Law but Seehofers resignation! has already received more than 15,000 signatures. The demonstrators made their protest against these right-wing politics clear with self-made posters. Stop deportations, Deport Seehofer, Life-saving is not a crime, but failing to is! and Refugees Welcome were some of the slogans. Part of the rally in Berlin The so-called orderly return law provides for legal penalties if rejected asylum seekers and refugees given a temporary stay do not prove the veracity of their identity information and actively participate in their own deportation. Asylum seekers, whose deportation is not possible for the time being according to the authorities, should not receive a temporary stay, but an invitation to leave. Linked to this are harsher work prohibitions and the exclusion of integration possibilities. Only accommodation, food and toiletries should be provided. At the same time, the European Union decided last week to end its Operation Sophia in the Mediterranean. At the start of the demonstration in Berlin, WSWS reporters spoke with Kathrin, who, as head of operations on the Iuventa, a ship that is part of the Jugend Rettet (Youth saves) initiative, actively participated in the rescue of refugees on the Mediterranean. The Iuventa had saved around 14,000 people from distress between 2016 and 2017, reported Kathrin. The ship was seized in Italy in 2017 and has since been held in the port of Trapani in Sicily. The 10 crew members confront a criminal investigation in Italy for aiding illegal immigration, and face up to 20 years imprisonment. Kathrin Kathrin condemned the prosecution as a bureaucratic legal measure that serves to condemn men to death with open eyes. Although only a handful are being charged, it affects us all. It is something that endangers the freedom of democratic society. The Italian investigation into the crew of the Iuventa had not started under Interior Minister Matteo Salvini (Lega), infamous for his refugee policy begun in mid-2018, Kathrin clarified. Months before, a bug had been installed on the ship, telephone calls had been intercepted, and undercover agents had been deployed on other ships. The escalation of reprisals against refugee aid workers is not a national phenomenon. In fact, this strategic criminalization of solidarity and humanitarian aid is currently happening across Europe, Kathrin said. Everywhere, people are prosecuted, for example those who had helped refugees with a place to sleep, something to eat or a shower. Providing life-sustaining measures is to be penalized if it is given to those with the wrong passport, she said. Kathrin was participating in the protests because this inhuman policy is supported by the German government. To date, the government had still not made a statement on the charges against the crew. On the contrary, Seehofer was one of those who demanded that the crew of the rescue boats should be prosecuted. Ruben, a maritime rescuer for Sea Watch, also stressed that anti-refugee politics were a European problem. Ruben Not only right-wing, but also supposedly left-wing governments, were implementing this policy, according to Ruben. For example, you can see it in Spain, where the so-called socialists rule and Sanchez also prevents rescue ships from leaving port. Referring to the ending of Operation Sophia, Ruben noted that the European Union was deliberately deploying Libya to do their dirty work. They know you cant take people back to Libya with their own warships, because its clear human rights crimes are commonplace there. There are court rulings prohibiting European ships from returning people there. Therefore, he said, the Libyan militia were used, which could not be held legally responsible for its actions. Asked by the WSWS reporters about his perspective for the fight against right-wing government policies, Ruben replied, We are building a solidary Europe from below. 50 cities had already joined the sea-bridge movement and declared themselves to be safe havens. Ruben found it particularly interesting that suddenly people no longer talk only about migration, but also about climate change and article 13. Since all these topics are being discussed, the AfD is falling in the polls, he said. SGP candidate Markus Klein with Arnoud at the SGP's stall Arnoud, who is visiting Berlin for several weeks, discussed the current developments in EU policy and parallels between Germany and France with Markus Klein, a Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) candidate for the European elections. In France, too, the asylum laws are being tightened up. At the same time, popular resistance is growing in the form of the yellow-vest movement. Arnoud explained how Macron was increasingly trying to suppress the protests and to mobilize the military against them. Asked about the need for an international policy against this turn to the right, Arnoud agreed: In times of globalization, this seems to be the only option. The corporate press has been full of reports condemning Pauline Hansons One Nation, in the wake of a two-part Al Jazeera investigation aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) over the past fortnight, showing representatives of the right-wing populist party on a fundraising tour to the United States last year. Senior Labor and Liberal-National representatives have hypocritically denounced One Nation for soliciting funding from the powerful US gun lobby. The same politicians have collaborated closely with One Nation and promoted anti-immigrant xenophobia and nationalism similar to its stock in trade. Moreover, all of the major parties raise their finances from sections of the corporate elite, to whom they are beholden. The manufactured outrage has served to cover up the dubious character of the Al Jazeera program, which resembled a police sting. It has prevented any serious discussion of the possibility that the program was a political operation, aimed at destroying One Nation amid an unprecedented crisis of the official parliamentary set-up. The program was produced by Peter Charley, the head of Al Jazeeras North American investigative unit. Charley previously produced the ABCs Lateline news program from 2000 to 2007 and has worked for a host of other Australian media outlets. He doubtless has extensive contacts within Australias media and political establishment. According to Al Jazeera, it began its investigation in 2015. Charley commissioned Rodger Muller, another reporter, to pose as the head of a non-existent lobby group named Gun Rights Australia. They created a professional website for the fictional entity, along with slick campaign videos. Over the ensuing 18 months, Muller cultivated contacts with various gun lobbyists by presenting himself as an activist seeking to relax Australias restrictive firearms laws. Muller travelled to the US and participated in the NRAs 2017 national convention. Sometime in 2018, Muller attended a One Nation function in Sydney. He introduced himself to James Ashby, a senior advisor to the partys leader, Pauline Hanson, and offered to secure connections between One Nation and the US gun lobby. At no point in the two-part program is it explained why Muller approached One Nation. There is a plethora of right-wing populist parties, many of which have made a more explicit pitch to anger over Australias gun laws. A report released by the Australia Institute last week demonstrated that One Nation is among the parliamentary parties that has received the least funding from Australian gun lobbyists. Between 2011 and 2018, One Nation received just $6,203 from the sector, less than a thousand dollars a year. This compared with over $800,000 to the right-wing populist Katters Australian Party, around $700,000 to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, almost $90,000 to the Coalition and more than $30,000 to Labor. Moreover, by the time that Muller approached One Nation, the investigation had already spanned at least two years. Vast resources were apparently expended, to provide Muller with a backstory and fictional identity to fool the One Nation leadership. The centrepiece of the TV program is a trip to the US by Muller, Ashby and One Nations Queensland leader Steve Dickson. Secret footage from the visit, filmed by Muller using hidden cameras, certainly presents an unedifying spectacle. Ashby and Dickson appear consumed by the pursuit of money and boast of their ability to manipulate the electorate. That senior figures in One Nation, or any of the other parliamentary parties for that matter, are cynical political operators is hardly a revelation that required a three-year investigation. Over the course of several days in Washington, Muller brokered meetings between the One Nation representatives, and a host of political lobbyists in the US, including the National Rifle Association and Koch Industries. The trip largely consisted of a series of alcohol-fuelled functions, at which the One Nation representatives told anyone who would listen of their desire to change Australias gun laws and of their need for financial assistance. For all of the hype surrounding Al Jazeeras program, One Nation came away empty-handed. Their attempts to solicit donations appeared amateurish, unprepared and wholly arranged by Muller. There are significant questions about the editing of the program. While every poorly chosen and politically damaging remark by Ashby and Dickson is featured, Muller remains a silent presence in the background through much of the program. It seems inevitable, however, that to gain the confidence of the One Nation representatives, Muller voiced the same backward and jingoistic positions that they did, and encouraged their boorishness to gain the most damaging footage possible. Much of the media coverage has focused on remarks made by Pauline Hanson in the program, which appear to lend credence to the right-wing conspiracy theory that the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, which killed 35 people, was a ploy to restrict gun laws. Many of the articles and reports have obscured the fact that the remarks were made during a private dinner between Hanson, Muller, Dickson and Ashby. Hanson responded to the airing of the program by condemning it as a political sting. She said the party had been stitched up. She absurdly denounced Muller as a foreign spy because he was employed by Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Qatari state. Some journalists, including Peter Greste, a former Al Jazeera reporter, have labelled the program as unethical. Greste said that the program was guilty of crossing the line by actually creating a story and not simply reporting it. The timing of the program raises many questions. It was aired on the eve of an Australian federal election, which will be dominated by mass hostility to the major parties. There are widespread concerns within the corporate and financial elite that major losses for the Coalition and the Labor opposition could deepen Australias protracted political instability. They are particularly fearful that a parliament dominated by various right-wing populist formations and independents, will be unable to implement the austerity agenda that they are demanding. The immediate beneficiaries of the program, Labor and the Greens, have extensive connections at the ABC. Both have used the program to demand that the Coalition disavow any preference deals with One Nation, which may be crucial in marginal electorates. The production of the program also coincided with a bitter civil war within the Coalition, pitting a moderate faction against a right-wing grouping around Morrison, which is seeking to transform the organisation into an alt-right, Trump-style movement based on anti-immigrant xenophobia and populism. Both factions, at various points, have had an interest in taking down One Nation. The Turnbull wing has viewed the party as a close ally of Morrison. For its part, the Morrison wing of the party has sought to undercut the appeal of One Nation and similar groups, by adopting its program. The Al Jazeera investigation recalls a political operation conducted against One Nation in the late 1990s. The party had been feted by the Coalition government of Prime Minister John Howard, and the corporate elite, who viewed it as a vehicle to shift politics further to the right, and to divert growing social discontent into xenophobic channels. Their attitude changed in mid-1998, after One Nation attracted nearly 25 percent of the vote in a Queensland state election. The political and media establishment, determined to stamp out any challenge to the two-party set-up, no matter how reactionary, began pointing to One Nations connections with ultra-right wing and neo-Nazi outfits, and its authoritarian organisational structure. The political frame-up, spearheaded by sections of the Coalition, culminated in the jailing of Hanson and One Nation co-founder David Ettridge, under Queenslands anti-democratic electoral laws. At the time, the Socialist Equality Party was alone in correctly warning that the operation against the right-wing party was a serious assault on democratic rights that would set a precedent for attacks on progressive and socialist organisations. The Al Jazeera program is another sign that the upcoming federal election will be dominated by mud-slinging and dirty tricks. All of the major parties are seeking to divert attention from their common agenda of austerity, anti-democratic measures and support for US wars and to score cheap political points from their rivals through scandals and scares. The author also recommends: Jailing of One Nation leaders sets anti-democratic precedent [29 August 2003] The International Socialist Organisation and the jailing of Pauline Hanson [5 September 2003] The rise and decline of Pauline Hanson's One Nation [9 March 1999] The International Socialist Organization is collapsing just over a month after its national convention, amidst factionally instigated denunciations of sexual assault and cover-up. In the midst of a vicious purge of long-time leaders, ISO members have been stampeded into voting for a resolution, proposed by the surviving leadership, for building a new model of revolutionary socialism that begins with develop[ing] a process for dissolving the ISO. The membership also voted to shut down, within the next two weeks, the organizations principal publication, SocialistWorker.org. These decisions effectively liquidate the International Socialist Organization. The ISOs collapse has taken place with extraordinary speed. The chronology of the crisis leaves no doubt that the collapse was instigated by a factional conspiracy organized by a section of the leadership, which was implemented in two stages. The operation began barely one month ago. In late February, the ISO held its annual convention. A statement posted March 15 on SocialistWorker.org describes the event as the most painful in the history of the organization. The convention, according to the statement, was devoted to reckoning with the damaging impacts of our past practices and internal political culture. The convention voted for a drastic change in the composition of the ISOs National Committee and the Steering Committee (SC). The latter functions as the day-to-day leadership of the organization. Selected on the basis of a racial quota system, two-thirds of the SC were new to leadership. One half of these politically inexperienced and easily manipulated members were comrades of color. On Monday, March 11, the second stage of the factional operation began. A document, written by a former member (identified only as FM), arrived by email at the offices of the ISO. According to the March 15 statement, FMs document was also sent to allies outside of the ISO whom we have worked with in socialist-feminist and queer activism. The timing of the document and the events that immediately followed its arrival leave no doubt that it was solicited, if not entirely written, by a faction within the ISO leadership. The document from FM revived a 2013 charge of sexual assault against a member of the ISO, who had been elected to the new SC. According to the ISOs March 15 statement, FM had been a member of the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC) that originally heard the 2013 case. FMs document, which contained no new information or evidence supporting the allegations made in 2013, was immediately seized upon as the pretext for a massive purge of longstanding members of the ISO leadership. Amidst unrestrained hysteria, the SC suspended, expelled and forced the resignation of leading members. The timeline of events exposes the unprincipled, undemocratic and sordid nature of the proceedings. On Tuesday evening, March 12, just 24 hours after the arrival of FMs document, the ISO SC held an emergency meeting at which it asked the respondent [i.e., the accused] to identify himself and resign, according to the March 15 statement. The individual resigned from the SC and said he would take a leave of absence. The SC voted to suspend him and stipulated that a decision would be made on his membership status later. Two days later, on Thursday March 14, a joint meeting of the NC, SC and other members agreed unanimously to expel the respondent according to the original decision of the NDC. It took the decision, also without any due process or investigation, to suspend from membership three members of the 2013 SC directly involved in the outcome of the case, while a complete investigation of what happened in 2013 takes place. Moreover, the ISO voted to suspend from a position on any leadership body any member of the 2013 SC, along with a recently elected NC member, who had played a role in undermining the work of the NDC, for the duration of the investigation. Among those suspended was 80-year-old Joel Geier, one of the founding members of the Independent Socialists, the predecessor to the ISO. Geier has since resigned. Eight former leading members of the ISO have also announced their resignation. These include Sharon Smith, the former national organizer, Paul DAmato, Lance Selfa and Ahmed Shawki. The 2013 allegation of sexual assault The ISO SC has not released the document from FM, nor has it made available the specific evidence that corroborated the 2013 claims of sexual assault. However, the resignation letter from Joel Geier, dated March 21, provides information that discredits the claim that there had been a cover-up. Geier notes that he had been involved in drawing up guidelines for a new NDC, established by the ISO in 2013, and that he advocated that the committee incorporate elementary democratic rights for the accused. The case in question involved a non-member claiming that she had been raped by a member. The NDC voted for the expulsion of the accused. The SC overturned the decision, for reasons explained by Geier. It was pointed out to them, Geier writes, that they had reached their conclusion without the opportunity for the Respondent to present his own defense in a hearing, without his ability to question the evidence and witnesses against him, without the opportunity for him to raise questions to the claimant, even through an advocate. Moreover, the person who made the accusation refused to participate in the ISOs internal procedures. After the intervention of the ISO SC, which sought to preserve some semblance of due process, the NDC reversed its decision. Subsequently, an Appeals Committee decided that there was insufficient evidence to make a determination in the case. No disciplinary actions were recommended. At the 2014 ISO convention, the proceedings and outcome of the case were reported to the membership. In unchallenged statements supporting the leadership purge, posted on Socialist W orker.org during the past two weeks, the reversal of the NDCs 2013 decision is denounced on the grounds that any man accused of an assault must be presumed to be guilty. There is no need for any fact-finding proceeding nor any presentation of corroborative evidence. The accuser must be believed. A March 20 post by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, titled What Socialists Can Learn From #MeToo, exposes the hysterical psychology, akin to a lynch mob, that prevails among ISO members recruited on the basis of middle-class identity politics. She writes that because I believe the accusation and am writing from my own perspective, I am going to use straightforward rather than legalistic language: rape rather than alleged rape, survivor rather than complainant, and rapist rather than respondent. Though Wrigley-Field admits that she never read any documents relating to the 2013 accusation, she complains that the investigation was obsessed with procedure rather than with truth and mitigating harm. For Wrigley-Field, truth is determined by and made equivalent to the assertion of the accuser. No procedural rules, demanding the submission and examination of evidence, should be allowed to test, let alone directly challenge, the accusers truth. Summing up the witch-hunters philosophy, Wrigley-Field proclaims: When we honestly believe that our rules are a barrier to discovering the truth, then fuck the rules. The concealed political issues In the statements issued by the ISO, there is no explicit reference to or discussion of the political differences within the organizations leadership that underlay the crisis that erupted during the week of March 11, 2019. Readers are expected to believe that the alleged mishandling of an accusation of sexual assault, which occurred six years ago, has caused the political collapse of the International Socialist Organization. This is preposterous and will be believed only by those who are either hopelessly naive or hopelessly stupid. The unleashing of a sex scandal in a political organization is aimed invariably at generating hysteria, stampeding the membership and preventing an open and rational discussion of program, perspective, strategy and the interests of conflicting internal factions and social forces. Only in the aftermath of the organizational massacre, as the smoke begins to clear, do the political interests and aims that precipitated the crisis begin to emerge. On the basis of statements that have been posted on SocialistWorker.org, as well as an examination of the alignment of various key individuals, it is evident that the outcome of the crisis has been an extremely sharp movement to the right. * Issue 1: The ISO and the Democratic Party The liquidation of the ISO has effectively removed an organizational barrier to the integration of its dominant faction into the political orbit of the Democratic Party. Prior to the February convention, the ISO was engaged in a protracted internal discussion of the political implications of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs election to Congress. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member, is being elevated into significant positions of power within the Democratic Party. With the 2020 election approaching, the Democratic Party is exerting immense pressure to organizationally disarm and integrate potential opposition from the left. The DSA, which is a faction of the Democratic Party aligned with the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, has been seeking to bring the ISO into its political fold. Significantly, the March 15 statement of the SC states that the ISO (or, presumably, its remnants) will study how the ISO can relate to socialist campaigns run on Democratic ballot lines. * Issue 2: The ISO and the trade unions In recent years, leading ISO members have acquired influential and personally lucrative positions in the AFL-CIO. This development is exemplified in the rise last year of Jesse Sharkey to the presidency of the Chicago Teachers Union. The March 15 statement denounces the pre-purge ISO leadership for creating conditions in which comrades with decades of trade union experience were held in suspicion for fear that they might stray too far from a course set by the SC. Sharkey, who supported the ISO purge, represents a stratum of ISO-affiliated trade union bureaucrats who no longer want to be restricted by party discipline. The desire to free themselves from ISO control has been intensified by the fact that Sharkey, as CTU president, now plays a leading role in the Chicago Democratic Party. In the recent municipal elections, candidates linked either to the CTU or the DSA won nearly a dozen seats on the Board of Aldermen, giving the pseudo-left the role of junior partner to the next mayor of Chicago. The CTU under Sharkey, moreover, has endorsed Toni Preckwinkle, a long-time Democratic Party operative, in the April 2 Chicago mayoral runoff. * Issue 3: The ISO and financial resources A major factor that underlies the conflicts within the ISO is control over resources. The ISOs assets run into the millions of dollars. The ISOs non-profit 501(c)(3) organization is called the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC), whose active projects include Haymarket Books. In its 2017 tax filings, the latest year that is publicly available, CERSC reported an adjusted net income of $3,177,938, with $3.6 million in revenue from book sales and over $1 million in contributions and grants from foundations. Among the major assets of the CERSC are nearly $200,000 in stock in Oracle, the US computer technology corporation, and a similar amount in CTO (Consolidated-Tomoka Land Co.,) a Florida-based real estate company. In 2017, the CERSC paid out nearly $900,000 in wages and benefits. The CERSC is a major beneficiary of grants from foundations. In 2017, this included $225,000 from the Tides Foundation (established by an R. J. Reynolds tobacco heiress and bankrolled more recently by billionaire George Soros) and $240,000 from the Lannan Foundation, which has a close relationship with the ISO and its members. The Lannan Foundation has given grants to several ISO members to write books, including Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a tenured professor at Princeton, who specializes in the promotion of identity politics. It also provided the CERSC with a grant to purchase a $2.3 million building in Buena Park, Chicago to house Haymarket. Notably, Haymarket Books, the publishing arm associated with the ISO, issued a statement on Facebook solidarizing itself with the internal purge. Calling Haymarket the flagship project of the CERSC, the statement declares that we stand with and believe survivors. It continues: When concerns about actions outside of the CERSC on the part of some members of the CERSC board came to our attention, we took immediate action. An entirely new board has since been constituted with individuals who have our full support and confidence. Among the six executives or directors of the CERSC, listed in the last tax filing of the organization, are four individuals who have been purged from the ISO: Sharon Smith, Ahmed Shawki, Lance Selfa and Paul DAmato. The signatories of the Haymarket statement include Anthony Arnove, an editor at Haymarket and one of the remaining directors at the CERSC. Also signing the statement was Julie Fain, the managing editor of Haymarket Books and the wife of Jesse Sharkey, the CTU president. For all the talk of openness and transparency, it is to be expected that the settlement of conflicts relating to the disposition of assets among the conflicting leadership factions will take place in secret negotiations behind closed doors. Foundations and non-profit organizations are subject to legal constraints. Those who presently have control of the income and assets will be anxious to avoid lawsuits by those ex-leaders and foundation shareholders who have been forced out of their posts. Political conclusions Whether or not the complete dissolution of the International Socialist Organization was the intended outcome of the political conspiracy organized by a section of the leadership is not clear. However, it is the logical outcome of the ISOs right-wing, middle-class and thoroughly opportunist politics, in which all the various factions involved have participated. The ISO was eminently susceptible to a #MeToo-style operation. The membership of the ISO was recruited on the basis of middle-class identity politics. Those who joined the organization received no education in Marxist theory, let alone the central historical experiences of the Fourth International. Perpetually operating in an environment of unprincipled factionalism, rampant opportunism, political cynicism and extreme subjectivism, the members are conditioned to reject concern for issues of program and political principle. Their one abiding passion is hatred of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site. Our fight for the political independence of the working class, on the basis of the Trotskyist program of Permanent Revolution, is condemned as sectarianism. No serious assessment of the political causes of the breakup of the ISO will emerge from its opportunist milieu. Rather, commentaries have been posted on SocialistWorker.org assigning ultimate responsibility for the breakdown to a misguided adherence to Leninist orthodoxy and, even worse, unrealistic revolutionary aspirations. Aside from the fact that the politics of the ISO has had nothing to do, since its founding, with socialist revolution, let alone Leninism, the political demoralization that pervades its leadership is summed up by Paul LeBlanc. Ruminating on his six decades of opportunist political activity, he opines that if organizations aspire to do more than they can possibly do [i.e., seek to mobilize the working class for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism], profoundly debilitating results are inevitable. [Reflections on Coherence and Comradeship, posted on SocialistWorker.org, March 27, 2019] Some are boasting that out of the wreckage of the ISO a new model of revolutionary socialism will emerge. They are whistling as they pass by the graveyard. Their quest for a new model is leading them squarely into the Democratic Party. In the final analysis, the breakup of the ISO reflects the impact of the intensifying social crisis, and the initial manifestations of class struggle, on the politically bankrupt organizations of the pseudo-left. The ISO will not be the last victim of this process. As Trotsky once said of the opportunist organizations of his day, The great events which rush upon mankind will not leave of these outlived organizations one stone upon another. This has proved to be the fate of the ISO. The revelation that former Justice Minister and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould secretly recorded a telephone discussion with Canadas top civil servant over the SNC-Lavalin affair has intensified the crisis that has been roiling Canadas Liberal government since early February. The scandals roots lie in the efforts of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his top aides to prevail on Wilson-Raybould to shield SNC-Lavalin, one of Canadas largest and most internationally active companies, from criminal prosecution on corruption charges. It has laid bare bitter divisions not only within the Liberal Party, but more importantly within Canadas ruling big business elite, which is using the crisis to shift official politics still further right. Wilson-Raybould announced last Friday that she had taken the unprecedented step of surreptitiously recording a December 19 call from Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council, and would be turning the audio over to the House of Commons Justice Committee. Wernick had called Wilson-Raybould, at the prime ministers behest, to pressure her to overrule the Public Prosecution Service of Canadas decision to proceed with the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. He argued that the Attorney General should intervene and offer the company a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), which would have seen the charges that SNC paid tens of millions in bribes to Libyan government officials between 2001 and 2011 dropped, provided the company paid a fine and made good conduct pledges. DPAs had only come into existence through an amendment to the Criminal Code the Trudeau government pushed through earlier in 2018a move so obviously tied to the corruption case that Ottawa insiders referred to the DPA law as the SNC-Lavalin bill. On the tape, Wilson-Raybould can be heard warning Wernick that the pressure that has been brought to bear on her to bail out SNC-Lavalin borders on illegal government interference. She goes on to say that if this were to become public, it would undermine the claims Trudeau has made, in rebutting charges that the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was politically-motivated, that the rule of law prevails in Canada. For weeks the Conservative official opposition has been urging the RCMP to open a criminal investigation into the SNC-Lavalin affair. It and much of the media are now triumphantly proclaiming the Wernick tape conclusive proof that Trudeau and his government violated the law. Meanwhile, Wilson-Rayboulds release of the tape, along with other new evidence, has further inflamed relations within the Liberal Party. Reports suggest it is highly likely that the former Attorney Generalwho as both a woman and Canadas first-ever aboriginal Justice Minister had been touted as the physical embodiment of Trudeaus progressive diversity agendawill be kicked out of the Liberal parliamentary caucus, along with her fellow former minister and close personal friend, Jane Philpott. Philpott, who was lionized by the media as one of Trudeaus most effective ministers, resigned from her post as President of the Treasury Board on March 4, three weeks after Wilson-Raybould, citing Trudeaus handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair as the reason. By giving an exclusive interview to Macleans two weeks ago in which she asserted, Theres much more to the story that needs to be told, Philpott helped ensure that the media furor and opposition attacks against the government over the SNC-Lavalin affair would continue. Initially senior Liberals, including Canadas self-proclaimed feminist prime minister, were loath to be seen purging two prominent women from the party. But with Wilson-Raybould and Philpott so manifestly working to undermine the government and Trudeaus own authority and credibility, the sentiment appears to have changed. A growing list of Liberal MPs are publicly demanding the two be expelled, with the secret taping of Wernick cited as proof of the former Justice Minsters disloyalty. Whatever Wilson-Raybould and Philpotts original intentions, there is no question they have been emboldened by the corporate media in their challenge to Trudeau and to the government in which they themselves served until only a few weeks ago. The entire imbroglio was initiated by a Globe and Mail expose published in early February. It suggested that Wilson-Rayboulds demotion to Veteran Affairs Minister at the beginning of 2019 had been due to her refusal to buckle to pressure from the Prime Ministers office over the SNC-Lavalin prosecution. Soon after the media, at least in English Canada, was all but universally applauding Wilson-Raybould as she quit cabinet, then went public with her claims she had been bullied by the Prime Ministers Office to protect SNC-Lavalin. Philpott has been similarly promoted as a politician of rare principle and integrity. That the Trudeau government rewrote and tried to bend the law to prop up a titan of corporate Canada is beyond dispute. But far from being an unprecedented act of Liberal corruption and cronyism, the determination of Trudeau and his ministers to defend SNC-Lavalin from prosecution is little more than a run-of-the-mill example of how bourgeois governments operate on a daily basis, i.e., at the beck-and-call of the major corporations and financial elite. If the corporate media has chosen to feign shock and outrage, it is because powerful sections of Canadian big business have soured on the Liberal government and either want to replace it or restructure it by replacing Trudeau with a more openly right-wing figure, like Foreign Minister and Russia war hawk Chrystia Freeland. Behind a smokescreen of pseudo-progressive, identity-politics-laced rhetoric, the Liberals have pursued a right-wing agenda little different from the Harper Conservatives who preceded them. They have expanded Canadas role in the US military-security offensives against Russia and China and are playing a leading role in the US regime-change drive in Venezuela. They are collaborating with Trump in his anti-immigrant witch hunt, are expanding the powers of the national security apparatus, and criminalized last falls postal strike. But under conditions of global capitalist breakdownanemic growth and fears of a 2008-type financial crash, the eruption of trade war, and a surge in great-power conflictsections of the ruling class are determined to bring to power a government that will even more aggressively assert Canadian imperialisms interests on the world stage and more aggressively attack the working class at home. Specific complaints include everything from the governments failure to match Trumps corporate tax cuts and get oil pipelines built to tidewater to the Liberals failure to push through the military procurements and major hikes in military spending promised in their 2017 national defence policy. Moreover, after four years of right-wing Liberal rule, the progressive aura that Trudeau projected and used, with the enthusiastic backing of the union bureaucracy, to contain social opposition, is well past its best-before date. Recent polls indicate the media furor over the SNC-Lavalin affair has damaged the Liberals and in particular Trudeau, who now trails his party in support. For the first time since 2015, the Conservatives are consistently leading in the polls. Their return to power under Andrew Scheer, who describes himself as Stephen Harper with a smile, now appears a distinct possibility. The ruling elite, it need be underlined, is fresh from carrying out such a lurch to the right in Ontario. Last year a purportedly progressive Liberal government that had used its close ties to the Ontario Federation of Labour, Unifor, and the teachers unions to slash taxes for big business and the rich while imposing years of austerity on working people, was replaced by a Progressive Conservative government led by the Trump wannabe Doug Ford. Ontarios new government has launched a class-war assault on the working class, slashing welfare rates, Pharmacare, and the Ontario Student Assistance Plan (OSAP), rolling back a minimum wage increase, gutting labour standards, hiking high school class sizes, and laying the groundwork for massive cuts to education and health care. If the resolution of the deepening governmental crisis is left in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the outcome will prove disastrous for working people. Whether Canadas ruling elite brings a Conservative-led government to power, replaces Trudeau at the helm of a restructured Liberal government, or allows him to continue in office, the policies of the government that will take office after the next election, currently slated for October, will be determined by the accelerating breakdown of global capitalism. The only progressive way out is for workers across Canada to unite their struggles against austerity, job cuts and concessions and constitute themselves as an independent political force, fighting, in opposition to all the establishment parties and factions of the capitalist elite, for a workers government and socialism. Anti-riot police violently broke through the picket lines at three factories on strike in Matamoros, Mexico on Sunday, leaving four workers injured from the beatings, including two who had to be hospitalized. These are the last three maquiladora plants on strike in the city, following a wave of wildcat strikes began on January 12 in defiance of the trade unions. More than 89 factories have agreed to the demands of a 20 percent raise and a bonus of 32,000 pesos (US$1,670), popularized as the 20/32. While the strikes at these plants were branded as illegal by local authorities, nearly 600 workers at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in the citythe second largest in Latin Americahave been on a wildcat strike for the same demands since January 30. Before a federal labor board could rule on the legality of the strike, Coca Cola sent a group of thugs on Friday to attack the picket line and even tried to enter the occupied facilities with heavy equipment. Fistfights broke out and several workers were injured, but the assault was repelled with the support of dozens of workers from nearby maquiladoras. Companies across the city have retaliated against the strikes, with as many as 6,500 firings so far, according to the Mexican Employer Confederation (Coparmex). Seeking to claw back these concessions and make an example out of Matamoros workers to contain the strike wave, employers have threatened 50,000 layoffs. The most militant workers are reportedly being placed on blacklists used by maquiladoras along the border. The Maquiladora Association Index said this weekend that the strikes have cost companies up to $600 million and that severance money is being saved for firing thousands at a time. The escalation of repressive measures against the remaining strikes marks a new stage in the response by the ruling class that will involve even greater reprisals and state violence against any resistance. The three maquiladoras launched their strike on February 5 when workers at dozens of plants affiliated to the Industrial Union of Workers at the Maquiladora and Assembly Plants (SITPME), which has dismissed their demands and sent thugs against strikers, decided at a mass assembly to carry out a general strike against the trade union and the companies. The police returned on Monday to clear the entrances again and the companies are planning on resuming operations on Thursday. After the assault, Tamaulipas governor Francisco Javier Garcia Cabeza de Vaca declared, The labor conflict that erupted near the beginning of the year and kept some maquiladoras on strike in the Matamoros municipality took a decisive step toward resolution in the early morning of Sunday, when Tamaulipas State Police intervened to recover the companies Avances Cientificos de Mexico, Mecalux Racks Metalicos and Flux Metals, at the request of the companies themselves. Mecalux is a Barcelona-based metallurgic company; Flux Metals describes itself as a US fabrication and machining company; and Avances Cientificos is owned by the US-based ThermoFisher Scientific. They employ about 700 workers in Matamoros. In contrast to workers willingness to fight, Susana Prieto, a labor lawyer who has claimed to be the leader of the strike movement, has responded by directing workers to simply place their hopes in a lawsuit to seize the severance pay that companies are denying them. More generally, Prieto, who is tied to the ruling Movement for National Regeneration (Morena) and independent unions backed by the US AFL-CIO federation, is working to channel any resistance against city-wide reprisals behind dead ends such as joining these alternative unions and presenting workers as local candidates. In 2016, she carried out the same trap against thousands of workers in Ciudad Juarez who had rebelled against the existing unions. On Monday, an auto-parts worker at the Inteva maquiladora spoke to the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter to denounce Prietos betrayal of the remaining strikes. She lies, she only lies. The workers struck for the 20/32 and now she acts as if the strike was because of the layoffs and the refusal of the employer to pay severance. These men are going to be left with nothing and Susana is exposing them as martyrs in her favor. He added: I had noticed that she had an authoritarian behavior in which no one voices opinions. She was taking people to the SME [Mexican Electricians Unions] without asking. Now I see that its just another CTM [the pro-company Confederation of Mexican Workers]. Im worried that she has used us in such a miserable way. I want to make a warning of the danger that we face, but Im fearful about being attacked as a traitor. He commented that his wife was fired from Autoliv: She was a leader of the strike at Autoliv and formed a rank-and-file committee, and on Wednesday January 16, when the committees met with the union and the local labor board, the lawyer slandered all the committees created by the strikers. These committees were appealing to workers across Mexico and internationally to support and join their struggle. As the WSWS has warned since the first week of the strike, Prieto was sent by the political establishment to sideline the independent rank-and-file committees formed by workers and to subordinate them to the trade union apparatus and create illusions in the Morena administration, whether the CTM or so-called independent unions, in order to isolate the strike and facilitate suppression and reprisals. This occurs in the context of efforts by US imperialism to incentivize the shifting of key industries toward North America as it prepares to intensify its economic and military confrontations against global rivals. Bloomberg reported last week that Americas imports from Mexico surge the most in seven years as Trumps policies shift supply chains, citing the US trade war against China and the new regional trade agreement. Representing a Mexican bourgeoisie salivating over the prospect of these investments, the administration of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) is moving against what Bloomberg called the main obstacle to added Mexican investments: a more aggressive labor movement. Prieto herself has recognized that the deployment of the state police has been part of efforts by the federal government to crush the strikes. On Thursday, the Financial Times warned that the Matamoros rebellion risks the attraction of Mexico as a cheap location for US and Canadian factories. In other words, any new investments are conditional on wage stagnation or new attacks on living standards. Real wages in Mexico have fallen 80 percent in the last 30 years. The danger for workers was summed up by AMLO on March 21, the birthday of ex-president Benito Juarez, when he stated: His fame was so great, the glory of President Juarez, that he was admired abroad. Mussolini was named Benito because his father admired Juarezthat is why his name was Benito Mussolini, a leader of world dimensions, a great leader. Let his [Mussolinis] critics do their job. Why should I? The Mexican ruling class and its imperialist patrons in the US and Europe are responding to the largest strike in North America in the last three decades by turning sharply toward authoritarian forms of rule. Capitalists are again compelled to politically disarm workers by chaining their struggles behind nationalist and pro-capitalist politics and the trade unions, including through pseudo-left politicians such as Susana Prieto. This cannot be allowed to happen. Workers in Matamoros want to fight, but for this they need to re-form or consolidate their rank-and-file committees in opposition to all trade unions, to organize a struggle in defense of strikers at Coca-Cola, Mecalux, Flux Metals and Avances Cientificos, as well as to fight against the ongoing mass layoffs. All plants that violate their agreements with workers and carry out reprisals must be placed under the democratic control of the workers committees. This struggle against transnational corporations with the backing of the Mexican and US states can only be waged internationally. Workers in Matamoros need to join the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees in the United States in organizing an international fight against mass layoffs and concessions across North America and beyond. David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), will be speaking alongside Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP, Socialist Equality Party-Germany) Deputy National Secretary Christoph Vandreier at four events as part of the upcoming meeting series, The Threat of Fascism and How to Fight It. David North and Christoph Vandreier address the meeting in Leipzig, Germany North and Vandreier will jointly address meetings in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan; Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City. SEP (US) National Secretary Joe Kishore will speak with Vandreier at the meetings in California at San Diego and Berkeley. The meetings are part of an international book tour featuring Vandreier, author of Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy and the Return of Fascism in Germany, (Mehring Books, 2019) available for purchase. Vandreier and North recently spoke before large audiences in London, England and Leipzig, Germany, where Vandreiers book was greeted with great enthusiasm. In every country there is broad concern among workers and youth over the growth of the extreme right. There is not a mass base for fascist politics, but as the class struggle grows worldwide, elements within the state, academia and the media are instigating political conspiracies and conducting historical falsification to create a political environment that legitimizes the resurgence of the far right. The meetings will address the role of the SGP in exposing this state-backed operation. The meeting series will also take up the historical lessons that must be learned in order to build a mass working class movement capable of preventing the disaster of Nazism from taking place on an even greater scale today. Berkeley, California Monday, April 8, 7:15 p.m. UC Berkeley Moffitt Library Room 101 350 Moffitt Library, Berkeley CA 94720 Facebook Event Page San Diego, California Tuesday, April 9, 7:30 p.m. San Diego State University Student Union, Templo Mayor 6075 Aztec Cir. Dr., San Diego, CA 92182 Facebook Event Page Detroit, Michigan Thursday, April 11, 7:00 p.m. Wayne State University Student Center, Room 285 5221 Gullen Mall, Detroit, MI 48202 Facebook Event Page Ann Arbor, Michigan Monday, April 15, 7:00 p.m. University of Michigan Weiser Hall Room 182 450 Church St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Facebook Event Page Cambridge, Massachusetts Wednesday, April 17, 7:00 p.m. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Building 6, Room 120 (6-120) 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139 Facebook Event Page New York, New York Thursday, April 18, 6:30 p.m. New York University Global Center Lecture Hall 95 238 Thompson St., New York, New York 10012 Facebook Event Page Shortly before carrying out the March 15 terrorist attack in Christchurch, in which 50 Muslim worshippers perished, fascist Brenton Tarrant posted on the internet a 74-page manifesto, justifying his actions and inciting further right-wing violence around the globe. The manifesto, titled The Great Replacement outlines the gunmans white supremacist ideology and influencesincluding US President Donald Trumpand his connections with extreme right-wing circles internationally. It largely resembles the anti-immigrant rhetoric of established political parties and governments around the world. In a highly revealing section headed Break the back of cheap labour, Tarrant calls on his followers to support the trade unions. He advances the same nationalist and anti-immigrant demands put forward by the unions and nominally left bourgeois parties, which have become increasingly explicit as these organisations have shifted sharply to right in response to the deepening capitalist crisis. Tarrant declares that nothing drives the invasion of refugees and migrants more than the greed that demands cheap labour. The global market, he writes, must never be allowed to compete with a white European market. Opposing the importation of both goods and labour is an essential pillar of his fascist program. The manifesto blames the decline in white workers living standards on immigrants and advances policies to drive immigrants out. These include furthering the unionization of workers; increasing the native birth-rate and thereby reducing the need for the importation of labour; increasing the rights of workers. [Emphasis added] The section concludes: human greed and the need for increasing profit margins of capital owners needs to be fought against and broken. Cheap labour is slave labour, refuse to import modern slaves. Nothing highlights the reactionary essence of trade union nationalism and anti-immigrant chauvinism more than these statements. Similar calls for an end to the importation of foreign workers can be found in countless union press releases and speeches by bureaucrats all over the world. Tarrants pretence to oppose cheap labour and corporate greed is a fraud, as is his claim that the trade unions defend workers rights and oppose private profit. What the fascist shooter and the trade union bureaucracy have in common is their commitment to the defence of capitalism and intense hostility to socialism and internationalism, that is, the perspective of uniting the working class across borders in the fight to abolish the private profit system and the reactionary division of the world into competing nation states. Instead, fascists and trade union leaders alike advocate protectionist and anti-immigrant policies to defend the interests of their countrys corporations. The unions long ago abandoned any resistance to finance capital and became adjuncts of big business and the state in increasing the exploitation of workers. Opposed to any struggle in defence of jobs and working conditions, the unions in every country have turned to the vilest forms of nationalism in order to blame foreign competition for deteriorating living standards. The auto unions in the US and Canada, for example, support the trade war agenda of Donald Trump, who has made anti-Mexican chauvinism central to his attacks on the working class, the militarization of the southern border and mass deportations of undocumented workers. The United Auto Workers union has aligned itself with Trumps demands for cutbacks at General Motors plants based on the lie that such concessions will protect American jobs. These positions are not limited to a few individual union leaders, but are a universal phenomenon bound up with deep-going objective processes. In the early 20th century, the unions sought to extract limited gains for workers within protected national economies, without challenging capitalist rule. Globalisation and transnational production, particularly since the 1970s, removed any rational economic basis for national-based industries and reformist policies based on the nation state. Like Tarrant, the unions defend capitalism while opposing globalism on the basis of a reactionary, and impossible, return to self-contained national economies through trade tariffs and other protectionist measures. Such attempts to turn the clock back, in any country, would see finance capital flood elsewhere, virtually overnight. Vast transnational corporations have produced a global labour market, systematically shifting production to those countries where wages, taxes and social and democratic rights are the most brutally suppressed. The logic of economic nationalist policies, like Trumps America First agenda, is trade war and preparations for military conflict to determine which imperialist power will control the worlds resources and markets. That is how the capitalist class seeks to resolve the contradiction between globalised production and the division of the world into nation states. The trade unions are assisting the development of militarism by stoking xenophobia to divide workers and derail the deepening class struggle internationally. In New Zealand, since the 2008 global financial crisis, Labour, the Greens and the trade unions have aligned themselves with the racist NZ First Party. They have enforced austerity measures and scapegoated migrants for unemployment and low wages, while ratcheting up anti-Chinese chauvinism as New Zealands ruling class aligns with the US war preparations against China. The unions suppression of the class struggle and extraction of concessions from workers has produced the poverty and social misery which, in the absence of an independent socialist movement in the working class, are being exploited by the extreme right. In the wake of Tarrants terrorist attack, New Zealands unions are falling into line with calls from the Labour government and the media for national unity and opposition to division. The teacher unions seized on the Christchurch massacre as the pretext for cancelling a nationwide strike over pay and staffing. They are seeking to assist the Labour government in suppressing opposition among teachers, part of an international upsurge, so as to prepare the way for a sell-out. The fascist Tarrants support for the trade unions must come as a sharp warning to the working class. Workers must break from these nationalist, pro-capitalist organisations and establish their own independent organisations: rank-and-file workplace committees, controlled by workers themselves. Above all, the working class must recognise the impossibility of defending living standards without a political struggle against capitalism and the nation-state system. The only way to fight against social inequality, war and the danger of fascism is for workers to unite on the basis of socialist internationalism. The author also recommends: New Zealand: Unite union applauds ban on migrant workers at Burger King [15 September 2018] US unions praise Trump and his America-First nationalism [12 November 2016] Australian unions peddle anti-Chinese chauvinism as they enforce job destruction [30 October 2015] Why are Trade Unions Hostile to Socialism? [1998] Support for Spains pseudo-left Podemos party has slumped ahead of the April 28 general election as a result of its pro-austerity, pro-Socialist Party (PSOE) policies. Polls suggest the share of the vote for the Podemos-United Left coalition has crashed from 21.1 percent at the last election to 12.3 percent, and that it could lose up to half of its 71 seats in Congress. Some of its support has gone to the PSOE, which is polling just over 27 percent, up from 22.7 percent at the last election in 2016. The Popular Party (PP) is polling 19 percent, down from 33 percent. The fascist Vox party could enter Congress for the first time with 10 percent of the seatsmostly at the expense of the PP and the right-wing anti-separatist party Citizens, now at 17.7 percent. It is possible a right-wing coalition government involving the PP, Citizens and Vox could come to power. A major reason for the drop in electoral support for Podemos is mass abstention, particularly among the youth who no longer identify the party as a radical alternative. According to polls, only 49.5 percent of the population below 25 will vote on April 28. Podemos emerged as the decades-long two-party set-up, involving the PP and PSOE, crumbled following the 2008 global economic crash and was further discredited during years of austerity. Guided by Stalinist-influenced academics and theoretically rooted in a postmodernist rejection of Marxism and the revolutionary role of the working class, Podemos articulated the interests of affluent layers of the middle class. It sought to divert opposition to the social counter-revolution against the working class behind criticisms of the cronyism and corruption of the PP/PSOE caste, claims of opposing austerity and talk of nationalising the top companies and banks. Within a year of its creation in 2014, Podemos was challenging the PSOE and PP as Spains most supported party (polling more than 25 percent of the vote). However, the working class has now witnessed first-hand how Podemos rules in the local Cities of Changewith the imposition of austerity, and cuts estimated at 2.3 billion, strike breaking and attacks on migrants. One of the partys main promisesto stop the rapid increase in rents (Barcelona by 48 percent between 2013 and 2017, and in Madrid by 30 percent)has not materialised. Since its creation, Podemos has functioned as an adjunct to the PSOE. It helped to bring to power a PSOE government in June 2018 under a supposedly left Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. During its eight months in power, the PSOE proved indistinguishable from the former PP government, implementing austerity measures, showering the military with billions of euros, supporting the US-led regime-change operations in Venezuela, intensifying the crackdown on migrants and continuing the repression of the Catalan nationalists. Podemos would still be supporting that administration had it not been for the Catalan nationalists withdrawing their support for the 2019 budget, forcing Sanchez in February to call a snap election. Internally, Podemos is imploding, riven with factional disputes, desertions and a collapse in membership. Last December, the party, which claims 507,250 members, re-elected Pablo Iglesias as general secretary with just 60,000 people voting. This was less than a third of the turnout in the last referendum on Iglesiass leadership a few months earlier in which 190,000 voted. The Stalinist-led United Left (IU) and regional nationalist parties that rushed to ally with Podemos when it was riding high are abandoning it. The IU, while continuing to ally itself with Podemos at the national level in Unidos Podemos (renamed in the grammatically feminine form, Unidas Podemos, in time for the election), has decided it will not stand with Podemos in local and regional elections on May 26. IU congressional deputy Manuel Monereo, a Stalinist and very close to Iglesias, announced that the Podemos project was finished and called for something new to be created to give the necessary hope and freshness. In Galicia, the left nationalist En Marea alliance has rejected Podemos participation with one of its deputies declaring, Im outraged that we have the largest representation in the history of Galicia but we are losing influence. En Marea is expected to go from five seats in the last election to three seats. The Valencian nationalists of Compromis announced that it will not repeat its alliance with Podemos. Compromis leader Monica Oltra said, It is not intelligent to repeat the same formula that diminishes our electoral possibilities. Compromis is expected to lose three of its four seats. The past months have also seen desertions of top Podemos leaders. Inigo Errejon, long-time number-two of Podemos, has created a new party with Madrid Mayor Manuela Carmena, More Madrid (Mas Madrid), with the explicit aim of forging alliances with right-wing parties. The general secretary of the Podemos Madrid region and founding member, Ramon Espinar, has resigned, saying, When you have no room to lead and do not share the course, you have to go. Last week, Podemos Congress deputy Pablo Bustinduy, who served as party spokesman in the Congressional Commission of Foreign Affairs, quit as a candidate for Unidas Podemos in the May European Union (EU) elections. At a March 23 rally, Iglesias, returning to political activity after a three-month paternity leave, confessed, I know I have disappointed many people. We have brought shame on ourselves with our infighting for seats, positions [in the state machine] and visibility. We have acted like any other party. We have not been able to change the rules of the enemys game. We have supported measures that could alleviate problems but they do not solve them. We have not come to apply patches. Iglesiass appeal that Podemos stop applying patches does not signal a genuine change of course. Podemos will continue to play the enemys game. He wants Podemos to take ministerial positions in a PSOE-led government, rather than propping it up from the outside, claiming that this will enable him to exert pressure more directly and somehow turn the PSOE to the left. Podemos spokesperson Irene Montero insisted that Iglesias was the only candidate that defended the working class and the only one who can sit in front of those in power and say to them that their privileges have ended. Claiming that without Podemos the PSOE would never have looked to its left, Montero said that we have never been closer to installing Pablo Iglesias in the Council of Ministers and that, if they receive enough votes, they will attempt to renegotiate a government with the PSOE. In less than 24 hours, the PSOE, which is trying to outdo the right-wing parties in a law-and-order campaign directed against the Catalan nationalists, replied to Podemos. PSOE Organisation Secretary Jose Luis Abalos made clear the party was seeking an alliance with Citizens, which was preferable to the [Catalan] separatists to bring Sanchez to power. Citizens support is always preferable to those who question the unity of Spain and the constitutional framework. While the PSOE is preparing a right-wing government with Citizens that openly advocates for austerity and police state rule in Catalonia, Podemos is claiming that only it can push the PSOE to the left. The great unmentionable in these elections is the growing levels of poverty, precariousness and the preparations for further austerity and police state measures to respond to the international upsurge in the working class. The Bank of Spain has already alerted that the next government will have to implement 25 billion in cuts to satisfy Spains commitments to the EU, slash the public deficit from an estimated 2.5 percent now to 1.3 percent at year-end and 0.5 percent in 2020. At the same time, economic growth is expected to slow from 2.2 percent to 1.7 percent in 2021. In a decision that sets a new standard for legalistic sophistry in the service of barbarism, the US Supreme Court has approved the execution of a Missouri inmate using methods that are tantamount to torture. Despite evidence that the death row prisoner, Russell Bucklew, has a rare medical condition involving the formation of tumors in his bloodstream, which renders execution by lethal injection excruciatingly painful, the court issued a 54 ruling Monday that the execution should proceed as planned. The decision was the first in which the replacement of conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy by ultra-conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh clearly paid dividends for the most right-wing factions in Washington. Kennedy was the fifth vote to approve a stay of execution for Bucklew last year in an earlier, unrelated appeal. Kavanaugh supplied the fifth vote to send Bucklew to the death chamber. There are exceptional aspects to the issues in Bucklew v. Precythe. Only five cases of his rare medical condition are known to exist. As the dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer noted, Bucklew suffers from a congenital condition known as cavernous hemangioma that causes tumors filled with blood vessels to grow throughout his body, including in his head, face, neck, and oral cavity. As a result, Breyer explains, executing him by lethal injection will cause the tumors that grow in his throat to rupture during his execution, causing him to sputter, choke, and suffocate on his own blood for up to several minutes before he dies. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, President Trumps first nominee to the Supreme Court, simply dismisses the unique character of Bucklews appeal and uses the case to set a precedent for near-universal dismissal of challenges to the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. If death by lethal injection is not cruel to a prisoner with Bucklews particular cancer, and if a disease affecting only four other people is not unusual, it is hard to imagine what other circumstances would be sufficient to meet the test of the Eighth Amendment. The Gorsuch opinion bristles with resentment over the legal campaign waged by Missouri death row inmates and opponents of the death penalty over many years, claiming they have challenged the methods employed by the state to carry out executions in an effort to block executions altogether. The language of the opinion is revealing: After a decade of litigation, Mr. Bucklew was seemingly out of legal options. But Bucklews case soon became caught up in a wave of litigation over lethal injection procedures, which severely constrained states ability to carry out executions. After losing one appeal, that was still not the end of it, Gorsuch writes, venting his impatience at the refusal of Bucklew and his attorneys to accept his fate. Next, Mr. Bucklew and other inmates unsuccessfully challenged Missouris protocol in state court. Then the prisoner sought to intervene in yet another lawsuit The corporation that manufactured sodium thiopental stopped supplying it for use in executions after a campaign by death penalty opponents, Gorsuch notes. As a result, the State was unable to proceed with executions until it could change its lethal injection protocol again. The result is that Bucklew is still alive 22 years after he was convicted of killing his girlfriends new lover and kidnapping and raping her. Gorsuch claimed that the surviving victim, as well as the state, have an important interest in the timely enforcement of a sentence. He then argued: Those interests have been frustrated in this case. Mr. Bucklew committed his crimes more than two decades ago. He exhausted his appeal and separate state and federal habeas challenges more than a decade ago. Yet since then he has managed to secure delay through lawsuit after lawsuit. The vindictiveness is palpable, as is the determination to clear away all obstacles to the functioning of the American death machine. Gorsuch concludes: Courts should police carefully against attempts to use such challenges as tools to interpose unjustified delay. Last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm In the context of recent Supreme Court decisions on the death penalty, there are only narrow grounds for legal challenges by inmates to the method of execution. Bucklew had to prove that the method of execution would be unconstitutionally painful, and he was required to propose an alternative method of execution that was constitutionally permissible. The five-member majority essentially ignored the evidence of Bucklews medical condition, while dismissing his suggestion of nitrogen gasapproved as a method of execution in three stateson particularly ludicrous grounds, namely, that he did not submit a full plan of operation for his own execution, including such details as what kind of protective gear his executioners should wear when they gassed him. A noteworthy aspect of the Gorsuch opinion is his extensive and graphic discussion of the methods of execution that prevailed at the time of the adoption of the Eighth Amendment in 1791, when the ten amendments known collectively as the Bill of Rights were added to the Constitution. He writes that the methods of execution deemed cruel and unusual by the Founding Fathers were such things as hanging, drawing and quartering, death by dragging through the streets, and burning at the stake. Hanging in and of itself was not considered cruel, he writes, because The force of the drop could break the neck and sever the spinal cord, making death almost instantaneous. He continues: But that was hardly assured given the techniques that prevailed at the time. More often it seems the prisoner would die from loss of blood flow to the brain, which could produce unconsciousness usually within seconds, or suffocation, which could take several minutes. The legal significance of this discussion is that the Supreme Court has, for more than half a century, moved away from originalism in its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. Chief Justice Earl Warren set the tone in a 1958 opinion holding that the Eighth Amendment prohibited not merely what was regarded as barbaric in the 18th century, but any punishment that defied evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. This is the basis for such relatively recent decisions as the finding that capital punishment is cruel and unusual as applied to any child or juvenile, or to the intellectually disabled, or to those suffering from mental illness such that they cannot comprehend either their crime or their punishment. Kennedy had adhered to the Warren view, but Kavanaugh evidently does not, suggesting that the recent decisions limiting capital punishment could be reversed. The two most right-wing justices on the high court, the late Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, bitterly opposed any meaningful limitations on executions. Gorsuch succeeded to Scalias seat on the court, and his opinion in Bucklew takes a giant step toward Scalia and Thomas position. As noted by several legal commentators, Gorsuch embraces Thomass language in previous dissents on death penalty cases, finding that a method of execution is prohibited only when the State is cruelly super-adding painin other words, where the state intentionally chooses a method of execution calculated to cause more pain than necessary to end a human life. The dissents by Justice Breyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor make many valid criticisms of the majority opinion. Breyer notes the reversal of longstanding court precedent, given that the court has repeatedly held that the Eighth Amendment is not a static prohibition that proscribes the same things that it proscribed in the 18th century. Rather, it forbids punishments that would be considered cruel and unusual today. As is invariably the case, Gorsuch applies originalism selectively: to oppose efforts to apply constitutional principles more democratically. As he explains in his Bucklew opinion, he has no objection to the choice of electrocution as a method of executionclearly never envisioned by the Founding Fathersor any other new method of state killing such as the gas chamber. With 95 percent of the ballots counted, comedian Volodomyr Zelensky emerged as the clear front-runner in first round of Ukraines Presidential elections which took place on Sunday. According to Ukraines Central Election Committee, Zelensky led the first round with 30.2 percent of the vote. Current president and chocolate oligarch Petro Poroshenko finished second with 15.9 percent, and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko placed third with 13.4 percent of the ballots cast. Approximately 63.4 percent of voters took part in the election. Zelensky and Poroshenko will now move to the run-off elections to be held on April 21. The presidential election campaign took place under conditions of an extraordinary political and social crisis, with the Poroshenko regime whipping up an atmosphere of war hysteria. Before the official start of the election campaign, the Poroshenko regime provoked a confrontation with Russia in the Azov Sea and then used it as a pretext to declare martial law in several regions of the country. In the weeks prior to the elections, far-right thugs from the Azov Battalion, which was elevated to a major role in Ukrainian politics through the coup in 2014 and is now associated with Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, violently attacked Poroshenkos office in Kiev, and forced the president to flee his own campaign event. Zelensky won the most support in the central and southern regions of the country, while Poroshenko performed best in the western Ukraine, which is traditionally the stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism. Yuriy Boyko, candidate of the Opposition For Life Party led in the eastern regions of the country where ties with Russia are strongest, including in the separatist controlled Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. It appears that the Poroshenko regime will accept the results as Ukraines Central Election Committee reported that no systemic violations had taken place. However, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who finished third, has claimed that the exit polls were being manipulated. According to her campaign, Tymoshenko actually came in second and won 18.06 percent compared to just 14.74 for Poroshenko. Tymoshenkos staff promised to spread their projected results faster than the Central Election Committee. It is unclear at this point whether Tymoshenko will call her supporters onto the streets to protest the results. Tymoshenko is regarded a close ally of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. As head of the National Police and government militias, Avakov holds significant power within the country and has close ties to various far-right organizations. There has been speculation that Tymoshenko could use Avakov and his ties with right-wing forces such as the Azov-battalion related National Militia to dethrone Poroshenko if she did not make it to the second round. The success of Zelensky was an overwhelming rebuke to the right-wing nationalist regime of Poroshenko, who was brought into power in the imperialist-backed, far-right coup in early 2014 and ran a thoroughly nationalistic and militaristic campaign on the slogans of Army. Faith. Language. It is an initial, if distorted, expression of growing mass opposition to the imperialist-backed war by the Ukrainian armed forces in East Ukraine and their ongoing war preparations and provocations against Russia, as well as anger over the social catastrophe in the country. In poll after poll, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians indicated that they were mainly concerned with jobs, wages, corruption and ending the war in Eastern Ukraine that has claimed the lives of at least 13,000 people. Over the past years, significant sections of the population have seen their wages and living standards plummet as increasing sums of money were spent to continue the war against separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine is now Europes poorest country, and the average Ukrainian earns about 350 dollars a month. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country to work abroad. Ukraine is under IMF directed orders to slash social spending or risk default on billions of dollars in IMF loans. Poroshenkos campaign was also rocked by a report revealing a high-level corruption scam related to military procurement. In November of 2018, a preliminary presidential poll reported that 50 percent of Ukrainians would refuse to vote for Poroshenko under any circumstances. Under these conditions, Zelensky was able to capitalize on popular discontent over corruption, as well as over Poroshenkos promotion of Ukrainian nationalism and escalation of the war, and by presenting himself as a candidate who, unlike Poroshenko and Tymoshenko, stood outside the establishment. Zelensky supported the coup in Kiev in February 2014, and has insisted on the return of Crimea and the eastern separatist provinces to Ukraine. In an attempt to appeal to widespread anti-war sentiments, however, he has also made overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin, signaling that he would be willing to negotiate with Russia over ending the war, and calling for a ceasefire so that negotiations can resume between the two countries. Vladimir Putin for his part has rejected any possibility of negotiations with Ukraine should Poroshenko be re-elected. However, while trying to appeal to the anti-war sentiments among broad sections of the working class, Zelensky has made clear that he is a supporter of the Ukraine joining both the EU and NATO, steps that would significantly escalate tensions with Russia. Zelensky has also been purposefully vague on his economic plans other than promising to end corruption and enforce new laws on offshore bank accounts. Despite his campaign promises, should Zelensky be elected, he will continue the austerity measures dictated by the IMF to which the country now owes over $12 billion. Whatever his talk about opposing corruption and not being a figure of the establishment, Zelensky will defend the interests of the countrys oligarchy and is prepared to continue its close alliance with US imperialism. Zelensky is said to have been backed financially by the oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi and has admitted that he enjoys a working relationship with the billionaire. He reportedly also stated that he shared a common mindset with French President Emmanuel Macron, who is now mobilizing the army against Yellow Vest protesters. Pennsylvania Horticulture Societys Harvest program ends season with almost 19,000 pounds of produce donated and $30K raised to fight food insecurity A pro-government columnist again calls on Fidesz to leave the European Peoples Party, after Manfred Weber disavowed Hungarys governing party. In an interview with ZDF television, Manfred Weber said that he does not want to become President of the European Commission if his election depends on Fidesz votes. The State Secretary in charge of EU relations in the Prime Ministers office reacted by declaring that the EPPs top candidate has become a hostage of the pro-migration Left. In the meantime, the pro-government Nezopont Institute polling company published a survey according to which Fidesz has increased its lead in the wake of its dispute with the EPP. Magyar Nemzets Zsolt Bayer in an angry piece calls on Fidesz again to quit the European Peoples Party. The pro-government accuses Mr. Weber of bowing through his personal cowardice to the ideological dictates of pro-migrant liberal left-wing soft power. The pro-government columnist thinks that the spineless moderate politicians of the EPP follow left-wing rules of behaviour, abandon their friends and beliefs, and in order to justify their conduct regularly lie to themselves. That was the psychology of many people under communist rule, Bayer continues: they had to toe the party line to achieve something and then started justifying themselves with lies. 'You cannot remain true to yourself among such cowardly scoundrels, he maintains, and urges Fidesz to quit the Peoples Party and quick. MTI Photo: Szecsodi Balazs This opinion does not necessarily represent the views of XpatLoop.com or the publisher. Your opinions are welcome too - for editorial review before possible publication online. Click here to Share Your Story State secretary Peter Sztaray and Houlin Zhao, the head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), signed an agreement on hosting the ITU Telecom World conference. The Hungarian government gladly agreed to host the conference, Sztaray said, adding that the number of participants 5,000-6,000 business representatives from 130 countries indicated the significance of the event. The conference will be held at Budapests Hungexpo fair grounds from September 9 to 12, together with an exhibition linked to the event, he said, adding that Hungarians would be able to visit the exhibition free of charge. Budapest also hosted the 2015 world conference of ITU, of which Hungary is a founding member. MTI Photo: Mathe Zoltan From the organizers: International Book Festival Budapest, held for the 26th time in 2019, is a recognized event of the international world of books, as one of the important professional and intellectual forums of the region. The Book Festival awaits its visitors at Millenaris, which provides a rich cultural milieu, a modern atmosphere, an even smarter exhibition area and very good accessibility. International Book Festival Budapest traditionally invites the most renowned authors of the world. Award ceremony of Budapest Grand Prize and the on-stage conversation with the prize-winner will be a special event of the upcoming Book Festival. The festival hosts about 100 authors from 25 countries, more than 400 Hungarian authors, scientists, and artists and offers a wide range of cultural programs, such as meetings with authors, signings sessions, book premiers and presentations, roundtable discussions, concerts, theatre performances, exhibitions and films. In 2019 the Guest of Honour is Norway. Karl Ove Knausgard Norwegian writer whose six-volume autobiographical novel, Min kamp (200911; My Struggle, 201218), proved to be a runaway best seller in Norway and also captivated a large and growing number of English-language readers. He further determined not only to tell the story of his own lifewithout hiding behind a characters personabut also to examine it in excruciating detail in an attempt to find meaning in an ordinary life. All this he began to do, using the real names of the people in his life and writing his thoughts uncensored, alternating between essayistic meditations and examinations of the minutiae of child rearing and other domestic activities. Opening ceremony: 25 April, 15:00 Entry is free. Opening hours: 25 April: 12:00 - 19:00 26 April: 10:00 - 19:00 27 April: 10:00 - 20:00 28 April: 10:00 - 19:00 Venue: Millenaris 1024 Budapest, Jus Rokus u. 16-20. MTI Photo More: bookfestival.hu It is almost exactly three years to the day that Diana Krall performed for the first time on the stage of the Bela Bartok National Concert Hall to tremendous interest and acclaim. Then, as now, Robert Hurst accompanied her on the double bass, with Karriem Riggins on drums. On this occasion, the addition of truly special guests, Joe Lovano and Marc Ribot, will make the evening even more magical. In 2016, Diana bid farewell to the Mupa audience by playing four songs from her newest album, Wallflower, California Dreamin', the title song, Simple Twist of Fate and Ophelia. The applause took an age to die down, but Krall did eventually manage to leave the stage to enjoy a well-deserved glass of Tokayi wine. Time passed and new records were made: May 2017 saw the release of Turn Up the Quiet, once again with Tommy LiPuma as producer and with support from the great American songbook. The album was packed full of smoky, romantic songs for the evening hours. Then came 2018's Love Is Here To Stay, getting not just Krall's fans but also those of Tony Bennett all hot under the collar. This was not the first encounter between Krall and Bennett: they toured together at the beginning of the 2000s, while Krall has also appeared on two of Bennett's duet albums. The two legends were also accompanied by the pianist Bill Charlap's trio. Krall and Lovano know each other well after appearing together on stage in January 2017 during The Nearness of You, a benefit concert in memory of Michael Brecker. On this summer evening, we can be sure that Diana Krall will perform some of the finest songs taken from her entire musical career. Date and time: 26 June, 8 pm Tickets: HUF 7,000 - 24,900 Venue: Palace of Arts 1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell u. 1. 'Disgusted' Fraternity Expels Four University of Georgia Students After Racist Video Surfaces Fraternity Expels 4 University of Georgia Students Over Racist Video The Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity has expelled four members at its University of Georgia chapter after a video surfaced of men mocking slavery and using a racial slur. The NSFW video shared online Friday showed four white men, with one appearing to beat another with a belt as he ordered Pick my cotton, b-. Soon, another man is heard saying, Youre not using the right words. After which he states, Pick my cotton, n. The video has been viewed more than 55,000 times. Tau Kappa Epsilon is disgusted, appalled and angered by the remarks shown in a video of four expelled members, the national fraternity tells PEOPLE in a statement. TKE will not tolerate any actions such as these that would be defined as racist, discriminatory and/or offensive. Fraternity officials said they investigation the incident alongside staff and members of the Xi Lambda chapter and determined that the video was not part of a TKE event and did not take place on any chapter premises. Still, the statement continues, these four individuals acted outside the expectations of our membership and their chapter and therefore were removed from both. Officials with the universitys Student Government Association condemned the video in a tweeted statement, revealing that the chapter has been suspended. We appreciate those of you who have been engaging in this important dialogue about bigotry and the ways in which people who engage in it can be held accountable for their actions, the statement read. The incident comes nearly a year after officials at Syracuse University removed 18 Theta Tau fraternity members from classes over a pair of videos the schools president called disgusting. School officials also permanently expelled the Syracuse chapter of the fraternity after the universitys independent newspaper, The Daily Orange, published footagethis link opens in a new tab showing the men engaging in what the University Chancellor branded racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, ableist and sexist activities at a Theta Tau-sponsored event. 'Sweet, Kind Boy' Whose Body Was Found Encased in Concrete Is Mourned, as Mom Is Charged Memorial Planned for Colo. Boy Whose Body Was Encased in Concrete A Colorado community is coming together to honor a 7-year-old boy whose body was found encased in concrete two days before Christmas last year as the boys mother stands accused in his death. Caden McWilliams body was found in a dog crate filled with concrete in his mothers Denver storage unit by authorities on Dec. 23. His mother, Elisha Pankey, turned herself in to authorities following the discovery and has been charged with child abuse resulting in death and abuse of a corpse. Now, teachers and parents from Cadens former elementary school say they hope to honor his memory by creating memorials for him and by raising awareness about child abuse. I wouldve never, never guessed that this wouldve happened to such a sweet, kind boy, Cadens former teacher at Ellis Elementary School, Christina Hafler, told local station ABC7. He always came to school with a smile on his face, always. Caden McWilliams | Facebook A GoFundMe page created by the school is raising money for a public art project that will incorporate Cadens memory, to be displayed on the side of the school. Additionally, the school plans to dedicate a bench and/or a a tree to his memory. RELATED: 7-Year-Old Boy, Encased in Concrete, Allegedly Died in Dog Crate That Mom Made Him Sleep In As a long term goal we would like to educate and shore up our community to identify ways that we can help intervene and prevent other tragedies like this from happening to kids in our neighborhood, the GoFundMe page reads. At Ellis [Caden] stood out from others from the moment he walked through the school doors every morning with a huge smile on his face, Principal Nicole Whiteman said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE. His smile and eyes showed how kind and sweet he was at the core. Other students wanted to be his friend and looked to Caden for what to do next. Months before his body was found, Cadens parents un-enrolled him from elementary school, telling school officials they planned to homeschool him, an arrest affidavit previously obtained by PEOPLE states. Story continues However, authorities allege Caden was neglected and died in July. Nobody reported the boy missing. RELATED: Body of Missing Boy, 7, Found Encased in Concrete in Storage Unit as Mom is Charged It wasnt until authorities began investigating a separate domestic incident involving his parents in December that they realized the couples son was missing. When a tip came in saying that the couple had a storage room in the area, authorities became suspicious and obtained a search warrant to search the unit, where they discovered Cadens body. 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. Elisha Pankey | Aurora Police Department According to her arrest affidavit, Pankey allegedly admitted to a fellow jail inmate while being held on separate charges that she kept Caden in a large dog crate in the familys hotel room. On the night of his death, the crate was covered in blankets. Caden cried to his mother about being hot, but Pankey allegedly ignored him and the next morning, he was dead. Pankey is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday. She is represented by the state public defenders office, which declined comment to PEOPLE citing client-attorney confidentiality. If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages. A woman was found dead aboard a flight back to her native Australia after enjoying a vacation in the U.S., according to reports. Aleisha Tracy, 34, was on her way back home to Australia while aboard a Qantas flight from Los Angeles, California, on Sunday when she began having a medical emergency, Yahoo News reported. While two medics on the plane did their best to revive her while in the middle of the 16-hour flight, and other paramedics attempted once again after the plane touched down in Melbourne, it was already too late. Our cabin crew were assisted by two doctors on board. We are very grateful for their assistance, a Qantas spokesperson told Yahoo News. Qantas and the Victoria Police Department in Australia did not immediately respond to PEOPLEs requests for comment regarding Tracys death. Tracys friend, David Loiterton, posted an emotional tribute to her on Facebook. I will miss you brightening up my day. I will miss your hilarious stories, he wrote, according to Yahoo News. You were a one of a kind friend who was always there. I am truly blessed to have known you. Thank you for such a beautiful friend. I will miss you. Tracys social media pages reveal that she loved to travel, and pictures posted to her Instagram document her trips to Indonesia and Las Vegas, Nevada, where she visited once again on her most recent trip to the states. RELATED: Plane Passengers Trapped for 2 Hours With Dead Body on Board After Man Dies Mid Flight My favourite place to visit in this crazy city! Tracy wrote in a post on March 26 from the Bellagio hotel. Another picture from a few days before featured Tracys boarding pass as she waited for her plane to the United States. Story continues No bubbles here, this badass needs a rest, she wrote, along with the hashtags Qantas and vivalasvegas. National Broadband Network, an internet provider in Australia where Tracy worked, issued a statement to News.com.au about her death. RELATED: Hawaiian Airlines Plane Makes Emergency Landing After Longtime Flight Attendant Dies Mid-Trip We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Aleisha who was a valuable and well-liked member of the NBN team, they said. She will be greatly missed. The thoughts of everyone at NBN are with her family, friends and work colleagues at this difficult time. Police are awaiting post-mortem examination results to determine Tracys cause of death, Yahoo reported. Baby Boom! Nearly Half the Teachers at This Kansas School Are Pregnant: 'It's So Much Fun' Its a party at Oak Street Elementary School! Seven of the 15 teachers at the small Kansas elementary school have become pregnant over the last year, which has come at the shock of principal Ashley Miller. I was very excited, obviously, because this is great news, Miller, who has worked at the school for 20 years, told Good Morning America. After the third one I was a little in shock, the fourth one I was really in shock, the fifth one I didnt know what to say and by the seventh one I had to remember to congratulate her because my first words were, Are you kidding me?' She added: I have never in my life had this many pregnant people in the building. Never happened. Two of the teachers gave birth to their babies in March, and when the last of the children are born in October, there will be a total of eight newborns between the mothers. Fourth-grade teacher Kelli Jo Sheahon, who is expecting twins, told GMA that the teachers are embracing their unique situation and are bonding through the experience. Its so much fun to see the other mommies in the hall and were asking each other, How do you feel, she explained. I dont know that a lot of other people get that experience at work. RELATED: Hows This for a Baby Boom? 9 Nurses at a Maine Hospital are Pregnant at the Same Time! A baby boom such as this one could seem like a tough scheduling situation for any principal, but fortunately for Miller, the delivery dates are spread out from each other in a way that they all wont be on maternity leave at the same time. Shes also going to have substitute teachers ready for when the big days finally come. When Oak Street Elementary posted news of the pregnancies to their Facebook account last month, many commenters wrote congratulation messages while joking about not drinking the water at the school and Sheahon said she had already heard every joke in the book. RELATED VIDEO: Little Girls React to Parents Pregnancy Story continues I had someone tell me before I announced, Dont drink the water, and in my mind I was like, Too late, she recalled. Miller told GMA that shes looking forward to the day, years from now, where all of the children could enroll in the school at the same time and potentially be classmates. Some of us have had kids who have all been through Oak Street, Miller said. We do a lot of evening activities [together] so this place is crazy when we do that because we all bring our kids. Drama Student Allegedly Stabs 2 Classmates While Acting Out Scene from The Butterfly Effect A University of Hartford drama student allegedly stabbed two of his classmates while they were acting out a scene from a movie. At around 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, police were dispatched to the college after receiving reports of two people stabbed, a spokesman for the Hartford Police Department tells PEOPLE. When they arrived, officers found two young men suffering from stab wounds in a dorm room. Both victims were taken to St. Francis Hospital. One was listed in critical, but stable condition and the other was listed in stable condition, police say. Following the discovery, the institution was placed on lockdown. The suspect, who has been identified as 20-year-old Jake Wascher, was later found in a wooded area south of the university, police say. The suspect was acting out a scene from a movie in which a person [or persons] gets stabbed, at which point he began to stab both victims before fleeing on foot, Hatford police Lt. Paul Cicero told the Hartford Courant. Police told the outlet the film was The Butterfly Effect. The outlet reported that one of the victims, a 19-year-old student from South Windsor suffered wounds to his chest and back. The other victim, a 21-year-old student from New Fairfield was stabbed in the chest and four times in the back. On Monday, the 21-year-old was discharged from the hospital, according to the Hartford Courant. A witness, who was at the dorm during the stabbing, told police that Wascher was acting as the main character in the film, starring Ashton Kutcher, and the 21-year-old was directing. Thats when Wascher allegedly stabbed the 21-year-old with a knife. Fearing for his life, the 19-year-old pleaded with Wascher to stop, according to the witness, the Hartford Courant reported. Wascher then allegedly stabbed the 19-year-old. RELATED: Woman Reveals Her Final Words to Her Sister After They Were Stabbed at a BART Station, Man Arrested A different witness, who was cooking in the dorm during the alleged incident, told police they heard screams coming from the 21-year-olds bedroom. When they went to see what the commotion was about, they allegedly saw a six-to-seven-inch kitchen knife in the 19-year-olds chest, according to the Hartford Courant. Story continues When Wascher was found in the woods after fleeing the scene, police claim he said he was curious what it would be like to stab someone, the Hartford Courant reported. Wascher was taken into custody and held on a $1 million bail. He later told police during a video interview that he was into his character and my emotions got the best of me, and I acted a little too hard. Wascher was also hospitalized, according to the Hartford Courant. Police say he suffered minor scratches to his face while running in the wooded area. 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. On Monday, he was charged with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of first-degree assault, police say, the Hartford Courant reported. Following the incident, The University of Hartford released a statement obtained by NBC Connecticut. The University of Hartford campus community is deeply saddened by the serious incident involving the assault of two students on campus this afternoon, the statement read. Waschers attorney Richard R. Brown has spoken out about the incident telling the Hartford Courant, I can say to the best of our knowledge he has no criminal history and the allegations against him are inconsistent with his demeanor both here and in California. There was no big incident in the past, Brown added. Brown did not immediately respond to PEOPLEs request to comment further. According to Waschers Facebook, hes currently pursuing a BFA in acting at The Hartt School. Wascher previously studied theatre and dramatic arts at California State University at Fullerton. When 79-year-old Carla Brooks opened her eyes from a deep sleep, a shadowy figure appeared above her, stroking her hair. Before she could scream, the stranger stuffed a rag into her mouth and sexually assaulted her. It happens to everybody no matter their age, Brooks tells PEOPLE, explaining that rape is about power. As soon as the man left her St. George, Utah, home, Brooks called 911, and the investigation began. Like thousands of other rape victims, she felt disappointed and afraid when her attackers DNA did not produce a match in local and statewide databases. But when investigators sent the DNA for further testing, her rapist was identified and arrested. I didnt have to worry about him coming back, she says. It gave me quite a bit of peace. In February, 32-year-old Spencer Monnett pleaded guilty and was sentenced five years to life for first-degree felony of object rape. He also pleaded guilty to burglary of a dwelling. For more on how Carla Brooks became an advocate for sex assault survivors after she was raped, subscribe now to PEOPLE or pick up this weeks issue, on newsstands Friday. Since her attacker was arrested, Brooks has become determined to help other victims after learning of the thousands of rape kits that continue to sit on crime-lab shelves due to resource constraints. Currently, there is no database tracking untested rape kits, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2004 by actress Law & Order: SVU actress Mariska Hargitay aimed at helping sex assault survivors. 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. Brooks has raised nearly $40,000 through her GoFundMe page and has donated to groups like End the Backlog, an organization devoted to change laws around the country to get rape kits tested. Brooks believes that merely sharing her story of trauma and survival can make a profound difference in peoples lives. I learned if bad things happen, you can still go on, she says. Cher had been performing since the mid-Sixties, but before 1994, she had never written her own music. That changed when she heard the news of Kurt Cobains death in April of that year. You know, I dont know any of his music, she told Rolling Stone in 2000. And I dont know how I was impacted; I only know I woke up one morning and Courtney Love was reading his suicide note on MTV, and I just felt bad. I didnt even know him. I remember my son was really upset about his death, and just something about his suicide note made me feel bad for him. I just thought it was a weird thing that she was reading the note, which was something that was really private, over the TV. Related stories 50 Greatest Grunge Albums Nirvana Manager Danny Goldberg on What Everyone Gets Wrong About Kurt Cobain So she wrote a poem, something she had been doing for years, and brought it to a songwriters workshop at Miles Copeland IIIs castle in France. The poem turned into a song, a grunge-pop power ballad titled The Fall (Kurts Blues) that pairs Chers emotional tribute to the late star with a hollow, rainy guitar riff reminiscent of Nirvanas Come as You Are. During the workshop, she penned seven more songs that wouldnt come out until 2000, on the internet-only release not.com.mercial, named so because when she originally presented the material to her label, they declined to release it for exactly reason. The lyrics are a careful meditation on idolatry and isolation, with Cher writing from her own experience as a star. But my heart has run on empty/Since I heard the fuckin news/Were a heartless, godless culture/Wed walk nowhere in your shoes, she belts toward the end of the song. Well the good news if theres any/Is you ever lived at all/But our country kills its heroes/We just raise them for the fall. Story continues In an odd twist, Cobain had paid his own tribute to Cher years prior when he sampled Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves in Montage of Heck, a 1988 collage of songs he recorded on cassette that wouldnt be released until 2014. Of course, in the six years between Cher writing The Fall and finally releasing it, she staged one of pops most historic comebacks with the 1998 LP Believe and single of the same name. The album brought her to new heights, so it was odd for her to even release not.com.mercial, but Cher did it for her loyal fans and never considered it to be an official follow-up to Believe (that would come in 2001 with Living Proof). Lets hope Cher has checked out at least a couple Nirvana songs in the time since. Sign up for Rolling Stones Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Gigi Hadid is one of Americas top models. At 23, shes fronted campaigns for a staggering number of fashion brands, including Marc Jacobs, Prada, Chanel and Maybelline. Shes chronicled her adventures on the runway and off with her social media account, where 47 million fans follow her on Instagram. Shes branched out as a designer for Tommy Hilfiger and FAO Schwarz (where she engineered the costumes for the human toy soldiers standing outside the chains flagship Manhattan store). And for this weeks Power of Women New York issue, Hadid talked to Variety about volunteering with Unicef to shed light on the plight of children refugees in Bangladesh. As part of her cover story, Hadid spoke about her career and why its not always so easy grappling with the fame in the social media age. Related stories Variety Nominated for Three Webby Awards in Social Media, Video Categories Taraji P. Henson Reveals She Suffers From Depression and Still Faces Pay Inequality What was a big business decision you had to make? A huge thing was finding the right manager. As a young model at 17, I had to go to my agency and say, This persons not working for me. I need someone who is a mentor and a guide and has a vision. What were you not getting? When I moved to New York, I was going to school and I never felt like I was supported as a person as well as a model. I felt like I had to be like, Can I go to any castings? Can I have a test shoot? My new agent has pushed me, taught me, explained to me why we make a yes or no decision. The choice has always mine, but he will try to teach me in the process. How has your career changed? In the beginning of my career, I knew I came from privilege [her parents are real estate developer Mohamed Hadid and model Yolanda Hadid]. And I knew that I needed to be here and prove myself. I think after saying yes for so many years, it got to a point where I was a bit run down. I could say, Lets find a way I can feel whole every time I go to work. We have created a space and way that I can schedule my work. And how we do that is that I have time to go to my farm and feel balanced. Story continues When did you feel the most drained? Probably two years ago. I bought the farm around the same time. Where is the farm? We dont say. Oh, sorry. I wasnt trying to trick you. Its fine! I got to a place where I had to say, Its okay to not be okay all the time, and it doesnt make you less professional. It doesnt make you a bitch. When did you first feel successful as a model? I started to feel successful in situations that the rest of the world did not experience with me. The world saw the covers and the followers and whatever. But when I feel successful is when someone that I genuinely respect looks at me and says, Youre good at your job. Youre fun to work with. Youre nice to be around. When did you decide to be a designer? Ive been creative my whole life. Art has been in my life longer than fashion. The designing side of things is something that makes it not feel like work. Those are my favorite days the days where I can sit at a table and draw and talk to people and be in a creative space is something that has always come naturally to me. Im only going to be modelling for so long, and I think Ill end up somewhere in the creative part of the industry. Whats your favorite thing that youve designed so far? Oh, theyre all my children. If you could design anything, what would it be? Id love to design a public workspace or a theme park. A theme park! I always have strange ideas. Are you a theme park fan? Yes, I love theme parks. When I was on the Tommy Hilfiger tour, we went almost to a theme park in every country. I love rollercoasters. I love Disney. I like when people create worlds. How do you see your brand? I think about that all the time. I think my brand is fully recognized and realized when people sit down with me and when people take the time with me as a human. My brand is me. Its fashion in a way of loving creativity. Its being an outdoors person in terms of connecting with the Earth and feeling grounded and spiritual and going back to a place where you have an open mind to be creative and build things. Sometimes I think my creativity is private because it feels nice that way. Gigi-Hadid-FULL-1000px-2 What are your thoughts on fame? Do you get tired of it? Do you resent it? How do you navigate it? Those are a bunch of questions, but take whichever one you want. I always wanted success for myself. I wanted to support myself. I wanted to get to a place where I could have creative freedom and start to have more power to shape my life. Fame is something that I deal with and learn about every day. [She starts to tear up.] Ive had my ups and downs with it for sure, because overall, its definitely a learning process. Ive learned a lot about myself because of it. Ive learned to be honest with myself and celebrate myself, protect myself, be assertive when I need to. I always want to be kind, but that doesnt mean I need to let people take advantage of me. Ive learned my connection with the Earth, going to places where I can be myself and not worry about being photographed. Although in moments Ive resented it, I think that overall, I wouldnt be as developed within myself without it. [She wipes her cheek.] Sorry. Why is this making you emotional? It makes me emotional because at times, fame makes you feel out of control of your life. I think its tough. Obviously, people judge you. People can create a headline or an opinion about someone based on a small moment or a mistake. Ive always been someone that feels heavily because Im a projector. I take peoples energy. I think that Ive always tried to learn and improve any time Ive made a mistake or did something that I wasnt proud of. The more opportunity that I have to meet people and share my genuine self or sit with them or talk to them, that gives me so much empowerment, because I feel like I can control that moment. I dont know if anything I just said made sense. It did. What do you think is the biggest misconception about you? When I wanted to start modeling in high school, my mom always said, I want you to focus on the other things that you love volleyball, horseback riding, cooking and school. And I love learning, and becoming great at those things gave me so much value in myself that had nothing to do with my looks. I didnt want to be known as the pretty girl. I wanted to be known as the smart girl, the best hitter on the volleyball team. Theres been a lot of discussion about pay disparity in Hollywood. But in the modeling industry, women are actually paid more than men. I think women are empowered. I think that women are very much celebrated in fashion. From the outside world, theres misconceptions about the creative directions that are given to models. Obviously, Im not pushing aside any negative thing thats happened. I know that is very real. But so much of the time is about friendship and community and creative partners. Backstage at shows, its really such a beautiful feeling. Its a sisterhood. When one friend is opening a show, were all back there, excited for that person. I feel so supported and a beautiful energy. Have you always been a feminist? Yes, because I saw my mom take so much control over her life. And even through my parents got divorced, they never showed me the negative sides. My parents were always supportive of each other, always spoke positively about each other, and that showed me so much strength in my mom. I understood from a young age that I wanted to be a bridge, not only between my family. I wanted to be a bridge between people as someone who helps people accept each other. I think thats how I want be a feminist, as someone who helps women celebrate one another. You saw your friend Taylor Swifts Reputation tour 10 different times. Did you have to buy all those tickets? I would totally buy them, but Taylor is very generous. I would go lie on her couch while she starts hair and makeup, and then Id be in the crowd. I was like, How are we both just chilling, and now Im a little tipsy, dancing at your concert, and youre up there in a glittery suit? Its an interesting duality to experience in a friendship, because I love her and cherish her as a friend. But Im also her biggest fan. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Natural Causes Not Classroom Fight Led to Death of South Carolina 5th Grader: Prosecutor Natural Causes Killed S.C. Girl Who Got into Classroom Fight The father of the South Carolina fifth-grader who died last week after a classroom fight wants answers. On Monday, Jermaine Van Dyke spoke to reporters about the death of his 10-year-old daughter RaNiya Wright, saying school officials have yet to meet with him to brief him on what happened to her. Im here today looking for justice for my daughter, Van Dyke said during a brief news conference Monday. I want just to find out what happened, how it happened, and who was involved. RaNiya, a Forest Hills Elementary School student, died at 9:39 a.m. on March 27 at the Medical University of South Carolina two days after suffering injuries during a fight with another fifth-grade student. In a press statement obtained by PEOPLE, the Colleton County School District said school administrators ended the fight and called emergency medical services to the school. No weapons were involved in the incident, police said. This was a physical altercation that took place between two fifth grade students at Forest Hills Elementary, Colleton County Sheriffs Office spokesperson Shalane Lowes wrote in an email to PEOPLE. Lowes said the case is active and no arrests or criminal charges have been made. However, a student from the Walterboro school has been suspended until the investigation is complete, according to the school districts press release. RELATED: South Carolina Fifth-Grader Dies After Classroom Fight: She Was a Wonderful Student RaNiya with her mother, Ash Wright | GoFundMe An autopsy was scheduled to be performed Friday, but officials have yet to release those findings. According to a police incident report obtained by PEOPLE, officers were called to the school about 1 p.m. Monday about a student who collapsed. The student, later identified as RaNiya, was in the nurses station, not breathing. She was taken by helicopter to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. Weve been extremely disappointed, Mark Peper, an attorney for Raniyas father, told reporters. Story continues Weve made multiple attempts to contact both law enforcement and the school district, Peper said. We heard late Friday evening from the attorney for the school district that was brought on board. Unfortunately, he didnt have many answers. Peper also said fighting was a regular occurrence inside RaNiyas classroom, according to ABC4. Its been made pretty clear to us that theres been a pattern of behavior over the last 4 or 5 years, said Peper, who stopped short of labeling the behavior bullying. 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. It would be fair to say that the school was on notice that there were some altercations occurring on a very regular basis between individuals in this specific classroom, Peper said, reports the station. A GoFundMe account has been established to raise money for medical and funeral expenses to help RaNiyas family. As of this writing, it has raised more than $54,000. As the vampire stud of the Twilight franchise, Robert Pattinson hit multiplex paydirt. Since then, hes been raising his personal bar in the indie sphere (Good Time, Damsel). The star does himself proud in this elusive but bracing brainteaser from Claire Denis, the great French filmmaker (Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day) whod much rather challenge audiences than coddle them. High Life is the writer-directors first film in English, and the only one set in space. In the script she wrote with Jean-Pol Fargeau, her concerns about existence in all its ferocity and folly remain the same. Humans are hurtling toward a void they cant fully comprehend or evade. Pattinson, in a role once planned for the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, plays Monte, an astronaut alone on a prison ship, except for an infant girl named Willow (Scarlett Lindsey) and the lifeless bodies of a doomed crew. He coos and sings to his infant daughter while offering advice she couldnt possibly grasp: Never drink your own urine, never eat your own shit even if theyve been recycled. Such practices are taboo, a word and a concept that holds no fear for Denis, whose attraction for the forbidden is a hallmark of her art. Related stories 'Good Time': How Two Brothers Scuzzed Up Robert Pattinson and Made a Gritty Classic The Top 40 Sci-Fi Movies of the 21st Century High Life raises questions that Denis perversely, and with sustained provocation, rarely bothers to answer. Take the crew members and the circumstances under which they died. There are flashbacks, but the movie is less interested in explanations than in elliptical clues. We know the ship is meant to extract energy from a black hole. Thats the suicide mission that drives the plot. The support systems on the ship must be renewed every 24 hours, and if eventually theres no one alive it to do the job, the word is kaput. For a science fiction film, High Life keeps its distance from the usual bells and whistles of the genre, preferring the minimalism of Yorick Le Sauxs spare cinematography and the near-subliminal hum of Stuart Staples score. Its left to the actors to provide whatever vestiges of humanity remain in these travelers who quickly realize that space is the ultimate prison. Andre Benjamin excels as Tcherny, the one who obsesses over the ships greenhouse as if the dirt beneath his feet can somehow ground him in reality. And Mia Goth brings a striving urgency to Boyse, a woman whose natural desires are subverted by a system that sees her only a guinea pig for reproductive experiments. Story continues That leads us to the French sorceress Juliette Binoche, braided up like Rapunzel in the role of Dibs, a doctor tasked with caring for all the prisoners on board. Instead, this unforgettably unhinged woman is obsessed with harvesting their eggs and semen for her own nefarious purposes. The celibate Monte, known to the crew as Monk or Mr. Blue Balls, is having none of it. I keep my fluids to myself, he insists. Not while Dibs is around. The mad doctor has her methods. She also has the Fuckbox, a chamber of sex toys that would bring a blush to all 50 shades of Christian Grey; its also filled with body-horror implications Denis delights in unpacking. Yes, theres a chill in the French filmmakers intellectual precision. Yet this brilliant innovator offers the sight of Monte connecting emotionally with the grown Willow (Jessie Ross), the child he never wanted, as the years take them closer to oblivion. The actor even sings a lullaby to Willow over the end credits. Is that a glimmer of hope poking through this bleak space odyssey? Sign up for Rolling Stones Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Patience, thy name is Mott the Hoople fandom. The 70s groups devotees have had a longer time to wait for a reunion than most especially in underserved America. Its been 45 years since the Ian Hunter-led band went separate ways, and exactly that long since they played the United States at all, since a few very short tours where various incarnations of Mott got back together in 2009 and 2013 were limited to Europe. But with an eight-city stateside tour that begins this week, the American faithful are finally getting their very belated chance to be hot to trot to Mott. Never mind if the spots on everyones faces may no longer be from ripping stars off, at this late date; refreshed youth will be conferred upon all dudes at the door. Related stories Mott the Hoople to Tour U.S. for First Time Since 1974 Dale Griffin, Mott the Hoople Drummer and Co-Founder, Dies at 67 But what took so long? Was it Hunters general resistance to nostalgia that kept even European fans waiting for (a mere) 35 years to see Mott in concert again, let alone the near-half-century before Mott came anywhere within a thousand miles of all the way to Memphis again? It really is basically me going out singing songs that I wrote anyway, says Hunter, speaking with Variety in a pre-rehearsals phone call, sounding almost nonchalant about the late-breaking nod to fan demand. Most of it is stuff I wrote, or I had a hand in writing, and Ive been doing this since 69, professionally. But Ive got to tell you, when they put the Mott intro music on and you walk out there, its something very special. And its lovely and its fun. And as long as it isnt He hesitates. I wouldnt do it all the time, you know. I wouldnt want to do that, because I like new stuff. But now and again, its quite bone-tingling when you hear the intro. And Im really looking forward to it. Although the distinction probably isnt necessary in most fans minds, the group doing this tour is being billed as Mott the Hoople 74, because the core lineup consists of Hunter plus two musicians who joined late in Motts tenure keyboard player Morgan Fisher, who came on in 1973, in time for the groups most widely well regarded album, Mott, and Ariel Bender, who came in just in time for their 1974 studio swan song, The Hoople. Story continues That latter album is what were basing this show around. That, and there was a live album that came out (Mott Live, also in 74); half of it was done in London and half of it was done at the Uris Theater on Broadway. This show is based around those two records. So what distinguishes the final incarnation of Mott the Hoople from previous ones? The fact that, toward the end, they transitioned from being more of a meat and potatoes or, being English, bangers n mash sort of group, albeit one that had a very Dylan-influence frontman in Hunter, to one with more of a theatrical bent, which kind of finished up what David Bowie had started when he produced their All the Young Dudes album in 72. We were always a bit that way, Hunter says of their penchant toward rock mini-musicals toward the end, but I mean, this was in the days when you had to have a show. It wasnt enough to just stand there. You had to have a show as well. We were a bit that way. We were a tad theatrical, he says with a chuckle. For half a minute, they even got lumped in with glam, or glitter-rock, quite a turnabout from how theyd started circa 1969. But before we started, the Who latched onto the mods thing, Hunter points out. You know, anything that would get bums in the seats, basically! So I was thinking, okay, fine. I mean, we looked like brick layers. I never liked to think we actually glammed it. We did dress up, but it wasnt tinsel and silk and satin. It was more flashy than glam. There were other reasons beyond prevailing fashions for making a shift. Mick Ralphs had gone, and Luther (Grosvener, who changed his name to Ariel Bender, upon replacing Ralphs as guitarist) really wasnt a writer. He was also fresh into the band, and as much as he gave to the band I mean, Luther basically carried the band live; he was brilliant on stage he wasnt coming up with the material in the studio. And he didnt quite understand the style of the band. So The Hoople was geared more towards keyboards. I had this thing about putting saxes against cellos, too; other people did it later on, but early on, I did it. Then Morgan Fisher was now in the band. and hes somewhat of a stalwart piano player, so we naturally geared toward Morgan. And I was fiddling about with this orchestral sort of thing with Marionette and stuff like that. Grosvenor/Bender, whod previously kept a low profile in Spooky Tooth and Stealers Wheel, became almost literally a new man upon joining Mott, and not just in fake-name. It was the funniest thing with Luther, because before us, hed been in bands where he was a very tasteful player, and a tasteful writer, too. But when he joined us, and we coined the name Ariel Bender, he walked into this alter ego that was just outrageous. And he hasnt changed much. Every time he does anything in the Mott area, this is what he does. (Mark) Bosch, my regular guitar player, idolizes his playing. Hes off the wall and as a guy, hes not really changed that much. Hes still running around the stage like a 12year-old. That Bender and Fisher were left out of the previous European reunions, which focused on the 1969-72 lineup, was a thorn in Hunters side. Mainly, its important that Luther and Morgan get their shot, Hunter says. They never got it the first couple of times around. And its important that they get it, because they kept the whole thing rolling back in 74 at a time when interest in Mott was peaking more than ever, especially in the UK; it wasnt lack of popularity that caused the split. He further explains the recent history: The original band got together in 2009 in London, and then we did a second lot in 2012, but that was the original band. And sadly, it just seemed that they didnt want Morgan and they didnt want Luther to play, which kind of upset the bass player, Pete (Overend Watts), and myself. But they (guitarist Mick Ralphs and organist Verden Allen, presumably) maintained it had to be the original band. So Luther and Morgan came to those gigs, and they were very sporting about it. And I just thought that one of these days when we get a window, we should make it up to em by following the second half of that band, which was the 74 version. We got together for three festivals in Europe last summer, and it worked like a dream, so we thought, why not? A lot has gone down since then to make any other version of the band besides the 1974 edition implausible, anyway. Dale Buffin Griffin was only able to make cameo appearances on the earlier UK reunions, where he was replaced by Pretenders drummer Martin Chambers, because of poor health; he died in 2017. Watts passed away in 2017. Ralphs is still around but has had to bow out of Bad Company touring, as well, due to health issues. Amid all this happiness for American Mott fans, that ebullience dissipates west of the continental divide. Thats because all eight of the reunion dates are toward the east coast. Fans in California and the other Western states have been determinedly hoping a west coast swing would be added, although a gradual acceptance that this may not come to be has prompted a fair amount of flight bookings. Hunter confirms that they wont be coming back to the States to hit other parts of the country. We were already booked in Europe for the coming months, he says. The American side of it was tacked on the front. So we have to leave when we have to leave. Theres nothing planned after this, Im sorry to say. But nobody got in touch with us on the west coast. Either your promoters didnt think it would work over there, or He trails off. Im sorry about that. But youve got to be asked before you go somewhere! At 79, Hunter continues to be an inveterate tourer as well as solo recording artist, regularly visiting the U.S. with his backing outfit, the Rant Band members of whom will augment the original (or semi-original) Mott members on this tour. And he has more solo gigs booked for after the close of Mott the Hoople 74. An impending 80th birthday might make other rock n roll stars think about more extensive time enjoying mechanical royalties from All the Way From Memphis in the countryside. Does he ever ponder calling it a day? Well, no. I mean, I get away with it, Hunter says. Eventually he concedes that the thought has crossed his mind. I do think, Oh, this is it. He laughs at himself. I get to Scotland and I think, This is it. This is the last time I see all this. But Ive been doing that for the last 20 years, and nothing seems to stop. And what am I going to do anyway? Whats the point in stopping? So, no, Ive no idea when Im going to retire. Im having a great time. The Mott the Hoople 74 U.S. itinerary (some shows, including Cleveland of Cleveland Rocks fame and Philadelphia sold out early on): April 1 Milwaukee, WI Miller High Life Theatre April 2 Minneapolis, MN First Avenue April 3 Chicago, IL Chicago Theatre April 5 Detroit, MI The Fillmore April 6 Cleveland, OH Masonic April 8 Glenside, PA Keswick Theatre April 9 Boston, MA Orpheum Theatre April 10 New York, NY Beacon Theatre Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Suzanne Scott sits atop the most watched operation in cable news, and easily the most controversial. She has managed to keep out of the spotlight during her long run at Fox News viewers certainly know who Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are, but not her. Yet her anonymity may no longer be possible. Since ascending to CEO of the unit that manages Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network 11 months ago, Scott, 53, has presided over an organization that continues to be enveloped by a cyclone of criticism from detractors, who think Fox News functions as a propaganda machine for President Trump and his White House. Related stories Variety Nominated for Three Webby Awards in Social Media, Video Categories Taraji P. Henson Reveals She Suffers From Depression and Still Faces Pay Inequality But Scott, like her late boss, Roger Ailes, who was forced out in 2016 amid a flood of sexual harassment allegations, is unapologetic about the channels primetime lineup of contentious right-wing hosts as she attempts to turn the page on an era of scandal and turmoil. In her first lengthy interview since taking over the top job last May, Scott wants it known that she brings a different style of leadership than her pugnacious predecessor, and that she pays more attention to the demands of Fox News viewers than she does to scathing commentary from critics on social media and television news programs who refer to her network as state-run media. We became No. 1 under President Bush. We stayed No. 1 under President Obama. We are still No. 1, she says. My focus is on business. Scott has nearly 23 years invested in making Fox News a contender. She has been a programming force behind everything from commentator Greta Van Susteren to afternoon roundtable The Five. She was smart and she had instincts, recalls Van Susteren, who left the network in 2016 and did a short stint at MSNBC before taking jobs with Voice of America and Atlanta-based Gray Television. Scott is determined to keep Fox News tops in U.S. viewership at a time when the channel is facing even headier new challenges. Advertisers have grown squeamish about the networks primetime schedule, and the Trump news cycle puts Fox News under even more scrutiny than before. Story continues Scott took the reins just in time for her unit to become the single most important operation within the newly minted Fox Corp. The Fox News cash cow generates the bulk of the finances of its parent company, the new entity spawned by Disneys acquisition of 21st Century Fox. We think over 80% of the value is Fox News, says Laura Martin, a media analyst with Needham & Co. That alone ensures that Fox Corp. leaders Lachlan Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch will keep a close watch on Scotts ship. Theres also no question that she is also under the microscope because of her status as the most powerful female executive in TV news. She gets high grades from her bosses. Suzanne is a focused, highly dedicated executive with a results-driven approach to her work, says Lachlan Murdoch via email. She has done a great job and continues to excel as CEO. Scott says she has moved her company forward after a difficult time and intends to keep its programming front and center, overseeing last years launch of the Fox Nation subscription streaming service as viewers transition into an age when news and information are available at the flick of a finger. We know we have them on the live, linear opinion and news channel. Now we know more than ever we have them digitally, and its growing, she says from her office at Fox News New York headquarters, just steps away from the executive offices of the Murdochs. She says 85% of people who take a one-week free trial of the companys subscription-based Fox Nation streaming-video service are electing to stay on board. When it comes to the potential of digital media, she adds, I dont even think we know the limit of that yet. But she offers no concession when asked about Fox News content. Several members of the networks roster have gone to work for Trump, yet Scott dismisses the idea that Fox News is in the palm of the presidents hand. If youre a real consumer of Fox News, you know thats not the case, she says. Laura Ingraham, who has supported Trump in the past, has admonished the president for his posthumous insults directed at the late Sen. John McCain. And in recent days, the president has criticized some Fox News anchors as well as the networks decision to take weekend host Jeanine Pirro off the air for two weeks. The move comes in the wake of anti-Muslim comments Pirro made regarding Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar. Scott said she did not want to comment on a personnel matter. Fox News has arrived at a tricky juncture. Broadening its viewership further could prove challenging for Scott and her team, which recently raised eyebrows by tapping former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile as a contributor. They are the Trump-based network, says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. He believes Fox News has become more conservative than ever, and if the network brings on so-called Never Trump conservatives, he says, they hear about it from their viewers. These people arent shy. They were certainly in a celebratory mood last week, with primetime ratings surging following Attorney General William Barrs summary of the Mueller report that appears to exonerate Trump. Moreover, the network has been analyzed for months by liberal advocacy groups, who routinely call out primetime hosts like Carlson and Ingraham for comments they make about immigration and other topics. Many advertisers have moved commercials out of their programs. At the same time, Fox News fans are die-hards. Their devotion to the outlet is a big reason Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network generated more than $2.98 billion in advertising and distributor fees in 2018, according to Kagan, a market-research firm that is part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. But if those among Foxs devoted audience feel the network is caving in to critics, they arent afraid to express themselves and threaten to leave the Fox fold. That puts Scott in an awkward position of defending personalities the core viewers love while hoping that sponsors will support them. The networks critics may believe theyve gained some leverage. With marketers shifting some placement away from Carlson and Ingraham, Fox News primetime is filled with direct-response ads for MyPillow, whose owner, Michael J. Lindell, is an avid Trump supporter, and over-the-counter medications; its news programs are stocked with commercials for luxury cars. Ad money spent in support of Ingraham and Hannity rose in 2018, but ad dollars attached to Tucker Carlson Tonight fell 47.8%, to $48.3 million from almost $92.7 million in 2017, according to Kantar, a tracker of ad spending. Marianne Gambelli, Fox Corp.s president of ad sales, says the figures are inaccurate. We became No. 1 under President Bush. We stayed No. 1 under President Obama. We are still No. 1. Suzanne Scott Fox News continues to win significantly more ad dollars than either of its main rivals, MSNBC and CNN. But the primetime ad dilemma is notable. Says the University of Virginias Sabato, It is just plain bad publicity. Scott says the network is not about to change its stripes. Our audience is deeply connected to our primetime shows, she says. We are the only ones with conservative talent in primetime. We believe in free speech. We fully support our primetime talent, and were not going to let the voices of the few impact our business. Still, she has tried to bring all sides to the table. Fox News has in the past months made new outreach to Madison Avenue, holding a cocktail party last summer for media buyers and the networks three primetime hosts, and, more recently, inviting clients to tour the news operations. Advertisers who have pulled ads from primetime say they are going to pause, with the intent to return, Gambelli says. Scott says bringing people together to hash out problems is how she moves business forward. There wasnt much communication with the staff under Roger Ailes, she explains. My mother always said, Theres no problem you cant solve if you get directly in front of people and address them the right way and address them quickly. She has used her skill as a collaborator to stabilize a workplace that was hurled into disarray by Ailes shocking ouster after the sexual harassment controversy that erupted when he was sued by former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson. In the aftermath, Scott was named president for programming under Ailes successors, Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, before being promoted to the top job. Ailes denied the allegations and died less than a year later but those claims sparked a wave of lawsuits alleging unsavory behavior at Fox News and proved to be the tip of a movement around harassment and gender parity that would go on to engulf NBC News and CBS News as well. There was a lot of noise around this place a few years ago. A lot of people were afraid, Scott says. All they heard was, Its the end of Fox News and Fox News no longer exists and So long, No. 1. She adds, I wanted to change that conversation. Martha MacCallum, Fox News 7 p.m. anchor, says she has noticed a tone change at the company since Scott took the reins. The executive has made it easier for employees to raise issues with management, holding regular meetings between staffers and top executives, and works to help women who want to have families to negotiate life in the always-on news business. Scott says she is mindful of the perks that companies like Facebook and Google offer their employees in a competitive market for talent. Despite what the networks liberal detractors might say, Scott has literally taken Fox News out of the basement or the darker, below-lobby floors of the companys Manhattan headquarters, where it stayed for years under Ailes. A good chunk of staff has moved to the second floor as part of $130 million in capital improvements made over the past two and a half years that also include revamps of Fox News production studios and an overhaul of its digital properties. Scott relishes studying news programs and anchors. Its something she has been doing since her arrival at Fox News more than two decades ago, when she began as an assistant to Chet Collier, a veteran programming executive with long-standing ties to Ailes, as the network was being born. The two took part in the frenzied launch in 1996 of Rupert Murdochs newest against-the-grain project, a cable-news rival to CNN. Collier would screen tapes from anchors and journalists who might want to join, and Scott sat in on programming meetings. The experience was a gift, she recalls. We would talk about the people wed see on the screen. How are they communicating? How are they using their voice? Are they talking too fast? Are they in command of the story? Are they asking interesting questions? That led her to a producer role on Van Susterens 10 p.m. show on Fox News. Van Susteren had made a mark for herself at CNN with shows that analyzed big court cases, and Scott saw a chance to bring more women into the Fox News viewership base and focus on something other than politics, which was the top subject in the rest of the primetime schedule. She surrounded Van Susteren with a cast of attorneys and forensic specialists and sent them and the anchor to crime scenes. Van Susteren analyzed the high-profile murder cases of Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson, among others. A fascinating crime, says Scott, is like The Young and The Restless, a story that every day keeps giving you something new to churn over. As a result, Scott just kept moving up the ranks, says one former Fox News staffer, and was in management discussions regularly with Shine and Ailes. A lot of people were intimidated by her because they knew she had a seat of power. While Fox News primetime hosts get the lions share of the publics attention, Scott has in recent months emphasized the networks news programs. Viewers have seen Chris Wallace talk to Russian president Vladimir Putin and MacCallum snare an exclusive with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. On one recent evening, late-night news anchor Shannon Bream scored an exclusive sit down with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro just minutes after primetime host Ingraham interview Ben Carson. Scott believes viewers have been looking for other kinds of stories after a bruising political-news cycle in the fall. There is usually a little fatigue after a mid-term. This fall was intense between Kavanaugh and the mid-terms, she says, noting research found some viewers at holiday time were turning off the TV or drifting over to sports. One of the conversations Jay [Wallace, president of news] and I have had this past year is big bookings, especially since the new year: New stories. Different stories. Owning stories. She has added new hours of live programming to the Fox News schedule, at 4 a.m. and 11 p.m., giving new duties to Heather Childers and Shannon Bream, and expanded the presence of news veterans like Harris Faulkner and Bill Hemmer during the day. Faulkner, who now anchors a 1 p.m. program as well as the noon panel show Outnumbered, says Scott told her to present a news hour that is like primetime in the daytime, and has offered her new opportunities, like hosting a recent town-hall broadcast. Critics have suggested Fox News can appear lawless, with contributors using harsh epithets on air. In June of last year, Scott held a meeting with producers, telling them they had to protect the brand, or crack down on inappropriate comments on air. Fox Business host Stuart Varney and Fox & Friends co-anchor Steve Doocy are among those who have in recent months called out guests for getting unruly. Some of that is just good policy, Scott says, but she has other reasons for making people more mindful of what they say. She acknowledges Fox News primetime hosts have a little bit more latitude, but otherwise is averse to empty name-calling. What is not well known about me is I have a special-needs sister, and I grew up in a household where you could not use certain words to describe or talk about people. And I dont want to hear things on the air that I think are over the line, says Scott. When you are a producer, you are there to protect the brand, and you are there to protect the talent. That is your role in the control room and that is the message I wanted to send. People have to be listening. Meanwhile, Scott has come face to face with Fox News wide influence. In the summer of 2017, she took her daughter to the Jersey Shore to relax while the Fox News primetime lineup was in flux, having lost two of its primetime hosts in a matter of months. Bill OReilly had been ousted from his longtime 8 p.m. roost in April after accusations of sexual harassment, which he denied, and Megyn Kelly had defected in January to seek her fortunes at NBC News. Scott says dozens of people on the shore had found out about her job at Fox News, and they peppered her with questions about moving the 5 p.m. panel show The Five into primetime as a placeholder. Im a pretty quiet person, she says. How do they even know who I am? Given that Scott is the top woman in TV news, theres a good chance people will continue to talk about her. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. MADRID Nabil Ayouch (Horses of God, Much Loved, Razzia), one of the foremost Arab World filmmakers, is preparing Blackout, a real-time, near-future social-issue thriller drama series set on the border of Europe and Africa in and around Ceuta, one of Spains enclaves in Morocco. Black-Out is set up at Ayouchs Paris-based Les Films du Nouveau Monde and Casablanca label Ali N Productions which backed his latest two movies Razzia, a 2017 Toronto Platform premiere and Moroccan Academy Award entry, and upcoming We Will Be Reborn, a realist hip-hop musical. It is one of the potential highlights among 16 drama series projects to be pitched next week in Cannes at this years second and expanded In Development, a joint venture of MipTV and Canneseries. Related stories Nabil Ayouch Discusses Latest Movie Project 'Positive School' Nabil Ayouch Set to Direct Realist Hip Hop Musical 'Positive School' (EXCLUSIVE) Moroccan broadcast network 2M has boarded the project. Given that Ceuta is an integral part of Spain, so the European Union, the highly-fortified Ceuta border fence, consisting of two 20-foot fences and a road between them, is one of the only two land borders between Europe and Africa. It already suffers breaches, on one occasion in 2017 by about 600 immigrants, mostly from Sub-Sahara Africa. Taking place over one night eight hours in eight hour episodes Blackout imagines a near future scenario where Ceuta barrier fence will have been electrified. When a large power outage plunges Ceuta into blackout, the barrier falls, and the thousands of migrants camping outside Ceuta sweep into the city. The narrative will mix action and character introspection, focusing on six characters, Ayouch said, citing two: Pilar de la Barca, general officer of Ceuta Guardia Civil, who has dedicated her life to her work, neglecting her husband and adolescent daughter, but who discovers her soul, heart and sensitivity once called on to defend the city; Thiale, a former Nigerian child-soldier famed for his courage who, once in Ceuta, meets Awa, a Senegalese woman, there to find her little sister and take her back to Senegal. Thiale abandons his dream of getting to Europe, his destiny changed. Story continues Spoken in Spanish, Moroccan and French, Blackout is currently being written by Ayouch, filmaker-actress Maryam Touzani (Aya Goes to the Beach), a co-writer of Razzia, and cineast Rita El Quessar (Once Upon a Time). The series project has a bible. Avouch will direct and produce with Moroccan partner Amine Benjelloun. Coming in on migration, as well as real attitudes to migration, from a novel angle, Black-Out asks important questions, Ayouch said: When the gates open and man is face to face with himself, when there is no longer any law, when fear of the other takes over, when supposed paradise reaches out to some and supposed hell awaits the others, where will we still seek the means to remain lucid? Should we shoot, negotiate, barricade ourselves? Should we kill, hide, run? He added: Is morality still an issue when, on each side of the barrier, your future and that of your kin is at stake? Ayouch, Touzani and El Quassar will present Blackout at In Development. Benjelloun will attend MipTV to hold meetings. Their priority is to meet with potential Spanish partners at Cannes, Avouch said. Maryyam-Touzani-Nabil-Ayouch-and-Rita Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Marvels greatest heroes face their last stand in Avengers: Endgame. (Credit: Marvel Studios) A selection of new tie-in toys released for Avengers: Endgame have offered up some tantalising hints of what might lie ahead for major characters in the highly anticipated blockbuster. Theres only a few weeks to go until the release of Endgame, which sees more than a decade of storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe come to a crescendo as the surviving heroes make their last stand against mad titan Thanos. To mark the films imminent arrival, Hot Toys unveiled a figure wearing the latest costume for Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, while the newest Funko POP! figures for Endgame seem to tease a major change for Bruce Banner and his angry green alter ego, The Hulk. Read more: Russos admit Endgame trailer uses footage not in the film The new range of POP! figures revealed the superhero team in the interesting new Avengers uniforms glimpsed in the most recent trailer for Endgame. The unusual, slightly grey-haired appearance of the Hulk figure, meanwhile, has added further fuel to the fire of a long-standing rumour that Avengers: Endgame might feature the MCU debut of Professor Hulk a compromise of sorts between the two sides of Banner. In the comics, Professor Hulk contains elements of both Banner and his alter ego, which would seem like a logical follow-up to the story told in Avengers: Infinity War, in which Mark Ruffalos troubled scientist was unable to summon the Hulk. Hasbro has also teased the possibility of Professor Hulk with a NERF blaster that seems to depict the same, greying version of the green behemoth. Read more: Every Marvel movie coming after Avengers: Endgame Hot Toys, meanwhile, have unveiled a figure depicting the highly advanced Mark LXXXV Iron Man armour, which will be seen in the new movie. Story continues In Infinity War, Tony Stark was seen wearing the nanotechnology-infused Mark 50 suit, which is clearly several generations behind the Mark 85 armour being teased for Endgame. This seems to lend credence to the suggestion that there will be a major jump forward in time during the Russo Brothers new film. Hasbro also unveiled its range of Avengers toys this week, including figures of Hawkeye in his new incarnation as the darker warrior Ronin. Read more: Linking Captain Marvel to the rest of the MCU The arch-villain of the piece, Thanos, is also getting a new look if the Hot Toys figure of him is anything to go by. Images show the titan wielding a double-ended blade that, in keeping with his ethos, is perfectly balanced on either side, as well as the Infinity Gauntlet. The trickle of information ahead of Endgame has been speeding up in recent weeks, with fans now eagerly anticipating the chance to spend three hours in a cinema watching an ambitious superhero story reach its conclusion. Avengers: Endgame will be released in UK cinemas on Thursday, 25 April. Trooper is a true super pup. According to WCPO, the little puppy was abandoned at a Hamilton, Ohio, park on March 13. Hours after being dumped at the park, the pup was struck by a train while attempting to cross tracks near the park. The train amputated both of his back legs, as well as his tail. He also had a ruptured eye due to the trains impact on his tiny body, Tara Bowser, the Executive Director of Animal Friends Humane Society, told PEOPLE. Animal Friends took over care of Trooper after the horrible accident. Animal Friends Humane Society Trooper was hospitalized immediately at an emergency vet clinic. He required surgery to further amputate both back legs and tail, this way the surgeons could clean up the area and have enough skin to suture. His left eye was also removed since it was damaged beyond repair, Bowser added. RELATED: 200 Dogs Saved From Cruel Korean Dog Meat and Puppy Farm That Bred Pups as Friend and Food It was a traumatic and overwhelming few days for Trooper, but the puppy quickly and miraculously rebounded. Even with his injuries, the puppy remained curious and excitable and revealed a love for kisses and cuddles, Bowser said. Animal Friends Humane Society This affectionate puppys attitude helped him recover rapidly. In less than a month after the train accident, the puppy was trying out a new wheelchair provided by the Paw it Forward 4D Foundation. The Humane Society posted on Facebook that Trooper is quickly adjusting to the new wheels and is already rolling around with relative ease. Bowser is optimistic that, despite Troopers injuries, the puppy will lead a normal, happy life. RELATED: Merlin the Rescue Duck Walks For the First Time Thanks to Custom Wheelchair Trooper will be enjoying that new life in a forever home. Animal Friends recently adopted out the pup. The shelter shared the good news on Facebook, adding that Troopers adopters have experience with disabled animals and someone will be home with him at all times to give him the care he needs. He will be leaving his foster family and moving in with his new, forever family in the coming days. Story continues Animal Friends Humane Society Bowser hopes Troopers story helps save other pups from enduring the pain the innocent puppy went through. Please be more responsible with pets. If you dont have the means to properly care for an animal, then dont get one. If you have an animal and can no longer care for it, do the responsible thing and find it another home or surrender it to a shelter that will take care of it, Bowser advised. Turning an animal loose to fend for itself is never the answer. On 'The View' and 'GMA': Former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett on Joe Biden and finding her voice originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com Valerie Jarrett, who was the longest-serving senior advisor to President Barack Obama, opened up on ABC's "Good Morning America" and then on "The View" about her views on the current political climate, the only time she met Donald Trump, and her advice for 2020 candidates, including Democratic hopeful former Vice President Joe Biden. (MORE: Former Nevada lawmaker Lucy Flores accused Joe Biden of inappropriate touching and kissing, calls encounter 'awkward and disturbing' ) On "The View," Jarrett said Bidens alleged behavior toward women should not preclude him from launching a presidential campaign. Two women have recently said that Biden acted inappropriately, kissing one woman on the back of the head in 2014, and touching anothers face with both hands and rubbing noses with her in 2009. (MORE: Joe Biden's staff pushes back against false interpretation of photos ) "You can make your case directly to the American people. Let him run. That's part of what being in a democracy is all about, Jarrett said. She said that Biden never made her feel uncomfortable in the eight years they worked together. But the real question, Jarrett said, is: How is the person who it is directed at feeling? When people say theyre uncomfortable, we need to take that to heart, Jarrett said. In an interview on "Good Morning America," Jarrett spoke about her journey -- from growing up in Iran as a little girl to becoming a single mom in Chicago to ending up at the White House -- that she's chronicled in her new memoir "Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward." Jarrett recalled one of the best hires she ever made that changed the trajectory of her career, when she was working in the Chicago mayor's office and hired someone named "Michelle Robinson," who was "tall and elegant." Story continues Soon, she met Robinson's fiance, a young Barack Obama, and a lifelong friendship began. "I worked very hard to work their trust," Jarrett said of her relationship with the Obamas. Jarrett described the "political landscape today" as "depressing." "I think tone does start at the top," she said. "We look to the President of the United States to be leader, to be a role model, particularly for young people. And ... some of the rhetoric has been profoundly disappointing and troubling to me." She recalls the first and only time she met now-President Trump, during the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011, a time when she says he was "the driving force behind the birther controversy." While her outlook on the current political climate is grim, Jarrett said she is "delighted with the field" of Democrats running for the Oval Office in 2020. "And I've offered my advice to anyone who has asked." "I've encouraged them all to try to ... start to spend their time really focusing on what they believe in, you know, what's their vision for our country," she said. Finally, if there is one thing Jarrett said she hopes people take away from her new memoir it is to "take some risks." "Calculated risks, but risks nonetheless," she added. "And get outside of your comfort zone. I think there's nothing scarier than the thought of getting outside of what's familiar ... and straight. But there's nothing more exhilarating than that zig zag." Read a preview of "Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward" below. Preface The summer sun reflecting off Lake Michigan caught my eye as I turned my chair toward the window. I was always drawn to the spectacular panoramic view of Chicago from the floor-to-ceiling window of my office on the seventy-ninth floor of the Sears Tower. Perhaps because Id spent the first five years of my life living in a desert far away, I never took Lake Michigan for granted. It has always brought me peace and tranquillity. The best part of my daily commute to work was driving downtown, heading north from South Kenwood along the five-mile stretch of the lakes shoreline. I love water. And the sun. In the summer, at our family dinners that my ninety-year-old mom still hosts every Sunday, my cousins say, There she goes again, when I keep moving my chair so that Im directly in the sun, chasing its warmth until the days last rays sink behind our home. PHOTO: Valerie Jarrett Finding My Voice (Viking) But on this particular afternoon in the summer of 1987, the gorgeous sunshine and vast waters dotted with bobbling white sailboats did nothing to improve my mood. Id turned my back to the office door, hoping that nobody would catch me crying. Never cry at work was one of my many cardinal rules. And yet here I was. Who was I in that moment? Well, most important, I was a mom. From the moment twenty months earlier when the doctor announced, Its a girl! and placed her perfect little brown body on my chest, Laura, named after both my grandmother and my husbands, had become the center of my universe. Id had no idea I was capable of such unconditional love. (MORE: Michelle Obama's 'Becoming' could be 'most successful memoir in history,' publisher says) I had also essentially been a single mom since seven months after Lauras birth. My husband chose to move to Michigan to complete his medical residency, leaving our marriage dangling by a thread. I was also a daughterthe only child of two parents who loved each other and me unconditionally and showed me by their example, and our family legacy, the value of commitment, hard work, and excellence. And I was a lawyer. The first in my family. My position as an associate at a high-powered corporate law firm had made my parents so proud, and I was the envy of many. Ten years earlier I had ambitiously created a plan for my life based on a need for order and direction. I had this notion that by sheer force of will I could drive my life in a rigid linear path, and that it was somehow a sign of strength if I had the self-control to never waver from my intended course. Law school, work, marriage, baby, bliss. Id pursued my plan with the single-mindedness of purpose that Id had since I was a child. I thought it would deliver happiness. And from a distance it might have looked like the perfect life. But as my plans were crumbling around me, I was now sure of just one thing: I was miserable. (MORE: First look at Queer Eye culture expert Karamo Brown's new memoir) My own mother had been a professional working mom, well before it was common to do soa passionate educator who managed to pour her energies into raising me and taking care of my dad while also establishing a world-class child development research institute. And she always seemed so competent and fully prepared for the everyday challengesso adept at what I now recognize was a mighty juggle. Id never questioned that I myself would someday be a happily married, successful working mom. I am a morning person, so normally Im unable to stay awake past 10 p.m. But after my husband, Bobby, moved away, I found myself wide awake at midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m. I was twenty-nine years old and terrified to be alone. I found myself popping into Lauras bedroom multiple times a night to make sure she was OK. Being singularly responsible for my precious baby was unexpected, overwhelming, and not a part of my plan. So on that gorgeous summer day, the reality slowly crept in that my marriage bore no resemblance to the perfect one of my parents. They had each been the others best friend and, other than an occasional business trip, they never chose to spend a night apart. Alma Brown, Lauras sitter, a tall black woman twenty years my senior whose face showed wrinkles from both laughter and hardship, walked in my front door at 8 a.m. sharp every morning, radiating the casual confidence that comes from decades of caregiving. Id exit the apartment quickly and then linger outside the door waiting for Laura to stop crying, which, no doubt because of Mrs. Browns expert and loving touch, took only a minute. But my heartache from our separation stayed with me from the minute I closed that door until I opened it again in the evening. I awoke every morning (feeling like it had been only minutes since I patted Laura to sleep the night before) with the sole goal of getting myself home as soon as I could. My workday had become a strict exercise in efficiency. Social meals, phone calls with my friends, and even occasional watercooler conversations had all been abandoned. PHOTO: President Barack Obama walks with senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to the Oval Office at the White House, April 23, 2009. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images, FILE) The ache made it hard to focus. Walking into my office, Id find my unfilled time sheets from the day before on the top of my large to-do pile. Lawyers bill their clients by time, each day parsed into six-minute increments and recorded on a time sheet to be tallied up by the billing department. Thats how the firm made money. But instead of carefully logging my hours, Id sit there each morning sipping my third cup of coffee (I always gulped down two before leaving home) and wondering what it was Id done the previous day. With neither head nor heart in the work, I always ended up tallying myself short. After nine hours at my desk, I often produced only four billable hours. And the work I had done was mediocre. I was not good at my job. The soft voice inside me kept telling me that I needed to change my life, but its hard to listen to your voice if you dont trust it. (MORE: Michelle Obama reflects on being the first black first lady) Over the span of the next thirty years, my career took what many would think was a zigzag, not a trajectory upward. Some might call it a step down to go into city government, but I did it, as a staff lawyer, and then rose to be a cabinet member for a mayor. I would be a CEO and a board chair to several organizations and always looked for ways to ad- vocate for equality and civic engagement. Those experiences each pre- pared me to spend eight years in President Obamas White House, where I was the longest-serving senior advisor to any president in history. All while I raised Laura as a single mom, marveling at how she found her own confident voice, had the courage to also change careers in pursuit of her passion, and had the good sense to marry a man who reminds me of my dad. People assume I always knew where I was going and the path I would take, but the truth is, for a long time, I knew neither. What follows is the story of how I found my voice and learned to trust ita voice that went from barely audible, even to me, to one I hope has been a catalyst for change, and has been a source of strength and empowerment for others. My journey has been exhilarating, challenging, and yes, at times, very painful, but what an adventure! From "Finding My Voice" by Valerie Jarrett, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright 2019 by Embarcadero LLC. ABC News' Annika Merrilees contibuted to this report. Reporter's Notebook: Ginger Zee's 'GMA' adventure to Iguazu Falls, one of the world's largest waterfalls originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com Follow along as ABC News' Ginger Zee visits South America to see Iguazu Falls, one of the largest waterfalls in the world. Iguazu Falls is the subject of one of eight new episodes in a Netflix original documentary series, "Our Planet," which is a sponsor of "Good Morning America." Read on as Zee takes you inside her adventure, in her own words. Iguazu Falls, selected to be one of the New Seven Natural Wonders of the World in 2011, is a towering spectacle. The falls are fueled by the great Amazon rainforest, which consists of 275 separate falls. It's also home to human presence dating back at least 10,000 years, according to the Iguazu Falls National Park and the National Parks Administration of Argentina. The story goes that when Eleanor Roosevelt approached the falls she said poor Niagara. Thats how show-stopping Iguazu Falls are. #IguazuFalls is a complex of at least 275 waterfalls that shares borders with Argentina and Brazil. We will bring you the story of the falls coming up on @GMA #OurPlanetOnGMA pic.twitter.com/0lESggGIZx Ginger Zee (@Ginger_Zee) April 5, 2019 But beyond their majesty is the real story a celebration of vital fresh water and the tale of one of the most threatened rainforests on the planet that's the reason we went to Iguazu National Park. These falls are encased in one of the most threatened rainforests on our planet the Atlantic Forest currently at only about 10 percent of what it was originally thanks to deforestation. Story continues Why should you care? Well, each tree generates water vapor, that vapor rises into clouds and makes something youve heard me talk about before - an atmospheric river, that drives our weather patterns. If we lose more of this and the Amazon upstream we dont just lose water to the falls - we lose oxygen. We lose habitats for all those unique species that live around the falls. We lose a part of our delightfully balanced planet. They tell me the falls are even more powerful today. On average you get 1,700 millimeters of water per second an incredible force. And now you get to see all of that hit me in one fell swoop. PHOTO: View from Iguazu Falls from Iguazu National Park in Argentina. (Netflix) Friday, April 5, 9:30 a.m. EDT WE DID IT! Just wow! Going into the falls is beyond he surface thrill ride we spent three days learning about them, connecting to the story of their place on our planet and the feeling I got once I was past the screaming, the overwhelming power was the deep connection I felt with our earth. An even greater respect for the beauty of the fresh water our lives depend on! Thursday, April 4, 5:58 p.m. EDT Today we saw even more of Iguazu Falls from every angle. You can access almost everything by walking the footbridges and paths - we saw a glorious rainbow form over one of the falls. But beyond that rainbow was a boat and I knew we were going on that boat to get soaked by the falls later in the day. I also knew that beyond those falls was a team of two dozen people that were preparing to have us live from the waterfalls on a boat in Argentina on Friday morning. Its an incredible feat every time I go on an adventure but this one posed even more challenges. Maria Stefanopoulos leading the charge as she had for almost every great adventure Ive been on. Cameras had to be mounted and waterproof visual and audio equipment for the live shot, theres a backup camera with a 40-zoom lens that will be onshore, and the most spectacular images from our talented drone team. Its wild to think what goes into bringing you a segment on "GMA," but also worth it once you know what we will be highlighting. Early this morning I met up with Mandi Stark, one of the filmmakers for "Our Planet." We took a ride through the rainforest and talked about the integral part this forest plays to the galls and the globe. Our guide told us we were riding through the "Atlantic forest" one of the most threatened rainforests on the planet. Only 8-12% of the original is still around thanks to deforestation. It is rich in biodiversity of species and needs to be protected much like the Amazon to the northwest, because thats where the water from the falls comes from. Each tree gives off water vapor that rises to form clouds which form rivers of their own atmospheric rivers. Incredibly powerful and transporting fresh water around our planet. The trees in the forest also provide oxygen and home to the fragile ecosystem that still exists, albeit compacted. I learned as we passed under giant spiders that we would see the coati (which we had seen plenty of), tapir, monkeys and possibly even puma and jaguar. So exciting to know we at least have a chance at preserving what is left of this beautiful forest. Then we arrived at a long set of stairs that brought us down to the boat dock where we were brought through a turbulent river to the mouth of the falls. When you are that close you can feel the energy of the rushing water, hear the roar all before getting dunked and then the boat revs and you realize you are going straight in. Thursday, April 4, 12:03 p.m. EDT Chasing rainbows and excited to bring you the critical information about our planets fresh water, as we learn more about the role the rainforest surrounding these falls plays in our lives. Thursday, April 4, 9:10 a.m. EDT Out exploring Iguazu National Park this morning with "Our Planet" Producer Mandi Stark! We're talking about what fuels these falls. Can't wait for you to see our chat tomorrow on "GMA"! Wednesday, April 3, 10:26 a.m. EDT Facebook Live time! Gave everyone a preview of all that's to come this Friday on "GMA." We found some new furry friends along the way too! Keep asking me questions in the comments, I'll be checking back to answer you guys! Wednesday, April 3, 7:43 a.m. EDT I'm here at "Devil's Throat" aka "Garganta Del Diablo" -- can't wait to show you this incredible sight. SO impressive! The views here -- it doesn't seem real. Tuesday, April 2, 1:52 p.m. EDT Now arriving: Igauzu! We're here! And there's some interesting signage posted around our hotel... Tuesday, April 2, 7 a.m. EDT Good Morning... Argentina! We're just about to our destination. While "GMA" is just getting just getting on the air back home, I couldn't help but to think, Wow, Iguazu is grand in the purest sense of the word but it also plays a critical role on our planet. This is one of the parts of our planet that not only needs to be conserved for the animals and indigenous people but keeping the rainforest protected preserves the critical water source and the fine balance between our atmosphere and land. I can't wait to see one of the great wonders of our world in Iguazu and share them with you! New pics to come as my team and I settle into our new home and begin our incredible adventure for Friday live on "GMA"! Stay tuned! Monday, April 1, 2019, 8:51 p.m. EDT Iguazu Falls, from everything I have read and seen, will be the most majestic sight I've ever encountered. And thanks to "GMA" and my adventurous spirit, that's saying a lot! I have traveled to Vietnam to see the world's largest cave, Son Doong, and flown a drone into a volcano in Iceland. Iguauzu is a bit more well traveled than those other spots, playing host to around a million visitors each year, but it also plays a critical role on our planet. Fresh water has not only been augmented horrifically by humans, but in this part of South America, most of that water at Iguazu has its origin in the Amazon rainforest. Each tree gives off water vapor, that vapor condenses to become clouds. The clouds travel across the continent fueling the wetlands, rivers and eventually the falls. The more the rainforest is depleted, the less fuel there is for the falls. Monday, April 1, 2019, 4:34 p.m. EDT Off we go! Iguazu-bound by way of Atlanta and then Buenos Aires! So excited! "Our Planet" on "GMA" is sponsored by Netflix. Joe Bidens presumptive presidential campaign is already facing its first crisis. Former congressional aide Amy Lappos told the Hartford Courant on Monday that Biden touched her inappropriately, including rubbing noses with her, at a political fundraiser in 2009. The allegations follow an essay for The Cut by former Nevada Democratic legislator Lucy Flores in which she said the former vice president behaved inappropriately toward her at a campaign event in 2014. "It wasnt sexual, but he did grab me by the head," Lappos said. "He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth." The allegations echo Flores' experience, which she described in her essay, published Friday. "I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified," Flores wrote. "I thought to myself, I didnt wash my hair today and the vice president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice president of the United States smelling my hair? He proceeded to plant a big, slow kiss on the back of my head." Flores said that while shes not suggesting the encounter qualified as sexual harassment or as a criminal act, it was still out of line for the vice president to touch her, a relative stranger, in such an intimate way while in a professional setting. In a statement responding to Flores' essay on Sunday, Biden said that he didnt believe he had acted inappropriately, but that he will listen to womens experiences. "In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support, and comfort," he said. "And not once never did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention." His team has not addressed Lappos' allegations. Story continues Lucy Flores Photo: John Locher/AP/Shutterstock. No one has been exactly shocked at the charges against Biden. In fact, it has been somewhat of an open secret that good, ol' "Uncle Joe" has behaved creepily throughout the years from whispering into women's and girls ears to kissing them in a similar manner to the way Flores said he kissed her. His camp alleges that some of the photos of him with women have been taken out of context a point that was supported by Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. In a Medium essay published Sunday, Carter wrote that a photo of Biden putting his hands on her shoulders was a moment between close friends, and that it has been misinterpreted. Flores responded to this by saying that unlike Carter, she didn't have an existing relationship with Biden when he allegedly invaded her personal space. Several Democratic presidential candidates have said they believe Flores. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Biden needs to give an answer about the incident, while Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said: Lucy Flores felt demeaned, and that is never okay. If Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic hell have to engage on further. Julian Castro said that the American people must decide whether the allegations should disqualify Biden, while Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said its crucial to take these types of allegations seriously. Sen. Bernie Sanders said that he has "no reason not to believe Flores," who is a supporter of his, and that the incident speaks to "the need to fundamentally change the culture of this country." He did, however, add that he's "not sure that one incident alone disqualifies anybody." Both women said that their experiences with Biden felt like an unwelcome invasion of their personal space, one that should not be acceptable. "The transgressions that society deems minor (or doesnt even see as transgressions) often feel considerable to the person on the receiving end," Flores wrote in her essay. "That imbalance of power and attention is the whole point and the whole problem." Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here? Transgender Woman Shot & Killed Near Washington, D.C. Betsy Devos Backtracks On Proposal to Eliminate Special Olympics Funding College Student Samantha Josephson Allegedly Killed After Mistaking Suspects Car For An Uber When Laura Thurman was pregnant with her second child, she had a plan: On top of the six weeks of paid family leave offered by her employer, a large pharmaceutical manufacturer in West Virginia, she would save up vacation time. With her first daughter shed been able to accrue enough to take a total of eight weeks off, but that hadnt felt sufficient. This time she set out to rack up more time so that she could remain at home longer and still have spare paid time off to go to the doctor with her infant once she was back at work. We planned for two years, she says. We saved up that vacation, had that cushion all ready. But those carefully crafted plans fell apart when her father fell ill. Hed had health issues for a while, but he went into the hospital and ended up in the intensive care unit. Thurman has only one sibling, a brother who was deployed in the military at the time. I had to drop everything and go, she says. He was in the cardiac ICU for about six weeks, and during that time Thurman traded shifts with her stepmother to spend days with him at the hospital. Then her father passed away. Like most Americans, Thurman doesnt have paid leave to care for a relative other than a newborn, so she had to dip into the vacation time shed built up. There was no question in her mind that she needed to be with her father before his death, although she did have to ration how much time she spent in the hospital so she didnt exceed the time she had accrued. It kind of kills you to leave that ICU, she says. I did the best with what I had. Still, at the end of the ordeal, shed burned through the weeks shed diligently put aside for when her child arrived. That left no margin of error for a complicated birth or even extended doctor-mandated bed rest. We were hoping nothing goes wrong, she says. It kind of leaves you on eggshells. The burden placed on people like Thurman doesnt tend to get a lot of airtime, not least because the people who suffer most from it are female. But the lack of a national guaranteed paid leave standard has captured politicians attention. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democratic presidential contender, recently reintroduced her plan to create a national paid family leave program with Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro, also a Democrat. In their proposal, paid time off would be guaranteed to prepare for the arrival of a newborn and to care for relatives or recover from ones own injuries or illness. Story continues Even Republicans have jumped on the bandwagonsomewhat. In the budget outline for 2020 that President Trump just released, he included a proposal to allow states to establish paid parental leave programs in a way that is most appropriate for their workforce and economy. He raised the issue on the campaign trail too. But his proposal would give new parents only six weeks of paid parental leave, which wouldnt have helped Thurman when her father was sick, nor would it have afforded her extra time to be with her daughter after she gave birth. Six weeks is hard, Thurman says. Youre not even human at that point. Physically she felt recovered thanks to an easier birth with her second child, but mentally she felt drained. You just want to be home. Your whole brain is there," she says. "I was not my best worker self. Id leave home at 5:30 in the morning and get home at 4:30 in the afternoon. It was a huge stretch of time to be apart from hew newborn. Not to mention how exhausted she was from lack of sleep as she was up two or three times a night to breastfeed. Thurman was eligible for three months of unpaid leave guaranteed through the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, but the time was useless to her. I cant take FMLA, she says. She's the breadwinner; unpaid leave was as good as no leave at all. Are there people that can take six weeks without pay? It sounds nice, Thanks for holding my job, but [now] Im bankrupt, and my house just got repod. Thurman isnt unusual. According to the Federal Reserve, 40 percent of American adults would have to borrow money or sell possessions or simply be unable to pay if faced with an unexpected $400 emergency. The median American has less than $12,000 in savings, while people in the bottom two fifths of the income scale have nothing at all. So perhaps its no surprise that about half of the people who report that they cant take unpaid FMLA leave say its because its not financially possible. I feel so lucky to have had what I had, because I know so many people dont, as Thurman puts it. But at the same time it feels like the bare minimum. Shes right. When it comes to paid leave, the sole guarantee in the United States is that someone who is employed at a large-enough company, who has been working there for a long-enough time, can take 12 unpaid weeks away from work for the arrival of a newborn, to care for a sick or disabled family member, or to recover from her own serious illness. Employers are free to offer paid leave on top of that, but just 15 percent of Americans receive some. Jonna Ashley fell into the other 85 percent. The first thing her employer, a nonprofit in Chicago, said when she announced that she was pregnant was that she wouldnt get any paid time off at all. That meant Ashley had just the requisite 12 weeks of unpaid FMLA leave to work with. She started to save up her paid sick and vacation time to have some wiggle room while out on leave. But then between 32 and 33 weeks of pregnancy, she started having contractions at work. I remember just telling my boss, Im having contractions. I think Im going to go to the hospital. Ill be back, she recalls. I went to the doctor midday and I never left. She had her son via an emergency C-section. Her own recovery kept her in the hospital for a week. But her son had to stay in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for about a month because he was on a feeding tube and had breathing problems. Ashley was with him around the clock. Once he was released, Ashley still had to watch him vigilantly. Two months in, she was out of the few weeks of sick and vacation time she had saved up. She and her husband had run out of funds; they hadnt had as much time to save up for her sons arrival as theyd expected. But she was afraid to go back to work without paid time off, given her sons frequent appointments. Ashley decided to quit, even with another month of unpaid leave. She was out of options. With paid leave, she would have had time and resources to find a suitable child care option. She wouldnt have had to use up her paid sick and vacation time, which would have given her more flexibility in her return to the office. Instead she felt pushed out of work entirely. It was a struggle. Not only was I home, but we were pretty broke, she says. I was isolated and housebound because we didnt have a lot. They cut back on buying anything newincluding clothes for her son. Shopping for groceries became a source of panic. And with her out of work, her husband felt pressure to work even harder to make more money, missing out on key parts of his sons early life. There wasnt a lot of equality. We ended up going back to old-fashioned ways, she says. I was at home with my son; my husband was at work all the time. It wasnt the kind of parents we pictured we were going to be. Ashley estimates it took them three years to recover from the crisis and build back their savings. Both Ashley and Thurman feel that the ideal amount of paid leave to be with a newborn would be right around six months. Six months felt like, OK, now my baby is robust, Ashley says. Six months was the point I was like, Im ready to go back to work. Their hunch is backed up by medical realities. Doctors agree that around six months is the ideal amount of leave both for a mothers physical and mental recovery, as well as to reap the benefits of breastfeeding for a newborn and to get all of his or her vaccinations done. Postpartum depression, which afflicts up to one in seven women, tends to peak after two to six months and then decline. Six months of leave is also the international norm: Nearly three quarters of developed countries guarantee that much paid maternity leave. But Americans dont just need leave to care for their new infants. Like Thurman, people need time off to care for relatives at other times in their lives. In fact, about three quarters of the people who take FMLA leave do it not for a newborn, but to care for either a family member or themselves. That was the case for Staci Lowry. One morning in December 2014, her daughter Bailee, who was four at the time, woke up just really out of sorts, she recalls, just really whiny. At first Lowry thought Bailee just hadnt slept enough, but then she also had trouble walking. She sat in her morning bath in a daze. When Lowry sat her on the toilet so she could go to the bathroom, Bailee just slumped over. Lowry, who used to be a certified nurse, looked at her and thought she looked like shed had a stroke. Even though she thought it made no sense, she decided it was better to be safe than sorry and took Bailee to the emergency room. The doctors took one look at her and rushed her to have an MRI. They determined that she had indeed had a stroke in the previous 24 to 48 hours. While Lowry was in the hospital, a social worker helped her fill out the paperwork to take FMLA leave, and she notified her job at a telecommunications company in Detroit. Nobody ever expects for something like that to happen to their child, Lowry says. It wasnt like she could have saved up paid leave for a planned birth or adoption. Everything was fine; you wake up and everything fell apart at the seams. I literally lived in the hospital, Lowry says. Her job was the furthest thing from her mind. But Bailee was in the hospital through February, and eventually she ran out of FMLA leave and her employer started asking when she would be returning to work. She got a letter terminating her job in early March. (In a place like Sweden, she could have counted on over 10 months of paid parental leave.) I had, like, no savingszilch, zero, nada, she recalls. Plus, Lowry couldnt enroll in unemployment insurance because her company said shed left her job voluntarily. Nothing was in place for me to survive at all. Later, she was able to enroll in food stamps, cash assistance, and Medicaid. She lost her house to foreclosure. Lowry has since become an advocate for paid family leave with the nonprofit Family Values @ Work, and she worked for a period at a nonprofit. Shes now in school full-time for an associates degree while consulting and doing odd jobs on the side. But shes still in debt and her career has suffered from the period she was out of work. It was so hard to bounce back from, she says, emotionally, spiritually, everything. On the 2016 campaign trail, Ivanka Trump assured mothers that her father would change the labor laws to help them, promising that his policies would give paid leave to those whose employers did not. Donald Trump then pledged to provide six weeks of paid leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer didnt offer it themselves. But what the President and his daughter want to offer is a pittance compared with what women need after the arrival of a new child. And the proposals overlook women like Staci Lowry and Laura Thurman, who need to care for their children for months after theyre born or for other close relatives who fall sick. When we think about paid leave, we picture a mother and her newborn. But we know that women dont care for their children (or loved ones, for that matter) in neat six-week stints and, of course, that a mothers work is never done. Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times and a contributing writer at The Nation. Family SUV vs. Family Minivan: Which Is Right for You? Get help choosing the best type of car for your familyminivan or SUVand then check out the our top picks in each category. James Yang When mom of two Linzy Cotaya went car shopping a few years ago, she wanted a model that would comfortably get her to school, work, and 8,000 kid activities, she says. But there was one line she wouldnt cross. I have friends who love their minivan, but I couldnt do it, says Cotaya, who lives in New Orleans. Getting an SUV instead allowed me to hang on to a piece of my prekids self. Well, thats one opinion. Another: Why did I ever resist the minivan? says Genevieve Howland, a mom of three in Destin, Florida, who drives a Chrysler Pacifica. In what other vehicle can a mom switch seats, soothe a baby, and rummage through the trunk all while watching a movie? (Note from Parents editors: Maybe dont try this at home.) Whether youve maxed out the number of car seats (not to mention adults) you can squeeze into your sedan, youve hit your head on its ceiling one too many times while pulling a kid out of the back, or youre in need of more trunk space for your stroller and groceries, its probably time for an upgrade. One thing SUV and minivan owners do agree on: Once you gain all that extra space, you wont ever want to go back. RELATED: The 10 Best Family Cars of 2019 Pros of a Family Minivan This feature sold Alexandra Fung, whod wanted a minivan ever since she rented one on a family vacation. I dont have to worry about my three kids banging the door of our Toyota Sienna into a neighboring car, says Fung, of Arlington Heights, Illinois. A minivans power doors open and close with the push of a button from the drivers seat so you dont have to get up during your carpool. Most little kids need to be lifted into an SUV, but they can climb into a minivan by themselves. When my kids were small, it was so easy for them to get into our Toyota Sienna and for me to move around inside to fasten them into their car seats, says Elizabeth Girouard, a New Jersey mom of three. Now its fantastic for friends in our carpools to hop in and out. Story continues Other moms started their families with an SUV but moved on to a minivan as their tribe expanded. With three kids, we can comfortably spread them out in their car seats among the two rows in the back, says Thao Tran-Nasser, a mom of three in Westfield, New Jersey, who drives a Honda Odyssey. Dori Shwirtz, a mom of four in Miami Beach, Florida, adds: It fits everything I could possibly need, and theres enough space that my kids dont kill each other! Both minivans and SUVs have a lot of the same creature comforts, but minivans offer a few extra family-centric perks. After my husband showed me there was a vacuum in the Chrysler Pacifica, I was sold on getting a minivan, says Randee Braham, a mom of two in Los Angeles. Minivans give you 25 to 28 miles per gallon (mpg) on the highway and 18-ish mpg in the city. Some three-row SUVs such as the Volkswagen Atlas are in that ballpark, but others get as little as 22 mpg highway and 15 mpg city. I drove SUVs that got progressively bigger as my family grew, and my last one was a gas-guzzling monster, says Amy Schmidt, a mom of four in Kings Mills, Ohio, who now owns a minivan. Bottom line: Dont assume that an SUV is better on gas than a minivan; compare the numbers. Pros of a Family SUV It cant be denied: SUVs offer more choices to suit your style. My three-row SUV can fit the same number of people as a minivan and is as comfortable, but its way more sleek, says Rachel Pierre, of Houston. SUVs also dont say mom car the way minivans do. My SUV doesnt have the I used to be cool stigma of a minivan, says Jo Trizila, of Dallas. For many SUV buyers, an eagle-eyed view of the road and plenty of legroom is a big draw. Sitting taller can be safer too. When I test-drove a minivan, I felt like I was behind the wheel of a bus, says Tajinder Rehal, a mom of three in Gilroy, California. We ended up getting a Honda Pilot, which has three rows of seats. For Ashley Chambrello, a mom in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, her two-row Ford Edge offers ample space. My SUV fits everything from my stroller to my portable high chair, she says. If you live in a rainy or snowy area (or enjoy road trips to the mountains!), you need a car that wont slip and slide in bad weather. SUVs offer more choices than minivans for transmission systems, like all-wheel drive and four-wheel drive, that send power to your front and back wheels, giving you more traction. I feel very safe having the all-wheel drive in my Chevy Traverse, says Kristen Parent, a mom of two in Madison, Wisconsin. Ready to start car shopping? Check out Parents' 10 Best Family Cars of 2019 for expert picks in both the minivan and SUV categories. If you zoom out far enoughpast saxophonist and musicianyoull arrive at the title that best describes Kamasi Washington: Guide. The 38-year-old tenors short yet prolific solo recording career, more cleanly than any other living artist, has taken the shape of a monumental journey. His three albums2015s The Epic, 2017s Harmony of Difference, and 2018s Heaven and Earthare all propulsive, universe-spanning odysseys, and Washington masterfully shepherds the listener from A to B. Washingtons latest project, a 22-minute short film called As Told to G/D Thyself, nestles nicely into that trajectory. Shot by Terence Nance, Jenn Nkiru, and Bradford Young, the film condenses and reimagines Washingtons massive 2018 triple album, Heaven and Earth and its bonus disc, The Choice. Through intergalactic animation and surreal live action, the 22-minute experimental film presents "a cosmic journey of sacred youth during which pain, pleasure, and sublimation are non-negotiable." Got it? No? If you need hand-holding, Washington will help you along. Its about discovery, he says with a laugh, speaking over the phone from Brazil. It's about discovering the abilities that you have. And how when discovering the abilities that we have, we're able to create the world we want to create. Coming from someone other than Washington, that might sound like New Age-y mumbo-jumbo. But the man in the dashiki knows of what he speaks. Hes done it. Over the past few years, hes emerged as the preeminent jazz musician of the 21st centurythe only one whose music has truly transcended the genre. Hes a festival mainstay whose work has appeared in the Whitney; a winning complement on hip-hop tracks who also commands the respect of jazzheads; an artist whose music transports listeners to outer space while also powerfully speaking to earthbound concerns (race in particular). Through his music, hes gone precisely where hes aimed. Its been a smooth voyage. But dont expect it to continue that way. Washington is ready to chart a new course. Hes excavated his inner reservoir, which leaves exploring unfamiliar territory. I'm searching around in the dark realm, Washington says. Where will that lead? More than at any point in his career, he doesnt know. But in the grand scheme, with Washington, the destination has never really been whats important, has it? Story continues 775141423EP00185_2018_Coach Frazer Harrison/Getty Images GQ: Are you a big space nerd? Kamasi Washington: Absolutely. I think for most people who are curious, the universe is irresistible. You can't help but wonder about it and dream about it. Was there a moment as a kid when you got interested in space? I was kind of always interested in it. Before I was into music I was into science and math. My mom had all kinds of books and stuff around the house. I remember the first time my uncle took me to Big Bear [Lake, in California]. I'm a city kid. I grew up in L.A. And [at Big Bear], I could actually see what the sky really looks like. And I remember being completely blown away by that. Seeing a sky with a thousand stars in it instead of like the seven that we have in L.A. normally. Do you have a favorite space movie? I was definitely a Trekkie as a kid. My favorite space movieit's hard choosing between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars: A New Hope. Star Wars, I always loved the idea of all these different worlds that have all these different cultures, all the languages and different clothes, and that they had different ways of doing things. And 2001 just lets you feel how big space is, what a journey it would be to go somewhere in space. There's perseverance, optimism, and discovery in your music. As the world seems to grow messier and messier, how do you hold onto those hopeful ideas? If you look at the world as being like a mountain, most people focus on the tip of the mountain. But the mountain itself is really more the base. And I find in my travels, the base part, the masses, it's very encouraging. I meet so many amazing people, people who really want the world to be a beautiful place. And you can feel it in their energy. And then, of course, I see the actions of those people who seem to be in power, and sometimes it's really discouraging. But it's more of a balance of the two that keeps me wanting to do what I do. There's hope in the fact that I meet so many amazing people. And there's a job to be done because there's so many problems. It's kind of like the relationship between "Fists of Fury" and "Space Travelers Lullaby." The relationship between never-ending struggle and endless potential. And that struggle is where my mind exists. I see both. It's about managing those two things. Part of what makes us good is what makes us bad, and what makes us bad is what makes us good. It's just about having a balance. Since the film's central idea is discovery, I'm curious where you are on your journey. On a musical level, I recently sat in for Wayne Shorter. And I've been playing a little bit with Herbie Hancock. And just their level of openness and tapping into the unknown parts of music, the parts they don't normally go [to]and to open your mind to what you don't do. That's affected me greatly. That's where my search is happening now, in the places I don't know. Most of the music I've released has been coming from the places I do know. So now I'm searching around in the dark realm. What are you finding? I'm finding that it's not really dark. We think that there are bad notes and good notes. But they're just notes. And I'm finding that as soon as I release something as being wrong or right, it just becomes. And then I can make it beautiful. I find myself musically going to places that I wouldn't necessarily have gone. I'm composing keys on top of keys, and realizing that it's more about the intention of what you want something to be rather than what it may be. A note that is supposed to be dissonant or consonant is dissonant or consonant because you think it is. Or it works because you think it works. And so in that, I'm coming up with ideas that are musically pretty far outbut not at the same time. Last night, we played "The Rhythm Changes" [off The Epic] in Sao Paulo. And it's normally in the key of B flat. And I started it with a G alto chord, which shouldn't work. I did it on purpose just to see. And because I played it with a certain intention, the rest of the band heard it and it turned it into one of the coolest versions we ever made. It was pretty way out. But I played it like it was just what it was supposed to be. So the way they heard it and what they added to it was cooler than what I could've necessarily imagined. I couldn't have pulled that from my musical lexicon. It's kind of like necessity being the mother of invention. Putting yourself in an awkward situation on purpose to see what the outcome will be. Your past work has relied on a group of collaborators you've worked with for a long time. Does this new philosophy mean that you're looking for new sounds and people to throw you off? Yeah. I'm honestly in a place where I don't know what I'm looking for. I poured so much of myself into Heaven and Earth that it was like, musically I emptied out the jug. I needed to refill it, and instead of going back to what I was used to doing, it was like, Where can I go to discover something else? That's the thing about music. The longer you're in it, the more you have, but the harder it is to discover. There's kind of an interesting paradox that happens. Watching As Told To G/D Thyself, the aesthetic made me think of the videos for When I Get Home by Solange. Did you see those? Yeah, definitely. We didn't talk about what anyone else was doing. It was just more of trying to manage all the different parts of what we all thought about the songs. It meant something different to everyone, so we were trying to create something that could be that as well. I didn't want to box it in because I felt like every person I've let see the film, some people think the kids are in space, some people think he's in his mind, some people think he's in a magical forest. I like that. I wanted it to be able to be anything. The same way when I play a certain note of a certain chord, it's like, I know what I'm intending for it to mean but what the meaning is for Terence, Brad, and Jenn is different. That's what's beautiful about art. That's what makes it timeless. Every person can pull something else out of it. Beyond this film, it seems like more and more popular music is incorporating very ambitious compendium projects. Do you feel like there's a reason that's happening right now? I think there's a connection between the visual arts and the musical arts that's relatively new. And I think that a lot of the visual artists that are working with musical artistsit almost seems like there's a new genre coming out in film that's music and abstract. It's almost like when a new style of music comes out. It always starts out with just people somehow randomly ending up in the same space and creating things that feel connected to one another, even though in a lot of cases the reality is that people are just creating on their own. And it's just the fact that we're living on the same planet that these similarities are there. It's almost like our reactions to the world are similar. I find that it's a blessing for me to be able to work with someone like Brad or Terence and Jenn. They saw things in the music that I wouldn't see because their connection to their soul and their spirit is more visual. Mine is more audible. There are so many great visual artists who are connecting with musical artists to create imagery. And I think that combination of sound and light is creating a new connection. It's interesting because your film is going to be on Apple Music but your last piece was in The Whitney. It seems like a lot of these pieces are bridging the gap between an art house and popular audience. Yeah, they're so related. For so long, the world has been so divided. You pick the thing you're going to like and only do that. But now I think we're in a time and space where you can kind of be into everything. And so people who are into avant-garde music may have not explored as many of the more avant-garde films. You can only imagine if John Coltrane and Salvador Dali got together to make something. How cool would that have been? It wasn't necessarily the reality back then. And that's kind of what's happening now. Because this film is a little bit supernatural, I wanted to ask if there have been any supernatural events in your own life. Yeah, I've had a bunch of supernatural events in my life. Every night when we play. Sometimes the connection feels supernaturalconnecting with musicians where it just feels like someone's in your head. It's very tangible in that you can hear it. But when you're the one making the music, it feels like someone is in real time hearing the exact same thing as you, then it feels supernatural. And I've had moments in my lifeand who knows if what I thought I saw is what I've seenof feeling like I've been witness to things that aren't supposed to be possible. I once saw this kid's leg grow out. I was at summer camp, he was handicapped, and these people were like praying for him, and it looked like his legit did grow out. He had one leg that was way shorter than the other one, and then all of a sudden they were the same size. And I had a moment before The Epic came out of almost clarity of what would happen when it did come out. This was like 2011. I had this overwhelming sensation. As an artist you don't always know if you're on the right path. And I had this overwhelming sensationit made me cry for no reason in publicthat I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Meghan Markle famously deleted her personal social media accounts (and her lifestyle blog, The Tig) when she joined the royal family, and now, after a Markle-free Instagram drought (well, minus the official postings from Kensington Palaces Instagram account), shes back, baby. Kind of! Markle and Prince Harry just launched their official Instagram account as a couple and the handle is, quite perfectly, @SussexRoyal. Much like the official @KensingtonRoyal account, this new account will likely be high-quality photos of the couple doing their jobs (aka making official appearances to the various charities and organizations they work with). Were going to guess that the first royal baby photo will be unveiled there as well, which is extra exciting because Markles due date is reportedly some time this month (Aries baby, anyone?). The Duke and Duchess of Sussex uploaded their first Instagram post on Tuesday, April 2nd, which included several images from the last few months, most from their official visit to Australia and New Zealand. Some of the uploaded photos were the standard Getty images weve seen before, but a couple were brand new to us, and we stay very current on all things Markle. undefined Previously, any Markle and Harry photos were shared on the @KensingtonRoyal account, but now that handle has been rebranded for exclusively Will and Kate news. According to People, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have left their shared office space with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at Kensington Palace and will be working out of Buckingham Palace moving forward. As for the new all-Sussex Instagram account, it seems like the Follow button is glitching for some people, which we can only attribute to the breathless interest in Markles return to social media. We know were following. 'Healthyish Loves It' is our new weekly newsletter where we tell you about the stuff we can't live without. Who would have thought there were four words in the English language as ominous as: What ya got there? And yet, every day, as I toss whatever scraps of sandwich or salad I call lunch onto my desk, I fear nothing more than the sound of those words. Because that means Adam Rapoport, the editor in chief of this website/magazine/brand, is standing in the doorway of my office, watching me. And, of course, judging. There are many ways I could eat my lunch in peace, free from the inquiries of a man who routinely removes his shoes in the office, but the one that has worked the best is to pack whatever Im eating in an extremely attractive container made by the Netherlands-based company Mepal and sold via Food52, a site whose pristine aesthetic has led me to truly believe that the easiest way to improve all aspects of my life is to buy neutral-toned kitchenware. These bowls are technically called Microwavable Nested Storage Bowls, which is interesting because I dont microwave, nest, or store them. I eat my lunch out of them, and my life is better for it. We love it: Nested Storage Bowls, $60-70 for a set of four. The key thing about these bowls is that, unlike virtually all things Ive ever packed my lunch in, they are not clear: Theyre opaque. And theyre so pretty (look at the colors!) that if you kind of blur your vision a little, you can pretend youre eating in a real, maybe even ceramic, dish. (Theyre also much larger than bowls typically marketed for transporting lunches. Have you ever tried to bring a salad or grain bowl in something the size of a bento box? How do people do it?) And the opacity is not just about form but also function: No prying eyes can see whats inside. Julia Kramer, deputy editor All products featured on Healthyish are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Slim Chillers 100-Calorie Vodka Martini Freezers are back at Costco, so youd better start stocking up for the summer! The boozy ice pops went viral last summer for being low in calories and sugar while still tasting amazing. And with flavors like Watermelon Lemonade and Appletini, we know they will be a favorite poolside treat when the weather warms up. Costco Deals, a popular Instagram account for all things Costco, shared a photo of the Slim Chiller pops at a Costco location in San Diego earlier last week, asking followers if any other locations were carrying them too. So far, followers of the account have reported the pops have arrived in some California, Florida, Arizona, Kentucky, Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin Costco stores. The boozy freezer pops come in a 12-count variety pack, which is sold for $19.99. The pops come in four flavorsLemon Drop, Cosmopolitan, Appletini, and Watermelon Lemonade. According to Slim Chillers website, the pops are made with premium, eight-times-distilled, charcoal-filtered vodka, and are intended for those looking to enjoy a festive boozy drink without all of the sugar. The company also has a line of skinny wine cocktails outwhich also come in popsicle form. The pops come in Orangeberry Mimosa, Blackberry Pomegranate Sangrini, Strawberry Grapefruit Rossini, and Peach Mango Bellini, and are also made with eight percent alcohol. Slim Chillers has a Where to Buy section on their website, so if youre not seeing those pops at your local Costco quite yet, you can check to see if they are at any other establishments near you. We wish you the best of luck in your boozy pop searchjust remember to enjoy responsibly! I dont think we have anything for you. Youre obviously in the wrong place. Its a scene as iconic as the film itself; the moment in Pretty Woman when Vivian Ward, played by Julia Roberts, enters that boutique store on Rodeo Drive only to be turned away by the sales assistant. And its lucky for the retailer this happened in the days before social media or the story would have been very different. Armed with digital tools and technology, consumers today are empowered to ask retailers for what they want when, where and how they want it. In the ever-competitive world of fashion retail, brands that deliver the products, services and experiences that shoppers desire will secure their loyalty in return. Related stories Mobile Marketing Offers 'Captive Audience' - But Where Do Brands Start? Billion-dollar Bragging Rights, Fashion's New Benchmark Weak Retail Sales Add to Confusion Over Economy Crucially, these consumers dont want to be made to feel like theyre in the wrong place. More and more, they are looking for inclusion and diversity, and brands that reflect their morals. A recent survey of more than 4,600 consumers found that shoppers will reward positive retail experiences with increased wallet share. Jill Standish Whats more alarming is the switching factor. Results found that almost one in three shoppers say they are likely to switch to a retailer that echoes the same level of importance they place on I&D. That number is higher still for individuals from diverse backgrounds suggesting that brands that champion inclusivity will be rewarded for their commitment to social progress. Above all, we see the growing trend for I&D playing out across three key areas. Delivering the right products and experience Todays consumers are not only tech-savvy, they expect fashion brands to understand them across every single touchpoint from marketing and advertising, through the products and services offered, to the service provided by front-line employees. Put simply, shoppers wont champion a brand that doesnt champion them. Story continues It may come as little surprise, therefore, that store environment, along with products and services, top the list of reasons why shoppers choose to switch brands. Indeed, 62 percent would change retailer if they felt unwelcome or unfairly treated and half would switch if the brand didnt offer products for diverse populations. Many retailers are making strides to close these gaps. Take Japanese retail giant Aeon Co., as one example. With a shifting customer base resulting from Japans aging population, Aeon Co. redesigned several of its stores, offering earlier opening hours, early-bird discounts and in-store exercise classes all geared toward including seniors and fostering a sense of community. Global sporting brand Nike provides another example of inclusive product offering. It launched the first performance hijab for Muslim female athletes, designed to meet cultural requirements and improve female participation rates in a sport in Middle Eastern countries where women and girls still face barriers and limited access to sport. Being active in complex social issues In much the same vein as store environment and product offering, consumers increasingly value those retailers that take the time to be part of broader social and cultural conversations 60 percent of shoppers want their brands to be part of the dialogue on social issues. Social media is an increasingly influential enabler of this conversation, as many retailers come to understand that brand perception and community sentiment will bolster profits and sales for the long term. U.K. health and beauty retailer Boots garnered praise recently for moving away from traditional advertising by launching a series of ads featuring women from diverse backgrounds. Instead of focusing on womens looks, the campaign for their beauty category, featured women dancing without revealing their faces, focusing on how products made women feel rather than how they made them look. On the flip side, shoppers are holding brands to account for their actions, with three-quarters of shoppers believing that a retailer must take responsibility for a negative performance relating to I&D. Starbucks garnered global praise for their reaction to the store incident in Philadelphia involving a store manager and two black customers. Starbucks chief executive officer Kevin Johnson made the decision to close 8,000 stores across the U.S. to conduct unconscious bias training for more than 180,000 employees. Promoting brand purpose with consistency Retailers leading the way in I&D are recognizing the importance of authenticity in delivering more meaningful experiences and connections for their customers. And, thanks to social media, todays retailers need to understand that every single facet of their brand can, and at some point, probably will be publicly examined. The bottom line is that a retailer is only as strong as the sum of its parts products and services, store experience, marketing and advertising, and so on and those should all consistently reflect a clearly defined brand purpose. Take fashion retailer Davids Bridal as an example. It launched an advertising campaign across television, radio and digital to acknowledge the evolution of the wedding sphere. The campaign, called Rewrite the Rules, featured non-traditional couples, including a lesbian couple, an interracial couple and a couple with their child at the altar. Conclusion: The sustained strategy With such positive strides being made toward I&D, values-driven retail shows little signs of slowing down. The proof is in the pudding as shoppers continue to reward those fashion retailers taking positive action to ensure I&D is not only on their agenda but also embedded across all aspects of their brand. The emphasis here is on the action, as the age-old adage, actions speak louder than words, rings truer than ever. If theres one thing we can learn from that iconic Pretty Woman moment, consumers will buy from those that make them feel included or else it will be a big mistake, huge. Jill Standish is senior managing director and head of retail at Accenture. Sign up for WWD's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The European Union said on Tuesday that Britain could be heading for a potentially disorderly exit in just 10 days time as Prime Minister Theresa May met with ministers to thrash out ways to break the Brexit deadlock. Nearly three years since the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU in a shock referendum result, May's exit strategy is up in the air as her government and party are still squabbling over how, when or even if Brexit should happen. May's divorce deal has been defeated three times by the lower house of the British parliament, which failed on Monday to find a majority of its own for any alternatives. She is expected to try to put her deal to a fourth vote this week. The deadlock has already delayed Brexit for at least two weeks beyond the planned departure date to 2200 GMT on April 12. "Over the last days a no-deal scenario has become more likely, but we can still hope to avoid it," EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said in Brussels. May chaired several hours of cabinet meetings in Downing Street in a bid to find a way out of the crisis. It was unclear what, if anything, had been agreed. Barnier said May's deal was the only way to ensure an orderly EU exit for the world's fifth-largest economy. If the deal was rejected, London must choose between a no-deal Brexit and a long delay, he said. European Central Bank policymaker Francois Villeroy de Galhau said markets needed to price in the growing risk of a no-deal. The cacophony of warnings over a disorderly Brexit ratchet up the pressure on British lawmakers as some try to grab control of parliament to prevent a no-deal. If May cannot get her deal ratified by parliament then she has a choice between leaving without a deal, trying to trigger an election, or asking the EU for a long delay to negotiate a Brexit agreement with a much closer relationship with the bloc. At least half of her Conservative Party wants to leave the EU without a deal, though some lawmakers and ministers are telling her she must keep the United Kingdom firmly within the bloc's economic orbit. May will set out next steps ahead of an emergency EU summit on April 10, her spokesman said. May remained opposed to another referendum, he added. "I hope that we can still find a solution. The British parliament has said itself that it doesn't want a disorderly Brexit," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. The defeat of May's deal after pledging to quit if it was passed has left the weakest British leader in a generation facing a spiralling crisis. The British electorate, its two major parties and May's cabinet are all divided over Brexit. May risks ripping her party apart whichever way she tilts. BREXIT CHAOS? Investors and diplomats are in despair at the chaos and such is the volatility of Brexit news from London that some traders have stepped away from sterling - which has seesawed on Brexit news since the 2016 referendum. Sterling fell towards $1.30. The EU said a no-deal would disrupt financial markets and have an impact on liquidity. "Markets were betting as recently as yesterday that there would be a deal and they are going to need to price in the growing risk of a no deal, including on the value of the pound," the ECB's Villeroy told French radio station BFM Business. Britain's top civil servant, Mark Sedwill, said a no-deal Brexit would push up food prices by 10 percent, force direct British rule in Northern Ireland and compromise national security, the Daily Mail reported. Auto-maker Ford also sounded the alarm bells, saying it would have to consider what actions to take to protect its buisness in the event of a no-deal Brexit. "We've been clear with the government in the UK and also in Brussels, we have to maintain frictionless trade at the borders and tariff-free trade," Ford Europe Chairman Steven Armstrong said. No-deal means there would be no transition so the exit would be abrupt. Britain is a member of the WTO so tariffs and other terms governing its trade with the EU would be set under WTO rules. A group of lawmakers said on Tuesday they would try to pass a law which would force May to seek a delay Brexit and thus prevent a no-deal exit on April 12. "We are now in a really dangerous situation with a serious and growing risk of no-deal in 10 days time," said opposition Labour lawmaker Yvette Cooper, who has proposed the legislation alongside eleven others from several political parties. With Brexit stalled, parliament has been trying to come up with an alternative but has thus far failed. That means May's deal is back in focus, though she must find a way to get around a ban on repeatedly bringing the same matter to a vote in parliament. Search Keywords: Short link: Last week, in a post on Medium, Candice Russell, a reproductive rights activist, wrote a letter to the unnamed women who, she suspected, may have had experiences like what she said shed been through: She alleged shed been sexually coerced and intimidated by Willie Parker, M.D., who has categorically denied the charges, saying consent is core to who he is as a doctor and as a man, and that at no time in his life, professionally or personally, has he ever been inappropriate with anyone sexually or otherwise, as a peer, supervisor, or in any other capacity. Still, the news caused a shudder through the reproductive rights community: Dr. Parker is one of a few abortion providers for women in Mississippi and Alabama and the author of Lifes Work: A Moral Argument for Choice and was once a board member of Physicians for Reproductive Health. He has been honored by the United Nations Office of Human Rights as a Womens Human Rights Defender and by Planned Parenthood. He has been a hero. It is hard to speak out. It is even harder to speak out against a hero. As I read Russells March 25 piece and related articles, I was not shocked. I have become accustomed to hearing accusations against men who, on the surface, share my values, in this case, being an advocate for choice and access to safe and legal abortion. Without being able to ascertain Dr. Parkers guilt or innocence until an investigation is completedand hopefully there will be oneI cant rush to judgment. But based on my personal experience with abuse, I wonder what it took for Russell to step forward in the way she did. I explored an ethics complaint against Eric Schneiderman (the former attorney general of New York), a civil claim, and a restraining order, and eventually decided that the court of public opinion was going to be my best and oddly safest resort. What options were available to Russell? And what is she facing now? Story continues There are those who use the #MeToo movement to give themselves a platform rather than use their voice to elevate the movement. But the vast majority of people who speak up about sexual misconduct and abuse have nothing to gain except the knowledge that they have done the right thing. When I told my story of abuse by Schneiderman to Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, I knew that whether or not I would be believed was out of my hands. I reminded myself that Mayer and Farrow were not my friends; I could trust them only to do a thorough and thoughtful investigation. In fact, they were able to establish that I was part of a pattern. Its one of the things that helps silence breakers like me to be brave, to warn potential victims, to prevent the abuser from harming othersand to highlight the hypocrisy of those who are champions of women publicly but abuse them privately. There are many who would rather that women suppress instead of speak their truth. But as long as we dont speak up, the bad behavior may continue. Just because this doesnt happen the majority of the time doesnt mean we have to tolerate it. Perpetrators know that theyre doing something wrong, but perhaps they dont think that they are. Research has found that lying to help someone else is actually perceived to be a good thing; it doesnt take much to see how men who help support feminist goals may absolve themselves from inappropriate behavior. Just because theyve done some good deeds doesnt mean they get a pass. If we cant change the way lecherous men think, perhaps public shame will change the way they behave. Right-wing sites have tried to make the case that these allegations are further proof Dr. Parker does the devils work. But Russells accusations do not negate the cause of reproductive rights. If her account is true, Dr. Parker used the cause to deflect attention from his behavior. The cause is a victim too. As Russell wrote in her Medium post, This is a movement led by entire communities, not a religion worshipping one single deity especially if that deity is a cisgendered heterosexual male using his power to exploit and abuse the very people standing at his feet. This case is especially complicated because Parker is a man of color. American history is full of false accusations of sexual abuse by black men to justify their lynching and killing without due process. Its an argument that Clarence Thomas deployed strategically to discredit Anita Hill and silence many other women. Shortly before the Kavanaugh hearings, in an address to first-year law students at Georgetown University, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, Every woman of my vintage has not just one story but many stories. But we thought there was nothing you could do about itboys will be boysso just find a way to get out of it. The reckoning has been going on for centuries. Its finally reaching its pinnacle, but it will take years and years to complete. The treatment of women is the very essence of whether a society will move forward or backward. Lets not kid ourselves that most of the dozens accused of bad behavior have suffered all that much. Theyre still rich, and money is still power. This is not about politicsfrankly, I am disaffected with politics. Perpetrators are of all stripes. Whats important is how people with different political leanings hold the accused among their ranks accountable. Having a perpetrator in the White House and on the Supreme Court is traumatizing for many women, and sends a disastrous message that women are not protected by those at the top. In 2018 a Thomson Reuters survey placed the United States as the tenth most dangerous place in the world for women, the only Western country on that list. The misogyny that earned us that ranking has permeated all aspects of the American canvas for a long time. When I saw Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein in handcuffs, I felt like they had been held accountablethough far too late. And yet lets not kid ourselves that Charlie Rose or Russell Simmons or Bill OReilly or Les Moonves or R. Kelly or Brett Rattner or most of the dozens accused of bad behavior have suffered all that much. They arent suffering. Theyre still rich, and money is still power. When people have that level of money and fame, even unwanted fame, they can stay high. The next frontier of this movement will make it easier to take away their moneythe money they made while they trampled on people to get to the top, the money they took from womens pockets by denying a promotion or an opportunity. The next frontier will also make it more possible for victims to be heard. When power structures and organizations by design facilitate and conceal abuse, the court of public opinion becomes the most effective path to justice. Women like me and Russell have to call The New Yorker or Medium. But what about those victims whose abusers wont make headlines? For every accusation thats made news, there are millions more stories that have yet to be heard. I wish I could end on a hopeful note, but to do so would be to believe that the power structures that enable these behaviors will be dismantled. That wont happen anytime soon. We are in a war that will lead us to two possible outcomes: a world that is less safe for womenwhere womens rights and freedoms have been further erodedor a world that is safer for women. I am fighting for the latter. It will take legislation, continued press attention, and education. It will take all of us. And then I will have hope. In the meantime, we tell our stories. During a low point after I stepped forward, I told my friend Farai Chideya, The bad guys ultimately win. She responded, But the storytellers also win. Tanya Selvaratnam is an Emmy-nominated producer and the author of The Big Lie and the forthcoming Assume Nothing. ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika stepped down on Tuesday after 20 years in office, and six weeks of massive nationwide protests aimed at pushing him and his much-criticized inner circle from power to create a real democracy in the gas-rich nation. The announcement followed soon after a sternly-worded call from the powerful army chief for Bouteflika, 82 and ailing, to "immediately" bow out. Crowds celebrated peacefully in the capital Algiers soon after his announcement. Honking car horns, singing songs and waving Algerian flags, hundreds gathered Tuesday night at the central post office a plaza that has become a symbol of the protest movement. Police watched from the sidelines. The Constitutional Council was expected to convene Wednesday to formalize his departure. Under the constitution, the president of the upper house, the Council of Nations, steps in as interim leader for a maximum of 90 days so that elections can be organized. The current upper house president is Abdelkader Bensalah, a Bouteflika ally and it's unclear whether protesters will abandon their fight for an overhaul of the entire power structure. An official in the president's office told The Associated Press that Bouteflika had resigned, and the official APS news agency said in a full-page headline that Bouteflika had notified the Constitutional Council of his decision. The move came a day after Bouteflika's office said he would leave by April 28, the official end of his fourth mandate but only after "important" changes were made to ensure institutional continuity. That gave rise to fears that his entourage would do all to preserve the interests of those who profited from his time in office. There was no word about what would happen to the presidential entourage, including younger brother Said Bouteflika, a top counselor blamed by protesters for widespread corruption in the North African country with a high unemployment rate and drastic gap between the rich and poor. Story continues Earlier Tuesday, military chief of staff Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah convened a meeting of the top military hierarchy. That made clear that the army chief's call for Bouteflika to desist had the backing of the military among the most important on the African continent. In a communique, the Defense Ministry referred to Bouteflika's entourage as a "gang" and said it had made "fraud, embezzlement and duplicity its vocation." Bouteflika has rarely been seen in public since a 2013 stroke. His resignation caps six weeks of peaceful marches by protesters who wanted not just Bouteflika but the entire system to make an exit. As the protests escalated, Bouteflika announced two new governments and army chief Gaid Salah urged Bouteflika to submit to Article 102 of the Constitution, which would declare him unfit for office. Gaid Salah also called for the application of two more articles championed by protesters, notably Article 7, which stipulates that "the people are the source of power." Tensions had been mounting in recent days between the army chief and the president's entourage along with suspicions of a potential military coup. The Defense Ministry statement Tuesday appeared to be a final warning, and the catalyst for Bouteflika's resignation. Bouteflika was an independence fighter during Algeria's war against colonizer France in the 1950s and 1960s, and then went on to defend Third World interests at the height of the Cold War as Algeria's foreign minister. Bouteflika came to the presidency after Algeria's darkest period, the 1990s Islamic insurgency that left around 200,000 people dead. After taking power in 1999, Bouteflika managed to bring back stability to a country devastated by killings and distrust. The insurgency then linked up with al-Qaida and metastasized into a Sahara-wide extremist movement. As president, however, age and illness took its toll, and corruption scandals dogged Bouteflika and associates. Bouteflika also failed to create an economy that could offer enough jobs for Algeria's growing youth population despite the nation's vast oil and gas wealth. In a country where secrecy surrounds the leadership, it has never been clear whether Bouteflika was fully in charge or whether the powerful army was pulling the strings. ___ Elaine Ganley reported from Paris. Thomas Adamson contributed from Paris. By Lamine Chikhi ALGIERS (Reuters) - Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who resigned on Tuesday after resisting weeks of protests, established himself by ending a ruinous civil war but came undone over corruption and economic stagnation. The 82-year-old, a veteran of Algeria's war for independence, has rarely been seen in public since a stroke in 2013. He had sought to fend off the wave of dissent against his two-decade-old rule that began on Feb 22 by reversing his decision to seek a fifth term. But he did not say when he would go, further angering protesters. Bouteflika submitted his resignation on Tuesday after the army chief of staff demanded immediate constitutional procedures to remove him from office, the APS news agency reported. In a report on Monday, APS had said Bouteflika would leave before his term ended on April 28. Two private TV channels said on Sunday he could quit this week. A fighter in the 1954-1962 war to end French colonial rule, Bouteflika became independent Algeria's first foreign minister and one of the forces behind the Non-Aligned Movement that gave a global voice to Africa, Asia and Latin America. He championed post-colonial states, challenged what he saw as the hegemony of the United States and helped turn his country into a seed-bed of 1960s idealism. He welcomed Che Guevara, and a young Nelson Mandela got his first military training in Algeria. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, on the run from U.S. police, was given refuge. Cleaver held court in his Algiers safe house with Timothy Leary, the drug-taking high priest of U.S. counter-culture. As president of the U.N. General Assembly, Bouteflika invited Yasser Arafat to address the body in 1974, a historic step towards international recognition of the Palestinian cause. By the end of the 1970s, though, Bouteflika had fallen from favor at home and went into exile. He returned to public life when Algeria was being ravaged by a conflict with Islamist militants which killed an estimated 200,000 people. First elected president in 1999, he negotiated a truce to end the fighting and wrested power from the secretive military-based establishment known as "le pouvoir" (the powers-that-be). Helped by oil and gas revenues, Algeria became more peaceful and richer. But it remains mired in corruption and political and economic torpor in a region where uprisings brought changes elsewhere. With a cushion of foreign reserves and a population wary of major upheaval after their civil war, Algeria avoided the Arab Spring revolutions that toppled leaders across the region in 2011. But protests against poor living standards, the lack of job opportunities and services were common even before the mass protests, and foreign investors are keen for economic reforms that will cut the red tape that often hampers business. POST-COLONIAL STATES' SPOKESMAN Some biographers say Bouteflika was born in Tlemcen, western Algeria, and others give his place of birth as Oujda, just over the border in Morocco. Aged 19, he joined the rebellion against French rule as a protege of Houari Boumediene, a commander who would later become Algerian president. After independence, Bouteflika became minister for youth and tourism at the age of 25. The following year he was made foreign minister. Dressed in the tailored suits and sunglasses fashionable in the 1960s, Bouteflika became a spokesman for states emerging from colonial rule, given added authority by the cachet Algeria had earned from defeating France. Bouteflika demanded that Communist China be given a seat in the United Nations. He railed against apartheid rule in South Africa. The invitation to Arafat to address the General Assembly was controversial. Only two years before, Palestinian gunmen took hostage and killed members of the Israeli team at the Olympic Games in Munich. Bouteflika watched from the chairman's dais as Arafat, a gun holster on his waistband, addressed the assembly in New York. When pro-Palestinian militant Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal", kidnapped oil ministers from an OPEC meeting in Vienna in 1975, he demanded to be flown with his hostages to Algiers. Bouteflika was shown on camera embracing Carlos at the airport before they sat down to negotiate the hostages' release. RETURN FROM EXILE When Boumediene died in 1978, Bouteflika lost his mentor. He was replaced as foreign minister and an investigation was launched into financial impropriety. Bouteflika said the allegations were fabricated as part of a political plot. He left Algeria in the early 1980s and settled in Dubai, where he became an adviser to a member of the emirate's ruling family. He returned home in 1987 but kept a low profile, refusing offers of government posts. In the meantime, Algeria was unraveling. The military-backed government annulled a parliamentary election in 1992 that Islamists were on the verge of winning. In the conflict that followed, whole villages were massacred and civilians walking in city streets had their throats slit. Bouteflika, backed by the military, was elected president in 1999 with a pledge to stop the fighting. Against fierce opposition from the establishment, he gave an amnesty to militants who laid down their arms. The violence declined dramatically. He won re-election in 2004 and again in 2009, although his opponents said the votes were rigged. Through a series of ferocious turf battles with his security forces behind the scenes, Bouteflika had, by the start of his third term, become Algerian's most powerful president in 30 years. He consolidated that power last year by dismissing about a dozen top military officers. Little is known about his private life. Official records mention no wife, though some accounts say a marriage took place in 1990. Bouteflika lived with his mother, Mansouriah, in an apartment in Algiers, where she used to prepare his meals. Age and poor health caught up with him. French doctors operated on him in 2005 for what officials said was a stomach ulcer. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables said he was suffering from cancer. He became weaker after his mother died in 2009. Bouteflika said in a speech in Setif, in eastern Algeria, in May 2012 that it was time for his generation to hand over to new leaders. "For us, it's over," he said. Months later at the start of 2013, a stroke put him into a Paris hospital for three months. He was seen little in public after returning to Algeria to convalesce. (editing by Ulf Laessing, Mark Heinrich and Philippa Fletcher) Saint Petersburg (AFP) - A blast caused by an explosive device wounded four people on Tuesday at a military academy in Russia's northwestern city of Saint Petersburg, investigators said. The Investigative Committee that probes major crimes said in a statement that "four servicemen received various injuries" but their injuries were not life-threatening. The unidentified explosive device went off around 1:30 pm (1030 GMT), in "staff premises of an administrative building at the Mozhaisky academy," the defence ministry said in a statement cited by agencies. It described the device as lacking casing, meaning that it was not a military device such as a mortar shell. The Investigative Committee opened a criminal probe into attempted murder over the incident, saying it was working to establish "the origin of the detonated object". "Everyone is alive," Saint Petersburg's acting governor Alexander Belov told the media. "Three people are injured (and in addition) one is lightly injured," Belov said. One was "successfully" operated on, the defence ministry said. - 'In bag under stairs' - Kommersant daily reported, citing its sources, that the blast went off as military personnel working at the academy attempted to neutralise the device, which cadets discovered hidden in a bag under a staircase. The blast was so powerful that the staircase collapsed. All those injured are military personnel on the staff at the academy, one of them a woman, the daily reported. Their names have not been officially released. The most seriously injured person is a teacher at the academy who was decorated for his work as a sapper in Chechnya, Kommersant reported. On Tuesday afternoon, police sealed off the area around the academy and cadets and staff were leaving the grounds. Local independent news site Fontanka reported that mine clearing specialists were also at the scene. A cadet who gave her name only as Natalya told AFP that "everyone is being evacuated." Story continues She added that "it looked like something exploded on the first floor" but said she did not have any more information. There was no visible damage to the building's facade. The academy, one of Russia's largest with more than 2,000 students, is overseen by the defence ministry and trains officers to serve in air and space defence and other branches of the armed forces. It has accepted women since 2008. It is located in the centre of Saint Petersburg, the former imperial capital of Russia whose palaces are a major draw for tourists. In April 2017, a bomb went off on a train in the city's metro, killing 15 people and injuring almost 70 more. The alleged perpetrator also died in the attack. The blast on Tuesday came as 11 defendants went on trial in the city at a military court charged with helping to organise the 2017 suicide bombing that was claimed by a little-known group linked to al-Qaeda. United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Britain, France and Germany are accusing Iran of developing missile technology, following recent activities, that they said was inconsistent with a UN resolution, and are calling for a full UN report, according to a letter released Tuesday. The European trio cited Iran's launch of a space vehicle and the unveiling of two new ballistic missiles in February as forming "part of trend of increased activity inconsistent" with the resolution, according to the letter sent to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. UN Security Council Resolution 2231 -- adopted just after the 2015 nuclear deal -- calls on Iran "not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons." Tehran insists that its missile program is defensive and that it has no intention of developing a nuclear capability. The three countries asked Guterres to "report fully and throughly on Iranian ballistic missile activity" in his next report, which is expected in June. The letter from the European countries, which are signatories to the nuclear deal along with the United States and Russia, came nearly a month after the United States made a similar appeal to the council, saying it was time to bring back tougher international restrictions on Tehran. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the nuclear accord in May last year and reimposed sanctions on Iran, citing concerns about missile development among its reasons. At a council meeting in December, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called for tighter restrictions on Iran to curb its missile program but Russia flatly asserted that there was no proof that Iran's missiles can carry a nuclear payload. The European countries said the Safir space launch vehicle used for a satellite blastoff on February 6 is based on two other missiles and uses technology closely related to the development of long-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Story continues On February 7, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards unveiled the Dezful surface-to-surface missile which they claimed had a range of 1,000 kilometers, according to the letter sent on March 25. During a public display in Tehran on February 4, Iran revealed a variant of the Khorramshahr ballistic missile that the letter said was "potentially an intermediate-range ballistic missile." Iran reined in most of its nuclear program under the landmark nuclear deal with major powers but has kept up development of its ballistic missile technology. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, unveils the Fire Phone at an event in 2014. (Photo: Mike Kane/Bloomberg via Getty Images) WASHINGTON When Jeff Bezoss personal security consultant Gavin De Becker published what amounted to a startling indictment of the National Enquirer on Saturday, alleging that the tabloid publication may have worked with Saudi Arabia to expose the Amazon CEOs affair, there was one thing missing: any evidence for the claim. Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos phone, and gained private information, De Becker wrote in an op-ed in the Daily Beast, adding that it was unclear if the Saudis had actually worked with the Enquirer, which first published details of the affair. De Beckers lack of details on the alleged hack may be because he doesnt want to tip his hand in advance of an FBI investigation or any potential court proceedings. However, the notable lack of technical detail has led multiple cybersecurity experts to call for further details before speculating on the events, Saudi capabilities or the potential consequences of that behavior. If the Gulf states are going hog-wild on U.S. persons, that would be big news, said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But its also a claim that requires evidence. Dave Venable, a former intelligence officer at the National Security Agency who advises on information-security issues, agreed. While it wouldnt be surprising if Jeff Bezos claims of Saudi Arabias involvement in the hack turn out to be true, any claim of this magnitude needs to be backed up with strong forensic evidence, he told Yahoo News. In the last decade, technology used to spy on people and monitor or steal personal information from inside digital devices has proliferated across the Middle East and North Africa, where governments have different views of civil liberties and privacy as well as what might constitute a crime. Companies like NSO Group in Israel and Hacking Team in Italy have sold tools and capabilities to governments, particularly in the oil-rich Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Story continues However, De Beckers op-ed does not indicate that the investigative team had obtained forensic evidence of an intrusion into any of Bezoss devices, nor does it suggest that evidence, if it exists, has been reviewed by outside peers, as has been done with other notable hacking cases. Its possible that the well-resourced team within Amazon did its own forensics, or that De Becker obtained intelligence from another source. However, there are independent organizations with a strong track record on similar issues, like Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which relies on multiple forensic experts who track Middle Eastern spyware, particularly on mobile devices. Citizen Lab experts have published extensively on companies including NSO Group, which markets and sells advanced hacking tools to governments around the world, including Saudi Arabia. If NSO or another regional company was involved, Citizen Lab would likely be familiar with the type of forensic evidence Amazons team may have been analyzing. NSO Group denied that its tools were used to hack Bezos. Independent security experts and former intelligence officials suggested that Saudi digital capabilities remain nascent; the oil-rich kingdom still heavily relies on outsourcing hacking tools from companies like NSO and, before that, Hacking Team. If the purchased tool is sophisticated, it might be designed to leave no evidence, said Timo Steffens, an author focused on researching targeted cyberattacks and attribution online. However, he continued, unless there is forensic evidence, anything mentioned in that article is rather weak in front of a court. De Beckers new claims follow what has been a whirlwind story of power, wealth and celebrity. In January, Bezos and his wife announced they were divorcing, just before the National Enquirer published an investigation, which included leaked intimate texts, revealing that the Amazon founder had been having an affair with a former TV host, Lauren Sanchez. In February, Bezos revealed some of the backstory on Medium, including details of how David Pecker, CEO of the Enquirers parent company, AMI, was allegedly blackmailing him with racy photographs documenting the affair. Bezos also suggested there might be Saudi involvement in obtaining his private data. Since then, Michael Sanchez, Laurens brother, came forward as the source of the leaked material. The Enquirer, which has acknowledged Sanchez as a source, has denied any cooperation with Saudi Arabia on the Bezos story. The FBI declined to comment on whether it had opened an investigation or received evidence from De Becker. Saudi Arabia has begun dipping its toes in the waters of creating its own domestic private capabilities but largely remains dependent on outside entities. One company inside Saudi Arabia, according to a security expert from the region, is called Haboob. That company also appears to be an industry novice. According to Joseph Cox, a digital-security journalist at Motherboard, an official from Haboob reached out to him to try and purchase hacking tools not realizing that Cox is a journalist. Read more from Yahoo News: Durban (South Africa) (AFP) - Dozens of Malawians have opted to be repatriated following attacks on foreigners last week in Durban, officials from Malawi and South Africa said Tuesday. Some 300 Malawians were displaced following the spate of deadly violence, which prompted condemnation by South Africa's government and raised fears of a resurgence of xenophobic bloodshed. Around a third of those driven from their homes have opted to leave the country, the officials said. "At the moment 105 (have) requested voluntary repatriation -- only 85 presented for interviews and processing," Malcolm Canham, the senior coordinator for disaster management in Durban told AFP. The UN International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the Malawi embassy and South African immigration officials were processing the applicants, he said. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday had "condemned violence against foreign nationals" and called on police to identify those responsible and bring them to justice. The assaults prompted emergency talks between Foreign Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and Police Minister Bheki Cele, and diplomats of African countries. Three South Africans were killed during the unrest in the southeastern KwaZulu-Natal province last week when protests targetting foreign-owned shops spilled into violence. Police said the owner of one shop attacked by a mob opened fire, killing two of them. A third person, a woman, died after she fell off a roof while fleeing protesters. A representative of the displaced group, Wrightwell Saka, told AFP many of those wanting to return to Malawi were too scared to stay. "The situation was bad... they attacked us during the night, it was midnight, we (were not) ready for anything," said Saka. "Luckily most of us escaped, we escaped unhurt" but they had "never experienced something like this. That's why they have chosen to be repatriated back to Malawi." Story continues Another Malawian, Alfred Chirwa, said his compatriots were attacked because "they say we are coming here to steal their jobs," adding some South Africans had threatened further assaults. Such attacks have become increasingly common in recent years in South Africa, the most developed sub-Saharan economy, as immigrants bear the brunt of anger resulting from chronic unemployment and limited progress made by many poor black people since white-minority rule ended in 1994. The country hosts millions of foreigners, most from African countries and many of them undocumented. Malawi's Information Minister Henry Mussa said his government was doing everything "possible to secure the safety and welfare" of its citizens. burs-sn/cw/klm Michelle Gustafson/Bloomberg via Getty Let 2019 mark the death of Americas appreciation for benevolent sexism. For decades, the best women could get in politics was men exhorting other men to protect and take care of their sisters, mothers, wives and daughters. (If you happened to be an only child, unmarried, childless and an orphan, you were on your own, sweetheart.) As Democrats look back on Joe Bidens treatment of women, theres some hope that 2019 could be the year this finally changeseven if many so-called feminists have to be dragged kicking and screaming into a more equitable future. The conversation opened in earnest last Friday, when former Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores wrote for New York magazines The Cut about an experience with former Vice Presidentand possible 2020 candidateJoe Biden that made her so uncomfortable, she wished for the earth to swallow her whole. Offstage before a campaign event, Flores wrote, Biden came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, smelled her hair and kissed the back of her head. Then a second woman, Amy Lappos, emerged, describing first on Facebook Sunday and then in an interview with the Hartford Courant published Monday afternoon her experience with Biden at a 2009 fundraiser: "It wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head," she said. "He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth." This is how to right the bar for whats OK. Its not OK to touch women in ways that make them deeply uncomfortable just because it isnt directly sexual. After Flores story came out, Bidens communications team circulated two stories addressing photos that have often been cited as examples of the former vice presidents inappropriate touching. Stephanie Carter used Medium to provide background on an infamous video of Biden holding her shoulders at her husbands confirmation as Secretary of Defense, explaining that she had been anxious and uncomfortable at the event, and Bidenan old friendhad sensed that and provided welcome reassurance and comforting. In The Washington Post, Sen. Chris Coons explained that his kids have known Biden their whole lives, and claimed his daughter did not think of it as anything when Biden whispered in her ear and kissed the side of her head in another infamous video, in which the little girl is seen leaning away from the vice president. Story continues I dont find this totally compelling, coming as it is from the father and not the little girl, and considering how hard it would be for any little girl, let alone a Delaware Democrats daughter, to tell her dad she doesnt love Grandpa Joes close talking. Anyone paying attention for the last few years probably isnt surprised by these allegations. The Daily Show did a segment on Bidens audacity of grope in 2015, and photos and videos of Biden hugging and kissing women and girls in ways that some viewers found inappropriate surfaced in 2017 as well. While Bidens spokespersons claim that stories about those videos are part of a cottage industry of lies is hyperbolic, its true that many of the Biden images circulated by the right as damning are doctored. But right-wingers muddying the waters in no way detracts from the stories Flores and Lappos are telling. The excuses made for Biden by supporters ranged from the standard hes from a previous time (when groping was OK?) and hes just a physically affectionate guy to attacks on Flores implying that she is an opportunist and a liar. When Biden himself finally responded, he did better. While insisting that to him, these touchy moments were innocent expressions of affection, Biden also maintained that he wouldnt question any womans reporting of her own experience and is interested in continuing to listen (and, hopefully, learn). Others, clearly arent ready to learn but instead want to hand-wring about how women who dont want to be groped by strangers are the real problem with the culture. On The View, Meghan McCain worried that criticism like Flores would discourage politicians from shaking hands with every resident of Iowa, which seems both unlikely and illogical. Its hard to conceive of how not wanting to be groped by a stranger is the same thing as shaking the hand of a presidential candidate. Ill shake hands with pretty much anyone. I do not want my shoulders or any other part of my body touched by someone Ive never met before, no matter how famous they are (unless they ask and its Chris Pine and he wants to give me a hugbut even he has to ask first). McCains colleague Joy Behar described Biden as a close talker, which everyone agrees makes you the absolute worst person in a bar but somehow is an excuse if youre a politician? Whoopi Goldberg said Biden might be a little overly familiar and a hands-on kind of guy. Biden isnt Harvey Weinstein, but those explanations are all too reminiscent of the way people like him were talked about just a couple years ago. Hes just a womanizer, relax. Also, handsy is the word Goldberg is looking forhands-on would be if Biden invited constituents to come to work with him and participate in government. The cherry on top of Goldbergs justification was how she just couldnt imagine Biden making anyone feel violated. Thats nice for her. Just like its nice for the former Biden staffer who shared how great her former boss was. But its also irrelevant. One womanor even dozens of womenbeing comfortable does not negate any other womans discomfort. We are striving for greater respect and better communication, which ultimately will result in the clarity men claim they crave. A good start is to treat strangers like they are strangers. This may seem anathema to the (Bill) Clintonian glad-handing kind of politics, but you can still be very warm and friendly to a constituent without molesting them. You can look a person in the eye, ask them a real question. Notice something specific about them. Make them feel seen without making them feel felt up. Much of the criticism leveled against Flores has suggested she is ungrateful for the support Biden gave her. This happened when Al Franken was called out for groping as well. Hes so good on womens issues, his defenders said. The same is true for Bidenby the standards of the past several decades, he has been a champion of womens issues. But his language, and behavior, have been at best paternalistic. In a 2014 speech on Obamas Council on Women and Girls, Biden repeatedly referenced daughters, granddaughters, sisters, wives, mothers and grandmothers. A man raising his hand to a woman is the cardinal sin, he said. The measure of manhood is willingness to speak up and speak out and begin to change the culture. This isnt terrible. For a long time, much of the country probably needed to be reminded that most women are important in some way to a man in order to conceive of a culture in which women deserved bodily autonomy and respect and the ability to not feel constantly on edge while moving around through the world. It is benevolent sexism, a fatherly pat on the head to a grown woman who deserves respect. Recall the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991, when Biden said there were things that I might say, jokes that I might say with a male trusted aide that Ive been with for 20 years, might not be the same joke that Id be willing to tell with the female members of my staff. This is the kind of attitude that keeps women away from the dinners where decisions are made, or the cigar club where networking happens. This attitude is why women dont get mentored nearly as much as menand why when they do, the mentoring often comes with unprofessional expectations. In order for us to have the same opportunities and access as men, we need to be treated the same waynot as fragile dolls or delicate daffodils who need saving, but as capable, intelligent people with meaningful skills and ideas to contribute. Joe Biden does not deserve to be cast off from decent or Democratic society. But he is not our future. He is our past. And the president in 2020 should be a model of how we want to be, not how we were. We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention Biden said in response to Flores account. Hes right. This is a time for women to claim control of our own narrative. Read more at The Daily Beast. 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. By Aditya Kalra and Saad Sayeed NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Facebook has deleted 712 accounts and 390 pages in India and Pakistan for "inauthentic behavior", it said on Monday, many linked to India's opposition Congress party days before a national election, and others related to Pakistan's military. Facebook has come under increasing pressure around the world to ensure its social media platform is not abused for political purposes or to spread misinformation. The action against accounts with alleged links to Congress, the party led by the Gandhi family that has dominated Indian politics for much of its post-independence era, marks a bold move by Facebook. The platform has more than 300 million users in India, where it has been a key political campaigning tool in the election - the largest democratic exercise in the world - starting on April 11. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his rivals use official Facebook accounts to send political messages to millions of followers, thousands of unverified pages also share posts to support or criticize politicians. Among the most significant things it has removed, Facebook said it had taken down 549 accounts and 138 pages linked to India's Congress for "coordinated inauthentic behavior". In a Tweet, Congress said none of its official pages or those run by its verified volunteers had been taken down. The party is awaiting a response from Facebook to provide a list of all pages and accounts which were removed, it said. Also removed were 15 accounts linked to an Indian IT company which, among other things, issued posts on Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and alleged misconduct of political opponents including Congress, Facebook said. The Digital Forensic Research Lab at think tank Atlantic Council, which partnered with Facebook for the review, said the accounts linked to Congress pushed satirical posts, while pro-BJP pages "carried vitriolic posts against opposition leaders". Story continues "The fact that partisans on both sides resorted to such tactics is a troubling feature," it said in a blog post. In the face of increasing calls for tougher regulation of online content, Facebook has been taking similar measures elsewhere. In Pakistan, it removed 57 accounts, 24 pages, seven groups and 15 Instagram accounts, also for inauthentic behavior, as part of a network that originated there and was linked to employees of a unit of the Pakistani military. Nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan both sent warplanes to attack each other's territory in February after a suicide bomb attack claimed by a Pakistan-based militant group killed 40 Indian paramilitary police in the disputed region of Kashmir. The attack also led to a deluge of fake news, another issue social media companies have been grappling with. CRITICISM OF POLITICIANS Facebooks head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said the firm had removed accounts based on their behavior, not their content. The company's review found individuals using fake accounts and issuing posts including criticism of the BJP who were "associated with an INC (Indian National Congress) IT Cell". Two of the samples shared by Facebook were of posts that criticized Modi's initiatives and called for supporting the Congress party and its president, Rahul Gandhi. Separately, Facebook removed 12 accounts and one page, plus one group and one Instagram account, which linked to individuals related to an Indian IT firm Silver Touch. Asked what Silver Touch's link with politics was, Gleicher told Reuters earlier it was "associated with" a mobile app promoted by Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). After BJP's IT head, Amit Malviya, told Reuters both the party and the app had "nothing to do with Silver Touch", Facebook in a new statement late on Monday said it had "seen no evidence to date of Silver Touch being associated with the NaMo App on our platform," referring to the Narendra Modi app. "We wont be speculating about off-platform connections of the actors we took down today," a spokeswoman said. Facebook's actions on Monday also included the removal of a "pro-BJP" page called "The India Eye", which had more than 2 million followers, "was strongly nationalist", a vocal supporter of Modi and a critic of Gandhi, Atlantic Council said. Facebook said it had also removed another 227 pages and 94 accounts in India for violating its policies on spam and misrepresentation. In Pakistan, Facebook said it removed pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram that spread information about Pakistani politics, the Indian government and the Pakistani military. Those accounts were being run by employees of the Pakistani military's public relations arm, the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), Facebook said. No comment was immediately available from ISPR. These Pakistani accounts, pages, groups and Instagram accounts removed from Facebook had more than 2.8 million followers. Last week the firm removed a social media network in the Philippines and took the unusual step of linking it to a businessman who said he had managed the president's online election campaign in 2016. It has also taken such action recently against accounts in Russia and Iran. (Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Saad Sayeed; Additional reporting by Jonathan Weber and Munsif Vengattil; Editing by Martin Howell and Nick Macfie) United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The foreign ministers of France and Germany on Tuesday lamented the disarray in British politics over Brexit, saying London must come up with a clear position on leaving the European Union. "Honestly, it's sometimes difficult to follow," French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told reporters after British lawmakers again rejected a series of alternatives to Prime Minister Theresa May's divorce deal. "Three years after their decision, it would be great if they had a clear position. Otherwise the hard Brexit will have to take place in the coming days," he said. May announced earlier in London that she would ask the European Union next week to delay Brexit for a second time, beyond April 12, to try again to get her deal agreed and ratified in the British parliament. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said May's decision would allow for talks with the British opposition on a possible extension, but it was unclear whether this approach would succeed. "In the end, we will have to wait to see what London decides of course. We are five minutes past midnight and this should be known in London as well," he said. France and Germany are holding joint presidencies of the UN Security Council in March and April, working closely at the world body on international issues despite the political turmoil in their close ally. UNITED NATIONS (AP) France, Germany and Britain expressed concern in a letter released Tuesday that Iran's latest ballistic missile activities are part of increasing actions to develop missiles capable of delivering a nuclear weapon. Ambassadors from the three U.N. Security Council nations said in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that Iran's latest development and launching of ballistic missiles is having a destabilizing effect in the Middle East and increasing existing tensions. The Western allies also said Iran's activities are "inconsistent" with a 2015 U.N. resolution calling on Iran not to undertake any activity involving such missiles. The resolution was adopted unanimously to support the 2015 deal between Iran and six major powers including the United States to rein in Tehran's nuclear program. Last year, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the pact but France, Germany and Britain, also signatories, still support the nuclear agreement. In their letter, the three European allies pointed to the Feb. 6 launch of a Dousti satellite, saying its Safir space launch vehicle is capable of delivering nuclear weapons. They also cited Iran's unveiling of a Dezful surface-to-surface ballistic missile on Feb. 7 saying it is "highly likely" to meet the criteria to deliver a nuclear weapon, and Tehran's public display on Feb. 4 of a variation of the Khorramshahr ballistic missile, calling it "potentially" a nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile. France's U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre, Germany's U.N. Ambassador Christoph Heusgen and Britain's U.N. Ambassador Karen Pierce asked Guterres to report "fully and thoroughly on Iranian ballistic missile activity inconsistent" with the 2015 resolution in his next report to the Security Council. The ambassadors' latest letter is a follow-up to previous letters in November, December and February on Iranian missile activity "inconsistent" with the resolution. Story continues In early March, the United States urged the Security Council to impose new sanctions on Iran, saying its recent missile-related launches could be capable of delivering nuclear weapons and risk a regional arms race. Acting U.S. ambassador Jonathan Cohen condemned "Iran's destabilizing activities" in a letter to Guterres and called on Tehran "to cease immediately all activities related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons." The Trump administration re-imposed U.S. sanctions on Iran in November, including those targeting its vital oil sector, after it pulled the United States out of the nuclear deal. On March 22, the U.S. hit Iran with additional sanctions, targeting 31 Iranian scientists, technicians and companies which had been at the forefront of the country's former nuclear weapons program. The European ambassadors' letter made no mention of sanctions. Under the nuclear agreement, many U.N. sanctions on Iran were lifted. Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Hamas leader Ismail Haniya said Tuesday the rocket from Gaza that hit a house in Israel last week launched due to a technical error, his first official statement on the strike. The rocket that was fired from the Gaza Strip on March 25 destroyed a house north of Tel Aviv and injured seven Israelis. Israel responded by striking a series of Hamas targets in the Palestinian enclave, including flattening Haniya's office, before Egypt brokered a ceasefire that prevented a full conflict. In his comments on Tuesday, Haniya said the rocket was "due to a technical defect, but was a mini demonstration if (Israel) thought to commit folly against the Palestinian people." The statement from his office said he made the remarks during a meeting with political analysts. He did not provide further details on what type of technical defect could have caused the launch. Previously only unnamed officials from Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules Gaza, have said the rocket was fired due to a technical error. Following the latest ceasefire, Hamas said Egypt had brokered a truce that would see Israel ease its crippling blockade of the enclave in exchange for calm. Israel has not publicly commented on the reported agreement. On Monday, Israel expanded the fishing zone around Gaza, increasing it in one area to the largest distance in years, in what Hamas officials said was the first step. An Egyptian security delegation visited Gaza late Monday and met with Hamas. Haniya said the delegation brought a timetable from the Israeli side for implementing the agreements. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the middle of a gruelling election campaign and faces a strong challenge from centrist former military chief Benny Gantz. Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since 2008. Paris (AFP) - Ireland does not want to become a "back door" into the EU single market for Britain in the event of a no-deal Brexit, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said Tuesday in Paris. "We don't want Ireland to be a back door to the single market, anymore than anybody wants us to become a back door to the single market," Varadkar said after a meeting in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. Varadkar said he was committed to preventing goods that do not meet EU norms from entering Ireland or the EU. "In the unlikely event that we have a no-deal and the UK were to do trade deals with the US or China and we had chlorinated chicken or hormone beef, or products made by child labour in Asian countries, the last thing we would want is that coming south of the border into the Republic of Ireland. "And we certainly wouldn't want it getting through the Republic of Ireland into the European Union," he said. But he again reiterated his opposition to creating a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, for fear that it could jeopardise peace in the British province. Varadkar said that while physical inspections would be necessary on imports like live animals, they could be done at ports in Northern Ireland rather than in the Irish Republic. "That is the right and best place for them," he said. But the British government has refused to envisage carrying out customs checks on goods arriving in northern Ireland from Britain, arguing that to do so would drive a wedge through the United Kingdom. The EU's Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said Tuesday that the EU was working with Ireland "on a unilateral basis in the event of no deal, to know where we can do these checks," but refused to elaborate further. The last thing Joe Biden needs right now is help from Mike Huckabee. But there was the former Arkansas governor and current Fox News pundit Monday morning on the Fox Business Network dismissing the allegation of inappropriate behavior by the former vice president and 2020 presidential hopeful. Well, it is creepy, Huckabee said, agreeing with his Maria Bartiromo. But I have to say, I dont think Joe Biden is a sexual predator. I think hes a creepy old guy who is a little hands-on and all that. He proceeded to say Bidens behavior cant be that bad because he was doing them in public. I wasnt like he invited women up to a hotel room or office by himself, he said. This is stuff he did with a thousand cameras on him and he did it anyway. So I just think this is Joe. And I kind of like the guy, Huckabee continued, calling the timing of the allegation from Lucy Flores, a former member of the Nevada State Assembly, suspicious. Why didnt she say this a year ago, or the day after it happened? he asked, speculating that she might be working for Bernie Sanders and Beto ORourke. The fact that she did it on the cusp of his announcement is a little suspect. Contrast that with the sober response from Biden himself: I may not recall these moments the same way, and I may be surprised at what I hear. But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. Then there is Huckabees history of downplaying far more serious examples of sexual misconduct. He previously said he could not recall President Trump ever admitting to sexual assault and used the allegations against former Democratic Senator Al Franken to defend accused pedophile and Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. A week before the special election in Alabama, Huckabee told Fox News, They have a lot of questions about Roy Moore, I understand that. But you know, its down to the fact that as long as Al Franken is in the Senate, as long as youve got Conyers, who are staying in office, why not have Roy Moore? Read more at The Daily Beast. Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here Algiers (AFP) - Ailing Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika submitted his resignation with immediate effect on Tuesday after unprecedented protests and a call from the army chief for impeachment. His departure, reported by state media, spells the end of two decades in power that saw him cling on through ill health at the top of Algeria's notoriously opaque ruling elite. Here are the main players in the political drama: - Bouteflika and his inner circle - Bouteflika, 82, has ruled over Algeria since 1999 with support from his faithful backers, but a string of them deserted him under pressure from the massive street protests since February. One of the first to abandon him was army chief General Ahmed Gaid Salah who on Tuesday upped the pressure with a demand for Bouteflika, rarely seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013, to be impeached. The leader's key ally has long been his younger brother and special adviser Said Bouteflika, 21 years his junior, who was frequently cited as a likely successor to the president. Discreet and rarely seen in public, Said Bouteflika has exerted increasing influence behind the scenes as his brother's health woes worsened, but the president's resignation could take away much of his power. - The army - After coming to power with the army's backing, Bouteflika gradually shook off the influence of the military top brass. Gaid Salah was promoted to the post of army forces chief in 2004 just as he was about to be sent into retirement after a reported power struggle between Bouteflika and his predecessor. He has been a loyal supporter who helped Bouteflika dismantle the powerful DRS intelligence agency which was considered by many as a "state within a state". Over the years the armed forces chief became one of the regime's most powerful figures, giving clout to his calls for Bouteflika to go. A military intervention to put an end to street protests, which have been peaceful, has not looked likely. Story continues The army has not seemed to be keen on being dragged into a conflict like the civil war that blighted most of the 1990s. - Placeholder replacement - According to Algeria's constitution the speaker of the upper house of parliament Abdelkader Bensalah should now take over as interim leader for up to 90 days during which a presidential election must be organised. A seasoned establishment insider Bensalah, 77, has held the speaker position for almost 17 years and has stood in for Bouteflika at numerous events both at home and abroad since the leader's stroke. Another veteran of the independence struggle, he has served as a lawmaker, ambassador, civil servant and senator during a long career that now sees him propelled from the shadows into the top post. In 2015 Algerian daily El Watan wrote that "making himself useful at the right time is what he knows how to do, he who rarely speaks on issues related to the management of state affairs". - Political parties - Algeria's political parties, including opposition movements, have been marginalised by the massive protests that erupted in February after Bouteflika announced a bid for a fifth term in office. Protesters have lashed out against both Bouteflika's the National Liberation Front (FLN) party and its key coalition ally the National Rally for Democracy (RND) as part of demands for an overhaul of the political system in the country. Under pressure, the RND and some members of the FLN have deserted the president but failed to win hearts among demonstrators who kept on calling for "change" during near-daily protests. Opposition parties have not fared much better as protesters accuse some members of failing to stand up to the establishment during Bouteflika's 20-year rule and playing roles within the political system. Among those they have chastised are Ali Benflis, a former Bouteflika premier who has become one of the president's key rivals, and Abderrazak Makri of the moderate Islamist Movement for the Society of Peace. - The street movement - The protests, largely led by social media savvy young people and including lawyers and other professionals, have piled on the pressure with a succession of massive Friday rallies. Over the weeks their demands have been met by gestures from the government, including Bouteflika's announced departure, but it is unclear if the protest movement will stop. The demonstrators have no official spokesperson, although figures such as prominent rights activist Mustapha Bouchachi or opposition politician Karim Tabbou have emerged as possible representatives. By Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Mike Pence said on Tuesday the United States would continue to pressure Venezuela's oil industry and those who support it with economic sanctions, citing world oil prices as low enough to allow for the measures. Oil prices hit their highest point since November on Tuesday, with Brent crude approaching $70 a barrel, based in part on fears that U.S. sanctions against OPEC members Iran and Venezuela would result in a cut to global supplies. [O/R] "We recognise the importance of energy to the United States," Pence told reporters. "But the price of oil around the world has been quite low for some time, quite competitive for some time, and we're just going to continue to stand firm and bring even more pressure on this regime," he said. A White House official said while oil prices have crept up from historic lows recently, prices are still under last year's highs. Pence's comments stood in contrast to concerns that President Donald Trump has voiced about oil prices. As recently as last week, Trump called for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to boost production, saying on Twitter that the price of oil was "getting too high." Pence, who is helping lead the White House campaign to dislodge Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power, made his remarks in a meeting with family members of six executives jailed in Venezuela since 2017. The executives worked for Citgo Petroleum, the U.S. refinery division of Venezuelan state oil firm PDVSA. The United States and most other Western countries have backed Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who declared himself interim president in January, arguing that Maduro's 2018 reelection was illegitimate. Maduro has called Guaido a puppet of the United States. The United States slapped stiff sanctions on PDVSA in January, aimed at cutting Maduro's government off from oil revenues. Story continues Trump is considering expanding the measures with sanctions on foreign companies that do business with Venezuela, his national security adviser John Bolton said on Friday. "We're going to continue to bring pressure on the oil industry. We're going to continue to bring pressure on countries in this hemisphere who are supporting the dictatorship in Venezuela," Pence said. Pence also said the Trump administration was considering new measures to punish Cuba, which has close ties with Maduro. "We're looking at strong action against Cuba which continues to provide personnel and support for the dictatorship in Venezuela," he said. 'WORRIED FOR THEIR LIFE' Pence expressed sympathy to the family members of the six Citgo executives - five U.S. citizens and one legal permanent resident - who were arrested in Caracas during corporate meetings and accused of embezzlement and money laundering. Pence said the men had been "illegally detained" and that 16 court hearings had been cancelled as the men languished in basement cells without enough food or medical treatment. He said the Trump administration was working for the prisoners' release. "We are just worried for their life and we just want them home as soon as possible," said Carlos Anez, who told Pence his father had worked for Citgo for more than 20 years before he was detained. (Reporting by Roberta Rampton; editing by Lisa Shumaker and Marguerita Choy) Jerusalem (AFP) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday, just five days ahead of an April 9 Israeli general election, the premier's office said. Netanyahu has held a series of meetings with foreign leaders in the runup to the vote, helping him further his argument that he is Israel's irreplaceable statesman. His office did not provide further details in its brief statement on the meeting on Tuesday. Israel and Russia coordinate their military activity in Syria to avoid accidental clashes. Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes against what it says are Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria. It has pledged to keep its main enemy Iran from entrenching itself militarily in the neighbouring country. In the civil war that erupted in Syria in 2011, Russia has been backing President Bashar al-Assad's forces alongside Iran and Tehran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah. A friendly fire incident in September that led to Syrian air defences downing a Russian plane during an Israeli raid angered the Kremlin, which blamed Israel. Netanyahu and Putin held their first extensive face-to-face discussions since the friendly fire incident in Moscow on February 27. The two have spoken repeatedly by phone in recent months, including on Monday. The Israeli premier is currently hosting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who arrived in Israel for a three-day visit on Sunday. He also recently hosted US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and last week met US President Donald Trump in Washington. Netanyahu is facing a tough election challenge from centrist former military chief Benny Gantz. ZURICH (Reuters) - Novartis on Monday said it had agreed to pay $310 million upfront, with the possibility for more later, for some research assets of Boston-based inflammation specialist IFM Therapeutics as the Swiss drugmaker expands its immunology pipeline. The deal, for the IFM subsidiary IFM Tre, could eventually reach nearly $1.6 billion, IFM said, should its portfolio meet certain milestones. IFM Tre has one molecule, IFM-2427, in an early Phase 1 trial, and a pair of less-developed assets. IFM, whose research head Martin Seidel spent more than a decade at Novartis before assuming R&D duties at IFM in 2017, focuses on immune system modulation. In buying three potential drugs, Novartis is hoping for agents to fight chronic inflammatory disorders like gout, atherosclerosis and fatty liver disease (NASH), as well as inflammatory bowel disease. "These programs complement the existing Novartis pipeline of anti-inflammatory medicines," said Novartis, adding studies have shown IFM Tre's molecules can selectively suppress disease-causing inflammation, while allowing the rest of the immune system to continue normal operations. IFM Therapeutics is part of the portfolio of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Atlas Venture, whose other stakes include Intellia Therapeutics that is also working with Novartis. The IFM Tre deal is seen closing before July. (Reporting by John Miller, editing by John Revill) Tunis (AFP) - Arab leaders slammed the US decision to recognise the Golan Heights as Israeli territory at a summit in Tunis on Sunday, but struggled for further unity as Qatar's emir left the meeting early. In a final declaration the Arab League summit said it "affirmed that the Golan is occupied Syrian territory according to international law, the decisions of the United Nations and the Security Council". A separate statement dedicated solely to the issue called Washington's move "invalid and illegitimate". "It is true that America is the strongest military force in the world, but its decision is absolutely worthless," League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit told a closing news conference. President Donald Trump signed a proclamation Monday in which the United States recognised Israel's annexation of the strategic plateau that it seized in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Israel's move has not been recognised internationally, and three UN Security Council resolutions have called for it to withdraw from the territory. Trump's shift on Golan had already drawn a string of angry reactions from Arab capitals, despite proving problematic for key regional US allies such as Saudi Arabia. The decision has also drawn criticism from other Security Council members and been rejected by the European Union. The united front shown at the Tunis summit on the issue failed to mask other deep divisions inside the Arab League, as it struggles with major headaches such as a diplomatic crisis in the Gulf and conflicts in Syria and Yemen. In an apparent sign of the tensions, Qatar's Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani quit the gathering "after attending the opening ceremony", the Gulf state's official QNA news agency reported, without giving any further details. A Tunisian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Qatari leader had walked out during the speech of League chief Aboul Gheit, and "has left Tunisia". Story continues Qatar is at the centre of a bitter Gulf standoff since June 2017, when Saudi Arabia along with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain severed ties with Doha. The Saudi-led bloc accuses Doha of supporting extremist groups and being too close to Iran, charges Qatar denies. The meeting in Tunis had brought together Saudi King Salman and the emir for a rare encounter. But an appeal by Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi for the region to "overcome its differences" appeared to have little impact as the Qatari ruler left prematurely. In his opening speech Aboul Gheit had blasted Turkey and Iran for their "interference" in Arab countries, insisting that Tehran and Ankara had worsened regional crises. In questioning Michael Cohen at the momentous House hearing Wednesday, Republicans tried to paint Donald Trumps former lawyer as a disappointed applicant for a top White House job who is now seeking revenge on the president. After a blistering opening statement in which Cohen called President Trump a racist, con man and cheat, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, questioned Cohen about his career. He pointed out that despite all the negative things Cohen had said about Trump, he had nevertheless worked for him for over a decade before asking about what happened after the 2016 election. How long did you work in the White House? asked Jordan. I never worked in the White House, replied Cohen. And thats the point, isnt it, Mr. Cohen? said Jordan. Cohen denied that was the reason he had turned against Trump, but Jordan painted him as a bitter former employee, upset that he didnt get brought to the dance. I was extremely proud to be personal attorney to the president of the United States of America, said Cohen. I did not want to go to the White House. I was offered jobs. I can tell you a story of Mr. Trump reaming out [former Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus because I had not taken a job where Mr. Trump wanted me to, which was working with Don McGahn at the White House general counsels office. Reporting by CNN, however, indicates that Cohen very much wanted a top White House job. Cohen said a lawyer advised him against taking a post with the White House counsel because there would be no attorney-client privilege in his dealings with Trump, which would make it difficult for him to handle personal matters for the president. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, speaks at the hearing with Michael Cohen. (Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Jordan called Cohen selfish and compared his motivation for testifying to that of former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in May 2017 and who subsequently offered testimony detrimental to the president. Cohen insisted that he got exactly what he wanted, which was to be the personal attorney to the president, enjoy his sons senior year of high school and wait for his daughter to return to New York after her college graduation. Jordan pointed out that he was also going to federal prison. The presidents two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, both stated on Twitter during the testimony that Cohen had indeed sought a job at the White House. Michael was lobbying EVERYONE to be Chief of Staff. It was the biggest joke in the campaign and around the office. Did he just perjure himself again? wrote Eric Trump. Hahahaha Michael Cohen begged to work at the White House and everyone knows it, wrote Donald Trump, Jr. If evidence, such as emails, emerges showing that Cohen had asked for the chief of staff job or another role in the White House, he might be subject to additional perjury charges. Samsung has revealed when its first-ever 5G smartphone will first hit stores, but U.S. customers will have to wait a while to buy the new hardware. The Samsung Galaxy S10 5G will be available in South Korea starting on April 5 in majestic black, royal gold or crown silver colors, the company said in a press release. The phones launch will expand to additional markets after, but Samsung did not provide a definitive timeline for when the Galaxy S10 will be available in the United States. We are at the beginning of a new era where the incredible speed and connectivity of 5G becomes a reality, bringing the world closer to Samsungs vision of connected living, said DJ Koh, President and CEO of IT & Mobile Communications Division, Samsung Electronics. We are proud of the work weve accomplished to bring our first 5G smartphone to market and look forward to bringing it to everyone around the world in the coming year. Samsung has yet to officially announce pricing for the Galaxy S10 5G. However, based on pricing for the South Korea launch, the phones base model could cost more than $1,200, according to BGR. The Galaxy S10 5G has a 6.7-inch HD screen, six different cameras and wireless charging, among other features. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP Aside from the new version of its flagship Galaxy smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Fold is set to hit stores later this month. The foldable device has a 7.3-inch Infinity Flex Display that can fold down to a 4.6-inch, pocket-sized configuration. Related Articles The Independent Scientists say they finally have an explanation for a mystifying, bright blue light that came from deep in space. Three years ago, astronomers were stunned to see a bright blue flash that came out of the spiral arm of a distant galaxy, some 200 million light-years away. It looked like a supernova, but it was even brighter and faster than those already extreme events. Scientists found that it consisted not only of the bright flash of light, but also pulsing and powerful X-rays, with hundreds of millions of such pulses being traced back to the same object. By David Lawder and Chris Prentice WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and China "expect to make more headway" in trade talks this week, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Tuesday as the top U.S. business lobbying group said differences over an enforcement mechanism and the removal of U.S. tariffs were still obstacles to a deal. "We expect to make more headway. I can't report any of the details, but it's a larger, grander discussion than anything we've had before in U.S.-China trade relations, and there's a certain amount of optimism," Kudlow said in remarks at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Kudlow, who directs the White House National Economic Council, acknowledged that there are still issues to be resolved, and the Trump administration will focus heavily on ways to hold China to keep its reform promises and curbing intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers and lowering tariff and non-tariff barriers. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are due to resume talks with Chinese vice premier Liu He on Wednesday, just days after the two sides reported progress in talks last week in Beijing. The Chamber, the largest and most influential business lobbying group, sees increasing chances that Washington and Beijing will reach a deal to end a nine-month tariff war. "We're getting to the point where it's clear that both governments want a deal," Myron Brilliant, the Chamber's head of international affairs, told reporters. "The presidents want a deal, and they need to get through the end-game issues. This is a critical week." The United States and China have levied tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of two-way trade since July 2018, raising costs, disrupting supply chains and roiling global markets. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is pressuring Beijing to meet a long list of demands that would rewrite the terms of trade between the two countries, including changes to Chinas policies on intellectual property protection, technology transfers, industrial subsidies and other trade barriers. Story continues Trump on Tuesday afternoon repeated his now-familiar refrain that China trade talks were going "very well" as he met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg at the White House. Absent significant process this week on the "tricky" issues of tariffs and enforcement, the goal to complete a deal this month may be missed, Brilliant said. The Trump administration and American companies want structural IP and market economy issues addressed, with a way to ensure China follows through on its promises, Brilliant said. U.S. officials favor tariffs as a way to maintain leverage on China and ensure those obligations are met. But it is unlikely that China would agree to an enforcement mechanism that included re-imposition of unilateral U.S. tariffs without the current tariffs being removed, Brilliant said. The continued threat of tariffs hanging over commerce would mean a deal would not end the risk of investing in businesses or assets that have been affected by the trade war. (Reporting by David Lawder and Chris Prentice; editing by James Dalgleish) Washington (AFP) - President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is "100 percent" prepared to close down the US-Mexico border, warning Congress and Central American governments to take action to stem the flow of migrants into the country. Delays were already increasing at several key border crossings as Trump ratcheted up pressure on Democrats in Congress to toughen US laws against illegal immigrants, threatening to hurt the US economy in the name of border security. "It is a national emergency on the border," Trump said. If Mexico does not stop migrants from transiting across its territory, and if Congress does not act, he said, "the border's going to be closed, 100 percent." "Sure it's going to have a negative impact on the economy," he said. "Security is more important to me than trade." Trump said Democrats were blocking reforms for political reasons but could fix the problem "in 45 minutes." He was not specific, but Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has asked Congress to give border officials the power to forcibly repatriate Central American illegal immigrants, including children who arrived alone, back to their countries. The threat to close the frontier, which handled some $612 billion worth of trade in 2018, sent shivers through the economy, and drew warnings from allies of the president. "Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country, and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said. McConnell's call was backed by the Chamber of Commerce, which said in a statement that while it supported immigration reform, closing the border "would inflict severe economic harm on American families, workers, farmers and manufacturers across the United States." - 100,000 migrants a month - Despite Trump's tough rhetoric, Mexico's foreign minister said he had spoken with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had told him the border would not be shut. Story continues "Until today, the secretary of state of the United States and his team have told us: this is not the policy we are going to apply, closing points on the border," Marcelo Ebrard said at a press conference. Ebrard added Mexico continued to maintain "a good dialogue" with US authorities and that normal border traffic was expected "as soon as possible." Homeland Security officials meanwhile said they were preparing for the possibility of a shutdown of at least some border entry points as they divert staff to deal with the flood of migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, expected to hit nearly 100,000 a month. Officials said facilities for handling the migrants -- who for the moment cannot be sent back after they cross the border and request asylum -- are overtaxed and understaffed, creating hazardous conditions. "We are in a full blown emergency. The bottom line is all options are on the table right now," a senior Homeland Security official, who declined to be named, told journalists Tuesday. "The volume of vulnerable populations that's arriving is unsustainable... The humanitarian situation cannot be ignored and the security situation cannot be ignored." Trump said Mexican officials had reacted to his threat to close the border last week by clamping down on the caravans of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in the three Central American countries. Mexico "made a big step over the past two days," he said, adding that they would have to continue if they don't want the border closed. He also defended his decision to cut off "hundreds of millions of dollars" in US aid to the three countries, accusing them of arranging the caravans of migrants. The three "don't do anything for us," he said. - Long lines at border ports - On Monday, Nielsen ordered an "emergency surge" of personnel to deal with the situation, including moving 750 staff to areas of the border where the migrants arrive. Many were being diverted from official ports, leading to slowdowns in processing arriving visitors and commercial vehicles. Delays for incoming traffic were three hours at Brownsville, Texas, for the second straight day, and more than two hours in other areas. On the Mexican side, Andres Morales Arreola, head of operations for border crossings in Chihuahua state, said the border between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso had "collapsed" because so many US border officials have been reassigned to deal with the migrant influx. Long lines have formed at the border since Thursday, with wait times of up to eight hours for those trying to cross. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Armando Cabada Alvidrez called on the city's bustling manufacturing sector to temporarily cut back shipments to the US in order to reduce the backup. Kiev (AFP) - Ukraine's former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko on Tuesday denounced the results of a "rigged" vote that eliminated her from the presidential race, but said she would not urge street protests. Tymoshenko, an internationally recognised political figure, came third in Sunday's first-round vote in what was also her third bid for the presidency. That means she will take no part in the second-round run-off on April 21, in which actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, a political novice, will face President Petro Poroshenko. With 99 percent of the ballots counted, Zelensky was ahead with more than 30 percent of the first-round vote, nearly twice that of Poroshenko, on almost 16 percent. Tymoshenko, Poroshenko's long-time rival, took 13 percent of the vote. "These elections were rigged by Petro Poroshenko," the 58-year-old political veteran told reporters. She had no plans however, to challenge the result of the vote either in court or by calling street protests. "The current president has privatised the judicial system," she said. "We would simply be wasting time." Any street violence would play into Russia's hands, said Tymoshenko, who came to international prominence as a face of the 2004 Orange Revolution. "I respect people's choice," she added. Ties between Kiev and Moscow have never recovered after the 2014 popular uprising in Kiev that ousted a Kremlin-backed regime. Since those bloody street protests, Russia has annexed Crimea and supported a separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine, a conflict that has so far claimed some 13,000 lives. Tymoshenko said neither political novice Zelensky, nor the pro-Western Poroshenko would be able "to cope with the challenges" or "stop the war". Tymoshenko called on her supporters to mobilise and back her Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party in parliamentary polls in October. "Our fight is not over yet," she said. Tymoshenko served three years as prime minister and spent another three years in prison for abuse of power, charges the West denounced as politically motivated. A monitoring mission by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said the first-round vote had in general been "well-organized, smooth, transparent and efficient". Beirut (AFP) - A US-backed force said Tuesday it was chasing Islamic State group jihadists in eastern Syria, as coalition warplanes pound the militants more than a week after their "caliphate" was declared defeated. The Syrian Democratic Forces, supported by warplanes of a US-led coalition, dislodged IS fighters from their last redoubt in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border on March 23, following a months-long offensive. The US-backed alliance is now "tracking down remnants of the terrorist group", SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said on Tuesday. "There are groups hiding in caves overlooking Baghouz," he said. The US-led coalition said it was supporting sweeping operations with air strikes on jihadist hideouts. "The Syrian Democratic Forces continues to deny Daesh a physical space and influence in the area and work to deny them the resources they need to return," coalition spokesman Scott Rawlinson told AFP on Monday, using an Arabic acronym for IS. "In support of back-clearance operations, the coalition continues to conduct precision strike support in coordination with SDF," he said. The official said anti-IS operations are now focusing on "eroding" IS's "capacity to regenerate and collaborate". The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said that more than a dozen coalition air strikes have targeted IS hideouts in Baghouz since Sunday. Strikes hit caves and farmlands in the village where holdout jihadists are believed to be hiding, it said. IS fighters also retain a presence in Syria's vast Badia desert and various other hideouts, and have continued to claim deadly attacks in SDF-held territory. Last week, IS killed seven US-backed fighters in an attack on a checkpoint in the northern city of Manbij, which is controlled by a local council linked to the SDF. The Observatory on Tuesday said that nine suspected jihadists were captured in the former IS bastion of Raqa since Sunday. Story continues The SDF has warned that a new phase has begun in anti-IS operations, following the defeat of the jihadist proto-state. They appealed for sustained coalition assistance to help smash sleeper cells. The "caliphate" proclaimed in mid-2014 by fugitive IS supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi started collapsing in 2017 when parallel offensives in Iraq and Syria wrested back its main urban hubs -- Mosul and Raqa. The nearly five years of fighting against the most brutal jihadist group in modern history left major cities in ruins and populations homeless. By Steve Holland and Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump took a step back on Tuesday from his threat to close the U.S. southern border to fight illegal immigration, amid pressure from companies worried that a shutdown would cause chaos to supply chains. Trump threatened on Friday to close the border this week unless Mexico acted. He repeated that threat on Tuesday but said he had not made a decision yet: "We're going to see what happens over the next few days." Closing the border could disrupt millions of legal crossings and billions of dollars in trade. Auto companies have been warning the White House privately that it would lead to the idling of U.S. plants within days because they rely on prompt deliveries of components made in Mexico. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest U.S. business lobbying group, has been in contact with the White House to discuss the "very negative economic consequences that would occur across the country," said Neil Bradley, the group's top lobbyist, on a call with reporters. Trump praised efforts by Mexico to hinder illegal immigration from Central America at its own southern border. On Monday, the Mexican government said it would help regulate the flow of migrants. "Mexico, as you know, as of yesterday has been starting to apprehend a lot of people at their southern border coming in from Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador and they're really apprehending thousands of people," Trump told reporters on Tuesday. The Mexican government has not published apprehension statistics but a senior White House official said it has provided daily updates to the Trump administration, including specific apprehension numbers. "They say they're going to stop them. Let's see. They have the power to stop them, they have the laws to stop them," Trump said. PUSH BACK Trump has made fighting illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America a key part of his agenda but shutting down one of the world's most used borders might be a step too far, even for many of his fellow Republicans. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell joined Democrats in warning Trump against such a move. "Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing," McConnell told reporters at Congress on Tuesday. A group representing General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV said in a statement that "any action that stops commerce at the border would be harmful to the U.S. economy, and in particular, the auto industry." Dozens of U.S. vehicle, engine, transmission and other auto parts plants could close because of a lack of components in the days after a border shutdown. It would also prevent thousands of vehicles built in Mexico from landing in U.S. dealer showrooms. Automakers exported nearly 2.6 million Mexican-made vehicles to the United States in 2018, accounting for 15 percent of all vehicles sold in the country. Some, like the Chevrolet Blazer SUV, are only made in Mexico. Retailers are also raising alarm bells, according to officials with two groups that represent hundreds of U.S. retail firms. "It will be unprecedented self-inflicted pain," said David French, senior vice president of government relations at the National Retail Federation. "We are still nervous about this and we have been talking to some of our companies about maybe ramping up direct pressure on the White House by getting CEOs to call." SLOWER BORDER Senior U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials said on Tuesday a recent redeployment of some 750 officers on the border to deal with a surge in migrants - mostly Central American families turning themselves into border agents - had already led to a slowing of legal crossings and commerce at ports of entry. "Wait times in Brownsville (Texas) were around 180 minutes, which were two times the peaks of last year," said a senior DHS official on a call with reporters. "We ended the day yesterday at Otay Mesa (California) with a back-up of 150 trucks that hadn't been processed," the official said. Mexico's Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Tuesday that backups were delaying commercial traffic at the U.S.-Mexico border at several crossings. He said the government had not drastically changed its migration strategy following the shutdown threats. DHS officials said border facilities have been overwhelmed by families seeking asylum, fleeing poverty and violence in Central America. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimated that some 100,000 migrants were apprehended or encountered at the border in March, the highest level in a decade. "The system is on fire," a DHS official said. Because of limits on how long children are legally allowed to be held in detention, many of the families are released to await their U.S. immigration court hearings, a process that can take years because of ballooning backlogs. To try to address the problem, the Trump administration in January started sending some migrants to wait out their U.S. court dates in Mexican border cities. On Monday, DHS said it would dramatically ramp up that program, despite court challenges. The biggest priority for DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is to seek action from Congress to change the immigration laws, said a DHS official. She sent a letter to Congress last week repeating many of the Trump administration's demands, including a request to quickly deport Central American minors that cross the border alone. Under current law, minors who are not from the contiguous countries of Canada and Mexico are placed in the care of sponsors in the United States, which Nielsen called a "dangerous 'pull' factor" for migrants. Migrant advocates and some Democrats in Congress oppose the proposed legislative changes, saying they would send vulnerable children back to dangerous situations in their home countries. Trump said he had spoken with "a few" Democrats on Tuesday about the administration's proposals and added, "they're changing their minds." (Reporting by Roberta Rampton, Steve Holland and David Shepardson in Washington and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Additional reporting by Alexandra Alper, Nandita Bose and Yeganeh Torbati in Washington and Lizbeth Diaz in Mexico City. Writing by Ginger Gibson and David Alexander; Editing by Alistair Bell and Rosalba O'Brien) Consumer Reports has no financial relationship with advertisers on this site. Amazons announcement Monday that it would cut prices an average of 20 percent on more than 500 grocery items at its Whole Foods grocery subsidiary follows a price increase on as many items just a few weeks ago. The lesson for shoppers, supermarket analysts say, is to enjoy the savingswhich Amazon says will focus on high-quality, peak-of-season produce, including greens, tomatoes, tropical fruits, and morebut not to expect your overall Whole Foods grocery bill to go down too dramatically. If its just five hundred or so items, its not that big a deal, says David Livingston, CEO of DJL Research, which does analysis and consulting on the grocery industry, and is based in Honolulu. They have probably 20,000 or 30,000 SKUs in the store, he says, using the retailing term for a stock keeping unit, or discrete product. What theyre not telling you is they may be marking up prices on everything else. The Wall Street Journal reported in mid-February that Whole Foods discreetly raised prices on more than 500 items, mainly packaged goods. Shoppers Should Be Skeptical and Smart In a press release issued Monday, Amazon mentioned several fresh items, including large yellow mangoes, $1 each; mixed-medley cherry tomatoes, $3.49 for 12 ounces; and organic rainbow chard, $1.99 per bunch. Amazon said these deals would be available to all shoppers, not just Amazon Prime members, who are offered additional savings on Whole Foods goods. The retailing giant also said Amazon Prime members would see double the number of exclusive weekly deals, in addition to deeper discounts on fresh and prepared foods, as well as packaged goods. Livingston says shoppers should be skeptical. If these are just normal, seasonal price reductions, theyre making it look like a bigger deal than it is, Livingston says. For instance, the grocer is lowering prices on organic asparagus ($2.99 per pound, a savings of $2) and organic strawberries ($2.99 per pound, a savings of $2), two foods that are are typically in surplus in the spring. Its also discounting spiral-sliced ham ($3.99 per pound, a savings of at least 33 percent), an Easter staple. Story continues Burt Flickinger III, managing director at Strategic Resource Group, a consulting company that specializes in retail and consumer products, and is based in New York, says his research into Whole Foods showed that the food retailers prices had turned off so many shoppers that it was unable to sell produce at the same rate as competitors. Whole Foods may be focusing on discounting fresh items now to improve turnover and reduce its own food waste, he says. Consumers can certainly save by taking advantage of these new Whole Foods prices, but smart shoppers dont buy everything there, he says. Probably a customer who only shops at Whole Foods could save, with these important price cuts, $500 to $1,000 a year, Flickinger says. But theyll still pay from $1,500 to $2,000 a year more than shoppers who got the same products at competitors such as Costco, HEB, Kroger, Wegmans, or WinCo. More from Consumer Reports: Top pick tires for 2016 Best used cars for $25,000 and less 7 best mattresses for couples Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer, and healthier world. CR does not endorse products or services, and does not accept advertising. Copyright 2019, Consumer Reports, Inc. (Adds Facebook's new statement) * Most accounts affected linked to Congress or Pakistan military * Closes others from IT firm to which Modi's BJP denies links * Action comes days before start of Indian general election * Sites promoted satire or poured vitriol on opponents -think tank * No link between campaigns discovered, Facebook says By Aditya Kalra and Saad Sayeed NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD, April 1 (Reuters) - Facebook has deleted 712 accounts and 390 pages in India and Pakistan for "inauthentic behavior," it said on Monday, many linked to India's opposition Congress party days before a national election, and others related to Pakistan's military. Facebook has come under increasing pressure around the world to ensure its social media platform is not abused for political purposes or to spread misinformation. The action against accounts with alleged links to Congress, the party led by the Gandhi family that has dominated Indian politics for much of its post-independence era, marks a bold move by Facebook. The platform has more than 300 million users in India, where it has been a key political campaigning tool in the election - the largest democratic exercise in the world - starting on April 11. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his rivals use official Facebook accounts to send political messages to millions of followers, thousands of unverified pages also share posts to support or criticize politicians. Among the most significant things it has removed, Facebook said it had taken down 549 accounts and 138 pages linked to India's Congress for "coordinated inauthentic behavior." In a Tweet, Congress said none of its official pages or those run by its verified volunteers had been taken down. The party is awaiting a response from Facebook to provide a list of all pages and accounts which were removed, it said. Also removed were 15 accounts linked to an Indian IT company which, among other things, issued posts on Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and alleged misconduct of political opponents including Congress, Facebook said. Story continues The Digital Forensic Research Lab at think tank Atlantic Council, which partnered with Facebook for the review, said the accounts linked to Congress pushed satirical posts, while pro-BJP pages "carried vitriolic posts against opposition leaders." "The fact that partisans on both sides resorted to such tactics is a troubling feature," it said in a blog post. In the face of increasing calls for tougher regulation of online content, Facebook has been taking similar measures elsewhere. In Pakistan, it removed 57 accounts, 24 pages, seven groups and 15 Instagram accounts, also for inauthentic behavior, as part of a network that originated there and was linked to employees of a unit of the Pakistani military. Nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan both sent warplanes to attack each other's territory in February after a suicide bomb attack claimed by a Pakistan-based militant group killed 40 Indian paramilitary police in the disputed region of Kashmir. The attack also led to a deluge of fake news, another issue social media companies have been grappling with. CRITICISM OF POLITICIANS Facebooks head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said the firm had removed accounts based on their behavior, not their content. The company's review found individuals using fake accounts and issuing posts including criticism of the BJP who were "associated with an INC (Indian National Congress) IT Cell." Two of the samples shared by Facebook were of posts that criticized Modi's initiatives and called for supporting the Congress party and its president, Rahul Gandhi. Separately, Facebook removed 12 accounts and one page, plus one group and one Instagram account, which linked to individuals related to an Indian IT firm Silver Touch. Asked what Silver Touch's link with politics was, Gleicher told Reuters earlier it was "associated with" a mobile app promoted by Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). After BJP's IT head, Amit Malviya, told Reuters both the party and the app had "nothing to do with Silver Touch," Facebook in a new statement late on Monday said it had "seen no evidence to date of Silver Touch being associated with the NaMo App on our platform," referring to the Narendra Modi app. "We wont be speculating about off-platform connections of the actors we took down today," a spokeswoman said. Facebook's actions on Monday also included the removal of a "pro-BJP" page called "The India Eye," which had more than 2 million followers, "was strongly nationalist," a vocal supporter of Modi and a critic of Gandhi, Atlantic Council said. Facebook said it had also removed another 227 pages and 94 accounts in India for violating its policies on spam and misrepresentation. In Pakistan, Facebook said it removed pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram that spread information about Pakistani politics, the Indian government and the Pakistani military. Those accounts were being run by employees of the Pakistani military's public relations arm, the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), Facebook said. No comment was immediately available from ISPR. These Pakistani accounts, pages, groups and Instagram accounts removed from Facebook had more than 2.8 million followers. Last week the firm removed a social media network in the Philippines and took the unusual step of linking it to a businessman who said he had managed the president's online election campaign in 2016. It has also taken such action recently against accounts in Russia and Iran. (Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Saad Sayeed; Additional reporting by Jonathan Weber and Munsif Vengattil; Editing by Martin Howell and Nick Macfie) Israel's energy minister said on Sunday that Brazilian state-run oil firm Petrobras will take part in a tender to explore for oil and gas off Israel's shore. "It was agreed that Petrobras ... will take part in a process of oil and gas exploration in Israel," Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz told Army Radio as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro began a visit to Israel. Does Case 3000 - known as the submarine affair - prove that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guilty of doing something illegal? Well, all Likud supporters believe with absolute confidence that its a political plot. Netanyahu's opponents, however, believe - also with absolute confidence - that its the largest corruption case to ever occur in the State of Israel. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Those who hold the firmest positions are usually the least familiar with the details. And what determines the position is the political alliance. I have looked into the details, and I guess that makes me part of a small minority without an unyielding stance on the issue. I do, however, have a few questions. For instance, some of Netanyahu's close associates were involved in the submarine deal (and are accused of receiving kickbacks for the submarine sale), while he claims not to have been aware of anything, TV presenter Ayala Hasson revealed in her Channel 13 news report that the prime minister was fully in the know. Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo: Motti Kimchi, Alex Kolomoisky) So what exactly did the renewed discussion about the submarine affair bring about? Probably nothing, because it's highly unlikely that those on the fence about the issue will formulate a concrete position - given that it would take days to process the claims of both sides and distinguish between valid points and manipulations. I am not an advocate for inquiry commissions, which have become committees that are conducting witch hunts. This time, however, it seems that there is an actual need for such commission, regardless of the upcoming elections. This is not unique to Israel, this is a global phenomenon. When in the 1950s, the researchers discovered the negative effects of smoking, the tobacco companies owners demanded a second opinion. They couldnt contradict the data but they were able to create confusion and insert doubts. Prof. Robert N. Proctor created an academic concept of agnotology - is the study of intentional, culturally induced ignorance or doubt - and we are currently in the midst of that. In the current public debate - which we are all part of these days - the eventual result is neither confusion nor ignorance, but rather the establishment of firm positions based on nothing but political alliances. Agnotology - colloquially known as gaslighting - has many sub-concepts. The professionals in this field working for the prime minister have been spreading hints about alleged evidence of an extramarital affair found on Benny Gantzs hacked phone. If people affiliated with the ruling Likud know what's on the former IDF chief's phone, then it means it wasnt the Iranians who hacked it but rather some political elements. If they dont know, however, then this is an especially contemptible type of political propaganda, which basically involves throwing a ton of mud against the wall and hoping something sticks. And its quite ironic that these rumors are spread by someone who has cheated on all three of his wives. Yes, Im talking about Benjamin Netanyahu. But this is essentially the idea behind gaslighting - you dont shy away from using any means necessary. Once again, this is not specific to Israel. The entire presidential campaign in the United States back in 2016 was a prime example of gaslighting at play. That same year, a similar thing happened in Britain during the Brexit campaign, when the pro-leave members launched their infamous slogan We send the European Union 350 million a week. Although it was nothing more than manipulation, the experts suggest its what ultimately decided the outcome. A survey conducted after the Brexit vote shows that 42% of Britons still believe the slogan to be true, 36% think its a lie, and 22% say theyre unsure. Those opposing Britain leaving the EU are now planning a class action lawsuit against the mastermind of that slogan - Boris Johnson - who almost became prime minister - and might still. Gaslighting is an integral part of any election campaign, since its the main side effect of freedom of speech. The problem is that during these Israeli elections, this side effect pretty much defines the entire campaign. The media is also to blame for this. We are all suspected of political bias. Its the downside of any democracy. The controversial Nation-State Law may have faded from the public consciousness lately, but for Israel's Druze community it still looms large as an election issue. The law raised the ire of many Druze who consider the issue a major factor in the upcoming elections. We travelled to the Druze town of Usifiyeh on Mt. Carmel to hear what the residents' viewpoint. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Some 400 years ago, the Lebanese Druze Emir Fakhr-al-Din ibn Maan (an early leader of the Mount Lebanon Emirate, a self-governed area under the Ottoman Empire) established the village of Usfiyeh on the remains of a 5th-century Jewish town, Husifah. Usfiyeh (Photo: Ido Erez) Cooperation between the Druze villagers and the local Jews began during the Great Arab Revolt (1936-1939) when the Druze suffered from harassment by the local Arabs and sought the protection of the Jewish pre-state militias. That cooperation blossomed into the sacred blood covenant between the Druze and the Jews of the Zionist movement. Since the 1948 War of Independence and throughout the history of the State of Israel, Druze and Jews have fought side by side in defense of the country. Today, Usfiyeh is the second largest Druze town in Israel. A quick survey of residents of the IDF veteran's neighborhood reveals a troubling conclusion. The Nation-State Law designating the state as a state of the Jews alone with no reference to its non-Jewish inhabitants has angered many Druze citizens. Walid Sattar, a resident of the town with an impressive IDF military background and dressed in traditional Druze garb, is furious and blames Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the law: "Bibi backstabbed us; we support the State of Israel and Bibi (Netanyahu) equates us with the Arabs of Umm el-Fahm who commit terror attacks." Walid Sattar (Photo: Ido Erez ) At the local meat market, we meet Muwafiq Mansour who also served in an IDF combat unit. "In the past I voted for (the Kulanu Part led by) Moshe Kahlon, but after the Nation-State Law passed with the support of Kulanu, I will vote for (Blue and White Party led by Benny) Gantz. My son is an officer in the army and I am ashamed because Bibi betrayed us. We supported the Jews before the establishment of the state but unfortunately this is what we get" Mansour (Photo: Ido Erez ) The Kulanu Party garnered much success in Usfiyeh in the 2015 election winning 32.6% of the vote there. The Zionist Union and the Joint List (Arab parties) garnered 22.43% and 21.36% respectively. The Likud only received 3.87% of the votes in the town. At a cellphone repair shop we met Kayuf Baha as he was serving a customer who refused to be interviewed. "I plan to vote for Gantz because of Ghadir Marih, the popular Druze representative from (the neighboring Druze town of) Daliyat al-Karmel. She will advance the cause of minorities," said Baha. Ghadir Marih, Blue and White candidate with her mother in law "As someone who served in the IDF, as well as all of my family members, the Nation-State Law really disturbs me. This law really harmed us. We have given everything to the state and unfortunately it blew up in our face," he added. Baha (Photo: Ido Erez ) Although the Blue and White Party has a female Druze candidate in a realistic spot, none of the women we attempted to interview in Usfiyeh agreed to be interviewed. Some said that they do not understand politics and one told us that she "votes according to what the extended family agrees on." At a local hummus shop, Mussa Ilon, a Christian resident of the town served us black coffee and expressed anger at the law: "It doesnt matter who I vote for, I want to move Netanyahu," he declared. Usfiyeh has a small Christian minority, a monastery and two ancient churches. Hussein Sibasi, a Druze resident of Daliyat al-Karmel, joined the conversation. "Generally, I deliberate whether to vote for Likud. Now, because of the law there's no chance. The Likud of today is chauvinist, fanatic and nationalist." Sibasi (Photo: Ido Erez ) David Haliva, an avowed Likud supporter from Beer Sheva tried to convince the cafe patrons that Netanyahu is good for the Druze. "God willing, when Bibi is elected, you will hear that the Nation-State Law is altered or withdrawn. The Druze are our brothers," he declares. Haliva (Photo: Ido Erez ) Haliva says that the Likud made a major error and they are now trying to walk it back but dont know how. "Look at what a beautiful state we have here. Look at this beautiful town you have. There is security and a good economy." Sibasi is angered by Haliva's words and they get into an argument and tempers flare. "The Likud even threw the Druze minister Ayoob Kara to the dogs," Sibasi says. "Even he, who took a stance against the whole (Druze) population and voted for the law Bibi threw him to the dogs. The Druze will no longer vote for Likud." Over the weekend, Gaza's Hamas rulers marked a year of bloody, weekly protests that have failed to break the Israeli blockade. Rocket attacks brought a wave of Israeli airstrikes and unprecedented protests broke out against the Islamic militants' increasingly unpopular rule. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter And yet Hamas' control over Gaza is tighter than ever. The militants' rule has been strengthened by an unlikely overlap of interests with Israel's right-wing government. Neither wants to see an independent state established in all the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, as the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Hamas' refusal to give up power the asking price of its West Bank-based Palestinian rival for reconciliation aligns with Israel's long-standing policy of maintaining a separation between the West Bank and Gaza. IDF troops at Gaza border (Photo: IDF Spokesman) Egyptian delegation Under an emerging arrangement, Hamas would halt rocket fire and keep border protests peaceful in exchange for Israel easing its border blockade and allowing $30 million a month in Qatari aid into the territory. On Sunday, Israel reopened Gaza crossings to limited traffic. Egypt has brokered short-lived deals in the past, and it is not clear if the current arrangements will last beyond Israel's April 9 election. In a close race, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under fire for what his challengers say is a Gaza policy that exposes Israel to Hamas blackmail. Transfers of goods to Gaza at Kerem Shalom Crossing (Photo: Barel Efraim) For Gaza residents, open-ended Hamas rule is a bleak prospect. Gaza's 2 million people have endured rising poverty and unemployment, undrinkable ground water and frequent electricity outages since Israel and Egypt closed Gaza's borders after Hamas seized power in 2007. In recent weeks, hundreds dared to protest Hamas policies, such as new tax hikes, chanting "We want to live." Many were jailed and beaten. Protester Amer Balousha, a 27-year-old unemployed law school graduate, said he and others were mistreated in Hamas detention but will not be deterred. "If the situation does not improve, the protests will continue," he said. Hamas over Abbas Hamas has demonstrated that it prefers an understanding with Netanyahu over reconciling with its Palestinian rival, President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas (Photo: EPA) A deal with Israel would help keep Hamas in power. By contrast, Abbas -- who presides over autonomous enclaves in the West Bank -- wants Hamas to hand control of Gaza to him, a demand the group has repeatedly rejected. Hamas and Netanyahu both oppose Abbas' goal of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands Israel captured in 1967. Hamas seeks to establish an Islamic state in the area encompassing Israel and the war-won lands, while a majority in Netanyahu's Cabinet and Likud Party reject a two-state solution along the 1967 lines. Hamas leadership Last month, Netanyahu was quoted as saying that those who oppose Palestinian statehood should back his policy of allowing Qatari aid into Gaza and maintaining the separation between the rival Palestinian governments. "There is a great confluence of interests" between Israel and Hamas, said Tareq Baconi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. "Netanyahu prefers to deal with Hamas because clear dynamics have been established and Hamas will not seek a final resolution (of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) from Israel." IDF briefing on Gaza (Photo: IDF Spokesman) Managing the conflict Israel and Hamas have fought three wars, most recently in 2014. In between, there have been repeated cross-border skirmishes and periods of calm brokered by Egypt, which has close security ties with Israel and controls part of the Gaza border. Israel's stated reason for the blockade is to contain Hamas and prevent it from rearming, while rights groups denounce the restrictions as collective punishment. Last summer, amid weekly mass protests along the frontier in which scores of Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire and thousands wounded, Egypt started new cease-fire talks. Hamas hoped they would lead to an easing of the blockade. Mass gathering in Gaza Early on, Israel consented to Qatari cash shipments and Hamas pledged to halt rocket fire, but then the talks stalled. In March, with Israel's election campaign heating up, Hamas sensed an opportunity to apply pressure on Netanyahu to resume negotiations, twice firing rockets into central Israel. It worked. Two Hamas officials, speaking Sunday on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the renewed truce talks, relished in the group's apparent leverage. But they also expressed concern any new deal could quickly unravel. Gaza fishing port (Photo: Reuters) A new Gaza policy? Netanyahu's main challenger, former army chief Benny Gantz, has said he would handle Gaza differently. His party's platform pledges a "powerful response to any provocation and violence," while improving the lives of Gaza civilians and driving a wedge between them and Hamas. But the plan is short on specifics. Gantz and two other ex-military chiefs in his team held top command roles in the last three wars with Hamas, exacting a heavy price for rocket fire but coming up against the limits of military action. A consensus has emerged in Israel that Hamas cannot be brought down by force, short of a bloody reoccupation of Gaza. March of Return border riots (Photo: Haim Horenstein) Yet any easing of the blockade, meant to bring relief to Gaza's residents, would also prolong Hamas rule. Odd man out Abbas has given up on reconciliation with Hamas after years of failed efforts. He has stepped up financial pressure on Gaza, including cutting in half salaries for tens of thousands of ex-civil servants who were replaced by Hamas in 2007 but remained on the Abbas government payroll. Such cutbacks worsened Gaza's economic deterioration. But instead of stoking a popular uprising against Hamas, anger turned toward Abbas. Abbas is also suspicious of multi-million-dollar Gaza development projects proposed by the U.N. and Qatar, with U.S. and Israeli backing. He fears it's a plot to turn the territory into a Palestinian mini-state and undercut Palestinian political claims to the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Baconi, the analyst, said that Abbas' policies are counterproductive, even if his concerns are understandable. "Putting more sanctions on Gaza or trying to break the Hamas government will further entrench the division," he said. ___ The family of an Australian man who was detained for a year and is now unable to leave Egypt has called on the Australian government to help get him out of the country. Brisbane resident Hazem Hamouda was arrested in Cairo in January 2018 after arriving there with his family for a holiday. Egyptian police accused him of having links to Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned in Egypt, and of spreading falsities online allegations his family denies. The European Parliament's top Brexit official says the U.K. has a "last chance" to break the deadlock on leaving the European Union. Guy Verhofstadt tweeted the comments soon after Britain's Parliament again rejected alternative options to Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal. Parliament has carved out time on Wednesday for another series of indicative votes on Brexit options. Verhofstadt said: "The House of Commons again votes against all options. A hard Brexit becomes nearly inevitable. On Wednesday, the U.K. has a last chance to break the deadlock or face the abyss." Britain is legally due to leave the EU on April 12, after the bloc agreed to extend the March 29 deadline. A Palestinian was killed and three other people were wounded during pre-dawn clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank, Palestinian Authority officials said Tuesday morning. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The clashes occurred during an arrest raid in Qalandia refugee camp, north of Jerusalem. The IDF said that troops came under attack by Palestinians after they entered the town. The mother of a Palestinian man killed during an IDF raid mourns at a hospital in Ramallah, April 2, 2019. The army said that Israeli forces operating in the area came under attack when "violent disruptions erupted, including stone and explosives being thrown at the forces." The troops responded with live fire, the army said, adding that "the incident will be investigated. Ramallah medical center chief Ahmad Betawi said they had received the body of a 23-year-old Palestinian shot by Israeli troops, as well as the three wounded Palestinians taken there for treatment. Palestinian news agency Wafa named the dead man as Mohammad Ali Dar Adwan, and reported that he was shot dead at close range by Israeli troops as he drove down a street in the camp. Home-made weapons seized by IDF troops in the West Bank overnight (Photo: IDF) Wafa also reported that three brothers from the same family were arrested in the camp during the raid. The IDF said troops had arrested 12 Palestinians wanted for "involvement in terror activity and violent disturbances." Israeli forces also arrested a senior Hamas official, Hassan Yusif, in Ramallah. The army also said that forces operating in the village of Beit Omar, south of Jerusalem, found and confiscated home-made illegal weapons. Archive: IDF troops arresting Palestinian suspects in the West Bank (Photo: IDF) Last Wednesday, a 17-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli troops during clashes with stone-throwers in Deheisha refugee camp near the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Over the weekend, three Palestinian men were killed and 64 others were wounded by Israeli fire as some 40,000 demonstrators massed at several rallying points near Israeli border to mark one year of weekly March of Return protests in the Strip. On Saturday, Gaza health officials said Israeli troops shot and killed another Palestinian man near the perimeter fence with Israel, hours before the planned mass rally. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fly to Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Israeli leader's office said on Tuesday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The statement did not elaborate on the intended topics of discussion. The two leaders will meet five days before Israel's April 9 election in which the right-wing Netanyahu faces a strong challenge from a centrist candidate. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Vladimir Putin (Photo: AFP) On Monday, Netanyahu told reporters he and Putin spoke by telephone about Syria, whose Russian-backed president, Bashar Assad, has been gaining ground in an eight-year civil war. Israel worries Assad's Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah reinforcements could set up bases to attack it from Syria, and has carried out scores of air strikes against them. Russian defense officials have on several occasions demanded that Israel ends its "arbitrary" airstrikes on targets in Syria, calling them "provocative." Thursday's meeting could also help Netanyahu in the closely contested election, in which he has played up his statecraft and security credentials in the face of the politically untested challenger Benny Gantz, a former military chief. In February the two leaders met - at the Kremlin in Moscow - for the first time since the incident in September when Syria accidentally downed a Russian plane during an Israeli aerial assault in the war-battered country, which sparked an international crisis. Following the meeting a senior Israeli official said both sides are willing to put the incident behind them. Pope Francis, addressing sexual abuse scandals and calls for women priests, said on Tuesday that for its own good the Roman Catholic Church had to acknowledge its history of male authoritarianism and sexual abuse of women. But he also said in a major document that the church "could not agree with everything some feminist groups propose," a clear reference to the Church's ban on a female priesthood. The pope is grappling with criticism over the Church's response to a decades-long sexual abuse crisis that has gravely damaged its standing around the globe. Francis made his comment in a 50-page document known as an "Apostolic Exhortation," his reflections on the workings of a month-long meeting of bishops that took place last October on the role of young people in the 1.3 billion-member Church. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said on Tuesday that the Egyptian delegation had submitted to Israel the organizations demands concerning Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The demands include removing the cell-phone reception blocking technology, revoking the recently imposed sanctions and renewing family visits. Hamas said on Tuesday that some parts of a potential ceasefire arrangement with Israel will be agreed upon prior to the April 9 elections. The terror group said aspects of the arrangement that are simpler to implement will be agreed upon before the Israeli elections, while the more complex ones, such as energy project in the Gaza Strip, will be concluded after the vote. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said Tuesday that his organization has given Israel a series of demands regarding its security prisoners who are set to begin a hunger strike next week. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The demands were passed to Israel by the Egyptian delegation currently trying to mediate an end to Gaza hostilities between the two sides. Israeli prison guards (Photo: Israel Prison Service) Hamas' demands for Israel: 1. Removing the cell phone jamming device 2. Lifting recent sanctions on the prisoners 3. Restoring visits for prisoners 4. Improving prison conditions According to Hamas, some of the understandings with Israel will be implemented before the elections on April 9, and some afterwards. The understandings that will be implemented before the elections are the simpler ones, such as expanding the fishing area off the Gaza coast (already done); easing restrictions on exported goods from Gaza; improving the electricity supply by operating the turbines at the power plant; and beginning projects that will provide temporary employment. Guards search the cells of Hamas prisoners at Ketziot Prison (Photo: IPS) The understandings that will be implemented after the elections include the construction of another power line from Israel to Gaza within six months and the construction of a gas pipeline to the Gaza power plant within a year. In addition, the Palestinians are demanding the establishment of infrastructure and alternative energy projects. The timetables will be presented to representatives of the Palestinian factions in Gaza, who will announce whether they accept or reject them. Last week, the Israel Prison Service announced that it would charge the Hamas prisoners in Ramon Prison NIS 250,000 ($70,000) after they set fire to the mattresses in their cells last week. The arson took place in the wing where mobile phones are being jammed by the IPS, which expressed concern that such a move would lead to attacks on prison guards, damage to prison property and riots. A few days earlier, a prison guard at Ketziot Prison was stabbed in the neck by two security prisoners in the neck during a search of the site. An Egyptian province on the Red Sea will impose a ban on disposable plastics, prohibiting everything from single use straws to plastic bags in an effort to fight pollution and protect the environment, its governor said Tuesday. The ban will apply to restaurants, supermarkets, grocery stores, pharmacies and on cruise ships that dock off the shores of this province, called Red Sea. It will also apply to the hotels in Hurghada, the provincial capital, and elsewhere in the province. Plastic spoons, forks and knives, cups and dishes will also be among the banned items. "It's a fight against the sea of plastic that people carelessly discard," Gov. Ahmed Abdallah told The Associated Press. "And it all ends up in the Red Sea." Russia's Defense Ministry says three people have been injured in an explosion inside an elite military academy in Russia's second-largest city. The ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that an unidentified "object" went off early afternoon inside the prestigious Mozhaisky Academy in St. Petersburg, which trains officers for the army's missile defense unit. Three people suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Live footage from outside the academy showed dozens of cadets being led out of the gated compound. No other details were immediately available. The arrangement in the making between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has turned into an important part, which for now has yet to be revealed, of Donald Trump's self-titled Deal of the Century. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Everyone who needs to know understands and is keeping quiet. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi - whose country is acting as sole mediator and whose emissaries have spent the past few days running between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their military wings, and even visiting the Gaza-Israel fence - is mum. Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump at the White House (Photo: Reuters) The headlines in Cairo's major newspapers tell of Sisi's comments on women's rights, raising civil servants' salaries, the president's recent guests and of course his planned visit to the White House on April 9, Israeli Election Day. We learn what Sisi wants from Trump and what Trump expects to hear in return. But what of Gaza? On this issue, there is almost nothing. Egyptian army officers report directly to a special command center in Cairo, which in turn directly reports to the presidential palace, and not a single word leaks out. IDF troops along the Gaza border (Photo: Barel Efraim) The silence on the issue is kept by everyone - even Qatar. For there too, those in the know understand that the arrangements in Gaza are part of Trump's Mideast mega-deal. It is interesting to note that while Egypt (on Saudi Arabia's orders) is boycotting Qatar, Egypt still lets its envoy, Mohammed al-Emadi to keep acting as an ATM for Gaza. Only now the money is not going directly to Hamas' leaders but rather is handed out to the people in the form of a humble living allowance. In Israel too, it is known that the Gaza arrangement is part of a bigger plan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deployed IDF troops, called up reservists, set up security forces at the Gaza border, all to prepare for the day after the arrangement, when Israel would increase the number of fishing permits, allow exports to the West Bank and perhaps even into Israel, set up industrial zones and other economic arrangements. Note how Trump and his advisors are not saying a word. If they spoke out now, put pressure on one side or the other, the deal that is not yet finalized could all blow up. It would almost certainly fall apart. After all, who in the Arab world wants to be associated with Trump, who is associated with Netanyahu? Netanyahu and Sisi at the UN General Assembly in Sept. 2018 (Photo: GPO) Even King Abdullah of Jordan has connected the dots between what is happening on both sides of the Gaza border and Trump's deal. It is no coincidence that Abdullah prefers to talk about Jerusalem rather than Gaza. He is keeping track of the developments between Israel and Hamas and knows where things are going. Naturally Abdullah is more interested in events in the West Bank, which is on his doorstep. The Gaza Strip is of less importance to him, but he is following along so as not to be taken by surprise. It seems as if the only one who can break this chain from Israel to Hamas, via Egypt, to the White House is Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. He understands that this is a part that, for obvious reasons, had not yet been officially announced. After all, this is all still in the early stages, where there are no announcements, but rather laying the foundations of the deal and removing any obstacles. Abbas and his ministers are caught in a trap. They are attacking the American plan, feuding with Trump as they are with Netanyahu, and they have no solution or alternative plan. Benny Gantz slams his political rival Benjamin Netanyahu for sharing the stage at a press conference with a far-right activist who has previously expressed support for racist rabbi Meir Kahane. "No Kahanist has ever been (on such a stage) until Netanyahu made him the face of his premiership," Gantz says in a statement to Ynet. "There is a danger that he will turn into Erdogan," the Blue and White chairman adds, referring to the Turkish president with autocratic leanings. Twitter shut down 258 of the over 400 automated and fake accounts on Tuesday, associated with a scam that was exposed in the New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth Monday, involving an army of fake social media accounts used to boost support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Yitzhak Haddad, who was described as the heart of the network and operated under the user name "Bond", was one of the users Twitter blocked after the organization received a list of the fake accounts from the internet watchdog organizations that broke the story. Haddad Yossi Cohen and Moshe, two other profiles suspected to have been part of the network, were also blocked by Twitter. Moshe, a profile that has been active since the beginning of 2018, made headlines yesterday when it was revealed his profile picture actually features a Greek model named Theo Theodoridis. Twitters move is out of the ordinary, and only occurs when the organizations supervising board believes illegal or inappropriate use is being made of the social network. Following the ordeal, the Blue and White Party addressed the Central Election Committee and said the Likud party has been using illegal methods in their campaign. Netanyahu is leading a campaign of virtual terror against the citizens of Israel, Benny Gantz, leader of the party said Monday. Gantz and Lapid Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied the fake account network was operated by him and his party, and said the profiles belonged to real people. In a press conference, Netanyahu introduced a man named Giora Ezra, a real estate manager from the central city of Yavneh, who goes by the user name Captain George one of the accounts that the report deemed fake. Ezra would often use foul language to attack Likud opponents. Are you a bot? Are you real? asked Netanyahu. "It is such a huge, transparent lie; false allegations," he said as he pointed to Ezra. "With a straight face they lie and say that these people who express themselves online are not real people. Meanwhile, all of them have turned out to be real, independent people with genuine opinions." PM Netanyahu Among other thigs "Captain George" recently wrote, were praise for extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane and that Benny Gantz "needs 50 psychiatrists." He called journalists "foul, stinking garbage," "dog," "sons of bitches." Ezra sat beside Netanyahu and Likud MK Amir Ohana, head of the Likud's LGBT chapter, who said issued no protest to the homophobic things Ezra tweeted to his opponents. Ezra also delved into a multitude of conspiracy theories regarding Gantz alleging he was especially susceptible to blackmail and that he engaged in pedophilia. When talking to a reporter Monday, Ezra denied the tweet saying he had no idea what pedophilia is. Netanyahu with Ezra Some critics of the report used straw-man arguments, referring to things the report did not actually allege. For example: the Likud released a video that said the report called its many voters "bots," but the report did not claim that they were bots fictitious accounts operated by a computer program but rather profiles controlled by real people who conceal their identity and help spread misinformation or political spin. Of the hundreds of accounts analyzed, very few used their real name. it is not a "bot network" but rather a coordinated network of people spreading pro-Likud and pro-Netanyahu propaganda against his opponents. The fact that the network is operated by humans and not machines makes it harder to detect. Most of the accounts were established in the last three years but only became active users after the elections were announced. More than 97% of those users interacted with each other on a consistent basis through Likes and Shares. Activity surged following major events and announcements during the campaign period. And as for freedom of speech, some of the accounts engaged in incitement, baseless slander and misleading news reports. Voters in Iron County and elsewhere in Wisconsin are casting their ballots in state and local elections today in the states spring election. Although many of the races are uncontested, there are a number of contested elections for Iron County voters to participate in. The lone contested state-level race facing Iron County voters is the Wisconsin Supreme Court race between liberal-backed Lisa Neubauer and conservative-backed Brian Hagedorn. There are also several contested local races, including town and school board elections. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Hurley School District... BIRMINGHAM, Ala. James Richard Tassava, 75, died on March 31, 2019, in Birmingham, after a long illness. Jim was born to Leonard Tassava and Helmi (Talo) Tassava on May 13, 1943, in Ironwood, Mich. The little brother to Nancy and Marvin, Jims first language was Finnish; he learned English after starting elementary school. As a boy, he worked with his family on their dairy farm, showed 4-H cows at the Gogebic County Fair, and enjoyed hunting and fishing. Jim graduated from Luther L. Wright High School in 1961. He attended Gogebic Community College in Ironwood while working at the local radio station, then transferred to Northern Michigan University in 1965, where he majored in secondary education. There, he met Mary Jauquet of Channing, Mich .; they married in 1967 after graduating from Northern. Jim and Mary moved to Ortonville, Mich., in August 1967 to teach elementary school. The next year, they returned to the U.P., where they taught in the Stephenson public schools until 1981. Jim taught a variety of high school subjects, including English. While living in Daggett, they had two children, Christopher Tassava, of Northfield, Minn., and Beth Stafford, of Birmingham. In the summer of 1981, Jim and his family relocated again, this time to his hometown of Ironwood. They first lived on the family farm with his father, then moved into town, where Jim a skilled do-it-yourselfer remodeled the familys home. In Ironwood, he worked as a handyman before moving into sales for several companies. He also served as dairy judge at county and state fairs. The family moved in 1987 to Hancock, Mich., where Jim worked as a salesman for local radio stations and remodeled another house. After he and Mary divorced in 1995, Jim switched careers to become an over-the-road truck driver, traveling extensively all over the Midwest. For health reasons, Jim retired in 2006 and later moved to Birmingham, to be nearer his daughter and her family. In retirement, he enjoyed a quiet life with his cat, B, and spending time with Beths children. Jim always enjoyed traveling. He and Mary enjoyed a long trip to Europe in 1971, including an extended stay in Finland where he met numerous relatives. In retirement, he took numerous cruises to ports of call in the Caribbean and South America. He was a member of Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Birmingham. Jim was predeceased by his father, Leonard; mother, Helmi; sister, Nancy; brother, Marvin; and nephew, Marvin Jr. He is survived by his son, Christopher (Shannon); daughter, Beth (Daniel) Stafford; grandchildren, Julia and Genevieve Tassava and Rebecca and Ryan Stafford; his former wife and good friend, Mary Tassava; and numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins. Jim would say his greatest gifts to the world were his two wonderful children and his four grandchildren. He was a very proud father and grandfather. Services will be held for Jim at 11 a.m. on Thursday, April 4, at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Birmingham. Visitation will be held at the church at 10 a.m. His ashes will be interred at Sunset Acres Cemetery in Ironwood Township, Mich., in summer 2019. In lieu of flowers, memorials can be made to Oak Mountain Mission Ministries Inc., 2699 Pelham Parkway, Pelham, AL 35124. News Washington, DC - To help Iowan residents, farmers, and ranchers affected by the devastation caused by recent flooding, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to aid people in their recovery efforts. USDA staff in the regional, state, and county offices are responding and providing a variety of program flexibilities and other assistance to residents, agricultural producers, and impacted communities at large. Recent flooding in the Midwest and along the Missouri and Mississippi River Valleys has caused devastating impacts across the region, and USDA has personnel and resources devoted to helping farmers and communities recover after this storm, Secretary Perdue said. I encourage area farmers and ranchers to contact their local USDA Service Center so we can work with them to identify the resources and tools needed to reestablish their operations. While farmers and ranchers in the area are resilient, the pain is real. We will do everything in our power at USDA to be as helpful as we possibly can. On Saturday, President Donald J. Trump declared that a major disaster exists in the Iowa counties of Fremont, Harrison, Mills, Monona and Woodbury. Farm Production and Conservation Agencies Helping Producers Weather Financial Impacts: When major disasters strike, USDA has an emergency loan program that provides eligible farmers low-interest loans to help them recover from production and physical losses. USDA also offers additional programs tailored to the needs of specific agricultural sectors to help producers weather the financial impacts of major disasters and rebuild their operations. Livestock owners and contract growers who experience above normal livestock deaths due to specific weather events, as well as to disease or animal attacks, may qualify for assistance under USDAs Livestock Indemnity Program. Producers who suffer losses to or are prevented from planting agricultural commodities not covered by federal crop insurance may be eligible for assistance under USDA's Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program if the losses were due to natural disasters. USDA's Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish Program provides payments to these producers to help compensate for losses due to disease (including cattle tick fever), and adverse weather or other conditions, such as blizzards and wildfires, that are not covered by certain other disaster programs. USDA Helping Agricultural Operations Recover After Disasters: USDA provides financial resources through its Environmental Quality Incentives Program for immediate needs and long-term support to help recover from natural disasters and conserve water resources. Orchardists and nursery tree growers in the affected area may be eligible for assistance through USDAs Tree Assistance Program to help replant or rehabilitate eligible trees, bushes, and vines damaged by natural disasters. USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has information about protecting livestock on its Protecting Livestock During a Disaster page. Additionally, the agency is helping to meet the emergency needs of pets and their owners, as inspectors are coordinating closely with zoos, breeders, and other licensed facilities in the region to ensure the safety of animals in their care. USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service Preventing Foodborne Illness: As residents make it back into their homes, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is helping ensure they are taking the proper steps to reduce the risk of foodborne illness. Food safety tips after a power outage and flooding are available on the FSIS website. USDA encourages those whose homes flooded during the storm to take steps to protect the safety of their food. Tips to protect food safety after flooding occurs: Drink only bottled water that has not come in contact with flood water. Discard any bottled water that may have come in contact with flood water. Discard any food that is not in a waterproof container if there is any chance it may have come in contact with flood water. Food containers that are not waterproof include those with screw-caps, snap lids, pull tops, and crimped caps. Discard wooden cutting boards, plastic utensils, baby bottle nipples, and pacifiers that may have come in contact with flood water. Thoroughly wash all metal pans, ceramic dishes, and utensils that came in contact with flood water with hot soapy water. Sanitize by boiling them in clean water or by immersing them for 15 minutes in a solution of 1 tablespoon unscented, liquid chlorine bleach per gallon of drinking water. Undamaged, commercially prepared foods in all-metal cans and retort pouches (for example, flexible, shelf-stable juice or seafood pouches) can be saved. Follow the "Steps to Salvage All-Metal Cans and Retort Pouches" in the publication Keeping Food Safe During an Emergency. USDA Helping Impacted Communities Recover: During declared natural disasters that lead to imminent threats to life and property, USDAs Natural Resources Conservation Service can assist local government sponsors with the cost of implementing recovery efforts like debris removal and streambank stabilization to address natural resource concerns and hazards through the Emergency Watershed Protection Program. USDA Rural Development (RD) offers technical assistance, loans, grants, and loan guarantees to rural communities and individuals to assist with the construction or rehabilitation of utility infrastructure including water and wastewater systems, community infrastructure, and housing. Rural Development is also helping businesses and utilities that are current USDA borrowers by considering requests to defer principal and/or interest payments, and to provide additional temporary loans. Current USDA single-family home loan customers may also qualify for assistance. Rural community leaders and current USDA Rural Development customers can contact their local RD office or visit the RD disaster resource website to obtain more information. Visit USDA's disaster resources website to learn more about USDA disaster preparedness and response. For more information on USDA disaster assistance programs, please contact your local USDA Service Center. To find your local USDA Service Center, go to offices.usda.gov. Latest News New Orleans, Louisiana - A federal grand jury sitting in New Orleans, Louisiana, returned an indictment against two Louisiana residents, charging each with one count of conspiracy to harbor an alien, one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, 48 counts of failure to withhold and pay over employment tax, and 12 counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation of a fraudulent tax return, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Departments Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Peter G. Strasser. As alleged in the indictment, Imad Eddie Hamdan and Ziad Z Mousa owned and operated over 30 locations of Brothers Food Mart. Hamdan and Mousa are alleged to have hired undocumented workers to work in their stores and paid them in cash. To further conceal these undocumented workers, Hamdan and Mousa allegedly filed false employment tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that did not report the cash wages paid to the undocumented workers. In addition, the indictment charges that Hamdan and Mousa paid the salaries of the managers of the Brothers Food Mart stores partially in cash. Allegedly, employment taxes were also not withheld or reported in connection with these cash wages. Finally, according to the indictment, Hamdan and Mousa issued and filed false Forms W-2 that underreported their wages. The indictment further alleges that Hamdan and Mousa aided in the filing of fraudulent tax returns for the managers of Brothers Food Mart stores. An indictment merely alleges that crimes have been committed. The defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If convicted, Hamdan and Mousa each face a statutory maximum sentence of ten years in prison for the conspiracy to harbor aliens count, five years for the conspiracy to defraud the United States count, five years for each count of willful failure to withhold and pay over employment tax, and three years for each count of aiding and assisting in the preparation of a fraudulent tax return. They also face substantial monetary penalties, supervised release, and restitution. Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Zuckerman and U.S. Attorney Strasser commended Assistant United States Attorney Greg Kennedy and Trial Attorney Lauren Castaldi of the Tax Division, who are prosecuting this case. The case was investigated by special agents of IRS-Criminal Investigation and Homeland Security Investigations. Latest News Washington, DC - Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) kick off Winning on Reducing Food Waste Month by calling for greater collaboration with public, private, and nonprofit partners as well as state and local officials to educate and engage consumers and stakeholders throughout the supply chain on the need to reduce food loss and waste. In the U.S., more than one-third of all available food goes uneaten through loss or waste. Food is the single largest type of waste in our daily trash. In recent years, great strides have been made to highlight and mitigate food loss and waste, but the work has just begun. When food is tossed aside, so too are opportunities for economic growth, healthier communities, and environmental prosperity but that can change through partnership, leadership, and action. Further elevating the importance of this issue, todays announcement follows a Presidential Message from President Trump acknowledging the month of April as Winning on Reducing Food Waste Month and encouraging public action and participation from all sectors. USDA alone cannot end food waste, it will require partners from across the supply chain working together on innovative solutions and consumer education. We need to feed our hungry world and by reducing food waste, we can more wisely use the resources we have. I am pleased President Trump identified this issue as one of importance, and I look forward to USDAs continued work with our agency partners at EPA and FDA to change behavior in the long term on food waste, said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. Reducing food waste and redirecting excess food to people, animals, or energy production provide immediate benefits to public health and the environment. I am proud to join President Trump and my federal partners in recognizing April as Winning on Reducing Food Waste Month, said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. We are working closely with our federal partners and stakeholders across the nation to reduce the amount of food going to landfills and maximize the value of our food resources. With 1 in 6 people getting a foodborne illness every year in the U.S. and up to 40 percent of food left uneaten, its understandable why food safety and food waste are major societal concerns, said FDA Deputy Commissioner Frank Yiannas. The FDA is working to strengthen its collaboration and coordination with the EPA and USDA to strategically align our federal efforts between the two issues to better educate Americans on how to reduce food waste and how it can be done safely. As part of the months observances, on April 9, EPA will host a livestreamed event with USDA and FDA. Additional joint agency actions will be announced at the event regarding the Winning on Reducing Food Waste Initiative. At the event, a panel of food waste stakeholders will share how state and local communities can join the federal government in reducing food waste and loss. USDA, EPA, and FDA invite public and private partners to participate in Winning on Reducing Food Waste Month through the following: Join the conversation: Share your efforts with the #NoWastedFood hashtag in your social media posts throughout the month. Educate your community: Learn about USDA, EPA, and FDA programs and resources to reduce food loss and waste. Be a U.S. Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champion: Join other corporate and business leaders who have made a public commitment to reducing food loss and waste in their U.S. operations by 50 percent by the year 2030. The Winning on Reducing Food Waste Initiative is a collaborative effort (PDF, 579 KB) among USDA, EPA, and FDA to reduce food loss and waste through combined and agency-specific action. Individually and collectively, these agencies contribute to the initiative, encourage long-term reductions, and work toward the goal of reducing food loss and waste in the United States. These actions include research, community investments, education and outreach, voluntary programs, public-private partnerships, tool development, technical assistance, event participation, and policy discussion. For more information about Winning on Reducing Food Waste Month, visit the USDA Food Loss and Waste website. Today Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low around 50F. Winds light and variable. Tonight Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low around 50F. Winds light and variable. Tomorrow Partly cloudy skies, with gusty winds developing during the afternoon. High 72F. SE winds at 10 to 15 mph, increasing to 20 to 30 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph. 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. Hindus are portrayed as intolerant and promoting a dangerous Hindu majoritarianism in India. Yet what this Hindu majoritarianism actually consists is seldom defined. Is it a genuine concern or does it hide anti-Hindu or even anti-India agendas that have been common since the colonial era? Hinduism is the most ancient, diverse and pluralistic religion, culture and spiritual tradition on the planet. It has given the world the many paths of Yoga and Vedanta, a science of Self-realization, Ayurveda and many practices of right living according to dharmic principles. Hindus have numerous gurus, avatars, deities, a vast array of philosophies, numerous temples, festivals and pilgrimages. There is no uniform Hindu dogma of one God, Book, Prophet or Saviour that could promote a religious majoritarianism at an ideological level. Hindus do not aggressively seek to convert the world to a single belief like Christianity and Islam, and have never engaged in jihads and crusades. Even in India Christian and Muslim missionary groups are active, probably more so than in any other country. Where is there anything like a Hindu missionary business comparable to these? Hindus have a synthetic and accepting view of religion, granting respect for all spiritual aspiration, extending to native traditions and pagans, not just monotheistic beliefs. Yet so far Christian or Islamic groups seldom honour Hindus in return, certainly not the Vatican or Saudi Arabia. Religious intolerance and exclusivism is commonly directed against Hindus, for which Hindus certainly have every right to respond. Political majoritarianism As for political majoritarianism, Hindus have perhaps the lowest voting percentage of any religious group. Muslims and Christians in India have higher percentages for voting and commonly vote on religious lines as directed by their religious leaders. Only in the 2014 national election did a Hindu vote become a determinative factor, which is probably why the myth of Hindu majoritarianism is being highlighted today. Modern India was created by partition in 1947 in which Muslims claimed they could not live under Hindu majority rule and so created Pakistan as their own religious state. Yet Hindus in India did not create a Hindu religious state in response. Today in 2019 India's Muslims have increased in numbers and are a flourishing community. Meanwhile Hindus in Pakistan have almost no human rights and are being steadily eliminated. Minorities in India are much better off than those in Pakistan or China, not to mention the Middle East where an intolerant majoritarianism is common. India has a greater religious diversity than perhaps any country in the world, which exists because of its Hindu majority, while countries in the region without such a Hindu presence have little religious diversity or tolerance, and little democracy as well. Cultural majoritarianism In history books in India Hinduism is seldom taught in a favourable light, with a more positive history afforded to the Mughals than to any great Hindu kings or emperors. In the media Hindu practices are often denigrated as backward. India's media and academia are generally leftist, Marxist and sympathetic more to Christianity and Islam than to Hinduism. Bollywood often portrays Hindus, particularly Brahmins, in a negative light. All this is hardly cultural majoritarianism. State governments in India expropriate the revenues from Hindu temples but not from churches and mosques. Courts similarly regulate and restrict Hindu practices but rarely interfere with those of other religions. Here we also see minority favoritism not oppressive majoritarianism. Only recently have Indian politicians, except for BJP and Shiv Sena, bothered to visit Hindu temples and sacred sites, wear Hindu attire, or proclaim any Hindu identity. Most notably Congress leader Rahul Gandhi suddenly claimed to be a thread wearing Hindu Brahmin when it became electorally favourable to do so, with temple visits linked to campaign travels. This is not a sign of majoritarianism but of trying to subvert majority Hindu sentiments. Narendra Modi in 2014 was the first PM to actively show a Hindu image to the world, which the Congress Party then denounced as Hindu majoritarianism. Democracy and the need to vote Democracy is rule of the majority. India as 80% Hindu and India is the home of more than 90% of the world's Hindus. Hindus have a right for their views to be respected in a country where they are a majority, particularly given the facts of partition, and India's history of foreign rule. Hindus deserve their political rights and need not be made hostage to minority vote banks. The charge of Hindu majoritarianism is just another ploy to keep Hindus from being political, in an era in which all other groups are political - and when not voting defeats you and discredits what you stand for. It is time for Hindus to wake up from the myth of Hindu majoritarianism and claim their rightful voices in media, education and politics. Without a political presence no group will survive today or be taken seriously at social, cultural or religious levels. The truth is that India has long suffered from a dynastic elitism that has tried to subordinate the Hindu majority of India to a small Delhi coterie in which family name rules over any religion or even over the culture of India. This is the real problem to be addressed, not the myth of Hindu majoritarianism. (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL.) MUMBAI: Beleaguered private carrier Jet Airways on Tuesday said it has decided to ground 15 more aircraft due to non-payment of rentals to lessors. With the grounding of 15 more planes, the total number of planes which have been grounded by Jet Airways comes to 69. The total fleet strength of Jet Airways is now only 20. It is to be noted that till March, Jet Airways, which is headquartered in Mumbai, had grounded 54 planes due to lease rental defaults. The cash-strapped airline is now under the new ownership. ".... an additional 15 aircraft have been grounded due to non-payment of amounts outstanding to lessors under their respective lease agreements," Jet Airways said in a filing to the stock exchanges. Jet Airways had informed the government last week that it has 35 aircraft in operations, PTI reported. A resolution plan was approved by the board of Jet Airways on March 25. The resolution plan - formulated by SBI-led domestic lenders - allows the lenders of Jet Airways to take control of the airline and infuse fund to the tune of Rs 1,500 crore. Meanwhile, the domestic pilots union of Jet Airways, National Aviators Guild (NAG), on Tuesday wrote letter to DGCA and the airline's top management demanding interest on their delayed salaries and timely payment of salaries in the future. The pilots said that the current situation is not "ideal" for them to fly the aircraft. The guild wrote separate letters to Director-General of Civil Aviation BS Bhullar and Jet Airways chief executive Vinay Dube. In the letter, the pilots said that they are finding it very tough to pay their EMIs and meet other financial commitments. The pilots and engineers of Jet Airways have salary arrears for three months, starting January. "Non-payment of salaries is leading to extreme tension and frustration among us, which is hardly an ideal situation for pilots in the cockpits. EMIs, school and college fees to be paid along with medical bills of our ageing parents," said guild president Karan Chopra. The guild reportedly represents around 1,100 of the 1,600 Jet pilots. It may be recalled that the guild had earlier warned to go on strike from April 1 if their salaries were not paid and clarity was provided by the management on future payments by March 31. (with PTI inputs) Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India Monday asked banks to disclose bad loan divergences in their financial statements if the additional provisioning exceeds 10 percent of profit before provision and contingencies. In a notification, the RBI said it is observed that some banks, on account of low or negative net profit after tax, are required to disclose divergences even where the additional provisioning assessed by RBI is small, which is contrary to the regulatory intent that only material divergences should be disclosed. Therefore, it has been decided that henceforth, banks should disclose divergences, if "the additional provisioning for NPAs assessed by RBI exceeds 10 percent of the reported profit before provisions and contingencies for the reference period". Earlier, banks were to make suitable disclosures if the additional provisioning requirements assessed by RBI exceeded 15 percent of the published net profits after tax for the reference period. RBI further said disclosure has also to be made if the additional gross NPAs identified by RBI exceed 15 percent of the published incremental gross NPAs for the reference period. In another notification regarding large exposures framework (LEF), the RBI said non-centrally cleared derivatives exposures will be outside the purview of exposure limits till April 1, 2020. However, banks must compute these exposures separately and report to the Department of Banking Regulation on quarterly basis, it added. Jhajjar: A former Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) leader was shot by unidentified assailants at his own hotel in Gurugram on Monday. Satish Deshwal, the former District President of INLD, was shot in broad daylight by two armed men at his hotel counter on Gurugram Road. The assailants fled from the spot immediately after committing the crime. Jhajjar: Satish Deshwal, former District President of Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), shot dead by unidentified assailants yesterday at his hotel counter at Gurugram Road. Body sent for postmortem. Investigation underway. ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 The body has been sent for postmortem. An investigation is underway. With ANI inputs JAMMU: Indian Army on Tuesday completely destroyed seven Pakistani posts across the Line of Control while retaliating to heavy shelling by Pakistani forces in Rajouri and Poonch districts, officials said. Officials added that there have been several casualties to Pakistani troops too, PTI reported. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) of Pakistan later confirmed that three Pakistani soldiers lost their lives on Tuesday along the LoC in retaliatory firing by Indian forces. All schools along the border areas in Poonch and Rajouri districts have been shut down by authorities as a precautionary measure. On Monday, a BSF inspector and a five-year-old girl were killed and at least 24 got injured after Pakistani troops resorted to heavy shelling in forward areas along the Line of Control in Poonch district. Officials said that the Indian Army retaliated "befittingly" to cross-border shelling by Pakistan on Tuesday also. "There was heavy mortar shelling and firing along Line of Control in Poonch district and Nowshera sector of Rajouri district till Tuesday morning", officials told PTI. Defence sources said that Pakistani troops also targeted in Shahpur sub-sector in Poonch and Nowshera on Tuesday. The strong retaliation by Indian troops resulted in the destruction of seven Pakistan posts across the LoC in Rakhchikri and Rawalakote forward areas of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK). Officials said that heavy weaponry and 120 mm mortar bombs are being used by Pakistani forces to target civilian areas along the LoC in Poonch. They added that regular shelling by the Pakistani Army has triggered panic among villagers. Meanwhile, four civilians were injured in Pakistani shelling along the LoC in Mankote sector of Poonch district on Monday night. ANI reported that the injured were admitted to a district hospital in Rajouri for treatment. "Four patients were admitted in the hospital last night. A 14-year-old boy was seriously injured. The condition of all four is presently stable," Medical officer Dr Riaz Ul Haq told ANI. (with PTI inputs) New Delhi: Indian Foreign Secretary VK Gokhale, who is on a two-day visit to Russia, met Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov on Monday and discussed a range of issues including India's membership for the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) which Moscow backs. A release by Russian govt said, both sides "discussed cooperation within BRICS format, the current issues of the key multilateral export control regimes, including New Delhi application for NSG membership, other non-proliferation and arms control issues, as well as topical international issues of mutual interest." Russian President Putin and PM Modi have spoken twice this year: first on January 1 on New Year and second on February 27 during which President Putin expressed his deep condolences over the Pulwama terrorist attack. The Russian President has invited Prime Minister Modi to attend the Eastern Economic Forum in the eastern Russian city Vladivostok later this year. The second informal summit between both countries is expected to happen this year in India. The first happened last year in Sochi, Russia. Moscow has been a long-standing ally of New Delhi and has backed India in international forums such as the listing of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar in United Nations. The country also is an important supplier of India in defence sector. Both sides concluded the S-400 deal last year during the annual bilateral summit. NEW DELHI: India has asked Pakistan to provide consular access Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian national abducted by Pakistani spy agencies from Iran in a note verbale sent to Pakistani high commission on Tuesday. India had gone to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding the sentence announced by the Pakistan military court and got a stay. The ICJ will be announcing the final verdict in the case very soon after the hearing in February by both sides in The Hague where the world court is located. India has demanded consular for not only Jadhav but 4 other Indian prisoners -- Mohammad Javaid, Abdul Hakeem, Muhammad Ismail, Salfikar Ali - languishing in Pakistani jails. The note verbale on the release and repatriation of Indian prisoners and fishermen in Pakistan calls for release of 10 Indian civil prisoners lodged in Pakistani jails since they have already completed their sentence. New Delhi has also confirmed identity of 5 prisoners lodged in Pakistan jails to be Indians and called for there early release as well. At least 503 Indian fishermen are believed to be in Pakistans custody of which Islamabad has acknowledged the custody of 483 fishermen who are Indian or believed-to-be-Indian in their jails. Since 2014, the government have been able to secure the release of 1749 Indian prisoners, including 1725 fishermen along with 57 boats. New Delhi has strongly raised its concern and protested the delay in the informing the death of one Indian fisherman Bhikha s/o Bhagwan in Karachi Jail to the Indian high commission in Islamabad. He dies in early March. This is not the first case in which delay has been seen regarding informing the death of an Indian fisherman. In the past death of 2 Indian fishermen--Deva bhai and Nanu Bhai was informed after an inordinate delay. In October 2017, India had suggested Pakistan that the two sides could work together for the release and repatriation of elderly, women and mentally unsound prisoners on humanitarian grounds and proposed to revive the mechanism of Joint Judicial Committee. In the past 6 months, the Ministry of External Affairs - via 3 note verbale, one on January 1, other in December and November - has called on Islamabad to organise an early visit of Joint Judicial Committee to Pakistan but it has got no response. National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday arrested absconding Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist Nisar Ahmed Tantray as soon as landed at Delhi airport after being deported from UAE. Nisar, a resident of Tral in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir, was involved in a fidayeen attack on a CRPF group centre at Lethpura on the intervening night of December 30-31, 2017. He had fled away to UAE on February 1, 2019 after one of his associates was arrested by NIA . Nisar was produced before NIA court for police remand. He is younger brother of Noor Tantray, the JeM commander who was killed by security forces in an encounter at Pulwama on December 26, 2017. The CRPF group centre in Lethpora was attacked by three terrorists and NIA was given the responsibility to probe this attack, which had claimed the lives of five CRPF personnel. The probe by NIA had revealed that the cowardly attack was carried by Jaish terrorists. The three terrorists involved in the attack were identified as Fardeen Ahmed, Manzoor Baba and Abdul Shakoor. The three terrorists were killed by security forces after the attack. Fardeen and Manzoor were resident of Pulwama, while Abdul Shakoor was a Pakistani national. The mastermind of this attack was Faiyaz Ahmed from Pulwama. He was arrested by NIA on February 4, 2019. According to NIA sources, Faiyaz was an overground worker of Jaish and he had provided shelter to the terrorists who carried out the Lethpora attack. Besides this, Faiyaz also provided all kind of logistic support to the three terrorists. A Pune-Nagpur IndiGo flight was forced to return to Pune after take-off due to a technical glitch in the aircraft's engine on Tuesday, reports news agency ANI. "After take-off from Pune, the pilot observed engine caution message. The aircraft returned to Pune. It is currently being inspected by a technical team," IndiGo said in an official statement. The Pune Airport Authority said that the flight has been landed safely and the reason for the glitch is yet to be ascertained. Pune: An IndiGo Pune-Nagpur flight after take-off returned to Pune when the pilot observed engine caution message, today. The aircraft landed safely. It is being inspected by a technical team. ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 Just last week, IndiGo's Delhi-Istanbul flight had to be diverted to Kuwait due to an engine snag. According to the airline, the snag hit its A320 NEO aircraft which was en-route from Delhi to Istanbul. In a statement, the airline said that the flight landed safely in Kuwait and the reason was being found out. New Delhi: Four civilians were injured in Pakistani shelling along the Line of Control (LoC) in Mankote sector of Poonch district in Jammu and Kashmir. The shelling by Pakistan took place on Monday night. The injured civilians were rushed to a district hospital in Rajouri and are undergoing treatment. A local named Abdul Hamid told ANI, "Three members from my family are admitted in the hospital. It`s becoming difficult for us to live in such tensed situation." Medical officer Dr Riaz Ul Haq said, "Four patients were admitted in the hospital last night. A 14-year-old boy was seriously injured. The condition of all four is presently stable. "Yesterday, a Border Security Force (BSF) personnel and a five-year-old girl were killed in a ceasefire violation by Pakistan in Mankote and Krishna Ghati sectors of Poonch, informed Rahul Yadav, District Development Commissioner (DDC). A total of five security personnel were injured in the attack. Of the five, one succumbed to his injuries while the other four were undergoing treatments, an official told ANI. Jammu: Jammu and Kashmir Police chief Dilbag Singh Monday said a study group has been set up to suggest measures to strengthen security along the 270-km Jammu-Srinagar highway, following the Pulwama terror attack. Singh said two suicide attacks were foiled by police with the killing of two Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) terrorists after the February 14 terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. "We have constituted a study group which will be surveying the highway within next two days and suggest measures for further strengthening the security mechanism on the vital road," Singh told reporters here tonight. Sharing details about the arrest of Hizbul Mujahideen suicide bomber Owais Amin, a resident of Shopian district of south Kashmir, who made an abortive attempt to target a Jammu-bound CRPF convoy near Banihal in Ramban district on Saturday, Singh said Pakistani hand behind the unsuccessful attack cannot be ruled out. Amin was arrested within 36 hours of the incident by a joint team of police and the Army near Jawahar Tunnel when he was trying to flee. Jammu-Srinagar national highway is the only all-weather road that links Kashmir with rest of the country and witnesses heavy traffic movement, including vehicles of security forces moving in and out of the valley, on a daily basis. "We are always concerned with the security of the commuters including the convoys. Soon after this incident happened, we luckily got timely clues and with coordinated efforts with other security forces and Army were able to nab the culprit," Singh said. The arrested terrorist was produced before media persons but the police chief did not share much details especially about his disclosures during interrogation. "We are exercising all alert and all security measures have been taken to maintain peace and foil terrorist attacks," he said when asked about reports of presence of more suicide attackers. "The SOPs are being implemented to the best possible extent but there are certain grey areas which we need to look into," he said ruling out security lapse leading to the incident. He said airlifting of all security personnel was not possible because of the limited number of seats. "Many personnel are availing the facility." Terming the arrest of Owais a "major success", the officer said he has given some leads and police is focusing on various aspects including the persons behind this attack, where the IEDs were fabricated inside the car. He said the trigger mechanism for detonating the bomb was not perfect leading to a minor explosion in the car, while the secondary blast could not happen. "After the minor explosion, the militant believed that he can run away and jumped out of the car and fled the spot. He hid himself in an orchard and returned to the highway on Saturday night, took lift in a truck to cross over to Kashmir but the alertness of the security personnel resulted in his arrest," he said. Singh said as per the investigation, he is affiliated to terror group Hizbul Mujahideen. He said the terrorist was trying to carry out an attack similar to that of Pulwama as the material found from the car was enough to cause heavy damage. "We found different types of explosives and inflammable substances including over 50 gelatine sticks of super power 90 grand, urea, sulphur, ammonium nitrate, two bottles of petrol, two LPG cylinders -- one big and one small, the remains of the IED which caused the minor blast and fire in the vehicle and one unexploded IED fitted in a tiffin box," he said. After his arrest, the accused was put to sustained questioning and he confessed his role and further investigation is on, Singh said. Bengaluru: Predicting defeat for BJP in the Lok Sabha elections, former Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah on Monday mockingly said Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet the fate of 'India Shining' due to his anti- poor policies. "After completing five years, Vajpayee came up with a slogan 'India Shining' in 2004. I don't know where it shined. If it had really shone, there was no need for any welfare schemes. History tells us what happened to 'India Shining.' Narendra Modi will also meet the same fate," Siddaramaiah said at a 'Meet the Press' programme at the Press Club of Bangalore. 'India Shining' referred to the overall feeling of economic optimism in the country during the 2004 general elections. The NDA witnessed a defeat and a stunning comeback of Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre to rule India for 10 years. The Congress leader slammed BJP for criticising Congress party's poll promise - Minimum Income Guarantee Scheme (Nyunatam Aay Yojana-NYAY) - that is estimated to cost Rs 3.26 lakh crore to the national exchequer. "They (BJP) mock our scheme of giving Rs 3.5 lakh crore to the poor people and speak low about it. The very fact that they are opposing this programme, they are anti-poor. They cannot stand with the economically weaker section," he said. "There are no such instances also whether be it former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Modi's five year term," Siddaramaiah charged. To support his claim of Modi's defeat in the ensuing Lok Sabha polls, he said the BJP will fail to repeat its 2014 stellar performance in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Siddaramaiah said, the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party alliance in UP and Rashtriya Janata Dal and Congress tie-up in Bihar will trounce the BJP. "BJP will not win. Modi will not be prime minister again," he asserted. Flaying Modi for "politicising" surgical strike, the former chief minister said such surgical strikes had happened in the past too, including during the formation of Bangladesh by breaking Pakistan into two. "However, for the first time such heroic actions were politicised," he alleged. The senior Congress leader also questioned what he termed as the "intelligence failure" which led to the deadly attack on Central Reserved Police Force (CRPF) convoy, killing 40 soldiers in January. "What happened to your intelligence in Pulwama? What were your agencies doing when your soldiers were ferried in trucks and not airlifted?" Siddaramaiah sought to know. The incident had further soured India-Pakistan relations, with India avenging the killing with airstrikes on the terror camps inside the Pakistan territory in February. To a question, Siddaramaiah allayed fears about the longevity of the coalition government of Congress and JD(S) led by chief minister HD Kumaraswamy. He said the government will remain post Lok Sabha elections. Replying to a query on Congress rebel candidates, the former chief minister said those have no ideological base shift their loyalties and change parties. New Delhi: As many as 97 FIRs and daily diary (DD) entries have been registered here till date against various political parties and others for violation of the model code of conduct in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, Delhi's chief electoral officer (CEO) said Monday. CEO Ranbir Singh also told reporters that a statistics surveillance team, constituted to keep an eye on the expenses of political parties, has seized Rs 51.97 lakh cash from outer Delhi and Dwarka. "A total of 97 FIRs or DD entries have been lodged in connection with the violation of the model code of conduct. Out of these, 10 is against the Aam Aadmi Party (six FIRs and four DD entries), 10 against the Bhartiya Janata Party (seven FIRs and three DD entries), two against the Congress (both DD entries), one against the Bahujan Samaj Party (one DD entry), and 74 against others or non-political (entities)," the CEO office said in a statement. Singh also said social media is being aggressively monitored to check any violation of the poll code and experts are also assisting the election team. The office of the Delhi CEO said more than 2.44 lakh posters, banners and hoardings have been removed since the poll code came into force. "As many as 30,533 posters, banners and hoardings were removed from areas under the New Delhi Municipal Council, 43,075 from East Delhi Municipal Corporation areas, 2,411 from Delhi Cantonment Board, 81,967 from South Delhi Municipal Corporation, and 86,623 from North Delhi Municipal Corporation areas," the CEO Office said in a statement. Police have registered 564 FIRs and arrested 560 people under the Excise Act, it said, adding, 191 FIRs have been registered under the Arms Act in which 229 people were arrested. They have also seized 298 unlicensed arms and weapons, and 2,323 cartridges and explosives. As many as 40,965 people have been booked till date under various sections of the CrPC and the Delhi Police Act. Special commissioner of police (elections), Praveer Ranjan said, details of cash seizure have been sent to the Income Tax department and a report is awaited. "I-T department officials will analyse if the cash was meant for polling purposes or not," he told reporters. The Delhi CEO office also said, as on date, 14 cases have been recorded for other category of violations, such as misuse of vehicles, violation of loudspeaker norms, illegal meetings and gratification of electors. "Till date, 738 bottles, 67 half-sized bottles, 81,915 quarter-sized ones of Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) and 475 bottles, 762 half-sized and 155458 quarter-sized ones of country liquor and 4,861 bottles of beer have been seized," it said. The Lok Sabha being conducted in seven phases will begin on April 11 and continue till May 19. Delhi will vote on May 12 and the overall results will be declared on May 23. There are over 1.4 crore voters on Delhi's electoral roll, out of which 2,04,420 are in the age group of 18-19, Singh said, adding out of the total electorate size of 1,40,80,442, as many as 77,51,908 are male and 63,27,866 female, while 668 belong to third gender. The number of overseas electors stand at 40. The CEO also appealed to people to apply soon to get themselves enrolled in voters list, saying April 13 would be the last date for receiving application. As many as 13,816 polling stations would be set up in 2,696 locations with each Assembly constituency having a model polling station. According to latest assessment, there would be 433 critical polling stations, officials said. Delhi has seven Lok Sabha seats and 70 Assembly constituencies. The seven parliamentary seats are -- New Delhi, South Delhi, West Delhi, North-East Delhi, East Delhi, North-West Delhi (reserved for SC) and Chandni Chowk. Informing reporters that each parliamentary constituency would have one Pink Booth (staffed only by women), Singh said "As many as 45 localities have been identified where voters are vulnerable to influence, and pre-emptive actions are being planned." As part of voter awareness campaign, the Election Commission and the railways have decided to utilise four long-distance trains to carry motivational messages for the electorate. The trains will display important contact details, including voter helpline number and the National Voters' Services Portal address, besides motivational messages urging voters to exercise their franchise. The Kerala Express was flagged off a couple of days ago from Delhi. Three other trains, the Himsagar Express, Howrah Express and Guwahati Express will also be flagged off soon as part of this campaign. Hours after the Congress released its manifesto for upcoming Lok Sabha election, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday addressed a press conference and slammed the grand old party, accusing it of proposing Balkanisation of India in its manifesto. #WATCH Union Finance Minister & BJP leader Arun Jaitley on Congress manifesto: Some of the ideas are positively dangerous, they are an agenda for the balkanisation of India. pic.twitter.com/XPp8LDXM4c ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 In a scathing attack on the Congress, the senior BJP leader remarked that the manifesto released by the Congress has imprints of tukde tukde gang. Some of the ideas are positively dangerous in the Congress manifesto. They are for an agenda for the Balkanisation of India, Jaitley told reporters. Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram was the head of the committee which prepared the manifesto of the Congress party. Even though there was a drafting committee, but it appears that some of the important points have been drafted by the Congress presidents friend in Tukde Tukde gang when it deals with Jammu and Kashmir, Jaitley said. Jaitley also hit out at the Congress for promising to scrap Indian Penal Code Section 124A, which deals with sedition. It was not even done by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi or even Dr Manmohan Singh government. The Congress manifesto says IPC Section 124A will be scrapped. This means sedition will no longer be a crime. A party that makes such a promise does not deserve a single vote, said Jaitley. In its manifesto, the Congress has also promised to review Armed Forces Special Protection Act (AFSPA) for Jammu and Kashmir. The party has said in the manifesto that it will make suitable changes in the text of the laws in order to protect the human rights and balance the requirements of security. Jaitley also took a potshot at the Congress for promising to review AFSPA and accused the party of going soft on terror. "Rajiv Gandhi got TADA (an anti-terror law that was considered draconian), Narasimha Rao took it back. Manmohan Singh took back POTA," he noted. The Union Finance Minister stressed that there will be rule of insurgents and terrorists in the country if all the plans of Congress are implemented. Earlier, Congress president Rahul Gandhi released the party's manifesto - 'Congress will deliver' with six key ideas: Kaam, Daam, Shaan, Samman, Sushasan and Swabhimaan. Under Shaan, the Congress promised to increase the spending on defence and expedite modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces, saying it will take steps aimed at reversing the trend of declining defence spending under the BJP-led NDA government. In its manifesto, the Congress also promised to create the office of Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) as principal adviser to the Government on matters relating to defence and provide a statutory basis to the National Security Council (NSC) and the office of National Security Adviser (NSA). On internal security, the party said it will establish the National Counter-Terrorism Centre in three months. The party also pledged to make the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) operational by December 2019. In other pledges, Congress said that it will focus on job creation and work for the welfare of farmers after coming to power. Patna: A local court on Tuesday granted bail to Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey in connection with a case where he had misbehaved with Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) KK Upadhyay in Buxar district of Bihar. The minister was caught misbehaving on camera on last Saturday, March 30. The BJP MP entered into an argument with the official after the latter had stopped Choubey's convoy for violating the model code of conduct (MCC). Reports suggest that SDM Upadhyay stopped the convoy of the minister because it had more than allowed vehicles. Choubey is the sitting MP from Buxar and will contest Lok Sabha election from the same constituency. The 66-year-old union minister was a member of Bihar legislative assembly from Bhagalpur (Vidhan Sabha constituency) before entering the fray as BJP candidate for the 16th Lok Sabha election. Choubey was appointed as Minister of State for Health in Narendra Modi's government on September 3, 2017. The United Nations atomic watchdog said on Tuesday that if a deal was reached with North Korea to give up its nuclear programme then it would be ready to send in inspectors within weeks - if asked - to verify and monitor denuclearization. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano told the U.N. Security Council that the IAEA was the only international organization equipped to carry out the job "in an impartial, independent and objective manner." "Subject to the approval of our Board of Governors, we could respond within weeks to any request to send inspectors back to the DPRK," he told the 15-member council during a meeting on the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The official name of North Korea is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have met twice in the past year to discuss denuclearization. North Korea is under tough U.N. Security Council sanctions that have been steadily tightened since 2006 to choke off funding for Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Trump and Kim last met in Vietnam in February, but the summit was cut short after they failed to reach a deal on the extent of economic sanctions relief for North Korea in exchange for steps to give up its nuclear program. On the day that their talks in Hanoi collapsed, Trump handed Kim a piece of paper that included a blunt call for the transfer of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States, according to the document seen by Reuters. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency has not had access to North Korea since Pyongyang expelled its inspectors in 2009, and it now monitors the country's nuclear activities mainly through satellite imagery. Amano said that sending in IAEA inspectors "would help to make the implementation of any agreement sustainable." "It would also contribute to the denuclearization of the DPRK in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner, as required by numerous resolutions of the Security Council," he said. The IAEA already monitors the implementation of a 2015 deal between Iran and world powers to curb its nuclear program. Trump withdrew the United States from the deal with Iran in May 2018. "Our inspectors have had access to all the sites and locations in Iran which they needed to visit," Amano said. Search Keywords: Short link: New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday released its manifesto - 'Congress will deliver' - for the 2019 Lok Sabha election. The manifesto document has been released by party president Rahul Gandhi at the party's Akbar Road headquarters. All top party leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, were present during the release. Delhi: Congress party releases their election manifesto for #LokSabhaElections2019 pic.twitter.com/fccNKOuSqZ ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 "The Congress manifesto has five key ideas, reflecting the party symbol (hand)", said Rahul Gandhi. The Gandhi scion said that the manifesto reflects the voice of the people and not just one man's view. He added that the manifesto lays major thrust on jobs creation, addressing agrarian distress and strengthening the education and health sectors besides charting a roadmap to boost economic growth. It has a separate budget for the welfare of the farmers. "This document has been prepared after consulting a large number of people from various walks of life. The purpose of the manifesto is to spell out the vision party, to move towards a forward-looking economy," said Manmohan Singh. The manifesto committee of the grand old party was headed by former finance minister P Chidambaram. "Manifesto addresses farmers, youth, Dalits, women, industry, security concerns, foreign policy, north-eastern states and much more," he said. New Delhi: The Congress will release its manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls on Tuesday. The manifesto document will be released by Congress president Rahul Gandhi and all top party leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, will be present at the party's Akbar Road headquarters here. Gandhi has said that the manifesto will reflect the people's voice and not just one man's view, while making a clear reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has also said the manifesto will lay major thrust on jobs creation, addressing agrarian distress and strengthening the education and health sectors besides charting a roadmap to boost economic growth. The Congress document is the result of extensive nationwide consultations and it will be a very "powerful" document aimed at redressing key challenges facing the nation, Gandhi said. The Congress had initiated a consultation process across the country and many of its top leaders had interacted with a host of people from different sections to seek their views on their aspirations from the party. The party's manifesto committee was headed by former finance minister P Chidambaram. The Election Commission (EC) on Tuesday stopped the release of a book on the controversial Rafale deal, citing an apparent violation of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) before the Lok Sabha poll. The release of the book was to be chaired by N. Ram, the Managing Director of the Hindu group. It is to be noted that Ram has himself written many news reports on the deal for French-made fighter jets. Sources said that 148 copies of the book were seized from the book author's office. The book titled "Rafale: The Scam That Rocked The Nation" is written by S Vijayan. The publisher of the book wanted to release the book at a school but the school authorities denied permission citing the objection from the EC. The publisher, Bharati Publication, then decided to release the book in its office, but the books were seized by a flying squad of election officers and the Teynampet police. N Ram has slammed the EC's decision, saying it was anti-democratic and illegal. He stressed that the EC's order is aimed at curbing the freedom of speech and of the press. N Ram argued that the release of the book was not going to violate the model code of conduct and said that he will approach the court seeking the release of book. Activist and noted lawyer Prashant Bhushan has expressed displeasure over EC's decision to ban the book on Rafale. He said that the poll panel allows movie on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and allows PM Modi to use AIR and Doordarshan for election speech on anti satellite missile but has decided to ban the book on Rafale. "EC bans book on Rafale scam & seizes copies, citing Model Code of Conduct! EC allows propaganda movie on Modi, allows Modi to use AIR&DD for election speech on Anti satellite missile, allows misuse of of Railways&advertisement money by govt for elections, but bans book on Rafale!," he tweeted. EC bans book on Rafale scam & seizes copies, citing Model Code of Conduct! EC allows propaganda movie on Modi, allows Modi to use AIR&DD for election speech on Anti satellite missile, allows misuse of of Railways&advertisement money by govt for elections, but bans book on Rafale! https://t.co/ePz5KL2Nta Prashant Bhushan (@pbhushan1) April 2, 2019 It is to be noted that Supreme Court is currently hearing a batch of petitions seeking review of a judgement passed by the apex court on December 14 on Rafale fighter jet deal in which the SC had refused to order a probe into the deal for procuring 36 Rafale jets from France. Congress president Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had favoured industrialist Anil Ambani in the Rafale deal allowing him to earn Rs 30,000 crore, while the government has rejected Gandhi's claim maintaining that the deal is completely corruption-free. Hyderabad: Describing Congress and BJP as two sides of the same coin, All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin has said he would consider Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) as a better candidate for the Prime Minister's post than Narendra Modi and All India Congress Committee (AICC) President Rahul Gandhi. Speaking at a public meeting on Sunday night, the Hyderabad sitting MP alleged that both the national parties had 'failed' to deliver on their promises, despite having majority during their respective terms. "I dont know what God will decide and people will decide. If you ask me to chose one of these three, if you ask me, KCR has more ability than Modi and Rahul Gandhi for the Prime Minister's post. He (KCR) understands the Indian constitution much better than Modi and Rahul Gandhi." "I know people will question me on how I can I say this and supporters of Modi will have sleepless nights with my statement," he said. In a different meeting, KCR on Sunday said that a coalition of regional parties will form the Government at the Centre after the coming Lok Sabha polls. Owaisi said he believes that by bagging all the 17 Lok Sabha seats in Telangana by Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and AIMIM, there is a chance that there will be non-BJP and non-Congress Government at the Centre, a development that is beneficial to Telangana. "There is no difference between Congress and BJP. They are two sides of the same coin. How long will this Ram and Sham (BJP and Congress) duo go on?" "Are there no better people than Rahul and Modi? I can confidently say that if you make a list of eligible persons for the Prime Minister's post, KCRs name will be in the list," Owaisi added. KCR has been advocating a non-Congress and non-BJP Government at the Centre, alleging that both parties have failed to meet the people's expectations. He has described MIM as TRSs friendly party. The Left Front would make all efforts to defeat the Congress President Rahul Gandhi in Wayanad and there was no question of withdrawing its candidate, Communist Party of India (CPI) General Secretary S Sudhakar Reddy said on Monday. The Congress announced on Sunday, that Gandhi would contest from Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala besides his traditional stronghold of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. The ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala has fielded CPI's PP Suneer in the segment. CPI is the second biggest constituent in the LDF. "We are not worried about his (Gandhi's) candidature. We will fight. We will make all efforts to defeat him in this election," Reddy told PTI. He said he was personally visiting Wayanad on April 10 to campaign for the LDF candidate. "No question of withdrawing (our candidate in favour of Gandhi). We will fight. We are making every effort to win the seat," Reddy asserted. "Gandhi could have chosen to contest from some other constituency where the BJP was strong -- Karnataka or some other State," he said. "The contest is not going to give any good signal as such, because the Left is committed for the anti-BJP nation-wide platform and on this occasion being the leader of the biggest opposition party, he should not have chosen to contest against the CPI candidate," Reddy argued. He also said it's not good for Gandhi, because the anti-BJP front all over the country would be worried "why such a contest is there." Other (Congress) candidates fighting against the Left and CPI candidate is different from Rahul Gandhi taking on a Front nominee, Reddy maintained. He does not believe Wayanad is a "safe seat" for the Congress, "I don't think so, last time they have won, but that does not mean it's a safe seat for them." On BJP's criticism that Rahul Gandhi chose Wayanad as he feared defeat in Amethi, Reddy noted that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi contested from two constituencies in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and the Amit Shah-led party puts forward "different type of argument" in such case. But he said as far as Gandhi contesting from a second seat was concerned, people would naturally think he was not sure about winning in Amethi. Dehradun: The ruling BJP in Uttarakhand on Monday, accused the Congress of launching a slander campaign against its candidate for Tehri Lok Sabha constituency, claiming a "lie gang" is active in the state unit of the Congress whose "main job is to concoct falsehoods to mislead voters." Rebutting state Congress spokesperson Mathura Dutt Joshi's charge of non-performance against sitting MP Mala Rajya Laxmi Shah, who has been renominated from the seat, the Uttarakhand BJP's media head Devendra Bhasin said she had asked 33 questions and participated in as many debates in the Lok Sabha. "She also played a significant role in many development projects like the Mussoorie-Dehradun ropeway and the all-weather roads project," he said. Shah, who belongs to the erstwhile Tehri royal family, is pitted against Uttarakhand Congress chief Pritam Singh in the Lok Sabha seat. "The lie gang of the Congress has gone into overdrive. It is concocting lies and spreading them to mislead the electorate. Recently it hurled the false charge of non-performance at our sitting MP and candidate for Tehri Mala Rajya Laxmi Shah. Accusing her of doing nothing for her constituency, it said the number of questions asked by our MP in the Lok Sabha were very few," he told reporters. "This is part of a slander campaign by the opposition to mislead the electorate as the party knows defeat awaits it on all the five Lok Sabha seats in the state," Bhasin said. She had 90 to 100 per cent attendance in the House during which she had raised a number of state-specific issues, Bhasin said and challenged the Congress to produce the records of its own top leaders. "Why don't they say something about the performance of their own top leaders? Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi's attendance in the Lok Sabha was only 60 per cent and the number of questions asked by her was zero," he said. Targeting Congress' Rajya Sabha MP from Uttarakhand Raj Babbar who also heads the party in Uttar Pradesh, the Uttarakhand BJP's media head alleged that the actor-politician was never seen in Uttarakhand after being nominated as a member of the Upper House. Before him, another Congress MP from the state, Satish Sharma, also also did the same thing, Bhasin claimed, adding, "Winning and forgetting is the Congress' character. Instead of levelling charges against others they should look within themselves." With the first phase of voting in Lok Sabha 2019 election fast approaching - on April 11, political parties and their respective leaders are putting finishing touches on their strategies and reaching out to voters in a big way. Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads the charge for the Bharatiya Janata Party, Congress on Tuesday released its manifesto with their pro-poor scheme called 'NYAY' already being touted as the main highlight. Regional players like Mamata Banerjee, Chandrababu Naidu, Mayawati and Omar Abdullah too are leaving no stone unturned to take political potshots at rivals while trying to clear the way for their respective electoral success. Thank you for joining us. Do come back again for election live updates on Wednesday (April 3). Here are the updates from Tuesday (April 2): * BJP workers have filed a complaint of violation of model code of conduct against Jaideep Kawade (son MLC & President, People's Republic Party, Jogendra Kawade) & Congress MP candidate from Nagpur Nana Patole, ANI reported. * BJP President Amit Shah holds road show in Bengaluru; BJP MP candidate from Bengaluru South, Tejasvi Surya and BJP Karnataka Vice-President Tejashwini (wife of late Union Minister Ananth Kumar) also present. #Karnataka. BJP President Amit Shah holds roadshow in Bengaluru; BJP MP candidate from Bengaluru South, Tejasvi Surya and BJP Karnataka Vice-President Tejashwini (wife of late Union Minister Ananth Kumar) also present. pic.twitter.com/Z6AjXMPWcF ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 * "There are two kinds of people who have a problem with 'Chowkidar.' One type includes Maha Milawati' and the second includes all those who sponsor terrorists," PM Modi in Gaya, Bihar * The Biju Janata Dal (BJD) on Tuesday declared names for two Lok Sabha and seven Assembly Seats. Notable mentions in the BJD list are Mahesh Sahu, who will contest from Dhenkanal Lok Sabha seat, and Indrani Murmu, who will contest from Keonjhar Lok Sabha seat. Mahesh Sahu is a sitting MLA of the BJD. Furthermore, Rajya Sabha member and Editor of vernacular daily Sambad will contest Assembly election from Khandapada seat. Five sitting MLAs have been denied ticket by BJD in this list, ANI reported. * Watch BJP leader Vineet Agarwal Sharda asking people to vote for 'kamal' (BJP party symbol) during a public rally in Meerut. #WATCH BJP leader Vineet Agarwal Sharda asking people to vote for 'kamal' (BJP party symbol) during a public rally in Meerut. (01.04.2019) pic.twitter.com/wCTnSWprey ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 2, 2019 * Biju Janata Dal (BJD) releases list of 9 candidates; 2 for Lok Sabha polls and 7 for Legislative Assembly polls. Mahesh Sahu to contest from Dhenkanal Lok Sabha seat and Chandrani Murmu from Kendujhar Lok Sabha seat. Odisha: Biju Janata Dal (BJD) releases list of 9 candidates; 2 for Lok Sabha polls and 7 for Legislative Assembly polls. Mahesh Sahu to contest from Dhenkanal Lok Sabha seat and Chandrani Murmu from Kendujhar Lok Sabha seat. ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 * "I want people of Bihar to give a befitting reply to those who are spreading rumours about reservations. Be it Modi or anyone else, no one can remove reservations," said PM Modi in Jamui, Bihar. * Election Commission has written to the President against Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh for violation of model code of conduct. Singh had said: "We all are BJP workers&we want BJP to emerge victorious. We want that once again Modi ji should become the PM." Election Commission has written to the President against Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh for violation of model code of conduct. He had said 'We all are BJP workers&we want BJP to emerge victorious. We want that once again Modi ji should become the PM' on 23rd March. (File pic) pic.twitter.com/22NPW7579a ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 * Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has called the Congress manifesto 'a bundle of lies' and 'the party has expressed its failure over 55 years in its 55-page manifesto.' * Congress manifesto aims at Balkanisation' of India, says Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. *Election Commission of India has written to the Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation and Chairman, Railway Board over "non-compliance of lawful instructions and lackadaisical approach towards enforcing the model code of conduct," news agency ANI reported. * "The way PM Modi's government implemented GST and demonetization, in haste, that affected small businesses; that also led to increase in unemployment. Congress was involved in Bofors and now BJP govt is involved in Rafale," said Mayawati. * The announcements made by the BJP in the last days of their government are just for electoral gains," BSP chief Mayawati says at a rally in Bhubaneswar. * "Don't underestimate our ability to deliver, we'll deliver. We promised we'll deliver. We've delivered in past and we'll deliver in future. Who created telecom jobs? How did we get from 2 million telephones to 1.2 billion," Sam Pitroda, Indian Overseas Congress Chief on party's election manifesto. "How did we provide the Food & Agriculture Revolution? What about Space Revolution? All that these people can do is, talk. Look at our track record," he added. * Congress President Rahul Gandhi on him contesting from Wayanad (Kerala): "There was a demand for me. There is a very strong feeling in south India that they are not being carried by the current govt. South India feels hostility from Mr Narendra Modi." * Congress manifesto has five key ideas, reflecting the party symbol (hand): Rahul Gandhi * Manifesto should reflect the wishes of the people of India: Rahul Gandhi * Congress releases election manifesto for 2019. * Congress to release election manifesto 2019 shortly * PM Modi addresses his first rally of the day, in Odisha's Kalahandi. - Schemes and work of the central government could have reached Odisha a lot quicker if the state government was formed by BJP. The problem lies with the state government here which has not cooperated. - We have tried to bring as many schemes and projects to Odisha as was possible despite the lack of cooperation from the government here. - Congress and BJD have conspired to keep the poor the way they are. They have cheated the poor after every election. - Rajiv Gandhi had once said that he (Centre) sends one Rupee but only 15 Paise reaches Kalahandi. What did Congress do about it? Was it not their responsibility to ensure full amount reaches? Were they not all-powerful back then? Will you forgive those who stole from the poor? When elections come, Congress starts chanting pro-poor mantra, then forget all about them. - Congress will tell you all about the illness but do nothing to give a cure or solution. * Union minister and BJP leader Ashwini Kumar Choubey granted bail in connection with a case against him on charges of misbehaving with Buxar SDM and for violating Model Code of Conduct. * RBI to cut rates again before vote; BJP victory best for economy: Reuters poll (Read full report here) * Congress is set to release its manifesto today. (Read full report here) * PM Modi will be in Bihar's Jamui and Gaya where he will have a rally each. Then, he will Odisha's Bhawanipatna. New Delhi: The Delhi BJP has started a campaign where the party's volunteers are interacting with college students and telling them about various initiatives initiated by the Narendra Modi government aimed towards the youth, a move aimed at reaching out to the first-time voters ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. The campaign - 'Youth4Modi' - being run by Delhi BJP vice president Jai Prakash will be covering colleges, tuition centres and other places frequented by the youth. "The volunteers, who comprise former members of the students unions of colleges or college passouts, have been talking to students about Modi government's initiatives like Startup India, Skill India, Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana and the 10 per cent reservation for economically weaker sections," Prakash said. He also claimed that their volunteers have found a lot of curiosity among the first-time voters about the Balakot air strikes and are curious to know about the operation. Till now, the campaign has covered colleges like Kirori Mal, Shri Ram College Of Commerce, Hansraj College and Ramjas College. The volunteers will soon be visiting Maharaja Agrasen College as a part of the campaign. The campaign was also carried out at the Vishwavidyalaya Metro station recently where Union Minister Vijay Goel addressed the young voters. Over 1.4 crore voters are currently on Delhi's electoral roll, out of which 2,04,420 are in the age group of 18-19. On Sunday, while addressing a 'Main Bhi Chowkidar' event, Modi had urged first-time voters to the see track record and not listen to tape record. "It is the job of the new voters to understand those who lie," he had said. New Delhi: Ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, animal rights body People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India on Monday asked all political parties to adhere to the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) and not use any animal in their election campaigns. PETA India also appealed to the public to report any violations of the poll code, particularly the use of animals in election campaigns by political parties, through a mobile application of the Election Commission of India (ECI). The Lok Sabha elections, to be held in seven phases, starting April 11. "I'm writing from PETA India on behalf of our more than 1.2 million members, to inform you about a ban on the use of animals in election campaigns in the Manual on Model Code of Conduct (MMCC) by the ECI," said PETA India's associate director of policy Nikunj Sharma, in a letter addressing the respective presidents of national political parties. In the letter, Sharma stated that using animals in election campaigns is "unnecessary, archaic and cruel." "During these campaigns, animals are terrified by being forced into the middle of screaming crowds. They are often beaten, whipped, kicked and terrorised while being paraded through the streets and shoved by shouting mobs," he said. He said the animals are also often forced to carry loads in excess of their physical capacities, denied adequate food and water, and seriously injured in the mayhem. "We request that you (political parties) issue directions to your party cadre in order to comply with the provisions of the MMCC, by running eye-catching and creative campaigns that do not subject animals to frightening, frenetic crowds," Sharma stated in the letter. The ECI, in the MCC, has advised the political parties and candidates to refrain from using any animal for election campaign in any manner. Even a party, having reserved symbol depicting an animal, should not make live demonstration of that animal in any election campaign of the party or any of its candidate. Under 'Regulation of Road Shows During Elections,' the manual also banned the display of animals in road shows, the body said. "We are also appealing to the public to report any violations of the MMCC, particularly any use of animals in election campaigns by political parties through the cVIGIL ("Vigilant Citizen") mobile application of the ECI," the letter said. Elaborating about the app, PETA India said it allows people to document violations with pictures or videos in order to establish the veracity of a complaint ex post facto and offers a fast-track complaint reception and redressal system. "This enables users to play a proactive and responsible role in order to help ensure free and fair elections, and it can also help protect animals from abuse. Reporting violations in this way will allow the ECI to take necessary action," it said. New Delhi: Rahul Gandhi led a number of key Congress leaders on Tuesday and released the party manifesto in yet another bid to woo voters and win power. Rahul was joined at the party headquarters by former PM Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, P Chidambaram, AK Antony, Randeep Surjewala and - now in a political role - Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. While the party president had already outlined how its NYAY scheme would highlight its manifesto for Lok Sabha 2019 election, Rahul once again elaborated on how Congress is committed to the cause of removing poverty from the country. Fighting poverty has been a Congress promise for decades. 'Garibi Hatao' was a poll promise of Indira Gandhi and 'Garibi Mitao' has become synonymous with Congress' election strategy in recent years as well. Before the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Congress had played hard at projecting itself as a party devoted to upliftment of the economically marginalised. It was a question of retaining power then. It is a question of coming to power now. Here are some of the highights of Congress manifesto from 2014 and 2019: 'Your Voice Our Pledge' Congress had claimed in its manifesto before the 2014 Lok Sabha election that it is a party that remains committed to the cause of the people. Despite massive corruption charges against some of its leaders, the party maintained that jobs - 100 million - would be created, subsidy would be given to the deserving, export taxes would be done away with, growth rate of 8 per cent within three years, introduction of GST within 100 days of returning to power, fiscal deficit of 3 per cent by fiscal 2017 and $ 1 trillion investment in infrastructure. In what it claimed at the time was the lengthiest manifesto, Congress played hard to win trust, win votes. It did not work as the 'lengthiest manifesto' could scrape in only 44 seats. 'Congress Will Deliver' On Tuesday, Rahul once again made promises galore and said the Congress manifesto will look out for the poor, youth and other sections of the society. "Money for poor, money for farmers," he said. The manifesto promises that Congress would fill 22,000 government jobs, assure employment in gram panchayats for 10 lakh youth, ensure no permission is required for entrepreneurs for three years, a guarantee of 150 days of MGNREGA, separate farmer budget and ensure that defaulting on farm loans won't be a criminal offence but a civil offence. The manifesto also says that six per cent GDP would be for education and that the poor would have access to high-quality medical facilities. Congress' manifesto is also based on the following key pledges: * Minimum Income Guarantee To Eliminate Poverty or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) * Jobs Revolution * Farmers and Farm Labour * Universal Healthcare * GST 2.0 * Armed Forces and Paramilitary Forces * Quality Education For Every Child * Gender Justice * Adivasis * Right to Homestead * End to Hate Crimes * Celebrating Freedom * Protecting Our Institutions * Cities and Urban Governance * Environment and Climate Change These and many others are lofty promises made by Congress for the upcoming election. Will 900 eligible voters choose to put their faith in the party and its promises or will they once again reject Congress? May 23 - counting day - will reveal. SRINAGAR: Defending his statement that Jammu and Kashmir should have a separate 'sadr-e-riyasat' (president) and wazir-e-azam (prime minister), National Conference vice-president Omar Abdullah on Tuesday said that his party would leave no stone unturned for restoration of the terms of accession of Jammu and Kashmir became the part of India. "I have not said anything wrong. I have only reiterated what is a reality. Is it not true that since the day J&K became the part of the country, it had its own 'sadar-e-riyasat' (president) and wazir-e-azam (prime minister) till 1965? Omar asked reporters at Pattan in Baramulla district of north Kashmir. Omar added that the NC had taken the same stand when he was serving as a minister in the NDA government led by late Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. "This is not something new the NC is saying. When I was a minister in the NDA under Vajpayee, then also it was in our manifesto, then also we were talking about the internal autonomy and also about pre-1953 position. If it was right to say these things at that time, then how am I suddenly wrong now? he said. Omar reiterated that his party would seek the restoration of the terms of accession, including the restoration of internal autonomy. "Our stand is same now as it was then. We want the restoration of the internal autonomy of the state and the restoration of the pre-1953 conditions on the basis of which this state had become the part of this country," he said. The NC leader sparked a huge political row on Monday when he said at a rally that Jammu and Kashmir needs a separate PM and president. He had also said that the NC would not allow anyone to make changes with the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. "We won't allow any more attack our on special status. On the contrary, we will strive to get back what was infringed upon. We will work towards getting back the coveted posts of 'sadr-e-riyasat' and prime minister for our state," the NC vice-president had said. Hours after Omar's made the controversial remarks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi slammed the NC leader for demanding a separate PM for Jammu and Kashmir. Omar said that the prime minister made his speech delivered at Bandipora famous by mentioning it in his rally and using it to attack the Congress and other parties. The NC vice-president also advised PM Modi to read history in order to understand the terms of accession. Omar said it has been mentioned in the same Constitution, which Modi vows to uphold. PATNA: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold three election rallies in Bihar and Odisha on Tuesday, April 2. Kicking off his campaign for the upcoming Lok Sabha election in Bihar, the Prime Minister will address rallies in Jamui and Gaya. The Prime Minister will also hold an election rally in Odisha's Kalahandi. As per a release issued by the BJP Bihar unit, PM Modi will be joined by the party national general secretary in-charge for the state Bhupendra Yadav and state president Nityanand Rai in Jamui, where the rally will be held in the afternoon. The Gaya rally, set to be held in the evening, PM Modi will share the dais with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Consumer Affairs Minister Ram Vilas Paswan and Deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi among others. BJP has fielded no party candidate from either Jamui or Gaya, which will be contested by party allies. LJP leader and Ram Vilas Paswan's son Chirag Paswan will contest from Jamui, while JDU candidate Vijay Manjhi is contesting from Gaya. Bihar will go to polls in all the seven phases on April 11, 18, 23, and 29 and May 6, 12 and 19. The counting of votes will take place on May 23. Out of 40 Lok Sabha constituencies in Bihar, BJP and the Janata Dal (United) will contest 17 seats each, while the remaining six would be fought by the LJP. Launching a direct attack on Congress for its minimum guarantee scheme for the poor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said that the Congress remembers poor only during elections. The NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojana) scheme - announced recently by Congress President Rahul Gandhi - guarantees Rs 6,000 per month for the poor. Rahul Gandhi has said that the NYAY scheme will benefit poorest 20% families of the country and the Congress will implement this scheme if it wins the Lok Sabha election. Dubbing NYAY a revolutionary scheme, the Congress president had said that it will change the face of India. They keep chanting the word poor during elections, but they snatch the rights of the poor. This is the truth of the claws of Congress, this is their policy and their principles, PM Modi said while addressing a rally in Odisha's Kalahandi. It was here in Kalahandi that Rajiv Gandhi had said that if he sends Re 1 from Delhi, only 15 paise reaches the poor tribals. After decades when the Congress formed the government in Delhi, they accepted only 16 paise out of Re 1 reaches the poor. So in nearly 25 years, Congress gave only 1 paise relief to Odisha. Do you trust these people? asked the PM. Modi said his government has ensured that if 100 paise is sent to the poor, then they receive entire money. We have managed to do in five years what the Congress could not do in decades. Can you believe how much money was going to the pockets of middlemen and being turned into black money? There was no redressal of grievance of the poor. But the BJP government has stopped the leakage of money for the poor, he said. The prime minister also targeted ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha, claiming that the party has done nothing for the welfare of the people of the state. He accused BJD supremo and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik of taking forward the corrupt practices of Congress. PM Modi said that the BJD government had encouraged mining mafia, chit fund scammers and corrupt officials in the last two decades. It is to be noted that Naveen Patnaik is the CM of Odisha for the last 19 years and PM Modi said in his speech that 19 years were adequate time to change the face of state and usher it on the path of development. In 19 years, a person becomes eligible to vote. In 19 years, a student becomes an engineer, a doctor or graduate. You relied on the BJD for the last 19 years, but now the time has come to change it, the Prime Minister said. Voting for 21 Lok Sabha and 147 Assembly seats in Odisha will take place simultaneously in four phases on April 11, 18, 23 and 29. Kalahandi will go to poll on April 11. The counting of votes will take place on May 23. New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who recently confirmed that he will fight the upcoming national election from Wayanad besides Amethi, said on Tuesday that there was a "demand" for him to contest from Kerala. He also hit out at the Narendra Modi-led BJP government and added that South India feels that PM Modi is "hostile towards it." He was speaking while Congress released their party manifesto for the Lok Sabha election. "There is a very strong feeling in South India that they are not being carried by the present government. South India feels hostility from Mr Narendra Modi," Rahul said. Rahul is currently the MP from Amethi, a constituency that considered to be a Gandhi family bastion. This is the first time he is contesting from two seats. Furthermore, he said, "They (people from South India) feel that they are not being included in the decisions of this country. So I wanted to send a message to South India that we are with you and we are standing with you. That is why I am standing from Kerala." Rahul will file his nomination from Wayanad on April 4 and will be accompanied by sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. Rahul's decision to contest from Wayanad has drawn huge criticism from the opposition. Union Minister Smriti Irani, who is also contesting from Amethi on BJP ticket, alleged that he is confident of his defeat from Amethi and this is the reason why he has decided to contest from a second seat. At Zee News' India Ka DNA conclave, Irani said that her biggest achievement will be when she will defeat Rahul in Amethi. BJP-led NDA has decided to field Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS) chief Thushar Vellappally against Rahul Gandhi from Wayanad. CPI(M) ex-General Secretary Prakash Karat also expressed disappointment over Rahul's decision and said that it shows that the Congress' priority now is to fight against Left in Kerala. (With agency inputs) Asserting that neither the BJP nor the Congress would be able to get a clear mandate in the Lok Sabha polls, Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) working president KT Rama Rao has said that a 'non-BJP, non-Congress' front will soon be a reality. "The country -- which will go to polls in seven phases across 543 constituencies from April 11 -- will see a wind of change in Indian politics with regional parties likely to win at least 160-170 seats and lead a regional force," he said and added that, "The BJP and the Congress will suffer setback and may not even cross the 150 and 100 mark, respectively." Holding that coalition governments continue to stay, Rao said so far regional parties were extending support to the Congress and the BJP, and the time has come to reverse the trend and bring a change in national politics. The TRS working President also said that his father and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, had all 'the qualities and capabilities to become Prime Minister.' "Between us non-Congress and non-BJP parties have 160-170 MPs. May be there comes a time when the Congress and BJP decide to support the coalition instead of leading it. Let the regional forces lead," Rao told PTI in an exclusive interview. "The real power is with regional parties and there is no need to empower the BJP and the Congress," he said, adding it is for this reason that Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, also called KCR, is trying to rally 'non-Congress, non-BJP' parties to come together. "He (KCR) has been saying why should Trinamool Congress throw its weight behind the Congress right before the elections and make them look bigger? What is the point? You can hold all your aces up your sleeve and wait till May 23. Post the elections, we all can sit and decide," he added. Maintaining that regional parties have strength on the ground, Rao said there was no need for regional parties to leverage and give weightage to the so-called national parties. "Can the BJP win a single seat in Tamil Nadu without the support of AIADMK? Then why should these two Dravidian parties give their strength and resources to national parties and make them look bigger?" he questioned. Asked which regional parties are part of a 'non-BJP, non-Congress' front, Rao said negotiations are still on and at an appropriate time everything will be disclosed. "As of now, AIMIM is part of it. There are many parties which are not with UPA or NDA may come. In Tamil Nadu, AIADMK is with BJP, DMK is with Congress, but a bunch of others is in neither camp. Who knows what they will throw up? Go around the country, it is a similar situation." He further said that, "The SP-BSP alliance might win 50-55 seats out of 80 in Uttar Pradesh, while in Telangana out of 17 seats, TRS is confident of winning 16 seats and one seat by ally AIMIM. Likewise in West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress is likely to win 30 plus, in Odisha BJD may win 20." "So, between all of us, we could have anywhere between 120-130 seats. If there are others joining us, it could be 160-170 seats. National parties will have no choice but to support us. Anything can happen," Rao said. Asserting that the LS election is all about setting the tone for governance in Delhi, he said, "Let the BJP and Congress suffer with the bipolar disorder. They might think it is a two way tussle between Modi and Rahul and the rest of the country." Asked who will be the prime minister if such a front becomes a reality, the TRS working president said, "Ideally, we would want a non-BJP, non-Congress prime minister. I do believe Telangana chief minister has it in him. KCR is an able administrator and why cannot he lead the country." He further said, "Rahul Gandhiji who wants to become Prime Minister has 44 MPs in the Lok Sabha. If KCR with 16 MPs or wanting to get 16 MPs, wanting to become prime minister is a tall order, so is Rahul Gandhi with 44, in my opinion." Rao, however, made is clear that KCR is not a probable prime minister. Stating that the coalition era will continue in the country, he claimed both the BJP and the Congress will suffer setback in the Lok Sabha election. "The saffron party has certainly fallen from the high of 2014 when they got 283 seats. They are facing one of the toughest situations. I don't foresee them crossing 150." "Even the BJP's rhetoric in their election campaign shows the party does not have enough to showcase their governance or what they have delivered," he said. "Today, their campaign is all about Pulwama attack. The Prime Minister's sudden announcement about anti-satellite mission, trying to own the DRDO's achievement. All this points to the fact that after five years the BJP leadership really does not have a lot to talk about development issues," he observed. Unfortunately, Congress too has failed to inspire any enthusiasm among the country's electorate, he said and added, "In my opinion, the Congress will not cross 100 and BJP will not cross 150." New Delhi: Congress on Tuesday released a 55-page manifesto titled 'Congress Will Deliver' ahead of Lok Sabha 2019 election. In it, the party made a long list of promises with focus on farmers, youth and economic development. It also made a number of promises in relation to the national security of the country. One of the key promises made by the party was that it would modernise the armed forces if voted to power. "Congress will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government, and increase it to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces," reads the manifesto. " We will expedite all modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces in a transparent manner. We will improve social security, education and health facilities for our Paramilitary Forces and families." Controversially, the manifesto also says that Congress would review the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). AFSPA gives special powers to the Army and central forces deployed in "disturbed areas" to kill anyone acting in contravention of law, arrest and search any premises without a warrant and provide cover to forces from prosecution and legal suits without the Central government's sanction. While those in favour of AFSPA have already begun questioning Congress, some accusing it of trying to undermine India's armed forces, the party has also assured that it would start unconditional talks for peace in Jammu and Kashmir and that armed and paramilitary forces would be reduced in the state while more cops would be deployed. The manifesto also assured that no changes would be made to J&K's constitutional position and that three interlocutors from civil society would be appointed for talks for peace. Mumbai: Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray on Tuesday said his party and the BJP are bound by Hindutva and the two decided to enter into a pre-poll alliance after overcoming differences that soured their ties in the past. In an interview to Sena MP Sanjay Raut in party mouthpiece 'Saamana', Thackeray said he agreed to the alliance after BJP president Amit Shah came to him twice to sort out the issues. The Sena, which has often been critical of the BJP, its leadership and policies of the NDA government, entered into a seat-sharing pact with the ruling party recently. The BJP and Sena agreed to contest 25 and 23 seats, respectively, in Maharashtra which has 48 Lok Sabha constituencies. "...You ask me why did we agree to an alliance again. The whole world is a witness. BJP president Amit Shah came to me not once, but twice. And when the alliance was charted out, we put forth the problems of people. Even the chief minister was present when all this happened," Thackeray said. Shah wanted the sourness between both the parties to end, he said, adding he also agreed to the BJP chief's views. To another query, Thackeray said in the course of discussions, the issues that caused the sourness between the two saffron parties were "ironed out". "Like before, Hindutva is the thread that binds the BJP and the Sena together," he asserted. He also hit out at the opposition parties, saying if they come to power, they would "quarrel" for the prime minister's post as they lack a leader to bind them together. The way the opposition parties have come together now ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, they had made a similar move after the Emergency -- since there was immense anger among people -- and formed the Janata government which lasted for 22 months, he noted. "Then they at least had a face in Jayaprakash Narayan. Now, there is no face to bind the opposition in the country. If the opposition comes to power, there will be quarrelling among them for the prime minister's post," he claimed. "We (Sena and BJP) have Hindutva as a common thread. Hindutva is nationalism," said Thackeray, whose party is an ally of the BJP at the Centre and in Maharashtra. To a query on BJP veteran L K Advani, Thackeray said during the last five-ten years of his father late Bal Thackeray's life, the younger generation took over the Sena and the patriarch guided them, but intervened and spoke only when it was necessary. "Change is a natural process. But it doesn't mean you forget them after making them retire. You have to be forever grateful to them. Because, the Sena supremo, Atalji, Advaniji sowed the seeds in an extremely difficult environment. They risked their lives in spreading Hindutva," he said. Asked if he stood by his earlier statement that the Sena rotted in 25 years of alliance with the BJP, Thackeray said his father extensively travelled across Maharashtra to spread his party. "However, we became inattentive after the alliance (with BJP). This carelessness is no more there. Spreading of one's ideology is not a crime," he said. "Should I keep the Sena limited to the seats which we received as part of the alliance formula? Should we not take our party to other places as well? Because Sena is not a party but an ideology," the 58-year-old leader said. Asked if he had also become a "chowkidar" after tie-up with the BJP, Thackeray said he was just a common man. "I am a Shiv Sainik. I don't need to be separately called a chowkidar. A soldier is a soldier who safeguards the common man and fights for their rights. I don't need to separately become a chowkidar," he said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently added "chowkidar" to his Twitter handle profile and asked people to take the #MainBhiChowkidar pledge against corruption. Several BJP leaders and ministers later followed suit. Asked if the Sena will get a better share in portfolio allocation after the Lok Sabha polls, Thackeray said maintaining relations was the responsibility of both the alliance partners. But, the first priority was to win the elections and the opposition, however weak, cannot be ignored, he added. On the leadership of Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Thackeray said he does not have personal enmity against anyone. "Since they are both younger to me, I look at them as kids. Both these kids are trying to find a stability in the present environment. We will know about their success and failure later. However, I don't see a specific shape of his (Rahul Gandhi's) leadership," he said. New Delhi: Television actress and model Ruhi Singh was booked for allegedly assaulting police personnel in an inebriated state on March 31 in Mumbai's Bandra. "A case has been registered against TV Actor Ruhi Singh & 2 others after she allegedly assaulted police personnel at Linking Road, Bandra before fleeing in her car, in an inebriated state, & meeting with an accident at Santacruz. Incident took place on night of 31 March, " ANI tweeted. Mumbai: A case has been registered against TV Actor Ruhi Singh & 2 others after she allegedly assaulted a police personnel at Linking Road, Bandra before fleeing in her car, in an inebriated state, & meeting with an accident at Santacruz. Incident took place on night of 31 March. ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 Talking about the incident, Additional Commissioner of Police (West region) Manoj Kumar Sharma told DNA, "Santacruz police reached the spot and took her medical samples to check if she was driving under the influence of alcohol. She was booked in a separate case and then allowed to leave. "We have received reports of her blood and medical tests, which have confirmed that she was inebriated at the time of the incident." New Delhi: There is good news for the fans of talented actor Irrfan Khan as he is back to the bay after almost a year. Irrfan was recently spotted at the Mumbai airport and looked healthier than before. He didn't shy away from the shutterbugs who were more than happy to spot him. Irrfan wore a floral shirt with a peach-pink t-shirt inside. He donned a fedora hat in dark blue colour and wore stylish sunnies. Irrfan looked healthy and much better than his previous outing when he was last seen at the Mumbai airport. Check out his pictures: (Pic Courtesy: Yogen Shah) The actor has been away from the arclights for almost a year now. The powerhouse of talent took off to London for undergoing treatment for a rare form of cancerNeuroEndocrine Tumour. He had announced about his illness on social media last year. His fans and the film fraternity were shocked by the news of his health but showered him with speedy recovery messages and constant support. Recently, rumour had it that soon the talented star will get back to movies with 'Hindi Medium 2'. After the huge success of 'Hindi Medium', the makers are planning to go ahead with the sequel and the buzz is that Kareena Kapoor Khan might be seen playing the female lead. Irrfan was last seen in 'Blackmail' and 'Karwaan'. QUITO: Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno on Tuesday said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has "repeatedly violated" the terms of his asylum in the Andean nation`s London embassy, according to a local media interview. Moreno told the Ecuadorean Radio Broadcasters` Association that Assange does not have the right to "hack private accounts or phones" and cannot intervene in the politics of other countries, especially those with friendly relations with Ecuador. Assange took refuge in Ecuador`s London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. That probe was later dropped, but Assange fears he could be extradited to face charges in the United States, where federal prosecutors are investigating WikiLeaks. He says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and is putting pressure on him by isolating him from visitors and spying on him. Ecuador has said its treatment of Assange was in line with international law, but that his situation "cannot be extended indefinitely." The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey, marking the first concrete U.S. step to block delivery of the jet to the NATO ally in light of Ankara`s planned purchase of a Russian missile defence system. US officials told their Turkish counterparts they will not receive further shipments of F-35 related equipment needed to prepare for the arrival of the stealthy jet, two sources familiar with the situation told Reuters on Monday. The Pentagon confirmed the Reuters report that the equipment delivery had been stopped. "Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey`s F-35 operational capability have been suspended," Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mike Andrews, a Defence Department spokesman, said in a statement. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has refused to back down from Ankara`s planned purchase of a Russian S-400 missile defence system that the United States has said would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft. The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest of a series of diplomatic disputes between the United States and Turkey including Turkish demands that the United States extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria, and sanctions on Iran. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the next shipment of training equipment, and all subsequent shipments of F-35 related material, had been cancelled. The aircraft is built by Lockheed Martin Corp. A Pentagon official had told Reuters in March that the United States had a number of items it could withhold in order to send Turkey a signal that the United States was serious about Ankara dropping its ambition to own the S-400. Turkish officials in Ankara were not immediately available for comment. Turkey has said it will take delivery of the S-400s in July. NATO SUMMIT The US decision on the F-35s was expected to complicate Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu`s visit to Washington this week for a NATO summit. On Sunday, Erdogan suffered one of his biggest electoral losses in decades in local elections. "Certain Russian weapon systems are seen as inherently threatening to the United States regardless of who is operating them and for what purpose," Andrew Hunter, a fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said. "Because Turkey is not just an F-35 purchaser, but an industrial partner, blocking delivery of these systems represents a major escalation by the United States as it threatens to impose serious costs on both sides," Hunter said. Reuters reported last week that Washington was exploring whether it could remove Turkey from production of the F-35. Turkey makes parts of the fuselage, landing gear and cockpit displays. Sources familiar with the F-35`s intricate worldwide production process and U.S. thinking on the issue last week said Turkey`s role can be replaced. The United States and other NATO allies that own F-35s fear the radar on the Russian S-400 missile system will learn how to spot and track the jet, making it less able to evade Russian weapons. In an attempt to persuade Turkey to drop its plans to buy the S-400, the United States offered the pricier American-made Patriot anti-missile system in a discounted deal that expired at the end of March. Turkey has shown interest in the Patriot system, but not at the expense of abandoning the S-400. Turkey has engaged with US negotiators in recent days about buying the Patriot system, a person familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity. The system is made by Raytheon Co. Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar in March said that despite some issues, Turkish pilots were continuing their training at an air base in Arizona on the F-35, each of which costs $90 million, and that Ankara was expecting the aircraft to arrive in Turkey in November. By halting jet deliveries, the Pentagon could subsequently delay training of Turkish pilots. Two additional jets are scheduled to arrive in Arizona in April and a significant delay could impact Turkey`s November target date for operations. US lawmakers also have expressed alarm over Turkey`s planned purchase of the Russian system. Four US senators last week introduced a bipartisan bill that would prohibit the transfer of F-35s to Turkey until the U.S. government certifies that Ankara will not take delivery of the S-400 system. Following news of the halt, US Senator Jeanne Shaheen, one of the bill sponsors, said she was glad to hear the administration was "to delay the transfer of F-35 equipment to Turkey to help ensure U.S. military technology and capabilities cannot fall into the hands of the Kremlin." Borderless Access Hires in Romania and South Africa Panel provider Borderless Access has appointed Horia Hateg-Codrut as Client Servicing Manager for Germany/Eastern Europe, while Bev Tigar joins as Client Development Lead for South Africa. Borderless Access initially made its name as an emerging markets panel specialist, before adding developed countries and other digital MR services. Hateg-Codrut joins the company's new office in Romania, having previously worked at Insites Consulting as Presales Administrator, and SSI as an Account Executive / Sales Consultant. Johannesburg-based Tigar most recently served as Senior Team Leader at Kantar TNS, before which she spent thirteen years at Nielsen, latterly as Executive Director, Business Development. Commenting on the appointments, CEO Ruchika Gupta said: 'We are constantly looking at new markets where we can enable clients with rich insights using our digital market research solutions. The appointment of Horia Hateg, in Romania and Bev Tigar for the South Africa region, is a natural step towards furthering our aggressive growth goals while meeting the high expectations expected by our clients'. Web site: www.borderlessaccess.com . Gov. Ned Lamont said Tuesday he is exploring private management of a new public benefit that the Democratic governor has pledged to create this year with the support of labor and over the concerns of business: A paid family and medical leave program financed by a tax on employees. If I have somebody who wants to administer this thing and take the financial risk in return for a 10-year contract, thats the way I like to think about these things, said Lamont, a cable entrepreneur elected last fall.. The Lamont administration and Democratic lawmakers have proposed competing versions of legislation that essentially would create a disability insurance program that would pay workers at least a portion of their wages to care for family members for up to 12 weeks. Negotiations are underway with legislative committee co-chairs and other stakeholders about the variables of such a benefit: How much weeks of wages would be offered? What percentage of wages would be replaced? Who would be eligible? What constitutes a family member? As a form of insurance to be covered by a half-percent payroll tax on employees, those variables must be set before actuaries can assure the governor and legislature of the programs solvency. We are sitting down with the respective chairmans as we speak, right now, Lamont said. Im also talking to folks in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and other places, New York, where we can learn from their experience. And were going to take the best ideas we can and put that forward in a bill we know is fiscally locked tight. Advocates of paid family and medical leave said Tuesday that a new poll they commissioned from BLS Research & Consulting found 88 percent of registered voters supporting such a benefit, with support across party lines. Support dropped to 82 percent when respondents were told the program would offer 12 weeks of paid leave and would be paid for through very small payroll deductions. The National Federation of Independent Business said the poll offers an incomplete view. A public poll doesnt reflect a reality small businesses would face if one or more employees are off the job for up to 12 weeks, the NFIB said in a statement. Its highly possible the required work cant be completed. Maybe large companies with many employees could handle it, but this will become an impossible circumstance for most small businesses. Lindsay Farrell, the executive director of the Working Families Party, a union-financed group and part of the coalition backing passage of the bill, said the advocates are skeptical about private management, but their goal is a solid program with benefits generous enough to be useful to lower-paid workers. This is not an ideological fight. We just want to make sure the program works, Farrell said. Most people dont have a very good experience with private insurance companies. Its public dollars. We want to make sure we keep the costs down for people. If the program is not privatized, it would be run by the state Department of Labor. Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven, has publicly urged the administration to look at private management, but the GOP still was dubious about paid family and medical leave as is currently being considered by Democrats. I think there still is a long way to go, Fasano said. I think having it funded by an outside group saves money, will be done more efficiently and probably gives the bill a bigger chance of actually working. But there is a lot more to this bill that raises concerns with my caucus and wont garner votes in the current form. This story originally appeared on the website of The Connecticut Mirror, www.ctmirror.org. The Trump administration stepped up its threat to close down the US-Mexico border on Tuesday, warning both Congress and Central American governments to take action to stem the flow of migrants into the country. "The president's not threatening. He's taking his job as the commander in chief very seriously in terms of protecting the American people," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. Closing the border is "not our first choice," she said. However, she added, "Maybe that it's the best decision." Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen cut short an official trip to Europe to return for meetings early Tuesday on the border crisis. And DHS officials said border crossing times were already lengthening as they divert staff to areas between official ports to deal with tens of thousands of migrant families crossing illegally into the country. A senior Homeland Security official, who declined to be named, told reporters that a definitive solution on border closures had not been made yet. "The bottom line is all options are on the table right now," he said. "We are in a full blown emergency," he said. "The volume of vulnerable populations that's arriving is unsustainable.... The humanitarian situation cannot be ignored and the security situation cannot be ignored." On Saturday Trump said in a tweet that he was prepared to shut border crossings to force Mexico to halt the flood of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Central America. Officials said the number being detained for crossing the border illegally has reached near 100,000 a month, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. "Mexico must use its very strong immigration laws to stop the many thousands of people trying to get into the USA. Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border!" The warning stirred fears across border populations who cross legally daily for business, family visits and other reasons. But it also shook US and Mexican industry, who depend heavily on the open border for trade in everything from farm goods to auto parts. Delays for incoming traffic at key ports mounted Monday, hitting three hours at Brownsville, Texas, as port staff were diverted to dealing with migrants. DHS says that besides getting Mexico to block the transit of migrant caravans to the border, Congress should take immediate action to give border officials the power to forcibly repatriate Central American illegal immigrants, including children who arrived alone, back to their countries. Search Keywords: Short link: A new trend has been gaining momentum in the media and in legislatures: presidential tax disclosure bills. These bills would require a presidential candidate, and often their vice-presidential counterpart, to disclose their tax returns for the previous five years to be able to gain access to the states ballot. Continue > By Emily Blanford State policymakers continue to explore innovations in Medicaid programs to address costs and outcomes. This blog, the second in a two-part series, discusses Medicaid state policies related to substance use disorder and mental health innovations; payment and delivery system reforms; and long term services and supports. Part one of the series highlighted state actions related to Medicaid expansion and community engagement and work requirements. Substance use disorder and mental health innovations: Mental health and substance use treatment have long been an area of focus for improvement in state Medicaid programs. One way states are trying to improve outcomes and reduce costs is through the use of 1115 demonstration waivers, rather than using more traditional Medicaid coverage options. These 1115 waivers allow states to design services in a way that meets their unique needs. Currently, 27 states have an approved 1115 waiver to provide mental health and/or substance use treatment services. In 2018, several states expanded their mental health and substance use treatment options. For example, Illinois enacted the Early Mental Health and Addictions Treatment Act, which provides for a pilot program for youth. Illinois also enacted legislation requiring Medicaid reimbursement for telehealth services provided by substance abuse centers through HB 2907. Missouris legislature (HB 2280) extended Medicaid eligibility and substance use treatment for women up to one year after giving birth. Payment and delivery system reforms: To reduce costs and create efficiencies through better coordination of services, states have implemented or are considering payment and delivery system reforms. Key models states are using for these reforms, as defined by the Kaiser Family Foundation, include patient-centered medical homes, ACA health homes options, accountable care organizations, episode of care initiatives and Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) programs. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 states had at least one delivery system or payment reform model in place in fiscal year 2018 and 19 states indicated they will be looking to expand initiatives. For example, in the general budget bill for fiscal year 2019, Massachusetts included provisions to develop models within Medicaid including the use of patient-centered medical homes and accountable care organizations. Long term services and supports: States also continue to modify and expand access to long term services and supports, particularly community-based supports to avoid more costly institutional services. Many states are struggling with a lack of an adequate workforce to provide long term services and supports. Delaware enacted HB 200, which assured home care workers receive the same level of reimbursement whether they are working through a managed care organization or on a fee-for-service basis. Washington enacted SB 6199 which allows consumers to direct their own services to help improve access to community-based services. The Money Follows the Person (MFP) demonstration grant provided states with an opportunity to reduce costs for services by creating the infrastructure to transition individuals out of institutional settings to community-based settings. With MFP demonstration funding expiring, states are looking to extend the program or provide some of the supports available through the MFP program. For example, Colorado enacted HB 18-1326, which extends services similar to those established under the MFP demonstration more permanently. Connecticut expanded the number of individuals to be served through their MFP program by repealing an enrollment limitation in HB 5253. With many states running out of funding, federal lawmakers passed a three-month extension of MFP funding in 2019, making this an area states will continue to watch for funding key long term services and supports. We anticipate that these issues will remain at the forefront of state legislatures in 2019, as policymakers continue to adjust existing policies and develop innovative new solutions. Keep track of developments in state Medicaid programs and other health reforms through NCSLs Health Innovations State Law Database. Emily Blanford is a program principal in NCSLs Health Program. Email Emily By Express News Service NEW DELHI: In a bid to safeguard the interest of domestic manufacturers, India has extended anti-dumping duty on imports of certain types of sheets used in solar cells from China, South Korea, and Thailand for another five years. On Monday, a Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) notification said that it would impose a duty of $537 to $1,599 per tonne on imports of Ethylene Vinyl Acetate sheet for solar module being exported by these four nations. The anti-dumping duty imposed shall be effective for a period of five years (unless revoked, superseded or amended earlier), said the Department of Revenue in a notification. The directorate had initiated the probe in April last year following a complaint by a domestic company, wherein, it had concluded that imposition of the duty is required to offset dumping. The product is a polymer based component used in the manufacturing of solar PV (Photo Voltaic) modules. Imports of components used in the solar industry have increased post Indias launch of its ambitious national solar policy -- Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission -- in January 2010. Data shows that imports of these sheets from the four countries have increased to 6,367 tonne during the period of investigation (October 2016 to September 2017) from 4,674 tonne in 2016-17. Under this scheme, the country had set a target of generating 20,000 megawatt (MW) of solar power by 2022. Separately, the central government has again extended its deadline to impose retaliatory customs duties on 29 US products, including almond, walnut and pulses, till May 2. It may be noted that the government has extended this deadline over half a dozen times since June 2018, when it decided to impose them in retaliation to high customs duties imposed by the US. By PTI NEW DELHI: Indian aviation watchdog DGCA has approved the summer schedule of flights of Jet Airways from March 31 to April 25 only, according to an official document. The summer schedule of flights of all other domestic airlines such as Vistara, IndiGo, Air India and GoAir have been approved till October 26, according to the document. The summer schedule begins on March 31, 2019, for all the airlines. As per the international practice, DGCA approves two flight schedules in a year, namely, 'summer schedule' effective from Sunday of the last week of March and 'winter schedule' effective from Sunday of the last week of October. ALSO READ | Jet Airways pilots decide to wait, defer strike to April 15 A major crisis at the struggling Jet Airways was averted Sunday after its pilots' body, National Aviator's Guild (NAG), deferred till April 15 its call for halting operations. The NAG, which claims to represent around 1,100 of the 1,600 Jet Airways pilots, had announced earlier that its members will not fly from April 1, unless their salary dues were cleared and clarity was provided on future payments by March 31. On March 25, Jet Airways' board approved a resolution plan formulated by SBI-led domestic lenders. Under the plan, lenders decided to take control of the airline and make a fund infusion of Rs 1,500 crore. Consequently, the stake of promoter Naresh Goyal has come down to 25.5 per cent from 51 per cent, while that of Abu Dhabi's Etihad Airways, which had a 24 per cent stake in the carrier, came down to 12 per cent. Express News Service NEW DELHI: In a big relief to over 70 firms that were facing insolvency proceedings due to payment defaults, the Supreme Court on Tuesday scrapped the controversial February 12, 2018 circular of the Reserve Bank of India. We found RBIs February 12 circular to be ultra vires (beyond ones legal power or authority), the two-judge bench of Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman and Justice Vineet Saran said. The RBI notification on Resolution of Stressed Assets Revised Framework dated February 12, had mandated banks to classify even a one-day delay in debt servicing as default, formulate a resolution plan within 180 days of default, and refer the case to National Company Law Tribunal. This meant banks had to report any loan account of over Rs 2,000 crore under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code if it was not resolved within 180 days of default. According to ICRA, the RBI circular impacted Rs 3.8 lakh crore worth of debt across 70 large borrowers, of which 34 borrowers responsible for Rs 2 lakh crore debt were in the power sector. Many large power companies such as Essar Power, GMR Energy, KSK Energy, and Rattan India Power as well as The Association of Power Producers and Independent Power Producers Association of India had in August last year moved the SC challenging the constitutional validity of the RBI circular. The circular was one of the factors that resulted in a public spat between the mint street and the north block, finally resulting in the ouster of RBI governor Urjit Patel. However, the position of RBI was not altered with change in its leadership. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das also refused to dilute the February circular.Terming it a positive and pro-industry judgment, Supreme Court lawyer Dipak Bhattacharya said, It sets legal limits to a regulator as it should. Mahesh Agarwal, a lawyer who represented power and shipyard firms in the case said: Banks would now be in a position to take an independent decision with regard to the resolution of debts, which can now be done by way of settlements rather than forced insolvency proceedings. Experts maintain that while it will not impact the asset quality, it may drag down the resolution process. T Muruganandham By Express News Service CHENNAI : Dr J Jayavardhan, sitting MP of South Chennai parliamentary constituency which had turned many illustrious leaders to the Lok Sabha in the past, is seeking the peoples mandate for a second term. When he contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, he was the youngest among the candidates - just 26 years old and he is the son of Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar and belongs to fishermen community. Excerpts from the interview with the soft-spoken Jayavardhan: Q: What have you done to the constituency to seek a mandate for a second term? A: Due to my efforts, funds were sanctioned and many projects were completed. For example, all railway stations in my constituency have been sanctioned foot-over bridges. For the preservation of Pallikaranai Marshland which was affected by the Perungudi dumping yard, solid waste management project worth Rs 1,200 crore has been initiated. Besides, flood prevention works were going on at a cost of Rs 1,250 crore with German assistance apart from Tamil Nadu PWD works being carried out at cost of Rs 1,300 crore. Q: Your constituency has sizeable fishermen population. What have you done for them? A: The people of Uroor Alcot Kuppam have been asking for a sewage line for such a long time. Now works were on to lay sewage lines. For construction of community hall in Nochikuppam, I have allotted Rs 60 lakh and the works are on. I have been reviewing the ongoing infrastructure works in every fishing hamlet in my constituency. I have raised calling attention motion several times with regard to the release of fishermen arrested by Lankan Navy. Q: Do you think you will win this election since there is an anti-incumbency mood among the people ? A: The people of our State know clearly that the Congress and its partner DMK had betrayed the people of Tamil Nadu on many issues. In 2014, Tamil Nadu people gave them a zero in Lok Sabha elections and this time too, the people would sideline these parties. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Q: What do you promise for the people ? A: I will implement more long term projects for water management, solid waste management, traffic management etc., Q : There is a complaint that you did not meet the people of your constituency frequently? A : I have walked each and every street of Mylapore with R Natraj, MLA to know the grievances of the people. Similarly, I had criss-crossed T Nagar with MLA Satyanarayanan. During my visits, I took note of peoples grievances and earnestly tried to resolve them. I also visited many areas with officials from key departments. By Express News Service NEW DELHI: The Congress manifesto released on Tuesday promised to bring clarity about the power and role of the Lieutenant Governor and the chief minister in the national capital by amending the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Act. "Congress promises to amend the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Act, 1991 to make it clear that the L-G shall act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers except in matters concerning the three reserved subjects," the Congress manifesto said under the 'Federalism and Centre-State relations' section. The 'reserved subjects' are land, police and public order. Though Delhi has its Legislative Assembly, it does not enjoy the power of a full state and the L-G plays a critical role in administering the city. Incidentally, the Aam Aadmi Party government has been at loggerheads with the office of the L-G, accusing him of not allowing the elected chief minister to function. READ| Congress assures statehood to Puducherry, promises to amend law to restrict LG's power to three subjects Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his Cabinet colleagues have been saying for long that as the government does not have full autonomy, it faces a lot of difficulties and resistance from the L-G to implement various projects and schemes for public welfare. As the Congress skirted the issue of full statehood for Delhi in its manifesto, it drew a sharp reaction from the AAP, which has made the issue of complete autonomy its main poll plank in the Lok Sabha election. Terming the development 'surprising' and 'shocking', Gopal Rai, in-charge of the party in Delhi, stated that it is a U-turn of the party from its previous stand of 2015 when it promised to grant the status of statehood to Delhi once it come to power. "There will not be a compromise from our side on the agenda of statehood. Delhi Congress should answer as to why the issue has not been mentioned in the manifesto. The party should re-think this manifesto is a conspiracy against the people of Delhi, who desperately want to have the full powers of a state," said Rai. Delhi Congress president Sheila Dikshit had already rejected the idea, saying that full statehood is not possible for Delhi. "We had tried this trice when we were in power in Delhi for 15 years, but could not manage full statehood tag for Delhi. To make Delhi a complete state, amendments are required in the constitution," the Congress leader had said. Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari has also expressed his opposition to full statehood for Delhi. By PTI NEW DELHI: In what could escalate the tussle between the AAP dispensation and the Centre over DMRC's Phase-IV, the Delhi government Tuesday alleged that the Union government has made some "unilateral changes" in the project, without communicating any reasons. In a statement, the Delhi transport department said, "If the Government of India was of the opinion that only three 'Priority Corridors' were required to be considered in the first stage, it could have very well communicated to the Delhi government and in that case, the Delhi cabinet could also have approved only these three corridors." In early March, three of the six proposed corridors, got the Union cabinet nod. These are: Mukundpur-Maujpur (12.54 km), Janakpuri West-R K Ashram (28.92 km) and Tughlakabad-Aerocity (20.20 km). "The Delhi government had approved all the six corridors proposed by the Delhi Metro in Phase-IV. However, the Government of India thereafter approved only three corridors out of the six approved by the Delhi Cabinet. Once the project report has been approved by the Delhi government, the Government of India should not have unilaterally made any changes. A clear stand of the Delhi government is that the Government of India should also have approved all the six Corridors of Delhi Metro Phase-IV," the statement said. These kind of "unilateral changes" by the Centre without either taking the Delhi government into confidence or even "without communicating any reasons for its change in stand, is not comprehensible", it said. Secondly, the component-wise cost has also been "revised" by the Centre "unilaterally" without assigning any reasons or justification, the Delhi government alleged in the statement. "Equity component of the Delhi government has been increased from 8.08 per cent to 16.36 per cent," it claimed. "Similarly, the entire amount towards land acquisition has been apportioned to the Delhi government whereas in the earlier three phases, it was apportioned between Government of India and the Delhi government equally," it said. Meanwhile, amid a report that Delhi transport minister Kailash Gahlot had directed his department to tell the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) not to start work on Ph-IV until it got further clarifications on the project's funding, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said, the Delhi government's allegation that their share of expenditure for the three corridors approved by the Centre is "more than its earlier proposal is baseless, false and derived on false assumptions". "It appears to be another propaganda of the Delhi government to stall the Ph-IV project and deprive the people of Delhi from its benefits," it alleged in a statement. "So far, no letter has been received from Delhi government on this matter. It has come to the notice only from the press reports that Delhi government has asked Delhi Metro to stop the work till the matter is cleared," the statement by the ministry said. The fact of the matter is that as per the proposal of three corridors submitted by DMRC in January 2018 (the cost of which was proportionate to the cost of the six corridors approved by Delhi Cabinet earlier) the total liability of city government was Rs 8,872 cr whereas, as per the cost approved by the Centre in March, the total liability of Delhi government has come down by more than Rs 1,000 cr to Rs 7,844 crores, the HUA ministry claimed. The Delhi government in its statement also alleged that its share in the project cost has also been "increased substantially" as compared to that approved by the Delhi cabinet. "Contribution of Delhi government towards three 'Priority Corridors' (including additional 244 cars) has been increased from 20.77 per cent to 31.44 per cent. The above unilateral changes are not only against the federal system of government but also substantially increase the financial burden of the Delhi government, therefore while releasing the amount of Rs 200 crore for the Metro Ph-IV, the above-mentioned concerns have been conveyed to the DMRC," the Delhi government's statement said. The Delhi Metro had last year written to the city government and the Centre seeking nod to begin work on the three 'priority corridors' which were approved in March by the Union Cabinet under the Phase-IV project, DMRC sources had earlier said. The HUA ministry also alleged that the Delhi government has been "following a similar propaganda to stonewall the Delhi-Meerut RRTS (Regional Rapid Transit System) project also". "The delay of four years by Delhi government in providing approval for Ph-IV has escalated the cost of the project by about Rs 5000 cr. Similarly, the delay in approving the Delhi-Meerut RRTS projects by two years has led to a cost increase of Rs 3,100 cr, the HUA ministry claimed in the statement. The funding pattern of Delhi Ph-IV project approved by Centre is similar to the metro projects of Kanpur, Ahmedabad-Phase2, Patna, Agra, Surat, etc, and based on the Metro Rail Policy 2017," it said. By Express News Service VIJAYAWADA: Objecting the appointment of KK Sharma (retd IPS) as the Central Police Observer (CPO) to Andhra Pradesh, the TDP on Monday lodged a complaint with the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) seeking the shifting of the former from the State. TDP Rajya Sabha MP Kanakamedala Ravindra Kumar submitted a representation to the CEC mentioning that Sharma was shifted to AP after his appointment as Central Police Observer to West Bengal was objected by Trinamool Congress and observed that it was ridiculous to send an officer, who was not suitable in West Bengal to AP. In the complaint, it was mentioned that the TDP already expressed serious reservation on the appointment of Sharma as the CPO on the ground that he had affiliation to the RSS. There had been many reports in the newspapers about the controversial conduct of this officer. Moreover, he is retired police officer. How do you expect a retired officer to command the deployment of forces? What action can you take in case the officer does not perform his functions properly. Going by the reports what confidence can you give to political parties that he is going to be fair? If these issues are not addressed how can we expect that the Election Commission is fair in conducting the elections, the TDP representation read. By Express News Service On Monday, Dabangg 3, starring Salman Khan began shooting for the film in Indore. The film, directed by Prabhudeva, has the actor reprising the role of Chulbul Pandey. This third installment of the series features Sudeep, who is playing an antagonist, who is said to joining the Dabangg sets from the first week of May. The actor is a known face in Bollywood with films like Phoonk, Rann, Raktha Charitra. His popular Telugu film Eega was dubbed in Hindi as Makkhi. The actor is getting back to Bollywood after almost a decade. Salman took to social media to share the news through a video. Arbaaz Khan and I have just landed in Indore where we were both born and we are going to Mandleshwar and Maheshwar to shoot for Dabangg where our grandfather was posted when he was in the police force (sic), he said. Credit: Rob Blackham British guitar legend Robin Trower kicks off a U.S. tour tonight in Alexandria, Virginia, in support of his recently released studio album, Coming Closer to the Day. Coming Closer to the Day continues a prolific run for Trower, who's released five albums in the last six years. The 74-year-old musician tells ABC Radio that the new album is a bit different from his recent previous releases, in that "it's got more personal thoughts," adding, "[L]ots of the lyrics are very personal to me. They're about me or what I'm thinking." Case in point: the album's title track, which Robin explains is "me thinking about, I've got less ahead than I've got behind meI've got some stuff to do and I better get on with it or, you know, don't bother." Musically, Coming Closer to the Day is steeped in the blues, with some nods to Trower's hero, Jim Hendrix, and elements of R&B and soul as well. "I determined three albums ago that I would start to allow all my influences to breathe and come through what I was doing rather than denying them," Robin notes. "So, I'mdrawing on a lot of black music, basically, and I feel I'm achieving music ofmore depth and soul." Impressively, Coming Closer to the Day also marks the latest album on which Trower's handled all guitar, vocal and bass parts. "That's what really is a lot of fun, to do everything," he declares. Robin says he's hoping play three or four of the new songs at his U.S. shows, alongside material from his classic 1974 album, Bridge of Sighs -- "the mainstay" of his set -- as well as songs from 1975's For Earth Below and 1977's In City Dreams. Here are all of Robin's U.S. tour dates: 4/2 -- Alexandria, VA, Birchmere 4/4 -- Glenside, PA, Keswick Theatre 4/5 -- Huntington, NY, Paramount Theatre 4/6 -- Montclair, NJ, Wellmont Theater 4/10 -- Buffalo, NY, Asbury Hall 4/11 -- Northfield, OH, Northfield Park 4/13 -- Grand Rapids, MI, 20 Monroe Live 4/14 -- Milwaukee, WI, Pabst Theatre 4/18 -- Lincoln, NE, Bourbon Theatre 4/19 -- Kansas City, MO, Voodoo Lounge 4/20 -- Tulsa, OK, Brady Theater 4/24 -- Austin, TX, Moody Theater 4/26 -- Dallas, TX, House of Blues 4/27 -- Houston, TX, House of Blues 4/28 -- San Antonio, TX, Aztec Theatre 5/2 -- Phoenix, AZ, Celebrity Theater 5/3 -- Anaheim, CA, City National Grove 5/4 -- Los Angeles, CA, The Wiltern 5/5 -- Ventura, CA, Majestic Ventura Theater 5/8 -- Santa Cruz, CA, The Catalyst 5/9 -- Petaluma, CA, Mystic Theatre 5/10 -- San Francisco, CA, The Fillmore 5/11 -- Lake Tahoe, NV, Harrah's 5/12 -- Jackson, CA, Rancheria Casino 5/15 -- Eugene, OR, McDonald Theater 5/16 -- Portland, OR, Roseland Theater 5/17 -- Seattle, WA, The Moore Theatre And here's the Coming Closer to the Day track list: "Diving Bell" "Truth or Lies" "Coming Closer to the Day" "Ghosts" "Tide of Confusion" "The Perfect Wrong" "Little Girl Blue" "Someone of Great Renown" "Lonesome Road" "Tell Me" "Don't Ever Change" "Take Me with You" Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Egypts current account deficit widened to $2.1 billion in the last three months of 2018 from a deficit of $1.78 billion in the same period a year previously, according to Reuters calculations based on central bank data released on Monday. Tourism improved in Egypt. Travel revenues rose to $2.86 billion in the quarter from $2.28 billion in the same quarter last year, Reuters calculations showed. Foreign portfolio investments recorded an outflow of $2.65 billion in the quarter versus an inflow of $540.7 million in the same quarter the year prior. Overall, the balance of payments in the second quarter of fiscal year 2018/19 is negative because we achieved a deficit for the first time since fiscal year 2015/16, mainly pulled down by negative net portfolio investments due to the turbulence in emergent economies, said Yara Elkahky, an economist at Naeem Brokerage. Egypts net foreign direct investments declined in the same period to $1.74 billion from $1.9 billion a year earlier, Reuters calculations showed. Petroleum exports rose to $3.2 billion in the quarter from $2.03 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. Petroleum imports declined to $2.36 billion from $3.23 billion year-on-year. Egypt became a net exporter of natural gas in late 2018. The central bank had previously separated petroleum investments but did not do so in the report released on Monday. The trade deficit narrowed to $9.36 billion in the quarter from $9.84 billion in the second quarter of the 2017/2018 financial year. The petroleum trade balance will continue to improve on the back of gas exports, said Radwa El-Swaify, head of research at Pharos Securities Brokerage. The non-petroleum trade deficit should stabilise pending an improvement in exports. Suez Canal revenues edged up to $1.49 billion in the quarter from $1.39 billion year-on-year. Expatriate remittances fell to $6.14 billion in the quarter from $7.1 billion year-on-year. The overall balance of payments registered a deficit of $2.06 billion during the quarter, the second quarter of the fiscal year beginning in July. It registered a surplus of $515.2 million in the same period last year. Hopefully, tourism will continue to outperform, El-Swaify said. And foreign portfolio investments have actually reversed their trend, so this is an item that will change going forward. Egypts economy has struggled to lure back foreign investors and tourists since a 2011 uprising drove them away. In late 2016, it signed a $12 billion deal with the International Monetary Fund to boost growth. As part of the plan, the government imposed economic reforms that have strained the budgets of millions of Egyptians, among them devaluing the currency, cutting energy subsidies and introducing a value-added tax. Search Keywords: Short link: By PTI HYDERABAD: A local court Tuesday sentenced well-known Telugu actor-producer M Mohan Babu to one-year imprisonment in a 2010 cheque bounce case. The 23rd Special Magistrate Court here also directed him to pay a fine of Rs 41.75 lakh in connection with the case filed by Telugu director Y V S Chowdary. Mohan Babu's film production company, Sri Lakshmi Prasanna Pictures, which was also named in the case, was directed to pay a fine of Rs 10,000 to the complainant, Chowdary's advocate K Satya Saibaba said. 'Devadasu' fame Chowdary had filed the complaint after he received Rs 1.10 crore out of Rs 1.60 crore remuneration that was offered by the film company for directing Telugu film 'Saleem', starring Manchu Vishnu, Ileana DCruz, among others. The movie was released in December 2009. For the remaining amount, Mohan Babu had given a cheque of Rs 40.50 lakh, which got returned for "insufficient" funds, the counsel said. The court sentenced Mohan Babu to one year in jail besides directing him to pay the fine. After a plea was filed seeking suspension of the order, the court allowed it and suspended its order for one month to enable the petitioner to go for appeal in a higher court. The actor had joined the main opposition YSR Congress Party in Andhra Pradesh last month. By PTI LUCKNOW: Days after breaking away from the SP-BSP-RLD alliance in Uttar Pradesh, the Nishad Party Tuesday alleged that Akhilesh Yadav was working under Mayawati's "pressure" and expressed confidence that the BJP will give it an adequate number of seats in the state to contest the Lok Sabha polls. Barely three days after joining the alliance, the Nishad Party on March 29 sprang a surprise by parting ways with the fledgeling anti-BJP alliance and meeting Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. "We have spoken to the BJP leadership and are awaiting a positive response from its president, Amit Shah. There is no bargaining from our side. I trust them (BJP). Our main issue is of reservation and we want to contest the polls on our party symbol," Nishad Party president and founder Sanjay Nishad said. ALSO READ | Lok Sabha elections 2019: Parties woo Nishad community to gain big in Uttar Pradesh The Nishad Party was formed in 2016 to empower Nishads, Kewats, Binds and other communities, whose livelihoods are dependent on rivers. Members of these communities are mostly boatmen or fishermen and are demanding schedule caste status. On why he decided to part ways with the alliance, Nishad said, "I wanted the Gorakhpur and Maharajganj seats on which I was given assurance by the SP chief (Akhilesh Yadav)." "But later, I was offered one seat and was asked to contest on the SP's symbol, for which I am not ready. I wanted to contest on my own party symbol 'Bhojan Bhari Thali' (plate with food). Akhilesh is working under pressure from (BSP supremo) Mayawati and betrayed me. So, I had to take the decision," he said "In the BJP, its leader and cabinet minister Sidharth Nath Singh, whom I trust, arranged my meeting. "I am hopeful that I will be getting positive response from them (BJP)," Nishad said. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE He said he had organised a meeting of SP and Nishad Party members on April 12 in Gorakhpur, but it was cancelled by the SP. "There was resentment among my party's cadre, which was earlier alerting me as they expected betrayal by the SP," Nishad said. "The party workers were not willing to contest on the SP symbol and many of them began quitting. The SP did not put our name on the posters/letters or anything. Our party workers, authorities, core committee were upset with it," he said. Sanjay Nishad's Nirbal Indian Shoshit Hamara Aam Dal (Nishad Party) had contested the Gorakhpur parliamentary by-poll in 2018 on the SP symbol and his son, Praveen Nishad, defeated BJP's Upendra Dutt Shukla by over 21,000 votes. It was seen as a major setback for Chief Minister Adityanath as he had represented the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat several times before. While Praveen secured 4,56,513 votes, Shukla got 4,34,632 votes and Congress candidate Surheeta Kareem got only 18,858 votes. After joining the SP-BSP-RLD alliance last week, Nishad had attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi by calling him a 'jumlebaz' and had used the same epithet for Adityanath. "Our Constitution, youth and farmers' futures are in grave danger. People voted for a 'jumlebaz' party because of their false promises," he had said. "Modi and Yogi promised many things for the Nishad community (boatmen) but nothing was done. The Nishad community will now give full support to the SP-BSP alliance in all the state," Nishad had said after joining the alliance. Nishad, a former BSP member had fielded 100 candidates in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly election in alliance with the Peace Party, the Apna Dal (Krishna Patel faction) and the Jan Adhikar Party. Nishad Party candidate Vijay Mishra had won Gyanpur constituency in Bhadohi district. By PTI SRINAGAR: Activist Chowdhary Talib Hussain, who led campaign for justice in the Kathua rape-and-murder case, Monday joined the People's Democratic Party (PDP) here. Hussain was welcomed into the party fold by PDP president and former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, a party spokesman said. He said Hussain, a crusader for tribal rights, has championed the cause of the community vocally and has spearheaded the movement for political empowerment of the youth in the tribal community. "Hussain is an energetic and hardworking activist from the area who joined the PDP with an aim to serve people of the state. He will contribute immensely for the growth of the party in the area," the spokesman said. Welcoming him into the party, Mehbooba urged all members of the community to unite as one single unit to prevent further assaults on the rights of the community. Happy to welcome well known tribal rights activist Chowdhary Talib Hussain into PDP today. He fought tirelessly to ensure justice for Rasana rape victim at the cost of his personal safety. Im confident he will work tirelessly towards our vision for a khushaal J&K. pic.twitter.com/CQRSgO5n4a Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) April 1, 2019 Taking to Twitter, Mehbooba said Hussain had worked tirelessly to ensure justice for the Kathua rape victim at the cost of his personal safety. "Happy to welcome well known tribal rights activist Chowdhary Talib Hussain into PDP today. He fought tirelessly to ensure justice for Rasana rape victim at the cost of his personal safety. Im confident he will work tirelessly towards our vision for a khushaal J&K (sic)," she wrote. Hussain said he was impressed by Mehbooba's stand and role in the Kathua case when she was the chief minister of the state. Rajesh Kumar Thakur By Express News Service JAMUI (Bihar): Prime Minister Narendra Modi kicked off his first election rallies in Bihar on Tuesday by attacking the Opposition and saying those who had entered politics for wealth, were not in a position to talk about the nations welfare. Speaking at a rally in Jamui, the PM hit out at Opposition leaders for raising questions on the 2016 surgical strikes and the February 26 air strike by the Indian Air Force in Pakistan. The leaders of the Opposition are seeking proof of surgical and air strikes carried out by our brave soldiers against terror camps in Pakistan. Are they not behaving like supporters and helpers of Pakistan? he asked. Bihar has full faith in BJP-JD(U)-LJP. People support our development efforts. Watch from Jamui. https://t.co/V8ipeWnKli Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 2, 2019 Now, tell me what you want. The heroes of India or those who are maddadgars (helpers) of Pakistan, he asked. He also chose the occasion to hit out against Jammu and Kashmirs former chief minister Omar Abdullah for his alleged demand to create a separate post of the Prime Minister for J&K.I challenge the Opposition gathered under the Mahamilavat (Modis term for the Oppositions Grand Alliance) to clear their stand. Are they in support of Omar Abdullahs demand? he asked. Modi then trained his guns on the Congress. READ HERE | Modi still most preferred choice for PM, Rahul catching up among housewives: IANS-CVOTER 2019 Survey He claimed that whenever the party had come to power, all systems had gone into reverse gear. For them, the country does not matter. What matters is their continuation in power, he claimed. He kept up a similar line of attack at his second rally, in Gaya. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE He claimed that the world was standing with India against terror. Reverting to his much publicised chowkidar rhetoric, the PM went on to say: This chowkidar has done a lot and will do more. Trust me and lend your support to make a new India on April 11. Lauding the roles of both Bihar CM Nitish Kumar and Deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi, he said the NDA has proved its worth in the state and would continue its work for the states progress. By PTI NEW DELHI: The RJD on Monday came out in full support of the Congress' proposed minimum income scheme NYAY with its leader Tejashwi Yadav asserting that the scheme will make a "massive" dent in the vicious cycle of poverty and help the victims of 'anyaay' (injustice) in Bihar. Tejashwi also said the Bihar grand alliance, which represents the oppressed and marginalised sections of the society, has rattled the BJP-led NDA, and asserted that it was not a "lackluster alliance" but a "robust rainbow coalition of not only political parties but also of social constituencies". "The Nyuntam Aay Yojana or 'NYAY' proposed by the Congress will have far-reaching impact for the people of Bihar. It promises to put in the hands of the poorest, a regular sum of money every month to be spent on basic necessities," Yadav told PTI in an interview. "The people of Bihar have been victims of 'anyaay' (injustice), suffering from the anti-poor policies and actions of the central and state governments, and it is high time they should demand and get 'NYAY' (which in English means justice)", Yadav said. The backing to NYAY by Tejashwi, whose party has forged an alliance in the state with the Congress and four other political parties, came barely a week after the big-bang poll promise by national party's chief Rahul Gandhi that Rs 72,000 per year will be given as minimum income to poor families, benefiting around 25 crore people, if his party is voted to power in Lok Sabha polls. Emphasising that the scheme will put the money in the hands of those who need it the most after "economic mismanagement" by the state and Union governments, Tejashwi said that the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is of the firm view that NYAY will make a "massive and desirable" dent in the vicious cycle of poverty which severely impacts the access and opportunity structures for the poor. Asked why it took a long time to seal the seat sharing, Yadav said: "Let me first clarify that rather than being in a hurry to seal a lackluster alliance, our idea was to have robust rainbow coalition of not only political parties but also of social constituencies." He said the alliance partners diligently looked at multiple factors such as inclination of social groups in the area, presence of alliance partners, historical trend of the constituency, as well as winnability of the potential candidate and the party, before deciding the seats. "Now when we have shaped it, one should look at the rattled NDA," the former Bihar deputy chief minister said. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE After prolonged deliberations among its partners, the 'mahagathbandhan' (grand alliance) in Bihar finally announced the seat-sharing details of all the 40 Lok Sabha seats on Friday which included candidature of RJD leaders Misa Bharti and Abdul Bari Siddiqui from Pataliputra and Darbhanga respectively, besides Congress' Meira Kumar from Sasaram. As per the seat-sharing arrangement, the RJD has got 20 seats, out of which it is giving one to CPI(ML), the Congress has nine, followed by five for Upendra Kushwaha's Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) and three each for former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and Mukesh Sahni's Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP). Fully supporting NYAY, he said it will certainly take care of the despair and hopelessness prevailing in an India which is away from the gaze of popular discourse. "The scheme's primary objective is to ensure that 20 per cent of the most disadvantaged citizens receive an annual income of Rs 72,000, he said. The money will be directly credited to the account of the women in the household, thereby, not only empowering them but also at the same time ensuring that it is prudently spent, RJD chief Lalu Prasad's son said. "After several years of economic mismanagement during which only the rich prospered, NYAY will benefit the farmers and farm workers, and lakhs of people working in the informal sector. After disastrous policies like 'note-bandi' (demonetisation) took away money from the hands of the people, NYAY will put it where it belongs -- in the hands of the people who need it the most and will spend it to improve their lives as well as boost the overall economic activity," he said. On suggestions that a section of the state unit of the Congress was unhappy with the seat sharing among the grand alliance partners, Yadav said: "As a young politician, I was solely guided by my father's message to the nation and political parties as early as in May 2014, wherein he appealed to all to set aside their difference to collectively fight the right-wing dictatorial regime. Anybody who has keenly followed Bihar politics would understand that it is the RJD which has sacrificed the most in order to create a rainbow alliance against anti-poor and anti-constitution policies of a "person driven by megalomania", Yadav said. "The RJD has been one of the most vocal political parties in Parliament, Assembly, and on the streets raising the issues of "unprecedented unemployment situation and the onslaught on reservation of SCs, STs and OBCs", he said. "Apart from these two important issues, we will also highlight agrarian crisis, onslaught on constitutional bodies, social security, caste census, need for a special package for Bihar's development, scams in the NDA government, safety of women and girl-child in view of the heinous crime perpetrated at Muzaffarpur shelter home and problems faced by rural landless labourers during the campaigning for Lok Sabha polls," he said. By Online Desk NEW DELHI: The Election Commission has found Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh's alleged remark calling for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's win as violation of Model Code of Conduct (MCC), poll body sources said on Tuesday. The poll panel is likely to write to President Ram Nath Kovind to bring the matter to his notice. However, the EC will take a final call at a meeting to be held on Tuesday, the sources added. During a sojourn to Aligarh in UP on March 23, Singh had addressed a rally where he said, The next Prime Minister should be Narendra Modi only. It went viral on social media soon after. We are all workers of the BJP and we would want that the party wins the polls. We also want that Narendra Modi becomes the PM again. This is important for the... country. We are workers of the party and respect all the decisions, Kalyan had said. The statement filtered into Rajasthan and turned ready ammunition for the ruling Congress party with Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot reminding him of his Constitutional obligations. Singh, who served two terms as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (1991-1992 and 1997-1999) was appointed the Governor of Rajasthan in 2014. A Governor is considered to be a neutral post and the person occupying the office is not supposed to side with any political party. (With agency inputs) By ANI CHENNAI: The Election Commission (EC) has reportedly halted the release of a book on the controversial Rafale fighter jets deal, citing an apparent violation of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The book release, which was to be chaired by N. Ram, the Managing Director of the Hindu group, was stopped by the officials of the poll body. As many as 148 copies of the book were seized from the author S Vijayan's office. Vijayan, who penned the book titled "Rafale: A Scam That Rocked the Nation" published it through Bharathi publications based in Chennai. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Talking to ANI, PK Rajan, the editor of Bharathi publications said: "We have not done any investigative journalism. The writer has merely aggregated the information available online, in a concise manner." He said that the reason he was denied the permission is that "they were afraid the truth will be out in open" and the people of Tamil Nadu would get to know the "truth". He also said that his publication house was stopped by the officials three-four times earlier as well citing the same reason. "We were denied permission to hold the event many a time. After that, we decided to hold it in our own shop because we believed that no police permission would be required in that case," he said. Sumi Sukanya Dutta By Express News Service NEW DELHI: Indias national drug regulator has decided to test samples of Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo on the shelves in markets in various parts of the country after the Rajasthan drug regulator found cancer-causing formaldehyde in two batches of companys No- Tears baby shampoo in the state. Officials in the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation said that the samples collected will be tested in central drug laboratories under the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry. We have been keeping a close watch on the situation and are set to pick samples from various states following the Rajasthan episode, Drug Controller General of India S Eswara Reddy said. Officials said that the company might also be asked to withdraw its shampoo from across the country if tests re-confirm the presence of formaldehyde causing substances - an established carcinogen - in the products in central laboratories. Rajasthan state drug regulatory body has labelled some samples of J&Js baby shampoo as not of standard quality and said the product contains harmful ingredients. It has also sent a notice to the US pharma major asking for an explanation for the same. The company, when contacted, however, maintained that all its products are safe and its assurance process is amongst the most rigorous in the world. By AFP WASHINGTON: The NASA on Monday termed as a "terrible thing" India's shooting down of one of its satellites that has created about 400 pieces of orbital debris, endangering the International Space Station (ISS). NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said about 60 pieces have been tracked so far and out of which 24 are going above the apogee of the ISS. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris and an apogee that goes above the international space station. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight that we need to see have happened," he said at a NASA townhall here. "The ASAT test by India last week has resulted in about 400 pieces of orbital debris," he added. ALSO READ | Mission Shakti: India's satellite-destroying missile test sends message to China Bridenstine said not all of the pieces were big enough to track and the NASA is right now tracking objects which are 10 centimeters or bigger. "Some 60 pieces of orbital debris have been tracked so far, 24 out of which poses risk to the International Space Station," he said. Bridenstine was addressing employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a televised address, announced that India shot down a satellite in space with a missile, catapulting the country into an elite club of space powers alongside the US, Russia and China Bridenstine is the first top official from the Trump administration to come out in public against India's ASAT test. ALSO READ | 'Foolish to betray defence secrets': P Chidambaram on PM's Mission Shakti address "We are charged with commercialising of low earth orbit. We are charged with enabling more activities in space than we've ever seen before for the purpose of benefiting the human condition, whether it's pharmaceuticals or printing human organs in 3D to save lives here on earth or manufacturing capabilities in space that you're not able to do in a gravity well," he said. "All of those are placed at risk when these kinds of events happen," Bridenstine said as he feared India's ASAT test could risk a proliferation of such activities by other countries. "When one country does it, other countries feel like they have to do it as well," he said. "It's unacceptable. The NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is," the NASA Administrator said. He said the NASA is "learning more and more every hour" that goes by about this orbital debris field that has been created from the anti-satellite test. "Where we were last week with an assessment that comes from NASA experts as well as the Joint Space Operations Center (part of US Strategic Command). Is that the risk to the International Space Station has increased by 44 per cent," Bridenstine said. The risk from small debris as a result of the ASAT test to the ISS went up 44 per cent over a period of 10 days. "So, the good thing is it's low enough in earth orbit that over time this will all dissipate," he told his NASA colleagues. He said a lot of debris from the 2007 direct ascent anti-satellite test by China is still in the space. "And we're still dealing with it. We are still, we as a nation are responsible for doing space situational awareness and space traffic management, conjunction analysis for the entire world," Bridenstine said. The US, he said, is doing it for free with its taxpayers' money from an orbital debris field that was created by another country. "Why do we do that as a nation? Because it's the right thing to do because we want to preserve the space environment," he said. According to Bridenstine, the US is currently tracking about 23,000 pieces of orbital debris that are 10 centimeters or bigger. "At the end of the day we need to be clear with everybody in the world, we're the only agency in the federal government that has human lives at stake here. And it is not acceptable for us to allow people to create orbital debris fields that put at risk our people," he said. Bridenstine said while the risk of the ISS went up 44 per cent, the astronauts are still safe. "The International Space Station is still safe. If we need to manoeuvre it, we will. The probability of that I think is low. But at the end of the day we have to be clear also that these activities are not sustainable or compatible with human spaceflight," he said. pronab mondal By Express News Service KOLKATA: For the first time in the history of Brigade Parade Ground, Kolkatas prime seat of protest, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address a covered rally on April 3. The venue, with a capacity to accommodate more than 15 lakh people, hosted several important political events, including the Bangladesh liberation rally held by Indira Gandhi and Mujibur Rahman in 1972, but it never offered a shed over the heads of the attendees. The decision of organising the covered rally was taken for the sake of the supporters who would be waiting for hours for the Prime Ministers speech, a BJP leader in Kolkata said. Mega hangers covering around 25 lakh square feet are being mooted to protect attendees from the scorching April heat, he said. Several decorators have been assigned to lay the groundwork for the spectacle that the citys biggest rally venue never witnessed before. Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh said lakhs of supporters would start hitting the venue from morning and the Prime Minister would arrive around 3 pm. "Since, were into summer, the health of our supporters is our top priority, Ghosh said. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE He also said this Brigade meeting would be an historic event this time. According to BJP sources, each of the nine hangers will cover around a lakh square feet. Modi had addressed a rally on the Brigade grounds as a PM aspirant in 2014. The BJP leadership is careful to ensure there is no repeat of the mishap in Midnapore during the Prime Ministers visit last year. One of the hangers, weakened by the soft soil due to a downpour, caved in and around 90 persons were injured. VHP no to arms on Ram Navami After Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has decided to shun open display of weapons during Ram Navami celebrations across West Bengal on April, 14 in view of the Lok Sabha elections. It has also decided not to involve BJP candidates in its processions. At least three people were killed and scores injured in Ram Navami riots across south Bengal last year. Several Sangh Parivar activists were booked under Arms Act for open display of weapons during the processions. In view of the upcoming elections, we have decided not to use weapons during the processions. Also, we would request the 42 BJP candidates not to take part in the processions, VHP eastern regional organisational general secretary Sachindranath Sinha said. However, state BJP president Dilip Ghosh said that Sangh cadres will display weapons at the processions and the partys candidates can take part in the processions. A delegation from the IMF will visit Egypt in May to carry out the latest review of the implementation of its economic reform programme before the final disbursement of nearly $2 billion of a $12 billion loan, Subir Lall, the IMF mission chief for Egypt, said on Tuesday. Lall was speaking to a press delegation accompanying the American Chamber of Commerce in Cairos door-knock mission to Washington, which is currently underway. He also said that Egypts implementation of its reform programme had helped the economy to perform well, and lower unemployment indicators, which have fallen to the lowest level since 2011, he said, in addition to increasing the monetary reserves of the Central Bank of Egypt, as well as bringing about a decline in public debt levels due to the improvement of the country's public finances. He also praised the economic reform procedures Egypt has undertaken to improve the investment environment and encourage the private sector to continue to expand. Search Keywords: Short link: By PTI NEW DELHI: The Congress on Tuesday released its manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls, making a slew of promises, including giving Rs 72,000 each to five crore poor families under the 'Nyay' scheme, filling up 22 lakh government vacancies, bringing a separate budget for farmers and fixing a single moderate GST rate. The 55-page document titled 'Hum Nibhayenge' (We will deliver) focused on addressing the issues of joblessness, farm distress, the safety of women and boosting the rural economy, with stress on building a narrative on "real issues" faced by people. The manifesto was released by party president Rahul Gandhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and senior leader P Chidambaram among others. For farmers, Congress promised to put them on the path from "Karz Maafi" (loan waiver), to "Karz Mukti" (freedom from loans). This will be done through remunerative prices, lower input costs, and assured access to institutional credit, the party said, adding it will present a separate "Kisan Budget" every year if voted to power. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Speaking on the occasion at the Congress headquarters here, Gandhi said the Congress will allocate 6 per cent of GDP to education, strengthen government hospitals and give high-quality healthcare access to poor if voted to power. The party also promised to enact the Right to Healthcare Act and guarantee every citizen free diagnostics, out-patient care, free medicines and hospitalisation, through a network of public hospitals and enlisted private hospitals. The Congress president alleged that the BJP government had spread hate and divisiveness in its five-year rule and his party will work towards uniting India by bringing people together. "Our manifesto process reflects our commitment to a higher vision, that of listening to the 'jan awaaz'. It is not the 'mann ki baat' of one individual but the collective voice of lakhs of people," he said in a preface of the manifesto. With this manifesto, Gandhi said the Congress has offered to people "the only national alternative -- a distinct alternative that is unwavering in its commitment to truth, freedom, dignity, self-respect and prosperity for our people." He promised to make India "strong and united, and just and prosperous society". On the party's showpiece minimum income guarantee scheme or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), the party's manifesto promised to give Rs 72,000 per year to the poorest 20 per cent households in India. To the youth of India, Congress pledged to make jobs its top priority, saying it will ensure 34 lakh jobs in the public sector by filling all 4 lakh central government vacancies before March 2020, persuading the state governments to fill 20 lakh vacancies and creating an estimated 10 lakh new Seva Mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local bodies. The party said it will also provide a fillip to the private sector by incentivising businesses for jobs creation and employing more women. On GST tax, Congress said it will radically simplify the GST regime with a single moderate rate of tax, zero-rating of exports, and exemption for essential goods and services. It also promised panchayats and municipalities a share of GST revenues. The Congress, it said, will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government, and increase it to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces. "We will expedite all modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces in a transparent manner. We will improve social security, education and health facilities for our Paramilitary Forces and families," the party said. On education, Congress promised that school education from Class I to Class XII in public schools shall be compulsory and free. The party promised to pass in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha the Women's Reservation Bill reserving 33 per cent of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies. "Congress will also reserve 33 per cent of all posts/vacancies in the Central government for women," it said. By PTI BHOPAL: Almost a decade after security personnel were deployed outside the RSS office in Bhopal, the Congress government withdrew them Monday, only to rescind the decision a day later. The security personnel were withdrawn after the Kamal Nath-led government said they will be deployed on election duty elsewhere. The decision did not go down well with Congress candidate from Bhopal, Digvijaya Singh, who tweeted his disapproval on Tuesday. "Its not at all proper to remove security provided to the RSS office in Bhopal. I request Chief Minister Kamal Nath to immediately provide adequate security," Singh said. The chief minister has issued directives to reinstate the security outside the RSS office, an official said. By IANS MAYMANA: A dozen militants including Taliban key commander Mawlawi Hussain were killed in Qaisar district of Afghanistan's Faryab province on Tuesday, Army officials said. "Security forces in a surprise move against the enemies stormed Taliban hideout in Doshakh area of Qaisar district early Tuesday, killing 12 insurgents including notorious commander Mawlawi Hussain on the spot," Army spokesman Mohammad Hanif Rezai told Xinhua news agency. In the operations that lasted for two hours, five more insurgents including Mawlawi Khalil, a shadow deputy governor of Qaisar district, were captured alive, the official said. Taliban militants who are operational in parts of the relatively troubled province didn't comment. By PTI SRINAGAR: NC chief Farooq Abdullah Tuesday said those saying articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution were supposed to be temporary are "wittingly or unwittingly affirming" that J-K's accession to India too was "temporary". The former Jammu and Kashmir (J-K) chief minister asserted that people were unfazed by the threats of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) combine on scrapping the articles which provide special status to the state. The National Conference (NC) chief also backed his son and party vice-president Omar Abdullah's comments on Monday that the NC would seek restoration of terms of accession of the state, including the provision for 'Sadr-e-Riyasat' and prime minister posts. The senior Abdullah said those who created a ruckus about assertions of his son were "unqualified and untaught" about historical facts. "It was our party who after Maharaja Hari Singh executed accession with the Union of India, sought unimpeachable constitutional safe guards for our state under the Delhi agreement," he said at a public gathering at Madar-e-Maharban stadium in Ganderbal district in central Kashmir. "Our party has always sought restoration of the relation of our state with the Union of India on the original terms of accession, which only gave three subjects of communication, defense and foreign affairs to the union, rest the Maharaja gave everything to the people of the state," Abdullah added. The former Union minister said the people of Kashmir "will not be fazed or frightened by the threats of BJP-RSS". READ HERE | I have my doubts: Farooq Abdullah on killing of 40 CRPF jawans in Pulwama terror attack "We will continue to seek our rights that were infringed upon. Those who are saying article 370 and article 35A are temporary are wittingly or unwittingly affirming that the accession was also temporary," he said. Former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao in a televised address in Burkina Faso, in Africa, had approved of having 'Sadr-e-Riyasat' and prime minister for the state, claimed the NC president. "He (Rao) has on record said that 'as far as giving autonomy to the state of J-K is concerned, sky is the limit'. When he came back, I asked him that much of special status has been eroded since 1953, to which he answered that once in government, the forum of assembly should be used to undo the erosions," Abdullah said. He said after coming to power in 1996, the government got the autonomy resolution passed with a huge majority in the state legislature. "Those who say that the resolution was cast out are wrong, the documents are still with the Union government and one day the Centre has to implement it. There is no other way peace can return to the state until autonomy of the state is restored," he said. Follow our full election coverage here The NC president said the forthcoming elections would decide whether the minorities, including Muslims, walk holding their heads high and chin up. "Today our nation is facing immense hazard in the form of communal strife. We are at crossroads, now it is up to us to decide if India remains secular, progressive in its outlook wherein all the communities thrive and draw their sustenance affably or a country which is tangled with the clutches of communal strife and bigotry," he said. "Now it is up to the people. The opportunity has come and we should not let it pass by us unutilized," he added. On one hand there is Gandhi's India which is all inclusive and on other hand there are forces which believe that India belongs to the adherents of only one faith, he said further. "World has seen such fascist forces trying their level best to harm the brotherhood and peace before as well in the form of Adolf Hitler. Today, we are facing modern day Hitlers and Gobbles. Like Gobbles they thrive on falsehood, lies and mendacious politics," Abdullah said. Flaying BJP president Amit Shah and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Abdullah said the Muslims of the country do not need certificates from BJP-RSS on their patriotism. "We are not anti-national. We have given immense sacrifices for the unity of the nation. I have lost many of my party functionaries and workers to the frenzy of conflict. These people don't see that, but when we raise voice for the restoration of our rights, we are being tainted as anti-national," he said. By PTI PATNA: The opposition RJD in Bihar Tuesday took potshots at Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, who shared stage at an election rally at Gaya, wondering whether the prime minister privately expressed regret to the chief minister over the infamous "DNA" remark. "Hope the DNA episode were discussed. And explanations offered that the words had been uttered unwittingly," RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav told reporters here when asked what he thought of the rally where Modi, Kumar and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan put up a joint show of strength for the NDA. Yadav was referring to Prime Minister Modi's remarks made during the 2015 assembly polls, which the RJD fought in alliance with Kumar's JD(U) besides the Congress. Modi, whose projection as the prime ministerial candidate by the BJP had led Kumar to snap JD(U)'s 17-year-old ties with the BJP, had attacked Kumar over the removal of Jitan Ram Manjhi as the chief minister. He had also quipped that the manner in which "a Mahadalit was insulted" indicated that there was "something wrong with the political DNA" of the JD(U) leader. READ HERE | Congress' 'NYAY' will uplift victims of 'anyaay' in Bihar: Tejashwi Yadav Kumar had taken strong exception to the remark, insisting that it was tantamount to insulting the entire population of Bihar. The bitter rivalry between the two leaders, however, took a back seat over time and Kumar returned to the NDA in 2017 after ending his short-lived alliance with the RJD over the issue of corruption allegations against Tejashwi Yadav, who was then the deputy chief minister. At the Gaya rally, the two leaders showered praises on each other. Modi lauded Kumar for getting all villages across Bihar electrified and said, "I can say from experience (as Gujarat chief minister) that this is no mean feat". Kumar, in his address, thanked the Modi government for extending full cooperation for the state's development including a Rs 50,000 crore aid for building roads. He also urged the people of the state to vote in large numbers for the NDA and help Modi return to power. Tejashwi Yadav, however, maintained that Modi's promises like generous central assistance for development of Gaya a renowned Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimage town into a tourist spot where the footfall would exceed that at the Taj Mahal in Agra were far from being realised. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Interestingly, Manjhi who had been at the centre of the 'DNA episode' left the NDA last year and is now a part of the "Mahagathbandhan" led by the RJD and comprising the Congress, Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP and Mukesh Sahni's VIP. The former Bihar chief minister who floated Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) after quitting JD(U), is the Mahagathbandhan candidate from Gaya. Not known for being active on Twitter, the HAM president took to the micro-blogging site accusing the prime minister of pursuing "politics of hate". "You are welcome to the holy city of Gaya. This land has been made pure by luminaries like Buddha and Mahavira. Your politics of hate will find no takers here," tweeted Manjhi. Manjhi's message came in reply to a tweet from Modi earlier in the day in which the prime minister had mentioned that he would be holding two rallies in Bihar - at Jamui followed by Gaya. By Express News Service RAJAMAHENDRAVARAM: Launching a vitriolic attack on Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu for treating Polavaram as an ATM, leading to escalation of its cost, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said that the Centre had till now given Rs 7,000 crore for the project. Modi accused Naidu of working to preserve his own Heritage and stooping to such lows as to commit cyber crime by stealing citizens data through the TDPs Seva Mitra app. The BJPs star campaigner even likened Naidu to Bhallaladeva of the Telugu blockbuster Baahubali, which portrays the character as the one who wants to acquire power by hook or crook. On his second visit to the State in less than two days to campaign for his partys Assembly and Lok Sabha candidates, Modi addressed an impressive gathering at the Arts College ground here. READ | N Chandrababu Naidu hits back at PM Modi, says Polavaram a defunct ATM During his speech, Modi was unsparing in his criticism of Naidu while showcasing his governments initiatives for the welfare of the people in the country, and in the twin Godavari districts in particular. As usual, Modi started his speech in Telugu and recalled the great history of the city. The NDA is committed to the development of this region and the entire State, Modi assured. On one of his governments initiative, which came into effect on Monday, Modi said taxpayers with income up to Rs 5 lakh were now eligible for a full tax rebate and individuals who invested to the tune of Rs 6 lakh were also kept out of the tax bracket. This demand (of income tax rebate) of middle and small income groups fell on deaf ears till now. Now, we have heard them and this will come into affect from today itself, Modi said. Modi claimed his government kept up the pace of development without raising any taxes in the past five years. The previous governments did not purchase Rafale jets citing fund shortage, he said, taking a swipe at former Defence Minister AK Anthonys recent remarks on the issue. Turning his ire on Naidu and calling him a member of the maha milavat (adulterated grand alliance), Modi said the Polavaram project was an example of the style of functioning of the previous governments. It (Polavaram) was in cold storage for the past four decades. The governments, including the TDPs, should be blamed for it, Modi said and added that his government accorded national status to the project and released around Rs 7,000 crore for its execution. The TDP government, however, does not want to complete Polavaram and is not spending the allotted money properly, he said. As a result, the project cost escalated. Polavaram is the lifeline of farmers and quenches peoples thirst. However, for the U-turn Babu and TDP, Polavaram is an ATM. They draw money from it, Modi alleged. The U-turn Babu is not interested in the farmers welfare, but only in copying the schemes of the Centre and putting his sticker on them. Modi accused Naidu of taking credit for the PM Kisan Samriddhi Yojana by putting his sticker on it. Corruption, deception, U-turn are the characteristics of the TDP government, Modi said, I was told that Chandrababu Naidu is lilke Bhallaladev of Baahubali, who tries to attain power by any means. Naidu is making all moves, legal and illegal, to ensure that power remains with his family. Referring to the alleged data theft case, Modi said the TDP had resorted to cyber crime through its Seva Mitra app. There is neither seva (service) nor mitra (friends). They (the TDP) have stolen data of the people of the State. If they can steal your data, imagine what they can do to the State! Modi said the Chowkidar government had sneaked into the enemys territory and killed terrorists, but the leaders of the maha milavat were making comments favourable to Pakistan. By Express News Service THRISSUR: With speculation mounting over the NDA candidate for the Thrissur Lok Sabha constituency, the BJP national leadership is likely to field Suresh Gopi, who is already a nominated MP. After Thushar Vellapilly moved to Wayanad seat following the candidacy of Rahul Gandhi there, MT Ramesh and BJP spokesperson B Gopalakrishnan were also being considered. The action hero of the Malayalam film industry will make his election debut if BJP national president announces his candidacy in Thrissur. Though Suresh Gopi had earlier hesitated to stand for elections, he has expressed his willingness to seek the people's verdict in Thrissur. It has been reported that BJP president Amit Shah had called him to Delhi for further discussions. Responding to the speculation, BJP district president A Nagesh said, "We welcome any candidate here and there are more winning chances in Thrissur when going through the electoral arithmetic." Meanwhile, Suresh Gopi has been busy with a Tamil film and has several other projects in the pipeline. Sources in the BJP said the candidacy of Suresh Gopi may be announced either today or tomorrow as there is little time left to file the nominations. By Express News Service THRISSUR: The BJP's central election committee announced the much-awaited candidacy of cine actor Suresh Gopi, who is already a nominated MP, in Thrissur on Tuesday. Though BDJS leader Thushar Vellapally had started election campaign in Thrissur, he was moved to Wayanad following Rahul Gandhi's candidacy there. As far as the NDA is considered, Thrissur is one of the topmost constituencies where it can perform well in the upcoming elections. During the Assembly elections in 2016, the BJP managed to accumulate over one lakh votes in the constituency. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Popular for his character as Bharat Chandran IPS, acclaimed for the uncompromising attitude towards justice and mass dialogues, Suresh Gopi still remains the action hero among the Malayali population. Speculations on the candidacy of the cine actor started from Tuesday morning as he was called to Delhi for discussions. Suresh Gopi had aimed at competing for the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram but later backed off from standing in the elections. With the central committee of the part announcing the candidacy, NDA leaders here are all set to kick start the campaign with full energy. "The previous elections show that Thrissur is a constituency having more chances for winning. With the election campaign in full swing, Thrissur in which the candidacy was announced last will emerge the winner first," he said. Shri Suresh Gopi represents NDA from Thrissur LS constituency pic.twitter.com/TwXqS4gpY8 BJP KERALAM (@BJP4Keralam) April 2, 2019 It is reported Suresh Gopi will begin the campaign in Thrissur on Wednesday itself, as there is little time left to file the nominations and reach out to the public. UDF candidate T N Prathaban and LDF candidate Rajaji Mathew Thomas along with other independent candidates had filed their nominations and the second phase of the election campaign has already been completed. The NDA aims at projecting stardom to its fullest along with the philanthropic activities that he had taken up. By PTI TUTICORIN: BJP president Amit Shah Tuesday trained his guns on the DMK-Congress alliance in Tamil Nadu, alleging that Karti Chidambaram, A Raja and Kanimozhi, fielded by the combine for the Lok Sabha elections, were tainted with corruption. In his poll rallies here and at Sivaganga and Coimbatore, he focused on "corrupt" leaders fielded by the DMK and Congress, his party-led government ensuring the security of the nation and avenging the Pulwama attack and the Centre's support to Tamil Nadu on the growth front. Addressing a poll rally here, Shah hit out at National Conference leader Omar Abdullah for his "Prime Minister for Jammu and Kashmir" line and asked the people whether they supported the Kashmir leader's remarks. "Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, we will never compromise on the Kashmir issue," he said. In Coimbatore, he slammed the United Progressive Alliance saying it "cannot" protect the country and only the Narendra Modi government could do it. The BJP chief demanded that Congress president Rahul Gandhi make it clear to the people if he concurred with Omar Abdullah. Hitting out at Gandhi, he said while the Congress leader called the GST "Gabbar Singh Tax" in this budget, businessmen with Rs 40 lakh turnover have been exempted. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Earlier, in Tuticorin, Shah alleged that the candidates nominated by the Congress and DMK - the likes of Karti Chidambaram, Kanimozhi and A Raja (from Nilgiris) - were tainted by graft. Seeking votes for his party candidate and state unit chief Tamilisai Soundararajan in the port city of Tuticorin, Shah said "when BJP-led government returns to power" at the Centre it would continue contributing even more for the growth of Tamil Nadu. Shah said though BJP's Pon Radhakrishnan alone had won from Kanyakumari in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, his party led NDA made two from Tamil Nadu --Radhakrishnan and Nirmala Sitharaman-- as Union Ministers. He said the BJP government avenged the Pulwama attacks through air attacks on Pakistan. Citing the air strike to avenge the Pulwama attacks, he asked: "Should we not avenge the Pulwama attacks?," to which the people at the rally responded positively. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami took part in Shah's rally at Tuticorin, which last year witnessed violence over the Sterlite issue. Palaniswami lashed out at DMK for being "supportive" for running the copper plant and its expansion by setting apart 243 acres during its previous tenure. READ HERE | Amit Shah slams Congress for giving Hindus terror tag tag, dubs Patnaik's government 'failed transformer' Pointing out that the DMK was seeking votes citing last year's incidents, he accused the arch rival of spreading disinformation to win votes. The top AIADMK leader sought votes for Tamilisai to trounce Kanimozhi, DMK's MP in Rajya Sabha. Addressing a rally at Sivaganga, where his party nominee H Raja is pitted against Congress leader P Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram, he appealed to the people to strengthen the hands of Narendra Modi by electing Raja. In Tamil Nadu, while on the one side people have the NDA, which brought laurels to the country, on the other they see Congress and its allies, whose leaders Kanimozhi, A Raja and Karti Chidambaram indulged in corruption to the tune of about Rs 12 lakh crore, he alleged. Taking potshots at the Congress, Shah said Rahul Gandhi may have had Karti Chidambaram in mind when he recently spoke of giving bail to people --in his party manifesto-- and not lodging them in prisons. In its manifesto, Congress dwelt on amending the Code of Criminal Procedure and promised to release immediately all remand and under trial prisoners facing charges punishable with imprisonment of three years or less. Shah said the BJP government was implementing several poverty alleviation schemes and added it was AIADMK founder and late Chief Minister M G Ramachandran who pioneered such pro-poor initiatives in India for the benefit of the poor. Several schemes were being implemented for the benefit of 50 crore poor people and seven crore beneficiaries received LPG cylinders, he said. ALSO READ | Amit Shah's assets grow three times in seven years to Rs 38.81 crore, poll affidavit shows Toilets were built for eight crore houses, 2.5 crore houses were constructed, electricity was provided to 2.35 crore households and the Prime Minister's Ayushman Bharat scheme has seen more than 50 crore enrolments, Shah said. Though the BJP had a lone MP (Pon Radhakrishnan) from Tamil Nadu, his party-led government at the Centre implemented a host of schemes for its progress, he said. Shah said the UPA regime had allotted Rs 94,540 crore during its tenure for Tamil Nadu, while the NDA government had provided Rs 5,42,068 crore in just five years for the growth of the state. Among the projects brought to Tamil Nadu were the Defence corridor, while a separate department for fishermen's welfare was created at the Centre (Tamil Nadu has a huge population of fishermen and it would benefit them), he recalled. Terming his party's alliance with AIADMK, PMK and DMDK as robust, he said: "I am confident that the alliance under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister K Palaniswami will emerge victorious and the NDA alliance will go on to win over 30 Lok Sabha seats from Tamil Nadu." He expressed confidence that Modi would again become the Prime Minister and that the new government too would work for Tamil Nadu's growth alongside the State government. He also pointed to projects, including an AIIMS Hospital at Madurai and the Sagarmala, which would benefit Tamil Nadu and the efforts taken by the Centre to make Coimbatore, Erode and Tirupur smart cities. To serve the people, he said BJP's alliance with AIADMK will continue for Assembly polls (2021) as well. By Online Desk With less than ten days to go for the first phase of the Lok Sabha elections, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday released the party's manifesto for the polls. Titled 'We will deliver,' party chief Rahul Gandhi dubbed the manifesto the 'voice of the people.' From NYAY to farm loan waivers, the Congress manifesto declares that it will usher in a new India. The Congress chief has also signalled that he is listening to voices down south as the manifesto promises several benefits for southern India. Rahul Gandhi said that he is contesting from Wayanad to make sure that the party stands for the aspirations of South India, which he claims the Modi government has ignored. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE How would a Congress-led government be different from the present one? What does the manifesto mean for the people of Tamil Nadu? 1. NEET: The first and foremost promise of direct concern to Tamil Nadu is the pledge to scrap the National Eligibility-Cum-Entrance Test (NEET). The state has been fighting to remove NEET for years now. The DMK in its manifesto has also promised the abolition of NEET. Calling it discriminatory against students from certain states, the Congress manifesto says that it is the right of the state government to admit its students to medical colleges in the state. After dispensing with NEET, an equivalent standard exam will be held at state level. 2. School Education in State List: Apart from announcing that six per cent of GDP will be allocated to education, the party also proposes to transfer School Education to the State List, which has been a long pending demand from the state. 3. Ministry of Fisheries and Welfare of Fisherfolk: The Congress proposes to establish a separate Ministry of Fisheries and Welfare of Fisherfolk, which will pave the way to address the long pending fishermen issue in the state. The manifesto also promises to establish a permanent mechanism with neighbouring countries, which could ease the bitter relationship with Sri Lanka. 4. Farm loan waiver, Kisan Budget: The Congress party has promised that it will form a pro farmers government if it's voted to power and says it will end the agrarian crisis. In its manifesto, it promises to waive the outstanding farm loans in every state like it did in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. It also said that the debt-ridden farmers won't be liable for criminal proceedings. In addition to this, the manifesto also states that there will be a separate 'Kisan Budget' to ensure the agriculture sector is given due priority. This will again benefit farmers in Tamil Nadu. 5. Petrol, diesel under GST: In its GST 2.0, it promises to bring more transparency and simplicity in the tax system. It also promises to bring petroleum products under GST, which has been a long pending demand from the state. 6. Strike against unemployment: The Congress promises to fill the 4 lakh vacancies in the public sector by March 2020 in a strike against unemployment. Earlier in February, a report showed that thousands of engineers and MBA graduates applied for sweeper jobs in the Tamil Nadu Assembly Secretariat. The country goes to vote from 11 April to 19 May in seven phases. The results of the elections will be declared on 23 May. For elections related queries, click here. Ahead of participation in two major international jewelry/design fairs, upcoming artist Farah AbdelHamid talks about her wish to 'undo the jewelry social construct' At her studio in Darb17/18, in the heart of Old Cairo, Farah AbdelHamid is assembling a pile of silicon bubbles in pale colours. These bubbles, she explains, will make up part of the exhibits she is planning to show at 2019 Venice Design, the international design exhibition running alongside La Biennale di Venezia, where around 50 international creators from 30 different countries and of various cultural backgrounds are invited to present their processes and visions of design. AbdelHamid will be putting the bubbles one next to the other up the arch of a door to represent "a bodys communication with the object." For the same event, which is sponsored by the National Bank of Egypt, Misr El-Kheir philanthropy foundation and the private sector's ElSewedy Electric, she was also finishing her silicon and metal seven-metre-long chain, which could be "worn by one or two people around the neck or the waist." "Again, this is to show the multiple ways a body can be connected to a piece of jewelry," she said. This body-object connection underlines the 'Farah' design scheme. "The purpose is to create and recreate a new sensation and engagement between body and jewelry, she explained. L&S By so doing, AbdelHamid said, there is real room to "undo the social construct of jewelry." "I want to get the jewelry out of the box, because I would not wish for jewelry to be strictly seen as ornaments, although they are, but they are not just that," AbdelHamid said. This contemporary jewelry designer is not just interested in making beautiful necklaces and rings. She rather wants to think of "what makes a necklace a necklace and not a bag, for example." "I guess it is all about this connecting lines that bring together or maybe divide jewelry as jewels, ornaments and accessories," AbdelHamid argued. For AbdelHamid, what really brings these pieces together and actually gives them their function and beauty is the human body. This is why, she argued, one person may be happier and prettier with a particular jewelry item than another, and it is also why some people would be more attracted to a particular designers work, she added. "The body is the one common thing between the person who makes and the person who wears the jewelry it is also the thing in common between these two and the person who sees the jewelry," she said. By underlining this core concept of body-object sensation, AbdelHamid hopes that her work will help free jewelry from typical social associations that make, for example, gold items more valued than silver. L&S "The social association of jewelry, traditionally, I think, has included things like indicating a person's social status, in relation to the price of the metal and stones of a particular piece, or as in some social contexts, serving spiritual functions, like warding off the evil eye or healing woes and illness or designating a marital status, like in India for example where the adornments for a young woman are different from those of a married woman," she said. AbdleHamid is multi-disciplinary artist with a passion for contemporary jewelry. She received her formal training in jewelry and metalsmithing from the Rhode Island School of Design. Since then, AbdelHamid has been showcasing her commercial and conceptual jewelry at fairs and exhibitions in and outside of Egypt. "I guess with the help and support of such foundations that are sponsoring the event, there is a big room for Egyptian designers to be an essential part of the contemporary jewelry-making movement," she said. "In general, I think that with such an incredible history of jewelry-making, techniques and designs from the pharaonic times til today, Egypt could well be branded for jewelry-making. "And there is always a room for a new take on traditional things." In her early 20s, AbdelHamid, who has been offering informal technical jewelry-making and design courses and workshops, and is now building a community through her personal and shared studio space in Old Cairo, Studio with Farah. Through both her learning and teaching experience she said she has seen a growing interest in jewelry-making. With more and more people willing to embrace this art, she sees a growing making and maybe exporting market maybe more for commercial than conceptual jewelry. The next "commercial jewelry" stop for her work is Milan Design Week. The underlining concept of her collection, which is a collection of rings and earrings, is "hollow objects." To be on display in Milan is one pair of earrings that is inspired by the shape of a Turkish coffee making pot. "I like to experiment with taking the traditional into a contemporary spot," she said. L&S Experimenting, AbdelHamid argued, is essential for taking jewelry away from the otherwise inevitable path of design stagnation. "Adopt and assemble is something that I really like," she said. Is there a room in the Egyptian market currently for such contemporary concepts when it comes to jewelry? "Certainly; obviously an individuals taste is the making of a combination of influences and clearly in Egypt today there is a growing interest in the contemporary this is obvious from the expanding presence of concept stores," AbdelHamid answered. AbdelHamid is planning the launch of her sales in Egypt in spring or summer this year. It will be a diverse collection, some from the Milan Design Week collection and some other earlier items, with silver dominating, but also using silicon, gold and semiprecious stones. Search Keywords: Short link: Mouli Mareedu By Express News Service HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad police latest special wing, City Rapid Action Force (CRAF), which had undertaken election-related security arrangements in the recently concluded Assembly elections, is set to field its personnel in sensitive localities in the city ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. Speaking to Express, a senior police official said that the CRAF, also comprising women commandos, has been launched to deal with riots, riot-like situations, crowd control, rescue and relief operations, and poll related unrest. We had utilised the services of CRAF in the Assembly elections and the performance of the wing was good. With the Lok Sabha elections around the corner, we have provided special training to officials in controlling security during elections. We will deploy CRAF commandos at selected sensitive and hyper-sensitive areas based on requirement, a senior police officer said. Comprising a total of 40 members, the wing has 20 young women personnel, who have been trained at the City Armed Reserve (CAR) headquarters. The Hyderabad city police officials seemed confident about the performance of the CRAF in the upcoming elections. The members of the wing have undergone practical training in controlling emergencies like riots and agitations. Keeping the polls in mind, election-related security arrangements too were added to their training programme. Elaborating on the training procedure, the police officials who manage training sessions said that the wing has been equipped with non-lethal weapons for dispersing the crowd with minimum harm and losses. The CRAF are kept ready at all times for rapid deployment depending on the situation. The wing will be deployed only on the orders of the Commissioner of Police to undertake specific duties, and are normally not deployed for long durations. During elections, the police officials would utilise the services of the wing to maintain law and order during the polling and counting processes. The CRAF is prepared exclusively for handling communal violence, undertaking law and order duties, festival and election duties and managing agitations. The wing usually use methods like issuing warnings, employing tear gas shells and water cannons, initiating lathi-charge and others to manage violence, agitations or riot-like situations. The CRAF was officially launched on September 15, 2018 by the Hyderabad police and were deployed to undertake duties in the Assembly polls. By PTI ROME: European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has said the EU is "running out" of patience with Britain over Brexit. The United Kingdom is in crisis after lawmakers three times rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's proposed divorce deal, and now risks crashing out of the bloc in under two weeks. "With our British friends we have had a lot of patience, but even patience is running out," Juncker told Italian public TV channel Rai 1 on Sunday. "I would like, in the coming hours and days, for Great Britain to reach an agreement on the way forward." MPs held "indicative votes" last week on eight alternative Brexit options, but none of them achieved a majority. "Up to now, we know what the British parliament says no to, but we do not know what it says yes to," Juncker said. Asked about the matter of a second referendum -- an option demanded by many of those who would prefer to remain in the EU -- Juncker said that "it is something that concerns the British only". "They have to decide which instruments they will use to reach the end of this process." Italy's eurosceptic coalition government -- in power since last June -- believes it has not received enough support from the EU to manage migrants arriving by sea and has closed its ports. But Juncker said the bloc has "strongly supported" Italy, giving more than one billion euros to help the Mediterranean country with "this massive flow of refugees". By AFP BRUNEI: Brunei's imposition of harsh sharia laws, including death by stoning for gay sex and adultery, is a bid by the country's ruler to boost support among conservatives and highlights a steady drift away from the West, observers say. The tough punishments, which also include amputation of a hand and foot for theft, will come into force Wednesday when a new penal code is fully implemented after years of delays. The decision to move ahead with the laws has sparked a global outcry, with the United Nations branding them "cruel and inhumane" and actor George Clooney leading calls for Brunei-owned hotels to be boycotted. By making his country the first in East or Southeast Asia to introduce a sharia penal code on a national level, analysts believe all-powerful Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah is seeking to burnish his Islamic credentials among conservative supporters at a time the economy is weakening. ALSO READ: Brunei set to adopt Sharia law, adulterers and homosexuals to be stoned to death Brunei, a resource-rich former British protectorate on Borneo island with a population of about 400,000, was plunged into recession in recent years as oil prices plummeted and its crude reserves declined. "Brunei is becoming Southeast Asia's Saudi Arabia," Bridget Welsh, a Southeast Asia expert from John Cabot University, told AFP. "The regime has increasingly been relying on religious legitimacy, appealing to a conservative Islamic ideology. The weakening economy in Brunei, as well as concerns about possible erosion of support, underscore this increasing reliance on religion." - Shift to China - The Muslim-majority nation's implementation of punishments that may scare off Western businesses also signals a shift towards investment from China, which typically refrains from criticising trading partners on human rights, observers said. As in many other parts of Asia, Chinese companies are investing huge sums in the absolute monarchy, part of an infrastructure drive aimed at extending Beijing's economic and geopolitical clout. Initiatives include a multi-billion-dollar oil refinery -- Brunei's biggest ever foreign investment project -- a dam and a highway. Xi Jinping visited the country in November last year, the first trip by a Chinese president in 13 years. Experts say it is hard to gauge the level of public backing for sharia law in Brunei, as most citizens would not publicly voice criticism of the sultan. ALSO READ: Actor George Clooney calls for boycott of hotels in US, Europe over Brunei's LGBT laws But it is believed to have substantial support among the country's Muslim ethnic Malays, who make up some 70 per cent of the population. Those who speak publicly generally welcome it. "I'm proud because implementing the law feels like it solidifies the Islamic identity of Brunei," Muhammad Antoni, a 27-year-old oil and gas company worker, told AFP. Others were irritated at the calls for a boycott of nine Brunei-owned hotels in Europe and the United States. "Regarding celebrities calling for a boycott, it's not their place," said Haziah Zainal, a 36-year-old civil servant. "These actions seem ignorant as they have not even been here to experience what it's like." There was some unease online, however, where people can comment more freely. "This worries me so much for Bruneis economy," one user posted on social media platform Reddit, adding that it would mean "losing more business overseas". - Global alarm - In reality, it is not yet clear if the toughest punishment -- death by stoning -- will be implemented. Brunei has long had capital punishment, and any execution should be carried out by hanging. But the last known instance of someone being put to death in the country was in 1957, according to Matthew Wolfe of human rights group The Brunei Project. While condemning the new penal code, Amnesty International said the country was "abolitionist in practice" when it comes to the death penalty. The burden of proof is high before someone can be sentenced to death by stoning. An accused person must either confess to the offence, or it must be witnessed by at least four people who have to then testify. The sultan, the world's second-longest ruling monarch, has weathered controversies before -- the monarchy was deeply embarrassed over revelations the ruler's brother Jefri allegedly embezzled billions of dollars -- and is unlikely to back down. In a weekend statement, the government defended its right to introduce the new penal code, saying that sharia law "aims to educate, respect and protect the legitimate rights of all individuals". By PTI LAHORE: Pakistan could be blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) due to "lobbying by India", Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said as he estimated that the country could suffer USD 10 billion loss annually if it remains in the watchdog's grey list. In June last year, the Paris-based FATF had placed Pakistan on the 'grey list' of countries whose domestic laws are considered weak to tackle the challenges of money laundering and terrorism financing. The FATF is working to curb terrorism financing and money laundering and has asked Pakistan to reassess the operation of banned terrorist outfits in the country. Pakistan is under intense international pressure to rein in terror groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) after the Pulwama terror attack. "The Foreign Office is calculating the annual loss if Pakistan is pushed in the black-list by the FATF as India is lobbying for this," Foreign Minister Qureshi told reporters at the Governor's House here on Monday evening. He said the government has calculated that Pakistan will face USD 10 billion loss annually if it remains in the 'grey list'. A group of experts from the FATF recently visited Pakistan to review whether Islamabad has made enough progress on global standards against financial crimes to warrant its exclusion from the watchdog's 'grey list'. During its three-day visit to Islamabad in the last week of March, a delegation of the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on money laundering, a regional affiliate of the FATF, expressed serious reservations over insufficient physical actions on ground against banned groups to block flow of funds and activities. The visiting team members reportedly raised questions over specific and on-ground actions against each of the eight organisations proscribed under international requirements. It wanted the break-up of suspected transaction report against each banned outfit and specific actions taken against each entity. The team members said that activities of banned organisations and non-profit organisations are still unchecked at the provincial, district and grass roots level where they can still raise funds and hold meetings and rallies. The FATF noted that Pakistan had revised its terror financing risk assessment but did not demonstrate a proper understanding of the terror financing risks posed by the Islamic State group, Al-Qaeda, Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), Falah-i-Insaniat (FIF), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Haqqani Network and persons affiliated with the Taliban. Prime Minister Imran Khan's government recently banned Mumbai terror attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed-led JuD and its charity wing FIF. It declared JeM and five other groups "high risk". It also arrested over 100 members of the banned outfits including the son and brother of JeM chief Azhar Masood. The government also has taken over the control of the properties of the banned outfits including the JeM, the JuD and the FIF what it says in accordance with the FAFT requirements and the National Action Plan. Ahead of the team's visit, Pakistan wrote to FATF President Marshall Billingslea to appoint any other member as co-chair of the Asia-Pacific's Joint Group, in place of India, to ensure that the FATF review process is fair, unbiased and objective. The Joint Group is a sub-body of the International Cooperation Review Group (ICRG) of the APG. Pakistan is a member of the APG and its case is being presented before the FATF by the APG. India's Financial Intelligence Unit's (FIU) director general is the co-chair of the Joint Group. After obtaining Pakistan's response, the Mutual Evaluation Report will be presented in the Annual General Meeting of the APG that is likely to take place in August. The APG meeting would either accept the report or suggest changes to it. In case of the worst outcome, Pakistan may have to implement yet another Action Plan from October onwards. The FATF's Action Plan implementation deadline is September this year. The review on the implementation of the FATF Action Plan held in February did not go well, which has increased pressure on Pakistan. The next FATF review would take place in June in Washington and before that Pakistan will have to show compliance on 16 points that have been agreed for May in addition to three issues that were left out in the last review. To a question on the suspension of dialogue on the Kartarpur corridor by India, Qureshi said: "Pakistan went to India for a meeting on Kartarpur despite the escalation on borders but India was hesitating for a second meeting scheduled for April 2. I ask India to bring its apprehensions on the table for review by Pakistan but avoid cancelling meetings." "Pakistan had responded to the wishes of the Sikh community from across the world and India had reluctantly accepted the joint venture," he added. India Friday summoned Pakistan's deputy high commissioner in New Delhi and conveyed concerns over the presence of a leading Khalistani separatist in a committee appointed by Pakistan on the Kartarpur corridor project. Indian officials said they will wait for a response from Pakistan on the issue and they're not going ahead with a previously agreed meeting on the Kartarpur corridor on April 2 in Wagah on the Pakistani side. Last November, India and Pakistan agreed to set up the border crossing linking Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev, to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. By PTI ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court on Tuesday formed a five-member commission to probe the alleged abduction, forced conversion and marriage of two teenage Hindu girls in Sindh province that led to massive protests by the minority community in the country. A high court bench led by Chief Justice of IHC Athar Minallah heard the petition filed by the two sisters -- Reena, Raveena -- and their alleged spouses, Safdar Ali and Barkat Ali, to seek protection, the Express Tribune reported. In their plea, the girls claimed that they belong to a Hindu family of Ghotki, Sindh but converted willfully as they were impressed by Islamic teaching. The counsel for the girls' parents, however, asserted that the case pertained to forced conversion. Justice Minallah sought recommendations to resolve the matter. ALSO READ: 'Islam doesn't allow forced conversion': Pakistan's top clerics after proselytisation of Hindu girls The matter requires transparent inquiry - it is the government's job to conduct probes not the judiciary's, he observed. The chief justice said the court had to ensure that there was no forced conversion. The bench formed a five-member commission to probe the matter. The commission includes Federal Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari, Mufti Taqi Usmani, Dr Mehdi, Advocate IA Rahman and chairperson of National Commission on the Status of Women Khawar Mumtaz. The federal government has been tasked to organise meeting of the commission. The incident came to light when a video surfaced online showing the teenagers' father and brother claiming the girls were abducted and forcefully converted. It was followed by another video snippet in which the two girls claimed that they had converted to Islam. ALSO READ | Pakistani men who 'forcibly converted' minor Hindu sisters were already married: Sindh police Amid the uproar, Prime Minister Imran Khan directed Sindh and Punjab to investigate the matter and recover the girls if the forceful conversion allegation was correct. During the hearing, the chief justice noted the increasing number of forced conversion cases from Ghotki. He was irked at the governments' failure to find a solution. "Why are such incidents repeatedly being reported from one district of the Sindh province?" He said the perception that minorities' rights were not protected has to be changed. When speaking about the rights of minorities, Justice Minallah referenced the recent terror incident in New Zealand's Christchurch that killed 50 Muslims and the Jessica Arden-led government's response. The judge asked Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf lawmaker Ramesh Kumar Vankwani why the matter was not raised in the parliament. To which, Vankwani said he will bring the House's attention to it. Until the inquiry is completed, the high court has ordered for the girls to remain in state custody. They are currently being housed at the Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Crisis Centre in Islamabad. The high court summoned reports sought by the premier and adjourned the hearing till April 11. The Hindu community in Pakistan has carried out massive demonstrations calling for strict action to be taken against those responsible for forced conversion and marriages of Hindu girls, while reminding Prime Minister Khan of his promises to the minorities of the country. Last year, Khan during his election campaign had said his party's agenda was to uplift the various religious groups across Pakistan and said they would take effective measures to prevent forced marriages of Hindu girls. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj last month sought details from the Indian envoy in Pakistan into the alleged abduction of the two Hindu teenaged girls and their forcible conversion to Islam. Hindus form the biggest minority community in Pakistan. According to official estimates, 75 lakh Hindus live in Pakistan. Majority of Pakistan's Hindu population is settled in Sindh province. According to media reports, approximately 25 forced marriages take place every month only in Umerkot district in Sindh province. By PTI WASHINGTON: The children of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received multimillion-dollar homes and are being paid thousands of dollars per month by the kingdom's authorities, The Washington Post reported Monday. Khashoggi -- a contributor to the Post and a critic of the Saudi government -- was killed and dismembered in October at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul by a team of 15 agents sent from Riyadh. His body has not been recovered. READ MORE | Saudi Arabia rejects call for international probe of Jamal Khashoggi murder The payments to his four children -- two sons and two daughters -- "are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to reach a long-term arrangement with Khashoggi family members, aimed in part at ensuring that they continue to show restraint in their public statements," the Post said. The houses given to the Khashoggi children are located in the port city of Jeddah and are worth up to $4 million, the newspaper reported. Salah, the eldest of the children, plans to continue living in the kingdom, while the others, who live in the United States, are expected to sell the homes, the paper said. In addition to the properties, the children are receiving $10,000 or more per month and may also receive larger payments that could amount to tens of millions of dollars each, according to the report. Saudi Arabia's powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has been accused of orchestrating Khashoggi's killing, but the kingdom has claimed that the prince was not involved. Saudi Arabia initially said it had no knowledge of Khashoggi's fate but later blamed rogue agents for his death. Its public prosecutor has charged 11 people over his murder. By PTI NEW DELHI: India on Tuesday pledged relief assistance to Nepal that has been hit by a devastating thunderstorm. "We are deeply saddened to learn of the loss of life and damage to property in Nepal following the devastating thunderstorm that struck Bara and Parsa districts of Nepal," Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. READ| 29 killed, 600 hurt as massive rainstorm hits Nepal; army mobilised "Our thoughts and prayers are with all those who have lost their dear ones, sustained injuries or suffered damage to their property," he said. India is ready to provide relief assistance as may be required by Nepal, he said, adding that the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu and Consulate in Birgunj are in touch with the concerned authorities. The mission discovered the name of the queen who the pyramid complex belonged to An Egyptian archaeological mission has discovered the tomb of a Fifth Dynasty dignitary named Khuwy during an excavation and documentation survey carried out in south Saqqara, and has also discovered the name of the queen to whom a pyramid complex in the area belonged. The tomb consists of a superstructure with an L-shaped offering chamber, which was once decorated with reliefs. Only the bottom part of this decoration is preserved, as the white limestone blocks of the other parts were re-used in the construction of other buildings in antiquity. Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, explained that the mission has found at the north wall of the tomb, the entrance to a unique substructure, which is for the first time clearly inspired by the design of the substructures of the royal pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty. That part of the tomb starts with a descending corridor, which leads to a vestibule. An entrance in its southern wall gives access to a decorated antechamber. Its decoration represents the tomb owner sitting in front of the offering table on the south and north walls. Moreover, an offering list was depicted on the east wall and the palace-facade on the west wall. discovery Mohamed Megahed, head of the archaeological mission, told Ahram Online that the mission located the undecorated burial chamber through two entrances in the west wall of the antechamber of the tomb. It seems that the space of the burial chamber was almost completely filled with a limestone sarcophagus, which was found entirely destroyed by ancient tomb robbers, Megahed added. However, the mission discovered the human remains of Khuwy, which show clear traces of mummification. An entrance in the south wall of the decorated antechamber leads to a small room, most likely used as a storeroom. The mission found this room filled with debris, with no finds of any value. The discovery of this tomb stresses the importance of Djedkares era, and the end of the Fifth Dynasty in general, asserted Megahed. The mission, in cooperation with an international team of Egyptologists, has also discovered an ancient Egyptian queen who lived during the late Fifth Dynasty in the same pyramid complex. The mission found the name of queen Setibhor, who was not known before from ancient sources, engraved on a column in the south part of the until-now anonymous pyramid complex. The complex is located by the pyramid of king Djedkare in south Saqqara, and the identity of its owner was a puzzle that Egyptologists have been trying to solve for decades. The name and titles of the owner of this unique monument was found on the column made of red granite in the newly uncovered portico of the queens complex. The inscription was carved in sunken relief in a rectangle on the shaft of the column, and it reads: The one who sees Horus and Seth, the great one of the hetes sceptre, the great of praise, kings wife, his beloved Setibhor. discovery The column and the limestone blocks and fragments bearing relief decoration from the temple of the queen were found during exploration and documentation work in the pyramid complex of king Djedkare. The pyramid complex of queen Setibhor represents one of the earliest pyramids in south Saqqara, built at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, and it is the largest pyramid complex built for a queen during the Old Kingdom. Moreover, her funerary temple incorporated architectural elements and chambers that were otherwise reserved for the kings of the Old Kingdom only. The large size of the pyramid complex of queen Setibhor and her title of queen may indicate her direct intervention in helping her husband, king Djedkare, ascend the throne of Egypt at the end of the Fifth Dynasty. It seems that Djedkare wanted to honour his wife by constructing her a huge pyramid complex, with many unusual features, including palmiform granite columns, which constitute an architectural element so far known only in the pyramid complexes of kings and not used in the temples of the queens during the Old Kingdom period. discovery Megahed said that the mission has also completed the architectural restoration and consolidation of the substructure of the kings pyramid, which had not been subjected to any restoration work before. The work of consolidation, restoration and reconstruction of the inner walls of the pyramid represented a vital task for the mission, he said. The mission is focused on the pyramid complexes of Djedkare and his Setibhor and their associated cemeteries, hoping to obtain more information on the end of the Fifth Dynasty and the beginning of the Sixth Dynasty. This period witnessed a radical transformation in ancient Egyptian ideology and religious beliefs, such as the appearance of the Pyramid Texts for the first time inside the pyramid of king Unas, the successor of Djedkare, and also the end of the practice of constructing sun temples, which all the Fifth Dynasty predecessors of Djedkare had done. discovery discovery Search Keywords: Short link: One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021 The Zimbabwe National Roads Administration (Zinara) paid out over half a million United States dollars to a non-existent company between 2012 and 2013 under its special projects arrangement, investigations have revealed. An audit by Grant Thornton shows that cumulatively, Zinara paid Bermipools US$589 748, 94 in two years. Grant Thornton also established that Bermipools is one of the companies that were used by Twalumba Holdings to get a contract from Zinara. Twalumba Holdings was once investigated by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) over a US$2 million road rehabilitation tender involving Notify Enterprises, one of its shelf companies. However, in the case of Bermipools, checks with the Registrar of Companies showed that it is not a registered company. Further, company registration books of some of the beneficiaries of contracts awarded by Zinara under the special projects arrangement show that they were dished out to connected individuals. For instance, one contract was awarded to a company called Tencraft Construction. Among the directors of Tencraft Construction was the then principal director in the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructural Development Engineer Mufaro Eric Gumbie (now late) yet Zinara is a parastatal under the ambit of the same Ministry. Tencraft Construction was formed in 2006 under company number 1749/06. Company certificates obtained from the Registrar of Companies showed that one of the Haingate directors is Tichaona Kasukuwere. Tichaona is former Cabinet minister Saviours elder brother. Another contract awarded by Zinara under the same special projects arrangement was given to Haingate. Haingate was paid varying amounts also in excess of US$5 million for two special projects awarded to the company. Another company with a director known in political circles that benefitted under special projects was Badon Enterprises. The company is owned by Chegutu West legislator Cde Dexter Nduna. Cde Nduna co-owned Badon Enterprises with his wife Scholastica, making the company a Nduna family business. Evidence compiled by Grant Thornton showed that Badon received payments from Zinara between 2011 and 2015 in excess of US$5 million. Two years down the line in 2017, the company was declared insolvent. Cde Nduna told the Herald that the company had since been liquidated. He said he won the tender way before he joined politics meaning there is no connection between his political career and his Zinara contract. Cde Nduna said raising issues of debts or abuse of money against Badon Civil Engineering was now immaterial because when the company was liquidated no creditors came forward. That company has since been liquidated, said Cde Nduna. The liquidators asked for any creditors to come forward before the company was liquidated and no one came forward. I dont think it will make sense to start raising issues about closed company now. The Grant Thornton audit report unmasked that some contractors were overpaid and in other cases payments were made for incomplete jobs and in the absence of payment certificates as evidence of the work done. It also emerged that Zinara awarded these so-called special projects to the same individuals using different company names, for instance in the case of Twalumba Civil Engineering. (Newser) Saudi Arabia has let the world see the financials for its national oil company for the first time, and they couldn't be much better. Saudi Aramco posted $111 billion in net income in 2018, making it the world's most profitable company by far. That $111 billion is more than Apple and Exxon Mobil made combined, the Wall Street Journal reports. Amazon, by comparison, cleared a paltry $10 billion. The oil company's figures were included Monday in a prospectus for a $10 billion bond sale, per CNBC, which Saudi Aramco plans to use to finance a nearly $70 billion stake in Saudi Arabia's petrochemicals company. story continues below Saudi officials hope the figures will build confidence in the kingdom's plan for an IPO for the oil company by 2021, per the Journal. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants the billions an IPO would raise to diversify Saudi Arabia's economy, partly by funding other industries such as technology and mining. "These financials have not been open to the public," a senior portfolio manager said. "It is an important issue, and this is probably a stepping stone to an IPO." He predicted demand from investors would be strong. Still, Saudi Aramco did not receive the top credit rating from agencies like Moody's because of its dependence on the countrys economy. Moody's issued an A1 rating; Chevron and Exxon Mobil have higher ratings of AA2 and AAA. (Read more Saudi Arabia stories.) (Newser) Facing allegations of a sweetheart book deal that paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said Monday that she's taking an indefinite leave of absence for health reasons. Pugh was hospitalized for five days last week with pneumonia, the Baltimore Sun reports, and her office issued a statement saying her doctors told her she should take more time to recover; the statement didn't mention the book deal. The mayor will receive her $185,000 salary while on leave. Council President Jack Young will take the reins as mayor temporarily. Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, has called for a criminal investigation into Pugh's book deal. Pugh is a Democrat; city and state officials of both parties have supported an investigation or even called on Pugh to resign. story continues below Hogan's official request for an investigation concerns the sales of thousands of Pugh's book, Healthy Holly, to the University of Maryland Medical System while she was on its board, CNN reports. The system bought 20,000 copies of Pugh's self-published book at $5 apiece each year for five years. Pugh resigned from the board after the book deal was revealed. The Sun also found that health insurer Kaiser Permanente paid Pugh more than $100,000 for books from 2015 to 2018. In September 2017, the city's spending board, which Pugh controls, awarded Kaiser a $48 million contract to provide health insurance to city employees from 2018 through 2020. Last week, per CNN, Pugh said in a news conference, "I apologize that I have done something to upset the people, the people of Baltimore that I love and care for." (Read more Baltimore stories.) (Newser) There's yet more fallout from the snubs and slights arising from John McCain's funeral last August. In February, Meghan McCain, the senator's daughter, said she wished Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner had not attended the funeral, per the Hill. Last month, President Trump complained that he didn't get a thank-you for approving the funeral arrangementsthough the military flight carrying McCain's body to Washington was the only part that required his consent. Now Sarah Palin has said that not being invited to the funeral was "kind of a gut punch." story continues below Palin, of course, was McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election. "I was kind of surprised to be publicly disinvited to the funeral," she said in a British TV interview Monday, Mediaite reports. Before his death, McCain had said he regretting selecting Palin as his VP choice. Of the funeral snub, Palin said the McCain family "didnt have to embarrass me." (Read more Sarah Palin stories.) (Newser) More trouble for Joe Biden: A second woman has come forward to say the former vice president touched her inappropriately. Connecticut's Amy Lappos tells the Hartford Courant that Biden made her feel extremely uncomfortable at a 2009 fundraiser for Rep. Jim Himes. "It wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head," she says. "He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth." Lappos, who was an aide to Himes at the time, says she didn't complain at the time "because he was the vice president. I was a nobody." More: "Disgusting" statement . Lappos said in a statement Monday that she decided to speak out because of the "ridiculously dismissive" way that Democrats responded to former Nevada lawmaker Lucy Flores' allegation of inappropriate conduct from Biden at a 2014 event, the Washington Post reports. "Bidens statement in response to Lucys article was not only disturbing, it was disgusting," Lappos said. "I stand by Lucy and any woman with the courage to come forward regarding inappropriate behavior by men." . Lappos said in a statement Monday that she decided to speak out because of the "ridiculously dismissive" way that Democrats responded to former Nevada lawmaker Lucy Flores' allegation of inappropriate conduct from Biden at a 2014 event, the Washington Post reports. "Bidens statement in response to Lucys article was not only disturbing, it was disgusting," Lappos said. "I stand by Lucy and any woman with the courage to come forward regarding inappropriate behavior by men." Pelosi's view. Biden's potential 2020 rivals didn't speak out in his defense after the allegations first surfaced, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday night that he shouldn't give up on running, AP reports. "I don't think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all," said Pelosi, who has been a strong supporter of the #MeToo movement. story continues below No new statement . There was no new statement from Biden in response to Lappos' allegation, though a spokeswoman offered his Sunday statement that he does not believe he ever acted inappropriately, but "will listen respectfully" to those who say otherwise. . There was no new statement from Biden in response to Lappos' allegation, though a spokeswoman offered his Sunday statement that he does not believe he ever acted inappropriately, but "will listen respectfully" to those who say otherwise. Biden "smeared." Biden spokesman Bill Russo said earlier Monday that photos being circulated online of Biden allegedly inappropriately touching women and children are "smears and forgeries," Axios reports. He said some, like a photo of Biden with his hands on the shoulders of Stephanie Carter, were taken out of context, while others were Photoshopped. "These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while," Russo said. "And to this day, right wing trolls and (others) continue to exploit them for their own gain." Biden spokesman Bill Russo said earlier Monday that photos being circulated online of Biden allegedly inappropriately touching women and children are "smears and forgeries," Axios reports. He said some, like a photo of Biden with his hands on the shoulders of Stephanie Carter, were taken out of context, while others were Photoshopped. "These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while," Russo said. "And to this day, right wing trolls and (others) continue to exploit them for their own gain." "Always a champion for women." Former Biden press secretary Elizabeth Alexander praises him as "always a champion for women and equality" in a USA Today op-ed. She says Biden strongly valued female staffers, taking the rare step of paying them through their entire maternity leaves, and she knows he would feel "horrible" if "he ever made anyone feel anything less than completely supported or empowered." A generational divide? The reaction to the Biden accusations has highlighted "generational differences," with older Democrats likening him to a "friendly grandpa" and younger ones to a "creepy uncle," reports Politico. Democratic operative Alyssa Miller-Hurley says that while a lot of people, including her, love Biden, the stories about the 76-year-old's behavior are drawing attention to his age and the generational divide. The reaction to the Biden accusations has highlighted "generational differences," with older Democrats likening him to a "friendly grandpa" and younger ones to a "creepy uncle," reports Politico. Democratic operative Alyssa Miller-Hurley says that while a lot of people, including her, love Biden, the stories about the 76-year-old's behavior are drawing attention to his age and the generational divide. "Not his time." Biden was probably "more oblivious than predatory," but he is still "out of step with the mores of an increasingly progressive Democratic Party," Michelle Goldberg writes in a New York Times op-ed. "No one should judge the whole span of Bidens career by the standards of 2019, but if hes going to run for president, its fair to ask whether hes the right leader for this moment," she writes. "He is a product of his time, but that time is up." (Read more Joe Biden stories.) (Newser) "Pharma bro" Martin Shkreli is no longer calling the shots at drug company Phoenixus AGunless he's managed to smuggle a cellphone into solitary confinement. Sources tell Forbes that Shkreli, who is serving a seven-year sentence in federal prison for defrauding investors, was moved to the Special Housing Unit at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Dix, NJ, last month after reports that he was using an illegal phone to run the business. The Bureau of Prisons declined to confirm that Shkreli is in solitary confinement, but it said the allegations, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, are "under investigation." Shkreli's lawyer declined to comment. story continues below "When there are allegations of misconduct, they are thoroughly investigated and appropriate action is taken if such allegations are proven true," a bureau spokesperson tells the New York Daily News. Fellow inmate Justin Liverman, a former member of the Crackas With Attitude hacking crew, tells Forbes that Shkreli was still "in the SHU" as of Sunday. He says Shkreliwho was reportedly protected by inmate bodyguards nicknamed "D Block" and "Krispy"would have had little trouble obtaining a contraband phone in Fort Dix, which he describes as "cellphone heaven." "There are hundreds of phones on this compound," he says. "You can either rent phone time or buy one for $1,000." (Read more Martin Shkreli stories.) (Newser) Nipsey Hussle spoke openly of his youthful membership in one of Los Angeles' biggest gangsbut police don't believe that's why the 33-year-old rapper was gunned down on Sunday. Law enforcement sources tells the Los Angeles Times they believe the suspect has gang ties, but they believe the dispute was personal, not gang-related. Eric Holder, 29, was identified as a suspect Monday night. Police say Holder, who is still at large, shot at Hussle as he stood outside a clothing store he owned in a strip mall Sunday afternoon, CNN reports. The suspect was then driven away by an "unidentified female," according to the LAPD, which is seeking the public's help in locating Holder. Hussle had bought the mall and planned to redevelop as part of his plan to help the struggling south LA neighborhood he grew up in, the AP reports. story continues below Hussle joined the Rollin 60's Neighborhood Crips as a teenager and he wanted his community activism to help break the cycle of gang violence. "We dealt with death, with murder," he said last year. "It was like living in a war zone, where people die on these blocks and everybody is a little bit immune to it." South LA resident Latisha Roberts tells the Los Angeles Times that his death is all the more tragic because young people saw Hussle, who performed with rappers from rival gangs, as a role model. "The only people we hear saying that it's gang-related are the news and the media outlets," she says. "Everybody thats in the 'hood, they know thats not the case. Because then he would have been gone a long time ago." Police say 19 people were injured at a Monday night vigil for Hussle at the shooting site. They believe a fight started a stampede. (Read more Los Angeles stories.) (Newser) A former Mississippi Gulf Coast police officer is headed to prison for the death of her 3-year-old daughter, who was left in a patrol car while her mom had sex with a police supervisor and fell asleep. The Sun Herald of Biloxi reports ex-Long Beach police officer Cassie Barker was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison in the 2016 death of Cheyenne Hyer. The 29-year-old, who is pregnant, pleaded guilty last month to manslaughter in a plea bargain after being indicted on a charge of second-degree murder, the AP reports. Prosecutors recommended that she serve 20 years, which was the maximum sentence. story continues below Cheyenne was strapped in her car seat in the patrol car for four hours while Barker was with her then-supervisor. The car's air conditioning was turned on, but it wasn't blowing cold air. Cheyenne was unresponsive and had a temperature of 107 degrees when Barker returned. At Monday's sentencing hearing, father Ryan Hyer said he left Barker a year before the death because he caught her cheating on him with her supervisor. "I have blamed myself for every what if, should have, and could have," he said. "My life has been a complete hell without Cheyenne. This will never get easier." (A Florida woman rescued an 8-month-old boy who had been left in a hot car.) Read more here: https://www.sunherald.com/news/local/crime/article228687819.html#storylink=cpy (Read more child dies in hot car stories.) (Newser) There's no escape from the long arm of the law in Sweden. Not even sitting naked in a sauna, reports the AP. Police spokeswoman Carina Skagerlind says an off-duty police officer found himself sitting in the same sauna in Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb, as a fugitive who'd dodged a jail sentence for aggravated assault, among other offenses. Skagerlind says after recognizing each other, "the naked police officer calmly told the man that he should consider himself arrested." story continues below She said Tuesday the officer called colleagues to pick up the fugitive, adding "the arrest was undramatic and the wanted man didn't try to flee." "It's easier to take action when you have your colleagues with you, and all your kit. This was as stripped-down as it gets," Rinkeby's deputy police chief tells the BBC. The officer was praised for the March 29 arrest, and police warned fugitives on Facebook: "We are everywhere. Even if you do not see us, we are there." (Read more sauna stories.) (Newser) A University of Hartford drama student told police he was too "into his character" when he allegedly stabbed two people while re-creating a scene from The Butterfly Effect. "My emotions got the best of me" was actually Jake Wascher's second explainer, per a police report. It describes the 21-year-old as initially claiming he'd been "curious what it would be like to stab someone," reports the Hartford Courant. Either way, Wascher is charged with two counts of attempted murder after police were called to a university dorm room at 1:30pm Sunday. One witness said Wascher stabbed 21-year-old Brandon Gasparino, who was directing him in a reenactment of a stabbing scene from 2004's The Butterfly Effect, before turning on 19-year-old Thomas Nee, who'd ordered him to stop. story continues below Wascher stabbed Nee, then threw the knife at him, the witness said. Another witness later saw a 6- to 7-inch kitchen knife stuck in Nee's chest, per the Courant. Both Nee and Gasparino were taken to a hospital with wounds to the chest and back, while Wascher fled into a wooded area, police say. Apprehended two hours lateras prospective students toured campus, per FOX61Wascher allegedly said he'd dropped "the scissors ... that I used to do it," per the Courant, though officers say a knife was taken from the dorm. Wascher was in Hartford Hospital after a psychiatric evaluation Monday as his bail was set at $1 million. As of Monday, Nee remained in critical condition following surgery at St. Francis Hospital, per ABC News and the Courant. Gasparino has been released. (A model fatally stabbed his rival.) (Newser) Kayla Blake thought she'd lost Rebel forever. Per WHSV, the fifth-year psych major at James Madison University got a call Thursday morning informing her that her apartment building in Harrisonburg, Va., was on fire. She says she became "hysterical," as Rebel, the dog she'd adopted three years ago, was inside her third-floor apartment. She rushed home, but when she got there, she got bad news: Firefighters weren't able to get to her unit due to dangerous conditions, and they were sure Rebel had perished in the flames. "The K-9 unit told my parents that there was no way that Rebel would have been able to escape," she says. "Even if he hadn't fallen through a floor or anything, they said he would have died just from the heat." KSNB notes that Blake even put up a memorial tribute to Rebel on her Facebook page, noting, "I love you forever sweet boy." story continues below Two days later, though, when Blake went back to check out what was left, she heard a shocking sound: barking coming from the vicinity of her apartment. Blake immediately called cops and the fire department, and officials clambered through the debris to her apartment. "They walked up ... we heard one of the fire fighters yell, 'We got him!' and he looked out the window and gave me a thumbs up." A video on Blake's Facebook page shows the dramatic moment when rescuers and Blake emerged from the charred building with Rebel, cradled in Blake's arms. Firefighters tell Blake that Rebel survived with just a burn on his nose because the door to her bedroom was closed, per WTVR; the desk he cowered under, plus a flag hanging above it, were the only two items in her apartment that escaped the flames. "MIRACLES HAPPEN!!!!" Blake wrote on Facebook. "I cannot even begin to understand how he survived, but REBEL IS ALIVE!!! My boy is alive." (Read more uplifting news stories.) (Newser) First there was Goop, now there's Poosh. Yes, Kourtney Kardashian has launched her very own lifestyle website, complete with all the things you would expect from such a site: an article about the wonder spice turmeric, a list of organic wines, a guide to non-toxic toys, a 5-minute workout to give you an "instant butt lift." And then, of course, there's the Kardashian-specific content: Kris Jenner's brownie recipe, Kourtney talking about co-sleeping with her kids, pictures from North West's unicorn birthday party. What exactly is the site? Let Kourtney explain it to you herself: "Poosh is the modern guide to living your best life. Our mission is to educate, motivate, create, and curate a modern lifestyle, achievable by all." In advance of its Tuesday launch, sister Kim Kardashian posed in a leotard on her Instagram account to promote it. story continues below As Kourtney further explains, "I felt that there was something missing in the healthy lifestyle space. Healthy living gets a bad rap; its as though if you care about what you put inor onyour body, then youre not sexy or cool. But this just isnt true, and Poosh is here to prove just that. People are constantly asking me how I do it all, from being a single mom to working full-time to still maintaining a social life. I get endless questions about food, kids, beauty, and fashion, so I decided to create Poosh, a curated experience and a destination for modern living." And as Paper explains, many of the "articles" on Poosh actually include links so you can easily buy exactly what you're reading about. As for that name, Vogue "explains" that Kourtney named the site after her daughter, Penelope. Poosh's Instagram account already has 2.5 million followers. (Speaking of Goop, it's becoming a TV series.) (Newser) Legroom was not an issue here. A Lithuanian man had the weird experience of flying to Italy on a huge passenger jetas the only passenger. By the AP's count, the Boeing 737-800a different model than the 737s of recent controversyhad all of eight people aboard: two pilots, five crew members, and passenger Skirmantas Strimaitis. The jet can hold 188 passengers. It was "a once-in-the-lifetime experience," Strimaitis says of his flight from Vilnius to Bergamo, Italy. A travel agency had chartered the flight because it needed to bring a group of Lithuanians vacationing in Italy back home. It also sold one-way tickets for the flight to Italy, and Strimaitis was the only taker. (Read more air travel stories.) (Newser) Belize's Great Blue Hole was popularized by underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau in a 1971 episode of his series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. But what was at the bottom of the 410-foot-deep ocean sinkhole, which formed as a limestone cave thousands of years ago before rising sea levels submerged it, remained unknown. Nearly half a century later, Cousteau's grandson, Fabien Cousteau, answered that question with the help of billionaire Richard Branson and National Geographic Explorer. They launched an expedition to the Great Blue Holewhich, at nearly 1,000 feet across, is the largest ocean sinkhole in the world (though not the deepest)in December, and now they're out with a preview of what they found, Newsweek reports. Among those findings? Hundreds of conchs, old scientific equipment, a GoPro with footage still intactand the bodies of two divers. story continues below "We ... encountered the resting place for two of the divers whove been lost in the hole," submersible pilot Erika Bergman says. "We notified the local authorities, and everyone agreed to leave them undisturbed. They are at peace." All of those things were found beneath the hydrogen sulfide, or H2S, layer, which sits at a depth of 290 feet. H2S, a toxic gas, dissolves in water; sea life cannot survive beneath the H2S layer and won't pass through it. "Below the H2S, theres no oxygen and anything that falls down there now is preserved," Bergman explains. Also at the bottom of the hole? Unidentifiable tracks that, Bergman told CNN last month, remain "open to interpretation." The researchers have released a minidocumentary about the expedition. (The Great Blue Hole may hold the secret to the Mayan collapse.) Let us know what you're seeing and hearing around the community. Submit here Anthony Jenkins-Alexie watches dash camera video footage from City of Fairbanks Police Officer Kurt Werner's partrol vehicle showing Werner inspecting Sgt. Allen Brandt's stolen and abandoned patrol vehicle on Oct. 16, 2016 on opening day of Jenkins-Alexie's trial Tuesday afternoon, March 26, 2019 in the Rabinowitz Courthouse. Jenkins-Alexie is the Fairbanks man charged with the murder in the shooting death of Fairbank police officer Sgt. Allen Brandt, who was gunned down on a downtown Fairbanks street the night of Oct. 16, 2016 while responding to a report of shots fired. From left to right: Alaska House of Representatives Republicans Tammie Wilson, Bart LeBon and Democratic Rep. Adam Wool. Wilson and LeBon are members of the House Finance Committee, which is holding budget meetings across Alaska to discuss Gov. Mike Dunleavys proposed budget. Sundays meeting in Fairbanks featured more than four hours of testimony, with the vast majority opposing Dunleavys plan. March 24, 2019. Robin Wood/News-Miner The Daily News-Miner encourages residents to make themselves heard through the Opinion pages. Readers' letters and columns also appear online at newsminer.com. Contact the editor with questions at letters@newsminer.com or call 459-7574. Community Perspective Send Community Perspective submissions by mail (P.O. Box 70710, Fairbanks AK 99707) or via email (letters@newsminer.com). Submissions must be 500 to 750 words. Columns are welcome on a wide range of issues and should be well-written and well-researched with attribution of sources. Include a full name, email address, daytime telephone number and headshot photograph suitable for publication (email jpg or tiff files at 150 dpi.) You may also schedule a photo to be taken at the News-Miner office. The News-Miner reserves the right to edit submissions or to reject those of poor quality or taste without consulting the writer. Letters to the editor Send letters to the editor by mail (P.O. Box 70710, Fairbanks AK 99707), by fax (907-452-7917) or via email (letters@newsminer.com). Writers are limited to one letter every two weeks (14 days.) All letters must contain no more than 350 words and include a full name (no abbreviation), daytime and evening phone numbers and physical address. (If no phone, then provide a mailing address or email address.) The Daily News-Miner reserves the right to edit or reject letters without consulting the writer. A defense lawyer for Carlos Ghosn says his legal team has asked a Tokyo court to separate the former Nissan Motor chairman's trial from the carmaker's. Ghosn is accused of understating his income on Nissan's securities reports. The company itself has also been indicted for making false financial disclosures. Lawyer Junichiro Hironaka spoke to the media at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on Tuesday. The Tokyo District Court has been talking with prosecutors and Ghosn's legal team about how to proceed with his trial. The court plans to hold the first hearing in September. Hironaka asserted that because senior Nissan officials have reached a plea-bargaining deal, the company is more like a prosecutor than a defendant. He said it would be unfair to Ghosn if Nissan were to act as a prosecutor standing before the same judge. Hironaka also said he expects Ghosn to hold a news conference this month. He said his legal team is now working out what the former chairman should discuss. Hironaka said prosecutors have not asked to question Ghosn since his release on bail last month. He said his team can't say whether they would accept such a request before knowing what it's about. Major convenience store operator FamilyMart Co. on Tuesday introduced checkouts that use facial recognition technology as the company looks to make adjustments amid a nationwide labor shortage. With the latest facial recognition and image analysis technologies developed by Panasonic Corp., customers at a newly opened store in Yokohama can register their photo and credit card information and then check out items using unmanned registers. Customers simply need to place the items they want to purchase on a surface and cameras at the counter register both their face and the products. Their payment is processed when a passcode linked to the registered credit card is entered. In the trial stage, around 1,000 customers will be given access to the system, all of them workers at nearby Panasonic factories. aI am very excited to open this store with Panasonicas latest technology. We may face some (technological) difficulties, but we must overcome them,a FamilyMart President Takashi Sawada told reporters. Panasonic, which operates the FamilyMart store as a franchisee, has dispatched an official to serve as the storeas senior manager in order to keep a close eye on the new system. The hope is that the store will be able to effectively operate with a smaller than usual crew. The Governorship/National/State Assembly Election Petition Tribunal in Bauchi State says it has received 26 petitions. The Secret... The Governorship/National/State Assembly Election Petition Tribunal in Bauchi State says it has received 26 petitions. The Secretary of the Tribunal, Bello Abdullahi, disclosed this while speaking to newsmen in an interview on Tuesday. He explained that 15 of the petitions are for the National Assembly elections. We have so far received 26 petitions, seven of them are for the Senate. The seven petitions are from all the senatorial districts, with some having multiples. For the House of Representatives, we have so far received only eight petitions, meaning that not all the Reps submitted their petitions, he said. Abdullahi said that the tribunal has not received any petition for the governorship election in the state, pointing out that they still have time to file their petitions, except if they dont want to challenge the election. Continuing, he said, Most of them wait till the last day, last hour and last minute before they file their petitions and you cant refuse them because it is their right and it is within the stipulated time. On whether the tribunal has started sitting, the Secretary said that it has started partial sitting. He said: The tribunal has started sitting partially on motion ex parte only. As soon as that is over between now and Friday, the next thing well wait for is filling of memoranda and replies. The Code of Conduct Tribunal, CCT, Monday was treated with a rude shock as Onnoghens witness, Lawal Olarewaju was uncovered with a ... The Code of Conduct Tribunal, CCT, Monday was treated with a rude shock as Onnoghens witness, Lawal Olarewaju was uncovered with a piece of white paper allegedly programmed as his memory aid. This discovery followed a cross examination by the prosecution counsel, Aliyu Umar, SAN. Under cross examination, Umar asked Olarewaju who is the defendants official driver what he was doing with the piece of paper he saw him fumbling with inside the witness box. In his words, I saw you while fielding questions from the defence counsel with a piece of white paper. What is it for and who gave it to you? In response, the witness said, The piece of paper belongs to me. It is my own handwriting. This development caught the attention of the CCT chairman, Danladi Umar who demanded to see the suspicious paper and, eventually seized it as exhibit. But fielding question from journalists after adjournment, Umar hinted that the piece of paper found in custody of the witness suggested he was a false witness. He added, The handwriting on the paper does not also suggest that Olarewaju was as literate as he claimed. The Lagos state chapter of the All Progressive Youth Forum (APYF) has endorsed Femi Gbajabiamila for speaker of the house of represent... The Lagos state chapter of the All Progressive Youth Forum (APYF) has endorsed Femi Gbajabiamila for speaker of the house of representatives in the 9th assembly. In a statement on Monday, the group said Gbajabiamila has demonstrated his true passion for issues concerning Nigeria through his ills, motions and debates in the house. The lawmaker, who is majority leader of the house in the 8th assembly and of the All Progressives Congress (APC), declared to run for the position on Sunday. In the statement signed by Sola Osindero, APYF state coordinator in Lagos, the group said Gbajabiamila is best suited for the position, describing him as a true believer in qualitative representation. Everyone could recall how he led a movement within the House in 2007 to end the third term debate agenda and machinations of the then President Olusegun Obasanjo to perpetuate his stay in office, the statement read. As leader of the opposition in the House between 2011 and 2015, Hon. Gbajabiamila revived the role of the opposition in the House and continued to maintain a tough stance against the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). He was the first and only legislator to bring a motion on the floor of the House for the invocation of the doctrine of necessity, during the illness and absence of President Umar Musa Yaradua, which led to the swearing-in of Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan as Acting President. Another landmark achievement of Hon. Gbajabiamila was when he Chaired House Adhoc Committee that investigated the claims by the Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON) where about $1Bn was owed by Zenon Petroleum & Gas Limited and Forte Oil Plc which has been paid. Meanwhile, the APC leadership is expected to meet on Tuesday to decide on the zoning formular for national assembly leaders. TheCable gathered that the national working committee of the party will meet in Abuja to decide on how to zone four key positions including senate president, deputy senate president, speaker of the house of representatives and deputy speaker. Adams Oshiomhole, national chairman of the party, had said the APC will ensure all zones are represented in the leadership structure of the incoming assembly. The Kogi State House of Assembly has recommended the removal of the Chief Judge (CJ) of state, Justice Nasir Ajanah, for alleged gross... The Kogi State House of Assembly has recommended the removal of the Chief Judge (CJ) of state, Justice Nasir Ajanah, for alleged gross misconduct. This followed Tuesdays adoption of the report and recommendations of the House committee on public account, which indicted the Kogi State High Court and Kogi Hajj Commission of financial breaches. The House said that the Chief Judge could step aside to defend himself over the indictment by the auditor general of the state. The House also recommended punitive measures on those indicated, to avoid a reoccurrence. It however directed the state government to urgently resume payment of salaries of judicial workers. Committee Report 30 of the House Committee on Public Accounts on the States Auditor Generals on the 2016 Financial Statements (Budget Performance Analysis on Personnel Cost, Overheads, Capital Expenditure and Revenue Performance of Kogi State for the Year Ended 31st December, 2016), was presented by Hon. Ahmed Mohammed, Committee Chairman. It would be recalled that Kogi judicial staff members have been on strike for close to six months over unresolved differences between the judicial arm and executive, arising from their alleged non submission to the staff payroll verification exercise embarked on by government late last year. The judicial arm had earlier alleged of plans by Governor Yahaya Bello to remove Ajanah from office. A Federal High Court in Ibadan on Tuesday remanded Fatai Lawal in prison for trafficking 34.4 kg of hemp. Justice P.I. Ajoku rema... A Federal High Court in Ibadan on Tuesday remanded Fatai Lawal in prison for trafficking 34.4 kg of hemp. Justice P.I. Ajoku remanded Lawal after he changed his plea from not guilty to guilty to a two-count charge bordering on trafficking of an illicit drug. Ajoku remanded him and adjourned the case until May 9 for review of facts and sentencing. Earlier, Mr Raphael Himinkaiye, Counsel for the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), had told the court that the defendant committed the offence on Aug. 28 2018, along Ajibode Road in Ibadan. Himinkaiye said the defendant was driving a Micra car with Reg. No. YRE 676 SE when he was apprehended by the police. The defendant was transporting 34.4 kg of Cannabis to an unknown location when he was arrested, the prosecutor said. Himinkaiye said the offence contravened Sections 11 (B) AND (C) of the NDLEA Act Cap N30 Law of the Federation 2004. The senate committee on trade and investment has rejected the ministrys 2019 budget of N15.63 billion. The committee, on Monday, ... The senate committee on trade and investment has rejected the ministrys 2019 budget of N15.63 billion. The committee, on Monday, said it would not consider the budget till the minister could explain a company listed for appropriation. Sabo Mohammed, chairman of the committee, said the Special Economic Zone Company which was included in the budget was not part of the 17 agencies under the ministry. During the budget defense session, the committee referred Okechukwu Enelamah, minister of trade and investment, to item two on page seven of the budget booklet presented by the ministry. According to Mohammed, a document obtained from the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) containing information on how the company was registered, showed that it is a private company. Liability of the members are limited by share, which gives federal government 25 per cent and 75 per cent to private individuals, he said. He directed the minister to forward detailed written explanation on how the company got into the appropriation list, its management staff list and its staff strength as well as statement of account before consideration of 2019 budget proposal. In response, Enelamah said the company was established through a presidential initiative and its approval was given at a cabinet meeting held in May 2018 . One of the areas that this government has focused on is infrastructure. The second area is industrialisation and the two have something in common, he explained. If the government tries to do it alone, it would be extremely tasking. So the president directed that we should bring other partners that can combine with whatever monies we have to build world class infrastructure which led to the establishment of the company in partnership with other investors. Jason Kempin/Getty Images for for Essential Broadcast Media, LLCWhen the All-Star Birthday Celebration for Loretta Lynn was originally announced, the guest of honor joked that she wanted Keith Urban to jump out of her cake. Monday night at Nashvilles Bridgestone Arena, the CMA Entertainer of the Year was only too happy to oblige. Miss Loretta - you asked me to jump out of a cake for you - and I would do it again every time! the Aussie superstar shared afterwards on his socials. Thank you for a truly surreal and gorgeous night of music, heart, stories, magic, and LOVE!!!!! Keith literally climbed out of a giant blue cake at the event. Loretta sat sidestage Monday night as a whos who of the biggest stars in country music sang the songs she wrote and made famous. Keith did Blue Kentucky Girl, while Darius Rucker took on the once-controversial The Pill, according to The Tennessean. Kacey Musgraves delivered her version of You Aint Woman Enough (To Take My Man), while Miranda Lambert sang both Dont Come Home a Drinkin (With Lovin on Your Mind), and Fist City with Pistol Annies. The night also boasted plenty of superstar takes on Lorettas duets with Conway Twitty: Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood wondered what happens After the Fire Is Gone, while George Strait and Martina McBride issued the invitation to Lead Me On. Alan Jackson and Lee Ann Womack became the Louisiana Woman and Mississippi Man of song. But the high point of the evening came when the Coal Miners Daughter herself ended the night by joining the all-star cast to sing her signature song, alongside her famous singing sister, Crystal Gayle, plus Tanya Tucker and others. Ultimately, Monday nights celebration was just a warm-up: Loretta will actually turn 87 on April 14. Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Over 190,000 Chinese volunteer soldiers died in the Korean war. Yet 66 years later, remains or possessions of many of the fallen have still not been returned to China. But, for a sixth straight year, sets of remains will be returned on Wednesday, bringing families and war survivors some closure. In paying tribute to fallen soldiers, 88-year-old Ma Shixun, who survived the Korean War, said he would never forget the sacrifices that his comrades-in-arms made. He joined the Chinese volunteer army in 1951 and served in the logistics department, one of the hottest targets of the enemy's aerial bombing. Ma Shixun salutes at his comrades-in-arms' tombs. /CGTN Photo "'Are you all sure of what you're signing up for? Think twice!' my instructor asked us at the recruitment. I almost lost my life after one bombing because the fire couldn't be put out in our unit," said Ma. As part of the consensus reached by China and South Korea in 2013, remains of Chinese volunteer soldiers who served in the Korean War will be returned to China on a yearly basis. So far, 589 sets have come in. They include everything from shoes and stamps to skeletal remains. They've all been buried in Shenyang. One soldier from the PLA air force told CGTN at the cemetery that though the war ended 66 years ago, they must never forget the sacrifices of those who died and to treat them as spiritual role models. Ma Shixun pays tribute at his comrades-in-arms' tombs. /CGTN Photo "Since 1993, I have come to the cemetery on my own every year just before Tomb Sweeping Festival. At first, it was spontaneous. Nowadays though there are fewer and fewer living veterans, so we come to pay respects in groups," said Ma. After last year's repatriation ceremony, the newly formed Ministry of Veteran Affairs, a result of structural reform of China's State Council, is taking charge of the relevant work regarding the settlement of remains for Chinese volunteer soldiers. Pilots from the People's Liberation Army air force listen to veteran Ma Shixun sharing his wartime experience. /CGTN Photo "Ten sets of remains will be returned this Wednesday but their identities are still unknown. After the burial service, we will work on the establishment of digital archives for the remains which have been returned," Li Liansheng, who works at the Liaoning Bureau of the Ministry of Veterans Affairs, told CGTN. So far, only 24 sets of the 589 returned have been identified. As for the rest, veterans like Ma Shixun can only regard them as their comrades-in-arms. The number "81192" has shown up on many Chinese media outlets on this day every year for 18 years, reminding readers of a name most Chinese people won't and can't forget. Wang Wei, a Chinese pilot serving in the Navy Air Force, was missing and then assumed dead after a midair collision between a U.S. surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet on April 1, 2001. He was on duty tracing and monitoring the surveillance plane and parachuted out after his fighter jet was rammed and destroyed by the US plane. Unfinished artwork by Wang Wei. /VCG Photo The Chinese navy and other units then began a 14-day large-scale search, even though it was thought that there was no possibility of Wang Wei being found alive taking all conditions into consideration. With his jet breaking apart around him, the young pilot perished in the ocean at the age of 33 in quite an unusual and heroic way. Nobody could possibly know what he was thinking of at the last second of life. But the country honors him for his patriotic spirit. Pilot 81192, who was born in 1968 and joined the People's Liberation Army (PLA) after graduating from high school, has become a national hero. Wang Wei in pilot uniform at a navy flight school. /VCG Photo Netizens on Chinese social media commemorate Wang Wei though 18 years have passed. Some of them were very little kids in 2001, their first realization that "fight for your country" is not just a slogan but a moment you decide to jump like the pilot was when they heard about the incident. Some are now at the same age as Wang Wei had he lived, in their 50s. They still want to show respect to the hero pilot in memory of his sacrifice. "81192, the Liaoning aircraft has cleared its deck, please return!" "If you are still in the airspace to intercept the US plane, please mind your fuel to return directly, or let me guide you to the Liaoning aircraft carrier for landing 81192, please answer if you copy." Millions of Chinese netizens reposted the message used to reach to Wang Wei before the collision. They left comments on the related articles and videos, repeated the message though nobody could answer it. This kind of content is posted more and more on various social media platforms in recent years as China's military grows larger and more developed, especially after China's first aircraft carrier the Liaoning began service in 2012. These 18 years have seen a profound change in China's navy. Military fans always say it takes ten years to make army but a hundred years to build a navy. The unique charm of the navy is it showcases a country's winds of change. Looking back at the 70 years of development of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, it perfectly reflects how China has struggled and risen. The PLA Navy's aspirations toward blue-water elaborate strategies of offshore defense and open seas protection. The navy will enhance its capabilities for strategic deterrence and counterattack, maritime maneuvers, joint operations at sea, comprehensive defense and comprehensive support. The development year by year adds more pride to Chinese people, who hope desperately to see the army grow stronger. A Chinese citizen puts a fighter jet model up in front of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in memory of Wang Wei, April 2001, Beijing. /VCG Photo By Yin Xiaoping and Han Cheng CHONGQING, April 2 (ChinaMil) The Chinese military held its first International Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) training course from March 26 to 30, 2019, at the PLA Army Medical University in Chongqing city of southwest China. The training was led by the Logistic Support Department under Chinas Central Military Commission (CMC) and undertaken by the PLA Ground Forces Logistics Department. Seven foreign combat wounds medical specialists from Pakistan, Serbia and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), together with four Chinese military medical experts, conducted a five-day intensive training for 90 front-line backbone medical personnel selected from Chinas military medical institutions and peacekeeping standby forces. Focused on the theme of effective treatment for wartime injuries, the training included instruction and tutoring, case analysis as well as group discussions and exchanges of ideas, highlighting such special topics as combat wounds treatment principles, injury assessment and classification, combat wounds treatment methods and techniques, medical evacuation procedure and strategy, and the practice and application of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). ICRC experts shared their practical experience in handling mass casualties in local wars and armed conflicts. Chinese military experts introduced the latest achievements in front-line treatment capacity-building and their experience of treating the critically wounded. A Chinese military medical expert participating in the training said that this training is a venue for exchanges between the Chinese and international combat wounds concepts and techniques. It will promote medical service training and war readiness for the Chinese military and improve the front-line treatment capability and medical treatment level in war time. Incheon International Airport last week celebrated its 18th anniversary. Often rated one of the best in the world, the airport said Sunday that the number of global travelers passing through its gates has been growing at an average of 7.7 percent a year. A Vietnamese woman is now the only suspect remaining in detention in Malaysia for killing the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. A lawyer for Doan Thi Huong said Monday that his client has instead pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means. Huong was charged with smearing the deadly nerve agent VX on the face of Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur's airport in February 2017. Murder charges stemming from the same incident were dropped last month against an Indonesian woman, Siti Aisyah. Its been six months since agents from Saudi Arabia killed the Washington Post columnist. What has been done in the aftermath? In this documentary, The Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, The Washington Post examines Khashoggis writings, his killing inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and the Trump administrations response. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. Its hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Under the revised penal code, people would be executed for offenses such as rape, adultery, homosexual relations, robbery and insult to the Prophet Mohammed. Brunei's tourist brochures describe the country as a haven of tranquility. That may once have been the case as Brunei, a Muslim monarchy, has not executed anyone since 1957. But, its recent decision to impose the death penalty, including death by stoning, is stirring international outrage. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, is urging the government of Brunei to stop its revised penal code from entering into force on Wednesday. Bachelet says the application of the death penalty under the new law, which she calls cruel and inhumane, violates international human rights law. UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet warns the new code, if implemented, would mark a serious setback for human rights protections in Brunei. Her spokeswoman, Ravina Shamdasani, tells VOA it is very easy to fall afoul of this law because it is so broad. "For example, it criminalizes exposing Muslim children to the beliefs and practices of any religion other than Islam," she said. "It also introduces public flogging as a punishment for abortion, for example, which again would disproportionately affect people who are already vulnerable. It would disproportionately affect women." Shamdasani says there is no contradiction between human rights and faith. They are not opposing forces. She says her office has worked with religious leaders from all over the world to draft the so-called Beirut Declaration on "Faith for Rights." "This is a very constructive document, which again helps countries that are motivated by the desire to integrate religious tenets into their law to do so while fully respecting international human rights obligations so that they can work jointly to uphold human dignity and equality for all," she said. International law allows for the imposition of the death penalty only for the crime of murder or intentional killing. Bachelet says any religion-based legislation must not violate human rights. She says her office is ready to work with the Brunei government to bring it into compliance with its international human rights obligations. Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah rules the oil-rich monarchy and is one of the world's wealthiest people. When Japanese Emperor Akihito abdicates in one month's time, it will usher in a new era. The new era will be ushered in when Crown Prince Naruhito ascends to the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1. Akihito will abdicate the imperial throne on April 30 of this year. When he does so, it will be the second time in nearly a century that Japan has ushered in a new era. A day later, on May 1, the Reiwa era begins. Japan is the only remaining country in the world that continues to use the era-name system, which has its roots in China. Under Emperor Akihito, the current era, "Heisei" era, which translates to "peace prevails everywhere" or "achieving peace," has spanned 30 years, impacting the daily lives of those in Japan. As the current era nears its end, it's inspired those in the country to reflect on the past three decades and look forward to the future. The new era name was chosen by a panel from a number of names submitted by scholars. The Reiwa era follows the traditional naming guidelines: it consists of only two Japanese characters, or kanji, is easily read and written, and doesn't use common words. UPM to Reduce Coated Mechanical Paper Capacity in Germany UPM plans to permanently close paper machine 10 at UPM Plattling, Germany, reducing the annual capacity of coated mechanical paper in Europe by approximately 155,000 tons. April 2, 2019 - UPM announced plans to permanently close paper machine 10 at UPM Plattling, Germany, reducing the annual capacity of coated mechanical paper in Europe by approximately 155,000 tons. Paper production on paper machines 1 and 11 is planned to continue at the mill site. In total 160 positions would be affected by the machine closure, and the employee consultation process will start in the course of April in line with local legislation, UPM said. The machine is planned to be closed after the consultation process has been finalized, UPM added. Paper markets globally have been declining consistently over the past 10 years, said Winfried Schaur, Executive Vice President, UPM Communication Papers. UPM Communication Papers has responded to this development by selective capacity reductions, always considering the competitiveness of our business and we will continue to do so also in future. The planned closure announced today is in line with this approach and focuses on maintaining the most modern and competitive assets. Ruud van den Berg, Senior Vice President, Magazines, Merchants and Office Business at UPM Communication Papers, explained, Among our European coated mechanical machines Plattling PM 10 has both the lowest capacity and the highest technical age. We adjust our capacity to remain a reliable partner to our customers and will engage in a fair dialogue with employee representatives. UPM will recognize restructuring charges of approximately EUR 30 million as items affecting comparability in its Q2 2019 results. The planned actions would result in annual savings of approximately EUR 17 million. UPM Plattling mill has the capacity to produce 785,000 tons per year of coated and uncoated magazine papers (LWC, SC). The mill employs 590 people. Through the renewing of the bio and forest industries, UPM is building a sustainable future across six business areas: UPM Biorefining, UPM Energy, UPM Raflatac, UPM Specialty Papers, UPM Paper ENA and UPM Plywood. To learn more, please visit: www.upm.com SOURCE: UPM Foreign Minister Zarif says US is waging 'economic terrorism' against Iran 04/02/19 Source: Press TV Iran's foreign minister says the US is waging "economic terrorism" against the Islamic Republic by employing restrictive measures that are troubling the relief efforts targeting flood-stricken people across the country. A flooded area in Golestan province in northern Iran (see more photos by Mehr News Agency) Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted the remarks on Monday, saying the sanctions are "impeding aid efforts by Iranian Red Crescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods. Blocked equipment includes relief choppers." "This isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM," he added. .@realDonaldTrump 's "maximum pressure"-flouting UNSC Res 2231 & ICJ ruling-is impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedCrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods. Blocked equipment includes relief choppers: This isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM. pic.twitter.com/EEKTMiXLEi Javad Zarif (@JZarif) April 1, 2019 The United States under President Donald Trump left a multi-lateral nuclear deal with Iran in 2017. It later returned the sanctions that had been lifted under the accord. Zarif also reminded that the economic restrictions, which Washington is deploying against Tehran under the banner of "maximum pressure" is "flouting UNSC Res 2231 & ICJ ruling." The nuclear accord, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, has the UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany as its other signatories. It was ratified in the form of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2231 after conclusion in Vienna in July 2015. In October 2018, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN's principal judicial organ, ordered in response to a lawsuit filed by Iran that the United States had to halt the unilateral sanctions it has re-imposed on "humanitarian" supplies. A damaged house in Gonbad Kavous, northern Iran (see more photos by IRNA) Washington's refusal to relieve its bans comes as countrywide flooding, unleashed by heavy downpours on Iran since March 19, has killed scores of people and has pushed relief and rescue organizations to the utmost. A day earlier, Zarif had said that Trump was grasping "at every straw" to portray his failed policies on Tehran as a success. "Only thing proven is that he rejoices over the misery that he thinks he has imposed on ordinary Iranians," the top diplomat tweeted. .@realdonaldtrump is grasping at every straw to portray his failed Iran policy as a success. Only thing proven is that he rejoices over the misery that he thinks he has imposed on ordinary Iranians. Like his predecessors, he will learn that Iranians never submit to pressure. Javad Zarif (@JZarif) March 31, 2019 "Like his predecessors, he will learn that Iranians never submit to pressure," Zarif, however, added. Thousands Of Homes Destroyed In Iran As Deadly Floods Spread 04/02/19 Source: RFE/RL An Iranian state-linked charity says more than 25,000 homes have been destroyed in flash floods across Iran amid what authorities said were the heaviest rains recorded in the past decade. A destroyed house in Gonbad Kavous, northern Iran (see more photos by IRNA) At least 45 people have been killed since March 19, according to official figures, in floods that swept northern, central, and southern Iran and spread to western and southwestern parts of the country in recent days. Thousands of people from scores of villages and towns have been evacuated across the country as forecasters predicted more heavy rains in the next two days. Hadi Darfishi, the deputy director of the Islamic Revolution Housing Foundation, a charitable organization overseen by the supreme leader, said on April 1 that more than 25,000 homes were destroyed and over 60,000 damaged during the recent floods, according to the official IRNA news agency. Officials have said the government would compensate residents for flood damage. Flooding in Mamoulan, Lorestan province (see more photos by ISNA) Iran's Meteorological Organization has called on citizens to refrain from traveling to flood-hit areas and warned of the possibility of flooding in 11 provinces, including in the northwest. Western and southwestern parts of the country have borne the brunt of the storms in recent days, with rivers breaking their banks and many roads becoming impassable. Flooding in Ahvaz, Khuzestan province (see more photos by ISNA) Authorities in the southwestern province of Khuzestan declared a state of emergency on March 31 as they opened the flood gates to prevent water from overflowing two major dams. Gholamreza Shariati, the provincial governor, told state TV on March 31 that floods could also threaten the provincial capital, Ahvaz, if heavy rains did not recede. In the neighboring province of Lorestan, heavy rains have flooded the city of Dorood and the town of Noorabad. Flooded villages between Khorramabad and Pol Dokhtar cities in Iran's eastern province of Lorestan (see more photos by ISNA) The deputy governor of Lorestan announced on March 31 that at least 25,000 people must be evacuated from in and around Dorood. Flooding in Dorood, Lorestan province (see more photos by Mehr News Agency) In the western province of Kermanshah, authorities said an evacuation order had been issued for around 19,000 people living near rivers. The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and the army are taking part in rescue efforts. With reporting by RFE/RL's Radio Farda, IRNA, and Reuters Maximum Pressure On Iran Still Isn't Working 04/02/19 By Paul Pillar (source: LobeLog) "Gone With The Wind" Iranian magazine Seda on impact of Trump on Iran's economy Almost a year after President Trump reneged on U.S. commitments in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal, there is not the slightest sign that this move is achieving the declared objective of Iran crawling back to the negotiating table to negotiate a "better deal." Tehran instead has been exuding perseverance and hardline resistance. The most recent high-level Iranian statement, a speech by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei marking the Persian new year, was full of recalcitrance. Khamenei's themes included self-sufficiency and boosting Iran's defense capabilities. It is not surprising that determined opponents of the JCPOA-the most vocal of whom are determined opponents of any agreement with Iran-have been trying hard to spin this situation to make it look as if something positive is being accomplished. Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, for example, suggests that the new year's speech was "not the confident Khamenei of days past" and that the speech indicated that "the Trump administration has had considerable success convincing Khamenei that the pressure will continue, and that Iran cannot count on outlasting U.S. hostility." It also is not surprising that when The New York Times ran a story by Ben Hubbard, reporting from Beirut, about the financial strains that Hezbollah and other Iranian clients are feeling, columnist Bret Stephens jumped into action. "Heavens to Betsy," Stephens exclaimed in a column in the next day's Times, arguing that this must mean President Barack Obama was wrong when he said sanctions relief "wouldn't make much difference in terms of Iran's capacity to make mischief in the Middle East." Actually, Obama was right. The fallacy that Stephens, and others who defend the Trump administration's re-imposition of nuclear sanctions, are promoting is that making life more difficult, costly, or painful for someone else somehow advances U.S. interests-at least if the U.S. government sufficiently hates whoever that someone else is. That would be true only if schadenfreude were a U.S. national interest, which it isn't. Pain infliction serves U.S. interests only if it changes the targeted country's behavior in a desired direction, by either limiting its capabilities or inducing it to change its policies. Regarding Iran over the past year, this is not happening. It's Not All About the Money Most of Hubbard's article-the part Stephens doesn't mention-describes how and why Iran and its clients are not changing their policies and operations despite the financial pinch. The reporter notes that the client groups "are relatively inexpensive, remain ideologically committed to Iran's agenda and can promote it through local politics in ways that the United States struggles to thwart." Many of the groups "have income streams that give them some financial independence." That certainly is true of Lebanese Hezbollah, which also benefits from having achieved broad acceptance as a political actor. Hubbard recalls how much pushback Secretary of State Mike Pompeo received on this point when he recently met with senior Lebanese officials. Foreign Minister Gibran Basil, standing next to Pompeo at a subsequent public appearance, said, "From our side, for sure, we reiterated that Hezbollah is a Lebanese party, not terrorist. Its deputies are elected by the Lebanese people with great popular support." The article mentions that, to the extent Iran is scaling back militia operations in Syria, this may be due less to financial reasons than to the fact that Iran's ally Bashar al-Assad has largely won the war. In Iraq, financial stringency has led Iran not to curtail involvement but instead to seek stronger economic ties with its next-door neighbor. Militias that Iran sponsored "are now paid by the Iraq government, giving Iran leverage in Iraqi politics at little cost to itself." Hubbard quotes an anonymous Hezbollah fighter as saying that a financial pinch would not push members away from the organization. "You're not in Hezbollah for the money," he said. Something similar could be said about Iran in the Middle East. Iran's activity in the region is shaped not by the money but instead by Tehran's perception of what is in Iran's security interests. None of this should be surprising. Hubbard notes that "recent history suggests that financial pressure on Iran does not necessarily lead to military cutbacks." As multiple independent studies have concluded, that also is true of the recent and not-so-recent history of Iran's overall activity in the Middle East, including activity that the United States finds objectionable. Continued Iranian Compliance with the JCPOA Stephens tries to milk another supposed accomplishment out of the administration's pressure campaign by pointing to the fact that Iran is still observing its obligations under the JCPOA despite the United States having reneged on its own commitments. While acknowledging that Iran outwaiting Trump has something to do with this, Stephens also says the Iranian compliance "suggests an edge of fear in Tehran's calculations. The U.S. can still impose a great deal more pain on the Islamic Republic if it chooses to do so." Reflect first on the irony of an anti-JCPOA voice like Stephens pointing to Iran's continued rigorous observance of its obligations under the JCPOA-the terms of which Stephens and other opponents have been excoriating for three years-as a supposed accomplishment of the Trump administration's pressure campaign. Reflect further on how much Iran's compliance with those obligations undermines opponents' rhetoric about how Iran supposedly has been hell-bent on getting nuclear weapons, with the JCPOA just a way-station where it gets an economic fillip. If that really were Iran's intention all along-and given that it is not now getting the fillip-Iran would have renounced the JCPOA as soon as the United States reneged. Think also about what sort of diplomacy Stephens's suggestion implies: that the way to get another state to stick to agreed terms is not to stick to them oneself but instead to renege and then to threaten something worse. That would be a bizarre brand of diplomacy, to put it mildly, and one that neither the United States nor anyone else could use to get much business done. "Tehran's calculations" are unlikely to be anything like what Stephens suggests they are. The Trump administration, through both its actions and its rhetoric, has given Iranian leaders ample reason to conclude that the administration is determined to punish Iran as much as possible no matter what Iran does. Any hesitation within the administration not to push the sanctions pedal all the way to the metal appears to be a reaction not to Iranian restraint but instead to economic concerns about how elimination of waivers for importing Iranian oil would affect the world oil market and ultimately the price of gasoline at the pump. Iranian Patience Not Unlimited Iran's continued compliance with the JCPOA despite U.S. reneging definitely involves an Iranian decision to outwait Trump. This is partly, but not solely, a matter of some Democratic presidential candidates, as Stephens correctly notes, stating their intention if elected to bring the United States back into compliance with the agreement. Iran is making its decisions about nuclear policy within a larger context in which not Iran, but instead the United States under Trump, is the isolated actor. It is not just Iran but all the non-U.S. parties to the JCPOA that are committed to its preservation. So is the larger world community, as expressed in the unanimously adopted United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231. Iran may continue to outwait Trump, despite not getting the economic relief it bargained for, until the end of the current U.S. presidential term. Politics inside Tehran probably would make it impossible to wait any longer. This is where the 2020 U.S. presidential election comes into play. Former Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, when asked about this subject recently, replied, "My sense right now is that this Iranian regime would like to try and wait out the Trump administration. But if the president was elected to a second term, then their interest in doing that probably goes out the window." If that happens, the damage from the pressure campaign will not be limited to the consequences that Stephens ignores, such as how economic warfare against Iran has become economic warfare against Western allies and has contributed to the poisoning of U.S. relations with them. The damage will include a new Iranian nuclear crisis that was totally avoidable if only the administration had not embarked on its destructive course a year ago. About the author: Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community. His senior positions included National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, Deputy Chief of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and Executive Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence. He is a Vietnam War veteran and a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. Dr. Pillar's degrees are from Dartmouth College, Oxford University, and Princeton University. His books include Negotiating Peace (1983), Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (2001), Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy (2011), and Why America Misunderstands the World (2016). Germany to provide humanitarian aid to Iran's flood victims: Envoy 04/02/19 Source: Mehr News Agency Germany will provide humanitarian assistance to flood victims in Iran, says the German Ambassador to Tehran Michael Klor-Berchtold. In a Monday tweet, Klor-Berchtold wrote that German Foreign Ministry would provide humanitarian assistance to flood victims in Iran, adding that "40 boats and safety equipment will be delivered by German Red Cross to the Iranian Red Crescent." German Foreign Ministry provides humanitarian assistance to flood victims in Iran. 40 boats and safety equipment will be delivered by #GermanRedCross to #IranianRedCrescent. pic.twitter.com/VgQJrLwGkh MichaelKlorBerchtold (@KlorBerchtold) April 1, 2019 The official had earlier expressed sympathy with the flood-stricken people in Iran, expressing his country's readiness to provide humanitarian help. # # . Our sympathies are with all those who lost their loved ones or their homes in #Golestan, #Mazandaran floods. Ready to support if needed. MichaelKlorBerchtold (@KlorBerchtold) March 24, 2019 Floods have affected at least 23 of Iran's 31 provinces since heavy downpours began on March 19. Heavy rains triggered raging torrents of water in several areas of Golestan province, near the Caspian Sea on March 19. The wave of heavy rains has so far continued as many of Iran's provinces, including Lorestan and Khuzestan in the west, are now facing an emergency situation. Estimates by government agencies suggest that the floods have taken the lives of at least 42 people and destroyed over 25,000 homes across the country. . Meanwhile, rescue efforts are underway in several provinces. The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), the leading African philanthropy committed to empowering African entrepreneurs, Friday announced 3,050 African entrepreneurs, drawn from all 54 African countries, selected to join the 5th cycle of its $100million TEF Entrepreneurship Programme. The announcement was made at the Transcorp Hilton Abuja, following a presentation of the selection process by Accenture Development Partners. This year, over 216,000 applications were received, an increase from last years 151,000. Nearly 90,000 were submitted by female entrepreneurs, an increase of 45%, illustrating the Foundations strategy to achieve greater gender balance. The selected Entrepreneurs will each receive non- refundable $5,000 of seed capital, access to mentors, and a 12-week business training programme, directly focused on the needs of African entrepreneurs. On July 26 27 2019, they will gather at the TEF Entrepreneurship Forum, the largest annual gathering of African entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurship ecosystem on the continent. TEF Founder, Tony O. Elumelu, CON, who celebrated his birthday today, said: Every year, we face an almost impossible task to select 1,000 entrepreneurs, from the hundreds of thousands that apply. Our entrepreneurs are hungry to effect change. We know we are only scratching the surface, we see the depth of entrepreneurial talent, that all of us government, business indeed African society, must harness to transform our economies and livelihoods. We must rally together to empower them and accelerate the change we want on the continent. In her speech, Her Excellency, Mrs. Aisha Buhari, the wife of the President, Federal Republic of Nigeria, commended the Programmes impact on the continent, charging the selected entrepreneurs to contribute to the advancement of the African continent. Indeed, I am confident that these Tony Elumelu entrepreneurs will inspire deep confidence and be of immense value not just to Nigeria but to the entire continent, she said. Speaking on the announcement, the incoming CEO, Ifeyinwa Ugochukwu, said, The Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme has successfully empowered 7,520 entrepreneurs in its first five years of the 10- year programme. Marking the fifth anniversary of the 10-year programme, this years selection includes 2,050 entrepreneurs, supported by the Foundations partners in addition to the Foundations annual commitment of 1,000, bringing the total number of entrepreneurs empowered by the Foundation to date to 7,520. Last year, we launched TEFConnect - the digital networking platform for African entrepreneurs and open to all - to further democratise the access to opportunities for the thousands of entrepreneurs that cannot directly benefit from our Entrepreneurship Programme. This further demonstrates our commitment to empowering our entrepreneurs and our belief that entrepreneurship holds the key to unleashing the true potential of the African continent", she said. The Foundations growing list of partners includes the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Federal Republic of Benin (Seme City), the Anambra State Government, Indorama, the Government of Botswana and the African Development Bank (AfDB). For a list of the selected 2019 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurs and information on our applicants, please visittefconnect.com. 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 North Korea is sending tens of thousands of workers to China on temporary visitor visas to make quick cash for the regime now international sanctions ban countries around the world from employing North Korean workers. The move seems to be a desperate attempt to raise hard currency for the increasingly cash-strapped dictatorship after February's summit with the U.S. collapsed. One source said the North "is engaging in guerrilla-style cash raids by sending workers to China on two-month visitor visas." China needs cheap labor and the North is more than willing to supply it, with an estimated 70,000 workers heading across the border in search of jobs. "North Koreans have been sent primarily to China's three northeastern provinces, where they usually work in clothing and food factories as well as construction sites, saunas and restaurants, and as maids and cleaners." They are paid around US$200 a month, much of which is taken by the regime. UN member states are banned from issuing new work visas to North Koreans under Security Council resolutions and must also deport current North Korean laborers by the end of this year. But China needs cheap labor to help struggling industries stay afloat and seems willing to bend the UN rules by hiring North Koreans on visitor visas instead of work permits. Meanwhile, Radio Free Asia reported that North Korean authorities have banned all unauthorized gatherings because it fears public unrest. RFA said even small gatherings are subject to crackdowns and violators are charged hefty fines and face intense grilling by the authorities. It added that an atmosphere of fear has gripped the entire country. Over 160 staff from BIMA, the leading provider of mobile delivered health and insurance services in Ghana, stormed Alajo in a clean-up exercise. The clean-up exercise was aimed at advocating for a clean and healthy environment as well as supporting the Alajo community where the company opened its new office in October 2018. Staff of BIMA Ghana collected over 200 bags of litter as they travelled from the Alajo lorry station, through the principal streets of Alajo. Community members joined in with staff as they got involved in sweeping the streets, picking plastics, dredging gutters among other activities. Chief Medical Officer of BIMA Ghana, Dr David Sunusaid:"As a company providing healthcare through the BIMA Doctor Service, we believe in prevention. By undertaking this clean up exercise, we are encouraging all Ghanaians to take initiative and ensure their environments are clean, as this will prevent diseases such as cholera, typhoid and even malaria." Alajo, just like many parts of the city, has been vulnerable and prone toperennial floods, partly caused bya choked drainage system. As a way of preparing for heavy downpours in the coming months, BIMA has dedicated its agents force to step out and clean the environment. This exercise will be extended to other parts of the city which includes James Town in Accra. Damien Gueroult, Country manager of BIMA Ghana, said: We are proud to contribute to the drive towards addressing sanitation challenges in Ghana.BIMA Ghana relocated from Accra central to Alajo in October 2018 and as a way of introducing ourselves to the community, we have taken up this trash challenge to clean the environment and also educate our neighbours on the importance of having insurance. Aclean environment plays a key role in the health of all people, if we change our attitude towards littering the streetswith rubbish and dumping refuse in gutters, it will have a great impact on our environment. he added The assembly supported BIMA by supplying two big waste trucks for the event.The Assembly man of Alajo Hon. Ismail Hudu, commended BIMA Ghana for the initiative and advised other companies to contribute to the development of the community. About BIMA: BIMA uses mobile technology to deliver affordable insurance and health products to underserved consumers and families in emerging markets who cannot access these vital products through traditional channels. BIMAs technology platforms create a paperless experience and enable scale, while the agent force distributes products and provides customer education. This tech-enabled approach is the key to BIMAs growth, reaching 26 million subscribers in 15 markets across Africa, Asia and Latin America. BIMA proves that it is possible to service the bottom of the pyramid profitability and sustainably. BIMA works with mobile operators, banks and microfinance institutions as well as a growing range of corporates. All partners share BIMAs mission to reach underserved consumers, with 93% of the global customer base living on less than $10 per day and 75% accessing insurance for the first time. 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 Governance, just like life, isn't a bed of roses. The path to a more successful destination is strewn with challenges, some unforeseen whereas others are expected. Political parties are elected to solve problems. If that were not the case, there would hardly be any need for the good people of Ghana to go to the polls to elect people to lead them. The NPP has never been oblivious of the myriad of challenges the people are facing. It is against this backdrop that the Akufo-Addo administration has effortfully tried to deal with all the challenges bequeathed to it by the Mahama administration. Dumsor, clearly, mollified Mahama and his charges and their poor handling of the situation culminated in, amongst other factors, their humiliating exit from office. The phenomenon has been dealt with by the current administration. Notwithstanding the several measures introduced to suppress dumsor, it would be dishonest to believe that pockets of intermittent power outages would not rear their ugly heads. These minor setbacks get the needed attention, hence the short time frame used to retire them. What we are experiencing in some parts of the country cannot be equated to John Mahama's obnoxious dumsor. Dumsor scourged Ghana for over four years, setting it apart from what we are seeing presently. Clearly, Mahama's dumsor was the Goliath amongst the family. None can be compared to it. The NDC has been strenuously overstitching themselves in an apparent move to equate the challenges we are facing with dumsor as it existed under Mahama. The seeming challenge is not something out of the extraordinary. Pipes are being connected so that in future we don't wake up to witness that our lights are off. As if that were not enough, they seem to pray with fervency for real dumsor to embrace us. They are looking beyond the repercussions that would arise out of a continuous power crisis just to win votes. His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo hit the nail right on the head when he said that these NDC folks are preoccupied with the next elections and not the next generation. Ghana should burn if that would gift them the power they lost. They love to see businesses collapse so as to benefit politically. The love for power for these NDC folks far exceeds their love for Ghana. P.K.Sarpong, Whispers from the Corridors of the Thinking Place. Source: P.K.Sarpong 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 A teenager, Akwasi Agyeman, 18, has shot and killed his friend, Gyan Isaac, 20, under bizarre circumstances in a hotel room at Akumsa Dumasi, near Nkoranza in the Bono East Region. Its unclear what triggered the shooting in the hotel last week, but DAILY GUIDEs checks revealed that they were involved in internet scam, known in local parlance as Sakawa. According to reports, they duped someone on the Internet and hired a hotel room to share their booty. A misunderstanding reportedly ensued and Agyemang allegedly shot his friend with a locally manufacture pistol, causing him to bleed profusely. Gyan was rushed to St Theresas Hospital at Nkoranza where he was admitted but died the next day. Agyeman has been arrested by police to assist in investigations, according to Regional Police Public Relations Officer (PRO), Chief Inspector Augustine Oppong. The Police PRO said the gun had also been retrieved from him. However, Chief Inspector Oppong could not tell what triggered the shooting of the youngster by the suspect. Source: Daily Guide 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 Weve all heard at some point that good hand washing practices are needed for protection against diseases and to live a healthy life. However, hand washing is still not seen as a priority by many. In fact, most people would not bat an eyelid at someone who doesn't wash their hands as often as possible. To a lot of people, it doesn't really matter. Forming the habit of washing our hands regularly is one of the most effective ways to protect one's self from contacting and spreading infectious diseases. However, parents and teachers are expected to make efforts to teach children the benefits of washing their hands to prevent the spread of germs and bacteria. This is important because according to the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates from 2017, Nigeria loses over 160,000 children under five years of age to diarrhoea every year. The hands should be washed as often as possible with antibacterial soap and water, especially after toilet usage, before touching food, when returning home, and after contact with a sick person. This habit helps you stay healthy. But if you're still wondering how washing your hands could be regarded important for hygiene, here are the reasons. 1. Practicing proper hygiene and cleanliness. All the surfaces and objects we touch with our hands are covered with germs and bacteria. Washing our hands helps get rid of them. 2. Prevention of diarrhoea and other bacterial diseases. Among many diseases that can be contacted through dirty hands, diarrhoea is one of the most dangerous of them all. This disease which can be contacted through your hands can lead to death. Rotavirus is one of the deadliest diarrhoea disease-causing agents. 3. It promotes social etiquette and grooming Shaking hands with people is a big part of socializing and doing so with a dirty hand creates an awkward situation between the parties involved. 4. Protection against food poisoning. Handling food with dirty hands could contaminate the food and lead to food poisoning. This could create intestinal infection that might become deadly. 5. Saving the cost of going to the hospital. Washing your hands and those of your children and wards can save you the time, money and inconvenience of going to the hospital. To ensure that proper hand washing habit is encouraged among Nigerians, Dettol has partnered with the Federal Ministry of Water Resources to launch the Clean Naija Program. The aim of the initiative is to create awareness and educate the public on the importance of handwashing in order to achieve a cleaner and healthier Nigeria. The MOU signing for this initiative held on Thursday, March 14, 2019 in Abuja. Always remember, your health is in your hands. 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 All is set for Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia and Ghanas Economic Management Team (EMT) to hold the maid Town Hall Meeting (THM) in Ghana. Ahead of the meeting many Ghanaians have expressed their views, largely welcoming the move by government and describing it as a novelty that is good for the progress of the country. Information gathered by Peacefmonline.com indicates that Ghanaians will be asking questions bordering on import duties, the exchange rate, matters on energy, the broader economy, and governments flagship projects. Again, hopes are high that the Vice President, who has been known to be a champion of Ghanas digital revolution will shed more light on how and why he and government intend to make Ghana the digital hub of the West African sub-region. Ghanaians believe that if government is able to address the problems of high import duties and the blips on the currency market it will crown the efforts it has put in place to restore the economic mess they inherited in 2016. The Town Hall Meeting is slated for Wednesday, 3rd April 2019 at the Physicians & Surgeons Hall at 10am in Accra. The Economic Management Team (EMT) is a body set by various governments, at least from the time of President Kuffour and usually chaired by the siting Vice President to steer the affairs of the economy. Under this regime, President Akufo-Addo set up the nine (9) member EMT in February 2017 chaired by Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia with Senior Minister Yaw Osafo Marfo as the Vice Chair. Other members are Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta (Finance Minister), Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto (Agric Minister), Hon. John Peter Amewu (Energy Minister), Prof. George Gyan Baffour (Minister for Planning), Hon. John Alan Kwadwo Kyerematen (Minister for Trade and Industry), Dr. Anthony Akoto-Osei (Minister for Monitoring and Evaluation), and Prof. Joe Amoako-Tuffour (the Secretary). According to members of the Economic Management Team, they meet every week (Tuesdays) and invite various government agencies, the private sector and different stakeholders to have fruitful discourses that shape government economic policies. "So far, there is no doubt that the EMTs efforts have helped to shape well policies of the government and delivered on key economic milestones of President Akufo-Addos government," said the Secretary to the EMT, Joe Amoako-Tuffour. According to some members of the EMT, the Town Hall Meeting is part of the broader scope of President Akufo-Addos government to enhance inclusive governance and bottom-up decision making. Spokesperson to the Vice President, Dr Gideon Boako, who doubles as a member of the EMT Secretariat, indicated that the Town Hall Meeting will be largely questions and answers based to enable the Ghanaian people the chance to be heard and be part of government decision processes. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The office of the Special Prosecutor has responded to a letter by the Strategic Energy over what it described as corruption being perpetrated at the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) against the State by its CEO, Dr. Kofi Kodua Sarpong. The Special Prosecutor in a letter signed by its Deputy Prosecutor, Cynthia Lamptey, said I acknowledge receipt of your letter on the above petition dated February 28, 2019. The office will revert to you in due course to enable you know the way forward as far as the issues raised in the petition are concerned. The Forum in a Petition dated February 26, 2019 alleged violations were being carried out at the company by its Chief Executive Officer, Dr Kofi Kodua Sarpong. Stating the areas of concern to them as a group, the Forum pointed out that there had been breaches of Petroleum Exploration and Production Act 2016 Act 919 by the CEO. According to the Forum, the CEO Dr. K. K. Sarpong in the performance of his duty gave up the interest of EXPLORCO Ghana Limited without seeking approval from the Minister of Energy, which the Forum described as a clear case of breach of the law. They intimated that in 2015, Explorco acquired interest in the DWT/CTP block at a time when HES Corporation which was then operating DWT/CTP oil block was offloading part of its stake in the block. According to them, the then Minister for Energy, Hon. Kofi Buah obtained cabinet approval which was submitted to Parliament for GNPCs subsidiary Exporco Ghana Limited to purchase 10% stake in the DWT/CTP block. Hon Kofi Buah received the said parliamentary approval and GNPC was allocated $47m for the purchase. Upon assumption of office of the NPP government, AKER Energy acquired majority stake in the Hess operated block and AKER Energy requested to take over the 10% EXPLORCO Ghana Limited stake in the block, they noted. The Forum observed that Dr K.K. Sarpong acting as the GNPC boss granted the request without approval from the Minister of Energy. The approval by the CEO, according to the Forum was against the Petroleum Exploration and Production Act. Backing their position with some facts, the Forum averred that Act 919 Clause 15 states that A contractor or sub-contractor shall not transfer a share of that contractors sub-contractors incorporated company in the Republic to a third party or affiliate without the written approval of a) the Minister, in case of a contractor, or b( the commission, in the case of a sub-contractor, if the effect of the transfer would be to c) give the third party or affiliate to take over the interest of a shareholder who owns five per cent or more of the shares of the company. The Forum also cited conflict of interest as one of the things that had the potential of crippling GNPC. According to the group, Dr K. K. Sarpong who is the former Chairman of the Global Haulage Group and its subsidiary the Royal Bank, ordered an urgent transfer of $7.2 million to Global Haulage for the pourchase of a 6-block residential apartment in Takoradi. GNPC they said, has started constructing of a facility at the Beach road, Takoradi to accommodate its staff. This project according to the Forum is about 60% completed. The question is, in the interest of prudent and efficient utilization of our oil funds, why didnt GNPC apply its funds to complete the said project rather than utilizing so much funds for a totally new housing. Instructively, this was at a time the Corporation was on Christmas break with just skeletal staff on duty. Dr Kofi Kodua Sarpong called the General Manager, Administration, Miss Matilda Ohene to put pressure on the Finance and Audit Department of GNPC to make that urgent transfer. Strategic Energy Forum said the conduct of Dr. K.K. Sarpong puts him in a conflict of interest position which is abhorred by Article 284 of the 1992 Constitution. The Forum also indicated that Dr Sarpongs decision to drive the countrys little oil revenue for the decommissioning of the Saltpond Offshore Production Platform leaves much to be desired. They said the GNPC Boss is still insisting that the government and GNPC cough out about $60 million for the decommissioning project. Surprisingly GNPC has not explored the option of handling the Saltpond oil block to an international oil exploration company that will further explore the Saltpond field, hence the decommissioning of the project is at a Zero cost to GNPC and the government. The Forum urged the office of the Special Prosecutor to look into all the claims and ensure that the right things are done at GNPC, the forum stated. The office of the Special Prosecutor in receipt of the said petition said it will notify the Forum on any arrangement as to investigating the matter and prosecute if evidences proved positive to their claims. Source: The New Crusading Guide Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Government has placed a temporary ban on the importation of excavators as it strengthens fight against illegal mining among others. The ban takes effect from May 1, 2019. A statement from the Transport Ministry says the directive will remain so until further notice. The decision was taken at a cabinet meeting which took place on March 27, 2019. This has become necessary following governments decision to regulate the use of excavators, especially in its efforts to combat the illegal mining phenomenon, popularly referred to as galamsey. The statement dated April 1 was signed by the Minister of Transport Kwaku Ofori Asiamah. Urging the public to comply with the directive, the statement added, the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority and Ministry of Trade and Industry have taken note of the directive by Cabinet. 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 Ghana Police Service has disclosed that one person has been remanded as part of investigations into the murder of Tiger Eye PI member, Divela Ahmed Hussein-Suale. The remanded individual who was not named by the Police is currently assisting the police with investigations. According to the Director-General of the CID, DCOP Maame Yaa Tiwaa Addo-Danquah, 13 individuals including the Member of Parliament for Assin Central, Kennedy Agyapong and investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas have been questioned as part of investigations. "We've done lots of investigations and through the eyewitness, we have been able to come a long way. Unfortunately, I'm unable to provide the details of what we have done so that we don't compromise the investigation," she said. "We have gone far, in the course of this investigation, 13 suspects have been questioned, one is currently on remand assisting us with our investigation. "And these 13 people that we have questioned include Anas and honourable Kennedy Agyapong". Hussein-Suale was shot and killed on Wednesday, January 16, 2019 at Madina in Accra. VIDEO- 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 Ghana Union of Traders Association (GUTA) has asked government to ensure it honours its promise on the reduction of import duties as announced over the weekend. According to them, though they are excited about the announcement, they expect government to immediately put in place measures that will generate discussions which will see to the full implementation of reducing import duties that is adversely affecting their business. Some trade unions, including the Ghana Union of Traders Associations (GUTA), petitioned the Council of State a couple of months ago to intervene to review taxes and duties on imported items because they are too high. Following the petition, the Council of State moved into action to hold consultations with various stakeholders to enable it to provide informed advice on the issue. The council held discussions with a number of stakeholders, including the Minister of Trade and Industry, Mr Alan Kyerematen, and the Commissioner of the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), Mr Isaac Crentsil. The council also met the Minister of Finance, Mr Ken Ofori-Atta, and the leadership of GUTA, bringing the month-long consultative exercise to an end. They later held a closed-door meeting with President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on the high rate of duties, levies and taxes on imported goods at Ghana's ports of entry and the large volumes of tax exemptions. The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has indicated that reforms to Ghanas import duty regime, which will bring down the high duties prevailing in Ghanas ports, are in the offing, and will be rolled out soon. We have realised from the studies we have done that our ports are not competitive, and the import regime in our country is far too high. We are dealing with it, and, very soon, the measures that the government will roll out will become known to all of you. I am not talking next year, or in 6 months time, I am talking very, very soon, he told the Ghanaian community in the US. Speaking on Okay fm's Ade Akye Abia programme, National Chairman of GUTA, Dr. Joseph Obeng, said "We have been waiting to hear this from government for far too long. We petitioned the council of state over the high cost of import duties which is crippling our business so now that government has said this, we expect him to act within the shortest possible time frame to enable us bounce back." Source: Isaac kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline.com/[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 National Youth Organizer of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Henry Nana Boakye aka Nana B has vowed to win all the 47 constituencies in the Ashanti Region during the 2020 general elections. The youth commander disclosed this in Kumasi on Saturday during the Ashanti Regional NPP Youth Conference and inauguration of the Youth Working Committees. According to him the party is ready to snatch the remaining three seats from the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in 2020. He also emphatically stated that the party is ready to go extra mile and snatch Asawase, Sekyere Afram Plains and Ejura Constituencies from the NDC come 2020. We have declared operation 47/47, and it seeks to help the NPP to win all the 47 parliamentary seats in the Ashanti Region." He said the NPP has performed creditably over the last two years to retain political power in 2020. He added that the country's economy was on the brink of collapse when the NPP administration assumed office. We inherited a messed up economy from the NDC in January 2017, but we have worked to transform the state, he said. Nana B said the NPP is the best political party to manage the affairs of the state, predicting victory for the NPP in 2020. He stressed the need for the NPP to retain political power to continue its good works. Nana B reiterated the commitment of the NPP youth wing to campaign vigorously for the party in 2020. The NPP youth successfully led the party to victory in 2016, and under my leadership we shall lead the NPP to retain power in 2020, he added. The second Lady, Samira Bawumia and Bernard Antwi Boasiako, the Ashanti Regional NPP Chairman, were in attendance. 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 ABC/Randy HolmesThe Ted Bundy film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, which features Metallica frontman James Hetfield in his first dramatic film role, will premiere on Netflix May 3. In the movie, Hetfield portrays Officer Bob Hayward, the Utah highway patrolman who first arrested the infamous serial killer, played by Zac Efron, in 1975. You can get a brief glimpse of the musician in a new trailer for the film. Extremely Wicked, which also stars Lily Collins, Jim Parsons and John Malkovich, is directed by Joe Berlinger, who also co-directed the 2004 Metallica doc Some Kind of Monster. When Extremely Wicked premieres, Hetfield will be touring Europe with Metallica. The metal legends will be back in the U.S. in September to play two special shows at San Francisco's new Chase Center with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their 1999 live album S&M. Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Korea's exports fell for the fourth month running in March due to declining semiconductor prices and the economic slowdown in China. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said Monday that exports fell 8.2 percent on-year last month to US$47.1 billion. Semiconductors drove the downward trend with a 16.6 percent plunge. Making matters worse, growth in China, which accounts for 26.8 percent of Korea's exports, is slowing down, while its ongoing trade war with the U.S. also contributed to Korean shipments there falling 15.5 percent. The Bank of Korea projects Korea's exports to drop 1.4 percent this year. Private consumption at home is also slowing down. The accommodation business survey index for February compiled by the BOK was 44, the lowest since July 2015, when tourism was severely impacted by the MERS scare. The retail business index also stood at just 68, the lowest since July of 2016. As a result, Korea's economic growth rate is expected to fall even below the bank's projection of 2.6 percent for this year. Dean of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Ghana, Prof. Kofi Agyekum popularly known as Opanyin Agyekum is asking government to come clear on the actual cause of the recent power outages. Some parts of the country have been experiencing continuous power outages increasing the perception that 'dumsor is back'. However, the Deputy Minister of Energy in charge of Power, Mr William Owuraku Aidoo claims the recent outage is due to the total shutdown of the Atuabo Gas Processing Plant in the Western Region. Some communicators of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) claim the recent 'dumsor' is due to lack of funds; another claim government has disputed. Opanyin Agyekum speaking to the issue on Tuesday's edition of 'Kokrokoo', asked government to tell Ghanaians the truth. According to him, if they are not able to solve the power outages, it will taint their image. "The bottom line is the truth . . . they should tell us the truth. If authorities had told us the truth from the beginning, we would not have gotten to this level, but we will wait till the 12th day and see if they will be truthful to their word. Those complaining are justified . . . we dont want to go back," he said. In response, Eugene Boakye Antwi a Deputy Minister of Ministry of Works and Housing, and a Member of Parliament for Subin Constituency in the Ashanti Region, assured Ghanaians that the power problem will be solved. "We have no choice but to fix it . . . we cannot afford to let this country down," he indicated. Source: Rebecca Addo Tetteh/Peacefmonline.com/[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 Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is resigning after weeks of mass protests, state media report. Mr Bouteflika, who had been in power for 20 years, had already dropped plans to seek a fifth term as opposition to his rule grew. The powerful Algerian army had called for the 82-year-old to be declared incapable of carrying out his duties. He suffered a stroke six years ago and has rarely appeared in public since. State TV reported that the ailing leader had officially notified the Constitutional Council that he would end his term as president from Tuesday. Military head Lt Gen Ahmed Gaed Salah was quoted by the official APS news agency earlier as saying: "There is no more room to waste time." Leaders of the protests had rejected Mr Bouteflika's offer to go by the end of his current term - 28 April - as not enough. Who could succeed Algeria's ailing president? The demonstrations have also led to calls for the whole political system, in which the military plays a significant role, to be overhauled. Many of the protesters are young and say they want a new system of government. There have been accusations that Mr Bouteflika is being used as a front by "le pouvoir" - a group of businessmen, politicians and military officials - to retain their power. The governing National Liberation Front (FLN), which postponed elections originally scheduled for 18 April, had vowed to organise a national conference on reforms. Reports say car horns could be heard in the streets of the capital, Algiers, following the announcement of Mr Bouteflika's resignation. Source: BBC Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Actor, Clement Bonney, known in showbiz as Mr Beautiful has admitted that, being sidelined by movie producers has affected him largely. He told Kofi Adomaa on Kofi TV that the action by movie producers has denied his fans the chance to be entertained in the local movies. He noted that his sideline has equally affected the movie industry at large because it has reduced the quality of excitement a viewer needs to derive from watching the local movies. He said, It has affected me because my fans dont have the chance to enjoy me and it has also affected movie productions because it has affected the quality content that viewers need to see. Mr Beautiful added that the collapse of the movie industry should be blamed largely on the abysmal performance of the government followed by the actors and the producers. "50% is from the government, 25% from both actors and actresses and 25% from production, he explained. Mr Beautiful indicated movie producers can use stories from Ghana and South Africa in their movies to tell good and authentic stories for their audience but the movie producers in Ghana feel reluctant because they don't know how to package such stories. He stressed that the use of vulgar language in some local movies has also contributed largely to low patronage of the local movies. In Kumasi, the use of words like fool, animal, etc are seen as normal and not an insult but when it comes to Accra, Central, North, and you use these words, its a big issue. I started telling them that these vulgar words we are entertaining in the movies will affect us along the way but they did not agree with me he said. VIDEO- Source: ghanaweb.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 ENTEBBE A delegation from Mubende Artisan Miners Association has gone to Tanzania for a benchmarking trip on best mining practices especially in mining gold. The five-day visit is organized by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development and will comprise 30 members of the miners association. According to a statement from the ministry of Energy dated April 1, the minister of state for Minerals Mr. Peter Lokeris is heading the delegation that intends to visit Tanzanian artisan miners and observe the rich experience by Tanzania in gold mining in Mwanza and Geita including market exploration areas. The benchmarking team consists of cabinet officials, Members of Parliament, technical officers from the Directorate of Geological Survey and Mines, the Uganda Police Force, and representatives from Artisanal and Small Scale Mining Associations. The other officials from the ministry include the geological survey and mines, the ministrys accounting officer Ms. Prisca Boonabantu, the Commissioner for Mines Ms. Agnes Alaba and Mubende district leaders. While addressing the delegation April 1, in Entebbe before departure, Mr. Lokeris said the benchmarking trip is expected to improve the existing ASM management strategy, inform mechanisms to regulate ASM movements from one mining area to another, encourage ASM participation in supply chain initiatives and ease monitoring, evaluation and improvement of ASM practices. I would like to thank the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania for accepting our request to visit mining sites in Tanzania for purposes of benchmarking best mining practices that can be replicated in Uganda and vice versa, Mr. Lokeris said. He revealed that the Government of Uganda, therefore, through the ministry of Energy is undertaking this benchmarking trip to ASM model sites in Tanzania to facilitate sharing of experiences among ASMs, skills and technology transfers and promote technical networking on the management of Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) within the region. He explained that Ugandas mining industry is dominated by Artisanal and Small Scale Mining operations and that over 1 million Ugandans directly or indirectly benefit from Artisanal and Small Scale Mining (ASM) operations. Mr. Lokeris revealed that the minerals mined by ASMs include: Gold, tin, tungsten, columbite-tantalite, iron ore, gemstones, limestone, Marble, Kaolin, clay, sands, granites and salt which are widely distributed throughout the country. He said it was notable that the ASM sector is usually portrayed by its negative impacts rather than by understanding and addressing some of the structural challenges to improve the sectors opportunities for sustainable development. He explained further that the ASM sectors structural challenges include: inadequate regulation, the local politics in ASM zones, nomadic way of ASM operations, influx of foreigners, insecurity, environmental degradation (tailings and gaping holes), use of hazardous chemicals such as mercury and cyanide, inadequate technical and financial capacity and lost revenue opportunities for government. Adding that these structural challenges need to be addressed for ASM to contribute to social and economic development of the country and ASM sector in Uganda includes a diversity of players such as Ugandans, migrants and most vulnerable groups including women and children. He said the mandate of my ministry is to establish, promote the development, strategically manage and safeguard the rational and sustainable exploitation and utilization of energy and mineral resources for social and economic development. And this is the basis of our efforts as we formulate and implement policy, strive to create a conducive investment climate and ensure that mining activities are undertaken in a manner that ensures equitable access to benefits for all, said Mr. Lokeris. The minister of Energy Ms. Irene Muloni said her ministrys priority is to harness energy and mineral resources for employment creation, value addition, industrialization, and local content development. And the energy and mineral sector is thus a primary growth sector in attaining the national strategic direction towards middle-income status, said Ms. Muloni on phone. She revealed that the Government of Uganda recognizes the potential that ASM can contribute to the local economic development if well regulated and that ASM can play a significant role in providing employment, especially in rural areas, improving the livelihood of people directly or indirectly and controlling rural to urban migration. Ms. Muloni said the benchmarking trip is expected to improve the existing ASM management strategy, inform mechanisms to regulate ASM movements from one mining area to another, encourage ASM participation in supply chain initiatives and ease monitoring, evaluation and improvement of ASM practices. She revealed that lessons learned from this trip will be used to inform the policy, legal and regulatory reforms for Ugandas mining sector and that these lessons will be pioneered in Mubende District where extensive mining of gold by artisans is predominant before it is rolled out to other parts of the country. Related Fourteen U.S. Marine Corps aircraft including state-of-the-art vertical takeoff and landing planes based in Hawaii trained in the skies over South Korea last month. The drill came after the two sides in early March canceled an annual joint marine exercise dubbed Ssangyong slated for April. Lt. Gen. Lewis Craparotta, the commander of the U.S. Marine Forces Pacific, in a pre-released statement for an international security forum in Seoul on Tuesday said, "Speaking as a force commander, I know my Marines' readiness improves every time they come to train with your Marines and Navy." The 14 aircraft were four MV-22 Osprey VTOLs, four CH-53 helicopters, four new AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters, and two new UH-1Y transport helicopters. "For the Hawaii Marines, this was a great opportunity to train with Korean Marines and special operations forces," Craparotta added. If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Home Regional News East Lake Havasu City, AZ -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/02/2019 --Western Alarm Services, Inc. is a well-established company that provides its services to the people belonging to various parts of the grand state of Arizona. This company is best known for delivering premium class security solutions to both residential and businesses clients that belong to the regions of Mohave, La Paz Counties, Lake Havasu City and even its nearby areas. Western Alarm Services have been serving the people residing in the neighborhood for more than twenty years now, and over the years they have subsequently developed quite a good relationship with the local police and fire alarm departments. They are known to be one of the leading names when it comes to security systems in Bullhead City and Parker Arizona. Western Alarm Services is one of the only security companies present in the Mohave and La Paz County area who do not subcontract their extensive monitoring services. The staff of this company typically makes use of their thorough and in-depth knowledge of various security risks prevalent in the local region to understand the prevailing weather conditions, to adequately and efficiently lessen the multiple security risks faced by their distinct customers. From Western Alarm Services, people can easily avail the benefits of the best available home security systems in Kingman and Bullhead City Arizona. The full-service home security systems offered by this company go a long way ensuring the optimal safety and security of this company. The fact that they have cultivated a good relationship with both their vendors and clients over the decades has primarily played a significant role in enabling them to provide their customers with quite an integrated and cohesive security system. To contact Western Alarm Services, Inc. people can ideally give them a call at 928-855-5608. About Western Alarm Services, Inc. Western Alarm Services, Inc. was founded in 1978, and they majorly serve the people of Kingman, Lake Havasu City, Parker, Quartzsite, as well its nearby areas. Member of SPC meets the international president of MSF [02/April/2019] SANAA, April 1 (Saba) - Member of the Supreme Political Council (SPC), Mohamed al-Houthi, met on Monday in Sanaa Dr Joanne Liu, International President of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the heads of the French and Dutch missions of Doctors Without Borders in Yemen. The meeting discussed aspects related to the support provided by the organization and the two missions in the health aspect at the provinces level and the efforts of the organization in supporting 13 hospitals nationwide. The member of the Supreme Political Council al-Houthi stressed the importance of strengthening cooperation between MSF and the concerned bodies, including the National Authority for the Management and Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to overcome the challenges facing the health sector in Yemen. He also stressed the concern to overcome the difficulties faced by humanitarian organizations of all kinds and facilitate their tasks. He called for the provision of humanitarian assistance to the residents in Durihimy district, Hodeidah province, which has been besieged for eight months and whose people are in urgent need of delivering relief and medical assistance. For her part, Joanne Liu pointed out that the organization will seek more support in the field of motherhood, childhood and other fields in hospitals and government medical facilities. She expressed her willingness to provide all that she could, including consideration of support for the residents of the districts of Durihimy and cardiology centers. AA Saba PM, Shura Council Head discuss commitments to assimilate National Vision of Yemen's Modern State [02/April/2019] SANAA, April 2 (Saba) - Prime Minister Dr. Abdul Aziz bin Habtoor on Monday discussed with Head of the Shura Council Mohammad Al-Aidarous the joint commitments of the government and the Shura Council towards assimilating and implementing the national vision to further develop the structure of the modern Yemeni state. The meeting dealt with the reports, recommendations and observations issued by the Shura Council regarding the activity of ministries and government institutions and the importance of adopting them. The efforts of institutional organization and the soundness of the administrative procedures in the Shura Council were discussed. PM discusses mechanism for activating mine clearance and bomb disposal efforts. AA Saba In a startling revelation how political parties are using fake accounts to push their agenda on social media ahead of the general elections, Facebook on Monday announced removal of 687 spam Facebook pages and accounts connected to individuals associated with the Congress IT cell. These Pages and accounts have spent around Rs 27 lakh on ads on Facebook. The first ad ran in August 2014 and the most recent in March 2019. The individuals engaged in this coordinated inauthentic behaviour used fake accounts and joined various groups to disseminate their content and increase engagement on their own pages, Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy at Facebook, told reporters. "The page admins and account owners typically posted about local news and political issues, including topics like the upcoming elections, candidates' views, the INC (Indian National Congress) and criticism of political opponents, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). "While the people behind this attempted to conceal their identities, our review found that it was connected to individuals associated with an INC IT Cell," Gleicher said, adding the majority of these accounts had already been suspended by Facebook's automated systems. Facing the flak, the Congress tweeted that none of its official pages has been taken down and it was awaiting a response from Facebook to give it a list of pages/accounts that were removed. "This is to clarify that no official pages run by INC have been taken down. Additionally, all pages run by our verified volunteers are also unaffected. In the mean time, we are awaiting a response from Facebook to provide us a list of all pages/accounts that they have taken down," the Congress said in a tweet. Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari said the party needed to check the veracity "whether the Facebook pages are linked to us." The BJP reacted sharply, with Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad saying the steps taken by Facebook are "historic". BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya also joined the chorus against the Congress, saying Facebook's action was "unprecedented." "Facebook's crackdown on pages linked to Congress IT cell is unprecedented. Proves that just like Rahul Gandhi, Congress's digital footprint is also a purveyor of fake news! They can now commission an in-house journalist to write another book on their fraud," Malviya tweeted. The social media giant also discovered spam activities by an Indian IT firm Silver Touch, which has been linked to the pro-BJP page "The India Eye", followed by 2.6 million acounts. Facebook has removed 15 pages, groups and accounts linked to the firm. "They posted about local news and political events, including topics like the Indian government, the upcoming elections, the BJP and alleged misconduct of political opponents including the INC," noted Gleicher. Silver Touch spent over Rs 48 lakh for ads on Facebook. The first ad ran in June 2014 and the most recent in February 2019, Gleicher said. In addition to these, Facebook also removed 321 Facebook pages and accounts in India that broke the social networking giant's rules against spam. "These are multiple sets of pages and accounts that behaved similarly and violated our policies," Gleicher said. Facebook said it had discovered the coordinated inauthentic behaviour in February this year. Challenging BJP President Amit Shah to contest the coming Lok Sabha polls from Birbhum constituency, a Trinamool Congress leader has predicted that he would lose by a margin of five-six lakh votes if he contests from there. Anubrata Mondal, the president of Trinamool's Birbhum district unit, also ridiculed Shah for claiming that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would win 23 seats from the state. "Why doesn't Amit Shah contest from Birbhum? If he does, I give you my word, we will defeat him by five to six lakh votes," Mondal said on Monday while addressing a rally in Birbhum district. Dismissing Shah's claim of winning 23 seats from the state, he said: "Is he in his senses or has he lost it!" Mondal is regarded as Trinamool's strongman in the district. He has landed in controversies time and again for shooting off his mouth. He is also prone to making inciting and provocative comments which have brought him in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons Slamming the National Conference (NC) for its reported demand for a separate Prime Minister for Kashmir, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday termed it as a serious issue and sought an answer from the Congress. Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister and NC leader Omar Abdullah on Monday said he will work to restore the titles 'Wazir-e-Azam' (Prime Minister) and 'Sadr-e-Riyasat' (head of state) in the state, triggering an angry reaction from the Prime Minister. Addressing an election rally here, Modi demanded that the Congress and other constituents of the 'Mahagathbandhan' should respond to this statement made by their ally. Modi said the National Conference wanted to turn the clock back by creating a pre-1953 situation. "Do you accept this demand by an ally of the Congress? Will any Indian accept this," he asked the crowd at the L.B. Stadium here. The Prime Minister was addressing the rally as part of the BJP's campaign for the April 11 elections to 17 Lok Sabha seats in Telangana. The Secunderabad Lok Sabha seat in the state capital was the only seat won by the BJP in 2014. Modi also alleged that a parliamentary candidate of the National Conference had raised pro-Pakistan slogans a couple of days ago but the Congress and the National Conference kept quiet. Modi alleged that this mentality of dividing the country caused huge damage to India. "This mentality of the Congress strengthened the anti-national forces. Because of the mentality, they raise questions on air strikes and surgical strikes and it was because of this mentality that they met the Chinese envoy during the Doklam standoff," Modi said. The Prime Minister also vowed to foil all conspiracies. "As long as Modi is there, he will not allow your conspiracies to succeed. Modi will stand as a wall between the country's enemies and the people," he said. Modi recalled that after the imposition of Governor's rule in Jammu and Kashmir, the National Conference and the People's Democratic Party (PDP) stood against the government of India and opposed conducting panchayat elections. He pointed out that 70-75 per cent of polling was held and 30,000 candidates were elected who were running panchayats. "Kashmiri people boycotted those who boycotted the elections," he said. The Prime Minister also targeted the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and its ally Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM). He said the focus of the TRS government was not on development but on the growth of vote bank and the Chief Minister's family. In an obvious reference to TRS' election symbol "car", he said KCR may be sitting in the car but the steering was in the hands of MIM. Referring to the Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency, a stronghold of the MIM, Modi said there was no development on the other side of the Musi river. He said the government of India wanted to develop infrastructure and extend the metro to the old city. "But there is a big speed-breaker called Majlis. They don't understand the language of development. Day in and day out, they remember only Modi. This 'chowkidar' is giving them sleepless nights," he said. Modi also said that the steps taken by his government to protect the sisters and daughters of the country from "repressive mentality" have angered his opponents. He recalled the criticism he had to face for brining a bill in the Parliament to ban the repressive tradition of triple talaq. "I am appealing to the victims and those sisters and daughters scared of triple talaq to support us. We guarantee your protection," he said. Los Angeles, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- The report on the global Pulp and Paper market has been prepared by experienced and knowledgeable market analysts and researchers. It is a phenomenal compilation of important studies that explore the competitive landscape, segmentation, geographical expansion, and revenue, production, and consumption growth of the global Pulp and Paper market. Players can use the accurate market facts and figures and statistical studies provided in the report to understand the current and future growth of the global Pulp and Paper market. The report includes CAGR, market shares, sales, gross margin, value, volume, and other vital market figures that give an exact picture of the growth of the global Pulp and Paper market. Access PDF version of Pulp and Paper Market report at: https://www.qyresearch.com/sample-form/form/1005665/global-pulp-and-paper-industry-forecast-amp-opportunities-2019 Our analysts have used advanced primary and secondary research techniques and tools to compile this report. The research sources and tools that we use are highly reliable and trustworthy. The report offers effective guidelines and recommendations for players to secure a position of strength in the global Pulp and Paper market. New players can also use this research study to create business strategies and get informed about future market challenges. We provide a comprehensive competitive analysis which includes detailed company profiling of leading players, a study on the nature and characteristics of the vendor landscape, and other important studies. Report Includes Major Key-Players of Pulp and Paper Market: nternational Paper, Georgia-Pacific Corp., Weyerhaeuser Corporation, Stora Enso, Clark Corp., UPM, Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA), Oji Paper, Nippon Paper Industry Global Pulp and Paper Market by Type:- Pulp, Paper, Cardboard, Other Global Pulp and Paper Market by Application:- Packaging, Consumer Products, Chemicals, Building and Construction, Other Global Pulp and Paper Market by Region: North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Central & South America, Middle East & Africa All of the segments studied in the research study are analyzed on the basis of BPS, market share, revenue, and other important factors. Our research study shows how different segments are contributing to the growth of the global Pulp and Paper market. It also provides information on key trends related to the segments included in the report. This helps market players to concentrate on high-growth areas of the global Pulp and Paper market. The research study also offers separate analysis on the segments on the basis of absolute dollar opportunity. Table of Contents of Pulp and Paper Market Market Overview: It includes product overview and scope of the global Pulp and Paper market. It gives a summary of the segmental analysis provided in the report. Here, product, application, and regional segments are highlighted. Lastly, it includes market estimations related to revenue and sales. Competition by Player: This section sheds light on competitive situations and trends, gives analysis of manufacturers, and provides figures related to average price by player, revenue and revenue share by player, and sales and sales share by player. 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Global Pulp and Paper Market Analysis by Application Global Sales, Revenue, and Price Trend by Type Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis Manufacturing Chain, Sourcing Strategy, and Downstream Buyers Market Effect Factors Analysis Marketing Strategy Analysis and Distributors/Traders Global Pulp and Paper Market Forecast Research Findings and Conclusion Get Full Report Now at USD 2,900 : https://www.qyresearch.com/settlement/pre/a31dc52ecc6cbdf0860d038501fdc5e5,0,1,Global%20Pulp%20and%20Paper%20Industry%20Forecast About QYResearch QYResearch always pursuits high product quality with the belief that quality is the soul of business. Through years of effort and supports from huge number of customer supports, QYResearch consulting group has accumulated creative design methods on many high-quality markets investigation and research team with rich experience. Today, QYResearch has become the brand of quality assurance in consulting industry. Pune, Maharashtra -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/01/2019 -- Airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems market revenues are likely to witness a decline in 2018, after surpassing US$ 100 million in revenues in 2017. A new study by Fact.MR projects global revenues to grow at a healthy 4% CAGR through 2028. The report opines that market prospects will continue to be heavily influenced by overall investment in airport infrastructure development by governments around the globe. The airport runway foreign object debris detection system market continues to be heavily consolidated. The level of consolidation in the airport runway foreign objects debris (FOD) detection systems market can be gauged from Fact.MR's finding that four players account for over two-thirds revenue share of the market in 2017. The companies The Stratech Group Limited, Moog Inc., Xsight Systems Ltd., and Trex Aviation Systems continue to focus on R&D, global expansion, and competitive pricing to strengthen their position. Request Sample Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=1897 The Fact.MR study offers a comprehensive analysis on the key influencing factors for airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems market. According to the study, growing air traffic, especially in fast-growing economies of Asia Pacific is inducing investments in airport infrastructure. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has marked out Asia Pacific as the biggest driver for increased air travel globally. China, India, Thailand, and Turkey already have some of the busiest airports in the world sensing the emerging opportunities in a consolidated marketplace, players are likely to focus on competitive pricing to win government contracts. The consolidated nature of the market and heavy reliance on government contracts has also led to high focus on partnerships among market players. Investments in new airport construction and increase in mandates on airport security continue to induce momentum in the airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems market. Asian countries are at the forefront of investments in new airport construction, with the Government of India planning to invest US$ 60 billion in the next decade. The U.S. Department of Transportation's grant of US$ 586 million under the Airport Improvement Program is also aimed to upgrade facilities at regional airports. According to the report, government funding and investment will remain a critical factor in the airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems market over the assessment period. Browse Full Report @ https://www.factmr.com/report/1897/airport-runway-foreign-object-debris-detection-systems-market According to the report, high cost of airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems continues to be a key impediment to growth. High investment to the tune of over US$ 1 million in procuring mobile FOD detection systems and over US$ 7 million in procuring stationary, radar-based FOD detection systems continues to limit widespread adoption. The Fact.MR study also offers a region-wise analysis on the airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems market. According to the report, Asia Pacific continues to maintain its position as one of the most lucrative markets for stakeholders in the airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems market. The lucrativeness of airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems market can be attributed to the high number of domestic and international air passengers from China, India, Thailand, and southeast Asian countries. You can Buy This Report from Here @ https://www.factmr.com/checkout/1897/S The Americas represents the second largest market for airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection systems globally. The airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) installation and sales in the region can be attributed to growing investments in airport safety and maintenance. The report opines that Asia Pacific and Americas, notably the US, will continue to offer sustained opportunities to airport runway foreign object debris (FOD) detection system market players. About Fact.MR Fact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports. Contact Us Rohit Bhisey Fact.MR 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 United States Email: sales@factmr.com Web: https://www.factmr.com/ Read Industry News at - https://theswisstimes.com Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/01/2019 -- Automobile gears (or cogs) are rotating machine part having cut teeth, or cogs which mesh with another toothed part in order to transmit torque. The arrangement of two or more gears forms automotive transmission system. Automotive gear oil can be petroleum or synthetic based, used especially for lubricating automotive gears for all class of vehicles. It provide high transmission efficiency, reduce engine heating, provides proper clutch friction, insure better oxidation and protects gear teethes from corrosion. Automotive gear oil generally has high viscosity level in comparison to transmission fluid and automotive engine oil. This is necessary for better performance and protection of gears. The high viscosity level provides better transmission of lubricant throughout the gear trains. Devices requiring heavy oil do not have to use extra force to transfer the oil, since only a fraction of the lowermost gears are covered in an oil sump. Gear oils have extreme pressure or EP stabilizer and anti-wear stabilizer to deal with the sliding action of gears. Based on technology, gear oils can be broadly categorized as synthetic gear oil and petroleum-based gear oil. Synthetic gear oils are superior to petroleum-based gear oil as they provide superior resistance to shear breakdown and reduce energy consumption due to its low friction coefficient. The gear oils are standardised by American Petroleum Institute (API STANDARDS) based on the viscosity level and their use in automatic and manual transmission based vehicles. The different classification of the API includes GL-1, API GL-2, API GL-3, API GL-4, API GL-5 and API GL-6 and, SAE 75W-90, SAE 75W-140, SAE 80W-90, SAE 85W-140 and LS- for limited slip. For maximum transmission efficiency, gear oils must lubricate, cool and protect complete gear systems. It also supposes to transfer damaged particles away from the contact areas, guarantee protection against extreme pressure and temperature and reduce noise in the transmission operation. Request Report TOC @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/2839 North America is the largest market for automotive gear oil mainly attributed to large volume of motor vehicle in this region, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. The market is witnessing an escalating growth in Asia Pacific region. China, in recent years, has become the global hub for the automobile industry. Some of the other region in Asia Pacific such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines have emerged as the largest small cars markets in the world. Growing middle class, rising disposable income, developing surface transportation infrastructure, growing aspiration of owning private vehicles, increasing mobility due to development of satellite township near megacities and increase demand of goods carriers from micro, small and medium size enterprises are fueling the market for automotive gear oil in Asia Pacific region. Growing automotive aftermarket and do it yourself (DIY) culture in North America and Europe is fueling the growth of automotive gear oil in retail sector in these two region. Request for sample report: https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/2839 Some of the major players operating in the automotive gear oil market include Saudi Arabian Oil Co., Total S.A, Gazprom, ROSNEFT, LUKOIL oil company, Royal Dutch Shell plc, Exxon Mobil Corporation, BP p.l.c, Statoil, Chevron Corporation., Sinopec Lubricant Company, JIANGSU LOPAL TECH. CO.,LTD and Ashland Inc. Northbrook, IL -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/01/2019 -- The report "Battery Packaging Market by Type of Battery (Lithium-ion, Lead-acid), Level of Packaging (Cell & Pack Packaging, Transportation Packaging), and Region (APAC, North America, Europe, South America, Middle East and Africa) - Global Forecast to 2023", The battery packaging market is projected to grow from USD 20.6 billion in 2018 to USD 36.2 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.0% during the forecast period. The growth of the battery packaging market can be attributed to the increased consumption of batteries in the automotive, energy storage, and consumer electronics industries. Browse 124 market data Tables and 35 Figures spread through 149 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Battery Packaging Market - Global Forecast to 2023" Download PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=140916712 Based on type of battery, lithium-ion battery packaging is expected to account for the largest share of the battery packaging market during the forecast period. Lithium-ion batteries have higher efficiency, energy density, and cycle life compared with other types of batteries. Electric Vehicles (EVs) are replacing Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles. The adoption of EVs is fueling the demand for batteries, which subsequently is driving the battery packaging market. Due to their superior performance characteristics, they are preferred in the energy storage application. The cell & pack packaging segment is expected to dominate the global battery packaging market during the forecast period. Significant capital investments are being made by leading lithium-ion battery manufacturers globally. For instance, most leading Asian battery manufacturers, such as Samsung, LG, SK Innovation, and GS Yuasa, have planned investments in various parts of Europe (Poland, Hungary). In 2018, Tesla identified 2 new strategic locations to establish lithium-ion battery plants, one in Europe, and the other in Shanghai. All these factors are resulting in the increasing demand for batteries, which is expected to drive the market for battery packaging during the forecast period. The Asia Pacific region is expected to hold the largest market size in the battery packaging market during forecast period. The Asia Pacific region is estimated to account for the largest share of the battery packaging market during the forecast period due to the presence of leading battery manufacturers in this region. This region is home to some of the leading battery manufacturers including Panasonic, Samsung, GS Yuasa, Exide, and LG, among others. APAC holds the largest share of the global automotive market. The region has made significant investments in the renewable energy generation space, which have further increased the consumption of batteries. For instance, in India, the government is installing 40GW of grid connected rooftop solar capacity. This is expected to be completed by 2022. Get 10% FREE Customization on this Report @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestCustomizationNew.asp?id=167226464 Nefab Group (Sweden), United Parcel Service Inc. (US), DHL (Germany), Zarges Group (Germany), Heitkamp & Thumann Group (Germany), FedEx (US), Rogers Corporation (US), DS Smith (UK), Smurfit Kappa (Ireland), and Umicore (Belgium) are some of the leading players operating in the battery packaging market. About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledgestore" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Shelly Singh MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA : 1-888-600-6441 sales@marketsandmarkets.com East Quogue, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- Based out of New York, the US, Bruce Nagel + Partners is held in high esteem for creating professional contextual designs that not only echo the client's wishes but also synthesize modern aesthetics. The company is quite popular for its expertise, as it blends creativity with sustainability in every project it undertakes. Another thing that helps Bruce Nagel + Partners to not only remain popular but also competitive is the fact that it focuses on innovative forms and methods of architecture. Talking about the broad range of expert architecture services on offer, the spokesperson of Bruce Nagel + Partners stated, "We have been among the leading names in the list of premier architecture firms in New York, the US. With our offices located in Chicago, Florence, Dallas, Hampton, and NY respectively, we offer the finest architecture design services. We benefit from the tremendous experience and expertise that Bruce Dean Nagel has attained during his four-decade presence in the industry." Bruce Nagel + Partners takes immense pride in completing innumerable projects to the utmost client satisfaction without missing a single detail or deadline. The immense range of projects that the design firm has so far completed includes offices, private residences, hotels, churches, and restaurants. No matter how far the location is and how complex, big, or challenging a project is, the company uses innovative ideas, quality material, and latest technologies to create visually appealing and stunning spaces to match the particular specifications and tastes of clients. When asked about the architecture design services in Dallas, the spokesperson further stated, "We have been one of the leading and the best architecture firms based out of Dallas. We practice the theory of 'design to sustain' and integrate creative excellence in our designs. We are committed to offering architecture design services with creative excellence. Hence, we do not compromise with the quality and integrity of construction. Further, the creative designs we create not only reflect our principles and ethos but also speak volumes about our expertise and craftsmanship." Bruce Nagel + Partners is also popular for offering architecture design services in Florence, Italy. The company is sensitive to the responsibilities it undertakes, which are reflected in the projects it completed in Florence. It has great experience in creating functional architectures and strives to add an intrinsic value to the spaces that it designs. Therefore, those looking for the best architect in Chicago, or the best architect in Dallas for that matter, to avail value for money services can count on Bruce Nagel + Partners. About Bruce Nagel + Partners Bruce Nagel + Partners is one of the premier architecture design services providing companies based in New York, USA. With its offices located in Chicago, Hampton, Dallas, and Florence as well, the company works under the expertise of Bruce Dean Nagel who has more than four decades of experience in the field. By skillfully combining form with functionality, the architecture firm helps clients convert their dreams into reality. Hence, Bruce Nagel + Partners is known as the best architect in Florence, Italy . Rockville, MD -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- Worldwide cancer is one of the leading cause of death and effective way of treating it still looks unaccomplished in most parts of the world. The factors which influence the successful treatment of cancer are different depending on the stage of diagnosis, treatment availability and availability of trained healthcare professionals coupled with high economic burden of the disease. The gene expression of cancerous cells varies by cancer type and may also vary person to person. The exhaustive study of changes in gene expression and mutation patterns in different cancer type is one of the most studied topic for developing novel cure for cancer. Cancer RNA expression plays an important role in the studying mutation patterns and if understood wholly for particular person it may help in speedy recovery and cure. In recent days the gene therapy for cancer treatment is mainly driven by the cancer RNA expression and DNA expression. Cancer RNA expression plays an important role in the PCR sequencing enabling enhanced understanding of different mutations in cancerous cells. Cancer RNA Expression Market: Drivers and Restraints Increasing prevalence of the cancer is major driver in the growth of cancer RNA expression market. Comparatively early diagnosis of the cancer further enables to borrow some extra time for the additional therapies for better treatment outcome along with choice of treatments such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgical intervention driving the growth of cancer RNA expression market. The large number of studies going on to study the cancer RNA expression further expected to strengthen the pipeline product availability driving the growth of cancer RNA expression market. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy helps to kill the cancerous cells and in that process non-cancerous cells are also killed whereas in cancer RNA expression, it is possible to target only mutated cells which in turn minimizes the side effects of cancer treatment significantly. The conditions such as anemia, neutropenia and thrombocytopenia are common side effects in the cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy which further increases the cost of treatment significantly as well as patient sustainability but in case of cancer RNA expression the targeted gene therapy allows healthcare professionals to minimize the side effects. Whereas, low availability of marketed products may hamper the growth of the cancer RNA expression market. Request Free Sample Report@ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=3149 Cancer RNA Expression Market: Segmentation The global cancer RNA expression market is segmented based on the by sequencing technique, end user and region By sequencing technique the cancer RNA expression market is segmented as: Targeted RNA Sequencing Small RNA and miRNA sequencing Transcriptome Sequencing PCR Sequencing By end user the cancer RNA expression market is segmented as: Diagnostic Laboratories Hospitals Specialty Clinics Academic Research Institutes Cancer RNA Expression Market: Overview The significant amount of research and development going on in the cancer RNA expression market is expected to be the major growth driving factor. By the sequencing technique the cancer RNA expression market is expected to be dominated by small RNA and miRNA sequencing technique due to fast evolving applications of the technique. By end user the cancer RNA expression market is expected to be dominated by the hospitals due to high number of patient footfall for the diagnosis as well as treatment. The manufacturers in the cancer RNA expression market are focusing on the developing novel formulation and technique for the effective cancer treatment. Request/View TOC@ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=T&rep_id=3149 Cancer RNA Expression Market: Regional Outlook The global cancer RNA expression market is expected to be dominated by the North America due to comparatively superior availability of the cancer RNA expression sequencing techniques and cancer mutation specific approach of treatment. Europe is expected to be the second most lucrative cancer RNA expression market due to better reimbursement scenario and early diagnosis of the cancer. The Asia-Pacific is emerging cancer RNA expression market due to rapidly evolving healthcare infrastructure. Latin America is expected to witness steady growth to gradually increasing product penetration in the cancer RNA expression market. Middle East and Africa is the least lucrative cancer RNA expression market due to low rate of early diagnosis and lack of novel treatment options in most of the region. Cancer RNA Expression Market: Key Players The key market players operating in the cancer RNA expression market are: Thermo Fisher Scientific, Illumina Inc., Pacific Biosciences of California Inc., PerkinElmer Inc., QIAGEN N. V., GATC Biotech AG, Macrogen, Inc., Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd., Roche Holding AG, Eurofins Scientific among others. The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the Cancer RNA Expression market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to Cancer RNA Expression market segments such as geographies, application, and industry. The report covers exhaust analysis on: Cancer RNA Expression Market Segments Cancer RNA Expression Market Dynamics Cancer RNA Expression Market Size Supply & Demand Current Trends/Issues/Challenges Competition & Companies involved Indication Value Chain Regional analysis includes: North America (U.S., Canada) Latin America (Mexico. Brazil) Western Europe (Germany, Italy, France, U.K, Spain) Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia) Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (China, India, ASEAN, Australia & New Zealand) Japan Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries, South Africa, Northern Africa) The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies. Report Highlights: Detailed overview of parent market Changing market dynamics in the industry In-depth market segmentation Historical, current, and projected market size in terms of volume and value Recent industry trends and developments Competitive landscape Strategies of key players and products offered Potential and niche segments, geographical regions exhibiting promising growth A neutral perspective on market performance Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprint Report Analysis@ https://www.factmr.com/report/3149/cancer-rna-expression-market About Fact.MR Fact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports. Contact Us Rohit Bhisey Fact.MR 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 United States Email: sales@factmr.com Web: https://www.factmr.com/ Blog: https://factmrblog.com/ Read Industry News at - http://theguardiantribune.com Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- Estimated at a healthy Y-o-Y growth of 6.4%, global revenues of carbide tools market are set to exceed US$ 5 billion in 2019. A new Future Market Insights (FMI) study forecasts robust growth prospects for the global carbide tools market, prominently driven by fostering rate of adoption for automotive and fabrication applications. Drills and mills will remain the highest selling types of carbide tools, according to the report. FMI's analysis concludes that mills and drills collectively account for just-under 60% share in the total revenue generated through carbide tools sales. Carbide drills are however observed hold an edge over carbide mills owing to higher adoption for automotive applications, particularly related to automotive engines. The latter are expected to gain prominence in fabrication, as indicated by the report. Moreover, notably increasing demand for thermal deburring applications will reportedly spur sales of carbide burrs in the near future. Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1775 Based on FMI's analysis, most of the carbide tools that are sold have machine-based configuration. The report highlights significant opportunities in automatic machines or lathe machines. Convenient handling and operation, high-speed compatibility, and superior proficiency will remain the key determining factors rendering higher preference for machine-based over hand-based configuration. Almost 90% of carbide tools are coated, which affirm their improved performance over non-coated counterparts. Despite a high price point associated with the former, FMI anticipates that the revenue of coated tools will remain dominant over non-coated tools, as performance has become the paramount. Adoption for woodworking applications will sustain sales of non-coated carbide tools. Escalating utilization of carbide tools for job-shop applications in metal fabrication, general automotive applications, and high-speed cutting applications will predominantly push sales prospects of carbide tools, as per FMI's research. While adoption of carbide tools for automotive and fabrication end use applications holds more than 55% share in the total market revenue, growing adoption by heavy machinery manufacturers is also underpinning significant revenue generation in carbide tools market. Europe has been spearheading the expansion of carbide tools market, which is likely to receive strong support from towering sales of EVs in the region. The report underscores remarkable contribution of China and India to the global market revenue. Spectacular growth of the automotive components and metal fabrication industries has been instrumental in fueling the use of carbide tools within high-potential developing Asian economies, particularly China and India. Rapid automation of metal fabrication applications is cited as a predominant booster to adoption rate of carbide tools within the aforementioned countries. According to the report, the collective share of China and India currently equates just-under a fourth of the global value, likely to thrive at a robust pace in the years to come. Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-1775 FMI has covered detailed market structure in the carbide tools market report, which includes some of the most prominent players such as KYOCERA Corporation, YG-1 Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Materials Corporation, Allied Machine & Engineering Corp., OSG Corporation, Fullerton Tool Company, Sumitomo Electric Hartmetall GmbH, and others. The global market for carbide tools is a highly fragmented landscape and FMI has characterized the space by moderate competition. Established brands such as IMC Group and Sandvik AB have been facing challenges related to profit margins owing to promising entry of new market players. While entrants are likely to maintain their focus on economics costs during new product launches, leading companies will continue to prioritize expansion. Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- Chromium is a metal which was first discovered in the late 1790s in France, until 1958 it was not considered as an essential trace element but was considered in the 1960s. Chromium polynicotinate is a supplement made up of chromium and niacin. It is believed that niacin helps in the absorption of chromium. Chromium polynicotinate doesn't contain much niacin as excess of niacin can cause side effects. Chromium polynicotinate is taken by people those who want to lose body weight, increasing muscle, and decreasing fat content of the body. Chromium polynicotinate is also used by athlete to improve their performance and to increase energy. Several research studies has shown that chromium polynicotinate is useful in treating depression. It is suggested that chromium polynicotinate should not be consumed by patient suffering from liver or kidney disorder as it may cause some sort of allergic reaction to them. Request Report toc @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3068 Market Segmentation: Chromium polynicotinate is segmented on the basis of form, distribution channel and region. On the basis of form market is segmented into liquid and capsule. Among all these segment capsule is expected to grow enormously in the coming future. The demand for Chromium polynicotinateis more due to the health benefits it offers as well as ease of availability of product in the market. On the basis of distribution channel the market is segmented into supermarkets/hypermarkets, convenience stores, medical stores and online stores. Online stores is expected to hold a relatively high share in the chromium polynicotinatemarket, followed by medical stores.On the basis of region chromium polynicotinatemarket is segmented into North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, MEA and Japan. Regional segment for the market of chromium polynicotinateis divided into seven different regions: North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, MEA and Japan. Among these segment Asia Pacific is expected to have the major market share globally, as it is the largest producer and consumer of chromium polynicotinate country like China is generating the major revenue. In Europe region the major revenue is generated by the countries like Germany and Spain. In terms of revenue Europe may be the second prominent contributor in thechromium polynicotinatemarket. Research studies has shown that people suffering from diabetes were able to improve their blood sugar levels when they were given chromium polynicotinate. Chromium polynicotinate basically improved the fasting glucose levels of people suffering Type 2 diabetes. Chromium polynicotinateexhibits some special properties such as, acts as anti-depressant, helps in controlling cholesterol and fats and helps in the metabolism of glucose which is essential to produce energy for the body. Chromium polynicotinate also helps in reducing obesity and building of muscles. These versatile properties of chromium polynicotinate is attracting the pharmaceutical companies a lot, which expected to drive the chromium polynicotinate market to a greater extent. Moreover, the market is also driven by the increasing awareness and curiosity among the consumers about the health benefits associated with chromium polynicotinate. Although side effects from chromium polynicotinate supplement are very less, but some of them do exist. People those who consumed chromium polynicotinate experienced dizziness, people experience weird dreams after they start taking chromium polynicotinate, studies have shown that chromium polynicotinate may cause Iron mal-absorption in some people and people experienced headache after quitting the intake of chromium polynicotinate. Apart from these side effects chromium polynicotinate do not cause any health problems. These factors mentioned above may be the restrain of the growing market of chromium polynicotinate.Market Some of the key players in chromium polynicotinatemarket areBiotech Pharmacal, Inc., Olympian Labs, Solgar, Nature's Way,NOW Foods, Vital Nutrients,Puritan's Pride, Solal, Superior Labs, Inc., Olympian labs and Nutrafx among others. Request For Report Sample: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3068 New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- Recyclability, lightweight, and other physical attributes of disposable cups will continue to make them the foremost choice of packaging food products and beverages. Disposable cups are designed to hold both, hot and cold, substances, which further propels their applicability in global food & beverage industry. However, a majority of disposable cups are made from plastic materials to reduce chances of food contamination. This raises concerns regarding impact of such plastic cups on the environment, whether in terms of rising production or from dumping waste plastic disposable cups. Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2639 The breakthrough for disposable cup manufacturers in tackling such stringent hurdles is the advent of biodegradable materials in production of disposable cups. Disposable cups made from bioplastics or other such materials is predicted to garner surplus demand in the years to come. Such favourable consumer preferences, coupled with rising consumption of fast foods and on-the-go beverages in the world, will also continue consolidating the growth of global disposable cups market. Future Market Insights' latest report on global market for disposable cups projects that by the end of 2026, more than US$ 21.2 Bn worth of disposable cups will be sold globally. The report estimates the market's current value at a little less than US$ 12 Bn, and anticipates it to register a value CAGR of 5.9% for the forecast period, 2016-2026. According to the report, more than 500 Bn units of disposable cups were sold across the globe in 2016. The global sales of disposable cups is expected to surge steadily at 5.1% CAGR, procuring revenues from sales of over 850 Bn units towards the end of 2026. Key highlights of the report, titled "Disposable Cups Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 2016-2026," include: Based on moulding technologies, demand for thermoformed moulding is projected to gain traction, procuring over 70% share of global market revenues Paper will continue to be the most sought-after material for production of disposable cups, revenues from which are projected to soar at 6.3% CAGR By 2026-end, more than 280 Bn units of plastic disposable cups are projected to get sold across the globe; registering higher sales of disposable cups made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) materials. Throughout the forecast period, over 700 Bn units of printable disposable cups will sold globally, while non-printable disposable cups will register a relatively sluggish revenue growth Owing to their higher applicability in packaging beverages, disposable cups with 200 to 400 ml capacity will remain in great demand, accounting for nearly half of global market revenues towards the end of 2026 Over two-third of revenues emanating from global sales of disposable cups will be accounted by dairy and beverage applications, with the latter procuring higher share On the same lines, the market is projected to witness higher contribution from food retail companies as end-users of disposable cups Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-2639 The report further reveals that North America is likely to be procure a little over one-fourth share of global disposable cup revenues through 2026. During this period, the Asia-Pacific region will dominate the market by closing in on 30% revenue share. The region's dominance is being continued by active participation of China-based disposable cup manufacturers such as Hong Er Plastic Manufacture Limited, Zhejiang Hongsu Plastic Co., Ltd., UNHONG Corp., Zhejiang KaiJia Plastics Co., Ltd., and Changsha Yuhao Imports & Exports Co. Ltd. The report has also profiled leading manufacturers of disposable cups in the world, which include, Berry Plastics Corporation, Pactiv LLC, Huhtamaki OYJ, Solo Cup Company, Greiner Packaging GmbH, Genpak LLC, Dart Container Corporation, ConverPack, Eco-Products Inc., Cosmoplast Ind. Co. (LLC) and Churchill Container. Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- Modern endoscopy visualization is gaining increasing use owing to new high definition imagery capabilities, which aid greatly in the diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases such as cancer, lung disorders, urological disorders and more, through improved open and minimally invasive surgical procedures in recent years. Adoption of Ultra-high-definition Visualization Systems to Augment Endoscopy Visualization Components Market Rising incidences of diseases including cancer and gastrointestinal disorders has resulted in increased awareness among patients and the medical community about new endoscopy visualization tools, which include robot-assisted endoscopy and capsule endoscopes among others, which use ultra-high-definition visualization. A Sample Of This Report Is Available Upon Request @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-468 Endoscopy cameras are anticipated to hold the largest market share throughout the forecast period owing to constant updates by manufacturers with ultra-high-definition capabilities become standard for superlative detail of visceral organs during medical procedures. Hospitals and clinics worldwide are anticipated to witness the highest rate of adoption for endoscopy visualization components during the forecast period owing largely owing to relatively high rate of usage of endoscopy equipment. On the other hand, the acute shortage of skilled physicians and endoscopy specialists who have the knowledge to appropriately handle visualization components is anticipated to act as a major constraint to the growth of the endoscopy visualization components market. Consumables and Tech Innovations to Drive Focus of Endoscopy Visualization Components Market Players Product development through technological innovations, and expansion of consumables are anticpated to be the key strategic activities to be followed by major players in the endoscopy visualization components market including Hoya Corporation, Fujifilm Holdings Corporation, KARL STORZ GmbH, to strengthen their market presence. Stryker Corporation has released its 1588 AIM camera system which makes use of high definition camera components which enable 9 surgical camera settings, and a number of advanced imagery modalities including DESAT, ENV, IRIS, and more. The company also introduced its PneumoClear insufflator range which includes features such as integrated humidification, heating, and smoke evacuation capabilities, for improved laparoscopy processes. The Wassenburg subsidiary of the Hoya Corporation focuses on high quality consumables for endoscopy components such as their disinfectants, detergents and their range of EndoFender component covers for safe transportation and storage, with auto cleaning and disinfecting capabilities. The company also produces specialized carts to prevent components from getting affected by airborne contaminants. Fujifilm Holdings Corporation released their ELUXEO 7000 range of endoscopy visualization component system, which uses an innovative a multi-light 4-LED light source that significantly improves on durability up to 10,000 hours and reduces energy consumption, while minimizing maintenance requirements such as the frequent changing of light bulbs. Rising Incidences of Complex Diseases to Sustain Endoscopy Visualization Components Market in North America and Europe North America followed by Europe are expected to continue their control over major endoscopy visualization components market owing to relatively higher rates of cancer in the region. High awareness among the healthcare community and patients about the benefits of endoscopy are also contributing to the market. In addition, the United States also has a favorable environment for reimbursement policies, sophisticated healthcare infrastructure and higher investments by hospitals on the adoption of new endoscopy equipment along with growing rates of research activities in Canada are anticipated to strongly boost the market in the region. On the other hand, emerging economies Brazil, China and India are providing large growth opportunities for the endoscopy visualization components market owing to modernization initiatives in public and private healthcare sectors in these regions and the consequent growth of installations of endoscopy devices in these countries. However, at the same time, low awareness, lack of professionals with the adequate skills, and prohibitive prices are expected to hamper market growth in these regions. Read Comprehensive Overview with Methodology of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-468 Classification of the Global Endoscopy Visualization Components Market Endoscopy visualization components can be broadly categorized into 7 major segments which include camera heads, insufflators, light sources, monitors, suction pumps, video processors, and printers. The report provides data on the basis of revenue, price, growth rate and market share. London, UK -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- An independent specialist consultancy and events organisation agency, Euro Petroleum Consultants hosts conferences around the world focusing on key industry issues. Attracting hundreds of producers, technology providers and suppliers, the conferences allow attendees to exchange knowledge of Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Sectors. They host around 15 annual conferences all over the globe in countries including Russia, Thailand, Bahrain, Belarus, Italy, United Kingdom, and the UAE. The multitude of conferences they organise includes GTCC (Russia, Moscow), ASIA-TECH (Thailand, Bangkok), ASIA-BBTC (Thailand, Bangkok), Op-Ex Russia and CIS (Russia, Sochi), BBTC MENA (Bahrain, Manama), IOSF (United Kingdom, London), and various others. Industry experts looking to attend any of their conferences can find out more about these events directly on their website. Euro Petroleum Consultants is a well-renowned consultancy and events organisation agency across the globe. They employ a team of professionals who combine their knowledge and expertise to provide their customers with high quality services and consultancy. In addition to hosting conferences around the world, Euro Petroleum Consultants also offers training services, consultancy services and recruitment courses. The Euro Petroleum Consultants' team has served many world-renowned brands such as Axens Group Technologies, ExxonMobil, GAZPROM NEFT, Shell Global Solutions, Honeywell UOP, and many more, with their expertise. Talking about their conferences, a representative from Euro Petroleum Consultants stated, "Euro Petroleum Consultants has been producing high-level conferences for the oil, gas and petrochemical sectors since 1999. Euro Petroleum Consultants hosts 15 global events annually and provides a unique platform for producers, technology providers and suppliers to gather and exchange knowledge and experience on all key industry issues." About Euro Petroleum Consultants Euro Petroleum Consultants is a leading independent consulting company with worldwide experience in the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. Euro Petroleum Consultants has four primary business lines: Consulting, Conferences, Training, and Recruitment. Euro Petroleum Consultants was founded to provide solid consulting advice and quality assistance to the refining and petrochemical sectors, throughout all the stages of project analysis and implementation. For more information, please visit: https://europetro.com/events?event_type=Conference&order_by=begin_date&direction=asc Contact Details: Euro Petroleum Consultants Ltd 44 Oxford Drive Bermondsey Street London SE1 2FB United Kingdom Phone: +44 (0) 20 7357 8394 Email: enquiries@europetro.com Northbrook, IL -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/01/2019 -- The report "Food & Beverage Disinfection Market by Type (Chemical (Chlorine, Hydrogen Peroxide & Peracetic Acid, and Ammonium), Technology (UV Radiation, Ozonation)), End Use, Application (Surface, Packaging, Processing Equipment), and Region - Global Forecast to 2023", The food & beverage disinfection market is estimated at USD 148.9 million in 2018 and is projected to reach a value of USD 178.2 million by 2023, at a CAGR of 3.7%. The market is driven by factors such as growth in instances of foodborne disease outbreaks, technological advancements in food & beverage disinfection methods, growth in awareness about food safety among consumers, and increase in demand for the non-thermal process in disinfection. Browse 69 market data Tables and 44 Figures spread through 133 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Food & Beverage Disinfection Market - Global Forecast to 2023" Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report. Download PDF Brochure "The food processing equipment segment accounted for the largest share of the food & beverage disinfection market, by application area, in 2017." On the basis of the application area, food processing equipment accounted for the largest share of the food & beverage disinfection market in 2017, followed by food packaging. Food processing equipment forms a critical part of large manufacturing units, and the disinfection of these equipment helps achieve quality compliance. Also, a major focus of manufacturers is on disinfecting the food contact surfaces such as food processing equipment during the entire production line. Since food processing equipment comes in direct contact with the food surface, it becomes critical for processors to maintain the cleanliness and hygiene of these equipment to prevent cross-contamination of food products and to ensure high quality and safety of end-food products. These factors have fueled the growth of this segment. "The technology segment accounted for the largest market share among the two types in the food & beverage disinfection market in 2017." On the basis of type, the technology segment of food & beverage disinfection accounted for a larger market share than chemicals. Technologies such as UV radiation are increasingly adopted by food & beverage manufacturers as an effective, cost-efficient, and safe disinfection technology. It is used either separately or in combination with other technologies to enhance its efficacy. Ozonation, which is another popular disinfection technology, is gaining traction in the food & beverage disinfection market, due to its effectiveness in the food packaging industry. Due to these factors, the market for food & beverage disinfection technology accounted for the larger share. Speak to Analyst "Europe dominated the food & beverage disinfection market in 2017." Europe accounted for the largest market share in 2017. Europe remains one of the major markets for food & beverage disinfection manufacturers due to the established processed food & beverage industry in the region. The processed food market in Western Europe is well-established, owing to which it is expected to witness steady growth during the forecast period. Food processing manufacturers in this region look to replace traditional disinfection methods with modern ones such as UV radiation and ozone treatment. Also, international food & beverage disinfection manufacturers are investing significantly in the region. These factors have fueled the growth food & beverage disinfection market in the European region. This report includes a study of marketing and development strategies, along with the product portfolios of the leading companies. It includes profiles of leading companies such Evonik (Germany), Neogen Corporation (US), Solvay (Belgium), Stepan Company (US), FINK TEC GmbH (Germany), Entaco (Belgium), CCL Pentasol (UK), Xylem (US), Evoqua Water Technologies (US), Advanced UV (US), Halma (UK), Trojan Technologies (Canada), and Suez (France). About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledgestore" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Shelly Singh MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA : 1-888-600-6441 sales@marketsandmarkets.com New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- The competitive landscape of the market for garbage bag market is a mildly fragmented one marked with the presence of quite a few large players, according to a report published by Future Market Insights (FMI). The key players in the European garbage bag market are Novolasta, s.r.o Senkvice, Extrapack OOD, Pack-It BV, Achaika Plastic S.A., DAGOPLAST AS, Terdex GmbH, International Plastics, MirPack TM, Plasta.It, Primax D.o.o. The key players are now focusing on research and development of garbage bags in a bid to stay ahead in the competition. These market players are also trying to expand their geographical reach through collaborations with local players. So far as geography is considered, the market for European garbage bag has been segmented into Germany, France, Italy, Spain, U.K., Russia, and BENELUX. Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg comprise BENELUX. Owing to the high demand of garbage bags across Europe, the market is anticipated to soar registering a good CAGR during the forecast period of 2016-2026. Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-eu-3034 Demand for Biodegradable Garbage Bags to Bolster Growth - The market has been segmented into five categories, so far as material is considered. The segments are, namely Low-density polyethylene (LDPE), Liner low-density polyethylene (LLDPE), High-density polyethylene (HDPE), Polypropylene (PP) and others. High-density polyethylene (HDPE) is characterized with high performance and extreme tensile strength and with these qualities, HDPE is forecasted to spearhead the European market for garbage bags. This segment accounted for 30% of the total revenue of the European market in 2016. During the forecast period of 2016-2026, the segment of HDPE is expected to expand at a CAGR of 5.5%. These garbage bags have the ability to contain substantial amount of weight and are cost effective as well. Such characteristics are expected to propel the market for high-density polyethylene garbage bags. Furthermore, high-density polyethylene or HDPE bags come with biodegradable versions. Biodegradable HDPE bags are made of domestic biomass material thereby diminishing oil dependency. They are also easy to recycle and are frequently used. Developed economies of countries like the U.K. and Germany are expected to fuel the demand for premium garbage bags. These premium garbage bags come with qualities like odour control and ability to stretch and people from the developed countries are willing to pay the extra bucks for these premium quality garbage bags. As such, the opportunity for such premium quality garbage bags are increasing. Stringent Government Policies to Restrain the Growth of the Market Governments of several European countries are implementing strict measure to contain the usage of plastic bags. They are imposing regulations wherein the sales of lightweight bags are getting restricted. Countries like Italy, France are applying a complete ban on HDPE plastics bags that are meant for single use. Such bans, though restraining the growth of the market for HDPE garbage bags, help to diminish the harmful effects of plastic bags on the environment, specifically the oceans, lakes, rivers, and the wildlife that inhabit in those water bodies. This is one of the major restraining factors of the European market for garbage bag. In addition, imposition of extra charges and increased taxation by the governments of various European countries on the use of plastic garbage bags are dampening the spirit of the market players. Customers are charged extra for plastic garbage bags at various convenience and retail stores. Such government initiatives play a major role in the diminishing the usage of plastic garbage bags in Europe. Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-eu-3034 This review is as per the findings of a new report by Future Market Insights (FMI) titled, "Garbage Bag Market: Europe Industry Analysis & Opportunity Assessment, 2016-2026." For the study, the market has been segmented as follows: Global Garbage bag Market: By Material Type Low-density polyethylene Liner low density polyethylene High-density polyethylene Polypropylene Others Global Garbage bag Market: By End User Retail and Consumer Institutional Industrial Global Garbage bag Market: By Size 7-16 gallons 20-30 gallons 32-35 gallons 40-48 gallons +55 gallons Global Garbage bag Market: By Geography Europe Germany France U.K. Italy Spain Russia BENELUX Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- "Integration of advanced technology with medical devices has aided the healthcare sector in upgrading the monitoring, diagnostics and treatment procedures. Hi-tech medical devices employ stronger and accurate data capturing ability through improved hardware and software systems." The healthcare industry is undergoing a transition and scaling upwards owing to the rising competition between healthcare service providers. This report especially focuses on the dynamic view of the Hi-Tech Medical Devices Market that can help to manage the outline of the Market. Several analysis tools and standard procedures help to demonstrate the role of different domains in market. The study estimates the factors that are boosting the development of companies. Request Sample Copy of this Report@: https://www.healthcareintelligencemarkets.com/request_sample.php?id=29835 Top Key Vendors in Market: Apple Inc., Google Inc., Adidas AG, Nike, Sony Corporation, Sony, Xiaomi, Virtual-Realties Limited, and CAE Healthcare. Hi-Tech Medical Devices have become an indispensable part of the medical device industry. Today sophisticated medical devices are on the market, from syringes to laser devices. Key factors driving market growth include increasing populations using advanced technology hardware, software, and personal Internet (IoT). In addition to this growth in the Hi-Tech Medical Devices Market, disease spread patterns are changing due to aging, income-based and disposable income. Non-market factors contributing to the growth of the Hi-Tech Medical Devices Market are infrastructure development and favorable regulation by the government. Geographically, North America, followed by Europe, is expected to hold the largest market for Hi-Tech Medical Devices due to affordability and accessibility of expensive tests for treatment and innovations in drug therapies in this region. Growing demographics and economies in the developing countries such as India and China is expected to lead the growth of Market in Asia. Get Reasonable Discount on this Premium Report @: https://www.healthcareintelligencemarkets.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=29835 It includes driving factors and opportunities of the Hi-Tech Medical Devices Market, which helps to study the current statistics to enlarge the industries rapidly. Restraints of companies are also elaborated in this report. Finally, this innovative elaboration is aggregated by the global as well as regional scope for various services. Following are the List of Chapter Covers in the Hi-Tech Medical Devices Market: 1.Hi-Tech Medical Devices Market Overview 2.Global Economic Impact on Industry 3.Global Market Competition by Manufacturers 4.Global Market Analysis by Application 5.Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders 6.Market Effect Factors Analysis 7.Hi-Tech Medical Devices Market Forecast For More Information: https://www.healthcareintelligencemarkets.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=29835 New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- The latest market evaluation report on the Loading Dock Equipment market explores how the Loading Dock Equipment market will continue to expand for the forecast period 2018 - 2026. The study further serves as a unique research for stakeholders, product owners, and field marketing executives looking for actionable data and unique resource on market size, share, and growth. The market intelligence report gives business evangelists an authority to review the major trends, opportunities, and challenges expected to shape the future of the industry during the estimated period. Importantly, the study not only helps spot the major vendors but also their winning strategies. The real-time data accumulated through qualitative and quantitative research technique further help business owners determine where they stand in comparison to their region, country, and product category. Request sample to get a list of companies@ https://www.marketexpertz.com/sample-enquiry-form/14631 Major Players in Loading Dock Equipment market are: Assa Abloy, Rite Hite, Hormann, Doorhan, Nordock, Blue Giant, Pentalift, Pioneer Dock Equipment , Fastlink, Jinqiuzhu, Anhui Beiyan, Jinan Longhao, Suzhou Weierli, Suzhou Shengxing, Active, Suzhou Great Market segment by Region/Country including: - North America (United States, Canada and Mexico) - Europe (Germany, UK, France, Italy, Russia and Spain etc.) - Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and Southeast Asia etc.) - South America Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Chile etc.) - Middle East & Africa (South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia etc.) Ask for discount on the report @ https://www.marketexpertz.com/discount-enquiry-form/14631 Loading Dock Equipment Market share The report discovers market's total sale that is generated by a particular firms over a time period. Industry experts calculate share by taking into account the product sales over a period and then dividing it by the overall sales of the Loading Dock Equipment industry over a defined period. Subject matter experts further use this metric to offer a general idea of the share and size of a firm and its immediate rivals. By providing an in-depth knowledge of the position a company as well as an entrepreneur holds in the Loading Dock Equipment market Market by Type - Hydraulic Loading Dock Equipment - Air-Powered Loading Dock Equipment - Mechanical Loading Dock Equipment - Others Market by Application - Automobile Industry - Chemical Industry - Food Industry - Medicine Industry - Others Knowing the trends influencing the industry performance Stakeholders, marketing executives and business owners planning to refer a market research report can use this study to design their offerings and understand how competitors attract their potential customers and manage their supply and distribution channels. When tracking the trends researchers have made a conscious effort to analyze and interpret the consumer behaviour. Besides, the research helps product owners to understand the changes in culture, target market as well as brands so they can draw the attention of the potential customers more effectively. Our trend analysts look for the crucial connection between consumer trends, behaviour and values, to provide context for the sectors, demographics and global themes that matter to you. Purchase full Loading Dock Equipment report through this link and get 15% free customization on the report@ https://www.marketexpertz.com/checkout-form/14631 The study dives deep into the profiles of top market players and their key financials. This comprehensive report is not only for business analysts and any existing and new entrant can use it when designing their business strategies. The research is one of its kind global analyses of aspects such as import and export status, supply chain management, profit and gross margin worldwide for the forecast period 2018 - 2026. Extensive coverage of statistics associated with recent events including acquisition and mergers and strengths and weaknesses of a company forms an important part of the study on the Loading Dock Equipment market. The research provides answers to the following key questions: - What will be the market size and growth rate of the Loading Dock Equipment market for the forecast period 2018 -2026 across different regions? - What are the key driving forces expected to shape the future of the industry worldwide? - What strategies are the prominent vendors adapting to stay ahead of their competitors? - Which major trends are impacting the development of the Loading Dock Equipment market worldwide? - Which factors can hinder, challenge or even restrict the expansion of the Loading Dock Equipment market worldwide? - What are the opportunities or future prospect for the business owners operating in the market for the forecast period, 2018 - 2026? Browse the report description @ https://www.marketexpertz.com/industry-overview/loading-dock-equipment-market There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Loading Dock Equipment market. The report is distributed over 15 Chapters to display the analysis of the global Loading Dock Equipment market. Chapter 1 covers the Loading Dock Equipment Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force; Chapter 2 talks about the top manufacturers and analyses their sales, revenue and pricing decisions for the duration 2016 and 2017; Chapter 3 displays the competitive nature of the market by discussing the competition among the top manufacturers. It dissects the market using sales, revenue and market share data for 2016 and 2017; Chapter 4, shows the global market by regions and the proportionate size of each market region based on sales, revenue and market share of Loading Dock Equipment, for the period 2018- 2026; Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, are dedicated to the analysis of the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions; Continue About MarketExpertz Planning to invest in market intelligence products or offerings on the web? Then marketexpertz has just the thing for you - reports from over 500 prominent publishers and updates on our collection daily to empower companies and individuals catch-up with the vital insights on industries operating across different geography, trends, share, size and growth rate. There's more to what we offer to our customers. With marketexpertz you have the choice to tap into the specialized services without any additional charges. Contact Us: John Watson Head of Business Development Market Expertz | Web: www.marketexpertz.com Direct Line: +1-800-819-3052 E-mail: sales@marketexpertz.com News: www.marketexpertz.com/market-news Dongguan, China -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/01/2019 -- Proper aluminum/copper melting requires a furnace which is not only able to stick to modern standards, but also surpass them. It must be built perfectly from the ground up and contain all of the necessary qualities that make a proper furnace. As a result of these reasons, not every equipment manufacturer is able to provide the right type of aluminum melting furnace or copper melting furnace needed for excellent and efficient melting. However, one manufacturer which has managed to make a name for itself recently is HLQ Induction Equipment Co., Ltd. Their particular brand of furnaces has garnered quite a bit of attention for their high quality. Their furnaces come alongside induction for melting and casting aluminum, copper or brass. This doesn't come as a surprise, as HLQ Induction Equipment Co., Ltd. is often said to be the leader in heating healing machines and devices nowadays. Their equipment is always designed with meticulous care and attention to detail, ensuring that every aspect is able to provide the user with an immense amount of benefit. Through the adept design choices that HLQ Induction Equipment has made in the production of these furnaces, one is not only able to save energy but can also contribute to a lesser environmental temperature because of it. Unlike the usual diesel furnaces that can increase the temperature of the workshops to an unbearable point, the ingenious method of handling heat introduced in HLQ Induction Equipment's furnaces keeps the overall temperature at a regular level. Additionally, their Aluminum induction furnace can heat up quite quickly. This is through the electromagnetic induction method that they use. As a result of these magnetic lines, one can even control the temperature in real-time offering pin-point precision and product efficacy. Alongside other benefits like power and safety, these furnaces and their brass melting furnace have become the next big option that many aluminum producers have begun using. With how many benefits they provide, this certainly is not a surprise. About HLQ Induction Equipment Co., Ltd HLQ Induction Equipment is a producer of aluminum furnaces. Their line of furnaces comes equipped with a number of great benefits that allow them to be the top of the line in a highly competitive environment. Armed with all the qualities and standards needed to create a worthwhile and effective product, these furnaces are becoming the go-to option for a multitude of aluminum product manufacturers for their melting needs. Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- According to the latest market report published by Future Market Insights titled "Palletizers Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2018-2028," Palletizers being a highly productive material handling solution is expected to be the prime driver of the global palletizers market during the forecast period, 2018-2028. Globally, the revenue generated from sales of palletizers has been estimated to be around US$ 2,084.4 Mn in 2018, and is projected to increase at a CAGR of 4.9%, during the forecast period 2018-2028. The palletizers market in the developed region of North America and Western Europe together estimated to account for around 40% of the global palletizers market and are projected to witness low growth during the forecast period. The developed countries of North America and Western Europe region has high adoption rate for recently developed technology. This has resulted into high demand of advanced technology for robotic palletizers as compared to other regions. Large number of palletizers manufacturers are based in these regions only. Although, the manufacturing output growth in these regions have matured, the continuous developments introduced in the robotic palletizers and the end-user industries aiming highest automation possible has propelled the palletizers market in North America and Western Europe. China, India and South Korea are some of the rapidly developing manufacturing industries in the world and large market for robotics in the world. These countries are estimated to account for more than 85% of the APEJ palletizers market. Although, China is the largest palletizers market and the largest robotics market in the world, the industrial robot density of China is below global average. Millions of manufacturing and warehousing facilities, and huge domestic production of economical palletizers has created large opportunity for the palletizers market in the country. Request to Report Methodology @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-7084 Japan is exhibited to possess similar characteristics as that of North America and Western Europe, which are maturing the demand of palletizers, large palletizers market share and rapid adoption of technology. Fanuc, Kuka and other globally leading companies in robotics industry and providing palletizers are based in Japan. Central Europe & Baltics region includes countries such as Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Croatia and others. The total labour force in the region has remained almost constant since 2002 while the manufacturing output in the region has expanded by around 2.7 times. This has created immense opportunity in the region for palletizers market and other industrial automation solutions. Availability of economical and skilled labour in Poland has attracted manufacturing industries in the Western Europe region to shift their production facility to Poland and other countries in the Central Europe and Baltics region. In the MEA region, Turkey and GCC region are estimated to account for around 60% of the MEA palletizers market in 2018 and are further expected to expand palletizers market at a significantly high pace as compared to African countries. MEA region has considerably higher demand share of conventional palletizers as compared to other regions. The rapidly developing pharmaceutical industry in the North Africa and GCC region has propelled the demand of palletizers in the region. Due to lack of manufacturing capability, the majority of the demand of palletizers is served by imports from Asia Pacific and Western European countries. The market volume for global palletizers is expected to expand at 1.6X over the forecast period 2018-2028 Detailed profiles of palletizers companies are also included in the report to evaluate their strategies, key product offerings and recent developments. The key players of the global palletizers market are Premier Tech Chronos Ltd., ABB Ltd., FANUC Corp., Kion Group, Kuka Group, Honeywell International Inc., Okura Yusoki Co., Ltd., Columbia Machine, Inc., Fuji Yusoki Kogyo Co., Ltd. and Concetti S.P.A. In global palletizers market report, we have discussed individual strategies followed by these companies in terms of enhancing their product portfolio, creating new marketing techniques, mergers and acquisitions. The 'Competitive Landscape' section is included to provide report audiences with a dashboard view and company share collectively. Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7084 Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/01/2019 -- Sodium reduction is reduction of salt content from the food products. Sodium reduction ingredients are used for reducing salt content from the food products either by replacing the salt from the food or partially reducing the excess salt from the food products. Sodium reducing ingredients plays vital role in food additives industry. Sodium is an essential nutrient that our body requires for proper functioning. However, excess amount of sodium intake can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension). High blood pressure can lead to stokes, heart and kidney diseases. According to Federal, Provincial and Territorial (FPT) governments people in Canada eat more than required amount of sodium, almost double than what our body requires. Average sodium requirement of the body for proper functioning is 2300 mg of sodium per day. On the bases of sodium reducing capacity global sodium reduction ingredients market can be bifurcated into amino acids, mineral salts, yeast and other. Mineral salts have the largest market share for sodium reduction ingredients, and are expected to dominate the market in the forecasted period. Sodium reduction ingredients are majorly applied in the food and beverage industry. Other major applications include dairy, frozen food, bakery and confectionary, meat products, sauces, seasonings and snacks. North America has the largest market share for sodium reduction ingredients, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. Global sodium reduction ingredients market is expected to witness double digit growth in the forecasted period. North America is expected to maintain its dominance in the forecasted period owing to increased domestic consumption of processed food in the U.S. However, European region is expected to witness highest growth in the coming future followed by Asia Pacific. Request Report TOC @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/3397 Increasing demand for health nutrition food products paired with rising consumer awareness about harmful effects of excess sodium intake is driving the global sodium reduction ingredients market. Additionally, government and private company intervention to increase public awareness about the harmful effect of excess sodium intake is also expected to drive the global sodium reduction ingredients market. Also, rising demand for processed food (contain salt more than any other food products) by the customer in the developed and developing region is further expected to increase the demand for sodium reduction ingredients to some extent. Changing consumer consumption trends towards healthy nutritious food products showing increased product penetration and purchasing power of individual. This is providing opportunity to the market players to invest in this market. Some of the major companies operating in the sodium reduction ingredients market are Cargill Inc., Kerry Group Plc., Cambrian Solutions Inc., Advanced Food Systems Inc., Dupont, Angel Yeast, Koninklijke DSM N.V., Carbery, Innophos Holdings Inc., and Givaudan SA Request for sample report: https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3397 Dallas, TX -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/01/2019 -- Software Defined Networking Market report provides Global Analysis and Forecasts by Type and End-users report provides a detailed overview of the major factors impacting the global market with the market share analysis and revenues of various sub segments. Focusing on objectives of this report is to categorize dynamics of the market and to supply latest updates like mergers and acquisitions, numerous technological developments, new entrants within the market, that create an impression on totally different segments of the market. "Software-defined Networking is an emerging computer architecture which offers a method to centrally manage and configure physical and virtual network devices such as switches, gateways, and routers in your datacenter. To achieve better integration between the physical network and virtual network, previous SDN-compatible devices can be used. Virtual network components such as Hyper-V Virtual Switch, RAS Gateway, and Hyper-V Network Virtualization are designed to be fundamental elements of an overall SDN infrastructure." Request Sample Copy of This Research Report: https://adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/request-sample/736 Software Defined Networking Market: Key Players are Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems, Inc., Big Switch Networks, Juniper Networks, Inc., NEC Corporation, Dell Inc., Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., Inc., IBM Corporation, Extreme Networks, Inc., and VMware Inc. The Global Software Defined Networking Market size is estimated to reach USD 101.23 billion by 2025, owing to the growing demand for dynamic and cost-effective networking solutions. High capital investments by the telecom carriers across the world have increased the demand for higher operational efficiency in the field of networking technologies. Hence, carriers are aggressively adopting new technologies such as software defined networks, to reduce the load of operational expenditure. Additionally, growing demand of mobility and cloud services will have a positive influence on the growth of market. The Global Software Defined Networking Market On the basis of solution provided is segmented into physical network infrastructure, virtualization, SDN application, integration & deployment, training & maintenance and managed services. In 2017, physical network infrastructure contributed the highest share to the overall software defined networking market owing to the continuous telecom network upgrades in developing economies. Followed by physical network infrastructure, SDN application segment had the second-highest contribution to the global market. Get more details about Global Software Defined Networking Market: https://adroitmarketresearch.com/industry-reports/software-defined-networking-market The Software Defined Networking Market in this region is mostly driven by the presence of major tech companies enthusiastically adopting advanced tech to maintain a competitive edge in the US and Canada. Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow with the highest growth rate in coming years due to its rapid urbanization and growth in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail and automobile. Key segments of the Global Software Defined Networking Market Solutions Overview, 2015-2025 (USD million) - Physical Network Infrastructure - Virtualization - SDN Application - Integration and Deployment - Training and Maintenance - Managed Services Industry Vertical Overview, 2015-2025 (USD million) - BFSI - IT and Telecom - Consumer Goods - Defence - Healthcare - Others Regional Overview, 2015-2025 (USD million) - North America - Europe - Asia Pacific - Latin America - Middle-East & Africa For Any Query on the Software Defined Networking Market: https://adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/enquiry-before-buying/736 Get the access of more information through our blog, white paper and Case study: 1. White Paper on "Software-Defined Networking Simplifying Enterprises Network" This whitepaper covers all the aspects related to network technologies which are designed to make the network more agile and flexible to support the storage infrastructure and centralized server. The whitepaper also helps to understand various applications of SDN in cloud computing and mobile networks. It covers the requirement of SDN to provide flexible control over the network. Access the complete white paper on Software Defined Networking Market Report: https://adroitmarketresearch.com/white-paper/software-defined-networking-simplifying-enterprises-network 2. Blogs on " Simplify Wired Network Deployments With SDN": Software-defined Networking is an emerging computer architecture which offers a method to centrally manage and configure physical and virtual network devices such as switches, gateways, and routers in your datacenter. To achieve better integration between the physical network and virtual network, previous SDN-compatible devices can be used. Would you like to access the blog on Software Defined Networking Market Report? https://adroitmarketresearch.com/blogs/simplify-wired-network-deployments-with-sdn 3. Case Study on "Save Your Business With Software-Defined Networking @ This case study also contains a detailed analysis of network complexities, network flexibility, and cost & time efficiency along with various benefits of software-defined networking such as networking control, managing data traffic, and others. In number of emerging networking industries, SDN is generating highest interest in the recent developments. Browse the full case study on: https://adroitmarketresearch.com/case-studies/save-your-business-with-software-defined-networking About Adroit Market Research Adroit Market Research is an India-based business analytics and consulting company. Our target audience is a wide range of corporations, manufacturing companies, product/technology development institutions and industry associations that require understanding of a market's size, key trends, participants and future outlook of an industry. We intend to become our clients' knowledge partner and provide them with valuable market insights to help create opportunities that increase their revenues. We follow a code Explore, Learn and Transform. At our core, we are curious people who love to identify and understand industry patterns, create an insightful study around our findings and churn out money-making roadmaps. Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- The global sound sensor market was valued at US$ 1,270.3 Mn in 2017 and is projected to register a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 6% from 2018 to 2026, according to a new report published by Transparency Market Research (TMR) titled 'Sound Sensor Market Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 20182026.' The report suggests that rising significance of security and surveillance systems across the globe, increasing demand for voice recognition systems, and growing use of sound sensors in several medical applications are likely to augment the demand for sound sensors from 2018 to 2026. Since key players are introducing innovative sound sensors in developed markets such as North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, these regions are likely to account for a leading share of the global sound sensor market during the forecast period. Rising investments in smartphone and automotive technologies and industrial automation across emerging markets such as China, Japan, South Korea, and India are likely to boost the sound sensor market in Asia Pacific from 2018 to 2026. Report Analysis@ https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sound-sensor-market.html Working limitations of sound sensor to hamper the sound sensor market Sound sensors including ultrasound, acoustic, and audio sensors come with several advantages such as high sensitivity and ability to function across numerous industrial as well as medical applications. However, sound sensors have certain limitations as well. Ultrasound sensors cannot be used in vacuum, as sound waves require air as a medium for transmission. Moreover, these sensors may not function in any type of liquid medium. Thus, sound sensors need to be selected by considering all these limitations. Additionally, sensing ability of certain sound sensors is affected by soft edges of any surface as well as a certain level of temperature. These limitations of sound sensors are likely to hinder the global sound sensor market, with a medium-level impact, in the near future. Sound sensor is significantly adopted by the consumer electronics sector In terms of application, the global sound sensor market has been segmented into health care, automotive, consumer electronics, security & surveillance, industrial, and others. The others segment comprises aerospace and chemical. In the consumer electronics industry vertical, sound sensors are used largely in smartphone devices for object detection, as a microphone, and as a fingerprint scanner. Technologically advanced, new-generation sound sensors i.e. ultrasonic sensors are replacing optical-proximity sensors, thereby improving the smartphone design. Several manufacturers are coming up with innovative ultrasonic sound sensors to be incorporated in a large number of smartphones. For instance, Qualcomm Incorporated, a semiconductor company, announced the launch of an innovative in-display fingerprint sensor in 2018. This sensor is based on the new 3D and ultrasonic sensor technology that uses sound waves to collect fingerprint data. Furthermore, the device is capable to read fingerprints contaminated by water or oil. Download PDF Sample - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=61047 Asia Pacific to continue to hold a major share of the global sound sensor market Asia Pacific is expected to hold a major share of the global market for sound sensors during the forecast period. Leading share of the region is primarily attributable to strong presence of well-established players across the region, especially in prominent economies such as China, Japan, and South Korea. Governments of China and Japan are investing heavily in smartphone and semiconductor technologies. Furthermore, the automotive industry in Asia Pacific is expanding prominently, owing to the increasing demand from Japan and China. Asia Pacific is home to several well-established players that manufacture sound sensors including Badger Meter, Inc., OMRON Corporation, Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd., Benthowave Instrument Inc., and numerous emerging and smaller players. Moreover, Asia Pacific is witnessing high adoption of sound sensors, due to continuously increasing industrial automation and growing automotive industry in the region, which uses sound sensors significantly. Several manufacturers in the region are focusing on enhancing the quality of their products, showcasing their products by participating in several trade shows, and focusing on customer satisfaction. For instance, OMRON Corporation offers high-quality and technologically advanced industrial automation solutions including ultrasonic sensors. The company also provides customer support for its products. Additionally, the company conducts customer satisfaction surveys in various countries, on a regular basis, to identify and analyze customer requirements. Key players such as Siemens AG, STMicroelectronics, Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd., Robert Bosch GmbH, and TE Connectivity Ltd. to lead the global sound sensor market The report includes profiles of well-established players operating in the global sound sensor market. These include Siemens AG, STMicroelectronics, Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd., Robert Bosch GmbH, and TE Connectivity Ltd. These players are focusing on providing high flexibility to their customers in terms of buying products. In 2018, TE Connectivity Ltd. launched its innovative online store called 'TE Store,' which provides customers with an option to buy TE products such as connectivity solutions and sensors directly. The online store offers a high level of flexibility to customers, as they can easily compare and buy products of various companies from TE Store. Edison, NJ -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2019 -- Global Zirconium Dental Implants Market Research Forecast Study to 2022 presents an in-depth strategic assessment of the Zirconium Dental Implants. The study highlights influencing factors that are impacting or reinforcing market environment such as Government Policy, Technological Changes etc along with key market drivers. The research study is forecasted taken into consideration the primaries from industry experts and includes key data (revenue, market Size, growth rate, and product price) by important players such as Straumann, SDS, 3M, Dentsply, Danaher, Zimmer Biomet, Modern Dental Laboratory Co., Ltd, Cortex, Kyocera Medical, Osstem, Z-Systems AG, Glidewell, Laboratoire Dentaire Pointe-Claire, Autumn Dental Arts, Alpha-Bio Tec & Dental Arts Laboratories and segmented by products such as , Cobalt Oxide, Cobalt Alloy & Other. Request Sample of Global Zirconium Dental Implants Market Insights, Forecast to 2025 @: https://www.htfmarketreport.com/sample-report/1469251-global-zirconium-dental-implants-market-9 This report studies the global market size of Zirconium Dental Implants in key regions like North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Central & South America and Middle East & Africa, focuses on the consumption of Zirconium Dental Implants in these regions. This research report categorizes the global Zirconium Dental Implants market by top players/brands, region, type and end user. This report also studies the global Zirconium Dental Implants market status, competition landscape, market share, growth rate, future trends, market drivers, opportunities and challenges, sales channels and distributors. The research study also provides Global Zirconium Dental Implants Sales (K Units) and Revenue (Million USD) by Top manufacturers that includes Straumann, SDS, 3M, Dentsply, Danaher, Zimmer Biomet, Modern Dental Laboratory Co., Ltd, Cortex, Kyocera Medical, Osstem, Z-Systems AG, Glidewell, Laboratoire Dentaire Pointe-Claire, Autumn Dental Arts, Alpha-Bio Tec & Dental Arts Laboratories for forecasted period 2017-2022. Each player highlighted in the research study contains companies Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors, in-depth business overview, geographic footprint and contact information. The report contains a comprehensive market and vendor landscape in addition to SWOT Analysis. If you have a different set of players/manufacturers according to geography we can provide customization accordingly. Browse for Full Report at: https://www.htfmarketreport.com/reports/1469251-global-zirconium-dental-implants-market-9 Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with Sales, revenue, Market Share (%) and Growth Rate (%) of Zirconium Dental Implants in regions/countries such as North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Europe, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Central & South America, Brazil, Rest of Central & South America, Middle East & Africa, GCC Countries, Turkey, Egypt & South Africa, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast). In addition to this Global Zirconium Dental Implants Market Split by Product Type such as , Cobalt Oxide, Cobalt Alloy & Other and also presented nicely through graphs and tables. The objectives / scope of this 123 pages study is to define, describe, and analyze the Zirconium Dental Implants market on the basis of product type, application, and region. To forecast and analyze the size of market (in terms of value) in key regions, namely, North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Europe, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Central & South America, Brazil, Rest of Central & South America, Middle East & Africa, GCC Countries, Turkey, Egypt & South Africa To forecast and analyze the Zirconium Dental Implants market at country-level in each region Total sale of Zirconium Dental Implants in North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Europe, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Central & South America, Brazil, Rest of Central & South America, Middle East & Africa, GCC Countries, Turkey, Egypt & South Africa To strategically analyze each submarket with respect to individual growth trends and its contribution to the Zirconium Dental Implants market To analyze opportunities for stakeholders by identifying high-growth segments of the market To provide significant market trends and factors driving or inhibiting the growth of the Global Zirconium Dental Implants market and its regional markets To analyze competitive developments and landscape such as expansions, joint ventures, new products launches, mergers and Acquisition. To strategically profile key players in the market and comprehensively analyze their growth strategies. Buy Single User License of Global Zirconium Dental Implants Market Insights, Forecast to 2025 @ https://www.htfmarketreport.com/buy-now?format=1&report=1469251 There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the Global Zirconium Dental Implants market. Chapter 1, to describe Zirconium Dental Implants Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force; Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Zirconium Dental Implants, with sales, revenue, and price of Zirconium Dental Implants, in 2017; Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2017; Chapter 4, to show the Global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Zirconium Dental Implants, for each region, from 2012 to 2017; Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Europe, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Central & South America, Brazil, Rest of Central & South America, Middle East & Africa, GCC Countries, Turkey, Egypt & South Africa; Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application [Hospitals, Dental Clinics & Other], from 2012 to 2017; Chapter 12, Zirconium Dental Implants market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2017 to 2022; Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Zirconium Dental Implants sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source. Enquire for customization in Report @ https://www.htfmarketreport.com/enquiry-before-buy/1469251-global-zirconium-dental-implants-market-9 Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia. A research team led by scientists from the University of California, Davis, has used a unique approach to sequence the genomes of the English walnut (Juglans regia) and its wild North American relative, the little walnut (Juglans microcarpa), by tapping into the capabilities of two state-of-the-art technologies: long-read DNA sequencing and optical genome mapping. The English walnut, an important nut crop with 3.8 million tons harvested worldwide in 2017, is native to Asia. The little walnut, also known as the Texas walnut, is native to North America, where it occurs in riparian areas in the southwestern United States. Both species are wind-pollinated, highly heterozygous, and intolerant of inbreeding. Their hybrids are infertile. By sequencing the genome of their hybrid, we produced complete genome sequences for both parents in the time normally required to produce the sequence of one genome, said study co-lead author Dr. Ming-Cheng Luo, a research geneticist in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. This approach could be applied to genome sequencing of trees and many other woody perennials, opening the door to a better understanding of the genetic blueprints of almonds, pecans, pistachios and grapes. Like walnut, these other crops naturally cross-pollinate and are therefore highly variable, said study co-lead author Professor Jan Dvorak, also from the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Variability has always greatly complicated our ability to produce a high-quality genome sequence for such crops, but these new technologies now make it possible. The assembled genome sequences of the two walnut species will now help scientists identify genetic markers that breeders can use to develop new varieties with improved pathogen and pest resistance. We chose to cross the widely used English walnut specifically with the wild Texas black walnut because of its native resistance to several soil-borne diseases and root nematodes, which are serious pests of walnut in California, said co-author Dr. Dan Kluepfel, a researcher in the Crops Pathology and Genetics Research Unit at USDAs Agricultural Research Service. The results were published in the journal Horticulture Research. _____ Tingting Zhu et al. 2019. Sequencing a Juglans regia x J. microcarpa hybrid yields high-quality genome assemblies of parental species. Horticulture Research 6, article number: 55; doi: 10.1038/s41438-019-0139-1 Mars is dry today, but numerous ancient rivers are found across the planets surface and their existence is a challenge to models of planetary climate evolution. A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, catalogued these rivers to conclude that the runoff production persisted until less than three billion years ago and probably one billion years ago; it was intense for a given area, the rivers were wider than those on Earth today and occurred at hundreds of locations on the planet. Mars is crisscrossed with the distinctive tracks of ancient rivers. NASAs and ESAs Mars orbiters captured photos of hundreds of these rivers, and when the Mars rover Curiosity landed in 2012, it sent back images of pebbles that were rounded tumbled for a long time in the bottom of a river. But its a puzzle why ancient Mars had liquid water. The planet has an extremely thin atmosphere today, and early in the planets history, it was also only receiving a third of the sunlight of present-day Earth, which shouldnt be enough heat to maintain liquid water. Indeed, even on ancient Mars, when it was wet enough for rivers some of the time, the rest of the data looks like Mars was extremely cold and dry most of the time, said Dr. Edwin Kite, a researcher at the University of Chicago. Seeking a better understanding of Martian precipitation, Dr. Kite and his colleagues analyzed image data of more than 200 well-preserved river channels, alluvial fans and deltas across Mars, and calculated the intensity of river runoff using multiple methods, including an analysis of the size of the river channels. In the river basins for which there are the most data, Martian rivers were about two times wider than those on Earth. Between 3.6 and 1 billion years ago, and likely after 1 billion years ago, there was intense runoff in these channels, amounting to 3 to 20 kg/m2 each day. The analysis shows clear evidence for persistent, strong runoff that occurred well into the last stage of the wet climate, Dr. Kite said. The results provide guidance for those trying to reconstruct the Martian climate. For example, the size of the rivers implies the water was flowing continuously, not just at high noon, so climate modelers need to account for a strong greenhouse effect to keep the planet warm enough for average daytime temperatures above the freezing point of water. The rivers also show strong flow up to the last geological minute before the wet climate dries up. You would expect them to wane gradually over time, but thats not what we see. The rivers get shorter hundreds of kilometers rather than thousands but discharge is still strong. The wettest day of the year is still very wet. Its possible the climate had a sort of on/off switch, which tipped back and forth between dry and wet cycles, he said. Our work answers some existing questions but raises a new one. Which is wrong: the climate models, the atmosphere evolution models, or our basic understanding of the chronology of the inner Solar System? _____ Edwin S. Kite et al. 2019. Persistence of intense, climate-driven runoff late in Mars history. Science Advances 5 (3): eaav7710; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aav7710 It will likely be more than a month before Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are cleared for flight after the FAA announced it will be weeks before Boeing finishes testing its proposed software update. Boeing had earlier said it hoped to submit the proposal to the FAA this week but has put that off. Time is needed for additional work by Boeing as the result of an ongoing review of the737MAXFlight Control System to ensure that Boeing has identified and appropriately addressed all pertinent issues, FAA spokesman Greg Martin said in a statement. Boeing said it will take the time necessary to do it right with the update and offered no insight on a potential timeline. Although Boeing could have its plan ready by the end of the month, its not clear how long it will take the FAA to test and vet the upgrade. The FAA has said it intends to conduct a thorough review of the software update, which will link the two angle of attack sensors for redundancy and limit the influence of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which is a stall-prevention system installed to counter the aircrafts increased tendency to pitch up in low-speed, flaps-up manual flight. After the update is accepted, its likely MAX crews will have to be trained. More than 350 aircraft are grounded worldwide, forcing airlines to adjust schedules and reduce frequency on some routes to minimize potential disruption. Southwest is building its April and May schedules without its MAXes. Air Canada has leased additional aircraft until July 1 at least. Google Maps(OAKLAND, Calif.) -- A Northern California chemical engineer was arrested on attempted murder charges after he was caught on surveillance footage allegedly spiking a colleague's water bottle with "toxic amounts of cadmium," authorities said. David Xu, 32, was arraigned on Tuesday afternoon in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland, California. Xu was arrested on Thursday following an investigation that showed he had allegedly been trying to poison a female colleague for more than a year, according to an arrest warrant obtained by ABC News. In addition to one count of willful, deliberate, premeditated attempted murder, Xu was charged with felony poisoning and inflicting great bodily injury. "As you all know, he's presumed innocent," Xu's attorney, Julia Jayne, told reporters following Tuesday's court hearing. "These are allegations, only allegations. Charges have been filed." Authorities said Xu and the victim, who court papers identified as Rong Yuan, work at Berkeley Engineering and Research in Berkeley, California. Officials at the company declined to comment when contacted by ABC News. "That's insane, can't imagine anyone trying to poison anyone," Morgan Davis, Xu's neighbor in the Bay Area town of Lafayette, told ABC station KGO-TV in San Francisco. Yuan told investigators that she noticed a "strange taste and smell from her water and food" that she had left unattended in her office, according to court documents. She became sick last year and grew suspicious when two relatives who drank from her water bottle also fell ill, according to the court documents. Investigators combed through security video at Berkeley Engineering and Research and spotted Xu allegedly pouring a substance into his colleague's water bottle on Feb. 11 and again on March 4, authorities allege in court documents. Water samples from the victim's water bottle tested positive for cadmium, which is often found in rechargeable batteries, according to the court documents. Yuan is still recovering from the attempted poisoning, according to the court records. She declined to comment when reached by KGO-TV. Investigators have not commented on a motive in the case. On his LinkedIn page, Xu claims he had served as an engineering expert witness and consultant in materials and chemicals. The case comes about a year after a 57-year-old man was arrested in the deaths of 21 co-workers at a valve manufacturing plant in Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock, Germany. The suspect, identified only as Klaus O. under German privacy laws, was convicted last month and sentenced to life in prison for killing his colleagues by spiking their sandwiches with high levels of cadmium and mercury, authorities said. German authorities said the suspect was caught after managers at the plant installed a surveillance camera in the lunch break room and recorded Klaus O. spiking his colleague's lunches. Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. New Yorks Senator Chuck Schumer wants the FAA to exclude Boeing from the agencys standing advisory committee on rulemaking. Schumer said that companies involved in active investigations shouldnt also be involved in regulation writing. Schumer was, of course, referring to the aftermath of two crashes of Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliners, now the subject of intense international investigation. It makes no sense for Boeing or any company for that matter to be involved in an active investigation surrounding questions of safety while also retaining membership on a federal committee that recommends airline industry regulations, Schumer said in a statement. That is why I am demanding the FAA both suspend Boeing from this committee and any others until the formal investigation has ended, and to also answer serious questions I have raised. Schumer sent a letter to acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell demanding that the agency should suspend and/or update the public on Boeings membership on the Aviation Rulemaking Advisory Committee. Such ARCs routinely include industry representatives. Schumer said Boeing should be excluded until the MAX 8 investigation is complete. Under the agreement, still subject to regulatory approval, TIL will own 100% of MCTs owning company CSM Italia Gate. Terms of the deal were not disclosed Previously TIL held a 50% stake in the Gioia Tauro terminal, located in mainland Italys southernmost Calabria region, but it failed to see eye-to-eye with co-owner Contship on future strategy. Industrial action over working conditions and an absence of investment in new infrastructure had brought the terminal to a standstill in recent months, forcing the Italian Transport Minister to step in early last month and set the two owners a 30-day deadline to agree a solution in order to get the port working again. Contship Italia Group, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, is expected in future to focus on intermodal solutions based around its core Italian maritime terminal at La Spezia, inland terminal at Milan and smaller operations at the ports of Salerno and Ravenna. Rail connectivity with northern Europe has been key to its strategic development in recent years, and it is part of Hamburg-based Eurokai Group, described as the largest independent container terminal operator in Europe. For MSC, TILs full control of Gioia Tauro effectively gives it control of its own transhipment centre in the central Med region, complementing the terminals of its 2M alliance partner Maersk Line at the Eastern (Suez) and Western (Algeciras) ends of the sea. At the same time CMA CGM, through its subsidiary Terminal Link, controls Mediterranean transhipment hubs at Marsaxlokk, Malta and Tangier, while the remaining one of the four largest liner groups, Cosco, is fast developing its Med transhipment business out of Piraeus, Greece. Press Release April 2, 2019 De Lima hits gov't's advice for fishermen to avoid Panatag shoal Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has slammed the Duterte administration for dissuading Filipino fishermen from returning to the disputed Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal as she condemned the constant harassment against them by Chinese authorities. De Lima, who chairs the Senate Committee on Social Justice, Welfare and Rural Development, said the government should defend local fishermen by promoting sustainable fishing in the area than barring them from the fishing ground off Zambales. "Local fishermen should be allowed to peacefully fish in Panatag Shoal because we already won our claims at the International Arbitral Tribunal of the UNCLOS which gives the Philippines exclusive sovereign rights over parts of the South China Sea, including Panatag Shoal, which is part of our Exclusive Economic Zone," she said. "Instead of putting the welfare of our Filipino fishermen at the forefront and asserting the Philippines' rightful claim over SCS, this government chose to betray the country and its victory again by maintaining its policy of kowtowing to China. Mali na apihin ang kapwa natin Pilipino, pero higit na mas mali na kinukunsinti ng gobyernong ito ang pang-aapi sa kanila" she added. The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) recently advised Filipino fishermen to avoid fishing in the Panatag shoal temporarily following reported incidents of harassment against them by the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG). The advice came days after the camp of senatorial bet Neri Colmenares released a six-minute video narrating how the CCG would habitually harass local fishermen by picking their catch and shooing them away from the shoal. Prior to the release of said video, a mobile phone video of the CCG boarding a Filipino vessel to take some of their catch already made headlines in June 2018 but the government refused to act upon the issue. Amid the alarming reports, the government continues to downplay the harassment incident, with Presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo saying that "they have to show proof that is being done now again because if it's being done, certainly we will protest." "Hindi pa ba sapat na pruweba ang video para mapatunayan ang panggigipit ng Chinese Coast Guard sa mga Pilipinong mangingisda? Anong pruweba pa ba ang kailangan nila para labanan ang inhustisya?" she asked. The lady Senator from Bicol also pressed anew for a congressional investigation into the reported harassment of Filipino fisherfolk, which she asked for in a Senate Resolution No. 766 she filed last year. "The government should take a stand in protecting our fisherfolk from any untoward action. Let us champion their economic situation by promoting sustainable fishing in Panatag shoal and enforcing mechanisms that boost their livelihood," she said. De Lima said the Duterte administration should stop disowning or undermining its own victory in an international case of historical significance which gives the Philippines rights over fishery and energy resource in the SCS. It was a somber start to Sun n Fun for Epic Aircraft officials with confirmation that Natalia Fileva, the wife of the Bend, Oregon, companys owner, Vladislav Fileva, was killed in the crash of an Epic LT in Germany on Sunday. Fileva was co-owner of S7 Airlines with her husband. S7 owns Engineering LLC, the parent company of Epic. Filevs father was also killed, as was the pilot. There is so far no word on a possible cause for the crash, which occurred just after noon on a clear and warm day. It was an isolated incident, said Mike Schrader, VP of sales and marketing for Epic. Theyre just trying to wrap their arms around it. German officials said there were no distress calls or any indication anything was unusual before the plane disappeared from radar while heading to Frankfurt. The crash occurred about 10 miles south of Frankfurt. Fileva was flying to Frankfurt from France for medical treatment. European and Russian authorities are investigating. The LT is a kit-built aircraft in the U.S. but its not clear under what circumstances it was flying in Europe. It was registered in Russia. The Russian company bought Epic in 2012 with a goal of certifying the Epic LT. Press Release April 2, 2019 Gordon, LTO hold initial discussion on Motorcycle Law's IRR To ensure that the implementing rules and regulation will reflect the spirit of the law, Senator Richard J. Gordon met with an official of the Land Transportation Office to discuss the IRR of Republic Act 11235 or the Motorcycle Crime Prevention Act. Gordon and LTO Assistant Secretary Edgar Galvante met last week after the former wrote to the LTO to offer his experience in the successful implementation in 1985 of a public transport color-coded number system in Olongapo which could help ensure that the law would achieve its purpose. "As the principal author and sponsor of RA 11235, otherwise known as the Motorcycle Crime Prevention Act, let me lend my experience, particularly on the color-coded number system, in drafting the IRR to make sure that it reflects the spirit of the law. Olongapo City has been implementing a public transport color-coded number system since 1985 when I was Mayor of the City, I would like to lend you the experience of Olongapo," he said in a letter dated March 22. Gordon pointed out that when the color-coded number system was implemented in Olongapo City, crimes on board jeepneys and motorcycles dramatically decreased and having a central file helped passengers locate the drivers of the tricycles and jeepneys involved in a crime or accident and this is also what he envisioned in crafting the newly-enacted law. "Nung inimplement ang color-coding scheme sa Olongapo, it dramatically improved the general order of the city. Ngayon, dito sa batas na ito, naniniwala ako na mababawasan ng husto, kung hindi man matigil, ang mga krimeng ginagawa ng mga masasamang loob na gumagamit ng motorsiklo to get away with the crimes they committed," he said. The chairman of the Committee on Justice and Human Rights noted that for the last so many decades, motorcycles have become "crime machines," used for killing ordinary people, media personnel, lawyers, justices, judges, politicians and even policemen, with the Philippine National Police recording an average of four people killed by riding-in-tandem shooters each day. "It is high time that we stop this and prevent criminals from killing with impunity using these motorcycles," he stressed, adding that out of over 4,000 motorcycle riding crimes or incidents in 2016, only eight cases (0.18%) were solved. Aurora Energy has increased its 10-year spending plans by more than $42 million following an independent review of the state of its networks. The company, which distributes electricity in Dunedin, Queenstown and Central Otago, expects to spend close to $791 million on those assets through to 2029, up from the $748.8 million it signalled in October. The firms 2017 asset management plan had projected a 10-year spend of $719 million. Aurora, owned by Dunedin City Council, restructured its business in 2017, established a new board and brought in new management after a review by Deloitte found the firm had been underspending on maintenance for decades. It is facing prosecution by the Commerce Commission for breaching its reliability standards in 2016 and 2017. The company updated its plans to incorporate advice from consulting engineers WSP late last year. Aurora says the predominant change from the asset management plan it published in October is an increase in spending to replace cross-arms on power poles. It will focus on cross-arms made from Malaysian hardwoods, which have proven less durable than those made from Australian timber. Aurora says it will also increase spending on secondary systems including protection relays many of which WSP believed had become obsolete, had exceeded their expected life, or were performing poorly. Aurora says the replacement of at-risk electromechanical relays at critical sites will be prioritised during the next three years. All will be replaced by 2025 and more spares will be carried to manage the risk of obsolescence. Aurora is the countrys seventh-largest network, distributing electricity to more than 90,200 homes and business. It was previously managed as one business with council-owned contractor Delta Utility Services. It was forced to bring in outside contractors in 2016 to try and accelerate its maintenance efforts amid growing public complaints about the number of collapsing power poles in the region. At the same time it was trying to keep pace with rapid development in Queenstown and Wanaka. Hastings-based Unison Contracting has now established a permanent base in Dunedin as part of a five-year field services agreement it has to provide maintenance, renewal and development work for Aurora in the city. Last month, Aurora signed a similar agreement with Christchurch-based Connetics for work in Queenstown and Central Otago. Aurora chief executive Richard Fletcher says the new agreements, effective this month, will ensure the company can efficiently carry out its major investment programme, while also introducing contestability to its field services. In its report in October, WSP found that overhead lines, poles and cross-arms accounted for 58 percent of all the unplanned outages Aurora suffered due to deteriorated assets. Most of the firm's assets posed little risk to public safety or the environment, and recent inspections and remediation efforts appeared to have steadied or slightly reduced the level of pole failure, WSP said. That said, about 1,264 poles in Dunedin 4 percent of that network still had a red risk rating, as did 104 poles in Central Otago 0.4 percent of that network. 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Related News: 14th December 2021 Morning Report The New Zealand Refining Company Limited (NZX: NZR) Share Purchase Plan Issue Price Air New Zealand Limited (NZX: AIR) Announces Revised Crown Support Package New Zealand Oil & Gas Limited (NZX: NZO) Mahato PSC Update 13th December 2021 Morning Report Tower Limited (NZX: TWR) Capital Return - Interim Court Orders Received 10th December 2021 Morning Report Ebos Group Limited (NZX: EBO) EBOS Announces Successful Placement Pacific Edge Limited (NZX: PEB) PEB Announces Agreement with Northern Health in Australia AFT Pharmaceuticals Limited (NZX: AFT) AFT welcomes Australian Federal Court appeal success Its been a long time coming, but New Zealand SMEs looking for business loans are at last starting to see options that dont involve filling out a 20-page bank form, waiting weeks and putting their home on the line. The buzzword is 'fintech' - technology companies using digital information to make peoples financial life easier. Its not just loans - fintechs are involved in anything from money transfers to investment transactions to budgeting. But increasingly in countries like Australia and the UK they have been providing unsecured loans to small and medium-sized enterprises wanting funds for expansion or to tide them over cashflow gaps. Now overseas fintechs are digging in in New Zealand - and some home-grown ones are on the cards. This month Prospa, one of Australias biggest fintechs lending to SMEs, formally launched in New Zealand. The company is offering loans of $5,000 to $150,000 and makes its decision using a borrowers digital data to gauge whether its cashflow is enough to keep on top of repayments. It aims to make a decision within 24 hours and doesnt need a house or other assets as security. Co-founder Greg Moshal says Prospa has lent A$1 billion to Australian SMEs since the company was founded seven years ago, and uses companies existing digital information. We connect with various datasets. For example, we might bring in financial information from Xero, a companys bank statements, or their main transactional account. Small business has been under-served in access to capital and we think the problem is huge in the New Zealand market. Prospa is not the only fintech looking at New Zealand SME lending - and its far from winning the strange name award. Another Aussie fintech, Waddle, is offering pre-approved funds based on a companys invoice data from its accounting software. And Germany-based Spotcap offers loans up to $250,000 with a 24-hour decision. MYOB, Xero's main competitor in the online accounting software space, has teamed up with Aussie loan specialist OnDeck to provide SME lending, including in New Zealand. In Australia, there are companies like Moula, Capify, GetCapital, and OnDeck. The UK has Zopa, Funding Circle and the modestly-named Rebuilding Society. And while not a trendy fintech with a wacky name, New Zealand's Heartland Bank offers unsecured lending up to $75,000 through its digital Open for Business (O4B) platform. The company's 2019 first-half report showed lending through O4B grew 56.2 percent in the six months to the end of December to $115.4 million. SME expert Andy Hamilton welcomes the advent of digital, non-bank lenders in the market, particularly given proposals from the Reserve Bank to significantly increase the amount of capital banks have to hold. Hamilton, who heads Auckland-based business growth centre The Icehouse, says SMEs are worried about access to finance. The market for small business lending appears to be contracting with the Reserve Bank changes. It has to be a good thing to have more players in the market, more options, more transparency and visibility. Most SMEs are price takers; this gives them another option. Hamilton says fintechs are vibrating in New Zealand, but not necessarily achieving scale. And it wont be easy to get SMEs to recognise theres an option to bank lending. The challenge new players here is how they build their business. In other markets that's already happening. A survey of 2,000 directors at UK SMEs, carried out by peer-to-peer lender Growth Street, found almost half (49 percent) were interested in non-bank models. Prospas other co-founder, Beau Bertolli, expects New Zealand SMEs to be borrowing $4 billion-$5 billion within 3-4 years and hopes his company will have a chunk of that. Prospa has appointed a New Zealand general manager, Adrienne Church, and is working with financial service advisors NZ Financial Services Group to get the message out. Church has past form in the non-bank sector when she headed up the local arm of home loans company Resimac. Bertolli says he and Moshal founded Prospa because they had six small businesses between them and found it tough to get money from the bank. It is atrocious. It takes a long time; you might have a 10-20 page application form, and you have to get information from your accountant. Then you might wait 2-8 weeks before your application is assessed, and often the answer is no. If they say yes, they need security from the family home. You shouldnt have to tie up a $700,000 home for a $30,000 loan. Meanwhile, home-grown fintechs are also set to enter the New Zealand SME finance market, according to Kiwibanks Anand Ranchord. Kiwibank sponsors the annual Kiwi Fintech Accelerator, which began in 2017 and works with financial technology startup companies. Ranchord, Kiwibank lead for the programme, says within the next six months Kiwi fintechs will start to emerge. Momentum could start building within 12-18 months. Below the waterline, there is a good hotbed of innovation around fintech, including SME lending. The opportunity is to bring local players to the surface and allow them to grow the market and even head offshore. While some fintechs might take the route of funding the loans themselves, Ranchord says Kiwibank sees the opportunity to team up with startup fintechs. As a bank we are actively looking for partnerships and we are in discussions with a number of parties. Using connections to real-time data is a digital transformation for banking. Its going to make it easier to make credit decisions in close to real time and it will be cheaper and easier for SMEs. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. 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Related News: 14th December 2021 Morning Report The New Zealand Refining Company Limited (NZX: NZR) Share Purchase Plan Issue Price Air New Zealand Limited (NZX: AIR) Announces Revised Crown Support Package New Zealand Oil & Gas Limited (NZX: NZO) Mahato PSC Update 13th December 2021 Morning Report Tower Limited (NZX: TWR) Capital Return - Interim Court Orders Received 10th December 2021 Morning Report Ebos Group Limited (NZX: EBO) EBOS Announces Successful Placement Pacific Edge Limited (NZX: PEB) PEB Announces Agreement with Northern Health in Australia AFT Pharmaceuticals Limited (NZX: AFT) AFT welcomes Australian Federal Court appeal success Spark New Zealand's managing director Simon Moutter will leave the country's biggest telecommunications company in July, handing over the reins to customer director Jolie Hodson. Chair Justine Smyth announced Hodson's upcoming appointment, effective from July 1, saying the board's succession planning gave internal candidates the chance to shine over an extended period of time. "As board directors, we have had the opportunity to work closely with Jolie over recent years on a range of important company matters and we have been consistently impressed with her business acumen, her strategic vision and her quality decision making," Smyth said. "We are delighted to have confirmed a top-quality internal candidate, which speaks to Sparks desire where appropriate to develop and promote talent from within." Moutter re-joined the company in 2012, leading what was then Telecom into unknown territory after the demerger of its former network business, Chorus. Under his watch, the telco transformed from being a traditional carrier reliant on landline phone connections into a digital and mobile-focused firm. It rebranded as Spark and boosted its exposure to cloud-based services and set up a ventures unit where it's dabbled with emerging technologies, such as streaming video, data analytics and cyber security. Having bedded that initial change in, Moutter then changed tack, introducing a new strategy to transform the company into the lowest-cost operator by simplifying its services, introducing greater automation and digitisation, using its suite of brands more effectively, and shifting more customers on to higher-margin services. A key component of that was the introduction of flatter management structures with greater autonomy - a business model known as 'Agile' - to boost productivity and make it better able to respond to customer demands. Moutter, 58, said he hasn't decided what he will do next professionally. Prior to his return to Spark, he'd been chief executive of Auckland International Airport between 2008 and 2012, and he also led lines company Powerco through the mid-1990s. "Ive given my absolute best to putting Spark onto a positive track over the last seven years, so the company can fully deliver on its purpose to help all of New Zealand win big in a digital world," he said. "I feel its the right time to pass the leadership baton on and I am delighted the board has chosen an outstanding leader in Jolie to succeed me." Through his tenure, Spark's share price has climbed to $3.775 from $2.42 when he took over. The telco is also paying out annual dividends of 25 cents per share, compared to the 16 cents paid in his first year. Hodson joined Spark in 2013 as chief financial officer, coming from liquor group Lion, and has led a number of major programmes related to the company's transformation under Moutter. She was a key driver of the growth strategies in cloud and IT services. In 2016 she swapped the CFO role to take on responsibility for Sparks consumer and retail operations, large corporate and government customers, and cloud services businesses. Hodson will take up the mantle as Spark positions itself for the next iteration of mobile technology, known as 5G. The technology combines very short response times with ultrafast speeds, which is seen as a key component for the 'Internet of Things', where devices interact with each other independent of a human. Spark has been lobbying vigorously for the government to accelerate its auction of radio spectrum for 5G networks, saying it wants to have a network up and running by July next year at the latest. The carrier wants to shift more broadband customers off fixed connections and on to its hybrid wireless service, which reduces the fee it has to pay fibre network operators such as Chorus, even though fibre has greater potential speed and bandwidth. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: 14th December 2021 Morning Report The New Zealand Refining Company Limited (NZX: NZR) Share Purchase Plan Issue Price Air New Zealand Limited (NZX: AIR) Announces Revised Crown Support Package New Zealand Oil & Gas Limited (NZX: NZO) Mahato PSC Update 13th December 2021 Morning Report Tower Limited (NZX: TWR) Capital Return - Interim Court Orders Received 10th December 2021 Morning Report Ebos Group Limited (NZX: EBO) EBOS Announces Successful Placement Pacific Edge Limited (NZX: PEB) PEB Announces Agreement with Northern Health in Australia AFT Pharmaceuticals Limited (NZX: AFT) AFT welcomes Australian Federal Court appeal success The New Zealand dollar opened weaker, as dour business confidence added to the prospects of a domestic rate cut and as whole milk powder prices dipped overnight. The kiwi was trading at 67.43 US cents at 8am versus 67.76 US cents at 5pm in Wellington. The trade-weighted index was at 73.31 from 73.62. Yesterday's quarterly survey of business opinion from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research - seen as a key input in the Reserve Bank's projections - has local economists convinced that the cash rate is heading lower. Several economists now expect the central bank to cut the rate in May. Dairy product prices increased 0.8 percent at the Global Dairy Trade auction overnight, rising for the ninth straight time. Whole milk powder, however, fell 1.3 percent to US$3,287 a tonne. The decline reflects weaker demand across our markets, particularly North Asia, and follows eight consecutive increases in average prices since December 2018, NZX dairy analyst Robert Gibson said. "Kiwi suffers post-QSBO blues. A weak GDT auction coupled with broad USD strength added more downside pressure overnight," said ANZ FX/rates strategist Sandeep Parekh. The kiwi also fell against the British pound and was trading at 51.43 pence from 51.84 yesterday despite ongoing uncertainty around Brexit ahead of the April 12 deadline to reach an agreement with the European Union. The pound may have been shored up after stronger-than-expected UK manufacturing data overnight. The kiwi was also slightly weaker against the Australian dollar, despite the fact that the Reserve Bank of Australia "kept the door to cutting more than a little ajar," said Mike Shirley, senior dealer at Kiwibank. A lift in iron ore prices may have helped the Aussie overnight, he noted. The kiwi was trading at 95.47 Australian cents from 95.57 Australian cents. It was at 60.23 euro cents from 60.48, at 75.10 Japanese yen from 75.47 and at 4.5328 Chinese yuan from 4.5529. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. 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Related News: 14th December 2021 Morning Report The New Zealand Refining Company Limited (NZX: NZR) Share Purchase Plan Issue Price Air New Zealand Limited (NZX: AIR) Announces Revised Crown Support Package New Zealand Oil & Gas Limited (NZX: NZO) Mahato PSC Update 13th December 2021 Morning Report Tower Limited (NZX: TWR) Capital Return - Interim Court Orders Received 10th December 2021 Morning Report Ebos Group Limited (NZX: EBO) EBOS Announces Successful Placement Pacific Edge Limited (NZX: PEB) PEB Announces Agreement with Northern Health in Australia AFT Pharmaceuticals Limited (NZX: AFT) AFT welcomes Australian Federal Court appeal success Barfoot & Thompson says the Auckland market regained some momentum in March when its sales numbers almost doubled from February. March is the month when sales activity returns to normal after the summer break and this years March trading followed that normal pattern, says the real estate agencys managing director, Peter Thompson. Sales for the month at 963 were a healthy increase over the 474 for February, but were still not over the 1,000 mark, which is where we have come to expected sales for this month, based on the past few years, Thompson says. The agency's latest sales are down 9.5 percent from the 1,064 homes sold in March last year. But January and February sales had been the lowest sales months in the past decade. Barfoot & Thompson is Aucklands largest real estate agency and accounts for about one in three sales. The average sales price at $931,673 for March and the median price at $836,000 also showed a marked increase on those in February. However, if you put aside monthly variations and anomalies, sales prices are very much in line with where they have been at for the past 12 months, Thompson says. Prices are moving in a fairly tight band and showing no inclination to decline or increase. The latest Real Estate Institute data showed the Auckland house price index fell 2 percent in the year ended February its March data should be released within the next two weeks. It is a market requiring vendors to have realistic expectations if they want to avoid having their property on the market for longer than average, or eventually accepting an offer lower than an earlier one they declined, Thompson says. The agency listed 1,571 new properties in March. This was the highest level for the last four months, but 7 percent lower than the 1,689 listings in March last year. Nevertheless, Thompson says his firm now has 4,865 properties on its books and this represents a level of choice not seen since 2011. Traditionally, as we head into winter, choice tends to become tighter before growing again in spring. Given it operates in the high-priced Auckland market, theres little surprise that sales of properties worth more than $1 million accounted for a third of all Barfoot's sales. Four percent of sales were above $2 million. Only 8 percent of sales were of properties worth less than $500,000. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: Now is the time to reassess your investments Now is the time to reassess your investments Fonterra looking to lift China's importance in new strategy A2, Synlait shares climb as takeover bid revives optimism about Chinese appetite for milk Service sector activity eases in August but still expanding Lumpy imports drive bigger July trade deficit than expected Nimbys, carparks and the status quo under threat as govt tells big cities: grow up and out Dairy manufacturers got better prices in June quarter Orr defends RBNZ rate cut, says monetary policy looks ahead, not behind RBNZ's Orr says investors need to put their money to work Contact Energy is being taken to court by the Commerce Commission for the way it advertised new price plans with its AA Smartfuel discounts in 2017. The new plans, launched in April that year, replaced the firms involvement in the Fly Buys loyalty scheme. They offered discounts ranging from 10 to 50 cents per litre every month. Customers joining the one-year Fuel Rewards plan, which offered a 30-cent discount, could save up to $180 a year, the company said at the time. The Commerce Commission has brought seven charges under the Fair Trading Act. It alleges Contact failed to adequately disclose key information in the advertising, including that the discount was only accessible once per month, that rewards could only be redeemed on one fill and were limited to a maximum of 50 litres of fuel. The case will be called in the Wellington District Court on April 29 and the commission said it wouldnt comment more. Contact is the countrys second-largest power retailer and has lost almost 39,000 customers in the past five years. Like most of the major firms, it has had to work harder in recent years to offer greater value to consumers through better rewards and new services like broadband rather than competing on price alone against lower-cost, new-entrant players. In the three months following the Smartfuel launch in 2017, it added about 1,400 customers. That was about 25 percent less than in the same period a year earlier, according to Electricity Authority data. In the past year, the Commerce Commission has closed about 30 investigations under the Fair Trading Act, resulting in the issuing of 10 warning letters and 13 court prosecutions. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: 14th December 2021 Morning Report The New Zealand Refining Company Limited (NZX: NZR) Share Purchase Plan Issue Price Air New Zealand Limited (NZX: AIR) Announces Revised Crown Support Package New Zealand Oil & Gas Limited (NZX: NZO) Mahato PSC Update 13th December 2021 Morning Report Tower Limited (NZX: TWR) Capital Return - Interim Court Orders Received 10th December 2021 Morning Report Ebos Group Limited (NZX: EBO) EBOS Announces Successful Placement Pacific Edge Limited (NZX: PEB) PEB Announces Agreement with Northern Health in Australia AFT Pharmaceuticals Limited (NZX: AFT) AFT welcomes Australian Federal Court appeal success . : 16:00 ! , 13:00 . - , , . ,... Besides serving as Country Director, the 51 year old Anandan had been responsible for bringing cool services from Google into India. The departure for Google's vice president for India and South East Asia would pull the curtains off an eight year long stint. In a note, Scott Beaumont, President for Google Asia Pacific has been quoted saying, "We are grateful to Rajan for his huge contribution to Google over the past eight years. His entrepreneurial zeal and leadership has helped grow the overall internet ecosystem in India and Southeast Asia, and we wish him all the best in his new adventures." Anandan's career with Google began in 2010. Besides Google, he has also worked with Microsoft, Dell India and McKinsey & Company. Anandan, is also a prolific angel investor in the country and is a member of the Indian Angel network. Some of his investments include WebEngage, Instamojo, Capillary Technologies, TravelKhana, and EasyGov. In July 2016, Anandan had backed BOV Capital, touted to be Sri Lanka's first early-stage venture capital fund. It had launched a maiden Rs 100-crore early-stage fund to invest in technology-focused startups from Sri Lanka. Anandan, is expected to stay until the end of the month. With his exit, Google has pulled Vikas Agnihotri, the current Director for Sales to serve the interim responsibility. Bengaluru: State-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) on Monday reported revenue of Rs 19,400 crore (provisional) for the just-concluded financial year 2018-19, registering 6 per cent annual growth over Rs 18,284 crore on this account in fiscal 2017-18. In fiscal 2017-18, the annual revenue growth was 3.8 per cent over 2016-17. "The performance in fiscal 2018-19 has encouraged us to focus on design and development of indigenous products and technologies, as well as develop aerospace and defence manufacturing eco-system," said HAL Chairman and Managing Director R. Madhavan in a statement here. The city-based defence behemoth produced 41 aircraft and helicopters and 98 aero engines, besides overhauling 213 aircraft and 540 aero engines during the fiscal under review. The company hopes to secure an 'excellent' rating for the fiscal under review from the government for meeting all the parameters related to its performance. "Our strategy will help the company to be on the growth track in meeting the expectations of all stake shareholders," Madhavan added. The company also rolled out 12 'Dhruv' Advanced Light Helicopters (ALHs) during the year in review as part of the contract to deliver 40 of these for the Indian Air Force and the Indian Army. The company's scrip with face value of Rs 10 was trading at Rs 716.30 during Monday's afternoon trade on the BSE, up Rs 6.30 per share on its previous closing rate of Rs 709.80. While not able to win election by honest and principled persons, how to make their voice heard ? by N.S.Venkataraman The undersigned has been carrying out a campaign urging people in India to exercise their franchise in favour of NOTA ( none of the above not preferring any candidate ), if they are not satisfied with any of the candidate contesting in the election in their constituency. My campaign has not received much publicity so far. However , number of people who have heard about my campaign in my blog and from other sources have disagreed with my view. In the current political situation in India , most people suspect that many of the politicians contesting in the election are corrupt, dishonest and have made politics as their profession to seize power and accumulate wealth that are mostly ill gotten. Many of the politicians are wealthy with no known sources of income. We find strange situation that apart from politicians , those who run lucrative educational institutions, money multiplying hospitals and business houses and even facing criminal charges also contest in elections by joining one political party or the other or even as independent candidate to make more money and control the national economy in their favour.It is also suspected that huge money is paid to the political parties to get nomination to contest in the party symbol or get nominated. Further, most political parties except BJP and Marxists communist have virtually become family controlled property and family business. Even BJP and Marxist communists align themselves with family controlled and corrupt parties and politicians to form alliance before the election to corner the seats. It has now become too frequent for the leader of the family controlled political party to nominate son, daughter, nephew or niece or wife to contest in the election in the party symbol. We often say that honest people should enter politics and that is the only way to cleanse politics in India. In todays situation , without huge money and muscle power , which honest people do not possess ,it is not possible to win elections. Several honest and commited people have entered the electoral fray in the past and have failed miserably and could not get sizeable votes and have lost their deposits. I myself contested in the South Chennai parliamentary constituency in 2009 parliament election and my vote share was extremely low. I decided to spend three lakhs of rupees towards my electoral campaign and that was all I spent which was largely from my pocket. Now. the voice of the honest people are not heard at all in the election campaign and they vote silently to any one of the candidates even without full conviction and some of them refrain from voting due to the frustration with the standards of the candidates. While not able to win election by honest and principled persons, how to make their voice heard ? Nobody knows how many people today resent the type of political climate prevailing in India. Election Commission has given an opportunity to citizens to vote under NOTA (none of the above) to express their dissent and why not utilize this opportunity? Let the voice of the honest people be heard who disapprove the corrupt and dishonest politicians contesting in the election to seize power for their personal and family benefits and the benefits of their henchmen (party supporters). Those who criticise my view supporting NOTA argue that voting under NOTA will not serve any useful purpose and corrupt politicians will still get elected. This is true in practical terms. But, let the country men and corrupt politicians know that there is silent anti corruption revolution taking place in India and let them know the voice of the dissenters. Not voting under NOTA giving the excuse that people have no alternative is a defeatist view. When sizable number of votes are lost to the contesting candidates by exercising NOTA by the voters, it certainly will have a telling and positive impact on the long term prospect of democracy in India and will certainly create fear in the minds of corrupt politicians, who now take people for granted. Those who vote for corrupt politicians knowing they are corrupt and saying that they have no alternative, have no right to complain later about the corrupt political system in the country. 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This week, USA TODAY and its 10Best Readers Choice travel awards honored the new Cork N Bottle outlet at CVG as the No. 3 choice nationally in its Best Airport Shop for Local Merchandise category. The local merchandise in question, in this particular case, is bourbon, which is available for traveler tastings at the new location. One month ago, CVG also saw the addition of the new Christian Moerlein Malt House Taproom, a full-service restaurant and bar highlighting one of Cincinnatis most revered handcrafted beer traditions. The additions have given CVG more local flavor, with bourbon booming in popularity as perhaps Kentuckys signature export an identity that Northern Kentucky is increasingly tapping into. Christian Moerlein is the name most closely tied to Cincinnatis rich history as a German beer town. Cork N Bottle is, in particular, an interesting story, and a name that may surprise a number of Greater Cincinnatians who remember it historically but did not know it was still in business. The business originally opened in 1964 with a store in west Covington, at the bottom of the first exit ramp off of I-75 after crossing the Brent Spence Bridge going south. For years, it catered to customers many from Ohio who were lured by cheaper prices on liquor in Kentucky. Cork N Bottle bolstered that reputation with a heavy advertising presence to go along with the high visibility of their location just off the highway. Facing financial problems, the original ownership sold in 2014. The Covington store closed, although a second location on Buttermilk Pike in Crescent Springs remained open. Prominent Cincinnati developer and investor Tom Neyer, Jr., also a serious wine enthusiast, became the new owner. Weve done a pretty good job of breathing new life into (the Cork N Bottle brand), says Laine Discepoli, the companys marketing director. Weve got a really strong foothold in the bourbon market, and then when we had this opportunity at CVG, we decided to see what would happen if we stuck our toe in the water there. The Cork N Bottle space at CVG is modest at just 200 square feet in Concourse A (which is also where the new Christian Moerlein operation is located), but it is obviously drawing some attention. The opportunity for Kentucky bourbon tastings was specifically cited in the USA TODAY description of why Cork N Bottle rated as highly as it did. Tastings have also been a mainstay of the Crescent Springs site, with both wine and bourbon. If the old image of Cork N Bottle was of a high-volume, low-cost retailer, the new vision that has emerged is of an enterprise where quality is valued and enthusiasts can come and explore all the options that are available now, as well as those from the past that are treasured. Now that CVG keeps increasing the number of passengers each year, they were excited to have a retailer for something that is kind of a shoo-in at airports: alcohol, Discepoli says. So for anyone who is traveling, its almost thematic youre landing in Kentucky because youre coming into Cincinnati for maybe a business meeting, and what is Kentucky known for? Bourbon. And its right there, so it really resonates. That point is echoed by the airports leadership. Were thrilled that both local and out-of-town travelers can experience a taste of our region when starting or ending their travels at CVG, says Candace McGraw, chief executive officer, CVG. The CVG location has only been open for three months, but has drawn attention with a tasting station that offers opportunities for tasting both new and antique bourbon, in addition to offering multi-sized bottles of bourbon and other spirits for sale. While not directly affiliated with the Crescent Springs store, the Neyer family has also extended its alcohol and spirits expertise into downtown Cincinnati in the form of Corkopolis, the wine market and bar on Main Street that opened in 2016. Cannabis foemina: The "female hemp" stalks grow about five foot high and the leaves are a deep green above and a light green underneath. David Hooker/Cannabis Museum Cannabis was legally prescribed for medical issues until the government banned it in 1937. David Hooker/Cannabis Museum The country is quickly coming around to the notion that marijuana makes us feel better, as 33 states, including Ohio, have legalized the weed for medicinal use. But its really a comeback of sorts for the use of pot as medicine, as cannabis, the active ingredient in weed, was legally prescribed for medicinal purposes until the federal government banned it in 1937. A new exhibit at the Lloyd Library in downtown Cincinnati explores how cannabis was used as medicine before it became a forbidden substance. The exhibit, called Through the Rx Bottle, explores the history of medicinal cannabis through artifacts, especially prescription bottles that housed the medicines. Early medicinal herbals, medical and trade publications, and botanical illustrations from the Lloyd Librarys collection accompany the artifacts. The exhibit was put together in collaboration with the Cannabis Museum in Athens, Ohio, which is planning to open to the public next year. Before its prohibition, cannabis was sold by major drug companies, including Eli Lilly, Parke-Davis and Lloyd Brothers Pharmacists, the precursor of the Lloyd Library. Physicians found it useful for a variety of symptoms, as they offered treatments that match many of the claims made by proponents and patients of medicinal cannabis today, exhibit organizers said. A photo exhibition on the history of cannabis as medicine, produced by the Cannabis Museum, accompanies Through the Rx Bottle, as do a series of lectures and a symposium. Heres the lineup: Friday, April 12, 78 p.m. The First Golden Age of Cannabis Medicine: 1830-1937, led by Don E. Wirtshafter, executive director of the Cannabis Museum. Hell explore the history of cannabis prior uses, including medical, household, and industrial. Wirtshafter draws from more than 1,000 apothecary and trade bottles, historic literature and advertising, and decades of research. Its free and open to the public, but reservations are required and can be made by calling 513-721-3707 or visiting lloydgoldenage.eventbrite.com. Saturday, May 11, 11 a.m.4 p.m. Cannabis Symposium: Issues from the Past to the Present, will feature sessions on Cannabis and Its Ethnobotanical and Medicinal Use through the Centuries; Ohios Testing Labs and Cannabis Degree Program; Women, Cannabis and Medicine Prior to Prohibition; and exhibition tours with the curators. Reservations are required and the cost is $15 for non-members, $5 for Lloyd Friends. Thursday, July 18, 78 p.m. Medical Marijuana: A Social Justice Perspective, with Rev. Damon Lynch, III. Lynch, pastor of New Prospect Baptist Church, has been a champion for the community, involved with projects including: The Collaborative Agreement Refresh, AMOS Project, and the Opiate Coalition of Hamilton County. His lecture will explore the value of including all members of the community in the implementation of Ohios medical marijuana programs. Its free and open to the public, but reservations are required. Thursday, August 1, 78 p.m. Medicinal Cannabis and Alzheimers Treatment, with Teaera Roland, a nurse with a diverse clinical and administrative background in health care and an expert on cannabis and the elderly. Her lecture will focus on Alzheimers disease and other neurodegenerative diseases common with aging. Its free and open to the public, and the Ohio Board of Nursing and the Ohio Counselor, Social Worker, Marriage and Family Therapist Board have both approved one hour of continuing education credit. Reservations are required. The Lloyd Library and Museum is an independent research library and exhibit space established by three brothers who manufactured botanical drugs in Cincinnati beginning in the late 19th century. It focuses on medicinal plants, botany, and pharmacy. Its free and open to the public and located at 917 Plum St. Hours are Monday through Friday, and the third Saturday of the month from 9 a.m.4 p.m. For more information, visit www.lloydlibrary.org or call 513-721-3707. Facebook seeks tab to promote 'high quality news' Washington, April 1 (AFP) Apr 01, 2019 Facebook is working on a "news tab" that could be used to financially support "high quality and trustworthy" journalism, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Zuckerberg made the comments in a video conversation about the future of technology and society with Mathias Doepfner, chairman of German-based media giant Axel Springer. Zuckerberg said he sees interest in building a product separate from its personalized feed that would serve people who want news from professional media. "We want this to surface high quality and trustworthy information," Zuckerberg said in the video. "There's a lot of people who have a demand (for) more news." Zuckerberg said he believes as many as 10 to 15 percent of Facebook users would be interested in a dedicated news tab. The news tab would be created in a way to compensate news organizations whose content is selected, he noted. "We're not going to have journalists making news," he said. The comments marked a new direction for Facebook, which has been accused of enabling the spread of misinformation and hoaxes on its "news feed" that contains posts from friends as well as other content personalized for users. Zuckerberg reiterated that Facebook did not want to be a "publisher," a longstanding position it has taken to avoid being considered a media company, but was willing to be a partner for the sector. "It's important to me that we help people get trustworthy news and find solutions that help journalists around the world do their important work," Zuckerberg said in a post accompanying the video. Zuckerberg said any news tab would require "curation" or selection, without offering details, and that he would hope to build this in consulation with news organizations. He noted that details of this new product were still being studied but that he sees a possibility that it could help news organizations struggling with the transition to digital content. "There is a real opportunity in a separate news service to have better monetization for publishers than we have in news feed," he said. "Facebook could potentially have a direct relationship with publishers to make sure their content is available." Indian satellite destruction created 400 pieces of debris, endangering ISS: NASA Washington, April 1 (AFP) Apr 01, 2019 The head of NASA on Monday branded India's destruction of one of its satellites a "terrible thing" that had created 400 pieces of orbital debris and led to new dangers for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Jim Bridenstine was addressing employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration five days after India shot down a low-orbiting satellite in a missile test to prove it was among the world's advanced space powers. Not all of the pieces were big enough to track, Bridenstine explained. "What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track -- we're talking about 10 centimeters (six inches) or bigger -- about 60 pieces have been tracked." The Indian satellite was destroyed at a relatively low altitude of 180 miles (300 kilometers), well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit. But 24 of the pieces "are going above the apogee of the International Space Station," said Bridenstine. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station," he continued, adding: "That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight." "It's unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is." The US military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk for the ISS and for satellites. They are currently tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters. That includes about 10,000 pieces of space debris, of which nearly 3,000 were created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007 at 530 miles from the surface. As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44 percent over 10 days, Bridenstine said. But the risk will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere. Canada failing in climate change fight: watchdog Ottawa, April 2 (AFP) Apr 02, 2019 Canada is doing too little to combat climate change, a parliamentary report warned Tuesday, a day after government scientists warned the country was warming at twice the global rate. The rebuke came as Canada's independent environment auditor released a new report on government efforts to end fossil fuel subsidies, and as climate change shapes up as a divisive issue in elections seven months from now. "For decades, successive federal governments have failed to reach their targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, and the government is not ready to adapt to a changing climate," wrote environment commissioner Julie Gelfand. "This must change." A report by Environment and Climate Change Canada, details of which were released on Monday, showed that average temperatures in Canada have risen by 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1948, about double the global average of 0.8 degrees Celsius. In northern Canada, approaching the Arctic Circle, temperatures rose on average by 2.3 degrees Celsius over the same period. Canada has pledged to meet a Paris Agreement target of reducing CO2 emissions by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau -- who has declared climate action a top priority -- slapped a carbon tax on four provinces that had not fallen in line with his emissions reduction strategy. But the government's overall efforts have been panned by the environment auditor, and in December the environment ministry acknowledged a best case scenario of a 19 percent emissions cut. In her latest report, Gelfand outlined a badly defined process, a lack of good data and little progress in making decisions to meet Canada's G20 commitment to eliminate inefficient fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. She also slammed the government for looking only at the economic impact of fossil fuel subsidies, without considering potential social and environmental damage. For fossil fuel producers, subsidies can take the form of tax breaks, cheap loans, protection from competitors, or favorable trade restrictions. For consumers, they generally result in below-market prices for oil, gas or electricity. The intergovernmental International Energy Agency (IEA) last year estimated the global value of fossil fuel consumption subsidies in 2016 at about US$260 billion, down from US$310 billion the year before. Electricity and oil each accounted for just over US$100 billion, with natural gas topping US$50 billion. Coal subsidies were only about US$2 billion. Coal, natural gas, and oil extraction contribute nine percent of Canada's gross domestic product (GDP). Together with transportation, the sector produces half of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups said the report shows Ottawa "continuing to stall" while seeking to justify "irresponsible handouts to the oil and gas industry." Stick to defence spending pledge, NATO chief tells Germany Brussels, April 1 (AFP) Apr 01, 2019 Germany must honour its own promises on defence spending, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg insisted Monday, as the alliance prepares to mark its 70th anniversary amid unprecedented tensions with Washington. NATO foreign ministers meet in the US capital this week for a low-key celebration of the alliance's 1949 founding treaty, with US complaints over weak European military spending firmly on the agenda. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused NATO allies -- and economic powerhouse Germany in particular -- of freeloading on America's military muscle and reportedly threatened to "go it alone" if Europe does not step up. All NATO allies agreed to move towards spending two percent of GDP on defence by 2024, but last month Berlin announced that its own figure was set to fall in the coming years, from 1.37 percent in 2020 to just 1.25 percent in 2023. The news infuriated Washington, and Stoltenberg said Berlin must live up to commitments it had signed up to at a summit in 2014. "I expect Germany to make good on the pledge Germany made together with all other NATO allies," Stoltenberg told reporters. "I expect them to meet spending commitments, and they have submitted to NATO a national plan where they outline how Germany will increase defence spending in real terms by 80 percent over a decade." - Germany warns not to test 'unity' - German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, speaking in New York ahead of the NATO meeting, said that Berlin had already boosted defence spending by almost 40 percent since 2014 and was one of the alliance's top troop contributors. "We are grateful for our partnership within NATO, which has enabled us Europeans to enjoy security, stability and prosperity over the last 70 years," he told the American Council on Germany. "But public debates about burden-sharing in NATO are generating uncertainty -- at a time when Russia is trying to test our unity again and again," he said. "Europeans know that we need to assume greater responsibility for our security. It lies in our own interest." In 2018, only seven of NATO's 29 member states hit the two percent target. Stoltenberg, whose mandate as secretary general was extended by two years to 2022 last week, insists that away from Trump's fiery rhetoric, the US is fully committed to NATO, stepping up its investment of troops and resources in Europe. And in a sign of NATO's enthusiasm to keep the US on board, Stoltenberg reiterated the alliance's plans to invest more than $260 million (232 million euros) in a facility in Poland to support US forces. The storage and maintenance facility will allow equipment to be "pre-positioned" as part of NATO's efforts to step up its ability to counter the threat posed by Russia. US suspends F-35 program deliveries to Turkey over Russian arms Washington, April 1 (AFP) Apr 01, 2019 The United States said Monday it was halting all deliveries and joint work with Turkey on the F-35 fighter jet program after the NATO ally insisted on a major arms purchase from Russia. After months of warnings, the United States said that Turkey's decision to buy Russia's S-400 missile system was incompatible with remaining part of the emblematic US warplane program. "Until they forgo delivery of the S-400, the United States has suspended deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey's F-35 operational capability," Pentagon chief spokesman Charles E. Summers Jr. said. "Should Turkey procure the S-400, their continued participation in the F-35 program is at risk," he said in a statement. US officials have voiced concern that, with Turkey in both camps, Russia could obtain F-35 data to improve the accuracy of the S-400 against Western aircraft. The Pentagon said that it had started to look at secondary sources to produce parts for F-35s that were being developed in Turkey. "We very much regret the current situation facing our F-35 partnership with Turkey, but the (Defense Department) is taking prudent steps to protect the shared investments made in our critical technology," Summers said. Turkey had planned to buy 100 F-35A fighter jets, with pilots already training in the United States. The plane's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, said that contracts with Turkish companies to build parts for the F-35 had been expected to reach $12 billion. Among the eight Turkish companies involved in the purchase, Ayesas has been building a panoramic cockpit display for the F-35 and Fokker Elmo makes 40 percent of the electrical wiring and interconnection system, according to Lockheed Martin. - Growing tilt to Russia - The purchase of a Russian system is highly unusual for a member of NATO, the Western alliance forged to counter the Soviet Union. The US suspension announcement comes two days before foreign ministers from the 29 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are due in Washington to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance -- and hours after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party suffered a surprise rout in elections in major cities including Istanbul. Erdogan, whose relations with the West have soured sharply as he cracks down on dissent at home, has increasingly looked to Moscow as a partner. Russian tourists have made Turkey their top destination, providing a vital economic boost. Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov traveled to Turkey, where Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu insisted that the S-400 purchase would go ahead. "We have an agreement with Russia and we are bound by it," Cavusoglu told reporters. Hoping to offer an alternative, the United States last year approved the sale of Patriot missiles to Turkey -- a deal to which Ankara said it was open. Four senators last week proposed legally barring the transfer of F-35s to Turkey if it buys the S-400. One of the senators, Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, praised the Pentagon suspension and pledged to "continue working in the Senate to prevent this dangerous possibility from becoming a reality." - Rocky ties with US - Turkey's relations with the United States plunged last year when President Donald Trump imposed tariffs, battering Turkey's lira, over the jailing of an American pastor detained as part of a mass roundup following a coup attempt against Erdogan. The pastor, Andrew Brunson, was freed and Trump appeared to grow fond of Erdogan, speaking to him before his sudden decision to withdrew US troops from Syria. But tensions quickly resurfaced with the United States fearful that Erdogan will strike US-allied Kurdish fighters in Syria and a Turkish court trying a US consulate staffer, Metin Topuz, on charges of spying. Topuz, a Turkish citizen, is accused of ties to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish preacher who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States. Erdogan has repeatedly demanded that the United States extradite Gulen, whom the Turkish leader accuses of fomenting the coup. NATO, the world's biggest defence alliance Paris, April 2 (AFP) Apr 02, 2019 Created 70 years ago as a safeguard against the threat of Soviet aggression, NATO is the world's biggest defence alliance, grouping 29 European and North American countries. Here is some background about the Belgium-based organisation that formed at the start of the Cold War and then took on modern challenges such as terrorism: - 1949: Soviet threat - The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed on April 4, 1949 by 12 countries alarmed by the Soviet Union's drive to spread communism around the world via military aggression. They united "for collective defense", says the founding Washington Treaty signed by Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. The key Article 5 states that "an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all". It would require other members to undertake "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force". Next to join were Greece and Turkey (1952), Germany (1955) and Spain (1982). When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, the Alliance endured in the face of new challenges. - 1994: combat - In its first combat action, NATO in 1994 sent US fighter jets to stop Serbian bombing raids into Bosnia in violation of a no-fly zone. Four Serbian planes were shot down. In 1995, a NATO peacekeeping force deployed to Bosnia and Herzegovina in its first major crisis-response operation. In 1999, a NATO force launched a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia to end its bloody crackdown on its Kosovo province. Serbian troops withdrew and Kosovo came under UN administration, with a 40,000-strong alliance force deployed to ensure security. In 1999, the first ex-communist countries signed up to the alliance: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. - 9/11 attacks - NATO's "one for all and all for one" pledge was invoked for the first time after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. It joined the US "war on terrorism" in 2003, taking the lead of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) deployed to Afghanistan to root out Al Qaeda and other Islamist militants. As the European Union expanded, so did the alliance: Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined in 2004. The admission the same year of the three ex-Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania particularly annoyed Russia. Albania and Croatia followed in 2010 and Montenegro in 2017. - Piracy, trafficking - NATO largely ended its combat mission in Afghanistan in 2014, leaving behind a 16,000-strong residual force for training and counter-terrorism operations. In 2011, it took sole command of air strikes in Libya under a UN mandate to use "all necessary measures" to protect civilians. The seven-month campaign led to the overthrow of strongman Moamer Kadhafi. NATO now contributes to fighting piracy off the Horn of Africa and monitoring human trafficking in the Mediterranean, while also operating a unit to defend against cyberattacks. - Still tense with Russia - Although NATO and Russia established post-Cold War ties in 1997, relations remain tense, plummeting in 2014 over Moscow's role in Ukraine -- including its annexation of Crimea. In 2016, NATO deployed four multinational battalions to Poland and the Baltic states to guard against possible Russian adventurism. It was the biggest reinforcement of its collective defences since the Cold War. In late 2018, NATO carried out its broadest military exercise since the Cold War in Norway, just several hundred kilometres (miles) from the Russian border. IS-backed Boko Haram faction publishes 'execution' video Kano, Nigeria, April 2 (AFP) Apr 02, 2019 Boko Haram's Islamic State-backed faction has claimed to have executed five Nigerian soldiers but security sources told AFP on Tuesday three of those killed were civilian militia members. The Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) video, dated April 1 and said to have been filmed in Borno state, northeast Nigeria, was published online by the IS propaganda arm Amaq. It showed two men in military fatigues and three in red-orange jumpsuits reminiscent of those worn by IS hostages in Syria and Iraq. All five are shot in the head at point-blank range. Nigerian Army spokesman Sagir Musa said only that he had seen the video. But three senior security sources said at least three of the five were not soldiers. "We have identified three of them as CJTF (Civilian Joint Taskforce) who were held by ISWAP in Baga in December," said one of the sources on condition of anonymity. The CJTF assists the military with security. ISWAP attacked military bases in and around Baga, on the shores of Lake Chad, in northern Borno, in December last year. The sources said the militia members were trying to flee with civilians when they were detained. All three had been presumed dead. "The first three from the right are known to us by name... We are still working to establish the identity of the other two," said one source. "What is surprising is that one of them in military uniform was arrested in his civilian clothing and now he was given some military uniform to make him look like a soldier." - Hardliners - The video comes as Nigerian and regional forces have intensified their activities against ISWAP in northern Borno, particularly around the towns of Monguno and Marte. The Nigerian Army and the Multinational Joint Taskforce (MNJFT) comprising troops from Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Niger both claim to have inflicted heavy losses. The video will fuel speculation about the direction of ISWAP, which has claimed or been blamed for a spate of attacks against military bases since July last year. There is also wider concern about an increase in jihadist activity in the wider Sahel region, particularly in Burkina Faso, after IS's Middle East "caliphate" was declared defeated. ISWAP under Abu Mus'ab Al-Barnawi broke away from the group led by Abubakar Shekau in mid-2016 in opposition to his indiscriminate targeting of civilians. Well-informed sources told AFP last month Al-Barnawi had been ousted, some six months after his deputy, Mamman Nur, was killed by more hardline fighters. They had been angry at Nur's more moderate approach and back-channel talks with the government, which is seeking an end to the conflict after nearly 10 years and 27,000 deaths. He was also accused of pocketing a putative ransom payment for the release of more than 100 schoolgirls abducted from a school in Yobe state in February last year. ISWAP previously published a video online showing the execution of an aid worker kidnapped in a raid in the Borno town of Rann last year. Norwegian goes on trial in Russia for espionage Moscow, April 2 (AFP) Apr 02, 2019 A Norwegian accused by Russia of spying on its nuclear submarines went on trial Tuesday in Moscow, Russian news agencies reported. Norwegian Frode Berg, 63, was detained in Moscow in 2017 following a sting operation by Russia's FSB security service. Berg "is accused of spying for Norway. He gathered information on nuclear submarines," state prosecutor Milana Digayeva told RIA Novosti state news agency. The case is classified as "totally secret" and is being heard behind closed doors, Digayeva said. Fifteen witnesses were to be called, the prosecutor added. A former Russian police officer was accused of handing Berg files on the Russian navy and given a 13- year prison term in December. Berg admitted to acting as a courier for the Norwegian intelligence services several times, but said he did not know the purpose of what he was delivering. "He thought the money he was delivering had another purpose," Berg's Norwegian lawyer Brynjulf Risnes said. Risnes, who is in Oslo awaiting permission from Russia to visit his client, told AFP that Berg "is pleading not guilty to the charges of espionage." He said that there was a "very great risk that he will be convicted," given the lack of acquittals in Russian spy cases in recent years. Berg risks a jail term of 10 to 20 years, the lawyer said. He hoped that if convicted, Berg would not have to serve a full sentence in Russia but could be extradited or pardoned by President Vladimir Putin. At the end of the hearing, Berg told Norwegian journalists that "it went well, it went very well," Risnes said. Berg's position "has not changed," his Russian lawyer Pyotr Anashkin told the TASS state news agency. "He does not accept any guilt. He's glad the trial has started and soon it will all end." The Moscow court on Tuesday extended Berg's detention in custody until September. Norway, a NATO member, normally enjoy good relations with neighbouring Russia, with which it shares a short land border, but these have grown more tense since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. NATO head to meet chief critic Trump Washington, April 2 (AFP) Apr 02, 2019 NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg visits the White House on Tuesday to meet the Western military alliance's biggest partner and now critic -- US President Donald Trump. The White House visit comes before two days of talks in Washington among the 29 foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with the specter of Russia again topping the agenda. The occasion is meant to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance, which since the end of World War II has cemented Europe and the United States in a partnership fusing military strength with shared democratic values. But even as NATO's once implacable foe Moscow is again rising up the agenda, the alliance is struggling with an unexpected new source of turmoil: Trump's heated criticism of an organization he claims is taking the United States for a ride. Trump, in an unlikely role for the president of NATO's founding member, has long questioned the usefulness of the alliance and characterized fellow members as freeloaders relying on the US defensive umbrella and giving little in return. He has derisively questioned why NATO would defend tiny Montenegro and has been incensed that Germany, Europe's largest economy, is not on track to meet a NATO target for each country to spend 2.0 percent of GDP on defense. Stoltenberg, speaking to reporters before leaving NATO's home base of Brussels, agreed that Germany should live up to commitments from a NATO summit in 2014. "I expect Germany to make good on the pledge Germany made together with all other NATO allies," said Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway. "I expect them to meet spending commitments, and they have submitted to NATO a national plan where they outline how Germany will increase defense spending in real terms by 80 percent over a decade." NATO foreign ministers will discuss the "importance of fair burden-sharing" during a working lunch on Thursday, a State Department official said. "We anticipate there will be by the end of the 2020 more than $100 billion in additional new spending from our allies on defense, but of course there is also more work to be done and, as the secretary general said in Brussels, there needs to be a new sense of urgency on this," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity. - Further steps on Ukraine - If spending questions are dividing NATO, most alliance members share concerns about Russia which backs separatists in a low-intensity war in Ukraine from which it seized the Crimean peninsula in 2014. "We will be looking at ways to do more in the whole Black Sea region. We will be doing more surveillance, there will be more ships in the Black Sea from NATO countries, and there are sanctions that have already been imposed" over actions against Ukraine, Hutchison said. Stoltenberg said the foreign ministers will likely agree to step up support to Ukraine as well as Georgia, including through training maritime forces and coast guards and further port visits and exercises. He said NATO will also discuss further steps after the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, with the United States and its allies saying that a Russian missile system has negated the key Cold War pact. Stoltenberg will address a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday. But the anniversary will be comparatively low-key, with NATO waiting until December to hold a full leaders-level summit in London. Blast wounds four at Russian military academy Saint Petersburg, April 2 (AFP) Apr 02, 2019 A blast caused by an explosive device wounded four people on Tuesday at a military academy in Russia's northwestern city of Saint Petersburg, investigators said. The Investigative Committee that probes major crimes said in a statement that "four servicemen received various injuries" but their injuries were not life-threatening. The unidentified explosive device went off around 1:30 pm (1030 GMT), in "staff premises of an administrative building at the Mozhaisky academy," the defence ministry said in a statement cited by agencies. It described the device as lacking casing, meaning that it was not a military device such as a mortar shell. The Investigative Committee opened a criminal probe into attempted murder over the incident, saying it was working to establish "the origin of the detonated object". "Everyone is alive," Saint Petersburg's acting governor Alexander Belov told the media. "Three people are injured (and in addition) one is lightly injured," Belov said. One was "successfully" operated on, the defence ministry said. - 'In bag under stairs' - Kommersant daily reported, citing its sources, that the blast went off as military personnel working at the academy attempted to neutralise the device, which cadets discovered hidden in a bag under a staircase. The blast was so powerful that the staircase collapsed. All those injured are military personnel on the staff at the academy, one of them a woman, the daily reported. Their names have not been officially released. The most seriously injured person is a teacher at the academy who was decorated for his work as a sapper in Chechnya, Kommersant reported. On Tuesday afternoon, police sealed off the area around the academy and cadets and staff were leaving the grounds. Local independent news site Fontanka reported that mine clearing specialists were also at the scene. A cadet who gave her name only as Natalya told AFP that "everyone is being evacuated." She added that "it looked like something exploded on the first floor" but said she did not have any more information. There was no visible damage to the building's facade. The academy, one of Russia's largest with more than 2,000 students, is overseen by the defence ministry and trains officers to serve in air and space defence and other branches of the armed forces. It has accepted women since 2008. It is located in the centre of Saint Petersburg, the former imperial capital of Russia whose palaces are a major draw for tourists. In April 2017, a bomb went off on a train in the city's metro, killing 15 people and injuring almost 70 more. The alleged perpetrator also died in the attack. The blast on Tuesday came as 11 defendants went on trial in the city at a military court charged with helping to organise the 2017 suicide bombing that was claimed by a little-known group linked to al-Qaeda. Trump says he strengthened NATO by insisting on higher contributions Washington, April 2 (AFP) Apr 02, 2019 President Donald Trump said Tuesday he has strengthened NATO by insisting on a "rocket" like increase in military spending by allies that he says used to take advantage of US largesse. "Tremendous progress has been made and NATO's much stronger," Trump told reporters at a White House meeting with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg ahead of the alliance's 70th anniversary celebrations in Washington. "It's a rocket ship up," he said of the spending increase, which he said before his presidency had been on a downward "rollercoaster." "People are paying and I'm very happy," he said. Trump has long complained about NATO, accusing Western allies of being freeloaders that do not pull their weight on military spending, taking for granted that they can rely on the US defensive shield. The Trump administration has been especially incensed with Germany, Europe's largest economy, which is not on track to meet a 2014 pledge by NATO members to spend two percent of GDP on defense. Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, has stood behind Trump on the spending goals and credited his blunt approach with pushing members. Between 2016 and the end of next year, the 28 NATO members other than the United States will have boosted military spending "another $100 billion more by 2020 or a little bit into 2020," Trump confirmed Tuesday. "NATO is a strong alliance, but to remain a strong alliance we have to be fair. And therefore allies have to invest more in defense. You're having a strong message on that and your message has been having an impact," Stoltenberg said in reply. - Anniversary speech - The White House visit comes on the eve of a speech by Stoltenberg to a joint session of Congress, an honor demonstrating legislators' strong support for NATO, despite Trump's skepticism. To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance, which was founded in Washington on April 4, 1949, foreign ministers from the 29 members are due for two days of talks. A full leaders-level summit will only take place in December in London. Since the end of World War II, NATO has cemented Europe and the United States in a partnership fusing military strength with shared democratic values, principally in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union. Today, NATO once again sees a more assertive Russia as a threat, though Trump is rather emphasizing the need to improve ties with Moscow. "I hope we have a good relationship with Russia," Trump said. "I think we'll get along." On Thursday, ministers will return to Trump's favorite topic, a State Department official said: the "importance of fair burden-sharing." - Further steps on Ukraine - If spending questions are dividing NATO, most alliance members share concerns about Russia which backs separatists in a low-intensity war in Ukraine from which it seized the Crimean peninsula in 2014. "We will be looking at ways to do more in the whole Black Sea region. We will be doing more surveillance, there will be more ships in the Black Sea from NATO countries, and there are sanctions that have already been imposed" over actions against Ukraine, Hutchison said. Stoltenberg said the foreign ministers would likely agree to step up support to Ukraine as well as Georgia, including through training maritime forces and coast guards and further port visits and exercises. He said NATO will also discuss further steps after the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, with the United States and its allies saying that a Russian missile system has negated the key Cold War pact. Optimization Are you frustrated with a slow pc or a hard disk not performing as it should? Try SLOW-PCfighter to speed up boot time on a slow PC, or try a free scan of FULL-DISKfighter to recover space on a full disk. The latest offering is DRIVERfighter to update your driver updater. Get complete PC optimization and extend the life of your PC with these must-have software tools. A Precarious Alliance Patience Wears Thin with Germany's NATO Spending As NATO prepares to celebrate its 70th anniversary, the most successful military alliance in history finds itself in the throes of an existential crisis. The unfulfillled promises of some member countries -- in particular Germany -- to spend more on defense threaten to tear the block apart. By DER SPIEGEL Staff Interview with NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg The U.S. and President Trump 'Are 100 Percent Behind' Us In an interview, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg discusses recent tensions between the Trump administration and its European partners in the alliance, Germany's military spending and what China's growing military power means for the trans-Atlantic community. Some people deliberately and some unknowingly try to say very often so many years have passed away, the suspects themselves are probably sorry. But this is more wishful thinking on their part than actual reality. by Anwar A. Khan The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)-1 bench led by Justice Shahinur Islam announced the latest verdict of death punishment in the case over 1971 war crimes in Netrokonas Purbadhala on 28 March last. The five fugitives accused in the case are Sheikh Md Abdul Majid aka Majid Maulana, 66, Md Abdul Khalek Talukdar, 67, Md Kabir Khan, 70, Abdus Salam Beg, 68 and Nuruddin, 70. They are accused of participating in seven incidents that involved of murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, looting and other atrocities during Bangladeshs Liberation War in 1971. The ICT of Bangladesh was set up on 25 March 2010. Nine years have already gone away after its birth, but it has carried forward its obligations successfully regardless of, in defiance of many hindrances. Hail, International Crimes Tribunals of Bangladesh, hail to them! The war criminals slaughtered our freedom-loving innocent people in 1971 pronouncing the holy words, Naraye takbir, Allahuakbar. Pakistan Zindabad. Pakistan is the holy place of Islam. They did never allow those slain bodies for burial. Instead, they allowed those dead bodies for eating by the jackals, vultures, dogs and many other human flesh eaters. Hence, their temerity is irremissible. People of Bangladesh and the government are driven by a single purpose i.e. to establish justice to the worst war criminals. It is not avenge, revenge or cobra bite as has been propagating by the mango-twigs of the war criminals of 1971. The war criminals have rightly been tracked to prosecute who have evaded justice for decades. It is a mission. It is not wise and humane to let such matters rest without a harsh challenge. It has taken us about four decades to bring some of the king pin war criminals to justice. By this long time, many people died, and some of the best cases could not be brought to justice. It was a real tragedy in all respects. Between 2010 and now, many war criminals have been tried and convicted; some of them were hanged for their unspeakable barbarities. Md. Mujibur Rahman (now Editor, The Weekly Postcard) and one of the first batch trained guerrilla freedom fighters from the renowned Dehradun Military Academy says, If you allow people who have committed terrible crimes to live in your midst without taking legal action against them, you are basically saying it doesnt matter. Some people deliberately and some unknowingly try to say very often so many years have passed away, the suspects themselves are probably sorry. But this is more wishful thinking on their part than actual reality. But the truth is that they have never expressed regret or remorse for the grave atrocities they committed to the freedom loving people of Bangladesh during our glorious Liberation War in 1971. If we cant bring these culprits to justice, we feel we are betraying with our fallen heroes and their families. We are leaving them in the pits. But it is prosecution that has the greatest impact in terms of helping a society face its past. The war criminals against which trials are continuing in connection with a massacre that wiped out three million of our population. And we should never say, you will remain off the hook. Hence, the hunt for the war criminals must go on. These criminals as we find they had a lack of tolerance for people who did not fall in their support, not to speak of people of any religion. It is a million dollar question how one has to deal with the numerous obstacles obstructing justice and the frustrations of seeing so many war criminals of our 1971 history who committed terrible crimes and whom we were finally able to track down and expose, escape trial and punishment due to lack of political will or because of illness and/or death. In a world in which most countries prefer to let elderly perpetrators die in peace and tranquility, knowing full well that all they have to do to avoid prosecutions is drag out the legal procedures until such time as the criminals become medically unfit or pass away. Our response to such questions is to emphasise the tremendous suffering inflicted on the victims of mass murders by these criminals. One of the most important cases is that of notorious Matiur Rahman Nizami, the supremo of Al-Badr force, a deadly killing outfit belonged to Jamaat-e-Islami, a criminal organisation. Under his leadership, so many concentration camps were set up in many parts of Bangladesh during our Independence War in 1971. Each and every camp was notorious for the cruelty of Nizami and his accomplices who routinely tortured the inmates and invented unique murder methods to increase the suffering of the victims. The tribunal court awarded capital punishment to this infamous butcher. The countrys apex court has upheld his death punishment. Review petition was duly heard in the Supreme Court (SC) on May 3, 2016 and the final verdict has also been delivered to seal the fate of this dreaded war criminal to go to the hangmans noose. And he was executed by rights. It is, therefore, with great trepidation that the people of Bangladesh were waiting to hear the final judgment of SC. Valiant freedom fighter Syed Hafizul Hoque reminds us, The obligation we owe the victims, the responsibility to make a serious effort to track down those who turned so many innocent men, women, and children into victims, simply because they were classified as enemies of Jamaat-e-Islam, other religion trade based political parties and their notorious Pakistan. The words and gratitude of freedom fighters underscore for us one of the main motivations to keep trying to bring the 1971 war criminals to justice. So when the going gets rough, and the frustrations mount, we should think back to the words of the aforesaid veteran freedom fighters and remember that one of the greatest good deeds a Bengali can do is to fulfill that obligation to as many of the victims as possible. The wheels of justice for the victims of the war criminals crimes move in a zigzag way and at a frustratingly slow pace, even at this late date in time, when every day that passes can spell the difference between a perpetrator being convicted and punished and cases being dropped for reasons of death while trials were going on and death penalties to some accused were commuted on physical or mental infirmities. [ In the meantime, all we can do is hope that the countrys highest court keeps the earlier verdict unaltered in cases of many war criminals now lying pending with them, and in that respect, every moment counts. For us who saw the 1971 struggle of our proud history, the genocide of three million of our people is a living memory, not only because survivours of that tragedy, our parents, uncles and aunts, are still among us to testify and remind us of the horrors that they survived, but also because of our more recent history that some foreign and local mango-twigs of the war criminals are out to save them from the hangmens nooses, and that we remain the target of genocidal threats. The arrest in Germany of three men aged 88, 92 and 94, who served as guards at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the World War II, has once again raised the issue of the ongoing prosecution of elderly Holocaust perpetrators, almost seven decades after the end of World War II. Why shall we then consider age, health ground and so on in case of the 1971 war criminals of Bangladesh? The question of trying the war criminals of 1971 massacre is not new and has been an issue for many years, since elderly Nazis and collaborators have been brought to justice ever since the World War II ended. What is new, however, is the age of the men currently in detention, as well as other Nazi war criminals who have been investigated and/or prosecuted during the past decade or so, who have been considerably older than those brought to justice in previous decades. Thus the moral, legal and philosophical arguments for continued prosecution of Bangladeshs war criminals remain the same. The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers. If a person committed murder many years ago and has still not been held accountable, he or she is no less guilty today, just because many years have passed since the crime was committed. Old age should not afford protection to murderers. Reaching an advanced age does not turn a murderer into a righteous person. Every one of the 1971 victims deserves that an effort be made to find the persons who turned them - innocent men, women, and children - into victims. The ongoing efforts to bring more war criminals to justice sends a powerful message, that if one commits such heinous crimes, even decades later the search to hold such persons accountable continues. In this regard, the fact that so many of those who perpetrated the colossal crimes in Bangladesh in 1971 were able to escape punishment only made it easier for subsequent tragedies to occur. It must be as clear as possible, that committing such crimes will almost certainly result in swift and severe punishment. Trials of Bangladeshs war criminals continue to prove helpful in the fight against genocide denial and the recent efforts, primarily to rewrite the narrative of our glorious Liberation War by some nengty idurs (mice) to hide or minimise the role of local collaborators in genocidal crimes. It is important to note that a single perpetrator has never expressed any regret or remorse. It is just the opposite, they are still proud to this day of the crimes they committed. Hence, time after time to remind the skeptics, that the criminals being brought to justice are the last people on earth who deserve any sympathy since they had no mercy on their innocent victims, some of whom were even older than they are today. So when you see one of these deadly war criminals in print or electronic media, don't be taken in by their frail, sickly or saintly appearance. Think of them as they were in the prime of their youth and physical strength, when they devoted all their energy to helping run the largest mass murder factory in the history of mankind. The trial for the war criminals must carry on. And they must walk to the gallows. -The End The writer is a senior citizen of Bangladesh, writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs One interesting observation made by the author relates to the flow of refugees that was closely linked to the violence unleashed in Sri Lanka against the civilian population. Reviewed by S. Chandraseskharan (Refugee Dilemma -Sri Lankan Refugees in Tamil Nadu-Published by Prabhat Prakashan and Antar Rashtriya Sahayog Parishad- Price Rs 250.00) It is almost ten years since the LTTE was virtually wiped out in May 2009 and yet the problems relating to the ethnic question, the refugees and the attempts to get the Sri Lankan Government to transitional justice have failed. Most recently, the Sri Lankan Government managed to get two more years of extension to implement its own commitments in the Human Rights Council- ( Reference may be made to our paper 6414 dated 19-3-2019 where the Sri Lankan Diplomacy has continued to deny, delay, deceive and destroy its own commitments.) Sri Lanka cannot be forgiven for the ruthless killing of over 40,000 innocent civilians towards the end of the war against LTTE. Many more of the former LTTE cadres who were arrested/ captured have not been accounted for even now. There has been no attempt by the majority community either towards reconciliation or towards devolution worth the name. The book should be aptly termed as the tragedy of the Sri Lankan Tamils and not on the refugee dilemma alone. The book published by Professor V. Suryanarayan has come out just in time to highlight not only the desperate situation of the Tamil refugees arising out of repeated conflicts but on a global matrix, on the problems of refugees in general and India in particular. The author has pointed out that India being the only country that is contiguous to other South Asian countries had to bear the brunt of refugees from within the South Asian region. It is said that the total number of refugees and displaced persons looked after by India since independence would be approximately 25 million- a staggering figure indeed as it is more than the combined population of Sri Lanka, Singapore, Bhutan and Maldives ( page 26). The book begins with the Refugee Phenomenon in general and the changes taking place in the World that reflect the worsening situation . According to the UNHCR, for the first time the refugees worldwide had passed 50 million mark and in 2015 alone 24 people were displaced every minute of every day- reaching to 34.000 people every day! Next comes the Indian experience of Athithi Devo Bhava and historically India has continued to be the haven of immigrants from times immemorial. The real issue of the refugees of Tamil Nadu is discussed in the third chapter of the book - the Island in Distress. It comprehensively traces the history of the ethnic confict in Sri Lanka. The author has submitted rightly that the Sinhalese- Tamil Conflict is a product of the post independence politics, an offshoot of the nation building experiment where the Sinhalese leaders wanted to build the nation on the basis of the Sinhalese language and Buddhist religion to the exclusion of minority claims and no other to the politics of ethnic mobilization resorted to by Chauvinist Sinhalese and Tamil Leaders. He has also referred to the book by former President, late Jayawardene that conveyed the idea that Sri Lanka and the Sinhala nation are the same and that appears to be the root of the problem. In the major riots of 1983 where no Tamil was spared, Jayawardene had no word of sympathy for the state sponsored killings carried out by his own ministers. For a reader not so familiar with Sri Lankan politics chapter 3 alone would give a complete account of the ethnic problem and author has succeeded in conveying a complete narrative very objectively and in very few pages. He should be congratulated. Chapter 4 deals with the history of the refugees in and from Sri Lanka culminating in a massive exodus after the communal holocaust of July 1983. It is indeed surprising that a small country like Sri Lanka with a population of 22.4 million (page 60) is one of the worlds principal sources of refugees and internally displaced persons. Nearly, half of the 2.3 million strong Sri Lanka Tamil population have been rendered homeless and have migrated to different parts of the world or remain internally displaced. It is in chapter 5 that the author deals with the Sri Lankan Refugees in Tamil Nadu. He has divided them into six categories- 1. Refugees of Sri Lankan Tamil origin who live in the camps. 2. Refugees of Indian origin who live in the camps. 3. Refugees who live outside the camps. 4 Sri Lankan nationals 5. Militant refugees in Special camps. 6 Miscellaneous caegory. Of the first category, 63649 persons have been identified. Surprisingly, 29,500 refugeees of Indian Tamil origin are in the camps under the second category. There is a legal distinction between the two groups as a large section of the latter have become stateless due to the insensitive agreement after the Srimavo-Shastri pact of 1964. A small group of 14 Sri Lankan Tamils come under the category of militant group (5) and it is not clear why they are being kept under prison conditions in the State. It is sad that the the recent changes in the citizenship bill based on residency does not take into account the Indian Tamils of category 2. One interesting observation made by the author relates to the flow of refugees that was closely linked to the violence unleashed in Sri Lanka against the civilian population. Yet in the closing stages of the war in 2009 near the Mullai Vaikal region, with both the countries India and Sri Lanka sealing the border, the trapped civilians who were caught in the middle perished in thousands. The Tamil Nadu Government did nothing to save the civilians. It was indeed a sad chapter in the history of refugees in India when the author in chapter 2 has highlighted the historical anecdotes as to how India had treated the immigrants as their guests. The author has made a strong plea for a national legislation on the refugees combining the humanitarian needs of the refugees and the security interests of the State. This needs to be examined more carefully and will be necessary only if the existing mechanisms are inadequate. Should we shut out a flexible approach and entangle ourselves in legal niceties? It was a surprise to note that Tamil Nadu has a refugee camp for Rohingyas in Kelambakkam! In all, the book makes very interesting reading and is a must for all those who were involved in the Sri Lankan crisis in some way or other or even others interested in ethnic conflicts. It is highly recommended for the Scholars too. by Anwar A Khan The one thing one learns from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history. Hagel Dhakas Banani, the area where the fire broke out, is a busy commercial hub with multi-storey buildings housing offices, universities and restaurants. According to media reports, the fire broke out around 1:00pm on Thursday, the 28 March. Since then, the building was surrounded by onlookers and volunteer helpers. Hagels words of grandness have again come to us in tune; accurate in pitch on that day again. We can create situations for bringing about catastrophes; but not delights. That stirs us overmuch to speak. The dreadful inferno that hit the 22 storeyed skyscraper named FR Tower at Banani Commercial Area, Dhaka is not fortuity; it is purely a slaying. It is covetousness; and it is extreme gluttony of some highwaymen of the netherworld. The death toll from this horrific blaze that ripped through a Bangladesh skyscraper rose to 26, including some who leapt to their deaths, as firefighters combed through the charred shell of the building. Flames tore through the building trapping hundreds of office workers. Some of those stuck inside made it to safety by sliding down cables on the side of the building, but as shocked onlookers watched, others took their chances and jumped in a bid to escape the smoke and heat. A Sri Lankan citizen identified as Niras Chandra also was declared dead at Kurmitola General Hospital. Officer-in-Charge (OC) of Cantonment police station Kazi Shahan Haque confirmed the matter saying the victim fell off the building while trying to escape the fire. More than 70 people were hospitalised in the wake of the inferno. Hundreds of onlookers gathered to watch as trapped workers screamed for help from smoke-logged floors. Firefighters backed by military specialists -- some in helicopters -- tackled the blaze, lowering ropes to help people escape, while rescuers on long ladders smashed through windows. Fire disasters regularly hit Bangladesh's major cities where safety standards are notoriously lax. The government authorities have ordered a probe into the incident to examine claims that the skyscraper lacked fire equipment, its fire exits were inadequate and it had been illegally extended. Experts have said inspections of buildings in the city frequently found fire stairs blocked with stored goods and exit doors locked. The FR Tower building reportedly consists of offices and a restaurant. Videos shared on social media have showed people attempting to escape the flames by edging down a precarious rope on the outside of the building. Authorities said that six people died as a result of falling. Several people trapped inside the building posted pictures to social media showing people covering their faces to escape the smoke-filled interior. Helicopters joined 22 firefighting units that worked with the army, navy, air force and police to battle the blaze as smoke billowed into the sky to douse the terrible fire. The blaze comes a month after a massive inferno killed 71 people in an old neighbourhood at Chawkbazar of the Dhaka city. Critics at the time blamed poor enforcement of safety regulations in one of the world's most densely packed cities. Fire service officials have said a warehouse of deodorant and granular plastic in one of the five floors at FR Tower that caught fire fuelled that inferno, which took more than 12 hours to control. Firefighters on long ladders smashed windows to create escape routes. More than one hour after the blaze erupted people could still be seen on the 13th and 14th floors desperately waving for help amid clouds of black smoke. A top fire official said the flames had been stopped from spreading to adjoining buildings. "Teams have entered the building and they are scouring the floors for any remaining victims. The building did not have firefighting equipment," said Lieutenant Colonel Julfikar Rahman of the Dhaka fire service told reporters. Rescue crews were soon discovering bodies and carrying them out one after the other in white bags. Some workers told of risky escapes. A man who gave his name as Jico said he had been working on the 19th floor. "The fire started in a restaurant on the sixth floor. We ran to the roof as soon as we heard about it and then used a wooden plank to get over to the next building." Witness Sajib Hasan said he heard people shouting for help from the windows of the upper floors. Heavy smoke deterred efforts by responders to get close to them, but Hasan said he watched at least a dozen people get rescued. Firefighters were shattering the buildings glass walls to free toxic gas. A Facebook Live video taken by Roy Pinaki showed five people scaling down from windows while burnt building materials fell around them. One person slipped from what appeared to be a rope that people were using to escape, bounced off utility wires and fell to the ground. A 35-year-old man, identified as Abdullah Al Faruk, an MBA student at Dhaka University, was declared dead after he was rushed to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH). Many more were also admitted to the burn unit at DMCH and other hospitals, who are currently undergoing treatment. Parvez Sazzad was reported dead at a Banani clinic. Maksudur, Munir and Mamun were declared dead on arrival by doctors at United Hospital. Senior Executive Sazzadur Rahman Shuvo of the hospital confirmed the matter. A woman identified as Amina Yeasmin died of her injuries at Apollo Hospital. Two more bodies were brought out from the building around 6:30 pm after the fire was put out. The authorities concerned confirmed that the Air Force, Bangladesh Navy, police and the Fire Service Department have worked together to rescue the people inside. A helicopter carries water to drop on the burning office building as Bangladeshs firefighters on ladders work to extinguish the blaze frantically on that day. According to a 2012 study by Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, most high-rise buildings in the capital have inadequate fire safety measures. We found only two buildings fully compliant, BUET professor Mehedi Ahmed Ansari said of the survey on 112 buildings, adding that some they looked at were little more than death traps. Fire safety measures in the building were very weak. There were no sprinklers. Fire exits existed only in name. Fire department director Shakil Newaj said they had warned the FR Tower management to improve fire safety standards, but they did not pay heed. With the worlds urban population expected to surpass six billion by 2045 the pressure to build upwards results in ever more, ever taller buildings. Given the potential death toll and frequency of skyscraper fires, the stakes are high for getting both the architecture and fire-safety procedures right. The ring draws our attention as powerfully as the earnest intensity in his eyes, a reminder thatnot unlike the Fast & Furious franchise in which Johnson figures so prominentlythis story is all about Witnessing flames ravaging the building, dying the people helplessly and seeing the injured people groaning in the hospitals are not endurable. Bejesus damn it, I am so tired of hearing the truth from all corners and the newspaper reports and never anything is done to prevent it from re-occurring by the concerned authorities. Nobody is there to check conformity to safety standards when being built. High rises like this one lines the pocket of fat owners of the buildings and contractors and makes locals falsely feel contemporary. This is a regrettable waste of money for avarice. With the same investment, a whole community of family housing with recreations can be built in which human connections can be broadened. The building, as it is reported, simply does not comply with safety and health regulations. The fires that ravaged the area last week, claiming several lives and forcing thousands more to evacuate, destroyed the beautiful landscape. As the embers smolder, the reality of what happened is being laid bare. This video captures some of the extent of the damage and it is harrowing. Through this, hopefully, a basis can be set for a broader struggle against exploitation and all forms of oppression; and for human liberation in which no-one lacks the basics of life such as housing, water, and sanitation. The building is not a reinforced fire-resistant concrete hull construction. At the time, no emergency lights, posted in fire alarms, fire sprinkler systems, or emergency exits were fitted to the building. There is a solitary stairway, but it is a constrict stairwell, which runs the full height of the building. Initial efforts led to the evacuation of so many people before the heat and smoke became too overwhelming. But the conditions then within the building made it impossible to continue. Many remaining stranded people climbed onto balconies for air. A helicopter rescue was attempted but the heat, smoke and inadequate landing space prevented helicopters from reaching the roof in time. Even if landing space had been available, the strong heat and dense smoke made approaching the building by helicopter extremely hazardous. Despite the best efforts of rescue personnel and witnesses, who shouted and created signs instructing people to remain calm. By the fire subsided, it had engulfed all flammables and simply burnt itself out. Medical teams, fire crews and police were then able to enter the office towers and search for survivours. At the time, this had been the greatest death toll in any high-rise building fire. Death toll estimates range from 25 to a higher figure. Why safety must rule as tall buildings aim higher? Actually, our planning should include safety considerations, not just engineering capability. Technical challenges grow, technology evolves to meet the needs, reaches its limits, and the cycle begins again. The noted structural engineer Richard Tomasetti noted in 2013s The Tall Buildings Reference Book that limitations are best perceived as a function of time. This suggests that, over time, structural engineering can match any desired height given the right innovations. The approach to firefighting has been the most obvious constraint. Buildings more than seven or eight storeys tall are beyond the reach of a typical firefighters ladder. The requirement for suppressing fires has to be designed within the building itself. Some of the strategies developed for skyscrapers included compartmentalisation (containing and preventing the spread of fire), protected stairways for escape and for fire fighter access, a defend-in-place strategy, and the concept of phased rather than simultaneous evacuation of the building. Stairs, lifts, bathrooms, and a myriad of services supplying power, fresh air, data, as well as key life safety systems are often not to be bundled together in the buildings core. The past 6 decades have seen extraordinary advances in technology. These include the development of structural systems, high-strength concrete and steel, vertical transportation systems, and sophisticated glass and steel facades coupled with computational methods and smart technologies. Software and computing power has enabled more accurate analysis of structures and statistical analysis as well as higher degrees of coordination of the different systems that serve the building and its occupants. There are many interesting technologies developing to service super-tall structures. For example, distributing water from the base to the top of a super-tall tower would be unacceptably costly using todays technology. The concept study NEXT Tokyo 2045 proposed for Tokyo Bay which proposes the worlds first mile-high skyscraper looks to decouple from urban utilities to avoid pumping water from the ground up. Instead, the design team proposes using the buildings surface area to harvest water from clouds and rain. The facade of such buildings also offers enormous surface area for generating solar-powered energy for local use. Smart technology for elevators that continuously review building traffic patterns and optimise traffic handling is one of the latest evolutions of elevator design. These would allow double and triple-decker elevators to work effectively. Wrights vision for quintuple-decker lifts (albeit in his proposal was powered by atomic energy) has become potentially viable due to the developments in both hardware and software. Life in the high winds The behaviour and expectations of occupants is likely to evolve owing to the physics of height. Wind, often regarded as the main structural foe, is an inescapable phenomenon that effects not only the structural response, but also occupant comfort and the level of engagement with the outdoors. Wind hitting the building can cause uplift and areas of negative pressure that effects the permeability of the facade. Occupant controlled windows, balconies and outdoor living as we know it become untenable and a greater reliance is given to mechanical systems for ventilation and temperature control. Buildings can be designed so that wind can pass through, and the energy harnessed and controlled. Fire and safety We must pay great attention to addressing all the drivers for tall, and seem to ignore all those elements that act as constraints. Yet history provides us with a long list of disasters involving tall buildings. We have recently witnessed a most painful example in the FR Tower fire in Banani area, Dhaka. After FR Tower was ravaged by fire, a long and detailed investigations will establish its causes, one obvious conclusion can be drawn without having to wait for such investigation that it is a man-made cataclysm. Fire safety in high rise buildings (a constraint) has not received sufficient attention. This has put society in a position to challenge the competency of those involved in guaranteeing the fire safety of tall buildings. Solutions generated to enable height, such as, staged emergency evacuation and defend in place, do not seem to be valid anymore when large external fires seem to be an unavoidable feature of the architecture of modern tall buildings. It is not certain we have solutions that will guarantee the safety of people occupying a tall building when we have no capacity to evacuate if a fire was to propagate internally or externally. Lets not forget that disasters can be one of the most effective means to put a break to progress. So, the only limit to height is our capacity to maintain the safety of people in all aspects associated with the design, build and occupancy of tall buildings. Fire Service Department has to be revamped with modernised equipment like the developed countries. Fire protection systems in the buildings have to be re-evaluated to put them aright. The present building laws shall have to be amended, if need be, and ensure rigorous enforcement of them. Fire for fulfilling the lust of some arrant people of the high-rise buildings must not take away innocent lives. 21 people died in the road crashes on the same day as the newspaper reports say. Road accidents must not snatch away our life in such bestial manners. We are born and have to die, but not in this colossally helpless way of life. We want to reject this Death Valley in Bangladesh. We cant play foul games repeatedly with peoples life. Today, we have not come here to weep, but we are here to punish those beastly fellows . -The End The writer is a senior citizen of Bangladesh, writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs After the Universal Declaration in 1948, the UN adopted more binding two International Covenants in 1966 that became operational for those countries who ratified them since 1976. by Laksiri Fernando Seventy years is a long time since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the UN in December 1948. Whatever the marginal biases or weaknesses that it entails, it is a fair statement on human rights that all human beings should have, irrespective of the country, culture, religion, ethnicity, class, social status, ability/disability, gender or any other distinction. Its rationality and validity are based on the human rights commitments outlined in the UN Charter (1945). UN Human Rights Council in Geneva The important premise that the human rights promoters and also the UN have to understand however is the fact that the world is so diverse, social, political, economic and cultural conditions are different, so the development of human rights would be a difficult task that requires objectivity, patience, dialogue and multiple approaches. It is not clear whether this is understood properly then or today. After the Universal Declaration in 1948, the UN adopted more binding two International Covenants in 1966 that became operational for those countries who ratified them since 1976. Those are the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). With the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1979) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1989), the international framework for human rights promotion appeared complete with other declarations and conventions. Need for Social Approaches Among all the conventions, the Rights of the Child could be considered most futuristic. If implemented properly, with necessary skills and values in education for children (i.e. social rights), and with gainful employment when they grow up (i.e. economic rights), within few decades human rights situation could be dramatically changed or improved. What is primarily required for such a change and improvement is socio-economic reforms, apart from legal enactments. It is believed that those children who are abused or deprived of rights are most prone to violate the other peoples rights when they grow up. This is apart from legal, institutional and political conditions that propel or perpetuate human rights violations. A major predicament, however, in this respect is that those who are supposed to implement Child Rights are the old and abusive generations. Apart from the responsible officials, they are partly the fathers, mothers, teachers, religious preachers, and the neighbours. Therefore, the approaches have to be more nuanced and socially oriented. Women, without sparing men of the responsibility, undoubtedly can be mobilized in this venture. The Rights of Women and the protection of them could play a crucial role in this respect. Women and mothers can be the champions of the futuristic Child Rights. Women rights should not be limited to employment, equal wages, individual freedoms, freedom from abuse and political equality, they should be enhanced to the protection of children. This is a leadership role than a responsibility. This is one reason why women should be brought into politics (not dirty politics) and public life. Mere Ratification? By the end of 2018, all UN member countries (193) except the US had ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Rights of Women were ratified by 189 countries, but 50 of them with reservations on certain and some important provisions. These were due to certain religious and cultural beliefs. In the overall context of human rights implementation, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights can be considered crucially important. The first is important for democracy; and the second for social justice, equality and elimination of poverty. Both are interdependent, but without proper economic and social rights, no one can exercise civil, political or cultural rights properly. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is ratified by 172 countries, with 6 other countries including China only signing it, hopefully with the intention of ratifying it in the future. This is fairly a good indication for future of democracy in the world. The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is ratified by 169 countries, with 4 others including US only signing it. Ratification of human rights conventions can be considered satisfactory, whatever the reservations placed on some provisions and by some countries. However the ratification is not a guarantee of implementation or adherence to human rights. This is like the proverbial difference or the gap between theory and practice or the law and reality. Otherwise, the situation in the world today would have been wonderful. Gaping Holes No one expect any country to be perfect in practicing or implementing human rights i.e. civil rights, political rights, economic rights, social rights, cultural rights, womens rights and child rights that we have been discussing. However, the gaps are enormous in most countries. For convenience, let us limit this discussion to five main types of overall rights - civil, political, economic, social and cultural. In liberal democratic countries where civil, political and social rights are fairly established, the economic rights are pathetically lagging behind, and in some countries major aspects of cultural and indigenous rights are also neglected. There are authoritarian countries where almost all rights are neglected or often suppressed although they have ratified most international conventions. Then there are socialist countries, China being primary, where economic and social rights are promoted or fairly established, but civil, political and cultural rights are lagging behind or still neglected. In the case of China, the size of the country, mammoth population and past history are some inhibiting factors. Social democratic countries in Northern Europe and partly Australasia appear to be the best where two sets of rights are balanced fairly well. They are rated high in the happiness index as well. However, their social democracy moves back and forth with neo-liberalism creating considerable holes. Most alarming is the gross violations or neglect of basic human rights in so many countries around the world; many countries unfortunately being in the African continent. News and images of extreme poverty, hunger, malnutrition, armed conflicts, wars, gang violence, killings, terrorism, election violations, authoritarian or dictatorial political leaders are prominent in the media. Some may not understand these situations as related to human rights. But underlying causes are related, while obviously there are other factors involved. Rigid Legal Approaches All the above point to some terrible defects in human rights approaches at international as well as national levels. Simply said, the approaches are predominantly too legalistic with colossal neglect of economic and social rights. There are so many legal experts who draft, draft and draft so many international declarations and conventions on human rights. Altogether there are over 200 international instruments (declarations, covenants, conventions, resolutions, statements etc.) today. They like to call them instruments! These are mostly in the areas of civil and political rights. After the ICESCR in 1966, there is no significant international instrument drafted in promoting economic and social rights particularly affecting the poor and the needy. Then there have been efforts to persuade or force particularly underdeveloped, poor and former colonial countries to ratify them without assessing their capacities to implement them. There are no proper dialogues involved. It is questionable whether these (or some of these) efforts are genuinely human rights or intentionally political (with economic interests behind). I was partly witness to what went on in Cambodia during the UN intervention (1992-93), where nearly a dozen of instruments were forced on the country. By that time there were no more than 10 qualified lawyers in the country even to understand these instruments properly. The compulsion to ratify instruments has been the case in many other countries, before and after. There has been a parallel pattern emerged where many developing countries just superficially ratified human rights instruments to seek favours from the UN and/or Western countries. As an inducement, there were human rights conditions attached to foreign aid (and trade). Sri Lanka came under this category during JR Jayewardenes time and thereafter. Sri Lankas recent sponsorship of the UNHRC Resolution 30/1 (2015) also has evolved on those lines, going into an absurd extreme. There was a time when the country even was not sure whether it has ratified the First Optional Protocol to the ICCPR or not! If we take all the human rights conventions that Sri Lanka has ratified seriously, the country should in fact be a human rights paradise! This does not mean that the ratifications of human rights conventions were wrong or unnecessary in Sri Lanka or elsewhere. The point is that those were ratified without much commitment, realism, proportionality, proper planning or follow up. This is one reason why the high ratification numbers internationally of the ICCPR (172), ICESCR (169), CEDAW (189), CRC (196) or other instruments might not make much sense in practice today. Lopsided Implementation? There are several UN mechanisms to monitor the implementation of (1) the general commitments of human rights under the UN Charter and (2) the obligations under the ratified international conventions by member countries. The first type is called the Charter Based Bodies and the latter, Treaty Based Bodies. In whatever name they are called, the approaches seem to be going in a similar direction, the first type of bodies being more and more political and the latter type more and more legalistic. (US left the Human Rights Council last year after inflicting so much damage) The most controversial Charter based body today is the Human Rights Council. It oscillates between political and legalistic approaches. The US left the Council last year, after inflicting so much damage, but failing to sway the other members on the Israeli question. In my experience, the predecessor Human Rights Commission (1946-2006) was more flexible and balanced. There was no rigid bureaucracy like today, led by the Human Rights Commissioner and many so-called experts and officials. However, even during those days, the economic and social rights of the people in the world were terribly neglected. To conclude, the main defects of human rights approaches both internationally and nationally could be identified as (1) the rigid and sterile legalism and (2) the pathetic neglect of economic and social rights of the people. Therefore, with over 200 international instruments, the world has not progressed much since the inauguration of the Universal Declaration in 1948. This is regrettable. The most important conclusion, however, is not to throw the human rights baby with the questionable approaches of bath water. To save the human rights baby, more and more social approaches are necessary with peoples participation. ABCNews.com(ATLANTA) -- Georgia police are expected to charge a suspect in the hit-and-run that seriously hurt a 9-year-old girl who was playing in her yard when the speeding car careened toward her. Just before 7 p.m. Friday, 9-year-old Laderihanna Holmes was playing in her front yard when the car left the road, hit her and another girl then crashed into the house, DeKalb County Police said. The driver and passenger then fled the scene, said police. The male suspect, whose name was not released, will face charges including hit and run, failure to maintain lane and serious injury by vehicle, police said Tuesday. Authorities said the suspect's name will likely be released after he is arrested. "I just want everybody to pray for Laderihanna," the little girl's mother, Charlette Bolton, told ABC News on Sunday. "The community loves her, her school loves her, her friends love her and I just want the people involved to be caught." Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. English01/04/2019 SRNA News Roundup /I/ - April 1, 2019 REPUBLIKA SRPSKA BANJALUKA, April 1 - The international commission in charge of investigating killings of all peoples in the Srebrenica area committed between 1992 and 1995 has begun its inaugural session in Banjaluka. Commission members will make a decision whether they will speak in public and how. On February 7, the Government of Republika Srpska appointed two international, independent commissions - one to investigate all killings in and around Srebrenica from 1992 until 1995, and the other to investigate killings of Serbs in Sarajevo between 1991 and 1995. BANJALUKA, April 1 - Having repeatedly disputed January 9 as the Republika Srpska Day, the BiH Constitutional Court has confirmed it does not issue legal decisions, but political ones instead; the only response to such actions is unity which must be demonstrated by everyone in Republika Srpska, says Rajko Kuzmanovic, president of the Srpska Academy of Sciences and Arts. BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA SARAJEVO, April 1 - The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina on Monday issued a first-instance verdict sentencing a former member of the Croatian Defence Council /HVO/ Alminko Islamovic to 14 months in prison for crimes against Serb civilians committed in Brod in 1992. BANJALUKA, April 1 - The first-instance judgement of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sentencing a former HVO member Alminko Islamovic to 14 months in prison for crimes committed against Serb civilians in Brod is an insult to Serbs, said Marko Grabovac, the head of the Association for Tracing Captured Soldiers and Missing Civilians from Brod. ISTOCNO SARAJEVO, April 1 - The main culprit for the breakout of the 1992 civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the then Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, who withdrew his signature from two major international peace treaties, having been persuaded by the former US ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann and pressured by the United States, which did not want any agreements with Serbs in BiH, says Colonel Blagoje Kovacevic, the speaker of the assembly of the Sarajevo-Romanija Region board of the Army of Republika Srpska Officers Association. Prepared by Ognjen Begovic BANJALUKA, April 1 - Turkish Ambassador to BiH Haldun Koc hopes that signing a revised free trade agreement will give a fresh impetus to the development and improvement of economic relations between Turkey and BiH and that the mutual trade will reach one billion US dollars. FEDERATION OF BiH SARAJEVO, April 1 - A rescue team of the FBiH Mountain Rescue Service have found two persons who got lost on Mount Bukovik on Sunday night. SERBIA BELGRADE, April 1 - The Italian capital of Rome will host a top-level scientific conference on Thursday about the lethal consequences of the NATO 1999 destruction of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, while experts announce a disclosure of alarming data about victims of depleted uranium, reports the Vecernje Novosti daily. BELGRADE, March 31 - The Belgrade Accordion Festival, which gathered several hundred participants from the region, closed on Sunday evening where young ore Peric from Ugljevik was among the best performers. REGION BELGRADE, April 1 - The association of former camp detainees Jasenovac from Belgrade sent a letter to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Michelle Bachelet Jeria, calling for countering the constantly growing, organised and public manifestations of Nazism in Europe, particularly of neo-Ustashism in Croatia. ZAGREB, April 1 - Operations of Agrokor Group in Croatia have been taken over by Fortenova Group as of Monday. Of the total of 159 companies active within Agrokor Group, 47 unsustainable companies will continue to operate, through settlement, within Fortenova Group with an additional term plus in their title, so Konzum will become Konzum Plus, and Jamnica will be Jamnica Plus, reports the Croatian news agency Hina. /end/ds English01/04/2019 INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION WILL CONTRIBUTE TO PROVING TRUTH SARAJEVO, April 1 /SRNA/ - Head of the Association of families of missing persons of Sarajevo-Romanija region, Milan Mandic, congratulated the Government of Republika Srpska on the initiative to establish two independent international commissions to investigate the suffering of all peoples in the Srebrenica region and the suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo, saying that the eminent experts of these commissions will find the actual truth about the sufferings during the recent war. "The commissions with such experts will reach at least 90 percent of the truth that needs to come out, and then the fact that the genocide was not committed in Srebrenica, but against the Serb people in Sarajevo will come out too," Mandic said in his statement to SRNA. Regardless of what kind of truth the Serbs would get - black, white or gray, he says, it is important to know the truth and step out with it before the international public in order to prove that it is not true that the Bosniaks were exclusively victims "killed by the Serbs from the hill. He recalled that the first victim in Sarajevo was a Serb, a policeman at a police station in the municipality of Novo Sarajevo, who was killed by his Bosniak colleague from a service gun. "March 1 comes after that, which, unfortunately, is celebrated in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, although it is the day of a crime when the Serb wedding guest was killed, the Serb flag was burnt down and when it was clear there was no more place for us in our city of Sarajevo, built by the Serbs for centuries," Mandic said. He noted that the Serb people's golgotha began in Sarajevo at the time, especially in 1992 and 1993, when the most of the victims were of Serb national background, who are so well concealed so their bones cannot be found even 27 years later. "The Serbs had to leave Sarajevo and return to the homes of their grandparents, otherwise they would have been killed and have had the same destiny like my father who lived in that city, who I have been searching for all these years. That was the destiny of the Sarajevo Serbs," said Mandic. He says that the image of Sarajevo is not better nowadays, where being a Serb is imposible, nor can the Serb flag be hoisted. Mandic also recalled the suffering of Serbs in Podrinje, from Srebrenica to Zvornik. "What happened at Christmas and St Peters Day /Petrovdan/ in Skelani and Kravica was a destiny intended for all Serbs in that region. Around 3,500 Serbs were killed during the war, and I responsibly claim that the number of Bosniaks killed in that area has been "exaggerated" for political reasons, said the head of the Association. The constitutive session of an independent international commission to investigate the suffering of all nations in the Srebrenica region from 1992 to 1995 began today in Banjaluka. The Government of Republika Srpska appointed members for the two international and independent commissions - for the suffering of all peoples in and around Srebrenica between 1992 and 1995, and for the suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo between 1991 and 1995 on February 7. /end/vos DGAP-Ad-hoc: MBH Corporation Plc / Key word(s): Financing MBH Corporation plc secures EUR20 million capital commitment to support acquisition strategy 02-Apr-2019 / 09:00 CET/CEST Disclosure of an inside information acc. to Article 17 MAR of the Regulation (EU) No 596/2014, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. MBH Corporation plc secures EUR 20 million capital commitment to support acquisition strategy London, 2 April 2019 - MBH Corporation plc ("MBH"), a diversified investment holding company, has secured commitment for a financing facility with Global Emerging Markets Group ("GEM"). GEM has signed an agreement with MBH Corporation plc which allows MBH to a draw down an equity facility worth up to EUR 20 million. The proceeds from the facility provide a flexible tool to MBH's acquisition strategy. The company looks at EPS accretive and synergistic acquisitions, and can now consider those which might require a cash component to close, along with the share component. As a result, this agreement allows MBH to broaden its portfolio by adding new businesses in different verticals and geographies. Under the terms of the agreement, MBH will have access to the facility for up to 5 years. GEM undertakes to subscribe to, or acquire ordinary registered MBH shares upon MBH's discretionary exercise of a draw down notice. MBH will control the timing and amount of any draw down, and has the right, not the obligation, to draw down on the full commitment amount. The maximum draw down is subject to certain share trading volumes. GEM will also be issued 4 million options for the 5-year exercise period priced at EUR 2.10 for the first year and a 50% premium of the share price for the remainder of the term. Information and Explanation of the Issuer to this News: Callum Laing, Non-Executive Chairman of MBH comments: 'Having the GEM facility available, gives us a war chest to explore many more great businesses that can add to our portfolio. We have a broad pipeline of acquisition targets and expect to close several transactions in Q2 2019. The new facility is also a ringing endorsement of our business that an institution like GEM wants to partner with us as we scale.' About GEM Global Emerging Markets (www.gemny.com) was founded in 1991. GEM is a USD 3.4 billion investment group having completed 385 transactions in over 70 countries. The firm is an alternative investment group that manages a diverse set of investment vehicles across the world. About MBH MBH Corporation plc is a diversified investment holding company, listed on the Frankfurt and Dusseldorf Stock Exchanges. The company acquires small to medium enterprises across multiple geographies and sectors that are well established, profitable and looking to scale. By leveraging the Agglomeration strategy, MBH Corporation plc is able to create substantial shareholder value through the consistent, accretive acquisition of excellent companies. www.mbhcorporation.com Contacts for IR and media enquiries: MBH Corporation plc, Charlotte Fordham, charlotte@unity-group.com, +44 (0)770 396 3953 Kirchhoff Consult AG, Nicole Schuttforth, nicole.schuettforth@kirchhoff.de, +49 (0)40 609186 64 02-Apr-2019 CET/CEST The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases. Archive at www.dgap.de EquityStory.RS, LLC-News: Closir / Key word(s): Miscellaneous Moscow Exchange partners with Closir to enhance corporate access 02.04.2019 / 11:00 MSK The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. Moscow Exchange partners with Closir to enhance corporate access London, 2 April 2019 Closir, a leading corporate access technology platform, today announced a strategic partnership with Moscow Exchange. Moscow Exchange will be using Closir's technology to provide global investors with access to management of its listed companies during its well-established series of MOEX Forums in Moscow, London and New York. These forums provide global investors with unique insights into the Russian market as well as the opportunity to meet with leading Russian companies. Closir is a technology platform which connects listed companies in emerging markets to institutional investors including mutual funds, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and hedge funds allowing them to organise meetings, roadshows and virtual conferences. Closir extends the reach of companies throughout Europe, United States and Asia. Commenting on the partnership, Closir's CEO Michael Chojnacki said: "From an investor relations and corporate access standpoint, MOEX has long stood out as one of the most proactive and innovative exchanges not only in emerging markets, but globally. We are glad that MOEX has selected Closir to build on this culture and introduce a technology solution to a rapidly changing industry." Anna Vasilenko, Head of Primary Markets at Moscow Exchange, added: "MiFID II regulations that have been rolled out in Europe and increasingly adopted in the US have impacted how corporate access is consumed by investors. Our partnership with Closir will provide investors from around the world with easy and efficient direct access to Russian companies during the forums, and it should help to drive awareness and attract additional investment to our markets." The first MOEX Forum in 2019 will be held at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow on 3-4 April, featuring management teams from over 45 listed Russian companies as well as keynote speakers including Elvira Nabiullina, Governor of the Bank of Russia, Maxim Oreshkin, Minister of Economic Development of the Russian Federation and Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russian Direct Investment Fund. MOEX Forums in London and New York will be announced later this year. To request more information or 1:1 meetings with listed companies please email moex@closir.com. About Closir Closir is a leading financial technology company which provides products and services that help listed companies in emerging markets to attract global institutional investors. Closir operates an online platform which allows these listed companies to raise awareness of their investment story and to target and connect directly to investors in Europe, North America and Asia. Closir is a founding member of Innovate Finance, a UK government body promoting innovation in financial technology. For more information about Closir, click here. About Moscow Exchange Moscow Exchange provides exhaustive and convenient access to the Russian financial markets. The Exchange's markets offer clients trading opportunities across a diversified range of asset classes all combined with best-in-class post-trade services. Today, Moscow Exchange is the main liquidity and price discovery centre for Russian instruments. Moscow Exchange hosts trading in equities, bonds, derivatives, currencies, money market instruments and commodities. The Group also includes Russia's central securities depository, the National Settlement Depository, and the National Clearing Centre, which performs the function of central counterparty. Moscow Exchange ranks among the world's top 20 exchanges by total capitalisation of shares traded, and also among the 10 largest exchange platforms for bonds and derivatives trading. 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. Volunteer rider of seven years Martin Williams, WSBB's hospital liaison officer, pictured on call this week. Photo: Mark Williamson A MOTORBIKE charity that has provided a free out-of-hours blood supply service to the NHS in Coventry and Warwickshire, has been replaced with a new 14million contract which takes on its work and a range of other transport services. Warwickshire and Solihull Blood Bikes [WSBB] claim they were excluded from the tendering process, which started in June 2016, and was run by The Coventry and Warwickshire Pathology Service (CWPS) and their arrangement ended yesterday, Monday, 1st April. Mark Lavery, chairman of WSBB said: We are shell shocked and gutted. We found out by accident three weeks ago when someone spotted a delivery vehicle at University Hospital fo Coventry and Warwickshire. At no stage have we been involved in the tendering process. It was through making our own enquiries we found out that UHCW has chosen to pay a company for work we have previously done free-of-charge. We are devastated the NHS could make such an award without consulting us. We have completed over 7,000 calls in all weather conditions since we were founded in 2012 and it is estimated we have saved UHCW nearly 700,000 in that time. All our unpaid volunteers are shocked at the decision. We have committed significant time and effort to grow the group where public donations have enabled us to invest in five vehicles to maintain service in all weathers 365 days a year. Despite the blow, Mr Lavery has vowed to continue the other work WSBB does with Air Ambulance and the delivery of donor milk for premature babies. He said: We believe an investigation is warranted to determine how and why an experienced and reputable charity can be sacrificed in a cash-strapped NHS. It is totally beyond comprehension how tax payers funds can be used to increase the profits of a company when there is a proven free-of-charge service already in place. A University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust spokesman said: The Coventry and Warwickshire Pathology Service (CWPS) serves 1.6 million patients, four acute hospitals, nine Clinical Commissioning Groups and more than 250 GP practices. It runs a transport and logistics service to safely transfer blood samples and other medical items between hospitals and other sites. Demand has grown massively and approximately ten million samples were handled in 2018/19. The transport service was previously delivered by a wide range of suppliers, with some contracted through CWPS and others through third party organisations. With complexities increasing and the service potentially expanding to cover areas such as Hereford and Worcester, a decision was made to standardise delivery to ensure current and future needs, as well as stringent UK accreditation requirements, are met and exceeded. In line with public sector procurement regulations, we went out to open tender and supplier days were held to inform organisations of our requirements. This process has now concluded and the contract awarded to QE Facilities, a wholly owned subsidiary company of Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust. Any profit generated is reinvested in health care, not transferred to independent shareholders. Our aim now is to ensure the service continues to go from strength to strength and helps to further enhance the patient experience. The spokesman added: All previous suppliers including volunteers from the Warwickshire and Solihull Blood Bikes have been informed of the changes and thanked for their invaluable contribution. We offered to continue utilising Warwickshire and Solihull Blood Bikes until at least June 2019 while we supported them in exploring new opportunities. Since then, representatives have informed us by email of their decision to withdraw the service from 1st April. It should be noted Warwickshire and Solihull Blood Bikes transported approximately 1,000 samples a year 0.01% of the total received by CWPS. We are immensely grateful to the group for its hard work and support. The new contract runs until 2022. Sherif Salem, Archive Producer for Arrow Medias Britain In Colour for Smithsonian Channel, explains the process of combing the archives for new and surprising footage from Britains past. Britain In Colour is one of Arrow Medias most ambitious archive-only series a dream project for a footage researcher but also a pretty daunting challenge. With what seems like a profusion of archive documentaries around, how could we get hold of coverage that others simply hadnt found? The themes of the series are broad, complex and well-covered Royalty, Empire and Winston Churchill so we knew there was a lot to dig into. It was thrilling to start looking at early films, such as those from the end of the 19th century of Queen Victoria and the Boer War, and to stumble across more surprising moments like Churchill clowning around with Charlie Chaplin on set. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of material needed to cover fifty years of British history in each episode meant we needed to view a huge amount of footage in order to start to put an order to the episodes. With the final episodes due to be colourised, we needed to try and get hold of the original reels, as the colourising process works best with films scanned to the highest available resolution. But original reels can be elusive. The first step was to identify sources with significant quantities of original film. This meant reaching out to the key newsreel companies and institutional archives such as the Imperial War Museum and the BFI. Arrow Media has previously produced three series of America In Color and have a lot of experience creating archive-driven programming, so the team is encouraged to be proactive in meeting with the experts and archivists who take care of these film collections. We even travelled to the US National Archives (a rare escape from the usual desk-bound world of spreadsheets and download progress bars), bringing back some American perspective on significant British events including candid shots of President Roosevelt welcoming the King and Queen in Washington DC and US Army personnel filming VE Day in London. But the biggest challenge was finding stories that can be told compellingly without the aid of interview testimony, dramatic recreation or specialised photography. The archival imagery had to cover historic occasions, balancing both the iconic with the lesser known, while also capturing the personality of the key characters in the series. We achieved this by using as wide a range of sources as possible balancing newsreels and government films with home movies and films sponsored by local businesses. All the while, keeping in mind our colouriser newsreels shot on pristine 35mm by professionals tends to be easier to work with than mum and dads first go with a camera. Home movies, though, often provided the most memorable moments in the series. They can offer an unfamiliar view of familiar faces or capture life of ordinary citizens caught up in by the wider societal changes that we were hoping to reflect in each episode. For our episode on the British Empire we were grateful to be able to use some material from the incredible collection of the British Empire & Commonwealth Collection in Bristol. Filmed all around the world, their collection spans over 2,000 reels from the 1920s onwards, including rare glimpses of Gandhi in family films. Conor, the episodes story researcher, spent hours calling pubs, churches, shops and everywhere else with a phone to track down living relatives of some of the filmmakers. In a couple of cases, we were able to re-introduce the family to the archive, leading to valuable information on the context of the films and even a new donation of pictures. We are proud of what we have achieved with Britain in Colour. It is rewarding to think that diving into these rare films can help contribute to their preservation, and hopefully as more collections are digitised, interest in them can perpetuate that process and help safeguard them for future generations. Britain in Colour (3 x 60 min) for Smithsonian Channel, follows the hugely successful America in Color, now recognised as one of the networks most iconic shows. This ambitious new series will receive an exclusive world preview at MIPDoc on Saturday 6 April, from 1745 to 1830 in the Grand Theatre. Britain in Colour will premiere later this year on Smithsonian Channel in both the US and the UK. Share this story Channel 4 is now close to confirming the buildings it will move into for its new Leeds national HQ and Bristol creative hub The broadcaster is in advanced negotiations with Rushbond Group to lease space in their Majestic building in Leeds as its new National HQ. Channel 4 will lease over 25,000 square feet of space on the third, fourth and fifth floors of the building, which will be home to Channel 4 roles from across the organisation as well as a major hub for Channel 4 News. The Majestic sits at the heart of Leeds City Centre, overlooking the City Square and opposite Leeds Railway Station. Originally opened as a cinema, restaurant and ballroom in 1922 it is currently undergoing a major redevelopment by owners, Rushbond Group. The new National HQ in the Majestic will accommodate staff from a range of different departments, including the Managing Director, Nations & Regions, programme commissioners, the new Digital Creative Unit producing and commissioning content to reach audiences on digital and social platforms and staff across a variety of creative, digital, operational and supporting functions. Channel 4 News will also base their news hub in the building and will regularly co-anchor the award-winning programme from a new studio, which will be built within the space. The negotiations are being led by CBRE on behalf of Channel 4 and it is envisaged that Channel 4 will move in to the building in the second half of 2020. Ahead of moving into the Majestic, Channel 4 is agreeing terms with Bruntwood to lease space in the West Gate development on Grace Street in Leeds City Centre and will begin to move staff there from September this year. In the interim, Channel 4 will lease a smaller space in Bruntwoods Platform building in the City Centre from May. Channel 4 is also in advanced negotiations with developer Cubex to locate its new Creative Hub at Finzels Reach, Bristols new waterfront quarter. Channel 4 will lease 3,200 sq ft of space on the second floor of the Fermentation Buildings at Finzels Reach. Commissioning departments represented in the new Creative Hub in Bristol will include: Drama, Factual, Popular Factual as well as Creative Diversity, supporting on and off-screen diversity. It will also have additional supporting operational roles. Share this story Iran FM accuses US of 'economic terrorism' as flood-hit cities evacuated Tehran, April 1 (AFP) Apr 01, 2019 Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused the United States of impeding aid efforts and "economic terrorism" on Monday as authorities ordered the immediate evacuation of flood-stricken cities in western Iran. US sanctions are "impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedcrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods," Zarif tweeted, referring to search and rescue operations being conducted after huge rainfalls triggered vast flooding. "Blocked equipment includes relief choppers," the tweet read, adding that "this isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM." The evacuation was ordered after rivers burst their banks, dams overflowed and vast areas were cut off from communication. A chronic shortage of rescue helicopters in Iran, due to US sanctions, has forced the emergency services to request help from military helicopters and amphibious armoured personnel carriers to assist in the rescue operations. The authorities declared a "situation red", the highest level of alert, in Lorestan province with four or five cities "completely critical", state television news network IRINN reported from Khorramabad, the region's capital. "In Khorramabad the water has risen by as much as three metres (nearly 10 feet) in parts... and reports are coming in of regions... completely submerged with residents stranded on their rooftops," it added. The Red Crescent's provincial director, Sarem Rezaee, said his organisation had lost contact with much of the region. "Telephones are not working, our radio communications are down... at this moment we have no news of other cities and villages," he told IRINN, adding roads were flooded and helicopters were unable to take off due to the bad weather. "We have requested emergency help from neighbouring provinces but at the present no one can do anything." The airport in the western city of Khorramabad was flooded, with images showing water submerging the runway and cutting the province's main air link to the rest of the country. Authorities in Lorestan ordered evacuations in many regions, bringing in the armed forces to forcibly remove those who do not comply, local media reported. - 'Lost all contact' - The authorities said Pol-e-Dokhtar and Mamulan cities were already half submerged, with one fatality reported in Mamulan. Images on local media show water gushing through streets in Pol-e-Dokhtar where the water level had reached 1.5 metres (five feet). Every village in the vicinity of the two cities had been surrounded by flood waters while all five dams in Lorestan had reached capacity and four of them were overflowing. "We have lost all contact with Pol-e-Dokhtar," the Lorestan Governor General Mousa Khademi told the semi-official ISNA News Agency. "We do not have any information on the situation there... we do not know how many people have been affected by the floods," he added. Numerous rivers had burst their banks and landslides blocked many roads, said the reports. Media outlets showed images of collapsed bridges and oil and gas pipelines destroyed by the flood. The main railway line linking Tehran to the south of the country had also been blocked by the flood. This is the third major flood to hit Iran in the past two weeks with unprecedented rainfalls in the mostly arid country that had endured a decades-long drought until this year. The first occurred in the northeast of the country on March 19 and the second struck the west and southwest of Iran on March 25 with a combined toll of 45 people killed. The present flood has again struck in the west and southwest following heavy rain that is set to continue into Tuesday. Apart from Lorestan half a dozen other provinces are also facing critical circumstances, with the emergency services reporting 23 out of Iran's 31 provinces have been affected and could face floods. With the consecutive floods the reservoirs of many dams have reached full capacity forcing emergency discharge, as much as 1,800 cubic metres per second in some cases, to prevent them from breaking. In the past few days, there's been a lot of internet chatter about a person known as Dr. Sebi, who claimed to have the cure for HIV, herpes, and a number of other conditions. He died in 2016 and certainly had no known cure for HIV or anything else. But here's why his name is trending -- and here's what you need to know about him. Sebi's name surfaced in the wake of the online chatter about the violent and tragic murder of Nipsey Hussle (nee Ermias Asghedom). The 33-year-old Los Angelesbased hip-hop artist and entrepreneur was tragically shot to death in Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon, March 31. And instead of reflecting on his life and the nature of gun violence in America, we're now engrossed in a set of conspiracy theories about the reason Hussle was murdered -- and a nonexistent HIV cure is at the center of this conversation. Hussle seems to have been interested in the life and teaching of Alfredo Darrington Bowman, also known as "Dr. Sebi," a Honduran herbalist who claimed to have cures for HIV, herpes, and many other conditions. Sebi (I am going to drop the pretense of calling him "doctor," because he had no medical license) at various points lived in New York (and was essentially barred from operating in New York State in the late 1980s for making false claims about his various products) and Los Angeles (where he convinced celebrities including Michael Jackson -- whom he later sued for $380,000 -- that he had various cures and treatments) but had opened a center in a small village in Honduras. Sebi died in 2016 at 82 years old, due to pneumonia while in custody in Honduras -- which fueled conspiracy theories about the real nature of his death. Even The Root published a piece that bordered on accepting these theories. I hate to bring facts into this, but in 2013, 85% of all deaths due to the flu or pneumonia in the U.S. were among people over the age of 65. Sebi was 82. I first learned about Sebi when VH1 first aired The Last Days of Left Eye in 2007. Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes was in Honduras receiving a number of cleanses and detoxing processes administered by Sebi in the days before her fatal car accident there. In the documentary, she says that Sebi had the cure for HIV. I suspect this was one of the first claims about him that made its way to mainstream media. I don't recall VH1 ever providing any context or fact-checking Lopes' claims about Sebi. Nipsey Hussle and Sebi Hussle was another celebrity who was taken in by Sebi's promises. On the song, "Blue Laces 2," Hussle spits the lyric, "They killed Dr. Sebi, he was teaching health," and he told The Breakfast Club last year that he was working on a documentary about Sebi. "Dr. Sebi went to trial in New York because he put in the newspaper that he cured AIDS," Hussle said in the interview. "He beat the case. Then he went to federal court the next day, and he beat that case. But nobody talks about it." Sebi and his company were in fact brought to trial by New York City in 1988 and were found not guilty of "practicing medicine without a license" by a jury. But according to a New York Amsterdam News report, he was only found not guilty on the two counts because the state did not prove that he in fact had attempted to diagnose peoples' health conditions, which was key to breaking the law. He did not go to trial in federal court, but was taken to court by New York State in 1988 and avoided having to admit guilt by entering into a consent decree in which he agreed to not sell any products in the state making claims to cure diseases. He also agreed to publish new ads in the Amsterdam News offering refunds to former patients (he apparently charged $500 for the first visit and $80 for subsequent visits). Back to the present: On April 2, police released the name of a suspect in the shooting of Nipsey Hussle. But many fans of the rapper have concluded that the reason for his murder could have been that some conspirators -- the U.S. government, pharmaceutical companies -- are attempting to keep the HIV cure out of the public purview. Even actor/comedian Nick Cannon responded to Hussle's murder by suggesting on Instagram that he planned to finish the documentary on Sebi and posting several videos of Sebi in the hours following. The Danger of Quacks Dressed Up as Race Men It feels unseemly to me to have to deal with HIV conspiracy theories in the midst of what should be a conversation about the persistence of gun violence in America -- in this case not a mass shooting, but the death of a young and talented black man on the streets of another American city. There are so many issues here, but Sebi and false HIV cures shouldn't be one of them. But since Hussle to some extent left us to deal with this issue, it has to be addressed -- and here's what I think about Sebi and his cure in a few certain terms. First, Sebi was playing on the desperation of a lot of desperate people in the United States, particularly at a moment when mortality was high, stigma was higher, and there were no effective therapies for HIV. If he really had a cure, and had effectively cured people for nearly 30 years, why did he never produce a single documented case for others to replicate? For people who believe that pharmaceutical interests had him (and maybe Hussle) taken out, why don't they have the cure now? I often hear from people that "keeping people on therapy is more lucrative than curing people," but in 2014, U.S. taxpayer money helped bring about the first widely beneficial cures for hepatitis C, and Gilead Sciences, the company to first bring this cure to market, generated $50 billion in sales in the first three years. It sounds like there's a lot of money to be made in cures. And this is a fact many activists and patients are mad as hell about. Second, if Sebi was so interested in the health and wellness of black people globally, why didn't he make his supposed cure available more widely? TheBody contributor Stephen Hicks put it best on Twitter: "Millions of black people have died from AIDS complications, globally. If Dr. Sebi really had the cure, lived to be 83 years old, and saw millions of black people die w/o attempting to give them said cure, he's no hero." What is ultimately the saddest in all of this is that there are real people living with HIV in this country who wake up every day and fight for their lives. They fight against stigma in their homes and communities. They fight against stigma in the media. They fight to be heard and seen by their doctors and other providers. They fight their elected officials. They fight their insurance companies. They even fight pharma companies for better access to affordable medications. And there are those of us, who continue to work to support people living with HIV too, who know something about this epidemic -- and yet all it takes is one quack to claim some "wholistic African cures" to get far more credibility in the eyes of many than the vast majority of people who live this every day. That isn't to say people living with HIV can't be drawn into many of these conspiracy theories of cures, because I've seen and heard that, too. This planned documentary by Hussle/Cannon sounds like it won't be a full, true accounting, but full of more myths that delight and affirm some people's ideas about health and medicine. There is real racism in biomedical research, health care, and public health systems to deal with. And much of it is infuriating -- and costs an uncounted number of lives. And we need more black people to work with us to transform systems, not believe in false prophets. The truth is often stranger than fiction. You don't need hidden conspiracies when you have public policy. Most of the racism and deprivation of much-needed treatment and care is in plain sight. But I invite people really interested in curing HIV to listen to the people who live it. Stay on the top of all the latest markets movements! Subscribe to The Bull free weekly newsletter to receive our best tips, offers and promotion... SUBSCRIBE label In addition to the fact that limousine travel is very glamorous, it is also the most comfortable trip you can... 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 Welcome to followthemedia.com The article or material you have chosen... Michael Hedges April 2, 2019 - Observers of journalism and the news media are peering into past for solutions for the future. Local news has become a rallying cry for the salvation of the news media. Nostalgia plays a large part in this. Local newspapers and, not to forget, local radio stations remain an anchor in the memory hole. Local News Ecology Dry And Barren Filled With PreditorsMichael Hedges April 2, 2019 - Follow on Twitter Observers of journalism and the news media are peering into past for solutions for the future. Local news has become a rallying cry for the salvation of the news media. Nostalgia plays a large part in this. Local newspapers and, not to forget, local radio stations remain an anchor in the memory hole. ...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. : 1 - 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. All the fun of having a faithful hound or whatever, just without the mess. Recover your password. A password will be e-mailed to you. By Trend The next meeting of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea will be held in Nur-Sultan, Trend reports via Kazakh media. "The second meeting of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea will be held on April 16-17 in Nur-Sultan. All parties have confirmed their participation," Aibek Smadiyarov, Spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of Kazakhstan, told reporters. The first meeting of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea was held on February 19-20 in Baku. It was attended by delegations from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan. At the meeting, the parties adopted the Rules Of Procedure of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea and exchanged views on the implementation of the agreements reached at the 5th Caspian Summit. First Bahrain Real Estate Development Company, the developer of the kingdom's premium El Mercado Village project, has renewed its support as Gold Category sponsor for the upcoming Gulf Property Show in Manama. The Northern Gulfs Window to Real Estate, the Gulf Property Show will run from April 23 to 25 under the patronage of HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bahrain at the Bahrain Exhibition Centre, said the organisers Hilal Conferences and Exhibitions (HCE). On the expo's significance, First Bahrains CEO Omar Faysal Altemiemy said: "The Gulf Property Show is our first choice to promote our projects. The show has delivered tangible commercial and sales success for our projects and we are positive that we will be meeting more future home owners of El Mercado Village this year as well." El Mercado Village is a beautiful mixed-use community in Janabiya, located next to an upscale neighbourhood market. It consists of 42 premium homes, which include 8 four-bedroom standalone villas and 34 three-bedroom semi-detached villas. These homes are designed to offer modern amenities with a classic touch conveniently located on a quiet street just off Avenue 27, offering a direct ride home from Manama in the evenings or the quickest morning commute to Saudi Arabia of any villa in the country. The outdoor retail centre is anchored by an Alosra supermarket which features a range of cafes, shops and services to meet the needs of the surrounding community, said the statement from HCE. Of these unit, more than 40 per cent have been snapped up by investors. The remainder are ready for immediate occupancy and title deed transfer on conclusion of a sale, and most importantly, they will be having a special offer for buyers who conclude an agreement during the show, it stated. Al Temiemy said: "In addition to our homes for sale, we anticipate making a major announcement during the week of the show regarding our next project in Seef We are very excited about the opportunities which lie ahead." First Bahrain Real Estate creates enduring value for all stakeholders with demand-driven investment approach, operating out of Bahrain and Kuwait, strategically positioning themselves to execute projects across the GCC in compliance with Islamic Shariah, he added. HCE Managing Director Jubran Abdulrahman said: "First Bahrain have established a reputation as on one of the kingdoms major developers, by setting a high standard in delivering mixed used - residential, commercial, and industrial - property developments in Bahrain." "The Gulf Property Show highlights present and future developments in Bahrain and the Northern Gulf, providing the opportunity to promote Bahrains property assets as well as regional and international opportunities for investors in commercial and residential real estate," he added. The Gulf Property Show also carries with it the strategic organizational support of the Real Estate Regulatory Authority of Bahrain (Rera), Survey and Land Regulatory Bureau (SLRB) Urban Planning and Development Authority of Bahrain and Bahrain Property Developers Association (BaPDA).-TradeArabia News Service Golden Gate Developers, a joint venture between Kooheji Golden Gate and Indian real estate groups Ajmera Realty Group and Mayfair Housing, said it had received an overwhelming response from F1 visitors for its unique real estate project, Golden Gate, at its stand in City Centre Bahrain during the gala event. The 140,000-sq-m project, located in the heart of Bahrain Bay, consists of 746 apartments spread over two residential towers of 53 floors and 45 floors. The property is further equipped with seven floors of parking to accommodate 999 parking spaces, said the developer. Golden Gate vice president (marketing and sales) Eman Al Mannai said its special team has been introducing visitors to the numerous features and benefits of the project, while responding to visitors inquiries and completing the required booking process. "We are pleased to have the participation of our beloved kingdom in hosting the F1 race and are proud to be introducing a unique opportunity for the investors to invest in Bahrain's Golden Gate," remarked Al Mannai. "We are very much satisfied with the interest shown by the local and foreign investors in the project and their queries on owning one or more apartments in this project for the purpose of housing, leasing or resale," she stated. According to her, the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (Rera) has had a great impact in supporting the real estate sector by restoring confidence in the investors. Issuing the Golden Gate project, a licence approved by Rera has helped in giving reassurance and trust for investors towards the owners and the project. Al Mannai also thanked the Bahrain government for its continuous efforts in decreeing laws and regulations that would create a healthy investment environment. "Our team has also effectively introduced visitors to the kingdom to freehold projects which allow various nationalities to obtain residence in Bahrain when investing in the project," she added. According to her, the visitors at the City Centre Bahrain stand were particularly impressed with the unique design of the project, which reflects the commercial and cultural partnership between Bahrain and India. "The Golden Gate project is the embodiment of uniqueness and is an architectural masterpiece, drawing inspiration from Bahrain with its sails and gold, and Indian jewels at the top and bottom of the towers," she added.-TradeArabia News Service Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) welcomed a high-level delegation from International Bechtel Company (Bechtel), the engineering, procurement, and construction management (EPCM) contractor for the Line 6 Expansion Project on Sunday (March 31). Albas chief executive officer Tim Murray, deputy chief executive officer Ali Al Baqali, chief operations officer Dr Abdulla Habib, and director of Line 6 smelter project and engineering Shawqi Al Hashimi received the Bechtel delegation comprising the chairman and chief executive officer Brendan Bechtel, president and chief operating officer Jack Futcher, project director and principal vice president Denis Garrity, along with other senior officials from Bechtel. Commenting on this occasion, Albas chairman Shaikh Daij Bin Salman Bin Daij Al Khalifa said: We are pleased with the fast-paced progress of our landmark Line 6 Expansion Project. I thank our EPCM contractor Bechtel for embracing Extreme Ownership and for expediting the safe and early commissioning of Potline 6 on December 13, 2018. We also look forward to accelerating the delivery of Potline 6 ahead of its schedule in Q3 2019. Brendan Bechtel said: We are proud of this unique opportunity to be part of the Alba Line 6, which once completed, will be part of the worlds largest single-site smelters. It was a pleasure to witness its construction progress. We look forward to continuing our commitment and deliver Line 6 safely. The Bechtel delegation was given a guided tour of the Line 6 Expansion Project site, carbon and casthouse areas. TradeArabia News Service Business France, the national agency supporting the international development of the French economy, is organising the first French Tech Tour United Arab Emirates in partnership with French Tech Dubai UAE. The tour is taking place from April 1 to 3. Amadeus, leader in travel solutions that shape the future of travel, is the official partner of this tour, said a statement. A real technological road show and three-day commercial accelerator between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, this meeting will take place on the sidelines of the Future Technology Week. The French Tech Tour will feature B2B exchanges between five innovative French companies and the major tech incubators in the UAE such as Dubai Technology Entrepreneur Campus (Dtec) and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) or investment funds, it said. The five French startups that specialise in the fields of Blockchain, Open Innovation, Fintechs, data exchanges, or the IoT were selected in advance for their technical skills and potential, it added. In Dubai, participants will be able to visit the trade fairs of the Future Technology Week 2019 , www.futuretechweek.com, which are the unmissable trade fairs for Blockchain, cyber security and IOT technologies in the Near and Middle East, around the main theme of "Igniting Innovation". They include the main players in the sector with more than 12,000 visitors and 170 exhibitors last year. The UAE is pursuing one of the most ambitious digital transformation programs ever undertaken to make the country's major cities the "Smartest" in the world. The main advantage of the French Tech Tour is to present French expertise to the region's leaders and investors and to enable participants to enter these dynamic opportunity-rich markets or to increase their presence. In addition, a networking event was planned on April 1 in Dubai to allow these startups to exchange ideas and develop special contacts with local operators, it stated. TradeArabia News Service Ebrahim K Kanoo, the sole distributor of Toyota vehicles in Bahrain, has revealed a new-generation Hiace van and minibus range with advanced safety features, powerful new engines, increased ride comfort, and a host of new specifications. Featuring a semi-bonnet design that enhances reliability, toughness, and functional beauty, and offering a wider choice of body sizes and wheelbase lengths, the all-new Hiace is set to be the highlight of Bahrains light commercial vehicle (LCV) market, the company said. "The Hiace was developed using the keywords Hiace Pride as its foundation, and in line with the concept of being a faithful partner that makes people feel safe, satisfied, and proud. Owners, drivers, and passengers know they are in good hands when they own, drive, and ride in a Hiace," commented chief engineer Takuo Ishikawa, who was at the helm of the all-new vehicles development. Since the launch of the first-generation Hiace in 1967, it has become one of Toyota's representative global vehicles, with more than 6.24 million units sold in over 150 countries. The Hiace demonstrates prowess through its high durability and reliability, and has been used as a van, minibus, and as private transportation. Currently, it is largely sold in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania, Mexico, and Latin America. Senior manager of Toyota Marketing at Ebrahim K Kanoo, Ayman Shehadeh said: Ebrahim K Kanoo and Toyota always have our customers peace of mind at the top of our priorities. The Toyota Hiace has always been the preferred choice for van and bus operators in Bahrain due to its safety and reliability and we expect this new version to be even more popular than ever. The new Hiace promises a holistic solution for seamless and cost-effective transportation of passengers and cargo, and can also be customized to fit the exact needs of any customer. The shift to a semi-bonneted design has enabled the development team at Toyota to implement significant changes, which include a stiffer frame, stronger straight-line performance, greater stability and manoeuvrability, and more flexible suspension. Complementing the all-new vehicles enhanced reliability, toughness, and functional beauty is a dynamic driving experience powered by two new engines a 2.8-litre four-cylinder diesel engine and a 3.5-litre V6 naturally-aspirated petrol engine, with both being offered with a six-speed manual or automatic transmission. Aiming to enrich the customers experience, the all-new Hiace has been revamped inside-out with the objective of addressing two goals. The first is to create a vehicle that increases productivity, and the second is to provide safe, comfortable, and reliable transport for people everywhere. The vehicles spacious cabin space is built for maximised storage, with added features elevating the ownership experience to an unprecedented degree. The sixth-generation Hiace has also adopted a number of improvements for easier ingress and egress. There is noticeably bigger legroom, providing an enhanced riding experience enabled by wider doorsteps, strategically-positioned assist grips, and illuminated entry system. Living up to the Toyota tradition of always making safety a top priority, the sixth-generation Hiace gives its customers peace of mind by reinforcing both passive and active safety. Engineered to relieve the commuting burden from its drivers and passengers, the vehicles design cues are inspired by real-world problems to provide modern solutions. In addition to high-level body rigidity achieved through ring-shaped frame structures, the vehicle is characterized by an impact-absorbing body structure that leverages a straight side member to effectively absorb impact energy. The comprehensive array of safety features in the vehicle also include driver and front passenger SRS airbags, and a passenger airbag with a mini-clamshell design to protect centre seat passenger. TradeArabia News Service Arrivals from the Middle East to Egypt are expected to increase 50 per cent from 1.49 million in 2018 to 2.23 million in 2022 with visitors from Saudi Arabia driving this growth, according to data published ahead of Arabian Travel Market 2019, which takes place at Dubai World Trade Centre from April 28 May 1. While arrivals from Europe are expected to be the largest contributor on a regional basis, increasing from 6.2 million in 2018 to 9.1 million tourists in 2022, the latest research from Colliers International revealed arrivals from the Middle East will actually witness the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 11 per cent. Danielle Curtis, exhibition director ME, Arabian Travel Market, said: Over the last 12 months, Egypts tourism industry has witnessed healthy and steady growth, with arrivals up 14.5 per cent from 8.3 million in 2017 to 9.5 million in 2018. Growth has been fuelled by the cheaper Egyptian Pound and government incentives for charter airlines operating international flights. Adding to this, we are witnessing this growth first hand at ATM with the total number of attendees coming from Egypt increasing 16 per cent year-on-year. Taking advantage of this resurgence in tourists are some of Egypts most prominent tourism companies including Dana Tours, Nicolas Tours and Standard Tours who will exhibit at ATM 2019 and of course the Egyptian Tourism Promotion Board who will have a major presence too. Egypt tourism capital investment is estimated to reach $4.2 billion in 2019, up 25 per cent on 2018, as the country strives to keep pace with an ongoing leisure travel boom and GDP growth. The data from Colliers revealed that Egypts total tourism revenue will increase at a CAGR of 16.5 per cent between 2018 and 2022 outperforming the business segment. During 2017 and 2018, the leisure spend was $13.79 billion and $16.67 billion respectively, while business totalled $1.93 billion and $2.36 billion over the same period. The overall revenue generated by the leisure segment in 2018 represented 87 per cent of total tourism spend and we expect this growth to continue as a series of new government and private sector attractions and investments are unveiled including the development of new airports and new luxury hotel resorts in Red Sea destinations Sharm El Sheikh and Hurghada, Curtis said. Egypt has a diverse range of source markets decreasing the risk of being over-reliant on one specific market. Germany, Russia, the UK and Italy are Egypts top four source markets, with the first and last in top gear both growing 29 per cent in 2018 and showing the highest CAGR growth of 11 per cent. The UK, which recorded just a 4 per cent increase in arrivals between 2017 and 2018, has traditionally been a long-standing major source market for the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh. However, an ongoing ban on direct flights between the two destinations has stifled visitor numbers. Curtis added: It is hoped the recent resumption of Serbian flights to Sharm El Sheikh after a six-year absence and the introduction of Turkish Airlines daily flight from Moscow to the Red Sea via Istanbul, will kick-start direct flights between the UK and Egypt, and of course Russia and Egypt. ATM, considered by industry professionals as a barometer for the Middle East and North Africa tourism sector, welcomed over 39,000 people to its 2018 event, showcasing the largest exhibition in the history of the show, with hotels comprising 20 per cent of the floor area. Brand new for this years show will be the launch of Arabian Travel Week, an umbrella brand comprising four co-located shows including ATM 2019, ILTM Arabia, Connect Middle East, India & Africa a new route development forum and new consumer-led event ATM Holiday Shopper. Arabian Travel Week will take place at Dubai World Trade Centre from April 27 May 1. - TradeArabia News Service The Global Aviation Summit 2019, organised by the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA), kicked off at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh on April 1, said a report. Held under the patronage of King Salman, the event was attended by 15 ministers of transport and 140 presidents and directors general of civil aviation authorities, high-level government representatives and experts in international and regional organisations, said a report in Saudi Press Agency. In a speech on behalf of King Salman, Minister of Transport and chairman of the GACA Board of Directors, Dr Nabil bin Mohammed AlAmoudi said Saudi Arabia is proud to host and organise the event in cooperation with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). He added that the Royal patronage of this conference came from the belief of the importance of air transport industry at the global level, the report said. Also speaking at the event, ICAO president Dr Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu expressed his gratitude to King Salman for his patronage of the conference and to Saudi Arabia for hosting the Regional Safety Oversight Organization for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA-RSOO). Following that, three air service agreements were signed between Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Cyprus, the Republic of Chad and Georgia. An air service agreement was also signed with Argentina after the inauguration of an exhibition accompanying the conference. ON THE MOVE: Instinet Snags Wong; Liquidnet Loses Reilly Instinet announced the appointment of David Wong as a Managing Director and a lead analyst in the U.S. Technology, Internet, Media & Telecom (TIMT) group, focused on Semiconductor stocks. Based in New York, Wong joins Instinet from Wells Fargo Securities, where he served as the lead analyst in Semiconductors for 15 years. He previously held similar roles in equity research on the buy side at State Street and on the sell side at PaineWebber/UBS. Tim Reilly, Head of New York Sales and Canadian Equities at Liquidnet has left the firm. Reilly is the second senior executive to leave Liquidnet this year. Brennan Warble, Head of Liquidnet in the Americas, exited in January 2019. If you have a new job or promotion to report, let me know at jdantona@marketsmedia.com Supervisory Board of Deutsche Borse AG has proposed two new shareholder representatives for the company's control committee. The new members are Charles Stonehill who will succeed Richard Berliand and Clara-Christina Streit who replaces Ann-Kristin Achleitner. Supervisory Board of Deutsche Borse AG has proposed two new shareholder representatives for the company's control committee. The new members are Charles Stonehill who will succeed Richard Berliand and Clara-Christina Streit who replaces Ann-Kristin Achleitner. The Investment Association announce the appointment of three industry leaders to its Board of Directors: Keith Skeoch, Co-CEO of @SLA_plc; Patrick Thomson, CEO for EMEA for J.P. Morgan Asset Management; and Philippe dOrgeval, Head of @AXAIM in the UK. MUFG Investor Services, the global asset servicing arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, has appointed Bruno Bagnouls as Managing Director and Head of Private Equity and Real Assets of Mitsubishi UFJ Investor Services & Banking Luxembourg S.A. Bagnouls will oversee private equity and real assets for Mitsubishi UFJ Investor Services & Banking Luxembourg S.A. He joins MUFG Investor Services from TMF Group, where he was the Group Head of Private Equity and Real Estate and a Managing Director of TMF Luxembourg for four years. He has over 20 years of experience with leading fund and corporate services providers, including Alter Domus and Natixis Bank. Amun AG, a Swiss fintech aiming to facilitate access to crypto-asset investments added new broad members Adam Draper, Founder of Boost VC, Graham Tuckwell, Founder of ETFS Capital, Greg Kidd, Co-Founder Hard Yaka as well as four family offices. XTX Markets appointed Serge Harry as Chairman of the Board of XTX Markets SAS and of Geoffrey Damien as Managing Director, Head of France. Harry has over 30 years of experience in financial markets in various senior executive positions at the London Stock Exchange Group, New York Stock Exchange, Euronext and Euroclear. He also currently holds directorships, as a Non-Executive Director of LCH SA, MTS France and Curve Global. Damien came from Euronext where he was Head of Product Development and Projects and Head of Retail Execution. 1 2 next For more information on related topics, visit the following channels: UW Researcher Part of Team that Modeled Cocaine Trafficking Response to Counternarcotic Efforts Zoe Pearson, an assistant professor in UWs School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies, travels by dugout canoe along a river in the remote Mosquitia region of Honduras during 2011 for research on cocaine trafficking through Central America. Pearson contributed to a recent study that created a computer model called NarcoLogic. The computer model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool to assess drug interception. (Sara Santiago Photo) For five decades, the U.S. governments mission to intercept or seize cocaine and other drugs entering the United States originating from South America and going through Central America on the way to Mexico has been largely ineffective, and the volume of drugs coming into the United States continues to rise. According to a University of Wyoming researcher, thats because the focus of law enforcement agencies to identify transportation routes for drugs and seize them caused a ripple effect of drug trade organizations and cartels looking for new points of entry in a game of cat and mouse. This, in turn, created an unintended spread and fragmentation of existing trafficking routes, leaving in its wake widespread collateral damage, including corruption, violence, deforestation, displacement of communities and laundering of drug profits through other types of businesses, including cattle ranching. Zoe Pearson, an assistant professor in UWs School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies, was part of a research group that created a computer model called NarcoLogic. The computer model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool to assess different cocaine interception scenarios and predict how drug smugglers react to attempts by authorities to intercept their narcotics. Development of the model relied on multiple theories, empirical studies, media reports and several of the authors own years of field research in the region, she says. Interdiction (intercepting), in and of itself, is always going to be problematic. We need a new approach to drug policy, Pearson says. We obviously care about the health consequences of drug abuse. We would hope to see new policies address the ill effects of drugs on some peoples health, and policies that wouldnt cause collateral damage across the hemisphere. Pearson was a co-author of a paper, titled Modeling Cocaine Traffickers and Counterdrug Interdiction Forces as a Complex Adaptive System, that was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The journal is one of the world's most prestigious multidisciplinary scientific serials, with coverage spanning the biological, physical and social sciences. Nicholas Magliocca, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Alabama, was the papers lead author. Other contributors to the paper were from Ohio State University, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, Texas State University, Oregon State University and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The model produced realistic predictions of where and when drug traffickers move in and around Central America in response to law enforcement intervention. The model demonstrated that narcotics trafficking is as widespread and difficult to eradicate as it is because of the interception and seizure of drugs. Additionally, the model showed increased seizure of drugs will continue to spread traffickers into new areas. The drug transit zone in the Western Hemisphere grew from 2 million square miles to 7 million square miles between 1996 and 2017, according to the paper. This has made it more difficult for law enforcement to track and disrupt drug trafficking networks, the paper says. Zoe Pearson traverses an area in Honduras that has been deforested by drug traffickers and used as an airstrip to transport narcotics. (Sara Santiago Photo) When major drug kingpins, such as Pablo Escobar and Joaquin Guzman Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, are killed or arrested, and taken out of play, this seems like progress -- at least on the surface. But, in reality, Pearson says such action creates the cockroach effect, in which other drug traffickers rise up to fill the leadership void. For eight years, Pearson has been part of a team of researchers looking at the environmental, social and political effects of drug trafficking policy in Central America. For nine years, she has been conducting research on drug control policies in Latin America more broadly. Her role in the new paper included contributing information we needed to create the model. It included some fieldwork I conducted in Honduras that would impact the model, and I added detail based on drug literature, Pearson says. As an Ohio State University graduate student working on her Ph.D. on drug policy in Bolivia, Pearson traveled to Honduras in 2011 with her faculty adviser, geography Professor Kendra McSweeney. Pearson recalls taking a two-day trip by canoe down a river in a remote area known as the Mosquitia region. There, the two came across an area that had been deforested to make way for an airstrip and learned that people had been displaced due to violence and drug traffickers running them off from where they lived. We saw so much deforestation, and one entire town was completely emptied out, Pearson recalls. Someone we met wanted to exchange dollars for Honduran bills. He had crisp U.S. $20 bills in the middle of nowhere. Pearson says money from drug profits is often laundered through cattle ranches and oil palm plantations -- both of which flourish on deforested land. We were very careful not to ask direct questions about drug trafficking, Pearson says of her time in Honduras. Additionally, the research team used data compiled by the Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB), which documents, over many years, cocaine movement through the Western Hemisphere. Outside of the government, we think were the first team to use this CCDB data, says Pearson, who has been at UW for three years. The work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Magliocca and McSweeney, another co-author of the paper, received additional funding from an NSF Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research Project. The researchers hope is that Congress and government agencies will review their paper and use it in creating future drug policy. We hope our research is being read by people with the potential to make policy change, Pearson says. Coral Conservation Corps summer program students venture on a sailing and snorkeling trip with Lyric Sails last year for the first time to learn about sailing knots, sails and working hands-on with the boat crew. At the invitation of General Administration of Customs of the Peoples Republic of China (GACC), the WCO participated in the inaugural ceremony of the WCO Asia-Pacific Regional Training Centre in Xiamen on 19 March, 2019. The Revised Memorandum of Understanding on the establishment of WCO Regional Training Center in the Peoples Republic of China was signed on 6th July 2017 between the WCO Secretary, General Mr. Kunio Mikuriya and Minister of GACC, Mr. Yu Guangzhou on the sidelines of the Council Sessions held in Brussels, Belgium. Recognizing the important role and the significant potential of the Peoples Republic of China in supporting the WCO in its efforts to provide assistance to WCO Members, besides the Shanghai Customs College, today the revised MOU also covers the Customs Training Centre in Xiamen which is another example of the value attached to regional WCO bodies. Vice Minister of GACC Mr. Wang Lingjun, representative of WCO Secretariat, local government officials and representative of BRICSs member country attended the inauguration ceremony. During the opening remarks, Vice Minister Mr.Wang Lingjun highlighted the importance of training in Customs work in general and pointed out that the Center will keep building up its capacity in line with international standards so as to rank among world-class customs training centers and provide excellent training services to the WCO Asia Pacific Region Members. Customs Training Centre in Xiamen will also be functioning as BRICS Customs Training Center (Xiamen). The World Customs Organization (WCO), with financial support from the Finland Project II for ESA, organized a National Workshop on Rules of Origin for Angola Customs. This Workshop was conducted in Luanda from 25 to 29 March 2019, and was attended by more than 40 officials from Angola Customs and several ministries and other agencies. Angola will join the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Free Trade Area in June 2019. Within the framework of this agreement, there is a wide range of possibilities for cumulation with other partner countries in order to strengthen regional integration between SADC Members. Topics discussed during the Workshop included the key concepts for proper origin determination, related operational and procedural issues, the establishment of an efficient organization and provision of effective training and private sector outreach. During the Workshop, the WCO facilitator presented the Revenue Package initiatives, including the Guidelines on Preferential Origin Verification and Origin Certification, which have been designed to assist WCO Members in bringing the provisions in Free Trade Agreements into smooth operation. Participants discussed specific areas of concern, including the lack of knowledge and use of the FTAs and challenges linked to administrative cooperation. Discussions also emphasized the importance of verifying the originating status of goods, rather than merely checking the authenticity of the Certificate of Origin. The knowledge and experience gained from the Workshop will assist the Administration in the correct application of Angolas Free Trade Agreements, in particular the SADC Agreement and will help Angola benefit from the regional economic integration and promote exports of originating products while ensuring a correct application of preferential treatments for importations The WCO, in cooperation with the Hungarian National Tax and Customs Authority (NTCA) and with the financial support of the Korea Customs Cooperation Fund (CCF Korea), organized a regional workshop on cross-border E-Commerce for the Europe region from 26 to 29 March 2019 at the Regional Training Centre in Budapest, Hungary. The workshop was aimed at assisting WCO Members of the Europe region with the implementation of the Framework of Standards on Cross-Border E-Commerce to build capacities for addressing the challenges presented by growing cross-border E-Commerce. In his opening speech, Mr. Csaba Torda, the Head of Hungarian Customs Department welcomed all participants and thanked the WCO and the CCF Korea for organizing this timely event on a very thematic topic of E-Commerce, for addressing associated challenges being faced by Customs administrations. Mr. Seunghwan Jeong from Korea Customs Service shared his thoughts from a donor perspective on the relevance of the topic of Cross-border E-commerce, underlining the importance of capacity building in this area. The workshop brought together more than 50 participants coming from 26 Member Customs administrations of the Europe region and the private sector. The WCO experts, supported by an expert from the European Commission, explained the Customs perspective on the Cross-border E-commerce and presented the different business models, global and regional trends and the key drivers/ requirements for its development. Industry experts shared business perspectives, elaborating potential opportunities for enhancing collaboration between Customs and E-Commerce stakeholders, as well as successful projects such as the establishment of a pre-arrival processing system in some countries of the region. After outlining the opportunities and challenges presented by the cross-border E-commerce for Customs administrations in the region, experts introduced the WCO Framework of Standards on Cross-Border E-Commerce and explained each of the Standards contained therein. The underlying intent and expectations stemming from various standards were discussed with a view to implementing the Framework in a harmonized and expeditious manner. The Experts elucidated different aspects of the Framework such as advance electronic data, risk management, and expedited shipments, and presented relevant WCO tools such as the Immediate Release Guidelines. Additionally, the workshop discussed several cross-cutting issues concerning security and safety and illicit trade in the E-Commerce environment, as well as cooperation mechanisms between Customs and postal operators with regard to establishing interconnectivity of Customs and postal IT systems and the exchange of electronic advance data for an effective risk management. In this context, related regulatory developments such as the EUs Union Customs Code (UCC) and the US STOP Act, and related requirements were noted. Furthermore, the participants gained deeper insight into different models of revenue collection on E-commerce shipments and associated issues such as valuation, classification and rules of origin. Members initiatives (e.g., Australia and the EU) and new regulations were provided. There was also a wide-ranging discussion on de minimis regimes that varied from one Member to another. Throughout the workshop, several Members shared their implementation experiences and initiatives/pilots within the context of various standards of the Framework under four broad themes: trade facilitation and simplification; risk management and control measures for curbing criminal exploitation of E-Commerce including safety and security threats; postal issues, and revenue collection. The presentations made by participants contributed to enhancing the understanding of practical aspects of the Framework of standards. The participants also had an opportunity to observe postal-Customs clearance process at the office of exchange of Hungarian Post. Going forward, the WCO will continue supporting Members in this area, based on their specific needs and requirements. On Friday 22 March 2019 in Cote dIvoire, the interconnectivity project launch meeting took place for the IT systems of the Customs administrations of the Member States of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The meeting, chaired by Cote dIvoire, was attended by the ECOWAS Commission, the Secretariat of the World Customs Organization (WCO), the WCO Vice-Chair for West and Central Africa, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the European Union, the World Bank, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), USAID and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The Customs IT system interconnectivity project is one of the actions undertaken by ECOWAS to improve the flow in the circulation of goods on the various road corridors of its regional area by making precise information available to Customs offices in digital form on cargoes in transit from one state to another. More precisely, it allows Customs offices in the country of departure of the transit consignment to send data about the consignment in real time to the Customs offices en route and the Customs office of destination. It also means that the Customs offices en route can inform the office of departure that the vehicle and goods have passed through and the office of destination can confirm the arrival of the vehicle and the acceptance of the cargo. This IT solution was specified by the Customs administrations concerned (in particular Cote dIvoire, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal), with the technical support of the WCO, UNCTAD, JICA and the Chambers of Commerce, and with the financial support of a range of partners, including ECOWAS, the European Union, the World Bank and GIZ. The technical solution was then developed by UNCTAD and a pool of IT experts from the region and integrated into UNCTADs ASYCUDA World software. It is now operational and in use for transit operations between Cote dIvoire and Burkina Faso, as well as, to some degree, between Togo and Burkina Faso. The Directors General of Customs of Cote dIvoire and Burkina Faso took advantage of the opportunity of the Abidjan meeting to sign a framework instruction on interconnectivity (see photo). According to the timetable presented at the Abidjan meeting, interconnectivity is to be rolled out by 2020 for the 15 ECOWAS Customs administrations, but it is the aspiration of the Customs administrations of the WCO West and Central Africa region that this solution should be deployed throughout the region, including in Central Africa. The WCO has undertaken to continue providing technical support to this initiative, which it sees as a priority issue for the region in order to contribute towards the mobilization and coordination of the partners and donors who, together, want to provide support for interconnectivity. Advertisement By Bill Hughes Apr. 01, 2019 | PADUCAH By Bill Hughes Apr. 01, 2019 | 09:18 PM | PADUCAH Two of Kentucky's four Democratic candidates for Governor were in Paducah Monday night, along with some others hoping to win statewide offices. McCracken County Democratic Party Executive Committee Chair Jennifer Smith welcomed those who gathered, and encouraged voter registration and participation in the electoral process before introducing Rocky Adkins and Geoff Young. Secretary of State candidates Jason Belcher and Geoff Sebesta also spoke to and interacted with voters. Commissioner of Agriculture candidate Joe Trigg also participated in the event. Adkins, the Minority Leader in the Kentucky House of Representatives, quickly outlined his experience as a teacher and how he was elected State Representative on his 26th birthday in 1986 to represent three rural eastern Kentucky counties. During his 32 years as a legislator he has crafted budgets as a member of the Appropriations and Revenue Committee, then served as majority leader, and more recently as minority leader, so Adkins says he's seen the legislative process from every angle. Adkins said, "It's given me the experience to understand how to make state government work for people across Kentucky, and it's given me that experience and proven leadership to hit the ground running on the first day when I walk into the Governor's office, and I look forward to providing that leadership in the future." While saying he has the ability to work across the aisle to reach compromise for the public good - when possible - but also said there are times when he must stand firm and refuse to bend. Using the phrase, "there's nothing right about it," several times, Adkins said he doesn't agree with the agenda of Republican Governor Matt Bevin in several areas, including privatizing public education or public pension plans. He said Bevin has, "created a crisis that's not there," over pensions, but refuses to acknowledge bipartisan reforms in 2013 that, "got pensions back on the right track to recovery." Adkins cited statistics showing Kentucky Retirement System growth of over $2.4 billion in two years and growth in the teacher retirement system, too - increases of more than 15 percent two years ago and over 18 percent last year. Adkins also claims Bevin's policies of right-to work and repealing prevailing wage laws have hurt Kentucky families and the economy. He said attempting to cut access to health care for 100,000 Kentuckians is wrong, too, causing some to have to work two jobs in order to afford health care for their families. He added that expansion of Medicaid was a good thing, and it positively affects the economies of cities like Paducah that have healthcare facilities. Infrastructure improvements are also a priority for Adkins. Roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, airports, and industrial parks are important, but Adkins said world-class broadband infrastructure is vital for the Commonwealth's future. "It is a must, and it's gonna happen. Yes I'm gonna fight for the jobs of today, we gotta prepare for the jobs of tomorrow," Adkins said. As a representative from rural eastern Kentucky, he said it's time for rural Kentucky to have a fighting chance, Adkins said the existing workforce, displaced coal-related workers, and those currently being educated need opportunities in the industrial manufacturing sector, and he'll work to bring them to rural areas while continuing to help existing plants in cities. Saying the Adkins ticket with attorney Stephanie Horne can win the primary, he added, "You gotta have someone who can bring those voters we've been losing. You're looking at the candidate that can win in November and beat Matt Bevin and send him home." Geoff Young the addressed the crowd, saying he's lived in Kentucky since 1982 and has and economics degree from MIT, a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Massachusetts, and an agricultural economics degree from UK. He worked in the state energy office in Frankfort for fifteen years, working to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies to the commonwealth. Since then, he's been a political activist, running for governor in 2015 and for the House of representatives in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018. His running mate is Josh French of Elizabethtown. Saying this ticket is the most progressive in the primary, Young's highest-priority issue is promotion of unions, saying "the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of union busting," which he says is immoral. Young said, "It pits individual workers against the entire political economic power of big corporations and big institutions. One individual doesn't have a chance when you're trying to negotiate against a corporation with a human resource department, all kinds of managers, a legal department. To have a playing field in the workplace that is that unbalanced is immoral." His second priority is the legalization of all kinds of cannabis for both medicinal and recreational purposes. Young says this will help treat the opioid crisis, additions and improve health in other ways, while also helping the state budget with tax revenue. Young also strongly supports Roe vs. Wade, and says it's time for Democrats to take the offensive instead of letting pro-life advocates call them, "baby killers." He cited information saying that in countries where abortion is illegal, the number of abortions increases along with more deaths to women having procedures. "So, we're having more abortions and more women dying if we follow the strategy of the right-to-life movement and the Republican Party. Planned Parenthood is the most effective abortion preventing, abortion reducing organization that exists," Young said. He also disagrees with Bevin's executive order that would cut off state contracts with any Kentucky company or individual that supports boycotts of Israel. Young says that's a violation of 1st Amendment rights, and it's discrimination against Palestinians and those who support them. Another major issue for Young is corruption, regardless of the political party. Saying he and Adkins are both honest Democrats who can beat Matt Bevin in November, Young claims that fellow candidates Adam Edelen and Andy Beshear are, "crooks." Young says Edelen and Beshear, along with leaders of the Kentucky Democratic Party, are rigging party elections by deciding ahead of time who the nominee will be. "I've been them in court for four years. Their position has been, 'we can rig any election we want.' They don't have to pay attention to the will of you, the voters. They can just rig the election and we have to suffer from it," Young said. He says when he ran for Governor in 2015, party leaders rigged the primary so Jack Conway would win, and Conway lost to Bevin. Young urged voters to support him, but ,"if you don't like me, vote for Rocky, because Edelen and Beshear are certain losers against Matt Bevin in November. Supporting one of those two crooks is going to lead to four more years of Matt Bevin." Judy Schwender of Paducah said she didn't come to support any single candidate for an office. She came to the meet-and-greet to learn more about candidates and see how relatable they are in person. Schwender said, "You know, you can go to websites and you can read position papers and all that, but you've got to see how they interact with people, because when they get on the floor, when they're working bills and things, that's what they have to do - they have to work with people." Lana Blish echoed that sentiment, and was curious about all of the candidates, especially those running for offices other than Governor. Blish said, "I came here to be informed. I think when you are face-to-face with a candidate you will get a better feel for how they feel about the issues and how they interact with people. So, I very much have not made up my mind and will be coming to other forums to hear. Particularly the down candidates, I was not informed at all about the down candidates and wanted to hear them." Email To : Multiple e-mail addresses must be separated with a comma character(maximum 200 characters) Email To is required. Your Full Name: (optional) Your Email Address: Your Email Address is required. Mayfield under dusk-to-dawn curfew; no volunteers requested at this time By West Kentucky Star Staff Feb. 13, 2020 | 06:37 AM | MARSHALL COUNTY The Marshall County Sheriff's Office is asking for the public's assistance in locating a missing person. Deputies say 21-year-old Olivia Montgomery, of the Olive area, was reported missing by family members. Police say Montgomery left her home and has apparently shut off her phone. Family members believe that Montgomery may possibly be headed to Tennessee with an unknown male. Anyone with information on Montgomery's whereabouts is asked to contact the Marshall County Sheriff's Office. Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with The Elders delegation, led by its chair, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 1, 2019. [Xinhua/Rao Aimin] President Xi Jinping on Monday met with The Elders delegation, led by its chair, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, in the Great Hall of the People. During their meeting, Xi said the world today was facing unprecedented changes, while the prospect of international cooperation, as well as solutions to global challenges and the future of human society were being thought on by more and more insightful people. "We advocate cultivating the awareness of a community with a shared future for humanity, and better building and caring our common home planet," Xi said, adding that every country bore a responsibility for the future of mankind. China is a major developing country, but it never evades its due international responsibilities. China seeks cooperation with win-win results and helps developing countries realize common progress during its own development process, he said. He said China had always pursued a right approach to justice and interests by putting justice before interests, and given selfless help to African countries when it was still very poor. The Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China is "for mutual benefit and win-win cooperation with all the countries," Xi said. At present, many countries have felt pressure and worries from the impact of unilateralism, but the voice of the international community in support of multilateralism has remained the dominant force. It is important to ensure that existing multilateral processes do not stall and what has been achieved is not reversed, Xi said, reiterating China's commitment in maintaining international nuclear non-proliferation regime and strengthening international cooperation on climate change and other multilateral agendas. "China always holds an open attitude towards the reform of multilateral institutions," Xi said, stressing that the reform should be discussed by all the relevant countries and accommodate the legitimate concerns of all parties in accordance with universally recognized rules, serving the common interests of majority countries. China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative is a major contribution to multilateralism and international cooperation, Xi stressed, adding that China and other participating countries have upheld the principle of consultation and collaboration for shared benefits in the past five years and created many new modes of cooperation. Xi stressed that major countries should shoulder special responsibilities as the relations between major countries concern global strategic stability. China has been committed to promoting coordination between major countries and looked forward to harmony among major countries, with no conflict or confrontation but mutual respect and win-win cooperation, Xi said. Calling China-U.S. ties one of the most important bilateral ties in the world, Xi said he hoped the United States could meet China halfway, manage differences and expand cooperation and jointly promote China-U.S. relations based on coordination, cooperation and stability so as to provide more stable and expectable factors to the world. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Xi said it was Chinese people's choice to adhere to the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The CPC has led the Chinese people in tireless struggle and scored remarkable achievements in many areas, said Xi, adding that China had kept improving its development path and made unremitting efforts towards the "two centennial goals." "China running its own affairs well is in itself a contribution to the world," President Xi said. Mary Robinson, chair of The Elders and former president of Ireland, Ban Ki-moon, co-deputy chair, former Secretary-General of the United Nations and chairman of the Boao Forum for Asia, as well as former President of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo also spoke on behalf of The Elders. They congratulated on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the PRC and the success China had achieved in economic and social development, and spoke highly of the country's efforts made in environmental protection, poverty eradication and the work on ethnic minorities. China has played a responsible and constructive role at a crucial moment when multilateralism is faced with challenges, they said, adding that China had always adhered to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and taken part in the cause of peace and development in Africa. Saying that Xi's speeches on international occasions had sent positive messages, they called on countries to uphold the multilateral system with the United Nations at its core and enhance multilateral cooperation in areas of international and regional stability and climate change. The Elders, initiated by former South African President Nelson Mandela in 2007, is an international non-governmental organization consisting of former leaders of countries and important international organizations. Its goal is to promote the resolution of conflict via dialogue and work on solutions for global problems such as poverty and disease. Earlier Monday, Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, also met the delegation. Yang Jiechi (2nd R), a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, meets with The Elders delegation, led by its chair, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, in Beijing, capital of China, April 1, 2019. [Xinhua/Zhang Ling] (Source: Xinhua) Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 1, 2019. [Xinhua/Rao Aimin] Chinese President Xi Jinping met with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in Beijing Monday. They agreed to continuously enrich the China-New Zealand comprehensive strategic partnership based on the principles of mutual trust and mutual benefit. During their meeting at the Great Hall of the People, Xi first expressed sincere condolences to New Zealand for the deadly shootings in Christchurch two weeks ago, saying that Ardern's visit to China at a moment that her country was facing a special important agenda showed the great importance she and the New Zealand government attached to bilateral ties. China has always viewed New Zealand as a sincere friend and partner, Xi said, adding that China-New Zealand ties, established 47 years ago, had always been at the forefront among relationships between China and Western countries. He called on both countries to continue to deepen the bilateral comprehensive strategic partnership based on the principles of mutual trust and mutual benefit. China stands ready to work with New Zealand to maintain the bilateral ties as a "front-runner" in relations between China and Western countries, Xi said. Under the new circumstances, the two countries need to further deepen mutual understanding and trust and respect each other's core interests and major concerns in the spirit of openness, inclusiveness and seeking common grounds while reserving differences, he said. Xi called on both sides to expand substantial cooperation. China will support capable enterprises to invest in New Zealand, while New Zealand needs to provide a fair, just and unbiased business environment for Chinese enterprises, he said. He also called for the speeding up of negotiations on the upgrade of the bilateral free trade agreement. China welcomes New Zealand to participate in the Belt and Road construction, Xi said, encouraging both countries to enhance cooperation in international affairs, jointly strive for an open world economy and uphold multilateralism and multilateral trading. China attaches importance to climate change and is willing to work with New Zealand to promote the sustainable development of Pacific island countries, the president said. He also encouraged both countries to enhance exchanges in areas including education, culture, youth and science and technology, and to host a successful China-New Zealand Year of Tourism in 2019. Ardern thanked Xi for extending condolences over the deadly shooting incident, and expressed condolences for the loss of life in a chemical plant blast in Jiangsu Province in late March. Noting the long history of friendship between New Zealand and China, Ardern said her country attached great importance to ties with China and was proud that the country led in many areas in developing ties with China. Ardern said she agreed with Xi's comments on the relations between the two countries, and looked forward to strengthening the New Zealand-China comprehensive strategic partnership and deepening bilateral economic and trade cooperation and people-to-people exchanges after this visit. She reiterated New Zealand's adherence to the one-China policy. New Zealand pursues an independent foreign policy and firmly supports multilateralism and free trade, Ardern said, adding that the country had long supported the Belt and Road Initiative and participated in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. She said New Zealand would send a high-level delegation to the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation to be held later this month in Beijing. New Zealand is ready to enhance cooperation and coordination with China on major international issues including climate change, the prime minister said. Ardern arrived in Beijing on Sunday for a two-day visit to China. This is her first official visit to China since becoming New Zealand's prime minister in October 2017. (Source: Xinhua) Henblas Street developers bid to reduce affordable housing contribution rejected This article is old - Published: Tuesday, Apr 2nd, 2019 Developers building more than 50 apartments in the town centre have lost in their bid to reduce their contribution towards affordable housing after being accused of misleading politicians. Angry councillors said they wanted to take a stand after the Mandale Group, which is now working to create living space above shops on Henblas Square, attempted to get out of an already agreed condition. Permission for the 55 town centre flats was granted in November as long as the Mandale Group provided a sum of around 300,000 towards the cost of affordable housing elsewhere in the county borough. Members of Wrexham Councils planning committee delayed the application to lessen the amount to just under 29,000 at a meeting in February after asking for clarification of the numbers. It was heard for a second time on Monday afternoon as the firm reasserted that the original requirement would render the development unviable. However, councillors raised strong objections after questioning the figures put before them. Cllr Marc Jones, who represents the Grosvenor ward in which the apartments would stand, said: I feel weve been misled into granting planning permission in the first place. I question whether we as a council are standing up to developers sufficiently. If the viability can be moved like a set of goalposts so easily, it does concern me that were being sold a pup basically. I have to say Ive lost a lot of faith in any stats put in front of me after this experience. I cant support this and I think we have to make a stand here because otherwise theres a precedent. The development now faces an uncertain future with building work already well underway, but no longer having permission. A revised viability appraisal put forward by the company showed a profit of just over 250,000 if the changes were allowed. Council officers had recommended the lesser contribution for approval after highlighting that profit levels were an important consideration. Earlier in the meeting they warned the authority was unlikely to win if there was an appeal against the decision taken by councillors. Nevertheless, the majority chose to vote in favour of an alternative proposal put forward by Cllr Paul Pemberton to reject it. Cllr Pemberton told the meeting: Whether were been misled or lied to I dont know, but its naughty. I think in this particular situation if the inspector rules a different way to what Im going to vote for, then thats all well and good. Im not happy with it and Im going to be consistent by voting against it. He was supported by Cllr Graham Rogers, who said despite the urgent need to transform the town, the council should not give in to developers over agreed conditions. He told colleagues: I firmly believe as an individual that weve been blackmailed. The town definitely needs regeneration and we cant argue with that because Wrexhams in a mess, but I firmly believe that if we agree with whats being put forward tonight it will come and bite us. Come Hell or high water I will not be supporting this. By Liam Randall BBC Local Democracy Reporter (more here on the LDR scheme). (Click for large) Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-01 18:44:56|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close JAKARTA, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Monday launched three special economic zones (SEZs) situated in strategic business areas in an effort to lure more investment and accelerate economic growth in the territory. The SEZs are situated alongside the shipping lines for international trade and a pathway for the migration of tuna, providing abundant raw material for fishing industry, a statement from the chief economic minister Darmin Nasution revealed here. The three special economic zones which are located in 2,200 hectares of land is expected to lure 110 trillion rupiah (about 7.7. billion U.S. dollars) investment and create 120,000 new jobs by 2025. "We hope that the existence of the SEZs will expand manufacturing and other industries, and accordingly we will no longer export raw materials...," President Widodo said in the statement during the launch ceremony in Manado of North Sulawesi province. The zones are located in the province of East Kalimantan, North Sulawesi and North Maluku in central and eastern parts of the country. Under the SEZs status, the government will provide preferential treatment for investors, including removing export duties for producing exported products, easier land and employment regulations. By far, a combined 5.24 trillion rupiah (about 3.67 billion U.S. dollars) investment commitment has been pledged by investors. The Indonesian government has been trying to speed up economic growth in recent years, and subdued foreign direct investment during the weakening global economy has edged off demands of Indonesia's exported products and prompted capital outflows which led the central bank to end economic stimulus. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-01 21:51:21|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close PHNOM PENH, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen said on Monday that he has allowed tycoon Kith Meng's Royal Railway (Cambodia) to continue operating the country's railways until there is a new agreement. "When a new agreement has not been made, tycoon Kith Meng's Royal Railway still continues managing the operation of the railways," he said in a speech during a university graduation ceremony here. "Now, we are seeking other companies to invest in it so as to make the investment capital become bigger," the prime minister said. He added that the Royal Railway is still one of the shareholders when there are new investors in the country's railway project. "Our goal is to reform and to modernize our railway transport system," Hun Sen said. The prime minister's remarks came after he announced on Friday to revoke the railway license from the Royal Railway, a subsidiary of local conglomerate Royal Group, citing the failure of sufficient expansion of the railway's potential. In 2009, the government signed on a 30-year concessional agreement, allowing Toll Cambodia -- a joint venture between Australia-owned Toll Holding Limited and tycoon Kith Meng's Royal Group -- to operate the railway system in Cambodia. Five years later, Toll Holding transferred all its shares to its local partner, making Royal Group the sole shareholder, and the firm was re-named Royal Railway (Cambodia). The Southeast Asian nation has two lines of railroads. The 266-km southern line connects capital Phnom Penh to the international seaport province of Preah Sihanouk, and the 385-km northern line runs from Phnom Penh to Poipet city, which borders Thailand. The two lines, which had been built between 1929 and 1969, were damaged during decades of civil war. In 2016, the passenger train services between Phnom Penh and Preah Sihanouk province were resumed, as the train services between Phnom Penh and Poipet city remain in limbo. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-01 22:16:31|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close The Central Electoral Commission holds a press conference in Kiev, Ukraine, April 1, 2019. Ukraine's presidential election will head to a run-off, according to the country's electoral commission on Monday. Early official results showed that none of 39 candidates gained enough support to secure a victory in the first round, according to the head of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) Tetiana Slipachuk. (Xinhua/Sergey) KIEV, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine's presidential election will head to a run-off, according to the country's electoral commission on Monday. Early official results showed that none of 39 candidates gained enough support to secure a victory in the first round, according to the head of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) Tetiana Slipachuk. The preliminary official results of the election unveiled on Monday by the CEC suggested that Ukrainian actor Volodymyr Zelensky and incumbent President Petro Poroshenko advanced to the run-off round. With 81.97 percent of all ballots counted, Zelensky garnered 30.40 percent of the votes, while Poroshenko gained 16.01 percent. According to Ukrainian law, if no one gets more than half of the vote in the first round, the two candidates with the most ballots move to a run-off on April 21. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 01:07:41|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close People in costumes pose for a group photo in front of a promotion board of the 2019 Year of Tourism for China and Pacific Island Countries in Apia, capital of Samoa, April 1, 2019. The 2019 Year of Tourism for China and Pacific Island Countries was launched here at a grand ceremony in the capital of Samoa, with colored fireworks and wonderful cultural programs. (Xinhua/Zhang Yongxing) APIA, Samoa, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The 2019 Year of Tourism for China and Pacific Island Countries was launched here at a grand ceremony in the capital of Samoa, with colored fireworks and wonderful cultural programs. Luo Shugang, China's minister of culture and tourism, read a congratulatory message extended by Chinese President Xi Jinping to the event at the ceremony. In a speech delivered at the opening ceremony, Fiame Naomi Mataafa, Samoa's acting prime minister, hailed the launch of the tourism year, noting that it is the direct outcome of the South Pacific Tourism Organization (SPTO)'s attendance of a high-level dialogue of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, capital of China in 2017. China-Pacific Tourism Year 2019 is a milestone achievement and offers a great opportunity for Pacific Island countries to showcase China what the Pacific Island countries have to offer with their stunning natural landscapes, sandy beaches, unique culture and friendly people, she said. "China-Pacific Tourism Year 2019 also reflects, how we as leaders of the region, have placed value on the thriving Asian outbound tourism markets particularly China with the world's largest outbound market of around 140 million visitors last year," she said. Increasingly, Chinese travellers are looking for new destinations and experiences and the Pacific island region is still an untapped destination. she added. Both SPTO Chief Executive Officer Christopher Cocker and Samoa Tourism Authority (STA) Chief Executive Officer Papalii Sonja Hunter made it clear that Pacific island nations, including Samoa, are ready to welcome Chinese tourists. They told Xinhua on Monday that the Pacific tourism industry is currently working on programs to be "China Ready," and the focus is to sustainably develop and promote the Pacific to niche Chinese outbound market segments who wish to experience the region's beautiful islands, unique cultures and the healthy, organic food experience of the region. The two believed that there is great potential for the tourism cooperation between China and the Pacific island countries which attract a total of 2.1 million visitors each year, and of such visitors, an estimated 125,000 plus Chinese visitors visited the Pacific region. In their opinions, China is an important target for tourism growth in the region over the coming years given its numbers and spending power of Chinese visitors. According to Hunter, the launch of tourism year marks an important chapter in Samoa's tourism calendar as it officially marks the country's categorisation as a tourism destination for Chinese visitors. "We, as Samoans, have DNA connections with China as some Samoans have blood relationship with Chinese. We love Chinese. We are ready and welcome them to visit our beautiful country," Hunter said. Last year, Samoa, which has a population of more than 190,000, received over 172,000 foreign tourists. Currently, Samoa has a development blueprint to woo more foreign tourists. Chinese Ambassador to Samoa Chao Xiaoliang told Xinhua that the tourism year is a very important event for China and Pacific island countries as this will help promote the cultural and personnel exchanges between them. "I do believe that the tourism year will be a great success and the cooperation between China and Pacific Island countries in the tourism sector will no doubt bring tangible benefits to the people of the Pacific," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 01:22:43|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close Kamal Hassen Ali, assistant secretary general of the Arab League (AL) in charge of economic affairs, receives an interview with Xinhua during the second China-Arab States BDS Cooperation Forum in Tunis, capital of Tunisia, April 1, 2019. Chinese and Arab officials and experts on Monday envisioned building a "Space Silk Road" through closer cooperation on wider application of China's indigenously made BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) in the Middle East. The BDS, which went into trial operation in 2011 and started global service in later 2018, is a navigation satellite system independently developed by China. The China-Arab States BDS Cooperation Forum is a multilateral platform for promoting cooperation and exchanges between China and Arab states in the field of satellite navigation within the framework of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum. (Xinhua/Meng Tao) TUNIS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese and Arab officials and experts on Monday envisioned building a "Space Silk Road" through closer cooperation on wider application of China's indigenously made BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) in the Middle East. Speaking at the second China-Arab States BDS Cooperation Forum held in the Tunisian capital Tunis, the officials and experts agreed that increased application of the BDS in the region could elevate the China-Arab strategic cooperation to a higher level to benefit both sides. "The BDS cooperation is the best example for the strategic cooperation between China and Arab states, as satellite navigation integrates many hi-tech areas, including telecommunication and space technologies," Slim Khalbous, Tunisian minister of higher education and scientific research, told the audience at the forum. "This is an important opportunity for Tunisia, while the BDS cooperation also means the further upgrade of the China-Arab relations," the minister said, noting that Tunisia strongly supports its cooperation with China on the BDS application. He hailed Tunisia's cooperation with China, suggesting that the two sides conduct more exchanges between universities and enterprises, and implement more projects on the BDS application to boost the bilateral ties. Mohamed Ben Amor, secretary-general of Arab Information and Communication Technologies Organization (AICTO), said that the establishment of the China-Arab States BDS/GNNS Center in Tunis in 2018 was an important step in deepening the mutually beneficial China-Arab cooperation. He pledged to boost the China-Arab cooperation on the application of satellite navigation technology, which has been widely used in land surveying, environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, disaster-reduction, and maritime transportation. "Satellite navigation has provided many conveniences and benefits for us, and we are determined to push forward with our cooperation," Amor said in his speech at the opening ceremony. Kamal Hassen Ali, assistant secretary general of the Arab League (AL) in charge of economic affairs, lauded China, which made important contribution to building the ancient Silk Road, for establishing an excellent mechanism for cooperation and exchanges with Arab states. Under the theme of "Cooperation, Application and Service," this year's forum focused on increasing BDS application in the Middle East region. "The size of our cooperation will grow bigger, as the China-Tunisia cooperation has borne many fruits, and it will achieve greater progress in other countries in the region too," Ali said. Wang Zhaoyao, chairman of Chinese Satellite Navigation Committee, called for jointly building a China-Arab "Space Silk Road" which he said will help Arab states share more benefits from the China-made navigation satellite system. He noted that the BDS has been already applied in many Middle Eastern countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Kuwait and Sudan in areas such as precision agriculture, telecommunication, maritime monitoring and disaster relief. Li Chengwen, the Chinese ambassador for China-Arab States Cooperation Forum Affairs, said that a "Space Silk Road" is taking shape as the BDS becomes a new engine for pushing forward the fruitful China-Arab cooperation, especially in the hi-tech area. At the forum which was attended by more than 200 officials, experts and business people from China and Tunisia, several agreements were inked on furthering cooperation on the BDS application. Many of the attendees also watched the demonstration of the application of BDS for precision agriculture at the China-Arab States BDS/GNSS Center, during which a self-driving tractor equipped with the BDS smartly averted obstacles and drove along the planned routes through the remote control. The center, the first overseas BDS center, was set up in Tunis in 2018 by China and the AICTO to showcase the BDS technology and promote international exchanges and cooperation on the field. The BDS, which went into trial operation in 2011 and started global service in later 2018, is a navigation satellite system independently developed by China. It is compatible with other similar positioning systems, including the American GPS, Russian GLONASS and European Galileo systems, but it also boasts its unique advantages such as providing messaging service, which can be especially useful in making emergency calls at time of disaster or loss of direction in remote places. The China-Arab States BDS Cooperation Forum is a multilateral platform for promoting cooperation and exchanges between China and Arab states in the field of satellite navigation within the framework of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum. The first forum was held in Shanghai, China in May 2017. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 04:53:28|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close BEIRUT, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on Monday stressed the need to accelerate investments in Lebanon for 2019, local media reported. "We want to accelerate our investments for this year ... but there is a great need for urgent reforms in Lebanon, especially in the public finance and electricity sectors," Jurgen Rigterink, first vice president of the EBRD, was quoted as saying by the National News Agency. Rigterink's remarks came during a meeting with Lebanese Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil to discuss joint projects between the ministry and the bank. "We think that with the new Lebanese government, the country is ready to take these reform measures," he said. Khalil is expected to send the draft budget to the council of ministers soon and then to the parliament for voting by the end of May. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 06:23:54|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close Mahmoud Allam, Egypt's former ambassador to China, speaks during an interview with Xinhua in Cairo, Egypt, April 1, 2019. Egyptian researchers and experts in Asian affairs held a seminar in Cairo on Monday to discuss insights and visions on the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its economic and strategic significance for participant states. Held by the Chinese Studies Unit of Cairo-based Al-Hewar Center for Political and Media Studies, under the theme of "The Belt and Road Initiative -- Towards an Egyptian Vision," the seminar provided Egyptian insights ahead of the second high-profile BRI international forum that will be held in Beijing, capital of China, later in April. (Xinhua/Wu Huiwo) CAIRO, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian researchers and experts in Asian affairs held a seminar in Cairo on Monday to discuss insights and visions on the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its economic and strategic significance for participant states. Held by the Chinese Studies Unit of Cairo-based Al-Hewar Center for Political and Media Studies, under the theme of "The Belt and Road Initiative -- Towards an Egyptian Vision," the seminar comes to provide Egyptian insights ahead of the second high-profile BRI international forum that will be held in Beijing later in April. "The seminar comes at an important time to discuss an important topic, for it comes ahead of the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which will be joined by more than 30 leaders including Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi," Mahmoud Allam, Egypt's former ambassador to Beijing, told Xinhua. Allam, also one of the keynote speakers, highlighted the significance of the BRI in Egypt's development over the past few years, citing Chinese mega projects in Egypt, including the ongoing construction of a massive business district in the country's new administrative capital city, in addition to the establishment of energy plants and other infrastructure projects. "This discussion is like brainstorming over a roadmap for the future of Egypt under the BRI, and I am happy that such discussions about the BRI are not only held by governments but also research centers in BRI states," the ex-ambassador added. "This initiative was born to last," he concluded. Proposed by China in late 2013, the BRI seeks win-win development cooperation among participating states through economic and trade partnerships as well as infrastructure projects, in addition to cultural interaction and people-to-people exchange in the light of the initiative. The initiative refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which aims to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe, Africa and beyond. Mohamed Fayez Farahat, a political expert and head of the Asian Studies Unit at Cairo-based Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, said during the seminar that the elevation of bilateral relations between Egypt and China to the level of comprehensive strategic partnership led to a joint strategic mission to boost Egypt's economic development, citing massive Chinese investments in Egypt. "The BRI is different from other economic blocs as it links trade with development," Farahat told Xinhua, stressing that "Egypt's strategic location and its Suez Canal vital waterway make it a focal point on the maritime side of the initiative." The researcher explained that the initiative has different areas of cooperation, such as coordination of economic policies, the establishment of infrastructure projects, economic zones and industrial clusters, the financial cooperation between central banks, as well as people-to-people exchange among participant states. The speakers emphasized China's efforts to boost the initiative through the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and other financial institutions, in addition to currency swap deals with BRI states. During the seminar, Han Bing, minister counselor for economic affairs at the Chinese embassy in Cairo, expressed happiness to attend a seminar for "exchanging views on the BRI and on how connected the development strategies of China and Egypt are." He explained that the BRI seeks to boost practical cooperation to create new development opportunities for the peoples of BRI states. Han cited various Chinese investments in Egyptian development projects, noting that trade exchange between China and Egypt hit a record high of 13.87 billion U.S. dollars in 2018, with an increase of Egyptian exports to China to reach 1.8 billion dollars for the first time. "The BRI is based on the principles of joint consultation, common construction and shared interests," the Chinese diplomat told the attendees. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 06:28:58|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close Photo taken on April 1, 2019 shows the United Nations Security Council debate on international humanitarian law, at the UN headquarters in New York. UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock on Monday asked for efforts to safeguard humanitarian space by ensuring compliance with international humanitarian law. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The UN humanitarian chief on Monday asked for efforts to safeguard humanitarian space by ensuring compliance with international humanitarian law. "International humanitarian law is designed to minimize human suffering in war, including by safeguarding humanitarian activities. So, garnering greater respect for international humanitarian law is one of the most effective ways to safeguard humanitarian space," Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock told the Security Council in a debate. Civilians bear the brunt of conflict as combatants have increasingly resorted to siege and starvation as weapons of war, and as conflict has prevented farmers from reaping their harvests, destroyed vital infrastructure, and disrupted commercial trade, he said. This year, 139 million people are in acute humanitarian need, most of them because of armed conflict. That is three times the number of a decade ago, said Lowcock. Some 60 percent of people affected by food crises are living in conflict-affected countries, he added. Lowcock also saw the deliberate and organized use of rape as a weapon of war. One in five displaced women asked say they have experienced sexual violence. Children are being recruited into armed groups, forced into early marriage, used as suicide bombers, and barred from education as their schools are attacked or taken over, he said. In towns and cities, belligerents use explosive weapons designed for open battlefields, resulting in mass civilian casualties, enormous destruction of infrastructure, and long-term disruption of essential services, he said. Today's conflicts are also marked by more direct attacks against humanitarian workers, medical workers and their facilities. There were 317 attacks against aid workers in 2018, resulting in 113 deaths. The World Health Organization reported 388 attacks against health personnel or health facilities in 2018, resulting in more than 300 deaths and 400 injuries, he said. Combatants deliberately hinder humanitarian operations, slowing them down, driving up costs and blocking aid from reaching people in need. Violence against humanitarian workers, including killing and maiming, kidnapping and abductions, likewise hinders humanitarian operations, he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 06:49:03|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close BEIRUT, April 1 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese delegation informed on Monday Prime Minister Saad Hariri about the progress made with the design of the Lebanese National Conservatory that will be constructed by China in the northern Beirut suburb of Dbayeh, a statement by the Chinese embassy in Lebanon said. The Chinese team gave an overview to Hariri about the work that is currently being done for the project while playing a video to show a primary design for the conservatory. The statement said that Hariri thanked the Chinese government for assisting the construction of the project in Lebanon, adding that Hariri expressed great satisfaction with the conservatory's design. Hariri said that the conservatory is a great achievement on the level of the Chinese-Lebanese cooperation while promising to guarantee the smooth implementation of the project. He assured that this project will create an opportunity for further cooperation between the two countries. Chinese Ambassador to Lebanon Wang Kejian said that the conservatory will be an iconic project and a symbol of friendship between China and Lebanon while reflecting a solid cooperation within the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative. "China will also support the close cooperation between the project's teams from both countries while actively following up on the project's progress," Wang said. Head of the Chinese team Zhang Ri said that the project was highly valued by the governments of China and Lebanon. "The Chinese team will continue to carry out follow-up work efficiently and prepare for the early start of the project," he said. The conservatory, which covers 25,000 square meters, will be worth 31.9 million U.S. dollars. The project is considered as a musical city and a cultural monument for Lebanon with teaching rooms, a library as well as lecture and auditorium halls. It will also house a music show room with the most advanced logistical and technology equipment, which can host up to 1,200 people. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 06:59:05|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close Ma Zhaoxu (front), China's permanent representative to the United Nations, addresses a Security Council debate on international humanitarian law, at the UN headquarters in New York, April 1, 2019. Ma Zhaoxu on Monday warned against attempts to undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of states by using humanitarianism as a pretext. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Monday warned against attempts to undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of states by using humanitarianism as a pretext. At a Security Council debate on international humanitarian law, Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, asked states to abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, as well as the guiding principles for UN humanitarian assistance. "No country should undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of others by using humanitarianism as a pretext," Ma said. "Humanitarian action should strictly abide by the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence, highlight the humanitarian nature and professionalism of such efforts and avoid being drawn into the conflict or interfering in the domestic affairs of the countries concerned." All humanitarian agencies should follow international humanitarian law and related principles in earnest and refrain from using the delivery of humanitarian assistance for political, military and other purposes, he said. In this file photo taken on March 28, 2019, patients who have diarrhea are accomodated in a treatment tent at Macurungo urban healt center in Beira, Mozambique. (AFP Photo) BEIRA, Mozambique, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday that 38 million U.S. dollars will be allocated to contain and minimize the extent of cholera outbreak in central Mozambique in the next three months. The announcement was made by Matshidiso Moeti, WHO's regional director for Africa, in the emergency operation center in Beira, Sofala province, who said the WHO has been coordinating the action of all the health partners in central Mozambique. "With a good plan established and the good cooperation among the partners and the government, we will help Mozambique to minimize the impact on the health of the people and deaths from these various risks of this emergency," she said. A devastating tropical cyclone named Idai made landfall on the night of March 14 in central Mozambique, leaving at least 518 people dead, 59,910 houses destroyed, and water and sanitation infrastructures compromised, official statistics showed. So far, health authorities have registered a total of 258 cases and one death caused by cholera in Beira, the region hardest hit by Idai. Moeti said a cholera vaccination campaign will start on Wednesday in Beira, which is one of the methods of containing and minimizing the extent of cholera outbreak. More than 900,000 doses of oral vaccine for cholera have been prepared to start the campaign. "The goal is to stop cholera outbreak as soon as possible, with the combined interventions of the cholera vaccination campaign, also with the work that is going on around to provide safe drinking water, improving sanitation, communication with the population about hygiene, which is good to bring under control the cholera outbreak," she said. The director said during the three months the situation will be monitored and if needed the plan will be extended with additional resources. "Our intent is to have a health action as strong as possible within the next three months, not only against cholera, but also other diseases outbreak," she said. Moeti said the action from the health sector will become more important in the next phase of emergency responses because of the signs of diseases outbreak among people living in the accommodation centers. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 07:14:08|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close SAN FRANCISCO, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Google announced Monday new features to Gmail on the mail service's 15th anniversary, pledging to make it more efficient and helpful. Tom Holman, senior product manager of Gmail, said Google wants to make its top mail service more assistive to its 1.5 billion users across the world today. He said Gmail is updating Smart Compose, an artificial intelligence-powered feature that helps users write emails quicker. The new feature enables Gmail to adapt to the way users write an email by suggesting the most appropriate, possible words or sentences based on the user's habits in composing an email. He said the feature has helped save "people from typing over 1 billion characters each week," almost the amount of 1,000 copies of "Lord of the Rings." Smart Compose comes in more languages to include Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese and is available on Android phones. A similar feature will be expanded to iOS systems for iPhone users soon, Holman said. Gmail also introduced the feature of scheduling mails for a more appropriate date or time. After users write an email, they can simply hit the "Schedule" button to decide at which time the email will be sent. Holman said the feature is helpful for people working across time zones or who don't want to interrupt the happy time of vacation of an email recipient. Lastly, an updated feature enables Gmail users to improve their efficiency by allowing them to respond to a comment thread in Google Docs or browse hotel recommendations directly within emails. Google launched Gmail service on April 1, 2004, with its powerful built-in Google Search feature and 1GB free data storage capacity for each user, which Google claimed was nearly 100 times more than other email providers could offer at that time. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 07:54:13|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Monday asked for efforts to resolve disputes by peaceful means, thus tackling the issue of the protection of civilians by addressing the root causes. The purpose of complying with international humanitarian law is protect civilians; effectively preventing armed conflict offers the best protection for civilians, Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, told a Security Council debate on international humanitarian law. The Security Council should encourage preventive diplomacy and political mediation to promote the use of peaceful means, such as dialogue and negotiations, in resolving differences and preventing escalation in order to protect civilians from the scourge of war, Ma said. He also asked the international community to work together to promote and strengthen international humanitarian law. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 07:59:15|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Monday asked the international community to protect principled humanitarian action in the context that the shape of conflict has undergone a rapid transformation in recent years. "Throughout ICRC's operations, we see that neutral, independent and impartial humanitarian action has the best chance to reach those most in need. It is also a tried and tested formula to prevent humanitarian action being appropriated for larger and more controversial political agendas. Yet in many places across the world, the space for impartial humanitarian action is under threat," said ICRC President Peter Maurer. "It is the task of the international community to fiercely defend and protect principled humanitarian action," he told the Security Council. Maurer asked to fight any attempt to instrumentalize, manipulate or politicize principled humanitarian action. Humanitarian access must not be unlawfully denied or withheld, especially when people's basic needs are going unmet, he said. "Our license to operate should not be up for debate: it has already been guaranteed. The mission to protect and aid civilians during times of armed conflict was universally agreed 70 years ago in the Geneva Conventions. We call on states to step forward and reaffirm this mission, not only in words but through urgent and concrete actions," said Maurer. International humanitarian law does not rely on reciprocity. It applies even if an opponent fails to comply, he said. It relies on a consensual understanding among belligerents that there are limits to war and there must be a neutral and impartial humanitarian space in which those not participating in hostilities are protected. Those who deny the space, deny the very essence of the law. "The Geneva Conventions are not up for negotiation. They reflect in normative language the tested practice of societies over time. They are customary law and must guide practical action." Humanitarian organizations are increasingly placed under pressure as both states and non-state armed groups hold civilian populations and humanitarian actors to ransom in order to achieve their goals, he said. "But humanitarian organizations do not exist to endorse, to legitimize or to help authorities further their political objectives. The ICRC works to help states live up to the obligations they have signed, not to help them circumnavigate them." He asked states to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law. States should ensure the proper application of the rules on the conduct of hostilities, the protection of civilians and medical facilities and the humane treatment of detainees, he said. Maurer asked states to train and instruct their troops and the troops of their partners so that they know international humanitarian law and how to respect it; vet and oversee with appropriate structures, processes and mechanisms in combat operations; and to put accountability mechanisms in place. He asked to tighten rules on the proliferation of arms, putting into place safeguards and precautions to make sure that no weapons are transferred if there is a clear risk they would be used to violate international humanitarian law. He voiced particular concern over the use of explosive weapons. "The ICRC sees the enormous civilian costs of bombing and shelling including death, physical injury, but also the long-term damage to critical civilian infrastructure. We ask all parties to an armed conflict to avoid the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effect in populated areas, due to the significant likelihood of indiscriminate effects." Human dignity is disregarded, the applicability of international humanitarian law is questioned, humanitarian aid is politicized and deliberately hijacked for political gain or the control of populations. Terrorist attacks, indiscriminate by nature, are destroying the very notion of proportionality, precaution and distinction, which are at the core of behavior in combat. Neutral and impartial humanitarian action is hindered by elaborate sanctions regimes and counter-terrorism measures, noted Maurer. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 09:04:25|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close TRIPOLI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Monday said it needs 88.1 million U.S. dollars in urgent funding for its work in Libya this year. The UNHCR said that more than 57,000 refugees and asylum seekers have been registered in Libya until the end of March. There are more than 170,000 internally displaced persons in the country, plus more than 445,000 others who returned to their homes, it said. Immigrant shelters in Libya are overcrowded with tens of thousands of illegal immigrants rescued at sea or arrested by Libyan authorities. Also, armed conflicts forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes and move to other cities and towns. Internally displaced returnees are in urgent need for humanitarian assistance, as they are living in areas surrounded by unexploded ordnance of war near their destroyed homes, the UNHCR said a few days ago. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 09:19:27|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close WASHINGTON, April 1 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan met here on Monday with South Korean Minister of National Defense Jeong Kyeong-doo over the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, said the Pentagon. During their meeting, Shanahan and Jeong focused on the on-going diplomatic efforts to achieve a complete denuclearization of and peace on the Korean Peninsula, according to a statement released by the Pentagon. The two defense chiefs vowed to remain "an unwavering combined readiness posture," said the statement. They also pledged to enhance coordination and cooperation in various areas including information sharing on issues regarding the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), it added. Jeong's visit came one month after the second summit between the top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump in late February in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi that ended without an agreement. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is scheduled to visit Washington next week, said Monday that Pyongyang and Washington have shown their determination to continue the dialogue by managing situations stably so as not to increase tensions as seen in the past. Moon vowed to make efforts to help resume denuclearization negotiations between the DPRK and the United States. The Korean Peninsula's peace process would become a journey, taken jointly by the two Koreas and the United States that would not be easy, he said. Earlier last month, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang said at a press conference that no one should expect the Korean Peninsula issue to be resolved in just one day, and the key is to take into account the legitimate concerns of all parties in a balanced way and consolidate mutual trust and gradually gather consensus. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 09:24:28|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close CHENGDU, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Wolong National Nature Reserve, southwest China's Sichuan Province, has conducted a large-scale investigation into the number of wild giant pandas and their habitat, as China marks the 150th anniversary of their scientific discovery. The investigation covered 1,032 square kilometers of potential and actual habitats. By collecting the fresh panda feces, the reserve plans to archive their individual information including DNA and gender, said Shi Xiaogang, head of the reserve's Mujiangping protection station. The investigation is also expected to help study the dynamic changes of the same individual panda's activity in different seasons and years, and figure out the population and sex ratio of the wild pandas, to provide guidance for panda re-wilding, according to Zhang Hemin, a panda expert. The giant panda was scientifically discovered 150 years ago and named in the city of Ya'an, Sichuan. Easily recognized by black patches around the eyes, ears and across its round body, the species lives in the deep mountains and soon became one of the world's favorites. However, it was not until in 1978 that scientists home and abroad were able to begin observational studies of pandas at the Wolong Nature Reserve, known as "the home of the giant panda." The pioneers spent up to eight years setting up seven routes in the area of 35 square kilometers to trace the activities of wild pandas, and observing their activity patterns using radiotelemetry, providing much data on the species In 1980, the Chinese government cooperated with the World Wide Fund for Nature to establish the "China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda" (CCRCGP) to save the endangered pandas. The center aimed at raising the number of pandas by captive-breeding programs, but its ultimate goal was to return to the wild. In order to enable the captive pandas to return to the wild independently, the "wild training" of the captive-bred pandas at Wolong has been going on for over a decade. Now, Zhang Hemin and his colleagues have made some breakthrough in the panda captive-breeding, realizing the self-sustaining and sustainable development of the captive panda population. Over the past few years, 11 giant pandas have "graduated" from the training base and nine were successfully released into the wild. The training will enrich the genetic diversity of the panda population so as to maintain its healthy and sustainable development, Zhang said. So far, there have been more than 100 field observations and personnel patrols at Wolong, which is also equipped with modern observation facilities such as infrared cameras and GPS trackers. Staff are also working on improving the monitoring system for panda habitats and establishing a DNA database for the species. Giant pandas are one of the world's most endangered species. Fewer than 2,000 pandas live in the wild, mostly in the provinces of Sichuan and Shaanxi. There were 375 giant pandas in captivity at the end of 2013, about 200 of them at the CCRCGP. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 09:39:31|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations (UN) humanitarian chief on Monday asked for efforts to safeguard humanitarian space by ensuring compliance with international humanitarian law. "International humanitarian law is designed to minimize human suffering in war, including by safeguarding humanitarian activities. So, garnering greater respect for international humanitarian law is one of the most effective ways to safeguard humanitarian space," Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock told the Security Council in a debate. Civilians bear the brunt of conflict as combatants have increasingly resorted to siege and starvation as weapons of war, and as conflict has prevented farmers from reaping their harvests, destroyed vital infrastructure, and disrupted commercial trade, he said. This year, 139 million people are in acute humanitarian need, most of them because of armed conflict. That is three times the number of a decade ago, said Lowcock. Some 60 percent of people affected by food crises are living in conflict-affected countries, he added. Lowcock also saw the deliberate and organized use of rape as a weapon of war. One in five displaced women asked say they have experienced sexual violence. Children are being recruited into armed groups, forced into early marriage, used as suicide bombers, and barred from education as their schools are attacked or taken over, he said. In towns and cities, belligerents use explosive weapons designed for open battlefields, resulting in mass civilian casualties, enormous destruction of infrastructure, and long-term disruption of essential services, he said. Today's conflicts are also marked by more direct attacks against humanitarian workers, medical workers and their facilities. There were 317 attacks against aid workers in 2018, resulting in 113 deaths. The World Health Organization reported 388 attacks against health personnel or health facilities in 2018, resulting in more than 300 deaths and 400 injuries, he said. Combatants deliberately hinder humanitarian operations, slowing them down, driving up costs and blocking aid from reaching people in need. Violence against humanitarian workers, including killing and maiming, kidnapping and abductions, likewise hinders humanitarian operations, he said. With the Geneva Conventions adopted 70 years ago and relevant UN Security Council resolutions, there is a strong legal framework to safeguard humanitarian activity in conflict. Today's problem is that fighting parties and their backers do not always follow it, said Lowcock. He asked to promote policies and practices to strengthen adherence to international humanitarian law, and to broaden and deepen the understanding and acceptance of existing rules. Experience has shown that fighting parties often have an incomplete understanding of international humanitarian law. Providing training for armed forces and members of non-state armed groups on how to respect humanitarian law can help, he said. Lowcock called for enabling humanitarian and medical activities. All parties should adopt clear and simplified procedures to facilitate humanitarian access. They should establish civil-military coordination platforms or humanitarian notification systems to facilitate parties' respect for humanitarian operations. States and the Security Council could promote the universalization of international humanitarian law and human rights treaties, he said. The right kinds of incentives and penalties can boost compliance, he said. For example, sanctions imposed by the Security Council can be a powerful tool to promote compliance of international humanitarian law. States can exert their diplomatic, political and economic influence over parties to conflict to strengthen their compliance. He also stressed the importance of accountability. States need to do much better in holding individuals to account when they commit serious violations of international humanitarian law, and should strengthen their capacity to carry out impartial, independent investigations into allegations of war crimes and to prosecute suspects. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 09:44:33|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close WELLINGTON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau announced Tuesday Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) support to bolster capacity for those working on the frontline of regional economic development. "Up to 200,000 New Zealand dollars a year of funding per region for up to two years will be made available to organisations in regions eligible for PGF funding," Tabuteau said. "Having capacity funding available to regional economic organizations will address short term capacity issues and give organizations the ability to progress key regional and national economic goals such as job creation and reducing unemployment. "People living and working in our regions already know the opportunities in their patch and work hard every day to capitalize on those opportunities, but need capacity support to accelerate key projects through the PGF," Tabuteau said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 09:49:35|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close Ma Zhaoxu (front), China's permanent representative to the United Nations, addresses a Security Council debate on international humanitarian law, at the UN headquarters in New York, April 1, 2019. Ma Zhaoxu on Monday warned against attempts to undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of states by using humanitarianism as a pretext. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy to the United Nations (U) on Monday warned against attempts to undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of states by using humanitarianism as a pretext. At a Security Council debate on international humanitarian law, Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, asked states to abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter as well as the guiding principles for UN humanitarian assistance. "No country should undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of others by using humanitarianism as a pretext," he said. "Humanitarian action should strictly abide by the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence, highlight the humanitarian nature and professionalism of such efforts and avoid being drawn into the conflict or interfering in the domestic affairs of the countries concerned." All humanitarian agencies should follow international humanitarian law and related principles and refrain from using the delivery of humanitarian assistance for political, military and other purposes, said Ma. He asked for efforts to resolve disputes by peaceful means, thus tackling the issue of the protection of civilians by addressing the root causes. The purpose of complying with international humanitarian law is to protect civilians. Effectively preventing armed conflict offers the best protection for civilians, said the Chinese ambassador. The Security Council should encourage preventive diplomacy and political mediation to promote the use of peaceful means, such as dialogue and negotiations, in resolving differences and preventing escalation in order to protect civilians from the scourge of war, he said. Ma also asked the international community to work together to promote and strengthen international humanitarian law. Governments bear the primary responsibility for the protection of their own citizens, he said. The international community should provide constructive assistance only at the request of the countries concerned. All parties to conflict should understand and abide by international humanitarian law, implement Security Council resolutions on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, fulfill their obligations to protect civilians, and ensure humanitarian access, said Ma. UN peacekeeping operations, he said, should make great efforts to promote and publicize international humanitarian law and Security Council resolutions. The Security Council should work to prevent sanctions from negatively impacting and affecting humanitarian relief operations. The Chinese ambassador stressed the importance of protecting the safety and security of medical personnel and medical facilities in conflict. The countries concerned should carry out investigations into threats and acts of violence against medical personnel and the destruction of medical facilities in armed conflict and bring perpetrators to justice. The international community should provide support and assistance on the basis of full consultations with the countries concerned. China is an important participant and contributor to the international humanitarian law regime and stands ready to continue to play a constructive role in this field, said Ma. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 09:54:37|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Public security bureaus in China nationwide continue to crack down on wildlife crimes and strengthen protection of endangered wild animals, according to China Police Daily's report. The Shandong provincial public security bureau launched in late March a special campaign against wildlife crimes, which will last until the end of June. In this campaign, public security authorities will carry out investigations in places such as restaurants and markets where illegal actions are likely to occur. Illegal hunting, acquisition and sale of migratory birds are the focus of the crackdown. Forestry police in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region have conducted an array of campaigns to fight against wildlife crimes in recent years. From January 2015 to December 2018, a total of 73,000 cases were handled with about 273,700 wild animals confiscated and a total of 71,000 people involved. Since July 2018, four large-scale transnational cases of illegal acquisition, transportation and sale of precious and endangered wildlife products were detected in Guangxi, and 24 criminal suspects were arrested. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 10:04:44|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close KAMPALA, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Offshore investors in Uganda's government securities are shifting to treasury bonds as opposed to treasury bills due to higher returns, said a senior central bank official on Monday. Mary Katarikawe, executive director of operations of the Bank of Uganda, told Xinhua in an interview that the offshore investors are preferring Uganda's treasury bonds because of the higher returns compared to rates charged on treasury bonds in developed economies and some emerging economies. Katarikawe said offshore investors now hold 7 percent in total in Uganda government securities, which translates to 1.8 trillion shillings (493 million U.S. dollars) Like many other countries in the world, Uganda issues treasury bills and treasury bonds to finance its fiscal deficits. The ministry of finance said in its February economic performance report that the treasury bills yields decreased across all tenors. The annualized yield to maturity for 91-day tenor was recorded at 9.8 percent in February, decreasing by 107 basis points from January. The 182-day tenor recorded an annualized yield to maturity of 11.1 percent, a decrease of 112 basis points over the same period. Similarly, the yield to maturity for 364-day tenor decreased by 158 basis points to 11.5 percent. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 10:19:47|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close Noy Sonemany, a 26-year-old Laotian, poses for a photo in a workshop at the steel structure processing plant of CREC-5's China-Laos Railway Project division in the northern Lao province of Luang Namtha, March 21, 2019. The 414.332-km China-Laos Railway runs from Boten bordering China in northern Laos to the capital of Vientiane with an operating speed of 160 km per hour. The China-Laos Railway adopts Chinese technical standards and uses Chinese equipment. It started construction in December 2016 and is scheduled to be completed and opened to traffic in December 2021. (Xinhua/Wang Jingqiang) by Zhang Jianhua, Huang Zongwen, Wang Shan VIENTIANE, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Working for more than two years on the China-Laos railway construction site, Noy Sonemany has turned himself from an unskilled house builder in the town to a "Railway Craftsman" with outstanding professional skills. "My hometown is in Muang Xay, the capital of Oudomxay province. When I heard at home that they (the Chinese companies) were coming to build the railway, I came here to hunt for a job," said Noy, a 26-year-old Laotian who used to do odd jobs in his hilly town. Muang Xay is the first stop for many Chinese traders who enter Laos by road. Noy has seen many new things entering Laos from the north, so he decided to have a try at the Laos-China Railway Co., Ltd., to try something new. Noy first became a welder in the steel structure processing plant of the China Railway NO.5 Engineering Group (CREC-5)'s China-Laos Railway Project division. "He does welding here, and basically, he can do almost as much as I can do, even by himself," said Xie Xin, a professional welder from China. "Compared with the other Lao apprentices who started from scratch, Noy is more capable of learning." In order to learn more skills from his Chinese colleagues, Noy also learned some Chinese language, which expedites his learning of arch welding, steel plate punching and plate cutting under the guidance and help of Chinese technicians. On March 29, 2018, the "Yangshu Overseas Innovation Studio" was established in the Laos-China railway project as CREC-5's first overseas innovation studio. Being the only Lao employee in the studio, Noy has cooperated with his Chinese colleagues to obtain two Chinese technology patents. "We teach him some advanced technologies and create new products together. At the same time, we get some local information from him, which can help us to develop some technologies suitable for this project," said Yang Shu, head engineer of the studio named after him. "We invited him to join us in every meeting, and asked him to work with our Chinese masters in researching and processing. He offered many good ideas which enlightened us." At the just-concluded China-Laos Railway Construction Working Conference 2019, the Laos-China Railway Co., Ltd, which is responsible for railway construction and operation, awarded Noy Sonemany the honorary title of "Railway Craftsman" for the China-Laos Railway Project. "He is really hard-working, and he can adapt to the pace of our daily work well after receiving our technical training. In this process, his personal skills and family income have also improved greatly," said Hu Yong, division secretary of the Communist Party of China working committee of CREC-5. The China-Laos railway construction project is divided into six sections. The CREC-5 is in charge of the first section of the railway in northern Laos. "The China-Laos railway is an important project of the Belt and Road Initiative. As participants, we will spare no effort to create more local job opportunities and enhance employees' skills. We have trained more than 1,000 Lao employees till now, and they have played an indispensable role in the construction," Hu added. Compared with two years before, Noy is still thin, sun-tanned and doesn't talk much, but his life has completely changed. He is very satisfied with his job, with monthly income of about four million kip (about 460 U.S. dollars). "My child is just 10 months old and my wife is farming at home. After the railway is built, I hope I will take a chance to visit China," Noy said. The 414.332-km China-Laos Railway runs from Boten bordering China in northern Laos to the capital of Vientiane with an operating speed of 160 km per hour. The China-Laos Railway adopts Chinese technical standards and uses Chinese equipment. It started construction in December 2016 and is scheduled to be completed and opened to traffic in December 2021. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 10:34:54|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close CAPE TOWN, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) will double its loan approval book from its current 8 billion U.S. dollars to about 16 billion dollars during 2019, the bank's president Kundapur Vaman Kamath said on Monday. "In 2019, the bank will build on the strong momentum in our operations and aims to double its loan approval book to about 16 billion dollars," Kamath said at the 4th Annual Meeting of the NDB Board of Governors taking place in Cape Town. The two-day meeting, under the theme of "Partnership for Sustainable Development," stressed the importance of strengthening collective efforts and partnerships to bridge the infrastructure gaps among BRICS countries. The meeting also addressed the developmental needs of the member countries, developing countries and other emerging markets. The NDB will place a greater emphasis on sustainable development and support member states in efforts towards this end, Kamath said. Sustainability remains at the core of everything the bank does, he said. According to Kamath, nearly 80 percent of the bank's lending was now in the transport, clean energy, and water and sanitation sectors, with urban development and environmental protection also forming a major part. "We have also invested in building a strong and more diversified pipeline of projects for 2019," he said. On Monday's meeting, the NDB signed an agreement with South African electricity utility Eskom, under which the former will provide the latter with a loan of 180 million dollars. The loan will be used to support a project for renewable energy development and reduction of the country's reliance on fossil fuels. The NDB also signed a 300-million-dollar loan agreement with the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) for the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction and Energy Sector Development project. The loan will be in a two-step form and will be on-lent to the DBSA's identified subprojects within the wind, solar and biomass energy sectors, in particular. The NDB is a development bank established by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Its annual meeting presented an opportunity to reflect on the global development agenda and the role NDB could play in financing infrastructure and sustainable development, organizers said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 10:44:57|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close CARACAS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Venezuela's Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) President Maikel Moreno on Monday reconfirmed the order to prohibit opposition leader Juan Guaido from leaving the country and asked the National Constituent Assembly (ANC) to strip him of his parliamentary immunity. Moreno said a "certified copy of the decision will be sent to the ANC for the purpose of stripping Juan Guaido's parliamentary immunity." The decision was made as the opposition leader, who self-proclaimed himself "interim president" on Jan. 23, violated the measure imposed by the TSJ a few months ago. The ruling by the Supreme Court declared Guaido's "contempt" for failing to comply with the order prohibiting him from leaving the country which was imposed in January. Guaido has made several foreign trips to countries in the region. "It is public ... that the Supreme Court agreed on measures against citizen Juan Guaido, such as the prohibition from leaving the country without the authorization from this high court, and it is public that Juan Guaido violated this order," Moreno said. In light of this, the full chamber of the TSJ, chaired by Juan Jose Mendoza, ratified "the prohibition of leaving the country, without authorization, until the investigation is completed." Other measures against Guaido also included "prohibition of selling his property, blocking and freezing of bank accounts or any other financial means in Venezuelan territory," the TSJ leader said. The court also ordered the decision be sent to the plenary chamber of the Republic's General Prosecutor to continue the investigative proceedings. Venezuela's TSJ barred Guaido from leaving the country and froze his financial assets in January. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 10:49:57|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close MEXICO CITY, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Mexico must "act prudently" and have a "friendship policy," said Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Monday, in response to the declarations made by U.S. President Donald Trump to close the U.S.-Mexico border. During his daily morning press conference, Lopez Obrador said he preferred to maintain a stance of "love and peace." "We are not going to have a confrontation with the U.S. government," Lopez Obrador said. He declined to talk about the effects that an eventual closure of the U.S.-Mexico border would have. Mexico will help fight the migration problem, since most Central American migrants enter the U.S. through Mexico, he said. Trump has threatened to close the U.S.-Mexico border if Mexico doesn't stop the flow of migrants. He routinely uses illegal immigration as a justification to build a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. In February he declared a national emergency as a means to obtain funding for the wall after Congress denied the request. Last week, Mexico's Interior Minister Olga Sanchez Cordero said it was establishing a plan to restrain the migration flow in southeast Mexico. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 12:05:14|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena (2nd L) inspects the seized cocaine to be destroyed in a suburb of Colombo, Sri Lanka, April 1, 2019. Sri Lankan authorities publicly destroyed 769 kilograms of cocaine seized in nationwide raids during the past few years, local media reported. (Xinhua/A. Hapuarachchi) COLOMBO, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan authorities publicly destroyed 769 kg of cocaine, which the police had seized in nationwide raids carried out during the past few years, local media reported on Tuesday. The heroin valued at over Rs.10 billion (an estimated 57 million U.S. dollars) was destroyed on Monday in the presence of President Maithripala Sirisena in a warehouse in the outskirts of capital Colombo. Police officers first liquefied the cocaine, which was packed in more than two dozen sacks in front of two magistrates. It was then taken to be disposed in a cement factory located in Puttalam in north western Sri Lanka. Speaking at the event, Sirisena said this was the second time the government was publicly destroying all the drugs seized by the investigating officers in raids conducted throughout the country. The president said authorities had publicly destroyed over 900 kg of cocaine in January 2018. Sirisena said his aim was to free the future generations from drugs as Sri Lanka had become a transit hub for drug smugglers in Asia. He said he would soon implement the death penalty on those convicted of drug smuggling and trafficking in a large scale. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 13:20:26|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close CANBERRA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The value of Australian tax credits held by global mining giants grew to 324 billion Australian dollars (230.2 billion U.S. dollars) in financial year 2017-18. The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) on Tuesday revealed that the value of tax credits, which companies can use to lower their tax liabilities in future years, rose from 282 billion AUD (200.4 billion USD) in 2016-17. According to ATO data obtained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), of 138 tax returns lodged by oil and gas mining companies - only six "profitable" projects paid the petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT) - a tax on the sale of natural gas and oil - because of tax concessions. The scheme, which was introduced in 1987, was updated in 2012 to apply to all oil and gas production, including shale oil and coal seam gas. Under the concessions included in the PRRT, companies whose spending exceeds their assessable tax receipts receive a credit which can be carried over year-on-year. Peter Whish-Wilson, the Treasury spokesperson for the Greens Party, said that the 324 billion AUD equates to 70 percent of the government's total annual revenue. "The PRRT is the most egregious rort in the Australian tax code," he told the ABC. "While the world is in the middle of an LNG boom, we're practically giving the stuff away. "On current trends, it is an open question whether PRRT tax offsets will ever be expired. "Some companies might ride a multi-decade long boom and end up tax positive." Whish-Wilson's view was disputed by Stuart Robert, the assistant treasurer, who said that the tax credits are "a function of the money actually spent by companies" in Australia. "Tax losses, or credits as they are sometimes called, represent money companies have actually spent on developing projects, plus uplift, and are mostly not transferable between projects," he said. "As a result, the aggregated carry forward PRRT tax losses published by the ATO are not directly relevant to whether individual projects will pay PRRT." Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 13:25:27|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close VIENTIANE, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank (WB) Vice President for East Asia and Pacific, Victoria Kwakwa highlighted the development progress made by Laos in the past decade and emphasized the importance of supporting a more inclusive and sustainable pattern of economic growth in the future. During her four-day visit till last Saturday, she met Lao Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Somdy Douangdy, Minister of Planning and Investment Souphanh Keomixay, and Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Sommad Pholsena. Kwakwa and the Lao authorities discussed the close partnership between Laos and the World Bank Group, and focused on key areas of cooperation, including childhood stunting and nutrition, dam safety, the business environment, public financial management, and green growth, a WB press released issued on Monday said. "Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has grown rapidly and made impressive development progress over the past decade," said Kwakwa, "To make its development more inclusive and sustainable, it will be crucial for Lao PDR to build its human capital, pursue a greener growth path, and open up space for more private sector participation." "Strengthening the role of the private sector will equally be important for raising productivity and creating more jobs for Lao citizens. We are pleased to already be working with Lao PDR on these important agendas and stand ready to continue our strong partnership in the future," she said. While in Lao capital Vientiane, Kwakwa also met with bilateral and multilateral development partners and representatives of the private sector to discuss areas where all stakeholders may be able to increase collaboration for inclusive growth in Lao PDR. Some of the key themes covered included disaster resilience and response, green growth, connectivity, and doing business. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 13:40:31|Editor: Liu Video Player Close CARACAS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced Monday that he had decided to name a new minister of electricity. "I have decided to designate a worker from the electricity industry with 25 years of experience, an electrical engineer," said Maduro, referring to the newly appointed minister Igor Gavidia. Gavidia is an engineering graduate from the Central University of Venezuela and was president of the former electricity company Electrificacion del Caroni. The president said that Gavidia "from today, assumes the Ministry of Electricity and the presidency of the state company, Corpoelec." Gavidia currently "is at the head of the team" to achieve the stabilization of the national electrical system, he said. Maduro also announced his decision to create the Ministry of Science and Technology, making it a useful tool to overcome what his government is calling "the electricity war." According to the president, issues of science and technology will now have their own ministry, independent of the Ministry of Education. Venezuela suffered its worst blackout on March 7, when a prolonged power outage plunged most of the country in darkness, forcing officials to close schools and offices for about five days. From then on, the country experienced several other power outages, which officials have blamed on sabotage by U.S.-backed far-right oppositions trying to undermine the government. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 13:50:32|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close HONG KONG, April 2(Xinhua) -- The 7th Art Basel Hong Kong has ended with 242 galleries presenting works by renowned and up-to-date artists from around the world. The five-day fair, which ended on Sunday, attracted a record 88,000 visitors. Collectors from 70 countries and regions and representatives from more than 130 top international art galleries and institutions attended the fair. Collectors, mainly from China, South Korea and the United States, recorded strong sales at all levels of the market. "Our sales record is impressive, with Asian and Western collectors keen on gallery artists. The art market has continued to lean towards Asia in recent years, and we have met a number of new collectors and sold a range of works to local organisations." Alex Logsdail, the international director of Leeson Gallery, said on Sunday. At this year's exhibition, the East and West art galleries are working side by side, presenting high-quality works and excellent projects. Eight Asian art galleries made their debuts at the exhibition. Five of them participated in the main exhibition areas, including Beijing Art Now Gallery, Galerie du Monde from China's Hong Kong, Tang Contemporary Art, and so on. "I am impressed by the outstanding performance of the Asian galleries, which enables visitors to learn about the rich historical heritage of the region. The exhibition is a unique opportunity to explore the world of art in depth, thanks to the work of leading artists from all over Asia," Director Asia for Art Basel's show in Hong Kong Adeline Ooi also said on Sunday. Almine Rech Gallery has been involved since the first Hong Kong exhibition. Almine Rech, owner of this gallery, said he was delighted to see the show evolve both in terms of the quality of the work and the diversity of the collectors. At the same time, Hong Kong hosted a number of cultural events such as Art Central, Asia Contemporary Art Show and Spring Auction held by some auction houses. The booming art market in Hong Kong has become an international focus for some time. "Hong Kong's cultural activities are on the rise and many museums and foundations have organized first-class exhibitions to give visitors a rich artistic experience." Sadie Coles, owner of the Sadie Coles HQ Gallery, said on Saturday. Art Basel was founded in 1970 in Basel, Switzerland, and landed in Hong Kong in 2013. It is held annually in Basel, Miami and Hong Kong. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 13:55:33|Editor: Liu Video Player Close CANBERRA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has ruled out risking Australian lives to bring the children of Islamic State (IS) fighters stranded in Syria back to Australia. Responding to reports that three children of Khaled Sharrouf, an Australian who left the country in 2013 to fight for IS in Syria, have been found stranded in a Syrian refugee camp, Morrison said that any operation to return the children to the family in Australia would be too risky. "I'm not going to put one Australian life at risk to try and extract people from these dangerous situations," he told reporters on Monday. "I think it's appalling that Australians have gone and fought against our values and our way of life and peace-loving countries of the world in joining the Daesh fight. "I think it's even more despicable that they put their children in the middle of it." Sharrouf's wife, Tara Nettleton, joined her husband in Syria with their five children in 2014. She died of medical complications in 2015. Of their children, only three, 17-year-old Zaynab, 16-year-old Hoda and eight-year-old Humzeh, have survived. Their grandmother Karen Nettleton told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that she was particularly concerned for Zaynab's wellbeing. "Zaynab is seven-and-a half months pregnant; she's feeling very fatigued," she said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 14:05:34|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China will hold the second summit on digital development from May 6 to 8 in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian Province, according to a State Council Information Office press conference held Tuesday. The second Digital China Summit aims to serve as a platform for issuing China's policies on IT development, displaying the achievements of e-government and the digital economy and the exchange of theoretical and practical experiences in building a digital China, said Yang Xiaowei, deputy director of the Cyberspace Administration of China, at the press conference. Themed "New Dynamics, New Development, New Achievements Empowered by Information," the summit mainly consists of forums, an exhibition on digital China and an innovation contest, Yang said. The event is co-organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Fujian government. Organizers plan to invite around 1,500 guests to the summit. "So far, over 40 academicians with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering and guests from leading companies in the digital field have confirmed to take part in the summit," said Zhang Zhinan, executive vice governor of Fujian. Zhang said intelligent technologies and equipment such as facial and voice recognition, facial payments, driverless cars and driverless vendor vehicles will be used at the event, with 5G signals fully covering the major venues. Several ministries and commissions, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and the National Health Commission, will launch a series of policies on industrial informatization and digital economic development at the event. Zhang also said around 400 projects on the digital economy were agreed upon during last year's summit, with a total investment of around 300 billion yuan (44.7 billion U.S. dollars), and nearly 200 of them have begun construction. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 14:20:38|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China's central authorities have established a specialized work mechanism to address the practice of "formalities for formalities' sake" and alleviate burdens on primary-level authorities. The first meeting on the mechanism was held Monday in Beijing and was presided over by Ding Xuexiang, member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee as well as director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee. The General Office of the CPC Central Committee issued a circular stressing efforts to avoid work styles of "formalities for formalities' sake" and relieve burdens on local authorities earlier this year. Listing a series of measures, the circular aims to inspire officials to be "men of action" and demonstrate a keen sense of responsibility. "Formalities for formalities' sake" and bureaucratism are not only problematic work styles but also a political issue, which severely affects the implementation of the policies and decisions made by the CPC Central Committee, according to the meeting. Such practices would also undermine the authority of the CPC Central Committee and damage the image of the Party, the meeting said. The meeting underlined efforts to resolutely implement the circular, calling on central and state institutions to inspect and rectify "formalities for formalities' sake" practices, make typical cases public and guard against such problems. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 14:35:41|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese researchers have disclosed that the mosquitoes incubated in Zika virus (ZIKV) contaminated water can be infected by the virus. In the classic ZIKV transmission cycle, mosquitoes acquire the virus via biting an infected patient when infectious viral particles are released into the saliva of the mosquitoes. The mosquitos then transmit the virus to healthy people. Before being able to fly, mosquitoes grow up in water from spawn to larvae to pupae. The researchers from Tsinghua University and Beijing Normal University collected urine samples from 89 healthy people and found that ZIKV can survive in human urine. The researchers mixed healthy urine with ZIKV and found that up to four percent of the mosquitoes that emerged from the infected urine were ZIKV positive. Some of the infected mosquitoes transmitted ZIKV to animals. Furthermore, the researchers collected several sewage samples to cultivate the mosquito pupae, and urine containing a low amount of ZIKV was continuously added to the sewage sample every three hours, which simulated the urination of ZIKV patients. In this sewage condition, mosquitoes acquired ZIKV and obtained the ability to transmit the virus to animals. The result indicated that mosquitoes breeding in a water system contaminated by human urine containing ZIKV can carry and transmit ZIKV. This new potential transmission approach may accelerate the dissemination of ZIKV in nature. The study emphasized the importance of improving the sanitary system in mosquito-borne disease epidemic regions and providing new possible avenues for interrupting the mosquito-borne virus transmission cycle in nature. The stability of ZIKV is determined by the acid and alkali degree, said Cheng Gong, a professor of Tsinghua University. The virus activity dived when the pH value was reduced lower than 6.5. Thus water pH value control could also be a ZIKV prevention method. "All of our findings are based on laboratory experiments," said Cheng. "We need to do further research through field investigations." Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 14:55:43|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close TUNIS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's congratulatory message on the opening of the Arab League (AL) summit reflects well the political will to deepen China-Arab cooperation, a senior official of the regional bloc said on Monday. Kamal Hassen Ali, assistant secretary general of AL, lauded Xi's positive comments on the deep-rooted China-Arab traditional friendship. "The congratulatory message from President Xi Jinping indicates the importance both sides attach to the China-Arab cooperation, and the aspiration of both sides to strengthen bilateral ties," he told Xinhua in an interview on the sidelines of the second China-Arab BDS Cooperation Forum held in Tunis. BDS refers to the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System indigenously developed by China to provide global positioning and messaging services. China and Arab states are working to deepen their cooperation on boosting the BDS application in Arab countries. Xi sent the message on Sunday to Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi, the rotating AL president who presided over the 30th Arab League Summit held in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. In his message, Xi praised the AL's efforts to promote peace, stability and development in the Middle East, and recalled the agreement between the two sides in last July to establish a future-oriented strategic partnership of comprehensive cooperation and common development, which was a new starting point for Sino-Arab cooperation. "The China-Arab relations are based on solid ground, as was shown in the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum. The cooperation and exchanges have been witnessed in many sectors, including energy, environment, transport, communication and satellite navigation. This demonstrates the political will of both sides to elevate and deepen bilateral cooperation," the AL official said. "The China-Arab strategic partnership will further develop into a lasting stable relationship beyond time and space. We will definitely seek to enhance cooperation with China in building the Silk Road both in land and on the sea," he added. On the future of China-Arab cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Ali said he was very optimistic. Firstly, the Arab area boasts geographic importance, as it serves as a hub connecting China to Europe and Africa. Secondly, China and Arab states are deepening cooperation not only through increasing political and cultural exchanges, but also through building such projects as ports, renewable energy, power transmission, environmental protection and satellite navigation, Ali explained. "I am very optimistic about the future cooperation between China and the Arab world under the BRI, as the cooperation will benefit both sides and even the rest of the world," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 14:55:43|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close SAN FRANCISCO, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said Monday that Tesla Motors Inc. will pay a total of 86,000 U.S. dollars in a settlement over federal hazardous waste violations at a Tesla manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. Under the settlement with the EPA, Tesla will be fined for 31,000 dollars in penalty for violations of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act regulations. The electric automaker will also purchase 55,000 dollars in emergency response equipment for the City of Fremont Fire Department to help improve the department's ability to respond to hazardous materials incidents, said the EPA. Unannounced EPA-led investigations conducted at Tesla's Fremont facility in 2017 showed that Tesla had failed to comply with air emissions standards for equipment leaks and management requirements for generators of hazardous wastes. The Tesla factory had also made no adequate hazardous waste determination for certain solid waste generated during the manufacturing process, said the EPA. "It's vital that businesses comply with hazardous waste laws that keep facilities safe for workers and the community," said EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator Mike Stoker. In 2018, Tesla was fined by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District for 139,500 dollars for emitting excess air pollution from its factory in Fremont, according to local media. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 14:55:43|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Public Security has warned the public of major traffic safety risks ahead of Tomb-sweeping Day that falls on April 5 this year. Road safety may be threatened by forecasted rain in southern China, the travel peak during the holiday from Friday to Sunday and a large number of people visiting cemeteries via car, the ministry said in a statement on its website. Safety risks may also arise on rural roads, the ministry noted, adding that according to data over the past three years, 40 percent of accidents on rural roads during the Tomb-sweeping Day holiday were fatal. Tomb-sweeping Day, also known as Qingming Festival, is a traditional Chinese holiday when people pay tribute to deceased family and friends. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 15:00:44|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close LONDON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May has to consider what next steps she and her government will take on Brexit after lawmakers on Monday night rejected for a second time an alternative list of options aimed at breaking the current Brexit deadlock. With Britain scheduled to leave the European Union on April 12, May is expected to convene a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Her mission will be to seek a way of breaking the impasse between warring politicians. May is expected, trying for a fourth time, to get her under-fire Brexit deal through parliament later this week. Her deal, also known as the Withdrawal Agreement, has been rejected in the House of Commons for three times since January. Members of Parliament spent hours Monday debating a list of four Brexit options, ending in a series of votes which resulted in all of them being rejected. It was the second time within days that the British parliament had taken the unusual step of taking control of business in the Commons, a task usually managed by the ruling government. The first round of unbinding "indicative vote" was conducted on March 27, in which none of MPs' eight proposed options secured a majority, but among them, the proposed options about a customs union with the European Union and a referendum on any deal received most support from the lawmakers. Many of those options have returned for round two, but some have been replaced with new alternatives. The prime minister, who is struggling to hold her party together, warned Sunday night that she faced resignation and a split in the Conservative Party if she agrees to pursue a "soft" Brexit this week. PROPOSED OPTIONS Speaker John Bercow announced the results of the four options, which one by one fell, giving May's own deal a better chance. One option put forward by veteran Conservative Ken Clarke, the longest serving politician in the Commons, lost by just three votes, with 276 MPs against it and 273 backing. It would have seen Britain negotiating a permanent UK-wide customs union with the EU as part of any Brexit deal with Brussels. But it would prevent Britain striking independent trade deals with other countries, and has previously been ruled out by May. Conservative MP Nick Boles' Common Market option lost by 282 to 261. It would have seen Britain joining the European Free Trade Association and European Economic Area. It would have meant Britain remaining part of the EU single market, but would allow free movement of people across Europe. Boles announced he was resigning from the Conservative Party after the Norway-style Brexit option was rejected. Labour MPs Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson put forward a plan that would have forced a public vote on any Brexit deal passed by the British Parliament, before it could be implemented. It lost by 292 votes to 280. Scottish National Party MP Joanna Cherry's option aimed at preventing Britain from leaving the EU without a deal, lost by 292 votes to 191, a margin of 101. None of the Monday votes on the proposals are legally binding, meaning it will be up to the British government if they act on the results. DEAL OR NO DEAL Currently, Downing Street does not rule out the plan to seek a fourth parliamentary vote on May's Brexit deal, reached between London and Brussels in November 2018 after long painful negotiations. British Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told MPs after the results were announced Monday that the House of Commons could avoid a no-deal Brexit, and avoid having to hold European elections, by voting for May's deal this week. "This is now the second time the House (of Commons) has considered a wide variety of options for a way forward. It has once again failed to find a clear majority for any of the options," he said. "And yet the result of the House on Friday not to endorse the withdrawal agreement (May's deal) means that the default legal position is that the UK will leave the EU in just 11 days' time," he said. It was not a message many of the MPs wanted to hear. Last week's third defeat for May's deal saw her losing by 58 votes, closer to the finishing line than the previously losing margins of 230 and 149 respectively. But still a wide gap to bridge. Veteran Labour politician Hilary Benn, chair of the House of Commons Brexit committee, said he wants to know if May plans to ask Brussels to extend the April 12 deadline. The focus now switches to Downing Street and Tuesday when the British cabinet meets. It had been predicted that ministers might debate whether there should be a general election as a way forward. That so-called nuclear option may now be put on hold following the results Monday. As one leading political commentator speculated, May "may now go for meaningful vote four, or even five." European Union leaders have given Britain until April 12, the latest Brexit date, to agree a deal, or else leave the regional bloc with no deal. That would mean Britain trading under the World Trade Organization rules. A special summit of EU leaders has been scheduled for April 10 to discuss the Brexit saga. There was cold comfort from across the English Channel, according to the Guardian in London. It reported that the European Parliament's lead Brexit spokesman Guy Verhofstadt, said on his social media site after the Monday night results that a no-deal Brexit was "nearly inevitable." Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 15:05:45|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Dongfeng Automobile Co. Ltd., the listed arm of Dongfeng Motor Corporation, reported a 175.95-percent rise in 2018 net profits despite the overall decline in China's automobile market. Net profits attributable to shareholders reached 553.85 million yuan (82.47 million U.S. dollars) in 2018, according to the company's annual report filed to the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The Shanghai-listed company's total assets rose 10.35 percent year on year to hit 19.63 billion yuan at the end of 2018. Meanwhile, operating revenue dropped 21.2 percent year on year to 14.42 billion yuan. The company sold 32,000 new energy automobiles last year, up 9.4 percent year on year. Dongfeng Automobile shares opened 6 percent higher at 5.4 yuan Tuesday. China sold 28.08 million autos last year, down 2.76 percent year on year, remaining the world's largest auto market, data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) showed. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 15:20:53|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close YANGON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Twenty people were killed with 113 others injured in traffic accidents on Myanmar's Yangon-Mandalay highway last month, according to the figures from the Highway Police Office on Tuesday. In March alone, there were a total of 51 road accident cases reported on the Myanmar's busiest highway. The highway accidents were mostly caused by human error - overspeeding, negligent driving and drowsy driving and others. Deadly motor vehicle accidents also involved in the last month traffic accidents on the highway. The highway police force is urging people to comply with traffic laws as well as to cooperate with traffic police in carrying out road safety measures. In the whole 2018, there were a total of 473 accidents, leaving 103 deaths and 877 injuries on Yangon-Mandalay highway. Aiming at enhancing better traffic safety along the highway, the highway authorities have increased the number of road safety police to 16 police stations, providing 24-hour services for travellers since 2012. The 587-km long highway, connecting the country's commercial city Yangon and the second largest city of Mandalay, was opened to reduce the travel time between the two cities in December 2010. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 15:30:58|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close by Xinhua writers Xia Lin, Wu Xiaoling, Zhang Mocheng SAN FRANCISCO, April 2 (Xinhua) -- U.S. companies in Silicon Valley hope the trade disputes between the United States and China can be solved soon as they would like "to have a bigger footprint in China," President and CEO of the Bay Area Council (BAC) Jim Wunderman said to Xinhua in a recent interview. As head of the BAC, which is delegated by the high-tech behemoths in the region with their public affairs and strategy management, Wunderman reads the rules of business as knowingly as his palm lines and takes the responsibility of always seeking efficiency and avoiding traps for the powerful and pioneering digital force behind him. "I think eventually it'll be fixed, because I don't think it's in the interest of the United States or China to have a prolonged trade war," Wunderman told Xinhua, ahead of both countries going to meet midweek in Washington to kick off the ninth round of negotiations. "We want to see the issues, the trade issues between China and the United States, get resolved. You know, we don't have any control over that, of course, but we hope for that," he said. The BAC currently has established four offices in China, respectively in Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Nanjing, mapping out its tentacles to help Silicon Valley's giants and tech leaders to maintain contact with their Chinese counterparts and secure any potential to carry out cooperation. "We want to stay in this (game) and we've invested a lot in it. Now. We've been in China over 10 years, with a lot of time and work put in and commitments made and friendships built. So, there's no reason to pull back from our point of view at all," said Wunderman. Wunderman is now leading the BAC to strengthen cooperation with China's Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area on a region-to-region level, mulling opening a new office there. "China is an incredible market," added Wunderman, who has visited China many times and feels the country is "almost like a second home" with so many friends there. However, the outcome of an escalation of U.S.-China bilateral tariffs has been vexing Wunderman, whose BAC is a "CEO-led public policy organization focused on making the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley the most globally competitive and economically productive region in the world." A study recently released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that an escalation of U.S.-China bilateral tariffs will shave off 1 trillion U.S. 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 said, noting that the high-tech sector is one of the victims to bear the brunt of the tax warfare. "We think there's a lot of frustration of people who would like to do more business and they can't do it. Now, tariffs ... That's the problem," the BAC head said. "There are difficult issues. I think we're a bit stuck, hoping that we see some resolution on that," he said. "As those issues get more resolved, then I think most of our companies would like to have a bigger footprint in China." Seeing through history, Wunderman knows he should also navigate with expertise and patience. "I think we're pretty committed to staying on for a few years. You know, we'll stay on as long as it makes sense to stay on, as long as it may be fruitful," he said. Meanwhile, Wunderman emphasized a common interest among his U.S. clients in sustaining the relationship with China. "After all, the economy of China and its growth are very big. And we have a strategic advantage here in the Bay Area. And we want China to think of the Bay Area in California as the most important place to invest and do business," said Wunderman. Wunderman became the BAC president and CEO in April 2004. During his term, the BAC hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference in 2011, opened its Shanghai and Hangzhou offices in China, and engaged in opening the State of California's official trade office in China, according to the BAC's official website. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 15:56:12|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close KUNMING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- A hydropower plant in southwest China's Yunnan Province changed its water discharge plan to protect the brooding habitat for River Terns, a type of protected bird in China. The Hulukou hydro-power plant on the Dayingjiang River, an upstream tributary of the Irrawaddy River, started to discharge water from March 26 to April 1 to make room for maintenance and repair. Four days before it began discharging water, nature photographer Cun Zhiyong got worried. The discharge was estimated to be three million cubic meters, which was to substantially elevate the water level. "This means that the brood habitats of River Terns might become flooded," said Cun, 58. The River Tern, mainly found along inland rivers in India, Myanmar and Thailand, has seen drastic population decline in southeast Asia. Listed as a second-grade state-protection in China, the birds mainly breed along the Dayingjiang River in Yingjiang County on the China-Myanmar border. In 2014, 13 River Terns were spotted in Yingjiang but only five were observed in 2018. Last month, an investigation team sent by the county government and the Kadoorie Conservation China recorded seven birds and found a breeding nest. "River Terns have beautiful posture, and they fly pretty fast. When I started bird photography, I improved my skills by following and taking pictures of the River Terns," said Cun. The River Terns breed from March to May every year and often nest on bare rocks or sandbanks in rivers. The sudden rise of river water levels or other disturbances including harvesting of the eggs and destruction of the nests by humans and domestic animals threaten its incubation. "It will be a great loss if its population continues to decline," said Cun, who shared the warning in a WeChat group with government officials, bird photographers and conservation volunteers. His message caught the attention of Yang Zhenghua, deputy director of the Bureau of Forestry and Grassland of Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture which administers Yingjiang. Yang then arranged for officials to contact the Hulukou hydro-power plant, and he personally followed the issue. Nature reserve workers were sent to monitor the water level around three bird nests and kept human and domestic animals away from the nests, said Zuo Changsheng, deputy director of the Yingjiang sub-office of the Tongbiguan Nature Reserve. They also changed the water release plan to make sure that the water level is below the nests and the incubation is undisturbed, Zuo told Xinhua on Monday. The change of plan led water to accumulate in front of the dam, deforming the gate. "It will cost us at least 50,000 yuan (7,400 U.S. dollars) to repair the gate, but we would like to take the necessary actions to protect the rare birds," said Dong Jun, general manager of the plant. The hydropower plant generates around 90 million watts of electricity every year. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 16:11:19|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Sichuan International Aerospace Exhibition 2019 will be held in Guanghan city in southwest China's Sichuan Province in early October, according to the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense on Monday. More than 150 aircraft will be on show at the biennial exhibition, plus events such as an air show, display of aviation culture products, and professional forums. The exhibition will take place at Guanghan Airport of the Civil Aviation Flight University of China. In 2017, more than 200 enterprises took part in the exhibition, bringing 120 aircraft and attracting over 300,000 visitors. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 16:16:25|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese duck meat producers are upbeat about the industry's export outlook after the European Union (EU) started to grant more low-tariff quotas on Monday. The EU agreed in November 2018 to grant more low-tariff quotas to Chinese poultry meat, including the quotas for 5,000 tonnes of chicken meat and 6,600 tonnes of duck meat, after several rounds of consultations. "Today marks a good day for us. We estimate our production capacity will increase by around 2,000 tonnes this year. We are fully prepared," said Yu Mingfu, deputy general manager of the Shandong-based Weifang Legang Food Co. Ltd., one of the largest duck meat producers in China. The EU's new quotas will lead to higher prices of duck exports and increase the company's profits by 4 million dollars a year, he predicted. The company will improve the standards of production to supply higher-quality duck meat, Yu said. Hu Kui, deputy general manager of Henan Huaying Agricultural Development Co., Ltd., believes the new quotas are expected to boost the sales and international competitiveness of China's poultry industry, noting that Europe is a major market for duck meat. Previously, China's poultry exports to the EU had been subdued for years, as the EU refused to offer significant low-tariff quotas for Chinese poultry meat after the outbreaks of bird flu in Asia between 2006 and 2008. China filed a complaint to the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the EU over high poultry tariffs in April 2015, putting forth a consultation request and formally starting WTO dispute settlement procedures. In April 2017, the WTO ruled that EU's poultry tariff quota management had violated its rules. More than a year later, China and the EU reached the final agreement on the new tariff quotas. Yu Lu, vice president of the China Chamber of Commerce of Foodstuffs and Native Produce, said the agreement would create a fairer trade environment for Chinese firms specialized in poultry exports, boost China's poultry exports and enrich the poultry meat supply of the EU at more favorable prices. Industry analysts estimated that the new quotas would increase Chinese duck meat exports to more than 18,000 tonnes a year, up 50 percent from the current level. Statistics from China's Ministry of Commerce showed that to meet the import requirements of the EU, China's poultry industry has invested a total of 2.8 billion yuan (about 417 million U.S. dollars) since last year to renovate farms and upgrade processing equipment. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 16:21:29|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close CAIRO, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's congratulatory message to the 30th Arab League (AL) Summit indicates the longstanding friendly ties between China and the Arab countries and the rapid progress of Sino-Arab cooperation under the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), said Arab officials and experts. The message well reflects China's political will to deepen Sino-Arab cooperation, Kamal Hassen Ali, assistant secretary general of the AL, told Xinhua in an interview. Xi's message was sent on Sunday to Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi, the rotating AL president who presided over the 30th AL Summit held in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. In his message, Xi praised the AL's efforts to promote peace, stability and development in the Middle East, and recalled the agreement between the two sides in last July to establish a future-oriented strategic partnership of comprehensive cooperation and common development, which was a new starting point for Sino-Arab cooperation. Sino-Arab cooperation is achieving positive results as many mechanisms have been built to add momentum to the development of the bilateral ties, said Ali Yousif, executive director of the Arab-Chinese Friendship Societies' League, an AL affiliate based in Sudan. Xi's message reaffirmed that China stands side by side with its Arab friends when confronting all challenges, and showed that China "is Arab nations' true old friend," he said. Abdulaziz Alshaabani, a Saudi journalist and researcher in Chinese affairs, told Xinhua that the Chinese president voiced great concern over the stability of the Arab world as well as China's aspiration to help restore development and stability in the region. Alshaabani's remarks were echoed by Tariq Fahmy, professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, who said that Xi's message indicated China's support for the Arab countries. The cooperation projects between China and the Arab countries under the BRI will bring benefits to both sides, Fahmy said, adding that he believes Sino-Arab relations will develop and prosper under the initiative. Mahmoud Fataftah, a Palestinian expert in international relations, said that there were already many success stories of cooperation projects within the framework of the BRI, and he believed that the Palestinians can benefit from the initiative. "The message shows the depth of the China-Arab relations," said Mahmoud Raya, director of the Lebanese "China in Arab Eyes" news website. "The tone of the letter was warm and friendly, demonstrating the great importance that China attaches to boosting ties and authentic cooperation with Arab countries," Raya said. Currently, Sino-Arab relations are very positive and they are continuously growing on various levels, Raya added. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 16:36:46|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close KHARTOUM, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's congratulatory message to the 30th Arab League (AL) Summit shows a strong base for the firm relations between China and Arab countries, Ali Yousif, executive director of the Arab-Chinese Friendship Societies' League, an AL affiliate based in Sudan, said on Monday. "The Chinese president's message reaffirmed China's commitment to standing alongside its Arab friends under all these challenges, and it shows that the Arab nation has a true old friend which is China," Yousif told Xinhua in an interview. Xi's message was sent on Sunday to Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi, the rotating AL president who presided over the 30th AL Summit held in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. In his message, Xi praised the AL's efforts to promote peace, stability and development in the Middle East, and recalled the agreement between the two sides in last July to establish a future-oriented strategic partnership of comprehensive cooperation and common development, which was a new starting point for Sino-Arab cooperation. The message was very important in terms of content and timing, Yousif said. "The timing of the message is important because it came just ahead of one of the most important Arab summits that is convened under extraordinary circumstances and great challenges facing the Arab nation and lasting issues in Arab countries such as Syria, Yemen and Libya," he said. Yousif further pointed to the depth and strength of the Sino-Arab relations, which he called firm and progressive. China has consistently supported the recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people in establishing their independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital, he said. In the meantime, Yousif stressed that Arab countries have a great role to play in the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China. "The initiative represents an important mechanism for cooperation, provides huge development projects, ensures flow of investments into the Arab countries, and provides sources of funds through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank," he said. It also creates for Arab countries opportunities that help achieve regional integration and communications through roads and railway lines, he said. "The communication between the Chinese people and the Arab peoples must be enhanced, the cultural cooperation between the two sides must be increased, and the language barriers should be broken through focusing on teaching the Chinese language in the Arab countries and teaching the Arabic language in China," he added. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 16:41:51|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close by Ronald Ssekandi KAMPALA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Uganda is harnessing the power of mobile phones as a driver of its economic growth under the country's Vision 2040, which aims at the country's transition from a low-income country to one with a competitive upper middle class. The mobile industry has succeeded in enabling access to services in the fields of finance, agriculture, health, education and energy, Uganda's Minister of Information and Communications Technology Frank Tumwebaze said at a recent national dialogue on digital transformation. "Mobile phones enable the most widespread and inclusive means of accessing the Internet and digital technologies, which are vital to the growth of the Ugandan economy in an increasingly digital world," Tumwebaze said. Almaz Gebru, acting resident representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), said the evolution of mobile phones and digital services in Uganda is already yielding results. Gebru said that in the late 1990s, mobile phones were only for a minority. One usually had to travel over 20 km to the nearest service provider to make phone calls. "Today, nearly half of the Ugandan population have mobile subscriptions, with more than 10 million Ugandans accessing the Internet on phones. Farmers can access market prices and sell products remotely. Citizens in rural areas do not require a bank account to save, send or withdraw money. They no longer have to travel to town to pay school fees or utilities," she added. Key platforms such as mobile money and Cellular Internet of Things (IoT) enable the creation, distribution and consumption of a wide range of digital services, according to a report by the United Nations, Britain's Department for International Development and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The report said mobile money is now the main driver of formal financial inclusion in Uganda, with 22 million registered accounts compared to just 5 million registered accounts in traditional banks. Uganda's Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda said in a speech which was read on his behalf, that as the Fourth Industrial Revolution takes shape, the multiple use and fusion of different technologies across all sectors will be critical. "To benefit from this revolution, we need the right partnerships and the right legal and regulatory environment," Rugunda said, mentioning the National Broadband Policy released last year. The policy, said Tumwebaze, defines the appropriate technology mix that will enable universal connectivity and reform the licensing framework to improve quality of service in the industry. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 16:41:53|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close GUIYANG, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Having lived in the city for years, retiree Pi Yu wants to escape the endless flow of cars, concrete high-rises and the fast-paced life. "I've lived in the city for too long. I want to relax and go back to the countryside," said the 57-year-old who teaches at a vocational school in Guizhou Province, in southwest China. Pi now lives in a village house 65 km from Guiyang, capital of Guizhou, where her urban residence is. She grows Chinese roses, orchids, and osmanthus flowers and farms her own vegetables in the idyllic water town. She did not buy the house, however, as lands in villages are collectively owned. Unlike urban apartments, rural houses are not publically traded. In 2018, she joined a program launched by a village tourism company that transforms decrepit rural houses into hotels. She invested 200,000 yuan (about 29,800 U.S. dollars) and the company helped her secure a loan of an equal sum. In exchange, she can live in one of the rooms for free for 20 years, farm the land, and share the hotel dividends. "The people in the city have the money, the farmers have vacant houses and the company offers services in hotel management -- a win-win-win situation," said Xiao Jintao, vice manager of Guizhou Shuidong Village Housing Tourism Company. China's urbanization rate reached 60 percent by the end of 2018, with over 830 million people now living in the cities. As people move into cities, around 20 percent of the old houses in the countryside are left vacant, Xiao said, based on an investigation of villages in Guizhou. "These rural houses are an excellent retreat for people who are bored living in cities and desire a more rural lifestyle," Xiao said. Under the company's scheme, each investor puts in around 30,000 to 150,000 dollars to turn vacant houses into hotel rooms. The three parties divide the earnings. When the lease expires in 20 years, the hotel ownership is returned to the farmers. Pi renovated a 40-year-old house in Longguang Village. She kept backyard rooms which were used to make bricks and cure tobacco for what she calls a cool weekend town feel. "It was a major facelift. The house looked like an ugly maid. Now it is as charming as Snow White," she said. In Kaiyang County, over 80 investors like Pi have renovated 120 houses. Local banks offered loans to finance the renovation and tourism infrastructure spending. Booming rural tourism brought handsome earnings for the investors. "In the last six months, each investor received around 20,000 yuan, and the farmers got 6,000 yuan each," said Xiao. Villager Chen Huasong is a participant of the program. He moved into the county with his son and his old house was used to store firewood. "I tried renting out my 12 rooms before, but I didn't know that guests would need slippers. There were no TVs nor independent bathrooms. People just stopped coming," he said. Now hotel owners manage their properties through an app. Lodgers spend around 198 yuan to 268 yuan (29 to 40 dollars) a night. Last year, five restaurants were opened in the village, creating more than 50 jobs for villagers. In Guizhou, most villages are accessible in a quick three to five-hour drive, said Li Shiyong, head of the Kaiyang County government. The county will continue to seek out old houses for renovation. "It is a great way to attain rural revitalization," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 16:46:58|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close JERUSALEM, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu's office said in a statement on Tuesday. The office did not elaborate on which issues the two leaders will be discussing in their meeting. On Monday, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office said Netanyahu and Putin spoke by telephone over "regional issues." According to local media reports, the discussion included Syria. The meeting will be held five days before Israel's April 9 election, in which Netanyahu is seeking to be re-elected for a fifth term. Shifting from a long-held U.S. foreign policy, President Donald Trump announced last Thursday that he recognizes Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a territory Israel captured from Syria in a war in 1967 and later annexed. The move triggered international condemnations. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is fighting against rebel groups in Syria's eight-year civil war, with Russian support. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 16:57:06|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ADEN, Yemen, April 2 (Xinhua) -- A roadside bomb killed at least two Yemeni security soldiers while a number of others were injured in the southeastern province of Hadramout on Tuesday morning, a local government official told Xinhua. A security forces' vehicle struck an improvised explosive device planted on track by unknown terrorist elements in Seiyun district of Hadramout, said the official in Hadramout on condition of anonymity. The explosion targeted the vehicle carrying members of the newly-recruited security forces in Hadramout, the official said. The injured were evacuated to a nearby public hospital in Seiyun district. No group claimed responsibility for the bomb attack yet. Other security sources said that "unknown gunmen looted the soldiers' weapons, shot them after the bomb explosion, and then fled the area." The Yemeni security forces backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a key member of Saudi-led coalition, cordoned off the area for investigations. The government-controlled southeastern province of Hadramout and other areas in Yemen are witnessing growing activities of extremist organizations that take advantage of the conflicts in the impoverished Arab country. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 17:07:23|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close MOGADISHU, April 2 (Xinhua) -- National Army (SNA) forces foiled a major terrorist attack in southern region late on Monday following heavy fighting between the army and al-Shabab fighters, government officials said on Tuesday. The ministry of information said the SNA forces also seized a tanker truck loaded with explosives in Sabid village, Lower Shabelle region. "The terrorists were plotting to carry out a large-scale terrorist attack in Somalia but heroes foiled and arrested number of terrorists," said the ministry in a statement. It was not clear how many militants were killed during the latest fighting in Sabid where the insurgents have several bases. According to security sources, the explosives is one of the largest bombs ever made by al-Qaida allied terrorist group, al-Shabab, saying Mogadishu was the militants' likely target. The ministry said security forces recaptured Sabid village, located about 40 km southwest of Mogadishu from militants. The group which fights to topple the internationally-backed government uses portions of southern and central Somalia to plot and direct terror attacks, steal humanitarian aid, extort the local populace to fund its operations, and shelter radical terrorists. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 17:12:27|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close MANILA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- A terrorist was killed and two policemen were wounded in two separate clashes on Tuesday between security forces and Abu Sayyaf group in southern Philippine Sulu province, the military said. Gerry Besana, spokesman for the Philippine military's Western Mindanao Command, said one of the clashes occurred 8:31 a.m. local time in Simisa island of Sulu province. An Abu Sayyaf bandit was killed in that 15-minute firefight, he added. The government troops clashed with another group of Abu Sayyaf militants also at 8:30 a.m. local time in northern part of Sulu province, wounding two policemen, said the Sulu provincial police. The Abu Sayyaf militants fled after a brief exchange of gunfire. A pursuit operation was launched after the incident, the Sulu provincial police added. The Duterte government has formed an army division to hunt down the Abu Sayyaf group blamed for a series of kidnapping and bombings in the southern region, including the Jan. 27 twin bombings in a church in Jolo, Sulu province, that killed 23 and injured more than 100. The Armed Forces of the Philippines has launched a series of law enforcement operations against the Abu Sayyaf and other armed groups operating especially in the Sulu archipelago and in other parts of Mindanao in the wake of the January twin bombings. Philippine security forces have been trying to crush the Abu Sayyaf terrorists since early 2000. Abu Sayyaf Group is the smallest but also the most radical terrorist group in the Philippines, which regularly carries out kidnappings, bombings and beheadings in western Mindanao, particularly in their lair in the island provinces of Basilan and Sulu. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 17:22:32|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close A self-driving tractor equipped with the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) runs along the planned routes through the remote control during the second China-Arab States BDS Cooperation Forum in Tunis, capital of Tunisia, April 1, 2019. (Xinhua/Meng Tao) by Shi Yang, Zhi Linfei TUNIS, April 2 (Xinhua) -- "It gives me joy, hope and growth. I'm so proud to be part of the BeiDou family," said Nada Laabidi, manager of the China-Arab States BDS/GNSS Center in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. A project manager of the Arab Information and Communication Technologies Organization (AICTO), Laabidi has been working part-time at the center for a year. But her passion for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) has become so intense that she is determined to study in China to attain a degree in satellite navigation. This is because she, like many other people in the Arab world, sees the huge potential and opportunities provided by the growing space cooperation between China and the Arab states. The two sides are jointly building a "Space Silk Road" led by the BDS application within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) proposed by China in 2013. A SPACE SILK ROAD TAKING SHAPE On a sunny afternoon in April at the China-Arab States BDS/GNSS Center, Ahmed Zenkri, a sophomore engineering student from Tek-up University, was amazed by the perfect run of a self-driving tractor equipped with the BDS, during which it smartly averted obstacles and drove along the planned routes via remote control. "I have never seen this technology in Tunisia before," Zenkri told Xinhua. "But I am absolutely impressed." Zenkri is not alone. Many Arab experts and business people attending the second China-Arab States BDS Cooperation Forum in Tunis on Monday were stunned by the precision of the navigation service provided by the BDS. Such a driverless tractor, which is part of precision agriculture, can reduce labor costs and increase crop yields, Shen Jun, deputy director of the International Cooperation Center of the China Satellite Navigation Office, told Xinhua. "The demonstration was amazing. I saw how the BDS, a modern technology, can be integrated into the traditional agricultural sector. The driverless machinery can operate in a highly accurate way, so I believe that the system can be applied to a wide range of other agricultural activities," said Hassan Kherroubi, a Tunisian specialist in the mechanical industry at the Mjez El-Beb engineering school. The BDS, developed and independently operated by China, can provide services of comparable quality to other major satellite systems like the American GPS and European Galileo systems, said Mohamed Ben Amor, secretary-general of the AICTO. Being compatible with other positioning systems, it also boasts unique advantages such as providing two-way messaging services, which can not only reveal one's position, but also broadcast one's position to others, according to Ran Chengqi, director of the China Satellite Navigation Office. With the BDS starting global service in late 2018, many expect it to add a whole new dimension to China-Arab cooperation, which has been picking up speed under the BRI. The BRI refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and aims to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe, Africa and beyond. At the second China-Arab States BDS Cooperation Forum attended by more than 200 officials, experts and business people from China and Arab countries, several agreements on furthering cooperation on the BDS application were inked. The participants envisioned building a "Space Silk Road" through closer cooperation on a wider application of the BDS in the Middle East. "The BDS cooperation is the best example of the strategic cooperation between China and Arab states, as satellite navigation integrates many hi-tech areas, including telecommunication and space technologies," Slim Khalbous, Tunisian minister of higher education and scientific research, said at the forum. "This is an important opportunity for Tunisia, while the BDS cooperation also means the further upgrade of China-Arab relations," Khalbous said. Kamal Hassan Ali, assistant secretary general of the Arab League in charge of economic affairs, praised China, which has made important contributions to building the ancient Silk Road, for establishing an excellent mechanism for cooperation and exchanges with Arab states. "The size of our cooperation will grow bigger, as the China-Tunisia cooperation has borne many fruits, and it will achieve greater progress in other countries in the region too," Ali said. Wang Zhaoyao, chairman of the Chinese Satellite Navigation Committee, called for jointly building a China-Arab "Space Silk Road" which he said will help Arab states share more benefits from the China-made navigation satellite system. He noted that the BDS has been applied in many Middle Eastern countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Kuwait and Sudan in areas such as precision agriculture, telecommunication, maritime monitoring and disaster relief. Li Chengwen, the Chinese ambassador for China-Arab States Cooperation Forum Affairs, said that the "Space Silk Road" is taking shape as the BDS becomes a new engine for pushing forward fruitful China-Arab cooperation, especially in hi-tech areas. GREAT POTENTIAL TO BE TAPPED To promote the application of the BDS in Arab countries, the China-Arab States BDS/GNSS Center, the first BeiDou overseas center, was officially inaugurated in April 2018, in accordance with a memorandum of understanding signed at the first China-Arab States BeiDou Cooperation Forum held in Shanghai, China in 2017. The BeiDou system has witnessed several successful cases of application in Arab countries. Most Arab states have been aware of the China-built satellite system and recognized its benefits. In 2016, the BDS technology was used by Kuwaiti engineers in the construction of the 300-meter-tall iconic building of the National Bank of Kuwait to improve accuracy. The BDS assisted Kuwaiti workers in installing the core wall structure of the building, which was designed in a complex shape, with millimeter-range accuracy. In 2017, the augmentation infrastructure of the BDS has been installed across Algeria with centimeter-range accuracy, playing an important role in local military, security, transport and agriculture. After a successful test of the BDS application in autonomous vehicles, Tunisia is expected to implement a pilot project on smart farming with the BDS application in the near future. "As the Arab world is more and more keen to turn to digital transformation, I am confident that there is huge potential for the BDS to be adopted and implemented by Arab countries," Laabidi told Xinhua. (Video reporter: Yang Jiefeng; Video editor: Liu Yuting) Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 17:27:35|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Troops of India and Pakistan Tuesday exchanged heavy fire and targeted each other's positions along the Line of Control (LoC), which divides Kashmir, officials said. The two sides exchanged fire in frontier Rajouri district, 222 km southwest of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir. Earlier in the day, a similar exchange broke out in Shahpur sector of Poonch. According to Indian officials, so far no loss of life has been reported in the skirmishes on the Indian side but on the Pakistani side, three troops were killed. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 17:47:39|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close TASHKENT, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an ambitious project of our times and develops partnerships between different regions of the world, an Uzbek expert has told Xinhua. Mirzokhid Rakhimov, a professor and head of the Department of Contemporary History at the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, said in a recent interview that the BRI helps to create new mechanisms for international economic and trade partnerships, the construction of highways, and the expansion and intensification of trans-regional cooperation in various fields. "It is symbolic that the Belt and Road (Initiative) fully coincides with the philosophy of partnership and the positive interactions of the people (who lived) during the (times of the) Great Silk Road," he said. Rakhimov said that the creation of new mechanisms for international partnerships has begun in a fairly short period of time, such as the Silk Road Fund that was founded in December 2014. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with an authorized capital of over 100 billion U.S. dollars was set up in 2016. Many countries, including Central Asian republics, acted as co-founders and partners of this bank, Rakhimov said. "Expanding trans-regional cooperation in various areas is an important outcome of the Belt and Road Initiative," he added. In order to achieve the sustainability of bilateral and multilateral relations, it is advisable to intensify joint efforts in the implementation of international and regional integration projects, Rakhimov said, while acknowledging that disagreements and problems between the partner countries exist. Talking about the necessity and prospects of communication between think tanks within the framework of the BRI, Rakhimov thinks that academic partnerships, such as the cooperation between research centers and universities within the framework of the BRI, are very important. "For example, in 2018-2019 with the participation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a number of joint laboratories and research centers were opened in Uzbekistan," Rakhimov said. "It would also be useful to create a joint international 'Belt and Road magazine,'" the professor said. Recalling the bright historical moments between the two countries, Rakhimov highlighted the establishment of a strategic partnership between China and Uzbekistan, and the signing of a solid package of agreements on the development of a wide range of interstate relations. "China is one of the largest investors in Uzbekistan," the professor said. "Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev made his first official visit to China in May 2017, where he also took part in the Belt and Road Forum, held in Beijing." In Rakhimov's opinion, the visits of the Uzbek leader to China in 2017 and 2018 have lifted the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries to a new level. Rakhimov believed that it is also important for the two countries to strengthen cooperation in such areas as technological modernization, education, science and international tourism. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 17:47:41|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close GAZA/RAMALLAH, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian naval forces arrested on Tuesday four Palestinian fishermen and confiscated their fishing boats off the coast close to the maritime border between southern Gaza Strip and Egypt, official said. Niazzar Ayyash, chairman of Gaza Fishermen Association, told reporters that Egyptian naval gunships surrounded two fishing boats belong to three brothers and their colleague off the coast of Rafah in southern Gaza Strip, close to Egypt. "The Egyptian naval forces arrested the four fishermen and confiscated their fishing boats," said Ayyash. There has been no official comment to the arrest of the four Gaza fishermen. Last year, two Palestinian fishermen were shot dead by the gunfire of the Egyptian naval forces. Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip requested from Egypt a clarification to the death of the two. Israel had on Monday announced that it increased the distance of fishing for Gaza Strip fishermen from 6 nautical miles to 15 miles in the sea of the coastal enclave as part of a calm understanding brokered by Egypt between Hamas and Israel. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry announced on Tuesday that a Palestinian young man was shot dead by Israeli soldiers' gunfire near Qalandia Refugee Camp between Jerusalem and Ramallah. The Health Ministry said in an emailed press statement that Mohammad Odwan, 23 years old, was killed during clashes on Tuesday morning between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli soldiers. Palestinian security sources said that Odwan was killed during clashes with an Israeli army force that stormed the refugee camp, adding that three other demonstrators were injured by the soldiers' gunfire. There has been no immediate Israeli army comment to the incident. However, Israel Radio reported that Israeli army security forces arrested 12 Palestinians all over the West Bank, including Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas leader who lives in Ramallah. The Radio quoted Israeli security sources as saying that the 12 Palestinians are wanted to Israel security forces for being involved in carrying out violent actions against Israel. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 17:57:46|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Nur Bekri, former head of the National Energy Administration, has been arrested for taking bribes, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) announced Tuesday. The National Supervisory Commission has completed an investigation of his case and handed it over to the procuratorial organ for review and prosecution, the SPP said. Nur Bekri was also former deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 18:07:51|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close ROME, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The various cooperation agreements signed during Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Italy have laid an important foundation for Italian businesses to expand their presence in China, experts have told Xinhua. During Xi's March visit, China and Italy signed a series of bilateral cooperation documents, including a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on boosting cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. "The agreements put in place opened an important door for Italy," Renzo Cavalieri, a professor of East Asian law at Ca'Foscari University in Venice, told Xinhua. "Next we have to figure out how to use it." Matteo Bressan, an international relations expert with Lumsa University in Rome, said the set of agreements signed between Italy and China have established an important base for Italy to build on. "Italy and China have traditionally had good relations and these agreements represent another step forward," Bressan said in an interview. "Italy has ground to make up: The country's presence in China is still relatively modest compared to some other countries'." Bressan noted that in some economic sectors like fashion, design, luxury goods, pharmaceuticals and high-end food products, Italy has a good foothold in China, but in the wake of the recent deals, the country will have to do more. "I would like to see Italy do more to promote and expand the 'Made in Italy' brand," Bressan said. Both Cavalieri and Bressan said a challenge is posed by the fact that Italy's economy is dominated by small and medium-sized companies that usually lack the scale to succeed in an economy as large and faraway as China's. "We have to learn how to work together more in order to be a credible force in a country like China," Cavalieri said. In the opinion of Paola Paderni, a historian focusing on Chinese institutions at the University of Naples and president of the Italian Association for Chinese Studies, the deals may have given Italy an edge. "Every country in the world is working to adjust its expectations in a world where China's influence is only growing," Paderni told Xinhua. "Maybe these deals will help give Italy a small advantage." Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 18:12:53|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China will hold the second summit on digital development from May 6 to 8 in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian Province, according to a State Council Information Office press conference held Tuesday. The second Digital China Summit aims to serve as a platform for issuing China's policies on IT development, displaying the achievements of e-government and the digital economy and the exchange of theoretical and practical experiences in building a digital China, said Yang Xiaowei, deputy head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, at the press conference. Themed "New Dynamics, New Development, New Achievements Empowered by Information," the summit mainly consists of forums, an exhibition on digital China and an innovation contest, Yang said. The event is co-organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Fujian provincial government. Organizers plan to invite around 1,500 guests to the summit. "So far, over 40 academicians with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering and guests from leading companies in the digital field have confirmed to take part in the summit," said Zhang Zhinan, executive vice governor of Fujian. Zhang said intelligent technologies and equipment such as facial and voice recognition, facial payments, driverless cars and driverless vendor vehicles will be used at the event, with 5G signals fully covering the major venues. Several ministries and commissions, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and the National Health Commission, will launch a series of policies on industrial informatization and digital economic development at the event. This year's summit also aims to serve as a platform for people at home and abroad to cooperate and contribute to digital China, making the event more international. Organizers will invite representatives of international organizations, multi-national companies, foreign-invested enterprises in China and think-tanks to the summit. Government officials from countries along the Belt and Road will also take part in the event. Zhang also said around 400 projects on the digital economy were agreed upon during last year's summit, with a total investment of around 300 billion yuan (44.7 billion U.S. dollars), and nearly 200 of them have begun construction. By the end of 2018, the scale of China's digital economy reached 31 trillion yuan, accounting for one-third of the national GDP. The country's total length of optical cables reached 43.58 million km, and the number of users of 4G networks hit 1.17 billion. A booming digital economy also significantly contributed to domestic consumption, employment, industrial transformation and upgrading, and streamlining of administration and delegating powers to the lower-level government, said Wu Hao from the NDRC at the press conference. In Fujian Province, optical networks and 4G signals have fully covered urban and rural areas and all administrative villages on land have access to optical fibers, said Zhang. In addition, the province has also established online platforms to streamline administrative approvals and facilitate public services. Currently, over 90 percent of administrative approvals at the provincial, municipal and county levels can be handled online. Fuzhou, where the first summit was held, has witnessed bourgeoning development of the digital economy in the past year, attracting famous businesses such as Alibaba to invest in the city and nurturing a batch of high-quality digital companies, said Wang Ning, Party chief of Fuzhou, at the press conference. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 18:27:58|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close NAIROBI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese enterprises based in Kenya on Tuesday launched a scholarship to boost vocational training in the east African nation. Kenya-China Economic and Trade Association (KCETA), a non-profit body that represents 97 members of Chinese owned companies, said in a statement that 1.5 million Kenya shillings (15,000 U.S. dollars) has been set aside to benefit 15 students at the initial phase. The scholarship is named after Jin Yetao, a former employee of Avic International who lost his life in the Ethiopian plane crash on March 10. "The Jin Yetao Scholarship is a special scholarship bestowed by KCETA dedicated to college students in vocational and technical universities," said Li Changgui, general manager of China Road and Bridge Corporation in Kenya. Li said the scholarship that was launched in honor of a young Chinese expatriate who dedicated his working life to vocational training in Kenya and the greater eastern African region, will inspire future generations to embrace positive values. Jin joined AVIC International after graduation in 2011 and was responsible for the company's overseas vocational and training program. He was aboard the Ethiopian Airlines jetliner, ET302 that was travelling to Nairobi from Addis Ababa on March 10 but crashed six minutes after takeoff, killing all the 157 passengers and crew onboard. Su Tianshu, managing director of AVIC International, hailed Jin's contribution to vocational training, medicare and infrastructure development in Kenya, terming him an illustrious ambassador for the Belt and Road Initiative that aims to boost Sino-Africa ties. So far, two Kenyan vocational training institutes have expressed willingness to participate in the Jin Yetao scholarship whose first batch of beneficiaries will be announced in September this year. Kevit Desai, principal secretary in the state department of vocational and technical training, said the launch of Jin Yetao Scholarship will be a game changer in Kenya's quest to bridge skills gap and promote industrial growth. "We are saddened by the devastation the air crash caused so many families, but we must inherit the victims' will and continue what they started. In that sense, the Scholarship is very timely and has great significance," said Desai. Guo Ce, economic and commercial counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Kenya, said the launch of Jin Yetao Scholarship will strengthen China-Kenya cooperation to achieve mutual benefits. "Jin Yetao is a representative of hundreds of Chinese expatriates working in many different sectors across Kenya. His story will encourage our Chinese compatriots and their Kenyan counterparts to work even harder and jointly promote our partnership to an even higher level," said Guo. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 18:33:03|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close CHENGDU, April 2 (Xinhua) -- A fire that killed 30 people and engulfed about 15 hectares of forest in southwest China's Sichuan Province has been contained as of Tuesday noon, local authorities said. "However, there are still areas that are burning. Due to complex terrain, we need more time to extinguish the fire," said Wu Song, county chief of Muli, Sichuan's Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. "We're ready to increase precipitation artificially," Wu said. Local authorities have dispatched more than 600 people to put out the blaze which broke out at around 6 p.m. on Saturday at a remote spot in the mountains at an altitude of over 3,700 meters. Thirty people, including 27 firefighters and three locals, lost their lives while fighting the fire. Xie Shi'en, an official with the local firefighting squad, attributed the casualties to an "explosive blaze," an outburst of flames caused by wind, combustibles and dry air. "Among all scenarios in a fire, an explosive blaze is the most dangerous, and also very rarely seen," Xie said. Wang Xin, a firefighter who survived the blast, said the fire came so suddenly and rampantly that trees on the ridge were burned down within seconds. "All of a sudden, we heard a huge explosive sound from the ridge and saw a wall of flame rocket up. It was as if someone triggered a huge flamethrower," Wang said. "I have never seen anything like this during my 18 years of firefighting," said Long Sheng, another survivor. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 18:43:13|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close URUMQI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Construction on a slaughterhouse has begun in Alashankou in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, making the inland port the region's first to import live cattle directly from Kazakhstan. The project, with a total investment of 660 million yuan (98 million U.S. dollars), will be composed of five quarantine farms. An estimated 100,000 heads of beef cattle are expected to be quarantined a year once the first phase of the construction is completed in October. Another 140,000 heads a year will be quarantined before being slaughtered after the second phase is completed by next October. Arman Utegulov, representing the agricultural ministry of Kazakhstan, said 10,000 farms and 5,000 to 6,000 food processing factories in Kazakhstan will guarantee the meat supply for the project. Wu Fengjun, a local official, said the project is an important measure to deepen and widen the trade and interconnectivity between the two countries. Alashankou is a designated port for imported meat, food and vehicles. Over 18 million tonnes of goods passed through the port in 2018, with a total value of 77.9 billion yuan, up 8.9 percent and 7.3 percent respectively. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 18:43:17|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close GUANGZHOU, April 2 (Xinhua) -- South China's Guangdong Province on Tuesday opened a new bridge across the Pearl River estuary, the latest major transport project in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The Nansha Bridge links Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, and the city of Dongguan, a manufacturing powerhouse. It followed the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, which also crosses the estuary of the busy waterway, in October last year. The 12.8-kilometer eight-lane bridge is designed for a traffic speed of 100 kilometers per hour, according to Guangdong Province Traffic Group, an investor and constructor of the bridge. The project is also the first to employ China's self-developed 1,960-megapascal cable wire, a technological breakthrough that will boost future bridge construction in China. Also known as the Humen Second Bridge, the Nansha Bridge is expected to greatly relieve traffic pressure in the area. The Bay Area, consisting of Hong Kong and Macao, as well as nine cities in Guangdong Province, aims to boost joint development of the two special administrative regions and the Chinese mainland. Covering 56,000 square kilometers, the area had a combined population of about 70 million at the end of 2017, and its GDP reached around 10 trillion yuan (about 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2017. Photo taken on Nov. 9, 2012 shows follower laid to commemorate the victims at formerAuschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland. (Xinhua/Zhou Lei) WARSAW, April 2 (Xinhua) -- An American tourist could face a lengthy jail term after being caught attempting to steal a piece of historic railway track from a notorious former Nazi concentration camp in Poland. The 37-year-old man could serve up to ten years behind bars if found guilty of trying to spirit away an item of cultural importance, local media reported on Monday. The tourist, who has not been named, was spotted trying to remove a section of rail at Auschwitz-Birkenau before being apprehended by local law enforcement officers. A police spokesman confirmed the American had been charged and released pending a court appearance at a later date. The camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, which are preserved as World Heritage sites, lie about an hour's drive west of Krakow, an increasingly popular tourist destination. For many visitors to Auschwitz, the rail tracks and sidings evoke the scale of the human tragedy that unfolded at the camps during the Second World War, when prisoners -- mostly Jews -- were murdered by their Nazi captors. The camp has become a destination for millions of visitors, but whilst it is unusual for the track to be stolen, several incidents have shocked locals and Jewish groups over the last decade. In 2009, the infamous sign bearing the slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- meaning "Work Sets You Free"-- was removed by thieves from above the main gate at Auschwitz. Soon after, two British teenagers were caught pilfering exhibits from the camp museum. By the time of its liberation in 1945, the Auschwitz gas chambers had claimed over a million lives. Recently, authorities at the camp have requested visitors to refrain from posing for so-called selfies on the railway tracks leading into the complex. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 18:53:28|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close MANILA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Philippines hopes to "totally eradicate" hunger by 2030, a Philippine official said on Tuesday, adding that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte will soon order the creation of an inter-agency task force that will focus on hunger eradication. Citing government data, Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles said that 2.4 million families in the Philippines experienced moderate to extreme hunger in 2018, 13.7 million Filipino children are undernourished, and that a fifth of Filipinos children until the age of five are underweight. "It is apparent that current efforts aren't enough, and that at this point an inter-agency task force that can focus and align the different work being done to address the different aspects of hunger is needed," Nograles said. Already, he said Duterte has approved the creation of a Zero Hunger Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) that will seek to eradicate hunger in this country of nearly 105 million. Duterte will soon be issuing an executive order (EO) that will officially create the task force composed of members of the cabinet, he said. He said Duterte has approved the proposal in Monday's cabinet meeting, and that the issuance was just being finalized before being released to the public. "The president and the members of the cabinet recognize that we have to adopt additional measures to combat hunger given how data shows that it is a problem that cannot be ignored," Nograles said. Nograles said the IATF will formulate a national food policy to ensure the attainment of zero hunger and poverty eradication, consistent with the 2017-2022 Philippine Development Plan. Nograles said that "the ultimate goal of the task force is to totally eradicate hunger by 2030." "We plan to get there eventually. Our first milestone is to reduce current hunger levels by 25 percent two and a half years after the EO is issued," he said. "The next step is to cut hunger incidence by half in five years after the issuance of the EO, and reduce hunger by 75 percent within seven-and-a-half years," Nograles added. Under the proposed EO, the IATF will be chaired by the cabinet secretary, with the Department of Social Development and Welfare and Department of Agriculture designated as vice chairs. Indeed, poverty remains one of the biggest challenges facing this Southeast Asian archipelagic country. Hunger is one of the extreme effects of poverty in the Philippines. The latest available data from the Philippine Statistics Authority showed that poverty declined from 26.6 percent in 2006 to 21.6 percent in 2015. The World Bank said in a report released last year that, in 2015, some 22 million Filipinos, more than one fifth of the population, still lived below the national poverty line. Constraints to achieving faster poverty reduction, according to the bank, include the less pro-poor pattern of growth, high inequality of income and opportunities, and the adverse impacts of natural disasters and conflict. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 18:58:34|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close BERLIN, April 2 (Xinhua) -- More and more Germans wanted local politicians to deal with climate change, environmental and social issues, according to a report presented by the Bertelsmann Stiftung on Tuesday. Nine out of ten Germans identified climate issue as a particularly urgent task to be tackled locally, indicated the study, which surveyed Germans on sustainability and poverty in cities. A total of 84 percent of Germans believed ensuring affordable housing was an urgent task for local politics. Eighty-three percent regarded reducing waste or fighting poverty as most urgent. "Sustainable development is the great challenge of the 21st century. Its principle presupposes that economic, social and ecological concerns are taken into account in a balanced manner," said Brigitte Mohn, member of the board at Bertelsmann. Fifty-seven percent of Germans had the impression that sustainability was not a high priority in their own city or municipality. This figure was unchanged from 2017. "The importance of sustainability - also in local politics - must increase. Sustainability in municipalities is an issue that affects all urban concerns and must be tackled comprehensively and strategically," Bertelsmann expert Oliver Haubner told Xinhua on Tuesday. As long as sustainability was not a political priority at local level, Germans would "have the impression that politics and the public administration do not devote themselves to the topic to the appropriate extent," said Haubner. Germans, particularly those in big cities, were concerned about poverty, another dimension of sustainable development. The more inhabitants a German city had, the more often the poverty problem was considered urgent by respondents. According to the report, 27 percent of Germans considered poverty in their place of residence to be a "major" or even "very major problem". In large cities, this figure was almost twice as high, at 51 percent. Two-thirds of Germans thought that local politicians should do more to combat poverty, which showed that "citizens see a clear need for action. They expect politicians to make greater efforts to combat poverty in a country as rich as Germany," said Henrik Riedel, expert at the Bertelsmann Stiftung. The poverty rate in large German cities was above average, the Bertelsmann report found. The most recent data showed that 14 percent of the population in large German cities received social benefits compared to 10 percent nationwide. It was therefore becoming increasingly apparent that social, economic and environmental problems were concentrated in individual neighborhoods in Germany's metropolitan areas, concluded Bertelsmann expert Kirsten Witte. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 19:03:42|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close TOKYO, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Japanese government on Tuesday approved deploying Self-Defense Force (SDF) personnel to join a multinational peacekeeping force in Egypt for the first time since controversial new security legislation came into effect in 2016. Japans cabinet green-lit the contentious plan on Tuesday to dispatch two SDF members to join the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), a multinational peacekeeping force in Egypt, which is not under the command of the United Nations. The pair will be sent to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, in the first such deployment since controversial security legislation came into effect in 2016, amid a staunch political, public and international backlash. The SDF personnel will be dispatched to the MFO's headquarters on April 19 and will stay there until Nov. 30, under the governments current plans. They will be charged with facilitating communication and other liaison duties between Israeli and Egyptian forces, the government here said. The MFO, for its part, overseas the ceasefire between Egypt and Israel under a peace treaty inked in 1979 after the Arab-Israeli War. The MFO have had a presence on the peninsula since 1982, with support from Japan, up until now, coming in the form of financial assistance. The Japanese government has judged that the current situation where its troops will be operating on the Sinai Peninsula is generally calm, although the SDF members will be equipped with handguns and rifles, as per the MFO's request. The government here also believes the current situation in Egypt does not breach the five legal requirements necessary for participating in UN peacekeeping missions, one of which includes the existence of a ceasefire agreement among warring parties. Japan has decided to adopt the UNs five legal requirements as a barometer to determine whether or not to send SDF members overseas for peacekeeping missions, regardless of the UNs actual involvement. The imminent deployment, the first of its kind since Japan loosened the constraints of the SDF under the postwar pacifist constitution, and the first non-UN-backed overseas mission for Japanese troops, has, however, drawn a great deal of flak from those opposed to the move and other military plans potentially in the pipeline. Legal experts and constitutional scholars believe the new security laws, which allow Japan to send troops overseas on peacekeeping missions if requested by international organizations, thwarts Japans pacifist charter. The green-lighting of the SDFs deployment to Egypt has also been interpreted by critics as a litmus test ahead of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abes plans to amend the pacifist charter for the first time since World War II, to further loosen the constrains on Japans forces and allow them to increase their footprint in overseas theaters. To achieve his goal, Abe will need to secure a two thirds majority in a vote in both houses of parliament and a majority in a public referendum. The ruling Liberal Democratic Partys (LDP) coalition Komeito ally, however, is wary of amending the constitution, Article 9 of which forever renounces war and prohibits Japan from maintaining armed forces with war potential. The majority of the public are also against the contentious move. Nationwide rallies and protests were held before, during and after Abes LDP steamrolled the security bills through both chambers of parliament and into a constitutionally dubious law. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 19:23:53|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close BEIRUT, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Lebanon's state security arrested Tuesday four Syrian nationals at Beirut's airport before the take-off of their plane for holding forged Iraqi passports, the National News Agency reported. The four Syrian nationals were arrested after the airport security inspected a Syrian citizen and found that he has information about people traveling with forged Iraqi passports and fake stamps. The four Syrians were transferred to the related judicial bodies for further investigations and other legal procedures. Less than a week ago, Lebanon's state security has also arrested a Syrian woman for selling forged passports to Syrians in Lebanon. The woman has admitted offering forged passports and documents for Syrians trying to travel to Turkey and other European countries at a starting price of 6,000 U.S. dollars per passport. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 19:23:55|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) holds talks with Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar in Beijing, capital of China, April 2, 2019. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu) BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks with Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar in Beijing Tuesday. China and Mongolia, having maintained the diplomatic ties for 70 years, are facing important opportunities for further development of bilateral relations, Wang said. The two sides should maintain close high-level exchanges, align the Belt and Road Initiative with Mongolia's development strategy, carry out aid projects regarding development and people's livelihood, facilitate the implementation of major projects on energy and mineral resources, and deepen cooperation in various fields, Wang said. Mongolia is willing to work with China to push forward cooperation projects on agriculture and animal husbandry, mining, energy, transportation and infrastructure within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, so as to continuously enhance the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries, Tsogtbaatar said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 19:49:02|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close BEIRUT, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Russian Ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin said on Tuesday that the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland is not related to a political solution in the country, the National News Agency reported. "Syrian refugees must return to their homeland. We will cooperate with all parties who are willing to help in this area including Syrian authorities," Zasypkin said during his meeting with Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Bechara Boutros Al-Rahi. This is a humanitarian issue and it is in the interest of everybody to work towards this goal, he added. The ambassador called on all parties to assist in the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland without imposing any political conditions. Zasypkin said that the Russians working in this area made sure that returning Syrian refugees are safe and they are receiving all needed help and facilities from Syrian authorities. More than 1 million Syrian refugees are registered with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Lebanon, while the Lebanese government estimated the true number of Syrians in the country at 1.5 million. To facilitate the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland, Russia drafted a strategy and presented it to the Lebanese authorities. The strategy aims at securing the return of 890,000 Syrian refugees to their homeland. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 19:49:06|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close RAMALLAH, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it urged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open an investigation into the killing of a Palestinian earlier near Qalandia refugee camp, north of Jerusalem. Israeli forces shot and killed Mohammad Dar Adwan, 23, and injured two others in an overnight military raid to the refugee camp. Local sources said soldiers fired at close range at a Palestinian vehicle driving in a nearby street, killing Dar Adwan. They added that a large number of Israeli soldiers raided the refugee camp and detained at least three other siblings after storming their house inside the refugee camp. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry's statement described the incident as "a crime that adds up to the series of systematic Israeli escalation by Israeli forces and settlers against the Palestinian people." The ministry held the Israeli government and its prime minister responsible for "the escalation and its consequences," urging the ICC to speed up the questioning of those involved. Israeli army spokesperson said that the military forces "carried out an arrest raid into the camp, where Palestinian responded by hurling stones and Molotov cocktails towards them, which made soldiers open fire and injure a Palestinian." Qalandia refugee camp, run by local social committees and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), is located approximately 10 km north of Jerusalem, into the periphery of Ramallah and Al-Bireh twin cities. It is home to nearly 14,000 residents, in area (C) in which Israel retains full control, but leaves lawless. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 19:54:09|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Industrial Securities, a brokerage firm based in south China's Fujian Province, said Tuesday that its net profits dropped more than 90 percent in 2018, a brutal year during which the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index plunged over 24 percent. The company's net profits attributable to shareholders dropped 94.08 percent year-on-year to 135.35 million yuan (about 20 million U.S. dollars), according to the company's annual report filed to the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Its revenue dropped 26.31 percent to 6.5 billion yuan, while total assets edged up 1.36 percent to 155.14 billion yuan. In 2018, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index plunged 24.59 percent, while the Shenzhen Component Index dived 34.42 percent, weighing on the performance of brokerage firms. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 19:59:15|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close SHANGHAI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China consumed more than 280 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2018 and is considered one of the world's most robust natural gas and LNG (liquefied natural gas) markets, authorities said Tuesday. The country's natural gas imports exceeded 90 million tonnes, with LNG imports from 25 countries in Asian Pacific, North America and the Middle East hitting record highs to more than 53 million tonnes, accounting for over 60 percent of total imports. The figures were released on Tuesday at the ongoing 19th International Conference & Exhibition on Liquefied Natural Gas held in Shanghai. "China's annual receiving capacity of LNG has grown significantly in 2018 by 10 million tonnes," Zhang Jianhua, head of the National Energy Administration said, noting that the LNG industry of the country would get on a stronger footing for development with improving infrastructure and mechanisms, as well as a growing market. H. E. Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, Qatar's minister of State for Energy Affairs, said that Qatar had worked with China on a critical LNG trade project last year and hopes to have more cooperations in the future. Taking place on April 1 to 5, the conference is approved by the State Council and supported by the municipal government of Shanghai. Industry players from 53 countries and regions worldwide are attending the event. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 19:59:16|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close LONDON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to Britain Liu Xiaoming on Monday gave a briefing on China's "two sessions" in the British parliament, sharing his views with British parliamentarians on the "two sessions" and China's future development. Attending the briefing at the invitation of the British All Party Parliamentary China Group, Liu said the "two sessions" refer to the annual meetings of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The Chinese ambassador highlighted China's economic prospects in his speech, saying that China's economy continues to perform strongly and its growth continues to demonstrate higher efficiency. He also believed that China will continue to increase its contributions to the global economy. "In 2018, China's economy contributed close to 30 percent of world economic growth and continued to be the 'main engine' of world economic growth after more than ten years in a row," he said. Recalling the year 2018 which marked the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up, Liu admitted China's economic growth now faces increasingly severe challenges. "Against these challenges, the 'two sessions' send a clear message again that China will stay committed to the basic policy of reform and opening-up," he said. As part of China's endeavors to strengthen its reforms and open up more to the world, Liu said that China will tackle the most difficult issues in the key areas of reform, tackle external challenges by improving its opening-up layout and make vigorous efforts to increase the level of opening-up. Commenting on the direction of China's foreign policy, the top Chinese diplomat said China will work to build a community with a shared future for mankind, pursue peaceful development through win-win cooperation, uphold fairness and justice, and take the lead in the reform of the global governance system. Liu said the year 2019 is of special significance to both China and Britain as it is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, as well as the 65th anniversary of the establishment of China-Britain diplomatic relations at the level of charge d'affaires. "In face of the profound changes in the world unseen in a century, China stands ready to work with the UK (the United Kingdom) to build up consensus, enhance mutual trust and expand cooperation," he said. "Together we will create a brighter future for the China-UK 'Golden Era,'" he said. File photo taken on June 1, 2018 shows a train at Mombasa station of Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) in Kenya. In past years, China and African nations have deepened mutual assistance in development and made concerted efforts in building a closer China-Africa community with a shared future. (Xinhua/Wang Teng) NAIROBI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation (Sinosure) is helping to spur Africa's economic growth, the Pan-African investment insurer, African Trade Insurance Agency (ATI), said on Monday. George Otieno, CEO of ATI, told Xinhua in Nairobi that Sinosure insures most of China Exim Bank loans to African countries. "Sinosure helps to catalyze Africa's economic growth because it provides insurance to loans extended by Chinese banks to finance infrastructure projects in the continent," Otieno said. He said that without the insurance cover, Chinese banks would be reluctant to provide loans to African governments. "So, Sinosure has helped to unlock critical finance to fund infrastructure projects in Africa," he added. ATI said that it wants to partner with Sinosure to provide cover to investors and traders in Africa. "We have the local expertise in Africa and so we are able to underwrite loans for financing projects in Africa," Otieno said. According to the ATI CEO, the insurer has capacity to partner with Sinosure because last year it provided insurance cover to investment and trade projects worth 500 billion shillings (5 billion U.S. dollars) in Africa. Otieno noted that Sinosure is likely to require partners in its insurance business in Africa in order to diversify its risk. He observed that foreign investors still perceive Africa as a risky continent for business and hence need to provide political risk guarantees. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:04:20|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ULAN BATOR, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Mongolian parliament speaker Gombojav Zandanshatar said here Tuesday that his country is keen to strengthen parliamentary cooperation with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Zandanshatar made the remarks when meeting with the DPRK's Ambassador to Mongolia O Sung Ho, according to a statement of the Mongolian parliament's press office. "The Mongolian parliament will pay special attention to further developing traditional friendly relations between our two countries," said Zandanshatar. "We are willing to further enhance parliamentary cooperation with the DPRK." In an effort to expand parliamentary cooperation between the two countries, he made a proposal on co-organizing a parliamentary session of the regional countries in Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia at any time under the theme of promoting regional peace and stability by pushing forward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the statement said. For his part, the DPRK ambassador said that "the DPRK attaches great importance to DPRK-Mongolia relations. A further expansion of friendly relations and cooperation between our two countries is a foreign-policy priority for the DPRK." Mongolia and the DPRK have maintained good relations since the establishment of diplomatic ties in 1948. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:19:31|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close BAGHDAD, April 2 (Xinhua) -- All the five dams in Iraq's eastern province of Diyala are completely filled for the first time in many years by the heavy rain and torrents coming from mountainous areas, a provincial official said on Tuesday. "The dams of Mandali, Qazanyah, Himreen, al-Adhaim and al-Wand, which have a total storage capacity of more than four billion cubic meters of water, were completely filled for the first time in the near history of Diyala province," Khudher al-Obeidi, member of Diyala provincial council, told Xinhua. Lake Himreen dam is holding extra water that exceeds its designed capacity, he said, adding that the other dams are also facing the same problem, pushing the provincial authorities to start discharging the surplus water of the dams to rivers and streams to avoid any possible emergencies. The dams are expected to receive extra water due to the heavy rains during the past 24 hours, al-Obeidi warned. However, al-Obeidi said that the surplus of water gives Diyala province high flexibility in the next planting season and provides drinking water for more than two coming years. Late on Monday, the Iraqi authorities announced high alert in the provinces of Salahudin, Kirkuk, Diyala, Wasit and Maysan due to heavy rain and torrents that raised the water level to a danger point. On Sunday, Iraq's central province of Salahudin took precautionary measures in the evening in all the cities in north of the city of Samarra for expected flood waves in the Tigris River. During the past few days, Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi headed meetings with a crisis cell formed to discuss and evaluate plans to control the floods and the expected rise of water in the river level, caused by melting snow and heavy rain. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:19:32|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), proposed by China in 2013, aims to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe, Africa and beyond. After years of unremitting efforts, the BRI, which refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, has seen plentiful achievements made. Here are the key takeaways on its progress in the past five years from information released by the Belt and Road Portal, the official website of the BRI: INCREASING INT'L INFLUENCE The international influence of the BRI has kept increasing since 2013. In 2018 alone, over 60 nations including New Zealand, Austria, Kazakhstan and South Africa joined the initiative. By the end of last year, China had signed 170 inter-governmental cooperation documents with 122 nations and 29 international organizations. Many countries and regions have actively dovetailed the BRI with their own development programs such as the EU's Junker Investment Plan, the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, Mongolia's Prairie Road and Kazakhstan's Nurly Zhol (Bright Path). BOOMING INFRASTRUCTURE CONSTRUCTION With increasing collaboration on ports, railways, highways, electricity, aviation and communications, infrastructure development along the Belt and Road has been effectively upgraded, with better-than-expected achievements. Ports are better connected than other transportation facilities between China and other nations along the Belt and Road. China maintains first place worldwide in maritime connectivity, with shipping routes connecting its ports with over 200 nations and 600 major ports. As for railway connections, the cumulative number of trips made by China-Europe freight trains exceeded 12,000 in 2018, with annual shipments reaching 16 billion U.S. dollars, compared with only 17 trips and less than 600 million dollars in 2011. MORE TRADE, MORE JOBS Total trade between China and other Belt and Road countries amounted to 6.47 trillion dollars in the 2013-2018 period. More than 80 overseas economic and trade cooperation zones were built, and more than 244,000 jobs created for locals. During the period, China's outbound direct investment in other Belt and Road countries exceeded 80 billion dollars. IMPROVED FINANCING Development and policy-oriented financing has revved up support for the Belt and Road development in the last five years, with a rapid expansion of multilateral and bilateral financial and investment platforms. Countries along the Belt and Road accounted for over 60 percent of all members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a multilateral development bank headquartered in Beijing, as of December 2018. The Silk Road Fund, to which China contributed 40 billion dollars initially and an additional 100 billion yuan (about 15 billion U.S. dollars) later to support the Belt and Road projects, has signed contracts to provide financing for 19 projects. PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE EXCHANGES By the end of April 2018, 1,023 pairs of sister cities had been formed between China and 61 countries along the Belt and Road, accounting for over 40 percent of the total number of sister cities China had with other countries. In 2017, tourists made around 60 million trips between China and other Belt and Road countries, with the number of tourists from and to China rising 2.6 times and 2.3 times from 2012, respectively, making it a new source of growth for global tourism. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:24:33|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China's centrally administered state-owned enterprises have taken the lead in building the Xiongan New Area over the past two years. On April 1, 2017, China announced plans to establish the Xiongan New Area, about 100 km southwest of Beijing, in what an official statement called "a strategy that will have lasting importance for the millennium to come and a significant national event." The following is a timeline of some key moments of centrally administered SOE participation in building the new area: -- On Feb. 28, 2018, the building of the Beijing-Xiongan intercity railway started, with the participation of China Railway Group, China Railway Construction Corporation and China Communications Construction. The high-speed railway, set to be operational by 2020, will cut commuting time to 30 minutes. -- On March 1, 2018, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Xiongan New Area to jointly build a smart city management model. -- On June 29, 2018, China Southern Airlines announced plan to set up a subsidiary in the new area, with an investment of 10 billion yuan (1.5 billion U.S. dollars). -- On July 4, 2018, State Grid Corporation of China launched the State Grid Xiongan Financial Technology Group, the first fintech enterprise in the area. -- On July 18, 2018, Sinopec Capital Co., a subsidiary of Sinopec Group, was unveiled in Xiongan New Area, becoming the area's first investment and operation platform of a central SOE. -- On Dec. 7, 2018, China State Construction completed the building of and put into use the Xiongan citizen service center, which consumes about 70 percent less energy than traditional buildings thanks to green technology. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:24:34|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close NAIROBI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- African governments should embark on policy and regulatory reforms to attract investments required to bridge a housing deficit occasioned by rapid population growth, a pan-African housing financier, Shelter Afrique, said on Tuesday. Daniel Nghidinua, chairman of Shelter Afrique, said enactment of new policies and laws is key to addressing bottlenecks to home ownership that include lack of access to credit and high cost of land in urban areas. "There is a surge in the demand for urban infrastructure and housing in Africa, but unfortunately, investments are often lagging behind, hence the inability for people to own homes," Nghidinua said in a statement issued in Nairobi. He said rising cost of construction materials and insecure land tenure have driven up housing prices, hurting low income earners. The UN Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) says the African continent requires 4 million housing units annually to meet a growing demand, mainly in big cities and rural towns. Nghidinua said policy interventions are required to streamline land tenure and promote uptake of alternative building technologies to bridge housing deficit in Africa. He proposed creation of robust public-private partnerships to stimulate investments in housing for middle and low income segment of the population. "We believe that coordinated actions and investments by governments, the private sector and communities across the continent will help tackle housing crisis," said Nghidinua. Andrew Chimphondah, managing director of Shelter Afrique, said urgent action is needed to stave off a housing crisis that is undermining Africa's growth and transformation. "Many African countries are unable to meet housing needs of the citizens," he said. "Uganda is facing an annual deficit of 1.6 million housing units, Kenya 2 million housing units, Tanzania 3 million units; South Africa and Nigeria are facing a deficit of 3 million and 17 million housing units respectively," Chimphondah said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:29:37|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- A couple of senior Chinese scientists donated their life savings of 1.5 million yuan (about 223,000 U.S. dollars) to the education foundation of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences to establish a scholarship on Tuesday. Zheng Ruyong, an 88-year-old academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and her husband Huang He, also a scientist in his 90s, set up the scholarship to encourage young students to pursue scientific studies. Zheng, born in Hong Kong in 1931, entered CAS in 1953 to become a mycologist. Her research on powdery mildew has reached the world advanced level. She suffered from bone rarefaction and lumbar disease as a result of longtime work in front of a microscope. Over the past 15 years, she stood more than eight hours every day to continue her research. From 2012 to 2018, Zheng donated a total of 300,000 yuan to the Beijing Haiying Spinal Health Foundation to help surgical treatment of poor children suffering from spinal diseases. Living a simple life, the couple donated all their savings to help young students and sick children. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:29:38|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close CAPE TOWN, April 2 (Xinhua) -- South Africa on Tuesday joined the international community in expressing concerns over the U.S. administration's decision to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The unilateral decision by the U.S. government in this regard represents a serious violation of the UN Charter, international law and applicable United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, particularly Resolution 497, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) said. Such unilateral declarations constitute a severe setback to the rule of law and international norms, DIRCO said in a statement. On March 25, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a proclamation recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, marking a major shift in U.S. policy in the Middle East. The Golan Heights was seized by Israel from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967. In 1981, Israel passed a law that effectively annexed it - a move that remains unrecognized internationally. The South African government will not support any unilateral action by the U.S. government that undermines efforts of creating peace and stability in the Middle East, DIRCO said. South Africa calls upon the UNSC to exercise its mandate in preserving international peace and security and implement its relevant resolutions, supported by International Law, to restore the Golan Heights, an integral part of the Syrian territory, from Israeli occupation, DIRCO said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:34:40|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close LONDON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Britain's governing Conservative would emerge as the largest party with a reduced majority in a snap general election, a leading academic politics expert said Tuesday. But Professor John Curtice from Scotland's Strathclyde University said a Labour-led grand coalition of opposition MPs could gather enough seats to move into 10 Downing Street to govern the country. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Curtice said holding a general election could simply make Britain's Brexit impasse even more difficult to resolve. His predictions came as Prime Minister Theresa May was locked in lengthy talks with her senior ministers at a Downing Street cabinet meeting. Her ministers are divided between those wanting to leave with no deal and ministers who favour a softer Brexit to secure a deal with the European Union. The meeting was called against a backdrop of MPs failing on Monday night to find majority support for any alternative Brexit deal proposals to the one May has put forward but had been rejected three times. A snap general election is emerging as a growing possibility with Britain's Brexit journey deadlocked. Curtice wrote that in a general election the Conservative could emerge with 300 of the 650 seats. Following resignations, the Conservatives now have 312 MPs, relying on support from 10 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MPs to give it a wafer-thin majority. Curtice said even if the Conservatives and the DUP were to forge another deal, an agreement with the DUP could not take the Conservative Party over the line. He said the current leading opposition Labour Party, with an expected 263 seats, would be much further away from having a majority. "However, the (Labour) party might be able to form a government if it could secure the support of 48 Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) MPs, as well as 20 Liberal Democrat MPs and one Green MP. Between them the four parties would have a narrow overall majority of 14," said Curtice. The academic said he his prediction was based on a projection from the average of the most recent polls among leading poll companies. "It is clear that the endless debate about Mrs May's (Brexit) deal has not done either the Conservatives or Labour any good among the electorate," noted Curtice. He said support for the Conservatives has fallen by three points to 36 percent since the outcome of the Brexit negotiations was first unveiled in mid-November. The Conservatives have lost ground primarily among Leave supporters. Among them its support has dropped by no less than six points, said Curtice, adding: "Doubtless these Leave voters are frustrated at the party's apparent inability to deliver Brexit." However, support for Labour has also fallen, he added, saying at 35 percent, its average tally is down four points on mid-November. "The party seems to have lost support among both Remainers and Leavers, though the loss appears to have been somewhat heavier among the former than the latter. That certainly is the position if Labour's poll position now is compared with its standing at the time of the 2017 election," said Curtice. But two new kids on the political block may now need to be added to the equation. The newly formed Change UK party has been set up by eight former Labour MPs and three Conservatives who have quit their parties, and the newly established Brexit Party has been set up by Nigel Farage, co-founder of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). "We should bear in mind that at present many polls do not take into account the possibility that a general election might be contested by the Independent Group (now known as Change UK) and the Brexit Party," said Curtice. "Those polls that have asked about these two new challengers suggest that as many as one in ten Remain voters might back Change UK, while the Brexit Party could help draw away Leave supporters that UKIP could struggle to win over," he added. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 20:49:46|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ADDIS ABABA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopian government on Tuesday disclosed the seizure of 48.4 kg of cocaine while being smuggled into a third destination country during the past eight months period. The reported 48.4 kg cocaine was seized at the Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's major international hub, state news agency ENA reporting, citing the Addis Ababa City Administration Customs Office. The Ababa City Administration Customs Office also said that smugglers, who were on transit via Addis Ababa, were detained together with the illegal substance. The office, however, did not disclose details about the cocaine smugglers, including their number as well as identity. Despite indicating the smuggled substance has been en route to third countries, destinations countries were not also disclosed. An Ethiopian court had previously sentenced a Nigerian national, who was caught hiding cocaine in stomach, to seven years in prison in similar smuggling attempt. Emeka Raphael, 36, who was arrested by Ethiopian authorities in Addis Ababa Bole International Airport while he was transiting from Brazil to Nigeria, was caught by airport security after some 27 plastic stashes of cocaine weighing 500 grams were detected in his stomach. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 21:04:58|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ADDIS ABABA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopia's national air carrier, Ethiopian Airlines (ET) plans to add three more Chinese flight destinations, an Ethiopian official said on Tuesday. Speaking to Xinhua, Tewolde Gebremariam, CEO of Ethiopian Airlines Group, said Ethiopian Airlines is waiting flight permits from Chinese authorities to fly to the Chinese destinations of Chongqing, Shenzhen and Zhengzhou. "In addition to planning three new Chinese destinations, ET is also planning to increase its flight frequencies to the Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Shanghai," said Gebremariam. "Ethiopia's cargo and passenger flight frequencies and destinations need to increase to keep up with the fast rising ties between African countries and China," he further said. ET currently operates daily passenger flights from Addis Ababa to Guangzhou and Beijing, and three-times-a-week passenger flights to Chengdu, as well as daily passenger and cargo flights to Hong Kong and Shanghai. ET was the first African airline to start flight services to China, back in 1973. Gebremariam also recently said Ethiopian Airlines has started facilitating visa hub service for Chinese travelling to 35 African countries. "Most African countries' embassies are located in Beijing, but China is a big country and some Chinese may not be able to come to Beijing to apply for visas in countries like Zimbabwe, Zambia or Nigeria," Gebremariam said. "The visa scheme will facilitate easier air travel for Chinese experts and business people and reduces their financial cost. We believe the visa scheme will significantly boost China-Africa trade ties and we are very excited about it," he further said. He further said the carrier has the largest air network for an African airlines in China, currently travelling to five Chinese destinations, helping Chinese and foreign nationals living in various corners of China to directly travel to Ethiopia and beyond without the need to transit through the Chinese capital city Beijing. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 21:30:11|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close An officer from the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) shows confiscated containers carrying venomous tarantulas in Quezon City, the Philippines, April 3, 2019. Customs officials in the Philippines have seized a total of 757 live venomous tarantulas at Manila's international airport, the Bureau of Customs (BOC) said on Tuesday. The BOC said customs officers seized the hairy spiders from Poland on Monday. The tarantulas, classified as endangered wildlife species, were turned over to the DENR. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali) MANILA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Customs officials in the Philippines have seized a total of 757 live venomous tarantulas at Manila's international airport, the Bureau of Customs (BOC) said on Tuesday. The BOC said customs officers seized the hairy spiders from Poland on Monday. The tarantulas, classified as endangered wildlife species, were turned over to the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). According to Customs Officer Carmelita Talusan, the 757 live spiders were concealed in boxes of oatmeal and cookies. "The shipment was sent from Poland by a certain Wojciech Pakasz and was consigned to Jesse Camaro, a resident of Caloocan City," she added. Violators of Illegal Wildlife Trading in the Philippines could face imprisonment of up to two years and a fine of up 200,000 pesos (roughly 3,816 U.S. dollars) under the Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act, or an imprisonment of up to six years and a fine of 300,000 pesos (roughly 5,724 U.S. dollars) under the Customs Modernization and Tariff Act. From 2018, BOC said its officers at the airport has turned over to DENR a total of 2,152 wildlife and endangered species including the 250 geckos, 254 corals and other endangered reptiles which were sent through air parcels, baggage and shipments. Early this year, customs officers also seized 63 iguanas, chameleon and bearded dragons at the airport. On March 9, customs officers also seized 1,529 live exotic turtles at the airport. The star tortoise, redcoat tortoise, sulcate tortoise, red-eared slider, were stuffed inside four unclaimed luggage, the BOC said. Talusan said the customs officers at the airport will continue to be vigilant in a bid "to protect the borders against importation and exportation of illegal wildlife trade and other prohibited and anti-social goods." Ma Zhaoxu (front), China's permanent representative to the United Nations, addresses a Security Council debate on international humanitarian law, at the UN headquarters in New York, April 1, 2019. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy to the United Nations (U) on Monday warned against attempts to undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of states by using humanitarianism as a pretext. At a Security Council debate on international humanitarian law, Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, asked states to abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter as well as the guiding principles for UN humanitarian assistance. "No country should undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of others by using humanitarianism as a pretext," he said. "Humanitarian action should strictly abide by the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence, highlight the humanitarian nature and professionalism of such efforts and avoid being drawn into the conflict or interfering in the domestic affairs of the countries concerned." All humanitarian agencies should follow international humanitarian law and related principles and refrain from using the delivery of humanitarian assistance for political, military and other purposes, said Ma. He asked for efforts to resolve disputes by peaceful means, thus tackling the issue of the protection of civilians by addressing the root causes. The purpose of complying with international humanitarian law is to protect civilians. Effectively preventing armed conflict offers the best protection for civilians, said the Chinese ambassador. The Security Council should encourage preventive diplomacy and political mediation to promote the use of peaceful means, such as dialogue and negotiations, in resolving differences and preventing escalation in order to protect civilians from the scourge of war, he said. Ma also asked the international community to work together to promote and strengthen international humanitarian law. Governments bear the primary responsibility for the protection of their own citizens, he said. The international community should provide constructive assistance only at the request of the countries concerned. All parties to conflict should understand and abide by international humanitarian law, implement Security Council resolutions on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, fulfill their obligations to protect civilians, and ensure humanitarian access, said Ma. UN peacekeeping operations, he said, should make great efforts to promote and publicize international humanitarian law and Security Council resolutions. The Security Council should work to prevent sanctions from negatively impacting and affecting humanitarian relief operations. The Chinese ambassador stressed the importance of protecting the safety and security of medical personnel and medical facilities in conflict. The countries concerned should carry out investigations into threats and acts of violence against medical personnel and the destruction of medical facilities in armed conflict and bring perpetrators to justice. The international community should provide support and assistance on the basis of full consultations with the countries concerned. China is an important participant and contributor to the international humanitarian law regime and stands ready to continue to play a constructive role in this field, said Ma. File Photo: Doctors weigh a malnourished child who is receiving treatment at a malnutrition department in a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen, on Sept. 2, 2018. Millions of people in the war-torn Yemen are unable to secure one meal a day. (Xinhua/Mohammed Mohammed) UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations (UN) humanitarian chief on Monday asked for efforts to safeguard humanitarian space by ensuring compliance with international humanitarian law. "International humanitarian law is designed to minimize human suffering in war, including by safeguarding humanitarian activities. So, garnering greater respect for international humanitarian law is one of the most effective ways to safeguard humanitarian space," Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock told the Security Council in a debate. Civilians bear the brunt of conflict as combatants have increasingly resorted to siege and starvation as weapons of war, and as conflict has prevented farmers from reaping their harvests, destroyed vital infrastructure, and disrupted commercial trade, he said. This year, 139 million people are in acute humanitarian need, most of them because of armed conflict. That is three times the number of a decade ago, said Lowcock. Some 60 percent of people affected by food crises are living in conflict-affected countries, he added. Lowcock also saw the deliberate and organized use of rape as a weapon of war. One in five displaced women asked say they have experienced sexual violence. Children are being recruited into armed groups, forced into early marriage, used as suicide bombers, and barred from education as their schools are attacked or taken over, he said. In towns and cities, belligerents use explosive weapons designed for open battlefields, resulting in mass civilian casualties, enormous destruction of infrastructure, and long-term disruption of essential services, he said. Today's conflicts are also marked by more direct attacks against humanitarian workers, medical workers and their facilities. There were 317 attacks against aid workers in 2018, resulting in 113 deaths. The World Health Organization reported 388 attacks against health personnel or health facilities in 2018, resulting in more than 300 deaths and 400 injuries, he said. Combatants deliberately hinder humanitarian operations, slowing them down, driving up costs and blocking aid from reaching people in need. Violence against humanitarian workers, including killing and maiming, kidnapping and abductions, likewise hinders humanitarian operations, he said. With the Geneva Conventions adopted 70 years ago and relevant UN Security Council resolutions, there is a strong legal framework to safeguard humanitarian activity in conflict. Today's problem is that fighting parties and their backers do not always follow it, said Lowcock. He asked to promote policies and practices to strengthen adherence to international humanitarian law, and to broaden and deepen the understanding and acceptance of existing rules. Experience has shown that fighting parties often have an incomplete understanding of international humanitarian law. Providing training for armed forces and members of non-state armed groups on how to respect humanitarian law can help, he said. Lowcock called for enabling humanitarian and medical activities. All parties should adopt clear and simplified procedures to facilitate humanitarian access. They should establish civil-military coordination platforms or humanitarian notification systems to facilitate parties' respect for humanitarian operations. States and the Security Council could promote the universalization of international humanitarian law and human rights treaties, he said. The right kinds of incentives and penalties can boost compliance, he said. For example, sanctions imposed by the Security Council can be a powerful tool to promote compliance of international humanitarian law. States can exert their diplomatic, political and economic influence over parties to conflict to strengthen their compliance. He also stressed the importance of accountability. States need to do much better in holding individuals to account when they commit serious violations of international humanitarian law, and should strengthen their capacity to carry out impartial, independent investigations into allegations of war crimes and to prosecute suspects. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 21:42:29|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close Ruan Xiyue (L), the fourth generation artist of Carved Gourd Ruan, communicates with Ruan Yizhou, an arts and crafts master of Gansu Province, at a gourd carving studio in Lanzhou, northwest China's Gansu Province, April 1, 2019. A carved gourd, as the name suggests, is a gourd carved with landscapes, portraits, animals, calligraphy or poems, and then painted with ink. The process of gourd carving includes choosing gourd, painting, engraving and coloring. It was inscrbed in the first group of provincial intangible cultural heritages of Gansu in 2006. (Xinhua/Fan Peishen) Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 21:40:14|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese agriculture scientists have bred new rice varieties named "Green Super Rice (GSR)" for developing Asian and African countries to reduce hunger and increase local farmers' income. Supported by the Chinese government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the project has bred 78 GSR varieties for 18 countries with a total grown area of 6.12 million hectares since its launch in 2008, hoping to benefit 30 million resource-poor smallholder rice farmers in Asia and Africa. GSR varieties are superior rice varieties that can produce high and stable yields under fewer inputs. They need less chemical fertilizers, pesticides and water, and are more tolerant to pests, diseases, drought, salinity, submergence and other abiotic or biotic stresses, said Li Zhikang, a researcher of the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences. China used to consume 40 percent of global chemical fertilizers, resulting in serious pollution in the past. GSR provides a new possibility to reverse the unsustainable pattern. The target regions of the project includes nine other Asian countries (Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) and nine African countries (Mozambique, Tanzania, Rwanda, Liberia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal). In addition, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou provinces, and Guangxi Zhuang and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions of China are included. The research team led by Li has developed an efficient molecular breeding strategy by which the selecting period of new varieties can be cut down from 8-10 years to 4-6 years. Scientists upgraded the parent seeds, which were grown in a temperate zone in China to adapt to a tropical climate. The target countries choose from abundant varieties with diverse superiority according to their local agriculture conditions including drought, submergence and problematic soils. With a stronger tolerance for tough conditions, GSR varieties can achieve an average 0.89-1.83 tonnes increase per hectare, which means 230.9 dollars per hectare for a rice farmer, according to a survey conducted in the Philippines. "China has a very strong rice breeding and rice genetics effort, and the GSR project has shared germplasm resources from Chinese research institutes to many Asian and African countries," said Gary Atlin, senior program officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "China has provided really wonderful support for rice research and development all over the developing world." As the Belt and Road Initiative has become popular among more and more countries, a lot of advanced technology and products from China will go abroad and play a key role in promoting food security in resource-poor areas, said Li Zhikang, the researcher. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 21:50:19|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Jin Suidong, former vice chairman of the Henan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, has been indicted for the suspected crime of taking bribes, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said Tuesday. Jin's case had been investigated by the National Supervisory Commission. Upon the designation of the SPP, the People's Procuratorate of Jinan, Shandong Province reviewed the case and filed it in the Jinan Municipal Intermediate People's Court. Prosecutors accused Jin of taking advantage of his posts to seek benefits for others, asking for and accepting vast amounts of money and gifts. The SPP said the prosecutors had informed the defendant of his litigation rights, interrogated him and listened to the defense counsel's opinions. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 21:55:22|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close MAIMANA, Afghanistan, April 2 (Xinhua) -- A dozen militants including Taliban key commander Mawlawi Hussain were killed in Qaisar district of Afghanistan's northern Faryab province on Tuesday, army spokesman in the northern region Mohammad Hanif Rezai said. "Security forces in a surprise move against the enemies stormed Taliban hideout in Doshakh area of Qaisar district early Tuesday, killing 12 insurgents including notorious commander Mawlawi Hussain on the spot," Rezai told Xinhua. In the operations that lasted for two hours, five more insurgents including Mawlawi Khalil, a shadow deputy governor of Qaisar district, were captured alive, the official said. Taliban militants who are operational in parts of the relatively troubled province have not commented. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 21:55:22|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese agriculture scientists have bred new rice varieties named "Green Super Rice (GSR)" for developing Asian and African countries to reduce hunger and increase local farmers' income. Supported by the Chinese government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the project has bred 78 GSR varieties for 18 countries with a total grown area of 6.12 million hectares since its launch in 2008, hoping to benefit 30 million resource-poor smallholder rice farmers in Asia and Africa. GSR varieties are superior rice varieties that can produce high and stable yields under fewer inputs. They need less chemical fertilizers, pesticides and water, and are more tolerant to pests, diseases, drought, salinity, submergence and other abiotic or biotic stresses, said Li Zhikang, a researcher of the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences. The target regions of the project includes nine other Asian countries (Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) and nine African countries (Mozambique, Tanzania, Rwanda, Liberia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal). In addition, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou provinces, and Guangxi Zhuang and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions of China are included. The research team led by Li has developed an efficient molecular breeding strategy by which the selecting period of new varieties can be cut down from 8-10 years to 4-6 years. Scientists upgraded the parent seeds, which were grown in a temperate zone in China to adapt to a tropical climate. The target countries choose from abundant varieties with diverse superiority according to their local agriculture conditions including drought, submergence and problematic soils. With a stronger tolerance for tough conditions, GSR varieties can achieve an average 0.89-1.83 tonnes increase per hectare, which means 230.9 dollars per hectare for a rice farmer, according to a survey conducted in the Philippines. When super typhoon Haiyan devastated the central Philippines in 2013, most of the coconuts in the area, on which local farmers depended for their livelihood, were destroyed. A silver lining to their gloomy situation came in the form of GSR seeds they received several months before the typhoon came. "I like GSR because its grains are good and are considerably heavier than the previous rice grains I tried in the past," said Montano, one of the first farmers to grow the tough variety GSR 8. "The crop is tolerant to pests and diseases." "Even though we were badly affected by the typhoon, we were able to improve our livelihood and get back on our feet because of GSR 8," said Lazarte, another typhoon survivor. "China has a very strong rice breeding and rice genetics effort, and the GSR project has shared germplasm resources from Chinese research institutes to many Asian and African countries," said Gary Atlin, senior program officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "China has provided really wonderful support for rice research and development all over the developing world." As the Belt and Road Initiative has become popular among more and more countries, a lot of advanced technology and products from China will go abroad and play a key role in promoting food security in resource-poor areas, said Li Zhikang, the researcher. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 22:00:25|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close HONG KONG, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China's Guangdong Province, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) and Macao SAR will stage for the first time a joint overseas promotion in Japan on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam said Tuesday. A symposium will be held next Tuesday in Tokyo on the Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Lam told media ahead of an HKSAR Executive Council meeting. Lam said she will attend the symposium in Tokyo together with Guangdong Governor Ma Xingrui and Macao's Secretary for Administration and Justice Sonia Chan. The outline development plan for the Greater Bay Area, released by the Chinese central government in February, states in its last chapter the need to broaden the participation of the public and various market entities in the bay area's development, Lam noted, adding that Japan is a vast market which can render many professional services to the bay area. According to the Chief Executive's Office, Lam will depart for Tokyo on Sunday and will meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Foreign Minister Taro Kono during the visit. Lam said during the visit, she aims to explore how Japanese enterprises and research institutions can actively involve in the bay area's development. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 22:05:30|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close by Xinhua writer Hu Tao BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China has become a leader with vision in the aviation sector, as it is "making the industry reach its full potential," says a senior official with the U.S. National Business Aviation Association (NBAA). "China is a great market no one can miss. More importantly, it is playing a role on the global stage, setting an example and offering opportunities worldwide," NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen told Xinhua in an exclusive interview ahead of the 2019 Asian Business Aviation Conference and Exhibition (ABACE). Asia's predominant annual business aviation event, ABACE will be held from April 16 to 18 at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport. EXPECTATIONS AND INSPIRATION China has seen significant growth in aviation infrastructure, professional management and regulation. "They are all very important to the Chinese story of the aviation industry," Bolen said. "China is a country that creates expectations and inspiration." After more than 30 years working in aviation, he has seen the "China commitment and China speed" in making aviation soar. On his first trip to Shanghai, local authorities told him that they were planning an international airport with a high-speed rail link to downtown. In 2003, it was "all done." Aviation infrastructure has grown significantly. At the end of 2018, China had 235 civil airports. Under the government's 13th Five-Year Plan, the figure is expected to reach 260. Beijing is currently building its second airport, Beijing Daxing International Airport, to embrace the growing influx of passengers and goods. REALIZING THE FUTURE "China has the vision and commitment to boost aviation. It makes the commitments and future real. That's quite exciting to me and industry insiders worldwide," said Bolen. "Especially in the business aviation sector, we need to share experiences and meet challenges together." Corporate jets landed in the Chinese market in the mid-1990s and business aviation saw double-digit expansion every year until 2014. "Like each industry, there is always an economy cycle. We ought to work together to allow business aviation to thrive," Bolen said. Business aviation helps to spur economic development and create jobs by "bringing people and business closer in incomparable speed as travel time is quite important and productive work time," said Bolen. China's economy is continuously growing and Chinese enterprises have closer ties with the world. Business aviation is a better way to facilitate cooperation and competition, even in tough markets." All the world's major business aircraft manufacturers will attend ABACE with their flagship aircraft. Service providers in fields such as leasing, maintenance and professional training will go because China is "the market they can't miss." CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS The NBAA will try at the ABACE to bring industry leaders and professionals together to share experiences and absorb China's experience in developing its aviation industry. "We expect the Chinese aviation industry to grow with its own characteristics. That will make the global aviation industry more diversified and be good for mutual learning and better cooperation," Bolen said. For example, aviation training is a challenge for all countries, and safety is a common focus. With a surging aircraft fleet and professional team, China has an acknowledged safety record in civil aviation. The country's civil aviation industry had 100 months and 68.35 million hours of sustained safe flight as of the end of 2018, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China. China is the world's second largest civil aviation market and is expected to become the largest in mid-2020, according to the International Air Transport Association. "The world is expected to learn how China tackles challenges and makes things happen in its way," Bolen said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 22:05:31|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close by Dana Halawi BEIRUT, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Lebanese economists are calling upon government to take urgent reforms in the 2019 state budget in a bid to save the country's economy from further deterioration. "The government can surely cut a lot of expenditures in the 2019 budget," Nassib Ghobril, head of the economic research department at Byblos Bank, told Xinhua. Ghobril said that the government can, as a start, stop the bonuses that are paid to public sector employees. Ghobril added that employment in the public sector has not stopped yet while the sector already has an excess number of employees. The expert said that the public sector salaries and retirement salaries and benefits constitute 38 percent of the government's expenditures, the biggest burden on the state budget. The international community has been calling upon Lebanese officials to implement urgent and necessary structural reforms in a bid to be able to access funds and donations pledged for Lebanon at CEDRE conference. Moreover, Ferid Belhaj, vice president for the Middle East and North Africa at the World Bank Group, warned last Friday that the reforms that Lebanon has started are still not enough and a lot more should be done to have access to funds from the international community. The main reforms, according to the international community, should include the preparation of the 2019 state budget with a reduction in the deficit-to-GDP ratio of five percent over five years in addition to reforms in the electricity sector by creating a sustainable solution to the power crisis. Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil is expected to send the draft budget to the council of minister soon which will study it and then send it to the parliament for voting by the end of May. Lebanese officials and namely Prime Minister Saad Hariri have on many occasions hinted at the fact that the wage increase approved by President Michel Aoun in 2017 for public sector employees has exacerbated the burden on the state budget while adding that the new government will take very hard decisions when it comes to reforms and everybody should share the burden of the new state budget. Head of the General Labor Union Bechara Asmar expressed his fears over Hariri's announcements saying that he will not accept any changes in the salary scale and people will take it to the streets if the wage increases approved by President Aoun for public sector employees are removed. While Ghobril assured that the salary scale cannot be removed as it was approved with a law, he said that the government should start immediately to explore a sustainable solution to the electricity problem. "The government needs to address the power problem in a sustainable way which would allow the private sector to produce electricity and that would upgrade the network and lead to significant improvement in fee collection," Ghobril said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 22:25:43|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close Li Zhanshu, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, presides over the first plenary meeting of an inspection program on the enforcement of the Law on Promoting Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Beijing, capital of China, April 2, 2019. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin) BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) has launched an inspection on the enforcement of the Law on Promoting Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in a bid to improve the legal and business environment. NPC inspection teams will be sent to six provincial regions, in addition to inspections carried out by entrusted local legislative authorities in eight other regions. The inspection is designed to facilitate implementation of the law among various government agencies, said Li Zhanshu, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, while presiding over the first plenary meeting of the program Tuesday. Those agencies are required to protect the legitimate rights and interests of SMEs and private entrepreneurs, and provide guidance to the healthy development of SMEs, according to Li. Li instructed inspectors to adopt a problem-oriented approach and explore new working methods such as introducing third-party evaluation on law enforcement. First adopted in 2002, the law was revised in September 2017 and the revised version went into effect on Jan. 1, 2018. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 22:40:53|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close BEIJING, April 2 (Xinhua) -- A total of 15 teams of disciplinary inspectors have been dispatched to three central government departments and 42 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) by Monday, said an official statement Tuesday. This is the third round of routine disciplinary inspections launched by the 19th Communist Party of China Central Committee, the statement said. The three central government departments were the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, the National Energy Administration, and the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. The 42 SOEs were administrated by the central government, including the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and China State Shipbuilding Co., Ltd. The inspection teams will be stationed at the departments and state firms for two and a half months, and will receive complaints about violations of Party disciplinary rules from the public. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:01:08|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close YANGON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- A curfew was imposed in Minpya town, Myanmar's western Rakhine state, on Tuesday, the town's General Administration Office said. The curfew, which takes effect from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m local time, will last about two months, it said in a statement. The dusk-to-dawn curfew bans people from going to public roads and designated areas of Minpya town at night time. The imposition of the curfew came as terrorists in Rakhine state, disguised as civilians, launched attacks on government's security forces recently, the statement said. The attacks have resulted in casualties and destruction of civilian houses, it added. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:06:10|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close ISTANBUL, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's ruling party on Tuesday raised objections to local election results in Istanbul over what it calls some irregularities and mistakes detected during vote counting. "We have filed our objections with the electoral authorities in 39 districts as of 3:00 p.m. (1200GMT) today," the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Istanbul district chief Bayram Senocak told reporters in the city. The election boards of all the 39 districts in Istanbul have a two-day decision-making period, according to Turkey's Supreme Election Board. As Turkey's biggest city, Istanbul is seeing a tight race between Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayoral candidate from the main opposition Republican People's Party and AKP's Binali Yildirim, a former prime minister and former speaker of the parliament. Imamoglu has won 48.79 percent of the votes, as against 48.52 percent for Yildirim, according to the results unveiled by the state-run Anadolu Agency. The AKP lost two other big cities, the capital Ankara and the western city of Izmir, in local elections held on Sunday. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:11:12|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close JERUSALEM, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Israel will resettle half of the Bedouin population living in the south of the country on a 9 billion-new-shekel plan (about 2.48 billion U.S. dollars), said a report by financial newspaper Calcalist on Tuesday. Some 250,000 Bedouins live in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, and only about half of them live in recognized legal permanent settlements. The rest illegally live on state lands, such as in unregulated settlements, illegal structures and even tent encampments. According to the plan, the Authority for Development and Settlement of the Bedouin in the Negev, affiliated with the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, is expected to approve plans to build some 150,000 housing units. About 40,000 housing units will be allocated by 2021, and the remaining 110,000 units will be allocated in accordance with demand. Unregulated structures will be rebuilt. As part of the plan, the authority will also be responsible for the development and infrastructure work, while the construction of the houses will be carried out by the residents. According to the plan, Bedouin residents who will be relocated from their current unrecognized residence will receive a compensation of 250,000 new shekels. Residents who will stay in their rebuilt homes will be compensated by half the amount. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:21:17|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close MACAO, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) government and Bank of China (BOC) signed an agreement on Tuesday to strengthen cooperation in the construction of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Macao SAR's Chief Executive Chui Sai On and BOC Chairman of the Board Chen Siqing signed the Agreement on Service Cooperation for Integration into the Construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Under the agreement, the two sides will seize the historic opportunity of the development of the Greater Bay Area to give full play to Macao's institutional advantage of "one country, two systems" and BOC's unique industry advantages, and to promote cooperation in people's livelihood, government and banking coordination, industrial talent cultivation, Sino-Portuguese platform finance and characteristic financial development. Macao residents may use their Macao identity cards as legal documents for opening accounts, applying for bank cards, registering and trading when they use certain services in financial institutions affiliated to BOC in the Greater Bay Area, and in its more than 500 branch offices overseas. In line with the local financial regulatory policies, BOC will also build a cross-border capital pool for Macao enterprises to open up the capital channel in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao and the whole world. On the same day, BOC also opened its Corporate Finance Characteristic Financing Platform in Macao, which will serve Portuguese-speaking countries and regions, the Great Bay Area and countries along the Belt and Road. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:26:20|Editor: ZX Video Player Close JAKARTA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia's flag carrier PT Garuda Indonesia has ordered a total of 14 Airbus A330-900neo aircraft to support business expansion, an official of the airline said on Tuesday. The orders came as the airline has cancelled orders of 49 Boeing 737 MAX 8 from U.S. plane maker Boeing following two fatal crashes involving the model within the last six months. The airline said the cancelation was made over the loss of trust of passengers on the safety of the plane. The delivery of the French plane maker's aircraft will be undertaken within the next 20 years, starting from this year, said Wayan Susena, technical director of the airline. Three of the aircraft are scheduled to be delivered to Indonesia this year, from September to December, according to him. The aircraft will be used to serve international routes, the director was quoted by Tempo media as saying. The Indonesian Transport Ministry has grounded all Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes in the country, one of which is possessed by PT Garuda Indonesia. Indonesia's Lion Air, one of whose Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes crashed in October last year, is seeking to switch a 22-billion-U.S.-dollar order of the Boeing 737 MAX 8, 9 and 10 jets with other types of Boeing aircraft. Meanwhile, the country's Sriwijaya Airline has dropped orders of two jets of the model. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:36:23|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BERLIN, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The weekly climate protests by German students send positive vibes to the country's politicians, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday. It is right that "you are putting pressure on us," said Merkel, who acknowledged the importance of the "Fridays for Future" movement during a discussion about climate protection with high school students here. "The fact that this message is being sent out - that there is concern, that's good for us," stressed the German chancellor. Although Merkel said that it would certainly not be possible to declare every Friday a school-free day in the long term, she told the students that "teachers and the local authorities will discuss this with you." One could also learn a lot about climate protection in class lessons, she said. Meanwhile, Baden-Wuerttemberg's Minister President Winfried Kretschmann of the Green Party was critical of the student protests. Speaking on Tuesday in Stuttgart, Kretschmann said that the moral appeal was justified and that the future of the students was really at stake. However, while skipping school was once considered civil disobedience, "civil disobedience is a symbolic act. It cannot be permanent," he said. Sooner or later, the German student strikes will have to come to an end, stressed Kretschman. At some point, there will be sanctions, "otherwise everyone will end up picking their own topic that they will somehow morally charge up - and that is not acceptable," said the Green politician. For weeks, German students and supporters have been demonstrating every Friday for more action on climate change. The demonstrations have been quite controversial as students skip school to participate. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:36:24|Editor: ZX Video Player Close NEW YORK, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese leading online retailer JD.com has partnered with Google's augmented reality (AR) building platform ARCore to kick off an international competition in China on Tuesday, which will gather global developers to compete in creating innovative AR applications for the retail industry. The competition, titled the JD-AR & ARCore by Google Innovative Consumer Application Competition, aims to explore how AR can be used to attract and retain both online and offline customers, and to optimize omnichannel targeted marketing in different retail scenarios, JD.com said in a public statement. Applications for the contest can be submitted from April 2 to May 25. In their applications, developers are required to solve real-life problems put forth by the competition's partner brands, including U.S. multinational retail corporation Walmart, U.S. infant formula manufacturer Mead Johnson, and JD.com's retail experience shops. Top teams are eligible for investments in their projects by venture capitals, as well as membership in the JD-AR Alliance, which provides resources and standards for AR technology development, certification from ARCore, exposure to investors and brands, and the opportunity to have their solutions implemented into JD's applications. "JD is pleased to partner with ARCore by Google to connect the world's most talented AR developers with leading retail brands to develop new, innovative solutions," said Tony Tan, head of AR/VR at JD.com. Carrie Shiung, Google AR/VR China Country Lead, also said the collaboration with JD.com would help expand the company's presence in the dynamic Chinese market. "China is increasingly becoming a world leader in advanced fields such as AR, and this competition will allow us to discover new talent in the growing AR industry," Shiung said. First launched in February 2018, ARCore is Google's platform for developers to build AR apps that can understand various environments and place objects and information in them. Last year, Google invested 550 million dollars in JD.com as part of a strategic partnership. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:51:33|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close MACHAKOS, Kenya, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday kicked off biometric registration of citizens to improve government planning, service delivery and security. Kenyatta said the National Integrated Identification Management System (NIIMS) dubbed Huduma Namba will provide a single source of personal information of all Kenyans and registered foreigners. Kenyatta said NIIMS aims to establish and maintain a master digital national population register that will serve as the only single source of identification for everybody resident in Kenya. "It will integrate personal and functional data that is scattered in many government agencies into one single identity," said the president during the launch in Machakos county, eastern Kenya, adding that the number will be used at all stages of one's life from birth to death," The new system is aimed at amalgamating all government-issued documents which include identity cards (IDs), National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF), National Social Security Fund (NSSF), birth and death certificates or the Personal Identification Number (PIN) among others to a central source. The registration exercise that will last for 45 days is aimed at modernizing the national registry system at a cost of 6 billion shillings (60 million U.S. dollars). Kenyatta said the NIIMS exercise will not only transform civil registration and data management in the country but also tame corruption and fast-track the implementation of the development plan. "Huduma Namba will reduce delays and corruption in the delivery of services such as cash transfers for elderly persons and vulnerable children, issuance of passports and border control," said the president. Kenya now joins other developed nations such as the U.S., Europe, United Arabs Emirates, India and Australia which have successfully used integrated data systems to manage their citizens' information. The president said the NIIMS registration exercise will be able to verify the actual number of government employees including civil servants that include teachers and other cadres. He said there are several reasons why the government is making the extraordinary effort to undertake the biometric registration for everybody living in Kenya. "The need for accurate data as a key enabler for national planning, issuance of birth and death certificates and associated rights of nationality, schooling, passport and property ownership are all valid reasons for the registration," he said. Kenyatta said biometric identification and registration of farmers will facilitate fairer allocation of subsidized farm inputs including seeds and fertilizers. "It will also improve accountability and transparency in the management of National Health Insurance Fund and inform planning, investment and allocation of affordable housing units," he said. The president said the NIIMS exercise will also facilitate and monitor capitation in schools adding that Kenyans will no longer be required to carry multiple IDs and, pensioners and widows will receive their dues with much ease. Besides reducing transaction costs for Kenyans, said the president, the new system will significantly reduce cases of identity theft and make financial and property transactions more secure. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:56:38|Editor: ZX Video Player Close NEW DELHI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- India's main opposition party, the Indian National Congress' (INC) President Rahul Gandhi will be contesting from two parliamentary constituencies, Amethi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh and Wayanad in the southern state of Kerala, in the upcoming general elections. Gandhi is currently a lawmaker elected from the Amethi parliamentary constituency. He has represented the constituency thrice since 2004. Breaking his silence on his decision to contest from Wayanad parliamentary constituency, Gandhi said on Tuesday that there was "strong demand" from three southern states - Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, for him to contest from one of the constituencies in that part of the country. Gandhi is slated to reach Wayanad on Wednesday and carry out a road show and address his party members at a public rally. On Thursday he is scheduled to file his nomination papers from the parliamentary constituency. All the 20 parliamentary constituencies in Kerala go to polls on April 23, the third of the seven phases of the ensuing general elections beginning on April 11. According to INC sources, the party's decision to field Gandhi from the Wayanad parliamentary constituency is a bid to galvanize the party's support base in southern India, and bridge the north-south political divide. Gandhi is the son of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of former prime minister Indira Gandhi and great-grandson of the country's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-02 23:56:40|Editor: ZX Video Player Close OTTAWA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- One of the four men suspected of kidnapping a Chinese national student in the Toronto area in Canada last month has turned himself in to police, York Regional Police said Tuesday. The suspect named Abdullahi Adan surrendered to police overnight after York Regional Police issued a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest on Monday. Adan, who is the first of four suspects identified by police, is facing four criminal charges including kidnapping, forcible confinement, assault with a weapon and assault. On the evening of March 23, the Chinese student named Lu Wanzhen was kidnapped by masked and armed suspects in an underground parking garage of a condo building in the Greater Toronto Area city of Markham when he and his friend got out of their vehicle. Three armed suspects forced the student into a black minivan and fled from the underground parking garage. Police said that there are four suspects, including the vehicle driver in the alleged abduction. Lu knocked on a private home for help in the town of Gravenhurst north of Toronto on March 27, and a resident called police. U.S. President Donald Trump (L) welcomes his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) at the White House in Washington, United States, on May 16, 2017. (Xinhua File photo) ISTANBUL, April 2 (Xinhua) -- As the U.S. pressures Turkey to give up buying Russian-made S-400 missiles and observe sanctions on Iran while backing the Syrian Kurdish militia despite Ankara's opposition, stormy days may well be ahead in the already strained bilateral ties, analysts told Xinhua. Things should be expected to come to a head between the two NATO allies following local elections in Turkey on Sunday, said Haldun Solmazturk, a security and foreign policy analyst. "It's not possible to maintain so many conflicts of interest in so many areas," he argued. According to local media, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will travel to the United States within days after the municipal polls over the Russian S-400 deal and Washington's latest proposal to sell Patriot missiles to Ankara in return for its backdown on the Russian air defense system. Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to meet with his Russian counterpart Vadimir Putin in Moscow on April 8. "I don't see it much probable for the Turkish-U.S. ties to become smooth in the near future," said Yasar Yakis, a former Turkish foreign minister. "It should be considered a success in case relative progress could be achieved regarding some of the problems," he added. While bilateral ties have long been going through turbulent times, Washington has revved up pressure in recent weeks as Ankara holds on to the S-400 contract. The economic sanctions the United States reinstated on Iran last November has been another area of divergence with Ankara. Turkey is among those granted a six-month exemption by Washington regarding oil imports from Iran, but the United States is now saying it expects Ankara to comply with the sanctions. Solmazturk, who chairs the Incek debates at the Ankara-based 21st Century Turkey Institute, feels Turkey is now on the horns of a dilemma as a result of its badly-managed foreign policy in recent years. The Pentagon threatened early this month that there would be "grave consequences" if Ankara would go ahead with its plan to buy the Russian missile system. Warning that such a move would poison bilateral military ties, Pentagon spokesman Charles Summers said Ankara would not be allowed in such a case to have the fifth generation F-35 fighter jets nor the U.S. Patriot air defense missiles. Ankara concluded the deal at the end of 2017 to get four batteries of the S-400 air defense system for 2.5 billion U.S. dollars, and the first batch is scheduled to be delivered to Ankara in July. "Turkey got itself into a tight corner by its foreign policy and it may give up on the S-400s to get out of this," argued Solmazturk. There have been press reports about Ankara probably passing the S-400 missiles on to another country. However, Foreign Minister Cavusoglu underlined on Friday that there was no going back on the missile contract, denying rumors that Ankara may resell the missiles to a third country. Some U.S. senators on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to block the transfer of F-35 stealth fighter jets to Turkey unless Ankara scraps the S-400 deal. The United States is also reportedly considering removing Ankara from the joint production program on F-35s. If the S-400 deal goes through, Turkey will be the first NATO country to have acquired the sophisticated system. On Tuesday, the United States introduced sanctions on a network comprising 25 individuals and firms which, it claimed, circumvented the U.S. sanctions on Iran. Several of the firms and persons are based in Turkey. A day later, Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, reportedly said Washington expected Ankara and all the other countries to strictly observe the sanctions against Iran. Ankara may face U.S. sanctions in case it fails to comply with the sanctions on Iran or goes ahead with the S-400 deal. Washington would overlook Ankara's dealings with Tehran as long as Turkey tolerates the emerging Kurdish entity in northeastern Syria, maintained Solmazturk, a former general in the Turkish military. Washington's support for the Kurdish militia in Syria is yet another thorn in ties with Ankara. Ankara is annoyed with Washington's continuing military support to the Kurdish militia known as the People's Protection Units (YPG), as it sees the group as a terrorist organization. A convergence of positions regarding the YPG could emerge only if Ankara would tolerate Washington's support to the Kurdish fighters one way or another, said Yakis. Ankara has repeatedly said it would not tolerate the YPG presence along its border, threatening to militarily intervene to eliminate the militia. "Although an escalation of tension in ties between Ankara and Washington looks possible in the days ahead, Turkey would in the final analysis side with the U.S. due to its position on Syria," Solmazturk said, underlining that Ankara cannot strike a balance between Washington and Moscow much longer. Turkey has a military presence on a sizable swath of land in northwestern Syria, which it captured from the Islamic State and the YPG in past operations. "Turkey wants to be permanent in that area and the U.S. looks to be ready to accept that," said Solmazturk. In return, Turkey would accept a Kurdish-dominated area in northeastern Syria as long as the YPG would formally remain in the background, he argued. "If the Kurdish presence on the eastern part of the Euphrates River (in Syria) could be downsized in such a way that it is no longer perceived by Turkey as a threat, then the U.S. may close its eyes to Turkey's military presence in the western part of the Euphrates for some time," commented Yakis. Both analysts underlined, however, that such an eventuality is sure to attract Russian and Iranian opposition, as Moscow and Tehran are supporters of the Syrian government in the war. "A Kurdish entity in northeastern Syria can't be possibly sustained without Turkey's backing and Turkey can't maintain its presence in Syria without Washington's support," Solmazturk said. If such a scenario implies that Turkey may annex the Syrian territory under its control, then not only Russia and Iran, but all the world would oppose it, noted Yakis. The emergence of a Kurdish state-like entity in Syria clashes with Turkish interests, as it would be part of a greater Kurdistan project which is a threat to Turkey, Solmazturk cautioned. The Kurdistan Workers' Party has been fighting for an autonomous, if not independent, Kurdistan in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast since 1984. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 01:52:17|Editor: ZX Video Player Close A contestant shows a picture during the "Chinese Bridge" competition in Bucharest, Romania, on April 2, 2019. The Romanian edition of the 18th "Chinese Bridge," an annual Chinese proficiency competition for foreign college students, was held here on Tuesday, with Paula Sorina from the University of Bucharest winning the Grand Prize. (Xinhua/Chen Jin) BUCHAREST, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Romanian edition of the 18th "Chinese Bridge", an annual Chinese proficiency competition for foreign college students, was held here on Tuesday, with Paula Sorina from the University of Bucharest winning the Grand Prize. Titled "One World, One Family," the competition attracted 14 contestants, representing hundreds of local students studying Chinese in four universities in the capital city of Bucharest, central cities of Sibiu and Brasov, as well as Cluj-Napoca from the northwest. The students competed in three segments featuring free speeches, Q&As and artistic performances, showing their outstanding Chinese proficiency, their love of Chinese history and culture, and their understanding of China's economic and social development. Many contestants said that Chinese learning opened a door for them to a wider world. They will work hard in Chinese and strive to be the messengers of friendship between the two countries. Paula Sorina, a third-year student, will represent Romania for the "Chinese Bridge" international final in China, while Maria Lungu, also a third-year student at the University of Bucharest who took the first prize in the contest, will travel to Beijing to watch the final competition. Addressing the event, Jiang Yu, Chinese ambassador to Romania, said the first group of Romanian students went to China to study Chinese in 1950, and a few years later, China and Romania decided to launch university specializations to learn the languages of the other side. As bilateral relations deepened over the years, the enthusiasm of learning Chinese and understanding China has increased in Romania, and here came the Confucius Institutes, she continued. The ambassador reminded that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the 15th anniversary of the establishment of the Ample Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation and she called for opening a new chapter in bilateral friendship and cooperation. Rodica Cherciu, inspector of the Education Ministry who coordinates the Chinese teaching, spoke highly of the Confucius Institutes in promoting Chinese language, introducing Chinese culture and helping people-to-people exchanges. According to the official, more and more Romanians are interested in Chinese and Chinese culture and some 1,500 primary and middle school students are currently learning Chinese at school. She said that the Education Ministry is willing to further strengthen cooperation with China in educational exchanges, mutual recognition of credits and youth exchanges. Since the unveiling of the first Confucius Institute in Sibiu in 2007, Chinese teaching and learning have attracted increasing attention in this country. At present, there are four Confucius Institutes, over ten Confucius Classrooms and more than 130 teaching points in Romania. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 02:42:39|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close BUDAPEST, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Hungary's central budget deficit was 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) last year, according to data released by the Central Statistics Office (KSH) here on Tuesday. "Hungary's 2018 budget deficit ended at 2.2 percent of GDP, slightly higher than the 2017 deficit of two percent but still below the government's 2.4 percent target," the KSH announced on its official website. The country's public debt fell to 70.8 percent at the end of 2018 compared with 73.4 percent a year before, according to KSH. "The Hungarian budget deficit has remained below three percent of GDP every year since 2012 and this year it is expected to be at 1.8 percent of GDP, while public debt is forecast to be just under 70 percent by the end of the year," Hungarian Finance Minister Mihaly Varga said after the publication of the data. With this level, the Hungarian public debt was 10 percentage-points below the average of European Union members. Varga also said that the government was constantly monitoring a slowdown in major European economies and should it be required, it was ready to implement economy-boosting measures in the second half of the year, but there was no need for such measures yet. Hungarian economists and politicians are especially worried by a probable slow-down in Germany, which is Hungary's main export market. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 03:38:00|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close TRIPOLI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The head of Libya's Higher Council of State on Tuesday welcomed the African Union's observation at the upcoming UN-sponsored Libyan national conference. The remarks were made by Khalid al-Meshri during his meeting with Moussa Faki, chairman of the African Union Commission, in the capital Tripoli, according to a statement issued by the Council's information office. The Council "calls for the African Union to play a positive role in reducing negative interventions in Libya," the statement said. Al-Meshri also stressed the need to hold presidential and parliamentary elections in Libya, as well as a referendum on the constitution, the statement added. For his part, Faki highlighted the need for a Libyan solution to its own crisis, expressing desire for a Libyan reconciliation conference among heads of state of the African Union. UN Special Envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame last year proposed an action plan to end the Libyan political crisis that includes the national conference. Recently, Salame said the conference will be held on April 14-16 in the southwestern Libyan city of Ghadames. Libya has been suffering escalating violence and chaos since the fall of the late leader Muammar Gaddafi's government in 2011. Despite signing a UN-sponsored political agreement in 2015, the North African country has been struggling to make a democratic transition. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 04:08:12|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close PARIS, April 2 (Xinhua) -- French President Emmanuel Macron warned Tuesday that Britain risks leaving the European Union (EU) without an agreement if Prime Minister, Theresa May, fails to come up with a credible deal allowing an amicable divorce. Speaking ahead of talks with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, Macron noted that the repeated refusal by British lawmakers to approve May's Withdrawal Agreement would lead to a hard Brexit. "It is up to the United Kingdom to come up with a credible alternative plan supported by a majority by April 10 to avoid (a no-deal exit)," Macron said. Macron said that whether the alternative plan involved a snap election, a referendum or a customs union was for Britain to decide. "It's up to London to say it, and to say it now," the French president said, adding that "the EU cannot be held hostage to the resolution of a political crisis in the (UK) on a long-term basis." "If the United Kingdom is not capable, almost three years after the referendum, of coming forward with a solution that is supported by a majority, it will have effectively chosen a no-deal exit on its own," he said. The Irish prime minister noted that "as things stand, the United Kingdom will leave the European Union without a deal". However, he also said that "there is still time for (Theresa May) to come to the European Council with proposals, proposals that are credible and have a clear pathway to success." "We need to be open to any proposals that she may bring forward to us," Varadkar told reporters. Varadkar called on the EU member states to avoid "a rolling extension", arguing that any delay of Britain's departure "must have a clear purpose, clear plan". Britain is formally scheduled to leave the EU on March 29. However, European leaders have agreed to postpone the exit date until April 12 to give an amicable divorce a further chance. Struggling to find majority support for her Brexit deal, May said on Tuesday she would ask the EU for a further delay to Brexit beyond April 12 in a fresh attempt to end the deadlock. A special summit of EU leaders has been scheduled for April 10 to assess the latest twists in the Brexit saga. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 04:23:19|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close VALLETTA, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The Maltese parliament approved the nomination of George Vella as the tenth President of the Republic on Tuesday. Vella will be sworn in on April 4 and will replace outgoing President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca. Vella was Malta's foreign minister during the last legislature between 2013 and 2017. He was first elected to parliament in 1976 and was deputy prime minister between 1996 and 1998. Both the government and the Nationalist Opposition voted in favor of the former foreign minister and Labour Party deputy leader's nomination. Both MPs for the Democratic Party boycotted the debate because the party claimed the government had ignored calls for Malta's next president to be elected by a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Addressing parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said he could think of nobody better for the role, insisting that Vella was the best man for the job at this particular moment. Opposition leader Adrian Delia noted that his party's call for the president to be elected by a two-thirds parliamentary majority had not been accepted by the government. Despite this, he too said he was convinced of Vella's stature and moral fibre, irrespective of his political beliefs. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 04:28:26|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika (C) submits his resignation to President of Constitutional Council Tayeb Belaiz (R) in Algiers, Algeria, April 2, 2019. Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his resignation on Tuesday, weeks before his presidential term expires on April 28, official APS news agency reported. (Xinhua) ALGIERS, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his resignation on Tuesday, weeks before his presidential term expires on April 28, official APS news agency reported. The Constitutional Council, however, is due to hold an urgent meeting to validate Bouteflika's resignation before making it official, APS said. First elected to the presidency in 1999, Bouteflika was re-elected in 2014 for a fourth five years of term. When Bouteflika announced his decision to seek a fifth term in February, mass protests erupted across Algeria demanding his withdrawal of this decision. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 04:28:27|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the Prime Minster's Questions in London, Britain, on April 3, 2019. Theresa May on Tuesday offered to talk with opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in order to break the current Brexit deadlock. (Xinhua/Ray Tang) LONDON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday offered to talk with opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in order to break the current Brexit deadlock. In her statement on Tuesday evening after seven hours of a cabinet meeting, May offered to sit down with Corbyn to try to agree a plan which allows Britain to leave the European Union with a deal. Corbyn later said he was "very happy" to meet May, adding he recognized his "responsibility to represent the people that supported Labour in the last election and the people who didn't support Labour". Britain has until April 12, the latest Brexit date, to propose a plan to the European Union (EU), which must be accepted by them, or it will leave the regional bloc without a deal. Meanwhile, the prime minister also said that she will seek a further extension to Article 50 following the eight-hour cabinet meeting in Downing Street. "Leaving (the EU) with a deal is the best solution," May said in the televised statement. "This debate, this division can not drag on much longer," she said. "It is putting members of parliament and everyone else under immense pressure, and it is doing damage to our politics." Her statement came after MPs rejected all four proposed alternative options in a second round of "indicative votes" on Monday night, leading the chief European Union negotiator, Michel Barnier, to say that a no-deal Brexit was more likely. May said she hopes the British parliament could still agree a deal with Brussels by May 22. "This is a decisive moment in the story of story of these islands and it requires national unity to deliver the national interests," she added. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 04:38:34|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close BEIRUT, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The head of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said on Tuesday that the situation is stable along the Blue Line separating Lebanon and Israel. "We have been experiencing noticeable stability which is indicative of the effective use of our liaison and coordination mechanisms, coupled with restraint and continued engagement by the parties," UNIFIL chief Stefano Del Col said in a statement. His remarks came during a regular meeting with senior officers from the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Israel Defense Forces at the UN position in Ras Al Naqoura. The situation is stable despite a spike in activities and tensions over developments along the Blue Line in the last months, Del Col noted. Discussions on Tuesday revolved around air and ground violations, the situation along the Blue Line and the discovery of tunnels. Del Col asked all parties for prior notification of any activities planned along the Blue Line ahead of the summer, which usually sees a large number of visitors to the UNIFIL area of operations. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 04:58:39|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close Heavy smoke is seen at a KMCO plant in Crosby, about 40 kilometers northeast of Houston, the United States, April 2, 2019. The fire at the chemical plant has been contained, leaving one person killed and two others critically injured, local authorities said on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Lao Chengyue) HOUSTON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- One person was killed and at least two others injured after a heavy fire broke out Tuesday at a chemical plant in the U.S. state of Texas, and an investigation is underway, according to local authorities. Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) Houston Region Office has dispatched emergency response personnel to conduct an initial assessment of the fire at a KMCO plant in Crosby, about 40 km northeast of Houston. The company confirmed in a statement that "there have been injuries and one fatality." Local police said that a shelter-in-place order has been issued for residents who live within a one-mile (1.6 km) radius of the plant. Isobutylene is the chemical burning at the facility, which is a highly flammable colorless gas with a faint petroleum-like odor, according to the authorities. Two weeks ago, a heavy fire erupted at the Intercontinental Terminals Company (ITC) Deer Park, about 40 km southeast of downtown Houston. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 05:44:02|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close BAGHDAD, April 2 (Xinhua) -- At least four Islamic State (IS) militants were killed on Tuesday in an airstrike on their hideout in Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, provincial security sources said. Acting on intelligence reports, the Iraqi gunships pounded an IS hideout in a rural area, some 110 km northeast of the capital Baghdad, a statement by Diyala's provincial intelligence directorate said. The statement did not give exact number of the IS casualties, but said there were three to six extremist militants inside the hideout during the bombardment. An intelligence source told Xinhua that four IS militants were killed in the airstrike according to later reports. Despite repeated military operations in Diyala, IS remnants are still hiding in some rugged areas near the border with Iran, and in the sprawling areas extending from the western part of the province to the Himreen mountain range in the north of the province. Late in 2017, Iraq officially declared full liberation from the IS after Iraqi forces recaptured all areas once seized by the extremist group. However, IS remnants have since melted in urban areas or resorted to deserts and rugged areas, carrying out guerrilla attacks from time to time against the security forces and civilians. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 06:04:17|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close TEHRAN, April 2 (Xinhua) -- At least 57 people were killed in the floods that hit most parts of Iran over the past two weeks, Iran Emergency Organization said Tuesday. Mojtaba Khaledi, spokesman of the organization, told official IRNA news agency that 478 others were injured in the recent floods. Heavy downpours and floods have caused massive destruction to Iran's agricultural sector, infrastructures as well as the rural and urban residential areas since March 19. Dozens of villages and cities in western Iran are still surrounded by high water levels. In Poldokhtar county of Lorestan Province, a number of villages have disappeared under the mud and sludge. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 06:04:19|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close TRIPOLI, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Libya's eastern-based parliament on Tuesday demanded the international community postpone the unfreezing of Libyan bank accounts abroad until after the elections. The House of Representatives demanded the Libyan concerned authorities, UN Security Council and international community reject the unfreezing of the accounts, the parliament said in a statement. "Unfreezing the accounts will expose them to the risk of mismanagement and corruption in this transitional phase in our country," the statement explained. The parliament's demand came after the UN-backed Libyan government called on the international community to partially unfreeze Libyan accounts abroad. UN Security Council's Resolution 1973 has been freezing funds and accounts of Libyan late leader Muammar Gaddafi's government since 2011. Libya suffers political division between eastern and western governments, despite the signing of a UN-sponsored political agreement in 2015. Al Noor mosque shooting survivor Farhid Ahmed poses with a photo of his wife Husna, who was killed in the attack, after an interview with Reuters in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 18, 2019. (REUTERS Photo) UNITED NATIONS, April 2 (Xinhua) -- UN General Assembly on Tuesday adopted a resolution that strongly condemns continuing violence and acts of terrorism targeting individuals, including persons belonging to religious minorities, based on religion or belief. In the wake of the horrific attack at two New Zealand mosques, in which 50 people were killed and 50 others injured in March, the assembly on Tuesday convened the meeting and adopted the anti-hate resolution, titled "Combating terrorism and other acts of violence based on religion or belief." The assembly condemned "in the strongest terms" the heinous, cowardly terrorist attack aimed at Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, and expressed its deepest condolences to the families of the victims and to the government and the people of that country. The assembly urged all countries to protect and promote freedom of religion and belief and to foster a domestic environment of religious tolerance, peace and respect. Introducing the resolution, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the assembly that the international community "must stand up against the spiral of hate." Sending condolences to the families of the Muslims who were killed in Christchurch in a clearly planned terrorist attack, he said that "Islamophobia and racism go hand in hand." He also criticized the actions of "reckless politicians" who often use distorted historical narratives and toxic conspiracy theories "to equate Islam with terrorism." The draft of the resolution proposed by Turkey declares that the member states are "deeply alarmed by all terrorist attacks against places of worship that are motivated by religious hatred, including antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred." Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 06:09:23|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close PARIS, April 2 (Xinhua) -- French customs officers, who had been staging a work-to-rule strike over Brexit since March, were expected to end their industrial action on Wednesday, suggesting a return to normal traffic of Eurostar trains, the operator said on Tuesday. Eurostar, which is majority-owned by the French state rail operator SNCF, had recommended, passengers not to travel from Paris this period unless absolutely necessary. On March 29, it had expected traffic disruption until April 3. In early March, French customs began work-to-rule strikes in the Channel ports of Dunkirk and Calais, northern France, as they followed regulations in detail to reduce efficiency and increase time. Their action triggered severe delays and cancellations. At Paris' Gare du Nord railway station, where Eurostar trains leave for London, the strikes forced the operator to cut the services of four trains last Friday and by two trains at the weekend. As a hard Brexit is looming, French customs officers are demanding higher pay and better working conditions to face the eventual pressure that Britain departure may trigger. On March 12, French Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin announced "strong measures", worth 14 million euros (15.68 million U.S. dollars), to improve customs officers' working conditions. In addition to a planned rise in wages, the government also pledged to recruit additional 700 officers to handle British passengers' check, who will no longer have European passports once Britain leaves the European bloc. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 06:09:25|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close CHICAGO, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) soybean futures rose for second consecutive session on Tuesday, as investors turned to technical buying ahead of a new round of U.S.-China trade talks. China and the United States are expected to hold the ninth round of high-level economic and trade talks in Washington this week. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Monday confirmed 828,000 metric tons of soybeans by private exporters for delivery to China during the 2018/19 marketing year. The USDA on Monday also reported that weekly soybean export inspections were 730,806 metric tons for the week ending March 28, in line with market forecasts that ranged from 500,000 to 900,000 metric tons. CBOT wheat futures fell on Tuesday, pressured by a government report that showed the U.S. crop was in better-than-expected condition as it passes through key stages of development. As for weather forecast for agricultural crop, a band of "moderate" rain is falling in central Iowa on Monday morning, while some snow is included in northern Iowa, according to the National Weather Service. Enditem Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 06:14:29|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIRA, Mozambique, April 2 (Xinhua) -- China's rescue team donated disaster-relief equipment to health authorities of Mozambique on Tuesday in Beira, central province of Sofala, the region hardest hit by the devastating tropical cyclone Idai. The equipment, valued at some 700,000 U.S. dollars, include rescue kits, hospital supplies, medications, folding beds and tents. Ussene Issa, national director of medical assistance of the Mozambican health ministry, told Xinhua that China's aid will relieve the health sector's pressure in dealing with the current emergency. "China has not only offered the donations we are receiving today, but has also been involved in the medical care for Cyclone Idai victims, distributing food and water. What we gained from China is necessary support and important reinforcement," said the director, expressing the government's gratitude. Idai made landfall on the night of March 14 in central Mozambique, leaving at least 518 people dead, 59,910 houses destroyed, and water and sanitation infrastructures compromised, official statistics showed. Since March 25, the 65-member Chinese rescue team has been giving medical assistance to thousands of victims in local accommodation centers, distributing food, water and supplies, providing sanitizing services in many disaster-affected neighborhoods where sanitation and water infrastructures were compromised by cyclone Idai. According to Issa, emergency coordination with other health partners will allow the donations to be distributed efficiently across the affected provinces. Zhao Ming, leader of the Chinese rescue team, said at the handover ceremony that although his team is ready to return, they leave the best equipment and China will always show solidarity with the Mozambican people. Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-03 06:44:34|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close MOSCOW, April 2 (Xinhua) -- Denis Khisamov, a former officer of the Russian Defense Ministry, was sentenced to imprisonment for a term of 19 years for participating in activities of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, Russia's North Caucasus District Military Court in the city of Rostov-on-Don ruled Tuesday. The court also ruled to restrict Khisamov's liberty for another year and strip him of his military rank of a reserve captain, Tass news agency reported. According to the court's statement, Khisamov received training in an IS camp in Syria, participated in armed clashes and carried out other task assignments such as monitoring all parties to the Syrian conflict and recruiting supporters. Tass reported that Khisamov quit service from a subordinate research institute of the defense ministry with the rank of reserve captain in 2009 and was arrested in Turkey in 2017 after years of participation in terrorist activities in Syria. The Russian Federal Security Service initiated legal proceedings and investigations into this case. Unul din 476 de romani moare din cauze tratabile, cel mai sumbru bilant din UE Romania se afla pe primul in Uniunea Europeana la decese din cauze tratabile, ce pot fi evitate in principal prin interventii de ingrijire a sanatatii precum screening si tratament, cu 210 romani care mor astfel la fiecare 100.000, o medie [citeste mai departe] The Pro-Kremlin militants violated the ceasefire regime four times in the Donbas-conflict zone. One Ukrainian soldier was wounded as a result of the attack. The Joint Forces Operation (JFO) HQ reported this on Facebook. One serviceman of the Joint Forces operation was wounded. The subdivision stopped the fire by opening fire as well. The enemys casualties have been checking yet. The situation in the Joint Forces operation is under the control of the Ukrainian soldier, - the report said. The Russia-backed militants violated the ceasefire regime four times. The enemy fired with Minsk-banned weaponry at the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Luhansk region. In particular, the enemy fired with grenade launchers and small arms near Krymske village (Luhansk region), with 82 mm mortar, easel and automatic anti-tank grenade launchers and heavy machine guns near Zaytseve village (Donetsk region), with 82 mm mortar and heavy machine guns near Zolote-4 village (Luhansk region), with 120 mm mortar near Novoluhanske settlement (Donetsk region). Ukrainian Army uniform Open source Combat activity claimed the lives of two Ukrainians in Donbas on April 2. Volunteer Yana Chervona and military serviceman Oleksandr Melyutin were killed by the same 120 mm mine. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko posted that on Facebook. 'Tough news from the frontline. A mortar attack on 54th Brigade positions; a mine hit the bunker. Casualties... Yana Chervona and Oleksandr Melyutin died from the enemy mine explosion. Ukraine's defenders. I knew Yana as a volunteer; she was a person of good character. It's hard to believe it', Poroshenko wrote. Yana Chervona served with the 54th Brigade since 2016. In 2013-2014, she supported the Euromaidan movement in Kharkiv. When the military conflict in Donbas began, she joined the volunteer movement and helped the army. Chervona is survived by her husband and two children, a son and a daughter. The trend is still the same. And, according to it, Zelensky and Poroshenko will meet in the second round of elections. The other candidates are defeated Zelensky,the candidate for the presidency and Petro Poroshenko, the current President of Ukraine Open source According to the All-Ukrainian exit poll updated data, the three leaders of the presidential election remain unchanged: Volodymyr Zelensky with 30.9% is ahead, then Poroshenko with 18.8% comes, and the third place belongs to Yuliya Tymoshenko with 13.7%. Although the Central Election Commission processed only three-quarters of the protocols, the trend is still the same. And, according to it, Zelensky and Poroshenko will meet in the second round of elections. The rest are defeated. Not for the first time Actually, almost all the participants of elections are experienced politicians. And this means that they are able to keep emotions inside and make a good face during a bad game. Only Zelensky has not mastered such art. But his first place does not require restraint - the candidate can radiate quite sincere joy. Another forecast was also made in social networks by MP of previous convocations, former associate of Tymoshenko Andriy Shkil. Partially votes (for candidates who lost) will go to Zelensky, partially to Poroshenko, but the majority won't go to anyone, because voters will not come to the polling stations, he writes. The fact that some voters ignore the second round is not ruled out by other political analysts. Some add that Poroshenkos potential electorate will mobilize in the face of a threat. Deputy Director of the Institute for the Extremism Study Bohdan Petrenko is convinced that a direct indication of the candidate who lost will not make a great impression on the voter. Politicians who have gone the distance may call for voting for anyone, but the decision will eventually be made by people. No Tymoshenkos Maidan As a matter of fact, the art of politics is forcing Yuliya Tymoshenko to now portray the victim of injustice and demand from the authorities and society to recognize her victory in the first round. This opinion is told by the above-quoted Bohdan Petrenko. He argues that the strategical leader of Batkivshchyna is acting correctly, because in any case, regardless of whether there were frauds or not, she needs to accelerate the wave. Yuliya Tymoshenko cannot be such a catalyst. In addition, she is not interested in outraged masses, because her goal lies on a different plane. Ukraine's election results Open source People always tend to believe that the future will be better than the present. Belief in a better future is associated with significant events in history. The election of the president is such a landmark milestone. Change of power is almost always associated with new opportunities for the future. "A new servant of people" - no matter who he is after the second round - gives us a signal that a new "window of opportunity" is reopening. These expectations are not necessarily rational, but they will take place. Economics is not just numbers. It is also expectations. And these expectations can create miracles. Just recall the ups and downs in investment activity during Yushchenkos term (reforms were not introduced, but investments grew). Even minor positive moves will be accompanied by a multiplier effect. There will be no imbalance in the economic situation. Possible deviations will be nothing more than increased temporal volatility. The intrigue about the possible results of the second round has gradually disappeared. There is a new intrigue - who will be the prime minister in the new configuration. Many have chances for this (including Ukraine's PM Volodymyr Groysman). And even this - despite the already started "military actions" of participants in the process - gives grounds for optimism. Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelensky on set in Kiev, Ukraine, during filming of Servant of the People on Feb. 6 Associated Press After this weekends first round of voting in Ukraines presidential election, Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular actor, and Petro Poroshenko, Ukraines current leader, have emerged as front-runners. Ukraines next president, though, will be either Poroshenko or Zelenskys alter ego, Vasyl Holoborodko. Holoborodko is the incorruptible television president Zelensky plays in the hit series Servant of the People, now in its third season. A simple schoolteacher, whose tirade against corruption is filmed by a student and goes viral, Holoborodko catapults to the presidency. In real life, Zelensky has kept his campaigning to a minimum. He has let Holoborodko do the work for him, which may mean that the only way to guess at the real mans views may be to take seriously the fake ones. Like Zelensky, who never showed much of an interest in government until he decided hed like to run one, Holoborodko knows little about politics, economics, or international affairs. In the show, he sets aside the stirring inaugural address his handlers have written to state that he wont make any promises because that would be dishonest and I dont know enough. He does assure the public, though, that he will act in such a manner that I wont be ashamed to look children in the eye. His next two seasons in office are marked by a series of oftentimes funny confrontations with an intractable bureaucracy, slimy advisors, and corruptioneers galore. If the show is, as one Canadian supporter of Zelensky has written, a playbook for reform, then his backers should be worried. At best, they can expect nothing but setbacks for two years. At worst, they might see their country dissolve and their leader go to jail. At the end of the second season, Holoborodkos efforts win him enough enemies that he loses a rigged election. In the third season, crazed Ukrainian nationalists (with the slogan Freedom, Surname, Country) stage a coup that leads to his arrest. As one of the usurpers says while asking prison inmates to reveal their last names (and, hence, their nationality), Ukraine is not for everybodyso much so, apparently, that even Ukrainian prisons will only hold patriots. By the time the latest episode of the third season rolls around, the country breaks up into close to 30 statelets. In the far west is the Kingdom of Galicia; in the far east, the SSSR, which stands for Union of Free and Self-Reliant Republics but also happens to be the Latinized version of the Cyrillic acronym of the USSR. In the middle, theres even a Jewish state centered on the city of Uman, the home to Hasidism. Fortunately for Ukraine, Holoborodko stages a comeback, is re-elected president, appoints a new cabinet of reformers, and is so successful that the breakaway statelets are persuaded to rejoin the nation. The economy booms, foreign direct investment returns, start-ups take off, migrants return home, and Ukraine even embarks on a space program. Alas, two statelets refuse to come homeGalicia and the SSSR, whose elites insist they cant coexist in a unified Ukraine. The people save the day, however. A fire breaks out in a Lviv mine, threatening the lives of the miners trapped in the shafts. The SSSR leadership refuses to help, but a troop of Russian-speaking rescuers from Donbass rushes to Lviv and saves their Ukrainian-speaking comrades. Both regions rejoin the nation, and Ukraine is whole once more. But Holoborodko isnt finished. He attends a meeting of Western countries in Brussels, where the Westerners admonish Ukraine for challenging their economic and political primacy. Holoborodko proudly walks out. Back in Ukraine, he tells a graduating class that he envies them for being able to live in this new Ukraine. But theres one enormous problem that will affect them and their children for decades to come: Ukraine still has $163 billion in debt. He calls on Ukrainians to pay it back so that we will never again be second-rate people. The final scene of the episode (and, depending on Zelenskys political fortunes, possibly of the series) shows Maidan square, the site of the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions of 2004 and 2014, respectively, piled high with gold. The people have come through. The show ends with a transparent campaign message to vote for Zelensky for president. Servant of the People gets a number of things wrong. Most of the characters speak Russian most of the time. In reality, in Ukraine, Ukrainian is spoken publicly at least as often as Russian. The vast majority of Ukrainians who speak out for the Ukrainian language and culture are hardly radical putschists. Corruption is widespread, but its not quite the monster that Holoborodkoand Western journalistsimagines it to be. And rather than chide Ukraine, the West would be delighted if it took off economically and politically. These inaccuracies may be forgiven as campaign hyperbole. Unforgivable is the absence from the show of Russia or Russian President Vladimir Putin. In its alternate universe, Crimea and Donbass are not occupied. There is no war. There are no deaths. There is no mention of Russian attempts to quash Ukrainian independence since 1991. This curious absence suggests either that Zelensky, who serves as the shows executive producer, has no idea how to deal with a very real existential threat to Ukraine or, far worse, that he doesnt believe that there is one. At best, then, a President Zelensky would be prone to serious mistakes in his relations with Putin; at worst, he might be willing to make concessions that would hollow out Ukrainian sovereignty. The absence of Putins Russia has another implication. Its impossible to understand Ukraines war in the eastern Donbass regionthe inspiration for the shows own civil conflictswithout an appreciation for Putins invasion and annexation of Crimea; his support for separatists in Ukraines southeast; his continued basing of several thousand soldiers there; his stationing of tens of thousands of Russian troops, tanks, and artillery units along Ukraines border; and his blockade of Ukraines ports on the Sea of Azov. Read the original article here. State prosecution asks 15 years in prison for Volodymyr Dudka and 14 years and 10 months for Oleksy Besarabov The state prosecution asks 15 years in prison for Volodymyr Dudka and 14 years and 10 months for Oleksy Besarabov, the participants of the Ukrainian saboteurs case, as journalist Anton Naumlyuk reported on Facebook. The state prosecution asked 15 years in prison for Volodymyr Dudka and 14 years and 10 months for Oleksy Besarabov, the participants of the Ukrainian saboteurs case and fine in the sum of $7,630, Naumlyuk reported. It is noted that the prosecutors office asks the court to impose personal sanctions on the FSB investigation due to the falsification of some materials of the case. Dudka was arrested in November 2016 in Crimea along with Dmytro Shtyblikov and Oleksiy Besarabov. The FSB detained another so-called "Ukrainian saboteurs" who allegedly were planning sabotage on strategic sites of the occupied Crimea in Sevastopol on November 9. The detainees are allegedly members of the terrorist group of Ukraines Defense Ministry Intelligence Service. There are very limited options of UN peacekeeping mission deployment in Donbas - as Viktor Medvedchuk put it. In his commentary for 112 Ukraine TV channel, the head of the Political Board of the Opposition Platform - For Life party, cleared his position on this issue. 'I take this UN peacekeeping mission issue skeptically. I'm very well aware of the fact that it is only possible if our international partners and those living in the non-controlled territory [of Donbas] agree to it. Russia's position, in this regard, lies within the assumption that (...) if such position in the occupied territories is supported if they agree on such peacekeeping mission, it can take place, and this is where Russia supports them. No other options here', the politician said. 'Knowing the current views of people in Donetsk and Luhansk (I speak to them because I negotiate), I'm sure for now that there's no future of this mission in Ukraine, in Donbas. Distracting attention and making cheap talks is no good. One has to stick to what is stipulated in Minsk agreements. It actually says nothing about the peacekeeping mission. But it also states what it takes to bring peace to Ukraine - and it's mentioned in the UN Security Council resolution and the preliminary agreements, which were not implemented among the heads of the Normandy Four. It takes everyone's political will', Medvedchuk concluded. Chairman of the political council of Opposition Platform For Life Viktor Medvedchuk 112 Agency The chairman of political council of Opposition Platform - For Life Party Viktor Medvedchuk on air of 112 Ukraine TV channel said he was ready for the debates 'with anyone.' I give credit to the clever people of Zelensky team, but I can say that if the discussion about me is serious, Im ready to debate with anyone: with any politician, statesman, businessman. Because I and our political force have our own vision of the strategic development of Ukraine in terms of politics, economics, and humanitarian sphere, Medvedchuk said. He also noted that he was an opponent of the current president Petro Poroshenko, and added that the Opposition Platform - For Life would not support any of the candidates who can make it to the second round. Second: about the proposal of adviser of Mr. Zelensky. I want to say that I do not know how much Mr. Kolomoisky represents Zelensky or can potentially represent him. However, about myself I will certainly say that I cannot represent Mr. Poroshenko for any reasons because I was critical towards him all these years, did not support his election campaign, I opposed him, because I supported another candidate. This is our ideological position: both of our Opposition platform - For Life and our candidate And of course, our Opposition Platform - For Life Party will not support him or Zelensky in the second round. We will not provide such support and will not agitate for them in the second round, Medvedchuk added. Earlier, Viktor Medvedchuk said Poroshenko had entered the second round of elections thanks to Oleksandr Vilkul. Open source Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary-General, has stated that the alliance plans to enhance its presence in the Black Sea, as the organization reported on its website. NATO is also concerned by Russias pattern of aggressive behaviour. Including its ongoing actions against Ukraine, and the seizure of Ukrainian sailors and ships near the Sea of Azov. NATO has already stepped up its presence in the Black Sea. And we continue to work closely with our partners in the region, Stoltenberg said. According to Stoltenberg, the decision on the strengthening of the drills of the Ukrainian and Georgian coastal guard and Navy can be made on April 3-4 in Washington during the meeting of the foreign ministries of the alliance. He also noted that the NATO vessels would enter the ports of the Black Sea. As we reported, NATO warships from Canada and Spain arrived in the seaport of Odesa, southern Ukraine. The ships appeared in Odesa after patrolling the Black Sea waters. They would remain in the docks until late April 3. Besides, they were accompanied by Russian forces. Young people provoke employees of the State Border Guard, trying to get in the way of setting the fence Residents of Dilove village (Zakarpattia region, westernmost Ukraine) have been opposing the construction of the fence on the border with Romania. The press office of the State Border Guard of Ukraine reported that on April, 2. 'Border Guards of Mukachevo unit began to construct the fence on the borderline, in the zone of responsibility of Dilove village sector. A group of young people, about 40 people, reached the site demanding to stop the construction. The men, most of whom are locals, tried to provoke the law enforcers', the press office said. The protesters also shut down the Rakhiv-Mukachevo roadway. Border Guards continue to mount the fence on the border with Romania, witnessing and reporting the actions of protesters. The population of Dilove village is 3,505 people. As we reported on November 25, 2018, Major of the Border Guard tried to detain the smugglers at the Ukrainian-Romanian border near Dilove, but the criminals hit the law enforcer by their car. The Major died in the hospital. Several people were arrested on suspicion of a crime. Erdogan stated that the state would not refuse from the purchase of the Russian S-400 The U.S. decided to stop the supplies of details for the F-53 fighter to Turkey due to the plans of Ankara to purchase the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft weapon system as Reuters reported. U.S. officials told their Turkish counterparts they will not receive further shipments of F-35 related equipment needed to prepare for the arrival of the stealthy jet, the message said. The U.S. offered Turkey to buy Patriot system instead of S-400. According to the agency, Ankara was interested in the offer but decided not to refuse from S-400 purchase. Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkeys F-35 operational capability have been suspended, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mike Andrews, a Defense Department spokesman, said. The U.S. warned Turkey many times that the Russian S-400 system endangers F-35 safety produced by Lockheed Martin. Ankara is the partner of the creation of the plane but it refused to cancel its decision. As it was reported earlier, Russia and Turkey signed an agreement on the supply of S-400 missile system. Also, it is planned to get the joint production going. The United States criticized Turkeys intention to buy the S-400 missile systems from Russia. Besides, Russia might receive a tranche of the credit from the Eurasian Fund of Stability and Development in an amount of $200 million The President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko and his Russian colleague Vladimir Putin kremlin.ru Russia will provide Belarus with a state loan of up to $600 million to refinance the loans given by the Russian Federation earlier, as First Vice Prime Minister, Finance Minister of Russia Anton Siluanov said, Interfax reported. In compliance with the decision of the Russian President, Russia will give Belarus a state loan in an amount up to $600 million. This money will be spent for refinancing of the payments for repayment of main debt left after Russias previous loans, he stated. Siluanov also noted that Belarus completed the implementation of the measures required for the provision of the 7th tranche from the Eurasian Fund of Stability and Development in an amount of $200 million. This enables the funds council to make a positive decision concerning allocations. Therefore, the Belarusian side might receive the 7th tranche for stabilizing the budget till the end of this month, the Minister added. In late February it was reported that Belarus asked Russia for credit ($600 million) to refinance the debt. We want to loan up, we do not get this money, we return it to Russia right away, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko explained. The authority recognized it as such meeting the basic law of Ukraine Open source The Constitutional Court of Ukraine recognizes the draft bill No. 9310-1 on renaming Dnipropetrovsk region to Sicheslav region constitutional. UNN news agency reported that with the reference to the source in the CCU. 'The court already provided a conclusion in this case, in fact, recognizing it as such meeting the articles 157 and 158 of the Constitution of Ukraine', the source said. According to him, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine made this decision made this decision in the closed part of the Tuesday session. In the framework of decommunization process, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada asked Constitutional Court to change the name of Dnipropetrovsk region to Sicheslav region. The session was held in February 2019. In the fall of 2018, the parliament did not have enough votes to send this bill to the Constitutional Court. The Constitution of Ukraine and the Rules of Procedure of the Verkhovna Rada determine the procedure for amending the Basic Law of Ukraine. The Ambassadors have urged the candidates and their teams to act within the law during the second round of the elections G7 Summit in Canada, June 9-9, 2019 kyiveuromarathon G7 states welcome the preliminary results of the OSCE international observers mission concerning the first round of the presidential elections in Ukraine, as the press office of the organization reported on Twitter. Besides, the Ambassadors have urged the candidates and their teams to act within the law during the second round of the elections. As it was reported, Volodymyr Zelensky enters the second tour of the elections with 30,22% of votes, while Petro Poroshenko, the current President of Ukraine, occupies the second place with 15,93% as the Central Election Commission reported after the procession of 96,16% of the protocols. Related video: Zelensky is a leader in the majority of the regions of Ukraine, while Poroshenko is supported in western regions - Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil. Minister Linas Linkevicius regrets that due to Russia's aggression "elections could not be held in occupied Crimea and parts of Donbas" Foreign Minister of Lithuania Linas Linkevicius delfi.lt Foreign Minister of Lithuania Linas Linkevicius welcomed the democratic elections in Ukraine, as he wrote on Twitter. I congratulate #Ukraine, having reaffirmed its democratic credentials by conducting 1st round of Presidential elections in essentially free, fair & highly competitive manner. Regret that due to RU aggression elections could not be held in occupied Crimea & parts of Donbass. Linas Linkevicius (@LinkeviciusL) April 1, 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky enters the second tour of the elections with 30,22% of votes, while Petro Poroshenko, the current President of Ukraine, is second with his 15,93%, as the Central Election Commission reports after the procession of 96,16% of the protocols. Related video: Zelensky is a leader in the majority of the regions of Ukraine, while Poroshenko is supported in western regions - Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil. The Bundestag thinks that the results of the elections show the decreased confidence in the political elite Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian presidential candidate Zoya Shu/112.ua Christian Democratic Union of Germany, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, expects that candidate for the presidency Volodymyr Zelensky will tell about his plans on the strengthening of rule of law and fight against corruption as David Wadephul, the Chairman of the party, stated. Zelensky should provide the particular view on his policy during the next three weeks until the second round, as well as reveal the team of the politicians, who support him, Wadephul said, adding that Ukraine needs experienced management team. According to Wadephul, Ukraine cannot allow relying on the inexperienced management team in the conditions of the conflict with Russia and after difficult social and economic state: Such situation will usefully play in benefit of Russia and encourage it to strengthen forces for the destabilization of Ukraine. Moreover, Zelensky should explain how he is going to achieve the declared goal the deprivation of power from oligarchs, considering the fact that his election campaign was significantly supported by oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, reads the message. As of 8 a.m., April 2, Volodymyr Zelensky enters the second tour of the elections with 30,22% of votes, while Petro Poroshenko is second with 15,93%. The voters turnout in Ukraine made 63,45% and 62,71% as of 8:00 p.m., March 31. Open source Official Warsaw does not have any favorite in the presidential elections in Ukraine, it will support any democratic choice of the Ukrainian nation, as Ukrinform reported. We, Polish politicians, have no favorite, as we do not interfere in the political decisions of the other states. We are glad that the first round of presidential elections in Ukraine attests to the development of the diplomatic institutions, Krzysztof Szczerski, Secretary of State at the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland. He added that Poland would be monitoring the electoral campaign before the second round. A completely different campaign begins right now, a completely different competition between two candidates. Therefore, this will mean a full reorganization of the electorates and distribution of the support, he stressed. Zelensky is a leader in the majority of the regions of Ukraine, while Poroshenko is mostly supported in western Ukraine - Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil regions. Yuriy Boyko dominates in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Related video: Serhy Knyazev, the Chairman of the National Police National Police The National Police have received 2,600 reports about the violations of the election law for two days. 71 cases were qualified as the criminal offense as Serhy Knyazev, the Chairman of the National Police reported. The workload of the police was extremely difficult. During two days we provided an efficient response to 2,600 reports on the violations of the election law. The topics of the reports concerned the illegal agitation, taking of photos, damage of the ballots, bribery of the voters, false mining. As for today, 71 criminal proceedings were qualified as a criminal offense, Knyazev said. According to him, the majority of the proceedings were opened in Dnipropetrovsk (16), Donetsk (8) and Vinnytsia (6) regions. Over 72,000 police officers provided the law and order during the first tour of the elections; over 40,000 law enforcers guarded almost 30,000 polling stations. Another 23,000 employees patrolled the cities, towns and villages and took care of the security of road traffic. About 4,500 law enforcers as the members of the investigating units responded and processed the violations of the election law. 147 bomb squads, including specialists of the Emergency Service of Ukraine worked on that day. As of 2 p.m., April 2, Volodymyr Zelensky enters the second tour of the elections with 30,23% of votes, while Petro Poroshenko is second with 15,92%. Earlier the Central Election Commission published the results of the voting abroad. Over 55,000 Ukrainians participated in the elections abroad. According to the information, Poroshenko gained38,93% of votes, Zelensky got 26,01% and Anatoly Hrytsenko has 10,64%. Other candidates got lest than 10% of the votes. The voters turnout in Ukraine made 63,45% and 62,71% as of 8:00 p.m., March 31. Yet he reminded that Zelensky himself stated he was ready to participate in the debates Ukraine's presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky with his wife at the press conference after the results of the exit polls were revealed, March 31, 2019 112 Agency Ruslan Ryaboshapka, the advisor of Ukraines presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky, believes that political debates are pointless, as Hromadske reported. I consider it pointless, pardon me, this is a dog fight, when people put a show instead of a discussion or exchange of views concerning the programs, Ryaboshapka stated. He also does not see any point to discuss the teams and the program of his candidate with Poroshenko. Discuss these people and the action plan with Poroshenko? I dont see any point. There might be a question to Zelensky from Poroshenko, who considers him Kolomoiskys (Ukrainian business oligarch, - ed.) puppet? Maybe he should debate with Kolomoisky? Or Kolomoisky with Medvedchuk (the Chairman of Opposition Platform For Life political party, - ed.), the advisor said. Earlier, Poroshenko claimed the necessity of debates during the second round of the presidential elections. In his turn, Zelensky said he was ready to that. National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine invited both of the candidates to the television debates. A U.S. withdrawal has opened the door to a possible political settlement, but success will depend on regional powers and the countrys neighbors. President Donald Trumps intention to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan has given new life to the quest for a political settlement after 41 years of war, including over 17 directly involving the U.S. military. According to both U.S. government and Taliban sources, negotiations between the two sides have led to agreement on the outline of a framework for a deal in which the United States would withdraw troops and the Taliban would guarantee that any future government in which they participate would cooperate with international efforts against terrorism. The Taliban will have to disavow al Qaeda explicitly for the first time. The U.S. government is negotiating directly with the Taliban because Washington has finally accepted that there is no better military option. The U.S. government is negotiating directly with the Taliban because Washington has finally accepted that there is no better military option. Meanwhile, the Islamist group refuses to engage the Afghan government until it has reached agreement with the United States on ending what it calls the occupation of Afghanistan. Under the framework being negotiated by the U.S. government and the Taliban, however, the agreement between these two would be implemented only as one component of a broader pact, including a ceasefire and a domestic political settlement derived from negotiations including the Afghan government and the Taliban, with the representation of a broad range of Afghan society, including women and youth. The main parties to the conflict will also have to agree on the sequencing of the troop pullout, the ceasefire, the political settlement, and long-term assistance to Afghanistan to ensure that the foreign troop withdrawal does not lead to collapse of the government, as was the case in Afghanistan after the 1988 Geneva Accords. In addition to those core parties to the conflict, for any deal to endure, other regional actors need to agree as wellespecially Pakistan. Pakistan supported the Taliban while they were in power and has hosted their leadership and logistics bases since U.S. forces expelled them from Afghanistan. Pakistan has used support for the Talibans military and terrorist activities to pressure Washington and Kabul over five issues: The U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, which could threaten Pakistan, especially its nuclear arsenal, and, Islamabad believes, provide cover for Indian activities against Pakistan; Afghanistans refusal to recognize the international boundary with Pakistan, known as the Durand Line, and its claims on the loyalties of Pashtun and Baloch ethnic groups in the two countries; commercial and transit access to Central Asia via Afghanistan, which Pakistan could obtain at any time by allowing Afghanistan reciprocal access to India, which it has so far refused; some understanding on limiting the Indian presence in Afghanistan, at least in provinces directly bordering Pakistanwhile there are no Indian troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan claims that Indian aid and diplomatic missions provide cover for intelligence operations; and limits on building dams on waterways such as the Kabul River that flow into Pakistan, which is experiencing a severe water crisis. Afghanistan and Pakistan have made some progress on these issues, especially in talks brokered by China, which is involved because it views instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a threat to its massive transcontinental infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative. Avrio Capital, one of the first investment firms to focus specifically on food and agriculture, has re-branded into a new investment firm called Rio Investment Partners, raising $77.5 million in the first close of a $150 million fund. Rio will invest in growth stage businesses across the agrifood supply chain and counts Farm Credit Canada, a core investor in Avrio, as one of its cornerstone investors. Rio has been cofounded by Aki Georgacacos, an executive from Avrio, and Jean Francois Huc, an experienced biotech entrepreneur. Other existing Avrio team members Steven Leakos, managing director, and Jonathan Goodkey, principal, are also part of the Rio team. Avrio cofounder Jim Taylor will not join Rio, instead focusing on sub-debt, according to sources. Michael McGee, another partner in Avrio, is also not transitioning over, but his plans are unknown. Why the re-brand? The agrifood investing space is changing and evolving, and as we always like to say to our portfolio companies, if youre not growing, youre shrinking, Aki Georgacacos, partner at Rio, told AgFunderNews. So, when we thought about the future of the firm, we realized we wanted to build a platform that could invest in a very comprehensive way across the entire agrifood tech continuum. And as we mapped that out and started to think about the kind of professionals wed want involved, we felt it made sense to signal to the marketplace our new approach with a new name, while maintaining the heritage of Avrio. Avrio has an impressive heritage: the firm has deployed three funds totaling over $250 million, producing returns of at least two times their investments. One of its most successful exits was Manitoba Harvest Hemp Foods, in which it invested $6.05 million and returned $52 million, a 8.67x return and 48.24% IRR (internal rate of return). Private equity firm Compass Diversified Holdings acquired Manitoba in 2016, recently selling it onto Tilray, the famous publicly-listed cannabis group. On the technology side, Avrio exited precision ag software group Farmers Edge to Canadian billionaire Prem Watsas Fairfax Financial for a just under 5x return. It also exited Wolf Trax, a fertilizer and seed treatment startup that was acquired by Compass Minerals for nearly $40 million in 2014. That yielded a 15.4x return for Rios $2.5 million investment, and a 138% IRR. Why food & ag? A convergence of positive trends has created a unique opportunity for agri-food investing over the next decade, Huc told AgFunderNews. There is a strong, global imperative for innovation across the value chain we need to feed more and more people with finite resources. In recent years, we have seen a rapid growth in agri-food investment, which has stimulated a thriving ecosystem, particularly in North America. Within this global ecosystem, Canada has a large and robust agri-food sector that is critical to the economy. This is the backdrop for a global push to make agriculture and food more sustainable, healthy and efficient. Unlike many sectors of the economy, agriculture and food have been slow to adopt technologies that can improve productivity, reduce environmental impact, increase efficiency, decrease waste and improve health and safety, added Georgacacos. Today, there are hundreds of companies in the ag-tech and food-tech sector that did not exist 5 years ago. The use of technology in this sector remains embryonic, and there is a tremendous opportunity to leverage emerging technologies and capabilities to create value across the entire agri-food value chain, from inputs and production practices through processing and transformation to consumer-packaged goods promoting health and wellness. There has never been a better time to invest in the agri-food sector. What will Rio invest in? The firm is looking to invest at the intersection of enabling technologies, different capabilities, and the agrifood value chain. It will invest at growth stage where the value proposition is clearly understood, the unit economics look positive and the product market fit is established, said Georgacacos. With all of those elements checked off, our strategy is geared towards scaling businesses and taking on execution risk. Huc elaborated that the firm is looking at gene editing (CRISPR), gene sequencing and computational design technologies to improve seeds, enhance microbial production and produce alternative proteins; cellular agriculture and industrial biotechnology to produce food/pesticides/fertilizers/feed; remote sensing and predictive modelling to increase productivity in the field; data collection and management to enable precision agronomic farming; robotics to automate production, harvesting, processing and distribution; artificial intelligence to enable machine learning and reduce labor intensity; the internet of things to maximize connectivity and leverage data collection, AI and robotics; and blockchain to bring transparency and traceability to the food chain and facilitate transactions. We will also invest in companies possessing unique capabilities, such as privileged sourcing of value-added inputs, differentiated logistics networks that offer better cost structures and/or service levels, advanced manufacturing methods, e-commerce platforms that provide differentiated access to markets, management teams possessing unique experience, relationships and networks, and emerging brands that connect with consumers, added Huc. What types of food and agriculture technologies excite you the most? We are excited by opportunities in animal health, food technologies that deliver nutrition, wellness, cleaner labels and convenience to consumers, technologies that can reduce waste and spoilage across the value chain, the use of biotechnology to enable more sustainable and economical production, and digital solutions that save producers money and make them more efficient. Where will Rio invest? Initially, Rio will focus on North America, predominantly its home country of Canada. But the firm intends to invest in the U.S. as well and eventually build out its investment platform to eventually invest overseas with an international franchise and brand. For now, Rio is operating from two offices; one in Calgary, Alberta and one in Montreal, Quebec. What is this platform approach? Too often VC funds are reliant on one or two individuals to run their investments, articulate the strategy and execute; that makes it hard to scale and stake the sector more comprehensively, said Georgacacos. We want to create a team with a broad set of capabilities; we want to bring in young people and develop them through the firm, creating a private equity firm thats about the horse and not the jockey. In 10 years, we want to have a dynamic group of partners, senior investors and junior staff who have been recruited and retained at RIO, have developed their skills and expertise in Agri-Food investing, have fostered and flourished a unique network of industry contacts and have been promoted from within. This motivated team of professionals will be managing several RIO funds and generating industry leading returns for its limited partners. This is the platform we are committed to building, one where RIO eclipses the sum of its parts. Whats in the name? Rio means river in Spanish: it flows, evolves, changes. It needs to change as it goes forward to stay alive and relevant, and it brings life and growth to everything it touches, all of which resonated with our firm. Totally coincidental that its part of the Avrio name. The existing Avrio equity and sub-debt funds will continue to operate under the Avrio name. Chris Cohen's songs initially sound easy. They're each tiny jewels that unfurl at a leisurely pace, but dig a little deeper and you'll reach a melancholy core. His previous two albums -- 2012's Overgrown Path, and 2016's As If Apart -- were built from lush, blurry tracks that embedded themselves in your subconscious, like they'd always been there. Chris Cohen, his third solo album, was written and recorded in his Lincoln Heights studio and at Tropico Beauties in Glendale, California over the course of the last two years. Cohen would sing melodies into his phone, fleshing them out on piano, then constructing songs around the melodies, and later, adding lyrics and other instrumentation with the help of Katy Davidson (Dear Nora), Luke Csehak (Happy Jawbone Family Band), Zach Phillips, and saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, among others. It is his most straightforward album yet, but it is also the conclusion of an unofficial cycle that began with Overgrown Path. "My parents got divorced while I was making this record," he says. "They were married for 53 years and my father spent most of his life in the closet, hiding both his sexual identity and various drug addictions. For me it was like being relieved of a great burden, like my life could finally begin." It is this sense of truth and freedom that is woven into the very fabric of the record even as it grapples with complicated emotions. Indeed, a core truth of the record is what at first seems like a simple idea: "I hoped that by writing about what was closest to me at the time, I might share something of myself and where I came from," Cohen says. Though the album is undeniably part of the framework that made up his previous two records -- Chris Cohen is also a thoughtful, accomplished meditation on life and family, backed by dusky instrumentation influenced by the late evening beauty of Pat Metheny's Falcon and the Snowman soundtrack, and Thomas Dolby's Golden Age of Wireless. It's beautiful, but it's also unflinching in its depiction of emotional turmoil. On "Edit Out," written in the wake of his parents' divorce, Cohen examines his relationship with his father through devastatingly straightforward lyrics: "We were loved from afar / Everyone kept in the dark." Though it's a gorgeous song, the emotional weight is immense. A line like "people want a lot" carries a substantial amount of power, even if the initial intention of the lyric is not immediately clear. But Chris Cohen is not a confessional record in the traditional sense. Instead of picking at open wounds, the album looks forward by embracing the past. Cohen's father worked in the music industry, which exposed him as a child to not just the practical realities of a career in music -- from a young age he saw plenty of recording studios and heard stories about musicians from his parents -- but the more creative as well. "I had the sense that music was important and was something I could do," he says. On album opener, "Song They Play," Cohen revisits his childhood, and his attempts to get his father's attention. "I was mostly shielded from what was going on," he says. "but had occasional glimpses into my parents' complex world. When I sing these songs, I think it's my way of communicating what I am unable to communicate in real life." None of these songs are abrasive or even aggressive. The soft drum fills on "Song They Play" comfort, and the guitar virtually glitters. Chris Cohen is a beautiful album about pain and loss but it's also about accepting loss. Of the song "Green Eyes," Cohen says "[It's about] the men in my family and how they passed their worldview along to each other from great emotional distances. My father and grandfather were full of secrets and longing, which were communicated through everyday actions like driving a car or cooking a meal. We all wanted closeness, but never found it in each other." This is a statement about a specific song, but it is also a statement about the album as a whole: Chris Cohen is not so much autobiographical as it is multi-generational. The Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa announces the selection of eight graduate students to serve as Africa Society Fellows in advance of the Democratic Republic of Congo's newly elected President, Felix Tshisekedi's first trip to Washington on April 3. The Democratic Republic of Congo's vital role within the East and Central African region and the continent of Africa in addition to its partnership to the United States warrants significant emphasis. The Fellowship announcement event will take place at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 at Howard University's Ralph J. Bunche International Affairs Center, 2218 6th Street, N.W., Washington DC 20002. The Fellows will work closely with The Africa Society leadership and members of the African Diaspora to examine foreign policy and to produce a series of scholarly documents and presentations resulting in greater mutual understanding between citizens of the United States of America and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Patricia Baine, President of The Africa Society, will serve as project manager and the Fellowship coordinator. Providing the Fellows consultations and subject matter expertise will be Ambassador Pamela E. Bridgewater (ret.), The Africa Society Board Chair and CEO, and former US Ambassador to the Republic of Ghana, the Republic of Benin, and Jamaica, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Africa. The Fellows will be further supported by academic experts from their respective institutions. The Africa Society, whose mission is, to educate and advocate for Africa, announced the Fellowship opportunity to students participating in the U.S. Department of State's Charles B. Rangel International Affairs and Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Program and USAID's Donald M. Payne International Development program which are administered through the Ralph J. Bunche International Affairs Center at Howard University. The Africa Society Fellows, who will receive a stipend for their research represent the University of Texas at Austin, American, Georgetown, George Washington, and Johns Hopkins universities and will be intermittently resident at The Africa Society as they conduct their research. The Fellows' scholarly work will center on the Democratic Republic of Congo as a part of The Africa Society's year-long focus on that country. In addition to presenting their findings to domestic audiences including academic institutions, government entities, think tanks, and other relevant Africa-focused organizations, their papers will be shared with the United States Embassy in the DRC. Research will focus on the following topics: RTHK: Manila lodges protest over Chinese ships Manila has lodged a diplomatic protest after more than 250 Chinese ships were spotted in recent months off a Philippine-held island in the hotly disputed South China Sea, a presidential spokesman said on Monday. Under President Rodrigo Duterte the Philippines has largely set aside the once-heated territorial stand off over Beijing's claims to the resource-rich waterway in order to court Chinese investment. However, Duterte spokesman Salvador Panelo told reporters Manila had spoken up after reports emerged that a number of Chinese ships passed near Pag-asa (Thitu) island. The military put the number of vessels, including fishing and coast guard boats, at 275 for the first three months of 2019. "The DFA (Department of Foreign Affairs) has already made a diplomatic protest over it," Panelo said. "The mere fact that they are there and just staying there for a week. Why, what are you doing?" He did not say when the protest was filed and the DFA did not immediately issue any statements. Control over the South China Sea is a point of regional contention because trillions of dollars of goods traverse through it and rich petroleum reserves are thought to sit deep beneath its waters. China, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam have all staked claims to the sea. Beijing's ambassador to Manila Zhao Jianhua told reporters there are Chinese fishermen operating near the island and he pledged China would look into the number of vessels. "We do not know whether there is militiamen in that area or not, but clearly it is an area that is disputed," he said. "We have been handling this issue through friendly diplomatic channels so you don't need to worry about whether there will be any kind of outbreak of conflict," he added. This protest comes as the United States and the Philippines kicked off on Monday their largest military exercises, which have been running for decades between Washington and its former colony. The US has aimed to shore up its relationship with its long-time ally, as Duterte has taken steps toward China in an effort to unlock billions of promised trade and loans. During a visit to Manila in March, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed to defend the Philippines from "armed attack" in the South China Sea, a pledge Philippine leaders had long sought. (AFP) This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Brooklyn Councilman Kalman Yeger will be removed from the bodys immigration committee amid widespread outrage over his repeated claim that "Palestine does not exist." Speaker Corey Johnson announced the decision on Monday evening, following a closed-door meeting of the City Council's leadership that produced a "broad consensus," according to a council official. In a prepared statement, Johnson said the remarks were "dehumanizing to Palestinians and divisive, and have no place in New York City." "I do not believe that someone who engages in the type of rhetoric we heard from Council Member Yeger belongs on the Immigration Committee, which is supposed to welcome and support immigrants in our city," Johnson added. "What he said is totally inappropriate, and sends the wrong message about our values." Palestine does not exist. There, I said it again. Also, Congresswoman Omar is an antisemite. Said that too. Thanks for following me. https://t.co/apM565HoEV Kalman Yeger (@KalmanYeger) March 27, 2019 Yeger, a Democrat who represents South Brooklyn neighborhoods including Borough Park, Bensonhurst, and Midwood, posted the anti-Palestine comments on Wednesday, in response to a tweet from Zainab Iqbal, a reporter for BKLYNER. Noting Yeger's aggressive attacks on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Iqbal pointed out that Yeger has a history of making incendiary comments about Palestinians and Palestine. "Palestine does not exist," Yeger responded. "There, I said it again. Also, Congresswoman Omar is an antisemite. Said that too. Thanks for following me." The tweet was immediately denounced by several local officials, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, and prompted a small protest outside Yeger's Borough Park office the following day. That group was met by hundreds of Yeger's supporters, a group largely composed of members of the ultra-Orthodox community and led by controversial former Assemblyman Dov Hikind. The confrontation grew ugly, with one counterprotester overheard asking a Muslim child whether she has "any bombs on her." Iqbal, who was covering the protest, also said that a mob of counterprotesters surrounded her at one point and began peppering her with anti-Arabic accusations. "There was this fear in my stomach," she told Gothamist. It doesnt matter where hate or bigotry comes from, we must condemn it in all forms (but actually do so, not just say we will) if our condemnations are to mean anything at all. pic.twitter.com/zFqv29OKyr Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) March 29, 2019 While the latest statement from Yeger received near-universal condemnation in the council, at least a few members have come to the Brooklyn councilman's defense: Republican Councilman Erich Ulrich framed Yeger's right to serve on the immigration committee as a free speech issue, while newly-elected Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a former councilmember, said last week that he didn't believe Yeger was a bigot, and cautioned against "knee-jerk reactions." The decision to strip Yeger of his immigration post still has to go through Council's Committee on Rules, Privileges and Elections, and will then be voted on by the 51-member body. Earlier this year, the group voted to remove Councilman Ruben Diaz Sr. from his committee post for making homophobic statements (comments that, like Yeger, he had been making for years). Yeger, who has remained unapologetic about the comments, addressed the news on Monday by retweeting a Daily News editorial lambasting the "speech police." "Its unfortunate that political correctness takes precedence over objective fact," he wrote. "Of course, there are Palestinians. However, the fact remains there is no Palestinian state." A spokesperson for the councilmember did not respond to follow-up inquiries, including about his previous references to "so-called 'Palestinians.'" According to Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian activist and frequent target of Yegers, the fact that hes only facing consequences now for his long-held beliefs may be a sign of the citys evolving views on the issue. "He was irrelevant until he responded to a Brooklyn journalist which brought attention to his tweet," Sarsour told Gothamist. "Yeger has always held these views and now we are in a different political climate to be able to hold people like him accountable." Aside from the bigger accomplishments of congestion pricing, eliminating many instances of cash bail, and banning plastic bags, Governor Andrew Cuomo could claim other victories in the passage of his $175.5 billion budget. The limousine industry will get more regulation after last year's upstate crash that killed 20 people. New Yorkers will now get three paid hours off to vote on election day, and will be able to register to vote online. But Cuomo's budget proposal to allow localities to decide for themselves whether to legalize e-bikes and e-scooters did not make it through. The governor's office says they fought for the measure along with the rest of their agenda, but neither the State Assembly or the State Senate included it in their budget proposals, indicating that getting it passed will be difficult. "This proposal was not included in our Assembly proposal because it does not have a fiscal impact and could be considered outside the context of the budget," Kerri Biche, a spokesperson for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told Gothamist, adding that the Assembly has "previously supported e-bike bills." A spokesperson for Senate Democratic Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins did not respond to our request for comment. A package of City Council legislation that would legalize e-bikes and e-scooters would have gotten a boost from Cuomo's proposal. The bills seek to end what is seen by many as a double-standard on New York City's streets: while Citi Bike is allowed to deploy 4,000 pedal-assist e-bikes, delivery cyclists who rely on the throttle-powered e-bikes for their livelihoods are fined and have their bikes confiscated. Bird and other scooter companies want the legislation to pass so they can flood neighborhoods with the kind of electric-powered scooters that have become popular in Portland, San Francisco, and Mexico City. Its a beautiful day for an electric bike ride! Where will you explore today? pic.twitter.com/RF1KGaf1gB Citi Bike (@CitiBikeNYC) March 9, 2019 Brooklyn Council Member Rafael Espinal, who is one of the co-sponsors of the legislation, said he was "disappointed" that Cuomo's proposal was left out of the budget. "We have been pushing the issue for seven years, and will continue fighting to legalize e-bikes and e-scooters in New York," Espinal said, adding that he is "ready to move forward with [the legislation] once we get clarity from Albany on what they intend to do." Mayor de Blasio's administration and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson have both expressed some support of the council's legislation, but believe that Albany has to act first, while the bills' sponsors believe that the council can act to legalize e-bikes and e-scooters alone. Of course, electric bike/scooter home-rule isn't the only issue on the legislature's plate before the session officially ends on June 19: marijuana legalization and rent reforms also have to be hashed out, or not. The cry for the pied-a-terre tax was triggered by what many New Yorkers viewed as an obscene $238 million purchase of a penthouse by billionaire hedge fund owner Ken Griffin, who plans to use the home part-time. But rather than tax ultra-wealthy property buyers who do not pay local income tax, state legislators over the weekend agreed instead to pass a tax plan that will spread the costs across a much broader range of buyers. The new planwhich will apply a mansion tax surcharge for purchases over $2 million and levy a higher transfer tax on homes selling over $3 millionwould have affected about 25.5 percent of the Manhattan housing sales market based on 2018 data, according to Jonathan Miller, a real estate appraiser. Its a larger footprint, he said, adding that the new tax is less draconian for the top end of the market. Moses Gates, a vice president of housing and neighborhood planning for the Regional Plan Association, said that what the state wound up approving "definitely affects a much broader range of buildings and developers than the pied-a-terre tax would have. In other words, what was being billed as a victory for the citys real estate industry now seems like merely (another) win for the .01 percent. State Senator Brad Hoylman, who has sponsored a bill proposing a pied-a-terre tax every year since 2014, said the effort by the real estate industry to defeat the measure was based on a belief that it would hurt new development. He said while the new plan will tax those who have a greater ability to absorb additional real estate feels, the issue remains of "individuals who buy luxury second and third homes who aren't residents and still arent paying their fair share." He added that while the legislature didn't pass a pied-a-terre tax this time around, "I consider it a win because we do have a new set of taxes on luxury real estate that will fund basic infrastructure and save our mass transit system from crumbling out beneath us." On Monday, many brokers expressed relief at the pied-a-terre bill's failure, arguing that wealthy buyers were more willing to swallow a one-time fee as opposed to an ongoing pied-a-terre tax. But some homed in on the how the new plan reallocates the tax burden. Whats pretty unbelievable is the only message that has been broadcast from Albany is that people who buy $25 million and more will be paying, Leonard Steinberg, a broker at Compass, told The Real Deal on Monday. Theres been very little mention that everyone between $2 million and $25 million will be paying more taxes, as well. In the same story, Sheila Trichter, a broker with Warburg Realty, said, These buyers, in most cases, are financing their purchase and are on pretty tight budgets. It seems that these tax increases are once again hurting the middle class and helping the 1 percent. Under the pied-a-terre tax plan, only a single digit percentage of buyers in the market would have been affected, according to Miller. That plan proposed levying an annual fee on wealthy part-time owners a graduated tax, starting at a 0.5 percent of the value of residences over $5 million and reaching as high as a 4 percent marginal rate for homes over $25 million. Griffin, for example, would have had to pay just under $9 million a year in added taxes on his unit at 220 Central Park South. I'll say this again: The real estate lobbyists who say that the rich won't buy apartments with a pied-a-terre tax deserve an Oscar for their acting. For a property with a market value of $6 million, the annual tax would be an additional $5,000. Senator Brad Hoylman (@bradhoylman) March 26, 2019 An analysis by the Wall Street Journal found that the pied-a-terre tax would have had the biggest impact on part-time homes worth $25 million and uproughly 280 homes. This top slice of the market would have generated half of all the revenues from the pied-a-terre tax plan, which the WSJ projected would have been $471 million. On Tuesday, during an interview on The Brian Lehrer Show, Governor Andrew Cuomo denied that the new tax plan moved the burden away from owners at the super high end of the market. It certainly includes the properties of $5 million and then some, Cuomo said. It doesnt exclude, it includes more units. Ironically, however, because the mansion tax and transfer tax surcharges, which go into effect in July, will only apply to new sales, they will not include Griffin's $238 million unit, the very purchase that stoked the outrage that drove the pied-a-terre tax to the brink of approval. Hoylman, for one, is not giving up, saying he plans to reintroduce his tax bill again as early as this legislative session. From the beginning, he has focused his ire on foreign oligarchs who use New York real estate as a safe haven for their money. He said he plans to do research so as to refute the arguments used by real estate lobbyists to kill the bill, ranging from the difficulty of determining part-time and primary owners to the very legality of the measure. "We didnt win the pied-a-terre this round, but its not over," Hoylman said. "The reasons that the global superrich want to come here is the exact reason we need to impose these taxes." A painting stolen by Nazis during World War II is being returned to its rightful owners, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced today. The Dutch artist Salomon Koninck painted the artwork, A Scholar Sharpening His Quill, in 1639and until it landed at Christie's auction house two years ago by way of Chile, the painting had been lost for 76 years. During World War II, the Nazis' horrifying path of destruction included the confiscation, burning, and looting of countless pieces of art throughout Europe. They had a division known as Einsatzstab Reichleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, that seized significant cultural works owned by Jewish citizens. The ERR took a particular interest in the Schloss Collection, a notable private collection of Dutch and Flemish art helmed by the descendants of Adolphe Schloss, a Jewish art collector who died before the war. Knowing that the Nazis would be searching for the collection, Schloss's heirs moved it from Paris to a township further south, Chateau de Chambon, for safekeeping. But Adolf Hitler knew about the trove of art pieces, and wanted it for his museum in Linz. When the Nazis invaded France, they strong-armed informants and local officials into tracking them down, and eventually did. Nazis posing as policemen looted the collection, according to a history that the family compiled. The Scholar painting was among the 262 pieces of art they took from the collection. Eventually, the painting ended up at Hitler's Fuhrerbau building in Munich, but was one of the many artworks looted from there, too, during the brief period between the Third Reich's fall and the Allied Troop's imminent arrival. Many of those works' whereabouts have been lost to time. Then, in November 2017, a Chilean art dealer tried to sell the Scholar painting through Christie's. A Christie's spokesperson, who confirmed the news to Gothamist on Tuesday, says that the auction house discovered the painting's origins when it had been taken in on consignment and shipped to New York. Christie's Old Master Paintings and Restitution teams investigated and determined it was a match to the one described as missing from the Schloss family collection. Christie's then stopped the pre-sale process and told both the consignor and Schloss's family, but the art dealer "demanded" that the painting be returned to Chile. At that point, the auction house turned over the case to the FBI's Art Crime Team. The art dealer later said she had inherited the painting from her father, who had bought it in the 1950s from Walter Andreas Hofer, the art dealer who had a huge hand in helping the Nazis confiscate Jewish artistic and cultural works during the war, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office. "The campaign of cultural plunder that the Nazis directed against millions of innocent Jews was sadistic and unjust," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement. "That is why restitution in this case is more than returning a material good, but restoring a physical part of lost heritage. After nearly 80 years of being lost, this painting has been found and we are returning it to the Schloss family." A second ringleader of Nxivm, the alleged upstate cult and sex trafficking ring, pleaded guilty in a Brooklyn federal court last week, and newly unsealed court papers add another dark dimension to the ongoing revelations about the cult. As part of her guilty plea, Lauren Salzman, daughter to Nxivm co-founder Nancy Salzman, reportedly admitted to holding a woman against her will for years, under threat of deportation. "I knowingly and intentionally harbored Jane Doe 4, a woman whose identity is known to me, in a room in the home in the Northern District of New York" from March 2010 to April 2012, Salzman told judge Nicholas Garaufis, according to court papers obtained by the NY Post. She reportedly added that she warned her captive that non-compliance with the group's labor demands would mean a return to Mexico. She also admitted to being a member of Nxivm's secret society, DOS, the subset of the purported "self-help" group that branded women and inducted them into sexual servitude. The court closed Salzman's hearing to the public and immediately sealed the transcript immediately until it could be redacted. According to the Times Union, the secrecy surrounding Salzman's plea may indicate that she will cooperate with the larger case against alleged cult leader Keith Raniere. Salzman pleaded guilty to charges of racketeering conspiracy, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Her mother, Nancy, pleaded guilty to racketeering in mid-March, at the same time prosecutors charged Raniere with child pornography for his alleged relationships with minors. That's on top of the forced labor conspiracy, sex trafficking, and sex trafficking conspiracy charges. So far, Raniere maintains his innocencehis lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, has gone to great lengths to paint Nxivm as a "wonderful humanitarian organization"but his right-hand, Smallville's Allison Mack, has reportedly been engaged in plea negotiations as well. The same (allegedly) goes for Nxivm accountant Kathy Russell. Of the ringleaders implicated in the federal government's case, then, just Raniere and Clare Bronfmanthe Seagrams heiress accused not only of bankrolling the group, but also of money laundering and committing identity theft on its behalfplan to fight the charges against them. In a dramatic twist last week, Bronfman fainted in court after Judge Garaufis brought up the possibility that she'd quietly tried to retain embattled lawyer Michael Avenatti, who faces his own legal battle for allegedly trying to extort Nike. Anyway, it's possible that, should Mack and Russell also accept pleas, they'll all show up as witnesses for the prosecution when Bronfman and Raniere stand trial. Subject Quick Links Click on any of the badges below to see posts from that subject area. This is just a quick way to search for all posts with these labels using one click. #BuenasNoticias En el hogar de Jhon Martinez, en el distrito de Mi Peru, Callao, damos inicio a la distribucion de gas natural. El presidente @MartinVizcarraC participa junto a Jhon de esta buena noticia para los vecinos de Ventanilla. pic.twitter.com/IKKF5AU0l0 The new $175 billion state budget, in true Albany fashion, manages to both thrill and deeply frustrate. Approved just before the April 1st start of the fiscal year, its the first one Governor Andrew Cuomo ever had to negotiate with a fully Democratic legislaturea fact that boggles the mind, until you consider the warped gravity of a state capital Cuomo has bent to his will for so long. For the resurgent progressives, there are clear victories. Cash bail has been eliminated for misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes, and prosecutors will be forced to reveal exculpatory evidence to the defense far earlier in the discovery process, rectifying one of the most disturbing flaws of New Yorks criminal justice system. Speedy trial reform became a reality. Two years after Assembly Democrats stopped New York City from charging a fee for plastic bag use, the bags will be banned altogether, statewide, next year. New York will also become the first U.S. city with a form of congestion pricing. None of this would have happened if Republicans still controlled the State Senate, as they did for most of recent history. Congestion pricing appears to have coalesced on Cuomos terms: The executive branch and suburban lawmakers will have dominion not just over the subway system but the citys streets, too. A traffic mobility review board will decide the exact cost of the tolls, where they will be placed, the technology deployed, and which residents receive carveouts. The mayor of New York will appoint one member of the board, and representatives from suburban districts will get to pick two. This cannot be understood merely as another Cuomo-driven attack on New York City and its leftist legislators, like the governors quiet power grab to be allowed to remove members of the Public Authorities Control Board. It is also an indictment of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who long opposed congestion pricing on the dubious belief that car owners should be a protected class. De Blasio never took an interest in the particulars of congestion pricing once he became a late convert to the cause, failing to win more mayoral appointees to the new mobility review board. His failure today will punish his successors. What the budget process revealed, for all those progressive insurgents who hoped to radically transform Albany overnight, was how change, at least initially, wont be so seismic. Major decisions were still made in the dead of night with scant oversight. An MTA chair was confirmed, somehow, with hardly any public notice as the budget was passed. Legislative leaders capitulated to Cuomos obsession with an on-time budget, sacrificing transparency and several laudable policy goals, including the legalization of marijuana and a system of public financing for state elections. (By not including legalization of marijuana in the budget, passage during the remainder of the legislative session will become much more difficult.) Marijuana plants grow in Massachusetts, which recently legalized cannabis (Steven Senne/AP/Shutterstock) Progressives have called for a 6-to-1 matching funds system modeled on New York Citys; instead, a final decision on public financing will be a punted to a commission that could end up stacked with plenty of political figures appointed by public financing skeptics. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie did not advocate for a matching funds system. His college roommate, now one of the states most powerful lobbyists, complained taxpayer dollars would be used to fund clowns that have no chance of winning. Proponents of public financing of elections should understand what it is and what it isntits the isnt that foreshadows the titanic fight ahead. By strictly limiting the size of donations and matching smaller ones, a campaign finance system like New York Citys incentivizes candidates to chase small donors. They are rewarded for begging for $10. This is the systems greatest achievement and why, for all its flaws, it remains a national model. Many of the well-meaning activist groups also believe such a system would diminish the influence of New Yorks most powerful lobby, the real estate industry. We are in an unprecedented moment: An increasing number of mainstream New York Democrats are actively rejecting real estate money and speaking openly about the industrys pernicious influence on our politics. Both City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who will be a front-runner for mayor in two years, and State Senator Michael Gianaris, the number-two-ranked Democrat in the upper chamber, have publicly rejected real estate developer cash. First, we should appreciate how radical a break this is from the recent past. Even self-identified progressive politicians, as recently as a few years ago, were begging for donations from the Real Estate Board of New York, the industrys lobbying arm, and their wealthy members. In 2013, de Blasio ran for mayor as a proud leftist while courting major developers like Bruce Ratner and Jed Walentas. This was notable, in retrospect, less for de Blasios hypocrisy than for how few voters and activists really cared. Any serious candidate for mayor was supposed to grovel to these people. That was the New York we knew. Despite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs stunning victory last year over REBNY favorite Joe Crowley and the demolition, perhaps forever, of the Republican State Senate majority, the real estate industry is still a power to behold. After Cuomo and Senate Democrats expressed mild support for a tax on non-resident-owned properties valued at more than $5 million, real estate developers lobbied quickly to kill any hopes of such a tax. The so-called pied-a-terre tax died quickly. That aforementioned Heastie college roommate, Patrick Jenkins, was a lobbyist for one of the developers who helped block the tax, William Zeckendorf. The sobering truth is that it will take more than public financing of elections to alter this enduring dynamic. The real estate lobby can still bully the New York City Council when it needs to. De Blasios wholehearted belief in the citys campaign finance system has not, in any way, diminished the lobbys ability to influence him and members of his administration. Someone like Gianaris, who once gladly fundraised from REBNY, only changed his mind after watching Ocasio-Cortez throttle Crowley on his home turf. Johnson would not have been speaker without Crowleys help, and chased real estate dollars to fuel his bid. He too recognized the progressive insurgency and adjusted accordingly. This is why primaries continue to be important. Assembly Democrats who havent competed for votes in decades should prepare themselves for 2020. Matching funds wont go far enough. Lawmakers, in time, will have to be replaced or forced to radically rethink how they approach real estate and the city. Until very recently, Democratic elected officials in New York overwhelmingly embraced neoliberalism. The city was viewed, when healthy, as an investment vehicle for capital, real estate, and finance, the engines that must be stoked without end for prosperity to continue. Despite their rhetorical differences, there was clear continuity between Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who openly boasted that he wanted to make the city into a luxury product, and de Blasio, a liberal Democrat. Democrats in the City Council, state legislature, and executive branches of city and state government never questioned the consensus undergirding most serious decisions made in this city: Whats good for real estate is good for everyone else. Skyrocketing rents, tenant harassment, and displacement have taught most New Yorkers this is not the case. The relationship between real estate and government needs to be reimagined, if it's going to become a human right and no longer merely a money-making opportunity for a small cadre of developers. The negotiations that took place over the first state budget under full Democratic control in a decade demonstrated that this has not happened yet. The good news, for tenants and anyone without millions in capital to invest in luxury real estate, is that there will be a second act this year. Rent laws expire in June. Its no coincidence that the loudest voices calling for universal rent controlapplying rent regulations to all apartment buildingsare newly elected state senators like Julia Salazar and Zellnor Myrie. These new Democrats will have to fight to take the profit motive out of housingor convince veterans that not doing so will cost them their political careers. Real estate developers know the power of the threat. The left is learning it, too. " " Our expert says that a very simple sugar solution is the best thing to feed the hummingbirds that visit your backyard. BirdImages/Getty Images With the advent of springtime, hummingbirds are on the move and many bird watchers and backyard enthusiasts put out feeders to attract the playful and nectar-competitive avians, which has engendered a lot of discussion about what to feed hummingbirds. What's good for them, and what's to be avoided? Food is energy, and the hummingbird needs a lot of it to survive. Every year from late winter into spring the .12-ounce (0.003-kilogram) bird flies about 3,400 miles (5,470 kilometers) from its winter sites in Mexico to summer breeding spots as far north as Alaska. It doesnt need a smartphone to get there, either it relies on radar instinct that, as some watchful hummingbird fans have noted, guides the birds back to the same bird feeders year after year. It's a long and perilous journey but hummingbirds can fly like no other bird. They get their name from the "hummmmm" their fast wings make. First-time viewers, noting the sound and aerial maneuvers, often wonder if hummers are oversized flying insects. We spoke with Jason Ward with the Atlanta chapter of the Audubon Society, and he gave us the lowdown on what hummingbirds really need to satisfy their energy-guzzling metabolism, what we should feed them in our own backyards. Advertisement Q: What do you like most about hummingbirds? A: I love the fact that they're biological marvels. We're talking about a bird whose heart beats about 1,200 times per minute, flaps its wings about 100 times per second, and weighs less than a nickel! Not only that, but ruby-throated hummingbirds, the kind we all know and love in the eastern U.S., migrate 500 miles (805 kilometers) by flying over the Gulf of Mexico! It's something we still don't know much about, since these birds need to feed every 10 minutes or so due to their high metabolism. Q: What is the crux of the debate about how and what to feed hummingbirds? A: Hummingbirds have pretty good eyesight and are attracted to reddish-colored flowers. To increase the probability of hummingbirds visiting feeders, some people have decided to put red food coloring in their nectar solution. There are plenty of theories about the potential harm this red food dye can cause hummers from it thinning their egg shells out, to building up in their livers and kidneys. The truth is, those claims are unsubstantiated. We don't know for sure if red food dye harms hummingbirds. But until we're able to figure it out for sure, it's probably best not to use it at all. Q: What is in red dye (or any color dye) that could be harmful? A: We don't know. Most of the claims that colored dye is harmful are likely urban legend. Still, the use of the dye is unnecessary. Q: What's your advice on what to feed them? A: It's really simple. The solution should be one part sugar, four parts water. That is all. Advertisement Q: What about water? Should we set out something for them to drink? A: Hummingbirds will get most of the water they need to drink from nectar. But they'll use water features to bathe in. However, normal-sized bird baths aren't a good idea here; they're simply too deep for hummingbirds. Instead, misters, fountains or slow drippers are best, since they can provide shallow areas for hummingbirds to bathe in. Q: What do hummingbirds give us, or the environment? Why are they important? What's their place in the grand scheme? A: They're major pollinators! For wildflowers, shrubs and trees here in the U.S. They also assist in keeping insect populations in check by eating small, mosquito-sized insects and small spiders. Q: Aside from feeders, what flora attracts hummingbirds? A: In the U.S., the best flowers for hummers are going to be colorful, long and tubular. Here's a short list: Trumpet vine (aka, trumpet creeper) Trumpet honeysuckle Red cardinal flower Bee Balm Q: What preys on them? A: Many animals prey on hummingbirds. Large insects such as the robber fly and the invasive Chinese mantis have been known to catch hummers, snakes and bullfrogs. And most birds will dine on hummer. One of the biggest threats to hummers, in addition to most birds, are feral cats. Which is why responsible pet ownership involves keeping your cat indoors. Q: Where do they live? In nests? A: That depends on the species. Here in the eastern U.S., our ruby-throated hummingbirds build nests between 10 and 20 feet (3 and 6 meters) high in trees, on average. Nests are tiny and made out of grasses, plant fibers, dead leaves and spider webs. Advertisement Q: What's one thing people don't know about hummers? A: In order to sleep, hummers enter a state called "torpor." It's a hibernation-like state that allows them to conserve energy. They slow their heart rates down to 50 beats per minute, appear to stop breathing and will even hang upside down! Q: Got any cool hummingbird stories to share? A: I lead monthly bird walks in Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Last springtime, we were treated to some hummingbird courtship. When a male ruby-throated hummingbird sees a female he likes, he engages in this elaborate display, swinging back and forth in midair like a pendulum, while she watches from a nearby perch. It's really cool and fun to watch. It was easily the highlight of my bird walk that morning. Learn more about hummingbirds in "Hummingbirds of North America: The Photographic Guide" by Steve N.G. Howell. HowStuffWorks picks related titles based on books we think you'll like. Should you choose to buy one, we'll receive a portion of the sale. Now That's Interesting The world's smallest hummingbird and also the world's smallest bird is the Bee Hummingbird, native to Cuba and Isla de la Juventud. It weighs under 2 grams (0.070 ounces) less than a dime. YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. The ministry of emergency situations informs that on April 2, as of 08:20, some roads are closed and difficult to pass in Armenia. Vardenyats Pass is closed for trailer trucks and is difficult to pass. Sotk-Karvachar, Vanadzor-Dilijan highways are difficult to pass. Drivers are urged to use snow tires. Stepantsminda-Lars highway is open for all types of vehicles. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Ambassador to the Netherlands Tigran Balayan on April 1 met with President of the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary (ENCJ), vice-chairman of the Netherlands Council for the Judiciary, Kees Sterk, the Armenian foreign ministry told Armenpress. Ambassador Balayan introduced Kees Sterk on the ongoing actions in Armenia aimed at ensuring the independence of judiciary, as well as the principles and activity of the Supreme Judicial Council, highlighting the development of cooperation with the respective European structures. In his turn the ENCJ President introduced the Ambassador on the ENCJ activities and cooperation opportunities with the partner countries, mentioning the ways of establishing partnership with the Supreme Judicial Council of Armenia. During the meeting the officials also exchanged views on a number of issues. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Minister of economic development and investments Tigran Khachatryan received new US Ambassador to Armenia Lynne Tracy, the ministry told Armenpress. Minister Khachatryan congratulated the Ambassador on appointment and wished success in her diplomatic mission. In her turn the US Ambassador noted that she is delighted to discuss the opportunities to deepen the bilateral economic relations, as well as ensure more prosperous and brighter future for the people of Armenia. The Armenian minister introduced the guests on the governments economic priorities. In the current action plan we have made a key emphasis the quality of economic growth that should affect large number of people. Thus, we consider the economic inclusion the main measure through which the government must be accountable for the results of its policy, the minister said. The minister touched upon the issue of low productivity of enterprises and in this context discussed their technical equipment and upgrading issues. The sides also exchanged views on attracting new investments, developing foreign commercial ties and improving the business climate. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Minister of Education and Science Arayik Harutyunyan had a working meeting today with UNICEF Armenia Representative Tanja Radocaj, the ministry said in a news release. During the meeting Harutyunyan highly appreciated UNICEFs assistance in the transitioning period into a universal inclusive education and expressed hope that the support will continue. Transitioning to universal inclusive education is a priority objective for us because it will elevate the society to a new qualitative level, Harutyunyan said. Solidarity, love and tolerance, these are the values that for many years our society lacked. Countries which succeeded are those who have been able to pass down these values to the society. According to the minister, numerous problems emerge between various social groups during the transitioning period, and in this context he attached importance to UNICEFs support in training teachers and organizing meetings with parent communities. Expressing willingness to strengthen and develop cooperation, Radocaj in turn attached importance to the ministrys efforts in the direction of universal inclusive education. During the meeting the sides also discussed the development and introduction program of alternative pre-school models underway with support of UNICEF. Other programs, such as the expansion of the kindergarten network, were also discussed. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of Parliament Ararat Mirzoyan on April 2 received Ambassador of Syria to Armenia Mohammed Haj Ibrahim, the Parliament told Armenpress. Welcoming the guest, the Speaker of Parliament noted that the Armenian-Syrian relations, which have centuries-old historical and cultural traditions, have a great potential to further deepen. Mirzoyan highly valued the support and hospitality of the Syrian people towards Armenians who survived the Genocide, and stated that Armenia also couldnt stay indifferent to the ongoing events in Syria and for this purpose it provided a humanitarian aid to the Syrian people affected by war. From the perspective of deepening the bilateral ties, the Speaker of Parliament highlighted the role of inter-parliamentary cooperation and expressed confidence that the parliamentary friendship group will give new impetus to that. The Syrian Ambassador described the Armenian-Syrian relations not only friendly, but also brotherly. He expressed gratitude to the Armenian authorities for providing humanitarian aid, stating that this action is highly appreciated by the Syrian people. The Ambassador appreciated the role of the Armenian community in Syrias life, as well as in strengthening the bilateral ties. In this context he touched upon the program by which the restoration of Armenian churches in Syria has been included in the governments program. The meeting also touched upon regional and international issues. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Police Chief Valery Osipyan on April 2 received Head of the EU Delegation to Armenia, Ambassador Piotr Switalski, the Police told Armenpress. Welcoming the Ambassador, the Police Chief highly appreciated the close cooperation of Armenia and the European Union and introduced details from the ongoing reforms in the Police. The officials talked about the introduction of point-based system of road traffic and the new mobile patrol service to be created in Yerevan. Osipyan stated that respective works continue on these directions in order to have an effective and high-quality division. In his turn the EU Delegation chief welcomed the ongoing reforms in the Police and expressed his support for implementing them. The EU Ambassador said positive changes are noticed in the Police in the recent period, and that is the reason that the public trust towards the Police has greatly increased. The sides also discussed other issues of mutual interest. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of Parliament Ararat Mirzoyan held a meeting today with Ambassador of Argentina to Armenia Gonzalo Urriolabeitia, the parliaments press service said. The Speaker said that Armenia is interested in further deepening relations with Latin American countries, including with Argentina. According to Mirzoyan, despite the geographic distance good prerequisites for developing bilateral ties already exist. In this context, Speaker Mirzoyan attached importance to strengthening inter-parliamentary ties, and the role of the parliamentary friendship groups, mutual visits and international diplomacy. Mirzoyan welcomed the Argentine Parliaments decision to declare April 24th a Day of Tolerance and Respects between Nations in commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. Presenting the Armenian sides stance over the NK conflict settlement, the Speaker reiterated Armenias decisiveness for the exclusive peaceful settlement through negotiations in the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship format, the only structure vested with international mandate. Ambassador Gonzalo Urriolabeitia noted that Argentina supports the policy of solving conflicts peacefully. He attached great importance to parliamentary diplomacy, partnership between the parliaments and the need to supplement the existing friendship ties with new agenda. The sides attached importance to cooperation in international parliamentary arenas, as well as the expediency of partnership also in the economic sector, in addition to existing political and cultural ties. Both sides stressed the role of the Argentine-Armenian community in strengthening relations between Armenia and Argentina, as well as the role in the domestic life of Argentina. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Former President Serzh Sargsyan, together with senior members of his Republican Party (HHK), visited the Yerablur military cemetery today in Yerevan to pay tribute to the victims of the 2016 April War. Sargsyan laid flowers at the tombs of the fallen soldiers and the monument to those missing in action. The third President of Armenia refused to speak to reporters, however noting he will do so when the time comes. HHK Vice President Armen Ashotyan, HHK Vice President, former Minister of Defense Vigen Sargsyan, among others, were accompanying Sargsyan. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, 2 APRIL, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 2 April, USD exchange rate up by 0.05 drams to 486.47 drams. EUR exchange rate down by 1.55 drams to 544.99 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate down by 0.01 drams to 7.43 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 2.41 drams to 634.70 drams. The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals. Gold price down by 27.64 drams to 20230.82 drams. Silver price down by 0.45 drams to 235.7 drams. Platinum price up by 48.29 drams to 13341.24 drams. YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. 2nd President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan will soon answer all the questions of public interest, ARMENPRESS reports Vice President of the Republican Party of Armenia Armen Ashotyan told the reporters at Yerablur Pantheon. To the question when finally the 2nd President will talk to the public, Armen Ashotyan answered, 'Soon. A few weeks ago we did not say 'soon', but now we say. I understand that people wait for President Serzh Sargsyan to talk, his ideas are of great demand, but everything has its time', Ashotyan said, adding that Serzh Sargsyan remains in active politics, he is the President of the RPA and he also understands that people wait for him to say something. ''The questions are very different and he well understands the scope of the questions, starting from why he was mistaken and Nikol was right, ending with his opinion on Artsakh conflict settlement'', Ashotyan said. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Defense minister of Armenia Davit Tonoyan and Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces, Lieutenant-General Artak Davtyan visited the Yerablur Military Pantheon on April 2, the defense ministry told Armenpress. The officials paid tribute to the memory of heroes fallen at the 2016 April four-day military operations and Armenians who sacrificed their lives for the freedom and independence of the homeland. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan received a group of Diaspora-based Armenian investors, led by Armenian Employers Union President Gagik Makaryan, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Government of Armenia. Nikol Pashinyan highlighted the meetings held with investors as they allow the Government to discuss ways of improving the business environment and implementing investment projects. The Premier said contacts like this provide a good opportunity to take note of issues raised by business people. Gagik Makaryan noted that enthusiastic about the changes taking place in Armenia, new groups of investors will come to Armenia in the near future. They are all eager to implement investment projects in our country, which is consistently improving its business environment. Armenias positions are strengthening among foreign investors, which is a good opportunity to attract new investments. Then guests presented a number of investment projects in the fields of energy, construction and new technologies. On behalf of his Cabinet, Nikol Pashinyan welcomed the proposed initiatives, assuring of the Armenian governments readiness to possibly assist them in implementing investment programs. In particular, the Premier suggested familiarizing with the governments investment packages in the energy sector and taking part in tenders. The investors welcomed the governments policy and the steps aimed at improving the business environment. They expressed confidence that the governments policy will help attract foreign investors and mobilize the potential of Diaspora-based Armenian businessmen. YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. The Foreign Ministry of Armenia has issued a statement on the occasion of the 3rd anniversary of the Azerbaijani agression against Artsakh. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of MFA Armenia, the statement runs as follows, ''Three years ago on April 2, 2016 Azerbaijani armed forces resorted to large scale military offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan flagrantly violated the ceasefire and its commitment of non-use of force undertaken within Nagorno-Karabakh peace process under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs. The use of force was accompanied by atrocities perpetrated by Azerbaijani armed forces against both militaries and civilians in the most horrible manner. They replicated the massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by Azerbaijan against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh in the beginning of 1990s. This time the eminent threat of larger scale of atrocities against civilian population was prevented by the effective defense of the Nagorno-Karabakh army. The sacrifice of militaries and voluntaries became a part of continued heroic struggle of the people of Artsakh to live free and in dignity in their ancestral homeland. The April war demonstrated once again that the right of people of Artsakh to self- determination cannot be suppressed by the use of force. The status and security of Nagorno-Karabakh stand as indispensable issues of substance in any result oriented negotiations that should guarantee the peaceful life of the people of Artsakh. The non-use or threat of use of force, strict adherence to the ceasefire, introduction of the risk reduction and confidence building measures are essential for the creation of an environment conducive to peace. The stalemate created by the April aggression showed that there is no alternative to the peaceful and negotiated resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs''. YEREVAN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II asked Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia to mediate for the release of Karen Ghazaryan convicted to 20 years of imprisonment in Azerbaijan. ''We want to attract your attention also on this incident. Karen Ghazaryan, a citizen of Armenia from Berdavan community of Tavush Province, who still in unknown circumstances found himself in the territory of Azerbaijan and who has psychological problems was recently convicted to 20 years of imprisonment', ARMENPRESS reports, citing Ria Novosti, His Holiness Karenkin II said. He noted that the verdict was reached with obvious violations of human rights. ''Given our previous experience as religious leaders I ask Your Holiness to mediate with the religious and secular authorities of Azerbaijan for the return of the young man to his family in line with international commitments'', Catholicos Karekin II said. The spiritual leader of Armenia also thanked Patriarch Kirill for organizing trilateral meetings between the spiritual leaders aimed at fostering the settlement of Karabakh conflict. ''Karabakh conflict can be solved only through peaceful means for ensuring peace and stability in the region. It's first of all necessary to establish an appropriate atmosphere for the settlement of the conflict'', Karekin II said, emphasizing that the leadership and people of Armenia strive for peace, but this aspiration cannot be one-sided. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan In time, those of us who pointed out its failures were proved right. OLPC was a failure outside of a few special cases. I happened to be a major critic of the program, citing the need for teachers and school administrations to be involved with any educational effort that hoped to grow past pilot-itis. OLPC had massive media coverage, and for a while, it looked like it actually would revolutionize education. By handing out $100 laptops to children, and for the most part sidelining teachers, the organisers believed children would undertake learning on their own. That doesnt mean we should stop learning from OLPCs mistakes. The most recent entry in our continued education comes from Geoffrey Saxe and Kenton de Kirby, at the University of California, Berkeley in their paper Analysing the Evolution of a Digital Technology Intervention. It focuses on an OLPC deployment in Papua New Guinea. The three Oksapmin schools in the OLPC pilot program are managed by the Baptist Union, the national organisation representing the Baptist denomination in PNG. The schools are a half-day hike from each other in a remote, mountainous area with no roads that connect to other parts of the country. The OLPC laptops, solar panels and other material resources arrived in the Oksapmin area in late 2010 and were distributed to the schools several months later. The researchers arrived in the Oksapmin area four years later, in the summer of 2014, and their initial observations showed the limited impact of XO laptops at each school. The researchers identified five sequential threats to the development of One Laptop Per Child that occurred during the 2010-2014 period. They defined threat as a set of circumstances that an individual interprets as a risk to the continued use of OLPC technology in teaching and learning. Threat 1: Computers Alien to Most in the Community For most Oksapmin people, computers were alien prior to the OLPC program. The uninitiated user, whether a teacher or a student, faced a steep learning curve to use an XO to serve elementary functions, and had many, many questions: Fundamental ontological questions: what is this? is it a toy? a magical machine, a divine creation (or an evil one)? Hardware questions: how to open the computer (which is not straightforward), turn on the computer, or power the computer with solar panels and connecting wires. Software questions: understanding the idea of an application (or as these are named in Sugar, activities), the functionality of any one of the many activities, and how to navigate across activities. Pedagogy questions: what activities to privilege in relation to a curriculum, and how to use the software in productive ways, whether in whole class instruction or individual activities or in small group work. Support Questions: with so little technical knowledge in the community, whom can one turn to for support when something goes awry? Efforts to manage the threat occurred both outside and inside the Oksapmin world. Sometimes management efforts were planned and organised; other times they emerged on the spot in efforts to accommodate local challenges. School staff organised a one-week training session that covered a range of topics related to the operating of XOs and basic teacher training. Technicians installed servers and solar panels. Crucially, one school headmaster had an enthusiasm and deep interest in computational technologies and one community volunteer had a strong background in computational technologies and education. Had both not been in Oksapmin at the time of the deployment, the program would likely have met a different fate. Threat 2: Religious Zeal that Targeted Laptops Several months after the XOs arrived in 2010 and were distributed to the three schools, the XO laptops became a target of religious concerns by some, a zeal that energized church and community meetings. In the Oksapmin area, there is a strong and widespread Christian religiosity (introduced in the 1960s) that exists alongside and is fused with indigenous cosmology. This led to local conversations in which people expressed fears of the laptops fears linked to talk by pastors and others who broadcast concerns. As a result, some parents were choosing not to send their children to school, a decision that, if spread rapidly, could have jeopardized the continuation of the program Here the headmaster played a pivotal role. He engaged in a campaign to quell the concerns, speaking with pastors, parents, and students. His successful focal argument was: Computers were important for childrens futures; Computers were used in the world outside of Oksapmin Computers would help Oksapmin children to succeed. Threat 3: OLPCs empowerment vision in a cash poor community In 2011, a representative from the PNG government made a one-hour stop on a chartered small plane in Oksapmin to celebrate the distribution of XOs to the schools. During his visit, he made a recommendation that the laptops be owned by children, to be taken home so that they would always be available to them. This was a core tenet of the global OLPC program the laptop should be owned outright by the students. This created a problem in the Oksapmin world, where sharing is traditionally a central value to the community, so if children, least powerful members of the community owned the laptop, it might well become the property of extended families and sold for cash. The three school headmasters reacted in different ways to this threat. School Ownership: Tomianaps headmaster disregarded the representatives advice and retained the laptops at the school, though he did allow children to write their names on a computer and enter their name in the Sugar software, indicating that the laptop belonged to them. Student Ownership: The headmasters of Mitiganap and Tekin allowed students to take a laptop home, and over time, fewer and fewer computers returned with students. Some computers were used as currency in trade with outsiders. Adults and older peers appropriated others. Solar panels also disappeared into the community. As a result Tekin and Mitiganap had insufficient hardware to support major use of laptops in classrooms. Threat 4: Reassignment of Headmasters The OLPC program seemed to be on a successful trajectory at Tomianap, as that school had the most knowledgeable and motivated headmaster. Then, at the end of 2012, the headmaster at Tekin resigned, and Tomianaps headmaster was transferred to Tekin, resulting in: The headmaster most knowledgeable in the OLPC technology was transferred to a school with few laptops and solar panels. A new Tomianap headmaster who had comparatively little knowledge and motivation to actively support the OLPC program. The sad epilogue was that by the researchers visit in 2014, most of the laptops in Tomianap were left in storage at the school, unused, while the laptop-boosting headmaster was left to emphasise the educational value of the XOs by dedicating a room to displaying artwork that students had created using XO software in prior years. Threat 5: The Nationalisation of Development Funds The funding of the One Laptop Per Child program in Oksapmin came from the PNG Sustainable Development Program, which in late 2013 cut off funding due to a change in its organisation. The termination of outside support meant that there was no possibility for replenishment of computers, servers, and other aspects of the infrastructural supports, including software upgrades and additional teacher training. There were local efforts to sustain the laptop project, however, these efforts were limited in their impact on the continued access to OLPC technology. The project was functionally dormant by the time the researchers arrived in Oksapmin in 2014. 2019 Federal Budget: What it means for you. Source: AAP/Getty Images Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has pulled a $7.1 billion surplus out of the bag, promising in his words that Australia is back in the black. Its clear that this budget is one for the masses with sweeping tax cuts, massive infrastructure plans and pensioner sweeteners. Heres how Frydenbergs plans for spending will affect you: If you earn between $37,000 to $126,000 Taxpayers with an income between $48,000 and $90,000 around 4.5 million Australians will receive a tax relief payment of $1,080 after tax returns are filed. Another 5.5 million Australians with taxable incomes outside of that bracket will also receive tax relief. If youre earning between $37,001 and $47,999, your tax relief will scale from $255 to $1,080. If youre earning less than that, youll receive a maximum benefit of $255. And if youre earning $90,001 to $126,001, your tax relief will taper from $1,080 to $0. If youre an older Australian Youll get better quality and better access to aged care services thanks to $724.8 million that has been dedicated across five years from 2018-19. Thats 10,000 extra home care packages, another 13,500 residential care places and $320 million in subsidies for residential aged care. A new national hotline for Australias seniors, 1800ELDERHELP will also be established with $18 million. If youre 65 or 66 years old You can put more into your superannuation. If youre an Australian who is 65 or 66, youll be able to make voluntary superannuation contributions without needing to meet the work test. Youll also be able to make up to three years of non-concessional contributions. And if youre up age 74, youll be able to receive spouse contributions. What does that mean? Currently, Australians aged 65 to 74 can only make voluntary contributions if they work at least 40 hours in a 30 day period, and those aged 70 and over cant receive contributions from their spouse. These changes align the work test with the eligibility age for the Age Pension (67 from 1 July 2023). And lifting the age limit for spousal contributions will just help older Australians save more. Story continues If youre a welfare recipient Australian pensioners, carers, disability support pensioners, single parents, war widows and veterans will receive a one-off Energy Assistance Payment. If youre single, youll get $75; if youre in a couple youll get $125. This payment will land this financial year. Itll set the budget back $284.4 million over the two years from 2018-19. But that money will be recouped through changes to the way income is assessed for social security payments, with the Government planning to save $2.1 billion over five years with this measure. From 1 July 2020, Single Touch Payroll will be used to monitor recipients income, greatly reducing the likelihood of recipients receiving more than they are entitled to. If youre a motorist This is the big one. Frydenberg pledged to have cranes, hard hats and heavy machinery seen across the country with a $100 billion infrastructure plan designed to ease congestion and move traffic along. Of this, $4 billion will go into the Urban Congestion Fund aimed at cutting transport times. $500 million of this will go towards improving car parks near public transport hubs, in an effort to encourage more Australians to use public transport. Efforts to build safer roads around the country will receive a $2.2 billion push, targeted at safety issues in urban and regional areas. North Queensland will receive $730 million for its roads, while Western Australia will receive $1.6 billion for roads and rail. If you need the Cashless Debit Card Youll be able to access it if you live in the Northern Territory or Queensland. The Government is putting $129 million into extending the cashless welfare card to all of the Northern Territory and to Cape York communities. If youre an immigrant You might find it harder to settle in Australia. The Government plans to reduce the permanent migrant ceiling by 40,000 for four years in a row a cumulative loss of 120,000 places in the four years from 2019-20. That means the annual cap will fall from 190,000 to 160,000. The Government is also pumping $64.2 million into social cohesion measures designed to help migrants settle in Australia. Funding will be used to foster national community hubs, deliver local sport grants, community language programs and diversity and understanding initiatives. If you have cancer The Government had pledged $496 million to cancer research, services and facilities in Victoria. Sydney will also become home to the first childrens cancer centre in Australia. Diagnostic imaging for breast cancer will also be added to the Medicare Benefits Schedule, saving patients up to $1,500 per scan. If you have Leukaemia Treating it will now get cheaper. Besponsa, a medicine for people with acute Leukaemia will fall in price from $120,000 a course to $40 a script for general patients and $6.50 for concession card holders. If youre a woman considering a career in science Good news: the Government will put $3.4 million over four years towards improving gender equality in the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) fields. Money will be directed towards education and careers training. If youre a student Schools will see funding shoot up by 63 per cent, with an injection of $300 billion for public, independent and Catholic schools. This money will be used to improve libraries, play equipment and classrooms. If youre a bit too old for play equipment, the Government is committing $535 million to Australias vocational education and training (VET) sector. This will go towards creating 80,000 apprenticeships in areas like plumbing and carpentry and boosting awareness of VET careers through a National Careers Institute and Ambassador. A partnership program between schools, employers and the sector will also aim to funnel students into the sector. Employers will also receive a $4,000 incentive payment while apprentices will receive $2,000. If youre an Indigenous Australian Youve got $37.5 million coming your way to support housing for remote Indigenous Communities. The Government also pledged $5 million to tackle suicide rates in the young Indigenous community. Indigenous kids will also receive a $200 million Indigenous Youth Education Package, which will fund scholarships, mentoring and support programs. If youre a woman in a violent relationship $328 million in funding will go towards combatting violence against women and children. This entails $68.3 million for prevention strategies, another $78.4 million for safe spaces for victims, and $82.2 million to improve the services tasked with keeping women and children safe. National hotline 1800RESPECT will receive a boost of $64 million, and $35 million will be funnelled towards support and prevention strategies targeted at Indigenous Communities. If you own a firm in a regional area The $1 billion Roads of Strategic importance plan hopes to help you connect with local and international markets through improved freight corridors. If youre a farmer in North Queensland Its been a difficult year, but the government is planning to provide $232 million to help North Queenslanders affected by the floods. Those struggling to rebuild damaged infrastructure and replace livestock and crops will be able to apply for a grant from a $300 million pool, while an Emergency Response Fund of $3.9 billion will also be provided ongoing support. If youre a farmer affected by drought Youll be able to access a concessional loan from the Government. $6.3 billion will go towards this, while regional and rural mental health services will also receive $29 million in increased funding. Hopefully it wont happen again, but thats unlikely. In a bid to address this, the Coalition Government plans to invest $3.9 billion in a fund which will mitigate the effect of future droughts through water infrastructure and drought resilience practices. If youre a small business owner. Small businesses with a turnover of less than $50 million (or the engine-room of the economy, as Frydenberg put it) will see their tax rate cut to 25 per cent by 2021-22, after first declining to 27.5 per cent in 2019-20. And from tonight (2 April 2019), the instant asset write-off threshold will be increased from $25,000 to $30,000, while businesses with a turnover of up to $50 million will be able to access the benefit for the first time. But this policy will only apply until 30 June 2020. If youre interested in property No news is good news? Speaking to press, Frydenberg said lower dwelling investment was a major concern. And, he added, This is the worst possible time for a housing tax, alluding to Labors controversial plan to reduce negative gearing benefits. But if youre interested in property in the Northern Territory Its a different story. The Government is putting $550 million towards housing in the territory with the aim of tackling overcrowding. It comes after a federal freeze on funding, with the Coalition Government arguing Indigenous Australians should have had a formal say on how the money was spent. If youre a yellow crazy ant Your days are numbered, buddy. The Government is pledging $9.2 million towards controlling yellow crazy ants in Queensland. This was part of a 2016 election commitment. Make your money work with Yahoo Finances daily newsletter. Sign up here and stay on top of the latest money, news and tech news. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has handed down the 2019 Federal Budget heres who comes out on top, and who might take a hit from his first budget. WINNERS Low and middle-income taxpayers The government is offering additional tax relief to low and middle-income earners. Those earning up to $37,000 a year will receive tax relief of up to $255 a year; taxpayers who earn between $37,001 to $47,999 annually will get between $255 to $1,080 back; those earning $48,000 to $90,000 will receive the full tax relief of $1,080; and those earning upwards of $90,000 will see their tax relief gradually reduce from $1,080 to zero. In total, 10 million taxpayers will benefit from additional tax relief, with 4.5 million to receive the full amount when they lodge their taxes for the 2018-19 financial year. As of 2022-23, the 19 per cent tax bracket will include those earning between $41,000 and $45,000. Those earners previously were taxed at the 32.5 per cent tax rate. For those earning between $45,001 to $200,000, the tax rate will be lowered from 32.5 per cent to 30 per cent from 1 July 2024. The 2019-20 federal budget will give tax cuts to low and middle-income earners. Source: Getty Images Small businesses Small- and medium-sized companies turning over less than $50 million a year will have their tax rate lowered to 27.5 per cent in 2019-20, and further lowered to 25 per cent by 2021-22. Tax discount rates will also be raised to 8 per cent in 2019-20 and hitting 16 per cent by 2021-22. The instant asset write-off threshold has also been increased from $25,000 to $30,000, and access to this threshold will be expanded to medium-sized businesses with turnovers of less than $50 million. Jobseekers $525.3 million will be spent over five years to upgrade the vocational education and training (VET) sector. Itll deliver up to 80,000 new apprentices in areas of skill shortages, 10 national training hubs, a boost in literacy, numeracy, language and digital skills, and 400 training scholarships. Story continues Commuters $100 billion will be spent on infrastructure over the coming decade to ease congestion and connect towns and regions. Funding for the Urban Congestion Fund has quadrupled from $1 billion to $4 billion; $2 billion will be provided for a fast-rail between Melbourne and Geelong; and other fast-rail projects are underway in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Theres also an extra $2.2 billion for safer roads and $100 million for regional airports. Patients $81.8 billion will be spent on healthcare. Specific winners are breast, kidney, bladder, liver, and skin cancer patients, people with acute Leukaemia, those with complex and chronic heart conditions, those who need MRI machines, dental services, and more medicines subsidised by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). $737 million will be spent across seven years on mental health, with $461 dedicated to tackling youth mental health and suicide prevention. Older Australians $724.8 million has been dedicated across five years from 2018-19 to delivering better quality and better access to services. Itll mean 10,000 extra home care packages, 13,500 more residential care places will be made available from 2018-19, $60 million on residential care infrastructure and a $320 million general subsidy boost in 2018-19 for residential aged care. $18 million will be used to establish a new national hotline (1800 ELDERHelp). Domestic violence victims $82 million to improve frontline services for vulnerable women and children, $78.4 million to provide safe places for those impacted by domestic or family violence, $68.3 million on prevention strategies, $64 million for counselling service and national hotline 1800RESPECT, $35 million to support prevention strategies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The winners of the 2019-20 federal budget. Source: Getty/file Flood and drought-affected farmers $6.3 billion will go to providing farmers who need drought support and $3.3 billion will go to those affected by floods. A new Emergency Response Fund will be established to ensure additional resources are available for future national disaster recovery efforts. Students Funding for schools will increase from $19.9 billion in 2019 to $32.4 billion in 2029, a rise of 63 per cent. $30.2 million has also been provided to the Local School Community Fund, $432 million has been given to support access to preschool education for 2020, and $17.7 billion is being invested in the university sector. Another $93.7 million will be spent on scholarships for students to study at a regional campus of a university or educational provider. Indigenous Australians $37.5 million will go towards supporting housing for remote Indigenous Communities. $5 million has also been pledged to tackle suicide rates in the young Indigenous community. Indigenous kids will also receive a $200 million Indigenous Youth Education Package that will fund scholarships, mentoring and support programs. Welfare recipients Australian pensioners, carers, disability support pensioners, single parents, war widows and veterans will receive a one-off Energy Assistance Payment of $75 if youre single and $125 if youre in a couple. This payment will land this financial year and will set the budget back $284.4 million over the two years from 2018-19. LOSERS Multinational tax dodgers The ATOs Tax Avoidance Taskforce is getting $1 billion to ensure multinational companies, big businesses and rich individuals pay their fair share of tax. A further $42.1 million across four years will be provided to the ATO to recover any unpaid tax or super from big companies or wealthy individuals. Hopeful migrants The migrant intake will be reduced from 190,000 a year to 160,000 for four years, meaning that by 2022-23, a total of 120,000 people will not have been to call Australia home. Misbehaving banks and financial institutions $640 million will be spent to restore trust in the financial sector, with banking watchdogs ASIC and APRA to get $400 million and $150 million apiece to strengthen supervision and enforcement of the finance sector. Also, more than $35 million will be spent on a new criminal jurisdiction of the Federal Court. Gangs and drug suppliers $152 million across four years has been allocated to nip illicit drug suppliers in the bud. Among other things, this funding will revitalise the National Anti-Gangs Squad (NAGS) which also has the capacity to target non-traditional and emerging criminal gangs. Child sex offenders $7.8 million over four years will be used for the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) to set up a National Public Register of Child Sex Offenders that will have personal information and photographs of convicted offenders living in the community. Crazy yellow ants $9.2 million will go to controlling yellow crazy ants in Queenslands Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. Make your money work with Yahoo Finances daily newsletter. Sign up here and stay on top of the latest money, news and tech news. Cathay Pacific's purchase of rival HK Express was an inevitable plunge into the no-frills market as the premier marque belatedly faces the reality that it can no longer ignore the budget sector, analysts say. Asia's biggest international carrier has historically eschewed the low-cost sector, even as the region's rising middle class has fuelled an unprecedented boom in air travel and demand for cheaper routes. But last week it finally bit the bullet, announcing it was buying HK Express for $600 million from the debt-laden Chinese conglomerate HNA Group. The move allows Cathay to take over the city's only budget carrier and gifts it much needed slots at one of the world's busiest transport hubs -- prompting many to ask why it had taken the airline so long to make such a move. Analysts say Cathay's reluctance to embrace the budget model was a result of its conservative way of thinking, in much the same way Nintendo was dragged kicking and screaming into the mobile gaming market after years of weak earnings. But it is not too late for the airline, they say. "It's more like catching up rather than changing the landscape," Jackson Wong, analyst at Huarong International Securities, told AFP, adding that Cathay realised it had to "face reality" that the budget market was something they needed to embrace. Asia-Pacific is now the world's largest market for low-cost carriers, accounting for nearly 600 million seats in 2018, according to CAPA Centre for Aviation. - Too good an opportunity - And thanks to the region's booming middle classes, seat capacity has quadrupled over the past decade. During that time Cathay resisted moving into the low end of the market, even as their rivals did the opposite -- Singapore Airlines formed Tigerair in 2003 and Qantas followed up with Jetstar Asia. Now Asia's skies are littered with budget carriers: Air Asia, Scoot, Nok Air, IndiGo, Lion Air, VietJet, the list keeps growing. For a while Cathay's intransigence worked, it remained an avowedly premier -- and profitable -- brand. But as the regional budget scene grew, airlines in China and the Middle East began competing on longer haul flights and the more luxury frills Cathay offered. By March 2017 Cathay reported its first annual net loss in eight years and announced a three-year overhaul to cut costs and improve efficiency. Under new chief executive officer Rupert Hogg the move appears to have paid off -- last month the airline announced it had swung back into the black after two years of losses. Brendan Sobie, chief analyst at CAPA, said HK Express was too good an opportunity to pass up once it became clear the troubled HNA Group was looking to sell. "It's in their home market, they have to look at it, and quite frankly they'd be silly not to do it," he told AFP. According to Sobie, structural constraints and limited airport slots made it difficult for Cathay to establish a separate low-cost carrier, which was why it had previously said it would not think about a no-frills carrier until Hong Kong airport's third runway came into operation in 2024. - Losses 'woke them up' - He said the lack of space at home was also a limitation for competitors, making the move int the sector less urgent for Cathay, which had opposed budget airline Jetstar's application to operate in Hong Kong in 2015. But the purchase was not a financial "slam dunk" for Cathay, Sobie warned, given the small margins of budget airlines in the region and the fact that HK Express reported a net loss of $18 million in 2018, according to Cathay. Shukor Yusof, the founder of aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said Cathay's brief foray into the red changed thinking at the company. "The losses Cathay suffered in consecutive years woke them up and they realised if they didn?t alter their thinking, they?d be marginalised and become irrelevant,? he said. "Then they saw how Singapore Airlines changed its strategy and that strategy worked,? he said, adding that Cathay should have moved into the budget sector 10 years ago. He said turning HK Express around was a "big ask". "But if they apply stringent cost cuts and exploit the buoyant Chinese market, profitability is a possibility in two to three years," he said. He predicted HK Express may start to price aggressively and target a select group of travellers, with mostly leisure flyers among them. "I foresee HK Express behaving and exhibiting characteristics similar to Ryanair in Europe," he said, referring to the notoriously no-frills Irish low-cost carrier. New CEO Rupert Hogg has overseen a return to profit for Cathay Pacific after two years of losses and now it is now entering the budget sector WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: At least three dead cows have washed up on or near beaches in the past week. The bovines have been found on beaches in Spains Canary Islands tourist region with the latest find found near El Medano on the island of Tenerife, The Independent reports. The find was uploaded to YouTube by Ardiel Rodriguez. It shows two men pulling the corpse of a cow to the shore. A dead cow washed up on El Medano on the island of Tenerife. Source: YouTube/ Ardiel Rodriguez The cows body was later taken by council workers to a landfill. Another dead cow was found washed up near Granadilla de Abona, and a third at sea by fishermen. Its believed the dead cows could have been thrown overboard from vessels transporting cattle from South America. The Canary Islands department of agriculture with all certainty believes the cows came from a ship transporting cattle from America, radio station Caden SER reported. The Polaris 2, also known as the stink boat, is suspected of being one of these vessels. Its believed the cow was dead and thrown from a ship. Source: YouTube/ Ardiel Rodriguez The ship left Rio Grande, Argentina, on March 22 and was scheduled to arrive at the Port of Ceuta, Morocco. It has passed the Canary Islands. However, general director of Livestock David de Vera told the radio station international protocol prohibits dead animals from being thrown overboard they need to be incinerated or disposed of once reaching port. 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. French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday warned that the European Union could not "be held hostage" to the Brexit crisis and said that a lengthy extension of the deadline for Britain to leave the bloc was "not a certainty". Speaking during a visit to Paris by Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, the French leader said: "Our priority must be the proper functioning of the European Union and the single market. "The EU cannot be held hostage on a long-term basis to the resolution of a political crisis in the United Kingdom," he said. He added that France was "open" to a lengthy extension of the Brexit deadline on certain conditions but that it was "neither a certainty nor automatic. I am repeating it here very strongly." The comments underline growing frustration in Paris about the Brexit process, which has diverted attention away from pro-European Macron's plans for reinforcing the bloc. Following the rejection of British Prime Minister Theresa May's proposed Brexit deal three times, and inconclusive votes on alternative ideas in the House of Commons, Macron said the country was on course to crash out of the EU. "If the United Kingdom is unable three years after the referendum to propose a solution that commands a majority, it will have chosen de facto for itself to leave without a deal and we are unable to prevent this failure," he said. Repeating what was expressed by European leaders at a meeting in Brussels on March 22, Macron said "it is up to the United Kingdom to present a credible alternative plan, backed by a majority, between now and April 10." - 'No deal' divisions - The meeting between Macron and Varadkar was billed as an opportunity for them to exchange views on Brexit, and the French leader said: "We will never abandon Ireland and the Irish, whatever happens, because that solidarity is the very meaning of the European project." But differences are emerging between the two sides as the possibility of a "no deal" Brexit looms, which would lead to the creation of a border between the UK territory of Northern Ireland and Ireland. "We need to talk about what we will do in the event of 'no deal', which will be particularly difficult for Ireland," Varadkar admitted. In the event of a "no deal" Brexit, the Irish border would become the only land frontier between non-EU Britain and the rest of the bloc and would therefore in theory need to have customs controls. But Ireland has been steadfast in refusing any reintroduction of a physical border, which was removed as part of a peace agreement reached in 1998 to end decades of conflict on the island. Refusing border controls however could lead to the introduction of checks between Irish exports and the rest of the European Union, experts and officials have warned. A spokeswoman from the French government said on Monday that France wanted to avoid "Brexit causing Ireland to be detached from the European Union." The EU's Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said Tuesday the EU was working with Ireland "on a unilateral basis in the event of a no-deal deal, to know where we can do these checks" but refused to elaborate further. "We are working very closely with Irish authorities to try and perform controls away from the border if at all possible," an EU official, who did not wish to be named, said last week. Macron said "we will never abandon Ireland or the Irish people, whatever happens" A former chairman of the government of China's troubled northwest region of Xinjiang, an ethnic Uighur, has been arrested for graft, national prosecutors said Tuesday. Nur Bekri was the regional government's chairman for seven years until 2014 -- a period that was marked by a spate of deadly violence in the region, including riots. Bekri later served as head of the National Energy Agency and deputy director of the country's top economic planning office. His arrest was announced in a short statement by the Supreme People's Procurate (SPP). It is among the most high-profile cases in President Xi Jinping's sweeping campaign against corruption in the Communist Party, which has ensnared 1.5 million officials. In Xinjiang, authorities have stepped up a security clampdown in the name of combatting terrorism and separatism, detaining as many as one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in internment camps, according to estimates cited by a UN panel. Bekri had last month been been expelled from the Communist Party for "serious violations". He had resisted investigators and was untruthful, the country's graft watchdog said in a March statement. The Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection (CCDI) said Bekri had used his position to benefit himself and his family, buying luxury cars and doling out favours to others. "(He) lived extravagantly ... was morally corrupt, and abused his power for sexual favours," the CCDI said. As deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, Bekri was one of the most powerful ethnic minority members of China's central government. He was a member of the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party until 2017. In a separate statement, the SPP said three other senior officials have been prosecuted for graft. The former deputy head of the food and drug administration, Wu Zhen; former vice chairman of Beijing, Li Shixiang; and former vice chairman of Henan province, Jin Suidong, had all abused their positions for their own benefit, prosecutors said. This comes shortly after former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei was expelled from the Communist Party and his official positions, and the public security ministry announcing that it would "completely and thoroughly eliminate the poisonous influence of Meng Hongwei". The men are part of a growing group of Communist Party cadres caught in Xi's anti-graft campaign, which critics say has served as a way to remove the leader's political enemies. Nur Bekri, former chairman of the government of China's troubled northwest region of Xinjiang, has been arrested for graft Greece's prime minister was greeted with hugs and selfies on Tuesday during his landmark visit to newly renamed North Macedonia, where the neighbours celebrated a new start after resolving their decades-long identity row. The one-day trip came a little more than a month after Alexis Tsipras and counterpart Zoran Zaev finalised a deal that added "North" to Macedonia's name to distinguish it from a bordering province in Greece. "We are starting to cover lost ground to build a deep friendship, not only between our governments, but especially between our people," Tsipras said. It was the first official visit by a Greek prime minister since the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia declared independence in 1991, kicking off the name dispute that roiled diplomatic ties amid dogged wrestling over the name Macedonia and its cultural heritage. In the end, Skopje agreed to the change in exchange for assurance that Athens would stop thwarting its efforts to join NATO and the European Union. "Today our Republic for the first time in its history is a hosting an official visit of a Greek Prime Minister," Zaev noted during a joint press conference, after he welcomed Tsipras with a warm embrace outside the government building and raised his mobile phone for a picture. - Business time - With the name issue behind them, the two countries are now exploring the potential of stronger economic ties, with both leaders to attend a business forum later in the day. Tsipras, who brought ten ministers and dozens of business leaders with him, said he believed critics of the deal would be swayed once new financial, infrastructure and tourism links kick in. "Gradually everyone will start to understand, both the Greek people and the citizens of North Macedonia, the damage that has been done over the past years when we were unable to sit together and try to solve our disputes," he said. After the initial name accord was inked in June 2018, congratulations poured in from around the globe for the two young premiers, who fought risky domestic political battles to push the deal through, enraging nationalists on both sides of the border. Even before the deal was finalised, they were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by 2015 winner Wided Bouchamaoui of Tunisia. But there is still opposition to the deal among nationalist groups in both countries. In Greece, some are angry that the deal allows its northern neighbour to continue referring to its people and language as Macedonian. Disgruntlement is also palpable in Skopje among those who feel the name-change is an embarrassing concession and that the end-goal -- entry into the EU -- may never materialise. North Macedonia is in the process of joining NATO and hoping the EU will open accession talks in June. Yet the timeline for the latter could slide, with appetite for enlargement shrinking considerably among several members of the bloc, particularly France. Meanwhile, in his own protest, the Balkan state's President Gjorge Ivanov has been refusing to sign bills from parliament ever since North Macedonia became the official name. The two-term president is to be replaced following elections later this month. burs-ssm/wai The visit comes after Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (R) and his Skopje counterpart Zoran Zaev finalised the historic deal that added "North" to Macedonia's name In Northern Macedonia, as here in Greece, opposition to the name agreement still exists The head of NASA on Monday branded India's destruction of one of its satellites a "terrible thing" that had created 400 pieces of orbital debris and led to new dangers for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Jim Bridenstine was addressing employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration five days after India shot down a low-orbiting satellite in a missile test to prove it was among the world's advanced space powers. Not all of the pieces were big enough to track, Bridenstine explained. "What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track -- we're talking about 10 centimeters (six inches) or bigger -- about 60 pieces have been tracked." The Indian satellite was destroyed at a relatively low altitude of 180 miles (300 kilometers), well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit. But 24 of the pieces "are going above the apogee of the International Space Station," said Bridenstine. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station," he continued, adding: "That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight." "It's unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is." The US military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk for the ISS and for satellites. They are currently tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters. That includes about 10,000 pieces of space debris, of which nearly 3,000 were created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007 at 530 miles from the surface. As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44 percent over 10 days, Bridenstine said. But the risk will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere. A man watches Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address to the nation on a local news channel declaring his country is a space power after destroying a low-orbiting satellite Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will skip a meeting of Group of Seven ministers this week in France, the State Department said Tuesday, amid persistent tensions between Europe and President Donald Trump. Officials did not explain Pompeo's absence. But the move comes amid a long list of disagreements, including the US rejection of international agreements on ending Iran's nuclear program and fighting climate change. The State Department said that Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan would represent the United States and be joined by David Hale, the top-ranking US career diplomat, at the talks Friday and Saturday in Dinard on the coast of Brittany. Sullivan "will engage in discussions on a broad range of issues, including the deteriorating situation in Venezuela, destabilizing Iranian behavior in the Middle East, the responsible conduct of states in cyber space and the final denuclearization of North Korea," a State Department statement said. Asked to explain Pompeo's absence, State Department spokesman Robert Palladino gave no specific reason but said: "Trans-Atlantic alliances are stronger than ever." Pompeo has "full faith" in Sullivan "and his ability to advance America's national security interests," Palladino said. Pompeo will already be seeing several of his G7 counterparts Wednesday and Thursday in Washington at a 70th anniversary gathering of the NATO alliance, but he has no announced conflicting engagements later in the week. The Group of Seven is the longstanding club of major industrialized democracies, with their summits often steering the global agenda. Besides the United States and France, the group includes Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan. French President Emmanuel Macron is hoping to push an ambitious agenda at the G7 summit in August in the resort of Biarritz, for which the foreign ministers meeting is meant to prepare. The French hosts are no doubt mindful of lessons from the last G7 in Canada, where Trump refused to sign the final communique and openly criticized his host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, over trade policies. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will skip a meeting of Group of Seven foreign ministers in France The International Red Cross wants hundreds of children of foreign fighters from the Islamic State group in Syria to be allowed to return to their countries of origin and possibly be reunited with family there, the ICRC president said Tuesday. The children are living without their parents at the Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria that holds between 80,000 and 100,000 people displaced in the assault by US-backed forces against the last IS holdout. About 10,000 foreign women and children with ties to IS foreign fighters are held in a separate area of the camp, with children under 12 accounting for two-thirds of this group. "Our priority is to proactively look to bring kids back to their country of origin where there are hopefully still family if there are unaccompanied," Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), told reporters. Foreigners at Al-Hol camp are from some 30 to 40 countries. Once the identity of the children is established, the Red Cross will notify governments and see if there is family in those countries "to which we can send the kids back", Maurer told reporters. He did not have a specific figure for the number of children without their parents at Al-Hol camp, but estimated that there were "certainly hundreds, maybe more." With the collapse of the last IS bastion in Syria last month, several governments have been grappling with the problem of what to do with captured jihadist fighters from their country, the women who married them and their children. The ICRC president complained that governments were showing little interest in tackling the problem of foreign nationals linked to IS, limiting their response to offering emergency assistance. "That's not really the big issue," said Maurer. "The big issue will be: how do we find a system which deals with the different categories of people, which tries to identify who is a victim, to look at individual cases," he said. France last month took in five orphans, but it has a case-by-case approach to the return of the children. Children buy ice cream from a shop in a market at Al-Hol camp for displaced people in northeastern Syria The coroner has revealed what killed a university student who died after getting into the wrong car while waiting for an Uber ride. Samantha Josephson, 21, went missing on March 29 after getting in a car about 2am (local time) following a night out with friends at the Bird Dog bar in Columbia, in the US state of South Carolina. Her body was found the following afternoon. Clarendon County Coroner Bucky Mock said in a statement she suffered multiple injuries from a sharp object, but what that object was had not been revealed. Samantha Josephson was caught on CCTV footage (left) the night she went missing. Source: Columbia Police Department and WSFA Nathaniel David Rowland, 24, has been charged with kidnapping and murder. An arrest warrant said Ms Josephson suffered numerous wounds to her head, neck, face, upper body, leg and foot. She had absolutely no chance The 21-year-olds father, Seymour, said he thought his daughter would still be alive if she had not tried to catch a ride alone early on Friday following a night out. He said he would dedicate his life to increasing safety with ride-sharing services and wanted to discuss making Ubers and other ride shares more recognisable. Speaking at a candlelit vigil in Columbia on Sunday night, Mr Josephson said his daughter had absolutely no chance. Ms Josephsons father has pleaded for young people to travel in groups. Source: GoFundMe/ Samantha Lee Josephson Memorial Fund Samantha was by herself, he said. The door was locked, the child safety locks were on. She had absolutely no chance. Mr Josephson told his daughters friends they could help by always taking rides or walking around town in groups of two or more because there was safety in numbers. If there is somebody else in that car, there is actually a chance, Mr Josephson said. Samantha valued human life Ms Josephsons blood and phone were found in Rowlands car when he was arrested. Her body was found in Clarendon County, about 105 kilometres from Columbia, police said. Rowland remains in jail. It is not known if he has a lawyer. The womans mother, Marci, appeared at court for a scheduled hearing for Rowland on Monday. Members of the sorority Alpha Gamma Delta laugh as they talk about memories of Ms Josephson during a candlelight vigil in honour her life. Source: AAP Rowland did not appear but Ms Josephsons mother was given the opportunity to speak in court by the judge. Story continues She called Rowland evil and remembered her daughter as bubbly, loving, kind, and full of life. Unlike him, Samantha valued human life and could never harm another soul, she said. Unlike him, Samantha had love within her heart, and a purpose in her life, the life he brutally ended. with Associated Press 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. The children of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received multimillion-dollar homes and are being paid thousands of dollars per month by the kingdom's authorities, The Washington Post reported Monday. Khashoggi -- a contributor to the Post and a critic of the Saudi government -- was killed and dismembered in October at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul by a team of 15 agents sent from Riyadh. His body has not been recovered. The payments to his four children -- two sons and two daughters -- "are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to reach a long-term arrangement with Khashoggi family members, aimed in part at ensuring that they continue to show restraint in their public statements," the Post said. The houses given to the Khashoggi children are located in the port city of Jeddah and are worth up to $4 million, the newspaper reported. Salah, the eldest of the children, plans to continue living in the kingdom, while the others, who live in the United States, are expected to sell the homes, the paper said. In addition to the properties, the children are receiving $10,000 or more per month and may also receive larger payments that could amount to tens of millions of dollars each, according to the report. Saudi Arabia's powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has been accused of orchestrating Khashoggi's killing, but the kingdom has claimed that the prince was not involved. Saudi Arabia initially said it had no knowledge of Khashoggi's fate but later blamed rogue agents for his death. Its public prosecutor has charged 11 people over his murder. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, shakes the hand of Salah Khashoggi, son of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in Riyadh in October 2018 The head of Thailand's army on Tuesday urged political divides to be solved in parliament, as anger and frustration mount in the aftermath of a disputed election. The military-linked Phalang Pracharat party clinched the popular vote in the March 24 ballot, the first since a 2014 coup. But inconsistent numbers in the first round of counting sowed suspicion over the result and calls have mounted for members of the Election Commission to be dismissed. Royal Thai Army commander in chief Apirat Kongsompong urged competing sides to "help solve problems in parliament, debate in parliament". "But I cannot accept if Thai people come out trying to solve problems on the streets again,? he told reporters. He dismissed suggestion of a coup and said there were other steps to control outbreaks of violence such as declaring a state of emergency. ?Making a coup is not easy. It depends on several situations," he said. Thailand has been battered by turbulent politics for decades, and has seen more than a dozen coups since it became a constitutional monarchy in 1932. Demonstrations and an online petition that has garnered nearly a million signatures have heaped pressure on the Election Commission, but it has stood by the results. The full breakdown will not be ratified until May 9, but analysts say the confusion has fueled public mistrust. Phalang Pracharat's popular vote edge has been challenged by Pheu Thai, the party linked to self-exiled billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra. Pheu Thai has teamed up with six other parties in a coalition that is laying claim to a majority of seats in the lower house and the right to form a government. But rules created under Thailand's junta mean 250 military-appointed senators can vote for prime minister, giving Phalang Pracharat a built-in edge. The party has put forward 2014 coup leader and junta chief Prayut Chan-O-Cha as its candidate for premier. One of the senate seats is reserved for the head of the army. When asked who he would throw his support behind with a senate vote, Apirat said: "I already have a good person in mind." Thailand's Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha arrives at Wat Bupparam temple in Chiang Mai Tuesday to oversee a Buddhist ceremony. Prayut is expected to be named premier when final results of last month's election are released President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is "100 percent" prepared to close down the US-Mexico border, warning Congress and Central American governments to take action to stem the flow of migrants into the country. Delays were already increasing at several key border crossings as Trump ratcheted up pressure on Democrats in Congress to toughen US laws against illegal immigrants, threatening to hurt the US economy in the name of border security. "It is a national emergency on the border," Trump said. If Mexico does not stop migrants from transiting across its territory, and if Congress does not act, he said, "the border's going to be closed, 100 percent." "Sure it's going to have a negative impact on the economy," he said. "Security is more important to me than trade." Trump said Democrats were blocking reforms for political reasons but could fix the problem "in 45 minutes." He was not specific, but Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has asked Congress to give border officials the power to forcibly repatriate Central American illegal immigrants, including children who arrived alone, back to their countries. The threat to close the frontier, which handled some $612 billion worth of trade in 2018, sent shivers through the economy, and drew warnings from allies of the president. "Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country, and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said. McConnell's call was backed by the Chamber of Commerce, which said in a statement that while it supported immigration reform, closing the border "would inflict severe economic harm on American families, workers, farmers and manufacturers across the United States." - 100,000 migrants a month - Despite Trump's tough rhetoric, Mexico's foreign minister said he had spoken with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had told him the border would not be shut. "Until today, the secretary of state of the United States and his team have told us: this is not the policy we are going to apply, closing points on the border," Marcelo Ebrard said at a press conference. Ebrard added Mexico continued to maintain "a good dialogue" with US authorities and that normal border traffic was expected "as soon as possible." Homeland Security officials meanwhile said they were preparing for the possibility of a shutdown of at least some border entry points as they divert staff to deal with the flood of migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, expected to hit nearly 100,000 a month. Officials said facilities for handling the migrants -- who for the moment cannot be sent back after they cross the border and request asylum -- are overtaxed and understaffed, creating hazardous conditions. "We are in a full blown emergency. The bottom line is all options are on the table right now," a senior Homeland Security official, who declined to be named, told journalists Tuesday. "The volume of vulnerable populations that's arriving is unsustainable... The humanitarian situation cannot be ignored and the security situation cannot be ignored." Trump said Mexican officials had reacted to his threat to close the border last week by clamping down on the caravans of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in the three Central American countries. Mexico "made a big step over the past two days," he said, adding that they would have to continue if they don't want the border closed. He also defended his decision to cut off "hundreds of millions of dollars" in US aid to the three countries, accusing them of arranging the caravans of migrants. The three "don't do anything for us," he said. - Long lines at border ports - On Monday, Nielsen ordered an "emergency surge" of personnel to deal with the situation, including moving 750 staff to areas of the border where the migrants arrive. Many were being diverted from official ports, leading to slowdowns in processing arriving visitors and commercial vehicles. Delays for incoming traffic were three hours at Brownsville, Texas, for the second straight day, and more than two hours in other areas. On the Mexican side, Andres Morales Arreola, head of operations for border crossings in Chihuahua state, said the border between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso had "collapsed" because so many US border officials have been reassigned to deal with the migrant influx. Long lines have formed at the border since Thursday, with wait times of up to eight hours for those trying to cross. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Armando Cabada Alvidrez called on the city's bustling manufacturing sector to temporarily cut back shipments to the US in order to reduce the backup. US President Donald Trump said he is '100 percent' prepared to shut down the US-Mexico border to force action to deter illegal immigrants Motorists wait in line to cross the border into California from Mexicali, Mexico New York officials haven't announced which prisons will close this year, but state Sen. Bob Antonacci is optimistic about the fate of Auburn Correctional Facility. Antonacci, R-Onondaga, told The Citizen Tuesday that he doesn't believe Auburn and other maximum security prisons will be closed by the state. The state budget approved by lawmakers Monday allows Gov. Andrew Cuomo to close up to three state correctional facilities this year. The state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision will conduct a review of its 54 prisons and determine which should close. Facility security level is among the factors DOCCS will consider when evaluating its prisons. Other factors include programs available for inmates and the potential reuse of the prison property. Auburn Correctional Facility is one of the oldest prisons in the U.S. With 700 employees, it is the second to only Auburn Community Hospital as the largest employer in Cayuga County. Antonacci said he's had conversations with correctional officers at the Auburn prison. If the prison closed, he's aware that it would have a major impact on the local economy. "I am not, at this point, worried that Auburn is on the chopping block," he continued. "I'm pretty comfortable that this will not affect our district." While Antonacci isn't concerned about Auburn's fate, he is worried that prisons could close in neighboring districts. In the past, the state has shuttered medium and minimum security facilities. The state shut down three medium security prisons, including Butler Correctional Facility in Wayne County, and a minimum security prison during the last round of closures in 2014. There is a medium security prison in Cayuga County. Cayuga Correctional Facility in Moravia is the county's third-largest employer. In Seneca County, which is part of state Sen. Pam Helming's district, there is a maximum security prison Five Points Correctional Facility and the Willard Drug Treatment Facility. During the budget debate Sunday, Helming said she has "a real concern" about prison closures. She mentioned potential consequences of shutting down more prisons, such as the increased use of "double-bunking" to house inmates and a rise in inmate-on-staff assaults. The New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, the union represents correctional officers at state prisons, opposes the prison closures. There has been no timetable set for when Cuomo will close the prisons. The budget requires him to give state legislative leaders, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, at least 90 days notice before the closures. Online producer Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 2 Sad 0 Angry 5 East Hill Family Medical firmly believes in treating the whole patient and helping people become and stay healthy. This means that we work with the patient and the patients family as partners. We offer a patient-doctor relationship that offers personalized, participatory care and emphasizes healing of emotional and physical health. Did you know that chronic disease, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, are responsible for seven of every 10 deaths among Americans each year? These chronic diseases can be largely preventable through preventative screenings and a close partnership with your health care team. Preventative health screenings have long been advocated as one of the most important health care strategies to facilitate early diagnosis and treatment, improve quality of life and prevent premature death. Making sure you are up-to-date on preventative health screenings is one of the most important things you can do to say healthy, said Dr. Adam Duckett, physician and medical director at East Hill Family Medical. At every stage of your adult life, you should undergo routine screening exams to catch any potential health problems. The goal of screenings is not only to discover health problems, but to improve health outcomes that matter to the patient as well." The most common preventative services for adults fall under three categories: cancer screenings, cardiovascular disease screenings and immunizations. Heres a look into a few examples of preventative care that fall into these categories: Cancer screenings Colorectal cancer screening: This preventative measure is recommended for men and women once they reach age 50. Colonoscopies are standard for this screenings, but there are other alternatives to help aid colorectal cancer detection such as Cologuard, a stool-based colorectal cancer screening test. Breast cancer screening: Mammograms (X-ray of the breast) are the best way to find breast cancer early, when its easier to treat, and having regular mammograms can lower the risk of dying from breast cancer. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, women at average risk of breast cancer should be offered screening mammography starting at age 40. If they have not initiated screening in their 40s, they should begin screening mammography by no later than age 50. The decision about the age to begin mammography screening should be made through shared decision-making between the patient and provider. Cervical cancer screenings: There are two screening tests that can help prevent cervical cancer, or find it early. The Pap test (or Pap smear) looks for precancers, cell changes on the cervix that might become cervical cancer if they are not treated appropriately. The HPV test looks for the virus (human papillomavirus) that can cause these cell changes. How often women should be tested generally depends on age, but its always a good idea to check with your doctor. Prostate cancer: Screening for prostate cancer is done using a test that looks for a protein in the blood called prostate-specific antigen (PSA). It is recommended that men ages 55-69 engage in a discussion with their doctor about the benefits and harms of periodic screenings and make an individual decision about being screened for prostate cancer. Cardiovascular disease screenings Adults should have a health care professional check their blood pressure at least once every two years and their cholesterol levels at least every five years. These screenings are important because they can be indicators of cardiovascular disease. Immunizations There are several immunization vaccines recommended for adults, including protection against the flu, tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough. How many or how often you need specific vaccines will vary. Talk to your doctor for a recommended immunization schedule. Its time to take charge of your health! Schedule an appointment with your health care provider to discuss what screenings and exams you need and when you need them. To schedule an appointment with Dr. Duckett, call East Hill Family Medicals Adult Medicine Office at (315) 253-8477. We are all more than the sum of our body parts, illnesses or injuries. To become and stay healthy, the well-being of our whole selves needs to be considered. This includes our personal histories, values, life events and the people who matter most to us. Its having a healthy mind and a healthy body. All the articles in the series can be found at easthillmedical.com. Danielle Collier is the director of marketing and communications at East Hill Family Medical, a federally qualified health center offering dental, reproductive health, internal medicine and pediatric services. Located at 144 Genesee St., Auburn, the center can be contacted at easthillmedical.com or (315) 253-8477. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! Already a Subscriber? Already a Subscriber? Sign in Terms of Service Privacy Policy Firefighters from multiple departments were called to a fire on Dresserville Road in Moravia on Tuesday afternoon. The structure fire was reported at about 5:20 p.m, and members of the Moravia Fire Department arrived to find the home's kitchen fully involved, according to Moravia Chief Bill Andersen. Firefighters were able to knock the fire down after approximately 30 minutes, Andersen said. Andersen added that the cause of the fire is under investigation. The lone occupant of the home at the time was able to escape without injuries, while the home suffered significant heat and smoke damage throughout. Dresserville Road was temporarily closed in the area of the fire so that fire trucks could reach the home. Along with Moravia, fire departments from Locke, Sempronius, Groton, Cortlandville New Hope and Owasco also responded, and Fleming Fire Department covered Moravia's station. Four Town Ambulance, the Cayuga County Sheriff's Office, Cayuga County Fire Investigators and Emergency Management Office Fire Coordinators, the Red Cross and state police also responded to the scene. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 2 Sad 1 Angry 2 A man was tracked down and arrested about a week after two domestic incidents in Auburn, the Auburn Police Department reported Tuesday. On March 19, Dwight Williams, 40, of 43 Water St., Lyons, entered a woman's apartment and choked her while she was sleeping in bed, police said. After being choked, the 39-year-old victim called 911. Police said Williams went into a bedroom before shoving past her to leave the apartment. An arrest warrant was issued for Williams, charging him with first-degree criminal contempt, a class E felony, and obstruction of breathing, a class A misdemeanor. Police said a domestic violence team followed up, as is common when there is a domestic incident demonstrating a high chance of fatality. Although police were "actively looking" for Williams, the APD said he wasn't apprehended quickly enough and returned to the victim's 37 Olympia Ave. apartment again March 22. He allegedly caused more than $250 worth of damage to her vehicle. He was charged with another count of first-degree criminal contempt and third-degree criminal mischief, a class E felony, for damaging the car. After the second domestic incident, police began collaborating with state police in Lyons to capture Williams. The evening of March 28 the Auburn Police Department and state police searched for him in Lyons. Williams was eventually located and arrested by state police March 29. He was charged by the APD and arraigned in Auburn City Court the same day. Love 1 Funny 1 Wow 3 Sad 4 Angry 5 I write in support of drivers licenses for undocumented persons in New York state. I do so because it is the sensible thing to do. Expanding licenses would be an economic boom to the state. Expanding access will generate millions of dollars annually for New York and save motorists money. A 2017 analysis by the Fiscal Policy Institute determined that New York state and county governments would receive an estimated $57 million in combined annual revenue. See the report by visiting fiscalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/NYS-Drivers-Licenses-2019.pdf. Expanding licenses would make New Yorkers roads safer. Proper licensing is a practical way to improve public safety and strengthen trust between law enforcement and migrant communities. Legal licenses ensure that all drivers are properly licensed, are informed of traffic laws and operate a registered, insured and inspected vehicle. In 2003, New Mexico changed its policy, their rate of uninsured drivers fell from 33 percent to just 9 percent. A standard license is clearly labeled: Not for Federal Purposes. A drivers license cannot be used for voting purposes. U.S. Cctizens are required to register to vote in New York state. A standard license cannot be legally used as evidence of a holders immigration or citizenship status. Expanding drivers licenses would integrate migrant and immigrant New Yorkers in their communities.. Immigrant and migrant people live in New York, and yes, in Cayuga County. Drivers licenses allow those in our community greater access to the community and make their own decisions about where to shop and seek community resources. Standard drivers license allows individuals to drive and carry a valid ID for nonfederal purposes. A valid license allows those living in our communities to more fully participate in community life rather than live in isolation. In rural New York public transportation is not an option. Driving is a necessity, not a privilege. Undocumented immigrants contribute to all facets of New York life, including financially. They pay over $1.1 billion in state and local taxes annually and are responsible for $40 billion in New Yorks economic output, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute. The 2005 REAL ID Act allows for states to develop a multi-tier drivers license system and be in compliance. It has been done in Vermont, Connecticut and Washington, D.C. Sheriffs and community leaders throughout New York think we can do it, too. Mickey Belosi Owasco Love 2 Funny 2 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 7 LOS ANGELESEmily Lynne says a simple thank you for a tip goes a long way with your room on MyFreeCams. And being excitable is something I learned early on, Lynne says. Even as a viewer I just love the rush of a model getting happy over a tipeven if its small. Lynne, a Las Vegas resident who will celebrate her five-year camiversary in June, calls her career a dream come true. I love the fact that I can be myself, she says. I get guys who spend time with me because they genuinely like my personality and that feels really good. When it comes to advice for new models trying to make their name in the cam world, Lynne recommends logging on around the same hours with consistency at least until you have a few regulars that will log on any time youre online. Also dont be afraid to log on even if no ones online and even if other girls are complaining that its slow, she says, adding that creating content is also key to building your brand. Put every video you make out there. Even if you dont like the way it turned out, you did the work and you deserve to get paid for it. Lynne would know; the bootylicious model has made almost 400 explicit videos that are all available on her MFCShare page. An avid gamer who loves RPGs, Lynne says her favorite games are Fable 2, Kingdom Hearts, and The Witcher 3. The feeling of getting sucked into a game and needing to play it is amazing, Lynne explains. I love following a storyline and becoming invested in characters. Growing up both my parents played video games all the time. I'm pretty sure it's in my blood! She built her communitythe Salt Squadby spending a lot of time online and as she puts it, getting really lucky. Ive had a lot of really cool guys join my chat room and my favorite part is that they became friends with each other just as much as they did with me, Lynne says. In this exclusive Q&A for CAMStar accompanied by 12 pages of photos by Keith Ryan, Lynne talks about her background in the food service industry, her love of cooking and about a special member who helped her see her potential. Click here to see the full issue. Signature Flatbreads is to pay its staff the living wage and has created 50 new jobs at its Dunstable factory. The company said the decision to raise the wage rate of its permanent factory workers from the National Living Wage of 8.21 to the Real Living Wage of 9 per hour was designed to offer certainty and stability to staff. The company also hopes to eventually offer the Real Living Wage to all agency staff. Almost two-thirds of workers at the Dunstable site are non-British EU citizens, and the company said many had been left unsettled by the lengthy ongoing Brexit negotiations. Our business is only as good as the people who work within it, and we are fortunate to have a dedicated and loyal workforce, added Signature Flatbreads joint managing director Zizou Benchaoui. We want to reassure our employees that we will be providing security during this uncertain time. The moves come a year after Signature which was named Bakery Manufacturer of the Year in the 2015 Baking Industry Awards bought out its joint venture partner Aryzta. The company has also created 50 new jobs in 2019, after winning new business and adding two new production lines at Dunstable. Signature said its stability had been demonstrated by the recent launch of new Deli Kitchen products and growing significance of its exports to non-EU countries. The company supplies flatbreads, including tortilla wraps, pitta and naan bread, to major UK retailers and foodservice operators, as well as to 30 countries. Manufacturing top-quality products is essential to our success, so we believe this significant and ongoing investment is a clear signal to the industry of our confidence as a business, as well as to our staff, recognising their importance, added Benchaoui. The addition of our two new lines will enable us to keep up with the growing global demand for our flatbreads, while also offering employment opportunities to a considerable number of new workers. Founded in 1984 by the Eid family as Honeytop Speciality Foods, Signature was acquired by Aryzta in 2011 and sold back to the Eid family as part of an Aryzta restructure. Oregon Coast Whale Sightings Stellar, Including Stunning Orca Encounter Published 04/01/2019 at 8:53 PM PDT By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff (Oregon Coast) Whale sightings continue to be a bit bonkers along all of the Oregon coast, with outstanding reports coming over the last week. The highlight was a killer whale spotted on April 1 in Tillamook Bay. (Above: Orca sighting from a previous year, courtesy Whale's Tail charters). It is still the great migration northward for gray whales so there continue to be plenty of those. Both the Central Oregon Coast Cetacean Watch and the Clatsop & Pacific County Whale Sightings groups on Facebook are coming up with astounding appearances. Early on April 1, the crew from Kellys Brighton Marina near Rockaway Beach caught a magnificent moment with an Orca in Tillamook Bay. That group has had some astounding encounters in the past with its Nehalem Bay facility. One was documented in this YouTube video back in 2014; another incident made the regional media in 2008. Its believed Orcas are showing up on the north Oregon coast because theyre either chasing salmon or they are the mysterious pod of transient Orcas that maraud up and down the west coast chasing baby gray whales and large groups of sea lions. Indeed, the north coast has had the most vocal reports in recent days, with quite the run in the last few days of March, with numerous sightings around Hammond, Cape Disappointment on the Washington coast and at Cannon Beachs Silver Point. Also on April 1, photographer Sam Clark caught some amazing shots of gray whales breaching in the Newport area. Clark reports the whale breached three times, close enough to get a photo, then moved on. That can be seen on the central coast group site. Other reports came in from Fort Stevens on March 31. Silver Point seemed to be the hotspot for awhile on March 28. See the links to those Facebook whale groups to see the photos and videos. As long as weather cooperates, it should remain ideal conditions for spotting whales around the Oregon coast. Gray whales are still migrating in heavy numbers, though it starts to taper off over the next two months. Orcas, in the meantime, often show up about now looking for the baby gray whales, and its only a matter of time before that pod starts making appearances that can be confirmed. For more on Oregon coast whales. Tips for spotting Oregon coast whales. Oregon Coast Lodgings for this event - Where to eat - Maps - Virtual Tours More whale photos below: More About Oregon Coast hotels, lodging..... More About Oregon Coast Restaurants, Dining..... Coastal Spotlight LATEST Related Oregon Coast Articles Back to Oregon Coast Contact Advertise on BeachConnection.net All Content, unless otherwise attributed, copyright BeachConnection.net Unauthorized use or publication is not permitted Carolina Journal Executive Editor Don Carrington has produced investigative reports for CJ for more than two decades. (CJ photo by Greg de Geugd) Executive Editor Don Carrington knows a thing or two about uncovering stories of corruption in government. As an investigative reporter forCarrington has broken several stories detailing cases of government corruption and incompetence.Associate Editor Lindsay Marchello sat down with Carrington on Feb. 15 to talk about his career and the challenges of keeping governments accountable.: What does investigative reporting entail? How do you go about getting a story done?: It can either start with something I read, where I see something wrong from either a behavior or policy side and something doesn't look quite right. It catches my attention. Usually it's something that I already know a little bit about. Or it can be a tip out of the blue on something that I know nothing about. I generally read a lot. If I think it can turn into a story, then I share it with others here [at] to see what they think. Then I proceed. Oftentimes we don't do a story, or I end up learning a lot and say this just doesn't feel right for a story right now, like I learn about guardianship fraud but I feel like it's just not right for me to write about it right now or that the issue is getting coverage in other places. A lot of what I do is research, and that sometimes turns into a story and sometimes it doesn't.: So, once you pick up on a story, where do you go next?: Well, I do a lot of research. That's why you see a lot of paper here, it's stuff I like but there's an article about it, or some land records, or some personnel records or something that I have to remember and use it if I'm actually going to proceed with a story.: What are some of the challenges you face in North Carolina when trying to obtain information or a document from a government agency?: Getting cooperation from government officials has always been a challenge. It has been a challenge for me and for other investigative reporters and general reporters, too. Government officials are usually not very cooperative.: How do you get around that lack of cooperation?: You pester them, constantly. If you think it's been too long when they are not being cooperative, you have to threaten a lawsuit. I have not filed a lawsuit, but I have been part of threats many of times. One example is with the development of the Randy Parton Theatre. The city of Roanoke Rapids was not going to release its contract with Randy Parton. The theater had been paid for with public funds. The only money they had in the beginning was public funds, that taxpayers agreed to borrow. They were not going to let me see his contract, so I said we are going to sue you. They coughed up the contract within a couple of days. But they did check with the Institute of Government. That was a unique situation, but I knew they would have to give it up. You can't borrow money and set up Dolly Parton's brother in business and build him theater without sharing the deal. How much does he get? How much does he get to keep if people come to the show? The contract was startling. He himself would get up to [$1.5 million] a year. All of his expenses and his band would be paid for. That was a startling amount of money.: That leads into my next question. What were some of the biggest finds of your career as an investigative reporter?: Well, that was a pretty big find. Another one was there was an issue with Attorney General Mike Easley running public service ads in the year before he was getting ready to run for governor. The ads sure looked like campaign ads, which they said were prepared by his staff. I was able to get expenditures from his office through the controller's office. I essentially got the check registry for a period of time. I noticed there were payments to a sound studio in Philadelphia that just happened to be on the same block as his political consultant. I called them and the person said, Yes, we do political ads for Mike Easley. There the public record led me to the truth, that this was connected to his political campaign, at least the people producing it thought it was. He would tell people down here they were just public service ads. That was a pretty big find.: Did any of your stories have real-world consequences?: Yes, some of our earlier stories we relied on public records, but most of these were available at the General Assembly. They weren't online. They were records about an organization, a nonprofit that former congressmen Frank Ballance had set up while he was a leader in the state Senate. You could see by the votes that he would put things in bills that would direct money to a nonprofit that he controlled. It was approximately $2 million over 10 years. Other records showed it was tied to his church, and after a couple of stories, the auditor - and we later learned federal investigators - went right after it. He was funneling money into his own organization, and he had never properly registered it as a nonprofit with the IRS, where some of the records are available. There was little evidence of any public good that this operation did. Frank eventually went to prison for four years.: What are some cases in which you didn't get the information you requested?: Eventually you get it, but it could be as much as a year later and it can be heavily redacted. You don't always get to have a conversation about why something is redacted. Several reporters and organizations wanted the documents related to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and the Cooper administration eventually released as much as 40,000 pages. A lot of it was not related to the pipeline. A lot of it was duplicated. You just don't know if they pulled anything out of it.: How can we improve public record requests? Does it need to be improved?: Yes, it needs to be improved. I think when I make a request I would expect someone to say that they received the request and discuss it with me,That's how adults would handle it. That's not going on now. You don't get a call back. In a major blow to proponents of light rail, the GoTriangle Board of Trustees voted unanimously Wednesday, March 27, to end the Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project.The $2.7-billion project would have included a nearly 18-mile railway connecting UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill with Duke University, but significant setbacks and obstacles killed the plan.Jeff Mann, the GoTriangle President and CEO, said in a statement read to the board.Duke University refused to sign a cooperative agreement with GoTriangle over a bevy of concerns with the project. Duke President Vincent Price, Duke Executive Vice President Tallman Trask III, and Duke University Health System President and CEO A. Eugene Washington sent a joint letter to GoTriangle in February outlining their problems with the Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project. Electromagnetic interference with medical equipment, vibrations and noise from rail cars, and potential power disruptions to utilities, and liability concerns were just a few of the unresolved issues Duke had with the project.Gerry Cohen, former special counsel to the General Assembly and a vocal light-rail supporter, said Duke acted in bad faith in their negotiations with GoTriangle. Once supportive of the project, Duke has since changed its tune.Cohen said.Duke's unwillingness to work with GoTriangle and allow the construction of a light rail on Erwin Road created a significant obstacle. An eminent domain battle to take Duke's land would likely be costly and time consuming, and the delays would make it next to impossible to meet federal and state deadlines.Duke isn't solely responsible, and Mann pointed to several other factors contributing to the outcome.Mann said.Mann said a 2018 legislative change required that all other non-federal funds for the project be committed by April 30, 2019. Before the light rail project received any state money, all federal funds would have to be committed no later than Nov. 30, 2019.Not only has GoTriangle struggled to meet funding deadlines, but the agency has failed to reach an agreement with the state-owned North Carolina Railroad to move forward.Due to concerns expressed by Norfolk Southern and Duke University, the project team proposed a new tunnel option for downtown Durham. These proposed changes led the Federal Transit Administration to send a draft risk assessment to GoTriangle saying it must build into the budget an extra $237 million in project costs and contingencies. A new environmental impact study also would be required for changes to downtown Durham.The uncertainties and lack of agreement with stakeholders, such as Duke University, made it unlikely the project would receive any federal funding by November 2019, the FTA told Mann.Mann said.The GoTriangle board will use money collected for light rail for other transit projects and improvements.Mark Marcoplos told the News & Observer. Cohen said the possibility of a light rail project anywhere near Duke won't happen.Cohen said. This week, special counsel Robert Mueller released his long-awaited report on alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to impact the 2016 election. His conclusion: no collusion. It's been apparent for quite some time that Mueller would end up here - every indictment has been based on an ancillary crime, not the chief question of election conspiracy. Nonetheless, the final result came as a bombshell.That's because for two years, the mainstream media have treated Trump-Russian collusion as a reality. Facts would eventually arrive to fill in the gaps in the narrative. Surely, Trump's presidency would crumble when the deus ex machina, the Mueller report, arrived.But that didn't happen. And so the media are left with unending egg on their faces, having suggested continuously for years that Trump was illegitimately elected, and that his campaign had engaged in treasonous activity to prevent the rightful president, Hillary Clinton, from assuming office.That narrative found support in leaders from the Democratic intelligence community. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., of the House Intelligence Committee spent years camping outside CNN headquarters in a pup tent, ready at a moment's notice to suggest access to secret information that would certainly take down the president. Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Trump of treason, standing on his resume to do so. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated that Watergate "pales" beside allegations of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe suggested that Trump could be a Russian cat's paw. Former FBI Director James Comey implied that Trump had fired him for nefarious reasons, not because Trump was angry with Comey for failing to announce that Trump wasn't under investigation.Our intelligence leadership, in other words, humiliated themselves.Meanwhile, in Chicago, Cook County prosecutors agreed to drop charges against alleged hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett, who alleged that he was beaten by two white men in the middle of the night on the streets of Chicago. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the dropped charges a "whitewash." Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson bashed Smollett's defense team, explaining, "they chose to hide behind secrecy and broker a deal to circumvent the judicial system."Why have key institutions betrayed their initial mission? Mission creep. The job of the media is to objectively cover stories, not to drive narratives. The job of the intelligence community is to diligently follow evidence, not to follow its cognitive bias. The job of the state's attorney is to prosecute crime, not to play politics.Without defined roles, our institutions crumble. Treating institutions as mere tools to be wielded in pursuit of some higher goal leads to the destruction of those institutions; they become little more than weapons, aimed by those in power. That's dangerous stuff. We should be able to trust our press. If we can't, then we can no longer base our republican decision-making on a common set of facts. We should be able to trust our intelligence community and our prosecutors. If we can't, then we can't support granting them the power they require to protect us.But protecting institutions has taken a back seat to do-goodism. "Objective" journalists see themselves as crusaders; political members of the intelligence community see themselves as protectors; prosecutors see themselves as emissaries of social justice rather than as part of a broader, more objective system of determining guilt and innocence. Institutions only mean more than the people who comprise them when the people who comprise them value the institutions more than their own politics. That's being lost. The result is the continued atomization of our society.COPYRIGHT CREATORS 2019 Postmodernism is a sprawling movement centered on the conviction that the modern world's most distinctive achievements-among them the rise of science, technology, individualism, universal rights, democratic-republicanism, and liberal capitalism-should be treated with suspicion or outright contempt.Most of us encountered-fashioned indoctrinators in our education. Indoctrinators think this way:Our modern ideal of liberal education fought a long battle against that view. Truth matters, yes, but it is often complex, and exposure to contending theories and their leading advocates is the best way for students to sort it out. Students also need to develop their own strength of mind to be able, independently and with confidence, to handle the new, complex issues they will encounter all their lives.John Stuart Mill's now-classic statement of the liberal-education ideal argued passionately that students must learn not only the best answers but also their contenders, and that a trained mind will know not only the reasons for the best answer but also the strongest criticisms of it. And not only that, they will know the best arguments for the contender positions and how to respond to them.Institutionally, then, Mill argued that schools should hire teachers from diverse viewpoints-for only by exposure to the expert and passionate articulation of varied viewpoints will students get a first-rate education.Liberal education won the debate and prevailed-but most of us are surprised by our generation's resurgence of angry activism led by large numbers of students and recent graduates who are confrontational and completely uninterested in debate. (And who seem to disbelieve that there's anything that needs debating.)They are the products of a-fashioned indoctrination, one that results from the groundwork laid by two generations of postmodern ideology.Philosophers Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and others cast a suspicious eye upon "truth" and substituted group-relativized "narratives"-lamenting that those narratives are usually in brutal conflict with each other. We cannot escape ourRorty claimed:Others asserted that race or gender or class divides were more fundamental.That is the first step: Truth is out, and racial/gender/class/ethnic-group conflict prevails. But then, what is the purpose of education?Foucault was explicit about the implications of the death of truth. Shortly after leaving the Communist Party, he tells us, he followed the lead of his semi-mentor Jean-Paul Sartre:That is the second step: We should politicize education.But what kind of politics? For the first-generation postmoderns, orthodox Marxism was no longer tenable. Something new was needed-something, as deconstructionist Derrida put it,-but without its clunky baggage. Keep Marxism's themes of exploitation and oppression and its relentless antagonism toward current civilization-but abandon its faith in science, its claim that economics is fundamental, and its belief that the inevitable march of history would bring the revolution. Only subversivewould effect the transformation.The next-generation postmodernists got busy. They had learned from Foucault, Rorty, and Derrida that they should abandon truth for narratives, individuals for groups, and politicize the classroom with some sort of quasi-Marxism. And then Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Francois Lyotard taught them to workthe system rather than positioning themselves as revolutionaries imposing from the. Join the system's leading institutions and, from inside positions of power, rework its ethos.Reminded, for example, of Mill's claim that a good educator will present his opponent's arguments-and in their strongest form-postmodern professor Stanley Fish said:That is the third step: Dopresent the rival positions-and if they arise, suppress them immediately.One of Stanley Fish's postmodernist colleagues at Duke University, Frank Lentricchia, took the fourth step: With rival viewpoints off the syllabus, he said, teachers should onlyThe postmodern educator's task is to train students toPostmodernism need not lead to any particular political outcome-rejecting objective truth and universal standards can rationalize subjective commitments to any number of group "truths" and conflicting values. But it is true that first-generation postmodern intellectuals were dominantly far left politically, and that legacy has shaped the new generation's adversarial stance.And what kind of students should we create? Two professors, Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger, forthrightly urge as athat we train students toWe are all familiar with the theme of memes that go viral on social media, but just to be clear Fahs and Karger cite Ebola and HIV as the kinds of viruses they have in mind, especially for our "mindless" and "capitalist" corporate universities.Hence our current generation of angry young people, with all their inchoate energy and fears. Released from 15 years of such schooling, they only want toBut what?They feel in their bones that the system is oppressive, that they are being set up for failure by sinister forces, that everyone loathes everyone else-and they have neither been exposed much to other ideologies nor trained how to evaluate them. Thrust unprepared into a hostile world, it makes perfect sense that their protests will be manifestations of their internal rages and despairs.Philosophy is, and the results of applying postmodern theory to educational practice-for two generations now-is the great lesson of our time. One that needs to be challenged with every fiber of our being. Have Sheriff Offices in North Carolina, possibly even Beaufort County's Sheriff Office, become too political in the discharging of their sworn constitutional duties? No, the sheriff is a constitutional officer. Yes, the Sheriff Office, on strong occasion, often reverts back to political patronage in the dispensation of their sworn constitutional duties. About half of the jail is shut down at an unbudgeted cost oaf about $2,500 per day. Two thousand dollars pays other jails to house our prisoners and $500 is additional cost to transport them back and forth for trial dates. That comes to $75,000 per month. Estimates are this will go n for at least another six months. It has already been going on for about three months . That comes to $675,000 of wasted expense this year.The Sheriff says the cells are broken and cannot be operated safely.Here is the incredible part. The sheriff has not called anyone to repair or try to fix the cells. Even more puzzling is we are going thru a slow process of formal bids to replace the electronic system and the cell mechanical equipment. The excuse given by the county manager is the cost will be more than $500,000 so state law requires a formal process. That is simply and excuse. There are provisions for emergency repairs and these repairs could be broken into parts in order to expedite work. However, if we do any of these things some county employees may have to do some work for their pay. They may even have to stay after 5:00 pm.. For those with common sense, we have a jail with dangerous people in it and we did not call for cells to be repaired but we are going thru a lengthy process that will be very expensive to modernize the electronic syst4em and replace doors. Again, for those with normal intelligence, why not make temporary repairs while we get bids and figure out how to make log term repairs.When the sheriff reported to the commissioners at the budget retreat, half of the jail had already been shut down for at least 6 weeks, The sheriff never reported the seriousness of the problem, we had to figure out what was really going on. Why did he not notify the Board of Commissioners the first day cells were shut down?When I say sheriff, I am including anyone who works for King Ernie.Let us return to our old friend, common sense. The sheriff never reported to the commissioners that there were serious problems with the jail doors. I t never came up in budget sessions. Did 40 cells suddenly become inoperative?I for one do not believe we had a catastrophic failure of these cells.Even more alarming is that only two commissioners (Stan Deatherage and myself) are concerned that we need to repair the cells while we solver the bigger problem of long term repairs. Look at the hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be saved.I spent the last three weeks exchanging emails with the county manager and the sheriff. I asked one question "WHEN AND WHO DID YOU CALL FOR REPAIRS?' I do not have an answer. I proffered to the manager that we are well into the area of "fiduciary responsibility" for all electedofficials and be bumped the question to the chief deputy who has not responded during the past 10 days.What would you do with anything you own that was broken? Try to get it repaired. I bet there are not many things you throw in the trash without trying o repair them. Especially large items.When I look at the $100,000 of un needed uniforms and gun changes made just before the election last year, the million dollar medial cost for one prisoner and the close to one million dollars of wasted jail cost, with no push back from the commissioners I can only conclude that both the sheriff , and commissioners are demonstrating incompetence or manipulating the system to convince the public to build a new jail.Commissioners have the duty to control all county spending. The sheriff contends that he cannot be controlled by commissioners because he is a constitutional office. The constitution makes the sheriff responsible for the jail and directs that he serve warrants. North Carolina law is very clear that the sheriff does not have taxing authority, only the commissioners. You, the taxpayer provides the money.Anyone who pays taxes should be very concerned about what is happening in Beaufort County. Even if the commissioners cover this up this year, eventually taxes will have to be raised.We are denying justice to almost all prisoners. We have about 18 people in jail who have been there for between 6 months and 2 years without a trial. The Constitution f the United States calls for a speedy trial. If we simply tried prisoners timely we would need a jail half the size that we have.The sheriff is not the only culprit in this jail situation. Judges, district attorneys, and defense lawyers can all do a lot more to clean out our jail. Some day some smart lawyer is going to sue all of us on the issue of a speedy trial. The size of the jail and whether new or not has nothing to do with speedy trial issues. Speed trials solve a host of problems like the need for medical care and keeping prisoners out of county. In my Friday post titled, Ben Shapiro and the alt-right smear I wrote: Thus, National Review once a bulwark of American conservatism advocates that gay marriage is a family value according to Jonah Goldberg and that statues of former Confederate leadership must be torn down by patriotism according to Kevin Williamson. Williamson objected, saying this is what he actually wrote in his August 2017 piece Let It Be in National Review: The current attack on Confederate monuments is only another front in the Lefts endless kulturkampf. The Left is committed to always being on the offense in the culture wars, and, with Donald Trump and his white-resentment politics installed in the White House and Republicans lined up queasily behind him, the choice of going after Confederate totems is clever. It brings out the kooks and the cranks, and some respectable conservatives feel obliged to defend them. Getting Republicans to relitigate the Civil War is a great victory for the Democrats, who were, after all, on the wrong side of it as a matter of historical fact. Rather than embrace their partys proudest and finest legacy, Republicans are now trying to explain away President Trumps insistence that there were some very fine gentlemen among the tiki-Nazis in Charlottesville. President Trumps schoolboy forensics is here particularly embarrassing. From Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump: Evolution runs backward for American political parties. We should not, in any case, accept the fiction that what is transpiring at the moment is a moral crusade rather than political opportunism. I am glad to correct the record, and I apologize for any errors or misinterpretation of Williamsons views that my original post may have created. Nevertheless, I stand for what I have said. If Williamson recognizes that the idea of destroying statues is part of a cultural war that helps to shape modern public debate, I could not disagree more with him. What this business with the statues really represents is an effort to erase our collective historical memory and replace these memories with lies about the past. In Let it be, Williamson writes: What ought conservatives to do? They should listen to the oldest and most widely applicable of all the councils of conservatism and do exactly nothing. Well, I can not agree that to do nothing is a conservative position. Quite the opposite, Conservatism is a political doctrine that implies action or reaction insofar as it seeks to preserve social arrangements against revolutionary temptations. Millennials whose knowledge of history is deficient, to say the least are not only rallying against former Confederate soldiers or the pleasant memory of the antebellum. The war they are promoting against the Confederate statues is a war against American history and against all those who do not fit into the politically correct narrative of the past. If General Lees statues are torn down today, tomorrow will be Thomas Jeffersons. If in the morning they burn Stonewall Jackson, by night it will be George Washingtons turn to meet the same fate. In this case, the only thing silence or inaction means is complicity. There is a totalitarian impulse in this pulling down of statues, one weve seen elsewhere. To create the new reality, the new man, you must first destroy the reality we have. The great scholar of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski, wrote about the falsification of history under the Soviets, particularly under the regime of Joseph Stalin. But this practice of re-editing the past, Kolakowski observed, continued under other leaders. He cited the case of Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet security and the secret police, who was executed a few months after Stalins death in 1953. when Beria was put to death by the new leaders, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia found a note in the next volume telling them to excise certain earlier pages with a razor blade and insert the new pages that accompanied the note. On turning up the place referred to, the reader found that it was the article on Beria; the substitute pages, however, were not about Beria at all but contained additional photographs of the Bering Sea. Homepage picture: Wikimedia Commons. UPDATED APRIL 2 Puerto Rico Secretary of Education Julia Keleher is leaving her position as the islands top K-12 official, and will serve as an adviser at the islands education department to help with the leadership transition and ongoing policy changes. The new education secretary for Puerto Rico on an interim basis will be Eleuterio Alamo, who currently oversees the Puerto Rico education departments San Juan regional office. Gov. Ricardo Rossello, who also picked Keleher to be the secretary, announced Alamo as the new secretary on Tuesday. Keleher, who assumed the role of education secretary for the U.S. territory in January 2017, will also take on a new project as a consultant for schools on the Puerto Rican island of Culebra. Alamo appealed to Puerto Ricos leadership because of his experience dealing with schools in San Juan, Puerto Ricos capital and its largest city, and the complexity that work entails. Keleher is stepping down from her role effective Tuesday. Her salary of $250,000 for her new role as an adviser to the department will be paid for by the islands Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authorityher salary as secretary has also been paid for by that agency. Technically, shes been a contractor to the department during her time as secretary, and will remain so after she steps down. Last year, Keleher said she envisioned staying on as secretary for several more years. In a new Commentary on edweek.org, Keleher describes her decision to step down and the pivotal moment facing public education in Puerto Rico and the island itself. Weve finished phase one. Phase two, the running of this, requires a different leader, Keleher said in an interview of the governments plan to revamp schools. Im more of a change agent. Now, what we need is someone to hold the course. When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017 , Keleher and other educators were confronted with a humanitarian crisis that crippled the island for months and presented a slew of dire problems for the its public school system , which educated roughly 350,000 students before the storm and had been struggling academically and financially for years. See Our In-Depth Coverage: Putting Puerto Ricos Schools Back on Track Keleher won praise from some quarters for her determination to revamp K-12 in the U.S. territory. She focused on teachers professional development, getting more and better materials to classrooms, and forging closer connections between schools and the private sector. Yet other policies she successfully pursued, such as a new law allowing for charter schools and vouchers , as well as the closure of hundreds of schools on the heels of declining enrollment, drew her into frequent conflict with the islands teachers unions. At a San Juan rally last summer in opposition to her record, protesters shouted, Julia go home! (Keleher is not Puerto Rican.) Asked earlier if she would be a sort of shadow education secretary in her new role, Keleher stressed that she would not second-guess Alamos decisions, but also wanted to ensure what she and the governor had put in place would not be disrupted. Noting that Alamo has worked at the department for decades, she said she felt really good about someone from inside taking over. Alamo said he was looking forward to continuing ongoing education reforms, according to the Associated Press. For her upcoming work on Culebra, Keleher said she wants to work closely with one small community to see how to make each municipalitys educational system respond to their local needs. She says that Culebra, for example, should be a magnet for tourism and that schools could help prepare students to work in that industry. Were going to try from the bottom up, Keleher said, describing her goal. Progress and Friction Keleher minimized her well-publicized friction with the Asociacion de Maestros de Puerto Rico (the islands union, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers), saying that aside from school choice and school closures, she didnt believe she had serious conflict with the labor group. She highlighted a recent announcement that she plans to institute a pay raise for teachers, for example. However, its worth noting that those two major fights went to court, as the union sought in vain to stop both school closures and the law permitting charters and vouchers one charter is open this school year in Puerto Rico, and two more are slated to start next year. The voucher program is also slated to start in the 2019-20 school year. And its worth highlighting that several days ago, the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten highlighted the push to oppose the spread of charters in Arecibo, west of San Juan. Theres a ream of statistics that Keleher and her team have showcased to demonstrate the islands progress during her two-year tenure. These include: Delivering 1.2 million textbooks and digital resources to classrooms covering core subjects; Increasing the number of nurses in schools from 32 to 430, with each nurse getting training in screening for trauma; Upgrading the internet bandwidth at schools; Distributing 150,000 laptops and tablets to schools. One of the biggest remaining problems for the islands public schools is their state of repair. In January, Keleher said it would ultimately cost $11 billion to get damaged and deteriorating schools up to the necessary building standards . The school buildings are a real challenge, Keleher said. Not having a beautiful, modern, healthy, safe, engaging learning environmentthats going to be a longer road. In the short term, Keleher said whether test scores rise is an important barometer for improving schools. Over the longer term, she wants to see greater connections develop between schools and the islands business community. Asked if she would have done anything differently if given a do-over, Keleher responded, I dont have regrets. I think I learned a lot and I grew a lot as a person. If I had to do it all over again, I think I would like to take the time to create stronger, closer connections with each of the communities, and understand their needs. Watch our Education Week video published a year after Hurricane Maria about the ongoing challenges for Americas forgotten school system below: The Associated Press contributed to this report. Photo: Julia Keleher in San Juan in October 2017, during her initial efforts to help schools and educators recover from the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which struck the island the previous month. (Swikar Patel/Education Week) Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 . And follow the Andrew Ujifusa half of Politics K-12 @AndrewUjifusa . Yahoo! JAPAN Yahoo! JAPAN The Property of the People transparency group (previously) has published another damning US intelligence file, this one a report circulated by the Regional Organized Crime Information Center (RICOC, a joint state/federal intelligence body), revealing how the US intelligence bodies advised local law enforcement after the Charlottesville white supremacist march. RICOC appears to have taken Trump's "very good people on both sides" doctrine to heart, from the report's title ("Antifa/Anti-antifa: Violence in the Streets") and through its conclusions, which claims that white supremacists are animated by an opposition to antifa, ignoring the movement's actual genocidal ambition to use ethnic cleansing to establish a "white homeland." The framing paints antifa as the antagonists, and the white supremacist terrorists one of whom committed a brutal murder that day as beset by the antifa activists. It quotes a newspaper editorial that branded the antifa protesters as terrorists. In the ROCIC report there is also no discussion of the specific groups actively organizing the Unite the Right rally not long after the report's publication date. Neo-confederate groups such as the League of the South; neo-Nazi and Identitarian groups such as Vanguard America, the National Socialist Movement, the Rise Above Movement and Identity Evropa; and street-fighting groups such as the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights and the Proud Boys are not mentioned. All of these groups were involved in the demonstration in Charlottesville, which culminated in the killing of Heather Heyer by James Alex Fields, who marched with Vanguard America. The report also extensively sources information from conservative media and rightwing advocacy groups. It quotes a report from Glenn Beck's the Blaze, which cites the Washington Times, and Laura Ingraham's conservative lifestyle website LifeZette alongside more reputable sources, including the Guardian. Intelligence report appeared to endorse view leftwing protesters were 'terrorists' [Jason Wilson/The Guardian] ROCIC Special Research Report Antifa / Anti-Antifa Fighting in the Streets [egional Organized Crime Information Center/Property of the People] Vonda N McIntyre, author of the Hugo/Nebula/Locus-winning 1979 novel Dreamsnake, founder of the Clarion West Workshop, and icon of science fiction, has died of pancreatic cancer. She was 70. Vonda and I never really met, but we were on BBSes together in the 1980s and I later taught the Clarion West workshop she founded, and she has always been a significant presence in the field. Vonda was a stalwart of both the Seattle science fiction scene and the world of feminist science fiction and was a dear friend to people I really care about in both worlds; I want to extend my most sincere condolences to all of them, and to her family. There will be a memorial in Seattle with details to come. Vonda requested that "in lieu of flowers, people make memorial donations to one of their favorite charities." Here's some of her File 770 obit, by Tom Whitmore: The epic battle inside YouTube over content moderation and recommendation algorithms is detailed brilliantly in a damning new report from Mark Bergen at Bloomberg News. New story: I spent weeks talking to folks who've worked at YouTube (and Google) about how the company has wrestled with recommendations, conspiracy theories and radicalism. https://t.co/FHmpHPyaz3 Mark Bergen (@mhbergen) April 2, 2019 Bottom line: YouTube failed to moderate extremely harmful content on its platform, and we are all paying the price. "Scores of people inside YouTube and Google, its owner, raised concerns about the mass of false, incendiary and toxic content that the world's largest video site surfaced and spread Each time they got the same basic response: Don't rock the boat." Executives sacrificed everything for engagement, allowing conspiracies and disinfo campaigns to spread, and killing proposals from workers that would have changed the technology that recommends these toxic videos, staff say. Excerpt: The conundrum isn't just that videos questioning the moon landing or the efficacy of vaccines are on YouTube. The massive "library," generated by users with little editorial oversight, is bound to have untrue nonsense. Instead, YouTube's problem is that it allows the nonsense to flourish. And, in some cases, through its powerful artificial intelligence system, it even provides the fuel that lets it spread. Wojcicki and her deputies know this. In recent years, scores of people inside YouTube and Google, its owner, raised concerns about the mass of false, incendiary and toxic content that the world's largest video site surfaced and spread. One employee wanted to flag troubling videos, which fell just short of the hate speech rules, and stop recommending them to viewers. Another wanted to track these videos in a spreadsheet to chart their popularity. A third, fretful of the spread of "alt-right" video bloggers, created an internal vertical that showed just how popular they were. Each time they got the same basic response: Don't rock the boat. The company spent years chasing one business goal above others: "Engagement," a measure of the views, time spent and interactions with online videos. Conversations with over twenty people who work at, or recently left, YouTube reveal a corporate leadership unable or unwilling to act on these internal alarms for fear of throttling engagement. Wojcicki would "never put her fingers on the scale," said one person who worked for her. "Her view was, 'My job is to run the company, not deal with this.'" This person, like others who spoke to Bloomberg News, asked not to be identified because of a worry of retaliation. YouTube turned down Bloomberg News' requests to speak to Wojcicki, other executives, management at Google and the board of Alphabet Inc., its parent company. Last week, Neal Mohan, its chief product officer, told The New York Times that the company has "made great strides" in addressing its issues with recommendation and radical content. And don't miss the wonderful illustration by Graham Roumieu. YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant [bloomberg.com] Data from @MoonshotCVE shows less than 20 channels spreading anti-vax theories reached over 170 million people.@micahsch, one of YT's earliest employees: "YouTube should never have allowed dangerous conspiracy theories to become such a dominant part of the platform's culture." Mark Bergen (@mhbergen) April 2, 2019 One of most telling parts, for me, is Project Bean, the effort that didn't come to pass. Some involved diagnosed it as to benign neglect; others cited a paralysis and fear of big changes. YouTube's business is complicated! pic.twitter.com/OsH73yZL6b Mark Bergen (@mhbergen) April 2, 2019 J. L. BELL is a Massachusetts writer who specializes in (among other things) the start of the American Revolution in and around Boston. He is particularly interested in the experiences of children in 1765-75. He has published scholarly papers and popular articles for both children and adults. He was consultant for an episode of History Detectives, and contributed to a display at Minute Man National Historic Park. Mae Ruth Meyer, beloved mother and grandmother in blue, was called home on March 29, 2019 at the age of 90. Living Gospel Equality Now: Loving in the Heart of God: Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests News / National by Staff reporter PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa yesterday applauded the immense contribution of India to Zimbabwe's economic reconstruction, diplomacy and international politics.Represented by Patrick Chinamasa, Mnangagwa told the first Diaspora convention for Indians in Harare yesterday that the country's developmental trajectory will be smoother and softer with support from friends like India, its corporate citizens and its Diaspora.''I am standing here before a gathering of fellow Zimbabweans who happen to have a historical and cultural connection to India, which we recognise and respect. Indeed, that respect is grounded in the immense contribution and cooperation that this community has made over the years to this country in business, in politics, in diplomacy, in health, and in academia," Mnangagwa said.He thanked men and women of Indian origin who has served the country with distinction, and singled out Industry and Commerce deputy minister Raj Modi."Of course, you all know our current deputy minister of Industry and Commerce, Honourable Modi is also doing an excellent job promoting business relations with India."I wish to applaud investors such as Varun beverages and Surface Wilmar that came to Zimbabwe and have now established themselves," Mnangagwa said referring to Indian beverages firm Varun which has invested in a $30 million Pepsi bottling plant in Zimbabwe and Surface Wilmar which is one of the largest cooking oil refinery companies here which also manufactures soaps and oil refinery by-products."The Government of Zimbabwe is committed to ensuring that all these investments and other investments are secure and protected," Mnangagwa said."We want to see them flourish and be good ambassadors carrying back the message of trade and investment in Zimbabwe."The president said SMEs form the backbone of Indian business and entrepreneurship and indeed most of the businesses run by members of the Indian Diaspora are in the SME sector.He said India was both a potential market for Zimbabwean goods, as well as a source of investment and technology."There is a huge opportunity for Indian business which, taken in its tide, will see this growing economy in the world establishing a foothold in Zimbabwe in manufacturing and provision of services for the entire African region," said the president.Indian ambassador to Zimbabwe Rungsung Masakui said engagement with the Indian Diaspora is one cornerstone of his country's foreign policy."The government of India has been in touch with the Indian Diaspora and is proud of the immense contribution they have made to developing countries and their effort to establish themselves in business and other vast areas," Masakui said.The ambassador expressed gratitude to the government of Zimbabwe in allowing the Indian community to exist within Zimbabwe. News / National by Staff reporter Traditional leaders and scholars from the VaTsonga tribe in Zimbabwe (also known as Shangaan) are demanding the reinstatement of names of local landmarks whose identities were controversially changed after the liberation war.Names of such facilities as schools, beer halls and health facilities were changed during the period that ushered in Zimbabwe's independence, which was secured in 1980.Among the landmarks at the centre of the disgruntlement is the site currently known as Chitsanga hill, where the Chiredzi District Heroes Acre is located.It was prominent for having a fountain, at the foot of the hill that never dried, as well as plentiful reeds. Hence it bore the name Tihlanga hill.Tihlanga is Tsonga for reeds.Hebert Pikhela, an academic and researcher, criticised the renaming of the site."There is a false narrative that this place was an origin of any other tribe other than VaTsonga people. Our forefathers lived here and were displaced during the war. Others were later displaced with the coming in of sugarcane plantations. After the war, some other tribes came to stay here while VaTsonga also returned to their original places," he said.Pikhela said the change of names risked distorting the Shangaan dynasty.The scholar argued that Chiredzi's history had already been distorted with name changes.He advocated for the town to be renamed to Tshovani."This area was called Tshovani township long back. It, therefore, follows that after attaining town status, it should have been renamed as thus.Townhouse bosses changed Tshovani to Chiredzi," Pikhela argued.Chiredzi was named after a local river that starts at the mountains between Chief Nhema and Chief Ndanga in Zaka.Chiredzi is, on paper, under Ndanga district."We are not raising any tribal conflicts but as an equally important tribe, we also want to have a legacy in Zimbabwe. The fact that Chief Tshovani's land was under Ndanga district does not give Ndanga as Chief the jurisdiction of the land. It was a geo-political name not the definition of Chief Ndanga's territory," Pikhela insisted.There is also dissatisfaction with the renaming of the beer hall now known as Chigarapasi. Situated in Chiredzi, it is said to be the biggest beer hall in Zimbabwe.It is said to have been originally known as Tsamanihasi by VaTsonga people who stayed there before the liberation war of the 1970s.A school under Chief Sengwe also had its name changed, albeit after a lawsuit.Muhlanguleni Secondary School was originally named-PFukani before a headmaster from outside the area changed it to Mukai in 1984.Coincidentally, there was also another school in the capital Harare bearing the same name.There were problems when the school Chiredzi erroneously withdrew cash from a bank belonging to the Harare school, leading to a protracted legal battle.The headmaster gave in to the rage of parents and changed the school's name to Muhlanguleni.Local headman, Tiyani Chilonga under Chief Sengwe, also lamented the alteration of names of local facilities to dominant languages in the country."We have many names for schools and clinics that had their names changed from our language. This was due to officials running the administration of the area. I feel these names must be considered back to the original ones to avoid distortion and preserve our identity," Chilonga said.Tsonga is largely spoken southeast of Zimbabwe and is one of the Southern African country's 16 official languages since the adoption of the 2013 Constitution.VaTsonga have previously called on authorities to rename the Buffalo Range Airport and the Sango border post after local liberation heroes such as Justin Chauke buried at the national heroes shrine. News / National by Staff reporter COMMERCIAL traffic arrivals from South Africa through Beitbridge continued trickling into the country as the strike by South African Revenue Services (Sars) workers and their affiliates entered its fifth day yesterday.Although hardly noticeable because of a slump in imports through Beitbridge of late following the devaluation of the local currency coupled wth a newly introduced United States dollar duty regime on some goods, a few haulage trucks for both domestic market and in transit checked in at the border post."It's not the same, there is reduced traffic and our colleagues in South Africa confirm there is skeleton staff manning the Sars offices," a shipping agent at Beitbridge said on Sunday."There are queues of haulage vehicles on the South African side which are coming into Zimbabwe. They are not moving as fast as they would normally."The strike by Sars workers started on Thursday last week. Media reports yesterday suggested that the strike was still far from over because the two sides were far from reaching agreement.Sars, which deployed mostly senior personnel to ports including Beitbridge, according to reports, was evidently not copping and had advised clients to make e-payments to avoid inconveniences.A notice by the national acting chief customs officer, Beyers Theron advised clients of possible delays."The strike is expected to start on Thursday (March 28, 2019), and could involve a number of Sars employees at branch offices, including Customs officers at ports of entry," Theron said.Theron added that his office had put in place a contingency plan to address key areas of the business that could be affected by the strike action."While delays can unfortunately still be experienced at branches and ports of entry as a result of capacity constraints, Customs clients can assist Sars by, for example, not making cash payments at branches, but rather [electronic funds transfer] EFT payments during this time," Theron said."Sars will keep its clients updated on the strike action using social media platforms, including its website, and will also advise clients on any service limitations that may be experienced," he said.Shipping agents at Beitbridge said although business was slow there was very little difference considering that clearing picks up towards the weekend.The bulk of goods coming into the country by road from SA come through Beitbridge where both countries are currently upgrading their border posts for smoother and faster processing of travellers and goods.Beitbridge also handles goods destined for other landlocked countries such as Malawi, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo who use SA ports.Customs officers at Beitbridge said business was low."It's trickling, we have some traffic arriving," said Customs officers on the arrival side of border post.Zimbabwe has introduced new duty regimes on some goods deemed locally available, which is now payable in US dollars or its equivalent in real time gross settlement dollars bond notes. The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority on-line systems are, however, failing to pick up the new duty regime electronically.Zimra has from last week failed to respond to questions relating to that failure. News / National by Staff reporter Exiled former Cabinet minister Jonathan Moyo has been hit with a civil suit after allegedly failing to pay $32 000 electricity arrears for his Mazowe farm.Moyo, who is represented by his wife, Beatrice, has since approached the High Court with an application for condonation for late filing of his response.He claimed in his papers that he failed to promptly respond to the matter because he is outside Zimbabwe. News / National by Staff reporter Residents of Matapi flats in Mbare have expressed their profound gratitude to government and the City of Harare for the work being done in renovating the flats and making the place habitable.At the mention of Matapi, Matererini, Magaba and Chishawasha flats in Mbare what comes to mind is a dirty place, but that is now a thing of the past.Located in one of Harare's oldest suburbs, the place had become an eyesore.Following President Emmerson Mnangagwa's tour last year after Matapi Block 4 was gutted by fire, an investor FGC approached government and partnered the City of Harare to renovate the flats."We want to transform this place and after we are done it will be a completely new place which the residents will be proud of, we will also work on the ablution facilities," said Mr Etherton of FCG.The flats have been painted outside as well as the inside corridors, and window panes are being replaced.After assessing the progress, the Deputy Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Honourable Jennifer Mhlanga praised the work being done."Government is really impressed by the work being done here, the place has totally transformed as you can see," said Mhlanga.Some residents who spoke to ZBC News appreciated the work being done pledging to maintain the place in a hygienic manner."Tinotenda zvikuru, musha wedu wanaka and tichauchengetedza, hopefully zvirwere zvichaitawo zvishoma. (We are very grateful, our home is now habitable and we will maintain it, we hope there will be a reduction in the spread of diseases),," said one of the residents.The residents are happy and the partners say after they are done Mbare will be completely transformed. In our weekly digest, find all of the stories you might have missed. Read on for the announcements crossing the BOH news desk this week. LAUNCHES, COLLABORATIONS AND PARTNERSHIPS Maiden Home debuts a new category today in honor of its second anniversary: beds. Two bed frames, the Essex and the Wythe, are available made-to-order on the brands website. The company, founded by Nidhi Kapur, who hails from McKinsey, Google and Birchbox, was one of the first digitally native businesses in the direct-to-consumer furniture space. The Wythe bed frame Courtesy of Maiden Home Asheville, North Carolinabased ceramics company East Fork will debut new spring glazes, a blue Big Sky and light green Celery. Co-founder and chief creative officer Connie Matisse drew inspiration from her West Coast roots and the earliest signs of spring, said the brand. East Fork's new glaze, Celery Courtesy of East Fork The American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame Foundation has found a permanent home for its memorabilia, library and the Hall of Fame Foundation offices, in High Point, North Carolina. The 17,500-square-foot building is a block away from the International Home Furnishings Center. The permanent home of the American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame Foundation Courtesy of American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame Foundation Los Angelesbased interior designer Stefani Stein launched August Abode, an online lifestyle brand that sells wallpaper and vintage home goods. New Yorkbased direct-to-consumer paint company Clare kicked off the search for its next great paint color last Thursday. It gave six options for colors with names like Cornflower Blue and Berry Pink in the crowd-sourced campaign. You can keep up on the brands Instagram, @clarepaint, for updates over the next few weeks. Irving in Twilight with Matte Black Geo-01 pull Courtesy of Ziggy Los Angelesbased Tangram Studio, which makes custom furniture, is now Studio Other. Having changed into an independent entity in order for the commercial furnishings studio to grow across the U.S., it will continue to be led by Charlotte Wiederholt, who serves as president and creative director. Eco-conscious furniture brand Ziggy has collaborated with Nest Studio on a collection of hardware options in the likeness of Nests Geo Series pulls. Drew Barrymore has launched her debut home collection, available exclusively at Walmart.com, Hayneedle.com and Jet.com, reported HFN. Drew Barrymore Flower Home includes pet beds, textiles, wall art, ceramics, furniture and curtains, with price points from $18 to $899, and new seasonal collections. I have always had a love for creating joyful spacesplaces where unexpected prints and patterns, shapes and styles, and colors and textures come together in the most delightful way, said Barrymore. My new collection of furniture and home decor is inspired by this passion and I hope it inspired everyone to make themselves at home. OPENINGS, AUCTIONS AND EVENTS Fast Company seconds Warren Shoulbergs assessment that hotels by brands are the best advertisements for the retailers products yet: In April, minimalist Japanese retailer Muji will open its first hotel in Japan. In 2018, it opened two hotels in China; its latest comprises 79 rooms atop a multi-level Muji store. S.I. Newhouse Jr.s Collection of Modern Masters Comes to Christies, reported The New York Times. The magazine publishers career began modestly, but because he was never sentimental about his collectionalways willing to part with a Jasper Johns to trade up or cash outthe wealth grew fast. Today, his family follows in his footsteps, selling 11 works worth a collective $130 million at Christies New York. The Decorators Club Education Fund kicks off this years lecture series, Influential Women in the Arts, Architecture & Design, with a talk by architect Annabelle Selldorf tomorrow, April 3. The following lecture takes place April 11 and features designer Kit Kemp and Town & Country editor in chief Stellene Volandes. Wayfair will open its first storemore proof that the internet killed brick-and-mortar retail just to bring it back, reported Fast Company. The Natick, Massachusettsbased seamless, connected experience for shoppers will open in early fall. The fifth-annual Rebloom on the Roof fundraiser supports nonprofit Room to Rebloom, which provides victims of domestic violence in the National Capital Area with design services and other resources to help make their homes beautiful. Designer Barry Dixon and journalist Will Thomas will host the event on May 16. Purchase tickets here. Southern Guild announced its next exhibit will be Implement, with South African blacksmith Conrad Hicks, at the gallery in Cape Towns Silo District. It will run from May 24 to July 17. RECOMMENDED READING Business of Fashion broke down the new brick-and-mortar rules amid our current retail apocalypse by honing in on new New York shopping district Hudson Yards, which opened earlier this month. Neiman Marcus, Forty Five Ten and LOreal are just a few brands that have moved into the Manhattan neighborhood. Speaking of Hudson Yards, Fast Company explained what we were all thinking (or at least seeing all over our social media): Why Everyone Hates the Vessel. A $150 million structure with stairs that climb 150 feet into the air (I guess thats $1 million a foot), the Thomas Heatherwickdesigned structure has been described as the stairway to nowhere, a mythical giants wastepaper basket, a colossal shawarma, an Instagram-friendly panopticon, as well as what youd get if Twitter were a work of architecture. But the issue goes deeper than aesthetics, argues writer Katharine Schwab: The descriptions are hilarious, but the derision points to a bigger problem with how Hudson Yards developer Related has framed this expensive structure as a public benefitwhen in fact, critics say it is yet another way for the developers to make money (even though climbing the Vessel is technically free). The Guardian profiled Annie Leibovitz on some early shots that defined her career, featured in an exhibit at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. Reflecting the changing cultural role of photography itself, Leibovitz eased from photojournalism into portraiture, taking striking shots of the eras great artists, from Andy Warhol to Richard Avedon, from Ansel Adams to that ambush shot of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson, wrote Jordan Riefe. But it was her pictures of celebrities that really made her name: the cover shots for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue that included a topless Miley Cyrus at the age of 15 and a pregnant Demi Moore wearing only a 30-carat diamond ring. It is these images that have made Leibovitz that rare thing: a celebrity photographer. CUE THE APPLAUSE Stephanie Odegard received the Iqbal Masih Award for her work in reducing child labor. In 1987, Odegard launched Stephanie Odegard Co. Ltd. with the goal of ending child labor through her business and in the South Asian carpet industry. Successful in part because of a partnership with nonprofit GoodWeave, of which she is a co-founder, Odegard and 170 other companies reduced child labor in the South Asian carpet industry by two-thirds. Sonnemans Pluck lamp collection was recognized at the Red Dot awards for product design. The awards assess innovation, functionality, formal quality, longevity and ergonomics, and this years competition featured more than 5,500 product entries. Hartmann & Forbess Rollerfold was selected as the 2018 Window Covering Manufacturers Association product of the year. The submission resonated with judges for its design and style and its operating system. We congratulate the Rollerfold team and all of the industrys engineers and designers on their hard work and vision, says Ralph Vasami, executive director of WCMA. - 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." Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Residential condo buildings and single family houses are seen above Burrard Inlet in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Photographer: Darryl Dyck/Bloomberg via Getty Images The cooldown in Vancouver's housing market continues as March sales fell to a more than three-decade low. The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver says only 1,727 properties, of all types, changed hands last month. However, sales were up slightly when compared to the 1,484 transaction in February. Compared to the same time last year, the average price fell 7.7 per cent. March was the 10th straight monthly decline. The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver says government policy has gone a long way in bringing about the slowdown even though employment and the economy in the region are strong. What policymakers are failing to recognize is that demand-side measures dont eliminate demand, they sideline potential homebuyers in the short-term, said Ashley Smith, President of The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, in a news release. That demand is ultimately satisfied down the line because shelter needs dont go away. Using public policy to delay local demand in the housing market just feeds disruptive cycles that have been so well-documented in our region. A key measure economists look at for clues about further declines is the sales-to-active listings ratio. Anything below 12 signals downward pressure. For all property types, the sales-to-active listings ratio for March 2019 is 13.5 per cent. By property type, the ratio is 9.4 per cent for detached homes, 15.9 per cent for townhomes, and 17.2 per cent for apartments, said the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. Sign up now Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. When Angelina Jolie first approached UNHCR over 18 years ago, it was to learn about the world firsthand, to meet the people who were the innocent victims of war in an effort to understand their plight and hopefully one day, be a part of finding solutions. Only 24 at the time, she was already a Hollywood superstar an Oscar-winner who had just completed a major blockbuster, Tomb Raider. Stirred to action by what she saw and the people she met, Jolie signed up to be a Goodwill Ambassador for the worlds largest refugee agency, and from 2001-2012, when she was named Special Envoy, she took over 60 trips to war-torn locations. From those early trips, her activism has both broadened and deepened, and last Friday, she addressed the U.N. Peacekeeping Ministeriala gathering of the worlds Defense Ministersfor the 3rd time. In her speech, Jolie asked that the member nations consider expanding the role of female peacekeepers in their troops, and, just as crucial, that as peace negotiations in places like Afghanistan begin, that women be allowed at the table. Angelina Jolie addresses a meeting at the United Nations | Timoth A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images Women and girls are still the majority of the victims of war, Jolie said. Women are at the absolute epicenter of modern conflict, in the worst possible sense. But more often than not they are still on the outside looking in when it comes to politics and decisions about their future As long as we continue to put almost every other issue ahead of womens rights and participation, we will remain stuck in a cycle of violence and conflict. Jolies U.N. speech was really a culmination of 18 years of experience and immersion in foreign policy. Today, her work is really focused on four big projects: 1. The Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) 2. UNHCR 3. Women, Peace and Security Masters program at the London School of Economics 4. A global current affairs childrens program in partnership with the BBC RELATED: Angelina Jolies Youngest Children Join Her on the Red Carpet for the Premiere of Dumbo Story continues Jolie co-founded PSVI in 2012 with former U.K. Foreign Minister William Hague, and in less than seven years, 156 nations have pledged support. There is now a lot more awareness and discussion and many more countries have made commitments, says Jolie. For example, 156 countries have pledged not to include amnesties for rape when they are negotiating peace agreements. It is hard to believe, but peace treaties routinely grant immunity to people whove carried out the most disgusting violent crimes against civilians. So we have to make sure all those countries live up to that commitment. In November, Jolie and Hague plan to reconvene the member nations for a conference (the first was in 2012) to continue to come up with concrete solutions to combat sexual violence in war zones. While progress is being made, Jolie says it isnt time for anyone to rest on their laurels. Angelina Jolie (L) shakes hands with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina following her visit in Dhaka | STR/AFP/Getty Images If you look across the world there are far too many women and girls who are not only not seeing progress, their rights are slipping away from them, she says. We have to change laws that treat women as second-class citizens. But we also have to enforce them. So one of the things we are putting forward now is a proposal for a permanent international body to investigate war crimes, including mass rape and other sexual and gender-based violence. She adds, Unless you immediately gather evidence and testimony that can stand up in court, there is no chance of having successful prosecutions. At the moment it takes months and even years to start proper investigations when there has been mass rape carried out against a civilian population. We want to create a permanent body of experts, lawyers and investigators who can do this immediately. In addition to Jolies work on PSVI, she is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security, where she is expected to return for more lectures later this year. RELATED: Angelina Jolie Gets Blessing as She Visits Peru to Meet Brave Displaced Venezuelan Refugees Since January 2018, she has been working with NATO as the organization works to fight against sexual violence in combat zones, and to better care for victims. Later this year, Jolie inspired by her children: Maddox, 17, Pax, 15, Zahara, 14, Shiloh, 12, and Knox and Vivienne, 10 partners with BBC to produce a childrens English language television program that will focus on current affairs. We enjoy reading the kids pull out of the New York Times and look at National Geographic, she says. But as a parent, I felt there wasnt that one vetted and reliable internationally-minded news program tailored for children that we could sit down and watch together each week. That is what I hope this will be for our family and other families. Jolie will also be making a much-anticipated return onscreen, when Maleficent: Mistress of Evil hits theaters Oct. 18. The follow-up to the 2014 hit, which raked in $750 million, also stars a returning Elle Fanning as Princess Aurora and Michelle Pfeiffer as a new character. RELATED VIDEO: Angelina Jolie (and Some of the Kids!) Make a Surprise Appearance at the Survivor Finale I love my horns, says Jolie. It is such a pleasure to play her and I hope the audience enjoy her as much as I do. It was wonderful to work again with Elle and to have a chance to work with Michelle. Jolie is also producing an adaptation of the Newberry Award-winning childrens book The One and Only Ivan, about a gorilla named Ivan who lived in a cage in the mall. For that, Jolie tapped pal (and Survivor contestant) Mike White to write the script. The starry cast includes Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell and Emmy-winner Bryan Cranston. It was Shis favorite book a few years ago, says Jolie. I love its hopeful message about the environment and conservation. Angelina Jolie with her kids Knox, Zahara, Vivienne, and Shiloh at the premiere of Disney's Meanwhile, Jolie will always be a strong advocate for UNHCR. In February she traveled to Bangladesh to meet with Rohingya refugees who have been persecuted in Myanmar. And this June, she will once again participate in World Refugee Day, as she has for nearly two decades. The organization changed her life in many ways, including providing her a lifelong circle of friends. The second UN mission I went on, to Cambodia, I met two women from England and France who were working with UNHCR, Jolie recalls. Loung (Ung, the author ofFirst They Killed My Mother, the book Jolie adapted into a film in 2017) was there as well. She adds, Most of my friends are women I have met and worked within the field. Over 18 years our lives have taken many turns. Good and bad. We have grown older, most of us mothers now, still committed to shared goals. feel very blessed in my work to have the opportunity to meet so many extraordinary people who spend their lives dedicated to others. A former Mountie who killed his wife with his service pistol in their southeast Edmonton home nearly nine years ago now hopes to get married again. But the Alberta Court of Appeal has rejected a bid made by Tirth Sehmbi to obtain a passport and leave the country. "The main concerns arose from the appellant's desire to find a new life partner, and his developing relationship with a woman in Singapore," the appeal court said in a ruling released Monday. "A concern was also expressed that the appellant might attempt to relocate to another country with his children, and the difficulties that would arise if the appellant's illness re-emerged while he was outside the country." Sehmbi was found not criminally responsible in June 2013 for the July 2010 murder of his wife, Rajpinder. A Court of Queen's Bench justice ordered Sehmbi into custody at Alberta Hospital Edmonton after finding he was suffering from an acute psychotic disorder when he emptied his service pistol, shooting his wife 16 times. At one point Sehmbi, an RCMP constable at the time, held the gun to his wife's forehead and fired three bullets. Sehmbi is now on a conditional discharge and living in the community, but remains under supervision of the Alberta Review Board. His treatment team has concluded that he continues to pose a risk of harm to the public and that an absolute discharge would not be appropriate. If all goes well, he advises there is a real likelihood of marriage between them. - Alberta Review Board report In August 2018, the review board heard that Sehmbi's mental state, living situation and activities had remained basically unchanged over the past year. "However, there is one major change," the board noted. "He is actively seeking a life partner who lives in Singapore." Sehmbi told his psychiatrist that the woman's family knows about the shooting. "Apparently, she might arrive in Canada on a work visa and if she does, he plans on providing more detail on his index offence. If all goes well, he advises there is a real likelihood of marriage between them," the report said. Story continues The review board disagreed with a recommendation from Sehmbi's treatment team, which had sought to amend his travel conditions. The board varied three conditions that had been imposed by the treatment team. The board said he couldn't apply for a passport or do any international travel, and that any approved travel be restricted to Western Canada for up to two weeks. At an appeal court hearing held March 20, Sehmbi's lawyer argued that the review board had acted unfairly and provided inadequate reasons for its disposition. But in the decision issued Monday, the appeal court noted that the review board didn't commit any "reviewable error by departing from the recommendations of the treatment team." It also said that the board had only rejected "recommended changes to the status quo" and that Sehmbi hadn't had "any concrete travel plans for the board to consider." Sehmbi's journey back into society Five weeks after Sehmbi was committed to Alberta Hospital in 2013, the review board determined he could wander the hospital grounds unsupervised. The board also granted him passes to spend time in Edmonton as long as he was supervised. CBC By January 2014, he was permitted to visit the city unsupervised. At the end of that year, he was allowed to have face-to-face contact with his two sons as long as it was supervised "by a responsible adult." The review board granted him passes allowing him to stay away from the psychiatric hospital for up to four days and three nights. A disposition from the board after a hearing in November 2015 noted that Sehmbi appeared ready to transition to the community but said he continued to present "a significant threat to the safety of the community and will remain on a full warrant." Sehmbi was released from Alberta Hospital and allowed to live in a supervised group home. CBC By February 2017, Sehmbi was moved from a supervised group home and allowed to live independently with his mother and his two sons. In September 2017, the review board noted that Sehmbi "remains busy and involved with a part-time job, volunteer work, recreation, helping raise his two sons and domestic jobs in the house." In its most recent report, the review board noted that Sehmbi "enjoys a good relationship with his mother and his sons. He is helping his mother and sister, who are the legal guardians of his sons, in raising them." Cindy Ryan knows to the day how long it's been since her life changed thanks to an organ donation, and what that change has allowed her to experience. "My 50th birthday celebrated in hospital and a few more since," said the Westville, N.S., resident. "My daughter becoming vice-principal. My son graduating from St. F.X. My step-daughter becoming a nurse. My grandson starting high school. "My first date with the man who is now my husband, and our wedding, which gave me another son and granddaughter. The list goes on and on. In fact, it is 1,979 days long and counting." Ryan was on hand Tuesday as Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil tabled legislation that will make the province the first jurisdiction in North America to have presumed consent for organ and tissue donation. People will be able to opt out of donating their organs, but the onus will be on them to do so once the bill is proclaimed. The bill would not apply to people younger than 19 or those who do not have the ability to consent for themselves. Spain, Belgium already have opt-out system Ryan was hospitalized in 2013 with a virus that attacked her liver. She fell into a coma, and her family was told she had four weeks to live, but then she "hit the lottery" and received a liver transplant. Complications meant she needed another transplant in 2015. "Although many things have changed in the last four years, I am enjoying life again," she said. Shutterstock Dr. Stephen Beed, medical director of the province's Legacy of Life and critical care organ donation program, called Tuesday "a very good day" for the province and the program he helps run. The idea for presumed consent started gaining traction almost 15 years ago, he said. Several other countries, including Belgium and Spain, already use the system. The importance of organ donation is driven home when one spends time at the bedside with patients and their families, said Beed. Story continues "It's the only good we can offer to a family that's going through the worst days you can imagine in certain clinical circumstances, and we all understand the benefits for the recipients," he said. But while the idea has been pursued for some time and the former NDP government even passed, but did not proclaim, a similar bill in 2010 Beed said it wasn't until very recently that the organ donation program was in a position to be able to support such a change. Access to organ donation varies Even now, he said, there is more work to be done before donation opportunities are available in equal measure across the province. "I want to be able to say to every Nova Scotian wherever you live that the donation opportunity is going to be the same irrespective of your postal code," Beed said. "I'm not sure we can say that credibly today, but I want to be able to say that in 12 months or in 18 months. We have a chance to take what I think is a very good program and make it what I hope will be the best program in the country." Beed said enhancements to the system include more training for front-line health-care workers so they can recognize potential organ donors who can be referred to teams that can support them. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press "We know that the health-care communities across this province are populated by clinicians who didn't get training and education during their nursing school, their medical school, their residency on donation," he said. "So, we don't have a community that's as informed around the donation topic, if you will, as we'd like." Better recognition is part of improving the system, said Beed. The plan is to have experts in a central location who can support colleagues in more remote places, as well as to place local experts within the province's regional hospitals so there is support for staff on site. "That will require significant education and training, and it's going to be a long-term, continuous type of a process." 'We have work to do' premier Premier Stephen McNeil said the bill fills a need within the province, noting Nova Scotia has some of the highest per capita rates of willing donors in the country. "That doesn't always translate into the actual act of giving," he said. "We know that there are many ways that we can continue to improve the system that we have." McNeil pledged to put the necessary services in place to allow the province's donor program to live up to the promise of the legislation. "We know that in many parts of our province including the one I live in, which is a rural part of Nova Scotia we have work to do," he said. "I will make sure that the work that is required to build the system and supports around this will happen." The bill will not be proclaimed right away. Health Minister Randy Delorey said government officials would spend 12-18 months educating the public about the change and working on getting health-care workers the support they need to enhance the program. Even with the change, Delorey said, people should continue making their wishes known to loved ones, so there can be no question about intentions. Beed said that while they don't know for sure what the change will mean for donations, areas in Europe that have made the change have seen donations go up by as much as 35 per cent. He cautioned, however, that such progress doesn't simply come because of a law. There must be the necessary support for the system in place, too. As for Ryan, she said she's spent her second chance at life trying to pay it forward. That means acting as a public advocate for organ donation, along with her sister, "practically pulling people off the street to become blood donors" and starting a Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Transplant Association. She's even permanently tattooed her message on her arm. "So many changes in my life, so many things to be grateful for everyday, and all because someone I'll never have the honour to meet gave me the most generous gift of all - the gift of organ donation, the gift of life." READ MORE Submitted by Mark Ballard The journey to the top of Mount Everest is 8,850 meters, or 29,035 feet a lot of steps for St. John's mountain climber Mark Ballard. "I think human nature pushes you higher and higher," Ballard said. His trek to the top of the world's highest peak began long before he ever started planning to tackle the peak this spring. A year ago, on a whim, the engineer decided to tag along with some buddies who were heading to northern Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. "It started from there," he said. "I wanted to see if I could go higher and push it to harder mountains." Putting one foot in front of the other, he did just that. So far, he's summited Denali in Alaska, Skomakkarnibba and Kjerag in Norway where he currently works and lives and Island Peak in Nepal. But Mount Everest is different. It's harder, it's higher and, as the altitude bears down, it's not something every climber can handle. It began with his father Ballard's motivation for his journey began with a single step one he watched his father take over and over again. "My father lost his leg from diabetes and I've watched him for the last three years push himself," Ballard said. Submitted by Mark Ballard His father, Derek "Doc" Ballard, pushed himself to get out of bed. Pushed himself to sit up on his own. Pushed himself to learn how to walk on an amputated leg. "That has really inspired me to push myself higher and higher into my goals." Ballard started training for the punishing climb six months ago. Finding time between work as an oil and gas engineer in Norway he's managed to clock 331.5 hours of working out so far. "I've trained basically two hours a day every day," he said. "A combination of strength training for legs and back, cardio, and of course in-the-mountains hiking with lots of weight on my back." Ballard heads to Nepal on April 4 and begins his climb two days later. Story continues He's signed up with International Mountain Guides and will join a team heading up Mount Everest. "If you weren't a little bit nervous, there'd be something wrong," he said. Flying the Newfoundland flag Ballard said that he will have some cell service and Wi-Fi to keep in touch with his family and friends. He will also be documenting his climb up Everest on his Instagram account. Ballard said the trip to the top is totally dependent on weather as the window to reach the summit can open and close quickly. His best guess is that the trip will take six to eight weeks. Among the many items he will be carrying in his backpack is the provincial flag for Newfoundland and Labrador. "I am really proud to be a Newfoundlander and I carry that flag on all my climbs." He hopes to be posing with that flag when he reaches the top. Read more stories from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador By Steve Holland and Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday his pressure on NATO nations to pay more for their defense is leading to tens of billions of dollars more in contributions, but the allies may need to boost their budgets even more. Trump used a well-worn script about burden-sharing with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in talks at the White House. The meeting came a day before NATO foreign ministers sit down in Washington for what is expected to be a session dominated by concerns about Russia. Trump, who has ruffled feathers among European allies by repeatedly saying that NATO nations needed to pay more and ease the burden on the United States, said his tactics have paid off. "Since I came to office it's a rocket ship up. We've picked up over $140 billion in additional money, and we look like we're going to have at least another $100 billion in spending by the nations...by 2020," he said. The U.S. president said he would like to see NATO members pay more than 2 percent of their gross domestic product for defense. Trump told NATO leaders last year to increase defense spending to 4 percent of GDP. He said the United States pays 4.3 percent of its GDP to NATO. Trump singled out Germany for not doing enough, while praising German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Germany honestly is not paying their fair share," he said. "They're not paying what they should be paying. They're paying close to 1 percent." The White House, in a statement, said that Trump met with Stoltenberg to mark NATO's 70th anniversary and reaffirm U.S. support for the alliance. The White House said the two leaders "reviewed NATO's unprecedented progress to increase burden-sharing" and also discussed "ongoing efforts to fight terrorism (and) check Russian aggression." "WE'LL GET ALONG WITH RUSSIA" Trump said a stronger NATO provides a bulwark against Russia, but that he believed relations with Moscow will be fine. As has been his norm, Trump was reluctant to criticize Russia. I hope we have a good relationship with Russia," he said. "But I think well get along with Russia. Stoltenberg, who is to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, singled out Russia for "violating the INF treaty," the Cold War-era Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty. Trump in February announced plans to withdraw the United States from the INF treaty this summer, saying Russia was in violation of it. Russia is sowing discord in the alliance by selling to NATO member Turkey the S-400 air defense system. The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to its F-35 fighter jets to Turkey over its S-400 plans. "We have very serious concerns about its stated plans to proceed with the acquisition of the S-400 missile defense system and there will be potential consequences, within sanctions law and the F-35 program if they continue," said a senior State Department official who briefed reporters. The United States says that Turkey's purchase of the Russian air defense system would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft, which is built by Lockheed Martin Corp. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to preview the meeting of NATO foreign ministers, said the gathering would discuss all elements of the military threat posed by Russia, including in the Black Sea, as well as the Afghan peace process and members' budget contributions to the alliance. The official said the NATO allies would seek to agree on a package of measures to bolster NATO's military presence in the Black Sea, which has become a flashpoint with Moscow over its seizure of Ukrainian ships last year. "The focus is on the defense and deterrence posture of the alliance in the Black Sea region," said the official, adding that a plenary session on Thursday would focus on Russia, including what Washington sees as Moscow's breach of the INF treaty. (Reporting by Steve Holland and Lesley Wroughton; editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Leslie Adler) York Regional Police say a ransom demand was made in the case of Wanzhen Lu, a Chinese international student who was abducted by a group of masked men in a Markham, Ont., parking garage on March 23. Lu was found suffering from minor injuries in Gravenhurst, Ont., three days later Police wouldn't confirm any details of how or when the ransom demand was received, or the amount sought, but Const. Andy Pattenden did tell CBC that it was "made late into the investigation." "We cannot provide further details as it's now evidence before the courts," he said via text. One of four suspects wanted in connection with the abduction turned himself in to police this week. A Canada-wide warrant was issued Monday for Abdullahi Adan, 37, of Toronto, who was wanted on four charges: kidnapping, forcible confinement, assault with a weapon and assault. Adan turned himself in overnight, York Regional Police Const. Andy Pattenden confirmed to CBC Toronto early Tuesday. York Regional Police "It's definitely just due to the ongoing pressure, I'm sure, from the public, from the media, from social media, as well as our investigators who are working diligently to find all the suspects," Pattenden said in a telephone interview. Adan appeared in court via video link in Newmarket, about 50 kilometres north of Toronto, Tuesday morning. His case was put over to Friday. Lu owned condo, drove luxury cars Police have yet to reveal details about why Lu may have been targeted. The CBC has confirmed that he owned a unit in that Markham condominium building where he was forced into a van. Records show he purchased the unit outright in 2018. Police had also previously confirmed that Lu drove several luxury cars, and on Tuesday, CBC confirmed that there are liens against him in connection to four vehicles: a Ferrari 488 GTB, a Lamborghini Huracan, a Rolls Royce Wraith and a Land Rover Range Rover Velar, which documents show he was leasing. Photographs from an Instagram account, since deleted, appear to show Lu with the same cars. He has also been photographed in what appears to be high-end designer clothing. Story continues York Regional Police Lu, a Chinese national, is enrolled in a bachelor of business administration program at Yorkville University, a private institution with locations in Toronto, New Brunswick and British Columbia. Pattenden said investigators are "working closely" with the Lu family, who flew in from China after Lu was reported missing. He would not offer specific details on their whereabouts, because "there are still concerns for their security as we have three suspects still outstanding." 3 suspects still sought Adan was the first suspect to be named after surveillance cameras recorded three masked men taking Lu, 22, from the parking garage of a condominium building in Markham, around 6 p.m. ET on March 23. Police have said the men forced Lu into a black Dodge Caravan after shocking him with a conductive energy weapon, while a fourth was driving the vehicle. On March 26, Lu was found alive after knocking on the door of a home in Gravenhurst, Ont., almost 200 kilometres away from where he was taken. He was suffering from minor injuries and was taken to hospital. Police say he has since been reunited with his family. Police are advising the remaining suspects to seek legal counsel and turn themselves in. Police are also asking members of the public to contact them if they have any information about the investigation. The suspects are all described as male. One suspect is described as wearing a mask with blue pants and a jacket. The second has dark skin, is six feet one inch tall and was wearing a black Canada Goose jacket. The third was wearing a green and yellow jacket with a hood. Eyal Zisser is a lecturer in the Middle East History Department at Tel Aviv University. 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. . ..Israel Hayom..02 April'19..Despite the efforts to secure understandings with Hamas for a cease-fire, Israel is struggling to restore peace and quiet along the Gaza border. The rocket fire at Gaza-adjacent communities is continuing unabated, together with violent disturbances on the border fence, incendiary balloons and even infiltration attempts.In light of the difficulties involved in establishing a modicum of calm along the border, some Israelis are calling on the IDF to enter and reconquer the Gaza Strip. The IDF is undoubtedly capable of doing so, but the question is not how many days it would take for the army to defeat Hamas, rather what would happen the day after. More specifically, how much time would Israel have to before it is forced to remove its forces under an onslaught of international pressure? And even if U.S. President Donald Trump fully backs the Israeli government, we must still consider the Israeli public's patience before it starts calling on the government to return the boys home and leave Gaza to the Gazans, or in other abandon them to Hamas yet again.We can, of course, hope against hope that the Egyptians or even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will agree to govern Gaza on their own. However, we can't realistically expect the Egyptians to voluntarily spill their own blood in a fight to topple Hamas and Abbas is likely incapable of imposing his rule in Gaza, which he lost to Hamas a decade ago.In Israel, there are those who seemingly want to turn Hamas into Hezbollah. After all, this is the implication of their calls to establish a "Lebanese quiet" along the Gaza border: Completely disengage from Gaza under an umbrella of agreements and understandings with Hamas, similar to those with Hezbollah. To secure complete quiet along the Gaza border, however, Hamas must not only be as strong as Hezbollah but free of the restrictions and blockades currently squeezing it.To be sure, even those who hail the quiet on the northern border cannot ignore the price: Hezbollah has armed itself with over 100,000 missiles, which blanket the majority of Israeli territory. It's not certain that fleeting peace and quiet on the Gaza border is worth such a price.It's important to note that the current calm along the northern border could also come with an expiration date, after which we will learn yet again that the missiles in Hezbollah's warehouses haven't rusted quite as fast as hoped, and that the gun from the first act will reappear in the last act shooting.The prevailing situation on the border with Gaza is uncomfortable for Israel, but it mustn't be turned into a defeat and certainly not into a victory for Hamas. The only place Hamas is winning is in the Israeli press, which either for political reasons or a thirst for "ratings" is painting a battered terrorist organization as the victor.Hamas is in a Catch-22. It is flailing and kicking against the rising tides, mired in a war for survival it can't truly win. Its fight is to keep its head above water, nothing more. During its rule, Hamas has turned the Strip into a disaster zone. The people there are suffering unprecedented economic despair. They and their children have no hope for a better future. Now Hamas is sending Gaza's youth to die on the border fence in a futile campaign.Hamas has never been more isolated in the Arab world and international arena. It is wedged between the Egyptian hammer and Israeli anvil and looks to be losing the support of the people in Gaza, who hold it responsible for their calamitous situation.When Hamas is battered and weak, it has nothing to lose, which explains Israel's struggle to deter it sufficiently. In its weakness, however, Hamas is also willing to accept the crumbs Israel is offering: salary payments for civil servants and insignificant funds for economic initiatives to help it survive the month, not longer.Similar to its fights with other enemies in the region, Israel's battle with Hamas won't end in some form of a magic knock-out punch. It is an ongoing struggle where the side that is most steadfast, and also capable of self-restraint, will emerge victoriously. Hamas is driving quickly toward a dead end, devoid of hope for a future. Neither a military clash with Israel nor an arrangement with it will alter this reality. 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. . ..JNS.org..01 April '19..Israel is officially engaged in the throes of a low-intensity conflict with Hamas.The March 25 rocket attack on Israel, which destroyed a home and injured seven members of a family in Mishmeret, north of Tel Aviv, demonstrates that this conflict poses a real threat to the citizens of Israel. And even though Israel pounded Hamas targets in Gaza pursuant to that attack, this weeks attacksone on Saturday night, which saw five rockets fired at Israel, and another one on Sundaysuggest that Israels deterrence has lost some of its power.Eran Lerman, former deputy director of Israels National Security Council, suggests otherwise. He told JNS that Hamas takes us very seriously.He explained that there is a paradox here. Hamass behavior reflects an understanding that because it is so weak and Israel so strong, Israel will be careful not to obliterate the terror group because we can do so easily.Lerman said this is a paradox within a paradox.The reason Israel does not feel obliged to go in and destroy Hamas, he said, is because Hamas is not a threat to our existence. It gets on our nerves. Its an irritant.Efraim Inbar, president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told JNS that deterrence is a tricky notion. Of course, Hamas is afraid of Israel, but it tests Israels tolerance threshold all the time.Inbar said Hamas understands that Israel does not want an escalation, particularly at this time before the elections, and that Israel does not object to Hamas rule, which weakens the Palestinian national movement.He explained that Hamas launched missiles towards Tel Aviv as a threat to escalate in order to get concessions from Israel, immediately announcing that it was a mistake, hoping the Israeli response would be tolerable.Bearing in mind that Hamas is not very sensitive to the cost Israel exacted, this is what happened. Once in a while, Israel has to escalate its responses to signal that the brinkmanship game could be very risky. The continued yammerings of one guy about comics, books, movies. Sometimes I write stories. And I finally got that scanner. * The 4th International Competition of Cartoons Aleksandar Klas 2017, Serbia: All cartoonists whose cartoons are selected in the catalog and the exhibition will receive a free copy of the catalog ( Regulation ). * International Cartoon Contest in Memory of Cartoonist Prof. Atila Ozer 2016, Turkey: The selected cartoons will be published in a catalog. These will be sent at no cost to the participants whose works are : The selected cartoons will be published in a catalog. These will be sent at no cost to the participants whose works are exhibited and published ( Regulation ). Large crowds are expected to gather in Monsey today to mourn Yisroel Avorhom Portugal, the rebbe of the Skulen Hasidic dynasty in Brooklyn, who died on Monday. He died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore at the age of 95, according to media reports. A funeral will be held in Brooklyn at 11 a.m., followed by burial in Monsey at 2 p.m. A procession is expected to begin at 4 Blueberry Hill Road and continue to the Viznitz Cemetery on Route 306, where the rebbe will be buried. Heavy traffic is expected throughout the area today as people travel from Brooklyn to Monsey to attend the ceremony. Many will be taking buses from the funeral in Brooklyn. Those driving from Brooklyn to Rockland are being asked to park at Palisades Credit Union Park, where shuttle buses will be available. Photo - Dr Mark and Delma Tronson at Lennox Head 1999 In this third miracle article, by late 1984, after this foundational development, I was ready to initiate motor racing chaplaincy; his first point of contact was the Confederation of Motor Sport (CAMS) in Sydney. I was given a very gracious welcome. I noted that motor sport is an activity fraught with a proclivity to accident, and although the chaplaincy model was not one which focused on track circuit disasters and funerals, the discussion about grief provided a starting point from which relationships developed. By mid 1985, after a series of administrative meetings, I was invited to the Oran Park race track in south west Sydney to initiate the motor racing chaplaincy. I recall this first encounter vividly for two reasons. The first was the culture shock, in that motor racing was a family affair which was primarily focused in the pits, and not (as one might imagine) on the track itself. The driver, the mechanics, their partners and all the children made a weekend of it and the pits had a Sunday school picnic atmosphere. The children thoroughly enjoyed themselves as they knew the other children from the various motor racing teams. The second point I remembered clearly was that, time and time again, people told me that I was the first visitor who asked about the people involved, not the cars or their engines. I had read of this type of encounter previously; in the US horse racing and equine ministry, where the chaplain was constantly told by the Strappers that he was the only one who asked after their welfare rather than that of the horse! I also attended the very next Oran Park meet, when Jack Brabham's son David was involved in a serious track crash that came close to taking his life. This was also the first occasion I met the late Peter Brock, who assumed I was a petrol head. "To the contrary," I explained to Peter Brock. "No, not at all, rather I'm very interested in you as a person, your team members and their family members". Peter then warmly welcomed me, and introduced me to his own entourage. In late 1985 the CAMS Federal Council approved my 'Pit Padre' submission, and over the following years the motor racing chaplaincy proceeded under its own steam with a coordinating chaplain the Reverend Garry Coleman. Subsequently, in June 2010, Garry was awarded an OAM for his years of chaplaincy service. The motor racing chaplaincy ministry has grown nationally, and now encompasses bike racing, the Formula 1, Bathurst, the rallies, seven-day events and others, and extended to New Zealand. Sydney motor racing driver Tom Watkinson, who is an active follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, has come with me to church services, men's breakfasts and youth rallies on numerous occasions and given his testimony. The miracle of the motor racing ministry was that the careful presentation put to CAMS resulted in a fully professional ministry being adopted; the motor racing chaplains themselves, who have more than adequately served their pit communities. Photo - Mark Tronson on Moruya beach walking with 3rd daughter Salley in 2004 - Salleys an accountant now and married for 5 years to Sam Gillespie the chair of the young writers Brain Trust 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 Galatians chapter 5, verses 22-23, where we find the Fruits of the Spirit, uses the Greek word a (chara) for joy, which translates almost directly in the Hebrew. It has the same root as Christ in (chairo). In English, it means excited welcoming, a hailing, and in the Greek, inspired in Greek minds pictures of light, leaping, and a bright face. And from these roots I want to draw three QUICK (I promise!) points as we define and secure joy. Joy Is NOT Happiness I hate seeing those words used interchangeably. Its literally like saying that dog and cat are synonyms. Happiness is fed by outside circumstances. Joy is not. It is the expectant, elated, and excited welcoming of whatever comes our way. Not happiness, but excited welcoming. So when Paul in Philippians tells us to Have joy [rejoice] again and again, he is telling us to Have a confident anticipation for what might come, no matter what. Which is darn near impossible to be honest. But our God is the Doer of Impossible Things, and has given us the same incredible power. Joy is Found in Presence Psalm chapter 16 verse 11 tells us that, In Gods Presence there is fullness of joy. Where? In Gods Presence! Where will we find ourselves excitedly welcoming whatever comes? In Gods presence! Why? Because when all hell breaks loose literally God is with us, and nothing can stop us! Because if He is our Strong Tower and Defender, every time the prince of this world [the enemy] treads near us, hell be forced to kneel before the King of Kings, our Father, and we, His kings and priests (Revelation chapter 1 verse 6). So when dark draws near, if we only dwell in the Light through the discipline of the Holy Spirit (seeking Him and imitating Him) well be able to comfortably welcome whatever is thrown before us. Because HE is our Source of Joy. Pictures of Joy Those word pictures light, leaping, and bright faces indicate something powerful. Just like love is more than an internal feeling, JOY is more than an intrinsic quality. It is a fruit. It is supposed to be visible to the world. Were filled and empowered to show Gods presence in our midst! The world MUST see that we are excited about what comes before us because we trust God. Its hard, and it wont always make us happy. I repeat, Life with Christ isnt always happy. C.S. Lewis once quipped If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity and he hits the nail on the head. The dead must bury the dead. We must give up everything to gain eternity. It hurts. But we can be assured that in His Presence, the fullness of Joy is fruit for generations people longing for the Source of Living Water, of Love of the Life which flows through our xylems as we advance on the gates of hell victorious with every step. P.S. Xylems are plant veins I had to Wikipedia it. Praise God for Grade 10 Biology! Jak Hardy is the Founder and Chief Empowerment Officer of WorldChangers Global, an innovative not-for-profit tackling development through education. A leadership, development, and policy consultant, Jak aspires to be the worlds leading voice on the health benefits of Nutella. He holds a Diploma of Ministry, has trekked through a valley discarded degrees in law, theology and politics, and is completing postgraduate business at the University of the Sunshine Coast. In 2011, Alec Bradley Cigars launched an annual limited edition project known as Fine & Rare. It has become the companys signature limited edition series and one of the most popular. The distinguishing thing that sets Fine & Rare apart is the fact that it incorporates ten different tobaccos into the blend. At press time, there have been four different blends that have been rotated each year with various different vitolas released. In 2018, the Fine & Rare featured a blend first released in 2015 known as JRS 10=(86). Since its the second release, the 2018 edition has been dubbed Alec Bradley JRS 10=(86) Second Issue. Today, we take a closer look at that cigar For completeness, we list the annual Alec Bradley Fine & Rare releases since 2011: Since the series has been launched, there have been four blends used: Alec Bradley Fine & Rare HJ10-I: 2011, 2013, 2016 Alec Bradley Fine & Rate BR1213: 2012, 2017 Alec Bradley Fine & Rare TA-25A: 2014 Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86): 2015, 2018 Without further ado, lets take a closer look at the Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue. SPECIFICATIONS Blend and Origin While Alec Bradley has not disclosed the details of the Fine & Rare blend, each release has incorporated tobaccos from both Honduras and Nicaragua. The JRS 10=(86) blend is no exception. Wrapper: Honduras Trojes Binder: Honduras, Nicaragua Filler: Honduras, Nicaragua Country of Origin: Honduras Factory: Fabrica de Tabacos Raices Cubanas S. de R.L Vitolas Offered The Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue is once again a 6 1/2 x 56 Toro Grande the thickest size released in the Fine & Rare Series. A total of 2,500 ten-count boxes were allotted for this years release. Appearance The Honduran wrapper of the Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue had a medium brown color. There was a very light sheen of oil on the wrapper. This was a wrapper with a slightly bumpy surface. There were some visible veins and any visible wrapper seams were minimal. The band to the Alec Bradley Fine & Rare RS 10=(86) Second Issue features almost a parchment-like background with bronze trim. The band has perforated edges giving it a stamp like effect. The design of the band is in landscape mode with a shield design at the top and bottom along with partial wheel like designs on the lower portion. The center of the band contains a white, blue, and red design resembling a factory label. Some of the items on that label design include: Name of the Company: ALEC BRADLEY CIGAR COMPANY (with the red Alec Bradley badge logo to the left) Name of the Cigar and blend: FINE & RARE JRS 10=(86) Second Issue Production and Year 2500 boxes / 2018 Roll Date: July 30 August 5, 2017 Release Date: October 24, 2018 Weekly Production: 696 Size: 56 x 6 1/2 Names of the Rollers Signature of the Production Supervisors and Approvers (Alan Rubin and Ralph Montero) A blue and white Fine & Rare logo surrounded by red trim PERFORMANCE Pre-Light Draw The cigar experience of the Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue began by placing a straight cut. Once the cap was removed, it was on to the pre-light draw. The cold draw delivered a mix of natural tobacco, dusty earth, and a slight amount of fruit sweetness. This was a satisfactory pre-light draw. At this point, it was time to light up the Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue and see what the smoking phase would deliver. Tasting Notes The start of the Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue started out with notes of earth, natural tobacco, nut, and mixed pepper. Early on the natural tobacco took over as the primary note. The natural tobacco had a rich flavor with a nougat-like sweetness to it. Meanwhile, the nut, earth and pepper settled in the background. Occasionally the earth notes popped into the forefront during this time. The retro-hale started out as a dull red pepper note, but as the cigar progressed the pepper got sharper and some natural tobacco sweetness mixed in. As the Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) moved into the second third, there was a slight increase in the pepper and earth notes. The earth notes continued to float into the forefront from time to time. At the same time, the nut flavors also made an occasional guest appearance in the forefront. Meanwhile, the pepper notes remained grounded in the background The last third of the Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue saw the earth notes move into the forefront. The natural tobacco notes now floated between the forefront and the background. By this point, the nougat sweetness associated with the natural tobacco had dissipated. The nut and pepper notes remained in the background. This is the way the Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue came to a close. The resulting nub was cool in temperature, but slightly soft to the touch. Burn The Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue maintained a relatively straight burn line and burn path during the early stages. The burn did start to slightly meander as the cigar reached the middle stages. This was remedied with some touch-ups. The resulting ash had a darker charcoal color. This wasnt an overly firm ash, but it wasnt loose or flaky either. Meanwhile, the burn rate and burn temperature were both ideal. Draw The draw to the Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue performed quite well. This cigar maintained a very nice balance of openness versus resistance. In the end, this was a low maintenance cigar to derive flavor from. Strength and Body Overall the Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue was a cigar that fell right in the middle of the spectrum when it came to strength and body. This was a cigar that delivered a medium strength, medium-bodied smoking experience from start to finish. The intensity levels remained relatively constant. Both the strength and the body of the Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) balanced each other nicely with neither attribute overshadowing the other. OVERALL ASSESSMENT Final Thoughts One important point about the Fine & Rare series, the ten tobaccos are not going to necessarily translate to a blend that is exponentially high in complexity. What it does allow is for more tobaccos to marry and fuse resulting in some different flavor combinations. That is exactly the case with the Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue. Its not over the top in complexity, but it does deliver a unique flavor profile. Im curious to see what this cigar will do over a longer period of aging. The Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) cigar assessed here had five months of age on it since being procured in early November 2018. The Alec Bradley Fine & Rare JRS 10=(86) Second Issue is a cigar that can be enjoyed by the novice or experienced cigar enthusiast. Priced nearly at $22.00, this cigar falls into the ultra-premium category. While its not an inexpensive cigar, its certainly worthy of picking one up and smoking as it will deliver a nice experience. Summary Key Flavors: Earth, Natural Tobacco, Nougat, Nut, Pepper, Burn: Very Good Draw: Excellent Complexity: Medium Minus Strength: Medium Body: Medium Finish: Very Good Rating Value: Buy One Score: 90 References News Alec Bradley Fine & Rare RS 10=(86) Second Issue Heads to Stores Price: $21.99 Source: Alec Bradley and Purchased Brand Reference: Alec Bradley Photo Credits: Cigar Coop 1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war. 2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war. 3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength. 4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war. 5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites. 6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination. 7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N. 8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N. 9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress. 10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N. 11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.) 12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party. 13. Do away with all loyalty oaths. 14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office. 15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States. 16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights. 17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks. 18. Gain control of all student newspapers. 19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack. 20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions. 21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures. 22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms." 23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art." 24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press. 25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV. 26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy." 27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch." 28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state." 29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis. 30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man." 31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over. 32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc. 33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus. 34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI. 36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions. 37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business. 38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand. 39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals. 40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce. 41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents. 42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems. 43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government. 44. Internationalize the Panama Canal. 45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike. The Embassy Office Parks REIT, India's first share sale in a property collection under one operator, on April 1 became the country's second-most valuable real estate company on its stock-market debut, highlighting the potential of an investment product that already finds favour with the uberrich in New York, Singapore or London. After gaining as much as 8 percent to Rs 324.50, compared with the offer price of 300, the REIT units ended at Rs 314.10, up 4.7 percent. On April 1 closing price, the Embassy REIT was valued at Rs 24,238 crore, bettered in the property space only by DLF, which has a market capitalization of Rs 38,474 crore. And analysts believe there is scope for immediate further appreciation. "The units are currently trading at a 20 percent discount to the total NAV of Rs 375, based on the current market price of SPV projects," said Anil R, analyst, Geojit Financial Services. "The company has invested in India's key office markets of Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Noida and these markets have exhibited strong dynamics(High) absorption and constrained supply have resulted in high rental growth and low vacancy." At the current market price, the Embassy REIT units are traded at 12.6 times their estimated FY20 net distributable cash flow, yielding 8.25 percent. "(This) has been a marquee and landmark deal: It is India's first REIT and has best-in-class office assets across cities," said Nipun Goel, head, investment banking at IIFL. "Given the novelty of the product in India, the sponsorship of Blackstone and Embassy provided comfort to the investors," he added. The three-day offer that ended on March 20 saw robust demand and was subscribed 2.58 times on the final day of bidding. The Embassy REIT, backed by global private equity firm Blackstone Group LP and the Bengaluru-based Embassy Property Developments, raised Rs 4,750 crore through the issue of units at Rs 300 apiece. Embassy is likely to reduce its debt by 85 percent after the issue. ".It clocked 80.9 percent of its gross rentals from .corporates. Its revenues are expected to growon the back of rental escalation and better occupancies in certain assets" said Deepak Purswani, analyst, ICICI Direct. "(It) also enjoys a comfortable balance sheet, indicating potential for inorganic growth in the asset portfolio." Encouraging investor response and a good listing of the Embassy REIT increase the probability of similar sales by real estate companies that have substantial portfolios of rent-yielding assets. "We expect a slew of REIT offerings to hit the market in the coming months," said Gaurav Dua, head of research, Sharekhan. "The ability to raise resources through the monetization of rentyielding properties at a relatively attractive cost is a re-rating trigger for not only the REIT issuing realestate companies, but also a boost for investor sentiment toward the entire sector." Rajesh Mascarenhas, Economic Times, Mumbai Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram Bangkok, April 2, 2019 The Committee to Protect Journalists called today on the Singapore parliament to reject legislation that would force online platforms to take down or amend news or information authorities deem as false. The legislation, known as the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill, allows for maximum S$1 million fines ($740,000) and 10-year prison terms for owners and administrators of websites that fail to comply with official requests to correct or remove content ruled as objectionable, according to news reports. The bill was introduced into parliament yesterday, according to those reports. The Wall Street Journal reported that the legislation would require tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter to immediately issue corrections of false information published on their platforms and inform users when they may have been exposed to inaccuracies. It would also give government ministers the ability to order news organizations to publish corrections to false information being spread online, according to local news website Today. The law would grant all government ministers the power to determine if information is false and if it is harming the public interest, and to issue takedown or correction notices, according to Today. Websites would have the right to request a judicial review of such orders, but only after the orders have been issued, CNBC reported. This legislation represents a clear and present danger to online press freedom and should be dropped immediately, said Shawn Crispin, CPJs senior Southeast Asia representative. Singapores leaders already have a deplorable record of censorship and tight control over the news media, and this vague legislation will inevitably lend itself to abuse. Singapore needs less, not more regulation, of its online media. Criminal sanctions under the legislation would be imposed if information that authorities deem false was spread by malicious actors who undermine society, according to Singapores Law Ministry, as reported by Reuters. The ministry added that it would cut off a websites ability to profit without shutting it down if it was determined to have published three falsehoods that were against the public interest over a six-month period. The ministry did not specify how a websites funds would be restricted, but news reports note that authorities could bar digital advertisers from serving websites deemed to violate the regulations. Singapore Law Minister K. Shanmugam was quoted by Reuters yesterday saying that the legislation would not hinder free speech because it deals with false statements of facts. It doesnt deal with opinions, it doesnt deal with viewpoints. The Law Ministry did not immediately reply to CPJs emailed request for comment. The legislation is the outgrowth of a Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods established by Singapores parliament in January last year, according to Today. Singapore already has several laws and regulations on the books to censor news or content, particularly surrounding commentary and reporting on politics and security issues, according to CPJ research. Journalists have been imprisoned or forced into financial ruin. Mae Ruth Meyer is being remembered for her steadfast dedication serving New Braunfels Independent School District students. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram Relief over the release of Egyptian journalists Mahmoud Abou Zeid, known as Shawkan, and Alaa Abdelfattah from prison last month has been clouded by the conditions of their freedom. I am happy to see your joy over my release, but I am unfortunately not free, Abdelfattah wrote to his large following on social media yesterday. The journalist described the terms of his five-year probation period with police monitoring as humiliating. After five years in custody on anti-state charges, Abdelfattah was released on March 29, on condition that he stay overnight at a police station. Authorities imposed the same condition on Shawkan, an award-winning photojournalist and CPJs 2016 International Press Freedom Awardee who also served over five and a half years in prison on arbitrary anti-state charges. Both Abdelfattah and Shawkan have to report to a police station at 6 p.m. daily. It is left to the discretion of the officer on duty as to whether they spend the night in cells or just sign in and leave, though so far both have spent every night of their freedom behind bars. 60 months in jail for a demonstration that lasted for 15 minutes is enough, even for an authoritarian state, Abdelfattah wrote on Facebook. The journalist was jailed over his reporting on politics and human rights violations for outlets, including the independent al-Shorouk and the progressive Mada Masr. The police know where Alaa is, Abdelfattahs mother, Laila Suief, told me today. Suief, who is a renowned human rights activist, decried the release conditions as unnecessary and unjustifiable by law. Police lack neither the resources nor the authority to monitor Abdelfattah at home, Suief said over the phone, after spending the evening protesting how police denied Abdelfattah the right to bring books and an iPod with him into custody overnight. Every day since he was freed on March 4, Shawkan has been kept in custody overnight, and on one occasion he was kept inside for two days and two nights in a row, his lawyer, Taher Abu-Nasr, told me last week. To this day, authorities have cited no specific evidence to justify jailing him or continuing to restrict his freedom, nor did they give him an appeal date for contesting the conditions of his release. Shawkan continues to try to piece a life together under these restrictive conditions. In a post pinned to his Twitter account, from March 18, he wrote, Could somebody stops the TIME or at least slow it down? Coz I dont wanna return to the police station and be there until the dawn. The daily deadline to report to police is apparently never far from his mind: when he visited the pyramids with the Egyptian blogger, Wael Abbas, Shawkan posted on social media that he chose the site because it was close to the police station to which he needs to report. Abbas, who spent more than six months in prison as part of the mass trial of people accused of spreading false news, was released in December under a similar deal. He must report to police every Sunday and Wednesday between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., he told me. Unlike police monitoringwhere you know you it is for 12 hours a day, every dayprecautionary measures are defined entirely by the judge, who could order the person [being] released to spend a few hours or more [in custody] for a few days in the week, Tarek Hussein, an Egyptian human rights lawyer, told me in Washington D.C. last week. It is an ancient article in the penal code that gives the judge the right to add additional punishment to protect society against criminals during the night, Hussein, who advocates for freedom of the press from Tunisia, said. It only became applied to political prisoners after the 2013 and the 2014 protests. It was around this time that Egypt became one of the worlds worst jailers of journalists. CPJ found that Egypt led the world in using false news charges to jail journalists last year. And as of last month, the government regulatory body, the Supreme Council of Media Regulation, issued guidelines that allow authorities to penalize journalists or others with over 5,000 followers on social media who are accused of publishing false news. That is why, in describing the cruelty of not being able to finish his sons swimming lessons or put him to bed every night, Abdelfattah stopped short on social media of making a direct criticism. The subject of justice makes them annoyed, he tweeted in a subtle hint about his additional time spent in jail for insulting the judiciary. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram When Annalisa Camilli spent eight days on an Open Arms ship that rescues migrants in the Mediterranean, she knew her reporting for the Italian news magazine Internazionale may attract trolls. Camilli has covered the migrant beat for years and this was her second trip with the non-profit rescue operation. But, the reporter said, she was unprepared for the barrage of harassment, including derogatory name-calling, manipulated photos, and veiled rape threats that followed the trip in July. Some journalists say that online harassment, especially of those covering politicized issues such as migration, has worsened in Italy since a populist, anti-immigrant coalition comprising the Five Star Movement and the far-right party Lega came to power in elections last year. In 2018, 11 percent of all online threats documented in Italy by Ossigeno per linformazione were directed at journalists, the Italian research watchdog found. Forty percent of those targeted female journalists: a high percentage considering findings by the European Journalism Observatory that women represent only 23 percent of bylines in leading Italian news outlets. Online harassment can disrupt journalists ability to report and even push them from the beat. To understand the impact of the threats, CPJ spoke with four Italian reporters, including Camilli about the intense and apparently coordinated harassment campaignsor cyber mobsthey are exposed to when covering migrants. One person at the center of these cyber mobs is Francesca Totolo, a political activist and supporter of the neo-fascist party CasaPound. Since August 2017, she has regularly tweeted negative and taunting messages about journalists covering migration and other issues central to the Italian far-rights platform. Twitter threads viewed by CPJ start with Totolo commenting on or sharing an article, and tagging the journalist as well as several other accounts. What follows are abusive, threatening tweets directed at the journalist by Totolos followers, other Twitter users on the thread, and copy-cat accounts that replicate the aggressive messaging. Totolo has a very big network of haters and trolls, so if she does a tweet against you, then her network of trolls start to do the same, Marta Serafini, who covers local politics and migration for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, told CPJ. In an interview with La Stampa last year, Totolo said that she had close ties with anonymous Twitter accounts that focus on the migrant issue. In an email to CPJ, Totolo denied threatening reporters and denied that her followers are trolls. She said she is not a political activist. As well as cyber mob attacks, Camilli said she received repeated calls at all hours from several people, including a woman who introduced herself as Totolo. The caller and others accused Camilli of fabricating her work and claimed that a refugee she interviewed was an actor: a claim first made by Totolo in an article for Il Primato Nazionale, a CasaPound-affiliated publication. Camilli said she stopped picking up the calls and they eventually faded away. In her email to CPJ, Totolo denied threatening Camilli. The harassment has escalated as Italy debates how to handle the tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers who arrive each year by sea. The crisis was a central platform in elections and the newly elected coalition is implementing restrictive deportation policies, The Guardian reported. In the past few years, some politicians became very vocal about immigration. Journalists were embedded on NGO ships, and they became a target, not in the military sensebut in the propaganda senseof trolls, of haters on Twitter, said Serafini. Harassment and hate speech became more and more aggressive. Smear campaigns including allegations that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros pays reporters to cover migration in a specific way, or that female journalists prostituted themselves for stories, or had sex with refugees and other interviewees, are also used to try to discredit coverage. Angela Caponnetto, who reports for the Italian public broadcaster Rai, said she gets abusive messages via social media and email nearly every time that she speaks or reports on migration. Camilli said that after the election, she was harassed more or less every time I wrote something about NGOs, migrants, or rescuing them in the Mediterranean. Three of the journalists said that rape threats, both explicit and veiled, are common. Camilli and freelancer Claudia Torrisi both said that a regular threat is, I hope you get raped by migrants. A female journalist receives this kind of treatment on a daily basis, Torrisi said. Caponnetto told CPJ that she blocked Totolo on Twitter three years ago, but that smaller nationalist, anti-immigration Twitter accounts organize similar efforts to harass her. She said that when she reported the harassment to Italys Postal Police, who investigate cybercrime, they told her the attacks may be coming from the secret service or security forces in Libya. Most migrants crossing the Mediterranean depart from Libya. Italys postal police did not respond to CPJs request for comment. Camilli said she has veered from writing about migrants and the organizations that support them. In part this is because the news agenda at Internazionale shifted, but she acknowledged the impact the harassment had on her. I didnt want to follow up with stories about NGOs, about migrants in the Mediterranean. I started focusing on other issues, for example the law in Italy that was changing, she said. I think that in some way I was influenced because I didnt want to speak about that anymore. I was a little bit tired of being [harassed]. At the end, I think in some way [the harassers] have succeeded in what they want to achieve. [EDITORS NOTE: The eighth and tenth paragraph of this blog post have been updated to include Totolos responses.] Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram CPJ and a coalition of eight other international press freedom groups today called on the newly elected president of Slovakia to respect press freedom and ensure the safety of journalists. In a joint letter to president-elect Zuzana Caputova, the advocacy organizations, led by the European Center for Press and Media Freedom, said they were confident that Slovakia will secure justice for the February 2018 murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, whose alleged killers, including a mastermind, have been apprehended and are awaiting trial. The letter called on Caputova, a lawyer and anti-corruption civil rights activist who was elected Slovakias first female president on March 30, to use her authority to ensure the safety of journalists in light of increasing rhetoric against the press, including verbal attacks by former Prime Minister Robert Fico. It also asked that Caputova not approve proposed amendments to the press code. CPJ has previously called on Slovak parliamentarians to drop the proposals, which would expand the right of reply mandate to include politicians and public officials, and could increase self-censorship. Read the letter here. Bitcoin Exploded, Crypto Market Followed (UPDATED 3) On Tuesday morning, bitcoin price suddenly jumped by 16% in an hour (05:29 UTC), reaching USD 4,882 per coin, or the level last seen in November 2018, before trimming its gains to USD 4,755 (15:27 UTC.) (Updated on 15:51 UTC: updates throughout the entire text. A new section "Volatility and long-term investing" has been added, while the "Looking for catalysts" section has been updated with its new first paragraph.) Source: iStock Other top coins also registered strong hourly gains of 3.2% - 11.45% and have retracted later. Moreover, bitcoin surpassed its 200 daily moving average, which is considered to be a very important metric in technical analysis. At the time of writing (15:27 UTC), bitcoin is up by almost 15% in the past 24 hours, increasing its weekly gains to more than 20%. BTC price chart: (15:30 UTC) Source: coinpaprika.com Moreover, bitcoin just posted two-consecutive months of gains, having increased by more than 10% in the first quarter of this year. Also, as reported, the bitcoin bottom has already occurred, as there arent additional sellers coming, according to New York-based research and consulting boutique specializing in the digital asset market Delphi Digital. Meanwhile, more signs have recently emerged showing that the altcoin season is also here. ____ Top 10 coins by market capitalization: (15:30 UTC) Source: coinpaprika.com ____ Volatility and long-term investing Jehan Chu, managing partner at blockchain investment and advisory firm Kenetic Capital, told Bloomberg that the crypto market is still very much subject to waves of enthusiasm. "I dont think today is anything special other than a temporary enthusiasm, he added. However, Anthony Pompliano, co-founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital, a digital asset management firm, stressed that "short-term volatility doesnt matter to the long-term investor." "As I have said many times, Bitcoin is a game of accumulation. If an investor has done their own research, understands the risks, believes in the system design, watches the fundamentals, and has a low time preference, they stand a chance to be rewarded handsomely. This doesnt have to be accomplished over night either," he wrote in a newsletter, adding that bitcoins recent move has brought back a level of excitement that the market hasnt seen in over a year. George McDonaugh, CEO of KR1, a listed cryptocurrency and blockchain investment company, reiterated that moving away from a specific catalyst or event, lately there's definitely been positive sentiment in the market these last few weeks. "There's a sense that perhaps we've reached the lows for this cycle and it's onwards and upwards from here on in. I think it's still too early to call it, but it seems that that hasn't stopped a few eager buyers jumping the starting gun," he said in an emailed statement. Meanwhile, advisory firm Fundstrat Global Advisors claims that the worst is behind for crypto and "sceptics are on the wrong side of history." "We see fewer reasons to question the recent recovery Bitcoin pricesthe best quarter since 2017. While the key technical price hurdle is BTC closing above its 200D (currently USD 4,600 and falling by USD 15 per day), we see 2019 as positive risk/reward," they wrote in a summary of a crypto panel at the Texas CFA Summit held in San Antonio last Friday. Looking for catalysts "There's always a myriad of possible reasons why bitcoin has had a surge in price. The fact that there was USD 415 million worth in short positions on the Bitmex exchange may have been too succulent a target for the market not to move against. There have also been rumours about buying bots going awol after some fake news about an ETF [exchange-traded fund] green light from the SEC [the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission] was released as part of an April fools joke. You literally can't make this stuff up. I'd veer towards the first explanation than the second, going by the fact the ETF rumour came out a full 24hrs after the rally began," McDonaugh said. Mati Greenspan, senior analyst at social trading platform eToro, suggested in a tweet that "judging by the timing, it looks like the pump originated in Japan or South Korea." While his followers are also pointing at China, the Middle East and India. "The economy is slowing down fast in South Korea and Japan, and the stock market is stagnant, so people are prepared to give crypto a second chance," according to our correspondent in South Korea Tim Alper. Also, the fact that South Korean and Japanese giants such as Samsung, Hyundai, Kakao, Rakuten, SBI and many Japanese banks are starting to invest a lot of money into their crypto operations, is creating optimism among buyers and investors, he added. Greenspan also stressed that "it doesn't seem like too many people are selling the pop." _____ Mati Greenspan discusses the spike: ____ In either case, while the cryptoverse is struggling to explain the unexpected strong rally, some crypto users were complaining that major crypto exchange Binance "is unusable". Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted, later adding that he's also "honestly clueless" what caused the rally: However, Binance was not alone facing technical problems this Tuesday: ____ Reactions: ___ ___ ___ ___ ____ ___ ___ The Election Commission of India (ECI) in a first of its kind initiative has reached out to over 150 community radio stations across the country to educate and inform the voters ahead of the general elections. To facilitate the collaboration a workshop was organised by India International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Management (IIIDEM), in partnership with Seeking Modern Applications for Real Transformation (SMART), at IIIDEM, Dwarka. The Workshop was organised for training and capacity building of the community radios for voter education and awareness. How Community Radios can contribute? They can play a vital role in motivating and mobilising the voters, enlisting them into the electoral roll, mobilising them to go to the polling booth, educating them about their rights and responsibilities, and making them an informed and educated voter. Community radio stations can further strengthen democracy by developing content in local dialects and deepening the process of voter education and awareness up to the grass root levels. Community radios are one of the best mediums to reach out to the last voter of the country. The Election Commission envisions to make community radio stations an integral part of the voter education programme and the workshops were just the beginning of a long term and sustained engagement between Election Commission and Community Radio Stations. Cow toilet is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In fact, Dutch inventors are already testing out an innovative bovine urinal in an attempt to reduce the country's ammonia emissions.An average cowproduces four to five gallons (15 to 20 liters) of urine every day. If these cows can be trained to use a urinal, not only can it spell a big difference in farm hygiene and maintenance, but it can also make a huge impact on the environment.After all, Netherlands emits high amounts of ammonia as the world's second biggest agricultural exporter."We are tackling the problem at the source," Henk Hanskamp, the Dutch inventor behind the toilet, explainsto AFP. "A cow is never going to be completely clean but you can teach them to go to the toilet."'Cow Toilet' Shows Promise During TestingThe cow toilet is simple and straight-forward, with the urinal placed in a box behind the cow. A feeding trough is placed in front of the cow. After the animal has finished eating, a robot arm triggers a nerve by the udders to stimulate the cow's need to urinate.Tests for the toilet are ongoing in the town of Doetinchem in Netherlands, where seven out of 58 cows have already been trained to use their new toilets without stimulation.Hanskamp says that these animals have already gotten used to the urinals."They recognise the box, lift their tail, and pee," he recalls.Such technology is making the cow's surroundings cleaner and the ground drier. Veterinarian Jan Velema, who participated in the testing, explains that dry ground is also better for the hooves of the animals.The cow toilet is expected to be available on the market by 2020, according to Hanskamp. If successful, he says, the toilet could decrease ammonia productionby at least half.Ammonia EmissionsNitrogen in animal waste as well as fertilizer can turn into gaseous ammonia, accordingto a report from Ensia. Three-fourths of the total ammonia emissions in the United States and Canada come from agriculture.This has an alarming effect on the public's health.When ammonia gets into the atmosphere, it combines with other compounds in the air and forms particulate matter called PM2.5. PM2.5 poses a great danger to the health when it infiltrates the lungs and gets into the bloodstream. WHO estimatesthat air pollution kills 7 million people worldwide every year.Large amounts of ammonia also has a negative impact on aquatic life and plants, accordingto the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. State utility Idaho Power has agreed to buy 120MW of power from a future solar project in the state's south at a cost of US2.175/kWh a potentially record-low cost for solar power in the USThe announcement came at the same time that Idaho Power announced it had set a goal to provide 100 per cent clean energy by 2045.Idaho Power signed a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Idaho-based Jackpot Holdings for the power generated from a solar power project to be built south of Twin Falls and which will help the company replace power produced from the North Valmy coal-fired power plant in Nevada.The 120 MW project is expected to be completed by 2022 and will connect to an existing transmission line that currently delivered power from the coal power plant.More importantly, however, is the price Idaho Power will be paying for the electricity, which was awarded at US$21.75/MWh or 2.175/kWh, one of the lowest-cost solar contracts of its size that has been publicly reported.It is lower than existing publicly known prices for solar PPAs which include a 2.375/kWh contractawarded to 8minutenergy in Nevada, a 2.49/kWhsolar project in Arizona, and a project in Austin, Texas, which is believed to be below 2.5/kWh'Today's announcement reflects Idaho Power's commitment to resources that balance environmental stewardship with affordability and reliability,' said Idaho Power President and CEO Darrel Anderson. 'This deal will provide energy that is not only clean but is also at a cost that benefits our customers.'At the same time, Idaho Power announced that it has set a goal of providing its customers with 100% clean energy by 2045 a move which will see the company invest in additional wind, solar, and other clean sources, to compliment its existing hydropower facilities, which already provide around half of customers' energy demands.This decision makes Idaho Power one of the first publicly owned energy companies to set a goal for reaching 100% clean energy and doubles down on the company's existing 'Path Away From Coal' which will see the company part ways with two of its three coal-fired power plants by 2025, as it explores ending its participation with the third and final plant.The company has also already reduced its carbon emissions intensity by almost 50% since 2005.'Providing 100-per cent clean energy is an important goal for Idaho Power. More and more customers are telling us it is important to them, too,' said Darrel Anderson'We believe this goal is attainable. We have a great head start, thanks to our clean hydropower plants that produce almost half the energy our customers use. Our recently signed agreement with Jackpot Holdings moves us even closer.''This plan demonstrates Idaho Power's commitment to doing what's right for customers' pocketbooks and the environment,' added Idaho Governor Brad Little. 'It also shows innovation can improve our lives with solutions that are reasonably priced, responsible and delivered without government intrusion.'Idaho Power has promised to announce additional investments in wind, solar, other clean energy sources, and to invest in clean energy storage as well. The carcass of a pregnant sperm whale that washed up in Sardinia, Italy had 22 kilograms of plastic in its stomach and was carrying a dead fetus, the country's environment minister and a marine life non-profit organisation said.Luca Bittau, president of the SeaMe group, told CNN the beached mammal's remains contained 'garbage bags... fishing nets, lines, tubes, the bag of a washing machine liquid still identifiable, with brand and barcode ... and other objects no longer identifiable.''She was pregnant and had almost certainly aborted before (she) beached,' he said.'The fetus was in an advanced state of composition.'The dead animal, which was eight meters long, washed up last week on a beach in the Sardinian tourist hotspot of Porto Cervo.Bittau said the cause of death would be known after histological and toxicological examinations carried out by veterinarians in Padua, northern Italy.Sergio Costa, Italy's environment minister, said in a Facebook post: 'Are there still people who say these are not important problems? For me they are, and they are priorities.''We've used the 'comfort' of disposable objects in a lighthearted way in the past years and now we are paying the consequences. Indeed the animals, above all, are the ones paying them,' he continued.Costa also referred to the recent approval by the European Parliament of a law banning a wide-range of single-use plastic items, such as straws, cotton buds and cutlery, by 2021.'Italy will be one of the first countries to implement it,' he promised.'The war on disposable plastic has begun. And we won't stop here.'Last month, a young whale was found dead in the Philippines with 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of plastic bags in its stomach. A University of Hartford student has been charged with attempted murder after he stabbed two of his classmates while re-enacting a movie scene for a drama class, officials say.The three Connecticut college students were working on a group project Sunday afternoon in a dorm room when one of them took the class assignment too far.The student, Jake Wascher, now faces two counts of attempted murder and is being held on $US1 million bail.They were acting out 'a movie scene in which a person(s) gets stabbed, at which point (Wascher) began to stab both victims before fleeing on foot,' Hartford Police said.Police did not specify which movie the students were re-enacting, but The Hartford Courant reported it was 'The Butterfly Effect,' a 2004 sci-fi thriller starring Ashton Kutcher.The two victims, who are 19 and 21, were transported to a hospital with multiple stab wounds.The 19-year-old suffered puncture wounds to his chest and back. He underwent surgery and is in critical condition.The 21-year-old victim, who suffered a puncture wound to his chest and four to his back, is in stable condition.Wascher, 21, was arrested two hours later in the woods near the campus in Connecticut's capital city, police said.Hartford Superior Court said Wascher did not have an attorney on file as of Monday.Police said Wascher is from San Diego and was a commuter student. He did not appear to have any injuries when he was arrested, police said.'While there is no ongoing threat to campus, we recognize that this isolated incident is frightening and unsettling,' the University of Hartford said Sunday in a statement.'The University will provide counseling services to members of our campus community in need of support or assistance.'The university declined to provide further comment. In February, a 20-year-old woman gave birth to her first child, a baby boy. Then, 26 days later, she gave birth to twins.Arifa Sultana from Bangladesh has two uteruses, a condition called uterus didelphys. The new mom was not aware that she has the rare congenital abnormality until she was admitted for the second time this year to give birth to twins.Mother With Rare Condition Gives Birth"She came to the hospital complaining of lower abdominal pain," Sheila Poddar, the gynecologist who attended to Sultana at Ad-Din hospital in Dkaha, toldCNN.Sultana did not have an ultrasound during her pregnancy and, therefore, did not know that she was still pregnant after she had given birth to her first child. When she returned for abdominal pain four weeks later, she finally underwent an ultrasound and found out that she was having twins a boy and a girl.Dr. Poddar performed an emergency caesarian to deliver the babies. Sultana was discharged four days later with no complications."All three children are safe and healthy," said the gynecologist. "The mother is also fine."Double UterusUterus didelphys occurswhen the two small tubes that normally join and create one hollow organ the uterus remain separated while the female fetus develops. A woman who has two uteruses may also have to cervixes and two vaginas.While the rare condition increases the risk of miscarriage or fertility problems, women who have double uterus more often have successful pregnancies.It is not surprising that Sultana did not suspect that she has uterus didelphys because the congenital abnormality does not come with symptoms. Women who have similar conditions only discover it whenever they consult their gynecologists for repeated miscarriage or if a tampon does not catch their menstrual blood. In either case, the doctor would perform a regular pelvic exam or imaging test and find two uteruses.The condition is estimated to occur in about one in 2,000 women. The gestation of twins is even rarer; it only occurs in about one in a million women.In 2011, a woman from Florida gavebirth to fraternal twins from two separate uteruses. Another woman from South Wales who has the same condition gave birthto a healthy baby girl in 2014. 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They staged a dharna in front of the office of Assistant Director of Fisheries. As their demand was not met, they staged a road blockade on South Beach Road. "Some of the boats had changed their engines, but they are too long," said M. Samy, president of a mechanised boat owners association. Currently, around 45 out of 245 mechanised boats at the fishing harbour are not registered. For registration under the Tamil Nadu Marine Fisheries Regulation Act, boats should have a maximum of 240HP engine capacity and 24-metre length. Those exceeding the limits would have to be registered with the Mercantile Marine department. Talks the police held with the protesters remained inconclusive. The protest, which started around 11 a.m., continued till late in the evening. World News: Inequality hampers progress on SDGs in Asia Pacific by Trudy Harris April 02,2019 | Source: Sci Dev Net Rising inequality in the Asia Pacific is halting progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with urgent action needed to bridge the growing divide between rich and poor, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed has warned. More women, girls, young people and other groups need to be empowered and included in social and economic development initiatives to reverse the trend, Mohammed told a conference in Bangkok this week (27 to 29 March) aimed at tracking progress on SDGs in the region, home to 60 per cent of the worlds population. While the region has become home to the largest number of billionaires in the world, still millions of people lack access to fundamental services UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. While the region has become home to the largest number of billionaires in the world, still millions of people lack access to fundamental services, Mohammed told several hundred UN agency, government, NGO and business delegates to the conference convened by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). Inequality of wealth, of access to basic services and inequality [in] the ability to withstand setbacks and respond to the ravages wrought by climate change are all on the rise. The numbers are very clear and they are very stark. Almost two-thirds of the regions working women are employed in the informal sector, meaning their jobs are insecure and they have little or no access to social or labour protection, Mohammed said, as an example. The SDGs are the global goals that governments agreed to in 2015 to end poverty and hunger and tackle climate change. The goals are due to be met by 2030, but the UN and other leaders have expressed frustration at the slow pace of progress. A report released at the conference proposed a framework for governments to help them speed up empowerment and inclusion to meet the goals. The report, by the Asian Development Bank, ESCAP and UN Development Programme, focused on the importance of ensuring human rights and access to justice to all sections of society. For example, access to traditional forests, fishing grounds or other natural resources protected by governments is critical for small-scale farmers, indigenous people and rural communities. Unfortunately, the report found that most countries in the region do not have laws addressing land rights for indigenous communities. The report also stressed the need for all groups to play a role in determining their future. For instance, farmers and fishing communities can plan and design strategies to protect themselves against extreme weather, rising sea levels and other impacts of climate change. Fijis minister for fisheries Semi Koroilavesau said chiefs and tribal elders in his country had a key role in managing fishing grounds threatened by overfishing and other unsustainable practices. The elders were charged, for example, with ensuring fishing was restricted during the spawning seasons and with setting up no-take zones in fragile areas. The report also focused on ensuring social rules, norms and practices do not reinforce violence and discrimination against women and minority groups, nor lock them out of education, jobs and other opportunities. Child marriage, for example, prevails to such an extent that over 30 per cent of girls are married before they turn 18 in parts of the region. Asia Pacifics growth and poverty reduction have not translated into the kind of human development we want to see. We need to not only take sustainable economic development seriously but also inclusive growth to achieve equality, said Haoliang Xu, director of UNDPs Asia-Pacific bureau. World News: Answers called for on Mekong rapids April 02,2019 | Source: The Phnon Penh Post An activist who has been fighting for years against the planned dredging of sections of the Mekong River for greater shipping access has called on the authorities to clarify the status of the project, which was supposed to have been cancelled following a meeting between Thai and Chinese officials last month. Thailands Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai said two weeks ago that China had agreed to bring the project to a halt after it had learned about environmental concerns. Activists, including Pianporn Deetes, campaign director for Thailand and Myanmar for International Rivers, and residents had raised concerns over the impact on ecosystems along stretches of the Mekong River arising from the proposed removal of rapids under the dredging works. Don said China had promised to stop the project in a meeting he had with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Chiang Mai in mid-February. I am pleased to inform everyone that we have reached a consensus with China on the cancellation of the Mekong River navigation channel improvement project, as the Chinese side has already understood the possible consequences from this project, so they promised to end it for the greater good, the minister was quoted as saying to the press. However, it was the second time that Don had claimed a meeting with Wang had led to the project being suspended. Don had made a similar claim in December 2017 in Dali, southern China, on the sidelines of the Lancang Mekong Coopertion ministerial meeting. Then came the 17th meeting of the Joint Committee on Coordination of Commercial Navigation on the Lancang-Mekong River (JCCCN) with officials from China, Laos and Thailand on March 26-28. A summary of record was produced with the third joint inspection on navigation procedures being set down for October. The second mission was carried out last October on a stretch of the river from Jinghong in China to Luang Prabang in Laos. This was recorded in the meeting. Other work, including Chinas final technical and strategic assessment reports counted as preliminary work was reported to the meeting as being completed and subject to decisions by individual countries to proceed further. Other logistics work, including for navigation safety as well as the setting up of a navigation management unit, were also reported. This level of reporting has raised questions about the actual status of the project. Pianporn said the agreements from the meeting showed the project had not been shelved, as declared by the minister. Pianporn and others want clarity on the project, which started in the early 2000s. It is clear that the project has already proceeded on sections of the river in China, with damage to the environment reported. The rapids on the Mekong River are regarded as essential to the health of the waterways ecosystems as well as the livelihoods of people living along it. The river provides habitats and feeding grounds for fish, which allow the local fishermen to earn a reliable income and guarantee food security for communities, according to Pianporn. As the work beyond Luang Prabang have not yet started, downstream areas should be protected, the activists say. International Rivers has written to the department seeking clarification on the ministers comments, but has not received a response, Pianporn said. Sri Lankan president Maithripala Sirisena says he's decided on a date to carry out executions of drug offenders. Sri Lanka looks set to end a 43-year moratorium on capital punishment as President Maithripala Sirisena continues his offensive on the drug trade. Sri Lankan police on Monday destroyed nearly 800 kilos of cocaine in the presence of the President, valued at more than $141 million. The drugs were seized in four raids between June 2016 and June 2018. More drugs await the conclusion of court cases before they are also destroyed under judicial supervision, officials said. Mr Sirisena has vowed to step up his 'drug war' and promised to import high tech equipment to detect narcotics at ports and airports. He also said he's decided on the date when Sri Lanka's first executions since 1976 will be carried out. The death penalty is part of the country's constitution but it has not been implemented, the president told reporters. This is the reason for the increase in crimes, underworld activities and the drug menace. "In the coming days the death penalty will be carried out. The list of names in this regards has been finalised and we have also decided on the date." Capital Punishment is not outlawed in Sri Lanka and is a mandatory penalty for murder. But there have been no executions since 1976 because successive presidents have refused to sign death warrants. Consequently, all death sentences have been commuted to life in prison, with over 400 prisoners serving time on death row according to the Sri Lankan Prison service. Mr Sirisena signaled his intention to bring back capital punishment in July last year. In March the government advertised in newspapers for a new executioner, asking for candidates with "excellent moral character and mental strength". The presidents approach is influenced by that of Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte, whose violent war on drugs has claimed thousands of lives. Mr Sirisena visited the Philippines in January and praised Dutertes strongarm tactics as an example to the world. Drug menace is rampant in my country and I feel we should follow your footsteps to control this hazard, he said in Manila. Human Rights groups are urging the president to cancel the planned executions and reinstate the moratorium on capital punishment. President Sirisenas decision to restore the death penalty because he was inspired by the Philippines murderous drug war may be the worst possible justification and would violate international law, said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch in a statement. Executions, whether imposed by a judge or carried out unlawfully by the police, are not the way to address drug offenses. | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE! "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde , Agence France-Presse, SBS, April 2, 2019 Proposed changes to Bruneis penal code to incorporate punishments under a strict interpretation of Islamic law - including death by stoning - should be halted, the UNs top human rights official, Michelle Bachelet, said on Monday. In an appeal to the Bruneian Government to stop what she described as draconian revisions, due to come into force on Wednesday, High Commissioner Bachelet maintained that they would enshrine in legislation cruel and inhuman punishments that seriously breach international human rights law. According to a statement from Ms. Bachelet issue by her office, OHCHR, the death penalty would in theory be applicable for offences such as rape, adultery, sodomy; extramarital sexual relations for Muslim citizens; robbery, and insult or defamation of the Prophet Mohammad. Public flogging as a punishment for abortion would also apply, as well as amputation for theft, once the proposed revisions become law. Other changes include making it a criminal offence to expose Muslim children to the beliefs and practices of any religion other than Islam, Ms. Bachelet said, before describing them as potentially marking a serious setback for human rights protections in the south-east Asian State. FIND related content here The oil-rich country has been ruled by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Muizzaddin Waddaulah, for more than 50 years. Although the death penalty is already on the statute books in Brunei, the last execution there was carried out in 1957. Nonetheless, Ms. Bachelet stressed that under international law, capital punishment may only be applied for murder or intentional killing, after a trial held according to due process. I urge Brunei to maintain its de facto moratorium on the use of capital punishment, she said, underlining that human rights and faith are not opposing forces. She added: No judiciary in the world can claim to be mistake-free and evidence shows that the death penalty is disproportionately applied against people who are already vulnerable, with a high risk of miscarriages of justice. Echoing concerns about the countrys penal code by UN human rights panels in the past, Ms. Bachelet highlighted the possible encouragement of violence and discrimination against women, including on the basis of their sexual orientation, and against religious minorities in Brunei. Any religion-based legislation must not violate human rights, including the rights of those belonging to the majority religion, as well as of religious minorities and non-believers, Ms. Bachelet said. It is vital that the Government, religious authorities and a wide range of civil society actors work jointly to uphold human dignity and equality for all, the High Commissioner added. My Office stands ready to assist the Government of Brunei, using the constructive approach laid out by the faith-based framework of the Beirut Declaration on Faith for Rights. Source: un.org, Staff, April 2, 2019 Germany slams Brunei over anti-gay law The German government has summoned the Brunei ambassador to protest at the pending introduction of the death penalty for homosexual acts, the Foreign Office in Berlin says. An appeal was made during the discussions with the ambassador for the South-East Asian country to abide by "existing human rights obligations," the Foreign Office said. "We expressed our concerns in connection with the introduction of Sharia law," it said. The new legal code is to take effect from Wednesday based on the Islamic religious and legal system. It imposes death by stoning as the most severe punishment for homosexuality. The previous maximum was 10 years in prison. | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE! "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde Deutsche Presse Agentur, Staff, April 2, 2019 The US Supreme Court has ruled that a convicted murderer on death row in Missouri has no right to a "painless death". The ruling clears the way for the execution of Russell Bucklew, who asked for gas rather than lethal injection, citing an unusual medical condition. Bucklew, 50, argued the state's preferred method amounts to legally banned "cruel and unusual punishment". The 5-4 ruling split along the court's ideological lines. Bucklew was sentenced to death in 1996 for rape, murder and kidnapping in an attack against his ex-girlfriend and her new partner and six-year-old son. In recent court filings, Bucklew argued that his congenital condition, cavernous hemangioma, might cause him excessive pain if he is put to death by lethal injection. The condition causes blood-filled tumours in his throat, neck and face, which he said could rupture during his execution causing him extreme pain and suffocation. According to Bucklew, he would feel excessive pain if the state executioner is allowed to use the state's preferred method of a single drug, pentobarbital, applied by needle. But the Supreme Court's conservative justices said on Monday they considered the legal effort to be a stalling tactic. They said it was up to the prisoner to prove that another method of execution would "reduce a substantial risk of severe pain", but he had not done so. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that Bucklew had been on death row for more than 20 years. "The eighth amendment [to the US constitution] forbids 'cruel and unusual' methods of capital punishment but does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death," wrote Justice Gorsuch, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017. He continued: "As originally understood, the eighth amendment tolerated methods of execution, like hanging, that involved a significant risk of pain, while forbidding as cruel only those methods that intensified the death sentence by 'superadding' terror, pain or disgrace." Liberals on the court, including Justice Stephen Breyer, argued that Bucklew's condition should have allowed for him to be put to death by nitrogen gas, a method allowed in three states. "There are higher values than ensuring that executions run on time," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a separate opinion, adding that secrecy in the death penalty process has recently yielded different results in two similar cases. US inmate executed amid imam row In one case in Alabama, a Muslim man was forbidden from having an imam with him during his execution, but the court halted a similar sentence after an appeal by a Buddhist who wanted his spiritual adviser present when he was put to death. In Justice Gorsuch's majority opinion in the Bucklew case, he referred to those two cases, saying the inmate in Alabama had been given ample time to voice his complaint, but chose to do so only 15 days before he was scheduled to die. | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE! "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde I am a retired newspaperman. I live in Poca, WV, with my wife of 44 years, Lou Ann. I grew up in Cleveland. Three kids. Grandfather. Report all errors to DonSurber@GMail.com The NRA sent a letter begging its members to send money to rescue the organization's collapsing finances. Wayne LaPierre blames Andrew Cuomo, who is threatening the NRA's tax exempt status and has told New York state regulators to encourage insurance companies, banks and financial services companies to stop doing business with the NRA. This must have sounded sweet to many people when it got out: "Right now were facing an attack thats unprecedented not just in the history of the NRA, but in the entire history of our country. And if this attack succeeds, NRA will be forced to shut down forever." New York's Attorney General, Letitia James, noted in an interview with Ebony that "The NRA holds [itself] out as a charitable organization, but in fact, [it] really [is] a terrorist organization." The NRA's precipitous decline of income-- a $55 million deficit between 2016 and 2017-- is suspected to be related to a one-time money-laundering operation that saw at least $20 million of Russian money illegally used by the NRA to help the Trump campaign via one anonymous donor. At the same time, many patriotic Americans recognized that being part of the NRA means being part of Russia's attack on the American electoral system and membership income declined from $163 million to $128 million. letter to the FEC from 9 senators-- Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Patty Murray (D-WA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Christopher Murphy (D-CT), Ed Markey (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Kamala Harris (D-CA)-- is demanding an investigation of how the NRA uses shell companies together around election laws and flood elections with suspect money-- some of it from foreign sources. Another reason we need to see the full Mueller Report is to be able to understand the relationship between the NRA and Kremlin operatives Alexander Torshin and Maria Butina, relationships that are also being investigated by the House Judiciary Committee. Butina is due to be sentenced April 26. L.A. Times, the committee asked the NRA to provide: The House Judiciary Committee is on the case . The committee is looking to connect the dots between the $50 million the NRA spent helping Trump and his allies in the elections and the sources of that money. According to the, the committee asked the NRA to provide: Documents relating to development of the Republican platform for the election, including references to arming the Ukraine government in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea. Attempts to provide or obtain a range of things tied to the election, including voter data, polling information, political ad targeting, voter registration rolls, social media data, and campaign or party e-mails. Discussion of U.S. sanctions against Russia between June 16, 2015, and Jan. 20, 2017, involving Trump or 14 other people (at least six of whom have been charged or pleaded guilty to federal charges arising from the Mueller probe-- sorry, witch hunt). Meanwhile though, the NRA is still busy working with its Republican allies to continue enabling gun violence on every front. Last week OpenSecrets disclosed how the NRA is working with the GOP to defeat reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act , which expired in February. The bill would keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, a big no-no for the NRA, which is always a champion for domestic abusers. They vehemently oppose any and all regulations that lead to firearm confiscations over misdemeanor domestic violence or stalking convictions. The bill by Karen Bass (D-CA) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) that the House is due to vote on is now opposed not just by the NRA but by GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy and GOP Whip Steve Scalise. The NRA and other pro-gun groups have shoveled $183,618 into Scalise's coffers-- the second most of any member of Congress (Don Young of Alaska is #1 at $185,672-- and the bribes to McCarthy have totaled $106,150. The only Democrat in that 6-figure bribery area is Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN). Most Democrats have stopped selling their asses to the NRA and other gun groups and, aside from Peterson, the only Dems who accepted NRA bribes in the 2018 cycle were Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA), Ron Kind (New Dem-WI), Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), and Vicente Gonzalez (Blue Dog-TX). Timken buys Diamond Chain to expand portfolio The bearings and power transmission manufacturer Timken has acquired The Diamond Chain Company from Amsted Industries for an undisclosed amount. US-headquartered Diamond Chain supplies high-performance roller chains for industrial markets. In the 12 months ended 31 March, 2019, Diamond Chain posted sales of more than $60m. The acquisition of The Diamond Chain Company adds another strong industrial brand with a reputation for quality, reliability and performance to Timken's growing power transmission portfolio, says Timkens president and chief executive officer, Richard G. Kyle. Diamond Chain is a premier brand in the North American distribution channel and is an excellent strategic fit with our Drives chain business. The acquisition expands our leadership in roller chain, builds on our strong position in distribution, and adds depth to our manufacturing capabilities in Asia. We expect to drive significant synergies with the combination of Diamond Chain and Drives. Founded in 1890 and headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, Diamond Chain has manufacturing operations in the US and China, and a subsidiary in the UK. It employs around 370 people. The companys founders adopted the diamond as its trademark because it symbolised strength and perfection. The companys products were used in the Wright Brothers first flying machine and in Henry Fords first cars. With the acquisition of Diamond Chain, Timkens power transmission portfolio now accounts for roughly a third of its revenues. Timken says that Diamond Chains results will be reported mostly through its process industries business, and expects the acquisition to be accretive to adjusted earnings in 2019. People in Thanh Hoa province catch up to five kilograms daily, braving their pungent odour and stinging urine. Stink bugs neither sound nor look appetizing, but the insects are in fact used as ingredients in delicious dishes in central Vietnam. People in Ngoc Lac District in Thanh Hoa Province are used to hunting for stink bugs at this time of the year. Chuong Van Nghi has been doing this job for over 10 years. He carries a long bamboo stick and a plastic bag during his daily hunt for the bugs. The stink bug season usually lasts from the first to third lunar months, or February to April on the western calendar. When longan and lychee flowers bloom in western Thanh Hoa, the stink bugs assemble there to suck the nectar from them, causing the flowers and young fruits to wither. The stink bugs usually live in groups of 12-14, and move very slowly. To catch them, the hunters use a stick with a plastic bag attached to one end, place it inside a bunch of flowers and shake it gently lightly so that the bugs fall into the bag. In Ngoc Lac District, not many people catch the bugs, so the hunters are in great demand among longan orchard owners seeking to protect their trees from these pests. The bugs fall into the bags from which the hunters clear dead leaves and twigs. When catching the insects, people usually wear rubber gloves to avoid direct contact with them. The bugs give off an unpleasant odor and their urine can burn human skin. Two people can catch up to 5 kilograms of stink bugs a day. Despite being protected by gloves, the hands of a catcher are covered in the bugs' urine. People cook the bugs using simple recipes. After they are washed, the insects are soaked in saltwater for 10 minutes to clean the dirt, the cook then gets rid of their wings and head, boils them in water and marinates them. The final step is to deep fry them in a pan. People put stink bugs in aluminum tubs to marinate them. The cooked stink bugs are seasoned with lime leaves to create a pleasant aroma. This is a favorite dish of many ethnic Muong people in Ngoc Lac District, Thanh Hoa Province. Lifes hard for autistic people, and much harder for their families. Yet, amidst all this suffering, there is gratitude. Hong Phuc "Theres a retard here," a corpulent woman shouted as she punched on my apartment door. "Theres a retard here!," she kept yelling. We were living in Hanoi back then, when my son was five years old. That woman, a neighbor, rushed into my house to find "the retard" because, she said: "He stole my grandkids toy, he even opened the fridge to take biscuits himself." That day, my son lost a piece of his toe because of the iron folding door. That neighbor tried to push him out of her apartment while my son tried to get back in. After she left, I followed the trail of blood to find my son hiding in a corner of the bedroom. He did not cry and his eyes were wide open as if he had never been chased away so many times before. Then he lay down, very still, rolling the wheel of a toy car as I bandaged his toe. When was the last time that you had peace of mind? My answer to that question would be: the time before a hot summer afternoon in Hanoi, more than 13 years ago. My life was fine until the doctor, bedecked with golden jewelry, asked me: "What do you do?" Bewildered, I replied: "Well, actually, I'm a reporter." She interrupted me immediately: "Severe autism. These kids will grow up to be criminals. You should either have him treated at the hospital [Vietnam National Children's Hospital] or bring him to this center. Heres the address." That "center" belonged to her. I could not lift my face up, and kept staring at the floor. I remembered that when I was pregnant, Id read twice the book "Harvard Girl," written by Chinese authors Liu Weihua and Zhang Xinwu that describes how they raised their daughter, Liu Yiting to be accepted to Harvard University. I wondered what I had done wrong. The week after that day I could not eat. My life was in complete darkness. Every nice thing people said to comfort me only deepened the emptiness in my soul. And after the period of stumbling and self-blame came the period of over-optimism that I forced myself to enjoy. I hired two tutors for my son, each of them working for an hour and a half, each day. I took him from center to center for therapy. I had him treated by different types of doctors and let him have acupuncture and massages. I even reached out to fortune-tellers and spent tens of millions of dong (several thousand dollars) for rituals conducted by people whose names and addresses I cannot even remember. Very soon, I realized that the afternoon at the Vietnam National Children's Hospital that summer was just a small crisis in my life. At 3, my son urinated into a bowl of soup in the middle of a family meal, crashed all the eggs in the fridge and refused to sleep in a bed. He was admitted to and then refused by dozens of kindergartens. At 5, he spat into the coffee that strangers were having by the streets. I could not tell how many times I had to buy people another drink and apologize for my sons behavior or stop people from giving him candy, ice cream or even some money "because he was just a kid" or when I was looked down upon and scorned for not being able to train my own kid. At 6, he mixed two kilos of washing-powder with rice. At 7, the first primary school I took him to said it would only accept him as an observing student while the second one wanted me to pay his head teacher VND500,000 ($22) each month aside from all the school fees, as my son was naughty in class. And I got used to the scene in which mothers of other children angrily requested the school to expel my son or ban him from sitting next to their kids. At 10, he took half of a processed chicken in my parents fridge and put that into the toilet. At 13, he took VND4 million ($170) my sister left in a bag she put on a hanger to trade for a half-finished bag of snacks. At 15, he dumped my new dress into the waste pipe of the apartment building, only because he did not want me to wear it, and threw away a whole pot of fish I just cooked because he did not like the taste. Just last year, when everybody in the family was gathering for Tet, or Lunar New Year, and giving each other good wishes, my son looked me straight in the eyes and said: "Mom, dont die. Do you understand humans language?" Lets just assume that was an acting out of his love for me. Many people have asked me: "How he is with autism? Does he go to school?" and I would answer, for the thousandth time: "He has problems with his behavior, his way of thinking is quite different, and hes still in school." Some of them come close, eyes wide open with excitement. They ask: "Then he might have some special talents, right? Is he good at music? People with autism are normally geniuses." And I would quietly blame some journalists. I would wonder what kind of stories they had written so that people assume that autistic people in general are geniuses when just one percent of people with autism fit that description. It is also so hard for me to explain that while it is tough to raise an autistic kid, it does not necessarily mean unhappiness. After 16 years with a special kid, I feel grateful for all the difficulties we have been through, as they have made me realize the beauty in the soul that has stayed forever young and pure in my son, and easily gets close to those with "abnormal" appearances and characteristics. I have learned that there are things that will never be the same, and if there are no challenges to face, we might easily get lost in this life. I have also got used to asking people to stop talking about themselves and their feelings in their social media posts with references to "autism." For example, when they feel somewhat lonely and sad on a rainy day, they would post: "Feeling autistic with this rain. Anyone care for a drink?" Autism is a defect that cannot be seen. It is difficult for people with autism to go to school, be on their own, communicate, and stay focused. They have bizarre behaviors, they get angry easily, they only have certain foods, they put their belongings at certain places and have a fixed formula for their daily activities. The number of people with autism around the world has doubled in the past decade. In the U.S., one in every 68 children is born with it. Vietnam is estimated to have 500,000 people with autism, which means millions of their relatives are struggling to deal with the syndrome, but "autism" is not defined and included in the Law on Persons with Disabilities, and there are no statistics announced by the Ministry of Health on autistic people or their current situations. That is the reason why so many schools refuse autistic kids and there is zero support in terms of policies, health insurance, subsidies, or vocational training for this needy community. April 2 has been chosen by the United Nations as World Autism Awareness Day to raise awareness about people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On this day, buildings around the world are illuminated in blue in support of those who live with autism, and the campaigned has been named "'Light It Up Blue." So if you see that blue light somewhere on that day, please keep in mind that millions of people in Vietnam need you to understand and respect them. Who knows, thanks to your sympathy and understanding, an autistic person might get a chance to thrive. *Hong Phuc is a mother and journalist living in HCMC. The opinions expressed are her own. Binh Thuan police have opened an investigation after a Singaporean woman filed a complaint saying she was raped by a local man. On Sunday, the 30-year-old Singaporean woman, whose name has not been revealed, filed a report with the local police, accusing a man, only identified as the manager of the guesthouse where she was staying, of raping her on Saturday night, local media reports said. The woman, who was in the popular resort town of Phan Thiet in Binh Thuan Province on vacation, said she and her friend went out with the guesthouse manager for dinner and stayed out until late at night. After she returned to her room, he came at 1 a.m. and raped her, she said. Following her complaint, officers summoned the 26-year-old manager for questioning. The man denied the charge and said they had consensual sex. However, police said the womans body bore signs of sexual assault and that they are continuing the investigation. In Vietnam, punishment for convicted rapists ranges from two years in jail to death sentence, depending on the seriousness of the attack and damage caused to the victim. A school administration in northern Vietnam faces dismissal on suspicion it tried to cover up the brutal assault of a student in class. On March 22, five unnamed ninth graders of Phu Ung Secondary School in Hung Yen Provinces An Thi District stripped a classmate named Hanh and brutally hit her on the face and chest. No one intervened to stop the assault, but it was captured in a 40-second video by another student and circulated on social media. On learning about the incident a day later, the school administration suspended the five students for a week and ordered the video deleted. On March 25, the parents of the five students apologized to Hanhs family at a school meeting. However, Hanhs family later accused the school of not providing accurate information about the assault promptly and called for authorities to investigate the schools attempts to cover up the shocking incident. Since March 28, Hanh is being treated for acute stress disorder at the Hung Yen Mental Hospital. The case has come to the notice of government officials, including Minister of Education Phung Xuan Nha, who has ordered a thorough investigation and punishment for everyone responsible. The school education board faces dismissal and its principal has been suspended. Calculated assault Hanh sits on a bed in the Hung Yen Mental Hospital. Photo by VnExpress/Duong Tam Hanh, student of class 9A at the Phu Ung school, said the trouble started when she refused an order by a classmate to bring a hat downstairs on the morning of March 22. She was threatened with violence then. In the afternoon, Hanh was accused of writing love letters to another classmates lover. Hanh denied the accusation. She was beaten then once, and later in the day, stripped and beaten again. The second act of violence was filmed. Hanh was too scared to talk to anyone about the vicious attack on her. "I felt lonely. I have a group of friends who sympathize with me, but they will not speak up." After the ordeal, Hanh went to school as usual. But when she learnt that images of her ordeal, naked and being beaten, were being spread online, she could not take it. She wanted to stay at home. "I felt traumatized," she said. "I couldnt face them." She said seeing the classmates who beat her made her relive the experience. When she was admitted to the hospital, she was "shaking with fear," records show. It is too early to say when she would be discharged, an unidentified doctor said. Hanh is generally quiet in class, said Hoa Thi Trang, her class teacher. When the teacher asked Hanh why she hadnt complained about her assault, the girl said she was frightened of being beaten again. Family kept in the dark When the school informed Hanhs family members of the assault, they thought she had been beaten by one person, said Nguyen Van Doanh, the girls uncle. It was only on March 25, when they were asked to go to the school to meet with the five students and their parents that they came to know the truth, he said. "Only when I saw there were five families there did I realize that my niece was assaulted by five people, not one. And a teacher had told me Hanh was only slightly beaten." Doanh said the family decided to file a complaint after they discovered the video, which the school never mentioned to them. "The schools response [to the assault] has upset our family because they were slow and didnt tell us the full story of what had happened." Nguyen Van Doanh, Hanh's uncle, shows reporters his niece's torn-up shirt after the assault. Photo by VnExpress/Duong Tam Official response Nhu Manh Phong, principal of Phu Ung, has been suspended while the class teacher, Trang, has been replaced by another teacher to "stabilize the students mental state," said Duong Tuan Doan, Chairman of the An Thi District Peoples Committee. Education Minister Nha has visited Hanh in the hospital, remarking later the incident was "painful." "The teachers who did not do their jobs must be dealt with. Students lacking morals and behaving indecently also need to be dealt with properly," he said. Nguyen Van Phong, Chairman of Hung Yen Province, has instructed the An Thi District Peoples Committee to consider dismissing and disciplining the schools administration board for deliberately concealing information and for being too lenient. The class teacher also needs to be punished for "not knowing what the students were up to," he said. Asia's businesses are promising increasingly inventive perks in a desperate bid to lure executives to a region where toxic air engulfs major cities for much of the year. Health concerns are putting off those initially attracted by Asia's growing economic opportunities, experts warn, so firms are struggling to recruit -- and retain -- people with the expertise they need. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, some 92 percent of people in the Asia-Pacific region are exposed to levels of air pollution that pose a significant risk to health. This means that on top of large salaries, businesses are having to offer extra incentives. These include paying for smog breaks every few months, or allowing non-traditional working arrangements so people can commute from less polluted areas, says Lee Quane, Asia director for consultancy ECA International. At "a location with a higher level of pollution, you're likely to see us recommend allowances of anywhere between 10 to 20 percent of the person's base salary," he says. This estimate, derived from a rating system his firm uses to help companies decide appropriate financial compensation for relocation, would also incorporate factors such as crime rates and access to services, he adds. Other provisions employees could expect for moving to a highly polluted area include better insulated apartments, air purifiers for home and office, breathing masks, and regular medical check-ups. "If you look at the cost associated with even those smaller things... youre probably looking at a minimum cost, on an annual basis, of maybe $5,000 to $10,000 a year," Quane said, with location allowances an additional expense. Lower calibre employees In 2014, Panasonic confirmed that it offered a "pollution premium" for those working for the company in China, while media reports revealed Coca Cola was offering an environmental hardship allowance of around 15 percent for employees moving there. China has since taken measures to improve its air quality, but Beijing -- along with other key urban centres in South Asia including New Delhi -- routinely exceeds World Health Organisation safe limits for air pollution. As a result, these places are seeing a "reduction in calibre" of employees, Quane warns, arguing that firms are forced to opt for people who are less qualified. Patrick Behar-Courtois, who ran an organisational behaviour consulting firm in Shanghai for more than a decade, agrees. He says "generous financial offers" were not enough to offset the pollution concerns of the highly skilled people he wanted to recruit. "I basically had to revise my hiring policies and look for people locally, so obviously it means that I got profiles that were less experienced and I had to spend more time training them," he says. Executives with families are often unwilling to put their children's health at risk however attractive the job offer. World Health Organisation experts have repeatedly warned the very young are particularly vulnerable to air pollution and could face a lifetime of illness because of it. Eddy Tiftik built his career in China and held a senior position at one of the world's largest real-estate developers, but felt he had to leave for his family's wellbeing. His then-five-year-old son was constantly unwell with asthma because of Beijing's very high levels of pollution. "He literally would spend three weeks out of a month going back and forth from the hospital," Tiftik tells AFP. Children at risk India has one of the world's fastest growing economies, making it an appealing career option, but it is also home to seven of the most polluted cities, according to a recent report by Greenpeace and IQ Air Visual. "All senior executives want to have India experience on their CVs. There is however, a fear of pollution related health issues," says Atul Vohra, managing partner of Transearch, a global recruitment firm. Such concerns are not just an issue for expats, he says, adding that Indians are also turning down work in areas of the country with severe smog. For many the rewards are simply not worth the risks. Behar-Courtois recently left Shanghai, which has seen its air quality deteriorate in the past few years, after his wife developed thyroid issues he believes are linked to the smog. "In the last three to five years, I've seen a lot of people, especially with kids, who basically chose to put an end to their career here and move," he reveals. He now works as a professor in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai, where the air is cleaner. Tiftik says his son's symptoms abruptly stopped after the family moved to Bangkok, which has air quality problems of its own, but are fall less severe than Beijing. He would consider leaving the continent altogether if pollution worsens, he says, even though his Mandarin skills give him an edge in the Asian market. He adds: "Although my career is very important, my familys health is more important." Cambodian women who have returned from China often describe experiences of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, confinement, torture and forced labor. Photo by Shutterstock/Tymonko Galyna Agreements reached between Phnom Penh and Beijing to combat the trafficking of Cambodian 'brides' to China will be useless without fresh funding and stricter enforcement, groups said. Cambodia's Interior Minister Sar Kheng on Sunday announced a series of deals to fight transnational crimes, including human trafficking, however no details were made available. Chou Bun Eng, deputy head of the ministry's National Committee to Counter Human Trafficking, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation she had no new funds to address the issue and referred further questions to a ministry spokesman who said he had no information to share. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of Southeast Asian women have been lured to China by criminal networks promising lucrative jobs, only to be sold as brides as China grapples with a gender imbalance of tens of millions of men. "Its happening every day, this bride trafficking," said Dy Thehoya, senior program officer at the Centre for Alliance of Labour and Human Rights, a Cambodian charity that helps repatriate trafficking survivors. "The government creates mechanisms to address the problem but they are only on paper. In reality, they are ineffective due to poor implementation," he said. In 2016, Phnom Penh said it had identified 7,000 Cambodian women living in forced marriages in China but anti-trafficking groups said the real total could easily be double that. In recent years, Cambodia has introduced a number of policies to help address the problem, including heavier screening of Cambodian women who apply for travel visas. This drove the trend further underground, human rights groups said, with an increasing number of women travelling overland through Vietnam and then across its mountainous northern border to China. "It seems that the traffickers have relationships with officials from all sides," Thehoya said, adding that officials at Cambodian missions abroad had often been uncooperative when contacted for assistance. "They share the benefits." Cambodian women who have returned from China often describe experiences of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, confinement, torture and forced labor. Some escaped and made their way home while others have been sold on or discarded after producing a child for the man who bought them, usually for between $10,000 and $20,000, according to researchers. Five Cambodian charities who work to locate, repatriate and rehabilitate women forced into marriage said that they received a new call asking for help every other day in 2018. But finding the women and getting them out is almost impossible, as they do not understand the local language or know where exactly they are, have little or no access to phones and internet, and usually have their passports withheld. "Sometimes, we simply can not help the victims" said Sa Im, who works on women's issues at the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, a human rights group. Im said that her organization often lost contact with victims while trying to raise funds to bring them home, and called for the government to allocate more funds for repatriation. "Officials and anti-trafficking police on the ground know and understand the problem but have no budget support," she said. A child holds national flags of China and the Philippines in Beijing, China. Photo by Reuters/Thomas Peter The Philippines has filed a diplomatic protest over the presence of more than 200 Chinese boats near an island occupied by Manila in the disputed South China Sea. The Department of Foreign Affairs protested against the vessels near the Philippines-occupied Thitu island, presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo told a regular news conference, without describing the boats. The Chinese ambassador said they were fishing boats. "The mere fact that they are there and just staying there for a week, why, what are they doing there?" Panelo said. It was unclear when and where the Philippines filed the protest. The Philippines monitored more than 200 Chinese boats near Thitu, locally called Pagasa, in January to March this year, military data showed. The Philippines, China, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia have competing claims of sovereignty in the waterway, a conduit for in excess of $3.4 trillion of goods. Vietnam has repeatedly asserted its sovereignty over the Paracel (Hoang Sa) and Spratly (Truong Sa) archipelagoes, the latter including Thitu. Lights from hundreds of buildings in China's sprawling artificial islands can be seen at night from Thitu. Both Chinese and Filipino fishermen are present in the contested waters, Zhao Jianhua, China's ambassador to the Philippines, told reporters. He denied media reports that Chinese fishermen were carrying firearms. Beijing and Manila were handling maritime issues through friendly and diplomatic channels, Zhao said. "You don't have to worry about whether there would be any kind of outbreak of conflict or not," he said. The announcement of the diplomatic protest came as the Philippines and United States, a treaty ally, kicked off an annual joint military exercise involving roughly 7,500 troops, including 50 from Australia. They are aimed at enhancing response to natural disasters. "It's not directed to any threat or existing security concern," military exercise director Lt. Gen. Gilbert Gapay told reporters. Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured the Philippines it would come to its defense if it came under attack in the South China Sea. The Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, 72, is the world's second-longest reigning monarch. Photo by Reuters/Ahim Rani The incoming Islamic law in Brunei that punishes LGBT+ people with whipping, stoning or death for same-sex activity has made many flee for fear of their lives. As a transgender woman growing up in Brunei, Zoe saw the countrys slide toward conservatism from an early age, so plans to introduce strict new Islamic laws this week came as no surprise. The 19-year-old, who was born male but identified as female from early childhood, is now awaiting the outcome of her asylum application in Canada after fleeing her country late last year. "Even before Sharia law, LGBT+ people could be prosecuted under civil law," Zoe told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which is identifying her by only one name for her protection. "Ive always been scared of living my life openly in Brunei. I still am. I still think about how I present myself, because I was conditioned to survive." Brunei, a Muslim-majority former British protectorate with a population of about 400,000, is due to implement Sharia laws from April 3, punishing sodomy, adultery and rape with the death penalty, and theft with amputation. The laws, elements of which were first adopted in 2014, could see LGBT+ people whipped or stoned to death for same-sex activity. Some aspects of the laws will apply to non-Muslims. "I knew it was going to happen," said Zoe, who hopes to one day undergo hormone therapy and formally change her name to the one she sometimes goes by. "Our oil reserves were dwindling and the sultan needed a way to control the economy once he started to enforce taxes and reduce the high subsidies." The Brunei Prime Ministers Department did not respond to an emailed request for comment on Monday. Brunei does not hold elections and any discontent is assuaged with generous government polices including zero taxes, subsidized housing, and free healthcare and education. Zoe, who is worried that her LGBT+ friends back in Brunei do not fully appreciate how dangerous the situation will soon become, faces an uncertain future. "If I get sent back to Brunei, I will confess who I am and what I believe in to the Bruneian authorities," she said. "Id rather die being true to myself than resenting a long life. I wish that Muslims who want Sharia law just keep it with themselves and God. Not enforce it onto other people." Asia's silence Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, 72, is the worlds second-longest-reigning monarch and prime minister of oil-rich Brunei. He ranks as one of the worlds wealthiest people. Since details of the new laws were announced, actor George Clooney and musician Elton John are among celebrities who have called for a boycott of hotels owned by the government-owned Brunei Investment Agency. Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have all called on Brunei to abandon changes to its penal code. "It is seriously regrettable that Bruneis decision contravenes a number of international norms on human rights," New Zealands Foreign Minister Winston Peters said in a statement on Sunday. Matthew Woolfe, founder of human rights group The Brunei Project, said it was now very unlikely that Brunei would backtrack, but diplomatic pressure from Asian countries could help ensure the laws were not enforced fully. "We want to see more Asian governments coming out and speaking out on this. They have been too quiet," said the Australia-based campaigner. Socially conservative attitudes prevail across Asia, with Myanmar, Malaysia and Singapore banning sexual relationships between men, while Indonesia has seen an increase in raids targeting LGBT+ people in recent years. Members of the Association of South East Asian Nations, which did not respond to requests for a comment, have a principle of non-interference in each others domestic affairs. "Im not aware of any Asian country having come out and said anything about these laws," said Woolfe. Barbaric laws Brunei, which neighbors two Malaysian states on Borneo island, already enforces Islamic teachings more strictly than Malaysia and Indonesia, the other majority Muslim countries in Southeast Asia. Previously homosexuality was illegal in Brunei and punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, while the sale of alcohol is banned and evangelism by other religions is forbidden. Ging Cristobal, project coordinator at OutRight Action International in Manila, urged other Muslim countries in the region to put pressure on Brunei. "In reality, Brunei will not succumb to pressure from countries that are not Muslim-majority countries," said Cristobal. "Brunei might say that other regions are imposing on Asia, so it would be good to see other Asian nations condemn these barbaric laws." Better to leave Shahiransheriffuddin bin Shahrani Muhammad is gay man who fled Brunei last year after being charged with sedition for a Facebook post that was critical of the government. Now seeking asylum in Canada, the 40-year-old was surprised at the speed with which the new Sharia laws were being implemented. "I expected it to happen, just not so soon," he said. I thought there would be more time for people like me in Brunei to realize that its better to leave." Many people in Brunei back the Sharia laws because of rising unemployment and crime, he said. The death penalty has rarely been used in Brunei and the burden of proof needed to secure a conviction for same-sex activities is very high, he added. Nonetheless, for LGBT+ people, the prospect of going to trial is terrifying, carrying the risk of being the first person to be stoned, he added. Even if exonerated, they face being stigmatized for the rest of their lives - Cristobal said the new laws gave license "for other people to see LGBTIQ (people) as criminals and commit violence and abuse toward them". Khairul, 19, is a gay Muslim man living in Brunei who now fears for his future. "With the added laws that affect the LGBTQ+ community, I am scared," said Khairul, who asked not to be identified by his real name for fear of reprisals. "My life here will become more complicated and hard. "The fear of dying has become a reality, while the hope of being accepted by family is now just a dream." 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. INNIO* announced today (4/1) that it will supply six Jenbacher* gas engines for the LEMENE microgrid project in Finland, helping the Finnish government reach its climate goal of having 100 percent of its energy come from renewable sources by 2030. The LEMENE flagship project will be the largest energy self-sufficient business district using renewable energy in Finland. The combined heat and power (CHP) plant will enhance the security of the electricity supply in the Marjamaki area, located close to the city of Tampere, and the thermal energy will be used for district heating. "The LEMENE project is key to helping the Finnish government reach its national energy decarbonization goals and to make the Marjamaki industrial district energy self-sustaining. We chose Jenbacher gas engines because of INNIO's long-standing experience with gas engines, especially with burning greener gases such as biomethane. These six gas engines will provide the district with reliable, efficient and economically friendly power and heating," said Toni Laakso, chief executive officer, Lempaalan Energia Ltd. Located in the Marjamaki industrial area in the Lempaala municipality, the LEMENE microgrid project will have a variable renewable energy source as twin 2-megawatt (MW) solar power plants. The six gas engines, with a total capacity of 8.1 MWs, are the key elements providing secure energy as the solar power production varies. The microgrid also comprises a fuel cell solution providing a total of 130 kilowatts and a battery to even out temporary fluctuations in energy production. INNIO's three Jenbacher J416 and three Jenbacher J420 CHP units will run on natural gas or biomethane as available to make the gas engine a CHP carbon-neutral solution. The entire system is expected to be commissioned by the summer of 2019. With the European Union setting targets for a more sustainable energy supply based on renewables, each member country has set its own targets until 2030. CHP and district heating will provide a significant contribution to achieve Finland's targets of national energy savings until 2030. Furthermore, Finland's Prime Minister Juha Sipila mandated the increase of the use of renewable energy to more than 50 percent during the 2020s and self-sufficiency to more than 55 percent. By using INNIO's Jenbacher gas engine CHP system, the LEMENE project will avoid 235 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per megawatt-hour of electricity produced compared to electricity-only operation and heat provided by a natural gas boiler. The result is a reduction of 7,629 tons annually of CO2 if all six engines run a total of 4,000 operating hours per heating season. Running the same gas engine CHP system on carbon-neutral biomethane compared to natural gas, the avoidance of CO2 results in an additional 15,725 tons annually, making the six gas engine CHP system a dispatchable renewable energy source. The six Jenbacher engines will be installed at four different sites located in close proximity to each other, connected together with the solar plants, the fuel cells and the battery storage system to a microgrid system. The energy self-sufficient local grid operates mainly as part of the public electrical grid, but it can also operate as a supporting reserve system for the public electrical grid, or as an independent off-grid, on-demand system. The heat from the gas engines is provided to the local district heating network. "Our Jenbacher Type 4 gas engines are energy-efficient options to generate electricity and utilize waste heat while reducing CO2 emissions with high reliability and availability. The LEMENE microgrid project is a unique and independent energy self-supporting plant that is an example of the future of power generation. With the growing biomethane availability, more and more of our gas engines are becoming a source for renewable, dispatchable power generation," said Carlos Lange, President and CEO of INNIO. The LEMENE project is one of 11 key energy projects in 2017 that have been granted an investment aid from the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. The total amount of aid allocated for key energy projects in 2017 was 39.7 million of which the LEMENE project was granted 4.97 million. The Finnish government allocated a total of 100 million for renewable energy and new technology investments for 2016 to 2018. INNIO's Channel Partner for Jenbacher gas engines in Finland is Hoyrytys Oy. The LEMENE project is operated by Lempaalan Energia Ltd., which is a subsidiary of and wholly owned by Lempaalan Lampo Ltd. The former operates as a production company for the latter, producing district heating using solid fuels, such as peat, wood chips and sawdust. * INNIO and Jenbacher are trademarks. About INNIO INNIO is a leading solutions provider of gas engines, power equipment, a digital platform and related services for power generation and gas compression at or near the point of use. With our Jenbacher and Waukesha product brands, INNIO pushes beyond the possible and looks boldly toward tomorrow. Our diverse portfolio of reliable, economical and sustainable industrial gas engines generates 200 kW to 10 MW of power for numerous industries globally. We can provide life cycle support to the more than 48,000 delivered gas engines worldwide. And, backed by our service network in more than 100 countries, INNIO connects with you locally for rapid response to your service needs. Headquartered in Jenbach, Austria, the business also has primary operations in Welland, Ontario, Canada, and Waukesha, Wisconsin, US. For more information, visit the company's website at www.innio.com. Follow INNIO on Twitter and LinkedIn. Firefighter Miguel Roldan. PACO PUENTES It is June 2017, and firefighter Miguel Roldan has been working for 18 hours on a migrant rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea. A phone call warns him that another migrant boat is sinking. It is past 10pm and completely dark. He sets out with two of his colleagues in a small boat to find the drowning migrants. They sail 200 meters, turn off the boats engines and follow the screams for help. They find the migrants within 10 minutes, but Romes Search and Rescue Control Center deny the team permission to rescue them. They are in Libyan waters and have to negotiate with the North African country. They are granted permission to carry out a rescue operation 15 minutes later. But a quarter of an hour is an eternity for migrants struggling to stay alive. Its unbelievable. We respect the rules so much that weve watched people die because of bureaucracy Miguel Roldan, 32, firefighter We could only save half of them, many people drowned, remembers Roldan, a 32-year-old firefighter from the southern city of Malaga, who has been part of the underwater unit of the Seville City Hall Fire Department since 2013. His act of solidarity that day, as well as his help on other rescue missions in the summer of 2017, could land him behind bars for 20 years for allegedly aiding illegal immigration and working with human traffickers. Roldan had previous experience on rescue missions in the Aegean Sea, next to the Greek island of Lesbos, and decided to spend 20 days of his vacation in June 2017 aboard Iuventa, an old fishing vessel that was converted into a rescue ship by the German NGO Jugend Rettet. The crew departed from La Valeta port in Malta and sailed until they were 17 nautical miles from the coast of Libya in international waters. In those 20 days, the team rescued 5,000 people. When Roldan returned to Seville, the crew continued to carry out rescue missions in the central Mediterranean migration route, one of the most-popular ways to enter Europe, saving around 14,000 people in the following weeks. But the rescue missions were cut short on August 2 when Italian authorities seized the Iuventa and launched an investigation into the crew for facilitating illegal immigration. As a result of the investigation, a judge in the Sicilian city of Trapani, accused the entire crew seven Germans, two Scots and Roldan of helping human traffickers. Even just one minute spent in jail for saving lives would be too much Firefighter Miguel Roldan Its unbelievable. We respect the rules so much that weve watched people die because of bureaucracy. The accusation is a huge slap in the face, says Roldan. According to the International Organization for Migration (OIM), 3,116 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2017, with the majority 2,832 people drowning on the central Mediterranean route where Roldan was working as a volunteer. Since the beginning of the operation, weve cooperated directly and completely with the Italian authorities, says Sascha Girke, one of the founders of Jugend Rettet and the leader of the 2017 mission that Roldan took part in. According to Girke, the main objective of Iuventa is to go to areas where migrants are in danger of drowning they were between 200 or 300 kilometers off the island of Lampedusa and Malta and actively search and rescue them. Once rescued, the migrants are transferred to ships belonging to non-profit organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children. Roldans situation is not unique. In 2018, three firefighters from Seville were facing up to 10 years in prison for attempting to smuggle people as volunteers for Proem-Aid (Professional Emergency Aid), a Spanish association that aims to save migrants drowning at sea. The three men were acquitted but Roldan may not be so lucky, says Oino Reina, the president of Proem-Aid. Spanish firefighters (l-r) Manuel Blanco, Julio Latorre and Jose Enrique Rodriguez were acquitted of attempting to smuggle people into the EU in 2018. EFE The main difference between the cases is that we were dealing with the Greek justice system, but [Roldan] is being accused by Italy, a country that has a policy of harassing and attacking NGOs, especially since Matteo Salvini became the interior minister, explains Reina. According to information provided by Jugend Rettet, the investigation phase of the case will end in the summer, and if there is to be a trial, it will begin at the end of the year. Roldan, however, trusts that this will not happen. Even just one minute spent in jail for saving lives would be too much. English version by Asia London Palomba. Screen capture of a video taken by a soldier of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which shows an arrested woman who claims she is Spanish. Three Spanish women have been identified at detention camps for Jihadist combatants run by Kurdish militias in Syria following the fall of the Islamic State. According to police sources, one is a native of Morocco with Spanish citizenship, and the other two are Madrid-born women who converted to Islam. All three traveled to Syria with their husbands, and the Spanish government is now studying whether to repatriate them and any minors in their care. The last time that Lubna Miludi was seen in Spain was in April 2014, five months after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the Islamic State on June 4 of that year. She was 21, and there is footage from security cameras at Malaga airport showing her as she dragged a red suitcase to the gate to board a flight to Istanbul. From there, her plan was to cross the border and join the Islamic State. Kurdish authorities have not revealed how many Spaniards are in their custody Miludi, a native of Morocco with Spanish citizenship, had been working as a teacher in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave city in northern Africa. She told her parents that she was going to help the little children who have been orphaned because their parents died fighting the Jihad. Police sources have told EL PAIS that she is one of three Spanish women who have been identified at detention camps for Jihadists managed by Kurdish militia in Syria. The other two are Yolanda Martinez and Luna Fernandez, said these same sources. These Madrid natives joined the Islamic State around the same time as Lubna Miludi after being radicalized by their partners. At that time, the Islamic State was expanding and calling out for new combatants. An estimated 60,000 people from all corners of the planet heeded the call. In Spain, 237 individuals joined the ranks of the recently defeated Caliphate. Now, the Spanish government is analyzing what to do with these three women, said sources at the Interior Ministry. Kurdish authorities have not revealed how many Spaniards are in their custody. For now the government has only officially confirmed the existence of one Spanish woman in the area Yolanda Martinez, a Madrilena who converted to Islam, traveled to Syria with her husband Omar El Harchi, who was found by Spains High Court (Audiencia Nacional) to have worked as the operative leader of a recruitment network at the M-30 mosque in Madrid. According to that 2014 judicial report, Martinez and El Harchi a resident of Tetouan, in Morocco traveled to Istanbul together from Casablanca. In a telephone conversation, Martinez told her mother that they were in Turkey. The couple flew there with four other combatants, and this little group called itself Los Andalusies or Brigada Al Andalus. The third identified woman is Luna Fernandez, another native of Madrid who converted to Islam and traveled to Syria with her husband, according to anti-terrorist sources. Despite the information provided by the police, for now the government has only officially confirmed the existence of one Spanish woman in the area, arrested in Baguz, the last IS bastion in Syria, which fell 10 days ago. At least two women told militia members from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that they hold Spanish passports. One of them said she was 24, born in Morocco, and the widow of a Jihadist who had died in combat. She was traveling with seven children. The other woman is heard in a recording stating, in English, that she is Spanish. She was wearing a niqab and traveling with four children. The Spanish executive initially manifested a desire to bring back women with a Spanish passport and any minors in their care out of humanitarian reasons. English version by Susana Urra. Errata An earlier version of this story stated that Lubna Miluda was seen in Spain for the last time in November 2014, when in fact it was April of that year. Florida's Red Flag Law A Model, But Shouldn't Be By Tom Knighton. March 31st, 2019 The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was a horrific tragedy. That's something that is beyond debate. You either think it was or you're a horrible human being. You don't have to like those students who emerged from the aftermath to acknowledge that what happened was awful, after all. In that aftermath, though, the state of Florida reacted. They did what people often do when emotional and didn't stop to think about what happened. They reacted. As such, Florida passed a number of anti-gun laws that I suspect many lawmakers now regret. However, it's now being suggested that at least one of them is a model for other states. ..... The take-away here is one that is all too common - the "knee-jerk-reaction". Take that a step further and with the example of the 'Red Flag Law' it is not implausible to see this being the catalyst for other states as well as the Fed. Almost without fail following any mass murder tragedy there is a near immediate response to make a new law (prime example, New Zealand), either the more usual gun ban or in this case, one of the most egregious laws thought up to confiscate firearms with no due process. Emotion-driven does not equate to common sense. Back to Top The European Union will define Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory in the south of Spain, as a colony of the British Crown in draft legislation regarding travel to the EU without visas in a hard Brexit scenario. I was not prepared to see Spain hold this file hostage in the European Council British MEP Claude Moraes The move comes after the European Parliament on Monday stripped British negotiator Claude Moraes from his role as rapporteur after he refused to accept the contentious definition of Gibraltar, requested by the Spanish government. By removing Moraes, the draft law which will allow visa-free travel for EU and British nationals in the case that the United Kingdom crashes out of the EU without a deal can be approved with the definition of Gibraltar as a colony. This represents a win for Spain on an issue that Brussels has traditionally tried to remain neutral on. In February, Spanish government representatives had requested to include a footnote in the draft law indicating: There is controversy between Spain and the UK concerning the sovereignty over Gibraltar, a territory for which a solution has to be reached in light of the relevant resolutions and decisions of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The British government criticized the move, claiming Gibraltar is not a colony and it is completely inappropriate to describe it in this way, in a statement to EL PAIS. The dispute over the colony definition had threatened to derail the EU travel agreement. While it was approved by the 27 EU members, the draft legislation was held up in the European Parliament because of Moraess objections. British MEP Claude Moraes. Twitter The British member of the European Parliament (MEP) refused to accept the definition of Gibraltar as a colony of the British crown and there was little progress on the issue after five meetings. The growing risk that millions of Britons and EU citizens would need a visa for short stays in the case of a no-deal Brexit, pushed the president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, to ask Moraes for his resignation. When Moraes refused, the center-right European Peoples Party and the Socialists and Democrats forced him to leave his position at a hearing on Monday. Sergei Stanishev, a Bulgarian politician who is the president of the Party of European Socialists, will replace Moraes as the rapporteur for the EU on the visa-free travel legislation. The British MEP was removed from the key position on the grounds of conflict of interest. A Briton cannot negotiate with Great Britain on an issue relating to Brexit: that would place UK representatives on both sides of the negotiations, argued Esteban Gonzalez Pons, an MEP from the Spanish Popular Party (PP). Gibraltar is not a colony and it is completely inappropriate to describe it in this way British government Moraes has defended his independence and accused the Spanish government of lobbying to maintain the Gibraltar definition even though it was unnecessary to the draft law. I was not prepared to see Spain hold this file hostage in the European Council, with an addition that described Gibraltar legally as a colony, he said in a press release. British MEP Daniel Dalton came out in support of Moraes, writing in a message on Twitter that he was shocked that Moraes has been forced out for rightly opposing Spanish attempts to describe Gibraltar as a colony in the text. Gibraltar is British. The chief minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, also expressed his support. In a press statement, he said: The people of Gibraltar will not forget the excellent work that Claude Moraes has done. Neither will we forget those who have conspired to put their nationalistic footnotes over the rights of people. English version by Melissa Kitson. Three children of ISIS fighters in a Kurdish hospital. N.S More information The children of Jihadists struggling to survive Take care of my children, because even if I die, they are the seeds of the Caliphate. This is what a Jihadist woman told the head nurse of a Kurdish hospital in northeastern Syria, pointing to the cribs of the more than 75 children of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters who are fighting for their lives. These children of African, Asian and European descent were born in Baghouz, in eastern Syria, a former ISIS stronghold on the border with Iraq, and evacuated from ISIS camps in the Syrian desert. Some of them are orphans, but others are visited by their mothers who remain captive in nearby camps. Whatever the crimes their parents have committed, the children are clearly innocent victims of the conflict Paul Donohoe, International Rescue Committee Hardly any of the children here are more than three years old. Stigmatized for being the offspring of Jihadists, their mere existence poses a problem for their parents countries of origin. Some governments have decided to either repatriate them or allow them to return, while others have refused to take responsibility for kids who do not yell out jihadist messages, but simply cough and cry in their cribs. The children have gaunt, yellow faces and shaved heads, some with burn marks, others with stitches. These scars are the only signs that they have survived a war. In the largest crib in the room, three children sit quietly. They do not cry, or moan, or react to caresses. These bony-armed kids are struggling to stay alive. Since December, 123 children have died from malnutrition, hypothermia and respiratory problems. The children of ISIS fighters in a Kurdish hospital in northeastern Syria. N.S A nurse at the Kurdish hospital asks to go by the pseudonym Maya because she fears reprisals from ISIS. She is in charge of a team of 12 caregivers and three other health professionals who have been looking after the children. Many Jihadists have escaped from camps and we fear that they will come here and seek revenge for the children who have died, she says, asking that the name of the hospital not be mentioned either. A woman who says her name is Meriam el Ali enters the room. In fluent English, the 20-year-old Norwegian citizen of Somali origin defiantly demands care for her nephew, a sad-looking baby with long eyelashes. The caregivers give a withering look. Since December, 123 children have died from malnutrition, hypothermia and respiratory problems We make a huge effort to maintain tens of thousands of ISIS members in camps and prisons with the limited resources we have, while also treating our own wounded, fixing infrastructure and [dealing with] the cost of war, says a Kurdish security officer. What we are asking is for their countries of origin to take charge. Whatever the crimes their parents have committed, the more than 3,500 foreign children who languish in the different camps in northeastern Syria are clearly innocent victims of the conflict and they should be repatriated to their countries of origin to guarantee their safety and wellbeing, says Paul Donohoe, spokesperson for an NGO called the International Rescue Committee (CIR), which works in camps in northeastern Syria. Weve already surpassed 75,000 people, says an employee of the Al-Hol camp. The charity Save the Children says that 40,000 minors are living at the camp, 250 of whom are unaccompanied, according to CIR. The small blue and pink bracelets which encircle the wrists and ankles of these children are used to determine their gender and their names. In crib 15, one bracelet reads mahjul, the Arabic word for unknown. Maya estimates that there are at least 20 orphans in the two rooms, and out of all of them, the nameless child is the only one who can manage a smile. English version by Asia London Palomba. 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 The Finance Ministry has selected Pedersen & Partners recruiting company to search for candidates to the post of independent members of the supervisory board of state-owned Oschadbank, Ward Howell Ukraine to search for candidates for state-owned Ukreximbank and Talent Advisors, part of Odgers Berndtson Ukraine, to search for candidates for state-owned PrivatBank. "I and three super professionals in recruiting, Odgers Berndtson Ukraine, Pedersen & Partners and Ward Howell Ukraine, who together with us and international experts will search for six candidates for the posts of independent members of supervisory boards PrivatBank, Oschadbank and Eximbank," Finance Minister Oksana Markarova wrote in the Facebook social network on Monday. As reported, the Verkhovna Rada early July 2018 adopted a law on the reform of the supervisory boards of state-run banks, according to which the supervisory board of state-owned banks should consist of nine members. Six of them should be independent, three representatives of the state, one each from the president, the Cabinet of Ministers and the parliament. Naftogaz signs agreement with Norway's Wikborg for litigation with Gazprom for another EUR14 mln Naftogaz Ukrainy on April 1, 2019 signed an agreement worth EUR14 million with the Norwegian law firm Wikborg Rein Advokatfirma AS, which provides legal support within the litigation with Russia's PJSC Gazprom. According to the report in the ProZorro system, the contract price consists of the contractor's fee, expenses incurred for attracting third parties and travel expenses. As reported, in February 2018, the Stockholm arbitration obliged Gazprom to pay Naftogaz a fine of $4.63 billion for the underutilization of the Ukrainian pipe. Taking into account the previously made decision on the supply contract, Gazprom should pay the Ukrainian side an additional $2.56 billion. Gazprom contested this decision in a Swedish court. Zelensky at 30.23%, Poroshenko 15.92%, Tymoshenko 13.4% CEC with 97.1% of protocols processed Presidential candidates Volodymyr Zelensky and incumbent President Petro Poroshenko have received 30.23% and 15.92% of votes cast on March 31, respectively, according to Ukraine's Central Election Commission (CEC) with 97.1% of voting protocols processed. According to the CEC website, 13.4% of voters cast ballots for Batkivschyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko, followed by Opposition Platform For Life candidate Yuriy Boiko with 11.63%. Civil Position Party leader Anatoliy Hrytsenko received 6.93%, followed by ex-SBU State Security Service head Ihor Smeshko with 6.03%, Radical Party leader Oleh Liashko with 5.48%, Opposition Bloc leader Oleksandr Vilkul with 4.17%, and Svoboda Party leader Ruslan Koshulynsky with 1.63%. Other candidates had less than 1% of the vote. Some 1.18% of ballots cast were ruled invalid. Patients who use the government's medicine cost reimbursement program Affordable Medicines will be able to receive medicines to treat cardio-vascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and bronchial asthma using an electronic prescription, according to a posting on the website of the Health Ministry. According to the report, from April 1, patients will be able to receive medicines in any pharmacy that signed a contract with the National Health Service of Ukraine. Over 5,000 pharmacies in the country joined the reimbursement program. The leaders among the regions in the number of pharmacies that joined the program are Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk regions and Kyiv city. As reported, from April 1, the government program Affordable Medicines was transferred to the administration by the National Health Service. The prescriptions for the Affordable Medicines program become electronic only. Only the primary care physician with whom the patient has signed the declaration can issue it. 12500 N.E. Tenth Place Bellevue, WA 98005 JPFO.org 800-869-1884 info@jpfo.org FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 2, 2019 Contact: Floyd Neeland JPFO CONDEMNS JEWISH CALLS TO DISARM: "Of all people, Jews should know better." JPFO Position To every Jewish pundit seeking more gun law after unarmed New Zealanders murdered To every Jewish Congressperson who voted for H.R.8 and H.R.1112 To every Jewish denomination that proposes "gun-control" by government agents After outrageous mass murders in New Zealandand deadly acts of similar sociopaths in recent memorytoo many Jews around the world, among other thought leaders, are again screaming bloody murder to disarm innocent people who didn't do anything. JPFO condemns these dangerous illogical demands in the strongest terms possible. Facing these threats, you should call for the exact opposite, as Brazil is doing (WSJ, 3/16, A10). Making people defenseless does not make criminals and sociopaths harmless. It does the exact opposite, empowering eviland demonstrates irrational thinking from the people who believe they should lead society. Following a mass murder, calls should increase for universal self-defense training, discounts and sales on firearms, range time, ammunition, classes for men, women, children and families as groups, and new gun-safety and marksmanship curricula for schools. Unfortunately, leading the charge to disarm the public and make people helpless in the face of known dire threats that are clear and present dangers, are Jews for the confiscation of firearms. These misguided brethren of ours have been misled and have forgotten the lesson of the Holocaust: "Never Again!" If they remembered, there would be no way to attack us and get away with it. We would bring a barrage down upon the attackers that would forever give them pause before such an attempt were ever made. Never Again! Wake up and smell the muzzles pointed at you. Fighters of Russia-led illegal armed groups opened fire on the positions of Ukraine's Joint Forces 18 times in the past day, three Ukrainian soldiers were wounded in action, the press center of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) said in a morning update on April 2. "On April 1, the enemy violated the ceasefire 18 times, using the weapons banned by the Minsk agreements in five cases... Three of our defenders were wounded as a result of the shelling," it said. Hot spots were the town of Avdiyivka, the villages of Pisky, Novotroyitske, Lebedynske, Krymske, Novoluhanske, Zolote-4, Novotoshkivske, and Khutir Vilny. Russia-led forces used small arms, anti-tank grenade launchers, large-caliber machine guns. "Since Tuesday night, the enemy opened fire from 120mm and 82mm mortars to attack Ukrainian troops near the village of Verkhniotoretske in the Skhid (East) sector," the JFO press center said. According to Ukrainian intelligence reports, two enemy fighters were killed and another six were wounded. An enemy infantry-fighting vehicle was also destroyed. Yulia Tymoshenko, a presidential candidate and Batkivschyna Party leader, says she is convinced that incumbent President Petro Poroshenko has made it to the second round of the presidential elections dishonestly, but she does not plan to appeal to the results of the March 31 vote. "Poroshenko's vote was rigged, he shouldn't have been in the second round, he made it there dishonestly. Now, I know, you have a question whether we, as the team, are going to appeal these results in court. I can say right now: we will not go to court," she said at a press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday. According to the politician, her team and she accepted this decision because they do not believe that justice can be achieved in the Ukrainian courts. Tymoshenko says the incumbent president "privatized" the judicial system, and it will not produce a fair decision on the election fraud that has happened. "We would simply waste time, hoping for something that is not worth it," Tymoshenko said. In addition, she said she did not intend to call on Ukrainians to go to the protests against the election results in connection with the fraud. "You know what condition the country is in; you know it has been brought to the survival. And we are aware that any protest may become a springboard for the aggressor country, which has been waging war against Ukraine. I will never let us be involved in any domestic clashes in Ukraine, rocking the boat," she added. Throughout the 2018 lawmaker Glib Zagoriy gave more than UAH 1.5 million to charity, reads his electronic declaration filed into the Unified State Electronic Declarations Registry. It also features lawmaker owning 95 patents and trademarks, mostly in pharmaceuticals sphere. According to the document, Zagoriy is the ultimate beneficiary of the PrJSC Pharmaceutical firm Darnitsa, PJSC SIC Borshchahivskiy CPP, LLC Farmmedinvest. As for the real estate property, the lawmaker disclosed the leased land plot with an area of 40,778 square meters, the 271.5 square meters apartment and the 423.7 square meters office he took on lease. The lawmakers wife Kateryna Zagoriy possesses the right to use a 760.8 square meters country house and a land plot with an area of 5,423 square meters. Lawmaker also disclosed having Tesla SP85D 2015 year made, leased Mercedes-Benz S 600 2012 year made and BMW Alpina B7, produced in 2017. Kateryna Zagoriy owns Range Rover 2014. Glib Zagoriy earned UAH 329,583 lawmakers wage in 2018. He earned some additional money at his second job scientific work in two universities. Darnitsa beneficiary told journalists, that he gave the entire wage earned throughout 2018 to charity. The lawmaker also gave explanations about Kateryna Zagoriys income of UAH 531 million, earned after disposition of corporate rights and bonds. Zagoriy said that there is no paragraph about the spending of the family members in the electronic declaration. In the same time, the spending after the bonds trading operations in 2018 equaled UAH 521 million. So the factual income equals the balance between the income (UAH 531 million) and the spending (UAH 521 million), plus the bonds coupon profit. As the result, Glib Zagoriy said, his wifes actual income was some UAH 14 million. Zagoriy also disclosed getting UAH 1.9 million income from the sale of personal property and UAH 11.73 million royalty from PrJSC Pharmaceutical firm Darnitsa. In his electronic declaration Zagoriy disclosed UAH 4.8 million on accounts in Ukrainian banks Oshchadbank, Ukrsibbank and others. He also disclosed having $2.1 million and 421,000 euros and UAH 5.4 million in cash, UAH 37 million debt receivable for corporate rights and lending $1 million to the third persons. The personal property of the Darnitsa beneficiary includes two items of weapon, sleeve buttons, pieces of antique, the collection of the XX century sculptures and art. His declaration also featured the collections of the Ukrainian national costumes, carpets and other pieces of art that belong to his wife. As it was reported earlier, in 2018 PrJSC Pharmaceutical firm Darnitsa increased its net profit by 31.3 percent, to UAH 449,134 million. It is expected that during the upcoming stockholders meeting at the beginning of April, they will decide not to pay dividends and instead divert the profit of 2018 for the development of the company. The widely circulated news concerning the death of the Friday Prayer Imam of Ahvaz and the representative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in oil-rich Khuzestan province has been denied by his office. Jamaran, a website in Iran cited Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Mousavi Jazayeri's representative on Tuesday, February 12, as saying, the 78-year old cleric is currently visiting England, "expanding" on the "ideals of the Islamic Revolution." He is in good health, the representative has insisted, adding, "The purpose of his travel to England has got nothing to do with medical treatment." Mousavi Jazayeri is a close ally of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mousavi Jazayeri's visit to Britain for expanding on the ideals of the Islamic Revolution is another example of state-sponsored ayatollahs occasionally visiting Europe mainly for medical treatment and check-ups. Most of such visits take place in utmost secrecy. While the citizens of the Islamic Republic are frequently denied entry visas to Western countries, social media users have bitterly complained that senior clerics in the ruling establishment are readily granted entry. However, when it was leaked in November 2018 that former head of Iran's judiciary (1999-2009) Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi was receiving medical treatment at a hospital in Hanover, Germany, hundreds of Iranian dissidents rushed to the hospital to protest, demanding Germanys justice ministry to charge the ayatollah with crimes against humanity. The German government took no action and the 70-year old ayatollah returned to Iran. Hashemi Shahroudi, who died last December was accused of playing a major role in the harsh treatment of political prisoners and the extra-judicial killings of thousands of detainees. Iranian Baha'i citizen and human rights activist, Jinous Sobhani, was briefly arrested, Iran Human rights Documentation Center (IHRDC) reported on March 31. Hours later, informed sources said she was released, but there are no details about her arrest or release. Jinous Sobhani, human rights activist and former secretary of Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Shirin Ebadi was arrested late last Saturday at her home and taken away to an unknown location, IHRDC said. It is not yet known which security agency was responsible for the arrest. Meanwhile, agents took away Ms. Sobhani's personal effects, including her laptop and cellphone. Sobhani, the former secretary at the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC) and the Organization for the Defense of Mine Victims (ODMV), had once been arrested in 2009. Authorities confiscated her address book, telephone, and other work materials and took her to Evin Prison. Both the DHRC and ODMV were established by Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi, and Sobhani was an employee there until authorities shut down the DHRC claiming it is an illegal organization. The DHRC was one of the leading human rights organizations in Iran, at the time. Shirin Ebadi is currently living in exile in the U.K. Sobhani was released on March 11, 2009, on a 700 million rials (approximately $73,000 at the time) bail. The Baha'I community, the most significant religious minority in Iran, has always been under heavy pressure by the Islamic Republic's establishment. Hundreds of Baha'is have been arrested and a number of them executed since the Islamic Revolution led to the downfall of the last Iranian monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Islamic Republic does not recognize Baha'ism as a legitimate religion and has restricted the activities of its followers, including depriving them of higher education and sealing off their stores and businesses. On the fortieth anniversary of a referendum that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, a human rights organization has published the first volume of a series of books, titled "The Face of Crime." The first volume of the series exclusively covers the cases of 100 human rights violators in Iran, says Justice for Iran, JFI. Established in July 2010, Justice for Iran is a non-governmental, not-for-profit human rights organization, JFI according to its website. "The mission of JFI is to address and eradicate the practice of impunity that empowers officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran to perpetuate widespread human right violations against their citizens, and to hold them accountable for their actions." The next volumes of the series will list 400 more human rights violators in Iran to set the scene for their legal accountability. Out of the 100 human rights violators listed in the first volume, 25 are serving in entities under the direct supervision of the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. fifty more serve in judicial capacities, 36 in governmental positions, and one as a member of Majles (Iranian parliament). The list includes the names of Khamenei, President Hassan Rouhani, the head of the judiciary, mid-ranking cleric Ebrahim Raeisi (Raeesi) and his predecessor, Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani, as well as the former Prime Minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi (1981-1989). Mir Hossein Mousavi has been under house arrest since February 2011 for protesting the result of 2009 controversial presidential election and calling on people to gather in support of the Arab Spring. Based on research results reflected in the book, the 100 political figures have been involved in a long list of human rights violations including the mass execution of thousands of prisoners who were serving their terms in 1988, suppressing people's protests in the 1980s, 1990s, and in the aftermath of the controversial presidential election in 2009 that officially held the hardliner incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in office. Furthermore, the book accuses many of the violators of murder, torture, sexual torture, suppressing dissidents, and political serial killings in Iran and abroad. Mass executions of the prisoners in late 1980s have been described as the largest in the history of the Islamic Republic. Earlier on December 4, 2018, Amnesty International (AI) released a 200-page report including documents and evidence concerning the mass killings in 1988. By concealing the fate and whereabouts of thousands of political dissidents who were forcibly disappeared and secretly executed in prison more than 30 years ago, Iranian authorities are continuing to commit crimes against humanity, said Amnesty International in its damning report. In the report, Blood-soaked secrets: Why Irans 1988 prison massacres are ongoing crimes against humanity, AI called on the UN to "set up an independent investigation" into the mass enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings which have gone unpunished for three decades. These blood-soaked secrets from Irans past continue to haunt the country to the present day. This report unravels the web of denials and distortions that the Iranian authorities have perpetuated over thirty years, both at home and internationally, to hide the truth that they forcibly disappeared and systematically killed thousands of political dissidents within a matter of weeks between late July and early September 1988, said Philip Luther, Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International. Meanwhile, individuals responsible for these crimes against humanity have evaded justice and, in some cases, those involved have held and continue to hold powerful positions in Iran today, AI said, adding, more recently that the mass killings have been celebrated in the country and those involved hailed as heroes. Instead of continuing their cruel attacks against families, the Iranian authorities should be ensuring their right to truth, justice, and reparation including returning victims bodies and identifying remains by allowing professional exhumations of mass graves and DNA analysis, said Philip Luther. Based on the JFI research, 41 out of the 100 listed in the first volume of the human rights violators, have so far been internationally held accountable for their crimes, and are banned from traveling to Europe and North America, and their bank accounts and assets abroad are blocked. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops 24 times, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said April 2, Trend reports. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan has issued a statement on the anniversary of occupation of the Kalbajar district of Azerbaijan,1993 and April escalation, 2016, Trend reports referring to the ministry. The statements reads: "On April 2, 1993 the Kalbajar district of Azerbaijan was occupied by armed forces of Armenia. Kalbajar located beyond the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan was occupied as a result of offensive operation mainly carried out from the territory of Armenia by use of heavy weaponry, Mi-24 helicopter gunships and advanced fixed wing aircrafts of Armenia. As a result of occupation, up to 60.000 inhabitants of Kalbajar were subjected to ethnic cleansing and expelled from their native lands, 511 innocent civilians were killed, 321 persons were taken hostage or went missing. Currently, more than 70.000 Kalbajar residents are temporarily residing in different regions of Azerbaijan as internally displaced persons (IDPs). Armenian occupation destroyed rich historical-cultural heritage of Kalbajar. The original architectural features of cloisters belonging to the ancient Albanian Christian heritage of Azerbaijan and having no connection with the Armenian Church, were changed and armenianized. Natural mineral resources of Kalbajar are subject to illegal exploitation. Since 2002, Base Metals CJSC, which is a wholly owned by subsidiary of the Armenia's Vallex Group CJSC, registered in Liechtenstein, has been exploiting Gyzylbulag underground copper-gold mine near Heyvaly village in the Kalbajar district. Since 2007, GPM Gold, a subsidiary of GeoProMining Ltd., has been extracting ore in Soyudlu gold mine. The satellite images show that exploitation of the resources in the mine is expanding. The Vardenis-Aghdara highway through the occupied Kalbajar district of Azerbaijan is directly linked to gaining access to the areas in the occupied territories rich in natural resources and to facilitate extracting goods and minerals out of the occupied territories to Armenia and international markets. Along with the abovementioned Armenia, in blatant violation of the international humanitarian law, transfers settlers of Armenian origin to the occupied Kalbajar district, with a view to change demographic features of these territories. In response to the occupation of the Kalbajar district, the President of the UN Security Council issued statement on 6 April, 1993. Then, UN Security Council adopted Resolution 822, which reaffirmed the inviolability of international borders and the inadmissibility of the use of force for the acquisition of territory and demanded immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces from the Kalbajar district and other recently occupied areas of Azerbaijan. Following the adoption of this, the CSCE Minsk Group worked out the timetable of urgent steps to implement the resolution. Armenia until now continues to disregard the implementation demands of the UN SC resolutions. Escalation of situation along the line of contact on April 2, 2016 as the result of attacks by the armed forces of Armenia on settlements densely populated Azerbaijani civilians with heavy weapons once again demonstrated that the illegal presence of armed forces of Armenia in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan remains major threat to regional peace and security. In response to the attacks of Armenia, the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan have taken counter measures, which resulted in providing security for the Azerbaijani civilians residing in close vicinity of the line of contact through liberation of strategically important territories and heights from occupation. Armenia has to understand that occupation of Azerbaijans lands, including Kalbajar district is temporary. The only way to achieve a durable and lasting peace is to ensure the unconditional and complete withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, the exercise by the forcibly displaced persons of their inalienable right to return to their places of origin in safety and dignity. The Armenian side, instead of wasting time and misleading its own people and the international community, must cease its policy of annexation and ethnic cleansing, and comply with its international obligations, as well as the demands of the UN SC resolutions and decisions of other international organizations." Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: Recent statements and actions by the leadership of Armenia, including the introduction of the new formulation new war for new territories, are absolutely unacceptable, Trend reports with reference to the press service of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry. We believe that such actions dont correspond to the Vienna meeting at the level of the leaders of the two countries, and the joint statement adopted on its basis, the ministry said. We repeat that such provocations call into question the multi-year negotiation process and the activities of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs. We would like to emphasize that namely Armenia is fully responsible for all possible negative consequences of such dangerous rhetoric. The President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan met on March 29 in Vienna for the first time under the auspices of the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group (Igor Popov of the Russian Federation, Stephane Visconti of France, and Andrew Schofer of the United States of America). The meeting was also attended by Foreign Ministers Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and Elmar Mammadyarov. Andrzej Kasprzyk, the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, also participated in the meeting. The statement issued on the results of the meeting reads that the two leaders underlined the importance of building up an environment conducive to peace and taking further concrete and tangible steps in the negotiation process to find a peaceful solution to the conflict. Recalling their conversation in Dushanbe, the leaders recommitted to strengthening the ceasefire and improving the mechanism for direct communication. They also agreed to develop a number of measures in the humanitarian field, said the statement. 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, April 2 Trend: A seminar titled "A New Look at Sovereignty in the Modern World" was held in Minsk, Belarus with the organizational support of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Minsk Dialogue expert initiative and the Austrian Embassy in Belarus, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Embassy in Belarus. The seminar included experts and scholars invited from many countries, among whom was Benyamin Poghosyan, Vice President for Research Head of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense Research University in Armenia and Executive Director of the Political Science Association. The event was also attended by Ambassador of Azerbaijan to Belarus Latif Gandilov and second secretary of the embassy Jeyhun Mammadov. During his speech, Poghosyan voiced anti-Azerbaijani and anti-Turkish thoughts. He also noted that ancient historical ties link Armenia with Russia. Poghosyan said that at one time Russia allegedly liberated the lands of southern Armenia from the Persian empire, and the Christian population of Armenia, which was under pressure from Muslims, was saved. Poghosyan went on to say that Russia currently manages energy production in Armenia, the sphere of mobile operators and the railway, noting that the presence of a military base and air defense system in Armenia is important for the country's security. He also noted that Armenia has established ties with the EU, the US and NATO, but cannot accept projects that will harm relations with Russia. Poghosyan added that, due to its location between Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenia ceded a certain part of its sovereignty to Russia in order to defend itself. Speaking after the Armenian representative, Dustin Dehez, Managing Partner of Germanys Manatee Global Advisors consultancy, said that Poghosyans words about Armenia having ceded a certain part of its sovereignty to Russia were surprising, and he does not understand the logic of losing sovereignty for ensuring its security. Latif Gandilov, in his turn, noted that he did not intend to speak at the event, but the statement of new facts by the Armenian side forced him to express his opinion. The ambassador said that on May 28, 1918, the territory of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was 114,000 square kilometers. After Azerbaijan regained its independence in 1991, the territory of Azerbaijan after it left the USSR amounted to 86,600 square kilometers 20 percent of which was occupied by Armenia. Gandilov also said that after the creation of the USSR, the Irevan Khanate was transferred to the Armenians in order to form a state for them, along with Zangazur. The ambassador emphasized that the territories of the 7 districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh are twice the size of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Despite the adoption of 4 UN Security Council resolutions in 1993-1994 in connection with the occupation of the territories of Azerbaijan by Armenia and the demand for the unconditional release of the occupied territories, Armenia still does not fulfill these conditions. The ambassador also said that not a single Azerbaijani is inhabiting the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and Armenians are pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing. As a graphic example of this policy, he pointed out the genocide committed on February 26, 1992 against the population of Khojaly. As an independent state, Azerbaijan currently cooperates on an equal footing in the region with international organizations and states, pursuing an independent foreign policy, as stated by Gandilov. The ambassador said that Azerbaijan is directly cooperating in ensuring the energy security of Europe. Azerbaijan has implemented such large projects as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars gas pipeline, while the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) will be commissioned this year. Gandilov thanked Dustin Dehez for the truth in connection with the sovereignty of Armenia. A survivor narrates the horror of the storm that battered Bara Shree Krishna Patel is one of seven survivors airlifted from Simara to Kathmandu after rescue efforts began Monday morning in the wake of the terrible storm that battered Bara and Parsa districts on Sunday night. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: Poland wants to use the tenth anniversary of the EU's Eastern Partnership (EP) programme to promote the EU neighbourhood cooperation scheme and raise its status, Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz has told PAP, Trend reports. "We want to use the tenth anniversary of the Eastern Partnership, which we co-initiated together with Sweden, to raise the awareness within the EU about the six countries that are also part of Europe. It is also an opportunity to strengthen the message that the EU is open and ready to support their development through new programmes, such as youth exchange," the Polish minister said. In the process of raising the Partnership's status, Poland wants to use the experience from the integration process of the Balkan states with the EU. "We want to institutionalise this cooperation so that EP states can better cooperate with one another. We will also try to organise EU-EP minister-level meetings," Czaputowicz said. The Eastern Partnership is a Polish-Swedish initiative which emerged in 2009 and constitutes part of the European neighbourhood policy covering the EU's eastern neighbours. The participating countries are: Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus and Armenia. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev has visited a military unit of the Special Forces of the Defense Ministry. Minister of Defense, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov, First Deputy Minister of Defense, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Colonel General Najmaddin Sadikov and Commander of the Special Forces, Major General Hikmat Mirzayev reported to Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev. The head of state laid flowers at a bust of national leader Heydar Aliyev here. Minister of Defense Zakir Hasanov informed Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev of the reconstruction work carried out in the military unit. This included the reconstruction of headquarters, canteen, barracks and creation of modern training centers in the territory of the military unit. The head of state was informed of the plans to construct new buildings here. President Ilham Aliyev also inspected combat readiness of the special forces. President Ilham Aliyev then met with servicemen. The Commander-in-Chief addressed the meeting. Speech of President of the Republic of Azerbaijan and Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev - Dear officers, warm greetings! Familiarization with the military unit today made a pleasant impression on me. In recent years, the military unit has been overhauled and all necessary conditions have been created for the educational process. This shows again that the Azerbaijani army is successfully developing today. The process of army building is proceeding rapidly, our military units are being refurbished and rebuilt, and the army is fitted with the most sophisticated equipment. This is natural, because we are at war. The war is not over yet only the first stage of it is. Today, the Azerbaijani army is one of the strongest armies on a global scale. Three years have passed since the April fights. The April battles are a glorious page of our history. During the battles we sustained losses. May Allah rest the souls of all our martyrs in peace. The state made every effort to provide for the treatment and rehabilitation of our wounded soldiers. All our soldiers who were injured have fortunately returned to normal life. All measures were taken for their treatment, rehabilitation and return to active life. The April battles are a great historic victory for us, one of the most successful military operations in our modern history. You are well aware that prior to the fighting, the armed forces of Armenia constantly fired at our settlements and military positions from occupied territories. The Azerbaijani army carried out a very successful operation to thwart Armenian provocations and liberated a part of Agdara, Fizuli and Jabrayil districts which were seized earlier. Thousands of hectares of land were freed from the invaders and an area of tens of thousands of hectares passed under our control. The Azerbaijani flag now flies on the once occupied lands. During the battles, our soldiers displayed true professionalism and heroism. They once again demonstrated that Azerbaijani soldiers and officers are professional, they are attached to their homeland and are ready to fulfill their duty at any time. The April battles were a very successful operation in military terms, because our military personnel liberated important strategic heights from the invaders from unfavorable positions. At the same time, these battles are of great importance from a moral and psychological point of view, as Armenian propaganda had been spreading the myth for years that they are superior to us militarily. The April battles showed to the whole world that the Azerbaijani army possesses the highest qualities and can complete any task at any time. The myth created by Armenia has been smashed to smithereens. Our civilians also showed heroism during the fights. Several civilians died as a result of Armenian provocation. Hundreds of houses became uninhabitable and were burned out. We restored all these houses in a short time. In meetings with residents of the villages close to the contact line which I visited shortly after the fights, I was convinced of how high the national spirit of these people is, how fearless they are, as they did not abandon their homes and their villages even under shelling. As a result of the fights, the village of Jojug Marjanli gained a new life. It was reconstructed in a short time, 150 houses, a school, a kindergarten, a medical center, a mosque, which is an analogue of the Shusha mosque, were built, and jobs were created. In other words, life returned to Jojug Marjanli. This shows yet again that the Azerbaijani people will never put up with this situation. It shows once again that all citizens of Azerbaijan live with one dream the soonest liberation of our occupied lands and restoration of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, our lands fell under occupation in the first years of independence. The reason for this is that the forces that were in power at that time allowed Armenia to seize our lands by their unsatisfactory activity. As a result of the treacherous activities of the PFPA-Musavat tandem, the Armenian armed forces entrenched in the occupied lands and a direct communication was established between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, which allowed the enemy to continue its aggressive policy. But after the return of great leader Heydar Aliyev to power, the situation changed, a successful Horadiz operation was carried out. As a result of that operation, more than 20 settlements were freed from occupation. Today, the city of Horadiz and those very villages are flourishing and reviving. Work is carried out at the highest level there. The army building process was started. Today, Azerbaijan is one of the most powerful countries in the world in terms of army building. As I have already noted, according to the latest ratings, the Azerbaijani army is ranked in 52nd place in terms of its potential on a global scale. The two military parades held last year demonstrated our military might. The most modern weapons and equipment are purchased for our army and its combat capability is increasing. The April battles are a good example of this. We are doing and will continue to do everything necessary for our army. Last year, a successful Nakhchivan operation was carried out. As a result of this operation, we have seized strategic heights. These heights allow us the opportunity to control a vast territory. The successful Nakhchivan operation showed that our army is professional and its combat capability is at a high level. All this is a reality. Today, every citizen of Azerbaijan can be justly proud of the Azerbaijani army, and we are proud of our soldiers and officers. The Azerbaijani army is the main factor playing a role in the protection of the territorial integrity of our state. Day-to-day problems of our military personnel are being addressed. Great attention is being paid to that as well. At the end of last year, more than 300 servicemen were provided with new apartments. To date, the state has provided hundreds of military personnel with apartments. This process continues. At the same time, the process of reconstructing military units has gained momentum. In recent years, I have participated in the opening of many military units and camps. I observe a high level and excellent conditions everywhere, including this military unit. Here I was shown photographs showing the situation in previous years. Of course, the situation was very difficult. However, on the basis of my special instruction, the military unit was reconstructed in a short time and good conditions have been created here. Excellent conditions have been created for those who work here, and for those who stay in hostels. I should also note that civil affairs in our military units are dealt with by civilians, and this is also an innovation. Thus, we have enabled servicemen and their activity to focus on the main service duty. At the same time, about 20,000 civilians have been provided with jobs. As for the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, there is no change in our position here. This conflict must be resolved only within the territorial integrity of our country. Nagorno-Karabakh is our ancestral and historical land. Our people have lived, created and built on these lands for centuries. Today, the whole world recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh as an integral part of Azerbaijan. All influential international organizations have adopted relevant decisions and resolutions. This is a historical and legal basis. No country has recognized and, I am sure, never will recognize the self-styled Nagorno-Karabakh republic. Therefore, the goal of continuing the negotiations is to liberate the occupied lands. As you know, the new leadership of Armenia wanted to change the format of negotiations. Some of their statements are also known to the public. However, the unequivocal position of Azerbaijan did not allow that to happen. The conflict is between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenia has occupied our lands. Eighty percent of soldiers on the occupied lands on the other side are Armenian citizens. Therefore, the negotiations must be conducted between the two countries. The last Vienna meeting was important also because it reaffirmed the existing format. Both the talks between the foreign ministers and the meeting between the leaders show again that this is an Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Whenever we talk about a conflict, we call it like this: the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Justice and historical truth are on our side. Economic and military strength is also on our side. The work done in recent years, the reforms carried out in the military sphere, the buildup of our military power, the victories both in the political arena and on the battlefield inspire us even more and strengthen us. You, the people serving here, know and understand your duty perfectly well. You have participated in the most difficult battles and showed heroism and courage. The state appreciates your activity. I congratulate you on the successes achieved, I wish you and our army continued success and new victories. Thank you! X X X On behalf of the personal staff, Defense Minister Zakir Hasanov thanked the Commander-in-Chief for his attention to army building. X X X President Ilham Aliyev was also presented with uniforms of the special forces, special supplies and food norm samples. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: The 16th meeting of the Azerbaijan- EU Cooperation Council will be held in Brussels April 4, the Press Service of Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry told Trend. Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov will participate in the meeting from the Azerbaijani side, while High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission Federica Mogherini and Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn will participate in the meeting from the EU side. Discussions on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, issues on the EU-Azerbaijan partnership agenda, ongoing negotiations on the new bilateral agreement, the Partnership Priorities, the Eastern Partnership and other issues are planned at the meeting. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Samir Ali - Trend: An international seminar on the topic Role of criminal prosecution agencies in fight against human trafficking will be held in Baku April 3-4, Trend reports with reference to the press service of the Justice Ministry. The seminar will be held with the joint organization of the Azerbaijani representative office of the International Organization for Migration and the Justice Academy as part of the project Enhancement of National Capacities toCombat Human Trafficking in Azerbaijan (ENCT). Representatives of a number of foreign countries and international structures, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, employees of the Justice Ministry and the Interior Ministry are expected to attend the seminar. Cooperation in the field of combating human trafficking at the international, regional and local levels, issues of improving and applying national legislation in this area will be discussed at the event. Hearings of presentations by representatives of Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Switzerland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Interpol and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) will take place on various aspects of the fight against human trafficking, exchange of experience and opinions will be held. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: Vienna meeting held between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan marks a new beginning in bilateral negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Peter M. Tase, expert in Transatlantic Relations and Azerbaijani Studies, a senior advisor to the Global Engineering Deans Council and to various European and Latin American governments, told Trend. On March 29, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, in his meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, showed a great level of statecraft and pragmatism throughout the bilateral discussions. It is imperative to emphasize that Azerbaijan has constantly delineated a strong interest towards solving the Nagorno-Karabakh protracted conflict through peaceful means. The Vienna meeting marks a new beginning in the bilateral negotiations and discussions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, this is a useful platform that has and will continue to handle all pending matters that affect both countries, said the US expert. He pointed out that indeed, until now, Armenia and its leadership has been engaged in negotiations only to earn additional time and preserve the current status-quo, a tactic that is unacceptable towards Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani people. The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs and the international community in general must remain on alert and further pressure Yerevan to withdraw its armed troops from the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan and refrain from violating human rights within the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan, noted Tase. Tase further noted that European Union structures in charge of European security must take a closer look to the progress of these negotiations and exert pressure so that Armenian leadership has no more opportunities to buy more valuable time in the negotiations' table, rather deliver concrete results based on what has been discussed and agreed upon with their counterparts from the government of Azerbaijan. The President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan met on March 29 in Vienna for the first time under the auspices of the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group (Igor Popov of the Russian Federation, Stephane Visconti of France, and Andrew Schofer of the United States of America). The meeting was also attended by Foreign Ministers Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and Elmar Mammadyarov. Andrzej Kasprzyk, the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, also participated in the meeting. The statement issued on the results of the meeting reads that the two leaders underlined the importance of building up an environment conducive to peace and taking further concrete and tangible steps in the negotiation process to find a peaceful solution to the conflict. Recalling their conversation in Dushanbe, the leaders recommitted to strengthening the ceasefire and improving the mechanism for direct communication. They also agreed to develop a number of measures in the humanitarian field, said the statement. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Elchin Mehdiyev Trend: The April battles proved once again that Azerbaijan will not yield a single inch of its historical lands, Azerbaijani MP Khanlar Fatiyev told Trend. The MP said that Azerbaijan has managed to achieve great success in the military sphere over the past 15 years, as in all other areas. Today, Azerbaijan has an army equipped with modern weapons and equipment, and the process of building an army is not limited to material and technical support. The level of combat training and the moral and psychological state of the personnel the officers and soldiers of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces are at a high level. "During the April 2016 battles, the Azerbaijani army proved to the world that it is capable of liberating the occupied lands in a short amount of time by the order of the Commander-in-chief. The leadership of the invading state is also well aware of it. The economic strength and potential of Azerbaijan, the high prestige of the head of state among the world leaders forced the Armenian leadership to sit down again at the negotiating table for substantive negotiations," Fatiyev said. Fatiyev also touched upon the meeting of the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia March 29 and noted that President Ilham Aliyev during the meeting in Vienna once again demonstrated the unshakable will of Azerbaijan. The head of state said that the format of the negotiations will remain unchanged, and negotiations can only be held between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Fatiyev added. I believe that this meeting interrupted the pause observed for a long time during the negotiations on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. He also noted that the decisive position and successful policy by President Ilham Aliyev will result in Azerbaijans victory. The UN Security Council, having adopted resolutions 822 (1993), 853 (1993), 854 (1993) and 884 (1993) in connection with the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, condemned the occupation of the Azerbaijani territories, confirmed the territorial integrity, sovereignty and inviolability of Azerbaijans borders and demanded the immediate, full and unconditional withdrawal of the invading forces from our territories, Fatiyev said. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed an order on simplifying visa procedures for foreigners and stateless persons who will arrive in Azerbaijan to participate in the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. In accordance with the order, foreigners and stateless persons who will arrive in Azerbaijan to participate in the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and who will submit an official invitation letter from UNESCO and a document confirming their accreditation in line with the relevant rules of this organization will be able to get a visa in Azerbaijans international airports June 20-July 10, 2019. Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry has been instructed to inform UNESCO and the relevant authorities of foreign countries about the simplification of the visa procedure for people arriving in Azerbaijan to participate in the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, as well as about the possibility of obtaining an electronic visa through ASAN Viza system by foreigners and stateless persons according to the list approved in line with clause 4.2 of the Presidential Decree dated June 1, 2016. Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry has also been instructed to ensure that information on the simplification of the visa procedure for people arriving in Azerbaijan to participate in the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, as well as about the possibility of obtaining an electronic visa through ASAN Viza system by foreigners and stateless persons, is available on the webpages of the ministry, as well as the embassies and consulates of Azerbaijan in foreign countries. Azerbaijans State Migration Service has been instructed to inform the airline companies flying to Azerbaijan about the simplification of the visa procedure for people arriving in Azerbaijan to participate in the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: More than 60 representatives of diplomatic missions operating in Azerbaijan will visit the countrys Ganja, Samukh and Goygol districts on April 2-3, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry on April 2. The trip has been organized by the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry to review the development of the country's districts, to obtain information about the economic and social projects being implemented in the districts and the development of the tourism sector. The diplomats will review the Heydar Aliyev Park Complex in Ganja, the Nizami Ganjavi mausoleum, the Imamzade religious complex and the Ganja Automobile Plant. The diplomats will review the Agroenergy complex and Agro Diary LLC in Samukh district while the German Cultural Heritage, the Goygol National Park and the Goygol Winery in Goygol district. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Ilhama Isabalayeva Trend: The World Health Organization (WHO) highly appreciated the measures on epidemiological control and immunization carried out in Azerbaijan against measles and rubella, Javahir Suleymanova, specialist in infectious diseases at the WHO office in Azerbaijan, told Trend. According to her, the WHO mission visited Azerbaijan as part of the immunization program and got acquainted with the organization of the laboratory's work on the diagnosis of measles and rubella and the situation with epidemiological control. The experts concluded that the work in this area is carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the WHO. Suleymanova added that the experts also studied the work of the laboratory for the diagnosis of measles and rubella at the Ministry of Health. According to her, this laboratory is annually accredited by the WHO, and experts have assisted in the preparation of documents for the next accreditation. Azerbaijani Minister of Healthcare Ogtay Shiraliyev signed an order to conduct measles immunization activities in Azerbaijan. According to the order, measles immunization activities will be carried out among the population aged 20-40 from March to April, in Baku and other cities and regions of the country where a measles outbreak is registered. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: Officials in Yerevan today are unable to show even a single historical monument belonging to Armenians with more than 200 years of age to foreign guests, director of the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, academician and Azerbaijani MP Yagub Mahmudov told journalists, Trend reports. He noted that the Armenian-Dashnak gangs committed genocide against the Turkic-Muslim peoples in North and South Azerbaijan, Eastern Anatolia and Central Asia. "As a result of research conducted by the Institute of History in connection with the activities of the criminal group of the "26 Baku Commissars", which carried out mass genocide against the Azerbaijani people in 1918, numerous new facts were revealed. In January 2009, as directed by President Ilham Aliyev, immediately after it was discovered that the burial belonging to 26 Baku commissars contained not 26, but 23 bodies, a special research group was created at the Institute of History, and a scientific investigation was initiated," Mahmudov said. The director of the Institute noted that the Dashnak-Bolshevik regime, headed by Stepan Shaumian, had prepared in advance and carried out mass genocide against the Azerbaijani people in a conscious and systematical manner. "Of particular interest is the document connected to Shaumian, discovered during the study of archival documents. This document indicates that Shaumian, just like Anastas Mikoyan, was not shot along with the "26 Baku Commissars". Having studied this document, it becomes clear that after the execution of "26 Baku commissars" that is, for 10 days from September 20 to October 1, 1918 Shaumian was given food in a prison in Krasnovodsk [today Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan]," he added. Mikoyan was, besides Shaumian, the second spared prisoner, according to Mahmudov. The global community easily buys into Armenian lies and believes them. However, the global community is not inclined to accept our realities. Therefore, we must put more effort in this direction, he said. Mahmudov noted that numerous archival documents were published by the Institute of History in recent years, in the form of a compendium reflecting the genocide committed against the Azerbaijani people. Air service to Lukla to be operated from Manthali Air service to Lukla in the Himalaya will be operated from Manthali Airport in Ramechhap from Tuesday as Kathmandus Tribhuvan International Airport will be partially closed for renovation. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 Trend: Combating human trafficking and assisting its victims were the focus of a recent workshop hosted on by the US Embassy in Baku, and involving experts from the US and Azerbaijani governments. After opening remarks from Deputy Chief of Mission William Gill, Special Agent Rachel Simon from the Embassys Diplomatic Security office spoke about current methodologies for identifying and assisting victims of human trafficking. Marija Nikolovska, Migrant Protection Assistance Coordinator for the International Organization for Migration, presented information on the current human trafficking situation in Azerbaijan. Special Agent Simon also conducted training on recognizing fraudulent travel documents that are often used by traffickers. The workshop was attended by Azerbaijani officials from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Internal Affairs, and Justice, as well as the State Border and Migration Services. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Kheyraddin Nasirzade - Trend: An increase of at least 15 percent is expected in Azerbaijan's persimmon output in 2019, Chairman of the Persimmon Producers and Exporters Association Gadir Yusifov told Trend. The chairman underlined the intensive growth in the agricultural sector of Azerbaijan. In particular, he highlighted the correct pruning of trees in 95 percent of all regions of the country involved in this industry, as well as the competent implementation of integrated pest control. He further noted the timely autumn feeding of fruit trees, which is very important for a good harvest. Yusifov added that Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, the northern regions of Kazakhstan, and some Arab countries are the main export destinations of Azerbaijani persimmon. The minimum demand in the country is 20,000 tons per year, he said. He noted that in order to improve production in the future, it is necessary to modernize both the production, packaging, and sales of products. In 2018, the persimmon output of Azerbaijan amounted to about 200,000 tons, which was almost the same in 2017. The total export volume of persimmon in 2018 amounted to $114 million, which is 17 percent more than in 2017. In January-February 2019, exports amounted to about $26 million. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @1nasirzade Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, April 2 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: At the meeting of the Turkmen government, a proposal was made to join the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Program, Trend reports with reference to the Turkmenistan State News Agency. The possibility of connecting Turkmenistan to the regional technical assistance project "Railway Sector Development in Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation Countries" was discussed at the meeting. President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov said that the CAREC Program is the most important mechanism for promoting economic regional cooperation, especially in such areas as transport, energy and trade. Turkmenistans cooperation on this platform is of a strategic nature, the Turkmen president emphasized. It was also noted that participation in the proposed project will have a positive impact on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the strengthening of partnership relations between the participating states of the program. The CAREC program is being developed at the initiative of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in partnership with the UN Development Program, the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB). The main objective of this program is to assist in the implementation of investment projects in the field of transport, trade and energy, aimed at accelerated socio-economic development of the states of the region of Central Asia. The potential of Turkmenistan in the logistics of transit flows should be assessed taking into account the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran transnational railway line, the Kerki-Ymamnazar (Turkmenistan) -Akina (Afghanistan) railway, the first line of the Asian International Transport Corridor, the railway and road bridges across the Amu Darya, modern airports in Ashgabat, Turkmenbashi and Turkmenabat cities. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Rashid Shirinov Trend: Kazakh hardware production plant Kaz-Metiz plans to increase production and sales by 50 percent year-on-year in 2019, the company told Trend. It should be noted that in 2018, Kaz-Metiz increased its high carbon steel products by 14.5 percent to 23,923 tons (20,887 tons in 2017). "Forty percent of the products are exported to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Russia. We plan to expand the geography of exports to the EU countries," the company said. Kaz-Metiz plant, located in Karaganda, produces various steel products, including steel wire, rope and core. The products of the plant are in demand in Kazakhstan's rail transportation sphere, enterprises of the mining and smelting complex, the energy and construction sectors of the economy of Kazakhstan and neighboring countries. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Elnur Baghishov Trend: The Iranian economy faces such obstacles as banking system, currency, tax and privatization in terms of support for the national production, Iranian expert in economic issues Ali Sadiqi Hamadani said. Big reforms must be undertaken in these spheres, Hamadani added, Trend reports referring to ISNA. He added that the production in the Iranian economy requires huge funds. This is the result of the unsuccessful banking system and therefore, the reforms must be conducted in this system to support production, Hamadani said. The market value of the foreign currency is not real and does not correspond to the realities of the Iranian economy, Hamadani added. As a result of this process, producers lose interest in export, he said. Hamadani said that if the government stops intervention into the currency market and the currency price is set at floating exchange rate, the interest of producers in production and export will increase. Regarding the tax system, he stressed that the same steps were taken in Iran's tax system during economic development or recession. But this is an insignificant nuance. Hamadani said that the tax system should consider prices on the basis of different economic conditions. Commenting on privatization, he said that about 80 percent of Iran's economy belongs to the public sector and semi-public sector. That's why the government must reduce its role in the economy and the private sector must focus on the production, Hamadani said. He added that according to the World Bank report, Iran ranks 128th among 190 countries in terms of labor and income. This aspect reflects the necessity of improving labor and income in Iran to support production, Hamadani added. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 2 By Rashid Shirinov Trend: The next meeting of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea will be held in Nur-Sultan, Trend reports via Kazakh media. "The second meeting of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea will be held on April 16-17 in Nur-Sultan. All parties have confirmed their participation," Aibek Smadiyarov, Spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of Kazakhstan, told reporters. The first meeting of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea was held on February 19-20 in Baku. It was attended by delegations from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan. At the meeting, the parties adopted the Rules Of Procedure of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea and exchanged views on the implementation of the agreements reached at the 5th Caspian Summit. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, April 2 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: A meeting was held at the Foreign Ministry of Turkmenistan with the Bulgarian Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary (with residence in Baku) Nikolai Yankov, Trend reports referring to the Turkmen Foreign Ministry. At the talks, the parties noted the intention to build up comprehensive cooperation and readiness for joint work on its further revitalization, the information said. The development of trade and economic relations was also discussed. Interest was expressed in the development of relations in the field of culture and education. An impetus to bilateral relations was given by the visit of the Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov to Ashgabat in August 2015. Energy and transport were highlighted as strategic areas of cooperation during the summit talks. The Ashgabat talks demonstrated the readiness of Turkmenistan and Bulgaria to cooperate in ensuring global energy security and diversification of energy flows. Prospects for partnership are also opening up in the field of transport in terms of developing transit-transport corridors between Asia and Europe in the East-West direction, with access to Southern and Eastern Europe, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Middle Eastern markets. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Matanat Nasibova Trend: A center for rendering services to entrepreneurs and business incubation has opened in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani Deputy Minister of Economy Sahib Mammadov said. Mammadov made the remarks in Baku at the opening ceremony of the center, Trend reports on April 2. The opening of the center is aimed at developing the private sector and rendering support to entrepreneurship in Azerbaijan, he said. Mammadov stressed that Azerbaijan makes maximum efforts to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy and also takes measures aimed at raising the level of entrepreneurial activity. "The opening of new centers for rendering services to entrepreneurs will greatly improve the level of quality of private business, as well as positively affect the strengthening of the mechanism of small and medium-sized businesses in Azerbaijan," he said. Mammadov said that support will be rendered to the novice entrepreneurs, as well as to young people having innovative ideas through the newly opened center. The conditions will also be created for the implementation of start-ups aimed at improving the business sphere in Azerbaijan, he said. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 2 By Rashid Shirinov Trend: Kazakhstan is negotiating the conditions for the export of livestock products to Israel, Malaysia and South Korea, Prime Minister Askar Mamin said at a government meeting, Trend reports via Kazakh media. He reminded that the government was tasked to increase exports of processed agricultural products at least 2.5 times. "In this regard, it is necessary to ensure compliance with veterinary and phytosanitary safety requirements. In 2017, all regions of Kazakhstan received the status of FMD free zone. Conditions were agreed and restrictions on the export of livestock products to Iran, the UAE and Saudi Arabia were lifted," the prime minister said. Mamin noted that Kazakhstan should become a reliable supplier of high-quality and environmentally friendly products. "In this regard, I instruct the Ministry of Agriculture, together with the governors, to ensure a stable epizootic situation, to take special control of the record and movement of animals, conditions of storage and purchase of veterinary drugs, as well as timely vaccination," he said. The prime minister also instructed to take organizational measures for the timely pest management on acreages. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Azad Hasanli Trend: Azerbaijani banks will repay debts on overdue loans of the families of the martyrs of Karabakh War and the tragedy of January 20, 1990 (the Black January) in the amount of up to 1,000 manats at their own expense, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijan Banks Association (ABA). This applies to loans with a delay of more than 360 days and a size not exceeding 1,000 manats (including interest debt) and applies to only one member of the family. The decision was made at an extended meeting of the Presidium of the ABA held March 29, as part of the implementation of measures reflected in the decree of President Ilham Aliyev "On additional measures to resolve problem loans of individuals in Azerbaijan". Under this decree, banks are encouraged to take other measures to alleviate the debt burden of individuals. Currently, banks are determining which additional supportive measures can be taken. Banks are recommended to continue to explore the possibilities for the application of additional benefits. The decree provides for the payment of compensation for citizens whose credit load increased as a result of the devaluation of the manat in February and December 2015. The decree also creates opportunities for restructuring on concessional terms of both dollar and manat loans with a delay of more than 360 days. Also, as part of the decree, banks will receive preferential loans under a state guarantee in the amount of up to 682 million manats. In order to prevent deterioration of the currency position of banks, they will also be provided with securities worth up to 215 million manats with an annual interest rate of 0.5 percent from to the allocated loan. Apex court tells government to make sentence waiver provision for senior citizens At a time when the government is yet to decide on clemency for Charles Sobhraj, who has been waiting governments decision to waive his remaining jail-term citing existing legal provisions, the Supreme Court has directed the government to make a clear provision to provide a waiver of jail sentences to senior citizens. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Fakhri Vakilov Trend: The Uzbek soum can acquire a graphic symbol according to a petition posted on the Portal of collective appeals, Trend reports via Uzbek media. Currently, online payments are made in the national currency and Uzbek soum is indicated as UZS during transactions. However, for example, in supermarkets, customers see the full name of the currency. The petition draws attention to the experience of other countries. So, Kazakhstan tenge (), Kyrgyz som () and many other currencies have graphic symbols. The Central Bank of Uzbekistan has been proposed to hold a contest, during which the designers will present their versions of a graphic symbol. Follow author on Twitter:@vakilovfaxri Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Matanat Nasibova Trend: The reforms carried out in Azerbaijan contributed to the acceleration of the development of the private sector, as well as strengthening of the capabilities of the real sector of the economy, Azerbaijani Deputy Minister of Economy Sahib Mammadov said at the briefing in Baku on April 2, Trend reports. The Azerbaijani Entrepreneurship Development Fund has issued preferential loans worth 2.3 billion manats to 35,000 entrepreneurs up till now, he said. These loans are envisaged for implementation of the projects worth 5.1 billion manats. Mammadov stressed that a stable base has been created to support entrepreneurship in the country, which is being improved with the support of the public sector. This stable base is aimed at improving the business sphere in Azerbaijan and creating optimal conditions for improving the quality of business and the services being rendered to the population, he said. The Azerbaijani Entrepreneurship Development Fund was established on the basis of the National Fund for Entrepreneurship Support, operating in the country since 1997. This year, the fund intends to issue preferential loans worth 160 million manats. (1.7 AZN = 1 USD on April 2) Tehran, Iran, April 2 Trend: Iran's Kermanshah Province is one of the focal points in Iran-Iraq economic ties, said First Vice-President of iran Eshaq Jahangiri, "We seek to develop ties with Iraq and create proper conditions for Iran's exports to Iraq. Kermashah province can play a leading role in exports," Trend reports citing IRNA. The official insisted on developing Iran-Iraq ties specially in economic sector during a meeting in Kermanshah province, "Borders are an opportunity and advantage to develop the province." Referring to reopening of the Khosravi border he said Iran would like to reopen the border and there is no problem from Iranian side."I have discussed it with former and current Iraqi presidents." He noted that the security of Iranian pilgrims is a major concern for Iraqis, "Iraq is responsible for pilgrims' safety." Jahangiri arrived in Kermanshah province on March 31 alongside with ministers of agriculture, health, sport, roads and urban development. The first VP also visited Qarasu River. Kermanshah Province has 371 kilometers joint border with Iraq that includes six official border terminals and markets that transfer Iran's non-oil exports to Iraq. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Matanat Nasibova - Trend: Sales of the Azerbaijani company Fostanpak, engaged in the production of plastic and aluminum containers, paper and plastic glasses, declined compared with the previous two years, Ali Keresh, head of the companys sales department, told Trend. He said that this fact is usually of a seasonal nature, sales decline in the winter and autumn periods. Basically, our products are easily sold in the summer and spring periods, especially when there is a large influx of tourists, he noted. At the height of the summer season, a large customer base is provided by cafes and restaurants, and sales make up 100 percent. In the winter period, the sales, as a rule, decrease by 20-30 percent, but this year this figure was much higher than usual and amounted to 50 percent. He suggested that a slight crisis in the consumer market could also contribute to a sharp decline in the companys sales. The company Fostanpak is also engaged in the production of medical and cleaning products, stretch films, foils and other disposable products under the brand name Monopak. The company is also an Azerbaijani distributor of many foreign manufacturing companies from Germany, Turkey, Denmark, Poland, Ukraine, Russia and China. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: EU calls for recognition of gas infrastructures role in decarbonization of the energy system, Trend reports citing Eurogas. The European Union launched the Sustainable and Smart Gas Infrastructure Declaration today, calling for recognition of the role that the gas infrastructure will play in the decarbonization of the energy system, while also identifying that gas has the characteristics to easily store energy for longer periods, transport and be more easily used by certain sectors that would be challenging to electrify, reads a message from Eurogas. Eurogas Secretary General, James Watson said that the European Institutions have recognized the vital role that gas plays and will play in the energy system of today and tomorrow. This declaration is a signal that gas will be part of the solution that Europe seeks to meet its energy challenges not only through decarbonization but also through the unique value of the existing gas infrastructure and its value to society in Europe both industry and consumers, he added. Watson went on to add that the role of gas should not be a mystery for anyone, today it is driving decarbonization efforts as a substitute for fuels with higher greenhouse gas emissions. In the future we will see the existing gas infrastructure carry increasing volumes of renewable gas and also decarbonized gas in the form of hydrogen. The Declaration fully supports this view and lays the foundation for achieving a sustainable energy future for all Europeans, he said. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: Bosnia and Herzegovina is working on interconnection project to receive Azerbaijani gas, Federal Minister of Energy, Mining and Industry of Bosnia and Herzegovina Nermin Dzindic told Trend. "Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with the company BH-GAS d.o.o. Sarajevo which is in charge of development projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is working on realization of the Southern interconnection of B&H with Croatia project, which would create conditions for future expected connection to Ionian Adriatic Pipeline (IAP) and Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP)," said the minister. He pointed out that the Southern interconnection of B&H and Croatia is a project of interconnection of gas systems of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. "The main objective of the project is to secure a new route of natural gas supply for B&H by which a reliable and secure natural gas supply would be secured for Bosnia and Herzegovina," noted Dzindic. The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority projects for the EU and envisages the transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian region through Georgia and Turkey to Europe. The launching ceremony of the first stage of the Southern Gas Corridor was held in Baku on May 29, 2018, while opening ceremony of TANAP was held on June 12, 2018 in the Turkish city of Eskisehir. The gas from the Azerbaijani Shah Deniz field has already gone through the first segment of the Southern Gas Corridor - from the Sangachal terminal to the expanded South Caucasus Pipeline. Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) and Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) were connected on the Turkish-Greek border. IAP is a proposed natural gas pipeline in Southeastern Europe (SEE) that will stretch from Albania through Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Split in Croatia. It will be connected with the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). The capacity of the pipeline will amount to five billion cubic meters of gas per year. Total length of the pipeline is 511 kilometers. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn The 7th Conference on Interregional Cooperation between Russia and Tajikistan, which is being organized by the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of the Republic of Tajikistan with the support of the Roscongress Foundation, will take place in Moscow on 1617 April 2019, reports Trend citing to tass.com The conference is being held to expand practical cooperation between the regions of Russia and Tajikistan as well as the business circles and organizations of the two countries. The Conferences business programme for the zero day on 16 April 2019 includes thematic roundtables during which cooperation in such areas as agriculture, logistics, trade, education, and culture will be discussed. A youth forum organized by the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs on the Russian side will also be held at the Conference on this day. A plenary session will take place on the main day of the Conference on 17 April 2019 Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, April 2 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: The Turkmengas State Concern, in partnership with Turkmen Forom, will hold an international gas congress on May 21-22 in Avaza (Balkan province, Turkmenistan), Trend reports referring to the organizers of the event. The event is supported by the British Gaffney, Cline & Associates. During the congress, reviews of Turkenistan's gas market and the latest gas and chemical projects will be presented, and leading oil and gas companies of the world will make presentations. Special attention will be paid to the gas pipeline project Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI). Numerous contracts and memorandums are expected to be signed. Representatives of leading oil and gas companies, major international organizations and financial institutions from around the world are planning to take part in the congress. They include Hyundai Engineering, Kawasaki, Shell, Petronas, Gaffney, Cline & Associates, NAPECO, Vitol, CNPC, Dragon Oil, ENI, Buried Hill and others. On the sidelines of the business forum, discussions on topical issues of joint business will be held between foreign companies and representatives of Turkmenistan's energy sector. Turkmenistan is one of the leading countries in the world and the second in the CIS (after Russia) in terms of natural gas reserves. Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, April 2 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: Preparations for the state visit of President of the Republic of Korea Moon Jae-in to Turkmenistan scheduled for April were discussed at the governmental meeting in Ashgabat, Trend reports referring to Turkmenistans Altyn Asyr TV channel. About 40 interstate, intergovernmental documents are expected to be signed following the visit. Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov stressed that the Turkmenistan-Korea relations have recently reached a qualitatively new level. The Turkmen president focused on the need to fully use the potential for cooperation in the economic and industrial spheres, intensify constructive business ties and investment activity and implement new promising joint projects. During the meeting, the attention was drawn to the readiness of the Republic of Korea to actively cooperate in the three priority vectors of the Turkmen diplomacy, namely, water, transport and energy. The transport and logistics sector, communications and telecommunications were also mentioned as promising vectors of cooperation. Earlier it was reported that Turkmenistan intends to expand cooperation with the Export-Import Bank of Korea (KEXIM) and the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation (K-sure) in financing the projects to be implemented in Turkmenistan by the Korean companies. Seoul hopes for partnership with Turkmenistan in such spheres as the development of gas fields, the creation of petrochemical and gas infrastructure and modernization of industry. LG and Hyundai together with Japanese TOYO have recently implemented a project worth $3.4 billion to build a complex for the production of polyethylene and polypropylene in Kiyanly settlement. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Elnur Baghishov Trend: Helicopters of the Iranian Army Ground Forces have been sent to help the population in Pol-e Dokhtar County of Irans western Lorestan Province, Brigadier General Shahin Taghikhani, Iranian Army spokesman, told IRNA, Trend reports. According to Taghikhani, 8 helicopters have been sent to the region for rescuing flood victims. Taghikhani also said that the Commander of the Ground Forces General Kiyoumars Heydari has also gone to Pol-e Dokhtar County. In recent days, heavy rainfall in Iran has caused floods, leaving several towns and villages underwater. Countrys premier foreign policy think tank without chief for over a year The government is struggling to appoint the executive director at the Institute of Foreign Affairs, countrys premier foreign policy think tank under the aegis of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has remained without a chief for over a year. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Elnur Baghishov - Trend: The US has frozen the accounts of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, and this step has created problems for humanitarian aid from other countries for Irans flood-hit citizens, Irans Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said, Trend reports via IRNA. He said that no foreign citizens of Iranians living abroad can help the victims of the flood in Iran. He added that this move contradicts the allegations by the US that the sanctions arent directed against the Iranian people. In emergency cases, not all banking systems are usually closed, and conditions are created for the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Society to provide humanitarian aid to the people, he said. He noted that the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Society have recently announced that they cannot provide assistance to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. He added that no foreign assistance has been received so far, and there is no way for it to reach Iran. International circles should take urgent steps in this direction, he said. In particular, there is shortage of some equipment, such as helicopters. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Elnur Baghishov - Trend: German national Per Fischer, the head of the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), will travel to London to attend a meeting with the participation of British officials, businessmen, trade companies and investors, a source familiar with the matter said, Trend reports via IRNA. INSTEX is a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) established in January 2019 by France, Germany and the UK to facilitate non-dollar trade with Iran. The SPV is headquartered in Paris, France. The source said that the meeting will be held in mid-April and Fischer will inform about the function of INSTEX. The meeting will be held on the initiative of the UK Department for International Trade and the British Iranian Chamber of Commerce, according to the source. The purpose of the meeting is to answer the questions of concern to British companies for carrying out financial transactions with Iran, the source added. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Elnur Baghishov Trend: With the continued rainfall in Iran, Lake Urmia will reach its ecological balance in 2027, said Isa Kalantari, Iranian Vice President and Chairman of the Environmental Protection Organization, after visiting Lake Urmia, Trend reports referring to IRNA. According to Kalantari, when compared to the same period last year (started March 21, 2018), the water balance in Urmia Lake increased by 36 cm as a result of recent precipitation. Kalantari added that with the water from the Little Zab River being transported to Lake Urmia, the volume of water coming from the river to the lake annually will reach a level of 650 million cubic meters by the end of the current Iranian year (started March 21, 2019). "With the transportation of about 300 million cubic meters of water to Lake Urmia by the Iranian Ministry of Energy, as well as by the water and sewage companies of the region, the annual volume of water coming into the lake by the beginning of next year (begins March 21, 2020) will reach about 1 billion cubic meters," he said. Kalantari added that Iran had about 80 billion cubic meters of precipitation, which has ended up saving the country from drought for about 11 years. Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has resigned after weeks of protests against his 20-year rule, Trend reports citing Al Jazeera. The news comes after Algeria's army chief of staff demanded immediate procedures to remove Bouteflika, saying enough time had already been wasted, state news agency APS said. On Monday, Bouteflika, who is 82 and in poor health, had previously said he would quit before the end of his term on April 28. As approaching to Brexit deadline, London has prepared a set of especial rules to continue sanctions against Iran, Trend reports citing IRNA. After UK withdrawal from the European Union (EU), many of the EU regulations should turn out to be domestic laws. Despite the fact that UK parliament in its 2018 law on Brexit has completely changed all regulations into domestic ones, but the UK government has prepared a special document to change EU sanctions against Iran to its internal regulations. The regulations in 52 pages and 78 chapters have been presented to UK parliament on March 7 and will be officially announced after UK withdrawal from EU. Based on the document, ratification of the mentioned regulations have been aimed to enable UK to implement its sanctions against Iran efficiently after Brexit. The document added that sanctions regulations will be running inside UK land and water territories and will include all citizens inside and outside the country. The EU has passed two sets of sanctions against Iran first those related to Iran nuclear program and second sanctions aiming to encourage Iran to 'obey human rights'. According to the document, the US sanctions are to encourage Iran to 'abandon nuclear weapons program', restrict the ability of Iran to 'develop nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons delivery systems' and to promote implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) After the JCPOA came into effect on January 16, 2016, EU suspended some of its sanctions against Iran. This is while as per the document, restricted goods including military goods, missile-list goods, nuclear-list goods, graphite and relevant metals and restricted technology meaning military technology, missile-list technology, nuclear-list technology and relevant enterprise resource planning software are still in place. Based on the JCPOA, if Iran complies with its commitments, the suspended sanctions will be lifted and arms sanctions will be suspended on October 2023. But it is not seen in the document and instead UK will be permitted to decide independently on lifting or escalating sanctions after Brexit. Meanwhile, the document listed sanctions against Iran into three categories of financial, immigration and trade. By immigration sanctions, it means that the Secretary of State may direct that, in relation to any person within immigration regulations whose name is specified, or who is of a specified description, will be subject to specified exceptions. According to Iran Foreign Ministry report, 129 Iranian individuals and entities have remained in EU sanction list. The UK government seems to aim at keeping the name of them in the sanction list after Brexit. Trump earlier announced on May 8, 2018, the withdrawal from the JCPOA, which was condemned by other parties to the 2015 agreement and their emphasis to stay in the landmark international deal. Meanwhile, earlier on Tuesday, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano underlined the fact that Iran has complied with its commitments under the nuclear deal. 'The implementation in Iran of the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, Additional Protocol, and additional transparency measures under the JCPOA amounts to the most robust verification system in existence any here in the world,' he added. Mexico will help to regulate the flow of Central American migrants passing through its territory to the United States, but the root causes behind the phenomenon must be tackled, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said, Trend reported citing Reuters. Speaking after U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to close the U.S. southern border if Mexico did not halt illegal immigration immediately, Lopez Obrador said he would not have a confrontation with the United States. I prefer love and peace, Lopez Obrador told reporters at his regular morning news conference. The leftist president has consistently refused to get drawn into a war of words with Trump over the border. A senior Mexican trade official warned later that closing down the U.S.-Mexico border would cause pain on both sides. Most of the people caught at the frontier trying to enter the United States illegally come from three violent and impoverished countries: Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Lopez Obrador has tried to persuade Trump to address the problem by fostering economic development in Central America. But on Saturday the U.S. State Department said it was cutting off aid to those three countries. Detentions at the U.S. border have surged in recent months, angering Trump and putting pressure on Lopez Obrador to find a solution that will prevent a shutdown of the frontier to the market for 80 percent of Mexicos exports. Asked if it was time to put pressure on the Central American countries to do more to tackle the problem, Lopez Obrador said the causes of migration were not being attended to and that people needed to be offered more opportunities there. Obviously, we have to help because Central American migrants pass through our territory and we have to bring order to this migration, make sure its legal, he said. Thats what were doing. But serenely, calmly, without a commotion and with great prudence and responsibility. Mexico began issuing temporary humanitarian visas to some members of a migrant caravan in southern Mexico, giving priority to children and the elderly, the National Migration Institute said Monday. It said it would provide transport back to Central American countries, Cuba and Haiti, on a voluntary basis. Earlier this year, Mexico handed out humanitarian visas liberally, but reined in the program after a surge in applications. The institute said from next month it was planning to encourage people to apply for visas in their home countries. It was not immediately clear if the government was limiting the number of visas it issues. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said he had appointed engineer Igor Gaviria as the new minister of popular power for electric energy, Trend reported citing Sputnik. Addressing the nation, Maduro thanked former electric energy minister, Luis Motta Dominguez for his service. The president added that he had instructed the new minister to "prepare for new responsibilities in conditions of the revolution." Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: The cancellation of such mega-projects in Turkeys Istanbul city as the construction of the shipping channel is out of the question, a source in the Turkish government told Trend on April 2. The Turkish government was commenting on the results of the municipal elections in the country. This project is one of the priorities and is being implemented within the governments Vision 2023 plan, the source added. The source said that the information that a new shipping channel will not be built in the city because candidate from the ruling Justice and Development Party Binali Yildirim lost the municipal elections in Istanbul is false. The intention to implement the project of construction of the Istanbul ship channel was announced for the first time in 2011 by incumbent Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The length of the ship channel in Istanbul will be 43 kilometers. The purpose of the construction of the Istanbul channel is to reduce the burden of shipping on the Bosphorus Strait, as well as to prevent the threat of environmental and man-made disasters on one of the most intense sea routes in the world. The width of the Istanbul channel, according to the plans, will be 400 meters, and its depth - 25 meters. The channel will be able to let pass 150-160 vessels per day. The Bosphorus is used by an average of 150 vessels per day, of which about 30 are oil tankers. Annually about 150 million tons of oil and oil products are transported through the Black Sea Straits, while the throughput capacity of the Bosphorus is estimated at 200 million tons. The Istanbul channel will run parallel to the Bosphorus and will actually make the European part of Istanbul an island and finally separate it from Europe. The channel will pass from the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea through the Kucukcekmece Lake. The new residential complexes, which will be connected with other areas of the 15 million metropolis thanks to modern transport infrastructure, including metro and high-speed trains, as well as with the third airport in Istanbul are planned to be built on the banks of the artificial channel. A new port is also expected to be built as part of this project. The tankers with a length of 275 meters, a width of 48 meters and a capacity of 14,500 DWT may be used on the Istanbul shipping channel, which is being built as part of the governments Vision 2023 plan. The construction of the navigable channel will continue for five years and the minimum service life of the channel will be 100 years. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu U.S. Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan met here on Monday with South Korean Minister of National Defense Jeong Kyeong-doo over the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, said the Pentagon, Trend reported citing Xinhua. During their meeting, Shanahan and Jeong focused on the on-going diplomatic efforts to achieve a complete denuclearization of and peace on the Korean Peninsula, according to a statement released by the Pentagon. The two defense chiefs vowed to remain "an unwavering combined readiness posture," said the statement. They also pledged to enhance coordination and cooperation in various areas including information sharing on issues regarding the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), it added. Jeong's visit came one month after the second summit between the top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump in late February in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi that ended without an agreement. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is scheduled to visit Washington next week, said Monday that Pyongyang and Washington have shown their determination to continue the dialogue by managing situations stably so as not to increase tensions as seen in the past. Moon vowed to make efforts to help resume denuclearization negotiations between the DPRK and the United States. The Korean Peninsula's peace process would become a journey, taken jointly by the two Koreas and the United States that would not be easy, he said. Earlier last month, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang said at a press conference that no one should expect the Korean Peninsula issue to be resolved in just one day, and the key is to take into account the legitimate concerns of all parties in a balanced way and consolidate mutual trust and gradually gather consensus. Washington welcomed Chinas move on Monday to list all fentanyl-related substances as controlled narcotics, after criticism from President Donald Trump for allowing the synthetic opioid to be shipped to the United States, Trend reports citing Reuters. The United States is battling an epidemic of opioid-related deaths, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has said he hopes to include Chinas commitments to curb the drug in any agreement to end the two countries bitter trade war. This significant development will eliminate Chinese drug traffickers ability to alter fentanyl compounds to get around the law, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in a statement. We look forward to our continued collaboration with China to reduce the amount of this deadly poison coming into our country, the DEA statement said. Earlier on Monday, China had announced the expanded control of all fentanyl-related substances at a press conference, even as it blamed U.S. culture for abuse of the drug. China said the addition of fentanyl-related substances to the supplementary list of controlled narcotic drugs will take effect on May 1. Fentanyl itself and its analogues had previously been listed and remain controlled. The drug in its illegal form has gone by street names, including China White, China Girl, and Dance Fever, according to the U.S. government. It is a highly addictive painkiller many times more potent than morphine. Resolved. All resolved, Liu Yuejin, a senior public security ministry official and vice commissioner of the China National Narcotics Control Commission, told reporters when asked if U.S. concerns had been resolved. But Liu said the amount of fentanyl from China going to the United States was extremely limited and that U.S. criticisms of China being the main source of the drug lack evidence. We believe that the United States itself is the main factor in the abuse of fentanyl there, Liu said, adding that American culture was partly to blame. He said the United States had a long tradition of abusing prescription medicines and that enforcement and education about the dangers were not good enough. Some people link drug consumption with freedom, individuality, and liberation, Liu said. If the United States truly wants to resolve its fentanyl abuse problem, it needs to strengthen its domestic work. Chinese officials in the past year have vowed to step up cooperation with Washington on illegal drug production and sales, referring to it as a bright spot in relations. Gandaki Med College officials released on bail The Kaski District Court has ordered the release of two Gandaki Medical College employees, who were arrested on a fraud charge, on bail. KYODO NEWS - Apr 2, 2019 - 12:18 | All, Japan The Japanese government on Tuesday approved sending two Self-Defense Forces officers to a multinational peacekeeping force in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula later this month, in what would be the first dispatch of SDF personnel to an overseas mission not under the command of the United Nations. Japan will dispatch two Ground Self-Defense Force officers to the command of the Multinational Force and Observers, which is tasked with monitoring the cease-fire between Israel and Egypt on the peninsula, between April 19 and Nov. 30 at the MFO's request. The dispatch will "expand the scope of our country's international contributions," said Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga separately told reporters that sending the GSDF officers to the peacekeeping force "will further contribute to peace and stability in the Middle East." The MFO -- in charge of supervising the implementation of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel after the Arab-Israeli War -- has been operating since 1982 on the peninsula, with Japan providing financial support since 1988. (Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya speaks to reporters) The two GSDF members will be given liaison and coordination duties in going between the Israeli and Egyptian forces and possess guns and rifles at the MFO's request. The government gave the go-ahead after Kentaro Sonoura, a special advisor to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Parliamentary Vice Defense Minister Takako Suzuki visited the site and judged that the plan meets Tokyo's requirements for sending SDF members abroad on a peacekeeping operation. Japan's new security law that came into effect in 2016 loosened the constraints under the postwar pacifist Constitution and allows SDF participation in overseas peacekeeping operations even if they are not under the control of the United Nations. After posting a suicide letter on Twitter, the founder and bassist of the Mexican rock band Botellita de Jerez, 64-year-old Armando Vega Gil, killed himself on Monday that said he was falsely and anonymously accused of sexually abusing a minor. Vega Gil was found dead at his Mexico City home, authorities confirmed. The musician said that he was anonymously accused via the #MeTooMusicosMexicanos (#MeTooMexicanMusicians) Twitter hashtag of abusing and harassing a woman when she was 13-years-old. also read Taliban key commander among 10 killed in Afghanistan The representative for Botellita de Jerez, Paola Hernandez, said she spoke with Vega Gil at around 2.00 a.m., some two hours before his death. "I will say this categorically, this accusation is false," Vega Gil's letter said. "Let me make it clear that my death is not a confession of guilt, on the contrary it is a radical declaration of my innocence. I just want to clear the path my son will walk in the future." Hernandez said during a radio interview "He was really sad and pissed off, he didn't know how to clear his name. He said he wasn't guilty ... he was worried about how his son would take all this,". also read NASA terms India's ASAT test as 'terrible thing, says it could threaten ISS Here it is to be noted that Vega Gil's death sparked an acrimonious debate on Mexican social media. Some argued that if he was innocent he should have cleared his name in Mexico's justice system, while others said the court of public opinion, especially online, had already found him guilty and permanently muddied his reputation. Vega Gil ended his letter saying: "Don't blame anyone for my death, this suicide is a conscious, voluntary, free and personal decision. Hasta pronto." In Pakistan, a man has done such thing that everyone is surprised. According to the sources, in a village far away from Lahore, a man first divorced his wife due to a domestic dispute and then cut off his tongue while attacking him. The incident is from Pindi Bhattian tehsil of Hafizabad district, which is located about 10 kilometers from Lahore. also read: The 32-year-old dentist from Hyderabad died in Chicago car accident According to the sources, the police have registered a case accusing him of trying to murder his wife. The accused Jahangir divorced his wife Nasreen some days ago. After the divorce, there was a dispute between Jahangir and Nasreen. Meanwhile, on Saturday, the accused went to meet his ex-wife. There was a dispute between the two people once again. The quarrel between the two increased so much that the argument reached to fight. Then Jahangir attacked his ex-wife with sharp scissors and cut her tongue. Later on, she was taken to the hospital in an injured state. Nasreen said that the accused wanted to kill her. The accused has been arrested. Two sharp scissors have also been recovered from him. The father of the victim, while lodging an FIR in the police station, told that Jahangir cut off his daughter's tongue and also told that he often tortured her mentally. The police filed a case against the accused for trying to murder and arrested him. Currently, the woman condition is stable. also read: Swiggy sends sorry and Rs 200 coupon after girl asked for sexual favour by delivery boy Thiruvananthapuram: Congress President Rahul Gandhi will file nomination papers from Kerala's Wayanad Lok Sabha seat on Thursday. He is contesting from two seats. Party sources said on Tuesday that Rahul will arrive here on Wednesday evening and will submit his nomination form for Wayanad seat on April 4. Congress General Secretary Oman Chandy, K.C. Many senior leaders including Venugopal, Mukul Wasnik, Indian Muslim League leader Kunhilikuttu and party state president M Ramachandran will go to Kozhikode and Wayanad when Rahul Gandhi will file nomination. Gandhi is also contesting from Amethi Lok Sabha seat. also read: Taliban key commander among 10 killed in Afghanistan Kerala Chief Minister Pinarai Vijayan, former Communist Party of India general secretary Prakash Karat and other leaders of the Left Party have strongly opposed the announcement of Congress party president to contest from Wayanad. They said that this action indicates that the Congress party is not against the BJP, instead, they are against the left party. In the meantime, due to Mr. Gandhi's 'soft stand', CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury is seen alone inside the party. Yechury says that the left party should be reconciled with the same ideologically instead of falling into any kind of controversy at the time of the election, and the only goal should be to defeat the BJP at the moment. Lok Sabha elections are going to be held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. Counting of votes will take place on May 23. also read: Court complaint against Priyanka Gandhi for entering Kashi Vishwanath temple Kabul: Ten militants including a Taliban commander, Mullah Manan, have been killed as government forces stormed Taliban positions in the northern Baghlan province on Sunday. According to the repory of Xinhua, The government forces launched operations against Taliban fighters in Bagh-e-Shamal area on the outskirts of provincial capital Pul-e-Khumri on Sunday afternoon. Key Taliban commander Mullah Manan was among 10 killed on the spot. NASA terms India's ASAT test as 'terrible thing, says it could threaten ISS According to the source,Taliban militants stormed security checkpoints in Akazai area of Bala Murghab in the western Badghis province on Sunday, killing 14 security personnel and injuring 15 others, a member of provincial council. The US halts delivery of F-35 Fighter aircraft equipment to Turkey Army spokesman Mohammed Hanif Rezai said that the government forces would continue to chase the militants elsewhere in the province. Taliban militants didn't comment on the incident. At least three Pakistani soldiers were killed in a clash with Indian border guards on the disputed Kashmir border. Congress leader Hardik Patel seek an urgent hearing from court to contest LS Poll According to the report, The incident, the latest in a series of border clashes between the two countries occurred in the Rawlakot sectors Rakhchakri area along the Line of Control (LoC), a de facto border that divides the disputed Himalayan valley between the two countries, after a break of only a couple of weeks. Kerala Police arrested 21 in crackdowns on child pornography according to a statement from Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the army's media wing One soldier was also injured in the clash. The statement further added, "The Pakistan army responded effectively. [There are] reports of casualties on the Indian side. India and Pak have been locked in diplomatic and military tensions following a suicide attack on an army convoy in Indian- administered Kashmir in February that killed more than 40 Indian troops. Hospitals overwhelmed by patients and their relatives in the wake of storm Madhabi Chaudhary, the matron at Narayani Sub-regional Hospital in Parsa, was preparing to go to bed on Sunday night when she got a call telling her to be present at the hospital at once. Integrated settlement for quake-displaced Dalits Bimmayas family is one of the six Dalit families who have been resettled in an integrated settlement constructed with the support of Oxfam and Janahit Gramin Sewa Samiti. Bahrabise Municipality also allocated Rs 1 million budget for the integrated settlement. Digital content firms propose virtual special zone VietNamNet Bridge - Believing that they are at a disadvantage, digital content firms have proposed establishing a special zone. Vietnamese companies have to follow strict regulations on management, censorship, and business conditions, and have to pay different taxes, but foreign companies dont. Vietnamese digital content providers have complained about the protection policy which puts domestic companies at a disadvantage with foreign ones.Vietnamese companies have to follow strict regulations on management, censorship, and business conditions, and have to pay different taxes, but foreign companies dont.Analysts also say that Vietnams policies dont encourage development and that strict regulations will hinder the creativity of businesses.In an effort to ease difficulties for digital content firms, some experts have suggested a so called virtual special zone, a temporary special zone with special policies which include capable digital content firms.The firms in the special zone would have the right to implement trial projects to launch new services under looser policies. The firms would have to commit to observe the rules of the special zone.If the pilot virtual special zone program succeeds, it would be applied on a larger scale, to firms outside the zone as well.The opinions about the special zone vary.Nguyen Ngoc Bao, CEO of VTC Mobile, said digital content firms need an open policy to allow businesses to do things that are not prohibited by law.Nguyen Ngoc Han, CEO of Thu Do Multimedia, noted that special economic zone (SEZ) is a separate zone which enjoys special policies to facilitate economic activities. SEZs operate on the basis of preferences to attract investments to a specific zone, applied only in a limited geographical area.Meanwhile, a virtual special zone as suggested by experts is an area which first applies policies on a trial basis before it is expanded to other areas of the country.The digital content industry, by nature, is a type of cross-border service, so virtual special zone is not unreasonable for the IT & digital content industry, he said.He warned that an ask-and-grant mechanism may take shape in the special zone. Digital content firms would have to ask for favors from management agencies to join the special zone and be eligible for preferential policies.Han believes that to encourage digital content firms, it is necessary to strictly observe the Enterprise Law which says businesses can do what they want as long as they follow the law, and that a special zone is not necessary. RELATED NEWS Digital content firms give up online games after modest revenue Vietnam in digital era: outlook optimistic but risks exist N. Ha Achyut Wagle holds PhD in economics and is currently a professor at the Kathmandu University School of Management. He is an econo-political analyst, writing for The Kathmandu Post for many years. Whether startups or well established firms, IT infrastructure is an integral part of their functioning. But rather than investing on purchasing them, the trend is moving towards renting IT infrastructure that will save them huge chunk of money, while assuring the latest equipment when needed. Catering organizations with such renting services is Rent A Computer, a Lucknow-based IT Infra rental company. Started its operations in 1990 with the name Sandix System (P) LTD, the firm later rechristened to Rent A Computer for better brand positioning and precise service offering.From offering wide range of products like computers, laptops, servers, high speed scanners, LCD projectors, UPS and many more, Rent A Computer meets the distinct needs of its clients in addition to excellent customer services. Beside these, the company also provides equipment for seminars, computer training centers, trade shows, call centers, conventions and BPOs. Considering clients requirements with top precision, Rent A Computer offers the most appropriate products to the customers after due diligence. Its assortment of latest products available in the market reinforces the firms comprehensive rental solutions. Some of the technically dominant & cutting-edge products available in the companys stockpile are of the leading brands like laptops by Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Dell, to name a few. And in terms of desktop offerings, the company serves through its in-house production. "Considering clients requirements with top precision, Rent A Computer offers the most appropriate products to the customers after due diligence" With the flexibility of rental plans that are suitable to all kind of business requirements, Rent A Computer stands apart from its fellow competitors in the industry. In its short-term rental plans, customers are offered with rental tenure from few months, weeks to even for few days, whereas in long-term rental plans, the time span can vary from one year to multiple years as well. The huge number of assets with over 2000 units of laptops, desktops & servers enable the firm to serve customers in multiple locations such as Kanpur, Varanasi, Allahabad, Dehradun, and many more, without any delay. In case of any specific client requirement, it provides the same, provided the rental agreement is for long duration.To mitigate the risk factorof misuse ormishandling The endemic reptiles are already proposed to be listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora While proper information about the conservation status of tiger gecko species is largely missing, these Asian lizards are already particularly vulnerable to extinction, as most of them have extremely restricted distribution. Furthermore, they have been facing severe declines over the last two decades, mostly due to overcollection for the international exotic pet market. Such is the case of the Cat Ba Tiger Gecko, whose tiny populations can only be found on Cat Ba Island and a few islands in the Ha Long Bay (Vietnam). In their study, a Vietnamese-German research team, led by PhD candidate Hai Ngoc Ngo of the Vietnam National Museum of Nature in Hanoi, provide an overview of the evidence for domestic and international trade in tiger gecko species and update the information about the abundance and threats impacting the subpopulations of the Vietnamese Cat Ba Tiger Gecko in Ha Long Bay. By presenting both direct and online observations, interviews and existing knowledge, the scientists point out that strict conservation measures and regulations are urgently needed for the protection and monitoring of all tiger geckos. The research article is published in the open-access journal Nature Conservation. Tiger geckos are a genus (Goniurosaurus) of 19 species native to Vietnam, China and Japan. Many of them can only be found within a single locality, mountain range or archipelago. They live in small, disjunct populations, where the population from Ha Long Bay is estimated at about 120 individuals. Due to demands in the international pet trade in the last two decades, as well as habitat destruction, some species are already considered extinct at the localities where they had originally been discovered. However, it was not until very recently that some species of these geckos received attention from the regulatory institutions in their home countries, leading to the prohibition of their collection without a permit. Only eight tiger geckos have so far had their species conservation status assessed for the IUCN Red List. Not surprisingly, all of them were classified as either Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered. Nevertheless, none is currently listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which could be the only efficient and reliable method to monitor, regulate and police the trade of the species on a global scale. "Tiger geckos are neither sufficiently protected by law nor part of conservation programmes, due to the lack of substantial knowledge on the species conservation status and probably due to the general lack of public as well as political interest in biodiversity conservation," they explain. "To date, exact impacts of trade on the species cannot be identified, as data of legal trade are only recorded for species listed in the CITES Appendices". During their survey, the researchers tracked local traders in possession of wild-caught tiger geckos representing all five Vietnamese species en route to foreign exotic pet markets, mainly in the United States, the European Union and Japan. The species were also frequently found to be sold in local pet shops in Vietnam, as well as being offered via various online platforms and social media networks like Facebook. Having spoken to local dealers in Vietnam, the team found the animals were traded via long and complex chains, beginning from local villagers living within the species' distribution range, who catch the geckos and sell them to dealers for as little as US$4 - 5 per individual. Then, a lizard either ends up at a local shop with a US$7 - 25 price tag or is either transported by boat or by train to Thailand or Indonesia, from where it is flown to the major overseas markets and sold for anywhere between US$100 and 2,000, depending on its rarity. However, many of these delicate wild animals do not arrive alive at their final destination, as their travels include lengthy trips in overfilled boxes under poor conditions with no food and water. Indeed, although the researchers reported a large quantity of tiger geckos labelled as captive-bred in Europe, it turns out that their availability is far from enough to meet the current demands. In conclusion, the team provides a list of several recommendations intended to improve the conservation of the Asian geckos: (1) inclusion of all tiger geckos in the Appendices of CITES; (2) assessment of each species for the IUCN Red List; (3) concealment of any currently unknown localities; and (4) improvement/establishment of coordinated ex-situ breeding programmes for all species. ### The inclusion of all tiger gecko species from China and Vietnam in CITES Appendix II was recently proposed jointly by the European Union, China and Vietnam and is to be decided upon at the Conference of the parties (CoP18) in May-June 2019, held in Sri Lanka. Original source: Ngo HN, Nguyen TQ, Phan TQ, van Schingen M, Ziegler T (2019) A case study on trade in threatened Tiger Geckos (Goniurosaurus) in Vietnam including updated information on the abundance of the Endangered G. catbaensis. Nature Conservation 33: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.32.33590 Additional information: The research is funded by a PhD stipend from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Cologne Zoo. Through Jan. 23, 2022 Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum 212 N. Sixth St., Springfield Downtown Special Music Events Open during normal museum hours. From Muddy Waters to REO Speedwagon, Cheap Trick to Earth Wind and Fire and Chance the Rapper, the Land of Lincoln has produced some of the most highly celebrated music in rock history. Musicians, legendary radio stations, and musical gear have shaped the sonic history of Illinois and the world.This exhibit will showcase the achievements and contributions of Illinois finest in music. Written by award-winning author, documentary-producer and former Chicago Sun-Times Columnist and Critic, Dave Hoekstra.And you just might see an Illinois musician performing or being interviewed by a visiting radio personality or podcasterState 217-558-8844 Losses from killer rainstorm expected to run into millions Losses to the agricultural, industrial and energy sectors from Sunday nights killer rainstorm are expected to total millions of rupees, officials said. Heavy rain and strong winds lashed two districts in the central Tarai region killing at least 31 people. More than 600 people sustained injuries. TWEET ME DISCLAIMER *COMMENTS, LINKS, AND CUT AND PASTE ARTICLES, ARE NOT ALL ENDORSED BY THE PUBLISHER. THIS BLOG claims no credit for any images posted on this site unless otherwise noted. Images on this blog are copyright to its respectful owners. If there is an image appearing on this blog that belongs to you and do not wish for it appear on this site, please E-mail with a link to said image and it will be promptly removed. MORE DISCLAIMERS This is a commercial free blog. Money is nice, but being able to speak my mind is better. "Real talk: Daniel Rubin has a great little piece up wherein he chats with The Field Negro, the Philly-based blogger who sharply ponders all things black on a daily basis. (Seriously, if youve never checked in with TFN, you should: Its author, Wayne Bennett, is a fantastic read who can cut through bullshit like a hot knife through butter, which is a far grosser analogy than I wanted to make, but there you have it.)" ~Philebrity~ "One of the most precocious and hilarious Black political minds on the net. Ive been a long-time fan!" ~Asad Malik~ "..While most of what he writes is tongue-in-cheek, his space is a safe house for candid discussions about race, especially in the comments section, where people of all colors meet." ~~Daniel Rubin, "The Philadelphia Inquirer"~~ "To white people, Bennett's musings are like kitchen-table talk from a kitchen they may otherwise never set foot in. To African Americans, he is part of a growing army of black Internet amateurs who have taken up the work once reserved for ministers and professional activists: the work of setting a black agenda, shaping black opinion and calling attention to the state of the nation's racial affairs." ~~Richard Fausset, "L.A. Times"~~~ ~Erik Hare, "The Twin Cities Daily Planet"~ "That's why I love the blog " Field Negro " so much. Field, as he's known to his fans, has the sense of reality that it takes to call out the ( CowPuckey ) of blame beating by those who are in positions of power and their lackeys. Because of his handle and his unabashed way of writing about racial issues, Field is often cited as a "Black blogger." What he is, however, is a first-class detector of blame deflection and an excellent student of history. If you want to write about the past and future of repression there's really no other perspective to take - which is why everyone should read Field."~Erik Hare, "The Twin Cities Daily Planet"~ 411 On The Field field negro Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States Raised in the house, but field certified. Jamaica is the land of my birth, but I consider myself a citizen of the world. I currently practice law in the city of "brotherly love". View my complete profile "Half a century after Little Rock, the Montgomery bus boycott and the tumultuous dawn of the modern civil rights era, the new face of the movement is Facebook, MySpace and some 150 black blogs united in an Internet alliance they call the AfroSpear. Older, familiar leaders such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, are under challenge by a younger generation of bloggers known by such provocative screen names as Field Negro, thefreeslave and African American Political Pundit. And many of the newest struggles are being waged online." ~Howard Witt-The Chicago Tribune~ "I had no idea, for example, of the extent of the African-American blogging world out there and its collective powers of dissemination.But now, after reading thousands of anguished, thoughtful comments posted on these blogs reflecting on issues of persistent racial discrimination in the nation's schools and courtrooms, what's clear to me is that there's a new, "virtual" civil rights movement out there on the Internet that can reach more people in a few hours than all the protest marches, sit-ins and boycotts of the 1950s and 60s put together." ~Chicago Tribune Reporter, Howard Witt~ IF YOU ARE BRAVE ENOUGH TO FLAUNT IT. Come visit my store on CafePress! DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) Saudi Aramco's net profits reached $111 billion last year, according to an assessment published Monday by Moody's Investors Services that offered a rare glimpse into the state-owned oil firm's finances before it issues its first bonds in international markets. That places Aramco ahead of some of the world's most profitable firms. By contrast, Apple booked a net profit of about $60 billion in its last full year, Royal Dutch Shell had net income of $23 billion and Exxon Mobil $21 billion. Moody's said the oil giant's revenue hit $355.9 billion last year and that it produced 10.3 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2018. The figures provide the first look in recent memory at Aramco's revenue and earnings. The company, which began as a U.S. venture with a concession for oil rights in Saudi Arabia, was fully acquired by the Saudi government in 1980. "I would say that this tells us that Aramco is worth at least one trillion dollars," said Ellen Wald, president of Transversal Consulting and the author of "Saudi Inc," a book about Aramco's corporate history. In another assessment issued Monday, Fitch Ratings said Aramco posted profits of $224 billion before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. Moody's said Aramco paid $58.2 billion in dividends in 2018 and $50.4 billion in 2017. It remains unclear exactly how these dividends are distributed within the Saudi monarchy and its ruling family. Fitch said Aramco accounted for around 70% of the Saudi government's budget revenue between 2015-2017, but it wasn't immediately clear if that figure included the dividends mentioned by Moody's. In anticipation of a partial listing of Aramco on an international exchange, the Saudi government in 2017 reduced Aramco's tax rate from 85% to 50%. Such moves are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to create new income streams and lessen the government's dependence on oil for revenue. In their first-ever grade assessment for Aramco, Fitch issued the firm an A+ rating, while Moody's gave the company it's A1 rating. Story continues The ratings are considered investment-grade level and indicate low credit risk, but the agencies held off on issuing their top grades to Aramco due to strong links between the Saudi state and the company. Specifically, Fitch noted "the influence the state has on the company through regulating the level of production, taxation and dividends." Wald said that five years ago, under the late King Abdullah, the government's links to Aramco would not have been a significant concern because the company had "essentially complete independence." That's now changed under King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who have taken a much more active role in controlling various power centers in the kingdom, including Aramco, Wald said. "There's no telling... what kind of demands this king and his son might make on the company in the future that might have impact on its core profitability," she added. The ratings agencies issued their reports on the same day that Aramco said it will start to meet with investors about selling its bonds which, if issued, would be priced in dollars and traded on the London Stock Exchange. The bonds are expected to help pay for Aramco's $69 billion acquisition of majority shares in Saudi petrochemical firm SABIC from the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund. Fitch said its conservative forecasts show Saudi Aramco's net debt rising to around $35 billion by 2021, after incorporating the SABIC transaction. The $69 billion deal with SABIC pumps capital into the Public Investment Fund, which is overseen by the crown prince. Prince Mohammed has transformed the fund in order to back major development projects throughout the kingdom amid delays to an initial public offering of Aramco, which he'd touted as a way to raise capital for the PIF's projects. The deal was struck after the crown prince's early efforts at attracting Western investors for his social and economic transformation plans suffered a setback following the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents inside the country's consulate in Istanbul last year. ___ Associated Press business editor Carlo Piovano contributed to this report from London. Airbnb has confirmed a stake in Oyo, which operates a budget hotel business headquartered in India with a presence in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Middle East, per multiple reports. The investment is said to be between $100 million and $200 million, and it marks the hospitality giant's latest move to strengthen its home rental business globally and expand the range of options it offers to travelers. Oyo was founded in 2013 and based in Gurugram, a tech hub in North India. The brand is among the world's largest hotel chains, including both hotels and homes. Operating primarily in South Asia, it manages upwards of 458,000 rooms across multiple countries, including India, China and Malaysia. And its geographic growth is clearly part of the appeal. Greg Greeley, Airbnb's president of homes, said in a statement that "emerging markets like India and China are some of Airbnb's fastest-growing," per The Wall Street Journal. This new investment is seen as a potential attempt to tap into Oyo's mounting presence in the area as Airbnb continues its focus on expansion. Here a few key things to know about the investment, including how two VC-backed businesses with significant market shares in the hospitality space could rely on each other's expertise. Standardization vs. discoverability Ritesh Agarwal was only 19 years old when he was accepted into the Thiel Fellowship program, per CNBC, with the idea for Oyo already beginning to percolate. And while his company has often been touted as India's answer to Airbnb, its business model is quite different. Initially launched as a hotel aggregator, Oyo would lease a part of a hotel's inventory beforehand and organize the hotel rooms up to a quality standard set by the company. Next, it would partner with hotels to provide standardized services, amenities and in-room experiences. Similar to traditional hotels, Oyo allows customers to use its app to search and book rooms, request room service, book a cab and more. That model changed in 2017 when Oyo decided to not lease the hotel rooms anymore, but rather only enter partnerships with hotels to operate them as franchises. Agarwal told the Economic Times that the company had spent the previous two years shifting the business to the franchise-only focus. While both Airbnb and Oyo offer services under the umbrella of accommodation, Airbnb is focused on discovering properties by connecting hosts and travelers. As maintaining a quality standard has been pivotal to Oyo's growth, the investment will give Airbnb access to a variety of franchised or leased hotels for travelers who may be hesitant to rent privately owned properties from strangers. Oyo is growing at breakneck speed Oyo touts itself as the world's fastest-growing chain of leased and franchised hotels. So far this year, Oyo has expanded into Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, launched a new partnership in Japan, and added to its hotel offerings in Nepal. Its 2018 growth included expanding in China, and the hotel aggregator already has a presence across 285 Chinese cities, with the ability to add 35,000 rooms a month, according to Forbes. Since its launch in 2013, the company has raised more than $1.5 billion in funding from investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed and Greenoaks Capital. Oyo also reportedly raised a $1 billion round led by SoftBank in September last year, which was said to value the company at about $5 billion. The investment by Airbnb is the second time that Oyo has drawn the interest of a VC-backed business. In December, Reuters reported that Singapore-based ridehailing business Grab had invested $100 million in the company. A pre-IPO eye to the future Airbnb is one of the few profit-making tech unicorns prepping for an IPO this year. The business reportedly brought in over $1 billion in revenue during 3Q 2018, more than any other quarter in its history. With cash available to spend, a stake in Oyo is the latest in a string of investments by the vacation rental company. Airbnb agreed in March to acquire discounted last-minute hotel booking platform HotelTonight. In January, Airbnb also bought Gaest.com, a Danish website for booking meeting spaces, and it also reportedly acquired high-end travel website Luxury Retreats for about $300 million in 2017. While it hasn't been among the most acquisitive companies, Airbnb's recent string of deals show a tactical eye to expanding its footprint. Featured image courtesy of Airbnb. With the telecom industry on the cusp of 5G boom, various technological firms are aiming to stretch the boundaries of 5G to reap its immense benefits across diverse industries. The farming industry is the latest to be bitten by the 5G bug as it aims to automate production and scale up farm outputs for future population explosion. Why 5G? 5G is billed as the technology of the future with faster download speed and seamless transfer of data. Leveraging state-of-the-art communication network architectures, 5G is touted to be the primary catalyst for next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) services. These include connected cars coupled with augmented reality and virtual reality platform, smart cities and connected devices that revolutionize key industry verticals. Moreover, 5G is likely to augment the scalability, security and universal mobility of the telecommunications industry, which is expected to lead to the wide proliferation of IoT. Leveraging such technological advancements, the farming industry is using remote sensors and drones as key tools to test and collate data for the latest farming technologies. Drones with 5G capabilities have been used to boost potato production in the Netherlands through precision agriculture tests. The test involved capturing accurate images of the field through a camera drone and sent to an agricultural machine through 5G mobile connection on real-time basis. This has helped to set the precise dose for proper protection of the crop from pests to boost farm productivity. As the entire process required large bandwidth hitherto unavailable in existing 4G networks, 5G emerged as the perfect option to achieve the desired results. Moreover, it saved time for farmers to physically scan the entire field to detect the quantum of pesticide required for the crops. Other 5G Innovations in Farming 5G sensors, artificial intelligence and cloud computing methods are increasingly being adopted in Japan to monitor water temperature and salt concentration in oyster farms. Drones with 5G capabilities are used to capture images of fish as they swim in large tanks in farmed fishing. These images are then analyzed to calculate the timing and volume of seafood required according to the weight of the fish. These efficient farming operations are vital to sustain the growing industry that is crippled with shrinking workforce and aging population. Moreover, it helps to reduce seafood wastages to a large extent and improves farm productivity. A U.K. government initiative with support from tech firm Cisco Systems, Inc. CSCO has launched a smartphone app called Me+Moo to track "connected" cows. The project involves 5G-connected collars that send daily updates on the cows health and behavioral patterns for accurate data. Veterinarians and nutritionists can then monitor this data for proper feeds and medicines that would have been otherwise been impossible for farmers to do on an individual basis on large farmlands. Road Ahead Such technological innovations seem to be the call of the hour to bridge the gap between the soaring global population and the food produce required to feed it. Per the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the world will need to grow 70% more food in 2050 than it did in 2009. No wonder that leading technological firms are pitching in their contribution to spearhead innovations in the farming industry. At the same time, firms like T-Mobile US, Inc. TMUS, CenturyLink, Inc. CTL and United States Cellular Corporation USM are working tirelessly for rural broadband expansion to benefit the overall industry. With such a holistic growth model, 5G is poised to be the next game changer in the farming industry. Today's Best Stocks from Zacks Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%. This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000 2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year. See their latest picks free >> 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 Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) : Free Stock Analysis Report CenturyLink, Inc. (CTL) : Free Stock Analysis Report T-Mobile US, Inc. (TMUS) : Free Stock Analysis Report United States Cellular Corporation (USM) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. BERKELEY, Calif., April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aduro Biotech, Inc. (ADRO) today announced that Stephen T. Isaacs, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Aduro, is scheduled to present at the H.C. Wainwright Global Life Sciences Conference in London, United Kingdom on Monday, April 8th at 9:30 am GMT. To access the live webcasts and subsequent archived recordings of these and other company presentations, please visit the investor section of Aduro's website at www.aduro.com . The archived webcasts will remain available for replay on Aduros website for 30 days. About Aduro Aduro Biotech, Inc. is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of therapies that are designed to harness the body's natural immune system for the treatment of patients with challenging diseases. Aduros product candidates in the Stimulator of Interferon Genes (STING) and A Proliferation Inducing Ligand (APRIL) pathways are being investigated in cancer, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. ADU-S100 (MIW815), which potentially activates the intracellular STING receptor for a potent tumor-specific immune response, is being evaluated in patients with cutaneously accessible metastatic solid tumors or lymphomas. BION-1301, a fully blocking monoclonal antibody that blocks APRIL binding to both the BCMA and TACI receptors, is being evaluated in multiple myeloma and as a potential treatment for IgA nephropathy. Aduro is collaborating with a number of leading global pharmaceutical companies to help expand and drive its product pipeline. For more information, please visit www.aduro.com . Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. Im Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and Ill be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education. This week, Im looking at the exodus of law deans with a decade or more of experience under their belts with commentary from outgoing Chicago-Kent law dean Harold Krent on how to last in the job. Next up is a look at the benefits of hosting the Global Legal Hackathon on law campusessomething Arizona State University Sandra Day OConnor College of Law and Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School understand. Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at ksloan@alm.com or on Twitter:@KarenSloanNLJ Seasoned Law Deans Bid Adieu Ive written several stories recently noting the gender and racial diversity of the incoming cohort of law deans. (You can read them here and here.) But heres something I havent mentioned in my coverage: A number of the nations longest serving deans are leaving that role at the end of this semester, or soon thereafter. Put another way, theres a lot of institutional knowledge that is retiringor at least moving out of the deans suite. Heres a little background: The average tenure of a law dean is currently about four years. This figure is courtesy of a helpful deans database maintained by Jim Rosenblatt, a professor at Mississippi College School of Law (and former dean.) According to that database, two of the five longest-serving deans are soon to step down, and a third left the deanship at the end of the previous academic year. A quick rundown: Chicago-Kent College of Law Dean Harold Krent is wrapping up his deanship this semester after 17 years in the job. That makes him third-longest serving dean in the country. Avi Soifer announced this month that he will step down as the dean of the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law as soon as the school can find his replacement. He has been in the job for 16 years, landing him right behind Krent as the fourth-longest serving dean. Last year, longtime University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law Katherine Shelley Broderick left the deans office after occupying it for 20 years. (Shes no longer on Rosenblatts list, but that tenure would have landed her as the third- longest-serving dean if she were on it today.) Four more of the 15 longest deanship are wrapping up: Alan Michaels at Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law (11 years); Nell Newton at the University of Notre Dame Law School (10 years); Patricia White at the University of Miami School of Law (10 years); and Donald Guter at South Texas College of Law Houston (10 years.) Those are some impressively long tenures in a job that is high-pressure under good circumstances, and was made all the more difficult over the past eight years because of a shrinking applicant pool, newfound budget pressures, a difficult entry-level legal job market and declining bar pass rates. I reached out to Krent for his thoughts on how to remain an effective dean over a long period of time. Heres what he said: Deans have many constituenciesstudents, faculty, staff, university, community, and the legal academy. I have consoled myself that one cannot be a hit with all constituencies, and success with the respective groups over the years have ebbed and flowed. But, I think it critical to keep good lines of communication with all the groups and offer help when feasible. With so many experienced deans stepping down, whos left at the top?According to Rosenblatts database, its John OBrien, who has been dean of New England Law Boston for more than three decades. (!!!) Next up is Bradley Toben, who has been at Baylor University School of Law for more than 27 years. (You can read more about his tenure here.) Marquette University Law Schools Joseph Kearney rounds out the top five longest serving deans. He has been dean for 16 years. My thoughts: There are clearly advantages and disadvantages to having a longtime leaders move on. On the con side, deans who have been on the job for a decade or more know their institutions inside and out. They understand the dynamics of the faculty. They have had time to establish personal connections with alumni (and donors.) And they also know the ropes of dealing with central university administrators. On the other hand, fresh leadership can yield exciting new approaches. Its worth noting that many of these departing deans will be replaced by academics who are significantly younger, and may bring different ideas about what a modern legal education looks like, and may be able to connect in a different way to younger faculty and students. Either way, best of luck to these academics who are closing the book on their deanships. Story continues Global Legal Hackathon Comes to Law Campuses Confession: Im a bit late on this on, but I want to give a nod to Arizona State University Sandra Day OConnor College of Law and Brigham Young University J. Rueben Clark Law School, both of which hosted preliminary rounds of the 2019 Global Legal Hackathon in late February. (The competition is heading into the final round next month in New York, which reminded me that several law schools were involved in the early stages.) Ive previously written a bit about this competition, now its second year. But heres a quick overview: About 5,000 participants gathered for a two-day competition in late February, at 46 sites spread across 24 countries. They pitched their ideas for how to use tech to address legal issues, with panels of judges sending the best ideas onto a second, then final round with 12 teams. The Takeaway: The competition is designed for lawyers, law students, and those in the legal tech industry, so there were law students participating outside of Phoenix and Provo. But I think its smart for law schools to offer up their campuses as competition sites. I suspect that boosts the likelihood of their students participating, and I think it gives students who arent hardcore legal tech enthusiasts the chance to be exposed to whats happening outside the traditional practice of law. Maybe they arent willing to give up two days to participate on a Hackathon team, but even sitting in on the project pitches might help open their eyes to the possibilities legal tech presents. And the students who do participate on Hackathon teams get the chance to network and connect with practitioners. There were 10 preliminary round sites in the U.S. this year and just two were at law schools. If I were a law dean, Id offer up my campus next year Extra Credit Reading The New York State Bar Association has launched a task force that will examine whether the states adoption of the Uniform Bar Exam has led to an increase in lawyers who are unprepared to practice. A California appeals court upheld the expulsion of a former University of Southern California law student who stole her classmates law review write-on submission then lied to cover her tracks. Gonzaga Law Dean Jacob Rooskby and about 50 law students made Jimmy Kimmel Live! in a segment seeking to prove that their university campus exists. Law students stepped up their efforts to end mandatory arbitration at law firms, handing out leaflets outside of DLA Piper and Venable. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has landed a summer teaching gig with the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, joining his court colleague Neil Gorsuch. Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. Sign up for the newsletter and check out past issues here. Ill be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at ksloan@alm.com Rainstorm leaves 27 dead, more than 400 injured The death toll from the devastating windstorm that struck Bara and Parsa districts reached 27 as of Monday evening, while more than 400 people were injured and hundreds of families were rendered homeless. BATON ROUGE, La., April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Amedisys, Inc. (AMED), Americas leading independent home health, hospice and personal care company, has closed on its acquisition of RoseRock Healthcare, a hospice care provider in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Under the terms of the agreement, Amedisys acquired substantially all the assets of RoseRock Healthcare. RoseRock provides specialized hospice care to approximately 220 patients daily in northeastern Oklahoma. Amedisys also operates six home health care centers in Oklahoma, including a center in Tulsa. To all the outstanding caregivers at RoseRock Healthcare welcome to the family, stated President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Kusserow. Youve joined a nationwide team committed to the same principles of honoring life through excellent patient care that have made your company so successful. I look forward to working collectively to bring the best of our combined strengths to our patients. Amedisys is the third largest hospice provider in the country, now operating 138 hospice care centers in 34 states. It is our privilege to carry on the tradition of RoseRock in caring for patients and their families when they need us the most, said Regarner Thompson, Senior Vice President for Hospice, South Region. We have a shared mission to help our patients live each day to the fullest, and together, we will bring the gift of hospice to even more patients and their families. About Amedisys: Amedisys, Inc. is a leading healthcare at home Company delivering personalized home health, hospice and personal care. Amedisys is focused on delivering the care that is best for our patients, whether that is home-based personal care; recovery and rehabilitation after an operation or injury; care focused on empowering them to manage a chronic disease; or hospice care at the end of life. More than 3,000 hospitals and 65,000 physicians nationwide have chosen Amedisys as a partner in post-acute care. Founded in 1982, headquartered in Baton Rouge, LA with an executive office in Nashville, TN, Amedisys is a publicly held company. With more than 21,000 employees in 473 care centers in 38 states and the District of Columbia, Amedisys is dedicated to delivering the highest quality of care to the doorsteps of more than 376,000 patients and clients in need every year. For more information about the Company, please visit: www.amedisys.com . Story continues Contact: Kendra Kimmons Vice President of Marketing & Communications 225-299-3708 kendra.kimmons@amedisys.com Revisiting the wildlife farming policy The new proposed policy enactment could facilitate wildlife trade business Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg addresses the media as he arrives at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Frydenberg said he will unveil Australia's first balanced annual budget plan in a decade days before general elections are called. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk) CANBERRA, Australia (AP) The Australian government unveiled a plan on Tuesday to balance the national budget next year and pay off all debt in a decade as it prepares for a general election next month. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg outlined a strategy to deliver a 7.1 billion Australian dollar ($5 billion) surplus in the fiscal year starting July 1 Australia's first surplus budget in 12 years while promising tax cuts and cash handouts for most Australians. Prime Minister Scott Morrison hopes the budget will be positively received by voters whom he will ask to re-elect his conservative coalition for a third three-year term. Morrison is expected to announce within days that an election will he held on May 11 or May 18. The government expects surpluses to grow annually to AU$17.8 billion in 2021-22 before slipping to AU$9.2 billion the following year as tax cuts take effect on government revenues. Net debt would peak at AU$373 billion in the current fiscal year at 19.2 percent of GDP and be paid off by 2029-30. Frydenberg described proposed income tax cuts as the largest since Australia's mining boom years before the global financial crisis in 2008. The cuts, which include lowering the 32.5% tax rate to 30% from July 2024, are forecast to cost the nation's coffers AU$158 billion in tax revenue by 2030. The budget strategy has to be endorsed by Parliament to become law. But the government does not propose to get much of its economic blueprint through Parliament before the next election, which opinion polls suggest the center-left opposition Labor Party is likely to win. Frydenberg said he will try to pass legislation this week that would give AU$284 million to pensioners in one-off payments by July to help pay soaring energy bills. He said voters must decide at the election between the low-taxing conservatives and high-taxing and high-spending Labor. "There's a clear contest in this election between one side of politics which wants to reduce taxes and the Labor Party which will try and increase taxes," Frydenberg said. Story continues Opposition treasury spokesman Chris Bowen said Labor would go to the May election promising bigger surpluses than the ruling coalition. "Based on the figures we've seen tonight, we would have a better bottom line ... paid for by a whole range of policies," Bowen told Sky News TV. Annual GDP growth is forecast to accelerate from 2.25% in the current fiscal year to 2.75% for the next two years. The jobless rate is expected to remain unchanged at around 5%. The Australian economy is vulnerable to commodity swings that the Treasury Department regards as particularly volatile at the moment. Exports are forecast to grow by 4% in the next fiscal year, supported by major liquefied natural gas projects ramping up production. Australia recently overtook Qatar as the world's biggest LNG exporter. But prices of Australia's most lucrative exports coal and iron ore are forecast to decline next year. A dam collapse at a Brazilian iron ore mine in January that killed more than 110 people elevated prices of Australian iron ore in the current fiscal year. But the price will settle as supply issues are addressed, Treasury said. Australian coal shipments have also been held up at Chinese ports with conflicting reports of Chinese policy changes. "There is greater uncertainty than usual around commodity prices as a result of heightened price volatility and policies in China and Brazil," a Treasury document said. Frydenberg said one of the government's "chief concerns" is a forecast downturn in the Australian housing market next year. Housing prices are falling in Australia's largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, where construction has slowed. Frydenberg said the downturn would be worse if a Labor government is elected and implements its promised reduction of tax breaks for landlords. The budget continues the government's policy of increasing defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2020-21, with AU$38.7 billion allocated next year. President Donald Trump has called on U.S. allies to raise their defense spending to that level. A AU$2 billion fund to invest in infrastructure construction among Australia's Pacific island neighbors will become operation on July 1. The fund offers an alternative to growing Chinese investment in the Pacific. A conservative Australian government delivered annual surplus budgets for a decade before the global financial crisis struck during a Labor government's first year in office. Labor ran up debt through stimulus spending and avoided a recession. But Labor's failure to curb debt during six years in office damaged the party's economic credentials. If opinion polls are correct and Labor wins the next election, Morrison would become the sixth Australian prime minister since 2007 to fail to last an entire three-year term. Labor has said if it wins the election, it will outline its own economic blueprint before September. FILE PHOTO: A logo of the Brazilian mining company Vale SA is seen in Brumadinho, Brazil January 29, 2019. REUTERS/Adriano Machado/File photo BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazilian miner Vale SA said on Monday it failed to obtain stability certificates for 13 dams under review following the rupture of another dam in January that killed hundreds, although its shares rose on strong global iron ore prices. The world's largest iron ore miner also disclosed in a securities filing on Monday that a court had frozen an additional 1 billion reais ($258.42 million) in assets over potential damages related to the evacuation of its Vargem Grande dam. Despite the disclosures, Vale shares jumped to their highest point since the Jan. 25 disaster, rising 3.6 percent to 52.79 reais. The shares pared gains to close 3.3 percent higher at 52.60 reais on Monday. Iron ore futures contracts for May delivery rose as much as 5.2 percent on Dalian Commodity Exchange to hit a seven-week high on Monday, on strong economic data from China and supply concerns after Rio Tinto cut its 2019 forecast for iron ore shipments. Prices have also been buoyed by production cuts at Vale, which said last week it expects to sell 75 million tonnes less than planned this year following the dam burst and heightened security concerns over its tailing ponds. Brazil's iron ore exports fell 25.9 percent in March over the same month in 2018 to 22.18 million tonnes, the lowest monthly volume in six years due to the drop in Vale output. Vale said neither the lack of certificates nor the asset freeze would affect its iron ore and pellet sales forecast announced last week. Courts now have frozen a total of 17.6 billion reais in Vale assets since the Jan. 25 disaster when a tailings dam burst at a Vale iron ore mine in the town of Brumadinho, in southeastern Minas Gerais state, burying hundreds of people in mining waste. In response to the disaster, Vale and the Brazilian government are reviewing the safety of all of the miner's dams. The miner disclosed that although 80 structures had their stability certificates renewed, another 13 dams and four dikes did not receive certifications. Seven of them are so-called upstream tailings dams, the same type as the one that ruptured in Brumadinho. The areas around those dams have already been evacuated as a preventative safety measure. Story continues The lack of safety certifications for the other structures will not require further evacuations, although they remain at higher states of alert under an official system that rates the risks of rupture. Vale has said it has taken all upstream tailings dams offline as a precaution until they can be decommissioned, which could require them to reduce their output by up to 10 percent. Last week Vale slashed its 2019 iron ore sales forecast by up to 20 percent to 75 million tonnes. Vale Chief Financial Officer Luciano Siani told analysts that safety and not boosting production remains the company's priority. ($1 = 3.86 reais) (Reporting by Jake Spring, Jose Roberto Gomes and Roberto Samora in Brasilia; Editing by Bill Trott and Matthew Lewis) By Ruth Anderah. Court has given Chicken Tonight Restaurant only 15 days within which to defence itself on allegations that its employees assaulted a local musician Angella Katatumba. Katatumba filed a suit against Chicken Tonight Restaurant seeking over 600 million shillings compensation as a result of being assaulted by its workers. The case has been allocated to Justice Lydia Mugambe. Angela Katatumba dragged Chicken tonight and three of its employees to court accusing them of assaulting her and forceful evicting her from their premises where she had gone for fast foods. Katatumba says that on April 1st2018 she had gone to Kabalagala Chicken tonight Branch where two of the employees attacked her under the supervision of Rogers Olubworth Choka by kicking her which resulted into humiliation , physiological torture, trauma and body injuries. She add that on being examined it was established that she had suffered from grievous bodily harm and she was later referred to international Hospital Kampala where she was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome which requires her to visit the doctor monthly for a period of two years. * Ford sees $1 billion in tariff costs from no-deal Brexit * Ford Europe chair says "wasting" millions on preparations * Moving manufacturing out of Britain possible in long term (Updates with details, quotes, changes SLUG for media clients) By Toby Sterling HALFWEG, Netherlands, April 2 (Reuters) - Ford is spending tens of millions of euros preparing for a possible British exit from the European Union without a trade deal and has yet to decide on its longer-term plans for Britain, Ford Europe chairman Steven Armstrong said on Tuesday. "We love being in Britain, but it has to be competitive and if it's not competitive then we'll have to take whatever actions we'll need to take to protect the business," Armstrong told Reuters at an event in the Netherlands. Ford, which makes 1.3 million engines at two British locations, Bridgend and Dagenham, and cars in Germany, has warned it could face $1 billion in tariff costs in case of a so-called hard Brexit. While the company has announced 5,000 job cuts in Germany, its second-biggest European market, it has yet to make major decisions in Britain, which is its biggest. Armstrong said Ford was already spending tens of millions on euros on measures such as currency hedges and shifting inventory between countries. He said the best case scenario was that money spent preparing for Brexit would be "wasted". Britain's departure from the EU has been pushed back from March 29 until at least April 12 or potentially much later, ruining some of the contingency plans of certain carmakers. BMW's Mini plant in Britain is closing for four weeks and Peugeot's Vauxhall car factory for two weeks in moves planned months ago to help deal with any disruption from Brexit. "We've been clear with the government in the UK and also in Brussels, we have to maintain frictionless trade at the borders and tariff-free trade," said Armstrong. TARIFF THREAT Britain's largely foreign-owned car industry has become increasingly incredulous as a stable and attractive investment environment descends into deep political crisis. Story continues Ford's British-built engines, which are shipped for fitting in vehicles in Germany, Turkey, the United States and elsewhere, could face delays and extra costs from a no-deal Brexit. "We've spent the last 40 years putting a business together that relies on cross-border trading," said Armstrong, who is overseeing an overhaul of Ford in Europe to refocus on its strong position in commercial vehicles and on popular European lines such as Fiesta, Britain's top-selling passenger car. "We can't radically reshape on day one so you'd have to live with (tariffs) for a period of time," he said. Armstrong said Ford has hedged against the possibility of a sharp fall in the value of the pound through the end of 2019, while stockpiling inventory would help bridge a one or two month period of potential chaos around Brexit. "But it's impossible really to mitigate the financial impact in the longer term of no-deal," he said. Ford could try to pass on higher tariff costs, but that would be difficult in Britain, where a recession would mean falling sales, he added. "We haven't really factored in completely the negative shock. There are a number of things that we would try to do but the reality is ... it would impact the whole of industry, not just Ford," Armstrong said. (Reporting by Toby Sterling. Editing by Jane Merriman and Alexander Smith) Aiden James, of Formby, Merseyside, is accused of terror offences. A British man fuelled violence and devastation in Syria by travelling to fight against Islamic State, a court has heard. Aidan James, 28, from Formby, Merseyside, had no previous military knowledge when he allegedly set out to join the bloody war in 2017 for the Kurdish people. He prepared himself to join their cause in an amateurish way and underwent training with weapons in Iraq for a month, the Old Bailey was told. From there, he went to the Syrian border with Iraq for another month of training, jurors were told. Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC told jurors that the violence in Syria had been fuelled by the involvement of individuals on all sides who had no prior link or association with the land or its people. Aiden James is on trial at the Old Bailey facing charges of engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts and two charges of attending a place used for terrorist training. Stock image. (PA) And by 2017, the conflict had already raged for five years, leading to death, displacement and damage. Mr Heywood said: The prosecution case against this defendant is that as a citizen and resident of this country who did not know and had never been to Iraq or Syria before and who had no prior military knowledge or experience whatever and no official sanction at all, he went there for four months to fight. He picked one particular cause and he joined in. At the time and since, he claimed that his aim was to combat Islamic State. In reality, it was not just that there was much more to it. Kurdish forces, pictured, who have spearheaded the US-backed fight against IS in Syria. He had picked his cause and it was the cause of just one of the many groups of people that inhabit that part of the world and would like it to be their own the Kurdish people. The prosecution case against him is that he went as an individual to Syria to fight with guns and explosives. Mr Heywood said: Mr James is not charged with any offence that his purpose was simply to go to fight Isis rather the charges are levelled against him because his intention was to lend support to advance a political or ideological cause. The court heard that Parliament has the power to proscribe groups anywhere in the world linked to terrorism, banning UK citizens from joining or funding them. Read more from Yahoo News UK: YouTubers posting thousands of clips of themselves drinking water Lib Dem councillor scared to put her children to bed Passenger who died on Qantas flight identified Story continues Two of the groups James associated with the Peoples Protection Unit known as the YPG and its female wing, the YPJ are not proscribed by Parliament. But a third, the PKK or the Kurdistan Workers Party, has been banned since 2001 for its advocation of Kurdish self-rule through both political and armed struggle. James has pleaded not guilty to engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts and two charges of attending a place used for terrorist training. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK NEWARK, Ohio and SPARTANBURG, S.C., April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Park National Corporation (Park) (NYSE AMERICAN: PRK) and CAB Financial Corporation (CAB) (CABF) announced today the completion of their previously announced merger transaction. Effective today, CAB has merged with and into Park. With the merger, CABs banking subsidiary, Carolina Alliance Bank, becomes a community banking division of Park subsidiary, The Park National Bank. Carolina Alliance Bank will continue to serve its communities with the same local leadership, local advisory board and local decision-making. Headquartered in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the Carolina Alliance Bank division has $760 million in assets (as of December 31, 2018). It operates seven banking offices in upstate South Carolina and western North Carolina. Carolina Alliance Bank will gain greater lending capacity as a banking division of The Park National Bank, helping it expand its service to commercial and small business customers. More potential enhancements and updates to its banking services will be considered as the partnership with Park continues to develop throughout the year. The team at Carolina Alliance Bank looks forward to continuing its commitment to customers and communities as a division of The Park National Bank. We are truly excited about the partnership and believe it will greatly enhance our capabilities going forward, said Carolina Alliance Bank Chief Executive Officer John Kimberly. The Park National family of community banks now includes 12 banking divisions, each led by local professionals. The banks share operational, compliance and administrative resources, placing them in a strong position to remain competitive with sophisticated technology and service capabilities while keeping a steadfast focus on personalized service and community involvement. Park National and Carolina Alliance bankers have worked steadily over the past several months to identify all the possibilities our combined organization will enjoy, Park Chief Executive Officer David Trautman said. We are all excited about the opportunities that lie ahead as we work together to deliver extraordinary service to our current and new clients. Story continues Park has more than a century of banking success in Ohio. Recently, it has pursued growth opportunities in the Carolinas and other regions. In July 2018, it welcomed NewDominion Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina into its family of community banks. Sandler ONeill & Partners, L.P. served as financial advisor and Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP served as legal advisor to Park National Corporation. FIG Partners, LLC served as financial advisor and Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP served as legal advisor to CAB Financial Corporation. Headquartered in Newark, Ohio, Park National Corporation has $7.8 billion in total assets (as of December 31, 2018). The Park organization consists of 12 community bank divisions, a non-bank subsidiary and two specialty finance companies. Parks banking operations are conducted through Park subsidiary The Park National Bank and its divisions, which include Fairfield National Bank Division, Richland Bank Division, Century National Bank Division, First-Knox National Bank Division, United Bank, N.A. Division, Second National Bank Division, Security National Bank Division, Unity National Bank Division, The Park National Bank of Southwest Ohio & Northern Kentucky Division, NewDominion Bank Division, and now Carolina Alliance Bank Division. The Park organization also includes Scope Leasing, Inc. (d.b.a. Scope Aircraft Finance), Guardian Financial Services Company (d.b.a. Guardian Finance Company) and SE Property Holdings, LLC. Park National Media Contact: Bethany Lewis, 740.349.0421, blewis@parknationalbank.com Park National Investor Contact: Brady Burt, 740.322.6844, bburt@parknationalbank.com Carolina Alliance Bank Contact: John Kimberly, 864.208.2265, jkimberly@carolinaalliancebank.com Forward Looking Statement: Certain statements contained in this communication which are not statements of historical fact constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements can often, but not always, be identified by the use of words like believe, continue, pattern, estimate, project, intend, anticipate, expect and similar expressions or future or conditional verbs such as will, would, should, could, might, can, may, or similar expressions. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements relating to the expected timing and benefits of the merger as well as other statements of Parks goals, intentions and expectations; and estimates of Parks risks and future costs and benefits, whether with respect to the merger or otherwise. These forward-looking statements are subject to significant risks, assumptions and uncertainties that may cause results to differ materially from those set forth in forward-looking statements, including, among other things: the risk that the businesses of Park and CAB will not be integrated successfully or such integration may be more difficult, time-consuming or costly than expected; expected revenue synergies and cost savings from the merger may not be fully realized or realized within the expected time frame; revenues following the merger may be lower than expected; customer and employee relationships and business operations may be disrupted by the merger; possible changes in economic and business conditions; the existence or exacerbation of general geopolitical instability and uncertainty; the ability of Park to integrate recent acquisitions and attract new customers; possible changes in monetary and fiscal policies, and laws and regulations; the effects of easing restrictions on participants in the financial services industry; the cost and other effects of legal and administrative cases; possible changes in the credit worthiness of customers and the possible impairment of collectability of loans; fluctuations in market rates of interest; competitive factors in the banking industry; changes in the banking legislation or regulatory requirements of federal and state agencies applicable to bank holding companies and banks like Parks affiliate bank; continued availability of earnings and excess capital sufficient for the lawful and prudent declaration of dividends; and changes in market, economic, operational, liquidity, credit and interest rate risks associated with the Parks business. Please refer to Parks Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, as well as its other filings with the SEC, for a more detailed discussion of risks, uncertainties and factors that could cause actual results to differ from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements included in this communication are made as of the date hereof and are based on information available as of the date hereof. Except as required by law, Park does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statement. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! We think intelligent long term investing is the way to go. But no-one is immune from buying too high. For example the China Oil And Gas Group Limited (HKG:603) share price dropped 59% over five years. That's an unpleasant experience for long term holders. And we doubt long term believers are the only worried holders, since the stock price has declined 21% over the last twelve months. The last week also saw the share price slip down another 14%. This could be related to the recent financial results - you can catch up on the most recent data by reading our company report. View our latest analysis for China Oil And Gas Group There is no denying that markets are sometimes efficient, but prices do not always reflect underlying business performance. One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement. China Oil And Gas Group became profitable within the last five years. That would generally be considered a positive, so we are surprised to see the share price is down. Other metrics may better explain the share price move. The modest 0.8% dividend yield is unlikely to be guiding the market view of the stock. In contrast to the share price, revenue has actually increased by 4.1% a year in the five year period. So it seems one might have to take closer look at the fundamentals to understand why the share price languishes. After all, there may be an opportunity. The chart below shows how revenue and earnings have changed with time, (if you click on the chart you can see the actual values). SEHK:603 Income Statement, April 2nd 2019 We consider it positive that insiders have made significant purchases in the last year. Having said that, most people consider earnings and revenue growth trends to be a more meaningful guide to the business. It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on China Oil And Gas Group's earnings, revenue and cash flow. Story continues A Different Perspective While the broader market lost about 4.0% in the twelve months, China Oil And Gas Group shareholders did even worse, losing 20% (even including dividends). Having said that, it's inevitable that some stocks will be oversold in a falling market. The key is to keep your eyes on the fundamental developments. Regrettably, last year's performance caps off a bad run, with the shareholders facing a total loss of 16% per year over five years. We realise that Buffett has said investors should 'buy when there is blood on the streets', but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality businesses. It is all well and good that insiders have been buying shares, but we suggest you check here to see what price insiders were buying at. If you like to buy stocks alongside management, then you might just love this free list of companies. (Hint: insiders have been buying them). Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on HK exchanges. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. * PREVIOUS TRADING SESSION MOVES: * SSEC +2.6 pct, CSI300 +2.6 pct, HSI +1.8 pct * HK->Shanghai Connect daily quota used 1.1 pct, Shanghai->HK daily quota used 3.0 pct * HK->Shenzhen Connect daily quota used 6 pct, Shenzhen->HK daily quota used 3.5 pct * CNY official close 6.7125 per dollar * FTSE China A50 +2.0 pct, BNY Mellon ADR China Select Index +0.0 pct SHANGHAI, April 2 (Reuters) - Following is a list of recent corporate and policy announcements, as well as other news that might affect Chinese financial markets. Policy, government, sector news: * Don't discriminate against our firms, China's Xi tells New Zealand * China's Xi says West has long-term economic, military superiority * China's top two steel producing cities to extend output curbs - sources * China books fresh deal for 828,000 tonnes of U.S. soybeans * China expands curbs on fentanyl, blames U.S. for its abuse * Moody's says slowdown in China property sales likely to continue through 2019 Data: * China manufacturing returns to growth in March - Caixin PMI Company moves: In focus * China drone maker EHang delays IPO plan, eyes private funding-sources * China's Kunlun in talks with U.S. over Grindr -filing * China's Ganfeng boosts stake in Argentina lithium project * Tencent announces increase of global medium term note programme maximum limit to $20 bln * Shares of Gree Electric Appliances shares to halt trade from April 1 Earnings/Performance * SAIC Motor's 2018 net profit up 4.65 percent y/y * Zhejiang Longsheng's 2018 net profit up 66.2 pct * Tongwei sees q1 net profit up 50-60 pct * Zhengzhou Yutong Bus' 2018 net profit down 26.45 percent y/y Other moves (spin-offs, divestitures, deals) * China Gezhouba's consortium signs contract for power project in Pakistan for about 12.5 bln yuan * Sanan Optoelectronics' unit receives subsidies of 200 million yuan * ZTE elects Li Zixue as chairman (Compiled by Luoyan Liu) The illicit cannabis industry is estimated at $50 billion yearly, much of which will move out of the shadows and become a legal market in the coming years. One research firm estimates the legal trade could be worth $21 billion by 2021. This is still an early industry, and the winners and losers will be sorted out over the coming years. Many have of the early entrants have gotten significant press, but newer up-and-comers that are less known may have just as much potential. Item 9 Labs (INLB) could be one of these as they finish a major expansion project on their Arizona cannabis cultivation and production facility, doubling capacity. New CEO Sara Gullickson is a well-known operator in the region and they're planning for a second major production facility in Nevada. Item 9 is already growing revenue quickly, 350% year-over-year growth in Q4 of 2018, making their facility expansion extra interesting. 2019 could be their breakout year as an up-and-coming producer. How the North American Marijuana Industry Gets To $21B NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / It's no secret that marijuana is set to become a big market in North America. It's now legal by prescription in over 30 U.S. states. Recreational use has been legalized in 10 states, and it's probably only a matter of time before that's the norm. Canada has legalized cannabis on the federal level, and it seems like it may be only a matter of time before it's accepted across the North American continent. The estimates vary, but over $50 billion in annual illicit sales may be moving into legal consumer goods in the coming years according to ArcView Market Research, and by 2021 the legal market could be worth $21.6 billion. [1] For speculative investors, this boom has made for some big winners. Well-timed bets on some small companies have paid off, as with small-cap CV Sciences (CVSI) shares gaining about 700% in 2018 and MariMed (MRMD) shares gaining almost 400%, so many investors have smartly taken a basket approach to holding many of these high-risk endeavors. And now ETFs like Horizons Emerging Marijuana Growers Index (HMJR)(HZEMF) have emerged that can provide that approach in a single vehicle to own a portion of the sector. Story continues One up-and-comer in the U.S. hasn't received much national press but could soon as they ramp up their cultivation and production business. Item 9 Labs Corp. (INLB) is a blossoming producer and wholesale distributor headquartered in Arizona, where it owns and operates one of the largest properties in the U.S. zoned to grow and cultivate the medical marijuana flower, at 50 acres. The company is focused on high-end products that can command a higher margin than many competing brands. Item 9 was ranked one of the fastest growing Arizona concentrate brands, according GreenEdge Retail Tracking, and their recent reporting showed Item 9 Labs increased concentrate sales by 234% in Q4 compared to Q1 of calendar year 2018. [2] The company is nearing completion of a new 10,000 sq. ft. cultivation and manufacturing facility that will double their current space in Arizona to 20,000 in total. In 2018 the company partnered with Strive Wellness to construct and manage another 20,000 square-foot medical marijuana cultivation and processing facility in Pahrump Nevada, which is expected to be operational and to be producing legal medical marijuana products by the end of 2019. Item 9 has been ramping up their revenue, and with their new facilities completed soon sales could increase dramatically in 2019 if they can fill the sales channel. Revenue increased to $1.017 million in the quarter ending December 31, 2018, from $0.224 million in the year-ago quarter, or 350% growth. Revenue in this first fiscal quarter was also more than the entirety of Item 9's 2018 sales! [3] New CEO Sara Gullickson is known in the SW as a capable cannabis operator, and was selected by Marijuana Business Magazine for its Women to Watch in 2019 list. She founded Dispensary Permits and DispensaryTemplates.com - acquired by Item 9 in 2018 - which own dozens of cannabis related domains and an email database of over 24,000 subscribers, with more than 60,000 unique site visitors per month. [4] Item 9 also recently added two more medical cannabis executives to their advisory board in Donald Burton and Larry K. Lemons, with experience at The Harvest Foundation of Nevada, Sanofi (SNY) and MariMed Advisors (MRMD). The valuations in this growth industry are impressive, most companies being valued as a product of their current and future sales as they all scramble to capture as many accounts as possible before turning to the bottom line. MariMed Inc. (MRMD) has a $750 million market capitalization and revenue of $9.9 million in the trailing twelve months. Tilray (TLRY) has a market capitalization of $6.7 billion and revenue of $32.7 million in the last twelve months. Cronos Group (CRON) had only $11.71 million in TTM sales yet has a market valuation of $3.77 billion. Capacity is key which is why Item 9's Nevada and Arizona expansions are so important right now. If they can replicate and continue growing on their $1 million in quarterly sales at the end of last year, it's within reason to think Item 9 could be doing $4 to 6 million in annual revenue this year, and the growth isn't likely to stop. Based on their recent growth metrics and with Arizona's additional capacity to be completed soon, INLB could be a top name to know in 2019. About One Equity Stocks One Equity Stocks is a provider of paid-for research on publicly traded emerging growth companies. This is an advertisement. We are not a licensed broker-dealer and do not publish investment advice and remind readers that investing, especially in penny stocks, involves considerable risk. One Equity Stocks encourages all readers to carefully review the SEC filings of any issuers we cover and consult with an investment professional before making any investment decisions. One Equity Stocks is a for-profit business and is typically compensated for coverage of issuers we cover as well as other advisory work we perform. Although we always strive to be objective and present the facts, you should assume we are biased because of the financial relationship we have with companies we write about. One Equity Stocks and affiliates have had an advisory relationship with INLB since March of 2019 and may receive up to 210,000 restricted shares of INLB for various advisory services including this advertisement over the next 180 days. We also receive $15,000 cash per month from INLB. We have not sold any stock in INLB but may do so without notice in the future, and if so are unable to update this disclosure. Please contact us at info@investorclick.net for additional information or to subscribe to our intelligence service. Small Cap Risk Disclosure Don't buy a penny stock if you aren't prepared to lose your entire investment. Penny stocks may trade infrequently, which means that it may be difficult to sell penny stock shares once you own them. Moreover, because it may be difficult to find quotations for certain penny stocks, they may be difficult, or even impossible, to accurately price. For these, and other reasons, penny stocks are generally considered speculative investments. Consequently, investors in penny stocks should be prepared for the possibility that they may lose their whole investment (or an amount in excess of their investment if they purchased penny stocks on margin). Sources 1. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/legal-cannabis-industry-growth-2016-marijuana_us_587e785be4b0cf0ae88070c0 2. http://www.item9labscorp.com/news-media-disclosures/fullstory/?qmodStoryID=7884093900418961 3. https://backend.otcmarkets.com/otcapi/company/financial-report/212318/content 4. http://www.item9labscorp.com/news-media-disclosures/fullstory/?qmodStoryID=7545055828642159 SOURCE: One Equity Stocks, LLC View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/540767/The-Up-And-Coming-Cannabis-Producer-Thats-About-To-Double-Their-Production-Potential By Damalie Mukhaye. The opposition Forum for Democratic Change has poked holes in govt plans to support a private investor to construct a 1.4tn shilling specialised hospital in Lubowa. Addressing journalists at the party headquarters in Najjanakumbi, the spokesperson Ibrahim SsemujjuNganda said rather than guarantee the huge loan at the expense of Ugandan tax payers, govt should construct its own facility to benefit Ugandans He also tasked the civil society to petition the Vatican over one of their own that is allegedly fleecing poor Ugandans. Parliament last week gave the green light to government to guarantee the loan that is fund construction of the private specialised facility. Related Stories. CSOs ask govt to terminate lubowa hospital agreement Muhakanizi clarifies on Lubowa land Investors need to pay close attention to Anadarko Petroleum (APC) stock based on the movements in the options market lately. ConocoPhillips COP is discussing with Chrysaor Holdings Ltd. to divest a bulk of its North Sea resources, according to Bloomberg. Earlier, ConocoPhillips was trying to divest those properties to Ratcliffes Ineos a multinational chemicals firm. However, the effort to conclude the $3-billion deal failed which convinced ConocoPhillips to start searching for prospective bidders since January. The source added that Chrysaor Holdings, an oil and natural gas explorer and producer, is leading other bidders to acquire North Sea oil fields from ConocoPhillips. Investors should know that although ConocoPhillips is in talks with Chrysaor Holdings, the discussions may not lead to an agreement. Overall, with the sale of bulk of its North Sea assets, ConocoPhillips is trying to divert focus to prolific shale plays in the United States. The company already has strong presence in Eagle Ford, Delaware basin and Bakken shale and revealed that upstream business in the shale resources was phenomenal in 2018. ConocoPhillips is also projecting more than 25% compound annual production growth rate from its operations in the three key shale plays. Headquartered in Houston, TX,ConocoPhillips is a leading explorer and producer of oil and natural gas in the world. The company currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).Other prospective players in the energy space include Antero Resources Corporation AR, NGL Energy Partners LP NGL and ProPetro Holding Corp. PUMP. While Antero Resources and NGL Energy sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), ProPetro Holding carries a Zacks Rank #2. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Antero Resources is likely to see earnings growth of 20% over the next five years. NGL Energy is likely to witness earnings growth of 227% for the fiscal year ending March 2019. ProPetro Holding is likely to see 19.5% earnings growth through 2019. Today's Best Stocks from Zacks Story continues Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%. This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000 2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year. See their latest picks free >> 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 NGL Energy Partners LP (NGL) : Free Stock Analysis Report Antero Resources Corporation (AR) : Free Stock Analysis Report ConocoPhillips (COP) : Free Stock Analysis Report ProPetro Holding Corp. (PUMP) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Carlos Rodriguez Sr. is chairman and chief executive officer and Carlos Rodriguez Jr. is chief operating officer of Driftwood Acquisitions & Development. Driftwood Acquisitions & Development has expanded its unique hotel investment strategy to California, an uncharted state for the Coral Gables-based company Led by father-son team Carlos Rodriguez Sr. and Carlos Rodriguez Jr., Driftwood bought the 353-room Marriott Mission Valley in a shopping and hotel district near San Diego's former Qualcomm stadium for $85.7 million March 18. The deal breaks down to $242,776 per key. It's not that DAD wanted to invest in San Diego or California specifically. It's more that this opportunity matched what DAD looks for in an investment and that the area, already doing well, is poised for growth, Carlos Rodriguez Sr. said. "We don't say that, 'We need to be in San Diego, or we need to be in New York or Ocean Drive in Miami Beach.' We are constantly looking across the nation. We have four persons whose job is 24/7 to be looking for opportunities for us to buy and enter into a market. So when we see it, we jump on it," said the DAD chairman and CEO. DAD plans to build a second hotel on the 7.4-acre site. The company is in talks with Marriott for the hospitality company to put its brand on a 150-room extended-stay hotel. DAD has an uncommon investment strategy targeting hotels with positive cash flow and upside potential. After closing on the purchase, it syndicates 90 percent of its equity ownership to accredited investors. Eventually, its strategy calls for the sale of the hotels at a profit for all. "We sell pieces of the investment as limited partners. We always retain control over the general partner, and we always retain 10% of the ownership," Rodriguez Sr. said. Most recently, DAD, which was founded in 2015, sold its first hotel that completed its investment cycle. On Dec. 26, an affiliate sold the 90-room SpringHill Suites in Central Florida's Altamonte Springs for $11.65 million. The company boasted the internal rate of return for this sale was more than the initially projected 16%. It bought the asset for $6.75 million in December 2015, meaning it held it for three years. It likely will hold the The San Diego investment longer. "This one is more of a long-term play because we see a lot of value-creation opportunity in this particular deal," Rodriguez Sr. said. DAD doesn't plan to renovate the hotel but plans room upgrades and the additional hotel, which should be finished in late 2022. The location also offers an upside with San Diego State University planning to redevelop the area that includes the SDCCU Stadium, where the San Diego Chargers played before moving to Los Angeles. The stadium is just over a mile drive from the Marriott hotel. "That's only a plus for the hotel. We understand it's going to take years for them to redevelop the whole area," Rodriguez Sr. said. "As that development progresses, it's only going to be a positive impact to us and to the neighborhood." DAD is a sister company to Driftwood Hospitality Management LLC, a North Palm Beach-based hotel manager. In the 1990s, Rodriguez Sr. moved to Miami and started his own hotel company, Cardel Hotels, and a management company, Cardel Hospitality Group. In 2003, he merged it with Driftwood Hospitality Management, where he still is executive vice president. DAD was founded later with ties to DHM. DAD owns 25% of DHM, and DHM owns 12.5% of DAD, according to Rodriguez Jr. DHM manages DAD's assets and has started managing the Marriott Mission Valley at 8757 Rio San Diego Drive. Read more: Driftwood Sells Altamonte Springs Marriott Hotel for $11.65 Million Cover sheet of the criminal complaint against Edward Rostohar. Former CBS Employees Federal Credit Union CEO Edward Rostohar said he was able to steal and conceal his $40 million embezzlement for 20 years because NCUA auditors didnt really know what to look for during examinations, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. In addition to Rostohars insider knowledge as a former NCUA auditor, he also identified and exploited a weakness in the credit unions data processing system. The long-time president/CEO of the Studio City, Calif.-based credit union is in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles where he is awaiting a court hearing on April 18. He is expected to be indicted on bank fraud and aggravated identity theft felony charges. Money recovered from Suspect's residence. (Source: Los Angeles Police Department) As he was backing out of his driveway at his Studio City home on March 12, Los Angeles police apprehended Rostohar who was carrying a passport and $200,000 in $100 bills in the trunk of his 2018 Porsche. His fraud was detected on March 6 when a credit union employee found a $35,000 check made out to Rostohar, which led the employee to uncover $3.7 million in checks made payable to the former CEO. The checks had forged signatures of another credit union. Before he joined CBS EFCU 30 years ago, the 62-year-old Rostohar worked for several years as an NCUA auditor. Because of that, Rostohar knew what NCUA auditors looked for in their exams and audits of the credit union, FBI Special Agent Alice Tsujihara said in a sworn affidavit. Rostohar explained that the auditors themselves never operated a financial institution, and thus didnt really know what to look for. Rostohar knew how to respond to auditors so that his theft would not be discovered. One of the items NCUA auditors looked for were quarter end records. To conceal his theft, Rostohar told the FBI that he adjusted the balance in the general ledgers clearing account through which expenses and income were processed. Rostohar deposited fake income in this account, drawing the funds from the credit union members certificate of deposits. However, the funds were not taken from individual member CDs, but from the overall CD balance held by the credit union. Then the real expenses would be processed through the account. Another item NCUA auditors looked for was negative earnings, according to the affidavit. Rostohar altered the credit unions records so that it appeared the credit union was operating with positive earnings even if it was as little as $1,000. Rostohar removed funds by altering the payees on the credit union checks, but he also identified and exploited a weakness in the ShareOne data processing system, according to court documents. His theft process included pretending to withdraw funds from member accounts by using the credit unions data processing system to issue a check with a blank payee. He then manually typed the name and address of a member on the credit union receipt to ensure the bank records would show a members name and address as the payee information. The check was then shown with a blank payee on the data processing system. Funds to issue the check were withdrawn from a share account that belonged to the credit union and used as a clearing account. Once the credit union check was issued on the data processing system, Rostohar then manually typed a payee of his choosing, most often reflecting his name or an associated party name and deposited the altered check in one of his Citibank or Chase Bank accounts, according to court documents. Rostohar managed to fund the credit unions clearing account after he identified and exploited a weakness in the ShareOne data processing system, the FBI affidavit said. He posted entries to the general ledger account, which reflected the aggregate of all deposits held in the individual member share accounts listed on the member share and loan trial balance. According to court documents, Rostohar made a general ledger entry by moving a deposit to the credit unions clearing account; this enabled him to withdraw money out of the credit unions account by issuing a credit union check through Catalyst Corporate Federal Credit Union based in Plano, Texas, with offices in California, Georgia and Hawaii. Court documents indicate that Catalyst Corporate CU received several complaints from members of unauthorized transaction and withdrawals from their accounts. Rostohar told investigators he gambled away much of the money and spent the rest on traveling by private jet, buying expensive watches, and giving his wife a weekly allowance of $5,000. He also bought two cars a Porsche and a Tesla with money he pilfered from the credit union, according to court documents. The former executive also told federal investigators that he opened a cafe in Reno with his business partner, Ellen Burcham, and he purchased real estate there. Additionally, he made a down payment on a Reno home with stolen money from the credit union. Rostohar also was a co-owner of a condominium in Cabo, Mexico. Linda Tlemsani, Rostohars wife, did not appear to know the magnitude of the theft, FBI Special Agent Tsujihara said in her affidavit. Tlemsani said she spent the $5,000 weekly allowance on food, clothes and expense related to her work as an aspiring recording artist, noting that producing a music video and taking various classes was very expensive, but that she hoped to become a recording artist in the near future. It was Rostohars wife who called Tsujuhara and LA police informing them that her husband was panicking, planning to leave the country and threatening to take his life. When police arrived at his home, Rostohar was in his bedroom packing. He managed to slip into his car but was apprehended by police as he was driving out of his driveway where he was arrested. (Bloomberg) -- Hewlett-Packard Co.s board, riven with conflict, faced a "poisonous internal environment" on the eve of its announcement to acquire British software firm Autonomy. A simmering dispute between executives burst into the open just as HPs board wavered over whether to proceed with the $11-billion transaction, then-Chief Executive Officer Leo Apotheker said on the second day of his evidence in the civil case against Autonomy founder Mike Lynch. HP is suing Lynch over claims he regularly inflated his companys sales in an attempt to beat quarterly stock market expectations. The computing giant argues it was conned into overpaying for the British software firm and had to take a $8.8 billion writedown of the business just a year later. Apotheker said he was furious with his chief financial officer, Cathie Lesjak, a veteran HP executive, who blindsided him with her last-minute opposition to the deal in August 2011. Lesjak told the board that while she supported the rationale for the deal, the transaction wasnt the best way to put HPs cash to work, he said. Shortly before the meeting, Lesjak sent a private email to Chairman Raymond Lane that described Apotheker as "a dead man walking." She is scheduled to give evidence later in the nine-month trial at which HP accuses Lynch of defrauding the company. Lesjak didnt immediately respond to a request seeking comment. Apotheker said he would have postponed the software transaction if the board had wanted to do so. Instead, the members supported the deal, which was seen as a way to add a higher-margin business to help transform the computing giant. "I happen to be of the school that believes that dissent is fine," he said. After the meeting, Lane said that he told Apotheker that the board had begun to question his style. I said our confidence is shaken in the operational execution and in him and we want him to hear our sense but if he wants to go ahead, we support him, Lane said in an email to the non-executive directors that signed off with Fasten your seatbelts. Story continues Apotheker was fired in September 2011 before the Autonomy deal completed in November. The CEO said he had earlier lost confidence in Lesjaks forecasting of the business and had already decided to fire her. Lesjak stood to receive a $20 million severance package. Apotheker, who led SAP AG before being recruited for the U.S. role, said Tuesday that HP was at a "critical point" when he joined in 2010. The Palo Alto, California-based companys main hardware businesses were in decline, and the firm was reduced to competing on price, he said. Lynchs lawyer, Robert Miles, asked Apotheker whether he was aware that Lesjak told board members that he was "corrupting the company" and didnt know what he was doing. He replied that he wasnt. In his letter to the directors, Lane said the board was "very concerned about how poorly this announcement will be perceived." Investment banker Peter Weinberg, who advised Apotheker on the transaction, also struggled to understand the board dynamic even as he pushed for the deal, according to a series of emails disclosed to the court. We would go so far as to state the status quo is not a practical option, even if the market reaction is anticipated to be less positive," he said. (Updates with Peter Weinberg email in last paragraph.) To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Browning in London at jbrowning9@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Christopher Elser For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. New York City. Photo: Shutterstock.com Debevoise & Plimpton announced Tuesday that it will be adding three funds lawyers from Linklaters, including the head of the U.K. firm's investments funds group in New York, Lorna Bowen. The news that Bowen, Justin Storms and Andrew Ford are set to join Debevoise on April 15 makes Linklaters the second London firm losing partners in New York this week. On Monday, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe announced that it had hired an infrastructure expert from Ashurst. "Lorna, Justin and Andrew are tremendously talented attorneys who are highly respected in the asset management industry. Their addition to our premier global investment funds practice is exciting for the firm, further enhancing the talent and resources we make available to our clients seeking exceptional fund formation advice," Michael Blair, the firm's presiding partner, said in a statement. Bowen, Storms and Ford together represent a range of alternative asset managers. They focus on the structuring, formation and regulation of funds investing in all types of alternative asset classes, often as first movers. "Debevoise has a stellar reputation around the world as a preferred partner for investment firms seeking the highest quality, most commercial, market-aware and creative advice," Bowen said in a statement. The Debevoise funds practice broke its previous revenue records this past year, advising on more than 100 private funds targeting more than $125 billion in commitments, according to private equity group co-chair Rebecca F. Silberstein. "We have worked closely with Lorna, Justin and Andrew on complex client matters for years and have been impressed by the team's creativity, keen insight and practical approach," Silberstein said in a statement. "Collectively, they have represented some of the world's largest and most prestigious funds and will provide enormous value to our clients as our funds practice continues to grow." Debevoise hired several funds partners in 2017, bringing on Patricia Volhard from German firm Pollath + Partners in London and Frankfurt as well as Simon Witney in London from King & Wood Mallesons. A spokeswoman for Linklaters said the firm remained committed to growing its funds practice in the U.S., both in New York and Washington, D.C. "Lorna, Justin and Andrew have been great colleagues and we wish them well in their next phase of their careers," she added. The firm has made a series of lateral partner hires in Washington in recent months, most recently bringing on bankruptcy partner Amy Edgy from Jones Day and financial regulatory partner Jerome Roche from Mayer Brown. By Moses Kyeyune. The House Committee on Defence and Internal Affairs has kicked ministry of defence officials out of this afternoon meeting, accusing the line Minister Adolf Mwesige of arrogance. Havoc broke out in the committee after Obongi County MP Kaps Fugaroo told the officials led by the minister that they are answerable to the committee. The minister however, without fear of contradiction responded by bashing the members and emphasing that he is not a subordinate, sparking bitter exchanges that forced the committee chair Doreen Amule to suspend the sitting. . However before suspension, a motion was passed by mps fungaroo to expel the defense officials until further date. The defence ministry had appeared before the committee to defend their budget proposal for the financial year 2019/2020 worth 3.8 trillion shillings. 61-year-old mother Cecile gave birth to her granddaughter. P hoto: Supplied/Ariel Panowicz Creative It would be no surprise that as a birth photographer youd be used to being a part of highly emotional moments in peoples lives. But the birth of little Uma Louise Dougherty-Eledge left this seasoned photographer an absolute mess. And the incredible images, and story behind them, have since gone viral around the globe. Being a part of this incredible journey has been one of the most magical experiences, photographer Ariel Panowicz tells Yahoo Lifestyle. READ MORE: Woman with two wombs delivers surprise twins Uma Louise was born at 6:06am on Monday in the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, weighing 2.6kg, to proud dads Matthew Eledge and husband Elliot Dougherty. Proud dads Matthew Eledge and husband Elliot Dougherty. Photo: Supplied/Ariel Panowicz Creative She was conceived via in vitro fertilisation, using Matthews sperm and eggs from Elliots sister, Lea Yribe. And it was Matthews 61-year-old mother Cecile Reynek Eledg, who served as the gestational carrier and gave birth to Uma, helping her son and son-in-law become first-time parents. The incredible moment was captured by Ariel, who has followed the couples journey right from the start. From witnessing the moment Matt and Elliot met to photographing their wedding, maternity photos, and then the birth of their baby girl, its been so amazing watching their love and family grow, Ariel tell us. READ MORE: Grandmother gives birth aged 50 The strength and poise that Cele demonstrated at 61 years old while giving birth was truly a sight to see. She was so calm, (literally didnt make a peep during birth), and had the energy of a true warrior. Photographer Ariel says everyone in the room was very emotional. Photo: Supplied/Ariel Panowicz Creative The incredible images have since gone viral. Photo: Supplied/Ariel Panowicz Creative When Uma finally entered the world, the room was filled with such an immense amount of love, it truly felt like it vibrated off the walls. Almost everyone was in tears. The look that Cele gave her son and son-in-law when they locked eyes with their baby girl for the first time was enough to drain every dang tear from your body. Each person involved in the creation of this little girl is filled with pure love, selflessness and acceptance for one another. This is what family is. Story continues Matthew revealed there were others who had offered to carry and deliver the child for the couple. I had a lot of people in college say they would (carry and deliver a child), but when push comes to shove, thats a huge commitment, he told CNN. More than anything, we feel lucky to have women selfless enough to do this. Matthew and Elliot hold their girl for the first time. Photo: Supplied/Ariel Panowicz Creative The couple and Ariel decided to share the powerful images online and they have been blown away by the response. The power of the internet is truly wild, Ariel tells Yahoo Lifestyle. READ MORE: What is a hands off birth? Its amazing to see how much love and support the world has shown this unique family. People really, truly have demonstrated so much acceptance for something that is so seemingly different than what society perpetuates as a normal family. I think its a beautiful reminder to all of us just how powerful love can be. Baby Uma will be surrounded and raised by an amazing family, starting with her two Dads. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - EMX Royalty Corporation (TSX Venture: EMX) (NYSE American: EMX) (the "Company" or "EMX") is pleased to report results for the year ended December 31, 2018. All dollar amounts are CDN unless otherwise noted. HIGHLIGHTS FOR 2018 Financial Update EMX had royalty revenue of $2.1 million generated in North America and Turkey during the year. The Company also received $2.1 million in property payments, and $1.1 million from the sale of marketable securities. The Company's net income for the year was $62.1 million, which principally resulted from an $80.3 million gain from the sale of the Malmyzh project by IG Copper LLC ("IGC"). Royalty generation costs totaled $8.1 million, of which $1.9 million was recovered from partners. In addition, partners continued to advance projects and incur exploration expenditures totaling approximately $19 million that did not flow through to the Company's financial statements. General and administrative expenses totaled $4.1 million, which includes $1.1 million in salaries and consultants, $0.8 million in administrative costs, and $1.0 million in share-based payments. Total cash used in operations was $5.9 million. Other items affecting financial results in 2018 include an impairment of $7.2 million at the Leeville royalty property in Nevada, $1.7 million in depletion costs, $1.9 million loss related to reduction in goodwill, foreign exchange gain of $3.5 million, and discretionary bonuses of $5.2 million related to the successful sale of Malmyzh (as discussed below). Sale of Malmyzh Strategic Investment After seven years, EMX's strategic investment in IGC was realized in 2018 through the sale of the Malmyzh copper-gold project to Russian Copper Company ("RCC") for US$200 million (see EMX news releases dated October 11, and October 30, 2018). EMX received an initial cash distribution of $84.2 million from IGC in Q4 of 2018. Subject to certain escrow conditions related to the sale of Malmyzh, cash distributions of up to $5.5 million will be made to EMX as funds are released during 2019. The Company awarded bonuses totaling $5.2 million to the Chairman, and all EMX management and staff, in recognition of the seven year effort to identify, develop and monetize the Company's investment in IGC. The bonuses were approved by the Compensation Committee comprised of three independent directors and the Board, with Michael Winn and Dave Cole abstaining given their participation in the bonuses (see EMX news release dated November 30, 2018). Operational Update Story continues The Company's royalty and mineral property portfolio totals over 90 projects on five continents. Cannot view this image? Visit: https://media.zenfs.com/en-us/newsfile_64/3955fd7d68e7359d61cb43bfabc85741 Figure 1 To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/1508/43827_cdfc5f9f542538fc_002full.jpg In North America, EMX received ~$1.84 million in gross revenue from the sale of 1,116 ounces of gold from the Leeville royalty property that covers portions of Newmont Mining Corporation's ("Newmont") underground mining operations on the Northern Carlin Trend. Additionally, EMX executed a strategic alliance with South32 USA Exploration Inc. ("South32") to evaluate exploration opportunities in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, executed another property agreement with Kennecott Exploration Company in Arizona, and saw further advances on its portfolio where partners spent approximately $7.0 million on exploration. In Turkey, the Company received pre-production payments totaling $1.65 million related to the Akarca royalty property where engineering, metallurgical, and other project studies were advanced during the year. At the Balya royalty property, EMX received pre-production royalty payments totaling $133 thousand, and the operator continued to expand drill defined zones of lead-zinc-silver mineralization through an ongoing ~24,000 meter drill program. At the Sisorta gold royalty property, EMX received pre-production royalty payments totaling $145 thousand, and the operator continued to advance the property, having submitted an Environmental Impact Assessment study. In Serbia, Nevsun Resources Ltd. ("Nevsun") announced significant advancements at the Timok Project royalty property, including: a) an updated high grade Upper Zone Pre-Feasibility Study ("PFS") that outlined a 10 year mine life yielding approximately 1.7 billion pounds of payable copper and 516 thousand ounces of payable gold, with initial production forecast to be in 2022, b) commencement of an Upper Zone exploration decline, and c) an initial inferred resource for the Lower Zone porphyry project of 1.7 billion tonnes averaging 0.86% copper and 0.18 g/t gold at a "dollar equivalent" cut-off of US$25/tonne (see Nevsun news releases dated March 28, June 5, and June 26, 2018). In Q1 2019, the acquisition of Nevsun was completed by Zijin Mining Group Co. Ltd. In Scandinavia, the Company completed nine transactions, including four with Boreal Metals Corp. ("Boreal"), four with Norra Metals Corp ("Norra"), and one with South32 Ltd. The deals with Boreal and Norra involved receiving equity in Boreal and Norra, advance royalty payments, and a 3% NSR royalty interest in the projects, while the South32 agreement involved cash payments, work commitments, and upon earn-in, a 3% NSR royalty interest. Boreal also announced drill results at Gumsberg in Sweden, where high grade zinc-lead-silver massive sulfide mineralization was encountered (see EMX news releases dated March 1 and May 2, 2018). In Australia, the Company acquired a prospective sediment hosted copper exploration project in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The Company made a decision to relinquish all properties in New Zealand during the year. OUTLOOK The Company enters 2019 with a strong balance sheet, including working capital of $89 million comprised of $86.2 million in cash, $1.5 million in investments, $7.5 million in receivables, and $5.7 million in payables. EMX intends to operate the business as we have for the past 16 years, generating and marketing new royalty opportunities. The Company will also continue to selectively evaluate royalty acquisitions and strategic investments as we have in the past. EMX's business model of royalty generation, royalty acquisition, and strategic investment provides multiple avenues for growing the Company's portfolio and building shareholder value. Despite the impairment of the Leeville royalty this past year, the Company continues to be optimistic about the potential to increase future revenue from this royalty. Newmont's exploration successes extend southeast from the Leeville mining complex and across EMX's royalty position. As discussed by Newmont, this trend is an important contributor to its Northern Carlin Trend development strategy. The upside exploration potential of the Leeville royalty property, coupled with a positive outlook for the gold price, underscores the upside optionality of this material Company asset. We are also excited about the potential growth in revenue that may come from our Turkish portfolio (Balya, Akarca, and Sisorta), as well as the significant potential of our Timok royalty in Serbia, where the Upper Zone high grade copper-gold development project is scheduled to commence production in 2022. The Timok royalty is a material Company asset. EMX continues to see strong industry interest in the Company's royalty generation properties. More than $20 million is expected to be spent by partners advancing EMX's portfolio during 2019. A majority of this portfolio to be explored is in the southwest U.S., Sweden and Norway. EMX will also continue to evaluate royalty acquisition and strategic investment opportunities within the regions where we currently operate, while looking for new opportunities to grow the portfolio elsewhere in the world. The overarching goal to sustain the Company's royalty generation, royalty acquisition, and strategic investment activities with positive cash flow was realized in 2018 with the Malmyzh sale. In addition, ongoing revenue from royalties, advance royalties and other pre-production cash payments have been increasing over time. Going into 2019, EMX is well funded to identify new strategic investment opportunities, while developing a pipeline of quality royalty and royalty generation mineral properties that provide multiple opportunities for exploration and production success. FILING OF FORM 20F The Company has filed a Form 20-F annual report, including the Company's audited consolidated financial statements (the "Financial Statements") and Management's Discussion and Analysis, for the year ended December 31, 2018 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") on EDGAR (www.sec.gov) and with Canadian securities regulators on SEDAR (www.sedar.com). The annual report is also available for viewing on the Company's website at www.EMXroyalty.com under the heading "Investors". Shareholders may receive a printed copy of the Company's complete Financial Statements, or its complete Form 20-F, free of charge, upon request to the Corporate Secretary at Suite 501 - 543 Granville Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6C 1X8, Canada. About EMX. EMX leverages asset ownership and exploration insight into partnerships that advance our mineral properties, with EMX receiving pre-production payments and retaining royalty interests. EMX complements its royalty generation initiatives with royalty acquisitions and strategic investments. Please see www.EMXroyalty.com for more information. Mr. Dean D. Turner, CPG, a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and consultant to the Company, has reviewed, verified and approved the disclosure of the technical information contained in this news release. For further information contact: David M. Cole President and Chief Executive Officer Phone: (303) 979-6666 Email: Dave@EMXroyalty.com Scott Close Director of Investor Relations Phone: (303) 973-8585 Email: SClose@EMXroyalty.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements This news release may contain "forward looking statements" that reflect the Company's current expectations and projections about its future results. These forward-looking statements may include statements regarding perceived merit of properties, exploration results and budgets, mineral reserves and resource estimates, work programs, capital expenditures, timelines, strategic plans, market prices for precious and base metal, or other statements that are not statements of fact. When used in this news release, words such as "estimate," "intend," "expect," "anticipate," "will", "believe", "potential" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, which, by their very nature, are not guarantees of the Company's future operational or financial performance, and are subject to risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause the Company's actual results, performance, prospects or opportunities to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and factors may include, but are not limited to: unavailability of financing, failure to identify commercially viable mineral reserves, fluctuations in the market valuation for commodities, difficulties in obtaining required approvals for the development of a mineral project, increased regulatory compliance costs, expectations of project funding by joint venture partners and other factors. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this news release or as of the date otherwise specifically indicated herein. Due to risks and uncertainties, including the risks and uncertainties identified in this news release, and other risk factors and forward-looking statements listed in the Company's MD&A for the year ended December 31, 2018 (the "MD&A"), and the most recently filed Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2018, actual events may differ materially from current expectations. More information about the Company, including the MD&A, the 20-F and financial statements of the Company, is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the SEC's EDGAR website at www.sec.gov. Corporate Logo To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43827 Ethics complaints against Judge T.S. Ellis have been dismissed, according to a new report. Four complainants slammed Ellis' conduct in Manafort's trial as "embarrassing" and perhaps indicative of "early onset dementia," according to a report Monday from BuzzFeed News. "Considering the district judge's remarks in their overall context, the record does not support the conclusion that the district judge engaged in misconduct," Judge Roger Gregory of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit writes in his order, which appears to have been filed Friday. Ethics complaints against T.S. Ellis, the federal judge who gained a reputation for his harshness toward special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors in the trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, have been dismissed, according to a new report. The order from Judge Roger Gregory of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit quashes complaints lodged by four unnamed people who slammed Ellis' conduct in Manafort's trial as "embarrassing" and perhaps indicative of "early onset dementia," according to a report Monday from BuzzFeed News . A source familiar with the matter told BuzzFeed that the complaints were lodged against Ellis, who is not named in the order published by the news outlet. "Considering the district judge's remarks in their overall context, the record does not support the conclusion that the district judge engaged in misconduct," Gregory wrote in his order, which appears to have been filed Friday. "The complainants have also failed to present, and the records do not disclose, any evidence of willful indifference to prevailing law or other misconduct," Gregory wrote. "The record does not support the existence of an improper influence upon the judge, mental disability, or 'early onset dementia.'" Ellis, 78, gained extra media attention during the high-profile trial for his brusque, impatient style of addressing prosecutors on Mueller's team. He repeatedly urged prosecutors to hurry up with their arguments and admonished them for highlighting multiple examples of Manafort's expensive tastes. Story continues Manafort is "not on trial for having a lavish lifestyle," Ellis said at one point early in the trial . "To parade all of this seems to me unnecessary, irrelevant and maybe unfairly prejudicial." On another occasion, prosecutors filed a motion during the trial, saying that one of Ellis' outbursts against them could potentially prejudice the jury against them. Ellis apologized and instructed the jury to ignore his criticism. Before the trial had even begun, Ellis accused prosecutors of lodging the charges against Manafort merely to pressure him into cooperating with Mueller's probe of Russian interference and possible Trump-campaign collusion during the 2016 election. "You don't really care about Mr. Manafort's bank fraud," Ellis said at a hearing in May. "You really care about what information he might give you about Mr. Trump and what might lead to his impeachment or prosecution." Manafort, 70, served as then-candidate Donald Trump 's top campaign aide for several months in 2016. He was charged in two separate federal court districts by Mueller's grand jury, on charges that mostly pertained to work he performed years before joining Trump's campaign, as a political consultant for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. Ellis presided over Manafort's trial in Alexandria, Va., district court in August. Manafort was convicted in that trial on eight criminal counts including tax fraud, bank fraud and failing to file a foreign bank account report. Ten other counts were deadlocked by the 12-member jury. Manafort was sentenced in March to serve 47 months in federal prison a much lighter sentence than federal sentencing guidelines called for. Ellis, who had already been criticized for his conduct during the trial, drew further ire from Mueller's supporters by saying that Manafort "has lived an otherwise blameless life." Manafort was sentenced to 43 additional months in his second case in Washington, D.C., federal court. Manafort's combined sentences will keep him behind bars for up to 7 years. A spokesman for the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to comment on BuzzFeed's report. A spokesperson for the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court was unavailable to comment on the report because that building was flooded, a respondent told CNBC. The four anonymous individuals tore into Ellis in their complaints accusing him of misconduct, according to BuzzFeed. "Losing temper, or attacking motivations of officers of the court is not acceptable, particularly for federal judiciary," one complainant said. Another complainant went much further, asserting that the judge's comments "were demonstrably intended to embarrass either the witness for the government or the prosecutors in the case. In so doing, he inappropriately tilts the scales of justice against the prosecution and in favor of the defendant in the eyes of the jury." That complaint added that either the judge "has early onset dementia or he fails to understand his role as ... an impartial arbiter." More From CNBC ROME, April 2 (Reuters) - The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said on Tuesday he was "slightly worried" about the state of the Italian economy and urged the government to do more to boost growth. After talks with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Juncker told reporters that was "great love" between Italy and the European Commission. Rome and Brussels clashed last year over Italy's budget plans for 2019 before finally agreeing on a compromise deal that allowed the government to borrow more than initially envisaged. Juncker said the accord was based on a 2019 growth projection of one percent, but added that this was now overly optimistic. (Reporting by Francesca Piscioneri, Editing by Crispian Balmer) Even without the know-how, most Americans reject financial advice Most Americans decline any financial help or advice, the CNBC Invest in You and Acorns Savings Survey found. This comes despite the fact not even half of all adults would be able to cover an unexpected expense. Three-quarters of all Americans manage their own finances. When it comes to managing their money, most people are content on their own. That could backfire. Despite reports that many workers are living paycheck to paycheck and not even half of all adults would be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense , the majority of Americans are declining any financial help or advice. To that point, 75 percent, of Americans manage their own finances, with no help from a professional or online service, according to a new CNBC Invest In You and Acorns Savings Survey . Only 17 percent said they use a financial advisor. John Holloway, 33, who co-owns a life insurance brokerage in Roswell, Georgia, says he's determined to do it alone, even while supporting a family. "I like to challenge myself," he said. Admittedly he's made some mistakes, like neglecting to save early on, he said. Now Holloway sets aside whatever he can and sticks with a 70/30 split of stocks to bonds in his investments. As of his most recent tally, he has about $250,000 stashed away, including home equity, he said. For most people, lacking the know-how to handle your own finances comes at a high cost, according to the National Financial Educators Council, or NFEC. Americans said money mistakes cost them $1,230, on average, last year alone, the NFEC found, not to mention the toll that can take on long-term savings goals. Over time, the stakes get much higher. "With debt and living expenses on the rise in much of the country, the importance of setting financial goals and sticking to them has never been greater," said Jerry O'Flanagan, the executive vice president of consumer banking at First National Bank of Omaha. However, most people are coming up short, he added. "They're not spending enough time on it." Story continues A report by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found that 4 in 10 workers who provided an estimate of their retirement savings said that they "guessed" the amount they needed, a finding that was basically unchanged from a decade earlier. Still, more than half of adults, or 57 percent, are more confident about their ability to save for retirement than they were three years ago, according to the CNBC survey. The survey, conducted for CNBC by SurveyMonkey in March, polled more than 2,300 adults about various aspects of financial wellness. Another report by the Stanford Center on Longevity found that even under the most optimistic assumptions, most workers are not currently meeting their retirement savings goals. The Stanford Center advises saving 10 percent to 17 percent of your income if you plan to retire at 65 about double what most people are actually socking away . More from Invest in You: Got goals? These simple actions will help you get the things you want Do this now to feel financially secure in future Friends don't let friends stay clueless about money To get a more accurate picture of your retirement number, financial advisors, even apps , can play an important role as well as addressing any specific financial concerns you may have, such as a job change, move, illness, change in marital status, buying or selling a home, or paying for a child's education. Not surprisingly, those making more than $150,000 a year were more likely to consult with a financial pro or use a money management app, the CNBC survey found. Those making less than $50,000 annually were the most likely to admit to not managing their financial future at all. "There's a common misconception that you have to have wealth to work with an advisor and that's not the case," said Bill Van Sant, a certified financial planner and managing director at Girard Partners outside of Philadelphia. "High net worth individuals are still going to have assets at the end of the day," he said "[Having a financial plan] is even more important for your typical family." Disclosure: NBCUniversal and Comcast Ventures are investors in Acorns. More From CNBC FILE PHOTO: Darren Woods, chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp, attends a news conference at the New York Stock Exchange, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo By Ron Bousso and Julia Payne LONDON (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil recently held talks on the sale of a suite of oil and gas fields in Nigeria as the company focuses on new developments in U.S. shale and Guyana, industry and banking sources told Reuters. The potential disposals are expected to include stakes in onshore and offshore fields and could raise up to $3 billion (2.30 billion pounds), two sources said. "Exxon is actively divesting in Nigeria," one source who was briefed on the divestment plans said. Exxon declined to comment. The Irving, Texas-based company is one of the largest oil and gas producers in Nigeria, with 106 operated platforms. Its oil output in the West African country reached 225,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2017, its website says. Exxon officials have held talks in recent weeks with several Nigerian companies to gauge their interest in the fields. One source said Exxon was soon due to open a "data room" - which would provide technical information on the fields, such as seismic and production details - in Nigeria. The discussions focussed on a number of onshore fields Exxon shares in joint ventures with Nigerian state oil firm NNPC, including oil mining leases 66, 68, 70 and 104, one source said. Exxon's share of oil production in those fields reached 120,000 bpd in 2017, the last year for which data was available. Exxon is also weighing the possible sale of stakes in offshore fields in Nigeria, two sources said. It is looking into offering for sale assets in Equatorial Guinea and Chad, according to two sources. The Nigerian government has in the last decade supported a drive by domestic firms such as Oando, Seplat and privately held Aiteo to expand their operations in the country as international companies including Royal Dutch Shell sought to lower their presence due to oil spills resulting from pipeline sabotage. Exxon recently launched the sale of its stake in Azerbaijan's largest oilfield, which would mark its retreat from the former Soviet state after 25 years. Exxon announced earlier this year plans to boost its capital spending from $26 billion in 2018 to $30 billion in 2019 and up to $35 billion next year as it seeks to develop oilfields in Guyana and the U.S. Permian basin as well as gas projects in Mozambique and the U.S. Gulf Coast. In an analyst presentation last month, Exxon said it would accelerate its divestments to around $15 billion by 2021. (Additional reporting by Gary McWilliams in Houston; Editing by Dale Hudson) April 2 (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp said on Tuesday it had made a final investment decision on a multi-billion dollar expansion of its integrated manufacturing complex in Singapore that would help it increase production of cleaner fuels with lower-sulphur content. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is introducing new rules on marine fuels from 2020, limiting the sulphur content to 0.5 percent from 3.5 percent, to curb pollution from ships. The shipping and oil refining industries are scrambling to prepare for the shift and have made large investments to comply with the new standards since they were announced in 2016. Exxon's expansion project, which is expected to come online in 2023, would convert fuel oil and other residual crude products into higher-value lube base stocks and distillates, the company said in a statement. The company said the expansion would increase its capacity to produce cleaner fuels with lower-sulphur content by 48,000 barrels per day, including high-quality marine fuels. Exxon did not specify the amount it plans to invest in the expansion project. The Singapore refinery is Exxon's largest with a capacity of about 592,000 barrels per day. Singapore is also home to the oil giant's biggest integrated petrochemical complex. The company said the expansion project is part of a plan to further enhance the competitiveness of its Singapore facility, which includes the world's only steam cracker capable of cracking crude oil. (Reporting by Koustav Samanta in SINGAPORE; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu) Ocean LNG, a joint venture (JV) between Exxon Mobil Corporation XOM and Qatar Petroleum, recently reached an agreement to manage the offtake and marketing of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which will be produced and exported from the proposed Golden Pass LNG export project. The facility is located in Sabine Pass, TX. ExxonMobil holds 30% working interest in the JV, while its partner Qatar Petroleum owns the remaining 70%. The project is anticipated to come online in 2024. The partners have reached a final investment decision on the project this February. The Golden Pass terminal was initially constructed for importing natural gas. ExxonMobil and its partner Qatar Petroleum decided to convert the facility into an export terminal with an investment of roughly $10 billion. The largest publicly-traded energy player, ExxonMobil, earlier emphasized that the Golden Pass LNG export project is part of its five-year massive investment plan. Every year, the development will be capable of producing roughly 16 million tons of LNG. With the commencement of the project, the companies will be able to export natural gas produced from the prolific shale fields in the United States. The JV intends to market its LNG volumes in the Asia-Pacific region, where demand for cleaner energy is on the rise. The export terminal of the project is perfectly placed to access both the Atlantic and Pacific basin markets. Ocean LNG intends to have a significant presence in South America and Europe. Notably, ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum are collaborating to explore and develop resources in Brazil, Mozambique and Argentina. Hence, the Golden Pass terminal project will strengthen the relationship between the companies. The engineering, procurement and construction works for the project will be carried out by a joint venture comprising McDermott International, Inc. MDR, Chiyoda International and Zachry Group. The construction of the project is expected to create around 9,000 jobs. The facility will incorporate three liquefaction trains. Each train is expected to have an annual production capacity of 5.2 million tons. Story continues Price Performance Irving, TX-based ExxonMobil has lost 5.4% in the past year compared with 8.9% collective decline of the industry it belongs to. Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider Currently, the company carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Investors interested in the energy sector can opt for some better-ranked stocks as given below: Argentina-based YPF Sociedad Anonima YPF is an integrated energy company. It delivered a positive average earnings surprise of 210.4% in the trailing four quarters. The stock currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Fort Lauderdale, FL-based Seacor Holdings Inc. CKH is an energy-related transportation and logistics company. In the first quarter of 2019, its earnings are expected to grow 118.8% year over year. The company currently holds a Zacks Rank #2. Today's Best Stocks from Zacks Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%. This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000 2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year. See their latest picks free >> 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 McDermott International, Inc. (MDR) : Free Stock Analysis Report SEACOR Holdings, Inc. (CKH) : Free Stock Analysis Report Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) : Free Stock Analysis Report YPF Sociedad Anonima (YPF) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research (Bloomberg) -- Fears about potential government regulation of social-media companies isnt holding back Facebook Inc. shares, which are on track to close at the highest in more than seven months. The stock gained as much as 3.4 percent on Tuesday after bullish comments from Deutsche Bank about Facebooks move into e-commerce via Instagram. Instagrams so-called checkout service could generate as much as $10 billion in revenue by 2021, analyst Lloyd Walmsley wrote in a research note. Facebook shares have traded in a range above $160 a share over the past two months amid investor concerns about the effect that regulation would have on its digital-advertisement sales, which exceeded $55 billion in 2018. Over the weekend, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg proposed a new set of Internet regulations that were panned by privacy advocates and other critics. "We think part of this move could be short covering," Lynx Equity Strategies analysts KC Rajkumar and Jahanara Nissar said in a research note Tuesday. Regulation fears have made investors hesitant to buy Facebook shares and many are short the stock, they said. "Their view is that multiple expansion is hard to come by until the regulation overhang diminishes," the analysts wrote. Short interest is about 21 million shares, or 0.9 percent of the float, according to data from S3 Partners. Thats down from 24 million shares on March 13. (Adds short interest data in last paragraph.) To contact the reporter on this story: Jeran Wittenstein in San Francisco at jwittenstei1@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Catherine Larkin at clarkin4@bloomberg.net, Steven Fromm For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. (Bloomberg) -- Fresh off reports that its exploring a venture with PSA Group to build cars in Europe, the chairman of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles said the automaker will remain an active player in helping to shape an automotive industry being transformed by technology. John Elkann, the chairman and chief executive officer of Exor NV, wrote in a letter to shareholders of the holding company about his belief Fiat Chrysler can benefit from the emergence of electrified and autonomously driven vehicles. Exor, with a 29 percent stake and 42 percent of voting rights, is the Italian-American carmakers largest holder. We are determined that we and FCA will play our part actively and ambitiously in this new and exciting era, Elkann wrote. Our commitment to FCA and to participating in its bold and profitable future is also unchanged. The Fiat chairman, scion of the carmakers founding Agnelli family, has repeatedly sought in recent years to tamp down speculation that Exor would seek to sell all or part of Fiat Chrysler to another automaker. But the family also has said it would consider diluting its stake in a larger group the carmaker could form with other companies. Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot owner PSA have been holding preliminary discussions to collaborate on a super platform -- the basic underpinning of a car model -- to reduce their investment costs in the highly competitive European region, Bloomberg News reported last week. Any eventual partnership will likely include sharing investments for new electric cars, according to people familiar with the talks. Carmakers are increasingly joining forces to share investments as the auto industry is facing technological disruption from the rise of fully-electric and increasingly self-driving cars. Stricter emission rules imposed by European regulators are also forcing the industry to shift away from traditional combustion engines. Elkann, in Turin on Tuesday to inaugurate Fiats car museum, reiterated plans to produce the battery-powered Fiat 500 at the companys Mirafiori factory there. During the first 20 years of the industry, some 47 automaking plants were founded in the city, he said. Story continues That courageous and visionary spirit continues to guide us and allows us to face this new period of change with enthusiasm, the 43-year-old Fiat chairman said at the event. Fiat Chrysler has been a laggard compared with global rivals when it comes to investing in electrification, though its five-year strategy plan through 2022 calls for offering hybrid gas-electric engines in more of its top-selling Jeep and Ram models, and for making fully electric versions of some Fiat, Jeep and Maserati vehicles. The automaker ranked dead last among 13 car companies for both fuel economy and carbon emissions in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys evaluation of 2016 model year vehicles. The company also paid a $77 million civil penalty after its U.S.-assembled passenger-car fleet fell short of required fuel economy targets. It has also taken a penny-pinching approach on driverless cars, choosing to supply Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans to -- and potentially license self-driving technology from -- Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., rather than follow other automakers investing billions to develop the know-how in-house. Fiat is also partnering with BMW AG and auto supplier Aptiv Plc to bring autonomous features to its Jeep, Ram, Maserati and Alfa Romeo brands. A partnership with PSA could eventually develop into a wider combination in the future, though the current focus is on limited cooperation, according to two of the people familiar with the companies talks. Fiat shares were up 1.3 percent to 13.77 euros at 2:34 p.m. in Milan. (Updates with Elkann comment in seventh paragraph.) To contact the reporters on this story: Gabrielle Coppola in New York at gcoppola@bloomberg.net;Daniele Lepido in Milan at dlepido1@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net, Chester Dawson For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. There's no rest for the weary in South Dakota as flooding worsened last week. The South Dakota Army National Guard spent three days delivering water to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the southwestern part of the Mount Rushmore State after flooding damaged a major waterline, leaving more than 8,000 people who live on the reservation without access to clean water. According to a report from the Rapid City Journal, the floods left many families stranded in their homes for some time. Roads and driveways were impassable, and a number of homes were surrounded by water. The Oglala Sioux Tribe's emergency management team, along with help from volunteers and the Rapid City Fire Department, conducted swift water evacuations. They also delivered food and supplies to the stranded families. The Salvation Army and American Red Cross sent help, too, and private citizens worked together to help friends and neighbors. Some of them even delivered supplies by boat or horseback. Red Cross officials told NBC News that, as of March 31, they were still at the reservation providing assistance. More to Come The Minnesota River near Morton, Minnesota nearly reached record flood stage on March 31, 2019. This location is forecast to remain at major flood stage until Sunday, April 7, 2019. (Source: NOAA) The Minnesota River near Morton, Minnesota nearly reached record flood stage on March 31, 2019. This location is forecast to remain at major flood stage until Sunday, April 7, 2019. (Source: NOAA) At other points along the Minnesota, the river has shown no mercy, with gauges from New Ulm, Minnesota to Montevideo, Minnesota still at major flood levels. Farther east, flooding is not letting up along the James River in South Dakota. Six gauges are at major to moderate flood stages from Yankton northward to Redfield, and most are forecast to stay this way all week, based on the latest outlooks from the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Sioux Falls. Snow and rain today (Monday, April 1), followed by a warming trend and more snowmelt throughout the week will keep the odds high for flooding to stick around. Major to moderate flooding will also remain steady this week along the Big Sioux River, from Akron, Iowa to Watertown, South Dakota. Water levels at most gauges may not fall below flood stage until Friday or Saturday, April 5-6. The Mississippi River has crested in the Saint Paul, Minnesota area. It has risen to nearly 20 feet, which is almost six feet above flood stage. Story continues Water levels have been receding downstream in some areas along the Missouri River, but many locations continue to experience flooding. Nearly half of a popular park in Glasgow, Missouri was flooded last week, and the gauge there is still recording major flood levels today. Several spots from Rulo, Nebraska to Saint Joseph and Miami in Missouri are stuck at moderate flood stages, and also may not fall below flood stage until the weekend. Impact on Freight BNSF map.PNG These parts of the country don't have markets that play significant parts in overall outbound freight volumes, or market shares relative to the rest of the U.S. However, the flooding that began on March 15 across eastern Nebraska (including Omaha) and western Iowa does continue to cause some disruptions, particularly to the transport of grains and cattle that managed to survive. The Union Pacific (NYSE: UNP) and BNSF (NYSE: BRK) railroads have been gradually repairing damaged tracks, but several are still out of service. Many state and U.S. routes are still closed in the impacted areas, as well as several sections of I-29 from western Iowa to St. Joseph, Missouri; and exit 13 on I-680, just north of Omaha, Nebraska, is still closed in both directions. However, most of I-80 in Nebraska looks fine, with the exception of width restrictions and intermittent lane closures in some areas. A reminder to carriers: under the terms of the declaration, motor carriers and drivers providing direct assistance for emergencies in the affected states are exempt from Parts 390 through 399 of Title 49 Code of Federal Regulations, including hours of service. Image sourced from Pixabay Want more content like this? Click here to Subscribe Permalink See more from Benzinga 2019 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida. (Hannah Morse/Palm Beach Post via AP, File) Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida. (Hannah Morse/Palm Beach Post via AP, File) When Florida authorities shut down 10 massage spas last month and charged hundreds of men with buying sex, they broke a long-standing pattern of meting out minor charges and punishment for owners, letting patrons off scot-free and turning a mostly blind eye to signs of human trafficking. An Associated Press review of state records over the past decade shows that while police officers and sheriff's deputies in Florida have investigated hundreds of individual massage parlors within their own counties for illegal sexual activity, it was usually low-level massage therapists who were arrested, while owners mostly were exempted or charged with misdemeanors resulting in fines and probation. Johns usually were not charged at all. In stark contrast, the investigation announced last month spanned several jurisdictions between Palm Beach and Orlando and focused heavily on the possibility of widespread human trafficking. Several spa owners, most of them women originally from China, were charged with felony racketeering and money laundering and could face years in prison. Authorities also charged 300 men accused of being patrons, including New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and former Citigroup President John Havens. Authorities say Kraft was twice recorded on video engaging in and then paying for sex acts at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, located in a shopping center in Jupiter. Both men have denied wrongdoing. Florida has more than 8,600 licensed massage therapy establishments. It's difficult to know how many of them sell sex, based on the records. Nationwide, the anti-trafficking advocacy group Polaris estimates there are 9,000 massage establishments with therapists who are trafficked from other places and forced to provide sex acts. The AP reviewed records from more than 150 Florida Department of Health cases involving massage parlors whose licenses had been revoked, suspended or voluntarily surrendered in the past decade. Of the spas that lost their licenses, almost 40 percent had massage therapists involved in sexual activity, the AP found. Sex cases were found statewide, in 26 of the state's 67 counties, with the tourism-heavy Orlando area having the most. Few of the cases resulted in charges of human trafficking, and those that did ended with only minor punishments. In 2017, Mi Cha Jones, owner of the Jee Jee spa in Miami Beach, was charged with two felony counts of human trafficking and one felony count of deriving support from the proceeds of prostitution. Jones was sentenced to only two years of probation after pleading guilty to the latter count in 2018. Nearly five years ago, investigators found clear evidence of prostitution and a potential sign of human trafficking women living on the premises at the O Asian Wellness Spa and Massage in Boca Raton. The spa's owner was facing a minimum of four years and maximum of 35 years in prison, but was sentenced to only nine months in jail and probation after a plea deal. None of the johns who patronized the parlor were charged at all. In 2013, an inspector found three rooms with beds, clothes, computers, cellphones, desks and a refrigerator full of food at Serenity Massage in Tampa. The owner admitted massage therapists were living there but was ultimately only fined. There was no indication any investigation into human trafficking was ever launched. Florida Department of Health spokesman Brad Dalton said revoking a spa's license is the most severe punishment available to the department's Board of Massage Therapy. "Any action above that would have to come from law enforcement," Dalton said. A tougher stance is being championed by Martin County Sheriff William Snyder, whose agency spearheaded the current investigation after receiving a tip from a state health investigator. "When I saw the videos of the women being used I began to change my whole thoughts and view of it," said Snyder, a former state lawmaker who sponsored a 2012 bill that made human trafficking illegal in Florida. He was elected sheriff that same year. Still, it remains to be seen whether anything will truly change. No one has yet been charged with human trafficking, something Snyder said can be difficult to prove, especially if women don't testify against their abusers. He said many of the women fear deportation, even though they could be eligible for a visa if they cooperated. They also fear traffickers will harm their families back home, he said. And while hundreds of men identified as johns have been accused, Kraft and others have been charged only with misdemeanors that prosecutors have offered to drop if they agree to participate in a diversion program. Jail time for johns, what Snyder sees as the "holistic" answer to stemming human trafficking, looks highly unlikely. Still, the sheriff says he hopes the national spotlight that has shone on the Kraft case will make other potential clients think twice before risking a visit to an illicit massage parlor. "I have come to understand that as long as there is a demand, there will be a supply," he said. "Even if the demand diminishes microscopically and a few women in some forlorn province in China are not enticed to come here under false pretenses and trafficked, it will all be worthwhile." Mike Schneider and Terry Spencer report for the Associated Press. Stephen Payne, incoming dean of Catholic University's Columbus School of Law Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Stephen Payne will serve as dean of Catholic University of Americas Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., beginning July 1, according to the school. Payne is chair of Gibson Dunns Food and Drug Administration and health care practice group and has taught law and policy related to his practice as an adjunct at George Mason Universitys Antonin Scalia Law School in Northern Virginia. Steve Paynes career is impressive in all of the ways that mattered most in our search for a new dean of Columbus School of lawfrom his clear regard for the power of education, as demonstrated in both his own academic achievements and his work as an adjunct professor, to his service to his country and community, said John Garvey, Catholic University president, in a statement. His experience in building and leading a multidisciplinary legal practice at a global law firm, as well as his success in identifying, recruiting, and promoting talent for several diverse organizations, made Steve the ideal choice to lead the school in preparing the legal leaders of the future, Garvey added. Payne takes over from interim dean Regina Jefferson, who occupied the position after Daniel Attridge, a Kirkland & Ellis of counsel, stepped down last July. After graduating from Cornell University and Yale Law School, Payne served as captain in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps at Fort Benning, Georgia. He was also a federal prosecutor, serving as a special assistant U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. He spent the last two decades in Big Law, joining Sidley Austin in D.C. and making partner there in 2004. He spent 11 years at Sidley before moving to Gibson Dunn in 2011. Upon learning of his selection, Catholic University said Payne exclaimed, Providence is wondrous. I have enjoyed teaching law students, but I never thought I would have the opportunity and honor to join this special community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni, Payne said in a statement. I am so grateful for this opportunity and, with the communitys prayers, hope to become worthy of what is being entrusted to me. Gibson Dunn had no immediate comment on Payne's move. Investing.com - Gold prices slipped on Tuesday in Asia after data suggested China's manufacturing sector was recovering from a sharp slowdown earlier in the year. Gold futures traded on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange were down 0.3% to $1,290.65 by 12:45 AM ET (04:45 GMT). China's Caixin/Markit manufacturing purchasing managers' index (PMI), released on Monday, rose to 50.8 from 49.9 in February. That was the strongest reading in eight months and followed an uptick in the official PMI, which tracks mainly state-owned enterprises. Global equities traded higher on Monday following the release of the survey, with Chinese stocks surging more than 2.5%. Safe-haven gold, however, moved in the direction opposite to most commodities as investor sentiment picked up. "Let us not forget that in 2018, market sentiment flip-flopped back and forth daily between 'risk-on' and 'risk-off' ideology," Walter Pehowich, executive vice-president at Dillon Gage Metals in Addison, Texas, said. "Every day we continue to see risk in the headlines, whether geopolitical or economic, anything can happen in a moment that will turn markets around," added Pehowich, who sees gold duly returning to above $1,300. Looking ahead, the U.S. March jobs report due on Friday is likely to be in focus. Other data include reports on U.S. retail sales and manufacturing should also receive some attention. News on the Sino-U.S. trade front and developments with Brexit are being closely followed. On Monday, the U.K. Parliament rejected all the options to replace Prime Minister Theresa Mays unpopular deal. Chinese Vice Premier Liu He is due to travel to Washington later this week for more trade discussions. High-level officials from both sides, including He, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, concluded the latest round of trade talks last week in Beijing. While May is still trying to get her twice-rejected deal through Parliament, the legal default, for now, will be for the U.K. to leave the European Union in 11 days with no deal. Story continues Related Articles Canadian court dismisses $9.5 billion Ecuadorian claim against Chevron Canada Canada says reopening USMCA trade pact could be a 'Pandora's box' Oil up Cautiously, Awaiting U.S.-China Deal; Houston Still a Problem (Bloomberg) -- Google will require contracting companies it does business with to give employees health care, parental leave and other benefits. The decision comes after months of activism from Google staff and contractors asking for equal treatment. The new policy will require health benefits, sick leave, a $15 minimum wage, paid parental leave and $5,000 a year for education, a Google spokeswoman wrote in an email. More than half the internet giants workforce is not full time. The company pays for tens of thousands of contractors, temporary workers and vendors -- known internally as TVCs -- who do everything from serving food in cafeterias to software code. Some of these people are employed by large staffing firms, including Adecco Group AG and Randstad NV. Alphabet Inc.s Google is famous for generous benefits and luxurious working conditions. Now, contracting firms will have to offer some of these expensive benefits, too. Googles top requirement is comprehensive health care that covers the employee and their dependents and includes hospitalization, preventative and wellness services, laboratory and emergency services, prescription drugs, mental health services, labor and delivery, newborn and pediatric services, oral and vision care, rehabilitative and habilitative care, and counseling. A Google representative told the Hill that the company will give suppliers until 2022 to institute the health-care benefits. The Hill reported Googles move earlier. Contracting firms must also provide a minimum of eight days of sick leave, plus 12 weeks of paid leave for birth parents, non-birth and adoptive parents. The $5,000 a year for education will be in the form of tuition reimbursement to learn new skills or take courses, Google said. "Going forward, in order to do business with Google, all companies that employ U.S. vendors and temporary staff will need to provide these things," the spokeswoman said. To contact the reporter on this story: Gerrit De Vynck in New York at gdevynck@bloomberg.net Story continues 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. German, British and EU flags fly in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin. Photo:Reuters/Hannibal Hanschke Clemens Fuest, head of the Munich-based Institute for Economic Research (Information and Forschung, IFO), warned on Monday that a hard Brexit could push Germany into a recession. In an interview with public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, Fuest said that if the UK leaves the European Union with no deal, that could be the drop that causes the keg to overflow as far as the German economy is concerned. That could take us from weak growth to a light contraction in the economy, Fuest said. And we would call that a recession. He added that the contraction would not initially be reflected in the employment market, but it could also become problem there too in the mid-term. Germanys Council of Economic Experts recently slashed its 2019 GDP growth forecast to 0.8%, from 1.5% in November. They warned that the countrys economic boom was over for the time being, but said they did not expect a recession for now, thanks to a healthy domestic economy. Fuest said that there was the idea in the UK that it would make good trade agreements with the US and other countries, for example, the countries of the former British empire, but, he noted, the profits the UK could make in trading with the US are nothing in comparison to what it will lose in trade with the EU in the event of a hard Brexit. One thing is clear: one trades above all with ones neighbours, and that is still the EU, Fuest said. Fuest believes that the best option for the UK would be to significantly extend the Brexit deadline, by about two years, to allow Britain to participate in the next EU parliament elections and for both Britain and the EU to reconsider. I believe that one thing that the EU did not do right was to insist on only negotiating the transition and not discussing a long-term agreement, Fuest said. A survey released last week by KPMG showed that about half of German companies have not yet made preparations for Brexit as of the start of this year, because there are so many potential Brexit scenarios that they dont have the financial resources to prepare for all of them. READ MORE: Nearly half of firms in Germany have made no Brexit preparations Analysts told German business daily Handelsblatt in January that a no-deal Brexit was expected to cost the German economy around 9 billion, with the German car industry worst hit, followed by chemicals, food and consumer goods sectors. (Adds Harley's comments) By Rajesh Kumar Singh CHICAGO, April 2 (Reuters) - Harley-Davidson Inc's workers in Milwaukee and Tomahawk, Wisconsin, have rejected the motorcycle maker's proposal for a five-year contract, their union said on Tuesday, citing non-financial issues such as temporary workers and job security. The current seven-year contract had been set to expire on April 1. But Harley and the United Steelworkers (USW) union, which represents more than 1,000 hourly employees at the two facilities, said they had agreed to extend the contract through April 14. The union is pressing the Milwaukee-based company to address issues related to temporary workers, job security, scheduling, and seniority and temporary workers rights. A USW official told Reuters the union wants to protect full-time workers from layoffs. While it is asking for a road map that would allow temporary workers to become full-time workers, it is opposed to the company using temporary workers to pull work away from full-time employees. Patricia Sweeney, corporate media relations manager at Harley, said a flexible workforce enables the company to staff efficiently during the peak motorcycle demand season, helping it manage its cost structure and remain competitive. "This enables us to effectively manage the seasonality of our business," Sweeney told Reuters. "It's a practice we've had in place for the past seven years." Earlier, the company said it was disappointed with the union's decision to reject a "competitive" offer. Harley, however, said production would continue as usual at all of its facilities. Under the proposed agreement, Harley's employees would have received a 14 percent wage increase during the contract period as well as a $2,250 signing bonus. The proposal also included no changes to healthcare and significant pension enhancements for current employees, along with a retirement incentive for those eligible to retire, Harley said. The average wage for current, regular full-time employees under the first year of the agreement was proposed to be over $25 an hour in Tomahawk and over $33 per hour in the Milwaukee area. Story continues The statement did not quantify the financial impact of the proposal for a company that has been struggling to revive demand in the United States, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of total bike sales. Adding to its troubles, it is estimated that a tariff war waged by U.S. President Donald Trump will cost the company between $100 million and $120 million in 2019 and contribute to a 6-percentage-point drop in operating margins in the quarter that just ended. To avoid fallout from the tariff war, Harley is spending $15 million to expand a facility in Thailand to serve European markets. A decision to shift production out of the United States for European markets was announced last summer after the EU slapped tariffs on U.S. imports in response to Trump's duties on steel and aluminum imports from the trading bloc. Trump had blasted Harley's decision and publicly backed a boycott of the company. (Reporting by Rajesh Kumar Singh, editing by G Crosse, Tom Brown and Jonathan Oatis) Over the past year, building off the 2015 Yates Memorandum, which had emphasized that holding individuals accountable for corporate misconduct has an important deterrent effect and incentivizes appropriate change in the way businesses behave, the Fraud Section of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has significantly increased individual prosecutions. The Fraud Section charged more individuals in 2018 than in previous years. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) unit in particular emphasized its clear commitment to holding individuals accountable for transnational corruption. (DAAG, Matthew S. Miner, Remarks at 5th Annual GIR New York Live Event, Sept. 27, 2018). Thirty-one individuals were charged in 2018 as a result, 18 of whom pleaded guilty. (See U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Fraud Section Year in Review, 2018 at 5). While the Yates Memorandum does not specifically apply to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the SEC noted in the Division of Enforcements 2018 Annual Report that individual accountability is critical to an effective enforcement program and is one of the core principles of the Division of Enforcement. Perhaps an unintended consequence of the increased focus on individual prosecutions is the development of FCPA case law. Given that individuals are more likely to fight a government prosecution, the courts have been given an opportunity to weigh-in and interpret key provisions of the FCPA. Prior to this, the majority of cases against corporations settled and many of the statutes terms were undefined by the courts, leaving parties to rely on often vague language contained in highly negotiated settlement documents. Issues such as the FCPAs extraterritorial application and the scope of civil disgorgement were often glossed over in settlement agreements or were susceptible to the DOJs expansive interpretation. Partially in recognition of this fact, in November 2012, the DOJ and the SEC published a Resource Guide to the FCPA (the FCPA Resource Guide), which set forth many of the same broad interpretations that practitioners had seen in prior settlements. However, with the rise of individual prosecutions and the resulting court challenges to prosecutions, courts have now weighed-in on some of these key issues. Notably, in connection with both the territorial application of the FCPA and disgorgement, courts have rejected the interpretation set forth by the DOJ and SEC in the FCPA Resource Guide. If the DOJ and SEC continue to focus on individual prosecutions, we can expect more clarity from the courts on these issues and others over time, which, in the long run, is beneficial for FCPA practitioners and those conducting business internationally. Story continues Jurisdictional Reach The DOJ has long taken an expansive view of the territorial reach of the FCPA. Indeed, the FCPA Resource Guide specifically stated that foreign nationals and companies may be criminally liable for conspiring or aiding and abetting a FCPA violation even if they did not take any act in furtherance of the violation within the territory of the United States. However, in August of 2018, in a challenge by an individual defendant, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dealt a blow to the DOJs expansive reading. In United States v. Hoskins, 902 F.3d 69 (2d Cir. 2018), the Second Circuit considered whether an individual may be held liable for conspiring or aiding and abetting a U.S. company in a violation of the FCPA if that individual is not in the categories of persons directly covered by the statute. As the Hoskins court put it, the question posed in the case is whether a person can be guilty as an accomplice or a co-conspirator for an FCPA crime that he or she is incapable of committing as a principal? The Second Circuit concluded that, because the individual did not commit the actions in question while in U.S. territory and did not otherwise fall within the categories of persons directly covered by the statute, the individual was beyond the extraterritorial reach of the FCPA, and the government cannot use conspiracy and aiding-and-abetting liability to expand the statutes territorial limitations. Thus, the Second Circuit rejected the DOJs long-standing view regarding the extraterritorial reach of the FCPA. The court, however, left open the possibility that that the government may still prosecute foreign nationals as agents of those that fall within the categories of persons enumerated in the statute. The Second Circuits ruling is significant because it rejects a long-held view by the DOJ that it can charge foreign nationals under an aiding and abetting or conspiracy theory and gives practitioners leverage to push back on the DOJs expansive view of FCPA jurisdiction. The more significant impact may come on remand in the lower court, since presumably the court will add more clarity on the type of relationship necessary to establish that a foreign national who never enters the United States nor works for a U.S. company is an agent for purposes of falling within the coverage of the FCPA. Trial is currently scheduled for September 2019, with the government pursuing, inter alia, the agency theory. Disgorgement The U.S. Supreme Court similarly dealt a blow to the SEC practice of seeking disgorgement without regard to any statute of limitations. In June 2017, it issued a unanimous decision in Kokesh v. SEC, 137 S.Ct. 1635 (2017), holding that disgorgement sought by the SEC is subject to the five-year statute of limitations set forth in 28 U.S.C. 2462. For many years, the SEC has sought both civil monetary penalties and disgorgement of unlawful gains from those alleged to have violated federal securities laws. While civil monetary penalties are subject to a five-year statute of limitations under the Supreme Courts 2013 decision in Gabelli v. SEC, 568 U.S. 442 (2013), the SEC could seek disgorgement of a defendants wrongful gains regardless of timing. For example, in 2015, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was ordered to disgorge more than $14 million based on actions that took place between 2007 and 2011. But SEC claims for disgorgement will no longer be able to reach so far back in time. The Kokesh decision has the potential to significantly limit the financial sanctions at issue in SEC enforcement actions going forward, especially in the context of the SECs enforcement of the FCPA. Disgorgement in FCPA cases tends to be large, and the underlying conduct often spans a number of yearsoften beyond the five-year statute of limitations. Indeed, the SEC estimates that the Kokesh decision may cause it to forego up to approximately $900 million in disgorgement in connection with currently filed cases. See SEC Division of Enforcements 2018 Annual Report, at 5. In light of this decision, we may begin to see a decrease in the length of time that the SEC takes to resolve actions. Moreover, defendants negotiating settlements will now have more leverage and should keep the courts ruling in mind when considering requests for tolling agreements and its pursuit of injunctions. We are beginning to see the impact of the Kokesh decision on pending cases and a willingness to extend Kokesh beyond its holding. In July 2018, for example, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York dismissed as time-barred the SECs FCPA charges against the two former executives of Och-Ziff Capital Management, Michael Cohen and Vanja Baros, arising out of multiple alleged schemes to make improper payments to various officials in Africa. Included in the dismissal was the SECs request for an injunction ordering the defendants to refrain from any future violations of the securities laws. Going beyond what the Supreme Court found in Kokesh, Judge Garaufis found that the injunction was subject to the five-year statute of limitations because it would serve as a penalty. The courts ruling in this regard adds to the chorus of voices that have considered the applicability of 2462 to injunctive relief. Some courts have permitted injunctions for conduct occurring outside the five-year statutory of limitations, while others, like the Eastern District, have not. See SEC v. Quinlan, 373 F. Appx 581 (6th Cir. 2010) (allowing injunction); SEC v. Collyard, 861 F.3d 760 (8th Cir. 2017) (same); SEC v. Graham, 823 F.3d 1357 (11th Cir. 2016) (same). Thus, this is another issue likely to be decided as more individuals challenge the SECs efforts to seek injunctive relief under 2462. Conclusion While both the DOJ and the SEC view individual prosecutions as a key to driving proper business behavior, as can be seen by these recent decisions, the perhaps unintended consequence is that having more individuals in the mix will allow for greater court scrutiny of the DOJs and SECs position concerning certain key elements of the statute. Indeed, courts have already started to reject the DOJs and SECs expansive interpretation of the statute as set forth in the FCPA Resource Guide. As more individuals challenge charges, there will be a continued uptick in the number of issues that reach the courts and, consequently, more clarity around the application of the FCPA. As a practical matter, this will give practitioners more tools in their toolbox to defend criminal defendants and more clarity for those corporations operating internationally. Martin S. Bloor is a member at Cozen OConnor. (L to R) John Rooney, Anne Mitchell, Glenn Rippie and Mike Guerra of Jenner & Block. Jenner & Block has hired an eight-lawyer group of energy and regulatory lawyers from a Chicago boutique that has shuttered, the firm is expected to announce Tuesday. The lawyers, led by partners Michael Guerra, Anne Mitchell, Glenn Rippie and John Rooney, formerly practiced at Rippie Rooney & Ratnaswamy. The hiring further strengthens Jenner & Block's ties to one of its prominent clients, Illinois-based energy company Exelon Corp. The addition of the attorneys, including four partners, two associates and two of counsel, also represents a boon to a growing energy practice at litigation-focused Jenner. Jenner & Blocks energy practice informally launched in 2016 when the firm brought back former partner Randall Mehrberg, who was Exelon Corp. general counsel. The next year, the firm hired former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Commissioner Suedeen Kelly and former FERC general counsel Max Minzner. The new hires at Jenner also have deep ties to Exelon. Guerra was formerly a vice president at Commonwealth Edison Co,, which is owned by Exelon. Rippie has represented Exelon for more than 20 years, according to Anne Pramaggiore, CEO of Exelon Utilities and a former McDermott Will & Emery lawyer. Rippie and Rooneys former firm has worked alongside Jenner & Block lawyers in some Exelon cases. The firms also have paired up in representing other clients, including Nicor Gas, Rooney said. Ive had experience working with Jenner & Block lawyers, from first-year associates to former chair Tony Valukas, Rippie said. If we were going to partner on a matter for a client, they were the first group of people Id recommended. There is a commitment to excellence we have shared. Pramaggiore and Thomas ONeill, Exelons current general counsel, said in an interview they would continue working with Jenner & Block and its new energy partners on the company's legal matters. Exelon has also worked with the Rippie group in a program the company devised that pairs the companys longstanding outside counsel with minority-owned law firms to help them break into the cloistered energy regulatory policy, Pramaggiore said. Being part of a larger firm will give these wonderful lawyers the ability to mold the next generation and spend some time institutionalizing their working model, Pramaggiore said. I think thats really important for our industry and the company. Jenner & Block last year won two significant cases on behalf of Exelon involving defenses of so-called Zero Emissions Credit programs, which provide funds to energy firms that produce energy without carbon emissions, often in the form of nuclear power. Those victories came in U.S. federal appeals courts, upholding legislation in New York and Illinois. Mehrberg, the co-chair of Jenner's energy practice, said the addition of the eight lawyers was a sign of the success Jenner & Blocks energy practice has had in a relatively short period of time. This is just very exciting and a little bit affirming, he said in an interview. In our third year, being joined by these lawyers who are widely recognized as top energy lawyers just feels great. We have a critical mass of great lawyers, a critical mass of great clientele. And we have had great success on our matters. The associates joining the firm are Hanna Conger and Marjorie Kennedy, while the of counsel are Carmen Fosco and Maris Jager. Jenner has many other ties to Exelon, a Fortune 100 company. William Bill Von Hoene, Exelons current chief strategy officer, and ONeill, the Exelon general counsel, are former Jenner partners, so is ONeills predecessor, Daryl Bradford, who retired from the energy company in 2016. Kellogg announces plans to sell its Keebler, Famous Amos and fruit snacks businesses to Ferrero for $1.3 billion. Kellogg said last year it was exploring a sale of the brands as it refocuses its business. Ferrero beats out Hostess Brands for the Kellogg cookie assets. Kellogg K announced plans Monday to sell its Keebler, Famous Amos and fruit snacks businesses to Nutella-owner Ferrero for $1.3 billion. Ferrero beat out Hostess Brands for the cookie business, people familiar with the deal previously told CNBC. The owner of Twinkies and Ho Hos had been looking to acquire Keebler through a "Reverse Morris Trust ," an unusual deal structure that allows for a tax-efficient combination of two similarly sized companies. The Kellogg-Ferrero deal, expected to close by the end of July, was first reported by CNBC. The acquisition is the latest in a string of deals for Ferrero. The company, founded in Italy in 1946 as a family business, entered the U.S. market in 1969 with its Tic Tac mints. In the past two years, it has built up that foothold, buying Ferrara Candy Co. for $1 billion and Nestle's U.S. candy business for $2.8 billion. Its array of brands now includes Butterfinger, SweeTarts and Crunch. Its U.S. strategy has been to buy brands that, like Nestle's candy business and Kellogg's cookie business, have been neglected within broader food companies' portfolios. It plans to pour its resources into reinvesting and modernizing those brands. Already, it has rolled out a "better Butterfinger" with larger peanuts, more cocoa and milk and no hydrogenated oils. "We are acquiring a portfolio of well-established brands that consumers love, with very strong market positions across their respective categories, allowing us to significantly diversify our portfolio and capitalize on exciting new growth opportunities in the world's largest cookies market, Ferrero Group CEO Lapo Civiletti said in a statement. Story continues With the deal, Ferrero is also acquiring six U.S. food manufacturing facilities across the U.S. and a leased manufacturing plant in Baltimore. The company had also been in the running to buy Campbell's Australian cookie business, Arnott's, CNBC first reported, but has since dropped out, people familiar said. Kellogg, meantime, is paring back its portfolio to focus on brands it can revive, like Pringles, Cheez-Its, and Rice Krispies Treats. Shares of Kellogg, which has a market capitalization of $19.72 billion, are down nearly 11 percent over the past year. They were down fractionally Monday. "This divestiture is yet another action we have taken to reshape and focus our portfolio, which will lead to reduced complexity, more targeted investment, and better growth," Kellogg CEO Steve Cahillane said in a statement. "Divesting these great brands wasn't an easy decision, but we are pleased that they are transitioning to an outstanding company with a portfolio in which they will receive the focus and resources to grow." The Corn Flakes-owner acquired Keebler in 2001 for $4.4 billion. At the time, part of its draw was the cookie brand's "direct-store delivery" platform, through which employees place the company's own products in stores, rather than ship from warehouses. So-called DSD gives a food company more control over ensuring proper display in grocery and convenience stores. But as in-store sales of products like cookies have fallen, it is less economical. Kellogg has since dropped DSD distribution . Evercore acted as lead financial advisor to Kellogg, while Goldman Sachs acted as co-advisor. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz provided legal counsel to Kellogg. J.P. Morgan Securities acted as financial advisor to Ferrero, while Davis Polk & Wardwell provided legal counsel. Watch: Kellogg explores selling cookie and fruit snack business More From CNBC April 1 (Reuters) - Cereal maker Kellogg Co said on Monday it would sell its Keebler cookies unit and some other assets to Italy's Ferrero Group for $1.3 billion. The sale includes some snacks, pie crusts and ice-cream businesses as well as cookie brands Mother's and Famous Amos. (Reporting by Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur) Restaurant chain Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen accounts for around 7 percent of Restaurant Brands International Inc (NYSE: QSR)'s total EBITDA and last week released a franchise presentation that shows some metrics are below pre-acquisition levels, according to KeyBanc. The Analyst KeyBanc Capital Markets' Eric Gonzalez maintains an Overweight rating on Restaurant Brands with a $72 price target. The Thesis Popeyes publicly released its 2019 franchise disclosure document (FDD), which includes multiple unit-level economic data readouts. Gonzalez said, for example, the document showed U.S. franchisee cash flows were flat-to-slightly-negative in 2018 but the research firm's estimates suggest slightly improved profitability last year. Gonzalez said restaurant level operating profit excluding lease expenses are 130 to 150 basis points below 2015 and 2016 levels, likely due to sales deleverage and wage pressures. Restaurant companies typically shy away from offering the type of information Popeyes disclosed, which prevents investors from fully understanding the overall health of the business. In Popeyes' case, investors should give management the opportunity to strike a balance between value and innovation to reverse poor trends moving forward. The Popeyes brand remains "overlooked" by investors given its small size relative to sister brands like Tim Hortons and Burger King. The Popeyes brand is more likely to see international success across different cultures, however, and a 2018 master franchise agreement in Brazil could prove to be the first of many. Price Action Restaurant Brands traded around $65.63 per share Monday afternoon. Related Links: Piper Jaffray Applauds Restaurant Brands, Highlights Ongoing Momentum McDonald's, Restaurant Brands, Chipotle Are Morgan Stanley's Top Restaurant Picks In Challenging Year For Sector Latest Ratings for QSR Mar 2019 Barclays Initiates Coverage On Overweight Feb 2019 Citigroup Maintains Buy Buy Feb 2019 KeyBanc Maintains Overweight Overweight View More Analyst Ratings for QSR View the Latest Analyst Ratings Story continues See more from Benzinga 2019 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. HOUSTON, April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kirby Corporation ("Kirby") (KEX) will announce its 2019 first quarter results at 6:00 a.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT) on Thursday, May 2, 2019. This announcement will be followed by an earnings conference call webcast at 7:30 a.m. CDT. To listen to the conference call webcast, please visit the Investor Relations section of Kirbys website at www.kirbycorp.com . For listeners who wish to participate in the question and answer session of the conference call webcast, you may access the call by dialing 866-691-5839 within the U.S. and Canada or +1 409-216-0840 internationally. The conference ID for the call is 7394316. A replay of the webcast will be available for a period of one year by visiting the Investor Relations section of Kirbys website. The financial and other information to be discussed in the conference call will be available in the 2019 first quarter press release and in a Form 8-K to be posted prior to the call on Kirbys website at www.kirbycorp.com . Kirby Corporation, based in Houston, Texas, is the nations largest domestic tank barge operator transporting bulk liquid products throughout the Mississippi River System, on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, coastwise along all three United States coasts, and in Alaska and Hawaii. Kirby transports petrochemicals, black oil, refined petroleum products and agricultural chemicals by tank barge. In addition, Kirby participates in the transportation of dry-bulk commodities in United States coastwise trade. Through the distribution and services segment, Kirby provides after-market service and parts for engines, transmissions, reduction gears, and related equipment used in oilfield services, marine, power generation, on-highway, and other industrial applications. Kirby also rents equipment including generators, forklifts, and compressors for use in a variety of industrial markets, and manufactures and remanufactures oilfield service equipment, including pressure pumping units, for land-based oilfield service customers. Contact: Eric Holcomb 713-435-1545 Daniel Hand High School in Madison. Daniel Hand High School in Madison. Courtesy photo. A Superior Court judge has granted summary judgment to the Madison Board of Education in a case arising from a female high school English teacher who pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct with at least two male students. Judge James Abrams made his ruling in consolidated actions via three separate lawsuits filed on behalf of male students against the town's Board of Education and Anthony Salutari, the high school principal. The claim against the town of Madison had been previously withdrawn. In addition, the suit against Allison Marchese, the teacher, defaulted. The Friday ruling dismisses the cases and lets Madison teachers and administrators off the hook, but one of the boy's attorneys said Tuesday he plans on challenging the rulings in the Connecticut Appellate Court. The case involves Marchese, who admitted to inappropriate conduct with two of the three boys at Madison's Daniel Hand High School. She denied any wrongdoing with the third John Doe. Marchese was sentenced to three years in prison in 2017. She was also given five years' probation and issued a protective order barring her from contact for 10 years with the two boys with whom she admitted she acted inappropriately. Marchese admitted to upward of three months of online instant messaging of a sexual nature via Instagram with John Doe 1. She also admitted to one encounter involving oral sex with John Doe 2, as well as some online messaging with racy photos sent from the teacher to that boy. But she denies any wrongdoing with John Doe 3, who said the teacher had inappropriate conversations with him and hugged him inappropriately. John Does 1 and 3 were both freshmen and sophomores at the time of the alleged incidents, and John Doe 2 was a junior. The cases hinged on whether the staff and school administrators should have known that Marchese had acted inappropriately with students. Marchese was not represented in the civil lawsuits. Her attorney during the criminal phase was New Haven-based attorney William Dow III, who did not respond to a request for comment. The three students were suing for monetary damages against the school district. Abrams said the school defendants were entitled to governmental immunity for their discretionary acts. The judge also said none of Marchese's observed behavior hinted at the secret. "Given the shocking and depraved nature of Allison Marchese's behavior that eventually came to light, the court is strongly tempted to conclude in hindsight that school personnel missed or ignored clearly evident signs of such behavior," Abrams wrote in his ruling involving John Doe 3. "However, the court is bound to make its decision based only on the evidence before it and that evidence does not support such a conclusion. Based on the evidence before the court, there are no facts that would lead any school employee, or a reasonable person, to have reasonable suspicion that the plaintiff, or any student, was being abused or was at risk of imminent harm." "Because of the vital importance of their function to society, school administrators undoubtedly must be accorded substantial discretion to oversee properly their myriad responsibilities," the judge continued. One of the biggest arguments John Doe 2 and John Doe 3 made was that Marchese wore risque and inappropriate clothing to school. The attorney for the school district said that claim offended her. "I became very incensed that was even a subject up for discussion," said attorney Catherine Nietzel, of Ryan, Ryan, Deluca, which represented the Board of Education. "As a woman, the idea that we can infer her devious sexual proclivities based on clothing that you see in every gym in America was offensive to me, particularly as the daughter of a school teacher." The plaintiffs argued in their suits that Marchese would, on occasion, call the boys out of the classroom, maintaining that should have been a sign that something was awry. But Nietzel said, "It was precisely the type of school where, as teachers testified, that they did things like calling students out of the classroom in order to help them." While Nietzel said she does not see any appealable issues, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys disagree. "There will be an appeal," said James Harrington of New London's Polito & Associates, and the attorney for John Doe 1. "I don't want to get into the specifics of the appealable issues, but there are a number of them." Harrington also declined to discuss the specifics, except to say, "We remain hopeful the Appellate Court will take another look at the case." Representing John Doe 2 are Steven Errante and Marisa Bellair of New Haven's Lynch, Traub, Keefe & Errante and Daniel Schofield of Pullman & Comley. Schofield referred all comment to Bellair, who did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Errante was on vacation and was not available for comment. Representing John Doe 3 was Madison solo practitioner William Bilchick, who did not respond to a request for comment. WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MannKind Corporation (MNKD), a company focused on the development and commercialization of inhaled therapeutic products for patients with diseases such as diabetes and pulmonary arterial hypertension, announced today that it will be featured as a presenting company at the H.C. Wainwright Global Life Sciences Conference at 12:10 PM (CET) on April 8, 2019. The conference is being held at the Grosvenor House in London, UK. Michael Castagna, Chief Executive Officer, of MannKind Corporation, will provide an overview of the Company's business during the live presentation and will participate in one-on-one meetings with investors who are registered to attend the conference. If you are an institutional investor, and would like to attend the Companys presentation, please click on the following link ( www.hcwevents.com ) to register for the conference. Once your registration is confirmed, you will be prompted to log into the conference website to request a one-on-one meeting with the Company. The presentation will be webcast live. To access the webcast, please visit www.hcwevents.com . Interested parties can also access a link to the live webcast of the presentation from the News & Events section of the Company's website at http://www.mannkindcorp.com . The webcast replay will remain available for 14 days following the live presentation. About MannKind Corporation MannKind Corporation (MNKD) focuses on the development and commercialization of inhaled therapeutic products for patients with diseases such as diabetes and pulmonary arterial hypertension. MannKind is currently commercializing Afrezza (insulin human) Inhalation Powder, the Company's first FDA approved product and the only inhaled rapid-acting mealtime insulin in the United States, where it is available by prescription from pharmacies nationwide. MannKind is headquartered in Westlake Village, California, and has a state-of-the art manufacturing facility in Danbury, Connecticut. The Company also employs field sales and medical representatives across the U.S. For further information, visit www.mannkindcorp.com . Story continues Company Contact: Rose Alinaya SVP Investor Relations 818-661-5000 ir@mannkindcorp.com Source: MannKind Corporation The much-awaited Cannabis Banking Bill was finally passed by the House Financial Services Committee on Mar 28. This opens up avenues for legal and effective financing for marijuana companies in the United States. Meanwhile, Walgreens WBA announced plans to sell weed-based products through its drug retail stores. Interestingly, a number of marijuana companies are expected to go public this year. With both Canada and the United States becoming increasingly weed-liberal, a bump in weed stocks is widely expected. Cannabis Banking Bill to Boost Gains for Marijuana Companies On Thursday, the House Financial Services Committee voted 45-15 in favor of passing the Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act of 2019 or the SAFE Banking Act. The bill seeks to safeguard the process of financial lending to cannabis companies in the country. This would not only protect the industrys credit lines but also aid cannabis ancillary industries in the country. The ancillary sector has been suffering from financial uncertainties associated with the legal status of marijuana in the past. Notably, 47 U.S. states with a population of 319 million people offer some form of legalized marijuana for sale. In 2018 alone, buyers in Colorado bought $1.55 billion worth of legal weed products. Moreover, the cannabis industry in California is expected to reach $5.1 billion by 2020. Therefore, offering secure financing to such a burgeoning industry would result in stunning gains for major players in the space. Weed IPO Wave to Continue in 2019 Experts are of the view that the marijuana industry would generate as much as $5 billion in annual revenues over the next two years. With a host of marijuana companies listing themselves in 2018, the trend is likely to continue this year, courtesy of the favorable conditions. The marijuana-heavy exchange traded fund ETFMG Alternative Harvest ETF (MJ) has rallied 45.8% year to date. It is largely expected that Pax Labs, the cannabis-focused vaporizer company, will soon go public. The company, which raised $20 million last October, is currently valued at $15 billion. Next on the list might be Harborside, in business as FLRish IP LLC. The California-based operator of a chain of retail pot shops CEO Andrew Berman said the company plans to go public soon. Story continues Current players in the marijuana industry like Cronos Group CRON, Aurora Cannabis Inc. ACB, Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc. IIPR and Canopy Growth CGC have posted excellent year-to-date returns of 77.4%, 82.7%, 80% and 61.4%, respectively. Aurora, Innovative Industrial and Canopy possess a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. To Conclude Per a CNBC report, Walgreens has announced plans to sell CBD creams, patches and sprays in nearly 1,500 of its stores in the country. The drugstore chain will be offering these cannabis-based products in Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Kentucky, Tennessee, Vermont, South Carolina, Illinois and Indiana. Guams lawmakers voted in favor of a bill to legalize marijuana on Mar 27, making it the first U.S. territory to legalize weed this year. The bill allows adults who are 21 and above to possess, consume, cultivate as well as purchase marijuana from licensed retailers. Increasing tolerance, financial protection, credit availability and legal votes have shaped Americas hemp industry lately. Such a development has more to do with growing awareness of its commercial and medicinal values. Establishment of stores, which sell recreational weed in the east coast, would go a long way in establishing a firm footing for the space. 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. See Stocks Today >> 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 Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. (WBA) : Free Stock Analysis Report Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc. (IIPR) : Free Stock Analysis Report Canopy Growth Corporation (CGC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Aurora Cannabis Inc. (ACB) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cronos Group Inc. (CRON) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg will visit Dublin on Tuesday. Photo: Reuters Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will meet with several Irish members of an international committee created to combat disinformation and fake news on Tuesday in Dublin. Hildegarde Naughton, one of the Irish lawmakers on the committee, said that the members would address the regulation of social media, transparency in political advertising, and the safety of young people and vulnerable adults with Zuckerberg. James Lawless, another Irish lawmaker on the committee, said that electoral interference and harmful content were huge issues that needed to be tackled. Speaking on Irish radio, Lawless called Zuckerbergs whistle-stop tour around Europe, during which he is set to meet lawmakers and regulators in several countries, a kind of charm offensive. Irish data protection authorities said in February that Facebook was the subject of seven separate investigations, which includes a probe related to an attack on the platform that could have exposed the personal data of up to 50 million users. Because Ireland is home to the European headquarters of so many major technology companies including Facebook, Google, and Twitter the activities of Irelands data protection regulator are closely watched. Zuckerberg had sought a meeting with Helen Dixon, Irelands data protection commissioner, but she is currently in the US. The Facebook chiefs tour around Europe comes just after he called for lawmakers and regulators to pass more specific laws to more clearly define what constitutes harmful content and political advertising. Zuckerberg also called for the introduction of global privacy regulations similar to the European Unions GDPR rules. Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree, Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. Ive come to believe that we shouldnt make so many important decisions about speech on our own. The International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News, a grouping of lawmakers from across the world who meet to discuss the regulation of social media platforms, held their first session in Westminster in November. Story continues They are set to meet again in Ottawa, Canada in May. Press Release Second generation factory container now includes Nokia Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) for global IoT connectivity and Nokia Digital Automation Cloud for reliable and secure connectivity New partners added to Factory in a Box 2.0 ecosystem including augmented reality and 3D printing technology to improve production workflow Concept of a modular production line that can be deployed anywhere in the world, set up within hours 1 April 2019 Hannover, Germany - Nokia is showcasing the second generation of it's Factory in a Box in the 5G Arena in hall 16 at Hannover Messe 2019 (April 1 to April 5), in collaboration with several industry ecosystem partners. The container is a proof of concept that demonstrates how Industry 4.0 solutions can be packed, transported and brought back into service in a matter of hours, including full over-the-air connectivity. Factory in a Box 2.0 combines additive manufacturing alongside augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) and robotics, powered by Nokia private 4G/5G. The semi-automated production workflow is also now integrated in Nokia's Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) and has a Nokia Digital Automation Cloud on board for industry-grade connectivity. Today's factories no longer operate as standalone operations, but depend on the timely arrival of raw materials to keep production flowing and finished goods being distributed to the end customers. Global IoT plays a key role to ensure data on the entire supply chain can be collected and made available, which is critical in an application like Nokia's Factory in a Box. Nokia WING helps Mobile Network Operators deliver a better global IoT experience to their enterprise customers, ensuring the ability to collect this IoT data from all parts of the supply chain, no matter where the devices are located. Nokia Digital Automation Cloud fits both small industrial environments with few devices and large areas with multiple devices to connect. Its high-performance 4G wireless connectivity is optimized for industrial needs and it can host time-sensitive applications and IoT stacks that require low latency. This digital platform enables industrial companies to activate applications such as high-accuracy object positioning, real-time video processing and utilizes features like local network slicing, which are often required in advanced IoT solutions such as Automated Guided Vehicles, analytics and robotics. It is an ideal solution for the Factory in a Box 2.0 container as it can flexibly be moved in and out and used with or without an internet connection. Story continues Grant Marshall, VP Supply Network & Engineering at Nokia said: "We could tell from the positive feedback we received on the Factory in a Box last year that there is a lot of potential for this concept in the manufacturing industry. This year, we have raised the bar again, and Factory in a Box 2.0 is now connected to Nokia WING and has Nokia DAC on board, making it even more flexible, secure and efficient." Learn more about Nokia's enterprise solutions at Hannover Messe 2019 in Hall 6, H10. About Nokia We create the technology to connect the world. We develop and deliver the industry's only end-to-end portfolio of network equipment, software, services and licensing that is available globally. Our customers include communications service providers whose combined networks support 6.1 billion subscriptions, as well as enterprises in the private and public sector that use our network portfolio to increase productivity and enrich lives. Through our research teams, including the world-renowned Nokia Bell Labs, we are leading the world to adopt end-to-end 5G networks that are faster, more secure and capable of revolutionizing lives, economies and societies. Nokia adheres to the highest ethical business standards as we create technology with social purpose, quality and integrity. www.nokia.com Media Inquiries: Nokia Communications Phone: +358 10 448 4900 Email: press.services@nokia.com Investing.com - Oil prices gained on Tuesday in Asia following reports that the U.S. is considering imposing more sanctions on Iran. U.S. Crude Oil WTI Futures was up 0.3% to $61.80 by 12:15 AM ET (04:15 GMT). U.S. crude rose 33% during the first quarter. The last time it gained more for a quarter was during the second quarter of 2009, when it rose about 40%. International Brent Oil Futures also traded 0.3% higher to $69.19. It rose 26% for the first quarter, its best gain in 10 years. Citing an unnamed senior Trump administration official, Reuters reported that Washington is considering more sanctions against Iran that would target areas of its economy that have not been hit before. The report also suggested that unlike last time when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran, the White House may not grant waivers to a group of eight importers when the current waivers expire next month. In other news, better-than-expected data from China and the U.S., the worlds two largest oil-consuming nations, were cited as supporting oil prices. Surveys released on Monday showed that manufacturing activity in China expanded more than expected in March. The Caixin manufacturing purchasing managers index rose to 50.8 from 49.9, above the 50-mark that separates expansion from contraction and its strongest level since last August. Meanwhile, data on Friday also showed a sixth-straight weekly fall in the U.S. oil rig count to a near-one-year low, suggesting lower production ahead. Related Articles Canada says reopening USMCA trade pact could be a 'Pandora's box' Oil up Cautiously, Awaiting U.S.-China Deal; Houston Still a Problem Commodities - U.S. Crude Struggles to Erase Inventory-Induced Losses FILE PHOTO: The logo of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is seen outside their headquarters in Vienna, Austria December 7, 2018. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger/File Photo By Alex Lawler LONDON (Reuters) - OPEC oil supply sank to a four-year low in March, a Reuters survey found, as top exporter Saudi Arabia over-delivered on the group's supply-cutting pact while Venezuelan output fell further due to sanctions and power outages. The 14-member Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries pumped 30.40 million barrels per day (bpd) last month, the survey showed on Monday, down 280,000 bpd from February and the lowest OPEC total since 2015. The survey suggests that Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies are pressing ahead with even larger supply cuts than called for by OPEC's latest deal, shrugging off pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to increase supply. On Thursday, Trump again called for OPEC to pump more oil to lower prices. Crude oil is trading above $68 a barrel, close to a 2019 high, boosted by the Saudi move and involuntary supply curbs in Venezuela and Iran, which are both under U.S. sanctions that limit their exports. "The will is there to bring global oil inventories lower," said Tamas Varga of oil broker PVM, referring to OPEC strategy. "Unless there is a sudden jump in OPEC production or a complete break-down in the U.S.-China trade talks, financial investors will find oil attractive to pour more money into." OPEC, Russia and other non-members -- an alliance known as OPEC+ -- agreed in December to reduce supply by 1.2 million bpd from Jan. 1. OPEC's share of the cut is 800,000 bpd, to be delivered by 11 members -- all except Iran, Libya and Venezuela. In March, the 11 OPEC members bound by the new agreement achieved 135 percent of pledged cuts, the survey found, up from 101 percent in February and a high rate by OPEC standards. Among exempt producers, Venezuelan supply fell by 150,000 bpd as power cuts hit exports, adding to the impact of U.S. sanctions on state oil company PDVSA and a long-term decline in production. The latest OPEC+ deal came just months after the group agreed to pump more oil, which in turn partially unwound their original supply-limiting accord that took effect in 2017. Story continues SAUDI, VENEZUELA The biggest drop in supply came from Saudi Arabia, OPEC's biggest producer, which pumped 220,000 bpd less than in February, the survey showed. Saudi Arabia has reduced production from a record 11 million bpd in November due to concern about a potential glut, although the survey showed that supply fell slightly less than the kingdom had indicated. The second-biggest drop occurred in Venezuela. Washington imposed sanctions on state oil firm PDVSA in January, while blackouts halted operations at the country's main oil export terminal of Jose and at crude upgrading plants. Some sources in the survey put Venezuelan production in March as low as 650,000 bpd. Supply to the market did not fall this low, according to export data, which points to shipments of 800,000 bpd or more despite stoppages. Output in Venezuela, once a top-three OPEC producer, has been declining for years due to economic collapse. The survey showed Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates also delivered larger cuts than required under the deal, while Iraq, a laggard on compliance in the last round of cuts, reduced supply as exports from the country's south fell. OPEC's biggest production gain occurred in Libya as the country's biggest oilfield, El Sharara, restarted. Among OPEC countries in the supply pact, Nigeria overproduced by the largest amount, the survey found. The start-up of Total's Egina field helped boost output. Nigeria says the Egina field produces condensate, a type of light oil excluded from the OPEC cuts. The survey includes the field based on Total's listing of it as a crude producer. Smaller producers Congo, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon also pumped above their targets, the survey found. March's output is the lowest by OPEC since February 2015, excluding membership changes since then, Reuters surveys show. The Reuters survey aims to track supply to the market and is based on shipping data provided by external sources, Refinitiv Eikon flows data and information provided by sources at oil companies, OPEC and consulting firms. (Additional reporting by Rania El Gamal; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Dale Hudson) A member of the North Korea's embassy tells reporters not to take pictures of the diplomatic building in Madrid, Spain, on Mar. 13. AP By Lee Min-hyung The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received "pretty significant" data stolen from the North Korean Embassy in Madrid by a political group opposing Kim Jong-un, according to U.S. media reports. Citing a law enforcement source, NBC News said Saturday (local time) Free Joseon handed over data to the FBI following the group's raid on the embassy in Spain in February. This is in line with Free Joseon's claim last week that it shared certain information of "enormous value" with the FBI. But given the clandestine nature of the organization, doubts have surfaced over whether its claim is true. The U.S. media outlet quoted an unnamed former U.S. intelligence officer as saying that obtaining information at one of the regime's embassies could prove significant. The specifics of what was stolen by the group remain unclear. Free Joseon is gaining media attention in recent weeks after it claimed responsibility for the raid. The group is known to consist of activists seeking to overthrow the Kim regime. The organization said it would continue fighting the regime until it stops its dictatorship and guarantees freedom to its people. "The Kim Jong-un regime will continue to feel humiliated if it rejects the order of freedom," Free Joseon said in a statement, Sunday, urging the North to dismantle its political prison camps and reform its dictatorial leadership style. The group also hinted at the possibility of carrying out another "big task" against the regime. "We will keep silent like the calm before the storm until preparations for the big task is finished," it said. "Please support our making of miraculous facts and continue waiting for us with patience." The statement came hours after North Korea expressed regret over the raid for the first time since the incident took place Feb. 22. The regime's foreign ministry spokesman told its propaganda news outlet, the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), that the raid was a "grave violation" of international law. "We are paying close attention to any rumors about the FBI and the anti-regime organization being involved in the recent terrorist attack," the spokesman said. He added that the regime will wait patiently for the result of an investigation into the incident. "We urge the Spanish authority to carry out an investigation responsibly and punish the masterminds of the incident according to international law," he said. Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean diplomat who defected to the South, said Sunday the regime was seeking to find out details about Free Joseon by putting pressure on Spanish investigators. "It took 37 days for the North to respond to the incident, which shows that the regime viewed the raid with much consideration," Thae said Sunday in his online blog. "The (response) is the regime's apparent intention of learning as much as possible about Free Joseon, formerly known as Cheollima Civil Defense," he said. April 2, 2019: Oslo, Norway, PGS routinely releases information about 3D vessel utilization after the end of each quarter. Summary of vessel utilization: Approximate allocation of PGS operated 3D towed streamer capacity Quarter ended March 31, Quarter ended December 31, 2019 2018 2018 Contract seismic 29% 36% 23% MultiClient seismic 38% 31% 14% Steaming 6% 4% 15% Yard 0% 0% 5% Stacked/Standby 27% 29% 43% The Q1 2019 vessel statistics includes eight vessels. All cold-stacked* vessels are excluded from the statistics. PGS will release its Q1 2019 results on Thursday April 25, 2019, at approximately 8:00am Central European Summer Time (CEST). A corresponding presentation is scheduled for 09:00am CEST the same day. *The term "cold-stacked" is used when a vessel is taken out of operation for an extended period of time. Costs are reduced to a minimum, with the vessel preserved for a long idle time, all or most in-sea seismic equipment removed from the vessel, and typically the Company does not have available crew to operate the vessel. FOR DETAILS, CONTACT: Bard Stenberg, SVP IR & Communication Mobile: +47 99 24 52 35 **** Petroleum Geo-Services ASA and its subsidiaries ("PGS" or "the Company") is a focused marine geophysical company that provides a broad range of seismic and reservoir services, including acquisition, imaging, interpretation, and field evaluation. The Company MultiClient data library is among the largest in the seismic industry, with modern 3D coverage in all significant offshore hydrocarbon provinces of the world. The Company operates on a worldwide basis with headquarters in Oslo, Norway and the PGS share is listed on the Oslo stock exchange (PGS.OL). For more information on PGS visit www.pgs.com. *** The information included herein contains certain forward-looking statements that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, projects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future. These statements are based on various assumptions made by the Company, which are beyond its control and are subject to certain additional risks and uncertainties. The Company is subject to a large number of risk factors including but not limited to the demand for seismic services, the demand for data from our multi-client data library, the attractiveness of our technology, unpredictable changes in governmental regulations affecting our markets and extreme weather conditions. For a further description of other relevant risk factors we refer to our Annual Report for 2018. As a result of these and other risk factors, actual events and our actual results may differ materially from those indicated in or implied by such forward-looking statements. The reservation is also made that inaccuracies or mistakes may occur in the information given above about current status of the Company or its business. Any reliance on the information above is at the risk of the reader, and PGS disclaims any and all liability in this respect. Story continues --END-- This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5 -12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act. 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: Petroleum Geo-Services ASA via GlobeNewswire HUG#2240391 Madeleine McCann went missing in Portugal in 2007 (Picture: PA) Police could abandon the 12 million investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann because leads have dried up and government funding is running out, it has been reported. The Mail on Sunday reported that Scotland Yards hunt for missing Madeleine is understood to have no earth-shattering leads. It said detectives rarely visit the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, where the three-year-old disappeared in May 2007. The police inquiry to find her, Operation Grange, was given 150,000 more funding last October to last until the end of this month. It is thought the Metropolitan Police has applied for a further 300,000 to keep the investigation going until March 2020. British police officers in 2014 clearing an area of wasteland during the search for evidence in the town of Praia da Luz (Picture: PA) Police in Portugal halted their investigation in 2008 but Scotland Yard launched its own in 2011, although its inquiry was scaled back in 2015. A source told the Mail on Sunday that the remaining few detectives on the case are not pursuing hard leads. Read more Ex-Vote Leave chairwoman dodges calls to apologise for Brexit referendum overspend Many Labour MPs want to back plan to cancel Brexit in wake of latest defeat for Theresa May Two teenagers charged with robbery after three attacks on men who arranged dates on Grindr Most of what Operation Grange is doing is having things set up to knock down and rule out, rather than pursuing a particular fantastic lead that could unlock it all, said the source. Im not aware of any earth-shattering lead or breakthrough imminently. Madeleines parents Kate and Gerry McCann (Picture: PA) Operation Grange has cost 11.75 million, including more than 10 million on salaries, more than 400,000 on overtime and about 287,000 on travel costs, the Mail on Sunday said. A spokesman for the Home Office told The Sun Online: We have received and are considering a request from the Metropolitan Police Service to extend funding for Operation Grange until the end of March 2020. The Apartment block in Praia Da Luz, Portugal where Madeleine McCann went missing (Picture: PA) The Home Office maintains an ongoing dialogue with the MPS regarding funding for Operation Grange. The cost of Operation Grange which to date is 11.75million has been met through Special Grant funding. Story continues That funding is usually available to police forces when they face significant or exceptional costs. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: The investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann remains ongoing. A spokesman for Madeleines parents said: Kate and Gerry remain incredibly grateful to the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office for the continued work they are doing. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK By Steven Ralston, CFA OTC:PQEFF | TSX:PQE READ THE FULL PQEFF RESEARCH REPORT Petroteq Energy (PQEFF) (PQE.V) is an upstream exploration and production (E&P) company focused on advancing its proprietary Clean Oil Recovery Technology (CORT). Currently, the company is ramping up bitumen oil production at its newly commissioned 1,000 bpd facility at Asphalt Ridge in Utah. Asphalt Ridge Operational Update On March 28, 2019, Petroteq Energy announced that the company has been continuously producing over 500 barrels per day for the last two weeks. The nameplate production capacity of the companys oil sands processing facility is 1,000 bpd. Management anticipates achieving a 700 bpd production rate in April and the facilitys rated production capacity by the end of May. The ramp up in production is being conducted in a measured approach in order to help ensure that product quality will meet the standards expected by its refinery customers. The cash flow derived from production should reduce the need for dilutive share financings. During the winter months, Petroteq Energy completed its first maintenance turnaround of the Asphalt Ridge processing facility and also installed new equipment delivered from third-party vendors. The maintenance turnaround was completed on February 21, 2019, including upgrades to the front-end feedstock mixing operations and solvent recovery process, along with enhancements to facilitate the planned integration with the proposed 3,000 bpd expansion project. View Exhibit I Bitumen oil production recommenced with the facility producing higher quality, heavy crude oil (API gravity 17) with low sulfur content and a low sediment factor ( below .05% BS&W). By mid-March 2019, Petroteq Energy resumed sales of bitumen oil at Asphalt Ridge with the announcement that two loads of 250 barrels of oil (API 17) had been sold to local refineries. Management intends to continue expanding production, initially to nameplate capacity of 1,000 bpd and later this year by adding a second processing train. Managements Strategy Managements primary goal is to become a significant bitumen oil producer in Utah by advancing its proprietary, patented, closed loop, environmentally-friendly Extraction Technology. In 2015, the company constructed and operated a 250 bpd pilot plant that produced almost 10,000 barrels of bitumen oil. Concurrently, the company acquired the lease on the resource providing the oil sands feedstock to the pilot plant. The components of the pilot plant were relocated, upgraded and expanded to a 1,000 bpd facility. Management plans to scale up production to nameplate capacity over the next few weeks. View Exhibit II Management plans to continue upgrading the processing facilities at Temple Mountain Mine: Phase 1: the construction and commissioning of a 1,000 bpd plant (completed) Phase 2: the expansion of production capacity to 4,000 bpd by the end of 2019 Phase 3: increase capacity to 8,000 bpd by early 2022 View Exhibit III The company is building investor awareness by attending Analyst Conferences: The MicroCap Conference in New York City (April 9, 2018) 8th Annual LD Micro Invitational Conference (June 4, 2018) The MicroCap Conference in Toronto (June 21, 2018) 20th Rodman & Renshaw Global Investment Conference in NYC (September 6, 2018) The MicroCap Conference in New York City (October 1, 2018) 31st Annual ROTH Conference in Dana Point, California (March 18-19, 2019) 8th Annual Scottsdale Capital Conference in Scottsdale (April 27, 2019) Asphalt Ridge Located in the northeast flank of the Uinta Basin, Asphalt Ridge is a northwest-southeast trending escarpment (a steeply sloping ridge of land) which is quite prominent as it rises from 500 to 1,000 feet above Ashley Valley along its 20-mile strike. The Ridge exhibits a gentle slope on the southwest side and a steeper slope towards the northeast). Multiple mapping and drilling programs have been conducted, notably by Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio), Sun Oil Company, Texaco, Phillips Petroleum and Shell Oil Company. Asphalt Ridge hosts an important oil sands deposit in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah. The bitumen-saturated outcrops have been mined since at least the 1920s. The sandstone structures of Asphalt Ridge feature extensive surface deposits. Bitumen-saturated outcropping sandstones are exposed on the northeast-facing cliffs, all along the northwest strike of Asphalt Ridge, from an area in the southeast where the Green River flows to where the Ridge terminates in the northwest by a series of crosscutting high-angle faults. View Exhibit IV Petroteq Acquires 50% of Federal Mineral Leases On February 8, 2019, Petroteq Energy announced the execution of a definitive agreement with Momentum Asset Partners I, LLC for the acquisition of 50% of the operating rights of six U.S. Federal oil and gas leases: one located in P.R. Springs (encompassing approximately 8,480 gross acres) and five located in the Tar Sands Triangle. Total consideration for the transaction is US$10.8 million comprised of US$1.8 million in cash and US$9.0 million payable in Petroteq Energy shares (approximately 15 million common shares). The P.R. Springs lease is estimated to contain gross contingent resources of 45 million barrels of mineable oil/bitumen in place and 20.38 million barrels of mineable oil/bitumen in place on a net basis (discounted by risk and royalty), according Chapman Petroleum Engineerings Evaluation of Contingent Resources report dated December 31, 2018. The Tar Sands Triangle leases are estimated to contain gross contingent resources of 41.3 million barrels of in situ oil/bitumen in place and 20.7 million barrels of in situ mineable oil/bitumen in place on a net basis (discounted by risk and royalty), according to the Chapman Report. The company is expected to issue a Resource Development Plan that will outline the companys long-term strategy of developing its capability of producing bitumen oil. Indicated Target Based on comparative valuation analysis of Price-to-Sales (P/S) ratios with comparable oil recovery companies and a discounted cash flow (DCF) model of the Asphalt Ridge Project, our blended valuation process indicates a share price target of $1.38. SUBSCRIBE TO ZACKS SMALL CAP RESEARCH to receive our articles and reports emailed directly to you each morning. Please visit our website for additional information on Zacks SCR. DISCLOSURE: Zacks SCR has received compensation from the issuer directly or from an investor relations consulting firm, engaged by the issuer, for providing research coverage for a period of no less than one year. Research articles, as seen here, are part of the service Zacks provides and Zacks receives quarterly payments totaling a maximum fee of $30,000 annually for these services. Full Disclaimer HERE. Story continues April 2 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories in the Wall Street Journal. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. - The White House is standing behind the proposed nomination of Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve board, a senior administration official said Monday, following reports of Moore's past legal and financial problems. https://on.wsj.com/2OC7WX2 - In the aftermath of a Boeing Co 737 MAX jet crash in Indonesia in October, much of the American aviation industrythe plane maker, the FAA, U.S. airlines and their pilotsclosed ranks to reassure the public the model was safe to fly. https://on.wsj.com/2FIdYS5 - The new funding the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will receive in New York's state budget will go a long way toward supporting the agency's next five-year capital-spending plan, MTA Chairman Patrick Foye said. https://on.wsj.com/2uEhBDt - Facebook Inc said it has taken down hundreds of pages and accounts that it said were working together to spread misleading content or spam ahead of elections in India set to begin April 11. https://on.wsj.com/2VhIgBT (Compiled by Bengaluru newsroom) Trucks may be more likely to cross a "structurally deficient" bridge while traveling in Rhode Island than in any other state in the country, according to a recent analysis of government data. Combing through U.S. Department of Transportation's 2018 bridge inventory database, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) found that Rhode Island, along with West Virginia and Iowa, have the most structurally deficient bridges as a percent of total bridges within each state, at 23 percent, 19.8 percent, and 19.3 percent, respectively. They were the same three states that topped the list in 2017. Iowa was also among the top three states with the largest overall number of deficient bridges, at 4,675, followed by Pennsylvania (3,770) and Oklahoma (2,540). Those states were at the top of that category last year as well. ARTBA's analysis revealed that the pace of bridge repair is the slowest since it began compiling the report five years ago, dropping by just 1 percent last year. "At the current pace, it would take more than 80 years to replace or repair the nation's structurally deficient bridges," said ARTBA chief economist Alison Premo Black. "America's bridge network is outdated, underfunded and in urgent need of modernization. State and local governments just haven't been given the necessary resources to get the job done." The report is monitored closely by the trucking industry because the country's 48,000-mile Interstate Highway System carries approximately 75 percent of the nation's heavy truck traffic. It also comes as lawmakers in Washington, D.C. negotiate for a reauthorization of the surface transportation legislation the FAST Act and ways to pay for it, including raising the gas tax to keep the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) solvent. ARTBA pointed out that the HTF is the source of more than half of highway and bridge capital investments made annually, on average, by state transportation departments. States could see a 40 percent cut in federal investment, beginning in 2021, if Congress doesn't pass a surface transportation package, the group noted. Story continues "Since the 2016 election, leaders on both sides of the aisle have regularly cited upgrading America's infrastructure as an area for common ground. This report makes clear that it's about time Congress and the Trump administration stop talking and start solving this national problem," Bauer said. ARTBA estimated the cost to repair, rehabilitate or replace 235,000 bridges in the country that need those kinds of upgrades at $171 billion, based on federal costing data. The government classifies a bridge as "structurally deficient" depending on the condition of its deck, superstructure, substructure and culverts, and bridge ratings are updated as inspections are completed. Nearly 88 percent of the bridges classified as structurally deficient in 2018 had the same rating in 2017, ARTBA found, and 5,660 bridges were newly classified as structurally deficient in 2018. There were 6,229 bridges found to be structurally deficient in 2017 that were removed from that category in 2018, for an overall net decline of 567. Image sourced from Pixabay Want more content like this? Click here to Subscribe Permalink See more from Benzinga 2019 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. L to R) Patricia H. White, Shelley Broderick and Don Guter. (Courtesy Photos) (L to R) Patricia White, Shelley Broderick and Donald Guter. (Courtesy photos) A number of the nations longest-serving deans are soon to leave their posts, which means a lot of institutional knowledge is retiringor at least moving out of the deans suite. The average tenure of a law dean is currently about four years, according to a database maintained by Jim Rosenblatt, a professor at Mississippi College School of Law (and former dean). According to that database, two of the five longest-serving deans are soon to step down, and a third left the deanship at the end of the previous academic year. While the departures mean the loss of entrenched deans who understand the dynamics of their faculty, the turnover also makes room for more fresh leadership who can present innovative approaches to legal education. Here's a quick rundown: Chicago-Kent College of Law Dean Harold Krent is wrapping up his deanship this semester after 17 years in the job. That makes him third-longest-serving dean in the country. Avi Soifer announced this month that he will step down as the dean of the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law as soon as the school can find his replacement. He has been in the job for 16 years, landing him right behind Krent as the fourth-longest-serving dean. Last year, longtime University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law Dean Katherine Shelley Broderick left the deans office after occupying it for 20 years. (Shes no longer on Rosenblatts list, but that tenure would have landed her as the third-longest-serving dean if she were on it today.) Four more of the 15 longest deanships are wrapping up: Alan Michaels at Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law (11 years); Nell Newton at the University of Notre Dame Law School (10 years); Patricia White at the University of Miami School of Law (10 years); and Donald Guter at South Texas College of Law Houston (10 years). Those are long tenures in a job that is high-pressured under good circumstances, and was made all the more difficult over the past eight years because of a shrinking applicant pool, newfound budget pressures, a difficult entry-level legal job market and declining bar pass rates. Deans have many constituenciesstudents, faculty, staff, university, community, and the legal academy," said Krent, at Chicago-Kent "I have consoled myself that one cannot be a hit with all constituencies, and success with the respective groups over the years have ebbed and flowed. But I think it critical to keep good lines of communication with all the groups and offer help when feasible. With so many experienced deans stepping down, whos left at the top? According to Rosenblatts database, its John OBrien, who has been dean of New England Law Boston for more than three decades. Bradley Toben has been at Baylor University School of Law for more than 27 years. And Marquette University Law Schools Joseph Kearney rounds out the top five longest-serving deans. He has been dean for 16 years. I love my work, Toben said in a 2018 interview with Law.com affiliate Texas Lawyer. Its not a matter of length of years, its a matter of can you make a contribution that moves the institution forward. I hope to have a blessing of doing that a lot more years. Stay on top of developments and trends in legal education with Ahead of the Curve by Karen Sloan, a new weekly briefing from Law.com. Sign up here and get next week's email update straight to your inbox. Megan Royle had returned to her home in Gillingham, Kent, after flying back from her mothers wedding when she discovered the olive thick tail scorpion. (PA) A student has spoken of her shock after she found a surprise stowaway in her suitcase following a trip to South Africa. Megan Royle had returned to her home in Gillingham, Kent, after flying back from her mothers wedding when she discovered the olive thick tail scorpion, a highly venomous insect the size of her fingernail. The 20-year-old said: I was rushing to unpack as I was going out to meet friends then this tiny scorpion hopped out of the suitcase and scuttled across the bed. I didnt clock straight away what it was. I thought to myself: That cant be a scorpion. Megan Royle (right), with her mother Lindsey Mallon (centre), and step father Paul Kratovil, whose wedding Megan was attending in South Africa. Student Megan returned from the wedding to find a scorpion had stowed away in her suitcase. (PA) Megan Royle had returned to her home in Gillingham, Kent, after flying back from her mothers wedding when she discovered the olive thick tail scorpion. (PA) Read more from Yahoo News UK: European Union set to demand 10bn euros from UK Ms Royle said she called her mother for advice, and added: Mum told me not to worry, its only the little ones that are dangerous and this one was tiny so then I was freaking out even more. Ms Royle said she then contacted the RSPCA which collected the scorpion and identified it as a species that requires a Dangerous Wild Animal licence to be kept in the UK. Animal collection officer Brian Milligan went to collect the scorpion. He said: The scorpion was small and sandy-coloured. It seemed to be well so I took it straight to our specialist exotics centre in Brighton. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK In a post showing the Taiwanese leader giving orders on the phone, President Tsai Ing-wen condemned the incursions as an "outright provocation of regional security and stability." According to risk consultancy Stratfor, the incident on Sunday is "one of the most serious incursions by People's Liberation Army Air Force fighter jets on the Taiwanese side of the maritime border this century." Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has called for Chinese warplanes that cross a maritime line separating the two sides to be "forcefully expelled." Her comments in a Facebook post on Monday came after two Chinese fighter jets crossed a maritime line separating mainland China from the self-ruled island of Taiwan on Sunday. In a post showing the Taiwanese leader giving orders on the phone, Tsai condemned the incursions as an "outright provocation of regional security and stability." "I have ordered the military to forcefully expel any incursions across the 'median line' immediately," she said, according to a CNBC translation of her post written in Chinese. The so-called median line on the Taiwan Strait separates mainland China from the island. Taiwan scrambled aircraft to drive away the Chinese planes on Sunday, the self-ruled island's defense ministry said. China has repeatedly sent military aircraft and ships to circle Taiwan during drills in recent years and worked to isolate the island internationally. Beijing views Taiwan as a renegade Chinese province and has sought to bring the island under its control by force if necessary. According to risk consultancy Stratfor, the incident on Sunday is "one of the most serious incursions by People's Liberation Army Air Force fighter jets on the Taiwanese side of the maritime border this century." 'Tit-for-tat provocations' The duration of the latest incursion about 10 minutes implies it was intentional, and reflects escalating tensions between China and Taiwan amid the broader United States -China geopolitical struggle, Stratfor said in a post on Monday. Story continues "China's apparent ending of the informal nonincursion agreement might be an effort to test Taipei's response, and it could compel Taipei to seek negotiations on avoiding escalations from such encounters," said Stratfor. "It could result in Taiwanese fighters making their own incursions on the west side of the line, which in turn could lead to a cycle of tit-for-tat provocations coming amid already-tense cross-strait relations," the report added. China's defense ministry did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comments. When asked about the encounter in the Taiwan Strait at a scheduled press conference on Monday, China's foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was "not aware" of the matter. Taiwan is one of a growing number of flashpoints in the U.S.-China relationship, which includes an ongoing trade war and Beijing's increasingly aggressive military posture in the South China Sea. In late March, the U.S. sent Navy and Coast Guard ships through the Taiwan Strait, as part of an increase in the frequency of movement through the waterway despite opposition from Beijing. After the incursion on Sunday, a spokesman for Taiwan's presidential office, Huang Chung-yen, said Beijing "should stop behavior of this sort, which endangers regional peace, and not be an international troublemaker," Reuters reported. Reuters contributed to this report. More From CNBC On Monday, March 25, Rabbi Dovie Shapiro, director of Chabad of Flagstaff with his wife Chaya, was horrified to discover vandalism at the construction site of the Molly Blank Jewish Community Center. Swastikas had been painted and carved into walls, black paint and plaster dumped on the grounds, and thousands of dollars worth of valuable equipment, tools, and supplies were irreparably damaged. The 12,500 sq. ft. Chabad center being built on a hill overlooking Northern Arizona University is expected to open later this year. It will be the first of its kind in Flagstaff, which has never had a purpose-built synagogue or Jewish community center. The Flagstaff Police Department is treating this as a hate crime. When people do acts of hate for no reason, the way to respond is with acts of love for no reason, Shapiro told the reporter and photographer from the Arizona Daily Sun who covered the breaking story. The photographer, Jake Bacon, took Shapiros words to heart. He posted his photos of the vandalism on his Facebook page, which elicited a huge response. Many people responded, wanting to know how they could help. I tried to think of something simple people could do that would demonstrate to Chabad how cherished they are, and how welcoming Flagstaff is. I wanted to encourage the community to show a blinding light that would dispel the darkness, said Bacon. Bacon came up with the idea for people to cut out hearts from cardboard, cover them with foil, write supportive messages, and hang them on the fence surrounding the Chabad center construction site. People of all ages, religions, and ethnicities came out to display their hearts bearing messages like, Stay Strong, You are Loved, Love Shines Brighter than Hate, and We Stand with You. Loving your fellow as yourself is an essential teaching of Chabad, and seeing all the hearts has lifted our spirits, said Shapiro, who was profoundly moved by Bacons idea. Teachers in the community used this episode as a teachable moment, talking to their students about standing up and taking action. Its not enough to wring your hands and say how awful. If you believe it, do something about it, the photographer said. In an expression of unity, more than 150 people of all faiths and backgrounds, including the mayor, full city council of Flagstaff, and the County Supervisor, celebrated Shabbat dinner together at Chabads current center, down the street from the site of the new center. The rabbi invited everyone at the dinner to the grand opening of the new center, where he plans to display the foil hearts as a lasting tribute to the caring community of Flagstaff. Chabad of Flagstaff has launched a campaign to help secure sufficient funds for security and to help them continue to build a welcoming home in the community. www.charidy.com/beyondhate Unity Shabbat dinner (photo taken before the start of Shabbat) Photos: Jake Bacon Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, said the U.S.-Mexico border is in disarray and he is confident that President Trump will make good on his promise to close the border this week. Weve run out of beds at the border. We are releasing immigrants who have crossed over illegally into the arms of human traffickers, he told FOX Business Stuart Varney on Tuesday. We have a massive problem at the border and Im not really worried about the price of avocados right now. President Trump on Tuesday made a case in a tweet for closing the border. "After many years (decades), Mexico is apprehending large numbers of people at their Southern Border, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador," he said. "They have ALL been taking U.S. money for years, and doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for us, just like the Democrats in Congress!" Although it is unclear what a border closure, if any, would look like, Gooden said he is prepared for disorder created by any measure. We are in a state of chaos right now, he said. We have illegal immigration that has gone unchecked for years. We have built up to this point to where we have no control over whos coming in and out of our country." In his opinion, "temprorary pain at the border" is worthwhile if it means long-term meaningful border security. "The negative consequences that come with closing the border just dont outweigh fixing the problem at the border and President Trump stands ready to do that. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP Gooden also said reports of migrants coming across the border and being released into migrant cities and wandering around in large numbers is absolutely accurate and the American people are paying for it. Weve had disruption for decades. We have unchecked border entry. The people of Texas are fed up with this. The people of Texas want this border crisis solved," he said. Related Articles President Donald Trump will wait until after the 2020 elections to push lawmakers to move forward with an overhaul of the U.S. health care system, solidifying the issues place at the forefront of what is expected to be a bitter race for Congress and the White House. The GOP plan "will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election," Trump tweeted. With both Republicans and Democrats in disarray on health care, it remains to be seen which tentative plan voters will embrace or how candidates will navigate a complex issue on which the public is divided. Health care has long been the space where people think about whats the right role for government and what is a countrys obligation and responsibility to meet basic needs of the population, said Allison Hoffman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Its become the place where people are expressing and fighting out different views about what the world should look like. GOP lawmakers appear to be taking a renewed interest in a failed proposal to transfer federal subsidies offered under ObamaCare to a large block grant to states to allow local officials to craft their own insurance systems one that earned widespread opposition from the health care industry and some Republican governors when it was first introduced last year. And while Democrats routinely bash the GOP for lacking a clear alternative to ObamaCare despite repeated attempts to repeal the law, the party is also struggling to coalesce around whether to improve the existing system or embrace a move to so-called Medicare for All a catch-all term for several proposals, including one backed by 2020 candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and others to end all private insurance. In politics, the safest bet is always the status quo -- that not much is going to change. For the next year, that seems like the safest bet. Although the courts are the wildcard here, Richard Kronick, a professor at the University of California, told FOX Business. Story continues Amplifying the attention on the issue is the White Houses recent decision to agree with a federal judge in Texas that former President Barack Obamas signature domestic achievement is unconstitutional. Overturning the law would not only create chaos in the U.S. health care system and force millions of American off of their insurance plans, it would also invalidate a number of other government programs -- including a new pathway at the Food and Drug Administration to approve copycat versions of advanced biologic drugs. For Trump, the delay until after the elections comes as the courts continue to block his administrations attempts to implement more conservative health care policies without the backing of Congress. Last week, a federal judge rejected a Kentucky program that would require lower income individuals enrolled in Medicaid to work to receive the benefits of the entitlement program the second time the courts have blocked the proposal advocated by the White House. The judge also nullified Arkansas own work requirement system. After the decision, top Trump health official Seema Verma said the administration will continue to defend our efforts to give states greater flexibility to help low-income Americans rise out of poverty. States are the laboratories of democracy and we will vigorously support their innovative, state-driven efforts to develop and test reforms that will advance the objectives of the Medicaid program, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a statement. Meanwhile, a district court on Thursday blocked the Trump administrations attempt to allow small businesses to group together to buy insurance in so-called association health plans -- which dont adhere to regulations set by the federal health law. While the White House argues such a system can lead to lower costs for Main Street companies, critics say it is a direct move to undermine ObamaCare because it could dissuade those firms from participating in the laws insurance exchanges. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP And despite the administrations new stance that ObamaCare should be removed in its entirety, the recent court rulings could end up being more significant because they address core conservative beliefs, experts say. Theres a certain amount of what you see going on that is grandstanding, and there is a certain amount that is true substantive disagreement on what the role of government should be, Hoffman said. Related Articles By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - U.S. senators from both parties on Tuesday asked Energy Secretary Rick Perry for details about recent approvals for companies to share nuclear energy information with Saudi Arabia, with the lawmakers expressing concern about possible development of atomic weapons. Saudi Arabia has engaged in "many deeply troubling actions and statements that have provoked alarm in Congress," Senators Bob Menendez, a Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Republican, told Perry in a letter, a copy of which was seen by Reuters. The senators said Congress was beginning to reevaluate the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and they believe Washington should not be providing nuclear technology or information to Saudi Arabia now. The Trump administration has been quietly negotiating a deal that would potentially help Saudi Arabia build two reactors. Last week news reports revealed that since November 2017, Perry has authorized so-called Part 810 approvals allowing U.S. companies to share sensitive nuclear information with the kingdom. The approvals were kept from the public and from Congress. The senators asked Perry to provide them by April 10 with the names of the companies that got the 810 approvals, what was in the authorizations, and why the companies asked that the approvals be kept secret. While 810 agreements are routine, the Obama administration made them available for the public to read at Energy Department headquarters. Lawmakers say the department is legally required to inform Congress about the approvals. Perry approved the seven recent authorizations as the administration has tried to hash out nonproliferation standards with Saudi Arabia. Such a pact, known as a 123 agreement, would have to be agreed before U.S. companies can share physical exports of materials and equipment to build reactors. The kingdom has resisted standards on reprocessing spent fuel and enriching uranium, two potential paths to making nuclear weapons. The United States has been competing with South Korea, France, Russia and China on a potential deal to help build reactors in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is expected to announce the winner this year. Story continues Lawmakers from both parties have been concerned about Saudi Arabia's bombing campaigns in Yemen, which is on the brink of famine, and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, last October in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Concern in Congress grew last year after the kingdom's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told CBS that "Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible." Perry has said the 810 approvals were kept from the public for corporate proprietary reasons. He has also said that if Saudi Arabia relies on China or Russia for building nuclear reactors those two countries don't give a "tinker's damn" about non-proliferation. Many non-proliferation experts dispute the notion that a deal with China or Russia would be riskier. These people say the United States has many other levers it can pull to influence nuclear behavior. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by David Gregorio) Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris. Photo: Reuters Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar said on Tuesday that the European Union should be open to any proposals that UK prime minister Theresa May might bring forward to resolve the Brexit impasse. Speaking alongside French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris, Varadkar said there was still sufficient time for May to present credible solutions. As things stand, the UK will leave the European Union on 12 April without a deal. However, there is still time for the prime minister to come to the European Council with proposals proposals that are credible, and have a clear pathway to success, he said. I think we need to be open to any proposals that she may bring forward to us. Varadkar said, however, that the withdrawal agreement itself cannot be reopened. But if the United Kingdom changes its red lines, we could make changes to the declaration on the future relationship, he said. The Irish leader also said that the EU needed to determine how it would respond to any requests from the UK for a longer Brexit extension, saying that the bloc wanted to avoid a rolling extension. Any extension must have a clear purpose and a clear plan, Varadkar said. He reiterated that any long extension would involve the UK participating in the upcoming European Parliament elections. In the event of a no-deal Brexit, Varadkar said Ireland would have dual priorities: protecting the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ushered in 20 years of relative peace and stability in Northern Ireland, and protecting the EUs single market. He said his government was currently in negotiations with the European Commission as to how to achieve both of these objectives. (Bloomberg) -- Walmart Inc. will let customers order groceries by voice through Googles smart-home assistant, an attempt to counter Amazon.com Inc.s growing clout in e-commerce. Beginning this month, Walmart shoppers can add items directly to their online shopping carts by saying Hey Google, talk to Walmart. Information from prior purchases will help identify the correct brand and size -- like whether you drink 1 percent or skim milk without having to specify, according to Tom Ward, Walmarts senior vice president of digital operations. In a blog post Tuesday, he said customers can tweak their orders at home or from their smartphone while on the go. The voice-shopping service comes out of a partnership between the two companies that began in August 2017, one of several alliances Walmart has made in recent years with technology companies including Microsoft Corp., Chinas JD.com and Japans Rakuten. But the Walmart-Google pairing hasnt had much to talk about since then, especially after Walmart withdrew from Googles shopping platform earlier this year. For Alphabet Inc.s Google, teaming with the worlds largest retailer could help its digital home assistant bridge the gap with Amazons Echo device, commonly known as Alexa. It wont be easy: Amazon controlled 70 percent of the 66 million smart speaker devices installed in the U.S. as of December, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Google Home had just 24 percent. Both Amazon and Google also face the challenge of convincing consumers to order by voice, which is tricky for perishable items like fresh salmon. Only 4 percent of shoppers use voice assistants for grocery planning, according to research from consultant Bain & Co., a fraction of those who own smart speakers. And those who are interested in voice-based grocery shopping already have other options: Rival Kroger Co. has unveiled voice-shopping capabilities through Google. Googles home assistant is available on devices including iPhones and JBL portable speakers, Walmart said. The retailer will also expand the service to other platforms in the coming months, it said, a signal that it may be working with Apple Inc. Walmart declined to identify other potential partners. Story continues Were kicking off the work with Google, adding others to the mix as time goes on, Ward said. To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Boyle in New York at mboyle20@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, Lisa Wolfson, Anne Riley Moffat For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. (Bloomberg) -- U.S. lawmakers and privacy advocates have spent the last year hammering Facebook Inc. to change its behavior, prompting billionaire Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to reveal his vision for government oversight of the internet. Yet Zuckerbergs weekend plea for regulation may not align with what Washington is willing -- and able -- to do, as critics call for actions that could go as far as breaking up the company. Facebook is under fire for a cascade of missteps, including repeated data lapses and letting Russians exploit its platform to sway U.S. elections. It drew public anger after revelations that it allowed Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy that worked with Donald Trumps 2016 campaign, to obtain data on millions of Facebook users without consent. More recently, the companys plan to integrate its Instagram and WhatsApp chat services into its own Messenger platform raised concerns the move was designed to avoid a regulatory breakup and accelerate user data collection ahead of potentially tougher privacy rules. Facebook also faces possible regulation of content, particularly following its failure to stop the spread of videos of last months attacks at two New Zealand mosques. Zuckerberg called over the weekend for government regulation of four broad areas -- harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. He suggested rules such as the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation as a common framework. Whether and how the company can be tamed are open questions. Scenarios range from the most imminent likely punishment -- an expected multi-billion dollar penalty to be levied by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations -- to longer-term efforts to dismantle the company or make it more accountable for content on its platform. Heres a closer look at the possibilities: Privacy Settlement The most significant threat to Facebook is the FTCs privacy investigation, which is examining whether the company violated a 2011 settlement with the agency. The investigation has dragged on for more than a year and could result in Facebook paying a multi-billion dollar fine. That would be unprecedented for the agency -- whose record fine in a privacy case is $23 million -- but it would be manageable for Facebook. Story continues Privacy advocates want to see more than just a sizable fine. Some want the FTC to require the appointment of an independent director on the companys board to represent the interests of users. Theres also a push to prohibit Facebook from integrating the business operations of Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Others go further and say Facebook should have to unwind those properties. Data collection practices should be restricted, advocates say, like stopping the capture of data from people who arent actually Facebook users. Theres also a call for the appointment of an independent privacy ombudsman that will review Facebooks operations and publicly recommend changes. Breakup Facebook could draw antitrust scrutiny on multiple fronts. The most radical outcome of a monopolization investigation would be a breakup of the company, which Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and presidential candidate, has proposed. Warren argues that the government should designate the company as a utility and separate the main social-media business from Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook would be sure to fight any such attempt, leading to a lengthy and high-stakes court battle with antitrust enforcers that could still leave the company intact if they fail to prove Facebook is an illegal monopoly. There hasnt been an antitrust breakup of a company since AT&T in 1982. Antitrust officials at the Justice Department and the FTC have other avenues to rein in the company short of a breakup. They could move to curb certain conduct seen as squelching competition. Some have pointed to the decision by Zuckerberg to block Twitters video service Vine from the platform in 2013 as an example of the social media company abusing its power. Future acquisitions are also certain to face tougher scrutiny than when the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp, deals that sailed through the FTC. Today, many see approval of those acquisitions as a mistake because they enabled Facebook to buy emerging competitors and solidify its dominance. Privacy Law In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a series of Facebook lapses increased public anger that was already simmering from years of data scandals and breaches at companies including Sony Corp., Equifax Inc. and Target Corp. Republicans and Democrats alike say theyre looking to pass federal legislation on the issue. Several industry groups have agreed on the need for consumers to have greater insight into, and control over, what personal information is being collected about them. Although Facebook already gives users control over a lot of its data collection practices, any restrictions could still greatly affect its business model. There are key splits between the political parties, and a law could be further off than its champions suggest. Industry groups, including some that represent Facebook, are pushing for Congress to overrule state statutes, especially a strict California law passed last year. Republicans have joined the call for overriding state laws as a way to avoid a regulatory patchwork. But consumer groups and some Democrats have said Congress shouldnt overrule state laws unless a federal standard offers even greater protection. Theres pressure from industry for unified national policy, while lawmakers push for a bipartisan agreement. Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, who leads a subcommittee on consumer protection, told reporters in February she was hoping to have a bill passed by the end of 2020. Increased Liability With few exceptions, Facebook and other sites arent liable for the content that their users post. A growing number of tech critics have called for paring back the immunity social media companies enjoy. Critics include conservatives that allege social media is biased against them and tech-watchers that are concerned about the impact of controversial and violent content, such as the videos of the New Zealand killings. Online tech companies say ending the protections would make their businesses untenable. The law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, was recently pared back to the great consternation of the tech platforms. Last year, the U.S. limited the immunity of platforms that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking -- an effort that Facebook resisted, but eventually supported. Many in the tech policy community believe another push to narrow protections could come as Congress tries to tackle illegal drug ads, which can be found on Facebook. Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has said he might want to take up the issue of the liability protections more broadly in a net neutrality fight, and Europe is considering fines for failure to remove terrorist propaganda. Some conservatives have also floated the idea of limiting the exemption from liability for user content as a tool to address conservative bias, although its not clear how that could work without running afoul of First Amendment protections. Its also not clear if any of the pushes have broad backing. Privacy Policeman In January, a coalition of consumer groups called for the creation of a new U.S. data protection agency that would handle privacy enforcement in place of the FTC, which the groups view as a toothless agency that has failed to carry out its consumer protection mandate. When Zuckerberg testified before Congress, he told Democratic Representative Raul Ruiz of California the idea deserves a lot of consideration. This scenario doesnt seem likely to gain traction given that most of the debate on privacy enforcement has focused on how to strengthen -- rather than sideline -- the FTC. Its also considered extremely difficult to secure the political consensus necessary to set up a new agency. SEC Facebook said last July that it was cooperating with a probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission related to its sharing of data with Cambridge Analytica. Unlike other agencies zeroing in on privacy concerns, the SEC is likely focused on whether Facebook made timely and accurate disclosures to investors. If the regulator finds that executives withheld material information, its enforcement unit could sue the company and or its top executives. In most cases the agency ends up settling and those it accuses of wrongdoing agree to pay fines or return money to investors. SEC inquiries can drag on for years and while enforcement actions can result in significant penalties, they rarely are big enough to damage a public companys long-term financial situation. HUD Case The Department of Housing and Urban Development has accused Facebook of enabling and encouraging bias based on race and religion, as well as sex, by restricting who can see housing-related ads on its platforms and across the internet. The complaint will be heard by a U.S. administrative law judge unless one of the parties to the lawsuit wants it moved to federal district court. If the judge rules that Facebook violated the Fair Housing Act, penalties could include fines and a ban on the ads in question. Taxes In February, California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a digital dividend that would let consumers share in the billions of dollars made by technology companies such as Facebook. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is also running for president, has echoed the idea. This initiative is still embryonic and neither has described what form a tax would take. In January, the U.S. Treasury Department began discussions with the other 35 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development about how to tax global digital companies. Any outcome from these negotiations would take years, if not decades, to implement. Prison Time? Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in November released a draft of a bill that would impose steep fines and even prison time for executives at corporations that fail to adequately safeguard Americans personal data. He hasnt released a final bill and the initiative isnt likely to gather momentum. Even without the possibility of prison, theres a push to hold individual executives accountable for data violations. FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, a Democrat, has called for the agency to use this authority when a company violates an order imposed by the FTC -- like Facebooks privacy consent decree. Chopra has argued the FTC should in some cases seek the dismissal of executives and board members who oversee conduct that violates agency orders, especially in cases of repeat offenders. Clawbacks of bonuses and changes in executive compensation, bans on business practices and closing of business lines are other possible punishments Chopra outlines. Any action would require a majority vote of the Republican-controlled commission. --With assistance from Ben Bain and Laura Davison. To contact the reporters on this story: Ben Brody in Washington at btenerellabr@bloomberg.net;David McLaughlin in Washington at dmclaughlin9@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, John Harney For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. Wells Fargo is launching an external search for its next CEO and analysts had one resounding piece of advice for the embattled lender: find the next Jamie Dimon. The current head of JPMorgan Chase is the industry's most prolific leader, credited with training the next generation of executives and solidifying the banks position as the largest financial institution in the U.S. His former proteges hold positions across the financial sector, including Barclays CEO Jes Staley and Charles Scharf, former Viseo CEO and BNY Mellons current chief -- as well as Comcast CFO Michael Cavanagh. Achieving that goal, however, is easier said than done. Dimon was appointed CEO of Chase after the companys purchase of Bank One where he was the top executive -- in 2004, and only after serving as president and chief operating officer of the combined firm. What they need to find is an individual who is in the same position that Jamie Dimon was when he went to BankOne, RBC Capital Markets Gerard Cassidy told FOX Business. Finding somebody who is already established and has brand recognition, Im not convinced that's who you want to go for. Wells Fargo declined to comment on its search beyond prior comments from board Chairwoman Betsy Duke. Chase is an obvious place for Wells Fargo to look and experts flagged a number of potential candidates, including investment banking head Daniel Pinto. But some analysts are hoping the lender will go with a lesser-known individual. Other names that analysts cited were William Demchak, CEO of PNC Financial Services Group, Colm Kelleher, Morgan Stanleys departing president, Bill Rogers, the CEO of SunTrust Banks Inc. who is slated to lead the lender after its merger with BB&T, and Robert Steel, CEO of Perella Weinberg Partners and former economic adviser for past New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Experts also flagged Bank of America as a potential firm to pull from, but viewed it less likely that the lender would look to a company like Citigroup -- which has more of an international focus on emerging markets. Story continues Given Wells Fargos laundry list of regulatory problems, the bank could tap someone from the federal government for its next chief. One name cited by several analysts was Neel Kashkari, current president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Demchak, Kelleher, Pinto and Steel did not respond to FOX Business' requests for comment. Kashkari and Rogers, through spokespeople, declined to comment. Underscoring Wells Fargo's search, however, is the need to appease its most fervent congressional critics, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren -- a Massachusetts Democrat who had a notable role in forcing the departure of current CEO Tim Sloan and former chief John Stumpf, who oversaw the lender when many of its major scandals occurred. Warren has fired two CEOs, said Dick Bove, senior research analyst at Odeon Capital Group. You cant ignore her, you just cant do that. At the top of the list for any new executive will be addressing the federal scrutiny and convincing the Federal Reserve to lift the asset cap imposed on Wells Fargo last year. They are doing it to try to get themselves out of the crosshairs of a regulatory body politick thats been against them both in rhetoric [and] in reality, Tony Scherrer, director of research at Smead Capital Management, told FOX Business. The focus externally is a good way to show your hand, that youre looking to change things potentially pretty meaningfully in terms of the culture at least. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP Outside of moving past the tumultuous last few years, however, the new CEO could also be tasked with expanding Wells Fargos investment banking and overseas operations to better compete against Chase and Bank of America. Related Articles President Donald Trump ordered the State Department to cut funding for Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador this weekend in retaliation for the recent influx of migrants from these nations, reversing a longstanding policy that says aid helps abate immigration. Were giving them $500 million, Trump told reporters on Friday, claiming without evidence that the governments of these nations set up immigrant caravans destined for the U.S.-Mexico border with their worst people. We were paying them tremendous amounts of money, and were not paying them anymore because they havent done a thing for us, he continued. The State Department said a day later that it would be ending foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Hondura and El Salvador) for fiscal years 2017 and 2018 at the presidents direction. A congressional aide told Reuters this could be about $700 million. We will be engaging Congress as part of this process, said a State Department spokesperson. According to Liz Schrayer, president and CEO of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalitiona nonprofit coalition of businesses and NGOs dedicated to American development and diplomacypulling back aid exasperates the exact root causes that are creating the migration numbers increase. Weve seen statistics that for every 10 additional murders, six additional children seek safety at our border, said Schrayer. Foreign aid targets these uninhabitable conditions by supporting security and programs of economic development, she said. One such U.S.-funded program in El Salvador gives children job training, and according to Schrayer, homicides rates have come down 78% in these areas. That means kids are staying in these communities, she said. Theyre not coming to our borders. Trump argues the governments in the Northern Triangle arent doing enough to stop migration to the U.S. Schrayer said she agrees with the president in that yes, those countrys leadership need to be accountable to their citizens, and should do more. Story continues But, she added, the situation should also be answered with the active diplomacy and effective development funded by foreign assistance programs. Speaking at the Northern Triangle conference in June 2017, Vice President Mike Pence promoted this policy, saying that to further stem the flow of illegal immigration and illegal drugs into the United States, President Trump knows, as do all of you, that we must confront these problems at their source. Trumps decision to cut aid is a full reversal of this policy, and Congressional Democrats were swift to condemn the decision. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the end of these aid programs would undermine American interests and put our national security at risk. U.S. foreign assistance is not charity; it advances our strategic interests and funds initiatives that protect American citizens, Menendez said in a statement. From combating drug trafficking and transnational criminal groups to helping establish safe communities with economic opportunities, U.S. foreign assistance addresses the factors driving migration from Central America. A Congressional delegation to El Salvador investigating the increase in family and child migrations to the U.S. called the presidents decision entirely counterproductive. It will only result in more children and families being forced to make the dangerous journey north to the U.S.-Mexico border, said the five Democratic lawmakers in a statement. We will work with our colleagues in Congress to do everything in our power to push back on the Presidents misguided approach to Central America. Trump has long threatened to cut off aid to the Northern Triangle in retaliation for these countries not stopping the caravans passing through their borders. Families and children continue to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, however, and Trump says the detention centers are full. Weve run out of space, said Trump on Friday. We cant hold people anymore. Trump has threatened to entirely shutdown the southern border as the result of these record-breaking numbers. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, February of this year saw 78,000 apprehensions at the southern bordermore than any other month in the past five years. Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands, April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wright Medical Group N.V. (WMGI) announced today that it will present at the Needham Healthcare Conference on Wednesday, April 10, 2019, at the Westin NY Grand Central Hotel in New York, New York. Julie Dewey, chief communications officer, will present at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time. A live audio webcast of the conference presentation, along with the accompanying presentation materials, will be available on Wrights corporate website at www.wright.com , under the Investor Relations link. The audio webcast and accompanying presentation materials will be archived on this site under the Investor Presentations link following the conference. Internet Posting of Information Wright routinely posts information that may be important to investors in the Investor Relations section of its website at www.wright.com . The company encourages investors and potential investors to consult the Wright website regularly for important information about Wright. About Wright Medical Group N.V. Wright Medical Group N.V. is a global medical device company focused on extremities and biologics products. The company is committed to delivering innovative, value-added solutions improving quality of life for patients worldwide and is a recognized leader of surgical solutions for the upper extremity (shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand), lower extremity (foot and ankle) and biologics markets, three of the fastest growing segments in orthopedics. For more information about Wright, visit www.wright.com . Investors & Media: Julie D. Dewey Sr. Vice President, Chief Communications Officer Wright Medical Group N.V. (901) 290-5817 julie.dewey@wright.com The Massachusetts Gaming Commission hearing will examine Wynn Resorts' conduct in dealing with accusations of rape and sexual misconduct against founder and former CEO Steve Wynn. The hearing begins Tuesday and is expected to last three days. At stake is Wynn Resorts' state gaming license. This week, Wynn Resorts WYNN goes on trial, or at least something resembling it. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission is calling the casino giant on the carpet for repeatedly turning a blind eye to accusations of rape and sexual misconduct against founder and former CEO Steve Wynn. A hearing will begin on Tuesday and is expected to last three days. The hearing will culminate in a decision about whether to revoke Wynn Resorts' state gaming license. The casino won the license in 2013, beating out competitors including Caesars CZR and Mohegan Sun. The scandal swirling around Steve Wynn has called the company's suitability qualifications into question. The board of Wynn Resorts had been specifically instructed by its counsel not to reveal to the commission the existence of a $7.5 million settlement paid by Steve Wynn to a former employee to settle sexual harassment claims. The commission was not informed that multiple employees had complained through proper channels about serious misbehavior by the company's then-CEO. Steve Wynn stepped down as chairman in February last year. By the end of March, he'd sold his entire stake in the company he'd founded. He continues to deny all allegations of sexual misconduct. Wynn Resorts has already admitted to a litany of charges, laid out in a complaint by the Nevada Gaming Control Board. That complaint had detailed how more than half a dozen casino executives learned of serious allegations against Steve Wynn but failed to follow the company's own policies in response. In February, the Nevada Gaming Commission levied a historic $20 million fine against Wynn Resorts, nearly quadrupling the previous record fine. Commissioner Philip Pro said, "It's about a failure of a corporate culture to effectively govern itself as it should." Story continues CEO Matt Maddox and Chairman Phil Satre, who joined the board after the resignations of Steve Wynn and subsequent chairman and longtime Wynn pal Boone Wayson, argued the company had undergone a paradigm shift and reinvented itself. It separated completely from Steve Wynn within months of The Wall Street Journal article in January 2018 outlining a slew of allegations. No executive blamed in the Nevada complaint is with the company any longer, including Wynn Las Vegas President Maurice Wooden and General Counsel Kim Sinatra. The company's board also was refreshed, with the addition of three women directors. Wynn Resorts also has overhauled its policies on sexual harassment. It now requires training for every employee and has installed an independent compliance committee to oversee both the training and the complaints. After the company agreed to settle with the Nevada Gaming Control Board, it released a statement saying, "We have undergone an extensive self-examination over the last 12 months, intended to reinvigorate and implement meaningful change across all levels of the organization." Wynn Resorts said Maddox was not available for an interview ahead of Tuesday's hearing. Maddox role in spotlight In Massachusetts, gaming regulators will decide whether Wynn Resorts or its associated qualifiers violated state laws or regulations. They will determine whether the company failed to abide by its own internal policies and procedures. Commissioners will tackle questions about whether the company or executives lied or provided misleading statements after the license was awarded. Maddox will face special scrutiny. He has been with the company since 2002 and was president from 2013 until he stepped into the role of CEO after Wynn's departure. He was known to be Wynn's protege, but in an interview shortly after becoming CEO, he told CNBC that he didn't have any actionable knowledge of the Wynn allegations. "There was never a complaint that made it to me," he said. Maddox then pointed out he'd appointed Sinatra as a new diversity and inclusion officer, saying she had "been my partner at this company over the last 15 years and is an incredible executive." But Sinatra knew about multiple instances of sexual harassment allegations against Wynn and failed to report them, according to the complaint filed with the Nevada Gaming Commission and admitted to by Wynn Resorts. Also under a microscope at this week's hearing will be Elaine Wynn, Steve Wynn's ex-wife, who is co-founder of Wynn Resorts and was a longtime board member. (She stepped down in 2015.) With almost 9 percent ownership of outstanding shares, Elaine Wynn is the company's largest individual shareholder and subject to suitability requirements in Massachusetts. She testified in court in March last year that in 2009 she had told Sinatra, then the company's general counsel, that she'd gotten information about an alleged rape by her ex-husband against an employee in 2005. Elaine Wynn was a director when the Massachusetts gaming license was granted. She and Maddox are the only original individual qualifiers remaining. The current qualifiers have been asked to attend including all the current board members to be available to testify. Encore Boston Harbor set to open in June Wynn Resorts considers its property in Everett, outside Boston, to be integral to its growth strategy. It changed the name from Wynn Boston Harbor to Encore Boston Harbor to distance itself from Steve Wynn's brand. The $2.6 billion property on the Mystic River has begun taking reservations for its anticipated opening in June. Gaming analysts have begun factoring in expected earnings from Encore Boston Harbor. The expectation generally is that Wynn Resorts will retain its license but pay a significant fine. Analysts point to the investment that Wynn made to recover the property, once a toxic waste site, as well as the 4,000 union jobs the project created for construction. Nearly the same amount is anticipated when the resort opens its doors for business. But Nomura/Instinet analyst Harry Curtis said "the potential revocation" of its gaming license in Massachusetts is still a risk to the stock. Wynn shares were up 8 percent Monday, along with other casino stocks, after Macau gaming revenue in March was better than expected. The stock, which has a market capitalization of $13.9 billion, has lost nearly 30 percent of its value over the past year but is up nearly 30 percent since January. A written decision from the gaming commission will be issued after a period of deliberation but is not expected immediately. More From CNBC Washington is considering additional sanctions against Iran, a senior U.S. administration official has said. The United States intends to follow through with new sanctions around the first anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from a landmark international nuclear deal, the official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said on April 1. President Donald Trump announced in May that the United States was pulling out of the 2015 deal meant to curb Tehran's nuclear program and ordered that sanctions be imposed again on Iran. The sanctions target Iran's energy, shipbuilding, shipping, and financial sectors. "We just want a continued chilling effect," the official said. "We want businesses to continue to think doing business with Iran is a terrible idea at this point." The 2015 pact, agreed by the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China, and Iran, sought to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons in return for the removal of sanctions that had crippled its economy. The official said Washington hoped to take the additional measures in the coming weeks. The Trump administration has pressed hard against what it calls Tehran's "malign" activities including alleged support for extremist violence in the Middle East, testing of ballistic and nuclear weapons, and support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. WATCH: Amateur video sent to RFE/RL's Radio Farda from Shiraz and Golestan Province show inundated streets and cars being swept away last week. Meanwhile, Iran said on April 1 that U.S. sanctions were impeding aid workers from sending helicopters to flood-hit regions of the country because of the poor state of the national helicopter fleet. Iran has announced a state of an emergency in southern regions threatened by flooding after heavy rains that have killed more than 45 people. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that U.S. sanctions were "impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedCrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods." "Blocked equipment includes relief choppers: This isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM," Zarif said. With reporting by Reuters and dpa In this past election, like many before it, the left used the specter of The Klan and Old Jim Crow in order to motivate black people to vote... Fewer Colorado Springs-area homes are being built so far in 2019 than during the same time last year, but one housing industry official says the local economy remains healthy and he doesnt expect a construction downturn. During the first quarter, the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department issued 705 permits for construction of single-family homes in El Paso County, a 27.3 percent decline from the same period last year, the agency reported. In March, the department issued 274 permits, down by a nearly identical percentage. Its certainly not a red flag, the sky is falling kind of position by anybody I talk to among the top builders, said Todd Anderson, board president of the Housing & Building Association of Colorado Springs and owner of a building industry and leadership development consulting firm. Anderson said one reason for the reduced construction might be that builders pulled extra numbers of permits in late 2018 to avoid paperwork requirements and higher costs related to energy-efficiency building codes that took effect Dec. 1. In effect, builders borrowed from the permits they would have pulled in early 2019, he said. Other builders might have waited before launching their next round of construction until they sold off their inventory of speculative homes those built with the expectation that buyers will come along later, Anderson said. Once builders give the green light to resume construction, it might take several weeks to get going on new homes, he said. But Anderson said hes confident single-family permits will total about 3,000 this year, which he says is a solid and sustainable figure for the area, based on historical averages. Were still very bullish and positive, he said. Among factors working in favor of builders: Employers continued to add jobs in 2018, albeit at a slower pace than a year earlier, figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show. Long-term mortgage rates have been falling and averaged 4.06 percent nationally last week, down from 4.28 percent a week earlier, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. And the Pikes Peak regions population is growing. Local homebuilders also are benefiting from Denver-area residents who buy homes in northern Colorado Springs and northern El Paso County and commute to their jobs up north, Anderson said. Were continuing to see a pretty decent influx of people that work in the (Denver) Tech Center and all around Denver that cant afford and cant qualify for a home anywhere near Denver, and Castle Rock is almost as expensive now, he said. Theyre buying down here in El Paso County because its $100,000 to $150,000 less for the same size house. Homebuilding continues to be a significant part of the Pikes Peak regions economy, so its tracked closely by economists, business people and local governments. The industry employs thousands of drywallers, plumbers, electricians and others in the trades. And tax revenues collected on the sales of building materials generate millions of dollars for local governments, which use the money to pay for basic services. Wildwood Casino on Tuesday will become the third Cripple Creek gaming giant to unveil plans for a hotel, all to attract more visitors to the historic mining town. American Gaming Group plans to start work in mid-May on the $14 million, 104-room Wildwood Hotel next to the casino it opened in 2008 on the gaming districts north end. The four-story hotel is to open by late August 2020. The City Council will consider a series of rezonings and related development approvals at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. The three new hotels would nearly double total rooms, to more than 400, before the 30th anniversary of Colorados legalized gambling in late 2021. Bronco Billys Casino and Triple Crown Casinos earlier announced plans for 150-room hotels next to their complexes in the heart of the gambling district. Everyone in Cripple Creek knows the town needs more hotel rooms. Its been an ongoing issue thats kept the town from achieving its full potential, Wildwood co-owner Joe Canfora said in a news release. There is a need for quality rooms in this market, and we will be the first to deliver. The project is financed through STORE (Single Tenant Operational Real Estate) Capital Inc., a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based real estate investment trust, which Canfora said will allow the hotel to be the first under construction and the first to open of the three. The Triple Crown is slated to open in the second half of 2020, and Bronco Billys hotel is set to open in late 2020 or early 2021. The Wildwood Hotel will replace a parking lot on the casinos north side. The lot will be moved to the west and connected to the gaming hall with a heated, covered entry. The hotel will have 10 high-roller suites, including four that can be converted into hospitality suites, a 1,000-square-foot multipurpose space and a rooftop area for events with up to 100 people. Room rates are expected to average $100 a night, Canfora said. The recipe for success in Cripple Creek includes many ingredients, including meeting space, a small convention center to help fill these rooms, employee housing, attracting (tour) bus groups and marketing Cripple Creek as a tourist destination, he said. Once everybody adds (hotel) product, I see nothing but positive for Cripple Creek. I see Cripple Creek prospering more with fewer valleys in business. American Gaming began planning for the hotel early last year after restructuring its ownership, buying out smaller partners and adding 125 slot machines to the Wildwood Casino, Canfora said. The casinos current hotel, the 67-room Gold King Inn, will be renamed the Wildwood Inn and continue to provide rooms and overnight accommodations for bus tours. The 22-year-old hotel recently got extensive renovations, including a remodeled lobby and updated rooms. The casino is the largest single gaming property in Cripple Creek, though Bronco Billys and Triple Crown are larger when their multi-casino properties are combined. Wildwood operates 506 slot machines and 14 tables for poker, blackjack, craps and roulette, which it says is the most of any of the citys 12 casinos. Democrat Mike Johnston's campaign to replace Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner set a state fundraising record, collecting $1.8 million so far this year, Johnston announced Tuesday. The former state senator and gubernatorial candidate from Denver took in more cash for an initial fundraising quarter than any Senate candidate in state history, according to Federal Election Commission records. Johnston, who isn't taking donations from political action committees, said he received contributions from residents of each of Colorado's 64 counties, but his campaign didn't provide details such as the number of donors, expenditures or cash on hand. Johnston launched his campaign Jan. 31, joining a sprawling Democratic primary field of candidates hoping to challenge Gardner, considered one of the most vulnerable incumbent senators up for re-election in 2020. Johnston is the first Colorado Senate candidate to announce an estimate of his fundraising total for the quarter, which ended March 31. Senate and congressional candidates must file detailed reports for the first quarter with the FEC by April 15. Colorado deserves a senator who will fight for Colorado values and wont be afraid to address the real problems facing our country," Johnston said in a statement. ""My whole life Ive run toward our toughest challenges, and thats what Ill do in the U.S. Senate. "This early support builds the momentum we need to share that message and defeat Cory Gardner, so we can fight for the progressive policies our country needs on healthcare, immigration and climate change. The $1.8 million Johnston brought in for his Senate campaign's first quarter also tops the sum he raised across four quarters in 2017 for his gubernatorial bid. He set a modern record that year for donations to a state-level campaign in an off-year by taking in more than $1.5 million. (Johnston finished third in last year's four-way primary for governor, behind then-U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, who won the governor's race, and former State Treasurer Cary Kennedy.) The $5,600 individual contribution limits for U.S. Senate campaigns are substantially higher than Colorado's limits on contributions for governor, which are capped at $1,050 from individuals. Johnston's U.S. Senate fundraising total is slightly more than the $1.7 million Gardner reported on hand at the end of 2017, after the incumbent raised a total of $2.6 million over the last four years. A campaign spokesman for Gardner didn't respond to an inquiry from Colorado Politics asking if the Republican plans to release fundraising totals for the most recent quarter before the filing deadline. In all, eight Democrats are already running in the Senate primary, and a handful of prominent Democrats are considered potential candidates. Gardner is one of only two Republican senators running for re-election in states won by Democrat Hillary Clinton, who carried Colorado in 2016 by 5 percentage points. Former House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, who made unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Senate in 2010 and Congress in 2014, is the other major Democratic candidate so far running for Gardner's seat. A spokeswoman for Romanoff told Colorado Politics his campaign doesn't plan to release fundraising totals ahead of the filing deadline. Also in the running are scientist Trish Zornio, organizer Lorena Garcia, activist Danielle Kombo, pharmacist Dustin Leitzel and veterans advocate Keith Pottratz and former congressional candidate Stephany Rose Spaulding. Several Democrats have said they're considering joining the field, including John Walsh, a former U.S. attorney for Colorado, and state Sen. Kerry Donovan of Vail. U.S. Reps. Ed Perlmutter and Joe Neguse are also considered potential Gardner challengers. Before his announcement, the Colorado Senate candidate with the previous highest initial quarterly fundraising total was Republican Pete Coors, who reported raising $1.6 million for the second quarter of 2004, his first as a candidate. (Coors lost the race to the Democratic nominee, then-Attorney General Ken Salazar.) Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet had the next-highest initial quarterly total, taking in $1.42 million during the first quarter he was in the 2010 race, following his appointment to the seat in January 2009. (Bennet survived a primary challenge from Romanoff and narrowly defeated Republican nominee Ken Buck in the general election.) Hot on Bennet's heels, Gardner reported raising $1.41 million for the first quarter of 2014, which was also the first quarter he was a declared 2014 Senate candidate. (Gardner, at the time a sitting congressman, unseated Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Udall.) Democrat Tom Strickland brought in $1.3 million for the last reporting period of 2001, his first in the 2002 Senate race. (Strickland lost a bid to oust Republican U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard in a rematch of their 1996 contest.) DENVER The fiercely controversial red-flag bill, which allows a court to temporarily seize guns from a person deemed to be a threat, is on its way to Gov. Jared Polis for his promised signature. The state House approved Senate amendments to House Bill 1177 on Monday and passed the legislation 38-25. Democratic Reps. Bri Buentello of Pueblo and Donald Valdez of La Jara joined Republicans in voting no. A couple of lawmakers were excused. The law takes effect the instant Polis signs it. Courts and law enforcement officials have until Jan. 1 to come up with conforming processes. Under the bill, family, household members or law enforcement can petition a court to have guns seized from anyone believed to pose a threat to themselves or others. The petitioner must provide reasonable proof that the person is a danger. If the court concurs, the person in question would be provided legal counsel and a hearing within 14 days to determine if an order to seize the guns should be instituted for up to 364 days. The court also can order a mental health evaluation and treatment. When the gun owner wants to recoup the weapons, he or she must prove they no longer pose a risk. Republican lawmakers fought the bill furiously. And as of Wednesday, 31 counties had adopted resolutions declaring themselves sanctuary counties, meaning they will not enforce the law. Rio Blanco County, on the Western Slope, adopted a similar resolution based on the 2018 bill. Several sheriffs have said they will not enforce the law. El Paso County named itself a Second Amendment preservation county, meaning the Sheriffs Office would serve any court orders issued under the new law, as it does temporary protection orders, and instruct the individual to surrender any firearms to a licensed dealer. But the agency would not search a residence for guns or store surrendered guns, said spokeswoman Jacqueline Kirby. The bill also is cited as one of the reasons for attempted recalls of Democrats throughout the state, including for Senate President Leroy Garcia and for Reps. Buentello and Daneya Esgar of Pueblo, although all three voted against the bill. So did Valdez. But he, too, is being considered for a recall, the Pueblo Chieftain reported last week. Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock, a Republican, faces a recall attempt because he supports HB 1177. One of his deputies, Zackari Parrish, was slain Dec. 31, 2017, by a mentally ill man Parrish was trying to help. Also targeted for potential recall: Rep. Rochelle Galindo of Greeley, and Sen. Jeff Bridges and Rep. Meg Froelich, both of Greenwood Village. Some have called the law unconstitutional, but Attorney General Phil Weiser and former U.S. Attorney John Walsh deemed it constitutional, said House Majority Leader Alec Garnett, D-Denver, a prime co-sponsor. Calling Monday a monumental day, Garnett said, Colorado really took a step forward in protecting the public, trying to prevent future gun violence. He expressed admiration for his co-sponsor, Rep. Tom Sullivan of Centennial, whose son Alex was murdered in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting and for whom he ran the bill. Garnett also thanked the other gun violence victims, district attorneys and law enforcement officers who helped put in place model legislation that maximizes due process and will save lives. The fear tactics and intimidation tactics that came from one extreme side of the spectrum didnt work, he said. Coloradans should feel good that obstructionist nature for the sake of obstruction is not how we do business in Colorado. The attempted recalls are costly taxpayer-funded elections that go after lawmakers who were just elected, many with strong support, he said. The world has changed a lot since 2013, when two Democratic state senators were recalled largely due to their support for gun control measures, Garnett noted. The public is overwhelmingly supportive of temporarily removing firearms from people who are deemed dangerous by a judge. They want the legislature to stand up and stop mass shootings. The Associated Press contributed to this story. 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 Russ Wolfe, co-founder of Colorado Springs iconic Flying W Ranch, died Friday. Wolfe, 94, preserved the western way of life at the ranch, which saw more than 6 million visitors before it burned in the Waldo Canyon fire, his family reports. Under Wolfes leadership, what began as a simple tourism business in the 1950s became a local landmark complete with a 400-seat rodeo arena and steakhouse where weddings, conventions and other events were hosted. Wolfe was a key player in local tourism for decades, helping to start the Pikes Peak Country Attractions Association and Experience Colorado Springs, formerly the local convention and visitors bureau. The mans life speaks for itself, said daughter Leigh Ann Wolfe. Russ Wolfe, born in Kansas on Jan. 25, 1925, had never seen the ocean when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an apprentice seaman in 1942 at age 17, according to a written history compiled by Leigh Ann Wolfe. He rose through the ranks to become a first lieutenant, second in command on a minesweeper during World War II. He survived a typhoon and saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after they were bombed. He was introduced to ranching through his wife, Marian, whose father bought a ranch in 1948 in what is now northwest Colorado Springs. My father-in-law asked me if Id consider learning the cattle business, and I said, Ill do anything to get out of Kansas, especially if I can marry your daughter, Russ Wolfe recalled when he was honored with the Pikes Peak Range Riders Silver Spur Award in 2000. The two were married 54 years when she died in 1999. Together, they started the Flying W as a way to generate extra cash for a ranching operation that covered more than 6,000 acres in an area that now includes Mountain Shadows, Peregrine, Rockrimmon and other upscale neighborhoods. He initially led trail rides. Later, his wife cooked meals of beef brisket, red beans and biscuits that became a staple at the ranch. The first meal attracted 11 customers who paid $3 each for everything. Wolfe eventually hired Colorado College students to sing during the meal. The operation grew rapidly and by the early 1960s was attracting more than 100,000 people a year for its chuckwagon suppers and Western shows. Wolfe built the winter steakhouse in 1968 to keep the Flying W Wranglers, musicians who entertained customers nightly, working year-round. He and his wife also raised Hereford bulls, black Angus cows and quarter horses. He could castrate a bull calf in 1 1/2 minutes, according to Leigh Ann Wolfes written history. The Rev. Scotty Vaughn, pastor at a church that opened on the ranch, said Russ Wolfe became his role model when he began working for the ranch as a musician in his early 20s. He just taught me a lot of stuff not only about work, but about life, Vaughn said. He helped me to grow up. I think he did that for a lot of folks. Russ was a pioneer. He cared about people, and he cared about the community. He cared about God, and he cared about his country. Russ Wolfe served more than two decades on the board of Academy School District 20. He helped lead the charge in the 1950s to expand the district, then one elementary school with 20 students, to include Black Forest and the Air Force Academy, according to the written history. Colorado Springs architect Lamar Kelsey wrote in a 1977 letter that Wolfes 23 years of service on the board showed a level of devotion that few men achieve. Wolfe also lobbied for a local tourism tax and won many accolades for his work in the hospitality industry. In 1982, then-Gov. Richard Lamm presented him with the Colorado Hospitality Award. Leigh Ann Wolfe said shes devastated that her father didnt live to attend the groundbreaking for the ranchs reconstruction, slated for June 29. But, hell be there in spirit, she said. Russell Marshall Wolfe is survived by his sister, Rosemary June Emerick, and her husband, Jack Kenny Emerick; daughters Terry Camille Wolfe, Sunny Lea Baber (husband Richard Baber) and Leigh Ann Thurston (husband Gerald H. Thurston); grandsons Jason Russell Wolfe and Gerald H. Thurston III; granddaughter Ruth Russell Thurston; and great granddaughter Emerson Marie Wolfe. His funeral will be at 2 p.m. Saturday at First United Methodist Church, 420 N. Nevada Ave. Vaughn will officiate, and the Flying W Wranglers will perform. The family will receive friends at the church following the celebration of life. Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS, and a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. We listen to local police and fire departments scanner traffic, but sometimes miss crimes, wrecks, fires or other incidents, especially if they happen overnight. If you know of something were not covering yet, please let Managing Editor Jeff Pownall know by emailing him at jpownall@lufkindailynews.com, or submit a news tip online by visiting lufkindailynews.com/tips. The answer that negotiators arrived at was the Irish backstop , which effectively would mean that Northern Ireland would remain in a European customs union and stay aligned with single market rules no matter what. The backstop would cease to apply should the U.K. and EU come up with alternative arrangements, namely some sort of technological solution that obviates the need for formal checks or physical infrastructure, but such a solution is as yet undeveloped and probably years away. Though Northern Irelands Department for the Economy has concluded that the backstop would be a boon for foreign direct investment in Northern Ireland, the ruling Democratic Unionist Party despises the idea. Being stuck applying EU tariffs and following EU regulations, just like the Irish Republic, while the rest of the U.K. floats away is seen as a stepping-stone toward Irish reunification. And without the DUPs votes, the withdrawal agreement does not have the numbers to pass in Parliament unless it gets significant support from the opposition Labour Party an unlikely prospect. Were it not for the Irish question, resolution would be easier. But not by much. There is still a deceptively hard decision to be made over whether to prioritize business interests through close ties to Europe or greater autonomy through a U.K.-EU free trade agreement. Every advanced European economy has had to make this decision at some point, and all of them chose either full EU membership or participation in the single market (Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein), which means they obey rules set by EU member states on things like food standards and competition. Most Brexiteers resist the single market, preferring instead a comprehensive free trade agreement. And thats where Northern Ireland invariably comes up again, because its the EUs relative strength on trade that enables it to make the Irish backstop a permanent feature of any future arrangement even a free trade deal. Disunity Ahead If Parliament cant break the deadlock, some members 184 of roughly 638, according to Wednesdays vote favor canceling Brexit over leaving without a transition period. This could be done unilaterally by the U.K. at any time. Another 160 support departing without a deal. But that would only exacerbate the Irish border issue, creating the need for checks on goods moving across the border. (Ironically, a British government guidance document released earlier this month states that, in a no-deal scenario, it would not carry out checks on goods moving into Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, though checks would be conducted on goods entering the rest of the U.K. This is not a far cry from the special treatment the Northern Irish DUP has been trying to prevent.) Worse still, no deal is not in itself an endpoint; like the withdrawal agreement, it is merely a transient stage while working out the future relationship just a much more chaotic transition. Once out of the EUs customs union, the British government would be free to negotiate its own free trade agreements with non-EU countries. At some point, however, it would desire a trade deal with the bloc that accounts for almost half of all British trade. The realities of the balance of power, and of the Irish border, would not have changed in the intervening period. In fact, if prevailing economic impact assessments are accurate, the U.K. will be returning to the table after having been through much worse than the EU collectively. This is the crux of the matter. Leaving the EU is easy. Trade negotiations are hard. And for a European power, even one like the United Kingdom, breaking up with Europe is imposible. 1. Fill in your name or an alias. Do not leave blank or use the name 'guest' or 'anonymous'. 2. No Nivul Peh. Profanity will be deleted. 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The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss (no more than 50% of the source material) provide a link back to the original articleIf you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe a post on this website falls outside the boundaries of "Fair Use" and legitimately infringes on yours or your clients copyright please contact [email protected] This website is owned by :Marco ZwaneveldDrijfriemstraat 522516 XR The HagueNetherlands.I will not rent, sell, share or otherwise disclose your personal information to any third party.We might contact you from time to time regarding your purchases or the services (like forums and announcement lists) you have subscribed to.Some of the 3rd party advertisers on lunaticoutpost.com may use cookiesto track peformance and/or to serve relevant ads.If you wish to read more and/or opt out of such cookies, please visit: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ Username: Password: or Register Back to Forum Reply to This post Post New Thread Thread Rating: 12 Vote(s) - 2.33 Average 1 2 3 4 5 Page: 1 2 3 4 5 ... 10 Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Natura Naturans Registered User User ID: 480998 04-02-2019 04:06 PM Posts: 13,155 Post: #1 Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Advertisement A review of the data pertaining to the accusations in the phony Steele dossier about a Trump-Russia Bank connection discovered the sources used is most likely the same source the FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to investigate the Trump-Alfa Bank connection. This person also just happens to be a radical Hillary Clinton supporter! Jean Camp, who created the fake computer logs and tried to implicate Trump in Alfa Bank collusion Some techies uncovered that the the Trump Tower servers began to be bombarded with the same exact invalid look-up requests that use the words trump and alfa together, which were automatically placed in the servers log file by the server. According to the New York Times, computer logs showed that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 look-up messages to the Trump servers. The reason the FBI wasnt able to find anything was because the claims were based entirely on DNS logs, digital records of when one server looks up how to contact another across the internet. A forensic examination conducted by Alfa Bank of the Alfa Bank computer revealed that the only communications that took place regarding trump were those logged requests coming from outside its servers noted by the New York Times above. No other communications were found as indicated in the forensic report related to this subject. Alfa Bank then blamed Jean Camp & Associates for artificially setting up a false Trump-Alfa Bank narrative and threatened a lawsuit: In May of this year [2017], the bank tapped Kirkland & Ellis LLP, a white-shoe American law firm, to write a letter to L. Jean Camp, an esteemed Indiana University computer scientist and researcher and a vocal supporter of the claims made by Tea Leaves. This initial letter, first reported by CNN, claimed that the Camp investigation into the covert server chatter had encouraged inquiries into supposed links to the Trump organization and that her activities continue to this day to promote an unwarranted investigation into Alfa Banks communication with the Trump Organization. The letter added that Alfa Bank is exploring all available options to protect itself [including] litigation and causes of action under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, further demanding that Camp preserve all records pertaining to the Tea Leaves research. Such a preservation request is often the precursor to a lawsuit. There would be more letters. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04...y-hillary/ The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. --Baruch Spinoza As all the accusations against Trump for Russian collusion collapse we are finding out just how they were created in the first place.A review of the data pertaining to the accusations in the phony Steele dossier about a Trump-Russia Bank connection discovered the sources used is most likely the same source the FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to investigate the Trump-Alfa Bank connection.This person also just happens to be a radical Hillary Clinton supporter!Jean Camp, who created the fake computer logs and tried to implicate Trump in Alfa Bank collusionSome techies uncovered that the the Trump Tower servers began to be bombarded with the same exact invalid look-up requests that use the words trump and alfa together, which were automatically placed in the servers log file by the server. According to the New York Times, computer logs showed that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 look-up messages to the Trump servers.The reason the FBI wasnt able to find anything was because the claims were based entirely on DNS logs, digital records of when one server looks up how to contact another across the internet. A forensic examination conducted by Alfa Bank of the Alfa Bank computer revealed that the only communications that took place regarding trump were those logged requests coming from outside its servers noted by the New York Times above. No other communications were found as indicated in the forensic report related to this subject.Alfa Bank then blamed Jean Camp & Associates for artificially setting up a false Trump-Alfa Bank narrative and threatened a lawsuit:In May of this year [2017], the bank tapped Kirkland & Ellis LLP, a white-shoe American law firm, to write a letter to L. Jean Camp, an esteemed Indiana University computer scientist and researcher and a vocal supporter of the claims made by Tea Leaves. This initial letter, first reported by CNN, claimed that the Camp investigation into the covert server chatter had encouraged inquiries into supposed links to the Trump organization and that her activities continue to this day to promote an unwarranted investigation into Alfa Banks communication with the Trump Organization. The letter added that Alfa Bank is exploring all available options to protect itself [including] litigation and causes of action under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, further demanding that Camp preserve all records pertaining to the Tea Leaves research. Such a preservation request is often the precursor to a lawsuit. There would be more letters.The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. --Baruch Spinoza FreeFlow lop guest User ID: 5 04-02-2019 04:14 PM Post: #2 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 495435 04-02-2019 04:15 PM Post: #3 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter No surprise there LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 423870 04-02-2019 05:34 PM Post: #4 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Democrats colluded with russia like a hungry crackwhore. They confess their crimes every time they accuse Trump. The tards have ZERO imagination. spo snouou Vocem sine nomine audivit! User ID: 350320 06-02-2019 09:04 AM Posts: 67,593 Post: #5 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/10493...60961.html _____ _____ spo snouou Vocem sine nomine audivit! User ID: 350320 06-02-2019 09:16 AM Posts: 67,593 Post: #6 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter LoP Guest Wrote: (04-02-2019 05:34 PM) Democrats colluded with russia like a hungry crackwhore. They confess their crimes every time they accuse Trump. The tards have ZERO imagination. unlike you lot that are making it up as you go along.. unlike you lot that are making it up as you go along.. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 503063 06-02-2019 09:22 AM Post: #7 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Natura Naturans Wrote: (04-02-2019 04:06 PM) As all the accusations against Trump for Russian collusion collapse we are finding out just how they were created in the first place. A review of the data pertaining to the accusations in the phony Steele dossier about a Trump-Russia Bank connection discovered the sources used is most likely the same source the FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to investigate the Trump-Alfa Bank connection. This person also just happens to be a radical Hillary Clinton supporter! link to image: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-cont...n-Camp.jpg Jean Camp, who created the fake computer logs and tried to implicate Trump in Alfa Bank collusion Some techies uncovered that the the Trump Tower servers began to be bombarded with the same exact invalid look-up requests that use the words trump and alfa together, which were automatically placed in the servers log file by the server. According to the New York Times, computer logs showed that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 look-up messages to the Trump servers. The reason the FBI wasnt able to find anything was because the claims were based entirely on DNS logs, digital records of when one server looks up how to contact another across the internet. A forensic examination conducted by Alfa Bank of the Alfa Bank computer revealed that the only communications that took place regarding trump were those logged requests coming from outside its servers noted by the New York Times above. No other communications were found as indicated in the forensic report related to this subject. Alfa Bank then blamed Jean Camp & Associates for artificially setting up a false Trump-Alfa Bank narrative and threatened a lawsuit: In May of this year [2017], the bank tapped Kirkland & Ellis LLP, a white-shoe American law firm, to write a letter to L. Jean Camp, an esteemed Indiana University computer scientist and researcher and a vocal supporter of the claims made by Tea Leaves. This initial letter, first reported by CNN, claimed that the Camp investigation into the covert server chatter had encouraged inquiries into supposed links to the Trump organization and that her activities continue to this day to promote an unwarranted investigation into Alfa Banks communication with the Trump Organization. The letter added that Alfa Bank is exploring all available options to protect itself [including] litigation and causes of action under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, further demanding that Camp preserve all records pertaining to the Tea Leaves research. Such a preservation request is often the precursor to a lawsuit. There would be more letters. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04...y-hillary/ fake news^ fake news^ Mole lop guest User ID: 503059 06-02-2019 09:24 AM Post: #8 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Biden son Ukraine oil president. Nuff said spo snouou Vocem sine nomine audivit! User ID: 350320 06-02-2019 09:49 AM Posts: 67,593 Post: #9 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 408320 06-02-2019 10:17 AM Post: #10 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Next, the allegation surfaced in a Slate and a New York Times article just a few days before Trump was elected. (Perhaps appropriately, the stories ran on Halloween.) The Timess story, however, conceded the FBI was dubious of the whole matter. Not to be outdone, private attorney Michael Sussman walked in similar allegations to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, according to four congressional sources familiar with testimony and documents gathered in the Russia case. The evidence of the connections to the Alfa Bank allegations also are in a footnote in the House Intelligence Committee report, where Sussman's name was redacted by the FBI. Congressional investigators are investigating whether someone in Sussmans firm, Perkins Coie, also provided Russia-related information to the CIA in early 2017." https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/...s-unproven "The story resurfaced earlier this month after CNN learned the FBIs counterintelligence team was still investigating the connection. The letter to Camp comes as scrutiny of Russias activity during the 2016 U.S. campaign has intensified. In a hearing Monday before the House Intelligence Committee, FBI Director James Comey publicly announced that the bureau is investigating possible collusion ties between President Donald Trumps campaign and the Russian government." https://www.cyberscoop.com/alfa-bank-l-j...-dns-data/ "Christopher Steele the Trump-hating former British spy hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by Clintons campaign and the Democratic Party to dig up Trump dirt in Russia was next to pick up the allegation. Eventually, allegations of connections between Alfa Banks parent-company Alfa Group, Russia and Trump made it into the dossier that Steele gave the FBI, although his grasp of the information was so shoddy that he misspelled the banks name.Next, the allegation surfaced in a Slate and a New York Times article just a few days before Trump was elected. (Perhaps appropriately, the stories ran on Halloween.) The Timess story, however, conceded the FBI was dubious of the whole matter.Not to be outdone, private attorney Michael Sussman walked in similar allegations to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, according to four congressional sources familiar with testimony and documents gathered in the Russia case. The evidence of the connections to the Alfa Bank allegations also are in a footnote in the House Intelligence Committee report, where Sussman's name was redacted by the FBI. Congressional investigators are investigating whether someone in Sussmans firm, Perkins Coie, also provided Russia-related information to the CIA in early 2017.""The story resurfaced earlier this month after CNN learned the FBIs counterintelligence team was still investigating the connection. The letter to Camp comes as scrutiny of Russias activity during the 2016 U.S. campaign has intensified. In a hearing Monday before the House Intelligence Committee, FBI Director James Comey publicly announced that the bureau is investigating possible collusion ties between President Donald Trumps campaign and the Russian government." LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 408320 06-02-2019 10:26 AM Post: #11 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Mr. Jones has spread the discredited Alfa Bank server conspiracy, which says Russias largest commercial bank supposedly had a direct link to the Trump campaign via a computer network. . . Mr. Jones, a former FBI investigator and once an intelligence aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, met with bureau agents in March 2017, according to an FBI memo obtained by the then-Republican majority on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Sources said the meeting appeared to involve a transfer of information. . . What Mr. Jones, head of the secretive Penn Quarter Group investigative firm, has produced for the news media or any other recipient in the past two years is unclear. There is one known media story: The New Yorker magazine last year used Mr. Jones research to further an allegation pushed by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn R. Simpson and by the Democratic Partys private law firm. It said Moscows Alfa Bank, controlled by oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, operated a computer server with a direct line to a server at Trump Tower in New York City." https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201...ank-serve/ "The FBI has turned down a request from The Washington Times to disclose whether it has received any opposition research from Daniel J. Jones, the former Senate Democratic staffer who raised $50 million to investigate President Trump.Mr. Jones has spread the discredited Alfa Bank server conspiracy, which says Russias largest commercial bank supposedly had a direct link to the Trump campaign via a computer network. . .Mr. Jones, a former FBI investigator and once an intelligence aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, met with bureau agents in March 2017, according to an FBI memo obtained by the then-Republican majority on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.Sources said the meeting appeared to involve a transfer of information. . .What Mr. Jones, head of the secretive Penn Quarter Group investigative firm, has produced for the news media or any other recipient in the past two years is unclear.There is one known media story: The New Yorker magazine last year used Mr. Jones research to further an allegation pushed by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn R. Simpson and by the Democratic Partys private law firm. It said Moscows Alfa Bank, controlled by oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, operated a computer server with a direct line to a server at Trump Tower in New York City." LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 408320 06-02-2019 10:35 AM Post: #12 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/05...was-a-lie/ "We know that the FBI sought and received a FISA warrant related to the Russia-linked bank, using the Steele dossier as evidence. This is the only plausible piece of evidence that the FBI could have used. (As McCabe said: The FISA warrants would not have been granted without the Steele dossier.)" LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 408320 06-02-2019 10:41 AM Post: #13 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Christopher Steele's nugget of fool's gold was easily disproven but FBI didn't blink an eye https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/...en-but-fbi LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 503070 06-02-2019 11:28 AM Post: #14 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter spo snouou Wrote: (06-02-2019 09:04 AM) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/10493...60961.html _____ Look at you DESPERATELY grasping on to your failed lie... you are incredulous. Look at you DESPERATELY grasping on to your failed lie... you are incredulous. #1 Doomologist lop guest User ID: 436526 06-02-2019 12:18 PM Post: #15 RE: Bogus Trump-Russia Alfa Bank Connections Were Created By Hillary Supporter Look at you DESPERATELY grasping on to your failed lie... you are incredulous. [/quote] he is spamminng the board again with walls of text... he should be banned... this is why we all stopped posting... now all you have is 4 to 5 people who spam the board with liberal crap... this place is a liberal dump.... jmho... Look at you DESPERATELY grasping on to your failed lie... you are incredulous.[/quote]he is spamminng the board again with walls of text...he should be banned...this is why we all stopped posting...now all you have is 4 to 5 people who spam the board with liberal crap...this place is a liberal dump....jmho... Advertisement Back to Forum Reply to This post Post New Thread 635% Growth For American Lithium Company After They Fight Back Against China (Ad) The USA is fighting an economic war with China over lithium. Until now, we've been losing (with China controlling 80% of lithium production). But this small lithium company could change that with their significant holdings in the hottest area of the US for lithium discoveries. They've Already Seen 635% Growth In 2021 The information below has been supplied by dairy marketers and other industry organizations. It has not been edited, verified or endorsed by Hoards Dairyman. The Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association (WCMA) is pleased to announce that Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers will address 2019 Cheese Industry Conference attendees as part of the organizations annual meeting, set for Thursday, April 18, beginning at 12 noon, at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin. Gov. Evers is set to speak about current challenges and opportunities in Wisconsins dairy processing industry, as well as his plans to support growth. In his recently-introduced 2019-21 Executive Budget, Evers included an increase in funding for dairy processor grants issued by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection (DATCP) for innovation, modernization, and food safety projects, from $200,000 to $400,000 annually. He also proposed an allocation of $200,000 to support the Wisconsin Initiative for Dairy Exports program, designed to help build Wisconsins dairy brand in international markets and increase dairy exports, and adjustments to DATCP expenditure authority which allow the reclassification of staff positions for the retention of key, high quality personnel. To register to attend, please visit CheeseConference.org. Online registration ends on Monday, April 8. About WCMA: Since 1893, the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association has represented manufacturers of dairy products, as well as companies that process, market, or distribute cheese and support the industry with supplies and services. Today, WCMA serves more than 600 member companies and cooperatives operate across the country and around the world. WCMA is a strong policy advocate, networking hub, and trusted source of education and information. The information below has been supplied by dairy marketers and other industry organizations. It has not been edited, verified or endorsed by Hoards Dairyman. In a letter to members of the House and Senate, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) President and Chief Executive Officer Rick Smith urged immediate action to ensure the U.S.-Mexico border remains open to U.S. dairy exports. The communication to Congress is a reaction to a proposal by the administration to close the United States southern border, which would negatively impact an already struggling U.S. dairy industry. DFA, owned by 14,000 dairy farmers across the country, expressed concern that the recent announcement risks the largest destination for American dairy products, accounting for more than one-quarter of all U.S. dairy exports. The dairy industry has worked together closely for more than two decades to grow and strengthen the market for U.S. dairy products in Mexico, Smith said. In the volatile dairy industry, strong dairy export markets are crucial for our farmer-owners, who have suffered years of financial stress on the farm. Mexico remains a key customer for our dairy farmer-owners, and we are asking Congress to work with the administration to keep our border open and quickly ratify the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to ensure our robust trade partnership continues. Closing the border could put the future of the USMCA in peril and further strain key trading relationships that are already fragile as a result of recently imposed tariffs. We are in the worst rural economic recession since the 1980s, Smith added. Our farmer-owners need strong dairy markets, both at home and abroad to recover and continue providing wholesome dairy products for generations to come. The Mexican export market is critical to the longevity of our industry. Dairy Farmers of America is a national, farmer-owned dairy cooperative focusing on quality, innovation and the future of family dairies. While supporting and serving nearly 14,000 family farmers, DFA works with some of the worlds largest food companies to develop ingredients that satisfy their customers cravings while staying committed to social responsibility and ethical farming. For more information, please visit dfamilk.com. The Department of Theatre at Hope College will present Seagull by Anton Chekhov, translated by Curt Columbus, on Friday and Saturday, April 12 and 13, and Thursday-Saturday, April 25-27, at 7:30 p.m. There will also be a no-admission matinee on Sunday April 14, at 2 p.m. All performances will be in the Dewitt Center main theatre. Directed by department chair Daina Robins, Seagull was written by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov in 1895 and first performed in 1896. The play focuses on the artistic and romantic conflicts between the four main characters: Trigorin, a renowned writer; Treplev, an aspiring playwright; Arkadena, Treplevs mother; and Nina, a young aspiring actress. Chekhov originally titled his play The Seagull: A Comedy in Four Acts. However, due to the style and content of the play, people sometimes question how the play could be considered a comedy. Seagull explores the artistic temperament and methodology of writers and actors, unrequited love and existentialism. Robins said, Anton Chekhov is a master playwright. His Seagull is a beautiful play which is daunting to tackle but very rewarding to explore in rehearsal. His characters are complex -- endearing, exasperating, serious, ridiculous, comical, tragic, loving, selfish. Utterly human. Just like us. In addition to Robins, the production team includes guest artist Caroline Spitzer as the costume designer; and faculty members Perry Landes as the lighting and sound designer, and Richard Smith as the scenic and properties designer. Staff members Paul Anderson and Darlene Veenstra served as technical director and costume shop manager. Also on the production team are several students; junior Emmie Sandstedt of Lake Zurich, Illinois, is the stage manager; and senior Trevor Wilson of Adrian, freshman Zandra Paxton of Quincy and freshman Caroline Dargay of Clarkston are the assistant stage managers. Junior Gracen Barth of Dallas, Texas, is the production manager. The cast includes senior Megan Clark of Clymer, New York; junior Maxwell Lam of Holland; freshman Zach Pickle of Schoolcraft; senior Katrina Dykstra of Walker; freshman Sam Joachim of Dearborn; freshman Sarah Wisser of Kalamazoo; freshman Sofia Munoz of Elmwood, Illinois; senior Jose Angulo of San Francisco, California; senior Jonny Loker of Oaxaca, Mexico; sophomore Riley Wilson of North Canton, Ohio; and senior Cameron Islami of White Lake. Due to the mature themes of the production, Seagull is not recommended for children. Tickets for the evening performances are $10 for regular admission; $7 for senior citizens and Hope faculty and staff; and free for Hope College students and students ages 18 and under. Tickets are available at the Events and Conferences Office located in downtown Holland in the Anderson-Werkman Financial Center (100 E. Eighth St.). The ticket office is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and can be reached at 616-395-7890. Tickets may be purchased by calling or visiting the ticket office, online at hope.edu/tickets, or in person at the performance. No tickets are required for the Sunday, April 14, matinee. The DeWitt Center is located at 141 E 12th St., facing Columbia Avenue between 10th and 13th streets. The main theatre is located on the main level of the building. The Department of Dance at Hope College will present its spring Student Dance Showcase concerts on Friday, April 12, in the dance studio of the Dow Center and on Saturday, April 13, in the Knickerbocker Theatre. The performances will be at 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. both nights. The public is invited, and admission is free. Student choreographers and dancers of Hope College will present contemporary and contemporary ballet, hip hop and dance theatre with different pieces and presenters each day. In total, 21 dances will be presented by multiple students from the Department of Dance and across campus, including students in Professor Angela Yetzkes Composition I class and the Hip Hop Anonymous club of Hope College. Yetzke, along with Shauna Steele, associate professor of dance, and Erik Alberg, technical director for the performing arts, serve as advisers and producers of the Student Dance Showcase. The Dow Center is located at 168 E. 13th St., on the corner of 13th Street and Columbia Avenue, and the dance studio is located on the second floor in room 207. The Knickerbocker Theatre is located at 86 E. Eighth St., between College and Columbia avenues. IceViking strongly condemns physical attacks and harassment directed towards them. They are also often victims of the Islamic idea. This is true when it comes to the cruel and tragic treatment of Muslim women and children when it is in accord with the Koran, the example of Mohammed and Islamic law, Sharia, which may be applied regardless of where a Muslim male may find himself in the world, whether in a Muslim or non-Muslim country. However, in no way, shape or form should one judge all Muslim men because of what is in Islamic scripture and what constitutes the Islamic law, Sharia. "Race", ethnicity or basically anything that you are "merely" born with should never be a basis for bigotry and discrimination. Apostates from Islam have been executed for 1400 years in accord with the Koran and the words and actions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed and Islamic law, Sharia. They should be lovingly helped. Furthermore, approximately as many as 11,000,000 Muslims may have been killed by other Muslims since 1948. To quote the website The Religion of Peace (TROP), edited by Glen Roberts: While it may be safe to say that a true Muslim would not intentionally kill another true Muslim ( 4:92-93 ), the Quran places no such value on the life of a Muslim who is not true. Consider verse 9:73 : Strive hard against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be harsh against them, their abode is Hell. The Arabic for strive hard uses the same root as Jihad - and the context in this sura is holy war (see v. 86 and 91). Thus, there are two distinct classes of people that a true Muslim is to target with harshness: disbelievers and hypocrites. A disbeliever obviously refers to a non-Muslim, so a "hypocrite" must be a Muslim of some sort. In fact, hypocrites are those who say they believe, but do not act as they should. In other words, they are "Muslims", but not true Muslims. They will go to hell just as unbelievers do, and so, according to the verse, their lives matter for naught. The same sura says that a hypocrite can be recognized not just by lack of piety (reluctance to follow Sharia), but by fear of death ( 9:56 ), reluctance to fight ( 9:44-45 ) and even friendliness toward non-believers ( 9:67 ). A true Muslim would thus be a pious person who relishes martyrdom, is eager to fight, and shuns non-believers. Even the Quranic passage that warns against killing "believers" ( 4:88-94 ) is more complicated than it first appears. It never says that a true Muslim is incapable of killing another Muslim, just that it should not be done. In fact, it makes exceptions for the unintentional killing of "believers" in war and mandates the killing of "hypocrites." Verse 17:33 says, "Do not kill anyone which Allah has forbidden, except for a just cause" . The greatest cause of all is that Islam be superior ( 9:33 ), which is exactly what Islamic terrorists say is their goal. Thus believing Muslims are allowed to be collateral damage in the war on unbelievers. There is sadly a phenomena that I`ve noticed in Sweden and elsewhere of people using true facts about Islamic doctrine and history as a cover for all sorts of irrational targeting of Muslims, ranging from xenophobia and racism to verbal abuse and physical attacks. This is strongly condemned by this website and does not in any way serve serious criticism of orthodox Islam and other important work. It`s also important that one tries to express oneself in a civilized way. Words matter. In this bloggers humble opinion the root cause of the problem is the ancient doctrine of orthodox Islam. In simple terms a non-Muslim is a Kafir. " The Koran defines the kafir and kafir is not a neutral word. A kafir is not merely someone who does not agree with Islam, but a kafir is evil, disgusting, the lowest form of life." An exact quote, as stated in the writings of Dr. Bill Warner in the article "Kafir" at http://www.politicalislam.com/kafir . In the perfect Koran (Allah`s direct and literal word as revealed to Mohammed through the angel Jibril), Muslims are told 89 times to emulate Mohammed in all ways (see Koran 33:21 for instance). Mohammed`s example, the Sunna, is found in the Hadith (stories of what Mohammed said and did) and the Sira (biographies of Mohammed). Islamic law, Sharia , is directly derived from these unchanging scriptures. It is based on the Koran`s numerous commands to obey Allah and obey the Messenger, that is Mohammed (see Koran 4:59 for instance). Islam is Sharia. Sharia is Islam. It is a capital crime for Muslims to deny Sharia in any way. A Muslim is someone who submits to Islam and submitting to Islam means obeying the Sharia of Allah. Sharia law includes pronouncements for both Muslims and non-Muslims (Kafirs). Islam is a "complete way of life", a "complete code of life", a "complete system of life". Islam is not just a religion but also a comprehensive ideology. Islam is a supremacist ideology. Islam is a totalitarian and imperialistic ideology akin to Communism and Nazism. Islam is a civilization. Islamic law, Sharia, is a manual for a civilization. Islamic law, Sharia, governs every aspect of life. It has a say about every conceivable human act . Non-Muslims are morally and legally inferior in Islam. Women are morally and legally inferior in Islam. The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS by Robert Spencer is the first one-volume history of jihad in the English language and a great book on the topic. Allah guarantees Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for him (Koran 9:111). A hadith depicts a Muslim asking Muhammad: "Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward)." Muhammad replied, "I do not find such a deed." (Bukhari 4.52.44) Muhammad himself said: I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah, and he who professed it was guaranteed the protection of his property and life on my behalf except for the right affairs rest with Allah. (Sahih Muslim 30) Freedom of speech, human rights, democracy, science and human lives are all at stake in the fight against the Islamic Jihad. As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQ Username: Password: or Register Back to Forum Reply to This post Post New Thread Thread Rating: 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average 1 2 3 4 5 Ilhan Omar Campaign Funds to Pay for Divorce from her Brother She Man lop guest User ID: 453356 04-02-2019 10:28 PM Post: #1 Ilhan Omar Campaign Funds to Pay for Divorce from her Brother Advertisement Update: Democrat Ilhan Omar Under Investigation for Using Her Campaign Funds to Pay for Divorce from her Brother Muslima Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is under investigation for using her campaign funds when she was a state lawmaker to pay for her divorce. According to Sinclair investigative reporter James Rosen, authorities have recently completed their investigation and are preparing to issue a ruling. Two complaints against Ilhan Omar were filed last year by Republican state lawmaker Steve Drazkowski. Sinclairs investigative stakeout reporters approached Ilhan Omar last week as she left the Capitol and she refused to answer any questions about the alleged campaign finance violations. Omars aide told Sinclair to try to schedule an interview with the lawmaker instead as expected, Omars team gave Sinclair the runaround and never responded to their email inquiries. Republican State Rep. Drazkowski complained that Omar uses her gender, religious beliefs and ethnicity, a Muslim woman from Somalia, as a shield against critics. Theres a political fear that people have, Drazkowski said, of being called a name, being called a bigot, being called racist, being called Islamophobic. Sources exclusively told Sinclair that the campaign finance board has completed their investigation of both complaints against Ilhan Omar one related to using funds to pay her divorce lawyer, and the other for issues related to travel expenses and will issue a ruling within the next 4 to 6 weeks. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04...r-brother/ Muslima Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is under investigation for using her campaign funds when she was a state lawmaker to pay for her divorce.According to Sinclair investigative reporter James Rosen, authorities have recently completed their investigation and are preparing to issue a ruling.Two complaints against Ilhan Omar were filed last year by Republican state lawmaker Steve Drazkowski.Sinclairs investigative stakeout reporters approached Ilhan Omar last week as she left the Capitol and she refused to answer any questions about the alleged campaign finance violations.Omars aide told Sinclair to try to schedule an interview with the lawmaker instead as expected, Omars team gave Sinclair the runaround and never responded to their email inquiries.Republican State Rep. Drazkowski complained that Omar uses her gender, religious beliefs and ethnicity, a Muslim woman from Somalia, as a shield against critics. Theres a political fear that people have, Drazkowski said, of being called a name, being called a bigot, being called racist, being called Islamophobic.Sources exclusively told Sinclair that the campaign finance board has completed their investigation of both complaints against Ilhan Omar one related to using funds to pay her divorce lawyer, and the other for issues related to travel expenses and will issue a ruling within the next 4 to 6 weeks. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 472656 04-02-2019 10:40 PM Post: #2 RE: Ilhan Omar Campaign Funds to Pay for Divorce from her Brother LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 423870 04-02-2019 10:41 PM Post: #3 RE: Ilhan Omar Campaign Funds to Pay for Divorce from her Brother If guilty, are we supposed to cane her? LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 496006 04-02-2019 10:52 PM Post: #4 RE: Ilhan Omar Campaign Funds to Pay for Divorce from her Brother did he bone her? tamarack lop guest User ID: 494132 04-02-2019 11:21 PM Post: #5 RE: Ilhan Omar Campaign Funds to Pay for Divorce from her Brother If I see him I'll ask what's up with this. This is pretty close to home. I know Steve.If I see him I'll ask what's up with this.This is pretty close to home. Back to Forum Reply to This post Post New Thread Exhaustion, pictured yesterday here and [See below for a visual demonstration and an apparently very happy customer]. The standard bracelet comprises stainless steel "base links", bearing the NOMINATION device mark. Nomination also sells individual decorated links and links with charms attached, which can be added to the bracelet. Wristwear seems to be this month's key IPKat fashion trend (seeand here ). In this claim, the Claimants (Nomination) were, respectively, the owner and exclusive licensee of three (two word and one device) EU/EU-designated trade marks for NOMINATION, registered in class 14 (among others) for jewellery (among other things). The Claimants sell a "composable bracelet", consisting of individual links that can be detached and reassembled to one's heart's content.The standard bracelet comprises stainless steel "base links", bearing the NOMINATION device mark. Nomination also sells individual decorated links and links with charms attached, which can be added to the bracelet. The Defendants (JSC) also sold (via eBay) composable charm bracelets (under the trading name "Daisy Charm"), whose links are compatible with Nomination bracelets. Until February 2013, the eBay listings stated that the Daisy Charm links "fit[s] Nomination". Shortly after this, JSC started to buy genuine Nomination bracelets from authorised Nomination retailers within the EU. These were then broken down into individual base links, each of which was repackaged with a single JSC charm base link. In some cases, JSC was able to source already-disassembled Nomination base links from Nomination retailers in the EU. JSC sold a Nomination link with a JSC link together in joined blister packs, or a blister pack for the JSC link and a plastic bag for the Nomination link (bearing the label "Manufactured by Nomination Italy Repackaged by JSC Jewellery UK"). Nomination brought a claim against JSC on three grounds: Sale of genuine Nomination links in this manner infringed the Nomination trade marks; Infringing use of the Nomination marks for the sale of the JSC links alongside Nomination links; and Passing off on the basis of 2. Infringement by sale of genuine Nomination links This part of the claim turned on Article 7 (now Article 15) of the Trade Marks Directive . Given that the Nomination links had been sourced from Nomination retailers in the EU, could Nomination nevertheless assert its trade mark rights, or had these been exhausted? The nuance in this case came from the fact that Nomination supplied its bracelets whole; it was JSC or the retailers that then broke down the bracelets into individual links. Davidoff and Nomination was unable to convince the court that the individual links (bearing the Nomination mark) were placed on the market in the EU without its consent. Nomination did not impose any contractual restrictions on its retailers regarding the sale of single base links. Although the CJEU decisions inand Sebago together suggest that the facts and circumstances surrounding the first placing of a trade marked product on the internal market must unequivocally demonstrate a renunciation of the right to object to the sale of each individual item of the product in question, this did not help Nomination in the circumstances. The evidence did not demonstrate that Nomination would certainly have objected to the sale of single links at the relevant time, and end purchasers were of course free to disassemble the bracelets as they chose. Nomination did however succeed with this cause of action by virtue of Article 7(2) (now 15(2)): it had legitimate reason to object to these particular further dealings with its goods. Nomination bracelets are normally sold in high-quality packaging that lends an image of quality; the JSC packaging had a distinctly budget feel. It is true that some authorised Nomination retailers sometimes sold individual links in transparent plastic bags, but the judge swerved this issue: the impression of quality would already have been conveyed when the customer initially bought the beautifully-packaged full bracelet. BMS conditions (the third, above, succeeded). First, JSC failed to identify who had done (some of) the repackaging. Second, JSC's repackaging might have damaged the goods. The judge was not convinced that either factor should apply to the repackaging goods that are not pharmaceuticals (which have particular safety and efficacy sensitivities). A point to note: this was the only one of five grounds of objection that the judge accepted. For example, Nomination asserted two otherconditions (the third, above, succeeded). First, JSC failed to identify who had done (some of) the repackaging. Second, JSC's repackaging might have damaged the goods. The judge was not convinced that either factor should apply to the repackaging goods that are not pharmaceuticals (which have particular safety and efficacy sensitivities). Infringing use of Nomination marks for sale of JSC links with Nomination links The judge was shown, among other marketing materials, a JSC advertisement stating: "so you will receive one branded Daisy Charm and one plain Nomination link, both compatible and for the classic size bracelet." The judge found that this advertisement blurred the commercial source of the JSC links sold in two-packs with Nomination links (especially when viewed by busy and moderately attentive consumers). Cel ine ). There was some evidence of actual confusion before the court. Several Nomination dealers had notified Nomination that consumers had taken JSC links to their stores, believing the links to be genuine Nomination links and requesting that the links be fitted to their Nomination bracelets. The judge seemed to place significant weight on this evidence. It is worth remembering that while a lack of evidence of actual confusion will not necessarily kill an infringement claim, convincing evidence of actual confusion will go a long way towards winning a claim. The evidence of actual confusion also did away with the potential need to analyse whether the use of Nomination's trade marks was in fact trade mark use. Consumers were confused as to commercial origin; therefore there was clearly use for the purpose of distinguishing the goods in question (per). Unsurprisingly, the outcome of Nomination's passing off claim followed the second infringement claim. Although in his message of Nowruz, Khamenei admitted to the economic downfall and the devaluation of the national currency, the decline of the purchasing power of people, the closure or slowdown of factories, ironically in his following speech in Mashhad, by lashing and blaming the western governments that seemed to be jealous! about regimes astronomical advances! Said: Today, they (western governments) come to open their blind eyes! to see that in comparison with other nations our best, enormous and advanced industries, are at the top of the list In todays advanced industry of Nano-Technologies, nuclear, missile, biotechnology and in other advanced world techniques we are in the forefront. Similar contradiction could be found in Khameneis speech in Mashhad. He accused some of the regime authorities that have described this year as the year of dangers. I absolutely disagree with that. I believe that with the Gods grace this year is the year of opportunities, facilities and opening. Despondent regime-leader seems to have forgotten that during his speech last December, he warned his troops to stay alert because the U.S, is a cunning enemy and might intend to deceive and hubbub for 2018 but executes his plans in 2019. Everyone has to be alert at all time, my advice to the Iranian people, specifically the youth and various parts of society, guilds and political currents is to be careful and do not prepare the ground for the enemy, because if we underestimate the enemy, he will be able to strike. After this speech Khamenei continued to warn his troops and regimes authorities about the danger awaiting his regime in 2019, since then, the regimes elements and media kept spreading the very same warning and fear. it seems that Khamenei has noticed that his warnings has accelerated the defection within regime, because after that, in four speeches he constantly told the regimes authorities: dont be afraid dont lose hope and do not be disappointed and dont let the situation dispirit you but During his speech in the first day of this Persian year, while forgetting his warnings about the enemys plans in coming year, Khamenei attacked those regimes authorities who followed him in warning about the upcoming dangers and said those who are spreading fear whether willingly or unwillingly are under the influence of enemys propaganda. It is necessary to mention that on March 14th, in a meeting with the members of so-called Parliament of Experts, Khamenei counted 11 unsolvable contradictions of his regime and it seems that we should add to this list, for instance the contradiction of Alert and Disappointment. On one hand, Khamenei needs to warn his thugs to be prepared for facing a danger awaiting the regime in the New Year, (in fact, this warning has terrified and discouraged his troops), on the other hand the Regime-leader and his high-officials are forced to Gasconade and blow their horns to inspirit Basijies. The result, (if we presume there is one) on one side is spreading incaution and false optimism among his troops and on the other side is Khameneis paradoxical fluctuation between solutions. During his speech, Khamenei admitted to the crushing effects of the sanctions by saying: we shouldnt be complaining of sanctions and we shouldnt be expecting much from their imposers, the U.S and EU meanwhile he claimed that sanction could be an opportunity and cause progress and self-sufficiency. Another contradiction in Khameneis speech was about JCPOA. While wailing about the U.S withdrawal from JCPOA, he complained about the role of the EU for have been insisting upon us to do not withdraw from JCPOA but in fact they have withdrawn from JCPOA and imposed new sanctions The desperate Regime-leader has forgotten his own remarks that if the U.S tear-down the JCPOA we will burn it he later promised to shred the JCPOA. Hence he says, that EU has practically withdrawn from JCPOA, but out of desperation, he is clinging to the JCPOA, which he earlier called a total damage. During his speech, by referring to the INSTEX, the European Financial Chanel Khamenei said This financial channel is more like a joke. A bitter joke. Just Like in the past, Europeans have stabbed us in the back, yet he admitted to the non-efficiency of his words: What Im saying it doesnt mean to cut-off all the relations with the Western government, there is no obstruction in this path He also blamed and accused his own fraction of a fallacy since they have translated his contradictory remarks as withdrawal from the JCPOA and cutting-off all the relations with the EU. In his new years message as well as his speech, Khamenei tried, by faking himself as an opponent and an innocent person, to give solutions to countrys ongoing problems, nonetheless his solutions werent but some rhetorical cliches and some must do therapies like this: We marked the past year, as the year of supporting Iranian products. I cant say this motto was completely implemented, however, I can say that, this slogan was acknowledged at a wide scale. After announcing this Iranian new calendar year, 1398, as the year of Production & Growth. Khamenei claimed: If production is launched as it should, it can solve both our poor living standards and provide what we are in need of from foreigners, including countries that are our enemies, it can also resolve our unemployment and national currency issues to a significant extent, Khamenei added. In his speech, while again faking himself as an innocent observer, Khamenei said: One sees some weird methods of misuse done by some folks. The executive branches, the judiciary and other Authorities must control and prevent irregular imports. Khamenei, by mocking Rouhanis governments performance in economic field said: with indolence, lethargy, and lack of motivation we wont be able to resolve countrys economic crisis, there should be some revolutionary mechanisms and a revolutionary management to control countrys economy. During his new years speech in Mashhad, Khamenei counted almost 60 to-dos and not to-dos and shifted all the responsibility to Rouhanis government and escaped any responsibility to resolve regimes issues. That was the reason for which, Rouhani in his new years message, by squibbing Khameneis dodging responsibility, and underlining the current dangerous situation of the regime said: we all should be accountable, and do not shift the responsibility to others. From Khameneis speech and new years message, and Rouhanis new years message, we could clearly conclude that the regime faces a very dark year full of crises ahead. Yet history will not wait for Khamenei to find a solution. This regime is condemned to downfall, an inevitable future, which will be materialized by the Iranian people and their Resistance movement. So far, locals report that over 200 people have been killed, while over 25,000 homes have been destroyed in the floods. The IRGC is questioning Rouhanis handling of the situation with their affiliated news outlets openly criticising the governments incompetence as thousands of IRGC and Basiji troops were sent in to quell protests among the flood victims and attempt to divert water away from residential areas. IRGC commander-in-chief, General Mohammad Ali (Aziz) Jafari visited a flood-hit area of northern Mazandaran province on Sunday to tell residents that the IRGC stood with them. Hussein Shariatmadari, editor of the IRGC-affiliated newspaper Kayhan, wrote: I wish that Mr Rouhani would cut short his apparent touristic trip to Qeshm Island upon hearing of the destructive flooding in the provinces of Golestan and Mazandaran and would come back to express empathy with the affected people, but sadly he did not do that. However, Rouhani has also been critical of the IRGC, especially after troops led by Jafari, blew up part of a railway line connecting Iran with Turkmenistan when they were using explosions to divert the floodwaters. Rouhani said that these explosions had no impact on the rising water levels, while the news outlets affiliated with his faction warned against using the floods for political gains. While Hamid Baeidinejad, Irans ambassador to the UK, criticised Persian speaking media outlets based outside Iran for covering the floods in order to prove the incompetence of the countrys officials. This is all part of a long-standing feud between the two parties and has nothing to do with how the floods are affecting the people of Iran. In fact, the main reason is that the IRGC is quickly gaining more power over Irans economy, politics, and foreign affairs without being accountable to anyone other than Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It is important to note that neither side is innocent in all this. Both are corrupt institutions controlled by an evil Supreme Leader. All are more concerned with the future of the Regime than the fate of the people. The Regime is weaker than ever before, plagued by domestic and international crises, and the people know that there is but one solution to their problem. That solution is regime change. It is no longer enough to hope that moderates can reform the Regime. There are no moderates there. Here, we will look at the first part of her speech, where Maryam Rajavi noted that she and the rest of the Iranian Resistance stood with the people of Iran during this time of incredible struggle, especially those rising up to overthrow the mullahs. Maryam Rajavi began by congratulating all Iranians across the world, especially the families of martyrs, the resistance units, the Iranian Resistance members and supporters, and political prisoners, on the Persian New Year. Maryam Rajavi praised the Iranian people for the year of uprisings, something that she called for in the last New Years speech, and congratulated them for every step they took towards freedom and liberty. Maryam Rajavi said: [Last year] was the year of the expansion of resistance units when the strategy of 1,000 Ashrafs and the army of freedom shined brighter than ever in our occupied homeland. [Our] uprisings and popular protests shook the pillars of the regime. The policy of appeasement failed, and the mullahs were deprived of one of their main sources of support for clinging on to power. Indeed, there were thousands of strikes, protests and demonstrations in at least 700 cities and towns. She said: Happy New Year to the people of Iran who refused to lose hope even under the oppressive and dark rule of the mullahs. Maryam Rajavi advised that over the New Year period, many Iranians are going without food due to extreme poverty that affects over 80% of the country and the droughts that are hitting Irans farms and destroying crops. She said she was proud to stand with Irans workers, farmers, and teachers, who are discriminated against and humiliated, forced to live under the poverty line, and imprisoned for their legitimate protests. Maryam Rajavi said: We stand, with all our passion, aspirations and determination to continue the struggle, alongside women and children who are perishing in poverty without any support and shelter and under repressive conditions in the impoverished shantytowns surrounding all major cities. She also took the time to remember the 120,000 martyrs of the Iranian Resistance who have been killed by the mullahs since the Regime took power, as well the political prisoners executed over the past year. Maryam Rajavi said: Our warmest salutations to you, the heroes, whose names are sung every day in the crimson-coloured anthem of freedom. But the fight is not over yet, so Maryam Rajavi called for a bigger uprising this year in order to overthrow the regime. She said this year will be the harbinger of storms and change. Maryam Rajavi said: Hail to the arisen protesters and those who shape the uprisings! Hail to this freedom fighting generation! Yes, freedom must be earned. The spring of freedom will be achieved through your determination and your efforts. The spring of freedom for the people of Iran is on the horizon. The MEK supporters also articulated their anger at the Regimes poor response to the disaster namely refusing to provide shelter, rescue people or distribute aid in favour of putting the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) onto the streets to quell dissent. This shows that the Regime will always, even in the midst of a national crisis, put its interests and the preservation of the Regime, ahead of those of ordinary Iranians. Hossein Abedini of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the umbrella group to which the MEK belongs, said: The delay and procrastination in helping those who are besieged by the flood have increased the number of victims. The blame game The Regime has refused to accept blame though, with the factions turning on each other and denying their involvement in the 40 years of disastrous environmental policies that have made floods more likely and more deadly. MEK President-elect Maryam Rajavi noted in a statement that the Regime had destroyed the channel that used to lead floodwaters out in Shiraz. In another statement, she said: The disaster once again proved that the ruling mullahs 40-year policy of plunder and pillage has taken a heavy toll on the lives and livelihood of our people. Then, the MEK supporters advised that the Regime is deliberately misleading the Iranian public and the international community over the real death toll in the floods, claiming falsely that it is only 44 people when local estimates reach over 200. This, the MEK explained, has stopped international aid groups from offering appropriate help. MEK leader Rajavi called for increased cooperation among Iranian civilians so that they could support each other when the Regime would not. She said: The only way and the best way is that we help one anotherno other power is more effective and more accessible than the power of solidarity among us. What can the UK do? Malcolm Fowler, a solicitor and former member of the Human Rights Committee of the Law Society of England and Wales, told the MEK supporters: The neglect and deceptions of the Iranian regime over the catastrophic floods and landslides are characteristic of its disregard and oppression of all dissidents. [British Prime Minister Theresa] Mays Government must now take them to a task. Several other high-ranking British lawyers spoke at the rally to express solidarity with the Iranian people and call for a more responsible government. The MEK supporters urged the UK government to condemn the regimes response to the crisis and, along with the European Union, put pressure on the mullahs to provide disaster relief to the affected areas. All in all, it is clear that the Regime cannot aid its people and so the people must overthrow the Regime and replace them with the MEK in order to ensure a free Iran. Twitter Ads info and privacy They were promised money, citizenship, and a better life for them and their families if they fought to preserve the Syrian dictatorship and, by extension, the Iranian Regime, so they joined the Shiite militias alongside Pakistanis, Iraqis and Lebanese people, also willing to risk their lives for a better life. But now, the war is all but won, and the Iranian Regime has succeeded in keeping two dictatorships in power with one war, so what will the Regime do with these forces? Well, as it turns out, many are being sent to their home countries, where Afghan security officials who believe that Iran is using these fighters to infiltrate impoverished Shiite Muslim communities treat them with suspicion. Given that Iran has a long history of doing just that in order to increase the spread of their evil revolution, that would not be a surprising thing. The Iranian Regime seeks to spread its influence across the Middle East to create a land bridge from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Mehdi, a 21-year-old Afghan who joined the Iran militias as a teenager due to immense poverty, said: Here in Afghanistan we are afraid. They say we are all terrorists. He would only speak on the condition that his last name was not revealed because he fears retaliation multiple sides. Afghan security agencies may arrest them as traitors and the ISIS affiliates in Afghanistan may kill them for being Shiites. He was only trying to raise the money to escape to Europe, but when Europes borders closed, he was stuck in Iran and at that point, dying was a risk worth taking for a better life. But what about that better life? Over 10,000 Afghan fighters have been returned to Afghanistan in extreme poverty with few or no legitimate options to find work. Mehdi said: I dont know what my future brings. Maybe I become a thief or maybe I go back to Syria. And the Afghan government and many experts believe the fighters could be mobilised again, causing chaos in the country as other groups pile in. Bill Roggio, the editor of the Long War Journal, wrote: Expect the Iranians to reconstitute their militias inside Afghanistan at some point. Iran does not discard assets in which it invests time, treasure, and expertise. An alliance of consumer tobacco harm advocates in the Asia Pacific region expressed firm support to local vaping groups advocating for fair and reasonable regulation of electronic cigarettes in the Philippines. Access to safer nicotine products such as e-cigarettes among adults who wish to use such products in lieu of combustible tobacco is a human right. We urge the Department of Health and Philippine Food and Drug Administration to acknowledge the scientific evidence supporting the reduced harm of electronic cigarettes and to not severely restrict their availability to adults based on outdated and scientifically flawed opinions, according to a position paper released by the Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates. CAPHRA members include consumer organizations from Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines and Thailand. CAPHRA released the position paper to support the stand of The Vapers Philippines and the Philippine E-Cigarette Industry Association which took part in the DoHs public consultation on the Draft Amendment of Administrative Order No. 2014-008 entitled Rules and Regulation on Electronic Nicotine Delivery System or Ends which include e-cigarettes. We support fair and reasonable regulation of e-cigarettes to ensure the safety of adult vapers, said PECIA president Joey Dulay. Dulay said the administrative order marginalized current smokers and adult vapers who should have the right to choose safer nicotine products, such as e-cigarettes, that work for them. If implemented, this administrative order will kill the local vape industry and unduly benefit the tobacco industry that has killed millions and will continue to cause the premature death of countless people, he said. The Vapers Philippines president Peter Paul Dator expressed utter frustration over the FDA proposal to set 25 as the minimum allowable age for the purchase and use of e-cigarettes, while the minimum age restriction for combustible cigarettes remains at 18. How can such an irrational and unfair proposal even be considered? Dator said. In its position paper, CAPHRA cited Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which recognizes the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.Contending that international law supports a harm reduction approach to tobacco control, CAPHRA also cited the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control which urged FCTC Parties to emphasize the special contribution of non-governmental organizations and other members of civil society not affiliated with the tobacco industry, including health professional bodies, womens, youth, environmental and consumer groups, and academic and health care institutions, to tobacco control efforts nationally and internationally and the vital importance of their participation in national and international tobacco control efforts. The Philippines is a party to the FCTC. CAPHRA called on government agencies and public health officials to accept peer-reviewed scientific studies on e-cigarettes and their effects on human health. Public health officials have a mandated responsibility to provide evidence-based guidance on adult smokers access to such products so they can be informed of available harm-reduced options. They also have a mandated responsibility to disseminate the truth regarding scientific evidence in all matters related to public health, especially on tobacco harm reduction, it said. CAPHRA said the general public deserves to receive accurate information that will help them make informed decisions based on facts and empower them to exercise their rights as afforded in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The FDA expressed concern that safer nicotine products such as e-cigarettes may serve as a gateway to smoking among the youth and that e-cigarette use damages cardiovascular health. The agency also claimed that the harm caused by secondhand e-cigarette vapor is the same as that from secondhand combustible tobacco smoke, nicotine is detrimental to the developing brain and e-cigarettes should have an age restriction of 25 or older while the combustible tobacco age restriction remains at 18 or older. Through its position paper, CAPHRA aims to support PECIA and The Vapers Philippines in addressing the issues raised by the FDA through the presentation of peer-reviewed scientific evidence that justifies the rationale for risk-proportionate regulation of e-cigarette products in the Philippines. 1. Comments must not be racist, misogynistic, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted. 2. Comments must not involve little more than name-calling and insulting remarks. 3. Comments must not be made by "anonymous" or "unknown". 4. Comments must not try to sneak in some free advertising for themselves (like spam). I invite anyone who wishes to comment on this blog to do so. I enjoy the comments, whether you agree with what I have said or not. But some people want to abuse the right to comment, and since this is my blog, I have decided to lay down the following rules. If your comment violates these rules, it will not be published. Iloilo CitySM Hotels and Convention Corp., the hotel unit of the SM Group, opened its third Park Inn by Radisson Hotel in this city Tuesday amid the booming demand of the MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions) market. SMHCC executive vice president Peggy Angeles said at least four more Park Inn hotels are in the pipeline as part of the groups P8.2-billion, five-year expansion plan until 2022. We are confident that this new landmark in Iloilo will add to the citys vibrant tourism landscape and set a new benchmark in hospitality in Panay Island, Angeles said. There is also a plan to construct an SMX Convention Center near the hotel which is strategically located six minutes from the Iloilo Business Park and less than half an hour from the Iloilo International Airport. All these will strengthen the position of Iloilo as a MICE destination, she said. The Department of Tourism earlier launched its MICE Roadmap 2030 to secure the countrys foothold as the leading MICE destination in Asia Pacific. Under the roadmap, the industry is eyeing a revenue growth of more than 400 percent from only P4.6 billion posted in 2016 to P24.4 billion by 2030. The 199-room hotel Iloilo, Angeles said, provides choice venues for meetings and social events, with a main function room that can accommodate up to 100 guests for mid-sized events and an al fresco area by the poolside for early evening functions.Park Inn by Radisson is a friendly, fresh, vibrant and uncomplicated brand that focuses on delivering the modern essentials of a great business hotel experience, she said. SMHCC earlier opened Park Inn by Radisson hotels in Davao and Clark, but the branch in Iloilo is the first under the corporations licensing agreement with Radisson Hotel Group. Angeles said another Park Inn by Radisson hotel would be opened within the first half of the year beside SM North Edsa while the extension of the Clark facility would be completed by the first quarter of next year. Park Inn Bacolod is scheduled for opening in the third quarter of 2020, while another in Baguio will likely be finished by 2022. Angeles said that aside from the Radisson brand, SMHCC would also bring another international brand to the country. It is set to break ground for a 400-room hotel with serviced apartments near the SM Mall of Asia in June. The group is also set to construct a hotel and an SMX Convention Center in Sta. Rosa, Laguna. SMHCC earlier announced the expansion of its portfolio, doubling its current hotel room inventory and growing leasable convention space by 2020. Shakeys Pizza Asia Ventures Inc., one of the countrys leading restaurant operators owned by the Po family, is acquiring Peri-Peri Charcoal Chicken, an emerging fast casual and full-service restaurant brand in the Philippines. Shakeys said in a disclosure to the stock exchange it signed an agreement to purchase the assets and intellectual property relating to the Peri business, including its brand, trade name and the various proprietary recipes used by the chain to make its trademark peri-peri chicken. The company did not disclose the acquisition cost. The deal is expected to close by mid-year upon fulfillment of certain conditions. The acquisition will also involve owning and operating all company-owned stores and serving as brand-owner and franchisor of stores being operated by franchisees. We look forward to growing this business through our tried and tested formula of investing in the brand, investing in the people and investing in the stores. We will maintain the taste and look that made Peri famous, but hope to further elevate the customer experience with Shakeys trademark wow-ing service and improve the stores accessibility via proper site selection and expansion of the network, Shakeys president and chief executive Vicente Gregorio said. Peri has a store network of 23 units in several parts of Metro Manila, about 60 percent of which are franchised and 40 percent company-owned.We are excited by the potential of Peri to scale. We expect it to be an important future growth driver for our fast-casual chain restaurant business. Our deep insights into how to best serve the typical fast-casual restaurant guest should allow us to further grow the Peri brand. This is in addition to leveraging our teams execution capabilities, which remain best-in-class and our restaurant operating systems, which have also continued to improve over the last few years, said Shakeys chairman Christopher Po. Shakeys had a nationwide store count of 228 as of end-2018. It expects to open 20 stores this year. Shakeys also has three outlets abroad. Shakeys said with two international area development agreements signed up, its total international pipeline would be at least 20 outlets over the next few years. Shakeys owns the perpetual rights to the Shakeys brand for the Middle East, Asia (excluding Japan and Malaysia), China, Australia and Oceania. This Peri acquisition is another vote of confidence in the growing middle class in the Philippines. We will continue to invest in the restaurant space and diversify the business portfolio in the hope of achieving our vision of establishing wow brandsa handful of industry leading, full-service restaurant chains appealing to the Filipinos increasing need for affordable yet premium dining out options, Po said. - Korina Sanchez and Mar Roxas have returned to the Philippines with their twins Pepe and Pilar - The twins got a special homecoming party from family and friends - The new mom shared photos from the special event PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed Korina Sanchez and Mar Roxas went to the USA a month ago to meet their twin babies Pepe and Pilar. KAMI learned that the family has finally returned to the Philippines. Upon their return, the cute babies got a homecoming party from family and friends. Korina shared photos from the heartwarming party. After a major production of flying twin babies 20 hours away, we are finally home! Came back with a nice get together to meet Pepe and Pilar, Korina wrote. She also shared a photo of the yummy cupcakes at the special event. PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! In a previous report by KAMI, Pepe and Pilar were able to meet their dad Mars son Paolo. Korina Sanchez is considered to be one of the most well-known newscasters in the country. On October 27, 2009, she got married to former senator Mar Roxas. Through surrogacy in the US, she finally had her first babies Pepe and Pilar. POPULAR: Read more news about Korina Sanchez! Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! PAY ATTENTION: 12 Times Meghan Markle Went Against Royal Rules Jake Cuenca Talks About His Experience Of Working With Bea Alonzo! Jake Cuenca discusses what it was like working with Bea Alonzo and Ms. Charo Santos during the shooting of their horror movie "Eerie". Check out all of our exciting videos on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel! Source: Kami.com.ph PH to export shallots, bananas to indonesia posted April 02, 2019 at 07:55 pm by Othel V. Campos April 02, 2019 at 07:55 pm The Philippines may start exporting bananas and shallots shortly to Indonesia after a meeting Monday with visiting Indonesian Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita. The prospective export was one of the early gains of the Philippines during the meeting in Manila hosted by Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez and Agriculture secretary Emmanuel Pinol. Both sides stressed the importance of opening up each others market, while highlighting the decades-long relations between Indonesia and the Philippines. Indonesia committed to remove an anti-dumping measure against Philippine bananas and acknowledged Davao Region, Northern Mindanao, and SOCCSKSARGEN as pest-free areas for banana production.The trade partner also recognized Nueva Ecija, Ilocos and Mindoro as pest-free for shallot or onion production. The development is considered a breakthrough in the bilateral partnership between the two countries after Philippines exports were stopped earlier due to Indonesias non-tariff measures. 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. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe Today marks the unofficial end of California's rainy season. While we may see some more storms roll through, 90 percent of the precipitation that falls across the state does so between October and the start of April. We now have a pretty good idea of how our water situation will look for the rest of the year. So, how'd we do? HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN Just two years ago we were in the throes of one of the worst droughts in California's recorded history. The rainfall in 2017 pulled the rest of the state out of drought conditions, but Southern California continued to suffer from extreme dryness. 2018 was another knock against our recovery. Thankfully in 2019, precipitation returned with a vengeance. Most of the rain and snow we get across the state is delivered in intense bursts via atmospheric rivers. This year we were battered by a parade of storms, starting in mid January, with six in February alone. That's meant 125 percent of average rainfall for Southern California. THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SNOW BUSINESS When this year's atmospheric rivers rolled through, they were often met by cold air coming down from Alaska - which meant a lot of wet snow. Great news, considering 30 percent of our water storage is up in the Sierras and wet snow means more runoff come spring and summer. As of March 28, we've received 161 percent of average across the state. April 1 is used as a measurement because that's when snowpack is generally expected to be at its peak. California snowpack measurements March 28, 2019. (California Department of Water Resources) DOWN AT THE RESERVOIR During the drought California's reservoirs reached historically low levels, but luckily when 2017 came along many of them were nearly filled. This year they're also doing well with many of them at between 70 - 90 percent capacity. WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE "It's a wet year!," wrote Demetri Polyzos, resource planning manager with the Metropolitan Water District, in an e-mail. "The supplies available to Metropolitan this year will exceed the demands on us. We are taking water management actions to store as much of that water as possible. We anticipate adding to our overall storage. That water will be available to the region (SoCal) for use in future dry years." The water situation is looking so good that the California Department of Water Resources increased the allocation to the central valley agricultural industry to 70 percent, one of the highest levels they've had in the last 20 years, according to Chris Orroco, information officer with the state agency. RUNNING ON EMPTY The past 20 years have done a number on our underground reservoirs. "We've not really caught up with the many years of drought we've had," said Thomas Harter, groundwater expert and professor at UC Davis. The state, especially our agricultural industry, relied heavily on groundwater resources during our dry years. The biggest problem areas are in the San Joaquin Valley and parts of the central coast. Harter said that it takes roughly one wet year to make up for one dry year, and that since 1999, it's been dry more often than not. "Even in basins that aren't chronically overdrafted, over the past 20 years, we find that many have not really caught up in water levels relative to what they were 20 years ago," said Harter. "That's because the last 20 years have been exceptionally dry overall, compared to what it's been like over most of the 20th century." More wet years and increasingly aggressive groundwater replenishment could help. THE FUTURE If you can predict it, let me know. It would make my job a lot easier. While we may see some additional storms, enjoy the abundance of green hills and water while it lasts. The past five years have been some of the hottest on record, which have also coincided with some of our worst fires on record. As the climate continues to change, scientists believe that we could see stronger swings between periods of extreme dryness punctuated by extreme wetness. We could slip into another dry period later this year. That's what happened after our short reprieve following the 2007 - 2009 drought. We then experienced the worst drought on record just a few years later. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe Fun fact: Antarctica used to be a lush, tropical environment where giant beasts roamed the land-- not quite the empty tundra that comes to mind when we usually think about the South Pole. And now L.A. is getting the bones (ok, technically the replica bones) to prove it. Dr. Nathan Smith, a paleontologist at L.A.'s Natural History Museum, was one of the few scientists who traveled there between 2010 and 2011 to bring back some undiscovered dino history. Antarctic Dinosaurs, an exhibition making its West Coast debut starting Wednesday at the Natural History Museum, goes through the history of Antarctic exploration -- and the dinosaurs discovered there by Smith and his colleagues. "You're going to travel back in time," NHM President/Director Dr. Lori Bettison-Vargas told reporters at a press preview event. "People are going to discover something that they could never have imagined ever being true, which is this ice place that we know of today was a lush, forest environment with dinosaurs." An expedition team member waits for the helicopter to pick up a fossil to take back to the basecamp. (Eva Koppelhus, courtesy Natural History Museum) Antarctica wasn't always Frostbite City. The focus of the exhibition is the expedition that Smith and the Field Museum's Dr. Pete Makovicky undertook in 2010-2011 in the modern, colder version of the area. They even discovered a new species of dinosaur. Their still-active dig site is on Antarctica's Mount Kirkpatrick, around 12,500 feet up, with temperatures getting down to -30 Fahrenheit. "It's a crazy place to work," Smith said. "We're trying to tell this as a story of Antarctic exploration, moving from a spirit of competition to a modern spirit of collaboration." When you enter Antarctic Dinosaurs, you start off learning about the human side of exploration. That includes a section highlighting 1912's doomed Terra Nova expedition, whose explorers were carrying scientific findings that were weighing them down -- a decision that may have contributed to their deaths, according to Smith. The exhibition has items ranging from their supplies to a large sled used to carry their discoveries. Life-size replica of Sauropodomorph. (Gina Cholick/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County) There are full-size replicas of four dinosaur species: The Cryolophosaurus, a 25-foot "frozen crested lizard" named after the bony ornamentation on its head The Glacialisaurus, an elephant-sized herbivore Two still-to-be-named sauropodomorphs, relatives of dinos like the Brachiosaurus and the Titanosaurus -- but much smaller, with the smallest coming in at about the size of a Labrador Retriever. The exhibit also gets interactive, giving viewers a chance to handle the tools that scientists use when excavating in the Antarctic. Smith eagerly encouraged onlookers at a press preview to handle the items, including a jackhammer and an electric saw (don't worry, they were altered to be safe for all ages in a museum context). Antarctica, 2011 -- NHM scientist and Associate Curator in the Dinosaur Institute, Nate Smith, with fellow expedition members Pete Makovicky, William Hammer, Peter Braddock, Philip Currie, and Eva Koppelhus. (Phil Currie, courtesy Natural History Museum) The research Smith's been part of has implications for climate change science -- they hope their findings will show how mass extinctions and climate change affected the ancient polar ecosystems, and the animals who lived there. A big expedition like the one behind this exhibition happens about every seven years, Smith said, though he goes out on smaller expeditions every year. One go-to is Ghost Ranch, an hour north of Santa Fe, which Smith said is a great fossil site. Being out in the field is Smith's favorite part of the job. Then there's the paperwork. "A lot of the other work is sitting in front of the computer, writing papers, writing grants, teaching, mentoring students," Smith said. He also does a lot of work with the museum, including exhibits, classes, and more. Expeditions like those to Antarctica are heavily dependent on resources from the National Science Foundation, and they're holding a meeting this fall to start the process for what comes next, Smith said. We hope that includes more dinosaurs. An illustration of Cryolophosaurus ellioti. (Field Museum, illustration by Velizar Simeonovski) Smith's been with the Natural History Museum as an associate curator since 2015. He said that moving here from the East Coast was a big culture shock after growing up in Chicago and working as a university professor in Washington D.C. "D.C. to L.A. was a bigger shock than Chicago to D.C., but it's grown on me quite a bit -- and you can't argue with the weather," Smith said. It's definitely better than Antarctica. Replicated Taniwhasaurus skeleton. (na Cholick, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County) Antarctic Dinosaurs opens at the Natural History Museum on Wednesday and will remain in Southern California until early next January. Correction: Peter Braddock was misidentified in an earlier photo caption. LAist regrets the error. An Abu Sayyaf bandit was killed while two policemen were wounded after they prevented teachers from being kidnapped by the terrorists in Patikul, Sulu on Tuesday. Reports said policemen from the Patikul Municipal Police Station were escorting the teachers who were travelling from Jolo to Barangay Taung when they crossed paths with around 15 bandits, triggering the firefight at 8:30 a.m. Wounded during the firefight were Police Master Sergeant Al-Nidzfar Eraji and Patrolman Jordan Changlapon of the Patikul MPS. The ASG, meanwhile, suffered a still undetermined number of casualties during the firefight. Shortly after the incident, additional policemen responded to the site of encounter while the wounded lawmen were brought to the hospital for treatment. Meanwhile, in separate encounter in Patikul, a bandit was killed following an encounter with marine troopers in Barangay Bakaan, Banguigui minutes after the attempted kidnapping of the teachers.Col. Gerry Besana, spokesman of the Western Mindanao Command, said the bandit was killed after Marine troopers from the 3rd Marine Company of exchanged fire with ASG terrorists while on pursuit operations in nearby Sitio Halu-Halu, Simisa Island, Barangay Bakaan, Banguigui, Sulu. The ASG members dead body was recovered in the encounter site along with an M1 Carbine rifle. The Joint Task Force Sulu continuously employ more pressure on the remaining Abu Sayyaf bandits to gain more enemy strongholds and armaments, said Lieutenant General Arnel dela Vega, Commander of the Western Mindanao Command. We believe that a number of the bandits were wounded and probably could have died due to loss of blood after the encounter especially that our troops are still pursuing them as of this report, Dela Vega said. While operations are vigorously undertaken to neutralize the remaining bandits, we still encourage other Abu Sayyaf members to lay down their arms in order to finally have peace in Sulu, he added. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe THIS STORY IS PART OF HOW TO L.A., OUR ONGOING SERIES OF PRACTICAL GUIDES FOR DAY-TO-DAY LIVING IN LOS ANGELES. If a matzo ball lands in broth and no one's there to compare it to their grandmother's, did that bowl of soup exist at all? Something about a Jewish-style deli brings out the fight in us. Many claim that the #19 at Langer's is the best pastrami sandwich on the planet. Others insist Brent's in Northridge holds the title. Are the matzo balls at Canter's heinous and rock-hard or deliciously firm? Comparing delis to each other is as much of a tradition as their long menus, their complimentary half-sour pickles and pastrami piled high on rye bread. Like many European immigrants, the delicatessen came to the United States through New York, according to David Sax, author of the 2009 book Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen. The New York deli saw its heydey in 1920s and '30s. Now, Los Angeles is America's premier deli city. Fighting words, we know. From the San Fernando Valley to the Westside, from the Eastside to MacArthur Park, no matter where you are in L.A., odds are you're close to one of these palaces of nostalgia and comfort food. Art's Delicatessen Namesake Art Ginsburg passed away in 2013 but his son Harold has taken the reins at Art's Delicatessen, where "every sandwich is a work of art." Opened in 1957, it's known for its hot pastrami and traditional Reubens as well as its friendly atmosphere. No surly wait staff here. Instead you'll find would-be actors chatting you up and a warm welcome for dogs, as long as they stay on the sidewalk patio. The omelet with corned beef, pastrami and salami is fun way to sample all the meats at once. Many items are available in lighter portions (for a reduced price), along with vegetarian dishes such as a veggie Reuben and vegetable soup. 12224 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. 818-762-1221. Brent's Delicatessen & Restaurant Often considered the second-best deli in Southern California (behind Langer's) the valley's not-so-secret treasure has been busier than ever. Weekend lines at Brent's Deli snake along the sidewalk in front of its strip mall parking lot. Owned and operated by the Perskin family since 1969, the restaurant makes a matzo ball soup loaded with shredded chicken and one oversized ball. The blintzes are lightly brown and the thinly cut black forest pastrami offers a great blend of fat and lean meat on fresh, house-baked rye. 19565 Parthenia St., Northridge. 818-886-5679. Cookies for sale at Canter's Deli. (Julee Shapiro for LAist) Canter's Canter's has been one of the anchors on this ever-changing stretch of Fairfax Avenue since 1953. After some changes in 2018, the bakery and take-out deli are still open 24/7 while the dining room closes at 3 a.m. on weeknights. You know what to expect here: Slightly surly servers and a mix of senior citizens, Supreme-shopping hipsters, rock 'n' roll fans and tourists, who come for the deli standards. The half-sours are firm. The matzo ball soup, which features one large, hard, softball-sized ball, comes with a basket of toasted bagel chips. The house-baked rye bread is lightly crunchy. You can smell the fresh baked treats as you walk in the door. Just a half-mile from the Sunset Strip, Canter's is also known for its rock and roll history. Slash of Guns N' Roses and members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers were friends of owner Marc Canter and have been frequent guests, either at the restaurant or at the adjacent Kibbitz Room bar. Even Barack Obama stopped in for a nosh in 2014. 419 N. Fairfax Ave., Fairfax. 323-651-2030. A pastrami sandwich at Daughter's Delicatessen on the Sunset Strip. (Julee Shapiro for LAist) Daughter's Delicatessen In a strip mall in the heart of the Sunset Strip, Trisha Langer -- the granddaughter of that Langer -- serves next generation versions of her parents' and grandparents' favorites. Order at the counter, grab a seat out front and they'll bring the food to your table. (There is also limited seating inside.) Daughter's version of Langer's #19, the Papa, is filled with that familiar thick-cut Langer-style pastrami, sweet slaw, Swiss cheese and homemade Russian dressing on a tasty, tough-edged rye. The Nana is similar, with corned beef and sauerkraut. You can also try blintzes, matzo ball soup, a lox plate and other deli faves. The grilled cheese is served on challah while the egg creams come in chocolate and vanilla. 8555 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 310-652-6552. Factors Famous Deli While most delis are family-friendly, Factors takes it a step further with an extensive kid's menu, ride-on machines out front and a super kid-centric atmosphere. Opened in 1948, it has been overseen by the Markowitz family since 1969. Expect large portions and crunchy pickles. Highlights include crisp potato pancakes, kreplach (dumplings) and sky high sandwiches of pastrami, roast beef and brisket. Newer items include an extra large chopped salad and a few surprisingly good Tex Mex items like fajitas and a soft taco plate. The hand-cut pastrami is thick and juicy and the fresh-baked breads are soft. 9420 W. Pico Blvd., Pico-Robertson. 310-278-9175. Diners at Freedman's Deli in Echo Park. (Julee Shapiro for LAist) Freedman's Not quite a deli but not quite anything else, Freedman's opened in an Echo Park strip mall in 2017, showcasing chef Liz Johnson's deli-inspired gourmet food. The menu changes according to the time of day -- there's no pastrami or matzo balls on the brunch menu -- but if you're craving pickles, just ask. All the meats and fish are smoked in-house. Bagels are made fresh each morning, producing balls of dough with a thin layer of firm crust and a light, airy center. The smoked salmon and post-modern scrambled eggs come with a waffle iron-formed potato "latke" that's crisp on the outside and soft inside, served with eggs and thinly sliced salmon. The chocolate babka is a glorious sticky bun covered in gooey sugary caramel. At dinner, you can order matzo ball soup served in a grandma-style tureen and brisket for four, cut tableside with an electric carving knife. The food is fresh and inventive, offering a new take on old favorites. 2619 Sunset Blvd., Echo Park. 213-568-3754. Fromin's Restaurant & Delicatessen Once a chain of five restaurants stretching from the San Fernando Valley to Palm Springs, Fromin's scaled back in 1990, keeping only the Santa Monica location. Founder Dennis Fromin still runs the restaurant. You'll find an extensive menu -- nine pages in all, with plenty of sandwich and fish options, latkes, blintzes, soups, herring, gefilte fish, borscht and chopped liver. The egg creams and chocolate phosphates are totally vintage but the avocado toast is riding the millennial wave. Breakfast is served all day, which is helpful because the cinnamon loaf French toast -- thick slices of cinnamon roll transformed into eggy pan-fried toast then dusted with powdered sugar -- can be a bit rich for the A.M. 1832 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica. 310-829-5443. The exterior of Greenblatt's Deli in West Hollywood. (Julee Shapiro for LAist) Greenblatt's Deli When this deli first opened in 1926, Sunset Boulevard was a dirt road. Greenblatt's has been in its current location near Crescent Heights since 1946 and is probably L.A.'s oldest deli. The main floor holds the meat counter plus an extensive wine shop. There are a few booths down here but the larger dining room is upstairs. Their pastrami is on the lean side and comes with a whole pickle and your choice of one side -- a bag of Kettle potato chips, creamy macaroni salad, house made slaw or potato salad. Go for the slaw. Greenblatt's does a lot of takeout so call ahead. It's open until 2 a.m. daily, making it the perfect pit-stop after a set at the Laugh Factory next door. 8017 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 323-656-0606. The pastrami sandwich at Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica. (Julee Shapiro for LAist) Izzy's Deli Izzy's Deli debuted in 1973 and is still run by its original owner, Izzy Freeman, along with his family. It's open 24 hours and calls itself both the "deli to the stars" and the "home of the overstuffed sandwich." That's true on both counts. Star sightings are supposedly common and the pastrami and corned beef sandwiches come loaded with meat. The potato salad is especially creamy and smooth. Located at the corner of Wilshire and 16th Street, Izzy's dining room is lined with large windows on two sides making it feel open and airy. Judith's Mish Mash Soup, a bowl of broth loaded with noodles, kreplach and a matzo ball, is the ideal sick-day remedy. 1433 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica. 310-394-1131. Label's Table Just a block from Factor's on Pico, Label's Table has been quietly serving sandwiches, soups and sides to a busy lunch crowd since 1974. Still run by its original owner, Bruce Krakoff, this is a no-nonsense, no-frills, lunch-only spot. Order from the menu board and wait for your number, then bring your red plastic tray of food to one of the long tables. The quality is good and the prices are reasonable (for a deli). The #2 fish brunch comes with a bagel cut into quarters, slathered in cream cheese, draped with lox and lined up in a horizontal stack with tomato, onion, olives and a pickle. 9226 W. Pico Blvd., Pico-Robertson. 310-276-0388. Langer's Loads of famous fans including Nora Ephron and Jonathan Gold say Langer's makes the best pastrami sandwich. The James Beard Award-winning deli, located at a bustling corner opposite MacArthur Park, is most famous for its #19 -- a sandwich piled with freshly cut pastrami, swiss cheese, coleslaw and Russian dressing on rye bread. Pair it with a vanilla or chocolate egg cream soda. Langer's is only open during the day and you should expect a wait at lunchtime. Weekends are less busy. Parking can be challenging so if you don't find a metered street spot, try the lot a block up on Wilshire; Langer's validates. 704 S. Alvarado St., Westlake. 213-483-8050. Nate 'n Al Delicatessen While the current owners have been in talks to sell this Beverly Drive institution, preservationists are pushing the city council to designate Nate 'n Al's as a historic landmark. Opened in 1945 by Al Mendelson and made famous by long-time customers like Larry King, the deli is still owned and operated by the Mendelson family. Known for its snappy hot dogs, silver-dollar-sized potato latkes and house-baked rye, the booths are large and comfy and the vibe is family-friendly. They serve a minimalist matzo ball soup: a single, unadorned ball with only a few noodles to keep it company. Their meats are smoked in house while the lox is imported from the East Coast. 414 N. Beverly Dr., Beverly Hills. 310-274-0101. A bagel with lox and a pickle at Wexler's Deli in Century City. (Julee Shapiro for LAist) Wexler's Deli Relative newcomers in the deli world, Micah Wexler and Michael Kassar opened a stand in downtown L.A.'s Grand Central Market in 2014. An instant success, they branched out to Century City's Westfield mall and to a larger outpost in Santa Monica, the only location where you can get their matzo ball soup and their babka French toast with vanilla bean whip. At all three Wexler's locations, you order at the counter, Katz's style, and wait for your number to be called. The MacArthur Park pays homage to Langer's #19, piled with soft, lightly peppered, thick-cut pastrami that's tinged with clove and never feels soggy. The house-smoked lox (sold on bagels or by the pound) is mild, not that fishy or smoky, and provides a perfect foil for the cream cheese. 317 S. Broadway, downtown L.A. 213-620-0633. 616 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. 424-744-8671. 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., Century City. 310-203-9776. This story has been updated: An earlier version of the story included New York Famous Deli in Eagle Rock, which closed in October 2018, and Lenny's Deli, which closed in August 2019. It has been removed. 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(1) Mar 20 (1) Mar 18 (1) Mar 17 (2) Mar 16 (1) Mar 14 (2) Mar 13 (4) Mar 12 (1) Mar 11 (1) Mar 10 (1) Mar 06 (4) Mar 05 (1) Mar 04 (1) Mar 03 (2) Mar 02 (2) Mar 01 (2) Feb 28 (2) Feb 27 (1) Feb 26 (1) Feb 25 (1) Feb 23 (2) Feb 19 (2) Feb 13 (1) Feb 12 (1) Feb 02 (1) Jan 31 (1) Jan 22 (1) Jan 18 (1) Jan 16 (1) Jan 09 (1) Jan 01 (1) Dec 20 (2) Dec 15 (1) Dec 13 (1) Dec 11 (1) Nov 30 (1) Nov 27 (1) Nov 20 (1) Nov 11 (1) Nov 10 (1) Oct 23 (1) Oct 20 (1) Oct 01 (1) Sep 30 (1) Sep 29 (1) Sep 24 (2) Sep 15 (1) Sep 13 (1) Sep 12 (1) Sep 08 (1) Sep 02 (2) Aug 31 (1) Aug 28 (1) Aug 27 (2) Aug 24 (1) Aug 21 (1) Aug 20 (1) Aug 18 (3) Aug 16 (1) Aug 15 (1) Aug 14 (1) Aug 11 (1) Aug 08 (1) Aug 07 (1) Aug 03 (1) Jul 27 (1) Jul 26 (1) Jul 24 (1) Jul 22 (1) Jul 21 (1) Jul 19 (1) Jul 15 (1) Jul 14 (1) Jul 13 (3) Jul 10 (1) Jul 08 (2) Jul 07 (1) Jul 06 (1) Jul 03 (1) Jul 01 (1) Jun 28 (1) Jun 24 (2) Jun 20 (1) Jun 19 (1) Jun 18 (1) Jun 15 (1) Jun 14 (2) Jun 11 (1) Jun 09 (3) Jun 08 (1) Jun 07 (1) Jun 06 (1) Jun 04 (2) Jun 03 (1) Jun 02 (2) Jun 01 (1) May 31 (3) May 30 (1) May 29 (1) May 28 (2) May 26 (1) May 25 (1) May 18 (1) May 17 (1) May 15 (1) May 09 (1) May 07 (2) May 02 (1) May 01 (1) Apr 30 (1) Apr 27 (1) Apr 26 (2) Apr 23 (1) Apr 22 (1) Apr 19 (1) Apr 18 (1) Apr 12 (1) Apr 11 (1) Apr 09 (1) Apr 07 (1) Apr 05 (1) Apr 01 (1) Mar 30 (1) Mar 27 (1) Mar 25 (1) Mar 22 (2) Mar 19 (1) Mar 18 (1) Mar 16 (1) Mar 15 (2) Mar 13 (1) Mar 12 (1) Mar 11 (1) Mar 10 (1) The implementing rules and regulations of the countrys new rice tariff law are now in the hands of the Department of Agriculture, the Palace announced on Tuesday. In a statement after the 36th Cabinet meeting on Monday evening, Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo said the IRR for the Rice Industry Modernization was already approved by the National Economic and Development Authority and the Department of Budget and Management. The IRR of the Rice Tariffication Act was likewise tackled. The IRR is already signed by the NEDA and the DBM while it is still pending with the legal department of the DA, Panelo said in a statement Tuesday. The IRR is expected to formulate a rice industry roadmap for the development of this sector, he added. In order to liberalize rice importation by replacing quantitative import restrictions with tariffs, President Rodrigo Duterte has signed Republic Act No. 11203 last February. Under the law, unlimited rice importation will be allowed. Potential investors, however, must first secure a phytosanitary permit from the Bureau of Plant Industry and pay the 35-percent tariff for shipments from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. For non-ASEAN countries, the government requires the collection of a 50-percent tariff for rice imports.The law also mandates the creation of the P10-billion Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund. The Palace has previously assured the public that the government will handle the multi-billion-peso fund with more accountability and transparency. According to Panelo, the Agriculture secretary shall oversee the proper and responsible utilization of the rice fund as mandated by RA 11203. He added that the Congressional Oversight Committee on Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization shall also conduct a periodic review of the rice fund. Panelo also called on the rice stakeholders to be actively involved in ensuring anti-corruption safeguards during the crafting of the envisioned Rice Industry Road map and the laws IRR. Tuesday, April 2, 2019 From Cosecha: Immigrant Leaders in Michigan, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia, and Indiana call for coordinated actions on May 1st to amplify Statewide Driving Without Fear Campaigns As statewide immigrant led Driver Licenses campaigns gain momentum across the Country, the Cosecha Movement launches the first ever Driving Without Fear National Network Nationwide - Leaders of state and county wide campaigns across have come together to launch a national Driving Without Fear campaign and are calling for coordinated actions across the country this May 1st, 2019. Across the country, immigrant leaders are demanding that states pass legislation that would allow immigrant families to apply for driver licenses. In the absence of any meaningful chance to win legalization at the federal level, Driving Without Fear campaigns are gaining momentum across the country. The national Driving Without Fear network is a project of the Cosecha Movement, which is running campaigns in Michigan, Massachusetts and New Jersey demanding drivers licenses for all undocumented immigrants. County campaigns in Georgia and Indiana and simultaneously demanding the stop of arrests for driving without a license. In 2017, Cosecha organized the massive "Un Dia Sin Inmigrante" marches which mobilized thousands of immigrants across the country to demand permanent protection, dignity and respect. Local leaders and Cosecha members have launched this "Driving Without Fear" network to bring together others like them leading the fight for undocumented families and workers in the United States and their right to dignity, respect, and to drive without fear. In cities across America, millions of parents and workers get up every morning to work and take their children to school. Families set out to buy groceries, take their children to the hospital when they are sick, or go to parks and malls to spend time together. But millions of undocumented immigrants fear sitting behind the wheel of a car because everyday things can lead to an arrest for not having license - children and parents alike tensing up and hold their breath every time a police officer drives by. For many it means saying no to opportunities, taking long bus rides or walks that keeps them away from home, it means spending thousands a year in paying for rides - but for many others this is not a choice, and they are sentenced to driving with fear everyday. This is why immigrants across the United States are organizing and demanding their right to drive without fear. In a time when abuse against our community continues to increase and expand and no one is talking about a permanent solution for our community, Cosecha leaders are not letting this administrations policies and rhetoric define their lives and choosing to continue to fight. Undocumented immigrants are leading their own struggle, bringing their families, their friends, their co-workers, and communities together to demand their right to Drive Without Fear. Immigrant leaders around the country are saying Licensias Hoy, Papeles Manana (Licenses Today, Papers Tomorrow) because they know that fighting for their right to drive without fear is only a first step in a longer path towards permanent protection, dignity, and respect. They have seen the energy bubbling across the country and are calling for other leaders to join them as part of a support network to support each other, learn and lead together. We need licenses because its a necessity-- not a privilege or a luxury. We need to work, buy groceries, take our kids to school. We must be conscious and come out to march. We cannot be afraid because fear wont give us anything, we already left our countries to come here so we can come out and march on May 1st. - Norma Morales from Cosecha New Jersey On May 1st, the immigrant community will take coordinated action and take to the streets to demand their right to drive without fear. In places like Perth Amboy, NJ businesses will be closing and hundreds from across the state will come together to demand that legislators keep their promises and pass drivers license legislation. In Grand Rapids, MI thousands will take to the streets to join coordinated actions across the state and demand that the state reinstate driver licenses for the community. #### To learn more about the network of "Driving Without Fear" Campaigns, and to learn more about May 1st marches, visit: www.ManejandoSinMiedo.com bh https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/04/may-1-driving-without-fear-campaign.html Learn.org has created its ranking for the best colleges for veterans in the US based off of benefit programs, various services offered, and educational program excellence. Read on to learn what schools made the list. View Schools Best Colleges for Veterans Making the transition back to civilian life can be a challenge, especially when it comes to going back to school. Thankfully, military veterans are extended a range of benefits because of their service to this country. Learn.org has researched these benefit programs, analyzed veterans services in higher education, and dug up extra incentives to come up with a list of the best schools for those who served. These schools offer great programs that are affordable while still providing an excellent education. To find these schools, we evaluated several data points from the U.S. Department of Education such as graduation rate, student to teacher ratio, and student retention. However, Learn.org's rankings are unique in that they emphasize accessibility, affordability, and quality of education, which we considered the most important attributes in our ranking lists. In this list, you'll also find out which universities offer Yellow Ribbon programs, which ones offer credit for military training and which ones give veterans the most robust services. So here it is, Learn.org's cream of the crop colleges for veterans. 1. The College of New Jersey The College of New Jersey, located in Ewing, NJ, has shown exemplary dedication to veterans. The Veteran Affairs Office here employs a team of counselors who walk veterans through all of the options available to them, from tuition assistance like the GI Bill and branch-specific aid to support programs like psychological counseling and educational planning. All of these benefits are governed by the school's Principles of Excellence; a set of standards designed to ensure veterans at TCNJ receive a high-quality education. 2. State Technical College of Missouri The State Technical College of Missouri in Linn is a public 2-year school with a recognized dedication to helping veterans make the transition to student life. There's a contact point for veteran students on campus and the Veterans Club, an organization where veterans can share common experiences, support each other and find a sense of community. 3. Hillsdale College Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, is a little different than the other schools on this list; it doesn't participate in any federal assistance for veterans (not even the GI Bill). So what makes Hillsdale so great for veterans? The school raises private funds to help former military members from any branch with everything they need to succeed including money for tuition, fees, books and housing. It's called the Freedom Scholarship, and it deserves all the kudos it's received. 4. Lake Area Technical Institute Lake Area Technical Institute landed at number four on our list thanks to a comprehensive array of programs for veteran students. Not only can vets get college credit here for the training they received in the military, but they also have access to a staff that helps them apply for and get the most out of their federal benefits, a student organization for veterans and a Veteran Ops Lounge where students can study, relax and meet fellow vets. 5. California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo offers a Veterans Success Center where all veteran students and their families can get help applying for federal benefits, hang out in the lounge, meet fellow vets and attend events. Cal Poly also participates in the Post-9/11 GI Bill. 6. Claremont McKenna College Claremont McKenna College is a small private school in California with an impressive student-to-faculty ratio of 8:1. How can vets take advantage of this type of education? Claremont McKenna provides a couple of ways. Vets can get credit for military experience and can take advantage of federal assistance like the Yellow Ribbon program where the school matches some of the government's funds. 7. Virginia Military Institute Students at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington have a dedicated point of contact on-campus to get help applying for state and federal benefits. The school participates in the Post-9/11 GI Bill and accepts military training for college credits. Along with these excellent veteran benefits, students can also take advantage of small class sizes with the average student to faculty ratio of 11 to 1. 8. Johnson University To show its dedication to veterans, Johnson University in Knoxville, TN, agreed to the Principles of Excellence executive order, a set of rigorous standards by which the school must abide. These include helping veterans build a comprehensive educational plan, providing one-on-one guidance for benefit applications and adhering to refund policies. 9. CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College is part of the City University of New York system and participates in the Principles of Excellence program. Baruch gives vets college credits for military service and provides access to a range of federal aid programs including the Post-9/11 GI Bill and the Veteran's Emergency Loan program. From the GI Bill, undergraduate vets here get an average aid package of $5,576 while graduate vets receive an average of $10,366 during the 2016-2017 school year. 10. Muhlenberg College How did Muhlenberg College end up in the top ten on our list? Well, how does 100% coverage of tuition and fees for higher education sound? That's what vets get at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Muhlenberg participates in the Yellow Ribbon program where schools can add funds on top of federal assistance, and the college chooses to take care of the rest of tuition and fees that federal programs may not cover. 11. DePauw University DePauw University also participates in the Yellow Ribbon program with a cap of $15,000 per student per year for in-state students. Fifty student vets took part in the program in 2017-2018. DePauw, located in Greencastle, Indiana, is a highly ranked private school with a faculty-to-student ratio of just 8:1 so vets here have access to a top-flight education at a relatively affordable price with aid. 12. St. Mary's College of Maryland St. Mary's College of Maryland prides itself on being a small public school with intimate class sizes and a tight-knit community of students. Another well-deserved point of pride? St Mary's College's commitment to veterans. The school participates in the Yellow Ribbon program and offers college credit for military training. 13. Binghamton University Binghamton University in Binghampton, New York, has shown an admirable dedication to helping veterans transition from military life to student life and beyond. The on-campus Office of Veteran Services gives students one-on-one counseling to maximize their federal benefits and connect with veteran services. Binghampton also boasts a vibrant Veteran Students Organization and a Veterans Lounge where students can study, relax and connect with fellow veterans. 14. University of Richmond Not only do students at the University of Richmond in Virginia get college credit for their time in the military, but they also have access to the fantastic benefits of the Yellow Ribbon program. In addition to federal funds, the University of Richmond gives 25 student vets up to $5,000 each per academic year, putting the school's high-quality education well within reach for those who served their country. 15. Stony Brook University Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, participates in a wide array of federal and state tuition assistance programs including the GI Bill and the Vocational Rehabilitation program. But Stony Brook also focuses on community, giving student vets easy access to work-study programs and clubs like the Veteran Student Organization, where they can get support, attend events and find fellowship with other vets. 16. Penn State Altoona Penn State Altoona is dedicated to helping veterans become thriving students. Penn State Altoona participates in a number of programs for veterans including the Post-9/11 GI Bill and the Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment Program. With an average student to teacher ratio of 15:1, students at Penn State Altoona will learn in an intimate, close setting. 17. St. Joseph's College-Long Island St. Joseph's College-Long Island deserves praise for the support system it's put in place for veteran students. St. Joseph's participates in a variety of state and federal assistance programs, hosts a chapter of the Student Veterans of America (SVA) club, and offers career services to help vets transition into life after academia. To top it off, the school is part of the Yellow Ribbon program, which gives some vets a stipend for books and supplies and a housing allowance, among other benefits. 18. McDaniel College McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, instituted the McDaniel Military Legacy Scholarship (MLS) in 2019. This scholarship offers up to $25,000 per year and up to $100,000 over four years for residential students ($80,000 for commuter students). Currently, there's no limit to the number of students who can take advantage of the MLS! The school also has the Veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq Conflicts (VAIC) Scholarship Program, which provided up to $7,152 in awards for on-campus veteran students in 2018-2019. 19. Niagara University Niagara University has a long history of serving veterans, including the Magnificent Seven; seven students who attended Niagara and exemplified what it means to serve. Veteran students at Niagara University get credit for military training and access to GI Bill benefits, including the all-important Yellow Ribbon program. They're also plugged into the Student Veterans of America organization, which gives veteran students a sense of fraternity. 20. College of William and Mary The Yellow Ribbon program is in full effect at the College of William and Mary -- five veteran out-of-state students are eligible to receive an extra $1,000 per semester on top of what the Veteran's Administration offers. Vets here also get priority registration for classes, college credit for military training and access to individualized support for transitioning to student life. 21. Caldwell University Caldwell University participates in a variety of federal assistance programs, but helping veterans financially is just one part of the equation. Caldwell does a stellar job of giving vets a complete support system -- there's the Counseling Center, which offers free mental health services, the Student Veterans of America organization on-campus, and a one-on-one advisor to help vets get access to both emotional and monetary help as they go through their academic careers. 22. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill serves veteran students and their families through the Carolina Veterans Resource Center (CVRC). Inside, there's a lounge for relaxing, study spaces for doing homework and conference rooms for the meeting of veteran student organizations. UNC Chapel Hill can be lauded for participating in the Yellow Ribbon program. To give an idea of what the school offered, in 2016-2017, the school matched government funds for undergraduates ($5,000), graduates ($7,000) and students at the Kenan-Flagler Business School ($9,227.50). 23. Belmont University Belmont University is a private school in Nashville, Tennessee, that offers a 14:1 student-to-faculty ratio and a range of highly ranked programs. The school serves vets by participating in the Yellow Ribbon program and matching 50% of tuition and fees that aren't met by federal assistance. On-campus, student vets will find the Bruin Vets Center, a place where military members can relax and watch TV, study quietly, cook meals in the kitchen and find companionship with fellow vets. 24. Bryant University For the state of Rhode Island, there was no better place for veterans than Bryant University. At Bryant, students can take advantage of the Yellow Ribbon program -- the school will match funds for 100% coverage of tuition and fees. Bryant is also home to the Bryant Veterans Professional Network, an organization that pairs vets with alumni, faculty and local businesses to provide support through academia and beyond. 25. York College of Pennsylvania Everything at York College of Pennsylvania is run through the Military and Veterans Advocacy Committee (MVAC), an organization that connects veteran students with all the benefits the school has to offer. And those benefits are numerous -- York College of Pennsylvania gives students course credits for military training, offers matching tuition funds as part of the Yellow Ribbon program, provides counseling services and connects veteran students with orientation courses and activities throughout their academic careers. 26. Wayne State College Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska, does a lot to make sure veterans can afford a quality education. The school participates in the Yellow Ribbon program, giving 10 students as much as $2,185.00 per academic year on top of any federal and state funds for which they qualify. Vets can also get credit for training and experience in the military. For instance, basic training is worth four credit hours, which is one less class to pay for. To give you an idea of what to expect in terms of funding, the average Post-9/11 benefits for undergraduate students at Wayne State added up to $4,295 for 2016-2017. 27. Walla Walla University College Place, Washington, is home to Walla Walla University, a private Seventh-Day Adventist University with a thriving student veteran community. Veterans here can get up to 6 quarter credits waived for basic training, get matching funds from the school as part of the Yellow Ribbon program, and receive one-on-one academic guidance and advisement from the on-campus Veterans Affairs Coordinator. 28. Citadel Military College of South Carolina The Citadel Military College of South Carolina, often considered one of the most prestigious military institutions in the country, is a fantastic place for veterans to get a top-tier education at an incredible value. The school boasts a huge range of scholarships (both merit-based and otherwise), participates in the Yellow Ribbon program, and gives students access to the Vocational Rehabilitation & Employment (VR&E) Program where veterans can receive funds to cover tuition, books, supplies and even parking. 29. Gonzaga University Gonzaga University boasts a wealth of resources for veterans, including the Student Veterans of America organization. The school also has two dedicated staff members (a veteran advisor and a veteran coordinator), the Gonzaga Veteran Advisory Group and the Transfer, Veteran & Returning Adult Services (TVRAS) Ambassador Program, wherein student ambassadors meet with new veterans to help them with the transition process. 30. Samford University Want to opt out of classes thanks to your military training and experience? Samford University, a private school in Birmingham, Alabama, gives veterans credit, plus it's a participant in the Post-9/11 GI Bill and the Yellow Ribbon program, meaning students have access to housing allowances, book stipends and even up to 100% of tuition and fees. What's more, Samford has dedicated staff for veteran services and a student organization just for those who served. 31. Rockhurst University Through the Yellow Ribbon program (and other financial assistance), full-time undergraduate student veterans at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, received an average of $14,550 in aid during the 2016-2017 school year. For graduate students, that number was $12,012. On top of that, vets can qualify for merit-based scholarships like the Veteran Award, which gives transferring military veterans $1,000 for tuition. 32. Marquette University Veterans can use Marquette University's veteran services to access a wide array of benefits, from the Post-9/11 GI Bill to the Vocational Rehabilitation Program and the Veterans' Administration Tutoring Program. Marquette also helps student vets apply for assistance from the state of Wisconsin including the VetEd Reimbursement Grant, Troops to Teachers and the Wisconsin GI Bill. 33. Le Moyne College Vets at Le Moyne College in Syracuse enjoy a superb support system. There's the Veterans' House, a designated on-campus building where vets can hang out, get connected with resources, find study partners, and relax. Veterans' Services Coordinators provide veterans with individualized academic advisement and students who served also get priority registration for classes. For the 2016-2017 school year, undergraduate veterans received an average of $16,895 for Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits. 34. Bentley University How about a top-flight private education at a fraction of the cost? Bentley University's tuition and fees reflect its elite status, but for veterans who served their country, it's within reach. That's because Bentley voluntarily entered into the Yellow Ribbon portion of the Post-9/11 GI Bill. What does that mean for veteran students? For ten undergraduates, it's an extra $5,000 above any federal monies, and for five graduate students, it's $4,000 toward tuition and fees. 35. College of the Ozarks The Yellow Ribbon program, college credit for basic training, and veteran advisors, are just the beginning of the support veterans get at the College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri. The school's myriad scholarship opportunities and federal program connections give vets more ways to pay for college. What's more, College of the Ozarks sets aside one week a year to honor veterans with services and events, and hosts a September 11 Remembrance event and an Honor America celebration where the community shows tribute to veterans on campus. 36. Fitchburg State University Fitchburg State University makes it a solemn mission to serve those who served their country. Veterans here have access to priority enrollment for classes, counseling services on campus and one-on-one help applying for federal and state assistance. If all the conditions are met, some veteran students may be eligible for a full tuition waiver under the Massachusetts Veteran Tuition Waiver. And, under the VALOR act, students who served in the military can use that service to get up to 60 credit hours applied to their degree. 37. University of St. Thomas The University of St. Thomas offers its veteran students class credit for training they received in the military, plus it participates in the Yellow Ribbon program for both graduates and undergraduates. For anything above the max amount, St. Thomas will provide 50% of tuition and fees for the academic year. For the nearly 100 undergraduate veterans and service members receiving benefits here, the average amount added up to $25,038 for 2016-2017. 38. Towson University Towson University in Towson, Maryland, has built an impressive support system for military members. It all starts at the Military and Veterans Center (MVC) on campus (staffed by a director of military and veterans services, a program manager specialist and student assistants), where veteran students can go to get academic advisement, find help with federal aid applications, and connect with the school's student veteran organization. Towson's Ziolkowski Scholarship also provides a veteran student with $3,221 (or $1,610 for two students) toward their education. 39. Gannon University Gannon University sees it as a sacred duty to serve the men and women who served this country. Through the Yellow Ribbon program, institutional funding and a wide range of scholarships, veteran students can get up to 100% of their tuition, fees and even room and board covered throughout the duration of their time in school. All of these benefit options can get confusing, so Gannon employs a counselor to sit down with every incoming vet to help them understand their options and apply for aid. 40. Marist College With a recognized student veteran organization on campus, a dedicated advisor for help with financial assistance applications and a range of scholarships, Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, represents a great option for veterans seeking higher education. But Marist doesn't stop there. The school offers incoming veterans a generous program of college credit for not just military training but also for life experience and prior learning, giving vets a way to surge ahead. 41. Saint John Fisher College Saint John Fisher College is a private Catholic school in Rochester, New York, with a prestigious reputation and an impressive 12:1 student-to-faculty ratio. Veterans can get all sorts of help here with paying for college, from the Yellow Ribbon program and the Veterans Educational Assistance Program to Vocational Rehabilitation and scholarships. For the 2016-2017 school year, the undergraduate students here who qualified for aid under the Post-9/11 GI Bill received an average benefits package of $20,556 to help cover tuition and fees. 42. Rutgers University-Camden To help ease their transition into student life, Rutgers University-Camden has instituted the Peer Advisors for Veteran Education (PAVE) program. PAVE pairs incoming veterans with student vets who are already on campus; these student vet ambassadors help new students overcome challenges unique to vets and provide support for life both inside and outside academia. In addition, the school provides Military Cultural Competency Training for non-vet students so they can understand and appreciate the sacrifices vets have made. 43. Missouri University of Science and Technology Missouri University of Science and Technology, a public university in Rolla, Missouri, has advisors on campus to help incoming students apply for aid and find resources for making the transition to civilian life. But academic advisors can only go so far. That's why Missouri S & T helps vets connect with the Student Veterans Association; it's a place where veterans can share common experiences and support one another through school and beyond. 44. Blue Mountain College Blue Mountain College, a small private school of around 600 students in Blue Mountain, Mississippi, knows the sacrifice you've made as a veteran. The school offers vets credit for military training and participates in the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The veteran students who received benefits in 2016-2017 got an average amount of $6,434 toward tuition. 45. Creighton University Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, shows its dedication to veterans by offering credit for military training, participating in the Yellow Ribbon program and offering tuition assistance through the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The school also offers a designated resource center and lounge specifically for vets and active duty service members. What's more, the school offers 115 unique degree programs including on-campus, online, and hybrid courses. 46. Waynesburg University Pennsylvania residents who served in the military will want to check out Waynesburg University. It's a private school with intimate class sizes and a small veteran student body. A little over 20 student veterans received assistance from the Post-9/11 GI Bill here, and the average aid package was quite healthy -- undergraduates got $15,663 in 2016-2017 and graduates got $7,324 during the same time period. 47. Plymouth State University New Hampshire's Plymouth State University works with the VA and a wide array of private funds to give veteran students access to all sorts of ways to support their education. The Hammer Family Scholarship, the Yellow Ribbon Program, AMVETS, the Google SVA Scholarship and many more give vets relief from tuition, fees, and room and board as they attend school. 48. University of Minnesota-Rochester In addition to all the assistance from federal programs, the University of Minnesota-Rochester makes sure its veteran students have access to the Minnesota GI Bill, which offers up to $3,000 per year for full-time students and $500 per semester for part-time students. Every veteran at UM-Rochester can also use their military experience to get college credits and take advantage of Minnesota's Veteran Education Assistance, which offers an extra $750 toward tuition for vets who have used up their GI Bill benefits. 49. University of Oklahoma-Norman Campus The University of Oklahoma-Norman Campus boasts a relatively large veteran student body and to serve them, the school offers a club, a counseling center, one-on-one help with tuition assistance and a dedicated hub for support -- the Norman Main Campus Veteran Student Services building. Many faculty and staff choose to volunteer for the Green Zone as well, undergoing training to learn how to better assist and provide guidance for vets at OU. 50. Western Carolina University Nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Cullowhee is Western Carolina University. Western Carolina adheres to uncompromising values, and veterans looking for support here as they move into a new phase of life can count on it. The school has an on-campus Director of Military Student Services there to guide new students through their transition to academia, both financially and emotionally. What's more, veterans can use their military training to get credit for classes. President Rodrigo Duterte named Janet Abuel as acting secretary of the Department of Budget and Management. Yesterday nights Cabinet meeting began with the Presidents announcement of the appointment of the DBM Officer-in-Charge/Undersecretary Janet Abuel as acting secretary, Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo said in a statement Tuesday. Abuel was previously named DBM officer-in-charge, replacing Benjamin Diokno who was appointed as governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Abuel, a certified public accountant, finished law at the University of the Cordilleras and topped the bar in 1998. She also holds a Masters degree in Public Administration from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, and a Master of Laws degree from the University of Sydney in Australia. Abuel is a career official at the DBM, starting as a budget and management analyst in 1996 and rising from the ranks to become undersecretary. Prior to her appointment as the acting DBM chief, she headed the local government and regional operations group, overseeing policy formulation and concerns of local governments, as well as supervising regional offices as an undersecretary. Meanwhile, the Department of Agrarian Reform on Tuesday warned substandard contractors of foreign-assisted infrastructure projects. Undersecretary for Foreign-Assisted and Special Projects Office Bernie Cruz said the agency could recommend to blacklist or suspend contractors with defective projects so that they could not be allowed to participate in future bidding of projects with the Department of Public Works of Highways. We [DAR] as the property owner will always continue to monitor and evaluate such projects, he told theThe beauty in the implementation of the foreign-assisted projects is that we have the responsibility to report their progress to the National Economic Development Authority, he said. According to Cruz, Agrarian Reform Secretary John Castriciones has instructed all DAR officials to end corruption within the agency. The fight against corruption is relentless under the Duterte administration, he said. The monitoring of the implementation of foreign-assisted infrastructure projects is stricter than locally funded projects since their allocations come from foreign loans, he cited. NEDA-Investment Coordination [-Cabinet Committee] conducts regular coordination meeting, wherein we submit our quarterly reports, he said. He gave the farmers as well as the public that corruption is very remote remote to happen in the implementation of foreign-assisted projects. Earlier, Cruz blocked the turnover of two substandard farm-to-market roads in Sultan Kudarat, Mindanao. He also ordered the deferment of the transfer of management and maintenance of a P34.55-million farm-to-market road to officials and residents of Barangay Masiag, Bagumbayan municipality and a P7.36-million farm-to-market road in Isulan town due to some cracks. Retirement communities like Laguna Woods Village in Southern California often plan activities for their older adult members. One recent outing included eating a small lunch, playing bingo gamesand buying their months supply of marijuana. Its like the ultimate senior experience, said 76-year-old retiree Ron Atkin. He talked with Associated Press reporters in the back room of a marijuana store called Bud and Bloom in the California city of Santa Ana. Most American states have legalized the use of medical marijuana. And 10 of them -- including California permit people who are 21 and older to use the drug for non-medical purposes. The federal government still bans the drug, even as acceptance increases across the country. The General Social Survey found last year that a record 61 percent of Americans support legalization of marijuana. It also found that Americans over the age of 65 are increasingly supportive. Many industry officials say that older Americans make up the fastest-growing group of people buying marijuana products. Seniors use the drug to treat pain, sleeplessness and other conditions that can develop with old age. Kelty Richardson is a registered nurse with the Holos Health clinic in Boulder, Colorado. The clinic provides medical examinations and sells doctor-recommended cannabis through its online store. Richardson said, I would say the average age of our customers is around 60, maybe even a little older. Joseph Cohen, Holo Healths medical director, holds Cannabis 101 classes at the nearby Balfour Senior Living community. The classes inform people about which kinds of the plant are best for easing arthritic pain and which are best for use as a sleep aid. There have not been very many scientific studies that prove the helpfulness of marijuana for given problems. A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, did find evidence that the drug can treat continuing pain in adults. The study also noted that the lack of scientific information presents a risk to public health. At Bud and Bloom in Santa Ana, winners of the bingo games took home special new marijuana devices called vape pens. But Ron Atkin comes to the store to buy chocolate and other food products made with cannabis. He uses the products to treat his painful spinal condition. He began doing so after other pain medicine stopped working for him. Atkin noted that his doctors did not suggest he try medical marijuana. But they did not warn him against the drug, either. Bud and Bloom sells everything from pills to drinks made with cannabis. It also sells more traditional marijuana plant materials, commonly called weed. Adele Frascella, who is 70 years old, bought some sweets made with cannabis. She said they help ease her arthritic pain. I dont like to take an opioid, she said. She added that she used to smoke marijuana in her younger days. I used to do it when I was like 18, 19, 20, she said. And then I had a baby, got married and stopped. She started smoking it again a few years ago. But these days, like many other seniors, she prefers eating food products made with cannabis instead of smoking the drug. Renee Lee is another senior who smoked marijuana as a young person. She got back into it more than 12 years ago. At that time, she had just gone through brain surgery and other major medical procedures. She said she was taking 10 [medications] a day, four times a day. And I wasnt getting any better, she added. So, she asked her doctors if she could try medical marijuana. They said go ahead. It ended her pain, Lee said. In 2012, Lee created the Rossmoor Medical Marijuana Club at her costly San Francisco Bay Area retirement community. Today, her club has more than 1,000 members. It holds special events, including talks by doctors and nurses who support the use of cannabis. Gary Small is a professor of psychiatry and aging at the University of California, Los Angeles. He said that people Lees age 65 and over are the countrys fastest-growing group in the marijuana-using population. He said that more studies on the drugs effects on older people are needed. And he said that, while marijuana may improve quality of life by easing pain and other problems, careless use of the drug could be dangerous. Cannabis use can come with risky side effects for older people, Small said. Too much cannabis can lead to memory problems and dizziness. And dizziness can lead to falls. Dick Watts, who is 75, had to learn that lesson for himself. The retired New Jersey builder keeps a winter home at Laguna Woods Village. He began having sleeping problems in his early 70s. At a class he attended, he learned that marijuana might help. So, he got a candy bar made with cannabis. He immediately ate the whole thing. Man, that was nearly lethal, said Watts, laughing. Now when he has trouble sleeping, he takes just a small piece of candy before bed. He said he wakes up in the morning with a clear head and good energy. And, he is sure to keep the candy out of reach from his young grandchildren, he said. Im Dorothy Gundy. And Im Pete Musto. John Rogers reported on this story for the Associated Press. Pete Musto adapted it for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor. We want to hear from you. How common is marijuana use among older people in your country? Write to us in the Comments Section. _____________________________________________________________ More Older Americans Using Marijuana to Treat Pain, Other Conditions Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story marijuana n. the dried leaves and flowers of the hemp plant that are smoked as a drug ultimate adj. used to say that something or someone is the greatest or most extreme example of a particular type of thing or person senior n. an old person cannabis n. a drug, such as marijuana or hashish, that comes from the hemp plant and is smoked illegally customer(s) n. someone who buys goods or services from a business arthritic adj. of or relating to a disease that causes the joints of the body to become swollen and painful spinal adj. of, relating to, or affecting the row of connected bones down the middle of the back opioid n. a drug, such as morphine or codeine, that is made from the substance opium and that is used to reduce pain or cause sleep dizziness n. the state of feeling that you are turning around in circles and are going to fall even though you are standing still lethal adj. causing or able to cause death Foreign ministers from countries belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are gathering in Washington to mark the 70th anniversary of the military alliance. NATO is one of the oldest common defense alliances of its kind, and one of the most successful. The group includes Britain, France and Germany, but also has added countries such as Turkey and Greece that are not near the Atlantic Ocean. NATO was formed to be an alliance of Western nations that would balance the military power of the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe. After the former Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, some experts questioned what part the alliance would play in international security. Since that time, NATO members have taken part in conflicts in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. NATO also has expanded to include countries that were once part of the Soviet bloc. Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Poland and Romania were formerly allied to the Soviet Union. Criticisms of NATO U.S. President Donald Trump has criticized the group, both as a presidential candidate and after taking office in 2017. Trump has said that many NATO members do not spend enough on defense to meet their commitments fully under the agreement. He suggested that NATO may no longer be useful. He once called it obsolete. Trumps criticism of the alliance has concerned European allies. However, some U.S. officials have also been frustrated over European positions on some security issues affecting NATO. For example, Germany has planned an undersea gas pipeline with Russia. In addition, the U.S. is worried about Europeans' apparent lack of concern over security threats presented by China. And some European members have sharply disagreed with the U.S. on expanding restrictions on Iran for its nuclear program and activities in the Middle East. They also have criticized the U.S. for withdrawing from a nuclear agreement with Russia which, the U.S. says, Russia has not observed. However, most foreign policy experts say NATO is a success. Mark Simakovsky is with the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington. He told VOA that NATO has showcased an ability to adapt to change in the past and it is dealing with issues like cyber warfare and spending more on defense. Defense spending Trump is not the first U.S. leader to call for NATO members to do more to defend their countries. President Barack Obama also pressed allies to spend more on defense. Other presidents have done so as well. In 2014, NATO members agreed on spending what is equal to two percent of their economies on their militaries each year. Most have never reached that level. NATOs 2018 report says 7 of its 29 member states reached the two percent spending promise. Kurt Volker is director of the McCain Institute in Washington. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO. Volker said defense spending shows a countrys commitment to its own security. He said such spending gives other NATO members confidence that the group can help defend that country. Hans Jundnani is with the British research group Chatham House. He said Europe needs to do more to share the burden of common defense. In 2018, Britain supplied the most among European countries to the defense costs of the alliance. Recently, a group of eight former British military and intelligence chiefs warned that Britain could drop from being a top military power unless it does more for its defense. Central European countries continue to support the security guarantee that NATO provides. They note American support of military bases in the Black Sea area, the Baltic States and Poland. On Monday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced an agreement to spend $260 million for military storage in Poland. Im Mario Ritter Jr. Jamie Detmer and Cindy Saine reported this story for VOA News. Mario Ritter Jr. adapted it for VOA Learning English. Kelly Jean Kelly 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 bloc n. a group of countries connected by a treaty or agreement obsolete adj. no longer used adapt v. to change in order to operate better or to be better able to meet needs cyber adj. related to computers and computer networks confidence n. the belief that someone has the ability to succeed at something frustration n. a feeling of annoyance at not being able to or being prevented from reaching some outcome Japanese officials have chosen a name for the period of rule of Japans incoming emperor. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga announced the name on Monday in Tokyo. Crown Prince Naruhito will become emperor on May 1, one day after Japanese Emperor Akihito leaves the position. This will be only the second time in nearly 100 years that Japan has welcomed a new era. Although use of the era is not required by Japanese law, it is widely used on government and business papers, calendars and other documents. The current era, known as Heisei under Emperor Akihito, has lasted 30 years. The term is often defined as meaning peace prevails everywhere. During that period, Japan has not been involved in a war, but has experienced natural disasters and economic troubles. The new era is to be called Reiwa. It was chosen by a group appointed by the government from names suggested by scholars. Rules require that the name have two Japanese characters, known as Kanji, which are easily read and written but are unusual or literary in nature. The first character can be defined to mean order and the second as harmony or peace. The term comes from a poem about plum blossoms in a collection of Japanese poems called Manyoshu. It is said to have been written about 1,300 years ago. After the announcement, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke about the meaning of Reiwa. Abe described it as: culture is born and nurtured as the peoples hearts are beautifully drawn together. He expressed his wishes that the new era would be "filled with hope. Over more than one thousand years, Japanese era names have come from Chinese classic literature. Abe said the Manyoshu was chosen because it was Japans oldest collection of poetry written by royal family members and ordinary people. Abe has expressed support for the image of the emperor, who enjoys wide public support. Japans current constitution was written after World War II. The constitution denounces war and gives the emperor no political power. Emperor Akihito gained what is known as the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1989 after the death of Hirohito, Japans emperor during World War II. Im Mario Ritter. Steve Miller reported this story for VOA News. Mario Ritter Jr. adapted it for VOA Learning English, with additional materials from the Associated Press. George Grow was the editor We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story era n. a period of time linked to a quality, event or person prevail v. to succeed, to defeat an opponent after a long struggle character n. a symbol, letter or number used in writing or printing scholar n. a learned person; someone who studies under a teacher nurture v. to help someone or something grow, develop and succeed ordinary adj. normal or average; common scholarship, news and new ideas in legal history After scaling back its consumer PC offerings and focusing primarily on the enterprise market, Toshiba sold its PC business to Sharp last year. But that business continued to operate as a subsidiary called Toshiba Client Solutions until now. Starting today, Toshiba America Client Solutions will be known as Dynabook Americas. That means the next time you see Sharp/Toshiba laptop or tablet on sale in the US, itll probably be sold under the Dynabook name. Toshiba had already been using the Dynabook brand in Japan, and Sharp continued to sell products under that name. But in the US, the company will hedge its bets a little by sticking with popular sub-brand names, so expect to see the Portege, Tecra and DynaEdge names continue. For example, the 2019 Dynabook line of devices include: Dynabook Tecra C40 Dynabook Tecra C50 Dynabook Tecra A40 Dynabook Tecra A50 Dynabook Tecra X40 Dynabook Tecra Z50 Dynabook Portege A30 Dynabook Portege X20W Dynabook Portege X30 Dynabook Portege X30T Other Dynabook products will include augmented reality smart glasses, IoT devices, printers, monitors, and digital signage devices and whatever category the DynaEdge mobile mini PC fits into. For the next few months you may continue to see Toshiba-branded computers sold in the US, but Dynabook plans to unveil a new wave of products in the second quarter of 2019 and theyll all ship with the Dynabook logo rather than the Toshiba name. The company says it will continue to provide service and support to customers with existing Toshiba-branded devices. HMD Global is the latest phone maker to jump on the hole-punch bandwagon. The companys new Nokia X71 features a slim bezels and a 6.4 inch display with a small hole in the upper left corner where youll find a 16MP front-facing camera. The phone has upper mid-range specs, and it will be available in Taiwan later this month for about $385. Its unclear if or when youll be able to buy one in the US or Europe anytime soon, but if it does become available internationally, it might have a different name (GSM Arena suggests it could be the Nokia 8.1 Plus). The Nokia X71 features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. Unlike many modern smartphones, the Nokia X71 has both a headphone jack and a microSD card slot (with support for cards up to 256GB). There are three cameras on the back of the phone, and the caemra system features Zeiss optics: 48MP primary camera 8MP 120 degree wide-angle camera 5MP depth-sensing camera Other features include a fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone, a 3,500 mAh battery, and a USB Type-C port and 18 watt fast charger. The phone ships with android 9 Pie and supports 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0. season READ: Angat water level fast going down, PAGASA warns The Chinese government said it will extend a suspension of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. autos and include the opioid fentanyl in a list of controlled substances, two steps that could generate a positive atmosphere for trade negotiations due to resume this week. Beijing temporarily scrapped the 25 percent tariff imposed on vehicles as a tit-for-tat measure on Jan. 1, after the White House delayed a rise in tariffs on USD200 billion of products that had been due that day. The Ministry of Finance announced an extension of the suspension on Sunday, without giving a specific end date. Vice Premier Liu He, Chinas trade envoy, left for the U.S. on yesterday, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Chinese officials also pledged to tighten regulation on fentanyl from next month, a promise President Xi Jinping already made to President Donald Trump at a December meeting in Argentina. The inclusion of the drug as a controlled substance in a category of non-medicinal narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances will start May 1, according to the China National Narcotics Control Commission. The moves signal China is trying to keep momentum in trade talks going as they enter what could be the final stretch before Trump and Xi are presented with a text to finalize or sign. Beijing is determined to prevent an escalation of the frictions that have hurt its economy and roiled markets, even as enforcement measures remain a sticking point in negotiations. What matters is not whether these are big concessions or not, but that they are a quick response to the U.S. concerns, said Gai Xinzhe, a senior analyst at Sino Ocean Capital in Beijing. Its not like in the past when issues raised in bilateral dialogues dragged on without solution. This is good for enhancing mutual trust in the negotiations. New Progress China touted new progress in talks after U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin visited Beijing last week. Both sides have been working line-by-line through the text of an agreement that can be put before Trump and Xi, people familiar said earlier. The continued suspension of auto tariffs seeks to create a good atmosphere for China-U.S. economic and trade talks and is a positive response to the U.S. decision to delay import tax increases, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement. The worlds second largest economy saw some early signs of stabilization in March as its manufacturing gauges signaled expansion. But Premier Li Keqiang stressed last week that new threats are arising from weakness in global demand and warned that short-term fluctuations in growth numbers are unavoidable. In addition to putting fentanyl on the controlled substance list, China said it will crack down on underground networks who sell the drug online and ship them to the U.S by disrupting their cyber communication channels and stepping up checks on private packages at its customs borders. The synthetic opioid is sold by online distributors across China and is blamed for thousands of overdose deaths in the U.S. Chinese officials also emphasized that the U.S. opioid crisis is largely self-created and cannot be blamed on supply from China. China exercised great restraint and did its very best with the recent moves, compared with the U.S. only mulling to suspend some of its tariffs, said Li Yong, a senior fellow at the China Association of International Trade in Beijing. Blame does not help to solve the problem. The right attitude should be to enhance cooperation and have construction communication. Bloomberg READ: Defense chief denies China scare tactics READ: GMA: China partner in development not threat Two Southeast Asian women were the only suspects charged with murder after an outcast from North Koreas ruling family was poisoned with VX nerve agent at a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, airport two years ago. The trial ended abruptly yesterday after a Vietnamese woman, Doan Thi Huong, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and is expected to be freed next month. It comes just three weeks after prosecutors dropped the murder charge against Siti Aisyah of Indonesia. A chronology of key events in the case: Feb. 13, 2017 A North Korean man, waiting to board a flight to Macau at a low-cost airport terminal in Malaysia, complained to airport officials that someone grabbed him from behind him and smeared his face with some liquid. He was sent to the airport clinic and pronounced dead on the way to a hospital. Feb. 14, 2017 International media broke the news that Kim Jong Nam was murdered in Malaysia. Police later said the victim was a North Korean man known as Kim Chol based on his passport. Feb. 15, 2017 Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam was detained at the same airport terminal where Kim was killed. Feb. 16, 2017 Indonesias Siti Aisyah was detained. Malaysias then-Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi confirmed that Kim Chol was Kim Jong Nam. Feb. 18, 2017 Police arrested North Korean Ri Jong-chol, 47, who is believed to be a chemical expert. Feb. 19, 2017 Police announced they were looking for seven North Korean suspects in connection with the murder. Police later said four of them were believed to have left the country and later sought Interpols help to detain them. Feb. 24, 2017 Officials said Kim was killed by the toxic VX nerve agent, listed by the U.N. as a weapon of mass destruction. Feb. 26, 2017 Officials said they found no hazardous material nor any trace of VX after a sweep of the airport terminal where Kim was killed, and declared it safe. Feb. 27, 2017 South Korean lawmakers said the countrys National Intelligence Service had told them that four of the North Koreans identified as suspects by Malaysian authorities were spies from North Koreas Ministry of State Security. The lawmakers also said they were told that two other suspects were affiliated with North Koreas Foreign Ministry and that leader Kim Jong Un directed a state-organized terror to kill his half brother. The lawmakers didnt say how South Koreas spy agency got the information. March 1, 2017 Aisyah and Huong were charged in a Magistrates Court with Kim Jong Nams murder and faced the death sentence if convicted. March 2, 2017 Ri Tong Il, a former North Korean deputy ambassador to the United Nations who was leading a high-level delegation to Malaysia to seek Kims body, said a heart attack likely killed the victim, not VX nerve agent as the autopsy showed. March 3, 2017 North Korean Ri Jong-chol was released due to a lack of evidence and deported. March 4, 2017 The Malaysian government expelled North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol, days after scrapping a visa-free entry for North Koreans. Kang Chol, who had denounced Malaysias investigations into Kims death and accused Kuala Lumpur of colluding with outside forces to defame Pyongyang, was given 48 hours to leave the country. March 7, 2017 North Korea banned Malaysian citizens in its country from leaving as tension escalated over Kims killing. Malaysia responded with a similar ban. March 30, 2017 Nine Malaysians held in Pyongyang returned home after the two countries struck a deal to end a diplomatic row. Malaysia released Kims body to Pyongyang and also allowed North Koreans to leave, including a North Korean Embassy official and an Air Koryo employee wanted by police for questioning over Kims death. Oct. 2, 2017 The joint trial of Aisyah and Huong began in the High Court. They pleaded not guilty. Their lawyers said they were pawns in a political assassination orchestrated by four North Korean suspects who fled Malaysia on the day of Kims killing. The four men were accused in the charge sheet of conspiring with the women to kill Kim. Aug. 18, 2018 A High Court judge ordered the two women to enter their defense after ruling there was enough evidence to infer that they had engaged in a well-planned conspiracy with the four missing North Korean suspects to kill Kim. Nov. 7, 2018 The judge set Jan. 7 for the trial to resume after Aisyahs lawyers complained that some witnesses were unreachable. Jan. 7, 2019 The trial was postponed to March. Aisyahs lawyers sought time to appeal to higher courts to obtain statements given by witnesses to police that they said are crucial for her case. March 11, 2019 Prosecutors unexpectedly dropped the murder against Aisyah, without giving any reason. Aisyah was given a discharge not amounting to an acquittal by the court. She was flown back to Jakarta in a private jet on the same day. Indonesian officials said her release was due to Jakartas continual high-level lobbying. A distraught Huong, who was supposed to start her defense, said she was in a shock. Her lawyers sought a postponement of the trial and asked prosecutors to also withdraw the murder charge against Huong. March 12, 2019 Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh phoned his Malaysian counterpart, Saifuddin Abdullah, requesting the court to be fair and also free Huong. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Aisyahs release was based on the rule of law, amid allegations the government had interfered in the trial. March 13, 2019 Law Minister Liew Vui Keong said Malaysias attorney general has sole discretion in withdrawing the charge against Aisyah and that the government cannot interfere with the attorney generals power. March 14, 2019 Prosecutors told the court that the attorney general ordered the murder case to proceed against Huong. They didnt explain why the attorney general refused to acquit her. Huongs lawyers accused the attorney general of being unfair and discriminating against her. The judge postponed hearing to April 1 after Huong told the judge she was unwell and stressed. April 1, 2019 Prosecutors said the attorney general offered a reduced charge of voluntarily causing injury with a dangerous weapon to Huong following renewed pleas from the Vietnamese government and her lawyers. MGM has removed all single-use plastics from its restaurants and replaced them with environmentally-friendly alternatives, the gaming operator announced in a statement. Last year, MGM said that it had been launching efforts to reduce its plastic footprint by phasing out single-use plastic in all of its restaurants, such as straws, cutlery and takeout containers. Taking the pledge further, the company has taken steps to make its takeaway packaging more recyclable, and to ensure all new designs avoid the use of unnecessary plastic. Changes that have been implemented include swapping plastic takeout bags with paper bags, using compostable and biodegradable takeout containers and cutlery and providing customers with biodegradable straws upon request. Reducing plastic waste is a small act that creates a ripple effect towards wider change, said Grant Bowie, CEO and Executive Director of MGM China Holdings Limited. We will continue our efforts in working with the government and industry partners to introduce many more positive steps toward sustainability, the executive pledged. Sands China observes earth hour Sands China Ltd. raised awareness of environmental sustainability with two events last week Earth Hour and Climate Week. On Saturday, the gaming operators properties turned off their exterior lights and non-essential indoor lights for one hour in support of Earth Hour 2019, Sands China said in a statement. Besides the annual event, Sands China maintains its monthly practice of observing Earth Hour. All its properties switch off exterior lights, signage and marquees for one hour on the first Tuesday of each month. Sands China held its in- house Climate Week on March 25-29 at its team member back-of-house areas, aiming to encourage team members to take their own steps to address climate change. In another environmental effort, Sands China recently banned plastic straws from its internal operations and from its restaurants, and switched over to providing paper straws upon request. It has also put a complete ban on shark fin into effect, covering the entirety of Sands Chinas internal food and beverage operations. Security breaches at the Macau International Airport allowed at least two people to access the facilitys restricted areas, the Public Security Police Force (PSP) revealed during yesterdays joint press conference at the Judiciary Police (PJ). The police force also informed that it had detained two people who had entered the region illegally to find work or to gamble. At the same conference, the PJ notified that it had finally detained a suspect in a large- scale investment scam involving hotel rooms and airfare bookings, and over MOP2.5 million. Tourists detained in restricted areas In two separate cases reported by the PSP, two tourists, one from mainland China and another from South Korea, were detained by police authorities after entering restricted areas of the Macau International Airport unauthorized. The first case occurred on Saturday at around 8 p.m., when a woman from mainland China was found by an airport staff member by the baggage claim carousel without permission to be at the location. The staff member then alerted the police, who questioned the tourist. The tourist told the PSP she had arrived from Bangkok earlier in the day and after exiting the airport she went for some food in the Cotai area, when she realized that she had forgotten to collect a piece of her luggage. She then returned to the airport and should have entered through the airport exit in the direction of the carrousel to search for her lost luggage. According to the PSP report she was not spotted doing so by any of the staff on duty at the gate. She was presented to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) under the accusation of illegal entry to a place of forbidden public access. Coincidentally however, the case was not singular. According to the PSP, another woman around 40 years old from South Korea had been detained the previous day for a similar stunt. According to the PSP spokesperson, the second case occurred Friday at around 9:30 a.m., when the woman was found in the boarding hall without a boarding card or ticket to board an airplane. When questioned by the police, she said she had entered the waiting room to ask the staff for information on how she could travel to Japan, unaware that the hall was a restricted area for passengers only. The staff on duty at the security control check gate told the PSP that they were not sure if she had passed through there or not as there were too many people. When taken to the police station, the woman refused to cooperate with police, failing to fill out identification forms, not allowing the police to take photos of her and refusing to allow her fingerprints to be collected. As a result, aside from the crime of illegal entry to a place of forbidden public access, she was also accused of aggravated disobedience. Her case was brought to the MP on Saturday. Six scammed in fake investment A total of six mainland residents with ranging in age from 33 to 55 were scammed by a local 42-year-old woman. The woman tricked them into investing in a scheme involving Macau hotel rooms and Japanese airfare reservations, and the victims reported losses amounting to over MOP2.5 million, the PJ spokesperson said. The case, which had been followed by the PJ for several months, finally unraveled on Friday when the suspect was detained while trying to exit Macau. She admitted to scamming the victims, initially two, by offering them the opportunity to invest in the early bookings scheme which would allegedly allow investors to claim profits from the sale of bookings made in peak season. Initially there were two women enrolled in the scheme, and she lured them in by paying them interest. After that, the two first victims invited other people to join the scheme, with the six victims delivering a total of HKD2 million, RMB350,000 and MOP45,000 between November 2018 and February 2019. According to the PJ, during the questioning that followed her detention, the suspect admitted she had never had any capacity to make early-bird reservations from which she could profit, admitting to having used all the money collected to gamble at the local casinos. Two illegal immigrants caught The PSP has caught two people who admitted to entering the region illegally. In the first case, a man from Vietnam was approached by an officer at Avenida 1 de Maio and was requested to provide identification documents. The man could not fulfill the request and was taken to the police station. Further investigation revealed that the same man had been banned from entering Macau for a period of 10 years from October 2016 until 2026. He told police he had entered Macau by swimming from the mainland. He also said he had reentered the region seeking a job. Since entering the region on March 20, he had been sleeping in parks and leisure areas in Macau. In the second case occurring on Sunday, a man from the mainland was caught on Avenida 24 de Junho after trying to flee the police. He confessed to illegally entering Macau with the help of a man he found on the internet on March 25, to whom he paid RMB8,000 to enter the city by boat coming from Hengqing. Further investigation revealed that, like in the first case, a ban had also been imposed on this second man, beginning on February 2019 for a period of four years. He told police that he wanted to come to Macau to gamble in the casinos and had been doing so since he entered the region on March 26 at around 3 a.m. Both men have been presented to the MP under the charge of illegal reentrance to the region. Gross gaming revenue dipped 0.4 percent year-on- year in March, rounding out the quarter with a 0.5 percent contraction in the latest sign of market stabilization. According to data released yesterday by the Macau Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, earnings for the month came in at MOP25.84 billion, slightly less than the MOP25.95 billion recorded in March 2018. Meanwhile, first quarter gross gaming revenue amounted to MOP76.15 billion in 2019, compared with MOP76.51 billion a year earlier. Gross gaming revenue in March 2018, the comparison point for yesterdays results, amounted to MOP25.95 billion a 22.2 percent rise from the same month in the preceding year. March was the second month of annual decline so far this year after January, which broke a 29-month succession of consecutive year-on-year growth. But March remains the strongest month of the year to date in terms of actual revenue, recording 1.85 percent growth over February. In comparison, February gross gaming revenue came in about 1.71 percent higher than January. Moreover, March gaming was generally much stronger than analysts were forecasting. Japanese brokerage Nomura had said it expected average daily gambling volume for the month to be down by as much 19 percent and predicted a year-on-year contraction of between 3 and 5 percent. In the final week of the month, Sanford C. Bernstein also saw gaming revenue tracking about 5 percent lower than in February. In response to yesterdays posting, analysts at JP Morgan (Asia Pacific) Securities wrote that the month had exceeded market expectation thanks to solid mass demand and favorable VIP luck. Parents of children with special needs particularly English- speaking children are left with very few options when their children do not meet the acceptance criteria of the inclusive education system, according to Eliana Calderon, president of the Macau Child Development Association. According to Calderon, there are still a number of cases where children with special needs are rejected after undergoing evaluation at private schools with inclusive education, leaving parents trapped as their only option is to send their children to government schools. This option remains a challenge as the official languages in public schools are Portuguese and Chinese, forcing these children to learn in a language alien to them. Speaking to the Times, Calderon admitted that there is still a long way to go for the citys inclusive education to meet international standards and processes. There are many cases [where] after the child [finishes] the evaluation, the parents are trapped because [private] schools still have the right to say no, explained Calderon. When a child cannot go to private schools, they must go to government schools [and are] forced to learn in Portuguese and Chinese. She shared that she had stopped sending her son to a local private school that provides inclusive education, explaining that children with special needs must pass the same evaluations given to students with no learning difficulties. For Calderon, it is not enough just to provide equal services and learning opportunities, as children with learning difficulties are in need of more resources and time. Were doing the best we can with the few professional resources that we have. In order to [provide] proper inclusive [education], its not just about giving equal opportunities, she said. Children with special needs need a bit more in order to be equal. According to data provided by the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau, there were nine school units providing special education classes and small special education classes with 142 teaching staff and 821 students in the academic year 2018/2019. Fifty-three school units were also participating in the inclusive education program, with 251 resource teachers who specially provide learning support to 1,480 students at a 1:5 or 1:6 teacher-to-student ratio. When the Times asked whether there are private or public schools that reject these students from attending, the bureau revealed that these schools can make admission arrangements according to the actual conditions and ability of the schools. Some schools are limited by various objective factors, such as their own ability and school places, so they cannot fully satisfy the demands for admission of all students, including inclusive students, the bureau admitted. The education bureau also noted that it has offered the service of consultation and arrangement of school places to provide assistance and support related to school admissions for students in need. The Times also contacted private schools providing inclusive education, including the School of the Nations (SON) and the Macau Anglican College (MAC), inquiring about the percentage of inclusive education students the schools accepted. No official data regarding the rate was provided by press time. MAC replied, students need to complete DSEJ assessment procedures in order to be included in the Inclusive Education Unit and receive program support. The private school added that all students have equal opportunities [getting] into MAC provided the school is able to cater to their individualized educational plan. SON did not reply by press time. Meanwhile, another matter that Calderon raised was the banning of the use of technology in these classrooms. She argued that there are instances where these children need more time and effort to understand teachers instructions, noting that taking a photo of what is written on the board helps children with writing difficulties cope. Technology is not allowed and I think this not yet in the area of inclusive education, she said. Commenting on the support and therapists available for these children, Calderon remarked, unfortunately, the government is trying to create a new system because they want the resources to be distributed evenly, so what they do is [change so that] many children with two sessions before only have one now and it is not fair. As professional speech therapists and occupational therapists are still lacking in the SAR, Calderon implied that it is still challenging to find an effective learning atmosphere for these students. Mainland visitors to Macau will not be permitted to re-enter the SAR from Guangdong Province within a 60-day period dating from their last departure under the new exit-entry measures that came into effect yesterday, the Times has learned. Announced by Chinas National Immigration Administration (NIA) last week, the new measure allows most mainland residents, regardless of where they were born or where they live, to apply for travel passes to Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan at any immigration administration center across the country. Residents of neighboring Guangdong province are excluded from the policy and can only apply for the travel permit once every two months. The new measure is a departure from previous restrictions that required visitors to obtain travel permits at their Hukou-registered residences. In 2018, the restrictions were relaxed and extended beyond the city of registration to the entire home province. However, the Times learned yesterday that restrictions similar to those announced for Guangdong residents will, in fact, be applied to other mainland visitors, if they only intend to cross into Guangdong and back. Under the NIA announcement, mainland residents who are not from Guangdong are said to be able to use self-service kiosks at municipal authorities to receive an immediate travel permit. Users were instructed to insert their travel card, select the type of travel permit, whether it applies for Macau, Hong Kong or both SARs, and then pay with a bank card. According to information provided to the Times, one mainland resident exited Macau yesterday to be issued a new travel permit for re-entry from a police station in neighboring Zhuhai. Although the Chinese citizen is not a resident of Guangdong province, the self-service kiosk would not issue the permit, saying only that it had failed to read the permanent residence. Several other mainland residents who were trying to obtain their own re-entry travel permits experienced the same difficulties, even though their Hukous are registered to other places, such as Guangxi province and Shanghai municipality. At a second police station, the Zhuhai Public Security Bureau Exit-Entry Administration Department, another self-service kiosk also failed to issue new travel permits. Around 70 people were waiting around in the area, reporting the same problem. A police officer instructed the people in the Department that visitors must wait 60 days from their previous Macau or Hong Kong exit before being able to successfully apply for a new travel permit. It goes with the policy written on your travel card, a visibly exhausted police officer kept telling the travel permit applicants, according to the information provided to the Times. These visitors would not need to wait 60 days if they returned to their Hukou-registered provinces, where a travel permit could be arranged on the day. Alternatively, some Taobao services can arrange for a permit can be sent from a Hukou-registered address to another address on the mainland, usually within three days. The same source said that they contacted the Zhuhai Department twice before yesterday to enquire about the new measure, but the authority said that they had no information to provide. Meanwhile, a Shenzhen immigration department in Baoan district confirmed that renewal of the permits was possible as outlined in the NIA announcement. Neither authority mentioned anything about a 60-day cooldown period between new travel permits. The measure was introduced to offer Chinese residents more convenient and more efficient processing of the necessary documents for travel within the greater China region. Data provided by the NIA shows an estimated 21 million people will apply for passports and travel permits this year in different places rather than returning to their home cities. DB Hong Kong billionaire Joseph Lau has filed a court challenge against proposed extradition law changes that would make it easier to transfer fugitives between the city, Taiwan, Macau and mainland China. Lau, who was convicted of bribery and money-laundering in the neighboring city of Macau in 2014, filed for judicial review of the move yesterday in Hong Kongs High Court. The proposal in question would allow for one-time transfers of suspects between Hong Kong and jurisdictions for which it lacks extradition agreements, such as mainland China, which has a separate legal system. In his court filing, Lau argued that the laws passage would remove his legal protection from having to serve prison time resulting from a trial that manifestly failed to meet internationally mandated standards of fairness. The former Chinese Estates Holdings Ltd. chairman contended that the case gave him direct legal interest in the subject matter of the bill. Lau was sentenced in absentia in Macau to five years and three months in prison. Since theres no extradition pact between the cities and Lau hasnt returned to the gaming hub, hes so far served no jail time. He is Hong Kongs 10th richest man with a net worth of USD8.5 billion (MOP68.77 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Chinese influence A Chinese Estates spokeswoman declined yesterday to comment on what she said were Laus personal affairs. The extradition proposal has become the latest focal point for concern over Chinas encroaching influence over Hong Kong, which has been governed separately under a one country, two systems framework since its 1997 return from the U.K. The move is particularly concerning to foreign businesses operating in Hong Kong because it could suddenly expose their local staff to the risk of prosecution on the mainland. Last week, the Hong Kong government said it would remove nine categories, largely commercial crimes, including bankruptcy, securities and futures, and intellectual property from the proposal. Offenses such as murder, corruption and robbery that would be eligible for at least a three-year jail sentence under Hong Kong law will remain. The changes failed to convince many critics, with thousands of residents taking to Hong Kong streets Sunday to demand the plans withdrawal. The American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong welcomed the tweaks, but said it continued to have reservations about the proposal. Rendition fears Those concerns flow primarily from the fact that the new arrangements could be used for rendition from Hong Kong to a number of jurisdictions with criminal procedure systems very different from that of Hong Kong, AmCham said Friday. We strongly believe that the proposed arrangements will reduce the appeal of Hong Kong to international companies considering Hong Kong as a base for regional operations. Lau remains a high-profile figure in Hong Kong despite stepping down from his Chinese Estates post in 2014. He recently married a former journalist, and has been active in art and jewelry auctions, purchasing a 12.03-carat blue diamond for $48 million at Sothebys in 2015. Shawna Kwan, Bloomberg Chinese officials led by President Xi Jinping have been committing crimes against humanity with their continued atrocious actions in the disputed South China Sea that hurt the livelihood and significantly diminished the food security of Filipino fishermen and their families, two former government officials said Tuesday. Former Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario and retired Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales, who filed a case against Xi before the International Criminal Court , said unlawful actions by Beijing showed that despite assurances to the contrary, the Chinese seek to take control and exert dominance over the disputed maritime territories. READ: Duterte pooh-poohs ICC case vs Chinas leader Even as now, with full accommodation being granted to Beijing by our government, we continue to be faced with unlawful actions from our northern neighbor, a modern-day Goliath, whose intentions and activities are to force a doctrine of dominance and control on our region and beyond, the two former officials said, in a statement. Notwithstanding the 2016 Philippine victory at The Hague, which ruled that Chinas claims to the South China Sea were excessive, China continues to do illegal dredging and artificial island building, which have degraded the marine environment and hurt the livelihood and food security of Filipino fishermen and their families. Today, our Filipino countrymen are increasingly focused on the presence of hundreds of Chinese vessels operating around Pag-asa that serves to harass, bully, and persecute our fishermen, they said. To our poor fishermen, however, Beijings actions may be viewed as crimes against humanity, given that they are planned by the Chinese government, accepted by the Chinese government, and nothing is done by the Chinese government to stop these persistent inhumane actions against a civilian population of over 300,000 Filipino fishermen who appear helpless against a powerful Goliath, they said. Del Rosario and Morales made the statement after Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jianhua on Monday described as fabrication their complaint before the ICC. We dont think it is a proper action that is based on facts. Its a fabrication and also a misuse of the mandate of the ICC, Zhao said in an interview. It is a kind of political action viciously targeting the Chinese leadership, he said.Del Rosario and Morales disagreed, saying that the ICC is a legal platform for us Filipino citizens to exact accountability for the injustices being particularly endured by our poor fishermen. Our objective, therefore, is to hold as individually responsible President Xi Jinping, Foreign Secretary Wang Yi and Ambassador Zhao Jianhua for crimes against humanity committed against our fishermen in our territory during the period when the Philippines was (still) a state party to the Rome Statute, they said. The Philippine government officially withdrew its signature to the Rome Statute on March 16, 2018 . The Rome Statute is the treaty that established ICC. READ: Manila pullout from ICC in effect, UN tells members In an interview with the ANC news channel, Del Rosario said the Philippines diplomatic protest against the presence of hundreds of Chinese vessels near Pag-asa Island in the West Philippine Sea was late, but a good first step. I dont know how long this condition has been existing but on the basis of our observation, I think its coming a bit too late. But, nevertheless, better late than never, Del Rosario said on ANCs Headstart. On Monday, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said the military had recommended the filing of a protest against the Chinese presence. Morales, meanwhile, described Panelo as misinformed, after he said the ICC case was a futile exercise. He is misinformed or he misread if at all he read the Rome Statute. What happened here is that a crime, a criminal case was committed within the territory of the Philippines at a time the Philippines was a member of the Rome Statute, Morales said in an interview on ANC. Whether or not the perpetrator subject to our communication belongs to a country which is a member of Rome Statute is immaterial. READ: PH protests Chinese tactics READ: SC justice, Palace clash over Sino loans READ: SC Justice fears Sino takeover of Philippines assets President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the immediate review of all government contracts, including the recent, to strike down any provisions that might be onerous, unconstitutional, and detrimental to public interest, the Palace said Tuesday. In a Palace press briefing, Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo said the President ordered the review during a Cabinet meeting after he found out an onerous provision in the governments contract with Maynilad Water Services Inc. Panelo said Duterte specifically tasked Solicitor General Jose Calida and Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra to study the arbitration case with Maynilad, hoping to prosecute those behind the disadvantageous provisions. Asked if the review would cover all government contracts, including those recently signed with China, Panelo said: Definitely, any contract.if the Philippines defaults on its $62-million loan for the Chico River Pump Irrigation project, an agreement that critics described as onerous. Government officials have brushed aside the possibility as unlikely, pointing to the Philippines track record of always repaying its debts. The contract with the water concessionaire Maynilad was signed during the Ramos administration and carried a provision that barred the government from interfering in the companys operations. This provision, Panelo said, cost the government P3.42 billion in October 2018, when Maynilad won its arbitration case against the government before the high court of Singapore, after suing over the delayed implementation of a water rate hike from March 2015 to August 2016. We were made to pay P3.5 billion because according to the ruling, the government intervened, and by reason of the intervention, Maynilad suffered damages. And the President could not believe that. How can a contract like this ban government action with respect to water services? he said. [So] well have to examine every provision of the contract. Anything that is against public policy or against the law, or against the Constitution, we will have to strike it down, he added. In a message to GMA News Online, Gueverra said the President was upset about a provision in the Maynilad contract. The President was upset about a provision in the concession agreement that if the republic interferes in any manner that will reduce or delay the implementation of agreed water rates, the republic will indemnify the utility company for any losses suffered thereby, Guevarra said. Panelo, the Presidents chief legal counsel, also reiterated that Duterte wants his legal team to review all contracts entered into by the government, including those that are already being executed and those that are about to be executed. At the same time, he allayed fears that the review would scare away potential investors. It will forewarn them that they cannot enter into any agreement that is in violation of the Constitution or a public policy They wont do it because theyve been forewarned, he said. Panelo said the President will not allow anything that goes against the interest of the Filipino people under his term. Maynilad is one of the two private water concessionaires serving Metro Manila. The water company, led by Filipino businessman Manny Pangilinan, serves Metro Manilas west side, which includes Caloocan, Pasay, Paranaque, Las Pinas, Muntinlupa, Valenzuela, Navotas, Malabon, and parts of Quezon City, Makati, and Manila.It also supplies water to its beneficiaries in Cavite City, Bacoor City, Imus, Kawit, Noveleta, and Rosario in Cavite province. Guevarra said Tuesday the DOJ teams will conduct the review of contracts perceived to be grossly disadvantageous to the government, with the help of lawyers from the Office of the Solicitor General. Priority contracts for review include concession agreements on public utilities and foreign loan contracts. Target provisions are those perceived to be onerous, one-sided, disadvantageous to the government, and or contrary to public order or public policy, Guevarra said, in an interview. We have organized teams to conduct this review but my office as attorney general will need a lot of help from the Office of the Solicitor General to perform and complete this task at the soonest time possible, he added. Guevarra said if onerous provisions are found, the first step would be to renegotiate the contract. If this proves unsuccessful, the government would resort to legal action. Contracts are subject to the will of the parties, but any stipulation, term or condition that is contrary to law, morals, public order or public policy may be abrogated or terminated, Guevarra said. Meanwhile, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said the Philippines has no history of defaulting on its loans, and those who fear this might happen with China have no faith in their own country. The Philippines has never, never defaulted on its loans. The Philippines has not done it even in the worst time and the worst time was right after Marcos, Dominguez said in a statement. He said even when the Philippines was cash-strapped, it had never defaulted on any of its loans, recalling that the country paid its obligations on the $2.2-billion Bataan Nuclear Power Plant project, even though it turned out to be a white elephant. The Philippines has no history of defaulting on its loans. So why people saying now that we will default? They have no faith in the Philippines? That means to say those people have no faith in their own country, Dominguez said. Dominguez also reiterated that there was no collateral involved in the loans that the government has entered into with any country as he invited the public to examine the terms of all the loan agreements that the Philippines has signed with its development partners, which are available for viewing at the Department of Finance website. Dominguez added that the governments debt was carefully structured to ensure that it does not borrow without raising its own capital for infrastructure projects, while at the same time sourcing a significant portion of financing from the local debt market to minimize exposure to adverse external factors. He said as of 2018, the governments project debt exposure was only 0.66 percent to China and 9 percent to Japan in relation to the total debt. He said by 2022, when most of the financing for the Build, Build, Build program would have been accessed, the countrys project debt to China would account for 4.5 percent, while that of Japans would be twice as large at 9.5 percent of the total debt. The story of Madonna wanting to bring a horse into a 19th-century palace has been shot down by a representative. The pop icon, who has been living in Portugal with her four adopted children since 2017, is currently filming the music video for her song, 'Indian Summer'. However, she was said to have incurred the wrath of Sintra mayor Basilio Horta after she allegedly demanded a thoroughbred horse be allowed into the Quinta Nova da Assuncao palace. According to the New York Post's Page Six, the 'Material Girl' hitmaker was also criticised by locals for wanting to filmed lying next to the horse inside the atrium of the property, which features delicate tile work and murals. Horta told Portuguese newspaper Expresso that he was put under enormous pressure by Madonna and her team, who allegedly threatened to call the country's Prime Minister, Antonio Costa, in an effort to gain permission for the horse. 'There are some things that money cannot buy. Under no condition could you let a horse enter the palace... Madonna is an artist, but the palace belongs to everyone and is not to be spoiled,' the mayor told the outlet. 'A Portuguese national would not have dared to try this. I take... equality very seriously.' He emphasised that no horses should be allowed into the palace because the wooden floors and beams of the property were not strong enough, and the animal could damage the building. A representative for Madonna has denied that she made the demands, and insisted the story is '100 per cent made up'. From an article by Ace Showbiz The son of Beatles great John Lennon is in Manila to help the Department of Tourism promote the country, but a local lemonade stand on Tuesday reminded him how truly famous his father waswhile showing off typical Filipino ingenuity with business names. Julian Lennon snapped a selfie for his Instagram of the juice store Johnn Lemon while touring a local mall in between visiting local hangouts and historical spots for the DOT, which invited him to help the agencys sustainability campaign. Hmm, wrote Julian on Instagram to caption the picture, which drew reactions from thousands of Filipino netizens and even his own familyincluding half-brother Sean Lennon. So thats where were from! Sean LennonJohns son with second wife Yoko Onotold his brother on the social media platform. Julian, Lennons son with his first wife Cynthia, responded: Ive been meaning to tell you, just hasnt been the right time.The photographer and film producer did not stop there, buying a drink at Johnn Lemon and taking a photo of it, with an emoji of a face with a hand covering its mouth as the only caption. Surely they would give you a discount! one Instagram user said. Julian, whom the DOT tapped to help promote Manila and Boracay, is also the founder of The White Feather Foundation, which deals with environmental and humanitarian issues in different parts of the world. Introducing The Main Index There are now over 43,000 individual posts here on A Light In The Darkness. They have all been individually added into Main Index categories. To get the full experience out of A Light In The Darkness and its very extensive library of items, covering virtually all things paranormal, supernatural etc ... we recommend that you flick down the Main Index, which runs down the right hand side of the blog page ... to find the indexed category in which the subject matter you seek is located. Alternatively, why not use long search bar you will find towards the top of the blog page ... ENJOY Bandar Seri BegawanBruneis imposition of harsh sharia laws, including death by stoning for gay sex and adultery, is a bid by the countrys ruler to boost support among conservatives and highlights a steady drift away from the West, observers say. The tough punishments, which also include amputation of a hand and foot for theft, will come into force Wednesday when a new penal code is fully implemented after years of delays. The decision to move ahead with the laws has sparked a global outcry, with the United Nations branding them cruel and inhumane and actor George Clooney leading calls for Brunei-owned hotels to be boycotted. By making his country the first in East or Southeast Asia to introduce a sharia penal code on a national level, analysts believe all-powerful Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah is seeking to burnish his Islamic credentials among conservative supporters at a time the economy is weakening. Brunei, a resource-rich former British protectorate on Borneo island with a population of about 400,000, was plunged into recession in recent years as oil prices plummeted and its crude reserves declined. Brunei is becoming Southeast Asias Saudi Arabia, Bridget Welsh, a Southeast Asia expert from John Cabot University, told AFP. The regime has increasingly been relying on religious legitimacy, appealing to a conservative Islamic ideology. The weakening economy in Brunei as well as concerns about possible erosion of support underscore this increasing reliance on religion. The Muslim-majority nations implementation of punishments that may scare off Western businesses also signals a shift towards investment from China, which typically refrains from criticizing trading partners on human rights, observers said. As in many other parts of Asia, Chinese companies are investing huge sums in the absolute monarchy, part of an infrastructure drive aimed at extending Beijings economic and geopolitical clout. Initiatives include a multi-billion-dollar oil refineryBruneis biggest ever foreign investment projecta dam and a highway. Xi Jinping visited the country in November last year, the first trip by a Chinese president in 13 years. Experts say it is hard to gauge the level of public backing for sharia law in Brunei, as most citizens would not publicly voice criticism of the sultan. But it is believed to have substantial support among the countrys Muslim ethnic Malays, who make up some 70 percent of the population. Those who speak publicly generally welcome it.Im proud, because implementing the law feels like it solidifies the Islamic identity of Brunei, Muhammad Antoni, a 27-year-old oil and gas company worker, told AFP. Others were irritated at the calls for a boycott of nine Brunei-owned hotels in Europe and the United States. Regarding celebrities calling for a boycott, its not their place, said Haziah Zainal, a 36-year-old civil servant. These actions seem ignorant as they have not even been here to experience what its like. There was some unease online, however, where people can comment more freely. This worries me so much for Bruneis economy, one user posted on social media platform Reddit, adding that it would mean losing more business overseas. In reality, it is not yet clear if the toughest punishmentdeath by stoning will be implemented. Brunei has long had capital punishment, and any execution should be carried out by hanging. But the last known instance of someone being put to death in the country was in 1957, according to Matthew Wolfe of human rights group The Brunei Project. While condemning the new penal code, Amnesty International said the country was abolitionist in practice when it comes to the death penalty. The burden of proof is high before someone can be sentenced to death by stoning. An accused person must either confess to the offence, or it must be witnessed by at least four people who have to then testify. The sultan, the worlds second-longest ruling monarch, has weathered controversies before -- the monarchy was deeply embarrassed over revelations the rulers brother Jefri allegedly embezzled billions of dollars -- and is unlikely to back down. In a weekend statement, the government defended its right to introduce the new penal code, saying that sharia law aims to educate, respect and protect the legitimate rights of all individuals. In our principles textbook, Tyler and I open our chapter on price discrimination with the following: After months of investigation, police from Interpol swooped down on an international drug syndicate operating out of Antwerp, Belgium. The syndicate had been smuggling drugs from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania into the port of Antwerp for distribution throughout Europe. Smuggling had netted the syndicate millions of dollars in profit. The drug being smuggled? Heroin? Cocaine? No, something more valuable, Combivir. Why was Combivir, an anti-AIDS drug, being illegally smuggled from Africa to Europe when Combivir was manufactured in Europe and could be bought there legally? The answer is that Combivir was priced at $12.50 per pill in Europe and, much closer to cost, about 50 cents per pill in Africa. Smugglers who bought Combivir in Africa and sold it in Europe could make approximately $12 per pill, and they were smuggling millions of pills. Instead of smuggling the drugs to Europe, its also possible to send the European and American patients abroad. Gileads Solvadi, for example, is a very effective drug used to treat hepatitis C. In the United States a course of treatment costs about about $85,000 but due to an agreement between Gilead and generic manufactures in developing countries, in Egypt, India and much of the developed world it can be had for less than $1000. In an excellent piece, Four Reasons Drugs are Expensive, of Which Two are False, Jack Scannell illustrates the battle between arbitrageurs and pharmaceutical companies: [The price difference] raises dreams of pharmaceutical tourism: Enjoy a 12 week Grand Tour, where you can gaze at the awesome pyramids and the inscrutable Sphinx of Giza, explore the treasures of Tutankhamen, gasp at the wonders of Luxor, while basking in the sustained virologic response you can only dream of buying in the US. Some may dream, but Gilead got there already and put its corporate towels on the sun loungers. Egyptians must prove residency to get Sovaldi. Tourists need not apply. To prevent resale Gilead requires ID and it labels and tracks every bottle sold abroad: [Patient IDs] will be used to put an identifying barcode on the bottles they receive with their name and other info. Not only can the code be used to guarantee only residents of the country get the drugsthe provisions require that patients then return a bottle to get a new bottle and allows them to get only one bottle of their prescription at a time, even though allowing them to get multiple bottles could ease the burden on patients and health providers, MSF says. Medecins Sans Frontieres are outraged by these restrictions but, as Tyler and I explain, the alternative is no sales in developing countries or one world-price and you can be sure that if theres one world-price that price will be the US price and not the Egyptian price. This is the intriguing wooden statue declared by the municipal government of Boac as municipal protected historical artifact and treasure. The statue is now displayed at Casa Real in Boac. Photo: Eli J Obligacion This is about the thoroughly intriguing story of whats believed to be a statue of 'Queen Isabela II of Spain' on one hand and whats also commonly believed by some devout Catholics in Boac as an image 'of the Blessed Virgin Mary'. It had been kept for nearly two hundred years (183 years to be exact), in the custody of the municipio of Boac and had episodes of being moved from place to place for various reasons. But where did this graven image come from in the first place? Who is it really supposed to depict? Close-up of the statue. Photo: Eli J. Obligacion What do we know about this wooden statue so far? At one time in 1980s the rebulto was transferred from the municipio to the back entrance of the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC), Marinduque office at Kasilag Street near the Boac municipal building. There, it was exposed to the elements as it was placed outside the said establishment, but easily accesible to people such as Marian devotees wishing to adorn it with flowers. There it was venerated, adored, touched with reverence as followers make their sign of the cross in so doing. In the 80s after the People Power Revolution, the newly-appointed Mayor of Boac, Pedrito Nepomuceno with his strong sense of local history had the opportunity to initiate the return of the statue to the municipal building. He was apparently one of the few who knew about the origin of the statue and whom it was supposed to represent. He was heeded. The statue was returned to the municipio and installed by the landing on the second floor. The flowers and prayers continued, however and no one dared to get in the way. PNRC building that once installed the statue outside to guard the building in the 80s (marked with an arrow). The municipal building is to the right in the background. Fast forward to 2013. The late Konsehal Miguel R. Magalang who also chaired the Boac Historical Society at that time sponsored a municipal resolution recognizing the importance of the statue, a wooden statue. The resolution (No. 2013-042 dated August 19, 2013), stated thus: Whereas, while the Boac Historical Society and the municipal government are still ascertaining the provenance of the wooden statue of Queen Isabella II, there is an initial confirmed data that its existence is an extraordinary historical discovery on the part of the Intramuros Administration because it is the only existing replica of the bronze statue of Queen Isabella presently installed in the Puerta de Isabel II in Intramuros, in the entire country. It is likened to the Magallanes monument which has a replica in the Province of Cebu and the Anda Monument with replica in the Province of Pampanga; Whereas, an existing primary source document from Intramuros Administration #295, which forms integral part of this Resolution as Annex A, indicates that the wooden statue of Queen Isabella II was received on June 9, 1836 by the Governadorcillo of Pueblo de Boac, Don Eugenio Bunag June 9, 1836. It was therefore resolved by the 8th Sangguniang Bayan to excitedly declare the 1836 wooden statue of Queen Isabella II as a municipal protected historical artifact and treasure. Now a date has been revealed to us:. It was therefore resolved by theto excitedly declare Quite a lot of valuable never-before-heard-of information indeed!: Statue of Queen Isabela II received in 1836; and a wooden statue. former Vice-Mayor and incumbent Konsehal Sonny Paglinawan and tourism officer Jing-Jing G. Loto in retrieving the said document. Titled, Valga para el Reynado de S.M. la Sra. D. Ysabel II I para los anos de mil ochocientos treinta i seis i treinta i siete. Basis as extraordinary historical discovery was a document in Spanish dated June 9, 1836. (I fully appreciate the kind help ofand tourism officerin retrieving the said document. Titled, The rest of the text was handwritten in that artful style and script we're so familiar with when poring over Spanish documents, so stylish to the extent that some words and letters are hardly readable. And that's a must-task for the experts to probe and translate it first into another language. But since the source of the document did not provide a translation of what looks like a Certifico, it seems that we're stuck here. The 'primary source document from Intramuros Administration #295". Titled Valga para el Reynado de S.M. la Sra. D. Ysabel II I para los anos de mil ochocientos treinta iseis i treinta i siete In the absence of an English or Filipino translation, it should follow that no final conclusion could be made or ascertained on the provenance of the wooden statue of Queen Isabella II as desired. What if the document which was merely issued during the reign of Queen Isabela II, indeed was actually stating something else that might be unrelated to the statue? Something tells me that that could be the case here. Isabela II as a child. Born in 1830, proclaimed sovereign on the death of the king in 1833. The Spanish document in Boac stating it was mentioned during her reign was dated 1836, she was six. Some facts about Queen Isabel II. This observation that must be considered valid is reinforced by certain now-easy-to-validate historical facts. Like what? Like: Isabella II (Spanish: Isabel; 10 October 1830 9 April 1904) was Queen of Spain from 1833 until 1868. She came to the throne as an infant, but her succession was disputed by the Carlists, whose refusal to recognize a female sovereign led to the Carlist Wars. After a troubled reign, she was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1868, and formally abdicated in 1870. (Wikipedia) Therefore, as to the date when the statue was supposed to have been received in Boac, Queen Isabela II was only 6 six years of age by then. But yes, she was already the Queen of Spain by 1836 as she "came to the throne as an infant". It is absolutely unthinkable that at age six, a graven image of Isabella II as an adult would be conceptualized at all, and for what so-exceedingly-special reason, if ever? No replica Fact is, the first Queen Isabel II statue presently standing at Puerta Isabel, one made of bronze was erected on July 14, 1860 in Arroceros (now Liwasang Bonifacio), thats when Isabel II was already 30 years old - or 24 years after the questioned Boac certifico document was issued. And her bronze statue depicted the queen in a regal robe and costume. The Queen Isabel II Statue is located in front of Puerta Isabel II in Intramuros, Manila, Philippines. Made of bronze and was funded by donations collected from the city in 1854 and 1855. Ponciano Ponzano, a Spanish sculptor was commissioned to do the work. It was erected amidst festive ceremonies on 14 July 1860 near Teatro Alfonso XII in Arroceros in what is now now Liwasang Bonifacio The Intramuros Administration definitely spoke too soon if its true that they claimed among others that the supposed statue in Boac is a replica of the statue now installed at Puerta Isabel. These two are completely different statues, far from being a copy or reproduction of an original work as what replicas are supposed to mean. Queen Isabela II statue in Ilagan, Isabela. Photo by Addie in Wanderland What may be considered a near replica of the Puerta Isabel statue may be the one installed in 2013 in Ilagan, Isabela Province (above), precisely in honor of Queen Isabela II. This province, the second largest in the country, was named after the queen when it was founded in 1856 by a royal decree. Formal photo portrait of Queen Isabela, 1860. She was 30 years old. (Wikipedia) Reina Isabel II wearing some Orders (Wikipedia) Where do we go from here? The quest for the true identity and provenance of this very rare historical artefact and treasure of a wooden statue continues. But is it really a wooden statue, by the way? (Drum rolls). Amyloid-positive (left) and amyloid-negative (right) PET scans can respectively be used to diagnose or rule out Alzheimer's disease in individuals with memory loss or cognitive decline. Credit: UCSF Memory and Aging Center A first-of-its-kind national study has found that a form of brain imaging that detects Alzheimer's-related "plaques" significantly influenced clinical management of patients with mild cognitive impairment and dementia. The study revealed that providing clinicians with the results of positron emission tomography (PET) scans that identify amyloid plaques in the brain changed medical managementincluding the use of medications and counselingin nearly two-thirds of cases, more than double what researchers predicted in advance of the study. The technique, known as "amyloid PET imaging," also altered the diagnosis of the cause of cognitive impairment in more than one in three study participants. The multicenter study of more than 11,000 Medicare beneficiaries, published April 2, 2019 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was managed by the American College of Radiology and led by scientists at the Alzheimer's Association, UC San Francisco, Brown University School of Public Health, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Public Health, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, UC Davis School of Medicine, and the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. "We are impressed by the magnitude of these results, which make it clear that amyloid PET imaging can have a major impact on how we diagnose and care for patients with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of cognitive decline," said study lead author and principal investigator Gil Rabinovici, MD, Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. "These results present highly credible, large-scale evidence that amyloid PET imaging can be a powerful tool to improve the accuracy of Alzheimer's diagnosis and lead to better medical management, especially in difficult-to-diagnose cases," added Maria C. Carrillo, Ph.D., Alzheimer's Association chief science officer and a co-author of the study. "It is important that amyloid PET imaging be more broadly accessible to those who need it." Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the accumulation of both amyloid protein plaques and tau protein "tangles" in the brain, the presence of which are required for a definitive diagnosis. Until recently, amyloid plaques could only be detected by postmortem analysis of autopsied brain tissue. With the advent of amyloid PETwhich involves injecting patients with "tracer" molecules that stick to amyloid plaques and can be used to visualize their location in the brainit became possible to detect plaques with a brain scan and therefore more accurately diagnose people living with the disease. Though there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease, early diagnoses enable physicians to prescribe appropriate symptom-management therapies, counsel families on important safety and care-planning issues and direct people to clinical trials for promising new drugs. It also allows people with the disease and their families to plan for the future, including legal and financial issues, and accessing resources and support programs. PET imaging results that reveal no signs of amyloid buildup in the brain rule out Alzheimer's disease as the cause of memory loss, which can prompt an evaluation for alternative and sometimes reversible causes, such as medication side effects, sleep or mood disorders and other medical conditions. However, despite FDA approval of amyloid PET tracers, use of amyloid PET imaging to assist with the accurate diagnosis of the cause of someone's dementia is currently not covered by Medicare or health insurance plans, making it unavailable to most people. Launched in 2016, the four-year Imaging DementiaEvidence for Amyloid Scanning (IDEAS) study was developed by a team of scientists convened by the Alzheimer's Association to determine whether learning the results amyloid PET imaging would change medical management and health outcomes of people with memory loss and cognitive decline. IDEAS recruited nearly 1,000 dementia specialists at 595 sites in the U.S. and enrolled more than 16,000 Medicare beneficiaries with mild cognitive impairment or dementia of uncertain cause. Under their Coverage with Evidence Development policy, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reimbursed amyloid PET scans conducted at 343 facilities and interpreted by more than 700 imaging specialists as part of this clinical study. "This was a uniquely real-world study that looked at the impact of amyloid PET imaging in community clinics and other non-academic settings, and demonstrates for the first time how much impact this technology has in real-world dementia care," Rabinovici said. The newly published results from the first phase of the IDEAS study focused on how amyloid PET scans altered physician diagnosis and treatment plans for the 11,409 participants who completed the study. As the study's primary endpoint, the scientists collected data on how physicians altered participants' medication prescriptions and counseling about safety and future planning. As a secondary endpoint, the researchers evaluated whether PET imaging results caused physicians to alter participants' diagnoses. Finally, several exploratory endpoints included physician decisions about referrals to Alzheimer's clinical trials. The newly published data reveal that physicians changed their clinical management of more than 60 percent of patients in the study, more than double the number the authors had predicted in advance. In participants who joined the study with mild cognitive impairment and whose brain scans revealed the presence of significant amyloid deposits, clinicians were twice as likely to prescribe Alzheimer's drugs following PET imaging (~40 percent prior to imaging vs. ~82 percent following imaging). In those with dementia and significant amyloid buildup on PET scans, prescriptions of these drugs rose from ~63 percent to ~91 percent after the study. Doctors discontinued the use of these drugs in some patients whose scans revealed little amyloid deposition. In addition, for approximately one quarter of study participants, physicians changed non-Alzheimer's drug prescriptions and counseling recommendations based on PET imaging results. PET scans that revealed no significant amyloid buildup led physicians to rule out Alzheimer's disease for approximately one in three patients who had previously been given an Alzheimer's diagnosis. On the other hand, PET scans that showed significant amyloid plaque buildup led to a new diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in nearly half of patients who had not previously been diagnosed with the disease. The researchers also discovered that one-third of participants who had previously been referred to Alzheimer's clinical trials showed no sign of amyloid buildup based on PET imaging, which generally rules out Alzheimer's disease as the cause of their cognitive symptoms. Based on the imaging results, physicians were able to ensure that nearly all patients referred to Alzheimer's trials were amyloid-positive (93 percent), which is critical to these trials' success. "Accurate diagnoses are critical to ensure patients are receiving the most appropriate treatments. In particular, Alzheimer's medications can worsen cognitive decline in people with other brain diseases," said Rabinovici. "But perhaps more fundamentally, people who come into the clinic with concerns about memory problems want answers. An early, definitive diagnosis may allow individuals to be part of planning for the next phase of their lives and to make decisions that otherwise would eventually need to be made by others." The IDEAS team is currently analyzing data on the study's second phase, which will examine how amyloid PET scans affect health outcomes following the scan. The researchers are using CMS claims data to document hospitalization rates and Emergency Department visits for IDEAS participants, and comparing them to participants with similar neurologic problems but who did not undergo amyloid PET. They plan to publish their findings in 2020. In addition, the researchers are developing a second study (known as New IDEAS) to include more people with both typical and atypical clinical presentations of Alzheimer's and recruit a study group that better reflects the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the national population. Explore further Amyloid imaging helps in evaluating possible Alzheimer disease Provided by Alzheimer's Association Credit: CDC Scientists have identified a way to provide more detailed information on malaria transmission both locally and across borders, according to two new papers published today in eLife. The studies, from collaborators in the US, UK, Thailand, Bangladesh, Namibia and Norway, suggest that combining data on parasite genetics and human movement can provide greater insight on how malaria spreads among populations. This approach, applied to data from Southern Africa and Bangladesh, could allow malaria control programs to strengthen their local and regional efforts for eliminating the disease. A global decline of malaria in recent decades has led to a push for complete elimination of malaria parasites in 21 countries by 2020. But malaria transmission differs among countries and policy-makers must focus on reducing transmission in locations where the disease remains, while protecting areas where it has been controlled from imported infections that threaten to reintroduce parasites. This is a particular concern for countries that share an international border with those that have high-transmission rates. "Countries and regional blocs are working to identify where parasite importations are common and to pinpoint the sources of imported cases to develop more effective and targeted malaria interventions," explains Sofonias Tessema, a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, San Francisco, US, and co-first author of the Southern Africa study. "But routinely collected data, such as malaria case counts obtained from health facilities, may not provide much information on importations. Malaria cases are often classified as either having been infected locally or imported based on the patient's self-report of recent travel. With only travel history data, it can be difficult to assess accurately whether malaria parasites were acquired locally or during travel." To address this, the team used parasite genetic data to estimate the contribution of importation and compared it with human-mobility data to identify relevant sources of malaria parasites in Southern Africa. "We found that parasites from cases near to each other were much more likely to be closely related genetically, providing evidence that the majority of malaria cases were from local transmission," says co-first author Amy Wesolowski, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, US. Using genetic data from malaria parasites, the team also identified more detailed evidence of parasite connectivity over hundreds of kilometers than the other data sources, within Namibia and across the Angolan and Zambian borders. While these data are not yet routinely collected, they suggest the need to strengthen local interventions and regional coordination to successfully eliminate malaria from a critical region of Southern Africa. Meanwhile, for the second study, researchers measured the spatial spread of malaria parasites in southeast Bangladesh. To do this, they analysed epidemiological surveillance data, travel surveys, parasite genetic data and anonymised, aggregated mobile data from their collaboration partners at Telenor Research and Grameenphone, both part of Telenor Group, Norway. "Our combined method gave us detailed insight into the direction and intensity of parasite flow between locations," explains co-first author Hsiao-Han Chang, Research Associate at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, US. Contrary to current beliefs, the team found that frequent mixing occurs in low-transmission areas in the southwest of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region, and elimination will require interventions in addition to reducing imported infections from forested regions. "Unlike risk maps generated from clinical case counts alone, our method also distinguished areas of frequent importation as well as high transmission," adds Richard Maude, Head of Epidemiology at Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), and a co-senior author of this study. Altogether, the findings suggest that the ability to gather useful information from genetic data, using new methods, provides a strong case for the coordinated collection of regional data on parasite genomics in areas where importation of malaria is a potential concern, and where efforts are being focused to eliminate the disease. Explore further Genome scientists develop novel approaches to studying widespread form of malaria Ochan Otim studied the liquors sold in these small plastic bags and found that they regularly contain dangerous contaminants. Credit: Rebecca Kendall/UCLA UCLA Extension's Ochan Otim is a chemist who specializes in developing methods for quantifying and assessing the health risk associated with organic and metal contaminants in the environment. For the last few years, Otim, who grew up in Uganda, has been driven to use his expertise to try to help solve a dangerous mystery in his country of birth. Why were so many people having health problems and even dying because of alcohol consumption? The two-decade civil war in Uganda beginning in the late 1980s ravaged the country with violence, abductions, concentration camps and starvation. The inhumane conditions and abject povery led to trauma and depression. Consequently, Otim said, many people were driven to drinking to alleviate their suffering. "It is a well-known phenomenon that when people are subjected to extreme stress, they seek relief, which in most cases involves abuse of recreational drugs, including alcohol," he said. "Living conditions in the concentration camps eroded traditional social norms and ethics and destroyed the social and cultural fabric of the communities and cut them adrift. When a culture is destroyed, the soul of a community is also destroyed." Anecdotally, he added, there was talk of dangerous potency in the spirits available on the market in the city of Acoli. This was leading to a widespread culture of fear in the area and calls for a ban on alcohol. Otim wanted to determine what the actual cause was because without that knowledge doctors and lawmakers would not be able to develop an effective solution. Otim, who teaches chemistry at UCLA Extension and is head of an organic chemistry laboratory in the City of Los Angeles' environmental monitoring division, recently published findings in the journal PLOS One showing that certain alcohols sold in Uganda contain dangerously high levels of metals, including carcinogens. In an interview, he talked about his findings and what recommendations could help. Why did you want to study this? I lost three siblings in rapid succession prior to this study. Everyone, including my mother, is convinced the sachet alcohol had something to do with their death. My story, however, is not an isolated case in Acoli. Being a chemist, I was curious to find out what could be in the alcohol that might account for the deaths that anecdotally were linked to high alcohol consumption. We wanted particularly to investigate and establish the evidence of the composition of the contents, and statistically and factually corroborate or repudiate the claims that the sachet spirits, which are alcohols sold in plastic bags, were contaminated and contained more than just alcohol. Besides, there had been widespread talks of deaths and illnesses attributed to heavy drinking; we wanted to know if there was indeed plausible scientific/chemical basis for these fears. What types of health problems have people had related to the consumption of contaminated alcohol and how many people seem to be affected by alcohol-related illnesses? There have been many claims linking respiratory, mental health problems, liver, skin and kidney problems, cancer and all kinds of ailments to heavy consumption of alcohol in Acoli. All known symptoms of alcohol-related illness are visible in the population, including weight loss, addiction, reduced appetite, swollen stomach and cheeks, red eye, dark/dry glittery skin, deformed finger nails and others. It is not possible to give precise figures of how many people are victims, but it is safe to say that the problem is pervasive in the entire northern region of Uganda. Perhaps, now that we have done this study and found that these brands of spirits are contaminated and pose serious health risks, it will be possible for other researchers to specifically examine health records and be able to correctly determine the number of deaths and illnesses that can now be directly linked to the contaminants and consumption of sachet alcohol. What did you find about carcinogens in the alcohol you sampled and how does this compare to alcohol sold in other countries? Four known carcinogens were found in the spirits: ethanol, which is the intoxicating agent; arsenic; chromium; and lead. Seventeen other metals, also found in the spirits, are potential carcinogens as well depending on how much of those metals a person ingests. It must be emphasized though that there are no safe levels of carcinogens. Residual contaminants in this empty bag of liquor. Credit: University of California, Los Angeles How do the metals get into the alcohol? Your guess is as good as mine. But it is possible that the contaminants are from distillation processes, the vessels used, poor quality control, and perhaps storage and packaging containers. It is important to definitively settle the question of how these contaminants got into the alcohols. If indeed it is from distillation and packaging processes, then public health, regulatory and state authorities need to move swiftly to put the producers out of business. And this is a very sensitive question that the authorities and the manufacturers of the spirits, and the public health authorities need to make efforts to find satisfactory answers to. A lot of the alcohols you examined are sold in sachets. Does using plastic bags, as opposed to glass bottles like in the United States, make the alcohols more vulnerable to contamination? Further studies need to be done to pinpoint the source of the contamination. Anecdotally, we suspect that the metals could come from the following sources: The soil where the materials (millet, sorghum, potatoes, cassava and corn) used for fermentation are grown The water used in the brewing process The equipment (pots, condensers and pipes) used in the brewing process Packaging materials including large metal and plastic storage and transportation containers (jerry cans and drums) and plastic bags (sachets) and glass bottles used for sale In your conclusion you mention increasing public health education about the health risks of excessive alcohol consumption. What type of public health education exists now in Uganda and what changes do you think should be made? No clear campaign is in place currently; the sale and consumption of alcohol is uncontrolled. The problem is also not simply the heavy consumption of spirits, but the consumption of alcohol heavily contaminated with harmful metals and organic contaminants, which is a subject of another study. The first point of action is quality and standard control. The second one is the control and restriction of the availability and sale of alcohol. And finally, public educationin churches, at schools and in familiesabout the risks of heavy alcohol consumption, such as contracting specific diseases like liver cirrhosis and cancer. We are aware that this will be difficult to implement for two reasons. The industrial production of spirits is barely regulated in Uganda. Added to this, the production of the cheaper homemade alternatives is based mainly in the rural areas to the extent that many peasants now rely on alcohol production as a significant source of their income. An alternative source of income must be found for people so they don't feel like they have to make their own alcohol. What can and should be done to increase the safety standards for producing alcohol? We believe that the following minimum requirements should be established in Uganda: Formulate a national alcohol policy Create a government agency to monitor the quality of spirits in the country Create a national laboratory dedicated to monitoring the quality of alcohol as well as other products consumed by humans Train the necessary personnel to accomplish the two goals above Do you believe your findings also hold for other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Kenya and Tanzania, and do you have evidence for the widespread contamination of alcohol in sub-Saharan Africa? Yes, because the conditions are similar. In 2018, the World Health Organization reported that four out of every 100 deaths in Kenya is linked to alcohol use. In 2014, more than 60 people died after drinking homemade alcohol believed to have been laced with industrial chemicals in the country. In 2005, 49 people in Kenya died after consuming a black marketed alcoholic brew laced with poisonous methanol. In Tanzania, a criminal gang flooded the market with potentially deadly alcohol in 2016. In addition to that, contaminated grains and fruits were shown to be used in the production of spirts, the products of which contain four times as much zinc as is allowed by the World Health Organization. Explore further Does alcohol consumption have an effect on arthritis? More information: Ochan Otim et al. Assessing the health risks of consuming 'sachet' alcohol in Acoli, Uganda, PLOS ONE (2019). Journal information: PLoS ONE Ochan Otim et al. Assessing the health risks of consuming 'sachet' alcohol in Acoli, Uganda,(2019). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212938 (HealthDay)Practicing physicians might not understand their legal responsibilities when caring for people with disability, which may contribute to inequalities in their care, according to a study published online April 1 in Health Affairs. Nicole D. Agaronnik, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues interviewed 20 practicing physicians across five specialties to examine the knowledge of their obligations to accommodate patients with disability under federal civil rights law. The researchers found that in three potentially problematic areas, interviewees reported having had little formal training about their obligations and demonstrated superficial or incorrect understanding of their obligations; these areas were deciding which accommodations their practices should implement, refusing patients with disability, and holding patients accountable for accommodation costs. "Our findings suggest that physicians have little formal training in legal requirements to provide equitable care to people with disability. Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, our results also suggest that practicing physicians might not fully understand their legal responsibilities when caring for people with disability," the authors write. "Therefore, one critical future direction involves educating physicians on several levelsabout disability disparities, their legal obligation to provide equitable care and reasonable accommodations, and approaches to accommodating disability." Explore further Physician addresses stigma against patients and providers with disabilities Copyright 2019 HealthDay. All rights reserved. Satellite imagery of Africa. Credit: Public Domain A recently discovered species of ebolavirus may be more widespread than previously thought and could be hosted by a particular bat species, according to findings published by a University of Arkansas biologist. The ebolavirus species, named Bombali, is one of two currently not known to infect humans. Kristian Forbes, assistant professor of biology, along with colleagues from the University of Helsinki, Maasai Mara University and the University of Nairobi, found Bombali in the organs and tissues of an Angolan free-tailed bat (Mops condylurus) captured in the Taita Hills of southeast Kenya, on the east coast of Africa. Bombali was originally identified in this species of bats last year in Sierra Leone, 3,400 miles to the west. This is the first time any ebolavirus has been found in wildlife in Kenya or other countries along the east coast of Africa. "This particular virus is known from the west coast of Africa, and now we are placing it on the opposite side," said Forbes. "It could conceivably be everywhere in between as well, which is a whole lot of countries." Forbes emphasized that Bombali is not the species of ebolavirus responsible for the deadly Ebola outbreaks in west Africa. There are six known species of ebolavirus, four of which are capable of infecting humans. Bombali is not one of them. To further assess the risk to humans, the researchers analyzed biological samples from people in the Taita Hills region who reported being sick with a fever and who had contact with bats in recent years. They found no evidence of Bombali infections. "This is a high risk group, so a good place to start looking for potential spillover to people," Forbes said. Samples were sent from Kenya to the University of Helsinki in Finland for analysis. Samples from the positive bat were then sent to a high-security lab in Sweden for further testing. The findings were published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. Ebolaviruses are rarely identified in wildlife, Forbes said. Establishing the geographical range and wildlife species infected by Bombali could help researchers understand the dynamics of this and other ebolavirus species in nature. "These are high risk viruses," he said. "The close relatives of Bombali virus do tend to spillover into human populations from time to time, so we must be vigilant and try to understand all we can about them." Explore further Ebola species found in bats ahead of any potential outbreak More information: Kristian M. Forbes et al. Bombali Ebola Virus in Mops condylurus Bat, Kenya, Emerging Infectious Diseases (2019). Journal information: Emerging Infectious Diseases Kristian M. Forbes et al. Bombali Ebola Virus in Mops condylurus Bat, Kenya,(2019). DOI: 10.3201/eid2505.181666 As political leaders debate the future of the U.S. health care system, a pair of health financing experts discovered that all of the current proposalsfrom Medicare for All to "repeal and replace"have been circulating in various forms since the 1940s. In an article published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, "Medicare for All and its rivals: new offshoots of old health policy roots," longtime health care researchers Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H., and David U. Himmelstein, M.D., reveal the historical foundations of today's health care debate. For example, the Medicare for All Act of 2019 (H.R. 1384), recently filed by Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingell, traces its roots back to the 1948 Wagner-Murray-Dingell national health insurance bill and the 1971 single-payer plan proposed by Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. Martha Griffiths. Today's "public option" plans that would offer individuals the option to buy-in to Medicare or Medicaid were first proposed by two Republicans, Sen. Jacob Javits and Rep. John Lindsay in the early 1960s. Even President Trump's recent budget proposalwhich seeks to shrink the government's role in health care by cutting trillions in Medicare and Medicaid funding, further privatizing Medicare and the VA, stripping the basic protections of the Affordable Care Act, and saddling patients with higher deductiblesechoes policies favored by President Richard Nixon and others in 1971. Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler inherited the archives of Dr. Sidney S. Lee, who was a professor of health policy at Harvard Medical School and former general director of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and chief executive of Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. While recently exploring Dr. Lee's archives, the researchers came upon news clips, transcripts of Congressional hearings, and other descriptions of proposals that closely mirrored those still being proposed today. "When Sen. Kennedy introduced a comprehensive single-payer bill in 1971, Republicans countered with a public option alternative that was friendlier to private insurers, and some conservative Democrats proposed settling for coverage with sky-high deductibles," said Dr. Woolhandler, an internist in the South Bronx, Distinguished Professor at CUNY/Hunter College and Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard. "In response, Sen. Kennedy complained that anything short of single-payer Medicare-for-All '...calms down the flame, but it really doesn't meet the need,' an observation that still holds true today." Dr. Himmelstein, a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York's (CUNY) Hunter College and Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, urged current political leaders not to repeat the mistakes of earlier generations that tinkered around the edges of the U.S. health system while ignoring its fundamental flaws. "The leading option for U.S. health reform would leave 36 million people uninsured in 2027, while costs would balloon to nearly $6 trillion. And the disgraceful trends of decreasing life expectancy, rising drug prices, medical bankruptcy, and physician burnout would persist" said Dr. Himmelstein. "That option is called the status quo." More information: Steffie Woolhandler et al, Medicare for All and Its Rivals: New Offshoots of Old Health Policy Roots, Annals of Internal Medicine (2019). Journal information: Annals of Internal Medicine Steffie Woolhandler et al, Medicare for All and Its Rivals: New Offshoots of Old Health Policy Roots,(2019). DOI: 10.7326/M19-0780 Provided by Physicians for a National Health Program Families spend about half of their evening meal distracted by electronics, toys and tasks, according to a recent study by University of Illinois alumna Jaclyn Saltzman, who conducted the research while earning a doctorate in family studies. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer When families gather for dinner at night, they spend nearly half of their time distracted by electronic devices, toys and tasks that take them physically or mentally away from the table, a new study found. However, fathers' presence at meals may have a positive impact reducing the amount of time that young children are distracted and increasing mothers' responsiveness to children's eating behaviors, according to the researchers. The study, conducted at the University of Illinois, examined 109 families' dinnertime routines and the effects that fathers' presence and various types of distractions had on mothers' interactions with their preschool children. "Our findings suggest that fathers play an important role in interacting with and engaging children at the table," said lead author Jaclyn Saltzman, who completed the research while earning a doctorate in family studies at the U. of I. "When dads are present for meals, young children spend significantly less time playing with toys and other objects. Likewise, moms spend more time engaging in responsive eating behaviors, such as encouraging preschoolers to eat healthy foods and allowing them to decide whether and how much to eat." Families were video recorded while they ate their evening meal at home, and the researchers who were not present while the families ate later watched the videos and coded the amount of time that each family member was distracted by various things. These included technology-related distractions, such as adjusting appliance settings or using TVs and other electronic devices; playing with pets, toys or other objects; food-related distractions; and leaving the table for any reason, such as to go to the bathroom or to work. Families' mealtimes lasted about 17 minutes on average, the researchers found. Mothers and fathers spent about the same amount of time 10 percent and about 9 percent, respectively occupied with food-related distractions, such as retrieving dishes or utensils needed for the meal. However, fathers were significantly more likely than mothers to use technology during the meal or to leave the table. Young children, who ranged in age from 18-24 months at the time of the study, spent about 4 percent of their time playing with toys and other objects, and nearly as much time about 3 percent watching TV or distracted by other technology during the meal. Fathers were not present at 35 families' meals. If their fathers were absent, young children spent significantly more time playing with objects than did children whose fathers were present, the researchers found. Accordingly, mothers spent significantly more time occupied with food-related distractions and were less attentive to the child's eating when fathers were not present at the meal. "Studies have shown that young children may be more prone to fussy eating and other negative behaviors when there are more distractions at meals," said Saltzman, a postdoctoral research fellow with Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Massachusetts General Hospital for Children Department of Academic Pediatrics. "Parents can consider removing toys, pets and other distractions so that young children are focused on the meal and parents have more opportunities to encourage healthy eating habits. "Active paternal involvement at meals might be an effective way to improve mothers' responsive feeding practices with young children," Saltzman said. "Fathers who live at home with their families may want to make mealtimes a priority, so they and their partners can encourage healthy mealtime practices." All of the families were recruited from a larger research project at the U. of I. called STRONG Kids 2, an ongoing study of more than 450 preschoolers that is examining the influence on child obesity of eating habits, genetics, household routines and family factors. The study was published recently in the Journal of Family Psychology. Explore further Happier mealtimes, healthier eating for kids More information: Jaclyn A. Saltzman et al. Associations between father availability, mealtime distractions and routines, and maternal feeding responsiveness: An observational study., Journal of Family Psychology (2019). Journal information: Journal of Family Psychology Jaclyn A. Saltzman et al. Associations between father availability, mealtime distractions and routines, and maternal feeding responsiveness: An observational study.,(2019). DOI: 10.1037/fam0000519 Nothing but blood and tears. File photo of an unidentified protester wearing a mask painted with the flag of Xinjiang, also known as East Turkestan, and tears of blood in Brussels, Belgium, in April last year, evocative of what political observers say are the crimes against humanity committed by Chinese officials with their continued atrocious actions in the disputed South China Sea. AFP Diplomats and activists on Monday denounced intense Chinese lobbying, pressure and even threats to rein in criticism of Beijing during last month's session of the UN Human Rights Council. Human Rights Watch charged that the Chinese mission in Geneva had sent a letter to a number of missions urging them to stay away from a US-organized event on March 13 about China's treatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province. The letter, signed by Ambassador Yu Jianhua and seen by AFP, tells countries "not to co-sponsor, participate in or be present at this side event... in the interest of our bilateral relations and continued multilateral cooperation."HRW slammed these "threats," with the organization's Geneva director John Fisher warning that the public outcry over the treatment of Muslim minorities had "sent China into panic mode." Chinese officials, he said in a statement, are now "using public as well as private pressure to block concerted international action." The Chinese mission did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation and comment. But several diplomats confirmed to AFP that their missions had received the letter ahead of the event. It took place on the sidelines of the rights council's three-week session and focused on allegations that upwards of one-million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic minorities are being held in detention centres in Xinjiang. China maintains instead that the Uighurs and others are at "campuses" for vocational training set up to counter radicalisation. Xinjiang, which shares a border with several countries including Pakistan and Afghanistan, has long seen violent unrest, which China claims is orchestrated by an organised "terrorist" movement seeking the region's independence. But many Uighurs and Xinjiang experts say the violence stems 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.On Monday, several diplomats backed HRW's claim that China had exerted significant pressure on countries to speak on its behalf during the conclusion of a review of its rights record before the council on March 15."They were doing their best to stage-manage everything," a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP. "When you see how few countries spoke up about Xinjiang, I am sure it did have an effect," the diplomat added. "They are not staying idle," another Western diplomat said. According to HRW, Chinese officials pressured the UN to remove elements provided by UN experts and NGOs from the so-called Universal Periodic Review report and tried to block the accreditation of Uighur activist Dolkun Isa. A UN official told AFP that "receiving pressure from governments attempting to silence critics is fairly common, but a particularly high number of these complaints come from China about the credibility of participants." "This session was particularly bad," acknowledged the UN official, who asked not to be named. HRW also charged that China had intentionally pushed friendly states to flood the speakers' list for the 20 minutes allocated to countries' concluding remarks. Nearly 100 countries requested the right to speakover three times more than usual in this situationbut only 13 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. Non-governmental organizations were also given a chance to speak, but there too, groups praising China grabbed six of the 10 available speaking slots. "It speaks volumes that China felt it necessary to twist arms and mount propaganda displays to try to suppress scrutiny of its rights record," Fisher said. Katherine Morrison with a patient. Credit: McMaster University Physicians are told to gauge the severity of a child's problem with obesity using the body mass index (BMI) that measures weight against height. But that doesn't work well to identify health issues, especially those of mental health, in children with obesity seeking care, says a study led by McMaster University. Other medical issues, including high blood pressure, prediabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease are also common, and are only slightly more frequent in those with the most severe obesity compared to those with less severe obesity, according to the study. The details of the study called the Canadian Pediatric Weight Management Registry (CANPWR) were published today in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. This study found two thirds of children entering weight management programs across Canada have severe obesity based on their BMI. "We found that social and mechanical health issues were more common in those with the highest body mass index. However, mental health issues, for example, are consistent across the BMI groups," said Katherine Morrison, principal investigator of the CANPWR study, and professor of the Department of Pediatrics at McMaster. "If you are only using BMI to identify the youth who need the most care, you would be presuming the kids with the lowest BMI class would be the least likely to have mental health issues or metabolic issues, but our findings suggest this is not true. This study suggests that using a clinical staging system, one that evaluates the health of the child and not just the BMI, is likely the best approach." Morrison is also co-director of the Centre for Metabolism, Obesity and Diabetes Research at McMaster, an investigator of the Population Health Research Institute, and a pediatric endocrinologist at McMaster Children's Hospital. She said the end goal is to improve care of these children. "There is a lot said about preventing obesity, we also really need to focus on how best to treat children with obesity. This is especially true when we see the burden of health illness that is associated with obesity in children entering weight management programs." The CANPWR study aims to identify what influences the success participants achieve in weight management programs and help improve these programs. The study follows participants for three years. The 10 clinics taking part in the study are in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa and Montreal. The paper used information from 847 children with obesity and the health issues were determined at their initial visit to one of the multidisciplinary weight management clinics across Canada. Participants were aged five to 17 at the time of enrolment. In this study, researchers showed that using a clinical staging system called the Edmonton Obesity Staging System for Pediatrics, or EOSS-P, was more useful for understanding the health issues of the children in these clinics than the BMI class system. They suggest that using a clinical staging system will better assist the design of health care interventions for children with obesity. Obesity-related health issues were common. Mental health concerns were the most common (90 per cent), followed by metabolic (85 per cent), social (65 per cent) and mechanical (62 per cent) health issues. The most common mental health issue identified was anxiety. The most commonly identified metabolic health complication was dyslipidemia, followed by non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Bullying was the most commonly identified social health factor, followed very closely by low household income. More than one-third of children in the highest obesity group came from low income homes, which was significantly higher than those with lower levels of obesity. Those with the most severe obesity by BMI were more likely to have experienced bullying, and more likely to report difficulties with peer relationships, compared to the less severe obesity groups. Explore further Study shows benefits of exercise can outweigh health effects of severe obesity Braden Scott gives a thumbs up as he pauses while practicing on the piano in Tomball, Texas on Friday, March 29, 2019. Braden was diagnosed with the mysterious syndrome called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, in 2016 and was paralyzed almost completely. But since then he has recovered much of his muscle function. His parents believe a lot of it has to do with thousands of hours of physical therapy. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) One morning last fall, 4-year-old Joey Wilcox woke up with the left side of his face drooping. It was the first sign of an unfolding nightmare. Three days later, Joey was in a hospital intensive care unit, unable to move his arms or legs or sit up. Spinal taps and other tests failed to find a cause. Doctors worried he was about to lose the ability to breathe. "It's devastating," said his father, Jeremy Wilcox, of Herndon, Virginia. "Your healthy child can catch a coldand then become paralyzed." Joey, who survived but still suffers some of the effects, was one of 228 confirmed victims in the U.S. last year of acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, a rare, mysterious and sometimes deadly paralyzing illness that seems to ebb and flow on an every-other-year cycle and is beginning to alarm public health officials because it is striking more and more children. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it may bear similarities to polio, which smoldered among humans for centuries before it exploded into fearsome epidemics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Fauci, who published a report about the disease Tuesday in the journal mBio, said it is unlikely AFM will become as bad as polio, which struck tens of thousands of U.S. children annually before a vaccine became available in the 1950s. Rachel Scott, right, helps suction the mouth of her son, Braden, in Tomball, Texas on Friday, March 29, 2019. He was 7 on July 4, 2016, when he uncharacteristically decided he didn't want to go swimming. He had trouble swallowing and felt tired and weak. His parents took him to an urgent care center, then to a hospital. Within days he could only move one hand. Late one night his father and a nurse were sitting beside Braden in the hospital when they noticed he had just stopped breathing. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) But he warned: "Don't assume that it's going to stay at a couple of hundred cases every other year." While other countries have reported cases, including Canada, France, Britain and Norway, the size and pattern of the U.S. outbreaks have been more pronounced. More than 550 Americans have been struck this decade. The oldest was 32. More than 90% were children, most around 4, 5 or 6 years old. Most had a cold-like illness and fever, seemed to get over it, then descended into paralysis. In some cases it started in small waysfor example, a thumb that suddenly wouldn't move. Some went on to lose the ability to eat or draw breath. Many families say their children have regained at least some movement in affected limbs, but stories of complete recovery are unusual. Health officials cannot say how many recovered completely, partly or not at all, or how many have died, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says deaths are rare. Scientists suspect the illness is being caused chiefly by a certain virus that was identified more than 55 years ago and may have mutated to become more dangerous. But they have yet to prove that. And while doctors have deployed a number of treatments singly or in combinationsteroids, antiviral medications, antibiotics, a blood-cleansing processthe CDC says there is no clear evidence they work. Many parents say that when they first brought their child to the emergency room, they quickly realized to their horror that the doctors were at sea, too. Braden Scott uses a device to support his left arm as he practices on the piano in Tomball, Texas on Friday, March 29, 2019. Braden was diagnosed with the syndrome called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, in 2016 and was paralyzed almost completely. The rare but mysterious illness seems to ebb and flow every other year and is beginning to alarm public health officials. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) "Everyone is desperate for some magical thing," said Rachel Scott, a Tomball, Texas, woman whose son Braden developed AFM in 2016 and has recovered somewhat after intensive physical therapy but still cannot move his right arm and has trouble swallowing and moving his neck. A growing number of experts agree that physical therapy makes a difference. "These kids can continue to recover very slowly, year over year. ... It's driven by how much therapy they do," said Dr. Benjamin Greenberg of UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, one of the nation's foremost experts on the condition. Wilcox, Joey's father, said his son made huge improvements that way. Joey can run and use his arms. Still, muscle tone is weak in his right leg and shoulder, and he still has left-side facial paralysis. "He can't completely smile," his dad said. Other stories are more tragic. Katie Bustamante's son Alex developed AFM in 2016. The suburban Sacramento, California, mother realized something was wrong when she asked the boy, then 5, why he wasn't eating his yogurt. Alex replied that his thumb had stopped working and he couldn't hold his spoon. That morning was the start of 17 months of hospital stays, surgeries, therapy, and struggles with doctors and insurers to find a way to restore his ability to breathe. It ended one morning last May, when Alex died of complications. Rachel Scott, left, talks with her son, Braden, in Tomball, Texas on Friday, March 29, 2019. "Everyone is desperate for some magical thing" to cure the kids, said Rachel. Braden developed acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, in 2016. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) Government officials need to step up, Bustamante said. "I want them to research it and find the cause, and I want them to find a way to prevent it," she said. "This is growing. This shouldn't be happening." More and more experts feel certain the main culprit is an enterovirus called EV-D68, based on the way waves of AFM have coincided with spikes of respiratory illnesses caused by EV-D68. Enteroviruses are a large family of viruses, some of which, such as polio, can damage the central nervous system, while many others cause mild symptoms or none at all. In the U.S., doctors began reporting respiratory illnesses tied to EV-D68 in 1987, though usually no more than a dozen in any given year. Then, in what may have been one of the first signs of the AFM waves to come, a 5-year-old boy in New Hampshire died in 2008 after developing neck tenderness and fever, then weakened arms and deadened legs. The boy had EV-D68, and in a report published in an obscure medical journal, researchers attributed his death to the virus. The first real burst of AFM cases hit in 2014, when 120 were confirmed, with the largest concentrations in California and Colorado. What ensued was an even-year, odd-year pattern: Cases dropped to 22 in 2015, jumped to 149 in 2016, and fell again, to 35 in 2017. Last year they reached 228, a number that may grow because scores of illnesses are still being investigated. Braden Scott smiles after practicing on the piano in Tomball, Texas on Friday, March 29, 2019. Braden was diagnosed with the mysterious syndrome called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, in 2016 and was paralyzed almost completely. But since then he has recovered much of his muscle function. His parents believe a lot of it has to do with thousands of hours of physical therapy. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) In keeping with the cyclical pattern, just four cases have been confirmed this year so far. CDC officials consider an illness AFM based on scans and other evidence showing a certain kind of damage to the spinal cord. Proof of an enterovirus infection is not required for a case to be counted, mainly because such evidence has been hard to come by. So far, CDC investigators have been able to find evidence of enteroviruses in the spinal fluid of only four of 558 confirmed cases. Scientists are using more sensitive spinal-fluid tests in hopes of establishing the connection between AFM and EV-D68 more firmly. That, in turn, could spur more focused work on treatments and maybe even a vaccine. Meanwhile, Fauci's agency has put out a call for researchers to apply for federal funds, and is tapping a University of Alabama-anchored network of pediatric research centers to work on the illness. The CDC is pledging a greater focus, too. Parents have accused the agency of doing little more than counting cases and have complained that when they tried to contact CDC, they encountered only automated phone trees and form responses. CDC officials have begun holding meetings and calls with families, set up a scientific task force and working to monitor cases more closely. Fauci suggested it would be a mistake to assume that surges will take place every other year forever. The next one "may be in 2019, for all we know," he said. Explore further Record count reported for mysterious paralyzing illness 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Credit: CC0 Public Domain A new University of Liverpool led study, published in The Lancet, highlights the effectiveness of a brief group psychological intervention for women affected by anxiety and depression in a post-conflict setting in Pakistan. Many women are affected by anxiety and depression after armed conflict in the world. In many communities there are few options for mental health care. More people can be reached through group in interventions than individual interventions. For that reason, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has developed a brief, five session, group intervention, called Group Problem Management Plus (Group PM+). The intervention is based on cognitive behavioural therapy and can be delivered by trained and supervised non-specialist helpers (i.e., people who are not licensed mental health professionals). Through a partnership involving University of Liverpool, the Human Development Research Foundation, Khyber Medical University, Pakistan and the WHO, the intervention was studied in post-conflict areas of the Swat Valley in Pakistan. The region, in the last decade, has experienced armed conflict between the Pakistani military and Taliban insurgents, displacing over 1.5 million people and causing significant damage to Swat's economy, infrastructure and social fabric. The intervention was tested in a state-of-the art randomized controlled trial involving 612 women in rural Swat. Trained non-specialists university graduates delivered the Group PM+ to 306 women, aged 1860 years, in primary healthcare dispensaries in Swat, while the rest of the women received enhanced usual care from the primary health care physicians. The women who received the group intervention were less depressed, had less anxiety, and functioned better three months after completing the therapy. Initial problem severity did not affect the outcomes indicating the intervention can also be helpful for those with severe problems. The results of this trial demonstrate the feasibility of employing local supervised non-specialist workers to deliver a brief, group psychological intervention in post-conflict setting. Professor of Child Psychiatry & Global Mental Health Atif Rahman, from the University of Liverpool's Department of Psychological Sciences, was the principal investigator on the study. Professor Rahman, said: "This is one of the first women-focused, well-designed randomized controlled trial conducted in post-conflict settings and the results are promising. The brief intervention significantly alleviates the silent suffering of many women who live through conflict and violence. It has the potential for scale-up in many conflict-affected countries of the world. "The study is a result of successful partnerships between the University of Liverpool and institutions in Pakistan fostered over many years." Dr. Naseem Khan, who supervised the study in Swat is an alumni of the University and now holds an academic position at the Khyber Medical University, stated: "It is challenging to conduct such sophisticated research in post-conflict settings but we were able to do it because, over many years, we built capacity in local researchers who understand the context and sensitivities". Professor Rahman leads the South Asian Hub for Advocacy, research and Education (SHARE) that promotes equitable and sustainable partnerships between institutions in the North and South. Explore further Behavioral intervention reduces anxiety, depression among adults impaired by psychological distress More information: Atif Rahman et al. Effectiveness of a brief group psychological intervention for women in a post-conflict setting in Pakistan: a single-blind, cluster, randomised controlled trial, The Lancet (2019). Journal information: The Lancet Atif Rahman et al. Effectiveness of a brief group psychological intervention for women in a post-conflict setting in Pakistan: a single-blind, cluster, randomised controlled trial,(2019). DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32343-2 Credit: University of Michigan Older adults who struggle with dressing, bathing and preparing meals, but don't get the help they need, may experience high levels of anxiety that can lead to adverse consequences, such as wearing soiled clothes or going hungry. A new study by University of Michigan researchers tracked the behavior of older adults whose needs were not handled properly, leading to elevated anxiety symptoms. This created "a vicious cycle that may lower the quality of life of older adults," said Xiaoling Xiang, the study's co-author and assistant professor of social work. "Our findings reinforce the notion that needs for mental health services and community-based long-term services and supports are interconnected," she said. Data came from the National Health and Aging Trends Study, collected from 2011 to 2016. The sample involved 3,936 Medicare beneficiaries with activity limitations at age 65 and older. The relationship between anxiety and unmet needs for personal assistance may or may not differ across age groups. The sheer number of older adults with disabilities and who are at risk of having unmet needs makes this an important public health issue, Xiang said. In fact, the numbers may be larger than what the study reported. Since the collected data had been self-reported, some people might not have disclosed everything happening in their lives. Credit: University of Michigan "Adverse consequences due to unmet needs may be underreported because of feelings of shame and embarrassment, particularly in a society that values self-sufficiency," said lead author Ashley Zuverink, a U-M alumna who is now with the Detroit Health Department. Researchers note that doctors and other health care providers working with older adults may consider screening for anxiety and other mental health symptoms. In addition, these experts can factor the patients' mental health status when devising plans for long-term services and supports. Explore further Factors associated with loss of usual source of care among older adults More information: Ashley Zuverink et al. Anxiety and Unmet Needs for Assistance With Daily Activities Among Older Adults, Journal of Aging and Health (2019). Ashley Zuverink et al. Anxiety and Unmet Needs for Assistance With Daily Activities Among Older Adults,(2019). DOI: 10.1177/0898264319830805 An undercover agent who was investigating Andrew Gillum for alleged unethical misconduct could testify against him in his upcoming ethics case, according to court records filed Monday. Mike Miller, who posed as developer looking to do business in Tallahassee in 2016, would say that he paid for Gillums activities while hanging out in New York City that year, according to the ethics commissions advocate. Those activities likely include paying for a ticket to the Broadway musical Hamilton and a boat ride around the Statute of Liberty with former lobbyist Adam Corey. But whether the agent will show up is uncertain, according to Gillums lawyer, Barry Richard. He said the FBI has not made him available to the commissions advocate, Elizabeth Miller. To my knowledge, she has not yet gotten agreement from the FBI to get him to testify, Richard said. They havent made him available to anybody. A spokesman for the Attorney Generals Office, where Miller works, implied otherwise. We have information to suggest the FBI may voluntarily produce a witness, spokesman Whitney Ray said. Regardless, Richard said hes hoping the FBI agent does show up. He didnt oppose the idea in court motions. Wed like him to testify, Richard said. We think it would support Andrews version of what occurred. Miller wrote that the FBI had been actively investigating Gillum, however a sign that the former Tallahassee mayor might not easily escape the ethics charges that dogged his campaign for governor last year. The FBI used various investigative techniques, including the efforts of possibly two undercover agents to reveal the full extent of Respondents alleged unethical misconduct, Miller wrote. The ethics commission ruled in January that there was probable cause to go forward with claims that Gillum accepted favors from Corey without disclosing them. Gillum has said that he paid for trip expenses with cash and believed the Hamilton ticket came from his brother. He faces fines for each of five violations. Miller asked an administrative law judge to keep secret the real identity of Mike Miller and allow him to wear a disguise if he appears in court. A second undercover agent, Mike Sweets, is also on Millers witness list but is not expected to testify during the hearing, scheduled for April 24-26. Corey is also among the 23 people on Millers list, and he will testify that Gillum did not reimburse him during a trip to Costa Rica in 2016, and that FBI agents paid for the ticket and the boat ride. Richard, however, said that Corey has been unresponsive to his requests to be deposed before the hearing, and he doubts whether Corey will show up. Miller asked to postpone the hearing because Coreys lawyer has had health problems, but Gillum doesnt want to delay it. Fabiana Rosales, wife of Venezuela interim President Juan Guiado, speaks in the Governor's Mansion on Tuesday flanked by Gov. Ron DeSantis, First Lady Casey DeSantis and Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez. Emily L. Mahoney | Times/Herald TALLAHASSEE On Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis, First Lady Casey DeSantis, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez and Fabiana Rosales, wife of Venezuela's interim President Juan Guaido, met in the Governor's Mansion to hold a press conference only to be delayed by an emerging safety "situation" in Venezuela. The 20-minute delay only underscored the ever-changing nature of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, a country where Rosales said death and hunger have become the norm. She did not expand on what Tuesday's "situation" entailed, but the governor's office confirmed it was related to Guaido's safety. "In Venezuela today there isn't electricity, there isn't food, there isn't medicine. And our children are dying every second," she said in Spanish. Throughout the event, she bit her lip and appeared nervous. "Today, Venezuelans live in danger. Today, the life of the President of Venezuela Juan Guaido is in danger." She was in Tallahassee meeting with both DeSantis and lawmakers. Florida is home to America's largest community of Venezuelan exiles, a fact that state leaders have said underscores their commitment to helping those in crisis in Venezuela as Guaido seeks to oust President Nicolas Maduro. Gov. DeSantis said there are "rumors" that Guaido could be arrested by authorities controlled by Maduro, something he said President Donald Trump would not take lightly. "I can tell you having spoken with the president about this very subject multiple times, that would be a big deal for him and I think he's shown he's willing to follow up his words with action," DeSantis said. "To arrest (Rosales') husband and God knows what they would do after that that would be a big, big mistake." Rumors of Guaido's arrest have been swirling for months, but intensified Monday when Venezuela's chief justice asked lawmakers to strip Guaido of immunity, taking a step toward prosecuting him for alleged crimes. Casey DeSantis offered her "full support" in helping with humanitarian matters, while the governor and Nunez pledged Florida's support for Guaido. "As the daughter of Cuban immigrants I understand all too well the plight of the Venezuelan people," Nunez said. Florida is "going to lead the nation in making sure they understand that we stand with democracy. We stand with freedom. And we stand with the true president of Venezuela." The leaders did not take questions from reporters, citing concerns for Guaido's safety. The press conference coincided with Vice President Mike Pence's meeting in Washington with families of six Citgo executives five of whom are U.S. citizens who have been detained by the Maduro government in Venezuela. The US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) is providing support for a detailed feasibility study for solar projects in Ghana, US Ambassador to Ghana Stephanie S. Sullivan said. According to the US diplomat, a new partnership between the Ghanaian Strategic Security Systems International company and its subsidiary Strategic Power Solutions, and the US Company AEG International will support solar energy generation in the West African nation. The diplomat said the energy will be generated from solar panels assembled in Ghana and from inverters, batteries, and other equipment manufactured in the United States. The solar panels will be assembled at Strategic Power Solutions (SPS) manufacturing facility in Ghana and power 28 health clinics and 310 schools, amongst other facilities, that will be transitioned to solar power through the project. The decision to move to solar power is cost effective and will improve the lives of citizens throughout Ghana, Mrs. Sullivan said. Through Power Africa, the United States has catalyzed some $60 billion in energy investments that will provide modern energy services for roughly 300 million citizens across Africa by 2030. Last month, the government of Ghana has launched an ambitious project to install 55 small-scale renewable electricity production and distribution systems, known as mini grids, in island communities with limited access to the national grid. About $230 million has been dedicated to the implementation of the project that is expected to scale up renewable energy solutions and expand access to those solutions in the country. The rollout of the Huduma Namba, also known as the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS) will proceed as planned following a court ruling on Monday. President Uhuru Kenyatta will today, Tuesday 2, officially launch the Huduma Namba in Machakos County. However, a three-judge bench of the High Court has put strict conditions for the government to adhere to. Firstly, the State is prohibited from collecting DNA and GPS coordinates pending the determination of a case filed by the Kenya Human Rights Commission. The High Court has also suspended the mandatory roll-out of NIIMS. This means that the government cannot force or compel any person to register in NIIMS. Only Kenyans willing to give out information can now do so during the ongoing registration process. The three-judge bench has also barred the government from issuing deadlines for the collection of NIIMS data, from making registration to NIIMS a condition for receiving government services, or sharing NIIMS data with any organization whether international or otherwise, for any reasons. The orders are in place pending the determination of a case in which KHRC was seeking the suspension of the excise. Through lawyer Martha Karua, the human rights agency argue that the process interferes with an individuals right to privacy. Martha Karua said it is in the interest of the public for the court to stop the process because the government will not suffer any prejudice. I was going to do a post on a couple of soup places....but man; it's hitting the 80's today. Let's save that for tomorrow.....how about a couple of brews and getting cheesy. I noticed that I tend to go with quite a few Belgian style beer when I'm at home and usually get something lighter when I'm out and about; unless there's something I'm really interested in. The Duval Single Fermentation was quite light and the ABV is lower than the typical Duvel Golden which goes thru a double fermentation. I'll take the stuff in the bottle any day of the week. I was thinking about our trip to Belgium recently. While the Missus no longer enjoys beer and really isn't into revisiting Belgium. I had a blast. When I saw the bottle of St Bernardus on the shelf, it brought me back to biking to Watou, after going to Westvleteren earlier in the day. Even though a lot of the Belgian brews don't travel well, the memories last. Did I mention that I've started keeping a cheese journal? Both the Missus and I love cheese...She especially loves the washed rind stuff like Epoisses (did you know that Epoisses is banned on the metro in Paris?) She actually went and requested Limburger from Whole Foods....they had to go into the back of the shop to get it for us. Anyway, I hadn't been to Venissimo in a while; but dropped by while the Missus was at work yesterday. I went right when they opened and the Cheese Monger working was amazing! We got four definite winners! From the left to right Brie Fermier, wonderfully rich, with an awesome mushroom-earthy flavor. It was amazing when served at room temp. Jeff's Select, a Gouda from Minnesota, with a bright annatto colored rind, was mildy nutty and easy to eat. My favorite, Monte Enebro, which Liz Thorpe in her wonderful book The Book of Cheese categorizes as a "misfit cheese", was just love at first bite for me. The cheese is ripened with Penicillium Roqueforti; the mold that is used for blue cheese. But while it does have that "spice" like a blue cheese; there's that definite creamy "barnyard" flavor of a goat cheese, along with a mild tanginess and buttery texture. Man, it was so good. The Missus's favorite, was something I just decided to taste on a whim after I had already picked three cheeses, the Ameribella, a washed rind cheese from Indiana. Oh man, this was so creamy, the mushroom funkiness and pungency turns in an almost buttery flavor at finish. Man, four for four, I can't remember the last time I brought home all winners! Thanks Venissimo! Venissimo Cheese 754 W Washington St San Diego, CA 92103 That duck salami I got from one of the vendors at the Little Italy Mercato was a winner as well. I add a couple of slices with the Missus's salad for lunch. Speaking of the Little Italy Mercato. Ever see this interesting couple around? On this day, they were both strutting their stuff, with "Wild Thing" blasting on the hand held speaker! You gotta love it! And thanks so much for indulging me! I'll be back with something more substantial tomorrow! " " German family minister Manuela Schwesig speaks to men and women rallying for closing the gender pay gap, on Equal Pay Day, March 20, 2015 in Berlin. Equal Pay Day is commemorated in the U.S. and around the world on different dates. Sean Gallup/Getty Images Would you work two months every year for free? If you're an American woman, you just might. Every April, one Tuesday is dubbed Equal Pay Day by the National Committee on Pay Equity (a coalition of groups working toward equal pay for all sexes and races). This 24-hour period symbolizes the gender pay gap, showing how far into the next calendar year women must work to earn the same amount of money as men. Similar days are also commemorated across Europe. The National Committee on Pay Equity has been holding an Equal Pay Day in the U.S. since 1996, but the issue of gender-based pay differences has been around long before that [source: National Committee on Pay Equity]. Advertisement While comprehensive data on gender inequities in pay wasn't collected until 1950, research shows women were earning a mere 30 cents per dollar compared to men during America's early years, when its economy was largely driven by agriculture. During the Industrial Revolution (1820 to 1850) women fared better, netting 50 percent of the wages men took home; by the early 20th century, that rate inched up to 56 percent (i.e. women earned 56 cents for every dollar men earned). Despite the fact that Congress mandated equal pay for equal work in 1963, the wage gap remained at 60 percent for years. In the 1980s it began to climb again, rising to around 75 percent. But some 30 years later, (the latest available statistics are for 2018) the gap had only nudged up to 81 cents per dollar, according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor. Still, this is slightly better than 2015, when the gap was around 80 cents per dollar. Economists say one-third to one-half of the gender pay gap may be explained by differences in education, experience and the number of hours worked. But the reason for the remainder is a bit of a mystery, although many say it's due to gender discrimination. To put the pay gap in perspective, consider this: In 2019, a typical 25-year-old woman employed full-time earned $5,000 less per year than her male counterpart. If that gap persists until those employees hit age 65, she would have lost out on more than $406,000 compared to the man, an astonishing figure. The gender gap is even steeper for women of color. In 2017, according to Census data, white women working full-time, year-round earned median annual incomes that were 77 percent of what their white male counterparts scored. For African-American women, the figure dipped to 61 percent; for Hispanic females, it was a dismal 53 percent. Only Asian women fared better than white women, earning 85 percent of what white males did. In fact, the American Association of University Women pegged "Equal Pay Day" for African-American women as happening some time in August and way down in November for Latina women in 2019. " " President Donald Trump met with leaders of the U.S. steel industry at the White House March 1, 2018 when he announced plans to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Win McNamee/Getty Images The economics of international trade are notoriously tricky. The World Trade Organization was formed for the express purpose of getting countries to play nicely when it comes to the often dangerous and always intricate matters of global trade. But President Donald Trump, evidently, doesn't want to play anymore. With a few comments in late February 2018, a couple of follow-up tweets and some quick comments to reporters on March 5, 2018, Trump has fired the first shot in what many across the U.S. political spectrum and around the globe fear could become a full-fledged trade war. What that could mean, those most fearful say, is a worldwide tit-for-tat on trade that may lead to the loss of thousands of American jobs and hold on to your wallets a coming recession. All that because the president, citing an $800 billion trade imbalance, threatened a 10 percent tariff on aluminum and a 25 percent tariff on steel coming from other countries into the United States. "This is a terrible idea for the United States. It's something that will be harmful to the U.S. economy," Bryan Riley, the director of the Washington-based National Taxpayers Union's Free Trade Initiative, says. To slam this in reverse for just a second, let's explain exactly what a tariff is. It's a tax, basically, levied on products coming into a country imports. So if Trump's aluminum/steel tariffs are enacted, and a U.S. company wants to buy $1 million worth of steel from, let's just say, China, it would cost that U.S. company $1.25 million with a Trump tariff. The extra $250,000 goes to the tax man. The idea is that, instead of paying that extra $250,000 tax, U.S. companies in need of steel or aluminum will buy from U.S. manufacturers, boosting those hard-hit industries, which in turn will hire more workers to keep up with the increased demand. Everybody in all those Rust Belt states will be happy. The Chinese, maybe not. But, again, none of this happens in a vacuum. Despite the president's declarations to the contrary, it gets complicated. Advertisement The Ripple Effects The first thing that could happen, sticking with the aluminum/steel example, is that consumer prices will go up on everything that contains steel or aluminum (cars, washing machines, beer cans). That's because the cost for making those goods will go up. U.S. companies aren't going to eat the extra $250,000 cost of buying non-American steel. Consumers of the products will. Those price hikes on products made with more expensive steel and aluminum will take more money out of consumers' wallets, which means they'll have less to spend. Other American companies will suffer, too, which may cause a pullback in those industries, costing Americans jobs. Though the tariffs may be designed to help some industries, the nature of trade means they could hurt others. Even in the U.S. "What trade does, in the aggregate, it expands production, it expands jobs, it lowers prices. It benefits countries in the aggregate. But it has distributional impacts," Charles Hankla, a professor of comparative and international relations at Georgia State University in Atlanta, says. Recently, he explains, steel and aluminum have been the industries hurt by trade, but the industries that use steel and aluminum car manufacturers, washing machine builders, etc. have benefited because the prices of steel and aluminum have gone down. And that's another part of the equation. "There are many, many more U.S. workers that are employed in industries that use steel or use aluminum than there are in our aluminum- and steel-producing industries," Riley says. So these tariffs are benefitting one industry but hurting more. Advertisement Implementing Tariffs U.S. presidents normally can't impose tariffs without first going through the U.S. International Trade Commission. But President Trump is employing a rarely used provision in a trade act that allows him to lay down tariffs, unilaterally, in matters of "national security," despite a Department of Defense memo stating it has all "the steel or aluminum necessary to meet national defense requirements." Whatever the method used to slap on tariffs, Trump seems bent on doing it. Canada, a staunch ally, is the biggest exporter of steel to the United States. Tariffs, if they are enacted, will hit Canadians hard. And Trump has said no country will be exempt. "I don't think that we can feel confident that there were no politics entered into during the decision-making process," Hankla says. Still, this is not a popular proposition domestically, either, even among Trump's own party. "We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan," House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, said through a spokesperson on March 6. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina echoed similar sentiments the day before on CBS News' "Face the Nation." "You're punishing the American consumer and our allies. You're making a huge mistake here. Go after China, not the rest of the world," he said. Graham also said the new tariffs would actually be a win for China, not a punishment. China is the biggest source of global oversupply of steel and aluminum, but it exports very little of that to the U.S. because of already-imposed tariffs, including more than 160 antidumping duties. "The issue here is, President Trump has shown that maybe he's not so concerned about international trade law, or the international trading system, or the legitimacy of the WTO or any of that," Hankla says, "so this could actually lead to a trade war this time." Advertisement Countries Strike Back Many economists expect other countries will retaliate with tariffs on U.S. goods that are totally unrelated to steel or aluminum the "war" begins causing a downturn for American businesses who export their goods and services. The European Union, Canada and China have already threatened their own tariffs on purely American products like Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Levi's and bourbon. The Chinese many believe this whole exercise is a shot at the Chinese, who make up the bulk of America's trade deficit could also threaten tariffs on American imports like civilian aircraft (Boeing could suffer mightily), soybeans and semiconductors. That could cost more jobs. Maybe forgotten in all this mess is that tariffs already are a fact of international trading. The WTO provides a forum for virtually all countries (it has 164 members) to hammer out trade agreements. It started just after World War II with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and implements and monitors trade agreements, too all of which include what could be described as "tariffs" or "trade barriers" or "taxes," negotiated by all parties. Other agreements like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has the U.S., Canada and Mexico as members can be struck among nations, too. But, again, those are deals that have to be agreed upon by all parties. Advertisement Previous Trade Wars Trade wars have happened before, often with disastrous results. President Barack Obama laid a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires in 2009. The Chinese fired back and, according to some, it resulted in higher tire prices for Americans and a loss of some 3,000 American jobs. President George W. Bush imposed a 30 percent steel tariff in 2002, plus 15 percent tariffs on other products harming the industry. A 2003 study determined they cost 200,000 American jobs representing $4 billion in lost wages. Some point to even worse results. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which increased nearly 900 American tariffs was integral, some say, in triggering the Great Depression of 1929. The point is, even for someone who wrote (or at least served as the title character in) "Trump: The Art of the Deal," this tariff thing, if it's to happen, may not go as planned. And it could go much, much worse. Now That's Interesting Give Trump credit in that he's trying to fulfill campaign promises in lowering the trade deficit and bringing back manufacturing jobs. One problem: Many economists don't see the U.S. trade deficit which occurs when a country imports more than it exports as that big of a deal. Some consider it necessary to the strength of the global economy. And many experts point out that reviving manufacturing is a lost cause. Advancing technology is the biggest driver of deindustrialization, say most economists, not bad trade deals. President Uhuru Kenyatta has said Kenya is keen on enhancing its cooperation with Cuba especially in the provision of quality healthcare, one of the governments Big 4 Agenda. The Head of State welcomed the ongoing collaboration that has seen the two countries partner in health research and capacity building. Kenya and Cuba are implementing a medical exchange programme in which Cuban specialist doctors are serving in the country while Kenyan doctors are in Cuba advancing their medical training. The President spoke during a meeting with visiting Cubas Vice President of the Council of State and Ministers, Ines Maria Chapman, who paid him a courtesy call at State House, Nairobi. President Kenyatta said Kenya has a lot to learn from Cubas healthcare delivery model which has seen the Latin American country register a life expectancy of 79.5 years compared to Kenyas 67.5 years. The Cuban VP thanked President Kenyattas leadership for enhancing the historic bilateral ties between the two countries, saying the ongoing exchange of expertise in the health sector will go a long way in cementing relations between the two countries. Kenya and Cuba have also finalized negotiations on a Malaria Vector Control project to be implemented in malaria-prone areas in the country. The project, that will apply Cuban biological larvicides, is set to be launched later this month. President Kenyatta observed that the relationship between Kenya and Cuba was growing by the day with the two countries also enhancing their collaboration at the multilateral levels. Speaking after the meeting, Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Monica Juma said the two countries are working very well on the diplomatic front. The relationship between Kenya and Cuba is improving across the sectors. For instance, Cuba is playing a crucial role in helping Kenyans learn the Spanish language, the CS said. Health Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki added that Kenya has adopted part of the Cuban medical training curricula that is set to equip students in the Kenya Medical Training Colleges with more skills to address emerging health challenges. -By PSCU ARCHIVED - A fifth of all foreign visitors to Spain in February were from the UK British visitor numbers and their spending were higher than in February 2018 Last summer was a relatively disappointing one for the international tourism sector of the Spanish economy last year - the number of foreign visitors was lower than in 2017 in both July and August but the latest data released on Tuesday by the governments central statistics unit showed an increase on both visitor numbers and spending in February for the sixth month in a row. The total of 4.38 million visitors represents an increase of 3.8 per cent over the second month of 2018, and as is invariably the case the largest single source of these tourists was the UK, with 884,000 (2.3 per cent more than in February 2018). This equates to 20.2 per cent of the overall total, a full point higher than in January, when the figure reached its lowest in the last four and a half years. The next highest figures relate to visitors from France (562,000 following an 3.1 per cent increase) and Germany (549,000 after an increase of 2.4 per cent) and, while other noteworthy results include rises of over 20 per cent in the number of people arriving from the USA and the rest of Europe category and a fall of 6.4 per cent in the figures for visitors arriving in Spain from Scandinavia. The main features of the breakdown by regions is a rise of 17.9 per cent in the number of people visiting the Balearics from outside Spain in February (although in the winter the islands account for a relatively small share of the overall total) and another of 18.7 per cent in the other regions apart from the main tourist destinations of the Balearics, the Canaries, Catalunya, Madrid and the Comunidad Valenciana. Underlining the importance of the British market to the sector, the UK was once again the main source of visitors to Andalucia, the Canaries and the Comunidad Valenciana and the second most important market in the Balearics. At the same time, the amount spent by foreign visitors to Spain in February was only 2.9 per cent higher than in the second month of 2018 at 4,667 million euros, and in this respect those arriving from the UK increased their contribution to the Spanish economy by 3 per cent. Average daily spending by the British was 7.2 per cent higher than a year previously at 124 euros, but this was counteracted by a slightly shorter average length of stay (7.4 days) to reduce the overall rise. Follow Murcia Today on Facebook to keep up to date with all the latest news, events and information in the Region of Murcia and the rest of Spain: https://www.facebook.com/MurciaToday/. article_detail --> Betting companies in Kenya have until June 30 to prove that they are tax-compliant or risk having their operating licences revoked, Interior CS Fred Matiangi has declared. Speaking during a meeting at the Betting Control and Licensing Board offices in Nairobi on Monday, the tough-talking minister effectively suspended licenses for all the over 20 registered betting companies in the country from July 1. The CS said renewal of the licenses would be subject to proof of tax compliance. According to Matiangi, the betting industry in Kenya generated at least Sh.202 billion in revenue last year alone but only remitted Sh.4 billion in taxes. Matiangi also raised concerns over the number of Kenyan youths actively involved in gambling. He said 76 percent of Kenyans aged below 35 years are involved in one form of gambling or another, with 54 percent of those coming from the low-income earning bracket. Right now, we have about 500,000 of our young people who have been blacklisted by some of the lending agencies because they borrowed and cannot pay, Matiangi added. What are we raising our children to become? he posed. Are we telling them to just do nothing with their lives, go around betting and become millionaires? The CS has also directed the Betting Control and Licensing Board to submit a comprehensive status report on betting in the country within 30 days. I have instructed Immigration PS and Director General to be involved to ensure that anyone who is involved in this exercise, especially those who are not citizens of our country, are properly documented and they have the right papers to be in our country, stated the CS. Where they are not, the law should take its course immediately and we should call them to account. We cannot run a sector where we are supporting indirectly money laundering in some kind of disguised way where it looks like theyre doing the right thing. Matiangi further tasked the betting board and the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK) with reviewing advertisements of betting companies. He said media houses should also be held accountable for the gambling commercials they air. This comes as the government seeks to introduce radical regulatory changes within the gambling sector in a bill that only awaits stakeholders input before it is tabled in Parliament. MTN recently published its annual report for the year ended 31 December 2018, revealing that CEO Rob Shuter received a total remuneration package of R42.9 million. Shuter is not the only South African telecoms CEO who earns a high salary: Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub got paid R50 million while Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko received R26 million. When these reports hit the media it always sparks debates about executive salaries and inequality in society. While these CEO salaries may seem excessive when looking at the average salary in South Africa, it is not a constructive way to analyse compensation. A more relevant assessment of CEO compensation is done through benchmarking peer salaries of similar positions around the globe. This assessment shows that local telecoms CEO salaries are in most cases lower than their counterparts in other countries. Global market for high-level skills South Africa is home to two of the worlds largest mobile operators, Vodacom and MTN, and these two powerhouses produce some of the worlds best and most sought-after executives. Vodacom and MTNs executives can easily move to another country, which many of them have already done. In fact, before Shuter took the reins at MTN he was the CEO for Vodafones Europe Cluster. Joosub in turn was the CEO of Vodafone Spain before he returned to South Africa to run Vodacom. A person with the skillset to run a large telecommunications company is extremely hard to find especially when the company has operations across Africa. Unless South African telecoms companies pay their top executives well, they will not attract the top talent. Eskom and the SAA serve as a warning of the alternative. Telecoms CEOs Salaries across the globe A look at telecoms CEOs salaries across the globe reveals that local chief execs are at the lower end of the scale. Considering the challenges related to running a company with operations in multiple African countries, Shuter and Joosub are well worth the money they earn. Business organisation Sakeliga will launch legal action in a bid to stop state-owned enterprises including Eskom from implementing race-based qualification requirements for contractors and tenders. The organisation will request Eskom, the Minister of Finance, and the Minister of Public Enterprises to suspend race-based pre-qualification requirements at Eskom, pending the outcome of Sakeligas court case. Sakeligas decision to pursue the court case, challenging the legality of SOEs pre-emptive disqualification of contractors based on race, comes especially in light of the electricity crisis in South Africa, said Sakeliga. South Africa in trouble Sakeliga CEO Piet le Roux said Eskoms race-based disqualification of contractors is unreasonably limiting the pool from which it could draw expertise. This comes at a time when Eskom is in dire straits financially and has implemented extensive load-shedding this year due to its inability to meet electricity demands in South Africa. The lack of power capacity is said to be the result of poor maintenance at Eskoms power stations and their associated infrastructure along with the poor build quality of new power stations such as Kusile and Medupi. It has come to our attention that Eskom has increasingly been setting race-based pre-qualification criteria in its tender documents. Today, businesses who are not 51% black-owned are frequently pre-emptively disqualified from even being considered for award of a tender, said le Roux. By disqualifying contractors based on race, Eskom now precludes electricity consumers in South Africa from the full range of cost-effective expertise available on the market. Court action Le Roux stated that the qualification criteria used by SOEs are based on the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act. The regulations were promulgated in 2017 by then Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan. We objected to these regulations at the time, said Le Roux. The Gauteng High Court dismissed this application in November 2018, but Sakeliga will now appeal the case. It added that the regulations are ultra vires and unconstitutional as they allow SOEs to set pre-qualification criteria beyond the criteria for tender validity. Le Roux said Eskom is not the only SOE in crisis and its court case will attempt to allow all players at the table, instead of having some precluded from contributing because of their race. Power problems The court action follows Eskoms downward spiral in recent years, which has left it with a debt burden of over R400 billion. It also implemented extensive load-shedding in South Africa in March, leaving many homes and businesses without power for several hours each day. Despite this, Eskom has continued to raise electricity prices. From 2007 to 2017, electricity tariffs increased by 333% and this percentage is expected to rise to 490% by 2021. Compounding matters is that Eskom is being run by a bunch of amateurs, according to experts. Energy expert Ted Blom said the current Eskom board has been in place for over a year, but the situation at the power utility is now worse than under the previous corrupt board. This board is ineffective, they do not have the necessary experience and the chairman is conflicted, said Blom. We are ready for December, everything ... From watching for restocks to waiting until the very last minute, heres what to do if you have gifts left to purchase this month. Officers in Muranga on Monday arrested a member of the Muranga County Assembly for defrauding a woman Sh.3 million. Peter Mburu Muthoni, the MCA for Kagunduini Ward, is also facing charges of making a document without authority. Mr Mburu reportedly pretended that he could offer the woman a tender to supply ballast to a Chinese company. Together with others he had introduced as an Engineer and a senior staff at the Chinese company, the MCA forged an agreement for the supply of ballast and in the process, they defrauded the victim the said amount. Mburu is set to be arraigned in court today, Tuesday 2, February 2019. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations stated that detectives are in pursuit of the other two suspects. Kagunduini Ward MCA Peter Mburu Muthoni was arrested today by officers in Muranga for among other things-making a document without authority. The MCA defrauded his victim almost Ksh.3M with the false pretence that he could offer her a tender to supply ballast to a Chinese company pic.twitter.com/HnroZcrH1T DCI KENYA (@DCI_Kenya) April 1, 2019 In one swoop, a mid-sized Larkspur wine company is carving out a sizeable corner of Napa wine, acquiring a pair of weighty wineries and a swath of vineyards. Distinguished Vineyards & Wine Partners announced on March 27 its purchase of Markham Vineyards and TEXTBOOK, adding the two Napa names to a portfolio of Sonoma, Oregon and New Zealand wines in separate purchases. Neither winerys sale price was disclosed. The purchases included an internal acquisition from Distinguished Vineyards parent company, Kirin Brewery Company of Japan, for the brick-and-mortar winery and vineyards of Markham, and the purchase of the TEXTBOOK brand from Scenic Root Winegrowers, the company of TEXTBOOK founders Jonathan and Susan Pey. Formed in 2008 and based in Marin County, Distinguished Vineyards & Wine Partners is the U.S. arm of Australia beverage company Lion, another subsidiary of Kirin. Known for its pioneering of high-end Merlot since 1980, Markham Vineyards Napa roots trace to more than a century earlier when Bordeaux immigrant Jean Laurent built the original winery building, which was included in the sale to Distinguished Vineyards. Operating as Markham Vineyards since 1978, the winery sold to Kirin subsidiary the Mercian Corporation in 1988. Though trading hands between subsidiaries, the transaction was structured as an acquisition, said Steve Myers, managing director of Distinguished Vineyards. Myers said Wednesday that the purchase was an opportunity for us to better collaborate with our two North American wine businesses. The sale also includes Markhams 350 acres of vineyards across the Oak Knoll, Yountville and Calistoga sub-appellations, and the winerys inventory. David Flanary and Kimberlee Nicholls will stay on as Markhams president and winemaker, respectively. Senior adviser and former president Bryan Del Bondio will also continue at Markham, carrying on a 41-year career that began as the winerys first employee. The purchase not only adds the pair of sound Napa assets to the companys portfolio, but also rounds out its mix of sparkling wines, Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays with Markhams Merlot and the acclaimed Cabernet Sauvignon from TEXTBOOK. Founded in 2004, Jonathan and Susan Peys TEXTBOOK brand has caught the eyes of critics and consumers alike, evinced by a 40 percent jump in sales last year and distribution among 46 states and six countries, records show. Under Distinguished Vineyards, and by extension the distribution network of Kirin, TEXTBOOK can now make its way to all 50 states, all provinces in Canada and eight countries, Myers said. Jonathan Pey will continue making TEXTBOOKs wines post-acquisition, alongside consulting winemaker Scott Peterson. In a press release Wednesday, Pey said, I am very excited to partner with the Distinguished Vineyards team, many of whom Ive worked with before TEXTBOOK has found a great home with Distinguished Vineyards. Pop the cork on Napa Valley wine! Discover the hidden stories of Napa Valley wine and the people behind it -- plus expert analysis from our columnists and more with our weekly email newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Wednesday, March 27 0551 Report of a tree down across Conn Valley Road. 1829 A caller asked about cones that had been placed on Hunt Avenue. 1907 Report of a possible drunk driver on southbound Highway 29 at Zinfandel Lane. Thursday, March 28 0947 Police arrested a 56-year-old St. Helena man on suspicion of domestic violence. 2258 Report of a possible drunk driver on Spring Street. Friday, March 29 1015 Police provided traffic enforcement during Run Big St. Helena. 1114 Report of a car parked on the wrong side of the street facing the wrong direction on Tainter Street. 1205 A car with a cracked windshield had been parked near Main/Fulton for two months. Police marked it to be towed in 72 hours. 1821 Police picked up a big black dog that had been wandering near Pope Street. 1852 Report of a reckless driver near Highway 29/Deer Park Road. 1938 Police picked up a small black dog from Kearney/Spring. 2101 Medical aid for an unconscious man at a Hunt Avenue store. Saturday, March 30 1319 A car was blocking a driveway on Voorhees Circle. 1612 Report of a large pothole on the Pope Street bridge. 1709 Medical aid for someone with a cut finger on Hunt Avenue. Sunday, March 31 0852 Report of a possible structure fire on Hudson Avenue. 0920 Report of a black dog running down Main Street near Sulphur Springs Avenue. 0943 Report of 12 or so Mustangs speeding down Spring Mountain Road. 1053 Report of a possible problem with a water tank on Spring Mountain Road. 1220 The letters of a marquee sign on Hillview Place were changed to say something inappropriate. Police took a report. Monday, April 1 0630 A person fell and needed help getting up on Pope Street. 1133 A dog had been barking for hours on Stockton Street. 2028 The manager of a Main Street property asked for extra patrol due to a group of kids whove been hanging out on the property. In a ruling that may open up police misconduct records statewide, a state appeals court has rejected an effort by the Walnut Creek Police Officers Association to keep records created before 2019 sealed from public view. The ruling by the 1st District Court of Appeal states that the argument being presented by the officers union is without merit and that records created before Senate Bill 1421 took effect this year are subject to disclosure. Police unions and some law enforcement departments in California have refused to release records covered under the law, arguing there is no provision that makes the statute retroactive. The court disagreed, finding that a request for records made since the law took effect requires agencies to turn over records generated in the past that they possess. The ruling has a direct effect on a lawsuit The Sacramento Bee filed against Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones in January with the Los Angeles Times seeking records dating back to 2014. The suit follows a request from both news organizations for records of deputies involved in shootings or accused of misconduct in the past five years. Jones department rejected the requests, saying it had such records but would not release them until it had clear legal authority to release such records. Karl Olson, a San Francisco attorney representing The Bee, said Monday that the ruling requires the department to hand over such records. The law is very clear that when theres a court of appeal decision every trial court in the state of California has to follow it, Olson said. And so there is a published Court of Appeal decision that is directly on point and it would be binding on any trial court, including the one in Sacramento. Ive already informed the Sacramento County counsels office, which is representing the sheriff. Ive informed them of the publication of this case and asked them to do the right thing, to avoid the need for further expenditure of taxpayer dollars to fight the publics right to know and to keep the public in the dark about serious incidents involving law enforcement officers. The county counsels office was closed Monday for the Cesar Chavez holiday and no one responded to a request for comment. The sheriffs department had no immediate comment. Since the law took effect Jan. 1, news organizations and others have filed public records act requests seeking access to such records, and Olson said he believed there may be as many as 20 lawsuits statewide involving such efforts. The Bees lawsuit is pending, with the first hearing in that case scheduled for June 7. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Two federal agencies are investigating a Monday morning incident in which a Napa Valley hot-air balloon clipped power lines, leaving three passengers hospitalized with electrical burns. The hot-air balloon was carrying 19 passengers and the pilot when it hit power lines, then landed south of Yountville shortly after 8 a.m., according to Cal Fire-Napa County Fire. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident, according to a statement issued Monday by the FAA. The agency wrote in its statement that its unknown why the balloon struck power lines, but it declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation. The FAA identified the balloon as one registered to Napa-based Balloons Above the Valley, according to the agencys online database. A Balloons Above the Valley representative could not be reached for a comment. One passenger involved in Mondays incident was flown by air ambulance to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento with moderate to major injuries, while two were taken by ground ambulance to Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa with minor injuries, Battalion Chief Jason Martin said. Updates on their condition were not available on Tuesday. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said a crew was dispatched to repair a broken pole, downed power lines and other broken equipment. The incident knocked out power to 13 agricultural pumps, said company spokesperson Deanna Contreras. 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. Napa County is contesting a recent Napa County Superior Court ruling that could force the Board of Supervisors to reconsider its controversial 2017 Mountain Peak winery approval in light of the subsequent Atlas fire. The court says the Atlas fire offers new evidence about wildfire evacuations in the Soda Canyon area that the Board of Supervisors didnt have when it approved the yet-to-be-built winery. The county has turned to the state First District Court of Appeal to avoid a Mountain Peak repeat. An agency doesnt have to revisit approvals made under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) if new information arises, the countys March 28 appeal said. Otherwise, approvals could keep being reopened every time opponents find what they claim is new environmental information. All of this means that the Mountain Peak winery debate will continue, though whether exclusively in the courtroom or also back before the county Board of Supervisors remains to be seen. The Board of Supervisors approved Mountain Peak winery along Soda Canyon Road in August 2017. Opponents calling themselves the Soda Canyon Group sued in September 2017 to try to overturn the decision. Then the October 2017 Atlas fire burned Soda Canyon. Opponents in court filings described an apocalyptic post-fire scene with burned houses, burned cars and burned animals along the road. They said the fire raises new questions about allowing a new winery with up to 14,500 visitors annually to be constructed in the mountains a few miles northeast of the city of Napa. The absolute last thing emergency responders want or need when disaster strikes, particularly a fast-moving wildfire, is more people to deal with who are potentially inebriated and wholly unfamiliar with a treacherous area with poor ingress/egress, the filings said. Superior Court Judge Cynthia Smith in a Feb. 21 order granted the Soda Canyon Groups request to add Atlas fire evidence to the countys administrative record on Mountain Peak winery. She wrote that she will be remanding the matter to the Board of Supervisors for reconsideration. Smith wrote that the catastrophic nature of the Atlas fire, and in particular the mass evacuations, many by helicopter, that resulted from the fire constitute truly new evidence of emergent facts that were not presented to the Board. Napa County refuted the need for Board of Supervisors reconsideration of Mountain Peak in various filings with the First District Court of Appeal and Napa County Superior Court. Supervisors in spring and summer of 2017, while they couldnt consider the yet-to-occur Atlas fire, looked at wildfire history and risk in Soda Canyon. The Superior Courts ruling contravenes the well-established policy of the finality of agency decisions, various county filings said. Courts dont micromanage agency approvals in lawsuits involving CEQA, one county filing said. They simply decide whether the agency considered applicable policies, considered whether the proposed project conforms to those policies and made appropriate findings supported by substantial evidence. The inclusion of the post-fire Atlas fire evidence clearly indicates the court is second-guessing the countys decision, especially after acknowledging that the administrative record is replete with evidence regarding the history of fires and risk of future fires, a filing said. Mountain Peak winery is to be located at 3265 Soda Canyon Road, about six miles from Silverado Trail. The county Planning Commission approved the winery on Jan. 4, 2017, and opponents many of them Soda Canyon Road residents appealed the case to the Board of Supervisors. Opponents made the condition of Soda Canyon Road a major issue. They said a road with blind turns, a one-lane bridge, deteriorating asphalt, a hairpin turn, a steep grade and areas that flood couldnt adequately serve winery visitors. Supervisors had concerns about adding traffic to Soda Canyon Road. But they liked the applicants on-the-spot pledge to make 75 percent of the wine from grapes grown on the 41-acre winery property and a nearby 180-acre vineyard. Without a winery, those grapes would be hauled elsewhere, the applicant said. The Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to deny the appeal and approve Mountain Peak winery, with Supervisor Diane Dillon absent at the initial May 23, 2017 hearing and not taking part in the subsequent, final Aug. 22, 2017 vote. In September 2018, Supervisors held a discussion on how to deal with new wineries coming to remote parts of the county and addressed wildfire dangers. Dillon said that perhaps wineries in certain areas should be required to cancel events during red-flag fire conditions. The Soda Canyon Group in its lawsuit said the county under CEQA should have required in environmental impact report for Mountain Peak winery. The county instead relied on a less-detailed negative declaration study that found the project would have less-than-significant impacts or no impacts in areas ranging from transportation to water quality. Pop the cork on Napa Valley wine! Discover the hidden stories of Napa Valley wine and the people behind it -- plus expert analysis from our columnists and more with our weekly email newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SANTA ROSA The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors is considering approving an urgency ordinance banning the cultivation of industrial hemp in the unincorporated areas of the county. The cultivation of industrial hemp poses a risk to the current legal cannabis in the county, according to a report by the countys Department of Agriculture, Weights & Measures. The unregulated cultivation of industrial hemp presents a potential for unintended pollination of cannabis plants if the hemp is being grown for seed, the county department said. Some farmers in the county are interested in growing industrial hemp and cannabis farmers are concerned about its impact on their crop. The urgency ordinance would prohibit industrial hemp cultivation until local controls are in place to ensure the hemp cultivation is compatible in the county. The proposed ordinance would pass if approved by a four-fifths vote of the board on first reading. Recent changes in federal and state laws will soon allow growing of industrial hemp in California, officials with the Department of Agriculture, Weights and Measures said. Industrial hemp is no longer considered a controlled substance. For decades, it was been one of the biggest nightmares of the California Republican Party: What happens when the sleeping giant of California politics finally wakes up? That feared sleeping giant was the great mass of legal Latino residents in the state, who didnt bother to vote in telling numbers through most of the years it was growing into the largest ethnic group in this state. The latest numbers show the sleeping giant did waken in a big way last fall, one of the main reasons why Democrats took over seven seats in Congress that had long been held by Republicans. Yes, Latinos voted Democratic in only slightly higher proportions than they usually have. But the raw numbers told a different story. The awakening was actually a gradual thing and it is far from complete. While Latinos surpassed whites five years ago as the states largest population bloc by a margin of 39 percent to 38.8 percent, even now, they account for less than 24 percent of all California voters. That means Hispanics can wield even more political clout than they have over the last few years, when they at times simultaneously held both the Assembly speakers chair and the presidency of the state Senate. What they did last year was already enough to shake things up considerably here and in Washington, D.C. Without its new California members, Congress would look quite different today. Heres what actually happened: Where just 16 percent of the total votes in the seven districts that switched parties last year were cast by Latinos in 2014, the last previous non-presidential general election year, in 2018 Latinos accounted for 22 percent. This was the single biggest reason why turnout in the districts targeted by Democrats equaled what is usually seen only in presidential elections. That flipped those seats. The best example may have been the 21st District south of Fresno where current Democratic Rep. T.J. Cox ousted longtime Republican Rep. David Valadao by a slim margin of 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent. In 2014, when Valadao won the district handily, Latinos accounted for 44 percent of votes there. Last year, that number was up to 52 percent. This amounted to an increase of almost 8,000 Hispanic votes in a district Cox carried by only about 1,000 votes. Increased Latino turnout plainly did Valadao in. Another way to see it was that President Trumps regular insults of Latinos and other ethnics aroused them sufficiently to cost his party that seat. At the same time, turnout was 58 percent among eligible Latino voters in the Modesto-centered 10th District, compared with just 29 percent during the last previous non-presidential year. Latinos in that district, long represented by Republican Jeff Denham, produced 26 percent of the 221,000 votes cast, up from 18 percent four years earlier. The increase did Denham in. In other districts, the Latino difference was also pronounced: The Orange County district that went to Democrat Gilbert Cisneros by a slim 51.6 percent to 48.4 percent margin over Republican Young Kim saw a 7 percent increase in Latino votes over 2014. Differences werent quite so great in other districts the Democrats flipped, but each of them saw increases of 3 percent to 4 percent in the Latino share of the vote. Theres a lesson here for every politician in California and nationally: When the interests of a large demographic group are denigrated by the leading figure of a major political party, consequences will follow. The backlash Trump created this time proved theres a major price to pay for insulting behavior and rhetoric. Some Latinos thought their groups turnout should have been even larger. Youre definitely going to see higher numbers in 2020, Virginia Maduena, a former mayor of the small city of Riverbank in Stanislaus County, within the 10th district, told a reporter. As long as Republicans continue to support Trumps rhetoric, I just dont see how a Republican can succeed here. Shes convinced the once-slumbering giant will stay awake and perhaps become even more alert and influential. If shes right, Democrats stand a good chance of hanging onto many of the seats they took from the GOP last year. Thomas D. Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column. He is author of the book, The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Governments Campaign to Squelch It. Though Steve Bannon left his White House post as President Donald Trump's chief strategist more than a year and a half ago, the shadow he casts over Western politics has hardly faded. The former investment banker and executive chairman of far-right Breitbart News became one of the leading ideologues of Trumpism - building a creed that allied American nativism with the language of European far-right nationalism - and helped push Trump toward his improbable electoral victory in 2016. In the months after palace intrigues forced him out of the West Wing, Bannon remained close to figures within the administration and even closer to the world of journalists who report on it. Bannon extended his brand as both populist soothsayer and rabble-rouser across the Atlantic, offering support to a constellation of far-right, ultranationalist and anti-immigrant parties across Europe. His listening tours and speeches last year in Britain, France, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere attracted large numbers of mainstream journalists, whose stories placed Bannon at the heart of a far-right insurgency that seeks to blow up the status quo in European parliamentary elections this May. "This populist-nationalist revolt is a worldwide phenomenon,'' Bannon told Bloomberg News last December, adding that the upcoming elections were a "historic moment." Bannon, indeed, seems to be in a constant search for "historic" dramas, and ways to locate himself within them. Enter "The Brink," a new and already critically acclaimed documentary in theaters across the United States that tracks his activities in the year after his exit from the White House. In it, we hear Bannon grandiosely quote Abraham Lincoln as his enemies loomed around him. We watch him scribble in the margins of a newspaper column a crude diagram charting the "triple threat" posed - for reasons only Bannon can divine - by an axis of China, Turkey and Iran. And we listen to him rage against the West's liberals, who he declares are content "to manage the decline" of their civilization. We also see Bannon guzzle copious amounts of energy drinks, snarl at complacent assistants, and, on numerous occasions, exhibit an almost disarmingly charming penchant for self-deprecation. The fly-on-the-wall approach of Alison Klayman, the film's director, offers a rarely seen portrait of the man once dubbed by Time magazine as the "great manipulator" - and one that happens to rather adroitly dispel the myth of his political genius. "I think the image that emerges of him is a much more human one, but certainly not soft and cuddly," Klayman told this column. She said her efforts to go "behind the curtain" show how Bannon's agenda is "in some ways more convoluted" than it is sometimes framed in the mainstream media, spurred both by his personal desire for attention and the imperatives of his wealthy backers. It's why, Klayman added, "I think some people see him as an opportunist." Take, for example, Bannon's insistence that his politics center on "economic nationalism" - a populist message about protecting the working class and curbing the excesses of globalization. In a stump speech before Republican donors, Bannon uses this line to dismiss the accusations of racism and bigotry often leveled against him, Trump and the right-wing nationalist base whose support they need. But, after months of following Bannon on trips in private jets and private fundraising sessions with billionaires, Klayman concluded that Bannon's economic populism "is a little bit of a branding exercise." In his meetings with patrons and far-right politicians, Klayman said, Bannon "is not talking about how we make policies that bring back manufacturing jobs. But he is talking about birthrates and how to win elections by talking about religion." In a drive through London, we see him roll his eyes in despair when informed that a particular street has "flipped" to mostly Arab businesses. He notes with glee that left-wing populists such as Britain's Jeremy Corbyn or Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the United States don't grandstand about immigration - a refusal he believes will limit their appeal among working-class voters. In lavish hotel dining rooms, Bannon and a motley crew of European far-right politicians grouse over the alien menace of Islam and growing Muslim populations in their countries. It's difficult to ignore the more disturbing echoes of Bannon's ideology in the aftermath of the slaughter carried out by a white supremacist, animated by similar concerns, in Christchurch, New Zealand, last month. "These aren't siloed biases," said Klayman, referring to the hatred felt by the Christchurch shooter. "There's a worldview that makes it all fit together." Klayman's first major entry into the world of documentary cinema was "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," a 2012 feature film on the Chinese dissident artist, who has since been forced to flee his native country. In subsequent work, he has sought to draw attention to the plight of refugees and migrants around the world. While Ai is intent on "honoring human dignity," Klayman said, Bannon "is very expressly not concerned with that." "He goes around and talks about making people's lives better, but you know it's only about certain people's lives, while he ignores the suffering of others," she said. The film also shows the limits of Bannon's powers. We watch him endure three demoralizing setbacks: The failed Senate campaign of controversial Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama; the landslide defeats that hit the Republican Party in the House in midterms last year; and the ultimate sputtering of his attempt to lead a continental far-right coalition in Europe. Still, Bannon is hardly one to give up, and journalists continue to chase after him on both sides of the Atlantic. Last week, CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed him for the majority of his one-hour prime-time show. In Rome, Bannon admitted at an event that Europe's nationalists "don't need me," but still prophesied their victory and emphasized his commitment to their struggle. In one pivotal scene in "The Brink," Bannon lectures Klayman on how the Democrats' insistence on "identity politics" will give the Republicans victory. But when challenged by Klayman, who argues that his messaging centers wholly on "identity" politics and tribal outrage, he smirks, and quips that such bad faith would make his work - in this instance, a pro-Trump film he was previewing to journalists - just "propaganda." "What would Leni Riefenstahl do?" he then asks Klayman, referring to the chief filmmaking propagandist of the Nazi era. "How would Leni cut that scene?" It's a chilling moment, not least because it's not totally clear that he's joking. Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York. Are you on birth control and looking for natural ways to support your fertility health? There are times where women we work with choose to use birth control. Some specifically want to prevent pregnancy. In other cases, their medical doctors recommend birth control to address an extremely heavy or irregular cycle, etc. Birth control is also widely used to control the cycle before IVF treatment. While its important to remember that a cycle on birth control is not the same as a natural cycle (See: How A Menstrual Period on Birth Control Differs From a Natural Period), there may be times when hormonal birth control is the right option for your situation. Were here to support you wherever you are on your journey. In addition, there are great ways to support your fertility health while taking hormonal birth control or while waiting for its effects to wear off. How To Support Your Body While on Birth Control Important: Always talk to your doctor about the herbs and supplements youre taking when using prescription medications. If youre using the Pill or if waiting for hormonal birth control to wear off, consider the following: Support gut health Hormonal birth control is known to disrupt our normal gut microbiome, which could lead to digestive symptoms, problems with nutrient absorption or increased yeast or bacterial infections. A 2013 study published in the journal Gut found taking birth control triples the risk of Crohns disease in women who have a family history of it. I recommend reviewing this Fertility Health Tip: Prebiotics and Probiotics. If you have gut lining concerns, the amino acid L-glutamine is an option to explore as well. Boost your B vitamins 2013 research published in Nutrients shows women who use hormonal birth control have lower levels of B-complex, including B12, B6 and folate. B vitamins are critical for the metabolism of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. For women wanting to conceive down the road, a lack of folate can increase the risk of neural tube defects. For general health and future fertility, many health practitioners suggest supplementing with a B complex 100mg as soon as the effects of birth control wear off, although it can be started as soon as the Pill is stopped. Consume estrogen balancing foods Eating foods high in fiber relieves body congestion and helps eliminate excess estrogen related to hormonal birth control. Enjoy organic apples and pears (skins too!), whole grains, along with beans and legumes regularly. Most women feel much better by making this one change alone! Employ gentle therapies to enhance mood Natural therapies that can be considered while on birth control are: flower essences, diluted essential oils, mild teas and homeopathic remedies. These can be good choices to ease stress and improve your mood. A few options: Star of Bethlehem flower essence for grief or loss, Chamomile tea (Matricaria recutita) for PMS or stress, or Frankincense essential oil (just a few drops added to a diffuser) for mild depression or anxiety. Tip: If your birth control uses placebo pills (ask your doctor if youre unsure), you can consider a liver support tea like Dandelion root (Taraxacum officinale) or Liver Cleanse tea the week youre not on hormones. This gives the body a gentle cleansing boost before you return to the hormonal Pills. Finding Balance While on the Pill Finding balance while youre on the Pill or other hormonal contraceptives can be challenging, but there are safe choices you can explore. You can always use food to nourish, heal and balance your body. Further, specific supplements like a B complex, prebiotics and probiotics are especially beneficial for women taking hormonal birth control. Taking birth control for any purpose is highly personal, but its clear its a choice many women pursue. I feel its important to keep your options open when dealing with any reproductive health concerns. Do your homework, learn as much as you can, and create a plan that will work best for you and your long-term fertility health needs. Products mentioned in this post: Star of Bethlehem Flower Essence Liver Cleanse Tea Resources To Learn More: How To Balance Your Hormones After Birth Control Fertility Tip: How To Enhance Fertility After IUD Removal Gut Health & the Microbiome Connection to Optimal Fertility References MATAGHIS. Only traces of shells are reminding of the April aggression of 2016 in the village of Mataghis, Martakert region of Karabakh. The damage caused by the aggression has been almost restored. In an interview with the correspondent Armenian News-NEWS.am, the head of village administration Zaven Avanesyan said that the roofs and windows of the houses were mostly damaged. Everything was restored. The school was damaged, it is fully restored now, the consequences are not visible at all. In addition, electric street lighting was provided. Houses of ten families were restored as well, he said. Zaven Avanesyan was the first and only wounded in the village as a result of aggression. About 3 o'clock in the morning, when the first shell fell on the village, Avanesyan was evacuating the villagers. The second shell hit his car. We were told to be ready for evacuation at any time. I decided to start evacuation after the first shell. I got into the car, the second shell hit it. I was taken to the hospital, but I remained on the phone, notifying the residents about the need to leave the village, he said. The opponent shelled the village trying to target hydroelectric power station which was located nearby. The village old-timed, grandfather Dariel is resolute: No one will leave the village. This is our land. Do we have to leave to make them happy? No way, this will never happen! Two ships from Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2) arrived in Odesa, Ukraine, on 1st April. Canadian frigate HMCS Toronto and Spanish frigate ESPS Santa Maria arrived in Odesa after patrolling in the Black Sea with fellow SNMG2 ships for the last several days. While in Odesa, the ship captains will meet with local military and elected officials, work with Ukrainian Navy personnel and welcome local Ukrainian civilians aboard during scheduled open ship periods. Two ships from Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2) arrived in Odesa, Ukraine, on 1st April. Canadian frigate HMCS Toronto and Spanish frigate ESPS Santa Maria arrived in Odesa after patrolling in the Black Sea with fellow SNMG2 ships for the last several days. While in Odesa, the ship captains will meet with local military and elected officials, work with Ukrainian Navy personnel and welcome local Ukrainian civilians aboard during scheduled open ship periods. NATO ship HMCS Toronto arriving in Odesa for a routine port visit while SNMG2 is in patrol in the Black Sea (Picture source: NATO) Following the visit to Odesa, HMCS Toronto plans to conduct a Passing Exercise with Ukrainian Navy ships in the Black Sea to enhance interoperability among Allied and Partner nation ships. Three Allied nations border the Black Sea, and NATO regularly conducts exercises and operations in the Black Sea in order to maintain a credible and capable defensive readiness. This is the second patrol of a Standing NATO Group in the Black Sea in 2019, Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group Two (SNMCMG2) spent approximately 20 days patrolling in the Black Sea in February visiting Varna, Bulgaria and participating in mine hunting exercise Poseidon. Since Russia's illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea in 2014, NATO has increased its presence in the Black Sea. Patrols by NATO Maritime Groups increased in 2018 to three patrols for each group for a total of 120 days of NATO Group presence over the year, compared to two patrols for each group and a total of 80 days in 2017. Concurrent with the port visit to Odesa, Royal Netherlands Navy frigate HNLMS Evertsen along with group members Bulgarian frigate BGS Drazki, Romanian frigate ROS Regele Ferdinand and Turkish frigate TCG Yildirim are conducting a port visit to Poti, Georgia. Georgia is another NATO Partner on the Black Sea. SNMG2 is one of four standing NATO groups which are multinational, integrated maritime forces made up of vessels from allied countries. These vessels are under continuous NATO command to perform a wide range of tasks ranging from the deterrent presence and situational awareness to exercises and the conduct of operational missions. They demonstrate Alliance resolve and foster solidarity, as well as enhance the Alliances relations with Partner nations through visits and exchanges. Australia and South Korea sign $680,000,000-dollar defense deal US, North Korea, South Korea and China agree to end Korean War Turkish FM: Armenia and Turkey will designate special envoys to discuss normalization of relations Why did the police summon Armenia ex-MP Ruben Hakobyan? Yerevan Municipality spokesperson: Director of city's bus operating company resigns Lukashenko thanks Erdogan for Turkey's principled stance on Belarus Russian and Iranian FMs discuss JCPOA situation NATO Secretary General to meet with Aliyev Turkish man arrested for throwing Erdogan's portrait on the ground Tractor that remained in Karabakh's Amaras after Azerbaijani shootings removed through Russian mediation Georgia MFA is discontent with showing of Georgian national flag at '3+3' regional format meeting in Moscow Armenia PM's Chief of Staff, France Ambassador discuss strengthening of trade-economic relations Iran, Turkmenistan stress measures to strengthen transit ties Iran's and Saudi Arabia's representatives hold security meeting in Amman NEWS.am daily digest: 13.12.21 Armenia Constitutional Court president receives France Ambassador 55-year-old Yerevan pedestrian run over by 21-year-old with moped, hospitalized Armenia education, science, culture and sport minister has new deputy Armenia Prosecutor General attending Conference of States Parties to UN Convention against Corruption Armenia President receives head of Higher Presidential Committee of Churches Affairs in Palestine Joining up for Green Future: British Embassy and HSBC Bank Armenia promoting sustainability in Armenia (PHOTOS) Armenia ruling force MP: Opposition demand for parliament speakers resignation is attempt to collect dividends Armenian Zartonk political party issues statement on apprehension of 3 members Dollar falls after long rise in Armenia Charles Michel to hold trilateral meeting with Armenia and Azerbaijan Presidents in Brussels on Dec. 14 Opposition 'Armenia' faction MP: Armenian parliamentary speaker elections were unlawful Tovmasyan Foundation: Christmas fair is held Ruling party MP: Armenian POWs' issue is an exclusively speculative one for opposition 'Armenia' Faction Armenia Armavir Province deputy governor sacked Armenia Parliament Speaker receives German MFA official Matthias Luttenberg Armenia representative at ECHR considers International Court of Justice decision on December 7 a victory Armenia Supreme Judicial Council examining issue of subjecting Yerevan judge to disciplinary liability Ambassador to Armenia on Russia peacekeepers indefinite presence in Artsakh: Life will show 'With Honor' Faction MP: We will definitely vote in favor of draft for Armenia Parliament Speaker's resignation Armenia ex-police chief Vladimir Gasparyan's health condition is stable Armenia PM attends reopening of high school in Vagharshapat Armenia representative at ECHR: Work on captives return from Azerbaijan continues Armenia opposition MP: It is necessary to urgently solve issue of opening of aid station in Shurnukh Opposition 'Armenia' Faction MP: Parliamentary speaker is making statements that pose danger to foreign policy Russia envoy to Armenia: 3+3 format should have positive impact on relations between regional countries Armenia ambassador presents her letter of credence to Cuba President Armenia parliament opposition plans to nominate candidate for new speaker of legislature Biden announces natural disaster in Kentucky Armenia President, France ambassador discuss agenda of bilateral relations Russia diplomat: Armenia is one of important countries in New Generation program Armenia official, France envoy outline priority domains of economic cooperation between 2 countries in 2022 Iran puts 20 US citizens on sanctions list for human rights violations Armenia PM visiting Etchmiadzin, police carrying out intensified service Yerevan holding New Generation 2021 forum 66 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Russia military doctors provide medical assistance to Karabakh remote village residents World gold prices rising moderately International Studies expert: Armenia authorities refuse any anti-Turkish process Yerevan public transport bus drivers staging protest World oil prices going up One of 4 injured dies in Yerevan road accident New Shepard rocket makes suborbital flight with tourists Researchers determine how Covid pandemic will develop in case of Omicron variant Iran ready to exchange electricity with neighboring countries Armenia takes part in tank exercises in southern Russia Azerbaijani FM says the only way to avoid tensions is to start the process of demarcation Peskov says US aggressive rhetoric does not contribute to detente in relations Russia US tornado leaves 79 people killed 133 new cases of coronavirus confirmed in Armenia ICRC representatives visit Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan 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 Three years ago this day, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military offensive across line of contact with Nagorno Karabakh (PHOTOS). The leadership of the country visited on Tuesday the Erablur military pantheon. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, speaker Ararat Mirzoyan, members of the government laid flowers to the graves of the heroes and the monument to the founder of the Armenian army Vazgen Sargsyan. As reported earlier, on the night of April 2, 2016, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale aggression against the Republic of Artsakh. The Armed Forces of Azerbaijan used virtually all types of weapons. During April 2-5, there were fights along the entire line of contact with the heaviest clashes in the south (Hadrut) and the northeast (Martakert). On the morning of April 2, the Armenian side reported the destruction of the Azerbaijani combat helicopter in the northern direction and the human losses in adversary units. In was announced that the enemy's armored vehicles had been destroyed. On the same day, an official source in Artsakh reported the death of 12-year-old Vaghinak Grigoryan as a result of the shelling of the school. Two more children were hospitalized. Around noon, the Armenian defense ministry reported the destruction of the Azerbaijani sabotage group by Artsakh Armed Forces. At around 6 am on April 3, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces launched an artillery bombardment and advancement of armored vehicles on the south. At the same time, fighting continued in the direction of Martakert. On the same day, the Defense Ministry of Artsakh announced that the territories occupied on the eve by the Azerbaijani side in the direction of Talysh village were returned under the control of the NKR Armed Forces. In the south, two tanks and one infantry fighting vehicle were destroyed. On the night of April 4, the Azerbaijani side, continued shelling with mortars and artillery along the entire line of contact, and the peaceful settlements were targeted. At 7 a.m. the southern and north-eastern directions of the line of contact were subjected to intensive bombardment. The Azerbaijani Armed Forces used heavy equipment and combat drones. An Azerbaijani drone attacked a bus, killing five people. On the night of April 5, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces used the Smerch rocket launcher in the south. Truce was established at noon April 5, the hostilities were stopped. Despite the truce, soldier of the Artsakh Army Armen Gasparyan was killed on April 6 in a shelling from the Azerbaijani side, while on the night of April 7, the Azerbaijani army made an a infiltration attempt towards the village of Talysh, however, retreated after losing one soldier. The sides exchanged bodies in accordance with the agreements on April 10. The Armenian side was handed over 18 bodies. According to the final data, 110 Armenian soldiers and volunteers were killed and 121 were injured. As to the losses of the Azerbaijani side, the Azerbaijani defense ministry carefully conceals the data, and reported only the death of 31 people. However, according to an independent source of Meydan TV, there are at least 93 deaths. The analytical center OSTKRAFT reported the classified data of the Azerbaijani army indicating that 800 people were killed Azerbaijan lost 24 tanks, 4 infantry fighting vehicles, two helicopters, one Grad multiple rocket launcher, 14 unmanned aerial vehicles, dozens of cars. As a result of the unleashed aggression, Azerbaijan seized about 500 hectares of non-strategic territories, paying for it with the hundreds of lives of their own soldiers. YEREVAN. The April 2 is somehow a day symbolizing the union of Armenian nation and readiness to confront all the challenges, Deputy Defense Minister Gabriel Balayan said on Tuesday. We must always remember, and the heroic deed of our serviceman has to be an example, he told reporters at Yerablur cemetery. The tension might be less now, but this does not affect combat readiness in any way. When asked what conclusions were made, how ready we are for war, since the April events of 2016 showed that the Armenian arsenal was 'naked', Balayan replied: I dont share the point of view that the Armenian arsenal was naked, because of the four-day April war we did not come out losers. And over the past few years, we have managed to sufficiently replenish both our arsenal and the degree of combat readiness. We are having the stage when the quantity is replaced by quality. During this time, there have been qualitative changes in terms of readiness, as well as weapons, ammunition. The war broke out all of a sudden, and there is no need for speculations. This is what Deputy Minister of Defense of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic) Vardan Balayan told Tert.am as he touched upon rumors according to which there was a delay of artillery and certain commanders had suspended counterattacks during the Four-Day Artsakh War in April 2016. Touching upon the proposal of the Sasna Tsrer (Daredevils of Sassoun) Party to hold hearings devoted to the Four-Day Artsakh War in the Parliament of the Republic of Armenia, Vardan Balayan said he doesnt support that proposal. He also stated that the main purpose of the army is to always be ready for war. We always have to remember the Four-Day Artsakh War. After the war, we have solved many issues, and the army is more combat-ready. We must do everything we can to make sure the army remains strong, he stressed. When told that there are even people who believe there is a need to institute criminal cases, taking into consideration the fact that both Nikol Pashinyan and Davit Tonoyan have declared that there were intelligence data regarding the potential operations of the adversarys special units, Vardan Balayan said he had no comment on that. When asked if it is right to claim that the artillery was delayed during the war and certain commanders had suspended counterattacks, the Major-General said the following: I believe these are speculations. If there were such things, we wouldnt be ready for war, but we won the war in April 2016. I believe our heroic soldiers, under their commanders leadership, did everything they could to give a counterattack and win. Azerbaijan had tried to create all the conditions to make the war large-scale, but since the key objectives were not met, the adversary was stopped. The intelligence data have not been overlooked, he stated. Emory University, in partnership with The Dalai Lama Trust and the Vana Foundation of India, will host the launch of Emorys international SEE Learning (Social, Emotional and Ethical Learning) program in New Delhi, India, April 4-6. Emory Presidential Distinguished Professor, His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, will preside over the program that will feature national and international experts and an invited audience of more than 1000 educational and policy leaders from around the world. The event will include childrens rights activist and Nobel Peace laureate Kailash Satyarthi, along with globally recognized experts in social and emotional learning Daniel Goleman, Linda Lantieri, Robert Roeser, and Kimberly Schonert-Reichl. SEE Learning provides educators with a comprehensive framework for the cultivation of social, emotional and ethical competencies that can be used in K12 education as well as higher education and professional education. The program is part of Emorys newly established Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics. Formerly known as the Emory-Tibet Partnership, a program within the Emory College of Arts and Sciences (ECAS), the center was established as a result of a total gift of $11 million from Yeshe Khorlo Foundation and from the Gaden Phodrang Foundation of the Dalai Lama. In addition, the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Fund donated $2.2 million dollars in operational funding for 2019-20 with a commitment to continue funding for two additional years. We greatly appreciate the generous gifts that enabled us to develop a compassion-based, ethics curriculum that represents the culmination of more than two decades of academic cross-cultural collaboration between Emory and the Dalai Lamas institutions, says ECAS Dean Michael A. Elliott. The intersection between health and science is very much part of Emorys mission, and has resulted in contributions to the well-being and quality of life for our local and global communities. The Dalai Lama invited Emory to create a program in ethics and basic human values that would be grounded in common sense, common experience, and scientific evidence, and that would be equally acceptable to those of any religious faith and those without, says Lobsang Tenzin Negi, executive director of the new center and professor of practice in the Emory Department of Religion. Scientific research has shown that ethical development, alongside social and emotional learning, contribute to a students physical, psychological, and social well-being, helping them to succeed not just academically, but in life. Negi and his colleagues collaborated with internationally recognized experts in developmental psychology, education, neuroscience and trauma-informed care in developing the program. There is a growing awareness of the effects of stress on young people and the need to incorporate social, emotional and ethical learning into standard K-12 academic curricula to address the needs of the whole child, says Negi. This innovative program, known as SEE Learning (Social, Emotional and Ethical Learning), includes important new topics such as attention training, the cultivation of compassion for self and others, resilience skills based on trauma-informed care, systems thinking and ethical discernment. Initiated as a pilot program in 2015, SEE Learning has met with interest in the United States and worldwide, with partnerships to date in North and South America, South Asia, East Asia and Europe. More than 600 educators in various countries have attended SEE Learning workshops, many of them providing ongoing feedback in evaluating, enhancing and refining the pedagogical framework for the program and contributing to the development of curricula designed for early elementary, late elementary and middle schools. A high school curriculum is planned for 2020. Following the global launch, an online platform will be available for educator preparation, and the curriculum is currently being translated into fourteen languages. The Emory Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics With a vision of a compassionate and ethical world for all, the center supports a research-based approach to educating both heart and mind. Programs are grounded in a theoretical framework for the cultivation of competencies that lead to the prosocial behaviors and outcomes that support flourishing and well-being for individuals and societies. The center also works to demonstrate the efficacy of these programs through innovative research. In addition to SEE Learning, the center houses two signature programs: CBCT (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training) and the Robert A. Paul Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI). CBCT is a secularized and systematic approach to cultivating compassion that draws from the Indo-Tibetan lojong or mind training tradition. ETSI is a long-term project integrating a comprehensive modern science curriculum into Tibetan monastic education. Emory University , led by President Claire E. Sterk, is a top-ranked private research university recognized internationally for its outstanding liberal arts colleges, graduate and professional schools, and one of the worlds leading healthcare systems, located on a beautiful campus in Atlanta, Georgia. Emory is enriched by collaboration among its two liberal arts colleges, graduate school, and professional schools of medicine, theology, law, nursing, public health and business, centers and partners, as well as by the legacy and energy of Atlanta. Through collaboration among its schools, units, and centers, as well as with affiliated institutions such as The Carter Center and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Emory is committed to working for positive transformation in the world. On 2 April, Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Syrian Arab Republic to Armenia Mohammad Ahmad Haj Ibrahim. As reported the National Assembly to Armenian News-NEWS.am, the head of the legislature stated that there are more perspectives for the deepening of the centuries-old and traditional historic and cultural relations between Syria and Armenia. Valuing the assistance and hospitality of the Syrian people to the survivors of the Armenian Genocide, the parliamentary speaker emphasized that Armenia could not turn a cheek to the current realities in Syria and extended a helping hand to the Syrians devastated by the war. From the perspective of further deepening of bilateral ties, the speaker of the National Assembly attached importance to the role of inter-parliamentary partnership. Congratulating Ararat Mirzoyan on being elected head of the legislature, Mohammad Ahmad Haj Ibrahim viewed the centuries-old Armenian-Syrian relations as not only friendly, but also fraternal. He expressed gratitude to the Armenian authorities for the humanitarian aid provided to his country and stated that the Syrian people highly appreciate this act. The ambassador valued the role that the Syrian-Armenian community plays in Syria and in the strengthening of bilateral ties. In this context, the diplomat touched upon the plan according to which the restoration of Armenian churches in Syria has been incorporated in the governments program. Highly appreciating the existing close political and cultural ties, the parties emphasized the need to enhance the economic component in the relations and set aside agriculture, information technologies and education. The parties also touched upon global and regional issues during the meeting. On 2 April, third President of the Republic of Armenia, leader of the Republican Party of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan failed to respond to journalists questions at Yerablur Military Pantheon, just like last time. He was asked dozens of questions, but he silently visited the tombs of the victims of the Four-Day Artsakh War and laid flowers. When one of the journalists told him that there were rumors that the Four-Day Artsakh War was planned, Serzh Sargsyan said the following: I have nothing to do with sick people. When asked when he would finally speak, he said: When the time comes, I will. When he was sitting in a car, the third President of the Republic of Armenia addressed all the gathered, said good-bye and left. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will discuss regulation of social media with senior politicians in Dublin. It is expected that on April 2 he will visit offices of Facebook in the republic. The European headquarters of Facebook is in the capital of Ireland, Daily Mail reported quoting AP. Zuckerberg will meet with three members of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News - Hildegarde Naughton, James Lawless and Eamon Ryan, AP reported. During their discussions the deputies will raise a number of concerns, including: the regulation of social media, transparency in political advertising and the safety of young people and vulnerable adults, their spokesman said. The Committee is made up of international parliamentarians and investigates issues like data privacy, safety, security and sharing. The trio have been vocal in demanding the regulation of social media platforms in recent years. Earlier Zuckerberg urged to strengthen the state supervision of the Internet in areas like harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. Serzh Sargsyan will speak in the course of the next two months. This is what member of the Republican Party of Armenia Galust Sahakyan told journalists at Yerablur Military Pantheon on 2 April. Serzh Sargsyan will express himself in some way in the course of the next two months, he said. Touching upon the government declaring the last Saturday of April as Citizens Day, Galust Sahakyan emphasized that, in his opinion, this is unnecessary. Every day is citizens day because we all interact with each other and say what we have to say to each other every day. Members of the Republican Party of Armenia visited Yerablur Military Pantheon under the leadership of Serzh Sargsyan today. As a citizen and as a soldier, I am ready to execute every command of the Commander-in-Chief of Armenia. This is what Mayor of Yerevan Hayk Marutyan told journalists at Yerablur Military Pantheon on 2 April. We Armenians are the representatives of a heroic nation. When the time comes, we unite as one and become invincible. It is our duty to always be ready for war, Marutyan said. When asked if Yerevan Municipality would continue the tradition of taking the parents of fixed-term military servicemen to see their sons, the mayor of Yerevan gave an affirmative answer. There will be another visit in May, and I might join them, he said. If a war breaks out during the term of office of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, its obvious that it will be necessary to leave political discrepancies aside and come together to fight against the external threat. This is what Vice-Chairman of the Republican Party of Armenia Armen Ashotyan told journalists at Yerablur Military Pantheon. According to him, no matter how much certain political figures try to manipulate with the events that took place in April 2016, the Armenian people won the war. Azerbaijan has been trying to resolve the conflict through a military solution for years, and it failed again. After losing in diplomacy between 2011 and 2016, the Azerbaijani authorities tried to use force. Afterwards, Azerbaijani diplomats also suffered another defeat in Vienna, Saint Petersburg and Geneva, he added. Touching upon President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyevs statement that the war with Armenia is not over and that this is merely the first phase, the Vice-Chairman of the Republican Party of Armenia stated that the President of Azerbaijan has always stood out with his dual approaches. The internal agenda is always different from the external one that Baku is trying to impose on the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs and the international community. Sometimes those agendas are combined, and this is very dangerous. This combination led to military aggression three years ago. We have to take this into consideration and be ready for war, he concluded. On 2 April, the administrative complex of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia hosted listeners of the National War College of the United States (school in the National Defense University) who are on a regional visit to Armenia, as reported the press service of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia to Armenian News-NEWS.am. The students visit is a scientific-practical visit, and the aim is to become familiar with the security issues in the South Caucasus within the scope of the theme-based Masters research. The security environment in the region, as well as the current threats and challenges from Armenias perspective were addressed during the lecture/discussion entitled Defense Policy of the Republic of Armenia. The main conceptual points in the defense policy presented in the program of the Government of the Republic of Armenia and in the visionary plan of the Defense Minister of the Republic of Armenia, the military reforms under implementation and the scopes of international cooperation were also presented. The Student Council of the Armenian National University of Architecture and Construction organized a candlelight vigil and march -dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Four-Day Artsakh War - to the Yerablur Military Pantheon. The march started in front of the Yerablur pantheon. As reported earlier, on the night of April 2, 2016, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale aggression against the Republic of Artsakh. The Armed Forces of Azerbaijan used virtually all types of weapons. During April 2-5, there were fights along the entire line of contact with the heaviest clashes in the south (Hadrut) and the northeast (Martakert). On the morning of April 2, the Armenian side reported the destruction of the Azerbaijani combat helicopter in the northern direction and the human losses in adversary units. In was announced that the enemy's armored vehicles had been destroyed. On the same day, an official source in Artsakh reported the death of 12-year-old Vaghinak Grigoryan as a result of the shelling of the school. Two more children were hospitalized. Around noon, the Armenian defense ministry reported the destruction of the Azerbaijani sabotage group by Artsakh Armed Forces. At around 6 am on April 3, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces launched an artillery bombardment and advancement of armored vehicles on the south. At the same time, fighting continued in the direction of Martakert. On the same day, the Defense Ministry of Artsakh announced that the territories occupied on the eve by the Azerbaijani side in the direction of Talysh village were returned under the control of the NKR Armed Forces. In the south, two tanks and one infantry fighting vehicle were destroyed. On the night of April 4, the Azerbaijani side, continued shelling with mortars and artillery along the entire line of contact, and the peaceful settlements were targeted. At 7 a.m. the southern and north-eastern directions of the line of contact were subjected to intensive bombardment. The Azerbaijani Armed Forces used heavy equipment and combat drones. An Azerbaijani drone attacked a bus, killing five people. On the night of April 5, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces used the Smerch rocket launcher in the south. Truce was established at noon April 5, the hostilities were stopped. Despite the truce, soldier of the Artsakh Army Armen Gasparyan was killed on April 6 in a shelling from the Azerbaijani side, while on the night of April 7, the Azerbaijani army made an a infiltration attempt towards the village of Talysh, however, retreated after losing one soldier. The sides exchanged bodies in accordance with the agreements on April 10. The Armenian side was handed over 18 bodies. According to the final data, 110 Armenian soldiers and volunteers were killed and 121 were injured. As to the losses of the Azerbaijani side, the Azerbaijani defense ministry carefully conceals the data, and reported only the death of 31 people. However, according to an independent source of Meydan TV, there are at least 93 deaths. The analytical center OSTKRAFT reported the classified data of the Azerbaijani army indicating that 800 people were killed Azerbaijan lost 24 tanks, 4 infantry fighting vehicles, two helicopters, one Grad multiple rocket launcher, 14 unmanned aerial vehicles, dozens of cars. As a result of the unleashed aggression, Azerbaijan seized about 500 hectares of non-strategic territories, paying for it with the hundreds of lives of their own soldiers. STEPANAKERT. Foreign Ministry of Artsakh issued a statement on the third anniversary of the 2016 April war. Three years ago, in the early morning of April 2, the Azerbaijani side, grossly violating the ceasefire regime established by the May 12, 1994 agreement on full cease-fire and cessation of hostilities, launched a war along the entire border with Artsakh. Employing heavy equipment, artillery and military aircrafts, the Azerbaijani armed forces shelled not only the advanced positions of the Defense Army of the Republic of Artsakh, but also peaceful settlements, causing casualties, also among civilians. Only four days later, on April 5, 2016, Azerbaijan, suffering considerable losses, was forced to ask for the cessation of hostilities through Russias mediation, the statement says. The scale and intensity of offensive actions, the number of military equipment and manpower involved, as well as the statements of the Azerbaijani authorities indicate that the April events were nothing more than a pre-planned military aggression. Azerbaijan planned to seize the entire territory of Artsakh and thereby resolve the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict by force, but these plans were thwarted due to the decisive actions of the Artsakh Defense Army. The actions of the Azerbaijani armed forces were accompanied by gross violations of international humanitarian law and by war crimes. Artsakhs foreign ministry had worked consistently towards bringing the inhumane atrocities to the attention of the international community, including specialized structures and agencies. Being sure that such crimes do not have a statute of limitations, the Republic of Artsakh will continue to make efforts to bring those responsible to justice. Three years have passed since the end of the hostilities, but it is still urgent to take international political and diplomatic measures to deter the aggressive ambitions of Azerbaijan for ensuring the complete implementation of the May 12, 1994 and February 6, 1995 agreements. It is also necessary to establish international mechanisms for monitoring the ceasefire regime, and especially through the implementation of the agreements reached in Vienna and St. Petersburg after the April War. The Republic of Artsakh reiterates that in case of Azerbaijan's attempt to resolve the conflict by force, all the necessary self-defense measures will be taken in line with the UN Charter to protect the rights of its citizens to live freely and securely in their homeland. Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II asked Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia to mediate for the release Armenian citizen Karen Ghazaryan, who had ended up under the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan in June 2018 and was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison, RIA Novosti reported. ''We want to attract your attention also on this incident. Karen Ghazaryan, a citizen of Armenia from Berdavan community of Tavush Province, who still in unknown circumstances found himself in the territory of Azerbaijan and who has psychological problems was recently convicted to 20 years of imprisonment', noted His Holiness Karenkin II. According to him, the verdict was reached with obvious violations of human rights. 'Given our previous experience as religious leaders I ask Your Holiness to mediate with the religious and secular authorities of Azerbaijan for the return of the young man to his family in line with international commitments'', Catholicos Karekin II said. The spiritual leader of Armenians also thanked the patriarch for organizing trilateral meetings between the spiritual leaders aimed at fostering the settlement of Karabakh conflict. ''Karabakh conflict can be solved only through peaceful means for ensuring peace and stability in the region. It's first of all necessary to establish an appropriate atmosphere for the settlement of the conflict'', Karekin II said, stressing that the leadership and people of Armenia strive for peace, but this aspiration cannot be one-sided. Armenian citizen Karen Ghazaryan who accidentally crossed the border with Azerbaijan on July 15, 2018 was sentenced to 20 years of prison charged with attempting to carry out terrorist attacks in Azerbaijan. Story Highlights 12% of Algerians are "thriving" 23% say their local economy is improving 61% say it is a bad time to find a job where they live WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Ahead of recent protests that ultimately prompted Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down on Tuesday, Algerians rated their lives worse than they have at any point in the past decade. The percentage of Algerians who rated their lives positively enough to be considered "thriving" dropped to a new low of 12% in the latter half of 2018. Gallup asks adults worldwide to evaluate their lives on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, where zero represents the worst possible life and 10 represents the best possible life. Gallup classifies people as "thriving" if they rate their current life a 7 or higher and their life in five years an 8 or higher, and "suffering" if they rate both their current and future life situations a 4 or lower. Those in the middle are "struggling." The percentage of Algerians who are thriving has dropped each year since 2014, when it was at a record-high 33%. Within the same period, the percentage who are struggling has risen from 62% to 78%. These worsening life evaluations followed several austerity measures by the government, including cuts to public spending that began in 2015 and intensified after cuts to subsidies for essential goods in 2017. The public spending cuts spurred Algerian teachers and doctors to take to the streets in early 2018. The Algerian government then backtracked on cuts to subsidies for consumer goods in the runup to the presidential election, originally planned for April 2019, in an unsuccessful effort to head off protests. During the course of the unrest, the goal of demonstrators shifted to opposition to Bouteflika sitting for a fifth term as Algeria's president. In response to continued demonstrations, Bouteflika initially withdrew from the election and subsequently vowed to step down from the presidency. Austerity Measures Weigh on Algeria's Local Economies The Algerian government's efforts to reform the economy and trim foreign debt through austerity coincided with a negative turn in attitudes toward the country's local economies and labor markets. Before the austerity measures, 48% of Algerians in 2014 said the economy in the area where they lived was getting better. Following the introduction of austerity measures, that percentage fell to 24% and has stayed at or below that point since. The percentage of Algerians who said their local economy was getting worse jumped from 18% in 2014 to 44% in 2016, though this figure has since declined. However, this doesn't mean Algerians see their local economy as improving -- instead, they have shifted toward saying there has been no change at all, with the percentage saying their local economy is "staying the same" having increased to 44% last year, up from 24% in 2016. The changing conditions also have shaken Algerians' outlook for the job market. One in five Algerians (20%) in 2018 said it was a good time to find a job -- less than half of the 43% who said so in 2014. The cuts to public spending have resulted in public employees having less money to inject into the economy, resulting in the creation of fewer jobs since the austerity measures were enacted. Bottom Line As the scheduled election approached, Algerians were primed for change after nearly four years of austerity. Public workers, teachers and medical workers -- those most directly affected by the government's spending cuts -- were the first to take to the streets, followed by others who likely sensed change was possible. The demonstrations have been at least partially successful, with Bouteflika stepping down as president. Bouteflika's forced decision opens the door to substantial political uncertainty, and Algerians will continue to face considerable economic difficulties. The country's dependency on income from oil sales and the continued depressed price of the commodity have shown the need for reform of the Algerian economy. However, contentious efforts to do so have substantially contributed to political instability. The risk of additional upheaval will continue to be a challenge for any new leader's attempts to enact sudden and drastic economic reform in the near future. For complete methodology and specific survey dates, please review Gallup's Country Data Set details. Learn more about how the Gallup World Poll works. Pieces of man-made space junk are constantly orbiting around the Earth at speeds of up to 17,400 miles per hour. According to NASA, there are more than 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball, 500,000 pieces about the size of a marble, and tens of millions of microscopic pieces as small as a speck of paint. The growing amount of debris is leading experts to conclude that this serious environmental and safety issue in space needs to be addressed. News@TheU spoke to Victoria Coverstone, professor and chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the College of Engineering, to learn more about the problem. Why is space littered with so much debris? More space debris is accumulating as the planet launches more objects into space. Nothing lasts forever, and the same goes for satellites. There are many dead satellites that are stuck orbiting right now. After 20 years or so, many times a satellite runs out of fuel, leading the satellite to just drift around, causing it to potentially collide with other objects. Debris can also come from humans who travel into space. Astronauts, for example, have accidentally dropped objects as small as a screw during space walks that then float off. Who is tracking these pieces of debris and how do they keep track of it? Led by the U.S. military, the Space Surveillance Network has a central location that detects, tracks, catalogs and identifies objects orbiting Earth. A lot of these objects are big, but most of them are very small, so theyre hard to detect. I know our government is investing money to upgrade the sensors that detect this space debris. The goal is to update the sensors to continually get more accurate information of where the smaller pieces are located. Why does space junk pose such a threat? I think people are paying more attention to this problem because it could cause severe economic and safety problems if more debris keeps building up. Some of the satellites that are being launched cost millions of dollars, and if it gets hit by even a tiny piece of space debris, it could be left not operational. Another aspect is, if youre moving astronauts into space, and a piece of debris hits a pressurized vessel, it could be catastrophic for the people onboard. The satellite that is the most monitored is the International Space Station, for obvious reasons. Thankfully there hasnt been severe collisions, but theres pictures of windows in the International Space Station that have dents from impacts from high velocity objects that dont penetrate through. Theyre getting hit by smaller objects very frequently. Thats why people on board the station have to maneuver often to avoid getting struck. Are there regulations that have been put into place to reduce the amount of junk in space? So far, NASA has put restrictions on themselves. The agency has implemented a rule that once a satellite mission in low earth orbit is complete, the party responsible for that satellite must have a plan on how to deorbit the satellite within 25 years. The only problem is that the United States can regulate ourselves and put restrictions on companies, but unless theres an international agreement, there are other players that need to be motivated and convinced that this is a problem. Right now, there arent any specific international rules of what you have to adhere to when you launch an object into space. The United Nations General Assembly endorsed some guidelines for orbital debris mitigation standard practices, but these do not contain specific requirements. As far as being more sustainable, organizations are also trying to figure out how to make satellites more recyclable, but this will require a change in the design approach to building satellites. Are there any ideas on how to remove space debris that is orbiting in space? Theres been several ideas proposed. One of the ideas is to launch a collector satellite that has some sort of mechanism, like a net, to capture junk and bring it back to a collecting space craft. The idea is when it eventually reaches its maximum garbage potential, then it reenters the atmosphere and burns up. This will require countries to come together and form an international group and figure out who will pay for this service. It all depends on when people choose to make the decision that this is an important issue to tackle moving forward. Posted by PickupTrucks.com Staff | April 2, 2019 Cars.com photo by Christian Lantry By Aaron Bragman The 2020 Jeep Gladiator is about to hit the streets, and now we know the mid-size pickup truck's official EPA fuel economy ratings. There's only one engine for the 2020 Gladiator, a 285-horsepower, 3.6-liter Pentastar V-6, as the promised turbo-diesel 3.0-liter won't be available until 2020. Part-time four-wheel drive is standard on all Gladiators the automatic Select-Trac all-wheel drive seen on the Wrangler Sahara is not available so fuel economy on the Gladiator is broken out by transmission choice. The standard six-speed manual transmission Gladiator is rated at 16/23/19 mpg city/highway/combined, while the optional ZF eight-speed automatic version comes in at 17/22/19 mpg. Related Video: Does it look odd to you that the eight-speed automatic, with its taller final gear and two extra cogs gets worse highway fuel economy than the six-speed manual? Looked wonky to us, too, but Gladiator chief engineer Pete Milosavlevski told us that the results are more a matter of tuning the powertrain to EPA testing cycle quirks than simply gears and ratios. "Gear ratios and top gear ratio are not an absolute indicator of fuel efficiency," he wrote in a text message to PickupTrucks.com. "The ability to use and time in each of those gears, balancing efficiency, reserve torque for drivability, and meeting EPA regulations drives different efficiencies between the transmissions on different drive cycles." So yeah, the manual transmission gets better highway fuel economy, while the automatic gets better city mileage. How does the Gladiator stack up against competitor trucks? It's pretty comparable, actually. The leader in the field is the Ford Ranger 4x4, which posts a 20/24/22 mpg city/highway/combined rating thanks to its smaller turbocharged 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine and standard 10-speed automatic, but we have reason to suspect that the Ford's EPA numbers may optimistic (more on that later), at least when talking about the FX4 Off-Road version. Chevrolet's Colorado 4x4 is rated at a more evenly matched 17/24/19 mpg with its 3.6-liter V-6 and standard eight-speed automatic transmission, but you can also opt for a turbo-diesel 2.8-liter in the Colorado, which nets you 19/28/22 mpg and can even be had in the most off-road capable version, the Colorado ZR2 (where it sadly only gets 18/22/19 mpg, no better than the Gladiator's gasoline V-6). The Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro comes with a 3.5-liter V-6, but like the Gladiator offers a manual or automatic transmission. The six-speed manual is rated at 17/20/18 mpg, slightly worse than the Gladiator, and the six-speed automatic version is rated at 18/22/20 mpg, slightly better than the automatic Gladiator. You can compare them yourself here. I don't really consider the Honda Ridgeline to be a Gladiator competitor it's a totally different kind of truck, with the only real similarity being you can seat five people, and it has a standard V-6 and a pickup bed, but for comparison's sake, it gets 19/26/22 mpg. One big factor in this situation is weight: The Gladiator is a heavy truck, nearly 350 to 590 pounds heavier than a Jeep Wrangler four-door, depending on trim level. The Gladiator Rubicon weighs just more than 5,000 pounds, or nearly 600 pounds more than a loaded Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro or Ford Ranger Lariat SuperCrew 4x4 and 300 pounds more than a Chevrolet Colorado ZR2. See how they all stack up here. Despite the aluminum hood, fenders and doors on the Gladiator, the steel box, beefed up frame, chunkier wheels and heavy-duty Dana 44 axles front and rear do take their toll at the scales and the pump. More From PickupTrucks.com: The requested page is currently unavailable on this server. Back to [RTHK News Homepage] * Aims to break impasse over Brexit 10 days before deadline * May to ask EU for further short delay to day of departure * May's gesture to Corbyn angers eurosceptic Conservatives * Corbyn "happy" to meet May, recognizes responsibility * May chaired over seven hours of fraught cabinet meetings * EU warns of disruptive no-deal Brexit barring breakthrough (Adds comment from Johnson, France, Germany, context) By Guy Faulconbridge, Elizabeth Piper and Kate Holton LONDON, April 2 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May said on Tuesday she would seek another Brexit delay to agree an EU divorce deal with the opposition Labour leader, a last-ditch gambit to break an impasse over Britain's departure that enraged many in her party. Nearly three years since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a shock referendum result, it is still unclear how, when or if it will ever indeed quit the European club it first joined in 1973. In a hastily arranged statement from her Downing Street office after spending seven hours chairing cabinet meetings on how to plot a way out of the Brexit maze, May said she was seeking another short extension to Brexit beyond April 12. Her move offers the prospect of keeping the United Kingdom in a much closer economic relationship with the EU after Brexit - though it could also rip her Conservative Party apart as half her lawmakers want a decisive split from the bloc. "I am offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and to try to agree a plan - that we would both stick to - to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal," she said. "We will need a further extension of Article 50 (divorce notification), one that is as short as possible and which ends when we pass a deal. We need to be clear what such an extension is for - to ensure we leave in a timely and orderly way." Corbyn said he would be "very happy" to meet May and that he would set no limits ahead of the talks, while reiterating that his party aimed to keep a customs union with the EU, access for Britain to its single market and protections for workers. Story continues He added that he would hold a vote of no-confidence in the government in reserve if any eventual accord still failed to achieve majority support in a deeply split British parliament. Germany and France called for more clarity from London, warning that without a clear sense of what Britain wanted it could be heading towards a disorderly Brexit within days. The EU's Donald Tusk called for patience with London. MAY'S GAMBLE INFURIATES PARTY EUROSCEPTICS Keeping Britain closely tied to the EU after Brexit is anathema to much of the Conservative Party. Many Brexit-backing Conservatives were livid at May over her overture to Corbyn. "This is a deeply unsatisfactory approach, it is not in the interests of the country, it fails to deliver on the referendum result and history doesn't bode well for it," Jacob Rees-Mogg, a prominent Brexiteer, told reporters following a meeting of the party's hardline eurosceptic parliamentary group. Boris Johnson, the face of the 2016 Brexit campaign, said a compromise with Labour would betray the referendum, asserting that the world's fifth biggest economy could be outside the EU but still subject to EU rules. "Brexit is becoming soft to the point of disintegration," said Johnson, who resigned as foreign minister last July. Still, May faced no immediate resignations from her senior team. Prominent Brexit supporters in May's cabinet, such as Michael Gove, defended her plan in public after a marathon meeting at which ministers haggled for hours over coffee and sandwiches. They finished with Chilean red wine. Any plan, May said, would have to include the current Withdrawal Agreement that she agreed with the EU in November and which the bloc says it will not reopen. May last week offered to quit if parliament approved her deal but lawmakers defeated it a third time on Friday, the very day Britain had been due to leave the EU. Brexiteers say her deal would trap Britain in the EU's orbit indefinitely but pro-EU opposition parties say her proposed break would isolate Britain and cause lasting economic damage. Lawmakers failed on Monday to find a majority of their own for any alternative plan ranging from a permanent customs union to a confirmatory referendum on any deal and a revocation of the divorce papers to avoid a no-deal crash-out. NEW OPTIONS FOR PARLIAMENT? May said that if she could not agree a unified approach with Corbyn, a veteran socialist who voted against joining the bloc in 1975, then the government would come up with a number of options on the future relationship with the EU. Then, she said, the government would put them before the House of Commons in a series of votes. "Crucially, the government stands ready to abide by the decision of the house," May said. Her move could cleave apart her Conservatives, who have been grappling with an internal schism over Europe for the past three decades. Over half of her lawmakers voted last week to go for a no-deal Brexit, much to the alarm of British business. "It seems to me that she wants to rely upon Labour votes to get this extension through," David Jones, a Brexit-supporting former Conservative minister, told Reuters. "If she does that, then she is putting the future of the party in peril." May said she wanted the Withdrawal Agreement Bill to be passed before May 22 so that the United Kingdom did not have to take part in elections that month to the European Parliament. Her spokesman said it was possible to cancel participation in the European elections right up to the day of the vote. The impasse has already delayed Brexit for at least two weeks beyond the planned departure date of March 29 to 2200 GMT on April 12. "This is a decisive moment in the story of these islands," May said. "But we can and must find the compromises that will deliver what the British people voted for." (Additional reporting by Jan Strupczewski in Brussels, Andreas Rinke and Michelle Martin in Berlin, Kylie MacLellan, Alistair Smout, William James, Andy Bruce, Costas Pitas, Andrew MacAskill and Ritvik Carvalho in London and Tom Miles in Geneva, Richard Lough, Michel Rose and John Irish in Paris Writing by Guy Faulconbridge Editing by Mark Heinrich) (Adds WikiLeaks' response, paragraphs 7-8) QUITO, April 2 (Reuters) - President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador told radio stations on Tuesday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has "repeatedly violated" the terms of his asylum in the Andean nation's London embassy, where he has lived for nearly seven years. Moreno, interviewed by the Ecuadorean Radio Broadcasters' Association, said Assange does not have the right to "hack private accounts or phones" and cannot intervene in the politics of other countries, especially those that have friendly relations with Ecuador. Attorneys for Assange did not respond to requests for comment. Moreno made the comments on Assange after private photographs of him and his family at a time years ago when they were living in Europe circulated on social media. Although Moreno stopped short of explicitly blaming Assange for the leak, the government said it believed the photos were shared by WikiLeaks. "Mr. Assange has violated the agreement we reached with him and his legal counsel too many times," Moreno said in the interview in the city of Guayaquil. "It is not that he cannot speak and express himself freely, but he cannot lie, nor much less hack private accounts or phones." Moreno did not say whether or not the government would take steps to remove Assange from the embassy. WikiLeaks said in an emailed statement that Moreno's remarks were in retribution for WikiLeaks having reported on corruption accusations against Moreno, who denies wrongdoing. "If President Moreno wants to illegally terminate a refugee publisher's asylum to cover up an offshore corruption scandal, history will not be kind," WikiLeaks said. Assange took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. That probe was later dropped, but Assange fears he could be extradited to face charges in the United States, where federal prosecutors are investigating WikiLeaks. Story continues Ecuador last year established new rules for Assange's behavior while in the embassy, which required him to pay his medical bills and clean up after his pet cat. He challenged the rules in local and international tribunals, arguing they violated his human rights. Both courts ruled against him. Last month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is linked to the Organization of American States, rejected Assange's request that Ecuador ease the conditions it has imposed on his residence in the London embassy. Assange says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and is putting pressure on him by isolating him from visitors and spying on him. Ecuador has said its treatment of Assange was in line with international law, but that his situation "cannot be extended indefinitely." (Reporting by Alexandra Valencia, Brian Ellsworth and Luc Cohen; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington; editing by Grant McCool) (Adds Harley's comments) By Rajesh Kumar Singh CHICAGO, April 2 (Reuters) - Harley-Davidson Inc's workers in Milwaukee and Tomahawk, Wisconsin, have rejected the motorcycle maker's proposal for a five-year contract, their union said on Tuesday, citing non-financial issues such as temporary workers and job security. The current seven-year contract had been set to expire on April 1. But Harley and the United Steelworkers (USW) union, which represents more than 1,000 hourly employees at the two facilities, said they had agreed to extend the contract through April 14. The union is pressing the Milwaukee-based company to address issues related to temporary workers, job security, scheduling, and seniority and temporary workers rights. A USW official told Reuters the union wants to protect full-time workers from layoffs. While it is asking for a road map that would allow temporary workers to become full-time workers, it is opposed to the company using temporary workers to pull work away from full-time employees. Patricia Sweeney, corporate media relations manager at Harley, said a flexible workforce enables the company to staff efficiently during the peak motorcycle demand season, helping it manage its cost structure and remain competitive. "This enables us to effectively manage the seasonality of our business," Sweeney told Reuters. "It's a practice we've had in place for the past seven years." Earlier, the company said it was disappointed with the union's decision to reject a "competitive" offer. Harley, however, said production would continue as usual at all of its facilities. Under the proposed agreement, Harley's employees would have received a 14 percent wage increase during the contract period as well as a $2,250 signing bonus. The proposal also included no changes to healthcare and significant pension enhancements for current employees, along with a retirement incentive for those eligible to retire, Harley said. Story continues The average wage for current, regular full-time employees under the first year of the agreement was proposed to be over $25 an hour in Tomahawk and over $33 per hour in the Milwaukee area. The statement did not quantify the financial impact of the proposal for a company that has been struggling to revive demand in the United States, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of total bike sales. Adding to its troubles, it is estimated that a tariff war waged by U.S. President Donald Trump will cost the company between $100 million and $120 million in 2019 and contribute to a 6-percentage-point drop in operating margins in the quarter that just ended. To avoid fallout from the tariff war, Harley is spending $15 million to expand a facility in Thailand to serve European markets. A decision to shift production out of the United States for European markets was announced last summer after the EU slapped tariffs on U.S. imports in response to Trump's duties on steel and aluminum imports from the trading bloc. Trump had blasted Harley's decision and publicly backed a boycott of the company. (Reporting by Rajesh Kumar Singh, editing by G Crosse, Tom Brown and Jonathan Oatis) (Adds details, quotes from unnamed official) WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - Turkey remains an important NATO ally and partner to the United States despite concerns over its plans to buy missile defense systems from Russia, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday, a day before the start of a NATO meeting in Washington. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to preview the meeting of NATO foreign ministers, said the gathering would discuss all elements of the military threat posed by Russia, including in the Black Sea, as well as the Afghan peace process and members' budget contributions to the alliance. The official said the NATO allies would seek to agree on a package of measures to bolster NATO's military presence in the Black Sea, which has become a flashpoint with Moscow over its seizure of Ukrainian ships last year. "The focus is on the defense and deterrence posture of the alliance in the Black Sea region," said the official, adding that a plenary session on Thursday would focus on Russia, including what Washington sees as Moscow's breach of the Cold War-era Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The United States has said it will withdraw from the treaty this summer unless Moscow ends its alleged violations of the landmark 1987 arms control pact. Russia denies violating the treaty. While the official described the NATO alliance as "strong and unified," U.S. tensions with Turkey over its plans to buy a S-400 missile defense system from Russia are likely to loom large. The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to its F-35 fighter jets to Turkey over its S-400 plans. "We have very serious concerns about its stated plans to proceed with the acquisition of the S-400 missile defense system and there will be potential consequences, within sanctions law and the F-35 program if they continue," the official said. "Our relationship is not being defined by the single issue of the S-400, but the S-400 is a deeply problematic issue for the United States," the official added. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Berkrot) (Add more quotes, background) By Philip Pullella ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE, March 31 (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Sunday that political leaders who want walls and other barriers to keep migrants out "will end up becoming prisoners of the walls they build." The pope made his comments to reporters aboard the plane returning from Morocco in response to a question about migration in general and about U.S. President Donald Trump's threat to shut down the southern border with Mexico. "Builders of walls, be they made of razor wire or bricks, will end up becoming prisoners of the walls they build," he said. Francis, who did not mention Trump in his response, has sparred with the U.S. president before over migration, which was a theme of several questions on the plane as well as during the trip to Morocco. Trump has declared a national emergency to justify redirecting money earmarked for the military to pay for his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall. "I realize that with this problem (of migration), a government has a hot potato in its hands, but it must be resolved differently, humanely, not with razor wire," the Argentine-born pope said on the plane. Addressing Moroccan leaders on Saturday, Francis said that problems of migration would never be resolved by physical barriers but instead required social justice and correcting the world's economic imbalances. "With fear, we will not move forward, with walls, we will remain closed within these walls," he said on Sunday. Besides the United States, migration has again risen to the fore of national political debates in a number of North African and European countries. On the plane, Francis repeated some of the key points of his views on migration. He said wealthy countries should help eliminate the root causes of migration such as poverty, war and political instability. Migrants should be accepted, protected and integrated and if a country cannot handle the numbers, the migrants should be distributed among other countries, he said. (Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Peter Cooney) OCLC Wise Reimagines the ILS OCLC is rolling out a new ILS to public libraries in the U.S.just dont call it an ILS. The company describes OCLC Wise as a community engagement systemits like an ILS, but one that is built around the customer experience. Wise handles traditional functions (such as circulation, cataloging, and discovery), but differentiates itself with integrated tools for marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), event registration, and collection analysis. The Wise system, while new to the U.S., is not entirely new. Developed by the Dutch library automation company HKA (which OCLC acquired in 2013), Wise is currently used by 80% of libraries in the Netherlands and is being adopted by libraries in Belgium and Germany. OCLC has been conducting advisory sessions and beta testing with public libraries in the U.S. for the past few years. Why is 2019 the right time to bring Wise to the U.S.? According to Scott Livingston, OCLCs executive director of management services, there has been a notable shift in the types of activities American Public Libraries are engaging in and the types of tools they are desiring to further their missions. Specifically, public libraries today are as much about people as they are about collections, serving as busy community centers. Wise seeks to adapt to this shift with a system that offers tools for engaging patrons, promoting events, managing meetings, and tailoring collections. Personalized Services For patrons accustomed to the modern ecommerce experience, there is a growing expectation of personalized services. Wise seeks to get personal by leveraging the patrons demographics data, circulation history, and event attendance to tailor services, messages, and collections based on actual patron behaviors. By having a system thats designed around the user profile, Wise operates like a CRM system, providing tools to analyze customer interactions with the goal of improving retention and engagement. According to OCLC product manager Ty Pierce, Wise is designed around people and driven by data, with nearly every function and feature of the system built to provide as seamless an experience for the customers as possible. And when OCLC says its system is patron-centric, it means that literally. With Wise, OCLC dethrones the bibliographic record as the long-standing mainspring of the ILS and elevates the patron record to top dog. Whenever a patron interfaces with the system (by checking out a book, attending an event, opening a newsletter, etc.), it records that data to the patron record to build a profile. This change presents some interesting opportunities for public libraries to leverage data to gain insights into their patrons and make predictive decisions about collections and programming with a system that provides the benefit of relying on observed behavior instead of assumption. Marketing and Communications One of the more innovative features of the Wise system is its integrated email marketing tool. Most libraries have an email marketing platform, and using it typically involves exporting a big list of email addresses from the ILS to a third-party platform for monthly newsletter blasts. But with Wise, libraries can use patron behavior data to target their communications and deliver highly relevant messages to their most interested patrons. Libraries seeking to promote an event or service can use Wise to identify and reach the target audience for their communications. By leveraging stored data, marketing messages can be tailored to patrons based on their expressed interests and circulation history. Automated emails can be set up to engage patrons around pre-designated parameters such as birthdays or before a card is set to expire. As an example, a library hosting an event might want to target readers of science fiction. The library could use Wise to generate a mailing list of everyone who had recently checked out relevant materials, and it could further refine that list by adding or removing categories. If the event is only for adults, the library could exclude patrons younger than 18. If the event features a particular author, the library could further target messages around author or title data. Once the list is compiled, the library could use Wises integrated messaging platform to deliver a targeted marketing message that would appeal to a high-interest group of patrons. Patrons would encounter fewer uninteresting, irrelevant, or overly general messages from the library and instead find messages that account for their tastes and behavior. Discovery and Social A library using Wise can maintain its current website or opt for a more cohesive interface that fully integrates the discovery interface with a Joomla-based website. Library patrons generally dont distinguish among a librarys website, catalog, calendar, or mailing service; the ability to integrate these various functions means they wont need to. The integrated system is capable of managing all aspects of a librarys web presentation to deliver a more seamless user experience. For patrons, the transition from catalog to website and back becomes easier, as they are not jumped to different systems or domains. The Wise discovery interface includes a catalog search that integrates with third-party content providers such as OverDrive and hoopla. The search bar features predictive input technology that suggests results based on the librarys holdings, and the results page features facets for limiting results. A library can control its web presentation though a portal that provides tools for promoting collections and events. Book jacket images are included with Wise, eliminating the need for another third-party integration and enabling the library to make carousels of featured materials. The Wise discovery system also serves as a social engagement connection point, presenting opportunities for patrons to view and create user-generated content such as reviews, ratings, recommendations, and wish lists. Integrations with social media platforms allow library patrons to take that same content out of the catalog. Livingston says that with Wise, I can post a title Im reading to Facebook or Twitter and invite friends to comment and [dialogue] around it. Its a very 21st century, social, e-commerce type of experience. By leveraging user-generated content, Wise is able present an item display that is familiar to internet users who are accustomed to using ratings and reviews to inform their selections. Anticipating Patron Needs The designed around people and driven by data ethic also extends to the systems collection development functions, which rely on patron data to deliver a customer-driven collection development solution. Unlike library-collection analysis tools that require data to be exported to a third-party service, OCLCs tools are integrated, automated, and real-time. The library can set thresholds in Wise, and the system will deliver purchasing recommendations, weeding lists, or floating collection moves in real time. The result is a balanced collection that adapts to the communitys changing reading habits. Working with parameters set by the library, Wise analyzes how materials are being used within a library system, within a branch, and down to the shelf level to make recommendations about appropriate balances for collections. This enables the library to rely on data instead of assumptions, as the system makes acquisition and balancing recommendations based on real-time transaction history. Patron Privacy Businesses and organizations are hungry for data, and the most successful players are those with the most access. In todays data-hungry world, Wises driven by data philosophy feels like a logical evolution for the ILS, which has historically offered limited tools for mining, retaining, or leveraging data. Driven by data appears, at first glance, to stand in contrast with ALAs stated commitment to an ethic of facilitating access to but not monitoring information. But Livingston stresses that the Wise system was developed in Europe, and as concerned as American libraries are about protecting patron privacy, European libraries, because of the history of Western Europe over the past hundred years, are even more sensitive. According to OCLC, the security protocols built into Wise reflect that heightened European sensitivity about government observation, intrusion, and civil liberties while adhering to the European Unions strict legal standards around data privacy and protection. Many Western European libraries are not government-funded and therefore need to work hard to attract and retain subscribers. These dual pressures of wanting to both leverage and protect data led to the development of a system that maintains but masks patron data. Circulation retention records are set by the library based on its policies, and librarians who are using the system to target messages can only see masked patron counts, not the records for the individual patrons matching those numbers. The emails are sent out programmatically, so the librarian can track the marketing campaign without seeing the names or borrowing histories of the target patrons. Holistic Design As a technology, the ILS has not done a very good job of adapting to the changing needs of modern public libraries, forcing them to seek add-on services to supplement or enhance their ILS functions and OPAC presentations. Third-party services such as BiblioCommons, collectionHQ, and ChiliFresh exist to prop up the ILS; they are like a wish list of features that public libraries want their ILS to have. Wise is OCLCs response to the strong market demand for additional services to supplement the ILS and enhance the librarys digital presence. With a holistic and patron-centric design philosophy, these additional services feel more like an integrated whole. OCLC is known for connecting libraries around the world with bibliographic-oriented systems such as WorldShare and WorldCat. For OCLC to roll out a system that is both patron-oriented and highly localized is remarkable, and it speaks to a growing divide in the services provided by public and academic libraries. As the needs of these institutions diverge, the one-size-fits-all ILS cannot accommodate all types of libraries. Libraries want a system that will handle all of their processes, but increased specialization is required as those processes change and grow apart. By delivering an ILS made specifically for public librariesaddressing their changing needsOCLC will hopefully shake up the stagnant ILS market and spur competitors to develop more specialized features. Screenshots are courtesy of OCLC. (Adds background) WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was prepared to close the U.S. southern border if necessary but that Mexico has apprehended thousands of people in recent days and its actions have made a big difference in the immigration situation. Trump threatened on Friday to close the border with Mexico this week unless Mexico took steps to help the United States with illegal immigration, a move which had threatened to overload U.S. ports of entry in the region. The administration softened its tone on the issue on Tuesday, saying Mexico was taking greater responsibility for dealing with the immigration flows. "They have started to do a significant amount more. We've seen them take a larger number of individuals" and hold those who have asylum claims in Mexico while they are being processed in the United States, White House spokeswoman Sanders told reporters at the White House. "We've also seen them stop more people from coming across the border so that they aren't even entering into the United States. So those two things are certainly helpful and we'd like to see them continue," Sanders said. Trump hinted at a softening earlier in a Twitter post on Tuesday. "After many years (decades), Mexico is apprehending large numbers of people at their Southern Border, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador," he said. He also told reporters at the White House he was still prepared to do that if necessary but that Mexico had apprehended thousands of people in recent days, having a big impact on the border situation. (Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by David Alexander Editing by Alistair Bell) (Adds quotes from Trump, White House statement, comments from State Department official, context) By Steve Holland and Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday his pressure on NATO nations to pay more for their defense is leading to tens of billions of dollars more in contributions, but the allies may need to boost their budgets even more. Trump used a well-worn script about burden-sharing with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in talks at the White House. The meeting came a day before NATO foreign ministers sit down in Washington for what is expected to be a session dominated by concerns about Russia. Trump, who has ruffled feathers among European allies by repeatedly saying that NATO nations needed to pay more and ease the burden on the United States, said his tactics have paid off. "Since I came to office it's a rocket ship up. We've picked up over $140 billion in additional money, and we look like we're going to have at least another $100 billion in spending by the nations...by 2020," he said. The U.S. president said he would like to see NATO members pay more than 2 percent of their gross domestic product for defense. Trump told NATO leaders last year to increase defense spending to 4 percent of GDP. He said the United States pays 4.3 percent of its GDP to NATO. Trump singled out Germany for not doing enough, while praising German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Germany honestly is not paying their fair share," he said. "They're not paying what they should be paying. They're paying close to 1 percent." The White House, in a statement, said that Trump met with Stoltenberg to mark NATO's 70th anniversary and reaffirm U.S. support for the alliance. The White House said the two leaders "reviewed NATO's unprecedented progress to increase burden-sharing" and also discussed "ongoing efforts to fight terrorism (and) check Russian aggression." Story continues "WE'LL GET ALONG WITH RUSSIA" Trump said a stronger NATO provides a bulwark against Russia, but that he believed relations with Moscow will be fine. As has been his norm, Trump was reluctant to criticize Russia. I hope we have a good relationship with Russia," he said. "But I think well get along with Russia. Stoltenberg, who is to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, singled out Russia for "violating the INF treaty," the Cold War-era Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty. Trump in February announced plans to withdraw the United States from the INF treaty this summer, saying Russia was in violation of it. Russia is sowing discord in the alliance by selling to NATO member Turkey the S-400 air defense system. The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to its F-35 fighter jets to Turkey over its S-400 plans. "We have very serious concerns about its stated plans to proceed with the acquisition of the S-400 missile defense system and there will be potential consequences, within sanctions law and the F-35 program if they continue," said a senior State Department official who briefed reporters. The United States says that Turkey's purchase of the Russian air defense system would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft, which is built by Lockheed Martin Corp . The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to preview the meeting of NATO foreign ministers, said the gathering would discuss all elements of the military threat posed by Russia, including in the Black Sea, as well as the Afghan peace process and members' budget contributions to the alliance. The official said the NATO allies would seek to agree on a package of measures to bolster NATO's military presence in the Black Sea, which has become a flashpoint with Moscow over its seizure of Ukrainian ships last year. "The focus is on the defense and deterrence posture of the alliance in the Black Sea region," said the official, adding that a plenary session on Thursday would focus on Russia, including what Washington sees as Moscow's breach of the INF treaty. (Reporting by Steve Holland and Lesley Wroughton; editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Leslie Adler) Monte Scott got sick and tired of the potholes plaguing his street, so he took matters into his own hands. (Photo: Courtesy of Facebook/Trinell Scott) A 12-year-old boy in Muskegon Heights, Mich. took it upon himself to do some road work last week, single-handedly filling giant potholes in the road after they damaged his mothers and grandmothers cars. Video of the Good Samaritan was posted on Facebook last Wednesday by his mother and has since gone viral. Monte Scott had grown sick and tired of the potholes plaguing the community and his family members, so he decided to make the most of his free time after arriving home early from a half day at school, according to USA Today. The boy pulled on a red and orange hoodie, grabbed a shovel and a garbage can filled with dirt from his backyard and got to work filling in the potholes. Want daily pop culture news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoos newsletter. He never even informed his family of his plans but someone happened to be driving by and spotted his one-man construction site. Youre gonna be something, too. Youre a hard worker, a man can be heard saying from behind the camera as he hands the tween a tip for his work. He really got a garbage can filling these potholes, a woman adds. Because his granny drive down this street and they down here. The video was posted to Facebook and went viral, eventually finding its way back to Scotts mom. I was at work, and I got a text message from my niece, and shed seen the video on Facebook, said Trinell Scott, who was delighted by her sons altruistic behavior, but not surprised. Thats just the type of kid he is. When he sees theres a problem or a need, and he thinks he can fix it, hell try to fix it. The proud mom couldnt help but share the video on her own Facebook page, and brag about her son in the process, of course. I love my son, she wrote. He has a heart of gold. The video has been watched more than 60,000 times, and comments from impressed viewers have been flooding in. I love this! Bless his sweet heart, one person wrote. Initiative. Caring. What if we all took responsibility? Kudos young man. Great job mom! wrote another. Story continues In an interview with WZZM-TV, Scott said his intentions were simple: He just wanted to help others. I didnt want people messing up their cars like my mom did, he told the station. If somebody were to drive down the street and hit a pothole [they] would have to pay like $600 to $700 to get their car fixed. They would be mad. He even described his process, which entails digging dirt from his backyard to fill up the garbage can, wheeling the can out into the road, shoveling dirt into the craters and patting it down to make the surface smooth and compact. I make sure its all even, and then I got some dirt, scoop it into the middle and level it out, he said. Muskegon Heights mayor Kimberley Sims took the opportunity to congratulate the boy on his industriousness but said she was sorry that the problem is so bad that he feels he has to do that. She also addressed the towns shortcomings. We have a constant issue of potholes, Sims told USA Today. Winter weather has done a lot of damage to the roads this year, she added, and construction crews in Muskegon Heights are working hard, but theyre shorthanded. I commend the young mans efforts, Sims said. Hes 12. He should be getting ready for school the next day or playing video games. She called his efforts a true testament of his love for his community and family. She added that policy improvements, plans and conversations are in the works for Muskegon Heights, so hopefully citizens wont be driven by desperation to take charge of situations like this. In total, Scott filled about 15 potholes in the road that day but his work is not done yet. Ill keep doing it, he said, to keep helping the community out. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. In early March, Kohl's (NYSE: KSS) reported another quarter of solid profit growth, capping off a strong 2018 fiscal year. For the full year, adjusted earnings per share soared 34% to $5.60. While much of the increase was driven by a lower tax rate, Kohl's also made progress on initiatives to grow its sales and improve its profit margin last year. Kohl's recently filed its annual report for fiscal 2018, which provides more detail on the company's results for the past year and its plans for 2019. Here are three important details investors might have missed. Gross margin growth -- despite pivot to national brands In recent years, Kohl's has been reducing its inventory steadily in order to avoid margin-killing clearance markdowns. This effort is working, as gross margin reached 36.4% in fiscal 2018, up from 36% a year earlier and 35.9% in fiscal 2016. This gross margin improvement is particularly notable because it comes in the face of two major headwinds. First, Kohl's is posting steady double-digit growth in digital sales, and gross margin tends to be lower for e-commerce transactions due to shipping costs. Second, gross margin tends to be lower for national brands than for private-label brands, and Kohl's has been making a big push to grow its sales of national brands recently. A key deal to begin selling Under Armour gear went into effect two years ago. As a result, Kohl's derived 61% of its sales from national brands last year, up from 54% in fiscal 2016. Yet Kohl's was able to more than offset the impact of this shift in its merchandise mix and continue expanding its gross margin. The exterior of a Kohl's store Kohl's has expanded its gross margin for two consecutive years. Image source: Kohl's. Kohl's plans to continue its focus on growing sales of national brands in 2019. That will include the launch of the Nine West brand at Kohl's this summer. Nevertheless, management expects gross margin to increase slightly once again this year. Story continues Free cash flow soared last year, but it may dip in fiscal 2019 One of the most impressive aspects of Kohl's financial performance last year was its cash-flow production. Free cash flow surged 59% year over year to $1.4 billion: the company's highest full-year total in nearly a decade. Working capital gains and a decline in capex to $578 million -- compared to $768 million just two years earlier -- contributed to this strong result. Looking ahead to fiscal 2019, free cash flow is likely to recede again, due to higher planned capital spending. Kohl's expects capex to jump to around $850 million this year, mainly thanks to costs associated with building its sixth e-commerce fulfillment center. Omnichannel capex will nearly triple year over year to $280 million. Kohl's is also planning a substantial year-over-year increase in capex for its "store strategies" in fiscal 2019: from $152 million to $240 million. This increase likely relates to the decision to open four more small-format stores this year and an ongoing initiative to subdivide several stores in order to lease excess space to other retail tenants, including Aldi and Planet Fitness. However, capex is likely to moderate in fiscal 2020, driving a rebound in free cash flow. First, e-commerce fulfillment center spending tends to be heavily concentrated in certain years, depending on the timing of construction. Second, technology capex is likely to decline over time, as Kohl's is shifting spending toward cloud services, which have a pay-as-you-go business model. The balance sheet is in excellent shape Kohl's annual report also confirmed that the company's balance sheet is in better shape than it has been since at least 2011. That's because Kohl's used a substantial proportion of its free cash flow last year to pay down debt. By the end of fiscal 2018, Kohl's had $3.5 billion of debt and capital leases on its balance sheet, down from $4.5 billion at the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, the company posted a modest increase in its adjusted earnings last year. This enabled it to reduce its leverage ratio -- adjusted debt divided by adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and rent -- from 2.54 to 2.16. Kohl's current leverage ratio puts it well within investment-grade territory. That means it will be able to return more of its free cash flow to shareholders in the future. Indeed, Kohl's raised its dividend by 10% this year. It also expects to buy back more stock, even though free cash flow will probably be lower in fiscal 2019 than it was last year. And with free cash flow likely to rebound after this year, Kohl's shareholders could benefit from even higher capital returns in fiscal 2020 and beyond. More From The Motley Fool Adam Levine-Weinberg owns shares of Kohl's. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Under Armour (A and C shares). The Motley Fool recommends Planet Fitness. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Priscilla Gragg Dont sit so close to the TVyoure gonna burn your eyes out! Thats what your own parents may have said to you as you played Super Mario Bros. as a child. But was their fear really warranted? Richard Golden, M.D., chairman of the public information committee for the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, explains what you should believe when it comes to protecting your own kids peepers. The truth: A screen wont harm your kids eyes, but it may cause them to feel dry and strained. The bright light makes it harder for anyones eyes to focus, and we blink less when staring at our phone or a computer. Plus, the eyes natural focus is for distance, so when a screen is brought closer to your childs face, her eyes need to work harder, which can lead to strain and contribute to headaches. Encourage her to keep her device at a comfortable reading distance, like 12 to 16 inches away, whenever shes using it. If youre worried about blue light, Dr. Golden says it would take many years of extended exposure to cause serious damage. At this point in your childs life, ultraviolet light is a bigger concern, so have her wear sunglasses and a hat when shes outside. The truth: Your childs pediatrician should screen him for various eye conditions and vision problems during his regular well-child visits starting at birth, but he doesnt need to see an ophthalmologist unless there is an issue. The pediatrician will check his eye movements, tracking, and pupil response, and once hes 3 or 4 years old, shell also test his ability to match figures or read letters on a chart. If at any point she is concerned about his vision, shell refer him to an eye doctor for further testing or to get glasses. Of course, if you ever notice that your child is rubbing his eyes a lot, has eye discharge, is sensitive to light, or is squinting, check in with his pediatrician sooner. The truth: Carrots contain vitamin A, which supports healthy eyesight. (So do green leafy vegetables like kale and spinach.) But these veggies wont improve your childs vision if she needs glasses. While you dont need to serve anything special for her eyes, you should offer fresh produce anyway for her overall well-being. The truth: Genetics is tricky. Think of it like height: If you and your partner are tall, your child will likely be tall, too, but that doesnt mean hell be the exact height as either of you. Similarly, if youre nearsighted or farsighted or have astigmatism, theres a good chance your child will as well, to some degree. Other factors, such as severe prematurity or corneal abnormalities, can also play a role in your childs need for glasses, but genetics is by and large the biggest culprit, says Dr. Golden. A stocks price-to-sales ratio reflects how much investors are paying for each dollar of revenues generated by the company. If the price-to-sales ratio is 1, it means that investors are paying $1 for every $1 of revenues generated by the company. So, it goes without saying that a stock with a price-to-sales below 1 is a good bargain, as investors need to pay less than a dollar for a dollars worth. Thus, a stock with a lower price-to-sales ratio is a more suitable investment than a stock with a high price-to-sales ratio. When considering valuation metrics, price-to-earnings ratio has always been the obvious choice. This is because calculations based on earnings are easy and come in handy. However, price-to-sales has emerged as a convenient tool to determine the value of stocks that are incurring losses or are in an early cycle of development, generating meager or no profits. While a loss-making company with a negative price-to-earnings ratio falls out of investor favor, its price-to-sales could indicate the hidden strength of its business. This underrated ratio is also used to identify a recovery situation or ensure that a company's growth is not overvalued. Price-to-sales is often preferred over price-to-earnings as companies can manipulate their earnings using various accounting measures. However, sales are harder to manipulate and are relatively reliable. However, one should keep in mind that a company with high debt and low price-to-sales is not an ideal choice. The high debt level will have to be paid off at some point, leading to further share issuance, rise in market cap and ultimately a higher price-to-sales ratio. In any case, the price-to-sales ratio used in isolation cannot do the trick. One should also analyze other ratios like Price/Earnings, Price/Book and Debt/Equity before arriving at any investment decision. Screening Parameters Price to Sales less than Median Price to Sales for its Industry: The lower the price-to-sales ratio, the better. Price to Earnings using F(1) estimate less than Median Price to Earnings for its Industry: The lower, the better. Price to Book (common Equity) less than Median Price to Book for its Industry: This is another parameter to ensure the value feature of a stock. Debt to Equity (Most Recent) less than Median Debt to Equity for its Industry: A company with less debt should have a stable price-to-sales ratio. Current Price greater than or equal to $5: The stocks must all be trading at a minimum of $5 or higher. Zacks Rank less than or equal to #2: Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy) stocks are known to outperform irrespective of the market environment. Value Score less than or equal to B: Our research shows that stocks with a Value Score of A or B when combined with a Zacks Rank #1 or 2 offer the best opportunities in the value investing space. Here are seven of the 18 stocks that qualified the screening: Quanta Services Inc. PWR is a leading national provider of specialty contracting services and one of the largest contractors serving the transmission and distribution sector of the North American electric utility industry. Quanta Services has operations in the United States, Canada, Australia and other selected international markets. This Zacks Rank #1 company has a Value Score of B. The 3-5 year EPS growth rate for the stock is estimated to be 8%. G-III Apparel Group, Ltd. GIII is a manufacturer, designer and distributor of apparel and accessories under licensed brands, owned brands and private label brands. It has a portfolio of more than 40 licensed and proprietary brands, including five global major brands DKNY, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Karl Lagerfeld. The companys owned brands include Donna Karan, DKNY, Vilebrequin, G. H. Bass, Andrew Marc, Marc New York, Eliza J and Jessica Howard. This Zacks Rank #1 company has a 35 year estimated EPS growth rate of 15% and a Value Score of A. Korea Electric Power Corporation KEP is an integrated electric utility company that generates, transmits and distributes electricity in Korea and internationally. Based in Naju, South Korea, the company generates power from nuclear, coal, oil, liquefied natural gas, internal combustion, combined-cycle, integrated gasification combined cycle, hydro, wind, solar, fuel cell, biogas, and other sources. The stock currently has a Zacks Rank #1 and a Value Score of B. It has a 3-5 year estimated EPS growth rate of 5%. Israel Chemicals Ltd. ICL is a specialty minerals company with worldwide operations. The company's products include bromine specialty chemicals, potash, phosphate fertilizers, and specialty performance and industrial products. It markets its products primarily in Israel, Europe, and the Americas. The company has an estimated 35 year EPS growth rate of 9.5%. The stock currently has a Value Score of A and a Zacks Rank #2. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Rocky Brands RCKY is a manufacturer and seller of footwear and apparel in the United States, Canada and internationally. It sells products under the Rocky, Georgia Boot, Durango, Lehigh, Creative Recreation, and Michelin brands. The stock currently has a Value Score of A and a Zacks Rank #2. Capital One Financial Corporation COF is primarily focused on consumer and commercial lending as well as deposit origination. Through its banking and non-banking subsidiaries, it provides various financial products and services to consumers, small businesses and commercial clients in the United States. Capital Ones principal subsidiaries include Capital One Bank (USA), National Association (COBNA) and Capital One National Association (CONA). This Zacks Rank #2 company has a 35 year EPS growth rate of 9% and a Value Score of A. F.N.B. Corporation FNB is a financial holding company that provides a wide range of financial services primarily to consumers, corporations, governments, and small- to medium-sized businesses. It operates through three segments: Community Banking, Wealth Management, and Insurance. The stock has a Zacks Rank #2 and a Value Score of B. It has a 3-5 year estimated EPS growth rate of 9.5%. You can get the rest of the stocks on this list by signing up now for your 2-week free trial to the Research Wizard and start using this screen in your own trading. Further, you can also create your own strategies and test them first before taking the investment plunge. The Research Wizard is a great place to begin. It's easy to use. Everything is in plain language. And it's very intuitive. Start your trial to the Research Wizard 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. 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 Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEP) : Free Stock Analysis Report F.N.B. Corporation (FNB) : Free Stock Analysis Report Quanta Services, Inc. (PWR) : Free Stock Analysis Report Israel Chemicals Shs (ICL) : Free Stock Analysis Report Capital One Financial Corporation (COF) : Free Stock Analysis Report Rocky Brands, Inc. (RCKY) : Free Stock Analysis Report G-III Apparel Group, LTD. (GIII) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! A large part of investment returns can be generated by dividend-paying stock given their role in compounding returns over time. Historically, Agricultural Bank of China Limited (HKG:1288) has paid dividends to shareholders, and these days it yields 5.5%. Does Agricultural Bank of China tick all the boxes of a great dividend stock? Below, I'll take you through my analysis. See our latest analysis for Agricultural Bank of China 5 questions to ask before buying a dividend stock When assessing a stock as a potential addition to my dividend Portfolio, I look at these five areas: Does it pay an annual yield higher than 75% of dividend payers? Has it paid dividend every year without dramatically reducing payout in the past? Has dividend per share amount increased over the past? Does earnings amply cover its dividend payments? Will the company be able to keep paying dividend based on the future earnings growth? SEHK:1288 Historical Dividend Yield, April 1st 2019 How does Agricultural Bank of China fare? Agricultural Bank of China has a trailing twelve-month payout ratio of 30%, meaning the dividend is sufficiently covered by earnings. Going forward, analysts expect 1288's payout to remain around the same level at 31% of its earnings. Assuming a constant share price, this equates to a dividend yield of 6.4%. In addition to this, EPS should increase to CN0.60. When thinking about whether a dividend is sustainable, another factor to consider is the cash flow. A company with strong cash flow, relative to earnings, can sometimes sustain a high pay out ratio. Reliablity is an important factor for dividend stocks, particularly for income investors who want a strong track record of payment and a positive outlook for future payout. Unfortunately, it is really too early to view Agricultural Bank of China as a dividend investment. It has only been consistently paying dividends for 9 years, however, standard practice for reliable payers is to look for a 10-year minimum track record. Story continues In terms of its peers, Agricultural Bank of China generates a yield of 5.5%, which is high for Banks stocks. Next Steps: With this in mind, I definitely rank Agricultural Bank of China as a strong dividend stock, and makes it worth further research for anyone who likes steady income generation from their portfolio. Given that this is purely a dividend analysis, you should always research extensively before deciding whether or not a stock is an appropriate investment for you. I always recommend analysing the company's fundamentals and underlying business before making an investment decision. I've put together three essential factors you should further examine: Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for 1288s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for 1288s outlook. Valuation: What is 1288 worth today? Even if the stock is a cash cow, it's not worth an infinite price. The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether 1288 is currently mispriced by the market. Other Dividend Rockstars: Are there better dividend payers with stronger fundamentals out there? Check out our free list of these great stocks here. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. By Ross Kerber and Suzanne Barlyn (Reuters) - Insurer American International Group Inc said on Tuesday it paid Chief Executive Officer Brian Duperreault $20.9 million in 2018 while also outlining a series of reforms to its pay practices in the face of shareholder criticism. The pay, for Duperreault's first full year at the helm of the insurer, was less than half the $43.1 million he received in 2017, which included a $12 million cash bonus and other one-time awards. At its annual meeting in 2018, only 62 percent of shareholder votes backed the pay, an unusually low number compared with the roughly 95 percent support that major U.S. companies typically receive in such votes. So-called say-on-pay votes are nonbinding but low results often spur directors into action to guard against losing their own seats. AIG now hopes to win over some of the skeptical investors at this years annual meeting, set for May 21 in New York. Potentially making the task harder will be that shares of the company declined 34 percent in 2018. Duperreault, known in the insurance industry as a turnaround expert, took charge of AIG in May 2017. In its proxy, filed on Tuesday, AIG listed a number of steps it has taken in response to shareholder concerns, including tying executive pay more directly to share performance. For instance, the company said that although Duperreault could have achieved a short-term incentive award of $3.456 million, the board reduced that to $3.04 million in order to reflect shared accountability for overall company performance. Other changes include an initiative to increase diversity among board members and ensuring that board member nominees who are also chief executive officers and up for election this year serve on only one outside board. (Reporting by Suzanne Barlyn in New York and Ross Kerber in Boston; Editing by Matthew Lewis) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her seat in Congress after defeating a Democratic incumbent, so its not surprising that shes now embroiled in a fight with the party Establishment over similar primary challenges. In late March, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it would no longer work with consultants who have advised candidates who challenged Democratic incumbents. As a protest to what she called a blacklist, Ocasio-Cortez raised more than $92,000 for Democrats in swing districts across the country over the weekend. The fight gets at the heart of a rising conflict among the partys left flank, which would like to replace both Republican incumbents and moderate Democrats with more progressive alternatives, and Establishment groups like the DCCC, which are more focused on keeping a Democratic majority. Read More: Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs Unlikely Rise On March 22, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unveiled new standards for political vendors, announcing that in order to protect Democratic incumbents, the DCCC will not conduct business with, nor recommend to any of its targeted campaigns, any consultant that works with an opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus. The new standards also include diversity guidelines for vendors, and a mandate that they include unionized labor when possible. But many Progressives saw the new standards as an attempt to strangle the new progressive organizations like the Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, two groups that endorsed progressives Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ayanna Pressley in their races to unseat longtime Democratic incumbents. Both groups have said they plan to launch more primary challengers to Democrats in safe blue districts who they deem to be insufficiently progressive, a plan which has sent shock waves through the Democratic establishment. It seems like the DCCC is trying to use their financial weight to make it more difficult to help out a primary challenger like Ayanna Pressley or like AOC, says Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, a progressive organization that boosts primary challengers to Democrats who take corporate donations. As primary challenges become more mainstream, the DCCC is freaking out. Story continues The DCCC said it was simply looking to protect a big tent within the party. When Chairwoman Bustos was running to lead the DCCC, she stood up in front of her colleagues and made a promise to stand with and protect every Member of the most diverse caucus in Congressional history as we work to defend and grow our Democratic majority, said DCCC spokesperson Cole Leiter. This transparent policy follows through on that exact promise and will protect all Members of the Democratic Caucus regardless of where they fall within our big tent. But other progressives argued that the DCCC rule would create a roadblock for fresh faces. If the DCCC enacts this policy to blacklist vendors who work with challengers, we risk undermining an entire universe of potential candidates and vendors especially women and people of color whose ideas, energy, and innovation need a place in our party, Pressley told TIME. When a candidate takes the risk to run, Democrats should not be in the practice of creating litmus tests or roadblocks that have a chilling effect on new candidates or those who would invest their sweat equity in support. The DCCCs new rule to blacklist + boycott anyone who does business w/ primary challengers is extremely divisive & harmful to the party, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Saturday night. My recommendation, if youre a small-dollar donor: pause your donations to DCCC & give directly to swing candidates instead. She then went on to tweet links to the fundraising pages for three newly elected Democrats candidates running in swing districts: Reps. Mike Levin and Katie Porter in California and Rep. Lauren Underwood in Illinois. On Sunday, she sent out an email urging her supporters to donate to Levin, Rep. Jahana Hayes in Connecticut and Rep. Katie Hill in California. By Monday, those three candidates had raised more than $92,000. The push to help candidates in swing districts is a shift for Ocasio-Cortez, who has mostly focused on boosting her progressive allies, mostly from solidly liberal areas. Not all of the candidates she supported over the weekend are in lockstep with her on policy issues: Hill, Porter and Underwood have not signed on as co-sponsors of Ocasio-Cortezs Green New Deal, and Underwood has said she wants to defend and repair the Affordable Care Act rather than push for Medicare for All. We were very appreciative of the support, and she helped get us to our fundraising goal, said Underwoods campaign manager Ronnie Cho, adding that other members of Congress also helped her reach her goal. But despite the fundraising haul, the Ocasio-Cortez endorsement may actually create problems for Democrats running in swing districts. In a press release Monday, the National Republican Campaign Committee slammed Californias own socialist Democrat, Katie Hill, adding that Hill, like Ocasio-Cortez, has no problem kicking Californians off their private health insurance and replacing it with Medicare for All. By Monday, Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive House Democrat who has been critical of the new DCCC policy, floated a potential compromise: maybe, he told reporters, the DCCC should only ban strategists who worked against Democratic incumbents in swing districts. But a DCCC insider told TIME that the rule is unlikely to change in any way. Police in Thailand say a group of Japanese men who ran a call center scam defrauded people in Japan of more than 900,000 dollars. Thai police on Friday raided the home they used in the resort city of Pattaya. They arrested 15 Japanese men, ranging in age from 22 to 54, on suspicion of working illegally in the country. Police found at least 500 names and phone numbers of Japanese, as well as instructions on how to make calls to carry out the scams. Police revealed the damage estimate at a news conference on Tuesday. They added that three or four others, including a Thai national, may have been involved. Police also showed the media the 15 men being interrogated. All appeared in orange T-shirts worn by detained suspects. They looked down and didn't respond to reporters' questions. Thai police plan to have Japanese police join their investigation. In a separate swindling case, Thai police arrested a 38-year-old Japanese man wanted by Japanese authorities. The man is suspected of defrauding a 75-year-old woman in Nara Prefecture of more than 70,000 dollars in 2013. Kazuya Hashimoto was arrested in Bangkok on Friday. Local police were tipped off to his whereabouts through the Japanese Embassy in the Thai capital. He is expected to be sent back to Japan shortly. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. ARE has unveiled Phase 1 of Alexandria Center for AgTech Research Triangle the companys latest strategic agricultural technology (agtech) business initiatives. The development will provide infrastructure and capital to rapidly-growing agtech companies. The development is the only integrated, multi-tenant greenhouse campus that offers amenity-rich agtech R&D in the United States. The redevelopment in Research Triangle Park (RTP) is fully leased and spans 175,000 rentable square feet of space (RSF). It is situated at 5 Laboratory Drive in North Carolina. Additionally, construction and pre-leasing of the second phase of the development project, spanning 160,000 RSF, is currently underway at 9 Laboratory Drive. It will further expand the office/laboratory and greenhouse space offering at the Alexandria Center for AgTech. The property will likely be delivered in 2020. Per management, the company witnessed a surge in capital invested in the agtech industry, as global venture capital funding increased significantly last year. This has likely aided the companys focus to grow this agtech cluster and address challenges of advancing human health by improving nutrition. Alexandria Center for AgTech is currently leased to a variety of high-quality companies, including Arysta LifeScience Inc., GreenLight Biosciences, Inc., Boragen, Inc., Elo Life Systems, Inc. and Indigo Ag, Inc. Moreover, the building at 5 Laboratory Drive has been designed to be highly collaborative, and will feature highly adaptable and unique spaces. At this agtech cluster, the company has launched two proprietary platforms Alexandria LaunchLabs AgTech and agtech-focused Alexandria Seed Capital platform that expands its Alexandria LaunchLabs initiative. Notably, Alexandria LaunchLabs provides seed-stage financing to life-science companies, and last January, the company launched Alexandria Seed Capital Platform, extending the funding model. Story continues In fact, Alexandria LaunchLabs AgTech is situated at the recently-unveiled development. It is a premier, full-service startup platform that will support growth of early-stage agtech companies. It will provide member companies with ready-to-move-in office/laboratory and greenhouse space. Also, it will provide access to seed capital through the Alexandria Seed Capital Platform AgTech. This Zacks #2 (Buy) Ranked stock has gained 14.7% over the past six months, outperforming 10.7% growth recorded by the industry. Other Stocks to Consider Investors can also consider other similarly-ranked stocks from the same space like Terreno Realty Corporation TRNO, Cousins Properties Incorporated CUZ and Boston Properties, Inc. BXP. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Terreno Realtys FFO per share estimates for 2019 remained unchanged at $1.42, in the past month. Furthermore, it has a long-term growth rate of 8.40%. Cousins Properties Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 FFO per share has been revised upward 15.9% to 73 cents in the past month. Also, it has a long-term growth rate of 3.20%. Boston Properties FFO per share estimate for the ongoing year has been revised marginally north to $6.92 in 30 days time. Additionally, it has a long-term growth rate of 6.30%. Today's Best Stocks from Zacks Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%. This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000 2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year. See their latest picks free >> 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 Boston Properties, Inc. (BXP) : Free Stock Analysis Report Terreno Realty Corporation (TRNO) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cousins Properties Incorporated (CUZ) : Free Stock Analysis Report Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (ARE) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Algiers (AFP) - Flag-waving Algerians celebrated the resignation of ailing leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika after two decades in power, but vowed to keep protesting to demand sweeping change to the country's whole political system. The 82-year-old president ceded power in the face of massive street demonstrations that have shaken the North African nation, with state media announcing late Tuesday he had submitted his resignation with immediate effect. Car horns sounded on the streets before jubilant crowds converged in the centre of the capital Algiers to cheer the departure of the veteran leader, who has rarely appeared in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. At the same time, many people said they were determined to continue demonstrating, rejecting any transition that leaves power in the hands of the "system". "I want my daughter to remember this historic day. Bouteflika's gone, but it's far from over," said 35-year-old Amal, who wore a T-shirt with the slogan "I am against the system" and vowed to march again on Friday. For 44-year-old engineer Hamid Boumaza, Bouteflika's resignation was "too little, too late". "Bouteflika's departure is no longer enough. We want them all to go. We want full freedom and we will march for as long as necessary." Others paid tribute to the longtime leader, but regretted that he had clung to power for so long. "Bouteflika worked. I voted for him at first, but he didn't know how to leave with his head held high," said Bilan Brahim, 40. - 'Appeasement of hearts' - 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 Bouteflika announced in February that he would seek a fifth term in office in an election that had been scheduled for this month. He dropped his bid in the face of the mass protests but also postponed the vote, angering Algerians who saw the move as a ploy to stay in power. Story continues On Monday, his office said he would resign before his mandate expires at the end of the month. And as pressure mounted, state television announced late Tuesday that Bouteflika "officially advised the Constitutional Council of the end of his term of office as President of the Republic". "This decision which I take in my soul and conscience is destined to contribute to the appeasement of the hearts and minds of my compatriots, to allow them to take Algeria towards a better future to which they legitimately aspire," his resignation letter said. Footage showed Bouteflika, dressed in a beige North African tunic and sitting in his wheelchair, handing the resignation letter to the head of the Constitutional Council, Tayeb Belaiz. The United States said the future of Algeria was now up to its people. "Questions about how to navigate this transition in Algeria, that is for the Algerian people to decide," State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters. Russian, a longtime ally of Algeria, called for a transition without foreign "interference". French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Bouteflika's decision to step down marked the turning of "an important page in the history of Algeria". "We are confident in the ability of all Algerians to continue this democratic transition in the same spirit of calm and responsibility" that has prevailed in recent weeks, Le Drian added. Algeria's constitution says that once the president officially resigns, the speaker of the upper house of parliament, 77-year-old Abdelkader Bensalah, acts as interim leader for up to 90 days during which a presidential election must be organised. The resignation came shortly after the military demanded impeachment proceedings be launched against Bouteflika. Armed forces chief Ahmed Gaid Salah said the army's "sole ambition" was to "protect the people from a handful of (other) people who have unduly taken over the wealth of the Algerian people". A long-time Bouteflika ally, the general last week called on the president to resign or be declared unfit to rule, becoming one of the first of his longtime supporters to abandon him. Bouteflika had named a new government on Sunday, made up mainly of technocrats under recently appointed premier Noureddine Bedoui. The administration -- supposed to steer the country towards transition -- included General Gaid Salah remaining in his position as deputy defence minister. Among the other key Bouteflika backers is his younger brother and special adviser Said, who was frequently cited in the past as a likely successor to the president. Discreet and rarely seen in public, Said Bouteflika has exerted increasing influence behind the scenes as his brother's health worsened, but the president's resignation could take away much of his power. Algiers (AFP) - Algeria's veteran President Abdelaziz Bouteflika informed the Constitutional Council that he is resigning in a move that is to take effect on Tuesday, state television said, after the military called for his impeachment. Bouteflika "officially advised the Constitutional Council of the end of his term of office as President of the Republic" from Tuesday, said a news ticker on the television. The report came hours after armed forces chief Ahmed Gaid Salah demanded the immediate launch of impeachment proceedings against Bouteflika as the military dismissed an announcement he would resign before his mandate expires at the end of the month. In power for two decades, Bouteflika has come under mounting pressure to step down since his decision to seek a fifth term despite rarely being seen in public after suffering a stroke in 2013. The 82-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, said last month he would pull out of the bid for another term, and on Monday his office said he would resign before his mandate expires on April 28. The moves failed to quell public ire, with hundreds of students taking to the streets again earlier on Tuesday. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has hit back at Liz Cheney after the Republican congresswoman accused her Democratic colleague of misunderstanding the history of the US constitution. Ms Cheney, daughter of former president Dick Cheney, on Monday shared a video of Ms Ocasio-Cortez in which she claimed the Democratic party used to be so popular politicians in the 1940s had to amend the Constitution in order to stop Franklin D Roosevelt being re-elected. The comment was mocked by critics who pointed out Roosevelt died two years before Congress ratified the 22 Amendment, which prevented presidents from serving more than two terms. We knew the Democrats let dead people vote. According to @AOC, they can run for President, too, Ms Cheney tweeted in reference to a conspiracy theory espoused by Donald Trump. I see from your dead people comment that you get your news from Facebook memes, responded Ms Ocasio-Cortez, who linked to a Newsweek article she said would clarify your misunderstanding of the 22nd Amendment. Despite the crticism, Ms Ocasio-Cortez was at least partially justified in her claim Roosevelt's popularity forced a constitutional change. Lawmakers were already pushing for the 22nd Amendment when Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in 1944. He died less than three months after his inauguration the following year, before a Republican-controlled Congress ratified the amendment in 1947. Americans borrowed about $88 billion to pay for health care last year, and one in four people skipped care because of costs, according to a new Gallup survey funded by a nonpartisan health group. The nationwide survey of 3,537 adults found that lower-income adults were more likely to skip care or fear bankruptcy over spiraling medical costs, but even affluent households deferred care over concerns about finances. West Health, a nonprofit coalition funded by Gary and Mary West, commissioned and funded the Gallup survey to ask Americans how health costs affect their finances, choices about care and views on the health care system, according to Tim Lash, West Health's chief strategy officer. Lash says worries about financial hardship from medical bills cut across all income levels. "Lower-income brackets had the most fear," Lash says. But "that fear persisted even for those we would associate with the middle class and upper middle class. Its not just those living at or slightly above poverty that are concerned. Its even the more affluent among us." 'Complex and interdependent': Big Pharma CEOs tell senators they won't reduce drug costs without other changes 'The culture has shifted': Challenge to Obamacare could leave 20 million people without health insurance The telephone survey was conducted Jan. 14 to Feb. 20 among insured and uninsured adults in 50 states and the District of Columbia. The margin of error ranged from plus or minus 1.2 to 2.1 percentage points. About one in eight people said they borrowed to pay health costs for themselves or a family member, says Dan Witters, a Gallup senior researcher. Based on more detailed questions among people who used credit or other forms of borrowing, Gallup estimated 2.7 million Americans borrowed at least $10,000, and an additional 1.6 million borrowed more than $5,000. Gallup estimated that Americans collectively borrowed $88 billion to pay for health care over the past 12 months. Story continues If that estimate is correct, Americans borrowed 2.5% of the nation's total $3.5 trillion in health spending in 2018. Benedic Ippolito, an American Enterprise Institute research fellow and health economist, says Americans often think medical debt is different from other types of debt. Ippolito's research released last year found that one in six Americans have a past-due medical bill on their credit report. More than half of those bills were for less than $600, and young adults were more likely to have an unpaid medical bill than older adults even though older adults typically spend more on health care. 'The system is broken': Struggling to stay alive: Rising insulin prices cause diabetics to go to extremes "It's just so low-priority relative to paying the mortgage, the car, they simply dont pay it," Ippolito says. "Not because they couldnt but because it is not as important." The Gallup survey revealed that people often don't know what they will pay for care at a hospital or for an outpatient surgery. About one in three adults reported that doctors discussed cost before ordering a recommended drug or procedure. In addition to questions about personal finances, the Gallup poll asked people how they view the American health care system's quality and whether Congress can effectively rein in medical prices. Survey respondents who identified as Republican were more likely than Democrats to say U.S. health quality was the best or among the best in the world. But two-thirds of Republicans and Democrats were "not at all confident" that Congress could achieve a bipartisan solution to lowering health costs. Lash says informing the public about health costs must include a discussion on quality. "Too many Americans justify the high cost were spending with this false belief that its justified because of the outcomes were getting," Lash says. "Perhaps displacing that myth, well get more engagement and a little more commitment to advancing smart policies." This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fear and health care: Gallup survey finds Americans skipped treatment, borrowed $88B to pay for costs DETROIT A Facebook video posted Wednesday showing a boy taking a pocked Muskegon Heights street into his own hands and filling up the potholes with dirt has since garnered more than 50,000 views. The boy, Monte Scott, 12, told WZZM-TV that he didn't want people messing up their cars like his mom did. In the video, Scott is seen working in a red and orange hoodie, using a shovel and a garbage can of dirt to fill up one of the larger potholes on what looks to be a bumpy stretch of street. "He really got a garbage can filling these potholes," a woman's voice in the video says. "Because his granny drive down this street and they down here." Post by trinell.scott. Passers-by stopped to capture the scene on camera, praise Scott and lament about the state of the roadway. "You're gonna be something too, you're a hard worker," a man is heard telling Scott. A user sharing the video identified herself as Scott's mother, and said her son left school early after a half-day, so he chose to fill up the potholes on Maffett Street off of Summit. "I love my son. He has a heart of gold," the video post's caption said. According to WZZM-TV, Scott's mother, Trinell Scott said he didn't tell anybody that he was planning on doing this, and she found about it when her niece texted her that a video was on Facebook. She also told the station that her son has since filled around 15 potholes near his family's home, and hopes to finish the street. Muskegon Heights Mayor Kimberley Sims told the Free Press that she was touched to hear about Scott's efforts and inspired. However, Sims said it was bittersweet to see Scott take charge because "the problem is so bad that he feels he has to do that." "We have a constant issue of potholes," Sims said, adding that Muskegon Heights crews are small, but are working to address issues daily this winter hit the city's roads particularly hard. "I commend the young man's efforts. He's 12, he should be getting ready for school the next day, or playing video games," she said, adding that his behavior is a "true testament" this his love for community and for his family. Story continues Sims explained the city passed its first street millage a couple years ago and levied taxes to improve the condition of the local roads, but said, "our overall funding system is broke." She said it's important to consider that Muskegon Heights is a depressed community, and "the tax base isn't there that would be in most communities." Looking to solutions, Sims said that if revenue sharing in the state could increase, communities like Muskegon Heights could get additional support and allocate more funds towards improvements that benefit the community. Sims said these policy improvements, plans and conversations can help drive progress, so the city's kids don't have to worry about fixing the streets. Follow Aleanna Siacon on Twitter: @AleannaSiacon. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 'He has a heart of gold': 12-year-old filling potholes in Michigan goes viral WASHINGTON President Donald Trump and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz are trading more insults over the pace of hurricane recovery in Puerto Rico, calling each other "crazed" and "unhinged." "The crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health," Trump said during a series of tweets late Monday night about the fate of a disaster relief bill in the Senate. Cruz quickly fired back, saying the Trump administration continued to provide an inadequate response to the damage wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017. "Pres Trump continues to embarrass himself & the Office he holds," she tweeted. "He is unhinged & thus lies about the $ received by PR." Start the day smarter: Get USA TODAY's Daily Briefing in your inbox Puerto Rico: Divided Senate split on emergency aid that would help Puerto Rico, Midwest, California 'I'll punch the bully in the mouth': Puerto Rico governor warns Trump over Maria relief Resuming the argument Tuesday morning, Trump again claimed that "Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane," but it is not clear where he got that figure, and actual spending is not close to that. A FEMA report said it passed the $3 billion mark in public assistance to Puerto Rico in August. Ricardo Rossello, the governor of Puerto Rico, admonished Trump over his false claim of $91 billion. "Mr. President: STOP spreading misinformation!" he tweeted. "#PuertoRico has not received $91b (only 300M in permanent work). It's not 'us' vs 'them'. It's about Americans in need." Trump invoked Cruz in a series of tweets complaining that Democrats blocked a disaster relief package because it did not contain enough assistance for Puerto Rico. ....the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health. 91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 Pres Trump continues to embarrass himself & the Office he holds. He is unhinged & thus lies about the $ received by PR. HE KNOWS HIS RESPONSE was innefficient at best. He can huff & puff all he wants but he cannot escape the death of 3,000 on his watch. SHAME ON YOU! 1/2 https://t.co/snGmda1CNN Carmen Yulin Cruz (@CarmenYulinCruz) April 2, 2019 Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., criticized Trump for urging senators not to provide any more aid to Puerto Rico. The president reportedly told colleagues that "they don't know how to spend the money and they're not spending it wisely." Story continues "They said that Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned," Schumer said. "President Trump tweets while Puerto Rico suffers." Mr. President: STOP spreading misinformation! #PuertoRico has not received $91b (only 300M in permanent work). It's not "us" vs "them". It's about Americans in need. https://t.co/00CqevN5T7 Ricardo Rossello (@ricardorossello) April 2, 2019 The impasse has stalled passage of a $13.5 billion bill that includes assistance to states hit by historic floods, including farm country in Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa. 'Hamilton': Lin-Manuel Miranda reprises 'Hamilton' role in Puerto Rico to raise funds Trump: I've helped Puerto Rico more than 'any living human being,' alleges officials misspending funds In one of his tweets, Trump said Puerto Rico is receiving assistance, "and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful!" Trump on Tuesday claimed he is "the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico," and that the problem is "bad Island leadership and with so much money wasted." Democrats and Puerto Rico officials said money has been appropriated for hurricane relief, but only a fraction has actually been spent. In her response, Cruz who is now running for governor of Puerto Rico said Trump "KNOWS HIS RESPONSE was innefficient at best. He can huff & puff all he wants but he cannot escape the death of 3,000 on his watch. SHAME ON YOU!" This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Unhinged': President Trump and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz trade insults over Puerto Rico relief Apple Card is coming this summer. And when its released, dont be surprised if some industry watchers compare it to a variety of high-end credit cards including the American Express Platinum. The tech giant unveiled the credit card during its otherwise star-studded Hollywood upfront-like event last week. While the Apple Card will allow users to make purchases anywhere MasterCard is accepted, its also quite unlike many other cards available today. Apple Card doesnt have late fees, annual fees, international fees, or over-limit fees. And although users will be encouraged to pay their monthly statements, technically, if you want to skip a month, you can. Just be ready to pay extra interest. For its part, Apple has called its credit card revolutionary and suggested it could upend the industry. But its also entering a market thats dominated by companies including Visa, Chase, American Express, and others, that have the credit card game down to a science. Apple is starting from the bottom of base camp in what looks to be a climb of Mt. Everest to gain 5% to 7% market share over the next few years, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told Fortune in an interview. The stage is set, now its about will consumers sign onto the platform and use the Apple Card over the coming years. Ives went on to say that Apples clear opportunity is tapping into its 1.4 billion active iOS devices and monetizing the financial vertical. He believes the company could attract 20 million Apple Card customers in its first three years. But before it can get there, Apple Card needs to intrigue users. As a metal card with plenty of incentives for using it, I cant help but compare it to the American Express Platinuma similarly high-end metal card with its own slate of perks that some may find compelling. So, to shed some light on where Apple Card might fit in the market, Ive compared the Apple Card and American Express Platinum below. Story continues From design to interest, heres a look at how the two cards compare: Design Apple Card and American Express Platinum are clearly vying for metal credit card dominance. Apple Card has a titanium design and laser-etched Apple logo and cardholder name. Theres a security chip in the card, but no credit card number, CVV, or any other information. The American Express Platinum is a metal card that features American Express logo and border and uses the same security chip in the Apple Card. Unlike the Apple Card, the American Express Platinum displays credit card number, expiration date, and CVV numbers in addition to the cardholders name. Fees Apple created some buzz when it said that cardholders wont be subject to annual fees, international usage fees, over-limit charges, and even late fees. American Express Platinum, on the other hand, is quite different. Cardholders are charged a $550 annual fee for having the card and up to $38 for both late payments and returned payments. And if cardholders want to add cards to their account for family members, American Express charges $175. Theres no charge for foreign transactions. Interest American Express Platinum cardholders pay off their balances each month to avoid interest on purchases. However, the company has launched a program for customers to carry a balance on the American Express Platinum and pay over time. That program, aptly named Pay Over Time, will charge interest on the cards outstanding balance. American Express doesnt say on its dedicated Pay Over Time page how much interest it charges. Apple Card balances come with an interest charge on the outstanding balance. As of this writing, Apple is predicting a variable annual percentage rate (APR) on Apple Card balances of 13.24% to 24.24%. Perks The iPhone makers Apple Card perks are based on a simple, 3-2-1 system. Whenever cardholders buy products at any Apple marketplace, including its brick-and-mortar stores, its App Store, or iTunes, Apple will automatically give them 3% of the purchase price back. Apple Card can be linked to Apples mobile payment service Apple Pay, which lets users hold their iPhones to purchase terminals and buy goods. When they use Apple Pay linked to the Apple Card at any store, they will get 2% of the purchase price back. Using the actual Apple Card at a store will earn cardholders 1% cash back. American Express has no shortage of perks and offers available to Platinum cardholders. The card comes with up to $200 in free Uber rides each year. American Express also uses a membership points system that adds points to cardholder accounts based on their purchase. Those points can be redeemed for cash, travel, or retail gift cards. American Express Platinum cardholders can also get up to $200 in airline fee credit to cover extra baggage costs, in-flight refreshments, and more. And with American Express partnership with hotels around the world, Platinum cardholders can get discounted rates when using their cards to book a room. Add that to access to lounges at airports around the world and other cashback offers, American Express Platinum is a clear leader in perks. Business So far, Apple has not said whether the Apple Card will be available to businesses. On the companys website promoting Apple Card, the focus is on the consumer. Meanwhile, American Express offers its Platinum card to both consumers and businesses. Per a CNBC article, which quoted analyst Ming-Chi Kuos report, Apple AAPL is likely to introduce batteries with higher capacity and same physical size in the 2019 iPhone models. Kuo, which expects Apple to release 5.8-inch, 6.1-inch and 6.5-inch iPhone models may have battery capacities of 20%-25%, 0%-5% and 10%-15%, respectively, higher than last years models. Additionally, the batteries are likely to support two-way wireless charging, a feature recently released by rivals Samsung SSNLF and Huawei. The two-way charging feature allows users to charge their wireless-charging devices like Apple Watch and AirPods by just placing the devices on the back of their iPhone. Kuo believes that the feature will create a better integrated user experience of the iPhone and AirPods. The feature may also appease customers who might be disappointed with Apples recent decision to cancel its wireless charging mat, AirPower, which was capable of charging an iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPod at a time Apple Inc. Revenue (TTM) Apple Inc. Revenue (TTM) | Apple Inc. Quote Can New Batteries Boost iPhone Sales? Apple may see an uptick in iPhone sales due to improved battery capacity after experiencing weak demand in China and lower-than-anticipated iPhone sales in first-quarter fiscal 2019. Additionally, increase in Chinese manufacturing activity in the month of March due to increased domestic demand may drive iPhone sales. China is an important market for Apple, given the growing number of middle-class customers. Notably, in first-quarter fiscal 2019, Greater China accounted for 15.6% of total sales. Moreover, the growing popularity of iPhone among Android users may help Apple boost its global smartphone market share. Notably, iPhone XR attracted more Android users than prior models in the United States, per CNBC. Lower Prices May Increase Market Share in Price Sensitive Economies Apple recently lowered the price (roughly 6% on average) of many of its products, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, and AirPods, on its online store in China. The price cuts can be attributed to the recent reduction of a value-added tax in China from 16% to 13%. Earlier, official Chinese third-party Apple sellers such as Alibabas BABA Tmall and JD.com JD lowered prices for Apple devices. Moreover, Apple's move to initiate production of its high-end iPhones in India by partnering with Foxconn may further reduce iPhone prices in 2019 local users. Notably, premium pricing has been blamed for Apples declining market share in countries like China and India. Therefore, the abovementioned initiatives may help the Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock to grow its smartphone user base in the top two growing economies in 2019. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Today's Best Stocks from Zacks Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%. This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000 2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year. See their latest picks free >> 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 JD.com, Inc. (JD) : Free Stock Analysis Report Alibaba Group Holding Limited (BABA) : Free Stock Analysis Report Apple Inc. (AAPL) : Free Stock Analysis Report Samsung Electronics Co. (SSNLF) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research STUTTGART (Reuters) - The need for advanced safety features in automated and autonomous cars will see vehicle software revenues more than quadruple to $1.2 trillion a year by 2030, the head of auto parts supplier Continental said on Tuesday. Ensuring an autonomous car can avoid an accident will require it to process signals from radar, camera and laser sensors, leading to a massive increase in demand for sophisticated software, Elmar Degenhart, chief executive of Continental, one of the world's biggest auto parts' suppliers, said. "Software competence is mission critical for successful car companies but the industry lacks scale in this competence," Degenhart told the Auto Motor und Sport industry congress in Stuttgart, Germany on Tuesday. Vehicle software currently generates annual revenues of $280 billion a year, he said. The revenue growth potential and scarcity of software development skills at traditional car manufacturers makes technology companies outside the auto industry well placed to gain a foothold in the industry. "Car companies are good at validation and homologation and lack software development skills, while software companies have the opposite problem," Degenhart said. "The IT industry has always valued speed of development more than perfecting the product, while the auto industry has tended to veer toward perfecting a product over rushing it out." Their approaches would become more aligned as the two industries cooperate more, he said. "The software and the auto industry will have to work more closely together to develop autonomous vehicles and this will lead to a change in approach on both sides." Separately Continental said it is sticking to plans to prepare for a potential listing its powertrain division on the stock market this year. (Reporting by Edward Taylor; Editing by Susan Fenton) It would most likely resemble the aftermath of a major natural disaster: food shortages, skyrocketing prices, people out of work and a plummeting stock market. While President Donald Trump sees shutting the border with Mexico as punishment for its failure to stop the flow of immigrants coming to the country illegally, economists warn that it would effectively paralyse the US economy given the huge volume of blue jeans, cars, flat-screen TVs, avocados and other goods that cross the border every day. Trump does not see it that way. In a series of tweets in recent days, the president has blasted Mexicos immigration policies and erroneously claimed that shutting the southern border would save the United States money, given that the US buys more goods from Mexico than it sells to it. Next step is to close the Border! the president tweeted on Sunday. This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico! If Mexico doesnt immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week, the president wrote on Friday. While Trump has repeatedly frightened business leaders by threatening to terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which facilitates trade around the continent by cutting tariffs and streamlining regulations, shutting the southern border entirely would be far more destructive. Nearly $1.7 billion (1.3 billion) of goods and services flow across the border daily, as well as nearly half a million legal workers, students, shoppers and tourists, the US Chamber of Commerce said Monday. Most of us in the trade business thought terminating NAFTA would be quite a body blow, but what Trump is talking about now, shutting the southern border, would be catastrophic, said Gary Hufbauer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Its just absurd. If Trump were to shut down the border, here is who would pay the biggest price: Story continues US Manufacturing US industries including agriculture and cars rely on Mexico for trade, either by selling goods and services into Mexico or by using Mexican materials in their products. So one of the biggest victims of a border shutdown would be US manufacturing, a sector the president has promised to help. The United States imported $349.6 billion (268 billion) of goods from Mexico in 2018, and it sent $265 billion (203 billion) back across the border, according to statistics from the Union Nations International Trade Centre, making Mexico the United States largest trading partner after China and Canada. Car manufacturers, who have spread their supply chains across North America, would be among those most affected. Shutting the border would lead to sudden disruptions in the supply chains for parts, causing car production lines in South Carolina, Michigan, Indiana and Alabama to shudder. The change would begin to affect US car production in less than one week, said Ann Wilson, senior vice president for government affairs at the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, which represents car parts makers. Other industries would be hard-hit as well. Many manufacturers of flat-screen TVs, computer hardware and medical devices are set up south of the border, while the apparel industry sources raw materials like cotton, buttons, zippers and threads from the United States and sews them into finished products in Mexico. Closings would also affect sectors outside manufacturing, including energy the United States supplies much of Mexicos natural gas through pipelines that run across the border as well as the transportation sector, where hundreds of thousands of US jobs are tied to moving goods to and from Mexico through ports and by truck or train. Overall, some of the worlds biggest multinational companies would be affected including Ford, Toyota, Boeing and Caterpillar but so would countless small and medium-sized businesses that depend on trade to make and sell their products. The Farm Belt and US Grocery Store Shelves The signing of NAFTA prompted a huge reorganisation in agriculture on both sides of the border. Now, consumers in the United States depend on Mexican farmers for fresh fruit and vegetables like avocados, tomatoes, strawberries, grapes and mangoes, as well as packaged foods and beer. Mexico relies heavily on US soybeans, corn, dairy products, chickens, beef and other goods. The development of refrigerated trucks and railroad cars means much of the industry depends on just in time deliveries. If the border were shut down, consumers would most likely see an immediate spike in food prices, and supplies of fresh food could dwindle from grocery store shelves in a matter of days. US farmers would lose a major market, causing a drop in prices for their crops and a potential buildup of their goods in factories, slaughterhouses and grain bins. Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, said that Mexico supplies more than 60 per cent of all US produce in the winter and early spring, and that a shutdown could result in immediate and uncontrollable spikes in prices for items like bell peppers, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, eggplant and yes, the beloved avocado. The rise in the popularity of the avocado would not have been possible without trade with Mexico, which supplies 80 percent of the avocados eaten in the United States. If prices go up for fresh produce, people are going to have to choose between eating healthy or putting other food on their plates, Jungmeyer said. Business Confidence Trump often credits his policies with economic growth, renewed business confidence and a rising stock market. But shuttering the border to legitimate commerce and travel could quickly undermine US growth and productivity, the US Chamber of Commerce said in a statement Monday. Closing the US-Mexico border would inflict severe economic harm on American families, workers, farmers and manufacturers across the United States, said Neil Bradley, the chambers executive vice president and chief policy officer. It is hard to imagine that such a measure would not prompt a drop in the stock market, which has seized up as the president threatened to withdraw from NAFTA or put more extensive tariffs on China. That would dent the retirement savings of many Americans, as well as affect the ability of companies to raise money in the capital markets. Once the president breaks the glass once, that casts a lot of uncertainty on the future, said Scott Lincicome, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. It would cast a cloud of uncertainty around a commercial relationship that for decades has been almost an afterthought. US-Mexico Relations and Border Communities Americans often take for granted the fact that Mexico is an ally, ready to work with the United States on a range of issues, including water use and drug trafficking. But before NAFTA went into force in 1994, that future was by no means assured, said Phil Levy of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. If business ties and relations with Mexico are strained, border communities in the United States would most likely suffer, from both decreased economic activity and potentially higher costs from crime and migration. In McAllen, Texas, for example, Mexican shoppers make up nearly one-third of the roughly $3.2 billion (2.45 billion) worth of retail sales the city records annually, signalling a grim prospect for city coffers if Trump follows through on his threat to shut down the border. Were impacted at a very personal level in that the people in McAllen, some of them, work in Mexico, McAllens city manager, Roel Rodriguez, said, adding that 30 percent is a huge number. La Plaza Mall, a Simon Malls property, is constantly full of shoppers on weekends, and the parking lots are often dotted with license plates from various Mexican states. The city and the Chamber of Commerce spend tens of thousands of dollars advertising McAllen in Mexico each year. The more global concern would be how it would impact the whole country, because the goods and services that come through the ports of entry, they dont just stay at the border, Rodriguez said. The produce, the equipment, the auto (car) parts. So theres a real danger for cities on the border, but it has a greater impact than just the cities on the border. Salvador Contreras, who runs the Centre for Border Economic Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, said there was a big risk for large companies with plants in the Mexican border town of Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, including Caterpillar, LG and Panasonic. If youre a multinational corporation who has, say, an operation in Reynosa, and your ability to operate is being impacted, you might question your desire to maintain that plant there, Contreras said. Migration Northern Mexican cities that depend on trade with the United States would be devastated by any extended border closing, leading to mass unemployment that could prompt more attempts to cross the United States border. Under US law, asylum-seekers can request protections once they reach US soil meaning border closings could actually encourage more desperate flights across the border. If anything, it would promote more poverty in Mexico, which would then turn into more pressure on immigration in the US, Hufbauer said. The New York Times As a former British military officer-turned-survivalist, Bear Grylls knows how to take care of himself in the wild. Taking care of other people, though, can be a challenge...particularly when that other person is the President of the United States. In 2015, Grylls was joined by then-POTUS, Barack Obama, for a special episode of his popular reality series, Running Wild with Bear Grylls. The duo hiked through the Alaskan frontier, chatting about climate change and snacking on bear-chewed salmon. Four years later, the 44-year-old TV host still has fond memories of their time together. "Taking President Obama while he was still a sitting president on one of our Running Wild journeys was a definite life privilege," Grylls tells Yahoo Lifestyle, adding that he had to modify part of his pre-show preparation for this particular guest. "Normally I always say, 'Come on your own, no entourage. Trust me, we're going to gun it and go. In this case, they were like, 'Don't say the word gun. And he's not going to be on his own.'" (Watch our video interview above.) Despite some of the conditions placed on their journey--Secret Service snipers were positioned on mountaintops and helicopters tracked their every move--Grylls says that the President was ready and willing to take risks whenever possible. "He was really curious and wanted to learn and was willing to step outside of his comfort zone. I think those are the key elements for progressing in life; otherwise, we get stagnant. He was an amazing guest to travel with." With Running Wild set to premiere its fifth season on National Geographic later this year (the first four seasons aired on NBC), there would seem to be an open slot for another Presidential visit for the current occupant of the Oval Office. "A lot of people say to me, would we do one with President Trump," Grylls says, anticipating our question about whether Trump would ever follow in Obama's footsteps into the wild. "I would say he's got a lot on his agenda and needs to focus on that. I think the world needs to keep him focused." Grylls himself remains laser-focused on climate change, which remains one of his signature issues. His latest National Geographic show, Hostile Planet, premieres on April 1 at 9 p.m. and takes a six-part look at the way climate change is impacting Earth's increasingly fragile ecosystem. "It really shows how animals manage to survive at the worlds' extremes, and how these extremes are changing because of climate change very fast," Grylls explains. "I think the message is it shows people the reality of what climate change is doing to our world, and one of the effects is the innocent party in this are the animals." For the record, President Trump is a pronounced climate change skeptic, which might make conversation a little awkward if he were to accept the Running Wild challenge. But Grylls says much of his younger fanbase is up to speed on the issue. "I don't meet many young people who deny climate change. There's no doubting that all of us should do all we can to protect it. If you have something, if you have something special, look after it." Hostile Planet premieres April 1 at 9 p.m. on National Geographic Lawmakers in both the House and Senate are considering bipartisan bills aimed at making it easier for Americans to save for retirement. House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) and ranking member Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) are cosponsoring the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act, known as the SECURE Act. The committee passed the bill on Tuesday morning. On Monday evening, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee announced a retirement bill of their own. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the Retirement Enhancement and Savings Act of 2019 or RESA. House Ways and Means Committee Chair Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., accompanied by ranking member Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, speaks during the House Ways and Means Committee on FY'20 budget on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) The SECURE Act The SECURE Act would allow parents to use 529 savings accounts to cover the costs of some apprenticeships, homeschooling and up to $10,000 of student loan repayments. The bill would also give parents penalty-free withdrawals from retirement plans in the case of a birth or adoption and encourages employers to automatically enroll their employees in retirement plans. In a statement, Neal said lawmakers are taking bold action to address the nations retirement crisis. Providing more, and easier, ways to save allows workers to actively plan for their futures and avoid falling into poverty later in life. Boosting Americans financial security in retirement supports families and strengthens our economy, said Neal. The bill would raise the age at which people are required to take distributions from their retirement plan to 72, up from 70.5 years. It would also allow long-term part-time workers to participate in 401(k) plans. Brady said the bill would create opportunity for workers, by helping them make their own decisions about their finances and retirement. Our reforms will help families save more and earlier for the future, ensuring folks have the flexibility and control over their own savings they need for whatever life throws their way, said Brady in a statement. The National Institute on Retirement Security does not take positions on legislation, but told Yahoo Finance the bills provisions aimed at expanding access to retirement programs are an important step. Story continues We see those things as promising, but probably not adequate to tackle the scale of the problem, said Dan Doonan, executive director with the National Institute on Retirement Security. A recent Government Accountability Office report found 48% of Americans over 55 years old had no savings in a 401(k)-style plan or individual retirement account -- though the report notes some of those people did have a pension. Thats an improvement from 52% in 2013. According to the GAO, 29% of older Americans have neither a pension nor a defined contribution plan. Doonan said access to retirement savings plans is a key issue and Americans want lawmakers to do more. He pointed to a NIRS survey that found 84% of Americans think leaders in Washington do not understand how hard it is to prepare for retirement. The Retirement and Savings Act Grassley and Wyden said their bill would make it easier for for small businesses to offer retirement plans and encourage workers to save. Planning for retirement is important, yet challenging. The Retirement and Savings Act would help Americans get on the path of saving for a secure retirement during their working years while making sure their savings will last throughout their retirement, said Grassley in a statement. The senators say RESA would improve multiple employer plans or MEPs, and make it easier for small employers to join together and sponsor a single retirement plan for their workers. The legislation would also repeal the ban on IRA contributions once a worker reaches 70.5 years old. It would lift a cap to make it easier for employers to automatically raise workers savings rates past 10% of their income. If the bill became law, employers would have to give workers estimates of how much an account would provide during retirement if it were invested in an annuity. The senators say lawmakers began working on the bill in 2006 and senators have held several hearings in the years since. The Finance Committee unanimously passed a version of the bill in 2016. Lawmakers also tried to make changes to retirement plans last year, but failed to send a bill to the presidents desk. Jessica Smith is a reporter for Yahoo Finance based in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter at @JessicaASmith8. Rep. Ryan on GM tweets: Trump is a 'distraction Democratic lawmakers move to close 'horrible loophole' in tax code Lawmakers grill Wells Fargo CEO about scandals Endometriosis is the second most common gynaecological condition after fibroids and can affect fertility - iStockphoto Scientists have developed a blood test that can detect up to 90 per cent of cases of endometriosis. The painful condition, suffered by around 1.5 million women in the UK, is difficult to diagnose, with the average sufferer waiting more than seven years before it is identified. Often, patients need to go undergo keyhole surgery to identify tissues around the ovaries and fallopian tubes in order to diagnose the condition. The new test looks for tiny DNA fragments in the blood, providing a diagnosis with in days, meaning women can be offered treatment far sooner. The test, developed by MDNA Life Sciences and experts at the University of Oxford, will be available privately within nine months at a cost of about 250. Researchers hope that it will be available on the NHS, at a later stage. According to the charity Endometriosis UK, it takes an average of 7.5 years to get a diagnosis from the first onset of symptoms. Experts now hope to speed up this process through a new blood test, with laboratory results available within a few days. The Mitomic Endometriosis Test, which was developed at MDNA's Newcastle lab, looks for biomarkers of endometriosis in the blood through the close examination of mutations in mitochondrial DNA. A study published in the journal Biomarkers in Medicine found that these newly-identified biomarkers can accurately detect endometriosis in blood samples in up to nine out of 10 cases, even in the early stages of the condition. Dr Christian Becker, from the Nuffield Department of Women's and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford, said: "Endometriosis not only causes enormous suffering to the affected women, but also brings a tremendous medical and economic burden to bear on society. "There is a long lag phase between the onset and diagnosis of the disease, mainly due to its non-specific symptoms and because it can only be diagnosed invasively by laparoscopy. "A specific, non-invasive test to aid diagnosis of endometriosis is certainly an unmet clinical need." Story continues Endometriosis occurs when tissue similar to the lining of the womb starts to grow in other parts of the body, such as the ovaries and fallopian tubes. It is the second most common gynaecological condition after fibroids and can affect fertility. Treatment can include the contraceptive pill and different types of surgery, including a full hysterectomy. American actress and writer Lena Dunham has spoken about her battle with the condition, which led to repeated surgery, and a hysterectomy last year at the age of 31. Until now, the only definitive way to diagnose endometriosis has been via laparoscopy - a type of keyhole surgery where a camera is inserted into the pelvis to look at internal organs. Harry Smart, MDNA Life Sciences' chairman said: "Our groundbreaking test for endometriosis will fundamentally change the way this debilitating disease is detected and diagnosed. "We look forward to helping UK women get treatment sooner, reducing their pain and distress and providing cost savings to health services." Dr Andrew Harbottle, MDNA Life Sciences' chief science officer, said: "Mutations in mitochondrial DNA act as ideal biomarkers, providing us with a unique and detailed diary of damage to the DNA and accurately detecting many difficult-to-diagnose diseases and conditions, such as endometriosis." Viewers of BBC One nature programme Blue Planet Live were left in shock on Sunday night after a seagull appeared to eat a baby turtle on live television. Presenter Liz Bonnin was helping a group of hatchling turtles make it from a beach into the sea around Australias Heron Island when millions of viewers saw the seagull swoop. It appeared to walk away with one of the baby turtles in its beak. Blue Planet Live presenter Liz Bonnin was releasing baby turtles into the sea (Picture: BBC) Viewers took to social media to express their horror at what had happened. Read more Ex-Vote Leave chairwoman dodges calls to apologise for Brexit referendum overspend Many Labour MPs want to back plan to cancel Brexit in wake of latest defeat for Theresa May Two teenagers charged with robbery after three attacks on men who arranged dates on Grindr Ms Bonnin said: Weve watched them come up to the sands of Heron to nest and weve also had the great privilege of watching precious new lives, little hatchings emerging from nests and making it in the big blue. The seagull was spotted in the background (Picture: BBC) Viewers were horrified as the seagull grabbed the turtle in its beak (Picture: BBC) A bucket of baby turtles was then emptied on to the shore in the hope the animals would scuttle into the sea. Did a seagull just snatch a baby turtle as she was talking??? #BluePlanetLive Mollie Goodfellow (@hansmollman) March 31, 2019 #LineOfDuty is always top drawer but @jed_mercurio is going to have to come up with something special to beat the drama of the seagull and the baby turtle from #BluePlanetLive Dan Walker (@mrdanwalker) March 31, 2019 Omg please dont tell me that seagull just ate one of those tiny baby turtles @BBCOne #BluePlanetLive Molly King (@MollyKing01) March 31, 2019 Theyre going to spend hundreds of years in our oceans if all goes well, said Ms Bonnin. Story continues But then the seagull struck, grabbing one of the turtles in its beak and then disappeared from view. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK BRASILIA (Reuters) - Senior Brazilian officials charged with steering pension reform through Congress presented a united front on Tuesday, insisting on an end to the political finger-pointing in recent weeks that threw the government's signature reform bill into doubt. Brazilian stocks hit a nearly three-month low last week on growing signs of political infighting and skepticism that President Jair Bolsonaro was fully committed to the political consensus-building needed to get lawmakers to pass his pension reform bill. But the message on Tuesday from Vice President Hamilton Mourao, Labor and Pensions Secretary Rogerio Marinho and the government's leader in the lower house, Vitor Hugo, was that the government is listening and willing to work with Congress. "We have high expectations that parliament will approve pension reform in the coming months, and then it's onto tax reform," Mourao said at an event in Rio de Janeiro. Vitor Hugo said "a page had been turned" from the tension of last week, adding that Bolsonaro and his top ministers are getting more involved in the negotiations with lawmakers to build the political support needed to get passage approved. Still, Brazil's benchmark Bovespa stock index slipped nearly 1 percent on Tuesday tracking losses The government's plan targets over 1 trillion reais ($260 billion) in savings over the next decade from a radical overhaul of the social security system. Economists insist this is needed to shore up the public finances, revive the economy and boost investor confidence in Brazil. But the proposal is likely to be watered down as lawmakers extract concessions and exemptions. Military personnel have already secured pay raises that almost fully make up for losses from later retirement ages and more required contributions. Marinho said that the government continues to analyze benefits for rural and disabled Brazilians, two points that have provoked the strongest opposition in Congress. A lawmaker survey run by transparency group Atlas Politico on Tuesday showed that the government currently has the support of 171 of the 308 lawmakers needed for the bill's passage in the lower house, which would send the proposal to the Senate. (Reporting by Marcela Ayres in Brasilia and Rodrigo Viga Gaier in Rio de Janeiro; Writing by Jamie McGeever; editing by Diane Craft) On Friday, Theresa May lost again in her bid to get her "withdrawal deal" approved by U.K. lawmakers. Now lawmakers will vote on a number of alternative options. None of the options are legally binding and have not been agreed by Europe. U.K. lawmakers will carry out a series of indicative votes in Parliament Monday as, for a second time, they try to agree an alternative to Prime Minister Theresa May 's unpopular Brexit deal. The most likely option to command a majority has a customs union tagged on to May's deal a much "softer" Brexit than the draft arrangement that Brussels has already signed off on. May has now attempted three times to get her deal over the line in Parliament, the last vote on Friday saw her defeated by 344 votes to 286. Many of the alternatives below were voted on last week but none were able to command a majority. Prior to Monday night's vote, the speaker of the house, John Bercow, will narrow down the list of motions. It should be noted that none of the options are legally binding and have not been agreed by Europe. Results are expected to be announced at some point after 9:30 p.m. London time (4.30 p.m. ET). Brexit indicative vote options Motion A: Unilateral right of exit from the backstop Some Conservative lawmakers want the U.K. to leave the EU on May 22 with Theresa May's "withdrawal agreement" amended to allow Britain to unilaterally to exit the controversial Northern Ireland backstop . Motion B: No deal in the absence of a withdrawal agreement This calls for a no-deal Brexit on April 12 if no withdrawal agreement can be agreed by Parliament. Motion C: Customs union Almost certain to be selected for a vote and the favorite to do well. Conservative lawmaker and "father of the house" Ken Clarke has laid down a plan that requires any Brexit deal to include a commitment to a "permanent and comprehensive U.K.-wide customs union with the EU." This was defeated by just six votes last week. Story continues A customs union is an agreement that allows partaking countries to set common external tariffs, allowing goods to travel freely between those countries. Critics don't like the idea of a customs union as it would impede Britain from striking its own future trade deals. Motion D: Common market 2.0 Proposed by a mix of parties, this motion proposes U.K. membership of the European Free Trade Association and European Economic Area. It allows continued participation in the EU's single market and a "comprehensive customs arrangement" with the bloc after Brexit. Support is uncertain with opposition Labour MPs (Members of Parliament) being encouraged, but not forced, to vote for it. The single market is a deeper form of co-operation between member states that allows the free movement of goods, services, money and people within the bloc. Motion E: Confirmatory public vote Another likely to be selected by the speaker. Labour is expected to back this in numbers. Drawn up by opposition MPs Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson, this motion wants a public vote to confirm any Brexit deal passed by politicians. Last week it achieved the highest number of positives votes but was still defeated by 295 to 268. Motion F: Public vote to prevent no deal Brought by Conservative lawmaker and soft Brexit proponent Dominic Grieve and Labour's Graham Jones. This proposal stipulates that a referendum must be held to stop Britain leaving the European Union without a deal. Motion G: Parliamentary supremacy Scottish National Party lawmaker Joanna Cherry has put forward a reworked version of her previous amendment calling for Brexit to be revoked. After failing to gain much support last Wednesday she has now called for a long extension to Brexit and, if Europe won't allow that, then Parliament must choose between a no-deal exit or canceling Brexit for now. Motion H: Efta and EEA Similar to Motion D, this proposes joining the European Free Trade Association (Efta). The only current members are Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. They participate in the European Single Market via the European Economic Area (EEA) and allow free movement of people across borders but are not part of the European Union customs union. More From CNBC BREAKING: Theresa May says Brexit must be delayed again Theresa May has said Brexit will be delayed for a second time. Speaking after seven hours of talks the Prime Minister offered to meet Jeremy Corbyn to come up with a plan for Brexit. The UK had been due to leave the European Union on March 29 but following a failure to reach a deal Brexit was delayed until April 12. But on April 2 the Prime Minister told the nation she was requesting a further extension of Article 50. Cabinet ministers arrived at Number 10 at around 9am for what was originally due to be a five-hour meeting. Mrs May has offered to sit down with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to thrash out a Brexit agreement to ensure the UK does not leave the EU without a deal. (PA) Education Secretary Damian Hinds, Minister for Energy and Clean Growth Claire Perry and Works and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd leaving Downing Street, London, following a cabinet meeting.I Mrs May said she hoped to agree a deal with Mr Corbyn which could be put to the Commons for approval before the April 10 European Council summit, but, if that cannot be achieved, then a number of alternative options could be put to the vote. Insisting that any resolution should take the UK out of the EU by May 22, Mrs May said: This is a decisive moment in the story of these islands and it will require national unity to deliver the national interest. Mrs May said: I have always been clear that we could make a success of no-deal in the long term but leaving with a deal is the best solution. So we will need a further extension of Article 50 one that is as short as possible and which ends when we pass a deal. Britains Home Secretary Sajid Javid leaves Downing Street in London, Britain, April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay Read more on Yahoo News UK: Tory MP Nick Boles resigns after failing to break Brexit deadlock EU set to demand 10bn euros from UK French finance minister says Britain heading for no deal Brexit And we need to be clear what such an extension is for: to ensure we leave in a timely and orderly way. This debate, this division, cannot drag on much longer. She added: Today Im taking action to break the logjam. Im offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and try to agree a plan that we would both stick to to ensure we leave the EU and we do so with a deal. Any plan would have to agree the current Withdrawal Agreement it has already been negotiated with the 27 other members and the EU has repeatedly said it cannot and will not be re-opened. Story continues However, if Article 50 is to be extended this must be approved by the EU. Even if, after today, we dont know what the end result will be, let us be patient. #Brexit Donald Tusk (@eucopresident) April 2, 2019 Mr Corbyn said: We will meet the Prime Minister. We recognise that she has made a move, I recognise my responsibility to represent the people that supported Labour in the last election and the people who didnt support Labour but nevertheless want certainty and security for their own future and thats the basis on which we will meet her and we will have those discussions. The move comes as a blow for Brexiteers as by agreeing to work with Mr Corbyn, Mrs May appears to be pursuing a soft Brexit. Jacob Rees-Mogg, chairman of the pro-Brexit European Research Group, said: This approach to Government is an unsuccessful one and it also lacks democratic legitimacy. People did not vote for a Corbyn-May coalition Government they voted for a Conservative Government, which became a confidence and supply with the DUP. This is a deeply unsatisfactory approach. Its not in the interests of the country, it fails to deliver on the referendum result and history doesnt bode well for it. Mr Rees-Mogg criticised the Prime Minister for planning to collaborate with a known Marxist and said the move would lose Tory votes. He said: You do find that leaders who decide to go with the opposition rather than their own party find their own party doesnt plainly follow. Im not sure this is the way to conciliate people to persuade them if they havent moved already to move at this stage. I think getting the support of a known Marxist is not likely to instil confidence in Conservatives. President of the EU, Donald Tusk, took to Twitter and called for patience in the process. Speaking to the BBC Hilary Benn said there were a number of important questions mainly the length of the extension if the offer of cross-party collaboration is accepted. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said the move could be a trap. This thread highlights a massive danger if MPs allow 12 April to pass with no commitment to fight Euro elections, May 22 becomes the inescapable exit dayand PM would then be able to say its my deal or no deal. Parliament needs to be very wary about a potential trap. https://t.co/Z8D7gnbCtJ Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) April 2, 2019 In a post on Twitter she said: If MPs allow 12 April to pass with no commitment to fight Euro elections, May 22 becomes the inescapable exit dayand PM would then be able to say its my deal or no deal. Parliament needs to be very wary about a potential trap. Labour MP Anna Turley, a leading supporter of the Peoples Vote campaign for a second referendum, said that Mrs May was trying to dip Jeremy Corbyns hands into the mess of Brexit. But she said that a deal based on a backroom pact between the Government and the Opposition would simply be a stitch-up that left the people behind. Ms Turley said: Any extension to the Brexit deadline and consideration of other forms of Brexit must be inclusive of all those MPs and voters who say a final deal should be signed off by the people. The public will not stand for a Westminster stitch-up. Nor will any deal that was cobbled together in a hurry to meet another artificial deadline command a stable majority in either Parliament or the country for long. It would be a bad deal for Britain if it was made in haste for the wrong reasons. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK An easyJet Airbus A320 commercial plane is seen landing at Geneva Airport. Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images One of Europes biggest budget airlines, easyJet (EZJ.L), warned that Brexit uncertainty is hurting the airline. The group said in a statement that whilst easyJet will deliver H1 results in line with expectations, macroeconomic uncertainty and many unanswered questions surrounding Brexit are together driving weaker customer demand in the market, such that we are seeing increasing softness in ticket yields in the UK and across Europe. Given this uncertainty our outlook for H2 is now more cautious. Ticket yield is the measure of money an airline makes from journeys. easyJet said it was set to report a headline loss of 275m ($359.2m) for the six months to the end of March. That amount is in line with its expectations. Shares plunged by over 8% in early trading on the update. Chart: Yahoo Finance Despite the gloomy report, easyJet CEO Johan Lundgren emphasised that whatever happens with Brexit, well be flying as usual. We are operationally well prepared for Brexit. Now that the EU Parliament has passed its air connectivity legislation and together with the UKs confirmation that it will reciprocate, means that whatever happens, well be flying as usual. I am pleased that we have also made progress on our European ownership position which is now above 49%, Lundgren said in a statement. For the second half we are seeing softness in both the UK and Europe, which we believe comes from macroeconomic uncertainty and many unanswered questions surrounding Brexit which are together driving weaker customer demand. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! Looking at Brilliance China Automotive Holdings Limited's (HKG:1114) earnings update on 31 December 2018, it seems that analyst forecasts are fairly optimistic, as a 18% increase in profits is expected in the upcoming year, compared with the past 5-year average growth rate of 4.6%. Presently, with latest-twelve-month earnings at CN5.8b, we should see this growing to CN6.9b by 2020. In this article, I've outline a few earnings growth rates to give you a sense of the market sentiment for Brilliance China Automotive Holdings in the longer term. Readers that are interested in understanding the company beyond these figures should research its fundamentals here. Check out our latest analysis for Brilliance China Automotive Holdings What can we expect from Brilliance China Automotive Holdings in the longer term? The longer term expectations from the 25 analysts of 1114 is tilted towards the positive sentiment. Broker analysts tend to forecast up to three years ahead due to a lack of clarity around the business trajectory beyond this. I've plotted out each year's earnings expectations and inserted a line of best fit to calculate an annual growth rate from the slope in order to understand the overall trajectory of 1114's earnings growth over these next few years. SEHK:1114 Past and Future Earnings, April 2nd 2019 This results in an annual growth rate of 13% based on the most recent earnings level of CN5.8b to the final forecast of CN8.5b by 2022. This leads to an EPS of CN1.67 in the final year of projections relative to the current EPS of CN1.15. Margins are currently sitting at 133%, which is expected to expand to 164% by 2022. Next Steps: Future outlook is only one aspect when you're building an investment case for a stock. For Brilliance China Automotive Holdings, I've compiled three important aspects you should further examine: Financial Health: Does it have a healthy balance sheet? Take a look at our free balance sheet analysis with six simple checks on key factors like leverage and risk. Future Earnings: How does Brilliance China Automotive Holdings's growth rate compare to its peers and the wider market? Dig deeper into the analyst consensus number for the upcoming years by interacting with our free analyst growth expectation chart. Other High-Growth Alternatives : Are there other high-growth stocks you could be holding instead of Brilliance China Automotive Holdings? Explore our interactive list of stocks with large growth potential to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing! We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Experts are hoping Tian Tian, the UKs only female giant panda, may have fallen pregnant after she was artificially inseminated on Mothers Day. (SWNS) Experts are hoping the UKs only female giant panda could be pregnant, after she was artificially inseminated on Mothers Day. Tian Tian had her annual health check and was artificially inseminated yesterday (March 31) at Edinburgh Zoo, under expert veterinary care. The 15-year-old giant panda arrived in Edinburgh in December 2011 on a ten-year loan from Bifengxia Breeding Centre in China. She previously gave birth to twins in 2009, in China, but five attempts to impregnate her in Britain have so far been unsuccessful, and last year her mate Yang Guang had his testicles removed after tumours were discovered. Experts are hoping Tian Tian, the UKs only female giant panda, may have fallen pregnant after she was artificially inseminated on Mothers Day. (SWNS) Tian Tian had her annual health check yesterday and was artificially inseminated under expert veterinary care. We are pleased to say that all went well. It is of course far too early to say anything about the chances of breeding success at this very early stage. (2/2) Edinburgh Zoo (@EdinburghZoo) April 1, 2019 A tweet from Edinburgh Zoo said: Tian Tian had her annual health check yesterday and was artificially inseminated under expert veterinary care. We are pleased to say that all went well. It is of course far too early to say anything about the chances of breeding success at this very early stage. Read more from Yahoo News UK: Japan chooses new imperial era name for new emperor The bears arrived on loan from China in December 2011 and are due to remain at Edinburgh Zoo for a decade. In 2012 an attempt at natural breeding took place and Tian Tian was artificially inseminated each year from 2013 to 2017 but no breeding attempt took place last year. The removal of Yang Guangs testicles is not said to have been linked to the failure of the pair to breed. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK By Guy Faulconbridge, Elizabeth Piper and Kate Holton LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May said on Tuesday she would seek another Brexit delay to agree an EU divorce deal with the opposition Labour leader, a last-ditch gambit to break an impasse over Britain's departure that enraged many in her party. Nearly three years since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a shock referendum result, it is still unclear how, when or if it will ever indeed quit the European club it first joined in 1973. In a hastily arranged statement from her Downing Street office after spending seven hours chairing cabinet meetings on how to plot a way out of the Brexit maze, May said she was seeking another short extension to Brexit beyond April 12. Her move offers the prospect of keeping the United Kingdom in a much closer economic relationship with the EU after Brexit - though it could also rip her Conservative Party apart as half her lawmakers want a decisive split from the bloc. "I am offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and to try to agree a plan - that we would both stick to - to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal," she said. "We will need a further extension of Article 50 (divorce notification), one that is as short as possible and which ends when we pass a deal. We need to be clear what such an extension is for - to ensure we leave in a timely and orderly way." Corbyn said he would be "very happy" to meet May and that he would set no limits ahead of the talks, while reiterating that his party aimed to keep a customs union with the EU, access for Britain to its single market and protections for workers. He added that he would hold a vote of no-confidence in the government in reserve if any eventual accord still failed to achieve majority support in a deeply split British parliament. Germany and France called for more clarity from London, warning that without a clear sense of what Britain wanted it could be heading towards a disorderly Brexit within days. The EU's Donald Tusk called for patience with London. Story continues MAY'S GAMBLE INFURIATES PARTY EUROSCEPTICS Keeping Britain closely tied to the EU after Brexit is anathema to much of the Conservative Party. Many Brexit-backing Conservatives were livid at May over her overture to Corbyn. "This is a deeply unsatisfactory approach, it is not in the interests of the country, it fails to deliver on the referendum result and history doesn't bode well for it," Jacob Rees-Mogg, a prominent Brexiteer, told reporters following a meeting of the party's hardline eurosceptic parliamentary group. Boris Johnson, the face of the 2016 Brexit campaign, said a compromise with Labour would betray the referendum, asserting that the world's fifth biggest economy could be outside the EU but still subject to EU rules. "Brexit is becoming soft to the point of disintegration," said Johnson, who resigned as foreign minister last July. Still, May faced no immediate resignations from her senior team. Prominent Brexit supporters in May's cabinet, such as Michael Gove, defended her plan in public after a marathon meeting at which ministers haggled for hours over coffee and sandwiches. They finished with Chilean red wine. Any plan, May said, would have to include the current Withdrawal Agreement that she agreed with the EU in November and which the bloc says it will not reopen. May last week offered to quit if parliament approved her deal but lawmakers defeated it a third time on Friday, the very day Britain had been due to leave the EU. Brexiteers say her deal would trap Britain in the EU's orbit indefinitely but pro-EU opposition parties say her proposed break would isolate Britain and cause lasting economic damage. Lawmakers failed on Monday to find a majority of their own for any alternative plan ranging from a permanent customs union to a confirmatory referendum on any deal and a revocation of the divorce papers to avoid a no-deal crash-out. NEW OPTIONS FOR PARLIAMENT? May said that if she could not agree a unified approach with Corbyn, a veteran socialist who voted against joining the bloc in 1975, then the government would come up with a number of options on the future relationship with the EU. Then, she said, the government would put them before the House of Commons in a series of votes. "Crucially, the government stands ready to abide by the decision of the house," May said. Her move could cleave apart her Conservatives, who have been grappling with an internal schism over Europe for the past three decades. Over half of her lawmakers voted last week to go for a no-deal Brexit, much to the alarm of British business. "It seems to me that she wants to rely upon Labour votes to get this extension through," David Jones, a Brexit-supporting former Conservative minister, told Reuters. "If she does that, then she is putting the future of the party in peril." May said she wanted the Withdrawal Agreement Bill to be passed before May 22 so that the United Kingdom did not have to take part in elections that month to the European Parliament. Her spokesman said it was possible to cancel participation in the European elections right up to the day of the vote. The impasse has already delayed Brexit for at least two weeks beyond the planned departure date of March 29 to 2200 GMT on April 12. "This is a decisive moment in the story of these islands," May said. "But we can and must find the compromises that will deliver what the British people voted for." (Additional reporting by Jan Strupczewski in Brussels, Andreas Rinke and Michelle Martin in Berlin, Kylie MacLellan, Alistair Smout, William James, Andy Bruce, Costas Pitas, Andrew MacAskill and Ritvik Carvalho in London and Tom Miles in Geneva, Richard Lough, Michel Rose and John Irish in Paris; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Mark Heinrich) London (AFP) - Prime Minister Theresa May said Tuesday she would ask the EU to again delay Brexit to avoid Britain crashing out of the bloc next week, signalling she could accept a closer relationship with Europe to break months of political deadlock. After more than seven hours of talks with her ministers, May said she would request a delay that was "as short as possible and which ends when we pass a deal" through the British parliament. In a move likely to enrage the Brexit-supporting wing of her Conservative party, she also offered to work with opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who favours closer ties with the European Union. "This is a decisive moment in the story of these islands. And it requires national unity to deliver the national interest," May said in a televised address. Brussels has set Britain an April 12 deadline to either pass the divorce deal it agreed with May four months ago, settle on an alternative, or depart the EU without an agreement. In reality, the deadline is even closer as the EU has called an emergency leaders summit for April 10. EU president Donald Tusk responded cautiously to May's statement, saying: "Even if, after today, we don't know what the end result will be, let us be patient." - Break the logjam - Britain voted by 52 to 48 percent to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, but the exit process has only exacerbated divisions among the public and politicians, including May's cabinet. Her statement follows weeks of turmoil, in which MPs rejected her divorce deal three times, but were unable to come up with their own plan. "Today I am taking action to break the logjam," she said. She noted calls in her own party for Britain to simply end its 46-year-old membership of the bloc without any agreement with the EU, but she said that "leaving with a deal is the best solution". May said she believed her existing plan was still necessary for an orderly Brexit, but offered to talk to Labour about a new plan for future trade ties. Story continues Corbyn has called for a new customs union with the EU and access to the bloc's single market, two things that until now, May has strongly opposed. If they could agree on a plan that MPs supported, the prime minister said she hoped to take it to the Brussels summit next week. If not, she promised to allow MPs to direct what she does, expressing hope that Britain could still leave with a deal before May 22, so it did not have to take part in European Parliament elections. The political chaos has already forced May to ask the EU to postpone the original Brexit date of March 29, but European leaders have warned they will not delay Brexit indefinitely. French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday that while he was "open" to a lengthy delay on certain conditions, it was "neither a certainty nor automatic". The EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, warned that the other 27 EU nations were prepared for a "no deal" situation, and "it becomes day after day more likely". - Future relationship - The EU has repeatedly refused to renegotiate the Brexit divorce deal it agreed with May last November after almost two years of negotiations but has said it could revise the accompanying political declaration on future relations. The deal aims to smooth the divorce with arrangements for Britain's financial settlement, the rights of expatriate citizens, and the Irish border. It also sets up a transition period until December 2021 to agree new trade terms -- but these are only loosely outlined in an accompanying political declaration, which the EU is open to changing. "What we need to focus on is our future relationship with the EU," May said of her talks with Corbyn. MPs have already sought to take control of the process by holding two rounds of votes on possible alternative. Plans for a new EU customs union was the most popular option in Monday night's vote, although it fell just short of a majority. burs-ar/dt/klm Sale of used cars is likely to go up. Photo: Gareth Fuller/PA Archive/PA Images Brexit, a global slowdown, and confusion over fuel type have caused 2.4 million drivers to think twice about buying a new car. The latest quarterly Britain Under the Bonnet report by Close Brothers Motor Finance found that in the past year, the proportion of drivers planning on buying a used car has dramatically increased, while those planning to buy new has fallen. Almost half (49%) of drivers said they would opt for a used car next up from 41% a year ago; while 34% were considering a new car a decrease of 8%. READ MORE: Aston Martin 1.6bn wiped out since October as car maker plans for Brexit hit The report looks at consumers attitudes and car buying behaviours, along with views from dealerships across the country, to give a comprehensive view of the UKs motor industry in 2019. Brexit was a key factor that had dampened demand. Almost half (48%) of respondents said Brexit has negatively impacted their plans to buy a car in the next three years. A third of these drivers said they are more likely to buy a used car or delay buying a car as a consequence. Unsurprisingly, the report found Brexit was now seen as a threat for half of car dealers. This is just less than double that of six months ago, when the figure was 26%. READ MORE: Zoopla founder raises 30m for new car website venture Uncertainty about fuel type was another factor. Almost one in five (18%) drivers said they wont buy a car in 2019 because they are confused about fuel type. A quarter of diesel drivers (24%) said they were put off because they are unclear about what the costs will be to own a diesel car in the future. Despite challenges, the vast majority of car dealers (93%) said they are confident about business prospects in the year ahead. Two-thirds (68%) could point to specific opportunities for their business in the upcoming months. One in five (19%) said they had experienced an increased demand for particular models. This is up from 6% the previous quarter. Story continues READ MORE: Why you no longer need a traditional car Just 4% of dealers said they had concerns about an economic downturn (down from 14% six months previously), suggesting a positive outlook for the future beyond Brexit. Rebecca McNeil, chief executive officer at Close Brothers Motor Finance, said: The motor industry is a cornerstone of the British economy, and in these unprecedented economic times it is no surprise to see the industry experiencing a number of challenges. All eyes are on Westminster as we wait in hope of a satisfactory resolution to the ongoing uncertainty. However, out of this period of change, rather than just treading water, a huge proportion of dealers are spotting opportunities and capitalising on them. Were seeing a number of dealers responding to the increased demand for used vehicles, while others are embracing the trends towards alternative fuel vehicles. READ MORE: Europes top electric car launches in 2019 Overall, the vast majority of dealers feel confident, and can see the possibilities that exist beyond Brexit. Brussels (AFP) - EU leaders still want to avoid the chaos of a "no deal" Brexit, but concern is rising that giving Britain a long delay poses risks of its own and would solve little. With less than two weeks until Britain ends its four-decade-old EU membership, UK lawmakers are still deadlocked over what kind of divorce they want. European negotiators insist the deal they signed with Prime Minister Theresa May last November is the only guarantee of an orderly exit. But May has repeatedly failed to ratify the accord, and lawmakers are toying with options for a "softer" Brexit -- or an abrupt "no deal" departure. If May gets the deal through parliament, Brexit can be postponed until May 22. If she fails again, she may have to ask for more time before a crisis summit next week. But will the other 27 EU capitals grant a new delay? So far they have been publicly unified in their approach to the Brexit talks, and they still agree on the "fundamentals", as one diplomat put it. But, the source added, there may be more "nuance" between their positions on whether to give May more time when she next meets them on Wednesday next week. - Political chaos - Some things seem clear: the EU 27 will not renegotiate the November withdrawal agreement nor rewrite the "Irish backstop" clause protecting peace in Ireland. And if Britain plans to remain in the union beyond May 22 it will have to take part in the European parliamentary elections that start the next day. If May puts aside her objection to this in exchange for time to seek a majority or agree a route to closer economic ties, a long delay would be needed. And -- with political chaos in London, and European business rattled by the uncertainty surrounding Brexit -- Brussels is unenthusiastic. "Such an extension would carry significant risks for the EU, therefore a strong justification would be needed," negotiator Michel Barnier said Tuesday. Story continues "Many businesses in the EU warn us against the cost of extending uncertainty," he said, citing economic but also political "costs". Until Britain is outside the union, the EU member states can not legally negotiate a new trade relationship. And Barnier and others fear UK officials half-in and half-out of the bloc would "pose a risk to our decision-making autonomy" as trade talks take shape. It is still hard to imagine, however, that EU leaders would turn down a chance to allow Britain to abandon Brexit altogether or to seek a formal customs union. Britain's neighbours, in particular Ireland, are vulnerable to disruption to trade and supply chains if Britain leaves the bloc without a plan. Barnier and other EU officials have stressed that Brussels is ready for such a scenario, even if some see this a bluster to keep pressure on Britain. Irish premier Leo Varadkar was in Paris on Tuesday for talks with President Emmanuel Macron and will meet Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dublin. Ireland and Germany are understood to be more open to May requesting an extension, with France and some others ready to push May for more commitments. Some British MEPs are ready to stand for re-election in May if Britain seeks a delay, and some feel their colleagues would welcome a softer Brexit. But the vote itself is an unmoveable date, and EU legal experts fear that if Britain fails to take part the new parliament could face a legal challenge. - Only deal possible - And in the end, the debate will simply return to the deal signed in November, Barnier warns. Some in London might dream of a clean break from Brussels, but if they leave without signing the accord, its terms will come back to haunt them. "The prolongation of the negotiation is a prolongation of the uncertainty," Barnier warned. "For what, I don't know. Is it for organising a new referendum, is it for organising new elections, is it because the House of Commons needs time?" And if there's a no deal? "A few months after, I'm sure the UK will ask the EU for negotiations on some sectors: aviation, transport and -- obviously -- trade," he said. "In that case, the withdrawal agreement or the Brexit points we put on the table at the start of the negotiation will still be there." In other words: Britain will still face a divorce bill, must still guarantee EU citizens' rights and must still respect the Irish backstop. In the business of selling pre-made doomsday bunkers, it pays to be discreet. The people [who] buy bunkers dont like the government or their neighbor knowing theyve bought a bunker. Ron Hubbard, President of Atlas Survival Shelters, told Yahoo Finance about his customers (video above). So when we sell somebody a shelter, most of the time, almost every time, we dont ask their name. That same discretion manifests in the preferred payment methods as well. I would say 90% of clients are just paying cash for the shelter, Hubbard said at in an interview in northern Dallas, Texas. When pressed later, he said its actually more like 100%. How exactly? Mainly wire transfers, Hubbard said at his facility in northern Dallas, Texas. Not checks because they don't want to government or the bank to be able to see they're buying a shelter. Ron Hubbard in front of a 10 x 36 bunker. (Photo: Yahoo Finance) You know the door in [Youtuber] Jake Pauls mansion? Hubbard is the type of character who continually gave us his cell phone to record 45-second videos of him in bunkers to send to potential clients. And each clip starts out: Hi Cynthia ... Hi Peggy ... This one right here has the HVAC/plumbing/dishwasher/wine-cooler you wanted ... Hubbard is a sort of hustler. He started Atlas Survival Shelters five years ago ago after cheap, imported doors from China began to put his custom door shop out of business. You know the door in [You Tube star] Jake Pauls mansion? Hubbard, a smooth self-promoted, told us unsolicited. Yeah I made that. He wanted the bubble design just like that. Jake Paul in front of the door that Hubbard says he made. (Photo: screenshot/Jake Paul/ YouTube) People over 40 have savings Hubbards journey as a bunker salesman began when a friend first introduced him to survival bunkers and Hubbard noticed how poorly the doors were made. A lot of other companies dont know what theyre doing when it comes to air and water sealants for their structures, Hubbard said. Its a major flaw. I thought I could do them better. Then I just thought I could make the entire survival kit and sell that. Story continues Hubbards instinct tuned out to be lucrative: He said the Dallas facility will be the worlds largest bunker warehouse when its fully open. (He owns another warehouse in California in California.) A look at bunkers in a warehouse. (Photo: Yahoo Finance) Another part of the success of Atlas Survival Shelters is the prices. The bunkers are usually significantly below competitors prices for similar inventory. Hubbard said his entry level pre-made bunker goes for $25,000. And this is believe it or not relatively low cost, considering the demographic that usually buys doomsday bunkers. You gotta keep in mind the average age of somebody buying a shelter is over 40, Hubbard noted. And people over 40 have savings. This means Atlas doesnt have to endlessly collect monthly receivables on each bunker for 15 to 30 years like a house. Most bunkers are paid for upfront and in-full, making Atlas Survival Shelters an extremely liquid company. Hubbard showing off the storage space inside of the bunkers. (Photo: Yahoo Finance) Theyre very afraid of their neighbors knowing At the end of the day, the customer is buying one of these bunker to prepare for a disaster. Part of that preparation often involves keeping ones name and location hidden from plain view. If your name is Bob and youre from Ohio well actually invoice you as Bob in Ohio, Hubbard explained, and well ship it to the Walmart in your town because we dont actually want your address where the shelters going. And this is exactly how people want the transaction to occur, given that they are regularly very afraid of their neighbors knowing they have a shelter with food and supplies. Hubbard showing off his bunker's shower Hubbard told Yahoo Finance that on average Atlas Survival Shelters sells at least one bunker or shelter a day. At the $25,000 price point, that translates to roughly $9 million per year in revenue. And Hubbard said his bunkers can cost as much as $250,000. We do have runs on shelters every now and then. Hubbard said when asked how day-to-day geopolitics affects consumer purchasing habits. When something happens or theres a missile crisis, all of a sudden every shelter will sell out in two hours. Its either feast or famine thats the nature of the business. Right now, Hubbard appears to be feasting. WATCH MORE: Air Force veteran worried about EMPs takes us into his doomsday bunker Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit. Ottawa, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. (TSXV: CMI), the world's leading provider of commercial grade auto-acquire mobile satellite antennas, announced today its first successful integration with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite tracking capabilities. The test was completed with the C-COM iNetVu FLY-981 Ku-band antenna and with Kepler Communications' first in orbit LEO satellites, KIPP and CASE. Kepler is a pioneering nano-satellite telecommunications company based in Toronto. During the store & forward tests, C-COM's FLY-981 antenna successfully acquired signal to Kepler's nanosats and achieved data transfer speeds of more than 100Mbps down and 30Mbps up. Cannot view this image? Visit: https://media.zenfs.com/en-us/newsfile_64/288c4ee1cc60bae4ac33ca59f6406606 iNetVu Flyaway Antenna System FLY-981 To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5445/43635_0657c38ab44c8af9_005full.jpg Shortly thereafter, the same data was downloaded to Kepler's teleport in Inuvik, Canada. This uniquely successful test completes a significant development project between the two companies. C-COM's engineering team developed the necessary tracking algorithms to work with the already globally renowned iNetVu 7000 series controllers, and Kepler provided access to their powerful LEO satellite constellation and assisted with daily testing. The iNetVu FLY-981 is C-COM's 98cm, fully automatic and motorized Ku-band flyaway product. This antenna system is a highly portable terminal of choice for various industries such as Oil & Gas Exploration, Emergency Response, Military Communications, Cellular Backhaul, Satellite News Gathering, and many other vertical markets. "For C-COM, this test with Kepler Communications LEO nano-satellites opens up new developing markets for our extensive worldwide reseller base," said Leslie Klein, President and CEO of C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. "The store and forward data delivery services offered by Kepler's LEO constellation using our iNetVu mobile antenna system's Low Earth Orbit option, will provide customers with a unique, cost-effective large data transfer capability," Klein continued. Story continues "For Kepler, the addition of the C-COM FLY-981 as an approved satellite antenna solution expands the potential user base beyond maritime applications, to land-based mobile/transportable applications such as natural resource exploration and extraction, remote research bases, disaster management, defense, and many other vertical markets requiring high-capacity connectivity where portability and reliability are key considerations," said Mina Mitry, CEO of Kepler Communications. C-COM offers classic and next generation Driveaway, Flyaway, Fixed Motorized, and Manpack systems (iNetVu) for any vertical market where communications are challenged due to disruption or deficiency. C-COM has more than 20 different Comm-on-the-Pause antenna models, integrated with all major modem manufacturers, approved with most major satellite operators, and is working closely with more than 500 active dealers in over 100 countries. More than 8,000 iNetVu systems have been sold since the brand's inception. Working with a renowned research team at the University of Waterloo, the Company is also developing an electronically steerable, Comm-on-the-Move Ka-band flat panel antenna system based on phased array technology with the potential to revolutionize satellite's addressable mobile markets for land, airborne and maritime. ABOUT C-COM SATELLITE SYSTEMS Inc. C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. is a pioneer and world leader in the design, development, and manufacture of mobile satellite-based antenna systems for the delivery of Broadband Internet to any location via Satellite. C-COM has developed a proprietary, one-button, auto-acquisition controller technology for rapid antenna pointing to a geostationary satellite with just the press of a button, enabling high-speed Internet connectivity where terrestrial markets are overloaded or simply don't exist. The company has sold approximately 8,000 systems to customers in over 100 countries providing service to a wide range of vertical markets such as Oil & Gas Exploration, Military Communications, Disaster Management, SNG, Emergency Communications, Cellular Backhaul, Telemedicine, Mobile Banking, and others. The Company's iNetVu brand is synonymous with high quality, reliability and cost-effectiveness. In partnership with a renowned research team at the University of Waterloo's Centre for Intelligent Antenna and Radio Systems (CIARS), C-COM has been developing a next generation Ka-band flat panel antenna based on advanced phased array technology for enabling high-throughput mobility applications over satellite: land, airborne and maritime. More information is available at: www.c-comsat.com iNetVu is a registered trademark of C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. ABOUT KEPLER COMMUNICATIONS: Kepler Communications is a satellite telecommunications provider based in Canada, backed by Costanoa Ventures, IA Ventures, and other leading investors. Kepler aims to build an in-space telecommunications network through an incremental deployment of products and technologies. For more information visit: www.kepler.space and @KeplerComms, or contact Kepler at info@kepler.space. Forward Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Statements about new technologies, the possible benefits of such technologies to end users and to C-COM and the potential for expanded sales and the potential impacts of new technology under development all contain forward-looking information. Several factors could cause actual events, performance or results to differ materially from the events, performance and results discussed in the forward-looking statements. New technologies under development may not perform as expected, anticipated benefits of the new technology may not be realized, and new products and services may not be released or, if released may not gain market acceptance. Any of those events and others could influence future performance and C-COM's ability to achieve the results mentioned above. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and C-COM does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. # # # 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. INVESTOR RELATIONS C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. Tel: (613) 745-4110 ext. 4950 Fax: (613) 745-7144 lklein@c-comsat.com Corporate Logo To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43635 Ottawa (AFP) - Canada's first commercial farm for genetically-modified salmon received environmental approval on Tuesday -- the final hurdle in a decades-long push to bring the fast-growing fish to market, amid strong opposition. US-based biotech firm AquaBounty said it would begin stocking its Rollo Bay facility in the eastern province of Prince Edward Island, capable of producing up to 250 metric tons (550,000 pounds) of fish a year, "as soon as possible." The first commercial harvest, it said, is expected at the end of 2020, around the same time as another at the company's facility in Albany, Indiana. The genetically-modified salmon has a gene that enables it to grow more rapidly than conventional salmon, and can reach adult size in 16 to 18 months, compared with 30 months for natural Atlantic salmon. The company will be raising them in contained, land-based hatcheries. The US and Canada found in 2015 and 2016, respectively, that the fish was safe to eat, clearing the way for it to become the first transgenic animal destined for North American dinner tables. Environmentalists and consumer groups, however, continue to raise concerns that it could be dangerous to human health and may pose risks to wild fish if it were to escape into the environment. "This decision means more Canadians will be eating GM salmon without knowing," said Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, citing a lack of mandatory labeling of genetically-modified foods in Canada. Argentina, Brazil and China have also granted environmental approvals for genetically-modified fish farming trials, the company said. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! Many investors are still learning about the various metrics that can be useful when analysing a stock. This article is for those who would like to learn about Return On Equity (ROE). We'll use ROE to examine Cardno Limited (ASX:CDD), by way of a worked example. Cardno has a ROE of 2.9%, based on the last twelve months. That means that for every A$1 worth of shareholders' equity, it generated A$0.029 in profit. View our latest analysis for Cardno How Do You Calculate Return On Equity? The formula for return on equity is: Return on Equity = Net Profit Shareholders' Equity Or for Cardno: 2.9% = AU$16m AU$535m (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2018.) Most know that net profit is the total earnings after all expenses, but the concept of shareholders' equity is a little more complicated. It is all earnings retained by the company, plus any capital paid in by shareholders. You can calculate shareholders' equity by subtracting the company's total liabilities from its total assets. What Does ROE Mean? Return on Equity measures a company's profitability against the profit it has kept for the business (plus any capital injections). The 'return' is the yearly profit. A higher profit will lead to a higher ROE. So, as a general rule, a high ROE is a good thing. That means ROE can be used to compare two businesses. Does Cardno Have A Good Return On Equity? Arguably the easiest way to assess company's ROE is to compare it with the average in its industry. However, this method is only useful as a rough check, because companies do differ quite a bit within the same industry classification. As is clear from the image below, Cardno has a lower ROE than the average (16%) in the Construction industry. ASX:CDD Past Revenue and Net Income, April 1st 2019 Unfortunately, that's sub-optimal. We prefer it when the ROE of a company is above the industry average, but it's not the be-all and end-all if it is lower. Nonetheless, it might be wise to check if insiders have been selling. Story continues The Importance Of Debt To Return On Equity Companies usually need to invest money to grow their profits. That cash can come from issuing shares, retained earnings, or debt. In the first and second cases, the ROE will reflect this use of cash for investment in the business. In the latter case, the use of debt will improve the returns, but will not change the equity. That will make the ROE look better than if no debt was used. Combining Cardno's Debt And Its 2.9% Return On Equity Although Cardno does use debt, its debt to equity ratio of 0.37 is still low. Its ROE is quite low, and the company already has some debt, so surely shareholders are hoping for an improvement. Careful use of debt to boost returns is often very good for shareholders. However, it could reduce the company's ability to take advantage of future opportunities. But It's Just One Metric Return on equity is a useful indicator of the ability of a business to generate profits and return them to shareholders. A company that can achieve a high return on equity without debt could be considered a high quality business. If two companies have around the same level of debt to equity, and one has a higher ROE, I'd generally prefer the one with higher ROE. Having said that, while ROE is a useful indicator of business quality, you'll have to look at a whole range of factors to determine the right price to buy a stock. Profit growth rates, versus the expectations reflected in the price of the stock, are a particularly important to consider. So you might want to take a peek at this data-rich interactive graph of forecasts for the company. Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. What happened? A neo-Nazi who plotted to murder an MP was convicted of terrorism today and could face life behind bars. Jack Renshaw bought a 19-inch machete to kill Labours Rosie Cooper. His plan was foiled after a former member of banned right-wing terror group Nation Action informed campaign group HOPE not Hate about the plan. After the trial concluded, it was revealed Mr Renshaw is a convicted peadophile who was previously jailed for grooming underage boys. Whistleblower In July 2017, Renshaw told a meeting of neo-Nazi group National Action he was going to murder his MP. Robbie Mullen, a member of the banned organisation, was present at the gathering, which took place a year after the the murder of MP Jo Cox by the far-right terrorist Thomas Mair. Mr Mullen, who was becoming disillusioned with the terror group after two years of membership, contacted HOPE not Hate and warned them about Renshaws plan. At the time of the National Action meeting Renshaw was on police bail for making hate speeches and under investigation for child sex offences. He told the fellow extremists he had decided on suicide by cop rather than face a seven-year prison sentence. He bought the weapon to take revenge on a female investigating officer and to kill his local MP. Renshaw planned to kill Ms Cooper then take hostages to lure police to him. He also planned to wear a fake suicide vest in the hope that police would kill him. He was arrested shortly after Mr Mullen reported his plans. He will be sentenced tomorrow. Read more National Action targeted disaffected young men through online propaganda (PA News) Neo-Nazi who plotted to kill Labour MP is convicted paedophile (The Telegraph) MP targeted by Nazi murder plot makes call to protect democracy (PA News) A debate has broken out over whether its ever OK to lie about details like your height and weight on dating platforms. While dating apps and websites like Match.com, Hinge and Bumble allow users to volunteer their credentials to potential suitors, not everyone tells the truth. How would you feel if you knew youd been lied to on a dating app? Read the full story and have your say below: Story continues Harry and Meghans sadness after death of superfan, aged 99 The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are to write to the family of an Australian war widow who has died aged 99. Daphne Dunne had been in hospital with pneumonia for two months before dying just days after her birthday. Daphne met Harry three times during his visits to Sydney over the years and recently received a letter from the duke and duchess congratulating her. In October, Mrs Dunne greeted Harry outside the Sydney Opera House on the first day of his tour Down Under with the words: Its so good to see you again. Read the full story here (Evening Standard) Investigation launched into saboteur pro-Brexiteers Pro-Brexit saboteurs have attempted to bring Britains railways to its knees, it has emerged. Police are investigating two incidents where homemade short-circuit devices were found clipped to railway tracks in Cambridgeshire and Nottinghamshire last week, along with a note threatening to bring this country to its knees if Britain doesnt leave the EU. British Transport Police said it is working tirelessly to catch those responsible. Read the full story here (Yahoo News UK) Abigail Beall has posted a throwback video of the day she brought golden retriever Mac to Knapps Loch in Kilmacolm, Scotland, to try swimming for the first time. The happy dogs enthusiasm made up for his lack of skill, as he doggy paddled across the lake. Beall posted the video to Twitter after she rediscovered it. Mac has since learnt how to swim properly, she added. (Storyful). 64.1% Britons are more likely to have sex under the influence of alcohol and drugs than those in any other Western nation, a new study has found. More than 60% of 22,000 people surveyed in the UK by the Global Drug Survey had sex after drinking, compared with 59.9% in the Eurozone, 58.5% from Australia and 55% from the US. Brits also topped the table for having sex after ecstasy (MDMA) and cocaine. Cannabis was the only drug on which the UK did not top the table. Read the full story here (gdgSky Newsfd) Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing titled: "Holding Megabanks Accountable: An Examination of Wells Fargo's Pattern of Consumer Abuses" in Washington, U.S. March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Erin Scott Last week, Wells Fargo (WFC) announced that its CEO and president Tim Sloan was retiring from his position in an impromptu fashion, leaving without a successor in place. A few weeks after being battered through a Congressional hearing, the 31-year veteran of the bank said he had decided to retire after becoming too much of a distraction, and was replaced by the general counsel on an interim basis. Sloan came into the banks chief executive role in October 2016 as his predecessor John Stumpf retired abruptly following the banks fake accounts scandal. A CEOs departure is often a complicated, political process, as boards, executives, and consultants juggle various interests and the language used to describe a departure is one of the finer points. Sloan is 58 and had only been CEO for a little over two years, but he and/or the board no doubt chose retire carefully, though some headlines said he was stepping down or resigning. Its interesting to see what the public language is when a CEO is leaving, said Andy Challenger, a VP at consulting firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, which tracks CEO departures. Stepping down is the most common, retirement common, resigned is another term theyll use. The word chosen has weight. According to Challenger, executives can usually frame their own departures, and each option has different connotations depending on what they want to do next and how much face they want to save. A lot of times boards and companies will leave it up to the CEO how they will want to frame their departure. If a CEO chooses to retire, that can seem like it was your choice, it was time for you to go, said Challenger. Stepping down does take on more of this job isnt working out for me connotation. Executives can save face by retiring, but by definition, it has one big downside the acknowledgement that the main act of a career is over. Generally, according to Challenger, CEOs who have retired generally stick to spots on boards or accepting an interim CEO job in the short term should the need arise and the services match. Story continues In Sloans case, hes only 58 still young enough to have another act if he wants to. But after a full 31-year career at Wells Fargo with many of those years in charge of parts of the bank, the baggage associated with being a decision-maker and supervisor at Wells Fargo might have made it difficult to find a similar job as a chief executive or corporate president anyway. And with that entire career at the same bank, retirement has a ring to it that reflects Sloans decades of service. Similarly, Sloans predecessor John Stumpf also chose to retire, and did so after 34 years of service. Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracks CEO departures of companies that have been in business for at least two years with at least 10 employees, and found some interesting stats. In the first two months of 2019, Challenger said 124 had stepped down, 75 had retired, 27 had resigned, and 23 had taken a new position in a new company. Between 2014 and 2018, the numbers even out a bit more: During this time, 1,689 had retired, 1,466 had stepped down 1,437 had resigned, and 646 had taken a new position in another company. (During this time, the average CEO tenure was 11.4 years.) Of course, there are other reasons for departures. In Challenger, Gray & Christmass data: terminated (154), no reason given (100), another position within company (90), deceased (49), and scandal (45) among them. - Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, personal finance, retail, airlines, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann. 19 Wells Fargo scandals that surfaced during the Tim Sloan era Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond outside Downing Street in London, Britain April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls The Chancellor is expected to tell his cabinet colleagues that the UK cant afford another election amid a tense five-hour meeting. Top ranking MPs are meeting with Theresa May on Wednesday after the Commons once again failed to agree on alternatives to her Brexit deal. Philip Hammond is expected to tell cabinet that the government has to make its own compromise proposal or admit that parliament has failed and put it back to the people in a referendum since the party and the country cannot afford an election. Mr Hammond is understood to believe that any compromise would have to involve attaching a customs union to the withdrawal agreement, an option he is not enthusiastic about. MPs rejected all four Brexit alternatives tabled to the House of Commons on Monday. But yesterday the Commons rejected a customs union with the European Union by only three votes last night. MPs also rejected a motion calling for a second referendum by 12 votes and Nick Boless Common Market 2.0 plan by 21 votes. The defeats came after Labour MPs supporting a second referendum failed to heed calls by their leadership to support softer forms of Brexit. However, the meeting comes as Michel Barnier warns each day that passes brings the prospect of a no-deal Brexit closer. Mr Barnier said that no deal was never our desired or intended scenario but that the EU27 is now prepared. It becomes day after day more likely. Michel Barnier has suggested he could directly address MPs to discuss options to further delay Brexit. He also suggested he could speak to MPs directly, that he could discuss the options for delaying Brexit further, according to the Times. Following the failure of MPs to unite behind an alternative to Mrs Mays plan on Monday, the group, including Conservative grandee Sir Oliver Letwin and Labours Yvette Cooper, aims to pass the bill through the Commons on Thursday. The move was announced as Mrs May and her senior ministers gathered at 10 Downing Street for an extended crisis session of Cabinet to try to break the Brexit deadlock. Number 10 made clear on Tuesday that exit without agreement in 10 days time remains the legal default unless MPs approve a deal. Story continues Anti Brexit protesters seen wrapped in flags outside Houses of Parliament in Westminster during an anti Brexit demonstration. MPs later rejected all four amendments selected by speaker John Bercow.]. (Photo by Keith mayhew / SOPA Images/Sipa USA) A leaked letter from cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill, obtained by the Daily Mail, showed that the UKs top civil servant has warned of 10% food price hikes, economic recession and disruption to security if Britain crashes out without a deal. Instead of initiating a third round of indicative votes on Wednesday, when Parliament once more has control over the Commons timetable, Sir Oliver will table a paving motion for approval by MPs which would allow debate and votes on Ms Coopers bill on Thursday. Read more from Yahoo News UK: YouTubers posting thousands of clips of themselves drinking water Lib Dem councillor scared to put her children to bed Passenger who died on Qantas flight identified The single-clause bill requires the Prime Minister to table a motion seeking MPs approval for an extension to the Article 50 process of Brexit talks to a date of her choosing. The group behind the bill, which also includes former Tory chair Dame Caroline Spelman, Commons Brexit Committee chair Hilary Benn, former attorney general Dominic Grieve and Liberal Democrat Norman Lamb, aims to push it through all of its Commons stages on Thursday, and hopes the House of Lords would then grant its approval in time for an emergency EU summit on April 10. Ms Cooper said: She needs to put forward a proposal, including saying how long an extension she thinks we need to sort things out. If the Government wont act urgently, then Parliament has a responsibility to try to ensure that happens even though we are right up against the deadline. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK Chicago (AFP) - Chicago on Tuesday became the biggest US city to elect a black woman its mayor, as voters put their faith in an openly-gay political novice to tackle difficult problems of economic inequality and gun violence. Lori Lightfoot, a 56-year-old former federal prosecutor and practicing lawyer who has never before held elected office, won the Midwestern city's mayoral race in a lopsided victory. She beat out Toni Preckwinkle, a career politician who is also black, by a wide margin of 74 to 26 percent with most ballots counted. "We were up against powerful interests," Lightfoot said in a victory speech, with her wife and young daughter by her side. "Today, you did more than make history, you created a movement for change," she told a cheering crowd. Lightfoot will become Chicago's first openly gay mayor as well as the first African America woman to hold the post. Since 1837, Chicago voters have elected only one black mayor and one female mayor. Her ascendancy to the top of Chicago government was a stunning development in a city where insider deals and entrenched party politics held sway for decades. "It is a city-wide rejection of the Chicago political establishment at the mayoral level," Evan McKenzie, political science professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, told AFP. Preckwinkle, the chief executive of Cook County in which Chicago is located, has for decades held various local elected offices, which analysts said hurt her in an election in which voters were looking to shake up city hall. Among the top issues were high levels of gun violence that claims more lives than in other major American cities, and years of political corruption in the Democratic stronghold. The initial field in the mayoral race consisted of 14 contenders, but Lightfoot managed an upset -- sidelining moderates and establishment figures by promising to clean up city government and reduce economic inequality. Story continues She and Preckwinkle were the final two left competing in Tuesday's run-off election. - 'New ideas' - Voters left little doubt they wanted the next mayor to tackle the major issues vexing the city of 2.7 million people -- including economic disparities and gun violence. "The message is that (voters) want new ideas and cleaner government," McKenzie said. Community groups have for years complained about disparities in living conditions among the sprawling city's diverse communities. Gun violence, fueled by gangs and the drug trade, plagues economically-depressed neighborhoods in the South and West, which are majority African American. The downtown business district, and areas to the north and along the city's famed lake shore, have enjoyed an economic boom even as more than 550 people were murdered last year alone. Reforming the police department, which has a sordid history of abusive tactics, and city hall, which is mired in a federal corruption probe of one of its members, were priorities for voters, McKenzie said. Lightfoot headed a panel investigating the city's policing problems and held a number of appointed positions in city government. She has promised to increase affordable housing, fight homelessness and crime, and boost oversight of the police department. "We can and will finally put the interests of our people, all of our people, ahead of the interests of a powerful few," Lightfoot said Tuesday night. - Laquan McDonald - Lightfoot will replace outgoing mayor Rahm Emanuel -- once a rising star in the Democratic Party and former president Barack Obama's first White House chief of staff. The powerful Emanuel sustained political damage for his handling of murder of black teenager Laquan McDonald and declined to run for a third term. Lightfoot emphasized during her campaign that she was among the few early candidates to declare her candidacy before Emanuel decided not to run again. McDonald was a 17-year-old boy shot dead by police in a 2014 encounter caught on police dash cam video. The video -- showing officer Jason Van Dyke firing 16 bullets into the knife-wielding teen even after he fell to the ground -- was not released for more than a year. Emanuel faced accusations of an attempted cover-up. He fired the police chief and brought in a reformer who instituted changes, worked to rebuild public trust, and reduced gun violence. But as Van Dyke was about to go on trial for murder in September, Emanuel announced he would not run for re-election. Van Dyke was convicted and sentenced to nearly seven years in prison. China announced Monday it will launch a crackdown on all fentanyl-like substances from May 1 following US pleas for Beijing to control a drug fuelling a deadly opioid crisis. China is suspected of being the main source of a powerful painkiller 50 times stronger than heroin that has caused record overdose deaths in the United States. The issue has figured in trade talks between the United States and China, with Beijing promising to list any type of fentanyl when presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a tariff truce in December. "The US is concerned about all variants (of fentanyl), and it has all been resolved," Liu Yuejin, deputy director of the National Narcotics Control Commission, said at a press conference. Designating all fentanyl analogues as controlled substances from May 1 aims to prevent smugglers from skirting the law by changing formulas to make drugs similar to the painkiller. Liu outlined further work China would undertake, including inspections of key bio-medical and chemical industrial parks, cleaning up drug-related information online and cutting off criminals' online communication channels. Chinese authorities will also urge courier companies to implement real-name registration for parcels, stepping up customs checks for high-risk international packages and enhancing enforcement co-operation. Sellers often ship fentanyl via express package services. These are big steps which would have a significant impact, said Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration. China produces 85 percent of the world's synthetic opioids, he said. "Without China's co-operation the United States would not be able to put a dent in the current opioid epidemic that has taken so many lives," Vigil told AFP. American officials attending the press conference declined to comment. Wang Hesheng, deputy director of China's National Health Commission, indicated some analogues of fentanyl with legitimate medicinal, industrial and scientific purposes would not be included in the listing. Story continues - 'Horror drug' - In December, Trump said the move against the "horror drug" could be a "game changer" because China has the death penalty for major narcotics offences. The action comes as China's top trade negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, prepares to return to Washington this week for more talks following discussions in Beijing last week. "The Chinese government will step up co-operation with other countries including the US to join hands to tackle the global challenge fentanyl presents," Liu Yuejin said. Still Liu repeated China's denial of responsibility for the US's deadly opioid crisis, saying US allegations of large scale trafficking from China "lack evidence and are contrary to the facts". Admitting the existence of some cases of Chinese and American criminals working together, Liu said the "amount was extremely limited," and China "cannot possibly be the major source to the US". Instead, Liu blamed American's abuse of prescription opioids, pharmaceutical industry influence, US pharmacies and doctors "excessive prescription", lax enforcement and American culture conflating drugs with "freedom, individuality and liberation". "If the US really wants to resolve the fentanyl substance problem, they have more work to do domestically," he said. - 'Extremely important' step - Vigil agreed that "corporate greed in pharmaceutical industry" and overprescription of opioids had driven a lot of the epidemic in the US. "If China stems the movement of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids to the United States it would have a huge impact, but it would not stop the epidemic," he said, adding American politicians need to take action. The US Justice Department has indicted several Chinese individuals on allegations of manufacturing and distributing illegal drugs. Asked about the cases, Liu said China was working with US law enforcement, but had not found evidence that the individuals had broken Chinese law. Diplomats invited to attend the briefing said Beijing's action marked an important step for combatting the drug trade. "What China did today was extremely important," said Stefan Thorsell, a police and customs liaison officer for the Swedish embassy in Beijing. "Even though Sweden is a small country we have problems, not as big as the United States, but we have problems with fentanyl as well," he said. [April 02, 2019] Techstra Solutions and Thoughtonomy Partner to Deliver Intelligent Automation for Business Transformation PITTSBURGH, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Techstra Solutions LLC (https://www.techstrasolutions.com), a digital transformation consulting and technology solutions firm, and Thoughtonomy (https://thoughtonomy.com), a U.K.-headquartered artificial intelligence (AI) software company, have partnered to accelerate the transformation of companies across a range of industries to an automation-first digital operating model. The award-winning Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce is the only intelligent automation platform that delivers a pool of digital workers directly from the Microsoft Azure Cloud using a SaaS delivery model. Businesses with an internet connection can integrate these "bots" into any system or application to emulate the actions of human employees. Uniquely equipped with advanced AI abilities (visual detection, machine learning, and additional cognitive functionality), Virtual Workforce quickly matures robotics process automation (RPA) capabilities without having to buy, integrate, or maintain new technologies and skill sets. Thoughtonomy is ahead of its competitors in developing an integrated AI solution that optimizes utilization, addresses a wider range of use cases, and enables scale and lower cost of ownership. Techstra Solutions believes autmation is a gateway to achieving digital transformation and a key enabler of true end-to-end process improvement. It can now deploy Thoughtonomy's robust platform in days, not months, and help business leaders and their technology partners quickly streamline operations and unlock ROI. "Many companies that have had success with RPA are struggling to mature their platforms to address increased demand," said Larry Honig, Chief Digital Officer of Techstra Solutions. "This is especially true when moving from back-office to sophisticated use cases such as customer experience and support. Scaling automation requires leveraging additional AI capabilities, such as computer vision, machine learning, and real time conversational interfaces, which is provided by Thoughtonomy via one solution, one platform, with one license." "Techstra's focus on delivering the business value of digital transformation resonated strongly with us," said Terry Walby, CEO and founder of Thoughtonomy. "We are excited to expand our U.S. network and deliver the huge benefits of Intelligent Automation and the future of work." About Techstra Solutions LLC Techstra Solutions is a consulting and technology solutions firm helping companies realize the business value of digital transformation. Focusing in the areas of technology, analytics, talent, and process improvement, Techstra empowers companies to accelerate and sustain organizational change. Our experienced practitioners, with cross-industry enterprise expertise, deliver results that meet strategic requirements and enable transformational success. About Thoughtonomy Thoughtonomy is a U.K.-headquartered AI software company that enables organizations and the people they employ to do more and achieve more. The company's award-winning SaaS-based Intelligent Automation platform, gives companies access to a pool of cloud based intelligent digital workers that can perform the repetitive, time-intensive tasks that slow people down. By integrating this digital workforce with their human teams, companies can accelerate growth and achieve a step change in efficiency. Thoughtonomy was founded in the U.K. in 2013 and now supports more than 200 clients spread across a wide range of industries in 29 countries. The company has offices in London and Manchester in the U.K., as well as New York and Austin in the U.S. Contact: Erin Starzynski, 212036@email4pr.com, 412-398-8027 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/techstra-solutions-and-thoughtonomy-partner-to-deliver-intelligent-automation-for-business-transformation-300822754.html SOURCE Techstra Solutions [ Back to the Next Generation Communications Community's Homepage ] Washington (AFP) - A Chinese woman carrying multiple cellphones and a thumb drive containing malware was arrested on Saturday at US President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while he was staying there, court documents revealed Tuesday. An arrest document in the federal district court of Palm Beach, Florida said Zhang Yujing tried to gain entry into Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, first presenting herself as a member and saying she was headed to the pool -- despite not having a swimsuit. Then, she claimed to be attending a non-existent Chinese-American friendship event. After she was detained, she offered an additional story: that she was asked by a Chinese friend named Charles to travel from Shanghai to attend the event and attempt to speak to a member of the president's family about US-China economic relations, the document said. The woman carried two passports from the People's Republic of China, according to the US Secret Service which arrested her. The charge documents mistakenly identified them as being from the "Republic of China," the official name of Taiwan. Secret Service agents at the scene found four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive and a thumb drive that "contained malicious software", according to the document. Zhang was arrested and charged with making false statements to federal officers and knowingly entering a restricted building -- which Mar-a-Lago becomes while Trump is in residence. Trump owns the luxurious beachside club in the wealthy Atlantic coast city of Palm Beach, and travels there frequently on weekends to play golf and meet friends. He keeps a residence in a private area of the club, but was reportedly golfing at a nearby course around the time Zhang was there. While Zhang's story of attending an event that was not on the club schedule raised suspicions, the Miami Herald reported that there might have been substance to it. Two events had been recently advertised at Mar-a-Lago for March 30 by a local Chinese-American businesswoman, Cindy Yang, on Chinese language social media, the Herald said. Story continues Yang is a Mar-a-Lago member who built and later sold a chain of massage parlors in Florida, which were recently raided by police over prostitution. In recent years she has promoted herself as a path of access to the US president, his family, and other decision-makers. Yang's website featured pictures of her with Trump and other members of his family and senior administration officials. The Herald also said that an event promoter who Yang worked with was named Charles Lee. A federal court upheld its previous ruling that cities cannot criminalize homeless people for sleeping outdoors if they have no adequate alternatives. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, rejected a petition Monday for a rehearing from the city of Boise, Idaho, in the case of Martin v. Boise. The court essentially maintained its September 2018 ruling that prosecuting or otherwise punishing homeless people for sleeping on the street if they have nowhere else to go qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment and is unconstitutional. The September ruling applied to all cities in the 9th Circuits jurisdiction, which encompasses western U.S. states including California, Washington, Oregon and more. The case stems from a 2009 lawsuit filed on behalf of six homeless Boise residents that claimed the citys citations under its camping and disorderly conduct ordinances violated the Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment. The ordinances criminalizing sleeping in public places were never a viable solution to the homelessness problem, Judge Marsha S. Berzon wrote in Mondays opinion. People with no place to live will sleep outside if they have no alternative. The judge added that putting people in jail was both unconstitutional and, in all likelihood, pointless. The distressing homelessness problem distressing to the people with nowhere to live as well as to the rest of society has grown into a crisis for many reasons, among them the cost of housing, she added, noting that the crisis has continued to grow despite cities ordinances prohibiting sleeping in public places. People walk past a person sleeping on a sidewalk in San Francisco in September 2018. (Photo: Robert Alexander via Getty Images) Since the September ruling, several cities, including San Francisco and Sacramento, California, Portland, Oregon, and Olympia, Washington, have all stopped enforcing ordinances that criminalized homelessness, according to a spokesperson for the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, which filed the lawsuit in 2009. Story continues Amid the nations affordable housing crisis, on a single day in January 2018, more than 500,000 people were homeless nationwide, according to a recent report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and almost one-quarter of those people lived in California alone. For example, about 7,500 homeless people live in San Francisco, including more than 4,300 who were unsheltered or living outdoors, per the latest count in 2017. But the city has only enough shelter beds for about 2,500 people, a recent release from the mayors office says. Our end goal isnt to protect the right of homeless people to sleep on the streets. Thats not a real win for them or for us, Eric Tars, legal director at theNational Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, told HuffPost. We win... when homeless people arent homeless, but in housing. While the court ruled again Monday that homeless people cant be punished for sleeping outdoors if there are no alternatives, our hope is that tomorrow, cities will begin to create those alternatives getting homeless people into housing, Tars added. The city of Boise has not decided whether to appeal the September ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, city spokesman Mike Journee told the Idaho Statesman. Related Coverage Homelessness Rises For Second Year In A Row In U.S. After Years Of Decline California Mayors Push For More Money To Fight Homelessness San Francisco Residents Raise Money To Block Homeless Shelter In Wealthy Neighborhood Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. By Susan Heavey and Susan Cornwell WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats mocked President Donald Trump on Tuesday for pushing back his promise of sweeping healthcare reform until after the 2020 election, and said they were happy to make it a central campaign issue. Trump in recent days had pledged to use court action to end Obamacare, the signature law of his Democratic predecessor President Barack Obama, and said his Republican Party would over the next few months push for a better healthcare plan at lower cost for most Americans. But Republican leaders in Congress quickly shied away from the issue and pushed him to reconsider. In a series of late-night posts on Twitter on Monday Trump did just that, saying there would be no vote on any healthcare legislation until after next year's election. Democrats gleefully jumped on the delay, saying it showed Trump and his party have no idea what to do with healthcare beyond repealing Obamacare. "Last night the president tweeted that they will come up with their plan in 2021. Translation: they have no healthcare plan," Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said. "They are for repeal, they have no replace." Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, said he told Trump on Monday that the party was not about to restart work on comprehensive healthcare legislation, noting they were unable to pass a plan when they controlled both chambers of Congress in the first two years of the Trump presidency. I made it clear to him we were not going to be doing that in the Senate, McConnell told reporters. Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in November elections after campaigning heavily on healthcare. Trump said on Tuesday he and Republicans would draw up a new healthcare plan ahead of the 2020 election and implement it soon afterward. "I think were going to have a great healthcare package ... If we get back the House and on the assumption we keep the Senate and we keep the presidency which I hope are two good assumptions were going to have a phenomenal healthcare, Trump told reporters. He said a Republican plan would mean most Americans pay lower premiums and deductibles for their healthcare than they currently pay under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. While Trump's delay gives Republicans more time to knit together an alternative to Obamacare, it all but guarantees a 2020 battle over the divisive issue. "Dont let President Trump fool you, America. Republicans are not the party of healthcare. They are the party that wants to end your healthcare," Schumer said at a rally on Tuesday. "We Democrats will not stop fighting tooth and nail to protect Americas healthcare, today, tomorrow, and on in through 2021. Trump and his fellow Republicans had vowed in the 2016 presidential election to "repeal and replace" Obamacare but failed to do so during their first two years in power, despite control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Several of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination, including a number of current U.S. senators, have already made healthcare a major part of their campaign message. Trump accuses Democrats of seeking "a socialist takeover of American healthcare," and is certain to take that argument onto the 2020 campaign trail. "I see what the Democrats are doing. Its a disaster what theyre planning and everyone knows it, he told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. (Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Susan Thomas and Bill Berkrot) By Sankalp Phartiyal and Aditya Kalra MUMBAI/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Two weeks after a suicide bombing in Kashmir in February killed 40 Indian policemen, a Facebook user called Avi Dandiya posted a live video in which he played a recording of a call purportedly involving India's home minister, the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and an unidentified woman. The trio could be heard talking about arousing nationalist sentiment ahead of India's general election, with the BJP president allegedly saying in Hindi: "We agree that for election, we need a war". Within 24 hours, one of Facebook Inc's fact-checking partners in India, BOOM, exposed Dandiya's video as fake. An analysis on BOOM's website said the video was created by splicing audio from older political interviews. By the time Facebook took down the post, it had received more than 2.5 million views and 150,000 shares. There is no Indian law that specifically targets fake news, but police in New Delhi registered a case of forgery against Dandiya and an official said investigations were ongoing. Still, Reuters last week found at least four edited copies of Dandiya's videos on Facebook with about 36,000 views. One on Google's YouTube has been seen 2,800 times while another on Twitter has 22,000 views. Messages and e-mails to Dandiya, an avid Facebook user who last appeared in a live video on March 23, went unanswered. The home ministry, the BJP president and party's information-technology chief did not respond to requests for comment. The videos underline how social media companies are struggling with fake news in India despite saying they've taken steps to tackle the menace ahead of India's general election, which starts on April 11. With 900 million people eligible to vote and an estimated half-a-billion with access to the internet, fake news can have an enormous impact on the election. Dandiya's video, for example, could have seriously damaged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP if enough people thought it was true. Policing content has become a massive global problem for social media giants which have no template for consistently preventing online fake news or eliminating it. Fierce internet disinformation battles gripped countries such as Brazil and Malaysia last year ahead of elections. Authorities in Indonesia and the EU, which are due to hold polls, have warned of the threat of fake news. In India, Facebook has partnered with fact checkers and, like Twitter, ramped up efforts to block fake accounts. On Monday, Facebook said it had deleted 1,126 accounts, groups and pages in India and Pakistan for "inauthentic behavior" and spamming, many linked to India's opposition Congress party. Google has partnered with fact-checkers to train 10,000 journalists this year to better tackle fake news. Facebook's popular messaging app WhatsApp has launched newspaper and radio campaigns to deter the spread of misinformation. Social media companies say they don't outrightly remove all fake posts as that would jeopardize free speech. Facebook has said that circulation of posts which are debunked, or discovered to be fake, is reduced by more than 80 percent. NO SILVER BULLET Posts that violate Facebook's community guidelines, including hate speech or content that could incite violence, are completely deleted, the company said, adding that Dandiya's video came under that category. But even when content has been identified as fake and removed, slightly modified versions of the same images, video or text can escape detection and spread further. "This is a highly adversarial space, so we still miss things and won't catch everything - but we're making progress," said a Facebook spokeswoman, who added that the overall volume of false news had been reduced on the platform. "There's no silver bullet solution in fighting misinformation." Twitter said it deeply cares about the potentially harmful effects of misinformation and encourages users not to share unverified information. A YouTube spokesman said the company will continue to embrace the "democratization of access to information" while providing a reliable service to users. Twitter and YouTube did not comment on Dandiya's video. SHOWN TO BE FALSE Another fake post that went viral recently was on popular Indian student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, who was arrested and charged with sedition after a 2016 rally to commemorate the execution of a Kashmiri separatist. Opposition parties said Kumar's arrest by federal police was an attempt by authorities to curb free speech. Some Facebook posts in February described Kumar as anti-India and showed his photo in front of a map that depicted some Indian states as part of Pakistan. Two Facebook fact-checkers in India investigated the posts and said the image was doctored. Still, a month later, Reuters found at least two copies of those posts on Facebook with 375 comments and 1,500 shares. Facebook in February announced an expansion of its fact-checking company partners to seven, from two. Facebook says it also issues an alert to users who try to share a post which its fact-checkers have debunked, but doesn't prohibit further sharing. Reuters found that when debunked posts of Kumar were shared, an alert popped up with a link to the fact-checkers' analysis. However, all four variants of Dandiya's videos could be shared without such fake news alerts from Facebook. "There is no way you can solve this problem (quickly) ... the magnitude of the problem is really huge," said Kanchan Kaur, a Bengaluru-based assessor at International Fact-Checking Network at U.S.-based Poynter Institute. FACT-CHECKING BUSINESS When tensions rose between India and Pakistan in February following a suicide bombing in Kashmir and cross-border air strikes, social media was flooded with fake news - old videos of captured pilots and photos of earthquake-hit regions were spread as depicting current events. "Since Pulwama we've been working seven days a week," said Jency Jacob, managing editor at BOOM, referring to the site of the suicide attack. On a recent visit to BOOM's office in India's financial capital Mumbai, five people were seen monitoring and analyzing online content. One of the rooms served as BOOM's studio where television-style news videos are shot on debunked stories and published on its website. As an industry, fact-checking is fast spreading in India. British broadcaster BBC has in-house fact checking operations and a dedicated WhatsApp number where anyone can flag suspected fake posts for further checks. "A dedicated team of journalists is debunking fake news daily, and also writing detailed explainers on controversial issues and claims," BBC's India Digital Editor, Milind Khandekar, told Reuters. Former software engineer Pratik Sinha and his mother are part of a 10-member fact checking initiative named "Alt News" which is run from a two-bedroom-flat in the western city of Ahmedabad. Using online video verification and social media tracking tools, Sinha said his team debunks up to four posts each day. Debunked posts appearing online has become a problem even for India's Election Commission. In February, a WhatsApp message called for spreading the word that said Indians living overseas could "now vote online for 2019 elections" and should register on the Commission's website. The Commission called it "FAKE NEWS" on Twitter and filed a police complaint against "unknown persons" for public mischief. A month later, the message continues to circulate on Facebook - a user who shared it on March 23 has so far received 42 likes and 19 shares. When someone questioned the post, the Facebook user responded: "I think you can vote. Just check the web site and follow the steps". (Reporting by Sankalp Phartiyal and Aditya Kalra; Additional reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal and Aditi Shah; Writing by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Martin Howell, Jonathan Weber and Raju Gopalakrishnan.) By Sankalp Phartiyal and Aditya Kalra MUMBAI/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Two weeks after a suicide bombing in Kashmir in February killed 40 Indian paramilitary policemen, a Facebook user called Avi Dandiya posted a live video in which he played a recording of a call purportedly involving India's home minister, the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and an unidentified woman. The trio could be heard talking about arousing nationalist sentiment ahead of India's general election, with the BJP president allegedly saying in Hindi: "We agree that for election, we need a war". Within 24 hours, one of Facebook Inc's fact-checking partners in India, BOOM, exposed Dandiya's video as fake. An analysis on BOOM's website said the video was created by splicing audio from older political interviews. By the time Facebook took down the post, it had received more than 2.5 million views and 150,000 shares. There is no Indian law that specifically targets fake news, but police in New Delhi registered a case of forgery against Dandiya and an official said investigations were ongoing. Still, Reuters last week found at least four edited copies of Dandiya's videos on Facebook with about 36,000 views. One on Google's YouTube has been seen 2,800 times while another on Twitter has 22,000 views. Messages and e-mails to Dandiya, an avid Facebook user who last appeared in a live video on March 23, went unanswered. The home ministry, the BJP president and party's information-technology chief did not respond to requests for comment. The videos underline how social media companies are struggling with fake news in India despite saying they've taken steps to tackle the menace ahead of the general election, which starts on April 11. With 900 million people eligible to vote and an estimated half-a-billion with access to the internet, fake news can have an enormous impact on the election. Dandiya's video, for example, could have seriously damaged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP if enough people thought it was true. Story continues Policing content has become a massive global problem for social media giants which have no template for consistently preventing online fake news or eliminating it. Fierce internet disinformation battles gripped countries such as Brazil and Malaysia last year ahead of elections. Authorities in Indonesia and the EU, which are due to hold polls, have warned of the threat of fake news. In India, Facebook has partnered with fact checkers and, like Twitter, ramped up efforts to block fake accounts. On Monday, Facebook said it had deleted 1,126 accounts, groups and pages in India and Pakistan for "inauthentic behaviour" and spamming, many linked to India's opposition Congress party. Google has partnered with fact-checkers to train 10,000 journalists this year to better tackle fake news. Facebook's popular messaging app WhatsApp has launched newspaper and radio campaigns to deter the spread of misinformation. Social media companies say they don't outrightly remove all fake posts as that would jeopardize free speech. Facebook has said that circulation of posts which are debunked, or discovered to be fake, is reduced by more than 80 percent. NO SILVER BULLET Posts that violate Facebook's community guidelines, including hate speech or content that could incite violence, are completely deleted, the company said, adding that Dandiya's video came under that category. But even when content has been identified as fake and removed, slightly modified versions of the same images, video or text can escape detection and spread further. "This is a highly adversarial space, so we still miss things and won't catch everything - but we're making progress," said a Facebook spokeswoman, who added that the overall volume of false news had been reduced on the platform. "There's no silver bullet solution in fighting misinformation." Twitter said it deeply cares about the potentially harmful effects of misinformation and encourages users not to share unverified information. A YouTube spokesman said the company will continue to embrace the "democratization of access to information" while providing a reliable service to users. Twitter and YouTube did not comment on Dandiya's video. SHOWN TO BE FALSE Another fake post that went viral recently was on popular student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, who was arrested and charged with sedition after a 2016 rally to commemorate the execution of a Kashmiri separatist. Opposition parties said Kumar's arrest by the police was an attempt by authorities to curb free speech. Some Facebook posts in February described Kumar as anti-India and showed his photo in front of a map that depicted some Indian states as part of Pakistan. Two Facebook fact-checkers in India investigated the posts and said the image was doctored. Still, a month later, Reuters found at least two copies of those posts on Facebook with 375 comments and 1,500 shares. Facebook in February announced an expansion of its fact-checking company partners to seven, from two. Facebook says it also issues an alert to users who try to share a post which its fact-checkers have debunked, but doesn't prohibit further sharing. Reuters found that when debunked posts of Kumar were shared, an alert popped up with a link to the fact-checkers' analysis. However, all four variants of Dandiya's videos could be shared without such fake news alerts from Facebook. "There is no way you can solve this problem (quickly) ... the magnitude of the problem is really huge," said Kanchan Kaur, a Bengaluru-based assessor at International Fact-Checking Network at U.S.-based Poynter Institute. FACT-CHECKING BUSINESS When tensions rose between India and Pakistan in February following a suicide bombing in Kashmir and cross-border air strikes, social media was flooded with fake news - old videos of captured pilots and photos of earthquake-hit regions were spread as depicting current events. "Since Pulwama we've been working seven days a week," said Jency Jacob, managing editor at BOOM, referring to the site of the suicide attack. On a recent visit to BOOM's office in Mumbai, five people were seen monitoring and analysing online content. One of the rooms served as BOOM's studio where television-style news videos are shot on debunked stories and published on its website. As an industry, fact-checking is fast spreading in India. British broadcaster BBC has in-house fact checking operations and a dedicated WhatsApp number where anyone can flag suspected fake posts for further checks. "A dedicated team of journalists is debunking fake news daily, and also writing detailed explainers on controversial issues and claims," BBC's India Digital Editor, Milind Khandekar, told Reuters. Former software engineer Pratik Sinha and his mother are part of a 10-member fact checking initiative named "Alt News" which is run from a two-bedroom-flat in Ahmedabad. Using online video verification and social media tracking tools, Sinha said his team debunks up to four posts each day. Debunked posts appearing online has become a problem even for the Election Commission. In February, a WhatsApp message called for spreading the word that said Indians living overseas could "now vote online for 2019 elections" and should register on the Commission's website. The Commission called it "FAKE NEWS" on Twitter and filed a police complaint against "unknown persons" for public mischief. A month later, the message continues to circulate on Facebook - a user who shared it on March 23 has so far received 42 likes and 19 shares. When someone questioned the post, the Facebook user responded: "I think you can vote. Just check the web site and follow the steps". (Reporting by Sankalp Phartiyal and Aditya Kalra; Additional reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal and Aditi Shah; Writing by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Martin Howell, Jonathan Weber and Raju Gopalakrishnan.) By Nadine Schimroszik HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - Deutsche Telekom's IT services arm T-Systems is on track to boost core profits this year, the unit's CEO Adel Al-Saleh told Reuters, but still has its work cut out to start delivering a cash return to Europe's largest telecoms group. American Al-Saleh was brought in at the start of 2018 to turn around T-Systems, which under previous management had over-committed to big, loss-making IT outsourcing deals and fallen behind in digital transformation. He struck a deal with labor leaders last summer to reduce the business's German headcount by 6,000, slash the number of offices to 25 from 230, and hire 3,000 staff - mostly in India - to round out its software skills. At the same time, Al-Saleh identified business lines that T-Systems could grow and those it should sell or run down. "We had a huge year in terms of what we needed to do," he said in an interview at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair, where T-Systems showcased promising business lines such as cybersecurity. "We accomplished nine percent growth in these growth areas. Our sales engine came back to life. We grew our sales performance. Order intake was pretty good. We tackled our costs. "We still have a lot to do. We are still on that journey. We need to become better." CASH CONTRIBUTION T-Systems stabilized revenues in 2018, when they grew by 0.3 percent to 6.94 billion euros ($7.76 billion). Yet adjusted earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) fell by 16 percent to 429 million euros. "This year is a year where we need to drive growth in EBITDA, not only in revenue," said Al-Saleh. "Our goal is to reach a positive cash contribution for the company by the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022." T-Systems has already discontinued loss-making IT services such as call centers, desktop management and support, and logistics for computers to deliver to employees, Al-Saleh said. It has also decided to "phase out" its involvement in ngena, a partnership to create a global platform that effectively merges its members' software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN). "We will phase out the engagement and decided to do something different," said Al-Saleh, promising an announcement this summer. He also highlighted a mainframe computing alliance with IBM that was struck in January and said more initiatives were in the works in areas such as smart cities, healthcare and cybersecurity. (Reporting by Nadine Schimroszik; Writing by Douglas Busvine; Editing by Thomas Seythal and Mark Potter) Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! Taking the occasional loss comes part and parcel with investing on the stock market. Unfortunately, shareholders of National Tyre & Wheel Limited (ASX:NTD) have suffered share price declines over the last year. To wit the share price is down 58% in that time. We wouldn't rush to judgement on National Tyre & Wheel because we don't have a long term history to look at. In contrast, the stock price has popped 9.6% in the last thirty days. Check out our latest analysis for National Tyre & Wheel To paraphrase Benjamin Graham: Over the short term the market is a voting machine, but over the long term it's a weighing machine. One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement. Even though the National Tyre & Wheel share price is down over the year, its EPS actually improved. It could be that the share price was previously over-hyped. It's fair to say that the share price does not seem to be reflecting the EPS growth. But we might find some different metrics explain the share price movements better. National Tyre & Wheel's dividend seems healthy to us, so we doubt that the yield is a concern for the market. The revenue trend doesn't seem to explain why the share price is down. Of course, it could simply be that it simply fell short of the market consensus expectations. You can see how revenue and earnings have changed over time in the image below, (click on the chart to see cashflow). ASX:NTD Income Statement, April 2nd 2019 We like that insiders have been buying shares in the last twelve months. Even so, future earnings will be far more important to whether current shareholders make money. If you are thinking of buying or selling National Tyre & Wheel stock, you should check out this free report showing analyst profit forecasts. Story continues A Different Perspective While National Tyre & Wheel shareholders are down 56% for the year (even including dividends), the market itself is up 11%. While the aim is to do better than that, it's worth recalling that even great long-term investments sometimes underperform for a year or more. Putting aside the last twelve months, it's good to see the share price has rebounded by 5.1%, in the last ninety days. Let's just hope this isn't the widely-feared 'dead cat bounce' (which would indicate further declines to come). It is all well and good that insiders have been buying shares, but we suggest you check here to see what price insiders were buying at. National Tyre & Wheel is not the only stock insiders are buying. So take a peek at this free list of growing companies with insider buying. Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on AU exchanges. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Weather Alert ...HIGH WIND WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM WEDNESDAY MORNING THROUGH WEDNESDAY EVENING... * WHAT...Southwest winds 25 to 35 mph with gusts up to 65 mph possible. * WHERE...Portions of east central, northeast and southeast Nebraska and southwest and west central Iowa. * WHEN...From Wednesday morning through Wednesday evening. * IMPACTS...Damaging winds could blow down trees and power lines. Widespread power outages are possible. Travel could be difficult, especially for high profile vehicles. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Monitor the latest forecasts and warnings for updates on this situation. Fasten loose objects or shelter objects in a safe location prior to the onset of winds. && WASHINGTON Marking the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the world's most famous NATO critic President Donald Trump focused Tuesday on the money paid by members of the historic U.S.-European military alliance. Tremendous progress has been made, Trump said in welcoming NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to the White House. Stoltenberg thanked Trump for his "strong commitment to NATO," especially his "strong leadership on burden sharing. Though Trump and Stoltenberg frequently say nice things about each other, their latest meeting took place amid tensions over Trump's attacks on the alliance, especially his claims that some countries don't contribute enough to mutual defense. "There are many countries that take advantage of us very seriously, both at NATO and on trade," Trump told a group of U.S. governors Feb. 25, though he praised NATO countries for increasing defense spending by about $100 billion in recent years. "I have a great relationship with the leaders but we have to be treated fairly," Trump said. At Tuesday's meeting, Trump took credit for an increase in defense funding by some NATO members, but he said the organization's spending goal 2% of gross domestic product per country "may have to go up." When I came, it wasnt so good, and now theyre catching up," Trump said. Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, called Trump's comments "extremely disappointing," noting that the president did not discuss the 70th anniversary or NATO's accomplishments over those seven decades, including its help in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks on the USA. "He only paid attention to one issue: how much money they're paying," Burns said. "That's all he cares about." Charles Kupchan, an adviser on Europe for President Barack Obama, said Trump sees NATO as a political issue, and getting allies to do more was one of his pledges. Trump simply "declared victory on the spending front," Kupchan said, and that enabled him to praise NATO as much as he ever has during his meeting with Stoltenberg. Story continues "Supporters of NATO like me breathed a sigh of relief," said Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. Trump often casts NATO spending in terms of how other countries owe the United States money, but that is not how NATO finances work: Each country pays for NATO commitments out of its own defense budget. During a summit in 2014 in Wales, NATO members agreed to increase defense budgets, so they would be at least 2% of their gross domestic product by the year 2024. Stoltenberg, who has a series of 70th-anniversary events in Washington this week, including an address to a joint session of Congress, has often downplayed NATO disputes with Trump. "The strength of NATO is that, despite these differences, we have always been able to unite around our core tasks," he said before leaving Brussels on Monday. "That is, to protect and defend each other. More: Trump repeatedly mulled leaving NATO military alliance, report claims More: 'Trump is having an impact': NATO head credits president's tough talk for $100B boost Criticism of international alliances, including NATO, has been a hallmark of Trump's political career. During his presidential campaign, Trump claimed NATO had become "obsolete." In a speech at his first NATO summit as president in 2017, Trump did not endorse the commitment of the 29 alliance countries to come to the defense of any member that is attacked. The president has frequently complained that too many NATO members, particularly Germany, don't spend enough money on mutual defense. During a White House news conference with Stoltenberg in April 2017, Trump changed his tune about the relevance of the alliance: I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete. A few weeks after returning from the NATO summit, Trump did endorse the mutual defense commitment contained in Article 5 of the NATO treaty signed in 1949. In January, The New York Times reported that "several times over the course of 2018," Trump privately told advisers he wanted to withdraw from NATO, a move that would all but destroy the alliance. A few days later, in a speech at the Pentagon, Trump expressed support for NATO but included a warning. We will be with NATO 100%," he said, "but as I told the countries, you have to step up." Trump repeated the 100% line in his Oval Office meeting Tuesday with Stoltenberg, who has often served as a bridge between NATO members and the critical U.S. president. Some NATO members remain suspicious of Trump, fearful he is willing to undermine the alliance that remains on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. Critics said a weakened NATO would be less willing to contain an expansionist Russia threatening Ukraine and other neighbors. Two former U.S. ambassadors to NATO, Burns and Douglas Lute, wrote in a report released in February that Trump "is regarded widely in NATO capitals as the Alliances most urgent, and often most difficult, problem." In the report titled "NATO at Seventy: An Alliance in Crisis" Burns and Lute said NATO did not hold a major summit to mark the 70th anniversary because "they feared President Trump would blow up a meeting in controversy as he has done each time he has met with NATO leaders during the past two years." NATO has a scaled-back summit scheduled for December in London, in addition to ceremonial events this week in Washington. Burns, a professor of diplomacy and international relations at Harvard University, said too many leaders of NATO countries believe Trump doesn't want to lead the alliance but has instead become its "chief critic." "The president has been, at best, ambivalent about the alliance," he said. Some analysts said they expected Trump to mute his criticism of NATO during this week of commemorations. Despite Trump's attacks, NATO has remained resilient and popular with U.S. lawmakers and the public, Kupchan said. "At the end of the day, he's a politician, and I just don't see anything in it for him" to attack NATO, he said. "I don't see how Trump would consider that to be a political winner." This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump, NATO leader meet amid tensions over military spending by US allies Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock Unlike nurses, who may pop in and out of your room during your labor, a doula ( from the ancient Greek meaning a woman who serves) can be there to assist you all throughout childbirth. Most doulas will meet with you at least once during your pregnancy to hash out any fears and questions you have and to discuss coping strategies. Once labor begins, your doula will meet you at your hospital, birthing center, or home, where she might encourage you to rock back and forth on a yoga ball, help you into the shower, massage your lower back, tell you how awesome you areor all of the above. She can also teach your partner how to apply counterpressure during your contractions or offer your partner a chance to grab a quick snack. A study in the American Journal of Public Health found that labor support can reduce the odds of a cesarean by more than 40 percent, likely because a doula keeps you calm, preventing the secretion of stress hormones that can interfere with labor. She can also help you cope with pain and get into a more active and forceful labor, which may postpone or eliminate the need for medication and reduce your risk of having an unplanned C-section. One research review, involving more than 15,000 women, found that those who used a doula had a decreased use of pain medsas well as slightly shorter labors, fewer cesareans, and higher overall satisfaction with the experience. Babies born to these moms were also more likely to have good five-minute Apgar scores. Doulas arent regulated by the federal or state governments, so consult the following organizations for candidates with proper certification: DONA International; Childbirth and Postpartum Professional Association; International Childbirth Education Association; or Pro Doula. Each has its own benchmarks for training and birth experience. Once youve narrowed down your list, meet with each doula and ask her scenario-based questions. You should leave the interview thinking she really gets you and your needs. The cost of a doula can vary depending on your location, ranging from $800 to $2,500. Less experienced doulaswho have training but still require births for certificationmay not charge as much. You may also get some coverage through your health insurance. Ask your provider if there are requirements for coverage, like a note or prescription for labor support from your doctor. Story continues Sources: George Mussalli, M.D., partner at Village Obstetrics in New York City; Randy Patterson, co-owner of Northeast Doulas, in Peekskill, New York; Susan Pisano, former vice president of communications at Americas Health Insurance Plans; Tammy Ryan, a certified doula and Midwestern-U.S. regional director for DONA International. * Egypt turns to rice imports after slashing local cultivation * Researchers carry out cooking tests to please Egyptian tastes * Process unique to Egypt, packet directions suffice elsewhere By Nadine Awadalla and Maha El Dahan CAIRO/DUBAI, April 2 (Reuters) - With steaming plates of rice and freshly sliced apples on the side, a group of Cairo-based food scientists work in their lab to decide whether the foreign grains will suit Egyptian palates. The scientists cook and taste samples of rice on offer at state tenders before they are accepted. The process, which began late last year, has so far eliminated Indian origin rice and approved of Chinese and Vietnamese offers. Egypt has spent $46.8 million on Chinese rice in two tenders since November. A third is ongoing. Egyptians are major rice consumers and take pride in the quality of their local crop. But after planting less local rice in 2018 to conserve water, Egypt tapped the international market in November, requesting samples for a cooking test. Rice is a heavily discounted staple on Egypt's subsidy program, under which the state purchases foodstuffs that are offered to subsidy card holders, currently around 60 million people. The scientists' role is to ensure that the rice bought by the state is suited to familiar cooking methods and tastes. "Here, as a unit, we are all (academic) doctors as well as mothers in our homes," said Nahed Lotfy, director of the test kitchen. "We are all trained judges who have completed training courses." Samples are anonymized, said Nasra Ahmed, one of the taste testers. "We get a sample on which we have almost no information at all," she said. "Everything arrives with a code." Researchers inspect grains for water absorption, color and smell. After cooking, the rice is presented to the tasters. "We evaluate the product based on color, taste, aroma, flavor, as well as general response," Lotfy said. Story continues Researchers cannot wear perfume or smoke cigarettes. Sliced apples and water act as palate cleansers. PUSHING UP COSTS Traders say the taste test drives up costs by forcing them to keep their offers open indefinitely while it takes place. They say the testing process is unique to Egypt. "It is something that doesn't happen globally," Mostafa al-Naggari, a major Egyptian rice exporter and importer, told Reuters. "In other countries, the cooking instructions are simply written on the packet." On the private market, importers have contracted to bring in 150,000 tonnes of Indian rice from October until end April, with no complaints from Egyptian consumers. Naggari, who buys Indian rice to supply Egypt's private market, said he was not clear why Indian samples had failed the test. "These are the rules of the tender and we will respect it, but I am happy selling rice on the private market." But Nomani Nomani, an advisor to the supply minister, said the cooking tests were necessary to avoid the rice piling up in subsidy stores like it did three years ago when Egyptians refused to buy it. "Of course if an Indian rice sample that suits Egyptian taste is presented we will accept it, but the cooking test is necessary to make sure the rice we are importing suits consumers," he told Reuters. (Reporting by Nadine Awadalla and Maha El Dahan Editing Aidan Lewis) EVERYONES TALKING Your say on Equal Pay Day. Today is Equal Pay Day in the U.S., the date into the new year that women had to work to earn as much money as men did in 2018. It accounts for the average pay gap for all women in the U.S., which stands at 19.5%, but its worth notingas we do belowthat Equal Pay Day for black, Latina, and Native American women falls much later in the year. The Broadsheet covers the gender pay gap year-round (though we wish we didnt have to!), so to mark this occasion, we wanted to hear from you. Last week, readers shared with us their experiences with the pay gap. Some edited excerpts are below. A.F., in the communications industry, recalled working as a lifeguard and realizing a less-experienced male colleague out-earned her. She confronted HR about it, but was met with excuses and reprimanded for gleaning the information from her co-workers misplaced pay stub. I didnt get a raise, she says. [It was] my first experience with a boys club. Im still questioning myself nearly 10 years later. Sonia Hodge, in K-12 educational administration, says when working for a past employer, she was asked to fill the top finance office without getting paid or recognized for it. Her unique circumstanceson the verge of marrying a man who lived out-of-stategave her little leverage. She eventually resigned. I was a 27-year-old woman who didnt know any better being dicked around by middle-aged men who called the shots. That was only five years ago, but Id do things differently now. Christy Kirk, whos in social media marketing, was ecstatic nine years ago when she was offered the job of general manager at a TV groups largest station. She was expecting to earn at least $165,000 per year, the salary of a smaller stations GM; she was offered $80,000 instead. [T]hey said it was because it was my first GM role. I pointed out that every GM in our company was on their first GM role and ALL made more than $80,000, and ALL were men. I tried negotiating but there was no negotiation. I refused the job, she says. Months later she planned to leave the company two weeks short of her contracts end. The president of the company, who had low-balled me for the GM job, threatened to sue me for leaving two weeks early. I told him to please sue because I had a lot of things to say under oath. It went away. I went away, she says. But I still have bruises from such a blatant attempt to underpay me or any woman. There are a lot of little girls out there who would like to have your job, is the all-too-familiar line Cari Coats, managing partner at Accendo Leadership Advisory Group, heard earlier in her career. Thats what I was told in my mid-20s when I questioned why the TV station I was working for hired my new male co-host at my same salary. (I had more experience and a better track record). SoI quit. When I reflect back on my (very successful) career, I realize what a defining moment this was for me. April Johnson, owner of Good Cakes and Bakes in Detroit, once worked at a company that forbid employees from discussing salaries. After leaving that job, I was mistakenly sent an offer letter for a new hire straight out of college that was $18,000 higher than the listed starting salary, she says. Now at her own business, [a]ll employees start at the same living wage, which is above minimum wage, and everyone is eligible for a $3/hour raise after three months based on their performance. S.R., in beauty intelligence, says she intervened when a female developer requested a salary lower than her male colleagues. I told her I would pay her more, the equal amount, but next time she had to negotiate for it, S.R. says. I think startup founders who have an influx of cash have rare opportunities to reset the dynamic. [J]ust highlighting the differences to her made her change her mode of thinking and her value. She now knows when she wants a pay increase, to consider her worth, her colleagues, and to not just pick an arbitrary number. The complexity of the gender pay gap is often framed in statistical terms: Is the average gap a reliable figure? Are we comparing apples to apples? And how do we account for variables like motherhood? (For more on all that, see below.) But as your responses indicate, the personal toll of the gender pay gap is just as multi-faceted; it can plant seeds of doubt and regret, it can build resilience, and it can galvanize meaningful change. Claire Zillman @clairezillman claire.zillman@fortune.com Paris (AFP) - French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday warned that the European Union could not "be held hostage" to the Brexit crisis and said that a lengthy extension of the deadline for Britain to leave the bloc was "not a certainty". Speaking during a visit to Paris by Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, the French leader said: "Our priority must be the proper functioning of the European Union and the single market. "The EU cannot be held hostage on a long-term basis to the resolution of a political crisis in the United Kingdom," he said. He added that France was "open" to a lengthy extension of the Brexit deadline on certain conditions but that it was "neither a certainty nor automatic. I am repeating it here very strongly." The comments underline growing frustration in Paris about the Brexit process, which has diverted attention away from pro-European Macron's plans for reinforcing the bloc. Following the rejection of British Prime Minister Theresa May's proposed Brexit deal three times, and inconclusive votes on alternative ideas in the House of Commons, Macron said the country was on course to crash out of the EU. "If the United Kingdom is unable three years after the referendum to propose a solution that commands a majority, it will have chosen de facto for itself to leave without a deal and we are unable to prevent this failure," he said. Repeating what was expressed by European leaders at a meeting in Brussels on March 22, Macron said "it is up to the United Kingdom to present a credible alternative plan, backed by a majority, between now and April 10." - 'No deal' divisions - The meeting between Macron and Varadkar was billed as an opportunity for them to exchange views on Brexit, and the French leader said: "We will never abandon Ireland and the Irish, whatever happens, because that solidarity is the very meaning of the European project." Story continues But differences are emerging between the two sides as the possibility of a "no deal" Brexit looms, which would lead to the creation of a border between the UK territory of Northern Ireland and Ireland. "We need to talk about what we will do in the event of 'no deal', which will be particularly difficult for Ireland," Varadkar admitted. In the event of a "no deal" Brexit, the Irish border would become the only land frontier between non-EU Britain and the rest of the bloc and would therefore in theory need to have customs controls. But Ireland has been steadfast in refusing any reintroduction of a physical border, which was removed as part of a peace agreement reached in 1998 to end decades of conflict on the island. Refusing border controls however could lead to the introduction of checks between Irish exports and the rest of the European Union, experts and officials have warned. A spokeswoman from the French government said on Monday that France wanted to avoid "Brexit causing Ireland to be detached from the European Union." The EU's Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said Tuesday the EU was working with Ireland "on a unilateral basis in the event of a no-deal deal, to know where we can do these checks" but refused to elaborate further. "We are working very closely with Irish authorities to try and perform controls away from the border if at all possible," an EU official, who did not wish to be named, said last week. Brussels (AFP) - The EU's powerful anti-trust authority on Tuesday said a tax break from Britain for unnamed multinationals was illegal under state aid rules, firing a shot at London amid Brexit chaos. The European Commission gave no indication of the amount of money to be recovered nor the companies involved, but said the tax break "unduly exempted certain multinational groups" from UK rules aimed at combatting tax avoidance. "This is illegal under EU State aid rules. The UK must now recover the undue tax benefits," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. The decision was a partial one, the EU said, with other aspects of the investigation finding no fault in Britain's tax decisions. But it lands just days after March 29 -- Britain's originally slated date to leave the EU -- and serves as a reminder that the UK will be expected to meet its EU membership obligations before and after Brexit. Britain joins Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland as EU countries needing to recoup money from multinationals illegally handed tax breaks. "We are clear that all multinationals operating in the UK must pay their fair share of tax," a British treasury spokesman said in a statement. "We will carefully consider the Commission's decision," the spokesman added. The crackdown on London is part of a five-year campaign against member states bending rules to give big international firms unfair tax breaks, with US tech giants such as Apple, Amazon and Starbucks already ordered to pay back taxes. The EU pressed on with the campaign in January and launched an in-depth probe into Nike's tax affairs in the Netherlands. The decision against Britain involves something called controlled foreign company rules that help prevent firms from using an offshore subsidiary to avoid British tax. The commission said an exemption to these rules in some cases unfairly awarded companies the tax break. The European Union is reportedly going to demand around 10bn euros from the UK even if a no-deal Brexit takes place next week. Stock image. The European Union is expected to seek around 10bn from the UK even if a no-deal Brexit goes ahead on April 12, it has been reported. Sources reportedly said that the fee Britain will have to hand over to the EU in contributions for existing obligations. In exchange, UK beneficiaries of EU funding would continue to receive grants for the rest of the year. The news comes as MPs are braced for yet another round of voting in the House of Commons. A senior EU source told Irish broadcaster RTE News: We hope to have it wrapped up this week. MPs in the Commons are told which amendments have been selected for the latest round of Brexit votes. (AFP) The official said there had been informal signals from the UK Treasury that Britain would be willing to consider paying the remainder of its budget obligations until the end of the year. This is in order that universities, local communities and any other beneficiaries would not be frozen out of EU structural, regional development and research funding immediately. Farmers, including those in Northern Ireland, will continue to receive direct payments in any case as Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) funding has already been committed by the EU for the entirety of 2019. It would also mean British officials working in EU institutions would continue to have their pensions paid. Despite three defeats Theresa May is determined to attempt to get her Brexit deal through the Commons. Here shes pictured leaving church. However, on March 13 the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee raised serious concerns about the idea and sharply criticised what it called ambiguous responses from the Treasury on the issue. The UKs gross budget contribution to the EU for 2019 is 17.49bn. Of that sum, Britain has already contributed 7.2bn, meaning that in a no-deal situation the EU would face a shortfall of 10.2bn this financial year. The EU now expects that amount to be paid. Read more from Yahoo News UK: Blue Planet Live viewers stunned after baby turtle snatched by seagull Brave window cleaners work 900ft above street level Dead whale had 22kg of plastic in its stomach A Downing Street spokesman said: Weve said before that if we leave without a deal, the financial settlement as set out in the Withdrawal Agreement will no longer apply. Story continues This remains our position but, of course, we are a country that honours our obligations, and those would need to be resolved. In 2017, the UK received back an estimated 4.6bn in EU funding, as well as the rebate of 6.5bn. The new EU law, to be adopted this week, was first tabled by the European Commission in January as part of the intensification of its no-deal planning. On Tuesday senior cabinet ministers will meet for five hours the first three will be in a political session in the absence of civil servants to discuss the way ahead, amid speculation about possible resignations, a general election or change of Tory leader. Despite seeing her deal again defeated on Friday, the Prime Minister is determined to bring it back to the Commons for a fourth time in a final roll of the dice to get it over the line before the EU deadline of April 12. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK MILAN (AP) EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Tuesday he is concerned over Italy's slowing economy, and expressed hope that the government would take action to accelerate growth. "Italian authorities must make supplementary efforts to keep growth alive in Italy," Juncker said at a joint press conference with Premier Giuseppe Conte. Juncker noted that when the EU approved Italy's controversial budget expanding social spending, the commission projected Italian growth at 1.2% for 2019. Italy has since fallen into a technical recession, and various bodies have lowered growth estimates for the year, including Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which says Italy's economy is likely to contract 0.2% this year. In its report this week, the OECD called for bold reforms to tackle low productivity as well as social and regional inequalities. The OECD was especially critical of the basic income scheme backed by the 5-Star Movement, saying it risks weakening work incentives and creating poverty traps given the relatively high payments compared with similar schemes in other member states. Conte said that his government this week would approve a decree "with measures that will give impulse to growth." But he also said that the slowdown was expected, "and that is why we conceived of a budget that wants to follow expansive but responsible policies, approving measures that the country needed for too long to re-establish social equality." By Steve Scherer and David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday moved to end the worst crisis of his tenure, expelling two former cabinet members whom he said had undermined the ruling Liberal Party. Trudeau announced that former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and former treasury board minister Jane Philpott would no longer be allowed to sit as Liberal legislators. The Liberals have been in turmoil since Wilson-Raybould said in February that officials had inappropriately pressured her to ensure construction company SNC-Lavalin Group Inc escaped a corruption trial when she was justice minister last year. "The trust that previously existed between these two individuals and our team has been broken," Trudeau told an emergency meeting of caucus. "Our political opponents win when Liberals are divided. We can't afford to make that mistake Canadians are counting on us," said Trudeau, who came into office in November 2015 and faces a re-election contest this year. Wilson-Raybould was demoted in January and resigned the next month. Philpott quit shortly afterwards, saying she had lost confidence in how Trudeau was handling the matter. The move represents a retreat by Trudeau who as recently as last week had said the Liberals needed strong legislators with differing points of view. But increasingly angry parliamentarians had demanded both women be removed from caucus on the grounds they were undermining party unity. Polls show the crisis has cut public support for the Liberals to such an extent that they could lose an October election to the official opposition Conservatives. Trudeau has denied any wrongdoing. The scandal is starting to hit his fortunes in the populous province of Quebec, where the Liberals say they need to pick up seats in October to remain in power. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said Trudeau's decision to expel the two politicians from the Liberal Party sent a message that "if you tell the truth, there is no room for you in the Liberal Party". Wilson-Raybould said on Twitter that Trudeau had also told her she could not run for the Liberals in the October election. Philpott said on Facebook that she "did not initiate the crisis now facing the party or the prime minister". (Reporting by Steve Scherer and David Ljunggren; editing by Grant McCool) By Ron Bousso and Julia Payne LONDON (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil recently held talks on the sale of a suite of oil and gas fields in Nigeria as the company focuses on new developments in U.S. shale and Guyana, industry and banking sources told Reuters. The potential disposals are expected to include stakes in onshore and offshore fields and could raise up to $3 billion, two sources said. "Exxon is actively divesting in Nigeria," one source who was briefed on the divestment plans said. Exxon declined to comment. The Irving, Texas-based company is one of the largest oil and gas producers in Nigeria, with 106 operated platforms. Its oil output in the West African country reached 225,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2017, its website says. Exxon officials have held talks in recent weeks with several Nigerian companies to gauge their interest in the fields. One source said Exxon was soon due to open a "data room" - which would provide technical information on the fields, such as seismic and production details - in Nigeria. The discussions focused on a number of onshore fields Exxon shares in joint ventures with Nigerian state oil firm NNPC, including oil mining leases 66, 68, 70 and 104, one source said. Exxon's share of oil production in those fields reached 120,000 bpd in 2017, the last year for which data was available. Exxon is also weighing the possible sale of stakes in offshore fields in Nigeria, two sources said. It is looking into offering for sale assets in Equatorial Guinea and Chad, according to two sources. The Nigerian government has in the last decade supported a drive by domestic firms such as Oando, Seplat and privately held Aiteo to expand their operations in the country as international companies including Royal Dutch Shell sought to lower their presence due to oil spills resulting from pipeline sabotage. Exxon recently launched the sale of its stake in Azerbaijan's largest oilfield, which would mark its retreat from the former Soviet state after 25 years. Story continues Exxon announced earlier this year plans to boost its capital spending from $26 billion in 2018 to $30 billion in 2019 and up to $35 billion next year as it seeks to develop oilfields in Guyana and the U.S. Permian basin as well as gas projects in Mozambique and the U.S. Gulf Coast. In an analyst presentation last month, Exxon said it would accelerate its divestments to around $15 billion by 2021. (Additional reporting by Gary McWilliams in Houston; Editing by Dale Hudson) BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The British parliament will on Monday hold a second round of indicative votes on various Brexit alternatives, and the customs union could emerge as a preferred solution for lawmakers who have rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's deal. A customs union would allow an easier flow of goods, but would not itself guarantee frictionless trade and would limit, but not prevent, Britain's capacity to strike its own free trade deals. HOW INDEPENDENT? The European Union is itself a customs union and is also part of three other customs unions with Andorra, San Marino and Turkey. In the case of Turkey, the arrangement does not include agricultural or coal and steel products. Other goods can circulate without paying customs duties and the whole zone applies the same import duties for products from third countries - such as the 10 percent rate for imported cars. Unlike a free trade deal, a customs union removes the need for complex rules to determine whether a good is really from a given partner - such as a machine with multiple imported components. Such "rules of origin" can prove costly and time-consuming for exporters. Being a member of a customs union limits, but does not prevent the separate participants from striking their own free trade agreements with other countries. Turkey, the junior partner in the customs union with the EU, does face a challenge. The EU's recent free trade deal with Japan opens Turkey up to inbound Japanese cars without providing reciprocal access for Turkish products to Japan's market. The junior customs union partner, which Britain would likely be, can find itself playing catch-up with a reduced bargaining position, given their own market is already open. Turkey did for example begin a free trade deal covering goods with South Korea in 2013, two years after an EU-South Korea accord came into effect. It remains in exploratory talks with Canada, whose deal with the EU began in 2017. Story continues However, Turkey is free is in those areas not covered by the customs union. So, following their agreement on goods, Turkey and South Korea also struck in 2015 a bilateral deal covering services and investment. Depending on the nature of an EU-Britain customs union, Britain would still be able to negotiate with others trade access covering its large financial services market, investment, public procurement, data flows and possibly agricultural quotas. FRICTIONLESS TRADE Delays that can even extend beyond 24 hours at the EU-Turkish land border show that a customs union in itself is no guarantee of frictionless trade. Turkish trucks laden with goods bound for the European Union still need to show documents including export declarations and invoices and transport permits for each EU country through which the truck plans to travel. So far the EU has limited deals on road transport access to countries that accept free movement of people, such as Norway and Switzerland. The controls come despite Turkey having aligned its legislation with certain EU internal market rules, such as covering product standards, intellectual property rights and competition controls. Goods also can be subject to inspections at the border to confirm they comply with EU regulations. HARD IRISH BORDER A customs union would ease the flow of goods across the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, but would appear unlikely on its own to prevent a hard border. It would need to go beyond the EU-Turkey union to cover agricultural produce, notably dairy and beef. Britain would then find itself bound to retain EU measures to prevent diseases, pests and contaminants in plants and animals. The EU and New Zealand already have such an agreement on sanitary measures without yet having a free trade deal, which for example allows New Zealand to export to the EU more than 200,000 tonnes of lamb. A customs union, together with requirements to meet EU single market rules on products, which would be subject to European Court of Justice control. Such an enhanced customs union would not so much replace as resemble the "backstop" agreed between London and Brussels, but rejected by British lawmaker, in which Britain would enter a "single customs territory" with the EU and Northern Ireland would be subject to additional EU single market rules. (The refiled story removes extraneous words in second para.) (Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Angus MacSwan) SINGAPORE, April 2 (Reuters) - Singapore's parliament on Monday began considering a law on "fake news" that an internet watchdog has called the world's most far-reaching, stoking fears the government could use additional powers to choke freedom of speech and chill dissent. Governments and companies worldwide are increasingly worried about the spread of false information online and its impact on everything from share prices to elections and social unrest. Human rights activists fear laws to curb so-called "fake news" could be abused to silence opposition. Here are details of such laws around the world: SINGAPORE Singapore's new law would require social media sites like Facebook to carry warnings on posts the government deems false and remove comments against the "public interest." Singapore, which ranks 151 among 180 countries rated by the World Press Freedom Index, defines "public interests" as threats to its security, foreign relations, electoral integrity and public perception of the government and state institutions. Violations could attract fines of up to S$ 1 million ($737,500) and 10 years in prison. RUSSIA Last month, President Vladimir Putin signed into law tough new fines for Russians who spread what the authorities regard as fake news or who show "blatant disrespect" for the state online. Critics have warned the law could aid state censorship, but lawmakers say it is needed to combat false news and abusive online comment. Authorities may block websites that do not meet requests to remove inaccurate information. Individuals can be fined up to 400,000 rouble ($6,109.44) for circulating false information online that leads to a "mass violation of public order." FRANCE France passed two anti-fake news laws last year, to rein in false information during election campaigns following allegations of Russian meddling in the 2017 presidential vote. President Emmanuel Macron vowed to overhaul media laws to fight "fake news" on social media, despite criticism that the move was a risk to civil liberties. Story continues GERMANY Germany passed a law last year for social media companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, to quickly remove hate speech. Called NetzDG for short, the law is the most ambitious effort by a Western democracy to control what appears on social media. It will enforce online Germanys tough curbs on hate speech, including pro-Nazi ideology, by giving sites a 24-hour deadline to remove banned content or face fines of up to 50 million euros. Since it was adopted, however, German officials have said too much online content was being blocked, and are weighing changes. [https://reut.rs/2RP1OeW ] MALAYSIA Malaysia's ousted former government was among the first to adopt a law against fake news, which critics say was used to curb free speech ahead of last year's general elections, which it lost. The measure was seen as a tool to fend off criticism over graft and mismanagement of funds by then prime minister Najib Razak, who now faces charges linked to a multibillion-dollar scandal at state fund 1 Malaysia Development Berhad. The new government's bid to deliver on an election promise to repeal the law was blocked by the opposition-led Senate, however. [https://reut.rs/2R4IR6I ] EUROPEAN UNION The European Union and authorities worldwide will have to regulate big technology and social media companies to protect citizens, European Commission deputy head Frans Timmermans said last month. EU heads of state will urge governments to share information on threats via a new warning system, launched by the bloc's executive. They will also call for online platforms to do more to remove misleading or illegal content. Union-level efforts have been limited by different election rules in each member nation and qualms over how vigorously regulators can tackle misleading content online. ($1=1.3559 Singapore dollars) ($1=65.4725 roubles) (Reporting by Fathin Ungku; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Joe Brock) Ajaccio (France) (AFP) - Bombs at public buildings and holiday villas going up in flames: a spike in attacks on Corsica has led to worries that nationalist violence could return to the tourist destination known as France's "island of beauty". The Mediterranean territory, famed for its beaches and as the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte, was once a hotbed of anti-French militancy which led to thousands of bombings from the 1970s to early 2000s. But since 2014, when local National Liberation Front of Corsica announced a ceasefire, French state infrastructure and the luxury holiday homes owned by wealthy mainlanders -- still seen as "colonisers" by some locals -- have been largely safe. After a series of incidents in recent weeks, Gilles Simeoni, the nationalist head of Corsican regional government, warned of a "tense atmosphere" on the island and "the resurgence of the logic of conflict". "It's our common duty, in Corsica and in Paris, to stop this dreadful spiral and to open a real dialogue," he said on Monday, three days before French President Emmanuel Macron visits. Improvised explosive devices were found earlier Monday outside two tax offices in the town of Bastia, leading to evacuations and bomb disposal teams being scrambled in scenes that recalled past attacks on symbols of the French state. At the weekend, a secondary home in Sagone, a village above a picturesque bay of turquoise water on the west of the island, was attacked, while another partly-built villa went up in flames in Venzolasca on the eastern coast. In early March, on the day Macron's visit was announced, six homes were bombed, causing no injuries but lots of structural damage. - No claim - For the moment, no group has claimed the violence and experts warn about drawing conclusions. "We're in the dark," academic Thierry Dominici at the University of Bordeaux in western France told AFP. Story continues "Either it's violence led by different people and it's a new form of protest. Or it's the action of isolated individuals who want a return of the (nationalist) violence," he said. Fears of a new cycle of political unrest are linked to a tense standoff between Macron and the island's nationalist leader Simeoni and his more radical coalition partner in the Corsican assembly, Jean-Guy Talamoni. Their parties -- Femu a Corsica (Let's Make Corsica) and pro-independence Corsica Libera (Free Corsica) -- won 45.36 percent in regional elections in December 2017 and came to power promising greater autonomy. They have formulated a series of demands, including an amnesty for prisoners jailed for separatist violence, expanded use of the Corsican language and measures to keep wealthy mainlanders out of the local property market. But they have run into resistance from Macron, who has offered greater institutional autonomy and support for the local dialect, but is unwilling to give too much ground out of fear of encouraging other separatists in France. In an interview on Tuesday, Macron said he and Simeoni shared a responsibility to "do everything to ensure that the page of violence has been turned for good". "I think that you can defend the Corsican identity and fully respect the nation and its values," he added. But Simeoni will snub a public meeting with Macron on Thursday which has been organised as part of the French leader's "Great National Debate," a months-long exercise to discuss the demands of the "yellow vest" protest movement. Talamoni too is set to stay away and the ruling coalition has called for a half-day strike -- called "dead island" -- to coincide with Macron's arrival on Thursday. Dominici says that despite the standoff and violence there is evidence that the nationalists are making progress as a non-violent political force having given up the armed fight. While highly political demands such as the freeing of prisoners have gone nowhere, Macron has offered to add an article on Corsica to the constitution which would recognise its "specificity" and allow the regional assembly to adapt some national legislation. "On their (nationalists') institutional demands, there has been some progress," he said. (Reuters) - Canada's auto sales fell 2.5 percent in March from a year earlier, marking 13 straight months of declines, according to industry data released on Tuesday. A report released by DesRosiers Automotive Consultants said auto sales fell to 181,800 units in March, down from 186,447 units a year earlier. Sales of passenger cars dropped about 10 percent, while light truck sales were marginally up 0.6 percent. In January, Canada's economy grew by 0.3 percent, as the country's construction and manufacturing sectors picked up. According to the report, Ford Motor Co's Canada division posted total March sales of 27,915 units, up 7.2 percent from a year earlier, while rival General Motors Co's sales plunged 18.4 percent in the country. Separately, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV reported an 11 percent fall in total March sales in Canada. The company, which is among the top four carmakers in the country, sold 21,684 vehicles in March, with its Alfa Brand reporting a 56 percent drop in sales. Fiat Chrysler's sales in the United States dropped 7.3 percent, hit by a decline in sales across all of its major brands, except RAM trucks. In the U.S., automakers reported weak sales for March and the first quarter, citing a rough start to the year. But the companies said a robust economy as well as strong labor market should encourage consumers to buy more vehicles in the coming months of this year. The story refiles to drop extraneous word in first paragraph (Reporting by Arundhati Sarkar and John Benny in Bengaluru; Editing by James Emmanuel) Yellow background with the top half of a woman's body with pain points marked in different colors. The text reads: The Mighty's Guide to Fibromyalgia. Diagnosis. Learn More About Fibromyalgia: Overview | Symptoms | Diagnosis | Treatment | Resources Related: Fibromyalgia Support Resources Medically reviewed by Nancy Russell, M.D. Official Diagnostic Guidelines | Why Its Hard to Get a Fibromyalgia Diagnosis | Conditions That May Be Mistaken For Fibromyalgia | Fibromyalgia Blood and Lab Tests Understanding Fibromyalgia: Getting a Fibromyalgia Diagnosis Currently, there is no definitive test to determine whether or not you have fibromyalgia. A clinical diagnosis can be made by a doctor using American College of Rheumatology (ACR) patient surveys that rate your symptoms. The 2010 ACR diagnostic criteria are most often used by doctors, with a 2016 update to the criteria. There are three qualifications youll need to meet to get a fibromyalgia diagnosis: A significant rating on both the widespread pain index and symptom severity scale Generalized pain in at least four of five regions of your body Symptom duration of at least three months23 When making a diagnosis, your doctor will also make sure you do not have another condition that is really the cause of your fibromyalgia symptoms. Related: Symptoms of Fibromyalgia Official Diagnostic Guidelines Related: What Treatments Work for Fibromyalgia? Set by the ACR, your doctor will want to cover the official guidelines to make your fibromyalgia diagnosis. This will include asking about your symptoms, getting a better idea of the level of pain you feel and how much your symptoms are impacting your life. Your doctor will also make sure your symptoms arent caused by a short illness like the flu and rule out other conditions that sometimes look similar to fibromyalgia. Widespread Pain Index The first measure used to diagnose fibromyalgia is the widespread pain index (WPI)23. Its a questionnaire you answer with your doctor. In the past, physicians used a tender point examination to determine your pain level by applying pressure to various muscle areas on your body. A physical examination is no longer required to make a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, though some doctors may still use it. In part, the physical examination wasnt helpful because everyone has a different level of pain tolerance, even when youre in more pain than usual.20 Now a series of patient questionnaires, which starts with the WPI, are used to make a diagnosis. Story continues On the WPI, youll consider 19 areas of your body where you have experienced pain in the past week, including: Left and right shoulder Left and right upper arm Left and right lower arm Left and right hip/buttock Left and right upper leg Left and right lower leg Left and right jaw Chest Abdomen Neck Upper and lower back Symptom Severity Score A fibromyalgia diagnosis is also based on your symptom severity score (SSS)23. There are two parts to the SSS. During the first part, youll rate the severity of your pain, fatigue and cognitive difficulties on a scale of 0 to 3 for each symptom. A zero rating means its not a problem at all. Level one represents mild or intermittent problems while level two is moderate trouble that disrupts your life and occurs often. Rating a symptom three means its severe, constant and greatly affecting your life. After rating each symptom, youll add the points together for a score between 0 and 9. Part two of the SSS records the other symptoms youve had in the past week, ranging from constipation or diarrhea to nervousness, dizziness, hives, swelling, dry eyes and hair loss. For each symptom youve experienced, check off a box. Once youre done, count up the total number of boxes you marked. If you didnt check anything, give yourself a score of 0. If you checked off 1 to 10 checkboxes, you score a 1; 11 to 24 boxes is a score of 2; and more than 25 boxes is a score of 3. Now add your score from the first part of the SSS (your 0 to 9 score of the severity of pain, fatigue and cognitive trouble) to the score of 0 to 3 from the second part of the SSS on additional symptoms. Your total score, which should be between 0 and 12, is your final SSS score.1 Scoring Your doctor will look at your WPI and SSS scores side by side. According to the 2016 ACR diagnostic criteria, which are slightly different than the 2010 criteria, you need to meet one of two score combinations to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia. The first is a WPI score of greater than or equal to 7 in combination with an SSS score greater than or equal to 5. You can also be diagnosed with fibromyalgia if you have a WPI score between 4 and 6 and an SSS score greater than or equal to 9.1 Generalized Pain There are two additional requirements before your doctor can confirm a fibromyalgia diagnosis. First, you must report generalized pain in at least four of five regions in your body. The regions include pain on both sides of your body, both above and below the waist or pain in your neck, spine or back. Jaw, chest and abdominal pain are not considered when evaluating generalized pain.1 This is to assess for widespread pain, which is the defining feature of fibromyalgia. Youll talk this through with your doctor. It is not based on a physical examination. Symptom Duration The final criterion for fibromyalgia is the length of time youve had symptoms. Because the feeling of fibro pain can be similar to the aches and pains of the flu or other viruses, you must experience symptoms consistently for at least three months before a diagnosis can be made. This helps your doctor rule out other temporary conditions with similar symptoms.12 Why Its Hard to Get a Fibromyalgia Diagnosis Fibromyalgia is a complicated disorder, and because its still not well understood, it can be hard to get a diagnosis. Over the years, fibromyalgia has caused controversy, with many doctors debating whether it was a real illness or not. Because fibromyalgia affects more females than males and the majority of the medical and research community identify as men, part of the stigma is due to gender bias.6 Its also at times been considered a wastebasket diagnosis for chronic complaints doctors couldnt understand. Research has lagged behind other illnesses because of the controversy, which makes diagnosis tricky even in recent years.16 While attitudes are changing, there are still doctors who do not consider the diagnosis valid or who have not caught up with the latest research. Its estimated that it takes at least five years for someone with fibromyalgia to get the correct diagnosis, sometimes much longer.19 Other studies have shown that doctors often misdiagnose fibromyalgia, sometimes over-diagnosing.13 One study found that doctors got it wrong 66 percent of the time.10 Conditions That May Be Mistaken For Fibromyalgia Its challenging to diagnose fibromyalgia because its symptoms overlap with conditions that need to be either diagnosed or ruled out. In the past, a fibro diagnosis was often made by ruling out other conditions before deciding on fibromyalgia once the doctor ran out of other options.6 Its important to correctly diagnose both fibromyalgia and other conditions that look like fibro to make sure your treatment plan will be helpful. Below are some conditions your doctor may rule out when making a diagnosis. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) causes fatigue that reduces your ability to participate in everyday activities, sleep trouble, cognitive difficulties like trouble thinking or memory problems and pain. CFS has the same symptoms of fibromyalgia, except fatigue is usually the primary symptom and symptoms must last at least six months. CFS cant be diagnosed by a definitive test, so doctors must make a judgment call based on your symptoms. You can have both fibro and CFS.8 Hypothyroidism Your doctor may check you for hypothyroidism, which has many symptoms in common with fibro. Hypothyroidism, which happens when your thyroid gland isnt producing enough hormones, slows your body down.15 You may feel tired, forgetful, depressed or have digestive issues like constipation. You might experience other symptoms, some of which also mimic fibromyalgia. A doctor can order a series of blood tests to rule out hypothyroidism, which would likely include the tests TSH, T-4, T-3 and a thyroid antibodies test. Autoimmune Diseases Autoimmune disease, including rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, have an overlap in symptoms with fibromyalgia. Autoimmune diseases cause your immune system to attack healthy cells in your body, which leads to chronic pain and other symptoms. The pain you feel with an autoimmune disorder is in your joints, not your muscle tissue like fibromyalgia. An autoimmune diagnosis can typically be determined using blood tests.16 An estimated 10 to 20 percent of people with rheumatic disease have also been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Lyme disease Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi) is a bacterial disease thats passed to humans through tick bites. Lyme disease symptoms can include: pain in the bodys tissues and joints, dizziness, nerve pain, short-term memory problems and inflammation in the brain or spinal cord.18 You can be tested for Lyme disease, but the first basic test used enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is inaccurate nearly 50 percent of the time.9 A second test, the Western blot, is a common follow-up, and your doctor may recommend trying more sensitive testing from private labs such as iGenex to definitely rule out Lyme disease.17 It is common for those with Lyme disease to have fibromyalgia as a secondary diagnosis. Anemia Anemia is a blood disorder that occurs when your body doesnt make enough healthy red blood cells, called hemoglobin. As a result, your body lacks oxygen. Though there are several types of anemia like sickle cell anemia, hemolytic anemia and aplastic anemia, most cases are caused by an iron deficiency. If you have an autoimmune disease, thyroid condition or inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) Crohns disease or ulcerative colitis youre more likely to also have anemia. Symptoms include weakness, shortness of breath and headaches, among others. Anemia is diagnosed by a blood test.4 Mitochondrial Disease Mitochondrial disease is a genetic chronic illness that affects the part of cells that produce energy small organelles called mitochondria. Mitochondrial disease symptoms may include muscle pain and weakness, cognitive difficulties, gastrointestinal problems and seizures. The disease is progressive and has no cure or reliable test, though some specialists sometimes use blood DNA testing or muscle biopsies.2 Other Conditions to Consider Other conditions your doctor may want to check when you have fibromyalgia symptoms can often be ruled out or diagnosed via blood or other lab tests. Your doctor might investigate migraine, endometriosis and other chronic pain conditions that are associated with a central nervous system pain processing disorder.12 Depending on your symptoms, your doctor may want to screen for cancer. Its possible to have more than one diagnosis, fibromyalgia included. Fibromyalgia Blood and Lab Tests There isnt a way to definitively diagnose fibromyalgia yet, but experts estimate in the next five to 10 years, doctors will have a yes-or-no test to diagnose fibromyalgia.16 Several blood and lab tests are currently under review that show promise for the future. FM/a Blood Test Developed by biomedical company EpicGenetics in 2012, the FM/a blood test may confirm a fibromyalgia diagnosis.21, 5 Its a regular blood test scored on a scale of 0 to 100. If you score 50 or higher, the company says it confirms your diagnosis with 99-percent accuracy. Your doctor must fill out an authorization form if you want to take the test.11 Testing is available in the U.S. and several international countries. Most insurance companies will cover the test, including Medicare. While the test is promising, its accuracy hasnt been verified by independent research outside of EpicGenetics. Many fibromyalgia specialists dont use it. IsolateFibromyalgia Blood Test The IsolateFibromyalgia test is another blood test that may be able to diagnose fibromyalgia.22, 7 By submitting blood from a regular test to IQuity Labs, the maker of IsolateFibromyalgia, you can get a yes or no diagnosis in less than a week. The company claims a more than 90-percent accuracy rate. Your doctor must request the test directly from IQuity Labs. Its only been on the market since 2018, so its likely not covered by your insurance nor is it available in New York.3 IQuity Labs wont completely reveal the research they say proves the IsolateFibromyalgia tests work, so there is no verification from independent researchers. Ohio State University Blood Test (In Development) Another blood test is under development by researchers at Ohio State University.14 In a preliminary test, researchers were able to determine who had fibromyalgia compared to lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. While the researchers are optimistic they will be able to develop a blood test for fibromyalgia within five years, they first want to replicate the results of their initial work by doing studies with more participants and zeroing in on exactly whats different about patterns in the blood of people with fibromyalgia.14 Spinal Tap You may have had a spinal tap to rule out other conditions, but in the future it could confirm a fibromyalgia diagnosis. If you have fibromyalgia, doctors tend to see low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is a chemical that makes you feel better. They also found high levels of the neuropeptide substance P, which contributes to how much pain you feel in your spinal fluid.6 Using a spinal tap to diagnose fibromyalgia has only been looked at in studies and not tested for clinical practice. Researchers would need to determine if they can tell the difference between serotonin and substance P levels in fibromyalgia versus migraine and other conditions first. A spinal tap is a possible diagnostic tool, but it needs more research first.16 Learn More About Fibromyalgia: Overview | Symptoms | Diagnosis | Treatment | Resources Sources 2016 Revisions to the 2010/2011 Fibromyalgia Diagnostic Criteria. (2016). Retrieved from https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/2016-revisions-to-the-20102011-fibromyalgia-diagnostic-criteria/ About Mitochondrial Disease Mito FAQ. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.mitoaction.org/mito-faq Accurately Identify Fibromyalgia Early. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.iquitylabs.com/providers/fibromyalgia/ American Society of Hematology. (2018, January 08). Retrieved from http://www.hematology.org/Patients/Anemia/ Behm, F. G., Gavin, I. M., Karpenko, O., Lindgren, V., Gaitonde, S., Gashkoff, P. A., & Gillis, B. S. (2012). Unique immunologic patterns in fibromyalgia. BMC Clinical Pathology,12(1). doi:10.1186/1472-6890-12-25 Brady, D. (2018). Fibromyalgia [Telephone interview]. Cerda-Olmedo, G., Mena-Duran, A. V., Monsalve, V., & Oltra, E. (2015). Identification of a MicroRNA Signature for the Diagnosis of Fibromyalgia. Plos One,10(3). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0121903 Diagnosis of ME/CFS | Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) | CDC. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/symptoms-diagnosis/diagnosis.html Fibromyalgia Community National Fibromyalgia Association (NFA). (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.fmaware.org/ Fitzcharles, M., & Boulos, P. (2003). Inaccuracy in the diagnosis of fibromyalgia syndrome: Analysis of referrals. Rheumatology,42(2), 263-267. doi:10.1093/rheumatology/keg075 FM/a. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://fmtest.com/ Gerwin, R. D. (2018). Fibromyalgia [Telephone interview]. Gittins, R., Howard, M., Ghodke, A., Ives, T. J., & Chelminski, P. (2017). The Accuracy of a Fibromyalgia Diagnosis in General Practice. Pain Medicine,19(3), 491-498. doi:10.1093/pm/pnx155 Hackshaw, K. V., Aykas, D. P., Sigurdson, G. T., Plans, M., Madiai, F., Yu, L., . . . Rodriguez-Saona, L. (2018). Metabolic fingerprinting for diagnosis of fibromyalgia and other rheumatologic disorders. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 294(7), 2555-2568. doi:10.1074/jbc.ra118.005816 Hypothyroidism. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.thyroid.org/hypothyroidism/ Liptan, G. (2018). Fibromyalgia [Telephone interview]. Lyme Disease Tests learn about the lyme tests available. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.lymedisease.org/lyme-disease-test/ Lyme Disease | Lyme Disease | CDC. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/index.html National Fibromyalgia & Chronic Pain Association (NFMCPA). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.fmcpaware.org/ Schrepf, A. (2018). Fibromyalgia [Telephone interview]. Wallace, D. J., Gavin, I. M., Karpenko, O., Barkhordar, F., & Gillis, B. S. (2014). Cytokine and chemokine profiles in fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus: A potentially useful tool in differential diagnosis. Rheumatology International,35(6), 991-996. doi:10.1007/s00296-014-3172-2 What is RNA? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.rnasociety.org/about/what-is-rna/ Wolfe, F., Clauw, D. J., Fitzcharles, M., Goldenberg, D. L., Katz, R. S., Mease, P., . . . Yunus, M. B. (2010). The American College of Rheumatology Preliminary Diagnostic Criteria for Fibromyalgia and Measurement of Symptom Severity. Arthritis Care & Research,62(5), 600-610. doi:10.1002/acr.20140 Read more stories like this on The Mighty: What Is Fibromyalgia? The Approach I Take When Children Ask Questions About My Illness The Two Faces of My Fibromyalgia HOUSTON (AP) -- A tank holding a flammable chemical caught fire at a Texas plant Tuesday, killing one worker, critically injuring two others and sending panicked employees fleeing over a fence to safety. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez confirmed the fatality in a tweet and said the two injured had been taken by helicopter to a hospital. The two injured were in critical condition, said Rachel Moreno, spokeswoman for the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office. Authorities shut down a roadway near Tuesday's fire at a KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Houston, Gonzalez said. Fire crews battled the blaze for about 5 hours before they extinguished it, according to the fire marshal's office. All residents within a one-mile radius of the plant were ordered to stay indoors or shelter in place for about four hours. It was not immediately known how many residents were affected by the shelter in place. Crosby has about 2,300 residents. The fire sent a large black plume of smoke into the air. The fire erupted about two weeks after a March 17 blaze at a petrochemical storage facility in Deer Park , located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Crosby. That fire at a facility owned by Intercontinental Terminals Company burned for days and triggered air quality warnings. Crosby also is where an Arkema chemical plant was inundated by water during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Some chemicals eventually caught fire and partially exploded. "It is disturbing and it is problematic that we're seeing this incident in a facility, especially on the heels of" the fire in Deer Park, said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county's top administrator. Samantha Galle lives less than a mile away from the plant and said she heard and felt an explosion Tuesday. "It shook everybody's house around here," the 23-year-old said. Gonzalez said a transfer line at the KMCO plant ignited in the area of a tank of isobutylene a flammable colorless gas used in the production of high octane gasoline which then caught on fire. Story continues The fire spread to a nearby warehouse where dry chemicals are stored. Moreno said the Environmental Protection Agency has been testing air samples from the area around the plant and has not found any harmful readings. Worker Justin Trahan told Houston television station KPRC that he heard "some panic on the radio" but no alarms sounding before the plant caught fire. "We didn't think anything of it we didn't think it was anything severe," he said. Trahan said employees began running after "the tank ignited." He said that he and other colleagues had to jump over a fence to escape because all the gates were locked. Pilar Davis, a product manager with KMCO, said none of the emergency evacuation points at the plant were blocked during the fire. At a news conference late Tuesday afternoon, John C. Foley, chief executive of KMCO, said a cause of the blaze is still being determined. "We will conduct a thorough investigation ... and take steps to ensure this doesn't happen again," Foley said. Davis said the fire initially ignited with isobutylene but was fueled by ethanol and ethyl acrylate. All three are chemicals and solvents used to make fuel additives at the plant. Davis declined to comment on the worker who was killed and the two who were injured, only saying they were part of KMCO's operations department. KMCO, which was founded in 1975, is a chemical company that offers coolant and brake fluid products and chemicals for the oilfield industry. The Crosby, Sheldon and Channelview school districts asked students and staff to shelter in place at all their campuses. But later Tuesday afternoon, all three districts lifted those orders to shelter in place. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said that it has dispatched emergency response personnel to conduct an initial assessment of the fire. Foley said his company's number one priority "is safety and compliance." "We have a long track record of investing in the people, the systems and the assets to operate safely," he said. Meanwhile, the Texas Attorney General's office filed a petition in state district court in Austin on behalf of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The petition seeks a permanent injunction, civil penalties and reasonable attorney fees, court costs, along with recovery of investigative costs. KMCO has had environmental violations in the past, according to a review of records. In 2016, KMCO's corporate agents pleaded guilty to a federal criminal charge of violating the Clean Air Act. A plea agreement document stated that a plant employee made false entries in logs of air testing of tanks that were known to be leaking chemicals. Another employee then used those falsified logs to submit reports to the federal and state environmental authorities. The document says the violation went on between 2008 and 2012. A year earlier, the EPA cited KMCO for failing to comply with regulations on its risk-management plan for the plant, but settled with the plant for a $2,700 penalty. Texas has served the plant with three notices of violation of a federal clean-air law since last August, the EPA website shows. Harris County had obtained an injunction against KMCO in 2009 that required the firm to pay $100,000 in civil penalties and give investigators easy access to the plant and prompt notification of releases. ___ Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant in Houston, Jake Bleiberg and Terry Wallace in Dallas, Jill Zeman in Little Rock, Arkansas, Adam Kealoha Causey in Oklahoma City and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report. ___ Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70 The resolution of the Sahara conflict would require strong political will, not just from the parties and neighboring states, but also from the international community, UN Se cretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday in his report to the Security Council. A solution to the conflict is possible, he stressed in his report that takes into account the outcome of the two Geneva round-table meetings held on the Sahara with the participation of Morocco, Algeria, the Polisario and Mauritania. In his report, Mr. Guterres called for extending MINURSO mandate, saying that building trust between all sides will take time. The Security Council members are expected to hold consultations on the Sahara and to renew the mandate of the MINURSO before it expires on 30 April. The Secretary-Generals Personal Envoy for the Sahara, Horst Kohler, is expected to brief on his latest activities and Colin Stewart, the Special Representative for the Sahara and head of MINURSO, is expected to brief on the Secretary-Generals MINURSO report On 5 and 6 Dec. 2018, Mr. Kohler, a former German president, had brought the parties to the Sahara conflict to an initial roundtable meeting in Geneva in a bid to relaunch the negotiation process which was in deadlock since 2012. The second Geneva roundtable meeting on the Sahara was convened March 21-22, while a third one is planned, according to the UN envoy Horst Kohler. In its Resolution 2440, the UN Security Council has urged all parties to the Sahara issue to work constructively with the personal envoy, in a spirit of compromise, throughout the process to ensure its success. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! Today we'll evaluate First Derivatives plc (LON:FDP) to determine whether it could have potential as an investment idea. Specifically, we'll consider its Return On Capital Employed (ROCE), since that will give us an insight into how efficiently the business can generate profits from the capital it requires. Firstly, we'll go over how we calculate ROCE. Then we'll compare its ROCE to similar companies. Last but not least, we'll look at what impact its current liabilities have on its ROCE. Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE) ROCE is a measure of a company's yearly pre-tax profit (its return), relative to the capital employed in the business. All else being equal, a better business will have a higher ROCE. Overall, it is a valuable metric that has its flaws. Renowned investment researcher Michael Mauboussin has suggested that a high ROCE can indicate that 'one dollar invested in the company generates value of more than one dollar'. So, How Do We Calculate ROCE? Analysts use this formula to calculate return on capital employed: Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) (Total Assets - Current Liabilities) Or for First Derivatives: 0.11 = UK20m (UK273m - UK88m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to August 2018.) Therefore, First Derivatives has an ROCE of 11%. Check out our latest analysis for First Derivatives Does First Derivatives Have A Good ROCE? One way to assess ROCE is to compare similar companies. Using our data, First Derivatives's ROCE appears to be around the 11% average of the IT industry. Independently of how First Derivatives compares to its industry, its ROCE in absolute terms appears decent, and the company may be worthy of closer investigation. As we can see, First Derivatives currently has an ROCE of 11% compared to its ROCE 3 years ago, which was 5.5%. This makes us think about whether the company has been reinvesting shrewdly. Story continues AIM:FDP Past Revenue and Net Income, April 2nd 2019 When considering ROCE, bear in mind that it reflects the past and does not necessarily predict the future. ROCE can be misleading for companies in cyclical industries, with returns looking impressive during the boom times, but very weak during the busts. ROCE is only a point-in-time measure. Since the future is so important for investors, you should check out our free report on analyst forecasts for First Derivatives. First Derivatives's Current Liabilities And Their Impact On Its ROCE Current liabilities include invoices, such as supplier payments, short-term debt, or a tax bill, that need to be paid within 12 months. The ROCE equation subtracts current liabilities from capital employed, so a company with a lot of current liabilities appears to have less capital employed, and a higher ROCE than otherwise. To counter this, investors can check if a company has high current liabilities relative to total assets. First Derivatives has total assets of UK273m and current liabilities of UK88m. Therefore its current liabilities are equivalent to approximately 32% of its total assets. First Derivatives has a middling amount of current liabilities, increasing its ROCE somewhat. Our Take On First Derivatives's ROCE While its ROCE looks good, it's worth remembering that the current liabilities are making the business look better. Of course you might be able to find a better stock than First Derivatives. So you may wish to see this free collection of other companies that have grown earnings strongly. For those who like to find winning investments this free list of growing companies with recent insider purchasing, could be just the ticket. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Heres what it might look like (ETF) Black holes are staples of science fiction films such as Interstellar but we have never actually seen one. But that could be about to change, thanks to a groundbreaking project using telescopes around the world. Next week, scientists from the The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will unveil results and possibly an image from the telescope in a press conference on April 10. The Event Horizon Telescope aims to turn our planet into a radio dish using computer power to fill in the gaps as huge radio dishes all over the planet tune in to the supermassive black hole. The scientists hope that the radio telescopes will capture the event horizon the point beyond which nothing can escape from the black hole, not even light. Will we capture the first image of a black hole (Getty) It will look like a ring of bright light around a dark blob, some have predicted. The black hole the Event Horizon Telescope is aiming at is 26,000 light years from Earth, so its normally the size of a pinprick in the night sky. Read more Frail pensioner cleared of murder after beating disabled husband to death Harry Potter books burned by Catholic priests due to evil forces European Union set to demand 10bn euros from the UK even in a no-deal Brexit Gopal Narayanan at the University of Massachusetts said in 2017, These are the observations that will help us to sort through all the wild theories about black holes. And there are many wild theories. With data from this project, we will understand things about black holes that we have never understood before. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK A view of a Flair Air plane at Calgary International Airport. On Monday, September 10th, 2018, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Canadian ultra-low-cost carrier Flair Airlines announced that its entire flight attendant staff has completed specialized training in autism awareness. The Kelowna, B.C.-based company said the certification is a first for the airline industry in Canada. The announcement on Monday, one day before World Autism Day 2019, includes plans to help families impacted by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) better familiarize themselves with the travel experience on the ground and in the sky. Families with autistic children will be invited to experience Edmonton International Airport, including checking in, clearing security, waiting at the gate, boarding, finding your seat and fastening a seat belt. This is a first of which we are very proud, Flair Executive Chairman David Tait wrote in a news release. Our crews were very excited to participate in this training and look forward to easing some of the rigours of air travel for families with autistic children. The certification course administered by Connecticut-based Autism Double-Checked is designed to prepare flight attendants to recognize and cater to the needs of autistic guests. Subscribe today Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disability characterized by problems with communication and social interaction with accompanying repetitive behaviour patterns. A recent report by the Public Health Agency of Canada estimates that one in every 66 Canadian youth aged five to 17 has ASD. Research has shown families with an autistic child are significantly less likely to take vacations for fear of how their child will react to crowded airports, airplanes and hotels. Tait said Flair will host a trial boarding event at Edmonton International Airport in cooperation with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, Autism Edmonton and Autism Double-Checked Flair said it will announce further details about autism flights to be held in mid-June. Knowing the airline understands special needs, and events like these flights-to-nowhere, greatly diminishes that fear of the unknown when the family goes on a trip, Tait said. Flair is among a growing number of businesses providing autism-related training to staff and making adjustments to better accommodate impacted individuals and their families. The grocery chain Sobeys Inc., for example, announced plans to test sensory-friendly shopping hours at its Nova Scotia location in February. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. Freetown (AFP) - An audit released by Sierra Leone's finance ministry has accused the administration of former president Ernest Bai Koroma of siphoning off more than $1 billion, officials said Tuesday. Finance Minister Jacob Jusu Saffa vowed to "recover all stolen monies to provide basic amenities for our people" after the audit found the hole in public finances during Koroma's decade in office from September 2007 to April 2018. "The audit uncovered grave violations of procurement process in awarding of contracts in energy, roads, and pension and telecom sectors amounting to $1.036bn," the minister said. In all, 50 auditors from Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana and Sierra Leone conducted the technical audit with funding from UK Aid to investigate widespread corruption in Sierra Leone's public sectors between 2015 and 2018. More than $500 million was unaccounted for in the awards of road contracts by the Sierra Leone Roads Authority, the report said. Julius Maada Bio took over as president last year following a tumultuous campaign in which he vowed to clamp down on corruption. "People found wanting in the audit report are to repay the monies before end of June 2019 or face the law," Jusu Saffa said. "The money is three times more than health and five times greater than education funding," Abubakr Kamara, coordinator of a local NGO Budget Advocacy Network, told AFP. "Government should utilise recovered monies from corrupt officials to improve health, water and education funding," Kamara said. AFP contacted several of the individuals named in the report but they denied any wrongdoing and refused to comment further. A commission of inquiry began work in February after the earlier publication of a damning report which alleged that "rampant corruption" under the Koroma administration had led to the "near collapse" of the West African nation's economy. Although Sierra Leone boasts huge mineral and diamond deposits, the former British colony remains one of the world's poorest nations and is only gradually recovering from a 1991-2000 civil war which left some 120,000 dead. A 2014-2016 outbreak of Ebola and falls in the price of raw materials also dealt the country further major blows. United Nations (United States) (AFP) - France and Germany on Tuesday announced an initiative to bolster multilateralism, warning that the rules-based order embodied by such organizations as the United Nations was under threat of unraveling. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and his German counterpart Heiko Maas will officially launch the Alliance for Multilateralism in September during the annual General Assembly meeting of world leaders. The move comes as the United States under President Donald Trump is cutting funding to the United Nations, withdrawing from international agreements and shunning cooperation on key issues like climate. The US retreat has given China an opportunity to advance its agenda, promoting its controversial Belt and Road investment scheme while Russia has set up parallel tracks in Syria, for instance, that have sidelined UN efforts. "Confronted with the risk of deconstruction of our multilateral edifice, France and Germany are convinced that they can convey a message together," Le Drian told a news conference. "We are in a good position to show to the world what could be the consequences of unilateralism and isolationism, and enabling nationalist and extremist speech to flourish." Aside from the European powers, Canada and Japan are expected to join, along with possibly Australia, India, Indonesia and Mexico, according to diplomats. The foreign ministers stressed that the alliance was not directed against the United States. "We don't want to lock out anyone," said Maas. "Of course, we would be happy if the United States were to join such an initiative." But the German foreign minister said alliance members must commit to a rules-based international order. Paris (AFP) - A French military doctor was killed in Mali when his armoured vehicle hit an improvised explosive device during an operation against "armed terrorist groups", the French presidency and army said Tuesday. France's army for the past year and a half has carried out military operations against jihadists in northeast Mali and into the border area of neighbouring Burkina Faso. Captain Marc Laycuras, who belonged to a medical unit from Mans in western France, died in the Gourma region near the Burkina frontier, army spokesman Patrik Steiger told AFP. He said Laycuras and another wounded soldier "were immediately taken by helicopter" to hospital near Gossi, about 150 kilometres (93 miles) west of Gao where the French Barkhane force is based. The doctor was gravely wounded and died of his injuries, Steiger said, adding that the other soldier was not in a serious condition. "No enemy or any particular presence had been detected in the area at the time of the explosion," he said. The doctor was the 24th member of the French military to die in Mali since France intervened in 2013 and drove back jihadist groups who had taken control of the north of the country. President Emmanuel Macron in a statement expressed his "very great sadness" at the news of the doctor's death. Macron also reiterated France's "full support for Mali and the United Nations forces in implementing the peace accord" reached in 2015 with some armed groups. But jihadist raids remain a persistent threat and the Gourma region is known to be a sanctuary for several armed groups, based in the forests and along the Burkina border. In the centre of Mali, an ethnic mosaic, attacks have had a bloody impact on groups with a history of rivalry. Just last month 160 people were massacred, the victims Fulani herders in the village of Ogossagou who were killed by suspected militiamen from the rival Dogon ethnic group. The violence persists despite the presence of a strong French military contingent, UN peacekeepers, and the creation of a five-nation military force in the Sahel region. ATLANTA A controversial law that would ban abortions after six weeks, or when a fetal heartbeat is detected, is awaiting approval from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp amid growing backlash from celebrities and human-rights groups. The "fetal heartbeat" bill, passed by Georgia lawmakers last week, is among the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. The current state law allows abortions up to the 20th week of pregnancy. The bill adds Georgia to a growing list of states toughening their laws on abortion. Governors in both Kentucky and Mississippi have signed six-week abortion bans in recent weeks. And Republican lawmakers in several other states, including Tennessee, South Carolina, Ohio and Florida, are considering similar bills. Pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion demonstrators display their signs in the lobby of the Georgia State Capitol building Republican Kemp is expected to sign the Georgia bill, however, it's unclear when he will do so. The governor has until May 12 to sign or veto the law. More: Georgia's 'fetal heartbeat' abortion bill: What you need to know "We dont have any plans regarding timing of signing of the heartbeat bill," Kemp press secretary Cody Hall said Monday. Kemp campaigned on a promise to support anti-abortion legislation. He specifically said he would sign a fetal heartbeat bill, calling the law "common sense." "We stand up for the innocent and speak for those who cannot speak for themselves," Kemp tweeted March 29. "The legislatures bold action reaffirms our priorities and who we are as a state." If it is signed into the law, the bill would make it illegal for women to get an abortion if a doctor has detected a heartbeat in the womb, which typically occurs at six weeks. Many women don't know they are pregnant at that point. The law also allows mothers to collect child support from the father to help cover the costs of her pregnancy and permits parents to claim their unborn child as a tax deduction. Human-rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood argue that the fetal heartbeat bill strips women of their constitutional rights and vow to challenge it in court. Story continues "This is part of a national attack on womens health care," said Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates. "This is nothing more than women being part of a larger political game and being used as political pawns." Fox and other opponents say this law represents a larger effort by conservative leaders to fast track the issue to the Supreme Court and potentially overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. This year, a judge in Iowa ruled that the state's six-week abortion ban was unconstitutional. A similar law was also overturned in North Dakota in 2016. Hollywood celebrities signed a letter saying that they wouldl urge TV and film production companies to abandon Georgia if the law is passed. State Rep. Ed Setzler, a Republican from the Atlanta suburbs who authored the fetal heartbeat bill, said the law is about protecting the human rights of unborn children. "It's not only about one person, it's about two persons," Setzler told USA TODAY. "To allow the more powerful person in the relationship, the mother, to be able to completely dispose of and destroy a living distinct child is just unfair, it's wrong." More: Georgia's restrictive 'fetal heartbeat' abortion bill goes to governor The bill's exceptions include cases that involve rape or incest on the condition that the victim files a police report or someone files one on their behalf. Setzler said the Department of Community Health and the State Medical Board would determine the process for getting an abortion after a police report is filed. Other exceptions include when a doctor determines that the pregnancy would cause death or bodily harm to the mother or that the fetus would not be able to live after birth. There is no exception for women who say they don't know they are pregnant at six weeks, Setzler said. "Its simply not true that women cant know theyre pregnant by six weeks," Seltzer said, adding that missed periods or home pregnancy tests allow women to find out immediately. The NARAL Pro-Choice Georgia condemned the law calling is "blatantly unconstitutional." Most Georgians, according to the organization, reject government intrusion into their private medical decisions. This is an all-out assault on the reproductive health and safety of Georgia women, NARAL Pro-Choice Georgia State Director Laura Simmons said. This cruel, unconstitutional bill is part of an extreme GOP agenda to strip freedoms from women and could not be further from the values that most Georgians hold." Supporters of the bill began celebrating last week when state lawmakers passed it. Cole Muzio, president and executive director of the Family Alliance of Georgia, lauded the bill, saying it marks a pivotal moment in the state's history. Muzio called abortion "one of the greatest human atrocities mankind has ever known." The bill "affirms common sense and self-evident truths," Muzio said in a statement. "It is the bill the growing pro-life community has been waiting for, and we have hope that the strength of this bill will echo far beyond the borders of our state." This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Georgia's 'fetal heartbeat' abortion bill: All eyes on Gov. Brian Kemp who has until May 12 to sign or veto. Geneva (AFP) - Global trade growth is expected to be lower in 2019 than it was last year, the World Trade Organization forecast on Tuesday, citing widespread "tensions" and economic uncertainty. The WTO had in its preliminary estimates predicted a 3.7 percent expansion of trade for this year, but has revised that down to 2.6 percent, marking a decline on the three-percent growth recorded in 2018. "The fact that we don't have great news today should surprise no one who has been reading the papers over the last 12 months," WTO director-general Roberto Azevedo told reporters in Geneva. In its main annual forecast, the 164-member WTO renewed its concerns about systemic threats that could continue to disrupt the world's economy, notably retaliatory tariffs between China and the United States. There are indications that ongoing talks between Washington and Beijing could resolve the bruising tariff battle, but timelines for a possible deal are not clear. Asked if he saw either side emerging victorious in the trade spat between the world's two largest economies, Azevedo said "there will be many losers". It was therefore becoming "increasingly urgent" that tensions are resolved, he added in a statement. The WTO is "definitely hoping that we will hear good news" from the US-China talks, said Azevedo, who is a Brazilian national. A year ago, the WTO projected that trade growth for 2018 would be 4.4 percent. The fact that the final number was 1.4 percent lower than the initial estimate highlights the considerable downside risks plaguing the global economy, WTO economists said. For this year, the downside risks again outweigh the upside potential, but a "relaxation" of tensions, especially the lifting of restrictive trade measures, could see 2019 beat the projections, the WTO said. - 'Smooth' Brexit? - The projections released Tuesday are based on a "relatively smooth" Brexit playing out over the next two years, WTO economist Coleman Nee told reporters. Story continues Britain leaving the European Union without a withdrawal agreement, or the various other possible Brexit scenarios that remain in play, will impact global trade, Nee said. But "the situation is so fluid," Nee added. "We will have to wait and see what the final outcome is," before fully understanding Brexit's influence on world trade. The WTO, which works to create a level playing field in global trade, has faced unprecedented criticism from President Donald Trump's administration, which has accused the body's arbitrators of treating the US unfairly. Azevedo stressed that the WTO leadership was available to help nations work together to improve the global trade climate, but conceded that when tensions mount countries "tend to try to go on their own". Skopje (Republic of North Macedonia) (AFP) - Greece's prime minister will on Tuesday pay a historic visit to newly renamed North Macedonia to join in marking the end of a decades-long identity row between the two countries. Alexis Tsipras is making the first official visit by a Greek premier since North Macedonia's 1991 independence. The one-day trip comes a month after he and his Skopje counterpart, Zoran Zaev, finalised the deal that added "North" to Macedonia's name to distinguish it from a bordering province in Greece. The name-change settled a dispute that had roiled diplomatic ties for nearly three decades as the neighbours tussled for ownership of the name Macedonia and its cultural heritage. The key trade-off for Skopje was assurance that Athens would stop thwarting its efforts to join NATO and the European Union. Now the neighbours are also touting the promise of boosting economic ties, with Tsipras bringing along 10 ministers and more than two dozen Greek business leaders on the trip. After political meetings and a press conference on Tuesday, the two leaders are scheduled to attend a trade forum in Skopje. Ahead of the visit, Zaev told AFP there would be new Greek investments worth more than 500 million euros in North Macedonia, which is much smaller and poorer than its EU member neighbour. "The Republic of North Macedonia will have huge economic benefits from the deal that I believe will be seen in every area of the economy," the prime minister added. - Enraging nationalists - Since the initial name accord was inked in June 2018, congratulations have poured in from around the globe for the two young premiers, who took on risky political battles at home to push the deal through, enraging nationalists in both countries. Even before the deal was finalised, the pair were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by 2015 winner Wided Bouchamaoui of Tunisia. "This visit is historic," Tsipras told the state-run MIA news agency on Monday, hailing a new future for the "partners and allies." Story continues But he conceded that a "significant portion of the Greek people" are still "seriously concerned" about the name deal. "It is our responsibility -- mine and Zoran's -- to show that our nations can only benefit from the path that is now open," he said, condemning "rising forces of nationalism". Disgruntlement is also palpable among some in Skopje who feel the name-change is an embarrassing concession to Greece and that the end-goal -- entry into the EU -- may never materialise. North Macedonia is in the process of joining NATO and hoping the EU will open its accession talks in June. Yet the timeline is unclear, with appetite for enlargement shrinking considerably among several members of the bloc, particularly France. Meanwhile, in his own protest, the Balkan state's President Gjorge Ivanov has been refusing to sign bills from parliament ever since North Macedonia became the country's official name. The two-term president will be replaced in elections later this month. burs-ssm/boc The Algerian defense ministry Monday brushed aside a statement from President Abdeelaziz Bouteflikas office that Deputy Defense Minister, General Ahmed Gaid Salah has been sacked. The office of the 82-year old President who is also Defense Minister reportedly circulated a statement announcing the dismissal of Salah. The statement said Bouteflika appointed General Said Bey to replace Salah put on retirement. Bouteflika appointed Gaid Salah last week as Deputy Defense Minister despite the latters call late last month on the Constitutional Council to apply article 102 of the constitution by declaring the President unfit to run affairs. Bouteflika since 2013 has made rare public appearances after suffering a stroke. The President is currently facing growing demand from Algerians to step down. Reports Monday said Bouteflika might give up power before the end of his current term on April 28. Gaid Salah, by demanding the enforcement article 102, has distanced himself from his Chief and his entourage who are maneuvering to cling to power despite repeated demonstrations by tens of thousands of Algerians since mid-February after the Algerian leader unveiled his plans to run for a fifth term in office. New York (AFP) - Descendants of a Jewish Parisian art collector are welcoming the return to their family of a rediscovered masterpiece -- a 17th century painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. Michel Vernay, 71, and his brother Laurent, 65, traveled from Paris to New York for a ceremony Monday at the French consulate to receive a 1639 painting by Dutch master Salomon Koninck titled "A scholar sharpening his quill." The brothers are the great-grandsons of famed art collector Adolphe Schloss (1842-1910), and were accompanied at the event by Eliane Demartini, another rightful heir of the looted art. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was present and spoke at the event. The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1943, during their occupation of France, and sent to Adolf Hitler's headquarters in Munich. The painting vanished at the war's end, and resurfaced only in November 2017 when a Chilean art dealer tried to sell it via Christie's auction house in New York. Christie's identified the piece and contacted the FBI to begin the process of restitution. - Spotlight on looting, genocide- Given the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe, a restitution "puts the spotlight on all the looting and Jewish disappearances," said Michel Vernay, a retired engineer. "It's like a monument in tribute to what happened in the past," he said. Theft and looting is an integral part of the process of genocide, said Vernay, whose mother lost half her family at the Auschwitz death camp. "People are deprived of their ability to exist in society, to exercise their profession," he said. "Then they are deprived of their nationality, their resources and their property, and when they are alone, without resources, homeless and defenseless, it's easy to end their lives." Laurent Vernay described every restitution as a small victory. "But one painting is not as important as any single life that was taken," he said. Story continues The brothers are convinced that the return of antisemitism is not a passing phenomenon. "It's up and down but its always there," Laurent said. What plans are in store for the painting? "I have no sentimental feeling about it," said Michel, who was seeing the painting for the first time. "I was born after the war, after it had vanished." The artwork is an inheritance that is shared with more than 20 people, he said. "As a painting cannot be split, I hope there will be a French museum able to purchase it and mark it as artwork recovered after being stolen." - French museums unhelpful - Even though, there are 170 paintings still missing out of the 333 in the Schloss collection, the brothers have no plans to search for them. "If you spend your life looking for them, then you don't live," said Laurent. "That was the position of my father, and I decided not to do too much." Both Michel Vernay and Eliane Demartini deplored the way that French museums have dragged their feet when it comes to returning Nazi-looted artwork. In the United States "there is a real procedure and a pride to be able to restore these works," Michel said, while in France such restitutions have been done in a haphazard way. French museums, including the Louvre, limit themselves to displaying recovered artwork under the label "MNR" (for "National Museums - Recovered") until the descendants recognize the pieces and step forward to claim them. "For me, who is 70 years old, these works of art were looted 75 years ago -- I have no memory of them," said Michel. "To exhibit them, saying 'find your artwork,' for people who had not even been born or were a year or two old during the war, and who are more than 80 years old today -- excuse me, that's really a joke," he said. "It's not frustration," he said, "but eventually some anger comes up because there is no movement." Le Drian, the foreign minister, reminded them that the French government committed themselves last year to "accelerate and intensify the work of identifying and restituting to their owners" looted works of art. "The fight that you have carried out along with your lawyers" to recover the artwork "is also our fight," he said. cat/ch/jm In a new interview with Yahoo Finance, former Starbucks (SBUX) CEO Howard Schultz, who is considering running for president in 2020 as an Independent, argued that Medicare-for-all is not realistic. "[These] Democrats who are running for president [are] well-intentioned, good people. They love the country," Schultz said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. "But, every single day there is another tweet or another policy and most of these policies the Green New Deal is an example, which I was critical of the minute it came out after I read it is they know, themselves, this is not going to be something that is going to get passed. And they say, 'Well, this is just aspiration.' We're not in the aspiration business. We're in the truth business. And we've got to tell the American people the truth." Schultz, 65, said in late January on "60 Minutes" that he's seriously considering running for president in 2020 as a centrist Independent. A life-long Democrat, Schultz has become disenchanted with the Democratic Party due to some of the socialist ideas coming from the left. One of those aspirations is Medicare-for-all. "The Democrats are now saying, 'Medicare-for-all.' That's their solution, which is basically a $33 trillion number, which would take 180 million Americans off of the insurance that's provided by their employer, wipe out the insurance industry. It's not realistic." Growing up in government housing in Brooklyn, at age 7, Schultz witnessed his family struggle without a safety net when his father lost his job after falling on ice. His fathers accident shaped how Schultz led Starbucks. Before Starbucks became a public company, Schultz offered all employees, both part-time and full-time, comprehensive health benefits. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz gives a speech at Miami Dade College in Miami, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Ellis Rua) Schultz supported the Affordable Care Act passed under Obama, but he argued that it could be fixed. "I supported [the ACA]. It wasn't perfect, and it's certainly imperfect today," Schultz said. "Why is it imperfect? Primarily because premiums have gone up twice. So a family of four is really struggling with that. So, we must lower those premiums back to a level that is affordable by most families." Story continues His solution is to bring business, government, and the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to the table. "You've got to sit down and say, 'Listen, the government can't solve all these problems. Businesses need to do more for their families. We must have transparency on the cost of drugs. There's no reason whatsoever why the government is not negotiating for fair prices with pharmaceutical companies. There's no reason why we don't have interstate commerce with insurance. Doesn't make sense to me." Schultz acknowledged that it's a complicated issue, but it's something that has kept coming up during his conversations with Americans over the last eight weeks. "[I] can promise you this... If I was fortunate enough to become president, I can promise the American people since health care has been so vital and so personal to my life from when I was 7 years old to what I did at Starbucks that I would solve this problem with such a deep sense of urgency and concern for the American people." Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter. The family of acclaimed supermodel Pat Cleveland is asking for help with medical expenses after she was diagnosed with colon cancer earlier this month. Following her appearance in a Tommy Hilfiger show during Paris Fashion Week, Cleveland, 68, unexpectedly fell ill and was rushed to a French hospital. On March 23, the American supermodel was informed by doctors that she had colon cancer, her family confirmed on GoFundMe. In the wake of the diagnosis, Clevelands husband Paul Van Ravenstein set up the GoFundMe campaign to assist with medical expenses, as he explained to Page Six that his wife does not have any health insurance coverage. Pat has no health insurance, she only has Medicare, which wont cover anything outside of the country. We didnt even think about it because Pat has been so healthy, Van Ravenstein, the director of Women and Fashion Film Festival, told Page Six. We had no option but to set up a GoFundMe; we have been so grateful for everyones support, shes worked with so many people over her career, he added. Since Van Ravenstein created the GoFundMe campaign on March 31, it has raised over $46,000, with donations pouring in from fans, family, and friends alike, including designer Zac Posen and model Kimora Lee Simmons. Pat Cleveland during New York Fashion Week in February | Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for NYFW: The Shows Cleveland rose to fame in the fashion world during the 60s and 70s, as one of the first African American models to break the racial barriers of the modeling industry. Her career has extended well into her 60s, after a brief hiatus to raise her two children, and she has even passed her love for the runway onto her daughter, Anna Cleveland. (Anna is currently a Paris-based model.) Though the news came as a shock to Van Ravenstein and Anna, Cleveland had reportedly been having issues with her health for several months, according to Page Six. RELATED: The Jonas Brothers Father Is in Remission Heres Everything You Need to Know About Colorectal Cancer After experiencing unusual digestive problems, her husband of nearly 40 years said the model sought medical attention in New York. She has had some stomach complaints for a few months, it got a little better but not totally, Van Ravenstein explained to the outlet. Story continues While in Paris recently, Cleveland saw another doctor on March 23 after she experienced discomfort and swelling in her stomach. The doctor told her to get in a taxi and go to the American Hospital in Paris immediately, Van Ravenstein told Page Six. A scan found a cancerous tumor blocking her colon, and she went into surgery immediately and they operated on her for two and a half hours. By Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's main opposition Congress party made election pledges on Tuesday to halve unemployment in five years, but its promise to change a law on special powers for troops in disputed Kashmir drew criticism from the ruling party. Congress has consistently trailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in opinion polls, despite winning three key state elections late last year amid farm distress and a jobs shortage. Releasing its manifesto for a staggered general election that starts on April 11, Congress highlighted job creation, tackling farm distress and empowerment of women among its top priorities. Votes will be counted on May 23. Party president Rahul Gandhi said Congress would expand an existing jobs program to guarantee 150 days of work a year to rural households, up from 100 days. "The main issues in the country today are unemployment and farmer distress," said Gandhi, releasing the manifesto. "The economy is jammed, and everyone agrees that Indias economy is stuck, so that needs to be restarted." Congress also promised to simplify a goods and services tax, quickly fill 2.2 million government jobs nationwide, create 1 million more on rural and urban development panels, and reward businesses for employment generation. "Over a five-year period, I do think we can bring unemployment down to 3 percent to 4 percent," Praveen Chakravarty, a party official who analyses data, told Reuters. "We can certainly more than halve the unemployment number in a five-year period." "AMBITIOUS MANIFESTO" Gandhi said Congress had won voters' hearts with last week's plan to hand 72,000 rupees ($1,041) a year to India's poorest, a promise the BJP has dismissed as a bluff and some economists have called fiscally irresponsible. "This is an ambitious manifesto," said Shilan Shah, an economist at Capital Economics in Singapore. "The income scheme promise, though a worthy initiative, looks implausible to implement, considering India's limited fiscal space. India does not have the financial infrastructure in place to give such handouts." The BJP has focused on national security amid fresh hostilities with arch rival Pakistan, after a February militant attack that killed 40 Indian paramilitary troops in Kashmir was claimed by an Islamist group based in the neighboring country. Modi's party came down hard on Congress for its pledge to amend a law that gives special powers to armed forces battling the Kashmir insurgency, in a bid to balance security needs and human rights concerns. "Some of the ideas in the Congress manifesto are positively dangerous and they will result in the Balkanisation of India," Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who heads the BJP's election publicity committee, told reporters. Congress leaders later clarified that they would review the immunity granted to security forces only in cases of enforced disappearance, sexual violence and torture. Congress, which had accused the government of trying to suppress dissent after a colonial-era sedition law was used recently against students marking the anniversary of the execution of a Kashmiri separatist, also vowed to scrap a law it said has been "misused and, in any event, become redundant". "Anti national acts will no more be a crime. Whichever party makes such announcements, that party does not deserve a single vote," Jaitley said. (Reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal, Manoj Kumar and Aftab Ahmed; Writing by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Darren Schuettler and Clarence Fernandez) If you're like most designers, you're likely tight-lipped about your design fees and how you charge clients. But its a topic of interest across the community. Take it from Keita Turner, the eponymous president and creative director of a New Yorkbased design firm, who admits, This is the million-dollar question for so many designers. This topic comes up constantly in conversation. Most designers tend to use the following common charging strategies: fee-based approach, by the hour, markup on product, or some hybrid method. How do you decide which strategy is best? AD PRO consulted with a host of designers and recruited seven to share their charging strategies with us. We also invited a business expert to weigh in on the topic. See which methods work best and learn whether or not these charging strategies might work for you. Sean Low, founder and president of The Business of Being Creative, a company focused on providing practical business counsel to professionals in creative fields, recommends charging from the top down and not the bottom up. Rather than deciding your hourly fee or your commission and then figuring out how much you can make based on that, Low advises: first, deciding how much money you want to make; then, figuring out how much you want to work; and then basing your fee structure on those two considerations. The first thing you have to do is figure out how much you want to earn, and then back into that, Low says. Finding the right price for a project is easy because it's based on what you need. But can you get it? The price today, more than ever, has to be reflective of the differences in value that you're offering. And once designers figure out what they want to make and how much they want to work, they can decide which charging strategy works for them to arrive at that number, based on how they work. For example, a big-name designer who cranks out a project in four months (while others might take eight) might charge an upfront design fee plus markup on product. Another designer who spends months working with the client closely on a regular basis might prefer to charge for his/her time by the hour. Often times, younger or greener designers might not have the confidence to simply demand a design fee upfront, so they opt for hourly billing and in the end sometimes sell themselves short. Story continues I think that a lot of designers are afraid to charge a straightforward commission. It depends on the level of designer that you are, says New York AD100 designer Vicente Wolf. A high-end designer will work on a flat fee, pay a design fee, maybe hourly if they're shopping, and then commission. I think lower-level designers charge by the hour. Maybe they're afraid to ask for too much. Wolf explains that he prefers a simple, straightforward way of billing. We charge a design fee when we start a job, which is worked out according to budget and the scale of the job. Then we charge 35 percent commission on the wholesale price on all products. We don't charge time. We don't charge time and commission, he says, adding that clients are not necessarily happy about this approach. Clients might think, 'Oh, theyre overcharging me in hours.' But in reality, nine out of 10 people I know who charge that way are underbilling. Wolf continues, Sometimes a certain type of client will say, Well, aren't you going to buy more expensive things so you make more commission? And my answer to them is always no, because we're designing a project within a certain budget the client gives us. It comes down to the integrity of the designer you're working with. And if you have questions about a designers integrity, then what the hell are you doing working with them? Frank Ponterio, principal of his Chicago interior design firm, bases his billing model on the scope of project and the client. One approach he employs is a hybrid of hourly plus markup, and the other is a straight fee-based model. In the case of the latter, he says, The scope of work and deliverables both need to be extremely well defined and understood. If all aspects of the project are very clear and the team is of the highest caliber, then this can be a wonderful method for both you and your client. He adds, Ive found this most effective on a second or third project with a client, when the trust in us as a firm is already there. You can basically qualify your fees and the cost of product by the previous projects youve done with them. Meredith Heron, eponymous principal of a Toronto-based design firm, discusses how she charges a fee based on a percentage of the overall budget, much like a contractor. For a project under $150,000, my fee is 25 percent of the overall budget. As the budget increases in $100,000 to $200,000 increments, the percentage drops. Once we get to a $1 million, my fee is 15 percent, and stops dropping there, she explains, adding that she believes in total transparency with her clients. We start off by collecting 10 percent to be retained, so that we can really work out the scope and budget. Once that is determined, we collect another 40 percent. When we are ready to order product, we invoice for another 40 percent so before anything gets ordered we should have approximately 90 percent of our fee. We collect the remaining 10 percent before we deliver and install. She continues, Almost always the scope increases, and our fee outstanding grows after installation as the add-ons inevitably happen. We collect this again at the time of ordering. This method has ensured that our accounts are up to date and we arent behind the eight ball on a project. Heron has calculated thaton any projecther overall profit has to be a minimum of 42 percent of the budget to be profitable, a number thats hard to make when there is only so much time in a day-week-month and you have a cap on what you can physically bill out. Not a fan of hourly billing (Ive lost years of my life to recording and totaling up hourly billing), she says that with a fee structure based on a percentage, Im always covered. Bonnie J. Steves, principal of BJS-Assoc. Interior Design in New York, feels that operating a lucrative business is harder than one thinks. Is there an ideal billing structure? she posits. No! But I have found that flexibility is key in running a well-oiled and profitable machine. A combination of hourly plus markup on a product provides you with the most room. Her fee structure is phasic, like Herons, and Steves believes that by using this model you arent as inclined to give away your services for free. The first phase is built on a design fee comprised of a number of factors: statement of work (SOW), size, scale, and expected number of hours to complete the SOW. By specifying the estimated number of hours in the contract, it affords you the option to adjust the billing as becomes necessary. If the SOW changes and the hours are exceeded, the fee structure goes to flat hourly. This protects you if the project expands in size, scale, and scope, and your fees expand to the true size of the project, she says. But Low directly refutes Stevess claim about changing the fee structure to hourly. Using the hourly to cover you in case of delays is a really bad strategyits awful, actually, like the worst strategy you could possibly think of because it's always going to be the wrong number. He claims that the issue boils down to hour fatigueand the fact that designers no longer have enough time to make the amount of money they need to make based on their initial assessment. Steves continues to explain her approach: After the initial phase, the next is procuring and project management. It is customary to charge a percentage of purchases for the management, which will cover the time that is invested in the final phases of the project while you are able to pass along substantial savings on the purchases, she says. The key to recognizing your worth is making sure that the client appreciates your expertise and realizes the value you bring to the project. New Yorkbased designer Josh Greene charges a higher flat fee with a 10 percent commission on anything that comes through his office. I do this because I found clients get fatigued when everything you send them that has a 30-40 percent commission on top of something that is already expensive, he says. Also, given that we use a variety of products from custom to store-bought, clients dont like to be charged a premium for items they could walk in and buy. So I find that the heftier flat fee spread out over the course of the project makes it easier to manage. ASID New York Metro president Kim Radovich, of Kim Radovich Interiors and Kim E. Courtney Home, describes her combo approach. I take a design fee, which provides the client with a full plan with a budget, drawings and recommendations for furnishings, finishes, fabrics, etcetera. Then I charge by the hour for anything over and above what is included in the design fee. And I sell product at 20 percent below retail, or cost-plus depending on the product. She claims her charging structure is simple so clients can always know what they are spending. Designer Turner explains that her billing varies depending on the scope of work, size, scale of the project, and whether it is residential or contract. For full-service, large-scale projects, we typically propose a flat-rate fee based on projected hours. We collect an initial retainer prior to starting any project, with additional retainers requested to coincide with general project phases, she explains. We charge hourly on consultations, small-scale projects, and on any additional design schemes or revisions required after client approval. Along with our other charging methods, we do employ the cost-plus or net-cost-plus percentage for all vendor product and service orders where we are required to prepare, coordinate, execute and-/or review proposals and purchase orders. Turner admits that her firm is currently reevaluating its fee structure. We are comparing the benefits of adopting either a monthly flat-rate fee or an hourly rate model billed bimonthly or per month, she says. Plus, we are seriously reconsidering how we bill to cover our project management time involved in our projects. For better billing consistency and the financial health of our business, we are assessing whether or not charging a percentage of construction costs or implementing hourly billing is a better strategy now. In the world of design, unlike many other businesses, there is no perfect billing structure, Steves says. More often than not, ones passion for design often clouds their vision and the business of getting paid is not always the top priority. To that point, Low agrees. There's no such thing as a charging strategy thats going to work for everybody. But, as he adds,It's about finding the one that's going to work to be reflective of who you are and what matters to you. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! Long term investing works well, but it doesn't always work for each individual stock. We don't wish catastrophic capital loss on anyone. Spare a thought for those who held Seamless Green China (Holdings) Limited (HKG:8150) for five whole years - as the share price tanked 94%. And it's not just long term holders hurting, because the stock is down 39% in the last year. We really hope anyone holding through that price crash has a diversified portfolio. Even when you lose money, you don't have to lose the lesson. See our latest analysis for Seamless Green China (Holdings) Seamless Green China (Holdings) isn't currently profitable, so most analysts would look to revenue growth to get an idea of how fast the underlying business is growing. Generally speaking, companies without profits are expected to grow revenue every year, and at a good clip. That's because fast revenue growth can be easily extrapolated to forecast profits, often of considerable size. Over five years, Seamless Green China (Holdings) grew its revenue at 40% per year. That's well above most other pre-profit companies. So it's not at all clear to us why the share price sunk 43% throughout that time. You'd have to assume the market is worried that profits won't come soon enough. We'd recommend carefully checking for indications of future growth - and balance sheet threats - before considering a purchase. Depicted in the graphic below, you'll see revenue and earnings over time. If you want more detail, you can click on the chart itself. SEHK:8150 Income Statement, April 2nd 2019 Balance sheet strength is crucual. It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on how its financial position has changed over time. A Different Perspective We regret to report that Seamless Green China (Holdings) shareholders are down 39% for the year. Unfortunately, that's worse than the broader market decline of 2.5%. However, it could simply be that the share price has been impacted by broader market jitters. It might be worth keeping an eye on the fundamentals, in case there's a good opportunity. Unfortunately, longer term shareholders are suffering worse, given the loss of 43% doled out over the last five years. We'd need to see some sustained improvements in the key metrics before we could muster much enthusiasm. Shareholders might want to examine this detailed historical graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow. Story continues If you are like me, then you will not want to miss this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying. Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on HK exchanges. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! While not a mind-blowing move, it is good to see that the Washington Prime Group Inc. (NYSE:WPG) share price has gained 12% in the last three months. But that doesn't change the fact that the returns over the last three years have been less than pleasing. In fact, the share price is down 41% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return. View our latest analysis for Washington Prime Group While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price. Washington Prime Group became profitable within the last five years. That would generally be considered a positive, so we are surprised to see the share price is down. So given the share price is down it's worth checking some other metrics too. We note that the dividend seems healthy enough, so that probably doesn't explain the share price drop. On the other hand, the uninspired reduction in revenue, at 8.6% each year, may have shareholders ditching the stock. This could have some investors worried about the longer term growth potential (or lack thereof). You can see how revenue and earnings have changed over time in the image below, (click on the chart to see cashflow). NYSE:WPG Income Statement, April 2nd 2019 We consider it positive that insiders have made significant purchases in the last year. Having said that, most people consider earnings and revenue growth trends to be a more meaningful guide to the business. This free report showing analyst forecasts should help you form a view on Washington Prime Group What About Dividends? When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. We note that for Washington Prime Group the TSR over the last 3 years was -14%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. This is largely a result of its dividend payments! Story continues A Different Perspective Washington Prime Group shareholders are down 2.4% for the year (even including dividends), but the broader market is up 12%. Of course the long term matters more than the short term, and even great stocks will sometimes have a poor year. However, the loss over the last year isn't as bad as the 5.0% per annum loss investors have suffered over the last three years. We would want clear information suggesting the company will grow, before taking the view that the share price will stabilize. If you want to research this stock further, the data on insider buying is an obvious place to start. You can click here to see who has been buying shares - and the price they paid. There are plenty of other companies that have insiders buying up shares. You probably do not want to miss this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying. Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on US exchanges. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Der Mond Group, an Oil and Gas company headquartered in Abu Dhabi, has signed an agreement with Swiss consulting services company Iota Group to open a petroleum academy in Dakar, Senegal. The first oil and gas academy in Senegal is dedicated to train a wide range of professionals from West African countries in the fields of industry and more especially Oil and Gas value chain. The academy will offer training programs and workshops of international standards in the energy industry and support Senegal in increasing the number of qualified and certified local professionals. Techma, a subsidiary of Iota Group, will provide its expertise, skills and training programs as well as qualified teachers. We are extremely proud to launch the first Senegalese private institution dedicated to shaping a pool of qualified professionals in the oil and gas industry, said Khadija A. Ba, president and founder of Der Mond Group, adding the group is proud to support Plan Senegal Emergent. The academys first goal is to provide an industrial security certification course in order to establish a long presence of certified professionals ready to tackle high-level challenges requested by the industry players. The academys regional office will be in Dakar, with offices set to open in Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Conakry and Cote dIvoire. Senegal is experiencing increasing commercial activity, driven by oil and gas discoveries, and the governments accelerated infrastructure development initiatives is one of the pillars of the Plan Senegal Emergent, the countrys development blueprint. Tehran (AFP) - Iranian emergency services were bracing for widespread flooding on Tuesday with mass evacuations planned as extensive rainfalls in regions neighbouring Khuzestan converge on the oil-rich southwestern province. "The water moving south from Ilam and Lorestan provinces will enter Khuzestan... many villages there will be submerged," said Ali Asghar Peivandi, the head of Iran's Red Crescent. "With the possibility of dams overflowing, we have made preparations to accommodate 100,000 people," he told state television. Khuzestan has an extensive range of dams but officials said water was flowing into them at a fast rate. In some cases water levels were only 70 centimetres (around 27 inches) lower than the dam crests, they reported. "Our dams are more than 95 percent full," Khuzestan governor Gholamreza Shariati told state TV. Water was released from dams as an emergency measure to prevent them from breaking, leading to fears the outflow may cause havoc in cities, towns and villages downstream. Iran has been hit by flooding across most of the country for the past two weeks. The northeast of Iran was swamped on March 19 before the west and southwest of the country were inundated on March 25, killing a total 45 people. This week the deluge hit the west and southwest, with at least four deaths already reported even though emergency services have only begun reaching regions cut off by floods. "Seventy-eight intercity roads have been blocked, as many as 2,199 rural roads and 84 bridges have been washed away," said Behnam Saeedi, spokesman for the National Disaster Management Organisation. "Across 15 provinces, 141 rivers burst their banks and around 400 land slides were reported," he told state TV. The main rail links between Tehran and the south and north of the country was disrupted as landslides and water swept away tracks. The government said the flooding had damaged nearly 12,000 kilometres (7,500 miles) of roads, or 36 percent of the country's entire network. Story continues Rescue efforts overnight were hindered by the inability of Iran's ageing and limited rescue helicopter fleet to fly at night. US sanctions stop Iran from purchasing helicopters, prompting Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to accuse the United States of impeding aid efforts. The sanctions were "impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedcrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods," Zarif tweeted. "Blocked equipment includes relief choppers, this isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM," he wrote. The military has been called in to help the emergency services cope. Drones surveyed flooded regions looking for survivors as choppers and amphibious armoured personnel carriers were used to evacuate stricken residents. JERUSALEM, April 2 (Reuters) - A Palestinian man was shot dead by Israeli forces on Tuesday during clashes with troops in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian health officials said. The Israeli military said troops opened fire after Palestinians threw rocks and explosives at them during an operation southeast of the city of Ramallah. The Palestinian health ministry said the man had lived in Qalandia refugee camp and that three other Palestinians were wounded. Tensions have been high in the West Bank since a Palestinian killed an Israeli soldier and a rabbi in a stabbing and shooting attack in mid-March. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians seek to establish a state there and in the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014. (Reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Rami Ayyub in Jerusalem) Jerusalem (AFP) - An Israeli cyber watchdog said Monday it has uncovered a network of fake online accounts backing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and slandering opponents ahead of next week's general election. In a new report the Big Bots Protect, which describes itself as a campaigner against social media abuse, said posts used "lies, libel and rumormongering" to attack Netanyahu's challengers. It found over 130,000 tweets from "hundreds of fake or anonymous accounts" without names or profile pictures, which did not identify themselves as linked to Netanyahu's Likud party. It acknowledged that there were also "hundreds of genuine accounts" backing the premier's bid for re-election. Among the targets were journalists and public figures considered hostile to Netanyahu including his main challenger, Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Blue and White party. The report said they included accusations that Gantz was a "rapist" and others questioning his mental health. A spokeswoman for Blue and White told AFP that party leaders had filed a complaint against the posts with police. "There is an attempt to steal the elections, there is a system of lies here," Gantz wrote on Twitter. "Netanyahu's house of cards is collapsing." The prime minister went live on Facebook and YouTube to dismiss the report, flanked by what he said was a genuine Likud online supporter. "A million Likud voters are not 'bots'," he said, adding that Likud was also filing a police complaint against Blue and White for accusing him. "Not one of them is fake," he said of the messages cited by the Big Bots Protect. "They have names, they have families," he added. "They have their own opinions, independent people!" Netanyahu, 69, is seeking a fifth term in office in the April 9 election, despite also facing potential corruption charges. Blue and White has consistently been scoring better than Likud in opinion polls, although Netanyahu is seen as standing a better chance of putting together a coalition government under Israel's proportional representation electoral system. JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fly to Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Israeli leader's office said on Tuesday. The statement did not elaborate on the intended topics of discussion. The two leaders will meet five days before Israel's April 9 election in which the right-wing Netanyahu faces a strong challenge from a centrist candidate. On Monday, Netanyahu told reporters he and Putin spoke by telephone about Syria, whose Russian-backed president, Bashar al-Assad, has been gaining ground in an eight-year civil war. Israel worries Assad's Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah reinforcements could set up bases to attack it from Syria, and has carried out scores of air strikes against them. Thursday's meeting could also help Netanyahu in the closely contested election, in which he has played up his statecraft and security credentials in the face of the politically untested challenger Benny Gantz, a former military chief. (Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Andrew Cawthorne) When the Italian confectionary brand Ferrero takes ownership of a chunk of Kelloggs business later this year, the company behind Nutella will also claim a stake in one of Americas most beloved brands: Girl Scout cookies. On Monday, The Ferrero Group, which grew out of a family pastry shop in the years after WWII, announced it would purchase several brands from Kellogg Company for $1.3 billion, with the deal expected to be completed in the second half of the year. Ferrero bought a slate of sweet snack brands from Kelloggs including Keebler, Famous Amos, andnotablyLittle Brownie Bakers, one of only two bakeries that produce Girl Scout cookies. The overall purchase will allow Ferrero to develop a portfolio of well-established and popular brands, and capitalize on exciting new growth opportunities in the worlds largest cookies market, Lapo Civiletti, CEO of the Ferrero Group, said in a release. In a further statement, Ferrero said the transaction was expected to close in the second half of this year, and noted, its still early days. We are still developing our integration plans and we will be thoughtful and transparent in our decisions on how to proceed, the company said. In buying Little Brownie Bakers, Ferrero gets the rights to make the Girl Scouts cookies that are sold annually by members of the leadership development organization. The utterly iconic Thin Mints, Do-Si-Dos, and Samoas are appreciated for their rarity and exclusivitynot to mention their adorable, yet savvy saleswomenbut perhaps under-appreciated in terms of the market share they claim. Girl Scouts sell about 200 million boxes of cookies annually, a nearly $1 billion business. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) From February to April every yearofficial cookie seasonmore than 1 million girls sell around 200 million boxes of the treats, an $800 million business. That easily makes them one of Americas best-selling cookie brands. The Scouts cookie-selling practice dates back to as early as 1917, when troops began selling them to raise money for activities, but the Girl Scouts have also modernized: they now have a digital cookie platform to track sales and book orders. They also accept Visa cards. Story continues Kentucky-based Little Brownie Bakers manufactures and supplies the cookies to Girl Scout troops, and is licensed to provide eight varieties of cookies, the company says on its website. The companys factory in Louisville has baked Girl Scout cookies since 1974, alongside other Kelloggs cookie brands. Since 2001, its received millions of dollars from Kelloggs and the state of Kentucky to update its facilities and keep its doors open, according to Louisvilles Courier-Journal. Theres only one other bakery thats licensed to make Girl Scout cookies: the Richmond, Virginia-based ABC Bakery. In a statement to Fortune, the Girl Scouts of the USA said the organization looks forward to partnering with the new ownership of Little Brownie Bakers to ensure a seamless transition into the 2020 Girl Scout Cookie season and the continued success of the Girl Scout Cookie Program. Local Girl Scout councils can choose which factory supplies their cookies. Thats why different varieties of the cookies exist, the two factories produce different types. So in theory, if the Scouts end up disliking the Ferrero experience, they can take their business to the factory in Virginia. But the ABC factory isnt American-owned either. Its under the umbrella of Weston Foods, which also makes Wonder Bread and is headquartered in Toronto. This story has been updated to include a statement from the Girl Scouts and Ferrero. Britains Conservative Party MP Jacob Rees-Mogg heads to the Parliament in London. Photo: Reuters/Henry Nicholls Conservative member of parliament (MP) Jacob Rees-Mogg insisted on Monday that he did nothing wrong by tweeting a speech by Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, over the weekend. On Sunday, the Tory backbencher posted a recent speech given by the AfD leader to the German parliament, in which she harshly criticised the European Union over Brexit. Rees-Moggs tweet has drawn criticism. Several members of the UKs Labour party expressed their disgust that Rees-Mogg appeared to be endorsing the AfD. The anti-immigrant party entered the German parliament for the first time after the 2017 elections, becoming the third-biggest party in the country. Labour MP David Lammy tweeted that Rees-Mogg was promoting Germanys overtly racist party, while Labours Stella Creasy tweeted, We have to deal with the AFD on the Council of Europe. One of their reps claims that muslims in Europe are seeking to kill all germans. So forgive us @Jacob_Rees_Mogg if dont use them as you do as a metric for decent opinions by which we should be influenced.#fascists. Rees-Mogg defended himself on LBC radio Monday morning, saying that he was not supporting the AfD. This is a speech made in the Bundestag of real importance because it shows a German view of Brexit, the pro-Brexit MP said in the interview. It is saying to Germans, youre paying more for this and Angela Merkel has tied herself in knots with the French to the disadvantage of the Germans. In her speech to the Bundestag, Weidel said Brexit was largely Merkels fault due to the chancellors negligence and failure to help out the UK. Berlin and Brussels were to blame for not allowing former British prime minister David Cameron the concessions he wanted, she said. The AfD earlier this year floated the idea of campaigning for Germany to leave the EU, if the EU did not meet the partys demands for reform. Party members by-and-large rejected the idea. The AFD was founded in 2013 as an anti-EU party, but shifted its focus to become an anti-migrant party during the refugee influx to Germany in 2015. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK WASHINGTON President Trumps children play a starring role in a memo from House Oversight Committee Democrats detailing claims made by a White House whistleblower who raised concerns about high-level security clearances that were given to 25 officials after they were initially denied access to top secret information. According to a source familiar with the whistleblowers testimony, Trumps daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, are two of three unnamed White House officials described in the memo. Kushner was identified as Senior White House Official 1 and Ivanka was described as Senior White House Official 2 in the memo, which was written and released on Monday, the source told Yahoo News. Photo: Keith Srakocic/AP The memo was sent from Democratic Oversight Committee staffers to the committee members. It summarized an interview Democratic and Republican committee staffers conducted with White House security adviser Tricia Newbold on March 23. Newbold, the adjudications manager in the personnel security office of the White House, has worked there as a nonpartisan career employee for over 18 years. According to the memo, Newbold claimed decisions that she and other career officials made to deny individuals security clearances were routinely overturned by senior officials in order to grant the employees access to classified information. Last year, Newbold began keeping track of all the employees who were granted clearances after first being denied them and the memo said her list eventually grew to 25 officials, including two current senior White House officials. These individuals had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct, the memo said. The memo described Newbold as having gone to the committee because she strongly believes Congress must intervene immediately to investigate and reform the White House security clearance process. Newbold did not respond to a request for comment on this story and a spokesperson for the Oversight Committee Democrats also declined to comment. Story continues None of the 25 officials on Newbolds list were identified in the memo, but there were sections detailing her allegations against three specific individuals who were described as Senior White House Official 1, 2, and 3. The source familiar with Newbolds testimony said Kushner was the first anonymous official and Ivanka was the second. The source did not reveal the identity of Senior White House Official 3. Photo: Kerstin Joensson/AP The memo stated Newbold claimed Kushners clearance was initially denied after the background investigation revealed significant disqualifying factors, including foreign influence, outside activities and personal conduct. According to Newbold, that decision was overruled by the director of the personnel office, who noted the disqualifying activities occurred prior to federal service. Before joining his father-in-law in the White House, Kushner was an executive at his familys real estate company, which has actively tried to woo foreign investors. Senior White House Official 2, who the source said is president Trumps daughter, is also described as having had clearance issues. The memo said Newbold claimed an initial clearance reviewer wrote an extremely thorough 14-page adjudication summary in Ivanka Trumps case that described multiple disqualifiers, including foreign influence and outside activities. Afterward, Newbold said the director of the personnel office told her do not touch. When Newbold stepped aside, she said the director ultimately granted the clearance. Before entering her fathers administration, Ivanka worked for Trumps real estate company and her own fashion brand, both of which courted foreign interests. There have previously been reports that president personally intervened after clearances for Ivanka and Kushner were denied. Abbe Lowell, an attorney for both Ivanka and Kushner, has previously said the couples clearances were handled in the regular process with no pressure from anyone. Lowell declined to comment on this story and referred questions to the White House, which did not respond. Along with the memo, the Oversight Committee released a letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone requesting Newbolds full list of approximately 25 individuals who were granted security clearances or eligibility to access national security information despite recommendations to deny their applications. Cipollone did not respond to a request for comment. A Democratic committee aide told Yahoo News they would be unable to identify the 25 officials in question without receiving the list. The Committee has requested that the White House turn over the list to the Committee, the aide said. In the letter, the committee also requested information from the Executive Office of the President People Information Center database for nine current and former White House officials, including Kushner, Ivanka and national security adviser John Bolton. The aide said all nine of these officials were not necessarily among those who were initially denied clearances and said the records were being requested based on previous public reporting about issues with their clearances. Republicans on the Oversight Committee released their own memo objecting to Chairman Cummingss unilateral and partisan investigation into White House security clearances. That rebuttal said the Democrats memo amounted to cherry-picked excerpts from Ms. Newbolds transcribed interview that were designed to justify a continuing investigation into the clearance process. Chairman Cummings solicited this material from Ms. Newbold despite Ms. Newbolds stated reservations about discussing highly personal information about White House officials. We did not intend to release any material from the interview; however, Chairman Cummingss reckless decision to release cherry-picked excerpts forces us to provide this supplemental information, the Republican staffers said. The Republican memo also argued Newbold had limited knowledge about the clearances in question and said GOP members of the committee were given short notice about her interview. It also noted that Newbold acknowledged the Trump administration had improved some aspects of the security clearance processes since last year. Additional reporting by Mike Isikoff. _____ Read more from Yahoo News: The UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA), headquartered in Tripoli, has surrendered to Italian authorities a famous Italian arms smuggler wanted in the EU member state for facilitating violation of the UN arm embargo on the North African country. Franco Giorg was flown to Rome aboard a private jet, Libya Observer reports Tuesday. The dealer has been imprisoned in Tripoli since 2016, after Italy issued an arrest warrant against him, the paper says. Franco Giorg, according to Italian authorities, negotiated the sale of large caches of weapons and ammunitions to Libya. The UN imposed an arms embargo on the North African oil-rich country in 2011 to prevent the then leader Muammar Gaddafi from buying military equipment, while he was facing an internal revolution backed by the NATO. Italys minister of justice has welcomed Giorgs handover noting that this is a sign of improved negotiations with Libya and another successful judicial cooperation, Libya Observer adds. Alex Wilson from Gravity demonstrates a jetpack for defence secretary Gavin Williamson (Picture: PA) Jetpacks could be used by the Royal Navy to allow sailors to board enemy ships, it has been suggested. The capabilities of the suit, similar to that used by the superhero Iron Man, were demonstrated to defence secretary Gavin Williamson during a visit to a technology park in Portsmouth, Hampshire. He announced a 75 million fund for the navy to develop drone mine-hunters and a hub to develop new tech, but was somewhat taken by the demonstration of the jet suit. It was piloted by Alex Wilson of private company Gravity, who flew the 340,000 jetpack using handheld turbines. The Daily Telegraph reported that Mr Williamson asked Mr Wilson: Can you just imagine doing an assault on to a ship? Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson (right) meets Alex Wilson from Gravity during a visit to the Portsdown Technology Park in Portsmouth (Picture: PA) The defence secretary said the navy could perform a much more discrete insertion using the jetpacks. He added: Maybe if I can have a go in future there could be a bigger order. The 75 million will enable the creation of the two autonomous ships which will be fitted with cutting-edge sonars to enable remote mine-hunting at higher range, speed and accuracy in the Gulf. The money will also help found a joint military and industry accelerator hub which has been named NavyX. Read more Frail pensioner cleared of murder after beating disabled husband to death Harry Potter books burned by Catholic priests due to evil forces European Union set to demand 10bn euros from the UK even in a no-deal Brexit A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence said: The Royal Navys new autonomy and lethality accelerator will look to overhaul and turbocharge the way the Royal Navy buys the latest technology, streamlining the process and creating a brand-new facility where industry, military and academia can test, assess and purchase new equipment. Mr Williamson said: Todays announcement will not only allow the Royal Navy to rapidly harness dynamic, cutting-edge equipment at speed, but also ensure they can outpace adversaries both on the water and the sea floor. Story continues Technology is moving faster than ever, and with the defence landscape rapidly evolving, we must ensure our armed forces are continually pushing the boundaries at the forefront of this change. Royal Navy personel demonstrating their underwater drone during a visit to the Portsdown Technology Park in Portsmouth (Picture: PA) Defence secretary Gavin Williamson during a visit to the Portsdown Technology Park in Portsmouth (Picture: PA) Admiral Sir Philip Jones, First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff, said: From the invention of the steam catapult and aircraft carrier, to the first use of sonars and torpedoes, the Royal Navy has a strong pedigree in the development, testing and introduction of new technologies that help us keep our country safe. Across the generations, our willingness to embrace innovation has kept us one step ahead of our adversaries, and to assure our continued success on operations into the future it is vital that the Royal Navy continues to be equipped with the latest cutting-edge capabilities we need to address the rapidly evolving challenges that pose a threat to our national interests around the globe. Mr Williamson made the announcement during a visit to QinetiQs Portsdown Technology Park, which is building the UK Centre of Excellence for Maritime Mission Systems. The secretary of state was shown examples of state-of-the-art autonomous vehicles including the flying suit, hoverbikes, vehicles, vessels, and drones. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK Allesandra Mussolini and Jim Carrey (Credit: Getty) Forget the Trumps Jim Carrey has incurred the fury of the Mussolini family with his shocking new painting. Carrey, who is using his flair for art to skewer the political world, posted his latest work up on his Twitter feed yesterday. Read more: Aspen hotel launches Dumb and Dumber package In a grim scene, Carrey captioned: If youre wondering what fascism leads to, just ask Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta. If youre wondering what fascism leads to, just ask Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta. pic.twitter.com/uc2wZl0YBu Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 30, 2019 Beneath was a painting of Italian facist dictator Benito Mussolini and his lover Claretta Petacci, who were executed by Italian communist partisans in 1945. Their bodies were then taken hung upside down at a filling station in Milan, the scene replicated in Carreys picture. But in reply to the picture, Mussolinis 56-year-old granddaughter Allesandra, a former actress, model and now member of the European Parliament, simply wrote: You are a bastard. You are a bastard Alessandra Mussolini (@Ale_Mussolini_) March 31, 2019 It was certainly to the point, but not content with taking on Carrey, she also tussled with a few others online who had their own opinions on the matter. I think youre confusing Jim Carrey with your murderous grandfather, said one Twitter user. Read more: Jim Carrey slams Louis C.K. over Parkland jokes Or maybe with some of your family, replied Mussolini. My grandfather fought to liberate Europe from people like your grandfather, said another. Do you want applause? she hit back. do you want applause? Alessandra Mussolini (@Ale_Mussolini_) March 31, 2019 Mussolini has previously threatened legal action against those who publicly disparage her grandfather. Story continues Carreys latest painting was, however, most certainly aimed at Donald Trump, however, who has received most of the actors ire. The Eternal Sunshine star has also skewered the likes of former US attorney general Jeff Sessions, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Trumps policy advisor Stephen Miller. Jon Snow hosts a Q&A during the Human Flow premiere at Milton Court Concert Hall on December 4, 2017 in London, England. (Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images For Altitude Film) Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow has attracted more than 2,000 complaints to Ofcom after saying, while covering a pro-Brexit march in Westminster, that he had never seen so many white people in one place. The 71-year-old broadcasting veteran made the remark while signing off a Channel 4 news broadcast on Friday, 29 March. Read more: Gemma Collins offers Brexit advice He was referring to pro-Brexit protesters, who filled the streets of Westminster in order to mark the day on which the United Kingdom was originally supposed to leave the European Union. Snow said: Its been the most extraordinary day a day which has seen I have never seen so many white people in one place. Its an extraordinary story. There are people everywhere, there are crowds everywhere. Pro-Brexit supporters gather in Parliament Square in central London for Leave Means Leave rally on the day Britain was originally scheduled to leave EU, on 29 March, 2019. (Photo by WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The broadcasting regulator said it has received 2,025 complaints since the show was broadcast. The comment drew criticism against Snow on Twitter, with radio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer calling his remarks unbelievably shocking. This is unbelievably shocking from a national broadcaster. Ive never seen so many white people in one place. Which of course, for some reason, is a bad thing. https://t.co/HzQn4SvPZh Julia Hartley-Brewer (@JuliaHB1) March 30, 2019 Channel 4 issued a statement, saying they regret any offence caused by the comments. They added: This was an unscripted observation at the very end of a long week of fast-moving Brexit developments. Jon has covered major events such as this over a long career and this was a spontaneous comment reflecting his observation that, in a London demonstration of that size, ethnic minorities seemed to be significantly under-represented. Read more: Celebs sign Brexit petition A spokeswoman for Ofcom said they were assessing the complaints, but were yet to decide whether to formally investigate. Kendrick Lamar Kendrick Lamar was thousands of miles away from Los Angeles on Sunday night but he still had Nipsey Hussle on his mind. The All the Stars rapper was performing at Lollapalooza in Buenos Aires, Argentina on when he stopped the show to have a moment of silence for Nipsey. Before we got on this stage, Kendrick told the crowd, we got wind that our brother, our warrior, our soldier, Nipsey Hussle, passed away. Kendrick then asked, So we want to take this time out to give a moment of silence, can we do that? After more than 30 seconds, Kendrick broke the silence, declaring, We love you, Nipsey! RELATED Nipsey Hussle Death: Community Call to Arms After Rappers Murder Nipsey Hussle was shot and killed on Sunday afternoon outside of his own clothing store in Los Angeles. Police have not made an arrest in the shooting death of Nipsey, but we are told the shooter is allegedly known in the area as a former acquaintance of the slain rapper. Hours before Nipsey was killed, he tweeted an eery message, stating, Having strong enemies is a blessing. The post Kendrick Lamar Has Moment of Silence for Nipsey Hussle at Argentina Concert appeared first on The Blast. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! The big shareholder groups in Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank Co., Ltd. (HKG:1551) have power over the company. Generally speaking, as a company grows, institutions will increase their ownership. Conversely, insiders often decrease their ownership over time. Warren Buffett said that he likes 'a business with enduring competitive advantages that is run by able and owner-oriented people'. So it's nice to see some insider ownership, because it may suggest that management is owner-oriented. With a market capitalization of HK$48b, Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank is rather large. We'd expect to see institutional investors on the register. Companies of this size are usually well known to retail investors, too. Taking a look at our data on the ownership groups (below), it's seems that institutional investors have not yet purchased much of the company. Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholder can tell us about 1551. Check out our latest analysis for Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank SEHK:1551 Ownership Summary, April 2nd 2019 What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank? Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing. Institutions own less than 5% of Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank. That indicates that the company is on the radar of some funds, but it isn't particularly popular with professional investors at the moment. If the business gets stronger from here, we could see a situation where more institutions are keen to buy. It is not uncommon to see a big share price rise if multiple institutional investors are trying to buy into a stock at the same time. So check out the historic earnings trajectory, below, but keep in mind it's the future that counts most. Story continues SEHK:1551 Income Statement, April 2nd 2019 Hedge funds don't have many shares in Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank. Our information suggests that there isn't any analyst coverage of the stock, so it is probably little known. Insider Ownership Of Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. The company management answer to the board; and the latter should represent the interests of shareholders. Notably, sometimes top-level managers are on the board, themselves. I generally consider insider ownership to be a good thing. However, on some occasions it makes it more difficult for other shareholders to hold the board accountable for decisions. I can report that insiders do own shares in Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank Co., Ltd.. The insiders have a meaningful stake worth HK$4.7b. Most would see this as a real positive. If you would like to explore the question of insider alignment, you can click here to see if insiders have been buying or selling. General Public Ownership The general public, mostly retail investors, hold a substantial 59% stake in 1551, suggesting it is a fairly popular stock. This level of ownership gives retail investors the power to sway key policy decisions such as board composition, executive compensation, and the dividend payout ratio. Private Company Ownership Our data indicates that Private Companies hold 25%, of the company's shares. Private companies may be related parties. Sometimes insiders have an interest in a public company through a holding in a private company, rather than in their own capacity as an individual. While it's hard to draw any broad stroke conclusions, it is worth noting as an area for further research. Next Steps: I find it very interesting to look at who exactly owns a company. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. I like to dive deeper into how a company has performed in the past. You can access this interactive graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow for free . Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies. NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. SINGAPORE, April 2 (Reuters) - American pop stars Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande were on an "offensive lyrics" list presented to members of parliament in socially-conservative Singapore as part of a statement by the city-state's home minister on hate speech. Monday's statement came nearly a month after Swedish death metal group Watain's concert was banned in Singapore on concerns about the band's history of "denigrating religions and promoting violence." Singapore keeps a tight rein on public speech and the media, especially when it comes to race and religion matters. A photo of the ministerial statement on "restricting hate speech" was posted on Facebook by opposition MP Chen Show Mao late on Monday with the caption "lesson of the day." The post had been shared over 1,000 times and received hundreds of comments by Tuesday afternoon. The list cited Lady's Gaga's 'Judas' and Ariana Grande's 'God is a woman', alongside songs 'Heresy' by Nine Inch Nails and 'Take me to the Church' by Hozier, as "illustrations of offensive lyrics." Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande have both held concerts in Singapore previously and the list did not suggest any of these artists would be banned from performing again. Singapore's home ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The statement came on a day Singapore submitted wide-ranging fake news legislation in parliament, stoking fears from internet firms and human rights groups that it may give the government too much power and hinder freedom of speech. (Reporting by John Geddie; Editing by Michael Perry) At a rehabilitation centre in Afghanistan, Imran Gul clasped two parallel bars, cautiously easing his weight onto his new leg. The 25-year-old nomad had been driving a tractor on hilly farmland when a landmine exploded, making him the latest victim of a scourge that has worsened in recent years as fighting intensifies between the government and the Taliban. "I did not hear the sound of the bomb," Gul told AFP as he tried out his prosthetic limb. "I touched my leg and saw there was no leg, and there were pieces of shrapnel in my eyes. My hands were soaked in blood," he added. The blast in the eastern province of Ghazni also took two of Gul's fingers. According to the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), casualties from landmines and so-called "explosive remnants of war" have soared five-fold between 2012 and 2017, the last year full data was available. Casualties have increased as a result of the intensifying fight between the Afghan government and the Taliban, especially since 2014. Battlefields have been left strewn with landmines, unexploded mortars, rockets and homemade bombs -- many of them picked up by curious children. "We are struggling to handle significant increases in the number of minefields in Afghanistan," said Patrick Fruchet, the UNMAS programme manager in Kabul. The Afghanistan government has signed an international anti-landmine treaty, but the Taliban and other militants are bound by no such rules. The UN hopes to raise attention to the issue Thursday, the annual International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action. "In 2012, we were down to about 36 casualties (killed and wounded) per month in Afghanistan -- which is still enormous," said Fruchet. But those numbers have jumped. In 2017, there were more than 150 casualties a month. In addition to the new explosive detritus, Afghanistan is still grappling with the legacy of mines from the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s and the civil war in the 1990s. Story continues - Lack of funds - Mohammad Jamshidi, UNMAS deputy programme manager, told AFP that a lack of funds means the country will probably miss the UN goal of being mine-free by 2023. The "deadline seems to be difficult to achieve because all these new contaminations and the lack of sufficient funding for the mine action", he said. In an effort to prevent further tragedies, various organisations hold information sessions to warn civilians, including children. Hashmatullah Yadgari, who works for the Danish Refugee Council, said many Afghans -- particularly returning former refugees -- have no idea what landmines and other explosives even look like. People "do not have any information about it", Yadgari said. In a tent inside a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul, a family was recently shown the various types of explosive device they may well encounter. "We had no knowledge and awareness about the landmines," said Sakina Habibi, a mother of three who has just returned to Afghanistan after nearly 30 years in Pakistan and Iran. Many survivors of blasts go to one of seven orthopaedic rehabilitation hospitals funded by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). - 'Lucky to be alive' - At the same rehab centre where Gul, the nomad who lost a leg, was being treated, other patients tried out their new prosthetics. Abdul, an Afghan mine clearer who only gave his first name, stood unsupported for the first time since getting fitted with two legs. He was disarming mines hidden in a house recaptured from the Taliban five months ago when the blast happened. "I de-activated five pressure mines. The sixth was designed to explode when exposed to light. When I moved my lamp closer -- boom," Abdul said. "I did my job, I prevented people from being killed by these mines. Even though I lost my legs, I'm lucky to still be alive," he added. The resilient father of two wants to keep his job, "to again save lives", he said, mimicking holding a mine detector in one hand and a walking stick in the other. Of the 12,000 new patients received annually by the ICRC, between 1,500 and 2,000 are casualties of war, some four-fifths of whom are wounded by landmines, said Najmudin Helal, head of the Kabul centre. Aside from physical rehab, the centre works with patients to help them find a new place in society. Nearly half of the 300 staff at the Kabul hospital are disabled. "They learn easily and they can teach the new disabled easily. It's a hope (for new patients) to see that life carries on," Helal said. BOSTON (AP) The Latest on hearings in Massachusetts on sexual misconduct allegations at Wynn Resorts (all times local): 3:45 p.m. Steve Wynn is again denying accusations of sexual misconduct after gambling regulators in Massachusetts released a report on how his former company responded to the allegations. The casino mogul wasn't in attendance Tuesday when the state's gaming commission opened a series of hearings into the response. Lawyer Brian Kelly says in a statement his client denies all allegations of nonconsensual sex. He also stressed that Steve Wynn isn't the focus of the hearings. Regulators aren't focused on the truth of the allegations but rather how long company officials were aware of them and how they responded. The hearings have implications for the company's Massachusetts casino license and Encore Boston Harbor, the $2.6 billion resort it plans to open in June. ___ 11:30 a.m. A report by Massachusetts casino regulators has found that Wynn Resorts executives concealed for years allegations of sexual misconduct against company founder Steve Wynn. The report by the state Gaming Commission's investigative team doesn't make a recommendation to regulators but concludes saying the five-member panel should evaluate the company's recent reforms in the context of the report's findings. The report was released Tuesday as the commission opened a series of hearings on whether Wynn officials knowingly hid information about the allegations, which Steve Wynn has denied, when it sought a casino license in 2013. The hearings have implications for Encore Boston Harbor, the $2.6 billion Boston-area resort the company plans to open in June. Wynn Resorts didn't dispute the facts of the nearly 200-page report and said it represents a "complete review." ---- 1:18 a.m. Massachusetts gambling regulators are holding hearings and releasing a long-awaited report into how Wynn Resorts handled allegations of sexual misconduct against company founder Steve Wynn. Story continues The state Gaming Commission has been investigating, in part, whether company officials knowingly hid information about the allegations when the state was considering its application for a license in 2014. The series of hearings opening Tuesday in Boston have implications for the Las Vegas company's Massachusetts casino license and Encore Boston Harbor, the $2.6 billion resort in Everett it plans to open in June. Wynn Resorts recently went through a similar review in Nevada where it was handed down a record $20 million fine but allowed to keep its casino license. Steve Wynn has denied the claims but resigned as CEO last year. The House Ways and Means Committee voted on Tuesday to advance several pieces of legislation aimed at encouraging retirement savings among Americans and strengthening their long-term financial security. Among the provisions called for are a couple aimed at increasing the flexibility associated with retirement accounts. If approved, individuals would be allowed to stash money into IRA accounts beyond the current age limit of 70 1/2. It would also delay when individuals are required to begin taking required minimum distributions to 72, from 70 1/2. Lawmakers are hoping to incentivize small businesses to offer private retirement plans to their employees by awarding tax credits of up to $500 for those that automatically enroll workers. The legislation seeks to make it easier for companies to band together to offer 401(k) plans. Traditional 401(k) plans would be encouraged to offer annuities to participants as well, through being awarded certain legal protections. Our reforms will help families save more and earlier for the future, ensuring folks have the flexibility and control over their own savings they need for whatever life throws their way, the top Republican of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said in a statement last week. Lawmakers are also pushing updates to 529 college savings plans, which would allow the funds to be used for other education-related expenses, such as private schooling and apprenticeships. Retirement reform is one of a few efforts in Congress believed to have bipartisan support. Major reforms havent been enacted in more than a decade. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP Another bill was approved that aims to reform the IRS including changes that would help protect taxpayers from fraud. The package of bills will need to be approved by the full House, before being taken up by the Senate. Related Articles The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned against the growing global climate of anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of deadly mosque shootings in Christchurch and called on Muslims and Christians to unite against hatred. Speaking in Cairos historic al-Azhar mosque on Tuesday, UN chief Antonio Guterres called on societies, faiths and cultures everywhere to focus on what unites us. Reflecting on what he called ever-rising anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia, the Secretary-General said it was vital now to counter and reject religious and political figures who exploit differences for their own gain. Antonio Guterres warned that hate speech was entering the mainstream, spreading like wildfire through social and traditional media. We see it spreading in liberal democracies and as well as in authoritarian states. These dark forces menace democratic values, social stability and peace. They stigmatize women, minorities migrants and refugees, he said. Guterres arrived at the more than 1,000-year-old mosque in the Egyptian capital, as a man of faith, he said, to show his solidarity with the faithful, in the wake of last months massacre at two mosques in New Zealand by a self-avowed white supremacist. As the holy Quran says in Surah Fussilat, verse 34, Good and evil deeds are not equal. Repel evil with what is better, and then you will see that one who was once your enemy, has become your dearest friend. said the UN chief. After he talked of the 15 March New Zealand mosque attacks he recalled the similar attack by a lone gunman on Jewish worshippers at a Synagogue in the Pennsylvanian city of Pittsburgh last October that killed 11 people. As in the Christchurch aftermath, concerned citizens of other faiths rallied to support and protect survivors, he said. This is the spirit that I know is deeply embedded in Islam a faith of love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy and grace, said the UN chief. Antonio Guterres is on a two-day trip to Egypt following his participation over the weekend in the Arab Summit in Tunis. Following his visit to Al-Azhar, he met Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb and was due to meet President Abdelfattah al Sisi. His planned meeting with al Sisi was criticized by some activists, as the president continues to crack down violently on opposition forces in Egypt. Amr Magdi, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, called on Guterres to raise the issue of human rights abuses in the country. Counter and reject leaders who seek to exploit differences between us, urges Guterres Speaking in Cairos historic al-Azhar mosque on Tuesday, UN chief Antonio Guterres issued a call for societies, faiths and cultures everywhere to focus on what unites us, urging everyone to work together towards realizing the 2030 Agenda for the collective benefit of all. Reflecting on what he called ever-rising anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia, the Secretary-General said it was vital now to counter and reject religious and political figures who exploit differences for their own gain. He said we must also ask why so many people feel excluded, and why they are tempted by extreme messages of intolerance against each other, a UN press release said. Mr. Guterres arrived at the more than 1,000-year-old mosque in the Egyptian capital, as a man of faith, he said, to show his solidarity with the faithful, in the wake of last months massacre at two mosques in New Zealand by a self-avowed white supremacist. As the holy Quran says in Surah Fussilat, verse 34, Good and evil deeds are not equal. Repel evil with what is better, and then you will see that one who was once your enemy, has become your dearest friend. said the UN chief. He noted the similar attack by a lone gunman on Jewish worshippers at a Synagogue in the Pennsylvanian city of Pittsburgh last October, where as in the Christchurch aftermath, concerned citizens of other faiths, rallied to support and protect survivors. This is the spirit that I know is deeply embedded in Islam a faith of love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy and grace, said the UN chief. With hate speech entering the mainstream and spreading like wildfire through social and traditional media, he noted that it was infecting both liberal democracies and authoritarian States. These dark forces menace democratic values, social stability and peace. They stigmatize women, minorities migrants and refugees, he said. Faith leaders have a very important role Mr. Guterres said, noting that his host, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, had joined hands with Pope Francis in Abu Dhabi in February. I have here, given by the Grand Imam, the text, the common text, approved by him and the Pope, said the Secretary General, which is a fantastic testimony of mutual respect, tolerance, compassion and peace, given by the two great religious leaders to the world. As the Grand Imam stated, Muslims have paid a heavy price due to the actions of a handful of criminals. He also stressed that all religions agree that God forbids killing, added Mr. Guterres. He noted that the Grand Imam had also called for Muslims in the Middle East to protect Christian communities, who have been subjected to terror at the hands of fundamentalist groups such as ISIS. I also commend the initiatives taken by al-Azhar to promote the true face of Islam and counter violent extremist philosophies and terrorist propaganda, said the UN chief. Nothing justifies terrorism and it becomes particularly hideous when religion in involved. Later in the day in Cairo as part of his extended visit to the Middle East region this week, Mr. Guterres toured the Grand Egyptian Museum describing it on Twitter as an impressive reminder of how the Arab world opened the door to epic discoveries and possibilities. A cannabis plant grows. Photo: Juan Cristobal Cobo/Bloomberg London-listed natural resources company Highlands (HNR.L), the oil producer that Yahoo Finance UK exclusively reported was getting into cannabis after making a surprising discovery, has signed its first deal. Highlands said in a statement that it sealed the first retail sale agreement for its unit Zoetic Organics, marking the beginning of on-site retail sales of its [cannabidiol] CBD products. Highlands revealed last month that it discovered a naturally occurring source of nitrogen, which was subsequently found to also include hydrogen. The combination created a natural and organic fertiliser. Highlands then began selling this gas to an organic cannabis grower in Colorado. It was then discovered that the gas essentially turbocharged the growth of cannabis plants. This has led to the groups decision to move into weed by raising more than 1.27m ($1.69m) to establish an organic, vertically integrated CBD operation in Colorado, through a newly established and wholly-owned Highlands subsidiary, Zoetic Organics. READ MORE: London-listed oil producer moves into weed after a surprising discovery The Zoetic Organics agreement is for two years with Schrader Oil and Ox Distributing, which collectively manages a wide network of convenience and gas stores, as well as convenience store distribution services, across the US. Highlands said that, under the agreement, Zoetic branded pre-rolled CBD smokables, ready-rolls, and CBD chew pouches will initially be distributed to and sold in 18 Schrader Oil convenience and gas stores. All parties, Highlands said, will aim to to work towards expanding their operations to both additional Schrader Oil and Ox Distributing affiliated stores and other third-party convenience stores. This is a significant development for Highlands as not only does it accelerate our predicted revenues from Zoetic Organics ahead of our own first harvest but it also provides us with an early opportunity to establish the Zoetic brand, Robert Price, executive chairman and CEO of Highlands, said. Story continues Market research firm Brightfield Group has estimated that the CBD market will reach $22bn (16.6bn) by 2022. Yahoo Finance UK first reported that Europes cannabis and CBD markets are set to grow exponentially over the next few years, with the weed sector set to rise over 2400% and CBD set to grow over 400% by 2023. Europes CBD market was estimated at $318m in 2018 and is tipped to rise to $416m in 2019, according to the report, entitled European CBD & Cannabis Market 2019 Report. CBD is then expected to grow to nearly $1.7bn by 2023. READ MORE: Europes weed and CBD market tipped to soar over 2400% and 400% Its graduation season in the Philippines and this teacher from Sultan Kudarat province is now viral after she took the event to the next level and created portraits for each of her students. Teacher Mailyn E. Akoy created portraits of each of her 59 students at the Notre Dame of Tacurong College, a private school located in Tacurong City and shared them online Facebook late last month. Fifty students graduated from Grade 12 with honors under the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) strand while the rest were from the accountancy, business, and management strand (ABM). Akoy taught entrepreneurship to the STEM students and ethics to the ABM pupils. In a Facebook Messenger interview with Coconuts Manila, Akoy said she was the class advisor for the 50 STEM students. She learned that several of the students didnt get high marks in the previous months, which disheartened them. It was painful on my part when they asked me why they failed [to get high marks]. Although I only taught them one subject, I did my best to come up with an idea on how I could reward them. I told them that whoever would finish with honors will get a gift from me, she said in English and Filipino. The teacher started drawing the portraits on Feb. 4. During my free time [at school], Id be able to make one portrait. When there are no classes I can finish four to five portraits [in one day]. She said what drove her to finish the drawings were the support of her parents and how her students reminded her of how she used to be: I did what I could because I saw myself in them when I was still a student. The students were thrilled when they received the portraits. The nine other students also received the gift even if they didnt graduate. They were surprised and their parents thanked me. Some students were jealous particularly those whom I didnt teach. For some, it was the first time they have ever received a portrait. Story continues Akoy is not the only Filipino teacher who became famous for gifting her students with portraits. Roselyn Barcoma from Laguna created a portrait of each of her students and gave it to them as post- Christmas gifts in January and became a viral sensation because of what she did. Netizens were no doubt happy that Akoy did this for her students. Harold Cabunoc said she did a good job. Photo: Mailyn Akoys FB Charles Nuezca thanked Akoy. Photo: Mailyn Akoy FB Janina Chio thanked Akoy and told her she loved her. Photo: Mailyn Akoy FB Commenting after Akoy posted an article which featured her and the students portraits, John Falguera wrote that she was his inspiration. Photo: Mailyn Akoy FB Good job, Ms. Akoy! And thank you for your service. This article, LOOK: Teacher creates portraits of her graduating students, originally appeared on Coconuts, Asia's leading alternative media company. Want more Coconuts? Sign up for our newsletters! CHICAGO Voters in Chicago on Tuesday elected former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot to become their next mayor, making Chicago the largest city to elect an African-American woman as its top elected official. With votes in 95% of precincts counted, Lightfoot had 73.7% of the vote and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle 26.3%. The win by Lightfoot, who identifies as a lesbian and will be Chicagos first woman of color to serve as mayor, also means the Windy City is the biggest U.S. city to pick an openly gay mayor. "Out there tonight, a lot of little girls and boys are watching," Lightfoot said in her victory speech. "They are watching us and they are seeing the beginning of something, well, a little bit different. They are seeing a city reborn. A city where it doesn't matter what color you are . . . where it doesn't matter who you love, just as long as you love." Lightfoot, who has never held elected office, easily defeated Preckwinkle, who is one of Chicagos most prominent politicians. Lightfoot beat Preckwinkle in each of the city's 50 wards. In a city weighed down by myriad problemseconomic inequality, persistent gun violence in pockets of the city, $28 billion in unfunded pension obligations and endemic political corruptionLightfoot made the case to voters that she was the outsider that Chicago needs to shake things up. Chicago has had a large African American population for much of its history, but only two of the citys 55 mayors have been black: Harold Washington from 1983 to 1987 and Eugene Sawyer from 1987 to 1989. Only one woman, Jane Byrne, has held the mayors office, from 1979 to 1983. Lightfoot will succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who announced in September that he would not seek a third term in office. She stunned Chicago in the first round of voting five weeks ago by finishing ahead of the entire 14-candidate field. Since no candidate won a majority of the vote, Lightfoot and Preckwinkle, the top two vote-getters, advanced to Tuesdays runoff. Story continues Lightfoot, 56, finished sixth in fundraising but topped the crowded field of candidates during the first round of voting. She billed herself as a change agent who could best battle the citys longtime problem of corruption. On many of the central issues, Lightfoot and Preckwinkle held similar positions, and both called themselves progressives. The candidates: Chicago votes: Who are the two women looking to make history as first black female mayor? Burke scandal: In corruption-plagued Chicago, high-level shakedown charges loom over mayoral race, candidates Both said they supported some form of a real estate transaction tax to help generate revenue for the cash-strapped city. Lightfoot and Preckwinkle said they opposed pursuing an amendment to the state constitution to reduce pension benefits for city workers and retirees. And they agreed that reducing the citys gun violence epidemic would require multiple remedies, including investments in economically distressed neighborhoods and improving schools in some of the most violence-plagued areas. Addressing supporters Tuesday evening, Lightfoot repeated campaign promises to pour attention into Chicago's 77 neighborhoods and take on the tough challenges that have led to the city losing tens of thousands of residents over the last decade from predominantly black neighborhoods. A shrinking city, which is where we are right now, just will not do, Lightfoot said. To thrive, Chicago must grow. It simply must. Some on Chicagos political left remain suspicious of Lightfoot. While she never served in elected office, Lightfoot received appointments from Mayors Emanuel and Richard M. Daley. She served as president of the Chicago Police Board, headed the police department Office of Professional Standards and the citys Police Accountability Task Force. Both the police board and Office of Professional Standards have faced criticism. Some say the oversight agencies were feckless organizations that rarely took action against Chicago police officers for misconduct. There is genuine confusion in this moment of what it means to be progressive, said Emma Tai, executive director of the group United Working Families. Were in this moment when most of the candidatesregardless of the past positions theyve taken or work that theyve donewere running as far from Rahm Emanuels record as they could. Thats not the same thing as being progressive. Lightfoot hammered Preckwinkle, 72, who is also the Cook County Democratic Party chairwoman, as a relic of the citys political machine. More than 30 Chicago city council members have been convicted of public corruption since 1973, and federal prosecutors have racked up hundreds more convictions of elected officials, city employees and contractors over those years. Throughout the campaign, Lightfoot knocked Preckwinkle for her ties to Alderman Ed Burke, a powerful city council member who federal prosecutors charged in January with attempted extortion. He allegedly tried to shake down the operators of a company that operates Burger King franchises in Illinois. After prosecutors announced the charges against Burke, Preckwinkle acknowledged she had received a $10,000 donation from the Burger King operators but had returned the money. Preckwinkle has also said that she would return $116,000 in political donations she collected at a fundraiser at Burkes home last year. Both Lightfoot and Preckwinkle acknowledged that a victory by either of them would mark a historic moment for African-American women, but neither dwelled on it during the campaign. "For a while, I may be disappointed," Preckwinkle said in her concession speech. "I am not disheartened. For one thing, this is clearly a historic night. Not long ago, two African-American women vying for this position would have been unthinkable." No love was lost between the two candidates during their battle for the mayors office. Before the first round of voting, Lightfoot compared Preckwinkle and three other mayoral candidates with ties to Burke to cockroaches. At their first one-on-one debate, Lightfoot called Preckwinkle sad and pathetic and accused her of lying about Lightfoot receiving the endorsements of two City Council members who back President Donald Trump. Lightfoot actually received an endorsement from the firefighters union, of which the aldermen are members. In this March 24, 2019 photo, Chicago mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot listens to a question during a candidate forum sponsored by One Chicago For All Alliance at Daley College in Chicago. Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle are competing to make history by becoming the city's first black, female mayor. Lightfoot questioned whether Preckwinkle "was blowing some kind of dog whistle" to conservative voters after the county board president brought up her sexual orientation at a debate. She also expressed outrage after one of Preckwinkle's campaign advisers posted a photo of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials on social media to argue against supporting Lightfoot. Preckwinkle fired the aide and apologized to Lightfoot. One of Preckwinkles surrogates, Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., suggested that Chicagoans should be suspicious of Lightfoot because of her service on the two police oversight boards. He said voters would have blood on their hands if they voted for Lightfoot. Preckwinkle declined to disavow the comments. Lightfoot said earlier this week that she needed to hear just two words from Preckwinkle to begin burying the hatchet: Congratulations, mayor. With her victory, Lightfoot is among the most prominent openly LGBTQ mayors in America. (South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is having his own star moment.) Lightfoot is one of several openly gay candidates running for mayor in medium and large U.S. cities around the country this election cycle. In Tampa, Jane Castor who previously served as that citys police chief is looking to become the first out woman to lead a major Florida city when voters go to the polls on April 23. Kansas City council member Jolie Justus on Tuesday finished as one of the top two contenders in a crowded field vying to succeed outgoing Mayor Sly James. She will face fellow councilman Quinton Lucas in a June 18 runoff. Meanwhile, in Madison, Wisconsin, former council member Satya Rhodes-Conway trounced Mayor Paul Soglin, who has held the seat for 22 years, in Tuesdays runoff. She becomes the citys first openly gay woman mayor. Lightfoot said the history-making was important. But the vast majority of city residents who voted for her were primarily motivated by a desire to shake up the citys political scene, she said. I think its more about (voters wanting) a break from the corrupt political machine, Lightfoot said. Anita Williams, a voter from the Garfield Park neighborhood on the city's West Side, said she wasn't hopeful that either candidate would bring much hope to her economically ravaged and violence-plagued corner of the city. Williams said she decided to cast her vote for Lightfoot because she liked that the candidate was open about her sexual orientation and family life. "I like that she was just open and honest about who she is," Williams said. "I am not optimistic that any politician is going to do much to help us out here, but I liked that part of her." Lightfoot follows several other LGBTQ candidates who won high-profile seats, including Sen. Tammy Baldwin, of Wisconsin; Sen. Kristen Sinema, of Arizona; and Gov. Jared Polis, of Colorado. All three are Democrats. Still, a rainbow wave hasnt yet arrived in American politics, notes Stephanie Sandberg, executive director of LPAC, an LGBTQ political organization that backed Lightfoots candidacy. About 4.5% of American adults identify as LGBTQ, according to a 2017 Gallup Poll. There are roughly 600 openly LGBTQ elected officials in the U.S. about 0.1% of elected officials nationwide, according to the Victory Institute, a national group dedicated to promoting openly LGBTQ leaders. Having a Lori Lightfoot who is not only African American, not only a woman, but is an out lesbian (she) becomes a role model for so many people(in) each of those communities, Sandberg said. No one has seen that before. Once you see it, it keeps breaking barriers. In this March 24, 2019 photo, Chicago mayoral candidate Toni Preckwinkle looks out over the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago, on a bus tour with members of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council during a day of campaigning in Chicago. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Chicago elects Lori Lightfoot as first gay and first black female mayor in citys history Buenos Aires (AFP) - Argentina's historic claim on the Falkland Islands is "legitimate and irrevocable," President Mauricio Macri said Tuesday at a ceremony marking the 37th anniversary of the 1982 war with Britain. Commemorative events were being held throughout Argentina to mark the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, when Argentina's then-ruling military dictatorship sent troops to the South Atlantic archipelago, known to Argentina as the Malvinas, occupied by Britain since 1833. "The claim to the sovereignty of the Malvinas islands is a legitimate and irrevocable claim, which unites all Argentines beyond our differences," Macri said in a speech to veterans in Buenos Aires. The center-right president, who has forged an more moderate approach to Britain than his predecessors, said Argentina intended to push its claim by using "the tools of dialogue, confidence building and trust and respect for international law." The 74-day conflict claimed the lives of 649 Argentine troops and 255 British forces. It ended with Argentina's surrender on June 14, 1982. Some 500 Argentine ex-combatants have committed suicide in the years since, according to a support group, the Malvinas Combatants Association for Human Rights. Among the events in Argentina, a "Malvinas Vigil" was held in Rio Grande, a strategic staging center for Argentine forces, 1,740 miles (2,800 kilometers) south of Buenos Aires and 360 miles west of the Falklands. Players in Argentina's Superliga held a minute's silence before their matches at the weekend. On Tuesday, relatives placed a commemorative plaque at the war memorial in Saint Martin Square in Buenos Aires, that read: "Argentine soldier known only to God". The plaque was taken from the Darwin war cemetery on the islands, which had been replaced by one with the name of the fallen soldier. The gesture follows a mission by the International Committee of the Red Cross which exhumed the remains of 121 Argentine soldiers buried in unmarked graves. Using modern identification methods, 112 have so far been identified by an Argentine forensic team, and a planeload of relatives of the soldiers visited the graves for the first time in 2018 and again last month. HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) An Alabama man shot by police during a car chase has since been released from the hospital and jailed. News outlets report 31-year-old Clifford Gilberto Landers was jailed Friday on charges including failing to stop at a stop sign and attempt to commit murder. University of Alabama in Huntsville spokesman Ray Garner says campus police last week tried to pull over a vehicle for multiple traffic violations, but the driver fled. He says the campus officers gave chase and were later joined by additional officers from the Huntsville police department. He says the driver then rammed two campus police vehicles, attempted to run over an officer and was shot by campus police. Landers was hospitalized in critical condition. It's unclear if he has a lawyer. ___ This story corrects the headline to show that Clifford Gilberto Landers was jailed on charges including attempted murder and not charges of murder. Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) claimed over the weekend that Cook County prosecutors did the correct thing by dropping the charges pending against Empire actor Jussie Smollett after a grand jury indicted him for staging a hate crime. Its the correct thing that the charges were dropped, Waters told Extra in a Sunday interview. First of all, we probably will never know all of the details. Weve heard a lot of information. No one was hurt that is, physically, killed, shot he never committed a crime before, he forfeited the bail, and its this kind of situation where they close the case all over the country every day. I have learned this isnt unusual. Cook County states attorney Kimberly Foxx announced Tuesday that she had dropped disorderly-conduct charges against Smollett due to his history of community service and the nature of the crime. After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smolletts volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case, a statement from Foxxs office said. Related Video: Jussie Smollett Skips NAACP Image Awards For more news videos visit Yahoo View. The charges were dropped weeks after an emotional press conference in which Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson laid out ample evidence that Smollett had diverted police resources by staging a hate crime against himself in order to advance his career. Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career, Johnson said at a February press conference announcing the charges against Smollett. This publicity stunt was a scar that Chicago didnt earn, and certainly didnt deserve. . . . The stunt was orchestrated by Smollett because he was dissatisfied with his salary. Story continues Johnsons characterization of Smolletts actions was based on a 23-day investigation that produced evidence that the actor paid two friends to attack him. Police obtained surveillance footage of the two men, one of whom acted on Empire with Smollett, purchasing the items used in the staged assault, as well as a check made out to the two men for their services. Despite the version of events presented by Johnson based on the evidence gathered by officers, Waters hopes Smollett goes on to future success in show business. Smollett garnered a lot of attention because of who he is hes an extremely talented man who people have come to love because he is on TV. Im hopeful that he will go on with his career and be successful, she said. The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, which had called for a federal investigation into Foxxs handling of the Smollett case, protested outside her office on Monday afternoon. HAPPENING NOW: Chicago Fraternal Order of Police protesting outside @SAKimFoxxs office as supporters defend her. pic.twitter.com/IEdi9mBizn Eric Cox (@EricCoxTV) April 1, 2019 Michelle Obamas former chief of staff, Tina Tchen, contacted Foxx days after Smollett filed the allegedly false report on behalf of Smolletts relatives to ask that she request that the probe be handed over to the FBI to avoid media leaks. Foxx told Tchen that she complied with the requests in texts and emails obtained by CWBChicago. Foxx said Friday that she is open to an outside investigation into her handling of the case. More from National Review Charities supported by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been floored by an influx of donations, following an online campaign started by royal fans. The global fundraiser was set up by fan account @freepeeper on Mothers Day (Sunday 31 March) in honour of the impending arrival of Meghan and Harrys first child this month. Supporters have been using the hashtag #GlobalSussexBabyShower to spread the word on social media. One of the charities to benefit is CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education) who tweeted that they were completely floored by support and donations in response to the campaign. Meghan visiting Mayhew animal charity in January [Photo: PA] An amazing day of overwhelming generosity & goodwill for #GirlsEducation. Counting our lucky to have support from all behind #GlobalSussexBabyShower. Wishing you a good night & sending our heartfelt thanks once again @freepeeper pic.twitter.com/qHDShahsav CAMFED Campaign for Female Education (@Camfed) March 31, 2019 The charity has received a total of 14,000 in donations so far, as of Monday afternoon. Last month, Meghan was announced as Vice-President of the Queens Commonwealth Trust, which supports the CAMA project, the alumnae association for CAMFED graduates. The Queen is Patron of the Queens Commonwealth Trust, while Harry is President. Another chosen organisation is animal charity Mayhew, of which Meghan is patron. They have received over 4,000 so far and tweeted that they were incredibly touched by the generosity of everyone. READ MORE: Meghan Markle wont give birth at the Lindo Wing, according to reports Story continues The third is one of Harrys patronages, WellChild, which provides care for seriously ill children and young people in the UK. CEO Colin Dyer says: We have been surprised and delighted by the donations from supporters of #GlobalSussexBabyShower. Its great that an online outpouring of goodwill can lead to practical help for children with serious illness and their families. Harry and Meghan meeting Matilda Booth at the WellChild Awards last September [Photo: PA] PR expert Nick Ede tells Yahoo UKs The Royal Box, that the campaign is a lovely way of celebrating Meghan and her forthcoming arrival. He says: Strangers to her, fans of hers and Harrys, have come together collectively, taken their own money and giving it to good causes, thats a brilliant thing to happen. So in many ways, the Meghan effect is very positive and is changing peoples lives, without her doing anything but just being part of the Royal Family, so its a good thing. The duchess was thrown an official baby shower by her close friends Serena Williams and Amal Clooney in New York in February. When Harry and Meghan got married last May, the couple asked well-wishers to make a donation to one of their seven chosen charities, instead of sending wedding presents. The organisations they selected represented a range of issues the couple are passionate about, including sport for social change, womens empowerment, conservation, the environment, homelessness, HIV and the Armed Forces. Meghan currently has no more scheduled public appearances in her diary until she gives birth. Kensington Palace are yet to announce where she will have her baby, but it has been reported that the couple have chosen a hospital in Windsor, and not the Lindo Wing at St Marys. An MEP has said he believes MPs are deluding themselves if they believe the so-called Malthouse compromise will work. Stock image. An MEP has launching a scathing attack on MPs as politicians attempt to work out a solution for Britains departure from the European Union. Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, who sits on the European Parliaments Brexit steering group, said MPs were deluding themselves if they thought the Malthouse Compromise would work. The compromise is essentially two choices to offer to the EU: Plan A is similar to the Theresa Mays thrice-defeeated Withdrawal Agreement, but with changes to the Irish backstop and the implementation period. Plan B assumes that agreement on the Withdrawal Agreement is not possible and creates a transitional standstill period. Mr Lamberts said: They are deluding themselves I have seen too much of that over the last two years in Westminster. French President Emmanuel Macron Im afraid the harsh reality is quite different and if people cannot come to terms with reality then the wake-up will be difficult. On the Northern Irish border he said quite obviously it would need to be policed and it is not the EU that has created the problem. It comes as Emmanuel Macron said that credible justifications for an Article 50 extension could include an election, second referendum or alternative proposals for the future relationship, such as a customs union. The EU would be open to such proposals, but it was for London to put them forward, he said. A long extension involving the participation of the UK in European elections and European institutions is far from evident and certainly not (to be taken) for granted. Read more from Yahoo News UK: YouTubers posting thousands of clips of themselves drinking water Lib Dem councillor scared to put her children to bed Passenger who died on Qantas flight identified Our priority shall be the good functioning of the EU and the single market. The EU cannot sustainably be the hostage to the solution to a political crisis in the UK. He added: We cannot spend the coming months sorting out yet again the terms of our divorce and dealing with the past. Story continues On Wednesday Theresa May met with her Cabinet in a five-hour meeting, three of which were politicians only with speculation discussions would involved the Tory leadership and prospects of a general election, despite Chancellor Philip Hammond warning the UK could not afford one. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK By Dave Graham MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico will help to regulate the flow of Central American migrants passing through its territory to the United States, but the root causes behind the phenomenon must be tackled, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Monday. Speaking after U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to close the U.S. southern border if Mexico did not halt illegal immigration immediately, Lopez Obrador said he would not have a confrontation with the United States. "I prefer love and peace," Lopez Obrador told reporters at his regular morning news conference. The leftist president has consistently refused to get drawn into a war of words with Trump over the border. A senior Mexican trade official warned later that closing down the U.S.-Mexico border would cause pain on "both sides." Most of the people caught at the frontier trying to enter the United States illegally come from three violent and impoverished countries: Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Lopez Obrador has tried to persuade Trump to address the problem by fostering economic development in Central America. But on Saturday the U.S. State Department said it was cutting off aid to those three countries. [nL1N21H083] Detentions at the U.S. border have surged in recent months, angering Trump and putting pressure on Lopez Obrador to find a solution that will prevent a shutdown of the frontier to the market for 80 percent of Mexico's exports. [nL1N21H06L] Asked if it was time to put pressure on the Central American countries to do more to tackle the problem, Lopez Obrador said the causes of migration were "not being attended to" and that people needed to be offered more opportunities there. "Obviously, we have to help because Central American migrants pass through our territory and we have to bring order to this migration, make sure it's legal," he said. "That's what we're doing. But serenely, calmly, without a commotion and with great prudence and responsibility." Mexico began issuing temporary humanitarian visas to some members of a migrant caravan in southern Mexico, giving priority to children and the elderly, the National Migration Institute said Monday. It said it would provide transport back to Central American countries, Cuba and Haiti, on a voluntary basis. Earlier this year, Mexico handed out humanitarian visas liberally, but reined in the program after a surge in applications. The institute said from next month it was planning to encourage people to apply for visas in their home countries. It was not immediately clear if the government was limiting the number of visas it issues. U.S. CONGRESSIONAL OBJECTIONS It has quickly become clear that any plan to cut aid to Central America would face strong objections from members of the U.S. Congress, who must approve it. One of Trump's fellow Republicans, Representative Mike McCaul, the top Republican on the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said cutting aid would worsen the situation. "If we cut all this funding ... I think it's going to make things tragically worse, not better," he said during a presentation at a think tank in Washington. Putting a stop to aid to Central America made the job of stemming the flow of migrants tougher, said Senator Ben Cardin, a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "And closing the border - that makes no sense at all," he told CNN. "We need Mexico's cooperation to work with us, and cutting off the border just tells Mexico: 'We're doing it alone'." Following a meeting on Monday with Lopez Obrador at the Presidential Palace in Mexico City, the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, invited the Mexican president to visit the committee for a meeting in Washington, an aide to Engel said. "Excellent meeting with President @lopezobrador_ on importance of U.S.-#Mexico relationship. I emphasized need to partner in assisting Central America," Engel said on Twitter. Mexico's Ambassador to the United States, Martha Barcena, said that the issues of "development cooperation, fighting corruption in Mexico, need for friendly and constructive bilateral relations" were discussed. U.S. Border Patrol projections are for over 90,000 apprehensions at the border during March, according to data provided to the Mexican government - a more than 140 percent increase from March 2018, and a seven-fold jump from 2017. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States was working with the Central American governments and Mexico and pointed to the numbers when asked why Trump had toughened his stance. "Just look at the math," Pompeo told reporters outside the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. "How many folks are coming across. This is a crisis. We need to fix it." (This story corrects paragraph 20 to show Engel invited Lopez Obrador for a meeting, not a hearing) (Reporting by Dave Graham; Additional reporting by Sharay Angulo and Anthony Esposito in Mexico City and Lesley Wroughton, Doina Chiacu and Patricia Zengerle in Washington; editing by Grant McCool, James Dalgleish and Sonya Hepinstall) Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Robert Muellers failure to establish a criminal conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russian government has set off a wave of revisionist attacks from both the right and the far left. Even though the full details of Muellers report remain secret, Trumps defenders insist that it has negated not only the wild hopes that Trump might be removed from his job through prosecutorial means but over two years worth of reporting on his suspect relations with Moscow. I am not a reporter and have not broken any of the stories Trumps defenders are now trying to discredit. But I did write a long feature last summer tying together the body of reporting as it stood at the time into a narrative exploring the Trump-Russia relationship. That story placed me among Trumps targets for revenge. But just as Trumps defenders barely managed to discredit any of the reporting on the Russia scandal, neither have they debunked the major conclusions in that piece. Having reread it in light of the ten months worth of revelations that have followed, I believe the story holds up extremely well. Indeed, subsequent events have vindicated its most important predictions and claims. The story argued that the breadth and depth of connections between Trump and Russia suggested the scandal was probably worse than most reporters and pundits perceived at the time. The media was giving too much weight to the unlikely outcomes on one side of the distribution that Trumps relationship with Russia was completely innocent and discounting unlikely outcomes on the other side that Trump was very deeply compromised. The media has treated the notion that Russia has personally compromised the president of the United States as something close to a kook theory, I wrote. The most likely possibility, I proposed, was that Russia was exerting some kind of hidden leverage over Trump. The conclusion has proven completely correct. We now know that during the campaign, Trump was pursuing a building deal in Russia worth several hundred million dollars in profit, according to an indictment by Robert Mueller that Trump has not disputed. This deal created two forms of secret leverage for Vladimir Putin. First, the money was a powerful incentive for Trump to stay in Putins good graces. And second, since Trump was publicly denying that he had any dealings with Russia, Putin had access to secret information that he could use to embarrass Trump if he so desired. A recent wave of criticisms of this story replicated the theme of the original pushback, which is an accusation that the story calls Trump a Russian agent. The story does not make such a charge, which would be a ridiculous and totally implausible thing to believe. Some critics have also seized on a chart that accompanied the story. I didnt see the chart until the story was published, and I assume its intent was a somewhat playful treatment of the subject matter, though its fair to conclude that the irony was lost on most readers. In any case, the decorative art has no bearing on my argument. To be fair, while my piece did not promote the Russian agent fantasy, it has gained some currency on social media. But to try to understand Trump in these terms is to fall for a spy-fiction-level analysis of how Russian intelligence works. A wide array of counterintelligence experts have explained that Russia really does make a concerted effort to compromise foreign dignitaries in politics and business. But the process is subtle, often affable on the surface, sometimes resorting to outright blackmail but more commonly using greed and persuasion as levers. I likened the relationship between Trump and the Kremlin to the sorts of covert ties Russia has formed with right-wing politicians in other western countries. The data we have seen since my story ran has largely bolstered its conclusion. Shortly after the piece ran, Trump flew to Helsinki and appeared strikingly and uncharacteristically submissive alongside Putin. The Washington Post reported that Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his meetings with Putin secret from his own government, barring national security experts and even personally confiscating notes on one discussion. Trump also made a series of oddly Russophilic comments, ranging from repeated attacks on NATO to calling Montenegro a very aggressive people who might attack Russia to justifying the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In my story, I wrote, It is possible that the current list of known campaign contacts accounts for most, or even all, of the direct cooperation. But that is hardly a safe assumption. Indeed, Muellers indictments since then have added more incriminating evidence. Mueller found that Roger Stone was coordinating with WikiLeaks to exploit the value of Russias email hack, and that Paul Manafort passed detailed polling data on to a suspected Russian intelligence asset. (Neither man has cooperated with Mueller, and both appear to be banking on presidential pardons, a fact pattern that hardly puts all suspicions about their activity to rest.) Some of the potential links I noted appear less probable today. A suspicious server that might have been used to transmit campaign data was reported on inconclusively by the Atlantics Franklin Foer and The New Yorkers Dexter Filkins. The fact that Mueller has not filed any indictments related to the server, which would seem to create an avenue for a conspiracy charge, reduces the probability that it played any important role in the campaign. Likewise, my story cited a McClatchy report that Mueller obtained evidence that Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 campaign, but Cohens recent testimony to the contrary renders that prospect exceedingly remote. The most dramatic possibility I mentioned in the story, which has also been the subject of the widest ridicule, is the possibility that the Russian compromising of Trump dates back to 1987. This was not my main thesis, but it was a possibility, a small but real chance 10 percent? 20 percent?, as I put it at the time. The facts I cited, in sum, were that Trump held a few meetings with Soviet officials, traveled to Moscow, discussed the possibility of building a tower there, and shortly thereafter began attacking American allies and discussing a presidential campaign, neither of which he had done previously. I still think Soviet intelligence was probably just sniffing around Trump back then, and didnt gain any real inroads until probably the 2000s, when his business became heavily reliant on Russian funding. But nothing we have learned since last summer has made this unlikely-but-not-impossible scenario any less likely. Indeed, there is one development that gives it more credence: The now-confirmed fact that Trump was pursuing a deal to build a tower in Moscow during the campaign. Russia was floating a Moscow tower deal at the time Trump explored his first campaign, in 1988, and also floated a Moscow tower deal when he ran in 2016. We know Russia dangles lucrative business deals in front of foreign politicians as a foreign policy tactic. (Russian influence scandals have popped up in Britain, France, Ukraine, and most recently in Italy, as well as elsewhere.) The pattern usually involves Russians luring foreign partners with surefire-profit business deals involving things like gold or silver mines or diesel fuel. Trumps cant-miss deal was a tower. Maybe the 1987 iteration of the tower deal was nothing more than a straight-up business arrangement, and only by 2015 did it morph into a pretext to slip a fortune to an American presidential candidate. Maybe not. Since my storys publication, a great deal of information has confirmed and fleshed out its thesis that Trumps relationship with Russia has compromised him. The New York Times reported in January that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trumps relations with Russia. The headline of that story read, F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia. That is to say, the FBI was investigating the exact same scenario I posited in my story. And while we know Mueller has not found enough evidence to charge Trump with a criminal conspiracy, the results of the counterintelligence probe have yet to be disclosed. In the meantime, Trumps defenders have seized upon the absence of criminal conspiracy charges to wish out of existence a massive trove of un-rebutted facts. Some of these defenders are the very people who have promoted claims that actually have been discredited like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbis skepticism that Russia hacked the DNC, or the various right-wing water-carriers for Devin Nuness crazed conspiracy theories. The story I wrote last year was ahead of the interpretive curve but very much in line with the known facts. At that time, all the dots pointed to the likelihood of a hidden, corrupt relationship between Trump and Russia. By now, we know this once a dark possibility to be true. MEXICO CITY, April 1 (Reuters) - The founder and bassist of the Mexican rock band Botellita de Jerez, 64-year-old Armando Vega Gil, killed himself on Monday after posting a suicide letter on Twitter that said he was falsely and anonymously accused of sexually abusing a minor. Vega Gil was found dead at his Mexico City home, authorities confirmed. The musician said that he was anonymously accused via the #MeTooMusicosMexicanos (#MeTooMexicanMusicians) Twitter hashtag of abusing and harassing a woman when she was 13-years-old. "I will say this categorically, this accusation is false," Vega Gil's letter said. "Let me make it clear that my death is not a confession of guilt, on the contrary it is a radical declaration of my innocence. I just want to clear the path my son will walk in the future." The representative for Botellita de Jerez, Paola Hernandez, said she spoke with Vega Gil at around 2.00 a.m., some two hours before his death. "He was really sad and pissed off, he didn't know how to clear his name. He said he wasn't guilty ... he was worried about how his son would take all this," Hernandez said during a radio interview. Vega Gil's death sparked an acrimonious debate on Mexican social media. Some argued that if he was innocent he should have cleared his name in Mexico's justice system, while others said the court of public opinion, especially online, had already found him guilty and permanently muddied his reputation. Vega Gil ended his letter saying: "Don't blame anyone for my death, this suicide is a conscious, voluntary, free and personal decision. Hasta pronto." (Reporting by Anthony Esposito and Lizbeth Diaz; Editing by Michael Perry) Baghdad (AFP) - Several million Muslims have travelled to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhim in Baghdad in recent days to commemorate the revered Shiite figure's death, an Iraqi official said Tuesday. "More than five million pilgrims" have flocked to the glittering shrine from other parts of Iraq as well as the Gulf, Iran, India and Pakistan since Friday, according to Adi al-Kazmi, an official at the site. Many had travelled hundreds of kilometres on foot, by horse or even on camels over several days, caught outside in heavy thunderstorms that hit Iraq at the weekend. Authorities had sealed off many of Baghdad's thoroughfares in recent days to allow pilgrims to reach the shrine, which is located in the city's northern Kadhimiyah neighbourhood. The site features an intricately-designed mosque and includes Imam Kadhim's double-domed mausoleum. Musa al-Kadhim, the seventh of 12 imams venerated by Shiite Muslims, died in 799 while in detention by Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. His death is commemorated yearly with a funeral reenactment that sees a mock coffin carried into the shrine by swaying pilgrims. On Tuesday, huge crowds of praying visitors made their way to the shrine, passing dozens of tents erected by volunteers to provide free tea, sweets, and shelter. A group of men dressed in black gathered in a tightly-packed circle and began rhythmically striking their chests as a sign of mourning. Security forces have set up rings of checkpoints to thoroughly search all pilgrims, and no security incidents were reported. In 2005, at least 965 pilgrims heading to the Imam Kadhim shrine died after a mass stampede along a nearby bridge that was sparked by rumours of a suicide bomber in the crowd. Iraq declared victory against the Islamic State group in late 2017 after three years of fierce fighting that ravaged the country's economy. It is now keen to demonstrate its newfound stability, particularly with religious tourism to its many Shiite sites. Many of its religious tourists come from neighbouring Iran, which announced recently that it and Iraq would introduce reciprocal visa-free travel. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! We often see insiders buying up shares in companies that perform well over the long term. On the other hand, we'd be remiss not to mention that insider sales have been known to precede tough periods for a business. So before you buy or sell INOX Leisure Limited (NSE:INOXLEISUR), you may well want to know whether insiders have been buying or selling. Do Insider Transactions Matter? It's quite normal to see company insiders, such as board members, trading in company stock, from time to time. However, such insiders must disclose their trading activities, and not trade on inside information. We don't think shareholders should simply follow insider transactions. But equally, we would consider it foolish to ignore insider transactions altogether. For example, a Columbia University study found that 'insiders are more likely to engage in open market purchases of their own companys stock when the firm is about to reveal new agreements with customers and suppliers'. See our latest analysis for INOX Leisure The Last 12 Months Of Insider Transactions At INOX Leisure There wasn't any very large single transaction over the last year, but we can still observe some trading. You can see a visual depiction of insider transactions (by individuals) over the last 12 months, below. By clicking on the graph below, you can see the precise details of each insider transaction! NSEI:INOXLEISUR Recent Insider Trading, April 1st 2019 For those who like to find winning investments this free list of growing companies with recent insider purchasing, could be just the ticket. Insider Ownership For a common shareholder, it is worth checking how many shares are held by company insiders. I reckon it's a good sign if insiders own a significant number of shares in the company. Our data indicates that INOX Leisure insiders own about 504m worth of shares (which is 1.6% of the company). We do note, however, it is possible insiders have an indirect interest through a private company or other corporate structure. Overall, this level of ownership isn't that impressive, but it's certainly better than nothing! Story continues So What Does This Data Suggest About INOX Leisure Insiders? An insider sold INOX Leisure shares recently, but they didn't buy any. And even if we look to the last year, we didn't see any purchases. On the plus side, INOX Leisure makes money, and is growing profits. It is good to see high insider ownership, but the insider selling leaves us cautious. Of course, the future is what matters most. So if you are interested in INOX Leisure, you should check out this free report on analyst forecasts for the company. But note: INOX Leisure may not be the best stock to buy. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with high ROE and low debt. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Washington (AFP) - President Donald Trump said Tuesday he has strengthened NATO by insisting on a "rocket" like increase in military spending by allies that he says used to take advantage of US largesse. "Tremendous progress has been made and NATO's much stronger," Trump told reporters at a White House meeting with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg ahead of the alliance's 70th anniversary celebrations in Washington. "It's a rocket ship up," he said of the spending increase, which he said before his presidency had been on a downward "rollercoaster." "People are paying and I'm very happy," he said. Trump has long complained about NATO, accusing Western allies of being freeloaders that do not pull their weight on military spending, taking for granted that they can rely on the US defensive shield. The Trump administration has been especially incensed with Germany, Europe's largest economy, which is not on track to meet a 2014 pledge by NATO members to spend two percent of GDP on defense. Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, has stood behind Trump on the spending goals and credited his blunt approach with pushing members. Between 2016 and the end of next year, the 28 NATO members other than the United States will have boosted military spending "another $100 billion more by 2020 or a little bit into 2020," Trump confirmed Tuesday. "NATO is a strong alliance, but to remain a strong alliance we have to be fair. And therefore allies have to invest more in defense. You're having a strong message on that and your message has been having an impact," Stoltenberg said in reply. - Anniversary speech - The White House visit comes on the eve of a speech by Stoltenberg to a joint session of Congress, an honor demonstrating legislators' strong support for NATO, despite Trump's skepticism. To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance, which was founded in Washington on April 4, 1949, foreign ministers from the 29 members are due for two days of talks. A full leaders-level summit will only take place in December in London. Story continues Since the end of World War II, NATO has cemented Europe and the United States in a partnership fusing military strength with shared democratic values, principally in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union. Today, NATO once again sees a more assertive Russia as a threat, though Trump is rather emphasizing the need to improve ties with Moscow. "I hope we have a good relationship with Russia," Trump said. "I think we'll get along." On Thursday, ministers will return to Trump's favorite topic, a State Department official said: the "importance of fair burden-sharing." - Further steps on Ukraine - If spending questions are dividing NATO, most alliance members share concerns about Russia which backs separatists in a low-intensity war in Ukraine from which it seized the Crimean peninsula in 2014. "We will be looking at ways to do more in the whole Black Sea region. We will be doing more surveillance, there will be more ships in the Black Sea from NATO countries, and there are sanctions that have already been imposed" over actions against Ukraine, Hutchison said. Stoltenberg said the foreign ministers would likely agree to step up support to Ukraine as well as Georgia, including through training maritime forces and coast guards and further port visits and exercises. He said NATO will also discuss further steps after the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, with the United States and its allies saying that a Russian missile system has negated the key Cold War pact. You dont need to be stuck at the same salary anymore. Man holding a folder while having a business meeting with a woman. Image source: Getty Images. There comes a point in just about everybodys career when they need to negotiate a raise. After all, the best way to improve your financial situation is to make more money, and the two ways to do that are to either get a raise or find a higher-paying job. If you like where you work, then youd probably prefer to stay there over finding someplace new. Negotiating a raise can be tricky, but when you know how to do it, you have a much higher chance of success. 1. Research the salary range for your position To know how much you can realistically ask for, you need to know what the salary range is for your position. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, this information is much easier to obtain than it used to be. Check out a few pay scale sites to pull up average salaries for your position. Make sure that the sites you use also account for your location. Salaries for the same position can vary quite a bit depending on where you live. 2. Make a record of all your successes at your current job If your only justification for a raise is, I want more money, youre going to get the typical response of, Sorry, thats not in the budget. You need evidence of your value as an employee. Depending on what you do, this could be: Performance reviews Positive feedback from management, clients, or customers Additional responsibilities youve taken on 3. Set your target salary After youve researched the salary range for your position and reviewed your own performance, you can use that information to decide on a target salary. If you have the experience and youve been a top performer, then you can aim toward the high end of the salary range. While you dont want to ask for an outrageous amount here, it is good to aim high. Its better to ask for more money and have your employer offer you less as a compromise than to ask for too little and miss out on thousands of dollars per year. Story continues 4. Consider other benefits youd accept as an alternative Theres no guarantee your employer will be amicable to your raise request. Even if they are, you could end up unable to settle on a number. In situations like that, it helps to have some alternative benefits you may accept in lieu of money. Here are some examples to consider: The option to work from home for one day or more per week Different hours or a more flexible schedule More paid time off Stock options 5. Prepare what youll say with mock negotiations The best public speakers practice often before a speech, and if you do the same, youll be much more confident and prepared when you ask for your raise. Start by outlining what youre going to say to your manager. For example, you could break your request down into three parts: Your accomplishments -- Go over the positive feedback and metrics you collected earlier to demonstrate your value. Your plans to help your employer -- Explain what your future plans are to benefit your company. Your raise request -- Present the salary range for your position and tell your manager youd like to increase your salary to $XXXX per year/hour. Once youve prepared that, you can set up mock negotiations with friends and colleagues to get more comfortable. Make sure that they throw some objections your way so that you can learn how to handle those as well. 6. Pick the right time for your meeting Timing is a big part of getting a successful raise. If you meet with your manager when theyre under the gun or you ask for a raise after a round of layoffs, youre shooting yourself in the foot. The ideal time for a meeting about a raise is when your company is doing well and after youve demonstrated what a valuable employee you are. For example, if you recently took on a larger workload or led a successful project, itd be perfect timing to talk about a raise. 7. Meet with your manager With all the prep work complete, its time for the moment of truth. Schedule a meeting with your manager, and when you meet with them, dive into the request you prepared earlier. The best-case scenario is that your manager approves your raise request right away, but more often than not, it doesnt go that way. Be prepared to work around any objections they have. If they say theres no money in the budget, you can propose the alternatives you thought of or ask when there will be money for your request. You may not get an immediate bump in pay, but if you stick to your guns, you should at least get a strong idea of what your employer can do for you and when they could increase your salary. What to do after a salary negotiation The goal for a salary negotiation is that you get a raise or other benefits that youre satisfied with. If you do get an increase in pay, make sure that you use it wisely. You could: Put it in one of the top bank accounts to earn interest and save for the future. Increase your 401(k) contributions . Open an individual retirement account (IRA) to increase your nest egg. What if you werent successful getting a raise? If your employer seemed open to it but just couldnt accommodate your request immediately, then you may want to give them time and revisit the subject later. If they completely shut you down or you feel like youre not getting what you deserve, then it could be time to look for a new job. The Motley Fool owns and recommends MasterCard and Visa, and recommends American Express. Were firm believers in the Golden Rule. If we wouldnt recommend an offer to a close family member, we wouldnt recommend it on The Ascent either. Our number one goal is helping people find the best offers to improve their finances. That is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team. Nicole Kidman is reportedly heartbroken after her daughter Bella Cruise expressed her devotion to Scientology. Photo: Getty Images/Church of Scientology Nicole Kidman is reportedly heartbroken after her daughter Bella Cruise voiced her devotion to Scientology in an email sent to thousands of the controversial churchs members. While Oscar-winner Kidman has remained famously tight-lipped about her adoptive childrens ties to the church, she now appears to have reached breaking point. Seeing Bella becoming a poster girl for Scientology will break Nicoles heart, a source told NW. She hoped that Bella moving to London and seeming so focused on her clothing line meant she wasnt so involved in the religion, but this is proof she was wrong. Read more: Nicole Kidman addresses kids relationship with Scientology Another insider revealed how Kidman always anticipated both Bella and her 23-year-old brother Connor would eventually abandon the religion to which their father Tom Cruise is so devoted. It will be devastating for Nicole, who has always held onto the hope that someday Bella and Connor could cut ties with the church, they told Womans Day. The reports come just days after Bella revealed she had recently qualified as an auditor for the secretive sect, in an email sent to the churchs London-based followers. Another insider revealed how Nicole always anticipated both Bella and her 23-year-old brother Connor would eventually abandon the religion. Photo: Getty Images With the qualification, Bella can now quiz Scientologists about their devotion to the religion following the church-sanctioned training which is believed to cost up to 16,000. Speaking of the effect training had on her life, Bella wrote in the email obtained by The Underground Bunker blog, that it was exactly what (she) needed. This is what I had been searching for. The missing piece, she said. Bella went on to divulge details of her fathers infamous devotion to the church and thanked him for helping her through the apparently rigorous training. Bella lived with her father following her parents divorce in 2001. Photo: Getty Images I would have drowned in my own problems if you hadnt been there to support me or get me through the preliminaries, she said. It took a whole family and org to get me here. So thank you to all for the endless support. Bella, who was adopted by Nicole and ex-husband Tom Cruise, made headlines in 2015 when she didnt invite her mother to her London wedding, despite her being in the same city at the time. Story continues It followed more than a decade of separation following her parents divorce in 2001 amid constant rumours Nicole was kept at a clear distance from her adoptive children due to the fact she isnt a Scientologist. Reporting by Holly Hales, Yahoo Lifestyle AU South Africa: North West Premier on service delivery drive North West Premier Job Mokgoro is on a service delivery drive this week in the Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati District Municipality. The Premiers visit to the district kicks off with a community meeting at the open space behind the Shaleng Community Hall. Premier Mokgoro has set aside this week to focus on engaging stakeholders in Taung, Vryburg and Ganyesa in Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati District Municipality to come up with lasting solutions to challenges affecting the delivery of services in this district, said the Office of the Premier ahead of Tuesdays visit. Mokgoro, who will be accompanied by the Members of the Executive Council, will start his visit in Shaleng village outside Taung, where he will engage the community on their demand for the construction of a new road, as well as cross-border issues they have raised. Mokgoro will then meet with the Batlhaping Ba-Ga-Phuduhucwana Tribal Council on Wednesday morning to discuss water challenges as experienced in the area. The Premiers week-long stay in this district will be characterised by engagements with stakeholders, including local traditional authorities, local councillors and community members. The Premier will later on Wednesday lead a meeting of the Executive Council, which will be held at the Ba-Ga-Phuduhucwana Tribal offices, said the office. On Thursday, Mokgoro will meet with the Naledi Local Municipality council to deliberate on water and other service delivery challenges in Vryburg before addressing a community meeting later in the day. At Kagisano-Molopo Local Municipality, the Premier will engage the Barolong Boo Tlou le Tau Traditional Council in Ganyesa on Friday, and meet with the councillors and the community in the afternoon. His engagement with these stakeholders will be on service delivery challenges and highlighting the rationale for placing the municipality under Section 139 (b), and the expected service delivery outcome thereof. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Chicago mayoral candidate Harold Washington shakes hands with during supporters during his 1983 general election campaign. Photo: AP/REX/Shutterstock Race will be on the minds of Chicagoans as they head to the polls to cast their votes for mayor in the runoff election on Tuesday. But a historic outcome is a foregone conclusion: Either Lori Lightfoot or Toni Preckwinkle will become the citys first black woman mayor. History had no such assurances in 1983, when Chicagos Democratic machine used racist appeals in an attempt to block Harold Washington from becoming the citys first black mayor. On the eve of that 1983 primary, the notorious Democratic boss, Alderman Edward Fast Eddie Vrdolyak, told precinct captains, Its a racial thing, dont kid yourself. Im calling on you to save your city, to save your precinct. Were fighting to keep the city the way it is. In deep-blue Chicago, in which mayoral elections are often decided in the primary, 1983s contest remained hot through the last days of the general. With Washington triumphant in the primary, Vrdolyak and other Democratic leaders abandoned their nominee for the Republican candidate, who trumpeted the dog-whistle slogan, Bernie Epton before its too late. In the white ethnic wards, Epton supporters even wore simple all-white buttons to signal their core issue: the race of the man who would lead their city. Tensions boiled over when Walter Mondale came to town to campaign with Washington at a Polish-Catholic church. A near riot erupted, with shouts of nigger lover being hurled at the de facto leader of the national Democratic Party. But according to Washington campaign insiders, the video of that ugly scene was all they needed to turn the election: It laid bare the extreme racism that had permeated the campaign to keep a black man from becoming mayor. Here is how the people who worked to elect the first black mayor of Chicago remember it. Marilyn Katz, media consultant for the 1983 Harold Washington campaign for Chicago mayor: On New Years Day, 1983, I go to my first meeting with the Harold Washington campaign for mayor and to my surprise in the room are essentially all the people Id worked with in 1968. Id been a part of SDS, an unindicted co-conspirator at the 68 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I was a part of this coalition formed in the second half of the 60s that included the Black Panthers and pretty much every progressive civil-rights person in the city. And now theyre all grown up. It was Bobby Rush, who co-founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, every Hispanic lakefront liberal, the white folks who worked with the Panthers. So it wasnt just Washington being black that inspired Chicagos Democratic machine to fight against us; it was that he was black and a leftist. And he was challenging power as it was held and exercised. I had television experience, but I didnt have any experience making political ads, so I called up my friend, Bill Zimmerman. We used to hang out in Los Angeles with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Bill worked with Hayden on his campaigns. So he actually had a reel to show. Bill Zimmerman, media consultant for the 1983 Washington campaign for Chicago mayor: When I got the call from Marilyn, I had just finished working on Toney Anayas 1982 campaign for governor of New Mexico. So I had experience working on campaigns where race was an issue. Toney is Hispanic, and there was enough anti-Hispanic racism in New Mexico to deny him the governorship. To deal with that, we made a schmaltzy 60-second spot about Toney and his wife sending their 18-year-old daughter off to college for the first time. The subtext was that Toney was married to an Anglo woman and Toney was a suburban homeowner, and we hoped that both of those facts would ease the racism among the white population. We ended up winning the campaign. Jacky Grimshaw, precinct coordinator for the 1983 Washington campaign for Chicago mayor: From Day One on that 83 campaign, race was an issue, and was an issue really going back to 1976, when Mayor Richard J. Daley died after more than 20 years in office. Wilson Frost, a black alderman, was president pro tempore of Chicago City Council. So he should have become acting mayor. But they literally locked him out of the mayors office while the council scrambled to anoint a white alderman. So there was this push to have a black candidate in the special election of 1977, which is when Harold first ran as a sitting state senator, but it was really just a protest run against the political establishment that insulted Frost. In 1983, with two years under his belt as a United States congressman, Harold was ready to mount a serious run for City Hall. Though race was always in the background, our message was vote for the most qualified candidate, Harold Washington. We werent running a race-based campaign. But they were. Zimmerman: In heavily Democratic Chicago, as in all big cities, the Democratic primary is the big prize. Back then, you wouldnt have a runoff between the top two primary vote-getters like you do today. All you needed was a plurality. Since the other two candidates in the primary incumbent Mayor Jane Byrne and Boss Daleys son, Richard M. Daley were white, the thinking in the Washington campaign was that in a city with a 40 percent black population, if Byrne and Richie Daley split the white vote, and Harold was able to turn out the black vote and capture some white votes from the upper-middle-class liberal community that lived on the north lakeshore, he could win. So with the numbers that tight, we hired Pat Caddell, one of the leading Democratic pollsters at the time. He had worked for Jimmy Carter, and his assistant, Paul Maslin, would go on to help get Doug Jones elected U.S. senator from Alabama. When we got the results of the first poll back, it told me what I needed to know about how to do the advertising in the primary, because what the poll revealed to us was that as much as black citizens in the city would like to see a black mayor, they didnt believe it could happen. We needed them to see Washington as viable. And in order to win, we needed to get more than 80 percent of the black vote. Grimshaw: From 1955 to 1976 when he died, Daleys share of the black vote had steadily declined, because of his mistreatment of Chicagos black community, so we knew the son wasnt going to take much of the black vote away from Washington. Zimmerman: But we learned from our polling that Byrne was getting about 40 percent of the black vote. When we probed a little deeper about why black voters were supporting Byrne, we learned that their skepticism about the possibility of a black candidate being elected was leading them to the conclusion that they should support the least racist white candidate. In their perception, Richie, being the son of Boss Daly, was a bigger threat to the black community than Byrne, who had cultivated black voters. So being skeptical about Harolds chances, they were supporting Byrne in order to keep Daley from winning the election. Paul Maslin, pollster for the 1983 Washington campaign for Chicago mayor: Byrne was doing things like literally promising ham to people in the African-American community. Typical machine politics largesse. We ended up doing mocking ads on the radio: Eat all the ham you want, and then vote for Harold. Zimmerman: Our main goal in the advertising, however, was to play up Harold as the most qualified candidate. We wanted to signal to both black voters and to white voters that he was a credible candidate for mayor. We showed him in official capacities, making statements about what he would do as mayor, and we made those statements directed to everybody, not just black voters. We tried to project an image of Harold as someone who could be everybodys mayor, not just the black communitys mayor. In one commercial we intentionally showed him interacting with white elected officials in the city. Grimshaw: Washington showed he was credible in the first debate, when he was clearly the smartest and most qualified person on the stage. Another thing about that debate was how it sparked a grassroots fundraising effort. Harold made it very clear that Byrne had an obscene amount of campaign money. So what was the reaction in the black community? They started this campaign where bars and mom-and-pop grocery stores across the black community would have barrels with signs on them saying, Washingtons for Washington, and people would drop into those barrels whatever amount of dollar bills or change they had. They would just come walking into our office with the proceeds. Thats when we knew it wasnt just a campaign, but a movement. And then there was the Washington rally at the UIC Pavillion. The arena holds 13,000 people and we had it filled to the rafters and it lasted all night. That rally was the talk of the town and reinforced that Harold had an interracial base of support that he could count on, versus Daley and Byrne, who were pretty much focused in the white community. Katz: And that show of white support helped inspire the black voters. The black community needed the belief that this could happen. Harolds white and Hispanic allies helped the black community believe he could win. Zimmerman: That rally also led to a high level of racial polarization in the city because the white community was getting the idea that the black community was rising and some were frightened, and they reacted with a great deal of fear and anger. Just to give you a personal example, the campaign had designed an oversize campaign button for people to wear. It was a big blue button about four inches in diameter, and blacks all over the city were wearing that button, and not just in the black community but wherever they went. As a white man, I was wearing it, and one day, walking down a street in the Loop, in downtown Chicago, an old blue-haired lady, seeing the button on my coat, literally stopped me on the street, spit on me, and called me nigger lover. Grimshaw: I remember this one time, when Harold was doing a radio interview on Milt Rosenbergs talk show. This guy called in and asked Harold if hed like to replace the elevators in City Hall with vines. Harold didnt quite understand what the guy was saying, and Milt did and kind of hung up on the guy, who had some other choice words. Maslin: But it wasnt just race that was playing a factor. It was also a real fear of the machine. When I was running phone banks, we realized that when black respondents have white people calling them, they think its the machine and theyre not gonna be honest. Remember, theres a history here. You could get in trouble for telling someone, Im for Harold Washington not for Jane Byrne. Could be a parking ticket or someone looking over your shoulder when youre trying to deal with the city in some way. Or if you have a municipal job, you could be putting that at risk. So when we had black interviewers calling black respondents, Washington would be over 80 percent; when we had white interviewers calling black respondents, hed only be at about 60 to 65 percent. When we switched to only using black interviewers to call black respondents, we started to gain more confidence. Katz: Of course the machine was run by Alderman Eddie Vrdolyak. Zimmerman: Who happened to be the leader of the most racist and conservative faction within the City Council. Katz: We heard Vrdolyak was telling his precinct captains that anyone who lives north of Madison and votes for Washington is a race traitor. And then two days before the primary, racist remarks by Vrdolyak are exposed in the Tribune. Michael Zielenziger, national correspondent with the Kansas City Star Times during the 1983 Chicago mayoral race: It was the Saturday before the primary, and I was in Chicago visiting my girlfriend, Diane Abt. Diane Abt, reporter for CBS News Radio in Chicago during the 1983 Chicago mayoral race: I knew there was a meeting happening in Eddie Kellys ward, where all the precinct captains would meet ahead of the primary to get their marching orders on how they were going to get out the vote. Zielenziger: While in Chicago, I was gonna write a story Sunday for Monday about the mayors race, so we went. Abt: Initially, Kelly or one of his cohort said, Oh, shes a radio reporter, get her out of here. But Roman Pucinski, who ran the 41st ward, said, Oh no, shes okay. Let her stay. Zielenziger: Roman knew me because I used to cover City Hall for the Chicago Sun Times. He knew Diane because she was still covering politics. Roman was a source of mine and he liked reporters. Abt: I didnt put a microphone up so that seemed okay. You can stay and listen. And we did, and were shocked by what we heard. Zielenziger: They were threatened by a black mayor. This was a meeting of the precinct captains who were gonna get the vote out. And they were explaining how the race looked and that every vote was important. And then Eddie Vrdolyak, from the very ethnic and white southwest side, came in and said, A vote for Daley is a vote for Washington. Its a two-person race. It would be the worst day in the history of Chicago if your candidate was not elected. Its a racial thing, dont kid yourself. Im calling on you to save your city, to save your precinct. Were fighting to keep the city the way it is. The minute he said it, it was like, Holy shit, Dianes here. Vrdolyak knew me and Diane, so it was only after he had said what he said that he saw us and quickly evicted us. Then the question is, what do we do with it? Harold Washington supporters rally in Chicago. Photo: Jacques M. Chenet/Corbis via Getty Images Abt: Because we knew it was explosive. But I was a radio reporter and didnt have any tape. And Michael didnt have a Sunday paper to publish in. Zielenziger: The soonest I could have published it was Monday, which was only a day before the primary. I knew it was an important story, so I wanted it to come out ASAP. I ironically sent it to David Axelrod, who at the time was a reporter at the Tribune covering city politics. Abt: When that quote appeared in the Sunday Tribune, it certainly hung heavy over the election. It was never said so plainly by an important political person like Vrdolyak. Ive heard people say to me: That quote turned the election around, because it lifted the veil on the racism in the Democratic machine. Katz: When it got out in the press that Vrdolyak was being so explicitly racist, that really helped raise our margins with black voters and helped bring more white liberals to our side. Tom Coffey, adviser to Harold Washington in the 1983 mayoral race: Harold ends up winning the primary by a comfortable margin. Now during the primary, Jesse Jacksons organization helped with the ground game. But Jackson agreed to stay in the background. But on primary night, Jackson takes the victory stage and holds it for an incredibly long time. Jackson, needless to say, was not popular with the white voters who were already uncomfortable with Harold. So Jackson upping his profile for the general helped exacerbate the racial divisions already forming in the primary. Zimmerman: When Harold wins the primary, everybody assumes, Okay, its all over. Eighty percent of Chicago is registered Democratic. No Republican had won an election in the city in decades, so winning the primary was tantamount to winning the election. But we were shocked to discover that the Democratic power structure in the city was unwilling to support Harold, a sitting congressman at the time with a 20-year record in public office. Maslin: The next day a group of us, not including the candidate, are thrown to the wolves for a press conference to talk about how we won the nomination and what happens now. There were a lot of questions about race, about Jesse Jackson taking the stage the night before. Part and parcel to the questions was: You all have a problem with white voters in white wards who didnt support Harold. Are you gonna take no prisoners or reach an accommodation? I got the sense that this story isnt over yet. Hes not mayor yet and theres a whole lot of stuff thats been awoken. Zimmerman: Soon after the primary, Vrdolyak announces that hes going to support Bernie Epton, the Republican candidate. Hes quickly joined by others, including Ed Burke, a powerful alderman from the southwest side. They explained their support of the opposing partys candidate by demonizing Washington. They accused him of being a tax evader. They accused him of having been part of various shady real-estate deals. They painted a picture of Harold as a dishonest person supported by outsiders trying to overthrow the established order. Katz: The racism in the Epton campaign was really ratcheted up when they hired the Republican media consultant, John Deardorff, who, leaving subtlety behind, produced negative spots that were tagged, Bernard Epton before its too late. The message wasnt lost on anyone in Chicago. Maslin: They even had buttons that the whites were wearing in the northwest and southwest sides. The button was literally just an all-white button. The fact that its a competitive race, mixed with the growing racial tensions, turns the race into a national story. Its also an off-year election, so Chicago was already a bit of a play act involving presidential jockeying ahead of the 84 election. Ted Kennedy backed Byrne in the primary in return for her support against Carter in 80, and Walter Mondale was tied to the Daleys. But in the general, they both got behind Washington. Katz: Mondale didnt just back Washington, he showed up in Chicago to campaign with him. And thats when it really got ugly. Zimmerman: The idea was to have Mondale, the leading national Democratic figure at the time, campaign for Washington in the white neighborhoods, because everybody knows that the white vote now is going to determine the outcome of the race. Maslin: With the phone banks and white voters, we now start seeing something similar to what we saw in the primary with black voters. When whites were calling whites, Washingtons support level was eight to ten points lower than when blacks were calling whites. With black interviewers, white respondents didnt want to be seen as racist. You see this with Trump. So we tried as much as possible to have whites calling whites, so we were getting a true result, and we didnt like what we were seeing. Zimmerman: So we send Mondale and Washington up to St. Pascals Church on the northwest side, which is in a working-class Polish neighborhood, and that combination Catholic, working-class, and Polish leads to very conservative politics. We knew there would be significant opposition when we sent them up there. So if Harold did well in speaking to those parishioners it would play to his advantage, and if he didnt do well because of racism it would also help us drive the message that the Epton campaign was fundamentally a racist campaign. What we didnt know was how virulent it would be. It was a lions den. Grimshaw: They were throwing things at Mondale. Katz: It was a mob of young aggressive thugs yelling nigger go home at Washington and nigger lover at Mondale. Maslin: There was violence in the air. In the wake of civil rights it was an alarming day. Here it is, the former vice-president of the United States, the presumed front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination for 84, in the most Democratic city in the country, getting good and yelled at. We started to say to Harold, You know, congressman, everyones talking about race but you. Our numbers were sliding. If we started at 22 points with whites, it had fallen to 19 and was continuing to drop. If we fell below 17 we would lose. The trend was unmistakable that we were headed that way. Zimmerman: Fortunately, a local CBS News crew was there, and they filmed the crowd reacting to Washington and Mondale. That created the strategic opening that we were trying to exploit, which was to make the case to white liberals that the campaign against Washington was so overtly racist that they would want nothing to do with it. With the footage from St. Pascals, we could make commercials that would effectively shame those white liberals into supporting Harold. We saw it as a last-ditch attempt to stop the erosion of white liberal support for Washington. We made two commercials out of that St. Pascals footage. The first, called Pledge, starts tight on a 4-year-old white boy struggling through the first line of the Pledge of Allegiance as the camera pulls back to reveal him standing with other children. An abrupt cut takes the viewer to the near riot at St. Pascals. The spot then cuts back to a young black girl as the group of children continues to recite the pledge. After she delivers the next line, the St. Pascals footage repeats. The spot then returns to another child continuing the pledge, followed for a third time by the scene at St. Pascals. Finally, a somewhat older white boy finishes the pledge, the camera freezes on his face and the text, Vote for Harold Washington, appears on the screen. The second spot, Shame, also relied on the footage from St. Pascals. It began with a series of well-known and emotionally evocative images that appeared onscreen one by one with ominous music in the background: the JFK assassination, the killing of Martin Luther King, a dead student at Kent State University. Over these powerful images, an announcer says, There are moments in our countrys history of which all Americans are thoroughly and profoundly ashamed. One of those moments may be happening now, here in Chicago. As the last sentence is delivered, the video cuts to the St. Pascals footage. The spot ends on a black screen with the text, Vote for Harold Washington, and the announcer saying, When you vote on Tuesday, be sure its a vote you can be proud of. Maslin: With these commercials in hand, we scrap together a focus group. Its 12 white liberals sitting around a table, and Zimmermans sitting right behind me. I go around the room and ask them about Washington, and they just vent. Theyre angry at him for not paying his taxes, theyre worried that Jesse Jackson is gonna have too much influence. Now remember, these are white liberals and most of them are Jewish. Theyre not anti-black, but theres tension on the left between blacks and Jews. On one hand the Jewish community gave a lot of support to the civil-rights movement; but on the other hand theres a lot of resentment in the black community toward Jewish shopkeepers who they felt were profiting from them. Elijah Muhammad was based in Chicago. Theres a whole dynamic of the Middle East and Israel that gets played out here in terms of black nationalists and black Muslims. And this was around the time when Jesse made his Hymietown remark. Its all an area of tension in this uneasy alliance between blacks and Jews. These Jewish liberals want to be sympathetic to the African-American candidate, but theyre troubled, and they appear to be buying the attack ads against Washington. They dont want to vote for Bernie Epton, but they might stay home. So theyre venting all this anger at Washington and finally Zimmerman tugs my sleeve and says, Just show em the goddamn ads! So I show them Pledge, which ends powerfully on with liberty and justice for all, and these liberals whod been bitching for 45 minutes just shut up. You could hear a pin drop. It was just dead silence for about 30 seconds. It was clear it had impact. You could sense them realizing that this was what it was all about. I then show them Shame and that gets a big reaction, too. We came out of that room and knew we had to at least get Pledge on the air ASAP. Katz: We convene a meeting with the campaign leadership, including the finance committee, to convince them that we need to get these two spots on the air. Much to our surprise, the businessmen on the finance committee vehemently opposed us. Recounting their prior experiences supporting black candidates in local races that required carrying some white votes, they argued that whenever the issue of race or racism had been raised, it had always backfired. Their experiences in race-dominated Chicago had taught them never to discuss racism if a black candidate needed white votes to win an election. Countering their argument was not easy: Zimmerman, Maslin and I were white; everyone else in the room was black. Zimmerman: We finally prevailed by proposing that we run the spots in combination with daily tracking polls. If the spots were damaging, we would quickly see it and have time to withdraw them. Reluctantly, the finance committee gave us permission to air Pledge on that basis, but forbid us from airing the more provocative Shame. Katz: We sent Pledge to the TV stations and got it on the air with the election only eight days away. The results were immediate. Our tracking polls revealed that Washingtons decline among whites had been stopped. By the third day, it was on the increase, if only slowly. Zimmerman: Early Friday morning, with only four days remaining before the election, the tracking poll indicated that Washington was not moving up fast enough to win. For the previous 48 hours, Katz and I had continually grilled the pollsters about the likely impact of Shame and had been told that everything in the available data indicated we should use it. The moment of truth had come. We knew there was a Friday noon deadline at the TV stations for locking down which spots would run over the weekend and on Monday. Katz: The two of us agonized over what to do. For two hours Friday morning we weighed the pros and cons of the action we were considering. Chicago was on the verge of a historic change. Through sacrifice and hard work, organizers had mobilized the African-American community as never before. It would all be wasted if Washington failed to carry the election on Tuesday. The finance committee, a group lacking any meaningful experience in media-driven campaigns, was using its authority to block a necessary decision. Clearly, we had a contractual obligation to obey, but did we not also have a responsibility to the candidate to act in his best interests? Zimmerman: Fully cognizant of the stakes, and fully aware of the moral ambiguity, we decided to risk defying the finance committee and put Shame on the air. Maslin: The ad goes up and the campaign is like, We didnt authorize that. But you cant take it down because everyones closed for the weekend thats the way TV was back then. The ads gonna run into Monday. Some people are worried that it went too far and thered be a backlash. Harold hears about it on Saturday at 11 oclock at night and says, Well, what can be done? Tom Coffey says, Nothing. The logs are closed. We cant make a change until Monday morning. Harold says, Well, thank you. Goodnight. In other words, dont do anything, shut up, dont say a word to the media. Because the question was, are we gonna disown the ad? We realized it doesnt matter. Dont say anything. Lo and behold, the message and the shift helped bring those whites in. Zimmerman: And we win with 51.7 percent of the vote, and a 19-point share of the white vote. Maslin: Theres a lesson in Harolds decision not to disown that Shame ad that goes beyond that 83 election. The following year, I end up working for Gary Hart, who shocks Mondale in New Hampshire. Mondale has a tough time getting his footing back, which he finally does a few weeks later in Illinois. Now we were trying to win Illinois with white liberals from Chicago and whites from the Chicago suburbs by perpetuating the idea that Mondale and Vrdolyak were one and the same. So we made an ad that called out Vrdolyak by name: Heres your choice, Mondale and Vrdolyak and the bosses; or Hart, who is independent and a new generation of leadership. Hart hated it. He didnt want to attack Vrdolyak by name, so he disapproved the ad. My boss, Pat Caddell, countermanded Hart and green-lighted the ad on the Friday before the election. Same situation as Harold. So that Saturday, Hart blows up with the media and declares, I didnt authorize the ad, were gonna take it down. Harts told you cant take the ad down, the logs have closed for the weekend. So all of Chicago is seeing Hart on the news saying, Im gonna take this ad down, and meanwhile the offending ad is running all Saturday and Sunday. He looked like a fool. Our numbers cratered. Not because of the ad itself. They cratered because Hart looked ridiculous. Voters are saying he looks weak, he cant run his own campaign. Who knows what would have happened if Hart let the ad run. Sure, Mondale lost the general to Reagan, and Hart may have lost, too. But if Harts the Democratic nominee in 84, maybe he later avoids the tabloid reporters in the bushes and becomes Bill Clinton. Zimmerman: Another important thing that happens after that 83 election is a young reporter who had been covering the campaign for the Chicago Tribune calls me up for coffee. He wants to ask me how to pivot from journalism to working political campaigns. That reporter was David Axelrod. And then, of course, Barack Obama starts working as a community organizer in Chicago around the time of the election. At one point he gets a haircut on the South Side right after Harold is elected. Black people are empowered; and the energy he felt in that room made him think for the first time about electoral politics as a route for himself. MOSCOW (AP) Khabib Nurmagomedov doesn't think Conor McGregor's retirement is for real. McGregor said last week he was quitting mixed martial arts but Nurmagomedov, who beat the Irish fighter for the UFC lightweight title in October, isn't buying it. Speaking Tuesday in his native Russia at a Moscow university, Nurmagomedov said McGregor "couldn't reach a deal with the UFC and it's so they feel they've lost him and they could lose money." "I don't think he's finished," Nurmagomedov added. McGregor previously retired in April 2016 but reversed the decision two days later and returned to the UFC. The 30-year-old Irishman hasn't won a fight since beating Eddie Alvarez in November 2016 to become the first UFC fighter to hold championship belts in two divisions at once. Nurmagomedov also said he would like to fight again in September, two months after the end of his Nevada State Athletic Commission ban for the chaotic brawl with McGregor's team after the October fight. McGregor's sanction ends Saturday. However, Nurmagomedov said he didn't want to fight before longer sanctions on two other Russian fighters also end. Abubakar Nurmagomedov and Zubaira Tukhugov were each banned for one year by the Nevada State Athletic Commission for their part in the brawl. Those sanctions run until Oct. 6. "They were banned because of me," Nurmagomedov said. ___ More AP sports: https://apnews.com/tag/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports Jerusalem (AFP) - An Israeli real estate agent shot to sudden notoriety when Benjamin Netanyahu presented him as a typical supporter, but scrutiny of his abusive online posts has caused discomfort for the premier ahead of polls. The veteran prime minister brought Giora Ezra, 63, to a press briefing Monday in a bid to dismiss accusations his Likud party has deployed an army of internet bots to help get him reelected. "Say, Giora, are you a real person? Are you a robot?" Netanyahu asked with a smile. "Giora says what he thinks, nobody is operating him, it's one huge lie." The publicity stunt came after an Israeli cyber watchdog reported a network of fake online accounts backing Netanyahu and slandering opponents ahead of next week's general election. "I woke up this morning and discovered that I'm a robot," Ezra said as Netanyahu chuckled. "I write what I write from my heart," he said. But the premier's attempt to present living evidence of his popular support after widespread coverage of the allegations soon appeared to backfire as a spotlight was shone on Ezra's online activities. It turned out Ezra, who writes on Twitter under the handle "Captain George", has a rich history of abusive posts against Netanyahu's opponents and journalists, including homophobic slurs. -'A mistake'- Soon after his internet personality was unveiled, it became apparent Ezra was much more than just a vociferous Netanyahu supporter. Benny Gantz, Netanyahu's main challenger, needed "to see a psychiatrist", Ezra had tweeted. "Captain George" insinuated that there was embarrassing sexual content on Gantz's phone, which was hacked last year. Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of a racist party that was banned from Israeli politics but still inspired extremists decades after his assassination was "right all the way", he also posted. And in addition Ezra employed a series of homophobic slurs in his tweets. Story continues Netanyahu's opponents were quick to play up what many saw as odious online statements. Zvi Hauser, a member of Gantz's Blue and White alliance, asked on Twitter if "sewage workers" got to visit prime ministers in other country's in a joke about his perceived foulest opinions. A spokesman for the Likud did not respond to AFP queries on Ezra. But party member Yoav Kisch said it should have checked out "Captain George" and his history of tweets before presenting him to the public. "It was a mistake," Kisch told army radio. Yuval Karni, a political reporter for Yediot Aharonot, one of the first outlets to publish the report on fake online accounts, had another take on "Captain George". "It would have been better if he were a bot," Karni wrote on Twitter. (Corrects figures for size of fishing zone in paragraph 5) * Gazans look for new hauls in broadest waters since 2000 * Mediators seek to ease economy after border violence By Nidal al-Mughrabi GAZA, April 2 (Reuters) - As their rickety motorboats puttered out into deep Mediterranean waters for the first time in almost two decades, the Palestinian fishermen prayed for deepwater mackerel and tuna to supplement Gaza's usual shallows fare of sardines, shrimp and crab. This week, as part of Egyptian-mediated efforts to ease the plight of 2 million residents of the blockaded Gaza Strip, Israel has extended the area where it permits Palestinians to fish. "Such a distance has been off-limits. And hopefully there are lots of fish to bring back," said 69-year-old fisherman Ahmed al-Amoudi. Israel keeps a naval cordon on Gaza, part of a blockade it and neighboring Egypt say is necessary to prevent arms smuggling by the Hamas Islamists that rule the coastal territory. Israel has long limited Palestinian fishing waters, and has varied the size of the zone. It was tightened to just 6-9 miles (9-15 km) from the coast in recent years. But on Monday, Israel broadened the limit to 12-15 miles (19-24 km) out, its widest since 2000, before a Palestinian revolt erupted. "This step is part of the civilian policy aimed at preventing a humanitarian deterioration in the Gaza Strip and reflects the policy of distinguishing between terror and the uninvolved populace," an Israeli official said. Palestinians saw the move as an Israeli concession to a year of protests at the border, combined with several surges of cross-border fighting which have prompted mediation by Egypt, the United Nations and Qatar on ways to help Gaza's economy. "Thanks to God and then to the 'March of Return', which opened up the sea for us," al-Amoudi said, referring to the weekly demonstrations at the frontier, which demand a lifting of the blockade and the right for Palestinians to return to homes their families fled or were forced from when Israel was founded. Story continues April to June are peak Gaza fishing season. The sector accounts for less than 5 percent of the enclave's GDP and supports some 50,000 people, a fraction of the 2 million population. But the fishing has value beyond the numbers, as one of the few viable industries in Gaza, where more than half the population is unemployed and nearly 80 percent receive some form of aid, according to the World Bank. With Gaza's land borders tightly controlled by neighboring Israel and Egypt, the sea's horizon provides many Palestinians with a glimpse of hoped-for freedoms of movement in the future. The fishermen still have it hard, with fuel and spare parts for their boats scarce. They say that Israel has also barred the importation to Gaza of wire cables that would allow them to line nets for plumbing the depths. But fisherman Wael Abu Mohammed was still cautiously upbeat. "With 15 miles now we will be comfortable, if there are no problems with the Israelis," the father of 10 said. "We hope for the best." The past year has been the deadliest in Gaza since the last war between Hamas and Israel five years ago, with nearly 200 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces at the border demonstrations. One Israeli soldier was killed. United Nations investigators say Israel has used excessive force. Israel says it has no choice but to use deadly force to protect the border from militants and infiltrators. The Israeli navy has in the past fired on Palestinian boats that strayed from the fishing zones, sometimes impounding the vessels and detaining their occupants. In addition to smuggling, Israel worries about seaborne attacks. In the 2014 Gaza war, Hamas frogmen swam from Gaza to storm an Israeli coastal base. The Israeli official said that maintaining the expanded zone for Gaza fisherman "depends on (them) honoring the agreements" and that any attempt to venture beyond it "will be handled accordingly by the (Israeli) security services." (Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi Writing by Dan Williams Editing by Peter Graff) Washington (AFP) - More bad news for US aviation giant Boeing: the US Air Force said Tuesday it had halted for a second time the acceptance of new KC-46 tankers due to ongoing quality issues. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson revealed the March 23 decision -- another setback in the already delayed air tanker program -- during a budget hearing in Congress. "The Air Force again halted acceptance of new KC-46 tanker aircraft as we continue to work with Boeing to ensure that every aircraft delivered meets the highest quality and safety standards," Wilson told the panel. She said that Air Force inspectors had discovered "foreign object debris" in the new planes that should not have been there as well as other areas "where Boeing did not meet quality standards." The problems were "unrelated to design or engineering specifications," she noted. But it was the second time this year Boeing faced the same criticism. The Air Force took its first KC-46 in January, more than one year late. Currently they have seven KC-46 aircraft in service. The Air Force plans to buy 179 KC-46s over the course of the program. Based on the airframe of the Boeing 767, the aerial refueller is to replace the Air Force's aging line of KC-10 and KC-135 tankers, many of which were manufactured during the Cold War. The Air Force chose Boeing to build the tanker over Airbus in 2011 after a furious battle between the two companies over the massive contract. Studio shot of yellow paper folded into an abstract organic form Everyone has met the type, people whore absolutely convinced they know much more than you and their opinions are much more valid. But it turns out that people whore able to admit that their own knowledge might not be perfect and that their own views might not be right, are actually cleverer. Researchers from Pepperdine University examined the idea of intellectual humility the opposite of intellectual overconfidnce, where you think youre always right. It turns out that the certainty of thinking youre always right means that youre less good at drawing the right conclusions in many situations, Science Alert found. Read more Frail pensioner cleared of murder after beating disabled husband to death Harry Potter books burned by Catholic priests due to evil forces European Union set to demand 10bn euros from the UK even in a no-deal Brexit Researcher Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancuso said, Research demonstrates that those who believe knowledge is certain are likely to incorrectly draw definitive conclusions from ambiguous evidence. Researchers analysed the links between intellectual humility and the ability to learn in 1,200 people. Krumrei-Mancuso said that intellectual humility was associated with more accurate assessment of ones general knowledge. That is, knowing (and being willing to admit!) what you dont know may be the first step to seeking new knowledge. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK Ray Park as Darth Maul (Credit: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Everett Collection) A gutted Peter Serafinowicz has told how he revealed to his kids he was going to be in the new Star Wars film, but was then left on the cutting room floor. British actor and comedian Serafinowicz memorably voiced Darth Maul in 1999s Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, with martial arts expert Ray Park playing the role on screen. And when Maul returned for a brief cameo in Solo: A Star Wars Story, Lucasfilm called on Serafinowicz once again to do his voice. Read more: Darth Maul actor fat-shamed He recorded his lines, and quite rightly thought it would be safe enough to tease to his kids that he was going to be in one of the movie events of 2018. Peter Serafinowicz (Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP) But then, when he didnt get his invite to the movies premiere, he started to get a bit suspicious. Speaking on the Collider Live podcast, he said: It was all secret. I went to Pinewood Studios. I was on the set. I spoke to Ron Howard for about half an hour about the character, and what hed become. Which was like 29 more minutes than I spoke to George Lucas 20 years ago. [Lucas] just said just make him sound evil. So I did it, and it was all super secret. Ray Park was coming in the day after, to film the physical thing. They had to bring him in a blacked out limousine. It was an area of the set which was off-limits to everybody. Read more: Simon Pegg The new Star Wars movies are missing George Lucas Anyway, I was excited that this film was going to come out. I was going to take my kids, and their friends. I told my kids itll be a cool thing, we can go with your friends to see the new Star Wars, your dads in it. Id seen on Twitter a couple of days before that there were people here for the premiere, and I thought Oh. I was not invited. Oh well. Then this email said were sorry but we changed to voice actor to Sam Witwer [who plays Maul in the animated Star Wars Rebels animated series]. They said it was better for the continuity. But it was a bit disappointing. Story continues Asked by the podcast hosts Did you go see it?, Serafinowicz replies flatly No. No, I boycotted it. It was on the news and everything, he jokes. Gutted. By Jim Christie SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. judge said on Tuesday that PG&E Corp cannot resume dividends and must use the money to reduce wildfire risk in California, stopping short of more costly measures he proposed earlier this year. The new criminal probation terms for PG&E are modest compared with ones the judge had in mind in January and that PG&E said could have cost upwards of $150 billion. The terms will, however, keep PG&E under the supervision of Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and hold the company, which also is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, to its target for clearing areas around its power lines of some 375,000 trees this year. PG&E's probation stems from its felony conviction after a deadly 2010 natural gas pipeline blast in San Bruno, California, near San Francisco, that killed eight people and injured 58 others. PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection on Jan. 29 in anticipation of liabilities from wildfires, including a catastrophic 2018 blaze, the Camp Fire. It killed 86 people in the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. At a January hearing, Alsup, who is overseeing PG&E's probation, said he felt compelled to propose additional probation terms in the aftermath of Camp Fire. San Francisco-based PG&E expects its equipment will be found to have caused the blaze. The probation process is separate from San Francisco-based PG&E's bankruptcy. As the company faces $30 billion in wildfire liabilities and bankruptcy proceedings, the energy company is expected to name as its new chief executive Bill Johnson, a source said on Tuesday. Johnson has been the CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority since 2013 and is retiring on Friday. Additional probation terms imposed by Alsup on Tuesday will require PG&E to meet goals in a wildfire mitigation plan it unveiled in February. The goals include removing 375,000 dead, dying or hazardous trees from areas at high risk of wildfires in 2019, compared with 160,000 last year. Story continues The judge said PG&E will not be able to pay shareholders until it complies with his new probation terms. Shares fell 2% on Tuesday to close at $17.66 on the New York Stock Exchange and are down 63% since November 2018 due to concerns about the company's bankruptcy and wildfire liabilities. The shares traded as low as $5.07 in January. PG&E in December 2017 suspended its quarterly cash dividend, citing uncertainty about liabilities from wildfires in October of that year that struck Northern California. PG&E paid $798 million in dividends in 2017 and $925 million in 2016, a period in which the company did a poor job of clearing areas around its power lines of hazardous trees, according to Alsup. Money meant for shareholders should have been spent on efforts to reduce wildfire risks in recent years, Alsup said at Tuesday's hearing. "PG&E has started way more than its share of these fires," Alsup said. "I want to see the people of California safe," the judge added. Lawyers for PG&E did not contest the new terms, which the company considers more feasible than terms Alsup proposed in January. To comply with the terms Alsup proposed in January, PG&E said it would have to remove 100 million trees. The company added that shutting power lines during high winds as Alsup proposed would not be feasible because the lines traverse rural areas to service cities and suburbs. Idling lines could also affect the power grid in other states, PG&E said. Alsup on Tuesday said he was still considering his proposal to require PG&E to shut down power lines during windy weather to prevent tree branches from making contact and sparking fires. (Reporting by Jim Christie; editing by Nick Zieminski and Lisa Shumaker) Do Democrats really need Terry McAuliffe in their already bloated presidential field? Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images There are at present 15 announced Democratic presidential candidates of sufficient stature to merit inclusion in polls, and probably in early debates (or 16 if you count newly announced Wayne Messam, which you probably should, since hes mayor of a city Miramar, Florida thats larger than Pete Buttigiegs South Bend). Its a very diverse field, with six women, three African-Americans, a Latino, an Asian-American, a married LGBTQ man, and candidates from every region and ideological tendency in the party. And thats not to mention a non-candidate who leads every national and most state polls, Joe Biden. But Biden aside, there are are at least eight other possible candidates still mulling a race. One of them is seriously buzzworthy: Stacey Abrams, the African-American legislator who narrowly lost a gubernatorial race in Georgia last year, and was subsequently buzzed about by Bidens staff as a potential early Dream Ticket partner for Uncle Joe, until she quashed the speculation. The other seven are white men of varying stature: former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, U.S. Representatives Tim Ryan of Ohio, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, and Eric Swalwell of California; Montana governor Steve Bullock; New York mayor Bill de Blasio; and Colorado senator Michael Bennet. There are those who consider Bullock, whos delaying his decision on a possible race until his legislature adjourns, a quite viable candidate. Ryan got some buzz for challenging Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic Leader in 2017, and seems to exemplify the Midwestern White Working-Class strategy for 2020, while Moulton is attractive to those who think Democrats have to have a robust appeal to veterans. Im not sure what Swalwells particular appeal is supposed to be, and so far nobodys taking de Blasios White House ambitions seriously. Bennet is a serious man with some serious admirers, but has the problem that his political patron, John Hickenlooper, is already in the race. And when youre in danger of being overshadowed by John Hickenlooper, youre probably not a first-tier candidate. And then theres the true poster boy for 2020 wannabe narcissism, Terry McAulliffe. Certainly McAuliffe is qualified by conventional standards; he was an effective governor of Virginia, which surprised many critics who thought of him as a glad-handing shaker of money trees for the Clintons over the years. But exactly what does he bring to the table that the field actually needs? Hes one of a number of would-be aspirants for a moderate lane in the 2020 primaries. He seems to regard his chief qualification as his close ties to the business community, according to a recent interview: McAuliffe pushed back against the notion that a billionaire like Bloomberg should be shunned by Democrats. This is a self-made man who created a vibrant business, thousands and thousands of people he hired, paid em well and provided them with benefits, McAuliffe said. And thats going to be a negative? I mean are you kidding me? That is the American success story. He is an entrepreneurs entrepreneur. Elsewhere in the interview, McAuliffe said hes absolutely a capitalist and defended a pair of controversial natural-gas pipelines being planned in Virginia, saying you cant have manufacturing jobs without cheap energy. It does not appear that McAuliffe is in close touch with the current Zeitgeist of the Democratic Party. But heres the thing: Anyone with the kind of ego and taste for power that makes one successful in any avenue of politics is probably going to see the next president of the United States in the mirror now and then. Future events could also shake up the field in some respects. Some think McAuliffe will only run if Joe Biden doesnt. And on top of everything else, Bidens most recent troubles are reportedly convincing one previously withdrawn proto-candidate, Michael Bloomberg, to rethink a 2020 candidacy after all. Yes, thats right: another white guy. When the incumbent is Donald J. Trump, the question Why Not Me? is going to occur to a lot of people. So expect an even more crowded field. The Pittsburgh City Council on Tuesday passed a series of gun-control bills that were introduced in response to the mass shooting that claimed eleven lives at the citys Tree of Life Synagogue last year. The legislative package, which passed 63, prohibits the public use of assault-style rifles like the AR-15 used in the synagogue shooting, bans the use of armor-piercing ammunition and high-capacity magazines, and allows the authorities to temporarily seize the firearms of anyone determined to be dangerous. Were happy to take a stand, Councilman Corey OConnor, who led the legislative effort, said after the bills passed. Its going to be a difficult battle, but we are willing to fight it. People are starting to change their minds and be more open to some sort of gun control. Opponents of the legislation booed lawmakers after it was passed, and at least one man vowed to move to an area where his right to self-defense would not be infringed. My guns are not hurting anybody. I have no intent of hurting anybody, lifelong Pittsburgh resident Dennis Jordan told the Council. I am not going to be allowed to own my guns because of this ordinance. I am ready to move out of this place. You just want to control people. You want to take away my right to protect people. City council will shortly be voting on gun legislation this morning. We spoke to two members of the public with opposing views. Stay with @KDKA for updates. pic.twitter.com/L7nA6IRfwM Amy Wadas (@AmyWadas) April 2, 2019 The legislation, which initially prohibited the possession of assault-style rifles outright, was weakened in order to make it more likely to survive the legal challenge sure to be brought by pro-Second Amendment activists. Those activists believe Pennsylvania state law, which prohibits municipalities from regulating the possession of guns and ammunition, is on their side. Story continues All of its illegal. Pennsylvania preemption law says that no municipality, period, may in any manner regulate. And thats at the heart of what theyre doing, Kim Stolfer, president and co-founder of Firearms Owners Against Crime, told CBS. The legislation was initially introduced days after a lone gunman opened fire inside the Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27, killing eleven and injuring seven in the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. Allegheny County district attorney Stephen Zappala Jr., a Democrat, told City Council members in January that, while he understood their motivation, the proposed legislation was unconstitutional. More from National Review Tiko Aramyan/Shutterstock April 1, 2019 Making decisions in regards to the medical well-being of a child is difficult enough for any parent. Add in the interference of law enforcement and the decision gets even trickier. That is precisely what happened when one Arizona mom chose not to take her feverish son to the hospital after a doctor recommended she do so. Sarah Beck's 2-year-old son was presenting with a temperature of more than 105 when she took him to Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe in February, according to NBC News. The doctor who examined the child suspected the culprit might be meningitis, a potentially life-threatening infection that affects the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. It can develop quickly and, if not treated, kill within hours. Since the clinic couldn't test the toddler for the disease, the doctor instructed Beck take her son to the hospital. However, since her child wasn't vaccinated, Beck was reluctant to follow the doctor's orders for fear of "possible repercussions," a police report stated. Later that day, upon learning the child never made it to the hospital, the doctor called the state Department of Child Safety which then contacted the Chandler Police Department in Chandler, Arizona, to report that there was "a present danger to health/wellbeing and that he required immediate medical attention." Officers from the Chandler Police Department showed up to the Beck residence to "to conduct a welfare check." After several attempts to speak with the parents, officers clad in pistols and ballistic shields raided the parents' home where they found two other children in bedrooms "covered in stains of unknown origin," according to the police report. The Chandler Police Department recently shared the video on its Facebook page and it quickly received more than 900 comments from viewers; some of them commended the officers, while others believe they were out of line v. Story continues "This is an absolute disgrace and the police department need to be held accountable. I am going to be all over our lawmakers to ensure something like this never happens again. Guns drawn at a mother and a sick infant? You have got to be kidding me," wrote one user. Another said: "This is wrong on so many levels. We should be able to disagree with doctors without fear that CPS and cops will kick down our door and steal our children away." As for the doctor who called the Department of Child Safety? While the precautions might seem a bit brash, it was her duty and obligation to go to these lengths to protect the child, according to Jen Trachtenberg, M.D., a pediatrician and assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. "If the doctor examined the child and came to the decision that further evaluation, testing, and treatment needed to be done to rule out meningitis and the parents failed to comply with the doctor's recommendations in this emergent situation, then the doctor truly had no choice," says the author of The Smart Parent's Guide . Ashanti Woods, M.D., a pediatrician at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, agrees. "When dealing with life-threatening and very serious illnesses, a doctor's direction to a family should be taken very seriously," he says. "In this situation, it appears that the physician was making an agreement with the family for them to head straight to the emergency department for further management of this child with a very high temperature specifically to rule out meningitis in an unvaccinated child." Had the child been vaccinated, the physician likely may have opted for a wait-and-see approach instead. "The vaccines that children normally would have received by age 2 protect against meningitis and also pneumonia," explains Mary Ellen Rimsza, M.D., FAAP, chair of the advocacy committee of the Arizona chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "If a child is unvaccinated, their physician will have greater concern about the possibility of these serious life-threatening [illnesses] as the cause of the fever and it will be more likely that their doctor will want to do additional tests." Washington (AFP) - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will skip a meeting of Group of Seven ministers this week in France, the State Department said Tuesday, amid persistent tensions between Europe and President Donald Trump. Officials did not explain Pompeo's absence. But the move comes amid a long list of disagreements, including the US rejection of international agreements on ending Iran's nuclear program and fighting climate change. The State Department said that Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan would represent the United States and be joined by David Hale, the top-ranking US career diplomat, at the talks Friday and Saturday in Dinard on the coast of Brittany. Sullivan "will engage in discussions on a broad range of issues, including the deteriorating situation in Venezuela, destabilizing Iranian behavior in the Middle East, the responsible conduct of states in cyber space and the final denuclearization of North Korea," a State Department statement said. Asked to explain Pompeo's absence, State Department spokesman Robert Palladino gave no specific reason but said: "Trans-Atlantic alliances are stronger than ever." Pompeo has "full faith" in Sullivan "and his ability to advance America's national security interests," Palladino said. Pompeo will already be seeing several of his G7 counterparts Wednesday and Thursday in Washington at a 70th anniversary gathering of the NATO alliance, but he has no announced conflicting engagements later in the week. The Group of Seven is the longstanding club of major industrialized democracies, with their summits often steering the global agenda. Besides the United States and France, the group includes Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan. French President Emmanuel Macron is hoping to push an ambitious agenda at the G7 summit in August in the resort of Biarritz, for which the foreign ministers meeting is meant to prepare. The French hosts are no doubt mindful of lessons from the last G7 in Canada, where Trump refused to sign the final communique and openly criticized his host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, over trade policies. Prince Harry penned a touching message to his Australian superfan Daphne Dunne just days before her death. Photo: Getty Images Prince Harry surprised his beloved fan Daphne Dunne with a touching message on her 99th birthday, just days before she sadly passed away. The war widow stole Harrys heart on a number visits Down Under, most recently when he and Meghan Markle greeted her among crowds of thousands during their royal tour last October. But the popular prince has proved hes not one to easily forget penning his friend a touching letter just in time to celebrate her milestone. Dear Daphne, my wife and I send our warmest wishes to you on the occasion of your 99th birthday on Friday, he wrote. We hope you have a wonderful celebration surrounded by family and friends and that youve managed to escape hospital. The tribute came after the pair garnered significant media attention across their three meetings, which have all happened during each of Harrys official visits to Sydney since 2015. [Photo: Getty Images] The tribute came after the pair garnered significant media attention across their three meetings, which have all happened during each of Harrys official visits to Sydney since 2015. But despite their obvious bond, Daphne wasnt expecting anything from the father-to-be ahead of her big day meaning the personal letter came as even more of a surprise. He wouldnt even think of (sending well wishes), she told the Today show last week. Despite their obvious bond, Daphne wasnt expecting anything from the father-to-be ahead of her big day meaning the personal letter came as even more of a surprise. [Photo: Getty Images] As referenced in his message, Daphne had been in hospital for the past two months battling a severe bout of pneumonia. Sadly, the great-grandmother succumb to the illness on Tuesday, less than a week after her birthday. By Stephen Nellis (Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc's chief financial officer, George Davis, has left the company to become finance chief at rival Intel Corp, the two companies said on Tuesday. Davis had been the mobile chip supplier's finance chief since 2013 and also served on the executive committee of the company's board of directors. Qualcomm said it appointed David Wise, a longtime veteran of the company and its treasurer, as interim finance chief while it searches for a replacement for Davis, whose departure was effective Tuesday. "On behalf of the Executive Team, I want to thank George for his dedicated service over the last six years at Qualcomm," Qualcomm Chief Executive Steve Mollenkopf told Reuters in a statement. "We all wish him well in his future endeavors." Intel said that Davis would become chief financial officer effective Wednesday, reporting to Chief Executive Bob Swan. Intel has been without a permanent finance chief since January, when Swan, who had joined as CFO in 2016, was promoted to become Intel's chief executive. Davis and Swan have worked together before. Before joining Qualcomm, Davis was the chief financial officer of semiconductor equipment firm Applied Materials Inc at the same time that Intel's Swan served on the board of directors. I know George is a world-class CFO, leader and team-builder, Swan said in statement. Our owners can expect a continued disciplined approach to capital allocation and a relentless focus on creating stockholder value. Qualcomm shares dipped 1 percent to $57.50 in late trading after Reuters first reported that Davis was departing for Intel. Intel shares rose .1 percent to $54.46. (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Peter Cooney and Tom Brown) New York (AFP) - The International Red Cross wants hundreds of children of foreign fighters from the Islamic State group in Syria to be allowed to return to their countries of origin and possibly be reunited with family there, the ICRC president said Tuesday. The children are living without their parents at the Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria that holds between 80,000 and 100,000 people displaced in the assault by US-backed forces against the last IS holdout. About 10,000 foreign women and children with ties to IS foreign fighters are held in a separate area of the camp, with children under 12 accounting for two-thirds of this group. "Our priority is to proactively look to bring kids back to their country of origin where there are hopefully still family if there are unaccompanied," Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), told reporters. Foreigners at Al-Hol camp are from some 30 to 40 countries. Once the identity of the children is established, the Red Cross will notify governments and see if there is family in those countries "to which we can send the kids back", Maurer told reporters. He did not have a specific figure for the number of children without their parents at Al-Hol camp, but estimated that there were "certainly hundreds, maybe more." With the collapse of the last IS bastion in Syria last month, several governments have been grappling with the problem of what to do with captured jihadist fighters from their country, the women who married them and their children. The ICRC president complained that governments were showing little interest in tackling the problem of foreign nationals linked to IS, limiting their response to offering emergency assistance. "That's not really the big issue," said Maurer. "The big issue will be: how do we find a system which deals with the different categories of people, which tries to identify who is a victim, to look at individual cases," he said. France last month took in five orphans, but it has a case-by-case approach to the return of the children. April 2nd is Equal Pay Day 2019, representing how far into the next year women must have worked in order to earn what white men earned the previous yearbut while this statistic is true for the average white woman, today is not Equal Pay Day for everybody. For women of color and disabled women, the wage gap is even larger, and their corresponding Equal Pay Days are even further into the year. Here, HG contributor Candace Ganger, a writer, mom, and woman of color, describes the numerous side hustles and part-time gigs she is forced to juggle just to make ends meet. Mark these 2019 #EqualPayDay dates in your calendar! The pay gap is far wider for women of color and disabled women, and for moms as compared to dads. Ready to take action? Call your senators at 202-816-4249 and urge them to pass the #PaycheckFairness Act! pic.twitter.com/wOCG0EgVfm UnitedStateofWomen (@USOWomen) April 2, 2019 Im a professional writer. I love what I do. Writing has, in many ways, saved my life, and I dont say that as an inspirational anecdote. As someone who struggles with depression and anxiety, I often turn to a blank page before reaching out to living, breathing humans, because its become synonymous with non-judgmental comfort. Theres something about a bare canvas that reflects back to me all the things I hold inside, letting me, somehow, make sense of the tangled mess. But writing for a living means working multiple full-time jobs. I dont just say that as a writer, but as a woman, and as a woman of color. I often find myself doing the strangest things to stretch a paycheck to buy toilet paper or bread; sometimes more than my male counterparts. I hate to say it, but I have to rely on multiple side hustles to get by, and its unfair and detrimental to my physical and mental health. Story continues Today is #EqualPayDay, and the average woman loses $10,086 a year to the pay gap. Here's what women could afford if the pay gap was eliminated: pic.twitter.com/emkoBXIEXJ UltraViolet (@UltraViolet) April 2, 2019 Anyone who works in creative fields or digital media knows that it often means long, arduous hours for little pay, and sometimesspecifically as a woman, and one of colorless respect. My staff position aside, Ive freelanced for nearly 12 years, and throughout that time, its become apparent that working in a creative field is often seen as less than. Art is valued far less than the work of someone who codes or even my husbands work as a line tech for a cable company. Art is referred to as a hobbynot something you build your career around and definitely not something you depend on for money. Ive had many clients refuse to pay my worth or for my time, and some (all successful men) have avoided paying me at all. They didnt care how badly my newborn son needed his special GI formula that cost more than our water bill each week or that I battled severe postpartum depression that required expensive medications and therapies for me to survive. And they certainly didnt care that a measly $60 article meant the difference between our electricity staying on, or not. I dont know why working in a creative field is treated as a fun, whimsical extracurricular when its my livelihood; how I pay my bills and support my children. In addition to writing every possible type of content you can imagine, Ive had to think outside the box to fill in the wage gaps, whether those gaps were due to embarrassingly low pay for a specific job or the patriarchy. For instance, I participated in a clinical research trial weeks after the birth of my daughter. The meetings ate away at my time and paid very little, but that small check (and free depression medication) meant that we could breathe a little. Ive pawned my engagement and wedding rings to buy diapers and formula; my kids didnt care what I had to do to get those thingsthey just knew that they needed them. Ive sung on street corners for donations. Ive cleaned houses, babysat, and sold vacuum cleaners on commission. Ive taken part in every at-home business (Avon, Mary Kay, Scentsy, etc.) to pay the bills without completely sacrificing time away from my kids my writing. Cash advances? A regular thing. Credit? Yep. Overtime? Ill take it. Write an insane number of things with a 24-hour turn-around time for a fraction of what Im worth? You got it. If you can think of a (legal) side hustle, Ive probably done it. I work seven days a week. I work on vacations and days off. We live modestly and yet, all of this work simply isnt enough to cushion us from any unforeseen fall. And so, I have to work and keep working. Its the only way. My husband, from whom Im currently separated, works a full-time job, but once you calculate taxes, insurance, 401k contributions, and various other expenses taken from the gross amount, there really isnt much left. It is the same for my paycheck, but with even less hours allotted. Have you ever taken the time to track all of your paychecks deductions? Its a hard reality check. For over 12 years now, Ive been the full-time caregiver for our children, despite forging my own path and career through writing. Its not spare time, but endless hours that add up to sleepless nights and early mornings while fitting in staff hours in the position that wont let me work over a certain amount of part-time hours per week, and still showing up for my kids as needed. I remember holding my newborn son at 4 a.m. while editing an ebook I agreed to work on in the early weeks after his birth. All of this to say, Ive done a lot of things to make sure my kids dont feel the discomfort of poverty I felt growing upthough, I know sometimes, they still do. Theyve watched me count change to pay for groceries or make calls to plead for an extension on a bill. Theyve overheard me asking for a fee for the rent I knew would be late. My 7-year-old son has outgrown his clothing; my daughter, 12, outgrows her clothes even more rapidly. Next check Ill get you a few new things, I tell them every 2 weeks. They know most times, its a stall; a lie. Because regardless of whatever extra work Ive taken on, it never seems to be enough. On #EqualPayDay, we acknowledge how far into the year white women must work for the same salary as their male counterparts. For every $1, white women make 77c & for WOC, the gap is even larger: Black women make 61c, Native American & API women make 58c, & Hispanic women make 53c pic.twitter.com/fHDbO1hLIN The Wing (@the_wing) April 2, 2019 If youre reading this and thinking, just get a normal job, then do I have bad news for you. When you spend so much time filling the cracks of a resume with sporadic work, it may amount to a great deal of experience and lessons learned, but employers look for a steady history. And even if youre hired, it doesnt mean that a normal job will pay nearly anything worth the hassle of being there. I worked at a local running shop for over two years on minimum wage. It was great. My workmates became family. But the gas it took to be there, plus the time away from my kids and the expenses incurred because of it, caused a deficit in our finances, not an increase. Despite the pushback from somebecause its more acceptable to work a normal job that causes financial deficit than to pursue a dream that could, at some point, pan outI left that job to pursue writing full-time, determined to make it work, somehow, someway. Months later, when Id all but given up, I sold my first two novels, wrote enough high-profile freelance pieces to catch up on bills, and acquired a remote staff position, writing. Multiple avenues towards one goal: doing the thing that makes me happiest (writing), but still making a living. I couldve chosen a different path, but to do so would have meant compromising who I am and what I know is my purpose. Its been grueling, balancing all the different jobs while caring for my kids, but honestly? Worth it. If you need a side hustle to make ends meet but love what you do, so be it. Of course, I wish that writing alone paid enough, but for me, right now, that just isnt so. Maybe someday, art will be valued at what its worth instead of some sliding scale judged by those who have no idea what it takes to create something from nothing. The inner workings of someones mind to a blank canvas or page is a gift to the world, an offering of the heart. Its invaluable. Today is #EqualPayDay, marking the day when womens earnings catch up to mens earnings for the prior year. The reality of the wage gap isnt the same for all women. We've broken it down: pic.twitter.com/arnFvHutql ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019 Someday, I hope to eliminate all side hustles so that I have the ability to give my gifts without sacrificing other things in its wake. Equal pay for the work Ive poured myself into seems fair. In the meantime, I guess Ill keep on keepin on however I can. Even if it means I may not sleep tonight in exchange for one more piece (like this one!). Because sometimes, its not just about the moneyits about saying I was here. See me; mark my words; dont forget them. Thats the real dream anywayto do something that means something. So, to all of you with side hustles wondering if itll all be worth it, let me tell you: I dont know. I do know the time and pain of side hustles is far less excruciating than sacrificing who you know you were meant to be. So, take that and run with it. PARIS (AP) French carmaker Renault's board will hold a special meeting to discuss recent results of its internal investigation of its former boss Carlos Ghosn, amid reports of suspicious payments under his watch. The board meeting planned for Wednesday will also look into Ghosn's 2018 pay as chairman and CEO of Renault SA, a Renault official told The Associated Press. Ghosn, under investigation in Tokyo, has denied wrongdoing. He was chairman of Nissan and headed the two automakers' alliance until his arrest in November in Japan. He was released on bail in March pending his trial in Tokyo. Unconfirmed media reports this week said the company has handed information about payments worth millions of euros (dollars) to a Renault-Nissan distributor in Oman from its probe to French prosecutors. Ghosn's representatives called the reports false. In a statement, they said: "The payments made by Renault to the distributor in Oman have not been diverted from their commercial objectives and under no circumstances has all or part of such payments benefited Carlos Ghosn or his family." French prosecutors did not comment. In Tokyo on Tuesday, Ghosn's lawyer said he has petitioned a Tokyo court seeking separate judicial proceedings for Ghosn and Nissan Motor Co., who currently are co-defendants in a financial misconduct trial. Hironaka reiterated Ghosn's innocence and accused Nissan of working "as one" with prosecutors who have charged him with breach of trust and with falsifying financial reports in under-stating his compensation. The lawyer declined comment on the reports about Renault's investigation. He said that under a plea bargaining process that is relatively new in Japan, some Nissan executives have escaped prosecution in return for cooperating with the prosecutors, Hironaka said. That has helped prosecutors shape a narrative that suggests Ghosn is guilty, he said. Hironaka, who has a strong track record for acquittals in a country where the conviction rate is over 99%, said he preferred that a different judge hear testimony from the executives who took plea bargains. Story continues Having Ghosn and his former employer Nissan face trial together would be unfair, he said. "No matter how you look at it, Nissan is not a defendant but a prosecutor," Hironaka said. Hironaka also requested that Ghosn be tried separately from another defendant in the case, Greg Kelly, a Nissan executive accused of facilitating Ghosn's misconduct. ___ Kageyama contributed from Tokyo. Photo: Xavier Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images Donald Trumps hostility to the island of Puerto Rico may have helped stall two congressional bills that would have allocated more aid for the hurricane-devastated island. On Monday, the Senate failed to pass either a Republican bill that included $600 million in food aid to Puerto Rico, or a $14.3 billion bill that wrapped additional assistance for the island into unrelated legislation. Puerto Ricos governor, Ricardo Rossello, told Reuters that though the territory needed the food aid, the amount allocated in the Republican bill still fell short of the islands actual needs. The discrepancy between Puerto Ricos needs and what the U.S. government is willing to provide isnt a recent development, but it has widened under Trump. The Washington Post reported in March that Trump seems to have a vendetta against the island and its elected officials, who criticized the administrations slow response to Hurricane Maria. The president is willing to provide nothing beyond some further food assistance to Puerto Rico, and in a series of tweets sent on Monday evening and Tuesday morning, Trump reiterated that position: The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any place in history. The people of Puerto Rico..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 ....are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government cant do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works. FEMA & the Military worked emergency miracles, but politicians like..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 ....the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health. 91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA.... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 ....The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump. So many wonderful people, but with such bad Island leadership and with so much money wasted. Cannot continue to hurt our Farmers and States with these massive payments, and so little appreciation! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 As is usual for Trump, the tweets contain a number of inaccuracies and outright falsehoods. Puerto Rican politicians dont control the islands budget; thats up to Congress. Puerto Rico is a part of the United States: The people who live on the island are citizens who pay taxes, even though they dont have voting representation in Congress. And the people of Puerto Rico did not actually receive $91 billion in federal aid after the hurricane. Since Hurricane Maria struck in 2018, the federal government spent $11.2 billion to help rebuild the island. The $91 billion figure estimates the islands total liabilities, according to a Post fact-check. Trumps statement is a bald-faced lie. But Trumps tweets also reveal the real inspiration for his fictions. He singles out Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, for specific vitriol. Yulin Cruz, now the co-chair of Bernie Sanderss presidential campaign and a candidate for governor of Puerto Rico, became one of his more vocal antagonists after Hurricane Maria, though she didnt restrict herself to criticism of the president. Its 2,975 people and theyre still calling it an estimate 2,975 people that will never see the light of day and many of them died because of what was done by the administration and that was silently approved by most of the political class in Puerto Rico, she told CNN last August. Trumps not known for having a thick skin. He has other reasons to disdain Puerto Rico, too. Its not entirely clear that he even realizes that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. His language, and the language of some administration officials, creates distinctions where none truly exist. Puerto Rico is a place, out of sight and preferably out of mind. Any aid the U.S. government delivers is a sign of generosity on its part, not something it owes to the people of Puerto Rico, who are disproportionately more likely than Stateside citizens to live in poverty. Trumps long-standing antipathy for people of color is germane to his rhetoric on Puerto Rico. When he speaks, you dont have to strain to hear the undertones for what they are. Stereotypes that depict poor people of color as moochers, takers, and welfare queens have been around a long time, and theyve informed immigration and welfare reform stances in both major parties at various points in their histories. But the Republican Party embraces these lies with pronounced enthusiasm, and holds them up as the evidence upon which the partys policies are based. The argument that immigrants are violent job thieves stems from this source and so, too, do Trumps falsehoods about Puerto Rico. Ive heard variations of this from many people inside the White House. https://t.co/ML7WHqbjhE Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) April 2, 2019 The scandal should highlight the disadvantages of Puerto Ricos peculiar legal status: The relationship between imperial power and colony sustains itself on an imbalance of power. Puerto Rico deserves a real chance to determine its own fate, either by voting to become a state or by becoming an independent nation, as some factions of the Puerto Rican left demand. The status quo shouldnt survive the presidency of Donald Trump. Representative Ilhan Omar is awaiting the results of an investigation into allegations she spent $6,000 in campaign funds for her personal use, Washington D.C.s local ABC affiliate reports. Authorities are expected to issue rulings in the next month to six weeks on two complaints filed last year with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board against the Minnesota Democrat by Republican state lawmaker Representative Steve Drazkowski. Drazkowski accused Omar of siphoning money from her campaign fund to pay her divorce attorney as well as to travel to Boston and Estonia. I had observed a long pattern, Drazkowski said. Representative Omar hasnt followed the law. Shes repeatedly trampled on the laws of the state in a variety of areas, and gotten by with it. Omar fielded questions on the investigation, and the campaign finance board followed standard practice and declined to confirm whether a probe was ongoing. Drazkowski claimed Omars critics are afraid to speak out against her because of her status as the first Somalian-American to be elected to Congress. Theres a political fear that people have, Drazkowski said, of being called a name, being called a bigot, being called racist, being called Islamophobic. Omar, who represents Minnesotas 5th District including Minneapolis, drew heavy criticism from her partys leadership earlier this year when she suggested that Jewish U.S. citizens pay allegiance to a foreign country, as well as several other remarks deemed anti-Semitic by both sides of the aisle. Republicans have pushed for Omar to be stripped from her spot on the House Foreign Affairs Committee because of her comments. More from National Review (Repeats to add slug keyword used by media subscribers) April 2 () - By Colin Packham CANBERRA, April 2 (Reuters) - Australia's conservative government on Tuesday said it would boost spending to counter the threat of violent extremism by A$381 million ($270 million) over the next four years, following mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand last month. "The tragic events in Christchurch last month show the need to remain vigilant to the threat of violent extremism," Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said in a statement released as part of the government's budget. The money would fund additional investigation teams and the adoption of new methods to meet evolving threats, Dutton said. Separately, the budget papers showed A$35 million would be allocated to countering foreign interference. The government would establish a Foreign Threat Assessment Centre, operated by the federal police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Dutton added. Earlier this year, the government said it suspected a foreign state actor was behind a cyber attack on its parliamentary network and the three largest political parties. In 2017, citing Chinese meddling, then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull introduced tough new laws designed to curb foreign interference. The claim led to a deterioration of relations between Australia and China. Lobbyists connected to foreign governments must now register with Australia, while offshore political donations are prohibited. (Reporting by Colin Packham;Editing by John Mair) (Reuters) - Irish-based carrier Ryanair said on Tuesday its pilots based in Portugal have voted for a labor agreement for the next four years, taking another step to head off any risk of another round of damaging strikes ahead of its peak summer season. The agreement governing pay and conditions was negotiated between Ryanair and the Portuguese pilot union SPAC to cover all of the airline's directly employed pilots in Portugal, the carrier said. Ryanair has been struggling with labor relations since it bowed to pressure to recognize unions for the first time almost a year ago. The airline had said in October that it had reached an agreement with its Portuguese pilots on seniority and home base issues, looking at the time to end a damaging series of strikes that had hurt its business. It had said that the Portuguese deal - covering issues such as leave allocation and promotion - would allow talks with Portugal's SPAC union on a full collective labor agreement. Separately, Ryanair said on Tuesday that passenger traffic grew 9 percent to 10.9 million in March. (Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur) Members of the Sackler family that own the manufacturer of OxyContin, the prescription painkiller largely blamed for the opioids crisis, have asked a court to dismiss the most high-profile lawsuit against them and on Tuesday declared that they feel deep and profound compassion for people who are struggling with addiction. The eight prominent members of the multibillionaire family are being sued in several large civil cases brought by hundreds of US cities, counties and states, accusing them of pushing aggressive sales of the drug while knowingly downplaying its dangers. On Monday night they filed a motion to dismiss the suit brought against them by Massachusetts. Related: New York sues billionaire Sackler family over alleged role in opioid crisis The company they own, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, the most well-known brand of opioid pill, previously asked the court in Boston to toss out the suit in which it is also named. The family accused Massachusetts of completely fabricating some accusations out of whole cloth, relying on allegations rife with mischaracterizations and factual inaccuracies and failing to show how any of the individuals being sued had broken the law. Its hard to justify the inaccuracies. Youre entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts, said an attorney for the members of the Sackler family sued in the Massachusetts civil case. The Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, sued Purdue and several other pharmaceutical companies last year and also named the eight Sacklers. They face a host of other investigations. In one of the most vivid accusations unveiled in Massachusetts when several documents were made public this January, the suit states that OxyContin became one of the deadliest drugs of all time and that at the pills launch party, Richard Sackler, who was then a senior executive, spoke of a blizzard of prescriptions for the potent painkiller that would bury the competition. Story continues That evocative image inspired a protest shortly afterwards at the Guggenheim art museum in New York where activists dropped thousands of fake prescriptions into the atrium, mimicking the alleged blizzard, and hanging banners slamming the museum for taking philanthropy from the Sacklers. The Guggenheim and two of the leading art museums in the UK announced last month that they would no longer accept donations from the family. But this weeks motion by the Sacklers to dismiss the case decried what it called Massachusettss relentless but baseless attempt to condemn Richard Sackler, accusing the suit of plucking misleading snippets from emails and documents, the filing states. Related: Sackler family members face mass litigation and criminal investigations over opioids crisis The eight Sackler members named in the Massachusetts case and several other suits, include Beverly and Theresa, widows of the two brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, who built Purdue into a pharmaceutical giant and launched OxyContin as a breakthrough, controlled-release prescription narcotic in 1996. The others are the founders children, Richard, Jonathan, Mortimer David Alfons, Kathe Sackler and Ilene Lefcort Sackler, and grandson David Sackler. Not a single document shows an individual director engaging in any unlawful conduct regarding the sale of prescription opioids or ordering anyone else to do so, the defense motion stated. The branches of the family related to Raymond and Mortimer, some of whose members live in the UK, are collectively worth an estimated $13bn. The Sacklers attorney, who had requested not to be named, speaking for the family on Tuesday, said that the Sacklers will defend themselves at trial if necessary, in the many lawsuits. That includes litigation grouping more than 1,400 US cities and counties in a federal court case in Cleveland, Ohio. But that their preference is to find solutions that deliver resources to people on the ground. The family feels deep and profound compassion for people who are struggling with addiction, the attorney said. Last month the Sacklers made an unprecedented $75m voluntary payment towards an addiction treatment center, as part of a $270m settlement by Purdue to end a case brought against the company, but not the Sacklers, by Oklahoma, without admitting culpability. They want to be known as people who were less interested in a blame game and more interested in contributing, its been a longstanding ethos to give back to the community, the attorney said. Earlier on Tuesday, a different attorney representing the family members, David Bernick, told ABCs Good Morning America: The Sackler family deeply feels the sorrow and the pain that this opioids epidemic has inflicted on people and their families. They very much want to help and they very much wanted to help since the opioids crisis began 20 years ago. But a federal case brought in New York by more than 500 cities and counties alleges that: This nation is facing an unprecedented opioid addiction epidemic that was initiated and perpetuated by the Sackler defendants for their own financial gain. Diamniadio (Senegal) (AFP) - Macky Sall on Tuesday embarked on his second term as Senegal's president pledging "constructive" dialogue with the opposition and reforms to spur development. Sall urged optimism as "it seems new economic perspectives are opening up for our country," a reference to Senegal's plans to enter the hydrocarbons sector in 2021-22 via two ambitious oil and gas developments. Clad in a navy blue suit, the trained geologist swore "before God and before the nation" to serve the people as several visiting African leaders looked on. Also present was Mark Green, administrator of the US development agency USAID. Sall, 57 and a self-declared "social liberal", chose the new city of Diamniadio, some 32 kilometres (20 miles) from Dakar a product of his Emerging Senegal Plan (PSE) launched in 2014, to make his address. "In vesting their confidence in you once again your fellow citizens have validated your record and backed your social project, to say the least," said Constitutional Court president Pape Oumar Sakho. Sall garnered a 58 percent vote share, well clear of former prime minister Idrissa Seck on 20 percent, with the rest of the pack left trailing to win easily in a single round on February 24. - Nod to youth, women - Helping to clear Sall's path to victory was the authorities' invalidation of several opposition candidacies including those of Karim Wade, the son of presidential predecessor Abdoulaye Wade (2000-12), as well as popular Dakar mayor Khalifa Sall. Both were disqualified over convictions for misuse of public funds. The election sidelined the Socialist Party and the Senegalese Democratic Party which have dominated politics since independence from France in 1960. Although the disqualifications outraged the opposition, Sall insisted he would rule "for all Senegalese, hence "I renew my call for... a constructive dialogue open to all political, economic and social forces." Story continues The opposition has so far shown no sign of wanting to grasp any olive branch Sall might extend since he was officially proclaimed as poll winner on March 5. Sall, who left the ceremony for the presidential palace in an open-topped saloon with his wife, also said he would particularly look to aid the young, pursuing employment and training policies promoting "the entrepreneurial spirit and new technologies." He added he would commit to "public policies favouring women and girls," ensure "decent housing" for all and "safeguard the environment". Kigali (AFP) - The houses along the quiet tree-lined street look just like the normal homes found all across the Rwandan capital. But behind the walls of the three adjoining villas in Kigali are the headquarters of a global operation involving investigators and prosecutors who are working to track down the very worst killers of Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Inside, French investigators have come to talk to witnesses and to gather evidence. A Norwegian team is also on site. All are supported by Rwanda's Genocide Fugitive Tracking Unit (GFTU), a special team created in 2007 to prosecute the architects behind the slaughter of some 800,000 mostly Tutsi victims. "The mandate was to investigate and compile case files for the fugitives who were still at large," said Faustin Nkusi, spokesman for the National Public Prosecution Authority, which oversees the unit. After the bloodshed, many perpetrators escaped. Some were arrested and taken to the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), based in Tanzania. That court closed in 2015 after several dozen convictions. For many of those who carried out the killings, justice has been at a local level through community tribunals known as "gacaca" courts. Between 2005 and 2012, these courts put nearly two million people on trial, with some two-thirds of cases resulting in a conviction. But the search for justice continues. - 72,000 convicted in absentia - A quarter of a century after the genocide, Rwanda is as determined as ever to make sure the key suspects are arrested and put on trial over the killings. Many are still at large, scattered all over the world. The GFTU has issued 1,012 international arrest warrants for suspects in 32 countries. Several are in neighbouring nations like Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Tanzania. Others are further afield in places like Kenya, Malawi and Zambia. And still others fled to Europe, North America or even Australia. Story continues Key suspects on the run include Felicien Kabuga, once one of Rwanda's richest men who is accused of financing the genocide. He was reportedly spotted in Kenya. Another is Augustin Bizimana, a former defence minister believed to be hiding in DR Congo. The team is having an impact: 19 people who were allegedly involved in plotting the genocide have been arrested and returned to Rwanda for trial, while 22 others have been tried abroad. But this is only a drop in the ocean. When the gacaca process closed in 2012, the courts handed the GFTU a list of nearly 72,000 fugitives who had been sentenced in absentia. And tracking down all those people along with other remaining suspects is tough. "It's not easy," Nkusi said. "We don't have the upper hand in investigating and arresting. We have to work together with other institutions from those countries." The GFTU team, which involves both investigators and prosecutors, works with teams across the world, including their judicial counterparts in countries where suspects are hiding. It also works with UN experts and the international policing agency, Interpol. - 'Justice has to be done' - Investigators face many challenges: by now, suspects have grown much older and have had years to perfect their changed identity as well as to slip across borders. Some have obtained political asylum. After Rwanda abolished the death penalty in 2007, countries were encouraged to send suspects home. In recent years, suspects have been extradited from United States, Canada and The Netherlands. Other nations, however, argue that they do not have extradition treaties with Rwanda while also demonstrating a reluctance to try suspects themselves. "We wish they would be brought back to the country, to the scene of the crime," Nkusi said, but pointed out that some countries were "not politically willing to do that". France, which denies Kigali's accusations of supporting the Hutu regime that planned the genocide, has refused multiple requests from Rwanda to extradite suspects. So far, only one former Rwandan army officer and two mayors have been sentenced in France. "They have an obligation to judge these people," said Nkusi. With Rwanda set this month to mark a quarter of a century since the genocide, Nkusi hopes the speed of extraditions will increase. "Justice has to be done," Nkusi said. "People have to be arrested. People have to be tried -- to either be found innocent or be convicted." Many union leaders regret too-early endorsements of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images If it seems elements of the U.S. labor movement are reluctant to jump into the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, its not an illusion. Some unions are suffering from buyers remorse, having made an early decision in 2016 to jump onboard the apparently unstoppable Hillary Clinton bandwagon. Others are simply wary of the size and unpredictability of the vast 2020 field. Either way, with some exceptions (it would be shocking if National Nurses United didnt back Bernie Sanders again, or if the Firefighters didnt back Joe Biden if he runs), youll probably see unions soliciting candidates to seek the support of their members, rather than picking and choosing favorites early on, as the Los Angeles Times Evan Halper reports: Some of the unions will probably be changing their mind this time and going about it a whole different way, because quite frankly, it backfired on them, said Christopher Shelton, president of the Communication Workers of America, which avoided the internal tension last time by having its full membership choose whom to endorse. The union backed Sanders. The efforts to make the rank and file feel more invested were on full display in Washington Monday, as the Communications Workers and another of the countrys largest unions, the Service Employees International Union, partnered with progressive groups at a town hall event. By the time eight Democratic candidates had individually taken the stage and been drilled with questions from workers packing downtown Washingtons Warner Theater, labor leaders had already been maneuvering in the background to restore unity. As my colleague Sarah Jones recently reported, one prominent 2016 pro-Clinton union, the American Federation of Teachers, is not only eschewing early bandwagons, but is making policy vetting of candidates more explicit: The union says candidates will need to do more than show up to meet members or hand out worksheets to students. Theyll also have to adhere to certain policy standards, the union says, including but not limited to issues raised in a 2018 convention resolution. That resolution expresses support for universal health care, whether single-payer healthcare or Medicare for All, in addition to free tuition at public colleges, universal cost-free child care, and that taxation of the rich fully fund IDEA, Title I and state allocations to public colleges and universities. These commitments may become a stumbling block for the centrists in the race and rank-and-file educators, who have won a series of major recent labor victories, have no reason to compromise at the moment. The good news for labor folk is that the Democratic Party as a whole seems more in sync with union interests and policy positions than at any time in recent memory. Candidates with a history of coziness toward Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or big donors are for the most part repenting, and on issues ranging from the minimum wage to trade to labor law are expressing an unusual degree of solidarity. At the same time, theres not much doubt the Trump administration represents the Ancient Enemy of reactionaries, who with one hand give the very wealthy and their corporate representatives tax cuts and deregulation, and with the other hand divide working people via cultural and racial appeals. Aside from issue positions, a second Trump term might lead to a decades-long stacking of the federal courts against labor interests, which already took a terrible blow from the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court in last years Janus v. AFSCME decision that prohibited free rider fees for nonunion members benefiting from public-sector union representation. So most union activists are girding themselves for holy war in the general election, and will have their work cut out for them, given Trumps relative success among union households in 2016, as Politico reported at the time: Nationally, Clinton outperformed Trump among union households by just 8 percent, the smallest Democratic advantage since Walter Mondales failed campaign against Ronald Reagan in 1984. For a more recent perspective, President Barack Obama won union households by 18 percent in 2012. Clintons poor performance among union households appeared to especially damage her in crucial Midwestern states. Obama won Ohio in 2012, besting Romney in those households by 23 percentage points. Clinton actually lost Ohios union households to Trump by 9 points, according to exit polls. The state went to Trump. Any heartland strategy for Democrats in 2020 will most definitely include a major effort to convince union members and their families that Trump has broken his promises to them. Perhaps this time labor wont be licking wounds from internal divisions over the primaries. Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world. Email This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Terms & Privacy Notice By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. By Kole Casule SKOPJE (Reuters) - The leaders of Greece and North Macedonia hugged, took selfies and signed a new agreement for air patrols on Wednesday in a display of newly-friendly relations since a nearly three-decade name dispute was settled earlier this year. North Macedonia's Prime Minister Zoran Zaev was all smiles as his counterpart Alexis Tsipras became the first Greek prime minister to pay an official visit to the ex-Yugoslav republic since it declared independence in 1991. The pair struck a deal last year for Macedonia to be re-named North Macedonia - satisfying Greece's longstanding complaint over an implied claim to its province also called Macedonia - and the change came into force in January. The deal has opened the way for North Macedonia to seek membership of the European Union and NATO blocs. Upon arrival, Tsipras and Zaev snapped selfies, while the Greek leader's wife was presented with flowers. The two prime ministers discussed infrastructure projects including improving a railway between the Macedonian capital Skopje and Greek port Thessaloniki. "We are writing history," Zaev said. "You are looking at two neighbors, friendly people who have shown Europe and the entire world that with brave decisions and good wishes for togetherness, something that was impossible yesterday has become reality today." "SILLY BEHAVIOR STOPS" They agreed to cooperate in their defense industries, cyber protection and military intelligence. Macedonia, which has no fighter jets, will also allow Greece to patrol its skies for the first time. Calling Zaev his "dearest friend", Tsipras said it was time to make up for nearly three "lost" decades. "For years, every time I would go to Europe with the government aircraft ... I noticed that the pilot made a deviation so it wouldn't enter the airspace of FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic Macedonia)," he said. "This silly behavior now stops .. Not only won't we make deviations, but we might also take a stroll to say hello." Zaev reiterated that NATO and EU membership were the priorities for his tiny Balkan state. "But we also want cooperation with Russia, China and the Eastern world," he said. The dispute had been on the United Nations' agenda ever since the former Yugoslavia broke up in 1991 and Greece, swept up by nationalist rage, had slapped a short-lived trade embargo on the landlocked state. EU commissioner for enlargement Johannes Hahn tweeted his congratulations, praising the pair for putting citizens and the region first. "Their courage and vision is a signal to the rest of South East Europe that hard nuts can be cracked," he said. (Additional reporting by Michele Kambas in Athens; Writing by Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne) Jonathan Greggain leaving Carlisle Crown Court after Sellafield Ltd was fined 380,000 when the production worker was contaminated with plutonium. Sellafield Ltd has been fined 380,000 after a production worker was contaminated with plutonium. Jonathan Greggain, 51, was working within a glovebox (sealed container) at the nuclear fuel reprocessing and decommissioning site in Seascale, Cumbria, when he felt a pricking sensation on his left hand as he handled a conductivity probe. Unbeknown to Mr Greggain, one of the legs of the probe had corroded in the acidic environment and effectively become a dangerously sharp object, Carlisle Crown Court heard. Tests later revealed he had sustained an internal dose of plutonium, which has slightly increased his risk of developing cancer. The Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria. Mr Greggain, who was present in court for Tuesdays hearing, is back at work but took six months off following the incident. In his victim personal statement, he said he had been diagnosed with depression and that the legal proceedings had made him stressed, depressed, frustrated, angry and disappointed. Sellafield pleaded guilty on Tuesday to failing to discharge its general health, safety and welfare duty to its employees, contrary to Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work Act, on or before February 5 2017. Sentencing, Judge James Adkin said: By its plea the defendant has accepted that its employees were exposed to risk while carrying out work within the glovebox in question and that they did not take all reasonably practicable steps to ensure they were not. The system of work in place before the incident meant that a probe would only be replaced when it was found to have corroded. The Office for Nuclear Regulation said the verdict was not a reflection on overall safety levels at Sellafield. However, he added that it could fairly be considered as an isolated incident as Sellafield had 670 gloveboxes on site used for delicate handling of radioactive materials. Nigel Lawrence QC said plutonium entering the bloodstream via a wound was by far the most dangerous pathway to individuals with deposits remaining in body tissues for the lifetime of the person affected. He said Mr Greggain received some eight times the statutory dose limit per year, although the defence pointed out the effective dose would be received over 50 years from intake and not on the day of the incident itself. Story continues James Ageros QC, for Sellafield, said the conductivity probes are now replaced every six months regardless of their condition. Read more from Yahoo News UK: YouTubers posting thousands of clips of themselves drinking water Lib Dem councillor scared to put her children to bed Passenger who died on Qantas flight identified A full review of all gloveboxes and potential sharp objects within them had been undertaken and all others were in acceptable order, the court heard. He said everyone at the company, including chief executive officer Paul Foster who sat in the courtroom, express their deep regret and remorse for this incident. In reaching sentence, Judge Adkin noted that Sellafield Ltd was a taxpayer funded non-profit making organisation and that much of the funding is devoted to trying to ensure operations are safe. Sellafield Ltd was also ordered to pay prosecution costs of 96,753. Following sentencing Dr Mina Golshan, deputy chief inspector and director of the Office for Nuclear Regulations Sellafield, Decommissioning, Fuel and Waste Division, said: Sellafield Ltd has already learned lessons from this event, implementing improvements to help prevent a recurrence, and we expect it to continue to seek reasonably practicable improvements in all areas of its work affecting safety. A spokeswoman for Sellafield said: This is a matter we take extremely seriously as reflected by our guilty plea. This was an isolated incident that did not cause wider risk to workers beyond this task, nor any broader safety concerns. It is not indicative of a failure of the business as a whole. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! We've lost count of how many times insiders have accumulated shares in a company that goes on to improve markedly. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of examples of share prices declining precipitously after insiders have sold shares. So before you buy or sell Ingenia Communities Group (ASX:INA), you may well want to know whether insiders have been buying or selling. What Is Insider Buying? It is perfectly legal for company insiders, including board members, to buy and sell stock in a company. However, rules govern insider transactions, and certain disclosures are required. We don't think shareholders should simply follow insider transactions. But it is perfectly logical to keep tabs on what insiders are doing. For example, a Columbia University study found that 'insiders are more likely to engage in open market purchases of their own companys stock when the firm is about to reveal new agreements with customers and suppliers'. See our latest analysis for Ingenia Communities Group Ingenia Communities Group Insider Transactions Over The Last Year Over the last year, we can see that the biggest insider purchase was by Deputy Chairman Robert Morrison for AU$201k worth of shares, at about AU$3.00 per share. That means that an insider was happy to buy shares at around the current price. While their view may have changed since the purchase was made, this does at least suggest they have had confidence in the company's future. We generally consider it a positive if insiders have been buying on market, even if the share price has increased a bit since then. Happily, we note that in the last year insiders paid AU$270k for 90.39k shares. On the other hand they divested 128.73k shares, for AU$389k. Over the last year we saw more insider selling of Ingenia Communities Group shares, than buying. The average sell price was around AU$3.02. It's not too encouraging to see that insiders have sold at below the current price. But we wouldn't put too much weight on the insider selling. You can see the insider transactions (by individuals) over the last year depicted in the chart below. If you want to know exactly who sold, for how much, and when, simply click on the graph below! Story continues ASX:INA Recent Insider Trading, April 2nd 2019 I will like Ingenia Communities Group better if I see some big insider buys. While we wait, check out this free list of growing companies with considerable, recent, insider buying. Does Ingenia Communities Group Boast High Insider Ownership? For a common shareholder, it is worth checking how many shares are held by company insiders. A high insider ownership often makes company leadership more mindful of shareholder interests. From our data, it seems that Ingenia Communities Group insiders own 1.1% of the company, worth about AU$8.1m. Overall, this level of ownership isn't that impressive, but it's certainly better than nothing! So What Do The Ingenia Communities Group Insider Transactions Indicate? There haven't been any insider transactions in the last three months -- that doesn't mean much. We don't take much encouragement from the transactions by Ingenia Communities Group insiders. And usually insiders own more stock in the company, according to our data. If you are like me, you may want to think about whether this company will grow or shrink. Luckily, you can check this free report showing analyst forecasts for its future. If you would prefer to check out another company -- one with potentially superior financials -- then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. The Republican Partys replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act is coming after the 2020 election. In a series of late-night tweets on Monday, President Donald Trump provided the first clue about Republicans timetable to introduce a replacement for former President Barack Obamas signature health care law, vowing that the yet-to-be-developed plan would be truly great and work for America. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win back the House, Trump tweeted. In the first of three tweets, Trump said, Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesnt work. Premiums & deductibles are far too high - Really bad HealthCare! Start the day smarter: Get USA TODAY's Daily Briefing in your inbox 'Ripped off the Band-Aid': End of Obamacare? President Donald Trump resumes an old battle. Here's why. The Republicans are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare. In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare, he added. In his final tweet, Trump said. "Also, Republicans will always support Pre-Existing Conditions." Trumps tweets come a week after his administration renewed its attack on the ACA, also known as Obamacare, siding with a Texas judges December 2018 ruling that the entire law should be tossed out. In a letter filed with the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Justice Department lawyers said that the lower courts ruling that the health care law is unconstitutional should be affirmed and that the United States is not urging that any portion of the district courts judgment to be reversed. The next morning, Trump told reporters: The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care you watch. He has since repeated the same line many times. Republicans decried the ACA when Obama signed it into law in March 2010 but have failed in repeated efforts to repeal it, most recently in 2017 with Trump in the White House and Republicans in charge of both congressional chambers. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: In a series of late-night tweets, Trump says Republicans' health care plan will go to vote after 2020 election Shamima Begum says she wants to return to the UK (Picture: BBC) Jihadi bride Shamima Begum has said she was brainwashed by Isis and that she really regretted everything. Speaking for the first time since the death of her third baby in March, the 19-year-old revealed she wants to return to the UK to be given a second chance. She told The Times that she had left London for Syria as a 15-year-old believing everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion. Ms Begum married Dutch fighter Yago Riedijk and the pair fled the caliphate as its last bastion in Baghuz crumbled earlier this year. The teenager, who has Bangladeshi heritage, has since been stripped of her British citizenship. Ms Begum said she really regretted everything and wants a second chance (Picture: PA) I have sat down and thought about how long I would have to stay here. And I have kind of accepted that I will have to stay here, I will have to make this like a second home, she said. Then in the late stages of pregnancy, Ms Begum appeared to have little remorse when she was found in the al-Hawl refugee camp in Syria in February. Her apparent defiance prompted public anger back in the UK, but some argued that she was a victim of grooming and should be allowed to come back to Britain. Read more Frail pensioner cleared of murder after beating disabled husband to death Harry Potter books burned by Catholic priests due to evil forces European Union set to demand 10bn euros from the UK even in a no-deal Brexit Since I left Baghuz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again, she said. I was brainwashed. The teenager attributed her early display of remorselessness to the threats she faced from extremists in al-Hawl. Anything I said against Dawlah (Isis), they would immediately attack me, so I was afraid of that, she said. Ms Begum was speaking to the Times from the al-Hol camp, where she and her baby were moved to out of concern for their safety after she went public. Her son, Jarrah, died on March 8 aged three weeks and was buried in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of the facility. Story continues It was reported last month that Ms Begums family had begun legal proceedings to review the home secretarys decision to strip her of British citizenship. Ms Begum, right, fled the UK to join Isis with two other teenagers, Amira Abase, left, and Kadiza Sultana, centre (Picture: PA) Sajid Javids move was only permissible under international law if it does not leave her stateless. Ms Begum was one of three schoolgirls to leave Bethnal Green to join Isis in 2015. On Monday it was reported that an Isis fighter being held in Syria had claimed to be one of at least seven students and ex-students from the University of Westminster to join the caliphate. Zakariyya Elogbani, who grew up in east London, told the BBC he abandoned a degree in business management in 2014 before joining the extremists. Mohammed Emwazi, the Isis executioner known as Jihadi John, also studied at the university until 2009. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK By Ron Bousso LONDON (Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell Plc on Tuesday became the first major oil and gas company to announce plans to leave a leading U.S. refining lobby due to disagreement on climate policies, citing its support for the goals of the Paris climate agreement. In its first review of its association with 19 key industry groups, Shell said it had found "material misalignment" over climate policy with the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) and would quit the body in 2020. The review is part of Shell's drive to increase transparency and show investors it is in line with the 2015 Paris climate agreement's goals to limit global warming by reducing carbon emissions to a net zero by the end of the century. It is the latest sign of how investor pressure on oil companies, particularly in Europe, is leading to changes in their behavior around climate. Last year, Shell caved in to investor pressure over climate change, setting out plans to introduce industry-leading carbon emissions targets linked to executive pay. Its chief executive, Ben van Beurden, has since repeatedly urged oil and gas producers to take action over climate and pollution, staking out a more radical position than the heads of other major oil companies. "AFPM has not stated support for the goal of the Paris Agreement. Shell supports the goal of the Paris Agreement," the Anglo-Dutch company said in its decision. "The need for urgent action in response to climate change has become ever more obvious since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. As a result, society's expectations in this area have changed, and Shell's views have also evolved," van Beurden said in the report. The company has disagreed with AFPM on a number of issues for some time, according to two lobbying sources. Shell said it also disagreed with AFPM's opposition to a price on carbon and action on low-carbon technologies. Story continues Shell and AFPM have also been at odds in recent months over regulation over the use of renewable fuels. While Shell and other large refiners invested in cleaner fuel technology, AFPM has fought hard against standards requiring refiners to blend or subsidize the blending of biofuels into the gasoline pool - saying it hurts independent refiners. Shell and rivals Exxon and BP have in recent years left the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative political group, over its stance on climate change. AFPM Chief Executive Chet Thompson thanked Shell for its "longstanding collaboration." "We will also continue working on behalf of the refining and petrochemical industries to advance policies that ensure reliable and affordable access to fuels and petrochemicals, while being responsible stewards of the environment," Thompson said in a statement. AFPM counts around 300 U.S. and international members including Exxon Mobil Corp, Chevron Corp, BP Plc and Total SA that operate 110 refineries and 229 petrochemical plants, according to its 2018 annual report. French oil major Total said in a statement to Reuters that consensus required by organizations such as AFPM does not always reflect its position, and that it regularly monitors the relevance of its participation. "In this case, Total takes a pro-active approach in order to convince its peers, particularly on climate issues. In case of differing points of view, Total publicly defends its position, and is ready to reconsider its participation in case of disagreement," the company said. Total said it was fully aware of climate issues, has publicly recognized them and takes them into its strategy. Shell's review was welcomed by Adam Matthews, director of ethics and engagement for the Church of England Pensions Board, which invests in Shell and led discussions with the company over its climate policy. "This is an industry first," Matthews said. "With this review Shell have set the benchmark for best practice on corporate climate lobbying not just within oil and gas but across all industries. The challenge now is for others to follow suit." WALK AWAY Shell also found "some" misalignment with nine other trade associations, including the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry's main lobby. Shell said that while it had some climate-related differences with the API, it welcomed the lobby's advocacy on a range of state and federal issues such as trade and transport, as well as the API's efforts to reduce methane emissions. Shell said it will continue to engage with the API and other groups over climate policies and monitor their alignment. Shell last month urged President Donald Trump's administration to tighten restrictions on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, instead of weakening them as planned. (Reporting by Ron Bousso; Additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw in New York and Bate Felix in Paris; Editing by Louise Heavens, Emelia Sithole-Matarise, Lisa Shumaker and Leslie Adler) Juergen Maier, chief executive of Siemens UK, poses for a photograph after an interview with Reuters in London. Photo: Reuters/Toby Melville As the British parliament gears up on Monday to vote on a number of different Brexit withdrawal options, the head of Siemens UK wants members of parliament (MPs) to unite in support of a customs union agreement with the European Union. Juergen Maier, chief executive of Siemens UK, urged MPs to not waste this critical week in an open letter in Politico published Monday. The world is watching we are now becoming a laughing stock, he said. Maier wrote that Brexit is exhausting our business and wrecking the countrys tremendous reputation as an economic powerhouse. He pointed out that Britains historic stability made it an attractive investment destination for companies like the engineering giant Siemens, but we are at risk of losing that critical pillar of economic stability. Maier believes that a majority could and should be found for a UK-EU customs union, which is vital for smooth trade and saves businesses billions every year in pointless and unproductive customs declarations. So, my message to MPs is simple. Enough is enough. We are all running out of patience, Maier said. Make a decision and unite around a customs union compromise that delivers economic security and stability. He said he can no longer defend the British parliaments behaviour to the Siemens management board, which makes it hard for him to get support for ongoing investment in the UK and could ultimately affect jobs in the country. Siemens directly employs some 15,000 people in Britain. CEOs of Germanys large multi-nationals, as well as SMEs, have been warning for the past few years that a no-deal Brexit will seriously damage their UK operations. Automotive companies, such as BMW, who build cars in Britain, fear massive disruptions to their just-in-time supply chains. MPs are voting Monday on a second round of indicative votes, which includes an option for a customs union. What we expect is that a proposal could reach a majority around the customs union and then we are prepared, on the EU side, to renegotiate the declaration and to include that customs union therein, Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliaments Brexit coordinator, told Belgian radio station VRT. Some members of British prime minister Theresa Mays cabinet appear to prefer a no-deal Brexit to one that keeps the UK in a customs union. Singapore (AFP) - Singapore Airlines said Tuesday it had grounded two of its Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner aircraft after discovering an engine defect during inspections, the latest problem for the US planemaker. The decision was taken after the deterioration of some engine blades was detected on the jets' Rolls-Royce engines, the carrier said in a statement. The planes were grounded pending the replacement of engines. "Some flights to destinations served by the 787-10 fleet have been affected," it said, adding "safety is our top priority". The city-state's flag carrier was the launch customer for the model -- which has a maximum capacity of 330 passengers -- and started operating them last year. It has nine 787-10 aircraft in its fleet, a spokeswoman said. Boeing's 737 MAX planes were grounded globally last month following the second of two deadly crashes to occur in less than five months. Scrutiny has centred on an anti-stall system developed specifically for the planes that has given pilots problems. Singapore was one of the first countries to ban 737 MAX planes from its airspace following the March crash of one of the models operated by Ethiopian Airlines, with the loss of 189 lives. (Note: Print or Digital Use Allowed. Please credit Stateline, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts. For downloadable graphics, please visit www.pewtrusts.org/stateline) By Matt and Vasilogambros April 2(Stateline) - There are sanctuary cities that refuse to assist federal immigration enforcement. Now, there are sanctuary counties that refuse to enforce new gun control laws. Rural, conservative communities are pushing back against state legislatures that have been approving new firearm restrictions at a rapid rate since the February 2018 massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida. More than 200 counties across nine states have vowed not to enforce new state measures that restrict gun access, and 132 have declared themselves to be Second Amendment sanctuaries, borrowing a term at the center of the immigration debate, according to a Stateline analysis. For gun rights supporters, its a defiant rebuff to state leaders they believe are attacking their communities gun heritage and way of life. So far, county leaders have not translated their rhetoric into action by, for example, defying a red-flag court order to confiscate guns from a person deemed to be dangerous to himself or others. But there is no doubt the movement is gaining momentum: Except for 52 counties in New York and three in Maryland, which acted in 2013 after their states passed new legislation following the Sandy Hook mass shooting, all of the counties have made their declarations since the Parkland shooting 13 months ago. In New Mexico, for example, the Democratic-controlled state government enacted a new law in March requiring background checks for firearm purchases. But the month before, as state leaders considered the measure, 29 of 33 county sheriffs signed a letter declaring they would oppose any new state laws that restrict the rights of New Mexicans to own firearms. The chairman of the New Mexico Sheriffs Association, Cibola County Sheriff Tony Mace, a Democrat, told Stateline both the newly enacted background check measure and other proposals being debated in New Mexico are unenforceable, overreaching, unconstitutional and a gun grab. Further, he said, they are a waste of taxpayer resources. Story continues In my community, I have more authority than anybody else, Mace said. As a law enforcement officer, I have discretion to use the laws that I want to. Thats my decision. Im not going to enforce that particular law. In a series of tweets in February, Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham mocked and lambasted the sheriffs for their political posturing and dangerous, cynical pandering. Thats not how laws work, of course, she tweeted, and its not how oaths of office work either. Twenty-five New Mexico boards of county commissioners adopted sanctuary resolutions after their sheriffs took a public stance against the proposed gun control laws. Robert Spitzer, a professor of political science at the State University of New York (SUNY) Cortland and the author of five books on gun control, suspects most of this is just bluster. Because they are elected officials, they respond to electoral pressures, Spitzer said of the sheriffs and commissioners. There is still some space between these braggart statements from some sheriffs and getting to a point where theres a direct confrontation over their refusal to enforce gun laws. Co-opting Sanctuary In southern Illinois, Effingham County is known for its colossal, 200-foot metal cross that towers over the intersection of Interstates 57 and 70 the largest cross in America. In April 2018, the conservative, rural county of 34,000 residents became known for something else: being the first county to use the sanctuary label to signal its determination to resist new state gun laws. Its Republican county leaders, worried that Democratic lawmakers who control the states legislature would pass laws restricting gun access, adopted a resolution that prohibits county employees from enforcing the unconstitutional actions of the state government. Around the same time, Chicago was in a legal battle with the Trump administration over its role as a sanctuary city that had declined to participate in the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants. David Campbell, the Republican member of the Effingham County Board who authored the gun-rights resolution, wanted to spice it up a little bit, so he applied the sanctuary label to his measure too. Thats a big buzzword these days, Campbell said. Were flipping the script on Chicago. There is a massive political divide between urban and rural areas in Illinois, especially when it comes to guns. Three new state gun measures went into effect at the beginning of this year, including a red-flag law, which rural state lawmakers strongly opposed. Illinois is actually two states, said Richard Pearson, the executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association. You have Chicago, and you have Illinois. Sixty-two of the states 102 counties have followed Effingham Countys lead by declaring themselves to be Second Amendment sanctuaries. Campbell said county leaders from other states, such as Oregon and Pennsylvania, have called him for advice on adopting their own resolutions. To be sure, these measures are not universally loved in the counties in which theyre enacted. Bruce Malone, a Democratic member of the Madison County Board in Illinois, voted against a successful sanctuary measure last year. He understands the county is very pro-gun, but he said he thinks county officials are not empowered to interpret the constitutionality of state laws. Thats what the courts do, Malone said. In my mind, what we did here was all about politics. I dont want to take anyones guns away, but why are we superseding the rule of law? The power of big-city Democrats, most of whom favor stricter gun control, in state legislatures is fueling similar resolutions around the country. In Oregon, gun-rights activist Rob Taylor is sick of seeing politicians from the Portland area creating land-use, tax and gun policies in the state legislature that he believes many rural residents oppose. Youve got a major metropolis ruling the rural areas, and youre starting to see rural areas rebel, the Coos County resident said. They dont have the same problems or logistics that we all have. Were tired of getting ruled by them. Taylor, who founded the Committee to Preserve the Second Amendment, a local political action committee, is working with counties across the state to put Second Amendment Preservation Ordinances on election ballots that would direct county officials not to use any resources to enforce federal or state gun laws. Law Enforcement Discretion Law enforcement officers have a great deal of discretion in how they do their daily jobs. If a sheriffs deputy pulls you over for speeding, for example, she can either write you a ticket or let you go with a warning. Law enforcement officials, busy and with limited resources, can focus their energies on laws that they think are most important, said George Mocsary, a professor at the Southern Illinois University School of Law. Rural officials may not prioritize the enforcement of gun laws they think are more relevant to big cities, he said. But counties were created by state governments, so they are bound by state laws, SUNY Cortlands Spitzer said. And as the countys top law enforcement officer, sheriffs should be enforcing those laws. State attorneys general have made that clear in recent weeks, threatening sheriffs who have said they would not enforce new state gun laws. In February, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, wrote an open letter to law enforcement officials who said they would not enforce a new state law approved by voters that implements restrictions on semi-automatic weapons and expands background checks. Ferguson said they could be held liable if someone is harmed because of their failure to enforce these regulations. But holding a sheriff liable is a fantasy, said Mocsary, citing two cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement officials were not liable for harm caused by their failure to enforce a law. Similarly, counties that reject state laws are following the same precedent of cities that have declared themselves to be sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants not to mention states that have legalized marijuana in defiance of federal law. David Chipman, a senior policy adviser at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said sheriffs cant pick and choose which laws to enforce. The center is a gun control organization co-founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Democrat who survived a 2011 shooting. During his 25 years as a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Chipman said it was his duty to make arrests based on the law, whether he agreed with it or not. Despite previous Supreme Court rulings, Chipman said a sheriff in a red-flag state who refused to carry out a court order to seize somebodys weapons would be in a tight spot if anybody got hurt. The oath doesnt make us lose our First Amendment rights to speak against laws we support or dont, he said. But if people dont serve their independent roles in the judicial system, it can become unjust. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2019/04/02/gun-rights-counties-vow-to-resist-new-restrictions Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Robert Muellers failure to establish a criminal conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russian government has set off a wave of revisionist attacks from both the right and the far left. Even though the full details of Muellers report remain secret, Trumps defenders insist that it has negated not only the wild hopes that Trump might be removed from his job through prosecutorial means but over two years worth of reporting on his suspect relations with Moscow. I am not a reporter and have not broken any of the stories Trumps defenders are now trying to discredit. But I did write a long feature last summer tying together the body of reporting as it stood at the time into a narrative exploring the Trump-Russia relationship. That story placed me among Trumps targets for revenge. But just as Trumps defenders barely managed to discredit any of the reporting on the Russia scandal, they have not debunked the major conclusions in that piece. Having reread it in light of the ten months worth of revelations that have followed, I believe the story holds up extremely well. Indeed, subsequent events have vindicated its most important predictions and claims. The story argued that the breadth and depth of connections between Trump and Russia suggested the scandal was probably worse than most reporters and pundits perceived at the time. The media was giving too much weight to the unlikely outcomes on one side of the distribution that Trumps relationship with Russia was completely innocent and discounting unlikely outcomes on the other side that Trump was very deeply compromised. The media has treated the notion that Russia has personally compromised the president of the United States as something close to a kook theory, I wrote. The most likely possibility, I proposed, was that Russia was exerting some kind of hidden leverage over Trump. The conclusion has proven completely correct. We now know that during the campaign, Trump was pursuing a building deal in Russia worth several hundred million dollars in profit, according to an indictment by Robert Mueller that Trump has not disputed. This deal created two forms of secret leverage for Vladimir Putin. First, the money was a powerful incentive for Trump to stay in Putins good graces. And second, since Trump was publicly denying that he had any dealings with Russia, Putin had access to secret information that he could use to embarrass Trump if he so desired. A recent wave of criticisms of this story replicated the theme of the original pushback, which is an accusation that the story calls Trump a Russian agent. The story does not make such a charge, which would be a ridiculous and totally implausible thing to believe. Some critics have also seized on a chart that accompanied the story. I didnt see the chart until the story was published, and I assume its intent was a somewhat playful treatment of the subject matter, though its fair to conclude that the irony was lost on most readers. In any case, the decorative art has no bearing on my argument. To be fair, while my piece did not promote the Russian agent fantasy, it has gained some currency on social media. But to try to understand Trump in these terms is to fall for a spy-fiction-level analysis of how Russian intelligence works. A wide array of counterintelligence experts have explained that Russia really does make a concerted effort to compromise foreign dignitaries in politics and business. But the process is subtle, often affable on the surface, sometimes resorting to outright blackmail but more commonly using greed and persuasion as levers. I likened the relationship between Trump and the Kremlin to the sorts of covert ties Russia has formed with right-wing politicians in other Western countries. The data we have seen since my story ran has largely bolstered its conclusion. Shortly after the piece ran, Trump flew to Helsinki and appeared strikingly and uncharacteristically submissive alongside Putin. The Washington Post reported that Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his meetings with Putin secret from his own government, barring national-security experts and even personally confiscating notes on one discussion. Trump also made a series of oddly Russophilic comments, ranging from repeated attacks on NATO to calling Montenegro a very aggressive people who might attack Russia to justifying the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In my story, I wrote, It is possible that the current list of known campaign contacts accounts for most, or even all, of the direct cooperation. But that is hardly a safe assumption. Indeed, Muellers indictments since then have added more incriminating evidence. Mueller found that Roger Stone was coordinating with WikiLeaks to exploit the value of Russias email hack, and that Paul Manafort passed detailed polling data on to a suspected Russian intelligence asset. (Neither man has cooperated with Mueller, and both appear to be banking on presidential pardons, a fact pattern that hardly puts all suspicions about their activity to rest.) Some of the potential links I noted appear less probable today. A suspicious server that might have been used to transmit campaign data was reported on inconclusively by The Atlantics Franklin Foer and The New Yorkers Dexter Filkins. The fact that Mueller has not filed any indictments related to the server, which would seem to create an avenue for a conspiracy charge, reduces the probability that it played any important role in the campaign. Likewise, my story cited a McClatchy report that Mueller obtained evidence that Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 campaign, but Cohens recent testimony to the contrary renders that prospect exceedingly remote. The most dramatic possibility I mentioned in the story, which has also been the subject of the widest ridicule, is the possibility that the Russian compromising of Trump dates back to 1987. This was not my main thesis, but it was a possibility, a small but real chance 10 percent? 20 percent?, as I put it at the time. The facts I cited, in sum, were that Trump held a few meetings with Soviet officials, traveled to Moscow, discussed the possibility of building a tower there, and shortly thereafter began attacking American allies and discussing a presidential campaign, neither of which he had done previously. I still think Soviet intelligence was probably just sniffing around Trump back then, and didnt gain any real inroads until probably the 2000s, when his business became heavily reliant on Russian funding. But nothing we have learned since last summer has made this unlikely-but-not-impossible scenario any less likely. Indeed, there is one development that gives it more credence: The now-confirmed fact that Trump was pursuing a deal to build a tower in Moscow during the campaign. Russia was floating a Moscow tower deal at the time Trump explored his first campaign, in 1988, and also floated a Moscow tower deal when he ran in 2016. We know Russia dangles lucrative business deals in front of foreign politicians as a foreign-policy tactic. (Russian influence scandals have popped up in Britain, France, Ukraine, and most recently in Italy, as well as elsewhere.) The pattern usually involves Russians luring foreign partners with surefire-profit business deals involving things like gold or silver mines or diesel fuel. Trumps cant-miss deal was a tower. Maybe the 1987 iteration of the tower deal was nothing more than a straight-up business arrangement, and only by 2015 did it morph into a pretext to slip a fortune to an American presidential candidate. Maybe not. Since my storys publication, a great deal of information has confirmed and fleshed out its thesis that Trumps relationship with Russia has compromised him. The New York Times reported in January that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trumps relations with Russia. The headline of that story read, F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia. That is to say, the FBI was investigating the exact same scenario I posited in my story. And while we know Mueller has not found enough evidence to charge Trump with a criminal conspiracy, the results of the counterintelligence probe have yet to be disclosed. In the meantime, Trumps defenders have seized upon the absence of criminal conspiracy charges to wish out of existence a massive trove of un-rebutted facts. Some of these defenders are the very people who have promoted claims that actually have been discredited like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbis skepticism that Russia hacked the DNC, or the various right-wing water-carriers for Devin Nuness crazed conspiracy theories. The story I wrote last year was ahead of the interpretive curve but very much in line with the known facts. At that time, all the dots pointed to the likelihood of a hidden, corrupt relationship between Trump and Russia. By now, we know this once a dark possibility to be true. Khartoum (AFP) - Sudanese police seized 15 tonnes of hashish in Omdurman, the twin city of capital Khartoum, in one of the biggest hauls reported in recent years, state media reported Tuesday. The operation that also saw police seize 80 million meth pills occurred in a western part of Omdurman on Monday, General Hussein Nafia, chief of anti-narcotics police, told the official SUNA news agency. "It's one of the biggest hauls in the country. This is the work of an international network," he said, without saying if any arrests had been made. Sudanese Prime Minister Mohamed Tahir Eila on Tuesday visited a police building in Khartoum where the seized drugs were put on display. The latest drugs bust is the biggest in the country since 2017 when 19 million tonnes of hashish was discovered in conflict-wracked Darfur. In recent years the Sudanese media have regularly reported security forces seizing hashish and other narcotics. Officials have acknowledged an overall rise in drug trafficking and consumption across the country over the past few years, especially among young people. The regulatory guidelines for Bitcoin in Switzerland are currently being adapted. The revised regulation should help bring stability in an otherwise notoriously volatile space. Switzerland has rapidly been cementing itself as one of Europes most technologically advanced nations it even has its own Silicon Valley known as Crypto Valley. Adapting regulation is a vital part in promoting mainstream adoption for crypto and blockchain. Without revised regulatory guidelines, companies and projects do not have room to grow. In this article, we discuss how Switzerland is adapting its regulation on cryptocurrency. Bitcoin in Switzerland In March 2019, Switzerlands federal assembly the federal legislature of the Swiss parliament approved a motion to relax its regulation on crypto. The motion was passed by 99 votes to 83, with a further 10 members opting to abstain from voting. The motion requests that the federal council adapt the provisions on procedural investments of the judicial and administrative authorities so that they can be applied to crypto. Members of the assembly argued that Switzerland needed to close the gap in terms of protection against crypto abuse. Their case centred on the premise that in a decentralised, peer-to-peer network, anybody could obtain crypto. By default, people with ill intentions could then use this as a window to commit illicit activities such as extortion or money laundering. It is Switzerlands hope that by adapting existing laws and regulations, clarifications will be made regarding crypto trading platforms and whether they should be subject to regulation by financial watchdog the Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA). FINMA guidelines Back in December 2018, FINMA published a set of guidelines for fintech companies. It was announced that from 2019 onward, interested parties can apply for a new fintech licence which is granted by FINMA. The guidelines published had the aim of simplifying the licence application process. Story continues The announcement read: To boost innovative financial companies, the Swiss parliament has introduced the new fintech licence a licence with relaxed requirements. The fintech licence allows institutions to accept public deposits of up to 100 million Swiss francs on the condition that the public deposits are not invested and no interest is paid on them. An additional requirement is that an institution with a fintech licence must have its registered office and conduct its business activities in Switzerland and cannot be based in another country. FINMA will be supervising institutions who obtain the licence. Interested parties also have the opportunity to present their project to FINMA in a meeting ahead of submitting their application. The simplified requirements will be fleshed out by amendments to the Banking Ordinance, the Auditor Oversight Ordinance, and the FINMA Fees and Charges Ordinance. This process began on January 1, 2019. Exchange-traded product (ETP) In late 2018, Switzerlands main stock exchange gave the green light for the worlds first cryptocurrency exchange-traded product (ETP). The Amun Crypto Basket ETP encompasses multiple cryptocurrencies and was first made available for trading on the Six exchange based in Zurich. It was designed to track an index based on the price movements of the top five crypto projects. Back when it was introduced, this meant just slightly under half of the ETPs assets were invested in Bitcoin, with the remainder being divided between XRP, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. The ETP was believed to carry an annual management fee of 2.5%. The ETP ticker (the abbreviated name for an asset, such as BTC for Bitcoin) is HODL, which is a nod to a popular phrase in the crypto space hold on for dear life. The move was particularly interesting considering the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) in the USA has been regularly rejecting exchange-traded fund (ETF) proposals. For example, back in the summer of 2018, the Winklevoss twins had an ETF rejected for their Gemini exchange by the SEC. This marked their second attempt at getting an ETF accepted, which would have been the first-ever crypto ETF on a regulated exchange. Switzerland adopting a crypto ETP marked a significant step toward cementing itself as a leader in crypto regulation. Interested in reading more Switzerland-related crypto news? Discover how Swiss private bank Julius Baer has partnered with SEBA to launch crypto services in 2019. The post How Switzerland is adapting its regulation on cryptocurrency appeared first on Coin Rivet. By Panu Wongcha-um BANGKOK, April 2 (Reuters) - Thailand's army chief on Tuesday warned against protests after a disputed election, invoking the revered monarchy and castigating people he said "distort" democracy. His words were the latest in a series of signals from the military and royalist establishment against opposition parties loyal to ousted ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra. The inconclusive results to the March 24 election, pitting the party of the junta leader against an opposition alliance, have seen both the pro-army Palang Pracharat party and the opposition claim victory. Final results may not be clear for weeks. General Apirat Kongsompong said the military would remain neutral in the election, in which his predecessor as army chief, Prayuth Chan-ocha, is seeking to stay in power as an elected prime minister, five years after he seized power in a coup. "General Prayuth has to be on his own path and the army has to step back," Apirat said. "We cannot get involved in politics." At the same time, Apirat made clear the military would not allow a repeat of past mass street demonstrations in which both supporters and opponents of Thaksin paralyzed Bangkok for months on end. "I cannot let Thais settle their differences on the streets anymore," Apirat told reporters, adding that both the eventual winners and losers in the election must settle their differences in parliament. He also had harsh words for politicians he said "distort" democratic principles to make them incompatible with Thai culture that reveres the king above all else, a clear reference to Thaksin's party and its allies. "This is not right," Apirat said of such politicians. "Thailand is a democracy with the king as the head of state." Thaksin-loyal parties have won every election since 2001, even after he was ousted in a 2006 coup. Thaksin has remained an influential political figure despite having lived in self-imposed exile since he fled Thailand in 2008 to escape a corruption trial that he said was politically motivated. Story continues Last week, six other parties joined with the pro-Thaksin Pheu Thai party in a "democratic front" alliance, which they claim will gain enough seats in parliament to try to form a government and block Prayuth from staying in power. "People should accept winning and losing," Apirat said. "Instead, they constructed a democratic side and a dictatorship side, which is not right. We are all Thais." The army chief also alluded to an election-eve statement from King Maha Vajiralongkorn, telling reporters on Tuesday "we must choose good people to govern so that bad people don't have power." King Vajiralongkorn's unexpected statement on March 23, which broke from his late father's practiced silence on politics, mentioned "good" and "bad" people but did not specify any one party or politician. However, less than a week after the vote, the king issued an official command that stripped Thaksin of all royal honors and decorations he had been given. The king's command came on the heels of military moves to discredit Thaksin. Last week the military said that Thaksin has acted "dishonorably" and stripped him from a pre-cadet school's achievement award as well as deleting his name from the school's hall of fame. (Writing by Kay Johnson; Editing by Nick Macfie) By Lesley Wroughton and David Brunnstrom WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three of eight countries granted waivers by Washington to import oil from Iran have now cut the imports to zero, a U.S. official said on Tuesday, adding that improved global oil market conditions would help reduce Iranian crude exports further. The United States reimposed sanctions on Iran after President Donald Trump last May withdrew the country from a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and several world powers, accusing it of supporting terrorism and conflicts in Syria and Yemen. While the United States has set a goal of completely halting Iran's oil exports, it granted temporary import waivers to China, India, Greece, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey and South Korea to ensure low oil prices and no disruption to the global oil market. The Trump administration is currently in consultations with the countries ahead of a May 2 deadline when the waivers expire. "In November, we granted eight oil waivers to avoid a spike in the price of oil. I can confirm today three of those importers are now at zero," Brian Hook, the special U.S. envoy for Iran, told reporters. Hook did not identify the three countries. "There are better market conditions for us to accelerate our path to zero," Hook said. "We are not looking to grant any waivers or exceptions to our sanctions regime." Hook said U.S. oil sanctions against Iran removed about 1.5 million barrels of Iranian oil exports off the market since May 2018. "This has denied the regime access to well over $10 billion in (oil) revenue - a loss of at least $30 million a day," he said. Oil prices on Tuesday hit their highest level so far in 2019, with Brent crude approaching $70 a barrel on the prospect that more sanctions against Iran and Venezuelan disruptions could deepen an OPEC-led supply cut. Analysts believe the administration is likely to extend the waivers to the remaining five countries to placate top buyers China and India and to decrease the chance of higher oil prices. China, India, Japan, South Korea and Turkey are likely to be given waivers that could cap Iran's crude oil exports at about 1.1 million barrels per day, U.S.-based analysts at Eurasia Group said in January. That would remove Italy, Greece and Taiwan from the waivers list. Hook said a decision on whether to extend the waivers would be made "in due course." A total of 23 countries that once imported Iran oil had cut imports to zero, he added. "With oil prices actually lower than they were when we announced our sanctions and global production stable, we are on the fast track to zeroing out all purchases of Iranian crude," Hook said. A senior Trump administration official told reporters on Monday that the U.S. government was considering additional sanctions against Iran that would target areas of its economy that have not been hit before. Hook said more than 26 rounds of U.S. sanctions against Iran had restricted the country's cash flow and constrained its ability to operate in the region. Earlier on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran's government of mismanagement that has led to devastating flooding across the country. At least 47 people have been killed in the past two weeks from flash floods. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and David Brunnstrom; editing by Tom Brown and Rosalba O'Brien) Two police cars have been written off after they were set alight outside Goldthorpe police station, in South Yorkshire. Three men have been arrested in connection with the incident. (SWNS) Three people have been arrested after cop cars were torched outside a police station in Barnsley. South Yorkshire Police said two men and a teenage boy were arrested after the cars were set alight outside Goldthorpe Police station at around 2.10am on Monday. The flames had also caused some damage to the police station walls and a council van. The men from Barnsley, aged 35, 33 and 18, were arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage and arson and remain in custody. Read more from Yahoo News UK: Blue Planet Live viewers stunned after baby turtle snatched by seagull Brave window cleaners work 900ft above street level Dead whale had 22kg of plastic in its stomach Chief Inspector Mark James, from Barnsley police, said: This reckless incident has left two operational police cars extensively damaged and behaviour like this will not be tolerated. Thankfully, no one was injured but the fire has also caused damage to the side of the police station and a council van. Officers worked quickly after the incident to carry out enquiries and these enquiries are continuing today. Id like to ask anyone who saw what happened, or who has any information, to contact us on 101, quoting incident number 56 of 1 April 2019. You can also pass information to Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is an abusive ex-boyfriend with a gun? Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images In the United States today, a man convicted of physically abusing his spouse, ex-spouse, live-in lover, or co-parent does not have the right to own a firearm. A man convicted of assaulting his casual dating partner or stalking him or her, after they break up however, can carry on owning as many AR-15s as his heart desires. (The same, of course, holds for abusers of all genders). Congressional Democrats want to change that. And not without reason. Women in abusive relationships are five times more likely to be murdered by their partner if he (or, in rare cases, she) owns a firearm. About half of all female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners and about half of intimate partner homicides are committed by casual dating partners. The fact that federal law bars abusive husbands but not abusive boyfriends from owning guns has no criminological justification. Thus, Nancy Pelosis caucus wants to use Congresss pending reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act as an opportunity to close the boyfriend loophole, by adding language that would bar abusive dating partners and stalkers from purchasing firearms. But the National Rifle Association is rallying to the defense of the little guy (who stalks his ex-girlfriends and stockpiles deadly weapons). As the New York Times reports: Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the N.R.A., said that for many of those offenses and Im using air quotes here the behavior that would qualify as a stalking offense is often not violent or threatening; it involves no personal contact whatsoever. She argues that the new provision is too broad and ripe for abuse. Like if you were sending harassing messages to somebody on Facebook, to somebody you never met or somebody you dated five years ago, she said, adding, How its written right now, you could be convicted for a misdemeanor stalking offense for a tweet that causes someone emotional distress and then you would be prohibited from owning a firearm. This is an improbable claim. According to the Justice Department, stalking is defined as a course of conduct directed at a specific person that involves repeated (two or more occasions) visual or physical proximity, nonconsensual communication, or verbal, written, or implied threats, or a combination thereof, that would cause a reasonable person fear. Overzealous prosecutors certainly exist in the U.S. But the likelihood of a district attorneys office using a single, emotionally distressing tweet as the basis for a stalking conviction and winning seems low, at best. More critically, the costs of restricting the gun rights of men (or women) who Facebook-harass their partners but dont stalk them in the conventional sense of the term seem considerably lower than those of allowing abusive dating partners to continue carrying firearms. In the first case, people lose the freedom to own a toy (that will drastically increase their risk of dying by suicide). In the latter case, many women will lose their lives. Nevertheless, the NRA feels compelled to fight for the right of creepy reply guys to own deadly weapons. The gun lobby currently sees itself as besieged, and wishes to make a show of strength by defeating the boyfriend loophole in the Senate. Whether a Republican Party thats already hemorrhaging support among female voters will rally to the cause of stalkers rights is unclear. Last week, the GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on red flag laws provisions that allow courts to take guns away from individuals who are guilty of nothing save giving a family member or police officer reason to believe they are a threat to themselves or others. Donald Trump endorsed such laws last year, shortly after the massacre in Parkland, Florida. Take the firearms first and then go to court, Trump said during a televised meeting with lawmakers, because a lot of times, by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court to get the due process procedures. I like taking the guns early. Trump may well cave to NRA pressure. But the government should seize the guns of dangerous individuals unless said individuals have been convicted of stalking or abusing their girlfriends, does not seem like a politically optimal position for the president to take. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! Many investors are still learning about the various metrics that can be useful when analysing a stock. This article is for those who would like to learn about Return On Equity (ROE). By way of learning-by-doing, we'll look at ROE to gain a better understanding of Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings Limited (HKG:1312). Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings has a ROE of 3.7%, based on the last twelve months. Another way to think of that is that for every HK$1 worth of equity in the company, it was able to earn HK$0.037. See our latest analysis for Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings How Do You Calculate Return On Equity? The formula for ROE is: Return on Equity = Net Profit Shareholders' Equity Or for Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings: 3.7% = HK$32m HK$1.9b (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2018.) Most readers would understand what net profit is, but its worth explaining the concept of shareholders equity. It is the capital paid in by shareholders, plus any retained earnings. Shareholders' equity can be calculated by subtracting the total liabilities of the company from the total assets of the company. What Does ROE Signify? ROE measures a company's profitability against the profit it retains, and any outside investments. The 'return' is the yearly profit. That means that the higher the ROE, the more profitable the company is. So, as a general rule, a high ROE is a good thing. That means it can be interesting to compare the ROE of different companies. Does Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings Have A Good Return On Equity? Arguably the easiest way to assess company's ROE is to compare it with the average in its industry. Importantly, this is far from a perfect measure, because companies differ significantly within the same industry classification. As shown in the graphic below, Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings has a lower ROE than the average (13%) in the Basic Materials industry classification. Story continues SEHK:1312 Past Revenue and Net Income, April 2nd 2019 That certainly isn't ideal. We prefer it when the ROE of a company is above the industry average, but it's not the be-all and end-all if it is lower. Nonetheless, it could be useful to double-check if insiders have sold shares recently. The Importance Of Debt To Return On Equity Virtually all companies need money to invest in the business, to grow profits. That cash can come from issuing shares, retained earnings, or debt. In the case of the first and second options, the ROE will reflect this use of cash, for growth. In the latter case, the debt used for growth will improve returns, but won't affect the total equity. In this manner the use of debt will boost ROE, even though the core economics of the business stay the same. Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings's Debt And Its 3.7% ROE While Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings does have some debt, with debt to equity of just 0.29, we wouldn't say debt is excessive. Its ROE is quite low, and the company already has some debt, so surely shareholders are hoping for an improvement. Careful use of debt to boost returns is often very good for shareholders. However, it could reduce the company's ability to take advantage of future opportunities. The Bottom Line On ROE Return on equity is useful for comparing the quality of different businesses. Companies that can achieve high returns on equity without too much debt are generally of good quality. If two companies have around the same level of debt to equity, and one has a higher ROE, I'd generally prefer the one with higher ROE. But ROE is just one piece of a bigger puzzle, since high quality businesses often trade on high multiples of earnings. Profit growth rates, versus the expectations reflected in the price of the stock, are a particularly important to consider. So I think it may be worth checking this free this detailed graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow . Of course Tongfang Kontafarma Holdings may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of other companies that have high ROE and low debt. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. New legislation to tighten New Zealand gun laws in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings drew overwhelming support when it was introduced to parliament on Tuesday. Lawmakers voted 119-1 in favour of the bill, which bans military-style semi-automatic (MSSA) rifles like those used in the March 15 rampage by a white supremacist which claimed 50 lives. Police Minister Stuart Nash said the attack by accused gunman Brenton Tarrant showed current firearms restrictions were inadequate. "Far too many people in this country have access to these dangerous firearms for no legitimate purpose, but at significant risk to the public," he said. The sole holdout against the legislation was David Seymour, a conservative whose ACT Party has a single seat in parliament. Seymour criticised the speed with which his colleagues were handling the legislation, fast-tracking a process that usually takes months so that the law will take effect by the end of next week. "It is important that we maintain our tradition of sober, robust law-making at all times, but especially now," he said in a statement. "The best way to show defiance in the face of terrorism is to refuse to erode our democratic institutions." Seymour had intended to try to stall the legislation in parliament but missed his chance when he arrived in the chamber late after spending too long explaining his plan to media. - 'Compelled to act quickly' - Nash was unapologetic about the hurried timetable for outlawing MSSAs, which will see the ban put to the vote twice more before it would formally become law. "We don't ever want to see an attack like this in our country again," he said. "We are compelled to act quickly." Further curbs -- potentially including a gun register, tighter vetting and stricter gun storage rules -- are set to be passed by the end of the year. New Zealand has about 1.5 million privately owned firearms, or 0.3 per person, including an estimated 13,500 MSSAs Story continues The government has also said it will review laws dealing with hate speech. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, widely praised for her compassionate and decisive leadership following the Islamophobic attack, has also called for action by social media giants after the alleged gunman livestreamed the atrocity online. She has also ordered a judicial inquiry into whether intelligence services could have prevented the attack. Nash said the largest criminal investigation in New Zealand's history was now probing the country's worst mass shooting. "Dozens of specialist police investigators, supported by Australian federal and state police, are following up concerns about a number of high-risk individuals," he told parliament. "As we meet today, a number of people are before the courts for trying to promote hateful publications and videos of death; for unlawfully possessing weapons; for making threats against our citizens, and, for murder." Tarrant was apprehended soon after his killing spree and the 28-year-old Australian is due to appear in Christchurch High Court on Friday via video link from an Auckland prison. (This April 1 story corrects the full name of OLED in paragraph 2) TOKYO (Reuters) - Apple supplier Japan Display Inc said on Monday it aims to raise as much as $990 million in new financing as early as this week, sending shares of the struggling manufacturer sharply higher. Japan Display, one of the world's top vendors of liquid crystal display (LCD) panels used in iPhones, has been battered by Apple's shifting fortunes. It has been particularly hurt by a slowdown in iPhone sales and a proliferation of new models that use newer, organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). Japan Display said it is aiming for a total capital increase of 110 billion yen ($990 million). As much as 80 billion yen of that would be through issuance of stocks and bonds to external investors, an agreement it aimed to reach this week, it said. It did not name the external investors, although two sources with direct knowledge of the matter had previously told Reuters it was looking to an investor group, led by China Silkroad Investment Capital, for a bailout. The remainder of the financing would come through preferred shares to refinance existing debt held by its largest shareholder, the state-backed INCJ Ltd, Japan Display said in its statement. Japan Display, formed in 2012 in a government-backedmerger of the ailing display units of Sony Corp,Toshiba Corp and Hitachi Ltd, flagged its fifth straight year of net losses in February. Shares of Japan Display rose as much as 16 percent in early trade on Monday and were up 13 percent at 78 yen as of 0211 GMT. (Reporting by Junko Fujita; Editing by David Dolan and Neil Fullick) By Yeganeh Torbati and Jose Gallego Espina WASHINGTON/SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The Trump administration is intensifying measures to curb the flow of Central American asylum seekers crossing into the United States from Mexico, officials said on Monday, including sending more people back to Mexico to wait for their asylum claims to be heard by U.S. courts. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency will speed up the reassignment of 750 officers to parts of the border dealing with the largest numbers of immigrants, a shift the administration first announced last week. Nielsen was cutting short a visit to Europe and flying back to Washington from London to personally oversee enforcement actions, and would visit the border later in the week, a Homeland Security official said late on Monday. She had been due to also travel to Sweden and take part in a meeting of G7 security officials in Paris. U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to close the border this week if Mexico does not stop a surge of people, often travelling as families from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Closing the border would potentially disrupt millions of legal border crossings and billions of dollars in trade. His aides doubled down on the threat on Sunday but offered no specific details or timeline. (Graphic: https://tmsnrt.rs/2CJe9fh) One policy put in place earlier this year to return asylum seekers to Mexico, called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), will be "immediately" expanded by "hundreds of additional migrants per day above current rates," Nielsen said in a statement on Monday. As of March 26, approximately 370 migrants had been returned to Mexico since the program began in late January, a Mexican official said last week. People who have been returned to Mexico to wait are struggling to find attorneys and receive notice of their proceedings in U.S. courts, rights advocates said. Story continues Trump administration officials say the MPP is a way to address the failings of the current system, which they claim encourages illegal immigration. Families that claim asylum are often released into the United States because of limits on how long children can be held in detention, allowing them to stay for years while their cases move through a backlogged immigration court system even though many claims are ultimately denied. SHELTERS AT CAPACITY The administration is hoping policies of deterrence will reduce the number of people who turn themselves in to U.S. border agents, overwhelming the capacity of processing centres along the southern border. CBP estimated last month that some 100,000 migrants would be apprehended or encountered at the border in March, the highest level in a decade, forcing agents to temporarily house migrants for processing in an outdoor enclosure under an international bridge in El Paso, Texas. That overflow site was shut down on Sunday after being used for a month. The total number of immigrants being released by U.S. immigration authorities in El Paso is averaging 500-600 per day, said Ruben Garcia, executive director of Annunciation House, which coordinates migrant releases with U.S. immigration authorities. Annunciation House is preparing for that total to rise to up to 1,100 during the current surge, Garcia said. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Monday that Mexico will help to regulate the flow of Central Americans passing through its territory to the United States. He said the root causes of the phenomenon must be tackled. In a move Democrats and Republicans in Congress have said would be counterproductive, the U.S. State Department cut aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador after Trump accused them, without providing evidence, of having "set up" migrant caravans and sending them north. The Mexican government did not respond to requests for comment about the expansion of MPP, and it was not clear to what extent Mexico was forewarned. In the past, Mexico has said it was accepting returned asylum seekers for humanitarian reasons although it opposes the policy. Shelters in major Mexican border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez are already at capacity because of the increase in asylum seekers in recent months and the U.S. policy of allowing only a few dozen people per day to ask for asylum at ports of entry. COURT HEARINGS Last week, San Diego immigration judge Scott Simpson heard from the first Central American families that were returned to Mexico under the MPP policy. Of four families in court on Wednesday, just one had an attorney. Yanira Esmeralda Chavez, a Salvadoran fruit seller, accompanied by her three boys did not have a lawyer as she made her case to Simpson. The family had been staying at a shelter in Tijuana, and asked to remain in the United States because they feared being sent back to Mexico. "I called the numbers on the attorney list that they provided me, but they said they cannot take my case because I am in Tijuana," Chavez said in the hearing. "It would be better if I stay in the U.S., where I have family members." Simpson gave Chavez two more months to obtain an attorney, and said that her family in the United States could perhaps help her find a lawyer. Throughout the day, Simpson expressed his concerns about the policy, saying he was "sceptical" about migrants getting their notices to appear in court, given the court does not have proper addresses for those returned to Mexico. (Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati and Jose Gallego Espina; additional reporting by Dave Graham, Sharay Angulo and Lizbeth Diaz in Mexico City, Andrew Hay in New Mexico and Julio-Cesar Chavez in El Paso; editing by Mica Rosenberg, Grant McCool and Lisa Shumaker) WASHINGTON President Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely stated his father was born in Germany the fourth time the president has made such a claim in less than a year. His father, Fred Trump, was born and raised in New York. The issue came up again on Tuesday when the president was discussing NATO and Germany needing to pay more as part of the alliance during a White House event with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The meeting took place amid tensions over Trump's attacks on the alliance, especially his claims that some countries don't contribute enough to mutual defense. "I mean, Germany, honestly, is not paying their fair share. I have great respect for Angela and I have great respect for their country," the president said of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "My father is German. Right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, and so I have a great feeling for Germany." WATCH: President Trump incorrectly says that his father was born in Germany https://t.co/ZeMdBprO7E pic.twitter.com/vq5YJFDQur The Hill (@thehill) April 2, 2019 But Fred Trump was not born in Germany. He was born in the Bronx in 1905. The president's grandparents, though, were both born in Europe and later immigrated to the U.S. According to a compilation of the president's remarks by the Washington Post and BuzzFeed, it's at least the fourth time President Trump has falsely stated where his parents were born, a topic that he has brought up while talking about relations and trade with Europe. The president made the claim on Fox News last year when discussing the trade issues in Europe and his administration's push for a new agreement. After blasting the European Union he added: "Now we also love the European Union, you know, I was there many many years ago, meaning my parents were born in the European Union." Story continues He echoed the claims again on CBS, saying "don't forget both my parents were born in the E.U. sectors," adding that "my mother was Scotland, my father was Germany. And you know I love those countries." The president again made the claims during a NATO summit in Belgium, telling the crowd that "my father is from Germany" and both of his parents were from the European Union. The White House did not respond to an inquiry about the repeated claims. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump, again, falsely says his father is from Germany. Fred Trump was born in New York President Donald Trump retreated from a threat to close the U.S. border with Mexico, saying he was still ready to do it but that the the Mexican government had begun stopping migrants from entering the U.S. Security is more important to me than trade, Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. Were going to have a strong border or were going to have a closed border. Trump added: Im totally prepared to do it. Were going to see what happens over the next few days. He said that he had cut off U.S. payments to Guatemala and Honduras on Monday, Central American countries that are the primary source of what the president says is a migration crisis at the U.S. border. Trump said in a tweet Friday that he would close the border this week because of a spike in undocumented migrants entering the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it apprehended more than 66,000 people in February, up from about 48,000 in January. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has said apprehensions would approach 100,000 in March. But the president said in a tweet earlier on Tuesday that the Mexican government is apprehending large numbers of people at their southern border. Its not clear whether Mexico changed any of its immigration practices since Trump most recently said he would close the border. Its a threat the president has periodically made, so far without following through. Mexico is the U.S.s third-largest trading partner, with about $616 billion in commerce annually between the two countries, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Closing the border would cause huge disruption to the U.S. agriculture and automobile industries, among many others. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress joined business groups in raising alarm about the economic impact on the U.S. of closing the border. A Trump administration shutdown of the U.S.-Mexico border would quickly spread across the economy, spiking fruit and vegetable prices, spawning food shortages, shutting production lines and throwing Americans out of work, at least temporarily. With thousands of trucks and trains and cars crossing the border each day, youd have huge backlogs, rotting produce and ripple effects across the supply chain, says Dan Griswold, senior research fellow and trade expert at George Mason University. The effect would be immediate and devastating for industry. President Donald Trump is threatening to close the border unless Mexico takes steps to stop a wave of migrant families, mostly fleeing Central American countries with high levels of poverty and violence, from reaching the U.S. border. The impact would be widespread because the supply chains of U.S. and Mexico are so tightly integrated and just in time inventory has manufacturers and retailers carrying limited stocks to reduce costs, Griswold says. Theater lines: 'Avengers: Endgame' tickets presale crashes AMC Theatres site, creates long Fandango waits Pricey pad: Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin buys $238 million condo in NYC, boosting prices With about $1.7 billion in goods crossing the border every day, the effects would dwarf the fallout from the 10% tariff Trump has slapped on more than $200 billion in imports from China, says Gary Hufbauer, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. This will be a real shock, Hufbauer says. Heres the big picture: The U.S. imported $346 billion in goods from Mexico last year and exported $265 billion in products to the country. Of the $611 billion in trade between the two countries, $502 billion crossed the border in trucks and trains last year, according to the Commerce Department. More than 13% of all U.S. imports come from Mexico, with some products making up an outsized share. Shipments from Mexico comprise more than a third of all auto and auto-part imports, nearly half of imported vegetables and 40% of imported fruits, according to the Peterson Institute and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Story continues Price cuts: Bye-bye, 'Whole Paycheck'? Amazon's Whole Foods Market cutting prices starting Wednesday Guac shortage? Want your avocados, tomatoes and berries? Trump shutdown of Mexico border could cause shortages Economywide, the effects would be far more punishing for Mexico, which could slip into recession, Hufbauer says. Border trade represents 37% of Mexicos gross domestic product compared with about 2% of U.S. GDP, according to Moodys Analytics. Economist Hoyt Bleakley of the University of Michigan likened a brief shutdown of a few days or a week to a blizzard that does little damage to the economy as shippers rapidly catch up. Even a prolonged shutdown that lasts a few months would likely shave quarterly U.S. economic growth by just two-tenths of a percentage point, still fairly modest, Hufbauer says. A shutdown, he says, could have broader effects by hurting business confidence. About 5 million American jobs depend on border trade, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Here are the potential effects on consumers and businesses: Automakers in the crosshairs A border shutdown would be devastating to American auto companies, their workers, auto parts suppliers and regional economies throughout the Midwest, Texas and California, industry experts said Tuesday. Not only do parts come into the U.S. from Mexico, but 37% of U.S. parts are exported to Mexico, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A disruption in the supply chain risks shutting down factories and bigger production operations that cant easily restart. It affects hundreds of thousands of people immediately, she said. We have seen Mexico earthquakes, coastal labor disputes at ports of entries and tsunamis. All pale in comparison to the impact a prolonged border shutdown would have on suppliers, dealers and industry employees, said Jeoff Burris, founder of Plymouth, Michigan-based Advanced Purchasing Dynamics, a supply chain consultant to auto suppliers primarily in North America. What is imported from Mexico has grown over the years from labor-intensive items like wire harnesses and cut-and-sown seat covers to almost every type of automotive component, including engines, axles and transmissions. A shutdown would be disastrous for hundreds if not thousands of suppliers on both sides of the border, Burris said. Moreover, the impact of shutting down the border would be almost immediate, and would be of a magnitude that would make it difficult and expensive to develop alternatives for moving product, he said. Very simply, Dziczek said, a border shutdown would shut down all U.S. auto manufacturing within a week and crash the economy. This will impact anyone who buys anything at a supermarket, has a job in manufacturing or distribution, has a family member or loved one who works in those areas or is worried about the U.S. economy not being tipped into a recession," said economic analyst Jon Gabrielsen, who advises the auto industry and suppliers. I dont know why were talking about avocados & strawberries (as much as I love both), when the whole flipping auto industry could be shut down in a matter of days if we close the US-Mexico border. https://t.co/qUETFqi3gT Kristin Dziczek (@kdziczek) April 2, 2019 Where are my fruits and vegetables? Its going to be insanity, said Phil Lempert, founder of supermarketguru.com, which tracks industry news and trends. Mexico is the top supplier of fruits and vegetables to the U.S., with $13 billion imported from the country last year. A border shutdown would be felt at American dinner tables almost immediately because fresh produce can't be warehoused for more than a few days, says Scott Vandervoet, whose family owns Vandervoet and Associates, a Nogales, Arizona, business that sells and markets produce imported from Mexico. "There is no standing inventory of fresh produce because it's perishable," Vandervoet said, "You aren't dealing with flat screens or sneakers. So I think the effects for the consumer would be felt immediately. " Most affected would be avocados. The shortage would be acute because of a recent multi-state avocado recall, a planting season that hasnt even begun in California and forecasts predicting a weak growing season. If the border is shut, we have about three weeks worth of avocados in the U.S., Lempert says. Forget about avocado toast and guacamole. Avocados and tomatoes would begin to disappear from store shelves within days. Blueberries, raspberries and strawberries also could be scarce, though Lempert said a berry shortage could be mitigated with imports from Chile and domestic production. Ground beef might also be in short supply. He anticipated a price hike of at least 10%. If the U.S. closes the border, there are other ways to transport foods from Mexico, but theyre slower and not as efficient. That means companies will charge consumers more. Prices for tomatoes, berries and tequila could jump 50% or more in some cases, and the cost of Mexican booze could rise as much as 20%, says Phil Flynn, senior analyst with the Chicago-based Price Futures Group. Grapes and mangoes may also cost more. It may take at least a couple of months for some prices to reach those levels. Food price hikes aren't limited to supermarkets. If you like guacamole, that will either become more expensive or will drop off menus, says Jennifer Bartashus, senior analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. It might be something that you have to ask for. Its still free but not given to you. The next phase is an upcharge. Border cities are vulnerable A border shutdown also would cripple the produce industry in border cities such as Nogales, Arizona, where 60% of winter vegetables imported from Mexico pass through the port daily headed for U.S. grocery stores and restaurants. "Any sort of protracted delay would be disastrous. Even a one-day closure would be devastating," said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, a Nogales-based trade group that represents businesses that grow, import and distribute produce from Mexico. To ensure produce is delivered fresh to grocery stores, distribution companies only warehouse about two or three days worth of inventory.The companies would be forced to lay off workers "because there is simply no work for them to do," which would, in turn, hurt the local economy, Jungmeyer said. "As those employees are laid off, they would not be able to go to the stores, and those companies would also suffer." On a daily basis, 1,200 trucks carrying on average 40,000 pounds of produce imported from Mexico pass through Nogales, Jungmeyer said. That's about 50 million pounds a day, he said. Del Campo Supreme, a tomato distribution company in Nogales, already is getting calls from U.S. supermarket chains worried that a border shutdown will affect the supply of tomatoes from Mexico, said Jim Munguia, the sales manager. Munguia is telling them if the shutdown only lasts a day, there will be no impact, but if the border shutdown drags on for more than a few days, the inventory will quickly dry up, because tomatoes from Mexico won't be able to get into the U.S., he said. In San Diego home of the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere just the threat of an extended border shutdown causes negative impacts, local economic experts told USA TODAY. When the San Ysidro port of entry was closed for about six hours in November of last year, retailers at the border lost more than $5 million in sales, Jason Wells the Executive Director of the San Ysidro Chamber of Commerce said. Local merchants would be hurt Mexicans regularly cross the border to go shopping, especially in the southern part of Arizona, before returning home. Border communities such as Nogales depend on sales taxes paid by Mexican shoppers as a key source of revenue. They often are the first to feel the impact of a decline in retail trade, and also feel it more heavily than other areas of the state. "Retailers in the U.S. border cities know how critical Mexican residents who cross the border and shop for food, clothing, auto parts, and other retail items on the American side are for their business revenues," wrote Vera Pavlakovich-Kochi, an associate professor of geography at the University of Arizona, in a February update. A true shutdown would imply nobody could traverse the border by car, bus, or on foot, heading either north or south. Arizona businesses such as hotels, restaurants and various stores could feel the pinch from a drop-off of foreign tourists. Americans seeking to hit the beach in Rocky Point or other Mexican vacation destinations also might need to adjust their itineraries. And perhaps more troublesome: How would Americans currently vacationing in Mexico return home, and vice versa? Contributing: Phoebe Wall Howard, Detroit Free Press; Daniel Gonzales, Russ Wiles and Rafael Carranza, Arizona Republic; Joel Shannon, John Fritze and Eliza Collins, USA Today This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: If Trump closes Mexican border, avocados could cost more and auto factories could shut Bloomberg during an exploratory trip to New Hampshire in January. Photo: Scott Eisen/Getty Images Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is reconsidering his decision to not seek the Democratic Partys nomination for president in 2020, according to Axios. The billionaire has reportedly been telling friends that he could join the crowded Democratic primary field if a centrist lane were to open up, Mike Allen writes. That would only happen if Joe Biden, who Bloomberg thinks attracts the same type of voters he would, doesnt get into the race. That possibility looks more real now that it has at any moment in the past six months. In recent days, Biden has faced criticism over inappropriately touching at least two women. Lucy Flores, a former Nevada lawmaker, wrote on the Cut about an incident in 2014 when Biden planted a big slow kiss on the back of her head. After Flores shared her story, Amy Lappos, a Connecticut woman who met Biden in 2009, shared her own encounter with him which she said crossed lines of decency and respect. Biden has denied ever intentionally acting inappropriately, but the womens stories have led to broader critique of his record. In a piece on the Cut, Joe Biden Isnt the Answer, Rebecca Traister called him a paternalistic lawmaker for whom it is perhaps easier to write legislation protecting women than it is to simply listen to, believe, and take seriously women, their stories of harassment, or their decisions about their own bodies and health care. While Bidens potential 2020 rivals arent calling for his head, some observers are. If the 76-year-old decides to sit out 2020, it appears theres a 77-year-old waiting in the wings to fill his shoes as the moderate grandfather. But unlike Biden, Bloomberg would enter the race after already declaring his intention not to run. On March 5, he wrote an op-ed that said he would forgo a presidential bid in order to launch a new initiative called Beyond Coal. Also unlike Biden, Bloomberg would join a crowded field as one of its most unpopular contestants. In a Morning Consult poll taken shortly before he announced hes not running, Bloomberg was the favorite of just 2 percent of Democratic voters. Compare that to the 33 percent (more than any other candidate or would-be candidate) that put Biden at the top of the heap. But as Democratic candidates report their fourth-quarter fundraising hauls, it also seems worth noting one distinct advantage Bloomberg would have over Biden and anyone else in the race: Hes worth $58 billion dollars. Washington (AFP) - Emboldened Democrats on Tuesday demanded Donald Trump's administration end its assault on the Affordable Care Act, after the US president said he would not seek to replace the health law until after next year's election. Trump thrust health care back into the spotlight last week when the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it was siding with a court ruling declaring the Barack Obama-era reforms unconstitutional. But late Monday Trump essentially punted away the problem of crafting a quick solution, after several Republicans warned that there was no coherent Obamacare replacement ready. A new Republican plan "will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare," Trump tweeted. "Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win back the House," he added. "It will be truly great HealthCare that will work for America." Trump's messaging essentially turns health care into a 2020 campaign issue. Democrats, sensing an opening, gathered on the steps outside the US Supreme Court to announce resolutions in the House and Senate calling for Trump and the DOJ to reverse their position. "The president has been trying to do away with the Affordable Care Act from day one," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, noting how the move would bump some 20 million people off their insurance and end protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump's position a "callous legal assault on Americans' health care," as he mocked the president for suddenly delaying his own plan. "Translation: They have no health-care plan," Schumer said. "What a ruse. What a shame. What a disgrace... The American people will not stand for the president playing cynical games with health care." The Justice Department had previously said it backed parts of Obamacare. But in its new position, it said it sided fully with the December ruling in a Texas federal court by Judge Reed O'Connor following a lawsuit brought by conservative states. Story continues That ruling is being appealed and the resulting impasse looks increasingly likely to end up in the Supreme Court -- putting a politically radioactive issue center stage in the middle of a heated presidential campaign. Democrats have stressed that dismantling Obamacare would end protections for people with pre-existing conditions and allow insurers to deny coverage to cancer patients, charge women more due to their gender, and raise rates on seniors. Trump caught fellow Republicans off guard when he pivoted to health care shortly after Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his report on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. Republicans overall showed little appetite to focus on the issue, particularly after the 2018 midterm elections when health care proved a winning campaign argument for Democrats. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was prepared to close the U.S. southern border if necessary but that Mexico has apprehended thousands of people in recent days and its actions have made a big difference in the immigration situation. Trump threatened on Friday to close the border with Mexico this week unless Mexico took steps to help the United States with illegal immigration, a move which had threatened to overload U.S. ports of entry in the region. The administration softened its tone on the issue on Tuesday, saying Mexico was taking greater responsibility for dealing with the immigration flows. "They have started to do a significant amount more. We've seen them take a larger number of individuals" and hold those who have asylum claims in Mexico while they are being processed in the United States, White House spokeswoman Sanders told reporters at the White House. "We've also seen them stop more people from coming across the border so that they aren't even entering into the United States. So those two things are certainly helpful and we'd like to see them continue," Sanders said. Trump hinted at a softening earlier in a Twitter post on Tuesday. "After many years (decades), Mexico is apprehending large numbers of people at their Southern Border, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador," he said. He also told reporters at the White House he was still prepared to do that if necessary but that Mexico had apprehended thousands of people in recent days, having a big impact on the border situation. (Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by David Alexander; Editing by Alistair Bell) The Republican mayor of El Paso, the largest American city on the US border with Mexico, has warned Donald Trump that if he goes ahead this week with his threat to close the border it would have a detrimental, almost draconian impact on the entire region. It would be a critical killer to us, frankly, the mayor, Dee Margo, said. In an interview with the Guardian at city hall, Margo reflected the views of a community that is now on tenterhooks over the US presidents next move. Trump began threatening last Friday morning that he would shut the border unless the Mexican authorities do more to block Central American asylum seekers from reaching the US. Related: US will run out of avocados in three weeks if Trump closes Mexico border Margo spoke in impassioned terms about the trepidation he was feeling about the threat. It would be a crippler. It would be exceptionally detrimental to our economy I shudder to think about it, he said. He added that it was difficult precisely to predict the impact on American families, given that such an event had never happened. But he said: If you cant cross the border to get to your job to earn money for your family, thats a problem. Margos stark warning carries additional weight in that he is a member of Trumps own party. The mayors grandchildren are fifth-generation El Pasoans. He said that as a sovereign nation, America needs border security and what he called a rational approach to immigration that would include some border fencing, increased personnel in the area, as well as comprehensive immigration reform for those undocumented immigrants already inside the US. Closing the border, he said, was not part of such a rational plan. From the Pacific coast of southern California to the Gulf of Mexico in eastern Texas, the US-Mexico border is almost 2,000 miles long and runs across scorching desert, desolate mountains, farmland, military ranges and wilderness, along river and gorge, and through towns and cities. Story continues Trump tweeted last Friday: If Mexico doesnt immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week. Commuters show their visa cards to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the Paso del Norte international bridge to cross into El Paso, Texas, on 1 April. Commuters show their visa cards to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the Paso del Norte international bridge to cross into El Paso, Texas, on Monday.Photograph: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters Margo rattled off key statistics showing the interconnected nature of the urban border economies, especially, his own El Paso at the western end of the Texas section of the border and its Mexican twin city directly across the large barrier that divides their downtown areas, Ciudad Juarez. Figures such as: Annual trade between the two cities amounts to $101bn a year. 23,000 pedestrians cross from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso to work every day. 50,000 residents of El Paso, and 115,000 in the wider region, cross into Mexico to work in the maquiladoras factories run by US firms that manufacture products then imported by the US. El Paso has been struggling in recent days with a surge of migrants applying for asylum, arriving from the depressed and crime-ravaged countries of Central America. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials prompted an outcry for detaining hundreds of migrants in the open air under the Paso del Norte international bridge that crosses the Rio Grande river into Ciudad Juarez. Related: Under the bridge: migrants held in El Paso tell of dust, cold and hunger Migrants held for days under the bridge described to the Guardian at the weekend having to sleep on the stony ground with only one thin, silvery Mylar emergency-type blanket to share with their children. They were cold and hungry, and many of their babies were sick. Margo told the Guardian that the treatment of those migrants was inhumane. But he said criticism should not be directed at the border protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) federal agents, but against both parties and houses in Congress, as well as Trump. The major problem is that theres been inaction on immigration for 30 years in Washington they lack intestinal fortitude to do whats needed, on both sides of the aisles and with presidential leadership. He added that the rhetoric from the White House about a possible border closure was exacerbating the current surge in migration from Central America. My supposition is that theres been a marketing thrust by the coyotes [people smugglers] in Central America to say: This is your last chance, the borders going to close, so hop on the bus and lets go. The result was that thousands of people from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador were making a quick rush to the border. I think the rhetoric coming out of Washington has the ability to control or exacerbate the situation and right now its not good. CBP ended on Sunday the practice of detaining people under the bridge and moved the remaining migrants to an undisclosed location. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a formal complaint about children being forced to sleep on the bare ground there, saying conditions were among the worst weve seen in recent history. Meanwhile Margo criticized Trumps insistence that building a wall solves the immigration issue. Even the Texas-Mexico border from El Paso in the west to Brownsville in the east runs close to 1,000 miles. A physical structure is part and parcel to border security, but its not the panacea. You cannot build a fence from El Paso to Brownsville, Texas it is a logistical impossibility because the terrain wont allow it and most of the land along the border is privately owned, he said. By Tom Polansek MALVERN, Iowa (Reuters) - The Black Hawk military helicopter flew over Iowa, giving a senior U.S. agriculture official and U.S. senator an eyeful of the flood damage below, where yellow corn from ruptured metal silos spilled out into the muddy water. And there's nothing the U.S. government can do about the millions of bushels of damaged crops here under current laws or disaster-aid programs, U.S. Agriculture Under Secretary Bill Northey told a Reuters reporter who joined the flight. The USDA has no mechanism to compensate farmers for damaged crops in storage, Northey said, a problem never before seen on this scale. That's in part because U.S. farmers have never stored so much of their harvests, after years of oversupplied markets, low prices and the latest blow of lost sales from the U.S. trade war with China - previously their biggest buyer of soybean exports. The USDA last year made $12 billion in aid available to farmers who suffered trade-war losses, without needing Congressional approval. The agency has separate programs that partially cover losses from cattle killed in natural disasters, compensate farmers who cannot plant crops due to weather, and help them remove debris left in fields after floods. But it has no program to cover the catastrophic and largely uninsured stored-crop losses from the widespread flooding, triggered by the "bomb cyclone" that hit the region in mid-March. Congress would have to pass legislation to address the harvests lost in the storm, according to Northey and a USDA statement to Reuters. "It's not traditionally been covered," he said. "But we've not usually had as many losses." Indigo Ag, an agriculture technology company, identified 832 on-farm storage bins within flooded Midwest areas. They hold an estimated 5 million to 10 million bushels of corn and soybeans - worth between $17.3 million to $34.6 million - that could have been damaged in the floods, the company told Reuters. Story continues Across the United States, farmers held soybean stocks of 2.716 billion bushels as of March 1, the largest on record for the time period, the USDA said on Friday. Corn stocks were the third-largest on record. Some Congress members have expressed interest in pursuing legislation to provide aid for damaged crops in storage, Northey said. But passing legislation could require a lengthy political process in the face of an urgent disaster, U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley told farmers at a meeting in Malvern, Iowa. "If we have to pass a bill to do it, I hate to tell you how long that takes," said the senator from Iowa, who joined Northey on the helicopter tour. With farm incomes declining for years before the flood, many farmers had planned to sell their grain in storage for money to live, pay their taxes or finance operations, including planting this spring. THROWING AWAY CROPS From the helicopter, piloted by National Guard members, officials surveyed miles of flooded fields in Iowa, littered with lawn chairs, fuel tanks, furniture, tires and other flood debris. Farmers will have to destroy any grains that were contaminated by floodwater, which could also prevent some growers from planting oversaturated fields. Near Crescent, Iowa, farmer Don Rief said the flood damaged more than 60,000 bushels of his grain, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He tried to move the crops before the flood, but dirt roads were too soft from the storm to support trucks. "We were just hurrying like hell," Rief said. "Hopefully USDA will come in and minimize some of the damage." The USDA does not have a program that covers flood-damaged grain because farmers have typically received more advance notice of rising waters, allowing them to move crops and limit losses, said Tom Vilsack, who ran the agency under former President Barack Obama. In this case, floods inundated fields quickly after multiple levees failed when rain and melting snow filled the Missouri River and other waterways. The frozen ground was unable to soak up the water. Near Percival, Iowa, railroad tracks leading up to a grain facility were flooded and broken. A Deere & Co dealership, Wendy's restaurant, Motel 6 and gas station nearby were also underwater, along with homes, cars and farm equipment. Some farmers moved machinery such as tractors on to highways to keep it out of the path of the floods. The equipment was still parked there during the flyover on Friday. DISASTER RELIEF 'GAP' About 416,000 acres of cropland across six counties in Iowa were flooded, said Amanda De Jong, state executive director for the USDA Iowa Farm Service Agency. Of that, about 309,000 acres will be eligible for the federal program that helps farmers and ranchers remove debris left by natural disasters on farmlands, De Jong said last week. She estimated the program would need about $34 million to clean up the fields. Iowa's agriculture secretary Mike Naig said the U.S. government also should help compensate farmers for some of the grain that was damaged. "This is clearly a gap that we think needs to be addressed," said Naig, who accompanied Grassley and Northey in the chopper. Time is short for a solution, said Carol Vinton, supervisor of Mills County, Iowa, one of the state's two most heavily damaged counties. Vinton said she was getting calls from farmers whose grain was damaged and are worried about making good on previously signed contracts to deliver those crops to elevators. The USDA wants to do everything it can to help farmers hurt by the disaster, Northey said. "They spent all last year raising that crop, putting it in the bin and they maybe already have it marketed," he said. "And now they're going to have to spend time just to get rid of it - just to clean the place up." (Reporting by Tom Polansek in Malvern, Iowa. Additional reporting by Mark Weinraub in Chicago; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Brian Thevenot) By Mike Stone and Humeyra Pamuk WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey, marking the first concrete U.S. step to block delivery of the jet to the NATO ally in light of Ankara's planned purchase of a Russian missile defense system. U.S. officials told their Turkish counterparts they will not receive further shipments of F-35 related equipment needed to prepare for the arrival of the stealthy jet, two sources familiar with the situation told Reuters on Monday. The Pentagon confirmed the Reuters report that the equipment delivery had been stopped. "Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey's F-35 operational capability have been suspended," Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mike Andrews, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has refused to back down from Ankara's planned purchase of a Russian S-400 missile defense system that the United States has said would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft. The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest of a series of diplomatic disputes between the United States and Turkey including Turkish demands that the United States extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria, and sanctions on Iran. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the next shipment of training equipment, and all subsequent shipments of F-35 related material, had been canceled. The aircraft is built by Lockheed Martin Corp. A Pentagon official had told Reuters in March that the United States had a number of items it could withhold in order to send Turkey a signal that the United States was serious about Ankara dropping its ambition to own the S-400. Turkish officials in Ankara were not immediately available for comment. Turkey has said it will take delivery of the S-400s in July. NATO SUMMIT The U.S. decision on the F-35s was expected to complicate Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu's visit to Washington this week for a NATO summit. On Sunday, Erdogan suffered one of his biggest electoral losses in decades in local elections. "Certain Russian weapon systems are seen as inherently threatening to the United States regardless of who is operating them and for what purpose," Andrew Hunter, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. "Because Turkey is not just an F-35 purchaser, but an industrial partner, blocking delivery of these systems represents a major escalation by the United States as it threatens to impose serious costs on both sides," Hunter said. Reuters reported last week that Washington was exploring whether it could remove Turkey from production of the F-35. Turkey makes parts of the fuselage, landing gear and cockpit displays. Sources familiar with the F-35's intricate worldwide production process and U.S. thinking on the issue last week said Turkey's role can be replaced. The United States and other NATO allies that own F-35s fear the radar on the Russian S-400 missile system will learn how to spot and track the jet, making it less able to evade Russian weapons. In an attempt to persuade Turkey to drop its plans to buy the S-400, the United States offered the pricier American-made Patriot anti-missile system in a discounted deal that expired at the end of March. Turkey has shown interest in the Patriot system, but not at the expense of abandoning the S-400. Turkey has engaged with U.S. negotiators in recent days about buying the Patriot system, a person familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity. The system is made by Raytheon Co. Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar in March said that despite some issues, Turkish pilots were continuing their training at an air base in Arizona on the F-35, each of which costs $90 million, and that Ankara was expecting the aircraft to arrive in Turkey in November. By halting jet deliveries, the Pentagon could subsequently delay training of Turkish pilots. Two additional jets are scheduled to arrive in Arizona in April and a significant delay could impact Turkey's November target date for operations. U.S. lawmakers also have expressed alarm over Turkey's planned purchase of the Russian system. Four U.S. senators last week introduced a bipartisan bill that would prohibit the transfer of F-35s to Turkey until the U.S. government certifies that Ankara will not take delivery of the S-400 system. Following news of the halt, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, one of the bill sponsors, said she was glad to hear the administration was "to delay the transfer of F-35 equipment to Turkey to help ensure U.S. military technology and capabilities cannot fall into the hands of the Kremlin." (Reporting by Mike Stone and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington; editing by Will Dunham, Howard Goller and Lisa Shumaker) By Michelle Nichols UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations atomic watchdog said on Tuesday that if a deal was reached with North Korea to give up its nuclear programme then it would be ready to send in inspectors within weeks - if asked - to verify and monitor denuclearisation. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano told the U.N. Security Council that the IAEA was the only international organization equipped to carry out the job "in an impartial, independent and objective manner." "Subject to the approval of our Board of Governors, we could respond within weeks to any request to send inspectors back to the DPRK," he told the 15-member council during a meeting on the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The official name of North Korea is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have met twice in the past year to discuss denuclearisation. North Korea is under tough U.N. Security Council sanctions that have been steadily tightened since 2006 to choke off funding for Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Trump and Kim last met in Vietnam in February, but the summit was cut short after they failed to reach a deal on the extent of economic sanctions relief for North Korea in exchange for steps to give up its nuclear program. On the day that their talks in Hanoi collapsed, Trump handed Kim a piece of paper that included a blunt call for the transfer of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States, according to the document seen by Reuters. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency has not had access to North Korea since Pyongyang expelled its inspectors in 2009, and it now monitors the country's nuclear activities mainly through satellite imagery. Amano said that sending in IAEA inspectors "would help to make the implementation of any agreement sustainable." Story continues "It would also contribute to the denuclearisation of the DPRK in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner, as required by numerous resolutions of the Security Council," he said. The IAEA already monitors the implementation of a 2015 deal between Iran and world powers to curb its nuclear program. Trump withdrew the United States from the deal with Iran in May 2018. "Our inspectors have had access to all the sites and locations in Iran which they needed to visit," Amano said. Separately, the South Korean defence minister told reporters in Washington that it was too early to tell whether activity near the Dongchang-ri site in North Korea was preparation for an actual missile launch or was just to "add another card" in Pyongyang's negotiation strategy. Last month, South Korean intelligence agencies said they had detected signs that North Korea was restoring part of the Dongchang-ri missile launch site it tore down. (Reporting by Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by James Dalgleish) By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. auto safety regulator said on Monday it will open an investigation into 3 million Hyundai Motor Co and Kia Motors Corp vehicles after reviewing reports of more than 3,000 fires that injured over 100 people. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the investigation is in response to a petition seeking a probe filed in June by the Center for Auto Safety. The investigation covers the 2011-2014 Kia Optima and Sorento and the 2010-2015 Kia Soul, along with the 2011-2014 Hyundai Sonata and Santa Fe. The probe rekindles safety concerns about vehicles of the South Korean duo, who have already been investigated by the U.S. regulator and prosecutors over engine-related recalls. Hyundai and Kia together have recalled over 2.3 million vehicles since 2015 to address various engine fire risks. Hyundai Motor shares fell as much as 2.5 percent in morning trade in Seoul, while Kia Motors fell 1.1 percent. Hyundai said in a statement it was cooperating and added it has been in "frequent, open and transparent dialogue regarding non-collision engine fires." Kia said it will continue to work with NHTSA and "openly shares information and data with NHTSA on all matters pertaining to vehicle safety." NHTSA said the decision to initiate the probe was based on its analysis of information received from multiple manufacturers, consumer complaints and other sources. The agency said while prior Kia and Hyundai vehicle recalls covered by the probe are primarily related to engine fires, the new probe "is not limited to engine components and may cover additional vehicle systems or components." Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, said it was "long past time for the full power of the federal government to be brought to bear to answer why so many thousands of Kia and Hyundai vehicles have been involved in non-crash fires." Story continues He added he hoped the probe will quickly lead to new recalls. "The evidence is now clear - Hyundai and Kia should have acted to recall these vehicles far earlier," he said. Last month, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said a group of U.S. states is investigating Hyundai and Kia for potential unfair and deceptive acts related to reports of hundreds of vehicle fires. In November, Reuters reported federal prosecutors had launched a criminal investigation into Hyundai and Kia to determine if vehicle recalls linked to engine defects had been conducted properly. South Korean prosecutors are also conducting separate investigations into the automakers over the recalls, raiding their offices and summoning executives for questioning. In January, the automakers agreed to offer software upgrades for 3.7 million vehicles not being recalled. A South Korean whistleblower in 2016 reported concerns to NHTSA, which has been probing the timeliness of three U.S. recalls and whether they covered enough vehicles. (Reporting by David Shepardson in WASHINGTON; Additional reporting by Hyunjoo in SEOUL; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Christopher Cushing) Photo: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images According to a new study by a former senior economist in the IRS research division, the Internal Revenue Service audits Americans living in poorer counties more frequently than it does in the richest. According to the study by Kim M. Bloomquist for the industry journal Tax Notes and laid out in map form by ProPublica Humphreys County in Mississippi, which has a median household income of $26,000, is audited 51 percent more frequently than Loudoun County in Virginia, which has the highest median income in the country with $130,000. Humphreys County had a population of just 9,375 in the 2010 census; despite its status as a national powerhouse of farmed catfish, more than a third of its majorityAfrican-American residents are below the poverty line. And yet the IRS audits the people of Humphreys much more frequently than those living in Loudoun County outside of D.C., where the median home value is reportedly just over $500,000. The disparity can be explained primarily by the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a refundable credit for low and mid-income households, especially those with children. According to a different report by ProPublica, EITC recipients are audited at higher rates than Americans in all tax brackets, except households with income above $1 million the practice is a response to pressure from congressional Republicans to root out incorrect payments of the credit. The audit maps look remarkably similar to other visualizations of poverty in America, with rural counties in the Deep South, eastern Kentucky, Appalachia, along the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and in Native American reservations in the West bearing the greatest frequency of audits. Like other financial burdens largely directed toward the poor, ProPublica explains how EITC audits can weigh a family down: EITC audits can be punishing for taxpayers, since they routinely start with a refund being held, and can drag on for well over a year. The IRS does sponsor a program to provide free legal help to low-income taxpayers, but in Mississippi, the state with the highest audit rate in the country (according to Bloomquists estimates, the IRS audits about 11,000 returns there each year), there is only one attorney for the program. (In the third paragraph of the April 1 story, corrects to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration from U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) By Michael Martina BEIJING (Reuters) - Washington welcomed China's move on Monday to list all fentanyl-related substances as controlled narcotics, after criticism from President Donald Trump for allowing the synthetic opioid to be shipped to the United States. The United States is battling an epidemic of opioid-related deaths, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has said he hopes to include China's commitments to curb the drug in any agreement to end the two countries' bitter trade war. "This significant development will eliminate Chinese drug traffickers' ability to alter fentanyl compounds to get around the law," the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in a statement. "We look forward to our continued collaboration with China to reduce the amount of this deadly poison coming into our country," the DEA statement said. Earlier on Monday, China had announced the expanded control of all fentanyl-related substances at a press conference, even as it blamed U.S. culture for abuse of the drug. China said the addition of fentanyl-related substances to the supplementary list of controlled narcotic drugs will take effect on May 1. Fentanyl itself and its "analogues" had previously been listed and remain controlled. The drug in its illegal form has gone by street names, including China White, China Girl, and Dance Fever, according to the U.S. government. It is a highly addictive painkiller many times more potent than morphine. "Resolved. All resolved," Liu Yuejin, a senior public security ministry official and vice commissioner of the China National Narcotics Control Commission, told reporters when asked if U.S. concerns had been resolved. But Liu said the amount of fentanyl from China going to the United States was "extremely limited" and that U.S. criticisms of China being the main source of the drug "lack evidence". "We believe that the United States itself is the main factor in the abuse of fentanyl there," Liu said, adding that American culture was partly to blame. He said the United States had a long tradition of abusing prescription medicines and that enforcement and education about the dangers were not good enough. "Some people link drug consumption with freedom, individuality, and liberation," Liu said. "If the United States truly wants to resolve its fentanyl abuse problem, it needs to strengthen its domestic work." Chinese officials in the past year have vowed to step up cooperation with Washington on illegal drug production and sales, referring to it as a bright spot in relations. The White House said after a December meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Argentina to deescalate trade frictions that Xi had agreed to designate fentanyl as a controlled substance. U.S. Representative Chris Smith, a Republican, said enforcement is crucial. "We have heard soothing but empty rhetoric before from China's leaders ... so we must continue to monitor developments closely and hold Chinese officials and manufacturers accountable if they fail to take decisive action and enforce this new policy," he said in a statement. Trump has called on China to apply the death penalty for "distributors and pushers" of the synthetic opioid. The volume of drugs coming into the United States through the mail has grown in step with legitimate online shopping, U.S. customs agents say, as Americans have taken to ordering drugs from overseas via the dark web. A U.S. congressional probe into the use of fentanyl in the United States found in 2018 that the substance could easily be bought online from Chinese "labs" and mailed to the United States due to gaps in oversight in the U.S. Postal Service. Such imports of prescription medicines and controlled substances are illegal, and China has become the main source of fentanyl in the United States, the U.S. Department of Justice says. (Reporting by Michael Martina; Additional reporting by Jonathan Landay in Washington; Editing by Nick Macfie & Simon Cameron-Moore) By Tom Hals WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) - Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of ride-hailing company Uber, and the company's directors won the dismissal of an investor lawsuit that sought to hold them liable for a fight over trade secrets that slowed Uber's push into autonomous vehicles. The lawsuit by California investor Lenza McElrath sought to pin damages on Kalanick and board members for the cost of its high-profile battle with Google's parent company Alphabet Inc, which accused Uber of stealing self-driving technology. The ruling on Monday by Delaware Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock dismissing the lawsuit closes a difficult chapter for Uber, which paid $245 million to Alphabet in February 2018 to settle their trade secrets fight. Uber is scheduled for an IPO this month. Its rival Lyft Inc made a soaring stock market debut last week, opening with a share price of $87.24 but it was down 10 percent on Monday. Michael Barry, a lawyer with Grant & Eisenhofer in Wilmington who represented McElrath, declined to comment. An Uber spokesman said the company was "pleased with the courts decision to dismiss this meritless complaint." The decision can be appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court. The dismissed lawsuit accused Kalanick and Uber's directors of breaching their fiduciary duties to investors by approving Uber's $680 million deal in 2016 for Ottomotto LLC. The self-driving trucking company was founded and staffed by former employees of Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet. Uber struck the deal shortly after Otto founder Anthony Levandowski resigned from Waymo. Just months after the deal closed, Waymo sued Uber in federal court over allegations that Levandowski brought with him thousands of secret files. The Waymo fight set back Uber's self-driving development and led to the shuttering of its autonomous trucking efforts. The lawsuit said the Uber board ignored intellectual property risks from the Otto deal and should have been more skeptical of Kalanick's judgment. Story continues The Court of Chancery judge, however, said there was no evidence that the board simply rubberstamped a deal. A due diligence report on the deal had been prepared but directors did not review it in full before the board gave its initial approval, and the board had some discussion of potential legal liability from acquiring Otto. "Their decision ultimately damaged Uber," wrote Glasscock. "Nonetheless, a failure to follow best practices is not necessarily a breach of fiduciary duty." (Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; additional reporting by Heather Somerville in San Francisco; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Bill Trott) Cairo (AFP) - UN chief Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday against growing hatred of Muslims, less than a month after a deadly attack on mosques in New Zealand killed at least 50 people. His remarks came during a speech at Egypt's Al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world's foremost religious institution, where he met Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb. "Around the world, we are seeing ever-rising anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia," the UN secretary general said. He cited the March 15 New Zealand mosque attacks by a white supremacist as well as a 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and is believed to be the deadliest against Jews in US history. Guterres warned of a surge in hate speech he said was "entering the mainstream, spreading like wildfire through social media". "We see it spreading in liberal democracies and as well as in authoritarian states." Guterres is on a two-day trip to Egypt, Following his visit to Al-Azhar, he was scheduled to meet President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. On Sunday, he attended an Arab League summit in Tunisia. La Paz (AFP) - The fate of a species may just rest on this love story. Happily, the first date between Romeo, once the last-known Sehuencas water frog, and Juliet, who was discovered deep inside a Bolivian cloud forest in January, went so well the two have been living together in the male's aquarium since. According to a statement by Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC) on Monday, the pair were introduced on March 1 after being cleared of chytridiomycosis, which has decimated amphibian populations throughout the Neotropics region. After a period of observation, they were moved into Romeo's aquarium, where he made a mating call for the first time since 2017: a clear sign he is eager to breed. "Romeo has been really sweet to Juliet, following her around the aquarium and sacrificing his worm meals for her," said Teresa Camacho Badani, chief of herpetology at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d'Orbigny in Bolivia, which is working on the project with the GWC. "After he's been alone for so long, it's wonderful to see him with a mate finally." Romeo had been found in the same cloud forest a decade ago and it was feared that he was the last survivor of his species. With a lifespan of 15 years, time was running out to find Romeo a mate to ensure the survival of the species, although the frog himself never gave up hope, continuing to call out for a mate during his decade in captivity. - Twinkle-toed performance - But it's not quite happily ever after, at least not yet. Romeo hasn't fully figured out amplexus -- the mating position for frogs where the male holds the female until he can fertilize her eggs as she lays them. Some species of frog need to go into amplexus for weeks or even months, but it isn't known how long it lasts for the Sehuencas. So far Romeo has gotten into the correct position a handful of times -- the longest for about 15 minutes on the first day the two were put together. Story continues Since meeting Juliet, Romeo has also exhibited a behavior water frog experts had not encountered for this species: a performance in which he rapidly twinkles the toes of his back feet, likely intended to impress the female. Apart from Juliet, four other Sehuencas water frogs were brought in from the wild during the same expedition: two males and two additional females. They were the first Sehuencas frogs that researchers had seen in the wild in a decade. The others have just begun showing signs of being ready to breed, and remain together in a single aquarium. According to the GWC, Bolivia has the 10th highest level of amphibian diversity in the world, but 22 percent of those species now face the threat of extinction. The Sehuencas frog, which is completely aquatic, was once found in abundance at the bottom of small streams and rivers or in ponds deep inside mountain forests. A combination of climate change, habitat destruction, contamination, chytridiomycosis and the introduction of invasive trout provoked the abrupt demise of many aquatic frog species in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Washington (AFP) - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday blamed Iran for the level of devastation from major floods, and said Washington was ready to help. Pompeo issued a statement in implicit response to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who on Twitter blamed "economic terrorism" by the United States whose sanctions have led to a chronic shortage of rescue helicopters. "These floods once again show the level of Iranian regime mismanagement in urban planning and in emergency preparedness. The regime blames outside entities when, in fact, it is their mismanagement that has led to this disaster," Pompeo said in a statement. "The United States stands ready to assist and contribute to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which would then direct the money through the Iranian Red Crescent for relief," he said. Vast stretches of Iran have been inundated since mid-March, killing some 50 people and disrupting major transportation and communications. The Iranian Red Crescent said Tuesday it was preparing to accommodate 100,000 people as rain hits southwestern Khuzestan province. The disaster struck just as Iran was reeling from the reimposition of sweeping US sanctions with President Donald Trump hoping to curb the clerical regime's influence around the Middle East. In contrast with earlier disasters such as the 2003 Bam earthquake, foreign assistance has been minimal amid fear of US penalties for dealings with Iran. Pompeo in his statement also highlighted Iran's targeting of environmentalists "for attempting to help Iran prepare for these very issues." Eight environmentalists appeared in court earlier this year on charges they were spying on military bases. New York (AFP) - US authorities said Monday that they have opened two separate investigations into automakers Kia and Hyundai after receiving more than 3,100 complaints of "non-crash fires" affecting vehicles from both manufacturers. The incidents are linked to one death and more than 100 injuries to date, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) road transport regulator. Nearly three million vehicles from the two manufacturers could be recalled after investigations that began on March 29: 1.7 million Kia Optimas, Sorentos and Souls, and almost 1.3 million Hyundai Sonatas and Santa Fes. One death and 77 injuries are linked to Kia vehicles, while 26 injuries are linked to Hyundais. Neither manufacturer immediately responded to a request for comment from AFP. After initially being alerted about the fire issue in 2018 by the Center for Auto Safety (CAS) consumer advocacy group, regulators requested information on "on all engine and nonengine related fires" affecting the vehicles from the two manufacturers, the NHTSA said. "Hopefully, this step will quickly lead to a recall being issued as soon as possible. The reality is that extended investigations do not protect Kia and Hyundai owners -- that requires recalls which result in effective repairs," CAS executive director Jason Levine said in a statement. "It is long past time for the full power of the federal government to be brought to bear to answer why so many thousands of Kia and Hyundai vehicles have been involved in non-crash fires," Levine said. It is not the first time that Kia and Hyundai vehicles have experienced unexpected fires, according to the NHTSA: around six million of their combined vehicles have been affected since 2015, only about 2.4 million of which have been recalled for repair. US consumers would run out of avocados in three weeks if Donald Trump makes good on his threat to close down the USMexico border. Trump said on Friday that there was a very good likelihood he would close the border this week if Mexico did not stop immigrants from reaching the United States. Related: 'We're one community': border cities fear Trump's crackdown But a complete shutdown would disrupt millions of legal border crossings in addition to asylum seekers, as well as billions of dollars in trade, about $137bn of which is in food imports. From the avocados on avocado toast, to the limes and tequila in margaritas, the US is heavily reliant on Mexican imports of fruit, vegetables and alcohol to meet consumer demand. Nearly half of all imported US vegetables and 40% of imported fruit are grown in Mexico, according to the latest data from the United States Department of Agriculture. Avocados would run out in three weeks if imports from Mexico were stopped, said Steve Barnard, president and chief executive of Mission Produce, the largest distributor and grower of avocados in the world. You couldnt pick a worse time of year because Mexico supplies virtually 100% of the avocados in the US right now. California is just starting and they have a very small crop, but theyre not relevant right now and wont be for another month or so, said Barnard. Monica Ganley, principal at Quarterra, a consultancy specializing in Latin American agricultural issues and trade, said that a border closure would inevitably hit consumers. Were absolutely going to see higher prices. This is a very real and very relevant concern for American consumers. The US and Mexico trade about $1.7bn in goods daily, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, which said closing the border would be an unmitigated economic debacle that would threaten 5m American jobs. The effects of a shutdown would run both ways. Mexico is the largest importer of US exports of refined fuels like diesel and gasoline, some of which moves by rail. It is unclear if rail terminals would be affected by closures. Story continues Related: Mexico's avocado army: how one city stood up to the drug cartels As changing palates have increased demand for fresh produce, and a greater variety of it, the United States has increasingly come to depend on Mexico to meet that need. Imports have nearly tripled since 1999. In that period, Mexico has gone from supplying less than a third of imported produce to 44% today. In addition to avocados, the majority of imported tomatoes, cucumbers, blackberries and raspberries come from Mexico. While there are other producers of these goods globally, opening those trade channels would take time, said Ganley. The United States on Tuesday warned Beijing against the use of "force or coercion" on Taiwan after the self-ruling island said that two Chinese fighter jets crossed a traditionally respected maritime line dividing the two sides. "The United States opposes unilateral actions by any party that are aimed at altering the status quo, including anything related to force or coercion," State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters. "Beijing should stop its coercive efforts and resume dialogue with the democratically elected administration" in Taipei, he said. Beijing -- which considers Taiwan part of its territory awaiting reunification -- has stepped up its jet and warship crossings near the island since the 2016 election of Beijing-skeptic President Tsai Ing-wen. But going a step further, Taiwan's defense ministry said that two Chinese J-11 fighter jets took the highly unusual step Sunday of crossing the median line in the Taiwan Strait that divides the mainland from the island. Taiwan scrambled its own aircraft and protested the "intentional, reckless and provocative action." The United States, like the vast majority of countries, recognizes only Beijing, but it maintains a close relationship with Taiwan. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act passed by the US Congress, Washington is legally obliged to provide the island with the means to defend itself. National security advisor John Bolton stressed US commitment for the Taiwan Relations Act in a tweet on Monday amid events to mark the law's 40th anniversary. "Chinese military provocations won't win any hearts or minds in Taiwan, but they will strengthen the resolve of people everywhere who value democracy. The Taiwan Relations Act and our commitment are clear," he wrote. By Shaylim Valderrama CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido on Monday called on supporters to continue taking to the streets to protest power and water shortages, as the government of President Nicolas Maduro appeared prepared to begin a rationing program. Scattered protests continued throughout several working-class neighborhoods of the capital Caracas on Monday, with small groups of people blocking roads demanding water be returned after a week of intermittent blackouts that have left many areas without electricity. That followed demonstrations around Caracas on Sunday night when police fired gunshots after residents set up burning barricades, according to Reuters witnesses. The oil-rich South American country has been hit by two waves of crippling blackouts since March 7. "Every time the power goes out, or we do not have water, or we do not have gas, guess what we are going to do?" Guaido, leader of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, said at a rally at the country's Catholic University. "We are going to protest, we are going to make demands, we are going to take to the streets of Venezuela, because it is our right." Power outages over the weekend prompted Venezuela's main oil terminal, Jose, to halt operations including crude exports, the lifeblood of its economy. It was the third time in a month that the port, which only restarted applications last Friday following last Monday's blackout, had stopped operations due to lack of electricity. Guaido invoked the country's constitution to assume an interim presidency in January, arguing Maduro's 2018 re-election was illegitimate. He has been recognized by most Western and South American countries as the OPEC nation's rightful leader. Maduro, who calls Guaido a puppet of the United States, has said that he should "face justice," but has not openly called for Guaido's arrest. The pro-government Supreme Court on Monday reiterated a previous measure blocking Guaido from leaving the country, which he openly violated in February. It added that the Constituent Assembly, an all-powerful legislature controlled by the Socialist Party, should discuss the issue of whether or not to strip Guaido of parliamentary immunity - a move that could pave the way for him being jailed. But state institutions loyal to the Socialist Party appear reluctant to act against Guaido, given his strong public backing and international pressure not to detain him. The chief prosecutor's office has opened an investigation of Guaido but has not ordered his arrest or officially charged him with anything. Maduro on Sunday said the country would begin a program of "load administration," which Venezuelans on social media interpreted as a program of power rationing, without providing details on when it would start. He has blamed both the U.S. government and the domestic opposition for "attacks" on the country's main hydroelectric facility, which his government says have been causing the blackouts. Electricity supplies have been intermittent in Caracas for several days, leading to the cancellation of school activities and a shortened workday on Monday. On Monday morning, the power was on in some blocks but not in adjacent ones. Blackouts and water shortages have long been common in Venezuela, especially in the interior. But the outages in March were more frequent, more widespread, and longer-lasting than previous incidents, particularly in the capital. Maduro's critics and local electrical engineers consulted by Reuters said the blackouts were due to years of underinvestment and lack of maintenance of the country's electrical infrastructure. (Additional reporting by Brian Ellsworth and Luc Cohen; Editing by Susan Thomas, Lisa Shumaker and Bill Berkrot) A candidate bold enough to get soft on the border. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images On questions of immigration policy, Democrats know what theyre against. The party has said, in no uncertain terms, that building medieval walls, closing the southern border to all legal commerce, withdrawing aid from Central American governments, deploying thousands of U.S. troops to southern Texas, and separating migrant children from their parents (and then subjecting them to physically and psychologically torturous conditions, before losing them in foster care) are not wise approaches to policing Americas borders. But Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Team Blues small army of 2020 candidates appear far less certain about precisely what a wise (or just) alternative would look like. Granted, Democrats have a consensus position on immigration: the classic, formerly bipartisan pairing of a pathway to citizenship for the law-abiding undocumented people already among us, and border militarization to keep future, aspiring undocumented immigrants out. But invoking comprehensive immigration reform does little to clarify the partys views on precisely how our government should be handling the recent influx of Central American asylum seekers. We know Democrats dont want to deter such migrants by separating their families. But do they want the government to put such families in long-term detention (together) so that they dont abscond into the interior of the country before their asylum hearings as the Obama administration did in 2014? Or do they want to let those families await their days in court outside of confinement, and then simply deport those who fail to show up for their hearings by conducting massive, nationwide ICE raids as the Obama administration did in 2016? We know that the Democratic leadership doesnt want to abolish ICE. But they do often evince a moral objection to discrete instances of (routine) internal immigration enforcement like workplace raids. Even the partys opposition to border walls is shot through with ambiguity. At times, the objection is framed as an ideological opposition to border militarization itself, as when Kamala Harris argues, the strength of our union has never been found in the walls we build; its in our diversity and our unity and that is our power. But other times, the complaint is merely technocratic suggesting Democrats share Trumps belief in the vital importance of enhancing border security, but dispute the efficacy of his tactics as when House Appropriations Committee chairwoman Nita Lowey said, Smart border security is not overly reliant on physical barriers, which the Trump administration has failed to demonstrate are cost-effective compared to better technology and more personnel. This incoherence has made it easy for the far-right to paint Democrats as supporters of open borders; the center to portray them as political cowards whose refusal to enforce the border (i.e., sanction the level of state violence necessary to prevent human beings in South America from seeking a better life for their families in the wealthiest country on Earth) is clearing the way for fascist rule; and the left to deride Democrats as hypocrites who are happy to leverage the publics visceral disgust with the realities of immigration enforcement, but have no real interest in fundamentally changing those realities. But on Monday, Julian Castro offered a compelling rebuttal to that last critique. Castros rivals for the Democrats 2020 nomination have released detailed plans on a wide range of issues, from health care to corporate concentration to wage stagnation to climate change. But as of this writing, Castro is the only one who has attempted to match his partys progressive rhetoric on immigration to a detailed, concrete policy vision. In a Medium post outlining his agenda, Castro makes the moral sentiment behind so much Democratic rhetoric on immigration explicit that humanism must take precedence over nationalism. When we see families seeking refuge, we dont see criminals, or an invasion, or a threat to national security, Castro writes. We see kids. We see parents. We see people. We see people first. Because we are people first. And its time for an immigration policy that puts people first. Castro endorses a laundry list of consensus Democratic positions (pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented, restoring pre-Trump levels of refugee admissions, protecting Dreamers and TPS recipients). But he then breaks with his partys orthodoxy on the necessity of increasing border enforcement. Under Castros plan: Entering the United States without papers would be a civil infraction, instead of a criminal one. Customs and Border Enforcement would focus on policing the border, rather than engaging in internal immigration enforcement (as it currently has wide latitude to do). Immigration detention would be a rarity, deployed only when a the government has good reason to suspect a given undocumented person is a threat to the publics safety or well-being. Immigration courts would gain independence from the Justice Department. (At present, the attorney general has the authority to set precedent for immigration judges, a power that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made full use of). Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would have its mission redefined. ICE would retain its national security functions such as human and drug trafficking and anti-terrorism investigations while its immigration enforcement operations would be reassigned to other law enforcement agencies. Castro told Vox that he believes this would prioritize individuals with serious criminal convictions, threats to national security, and multiple reentries with a criminal history. Taken together, these proposals would transform immigration policy in the United States by largely reinstating pre-9/11 norms of enforcement. Illustration: David Taintor/Department of Homeland Security Technically, entering the U.S. illegally has been a criminal infraction since 1929. But the federal government did not start routinely prosecuting border crossers until the George W. Bush administration. Similarly, internal immigration enforcement was far more lax for most the 20th century than it has been since the onset of the (forever) war on terrorism. In recent days, the Trump administration has taken to describing circumstances at the U.S. southern border as a humanitarian crisis. Castros plan spotlights how disingenuous that phrasing is by demonstrating that the inhumanity of the existing situation is a policy choice. Under the system he envisions, Central American asylum seekers along with all undocumented immigrants apprehended by authorities would be briefly detained, screened for red flags, assigned a case manager who would be charged with monitoring their whereabouts, and then released into the U.S. while awaiting an immigration hearing. Some would stay with relatives. Those seeking asylum would have access to well-funded, voluntary shelters and care services. The humanitarian crisis would be solved. Of course, the crisis the White House actually cares about the states failure to prevent the inflow of Central American undocumented immigrants would remain unresolved. Under Castros regime, if undocumented immigrants fail to show up for their legal hearings, they would then become subject to deportation. The former San Antonio mayor emphasizes this point, to make clear that he is not calling for open borders. And yet, with internal enforcement reduced and the governments resources concentrated on undocumented criminals Central American migrants who abscond into the country would have a very good chance of avoiding deportation and establishing roots. In other words: The policy would prioritize minimizing the inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants, over minimizing undocumented immigration. Understandably, Castro does not wish to frame his policy in such terms. Rather, the candidate insists that by pairing a liberalized enforcement regime with generous aid to Northern Triangle countries or, in his words, a a 21st century Marshall Plan for Central America the U.S. could reduce illegal border crossings and the ill-treatment of the undocumented simultaneously. But the evidence for this proposition isnt terribly strong. In my view, the substantive trade-offs inherent to Castros plan are worthwhile. Our government is deeply implicated in the dire conditions that Central Americans are fleeing. Our population is rapidly aging, and an influx of younger workers (even low skill ones) would have significant benefits for economic growth. Meanwhile, illegal border crossings have been declining for two decades, and are currently hovering near half-century lows. It seems likely that Castros policies would prompt an increase in undocumented migration. But it also seems likely that for anyone who believes in the universal dignity of all human beings the costs of that development would pale in comparison to those of our present system, which rains needless suffering down on migrant children and longtime, law-abiding U.S. residents. Still, one neednt be a restrictionist to wonder whether Castros plan might produce conditions that undermine the bargaining power of labor unions, and native-born workers at the bottom of the job market. And its also fair to ask whether he has grappled with the potential costs of humanely caring for any and all asylum seekers who arrive at our nations doorstep. As Voxs Dara Lind writes: [T]he biggest question mark in Castros proposal and one that the Democratic field is likely to struggle with as a whole is the immediate crisis facing the US right now: the influx of up to 100,000 unauthorized immigrants, many of them families, children, or asylum seekers, into the US a month, and the challenges of caring for them People will continue to come perhaps even in unprecedentedly high numbers. Even the short-term proposals to deal with migrants who are already here will take time to build up. And theres nothing in this proposal to directly address the large number of people who wont ultimately qualify for asylum under US law even if they have attorneys, and even if the Trump administration efforts to restrict asylum for, say, victims of gang and domestic violence are reversed. Not everyone fleeing their home country out of legitimate need qualifies for asylum as US law defines it, and many of the people currently coming will not. To many migration experts not just immigration hawks the mixed flow into the US is a problem. They believe it is important to reduce the number of people coming to the US without legitimate asylum claims, both because it frees up resources to address the remaining asylum seekers and because it reduces the possibility of deliberate malfeasance or fraud. The biggest problem with Castros vision, however, may be less substantive than political. The Democratic Partys views on immigration enforcement tend to be incoherent and contradictory for a reason the general publics are, too. In recent polling, roughly 80 percent of Americans including a majority of Republicans say that all undocumented immigrants who pass a criminal background check should be given a path to legal status. And yet, a majority of American voters also support ICEs efforts to enforce immigration law in the American interior. Which is to say: They ostensibly believe that law-abiding undocumented residents should have the right to live here legally but until 60 senators come around to that position, ICE agents should go around arresting and deporting any random undocumented immigrants they happen to come across. Similarly, while the public recoils from the cruelty of Trumps border policies, it also supports better border security and stronger enforcement, while opposing basically open borders (whatever that means). Its likely that some voters take their cues from partisan elites on border security, and thus, would adopt a more dovish position if the Democratic leadership did. But the Democratic coalition is home to a significant number of voters with conservative views on immigration and liberal ones on economics. And such voters are overrepresented in Electoral College swing states, and in the House and Senate. Given these facts, it isnt too surprising that none of the Democrats 2020 front-runners including self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders has loudly called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and relaxing internal enforcement. Nevertheless, Castros proposal is a worthy contribution to the 2020 debate. Judging by current polling, the former Housing secretary isnt going to be a true contender for the Democratic nomination. But his policies could provide the next administration with a framework for progressively reforming immigration enforcement, especially since many of them can be implemented (quietly) through executive action. Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden and Meghan McCain. (Photo: Getty Images) The ladies of The View are defending Joe Biden against Lucy Floress claim that the former vice president made her feel uncomfortable by touching both of her shoulders and kissing her on the back of the head at an event five years ago. You know, Joe Bidens presidential campaign hasnt even officially begun and people are trying to knock him out of the running, Whoopi Goldberg began at the top of the show. Former Nevada politician Lucy Flores claims that Biden was out of line when he campaigned for her back in 2014. Goldberg tossed to a clip of Flores detailing the alleged inappropriate encounter to CNNs Jake Tapper. (It was shocking because you dont expect that kind of intimate behavior from someone so powerful and someone who you just have no relationship whatsoever, Flores said. So I frankly just didnt even know how to react. I was just shocked. I felt I felt powerless.) Now, should she have spoken to him about this before she went on television about it? Goldberg asked the panel, explaining that in the old days we would call Joe a little overly familiar. Joe is a hands-on kind of guy, Goldberg continued. But Ive never heard anyone and she says she felt violated and I have to take her at her word, but it would have been nice if she turned to him and said, You know what, I dont really like this, or Mr. Vice President, Im not really comfortable with this, something because shes standing right there. Its hard to say to somebody sniffing your hair, Joy Behar interjected. No, its not. If somebody touches you inappropriately Goldberg replied, before Behar added, It wasnt, thats the point. McCain clarified that Flores has said her experience with Biden does not rise to the level of sexual assault and that the woman doesnt even consider this a #MeToo moment. It does not rise to any of those things, Goldberg said. Behar agreed, adding, Its a long way from smelling your hair to grabbing your hoo-ha We all know Joe Biden, hes been here. I remember when I met him in Florida before he was vice president and he was so friendly. Hes a close talker I feel it would be really unfortunate if we got rid of everybody who was just an affectionate kind of person. Those are nice people, too. Story continues Hes also been in public office for about 50 years of his life, Abby Huntsman chimed in. I do wonder if she could have sent him a letter, right? Send him a personal note to say, Hey this happened a few years ago, now I feel confident in telling you about it. I dont want to make this public. I always wonder when these things come out, what is the motive for this person? Is it simply to let people know I was uncomfortable, which you could have done in private? Or is it because you maybe want someone else to win and you want him to have doubts about actually announcing for president? Huntsman continued, Ive had concerns about the #MeToo movement from the beginning, about getting to this place where you cant have normal interactions with each other are we going to get to a place where we cant shake hands, where we cant hug each other? I worry about that. I do. Sunny Hostin was the only one who felt in the middle on the topic, acknowledging the power dynamic between Flores and Biden could have prevented her from saying something in the moment. Youre talking about the vice president of the United States, she was running for lieutenant governor, Hostin explained. She may not have wanted to offend him and I know a lot of women get put in that kind of situation where theyre offended, theyre uncomfortable, but they may not say anything. I do appreciate his response to the criticism. In a statement, Biden responded, In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once never did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. Hostin added, [Joes] saying I will listen. I dont know if well see any more smelling of hair and kisses on the forehead. That pisses me off, Goldberg stated. I dont want Joe to stop doing that. I dont either, Meghan McCain said in agreement. The co-host, who is close with Biden, went on to call him a retail politician that loves people like her father, the late Senator John McCain, and Bill Clinton. When Biden visited The View, McCain remembers him being the only politician other than my father to go into the crowd and shake everyones hand. I do agree women should be heard, McCain continued. I worked at Fox News during the Roger Ailes time. Theres a very big difference between things like that and things like this Joe Biden is a good, decent man. He has never made me feel uncomfortable once. Ive been around him a lot. McCain pointed out that Flores admitted to Jake Tapper that politics was definitely the impetus in her decision to come forward. [Lucy] was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, she was just seen at a Beto ORourke events if shes a Bernie or Beto person maybe she feels more inclined now, I dont know. All Im saying is I vouch for [Joes] character in my personal experience. Goldberg jumped in for some last thoughts. My point is, I want women to get to the place where they can say, Hey, you just made me uncomfortable. This idea that you have to tiptoe away from this, you dont have to carry it. If someone makes you uncomfortable, tell them. He came down to do you a favor. He came down to do you a favor. He was at your fundraiser. You had every right to say, Dont do that, Joe.' Goldberg added, Dont sit and wait and say Im uncomfortable on national television, cause it makes us suspect of your thoughts. McCain agreed, exclaiming, Honestly, Whoopi, you and I will probably get heat over this. I get heat all the time, thats all right, Goldberg replied. Ive been a woman a long time and my mother said if youre not comfortable, you tell them to stop. She instilled that in me and Im trying to share it with you. Read more on Yahoo Entertainment: Want daily pop culture news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoo Entertainment & Lifestyles newsletter. Walgreens slashed its 2019 forecast and missed second-quarter expectations with a performance that sent its shares plunging Tuesday and helped knock down the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Company leaders told analysts that challenges they had been expecting like reimbursement cuts and lower price increases for branded drugs hit Walgreens much sooner than they anticipated. "This has been a very disappointing quarter for us," Executive Vice Chairman and CEO Stefano Pessina said after noting in a statement that it was the company's most challenging quarter since it formed more than four years ago. The nation's largest drugstore chain said it now expects adjusted earnings per share to be roughly flat this year after confirming as recently as late December a forecast for growth of 7% to 12%. Drugstores are facing stress from several angles. There is growing pressure to cut prescription drug costs, and payers like insurers and pharmacy benefit managers are trimming their reimbursement. Generic drugs aren't as profitable as they used to be. Stores also are changing what they sell in the retail areas outside their pharmacies to keep customers coming in the door instead of shopping online at sites like Amazon.com. Plus Walgreens Chief Financial Officer James Kehoe said in late February that his company has been "quite damaged" by rival CVS Health Corp.'s acquisition of Aetna, one of the nation's largest insurers. He noted that Aetna transferred significant business to CVS pharmacies. Walgreens runs more than 18,500 stores in 11 countries after the Deerfield, Illinois-based drugstore chain combined at the end of 2014 with European health and beauty retailer Alliance Boots. The company's poor quarterly results were somewhat expected, Edward Jones analyst John Boylan said. But the magnitude of its 2019 forecast cut surprised him. "While we are disappointed by these negative developments in the drugstore industry as a whole, we also believe that these developments may accelerate industry consolidation because there are many small competitors that likely are feeling the same pressures," he said in an email. Story continues Walgreens said in December that it had started a cost-management program that aims to achieve at least $1 billion in annual savings in a few years. On Tuesday, the company raised that target to $1.5 billion by 2022. The company also has recruited some new executives and is focusing on selling more profitable health, beauty and wellness products in its stores and working on partnerships with companies like the grocer Kroger Co. to improve its food offerings. Pessina told analysts he expects that the moves Walgreens has made will lead to improved results in 2020. In the second quarter, Walgreens' net income sank 14% to $1.16 billion, while revenue climbed to $34.53 billion, thanks in part to some stores it acquired from Rite Aid Corp. Adjusted earnings per share slipped to $1.64 in the second quarter. Analysts were expecting earnings of $1.72 per share on about $34.58 billion in revenue. Shares of Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. tumbled nearly 13% to close at $55.36, a multiyear low, while the Dow edged down less than 1%. The drugstore chain was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average last June, replacing General Electric in the 30-company blue chip index. ___ Follow Tom Murphy on Twitter: @thpmurphy By Ginger Gibson and Mark Hosenball WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A White House whistleblower has said the Trump administration overruled security experts to give questionable security clearances to more than two dozen people, including the president's daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Tricia Newbold, a White House security adviser, told Democrats in Congress that clearances were initially denied to dozens of administration officials because of concerns over possible foreign influence, conflicts of interests, questionable or criminal conduct, financial problems or drug abuse. She said President Donald Trump's former White House personnel security director, Carl Kline, personally overruled the career officials' judgments in the cases of two senior officials. Newbold's allegations were laid out in a letter sent to the White House on Monday and released by Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee. "I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security, his letter quoted Newbold as telling his committee. "I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office." Cummings said he plans to subpoena Kline and warned that more subpoenas would be issued if the White House does not provide requested documents. In his letter to the White House, Cummings referred to three unnamed "senior White House officials" whose security clearance cases are addressed in some detail by Newbold. Two sources familiar with the information obtained by the Oversight Committee said two of those three senior officials are Ivanka Trump and Kushner, her husband. Asked about the whistleblower's assertions, Kushner said in an interview on Fox News Channel that he had complied with various investigations. "I disclosed all of my holdings for the Office of Government Ethics, and what I did with them is they told me what to divest, what to keep, what rules to follow. We followed all that," Kushner said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House committee, issued a statement calling the letter a "partisan attack" that was "an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants." Cummings said Newbold, a manager in the White House personnel security office, said she was targeted for retaliation after declining to approve applications based on national security protocols. "I'm terrified of going back. I know that this will not be perceived in favor of my intentions, which is to bring back the integrity of the office," she is quoted as saying in the letter Cummings sent to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. Separately, the House Judiciary Committee said on Monday that it will this week issue subpoenas to obtain Special Counsel Robert Muller's full report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Attorney General William Barr issued a summary of Mueller's findings to Congress on March 24, saying the special counsel did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. Mueller left unresolved the question of whether Trump obstructed justice during the probe, and Barr concluded the evidence was insufficient to charge the president. Barr has said he will issue a redacted copy of Mueller's full report by mid-April, but Democrats want it without redactions and have demanded it be given to them this week. The new round of subpoenas signals increased pressure from Democrats on the Republican Trump White House. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the letters. The Department of Justice declined to comment about the request from the Judiciary Committee. 'SIGNIFICANT DISQUALIFYING FACTORS' Cummings' memo on White House security clearances said career officials, including Newbold, initially rejected the application from "Senior White House official 1" after a background investigation revealed "significant disqualifying factors," including "foreign influence" and "personal conduct." The memo said Kline overruled the career officials' judgments, saying the activities that concerned security officials "occurred prior to federal service." It also said Newbold told congressional investigators that a second person, referred to as "senior White House Official 2" was the subject of a 14-page memo laying out "multiple disqualifiers" including foreign influence and outside activities. Kline also approved a clearance for that unnamed official. Newbold told congressional investigators that in a third case she was pressured by Kline to reverse a recommendation that the clearance application be rejected. Newbold refused, and the third official ultimately left the White House, the Democrats' memo said. (Reporting by Ginger Gibson, Mark Hosenball and David Morgan; Editing by Bill Trott, Howard Goller and Michael Perry) Washington (AFP) - Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner faced little scrutiny on his way to becoming one of America's most powerful people. But now a row over White House security clearances is pushing the president's publicity-shy favorite into unwelcome limelight. Unlike his can't-get-enough-exposure father-in-law, Kushner is a discreet presence. He's virtually a ghost on social media, where he has 77,000 Twitter followers but doesn't tweet. And in the White House, he may be a fixture at high-level meetings, but he'll rarely speak if the press corps is present, waiting until journalists leave the room. So it was a measure of the White House's need for damage control that Kushner went on the Trump go-to channel Fox News late Monday to dismiss concerns over his security access. "Ive been accused of all different types of things, and all of those things have turned out to be false. Weve had a lot of crazy accusations," Kushner said on Fox's "The Ingraham Angle." Controversy over Kushner's access to top secrets has been brewing since the start of the Trump presidency. After all, he was a relatively unknown quantity in Washington -- a man with no political or diplomatic experience, or previous vetting, but a ton of potentially tangled business dealings at home and abroad. This week the issue blew up when a veteran White House bureaucrat told Congress that her department had been overruled by higher-ups to grant passes to 25 people initially rejected due to worries over conflicts of interest, foreign influence and personal problems. Among the names that the Democrat-led congressional committee investigating the issue suggests may be on that list: Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump. - Riches to power - Kushner was just another privileged New York business scion until his father-in-law and fellow real estate dealer unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016. The change of address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2017 catapulted him into the smallest of presidential inner circles. Story continues Kushner's title in the Trump administration is a vague "senior advisor." In reality, the youthful-looking 38-year-old, who married Ivanka Trump in 2009, has the president's ear on everything from US drug addiction to selling Saudi Arabia weapons. An Orthodox Jew who is part of what Trump proudly calls the "most pro-Israeli" US government in history, Kushner is also tasked with presenting a new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Generations of seasoned US diplomats have already failed there and expectations are low that Kushner's as yet hidden plan will do better. With Ivanka Trump also tagged as an adviser to her father, critics say the White House has sunken into the kind of nepotism few would have thought possible anymore. "Not since JFK -- more than 50 years ago -- have family members of the president served in policy positions," Mark Carl Rom, associate politics professor at Georgetown University, said. "The Trump presidency is a throwback: he is making America 18th century again." - Everything 'turned to gold' - Naturally, Trump does not see things that way. He seems not only to rely heavily on Kushner but genuinely to like and appreciate him. At a big event Monday celebrating prison reform -- an issue Kushner says he was inspired to work on due to seeing his own father serve 14 months behind bars for financial crimes -- Trump singled out his son-in-law for lavish praise. "You know," Trump told the audience in the ornate East Room, "Jared has had a very easy life. He was doing phenomenally in New York and everything he touched has turned to gold." "Then, one day, he said,'I want to come down and I want to have peace in the Middle East. And I want to do criminal justice reform. And I want to do all these wonderful things.'" Finally, the punchline: "And his life became extremely complex." In a presidency defined by all-out fights with the opposition Democrats, accusations of administrative chaos, and the morass of the Russia collusion investigation, Trump is believed to value Kushner and his daughter as among the few people he knows he can always rely on. That's understandable but will depending on family bring Trump more trouble down the road? "The question is: Is their primary loyalty to the constitution of the United States of America, or to their father?" Rom asked. The credit card you use has a big impact on how much money your credit card company and the retailer get during a transaction. Cashier watching as customer pays with a credit card. Image source: Getty Images. The premium credit card market has gotten much more crowded lately, as these cards offer the most rewards for consumers and make the most money for credit card companies. Not everyone is a fan of premium credit cards, though. In fact, just about every retailer would prefer that you use a different payment method. Why does it matter to a retailer what type of credit card you use? It all comes down to fees. Fees make premium credit cards more profitable Whenever you pay a merchant using your credit card, the card company collects an "interchange fee" on the transaction. The fee is set by a payment network, which facilitates electronic transactions (think Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover). The card issuer, which is a financial institution that provides credit cards and lines of credit, receives that fee from the merchant. Here's what most people don't realize: Interchange fees aren't consistent. They vary based on the following factors: The payment network: American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa all negotiate their own rates with merchants. The merchant category: Different types of businesses pay varying interchange fees per transaction. The card brand: Payment networks charge different interchange fees depending on the brand of card being used. That last point is why retailers aren't fans of premium rewards cards. Let's use Visa as an example. At supermarkets, the interchange fee with a standard credit card may be just 1.2% of the transaction plus a flat fee -- say, $0.10. However, the interchange fee with a premium card may be 2% or higher, plus the flat fee. That means the store pays 0.9% more, cutting into their profit margins. However, those high interchange fees are what allow card issuers to offer more rewards and benefits to customers. Story continues What retailers do to fight back The most common way retailers deal with interchange fees is raising their prices. This isn't exactly fair, because it means even consumers who pay in cash end up footing the bill for customers who pay with credit cards, but it's what happens. Retailers have also fought interchange fees in court, and in 2018, Mastercard and Visa reached a $6.2-billion settlement over those fees. However, some major retailers, including Amazon, Target, and Home Depot, opted out of that settlement. They instead want to challenge a provision in the contracts Mastercard and Visa have with merchants stating that merchants must accept every card brand or end up with hefty fines. Essentially, merchants want the right to decline specific brands of cards with higher fees. Then they could accept the lower-cost Mastercard and Visa cards while rejecting the higher-cost options. Is this going to happen? It seems highly unlikely. Although it would be good for retailers, it would also lead to considerable confusion and frustration for consumers. No one wants to research whether a retailer accepts their specific brand of credit card before every purchase. Should you join the premium credit card club? If you don't have a premium credit card, you may be wondering if it's worth getting one. Since these cards have the most perks but often have annual fees of $400 or more, they're only a good choice for certain consumers. You could benefit from a premium credit card if you: Spend at least $1,500 per month on your credit card Travel multiple times per year As a general rule, premium cards are excellent for big spenders, because those customers will be able to rack up big rewards. Since these cards usually include plenty of travel benefits, they help out if you travel often and like to improve your experience through airport lounge access, hotel upgrades, and more. If you don't want to pay a large annual fee or you don't think you'll spend enough to take full advantage, there are plenty of popular credit cards that don't cost nearly as much. The cost of credit card rewards Credit card rewards programs can offer substantial savings in the form of travel rewards or cash back, but someone's always footing the bill. Retailers pay at least a portion of that through interchange fees, and those costs get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. While it's natural for those who pay in cash to feel short-changed, the best way to avoid that is to use a credit card as your main payment method. As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. The Motley Fool owns and recommends MasterCard and Visa, and recommends American Express. Were firm believers in the Golden Rule. If we wouldnt recommend an offer to a close family member, we wouldnt recommend it on The Ascent either. Our number one goal is helping people find the best offers to improve their finances. That is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! This article is written for those who want to get better at using price to earnings ratios (P/E ratios). We'll look at Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank Corporation Limited's (HKG:6122) P/E ratio and reflect on what it tells us about the company's share price. Based on the last twelve months, Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank's P/E ratio is 11.96. That corresponds to an earnings yield of approximately 8.4%. View our latest analysis for Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank How Do You Calculate Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank's P/E Ratio? The formula for price to earnings is: Price to Earnings Ratio = Share Price (in reporting currency) Earnings per Share (EPS) Or for Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank: P/E of 11.96 = CN2.95 (Note: this is the share price in the reporting currency, namely, CNY ) CN0.25 (Based on the year to December 2018.) Is A High P/E Ratio Good? A higher P/E ratio means that investors are paying a higher price for each HK$1 of company earnings. That is not a good or a bad thing per se, but a high P/E does imply buyers are optimistic about the future. How Growth Rates Impact P/E Ratios When earnings fall, the 'E' decreases, over time. That means unless the share price falls, the P/E will increase in a few years. So while a stock may look cheap based on past earnings, it could be expensive based on future earnings. Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank saw earnings per share decrease by 23% last year. And over the longer term (5 years) earnings per share have decreased 7.6% annually. This could justify a pessimistic P/E. How Does Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank's P/E Ratio Compare To Its Peers? We can get an indication of market expectations by looking at the P/E ratio. As you can see below, Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank has a higher P/E than the average company (6.2) in the banks industry. Story continues SEHK:6122 Price Estimation Relative to Market, April 1st 2019 Its relatively high P/E ratio indicates that Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank shareholders think it will perform better than other companies in its industry classification. Shareholders are clearly optimistic, but the future is always uncertain. So investors should delve deeper. I like to check if company insiders have been buying or selling. Remember: P/E Ratios Don't Consider The Balance Sheet The 'Price' in P/E reflects the market capitalization of the company. In other words, it does not consider any debt or cash that the company may have on the balance sheet. In theory, a company can lower its future P/E ratio by using cash or debt to invest in growth. Such expenditure might be good or bad, in the long term, but the point here is that the balance sheet is not reflected by this ratio. Is Debt Impacting Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank's P/E? Since Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank holds net cash of CN1.6b, it can spend on growth, justifying a higher P/E ratio than otherwise. The Verdict On Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank's P/E Ratio Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank has a P/E of 12. That's around the same as the average in the HK market, which is 11.8. While the lack of recent growth is probably muting optimism, the relatively strong balance sheet will allow the company to weather a storm; so it isn't very surprising to see that it has a P/E ratio close to the market average. When the market is wrong about a stock, it gives savvy investors an opportunity. People often underestimate remarkable growth -- so investors can make money when fast growth is not fully appreciated. Although we don't have analyst forecasts, shareholders might want to examine this detailed historical graph of earnings, revenue and cash flow. You might be able to find a better buy than Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank. If you want a selection of possible winners, check out this free list of interesting companies that trade on a P/E below 20 (but have proven they can grow earnings). We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! Today we'll look at Tang Palace (China) Holdings Limited (HKG:1181) and reflect on its potential as an investment. In particular, we'll consider its Return On Capital Employed (ROCE), as that can give us insight into how profitably the company is able to employ capital in its business. First up, we'll look at what ROCE is and how we calculate it. Next, we'll compare it to others in its industry. Then we'll determine how its current liabilities are affecting its ROCE. Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE) ROCE is a measure of a company's yearly pre-tax profit (its return), relative to the capital employed in the business. Generally speaking a higher ROCE is better. Overall, it is a valuable metric that has its flaws. Renowned investment researcher Michael Mauboussin has suggested that a high ROCE can indicate that 'one dollar invested in the company generates value of more than one dollar'. So, How Do We Calculate ROCE? Analysts use this formula to calculate return on capital employed: Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) (Total Assets - Current Liabilities) Or for Tang Palace (China) Holdings: 0.50 = CN254m (CN893m - CN384m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2018.) Therefore, Tang Palace (China) Holdings has an ROCE of 50%. See our latest analysis for Tang Palace (China) Holdings Does Tang Palace (China) Holdings Have A Good ROCE? ROCE is commonly used for comparing the performance of similar businesses. Using our data, we find that Tang Palace (China) Holdings's ROCE is meaningfully better than the 5.8% average in the Hospitality industry. We would consider this a positive, as it suggests it is using capital more effectively than other similar companies. Putting aside its position relative to its industry for now, in absolute terms, Tang Palace (China) Holdings's ROCE is currently very good. Story continues Our data shows that Tang Palace (China) Holdings currently has an ROCE of 50%, compared to its ROCE of 33% 3 years ago. This makes us think about whether the company has been reinvesting shrewdly. SEHK:1181 Past Revenue and Net Income, April 2nd 2019 When considering ROCE, bear in mind that it reflects the past and does not necessarily predict the future. ROCE can be deceptive for cyclical businesses, as returns can look incredible in boom times, and terribly low in downturns. ROCE is only a point-in-time measure. Since the future is so important for investors, you should check out our free report on analyst forecasts for Tang Palace (China) Holdings. Do Tang Palace (China) Holdings's Current Liabilities Skew Its ROCE? Current liabilities are short term bills and invoices that need to be paid in 12 months or less. The ROCE equation subtracts current liabilities from capital employed, so a company with a lot of current liabilities appears to have less capital employed, and a higher ROCE than otherwise. To check the impact of this, we calculate if a company has high current liabilities relative to its total assets. Tang Palace (China) Holdings has total assets of CN893m and current liabilities of CN384m. As a result, its current liabilities are equal to approximately 43% of its total assets. A medium level of current liabilities boosts Tang Palace (China) Holdings's ROCE somewhat. Our Take On Tang Palace (China) Holdings's ROCE Despite this, it reports a high ROCE, and may be worth investigating further. Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking at a few good candidates. So take a peek at this free list of companies with modest (or no) debt, trading on a P/E below 20. If you like to buy stocks alongside management, then you might just love this free list of companies. (Hint: insiders have been buying them). We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. President Trumps father was born in New York City, despite what he says. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images President Trump met with NATO secretary Jens Stoltenberg in the Oval Office Tuesday afternoon. Then he forced the poor guy to sit there while he vomited words all over reporters who shouted questions at him. Its a thing Trump likes to do. Two moments in particular stood out today, and theyre both the kind of thing thatll have you breaking out your pocket Constitution and rereading the text of the 25th Amendment. Lets start with Trumps attempt to talk about the origins of the special counsels investigation into his campaign. Three separate times he says oranges instead of origins. OMG, Trump just referred to "the oranges" of the Mueller investigation THREE TIMES pic.twitter.com/JCwAYVqZH5 Tommy MMXIXtopher (@tommyxtopher) April 2, 2019 Its funny and dumb, but its not nearly as disconcerting as one moment of oddness that preceded it. While declaring his love for Germany, Trump said hes proud that his father was born in the country. Born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany, Trump said. Fred Trump was born in the Bronx. Trump just said "my father is German, was German. Born in a very wonderful place in Germany." Fred Trump was born in New York. pic.twitter.com/U6eWYPzjrJ Tommy MMXIXtopher (@tommyxtopher) April 2, 2019 Somehow, this isnt even the first time Trump has told this lie. In his head though, as he has on so many other issues, Trump seems to have replaced fact with fiction. WASHINGTON A Democratic-led House committee voted Tuesday to issue a subpoena demanding Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross provide more information about his decision to add a controversial question on citizenship to the 2020 Census. The committee is simply trying to determine the real reason Secretary Ross added the citizenship question," said Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. "The Trump administration is stonewalling." Democrats and immigrant rights groups allege that the decision was made for political reasons after consultations with the White House. Republicans and administration officials insist the Justice Department simply wants to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities. Cummings said the documents and testimony requested could help answer the question. None of these requests is new,'' he said. "They are all items we asked for repeatedly, but the Trump administration refused to produce." The subpoena comes as the citizenship question faces legal challenges. Two federal judges have blocked the question from being added, and the Supreme Court will hear the case April 23. Census officials are preparing for the 2020 count, which begins next April 1. The committee voted 23-14, mostly along party lines to approve the subpoena. Michigan Rep. Justin Amash was the only Republican to vote for it. The decision by Ross last year to add the question has sparked heated debates. Democrats and civil rights groups argue adding the question is an attempt to intimidate people into not participating in the decennial count and could lead to an undercount, particularly of people of color. Republicans and the administration counter that its important to know who is in the country and that adding the question makes sense. 'Just counting heads' In testy exchanges, including some in which Cummings repeatedly pounded his gavel, committee members argued over the issue. Story continues We are simply trying to understand who lives in the United States of America and whether theyre citizens," said Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas. This is just basics. Were just counting heads. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the committee, criticized Democrats for seeking the subpoena, noting that the Commerce Department has submitted thousands of pages of documents and that Ross testified for more than six hours at a committee hearing last month. But thats not good enough, he said. The Democrats want to interfere with the (Supreme) court case. He said the Commerce Department wants to add a simple question about citizenship. This is wrong, he said, adding that the Democratic effort begs the question: Why dont Democrats want to know if youre a citizen of this country or not? Democrats seek documents Cummings is seeking to subpoena, in particular, a memorandum and note from agency counsel James Uthmeier to John Gore, the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department. He also wants Gore testify before the committee. Gore was the lone witness at a committee hearing last May where Democrats blasted him for not answering questions about the agencys decision to add the citizenship question. The panel had agreed a week earlier to subpoena Gore after he didnt show for a hearing that featured several Census Bureau officials. Gore told the committee at the time he couldnt answer many questions about the citizenship question in part because of pending lawsuits. Cummings is also requesting information from 2017 related to the citizenship question, both within the Justice Department and with outside entities, including the White House, the Trump presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee. Ross asks for more time In a letter to Cummings Monday, Ross asked the committee not to issue the subpoena and give the department more time to respond to the request. The Department respectfully requests that you abstain from considering or issuing a subpoena while our good faith dialogue continues, Ross wrote in the April 1 letter. Ross said the agency is committed to responding to the panel and has already submitted 11,500 pages of documents and maintained a candid and accessible line of communication. But he complained the committee only gave the agency one business day to comply and said he believes that the rush to issue a subpoena is premature. Cummings, however, said the panel wants documents without redactions and dismissed the agency's submissions. These are just numbers" without substantive information, he said. We dont want thousands of pieces of paper. Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., holds up redacted forms at a House Oversight and Reform Committee meeting April 2, 2019 that he said were submitted by the Department of Commerce. Last month, Ross testified before the committee about his decision to add the question and any political motivation behind it. Ross had testified before Congress that his addition of a citizenship question was done "solely" based on a Justice Department request. He said at the recent hearing he conducted intensive research beforehand because he understood Justice might want a citizenship question. Democratic Rep. Lacy Clay of Missouri said Cummings offered Ross the opportunity to come clean at that hearing. Clay said he supports issuing the subpoena, so we can finally get to the bottom of this. Contributing: Alan Gomez This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why is Trump administration focused on non-citizens? House committee subpoenas to find out Natasha Welsh, 43, is accused of stabbing her husband of 25 years Martin Welsh, 47, at their home in Greyhound Hill in Hendon, north west London on October 26 last year. (PA) A woman knifed her husband to death with a 15cm kitchen knife while their son played on his PlayStation upstairs, a court has heard. Natasha Welsh, 43, is accused of stabbing her husband of 25 years Martin Welsh, 47, at their home in Greyhound Hill in Hendon, north west London on October 26 last year he was pronounced dead early the next day. The mother-of-two denies murder and an alternative count of manslaughter, claiming she has no memory of the incident. The Old Bailey heard on Monday that both she and her husband had been drinking heavily before the killing. Pomeroys Statue of Lady Justice atop the Central Criminal Court building, Old Bailey, London. Welsh is on trial for murdering her husband but claims she does not remember if they were fighting or arguing. (PA). The jury heard that their son 21-year-old son Kyle has mental health problems including acute ADHD and that Welsh acted as his full-time carer. He had been messaging his sister Charlie, who did not live with the family, and her boyfriend while playing Fortnite on his PS4 about the row raging downstairs. He wrote: Things kicking off. How do I avoid it even with my music on? He added: Just play and forget I said anything. Everyone has to deal with their troubles. Kyle Welsh was playing Fortnite on his Playstation 4 when he heard his parents altercation. He later urged his sister to call 999 via chat when he said he found his fathers body. (Stock image). Later he said: Those dickheads need to learn how to handle their alcohol. Smashing sh*t up. Kyle then complained his parents were calling his name. A few minutes later he typed: Call 999 mum stabbed dad and he died. Please, please, please, please. Hes dead by now and Im going to kill her, he added. Jurors were warned that in the 999 call he made when he finally found the phone, Kyle could be heard laughing but that was due to his ADHD. Read more from Yahoo News UK: Blue Planet Live viewers stunned after baby turtle snatched by seagull Brave window cleaners work 900ft above street level Dead whale had 22kg of plastic in its stomach He told the operator: My dads on the floor with a stab wound in his shoulder and my mums acting like shes done nothing. Mr Welsh was later found to have died from a single stab wound to the chest. Following her arrest, Welsh denied having any memory of the killing. In a later statement she said: The last thing I remember doing is standing in the kitchen talking to him, I really cant remember what happened. Story continues She added: I accept I must have been the one who stabbed Martin. Prosecutor Peter Little QC said: The defendant does not positively suggest that she acted in self-defence or in any way that she lost her self-control. The trial is expected to last seven or eight days. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK Want to participate in a research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and earn a $60 gift card! Frank van Zanten became the CEO of Bunzl plc (LON:BNZL) in 2016. First, this article will compare CEO compensation with compensation at other large companies. Then we'll look at a snap shot of the business growth. And finally - as a second measure of performance - we will look at the returns shareholders have received over the last few years. The aim of all this is to consider the appropriateness of CEO pay levels. See our latest analysis for Bunzl How Does Frank van Zanten's Compensation Compare With Similar Sized Companies? According to our data, Bunzl plc has a market capitalization of UK8.3b, and pays its CEO total annual compensation worth UK2.8m. (This figure is for the year to December 2018). That's just a smallish increase of 0.1% on last year. While we always look at total compensation first, we note that the salary component is less, at UK836k. We took a group of companies with market capitalizations over UK6.1b, and calculated the median CEO total compensation to be UK3.6m. Once you start looking at very large companies, you need to take a broader range, because there simply aren't that many of them. So Frank van Zanten is paid around the average of the companies we looked at. While this data point isn't particularly informative alone, it gains more meaning when considered with business performance. You can see a visual representation of the CEO compensation at Bunzl, below. LSE:BNZL CEO Compensation, April 2nd 2019 Is Bunzl plc Growing? Bunzl plc has increased its earnings per share (EPS) by an average of 13% a year, over the last three years (using a line of best fit). Its revenue is up 5.8% over last year. This demonstrates that the company has been improving recently. A good result. It's also good to see modest revenue growth, suggesting the underlying business is healthy. You might want to check this free visual report on analyst forecasts for future earnings. Story continues Has Bunzl plc Been A Good Investment? Bunzl plc has served shareholders reasonably well, with a total return of 33% over three years. But they probably don't want to see the CEO paid more than is normal for companies around the same size. In Summary... Frank van Zanten is paid around the same as most CEOs of large companies. Shareholder returns could be better but shareholders would be pleased with the positive EPS growth. As a result of these considerations, I would suggest the CEO pay is reasonable. Shareholders may want to check for free if Bunzl insiders are buying or selling shares. Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Dubai (AFP) - Yemeni rebels blocked the UN from accessing vital food aid near the flashpoint port city of Hodeida, a pro-government source said Tuesday. More than 100 workers were denied access to the Red Sea mills warehouse, said a source in the Saudi-led coalition fighting on the side of the Yemeni government. "Unfortunately, the Huthi (rebels) have decided to once again renege on a previous commitment, denying the team access to the mills," the source told AFP. In February, a team from the UN's World Food Programme visited the Red Sea mills warehouse for the first time since September, when they became inaccessible due to the conflict between pro-government forces and the Iran-aligned Huthi rebels. The WFP said laboratory tests confirmed the wheat had been infested with insects and had to be fumigated to feed million of people. WFP spokesman Herve Verhoosel told AFP Tuesday the mission planned by the UN agency to the Red Sea mills was postponed due to "security reasons". Before the UN lost access in September the Red Sea mills held 51,000 tonnes of grain, which was enough to feed more than 3.7 million people for a month. This comes after an agreement was struck in Sweden in February, in which Yemeni rivals agreed to redeploy their fighters outside the ports and away from areas that are key to the humanitarian relief effort. The ports are in the rebel-held west of the country, and the agreement especially set out free access to the Red Sea mills warehouses, under control of the Saudi-backed government forces. Yemen's war escalated in March 2015, when a Saudi-backed coalition intervened against the Iran-aligned Huthi rebels. Since then, the conflict has killed around 10,000 people -- most of them civilians -- and has left more than 60,000 wounded, according to the World Health Organization. New Zealand Police Minister Stuart Nash, left, speaks during a press conference with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the Parliament House in Wellington on March 21, 2019. New Zealand lawmakers overwhelmingly backed a bill Tuesday that would ban the weapons used to kill 50 people in mosque shootings last month. Just one of Parliament's 120 members opposed the bill in the vote, the first of three needed as lawmakers plan to fast-track the bill into law. "Owning a firearm is a privilege, not a right," Police Minister Stuart Nash said. "We need to remove the most dangerous weapons from our community." The bill would ban a range of semiautomatic weapons while instituting a buyback program requiring current owners of such guns to give them to authorities by September, according to Radio New Zealand. The broadcaster reported that legislators plan for the bill to become law on April 11 four weeks after the attacks at two mosques in Christchurch. "We dont ever want to see an attack like this in our country again," Nash said. "We are compelled to act quickly." The only lawmaker who opposed the bill, David Seymour of the conservative ACT party, voiced concern over the bill's pace through Parliament. Gun control: How gun laws in a dozen countries compare with New Zealand's new ban on semiautomatic weapons Sheryl Sandberg: Facebook to restrict Facebook Live after New Zealand mosque shootings Seymour planned to stall the legislation in the Parliament but missed a vote to do so while explaining his plans to journalists outside, according to Agence France-Presse. The best way to show defiance in the face of terrorism is to refuse to erode our democratic institutions," he said, per the news agency. The bill was otherwise supported by liberal and conservative lawmakers. At least one group, the Council for Licenced Firearms Owners, expressed concern about the cost of the planned buyback program, according to the New Zealand Herald. A Treasury estimated the program would cost up to $200 million ($135 million USD). But lawmakers broadly agreed during the bill's first reading to support the program regardless of cost, the Herald reported. Story continues Other gun initiatives, including a gun register and new storage rules, could come later this year, per Agence France-Presse, which reported that New Zealand has about 30 privately owned firearms for every 100 people. The United States, by comparison, has about 90 firearms for every 100 people, according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sweeping gun law could go into effect in New Zealand just weeks after mosque attacks As far as the Nigerian music industry is concerned, Sound Sultan remains a brand to always respect for obvious reasons. His music prowess and originality are forces to reckon with especially the ability to move with the trend. He joins the list of Nigerian celebrities churning our versions of Kizz Daniels Fvck You challenge. Rather than follow the norm, Sound Sultan addressed a more burning concern in his heart, the state of the nation. Known for his musical consciousness, Sound Sultan laid bare the issues eating up the social fabric of Nigeria its cohesion, economic instability, among other delicate issues. This one had to stand alone. Check on it below and enjoy. View this post on Instagram This post is for our leaders: @muhammadubuhari @profosinbajo @akinwunmiambode, @jidesanwoolu, @aleeygiwa Dear Sirs, Kolade Johnson, an innocent, young citizen of Nigeria is dead. He was the only son of a widow, a husband and father. His only crime was being in the right place at the wrong time watching a football match when SARS operatives who allegedly came to arrest someone, started shooting sporadically. Kolade is not the first innocent victim of reckless behaviour by SARS operatives, and he will almost certainly not be the last. It is sickening, frustrating, and unfair. We are tired of hearing about victims of police brutality, but never hearing about the criminal, reckless police officers being brought to justice. We are tired of screaming and tweeting #ENDSARS while our innocent young people are being extorted, bullied, maimed and killed by the very same officers who are meant to protect them. And we are tired of our leaders remaining silent, incident after incident. We're going to track down Kolade's family, pray with them and raise money to assist them through this terrible tragedy. We hope that our leaders will use this opportunity to ACTUALLY show that they care about our lives and wellbeing, by tracking down the reckless officers responsible for this murder and bringing them to justice for their vicious crime. We will not let this go. Kolade was innocent and did not deserve to die. Kolade could have been anyone of us. Please show us that you care about us. Please. #JusticeForKolade PS: Anyone who has the contact details Kolade's wife and/or Mom, please DM @theofficialeme_ and myself. We must take care of ourselves with or without our Government. PPS: please repost Home | News | General | Adeleke: PDP kicks as police storm party's secretariat in Osogbo - Police on Monday, April 1, stormed the PDP secretariat in Osogbo - The party's chairman, Soji Adagunodo, said the police presence was to intimidate the opposition after the declaration of Senator Ademola Adeleke the winner of 2018 election by the Tribunal - Folasade Odoro, the state police public relations officers, however, said the police were deployed to the place for preventive measure There was palpable tension in Osogbo, the capital of Osun state on Monday, April 1, when a contingent of anti-riot policemen stormed the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)'s state secretariat, located around Biket area of the town. Nigerian Tribune reports that though the policemen did not enter the premises of the 3-storey building, their presence caused apprehension among members of the opposition party and the people in the neighbourhood. Legit.ng gathered that the stern looking policemen were seen in their patrol vans and they mounted security from around 8.15am till about 12.00pm. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda Reacting over the police siege, the state PDP chairman, Soji Adagunodo, who confirmed the heavy presence of police operatives, said the party did not invite them for any purpose, saying they were surprised to see them. He said: We saw grand mobilisation of police to our secretariat this morning. Whatever way the whole scenario turned out to be, we are not disturbed, we are not afraid. Their presence does not affect us as a political party. Whatever we are doing as a political party, we are a peace-loving party and we have been like that from inception. I received a call from the deputy commissioner of police that we want to demonstrate. Adagunodo further stated: Then, I told him protest for what? What are we protesting for or against? We are not protesting, we are jubilating and our jubilation started from March 22 and it will continue until the reins of power is handed over to Senator Ademola Adeleke. At that time, we would do a grand jubilation. I know by the virtue of rule of law, they have appealed and by the time the Appeal Court is going to give its judgment, we are going to see another jubilation in Osun for the PDP and Senator Ademola Adeleke and the grand jubilation would be when the Supreme Court gives its final judgment in favour of Senator Ademola Adeleke. So, I told deputy commissioner of police that we are not protesting, we are only jubilating. Whenever we want to do anything, we have been writing the Police. We have the records even when we want to do meeting we write them. The APC is jittery after they organised a protest and they thought we were going to organise a counter-protest but we said no, we allowed people to react and thank God that they were condemned entirety on the social media for their protest.'' The state police public relations officers, Folasade Odoro, said that the police were deployed to the place for preventive measure. She contended that there was intelligence reports that some suspected thugs were planning an attack on the place, hence the need for the command to deploy the police so as to forestall the breakdown of law and order. Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that the election tribunal judgment on Osun 2018 governorship election ruled in favour of Senator Ademola Adeleke. The three-member bench of the tribunal led by Justice Ibrahim Sirajo delivered its judgment at the Federal High Court, Apo, Abuja on Friday, March 22. READ ALSO: Senate queries minister of finance over high budgetary releases to her ministry The petition was filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its governorship candidate, Adeleke, challenging the victory of Governor Gboyega Oyetola in the guber polls held in September 2018. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! Protect your vote to make it count - PDP Guber Candidate | - on Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | What will happen to Nigeria if Senate presidency or deputy doesn't go to southeast - Okorocha - Rochas Okorocha of Imo has said that the presidency or deputy of the Senate should be zoned to the southeast - The Imo state governor said that there will be some political imbalance in the country if this is not the case in the 9th National Assembly - He said that this is so because the southeast is a key primary zone in this country Rochas Okorocha of Imo state has said there will be a sort of imbalance in the Nigerian political space if the next president or deputy of the Senate does not come from the southeast geopolitical zone. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda According to Daily Trust, Okorocha at the State House in Abuja on Monday, April 1, said: Ive been watching carefully what is happening in the National Assembly, its a very funny drama. "But all I ask from them is that they should consider the South East in their calculations. This nation will not be properly balanced if Southeast is not carried along properly in the affairs of the National Assembly. Nobody seems to be talking about the South East, it looks like the South East doesnt have a place anymore; that is wrong, politically speaking and that is not good for APC. Because there is going to be a bigger APC after President Muhammadu Buhari must have left the seat. PAY ATTENTION: Get the Latest Nigerian News Anywhere 24/7. Spend less on the Internet! They shouldnt think about giving South East, whatever position for giving sake. You cant just wake up and give them any position. South East is a key primary zone in this country and if we dont get the number one seat, we should get the number two seat. Meanwhile, Legit.ng reported that President Muhammadu Buhari might have approved the candidacies of Ahmad Lawan and Femi Gbajabiamila as the next Senate president and the speaker of the House of Representatives respectively. The National Working Committee (NWC) of the All Progressives Congress (APC) also met with the newly elected APC members in the House of Representatives on Monday, March 25, over the same issue. Naij.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! Nigeria Latest News: Is the NASS Leadership Still Capable of Leading Nigeria? | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General President Trump decides to keep his great health care plan a secret for a while longer. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Last week, President Trump stunned his own party by declaring that, in the wake of his administrations surprise endorsement of another long-shot lawsuit to nullify Obamacare, they were going to unveil their latest and greatest alternative. Were coming up with plans, he told reporters. And if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is out, we will have a plan thats far better than Obamacare. What followed was Republicans in Congress publicly pretending to follow Trumps new orders, while privately griping that they didnt have a plan and didnt want to run another election on health care after being slaughtered on the issue in 2018. We need a plan, and right now we dont have one, one Republican senator told Politico. Im not going to just throw this to the whims of our creativity. The whims of their creativity is a somewhat delicate way of saying the Republican party is structurally and endemically incapable of devising a health-care program that is remotely acceptable to the public. The reason, which has been amply demonstrated over the last decade, is that most people think great health insurance gives everybody access to medical care. But paying for that care requires some combination of taxes and regulations on insurance, both of which violate conservative dogma. Trump has spent the last year pretending that Republicans were on the verge of delivering terrific health care for every U.S. citizen, but were foiled at the last second by bitter deep-state operative and failed Vietnam War pilot John McCain. (He got to a vote and he said, Thumbs down. And our country would have saved a trillion dollars and we would have had great health care.) There was no plan to save a trillion dollars while providing great health care. The plan voted down by McCain was a placeholder bill designed to buy time for Republicans to keep up the pretense that they would come up with a plan in the future. Last night, Trump conceded that the terrific Republican plan would once again be delayed. The new plan will be unveiled, he promises, after the next presidential election. Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesnt work. Premiums & deductibles are far too high - Really bad HealthCare! Even the Dems want to replace it, but with Medicare for all, which would cause 180 million Americans to lose their beloved private health insurance. The Republicans..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 ....are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare. In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win...... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 ....back the House. It will be truly great HealthCare that will work for America. Also, Republicans will always support Pre-Existing Conditions. The Republican Party will be known as the Party of Great HealtCare. Meantime, the USA is doing better than ever & is respected again! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 If Republicans have a plan to give everybody better health care for lower premiums and lower deductibles, it seems crazy that they would keep it under wraps until after the election. But maybe people just love surprises. Home | News | General | Military arrests 2 suspected arms manufacturers in Benue after 4 weeks of surveillance operation - Military has arrested 2 suspected arms manufacturers in Benue state - The OPWS commander, Maj-Gen Adeyemi Yekini, said the two suspects were arrested by the sector command in Logo, following a tip-off from local informants - Yekini also noted that it took OPWS 4 weeks of surveillance operations to identify the factories and the suspects The headquarters of Operation Whirl Stroke (OPWS), in an ongoing special military operation in Benue, Nasarawa and Taraba states, has said that it has arrested two suspected arms manufacturers in Logo local government area of Benue state. Legit.ng reports that Maj-Gen Adeyemi Yekini, the OPWS commander, who disclosed this while addressing journalists on Monday, April 1, in Makurdi, said the two suspects were arrested by the OPWS sector command in Logo, following a tip-off from local informants. Yekini said that after local sources hinted the OPWS headquarters of the activities of the manufactures, it took them four weeks of surveillance operations to identify the factories and the suspects. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda He said after processing all the information at its disposal, the information was relayed to its sector command for action. According to him, it was the sector command that arrested the suspected arms manufacturers at different sites in Tine Nune village. Also speaking, the sector commander of the OPWS in the area, Capt. Samuel Okinahi, said it was not an easy task arresting the suspects. He said that several weapons were recovered from the manufacturing sites, adding that the suspected manufacturers admitted having customers in Benue and Taraba states. He said that the two suspects were arrested on March 24, by operatives of the command. Speaking to newsmen, one of the suspects, claimed to have studied Telecommunication engineering in Mauritania for five years, before returning to Nigeria. The suspect also claimed to have acquired the skills of arms production while studying abroad but lamented that all efforts to secure a viable business failed owing to the activities of witches in his community. Upon my return to the country, all my efforts at getting a viable business to do failed owing to my peoples witchcraft. Having expended all my resources on other businesses to no avail, I decided to take advantage of the lingering communal crises in my community to venture into arms manufacture to make a living, he said. He said that each AK47 machine gun costs between N350,000 and N400,000 while a pistol goes for N150,000. According to him, he has been in the business for two years and has numerous customers both in Benue and Taraba states. Some of the arms that the OPWS said were manufactured by the suspects included sub-machine guns, AK47, pistols, knives and other assorted local weapons. (NAN) READ ALSO: Buhari's administration will take Nigerians out of poverty before 2023 - Osinbajo Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that the Nigerian Army was commended for its professionalism and excellent conduct during the 2019 general elections by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Akwa Ibom state. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have upgraded to serve you better. Can Nigerian Soldiers really not deal with Boko Haram fighters?| - on Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Inside multi-billion naira Olusegun Obasanjo presidential library complex, Abeokuta (photos) The Olusegun Obasanjo Library is not just a library but a complex that serves as archives for historical documents and materials as it doubles as an academic centre. Established in 2017, the library owned by former President Olusegun Obasanjo is strategically located at Abeokuta, Ogun state, the home state of the ex-president. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda The tradition of having a presidential library started in 1939 by President Franklin D Roosevelt of America who gave his official documents for national use. In 1955, America then passed the Presidental Libraries Act to make the project of having a presidential library formal. The Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library is a house to the former presidents properties which he used when he was the president. A section of the library showcases the vehicles and an helicopter the president used on duty. Another section also showed the different deference craft like a war ship that Obasanjo must have used as a military officer or head of state. The beautiful conference hall in the library complex. Photo credit: Native Reporters Source: UGC A section of the library showing war crafts and vehicles. Photo credit: Native Reporters Source: UGC An area showing some of the motorcade of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Photo credit: Native Reporters Source: UGC Inside Multi-Billion Naira Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library Complex, Abeokuta (photos) Source: UGC A section showing stylish Nigerian traditional attires. Photo credit: Native Reporters Source: UGC PAY ATTENTION: Download our mobile app to enjoy the latest news updates Meanwhile, Legit.ng earlier reported that Obasanjo, asked the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to liberate itself from those he called bad eggs within the political fold. Obasanjo, a former member of the PDP, said there are hypocrites within the party and that these set of people lack commitment to the organisations move to return to the days of its glory. 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 | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Celebration as 7 elderly men taught by 25-year-old Islamic teacher complete learning of Holy Quran A prominent politician, Alhaji Bala Bello Tinka, on Saturday, March 30, completed the learning and recitation of the Muslim scripture, the Holy Qur'an, also known as Khatma in norther part of Nigeria. Tinka, who is also a business mogul and philanthropist, reached the mileage with six other classmates at the age of 51, Daily Trust reports. Legit.ng gathers that other celebrants include; a 50-year-old civil servant, Sadisu Magaji, Aminu Ahmed, 48 a tailor, Ahmad Abdulkadir Tsada, 56 tailor, Muhammad Maigana 58 artisan, Engineer Mohammed Musa. The youngest student in the class is a 39-year-old artisan, Muhammad Abba Pantami. According to report, Tinka and his classmates, amid tight schedules, broke all walls of impossibility to begin a journey to the completion of the Qur'an. Malam Dahir Alamin, the celebrants' tutor, disclosed that the journey started four years ago. He praised Tinka and his friends for their dedication, adding that they could now read the holy book without obstruction. He said: The class started four years ago when Tinka and his friends invited me to teach them the Quran. ''When we started some of them could not even read the Arabic alphabet, but with dedication and their commitment they can now read each verse in the Quran perfectly. Being elderly people with tight schedules, the process was slow at the beginning but with time they got used to it, from a verse per day we improved to half a page and later upgraded to a complete page.'' Al'amin, who is a 25-year-old bachelor, further added: I was 22 when we started the class in 2015 but there was a never a time they disrespected me because of my age. They accorded me same respect as other students below my age have been giving me in other schools. ''Today is the first time I witnessed elderly students completing the recitation of the glorious Quran. I believe this will encourage other people to follow their footsteps, especially the youths who spend most of their time roaming the streets or arguing over unimportant matters at joints. Tinka, who mastermind of the Quranic class, said the Walima was organised not as a show-off but rather to show that age is not a limitation to knowledge. He said: This event (Walima) was purposely organised to encourage others especially elderly people to follow suit and start such classes in their respective houses or enrol in Islamic classes. There were challenges on my part being a frequent traveller, but what kept me going till the end despite our tight schedules is the fear of Allah and the fact that this worldly life is temporary and whatever wealth we have in this life is useless if we failed to achieve greatness in the hereafter. One of the celebrants, Maigana, described the journey as interesting and also taxing considering his age. He, however, added that he was able to complete the journey with dedication and determination. He said: At the beginning it was challenging because of my advanced age and the daily struggle to meet the family obligations. But Alhamdulillah I was able to conquer all these and my next target is to memorize the Quran. Report said it was a fanfare and moment of celebration as people trooped en mass to the house of the celebrants. PAY ATTENTION: Download our mobile app to enjoy the latest news update Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously that Sheikh Ahmad Sulaiman, a popular northern Quranic reciter from Kano state, had been released by his kidnappers days after his abduction was announced. His release was confirmed by Malam Muhammad Kabir, who spoke on behalf of the family. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng. We have upgraded to serve you better. Religion is not Nigerias problem Onos Ariyo | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | You are running CAN like appendage of APC - Christian elders blast Ayokunle for visiting Buhari - NCEF has berated the CAN president, Rev. Samson Ayokunle, over its post-election visit to President Muhammadu Buhari - CAN led by Rev. Ayokunle had visited Buhari to congratulate him on his reelection during the Saturday, February 23 - The Christian elders accused Ayokunle of running CAN as an appendage of the All Progressives Congress The recent visit by the leadership of Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) led by Reverend Samson Ayokunle to President Muhammadu Buhari, has irked the anger of Christian elders forum in Nigeria. The Nation reports that the National Christian Elders Forum (NCEF) under the leadership of a former minister of defence, Lt. Gen. Theophilus Danjuma (retd.) and Solomon Asemota (SAN), faulted the congratulatory visit of the CAN to Buhari on his victory in the 2019 general elections, describing it as morally and spiritually reprehensible. Legit.ng gathered that the the organisation alleged that the President of CAN, Ayokunle is running CAN as an appendage of the All Progressives Congress. CAN president Samson Ayokunle had led the visit, which the National Christian Elders Forum (NCEF) described as shocking. It was learnt that NCEF said CAN should not have congratulated Buhari on his victory at the February 23 election. But the CAN insisted that it remained apolitical, adding that since the electoral umpire has declared Buhari winner, it had no right to say no. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda Besides, it stressed that the NCEF had no authority to speak for Christians because it has been disbanded. NCEF, therefore, disassociated itself from the visit, claiming that it is subjudice as the determination of who won the election is still in court, adding that, ''it is, therefore, premature and presumptuous for anyone to congratulate President Buhari for winning an election that is contested in court. A statement issued in Abuja on Monday, April 1, by the chairman of NCEF, Solomon Asemota (SAN), read in part: The National Christian Elders Forum (NCEF) was shocked to read in the news that the president of CAN, Rev. Dr. Samson Olasupo Ayokunle, with some CAN officials and Christian leaders paid a congratulatory visit to President Muhammadu Buhari on his purported victory in the 2019 general elections. The NCEF wishes to state that the congratulatory visit to Aso Villa by CAN could not be in the interest of Nigerian Christians who daily bear the agony of thousands of their brethren being killed, displaced and marginalised in the Jihad launched in the northern parts of the country. It is well known the indifference of the Buhari administration to the murder of Christians all over the country. ''This indifference has led many, including foreign observers, to conclude that the Buhari administration is complicit in the genocide that is taking place in Nigeria. The action of the CAN President, Rev. Samson Olasupo Ayokunle, is a further confirmation of all the protests and petitions of NCEF in 2018 querying the faithfulness of Dr. Ayokunle to Christ and to His church. ''With this ill-advised congratulatory visit to President Buhari, it should be clear to every Christian of good conscience that Rev. Ayokunle is running CAN as an appendage of APC which has proven by its religiously popularism biased appointments and policies that it is primarily a religious party that is to the disadvantage of Christians whom Rev. Ayokunle claims to be representing. The statement further read: ''As President Goodluck Jonathan demonstrated in 2015, the will of the people must not be subverted. We are no longer in the era of military coup in which individual(s) can impose themselves as rulers over the nation. ''This is democracy and the will of the people must not be subverted. Any attempt to kill democracy by a president who subverts the very process that brought him to power under the instrumentality of stealth and conventional jihad must be resisted and rejected. NCEF aligns itself with the stand of the ethnic nationalities in South West, South East, South South and Middle Belt zones that the Judiciary should perform its rightful oversight and ensure that the rightful winner of the 2019 elections is sworn into office in May 29, 2019. READ ALSO: Senate presidency: Ndume has not withdrawn for Lawan - Group denies social media report ''If the Judiciary, for whatever reason, is unable to take a stand and defend the will of the people then Nigeria would have destroyed Democracy and signed on as a fascist state. Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that the Christians Association of Nigeria (CAN) admonished President Muhammadu Buhari to be wary of people he would appoint into his cabinet when he officially took the second term leadership mantle in May 2019. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have upgraded to serve you better. Nigerians set 2nd term agenda for President Buhari | - on Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Police denie kidnap of 30 people on Abuja-Kaduna expressway - The Police command in Kaduna has said the news that 30 people were kidnapped along Abuja-kaduna expressway is not true - The police lamented that the rumoured kidnap came in at time when another event happened which was adequately responded to - At the place of the incident, the force said they rescued the injured and take them to hospital for an immediate attention The Police command in Kaduna state has said that report on alleged kidnap of 30 people along Abuja-Kaduna expressway is fake news and should not be believed. Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Yakubu Sabo, the commands public relations officer stated this in a statement in Kaduna on Tuesday, April 2, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). FOLLOW OUR LIVE UPDATES: Wike, AAC candidate battle for Rivers as final collation resumes Sabo said the attention of the command was drawn to the fake news going round on social networks to that about 30 people were abducted along Abuja-Kaduna expressway on Monday, April 1 as their vehicles were abandoned by road side. The command wishes to unequivocally refute the story as fake news fictitiously fabricated by some unpatriotic elements to create panic in the minds of unsuspecting citizens who ply the road for their legitimate businesses. It is unfortunate that the fake news coincided with a sad incident of April 1, when at about 1830hrs, some armed men at a point near Gidan Visa along the expressway intercepted a Toyota Hilux with registration no. CT 01 AF belonging to the judiciary, and opened fire on the vehicle in the process, one Mshelia Sulaiman was injured and they took away the occupants. Patrol teams within the axis quickly moved to the scene, rescued the injured person and rushed him to the hospital, he said. He also said that following the incident, a combine team of operatives from the Anti Kidnapping Unit, police mobile force and conventional policemen were immediately deployed to the reportedly affected area with the aim of containing the situation and arresting the criminals. A bank teller bearing the name of a possible victim and two foot wears were recovered in the Hilux and have since been taken to the police station. While the operation is still on, investigation on the incident has also commenced. The command appeals to members of the public to support the police with relevant information on the where about of these and other suspected criminals with a view to curbing the menace of banditry and other related crimes in the state, Sabo said. PAY ATTENTION: Download our mobile app to enjoy the latest news updates Meanwhile, Legit.ng earlier reported that unknown gunmen reportedly attacked travellers on the Abuja-Kaduna road in the evening of Monday, April 1, with some passengers allegedly abducted by the assailants. The incident resulted in a standstill as fear gripped the travelers. It was also reported that the attackers robbed travellers of their possessions and caused several crashes because they forced vehicles on high speed to stop abruptly. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: We have updated to serve you better Police parade gang leader of Badoo Cult group in Lagos | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | LIVE UPDATES: Wike, AAC candidate battle for Rivers as final collation resumes 15:54 PM 45191 views by Eromosele Ebhomele With some of the major issues relating to the controversial governorship election in Rivers state resolved, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) resumed collation of the results of the exercise on Tuesday, April 2. While Rivers governorship election results Port Harcourt Local Government The ruling PDP in Rivers won the governorship election in the Port Harcourt local government. AAC - 11,866 PDP - 40,197 Rivers governorship election results Ikwere Local Government Area In Ikwerre local government area, the home of Rotimi Amaechi, minister of transportation, Wike recorded a major victory against the candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC). AAC - 5,660 PDP - 14,938 Rivers governorship election results Andoni Local Government Area In Andoni, PDPs Wike recorded a landslide against his major opponent. AAC - 5,335 PDP - 92,056 Rivers governorship election results Oyigbo Local Government Area The candidate of the Africa Action Congress (AAC), Biokpomabo Awara, humbled Goveror Nyesom Wike of the PDP in Oyigbo local government area. AAC - 32, 026 PDP - 8,652 Rivers governorship election results Eleme Local Government Area The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won the election in Eleme local government area of Rivers state. AAC 2748 PDP 9560 Rivers governorship election results Opobo/Nkoro Local Government Area In Opobo/Nkoro local government area, the result of the election showed that Wike defeated his closest rival and candidate of the AAC. AAC 3888 PDP 6314 Rivers governorship election results Okrika Local Government Area The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had a field day in Okrika local government area as it won the governorship election comfortably. AAC 3046 PDP 10551 Rivers governorship election results Bonny Local Government Area The Peoples Democratic Party also won the governorship election in Bonny local government area of Rivers state. AAC 3,046 PDP 10,551 Rivers governorship election results Akuku Toru Local Governorship Area The candidate of the AAC beat Wike of the PDP in Akuku Toru local government area. AAC 36,661 PDP 25,765 Rivers governorship election results Omuma Local Government Area The Peoples Democratic Party comfortably led in the governorship election held in Omuma local government area. AAC 1,853 PDP 15,792 Rivers governorship election results INEC declares one hour break. The electoral umpire says it will resume collation of the results when sitting resumes. Rivers governorship election results The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has resumed collation of the results of the governorship election after a one hour break. Rivers governorship election results Tai Local Government Area It was a massive win for the PDP in Tai local government area. AAC - 540 PDP - 47,653 Rivers governorship election results Ahoada East Local Government Area It was another major victory for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Ahoada local government area of Rivers state. AAC - 3,713 PDP - 14,589 Rivers governorship election results Emohua Local Government Area It was another landslide for the PDP in Emohua during the governorship election. AAC - 2,856 PDP - 71,522 Source: Legit.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Just in: Governor Amosun's loyalist defects from APM, returns to APC The majority leader in the Ogun House of Assembly, Adeyinka Mafe, on Tuesday, April 2, announced the withdrawal of his membership of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM). The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Mafe, who represents Sagamu 1 constituency at the Assembly, stated in his withdrawal letter read at plenary by Suraj Adekunbi, the speaker of the House, that he had returned to the All Progressives Congress (APC). READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda I had earlier written a letter to leave APC. I write to officially withdraw the letter and I wish to notify you that I remain a member of APC Next Level, he stated. Mafe and three other members of the House had resigned their membership of APC and defected to the APM in November 2018. The other defectors are three other defectors were the chief whip, Idowu Olowofuja who represents Abeokuta South II, Ganiyu Oyedeji (Ifo II) and Tunde Sanusi (Obafemi Owode). Legit.ng earlier reported how the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ogun state lost no fewer than 26 aspirants of the state House of Assembly to the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) before the election. The defectors were aggrieved aspirants who alleged that the mandate given to them during the October 7 legislative primary of the APC was stolen by the national leadership of the ruling party. One of the defectors, Lamidi Olatunji, said they have come to inevitable conclusion to actualise their ambitions in APM. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app He said: We also wish to acknowledge the fatherly role of President Muhammadu Buhari in seeking to sustain the tenets of democracy, fairness and equity in the resolution of the crisis in Ogun APC. We regret that Mr Presidents efforts were frustrated by the forces that are hellbent in taking the southwest back to the dark age of slavery where unelected kingpins direct the affairs of the people. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng. We have upgraded to serve you better. Which of President Buharis ministers should he retain for 2nd term? | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | From grace to grass: Story of Valentine Strasser West Africa's youngest Head of State who is now poor and jobless Abraham Lincoln once said "nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Captain Valentine Strasser is the youngest Head of State in West Africa. The military man came into power through coup de'tat in 1992, at the age of 25, he was overthrown in 1996. To say his story is sad would be an understatement. Stasser's story truly defines the phrase, from grace to grass. 25-year-old Strasser had seized power in Sierra Leone as Head of State. He overthrew the previous president, Joseph Momoh, who was his boss. Strasser, at that young age not only had wealth, but also had the power to do anything he desired. Meet West Africas youngest ever Head of State who is now poor, jobless and unable to feed Facebook source: Flawlessview Source: Facebook READ ALSO: Buhari congratulates ex-chief of general staff Diya at 75 However, the young man gave himself up to the seduction of power, and became unpopular among his people. He engaged in reckless extravagance and wasted resources that were supposed to be utilized for the good of the people. Strasser was accused of mismanagement and when people began to disagree with his regime, he allegedly ordered their assassination. Many of his soldiers defected to the rebel army that had gained more influence when his regime began to fail. In the end, Strasser was overthrown in a coup by his deputy, Julius Maada Bio, in 1996. In an attempt to start his life anew, the former head of state fled to London penniless. PAY ATTENTION: Read best news on Nigeria's #1 news app According to Flawlessview, he tried to study law at Warwick University on a scholarship, but even that had failed, due to constant harassment from the daughter of one of his victims, and the fact that he had no money or accommodation. The Sierra Leone government later granted him amnesty and he returned to the country where he lived with his mother. He struggled to live daily, jobless and penniless. READ ALSO: Caught In the Act: 15 Celebrities Who Have Cheated On Their Partners It was recently reported by the Sierra Leone Telegraph that the former head of state is now sick, and was admitted at the Aspen Medical Hospital in Freetown. He was diagnosed with peripheral artery disease which affects his left leg. Captain Valentine Strasser is reportedly terribly ill Source: The Sierra Leone Telegraph Source: Depositphotos PAY ATTENTION: Get your daily relationship tips and advice on Africa Love Aid group Bio who had left the office as the Head of State in 1996, and came back to power as the 5th President of Sierra Leone in 2018, came to his former boss' rescue. President Bio had reportedly granted an executive clearance that arranged for medical evacuation for Strasser. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda Meanwhile, Legit.ng had earlier published an article celebrating Nigeria's old and new presidents and the great women behind them. Rare photos of the presidents and their first ladies were also posted in the article. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have upgraded to serve you better Top-5: How to be an African president - detailed guide by Naij - on Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | World | Africa | Sibusiso Moyo's wife unsuitable for ZACC chairperson role Speaker of Parliament Jacob Mudenda has leapt to the defence of President Emmerson Mnangagwa's pick for chairperson of the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission Justice Loice Matanda-Moyo, the wife of Foreign Affairs Minister Sibusiso Moyo. Mudenda spoke on Monday as the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said the High Court judge would not be effective in the position because she was conflicted. MDC spokesman Jacob Mafume told ZimLive: "There's a clear conflict of interest. That should not be happening and it undermines the fight for democracy and concentrates processes and power in a few families depending on where the husband is located. "If your husband is not located in an influential position, then you can kiss goodbye being appointed into anything." Matanda-Moyo joined the High Court in 2013 after serving as the president of the Labour Court and previously as director of public prosecutions in the Attorney General's office. Mudenda took out space in newspapers on Monday to defend Matanda-Moyo's appointment, which Mnangagwa referred to Parliament's Standing Orders Committee for its approval. The committee will shortly conduct public interviews for ZACC commissioners, at the end of which 12 names will be forwarded to Mnangagwa to pick the eight that will join Matanda-Moyo. The Speaker accused the media of "choosing to focus on Justice Matanda-Moyo's marital status while conveniently ignoring the fact that she is eminently qualified for the post", adding: "It is hardly surprising that no reference is made to her rich resume, her undoubted professional competence and her impeccable character." Mudenda said being a judge was testament to Matanda-Moyo's capacity to approach matters dispassionately. That she was a woman was confirmation of a "deliberate drive towards promoting the full participation of women in all spheres of Zimbabwean society on the basis of equality with men as enjoined by section 17(a) of the constitution," Mudenda added. But the MDC maintains that Matanda-Moyo's proximity to a member of the government will create unnecessary complications if she had to investigate her husband's department, or his government associates. "Whilst she appears qualified to do the job, it would appear that the current leaders believe that if they marry their wives they must also give them jobs in government," Mafume said. "We don't understand how, in a country as big as ours, talent can be concentrated in a few bedrooms. They make their wives MPs or put them on the boards of parastatals which gives the impression that competence and wisdom is concentrated in a few bedrooms." Alex Magaisa, a Zimbabwean lawyer who teaches law in the United Kingdom, accused the Speaker of being "disingenuous". "The question that one ought to ask in such situations is what would a fair-minded person looking at an appointment think of it? Would they perceive it to be a situation that might present a conflict of interest? I think a fair-minded person presented with a situation where the wife of a senior minister and stockholder' of the establishment is appointed as the anti-corruption Tzar would perceive a potential conflict of interest," Magaisa told ZimLive. He added: "How would she for example move against her husband or members of the government that he serves in the event of corruption allegations? "This is not to doubt her competence, no. It is merely that good governance requires that such situations that present conflicts of interest be avoided. I'm sure there are many more equally if not better qualified women who could occupy such a role without presenting similar conflicts of interest. "The argument that she is already a judge is not a helpful excuse. A judge is one of many on the bench and she can, if presented with a conflict of interest, recuse herself in favour of another judge. The chair of ZACC does not have the same latitude and luxury. Since government is generally terrain of corruption, she would need to recuse herself too many times." Magaisa said he had little doubt that "from a governance point of view this is an ill-advised appointment which does nothing to help the government in its efforts to be seen to be fighting corruption." "Such fights and such appointments are all about public confidence. Does the appointment inspire public confidence in the anti-corruption drive? I think not," he said. ZACC was dissolved in January over allegations of corruption against some commissioners and general ineffectiveness by the body. Some 133 people have been nominated for appointment to the commission. Parliament will conduct interviews with the nominees before forwarding 12 names to Mnangagwa, who will choose eight from the list. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa Home | World | Africa | Chamisa pleads with Sadc to heed his party's distress call OPPOSITION MDC leader Nelson Chamisa, who recently embarked on a regional diplomatic offensive to sound Sadc leaders on Zimbabwe's worsening political and economic crisis, has pleaded with the bloc to heed his party's distress call. "We feel that there has been an attempt on the part of Sadc, the chairperson of Sadc, the President of Namibia [Hage Heingob], to listen to one side. We feel that in order to have a perfect picture of what is happening in Zimbabwe, you must have a perspective from both sides. They must also listen to the MDC and not just Zanu-PF," he said. Chamisa said his party would continue to knock on the doors of African leaders and influential politicians to push the Zimbabwean agenda so that the political impasse is resolved. He was recently in Botswana, where he was lobbying influential political leaders in an effort to have Zimbabwe's political and economic challenges placed on the Sadc agenda. In Gaborone, he reportedly met with senior government officials, ruling party members, former President Ian Khama and opposition leaders, where he apprised them on problems in Zimbabwe. Chamisa said he used the Botswana trip to seek African solutions to the Zimbabwean problems. "Had a hugely enriching engagement with HE Ian Khama, the former President of the Republic of Botswana, so fulfilling to tap and drink from his well of wisdom, fixing African problems to make all African countries citadels of democracy and prosperity is key," he said. Chamisa's spokesperson Nkululeko Sibanda said his boss was firming his diplomatic offensive and would continue to knock on the doors of all influential African leaders to ensure that the problem in Zimbabwe does not degenerate into chaos. "President Chamisa is concerned about Zimbabwe, thus he is engaging in diplomacy on the African continent, as underpinned by essential ideas that Zimbabwe is part of a bigger African family, African counsel and support are fundamental," Sibanda said. Chamisa has so far met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and is looking forward to a meeting with Geingob, both believed to be sympathetic to President Emmerson Mnangagwa. Both Sadc and the African Union have backed Mnangagwa's call for the unconditional lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe, and have not censored government's recent violent crackdown on protesters, leaving Chamisa hanging out to dry. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa President Trump rethinking his support for releasing the Mueller report Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images In the immediate wake of Robert Muellers announcement that he has not established a criminal conspiracy between Russia and Donald Trump, the jovial president declared he would be happy to display the entire report before the public. Let it come out. Let people see it thats up to the attorney general, he said. But over the last few days, the administrations position on full disclosure has grown quieter. Meanwhile, periodic murmurs have suggested perhaps the report will amount to something other than total vindication. Privately, some Trump advisers acknowledge those attacks may have a shelf life, and that they are deploying them in part to blunt questions about Mr. Trumps own credibility, notes the New York Times. A senior White House official tells my colleague Olivia Nuzzi, There will be plenty of unfavorable things about the president in the full report, which we think will eventually come out, so lets not go overboard saying theres no wrongdoing. Lets move on. This morning, Trump tweeted, There is no amount of testimony or document production that can satisfy Jerry Nadler or Shifty Adam Schiff. It is now time to focus exclusively on properly running our great Country! Today, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders answered a question about the Mueller report by calling Democrats sore losers who need to move on. Trump is now calling demands to release the report a disgrace and a waste of time. Trump: demands for release of the full Mueller report are a "disgrace" pic.twitter.com/dxkC6XL26L Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 2, 2019 "somewhat of a waste of time" .... Trump comments on whether Mueller Report should be released. pic.twitter.com/ISCzdUKUMK Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 2, 2019 Its possible Trump is just so committed to a wide-ranging view of executive privilege he will insist on withholding a report that humiliates his critics and disproves all the unfounded suspicions the Fake News has raised about his relations with Russia. Or possibly hes concerned Congress will waste precious time reading a long, boring report whose conclusion weve already been told, when it should be getting urgently to work on his ambitious legislative agenda of um [tumbleweed rolls by.] On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, the Mueller report is less flattering than William Barrs topline summary indicated? Home | World | Africa | Aberdeen councillor sees 'big opportunities' in Bulawayo The near 40-year-long reign of Robert Mugabe ended abruptly in December 2017 when he was placed under house arrest by the Zimbabwean army and dismissed from his party leadership post. And while his Zanu-PF party still rule the country, with widespread allegations of human rights abuses and corruption, Bridge of Don councillor John Reynolds said the nation is nonetheless "opening up" to investment. Mr Reynolds has met with Zimbabwean embassy staff to explore what business links can be set up between Aberdeen and the country with their shared interest in oil a top priority. Were renewed links to be established, the two would have to overcome the torrid relationship Britain and Zimbabwe have had since Mugabe came to power in 1980. But in this Aberdeen has a head-start, due to its long-standing connection with the country. The Granite City is one of six "sister cities" of Zimbabwe's second largest settlement of Bulawayo. The council also has its own Bulawayo charitable trust established to help people in the burgeoning city. Mr Reynolds said political changes in the country could lead to rich investment opportunities for Aberdeen. He said: "The natural resources of the country are particularly large. "There is oil there and some firms are already seeing big opportunities. "There are also political changes now happening and the country is beginning to open up a lot more to the UK." Mr Reynolds added: "The difficulty will be getting over some of the history between the two countries but the Zimbabwean government are planning on opening a consulate in Glasgow and there are talks about them wanting to re-join the commonwealth. "There is a lot of history but also opportunities because of that. "British firms tend to like to do business in places where a lot of people speak English so they don't have to spend money on translations." When asked about the human rights record of the Zimbabwean regime, Mr Reynolds said: "Closer relations can also allow us to put friendly pressure on the government there. "It is better to be inside the tent that outside." Aberdeen has been twinned with Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, since 1986. It is historically the country's industrial capital, with factories producing cars and car products, building materials, electronic products, textiles and furniture. The bond between the two cities is most strongly exhibited by the Aberdeen Bulawayo Trust, a north-east charity which arrange fundraisers on behalf of the poorer residents of the African city. Last year, a football club from Bulawayo appealed for help from people in the Granite City to allow them to compete in the World Football Cup in London, a competition for teams that are unaffiliated with FIFA. Matabeleland FC's voluntary head coach, Justin Walley, even said he would like to visit Aberdeen to improve his skills with some sessions at Pittodrie. And stories from Aberdeen's African twin city will soon be published to mark the centenary of one of Scotland's most influential writers, Dame Muriel Spark. Shane Strachan, who has a PhD in creative writing from Aberdeen University, has written a collection of short fiction inspired by the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie writer. Mr Strachan's fictional take on Spark's life will also include chapters about an Aberdeen doctor who travels to Bulawayo and unknowingly traces the author's steps. He said: "I have been to Bulawayo twice now and I think there are more similarities with Aberdeen and Bulawayo than people think, especially in terms of our industrial backgrounds." CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa Home | World | Africa | Married cheat convicted A 35-YEAR-OLD married Harare man was last week fined at a traditional court in Mashonaland Central province for impregnating a married Madziwa Teachers College student last year. Tawanda Gunja pleaded guilty to the charge before Chief Masembura, who fined him five cattle and two goats for the offence. The court heard that Gunja, a farmer, met Francisca Mufandarambwa (45) at Madziwa Teachers College in 2017 when she was doing her first year and entered into a relationship. This was in spite of the fact that Gunja was customarily married to Gerald Dungare (59), an auditor at Bindura Municipality. The cheats had unprotected sex several times before Mufandarambwa fell pregnant last year and eventually gave birth. Mufandarambwa's husband then took the matter to the chief's court. Quizzed on her actions, Mufandarambwa told the chief that Dungare was sexually starving her after he married a second wife and she thought of finding a young man who wouldsatisfy her. "Your Worship, my husband was sexually starving me for a long time since he has a second wife. Whenever he came to our Chitungwiza home, I would entice him and he would simply ignore me until I thought of finding a young man who could satisfy me. I am no longer with my husband because he ignored me," she said. In his plea of guilty, Gunja said he met Mufandarambwa who pretended to be single and they had sex at her Chitungwiza home until they had their first child. "I admit to impregnating this woman at her Chitungwiza home, but deny that I snatched someone's wife. We met at her college and she never told me that she was married, that is why I used to go to her Chitungwiza home," he said. The chief warned his subjects against snatching married women. "It is a very dangerous game which can cost lives. Therefore, culprits should be judged harshly so that it sends a warning to potential offenders. The cattle and goats are to be paid within two weeks," Chief Masembura ruled. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa Home | World | Africa | Mthwakazi is not different from Saharawi - MLF It is very surprising to note how African leaders of today operate.No wonder the lack of developmentIn the past week, heads of (SADC/AU,please correct)met in Pretoria o give Solidarity support to the people of SAHARAWI. Each leader took to the podium to support SAHARAWI and vilify Morocco for denying the people of South West Sahara of their independence.Nothing is said or done about Mthwakazi just 500km from Pretoria. The people of Mthwakazi and their history is one of the best documented in the region and their plea to restore their Mthwakazi Country has so far fallen on deaf ears. It is even more perplexing to note how keen Ramaphosa seems to be in helping Zimbabwe solve it's self induced problems but just has no interest in Mthwakazi issues that,according to our knowledge,have the solutions to Zimbabwe problems.MLF has done all in its power to engage the majority of South African political parties who have responded differently,with the DA refusing bluntly to help Mthwakazi people in fear that South Africa will follow suit and be disintegrated.One hopes the renewed efforts to meet the ANC President who doubles as State President will yield desired results before the May 8 Election.We as MLF are encouraged by EFF's response to Mthwakazi and other African Nationals that are resident in South Africa and are living in fear of Xenophobic attacks. MLF appeals to SADC and AU member states to look into the Mthwakazi issue with the view of giving the status it deserves in its fight for territorial integrity and total independence from Zimbabwe.This will see the end of Southern African-American Colonialism as Mthwakazi Kingdom was the last state to be colonized in this region. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa "OPPOSITION MDC leader Nelson Chamisa, who recently embarked on a regional diplomatic offensive to sound SADC leaders on Zimbabwe's worsening political and economic crisis, has pleaded with the bloc to heed his party's distress call," reported Bulawayo24. The trouble with you, Chamisa, and your MDC A friends is that you do not listen to reason. Have you read and understood the EU Zimbabwe Election Observer Mission report? "The final results as announced by the Electoral Commission contained numerous errors and lacked adequate traceability, transparency and verifiability. Finally, the restrictions on political freedoms, the excessive use of force by security forces and abuses of human rights in the post-election period undermined the corresponding positive aspects during the pre-election campaign. As such, many aspects of the 2018 elections in Zimbabwe failed to meet international standards," stated the EU report. The EU have refused to endorse Mnangagwa's claim as the winner of last year's elections because the election process "failed to meet international standards" because of the glaring flaws and illegalities stated above. Mr Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF regime claim that they have the mandate to govern, that is just nonsense because the electoral process was flawed and illegal. The Zanu PF regime is illegitimate, period. You, Mr Nelson Chamisa, claim that you won last year's elections, the same elections with the same glaring flaws and illegalities. You had the opportunity to produce documentary evidence; the V11 forms summary of the vote count at each polling station, for example; to back you claim of the votes you received. You failed to produce the documentary evidence. So you claim to be the winner of the presidential race is just as hollow and nonsensical as Mnangagwa's claim. SADC leaders have a headache of Mnangagwa claiming to be legitimate when they know that he is not. The regional leaders must know by now that the root cause of Zimbabwe's worsening economic meltdown is the country being stuck with a corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship for 38 years and counting. If they thought endorsing Mnangagwa's victory would solve anything they were wrong and the economic reality of the worsening economic situation say it all. SADC leaders are scratching their heads as to how they are going to tell Mnangagwa and his junta that they are illegitimate and must step down. The leaders know as long as Zanu PF remains in power there is no hope of a meaningful economic recovery. None! SADC leaders know Chamisa and his hare-brain claim to be the winner of the flawed and illegal election and proposal for interparty dialogue with Zanu PF is a waste of time. Even listening to Chamisa's nonsensical claim will only encourage the upstart to believe he has a legitimate claim to power, only to tell that he and his MDC Alliance friend must step down too. Why bother listening to the upstart in the first place!When it was clear that MDC leaders had failed to implement even one democratic reform at the end of the 2008 to 2013 GNU SADC leaders deserted MDC leaders in droves in disgust. Ever since MDC leaders have done nothing to redeem themselves, they did not even have the common sense to demand that ZEC must produce a verified voters' roll before last year's elections. "We feel that there has been an attempt on the part of SADC, the chairperson of SADC, the President of Namibia [Hage Heingob], to listen to one side. We feel that in order to have a perfect picture of what is happening in Zimbabwe, you must have a perspective from both sides. They must also listen to the MDC and not just Zanu-PF," said Nelson Chamisa. Chamisa said his party would continue to knock on the doors of African leaders and influential politicians to push the Zimbabwean agenda so that the political impasse is resolved. The one thing Chamisa is after is a seat on the gravy train. He and his MDC Alliance friends are hoping that the country will end up with yet another GNU in which they will once again be allocated a ministerial position complete with the limo, generous salary and allowance, etc. Chamisa had made implementing democratic one of his demands. This is just lip service. He and his MDC friends failed to get even one reform implemented in five years during the last GNU it is naive to believe they will do so now! A new GNU involving Zanu PF and MDC will be a repeat of the 2008 GNU, it will never implement any meaningful reforms. The political and economic situation in Zimbabwe is critical and it demands a solution and not another gimmick. Zimbabwe needs an interim administration that will implement the democratic reforms fully and deliver free, fair and credible elections, guaranteed. Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF junta must step down to create the political space for the new administration. As for Nelson Chamisa and his MDC friends, ignore them. They are corrupt, incompetent and sell-out. They are only fishing for gravy train seats and another chance to sell-out! Zimbabwe would not be in the political and economic mess we are in today if they had not wasted the many golden opportunities to implement the democratic reforms. Home | World | Africa | MDC's violent acts condemned A local civic society organization, Heal Zimbabwe Trust has called upon opposition MDC members to cease all acts of violence against fellow party members during the run up to the May Congress. Heal Zimbabwe issued a statement after violent incidents were reported to have occurred in various places where MDC members were voting for their preferred Candidates. It is alleged that the fights is between factions belonging to Nelson Chamisa and Douglas Mwonzora who are highly likely to battle it our for the position of the Presidency. Heal Zimbabwe said it , "implore political parties to employ dialogue as a tool to resolve disputes. This helps to promote social cohesion and tolerance. Cohesive communities help establish harmony so that people are tolerant of each other and live together in peace." Read the full statement below: Heal Zimbabwe calls on the MDC Alliance to uphold peace and tolerance ahead of its congress. The MDC Alliance has announced that it will conduct its elective congress from 24-26 May 2019. On the 30th March 2018, during a selection of candidates for the party's district organs, rival MDC Alliance camps clashed over irregularities in the selection process. The clashes left former Chitungwiza deputy Mayor, Jabulani Mtunzi and several others injured and hospitalized. Further to this, Heal Zimbabwe has also received reports of similar clashes in areas such as Mbare, Kuwadzana and Epworth. In light of the above, Heal Zimbabwe implores political parties to reign in on their supporters who perpetrate violence and come up with punitive measures that help deter violence. Political parties must also remain guided by the provisions of the Electoral Code of Conduct for Political Parties which stipulates that NO political party or any of its members or supporters, and NO candidate or any of his or her supporters, may: (a) use violence, or threaten violence or incite or encourage the use of violence, against anyone on account of his or her political opinions or membership or support of a political party or participation in the election; (b) intimidate, or incite or encourage the intimidation, of anyone on account of his or her political opinions or membership or support of a political party; act in a way that may provoke violence or intimidation; (c) use violence or threats or illegal pressure to force voter to refrain from voting or to vote for a candidate or political party against his or her will; (d) force a voter to reveal the identity of the candidate voted for or take reprisals against a person because of the way in which he or she has voted or is believed to have voted. Heal Zimbabwe continues to implore political parties to employ dialogue as a tool to resolve disputes. This helps to promote social cohesion and tolerance. Cohesive communities help establish harmony so that people are tolerant of each other and live together in peace. In light of this, Heal Zimbabwe will continue to campaign robustly for a national dialogue that must be premised on adequate inclusion right from the grassroots. More importantly is inclusion of women in the dialogue since they have suffered the brunt of political violence during successive episodes of political conflict in the country. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images New Yorks recently elected Democratic trifecta, the first since 2011, has finalized its first budget. With Democrats in control of each branch of government, the party enjoys enormous leeway both to pass precedent-setting legislation and to rearrange the states budget priorities. In some areas, they succeeded in doing so: The budget for this fiscal year ends cash bail for 80 percent of arrests, creates a congestion tax that will help fund improvements to the New York City subway, releases hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the New York City Housing Authority, and raises funding for public education. But as positive as these provisions are, lawmakers fell short of progressive expectations in other respects. Public campaign financing isnt the only progressive policy lawmakers punted into an uncertain future, but it is a key priority for activists, and lawmakers couldnt agree on a version of the policy in time to include it in this years budget. Research suggests that public financing, which would match small donations with taxpayer dollars, would help counter the influence of major donors and lobbyist groups. New Yorks existing campaign-finance laws are unusually lax, reported the Brennan Center for Justice, which supports public financing. Small-donor participation in the state is low, which means that large donations wield significant influence in New York, even by the standards of other states. Public financing could, according to the Brennan Center and other progressive groups like the Center for Popular Democracy, increase the power of small donors and make lawmakers more accountable to their constituents. Public financing also some has institutional support within the Democratic Party. Nationally, House Democrats introduced a bill that would have created a pilot program for publicly financed elections; voters could request a My Voice voucher that would allocate funds to candidates in increments of $5. Cuomo himself backed public financings inclusion the budget, and proposed a six-to-one funding match for small donations; had it survived this years budget negotiations, the proposal would have amplified the influence of small donors. So why did New Yorks trifecta balk at public campaign financing? For one, Democrats still have to contend with 66 Republican legislators. But there are other, less partisan explanations for this years budget. Partisan affiliation does not negate the influence of money in politics, and as a result, Democratic control of state government does not guarantee progress. In March, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, told reporters that he didnt have the votes to keep public financing in the budget; members were instead interested in an alternative that didnt use public funds. I think they want to have the discussion but Id say right now theres not 76 members who want to move forward with it in the next three weeks in the budget, he said, according to the Gotham Gazette. Heastie was right, and for now, public financing is on hold. As Gothamist reported on Monday, lawmakers became a parody of themselves, agreeing only to create a commission to study the issue. The bipartisan commission does have a mandate to come up with some kind of public-financing scheme, but success isnt guaranteed, especially if the state Democratic Party cant agree on a solution. The reason the Democrats were so reluctant to adopt public financing may have something to do with the makeup of this years freshman class of legislators. As Politico noted in March, a number of new Democratic legislators earned their seats by defeating incumbents. If an insurgent candidate gathered enough grassroots support, public financing could boost their campaign even further. Advocates for public financing say thats the point: Public financing democratizes elections and lowers financial barriers that can keep working-class candidates without connections to major donors out of the electoral process. On his Twitter account, State senator Brad Hoylman also linked public financing to the demise of the pied-a-terre tax, which became a casualty of the states powerful real-estate lobby. What happened to the pied-a-terre tax is Exhibit A in the case for why we need public financing. Special interests still have too much power. Break Albanys addiction to big money and progress will follow. #FairElections https://t.co/OTW9fJvWpJ Senator Brad Hoylman (@bradhoylman) March 30, 2019 Cuomo, like Hoylman, had supported the tax. But the Real Estate Board of New York called it a bad tax that has no analysis behind it, the Wall Street Journal reported; the lobby also insisted that the taxs passage would deter wealthy homeowners from seeking second homes in New York City. REBNYs opposition seemingly sounded a death knell for the tax. Though its impossible to know if millionaires and billionaires really would have dodged the city en masse because of the tax, the threat may have cost the state necessary revenue. According to some projections, the proposed tax would have raised around $665 million per year. The mansion tax, by contrast, will raise around $365 million, Curbed reports. Voters created an opening for a new, more progressive era in New York politics, but its not clear from this years budget that lawmakers are ready to bring that era to life. As he escalates his trade war with China, President Trump is pushing to provide some additional bailout funds to placate the U.S. farmers being hurt by his tariffs.Out of the billions of dollars that were taking in [from tariffs], a small portion of that will be going to our farmers, Trump said Monday. Were going to take the highest year the biggest purchase that China has ever made with our farmers, which is about $15 billion and do something reciprocal to our farmers.The president tweeted a similar pledge on Tuesday: Hopefully China will do us the honor of continuing to buy our great farm product, the best, but if not your Country will be making up the difference based on a very high China buy, he wrote. This money will come from the massive Tariffs being paid to the United States for allowing China, and others, to do business with us.The tweet underscores again Trumps misunderstanding of how tariffs work. They are paid by U.S. importers, and ultimately passed on to U.S. consumers.The background: The Trump administration last week raised tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods and threatened to extend the tariffs to an additional $300 billion in imports. China responded in part by announcing that, as of June 1, it would impose tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods.Farmers feeling the pain: Farmers are feeling the impact of the trade war and, while many still stand by Trump, some are growing weary of his trade policy. "Farmers have been patient and willing to let negotiations play out, but with each passing day, patience is wearing thin," said National Corn Growers Association President Lynn Chrisp in a statement last week, according to CNN. "Agriculture needs certainty, not more tariffs."Net farm income dropped by $12 billion, or 16%, in 2018. The $15 billion in aid Trump has suggested would be on top of $12 billion he directed the Department of Agriculture to provide last year. That first farm-support program has reportedly paid out more than $8.5 billion thus far, with producers of soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton and sorghum getting much of the money.The latest bailout is still being devised, Trump said Monday, and its not yet clear who would be eligible for the aid. The question of how this would be done, whether it would apply to wheat and corn and other crops and not just soybeans, is going to be a question thats going to have to be answered, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said, according to The Washington Post.Perhaps a bigger long-term question for farmers is whether an important market for their products has been destroyed.Consumers are getting hit too: Heres one way to look at Trumps proposed aid to farmers, The Washington Posts Philip Bump: Trump is taxing consumers to bolster farmers, a core part of his political base. One estimate Bump cites puts the additional cost to consumers at $8.8 billion a month. Since November, the total estimated cost is $22.4 billion in tariffs and $21.6 billion in higher costs resulting from related supply-chain changes.The politics: The new tariffs have drawn criticism and concern from both Democrats and Republicans. The American worker is getting killed by this," former Vice President Joe Biden, whos running for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Monday on a New Hampshire radio station. "The American farmers are getting killed. And the additional bailout being proposed has once again raised cries of Trumpian hypocrisy that the president is looking to protect his voter base at the expense of the broader public. During the administration of Barack Obama, Trump and his party regularly excoriated Obama as picking winners and losers, shunting government resources to programs that he supported at the expense of the free market, The Washington Posts Bump notes.Like what you're reading? Sign up for our free newsletter. President Trumps decision to relaunch the fight over the Affordable Care Act may have thrown Republican lawmakers for a loop, but the president isnt backing down. The cost of ObamaCare is far too high for our great citizens, he tweeted Monday. The deductibles, in many cases way over $7000, make it almost worthless or unusable. Good things are going to happen! Its not clear, though, what those good things might be, or how and when they might happen. Heres why. Congressional Republicans arent on board: Republicans have no intention of heeding President Trumps urgent demands for a new health-care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, fearing the potential political damage that such a proposal could cause in 2020 and hoping he will soon drop the idea, according to interviews with numerous GOP lawmakers, legislative staffers and administration aides, The Washington Posts Seung Min Kim and Josh Dawsey reported over the weekend. Not only is there no such health-care overhaul in the works on Capitol Hill there are no plans to make such a plan. Asked whether two Senate committees overseeing health care plan to draft another Obamacare replacement plan, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) gave the Post a flat No, noting that the courts wont decide Obamacares fate for a long time. Even the senators supposedly working on a plan are hedging: Trump told reporters last week that Republican Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rick Scott of Florida will be coming up with a health care plan thats really spectacular. The presidents tweet Monday again mentioned those three senators along with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But there doesnt appear to be a working group formally tasked with devising an Obamacare replacement plan. "I think the president just listed off the names of people he's spoken to on the phone about health care," one Senate Republican aide told CNN. Story continues And when Chuck Todd, host of NBCs Meet the Press on Sunday asked Barrasso a straightforward question Should the American people expect an actual health care plan alternative from the Republican Party this year? he got a less than straightforward answer. The American people should expect to not have to be burdened with the incredible costs that are affecting them now, as a result of the healthcare law, Barrasso said, deflecting. Scott, on CBSs Face the Nation, seemed to indicate he expects a proposal from the White House. I look forward to seeing what the president's going to put out, he said. He also told the Post that, while hes going to try to get something done, I think it accelerates everything if the White House had a plan. And Scott is probably not the best person to pitch the GOP as the party of health care: The Florida senator on Friday unveiled legislation aimed at reducing prescription drug prices, but his background opens him and the GOP up to easy criticism. Scott was CEO of the hospital group Columbia/HCA in the 1990s. The company later agreed to plead guilty to at least 14 corporate felonies and pay the government $1.7 billion for its actions while he was in charge, in what the Justice Department at the time called the largest health care fraud case in U.S. history. The Washington Posts James Downie cracks that Scott is on Trumps health care team because no one knows how to fix U.S. health care better than a man who took in millions while overseeing a company committing massive Medicare fraud. Republicans are reportedly rooting for the lawsuit challenging the ACA to fail: Republicans may not like the Obama health care law, but they know that having it wiped off the books while Congress is divided could be a recipe for chaos. If youre looking strictly at political outcomes, it could be argued that a lot of members dont want to see this struck down because they dont want to deal with the fallout, an unnamed senior Republican senator told The Hill. Trump himself doesnt think the lawsuit challenging the ACA will succeed: Trump has privately said he thinks the lawsuit to strike down the Affordable Care Act will probably fail in the courts, according to two sources who discussed the matter with the president last week, Axioss Jonathan Swan reports. But he wants to press ahead on health care anyway: Aides tell The Post that the idea is to address what Trump sees as his biggest political vulnerability heading into the 2020 elections. Trump's view is that Democrats are going to bash him up on health care in 2020 regardless, so ignoring the issue wont work, Axioss Swan says. So Trump wants to market the GOP as the party of health care, and he knows that repeating the message is key to selling it: He plans to repeat this message again and again and again, Swan says. Plan or no plan, the president may not be easily swayed by those Republicans looking to change the subject or simply wait out the White House. And the White House just may come up with a plan: The White House has secretly been working on a health care proposal with three right-leaning think tanks the Heritage Foundation, the Mercatus Center and the Hoover Institute for months, the conservative Washington Examiner reports. Policy leaders at the think tanks told the Examiner than the plan would take concepts from previous GOP health care proposals. But a conservative policy analyst indicated that it may be quite some time before theres a concrete plan. I dont think theres anything thats fully formed, the analyst said. I think a lot of the devils in the details. For now, the GOP health care agenda is still mostly talk. Like what you're reading? Sign up for our free newsletter. Last May, Xiaomi co-founder and CEO Lei Jun had made it clear that it was an internet services and software company first, a hardware company later. He told India Today Tech that Xiaomi makes hardware just so it can serve as a messenger for its content in China. Indeed, in its home market, the company actually makes money off of its internet streaming services and software. But things hitherto were very different in India, where Xiaomi has emerged the number one smartphone brand. Its thrust as a hardware company meant that it was not making as much money in the country. The company, already known to sell products at cost or with a profit margin of 1-2%, had announced last April that it would cap income from its hardware business at 5% of after-tax profits. Hence, the company now has big plans for monetising internet services in India, too. Xiaomi India managing director Manu Kumar Jain told The Economic Times that the company wants to generate revenue and profit from streaming of movies and videos, music, digital payment and applications, and will invest a significant proportion of the recent Rs 3,500 crore fund infusion to expand into internet services. Just last month, the Indian business unit received the second tranche of this infusion amounting to Rs 2,000 crore. According to him, Xiaomi globally has three financial pillars, devices, retail and the yet-to-be-monetised services. "It is the internet services which will make money for us," Jain said, adding, "We are keen to invest in Indian companies and startups in this space to get them into the Xiaomi ecosystem". However, he reportedly declined to share what percentage of revenue it expects to generate from services or any financials since the parent company is a listed entity. But given the sheer potential of the space, it will be a neat amount. A report released by industry body IAMAI last October predicted that the number of internet users in India will increase 1.6 times from 481 million to reach 762 million in 2022. Along with increased availability of internet connectivity, the number of smartphone users, too, is expected to grow at 1.75 times to reach 526 million. Consider the over-the-top (OTT) video streaming market alone. The Boston Consulting Group estimates that this segment will mushroom from $500 million to $5 billion by 2023, and already vying for a slice of this red-hot pie are players like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Reliance Jio and Spotify. So Xiaomi has a stiff fight ahead. So far the company has launched three value-added internet services in the country - Mi Music, Mi Video and, more recently, Mi Credit. The latter, as the name suggests, is a money lending platform that lists financial loan providers such as KreditBee and ZestMoney that MIUI users can access to apply for instant loans. According to the daily, Xiaomi will soon commercialise Mi Credit, which is currently on pilot. "We are evaluating whether we will apply for NBFC licence, and if we do it we would ourselves offer credit. But it would take time," Jain explained. The company further wants to monetise streaming content from Mi Video and Mi Music, while its file transfer tool Mi Drop has already hit 100 million downloads. Last month it also announced the Mi Pay payments app in India, which is based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), taking on rivals like Paytm, PhonePe, MobiKwik and Google Pay. Xiaomi Technology India's sales in 2017-18 reportedly grew by 175% to Rs 23,060 crore, while its net profit too went up 79% to Rs 293 crore. Apart from internet services and software, Jain claimed that the fund infusion will also go into offline expansion, opening exclusive Mi Home retail stores, building localised R&D for devices, warehouses and service centres. It also plans to invest in manufacturing, which will be done by partners. Xiaomi recently announced its seventh manufacturing plant in the country in partnership with Flex. More than 65% of the value of the phone manufactured in India is sourced locally. With PTI inputs These celebrities can be so exhausting. Reply Thread Link why does anyone care what alyssa milano says? she is so irrelevant and try hard. Reply Thread Link She has 3.5 million followers on Twitter, so someone cares what she thinks. Biden crossed the line long ago and doesn't seem to learn from his mistakes. I see people wondering why anyone is trying to defend him and that's because he's currently #1 in the polls and Dems are afraid he's the only one who can beat Trump. So they don't like him being held accountable. They'd rather look the other way. The other joke is that Republicans would vote for him because they don't care about his being too touchy-feely. Look who they voted for last time. Reply Parent Thread Link Her repeated insistence that Biden is ~nice~ is really creepy in itself. Sis just admit you want the pretense of being progressive but not the higher taxes and go. Edited at 2019-04-02 10:56 pm (UTC) Reply Thread Link I'm just really sick of hearing about him Reply Thread Link girl this is when you just don't say anything.... Reply Thread Link People have been really acting stupid over this. People have been really acting stupid over this. Reply Thread Link Someone should let her know that Biden can be her buddy and do problematic shit. When I think about every single man who has harmed me, including sexual abuse, I don't think any of them intended to harm me. Some of them fancy themselves as champion of women's rights. It doesn't negate the harm they did or at the very least, how uncomfortable I felt in the moment. Reply Thread Link Yep. I know a few men who claim to advocate for womens rights but at some point in their lives have had inappropriate encounters with women. If she wants to be his friend thats her choice, but it doesnt mean she cant call him out on his fuckery. Reply Parent Thread Link I don't know what the "right" action is for Biden now, but I also think it's ridiculous that people are so quick to give him a pass. Maybe he doesn't deserve to be canceled, but he should have to own up to his actions and do better. Reply Parent Thread Link I love this comment so much...a coworker went in for a side hug and when he did he ran his hand over my butt. He's a nice guy but no one would take it serious if I made a big stink about it because of how "nice" he is. Reply Parent Thread Link Yikes Reply Thread Link mte Reply Parent Thread Link This is the gif of 2019. Reply Parent Thread Link MTE Reply Parent Thread Link "I'm all about believing women, until I can get 1/90th of power and goodwill bestowed upon me by a white man." Reply Thread Link Literally it makes me so angry dude Reply Parent Thread Link all for crumbs of clout lmao she thinks she's a revolutionary Reply Parent Thread Link Mfte ugh Reply Parent Thread Link White feminism in a nutshell Reply Parent Thread Link It's so exhausting Reply Parent Thread Link White women have sprung into action to defend him. Not surprised. Reply Parent Thread Link Shes still a mess on this though, considering she was the one that put Also, hes not the best horse to bet on considering the political climate. Theyre not stealing Trump votes with him. He the best the Dems can get? Chile. Edited at 2019-04-02 11:04 pm (UTC) There are a lot of celebs defending Jo Biden but why are we are just narrowing down on her? She was a mess on that last issue but it seems that she now has an ONTD target on her back.Shes still a mess on this though, considering she was the one that put #MeToo to the mainstream. The lack of self-awareness.Also, hes not the best horse to bet on considering the political climate. Theyre not stealing Trump votes with him. He the best the Dems can get?Chile. Reply Thread Link Alyssa has put herself front and center when it comes to Time's Up and #MeToo , she was even seated right behind Christine Blasey-Ford during her testimony juxtaposed with how OTT a 6 tweet thread on Biden's virtues are... It's a lot. Reply Parent Thread Link I really did not like when I could see her in the back during the hearing. I don't think she should've had a place there or at least she should've been outta sight. I kept thinking it was pseudo-opportunistic on her part. I'm sure Alyssa has good intentions with the whole movement but I also feel her and a few other celebs are also branding on this. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I saw on twitter a bunch of people are trying so damn hard to defend him. It irks me for a lot of reasons (one of them being I'm one of many of us who called this AGES ago as something that would blow up and ppl are trying to downplay it like it wasn't in the making for actual decades and ppl need to fucking hold men accountable god fucking DAMMIT) but part of what gets me is that neither side of the party divide has any self awareness and everyone sounds like a fuckin hypocrite trying to defend ~Uncle Joe~ Just stop. Start holding men accountable. That includes ur fave men who have gotten away with being gross for years bc being in denial about bad behavior gets us nowhere ffs Reply Thread Link Just stop. Start holding men accountable. That includes ur fave men who have gotten away with being gross for years bc being in denial about bad behavior gets us nowhere ffs Speak it. Reply Parent Thread Link I cringed away from the screen with her saying his intent was never to make anyone uncomfortable. Like, do you know how many times I have heard men use that same line, even when doing stuff that clearly crossed a line? Reply Thread Link MTE. I'm thinking of men I've trusted in the past who have crossed lines that I made incredibly clear to them. Reply Parent Thread Link the phrase "intent is not magical" has been around as long as I can remember, yet people still be over here having to scream it. Reply Parent Thread Link This isn't surprising. We saw with Bill Clinton in 2015-2016 that even prominent career liberal feminists were willing to keep their heads down and not support/believe women in the name of making sure the "right" candidate won. Thouhg at least they were smart about their insincerity. These people falling over themselves to comment are throwing away whatever good names they had to defend Joe Biden, of all people. Edited at 2019-04-02 11:12 pm (UTC) Reply Thread Link the fact that the clintons still have careers despite all their bullshit... yikes. they are all active defenders of creeps for the right money, prestige, and share of the power. Reply Parent Thread Link Even people here were saying it shouldn't be a factor in whether Hillary won or not. Still blows my mind people will stan that hard. Reply Parent Thread Link Crude oil inventories in Canadas oil province Alberta rose in February despite a government-imposed production cut aimed at propping up the price of Canadian crude and reducing excess supply in storage. Reuters quoted data from the Alberta Energy Regulator that revealed the province exported less crude by rail during that month, which caused the buildup in inventories. At the end of February, there were 72 million barrels of crude in storage, up by 3.9 million barrels a month earlier. For the first two months of the year, total stockpiles of oil fell by 2.3 million barrels. Albertas government instituted an obligatory production cut of 325,000 bpd amid a pipeline shortage that pushed Canadian crude prices to historic lows against West Texas Intermediate. Prices reacted immediately, before the cuts even went into effect, with some observers even cautioning that this could reduce refiners appetite for Albertas oil. Since January, when the cuts entered into effect, Albertas government has revised down the cuts twice as prices trend higher than the optimum level to keep refiners buying Canadian crude. The first revision came at the end of January, when Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said that producers could reverse the cuts, boosting their production by a combined 75,000 bpd in February and March. At the start of March, Notley announced another revision of the cuts, by 25,000 bpd, beginning this month. This brought the total revision to 100,000 bpd for the first four months of the year. This means an average of 3.66 million bpd for April. A short-term production limit is not ideal or sustainable, which is exactly why we have a plan to move more oil by rail in the coming months while we fight for the long-term solution of building pipelines to new markets, Notley said at the time. The balancing act for the government is a very steep task because they have to manage all these variables, a Genscape oil analyst told Reuters this month. The government did not expect rail would drop off as steeply as it did and thats had a dampening effect (on inventory draws). By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: As the United States leans into sanctions against Venezuelan oil and the administration of contested president Nicolas Maduro, longtime PDVSA buyers have had to look to other Latin American countries with heavier crude to fill the gaps. This has meant a lot of new demand for Brazils Petrobras, which is now seeing countries buyers from the U.S. as well as Europe compete for purchase of their Lula crude cargoes as the next best alternative to the heavier Venezuelan grades of fuel. With all of the Lula oil being snapped up, however, some countries have been pushed toward Brazils new grade of medium heavy Buzios crude oil, despite problems with the oils quality. The most notable of these countries is China, which despite a preference for Lula crude, are now buying Buzios in higher numbers as Lula becomes harder to secure. Chinas independent refiners are responsible for a huge portion of Petrobras crude exports. According to year-end statements by Petrobras, in 2018 almost 66 percent of the companys crude went to China, a whopping 37 percent year-on-year increase. That impressive rate continues to rise under the pressure of continued U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, with a 56 percent increase in January-February of this year compared to the same time period in 2018. According to reporting by S&P Global Platts, this April the Chinese independent refining companies Haike Petrochemical and Wudi Xinyue Petrochemical will receive their first and second shipments of Buzios crude, respectively. Wudi Xinyues first shipment of Buzios arrived early last month, consisting of 1 million barrels of crude. Its unusual for such a new grade of crude to be able to penetrate the market as quickly as Buzios seems to be doing. Petrobras only just started producing the new medium heavy grade Buzios in April of 2018, with exports not beginning until the last quarter of that year. Typically, new grades of crude are not widely adopted until refiners have had ample time to conduct tests to gauge the quality of the product and assess the refined product yield in order to evaluate the economics of refining the oil. Related: Did Aramco Just Open Pandoras Box? Not all Chinese refiners are sold on buying Buzios, however. As one source from an independent refinery located in the Shandong province was quoted, The [Buzios] grade contains higher calcium, which needs pre-treatment to lower the calcium content [...]It is a new grade and takes time to be accepted by the market. For this reason the refiner in question has made no plans to buy Buzios in the immediate future. Other refiners have similarly dismissed Buzios crude citing higher salt content and chlorides, attributes which would raise the cost of maintenance and negatively impact anti-corrosion plant units. Meanwhile, Brazils Petrobras is ramping up production in its Buzios oil field, located off the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro in the offshore pre-salt of Santos Basin. The Buzios field, formerly known as the Franco field, is 416km in size, and Petrobras, the owner-in-full of the field since it was discovered in 2010, has set a total extraction target of 3.058 billion barrels of oil equivalent from the site. Just last month the company began production of oil and gas from the newly installed fourth platform in the Buzios field. This newest platform, a P-77 floating unit, can process up to 150,000 barrels of oil per day, as well as compress up to six million cubic meters of natural gas per day, when running at full capacity. This puts it in league with the other three platform in the Buzios field, which each are capable of producing 150,000 barrels of oil and six million cubic meters of natural gas per day. The fourth and newest platform is interconnected to nine production wells and eight injection wells. By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Qatar is solidifying its hold as the top global LNG exporter. The tiny, gas-rich kingdom caught the energy world by surprise in late 2017 when it announced that it would increase its liquefaction capacity from 77 million tons per annum (mtpa) to a staggering 110 mtpa by late 2023 or early 2024 by developing more gas at its North Field, an increase in production of some 43 percent. The move will also increase Qatars total production capacity from 4.8 to 6.2 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe) per day. At the time it appeared that the countrys decision to ramp up production was also geopolitically motivated since it came shortly after a Saudi-led economic and political boycott was put in place against Doha over claims that it was funding terror groups as well as moving closer politically to Tehran - claims Qatar denies. Egypt and the UAE also joined in the boycott. Getting down to details To help make good on its pledge to increase it liquefaction capacity and develop more gas, state-run Qatar Petroleum (QP) last week announced it had formally selected a contractor on its project to sustain gas production at the supergiant North Field. This is the source of the states global LNG preeminence, ahead of the tussle for the lucrative main package on the first greenfield development of the asset for more than a decade. Houston-based firm McDermott International, the dominant player in Qatars offshore sector, was confirmed as the winner of an engineering, procurement, construction and installation (EPCI) contract on the North Field Sustainability project. The company said the 34-month contract was worth between $500-750 million. Inking more LNG deals Qatar also said last week that it agreed to increase LNG exports to Pakistan by 200 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd). A Pakistani delegation comprising Petroleum Secretary and Task Force on Energy Chairman Nadeem Babar visited Qatar earlier this month and requested additional gas supply from Qatar in an effort to meet growing gas needs of power plants for the upcoming summer season. Related: Trumps Foreign Energy Policy Could Haunt Him In 2020 Pakistan is already importing 500 mmcfd worth of Qatari LNG under a controversial 15-year supply deal, while it plans to step up imports to 700 mmcfd in a bid to run its second LNG terminal at Port Qasim at maximum capacity. The total capacity of the second LNG terminal is placed at 750 mmcfd, but the Pakistani government has allocated a capacity of 600 mmcfd. Pakistan LNG Limited (PLL) has secured a dedicated supply of 200 mmcfd which is processed at the second terminal and the remaining 400 mmcfd is being imported through purchases on the LNG spot market in Asia which has seen prices head south, recently hitting three year lows on ample supply coming out of the U.S., and Australia. There had been harsh criticism from Pakistani politicians that were claiming the country received unfavorable contractual terms from Qatar for its 15-year deal. A Pakistani governmental audit in 2018 reached a similar conclusion, claiming that the price 13.37 percent of the average price of Brent oil futures for the preceding three months negotiated with Qatar was at a higher rate than trading companies were offering in the open market. Under the current agreement, Pakistan can increase or decrease the size of the contract by five cargoes per year and can also sell cargoes to other buyers and divert cargoes to other terminals. However, after Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khans January 21 visit to Doha to seek a possible price renegotiation, including a one-year credit facility to defer payments to help ease the countrys balance of payments crisis, he didnt press for a reduction in contractual prices. He only requested an early review of LNG prices after a period of five to seven years, instead of the contracts 10 years. By Tim Daiss for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Chinas three state oil and gas companies plan to increase their spending on oil and gas by 20 percent this year, bringing the total to some US$74.4 billion (500 billion yuan) for the first time in five years. Nikkei Asian Review reports PetroChina, CNOOC, and Sinopec sourced foreign oil to satisfy as much as 70 percent of their needs as of 2018, with natural gas dependency on imports at 45 percent. Heeding a call from Beijing to boost the countrys energy security amid ongoing tensions with the United States, the three are now seeking to increase their production both at home and abroad. PetroChina last month said it will increase its spending by 17.4 percent this fiscal year, which the company can accommodate comfortably after it reported a 130-percent rise in net profits for financial 2018. Most of this will go into oil and gas production, at 80 percent, with the company focusing on domestic natural gas production, two LNG projectsin Russia and Canadaand the acquisition of a stake in an oil field in Abu Dhabi. Chinas second-largest oil producer, CNOOC, plans to boost spending to US$10.4-11.9 billion (70-80 billion yuan) from US$9.31 billion (62.6 billion yuan) last year. Sinopec plans a 41-percent increase in investments this year, to almost US$12 billion (80 billion yuan) focusing on oil. Chinas oil demand is still on the rise despite short-term worry about depressed economic growth and its effect on this demand, but according to a recent report from Morgan Stanley, it will peak in 2025 as electric vehicle adoption increases. In that, the authors of the report noted, China would be unique among industrialized countries where economic growth has traditionally gone hand in hand with fuel demand growth. For now, however, demand remains strong and the extent of Chinas dependency on imports remains a cause for concern in Beijing. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Irans Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh arrived in Moscow on Monday for senior-level talks regarding the global oil market and energy cooperation between Iran and Russia, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported. Zangeneh will be meeting with Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak to discuss energy-related issues, according to Iranian media. Russia, the leader of the non-OPEC group of nations part of the OPEC+ deal, was reportedly the deal broker that convinced Iran to agree to the wording of the production cut deal that began on January 1 and currently expires in June. Iran, alongside Libya and Venezuela, was exempted from the production cuts at the OPEC/non-OPEC meeting in December, due to the U.S. sanctions on its oil industry. The visit of the Iranian oil minister in Moscow comes a month before the United States is due to decide whether to extend all or some or none of the waivers it had granted to key Iranian oil customers when it re-imposed the sanctions in early November. 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. Russian oil companies, on the other hand, are currently sticking to the production cuts through June. The firms have not discussed production plans for the second half of the year and have decided that they would do so after April, Vagit Alekperov, president and CEO of Russian oil producer Lukoil, said last month. Last week, reports had it that Russiaalways the reluctant actor in OPEC+ cuts extensionsmay not support an extension of the deal for the full six months until the end of the year. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Venezuelas President Nicolas Maduro announced that he had replaced the countrys electricity minister amid a string of three nationwide blackouts that sparked protests against the lack of basic services including water supply. Reuters quoted Maduro as saying the new minister is an electrical engineer. This, however, is unlikely to help much with the root causes of the crisis, which some observers have attributed to years of underinvestment in power plants and the grid. Maduro himself blamed the first blackout on the United States, calling it sabotage. The news about the new appointment follows an announcement from earlier this week that electricity will be rationed for at least a month following the third blackout in a month. The rationing, Maduro said, will help the authorities deal with the consequences of the power outages. The blackouts are the latest in a host of woes for the sanction-stricken country. The first one crippled the already ailing economy and paralyzed Venezuelas oil industry. So did the second one, which shut down the countrys most important oil export terminal, the port of Jose, temporarily suspending vital shipments of oil amid a shrinking client base. This may shrink further as reports emerged last week that Washington was pressuring commodity traders to stop buying Venezuelan crude even if the deals were not in violation of the U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. The countrys oil industry has also suffered from the power outages just when Venezuela needs to export more of its falling production. The blackouts extended from the port of Jose to the four upgraders that process Venezuelas superheavy crude into a liquid making it fit for exporting. According to a recent Reuters survey, Venezuelas production fell by 150,000 bpd as a result of the blackouts, adding to an ongoing decline resulting from a lack of maintenance and seriously aggravated by the U.S. sanctions targeting Venezuelas oil industry specifically as the main revenue generator for the Maduro government. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Oil-rich Libya, torn between a UN-backed government based in Tripoli and an alternative administration and institutions in the east, could see the years-long political crisis solved this month by the creation of a single government, according to eastern strongman General Khalifa Haftar. Haftar leads a self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) with a base in the eastern city of Benghazi. LNA is the main opponent of the UN-backed Libyan government based in the capital Tripoli in the west. Libyans will have a single cabinet this month, the English version of Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat quoted Haftar as saying. This past weekend, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that he was hopeful for a solution to the eight-year long conflict in Libya after a high-level meeting in Tunis. The UN Secretary-General acknowledged that there are difficulties, but stressed that a window of opportunity has been created by the recent historic meeting in Abu Dhabi between Libyas Prime Minister, Faiez Serraj, and a key rival military leader, the Commander of the Libyan National Army, Khalifa Haftar, the UN said in a statement on Saturday. Since the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the division in Libyas political landscape has resulted in frequent attacks on oil fields and infrastructure from various groups. For years, Libya has been struggling to keep its oil production above 1 million bpd, compared to 1.6 million bpd before the civil war began. Related: Big Tech Joins Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance Forces loyal to Haftar control the four oil ports in the so-called Oil Crescent in the east and the major oil fields there. In February, Haftar forces took control over Sharara, the largest oil field in Libya, located in the south and capable of pumping 315,000 bpd. In early March, the Sharara oil field returned to operations after being closed for production in December, when clashes between militant groups forced the National Oil Corporation (NOC) to declare a force majeure. Sharara has been one of the main reasons why Libya is widely seen as a wild card in global oil price forecasts. Since it accounts for around a third of the countrys total oil output, Sharara, like the export terminals in the Oil Crescent, has become a natural target for various groups vying for power and control over Libyas oil wealth. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Washington is considering the addition of more sanctions against Iran and these could be announced next month, a government official who wished to remain unnamed told Reuters. We just want a continued chilling effect, the source said. We want businesses to continue to think doing business with Iran is a terrible idea at this point, he added, saying the new sanctions will target new, as of yet unsanctioned sectors of the Iranian economy. As regards the waivers Washington granted eight Iranian oil importers last November, the official repeated the adage that weve been hearing from pretty much everyone in the administration speaking to the media: the goal to bring Iranian oil exports to zero remains the ultimate goal. Extension of the waivers may not be granted even though some importers including India are already negotiating such extensions to keep the flow of cheap Iranian crude coming in. According to the official who spoke to Reuters this week, U.S. crude oil will help plug the hole left by Iranian crude on the international markets, but this is doubtful price-wise: U.S. crude, for geographical and consequently transportation reasons, is costlier than Iranian crude and likely to remain so in the observable future. This, however, does not mean it is not being bought. South Korea, for one, turned into the biggest buyer of U.S. crude this year despite being granted a sanction waiver. India, however, will be hard pressed to switch from Iranian to U.S. crude: it depends on exports for more than 80 percent of its oil consumption and at this level of import dependency, every cent matters, especially for an emerging economy. Despite Washingtons insistence on the zero Iranian oil exports, most analysts seem to agree that at least five importers will get a waiver extension, including South Korea, China, India, Japan, and Turkey. This would mean Iran will beofficiallyexporting 1.1 million bpd next month. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Debt-ridden Jet Airways on Tuesday said it grounded 15 more planes due to non-payment of lease rentals, taking the total number to 69. "An additional fifteen aircraft have been grounded due to non-payment of amounts outstanding to lessors under their respective lease agreements," Jet Airways said in a filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange. The Mumbai-headquartered airline, in the exchange filing, said that it is actively engaged with all its aircraft lessors and regularly provides them with updates on the efforts undertaken by the Company to improve its liquidity. Aircraft lessors have been supportive of the company's efforts in this regard, it added. Till March, Cash-strapped airline had taken 54 planes out of operations due to lease rental defaults. As per information available on Jet Airways website, the beleaguered airline has over 119 aircraft in its fleet. "The company is also making all efforts to minimise disruption to its network due to the above and is proactively informing and re-accommodating its affected guests," said Jet Airways adding that it provides required and periodic updates to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation in this regard. Also Read: Jet Airways defaults on $109 million loan repayment to HSBC Bank: report Jet Airways had missed loan repayment to HSBC Bank that was due on March 28, and was part of a two-tranche facility totalling USD 140 million. The company took external commercial borrowing from HSBC in 2014, said a Bloomberg report. SBI-led domestic lenders who now hold more than 50 per cent of Jet shares are seeking to overhaul the company and salvage. Under the resolution plan, lenders decided to take control of the airline and make a fund infusion of Rs 1,500 crore. Also Read: Jet Airways pilots defer strike; seek salary by April 14 In a major respite to the ill-fated carrier, its pilots' body, National Aviator's Guild (NAG), on Monday deferred its call for halting operations till April 15. The NAG, which claims to represent around 1,100 of the 1,600 Jet Airways pilots, had announced earlier that its members will not fly from April 1 if their pending salaries were not cleared and clarity on the revival plan not provided by March 31, as per PTI report. Edited by Chitranjan Kumar The police in Bayelsa said on Saturday that they were on the trail of those who killed a police sergeant and wounded another policeman on Friday night in Yenagoa. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that unknown gunmen on Friday night attacked the two policemen who were on guard duty at Udeme Hotels in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa capital. The spokesman of the police command, Asinim Butswat, said efforts have been intensified to arrest the gunmen. He said that the gunmen,operating in a Toyota Camry car, opened fire on the policemen at about 9 p.m. without any provocation. The policemen fired back at the armed robbers and in the ensuing gun battle, one sergeant was fatally wounded, he was rushed to the Federal Medical Center, Yenagoa, where he was later confirmed dead. The other policeman is responding to treatment. The unknown gunmen escaped with bullets wounds. Based on a tipoff, a notorious criminal hideout was raided, where their cohorts were arrested and they have volunteered useful information. Efforts have been intensified to arrest the gunmen, Mr Butswat said. An eyewitness had told journalists on condition of anonymity, that the gunmen drove into the hotel in a Toyota Camry, while pretending to be customers. They turned at the car park and drove towards the gate where they opened fire on the policemen, he said. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that few days to the February 23 presidential and National Assembly polls, gunmen attacked a check point under Julius Berger flyover in Yenagoa, killing a policeman and carting away two riffles. (NAN) News 1 views Buhari sadened by Soun Ogbomosos passing Webby - December 13, 2021 President Muhammadu Buhari has condoled with the Ogbomosho royal family, the people of Ogbomosholand, as well as the government of An attempt by Senator Dino Melaye to present a motion on militarization of the just concluded general elections on Wednesday caused an uproar in the upper legislative chamber with senators shouting at each other. The Kogi West Senator, who got re-elected at the just concluded National Assembly elections had raised a point of order, asking his colleagues to let him bring a motion on the militarisation of the just concluded general elections for debate. Raising the issue at the plenary of the Senate, Melaye said his point of order was not political. He told his colleagues that his motion will help curb electoral malpractices in future elections. He said, What I am raising this morning has nothing to do with political parties. I want to bring before this Senate, the elections both on the 9th and 23rd in this country and I believe that the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria shall not close our eyes to the happenings of those elections. I want that election to be debated on this floor. I want to bring a motion to be addressed by this Senate in the next legislative day so that the militarisation of the process, the abuses of this election, will not go undiscussed in this parliament for posterity sake. This is my prayer. Let it be discussed as a Senate. We will debate and give accounts of what happened in our various senatorial districts with the vision of correcting electoral malpractices. In his response, Senate President Bukola Saraki put the question for a voice vote and there were loud echos of ayes and nays. Saraki then ruled that the prayer be adopted noting that the Senates Standing Order says only one-fifth of the lawmakers is required to support the prayer before it can be adopted. But in a quick reaction, Senate Leader, Ahmed Lawan, stood up and questioned Sarakis ruling. He said, A non-partisan motion was on the floor. You ruled. We didnt hear the ruling. What was your ruling? At this point the Assembly chamber was getting saturated with noise. Standing up to speak loudly in order to be heard, Senator Bala NaAllah said there was no motion, adding that Melaye introduced himself as a senator-elect and so was not speaking as a senator. In his efforts to calm his colleagues, the Senate President said he ruled on the motion because if brought to be debated will not be partisan. He also said legal action will be taken where necessary and the motion will be debated at the leadership before it is placed on the order paper. The explanation could not end the rowdiness as Senator Barau Jibrin (APC, Kano) stood up to question Sarakis ruling again. Quoting the order of the Senate which permits a lawmaker to challenge the opinion of the Senate president/chairman, he said, I dont know your ruling on the motion. Voices began to rise again forcing Saraki to beg his colleagues not to abuse the process of the plenary. At the end it was resolved that Melaye will lead the motion on the alleged militarisation of the just concluded general elections on Thursday. The Ooni of Ife, Enitan Ogunwusi, has said that the greatest misfortune that has ever befallen Nigeria as a nation was the discovery of oil and gas. Mr Ogunwusi said this late on Friday during a courtesy visit by the National Executive of Nigeria Tour Operators (NATOP) to the Oonis palace in Ile-Ife. The executive members were led by Bilikisu Abdul, NATOPs President and accompanied by some journalists. The traditional ruler said that Nigerians had failed to develop the tourism potential in the country due to the discovery of crude oil. He said that Nigerians had also forgotten that every nations tourism potential was inexhaustible compared to its oil and gas that has a life span. As a nation, our biggest problem has been discovering oil; we have different tourism products rich in content which are nature based, tourism is not exhaustible but oil is. It is important for us to propagate domestic tourism, it is the future of the country and that is the way things can get better. We should encourage people to travel within the confines of the nation, we should focus on things nature has blessed us with and take away every negative charge in us. Tourism is something I am very passionate about, I dont joke with it so let us all collectively groom it together, he said. The Ooni of Ife also in his responses to requests made earlier by the leaders of the groups under NATOP assured them of his royal support. He promised to attend the AKWAABA Travel Market in September, Calabar Carnival slated for December and NATOP Annual General Meeting in April. He said he was going to channel his resources to the success of the tourism events as each was capable of attracting tourists into the nation. He commended NATOPs president for her doggedness and sense of responsibility to ensuring that the Nigerian tourism sites were well marketed. I will say that you all have my full support for all these programmes tabled before me today, we will work together to take Nigeria to the next level, he said. Earlier, the president of NATOP, Bilkisu Abdul, appreciated the Ooni for his remarkable contributions to the development of the nations tourism industry. She appealed to the Ooni to host NATOPs 2019 Annual General Meeting at Ife in order to explore the huge tourism potential of the town. Your highness, we have come to appreciate you for your support so far and request that you host our 2019 Annual General Meeting here in Ife, she said. Also, Gabe Onah, Chairman, Calabar Carnival invited the Ooni to observe and participate in the activities of the forthcoming 2019 Calabar Carnival which had been slated for December. He said in the last two years, Carnival Calabar had been the most sustainable social and economic venture initiated and driven by both the Federal and the Cross Rivers State Governments. According to him, the Cross Rivers State Governor has expanded the festival with not only international flavours but explored every avenue to make the carnival a truly African product. I speak on behalf of Governor Ben Ayade who in his quest to Africanise the carnival, decided to involve most reputable traditional rulers in Africa. Mr Onah said that Cross Rivers State would be happy to have the presence of Oba Ogunwusi in the 2019 festival and equally tap from his tourism promotion involvement to actually improve its tourism brand. Carnival Calabar has been the yardstick for measuring events in Africa today as we have hosted over 50 countries and organisations across the world, boosting over a million visitors in the state yearly, he said. Similarly, Ikechi Uko, the Organiser of AKWAABA Travel Market, said that his organisation was planing to hold the first global tourism diaspora conference as part of its activities for 2019 festival. He said this was to recognise Nigerians in the Diaspora, 400 years after the first set of Africans were sold into slavery in 1619. According to him, plans are in top gear to invite several Nigerians in the Diaspora during the programme for them to explore some places in the country and know a bit of their history. Uko said that his organisation would be honoured to have the Ooni as the Special Guest of Honour during the festival. Our people from the Diaspora will be honoured to meet with you as the King of Africa during the festival. For 2019 AKWAABA, we want to recognise Nigerians in the Diaspora while we bring in some for the event. We have had our people from Brazil, Atlanta and other countries asking if they will see the king of Africa in 2019 AKWAABA and we have promised them that they will see you as our king of Africa, he said. Among those on the NATOP courtesy visit were: Gabe Onah, Chairman, Carnival Calabar, Ikechi Uko, Organiser, AKWAABA Travel Market, Ken Akah, Special Adviser to Governor of Cross Rivers on events, Fatima Garbati, former NATOP President and Gbabo Laura, NATOP Secretary. (NAN) Congress party Tuesday released its much anticipated manifesto titled 'Congress will deliver' for Lok Sabha elections 2019. The poll promise document amongst a host of key ideas has focused majorly on the issues of unemployment and job creation. The biggest takeaways from the manifesto are Congress's flagship scheme NYAY which promises to eliminate poverty by 2030 and the assurance to fill 22 lakh job vacancies within the government in an effort to boost employment. Also Read: Congress manifesto 2019 promises to rehabilitate MSME sector reeling from demonetisation Here is how Congress's big poll push document addresses the key issues of unemployment and jobs:- 1. The first and foremost is NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojana) scheme which Congress President Rahul Gandhi said was "Garibi pe war, saal me 72000 hazar (War on poverty, Rs.72000 per year)". He also said if voted to power, his government would eliminate poverty through the NYAY scheme by 2030. 2. The party has promised to create a new Ministry of Industry, Services and Employment in its bid to underline the link between the growth of the industry and services sectors and rapid creation of jobs. 3. Congress has pledged to fill 22 lakh jobs vacant in government services by 2020 along with a promise of 10 lakh jobs in gram sabhas. 4. The party has vowed to create an estimated 10 lakh new Seva Mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local body. Also Read: 'Karz Maafi to Karz Mukti' : Congress manifesto promises to end Indian farmers' woes, to pitch separate budget 5. The party guarantees to provide a fillip to private sector by rewarding businesses for job creation and employing more women. 6. Congress will launch a 'Water Bodies Restoration Mission' and 'Wasteland Regeneration Mission' aimed at creating 1 crore jobs. 7. The party assures to exempt new businesses from applicable laws and regulations (except Minimum Wages Act and tax laws) for a period of 3 years. 8. It will encourage State Governments to fill their vacancies. Also Read: Congress manifesto says party won't interfere with RBI's functioning, will respect bank's autonomy 9. The party promises to increase the number of days of employment under MNREGA to 150 days from the existing 100. 10. The party will link the definition of MSME to employment, viz., a business employing 10 persons or less will be 'micro;' between 11 and 100 will be 'small;' and between 101 and 500 will be 'medium.' Also Read: What's doable in Congress jobs manifesto? Gunmen suspected to be herdsmen in Enugu have killed one Dr Nnamdi Ogueche, a senior lecturer at the Nnamdi Azikwe University, Awka, Anambra State. The lecturer was killed less than 24 hours after the decomposing body of a Catholic priest, Rev. Fr. Clement Ugwu, was found in a bush. The state Commissioner of Police Sulieman Balarabe described the killings as tragic and unfortunate. Ogueche was shot dead while returning from a peace meeting between his kinsmen and Fulani herdsmen in the state capital on Wednesday along the Iwolo Road in the Ezeagu Local Government Area of the state. The Special Adviser to Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi on Security Matters, Brig. Gen. Fred Eze (retd.) called for the meeting held between community members and the herdsmen in Uzo-Uwani. Ogueche was said to have attended the meeting as the Administrative Secretary of the Uzo-Uwani Local Government Council. There are speculations the killing might have been aimed at provoking another round of crisis between the herdsmen and the people of Uzo-Uwani. Ogueche was said to have been appointed at the meeting as a member of a team to assess the extent of damage of yam barns in Adaba, his community, and Umulokpa, alleged to have been destroyed by herders in the area. Briefing journalists on the activities of the command in stemming insecurity, the CP promised to bring the perpetrators of the killings to justice, just as he paraded five herdsmen alleged to specialise in kidnapping in the state. Balarabe also paraded seven other suspects, who were arrested for various crimes, ranging from armed robbery to murder. Rev. Fr. Ugwu was kidnapped from the St. Mark Catholic Church, Obinofia Ndiuno in the Ezeagu Local Government Area of Enugu State on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. On July 4, 2018, Rev. Fr. Paulinus Udewangu of the St. Mark Catholic Church, Nsude in the Udi Local Government Area of the state was kidnapped while undertaking his routine jogging. Addressing journalists on the killing of Fr. Ugwu, the Catholic Bishop of Enugu Diocese, Most Rev. Callistus Onaga, called on the police to fish out the killers. Bishop Onaga decried the spate of violent killings around the country and advised Christians to intensify their prayers for the survival of the country. Governor Samuel Ortom of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has been declared winner of the Benue State governorship election. Ortom was declared winner on Sunday by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), after the supplementary election held in some polling units across the state. The PDP candidate defeated his main challenger, Emmanuel Jime of the All Progressives Congress (APC), to win his second term ticket. Announcing the result on Sunday, the Returning Officer, Prof Sebastian Maimako, said Ortom of the PDP polled 434,473 votes to humble APCs Jime, who came behind with 345,155 votes, thus, winning with 89,318 margin. The man killed himself by jumping into a well A tragic incident has taken place on Wednesday in Oghara community in Delta State, after a man reportedly ended his own life by jumping into a well. The man who committed suicide by jumping into a well, is said to be a well known member of the Delta community and the incident left everyone in shock. It was further gathered that he was not buried, as the way he choose to die was seen as a taboo in the community. He was however thrown into a forest after his corpse was recovered from the well. The deceased never left a suicide note, and it was gathered that the incident has been reported to the police who was already investigating to unravel the mystery behind his death. Here is a video from the scene of the incident: Congress Party on Tuesday said its popular jobs scheme Nyaya will go through a testing phase of 6-9 months before rollout. Announcing its manifesto ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the party said , "There will a be Design phase (3 months) followed by a Pilot and Testing phase (6-9 months) before roll-out of the scheme." Congress President Rahul Gandhi announced the ambitious NYAY scheme on March 25 this year. The minimum income support scheme (MISP) promises to provide Rs 72,000 annually to 20% families in poorest of the poor category, benefiting around 25 crore people. Also read: Lok Sabha Elections 2019 LIVE updates: Rahul Gandhi releases Congress manifesto; promises separate farmers' budget The target population will be 5 crore families who constitute the poorest 20 per cent of all families. Unveiling the details of the rollout, the party in its manifesto said, "The estimated cost will be The party led by Rahul Gandhi will appoint an independent panel of eminent economists, social scientists and statisticians to oversee the design, testing, rollout and implementation of the programme. The programme will move from one stage to the other only after a 'go ahead' from the panel. "Congress intends to implement NYAY as a joint scheme of the central and state governments. The scheme will be funded through new revenues and rationalisation of expenditure. Current merit subsidy schemes that are intended to achieve specific objectives will be continued," the manifesto declared. Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday said the money proposed to be given to the poor under 'NYAY' scheme would be deposited in the accounts of women. "This money would go to the bank account of the woman in the family. Every month, this money will directly go to the bank accounts of women. Crores of women will get power and India would stand on its own," he said in an election rally recently. Senior Congress leader Chidambaram last month said the NYAY scheme would cost 1.8% of the GDP at any given time, and as per the party's calculations, it "will not cross 2% of the GDP". Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra hailed the Nyay scheme on March 26 and said, "She's happy that women will receive Rs 72,000 per year directly into their bank accounts under the minimum income guarantee scheme announced by party chief Rahul Gandhi." Also read: Congress poll manifesto promises to simplify GST, create a department to help startups Also read: 'I won't promise Rs 15 lakh': Rahul Gandhi lists key issues in Congress' manifesto Four armed men suspected to be operatives of the State Security Services (SSS) on Saturday whisked away a journalist, Jones Abiri, to an disclosed location. Mr Abiri, the publisher of Weekly Source Newspaper, had been incarcerated for about two years without trial. He was eventually charged for terrorism but was discharged by the court. The court also ordered the SSS to pay him N10 million which the agency is yet to do. On Saturday Mr Abiri was whisked away at about 4:30 p.m. by SSS operatives.. According to eyewitnesses, Mr Abiri was in company of some collegues at his office at Azikoro junction of Yenagoa when the armed men arrived at the scene in a white Hilux Van and black Prado Jeep and forcibly dragged and pushed their victim into one of the vehicles and drove off. Austin Bodo, a journalist who witnessed the incident, told the News Agency of Nigeria that we were sitting outside his office when a black Prado jeep and white Hilux drove into the premises in commando style. As they packed, two men carrying the type of guns used by DSS operatives, jumped out of one of the cars and said Abiri was under arrest and immediately started dragging him and forced him into one of the cars and drove off. Another witness, Bankole Abdulazeez, said we were discussing national issues when the cars drove in. Two armed men came out of the cars and without identifying themselves, they said you are under arrest and started dragging him. They threatened to shoot anybody that tries to stop them. I heard him shouting what have I done again? what have I done again? Before they finally dragged him into one of the cars and drove off, he said. When contacted, a DSS Official, who preferred anonymity, said: I only heard of it from a journalist friend; I dont think it is our men from here. Soon after unveiling its manifesto in the run up to Lok Sabha elections 2019, Congress party's website crashed owing to high traffic on its network. The party which created a dedicated site to facilitate access to its manifesto, tweeted that the website would be back up soon. "We're experiencing heavy traffic on our Manifesto website right now - we'll be back up soon." Congress informed through its official Twitter handle. The manifesto was uploaded on manifesto.inc.in after Congress chief Rahul Gandhi launched it along with his mother Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram. Also Read: Lok Sabha Elections 2019 LIVE updates: PM Modi slams Congress over NYAY, says party remembers poor only during polls The document according to Congress has "enough to address everyone's concerns" focusing on real issues away from the politics of "polarization" in the BJP's narrative. "The manifesto is a massive step for Congress. When we started this process a year back, I told them that this manifesto should reflect the wishes of the people and whatever is present in the document should be truthful," Gandhi said after releasing the manifesto in New Delhi. Tall promises made in the poll document such as the NYAY scheme have been dismissed by the BJP. Also Read: What's doable in Congress' jobs manifesto? Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley lambasted Congress and its manifesto asserting that Rahul Gandhi's friends in the "tukde-tukde gang" had drafted parts of it. "Some of the ideas are positively dangerous in the Congress manifesto," said Jaitley. "They are for an agenda for the vulcanisation of India." he added. BSP chief Mayawati too slammed both Congress and BJP while addressing a poll rally in Odisha, saying Congress was involved in Bofors scam while BJP is facing the "Rafale Scam" now. Also Read: Congress promises to amend various laws, focus on privacy, individual freedom Also Read: Congress promises to increase defence budget in poll manifesto Also Read: Congress poll manifesto promises to simplify GST, create a department to help startups Amnesty International has called on the government to investigate the killing of one Kolade Johnson by men of the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS) during a raid in Onipetesi area of Lagos. Kolade Johnson, a resident of Onipetesi in the Mangoro area of Lagos state, was shot at the weekend allegedly by operatives of FSARS. His death has sparked yet another outrage against SARS. In a statement on Monday signed by the Director of Amnesty International Nigeria, Osai Ojigho, Kolade Johnson is the latest victim of the SARS police unit which has become notorious for extrajudicial killings, torture and extortion. This appears to be an unlawful killing which must be impartially and thoroughly investigated, with any officers suspected of criminal responsibility for wrongdoing brought to justice in fair trial before an ordinary civilian court. It is shameful that more than two years since Amnesty International highlighted crimes under international law and human rights violations by SARS, these shocking incidents continue unabated. Nigerians will no longer accept the brutality being unleashed against them by SARS on an almost daily basis, Ojigho said. SARS is a police unit created to protect the people. Instead it has become a danger to society, torturing its victims with complete impunity while fomenting a toxic climate of fear and corruption. Amnesty Internationals investigations into the activities of SARS across Nigeria since 2016 have exposed the callous workings of a police squad operating outside of the law. Amnesty International, human rights group, says the reforms Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo initiated during the heat of the campaign against the special anti-robbery squad (SARS), are not working. Recall that in August when President Muhammadu Buhari went on vacation abroad, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who acted on his behalf, had ordered the reorganization of SARS. Meanwhile, the Commissioner of Police Lagos State, CP Zubairu Muazu mni has called for calm, assuring that justice will prevail in the case as the officer responsible for the killing has been arrested. In a statement released signed Commands PPPRO, DSP Bala Elkana, Muazu said members of the team suspected to be involved in the shooting have since been arrested and are currently in Police custody undergoing interrogation. They will be subjected to internal disciplinary procedures, and may be prosecuted in conventional Court if implicated by ongoing investigation. The CP has promised to initiate far reaching reforms to help in repositioning the Anti Cultism Squad for effective service delivery, particularly in areas of respect for Human Rights and proficiency in the use of firearms. He said members of the Public who have complaints on the activities of Anti Cultism Squad or any of our Police teams should call the following numbers 08063299264, 08065154338 and 08060357795, They Stole My Phone, I Need Someone To F**k Me And Buy Me iPhone Nigerian Lady A Nigerian lady whose phone got stolen says she need someone to fuck her and buy her an iphone. Gistvic Reports. The lady said after calling the thief who stole her phone, she was told to pay a ransom of N10,000 to redeem back the phone but instead she prefers someone having sex with her for an iPhone. This has got people talking as twitter users blast her for having no shame in spitting out those words. Gistvic Reports. See Reactions Below: SOURCE: GISTVIC.COM The former Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Abubakar Tsav, has urged ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, to stop parading a fake aura of superior wisdom and ask God for forgiveness. Abubakar Tsav, who is also a former National Commissioner of the Public Complaints Commission Abuja, stated this in an open letter to the former president, which he made [] More Members of a seven-man gang said to be notorious for robbing Lagos residents of their valuables were arrested by the Rapid Respond Squad of the Lagos State Police Command on Valentines Day. It was gathered that the syndicate was known for terrorising residents around the College Road, Fagba, and Abattoir areas of the state. The suspects, Lekan Akinyemi, 23; Chimeze Ofulie, 18; Babangida Abdullahi, 22; Abubakar Umaru, 30; Samuel Oyinloye, 24; Timileyin Oladipupo, 27; and Habeeb Olayinka, were arrested around 9pm on College Road, Ifako-Ijaiye, Lagos, after the gang had robbed more than five passers-by of their valuables while brandishing knives and other dangerous objects. A statement issued by the command on Sunday stated that all the suspects said they came from different parts of the country but were residing in Abattoir, Agege, Lagos. The suspects had, on Thursday last week, allegedly robbed one Augustine Agafe after he alighted from a taxi at College Road, Ifako-Ijaiye. Among the items they reportedly collected from their victim were an android phone, N14,000, and a handbag. Agafe stated, I allowed them to rob me because they were many and were holding dangerous weapons, but I trailed them to an open place before raising the alarm. This drew the attention of some RRS officers on patrol in the area and they arrested some of them. They equally robbed some other victims, among who were a lady and her boyfriend. The hoodlums dispossessed them of their phones and stabbed the boyfriend, who refused to let go of his mobile phone after parting with his wallet. In his confessional statement, one of the suspects said his gang specialised in robbing passers-by at night by collecting their mobile phones, bags, jewellery and wallets. An investigation by the police revealed that one of the suspects, Oladipupo, popularly known as Timi Yahoo, specialised in working on SIM cards of stolen phones to determine which ones were enabled for Internet banking in order to transfer money from their victims accounts. I have worked on so many SIM cards given to me by Akinyemi and other groups in Agege, and what I do is to further increase our gain from the robberies by transferring victims money from their bank accounts after using some software to determine how much is lodged in their accounts, and we share the proceeds, Oladipupo stated. The Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Muazu Zubairu, who ordered the arrest of all the gang members, added that they had been transferred to the Special Anti-Robbery Squad for a thorough investigation. He noted that the gang members would be charged to court as soon as investigations was completed. To Invest & Earn High Profits Take A Loan & Pay Low Interest The PDP presidential candidate in the just concluded 2019 election, Atiku Abubakar on Wednesday evening arrived the Musa Yaradua Centre in Abuja, alongside other top politicians like senate president Bukola Saraki, Senator Dino Melaye, Senator Ben Bruce, former governors, and others. Atiku is addressing a world press conference over the outcome of the election. A top Indian-American executive at Standard & Poor's Ratings Services has been named new president of Dun & Bradstreet International, a global leader in commercial data, analytics and insights for businesses. Neeraj Sahai, 60, who did his master's in economics from the University of Delhi, will be based at the company's New Jersey headquarters. "Dun & Bradstreet is fortunate to have two exceptional leaders, Neeraj as President of Dun & Bradstreet International and Gil Shaked, as Chief Technology Officer, join our executive team at this critical moment in our trajectory," said Dun & Bradstreet president Stephen C Daffron. As president of the international arm of the firm, Sahai will work closely with Daffron and chief executive officer Anthony Jabbour to align the company's businesses and joint ventures in Asia, India, the UK, Ireland, as well as the Dun & Bradstreet worldwide network of partners, around the firm's go-to-market strategy and growth opportunity, according to a news release. "I'm pleased to join Dun & Bradstreet at such a momentous time in the company's story," Sahai said in a statement. "International growth will be key to our next chapter and working with Anthony and Stephen I'm confident that we can bring innovation and opportunity to our partners and customers around the world," he added. Sahai joins Dun & Bradstreet from Standard & Poor's Ratings where he was serving in the same capacity. Prior to S&P, Sahai held several leadership roles with Citigroup across Securities and Fund Services, Global Transaction Services and Capital Markets and Banking. Sahai has an MBA from Clarkson University and also attended the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Advanced Management Programme. The Independent National Electoral Commission has insisted the use of smart card readers (SCRs) is mandatory in Saturdays governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections. Festus Okoye, INEC National Commissioner and Chairman Information and Voter Education Committee, said this in Abuja on Tuesday. Mr Okoye said the clarification was important going by allegations since the conduct of the February 23, Presidential and National Assembly elections that INEC was selective in the use of smart card readers in the conduct of the exercise. He said the allegations had led to speculations that INEC may be forced to jettison the use of SCRs in the state and FCT area council polls. INEC hereby states categorically that the allegations are absolutely false and the speculations are without any basis whatsoever. The use of the smart card readers is not only mandatory but its deliberate non-use attracts the sanction of possible prosecution of erring officials in accordance with the INEC Regulations and Guidelines for the conduct of elections. This is in addition to the voiding of any result emanating from such units or areas, as was done in the presidential and national assembly elections of February 23. The general public and all officials engaged for the elections are hereby informed that the commission is not reconsidering the use of these smart card readers which has greatly improved the credibility of our elections and instilled a high level of public trust in them. To clear any doubt or ambiguity, we wish to state that the deployment and mandatory use of SCRs in next Saturdays elections will not only be uniformed but also universal, and the provisions of the regulations and guidelines will be strictly and vigorously enforced. All stakeholders are to note and be guided accordingly please, Mr Okoye said. In another development, Mr Okoye assured that there would be uniform timing in the commencement of Saturdays Governorship and State Assembly elections nationwide. Speaking in Enugu, Mr Okoye said there would be full deployment of the smart card readers nationwide. He said that the commission was ready to conduct free, fair and credible elections, adding that it had fine-tuned all the loose-ends encountered during the Presidential and National Assembly polls. He said: This time around, we want to ensure that each polling unit in the federation starts the process at 8 a.m. dot on the day of the elections. So we want to make sure that all our ad-hoc staff and materials got to the polling units before 7.30 a.m. And the usage of the smart card readers will be universal in all the polling units. Any polling unit where the people or political thugs did not allow the presiding officer to use the smart card reader will get zero vote. Mr Okoye advised presiding officers to remain calm in the face of any threats from any quarters at the polling units but score that polling unit zero vote at the collation centre. He warned that the commission would no longer tolerate the killing, maiming or injuring of its ad hoc staff, who might be corps members serving their fatherland. We have discussed with the Inspector-General of Police to ensure that all our staff members, including the ad-hoc staff, are given adequate protection from violent attacks during the polls. The commission will protect its own with every passion and means it can muster, he said. " " Experts suggest delaying early school start times to accommodate for the unique sleep needs teens' physiological makeup requires. GCShutter/Getty Images There's a silent epidemic in the U.S., and its epicenter is the teenage bedroom. Sleep debt, a chronic state of sleep deprivation, is plaguing American teenagers. Researchers say a lack of sleep among teens is partially responsible for a rise in vehicle accidents, below-par academic achievement and emotional disturbances such as depression. And, with most U.S. high schools beginning anywhere from 7 to 7:20 a.m., the 11 p.m. to midnight bedtime of many American teenagers is a recipe for lingering drowsiness. But are later school start times the answer? Advertisement " " A study finds that many parents underestimate the amount of nightly sleep their teenaged children need. PeopleImages/Getty Images For pediatricians and sleep associations, the answer is "yes." For parents, it's a mixed bag. When asked whether they would support a later school start time for their 13- to 17-year-olds, parents were split, according to a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. The research, conducted by the University of Michigan through the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital Poll on Children's Health, found that of 554 parents whose teenagers start school before 8:30 a.m., many underestimated the amount of sleep their children needed, with only half agreeing with professional recommendations to delay morning school bells. Many of the parents who opposed later start times were concerned about transporting children to and from school, adjusting meal times or cutting after-school activities short. Most parents thought their children needed seven hours of sleep or less, while the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) say teenagers should get at least eight to 10 hours a night. The AASM and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) report that teens' circadian rhythms make it difficult to go to sleep until later in the evening, which makes it nearly impossible to get enough sleep before reporting to school in the early morning. The Center for Disease Control's Youth Risk Behavior Study found that two-thirds of U.S. high school students get seven hours (or less) of shut-eye each night, and at least 40 percent sleep for six or fewer hours. As many as 30 percent of American high school students report they have fallen asleep in school each day they have attended, making an examination of the intersection of school and health more important than ever. Now That's Interesting When a high school in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, pushed its start time to 8:55 a.m. in 2012, the number of teenage driver car accidents dropped by a whopping 70 percent. Cairo's downtown, with its old European-designed buildings, is wrestling to preserve its cultural heritage as Egypt readies a new capital in the desert. A stroll through the district takes pedestrians past buildings that meld Islamic and European motifs, neo-classical columns and ornate decorations. But its elegance and prestige are fading, as the one-way streets and former palaces fall into ruin and shops selling cheap clothes and odds and ends have moved in. "Some buildings are in a seriously dilapidated state," said Ahmed El Bindari, an architectural historian and volunteer tour guide, in the middle of a group of tourists. He enthusiastically recounts the history of the old buildings, some housing government ministries, and little passageways but complains of a lack of political will in heritage preservation. Bindari and others fear for the future of the district's old vacant buildings and worry that those in urgent need of repair will fall victim to a drive for urban renewal. - European influences - In the heart of Cairo and bordering Tahrir Square, the district is commonly known as Khedivial Cairo after Khedive Ismail Pasha, an Ottoman ruler who governed Egypt in the mid-19th century. He is credited with transforming Cairo into a modern metropolis with European influences after being inspired on a trip to Paris. Khedive Ismail ordered the building of the first opera house in the Middle East in 1869 to celebrate the inauguration of the strategic Suez Canal. He also commissioned French architects to design geometric, tree-lined streets and downtown became the cultural hub of the city flourishing with cafes, cinemas and shops. With its big avenues, facades and bronze statues recalling the French or Italian capitals, the district has also long hosted a lively literary cafe scene, as well as government ministry buildings. Authorities have traditionally been careful to ensure the buildings retain their style, and many in the city of around 20 million residents are fond of the area. - 'Regeneration banner' - Since the 1950s however, middle-class residents have progressively moved out of the area in favour of quieter, smarter and more modern suburbs. The ministries and public authorities still there are due to move too, once the new administrative capital being built in the desert some 45 kilometres (28 miles) from the city centre is ready. "What will become of the many ministries such as agriculture, education and health housed in historic palaces and buildings?" Bindari asked. He points to the gentrification of the so-called Maspero Triangle area hugging the banks of the River Nile which the government is redeveloping into a financial centre, with luxurious shopping malls and hotels. It has led to thousands of residents in informal housing being relocated to alternative accommodation. "I'm afraid that under the banner of regeneration, entire urban areas... will be razed to the ground," Bindari added. - Cause for optimism? - But Riham Aram, director of the Historic Cairo Restoration Project, is more upbeat. Since 2014, some 350 buildings have already been restored under an initiative for Khedivial Cairo, she said. "We've repainted entire buildings and restored decorations using similar material to what was originally used during construction," she said. "We must maintain this historic district so it doesn't turn into slums in the future," she warned. And she said that ways to reuse 18 government buildings in central Cairo would be examined. - Economic return - The private sector has also become involved in efforts to preserve the downtown area. In 2008, a group of businessmen from local construction firm Ismailia Consortium set up an arm of the company to restore city centre cultural heritage. "We found that the best way to conserve downtown Cairo is that there needs to be economic returns," said managing director Karim el-Shafei. "A lot of the apartments are empty. They can be renovated and rented out or sold bringing in profits because they are being used productively," he added. The firm has bought 32 downtown buildings as well as the historic Cinema Radio located on Talaat Harb street. But it faces several bureaucratic hurdles even for routine procedures such as opening a new cafe. Shafei is also keen to draw tourists to the centre to shop for locally made brands. But it is not all about investing just to make money, when it comes to restoring important sites, some experts note. "Along with the focus on the new capital, we hope that interest is not lost in the conservation of Cairo's cultural heritage," said Soheir Hawas, a Cairo University professor, who authored a volume on the area's architecture. Hawas, also a member of the National Urban Harmony Committee, wants to see government buildings turned into museums and cultural centres. "These are important pages in Egypt's long and continuous architectural record and must be preserved," she argued. IN LIGHT of scarcity of water supply in the country, President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the review of the government's deal with private water concessionaires to omit "onerous" provisions IN LIGHT of scarcity of water supply in the country, President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the review of the government's deal with private water concessionaires to omit "onerous" provisions that put the public at a disadvantage, Malacanang said Tuesday, April 2. Duterte gave the directive during the 36th Cabinet meeting held at Malacanan Palace on Monday, April 1, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said in a statement. Panelo said the President also wanted Solicitor General Jose Calida and Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra to look at the arbitration case lodged against the Philippine government by private water concessionaire Maynilad Water Services in Singapore. "[Duterte] directed the Solicitor-General and the Secretary of Justice to study the case of Maynilad vs Republic," the Palace official said. "The Chief Executive then instructed all agencies to check and review all contracts entered into and remove onerous provisions that might be detrimental to the lives of the Filipinos. He reiterated his vow to protect the people of the Republic of the Philippines," he added. In October 2018, the high court of Singapore upheld its earlier ruling granting Maynilad's application to raise water rates. Duterte's order came as he had expressed ire over the reported water crisis in Metro Manila and other nearby provinces, causing inconvenience to thousands of residents in the affected areas. Duterte has given state water regulator Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS), Manila Water, and another private water concessionaire Maynilad Water Services until April 15 to look for ways to provide sufficient water supply to consumers in Metro Manila and nearby provinces. The Chief Executive has also threatened to fire MWSS officials and terminate the contracts of Manila Water and Maynilad, if they fail to address the water shortage. During the Cabinet meeting, possible ways to mitigate the effects of El Nino and water shortage were also tackled, Panelo said. Story continues Panelo noted that a roadmap was presented, which included "immediate, medium and long-term interventions, such as making an intensive campaign for the conservation of water and energy." He added that there were also discussions about the creation of departments of Water and Disaster Resilience, dredging of waterways, replacement of tunnels and aqueducts, installation of water tank systems in all Department of Health's hospitals, and planned funding for the establishment of water treatment plants. Panelo said the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda), through Undersecretary Adoracion Navarro, had presented the proposed Executive Order (EO) on transforming and strengthening the National Water Resources Board (NWRB). "The EO will merge the NWRB and the River Basin Control Office into the National Water Management Council," the Palace official said. "This will streamline and consolidate planning and regulation of all water and river basins in the country. It will also draft a National Water Management Framework Plan," he added. (SunStar Philippines) HAGATNA, Guam -- More than 350 Philippine workers have been approved by the government of Guam to work at projects on the island.The Pacific Daily News reported Monday that petitions for 355 workers received HAGATNA, Guam -- More than 350 Philippine workers have been approved by the government of Guam to work at projects on the island. The Pacific Daily News reported Monday that petitions for 355 workers received approval despite the recent removal of the Philippines from the list of countries approved by the US government for new H-2B visas. The governor's office said four contractor firms were approved for Philippine workers including Core Tech, Nan Inc., J Corp., and Northern Construction. Officials said Core Tech was allowed to apply for a second project using 258 current H-2B workers, while the other contractors were approved to bring workers from the Philippines. Governor Lou Leon Guerrero said contractors should be able to petition for H-2B workers if they are unable to source skilled workers on Guam. (AP) Congress today released its manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections titled 'Congress will deliver'. Terming it as the voice of people, Congress President Rahul Gandhi said that the manifesto focuses on farmer distress. Blaming the BJP government for ignoring India's farmers, Congress said that agriculture in India has been driven into deep crisis where MSP was denied to the farmers for 4 years, farmer debt has increased manifold, procurement of machinery is non-existent and the input prices have also increased. Here're the key takeaways: As part of the poll promises, Congress party's manifesto said that it would put the farmers on the path from "Karz Maafi" to "Karz Mukti". This will be done through remunerative prices, lower input costs, and assured access to institutional credit. The manifesto has promised a separate "Kisan Budget" for the farmers every year. Congress president Rahul Gandhi said if farmers are unable to repay the loans, it will be treated as a civil offence and not a criminal offence. He said it will be a "historic step" in the welfare of farmers. "Under our government, farmers who cannot pay back loans, it will no more be a criminal offence", Rahul Gandhi said. Citing the example of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where Congress is in power, Congress manifesto reads that the government there waived the loans of farmers and would do the same for other States as well. Calling debt a civil liability, Congress' manifesto stated that the party will not allow criminal proceedings to be instituted against a farmer who is unable to pay his/her debt. In its manifesto, Congress promised to establish a permanent National Commission on Agricultural Development and Planning consisting of farmers, agricultural scientists and agricultural economists to examine and advise the government on how to make agriculture viable, competitive and remunerative. As per the manifesto, the recommendations of the Commission shall be binding on the government. The Commission will subsume the existing Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices and recommend appropriate minimum support prices. Congress has also promised to re-design the BJP government's Fasal Bima Yojana (Crop Insurance Scheme). According to the Congress' manifesto, the BJP's crop insurance scheme has only enriched the insurance companies at the cost of the farmers. Congress said that if it comes to the power, it will work with the state Governments to digitise land ownership and land tenancy records and, in particular, recognise ownership and tenancy rights of women farmers and ensure women get the benefits of agriculture related schemes. Congress has promised to review the prices of agricultural inputs, extend subsidies where necessary, and establish facilities to hire farm machinery. It also said that the party will repeal the Agricultural Produce Market Committees Act and make trade in agricultural produce free from all restrictions. The manifesto also talked about establishing farmers market, formulating new policy on export and import of agricultural products. Congress promised to establish a Commission on Marginal Farmers and Agricultural Labour to advise on policies and programmes that will help them earn income from higher wages and from non-crop based agriculture such as horticulture and floriculture, dairying and poultry. Congress promised to encourage farmers to diversify into the production of local varieties of millets and pulses that can be procured for the PDS, Mid-Day Meals Scheme and the ICDS programme. Congress manifesto said that it would set up programmes to promote horticulture, pisciculture and sericulture for diversification and greater income for farmers and would promote organic farming, encourage farmers to use mixed fertilizers and pesticides, support verification of organic products, and help them secure better prices for organic products. Congress also stated that it would double the funding in 5 years for teaching, R&D, agriculture-related pure sciences and applied science and technology in the agricultural sector. Congress has promised that the "distortions" that have crept into the text and the implementation of the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 will be removed and the original purposes of the Acts will be restored and enforced. Edited By: Udit Verma Also Read: Lok Sabha Elections 2019 LIVE updates: Rahul Gandhi releases Congress manifesto; NYAY, simpler GST, jobs get prime focus THE National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) has removed over 650,000 campaign materials all over Metro Manila.NCRPO Director Major General Guillermo Eleazar urged the candidates to also do their PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte's directive to review contracts entered into by each government office covers all deals with private firms and other countries, Malacanang said on Tuesday, April 2. The President issued the order to ensure that all government contracts are advantageous to the Filipino people, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said in a press conference. Panelo explained that Duterte had given such directive deal upon learning that the government was barred from "intruding into the terms of the contract" with private water concessionaire Maynilad Water Services, which eventually resulted in its defeat in the arbitration case lodged in Singapore. The ruling of Singapore high court, which became final in October 2018, has favored the Maynilad, as it compels the Philippine government to pay P3.42 billion to the water concessionaire for not implementing a water tariff hike from March 2015 to August 2016. From now on, all of the government's existing contracts will be subject to scrutiny by the offices of the Solicitor General and the Department of Justice, as well as the legal departments. "The President could not believe that how can a contract like this entered [into] by the government [impose] a ban on the government to take government action, with respect to such item as water services?" the Palace official said. "He directed the Solicitor General, the Department of Justice Secretary, and all legal departments to review, evaluate, scrutinize every contract entered by the government and/or each agency with private corporations and/or countries," he added. Panelo said the President has wanted to remove all "onerous" provisions included in any contracts that "will put the Filipino people [at] disadvantage or [are] in violation of the Constitution." He stressed that contracts found to be illegal or unconstitutional would either be amended or revoked. "We'll have to examine every provision of the contract. Anything that is against public policy or against the law or against the Constitution, we will have to strike down," Panelo said. Story continues Panelo said concerned agencies were ordered to "immediately" review the contracts, including the Philippines's $62-million deal with China. "It will be a continuing investigation on the contracts," he said. "The President is warning all and sundry that for as long as he is the President, he will not allow anything that will go against the interest of the Filipino people. He will use the Constitution, all the powers given [to] him, to protect the Filipino people and to serve them faithfully," Panelo added. Panelo expressed optimism that Duterte's latest directive would not scare potential investors in the country. He told investors not to worry and to instead take the President's order as an advance warning that they should not engage in an unlawful contract. Asked if Duterte's pronouncement has an impact to any firms planning to invest in the country, Panelo said: "No, I don't think so because as I have said some time ago, the considerations being looked at by potential investors are one, the peace and order situation, the lack of bureaucracy or bureaucratic red tape, and the business climate." "On the contrary, in fact, it will forewarn them that they cannot enter into any agreement that is in violation of the Constitution or public policy. Alam na nila 'yun kaya hindi nila papasukan 'yun (They're forewarned so they would not enter into an illegal deal)," Panelo added. (SunStar Philippines) THE National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) has removed over 650,000 campaign materials all over Metro Manila.NCRPO Director Major General Guillermo Eleazar urged the candidates to also do their EVERY successful entrepreneur starts somewhere. For some, the dream to be their own boss was triggered by hardships in the past. Some bumped into it by accident, while some needed to leave their comfort zones and bravely build meaningful relationships in a new place. The latter is the story of business owner Ma. Teresa Beltran-Chan, whose big break in business took place in Cebu, an island over a thousand kilometers away from her hometown of Bataan. Her secret is keeping a healthy customer relationship with every client she meets, something she acquired during her time working at the Philippine National Bank (PNB). Chan and her family moved to Cebu in 1987 when her husband David, who is from Mindanao, found a business opportunity in Cebu as a contract grower for chicken for a big conglomerate. The couple met in Manila during their post graduate studies in Asian Institute of Management (AIM), and initially settled in the countrys capital. Chan worked in the bank while David ran several businesses. When they moved to Cebu some 32 years ago, the couple practically knew no one except for Davids sister, who had married a Cebuano. We arent from Cebu but we found a home here, said Chan, a past president of the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI). She was offered a job in PNB-Cebu, the third biggest branch in the Philippines at the time, when the head office learned she was relocating. She became the banks senior assistant manager and eventually got promoted to assistant vice president. Chan represented PNB Cebu in the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry when it joined in 1994. Chans charming and smart personality allowed her to gain and expand her network, many of whom eventually became her friends and business partners. It was a difficult start at first. I was new here, but my PNB co-workers warmly welcomed me, and they immediately became like family. They helped me adjust to Cebus way of living and business practices, she said. Story continues PNB was my social life. I met a lot of people through the bank. I had the first dibs of Cebus economic status through the bank, Chan added. Chan took PNBs early retirement package in 2001 after serving the bank for 17 years, but she remained in the radar of Cebus business community, getting involved in business and community organizations. After leaving the corporate world, Chan ventured into franchising and opened STI Mandaue in 2008. A year after, she diversified her business and set up a small-scale contact center business named E-Asiatech Solutions Company, making use of the schools computer laboratory at night. She is one of the local pioneers in Cebus contact center industry. She initially hired 40 employees, which was trimmed down to 20 due to the low quality of communication skills. While working at growing her humble venture, Chan never left the business chamber. She remained proactive in helping the chamber execute its activities. Because of her notable and active participation, she was offered various chamber roles. Chan became vice president for finance and membership before she took on a big role as the first female CCCI president from 2014 to 2016. She also spread her wings and became active in organizations in Cebu like Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, Zonta International and Federation of Organized Women Active and Responsible to Development. I initially did not plan on settling in Cebu, but life led us here. My advice is to find what lights you up, keep your focus and see unexpected success, said Chan. What was your first job? Im a certified public accountant. I graduated in St. Scholasticas College in Manila. Right after college, I joined Human Settlements Development Corp. as a senior financial analyst, after which I became a cost accountant of Petro Chemicals. Then I left the corporate world and became a full-time student at Asian Institute of Management for two years. Thats where I met my husband. After AIM, I joined the Philippine National Bank in 1982 until my retirement in 2001. But in between those years, I resigned from PNB to start my small export business but went back to the banking job again. Working in the bank that time was a wiser move. It was the kind of job that did not stress me out because my job ended after leaving the office. Who inspired you to get into business? I was the only professional in the family. My siblings and parents were all into business. I grew up helping my mom and dad in our real estate business in Bataan, running some errands and accompanying them to the site. My dream to run a business on my own had long been there. As I child I dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. However, unlike others who immediately jumped into their dream, I took a different pathway first to prepare myself fully for the path where God wanted me to flourish. When did you realize this was what you were meant to do? Entrepreneurship was something I was always destined for. But it took me a while to go full-time, although when I was in Manila, I got into a small-scale export business selling Christmas decors. It did not take off though because just when we were preparing for the big expo, the news about us relocating to Cebu came. My principle was that you should devote your time first to your employer because thats a contract that you signed between you and the company (your employer). It would also be too demanding to juggle both, being a banker and an entrepreneur, when I also had other responsibilities at home as a wife and a mother. So, when I finally decided to retire early, I got to do other thingslike building my own business. Why did you pick this type of business or industry? I got into the call center business at the time when the industry was taking off, amid the global economic slump. Opportunities for outsourcing services were plenty, and the Philippines at that time was aggressive in snatching a good share in the pie. It was good timing to invest when the industry was at its infancy. There was a big room for growth. I started off with 40 people operating in STI Mandaues Library at night until we were able to gain clients and the number of workers leapfrogged to 60 agents. Thats when we moved to a bigger location. Then it grew to 200 agents. Now we are going to 300. We are now looking for a property where we can build our own office building, in anticipation of the sustained growth in business. Where did you get the training you needed to succeed? My rich background in the banking industry helped me grow my contact center business. Because I was trained to double-check facts and scrutinize details and read people, we saved the company from unscrupulous individuals. Many small-scale firms that time were cheated by brokers who promised to give inbound clients but after paying them hefty amounts, nothing happened. Some stopped their operations. How many times did you fail before you succeeded? Failures are all part of the growth. Failures in business are stepping stones. You learn from each mistake you make, and mistakes help you become better every day. There are plenty of things to learn to be successful in businessfirst, youve got to have focus. Dont be easily discouraged by what others say or think about you or your mistakes. Instead, get back up and try again. Youve got to keep moving forward. If you are still an emerging entrepreneur, live simply. Brands dont define us but the kind of life we live. Lastly, allow God to direct your steps. Your consistent good work will never remain unnoticed or unrewarded. Credit: CC0 Public Domain California's largest internal body of water is steadily drying up, exposing a lake bed that threatens to trigger toxic dust storms and exacerbate already high levels of asthma and other respiratory diseases in Southern California. Yet there is something about the Salton Sea that leads many lawmakers to ignore the urgency and put off remediation programs. It's just so far southoff the mental map of officials who represent more densely populated urban areas to the north, like Los Angeles. It is hydrologically unconnected to the Bay Area and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which supplies water for so much of the state's agricultural and residential use. It is a disaster in the making, yet it is an afterthought. That attitude is understandably galling to residents of the adjacent Imperial Valley, who are (for now) the ones most affected by the increasing dust and who have witnessed firsthand the degrading ecological conditions. They have heard officials promise repeatedly to fix this catastrophe by creating wetlands that moisten the exposed bed and sustain an ecosystem that continues to support migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway. They have repeatedly seen those promises broken. The dimensions of the failure were for many years merely theoretical, but they became real in the winter just past. As the rain and snow washed away drought and at least temporarily diminished environmental problems in the rest of the state, the contraction of the Salton Sea accelerated. Increasing salinity kept the lake from sustaining even the salt-hardy tilapia. The birds failed to appear. Until recently, lake levels had been sustained by Colorado River water under a 2003 agreement between the Imperial Irrigation District and the San Diego County Water Authority. It was an innovative and responsible arrangement. San Diego would pay for projects (lining earthen canals, for example) to help the Imperial Valley use water more efficiently. The water no longer needed in the valley would be exported to San Diego for residential use. Without excess water flushing through valley farmland, however, the runoff that formerly fed the Salton Sea would taper off, so for 15 years the Imperial Irrigation District would use some of its river water to counter evaporation at the lake. That would buy enough time for the state to develop and fund plans for the wetlands and other measures to keep the dust from blowing. Or at least, that was the theory. The 15-year program of supplying "mitigation water" to the lake ended a little more than a year ago, but the state has so far failed to meet its benchmarks for developing wetlands. This month, as the California Water Resources Board met at the Salton Sea lakeshore to discuss the remediation program's progress, members had to acknowledge that there hasn't been any. None of the promised projects have been completed. The Newsom administration has vowed a new focus on the Salton Sea, and there is reason for hopebut the lake is shrinking rapidly and action must now be accelerated to prevent a public health and environmental disaster. Meanwhile, the Imperial Irrigation District tried but failed to leverage its massive Colorado River water rights into federal funding for Salton Sea projects. A 19-year drought in the Colorado River Basin has been drying up lakes farther upstream that are crucial to the Southern California water supply, including massive Lake Mead. To prevent the water there from dropping too low to operate Hoover Dam's hydroelectric generators, California and six other states entered into talks over a drought contingency agreement to cut back their use of river water. The Imperial Irrigation District is the largest holder of river water rights and held out in the hope of winning a $200-million federal commitment for the Salton Sea. But the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California wanted to move things along and covered Imperial's portion, so the drought agreement is proceeding without any funding for the Salton Sea. The Imperial Irrigation District asked members of Congress this week to not allow the drought contingency plan to move forward unless the district is included, and to ensure that federal funding legislation provides money for the Salton Sea, but the district has lost much of its leverage. That leaves a shrinking lake, lots of broken promises and a looming disaster. Both California and the feds have to do better than thisespecially if they want to encourage agreements such as the one that makes Imperial Valley farmers more water-wise while keeping San Diego residents from deep rationing. The Salton Sea is not going away, even if it goes away. It can become a wetland and wildlife preserve, or it can becomeif we let ita health and ecological catastrophe. Explore further Seven states seek US support for Colorado River drought plan 2019 Los Angeles Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Credit: CC0 Public Domain An international team of researchers has found evidence of Denisovans interbreeding with modern humans in Southeast Asia more recently than thought. The group gave a presentation at this year's meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists outlining a genetic study they conducted. The Denisovans were a species or subspecies of humans that are believed to have lived in Asia and Southeast Asia. Little physical evidence of their existence has ever been found, all of it in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia. But much more evidence of them exists in our genes. Like Neanderthals, the Denisovans interbred with humans. It is currently believed that as humans migrated out of Africa, they encountered and mated with Neanderthalas they moved farther east, they encountered and mated with the Denisovans. In this new effort, the researchers report evidence suggesting Denisovans mated with humans possibly as recently as 15,000 years ago, in Papua New Guinea. The researchers collected tissue samples from 161 people (representing 14 groups) in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and sequenced their DNA. They report that in the samples from people in New Guinea, they found evidence of Denisovan DNA from populations that were different from those living in the cave in Siberia. They describe them as D1 and D2 (the population in Siberia is described as D0). They report further that D1 and D2 were so distantly related to D0 that they had to have diverged at least 283,000 years ago. They also found that D2 was so distant that it likely split off approximately 363,000 years ago. The researchers suggest such distant divergence makes D1 and D2 as different from D0 as they were from Neanderthals. They also suggest that D2 might even have to be reclassified to give the group its own name. And finally, they reported that they had found evidence of Denisovans interbreeding with modern humans between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago. Interestingly, Bence Viola, with the University of Toronto, announced at the same conference that two pieces of a braincase found in Denisova Cave back in 2016 had been identified as having come from a Denisovanthe first skull fragment to have been identified as Denisovan. Explore further A fourth Denisovan fossil has been identified 2019 Science X Network 'Is he acting in good faith?', Irish lawmakers want to know Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg met Irish lawmakers on Tuesday after calling for more action from governments to regulate social media. Zuckerberg held talks with members of parliament Hildegarde Naughton, James Lawless and Eamon Ryan whilst in Dublinthe headquarters of Facebook's international operations. All three are members of Ireland's parliamentary communications committee, also standing as the nation's representatives on the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News. The meeting came after Zuckerberg broke with years of convention among internet giants on Saturday, calling for governments to play a "more active role" in regulating the online sphere. In a weekend op-ed published by The Washington Post newspaper, Zuckerberg said he would welcome fresh internationally-coordinated regulation in four areas: harmful content, protection of elections, privacy and data portability. Ryanthe leader of Ireland's Green Partysaid that in their meeting, Zuckerberg was confronted with such concerns in a "good exchange", but intimated that these issues need to be solved at "European level". "The ball is in our court to a certain extent, to do the legislation we have to do, but I think we need to think bigger than that," Ryan saidoutlining the need for an increase in regulators. "They've got monopoly powers, we've got to take that on," he said. "Self-regulation won't work." With upcoming European Parliament elections and Facebook's role in the divisive run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain, the influence of so-called "fake news" was also raised. "He didn't have a response to that," Ryan said. Lawless said Facebook's self-designation as a platform was raised in the meetingwhich included former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, now serving as Facebook's head of global affairs and communications. Historically, social media firms have skirted obligations to moderate content by self-defining as platforms rather than publishers. California-headquartered Facebook has recently faced criticism for publishing hate speech, failing to block the live streaming of the attacks on New Zealand mosques and concerns over its handling of personal data. Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner watchdog is currently investigating Facebook under new European privacy laws. 2019 AFP Credit: CC0 Public Domain Facebook said Monday that it had removed hundreds of pages and accounts linked to government and political organizations in India and Pakistan that misled users about their identities, part of the company's effort to fight allegations that its platform is used to spread misinformation. The crackdown targeted accounts that engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behavior," Facebook's term for networks of users who work together to disseminate messages while concealing who they are. The fake Indian accounts were linked to the country's two leading political partiesPrime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Indian National Congressboth of which have trafficked in rumors and half-truths in the run-up to next month's general elections. In Pakistan, the company said it had removed 103 pages, groups and accounts on Facebook and Instagram that it traced to the Pakistani military's communications wing, Inter-Services Public Relations, or ISPR. The users created fake accounts to run military fan pages, news pages, and pages aimed at Kashmir, the Himalayan territory that is the subject of a long-running and bloody border dispute with India. "Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found that it was linked to employees of the ISPR," Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, said in a statement. About 2.8 million Facebook accounts followed one or more of these pages, Gleicher said. Among the messages they posted: praising Pakistan's "big heart" for releasing an Indian pilot shot down during a recent border skirmish, and mocking India's air force as a "consistent failure." During the rival nations' hostilities in February, fake news flew on both sides of the border, amplified by social media as well as mainstream news channels caught up in patriotic fervor. Gleicher said that while the pages were not removed for posting false content, the company took action because "we don't want our services to be used to manipulate people." A Facebook employee who was involved in the removals, but was not authorized to speak to the media, said that although the accounts were linked to the military, "we are not trying to say that ISPR directed them (to spread) false information." Pakistan's military did not immediately comment on Facebook's announcement. In India, the company said it removed 15 pages and accounts that it traced to Silver Touch, an information technology consultancy. According to a recent investigation by AltNews, an independent Indian website that debunks social media hoaxes, Silver Touch is based in Prime Minister Modi's home state of Gujarat and has developed apps for Indian government entities, including Modi's official app, which has more than 10 million Android downloads. Silver Touch's "The India Eye" Facebook page, among those removed in the crackdown, frequently spread misinformation about the government's political opponents, including the Congress Party, to nearly 2 million followers, AltNews found. Facebook also took down 687 pages and accounts it traced to the Congress party's cyber branch. Those accounts were followed by 206,000 users, the company said. Previous crackdowns by Facebook have resulted in the removals of pages from Iran, Myanmar, Russia and other countries. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant has faced intense criticism for not doing enough to halt the spread of fake news, particularly in countries where its user base has exploded but digital literacy remains relatively low. The company has rolled out fact-checking initiatives and formed partnerships with news organizations in countries such as India and Indonesia, both of which are in the midst of heated election campaigns. Last week Facebook also introduced rules requiring advertisers buying political ads ahead of upcoming European Union elections to prove they are located in the country whose users they are targeting, a move the company said would help prevent foreign interference. The Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp, with 200 million users in India, has come under particular fire after dozens were killed in mob violence linked to social media rumors. WhatsApp has since imposed limits on forwarded messages and launched an awareness campaign to educate Indians to think twice before sharing unverified content. Gleicher said that disguising users' identities "goes against what people expect on Facebook and it violates our policies. "This is why we continue to invest in people and resources to improve the technology we use to detect this type of harmful behavior, and we will continue to take action on an ongoing basis to address it." Explore further Facebook blocks more accounts over influence campaigns 2019 Los Angeles Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Google chief Sundar Pichai says that fears about artificial intelligence are valid but that the tech industry is up to the challenge of regulating itself A group of Google employees launched a public campaign Monday to remove the president of the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation from an outside artificial intelligence ethics advisory panel. A petition published online called on the Internet giant to cull Kay Coles James from its recently formed Advanced Technology External Advisory Council due to her history of being "vocally anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant." "In selecting James, Google is making clear that its version of 'ethics' values proximity to power over the wellbeing of trans people, other LGBTQ people and immigrants," read a statement posted on Medium by a group identifying itself as Googlers Against Transfobia. Positions expressed by James contradict Google's stated values and, if infused into artificial intelligence, could build discrimination into super-smart machines, according to the post. "From AI that doesn't recognize trans people, doesn't 'hear' more feminine voices and doesn't 'see' women of color, to AI used to enhance police surveillance, profile immigrants and automate weapons those who are most marginalized are most at risk," the group argued. The group said that reasoning for James being added to the panel has been given as an effort to have a diversity of thought. Neither Google nor the Heritage Foundation immediately responded to requests for comment. Petition backers said it launched with 580 signatures from academics, Google employees and others, including technology industry peers. The controversy comes as the world grapples with balancing potential benefits of artificial intelligence with risks its could be used against people or even, if given a mind of its own, turn on its creators. Google chief Sundar Pichai said in a published interview late last year that fears about artificial intelligence are valid but that the tech industry is up to the challenge of regulating itself. Tech companies building AI should factor in ethics early in the process to make certain artificial intelligence with "agency of its own" doesn't hurt people, Pichai said in an interview with The Washington Post. The California-based internet giant is a leader in the development of AI, competing in the smart software race with giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft. Last year, Google published a set of internal AI principles, the first being that AI should be socially beneficial. Google vowed not to design or deploy AI for use in weapons, surveillance outside of international norms or in technology aimed at violating human rights. The company noted that it would continue to work with the military or governments in areas such as cybersecurity, training, recruitment, health care and search-and-rescue. AI is already used to recognize people in photos, filter unwanted content from online platforms and enable cars to drive themselves. Explore further Google rules out using artificial intelligence for weapons (Update) 2019 AFP The revolver Vincent Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself with was found in a field by farmer in 1965, 75 years after the painter's death The revolver with which Vincent Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself is to go under the hammer, a Paris auction house said Tuesday. Discovered by a farmer in 1965 in the same field where the troubled Dutch painter is thought to have fatally wounded himself 75 years before, the gun has already been exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Billed by Auction Art as "the most famous weapon in the history of art", the 7 mm Lefaucheux revolver is expected to go for up to 60,000 euros ($67,000) when it is sold on June 19. Van Gogh experts believe that he shot himself with the revolver near the village of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris, where he spent the last few months of his life in 1890. The Dutch artist had borrowed the gun from the owner of the inn where he was staying. He died 36 hours later after staggering wounded back to the inn in the dark. It was not his first dramatic act of self-harm. Two years earlier in 1888, he cut off his ear before offering it to a woman in a brothel in Arles in the south of France. While most art historians agree that Van Gogh killed himself, that assumption has been questioned in recent years, with some researchers claiming that the fatal shot may have been fired accidentally by two local boys playing with the weapon in the field. That theory got fresh support from a new biopic of the artist starring Willem Dafoe, "At Eternity's Gate". Its director, the renowned American painter Julian Schnabel, told AFP that Van Gogh had painted 75 canvasses in his 80 days at Auvers-sur-Oise and was unlikely to be suicidal. Willem Dafoe, right, stars as Van Gogh in director Julian Schnabel's "At Eternity's Gate", which depicts the painter's death not as a suicide but an accident involving two local boys Were local boys to blame? The legendary French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrierewho co-wrote the script with Schnabelinsisted that there "is absolutely no proof he killed himself. "Do I believe that Van Gogh killed himself? Absolutely not!" he declared when the film was premiered at the Venice film festival in September. He said Van Gogh painted some of his best work in his final days, including his "Portrait of Dr Gachet", the local doctor who later tried to save his life. It set a world record when it sold for $82.5 million in 1990. The bullet Dr Gachet extracted from Van Gogh's chest was the same calibre as the one used by the Lefaucheux revolver. "Van Gogh was working constantly. Every day he made a new work. He was not at all sad," Carriere argued. In the film the gun goes off after the two young boys, who were brothers, got into a struggle with the bohemian stranger. Auction Art said that the farmer who found the gun in 1965 gave it to the owners of the inn at Auvers-sur-Oise, whose family are now selling it. "Technical tests on the weapon have shown the weapon was used and indicate that it stayed in the ground for a period that would coincide with 1890," it said. "All these clues give credence to the theory that this is the weapon used in the suicide." That did not exclude, the auction house added, that the gun could not also have been hidden or abandoned by the two young brothers in the field. Explore further Blog follows restoration of Van Gogh artwork 2019 AFP Credit: Grant Gilchrist One of the main challenges in wildlife conservation biology is to understand what factors affect vulnerable wildlife populations over time. Scientists have been trying to understand these factors to estimate how much hunting in a season is sustainable, but the lack of long-term monitoring data, especially in remote areas such as the Arctic, makes this task very difficult to accomplish. In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the University of Ottawa used a novel method to bypass this lack of data and track how nesting bird populations changed over time, even before population census data were collected. Professor Jules Blais and his team analyzed sediment cores from the bottom of small lakes and ponds in Canada's Eastern Arctic to examine the levels of a range of chemical compounds in the cores' composition. "When birds colonize an area, they begin to fertilize the local environment, drastically changing the nutrient levels in the water," explained lead author Dr. Kathryn Hargan, a W. Garfield Weston postdoctoral fellow and a L'Oreal-UNESCO postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa at the time the research was done. "Over time, sediments slowly accumulate at the bottom of lakes, archiving a detailed history of the biological changes in those bodies of water, much like tree rings reveal historical information." The common eider, an Arctic seaduck prized by the Inuit for its meat and down, once numbered in the millions, but reports by Northerners and some wildlife surveys suggested substantial reductions in recent decades. Although hunting pressures were suspected to be the cause of the population decline, this study was able to demonstrate that the eider population decline observed in the seaduck's main breeding range coincided with increased sales in firearms and motorized boats in Greenland, indicating eider harvest at that time was unsustainable. Credit: Nik Clyde, 2014 In the Hudson Strait near Cape Dorset, Nunavut the common eider's main nesting and breeding area the scientists found evidence that populations declined in the mid to late 20th century, during a period of intense hunting by Greenlanders and the relocation of nearby Inuit communities. In more isolated eider nesting sites, with lower hunting pressure, scientists found that populations remained stable. "The fact that traces of hunting practices over the last century can be detected in the nutrient profiles of pond sediment in the Arctic is fascinating," added Prof. Blais. "Tools such as these offer a new perspective into tracking environmental changes going back hundreds of years, and can potentially revolutionize wildlife conservation efforts." More information: Kathryn E. Hargan et al. Multicentury perspective assessing the sustainability of the historical harvest of seaducks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Kathryn E. Hargan et al. Multicentury perspective assessing the sustainability of the historical harvest of seaducks,(2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1814057116 Normal conditions (top), strengthening due to natural variability (middle) and weakening due to greenhouse warming (bottom). Black arrows represent horizontal and vertical winds with the shading on the background map illustrating ocean temperatures. Over the past few decades, natural variability has strengthened the Pacific Walker circulation leading to enhanced cooling in the equatorial central-to-eastern Pacific (middle). Climate models forced by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations simulate weakening of the Walker circulation (bottom). (Right) Temporal evolution of model-simulated Walker circulation trends, with the dark blue line and orange shading denoting anthropogenically-induced changes and the impact of natural processes, respectively. Credit: IBS A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that the recent intensification of the equatorial Pacific wind system, known as Walker Circulation, is unrelated to human influences and can be explained by natural processes. This result ends a longstanding debate on the drivers of an unprecedented atmospheric trend, which contributed to a three-fold acceleration of sea level rise in the western tropical Pacific, as well as to the global warming hiatus. Driven by the east-west sea surface temperature difference across the equatorial Pacific, the Walker circulation is one of the key features of global atmospheric circulation. It is characterized by ascending motion over the Western Pacific and descending motion in the eastern equatorial Pacific. At the surface, trade winds blow from east to west, causing upwelling of cold water along the equator. From the early 1990s to about 2013, this circulation has intensified dramatically, cooling the eastern equatorial Pacific and triggering shifts in global winds and rainfall (see Figure 1). These conditions further contributed to drying in California, exacerbating mega-drought conditions and impacting agriculture, water resources and wildfires. Given these widespread impacts on ecosystems and society, the recent Walker circulation trends have become a subject of intense research. In contrast to the observed strengthening, the majority of climate computer models simulate a gradual weakening of the Walker Circulation when forced by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations (see Figure 1). "The discrepancy between climate model projections and observed trends has led to speculations about the fidelity of the current generation of climate models and their representation of tropical climate processes," said Eui-Seok Chung, researcher from the Center for Climate Physics, Institute for Basic Science, South Korea, and lead author of the study. To determine whether the observed changes in the tropical atmospheric circulation are due to natural climate processes or caused by human-induced climate change, scientists from South Korea, the United States and Germany came together to conduct one of the most comprehensive big-data analyses of recent atmospheric trends to date. "Using satellite data, improved surface observations and a large ensemble of climate model simulations, our results demonstrate that natural variability, rather than anthropogenic effects, were responsible for the recent strengthening of the Walker circulation," said Prof. Axel Timmermann, Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University and co-author of this study. In their integrated analysis, the researchers found that the satellite-inferred strengthening of the Walker circulation is substantially weaker than implied by other surface observations used in previous studies. "Putting surface observations in context with latest satellite products was a key element of our study," said co-author Dr. Lei Shi from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in the United States. Analyzing 61 computer model simulations forced with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, the authors showed that although the average response is weakening of the Walker circulation, there are substantial discrepancies amongst the individual model experiments, in particular when considering shorter-term trends. "We found that some models are even consistent with the observed changes in the tropical Pacific, in stark contrast to other computer experiments that exhibit more persistent weakening of the Walker circulation during the observational period," said co-author Dr. Viju John from EUMETSAT in Germany. The authors were able to tease apart what caused the spread in the computer model simulations. Co-author Prof. Kyung-Ja Ha from the IBS Center for Climate Physics and Pusan National University says, "Natural climate variability, associated, for instance, with the El Nino-Southern Oscillation or the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation can account for a large part of diversity in simulated tropical climate trends." Prof. Brian Soden from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, at the University of Miami, United States, said, "The observed trends are not that unusual. In climate model simulations we can always find shorter-term periods of several decades that show similar trends to those inferred from the satellite data. However, in most cases, and when considering the century-scale response to global warming, these trends reverse their sign eventually." The study concludes that the observed strengthening of the Walker circulation from about 1990 to 2013 and its impact on western Pacific sea level, eastern Pacific cooling, and drought in the southwestern United States, was a naturally occurring phenomenon that does not stand in contrast to the notion of projected anthropogenic climate change. Given the high levels of natural decadal variability in the tropical Pacific, it would take at least two more decades to detect unequivocally the human imprint on the Pacific Walker Circulation (see Figure 1, right panel). Explore further Solar variability weakens the Walker cell More information: Eui-Seok Chung, Axel Timmermann, Brian J. Soden, Kyung-Ja Ha, Lei Shi, Viju O. John. Reconciling opposing Walker circulation trends in observations and model projections. Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-019-0446-4 Journal information: Nature Climate Change Eui-Seok Chung, Axel Timmermann, Brian J. Soden, Kyung-Ja Ha, Lei Shi, Viju O. John. Reconciling opposing Walker circulation trends in observations and model projections. In a stinging attack on Congress for its minimum guarantee scheme for the poor, PM Modi on Tuesday said that the party remembers poor only during elections. Following the release of Congress manifesto, Union Minister Arun Jaitley said the promises made by the Rahul Gandhi-led party is dangerous and divisive for the nation. Raising question over Rahul's promise to amend the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), he said that it appears some points of the manifesto have been drafted by Congress president's friends in the Tukde Tukde gang', like in the case of Jammu and Kashmir. BJP President Amit Shah also slammed the Congress party and said that our forces crossed the borders and avenged the killing of our bravehearts. On the other hand, Congress and DMK leaders want us to engage in dialogue with Pakistan. Earlier today, the Congress released its manifesto. The party has kept prime focus on the NYAY scheme, jobs for the youth, farmers' distress and a simpler taxation system in its manifesto which was unveiled today. Congress President Rahul Gandhi talked about 5 key ideas in Congress' manifesto during the event. He began with NYAY scheme and promised Rs 72,000 for 20 per cent of the poorest families. Gandhi then said that Congress will bring about a separate farmers' budget like the country earlier had for the Railways. He then spoke about education and healthcare. Rahul Gandhi also said that Congress would bring about a "saral, simple tax". Manifesto committee president P Chidambaram said that the manifesto keeps in mind the millions of voices of the people of India. He added that the manifesto guarantees two things - wealth and welfare. He added that the party will bring in wealth and guarantees welfare. He further said that the manifesto looks to bring back the conversation to the real issues and not on issues of religion and community. The three issues that the manifesto keeps in mind are unemployment, farmers' distress and women, the former Finance Minister said Follow the Lok Sabha Elections 2019 updates on BusinessToday.In LIVE blog: 7:40pm: Indian Army veteran Captain Shalini Singh on Tuesday joined the Aam Aadmi Party. Besides her, former vice president of Delhi BJP Purvanchal Morcha Shailendra Singh too joined the AAP, PTI reported. "We are proud to announce that the country's brave daughter Captain Shalini Singh and former vice president of Delhi BJP Purvanchal Morcha Shailendra Singh are joining the AAP. We welcome both of them," Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh said. 7:30pm: Addressing a rally in Gaya, Bihar, PM Modi said, "There are two kinds of people who have a problem with 'Chowkidar.' One type includes 'Maha Milawati' and the second includes all those who sponsor terrorists." PM Modi addressing a rally in Gaya, Bihar: Yeh dhamake kisne band kiye? Yeh Modi ne nahi kiya. Aapke ek vote ne kiya, yeh aapke vote ki taqat hai. Agar kuch badla hai toh woh hai reet, neeti aur niyat. Dilli mein 'Chowkidar' ki sarkar bani aur parinaam aapke saamne hai. pic.twitter.com/ZZkfGByEXD - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 7:20pm: Naveen Patnaik-led Biju Janata Dal (BJD) on Tuesday releases a list of 9 candidates; 2 for Lok Sabha elections and 7 for Legislative Assembly polls. Mahesh Sahu to be fielded from Dhenkanal Lok Sabha seat and Chandrani Murmu from Kendujhar Lok Sabha seat. 7:10pm: Early today, Supreme Court reserved a judgement for tomorrow on the petition filed by GJM leaders seeking an interim protection during general elections. Supreme Court reserves judgement for tomorrow on the petition filed by Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha (GJM) leaders Roshan Giri and Bimal Gurung seeking a direction to grant them interim protection for three weeks to allow them to participate in the general elections. pic.twitter.com/pp5JnxjuvF - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 7:05pm: "Recall how Congress treated architect of our Constitution, Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar. Congress plotted many conspiracies to defeat him. It is important that youth of today knows about these facts," said PM Modi in Jamui, Bihar. 7:00pm: Speaking at Jamui, PM Modi asked people of Bihar to give a befitting reply to those who are spreading rumours about reservations. PM Modi in Jamui, Bihar, earlier today: I want people of Bihar to give a befitting reply to those who are spreading rumours about reservations. Be it Modi or anyone else, no one can remove reservations. pic.twitter.com/LQ9H4w2tYc - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 6:55pm: Sasmit Patra of BJD accused PM Modi of violation of model code of conduct. Sasmit Patra,BJD: Today using a mobile number anyone could call up&listen to PM's speech while he was campaigning in Bhawanipatna,Odisha. So,we've gone before EC, since it didn't have pre-certification from EC,it's violation of poll guidelines&demanded action be taken against BJP pic.twitter.com/qcQzrepJcF - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 6:50pm: Commenting on Congress party's promise to amend the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, Omar Abdullah said that some 'Congress friends' conspired against removal of AFSPA. Some 'Congress friends' conspired against removal of AFSPA, says Omar Abdullah Read @ANI story | https://t.co/rwbELO8qqP pic.twitter.com/6Orp3b6o49 - ANI Digital (@ani_digital) April 2, 2019 5:35pm:BJP President addresses rally in Tamil Nadu. He assured the people of the state that like previous five years of our govt, the next five years of our govt will be dedicated to the welfare of people like great MGR and Jayalalithaa. On behalf of PM Modi, I want to assure the people of Tamil Nadu that like previous five years of our govt, the next five years of our govt will be dedicated to the welfare of people like great MGR and Jayalalithaa: Shri @AmitShah #BharatBoleModiModi pic.twitter.com/kRLF7VGhr2 - BJP (@BJP4India) April 2, 2019 5:30pm: In their recent manifesto, the Congress has proposed to bring back Special Status to North Eastern States and roll back Citizenship Amendment Bill. We promise to bring back Special Status to North Eastern States & we ensure the Citizenship Amendment Bill will not pass as we are committed to protecting the indigenous culture of the North East. #CongressManifesto2019 pic.twitter.com/E8lNAVDhQF - Congress (@INCIndia) April 2, 2019 5:25pm: "In ths time of grief & outrage, attempts will be made to divide us. Religions & identities will be pitted against each other. Hindu vs Mus. Jam vs Kash. Our pain musnt fuel such diabolical plans. Because eventually, the axe forgets but the tree remembers," Mehbooba Mufti said. 5:20pm: Former J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti lauded the Congress for promising to amend the Armed Forces Act (AFSPA) in its manifesto. Congress has shown great courage by endorsing issues PDP incorporated in its agenda of alliance with BJP. Revocation of AFSPA, not fiddling with JK constitutional provisions & holding unconditional dialogue .The roadmap PDP envisages is the only solution for a peaceful J&K pic.twitter.com/HddumNZZZK - Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) April 2, 2019 5:10pm: Ajit Jogi-led Janta Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC) will not contest Lok Sabha elections. The party has passed a resolution to not contest from any of the 11 Lok Sabha seats in Chhattisgarh, while they will support candidates fielded by the BSP on all these seats. 5:00pm: Election Commission of India writes to Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation and Chairman, Railway Board over 'noncompliance of lawful instructions and lackadaisical approach towards enforcing the model code of conduct', ANI reported. 4:40pm: Congress President Rahul Gandhi will file his nomination from the parliamentary constituency of Wayanad in Kerala on 4th April. Sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to accompany Rahul Gandhi for filing of his nomination. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra (file pic) to accompany Congress President Rahul Gandhi to Wayanad in Kerala for filing of his nomination from the parliamentary constituency. pic.twitter.com/UhCuQpQhKb - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 4:10pm: Congress names Babi Bagkar as its candidate to contest by-election from Mandrem, Goa. Congress names Babi Bagkar as its candidate to contest by-election from Mandrem (Goa) legislative assembly seat and Atal Shukla (UP) to contest by-election from Nighasan legislative assembly seat. pic.twitter.com/UgQMEPstuj - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 4:05pm: Arun Jaitley on Congress manifesto: It seems some points have been drafted by Congress president Rahil Gandhi's friends in the Tukde Tukde gang', like in the case of Jammu and Kashmir. Union Finance Minister & BJP leader Arun Jaitley on Congress manifesto: Even though there was a drafting committee, but it appears that some of the important points have been drafted by the Congress President's friends in 'Tukde Tukde gang' when it deals with Jammu & Kashmir pic.twitter.com/2rE39uBOaC - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 4:00pm: EC has written to the President against Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh for violation of model code of conduct. Election Commission has written to the President against Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh for violation of model code of conduct. He had said 'We all are BJP workers&we want BJP to emerge victorious. We want that once again Modi ji should become the PM' on 23rd March. (File pic) pic.twitter.com/22NPW7579a - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 3:55pm: Former Navy Chief Admiral L. Ramdas has written a letter to the Election Commission of India on Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath referring to the Indian Army as 'Modi ki sena' during a public rally in Ghaziabad on March 30, ANI has reported. 3:50pm: UP CM Yogi Adityanath slammed Congress party after it released its manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections. UP CM Yogi Adityanath on Congress manifesto: Iss chunaav mein Congress naetretavya ka ye jhuut dubara benaqab hoga aur janata zordaar jawab Congress aur uske sehyogi dalon ko degi. Unhone apne 55 varsho ki naakaami ko 55 page ke apne ghoshna patra ke maadhyam se vyakt kiya hai. pic.twitter.com/MhbXI9hDFT - ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 2, 2019 3:40pm: "In their recent manifesto, the Congress has proposed to tone down AFSPA in J&K. Do they want to demoralize the forces and their personnel?" said Amit Shah in Thoothukudi. 3:35pm: "In Pulwama, 40 soldiers were killed by Pakistan. Our forces crossed the borders and avenged the killing of our bravehearts. On the other hand, Congress and DMK leaders want us to engage in dialogue with Pakistan," said Amit Shah in Thoothukudi. 3:30pm: "I want to assure people that the next five years of our govt will be dedicated to the welfare of people like MGR and Jayalalithaa govts were," said Amit Shah in Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu. 3:20pm: The Congress promises to reduce the presence of the armed forces in the Kashmir valley in its manifesto for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. 3:10pm: Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday released its Lok Sabha election manifesto that promises to "reverse the unwarranted and illegal interference by the BJP government" into the functioning of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). "Congress will respect the autonomy of the RBI in matters reserved to the RBI under the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1939, including the formulation of monetary policy," said the manifesto. 3:00pm: The Congress has said that it will review all laws and revoke the laws which are outdated, unjust or restrict the freedom of people, ANI has reported. 2:50pm: MP CM Kamal Nath has said that I don't support the decision to remove security from RSS office in Bhopal. Madhya Pradesh CM Kamal Nath: We can have ideological differences with RSS but I don't support the decision to remove security from outside their office in Bhopal, hence have directed officials to continue to deploy security at RSS office https://t.co/gVUdtVFHdV - ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 2:40pm: Congress promises to bring every Fortune 500 company to set up business in India. 2:30pm: Congress promises separate department to help startups and a simple GST format. 2:20pm: BSP Chief Mayawati in Bhubaneswar: "The way PM Modi's government implemented GST and demonetisation in haste, that affected small businesses. That also led to increase in unemployment. Congress was involved in Bofors and now BJP govt is involved in Rafale." 2:10pm: Rahul Gandhi promises NYAY scheme, jobs, farmer welfare, universal healthcare and quality education for all. Read the full story here. 1:45pm: Congress manifesto - healthcare: "Congress promises to enact the Right to Healthcare Act that will guarantee to every citizen the right to healthcare services, including free diagnostics, out-patient care, medicines and hospitalisation through a network of public hospitals and enlisted private hospitals. We will ensure that government expenditure on healthcare and education will be doubled to 3 per cent of GDP and 6 per cent of GDP respectively by 2023-24." 1:40pm: The Congress manifesto mentions that the party will "Omit Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (that defines the offence of 'sedition') that has been misused and, in any event, has become redundant because of subsequent laws". 1:30pm: Congress manifesto - women reservation: "Congress will pass the Constitution (Amendment) Bill to provide for reservation of 33 per cent of seats in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha and in the Rajya Sabha. We will amend the Service Rules to reserve for women 33 per cent of appointments to posts in the Central Government." 1:25pm: Congress manifesto - economy: "To ensure that no Indian is left behind, Congress will provide a Minimum Income Support Programme (MISP) or Nyuntam Aay Yojana(NYAY) under which Rs 72,000 a year will be transferred to the poorest 20 per cent families in India. We will provide special respite to farmers and farm workers, not just through "Karz Maafi" or a loan waiver but by setting farmers on the path to "Karz Mukti", or Freedom from Indebtedness." 1:20pm: Speaking on why he is contesting from Kerala's Wayanad, Rahul Gandhi said, "They feel that they are not being included in the decisions of this country. So I wanted to send a message to south India that we are with you and we are standing with you. That is why I am standing from Kerala." 1:15pm: Congress manifesto - jobs: "Our pledge is jobs, jobs, jobs. Congress will fill all 4 lakh Central Government and institutional vacancies before March 2020, create an estimated 10 lakh seva mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local body, launch a 'Water Bodies Restoration Mission' and 'Wasteland Regeneration Mission' to create 1 crore jobs, exempt new businesses from applicable laws and regulations (except Minimum Wages Act and tax laws) for a period of 3 years, encourage State Governments to fill their vacancies, reward businesses for job creation, provide businesses with fiscal incentives for employing more women, and require businesses with over 100 employees to start an apprenticeship programme." 1:10pm: "The last 5 years have been disastrous for the people of India. The youth have lost jobs. Farmers have lost hope. Traders have lost business. Micro, small and medium enterprises have lost their confidence. Women have lost the sense of security. Deprived communities have lost their traditional rights. Institutions have lost independence," the manifesto reads. 1:07pm: "You will ask me but why don't you ask PM Modi why won't he address the media? Why don't you ask why won't he answer the questions of the public?" says Rahul Gandhi to a reporter. 1:04pm: Commenting on how BJP has been saying that implementing NYAY scheme won't be possible, Rahul Gandhi said, "It might be impossible for BJP. They said the same thing about MNREGA but it helped people of the country. It is impossible for BJP but it is possible for Congress and we will do it." 1:00pm: "Believe in me, I don't lie. I won't promise Rs 15 lakh but I will promise Rs 72,000," says PM Modi. 12:55pm: "Party promises saral, simple tax," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:53pm: "We will also work to bring the country together. The BJP government has only worked to disrupt peace in the country, you can see for yourself in J&K. We will also work on the national security," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:51pm: "Then there is education and healthcare. Six percent of GDP will be reserved for education. We want everyone to have the best healthcare there is," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:50pm: "If farmers cannot replay their loans then we want to make it a civil offence and not a criminal one like it is today," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:48pm: "For farmers, there should be a separate farmers budget, like we had for railways. Everything should be clear and transparent," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:46pm: "Then there are the ideas of employment and farmers. There are no jobs in the country. I told the committtee that if we can't give 2 crore jobs then tell me the truth, we will tell the citizens the truth. Truth is 22 lakh vacant government jobs," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:44pm: "There are five big ideas and themes in the manifesto. The first is NYAY sceme," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:40pm: "This manifesto is a massive step for the Congress party. The committee has done a very good job and I thank them for it," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:32pm: "We will release a forward-looking document that sums up the aspirations of the people of India," says former PM Manmohan Singh. 12:30pm: "The manifesto keeps in mind two things - wealth and welfare. We will bring wealth and guarantee welfare," says P Chidambaram. 12: 25pm: "Contents of the manifesto in my view is the millions of voices we heard in the process," says former Finance Minister P Chidambaram. Chidambaram is also the President of the manifesto committee. 12:15pm: Congress leaders arrive at the manifesto release event in Delhi. 12:13pm: We identified 8 crore fake people who were availing subsidies and looting public money: PM Modi in Kalahandi. 12:09pm: "Parties like Congress and BJD have conspired to keep the poor poor. They have betrayed them. People have been forced to migrate to other states for livelihood," said PM Modi in Kalahandi. 12:04pm: More than 400 Eklavaya model schools have been opened for the children of tribal communities: PM Modi in Kalahandi. 12:00pm: "If BJP had formed govt here, the work in Odisha would've been done much faster, better and at a bigger scale. Despite no cooperation from the state govt, we did our best to bring about the change in your lives," said PM Modi in Kalahandi. 11:57am: Congress ally Jaydeep Kawade said, "Smriti Irani sits next to Nitin Gadkari in the Parliament and says that they will change the Constitution. Let me tell you something about her. I have heard that those women who have bigger bindi on their foreheads, change their husbands quite frequently." 11:55am: In the last five years, 8 lakh poor families have been given houses in Odisha. More than 24 lakh free electricity connections have been given. After 70 years of independence, for the first time electricity was provided to 3,000 villages in India: PM Modi in Kalahandi. 11:50am: "Without taking a single leave in last five years, I have worked diligently to bring about transformation in the country. It was possible because people supported me. The credit for the transformation in the country goes to the people of the country," said PM Modi in Kalahandi. 11:45am: PM Modi addresses public meeting at Odisha's Kalahandi. 11:15am: Congress has released a list of 9 candidates for Lok Sabha Elections 2019 - 1 from Gujarat, 2 from Maharashtra and 6 from Rajasthan. 6 pic.twitter.com/PbZh5ZA8wU Sachin Pilot (@SachinPilot) April 2, 2019 11:05am: The district election officer of Mumbai has issued a notice to Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut for alleged violation of the model code of conduct over his comments against CPI candidate Kanhaiya Kumar. Raut, who is the editor of Sena mouthpiece 'Saamana', said in the publication on Sunday that Kumar should be defeated in the elections even if it means the BJP has to "tamper with EVMs". 11:00am: "When we will come to power, we will initiate an inquiry into Rafale deal on the first day and we have included this in the manifesto," said Bhalchandra Mungekar, member of Congress' manifesto committee. 10:50am: Supreme Court declines urgent hearing of Patidar leader Hardik Patel's plea seeking a suspension of his conviction in a 2015 case relating to rioting, so that he can contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. "The order was passed in August 2018. What is the urgency now?" the bench said while refusing to accord urgent hearing on the petition. Patel, 25, had started preparations to contest from Jamnagar on a Congress ticket after joining the party on March 12 and the last date for filing of nominations is April 4. 10:40am: Former Navy Chief Admiral L Ramdas said he would approach the Election Commission against UP CM Yogi Adityanath's comment on Indian Army. The CM called the Indian Army 'Modi ji ka sena'. "The armed forces do not belong to any one individual, they serve the country. Till the polls get over, the Chief Election Commissioner is the boss. I am going to approach the Election Commission in this regard," Admiral Ramdas said. 10:30am: BSP chief Mayawati said that it was the will of the people while justifying expenses in installations of her statues and of elephants in Uttar Pradesh. 10:15am: BSP MLA Maulana Jameel joined the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Talking to reporters in Muzaffarnagar, Jameel said he left the Mayawati-led outfit as he felt only Congress could defeat the BJP in the coming elections. 10:10am: Arvind Panagariya, former Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog on NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojana): If you are giving Rs 72,000 per annum to 5 crore families then there will be an expense of Rs 3.6 Lakh Crore - this is 13% of the total budget of central govt. No one has given details of how Rs 3.6 Lakh crore will be arranged for the implementation of the scheme. It's more than our defence budget. Fiscal situation is always tight, it's almost impossible to take out 13% of the budget. 10:00am: "My campaigns across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been overwhelming. NDA's solid track record and development agenda has connected with people. Votebank politics and failed promises of the Opposition has repulsed India," tweeted Narendra Modi. 9:45am: Congress on Monday fielded Olympian discus thrower Krishna Poonia from the Jaipur Rural constituency as it released another list of nine candidates for the Lok Sabha polls. She will contest against Union Information and Broadcasting Minister and Olympic medallist Rajyavardhan Rathore, who is the Jaipur Rural MP. Read the full story here: Congress fields Krishna Poonia against Rajyavardhan Rathore from Jaipur Rural 9:38am: In an attempt to urge people to vote in the upcoming elections, Coimbatore-based miniature artist Raja has carved 18 election party symbols in one gram silver and 300 milligram gold. Tamil Nadu: Urging people to vote in upcoming elections, Coimbatore-based miniature artist Raja has carved 18 election party symbols in one gram silver & 300 milligram gold in a miniature EVM, & a compass & a pencil in which a person raises his hands with the black ink-mark. pic.twitter.com/9VRqTsXBFu ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 9:35am: Electoral Officers of West Tripura constituency took part in a one-day technical training on the Commissioning of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPATs) on Monday. Agartala: Electoral Officers of West Tripura constituency took part in a one-day technical training on the Commissioning of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) & Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPATs) yesterday. #LokSabhaElections2019 pic.twitter.com/3ITZ8tFVBo ANI (@ANI) April 1, 2019 9:30am: In a press statement, Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal said that the PM Modi's comments on Rahul Gandhi's nomination from Wayanad are a "disgrance to the high office of Prime Minister". "Without understanding the cultural legacy and demography of Wayanad, the PM was making a communal and diviisive statement," Venugopal said. Airbus chief executive Tom Enders stands to receive a retirement package worth nearly 37 million euros ($41 million), an investor advisory firm said The chief executive of European aerospace giant Airbus stands to receive a 37 million euro ($41 million) severance package when he steps down next week, according to calculations by an investor advisory firm released Tuesday. The company acknowledged the "soundness" of the calculations made by Proxinvest, which were based on financial filings under German CEO Tom Enders. Enders, 60, will step down at Airbus's annual shareholder meeting in Amsterdam, where the conglomerate is based. Shareholder advocates note that means Enders's package will not be subject to a shareholder vote, as would be standard under French corporate guidelines which were tightened by France's employers' association last year. According to Proxinvest, Enders will receive a total of 26.3 million euros in retirement pay over the next 20 years, along with stock and performance bonuses valued at 7.3 million. He will also benefit from a one-year noncompete clause worth 3.2 million. "That's a pretty costly noncompete clause, 12 months goes by fast," Proxinvest's director Loic Dessaint told AFP. "If he wants to advise another company in a year and a half, he has the right," he said. In total Enders's package would be worth 36.8 million euros. The amount is likely to raise eyebrows in France, not least because the French government owns an 11 percent stake in the aircraft group, along with Germany's 11 percent and Spain's 4.2 percent. Media reports claim that Enders announced his resignation after failing to win board backing for a new term. Although Airbus posted a 30 percent surge in net profit last year to just over three billion euros, it has recently been confronted with a series of setbacks. In December, the French newspaper Le Monde said US authorities were investigating the firm for suspected bribery and corruption, exposing it to billions of dollars in potential fines. Last year Airbus paid 81 million euros to settle a German inquiry into the suspected kickbacks in the sale of Eurofighter jets to Austria. Its offices were also raided last year as part of an inquiry into alleged influence-peddling related to helicopter sales to Kazakhstan. And last year Airbus pulled the plug on its A380 superjumbo after it failed to win over enough clients, forcing it to announce more than 3,000 job cuts. Earlier this year French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire pressured the board of Renault, in which France owns a 15 percent stake, to curb the severance pay for CEO Carlos Ghosn. Ghosn, who awaits a Japanese trial on charges of under-reporting millions of dollars in pay as head of Renault's partner Nissan, was poised to receive tens of millions of euros upon his retirement. But Renault's board later vowed to block the bulk of the package, including millions of stock options, to avoid the prospect of an embarrassing "golden parachute". 2019 AFP A test fire at Purdue's Zucrow Laboratories, the nation's largest university propulsion laboratory, by Adranos Inc. of a high-performance, solid propellant for long-range missile and space launch systems. Adranos was selected as the winner of the Army's inaugural xTechSearch competition. Credit: Purdue University Adranos Inc., a Purdue University-affiliated company developing a high-performance, solid propellant for long-range missile and space launch systems, has won the Army's inaugural xTechSearch competition, besting more than 350 companies in the months long competition. The award decision was made by senior Army leaders based on what technology they believed could have the biggest impact on the Army's modernization needs. Adranos previously was awarded $125,000 for being selected a finalist in the competition, which it used to perform a live flight demonstration of its novel rocket propellant called ALITEC. A video of the flight demonstration is available here. Adranos founders Brandon Terry, who received his doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue, and Chris Stoker, an Indiana University JD/MBA alumnus, will use the $200,000 award funding to enable company growth and continued ALITEC development. The technology is a high-performance solid rocket propellant that has more thrust and is less corrosive than traditional solid propellants. "Brandon and I have always believed in our technology, but to have senior Army leaders recognize ALITEC's potential impact is a great honor for us. We are highly motivated to take the funding from this competition and advance our rocket fuel to the next level," Stoker said. "In this year when Purdue is celebrating its 150th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of Purdue alumnus Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, we're excited to be working on another potentially giant leap when it comes to aeronautics." Adranos's flight demonstrations confirmed that ALITEC could substantially increase the range of ballistic missiles over traditional solid propellants. The technology aligned with the Army's Long Range Precision Fire modernization priority, which is focused on restoring the U.S. Army's dominance in range, munitions, and target acquisition. ALITEC is processed in the same way traditional propellants, meaning that it can be used in any of the current or future missile platforms employed by the Department of Defense. "We mix it the same way. We cast it the same way. We cure it the same way. The only difference is we're replacing one metal powder with another metal powder in the processing," Terry said. The propellant could be used by the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA and other Department of Defense agencies, as well as U.S.-allied nations. The Expeditionary Technology Search, shortened to xTechSearch, called on companies to demonstrate technologies that can help the Army meet its modernization challenges. The goal is to seek nontraditional innovators who can work with the Army, including through cooperative research opportunities with Army scientists, as it modernizes the force. From robotics and night-vision to radar, machine guns and duct tape, innovation has driven the very nature of how the Army fights, said Jeffrey White, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology. "Innovation reforms, both large and small, have improved the lives of our soldiers," White said. "And continued innovation is absolutely critical for force modernization." Adranos, which is named after the Greek god of fire, has previously received nearly $1 million of funding for ALITEC development. Stoker said $600,000 in funding came from Archibald Cox Jr., chairman of Sextant Group Inc., a private investment firm. Cox is the former chairman of Barclays of America and former CEO of Morgan Stanley International and various other companies. He is now on the Adranos Board of Directors. The remaining funds came from other state and federal programs. The company received startup assistance from the Purdue Foundry, an entrepreneurial accelerator in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship. "We've worked with nearly 250 startups, and Chris and Brandon are 'rocket' stars with their expertise in the technology and in the development of their entrepreneurial skills," said Greg Deason, senior vice president of entrepreneurship and place making. "Even more importantly, their innovation will serve the U.S. Army in advancing defense technologies. Very proud of these guys." Explore further New technologies could solve rocket challenges 800 years in the making Credit: NASA Tropical Cyclone Idai barreled down on Mozambique on March 14, 2019leaving a path of destruction in its wake and triggering devastating floods. NASA's Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team combined images from several Earth-observing satellites to create flood proxy maps that show the progression of the post-cyclone flooding from March 18, 2019, through March 23, 2019. The spread of flooding is evident in the blue pixels that increase through the several-day period. Although the data may be less reliable over urban and vegetated areas, these flood proxy maps can be used as guidance by first responders, aid providers and others to identify the most impacted areas. The maps were derived from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from the ICEYE-X2 (March 18), Sentinel-1(March 19-20), and ALOS-2 (March 23) satellites operated by Finnish satellite manufacturer ICEYE, the European Space Agency (ESA), and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) respectively. The images were analyzed and compiled by NASA's ARIA team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the work was funded through NASA's Disasters Program. Explore further Image: Updated NASA damage map of Camp Fire from space More information: More information on ARIA and NASA's Disasters Program is available at the following links: More information on ARIA and NASA's Disasters Program is available at the following links: aria.jpl.nasa.gov/ disasters.nasa.gov/ Credit: CC0 Public Domain Scientists at the Sensitive Instrument Facility of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory achieved real-time atom rearrangement monitoring using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy during the synthesis of intermetallic nanoparticles (iNPs). In collaboration with Wenyu Huang, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State University and a scientist at Ames Laboratory, they examined nanoparticles made of a platinum-tin alloy. These unique iNPs have applications in energy-efficient fuel conversion and biofuel production, and are one focus of Huang's research group. "In the formation of these materials, there was a lot of information missing in the middle that is useful to us for optimal catalytic properties tuning" said Huang. By tracking the movement of metal atoms of platinum and tin during formation of iNPs using advanced microscopy at high temperature, intermediate phases were discovered with their own unique set of catalytic properties. "Conventional material synthesis focuses on the beginning and the end of a reaction, without much understanding of the pathway. Atomic-level observation of the alloying process led to the discovery of the reaction route," said Lin Zhou, a scientist in Ames Laboratory's Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering. "Once we knew intermediate states in between, we could control the reaction to 'stop' at that point. That opens up a new way to predict and control our discovery of new materials." The research is further discussed in the paper, "Toward Phase and Catalysis Control: Tracking the Formation of Intermetallic Nanoparticles at Atomic Scale." Credit: Ames Laboratory Explore further Scientists develop more efficient catalytic material for fuel cell applications More information: Tao Ma et al. Toward Phase and Catalysis Control: Tracking the Formation of Intermetallic Nanoparticles at Atomic Scale, Chem (2019). Journal information: Chem Tao Ma et al. Toward Phase and Catalysis Control: Tracking the Formation of Intermetallic Nanoparticles at Atomic Scale,(2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2019.02.026 Telenomus remus. Credit: CABI A group of scientists has confirmed the first report of an egg parasitoid Telenomus remus in Africa, which could prove an important biological weapon in the fight against the devastating fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) that threatens the food security of more than 200 million people. Dr. Marc Kenis, head of risk analysis and invasion ecology at the CABI Centre in Switzerland, led an international team of researchers from seven countries, who suggest Telenomus remus provides a "great opportunity for the rapid deployment of a biological control agent" for fall armyworm in Africa. The scientists, who confirmed the presence of Telenomus remus in Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Niger and South Africa using DNA analysis and morphological observations conducted at CABI's Egham laboratories and the Natural History Museum London, say the species could be a vital tool within an integrated pest management strategy for fall armyworm, which, as part of preliminary estimates in 12 of Africa's maize-producing countries, has the ability to cause yield losses of up to 20.6 million tonnes per annum. The team reports in a new paper published in Insects that surveys should now be carried out throughout Africa to assess the present distribution and impact of Telenomus remus on the continent. They go on to suggest that augmentative biological control options using the parasitoid should be considered, and call for classical biological control focusing on the importation of larval parasitoids from the Americas. Dr. Kenis said, "The frequent application of broad-spectrum insecticides is not only unsustainable in the long run, but also increases production costs, has biodiversity and environmental impacts, and poses health risks to the growers and consumers. Biological controls can offer an economically and environmentally safer alternative to synthetic insecticides that are currently being used for management of the fall armyworm. "Consequently, various biological control options are presently being considered, including the introduction of Telenomus remus, the main egg parasitoid of the fall armyworm in the Americas, where it is also used in augmentative biological control programmes. "It is important to discourage the use of highly hazardous synthetic pesticides, and to develop, promote and deploy proven, sustainable IPM technologies against fall armyworm." The scientists state that they are not aware of how and when Telenomus remus arrived in Africa, but are confident that it arrived before the fall armyworm as a specimen was collected in Kenya in 1988. They argue that Telenomus remus could have remained unnoticed on other hosts for a long time because the adults are "extremely small and difficult to distinguish and identify on a morphological basis." Dr. Kenis added, "In Latin America, field releases of Telenomus remus in maize can result in 80 to 100 percent parasitism, providing full control of fall armyworm." "The main challenge for a wider utilisation of Telenomus remus is to provide a product that is financially affordable for African farmers. Mass production on its natural hosts is costly but rearing systems on factitious hosts can be developed." Explore further Crop-destroying Armyworm caterpillar detected in Asia More information: Marc Kenis et al, Telenomus Remus, a Candidate Parasitoid for the Biological Control of Spodoptera Frugiperda in Africa, is already Present on the Continent, Insects (2019). Marc Kenis et al, Telenomus Remus, a Candidate Parasitoid for the Biological Control of Spodoptera Frugiperda in Africa, is already Present on the Continent,(2019). DOI: 10.3390/insects10040092 Provided by CABI A 19th-century archaeological abalone fishing site on the Northern Channel Islands. Credit: 2015 Hannah Haas One critically endangered species of smooth-shelled abalone is making a comeback in certain parts of its range along the California coast. To better understand the extent of black abalone recovery, a collaborative team led by scientists at the California Academy of Sciences, San Diego State University, University of Oregon, and Channel Islands National Park is turning to archeological sites on the Channel Islands. Their findings, published today in Ecology and Evolution, suggest that while the recent ecological rebound is encouraging, there's still work to do before the black abalone should be considered fully recovered. "Our goal is to provide a deep historical lens for understanding black abalone across 10,000 years of human fishing," says Dr. Todd Braje, Academy Curator of Anthropology. "Documenting abalone populations across millennia helps resource managers put shorter-term decadal changes in context. We hope these data will serve as a new benchmark for setting management goals." Black abalone play a critical role in the kelp ecosystem along the California coast. The marine snails are an important food source for key predators like the endangered sea otter. Historically, coastal Native Americans relied on abalone for over 10,000 yearsthe shellfish later became one of California's first commercial fisheries. "Management goals are often set using modern data from fisheries already on the verge of collapse," says lead author Hannah Haas, a former Master's student at San Diego State University. "If we want to restore kelp ecosystems, we first have to understand what a healthy system actually looks like, and archeological data can help paint that picture." The study team conducts a shoreline survey of prehistoric Chumash sites, which often contain discarded abalone shell. Credit: 2015 Todd Braje To better understand the characteristics of a flourishing abalone population in a historically healthy ecosystem, the study team turned to the archeological record left behind along the rocky shorelines of the Channel Islands. San Miguel Island, the westernmost island in the archipelago, hosts archeological sites spanning the last 10,000 years where the Chumash and their ancestors once deposited abalone shells by the thousands into trash piles known as shell middens. The team recovered nearly 2,000 whole abalone shells from 26 shell middens and measured shell size. They then compared deep historical shell size to modern measurements of live abalone collected by Channel Island National Park biologists during recent ecological monitoring. Shell size indicates the ratio of juveniles to adults and the population structure through time, which can help scientists compare and contrast overall population health between deep historical and modern eras. While there has been an encouraging rebound of black abalone in recent decades, current populations still pale in comparison to historical levels. Several thousand years ago, the distribution of juvenile to adult-sized abalone was more akin to what ecologists recognize as a healthy population. This was probably maintained by a delicate balance between competitors, predators, and prey that may have actually increased the productivity of black abalone over the long term. "We hope that our long-term analyses over the 10,000-year history of black abalone fishing in Southern California may help resource managers determine whether current abalone populations are healthy," says Haas. Millions of smooth-shelled abalone once clung to California's rocky coastline until a steep decline in the 1990s, driven by overfishing, warming waters, and a devastating infection known as withering foot syndrome. California closed commercial and recreational black abalone fisheries in 1993 and listed the species as endangered in 2009. "A variety of perspectives and data are key to understanding how to manage toward ecological balance rather than an era defined by commercial fishing, sea otter extirpation, and ecosystem dysfunction," says Braje. "We're trying to put together a diverse group of scholarsarcheologists, biologists, and resource managersto combine data insights and all work toward the same goal of abalone recovery and restoring healthy California kelp forest ecosystems." Explore further Study of mollusk epidemic could help save endangered sea snail Suzanne Grant smiles at the towering tulip tree while she can. "Just the other day I observed five eagles flying over it," the music teacher says on a balmy Tuesday of the tree rooted less than 50 yards from her Queen Anne home and three blocks from David Rodgers Park. Nearly 90 feet tall, with a diameter of 44 inches that classifies it as "exceptional" by city code, the deciduous tree has served the neighborhood as a contemplative counterbalance to the ever-devouring urbanism of Seattle. Grant has spent the last year trying to make sure the natural landmark isn't also consumed as new houses go up. More than 80 years old, it is set for a developer's saw this summer unless a city hearing examiner sides with her and dozens of neighbors attempting to preserve their local tree canopy. This neighborhood conundrum highlights a larger one playing out across the city and its swiftly shifting topography: Can a swelling population co-exist alongside keeping the Emerald City green? As the city referees about a dozen such battles a year, according to the Department of Construction & Inspections, that question has gotten more pointed year after year since 2009, the last time the city updated its tree ordinance. Between mayoral decrees, nonbinding resolutions and stalled legislation, the ensuing decade has brought plenty of faded hopes for Seattle tree advocates seeking new mandated protections for urban greenery. The city's most recent effort at tree-protection reform, Trees for All, spearheaded by departing City Councilmember Rob Johnson, was drafted but never introduced to the full council after tree advocates complained it needed more protection for exceptional trees. "Putting in new buildings and protecting trees is incompatible," said arborist Michael Oxman, about his frustration with the lack of an updated ordinance. Oxman, who is also a board member of the Seattle Green Spaces Coalition, says Seattle's current ordinance is laxly enforced and allows developers too many loopholes to avoid preserving exceptional trees. In his more than 40 years as an arborist, Oxman says, he has been aware of measures developers have taken to get around saving a tree: mis-measuring a tree's diameter, failing to note the presence of seven other trees with contiguous canopy on a property (making all exceptional), and arbitrarily declaring a tree "hazardous" even though it poses no risk. "There's a number of tree advocates who want stronger protections and I want to work for that, but it's likely they won't get everything they want," said Councilmember Mike O'Brien, about the balancing act between varied interests. As classified by city code, a tree is designated exceptional by virtue of its size, unique historical, ecological or aesthetic value that constitutes an important community resource. The city's Department of Planning and Development lists diameter measurements that a particular tree species must meet to qualify for the designation. For residential real estate, city code strictly states that an exceptional tree must be preserved unless deemed hazardous to the surrounding community. However, the code grants developers more flexibility in removing such a tree if it prevents them from maximizing a lot's "development potential" meaning it limits how much of a property can be built on. That's the crux of the argument between Suzanne Grant's group of Queen Anne neighbors and developer Alex Mason, of MGT builders. Mason, who owns the land containing the exceptional tree and the 104-year-old vacant house adjacent to it, plans to replace both with five residential units, three town homes and two row houses, that he classified as "middle-class housing" in a required environmental checklist. Removal of the tree, and subsequent planting of replacement vegetation per city mandate, is necessary for Mason to maximize the lot's development potential or floor area ratio according to a land-use application filed with the city's Department of Constructions & Inspections. Not so, says Grant and other neighbors who have filed appeals, 12 in all, to get the city to halt their beloved tree's removal. "You can't deny a developer their right to make money. But I'd like him to consider other plans," she says. Through a representative, Mason declined comment during the appeal process. Those plans have primarily been drawn by David Moehring, a Magnolia-based architect who first heard about the fight over the tulip tree via an online city bulletin. He soon volunteered his services to Grant and company, creating five different renderings that would allow Mason his floor area ratio and the tree to live, albeit with fewer parking spaces. "A developer can do what they want with their property, but they can choose creative ways, too, when it comes to preservation," says Moehring. One of Moehring's drawings was presented to Mason and a city representative at a public meeting over removing the tree held at the Queen Anne Community Center last May. But he says little consideration was given to it by the developer or city. Residents at the meeting also took exception with the three-story development's impact on storm water runoff, and the stability of a slope that part of the new development will rest on. Peter Brest, a neighborhood resident who also attended the meeting, says that middle ground between the sides should be easier to find. "We're not anti-development," he says of his neighborhood coalition, "We just want to maintain some character of the neighborhood." He and Grant agree the city is trending toward sacrificing too many of its green spaces for bland "box-like" dwellings. They don't wish to see the city's canopy cover, the percent of a city covered by trees, decrease much from its current 28 percent, joining its West Coast kin, San Francisco (13.7 percent) and Portland (23 percent) as have less than a fourth of its topography shaded in green. That effort received some welcome news last week, as the City Council passed a resolution shepherded by council members Johnson and Mike O'Brien as part of the Mandatory Housing Affordability legislation expressing Seattle's commitment to tree preservation and bumping its aspirational canopy goal to 33 percent. It also committed the city to protecting exceptional trees. "It's really tricky to regulate our way into getting private individuals to be stewards of trees. We really want to cultivate a culture of stewardship and preservation in the Seattle community. So everyone feels a responsibility to do it," says O'Brien, who adds the council plans to introduce new tree-protection legislation this summer. But as Grant awaits a date to have her appeal heard in front of a hearing examiner, she considers the city's pace too cavalier. She says Seattle isn't enforcing its own codes in only permitting developers to remove exceptional trees as a last resort. "I'm just talking for the tree because the tree can't talk for itself," she says. "And I'm going to keep speaking." Explore further San Francisco tree could get landmark status or the ax 2019 The Seattle Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Riding high on the music industry's return to crescendo Worldwide music sales rose by nearly 10 percent in 2018, a fourth consecutive year of growth fuelled by online streaming, according to figures released on Tuesday by an industry body. Revenues reached $19.1 billion last year, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the recorded music industry worldwide, said in its Global Music Report 2019. "We are now much more optimistic," said IFPI chief executive Frances Moore, describing the period prior to recent growth as a "mourn-fest" when "we only had bad years". However, the overall growth of 9.7 percent in sales masks a discrepancy within the industry, with streaming buoyantaccounting for almost half of revenueswhile downloads and physical purchases continued to drop. The streaming sector, which includes subscription fees and advertising income, grew by 34 percent to reach $8.9 billion in 2018. There were 255 million users of paid streaming services at the end of year, according to the report. But paid downloads fell by 21.2 percent and physical sales of music were down by 10.1 percent. Despite the growing presence of paid streaming services, piracy remains a problem with an estimated 120 million online users illegally ripping music from streams each month, Moore said. "They are hacking and downloading the music... at the price of the stream, and very often they are not paying at all," he said. "And whole discographies can be downloaded with bittorrent and other forms," Moore added. Marked regional disparities exist within the positive global growth picture. For a second year running, Latin America saw the largest increase, with total sales up 16.8 percent. In North America, where the transition from physical to digital music formats is well advanced, sales also jumped, by 14 percent last year. However, in Europe sales rose a miniscule 0.1 percent. Meanwhile, the IFPI's annual singles chart saw rising Cuban-American star Camila Cabello, Canadian rapper Drake and Briton Ed Sheeran top of the pile. In the album rankings, the soundtrack of smash hit musical movie "The Greatest Showman", South Korean boyband BTS and US star Lady Gaga were the biggest sellers. Vinyl, an increasingly popular format for audiophiles and nostalgic listeners, also saw sales grow for the 13th consecutive year. It now represents 3.6 percent of the industry's total turnover. 2019 AFP An aerial view of Grey Glacier, part of the Southern Patagonia Ice Field. Researchers obtained their data from the forward tip of the glacier. Credit: T. Sotomayor By using underwater sonar, researchers have found that a glacier jutting into a freshwater lake in southern Chile looks different underwater compared to ocean-bound glaciers in Greenland. Their findings, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, clarify how huge chunks of ice break off freshwater glaciers, and have implications for the safety of humans in the vicinity of these huge bodies of ice. Until recently, it has been very difficult to determine the underwater shape of glaciers because getting too close can be dangerous. Researchers are now using 'side-scanning sonars' for this purpose. These torpedo-shaped devices are towed underwater by a boat, emitting pulses of sound. They are able to map the underwater geography based on the strength of the returning echo. Although some research has been done on glaciers extending from land into the ocean, such as in Greenland, less has been done for glaciers extending into freshwater lakes. Earth scientist Shin Sugiyama of Hokkaido University and colleagues in Chile used a side-scanning sonar to study the underwater structure of Grey Glacier, a slowly moving ice mass in the Southern Patagonia Ice Field that extends with three finger-like appendages into the freshwater lake Lago Grey. They focused their attention on the eastern-most appendage and found it forms an underwater terrace extending about 100 meters beyond what's visible above water. The terrace appears to be tens of meters deep beneath the lake's surface. Pictures of a unique event in 2016 confirmed the sonar data. Ice broke off from the eastern appendage of Grey Glacier, and part of the submerged terrace was lifted above the water's surface, revealing its shape. After breaking off from the main glacier mass, a previously submerged section of the ice was revealed, allowing researchers a unique opportunity to see the geometry of the underwater ice directly. These photos were provided to researchers by local tourist guide Tadeo Sotomayor, who witnessed the event. Credit: S. Sugiyama, et al., Underwater Ice Terrace Observed at the Front of Glaciar Grey, a Freshwater Calving Glacier in Patagonia, Geophysical Research Letters, February 12, 2019 This terrace structure is quite different from glaciers extending into ocean water in Greenland. Those glaciers tend to develop rough, submerged ice faces with large cavities. The cavities are formed by changing water temperatures caused by melted ice water upwelling from the glaciers' bottoms. The freshwater glacier appears to have a different dynamic. Temperature and turbidity data suggest that slightly warmer water near the lake's surface melts the subsurface ice, forming the terrace-like tongue. The buoyancy of the submerged ice affects the stability of the above-water portion of the glacier. This can lead to huge chunks of ice falling off it and part of the underwater structure suddenly jutting above the surface. "If human activities happen in these glacial lakes, care should be taken to prevent accidents caused by the sudden emergence of underwater ice," says Sugiyama. "In the future, we plan to use the side-scanning sonar at other glaciers in Patagonia, Greenland and Antarctica. We are also willing to replace the instrument with a multi-beam sonar, which is able to capture a larger area of underwater ice from a longer distance." Explore further NASA's Greenland mission still surprises in year four More information: Shin Sugiyama et al. Underwater Ice Terrace Observed at the Front of Glacier Grey, a Freshwater Calving Glacier in Patagonia, Geophysical Research Letters (2019). Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters Shin Sugiyama et al. Underwater Ice Terrace Observed at the Front of Glacier Grey, a Freshwater Calving Glacier in Patagonia,(2019). DOI: 10.1029/2018GL081441 In what has come as a big relief to power, shipping, sugar and other companies, the Supreme Court (SC) Tuesday struck down a February 12, 2018 circular of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on defaulting firms, declaring it unconstitutional and ultra vires (acting or done beyond one's legal power or authority.) "We found RBI's February 12 circular to be ultra vires," the apex court ruled. The RBI circular mandated banks to take the defaulting companies to insolvency. The two-judge bench of Justice Rohintob Fali Nariman and Justice Vineet Saran pronounced the judgement. More than 75 companies are facing insolvency proceedings owing to payment defaults. Also Read: RBI says no dilution in its stand circular on stressed assets recognition, resolution Essar Power, GMR Energy, KSK Energy, Rattan India Power, Association of Power Producers (APP) and Independent Power Producers Association of India (IPPAI) moved Supreme Court in August last year to challenge the constitutional validity of the RBI circular. The SC had stayed the circular in September last year which directed the banks to report any loan account of over Rs 2,000 crore under the Insovency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) if it was not resolved within in 180 days of default. The asset would be taken to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to initiate insolvency proceedings against the defaulting companies. Also Read: RBI asks banks to reveal bad loans, tweaks NPA disclosure norms However, the circular did not discern between the companies which questioned poor management and the ones which challenged Non Performing Assets (NPAs) owing to external aspects and factors out of their control. The circular also pressed a one-day default rule meaning the banks would have to announce a company as a defaulter and a loan account as stressed even if it missed out on the repayment schedule by a day. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had in February 2019 refused to dilute the February 12 circular and said that there would be no changes to it. "It is reiterated that the RBI maintains its stand on all aspects of the framework as has been consistently articulated in its communications, including the clarification given during the post-monetary policy press conference on Feb. 7, 2019," the central bank said in a statement. Also Read: Reserve Bank to inject USD 5 billion more liquidity into banking system Shares of power sector rose on Tuesday after Supreme Court struck down RBI's February 12, 2018 circular on bankruptcy proceedings, calling it 'unconstitutional'. At 12:30 pm, Power Finance Corporation was quoting at Rs. 122.30 almost 2.26 per cent up. Shares of Rattan India Power lead the power sector and rallied 18 per cent up to Rs. 3.20, with Ratan Infra at 13 per cent jump, KSK Energy rose up to 4 per cent at Rs. 0.91 and Tata Power up 1.08 per cent at Rs. 75 intra-day. At 12:05 pm IST, other electric utilities industry stocks were also green such as Adani Power quoting 3.19 per cent up at Rs. 50.10, NTPC at Rs. 135.55 with 0.41 per cent increase, Power Grid at 1.64 per cent increase to Rs. 198.80 and JSW Energy shares gained 2.99 per cent at Rs. 7.90. The RBI, through this February 12 circular last year, had directed the banks to declare a borrowing company a defaulter if a resolution plan was not arrived at within a period of 180 days. This resolution plan was to be formulated by all the lenders of the company. This impacts the affected industries as they would be dragged to National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code by the Banks if a resolution plan was not formulated within 180 days. Power companies had challenged the circular in the Supreme Court saying they could not be treated in the manner similar to other sectors since they were heavily regulated and faces stress due to unavoidable factors such as non-availability of fuel or cancellation of coal blocks. (Edited by Rupa Burman Roy) Also Read: Cyient share price falls nearly 12% on weak Q4 revenue forecast Also Read: Godrej Properties share price rises over 9% on record sales performance in Q4 Google's India and South East Asia President Rajan Anandan has put in his papers after an eight-year stint at the American tech giant. Anandan, also an investor in multiple startups, is slated to join venture fund Sequoia Capital. He will work with Google till the end of this month. Vikas Agnihotri will take on the interim responsibility. He is currently serving as Google's Country Director for Sales. "We are grateful to Rajan for his huge contribution to Google over the past eight years. His entrepreneurial zeal and leadership has helped grow the overall internet ecosystem in India and Southeast Asia," Google President Asia Pacific Scott Beaumont said in an emailed statement. Anandan had joined Google from Microsoft India in 2010. Previously, he was also been associated with Dell India and McKinsey & Company. In a tweet, Anandan said: "8 amazing years. 850million internet users across India and SEA. Many billions of revenue and fastest growing region in the world. Incredible team that thinks big and executes superbly. Thank you @GoogleIndia #GoogleSEA. Loved every minute." Some of companies in which Anandan has invested include WebEngage, Instamojo, Capillary Technologies, TravelKhana, and EasyGov. Sequoia Capital Managing Director Shailendra J Singh, in a Linkedin post, said Anandan will join the leadership team at the firm, in addition to the six current managing directors. Anandan will focus on developing 'Surge' programme for startups by acting as an investment advisor and mentor to the founders. Surge aims to engineer rapid early progress for startups, by enabling disproportionate access to capital, talent, network and decades of company-building knowledge. "Rajan's deep understanding of technology, significant operating expertise and track record of growing tech businesses across the region will help Surge founders scale and build the transformational businesses of tomorrow," Singh said. April 2, 2019 in Photo and Video (E) [prMac.com] Vilnius, Lithuania - The Pixelmator Team today announced its latest app, the AI-powered Pixelmator Photo, will be released on April 9th and is now available for pre-order from the App Store with a 20% discount off its launch price. Pixelmator Photo gives photographers all the tools they need to edit photos on iPad - a collection of nondestructive, desktop-class color adjustments, AI that enhances photographs like a pro photographer, full RAW support, a magical Repair tool to remove unwanted objects from photos, a set of gorgeous presets inspired by analog photographic films, and more. "Pixelmator Photo is an unbelievably powerful and incredibly easy to use photo editor for iPad," said Saulius Dailide, one of the founders of the Pixelmator Team. "It brings an extensive collection of tools that experienced photographers know and love but, thanks to its clean and intuitive interface, it makes these powerful tools accessible even to beginner users. And with ML Enhance, the most intelligent and advanced automatic photo enhancement tool in any app, truly anyone can create great-looking shots in seconds." With an extensive collection of powerful, nondestructive color adjustments, Pixelmator Photo brings a desktop photo editing experience to iPad. It includes foundational tools like Brightness, Exposure, and Shadows & Highlights, time-tested photo editing classics, such as Levels and Curves, as well adjustments for adding film-style grain, selectively adjusting colors, correcting white balance, and many others. What's more, the Repair and Crop tools let photographers perfect all the details that go into great-looking shots, like removing blemishes or unwanted objects, as well as adjusting the composition of photos, their perspective, and more. Pixelmator Photo takes full advantage of breakthrough artificial intelligence, using machine learning to power automatic image enhancement and automatic cropping. The ML Enhance feature automatically improves photos like a pro photographer. Using a Core ML-powered algorithm trained on 20 million professional photos, it intelligently enhances exposure, white balance, and every individual color range of an image. ML Crop, also powered by Core ML, crops photos to make them more striking and compositionally eye-catching. Photographers can use ML Crop freely or they can choose the best crop for their selected image proportions by using ML Crop together with aspect ratio presets. The magical Repair tool, enhanced by machine learning, lets users easily remove blemishes, imperfections, and even entire objects from photos. The Repair tool recreates complex backgrounds with ease, so even if you didn't quite get the perfect shot the first time around, you can use image editing magic to make sure the final photo looks its best. With a wide range of color adjustments presets inspired by analog photographic films, Pixelmator Photo lets users apply a specific style or look to a photo with just a tap. Included with the app are collections based on classic photographic films, modern films, as well as presets designed for landscape, urban, and night photography. Adjustment presets in Pixelmator Photo have also been developed to work seamlessly with ML Enhance. When a photo has already been automatically enhanced, the stylistic changes are applied alongside the most important automatic adjustments. This ensures consistently beautiful presets on every photo. Founded in 2007 by two brothers, Saulius Dailide and Aidas Dailide, the Pixelmator Team develops powerful image editing apps for Mac and iOS. The team's apps have been honored with multiple Mac App of the Year awards, an iPad App of the Year award, an Apple Design Award, and many others. Pixelmator for iPad was featured at the Apple Special Event in October 2014. All Material and Software (C) Copyright 2007-2019 Pixelmator. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, and macOS are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks and registered trademarks may be the property of their respective owners. ### Election results: Wisconsin spring general election Wisconsin residents voted Tuesday in a number of contested state and local races, and local referendums. Election results here will be updated continuously Tuesday night through Wednesday after the polls close at 8 p.m. 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 by Jeff Sovern For a variety of reasons, what elite law schools do has an effect on legal education disproportionate to the numbers of such schools. For one reason, most law professors attended an elite law school, and their vision of what a law school should be is informed by their experiences as students. Consequently, if elite law schools offer a consumer law course, future law professors are more likely to see such a course as appropriate for their law school to offer; if the school they went to didn't offer such a course, law professors have an easier time seeing the subject as one a school can do without. So how do the elite law schools do at offering consumer law classes? According to our survey, only eight of the schools ranked in the top fourteen offer some form of a consumer law course or clinic (Harvard, Chicago, Penn, Virginia, Michigan, Duke, Berkeley, and Georgetown). The top schools not doing so include Yale, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and Northwestern. Put another way, 57% of elite law schools have a consumer law offering of one kind or another, which is close to the percentage for non-elite schools. So when it comes to consumer law, the elite schools as a whole are just ordinary. Those numbers havn't shifted much over time. Michigan didn't offer a course in 2014 and now does. And only two schools, Virginia and Northwestern, didn't offer the course in 2007 and now do. The Congress Manifesto 2019, released on Tuesday, makes several promises to voters such as minimum income guarantee (NYAY), filling vacant government jobs, a separate Kisan Budget, Right To Healthcare, a simpler GST and increased expenditure on education. But promises like these come with a price tag. The higher the cost, the more the financial burden on the economy. So, here's a quick look at some of the poll promises and the money needed to fulfill them: Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) or Minimum Income Guarantee The top on the list is the minimum income of Rs. 72,000 to the 20% poorest families of India. The Congress claims to have consulted top notch economists for the scheme. If implemented, NYAY will have far reaching implications not just for India's poor, but also the country's economy. The Congress proposal will cost Rs 3.60 lakh crore annually. In the first year, the cost of this scheme will be close to 1 per cent of the GDP, which will increase to 1.5 per cent in the second year. 6% of GDP to be spent on education Increasing expenditure on education is a great move. The money will be primarily spent on infrastructure, salaries to teachers. According to Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar, India currently spends 4.6 per cent of GDP on education. This amounts to Rs 8.76 lakh crore annually. Rahul Gandhi's proposal will require an additional Rs 2.66 lakh crore every year to take the total annual spend on education to Rs 11.4 lakh crore. Increasing healthcare expenditure to 3% of GDP Congress plans to increase the healthcare expenditure to 3 per cent of GDP by 2023-24. That is more than twice the present expenditure on healthcare. According to Niti Aayog, the current expenditure on healthcare is 1.3 per cent of GDP; which amounts to Rs 2.47 lakh crore. Congress aims to provide free healthcare to all citizens by improving and expanding government-owned hospital and primary and secondary care infrastructure. The cost of this would be close to Rs 5.71 lakh crore-nearly Rs 3.23 lakh crore higher than the current expense on healthcare. Filling up vacant government positions Congress has promised to fill all 4 lakh central government positions before March 2020, while persuading states to fill another 20 lakh vacancies in the state government. Strangely, while Congress President announced 22 lakh new jobs, the manifesto actually adds up to 34 lakh new jobs, which includes 10 lakh seva mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local bodies. The minimum salary offered to a central government employee after implementation of 7th pay commission is Rs 18,000 which amounts to an annual package of Rs 2.16 lakhs. Filling up all 4 lakh vacant position in the central government as promised in the Congress manifesto would cost a bare minimum of Rs 8,640 crores annually to the exchequer. Filling up another 20 lakh jobs at state level will cost a lot more. Congress manifesto thus puts an additional burden of around Rs 10 lakh crore on the Budget. Given that India's budgeted expenditure for 2019-20 is barely Rs 27.84 lakh crore, the Congress proposals appear profligate. Assume the government of India's earning continues to grow at 12-14 per cent per annum from the Rs 24.57 lakh crore in 2018-19, that would still be just about Rs 45 lakh crore by 2023-24. Of that, by the time the next government ends its 5-year tenure in 2023-24--if it's a Congress government--it will be required to spend around Rs 10 lakh crore annually on its new schemes. That's not going to be possible since the Centre's current expenses towards increments to employees, interest payouts, escalation on infrastructure projects and social schemes is already growing at a rate faster than its income. " " Panthera tigris sondaica) and other endangered species, hoping to use assisted reproductive technologies to make male and female gametes, which could then potentially create a live offspring. Jessica Weiller Scientists have begun banking skin cells from Sumatran tigers () and other endangered species, hoping to use assisted reproductive technologies to make male and female gametes, which could then potentially create a live offspring. It might not surprise you to hear wild animals aren't doing well. At this point, humans and the livestock we grow for food account for 96 percent of mammal biomass on Earth. We take up a lot of space with our bodies, livestock and infrastructure, and that's driving wild animals into extinction. But 21st-century humans are smart, right? Can't we figure out a way to help these animals survive? Or at least save some to their genetic material until such time when we can help make new Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sondaica), of which there are only about 400 alive in the wild today. Advertisement The concept of creating a repository for the genetic material of endangered species has been around for a while projects like the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo and the Frozen Ark in the U.K. have been cryogenically storing genetic material (freezing it in liquid nitrogen at temperatures around -320 F [-196C]) from captive mammals, from the Pacific pocket mouse (Perognathus longimembris pacificus) to the clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), since the 1980s. And cloning endangered species has proven possible in the early 2000s, scientists successfully cloned a couple of them: an African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica) and an Asian ox called a gaur (Bos gaurus). "The problem with cloning is it's highly inefficient the process is tricky, even with animals that are well understood and described, like house cats, dogs, horses and cows," says Franklin West, assistant professor of regenerative medicine in the Regenerative Bioscience Center at the University of Georgia. "So when you start talking about cloning endangered animal species, it gets tough because we just don't have enough information about the animal." " " The tanks at the San Diego Frozen Zoo Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species hold the cells of endangered species conserved in liquid nitrogen. San Diego Zoo Cloning also requires eggs from the animal you're trying to clone, but obtaining gametes (sperm and egg) from a live animal can be extremely difficult especially an endangered one. Sperm can be taken from a zoo animal that has recently died, but eggs present the real challenge. "Most of the time it's too risky to collect eggs because you need to superovulate the animal, and sometimes there's a surgical procedure involved," says West. "With most endangered species, the best you can get is a skin biopsy, but skin is never going to turn into a tiger, so what do you do with that? It's almost of limited value without some sort of functionalization of it." Which is why West and his colleagues have developed the technology to turn almost any cell in the body there are some exceptions, but very few into a pluripotent stem cell, which is a cell that can turn into any other type of cell in the body. West and his colleagues have had success in turning a skin cell into a stem cell and turning pluripotent stem cells into sperm. West says they could potentially even turn a stem cell into an egg as well, which would get around the problem with cloning not having an egg source. If they can use this assisted reproductive technology to make male and female gametes, they could use them together to make a live offspring. The team has begun by banking skin cells from a Sumatran tiger and a clouded leopard at Zoo Atlanta. "We could have done cows or horses, but we chose cats for a number of reasons," says West. "The fact that we know a lot about domestic housecat reproductive physiology makes it reasonable to do larger cats like clouded leopards. Ultimately, what I'd like to do is use domesticated cats as recipient animals theoretically, you could transfer a clouded leopard embryo into a housecat." In addition to creating new animals, this technology might be useful in helping protect vulnerable populations of animals from disease. For instance, the lions in the Serengeti National Park have become vulnerable to canine distemper a disease related to measles in humans which is most commonly found in domesticated dogs. This technology could potentially be used to generate distemper-resistant lions. Because it's almost impossible to vaccinate endangered animals en masse, this might be an option to breed resistant animals that could introduce resistance into natural populations. If you're interested in contributing to this project to turn frozen tiger skin cells into real live tigers, the UGA Regenerative Bioscience Center and Zoo Atlanta are currently collecting donations to help this project move forward. You can donate to their work here. Learn more about animal extinction in "Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law)" by Thom van Dooren. HowStuffWorks picks related titles based on books we think you'll like. Should you choose to buy one, we'll receive a portion of the sale. Now That's Interesting Although generating new individual animals might be helpful in endangered species conservation, habitat loss is what's really driving animals to extinction. If you have a problem with a stock brokerage firm, either as an investor or a financial professional, call Sallah Astarita & Cox, LLC Let's find out if our attorneys, who are former SEC Enforcement attorneys and broker-dealer counsel, can help you. Seeing deeply discouraging and engagingly encouraging prison realities in incarceration nation | Main | Unsurprisingly divided reactions to Supreme Court's latest divided ruling on lethal injection methods This Washington Examiner piece, headlined "Trump announces Second Step Act to help ex-prisoners find work," reviews some highlights from today's celebration of the FIRST STEP Act at the White House today. Here are excerpts: President Trump announced plans Monday for a Second Step Act focused on easing employment barriers for formerly incarcerated people. "We are proving we're a nation that believes in redemption," Trump said at a White House event celebrating people released under the First Step Act, which he signed in December. Trump said the "second step" legislation will feature a $88 million funding request for prisoner social reentry programs. "Today, I'm announcing that the Second Step Act will be focused on successful reentry and reduced unemployment for Americans with past criminal records, and that's what we're starting right away," Trump said.... Some advocates had urged deeper sentencing reforms in a second major criminal justice reform bill. Troy Powell, whose crack cocaine sentence was shortened by the First Step Act, spoke at the event Monday and called for more action to release inmates. "There's more that can be done. I left so many people behind in prison doing 40, 50 years for nothing, I mean absolutely nothing," Powell said. "I think there should be a second step." Trump applauded Powell. "Could I have said it better than that? His statement about so many people? And that's true, so many people are there that really are serving 40 and 50 year sentences for things you wouldn't even believe, for things some people wouldn't even be going to prison for today," he said.... Trump said his administration would also "encourage employers to adopt second chance hiring practices," and gave rare applause to the media for favorable coverage of Alice Johnson, whose drug sentence he shortened last year using his executive clemency powers. "Alice said, 'I also want to thank the media.' I bent over and said, 'Are you sure?' And I do too, I think that's fantastic," Trump said. One speaker at the event, former prison inmate and Georgetown University law professor Shon Hopwood, was introduced by Trump as a current teacher of his daughter Tiffany Trump. "I think you're going to be rewarded in a way you cannot even imagine," Hopwood told Trump. Unsurprisingly divided reactions to Supreme Court's latest divided ruling on lethal injection methods | Main | "Ghastly Signs and Tokens: A Constitutional Challenge to Solitary Confinement" The title of this post is the title of this notable new report written by Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Senior Research Analyst at The Sentencing Project. Here is its executive summary: While the First Step Act and other criminal justice reforms have limited the number of people imprisoned for drug crimes, they have yet to meaningfully reduce excessive penalties for violent crimes. Nearly half of the U.S. prison population is now serving time for a violent offense, including assault and robbery. Although the violent crime rate has plummeted to half of its early-1990s level, the number of people imprisoned for a violent offense grew until 2009, and has since declined by just 3%. This trend stems from increased prison admissions and sentence lengths, despite evidence that excessive penalties are counterproductive. Long sentences incapacitate older people who pose little public safety threat, produce limited deterrent effect since most people do not expect to be caught, and detract from more effective investments in public safety. For those who seek to end mass incarceration, there are signs of hope. In the past two decades, local, state, and federal lawmakers, governors, judges, and practitioners have rejected the death penalty, shortened excessive prison terms for violent convictions, scaled back collateral consequences, narrowed broad definitions of violence, and ended long term solitary confinement. The 15 reforms featured in this report, implemented in over 19 states, represent more effective, fiscally sound, and morally just responses to violence. While exceptions in a punitive era, these reforms serve as models for the future. For example: Rejecting torture in prison In 2017, Colorado Department of Corrections executive director Rick Raemisch restricted solitary confinement to only serious violations in prisons and set a maximum duration of 15 days. Using discretion to reduce extreme sentences Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner seeks to end the citys heavy reliance on life without parole (LWOP) sentences. He has made case-by-case evaluations when making resentencing offers to individuals convicted as juveniles, shown restraint in charging decisions and plea offers in homicide cases, and endorsed legislation to allow people serving LWOP to be evaluated for parole after 15 years of incarceration. Legislators reducing excessive sentences Mississippi legislators reformed the states truth-insentencing requirement for violent crimes in 2014, reducing the proportion of a sentence that individuals with certain violent convictions have to serve before becoming eligible for parole from 85% to 50%. Recognizing the rehabilitative potential of youth and young adults In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that LWOP sentences were unconstitutional for non-homicide crimes committed by juveniles. The Court also later ruled that mandatory LWOP sentences for homicide failed to recognize young peoples diminished culpability and greater prospects for reform. In 2018, California built on this precedent by directing individuals convicted under age 26 to Youth Offender Parole Hearings. Scaling back collateral consequences Floridians voted in 2018 to re-enfranchise people with felony convictions, including those convicted of most violent crimes. The reforms identified in this report demonstrate that it is possible to undo excessive penalties for violent crimes while also promoting public safety. They are the next step of criminal justice reform and offer blueprints for policies that will better enable an end to mass incarceration within our lifetime. Encouraging news and inspiring notes as White House celebrates FIRST STEP Act | Main | "The Next Step: Ending Excessive Punishment for Violent Crimes" April 2, 2019 Unsurprisingly divided reactions to Supreme Court's latest divided ruling on lethal injection methods The Supreme Court yesterday split 5-4 in favor of the state of Missouri in yesterday's execution protocol case, Bucklew v. Precythe, No. 17-8151 (S. Ct. April 1, 2019) (available here, basics here). Capital cases have a way of not only revealing deep splits among the Justices, but also revealing how differently commentators for and against the death penalty view the Court's work. Unsurprisingly, supporters of the death penalty have notable praise for the Court's work in Bucklew (with modest titles for their commentary): In contrast, opponents of the death penalty have notable criticism of the Court's work in Bucklew (with more extreme titles for their commentary): I understand why abolitionists are troubled by Bucklew because it reveals that there are now five Justices who are eager to prevent lower court judges from heavily supervising and persistently tinkering with how state wish to operate their machineries of death. But, practically speaking, it remains to be seen if Bucklew proves to be a big deal. Impressively, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has never found any method of execution unconstitutional, and despite seemingly "big" wins for states in both Baze and Glossip, energized and effective defense counsel have kept litigating hard and kept succeeding in gets lots and lots of scheduled executions halted (Ohio provided the latest example of this on-the-ground reality this year). Though I am always sympathetic to commentary that urges the Supreme Court to give more force to the Eighth Amendment's limit on punishment, I sincerely wish folks so troubled by Bucklew would spend a bit more time focused on all-too-common extreme prison sentences over ever-rarer death sentences and executions. A few weeks ago, as noted in this post, the Supreme Court denied cert in an Eighth Amendment case involving a federal sentence of over 150 years for a first offender lured into a drug deal by government agents. The entire First Circuit issued a remarkable opinion urging the Justices to take up the case, but not a single Justice was even move to say a work about a seemingly toothless Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in an era of mass incarceration. As I noted in my prior post, the legal press and criminal justice commentators have entirely ignored this case, confirming my fears that one needs to be a murderer on death row to have your case garner attention. Sigh. UPDATE: John Stinneford, whose article The Original Meaning of 'Unusual': The Eighth Amendment as a Bar to Cruel Innovation was cited in the Court's opinion, has this lengthy discussion of the ruling at The Volokh Conspiracy under the heading "What Bucklew Doesnt Say." Here is a small snippet: The majority opinion is explicitly originalist in its approach to the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, a rare (if not unprecedented) phenomenon in the modern history of the Court. But in contrast to some prior originalist concurrences or dissents by Justices Scalia and Thomas, the Bucklew Court does not rush to make any comprehensive claims about the original meaning of the Clause. Rather, it skirts around the edges of the Clause's original meaning, deciding only enough about that meaning to demonstrate (to its own satisfaction, anyway) that Missouri's lethal injection protocol is constitutional. In this regard, Bucklew is an admirably modest opinion. April 2, 2019 at 10:51 AM | Permalink Comments Doug - the eighth amendment is originalist now. The justices knew what bucklew was gonna say when denying cert on the stashhouse case. Bucklew is an important case to be up in arms about, not because of the narrow issue presented as much as because of gorsuchs well crafted opinion was tailored to overrule trop v Dulles sub silentio Posted by: Calif appeals lawyer | Apr 2, 2019 12:41:58 PM What does originalism have to say about LWOP for non-violent offenses or acquitted conduct enhancements or sex offender registries in your view? Lengthy prison punishments were relatively unusual in 1789 and punishments based on acquitted conduct and creation of registries entirely unknown. I fear there are not really 5 serious votes for an always originalist and robust 8th Amendment as a check on state power, but if there is I hope they get rid of all modern punishment practices that would look cruel and unusual circa 1789. Just as an originalist turn has proved helpful to defendants in the Sixth Amendment setting, it could be a great improvement for Eighth Amendment jurisprudence if it led to a serious commitment to scrutinizing what legislatures and judges do. I am not holding my breath, but the main point is that only a couple hundred people on death row + the 50 or so folks sentenced to death each year are likely to do worse if the Eighth Amendment takes an originalist turn. Meanwhile many millions imprisoned and on registries and many millions more sentenced each year might have a (slim) chance to do a little better. Posted by: Doug B. | Apr 2, 2019 3:10:51 PM Doug, you're right in your concern. However, until people like you finally accept that until the death penalty is finally taken off the table and abolished, progress on these other issues is unlikely to be effectively addressed. A death penalty sentence IS different. You need to be unequivocal in your support for abolition. Not to do so is just counter-productive to your wishes/aims for other aspects of the justice/sentencing system. Posted by: peter | Apr 2, 2019 3:34:21 PM peter, you are right that a death penalty sentence IS different. Different in that only a very, very, very small percentage of people are subject to it, those people are all ultimately convicted of an aggravated form of murder, they get all sorts of super due process before and after being subject to a death sentence, and they get an extraordinary amount of attention from all sorts of advocates, lawyers and others. I sincerely wish any and everyone facing years of imprisonment benefited from this kind of difference. Meanwhile, we have in recent years seen LOTS of progress on other issues, often aided by originalist jurists and pro-death penalty folks (e.g., Justices Scalia/Thomas in Blakely/Booker, the Right on Crime folks, Prez Trump). Many of the states adopting/pursuing non-capital reforms are death penalty states (see, e.g., Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi), and I have seen little evidence that states that get rid of the death penalty thereafter have a greatly improved CJ reform record (if you can point me to such evidence, peter, I would be grateful). Indeed, in California, it seems there is sometimes an inverse relationship here: voters in California keep voting to retain the DP, but also keep voting to soften other penalties; the New CA Gov imposes a capital moratorium, but then gets tougher on parole for others. I am agnostic regarding the death penalty in part because I have long seen and long feared that abolitionism plays a problematic role in fueling mass incarceration. Abolitionists gave us the modern LWOP sentence and a heck of a lot more NON-VIOLENT people are going to die prison because of the LWOP sentence than will ever be executed for murder in US. That said, abolitionists helped create the Roper/Graham/Miller line of cases, and I would like to get to a day in which all of the energy and litigation and websites devoted the the abolitionist cause might be effectively redirected toward fighting excessive prison terms. So I am not rooting against abolitionist. But I am always going to highlight that those most concerned about the death penalty and those most concerned about mass incarceration and other forms of extreme punitiveness are not always going to, nor should they, look at various constitutional and policy issues in exactly the same way. Posted by: Doug B | Apr 2, 2019 4:38:41 PM Not sure that Bucklew overrules Trop, but it does refine the "evolving sense of decency" in a more originalist vein. To paraphrase where I think the Bucklew majority is, there are two parts to the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause -- both of which implicate the evolving sense of decency in a different way. The unusual part is the easier of the two to see where the evolving sense of decency might be relevant. If there is an overwhelming trend against a practice, what was "usual" might become "unusual." But, under the original understanding of the Eight Amendment, it would be very rare for the Supreme Court to find that a common practice is actually unusual. (Probably a bad sign for those who want to expand Roper, Graham, and Miller.) The cruel part is the focus on Bucklew. And, here, the evolving sense of decency involves a comparison between the challenged punishment and the alternatives. Is there a consensus that the challenged punishment "super adds" unnecessary pain or unnecessarily stigmatize a defendant beyond what is needed to accomplish the legitimate punitive objectives. As Bucklew (and Baze and Glossip) holds, it is only possible to evaluate one punishment (typically an older punishment) in comparison to what would replace it. In short, there is still room for an evolving sense of decency in this originalist world, but the evolving sense of decency is now merely one evidentiary factor rather than the driving end conclusion. Posted by: tmm | Apr 3, 2019 10:40:39 AM Post a comment Cathay Pacific's purchase of rival HK Express was an inevitable plunge into the no-frills market as the premier marque belatedly faces the reality that it can no longer ignore the budget sector, analysts say. Asia's biggest international carrier has historically eschewed the low-cost sector, even as the region's rising middle class has fuelled an unprecedented boom in air travel and demand for cheaper routes. But last week it finally bit the bullet, announcing it was buying HK Express for $600 million from the debt-laden Chinese conglomerate HNA Group. The move allows Cathay to take over the city's only budget carrier and gifts it much needed slots at one of the world's busiest transport hubs -- prompting many to ask why it had taken the airline so long to make such a move. Analysts say Cathay's reluctance to embrace the budget model was a result of its conservative way of thinking, in much the same way Nintendo was dragged kicking and screaming into the mobile gaming market after years of weak earnings. But it is not too late for the airline, they say. "It's more like catching up rather than changing the landscape," Jackson Wong, analyst at Huarong International Securities, told AFP, adding that Cathay realised it had to "face reality" that the budget market was something they needed to embrace. Asia-Pacific is now the world's largest market for low-cost carriers, accounting for nearly 600 million seats in 2018, according to CAPA Centre for Aviation. - Too good an opportunity - And thanks to the region's booming middle classes, seat capacity has quadrupled over the past decade. During that time Cathay resisted moving into the low end of the market, even as their rivals did the opposite -- Singapore Airlines formed Tigerair in 2003 and Qantas followed up with Jetstar Asia. Now Asia's skies are littered with budget carriers: Air Asia, Scoot, Nok Air, IndiGo, Lion Air, VietJet, the list keeps growing. For a while Cathay's intransigence worked, it remained an avowedly premier -- and profitable -- brand. But as the regional budget scene grew, airlines in China and the Middle East began competing on longer haul flights and the more luxury frills Cathay offered. By March 2017 Cathay reported its first annual net loss in eight years and announced a three-year overhaul to cut costs and improve efficiency. Under new chief executive officer Rupert Hogg the move appears to have paid off -- last month the airline announced it had swung back into the black after two years of losses. Brendan Sobie, chief analyst at CAPA, said HK Express was too good an opportunity to pass up once it became clear the troubled HNA Group was looking to sell. "It's in their home market, they have to look at it, and quite frankly they'd be silly not to do it," he told AFP. According to Sobie, structural constraints and limited airport slots made it difficult for Cathay to establish a separate low-cost carrier, which was why it had previously said it would not think about a no-frills carrier until Hong Kong airport's third runway came into operation in 2024. - Losses 'woke them up' - He said the lack of space at home was also a limitation for competitors, making the move int the sector less urgent for Cathay, which had opposed budget airline Jetstar's application to operate in Hong Kong in 2015. But the purchase was not a financial "slam dunk" for Cathay, Sobie warned, given the small margins of budget airlines in the region and the fact that HK Express reported a net loss of $18 million in 2018, according to Cathay. Shukor Yusof, the founder of aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said Cathay's brief foray into the red changed thinking at the company. "The losses Cathay suffered in consecutive years woke them up and they realised if they didnt alter their thinking, theyd be marginalised and become irrelevant, he said. "Then they saw how Singapore Airlines changed its strategy and that strategy worked, he said, adding that Cathay should have moved into the budget sector 10 years ago. He said turning HK Express around was a "big ask". "But if they apply stringent cost cuts and exploit the buoyant Chinese market, profitability is a possibility in two to three years," he said. He predicted HK Express may start to price aggressively and target a select group of travellers, with mostly leisure flyers among them. "I foresee HK Express behaving and exhibiting characteristics similar to Ryanair in Europe," he said, referring to the notoriously no-frills Irish low-cost carrier. Launches mobile app to enhance patients experience JAKARTA,INDONESIA - Media OutReach -2 April 2019 - Columbia Asia Hospital, one of the largest and fastest-growinghealthcare companies in Asia, has outlined key trends impacting the healthcare industryin these times of digital living and convenience. Being a leading healthcareprovider in the region with patients base of over three million across fourmarkets, puts Columbia Asia Hospital in a good position to observe patients'behavior and implement solutions catering to their evolving needs. Dr.Kelvin Loh, Group Chief Executive Officer, Columbia Asia commented about existing healthcare trends,"The key trends observed by us clearly highlight that modern patients aredemanding for personalized, quick and seamless healthcare delivery. This makes dealingwith the healthcare system much more convenient for them, something that hasn'tbeen typical of healthcare delivery systems in the past. Our studies have also shown that technologyadvancements in healthcare have the potential of closing the communication andinformation gap between patients and providers. As a company that is continuouslylooking for better ways to enhance services to our patients, we will try tobring in newer systems and processes that will be in line with demands of thetimes." Key healthcare trends 2019 -- Columbia AsiaHospital : Patients arelooking for the best consultation with efficient services: Patientstoday are expecting a lot in terms of the service that they receive. Theseexpectations range from well-maintained hospitals, helpful doctors, nurses andstaff, shorter waiting time for appointments, quick access to health records etal. The future ofhealthcare lies in efficiency: For primary and secondary care, patientsprefer to rely on neighborhood / small-sized hospitals that provide easieraccess to quality healthcare services. In addition, smaller hospitals provide focused treatmentoptions and shorter in-patient stays enabling them to keep costs low forpatients. Leveraging digital technologies on a smaller scale further permits costeffective delivery of specialist care. Tapping intothe realm of mobile healthcare: More and more healthcare organizations arerelying on patient interface through mobile apps. Apps often feature theability to schedule appointments, access patient's medical history and testresults, send reminders and provide option of cashless payment for acquiredservices. Social mediaspace is the new word-of-mouth. Consumers today have the option of checkingreviews before making most purchase decisions -- hospital choices are alsoincreasingly getting dependent on reviews found in the online space. Otherfactors such as presence on social media platforms and its responsiveness havean influence on patients' hospital preference. Story continues In line with the highlighted trends,Columbia Asia has launched its official mobile app aimed to enhance theirservice offerings to patients. Keeping up with emerging healthcare trends thatare shaping the industry globally further drives the needs for hospitaloperators to continuously make patients' experience at hospitals hassle-freeand less time consuming. The patient-centric application allows for servicessuch as booking and managing of appointments, payment, hospital-related queries,along with retrieving of corporate information and promotions to be moreseamless and efficient. (Payment functionwill be ready in Malaysia and Indonesia soon) "The launch of our official mobile app is yetanother initiative in our digital transformation journey, as more and morepeople, particularly the millennials are opting for healthcare providers thatoffer treatment with added convenience. Aside from better serving the needs ofour patients, the mobile application gives us a cost-effective solution toreduce time in operational manpower," added Dr Loh. During the trial period of the mobile appdeployment, Columbia Asia witnessed encouraging results including 16 percentcut down in out-patient journey time and an overall improved staff efficiency of8 to 9 percent, subsequently adding to increased time for staff-patientengagement. Available on both iOS andAndroid platforms, Columbia Asia is looking at the enhancement of several servicesin the future such as exclusive medical package offerings and more. Pilot programhas also been launched with an app for physicians as part of its efforts toimprove connectivity to the IT platform to aid in better patient engagement. Download Links Apple App Store: http://bit.ly/cah_ios Google Play Store: http://bit.ly/cah_android About Columbia Asia Columbia Asia is an international private healthcare company founded byan American entrepreneur, Mr. Daniel Baty in 1996. From the outset, ColumbiaAsia envisioned to provide quality, affordable healthcare services easilyaccessed by people wherever they live - driven by our vision statement, apassion for making people better. It is owned by an investment fund, InternationalColumbia US, LLC (ICU). In 2016, Mitsui & Co., a Japanese conglomerate withdeep operating experience in Asia joined as a shareholder in ICU. Today, Columbia Asia is one of the largest and fastest growing hospitalgroups in Asia. It currently has 12 hospitals in Malaysia, 11 in India, 2 inVietnam and 3 in Indonesia. With no more than 200 beds per hospital, it leverages modern technologyto provide efficient specialist care and to reduce length of hospital stayswhich results in more cost-effective care. The hospitals of Columbia Asiaprovide a wide array of specialist services such as General Surgery,Pediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Orthopedics, Internal Medicine,Oncology, Cardiology, Neurosurgery, Bariatric surgery and more. These are appropriately supported byancillary services that include an Intensive Care Unit, Neonatal Care Unit,Physiotherapy, Laboratory, Pharmacy and Imaging. At Columbia Asia, strict clinical governance, ethics and excellence aredemanded. (Apr 2): Malaysia-listed oil-services firm Yinson Holdings Bhd has come to the rescue of Ezion Holdings. The loss-making Singapore liftboats operator will be acquired by a unit of Yinson after it struck a deal with Ezion's lenders. On Monday, Yinson Eden Pte Ltd (YEPL) entered into the conditional debt conversion agreement and conditional option agreement with Ezion. YEPL will acquire the benefits and rights of up to US$916 million ($1.24 billion) of Ezions loans for approximately US$200 million. The debt will then be capitalised into 22.5 billion shares valued at 5.5 cents each. Upon completion of the debt conversion, YEPL will hold a minimum 70% stake in Ezions enlarged share capital. YEPL will be granted a waiver from undertaking a mandatory general offer and will have the option to subscribe to 3.4 billion new shares at 6.5 cents each totalling $203.3 million. YEPL intends to retain the listing status of Ezion. Ezion currently owns 66 vessels including 13 liftboats, 18 rigs, five OSVs and 30 tugs and barges. Of these assets, the liftboats are key to Ezion's venture into the offshore windfarm sector. With the debt resizing, analysts say Ezion will have a cleaner balance sheet, with interest savings of US$20 million p.a. Lim Chern Yuan, Yinsons CEO, says the group is optimistic about the turnaround of Ezions business. Lim also says the acquisition of Ezions lifeboats is in line with the groups ambition to venture into the renewable energy sector. However, Maybank KimEng says turning around Ezion will be major coup for Yinson can pull it off. The research house also sees some short-term earnings headwinds for Yinson once the deal is completed while a likely US$400 million goodwill write-down will raise its gearing to 0.9 from 0.5. Beijing has offered to assist the United States in the case of a Chinese-American scholar serving a 10-year prison sentence in Iran, according to his wife, who has been briefed on the situation by US State Department officials. Wang Xiyue, a naturalised US citizen originally from China, is approaching his 1,000th day behind bars in Tehran after a closed-door trial found him guilty in 2017 of attempting to infiltrate Iran at the behest of Princeton University, where he was pursuing a PhD in history. Chinese diplomats in Tehran have met with Swiss officials who represent US interests in Iran at least once and are planning additional conversations about the case in the near future, Wangs wife, Qu Hua, told the South China Morning Post. An official from the State Department, which has been in close contact with Qu throughout her husbands ordeal, told her that the Chinese had stressed their willingness to help, she said. But I dont know exactly how, or what action will be taken towards his freedom, said Qu, 37. The State Department said it could not comment on the case, but a spokesperson said the US government placed the highest priority on the safety and well-being of Americans wrongfully detained overseas. Wang, 38, travelled to Iran in 2016 to conduct archival research into 19th and early 20th century Eurasian history for his doctoral thesis. After he requested access to digital files from a library, none of which were classified or relevant to contemporary politics, according to Qu, he was detained. Months of imprisonment later, including a 20-day stint in solitary confinement, Wang was convicted on charges relating to espionage and sentenced to 10 years in prison. A UN committee found in August 2018 that there was no legal basis for the arrest and detention of Mr Wang, while Washington has repeatedly called his detention unjust and demanded his immediate release. Alongside other family members of US citizens detained abroad, Qu, who is a Chinese citizen living and working in New Jersey, said she has been invited to a meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week in Washington. Story continues If she has the opportunity to speak to Pompeo, Qu said she would express her hopes that the US would work with any country that could help quickly resolve her husbands situation. Iran is one of the 13 countries on Washingtons current do not travel advisory list. For US citizens who do travel to Iran, the State Department recommends that they, among other things, discuss with loved ones a contingency plan for the care and custody of their children and draft a will. Wang, who is believed to be one of at least six Americans detained in Iran, knows about Chinas offer to intervene in his case, said Qu, who has been able to speak with her husband regularly by phone since his transfer from a political to a public prison in 2017. Iran sentences Chinese-American to 10 years for spying He really hopes the Chinese can help, said Qu, who is raising their six-year-old son alone in Wangs absence. He would like to come home. To be freed and to be united with us. Wang is in an underground cell with no natural light that houses 20 to 25 people, Qu said, adding that her husband who has suffered rashes, psoriasis, arthritis in his knees and bouts of the flu had requested medical attention. Swiss diplomats handling his case had communicated those requests to their Chinese counterparts, she said, citing information provided to her by the State Department. A spokeswoman for the Swiss embassy in Tehran declined to discuss the case on Sunday and referred all inquiries to the US State Department. When asked about Beijings involvement in Wangs situation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was not familiar with the situation but that Chinas long-standing position was that the US and Iran should, on a foundation of mutual respect, achieve the proper settlement [of issues] through dialogue. US President Donald Trumps administration has promoted further disengagement with Iran, with whom Washington cut off diplomatic relations in 1980 amid the American hostage crisis. In May 2018, the US withdrew from the multilateral agreement that committed Iran to curbing the development of nuclear technology in return for relaxed economic sanctions. Critics of Washingtons exit from the pact, which also provisioned quarterly meetings where issues such as detention cases could be raised, argued that severing the only channels of communication with Tehran would be to the detriment of Americans held there. Trump warns Iran of consequences over detained Americans Unlike the US, China enjoys a stable relationship with Iran, with both sides agreeing in February to increase cooperation under Beijings Belt and Road Initiative, a global investment strategy aimed at deepening Chinas economic links with countries in Asia, Africa and beyond. But intervention in the case of Wang, who was born in Beijing but relinquished his citizenship with his US naturalisation in 2009, would mark a shift in the Chinese governments position on the case. A core principle of Beijings foreign policy is non-intervention, which it often uses to defend against criticism of its internal affairs, not least in matters concerning individual liberties. Indeed, the only time a Foreign Ministry spokesperson has publicly addressed Wangs case at a regular press briefing in July 2017 was to clarify that the scholar was not a Chinese citizen. Like pulling teeth: China, US far apart on structural changes by Beijing But with negotiators seeking to gain ground in what could be the final stages of talks to end the US-China trade war, an offer to help in the plight of an American citizen, a case in which Washingtons diplomatic efforts seem impotent, could be a valuable gesture of goodwill. Qu emphasised that the matter should not be politicised, but she acknowledged that the coming weeks could be critical for her husbands case given the possibility that the China-US relationship may reach some breakthrough point. Obviously this is not a trade talks issue, this is a humanitarian issue, she said. If the Chinese could help that would be very positive. The raising of a non-trade issue in the current negotiations would not be without precedent. In February, Chinese negotiators reportedly proposed launching parallel talks aimed at resolving the US case against Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Despite repeated assertions from US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer that Huawei was a separate issue, his boss Trump has suggested that Huawei could be a topic of discussion in the trade talks. Lighthizers office would not comment on whether Wangs case has been raised during the talks. Serious concerns over Meng case due to Trumps comments, says her lawyer Juggling her job as a lawyer for a pharmaceutical company and caring for the couples son, Qu has spearheaded an on- and offline campaign to raise awareness about her husbands case, in the US and also in China. She said Wangs plight had prompted an outpouring of support from people in China, although a number of comments to her posts on the social media platform Weibo suggest a sentiment that, as someone who relinquished their Chinese citizenship, Wang is undeserving of Beijings help. [Hes] now a US citizen, why are you coming to Weibo to post [about it]? asked one user. You have to make a vow when you become a US citizen, has he forgotten what he said to the US flag? Its not for the Chinese government to take up the matter, said another. But Qu does not let such comments get to her. Of course you can argue that this is not in Chinas legal jurisdiction, but if China can help in a humanitarian matter for a Chinese family, then its very positive, she said, adding that she would feel very proud of her country if it were able to lend a helping hand when others [have] not been able to solve this. More from South China Morning Post: This article Beijing willing to step in to aid Wang Xiyue, Chinese-American scholar imprisoned in Iran, his wife says first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2019. India should not delay opening of Kartarpur Corridor: Shah Mehmood Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi Monday asked India not to delay the opening of Kartarpur Corridor and settle all differences through bilateral talks. Addressing a press conference along with Punjab Governor Chaudhry Sarwar here at the Governor House, he said despite tensions with India in the wake of Pulwama incident, Pakistan participated in talks on Kartarpur Corridor. Pakistan wants to move forward and improve its relations with India, he said. India should not shy away from Kartarpur Corridor talks scheduled for April 2 (today). Pakistan is more than willing to address all reservations expressed by India, he added. The minister said Pakistan has adopted a principled stance that Kartarpur Corridor should be opened for the Sikh community residing all over the world. Pakistan desires to open more border crossings for pilgrims from India, he added. Qureshi said the new visa policy is part of the governments efforts to attract foreign tourists to the country. People from 50 countries will be provided visa on arrival, while those from 172 countries will have e-visa facility. The government wants to remove barriers and promote tourism, he added. About the FATF sanctions, the minister said the country was placed in the grey list of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) during the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government. However, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government is taking initiatives to avert the country being put in its blacklist, he said. Being in FATFs grey list has caused a loss of $10 billion to the country, while the cost of being included in the blacklist will be even higher, he added. File photo: President Rodrigo Duterte MANILA, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the review of all government contracts particularly the concession agreements on public utilities and foreign loan agreements. The directive is reportedly related to Maynilads concession agreement with the government. According to Presidential Spokesperson and Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo, the President directed the Solicitor General, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Secretary and all legal departments to review, evaluate, scrutinize every government contract [This aims to] determine whether there are onerous provisions in the contract that that will put Filipino people in disadvantage or in violation of the constitution, he said. Panelo added that this will serve as a warning to government officials, private institutions and foreign government to be careful when it comes to entering in any kind of agreement. We can prosecute, look, you know that contact was entered into by government and drafted by lawyers of government. that could be collusion between the lawyers of the government and the lawyers of the private company, we have to prosecute them, he said. Panelo believes the said review could affect all contracts of future investors in the country. Meanwhle, DOJ Secretary Menardo Guevarra said that the first step will be a joint review and renegotiation of contracts. Guevarra added that if there are lapses in the contract, then it might lead to the cancellation of the particular agreement. As these are contracts, the first course of action should be to jointly review and renegotiate; if this is unsuccessful, legal action for rescission may be resorted to. We have organized teams to conduct this review. but my office as attorney general will need a lot of help from the office of the solicitor general to perform and complete this task at the soonest possible time, he said. The Justice department has already formed a team for the review but they still need to coordinate with the Office of the Solicitor General to speed up the process.Aileen Cerrudo (with reports from Rosalie Coz) The post Duterte orders review of all govt deals appeared first on UNTV News. Greece's prime minister was greeted with hugs and selfies on Tuesday during his landmark visit to newly renamed North Macedonia, where the neighbours celebrated a new start after resolving their decades-long identity row. The one-day trip came a little more than a month after Alexis Tsipras and counterpart Zoran Zaev finalised a deal that added "North" to Macedonia's name to distinguish it from a bordering province in Greece. "We are starting to cover lost ground to build a deep friendship, not only between our governments, but especially between our people," Tsipras said. It was the first official visit by a Greek prime minister since the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia declared independence in 1991, kicking off the name dispute that roiled diplomatic ties amid dogged wrestling over the name Macedonia and its cultural heritage. In the end, Skopje agreed to the change in exchange for assurance that Athens would stop thwarting its efforts to join NATO and the European Union. "Today our Republic for the first time in its history is a hosting an official visit of a Greek Prime Minister," Zaev noted during a joint press conference, after he welcomed Tsipras with a warm embrace outside the government building and raised his mobile phone for a picture. - Business time - With the name issue behind them, the two countries are now exploring the potential of stronger economic ties, with both leaders to attend a business forum later in the day. Tsipras, who brought ten ministers and dozens of business leaders with him, said he believed critics of the deal would be swayed once new financial, infrastructure and tourism links kick in. "Gradually everyone will start to understand, both the Greek people and the citizens of North Macedonia, the damage that has been done over the past years when we were unable to sit together and try to solve our disputes," he said. After the initial name accord was inked in June 2018, congratulations poured in from around the globe for the two young premiers, who fought risky domestic political battles to push the deal through, enraging nationalists on both sides of the border. Even before the deal was finalised, they were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by 2015 winner Wided Bouchamaoui of Tunisia. But there is still opposition to the deal among nationalist groups in both countries. In Greece, some are angry that the deal allows its northern neighbour to continue referring to its people and language as Macedonian. Disgruntlement is also palpable in Skopje among those who feel the name-change is an embarrassing concession and that the end-goal -- entry into the EU -- may never materialise. North Macedonia is in the process of joining NATO and hoping the EU will open accession talks in June. Yet the timeline for the latter could slide, with appetite for enlargement shrinking considerably among several members of the bloc, particularly France. Meanwhile, in his own protest, the Balkan state's President Gjorge Ivanov has been refusing to sign bills from parliament ever since North Macedonia became the official name. The two-term president is to be replaced following elections later this month. burs-ssm/wai Tuaspring Integrated Water & Power Project, Singapore. (Source: Hyflux) By David Yong (Bloomberg) Hyflux Ltd. will put its debt restructuring plan to vote this week, leaving its fate in the hands of unsecured creditors. Whatever the outcome, it will mark another entry in the list of fallen Singapore companies. The Singapore water-treatment and power group is seeking to fix S$2.8 billion ($2.1 billion) of liabilities by asking senior lenders to accept haircuts of some 75 percent and junior retail investors of about 90 percent on their claims. In an April 5 vote on the plan, the creditors will either hand control of Hyflux over to a consortium of Indonesian businessmen, or push the group closer to liquidation. Read more about the saga of Hyfluxs debt debacle and water plant Elsewhere this week in news on Singapore companies that had previously stumbled, investors were told of the potential for new foreign owners in the city-states troubled offshore oilfield services industry. Malaysian group Yinson Holdings Bhd. is planning to take over Ezion Holdings Ltd., while New York-listed Seaspan Corp. is proceeding with a plan to buy Swiber Holdings Ltd.s core assets. In recent history, several home-grown regional champions have also found new owners with financial power amid liquidity challenges. Chinese corporations have bought over semiconductor assembler STATS ChipPac in 2015, while French group CMA CGM SA acquired container liner Neptune Orient Lines Ltd. in the following year. Like Hyflux, both counted state investment company Temasek Holdings Pte. as a former investor. 2019 Bloomberg L.P Knife attack: two arrested after pair hurt and robbed of HK$350,000 in violent assault Two men have been arrested in connection with an armed robbery in Hong Kong on Tuesday morning that left a man and woman injured, and saw their attackers escape with a backpack containing $300,000 yuan (HK$350,000). According to police, the two suspects, aged 24 and 29, were detained at two separate locations in Yuen Long. As of 6pm, the pair were being held for questioning but had not been charged in relation to the theft, which happened around 8am on Fu Shing Street, near Sheung Shui MTR station. Police were still searching for several other suspects. One female witness said three robbers approached the couple carrying knives, and the incident turned violent when the female victim began shouting for help. The man was being held at knife point, she said. A police source said the couple, a 50-year-old man and 47-year-old woman, had arrived in the city from Shenzhen via Lok Ma Chau immigration control point earlier on Tuesday, with the cash in their possession. According to police, the three robbers assaulted the pair with knives, and took the mans backpack with the money inside, before escaping in two cars. The man, a visitor from the mainland, suffered injuries to his hands and legs while his wife, who holds a Hong Kong identity card, sustained minor hand injuries. Both victims were sent to North District Hospital for treatment. Before noon, a seven-seater car believed to have been used in the robbery was found abandoned in Tan Kwai Tsuen, Yuen Long. The village is about 20km away from the site of the incident. Police said a backpack carrying three knives was found in a nearby refuse collection centre in the village. Another source said two local men had been arrested, but no money had yet been recovered. In recent years, there have been several high-profile robberies on the street near Sheung Shui MTR station. In January 2018, a 29-year-old mainland man had 240,000 yuan (HK$288,000) stolen by a motorcycle rider on San Fung Avenue in Sheung Shui. Police said a pillion passenger got off a motorcycle and threatened the victim with a knife, before snatching the bag containing the cash. Story continues And in September 2017, a male passer-by foiled a US$3 million robbery and subdued one of two masked men as they attacked a middle-aged man and tried to snatch his backpack containing the money. According to official statistics, police handled 147 reports of robbery in 2018, down 9.8 per cent compared with the previous year. Additional reporting by Shirley Zhao This article Knife attack: two arrested after pair hurt and robbed of HK$350,000 in violent assault first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2019. New dangers for astronauts aboard ISS after India destroyed satellites: NASA The head of NASA has branded India's destruction of one of its satellites that created 400 pieces of orbital debris and led to new dangers for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) a terrible thing. Jim Bridenstine was addressing employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Monday, five days after India shot down a low-orbiting satellite in a missile test to prove it was among the world's advanced space powers. Not all of the pieces were big enough to track, Bridenstine explained. What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track we're talking about 10 centimeters [six inches] or bigger about 60 pieces have been tracked. The Indian satellite was destroyed at a relatively low altitude of 180 miles [300 kilometers], well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit. But 24 of the pieces are going above the apogee of the International Space Station, said Bridenstine. That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station, he continued, adding: That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight. It's unacceptable and Nasa needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is. The US military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk for the ISS and for satellites. They are currently tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters. That includes about 10,000 pieces of space debris, of which nearly 3,000 were created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007 at 530 miles from the surface. As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44 percent over 10 days, Bridenstine said. The risk, however, will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere. Pakistan, in a statement through the Foreign Office, had stated it "has been a strong proponent of the prevention of arms race in outer space". The statement asserted that space is a "common heritage of mankind" and as such responsibility falls on every nation "to avoid actions which can lead to the militarisation of this arena". Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week announced that the country had destroyed a low-orbiting satellite in a missile test, becoming the fourth country in the world to have carried out the feat. "This is a proud moment for India," the prime minister had said in his first televised national address since late 2016. "India has registered its name in the list of space superpowers. Until now, only three countries had achieved this feat," he said, just weeks before the country goes to the polls. The European Union's chief negotiator Michel Barnier warned Tuesday it is "day after day more likely" that Britain will crash out of the bloc next week without an orderly withdrawal agreement. Barnier was addressing a think tank in Brussels the day after British lawmakers again failed to unite behind any alternative to the Brexit withdrawal agreement Prime Minister Theresa May signed last year. "No deal was never our desired nor intended scenario. No deal was never my intended scenario, but the EU 27 is now prepared. It becomes day after day more likely," Barnier told the European Policy Centre. "Let's not forget first that we have already an agreement, we have already a deal, and it was concluded by Theresa May and the British government and the European Council and European Parliament on November 25 last year, four months ago," he said. "We tried to make sure that the UK could leave the EU on March 29, just as the UK had foreseen itself... If the UK still wants to leave the EU in an orderly manner, this agreement, this treaty is and will be the only one." Barnier warned that if May cannot get this withdrawal agreement past the House of Commons, then there are only two other options available before London leaves the union on or shortly after April 12. "If the UK parliament does not vote in favour of the withdrawal agreement in the coming days, then only two options would remain: leaving without an agreement or requesting a longer extension of the Article 50 period," he said. "It would be the responsibility of the UK government to choose between these two options." But he warned that such an extension would not automatically be granted by the other 27 EU leaders when they meet at an April 10 emergency summit. "Such an extension would carry significant risks for the EU, therefore a strong justification would be needed. Many businesses in the EU warn us against the cost of extending uncertainty," he said. "There would also be a political cost. If the UK is still a member state on May 23 it will have to organise elections," he said, referring to the upcoming European Parliamentary vote. This would mean Britain remains in the union "longer as a member on its way out" and might "pose a risk to our decision-making autonomy", he said, warning Britain's post-Brexit ties with Brussels cannot be negotiated while it remains inside the bloc. Singapore Airlines said Tuesday it had grounded two of its Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner aircraft after discovering an engine defect during inspections, the latest problem for the US planemaker. The decision was taken after the deterioration of some engine blades was detected on the jets' Rolls-Royce engines, the carrier said in a statement. The planes were grounded pending the replacement of engines. "Some flights to destinations served by the 787-10 fleet have been affected," it said, adding "safety is our top priority". The city-state's flag carrier was the launch customer for the model -- which has a maximum capacity of 330 passengers -- and started operating them last year. It has nine 787-10 aircraft in its fleet, a spokeswoman said. Boeing's 737 MAX planes were grounded globally last month following the second of two deadly crashes to occur in less than five months. Scrutiny has centred on an anti-stall system developed specifically for the planes that has given pilots problems. Singapore was one of the first countries to ban 737 MAX planes from its airspace following the March crash of one of the models operated by Ethiopian Airlines, with the loss of 189 lives. Jean Paul Gaultier is the latest fashion designer to team up with Supreme for a collection. The famous French creative and the cult American skatewear label are working together on a collection set to launch worldwide on April 11, according to a report by Vogue Australia. Dubbed Supreme X Jean Paul Gaultier', the series reportedly features menswear and womenswear pieces including clothes inspired by Gaultier's iconic early 1990s designs, with highlights including colorful faux fur coats and exaggerated tailoring. Supreme has also taken to Instagram to offer a tantalizing glimpse of what is to come. "I have been including elements of sportswear in my collections from the very beginning," Gaultier told Vogue, adding: "With Supreme, this inspiration will find its way to a new generation." Since being founded in 1994, Supreme has built up a reputation for high-profile creative partnerships, having previously worked with the former artistic director for Louis Vuitton menswear, Kim Jones, in 2017, as well as teaming up with Rei Kawakubo in 2012. The brand has also partnered with the artist Jeff Koons, as well as sportswear giant Nike and the beverage giant Coca Cola, to name just a few. Madonna's daughter Lourdes Leon has been snapped up to model the collection, in a fitting example of fashion symmetry: Gaultier was the creative behind the popstar's iconic conical bra bodices in the '90s. The move marks the latest big fashion milestone for Lourdes, who starred in Miu Miu's Spring 2019 campaign alongside Juliette Lewis, as well as featuring in a MadeMe x Converse collaboration earlier this year and stepping in front of the camera multiple times to represent Stella McCartney's Pop' fragrance line. Gaultier recently hit the fashion headlines after announcing plans to drop animal fur from his collections back in November, calling the way in which animals are killed for their fur "absolutely deplorable." Louis Vuitton is packing its bags and heading to the airport to debut its newest cruise collection. Under the direction of its artistic director of womenswear Nicolas Ghesquiere, the luxury fashion house will unveil its new cruise series on May 8 at the newly-renovated TWA Flight Center in New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport, reports WWD. The mid-century terminal, which was designed by the architect Eero Saarinenfirst, first opened in 1962 and was closed in 2001. It is slated to reopen as a new hotel on May 15, following the fashion show. "The TWA Flight Center, a sheer evocation of travel itself, is inherently linked to Louis Vuitton's commitment to exclusive architectural discoveries, to its art of travel, and represents an ideal close to Nicolas Ghesquiere's inspirations," the house told WWD in a statement. New York will be the latest in a string of exotic destinations for the house's cruise shows -- which have most recently been held in the Southern French village of Saint-Paul de Vence and Kyoto, Japan's Miho Museum. This year's cruise season will see major fashion houses travel all over the world to unveil their collections, with Dior set to stage its show in Marrakech, Gucci heading to Rome, Giorgio Amani to Tokyo and Chanel taking to the catwalk in Paris. Louis Vuitton is not alone in selecting the Big Apple this season: Prada is also packing its bags for a New York spectacle. Photo credit: AP/REX/Shutterstock From Esquire This one couldn't hold until our semi-regular weekly survey on Thursday: the Republican Party in the newly insane state of North Carolina seems to have been a SuperFund for quite some time. First, there was the vote-bundling ratfcking down in the 9th Congressional District, and now this. From WBTV: NCGOP Chairman Robin Hayes, who spent a decade in Congress representing a district that stretched from the Charlotte area to Fayetteville, surrendered himself to authorities and made a first appearance at the US Courthouse in Charlotte on Tuesday. The charges center around a wealthy Durham businessman named Greg Lindberg, who has been under the microscope of federal investigators for white collar crimes related to his business empire and, later, for contributions he made to politicians in North Carolina. Lindberg was also indicted and made a first appearance in court. Two other people who worked for Lindberg, John Gray and John Palermo, also appeared in court in connection to the indictments. Let's be fair. Both parties drank of the forbidden trough. Lindberg made sizeable contributions to both political parties, campaign finance records show, including a six-figure contribution to the North Carolina Democratic Party and nearly $2 million to the North Carolina Republican Party. But it does seem that it was the GOP that kept showing up and ordering doubles. A portion of Lindbergs contribution to the NCGOP-$240,000 was then forwarded to North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey, who is also a Republican. In October, NCGOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse confirmed to WBTV that the party sent Causey the money but said it was legal because, he said, the party steered the money to Causey after Lindberg made the contribution. In March, WBTV reported that Causey made a secret recording of a meeting between Lindberg, an associate, Causey and Hayes. During the meeting, multiple sources familiar with the recording told WBTV, Lindberg and Hayes reached an agreement for the NCGOP to pass $240,000 of Lindbergs contribution to Causeys campaign. Story continues The level of corruption in American politics is occasionally stunning. Anyone who doesn't tape every interpersonal encounter is out of their mind. Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here. ('You Might Also Like',) On 1 April, Minister for Home Affairs K. Shanmugam delivered a 95-minute parliament address on hate speech, offensive speech, and freedom of speech in Singaporeand it was anything but a Fools day prank. Rather, the commentary was lucid, well-reasoned, and invited young people to participate in the national conversation on this matter. Well, since you asked, Minister Trigger warning: This article contains content that may cause adverse reactions in children, victims of abuse, epileptics, cross-wearers, cross-burners, cross-dressers, followers of the Prophet (peace be upon him), followers of Baphomet (cursed is his name), woke liberals, and Richard Dawkins. Before wading into the muck that is the language-politics discussion, I feel compelled to disclose my own religious background: I was raised Hindu, and now lean towards the agnostic end of the religiosity spectrum. With all that out of the way, lets plunge headfirst into the mire. Whats this article NOT about? Lets make one thing very clearwere not talking about speech that incites violence, or blatant hate speech. This statement, for example: Homosexuals are evil, and should be stoned to death. This is clearly little more than vitriolic bile. Replace the word homosexual with any other groupChristians, Malays, transgenders, PES E Clerksand it remains so. Were also not discussing specific government legislation, and enforcement of that legislation, that should or should not be implemented. Rather, were trying to make some sense of the shrouded, hazy room occupied by the term offensive speechcomments that arent necessarily hateful, that cant be said to directly inspire violence against a person or group, but nonetheless leave you scratching your head, asking yourself, He can say that but perhaps shouldnt? Or, if youre on the other side of whatever issues being discussed, He should say thatbut he cant! With that out of the way, here goes: Story continues Homosexuality is a cult practice that promotes the homosexual agenda and conversions to homosexuality. A bold statement, to be sure, but you cant rightly call it hateful, can you? Depending on your position on the issue, the above statement would have registered several possible responses in your mind, ranging from What a bigot, to Well, I wouldnt put it that way, but You may or may not be surprised to hear that this comment comes, almost verbatim, from a discussion with a Christian friend of mine. But if that comment was acceptable to him, what about the next one? Christianity is a cult practice that promotes the Christian agenda and conversions to Christianity. To his credit, my friend agreed that if he was okay making the first statement, he should be fine with hearing the second. However, imagine instead if the sentence was said by a figure such as a Muslim cleric brought in from overseas. In this context, would it be acceptable? In fact, imagine a radical Buddhist leader, in the mould of Ashin Wirathu, who made the exact same comments about Islam: Islam is a cult practice that promotes the Muslim agenda and conversions to Islam. Many would consider it highly offensive, and most Singaporeans, including those of the more progressive bent, would find reasonable cause to ban such a person from speaking in Singapore. At the same time, these same individuals would find it unreasonable to ban Watain from Singapore, despite the band having espoused equally problematic and derogatory views about Christianity (if not more so). Why the double standard? The secular argument, thats why. Ah, thank you for bringing that up! In a secular society, it appears that criticism of religious beliefs and interpretations is fair; criticism of non-religious facts (like transgenderism or homosexuality) is not. After all, secularism is the neutral backdrop, so to speak, for a multi-religious society. Except, not exactly. While secularism is meant to divorce organs of state from religion, the progressive agenda seeks to utilise organs of state to pursue policies that, no matter their basis in scientific studies, are incompatible with religious/conservative beliefs and mores. Because of this, an increasing number of religious people see secularism as the new anti-religiona threat to their way of life. In secular countries like America, with strong progressive movements, the second statement (of the three highlighted above) might be considered an acceptable criticism, while the first is offensive. I fear similar thought processes abound in all liberal circles, even in Singapore. For many commentators who embrace or champion freedom of speech, I cant help but wonder if they are truly willing to accept the consequences of free speechnot the religious/racial/cultural disunity Minister Shanmugam described in his address, but rather the reality that many offensive opinions held by our deeply conservative society will now become acceptable for dissemination. In other words, free speech is a double-edged sword. Not to mention that secularism means different things to different people. What am I trying to say? In Singapore, the discussion around what constitutes offensive speech is muddied by the ghost that haunts every modern civilisation: tribalism. Simply put, we call things offensive not because they are objectively offensive but because the views they espouse disagree with our own. In this respect, I must say that at least the religious community in Singapore has some intellectual honestythey are open about the fact that they take offence at certain comments only because of their religious beliefs. Coming from those with a progressive bent, an appeal to a secular, objective reality seems disingenuous; they must accept that certain members of the religious community see themselves as religious adherents first, followers of secular laws second. Conversely, these members need to accept that certain parts of society simply do not care about their beliefs. Depending on your perspective on different issues, this reality may seem unfair to you. Unfortunately, its the one we have to deal with. Under this glaring truth, we have to abandon hollow allegations of offensiveness. If you, as an idealistic progressive, value the freedom to attend a Watain concert, then you have to be open to being called a man, even if you are a pre-op transgender woman. If you, a bread-and-butter family values man, value your religious right to comment on or legislate the private life of a gay man, then you have to be open to having the Quran metaphorically picked apart in front of you. If youre not comfortable with the consequence of either, then perhaps what needs to be reconsidered is not societys treatment of your tribe, but rather your own biases as a member of that association, and how they could ultimately be unhelpful to progressing a productive national conversation. Offensiveness has been, and will always be, a matter of subjectivity that changes with the times. When we discuss it, lets not succumb to disingenuity or tribalism, but instead approach the topic with the sincerity and openness it deserves. In lieu of, and even after, the emergence of an honest playing field, the onus remains on the government not to succumb to the occasional outburst of rage and moral panic from one group or another (cough, cough, snap petitions). This is how, bit by bit, we can move this conversationand this nationforward. Do you think freedom of speech confers the freedom to offend? Write in to community@ricemedia.co. The post Is Singapore Ready for Freedom of Speech? appeared first on RICE. Pakistan Army rejected Indian claims of shooting down Pakistani F-16 The Pakistan Army Monday rejected Indian claims that a Pakistani F-16 was shot down in an air battle on February 27. Reference to repeated Indian claims about shooting down of Pakistani F-16 by India and use of F-16 in air battle on 27 February. The event of 27 Feb is part of history now. No Pakistani F-16 was hit by Indian Air Force, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said in a statement. The ISPR said strikes by Pakistan Air Force (PAF) across the Line of Control (LoC) were carried out by JF-17s from within the Pakistans airspace. Later when 2 Indian jets crossed LOC, they were shot down by PAF. Whether it was F-16 or JF-17 which shot down 2 Indian aircrafts is irrelevant, the statement read. Even if F-16s have been used as at that point in time, complete PAF was airborne including F-16s, the fact remains that Pakistan Air Force shot down two Indian jets in self-defence. India can assume any type of their choice even F-16, the statement read. Pakistan retains the right to use anything and everything in its legitimate self-defence, it stressed. Last month, ISPR Director General Major General Asif Ghafoor in an interview with the international media had categorically rejected Indian claims that Pakistan used US-made F-16s to down Indian aircraft on February 27. The aircraft which engaged those targets and fought them were JF-17s. As regard to how to use F-16, in what context [they] were used or not because at that point of time our entire Air Force was airborne now it remains between Pakistan and the US to see how the MoUs regarding the use of F-16 have been adhered to or otherwise, he had said in an interview to Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik. Three Pakistan Army soldiers martyred at LOC Three Pakistan Army soldiers have been martyred due to unprovoked firing by the Indian army across the restive Line of Control (LoC) at Rakhchikri Sector in Rawalkot, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) reported on Tuesday. Subedar Mohammad Riaz from Jhang, Lance Havaldar Aziz Ullah from Noshero Feroz, and Sepoy Shahid Mansib from Abbottabad embraced martyrdom while one soldier got injured, said the military's media wing. The ISPR said that the Army responded to Indian firing in a befitting manner, adding there were reports of casualties on Indian side of the LoC. A day earlier, an elderly villager was killed while two women and three young boys were injured in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) in unrelenting ceasefire violations by Indian troops across the LoC. According to police, Indian troops had resorted to shelling in Nezapir sector at about 7am, using small and heavy weapons. The shelling was largely restricted to military posts on opposite sides but occasionally the Indian army would also pound civilian settlements, a police official had said. Another official in Kotli district said that Goi and Tattapani sectors had been experiencing heavy shelling since Sunday night. A 28-year-old woman was injured in Goi Batali village after shrapnel from a shell hit her. The Battal sector in the neighbouring Poonch district also witnessed heavy shelling, but no casualties were reported from there. The heavily militarised LoC was relatively calm over the past one week as the last casualties were reported on March 24 from Bhimber and Haveli districts where a 10-year-old boy and a man were injured, respectively. Tensions have been running high between India and Pakistan in the wake of a suicide attack on an Indian military convoy in Pulwama district of Indian-occupied Kashmir on February 14, which killed more than 40 paramilitary troops. In what was the most serious military crisis in South Asia since 2008, Indian and Pakistani warplanes engaged in a dogfight on Feb 27, a day after a raid by Indian jet fighters on what New Delhi said was a militant camp in Pakistan. Islamabad denied any militant camp exists in the area and said the Indian bombs exploded on an empty hillside. Pakistan downed an Indian plane for violating its airspace and captured its pilot after he ejected in AJK. The tensions de-escalated after Prime Minister Imran Khan decided to release the Indian pilot as a peace gesture, and following concerted diplomatic efforts by countries including the United States, China and the UAE Donald Trump appears to be having second thoughts about dragooning his party into another showdown over Obamacare, after Republican lawmakers threw a mild fit over his attempts to force the issue last week. Late Monday night, the president tweeted that the GOP was still developing a really great HealthCare Plan, but that they wouldnt vote on it until after the 2020 elections. Meaning the fifth of never. Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesnt work. Premiums & deductibles are far too high - Really bad HealthCare! Even the Dems want to replace it, but with Medicare for all, which would cause 180 million Americans to lose their beloved private health insurance. The Republicans..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement ....are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare. In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win...... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 ....back the House. It will be truly great HealthCare that will work for America. Also, Republicans will always support Pre-Existing Conditions. The Republican Party will be known as the Party of Great HealtCare. Meantime, the USA is doing better than ever & is respected again! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Thus, a brief and bizarre comedy of errors seems to have come to an end, at least for now. Lets review what just happened, shall we? Last Monday, the Justice Department shocked much of Washington when it urged a federal appeals court to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, after it had previously argued in the suit that only parts of the law should be tossed. (The case, originally brought by a group of GOP-led states, argues that Obamacare was rendered unconstitutional by the 2017 tax bill). Trump reportedly ordered the move after being egged on by his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who believed that it would force Republicans to take another stab at replacing Obamacarean idea that, to most GOPers on Capitol Hill, sounds about as appealing as a long stroll over a bed of hot coals. After all, Republicans were demolished on health care during the 2018 midterms and still do not have a plan they could pass. Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar all reportedly objected to the idea. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was apparently gobsmacked. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The next day, Trump went into branding mode. The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care. You watch, he told reporters prior to a lunch with Senate Republicans. During the meal, he reportedly told them that they should take another run at the issue. On Thursday, he told reporters hed asked a working group of senators to create a plan to replace Obamacare if the court struck it down. Along with Wyomings John Barrasso and Louisianas Bill Cassidy, the team supposedly included Floridas Rick Scott, who before becoming his states governor ran a health care company that got in trouble for Medicare fraud. Advertisement Advertisement Pretty soon Republicans, whod been grumbling all week about being taken off guard by Trumps scheme, were in open revolt, and making it clear that they wouldnt be writing any legislation. Senate Finance Chair Chuck Grassley said his committee, which would have to be involved in any health care push, was not planning to draft a bill. Floridas Scott told CBS he wouldnt be crafting anything either: I look forward to, you know, to seeing what the presidents going to put out. A Senate aide told the Hill that there was no working group; Trump had probably just sort of listed names of senators who sometimes work on health care issues. (The Hill did report that Sen. Mitt Romney, of all people, was involved in early discussions about a replacement plan). Anonymous Republican senators called Trumps strategy toxic and said that it had caught everyone, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, flatfooted. Advertisement Advertisement Meanwhile, Maines Susan Collins, who is up for reelection in 2020, sent a letter to the Justice Department all but begging it to rethink its legal position. Rather than seeking to have the courts invalidate the ACA, the proper route for the administration to pursue would be to propose changes to the ACA or to once again seek its repeal. The administration should not attempt to use the courts to bypass Congress, she wrote. With his tweets Monday night, Trump seems to have backed down from this issue. Now Republicans just have to keep praying that John Roberts makes this lawsuit disappear. Imagine youre in Los Angeles, zipping to your next meeting on one of the thousands of dockless scooters available on city streets. You arrive at your destination, park the vehicle, and go on your way. While you do all of this, however, the company that provided your scooter will collect detailed, anonymized data about your trip, from the moment you unlocked the vehicle right up until you left it. And that data will soon belong to the city of Los Angeles. Advertisement The Los Angeles Department of Transportation gets this kind of information through a groundbreaking digital tool it recently developed for all kinds of vehicles called the Mobility Data Specification, or MDS, which furnishes the city with information it has never before possessed. Patterns of movement derived from MDS can shape policy decisions, like where to put a protected bike lane or how to ensure low-income residents have access to dockless vehicles. But the agency can also use MDS to send instructions back to the mobility companiesso that, for instance, the city could warn Bird if you parked your scooter illegally. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Transportation officials are thrilled about MDS s potential, but privacy advocates and Uber want to stop it dead in its tracks. For now, MDS is mainly being used with dockless vehicles like scooters and electric bikes, but the system is intended to help cities also manage ride-hailing, car-sharing, and even autonomous vehicles and drones. In just half a year, MDS has already spread from Los Angeles to Seattle and Providence. And its all powered by the data coming from individual vehicles, just like that scooter you used to get to your meeting. Advertisement Advertisement Transportation officials are thrilled about MDSs potential to help them handle new mobility technologies, but privacy advocatesand Uberwant to stop it dead in its tracks. Whether the system should be hailed as a breakthrough for transportation policy or shunned as a massive invasion of privacy is quickly becoming one of the most heated controversies in urban policy. MDS is the brainchild of Seleta Reynolds, the Los Angeles Department of Transportations general manager, whom Mayor Eric Garcetti hired to lead the agency in 2014. Reynolds came to L.A. from San Francisco, where she was an executive at the Municipal Transportation Agency at a time when ride-hailingled by Uber and Lyftwas exploding in popularity. The headaches of that experience were formative. Advertisement As ride-hail took off, it felt like there were a lot of things changing in the city that were invisible [to me] because companies information was opaque, Reynolds says. They had prevented cities from getting even basic data or having a regulatory posture. Without access to ride-hail trip data, it was very difficult for a city to understand the new technologys impact on transit, bike ridership, or taxisand adjust policy accordingly. The city was losing the ability to manage, design, and understand what was happening in the public realm, she says. It was difficult for a city to understand ride-hailings impact on transit, bike ridership, or taxisand adjust policy accordingly. Reynolds frustrations are familiar to transportation bureaucrats across the country who have fought with Uber and Lyft to share ride information. A few cities like Seattle and New York eventually used legal channels to access trip data, but ride-hailing companies sometimes appealed to state officials to pre-empt local efforts, often successfully. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Reynolds arrived in Los Angeles determined to avoid being rolled again by mobility companies, and she saw technology as the key. Seeking to understand companies perspective, Reynolds joined the board of the Los Angeles Auto Show. There she met John Ellis, a former chief technologist at Ford. Reynolds soon hired his company, Ellis & Associates, to shape her agencys approach to technology, a role it maintains today. Advertisement Advertisement In June 2018, a strategic plan written by Ellis & Associates hinted at the dramatic steps LADOT was about to take. It called for the agency to standardize how data is processed into information and how that information can be converted into actionsthe ideas that would give rise to MDSand included a lengthy dive into the culture around technology evolution. Some will embrace this change with vigor and passion, only later to be disillusioned by a reality they didnt expect, the report reads. Many will go through the stages of grief as they confront the loss of a world they didnt want to see go away, struggling to see the benefit of the new world in its place. That left more than a few transportation professionals scratching their heads. Advertisement Behind the scenes, Ellis team was working with LADOT staff to create the application programming interfaces, or APIs, that would form the backbone of MDS. At the time, Reynolds assumed that the development of MDS would take place over several years. But then something unexpected happened: Dockless scooters exploded in popularity in neighboring Santa Monica in September 2017, and two months later LimeBike went directly to Los Angeles Councilmember Joe Buscainonot LADOTto negotiate the citys first dockless bike-share deployment. It was then that LADOTs efforts to build MDS went into overdrive. Advertisement When bikes and scooters showed up, they gave us a pretty interesting sandbox to start experimenting, Reynolds says. Advertisement When LADOT started crafting MDS in the summer of 2018, cities elsewhere were using a hodgepodge of data tools to track dockless vehicles on their streets. Local officials required that dockless vehicle companies submit information in PDF, CSV, or other formats. That wasnt a good situation for the companies scrambling to fulfill each citys unique requests, or for the cities struggling to share best practices. MDS was intended to be a way to standardize data collection for companies while ensuring cities had the information, capacity, and power to actively manage vehicle deployments. Advertisement Throughout the MDS development process, LADOT provided regular updates on its GitHub page, and the agency invited other cities programmers to join webinars along with representatives from dockless vehicle companies and data analytics firms. LADOT released the first version of MDS in May 2018just six months after development beganand the first companies began using it in September 2018, when LADOT launched a limited dockless vehicle pilot. MDS consists of two APIs. The first, called Provider, enables mobility companies to send information about individual devices directly to the city. With Provider, LADOT automatically gains information about the start, end, and route of each dockless vehicle trip, accurate within a few hundred feet. The city also gains information about whether the vehicle is broken, out of power, or in the process of being rebalanced (that is, being moved to another part of the city). Trip route information is shared after a 24-hour delay, but all other data flows to the city in a matter of minutes or hours. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement MDSs second API is called Agency. It enables a city to instantly send digital information and instructions directly to private mobility companies. It allows the city to alert companies to events like a crash or a parade, advising them that their riders should avoid those areas, and to notify companies of vehicles that are illegally parked. In theory, it could also allow cities to adjust pricing (like scooter fees) to incentivize mobility companies behavior. Imagine a city reducing the fee paid by a scooter company to the city if a ride originates in a low-income neighborhood, or increasing it if a trip goes through a construction zone. MDSs Agency API makes that kind of active mobility management possible for the first time. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement MDSs Provider API went live in September 2018, when LADOT began to allow scooters to operate on a limited basis. Approved dockless vehicle companies have until April 15 to show they are compliant with Agency as well. Reynolds can reel off a long list of policy problems that data collected from MDS can help her solve. An example: Ive built a bike lane, but MDS shows that people are deviating from it to use other routes. Why? Information about scooter location could allow a city to monitor whether a dockless vehicle company is obeying limits on the size of its fleet, or if its trying to cheat by putting a few extra ones on the sidewalk. Vehicles that remain stationary for long periods of time can be flagged as being potentially broken. Advertisement Historically, cities do not receive information at this level of specificity for origins, destinations, and routes of individual trips; ride-hailing companies like Lyft and Uber have insisted on aggregating data before sharing it, if they do so at all. And the delay in sharing trip information with cities had been measured in weeks and months, not minutes and hours. Perhaps most importantly, with MDS, city officials can avoid sparring with mobility companies over which data to hand over. As Reynolds put it in a recent podcast interview, Im earning data instead of asking for data. Some dockless vehicle companies are fans of MDS. Evan Costagliola, Limes director of transportation partnerships, says, Before MDS, we were getting city data requests in different formats, which was massively costly and time-inefficient for us. Creating a data standard streamlines the process for Lime, and its hugely beneficial. Advertisement Ubers feelings are less warm. The ride-hailing company has been a vociferous critic of the technology, especially regarding the potential privacy risk posed to individuals using dockless vehicles. Melanie Ensign, Ubers head of security and privacy communications, claims LADOT has not specified circumstances under which data can and cannot be shared with other agencies requesting it. On March 22, LADOT issued data protection principles that Ensign says are nice talking points, but we have yet to see a plan on how they intend to execute on them. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A particular concern is law enforcement; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already been accused of tracking people with location information collected by local governments. Its a problem that we cant be transparent with our customers about where their data may go, Ensign says. Public skepticism about privacy protection from Ellis, one of MDSs main architects, hasnt helped. Ensign calls his perspective frightening. Advertisement The two places where we have the biggest problems around privacy are Egypt and Los Angeles, Ensign says. There is a general consensus that if things do go wrong with mobility data privacy, they could go very, very wrong. Beyond misuses of data by law enforcement, nightmare scenarios include a hack by an external party or a bad actor within city government combining MDS data with other sources in order to stalk a victim. But Uber has something of a boy-who-cried-wolf problem when it cites privacy as reason to oppose MDS; ride-hailing companies have used the same claim for years when fighting city efforts to access even aggregated passenger trip information. (Lyft declined to comment for this article.) Proponents of MDS such as Remix, a transportation analytics contractor to LADOT, suggest that Ubers call for privacy protection masks a self-interested desire to protect competitive insights, especially if its core ride-hailing business becomes subject to MDSsomething Reynolds envisions. Advertisement If things do go wrong with mobility data privacy, they could go very, very wrong. Unlike in prior battles over mobility data, though, this time several prominent watchdogs are echoing Ubers alarms about privacy. The nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology claimed in an open letter that LADOT has not taken steps to reduce MDSs privacy risks, such as restricting its use by other city departments or committing to destroying all data after a set period of time. (CDT discloses a small amount of financial support from Uber and Lyft.) Another vocal critic of MDS is SharedStreets, a nonprofit developing a common digital map of city streets (SharedStreets received $250,000 in funding from Uber). Mollie Pelon McArdle, a co-director of Shared Streets, notes that LADOT has chosen to collect individual trip data instead of allowing mobility companies to aggregate the data in a way that makes it harder to identify specific vehicle tripsand therefore would have a much lower privacy risk.* She argues that every policy situation LADOT cites when justifying collecting individual trip information could just as easily be addressed with aggregated data. Kevin Webb, the other SharedStreets Co-director, tweeted that MDS isnt about making cities better; its about institutional relevance/power. Advertisement Advertisement When asked for examples of policy decisions that require individual trip data instead of aggregated data, Reynolds demurs. If data is aggregated before I touch it, I lose options of what to do or analyses to run, she says. Talk to me in two months after the system is in operation, and I might have decided I really dont need the disaggregated data. Thats why MDS is open and versioned. Were learning a ton as we iterate. Advertisement Advertisement Responding to privacy questions, LADOT has issued MDS data-handling guidelines and principles listing protective steps the agency takes, such as limiting data accessibility through public records requests. The agency also makes clear that MDS only collects vehicle information; there is no identifier for the individual using that vehicle. Advertisement But is that enough? A study in Nature concluded that data sets with time stamps of the kind collected through MDS can reveal a users identity with as few as four data points. A recent New York Times article explained how cellphone data can be deanonymized and used for purposes that individuals never intended or even knew about. And in the transportation world, researchers in 2014 were able to identify actor Bradley Coopers taxi trips from a data set released by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. By collecting data on tens of thousands of daily tripsmaybe moreMDS could magnify the risks of such scenarios. This month, LADOT announced that the latest version update of MDS would allow dockless vehicle companies to share vehicle trip data after a 24-hour delay instead of in real time, which had been a sticking point (according to Ubers Ensign, real-time data collection is basically surveillance). Reynolds claims the move is intended to make MDS easier to implement, but the privacy pushback may have been a factor. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement MDS critics arent placated; real-time information is still collected for origins and destinations of individual trips. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently joined the ranks of MDS critics. Geolocation data is notoriously easy to reidentify, says staff attorney Jamie Lee Williams, who, like SharedStreets, questioned whether safer, aggregated data would be equally useful to a city as individual trip data. Los Angeles should have data use practices and collect data according to that. This is backward. (While EFF collects some corporate donations, it does not identify the donors.) In the meantime, MDS continues to gain traction both in Los Angeles and around the country. On March 22, LADOT announced that Bird, LimeBike, and Spin would be permitted to operate 22,500 dockless scooters across the citywith the requirement that they use both the Provider and Agency APIs by April 15. Cities including Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Santa Monica, Providence, and Louisville are now using MDS to collect data to manage their own dockless vehicles. The Civic Analytics Network, an alliance of city chief data officers, issued an open letter backing the adoption of MDS as a standard. Advertisement Michael Schneurle, a data officer for Louisville, Kentucky, says LADOT staff helped his city use MDS after scooters appeared unexpectedly on local streets. Louisville eventually made aggregated MDS trip data available to the publica step LADOT has not taken (though Reynolds says she would like to). It was immediately among our four most popular data sets, Schneurle says. Advertisement Advertisement But it isnt always clear what data safeguards are in place when a city decides to adopt MDS; state and local laws often differ in their levels of protection. That concerns Joseph Jerome, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who says he worries less about Los Angeles and more about a midsized or small city deploying MDS in an insecure fashion, allowing someone to access raw data for months at a time. Advertisement Advertisement Reynolds says that as MDS evolves, she wants to figure out what kind of nonprofit or technical advisory group is best suited to manage itincluding adopting standards around privacy protection. It cannot be LADOT, she says. But with greater efforts around privacy, there is no guarantee that critics like Uber will let the MDS development process unfold unopposed. Ride-hailing companies have a history of asking state leaders to pre-empt local policies they dont like. Ubers Ensign implies that her company could revisit that playbook to fight MDS, saying it will be interesting to see if MDS is compliant with the California Consumer Privacy Actreferring to a bill passed in 2018 to protect Californians personal data that goes into effect next January. Advertisement Advertisement Even if California clamps down on MDS, many cities outside its borders have already adopted it. Without federal privacy legislation like Europes General Data Protection Regulation, it may be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Already, MDS has expanded to modes beyond scooters and bikes: Seattle is using it to collect data about LimePod, Limes car-sharing service. [Update, April 10, 2019: After publication, a spokesman from the Seattle Department of Transportation reached out to clarify that While we have the authority to require car-share companies to adhere to MDS as part of the permitting process, we havent begun requiring this standard yet and hope to implement the requirement later this year.] No city currently uses MDS to manage ride-hailing, but that could be a natural next step. As MDS expands into new cities and new modes, it has the potential to transform relationships between local governments and the mobility companies they have struggled to regulate. Im putting my foot into an arena where the public sector hasnt been previously, Reynolds says. I want to get it right because the stakes are so high around safety, equity, and all the things were trying to accomplish. In the new The Twilight Zone, now streaming on CBS All Access, a boy discovers a mysterious object, a kind of lo-fi storytelling device. Its old, a little worse for the wear, but the stories it tells are strange and fascinating. They root themselves in the boys mind, influencing him, changing him. As he ages, he begins to tell stories himself, to great success and acclaim. Though he is now a grown man, accomplished and busy, he still thinks of the object. He becomes convinced that the object is worth trying to re-create so that others may be entranced by it. A team of hundreds is assembled to remake the device, but this proves extraordinarily difficult. Eventually, there is a breakthrough: The device appears to work in a very specific dimension, a hard-to-reach corner of space-time that only a few human beings are able to access. The stories only play, in other words, when almost no one is watching them. But the man remains committed to the object even so, even though it can only play in the Twilight Zone. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement 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. This is not actually a synopsis of any one episode of the newly rebooted Twilight Zone so much as an eerified description of the entire project. Jordan Peele, one of the series producers, watched reruns of The Twilight Zone as a child. He has cited Mirror Image, an episode in which a woman encounters her double in a bus depot, as inspiring Us, his just-released, hugely lucrative, critically acclaimed horror film, which followed the hugely lucrative, critically acclaimed Get Out. Peele, at this exact moment, is Americas most exciting filmmaker, a pop sage with a huge amount to say and the energy and care to say it entertaininglywhom you can now also find doing deadpan narration on the outer limits of streaming services. Peele appears as the Narrator in the new, yet still old-fashioned, Twilight Zone, which, despite actually having Jordan Peele in it, does not have nearly enough Jordan Peele in it. Advertisement Advertisement The new Twilight Zone is extremely liminal, betwixt and between platforms and eras. Rod Serlings 1950s anthology series took on heady issues that were rarely discussed openly on television at the timelike xenophobia and racismby disguising them in sci-fi and fantasy. In the years since, there have been a number of attempts to make chilling anthology series whose episodes each end with a freaky twist, including Steven Spielbergs Amazing Stories (soon to rebooted by Apple), two previous failed remakes of The Twilight Zone, two runs of The Outer Limits, Serlings own Night Gallery, the deeply mediocre Philip K. Dickinspired series Electric Dreams, and The Twilight Zones only truly successful descendant, Black Mirror. As this list demonstrates, a betting person would not bet on the quality of a series like this, but the current reboot seemed to arrive at a moment that boosted its odds: In a post-Trump world, arent we all living in The Twilight Zone? Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Peele, at this exact moment, is Americas most exciting filmmaker, a pop sage with a huge amount to say and the energy and care to say it entertainingly. Unfortunately, the pertinent question to ask about the new Twilight Zone has less to do with political reality and more with the streaming landscape: In our post-Netflix timeline, isnt all IP worth rebooting? The new Twilight Zone boasts a starry, extremely diverse cast that includes Peele himself, who pops up at the beginning and end of every episode, like Serling, to supply a bit of deadpan narration for a bunch of perfectly adequate episodes that range in quality from pretty OK to bad. Kumail Nanjiani stars in the first episode as a stand-up comic who starts to metaphorically kill onstage by literally killing: After he does comedy about someone or something, its as if that person or thing never existed. Its a solid setup that goes where youre expecting, elevated only by Nanjianis palpable desperation. And its much better than the very predictable and dragged-out second episodethe only one Peele has a story credit onNightmare at 30,000 Feet, which is less like the classic Twilight episode from which it takes its name than it is The Appointment in Samarra on an airplane with a podcast. Advertisement Advertisement The best of the bunch is the third episode, which stars Sanaa Lathan as a mother driving her son to college. En route, she discovers that hitting rewind on an old-fashioned camcorder causes time itself to rewind. Though this plot is straight out of an Adam Sandler movie, its used for an entirely different purpose: to aid her as she and her son are plagued by a white cop hellbent on detaining and destroying them. The episode contains a hammy climatic speech, but the dread and horror it conveys are real. Lathans character has to live through traumas over and over again, inhabiting a universe, just like ours, where the elemental wish to be able to change things, avoiding catastrophe, provides no joy. There isnt magic strong enough to best virulent racism. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement If this sounds dark, it is, but Peele, in an interview with the New York Times, was clear that the series is not trying to be all-out, Black Mirror dark. We take ourselves seriously but never too seriously, he said. It cant go so dark that it makes us want to curl up in a ball. But these are extremely dark times, and Twilight Zones gentler vibe, while perhaps in keeping with the original, gives the production a distinctly network tone. The producers of Twilight Zone approached Peele after seeing Get Out, which seemed to them like a kind of Twilight Zone episode in and of itself. I know exactly what they meanthe better version of Jordan Peeles The Twilight Zone is already playing at the movies. The Kids is Slates science-based parenting column, assessing the latest research around childrens health, development, and well-being. Hundreds of teens packed into Cathedral Square in Christchurch, New Zealand, to protest for action on climate change at 1 p.m. on March 15. One mile away and 40 minutes later, a 28-year-old far-right extremist began to open fire at the Al Noor Mosque. The two events at the same time in the same small city couldnt seem more distantly related. Advertisement Really, though, they may be two sides of the same coin. Political activism and civic engagement provide teens and young adults with a sense of inclusion, purpose, and self-identity at a crucial time in their lives. Extremist ideologies, though different in almost every other way, fulfill the same needs. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Let me back up in order to unpack that idea. A few months ago, because youth radicalization seemed to be increasing, I began digging into the research on how and why young people get radicalized. According to the Anti-Defamation League, 50 extremist-related murders took place in the U.S. in 2018, a 35 percent increase from 2017. The shooter who attacked the Christchurch mosques (I am deliberately not going to name any perpetrators) as well as the men who terrorized Orlandos Pulse nightclub, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, were all extremists (most of them white supremacists)as was the man who rammed his vehicle into Charlottesville protesters in August 2017, and the New York City truck driver who killed eight people in October 2017 in the name of a jihadi militant group. Advertisement Advertisement These perpetrators all have different backstories, but a key characteristic shared by many violent extremists is that they felt isolated, alienated, and hopeless about the future before they turned radical. The Christchurch shooter had computers as his best friends. The Parkland shooters neighbor described him as ostracized. A classmate of the Newtown shooter said, I never saw him with anyone. Certainly other factors contributed to their decisions to commit mass murder, but loneliness played a fundamental role. Advertisement Child development theory helps to explain why. Social alienation is hard no matter what, but during adolescence it is particularly painful and meaningful because teens desperately feel a need to belong. (This is why teens social liveswhen they have social livestypically take precedence over everything else.) Also, during the teen years, kids develop a strong and stable sense of self. Theyre figuring out who they are in the world, says Nancy Deutsch, director of the University of Virginia Curry School of Educations Center to Promote Effective Youth Development, known as Youth-Nex. Teenagers are, in effect, hunting for causes to care about and latching onto immutable ideas about themselvesI am this kind of person, or I am someone who believes in that. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Talk to your kids about not just your politics but the values that underlie them too. The teens at Cathedral Square on March 15 were defining and expressing themselves as people who cared about the planet and wanted to save it. This was their collective self-identity, and it was one that also gave them a sense of membership, as they were literally surrounded by like-minded others. The shooter defined himself that day too, but as someone who committed mass murder to support a hateful ideologywhich would also grant him acceptance among others who shared it. A sense of meaning and belonging is a big thing, especially for young kids who are competing in a marketplace of popularity, explained national security and counterterrorism expert Mubin Shaikh at a global summit on homegrown radicalization at the University of Southern California in November 2017. Kids are always chasing after this sense of validation, and unfortunately, if they dont find it in their normal peer networks, theyll look for it somewhere else. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Former extremists agree. In the skinhead neo-Nazi movement, I found power where Id felt powerless, I found acceptance when Id felt invisible, and thats what drove my decision-making, said former white supremacist Tony McAleer, co-founder of the nonprofit Life After Hate, at the 2017 USC summit. Angela King, another Life After Hate co-founder, said that before she became a skinhead, I really struggled with my self-identity. There is good news in all of this, which is that parents and teachers can steer kids in the right direction by helping them find the right kind of purpose and inclusion. One obvious way to do this is to encourage kids to be civically engaged. Im not saying that if a teen becomes a terrorist, its his parents fault for not dragging him along to political rallies. But by giving kids the opportunity to participate in civil discourse and find nonviolent causes they care about, we may be able to prevent them from searching for the same experiences in dangerous places. Like online: One of the reasons YouTube is so worrisome is because loner kids often spend tons of time on the site, and YouTubes recommendation algorithmthe box that says Up Next when youre watching a videohas been skewed to present extremist content, although the company said in January it was working to fix this problem. (The Christchurch shooter referred to controversial YouTube influencer PewDiePie right before his attack.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement What are the best ways for parents to encourage civic commitment? Well, for a start, we shouldnt be afraid to talk about politics with our kids. My philosophy is that if you dont give them information, theyll get it from somewhere else, says Celeste Lay, a political scientist at Tulane University. Case in point: My 7-year-old proudly told me the other day he had made up a song about the wall with his friends. The notion of a flippant second-grade song about President Donald Trumps politically divisive project made me cringe, but I realized it was an opportunity for me to discover what he knew about the wall (which, turns out, wasnt much) and to share information on the subject, including ideological considerations concerning immigrants rights and family separation. Talk to your kids about not just your politics but the values that underlie them toowhy you stand for or against certain principles and why you agree or disagree with what politicians are doing. Advertisement Get Slate Parenting in Your Inbox Introducing Slate's Parenting newsletter, featuring the best of Care and Feeding, Mom and Dad Are Fighting, and Slate's family coverage. 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. Explain, too, the various ways Americans can use their political voiceby voting, protesting, writing emails and social media posts to elected officials, going to town hall meetings, and donating money. Or, better yet, show them by doing these things yourself. Role modeling is so important, Lay says. If parents want their kids to be participatory and vote and engage with their elected officials, or maybe if they want their kids to grow up and protestthey should model that behavior. Advertisement Advertisement This is not to say that its a good idea to involve your kids in every political issue. You probably dont want to drag your sensitive 8-year-old to an abortion rally or bring your kids into other situations that could get overwhelming, angry, or scary. Think, too, about whether they will actually be able to understand an issues nuances or whether they might get the wrong messageif they hear you say pot should be legalized, will they think its OK to start smoking it? Ultimately, it depends on the kidtheir age, their temperament, their maturity level. Use your best judgment. And let them make their own choices too. Instead of pushing your kid to protest climate change or volunteer to help the cause you care about, discuss with them a handful of issues they might find engaging to help them discover where their passion lies. And find ways to infuse civic thinking into their daily lives. In his book The Opposite of Spoiled, Ron Lieber explained that his kids organize their allowance money by splitting it into Spend, Save, and Give jarsthe money in the latter goes to institutions the kids care about. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Commentators and leaders should also stop shaming kids for having political voices, even when we think theyre too young or naive to have them. Sen. Dianne Feinstein may not think the Green New Deal is realistic, but she could have found a way to share her concerns without basically telling the kids who approached her in February that they should be quiet and let her do her job. Its important for adults to challenge kids to think clearly and critically, but we dont want to make them feel impotent in the process. For that matter, if your kids harbor different political opinions than you do, dont automatically shoot them down. Instead, engage with them to understand why they feel the way they do and share how and why you feel the way you do. This information-sharing exercise will, if nothing else, teach your kids how to argue more effectively. Eventually, they might change their mindsor, perhaps, you will. Advertisement We should stop referring to civically engaged kids as political pawns, too, which many people and organizations, including Slate, have done. Kids can have political agency. Our society treats children and teens as fragile beings who should be protected from reality. And while we certainly need to make kids feel safe and loved, theyre part of whats going on in society, theyre not separate, says Katherina Payne, an education researcher who studies the civic lives of young children at the University of TexasAustin. We should make sure that all young people know that they have the right to be participants in society. Advertisement Advertisement Lets not forget that sometimes kids really do have a lasting political impact. Plus, even if kids participate in politics for the wrong reasonsbecause theyre being pressured or forced to, for instancethey will still likely benefit from the experience. In one study from 2007, researchers found that eighth-graders who had been involved in community service (either voluntarily or because it was required as part of a class) were nearly twice as likely to graduate from college as kids who were not. Granted, some of this association may not be causalkids who have the means and interest for community service may be more likely to go to college for a number of reasonsbut when the researchers separately analyzed the kids who participated as part of a class and not because they chose to, they found that they also fared better academically in subsequent years compared with kids who didnt. Other studies have linked civic engagement in adolescence with higher income and better mental health as adults. And among urban minority adolescents, studies have shown that not only is civic engagement associated with higher educational attainment, but it is also tied to fewer arrests in early adulthood and greater life satisfaction. When youre engaged in these kinds of pro-social, larger-than-yourself activities as a teen, it becomes incorporated or internalized into your view of yourself as a moral, caring kind of person, says Joan Grusec, a psychologist at the University of Toronto. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Of course, its possible for parents civic nudging to backfire down the line, at least in certain ways. A 2014 study reported, for instance, that kids who grow up in highly politicized homes are more likely to change their political views (and thus diverge from their parents views) in early adulthood than kids who dont. Thats because, the researchers argue, kids who are primed to think politically are then more receptive and attentive to political information as adultsinformation that might incite them to change their views. But this isnt really a downside, is it? Because what the findings suggest is that involving kids in politics makes them more politically engaged as adultstheres no evidence to suggest that political engagement in childhood backfires to make kids less engaged down the line. Yes, by bringing politics into your family discussions, you might run the risk of raising kids who will later challenge you. But thats not because they are rejecting you or politics; its because youve raised them to be political thinkers too. Advertisement And lets not forget that sometimes kids really do have a lasting political impact. The civil rights movement involved many student activists, including the nine black students who desegregated Little Rock Central High School and the four freshmen from North Carolina A&T State University who staged a lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1965, high school students in Des Moines, Iowa, protested the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands and were suspended for doing so, which ultimately led to a Supreme Court ruling that upheld students First Amendment rights. Youth participated in the Arab Spring protests too, and in the United States, teens have been key drivers of the Black Lives Matter and gun control movements. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In many ways, teens and young adults are uniquely suited to lead social movements, because they are at a point in their lives when they are primed to take risks. Its no surprise to me that young people are often at the forefront of social change movements, Deutsch says. We tend to position adolescent risk-taking as a negative thingit leading to fast driving, drug use, and drinkingbut that same neurological system in the brain that contributes to negative risk-taking can also contribute to positive risk-taking. Most of the time, kids arent going to change the world or have a mature understanding of American politicsmy sons wall jingle is evidence of that. But sometimes they will understand just enough, and perhaps more than the average American. And regardless, theyll grow into more knowledgeable and confident adults for having participated in their society. Plus, by inviting kids into the world of politics and showing them that everyone has a civic voice, we may help stamp out radicalism and extremist violence in the next generation. Listen to Slates The Gist: Get More of The Gist Slate Plus members get extended, ad-free versions of our podcastsand much more. Sign up today. Join Slate Plus Subscribe to The Gist Copy this link and add it in your podcast app. copy link copied! For detailed instructions, see our Slate Plus podcasts page. Get The Gist 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. Listen to The Gist via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play. On The Gist, Joe Bidens nose nuzzle. In the interview, Don Winslows new book The Border is the final part of his trilogy on drug cartels. Hes here to discuss the book, how its been 20 years in the making, and the difficulty of trying to get things right. In the Spiel, Betsy DeVos indefensible Special Olympics funding cuts. 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. Democratic primary voters. What do they want? In March, majorities of Democratic voters told Morning Consult that what they wanted out of a presidential candidate was someone who had decades of political experience but was under the age of 70. A majority said they wanted a liberal candidate, but a majority also said they wanted a moderate candidate. Taken together, this poll would suggest a preference for someone who is liberal, but not, like, crazily so, and experienced, but not too experienced. A similar NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that Democratic voters said they would be particularly enthused to support a female candidate and/or a black candidate and particularly unenthused about voting for someone over the age of 75 or a socialist. Advertisement Theres also a lot of data about which policies Democrats support. A majority of Democratic voters told the New York Times and SurveyMonkey in February that they would like to see higher taxes on top earners, with 75 percent supporting one particular proposal to levy a 2 percent annual wealth tax on fortunes greater than $50 million. In a November 2018 Gallup poll, the issues most often identified by Democrats as important to them were health care, gender equality, and wealth inequality. Around the same, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey more narrowly focused on issues that had been in the headlines found that health care and corruption were the most important issues to Democrats. The same poll found that within the subject of health care, the issue that mattered most to Democratic voters was cost. When Kaiser asked about what kinds of costs were most concerning, the issue of unexpected medical bills came out on top. (For what its worth, Kaiser didnt break responses to the cost question down by party. A January 2019 poll commissioned by the advocacy group Protect Our Care, though, found that 84 percent of all voters would support a policy that would cut down on unexpected bills, so it stands to reason that such a crackdown would also have traction in the Democratic primary electorate specifically.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement When it comes to how political campaigns are conducted, sizable majorities of Democratic voters say that corporations and other large donors have too much influence. In May 2018, for example, 77 percent of Democrats surveyed told Pew that they favored the enactment of laws that would further restrict the influence of such donors on the electoral process. Now consider some known facts about Elizabeth Warren, presidential candidate. Shes been working in politics since 1995, but shes only 69. She has a record of liberal policy accomplishments but explicitly defines herself as being more moderate in her economic philosophy than ascendant Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She launched her 2020 campaign by promoting a comprehensive anti-corruption plan and has instituted groundbreaking rules to prevent large donors from influencing her. One of the things shes most well-known for is cracking down on fine-print consumer abuses like surprise medical bills; she actually came to prominence in part for her work on the subject of medical bankruptcies. The 2 percent wealth tax thing was her idea. She is, additionally, a woman. Despite all this, Warren has been able to raise so little money for her campaign that the New York Times wrote a big story about it, and shes stuck in fifth place in the polls, well behind two frontrunners who are well past age 75 and male. One of those frontrunners is the most donor-friendly Democratic candidate in the race and the other is a self-declared socialist. Voters: You cant trust them! Recent months have witnessed a steady stream of stories about state legislatures attempting to attack or outright overturn the will of state votersfrom discriminatory voter ID laws to the naked power grabs weve seen from legislators in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and elsewhere. While attacks on the right to vote rightfully elicit outrage and media coverage, far less attention is paid to an equally pernicious threat against democracy: bias infecting our juries and their verdicts. This term, the Supreme Court is faced with a series of cases where a criminal defendant has alleged that his right to a fair and impartial jury was seriously compromiseda violation that should concern all Americans. Advertisement Its worth emphasizing: The jury-trial right is critically important to our democratic structure because its the peoples way of exercising control over our third branch of government, the judiciary. As the Supreme Court has said, the impartial jury is a critical guard against the arbitrary exercise of power and ensures the continued acceptance of the laws by all of the people. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In recognition of how important the jury-trial right is to our democracy, close to 200 years ago, the Supreme Court said that it would guard against every encroachment upon it with great jealousy. Unfortunately, the court has not always made good on that promise. Last month, for example, the court denied a petition to review the case of Keith Tharpe, a black man who is on Georgias death row despite one of the jurors who sentenced him to death calling him a nigger who deserved to die. This same juror in that same sworn affidavit wondered if black people even have souls. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized, Tharpes case is an arresting demonstration that racism can and does seep into the jury system. We should all be, to use Sotomayors words, profoundly troubled by the fact that Tharpes racially tainted death sentence still stands. Advertisement Advertisement Also last month, the court held oral arguments in Flowers v. Mississippi. In that case, District Attorney Doug Evans had tried Curtis Flowers six times for the same crime. Over the course of the six trials, Evans used preemptory challenges to eliminate 46 of 49 black jurors. The persistent removal of black jurors is not only an injustice to Flowers, who is constitutionally entitled to an impartial jury, but also an affront to the dignity of the black citizens who reported to court to participate in a core function of our democratic process. These cases prove, as Sotomayor said, that the work of purg[ing] racial prejudice from the administration of justice is far from done. But our challenges are not limited to eradicating racial discrimination from the jury room. Anti-gay discrimination shows up there too. Advertisement Our challenges are not limited to eradicating racial discrimination from the jury room. Next week, the court will consider whether to review the case of Charles Rhines. New evidence shows that at least one juror sentenced Rhines to death because he thought, as a gay man, he shouldnt be able to spend his life with men in prison. One juror recalled another commenting that wed be sending him where he wants to go if we voted for [life without parole]. And a third juror confirmed that there was lots of discussion of homosexuality. There was a lot of disgust. There were lots of folks who were like, Ew, I cant believe that. Advertisement Advertisement The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where I am assistant counsel, has urged the court to grant Rhines petition because, like racial bias, anti-gay bias should not have a place in the jury box. South Dakota, where Rhines is on death row, is trying to trivialize these bigoted statements by pointing out that theyre examples of sexual-orientation discrimination as opposed to racial discrimination. But ultimately, that should be beside the point. The Constitution does not permit a persons race to play any role in deciding whether they should be sentenced to die, and the court should hold that the Constitution does not permit a persons sexual orientation to play a role either. Whether race or sexual orientation, the principle that Chief Justice John Roberts articulated in Buck v. Davis should remain the same: Our law punishes people for what they do, not who they are. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement After the tragic decision to let Tharpes death sentence stand, we hope that the court meets its obligation to protect the right to a fair and impartial jury in the cases of Flowers and Rhines, because if discrimination in the jury box goes unchecked, a pillar of our democracy crumbles. As the Supreme Court has rightly observed, the impartial jury is fundamental to our system of justice. In accepting and deciding important cases that seek to remove state-sponsored discrimination from our jury system, the court must fulfill its singular power to keep the promises of our constitutional structure, ensure public confidence in our justice system, and foster respect for the rule of law. Toward the end of his appalling opinion allowing Missouri to torture a man to death, Justice Neil Gorsuch decided to settle an old score. Last-minute stays of execution, Gorsuch declared on Monday, should be the extreme exception, not the norm. This, Gorsuch sought to make clear, was why the court rejected Domineque Rays strong religious discrimination claim in February, allowing the Muslim inmate to die without his imam present. Ray, Gorsuch insisted, waited to bring an available claim until just 10 days before his scheduled execution. The court had no choice but to spurn his last-minute request. Advertisement Gorsuchs post hoc rationalization of the courts controversial repudiation of Ray spurred withering rejoinders from Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Their debate is unusualthe justices internal squabbles over emergency motions rarely spill out into the open like thisand revealing. With Justice Anthony Kennedy off the bench, the Supreme Court is more bitterly divided over capital punishment than ever before. And Rays execution has become a flashpoint for the justices furious and increasingly public bickering over the death penalty. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The courts ruling in Bucklew v. Precythe did not involve a dispute over last-minute requests for stays of executions. Instead, it centered around Russell Bucklews request not to die in excruciating pain. Due to a rare medical condition, Bucklew might suffocate to death on his own blood if given a lethal injection, so he asked to be killed with nitrogen gas instead. By a 54 vote, the court rejected his request, ruling that death by gas was not feasible in Missouri (even though it is authorized by law) and that Bucklew failed to prove that this method of execution would significantly reduce his risk of pain. Advertisement Advertisement Why did Gorsuch drag Ray into this unrelated case? Gorsuch, however, didnt leave it at that. In the final pages of his opinion for the court, the justice went off on a tangent about death row inmates thwarting their executions with last-minute appeals. Courts should rarely (if ever) grant a stay of execution just days before a prisoner is scheduled to die, Gorsuch wrote. If a lawsuit could have been brought earlier, courts have a duty to toss it out to ensure the timely enforcement of a sentence. Gorsuch cited Ray as an example of a death row inmate who waited too long to sue and thus forfeited his constitutional rights. Advertisement Why did Gorsuch drag Ray into this unrelated case? Recall that Ray did not challenge the method of his execution, as Bucklew did, but rather demanded that Alabama permit his imam to accompany him in the death chamber. (Alabama offered to provide him a Christian chaplain or nothing.) On Feb. 7, in Dunn v. Ray, the court turned Ray away, concluding that he brought his claim too late. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a sharp dissent joined by the other three liberals. (Her dissent was so powerful, and Rays claim so strong, that the court reversed course in a similar case involving a Buddhist inmate last week, after Justice Brett Kavanaugh apparently changed his mind about the rights of religious minorities.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The courts decision in Ray is old news, it involves a man who is now dead, and it is legally irrelevant to Bucklew. Yet Gorsuch revived the dispute in a passage that sounds both gratuitous and defensivea likely effort to respond to Rays many critics. By doing so, he essentially invited the liberal justices to continue to take thwacks at the courts widely criticized action in that case. In dissent, Breyer gladly accepted this invitation. He countered that, contrary to Gorsuchs assertion, Ray brought his claim only five days after he was notified of the policy he sought to challenge. His lawsuit was not last-minute; it was a perfectly punctual response to a new revelation. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Gorsuch shot back that Breyer simply sought to relitigate Dunn v. Ray, then launched into a defense of the decision. According to Gorsuch, Ray was at fault because he misread an Alabama statute allowing an inmates spiritual adviser to be present at an execution. Ray should have guessed that his prison had a secret regulation interpreting this law to exclude all but a Christian chaplain from the death chamber. Moreover, Ray should have compelled the prison to share this confidential rule, which he could not have known about because it was concealed from inmates, at an earlier date. Convinced? Neither was Breyer, who accused the majority of paying too high a constitutional price to ensure Rays swift execution. Nor was Sotomayor, who condemned Gorsuchs wholly irrelevant suggestion that late-occurring stay requests from capital prisoners should be reviewed as presumptively suspect. When the court views these appeals with an especially jaundiced eye, Sotomayor wrote, it makes terrible mistakesas it did in Ray. Advertisement Even todays belated explanation for the Ray decision, Sotomayor continued, rests on the mistaken premise that Domineque Ray could have figured out sooner that Alabama planned to deny his imam access to the execution chamber. Gorsuchs contention that Ray should have somehow divined secret prison regulations excluding his imam remains profoundly wrong. Perhaps a less rushed and skeptical assessment of Rays appeal wouldve persuaded the courts conservatives that, in fact, his constitutional rights had been flouted. Advertisement Advertisement What can we glean from this war of words, which lays bare a great deal of sniping that usually stays behind the scenes? First, its obvious that the liberal justices remain incensed that the conservative majority barely bothered to justify its decision in Ray. (Its one-paragraph decision provided virtually no analysis.) Second, the conservatives believe the liberals misrepresented their actions in Ray, and nownearly two months laterseek to set the record straight. By doubling down, though, Gorsuch only divulged the deeply flawed logic that led the conservative majority to do what it did in Ray. At the time, its single-paragraph order seemed callous. But perhaps its sophistic victim-blaming was better left unsaid. Advertisement Theres a third lesson here: Now that neither bloc of the court must perform moderation in an effort to nab Kennedys vote in capital cases, the gloves are off. Even before Kennedys retirement, my colleague Dahlia Lithwick wrote of the nasty tempers and bitter resentments that emerged during oral arguments in a 2015 death penalty case. The tension and animosity between the justices was palpable and unpleasant, and it bled over into an acidic, acrimonious set of opinions. With a Kennedy vote no longer in play, and little reason for either side to reach Kennedy-esque compromises, this dynamic will only grow worse. And with Kavanaugh serving in Kennedys stead, the court has veered right on capital punishment. Bucklew and Ray are prime examples of our new death penalty regimeand of an era in which the liberal justices play the role of the courts conscience, railing in dissent against its increasingly inhuman jurisprudence. Gorsuch may say that he does not wish to relitigate Ray. But the four justices who tried to safeguard Rays constitutional rights are not finished reminding their conservative colleagues what injustice their zeal for execution has wrought. President Donald Trump takes great pride in his new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. It would be nice if he took a glance at its terms before carrying through on last weeks threats to close the border. The agreement expressly states that the United States does not have unilateral authority to impose a sweeping ban on cross-border trade. Article 34.1 deals with problems arising during the transition period from the North American Free Trade Agreement to the new regime. It begins by recogniz[ing] the importance of a smooth transition from NAFTA 1994 to this Agreement. It then emphasizes this point by providing that NAFTAs enforcement provisions will continue to apply but only to goods for which preferential tariff treatment was claimed under the earlier treaty. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The presidents tweets and casual remarks fail to reveal any awareness of the lawless character of his threats. Nor has there been any public effort to make a legal case for his actions. There is currently no indication that either the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel or the White House counsels office is seriously considering the matter. If Trump nevertheless makes good on his threat, he will not only be disrupting the lives of millions on both sides of the border. He will be creating a disastrous precedent that other leaders can use to legitimate their own countrys breaches with the rule-of-law system constructed since World War II. The president is not only threatening to destroy the complex web of trade agreements that has contributed so much to world prosperity over the last 75 years. He is also defying Americas statutory grants of asylum to victims of political oppression in their homelands. Rather than some arbitrary encumbrance on presidential power, these laws represent postwar Americas response to its tragic failure to provide asylum to Jews and others victimized by the Nazis and Communists during the 1930s. Advertisement Advertisement If the president follows through on his threat, he will immediately be confronted by a host of lawsuits challenging its legality. Undoubtedly, some federal district courts will issue preliminary injunctions, as in the case of Trumps early travel bans. But it is hard to predict whether the courts of appeal and the Supreme Court, which has leaned in favor of broad executive authority, will allow such extraordinary injunctions to continue while they are considering the merits of the presidents legal argumentswhatever they may turn out to be. Even by his own standards, Trumps threats represent a mind-bending violation of the rule of law. There is, however, one straightforward way to put an end to Trumps abuse of power. A bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats should demand that the administration immediately submit a bill to Congress that triggers the process through which the new trade agreement will come into effect. Once Trump acts to vindicate his own agreement, the ball is in House Speaker Nancy Pelosis court. Then after the House approves, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would not be able bottle it up in committee. Instead, the special procedures governing trade agreements provide that the Senate must vote on the agreement within 30 days of the passage of the House measure.* Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement There would then be no need for the Senate to spend 30 days before its floor vote. The lengthy period of NAFTA renegotiation by both the Obama and Trump administrations has already generated broad bipartisan support for the agreement. It is perfectly possible for Congress to preempt legal and economic chaos at the border if Trump is willing to make good on his commitment to submit the agreement for rapid enactment into law. Even by his own standards, Trumps threats represent a mind-bending violation of the rule of law. If he carries them through, he has only himself to blame for its terrible short- and long-term consequences. This piece was originally published on Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy. What is Attorney General William Barr doing removing grand jury information from the Mueller report before disclosing it? While rules govern grand jury secrecy, they contain room for interpretation. Barrs very decision to engage in this process to keep parts of the report hidden from Congress is a danger sign. If Barr is using grand jury secrecy rules as a shield to prevent disclosure of the Mueller report, he may find himself suffering blowback from Congress and the public. Advertisement The attorney generals second letter regarding special counsel Robert Muellers report stated that the report will be released to Congress and the public after Barr and his staff have made redactions that are required. He lists four categories for redaction: (1) grand jury material; (2) material that potentially compromises intelligence source and methods; (3) material that could affect ongoing matters, including ones the special counsel has referred to other parts of the Justice Department; and (4) information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties. While any one of those categories might be interpreted broadly enough to conceal large swaths of Muellers findings, grand jury material is one that permits Barr great discretion in defining its scope. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In his first letter, Barr highlighted Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which provides that an attorney for the government must not disclose a matter occurring before the grand jurythough with some relevant exceptions that Barr did not discuss. Many reasons exist for grand jury secrecyto prevent flight of a target, to ensure deliberations free from interference, to prevent witness tampering, to promote candor from witnesses, and to protect the reputations of those under investigation who are not ultimately charged. As an attorney for the government, Barr has a legal obligation to comply with the rule. Certainly, grand jury witness testimony comes within the definition of a matter occurring before the grand jury, but some courts have defined the scope of the rule more broadly than that. The D.C. Circuit, which likely controls here, has held that Rule 6(e) covers disclosure of the identities of witnesses or jurors, the substance of testimony, the strategy or direction of the investigation, the deliberations or questions of the jurors, and the like. That definition leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. Advertisement Advertisement Some courts have taken the position that reports of interviews of witnesses in anticipation that they will testify before the grand jury qualify as matters occurring before the grand jury, that is, if that information may reveal what occurred before the grand jury. Other courts have held that if the report of an interview was not itself presented to the grand jury, then the report does not become grand jury material. Barrs initial letter to Congress from March 24 stated that Muellers team interviewed approximately 500 witnesses. If Barr wanted to prevent the disclosure of the reports from these interviews, he could try to take the position that they were conducted in anticipation that the witnesses would testify before the grand jury and redact from Muellers report the names of the witnesses and the substance of their statements. He would face significant obstacles potentially including reports conducted for the counterintelligence investigation and those conducted before a grand jury ever formed. But that is not to say Barr would not try this route and, in the event the department gets challenged in court, fight it out there. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Barr might consider even Muellers own analysis to be grand jury material protected. Documents also may become 6(e) material when subpoenaed by a grand jury if they would reveal what the grand jury considered. In Fund for Constitutional Government v. National Archives, the court included within the scope of 6(e) documents considered by the grand jury. Even preexisting documents created for an independent purpose but subpoenaed by the grand jury may, in some cases, be covered by 6(e) where the documents are sought to discover what the grand jury obtained rather than for their own intrinsic value. Barr could share the documents with Congress without violating 6(e), but the fact that they were obtained for a grand jury investigation is the part that would be secret. According to Barrs initial letter, Muellers grand jury issued 2,800 subpoenas. Grand jury subpoenas are most often used to seek records from third parties, such as banks and service providers. A single subpoena might yield thousands of pages of documents in response. With 2,800 subpoenas served, Mueller and his team likely obtained thousands if not millions of pages of documents. If the actual reason for the disclosure of the documents were to inform the public that they were obtained by the grand jury, the documents themselves or even a list of the documents could arguably be grand jury material covered by Rule 6(e). If Barr takes this view, then he might redact reference to them in Muellers report. Once again, the question is how far Barr tries to push the envelope within his zone of discretion. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A very expansive view of 6(e) protection could also prevent the disclosure of materials obtained in a search warrant. Ordinarily, items obtained by search warrant are not considered matters occurring before the grand jury even if a grand jury is investigating the same subject. However, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has stated that where a government agent used search warrants and subpoenas to obtain information indiscriminately the official may become an agent of the grand jury, causing the materials to merge under the protection of 6(e). Barrs letter indicates that Mueller executed 500 search warrants, likely yielding voluminous documents. If Barr were to take the aggressive 4th Circuit approach to search warrant materials, then he could potentially try to shield from disclosure any reference to them. Advertisement Advertisement Barr might consider even Muellers own analysis to be grand jury material protected by Rule 6(e). In Fund for Constitutional Government, the court included within the scope of 6(e) conclusions reached as a result of the grand jury investigations. One of the great curiosities about Muellers report is his failure to reach a conclusion as to whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice. Did Mueller believe that the evidence was inconclusive? Or did he find that while the evidence was sufficient, he was unsure whether charges should be filed for obstruction of justice against the president as a matter of law in light of his role as head of the executive branch? Or was he instead deferring to Congress to decide whether the evidence proved a high crime or misdemeanor for which impeachment is appropriate? Of course, this presumes that evidence of obstruction was presented to the grand jury, which there is good reason to think it was not. Many questions also abound over Muellers conclusion that the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. If conclusions reached as a result of the grand jury investigations are broadly understood and protected from disclosure under Rule 6(e), then we might not learn the answers under an expansive reading by Barr of the rules requirements, or more properly we would not learn whether the grand jury considered the evidence. Advertisement Advertisement One check on Barrs discretion is the courts. While Barr, as an attorney for the government, must adhere to the secrecy provisions of Rule 6(e), he could seek permission from the district court to disclose to Congress the grand jury material in Muellers report. As Judge John Sirica noted in the Watergate case, once an investigation has ended, many grand jury secrecy considerations disappear: There is no need to protect against flight on anyones part, to prevent tampering with or restraints on witnesses or jurors, to protect grand jury deliberations, to safeguard unaccused or innocent persons with secrecy. In deciding that the report of the grand jury investigating Watergate should be disclosed to Congress, the court noted that secrecy must prevail during deliberations, and that any later disclosure will occur at the courts discretion. Trial courts have discretion to disclose grand jury material where the need for it outweighs the public interest in secrecy. Even if disclosing the report to the public compromises too much secrecy, Barr could make a more limited request for disclosure only to Congress. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement If Barr were looking for a way to disclose the report to Congress, he might also find authority under Rule 6(e)(3)(D). That section permits an attorney for the government to disclose a grand jury matter involving counterintelligence to any federal official to assist in that officials duties and permits disclosure of grand jury matters involving grave hostile acts of a foreign power or intelligence gathering by foreign powers to any appropriate federal government official for the purpose of responding to such threats. Muellers investigation has been characterized as, in part, a counterintelligence investigation, seeking to identify links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. So long as the content of the report satisfies the definition of this rule, members of the Senate and House intelligence committees may qualify as appropriate federal government officials, which the rule does not define. The rule provides that the government official receiving the information may use it only as necessary in the conduct of that persons official duties. The attorney for the government could make this disclosure with only notice to, rather than permission from, the court. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Barr finds himself in a position of great power. He could use Rule 6(e) to try to conceal large portions of Muellers report. If, however, he is committed to maximum transparency, as he pledged during his confirmation hearings, then he has a path to fulfilling that commitment by seeking court permission to disclose the report either to the public or Congress or by using any authority he has to provide the report to Congress with notice to the court. For its part, Congress could request Barr reveal the criteria he is applying in making redactionssince the devil is in his exact interpretation of grand jury informationand why he has failed to use authority he possesses to skip the redaction process and provide the report to Congress under exceptions codified in the very rule hes invoked for nondisclosure. If Barr does not invoke the exceptions to grand jury secrecy and provide Muellers report, he may find himself defending a subpoena from Congress. Instead, he could score political points for the administration by agreeing to an outcome that is inevitable anyway. More From Just Security: The Khashoggi Killing at Six Months: How Congress Should Move Forward The Mattis Transgender Policy Will Go Into Effect Next Friday The Power of Awareness For citizens in Sarpy County, Nebraska, reporting threats is as easy as clicking a button. Anyone with Internet access can report suspicious behavior and activity by clicking on a red square labeled TIPS, located on the websites of the countys schools and law enforcement agencies. The tool is part of Awareity, a Web-based platform for threat assessment teams. Weve had well over 400 tips since weve been involved in this, says Captain Kevin Griger, investigations commander for the Sarpy County Sheriffs Office. Griger played an essential role in building a communitywide threat assessment team in Sarpy County. Originating in January 2016, the idea was to keep tabs on people and cases of interest and to involve stakeholders who could act to prevent or mitigate those threats, including schools, the county attorney, the probation office, behavioral health officials, and others. Once the participating organizationsincluding schools, city officials, and the militarysigned a memorandum of understanding, the sheriffs office funded the first contract with Awareity in July 2016. The four school districts in the county now fund the platform, and the most recent contract was renewed in July 2018. After an initial licensing fee, Awareity charges a small amount for each user. You can click on the button and submit a tip, like Bill has a gun and hes threatening to shoot up the school tomorrow, or Sally has a hitlist, Griger says. Sometimes they are less serious in naturebut we get everything. The Web-based platform contains detailed reports and allows users to make updates on particular threats. Notifications about new threats or updates to existing cases are emailed to team members. For privacy purposes, the emails contain only a link that goes to the secure Awareity website where threat information can be viewed. As people come up on the radar, one way or anotherwhether through the school or through anonymous notificationour threat assessment team then sits down and decides what course of action to take to try to mitigate any issues ahead of time, instead of waiting until something has happened, Griger explains. However, not all threats contain plans to harm others. Weve had three suicides prevented as a result of it, where somebody felt it was serious enough to report, Griger says. For example, a school was able to intervene when someone reported that his girlfriend was talking seriously about suicide. When we get that information, were able to send somebody out to make contact, come up with a safety plan right then, and deal with the situation, Griger adds. Awareity allows users to build out different teams and have emails directed to just those groups. So, if an issue comes up at Bellvue High Schoolfor exampleschool officials with access to Awareity can choose to provide the details of the case only to that schools personnel. I think every one of our four superintendents has a license, so they see in real time anything that comes in through their particular school, Griger says. The particular people that are assigned to our threat assessment team can get onto Awareity and see the documents that pertain to each individual case. There are times, however, when schools may choose to escalate the threat and make everyone on the team aware of it. If they think its something thats bigger, and say, You know what, we need to bring this to the threat assessment team meeting and talk about this kidthen you can open it up and let everybody on our team see it, all 20 people, Griger says. When dealing with threat information, he adds that privacy concerns are treated with the utmost consideration. Because we are talking about students, school records, behavioral health issues, juvenile arrest records, things like thatwe restrict it as much as possible, Griger notes. Everybody signs a memorandum of understanding for confidentiality that the things we discuss in our threat assessment meetings are only for those meetings. While the reported threats or tips involve students about 80 percent of the time, sometimes the cases pertain to the community at large. One man, for example, was put on the list for making threatening comments to a county official. Hes always bringing in these odd things to the courthouse where hes suing us for $5 million, but they dont make sense, just weird gibberish that he writes out, Griger says. But he did threaten one of our county attorneys, so while hes somebody we dont feel has the means to carry it out or even the heart to carry it out, its somebody we are watching. At monthly meetings, the threat assessment team discusses cases and can decide to eliminate threats that are no longer credible. I have a list that we maintain, and I say, Okay John Doe is on this list, we have a safety plan, and after six months we decide if we can drop John Doe off the radar, Griger notes. We dont need to talk about him every month if theres no change or update. Awareity has been responsive about making tweaks or changes to the platform to better suit the countys needs, according to Griger. Its been a great program for us. The business itself has been very receptive to any ideas that we have to make it more user friendly, so if we ask, Is it possible to tweak it like this? they say, Absolutely, he adds. They are very responsive to doing things and changing things the way we want them done. Overall, Griger notes that smaller threats can have a snowball effect, sometimes quickly escalating into bad situations, so prevention is key. While being picked on while riding the bus isnt a big deal in the grand scheme of whats happening in the entire world, to that kid who reported it, or to his parents, its a big deal to them, Griger notes. He points out that the student could decide to retaliate one day with violence if the bullying doesnt stop. If we can deal with issues early on, that is better for everyone, Griger says. For More Information: Rick Shaw, [email protected], awareity.com. Robert Gilpin, R.I.P. - The Washington Post : His greatest book was written in 1981, but the main theory in it is perhaps more trenchant now... We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies , click here. 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. Companies can view office space as a service. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Company owners are searching for more effective solutions for managing their companies. One of such solution is shared office space; as much as 80 percent of companies using this solution put cost reduction as the reason. This way they save especially on costs needed for acquisition of offices and rentals, as well as repair and maintenance costs, a survey conducted by International Workspace has confirmed. As much as one third of the surveyed 18,000 companies from 69 countries listed savings between 5 and 10 percent after they moved into shared office space, while one half put savings between 10 and 20 percent. Less than one fifth of companies claim that their costs fell by more than one fifth. The company can invest saved costs into other parts of the business, its extension or development of its employees, said Karol Pelan, manager of the company Regus for the Czech Republic and Slovakia as cited by the TASR newswire. Also, big corporations have already realised that costs for office rental and maintenance do not need to be a fixed item in the companys structure of costs. When opting for shared office space, companies can consider office space like other services and pay only for what they need at a given moment. Operation Anthropoid was one of the most heroic and defining moments of the 20th century in Europe - carried out by a Slovak. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the third most influential man of the Third Reich, was one of the most heroic and defining moments of the 20th century in Europe. The act, carried out by Slovak Jozef Gabcik, determined the future of Europe. I am a soldier. I was given an order that I had to accomplish, Gabcik once said, as claimed by 90-year-old war veteran Vladimir Strmen. Gabcik's profile has been recently aired by the public-service broadcaster RTVS as part of the television poll The Greatest Slovak, partly in the form of a documentary. Instead of inviting writers, actors and directors of foreign origin, RTVS decided to bet everything on Strmen. The bet paid off. Veteran wins over famous stars Company Letmo SK wants to empower people with disabilities. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Category: Main Award for a Responsible Small/Middle-Sized Company 2018: Letmo SK 2017: Anasoft APR 2016: Osetrovatelske Centrum Have you ever thought of why a company selling wheelchairs is called Letmo? The explanation is simpler than you may think: the companys name is a short version of the Lets Move! phrase. We will put those who want it in motion, said Miroslav Zeman, the companys authorised representative, meaning it literally. The company does not just construct ordinary wheelchairs. It also offers special ones that can be controlled by the chin, head or even breath. Moreover, it tries to simplify the lives of people with disabilities in several other ways, for exampke by offering anti-decubitus chairs or solutions to remove barriers and transport immobile patients. Childhood played a role Zeman comes from the Czech Republic. He lives near Brno, where he also established his first company selling wheelchairs in 2000. He later spread his business to Slovakia, specifically to Banska Bystrica. The reason was simple: he wanted to be in the middle of Slovakia for distribution reasons. The citys proximity to the Kovacova rehabilitation centre also played a role. I now focus exclusively on Slovakia, although I still live in Brno, Zeman said. The inspiration to establish a wheelchair business came from his childhood. He lived in a block of flats that was barrier-free. These buildings, often called special purpose houses, were not very common at the time. The fact that he was surrounded by wheelchairs had a big impact on him. It is hard to explain, but you see the world differently through child eyes, Zeman admitted. People with disabilities can be self-sufficient He became more interested in the business thanks to the father of his friend, Vojta Vasicek, who was also a winner from the 1992 Summer Paralympics in Barcelona. Vasicek introduced him to the right people and in a few years time, Zeman founded a company with eight employees. Even though it is not a family business, its character is reminiscent of one. What Zeman finds striking is that back in the 1980s, most people with disabilities were self-sufficient. They had a job and could also drive a car. Many of my friends have disabilities and I dare say that their inventiveness and self-sufficiency in the past cannot be compared to todays resignation and ongoing complaints, Zeman said. What Zeman also observed is that the authorities in Slovakia and the Czech Republic often try to save money on passive patients using wheelchairs. However, if the state supported them to be more active, its investment could be refunded. These people can still study, work and settle down. Spreading awareness Since it is often hard to find information about wheelchairs and possibilities for patients, Zeman and his company launched a Vozickar.info website. We knew we needed to raise awareness of a target group, but we did not have a system of financing, Zeman said. We eventually came up with the idea that our clients work on the content. Instead of a financial reward, they receive our products. In the following years, they launched some other websites. This includes Vozickar.tv, which has more entertaining content, and Medzery.sk, where they can report what they are missing in the system. The company also organises a fair, which they invite the competition to. We are a marketing platform that helps clients make a choice and provide a service, and brings interesting speakers, Zeman said. Contaminated soil was allegedly used in the construction. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled The police have charged one person, identified as M.J.H., and one legal entity, a Bratislava-based company, in the case of the Bratislava ring road construction. There is a suspicion that contaminated soil was used at the construction site. They are charged with threatening and harming the environment, the TASR newswire reported. If they are found guilty, they could spend between four to 10 years in prison, the police wrote on their Facebook profile. The police did not provide any further details since the investigation is still underway. Environmental crime in question Read also: Read also: Police carry out raid in connection with ring road construction Read more The police officers raided several spots in Bratislava and its surrounding on March 28, due to suspicions that environmental crimes had been committed. It has been reported that the contaminated soil was used in the construction of the D4/R7 ring road. Experts from the Environment Ministry also participated in the raids. The police officers of the Regional Police Headquarters criminal department carried out 11 house searches and searches of other premises and land linked with the environmental crimes, the police specified, as quoted by TASR. Spanish manager charged The police have allegedly detained four people, including drivers active in waste management. They also went to the house of Javier H., who represents the Spanish consortium responsible for building the ring road, and took him in for questioning. The Bratislava ring road is being constructed by a consortium of companies under the leadership of the Spanish company Cintra. The road is being built as a public-private partnership project. The concessionaire is expected to build the road and operate it for 30 years. At the same time, the state will pay installments amounting to 52.8 million a year, to the company, over the 30 years, TASR wrote. It took several hours for firefighters to finally gain control over the fire. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled An area of forest in the High Tatra mountains caught fire on the afternoon of April 1. It started in the state forest close to the Tatranske Zruby settlement, the SITA newswire reported. Nobody was harmed Dozens of firefighters were working on the spot. The fire broke out about half a kilometre away from the settlement, over an area of one hectare. The situation was complicated by strong winds that were spreading the flames. No people were harmed. Luckily, the fire did not damage the houses or citizens of the settlement, said the mayor of Mesto Vysoke Tatry, Jan Mokos, as quoted by SITA. 14 professional and 29 volunteer firefighters, together with 20 pieces of equipment were working on the spot, the regional headquarters of firefighters and rescuers in Presov informed. The volunteer firefighters were from the Tatras and the close surroundings. People from the settlement also helped, Mokos told SITA. They all mobilised to keep the fire as far from the settlement as possible. Not the first fire The southern hillsides are dry because of the warm weather, which is why the municipality stays on alert. There have been several fires in the Tatras already. We have called on the firefighters several times to organise educational lessons for our citizens; we live in the foothills where fires can happen anytime during a time of drought, Mokos said, as quoted by SITA. The cause of the fire this time was probably a human factor, according to the mayor. One possibility is that someone threw away a cigarette butt. However, he did not exclude the possibility that it was started on purpose. It is suspicious since there were two fires in the same locality last year, Mokos said, as quoted by SITA. This one is the third. It is not the first fire that has occurred this spring either. Two fires broke out last weekend near the Roma settlement of Strane pod Tatrami. The European Commission's decision comes at a time when retailers are supposed to pay a special levy for the first time. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled The European Commission has issued an injunction requiring Slovakia to suspend the application of a special levy on retailers, which came into force in January 2019. Read also Read also Q&A: How will the new levy on retailers affect people? Read more Under the current valid law, retail chains were expected to pay 2.5 percent of their turnover to the state, if at least 25 percent of their turnover originates from the sale of food. 87 million a year was expected to be collected. The first payment would have been due by the end of April 2019. The EC also opened an in-depth investigation into a tax on the food retail sector in Slovakia on April 2. It has concerns that certain exemptions from the tax give some retailers a selective advantage over their competitors, in breach of EU State aid rules, as it stated in a press release. With the EC defending the large, rich and strong, it was able to send Slovakia a response within an incredible three working days, Agriculture Minister Gabriela Matecna (SNS nominee) responded, criticising the decision. The Agriculture Minister went on to condemn the EC for its sluggish decision-making efforts in issues such as dual food quality and unfair retail practices. Meanwhile, SNS head Andrej Danko announced he would not amend the law but rather scrap it completely. In the following minutes, I will prepare a draft bill to abolish the levy, he said, as quoted by the TASR newswire. Why is the levy problematic? As the EC wrote, the law introducing the special levy enables to fully or partially exempt food retailers from the payment of the tax, if they fulfil one of several conditions concerning their size, geographic scope of operation in Slovakia and/or type of activities. Furthermore, retailers that are members of trading alliances or franchises would not pay the tax either, despite the fact that their combined turnover is comparable to that of the largest retailers. As a result, only seven food retailers would have to pay the tax, with six of them being owned by companies based in other EU member states. The only Slovak-owned retailer subject to the tax would have a significant part of its turnover exempted, according to the EC. Read also: Read also: INESS: The new levy on retailers costs households 50 million Read more Slovakia did not announce the tax to the Commission, the press release reads. The Commission started to look into the matter following information it received from stakeholders. In December 2018, the Commission also received a formal complaint alleging that the Slovak retail tax is in breach of EU State aid rules. The EC should initiate an investigation into who decided on the suspension of the special levy in Brussels and how, responded Matecna. She believes the EC has succumbed to the lobby. We will ask the EC to launch an investigation into which officers made the decision and which lobbyists they met before, Matecna said. In addition, the ministry has not received any explanation as to why the EC has taken this step, Matecna claimed. Besides, it is unacceptable for the EC gives information to transnational lobby groups almost two months sooner than to member states, the Agriculture Minister maintained. The EC takes its time when it comes to consumers, but it is very prompt when it comes to rich firms, Matecna added, as quoted in a press release. Food prices did not rise The ministry also refutes the claims that food prices increased due to the special levy. Read also: Read also: Extreme rise in food prices: Who and what to blame for it? Read more Food prices have been increasing for years because of transnational retailers, which destroyed independent shops, our food producers, and flooded us with goods from abroad, SNS MP Eva Antosova said, as quoted in the Agriculture Ministry's press release. At the same time, Matecna admitted to having shopped at the end of March. She will do the same shopping a month later and compare food prices in public. This is her way of convicting the media, opposition and analysts for spreading misleading information on the increase of food prices. I want to inform the public today that food prices are decreasing from April 1, Matecna said, as quoted in the press release. She is calling on retailers to lower the prices of food products by a special levy, which has not been paid yet. The levy will be scrapped Danko pledged to scrap the levy during his press conference on April 2. However, if food prices do not fall, he is ready to ask the finance minister for stricter tax controls for the transnational retailers in Slovakia, which were to pay the special tax. Retail chains may have won the battle, but they havent won the war against the state, Danko said, as quoted by TASR. I am convinced we must check their financial reports more thoroughly. He went on to say that only one sentence could be changed in the law to comply with the ECs requirements, but he does not want to fight with retailers anymore, TASR wrote. The EC suspended the levy because Slovakia did not tax the Slovak retailer COOP Jednota in the same way as it did for transnational retail chains, Danko claimed, as reported by TASR. His SNS party submitted a proposal to scrap the levy for the parliamentary session on April 3. The MPs agreed that it will be discussed in a fast-track procedure during the ongoing session. If they pass its cancellation, the EC will have no reason to investigate the levy, the Sme daily reported. The immunity report was conducted for the first time in 16 years. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Slovaks in their thirties are at risk of contracting measles, according to a recent immunity report carried out by the Health Ministry. The last document of this nature was prepared 16 years ago. Read also: Read also: Vaccination is not about business, health minister says Read more It would be suitable if the re-vaccination of adults was compulsory and covered by health insurance, suggested Peter Makara, head of the Slovak Society of General Practice (SSVPL), who is surprised by the findings, as quoted by the Pravda daily. The latest report on the state of the population's immunity was conducted in 2018. Its goal was to learn how immune Slovaks are to measles, mumps, rubella and viral hepatitis A, B and C. In total, 332 doctors and 4,218 people ages 1-69 from different regions were involved in the survey. The ministry paid 250,000 for it, Pravda wrote. The threat of measles returns The survey showed that people aged 35-39 years have the alarmingly weakest immunity to the measles. It is a slow disease, and one in a million cases can result in severe brain damage and death after 10 or 15 years , said Katarina Holeckova of the department of infectious diseases and geographical medicine at the University Hospital in Bratislava, as quoted by Pravda. Almost 20 percent of people in their thirties do not have, in fact, enough antibodies to fight the sickness, regardless of whether they were vaccinated in the past. Not all people can produce antibodies, said Slovakia's chief hygienist Jan Mikas, as quoted by Pravda. The vaccine does not mean 100-percent protection. However, there are also other factors, including the cold weather and the use of other vaccinations in the past that may impact Slovaks' exposure to the illness, Mikas added. Read also: Read also: Measles return to Slovakia after 20 years Read more On the other hand, children are the most resilient to measles. For instance, 96.3 percent of three-year-olds have a sufficient level of antibodies. Similarly, 97.8 percent of people over 50 are immune to the disease, as reported by Pravda. The measles triumphantly returned to Slovakia, reliving its renaissance, after 20 years. In the last two years, the disease has been spread in the east of the country, causing local epidemics. Mikas has recommended the re-vaccination of Slovaks in their thirties, as well as people aged 25-49 years and the medical staff. It is not known whether the recommendations will actually turn into obligations, Pravda reported. Hepatitis A also causes problems Hepatitis A is another problematic disease as only 10.6 percent of children under five are resilient to it. Overall, 73.8 percent of people are not immune to hepatitis A, according to the survey. The most exposed are children, who live in bad sanitary and social conditions, said Mikas, as quoted by Pravda. He expects that viral hepatitis A epidemics may increase in frequency across all age groups in the future. Read also: Read also: Vaccination holes threaten Slovakia Read more Vaccination against hepatitis is not mandatory, which is why only a low number of people are vaccinated. Experts will therefore decide on whether to recommend the vaccination of children aged 2-5 years. I do not think the vaccination against hepatitis should be obligatory because we are a civilised nation, said general practitioner Valeria Cehulova, as quoted by Pravda. However, it should be required for citizens from a socially-disadvantaged environment, she added. Personal hygiene is key in preventing hepatitis, doctors also claimed. Hepatitis C and other diseases Slovaks are also less immune to mumps. However, this is mostly due to the fact that the vaccination is the least effective, Mikas said, as reported by Pravda. By contrast, the vaccination against rubella is the most effective. In addition, immune systems are sufficiently resilient to hepatitis B. Slovaks have been required to get vaccinated in this case since 1998. Experts also tested Slovaks for hepatitis C, for which there is no vaccination available. There is no threat caused by this disease, however. We discovered only four cases of this illness, and all the patients have been offered medical treatment, added Mikas, as quoted by Pravda. By voting for Caputova, Slovaks confirmed their devotion to European values. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Emmanuel Macron during his visit to Bratislava in 2018. (Source: SITA) Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled French President Emmanuel Macron sent a congratulatory letter to Slovakia's president-elect Zuzana Caputova. He also invited her for a visit to Paris. The French Embassy in Slovakia published the text of the letter in French on its Twitter profile. By electing Caputova their president, Slovaks have confirmed their devotion to the European values of progress, freedom, and solidarity, Macron wrote. "Europe needs strong, free, and respected voices like yours to be able to continue our commitments regarding the rule of law, just multilateral order, and the fight against climate change," Macron stated. Like never before, France and Slovakia are being called to reform the EU. The reactions to the presidential election result come just as the European Parliament election campaign is starting across the continent. There are concerns the eurosceptics might strengthen their positions in the EP after the election, Euractiv.sk wrote in its report about Macron's letter. Read also: Read also: Macron to Slovaks: Use every opportunity to take part in the European dialogue Read more In it, the French President uses the language that his party is using in the EP election campaign, Euractiv.sk wrote. Macron also encouraged Slovaks to change Europe's future during his visit to Bratislava in October 2018. You are convinced Europeans and you trust European ideas, Macron said back then. Change the future of Europe. Its up to you, up to each member state. Use every opportunity to take part in European dialogue. They say there is no rest for the weary. There is also, unsurprisingly, no rest for those unwilling to slow down. Few know this better than Robby Grubbs, the owner of San Antonios Merit Coffee, who has overseen significant statewide expansion in the last 18 months, first into downtown Austin, and now into Dallas. Turns out Merit has a whole lot in store for the Big D, including a stunning new coffee 2,500 sq. ft. coffee bar in the Deep Ellum district of downtown, and overseeing a brand new cafe in the tony Highland Park neighborhood, open this very day of publishing, April 2nd. Lets start with Deep Ellum first. The neighborhood is a Dallas cultural epicenter, but as a district its been historically rough on coffee shops (or anything that isnt a concert venue, bar, or tattoo parlor for that matter). A dearth of nearby housing has for the longest time relegated one of the only walkable areas of the city to a nighttime only destination. A lack of daytime foot traffic is death to coffee shops. But Deep Ellum is seeing that axiom bendif not break entirelythanks to revitalization efforts bringing in more businesses and eateries over the past few years that require an audience during sunlight hours. The newest edition to these efforts is Merit, who is betting big on this changing tide. Working with Austin-based architect Michael Hsuwhose previous work includes Austin favorites Uchi, La Condesa, Sway, and the iconic burger stand P. TerrysMerit has transformed the space that was previously home to funky antique store Lula Bs into a modern cafe. What was once a warehouse-like space has been given a total overhaul, including near-floor-to-ceiling windows comprising a majority of the southern- and eastern-most walls that allow in lots of natural light throughout the day, imparting a sense of openness to the cafe. Inside, the spaces antique shop past life is equally unrecognizable from the clean, buttoned-up cafe in its place. Through the front doors, guests are greeted by white counter-topped light wood bar offsetting the not-quite-navy-not-quite navy backsplash tiles, a nod to Merits preferred color palate. A matter-of-fact white lettered, light-wooded menu board along with the pastry case full of tasty treats from local Bisous Bisous Patisserie give subtle cues to how, where, and what to order. Following the bar space back, a pour-over station consisting of two Modbar modules jut from the clean counterspace, where baristas make single-serve coffees via Kalita Wave brewers with coffee ground through the white Mahlkonig EK-43 sitting at the right angle bend of the bar, the demarcation between the brewed coffee and espresso sections of the bar. For espresso-based drinks, Merit has stuck with the white Mahlkonig/Modbar combo but have switched it up to include to PEAK grinders, three espresso modules, and two steam valves from Modbars new AV line. The remainder of the space is divided between tables, zig-zag bench seating, and a glass-encased training center where Merit will host wholesale clients and other training classes. There are no half-measures in this build-out. No bets have been hedged. Even as a relatively unknown brand to the Dallas consumersave for the occasional guest spot at Communion in Richardsonand opening in a difficult part of town for coffee shops, Merit is going all-in. For Grubbs, a former Dallas resident whose ties include opening the Texas first Starbucks here some two decades ago (not to mention meeting his spouse just a few blocks away), the timing was right for the move. Dallas felt like the natural direction to go, Grubbs tells Sprudge. The opportunity presented itself thru the Developer, Asana. We met them through a deal in Austin and we fell in love with their portfolio and their history of doing things right. We realized that we are a little early in what we believe is a killer transition in Deep Ellum, which made it even more attractive. We are super stoked about attracting more daytime traffic here. The Deep Ellum cafe is just the first step in Merits plan to grow their presence in Dallas. The second Dallas outpost is located in the Highland Park neighborhoodnext to what Grubbs tells me is the busiest Drybar in the countryopens today. Building two shops simultaneously in a brand new city is an aggressive growth strategy, but as Grubbs explains, We knew we wanted at least two locations. It just so happened Deep Ellum and Highland Park came on the radar at the same time and both were too good to pass up. Merit will also ramp up wholesale efforts in Dallas once theyve gained a bit more of a footing in the city. In order to meet the demand, the San Antonio-based roastery commissioned a 45-kilo Probat roaster, up from the two 25-kilo and one 12-kilo Probats they currently run. Once the two new cafes get up and running and the wholesale program is humming along, surely Grubbs is going to slow down, right? Nope. Even with all this Dallas activity, Merit has been simultaneously developing a third Austin location. That will bring the total count of locations for the Merit/Local family of coffee bars up to 11 here in 2019, making them inarguably the most prolific and expansive of the new generation of Texas independent coffee companies. That its all come at such a blistering pace over the last two years is nothing short of astonishing. Grubbs closed my interview with him by teasing further Texas expansion, as well as continued growth and development within the three cities they currently call home. One thing is for certain: Merit is putting a premium on growth, even if it comes at the detriment of sleep. If the opportunity too good to pass up comes along during the planned and much-need breather, well, then its like Grubbs says: Plans schmans. Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge. After processing more than 530 nominations for three-year-old and older horses for the 2019 Indiana Sires Stakes season, the Indiana Standardbred Breed Development Program is looking forward to yet another exciting year. Past Breeders Crown champions and Dan Patch award winners will return to battle it out at Harrahs Hoosier Park in Anderson for more than $8.5 million in purses. The list of past champions and fan favourites is very long this year, which excites us for the 2019 race season at Harrahs Hoosier Park, said Jessica Barnes, director of racing and breed development. Just reading through the list, these are going to be some fun races. Perennial champion sire Always A Virgin leads the nomination list with 23 three-year-olds nominated, including Egomania, the 2018 sires stakes champion. The son of Has An Attitude earned $213,100 in 2018 for owners Country Club Acres, Joe Sbrocco, Richard Lombardo and John Fodera. The 2018 Indiana-sired champion filly Glorious Virgin is also returning after earning $195,250 on the track for breeder and owner Emerald Highlands Farm. On the trotting side, sire Swan For All is represented with 22 three-year-olds nominated for the 2019 season. Eleven Star Stables Kissesforall, earner of $194,300 in 2018, is among the top horses returning. Grand Swan, winner of the Indiana Sires Stakes Super Final at Harrahs Hoosier Park also looks to return to defend her title. The older division should be fun to watch later in the year, as previous champions Always Giggling (Always A VirginGiggles The Clown) and Always Woggy (Always A VirginSoggy Woggy) being nominated again. Three-year-old filly pace champion Voom Or Bang (Always A VirginVavoom Hanover) moves up to the older ranks. Returning stallion/gelding pacing champions Always A Prince (Always A VirginGlorious Princess) moved up to the older ranks and will see competition from 2017 Breeders Crown champion Beckhams Z Tam (Always A VirginSaras Lucky Charm), Breeders Crown champion and Indiana favourite Freaky Feet Pete (Rockin ImageSkyway Lori) and 2018 Indiana Older Pacer of the Year Rockin Ron (Real DesireIm All A Roan). Two-time Breeders Crown champion and 2017 Horse of the Year Hannelore Hanover (Swan For AllHigh Sobriety) looks to rebound on the track in 2019, and is nominated to take on 2018 Indiana Trotter of the Year Custom Cantab (Mr CantabCustom Model) and former Indiana Sire Stakes champion Churita (Airzoom LindyStonebridge Volare). Breeders Crown champion Fiftydallarbill (Swan For All-CR Dixie Chick) and 2018 Indiana Sires Stakes champion Katkin American (GuccioKatkin) are moving up to older competition in the stallion/gelding trot to take on 2018 Breeders Crown champion, Dan Patch Older Trotting Horse and world record holder Homicide Hunter (Mr CantabEvening Prayer). The 2019 race season will also debut the new format for the Indiana Sires Stakes. Three-year-olds will have eight legs with the $250,000 Super Final, while the two-year-olds will have six legs with a $250,000 Super Final. The revamped sire stakes program is estimated to pay out $8.5 million in purses during 2019, in comparison to $7.8 million distributed during 2018. When combined with additional opportunities for Indiana Sired and/or Bred horses, such as Late Closers, Indiana Sired Overnights, Fair Stakes and the Mini Series, the 2019 Standardbred Breed Development Program will offer more than $13.6 million in purses and incentives for program participants. The deadline for two-year-old nominations is April 15. The official sires stakes season starts May 29, with the first leg of the three-year-old filly trot, with the Super Finals slated for Oct. 11. (Indiana Horse Racing Commission) Opinion polls show that most Russians accept corruption as a basic element in Russian culture and unlikely to be eliminated any time soon. Most Russians also complain that the prevalence of corruption hurts the economy and is another unpleasant aspect of life in Russia. While the government makes a big deal (lots of publicity) about anti-corruption efforts it is widely understood that when some major government official (usually a former official) is arrested and charged with corruption there is more to the story than that. First, the official is probably guilty as charged and the details make interesting reading. The other part of the story is generally not published and involves the details of which other senior official the corrupt official offended. That is the usual reason for a senior politician or military officer getting prosecuted for corruption. While there may be no honor among thieves there is a code of conduct and those who misbehave are publically spanked, lose a lot of money and often spend some time in prison. Another unique aspect of Russian corruption is that it is much less tolerated in the military, where it has also been rampant for centuries. This corruption is seen as a major factor in Russian combat disasters. Even military leaders accept that, but in peacetime, the opportunities are too abundant and the discipline too inadequate to prevent corruption. Government prosecutors estimate that military corruption costs the military over $500 million a year and disrupts the operation of units, major programs and everything else. Despite the frequent prosecutions it is believed corruption in the military is increasing. There were 2,800 officers and officials prosecuted in 2018, an increase over previous years despite so many of those prosecuted getting convicted and imprisoned. Syria There are a number of complications in Syria that have led to a frustrating and costly stalemate. Many of these revolve around what to do with the Syrian Kurds. In addition, Iran has problems with Israel in Syria, as well as its own allies. The Iranians want the Syrian government (controlled by the Assad clan) to accept Iranian domination (as Hezbollah does in Lebanon). Iran also agrees with Turkey that the Syrian Kurds should not get autonomy and should accept rule by the Iranian backed Syrian government as well as Turkish control of border areas. Iran has a major problem in that no one wants them in Syria much less acting as an occupying military force dedicated to starting a war with Israel. The Russians would prefer that the Turks and Iranians got out of Syria and that the Assads and Kurds worked out a compromise (which the two seem willing to do). The Americans, Israelis and most other Middle Eastern nations agree with this approach. The Kurds have some additional problems. The SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), the Kurdish led rebel militia, wants some help in dealing with the 5,000 ISIL fighters (and 24,000 family members) they have captured so far this year. SDF has detained 72,000 people who left the last ISIL stronghold over the last year or so. These are held in a large refugee camp and various governments are being asked to verify who is a citizen of where. The UN has been asked to take custody of those found to be stateless. Iraq has agreed to take about 30 percent of the refugees and prosecute those who are suspected of ISIL crimes. Many of the ISIL wives are obviously still active ISIL members and many were caught smuggling weapons into the camp when they were searched before entering. These ISIL women are terrorizing other camp residents and seeking to intimidate the camp guards. The Kurds need help paying for the camp and want the nations these people came from, including Syria, to claim and take custody of them. All of the camp residents claim to be non-Syrian but for many of them, that is unclear. A growing number of nations, including Russia, have agreed to take their citizens back although some nations are revoking the citizenship of camp residents and that keeps these stateless people in the camp longer. On the plus side, the existence of the refugee camp discourages Syria and Turkey from attacking the Kurdish controlled northeast because if they capture the camp they are then responsible for it. The refugee camp is not the main reason Syria or Turkey hesitates to attack the Kurds. The possibility of being repulsed is a real threat and heavy casualties are a certainty. The Kurds still have powerful allies, but it is uncertain how far the Americans, Britain and other NATO countries, as well as Israel and Russia, will go to help defend the Kurds against Turkish or Syrian/Iranian invasion. Then there is the fact that that just about everyone opposes the Turkish presence in Syria. Russia has taken the lead in brokering agreements that would solve most of these disagreements regarding Turkey or Iran. So far there has been a limited success with only Israel willing to work with Russia. Israel and Russia have been cooperating in Syria for years but Turkey and Iran are determined to have their way despite the opposition they are encountering. March 31, 2019: The U.S. has suspended Turkish participation in the F-35 fighter program because Turkey insists on buying the Russian S-400 air defense system. The F-35 was designed to defeat systems like the S-400 and Turkey is no longer trusted to honor its commitments to maintain secrecy about exactly how the F-35 operates. Turkish firms are also manufacturing some F-35 components but the U.S. Department of Defense is already arranging for secondary suppliers of these components to start production. Turkey has received two F-35A aircraft and Turkish pilots are training on the F-35 in the United States. The training will cease and if the Turkish ban becomes permanent the two F-35s in Turkey will have to be returned. March 30, 2019: Recent Russian opinion polls show that more (now 68 percent) Russians believe there is an economic crisis in Russia. Thats up four percent over a year ago. Only eight percent of Russians believe the crisis will be over in the next year. A survey of members of parliament (the Duma) elicited even bleaker assessments with most Duma members believing the economy was slipping into a depression that would not recover until oil prices rose back to 2013 levels. That is unlikely to happen and the best option is to get the economic sanctions lifted. But Russians admit is not likely to happen with their current government. March 29, 2019: In the south (Ingushetia) 19 members of a police battalion were fired and the battalion disbanded because so many members of the battalion refused to follow orders to use force to disperse a recent demonstration against the provincial government. Apparently, most residents of Ingushetia oppose a treaty signed with neighboring Chechnya in late 2018 to swap territory and settle a long-standing provincial border dispute. Anywhere else in Russia this would not be a big deal but in the Caucasus memories are long and grudges with neighbors are a major source of popular anger and even violence. Still, it is considered disturbing when police refuse to follow orders. The U.S. government reminded Russia that the American Monroe Doctrine is still in effect and the United States will actively oppose Russian efforts to use the hundred military personnel it landed in Venezuela (on March 23) to assist in obtaining repayment of the billions of dollars Venezuela owes Russia. The Americans were told that the Russian troops were S-300 air defense system specialists sent in to make repairs as needed and help get the two batteries of S-300 equipment (especially the radars) working again after the recent power failures. The S-300s were delivered in 2013 and were operational by 2015 using Venezuelan crews. That is not much of an endorsement of the S-300 but for Russian gear, it is fairly common. Western equipment and operators are better prepared to deal with situations like a local power system failure. Russia implied that the 99 Russian troops were there to help with other equipment problems as well. Russia insists its troops are in Venezuela as part of a military assistance program. Brazil, the largest nation in South America and Venezuelas southern neighbor, demanded that the Russians withdraw their troops. The current, pro-Russian Venezuelan government is broke and the largest foreign financial victims are China and Russia. Large defaults on foreign debt have been a feature of South American finance, politics and diplomacy since the early 19th century. In response, the U.S. had established a policy of opposing foreign nations that wished to use force (gunboat diplomacy) to settle these debts. By 1850 that was called the Monroe Doctrine and generally enforced by the Americans in the Western Hemisphere ever since. The Monroe Doctrine evolved, especially as the United States became the worlds largest economy at the end of the 19th century. So while South American politicians still blame America for their financial mishaps they do so safe in the knowledge that everyone has quietly accepted the Monroe Doctrine and understands that these defaults get negotiated, not used as a cause of war. In 2013 the previous U.S. government said the Monroe Doctrine was dead. It had not been used for some time but the Monroe Doctrine was easily revived when it was needed and that was a relief to many nations near Venezuela. Venezuela certainly needs technical help as the current socialist government has mismanaged the economy so badly that GDP has fallen by 50 percent and most of the population can no longer afford to get enough to eat. Medical care is largely non-existent and most people with tech or management skills have fled the country. That was the main cause of the three major power failures in March. The Venezuelan government blames the power failures on American Cyber Warfare but most Venezuelans openly agree that the power system has been in decline for years because of the departure of so many management and technical people. More Russian personnel were already in Venezuela setting up a helicopter pilot training school for support the growing number of Russian made Mi-17V-5, Mi-35M and Mi-26T helicopters used in Venezuela by the military and commercial firms. Ukraine announced that 2,956 Ukrainian military personnel had died so far defending eastern Ukraine (Donbas) from Russian aggression since early 2014. About 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have also died, including many in Russian occupied portions of Donbas. March 28, 2019: The Russian Air Force has received its sixth T-50U AWACS aircraft. This is the upgraded model which first flew in 2011. Russian efforts to replace Cold War era equipment has slowed down but continues. Cold War vintage equipment that can no longer operate is simply retired. The military lacks the skilled personnel necessary to maintain older equipment so tolerates the air and naval forces shrinking because older equipment cannot be replaced on time. The Defense Ministry insists that the needed replacement gear is delayed, not canceled and deliveries do slowly continue. March 27, 2019: In Syria, Israel launched another airstrike on Iranian facilities, this time outside Aleppo. Seven people were killed and at least one warehouse full of weapons and explosives blew up. Israel apparently coordinated this attack with Russia, which is according to an understanding Russia has with Israel. March 26, 2019: In northwest Syria (Idlib province), Turkish and Russian military patrols began in northern Idlib province. This was according to an earlier agreement between Turkey and Russia to maintain the ceasefire in Idlib. To that end, Turkish and Russian troops will patrol the ceasefire line that defines the extent of rebel-controlled territory. The Russian and Turkish troops are enforcing a 12-15 kilometer wide neutral zone across northern Idlib. In return, the Islamic terror groups in Idlib are supposed to allow free use of two highways that connect northern Syria with the capital (Damascus) down south. To compel compliance Russia has resumed its airstrikes in Idlib this month and so far there have been about 140 deaths, half of them civilians, and 100,000 civilians driven from their homes. There are three million people in rebel-controlled portions of Idlib. March 25, 2019: Russia revealed that it had recently lost three soldiers in eastern Syria (Deir Ezzor province) when their convoy was ambushed by about 30 Islamic terrorists in late February. After this ambush Russian and Syrian forces tracked down and killed the attackers. With these deaths, Russia has lost 115 military personnel since 2015 (plus perhaps twice as many military contractors). The military death toll includes 39 killed when a Russian transport crashed at Khmeimin (Hmeimim) airbase in March 2018. March 20, 2019: Russia revealed that its 2015 program to offer para-military training to teenagers had so far gained 350,000 members (and has a goal of one million). The program provides various programs to keep the kids busy and more patriotic. Another reason for the program is to prepare young men for military service. Russia still uses conscription but popular pressure has forced the government to reduce conscript service to one year and because so much time has to be spent with training (to turn civilians into useful soldiers) the military gets little practical use out of conscripts. March 19, 2019: The Russian Defense minister arrived in Damascus (the Syrian capital) to hold talks with Syrian officials and to personally deliver a message from the Russian leader (Putin) to the Syrian leader Basher Assad. Details of the written message were not revealed. Russia, Iran, Turkey and Assad are constantly negotiating the terms of who will control what once all of Syria is free of rebels or Islamic terrorists. Russia and the United States are in constant communication with Israel, which is considered an enemy by Assad, Iran and Turkey. March 17, 2019: Russia and Turkey are setting up a joint coordination center to ensure smooth joint operations between Russian and Turkish military forces in and around the northeastern Syrian province of Idlib. Russia and Turkey are making plans to eliminate the Islamic terror group control over most of the province. March 16, 2019: The United States, Canada and EU (European Union) have sanctioned over a hundred Russian officials and 15 organizations for their role in implementing and sustaining the Kerch Strait bridge and the subsequent blocking of some traffic through the Kerch Strait. What Russia is doing violates international law, which Russia insists does not apply in this situation. March 15, 2019: Russia apparently supplied Iran with the zero click cell phone hacking tech which Iranians recently used to hack the phone of an Israeli politician. Its unclear if this was an authorized transfer of technology to Iran or an illegal one. Both methods are used for Iran to get needed items from Russia. March 14, 2019: In the south (Stavropol), two Russian Moslems from Volgograd (Stalingrad) were followed to a rural village where police tried to arrest them. The two ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) members resisted and were killed. Stavropol is adjacent to the Caucasus and often the scene of Islamic terrorist activity as it is the first part of Russia you enter when leaving the Caucasus. ISIL has been particularly active attacking local Moslem clergy who oppose Islamic terrorism. March 13, 2019: In the northwest (Idlib province), Russia has resumed regular airstrikes against rebel targets in Idlib province. Turkey had earlier announced an agreement with Russia to maintain the ceasefire in Idlib. To that end, Turkish and Russian troops will patrol the ceasefire line that defines the extent of rebel-controlled territory. March 12, 2019: Russia is apparently expecting a fight in Idlib province because at least four upgraded Su-25SM3 ground attack aircraft have arrived in western Syria and the only reason to bring these in is to use them under combat conditions. The only likely combat these days is in nearby Idlib province. Russia is also moving more warships to Syria and these often fire Kalibr cruise missiles at Syrian targets during major Russian operations. March 11, 2019: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is apparently planning a visit to Russia, which is the only neighbor left that can help with smuggling. Russia may not be able to help because Russia is increasingly an obedient client of China rather a somewhat equal ally. Russia cannot afford to defy China in such an obvious way by doing for North Korea what China refuses to do. If Russia cannot help North Korea is faced with growing economic misery and popular unrest at home while the United States and its allies continue to hunt down and disable the many smuggling operations North Korea still uses. Many of these overseas money raising operations are risky to begin with and not as profitable to earlier efforts carried out with more cooperation from China and less scrutiny from the West. March 10, 2019: Turkey has approached Russia and the United States to discuss Turkish plans to invade Kurdish controlled northeast Syria. Russia and the U.S. both advised against it. Turkey pointed out that Syrian refugees were willing to return to Syria is they were allowed to live in areas not controlled by the Assad government. This would include the Turkish controlled areas on the Syrian side of the border. This security zone only extends about 30 kilometers into Syria and only includes the half of the border not controlled by the Kurds. March 9, 2019: Iran is trying to revive its maritime smuggling routes to Syria by obtaining port management agreements with Syria. Iran is running into resistance from Russia as well as Lebanon who fear that this will turn the local coasts into a combat zone as Israel and the Americans put intensive and heavily armed, scrutiny on the area. Although the Assad government will not openly defy Iranian requests it has learned how to quietly cooperate with other nations, especially Russia, that will be blunt with Iran in opposing Iranian proposals seen as too dangerous to work. March 7, 2019: India has signed a $3 billion 10 year lease with Russia to obtain the use of another Akula class nuclear sub. The new sub will not arrive until 2025 and will replace another Akula (INS Chakra) that had earned the reputation of being something of a cursed boat. India had received this Akula II SSN (nuclear attack submarine), the K-152 Nerpa, in 2010 on a ten year lease. The Nerpa was built for this Indian deal and finally completed its sea trials and was accepted into Russian service in late 2009. India was supposed to take it in 2008 but there have been many delays. The Indian crew for the Nerpa had been ready since 2008. Most of the delays stemmed from an accident in late 2008 when, while undergoing sea trials, there was an accidental activation of the fire extinguisher system on the K-152. This killed 20 sailors and civilians and injured more than 20. There were 208 people aboard the sub at the time, most of them navy and shipyard personnel there to closely monitor all aspects of the sub as it made its first dives and other maneuvers. The source of the fatal accident was poor design and construction of the safety systems on the sub. This accident led to sailors and shipyard technicians being fearful of going to sea on the boat. So the sea trials were delayed, even after repairs were made. The post-accident modifications on the K-152 cost $65 million. Traditionally, when a new ship loses lots of people during sea trials it is regarded as "cursed" and unlucky. Sailors can be a bit superstitious, especially when there are dead bodies involved. So far India has not had any problems with this, until the sonar dome incident. When K-152 finally entered Indian service the name was changed from Nerpa to INS Chakra II. This was the same name used by the Charlie class Russian sub India leased from 1988-91. The lease arrangement had India paying $178,000 a day, for ten years, for use of the sub. The 7,000 ton Akula II requires a crew of 73 highly trained sailors. It was Indian money that enabled Russia to complete construction on at least two Akulas. These boats were less than half finished at the end of the Cold War. This was another aftereffect of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several major shipbuilding projects were basically put on hold (which still cost a lot of money), in the hopes that something would turn up. In this case it was Indians with lots of cash and seeking to lease a sub. March 3, 2019: A Russian bulk carrier visited a North Korea port and began unloading 2,092 tons of wheat that has been donated to North Korea as emergency aid. That much wheat costs about $450,000 and will be a lifesaver if it goes to the most malnourished North Koreans. The Russians put no restrictions on what North Korea does with the wheat, so it will probably go to hungry, and increasingly angry, military personnel. Israel revealed that a recent meeting, in Russia, between the Russian and Israeli leaders there was an agreement to carry out a joint effort to get all foreign forces out of Syria. Everybody wants the Turks and Iranians gone but the Syrian Kurds want some Americans to stay and Russia has treaty rights with Syria to operate an air base and a naval facility staffed with Russian personnel. This new agreement does not ban continued Israeli airstrikes against Iranian forces in Syria. March 2, 2019: Venezuela announced a program to sell oil to Russia and to establish a branch of the Venezuelan state oil company in Russia to facilitate this and get around the economic sanctions the Americans have placed Venezuela and Russia. A Russian state-owned oil company (Rosneft) has invested seven billion dollars in Venezuelan oil development projects since 2010 and is owed several hundred million dollars by the Venezuelan government. Protecting this investment is a major economic goal of Russia. Russian naval power analysts believe Russia is maintaining its relative naval strength with the U.S. Navy because the Russian navy continues to get some new ships while the larger American is having more problems modernizing its fleet. The Russian analysts believe the Russian navy is (in terms of overall effectiveness) 45 percent of the American fleet, down from 47 percent in 2017 and a low of 42 percent in 2012. March 1, 2019: members of the Russian parliament were seeking to pass a law that would create a new Internet infrastructure that would restrict Internet use within Russia by confining most Internet users within Russia to web sites within Russia and also funnel all Internet traffic from Russian users through Russian censors who would screen traffic for forbidden activity, particularly soldiers of civilians posting pictures and video of military operations to social media. Parliament backers of this plan were told that such a scheme was technically impossible and would reduce Russian internet users to the sort of local intranet found in North Korea. The North Korean approach ensures that only a select few users have access to the worldwide Internet. But even in North Korea civilians found ways around that. Moreover, North Korea has a primitive and much less productive economy that can function without free access to the global Internet. The Russian economy could not function with such restricted Internet access, something China has discovered and is still trying to overcome. The Russian legislators are outraged at the inability of the military to halt these often embarrassing leaks of military information via the Internet despite numerous efforts to deal with the problem. As a solution, legislators proposed simply making it illegal to post military information on the Internet and prosecute those who violate these rules. Military experts responded by pointing out that this would be ignored or evaded by many military personnel and would make it even more difficult to recruit Russians for the military. Russian Internet officials point out that the technical aspects of this proposed law would be impossible to implement and passing a law would not change that. The Russia only Intranet law is still awaiting a vote and even then it could be vetoed by president Putin, is more knowledgeable when it comes to tech issues. But Putin is willing to sign other new laws that would make it possible to prosecute any Russian who posted material on the Internet that Russian censors (or prosecutors) deemed offensive or disrespectful of Russia or current Russian officials. That is a broad mandate and simply legalizes persecution that is currently carried out illegally by the government and its bureaucracy. Russia legislators are doing what legislators often do; pass a law, declare a problem solved and then try to ignore contrary evidence for as long as they can. The 1960s and 70s were rife with historical activist movements. Discover the impact of the Red Power movement, the Brown Power movement, and other notable crusades for equality that you may recognize even in modern politics. Learn about the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Discover significant protests, activists, and organizations. Explore laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The post World War II period in United States life was full of confident optimism economically, but this vibrancy was not shared equally with women and minorities. Learn about new custom built communities, the consumerism boom, and some controversial elements of the 1950s. New trends in American life began in the 1980s as new attitudes about education, spending, and equality emerged in the United States. Learn how consumerism, cultural expansion, and film/music influenced lifestyle trends in America during the 1980's. Learn about how World War II started and the failure of the League of Nations to avert conflict. Also, find out what the consequences were of World War II. The student movement of the 1960s was formed by college students who wanted to end the conformist culture of the 50s. Study the origins, rise of the New Left, how racial injustice was tackled, campus revolts, Vietnam War protests, and why it ended. Learn about 1960s music and explore '60s artists and music genres. Discover 1960s music influences on society and see what bands were popular in the '60s. Learn about the hippie movement of the 1960s. Read about hippie beliefs and the counterculture movement. See hippie characteristics and the historical events in which they participated. Post-war Great Britain: Reforms, Industry & Economy Great Britain had many political and socioeconomic challenges to overcome at the end of World War II. Explore how Winston Churchill's party lost power, the social, industrial, and economic reforms that were attempted, the independence of British colonies around the globe, and the heralding of a new era with the rise of Thatcherism. What is the Greaser Subculture? Depicted in movies like 'Grease' and 'Cry Baby' Greasers are a subculture associated with edgy rebellion. Look into the history of the Greasers, learning about the influences and fashions that shaped famous fictional and real-life Greasers. Massacre at Wounded Knee | Summary & History What happened at Wounded Knee? This lesson describes the Massacre at Wounded Knee and its impact. Yale University One option for students is the MFA in Painting and Printmaking program offered by Yale University, and students can either concentrate in one of these areas or both. This program requires the completion of a minimum of 60 credit hours, 42 of which are completed within the chosen concentration area. The remaining 18 credit hours can be completed through elective courses, six of which must be taken from a department outside of the art school. According to the 2016 U.S. News and World Report graduate rankings of the best fine arts schools, Yale's program ranked first for painting and drawing, making it one of the best programs in the country. Rhode Island School of Design The Rhode Island School of Design offers a 2-year MFA program in painting that students may be interested in. This program combines a required core curriculum and with open elective courses that students can choose according to their interests. During the final semester of the program, students are expected to complete a portfolio that will serve as their culminating thesis and will be displayed in the Rhode Island Convention Center. Students in the program can work on their painting in both private and semi-private studios and they also have access to other art school facilities, like critique spaces and a computer center. Upon being accepted to this program, students also become teaching assistants, which includes the possibility of teaching an entire undergraduate course independently. This program was tied for second in the nation by the 2016 U.S. News and World Report rankings of best fine arts schools for painting and drawing. School of the Art Institute of Chicago Another option for students is the MFA in Painting and Drawing offered by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The program emphasizes exploration of both traditional and creative painting methods, as students can also incorporate other artistic mediums in their studies and projects. This program requires the completion of 60 credit hours, 39 of which must be completed through studio courses, 12 of which are completed through art history courses, and nine of which are completed through elective courses. It is also required that students participate in four graduate critiques, which are week-long periods during both the fall and spring semesters during which either the entire department or the entire art school faculty provides feedback of student work. As of 2016, this program was tied for second in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Maryland Institute College of Art Students who are currently working may be interested in the low-residency MFA in Studio Arts program offered at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which allows students to focus on painting. In this program, which is ranked fourth in the nation by the U.S. News and World Report 2016 rankings, students attend a six-week summer residency during each of the three years that it takes to complete the program. They then complete the rest of the program components independently from home until briefly returning to campus during the winter. During the time they spend on campus, students have access to private studio spaces and they are expected to develop their own space during the rest of the year that they spend off campus. In total, students must complete 60 credit hours to earn this degree. Columbia University Another option for students is the MFA in Visual Arts program at Columbia University. This program, which is interdisciplinary in nature, enables students to pursue an artistic medium of their choice, like painting. This program's curriculum consists of studio courses, critiques, a lecture series featuring visiting artists, a critical issues in art course, and electives. Students can complete the program in two years and are required to exhibit their work at the end of the first year in preparation for the presentation of their thesis at the end of the second year. Students will have 24-hour access to their own private studios and can also make use of the other art facilities. This program was ranked fifth in the nation by the 2016 U.S. News and World Report ratings of best painting and drawing programs in fine arts graduate schools. Southern Methodist University At Southern Methodist University, students can apply for the MFA program in acting, which is a selective program that only admits eight students per year. Students can complete this program in three years, with each year being devoted to different techniques and theatrical texts. During the first year of the program, students will take courses in movement and speech, among other topics, and can audition for various summer theatre productions. During the second year, students focus on plays written by Shakespeare, as well as other classic writers, and will direct a couple of their own pieces. The third year broadens students' exposure to other playwrights, like Beckett and Chekhov, and involves auditioning for various companies and agents in New York. University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin offers students the opportunity to enroll in its MFA program in performance as public practice. This unique program is designed for artists who are interested in studying performance from a variety of perspectives, as it focuses on the integration of performance with research and writing, and it prepares graduates for careers as performance artists in acting, as well as careers in teaching and directing, among other options. This program can be completed in three years and requires that students complete 60 total credit hours, 36 of which come from the required core curriculum. Students then also must complete 12 credits of electives and six credits of applied practice courses. The final six credits are earned through the completion of a thesis. University of Houston Another option for students is the MFA in Theatre program offered by the University of Houston that allows students to pursue an acting track. This program can be completed in four semesters and requires that students complete a total of 45 credit hours. Students take courses in movement, voice, speech, and acting through the four semesters, in addition to courses that focus on dramatic theory and training as an ensemble. During the summer in between the second and third semester, students are expected to seek work with a professional company to gain valuable experience. Additionally, during each of the two winter breaks in the program, students must complete a turbo-project, which involves rehearsing a theatre piece and presenting it within one week's time. Texas Tech University Students who enroll at Texas Tech University have a couple of options to choose from if they are interested in acting. The MFA program in performance and pedagogy allows students to select either a written thesis option or a project option. Students in the thesis option will complete 39 credits of core courses, 15 credits of electives, and six hours of written thesis credit. The project option entails completing 42 credits of required core courses and 18 hours of elective credits. Some courses that students in either option will be required to take cover topics in different styles of acting, the teaching of acting, and voice and movement. Students in the project track fulfill the requirements of this project by acting in a major role in a theatrical production. The New School - Parson School of Design Students may be interested in the MFA program in photography that is offered at Parsons School of Design at The New School. In this program, students must complete a total of 60 credit hours over the span of 26 months. Of these 60 credits, students can earn 12 of them through the completion of elective courses, which they can select according to the study plan they set up with their academic advisor. The other program credits are completed through studio courses and graduate seminars, as well as the master's thesis that each student must complete. New York Film Academy The two-year MFA program in photography offered at the New York Film Academy is another option for students looking for graduate programs in this field. In this program, students will work more closely with teachers during the first year and gain valuable classroom experience; the second year is designed to foster greater independence in students, ultimately leading to the final thesis project that students plan, design, and implement themselves. This program is designed for students who have previously completed courses in photography or have professional experience, though it is open to novice photographers who opt to complete the one-year photography program at the school before beginning the MFA program. School of Visual Arts - New York City Another option is the MFA program in photography, video and related media offered by the School of Visual Arts - New York City. This program is offered in two-year and three-year formats, with the two-year program requiring the completion of 60 credits and the three-year program requiring the completion of 72 credits. In each format, students will take courses in critique, theory, and history, though the three-year program requires the completion of more history-oriented courses. Students also complete studio courses in which they will further develop their photography skills. Each program also requires the completion of a master's thesis. University of Buffalo The University of Buffalo offers an MFA program in studio art in which students can pursue the study of photography. This program requires that students complete a total of 60 credit hours over the course of two years. The curriculum of this program is split among studio courses, electives, critique, theory and history courses, and seminars. Additionally, students have the option of participating in an international exchange at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. Students in the program are able to access the various art labs in the program's facilities at any time of the day, in addition to having their own personal studio space. The school's photography lab has a variety of advanced pieces of equipment to facilitate student work, including various lighting set-ups, enlargers, and printers. Syracuse University Syracuse University offers an MFA program in art photography that may be of interest to students. In this program, students must complete a total of 60 credit hours: 24 through major studio courses, 12 through studio elective courses, and 12 through other art history and related academic courses. Students then can choose six-credits worth of elective courses, in addition to earning three credits through a graduate seminar and three credits through a final presentation. This program takes a total of three years to complete, during which time students can also choose to participate in a number of global study opportunities in Florence, Italy or the Czech Republic, among other options. On January Armenian beauty Zara Gemilyan became the most beautiful woman of California winning the title Mrs. California Globe 2019. Zara will take part in Mrs. USA Globe on June and if she wins the title she will have the opportunity to participate also in Mrs. Globe 2019, which will be held in China on this December. NEWS.am STYLE has had a very interesting interview with Zara on modeling, career, victory and family. The beauty, 36, lives in Los Angeles for about 20 years. I was born in Yerevan and moved to Moscow when I was one, cause both of my parents went to past graduate university there. But Im very fluent in Armenian. I go back to Armenia at least once a year,-she says. Zara has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pepperdine university in international studies and management and a masters degree (MBA) in business also from Pepperdine university in Malibu. I was a marketing professional for a while but now manages my fathers and brothers construction company. I love music and play piano and violin. My mom is a classical pianist. The beauty of California says she was never interested in modeling in her childhood. As a kid I was always too focused on school and later career and family and had other priorities. Unfortunately Zaras marriage didnt work out, but now she has an amazing son whos 10. Hes my full time commitment. I am in good terms with my ex husband and we are still friendly and respectful towards each other,-she says. Zara became interested in beauty contest, when she realized that having a title increases chances of spreading awareness. My new year resolution was to support more women in need. As a Mrs. California I became a spokesperson for Women in Need foundation and we do fundraisers to help those who are less fortunate. Women participating in Mrs. Globe should show not only their outer, but also the inner beauty and strength. Definitely need to have a strong personality to do anything like this because its easy to break with all the good comes also lots of hatred and judgment. My platform is helping children in orphanages everywhere making them feel a sense of belonging and trying to improve their lifestyle. I was fortunate to be born into an amazing family and my duty is to give back,-she says adding. I think when you really know what you want and work hard towards it, theres nothing hard in life. As for representing Armenia one day in the same contest, the beauty says. I had the honor of being asked to represent Armenia by the amazing Ashot Khachatryan, but I already committed here and I dont like to not fulfill my promises. If I place on top in USA but not end up winning the title, I will still be able to represent Armenia. Syune Arakelyan Photos from Zara Gemilyans Instagram page Follow NEWS.am STYLE on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram The Syrian National Initiative are disappointed with the representation and vision of the Syrian National Coalition and the High Negotiation Commission. A new political group has published a vision for a political solution to the Syrian crisis. The group, The Syrian National Initiative, says in their vision that the High Negotiation Commission (HNC) and the Syrian National Coalition have: turned into puppets that have limited communication with society, and their public representation has clearly diminished. Since the Geneva Communique was issued, the group added, the ruling authorities in Syria have sought: to empty the political process of its basic content of making a fundamental change in the structures of the tyrannical power and corrupted political system. These changes includes: the reform of the military and security branches, determining their functions and missions of serving the homeland and the citizen, as well as the constitutional guarantee of the independence of the judiciary, the legislature, the electoral body and an independent national body of truth, justice and accountability. The Syrian National Initiative is promising to communicate and coordinate with all the independent Syrian parties, to whom they owe their decision and will, and believe in Syria as a modern civil democratic state. This includes the civil society, in the broadest sense of social, religious and civic leadership, as well as political and military components. The group is calling for a national conference based on a set of points, including: Protecting the unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian territories is unnegotiable question. Stopping the course of war, arming, destruction, fragmentation, subordination and all forms of guardianship on the country. The need for the state and society to start the reconstruction as a practical way that will allow for the return of the refugees and IDPs. Reform the Syrian national army as an army to serve and protect the homeland and the citizen away from partisan, ideology, and sectarianism. Restructuring the intelligence services and internal security forces on a professional basis that complies with human rights standards and works to preserve the security of the homeland and the citizen, and integrating the function and role of the new security services in the constitution. Release all political detainees throughout the Syrian territory, investigate the fate of missing persons, and document the crimes of torture and murder in detention and interrogation centers. The criminalization of hatred sectarian, chauvinist speech and terrorism. The Initiative is suggesting a new social contract between all Syrians, which will consider that: the Syrian people have equal citizenship, with equal rights and duties, with no distinction given to color, sex, language or sect. This citizenship is based on a comprehensive national consensus where religion belongs to God and the homeland to all citizens. No one can arrogate himself the right to impose a belief or to choose his ideology and his practice freely. Among the other principles of the new social contract is the: protection of the human being, its dignity. And the security of these protections require the criminalization of sectarianism, terrorism, and violence and the integration of the principle of equality between men and women into the national constitution, in which the constitution guarantees the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and stresses the need to create a legislative and legal environment that ensures womens political, economic and social empowerment and participation in accordance with all relevant international instruments. Among the 250 signatories are politicians, intellectuals, civil society activists, clerics and army officers. Some renowned signatories are: Aref Dalila, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Al-Haj Ali, Haytham Manna, Mumtaz Al-Sheikh, and Laila Batal. Below is the full text of the vision as published by the new group. March 3rd, 2019 We are approaching the eighth anniversary of the peaceful popular movement that began in March 2011 in tragic and difficult circumstances; one-third of the Syrians are scattered between asylum and forced displacement, and one-third of the countrys territories are subject to a rival interest. While the ruling authority refers to the alleged-victory of the axis of resistance on the ruins of the houses of refugees and IDPs, and we witness the slow death of a society that formed the shining light of the Renaissance and the progress of the Arab world and Levant, and gave the best knowledge to the region and the world, we are sadly watching the fateful decisions of this people turn into nothing more than a guardianship between the components of Astana (Russia, Iran, and Turkey) and the remnants of the Western Turkish Gulf axis what is known as the Small group on Syria. The countries engaged in the Syrian affairs have succeeded in controlling the Syrian peoples decision, regardless of their positions. Each of these countries seeks to achieve gains in the field to ensure continuity of its influence on decisions to be made, whether in Damascus or in other areas of control. When the people took to the streets, they called for dignity and freedom, emphasizing their peaceful nature until they reached millions of protestors in some cities. Instead of meeting the demands of the people, the Syrian authorities chose a military-security approach to deal with the civilians pushing the Syrian army into a confrontation with the society, which led to the escalation of violence. The authorities released hundreds of jihadists from Sednaya prison in May 2011 while detaining thousands of peaceful demonstrators. Due to the oppression of the Syrian regime, the peaceful voices were lost, to be replaced by militarization and extremism, which open the door for external agendas to manipulate and control the fate of Syria. We had no doubt that warlords live on so-called military victory, which is just a myth. So we tried, from our different positions, to emphasize on the political solution as the only way out of this catastrophe, and also to reaffirm that the cohesion of the Syrian society is by the hands of only the Syrians. Although on 30 June 2012 the international community agreed on the Geneva Communique, two days before the Cairo Conference of the Syrian opposition, there was an undeclared consensus among the international and local parties to the conflict in order to not place the Geneva outputs on the table. Therefore, we should have waited for the first international and regional consensus between the axes of the conflict, Vienna Conference 2015, where the political negotiations have been agreed upon on a new basis, as referred to in UNSCR 2254. However, the international and regional parties to the conflict were those appointed the negotiators and were those replaced so-called Riyadh 1 negotiators by Riyadh 2 ones. In both conferences, the most important and independent political forces and figures were marginalized and vetoed from participation. The High Negotiation Committee (HNC) and the Syrian coalition have turned into puppets that have limited communication with the society, where their public representation has clearly diminished. On one hand, they represent only a limited group of Syrians, where their most important cadres have been distanced or fired. On the other hand, they are the weakest party in any political negotiations due to the lack of practice and the absence of a clear political agenda. Perhaps the scandal of the Constitutional Committee reveals the disappearance and infertility of these structures. These parties, which boycotted and fought, for example, the Sochi National Dialogue Conference, have adapted its output as their only program in 2018 begging for being part of the potential constitutional committee. Syria has become a scene of warlords and terrorists whose interests are to exploit its resources at the expense of the Syrian people, while the latter became divided between dead, handicapped, detained, homeless and refugees. Since Geneva Communique was issued, the ruling authorities in Syria have publicly refused to speak about the most important executive provisions, which set the principles and guidelines for a Syrian-led transition. It seeks by all means to empty the political process of its basic content of making a fundamental change in the structures of the tyrannical power and corrupted political system. This change includes the reform of the military and security branches determining its functions and missions in the light of serving the homeland and the citizen as well as the constitutional guarantee of the independency of the judiciary, the legislature, the electoral body and an independent national body of truth, justice and accountability. Today, the authority is trying to deal with the Syrian tragedy with the same mindset, as if the revolution and the sacrifices have not happened. This authority is not only dead in the hearts and minds of the people but also no longer convincing its supporters. Similar to the opposition that is being dealt with regionally and internationally, the authority does nothing but to wait for the decisions of different international or regional summits. So, how could this situation lead to the salvation and a promising future? In an attempt to confront with this tragic situation, a large number of national politicians and military personnel have been involved in a joint effort, the Syrian National Initiative that takes into account the political, social, and economic demands of the Syrian people all over the country as the basis of any intra-Syrian dialogue. Starting points for a political solution The transition to a comprehensive national charter, from a proposed founding paper for the future of Syria to a starting point of a political solution, cannot be achieved without mobilizing as many Syrians as possible inside and outside the country. It, also, cannot be achieved without an intra-Syrian dialogue that affects all those who believe that the sustainability of the current means of governance, administration, negotiation, and dialogue cannot be a salvation for the homeland and liberation of the citizen. Therefore, the national initiative will communicate and coordinate with all the independent Syrian parties, who owe their decision and will, and believe in Syria as a modern civil democratic state. This includes the civil society largo senso, in the broadest sense of social, religious and civic leadership, as well as political and military components. It is necessary to bring together as many patriotic Syrians as possible, without marginalizing or excluding of anyone, on a practical essential basis in a national conference based on the following points: Protecting the unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian territories is unnegotiable question. Stopping the course of war, arming, destruction, fragmentation, subordination and all forms of guardianship on the country. The need for the state and society to start the reconstruction as a practical way that will allow for the return of the refugees and IDPs. Reform the Syrian national army as an army to serve and protect the homeland and the citizen away from partisan, ideology, and sectarianism. Restructuring the intelligence services and internal security forces on a professional basis that complies with human rights standards and works to preserve the security of the homeland and the citizen, and integrating the function and role of the new security services in the constitution. Release all political detainees throughout the Syrian territory, investigate the fate of missing persons, and document the crimes of torture and murder in detention and interrogation centers. The criminalization of hatred sectarian, chauvinist speech and terrorism. Scheduling the exit of all non-Syrian fighters and foreign militias from the Syrian territories, regardless of which country they came from and to which party they joined. Peace, freedom, dignity and national sovereignty are not achievable without establishing a state of citizenship for all Syrians away from distinction or exclusion. Cancellation of all special procedures of naturalizing non-Syrians after 2011. The Syrian Constitution is the unified social contract of the Syrians. Therefore, the task of any constitutional committee, to be agreed upon, is to establish the constitutional commitment to the principles of human rights, equality of citizenship, the protection of the Syrian State and its institutions, and the separation of the legislative, executive and judicial powers, as well as the principle of pluralistic peaceful devolution of power and administrative decentralization. Review the special procedures and laws issued from 2011 until today. The Syrian State is committed to return all dissidents, demobilized of the Syrian army, unless they have been sentenced to a criminal or moral penalty, to the ranks of the armed forces, while retaining the staff, ranks, allowances and promotions provided for in the relevant laws. It applies to civil servants as well. Establishing of transitional justice body in order to hold accountable all who has committed crimes against the Syrian human beings. The State undertakes to give back all confiscated, stolen, or illegally abused properties to its rightful owners as well as considering the decree no. 10 null and void. The Syrian State is committed to the safe return of all Syrian refugees and IDPs. The intra-Syrian dialogue is the best way to achieve this program, away from any guardianship, with clear guarantees from the United Nations and within the framework of its related resolutions. Charter of the Homeland and Citizen Since the Arab League Conference of Syrian Opposition 2012 and subsequent conferences and meetings, the most important political and civil movements in Syria have agreed on a set of constitutive rules for a sovereign constitutional state. These fundamental principles are proposed to all Syrians, as the basis of the new social contract between all Syrians. We propose to all national and societal forces these principles as a draft for a national comprehensive charter concerning the future of Syria. A future of dignity for all Syrians. The Syrian people are united on equal citizenship in rights and duties, without distinction because of color, sex, language or sect. This citizenship is based on a comprehensive national consensus where religion belongs to God and the homeland to all citizens. No one can arrogate himself the right to impose a belief or to choose his ideology and his practice freely. The human being is the ultimate goal of the relationship among the Syrians, whose foundation is based on respect for international conventions, namely the economic, social, political, civil, cultural and environmental rights, which all have been enshrined by humanity, as well as the guarantee of the practicing of these rights for all citizens and residents alike. The Syrian people are free and sovereign on their land whos both elements, the territory and State, are indivisible, and there is no right to abandon an inch of it, especially the occupied Golan Heights. The Syrian people recognize their right to struggle for the restoration of their occupied territories by all the legitimate means to resist occupation. The Syrian people are proud of their rich civilization in addition to its cultural and religious depth, which all form an integral part of its culture and society, and builds its state on the basis of unity in diversity with the participation of its different classes without discrimination or exclusion. Individual, public and collective freedoms form the relations among the citizens. The state guarantees public freedoms, including the right to access information and media, the right to establish non-governmental organizations (NGOs), unions, political parties, as well as freedom of beliefs and the right of religious practice, the freedom to demonstrate, the right to strike and the sit-ins peacefully. All these rights should be guarded by laws and rules for not being betrayed by the financial powers or the political authority. The Syrian State guarantees the respect for the social diversity which includes of beliefs, interests and the characteristics of all sectors of the Syrian people. It also recognizes the cultural and political rights of all its components in addition to their aspiration to development and welfare. The protection of human being, his dignity, and his security require the criminalization of sectarianism, terrorism, and violence. The protection of the environment, the national heritage, and the heritage of humanity in Syria is an inseparable element of the protection of the human person and the homeland. Integrate the principle of equality between men and women into the national constitution, in which the constitution guarantees the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and stresses the need to create a legislative and legal environment that ensures womens political, economic and social empowerment and participation in accordance with all relevant international instruments. The Syrian State, along with its Constitution and laws, emphasizes its respect to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and it should express its clear commitment to childrens right to life, natural development and the respect for an opinion. The necessary standards and policies should be implemented for health, psychological, educational and social, civil and legal services for children. Emphasizes the respect to the rights of wounded and disabled persons, and provide them with health and social security, as well as full participation in work and in public activities in addition to the social and cultural communication. Syria is an integral part of the Arab nation, linked to the Arab people by ties of culture, history, interests, great goals and common destiny. Syria, a founding member of the Arab League, is looking forward to strengthening various forms of cooperation and interdependence among the Arab countries. The Syrian people are committed to supporting the Palestinian people and their right to establish their free, independent and sovereign state, with Jerusalem as its capital. The Syrian people are linked to all other Muslim peoples with common historical roots and human values that are based on divine messages in addition to all human commons. Syria, a founding member of the United Nations and its sub-organizations, is a part of the international community. Therefore, it works with other countries in order to establish a world order that is away from all central conflicts, domination, and occupation. An order based on equilibrated relationship, common interests and collective responsibility to face the challenges and dangers that threaten the world peace and security. The people are the source of legitimacy, and justice is the primary govern for the relationship among citizens. Syrian sovereignty is recognized by achieving the link between the homeland and the citizen through both the democratic governance and the civil state. A State governed by both institutions and law where its constitution regulates its social contract. A State where it is banned neither the monopoly of power nor its inheritance in any form. The authority is based on periodic elections and complete separation between the executive, legislative and judicial authorities, on the principle of deliberating power via secret and free elections, with respect for the results of elections organized by an independent body whose outcomes are decided by the ballot box. The new constitution should establish the foundations of a civil democratic regime; a modern and fair electoral system that guarantees the participation of all intellectual and political currents, within a framework of both, the most comprehensive representation of the people and the stability of the parliamentary system. This system will ensure strict control over the financial resources and expenditure of political parties and associations. The Syrian army is the national institution that is responsible for protecting the country and maintains its independence and sovereignty on its territory. It is also keen on national security and does not interfere in political activities. The State adopts the principles of the democratic decentralization, in which the local administration has its own representativeness executive bodies that manage citizens affairs and development in the governorates and regions in order to achieve sustainable and balanced development. The State protects various forms of the organizations of the civil society. It also guarantees the representation and participation of such organizations in executive and legislative decisions, in addition to its role in building the independent judiciary, the National Human Rights Commission and the national reconciliation, accounting, and control bodies. The State should protect the private property, which un-sizable except in cases of general interest, in accordance with the law and subject to the allocation of fair compensation. The law prohibits any form of using the public funds for private interests. The State should regulate both, the public funds and the public sector for the benefit of only the people. Its policy should be based on social justice, sustainable balanced development, protection of vulnerable groups, redistribution of income and wealth through the tax system taking in considerations the diversity of social classes as well as the regions. It also should guarantee the freedom of investment, economic initiative, and equal opportunities and markets within restrictions based on antimonopoly and protection for workers and consumers. The Syrian State adopts the sustainable enhancing of education programs as its forefront of its national responsibilities in order to respond to the need to provide future generations with all the theoretical and practical knowledge and expertise to lead the comprehensive and sustainable human development process. Spreading of modern culture that aims to develop the popular awareness which is based on rational and objective values is an essential task of the state and society. The state has to end all manifestations of ignorance and illiteracy. The Syrian State attaches at best ways all its interests to pursuing an effective policy for communication, interaction and integration between the Syrian diaspora and their homeland. Therefore, the Syrian State should provide them with possible services in order to ensure their effective contribution to the development of their homeland and defending the just causes their people. In this regard, it should effectively implement policies that encourage all the cadres, to return to their homeland where they contribute to the reconstruction and development, as well as to benefit from the experiences and possibilities of those whose conditions do not allow them to return soon. The Syrian State is committed to eliminating all forms of poverty, discrimination and promoting employment with a view to full and decent employment and fair salaries, justice in the distribution of national wealth, balanced development and protecting the environment, and providing the basic services to every citizen: Housing, clean drinking water, sanitation and electricity, telephone and Internet, roads and public transport, quality education and qualification, comprehensive health insurance, pensions and unemployment compensation, at prices commensurate with living standards. First 250 signatures Dr. Aref Dalila Maj. Gen. Mohammad Al-Haj Ali Dr. Haytham Manna Dr. Mumtaz Al-Sheikh Dr. Zakwan Baaj Dr. Salah Wanli Mr. Safai Arkawi Staff brigadier Talal Farzat Staff brigadier Fayez Amro Staff Colonel Mustafa Alfrhat Lieutenant col. Adnan Tlas Journalist Ghayath Kanou Mr. Laila Batal Mr. Mohamed Walid Tamer Mr. Mahrous Alsoud Wael Alkhatib (Captain) Mr. Shiar Horo Dr. Younes Kanhoush Dr. Hesham Al-Sabagh (Lawyer) Mr. Hassan Faraj Col. Abdulrahman Alhalak Dr. Akram Alakrami Abdulrahman Awad Alghazawi (Captain) Dr. Imad Eddin Mahmoud Al-Khatib Brig. Sabri Adel Alawad Mme. Huda Al Masri Mr. Mohammad Sattam Hamdan (Captain) Mr. Fahd Hussein Horo Mr. Nouri Sheikhmous Mr. Muhammad Youssef Goma Mr. Assef Daabul Dr. Khaled Almahamid Col. Jamal Mohammad Bitar Brig. Gen. Zaher Abdulrahman Alsaket Mme. Mounerfah Albarouki Abdulkareem Agha (engineer) Col. Mustafa Dibo Hazani Brig. Ahmad Hussein Anjari Mr. Maram Daoud Col. Yasin Ali Alalosh Col. Abdulrahman Mahmood Alsatuf Col. Mohammad Bassam Fatih Col. Ibrahim Abdulrazak Mansoor Col. Abdullah Ali Alkhutabi Lieutenant col. Ibrahim Mohammad Alhamad Col. Suhil Mahmood Aljawbra Mr. Abgar Malol Battar Al Sharaa (Engineer) Mr. Uqab Abu Sued (Engineer) Mr. Loai Abazeid Col. Adnan Abdulkader Murad Mr. Marwan Abdo Mukhbat Col. Ibrahim Ahmad Khaled Col. Mohammad Ahmad Almuhamad Col. Mustafa Mustafa Ahmad Barakat Mr. Razok Muhamad Alrazok Maj. Abdullah Ahmad Tlas Mr. Hussam Marsheh Lieutenant col. Mohammad Baker Mustafa Alzokawi Lieutenant col. Ahmad Abdulrahman Abo-Shtara Mr. Majed Habbo Col. Khalil Najeeb Alobaidi (pilot) Col. Ali Mahmood Akari Mme. Fatima Sharba Mr. Saleh Alnabwani Brig. Gen. Abdulrahman Awad Alhasan Col. Talal Khaled Alnajm Mr. Mansoor Hasan Hasno Col. Abdulbaset Ibrahim Saad Eddin Mr. Abdulhadi Sari Col. Ahmad Hamade Brig. Mohammad Yahia Brig. Abdullah Omar Zakarya Col. Saleh muteb Alhamada Col. Saado Mussa Aljarodi Mr. Homam Daoud Mr. Mahmood Khaled Alakl Mr. Waseem Abazid Dr. Mohammad Alshaker Lieutenant col. Issa mohammad Ali (pilot) Lieutenant col. Mohammad khairat Alharbat Dr. Alaa kasem Hind Buzo (journalist) Ibrahim Alhaji (judge) Mr. Akram Abduldaiem Brig. Khaled Muhsen Alhalabi Mr. Haian Fayez Amro Mr. Naser Mahmood Alhussein Mr. Waseem Aloudat Dr. Aiman Aloudat Maisam Alzobi (lawyer) Mr. Barakat Alzobi Mr. Ahmad Aloudat Mr. Mohammad Aloudat Mr. Mohammad Al Mahamid Dr. Mohammad Almasri Mr. Mahmod Mafaalani Mr. Kassem Aloudat Mr. Mohammad Alzobi Mr. Ziad Abu Hamdan Maj. Gen. Abdulaziz Alshalal Dr. Imad Alkhatib Mr. Maamon Mahmod Almalki Col. Sobhi Hasan Zaraa Col. Mazen nazeer Bakor Mohammad Ismaeel Farzat (Captain) Mme. Amal Nasr Mr. Adnan Aldebs Mr. Thaer Abdullah Akkosh Mr. Mustafa Saud Alalosh Col. Ahmad Mohammad Maiof Brig. Adnan Abdulkareem Stif Col. Radwan Mahmood Ayoush Col. Farook Mahmod Albdan Lieutenant col. Omar Alshater (Engineer) Mr. Hussein Sheikhmos Othman Aref Hussein Lieutenant col. Ahmad Dabah Al-issa Abdullah Al-Ali (lawyer) Brig. Gen. Adnan Abdulkarim Stif Mahmod Al-Ghadri (engineer) Mr. Ahmad Gamil Al-Ali Fasih Ali Al-Khalaf (Sheikh) Abu-Khaled Goma Dbis (Judge) Mr. Rami Abdelrahman Col. Mohammad Sohil Hardan Mr. Ahmad Khalil Sheikh Mustafa Col. Nizar Ismaeel Sit Eldar (pilot) Mr. Khaled Abdulrahman Al-Saket Mr. Mohannad Issa Mr. Ghassan Abu Hamdan Mr. Ghazi Ahmad Al-Qasem Me. Hassan Al-Othman (lawyer) Mr. Mohammad Ibrahim Col. Haitham Assi Khattab Col. Khaled Qassar Al-Qutaini Lieutenant col. Ahmad Subhi Al-Nemer Lieutenant col. Jihad Rajab Raslan Brig. Abdulsalam Ahmad Orabi Lieutenant col. Adel Toma Col. Majed Diab Mahfouz Col. Ziad Haj Obid Col. Saeed Abdullah Al-Henawi Brig. Gen. Asaad Omar Nasif Mr. Anas Abu-Zohir Alshami Monseigneur Ibrahim Farah (patriarch) Mr. Mohsen Nazeer Al-Terkawi Mr. Hamad Shawakh Al-Ahmad Al-borsan Imad Mohammad Farzat (captain) Hussein Wawi Al-Sahlan (Sheikh) Mr. Rezan Mustafa Mr. Kamal Waleed Ali Mr. Jankiz Aziz Battal Dr. Mohammad Zidan Al-Alosh Mr. Rabah Saleh Brig. Gen. Abdullah Alhussein Abduljalil Al-Youssef (Sheikh) Brig. Omar Al-Asfar (engineer) Col. Khaled Issa Al-Issa Brig. Ghassan Ahmad (pilot) Mr. Wafaa Othman Mme Omaima Arnouk (journalist) Brig. Jihad Barho Najm Al-Saied Mr. Qassem Hamad Al-Jojah Mme. Hanan Radwan Mr. Ossama Al-Rifai Mr. Issam Aloudat Mr. Suliman Al-Kafiri Mr. Rashed Olbe Mr. Marwan Mutawe Col. Mohammad Hadaya Sheikh Ahmad Col. Mahmod Daif-allah Alhariri Col. Moayad Mohammad Al-Sheikh Dr. Hamid Ali Al-youssef Dr. Hanan Al-Share-Dabbagh Col. Mohammad Hasan Hasno Lieutenant col. Sadam Al-Abod Mahmod Al-Hmara Al-Fanan (Sheikh) Mr. Assem Mohammad Al-Hetta Mr. Nehad Al-Asaad Mr. Ahmad Jamil Al-Ali Col. Ibrahim Al-Habos Mr. Abdulrahman Sabsabi Mr. Mohammad Zidan Zidan Brig. Munir Thaib Al-Hariri First Lieutenant Riyad Mohammad Al-Terkawi Col. Anwar Thaib Al-Hariri Col. Hasan Jasem Fatrawi Ali Taha (Captain) Mohammad Murhaf Ahmad Farzat (captain) Mr. Osama Mohammad Saeed Bashir Mr. Muhannad Mohammad Drosh Al-Husni Dr. Mohammad Azab Drosh Al-Husni (Sheikh) Nidal Kareem Al-Ibrahim (Sheikh) Khaled Saleh Al-Arian (Sheikh) Khalif Mohammad Khalife (Sheikh) Khaled Al-Sayed (Sheikh) Mohammad Turki Al-Murshaq (Sheikh) Al-Shareef Mohammad Mahmood Al-Shareef (Sheikh) Abdulkareem Faraj Al-Zwain (Sheikh) Mr. Osama Mohammad Saeed Bashir Mr. Hanna Issa Rizq Qaisar Al-Zoabi (Sheikh) Saad Fahd Khalaf (Sheikh) Mahmood Jalawi Al-alo Al-Tawala (Sheikh) Mr. Mohammad Dosh Al-Noaimi Hussin Wawi Al-Sahlan (Sheikh) Mr. Sabri Massoud Khaled Abdulmunem Fattouh (captain) Mr. Bashir Mustafa Al-Khatib Col. Ahmad Abdulaziz Najjar Rasheed Mahmoud Horani (captain) Col. Muzahem Yonso Mr. Mohammad Khaled Al-Ismaeel Mr. Assem Ahmad Mustafa Col. Zidan Hussein Al-Abd Salim Muhammad Al-Tamer (captain) Mr. Abdul-Ilah Tamer Trad Al-Mulhem Mustafa Mahmood Fattoh (captain) Major. Nabil Abdullatif Alrifai Mohammad Ahmad Bakir (captain) First lieutenant. Mohammad Al-Sheikh Mr. Khalil Ibrahim Nassar Col. Alameed Adnan Mohammad Al-Ahmad Col. Hussein Samhan Al-Kalsh Col. Ziad Al-Salamat Mazen Saad Eddin (captain) Col. Turki Al-Rifai (pilot) Lieutenant Colonel. Nidal Ibrahim Shodab Mohammad Haj Hassan (captain) Yasser Alkhateeb (captain) Anas Isber (captain) Baraa Abdulkader Lazqani (captain) Brig. Zuhir Yossef Hamidi Mr. Nayef Ahmad Col. Gen. Mohammad Taha Al-Thiab Mustafa Mohammad Shalaan Al-Sheikh Ali (captain) Major. Ahmad Okla Abdulhameed Col. Gen. Hisham Hussein Al-Samori Mohammad Ahmad Qablan (captain) Major. Iyad Al-Jazar Bakdash Col. Ibrahim Khalife Brig. Mustafa Al-Khabor Col. Maher Mohammad Nabhan Nabhan Diaa Abdulrahman Qador (captain) Amer Mohammad Al-Ashqar (captain) This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Syrian Observer. The regime has sent conscription notices to 5,000 young men in eastern Ghouta, which was the first area in the capital to protest against Bashar al-Assad writes Zaman Al Wasl. At least 12 residents of eastern Ghouta were arrested by the regime security in night raids, as they track down young men who escaped conscription. The arrest campaign took place in Kafr Batna, Harasta and neighboring suburbs east of the capital, local activists say. Most of the young men in the capitals eastern suburbs have rejected the regimes conscription call, but the reconciliation deals have imposed a new de-facto. They must join the army or face being arrested by the military intelligence. In the last few months, the regime army has sent about 5,000 conscription calls to young men from eastern Ghouta, despite some names belonging to people who were killed or displaced. The fall of eastern Ghouta last April was achieved in a brutal fashion and changed the course of the war. More than 1,700 civilians were reportedly killed during the eight-week offensive. Eastern Ghouta was the scene of the first major protests against the rule of Bashar al-Assad in the capital. Assad urged all Syrians, including the Druze minority, to send its young men to the army. The regime had previously issued a decree to deprive anyone who evades reserve service from applying for employment in regime sectors. The Alawites-dominated areas are still the main manpower supply for the Assads army. More than 125,000 pro-regime forces have been killed in seven years of brutal war, according to local monitoring groups. Since the Syrian revolution erupted in 2011, more than 560,000 people have been killed, and more than six million people have been displaced. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. Since the southern province of Suweida was recaptured, industry has begun to return, bringing with it job opportunities for the local residents writes SANA. 13 artisanal and industrial facilities of an engineering, food and chemical nature have entered the labor market in Suweida province. The Chairman of the Suweida Industry Directorate, Haitham Amer, in a statement to SANA, said that since the beginning of the current year, these facilities were gave a push to the others working in different areas across the province. He added that the capital from those facilities, which has been put into service, reached up to 91 million Syrian pounds. There are 26 industrial facilities that are being implemented, and four other facilities that are partially implemented in accordance with the laws and regulations. Amer added that the Directorate regularly follows up on the facilities and works to overcome any obstacles that industrialists might face. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. While some Arab countries have restored diplomatic relations with Syria, the Arab League has been unable to create a consensus on the issue reports Alsouria Net. The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said that the Bashar al-Assads return to occupy Syrias seat at the Arab League was premature in an indication that there is no Arab consensus around the issue. This came in a statement Gheit gave to Euronews following the Arab summit in Tunisia. Regarding how the Arab resolution around the Golan was reached, Aboul Gheit said that not a single Arab country opposed the resolution rejecting the annexation of the Golan and the American recognition of that. At the end of its 30th session, held in Tunis on Mar. 31, 2019, the Arab League issued a statement regarding the American decision to recognize Israels sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Arab Golan, saying: We, the leaders of the Arab nations, who gathered in Tunis on Mar. 31, 2019, confirm our commitment to the fixed Arab principles, foremost of which is not to undermine the sovereignty of Arab states as a basic principle. We declare our rejection and condemnation of the United States decision issued on Mar. 25, 2019, to recognize Israels sovereignty over the Golan, and consider it void in form and content, and to represent a dangerous violation of the United Nations Charter, which stipulates the impermissibility of acquiring the territory of others by force, and the unanimously-issued Security Council resolutions 242 for the year 1967 and 497 for the year 1981, which unambiguously refer to the non-recognition of Israels annexation of the Syrian Arab Golan. The Arab League also called for a comprehensive political settlement in the region and warned that the divisions and conflicts are draining its wealth. The statement said that: Arab and national interests represent a necessary starting point to strengthening the security and stability of the Arab region. It stressed that: Achieving peace, stability and security in the Middle East is based primarily on a just and comprehensive settlement of the Palestinian issue and for the entire Arab-Israeli conflict. 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 head of Jordan and Ammans Chamber of Commerce has said that they would be implementing measures to ease trade between Jordan and Syria and Iraq reports Al-Rai. Figures and statistics have shown a notable decline of about 20 percent in Jordanian exports to Iraq and Syria over the first quarter of the year compared with the same period last year, despite the reopening of crossings, including the Nasib border crossing. The Amman Chamber of Commerce said, according to the figures, that, a notable decline in our exports to Iraq occurred over the first quarter of the year, with a rate of up to 10 percent compared to the same period in 2018. Exports to the Iraqi market in the first quarter were 107 million dinars compared with 118 million dinars, a decline of 11 million dinars compared to the same period last year. The Chambers figures showed that exports to the Syrian market over the first quarter witnessed a notable decline of 69 percent compared to the same period, with exports over the first three months about 18 million dinars compared with 60 million dinars over the same period in 2018. The Zarqa Chamber of Commerce figures showed a sharp decline in exports to the Iraqi market over the first quarter of the year, falling to 18 million dinars, a decline of 30 percent compared with the 35 million dinars in the same period last year. It said that exports to Syria were no more than 150,000 dollars. The head of Jordan and Ammans Chamber of Commerce, Fathi Jugheiber, said that the manufacturing sector was working in cooperation with the Ministry of Industry and Trade to remove all obstacles standing before the flow of goods between Jordan and Iraq through communication and bilateral discussions between the two sides. He said that there were a number of notes that would be provided to the Iraqis and that work was underway to restore the volume of commercial exchange to its normal level and above, especially in light of the easing security situation and the reopening of border crossing. Jugheiber noted that this decline did not mean that matters would remain as they were, expecting that there would be an increase in trade and export volumes over the second quarter of the same year, reaching satisfactory rates for the sectors in the two countries, especially Iraq, adding that there were many positive indications in this respect. He said that there would be future meetings between Iraq and Jordan in which plans, expectations and solutions to the obstacles that challenge Jordans exports to Iraq, would be developed. 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. Members of Russias Fifth Corps have attacked regime checkpoints and accused those in charge of them of treating local residents badly and imposing unfair tolls writes Human Voice. On Saturday, members of Russias Fifth Corps attacked a State Security military checkpoint in the town of Sur, in the Lajat region of the eastern Daraa countryside. According to a source quoted by the Aleppo Today channel, Corps members, under the command of Ahmed al-Awda, beat and rebuked State Security checkpoint members including the officer in charge. The source said that the attack occurred in front of a Russian military police patrol, saying that the patrol sided with the Fifth Corps and beat the checkpoint members and also reprimanded their officer. The source added that the reason for the attack was the continuing violations by Iran-backed regime checkpoints and militias against civilians and their poor treatment of those passing through and imposing tolls on them. A few days ago, members of the Fifth Corps attacked checkpoints of the Air Force Intelligence and 15th Division in the towns of al-Sahwa and al-Msafira in the eastern Daraa countryside, beating fighters and the officer in charge while directly threatening the officer Abou Rawad, and giving him a deadline to remove the checkpoints from the area due to the continuous violations of these checkpoints against residents, according to the Fifth Corps members. The Assad regimes Air Force Intelligence center in the southern Daraa province has been targeted amid an ongoing revolutionary mobilization against the Syrian regime in the province. The Horan Free League quoted local sources as saying that unknown figures attacked for the third time in a week the Air Force Intelligence station in the city of Dael in the central Daraa province. The sources said that the clashes, with light weapons, lasted for half an hour without any information about casualties on either side. In the city of al-Hirak in the Daraa countryside, unknown figures on Thursday set fire to an image of Bashar al-Assad, 12 hours after it was placed at the citys station, and then its remains were removed during the day. A Syrian regime agent known as Eyad Nimr had put the image up on Wednesday afternoon near the station in response to another image of Assad being burnt at the city entrance. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has recorded a new assassination amid the escalating security breakdown in the province, with unknown gunmen assassinating on Mar. 22, 2019, with machine guns a former rebel group fighter from the town of Tel Shihab in the Daraa countryside, who had recently joined the Fourth Division after agreeing to a reconciliation settlement with the regime forces, who took control of the area. Groups calling themselves the Popular Resistance in Daraa province have called on young men to join their ranks and resist the Assad regime, which has broken vows and violated the settlement and reconciliation agreements and forcibly conscripted young men to serve in its ranks. The popular resistance said in a statement issued on its Facebook page recently that it would be the shield that defends Syrians in all their forms, wherever they are, and called on young men of Houran to join them. According to the Popular Resistance statement, this comes as a result of, where matters in the south have led, in terms of the Assad regime breaking promises and carrying out arrests and forcing young men into compulsory and reserve service, and forcing defectors back to service in their ranks, taking advantage of the harshness of the life and the difficult conditions people are living. The Popular Resistance addressed its statement to young men across Syrian territory, calling for them to join their ranks to, drive away oppression from the oppressed and to continue on the path to freedom for which blood and bodies were spent. The Popular Resistance was formed by a group of young men from Houran in mid-November after the Assad regimes forces took control over the entire provinces of Daraa and Quneitra with Russian and Iranian backing, in a fierce military campaign that led to the displacement and settlement agreements in the province. 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. Admiral L Ramdas (retd) LARA- RAMU FARM Village Bhaimala PVSM AVSM VrC VSM P.O.Kamarle. Alibag, PIN 402209 Former Chief of the Naval Staff Maharashtra Gaurav Puraskar Magsaysay Awardee for Peace Tel 02141-248711/248733 Mob 9860170960/ 9422383930 lramdas[at]gmail.com April 1 2019 Shri Sunil Arora, Chief Election Commissioner of India, Nirvachan Sadan, Ashoka Road, New Delhi a 110001 Subject: aModi Ji Ki Senaa a (Prime Minister Narendra Modias Army) Dear Sir I am constrained to write to you yet again a just three weeks after my letter to you dated March 6 2019 - regarding my concerns about the growing POLITICISATION OF THE ARMED FORCES BY POLITICAL PARTIES. You were good enough to take note of this concern a one that is shared by many veterans a and issue the necessary notification to political parties to desist from using images of the military as part of electioneering. Today however I bring to your urgent attention a statement allegedly made by His Holiness Yogi Adityanath, Chief Minister of UP, while addressing an election rally in Ghaziabad on Sunday March 31, in which he described the Indian Army as aModi ji ki Senaa a (Prime Minister Narendra Modias Army - PTI) This was exactly the kind of development I was fearing when I wrote to you last month. As one of the senior most former Chiefs of the Armed Forces, I consider it my duty and responsibility to bring to your notice the fact that we, the armed forces of the country, owe our allegiance only to the Constitution of India. The President of India in his capacity as the Constitutional Head of the Nation, is also the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The Armed Forces are NOT a private force belonging to any individual or political party, and therefore any suggestion to that effect is completely unacceptable. I am sure that you will take suitable action as soon as possible to arrest such irresponsible actions. With Regards, Yours Truly L Ramdas (Former Chief of the Naval Staff) SEE THE ORIGINAL LETTER IN PDF Weve a little over a week away before the OPPO Reno launch on the 10th of April. Official renders of the device appeared from a Chinese retail website called JD.com, showing off the smartphone in 4 different colours. The renders of the smartphone only show off a dual camera setup with no sight of the periscope zoom lens which was speculated to be the 10x lossless zoom sensor. No notches could be seen in the front of the device as the camera selfie camera may just be housed in a pretty unusual pop up camera. No triple camera setup on the device leads us to believe that this may just be the low end of the OPPO Reno line. Nebula Purple Fog Se Green Mist Powder Night Black It is speculated that the device may be released in multiple variants, each with different names and features such as the Reno Zoom, Reno Pro and more. The device has been confirmed to be released with OPPOs brand new fast charging technology called VOOC 3.0 that can apparently charge 0-75% of battery in just 15 minutes. Besides that, OPPO has mentioned that the device may be released with bezels almost as thin as the OPPO Find X's. I think many are looking forward to OPPOs 10x lossless zoom released on the device. We tried it out for ourselves yesterday and it could zoom into things thats pretty far out from where we were. Our verdict? Its is pretty darn impressive. What are you excited to see on the OPPO Reno? For more OPPO Reno updates, be sure to follow TechNave.com! Some photo samples taken with OPPO's 10x lossless zoom The Undead Archives I have finally salvaged my pre-Blogger TDR archives and added them into Blogger. They are almost totally in the form of one giant post for each month. And the formatting strayed from the originals. Sorry. But historians everywhere can rejoice that this treasure trove of my thoughts is restored to the world. 4 hours ago How Much Higher Can Broadcom Go? Double-Digit Gains In Store For Broadcom With shares of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) up sharply in the wake of the Q4 earnings and Q1 guidance investors and traders alike are surely wondering how much higher can the stock go? Based on our assessment of the report, the market fundamentals, and the chart we think this stock could go a lot higher. Read Article Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra has learned of his ouster of the new cabinet appointed on Sunday while he was attending the 30th Arab summit in the capital of Tunisia. Lamamra, one of the hawks of the Algerian regime, which is fiercely hostile to Morocco and its territorial integrity, was appointed diplomatic advisor to the President last February 14 and was promoted just 20 days ago to the position of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. But apparently, this Algerian career diplomat was not appreciated by the senior officers of the National Liberation Army and especially by chief of staff and deputy defense minister, General Ahmed Gaid Salah, the current strongman who holds the reins of power in the country. Lamamra believed he was returning to his diplomatic business as usual and for a long time, after incumbent President Bouteflika decided not to seek a fifth term and to postpone sine die the presidential elections, thus extending de facto his current mandate. But Lamamras ambitions were quickly shattered. The former foreign minister had made of the Moroccan Sahara a focal point at his talks with foreign officials as well as at international or regional meetings, as was the case on Saturday (March 30) in Tunis. Actually, at a meeting with the UN Secretary General Antonio guterres, he brought up the Sahara issue, instead of limiting himself to topics on the agenda of the Arab summit: Palestine, Yemen, the Libyan and Syrian crises and the Golan Heights. The Algerian press agency APS confirmed that Lamamra and Guterres have reviewed the conclusions of the UN-sponsored second round table on Western Sahara held recently in Geneva under the chairmanship of the UN Secretary-Generals personal envoy Horst Kohler. The only consolation left to this veteran diplomat is the fact that he is not the only person in Algeria seeking to harm Moroccos territorial integrity. Read more about how to apply below! The House That Lars Built is a creative design studio and website focused on artful living through beautifully produced original content. Our goal is to help empower its readers recognize and fill your life with beauty while also providing skills that you can take with you to your next job! We create daily blog content, content for other brands, products, a YouTube channel, and are constantly seeking new ways to create an artful living. We are looking for interns in the following categories: Graphic Design We are looking for a creative and innovative graphic design intern with up-to-date knowledge of trends to interpret our clients needs and to design solutions with high visual impact. You will work on a variety of products, including websites, books, magazines, product packaging, websites, exhibitions, craft projects, corporate identity etc. Crafting We are looking for a creative powerhouse who has a strong background in all things arts and crafts. A knowledge of basic skills such as cutting, painting, creating, assembling is desired. Social Media W e are looking for people who are interested in those with the Lars voice who can help us both curate content, drive engagement, and work with our analytics for all our social platforms Business We are looking for those who are interested in product that aligns with the Lars brand from a buyer/curation, e-commerce, and development perspective Please view more detailed intern descriptions here Interns will specialize in their respective category but all are expected to participate in the following: Assisting on photo shoots Helping with the general maintenance of the studio Running errands and complete shipping tasks Writing and brainstorming activities participating in bi-weekly training meetings Internships are unpaid and can be used for university credit. The applicant will need to work with your university to get it approved. You must be able to work a minimum of 10 hours per week, have a laptop and car, and work from our studio in Springville, Utah (though some duties may be done at home at times). We expect a full commitment to the position once youve accepted the position. The internship will last from late April 2019-August 2019. Exact days can be flexible. Please email hello@thehousethatlarsbuilt.comwith the subject line INTERN and the desired position. Include your resume and portfolio (can be online, photos, basically anything to help us understand your proficiency and skills). We will email you back to invite you in for an interview. by Vladimir Rozanskij The substantial legitimacy of the vote confirmed, the run-off is scheduled for April 20. The two challengers, the outgoing Poroshenko and the comic Zelensky, confront each other on the relationship with Russia, with the European Union and with NATO. Ukraine seems determined to write its future without Moscow's interference. Kiev (AsiaNews) - After the counting of almost all the ballot papers, in Ukraine the clash between the young comedian Volodymir Zelensky and the outgoing president Petro Poroshenko is confirmed, in the run-off scheduled for April 21 (except for surprises). In fact, all complaints are considered up to ten days after the vote, as already announced by the defeated Yulia Timoshenk. However these should not however overturn the results of the vote. Western observers have also recognized the substantial democratic correctness of the Ukrainian election. Zelensky obtained 30.26% of the votes, while Poroshenko stopped at just over half (15.96%). Timoshenko, who hoped to remove the position of the president, received 13.37%, while the candidate supported by Moscow, Jurij Bojko, occupies the fourth place with 11.54% of the votes, more than expected. Zelensky managed to defeat Poroshenko even in "his" region of Vinnitsa, where his confectionery company is based, and where the president convinced the first pro-Russian metropolitan to move to the new autocephalous Church. The winner immediately admitted to being "humanly rather moved" by the success obtained: "It is a great responsibility, I thank all those who voted for me not to joke", also declaring that he was not open to alliances with any representative of the "Old power". Poroshenko intervened in front of his supporters, recognizing the credibility of the elections according to European standards. He claimed to have "taken the first step towards victory", despite the Kremlin's willingness to stop seeing him in the presidential chair. He confirmed the need to maintain sanctions against Russia. The outgoing president downplayed the success of Zelensky, calling him "Kolomoiskij marionette", that is the television magnate on whose networks the comedian performs, who actively participated in the electoral campaign. "Enough with the jokes now - warned Poroshenko - on April 21st we must confirm our path to enter the European Union and NATO, or we will return to the sad Soviet past". Zelensky himself, however, is anything but condescending to Moscow. In recent days he has provocatively addressed a question to the Kremlin, asking how much Moscow is willing to pay to compensate for the occupation of Crimea and the Donbass. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, replied that President Putin "is willing to explain to every citizen of Ukraine that Russia does not occupy any Ukrainian territory, not even the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass, which have been refused by Ukraine itself . The Russians do not even want to talk about the Crimea: "A question that is closed once and for all, it is neither an occupation nor an annexation, everything happened according to the same Ukrainian legislation and international law". However, the Russians have expressed some satisfaction with the outcome of the Ukrainian elections; according to senate speaker, Valentina Matveenko, "the complete disaster of the ruling elite in these years is evident", a result that is predictable because of the "destruction of the economy and the total impoverishment of the population". In any case, Ukraine is preparing to rebuild the country after turbulent years, and will hardly do so under Moscow's orders. 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. If you are currently a print subscriber but don't have an online account, select this option. You will need to use your 7 digit subscriber account number (with leading zeros) and your last name (in UPPERCASE). Political and cultural commentary from the perspective of radical common sense. Opposition to the AMERICAN BIPOLARCHY and ideological fanaticism in all forms. Don't take our word for anything: figure it out for yourself. The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success." At the end of April, the government will present a number of measures in the fight against speeding on Luxembourg's roads. Yesterday, our colleagues at RTL.lu decided to make their April Fool's prank speed camera-orientated. They reported that speed cameras in Luxembourg had software issues, and asked those who had received fines to call a hotline (which naturally went to the RTL studios). You can read more about that here, but it is in Luxembourgish. On the topic of speed cameras, the government is planning on introducing a host of measures throughout the year. Luxembourg will soon have 25 permanent speed cameras alongside mobile speed cameras used for traffic checks. A new addition to Luxembourg's radars has been a speed camera on a trailer based on the A4 motorway. The speed camera was put into place due to roadworks on the section of the road near Pontpierre. The Ministry of Mobility and Public Works has since confirmed that it has ordered a second trailer speed camera. Last year, the ministry confirmed that it would be introducing average speed cameras as part of a pilot project. The way these will work is that a first speed camera will record the time of a vehicle passing and its number plates. Several kilometres down the road, a second speed camera will record the same data and will calculate an average speed. If you arrive too early at the second speed camera, then you were likely speeding. Once the pilot project is completed, the ministry is likely to roll out more average speed cameras, most likely in tunnels. A further measure that the ministry revealed is the plan to introduce cameras at traffic lights in order to catch drivers who run red lights. An increasing number of drivers tend to ignore red lights, which is why the ministry will crack down on this behaviour. The larger crackdown on speeding comes as a result of the startling statistics on Luxembourg's speeding. In 2018, 250,000 vehicles were caught by speed cameras, of which 140,000 had Luxembourgish number plates. In this year alone, 35,000 drivers have already been caught by the cameras. In the last three years, speed cameras have recorded a staggering 800,000 infractions. Transporting a corpse from one municipality to another in Luxembourg involves a considerable amount of bureaucracy. The president of the Federation of Undertakers (Federation des pompes funebres), Thierry Graul, described the 1913 law, which regulates the transport of corpses, as outdated and in need of adaptation. Negotiations surrounding changes to the text have been ongoing since 2012, but have been without success so far. A number of points made over 100 years ago simply no longer make sense, according to the federation. In the past, corpses were transported by horses and on trains, which is unthinkable today, said Thierry Graul. He emphasised that no train would take a coffin nowadays, but we often transport corpses in planes. Those obviously were not listed in the original law, as it was published in 1913. Previously, a doctor had to certify that the undertaker had done their job properly and there were no infectious diseases present. The emergency doctor nowadays rarely has the ability to determine this, as they would not normally have access to a lab. A further thorn in the side of the federation is the so-called transport certificate, which needs to be requested to move a corpse from one municipality to another. If a person dies during the day, it isn't very problematic, but if someone dies outside the opening hours of the commune's administration, it makes things more challenging. Thierry Graul gave an example: if somebody died in Steinsel outwith the administration's opening hours, but was to be buried at a graveyard in Luxembourg City, then the corpse would not be able to exit the commune. First, the undertaker would have to deregister the person in Steinsel, then wait to receive the transport certificate. Afterwards, the undertaker would finally be allowed to move the body to Luxembourg City. When the law was first written, the main focus was introducing measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Today, most of those diseases are very rare. As a result, the handling of corpses was very different some 100 years ago. In the past, undertakers used formaldehyde - a substance that could contaminate our drinking water. In other words, this would contaminate Luxembourg's graveyards. A century ago, crematoriums were not as popular or had not even been established. Luxembourg's neighbouring countries no longer have a transport certificate of that kind, meaning that the Grand Duchy has stricter regulations than France or Germany. The federation hopes that, following the talks with the Minister of Transport , Syvicol (Association of Luxembourg Cities and Municipalities) and the court, they will also receive a positive response from the Ministry of Health. The aim is to make space for the creation of roughly 200 homes, shops and offices. Luxembourg City's mayor, Lydie Polfer, emphasised that the development project could only improve the neighbourhood. The City Council held a meeting on Monday, during which one of the topics up for debate was the Dernier Sol neighbourhood, which is located between the swimming pool in Bonnevoie and Pont Buchler. Part of the neighbourhood is set to be demolished and make way for some 200 homes, shops and offices. Members of the council agreed that this would give the neighbourhood, which is often frequented by homeless people and drug addicts, a new image. The project also includes a new and probably quiet road, so DP member Tanja De Jager emphasised the importance of a well designed road layout. More and more residents in the area erect fences to keep people off their land. It is not only private land that is often strewn with litter but busy residential streets are often dirtied by those who hang out on them. De Jager acknowledged that Stemm vun der Strooss was making efforts to combat this problem, but added that much still needed to be done. She described the project as a good way to improve the look and 'feel' of the neighbourhood. The partial development plan at Dernier Sol was accepted through the votes of the DP and CSV. From swim pool to carpool A further topic at the meeting on Monday was the Carsharing-Service, Carloh. As the 1.5 million initial capital had been used up much more quickly than planned, the council agreed to a capital increase of 2.86 million. The original budget of 1.5 million had been calculated to last ten years, but it was taken up swiftly. Every year, operational costs range from 500,000 to 600,000. There are also plans to extend the system, however, there are currently 630 subscribers. This number is estimated to rise to somewhere in the region of 3,000. In addition, more companies will be encouraged to benefit from Carloh scheme in the future and to kickstart this, the number of cars in the fleet will be increased from 17 to 52. The strategy includes a series of savings initiatives for private businesses, including cutting costs related to transport, port services, and electricity, as well as reforming railway management. It sets out plans to cut the number of national holidays, introduce financial incentives for tax and customs sectors, as well as promote and implement amendments to the Law on Investment and the Law on Special Economic Zones. Speaking at a recent forum on the public-private sector, PM Hun Sen said that these reforms would help increase the competitiveness of export goods if the European Union (EU) decides to remove its preferential trade arrangements under the Everything But Arms (EBA) scheme. In February 2019, the EU officially announced it will begin the process of considering the withdrawal of Cambodia from the EBA scheme on the grounds that Cambodia had violated its conditions. This process will take place over the next 12 months. This causes great concern to businesses operating in Cambodia, especially in the textile sector, which is said to bring about US$676 million per year to Cambodia. Concerning the current serious power shortage in Cambodia, PM Hun Sen announced plans to split various types of electricity prices for users, thereby reducing about $0.02 per kWh for industries that hold high investment value. Meanwhile, Vice Chairman of the Cambodia Chamber of Commerce and Industry Lim Heng said that for a long time, the Cambodian private sector has asked its government to issue the aforementioned reforms to help reduce production costs. He affirmed that these efforts of the Cambodian government to reform the economy will contribute to strengthening the private sector, especially in terms of increasing incomes for workers. VinCommerce, the retail unit of Vietnams private conglomerate Vingroup, is set to acquire all outlets of the Shop&Go convenient store chain, after accepting an arguably unprecedented offer from its operator for a one-dollar deal price. It was the corner store chains operator, Cua Hieu va Suc Song Co. Ltd., that offered to transfer all of the 87 locations in its system to VinCommerce for US$1, Vingroup said on Monday. Following the acquisition, all Shop&Go stores will be transformed, upgraded in all aspects from facilities and merchandise to staff quality, and operate under the standard management Vingroup currently applies for its supermarket system VinMart and convenient store chain VinMart+. The acquisition will be finalized by the end of this month. Founded in 2005, Cua Hieu va Suc Song operates in the retail trade of consumer goods, with the first Shop&Go outlet inaugurated in 2006 in Ho Chi Minh City. Thirteen years after its launch, the chain has expanded to 87 stores, including 70 locations in Ho Chi Minh and 17 in Hanoi. In both cities, Shop&Go stores are mainly located in the inner-city areas. Shop&Go follows the model of a 24/7 convenient store, providing fast food, mixed drinks, and other services such as ATM withdrawal and mobile top-up cards. However, the store chain has suffered unexpected business results from tough competitions in the retail market, according to a companys representative. The chain earned VND267 billion ($11.48 million) in revenue, but incurred nearly VND40 billion ($1.72 million) in losses in 2016, online news site Zing.vn reported, citing the companys financial reports After years of operating at a loss, by the end of 2016, Shop&Go accrued losses of VND205 billion ($8.82 million) while its registered capital was only VND1.27 billion ($54,610). It was not until October 2018 when the companys registered capital was increased sharply to VND207.27 billion ($8.91 million). With the Shop&Go acquisition, VinCommerce continues to affirm its leading position in the retail market with 108 VinMart stores and around 1,900 VinMart+ convenient shops across Vietnam. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A Vietnamese comedian who was on a tour in the U.S. was found dead in a house in California on March 31 (U.S. time), one of his senior colleagues said on Tuesday, as his family suspected he had died of a stroke. Anh Vu, 47, stopped breathing while sleeping at a friends house in Orange County, Hong Van, Vietnams renowned artist who runs a theater the deceased comedian previously worked with, told the media. The female owner of the house found his entire body to have turned pale when she tried to ask Vu to wake up for breakfast. The woman then immediately called 911 to the scene. Police in the U.S. want to contact Anh Vus family to assist an investigation into his sudden death. Anh Vu came to the U.S. to perform at the 15th edition of a Vietnamese artist festival at the Saigon Performing Arts Center in Orange County, at the invitation of the performing troupe Dan Nam Thuy Uyen. During practice and rehearsal before the festival, Vu had shown signs of tiredness and fatigue, according to actor Tri Quang, who was on the same tour with him. Many Vietnamese artists have extended their condolences to the sudden demise of Vu. Hong Van is calling for donations to cover expenses needed to have his body repatriated to Vietnam. News website Zing.vn quoted a younger sister of Vu as saying that the comedian might have died of a stroke, as he had taken a shower late at night after a hardworking day prior to his death. Vietnamese comedian Anh Vu. Photo: Hoang Thuan / Tuoi Tre Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A teacher from Hanoi has found a cash-packed envelope inside a bag of secondhand clothes she received from a donation group, and immediately contacted the owner to return it within the day. Tuyet, who teaches English at a school in Hanoi, is member of a donation group on Facebook called Freecycle, in which people give away different types of goods to those who need them. On her latest exchange on the group on March 30, the 26-year-old teacher received a bag of secondhand clothes from a member, only known as Q.L. Tuyet said she did not have time to check the bag upon delivery, but was stunned to see her daughter play with an envelope she found in the clothes. Upon learning that there is VND10 million ($430) worth of cash inside the envelope, Tuyet contacted Q.L. and arranged to meet her to return the money within the day, which really surprised the owner. The money found in the bag of secondhand clothes is seen in this photo shared on Facebook. Q.L expressed her gratitude towards Tuyet since her family had lost the money a few months ago. They would never expect the cash to be found and returned in such a surprising manner. Until now, Im still touched and hope there will be more people as kind as Tuyet in life, L. said. Tuyet told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that doing the right things made life more meaningful, adding that everybody would have done the same thing in that case. Q.L. shared the story on the same Facebook donation group, with the good heart of Tuyet winning praises from other members. Since not everyone can overcome their greed, both Tuyet and Q.L are examples of nobility that make life more worth-living, said Hoai Phuong, a 27-year-old user from Hanoi. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A leading maternity hospital in Ho Chi Minh City is set to launch the citys first international standard human milk bank next week as a solution to a shortage of biological milk for premature newborns. Nguyen Thi Tu Anh, head of the Neonatal Department at Tu Du Maternity Hospital, said the human milk bank would help maintain a sustainable source of breast milk for babies born prematurely. Human milk bank is a service for those who wish to share their breast milk with others donate the milk for vulnerable infants, orphans or nursing mothers. On average, Tu Du Maternity Hospital delivers and provides medical treatment for about 6,000-7,000 babies born with low birth weight every year, but only 30 percent of the newborns with illnesses can be breastfed by their mothers. The first human milk bank in the world was opened in Vienna, Austria in 1909 and Vietnam first launched the service at the Da Nang Hospital for Women and Children in the namesake city in 2017. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), feeding newborns breast milk exclusively for the first six months of life reduces child mortality and has health benefits that extend into adulthood. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Vietnam has launched an online system where official documents can be signed electronically and sent between government agencies and bodies of all levels at an instant, with its government at the forefront of dropping paper-based documents for good. The initiative is expected to help save over VND1.3 trillion (US$56.3 million) each year by cutting down costs associated with postal services, printing papers and ink, and time consumption, according to the Government Office. Development and implementation of this national e-document system was moved forward at incredible speed thanks to drastic directions from Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Minister and Chairman of the Office of the Government Mai Tien Dung told Tuoi Tre (Youth) in an exclusive interview. The system began its first test run on January 19 this year and was officially launched less than two months later, on March 12. It is a stepping stone to the launch of Vietnams unified portal for public services later this year, which will allow government bodies to access data from one anothers database at ease with an Internet connection, Dung said. To encourage use of this online system, the Office of the Government has already stopped sending or receiving physical documents since October 2018, he said. Any physical papers sent by organizations or individuals to the Government Office will be returned immediately, Dung stressed. Residents look up information on the planning of Binh Tan District, Ho Chi Minh City via an online portal. Photo: Quang Dinh / Tuoi Tre By allowing those in charge to sign documents electronically through mobile devices regardless of their physical location, the system is expected to significantly improve the work efficiency of government officials. Before the system went online, I used to sit in my office until 9:00 pm signing documents physically, Dung said. With this new system I can sign all documents instantly even during a business trip, he added. Starting Monday, the Vietnamese PM and deputy PMs have also stopped sending and receiving paper-based documents entirely to set an example for lower-level officials. In June, Vietnam will launch an eCabinet system that allows cabinet members to give their opinion and vote on government issues electronically through fingerprint authentication, effectively reducing the frequency of government meetings. Information on an issue under discussion will also be provided to all ministers via this system prior to a meeting, which cuts down on costs of having these documents printed and saves time reading lengthy reports. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A female teacher in the southern Vietnamese province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau has been suspended from work after she was accused of beating 22 eighth-grade students with a ruler, resulting in multiple bruises on their legs. The incident happened at Long Toan Middle School in Ba Ria City, Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province on Friday. Preliminary information showed that 22 out of 31 students in class 8A1 were beaten by their homeroom teacher Nguyen Thi Thu Huyen on Friday morning. The teacher stated in her report that the group of students were making a lot of noise and disorder in the classroom, so she disciplined them by hitting them with a ruler. Parents of the eighth-graders discovered bruises on their childrens legs on Saturday and posted the situation, along with some photos, to social media. They also reported it to the school board. According to vice-principal Nguyen Thi My Hoa, the school board has been aware of the case and asked Huyen to make a report on Monday morning. Huyen was also temporarily suspended from work until the municipal education and training bureau decide a suitable disciplinary action for her. The form teacher and leaders of the school also visited some of the students at their houses on Monday to express their apologies. Hoang Duc Minh, an official from the Ministry of Education and Training, told the press on Monday evening that stern penalty must be imposed upon the teacher if the accusation is true. The Ba Ria-Vung Tau educational department was also tasked with taking assertive measures to prevent similar violations of work ethics among local teachers, Minh stated. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! As one of the names that was most rumored to be cast on the last few seasons of RuPauls Drag Race, Ariel Versace certainly had a great deal to prove the moment she hit the workroom. The queens very quickly learned that this self proclaimed Life Sized Bratz Doll from New Jersey is much more than an Instagram filter. With looks that were consistently on-brand and a willingness to try things outside of her comfort zone, Versace showed that she was more than prepared for the competition. While she sashay-ed away following a lip synch against Shuga Cain, Versace has plenty more to show her fans post Drag Race. I caught up with one of my favorite fellow Jersey girls to talk about her Drag Race experience, proving the naysayers wrong, and what exactly it was like taking the now viral tumble on the main stage during her lip sync! Michael Cook: You were one of the girls who was the most talked about to be on RuPauls Drag Race for some time. What was it finally like to get into that workroom and really get into the competition after trying out four times? Ariel Versace: You know, it was just super surreal. There are many girls out there who start doing drag to get on Drag Race or to get a social media following, and that is a common misconception about me. I have been doing drag for six years before I even made it on the show. This is my fourth year auditioning, and I finally got in. Once I got into that workroom I said I am here to do work and show them while I am here. The moment you walk in there, you say to yourself holy shit, this is real-its happening! Its super exciting, and once you walk through the doors and the cameras are on, you feel that all the hard work has paid off and it is time to work. MC: Many of the girls knew exactly who you were the moment you walked in the door. Was it intimidating for them to have misconceptions and expectations about you the moment you hit the door? AV: Oh absolutely. You even heard Mercedes Iman Diamond say Is that Ariel Versace? I knew coming into it that some of the girls would know who I was, and I am glad that they did; I was hoping that it meant that they knew that I was someone that they should watch out for. Obviously, I built a name up for myself before Drag Race, so they knew that I was a hard worker. It is definitely hard because these people have these pre-conceived notions about you and you really need to prove that you are not just someone who wants to take a picture. I am a hard working entertainer, I have been doing this for six years, so let me show you why Im here. MC: It might be an East Coast trait, but you were extremely honest person with your cast mates and with RuPaul himself, especially where it conceded the personality of your cast mate Silky Nutmeg Ganache. Did you find it easy to be that honest? AV: Hello, Jersey girl (laughs)! In a situation like this, you want to be honest and it is never good to be fake; you want to be you the whole time. What is the point of lying about something you said? You are on RuPauls Drag Race and the cameras are on you the whole time, so if I said something I said something. Bitch, if I said you were annoying, I need to own up to it because I said it. I would rather be honest and vocalize how I am feeling that be this fake person lying in the background. Let me just be up front with you, because that is how we do it in Jersey! MC: You are a big name in the Philadelphia and New Jersey drag scene, but coming into Drag Race, everyone is a big name in their individual cities. What was it like having your established and successful style judged all over again? AV: I went into Drag Race knowing that I had a name for myself, being comfortable with my drag and the aesthetic that I own, and was ready to kill it; that is not the case. It really is anyone's game. I went into it thinking that I had a great social media following and was gonna kill it-that was not the case. It is so in the moment, you never know what to expect, and it is not called Drag Race for no reason; the whole thing is a race. It is fast paced, put the petal to the metal or youre gonna crash. MC: Speaking of crash-you had a slight stumble on the runway during your lip sync with Shuga Cain that is now going to go down in Drag Race herstory! AV: Oh no, that was part of the choreography. I am actually an aerialist and they edited out the rope (laughs), I kept thinking that I could slip on the train, and I was actually going to lift up the train while I was lip syncing but I had sewn it on and I wanted to just let it flow. As soon as I started to go down, it was like I knew it! It is not the first time that I fell and it wont be the last. It just happened to be on national television. If I fall in person on the club, at least I am keeping it consistent. At least I had the opportunity to fall on national television, right? MC: Who were you considering doing for the Snatch Game challenge? AV: I was either going to do Miranda Sings or Jennifer Coolidge, either one would have been amazing! MC: There are so many girls from your home state(s) who could absolutely kill it on Drag Race. Who do you think would really be a game changer on Drag Race if they were cast? AV: There are a lot of girls who I think would kill it on the show. Obviously, I have to shout out Chastity St. Cartier, she is an amazing lip syncer and she can dance, sew, and the paint is definitely good. The only thing about Chastity is that she has a hard time picking up lines and music sometimes, but I also think that would make for amazing television because she gets frustrated so quickly. Chastity is also the queen of popping off also, so there is that. I think Broolyn Ford would be amazing, she is like me. She speaks her mind and is also really visually appealing. I think Iris Spectre would be amazing on the show also. She is an amazing designer and I think she would definitely kill a lip sync. She gets in her head, as do I, and I think she would be mental breakdown Mary in certain situations. All of those things always make good television though! MC: With Drag Race in the rearview mirror, what is next for you? AV: Honestly, I have been traveling for the past six years, so I am going to just keep doing the damn thing. This was an amazing platform and I have a full schedule of travel for the next four months, which is an amazing blessing. I have brand deals that I have coming, DragCon is coming up, and I am going to be dropping music. I just have to keep dong what I have been doing for the past six years and keep moving; you have to keep it consistent. MC: What inspires you to keep being creative and moving forward with your art? AV: The support that you get from the people, really. That is one of the reasons the I really love social media, I get to talk to people that I dont really even know. They message me and may say that my drag makes me happy, or they met me and I was sweet and you realize you are someone that people can look up to and you can make them smile. I have been an entertainer my whole life, performing for my parents and grandma in a t shirt dress in the living room, then performing in theater all through high school. Performing is something that I am super passionate about and it is the thing that I always want to be doing. The fact that I get to keep doing it is an absolute blessing. AV: One last thing: Remember; goodbye is not the same as see you later. (Spoiler Alert) Whatcha Packin': Season 11 Episode 5 Via: YouTube SINGAPORE - Media OutReach - 1 April2019 - SugarCRM Inc., thecompany that helps global organizations build better business relationships,has named iZeno 2019's Regional Resellerof the Year Award for Asia Pacific winner. iZeno Directors, Freddy Soh (left) and Benny Ng (middle) awarded by Paul Rowan (right) The SugarCRM Partner Awards recognize partnerexcellence across global, regional and customer experience categories,rewarding partners who provide significant value to SugarCRM customers. The winners were announced at a prestigious awardsceremony in Monterey, California. iZeno Co-founder Benny Ng said: "iZeno isthrilled to be recognized by SugarCRM for this award, huge credit for whichmust go to our team members who are relentless problem solvers and showcasegreat teamwork across our CRM, Cloud, AI, Analytics and integration practice tohelp our enterprise clients with their complex challenges." "This is the third time we've been namedSugarCRM Reseller of the Year for APAC, and we plan to continue expanding ourreach across ASEAN- delivering CRM and CX success and innovation to even moreclients in Financial Services, Manufacturing and Government." SugarCRM chief executive officer Craig Charlton said:"I'd like to congratulate iZeno on being named one of this year's PartnerAwards winners. The award recognizes them as a key partner with a proven trackrecord of delivering value to customers. "Our unique channel program brings together animpressive group of CRM experts to promote partnership, growth and an overallcollaborative effort that ensures the best possible experience for partners,customers and users at every level." About iZeno iZeno was founded in 2003 to provide enterprises withbest-in-class technology solutions they need to keep their business runningseamlessly. With a team of 70+ in-house innovators, we have delivered over 500Enterprise Solutions, implemented and optimized to enable smarter insights. Ourteam draws on industryexperiences in accomplishing a portfolio of mission-critical applications,integrating AI & Machine Learning, DevOps, ITSM, Cloud, CRM & CX, DataAnalytics, and other leading technologies with our clients' existing ITframeworks. With a leading presence in the region, headquartered in Singaporeand operations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, no projectis too complex for us, and our team is always ready for a new challenge. Story continues To learn more visit izeno.com or follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/izeno-pte-ltd/ Contact us atmarketing@izeno.com About SugarCRM SugarCRM enables businesses to create extraordinarycustomer relationships with the most empowering, adaptable and affordablecustomer relationship management (CRM) solution on the market. Unlike traditional CRM solutions that focus primarily onmanagement and reporting, Sugar empowers the individual, coordinating theactions of customer-facing employees and equipping them with the rightinformation at the right time to transform the customer experience. More than two million individuals in over 120 countriesrely on SugarCRM. To learn more visit https://www.sugarcrm.com orfollow @SugarCRM. Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has left office after 20 years in power following a warning from the country's army chief to "immediately" step down. The 82-year-old's decision also follows weeks of massive nationwide protests aimed at pushing him out of power. According to the official APS news agency, Mr Bouteflika had notified the Constitutional Council of his decision to end his mandate. Under the constitution, the president of the upper house, the Council of Nations, steps in as interim leader for a maximum of 90 days so that elections can be organised. Army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah had earlier in the day convened a meeting of the top military hierarchy, making clear the call for Mr Bouteflika to step down had the backing of the military. The Defence Ministry statement referred to his entourage as a "gang" and said it had made "fraud, embezzlement and duplicity its vocation". Mr Bouteflika has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. His resignation caps six weeks of peaceful protest marches calling for him to make an exit. The leader came to power in 1999 after years of unrest that followed the Islamic insurgency and brought back stability to a country devastated by killings and distrust. As president, age and illness took its toll, and corruption scandals dogged him and associates. He is accused of failing to create an economy that could offer enough jobs, despite the nation's vast oil and gas wealth. Greece's prime minister Alexis Tsipras is on a landmark visit to the newly renamed North Macedonia after a decades-long identity row between the two countries.The one-day trip comes a month after Alexis Tsipras and his Skopje counterpart Zoran Zaev finalised the deal that added "North" to Macedonia's name to distinguish it from a bordering province in Greece.It is the first official visit by a Greek prime minister since the former Yugoslav republic declared independence in 1991, kicking off the name row that roiled diplomatic ties for nearly three decades as the neighbours tussled for ownership of the name Macedonia and its cultural heritage.In the end, Skopje agreed to the change in exchange for assurance that Athens would stop thwarting its efforts to join NATO and the European Union."The first prime minister of Greece to visit North Macedonia. Truly historic day," Zaev wrote on Twitter beneath a photo of the two leaders embracing outside the government building, where they took a selfie before entering inside.With the name issue behind them, the neighbours are also touting the promise of boosting economic ties.Tsipras is joined by 10 ministers and more than two dozen Greek business leaders with him who will attend a business forum in the afternoon.Ahead of the visit, Zaev told AFP there would be new Greek investments worth more than 500 million euros in North Macedonia, which is much smaller and poorer than its EU member neighbour."The Republic of North Macedonia will have huge economic benefits from the deal that I believe will be seen in every area of the economy," the prime minister added.Enraging nationalistsSince the initial name accord was inked in June 2018, congratulations have poured in from around the globe for the two young premiers, who took on risky political battles at home to push the deal through, enraging nationalists in both countries.Even before the deal was finalised, the pair were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by 2015 winner Wided Bouchamaoui of Tunisia."This visit is historic," Tsipras told the state-run MIA news agency on Monday, hailing a new future for the "partners and allies".But he conceded that a "significant portion of the Greek people" are still "seriously concerned" about the name deal."It is our responsibility -- mine and Zoran's -- to show that our nations can only benefit from the path that is now open," he said, condemning "rising forces of nationalism".Official nameDisgruntlement is also palpable in Skopje among some who feel the name-change is an embarrassing concession to Greece and that the end-goal -- entry into the EU -- may never materialise.North Macedonia is in the process of joining NATO and hoping the EU will open accession talks in June.Yet the timeline is unclear, with appetite for enlargement shrinking considerably among several members of the bloc, particularly France.Meanwhile, in his own protest, the Balkan state's President Gjorge Ivanov has been refusing to sign bills from parliament ever since North Macedonia became the official name.The two-term president will be replaced in elections later this month. Greece's prime minister Alexis Tsipras is on a landmark visit to the newly renamed North Macedonia after a decades-long identity row between the two countries. The one-day trip comes a month after Alexis Tsipras and his Skopje counterpart Zoran Zaev finalised the deal that added "North" to Macedonia's name to distinguish it from a bordering province in Greece. It is the first official visit by a Greek prime minister since the former Yugoslav republic declared independence in 1991, kicking off the name row that roiled diplomatic ties for nearly three decades as the neighbours tussled for ownership of the name Macedonia and its cultural heritage. In the end, Skopje agreed to the change in exchange for assurance that Athens would stop thwarting its efforts to join NATO and the European Union. "The first prime minister of Greece to visit North Macedonia. Truly historic day," Zaev wrote on Twitter beneath a photo of the two leaders embracing outside the government building, where they took a selfie before entering inside. With the name issue behind them, the neighbours are also touting the promise of boosting economic ties. Tsipras is joined by 10 ministers and more than two dozen Greek business leaders with him who will attend a business forum in the afternoon. Ahead of the visit, Zaev told AFP there would be new Greek investments worth more than 500 million euros in North Macedonia, which is much smaller and poorer than its EU member neighbour. "The Republic of North Macedonia will have huge economic benefits from the deal that I believe will be seen in every area of the economy," the prime minister added. Enraging nationalists Since the initial name accord was inked in June 2018, congratulations have poured in from around the globe for the two young premiers, who took on risky political battles at home to push the deal through, enraging nationalists in both countries. Even before the deal was finalised, the pair were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by 2015 winner Wided Bouchamaoui of Tunisia. Story continues "This visit is historic," Tsipras told the state-run MIA news agency on Monday, hailing a new future for the "partners and allies". But he conceded that a "significant portion of the Greek people" are still "seriously concerned" about the name deal. "It is our responsibility -- mine and Zoran's -- to show that our nations can only benefit from the path that is now open," he said, condemning "rising forces of nationalism". Official name Disgruntlement is also palpable in Skopje among some who feel the name-change is an embarrassing concession to Greece and that the end-goal -- entry into the EU -- may never materialise. North Macedonia is in the process of joining NATO and hoping the EU will open accession talks in June. Yet the timeline is unclear, with appetite for enlargement shrinking considerably among several members of the bloc, particularly France. Meanwhile, in his own protest, the Balkan state's President Gjorge Ivanov has been refusing to sign bills from parliament ever since North Macedonia became the official name. The two-term president will be replaced in elections later this month. The Korea Forest Service said it would work through the night to extinguish a fire that broke out on a mountain in the port city of Busan on April 1, prompting 90 people to be evacuated from the area. Hot weather and strong winds hindered efforts to extinguish the fire, KBS News reported. This footage, shot from a Korea Forest Service helicopter, shows plumes of grey smoke rising from the mountainous region. Credit: Korea Forest Service via Storyful Piers Morgan has said Donald Trump invited him to the White House to interview him while the pair took a trip on Air Force One. The Good Morning Britain (GMB) host had the first international interview with Mr Trump as president at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January last year. Morgan, 54, told the Press Association he was working on a follow-up long-form interview which he planned to hold inside the White House. Donald Trump extended an invitation to Morgan (Brian Lawless/PA) He said: The last time I saw him was on Air Force One (the aircraft used by the US president), and he said I could come to the White House and do the next one there. I imagine the next time you will see me pop up which I know will bring huge joy to people, especially my journalistic rivals who never get him is probably at the White House. Thats what I am working on. He added that he expected the interview to straddle a host of publications including GMB, ITV, MailOnline and the Mail on Sunday. Asked what viewers should expect from their next meeting, Morgan replied: I think another long-form interview, yes. Morgan met President Trump in 2008 when he appeared as a competitor on the celebrity version of The Apprentice in the US, which he went on to win. Donald Trump and Melania exit Air Force One (Andrew Milligan/PA) The presenter has previously said he is a friend of the president, but last year aired his disagreement with President Trumps ban on immigrants from seven majority Muslim countries. Morgan attributed exclusive interviews such as those with President Trump to the success of GMB, which on Monday saw its highest ratings share ever. At 6.30am, 33% of viewers were watching GMB while 41% tuned in to BBC One, with GMB having an average of 25.3% across a 2.5 hour slot. The ITV daytime shows ratings are up 10% on the same period last year, and the show this year received two Bafta nominations for best news coverage for their piece on knife crime and an interview with Thomas Markle. Sandra Oh has promised fans a darker Killing Eve when the acclaimed drama returns for a second season. Canadian actress Oh plays the titular MI5 agent who becomes obsessed with Jodie Comers notorious assassin in the darkly comic series, which bagged a leading 14 nominations at the TV Baftas last week. The first season won heavy praise for the performances of its two leading stars, with critics applauding the on-screen relationship between the two women. Oh, 47, said the next instalment will see Eve pushed to the limit. Speaking at the series season two premiere in Los Angeles on Monday, Oh told the Press Association: For me, for Eve, its definitely about going darker, really going darker and being even more pushed to the limit. In some ways, its like in season one Eve is kind of opening up and beginning to figure things out and season two is going right down. Its almost like season one shes like theres some kind of rabbit hole, what is that?. She plunges into it in season two. Actress Jodie Comer walked the red carpet for the season two premiere of Killing Eve (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP) Oh won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Eve while both she and Comer, 26, earned best actress nominations at the TV Baftas. Former Greys Anatomy star Oh said it was difficult exploring the darker sides of her character but ultimately professionally rewarding. She said: Its really hard, Ill be completely honest. Its really, really hard. And its extremely satisfying in a way where youre challenged and youre stretched and I think, at least for me as an actor, thats just what you want to explore the limits of where you can go. Fiona Shaw was among the stars at the Killing Eve season two premiere (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP) Irish actress Fiona Shaw stars as Carolyn Martens, head of the Russia section at MI6. She said season two will bring more thrills. You wouldnt have thought you could have many more but there are, Shaw said. Killing Eve season two will air in the US on April 7, though no UK date has been announced. Food. We all need it and we all eat it. But what does it tell us about who we are? This was one of many questions I explored in recent research focused on the evolution of Muslim identity in the West. Given that most British Muslims today are either migrants or the children of migrants, I wanted to understand how their identity changes, not just as it moves across continents, but also as it passes along generations. And so, along with other markers of cultural identity such as language and dress, I examined the types of food eaten by hundreds of respondents over 18 months of fieldwork conducted across the UK and Europe. Take tea. Its a straightforward beverage thats ubiquitous in everyday British life. Yet how its brewed matters. South Asian culture, which encompasses around two-thirds of the British Muslim population, frequently distinguishes between Desi chai/tea and English tea. Desi chai refers to equal amounts of milk and water boiled on a stove together with a teabag and sometimes flavoured with spices such as cinnamon, cardamom or ginger, whereas English tea refers to boiling water from a kettle poured onto a teabag usually with a splash of milk. First-generation South Asian migrants almost exclusively sip the former and, based on my research, often look askance at the latter. On one occasion, for example, I heard an elderly British Pakistani haughtily dismiss English tea as no more than weak, flavoured water. Their offspring, on the other hand, often drink both English as well as Desi chai (or, as its sometimes called, masala tea) indicating the emergence of an ambidextrous cultural identity informed by ethnic roots as well as social context. Lets take another example. The Naga pepper, cultivated in Bangladesh, is one of the hottest chillies in the world. Imran*, a young British-born Bangladeshi I interviewed, told me how a chilli-eating competition of sorts developed when an uncle visited his London home from Bangladesh. Both he and his father, whod been resident in the UK for over two decades, felt obliged to participate in a display of bravado. Story continues After two bites, Imran rushed from the room gulping copious amounts of milk to soothe his burning tongue. While his dad continued stoically on, tears streaming down his face, it was his Bangladeshi uncle who won the day. The implication in Imrans story was that his familys time in England had diminished their capacity to enjoy hot chillies an important emblem of Bangladeshi culture. When visiting Bangladesh later that year, Imran recounted that the ladies of the village had mockingly called out: As youre from London, well have to cook without chillies or youll start crying! The sociology of the palate In 1979, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously argued that dominant social groups bolster their cultural capital by defining their tastes in opposition to the perceived uncouthness of the hoi polloi. In other words, Bourdieu argued that snobbery is socially constructed. In my own analysis, Ive introduced a new twist on his use of the word taste by defining it literally with reference to the flavours felt in the mouth. Just as peoples aesthetic or artistic preferences are determined in no small measure by social factors, so too are the proclivities of their gustatory glands. In other words, socialisation has a physiological dimension. I call this the sociology of the palate. During my research, it quickly became possible to distinguish between the tastes of first-generation migrants and their British-born offspring. So pronounced did this difference become, I named it the distinction between the old guard and the avant-garde. To illustrate with a generalisation: the old guard, I found, prefer oily curries and chapattis, while the avant-garde have a penchant for takeaways or other quick and easy foods such as noodles. On one occasion, I recall observing a group of young Muslims gaze in bewilderment at an elderly Indian uncle as he tore up a slice of pizza and dipped the pieces in his lamb karahi like naan bread. Food and shifting identities Food, as the researchers Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta point out in a fascinating recent study, is also a symbol of national identity. Haggis, for example, often conjures images of kilts and tartan while hummus evokes Middle Eastern exoticism. Yet in 2001, the former British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, claimed that chicken tikka masala is not just the most popular but also now a true British national dish winning its place alongside older classics such as bangers and mash, Yorkshire pudding or fish and chips. This tells us that even national identity, far from being static and inflexible, is a moveable feast. Human palates and the identities they signify evolve, chameleon-like, to reflect changing social and cultural conditions often brought into sharp relief by migration. Lets return to Imran, the young British-born Muslim of Bangladeshi origin. Growing up, he told me he despised the overpowering smell of shutki in his home a type of dried fish popular in Bangladeshi cuisine. But several events in his teenage years triggered an introspective journey in which he reassessed his relationship with both his faith and ethnic culture. To the delight of family elders, he began during this period not only to pray regularly but also to eat shutki. For Imran, this was a conscious choice to signal a reaffirmation of his Bangladeshi Muslim heritage. Muaaz, another British-born Muslim of Bangladeshi ancestry I interviewed, had a different relationship with food. During the course of a religious retreat I undertook with him, he served an Italian bolognese proudly declaring hed cooked it without using a single Asian spice. For Muaaz, unlike Imran, this was a conscious choice to signal a shift from an old continent to a new one. Both Imran and Muaaz are committed Muslims, but the practice of their faith went hand-in-hand with different forms of cultural expression. The type of food dished up on a plate can tell us more than just the culinary preferences of the diner then. It can offer a window into human identity. And as the type of food on the plate changes both as it shifts across continents and moves along generations its a reminder that identity is never fixed, but subject to the constant pushes and tugs exerted by the forces of society and culture. * Names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the interviewees. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The Conversation The research on which this article is based was generously funded by the Jameel Scholarship Programme. The estranged wife of an Italian fashion boss says a London judge who thought she wanted to "have her cake and eat it" made a mistake. Ilaria Giusti and husband Ferruccio Ferragamo - chairman of Florence-based Salvatore Ferragamo, which is famous for shoes - are arguing over whether judges in England or Italy should make decisions about money following the breakdown of their marriage. She says judges in London should make decisions, but he argues they are both Italian and lived in Italy when married, so litigation should take place in Italy. She has asked two Court of Appeal judges to overturn a ruling by Mr Justice Francis, who ruled last year that legal proceedings in England should be halted pending rulings by judges in Italy. Appeal judges Lord Justice Moylan and Lord Justice Baker are expected to deliver a ruling in the near future. Mr Justice Francis said Ms Giusti moved to a new home in London in late 2017 and attempted to "put jurisdiction" in England in a way which was "frankly, unprincipled". But barrister Timothy Scott QC, who leads her legal team, told a Court of Appeal hearing in London on Monday that Mr Justice Francis "fell into error". He said Mr Justice Francis should have heard evidence from an expert in Italian law on whether "Italian separation proceedings were ongoing". "Mr Justice Francis found the position adopted by the wife to be unattractive and he used a number of disparaging phrases about it," Mr Scott told appeal judges in a written argument. "He described the situation as a remarkable case of the wife trying to have her cake and eat it. "He said in terms that her position was unattractive and also that it was unprincipled. "Although Mr Justice Francis, in the present case, correctly directed himself that he should not be influenced by what he regarded as the unattractive nature of the wife's case, it is hard to avoid the conclusion, looking at his judgment at a whole, that he was influenced by those considerations." Story continues Mr Justice Francis said in a ruling in November: "It appears to be common ground that the wife is likely to secure a higher financial reward for herself ... in England than would be the case in Italy." He said she had "taken many active steps in her endeavour to secure English jurisdiction". The judge said the pair had married in 2004 and separated in 2012 and "enjoyed a very high standard of living". He said Mr Ferragamo had "significant resources" as a result of the fashion empire created by father Salvatore. Barrister Nicholas Cusworth QC, who leads Mr Ferragamo's legal team, told appeal judges Mr Justice Francis had not fallen into error and the appeal should be dismissed. He said the marriage and separation were "wholly Italian". An infrared view of our Solar Orbiter spacecraft, which is currently undergoing a series of tests at the IABG facility in Ottobrunn, Germany, ahead of its launch, scheduled for February 2020. Selected in 2011 as the first medium-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision programme, Solar Orbiter was designed to perform unprecedented close-up observations of the Sun. The spacecraft carries a suite of 10 state-of-the-art instruments to observe the turbulent, sometimes violent, surface of the Sun and study the changes that take place in the solar wind that flows outward at high speed from our nearest star. Solar Orbiter's unique orbit will allow scientists to study our parent star and its corona in much more detail than previously possible, and to observe specific features for longer periods than can ever be reached by any spacecraft circling the Earth. In addition, it will measure the solar wind close to the Sun, in an almost pristine state, and provide high-resolution images of the uncharted polar regions of the Sun. After the preliminary definition and design phase, the mission started its integration and qualification in 2016, including environmental testing of the spacecraft as well as validation of all mission systems and sub-systems. The first phase of Solar Orbiter's environmental testing campaign was conducted in IABG's special thermal-vacuum chamber in December 2018. Inside the chamber, powerful lamps are used to produce a 'solar beam' that simulates the Sun's radiation to demonstrate that the spacecraft can sustain the extreme temperatures it will encounter in the Sun's vicinity. This picture was taken with an infrared camera, and the colouring indicates the temperatures of the spacecraft surface, corresponding to the range indicated in the colour bar on the right-hand side. During this thermal-vacuum test on the spacecraft, the solar beam was used at its maximum flux of about 1800 W/m2, reaching temperatures up to 107,6 C. An additional thermal-vacuum test was conducted on the heat shield that protects the entire platform from direct solar radiation: during this test, which used infrared plates to simulate the Sun's heat, the heat shield reached higher temperatures, up to 520 C, similar to what it will experience during operations. In this view, the spacecraft panel that will face the Sun is visible on the left, covered with the heat shield. The dark elements visible in the upper part of the panel are sliding doors that will open the path for sunlight to reach the remote-sensing instruments during science operations. Some of the thrusters that will be used to control the spacecraft orbit and to perform manoeuvres are hosted on the panel that is visible on the right in this view. A video showing the spacecraft rotating as part of a simulated orbit-control-manoeuvre is available here. After completing the thermal-vacuum tests, Solar Orbiter also successfully concluded the mechanical testing phase, including intense vibration tests, shaking the spacecraft to ensure that it will survive the stress of launch. Solar Orbiter is an ESA-led mission with strong NASA participation. It will be launched from Cape Canaveral aboard a NASA-supplied Atlas V launch vehicle. Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. French girls know good skincare. So it's not all that surprising really that the number one makeup remover used backstage at pretty much every fashion show we've ever been to, was founded in France. What is surprising, however, is that the skincare staple loved by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Lara Stone, Margot Robbie, Olivia Palermo, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Victoria Beckham is a drugstore beauty buyavailable from just 6. The Launch of Bioderma Sensibio H2O Years ago, the majority of skincare solutions recommended by dermatologists were cleansing milks. These cleansing milks often needed to be followed up with a toner to reset the skin's pH and remove any excess cleansing milk that could cause breakouts and congestion on the skin, but toner often led to skin irritation. This led Laboratoire Bioderma's research to develop a new micellar technology. In 1995, the brand launched Sensibio H2O, the first cleansing and makeup removing water guaranteeing gentle, non-rinse cleansing for sensitive skin. Sensibio H2O was rapidly accepted and prescribed by dermatologists. Plus, thanks to its tough makeup removing skills without irritating the skin, it is a favourite amongst professional makeup artists. Bioderma Sensibio H2O Micellar Water (11) Why Is Sensibio H2O Still Popular Today? The cult cleansing water may have been formulated over 20 years ago, but its popularity only continues. Whilst it was formulated specifically for sensitive skin types in mind, Sensibio H2O manages to remove 99% of makeup, 98% of pollution particles and 78% of heavy metalswithout stripping the skin. Last year alone, over 300,000 bottles of Sensibio H2O were sold in the UK, with makeup artists, beauty editors and celebrities swearing by the formula. I use Sensibio H2O to remove any makeup, dirt and grime before going in with a secondary deep cleanser like Dr Dennis Gross Alpha Beta Pore Perfecting Cleansing Gel (46) that I'll wash off with water. The smaller sized bottle is great for travelling and leaves your skin feeling fresh and clean with just one quick swipe. Story continues Sure, there are now many great micellar waters on the market, but nothing beats the OG. Since its launch, the cult cleansing water now comes in various incarnations depending on your skin's needs. Keep scrolling to shop them all along with some other great French pharmacy makeup removers. Bioderma Hydrabio H2O Micellar Water (11) Dehydrated or sensitive skin types will love this moisturising version of the cult makeup remover. It uses a patented Aquagenium complex to help improve your skin's ability to keep hydration locked in over time. Nuxe Reve de Miel Face Cleansing and Makeup Removing Gel (15) A luxurious honey and sunflowerinfused makeup remover that leaves skin feeling soft and nourished. Bioderma Sebium H2O Micellar Water (11) Formulated with oily-combination skin types in mind, this micellar water contains Fluidactiv to stabilise sebum production and purify the skin. La Roche-Posay Rosaliac Makeup Remover Gel (9) A refreshing, soothing option for skin that is prone to sensitivity and irritation. This gel feels wonderfully cooling on the skin and does a great job at reducing redness. Bioderma Sensibio H2O Micellar Water 100ml (5) The same cult classic formula in a smaller, travel-sized bottle for extra cute points. Caudalie Micellar Cleansing Water (15) This micellar water is another makeup artist must-have that is often spotted backstage at fashion week to cleanse models' skin. Next up, I tested Amazon's beauty best sellersthis is what I thought. Read More from Who What Wear A diner falsely accused Great Wall Buffet of having maggots. (Photo: Great Wall/DinerOptions.com) An Indiana restaurant is taking a customer to court after she claimed to have found maggots in a napkin dispenser, local newspaper the Kokomo Tribune reports. The maggots were later determined to be paper fibers from napkins. Want daily pop culture news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoos newsletter. The Great Wall Buffet, a Chinese restaurant in Kokomo, Ind., was visited by an inspector from the Howard County Health Department on March 7 in response to a complaint by diner Dottie Stewart. Stewart also went on Facebook to accuse Great Wall of having maggots, leaving her sick to [her] stomach. According to the inspectors report, however, there were no such maggots. The substance that appeared to be maggots was actually paper fibers from napkins that had been in the dispensers before, the report stated. The incident prompted the restaurant to hire a lawyer, Erik May, who sent Stewart a cease-and-desist letter over the malicious claim. Days later, she sent a letter apologizing for her mistake, saying she was mortified and distraught. She added that she deleted her Facebook profile in response. I had no intention of damaging the reputation of your restaurant, and I did not act with any malice toward you or your restaurant, she wrote. I did not intend for my Facebook post to be available to anyone other than my family and small group of friends. I am sorry. I understand that making the post on Facebook was not the right thing to do, and Im sorry. I would ask that you forgive me. It was never my intention to cause any distress. Looking back, however, I can clearly see that I didnt think things through before I made my Facebook post. But the restaurant has told the Tribune that it intends to file a lawsuit against Stewart, whose post May has caused irreparable damage and contributed to a considerable drop in sales. Manager Shan Lin told the paper that the post scared off diners, with Great Wall losing a catering order worth at least $200. Story continues People think they can say anything over Facebook, said Lin. The damage has been made. Its still there, still continuing. And its hard for me to forgive. I think we should stand up to protect our reputation, she added. Weve been in Kokomo for over 20 years, and I dont want someone who is not responsible just saying something on social media and spread rumors [about] us and make our customers scared. A video showing the napkin dispenser in question has surfaced on Facebook. Meanwhile, Lin told the Tribune that security footage showed Stewart returning to the buffet for more food after examining the supposedly maggot-infested napkin dispenser. Thats not what a normal person would be acting like if you find something thats very serious, could damage your health, you know? she said. May did not immediately respond to Yahoo Lifestyles request for comment. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. From Red Online When writer-director Jordan Peeles Get Out was released in 2017, it was applauded high and low for its clever writing and sharp take on liberal white racism in America. It became an Oscar-winner and an instant classic. It doesnt come as a surprise, then, that Peeles follow up, Us, came with sky-high expectations. But neither does it shock that its just as outstanding. Starring the likes of Lupita Nyongo and Elizabeth Moss, Us opens with Adelaide (Nyongo) returning to the beach home where she grew up along with her husband and their two children. She has a foreboding feeling, thanks to a traumatic childhood experience in the area. Turns out this isnt unfounded when four masked figures appear on their driveway at night, each of which are identical to the family. Its us, says son Jordan when the masks come off. I wont lie to you, this film is scary. But even if horror isnt usually your thing, I urge you to go and see it. Lupita Nyongo is truly exceptional, playing both herself and her doppelganger in wildly different yet equally engrossing ways, and the increasingly sinister plot pulls you in so much you physically cannot look away. Us very entertaining in that way. But like Get Out, this is more than just any old scary movie. Id say its thought-provoking, but even that seems too weak a term. Its intelligent and enigmatic and there are already countless theories about the meaning behind it. Please watch it, and then give me your take because I could talk about this film all day. ('You Might Also Like',) A huge waterspout made landfall at Tanjung Tokong in Malaysia on Monday, causing damage to a number of buildings in the area, according to the New Straits Times. Several videos of the waterspout were shared on social media, with this high-definition video showing it moving slowly towards an area just north of Tanjung Tokong Beach. There were no immediate reports of injuries. Watch the incredible phenomenon in the video above. Photo credit: Education Images From Town & Country Meet The Plum Guide an exciting new holiday-home-rental company thats on a mission to track down amazing properties across the globe and personally vet them, accepting only the top one percent to its books. (In fact, there are 150 criteria that a home must meet in order to make it onto the website.) The company has cleverly curated a list of the most luxurious and soulful homes in a number of locations, including London, New York, Paris and Rome. It is little wonder that they have just raised 14 million to help expand the company to new territories, including Tel Aviv, Berlin and Barcelona, by the end of the year. Photo credit: The Plum Guide The Plum Guide prides itself on finding homes that will appeal to even the most discerning traveller, much like the loft we opted to stay in, called The Cheshire Cat. The house was perfectly located in New Yorks fashionable Tribeca neighbourhood, with a SoulCycle studio opposite and a Whole Foods just around the corner in which to stock up on produce to fill the sizeable fridge. Thoughtfully, the host had already arranged some welcome treats and a bottle of fizz, which were a great way to kick off our trip in style and unwind after a long transatlantic flight. The hosts information pack was also invaluable, pointing out local gems such as restaurants for brunch and cute cocktail bars. Photo credit: The Plum Guide What makes a dream holiday home? We loved the amazing sense of space and double-height ceilings in the apartment, which is almost unheard of in Manhattan. Owned by an artist, the flats Instagram-worthy interiors were a wonderland of pattern and colour, with unique touches such as an indoor fountain and a cosy television room filled with quirky sculptures. The main living area was home to a number of giant leafy plants and a comfortable day bed that was ideal for curling up on with a book after a long days sightseeing. Photo credit: The Plum Guide Other highlights included lovely products in the bathrooms, a strong WiFi connection throughout and high-quality linens on all the beds. In the kitchen there was every appliance you could hope for and a long breakfast bar, which was our preferred place to start the day with a strong cup of cafetiere coffee and some cream-cheese covered bagels this was New York, after all. Perhaps most amazing of all was the private roof terrace, which offered 360-degree views of the Manhattan skyline and really made us feel like were true locals when we invited a couple of friends over for sundowners. The only question that remained was where to next? Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzenzski stood up for Joe Biden on Monday after former Nevada state assemblywoman Lucy Flores alleged that the former vice president kissed the back of her head in 2014 and made her feel uneasy, gross, and confused. Theres a lot of things I know about Joe Biden, Ive known him for a long time, Brzezinski began. He is extremely affectionate, extremely flirtatious in a completely safe way. I am sure that somebody can misconstrue something hes done. But as much as I can know whats anyones heart, I dont think that theres a bad intent on his part at all. As Lucy Flores explained in an essay for The Cut, she was the 35-year-old Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in Nevada when the alleged incident occurred side stage at a campaign rally. Brzezinski said that she read Flores account and agreed that it sounded like something Biden would do, but never thought he meant anything from it except to be nice. And her Morning Joe co-host, Joe Scarborough, also weighed in. Weve had clips of him and late-night comics have had clips of him, he said. Hes always been very expressive, and hes always been very expressive in public. Its not like hes hiding anything. Biden issued a statement in response to Flores allegation on Sunday. In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort, the statement read. And not once never did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention. https://twitter.com/BillR/status/1112339598699626501 Brzezinskis comments also come after Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, wrote on Medium that a viral image of her and Biden in 2015 showing a similar circumstance, was taken from a video and is misleading and not a #MeToo moment. Are we really going to do this? Brzezinski wondered. And Democrats, you have to ask yourself: What exactly is the line, the #MeToo line, you want to draw? Because you will live and die by that line. Its an important line, its very important. Dont mock it. Story continues Watch what happened when a meteorologist took to the airwaves after being shamed for being pregnant on camera: 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. This photographers incredible images bring ice caves to life, with vibrant light illuminating the interiors of the gigantic caverns. Peter Svobodas work looks to capture the mysticism of the world beneath the glacier, with many of the photographers shots looking almost otherworldly. In order to get this effect, Svoboda, 50, uses long exposure shots, but also insists on only using natural light. Many of his images include an individual who is almost completely engulfed by the sheer size and scale of the vibrant wonders. (Caters News) Apples (AAPL) road ahead in China will likely continue to be turbulent even if there is a U.S. trade deal with China. We have to remember the Chinese government has been trying to undermine Apples business for at least since March of 2013. There are periodic campaigns against Apple. And of course they help Huawei, Gordon Chang, China expert and author of The Coming Collapse, told Yahoo Finance On the Move. So eventually, Apple has a declining future in China. Part of it is also because its wrongly placed in the market, there are a lot of cheap products in the market as good as Apple, added Chang. The real question investors need to ask is if things could get any worse for Apple in the worlds second largest economy. Apple continues to be hampered by a barrage of cheaper priced smartphones in the country and the view among the Chinese that its products are too expensive. Many experts say Apples sales in China have also been hit because its brand is so synonymous with the United States. Apples sales in China in the most recent quarter plunged to $13.2 billion from $17.9 billion a year ago. The tech giant saw sales decline across its iPhone, Mac and iPad businesses. Apple CEO Tim Cook pinned the blame on a slowing Chinese economy derailing upgrades to new higher priced hardware. Early data on the current quarters suggest Apples struggles in China havent abated despite a slowly rebounding Chinese economy. Analysis of monthly government smartphone sell-through data from China suggests the annual rate of decline for Apple iPhones in the month of February (down 67% year-over-year) is similar to the weakness in January and December months (down 68% in each month), wrote UBS analyst Tim Arcuri in a mid-March note to clients. Overall, the data is neutral as weak China smartphone is well understood as are iPhone struggles in China, added Arcuri. An Apple spokesman didnt return a request for comment. Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @BrianSozzi Story continues Read more: Apple's services business is booming and may be worth more than its iPhones Apple's big event with Oprah and Spielberg was a letdown Why Apple CEO Tim Cook better blow minds with its new video streaming service It turns out I've been a bad, bad girl. But no naughtier than Princess Diana, because she too decided to wear red to a wedding. It's a question the British public googles up to 1000 times per month and until speaking to an etiquette expert this week, I had never known the official line or concerned myself with the matter when it came to choosing my own wedding-guest outfits for the many nuptials I've attended over the years. Princess Diana in a red printed dress and matching accessories for a wedding in 1981. Although fashion search engine Lyst has predicted that hot pink will be the colour many stylish guests choose to wear this wedding season, the allure of the little red dress has held strong in fashion circles over the past few summers. In its most vibrant, flouncy forms, many influencers, editors and more have been seen imitating full flamenco-emoji looks like a standard summer practice, and that includes taking the senorita vibes to weddings both overseas and on home turf. Around five years ago, I wore a red carnation-dotted dress to a wedding in Spain, and it didn't appear to cause any friction. Moreover, my best friend wore a fabulous off-the-shoulder lipstick-red midi to my wedding a few years backalso in Spainand it didn't bother me one jot. From my personal experience (and watching others make this decision on numerous other occasions), I assumed this old-fashioned taboo had washed away along with many other traditions surrounding the Big Day. Tish Weinstock wearing a red flamenco dress and sneakers to the 2017 nuptials of Greta Bellamacina and Robert Montgomery. Oh, how wrong I was. "Wearing red, whilst giving off different connotations, is as questionable as wearing white to a wedding," explains Isobel Kershaw, a leading figure at The British School of Etiquette and the fashion expert behind personal styling company The Stylist London. "The first consideration is what type of wedding, the themes and the venue. If the wedding is in winter, darker berry tones are perfectly acceptable, however for summer ones, the red tones are less acceptable." Story continues Why so? It's all thanks to the history that the colour red carries: "Red can be seen as the most sexy, confident and striking of colours, and therefore female guests choosing to wear the hue could be seen as a tad disrespectful. After all, no one should try to outshine the bride!" True. However, I do believe there are more demure shapes and silhouettes that can soften the idea of wearing a bold red dress. If you avoid anything slit on the legs or with too short a hemline, and steer clear of showing major cleavage or donning anything too tight, I think you're in safer territory. Jacinda Barrett in a dark berry hue for Meghan and Harry's wedding last year. There are, however, some official etiquette-approved exceptions to crafting a red ensemble. "The acceptable considerations may be wearing the yellow-based tones of red in a print," says Kershaw, advising that one should steer clear of a block-colour power-red (which is more blue-based) dress or suit, or consider adding red accessories to a look in a different colour. Of course, should the idea of red be "on theme" for the nuptials or wedding you're attending, then it's entirely acceptable. I put the question out to our audience via Who What Wear's private shopping group on Facebook (join So Should I Buy This? here), and the feedback was mixed. One user highlighted one very important situation where this would be frowned upon: at a Chinese wedding. Traditionally, the bride will wear red, and it would be considered in poor taste to follow suit. Some couldn't quite pinpoint why it didn't feel right to do but agreed it was best avoided. However, for the majority, the sentiment was that so long as it's not a white or cream look you're turning up in, red is entirely fair game. Demi Moore in a burgundy shade for Meghan and Harry's wedding last year. The best advice we can offer up? Just ask the bride if you're unsure. I would say that it's more offensive to wear something ultra-revealing or too casual than opting for a shade of red. So if you're set on sticking to this part of the rainbow, keep scrolling to shop for red dresses that look the part SHOP RED WEDDING-GUEST DRESSES Whistles Marigold Tiered Maxi Dress (329) So chic with flats. H&M Wrap Dress (35) A versatile party/wedding/barbecue option. Ghost Hollywood Sylvia Dress (225) A very good bridesmaid option, if you fancy your girls wearing red and bucking tradition entirely! Johanna Ortiz Beautiful Chaos Dress (1330) Can someone just invite me to an Italian wedding already? Carmen March Red Ruffled Dress (1730) Yes, this would totally outshine the bride, but I had to include it! Topshop Red One Shoulder Satin Midi Dress (65) Great for an evening do. Mango Pleated Dress (70) I'd add a belt to this to elevate the simple shape. Khaite Theodora Dress (995) I adore a dress with an interesting back. Polo Ralph Lauren Halter Dress (249) A rare find that can look just as good dressed up with heels and jewellery as it will with sneaks and a cardigan. Kitri Odile Wrap Dress (165) Add strappy sandals and go. Saloni Annie B Dress (625) You could pass this off as vintage. Next up, the coolest wedding guest outfits for 2019. Read More from Who What Wear For a small organization with a three-member staff, University of North Georgia (UNG) Press has more than accomplished its mission to promote education and research with an emphasis on innovative scholarship and pedagogy. Since its formation 10 years ago, UNG Press has released 43 books ranging from nonfiction and scholarly works to a children's book penned by UNG President Bonita Jacobs. It is quite a feat for a small university press, which is highlighted in March for Small Press Month. "We never thought about output," said Bonnie "BJ" Robinson, director of UNG Press. "But we are 'The Little Engine that Could.'" Part of its output includes Open Educational Resources (OER), which are digital textbooks that students can download for free. UNG Press is the leading university press in Georgia for OERs through its partnership with the University System of Georgia (USG), Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG), and eCore. "We have saved students more than $12 million through OER," said Jillian Murphy, assistant managing editor of UNG Press and a 2016 UNG alumna. "Students can choose to buy the print textbook form, but it is a much lower cost, and the digital version is completely free." As it marks 10 years, the scholarly, peer-reviewed press prepares to release a new textbook that embodies its mission of scholarly work and pedagogy. John Cagle, a part-time faculty member of criminal justice at UNG and retired GBI special agent in charge, authored the book, "Write to Protect and Serve." "Write to Protect and Serve" is a practical guide for law enforcement officials on how to write reports. John Cagle, a part-time faculty member of criminal justice at UNG and retired GBI special agent in charge, authored the book after discovering gaps in the current textbook. "I didn't feel the students in UNG's Public Safety Academy were getting all of the information they needed to understand the skill set," he said. To teach his students how to take accurate notes and convert them into a report, Cagle penned a "no frill, no fluff, down-to-earth" textbook with real-life scenarios and audio files. He pulled a majority of his content from his online class and transformed it into a 126-page book. UNG Press and Cagle plan to submit it to police academies and criminal justice programs for use. "With this book, we can fill a gap in the industry," Murphy said. Robinson pointed out no affordable textbook or exercise book dedicated to law enforcement reports such as "Write to Protect and Serve" is available. UNG Press does not limit itself to textbooks, pedagogy or scholarly works. It publishes works of nonfiction and specialized works on a single topic. It also publishes fiction and literature focused on the region or the South. In November 2018, UNG Press published its first children's book, "UNG The Gold I See: The Legacy of UNG's Dahlonega Campus." It tells the story of a young boy and his family during their visit to UNGs Dahlonega campus. "Publishing a children's book is really unique for a university press like us, but it met our regional focus as well as our service learning," Murphy said. Service learning is how UNG Press started. Robinson, a professor of English at UNG, noticed some of her students in the English department were in limbo career-wise after graduation. "Once they got their degrees as teachers, some realized the teaching field was not a good fit for them," she said. "And I couldn't understand why they didn't look at opportunities in publishing." Robinson decided to create one for them. She researched publishing programs and discovered a creative writing program that began a book publishing press. It allowed students to gain real-world experience in the publishing process from beginning to end with hands-on opportunities. Thanks to an innovation grant and faculty input, UNG Press was born and continues the service-learning opportunity for students. As Emily Storck finished dual enrollment, which allows eligible high school students to take college courses tuition-free and earn both high school and college credit, she knew she needed a way to cover the costs of being a regular college student at the University of North Georgia (UNG). The S-STEM Scholars program provided her that way. A product of a $615,000 grant to UNG from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Scholarship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) project, the program aims to increase the STEM workforce by recruiting and supporting academically talented, low-income students through degree completion, and partnering with employers to facilitate job placement. The grant, which was awarded in summer 2015 and runs through June 2020, provides annual $4,362 stipends to each student in the program, plus additional funds to support their research. The program has 12 students each on UNG's Dahlonega and Gainesville campuses. The scholarships are competitive, and students must apply and be interviewed for acceptance. The grant was the brainchild of Mike Bodri, then dean of the College of Science and Mathematics, with Dr. Natalie Hyslop, associate professor of biology and S-STEM adviser on the Gainesville Campus, as the principal investigator and Dr. John Holliday, professor of mathematics and S-STEM adviser on the Dahlonega Campus, as co-principal investigator. They authored the grant along with Charles Wood, former associate director of grants and contracts. Storck, who applied in summer 2016, said the program has opened doors for research, conferences and graduate school. The senior from Buford, Georgia, pursuing a major in chemistry got an earlier start on her research than most students thanks to S-STEM. Her research seeks to improve chemistry labs for UNG students. Storck also was recently selected for an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), which will send her to Florida State University (FSU) to research light and matter with an FSU faculty member for 10 weeks this summer. Jessica Hamilton, a junior from Dahlonega, Georgia, pursuing a degree in physics, is an S-STEM Scholar who earned a scholarship to intern at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany this summer. Caroline Brown, a senior pursuing a degree in chemistry with a biochemistry focus, is another student who took advantage of the S-STEM resources. Her undergraduate research on enzymes has landed her acceptance into multiple graduate schools like Yale University and the University of Washington. Brown, who is from Carrollton, Georgia, was one of the few undergraduate students invited to present her research at a conference at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Most have to apply. Andrew Redman, a senior pursuing a degree in physics, said the 3.0 GPA requirement of S-STEM has motivated him. His GPA fell below that mark, and the Suwanee, Georgia, native had to work hard to get his grades up to rejoin the program. S-STEM also served as the impetus for Redman's undergraduate research on space elevators, work he and his partner presented March 22 at UNG's Annual Research Conference (ARC). Holliday said one of the program's main goals is to keep students from needing to work so many hours at a paid job that they can't properly focus on their studies. That had been the case for Katie Horton, a senior from Clarkesville, Georgia, pursuing a degree in biology with a minor in chemistry. She works full time to put herself through school while caring for her pets. S-STEM has allowed her to take time off work as needed. "It was a huge weight removed from my shoulders," Horton said. "This has helped me stay in college and do what I came to do." Hyslop said the program prepares students for their next steps. Workshops include study skills, citations, time management, professionalism, resumes, cover letters and how to get into graduate school. Horton has found those workshops especially beneficial. "It's helped take a lot of the fear out of applying to grad school," Horton said. [April 02, 2019] 3CLogic Silver Sponsor for ServiceNow Knowledge19 3CLogic, a leading provider of cloud contact center software for enterprise businesses, today announced it is a Silver sponsor for the annual ServiceNow (News - Alert) user conference, Knowledge19. The event is considered one of the largest gatherings of professionals leading the enterprise digital transformation and aiming to deliver the next level of customer and employee experiences. The conference will be held May 5th to 7th at the Venetian and Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas. "3CLogic (News - Alert) fully embraces ServiceNow's vision of making modern digital workflows the center of better employee and customer experiences," says Denis Seynhaeve, CEO for 3CLogic. "Our mission is to complement these digital channels by deeply embedding the power of voice, providing enterprise customers a completely integrated service solution, resulting in a more efficient and productive employee and an even more satisfied customer." 3CLogic is a Now Certified application and one of the most popular offerings on the ServieNow Store today. Features for its AWS-hosted cloud contact center solution include: Computer Telephony Integration (CTI (News - Alert)), intelligent Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), click-to-call, skills-based routing, automated activity postings, customer self-service, reporting & analytics, and more. Last year the company announced its ServiceNow embedded administrative solution for Customer Service Management (CSM), ITSM, and HR to allow for a more ServiceNow-centric user-friendly experience. At Knowledge19, the company will be showcasing its fifth-generation integration with additional feature functionality and enhancements for ServiceNow's Madrid release and Workspace. "We are thrilled to be in Las Vegas again for our fifth ServiceNow user Conference. This has been a very successful event for us in the past and given the enhancements we plan to show at Expo Now, we're confident that this year will be the best one yet!" 3CLogic is a ServiceNow Silver Technology Partner and will be located at booth #826. About Knowledge19 At Knowledge19, approximately 20,000 attendees will have the opportunity to choose from more than 120 labs and 300 breakout sessions, specialized networking events, and Knowledge19 show floor exhibition hall. With the combination of pre-conference training, hands-on labs, and breakout sessions, the conference presents the best opportunity for ServiceNow customers and partners to learn about the future of ServiceNow, the ecosystem and how we are empowering digital transformations and delivering great customer and employee experiences. About 3CLogic 3CLogic is a leading cloud contact center platform modernizing enterprise communications with their employees and customers. Built on Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS), the solution provides advanced and scalable speech-enabled offerings for leading CRMs, including ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM (News - Alert). With deployments on four continents and a growing base of Global 2000 clients, 3CLogic drives digital transformation by improving CX, organizational efficiency and reporting insights using dynamic IVR, CTI, AI, advanced analytics, and API-driven integrations. For more information, please visit www.3clogic.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005156/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] PCMag Readers Choose Ooma Office as the Best Business VoIP Phone Service for the 6th Straight Year SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ooma, Inc., a smart communications platform for businesses and consumers, announced today that for the sixth year in a row the companys Ooma Office service has won PCMags prestigious Business Choice Award for Best VoIP System. Ooma, Inc., a smart communications platform for businesses and consumers, announced today that for the sixth year in a row the companys Ooma Office service has won PCMags prestigious Business Choice Award for Best VoIP System. The award is part of the magazines annual Readers Choice Survey, and Ooma once again emerged as the top business VoIP provider among 12 finalists, including RingCentral, 8X8, Vonage, Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon. The award ( https://www.pcmag.com/news/366695/business-choice-awards-2019-voice-over-ip-voip-systems ) is part of the magazines annual Readers Choice Survey, and Ooma once again emerged as the top usiness VoIP provider among 12 finalists, including RingCentral, 8X8, Vonage, Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon. PCMags story on the award says: Ooma takes the crown for the sixth time in a row, thanks to a top overall score (8.8 out of 10) and an almost astronomically high likelihood to recommend score of 8.9 . . . For six years now, Ooma is the VoIP service PCMag readers believe is the very best. It tops almost every metric we measure, making this cloud-based PBX service the clear choice for any office. "PCMag has been surveying our business readers for six years to find what delivers the best service, support, and overall experience, said Dan Costa, editor-in-chief of PCMag. Every year, Ooma has come out on top. Ooma was number one in nine of the ten categories we asked about. Most importantly, it is the VoIP service our readers recommend most." Jim Gustke, vice president of marketing at Ooma, said: To our current Ooma Office customers who participated in PCMags survey, we want to give our heartfelt thanks for your support. We are deeply honored to have earned your trust, which made it possible for Ooma to win this award for the sixth year in a row from one of the nations most influential tech publications. Ooma Office ( https://www.ooma.com/office/ ) offers a set of features carefully curated to meet the needs of small business, available through a straightforward fee of $19.95 a month per user with no contract required. Customers have their choice of hardware conventional analog phones, IP phones, virtual service through the Office for Mobile app, or any combination of the three. Advanced features such as a virtual receptionist, ring groups, call parking and multi-site access combine to make small businesses sound big. About Ooma, Inc. Ooma (NYSE: OOMA) creates powerful connected experiences for businesses and consumers, delivered from its smart cloud-based SaaS platform. For businesses of all sizes, Ooma provides advanced voice and collaboration features that are flexible and scalable. For consumers, Oomas residential phone service provides PureVoice HD voice quality, advanced functionality and integration with mobile devices. Oomas groundbreaking smart security solution delivers a full range of wireless security sensors and an intelligent video camera that make it easy for anyone to protect their home or business. Learn more at www.ooma.com . Ooma, Ooma Office, PureVoice and the Ooma logo are trademarks of Ooma, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. The detailed terms and conditions of Ooma's products, services, and support are fully set forth in the Terms and Conditions, available online under the "legal" tab on the bottom navigation bar of the Ooma Web site. PCMag Business Choice logo is a trademark of Ziff Davis Inc. Used under license. Reprinted with permission. 2019 Ziff Davis, LLC. All rights reserved. MEDIA CONTACT: Mike Langberg at Ooma [email protected] 650-566-6693 INVESTOR CONTACT: Matt Robison at Ooma [email protected] 415-661-0470 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f1875088-76b7-4d7c-a19e-e8ccbfdfdbac [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next. The delivery ceremony took place yesterday in Maputo, the capital of the African country. Tropical storm Idai is the worst natural disaster to hit the region in 30 years with 518 deaths, 1,522 wounded and 135,000 displaced in Mozambique alone. In the past ten years, Vietnam has sent about US$ 600 million to Mozambique. Hanoi (AsiaNews/Agencies) The Central Committee of the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha (VBS) and the Vietnamese community in Mozambique have delivered some 20 tonnes of food to the victims of tropical storm Idai, which devastated the African countrys central region in mid-March. During the handover ceremony (pictured) in Mozambiques capital Maputo Monday, Superior Monk Thich Dong Hue, member of the Executive Council of the VBS Central Committee and head of the Vietnam Buddhist Association (VBA), expressed hope that local authorities and people will soon overcome the consequences of the storm. Casimiro Abreu, Acting Director of Mozambiques National Institute of Natural Disaster Management, praised Vietnamese Buddhists for their solidarity and thanked the government and people of Vietnam for their valuable spiritual and material support. Movitel, a joint venture between Vietnamese telecommunications group Viettel and Mozambique investment company SPI, recently brought in 50 tonnes of food to Sofala province, the hardest hit by the storm. The company also dealt with the restoration of the information system and provided relief in many places in the country. Tropical Storm Idai was the worst natural disaster to hit the region in the past 30 years, killing some 790 people and affecting the lives of nearly three million others. In Mozambique alone, it left at least 518 people dead, 1,522 injured and 135,000 homeless, destroying 3,318 schools. Many areas around Beira city and the central region of Mozambique are still facing flooding, power cuts, food and water shortage as well as the risk of disease outbreaks. Although some 9.500 km separate the two countries, they have close trading relations. Last January, Vietnam's ambassador to Mozambique, Hu Huang, said that the African country received about US$ 600 million from the Vietnamese government in the last ten years, especially in the transport and communications sectors. 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Nov 10 (15) Nov 09 (9) Nov 08 (9) Nov 07 (12) Nov 06 (8) Nov 05 (4) Oct 29 (1) Oct 01 (1) Jul 29 (1) May 11 (1) Jul 11 (1) Richwood, TX (77531) Today Cloudy. Slight chance of a rain shower. High 74F. Winds ESE at 10 to 15 mph.. Tonight Mostly cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Areas of patchy fog. Low 68F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. The Food Bank for the Heartland is partnering with United Methodist Church to host a free mobile food pantry in Central City on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. Food will be distributed until quantities run out. The event will take place at Merrick County Fairgrounds, 1784 Fairgrounds Rd., Central City, NE 68826. Around 4000 to 6000 pounds of food will be available for distribution. 15-pound prepacked disaster pantry packs will be offered. Food Bank for the Heartland has been part of this community for 38 years, said Brian Barks, president and CEO. We understand the cleanup and rebuilding process from this historic flooding will take many months, and we will be here providing emergency and supplemental food to our neighbors in need throughout the Heartland. We are pleased to provide this mobile pantry for individuals and families in Merrick County. We are grateful for the outpouring of support from individuals, organizations and companies locally and across the county. Those attending the mobile pantry are asked to bring boxes or bags to assist in carrying the food received. Volunteers will be available to help recipients. No identification is required to receive food. Information about other disaster relief resources is available on . If members of the community are seeking opportunities to help their neighbors in need, they are encouraged to visit to make a donation to disaster relief. New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Lujan announced Monday (video) that he will run for U.S. Senate in 2020. The seat is being vacated by fellow Democratic Sen. Tom Udall, who is retiring. Lujan will seek to replicate the 2008 election, where he won his current job as then Rep. Udall departed to seek the U.S. Senate seat. Lujan is the 4th ranking Democrat in the U.S. House. His safely Democratic 3rd district covers much of the northern half of the state. Lujan won a 6th term by 32% last November, while Hillary Clinton won here by 15% over Donald Trump in 2016. Five current House members have indicated they won't seek reelection in 2020. In Alabama, GOP Rep. Bradley Byrne is looking to challenge Democratic Sen. Doug Jones. Rob Woodall (R, GA-7), Jose Serrano (D, NY-15), and Rob Bishop (R, UT-1) are retiring. Aside from GA-7 - which gave us 2018's closest congressional race - all these seats appear safe for the incumbent party. Noem holds firm that documents '100% prove' daughter was treated fairly The Republican governor says Kassidy Peters adhered to a 'stipulation agreement' before earning certification. But questions about the timeline of events remain. The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved the first drug specifically for postpartum depression a debilitating condition that affects hundreds of thousands of women a year in the United States. The disorder, which begins during pregnancy or within a month of childbirth, is characterized by feelings of worthlessness or guilt, or thoughts of suicide and is far more severe than the common baby blues. The condition can interfere with a mothers ability to bond with an infant, which can affect the babys development. An estimated 400,000 women in the U.S. each year suffer from postpartum depression. The newly approved drug, called brexanolone, will be marketed under the name Zulresso. Its manufacturer, Sage Therapeutics in Cambridge, Mass., said a course of treatment would likely cost $20,000 to $35,000. Tiffany Farchione, acting director of the psychiatry products division at FDA, said in a statement that the medication represented an important new treatment option for a potentially life-threatening condition. The drug, she said, is administered intravenously for 60 continuous hours. The approval requires that it be administered under strict safety conditions because of concerns it can cause excessive sedation and sudden loss of consciousness. The drug will be available to patients only through a restricted distribution program at certified facilities such as doctors offices or clinics where health care providers can carefully monitor the patient. It will carry a boxed warning, which is the strongest warning required by the FDA. The FDA-approved label says data from a study in which a dozen women who were breastfeeding received the drug showed that the medication is transferred to breast milk in nursing mothers. However, the amount that is passed on to the infant is low and available data do not suggest a significant risk of adverse reactions to breastfed infants from exposure to Zulresso. The FDA said the drugs efficacy was shown in two clinical studies in which participants received either the medication or a placebo and were then followed for four weeks. Experts called the drug a major advance for a serious illness that does not get enough attention. We dont have any treatments that are anywhere near this effective, said Jess Fiedorowicz, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa and a member of an FDA advisory panel that recommended agency approval of the drug. So this is groundbreaking in that regard. Women diagnosed with postpartum depression currently are treated with antidepressants and psychotherapy, but the drugs take four to eight weeks to be fully effective and generally have only a small-to-moderate impact. The new drug, by contrast, takes effect quickly and lasts at least 30 days, according to clinical studies. Still, said Fiedorowicz, the cost and method of administration could prevent women from getting it. Samantha Meltzer-Brody, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who led the clinical trials for the drug, said the medication is such an improvement over current therapies that she doubts the IV administration will discourage its use. She noted postpartum depression, one of the most common complications of childbirth, is under-diagnosed and neglected, and that suicide is a major cause of maternal death. For women suffering, you can say, You can come in and be treated, and in 2.5 days it can go away and not come back, she said. In clinical trials, she added, the IV administration did not prevent women from getting the drug. The main component of drug is allopregnanolone, a breakdown product of the hormone progesterone that affects the GABA neurotransmitters, which have a role in mood regulation, said Meltzer-Brody. She added that the exact mechanism of action is unknown. Sage is developing another drug to treat postpartum depression and major depressive disorder that would be administered as a once-daily pill. The medication recently showed good results in a phase 3 clinical trial. If approved, it could be a blockbuster, some industry analysts say. The FDAs advisory committee recommended approval of brexanolone in early November, but the agency delayed the green light to evaluate concerns about the small number of women who lost consciousness while receiving the drug. The agencys safety requirements are designed to deal with those safety concerns. Anna Glezer, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, said she was encouraged to see an entirely new approach to medication for depression and, in particular, a product aimed specifically at womens mental health. She said mild to moderate cases can be missed because the fatigue and sleeplessness that accompany the arrival of a new baby are also some of the physical symptoms of depression. In her clinical practice, she said, she asks women: Can you sleep when your baby is sleeping? Is your energy lower given how much sleep youre getting? Post-partum depression also is frequently accompanied by anxiety, she said. Given the way the drug will be administered, Glezer said she expects it to be used mainly on the most severe cases, especially women whose post-partum depression requires hospitalization. The FDA action is the second important approval involving depression this year. Earlier this month, in the biggest advance for depression in years, the FDA approved esketamine, also called Spravato, for people with major depression who have not responded to other treatments. Have you ever said, Im not sick, its just allergies to a friend or colleague? Did you struggle to complete this statement without sneezing, coughing, wiping away snot, rubbing itchy eyes or even wincing from tooth pain? If so, its probably time to recast allergies. Because when your sinuses are overwhelmed with allergens, such as New Mexico juniper, there can be a significant deterioration of overall well-being. There have been studies looking at quality of life for people who have allergies, and its often diminished, says Mark Schuyler, MD, chief of the Division of Allergy and Immunology for The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. Its a very real thing if people feel crappy or pain in the sinuses and their nose is running all of the time. The downside: Expect the allergy season, which is definitely energetic and overzealous in Albuquerque at the moment, to last until mid- to late-May. The upside: There are some simple and cost-efficient strategies to try to win the skirmish against allergies. Over-the-counter allergy medications Schuyler says the first step is locating a non-prescription antihistamine thats non-sedating or mildly sedating at the drug store. Most people find that Claritin is the least effective. Allegra and Zyrtec are better, and slightly more people prefer Allegra than Zyrtec. Xyzal is the most effective, but of course its the most expensive, Schuyler says. If allergy meds arent cutting it Schuyler also suggests an over-the-counter nose spray Flonase and Nasacort are the most common and work just as well as prescription nose sprays. Theyre more expensive and none of them work any better, Schuyler says of the prescription sprays. The only real difference is the side effects. Some of the prescription ones have fewer side effects, which would be pain, nose bleeds and sometimes a funny taste in the mouth. Schuyler says that folks can also try the Oprah Winfrey-popularized Neti pot or, for a less messy nasal cavity cleanse, a squeeze bottle made by NeilMed. Is it allergies or an infection? Sometimes its tough to decipher if your head is pounding because of allergies or due to a cold or flu bug. Schuyler says you can crack the code by examining your nasal mucus. Infections are characterized by fever, aches and pains, and yellow-green stuff coming out of your nose, Schuyler says. Allergies are characterized by thin watery stuff coming out of your nose. Also, itchiness in the eyes, nose, sometimes throat, sometimes ears, and no fever. If theres discomfort in your upper teeth, the culprit you guessed it might be allergies. Upper teeth pain is pretty common in sinusitis because the roots of the teeth go up into the sinuses. The biggest sinuses are the maxillary sinuses, which are in your cheeks, so that can be a sign of sinusitis, Schuyler says. In fact, many patients go to a dentist because their teeth hurt and it turns out theres nothing wrong with their teeth. Its just sinusitis. The number of people sickened by measles in the first three months of this year is more than for all of 2018 and the second-highest number reported since U.S. health officials declared the highly contagious and sometimes deadly disease eliminated in 2000. The upsurge, now at 387 cases, reflects outbreaks that have spread to 15 states, including New York, California, Texas and Washington, according to figures released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That surpasses the 372 reported for all of last year. Many of those outbreaks originated after unvaccinated individuals traveled to Europe, the Philippines and Israel, where the infection is more common, and returned to the United States after contracting the illness. Europe is even worse now than North America, said Peter Hotez, an infectious disease expert at the Baylor College of Medicine. This is all the new normal. Nobody ever thought wed ever be at this place. The outbreaks and the increasingly aggressive public health response to them have also prompted a spike in activity among anti-vaccine activists. Across the nation and around the world, a global movement that spreads misinformation about vaccines has helped drive down child immunizations, lowering the community immunity that is critical for protection against one of the worlds most contagious diseases. After Rockland County, New York, banned unvaccinated children from all public spaces last week as it battles a growing measles outbreak that originated in an Orthodox Jewish community, anti-vaccination activists likened the public health measures to the Nazi persecution of Jews that included forcing them to wear yellow stars. In Austin, Del Bigtree, CEO of an anti-vax group called ICAN, wore a yellow star during a rally last Thursday to identify with parents who decline to vaccinate their children. A spokesman for Bigtree said he took the action to let the Jewish community of Rockland County know he stands with them. After photos of Bigtree were posted on Twitter, the official account of the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum in Poland tweeted in response: Instrumentalizing the fate of Jews who were persecuted by hateful anti-Semitic ideology and murdered in extermination camps like #Auschwitz with poisonous gas in order to argue against vaccination that saves human lives is a symptom of intellectual and moral degeneration. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement: Groups advancing a political or social agenda should be able to assert their ideas without trivializing the memory of the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust. Texas has one of the most organized and politically active anti-vaccine groups. Texans for Vaccine Choice, which organized the rally last week, receives support from tea party Republicans and some of the states most influential conservative organizations, state lawmakers have said. Hotez, who has been an outspoken critic of the anti-vaccine lobby, called its latest actions highly offensive and asked the leadership of the state Republican Party to publicly denounce its actions. He added: I dont know what they think they gain by mocking the Holocaust. The rise in measles cases was both predicted and predictable, Hotez said. In a study last year, he and colleagues from several Texas academic centers identified pockets of vulnerability where the risk of measles and other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases is higher because parents hesitate or refuse to get their children immunized. Of 15 counties with the most nonmedical vaccine exemptions across the country, about half are now reporting measles outbreaks, including communities in Washington state, Texas and Michigan, he said. The researchers characterized many of these areas as hot spots because their high exemption rates put them at risk for epidemics, not just of measles but for other vaccine-preventable pediatric infectious diseases such as whooping cough. In Austin last week, 80 people who work at the Texas Capitol were vaccinated, for instance, because a House page contracted whooping cough, a bacterial infection also known as pertussis, which often starts with what feels like a mild cold, followed by weeks of intense coughing fits. The disease gets its name from the sound people make when they are gasping for breath. The growing measles counts come as state legislatures weigh measures to tighten vaccine requirements. In Washington state, where the biggest measles outbreak in more than two decades has sickened 74 people and cost over $1 million, the Legislature is deciding whether to eliminate personal or philosophical exemptions that allow parents to avoid immunizing their children against measles, mumps and rubella. In Maine, a measure to eliminate nonmedical exemptions for all communicable diseases is pending. John Benavidez isnt claiming his house is on fire. He isnt making outrageous demands, or calling for a boycott of the Public Service Company of New Mexico. He just wants to feel safe enough to go for a run. The Albuquerque resident says that despite a dozen or so calls to the city and PNM since mid-2016, street lights in his Downtown neighborhood near Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Interstate 25 remain mostly unlit. Yes, residents should have a little patience for the time it takes to assess damage, and a little understanding of the time needed to get parts when accidents, vandalism, copper theft and simple wear-and-tear happen. But Albuquerque residents like Benavidez deserve better than two years in, then out, then back in the dark. Last week, 193 of PNMs 11,182 lights were out. (The city owns around 21,000.) Part of the problem is the city has PNM on the honor system to get its lights back on ASAP, and burned-out street lights rightly take a back seat to power outages and downed wires. Another is that while PNM has reportedly been working on improving its online report a streetlight outage function, clicking through at pnm.com takes you to cabq.gov, the city website, where you first type in the address to figure out who owns the light, then are expected to call the city if you get a blue dot or PNM if you get an orange dot. While who has jurisdiction is a reality in this and many cases, heres a tip for city and PNM officials: Residents concerned about crime, safety and wanting to simply go for a run after sunset dont care who owns the street light. They just want it to work the way their hard-earned tax dollars and rate payments say it should. And until the city and PNM come up with a better system of communication and repair, they are left asking how many entities does it take to change a light bulb? 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. Every year, the otherworldly beauty of White Sands National Monument draws more visitors than any other park service location in New Mexico. For good reason. A little less than an hour north of Las Cruces, the 86-year-old monument boasts about 275 acres of ever-shifting gypsum dunefields, nine miles of hiking trails, back-country campsites and, of course, a visitors center. The monument drew more than 600,000 visits in 2017, generating more than $31 million in spending, according to the Associated Press. Now, New Mexicos congressional delegation has re-introduced legislation that would upgrade the national monument to a national park. Whats not to love about the proposal? According to the National Parks Portfolio, the change would offer primarily a shift in focus. Monuments are preserved for their historic or scientific value, while parks are designated for the publics use because of some outstanding scenic feature or natural phenomena. Supporters hope the designation change will heighten awareness about the regions offerings. According to the story Friday, U.S. Rep. Xochitl Torres Small said she believes the change would offer the potential to make it an economic powerhouse in southern New Mexico, creating new jobs and bringing much-needed services to our rural communities. We agree. Investing in outdoor recreation has paid off handsomely for neighbors including Colorado, Utah and Arizona. Re-designating White Sands as a national park would remind the region and the rest of the country of some of what New Mexico has to offer. 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. Special counsel Robert Muellers report evidently failed to find sufficient evidence that President Donald Trump or his campaign illegally conspired with Russian agents in the 2016 election. However, to understand political reality we must place the unusual Trump-Russian relationship in the financial context of usual presidential campaigns. The U.S. Supreme Court has recast some would say emasculated post-Watergate reforms starting with Buckley v. Valeo (424 U.S. 1 [1976]). The court created a two-tiered system of permissible regulation of campaign finance. Contributions directly to campaign organizations controlled by the candidate can be subject to relatively severe restrictions e.g., limits on how much can be contributed because there is a high chance of corruption or the appearance of corruption in that situation. The court maintains that less severe restrictions are permitted if a campaign organization a PAC is independent of the candidate, because there is less chance of corruption. This independence is a fiction. Media purchases and campaign ads are available, and the candidate can publicly acknowledge strategic information. Independent PACs easily tailor their efforts to match the publicly known efforts of the candidate. Public statements can help guide the efforts of independent PACs. For example, the candidate could say, We are putting maximum effort into Florida and cannot contribute more to Pennsylvania. Message to independent PACs: put money into Pennsylvania. Or the candidate can announce, We think we will make inroads into the opposition partys support among white, working class voters. Message to independent PACs: target those voters. Suppose the candidate said: If somebody has those missing emails of my opponent, I wish they would release them. Message to an independent PAC: find and release those emails. The judicial myth of independence does, however, have a pernicious effect. Independent PACs can run scurrilous, negative ads against an opponent. If there is blowback, the candidate has plausible deniability, because he or she cannot legally direct the efforts of an independent PAC. It is illegal for the candidate or his or her organization to communicate directly with independent PACs. Coordinating by burner phones, secret email accounts, or midnight meetings in abandoned car parks would be illegal. But this would also be incredibly stupid. The independent PAC can achieve all necessary coordination by closely monitoring the candidates campaign. What does this tell us of the Trump-Russia connection before and during the 2016 election? Russian entities and individuals, some with ties to President Vladimir Putin, interfered in the campaign with appeals that neatly tied in with Trump rhetoric. But Trump could hardly be held legally accountable for what the Russians were doing independently. Direct contact by the Trump campaign with Russian entities might be illegal. Such contact would be similar to, but legally distinct from, illegal cooperation with an independent PAC. Why did Russians help the Trump campaign? One answer is that Trumps rhetoric fit into Russians historic strategy of denigrating democratic institutions and promoting racial, ethnic, and class divisions in countries deemed to be enemies. This strategy goes back to the Comintern the Third International 1919-1943 and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In a sense, the Trump campaign joined the Russian effort rather than the other way around. There was, however, more than serendipitous similarity. Trump continually praised President Putin and called for better relations with the Russians. The Russian campaign aimed vicious charges at Hillary Clinton, advocated for Trump and discouraged voting by usual Democratic voters. The timing of Russian efforts shows this coordination. For example, release of Hillary Clintons hacked emails by WikiLeaks just as The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of grabbing women. Trump and the Russians were clearly working together or colluding during the campaign in the way that presidential campaigns routinely collude with supposedly independent PACs. Whether there was an illegal conspiracy to facilitate this collusion and any quid pro quo for the Russian efforts, are separate questions. Theodore S. Arrington is Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Albuquerque Public Schools may open a second College and Career High School. At a recent APS Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Raquel Reedy brought up the idea of the school district replicating CCHS and opening another branch. APS spokeswoman Johanna King confirmed there have been some very preliminary conversations with CNM about it. But King said that if the school does expand, it would be a ways off. The school is a joint effort between Central New Mexico Community College and APS, giving students a chance to get a high school diploma and college credits. MRI NO MORE: The state Public Education Department is shifting four schools from more rigourous intervention, or MRI, status the most intense state oversight to Comprehensive Support and Improvement, the second oversight category. Deputy Secretary of Academic Engagement Katarina Sandoval said the idea is to give the states CSI schools, which now number 90, three years each to make changes before the PED re-evaluates and identifies any schools for the more rigorous support. PED will give CSI schools a boost in funding, based on enrollment, to help them make changes. MRI has been a spicy topic in New Mexico, particularly because the previous administration threatened to close the schools if they didnt make improvements in a certain amount of time. The new PED has since taken closure off the table. So many changes coming to education. MRI right? APS AUDIT FINDINGS: APS audit of its $1.3 billion budget was approved by the Board of Education last week. The district touted that an independent accounting firm found just two errors at traditional APS schools. One was about accrual and the other had to do with capital assets. The hefty 900-page document showed 105 findings at charter schools. APS is required to do an annual audit under state law. Shelby Perea: sperea@abqjournal.com Copyright 2019 Albuquerque Journal Two years after buying a South Valley residential housing property from Bernalillo County, an Albuquerque real estate investor has filed a breach of contract lawsuit claiming the county bungled the deal. The county, meanwhile, acknowledges its failure to get the agreement approved by the proper authorities, according to court documents. But it argues that the mishap makes the deal void and that it should be able to rescind the sale. The county is asking a judge to dismiss James Nelsons complaint, grant permission to rescind the sale and have Nelson pay its legal costs. Nelson, who bought the 5,860-square-foot property for $163,500 in February 2017, sued the county last month in state District Court in Albuquerque. His suit says the county neglected to obtain the necessary state-level approval for the sale of the property at 305 Lagunitas SW and last year took the erroneous position that it was entitled to unilaterally void the agreement. The county is equitably estopped from denying that the Agreement was a valid, binding contract, because the County itself failed to seek legally required approvals for the Agreement, and the County cannot benefit from its own misconduct, the suit says. The county also used an after-the-fact appraisal to say Nelson had to either pay $35,000 to consummate the sale or show hed made improvements worth that much, according to the suit. The county admits it did not follow the proper processes required for the sale of the public property, court records show. It also acknowledged the property was appraised for more than Nelson paid. But in its response and counterclaim, the county is asking a judge to uphold its position that because the county inadvertently failed to get the necessary State Board of Finance OK for the sale, the agreement is void. Because the parties did not have a valid agreement, Bernalillo County is entitled to rescind the purchase agreement, according to the response filed by the countys contract attorney, Luis Robles. Nelson, who is seeking undisclosed damages and attorneys fees, said in an interview he has made improvements to the property and the countys move to rescind the 2017 agreement is unacceptable. (It) just means that everybody just goes back as if this deal never occurred they get the property back, I get my money back, he said. Well, no. You have put me through hell for two years; youre going to pay damages to me. Nelson, a general contractor who buys properties to fix and resell, said he has an interested buyer for the property, but the lingering issues have prevented the sale. He is currently leasing the property to a church but says he should have been able to sell by now and have the proceeds available to continue buying and flipping properties. A Bernalillo County spokeswoman said the county wants to continue working with Nelson on a fair, amicable resolution and filed a counterclaim to make it possible to rescind the sale and return the money he paid for the property if the State Board of Finance does not ultimately approve the sale. However, spokeswoman Tia Bland did not answer specific Journal questions, including whether it planned to present the deal to the State Board of Finance for approval. Nelsons lawsuit is just the latest development in his battle with the county over the site. The county was granted the property in 2010 and intended to use it as a recovery facility for homeless women. However, that idea died amid neighborhood opposition, prompting the county to move toward a sale. Nelson told the Journal last year that he discovered after the purchase that restrictive covenants on the property limited its use to supportive housing for homeless people with drug addictions or mental illness and it could be subject to a $750,000 lien if utilized otherwise. Nelson contends the county did not disclose that information prior to the sale, a claim the county has denied. The purchase agreement between Nelson and the county did not mention the restrictions. Nelson said he has subsequently worked with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to release its restrictions and covenants on the property, but he remains frustrated with his dealings with the county. Nelson also said the county did not disclose that the property has a septic system, which it does. The county has acknowledged the septic system and said in its court response to Nelsons suit that it does require repairs. The thing is that they put me in a really bad spot; Ive had to sell my own house because of this, Nelson said. Im running out of money; Ive actually run out of money a few times over the last two years. The New Mexico Technology Council celebrated the achievements of nine women at its 11th annual Women in Technology awards last Thursday. The event, held at the Albuquerque Marriott, aims to recognize the success of women working in science, technology, engineering and math fields, while inspiring others, especially younger women, to pursue STEM-related careers, said Council Board Chairwoman Sheila Mendez. These women hold critical technology and education positions throughout New Mexico in private industry, state government, national laboratories and education, Mendez told a packed audience of 440. They are not only shaping our world, but also mentoring young women to be excited about STEM careers and creating the conditions where our next generations can achieve that much more. Honorees included engineers and computer scientists from the states two labs, the University of New Mexico, and private firms like IT staffing company Robert Half Technology. The council also recognized two women finalists in last Januarys UNM/Central New Mexico Community College mobile app contest, Debbie Berlin and Rebecca Farish. And it awarded a $5,000 scholarship to CNM Deep Dive Coding graduate and founder of QUAY Concepts, Jennifer Quay Minnich, to further her education and training. Tech Council Executive Director Deborah Breitfeld said its critical to shine a spotlight on local women doing outstanding work and providing leadership to others. These women are blazing trails for younger generations in technology fields that have historically been male-dominated, Breitfeld said. A report by financial research and consulting firm SmartAsset ranked Albuquerque as the fifth-best city nationwide for women in technology. Women here account for 29.7 percent of the local tech workforce and on average earn 95 percent of what their male counterparts do. Although low, its better than national averages of 25.7 percent participation by women and a gender pay gap that has women earning 84 percent of what men do. This years Women in Technology honorees: LANL engineer Janette Frigo Sandia renewable energy technologies senior manager Amy Halloran Pajarito Powder chief engineer Alia Lubers LANL computer scientist Laura Monroe Robert Half IT Staffing in New Mexico Vice President Renay Moya UNM computer science professor Melanie Moses NM Techworks Community Learning Network Executive Director Jennifer Nevarez Computer Science Alliance co-founder and Executive Director Paige Prescott UNM biomedical engineering professor Christina Salas EL PASO, Texas The surge of migrant families arriving at the southern border has led the Trump administration to dramatically expand a practice President Donald Trump has long mocked as catch and release. With immigrant processing and holding centers overwhelmed, the administration is busing people hundreds of miles inland and releasing them at Greyhound stations and churches in cities like Albuquerque, San Antonio and Phoenix because towns close to the border already have more than they can handle. Relief organizations in some cities are struggling to feed and house the migrants and warning that a public health crisis is taking shape, especially with sick infants and children among the many immigrant families who need medical attention. Were asking volunteer doctors and nurses and community members to step up and do what the government should be doing. If this was a hurricane, FEMA would be on the ground helping, said Jim Gannon, CEO and executive director of Catholic Charities in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For many years, families arriving at the border were typically released from U.S. custody immediately and allowed to settle in this country with family or friends while their cases wound their way through the courts, a process that often takes years. Trump has railed against the practice, tweeting in November that it was over: Catch and Release is an obsolete term. It is now Catch and Detain. Illegal Immigrants trying to come into the U.S.A., often proudly flying the flag of their nation as they ask for U.S. Asylum, will be detained or turned away. But in recent months, the number of families crossing into the U.S. has climbed to record highs, pushing the system to the breaking point. As a result, the government is releasing families faster, in greater numbers and at points farther removed from the border. Since Dec. 21, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set free more than 125,000 people who came into the U.S. as families. Customs and Border Protection is also overloaded, and instead of holding families for up to 72 hours before turning them over to ICE, it has started releasing them directly into the U.S. The numbers are overwhelming right now, said Gregory Archambault, ICE director of enforcement and removal operations in San Diego. Everybody is stressed. The agency is stressed, the (local governments) are stressed, the law enforcement agencies. Everybody is stressed because there are these mass numbers of people. ICE has been releasing asylum-seeking families so quickly that they dont even have time to make travel arrangements. Families are given court dates, a head of household is often fitted with an ankle monitor, and they are dropped off at a charity-run shelter or bus station. San Antonio received part of that surge in recent days, forcing the city to open a help center with food for migrants. In El Paso, where shelters and churches are at capacity and seats on buses headed out of the city are getting harder to find, authorities briefly resorted to holding migrants in a pen lined with concertina wire under the shade of a bridge that connects the American city to Juarez, Mexico. They closed the makeshift holding area over the weekend and moved the migrants to a place with more shelter. They treated us like animals, said Herling Jerlyn, a teenager from Guatemala. Eduardo De Jesus Bermudez Florez waited for a Greyhound bus Tuesday to take him to Arlington, Texas, after spending time held under the bridge, where he said women cried through the night in cold temperatures. The immigrant from El Salvador himself teared up as he described his ordeal. He became separated from his wife and their 10-year-old daughter in Mexico before crossing the border, and he still doesnt know where they are. As De Jesus cried waiting for a bus, his 13-year-old son held the charger for his ankle monitor battery. Hed say dad, I want to leave this place,' said De Jesus, whose wife was once attacked with machetes by gang members. I just told him that from here we cant go back. Your future is here. Our country is too violent. In Albuquerque, nearly 280 miles from the border, faith-based organizations have helped roughly 1,000 migrants since mid-February. The groups were small at first, but they have been growing and the arrivals have become more frequent. San Diego County recently opened a shuttered downtown courthouse slated for demolition to house up to 150 asylum seekers. A coalition of religious and civic groups that manages the shelter said it has helped more than 11,000 members of asylum-seeking families since authorities began large-scale releases in late October. About 22,000 immigrants have been released in Arizona in the past three months. In the Phoenix area, the nonprofit organizations and churches taking them in have a capacity of only 700 a week, said Connie Phillips, president and CEO of Lutheran Social Services in the Southwest. That means immigration authorities have to drop off families by the busload at places not designed to take them in, like the Greyhound station in Phoenix. The bus company is no longer allowing anyone without a ticket to wait inside, so immigrant families, including little children, stand outside until a volunteer can get them in touch with a relative to buy them a ticket. That sometimes takes hours. The federal government is saying, This is not our responsibility,' Phillips said. And the cities and states have not stepped up to provide any kind of emergency funding. She added: This is going to be a public health disaster. These are small children, these are families, these are babies, and we cannot have people just out in the heat. Authorities said family arrivals along the U.S.-Mexico border reached an all-time high in February of 45,827 arrests or denials of entry. We didnt have family groups for years and years, like we have now, ICEs Archambault said. Our facilities are not made for this. We have diapers and baby formula and all this stuff, like a nursery. In another sign of how U.S. authorities are being tested as rarely before, figures released Tuesday show a significant drop in prosecutions for illegal entry, even as arrests have climbed sharply. The numbers are at odds with Trumps vow to prosecute everyone who enters the country illegally. In February, Customs and Border Protection referred 8,998 illegal-entry cases to prosecutors along the border, a drop of 12% from January and 23% from October, according to Syracuse Universitys Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. ___ Galvan reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego; Nomaan Merchant in Houston; Colleen Long in Washington; and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this story. SANTA TERESA Some of the best minds of the region together came together for the first border policy hack focused on collaborating across state lines and international boundaries. I thought it was one of the best policy hacks weve ever done, said Cris Turner, head of Dells government affairs for the Americas. Dell holds policy hacks around the world that bring together government officials, entrepreneurs, business and non-profit leaders as well as venture capitalists and students. The border hackathon included participants from three states and two countries: New Mexico, Texas, and Chihuahua, Mexico. Weve got so much turmoil going on around border issues and the solutions-oriented approach to this event really gives the opportunity to elevate a different story about the border and a story thats being told by people that actually live and work here, said Turner. He was also one of the judges. This gathering puts together our minds and all our intentions to do better. I always thought this could be the best border between Mexico and the U.S. and also the world, said Jaime Campos, director of Innovation and Economic Development with the state government of Chihuahua. Campos was on the same team as Francisco Palleres with the Economic Development Department of the City of Las Cruces. Both share the goal finding mutually beneficially solutions across borders. It is important for us to keep this positive idea that we can still collaborate, that were still a good partnership, said Palleres. Their teams idea was to focus on industry clusters to improve opportunities, wages and competitiveness. The other winning team focused on creating a campus of the mind or neutral space on the border where entrepreneurs and others could easily come together to brainstorm and create solutions. Among the challenges, How do you work between two countries and comply between all the rules said Bryn Davis, manager of asset services for El Paso Electric which operates in southern New Mexico and west Texas. The teams had 75 minutes to come up with their proposals for a cross border industrial campus. Each had to answer a question about select issues, including building federal and local support, academic and industry partnerships and creating businesses clusters based on the regions strengths. They had had five minutes to present their idea to the judges and then the judges had five minutes to ask questions. I think it was brilliant, said Tim Nitti, president and CEO of the New Mexico Partnership based in Albuquerque. I think these kinds of conversations start a solution. The six judges selected two winning proposals. One focused on the campus of the mind and the other on the border business cluster. Dell will work with the teams over the next 18 months to come up with a plan to execute the proposals with the help of industry and government support. Whats nice in that short amount of time, the easy ideas, the most achievable ideas bubble up, so I think implementing it is doable to in a short amount of time, said Emma Schwartz president of the Medical Center of the Americas Foundation in El Paso, who was on the winning team for the business cluster idea. CONCOW, Calif. - A Camp Fire survivor and burn victim shared her story of survival with Action News Now. 36-year-old Terra Hill has third-degree burns from her waist to her toes. She said the injuries changed her life forever. "I remember looking down at my feet, my feet melting off, Hill said. The skin was off to the side and there was blood everywhere. Just before her escape from the fire on Nov. 8, Hill said she was in bed when she saw a glow from her Concow window. She was a caretaker on the property. She got into a truck with her roommate and tried to drive off. "We maybe made it 10, 15 feet before it died and the brakes failed and it rolled back into a ditch," Hill said. The pair got out of the truck and tried to run back to the property to hide in a water tank, but the property was in flames. Her skin was burning off as she ran through the fire. They soon found other trucks parked nearby. "I started inhaling the air from the truck," Hill said. Hill and her roommate kicked each other, making sure the other was still alive. "And the last time I kicked him, he didn't kick me back," Hill said. She screamed for help and first responders picked her up and took her to safety. She was sent to UC Davis for treatment. Doctors at UC Davis said she had a 20 percent chance of survival, but three and a half months later, she beat those odds and was sent to the Enloe Rehabilitation Center in Chico. Hill has third-degree burns from her waist to her toes. "I will have surgeries throughout the rest of my life, Hill said. I will be in and out of the hospital. But she said despite her injuries, she will walk again one day. "I know I will be able to walk again because I don't know how to give up, but my life will never be the same again," Hill said. Hill's lawyer said she is pursuing a claim through the bankruptcy court alongside several other wildfire survivors. LOS ANGELES, CALIF. - At least 50 firefighters are treating multiple patients at the Nipsey Hussle memorial, the Los Angeles Fire Department told CNN. Officials are currently trying to remove all patients to a safe location in order to transport them, the department said. It's unknown how many people are injured. Los Angeles police have responded to the memorial's massive crowd with riot gear and batons and have formed at least two containment lines, as seen on a live signal from CNN affiliate KCAL/KCBS. In the live signal, there are people seen running and the dedicated memorial seems to be in disarray. Also in the live signal, people can be seen carrying others who appear to be injured; however, it is unknown what sort of injuries the persons sustained. Emergency officials are seen working on at least two people on the ground. Of the two people on the ground, one was covered in a white sheet. Rapper Nipsey Hussle was killed Sunday in a Los Angeles shooting near a clothing store he owned, the Los Angeles Police Department said. Two others were injured in the shooting around 3:20 p.m. In a tweet Monday night, the department said: "We understand the community is mourning and we feel your loss." "We are asking for everyone to follow the officers directions and disperse from the immediate area. Our men and women are on scene and making every effort to protect everyone in attendance at the Nipsey Hussle vigil." Reports of shots fired at the memorial, "do not appear to be accurate," the department said. However, there have been people injured. The rapper's last message on Twitter read: "Having strong enemies is a blessing." CHICO, Calif. - Chico Police are still searching for the triggerman in a weekend shooting that sent two to the hospital. Action News Now spoke with a student who said they saw the whole thing. "I run out to the balcony right there to go see what's happening and as I run out I see the dude's friend picking him up off the street, right there in the middle of the street, and they were picking him up and bringing him to the car," a student said, who didn't want to be identified. "They pulled up and one of his friends actually got out and was looking for a confrontation with the dude who just knocked his friend out and then after that is when the shots rang off." The student said he heard 4 to 5 gunshots. "There were like 60 people in the general area of here because the whole party took up that whole parking lot and when the fight went off everyone just migrated into the street so when the shooting happened I could not pick out anyone in particular because he did not care it seemed like," he said. One bullet hit a female student in the chest. "The only thing I did hear was I have a hole in me which was horrifying if I do say so myself," he said. Another victim was rushed to the hospital by friends. AUBURN, Calif. - The Placer County Sheriff's Office incarcerated a woman for writing checks to herself from an Auburn business. Deputies said that Amber Clark committed check fraud for several years. An investigation into missing funds led to her arrest. Shes now charged with embezzlement. Rajan Anandan, VP for Google South East Asia and India has moved on from the organisation. He will serve his notice period until the end of April. Anandan is set to join Seqouia Capital India as Managing Director. In the interim, Vikas Agnihotri, Country Director, Sales will take over his responsibilities. Anandans passion lies in funding startups and entrepreneurship. He has emerged as one of the most dynamic and savvy angel investors in India and focuses on investing in internet, mobile and SaaS companies. Scott Beaumont, President, Google Asia Pacific said, "We are grateful to Rajan for his huge contribution to Google over the past eight years. His entrepreneurial zeal and leadership has helped grow the overall internet ecosystem in India and Southeast Asia, and we wish him all the best in his new adventures." We're thrilled to welcome @RajanAnandan to the leadership team @sequoia_India as investment advisor & mentor to the @_surgeahead founders. Rajan's depth of experience & expertise will be invaluable in this journey!https://t.co/jgxC8uu8HP Sequoia_India (@Sequoia_India) April 2, 2019 Before joining Google in 2011, he was the Managing Director of Microsoft India and built it into Indias largest software business. He has also worked with Dell Inc as Vice President and was Country General Manager of Dell India. Anandan has also held various global leadership roles across Dell International Services, including a stint as the executive assistant to Michael Dell, Chairman of Dell Computers. He started his career with McKinsey & Company as a Partner in the Chicago office and has also worked with several Fortune 500 companies in the US. He moved to India in 2006 as the Vice President for Dell India. Using purpose to power behavioural change, involving customers to drive brand engagement and weaving creativity into the customer experience, are the three main themes, finds WARC, following its analysis of the worlds most creative campaigns. WARC, which provides the latest evidence, expertise and guidance to make marketers more effective, has released Creative 100 - Lessons from the worlds best campaigns, a report analysis of the campaignsranked in the WARC Creative 100, to uncover trends from the latest creative strategies as well as bringing together insights and opinion from the creators of award-winning ideas. Amy Rodgers, Research Editor, WARC, and author of the report, said, We have deep-dived into the Creative 100 rankings to provide learnings from creative successes that will inspire and lead the way to greater creativity. The three key trends from the WARC Creative 100 are: Purpose-led strategies evolve The use of purpose as a driver for marketing strategies continues to be a regular feature of the top creative campaigns, and was central to the number one campaign, Palau Pledge, which created an immigration policy for the island of Palau to protect the nation from environmental damage. Whilst purpose has become commonplace, several brands in this years Creative 100 evolved their purposeful messaging, from driving awareness to encouraging consumers towards behavioural change. In campaigns with this approach, the brand purpose was actually actioned by customers themselves, driving engagement through participation and subsequent diffusion of conversation. Alex Grieve, Executive Creative Director, AMV BBDO, remarked, Whats interesting about the evolution of purpose towards changing behaviour is that it mirrors a broader trend in marketing. In asking people to affect change, brands have realised they too need to change. Casting customers Directly involving customers in campaigns, whether to drive behavioural change or to drive brand engagement is a key theme from the Creative 100. This years most creative brand, Burger King, had its customers dress up as clowns in a campaign that trolled its competitors mascot, Ronald the Clown. Skittles cast one superfan as the star of its Superbowl campaign (ranked #4) and Marmite (#7) asked their customers to take a DNA test. Participation elements can turn ads into acts, and in a low-attention economy, this approach has become an important way of gaining attention. Martin Beverley, Strategy Director, adam&eveDDB, commented, Many ideas in the WARC Creative 100 arent just ads, theyre acts designed to impact popular culture and make a dent in the real world. Creativity across the experience Rather than seeing a campaign as an entity existing on a single channel, this year some of the most awarded brands created experiences where the creative idea was woven into every element of the purchase journey, building customer executions across multiple channels to work at those moments. Bodyforms #Bloodnormal (ranked #2) a social idea at its heart, used influencers, designers and stylists to create visual pieces to champion a cause and rightly played in the channels where consumers could share and support. Tides Its a Tide Ad (ranked #5) used traditional media in an innovative way, highjacking the brand awareness generated by other ads, and turning it into awareness for Tide whilst creating a choreographed brand experience. A similar approach was used by Budweiser in their Tagwords campaign (#32), which harnessed print and outdoor to drive the audience to online search. These brands created experiences for consumers, who then actively wanted to engage. Kate Stanners, Chairwoman and Global Chief Creative Officer, Saatchi & Saatchi, observed, This to me is modern storytelling. All three campaigns explored the possibilities of the channels they were in. Weaving from real physical spaces to virtual experiences creating more powerful and lasting connections with their audience. The WARC Creative 100, successor to the Gunn Report, is part of WARC Rankings, which tracks the winners lists from the most important advertising award contests, globally, as determined by the industry. The results of creative competitions are used to compile the WARC Creative 100, which is built on a rigorous methodology, used consistently across the competitions tracked. Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News N Augusta Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Success! Please click the 'Allow' button in the 'Show Notifcations' alert in your browser if one is available. Thank you for signing up! Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page. 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. A recommendation to produce plutonium pits at two sites across two states New Mexico and South Carolina was not a reparation to the latter, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration's leader, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty. Gordon-Hagerty, speaking during a Tuesday morning appropriations hearing, emphasized the pit production recommendation was not a "payoff." The nuclear chief's statement was a direct response to U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, who asked her if she could "dispel the myth" that the pitch was designed to, essentially, make amends for the closure of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. "It so happened that the MOX facility was going to be terminated. The secretary had planned that; we'd worked on that," Gordon-Hagerty said. "We'd followed, we'd worked with Congress on that matter, and it happened to be that that facility could be repurposed for exactly this." At least 80 plutonium pits nuclear weapon cores per year are needed by 2030, according to the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. To meet that weapons-driven need, the NNSA and the U.S. Department of Defense on May 10, 2018, jointly recommended producing 50 pits per year at the Savannah River Site and the remaining 30 per year at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The pit production mission at SRS would be done at a revamped MOX, per the same recommendation. The NNSA terminated the MOX contract on Oct. 10, 2018, five months after U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry told congressional defense committees he would ax the over-budget project. The U.S. Department of Energy expects MOX to be fully mothballed by fiscal year 2021, according to President Donald Trump's FY20 budget request. MOX designed to turn surplus weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear fuel was prized by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, both of whom are South Carolina Republicans. Graham has described MOX termination as a "colossal mistake," a blunder that represents the worst of Washington D.C. In early February, Graham said he seriously lacked confidence in the DOE. NNSA chief discusses MOX pitfalls during Energy Department advisory meeting "Most notably, the materials that they would use, we don't have a customer for those types of mixed-oxide fuels." "The pit production mission, we'll see how real that is," he said at the time. Selecting SRS and Los Alamos for the recommendation was an informed not politicking decision, Gordon-Hagerty told the House panel on Tuesday. "Savannah River is known for the last 70 years as part of the production complex in the NNSA and our predecessor agencies," Gordon-Hagerty said. "So it would make extreme sense to do it there." "And if we're looking to do this work for the next 50 to 70 years, I don't believe that it makes sense to rely on one single location," she continued. "So our two-pronged approach is the most effective way to get to the not less than 80 pits per year." https://www.aish.com/jw/me/Bible-Era-Seal-Unearthed-below-Jerusalem-Car-Park.html The tiny clay impression dates back over 2,600 years and bears the name, mentioned in the Bible, of a royal aide to King Josiah. Quick! Come and see this! an excited voice yells out to around 20 crew members painstakingly sifting through layers of, rock and earth. Ive found something! This is the incredible moment when a stunned archaeological team digging under a car park in the Old City of Jerusalem unearthed one of the most significant archaeological finds of recent years an official stamp baring the name of a senior official of the Royal Court of ancient Judah. The tiny clay impression dates back over 2,600 years and bears the name of a royal official known as Natan LMelech meaning Servant to the King who is mentioned in the Bible, an aide to the Judean King Josiah in the 8th Century BCE. Under the auspices of the Israel antiquities authority, the dig is taking place 40 feet under a former car park at the City of David archaeological heritage site. Blue bulla with the name Ikkar son of Matanyahu This is not just another discovery, Professor Yuval Gadot, 51, the Head of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, who is leading the dig, told Aish.com. We are talking about the cradle of civilization and a highly significant item which bears the name of a specific individual. The seal is the first archaeological evidence of the biblical name Nathan-Melech. Gadot added, This official was so high profile he is not referred to using his fathers name. There was no need. We are talking about someone who everybody knew. In addition, another bluish agate stone seal known as a bulla was also found with the inscription belonging to Ikkar son of Matanyahu. Gadot said, It is a very beautiful stone, and the Hebrew is so clear. He added, The big story here, is the context, with both the seal and the bulla were found in the same building. As we are digging, we are seeing that this was a central part of Jerusalem at the time, busy with administrative activity and also close to the temple mount. He added, Life as an archaeologist can be pretty quiet at times, with hours, days and weeks often passing without finding anything. The day the seal was found, Gadot was paid a visit by an archaeologist colleague from Los Angeles. Come here and see what we have just unearthed, he said, bringing him to see the seal. He didnt know what to say. Highlight of his career Without a doubt, Gadot said, digging at the City of David site in Jerusalem has been the highlight of my 30-year career. The past matters. Jerusalem is the cradle of civilization and it touches everyone. Its an exciting time to be an archaeologist, he added. There is so much more to be still be exposed. Doron Spielman, Vice President of the City of David, shared his reaction with Aish.com after holding the tiny clay seal in his hand. What is so striking, he said, is that it is smaller than a thumbnail, it weighs almost nothing, but its importance is diametrically opposite to its size. There are so many people who think this book (the Bible) was made up and seek to erase Jewish history in Jerusalem, yet here we find the stamp of the seal of the servant of the king. One of the reasons Jews have held onto their faith, across thousands of years, is because they have felt a connection to a constant chain of tradition. Who in the world today can dig 40 feet under the ground where you live and unearth something over 2500 years old, in your native language that appears in the book that you read? We are so unique, and no one else has this gift. GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip A dispute between Hamas and the PLO's main leftist factions has breached the recent unprecedented harmony in their relations, perhaps derailing what one Hamas source said is an effort to build a coalition against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The leftist factions the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) ascribed the rift to Hamas using violence and arresting participants in popular protests March 14-15 against the worsening living conditions in the Gaza Strip. The peaceful protesters marched under the slogan We want to live. On March 16, nine leftist groups, including the PFLP and the DFLP, met with Hamas rival faction Fatah at the PFLP office in Gaza City to appraise the protest. In a statement, they denounced the arrests of protesters and demanded that Hamas apologize and withdraw its security forces from the streets. However, Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, described the statement in a March 16 Facebook post as shameful. Abbas leads Fatah and the Palestinian Authority and is president of the PLO Central Council. But Hamas had managed to strengthen its alliance with the leftist factions by involving them in the weekly protests known as Marches of Return. The alliance helped generate a political bloc opposing Abbas' policies, especially his measures to undermine Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip and efforts to form a new government involving all factions save for Hamas. Since February 2016, when the PFLP and DFLP said they were in favor of a teachers strike protesting the worsening living conditions in the West Bank, tensions have prevailed between the groups and Abbas. That April, Abbas began withholding the PLO's monthly allocations for the PFLP and DFLP, which range from roughly 30,000 shekels to 50,000 shekels ($8,300-$13,800). The tension escalated last year when the PFLP and DFLP did not attend the October session of the PLO Central Council because of Abbas ongoing security coordination with Israel. Speaking to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, an informed Hamas source said, Hamas believes the alliance with the PLOs largest leftist forces [the PFLP and DFLP] to be a remarkable achievement of the return marches. The source confirmed that this partnership is indeed founded on joint political stances opposing the already-mentioned Abbas policies, and he cited even more: Abbas' support of the Oslo Accord with Israel and his unilateral decision-making. In addition, Hamas, the PFLP and DFLP are all committed to the peaceful return marches as a way to force Israel to end the siege on Gaza, he said. The source pointed to Hamas willingness to promote this alliance, with the goal of developing it into a cohesive PLO leftist group opposed to Abbas policies. The alliance, he added, has caused Fatah a good deal of anger. Fatah leader Yahya Rabah told Al-Monitor, Hamas has been controlling the political stance of some of the leftist forces partaking in the return marches, since their start in the Gaza Strip. He added, Multiple leftist forces have now embraced Hamas' stances, fully opposing Fatah and Abbas. Most recently, the PFLP and the DFLP refused to join [the formation of a Fatah-led] government involving the PLO factions, which Abbas urged March 10. Despite those warming relations between Hamas and the leftist factions, the PFLP announced March 18 it would boycott a weekly maritime protest held in conjunction with the return marches which Hamas organizes every Tuesday along the northern coast of the Gaza Strip. We are boycotting the maritime protest for one week only. It is a move in protest against the Hamas security apparatus abuses against participants in the popular protest," Kayed al-Ghul, a member of the PFLPs political bureau, told Al-Monitor. The PFLP is in favor of any popular protests demanding a decent life, be they in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Hamas ongoing repression of the marches threatens to disturb the political harmony between Hamas and the PFLP, he said. Ramzi Rabah, a member of the DFLPs political bureau, told Al-Monitor, The participants in the popular protests were violently attacked. This was never expected from Hamas. He demanded that Hamas free all of the demonstrators from its prisons at once, and called for the formation of a committee to investigate the abuses. Like Ghul, Rabah said, Hamas carrying on with the oppression of the protests will have a detrimental effect on the future of our relations. Mukhaimer Abu Saada, a political science professor at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, The left-wing parties pro-demonstration stances, especially those of the PFLP and DFLP, have annoyed Hamas, particularly since it considers the protests to be a Fatah conspiracy to carry out a coup against its rule in the Gaza strip. He added that the leftist groups' differences with Hamas, however, haven't moved them closer to Fatah, because they are beset by deeper political differences correlated with Abbas financially extorting the PFLP and DFLP for opposing his policies. Nor will the PFLP and DFLP let their frustration with Hamas' violence against the public protests over poor living conditions undermine their participation in the return marches, which they consider part of the anti-Israel struggle that partisan differences should not disrupt. But Talal Awkal, a political analyst for the Palestinian al-Ayyam newspaper, said, If Hamas doesn't halt its oppressive practices against the popular protests, its alliance with the left and political partnership in several [events], such as the return marches, will be disturbed. He told Al-Monitor, These forces are politically independent and measure their convergence with this or that faction, such as Fatah and Hamas, based on the extent to which these factions stances are in harmony with the left's political positions. Some 60,000 Armenians in Turkey are preparing to elect a new spiritual leader after the death of their beloved Patriarch Mesrob II Mutafyan, but the election process may become tangled due to interference by various actors. On March 8, Armenians lost their brightest patriarch of recent times. In fact, this was a farewell that lasted 10 years because of the patriarchs severe dementia. He was only 62. The process to elect the new patriarch is to begin at the end of a 40-day mourning period, but because of inescapable interference from several quarters, Armenians are now heading into a difficult era. The Armenian patriarch position in Turkey is a tough one, under the heavy burden of tragic memories of mass destruction of the Ottoman Empires Armenian population in 1915 a position stuck between the Turkish government and an Armenian diaspora angered by any move to reconcile. According to Armenian publisher Rober Koptas, the Turkish state has always exerted tight control of the patriarchate to ensure the Armenians will remain a minority community and not be allowed to become an organized body, The state doesnt have the maturity to allow Armenians to freely select their own spiritual leader. That doesnt mean that an elected patriarch would be vetoed by the government, but Ankara finds way to tacitly point out the right candidate that should be elected. One way of doing that is by conveying angry rhetoric and threats via the pro-government media. Then there are some influential Armenians who are getting along well with the state regarding their own interests and who frequently act as state spokespeople, pointing out the states favorite candidates. When 83rd Patriarch Karekin Kazanjian died in 1998, Mutafyan took his place later that year after months of stalling and interference by the state. Mutafyan, who attracted well-educated, dynamic youths to the church, was quickly labeled by the state a "supporter of terror, Armenian nationalist and active militant. But this kind of interference actually drove Armenians to unite. According to Koptas, unifying was the only thing the Armenian community could have done to challenge the state. The state stepped up its surveillance operations against the Armenian community and that same year, much to the annoyance of many Armenians, Mutafyan was forced to express opposition to France's decision to recognize the Armenian genocide, saying it could damage progress in relations with Turkey. The community is caught in the crossfire. Armenia, the Armenian diaspora and the Turkish government have conflicting views. When they go after each other, we are caught in the middle, said Mutafyan in explaining the pressure he was under. The government's interference became more visible when Mutafyan's diagnosis of Alzheimers disease was announced in 2008. One segment of the community said that, according to 1863 Armenian national bylaws, when a patriarch can't work anymore, a new patriarch has to be elected. But in 2010, Archbishop Aram Ateshian secured a letter from the Istanbul governor (a presidential appointee who is reponsible for both national government and state affairs in Istanbul province) and was designated "patriarchal vicar general." According to many Armenians, such a post was nonexistent and was invented to prevent the election of a new patriarch. Armenians have a tradition of the patriarch naming an acting one when needed. But if the patriarch dies or is not in a condition to decide, a locum tenens (temporary leader) has to be named to initiate the election process. Those who criticize Ateshian for acting like a government-appointed trustee claim the government was unsure of the political inclinations of potential candidates from outside Turkey. The government wanted to work with someone it trusts. Its message was clear: As the patriarch is not dead, there can be no election. However, of the earlier 83 patriarchs, 71 were replaced while they were alive and only 12 were selected after their predecessors passed away. Meanwhile, the government kept saying Mutafyan would miraculously recover. There was no recovery possible for [Mutafyan]. Nevertheless, Ateshian and his supporters referred to his illness, saying, We believe in miracles, our patriarch may recover, and followed the government's ploy. Ateshian pretended to be the patriarch. Some circles approved that, Armenian writer Sevan Degirmenciyan told Al-Monitor. Controversy escalated. The Clerical Council of the Armenian Patriarchate in 2017 designated Karekin Bekcian, a senior cleric from Germany, as locum tenens, but the Istanbul governor did not accept the appointment. That rejection further enflamed Armenian anger: A protest against Ateshian was held at a concert and cartoons ridiculing him were drawn in the streets of Istanbul. Now Mutafyan has gone and it is time for an election. To elect a new administrator after the death of the patriarch, the Armenian Clerical Council and foundation councils will meet to form an election committee. They will apply to the Istanbul governor. Letters will be sent to potential candidates who were born in Turkey or whose fathers were born in Turkey, above 35 years of age. The council will choose five candidates from among those who want to run for the post. The names of very old ones and those not trusted by the Turkish government will be deleted. The election will have two phases: An assembly of 90 delegates will be elected, and then those delegates will vote for the patriarch. In addition to Ateshian and Sahak Mashalian from Turkey, there are candidates from Armenia, Germany, the United States, Jerusalem, Australia and Brazil. Degirmenciyan thinks a 40-day waiting period is unnecessary. There was no such rule for elections of two previous patriarchs. The process is working very slowly. It will be September or October before a new patriarch is elected, he said. The community has had enough. People have lost hope. Can we really have a proper election? The Turkish government has excellent relations with Ateshian. But his name is worn out. An internet site said to be close to Turkish intelligence circles provides a fairly good idea of who the government wants: Someone who was born in Turkey. There is not much sympathy for Bekcian of Germany, who wants to annul the 1863 bylaws that regulate relations between Armenians and the state. The election of Sebuh Culcuyan, a patriarch candidate from Armenia, would mean Armenians of Turkey would be taking sides with Armenia and Russia. A second wall posting is even more striking: The diasporas candidate is Khajag Barsamian, who adheres to the Cilicia line that follows the pro-Atlantic and pro-European ideologies. They remain anti-Turkish. The state will not remain idle to the diasporas interference with the election. If Barsamian is elected, that will be a victory for the pro-Atlantic stand. Thus there is only one option left: Armenian native and national, Ateshian. The slate of candidates is open to intervention, but in the end, Armenians will vote. With so many plots and quarrels, it's worth waiting for the outcome. ALEPPO, Syria Street food in northern Syria from Afrin to al-Bab has acquired a new culinary dimension from Syrians displaced from eastern Ghouta, who brought with them the rich desserts they used to make at home. For the displaced, selling the sweets that are special to their regions at the markets is a way to meet their everyday expenses. Some of the newcomers have opened shops that bear the names of their hometown Ghouta, Douma or Daraya. Others go by the name Shami, which means Damascene in Arabic. For the people from Aleppo countryside, who are used to the Aleppo cuisine the archrival of Damascene cooking for centuries the sweets from eastern Ghouta are a novelty. They are characterized by the abundant use of cream, ghee and nuts such as hazelnuts, almonds and pistachios. The dough is often dipped in a sugary syrup with just a hint of rose water, making the dessert richer than Aleppo's sweets with cinnamon and orange blossom water. Many of the desserts carry the same name. Baklava exists in both cuisines but the shami baklava's fillings are richer, with a mix of chopped pistachios and Arabic ghee between the flakes of dough. Namoura, a syrup-soaked semolina cake, is prepared differently as well, with cream added to the recipe. Damascene sweets also include tamari kaak, sold by street vendors for as little as $0.60. The dessert is made of two crepes of different sizes topped with date syrup, sesame, sugar, tahini and nuts. Some sellers add a creative twist with chocolate and bananas. Alaa Hafni, who opened Shami Sweets shop six months ago in the northern Syrian town of Marea, told Al-Monitor that he offers a wide variety from delicate sesame-dipped barazek cookies to Nabulsi bnafah, shredded phyllo dough with nuts that hails, as the name indicates, from Nablus in the West Bank. Other delicacies include buttery ghoriba cookies with just a hint of orange flower or vanilla and maamoul date cookies. Maamoul, barazek and ghoriba are similar to other sweets in the Aleppo countryside but they taste different when I make them to my region's recipes," Hafni told Al-Monitor. "I make the barazek and ghoriba smaller in size but put more sugar and more pistachios in them. I mix them with flour and milk and a large amount of ghee, which gives them a unique taste not found in similar cookies in Aleppo. I make the maamoul dough with semolina as the main ingredient, but fill them with pistachio nuts, walnuts or dates. Of course I use large amounts of sugar and I am always generous with rose water when making the dough so I can give my cookies a distinctive taste, Hafni added. Mamoun al-Samman, owner of Ghouta Sweets in al-Bab, told Al-Monitor, During the years of war and siege in eastern Ghouta, I was unable to properly carry on with my work since most ingredients I use in making sweets were short in supply. After I made it to al-Bab, I decided to open a shop and resume my work. People here love the sweets I make. Theyre freshly baked and I use homegrown and locally produced ingredients such as ghee, cream, cheese and pistachios. It became easier for me to bake since the Aleppo countryside is rich in such ingredients. Samman said that most of the sweets he sells are cheap. I make a small profit but I win over many customers. Most people in the Aleppo countryside are from low-income families, so they can only buy desserts if they are not too expensive, so I make sure to take this into consideration. For instance, a kilo of Nabulsi kanafeh is no more than 2,500 Syrian pounds [$5]. Ice cream is also a favorite. Sweets shop owner Hassan Jadid told Al-Monitor, As the weather gets warmer, demand rises for the Shami ice cream. I use cream, fresh milk and rose water. It is all mixed by hand, not with an electric mixer. Ahmed Eid, a newcomer from eastern Ghouta who owns Shami Sweets in Azaz, denied that the new shops are depriving the locals of business. He told Al-Monitor, Shami shops did not negatively affect local and other shops in the Aleppo countryside. On the contrary, they brought a dynamism to the sweets market by introducing new products and new ways of making it. CAIRO Cairo hosted a tripartite summit March 24, bringing together Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Jordanian King Abdullah II and Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi. The summits final communique underlined the importance of enhancing coordination between the three countries, and taking advantage of the potential offered by their geographical positions and common strategic and economic interests in order to combat terrorism and confront all those who support terrorist groups by funding, arming or providing safe havens and platforms, particularly in light of the victory Iraq has achieved against the Islamic State (IS). The three leaders discussed ways to promote economic integration between their countries, including developing joint industrial zones as well as cooperating in energy, infrastructure, reconstruction and other sectors of development cooperation. Analysts and politicians told Al-Monitor that this summit is a further restoration of harmony between Arab positions, which may have some differences, and it seems tactical to reach a strategic stage to build a cohesive Arab regional system. This summit is the beginning of an Egyptian-Jordanian-Iraqi coordination, said Tarek Fahmi, a professor of political science at the American University in Cairo. There are urgent priorities that include the three parties, which require joint coordination, first and foremost, to confront terrorism and strengthen the economy in all three countries. He told Al-Monitor, From the Jordanian point of view, King Abdullah II visited the United States on March 9 and discussed developments related to the Palestinian cause or what is known as the 'deal of the century.' He came to Egypt to coordinate positions, especially with Egypt's close association to the Palestinian cause. Fahmi explained that Baghdad seeks to break out of the circle of engagement with the Iranian side and return to the Egyptian and Gulf Arab umbrella. The importance of this summit lies in the fact that it is the first foreign visit by Abdul Mahdi, who is seeking Egypt's support to counter terrorism in the region and back the Iraqi economy as well as reconstruction efforts, Fahmi added. Iraq is looking forward to implementing a series of projects with Egypt in several areas, including housing, culture, education and transportation, Abdul Mahdi said at a press conference March 23. Meanwhile, Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly announced during the Cabinet meeting March 27 that the Egyptian-Iraqi Higher Committee will convene at the end of April to approve a number of joint projects between the two sides. Egypt's interest in this summit is to open up to the various Arab parties and diversify the sources of regional and international alliances, and thus have the ability to maneuver and move in different regional directions, and not to rely on a single alliance, he said. Fahmi noted, The tripartite summit was significant in terms of coordinating a unified Arab position on the Golan Heights crisis before the Arab summit in Tunisia." US President Donald Trump's March 25 recognition of Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights angered several Arab and international countries. The final statement of the 30th Arab Summit that concluded in Tunisia March 31 stressed that the Golan is occupied Syrian territory. Arab leaders also instructed Arab foreign ministers to submit a draft resolution to the [United Nations] Security Council for an opinion from the International Court of Justice to prove the illegitimacy and the invalidity of the US decision to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan. Ahmed Youssef Ahmed, a professor of political science at Cairo University and former dean of the Institute of Arab Research and Studies, told Al-Monitor, Egypt and Jordan on the one hand, and Egypt and Iraq on the other, have two different positions in Arab politics. Iraq is close to Iran in a way that Egypt and Jordan are not. This summit thus came to serve as a bridge between the three countries, which means a kind of breaking the deadlock of alliances and reducing the level of tension in Arab relations. Ahmed believes the tripartite summit comes as part of Iraqs efforts to rehabilitate the network of Arab relations, especially after being trapped under either US or Iranian influence for years. Raed al-Azzawi, Iraqi political analyst and professor of international relations at the American University in Cairo, told Al-Monitor that Abdul Mahdis visit to Cairo has great significance, particularly as it is his first foreign visit that he hopes will garner Arab support to meet the challenges in the post-IS phase. The economic aspect was clear from the visit, Azzawi noted, as Iraq is seeking other outlets to expand economic relations and increase the trade volume with Egypt. Abdul Mahdi expressed his dissatisfaction with the level of trade exchange with Egypt at the Economic and Trade Forum between Egypt and Iraq on March 24, saying, The economic relations between Egypt and Iraq cannot remain the same. Balance of trade as well as balance of payments are still modest. The volume of trade exchange between Cairo and Baghdad stood at $1.4 billion in 2018, and Iraq seeks to increase it to $6 billion a year, Iraq's trade attache to Egypt Haider Nouri told Erem News in April 2018. Azzawi pointed out that Baghdad is seeking to implement new oil projects between Egypt, Jordan and Iraq. On March 23, the Jordanian daily Al Ghad pointed to this plan, quoting an informed source on condition of anonymity as saying that Iraq has been in contact with Egypt to develop the oil pipeline project with Jordan. The pipeline will be linked to Egypt instead of ending in Aqaba in southern Jordan, so as to achieve the largest possible economic development. On April 10, 2013, Jordan and Iraq signed an initial agreement to build a pipeline to transport Iraqi crude oil from Basra to the port of Aqaba at a cost of about $18 billion and a capacity of 1 million barrels per day, but the project is yet to be implemented. Azzawi concluded, Egypt believes that the unity, integrity and stability of Iraq is a priority in order to expand its geopolitical depth eastward. Umm Yasser, a Bedouin woman from Egypts Hamada tribe, remembers the difficulties of growing up in a cave in a mountain in Wadi Sehia, a valley in South Sinai. More than three decades later, Umm Yasser revisited the cave that she lived in as a child with her mother this time in the company of 15 women of seven different nationalities who hiked in Sinai between March 29-31. What makes this hike special is that local Bedouin women including Yasser lead it. I felt pain because I want to forget the bad memories I had [in the cave], but I dont mind being in pain for a while if it is for the hikers sake, Yasser, who is now 47 and was the lead guide during the hikes, told Al-Monitor. She added, I am happy to exchange my knowledge and culture with the hikers. The initiative was launched by organizers of the award-winning Sinai Trail, a 550-kilometer (342-mile) hiking trail across South Sinai through the territories of eight Bedouin tribes. It starts from the isolated Wadi el-Sahu, the main settlement of the Hamada tribe, which is a one-hour walk from Serabit el Khadem, a well-known locality in southwest Sinai Peninsula. Since the project of the Sinai Trail was first introduced in 2015, local men have always taken leading roles despite the fact that the projects goal was to involve the whole Bedouin community in South Sinai as much as possible. But the recent hike that uses women as guides partially cracks the patriarchal and conservative culture that keeps women at home. Because of the different roles [men and women have] in society, Bedouin women have different experiences, and we wanted to integrate that, Ben Hoffler, co-founder of the Sinai Trail, said to Al-Monitor. Hoffler added, Women here tend to know the mountains closer to their homes better than men, and they probably know the plants better because they are the ones who take the goats out to graze. The five female guides were all from the Hamada tribe. According to Hoffler, who has been based in Egypt for the last 10 years, the Hamada is regarded as the oldest and smallest tribe in South Sinai. It has a population of around 1,200 to 2,500 one of the smallest populations of all the tribes in the region but it is located on fertile land, with high sandstone mountains and valleys with waterfalls and natural pools. The trip has raised the hopes of the Hamada tribe of slightly opening up tourism in their remote area, which has been traditionally marginalized and doesnt have access to these kinds of opportunities that other Bedouin communities have especially along the Red Sea. People of the village and I were very happy because when people come, they bring work and money for us, said Yasser. I am especially glad for the younger generations because I am already old. I would like to see [more] people coming and visiting this place to help other women to work. One of the conditions to lead the hikes was that the female guides would not stay out in the mountains at night and would only walk with other women restrictions that were nevertheless turned into benefits by the organizers. [In a women-only trip], there are no male-female dynamics; women are not someones wife, mother or boss. Rather, they leave those roles behind and are free just to be themselves, Julie Patterson, member of the Sinai Trail and facilitator of the trip, told Al-Monitor. She described the work of the first-time guides as amazing. For Suzie Balaban, one of the hikers who participated in the trip, the initiative was also an opportunity to get closer to the Egyptian Bedouins. I am interested in diversity. In Egypt, where everything is so centralized, there are different ethnic groups that are not really celebrated or even accepted, she said to Al-Monitor. It was wonderful to experience the way they live and hear their life stories, she added. Marion Salwegter, from the Netherlands, was one of the few hikers living abroad who joined the group. I take every chance I have to go to the desert. But on these trips, all of the guides are Bedouin men. So this one, being a trip to meet Bedouin women, was an awesome [opportunity], she told Al-Monitor. The Sinai Trail organization now plans to run a trip of this kind every three months in order to create more jobs for the tribe and build on the first step they have taken. In the future, they would like to integrate further the women of the Hamada into the normal procedures of the Sinai Trail, with the ultimate goal of testing whether other tribes will follow when they see the benefits of the initiative. Sabha, a neighbor of Wadi Sahu from the Muzeina tribe but married to a man from Hamada, has been living in the village for 12 years and would like to become a guide in the future. I was surprised when I saw tourists for the first time, she said to Al-Monitor, referring to the group of hikers. Here we need work and jobs for the young generations, she continued, [so] I hope that people stay here for a long time. Hoffler believes the Sinai Trail project will be stronger if women start to participate more. All the very ancient knowledge of the desert, the wilderness, the plants, the animals, the ways, the stories, the poems, the proverbs coming from the women would be integrated, he said, and if it is, the trail would be richer. On the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution back in February, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei underlined the necessity of leading an Islamic lifestyle in the Second Step of the Revolution, his most important public message in the past few months. It was one of several other instances of Khamenei raising this subject in the last few years. The hard-line preacher Alireza Panahian has asserted, The revolution has progressed in most areas except for [enhancing an Islamic] lifestyle. Perhaps this points to the impetus behind the supreme leader's focus on the issue. A quick look at the social realities in Iran indicates that both the general public and the rank and file among the revolutionaries have not been immune to the cultural invasion of the West, to use Khameneis own words. Indeed, the public sphere has moved so radically away from Islamic and revolutionary ideals that some conservatives feel the need to shield themselves from its allegedly contaminating influences by retreating into their own private enclaves and public safe havens. To this end, numerous cafes and restaurants in Tehran have been established to cater exclusively to ultraconservative families. The condition of admission is strict observance of the hijab and abiding by conservative codes and etiquette. Since the early 1980s, the revolutionaries have proactively tried to impose a conservative moral ethos on Iranian cities by enforcing compulsory hijab and other sartorial codes, but they are increasingly disappointed with the ability of such coercive measures to dominate the public arena. Meanwhile, they continue to struggle to protect their own not only from the dominant, non-conservative lifestyle of the broader public, but also from the sheer rage of large segments of society that associate any visible sign of conservative religion (such as the chador) with government corruption, mismanagement and rights violations. Unlike in the early revolutionary years, in most cities today wearing strict hijab and other symbols of conservative religiosity can make one a target of the wrath of ordinary people. Thus, those displaying conspicuous icons of religiosity might well feel uneasy, and at times unsafe, when out in public places. In the last few years alone, several incidences of violent assaults against clerics have been reported in large cities. Three of them resulted in death. According to Mohsen Hesam-Mazaheri, a sociologist in Tehran, what's driving this phenomenon is clerics being associated with the state and thus with its malfunctioning, corruption and abuses of power. Given this, religious people, and especially women wearing the chador, are most vulnerable to assault. Though most of them are not beneficiaries of the wealth and power of the state, they are paying a price for being connected to the Islamic Republic. As a consequence of these dynamics, instead of seeking to impose conservative moral standards on society, religious Iranians are increasingly avoiding clear symbols of state-sponsored religiosity and dissociating from the state. Hesam-Mazaheri claims that in this vein more and more women are forgoing the chador in favor of less-marked hijabs in order to suggest a distance from the state and its conduct. Even some clerics now wear cloaks and turbans only in religious processions and defrock when in public spaces. Not every ultraconservative woman is prepared to give up the chador, however, nor is every cleric ready to hang up his religious gowns. Thus, fearful under the discerning gaze of the public, conservatives inevitably have sought refuge in private enclaves. The state itself, perhaps unwittingly, has exacerbated the separation of conservatives from the broader public by building large-scale housing complexes for members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), for example, Shahrak-e Mahallati and Shahrak-e Kharrazi in Tehran, and for clerics, such as Pardisan and Mahdiye in Qom. This isolation indicates that ultraconservatives are disappointed with the public sphere which attests to the failure of the Islamization project and feel vulnerable and in need of shelter from the secular, outside world. The latter includes most banks, educational institutions (such as government schools and universities) and national TV programs. Since the functions of these institutions are necessary for everyday life, ultraconservatives have launched alternative Islamic versions of almost all of them. These include several IRGC-owned hospitality complexes for members of the force and the public, among them the Talaiye Complex in northeastern Tehran, the Hoveyzeh Complex in eastern Tehran, and Fanoos Restaurant; tens of Quranic and Islamic schools; the Ammar International Popular Film Festival, showcasing works by religious and revolutionary artists, and numerous other parallel organizations. In short, the Islamic Republic is now experiencing the rise of separate and parallel religious and revolutionary subsystems and institutions, or in other words, the separation of the religious and the secular within the state. This isolation and segregation have paradoxical outcomes. On the one hand, it represents de facto recognition that there are two separate social realms: one for ultraconservatives and one for the general public. The perception by ultraconservatives that they can live as they wish in these secluded towns and neighborhoods might lead them to gradually give up trying to Islamize the broader public and thus relieve the pressure to conform felt by other Iranians. There are already signs that some segments of the ultraconservatives have adopted this mindset. On the other hand, and quite contradictory, living in an artificial bubble of in-group discourse and the lack of contact with the broader society may lead to even more radicalization among the ultraconservatives. All in all, though it is an overstatement to argue that Iranian conservatives have given up on the Islamization of the public sphere, evidence suggests that the state is now funneling its resources into preserving its loyal base rather than winning the hearts and minds of the broader, discontented public. WASHINGTON Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today extended condolences to the victims of Iranian flooding, and said the United States was prepared to offer help. But in a sign that the offer may have been less than serious, he did so in a statement blaming Iranian regime mismanagement for the flooding, and without any accompanying guidance on how assistance could be directed to Iran without violating US sanctions. On behalf of the American people, we offer our condolences to the victims of the recent floods in Iran, Pompeo said in a written statement. These floods once again show the level of Iranian regime mismanagement in urban planning and in emergency preparedness." Pompeo rejected the reported claim by Irans Foreign Ministry that US sanctions were preventing donations to Irans Red Crescent society. The regime blames outside entities when, in fact, it is their mismanagement that has led to this disaster, Pompeos statement continued. The United States stands ready to assist and contribute to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which would then direct the money through the Iranian Red Crescent for relief. Pompeos statement of condolence was also followed by a lengthy briefing by US envoy on Iran Brian Hook on how effective the Trump administrations maximum pressure campaign has been at draining Iranian revenues. The timing of the briefing was related to the coming one-year anniversary of the Trump administrations withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, a US official, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor. Some Iran watchers and former US aid officials said the US messaging on Irans flooding struck them as unusually cynical and tone-deaf compared with the actions of former Democratic and Republican US administrations after natural disasters in Iran. After the 2003 Bam earthquake, the Bush administration State Department announced extraordinary steps to facilitate relief efforts to Iran, including the issuing of a special Treasury Department license, said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, the London-based founder of the website Bourse and Bazaar, which tracks developments in Irans economy. The 2003 State Department announcement even included a phone number so you could call to find out how your organization could avail itself of the licenses, Batmanghelidj wrote on Twitter. In contrast, Pompeo has not provided any clarity how anyone else besides the US government can take advantage of a relaxation in certain aspects of the sanctions regime in order to help relief reach Iran, Batmanghelidj told Al-Monitor. The idea that the United States can simultaneously maintain that it cares for the Iranian people but not proactively seek to address the ways sanctions make relief [after the flood] more difficult is disingenuous, he added. So at the end of the day I see this as basically not serious. In 2017, after an earthquake in Kermanshah province killed over 500, there was likewise no sanctions relief or gesture of assistance. The Iranian people are well aware of Iranian regime mismanagement, but the Trump administration does not have credibility to try to advance its agenda on this issue, said Ali Vaez, Iran director at the International Crisis Group. The administration is clearly trying to exploit this natural disaster to twist its knife and further discredit the Iranian government. But this is an exercise in futility, Vaez told Al-Monitor by email. The Iranian people are fully aware of endemic mismanagement and corruption in their country. The Trump administration, with its travel ban and insults to sense of dignity and nationalism of the Iranian people, has near zero credibility in directing their anger to advance its own agenda. As to the blame game, the Trump administration just looks like it is trying to score political points, Vaez said. US sanctions are undoubtedly impeding disaster relief, Vaez continued. The fact that [the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control] OFAC hasn't issued a general license (unlike in 2003 after the Bam earthquake) is further evidence that what the administration cares about is not real relief for the Iranian people, but to score a political point. If [Pompeo] really wants to demonstrate goodwill, he would be better off waiving the rules in the US, Vaez said. Former USAID official Jeremy Konyndyk said Pompeos statement was counterproductive. Certainly if you are sincerely trying to help, you dont craft a statement in such a way as to blame a country for an act of God, Konyndyk told Al-Monitor. It is unseemly. I think even on political terms, this is a deeply counterproductive approach. The point of providing assistance in a situation like this is to alleviate specific suffering, and also to show solidarity, Konyndyk continued. If the message that the administration wants to send to the Iranian people is that its your government, we dont like it, [our problem is] not with you, then providing a really sincere, robust, good faith offer of assistance in a situation like this is an important way to show that. The Treasury Department did not respond to a query if it would be providing the kind of clarifying guidance that the US administrations did after the 2003 and 2013 earthquakes in Iran to facilitate aid relief. The State Department said the United States was willing to help, but the burden was on the Iranian government to convince the international banking sector that humanitarian transactions could be safely conducted. The United States stands ready to assist, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino told journalists at the State Department briefing today. The burden is on Iran here to open up its dark economy so that banks around the world have more confidence that when facilitating humanitarian transactions, humanitarian goods will actually reach the people, Palladino said. The regime makes it very difficult to facilitate humanitarian goods and services. Tyler Stapleton, deputy director of congressional relations at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said his organization was pleased at the US offer. It was the right thing to do, Stapleton told Al-Monitor. To the degree Iran was not prepared to deal with an emergency situation of this magnitude seems consistent with the mismanagement inherent in the regime. A prominent Islamic State (IS) leader was killed March 29 by Saraya al-Salam Brigades, an Iraqi Shiite militia in Salahuddin province. According to the militia, he had been responsible for the recruitment of children for the terrorist group. Besides its deployment of child soldiers, IS also used various techniques to indoctrinate children born and raised in the so-called caliphate. These techniques ranged from military training to the establishment of school curricula encouraging students to engage in violence. Juveniles In Iraq allegedly involved with IS face harsh sentences. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, an estimated 1,500 children are currently being held by the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government for alleged IS involvement. Al-Monitor visited Tasfirat Prison in Tel Keif, a town north of Mosul. The facility is one of three detention centers holding IS suspects prior to their trial at the nearby Ninevah counterterrorism court. Juveniles are kept separate from adults, but in similar, crowded and windowless cells holding up to 250 individuals. The prison is meant to be a temporary facility. But IS suspects spend between days and up to nine months here, a high-ranking administrator of the prison told Al-Monitor. If found guilty of IS-related crimes, juveniles face up to 15 years in prison. According to international standards, children recruited under the age of 18 by military organizations are considered victims rather than criminals, whether they willingly engaged in violence or were forced to do so. Mohammad Tallal, the head of Mosuls counterterrorism department at the Ministry of Interior, told Al-Monitor that a lack of financial support from the federal government is preventing the establishment of rehabilitation programs, the only long-term solution to the detention of juveniles. Without such programs, we are not able to release teenagers affiliated with and indoctrinated by IS. Right now they pose a danger to society. But if they stay in prison, they will remain criminals just the same. We need support to finance their rehabilitation, Tallal told Al-Monitor. Not only juveniles, but also young children are kept in similar cells with their mothers in Tel Keif prison. When we arrest the mother, we ask if she wants to leave her child with a relative. Some do, but others have nobody, the senior manager of the prison told Al-Monitor. The refusal of relatives to take in children of convicted or suspected IS members stresses the widespread social stigma children with IS relatives are facing. Kheiri Jaburi, a member of the Iraqi youth parliament in Mosul, is adamant, saying, We refuse children who are victims of IS and children with IS relatives to grow up together. The children of IS members should be sent far away. Al-Monitor visited Jadah camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in southeast Mosul. The camp shelters over 52,000 individuals still unable to return to their former place of residence. Their homes have either been destroyed or they fear retribution by the local community. Jadah camp for internally displaced people, Mosul, Iraq, March 19, 2019. (Charlotte Bruneau/Al-Monitor) RNVDO, a local organization, manages the camp since its establishment in 2014. "Families with IS relatives live alongside the families of victims in Jadah. Our main challenge is to make it possible for them to coexist, Ayman Abduljabar al-Jabori, the camp's manager, told Al-Monitor. Many families in the camp face challenges with their legal documentation, often lost or confiscated during the war. Riad and his family were detained over a year in the closed al-Hol camp in Syria, before being transferred to Jadah camp several months ago. He told Al-Monitor that he did not recover his or his childrens identification papers. Without legal documentation, living in Jadah remains the only option for many IDPs who are unable to cross the many checkpoints outside the camp. Their children also bear the costs, he said. Many children born during the IS occupation were not issued birth certificates preventing them from their rights to citizenship, education and health-care services. They become outcasts, a lawyer told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Procedures for the renewal of legal documents are lengthy, expensive and require clearance by the intelligence services. Some families who have a suspected IS member on the run have been failing to get clearance. Raed al-Maslah, the head of Ninevahs counterterrorism court, told Al-Monitor, IS relatives are a time bomb. Runaway IS members might use their families to carry out attacks. At the same time we have to prevent discrimination of innocent people. The lawyer, who has been working with IDPs for several years, said, After the liberation from IS in 2014, local governments were openly preventing IS relatives from getting their ID papers. Recently the federal government allegedly issued a directive asking local administrations to deliver documents as per the Iraqi law. Although the situation did improve, the directive is not always applied on the ground. The lawyer, who faced several such cases, explains that local administrations dread dealing with IS relatives because they are afraid of being accused of collaboration with the terrorist group by the intelligence services. In addition, local lawyers are not always willing to work with IS relatives, fearing stigmatization and retribution by local communities. According to Shirwan Aldoberdany, a parliamentarian from the Kurdistan Democratic Party for Ninevah governorate, corruption at different government levels is another factor that seems to be transforming the camps into permanent settlements. International organizations played an important role during and after the liberation. But we have a lot of questions regarding corruption of the local government that is benefitting financially from the funds allocated to IDPs, he told Al-Monitor. The Iraqi lawyer believes that the solution is not legal, but political. We need courageous political decisions. One option would be to mandate international organizations with the protection of children with IS relatives," he said. This would mitigate the problem of stigmatization faced by local organizations and alleviate corruption risks, he added. We dont want people to be scared of the system because it could collapse completely. We need to start afresh after Daesh [IS]. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem has been at the center of many recent political debates. Last year, its administration fought the deportation of Lara Alqasem, a student supporter of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement who came to study in Jerusalem, and in January, a literature instructor clashed with a student in the reserves who came to class in uniform. The instructor, Carola Hilfrich, received threats following the incident, and Al-Monitor has learned that she decided to cancel all her classes in the Humanities Faculty and go on unpaid leave. The incident renewed controversy over the issue of soldiers at universities. In the Western world, especially since the student protests of the 1960s in the United States and Europe, campuses have symbolized strongholds of freedom and democracy and to a large extent opposition to militarism. But in Israel, the situation is far more complicated. Mandatory military service for Jewish young people makes uniforms an integral part of Israeli society. Tourists are sometimes frightened at the sight of uniformed and armed soldiers on the trains and buses and at restaurants. Soldiers on active duty, students on reserve duty and officers studying in various university programs are common to see walking around college campuses. The Hebrew University recently won a bid to provide an educational program for Israel Defense Forces cadets in training for officer roles in the army intelligence service. Until now, Haifa University had administered the three-year military honors program, called Havatzalot. The program includes, among others, classes in the university's Islamic studies department. One of its senior professors, Liat Kozma, wrote in a March 27 tweet that has since been removed, Im thinking here about our Palestinian students, but not only them studying in a combined class of soldiers and civilians about the history of the Middle East impacts what can and cannot be said on an essential level. She added that turning 40% of our department into a military department would harm its legitimacy as a research facility. An even sharper critique was voiced by a leftist academic organization called Academy for Equality. The organization claims that the program would create a small army base on campus and put part of it under military control. Academy for Equality argues that the army could prevent the entry of Arab workers to its facility and change the campus environment to a military one. It further claims that the military could intervene in the curricula. A source at the Hebrew University told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that these claims are unfounded, that responsibility for security on campus will remain exclusively in the hands of the university, no facility will be closed for the sake of the soldiers and the curricula will remain the full responsibility of lecturers, without any intervention by the military. However, Academy for Equality also pointed to popular concerns that Arab students would feel uncomfortable, perhaps even threatened, by the presence of uniformed soldiers in class. The presence of a large and dominant group of soldiers in these classes" will harm the learning experience and cost students the "ability to freely and critically express oneself in classes, states a press release about the program. Notably, there is nothing to prevent soldiers from carrying weapons on campus, but in this program, soldiers do not carry them. Arab Israelis and Palestinians from East Jerusalem make up a large percentage of the students in the department. Tareq Yassin, the coordinator of student activism with the Arab-Jewish political party Hadash, said that the program promotes militarism at universities and creates a sense that youre not at an academic institution but at a security organization. He agrees with Kozma that the presence of soldiers would harm the ability of Arab students to express themselves freely. He says that universities are usually the first place of intensive contact for Arab young people with Jewish society in Israel, and that the uniforms will create a feeling of discomfort, in the very least. Who knows, he commented, maybe on a difficult day of demonstrations or even war, a soldier could raise his weapon and shoot at Arab students, as Jewish terrorists have done to Arabs in the past. Yousra, a student in the Islamic studies department who asked that her last name not be used, said that while she has become used to seeing student soldiers on campus, she has had a hard time speaking openly with a Jewish friend since the day she came to class in uniform while on reserve duty. You have to understand that an Israeli soldier in uniform with a weapon is a threat by definition to a Palestinian-Israeli Arab, even if its only a symbolic threat. I am not afraid, but will certainly feel uncomfortable in a class sitting beside a group of soldiers, she said. The rector of the Hebrew University, Barak Medina, recently said in an interview that the complaints come from a small minority of faculty and that while the program presents a certain challenge for the university, as a public institution its clear that it should allow the soldiers to study there. According to him, the university administration sees an advantage in the integration of Arabs and soldiers in that it could spark a dialogue that would benefit both sides. He added that there are Arab students who were actually interested in such encounters. From the Jerusalem campus at the top of Mount Scopus one can view the Old City with its mosques, walls, churches, the Tower of David, the western city with its high rises and hotels and the neighborhoods spread over the hills of Jerusalem. The universitys administration believes that it can integrate within its campus the complexity of Israeli society, soldiers alongside Arabs who dont serve. While many Arabs would prefer an environment without armed soldiers, such a mixture reflects the makeup of Israeli society. Israeli pundits were busy on March 31 shoveling through the mud that candidates on the right, left and center of the political spectrum have been slinging at each other. The job has been ongoing since the campaign for the April 9 elections began. There was the latest update on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus alleged involvement in the scandal stemming from Israels purchase of German naval vessels. Then there was in-depth analysis to be done on why Netanyahu rival Lt. Gen. (res.) Benny Gantz, leader of the Blue and White party, stuttered during an interview and the deconstruction of an interview by Lt. Gen. (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi, a Gantz colleague from the Blue and White. Talk shows and call-in programs speculated about the real reason the outspoken television presenter Oshrat Kotler had taken a leave of absence. Nine days before the elections, news editions also found time to report that a pelican had been found meandering along a major highway. Not a word, however, was said about the final communique of the annual Arab League summit that wrapped up March 31 in Tunis with discussion of the Palestinian issue. Who cares that the Arab states reiterated support for their 2002 peace initiative with Israel? So what if the Arab League insists on once again offering Israel full diplomatic relations and peace based on the 1967 borders? More so, they are offering it despite the booby traps placed in their path by Netanyahu and his friend President Donald Trump: the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. In November 2017, the Knesset held a special session at the request of more than 40 lawmakers to discuss the diplomatic challenges facing the Israeli government in view of the latest opportunities for peace. Knesset member Isaac Herzog, then chair of the opposition and leader of the Zionist Camp, turned to Netanyahu and said, We are talking about a dramatic regional move and you know it exists. Since 2009 you have missed historic opportunities time after time. Herzog was referring to Netanyahus last-minute pullback from a regional peace initiative led by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Herzog urged Netanyahu to make dramatic decisions and answer the question of how to ensure the future of the Jewish peoples nation-state. He asked the prime minister whether he wanted his legacy to be one of sit and do nothing until the Jewish majority is lost and whether he wanted to be remembered for disseminating hatred and incitement against the attorney general, police commissioner and the media. As expected, Netanyahu answered that prime ministers can only be replaced at the ballot box and boasted that due to our tremendous achievements, the public has decided over and over that I will stand here [at the Knesset podium], and you will sit there [on the opposition benches]. Indeed, in democratic regimes, voters choose their leaders. The upcoming elections will not, however, be determined by the achievements of Netanyahu governments over the past decade in the healthcare, education, transportation and economic sectors. Defense will not be determinative, nor will his government's contribution to resolving the bloody conflict with the Palestinians and bringing about regional peace. Instead, the electoral outcome will be determined by those Israelis torn between casting an ideological vote or a strategic vote. Poll findings announced March 31 on Channel 12 News revealed that 25% of voters are not enthusiastic about Netanyahu or Gantz as prime minister, with 38% preferring a fifth term for Netanyahu and 36% wanting Gantz to replace him. The rest do not support either candidate or are undecided. On the left wing, the undecided voters are torn between supporting parties that reflect their views such as Labor, Meretz or the Gesher, led by Knesset member Orly Levy-Abekasis or voting for Gantzs Blue and White, which prides itself on the hollow, pragmatic slogan There is no left, and no right. On the one hand, these undecided voters are being told that a significant electoral advantage for Gantz and his running mate Yair Lapid over the Likud would boost their chances of forming the next government and getting rid of Netanyahu. There is also concern about wasted votes, those cast for small parties that ultimately do not garner enough votes to enter the Knesset. Everyone understands that the only way to replace Netanyahu is to vote Blue and White, Lapid, a centrist, declared on March 31. There is no choice, even Labor Party people should vote Blue and White because a Labor vote ensures Netanyahu will remain in power. On the other hand, the left remembers that the same Lapid had joined Netanyahu's right-wing government in the past and incited against the human rights organizations Breaking the Silence and BTselem. Not only that, Channel 13 aired recordings of Gantz talking in private meetings about the possibility of including Netanyahus Likud in a government that he would head and even possibly joining a Netanyahu-led government. The Labor Party then warned, Anyone voting Blue and White will be responsible for forming the next Netanyahu government. An undecided leftist would therefore do better voting his convictions, saving himself from a morning-after election hangover. Perhaps, however, it is important to ensure that the Defense Ministry not be put in the hands of the hardliner and New Right leader Naftali Bennett and that the nationalist Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich not be entrusted with the Education Ministry. Maybe it would be better to leave the door open for the deal of the century Trumps administration is cooking up for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Labor and Meretz argue that if Gantz is successful in cobbling together a government coalition, left-wing liberals must join it in order to counterbalance the Blue and White, which is heavy on right-wing conservative candidates. Life is hard for the undecided. Having a far easier time of it are those who have concluded that this is not the time for such luxuries as peace and human rights and that removing Netanyahu is the only goal. On the right on the political map, the undecided voters are vacillating between a strategic vote for the Likud and a vote for one of the more radical parties, such as the New Right, the United Right, Zehut, led by the libertarian Moshe Feiglin, or Yisrael Beitenu, led by former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. Then there is the option of Kulanu, the softer right party headed by Moshe Kahlon. The considerations for the right resemble those for the left: the desire to ensure that their leader, Netanyahu, is able to form a government that embraces the dream of a Greater Land of Israel weighed against reservations about the corruption scandals dogging him and his extravagant lifestyle. This camp, too, fears that voting for a small party could be a wasted vote if the party fails to get into the Knesset. On this side, as well, life is much easier for the Netanyahu at all cost voters, whose loyalty to their leader blinds them to the clouds of corruption and hedonism engulfing him. From now until April 9, the two major parties will focus their efforts on attracting supporters of their satellites on the left and right but without removing the satellites from the running altogether by denying them sufficient votes to cross the electoral threshold and enter the Knesset. And what about the historic initiative for Arab-Israeli peace that was once again endorsed this week? It is not even in the running on April 9. Officially, Israel denies or rather declines to confirm reaching an agreement with Hamas last week. Indeed, the issue was not brought to the security Cabinet. New Right leader Naftali Bennett and his party colleague Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked have been running an election campaign headlined Bennett will defeat Hamas," calling for a harsh stance against the Gaza Strip escalating violence and criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus policy on Hamas. But on April 1, Shaked conceded in an interview on Channel 13, I have no idea whether there is an agreement with Hamas, I have not been updated. Earlier, Shaked and Bennett had urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to convene the security Cabinet to discuss the reportedly emerging deal, saying they would vote against Israels surrender to Hamas, as Bennett described it. That's the crux of the issue. An agreement with Hamas, whether concluded or signed, means that Israel has recognized the group de facto and no longer views it as a terror organization. That's probably why Netanyahu has avoided convening his Cabinet. However, what occurred March 30 along the Gaza border with Hamas curbing violence against Israel was obviously the result of understandings between the sides, a type of ad hoc Israel-Hamas arrangement mediated by Egypt on the way to a broader compact. Israel and Hamas are not discussing a cease-fire or a prisoner swap, as states sometimes do with terror organizations. The United States, for example, made a deal with the Taliban for the 2014 release of captured soldier Robert Bergdahl without removing it from the list of terror-supporting organizations. Such was also the case with American journalist Peter Theo Curtis freed from captivity in Syria the same year by the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, which the United States continues to view essentially as a terror organization. Israel has reached numerous understandings on cease-fires with Hamas after every flare-up of violence in recent years. In 2011, with Egyptian mediation, the two sides even signed an agreement on the exchange of some 1,000 Palestinians jailed in Israel in return for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas for five years. Despite these agreements and indirect meetings in Cairo, Israel continued to view Hamas as a terror organization. In issuing statements after every Israeli retaliatory bombing in Gaza, the chief military spokesperson would report attacks on terror targets and infrastructure of the terror organization Hamas. Last weeks agreement that prevented yet another round of violence is not simply one more cease-fire arrangement designed to stop violent Palestinian demonstrations along Israels border and the launch of rockets and explosive balloons. One could define it as a diplomatic accord between Israel and Hamas. According to the understandings between the sides, Israel has committed to significant easing of various restrictions on Gaza if Hamas dials back the anti-Israel violence. The Ynet news website reported March 28 that Israels proposals included more supply trucks allowed to enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing and expansion of Gazas fishing zone to 12 nautical miles, which was actually extended to 15 miles. The offer also included expanding the United Nations temporary employment project to include 40,000 Gazans, upgrading the power line from Israel to the Gaza Strip, easing of import and export permits, and allowing the entry into Gaza of dual-use items that Israel had banned until now. On March 30, after the mass Palestinian protest along the border went off relatively smoothly, the Israel Defense Forces issued the following statement, which translated from Hebrew reads: The events of the so-called March of One Million on the Gaza Strip border have ended with less violence than expected. The organization controlling Gaza acted with restraint, which we have not seen for the past year. It is important to note that the statement referred to the organization controlling Gaza rather than the usual term of terror organization Hamas. The following morning, Israel reopened the crossings, despite the five rockets fired overnight toward its border communities. On April 1, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) announced that Gazas fishing zone was extended to 15 nautical miles, a range that Israel had not allowed since its 1993 Oslo Accord with the Palestinians. COGAT later issued a strange explanation: "This is part of our policy, which distinguishes between terrorism and the general population This explanation seems strange as the agreement to extend the fishing zone was obviously reached vis-a-vis Hamas, and not vis-a-vis the fishermen (i.e., "the general population"). Hamas on the other hand, has no qualms about using the word agreement, as deputy head of the Hamas political department Salah al-Arouri explained March 30. We expect agreements to be signed within a few days, he said. Obviously aware of the significance of an agreement with the enemy that Hamas refuses to recognize, Arouri added, "This is not a peace agreement with Israel and has no connection to diplomacy. We are interested in ceasing the fighting in exchange for [Israel] lifting the siege." The agreement reached with Israel is just the beginning, a Hamas source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. The leadership, he added, understands that the Israeli government is under pressure due to the April 9 elections. It had, however, received an explicit promise of accelerated and intensive negotiations soon on lifting the blockade of Gaza and discussion of all issues Hamas had raised in the past, including the building of sea and airports and establishment of commercial-economic zones. Asked by Al-Monitor whether the agreement, which includes a Hamas commitment to cease all armed action or violent popular activity against Israel, means it had given up jihad and was recognizing Israels existence, the source answered, The Hamas leadership has said repeatedly, We do not recognize Israel as long as we have not been given our rights. Nonetheless, his words are clear. Agreement with Israel based on a cessation of armed activity in return for economic concessions is de facto recognition by each side of the others existence. Hamas will probably keep dubbing Israel the Zionist enemy, but it is far from certain that Israel will be able to keep calling Hamas a terror organization. It will probably adopt the term minted in recent days by the military spokesperson, the organization controlling Gaza. Even as Israel engages in agreements and understandings with Hamas, Netanyahu treats his security cooperation partner in the West Bank as a terror organization. Ever since the breakdown of the US-mediated Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in April 2014, no significant agreement has been reached with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Netanyahu and his ministers keep treating the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a terror entity despite the close and beneficial security coordination between the sides. The only agreement reached so far has been on settling the PAs debt to the Israel Electric Corporation, at the instigation of Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon. Netanyahu insists at every opportunity that Abbas supports terrorism and incites his people to terrorist activity. His divide and conquer method, in regard to Gaza and the West Bank, is designed to enable Israel to evade any deal with the PA, which would by its very nature entail territorial and diplomatic concessions that Netanyahu cannot or does not want to deliver. Netanyahu finds it far simpler to reach agreement with Hamas and whitewash the sins of the group that Israel has for years referred to in disgust as the Hamas terror organization. A reanalysis of data collected by ESA's Mars Express during the first 20 months of NASA's Curiosity mission found one case of correlated methane detection, the first time an in-situ measurement has been independently confirmed from orbit. Reports of methane in the Martian atmosphere have been intensely debated, with Mars Express contributing one of the first measurements from orbit in 2004, shortly after its arrival at the Red Planet. The molecule attracts such attention because on Earth methane is generated by living organisms, as well as geological processes. Because it can be destroyed quickly by atmospheric processes, any detection of the molecule in the Martian atmosphere means it must have been released relatively recently -- even if the methane itself was produced millions or billions of years ago and lay trapped in underground reservoirs until now. While spacecraft and telescopic observations from Earth have in general reported no or very low detections of methane, or measurements right at the limit of the instruments' capabilities, a handful of spurious spikes, along with Curiosity's reported seasonal variation at its location in Gale Crater, raise the exciting question of how it is being generated and destroyed in present times. Now, for the first time, a strong signal measured by the Curiosity rover on 15 June 2013 is backed up by an independent observation by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) onboard Mars Express the next day, as the spacecraft flew over Gale Crater. The study exploited a new observation technique, allowing the collection of several hundred measurements in one area over a short period of time. The teams also developed a refined analysis technique to get the best out of their data. "In general we did not detect any methane, aside from one definite detection of about 15 parts per billion by volume of methane in the atmosphere, which turned out to be a day after Curiosity reported a spike of about six parts per billion," says Marco Giuranna from the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome, Italy, the principal investigator for the PFS experiment, and lead author of the paper reporting the results in Nature Geoscience today. "Although parts per billion in general means a relatively small amount, it is quite remarkable for Mars -- our measurement corresponds to an average of about 46 tonnes of methane that was present in the area of 49,000 square kilometres observed from our orbit." Ten other observations in the Mars Express study period that reported no detections at the limit of the spectrometer's sensitivity corresponded to a period of low measurements reported by Curiosity. How to create and destroy methane at Mars - larger image Pinpointing the Source At the time of the Curiosity detection, it was speculated that the methane originated north of the rover, because the prevailing winds were southward, and that the release likely occurred inside the crater. "Our new Mars Express data, taken one day after Curiosity's recording, change the interpretation of where the methane originated from, especially when considering global atmospheric circulation patterns together with the local geology," adds Marco. "Based on geological evidence and the amount of methane that we measured, we think that the source is unlikely to be located within the crater." Marco and his colleagues made two independent analyses to home in on potential source regions of the methane, dividing up a wide region around Gale Crater into grids of about 250 by 250 square kilometres. In one study, collaborators from the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy in Brussels applied computer simulations to create one million emission scenarios for each square, in order to predict the probability of methane emission for each of those locations. The simulations took into account the measured data, expected atmospheric circulation patterns, and methane release intensity and duration based on the geological phenomenon of 'gas seepage.' In the other parallel study, geologists from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome, Italy and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, scrutinised the region around Gale Crater for features where gas seepage is expected -- these are the kind of features that might be associated with methane release. This process is well known on Earth to occur along tectonic faults and from natural gas fields, with a variety of release intensities. For example, on Earth, gas emission from active mud volcanoes is typically continuous with background variations, but also with sudden strong bursts, while other seeps might release gas intermittently. Episodic gas release, that is, generally long quiescence with no emission in between short-duration bursts, is typical of the expulsion of gas from small or 'dying' seeps or due to seismic events. On Mars, episodic gas expulsions could also be created during a meteorite impact, liberating gas trapped below the surface. "We identified tectonic faults that might extend below a region proposed to contain shallow ice. Since permafrost is an excellent seal for methane, it is possible that the ice here could trap subsurface methane and release it episodically along the faults that break through this ice," says co-author Giuseppe Etiope from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome. "Remarkably, we saw that the atmospheric simulation and geological assessment, performed independently of each other, suggested the same region of provenance of the methane." "Our results support the idea that methane release on Mars might be characterised by small, transient geological events rather than a constantly replenishing global presence, but we also need to understand better how methane is removed from the atmosphere, and how to reconcile the Mars Express data with results from other missions," adds co-author Frank Daerden from the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy in Brussels. "We will re-analyse more of the data collected by our instrument in the past, while continuing our ongoing monitoring efforts, including coordinating some observations with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter," concludes Marco. The ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which is designed to make the most detailed inventory of the Martian atmosphere yet, began its science observations in April 2018. "Mars Express was the first to report a significant detection of methane from orbit around Mars, and now, fifteen years later, we can announce the first simultaneous and co-located detection of methane with a rover on the surface," says Dmitri Titov, ESA's Mars Express project scientist. "With the spacecraft and its payload still operative, Mars Express is one of the most successful space missions to be sent to Earth's planetary neighbour. We expect more exciting science from joint efforts by both ESA orbiters at Mars." Reference: "Independent Confirmation of a Methane Spike on Mars and a Source Region East of Gale Crater," M. Giuranna et al. 2019 April 1, Nature Geoscience [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0331-9]. The Mars Express detections were made by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS). The Curiosity measurements were made by the Tunable Laser Spectrometer -- Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (TLS-SAM). Larger image Please follow Astrobiology on Twitter. The sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now. Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market. In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender. India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex. Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted. But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted? Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner. If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems. I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now. I want more variation in masturbation I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own. If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end. What is sex toys for Indian? Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation. It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms. They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable. Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner. The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner. It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past. In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping. Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order. In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing. Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome. Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own. But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance. More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around. Sextoy situation in India Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years. In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India. Mumbai Kolkata Bangalore Delhi Chennai Hyderabad These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India. In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well. If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too. If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it. What are Sextoys for beginner? Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms. Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy. I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion. I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy. If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma. Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it. Advantages of using sextoy for Indians There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways. Can have stimulating sex Can develop new sexual zones If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern. However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways. You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation. Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever. There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure. This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it. When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems. It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms). For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles [Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou... Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India. Sextoy for beginner men in India So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners. For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men! The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men Masturbator Cock rings Love Doll Sex Lubricants Toys for the prostate Lets check each one in detail. Masturbator The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products. It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands. Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands. They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.) Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much. Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! ! Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa SEXToys India PR (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018 Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood. If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here Really pleasant male masturbation and how to do it Are you in a rut with your daily masturbation routine? I'm going to show you five ways men masturbate that you might ... [For Beginners] How to choose and use a male masturbator without fail Gentlemen.Have you ever used a masturbator? The person who sees this article is probably the one who has not experien... Cock Ring A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis. It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow. It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber. In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection. Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction. It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it. Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time. Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function. Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy. You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect. [Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat... Love Doll Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex. There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women. Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price. The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true. You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste. There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice. You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls. If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here Thorough explanation of the charm of sex dolls! Have you ever heard of sex dolls that are used primarily for pseudo-sex purposes? It is a doll that is quite close to... Sex lubricants Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules. It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution. Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse. There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent. Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent. If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here. What is sex lubricant?Explain the difference and usage of each ingredient The word "sex toy" may seem like a hurdle to overcome, but lotion is actually one of the most familiar sex toys. Many... Toys for the Prostate Another sextoy for men is prostate toys. The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line. Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men. Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men. What is the prostate? The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm. You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus. By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms. Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.) The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation. Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure. sextoy for beinner women in India The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy. The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy. Vibrator. Dildo Electric Masserger Lets check out what each one is in detail. If you want to check out womens toys, click here. [BEST25]Sex Toys for Women in IndiaThat Can Help You Have an Orgasm There are many women who pretend to feel orgasm during sex. But don't worry, you don't have to pretend to feel orgasm... Vibrators A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator. Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy. It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy. Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women. For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators. Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex. Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself. This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual. Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men. When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons. Introducing how to use the vibrator, its purpose, and how to choose it! Vibrator uses the vibrations caused by the rotation of the motor to provide stimulation. It is one or two of the most... Dildo A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis. It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass. A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it. They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well. It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device. A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo. Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands. For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis. This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one. To learn more about dildo, please click here. What is Dildo: Orgasms with Dildos for Men and Women A dildo is a model of a male organ that is used by women for masturbation and by men to stimulate the prostate gland. Th... Electric Masserger A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores. It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low. Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels. Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation. It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure. For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm. It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out. If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager? To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here. What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th... How to choose a sextoy for Indian Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one. Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points: Does the size fit you (the partner)? Does the size fit you (your partner)? Is the environment able to produce sound without problems? Price range First of all, the choice of size is quite important. Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women. For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage. Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems. Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise. If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level. Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it. Finally, there is the price range. The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest. Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy. Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy? 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If this is your first time to learn about sextoy, or if you are interested in using sextoy, why not give it a try? Indian Sextoys for ur best! will introduce you to sextoy and other trivia about sextoy, sexuality, and sexuality for men and women. I want to read more! If you think its a great idea, please bookmark it. The aftershocks of the political earthquake triggered by Sundays municipal elections in Turkey that saw the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lose key cities to the main opposition continue to reverberate with some AKP candidates refusing to formally concede defeat, notably in the countrys commercial powerhouse Istanbul. But few believe the countrys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will risk unleashing a wave of popular protests that would further destabilize the economy, whose lagging performance was seen as a key factor driving the opposition's hefty gains. Indeed, formal appeals lodged by AKP officials ahead of a 3 p.m. deadline for registering complaints in Istanbul and elsewhere are seen as more of a diversionary tactic aimed at covering up the extent of the popular rebuke as Erdogan ponders his new strategy. The AKP is focused on some 30,000 spoiled ballots in Istanbul and is demanding a recount on the grounds they may include ones marked clearly in their favor. But barring last-minute shenanigans, the 20,000-vote lead commanded by Ekrem Imamoglu, the main opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP) candidate who has claimed victory, is unlikely to be dented. Striking a conciliatory tone, AKP spokesman Omer Celik clearly signaled that his party would not kick up a fight in a press conference last night. It is our duty to defend the right of every citizen who cast their vote. So it is not possible for us to pursue undeserved victory, Celik said. We dont recognize any power over the national will. For now, Erdogan has pledged to make the economy his priority with a slew of new structural reforms. Hes alluded to his partys mistakes and there is talk of a Cabinet reshuffle aimed at restoring market confidence. But it remains unclear whether he will match his words with action. Alarmingly, Erdogan renewed vows to move against US-backed Kurdish militants controlling Syrias northern border with Turkey to the east of the Euphrates River during the same post-election speech delivered at the AKPs Ankara headquarters on Sunday. The threats have been largely seen as more rhetoric to drum up nationalist votes. But a new operation could yet prove to be the real diversionary tactic to shift attention from increased economic hardship, though it would likely exacerbate it. Ankaras frosty relations with Washington were heading toward sub-zero levels yesterday after the Pentagon suspended delivery of equipment related to F-35 fighter jet production until Turkey scotches its order of Russias S-400 Triumf missile system. The embattled Turkish lira fell by 2% on the US announcement that it was suspending deliveries and activities associated with the jets operational capability. Who knows what further fallout would ensue from a unilateral Turkish move against the US-protected zone in Syria. Meanwhile, in no way does the oppositions success after decades of inertia and internal squabbles guarantee that it will be able to sustain it once in office. Imamoglus unifying and moderate tone has raised hopes that he will not submit to potential pressure from hard-liners to engage in cultural revanchism by reintroducing alchohol to all municipality-run social spaces, for example. And he seems to have the full backing of CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, once written off as an ineffectual suit but now credited with picking Imamoglu and forging winning tactical alliances with nationalists and Kurds alike. Either way, the AKP-dominated Turkish media is likely to swoop in on their tiniest missteps. As pundits continue to ponder these questions, Al-Monitor turned to Jenny White, a prominent American social anthropologist who has studied the AKP and authored several groundbreaking books based on years of living in AKP-run lower income neighborhoods in Istanbul. In the following highlights from the interview, which has been edited for clarity, White describes the challenges that lie ahead for the AKP and CHP opposition alike. Al-Monitor: How important is Istanbul to the AKP? White: Istanbul is crucial to the AKP for two reasons: It has symbolic value as the center of Ottoman power and home to the sultans, with whom Erdogan identifies himself and his regime. It is the turbine that generates the revenue AKP needs to feed its political and business networks. Erdogan's star rose in part because he controlled and exploited Istanbul's financial and symbolic capital. He also fixed the infrastructure, picked up the garbage, fixed roads, expanded public transport and improved health care and social services. He did something that people valued. Voters surely asked themselves, would the CHP have built a subway? Al-Monitor: Is the AKP still the social movement that it was in its early days or has it ossified into a typical Turkish political party? Do you see a potential for fragmentation as a result of Sundays big losses? White: The AKP is not a coherent movement and hasn't been for some years. But your question about fragmentation applies to the CHP as well. No matter what the AKP's fate is, it will be what the CHP does (or doesn't) do that will make the difference. The CHP was known even among its own constituents as a party tangled in infighting and lacking new ideas. The CHP now has an opportunity to turn a local victory into a new national reputation as the party to count on for prosperity and security. To do that, the leopard has to change its spots. The CHP has to reward good leadership, not see it as a threat. Attract talent and listen to it, build it in like Erdogan's team a group of experts that went everywhere with him when he was mayor. Make a specific plan not lovely generalities about how it will tackle the major issues: environment, economy, security, migrants, etc. Make it public, get feedback from experts and the public. Be the party for all the new CHP mayors paid lip service to that, at least. Al-Monitor: Is the CHP up to all of that? White: The danger, like after the last election, is that the CHP will become dysfunctional due to struggles over leadership and push out its own talent for this reason, or do nothing. One of my informants called the AKP the Yap (the doers) and CHP the Yapma (dont do) party. Al-Monitor: Clearly the AKP will do its share in ensuring the CHP fails? White: There are several outside forces that can derail the CHP. The AKP sucks resources and equipment out of CHP-won municipalities, leaving them unable to do much. That would be especially dangerous in this bad economic climate. Then there are divided loyalties among contractors and government agencies on which municipalities and internal AKP supporters, like municipal employees, rely. The result would be that CHP mayors are stymied and undermined from without and within. Getting back to your question about whether the AKP remains a social movement or not, in my book Islamist Mobilization I describe how the women working for the success of the Welfare Party [the AKPs precursor party] thought that they were part of a social movement. Once the Welfare Party consolidated its power, the women realized that they had no seat at the decision-making table. The fact that followers think it's a movement doesn't mean that the party has any desire to mobilize the population beyond getting its votes and obedience. Al-Monitor: Can we say that Erdogans successful formula of conflating Islamism with Turkish nationalism, which you describe in your book on the topic, has run out of steam? White: Note that I didn't call it Islamist Nationalism. I have always argued that the AKP is not and was not an Islamist party, defined as a party that makes policy through an Islamic lens and with an Islamic rationale, often in an attempt to change the state to make it more hospitable to Islam by, e.g., imposing Islamic law. The AKP is not inspired by any particular theology or Islamic ideology. Al-Monitor: But Erdogan uses a lot of religious symbolism, draws on Islamic texts in his speeches. He did that in Sundays speech. White: Many though not all AKP leaders are personally pious, but that doesn't make them Islamists. The AKP uses Islam as a political tool to gain the loyalty of voters by playing on their feeling of oppression and exclusion under the Kemalists. Since these days half the population is under 30, many voters have no experience of "Kemalist oppression" and feel free to find the present regime oppressive in its heavy-handed and often openly manipulative insertion of Islam into seemingly every aspect of their lives. The AKP also uses Islam to control the population by spinning conspiracy theories about Muslims under threat, for example showing the Christchurch videos in Erdogans election speeches, a technique borrowed from the Kemalist playbook that warned that Turks were under threat by evil outsiders. It is this difference Turkish national identity is presented as Muslim, rather than racially Turkish that makes Muslim nationalism different from Turkish nationalism. Added to that is the current sense that national history is rooted in Ottoman greatness, rather than some military adventures in World War I by a man named Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. None of this has changed as a result of the elections. Indeed, it's become naturalized so that even secular Turks are hiring Ottoman costumes for their weddings. Al-Monitor: How would you then describe the current AKP? Does it risk fracturing? White: Stripping away the Islamist modifier leaves the AKP as nothing more than a political party led by a very wily politician who seems to have overplayed his hand. It has no Muslim magic wand. Indeed, the AKP has long since begun to fracture as Erdogan has pushed out advisers and politicians close to him for perceived disloyalty to his plans. Turkish political leadership is not about rallying people around an idea or plan, but about personal loyalty and obedience to the leader. That makes parties brittle because the chance of disagreement by any given follower is great, especially those close to the leader who might have their own ideas. Disagreement becomes a personal affront, which in Turkey slides easily into accusations of treason. Treason against the person is treason against the state. What results is continual polarization and fracturing of political parties. I hope that this election cycle will be different and that the leopards will change their spots. Otherwise, it's not a culture war we will see, but a no-holds-barred war between self-styled heroic figures competing over loyalty and rewards. Culture will simply be the handle by which the jug is cast to the ground. GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip A truce seems to have taken a tentative hold between Hamas and Israel, at least as of April 1. Israel has reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing for commercial goods and the Erez crossing for pedestrian traffic with the Gaza Strip, and allowed Palestinians to fish off the coast of the besieged territory. On March 25, Israel had closed these crossings and banned fishing off Gazas coast in response to the injury of seven Israelis north of Tel Aviv by a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip earlier that day. The recent calm came March 31, just hours after Israeli artillery shelled two military positions of Hamas in the center of the Gaza Strip, in response to the launch of five rockets from Gaza that landed in open areas in the vicinity of the towns adjacent to the Strip. Israeli military sources accused the Palestinian Islamic Jihad faction of being behind this attack. A day earlier, on March 30, the Israeli army killed four Palestinian protesters in the rallies on the Gaza border marking the anniversary of the Great Return March and popular protests to break Israel's siege on the Strip. An Israeli army statement the same day estimated the number of protesters at around 40,000. It noted that hours after the start of the protest the number fell to 19,000, with most protesters staying away from the border fence. During the protest, Hamas deployed, for the first time, members in orange uniforms along the eastern border of the Gaza Strip to prevent protesters from engaging in potential clashes with Israeli soldiers. Hamas sought through this gesture to assert its commitment to the Egyptian-sponsored truce understandings with Israel. Hamas was heavily criticized by human rights groups and even other Palestinian factions for its violence against protesters decrying the living conditions in the Strip. Egypt has intensified negotiations for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip since March 27. An Egyptian security delegation held successive meetings with Hamas leaders in Gaza and with Israeli officials in Tel Aviv for this purpose. The recent Egyptian efforts have resulted in understandings between the Palestinian factions and Israel on the basis of calm in exchange for breaking the siege, a senior Hamas source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Based on these understandings, Israel would allow the entry of Qatari funds to Gaza at a rate of $40 million per month, up from $15 million a month. These funds will be channeled to support poor families, the health sector and temporary employment programs in Gaza. The source affirmed that the understandings would also allow Qatar to cover the cost of fuel for the power plant in Gaza until the end of 2019. Israel has also approved the establishment of two industrial zones, one in the east of Gaza City and another in the northern Gaza Strip, and the establishment of a hospital to treat cancer in Gaza, the source added. Israel would guarantee the entry of 1,200 truckloads of goods per day to Gaza and the export of 120 trucks from the Gaza Strip. Palestinian fishermen will also be allowed to fish in the Gaza [Mediterranean] sea at a distance of 12 nautical miles. Meanwhile, the source added, Hamas agreed to stop the weekly protests on Tuesday nights by the so-called night confusion units along the eastern border of the Gaza Strip. "Hamas would stop launching toward Israel balloons and kites outfitted with incendiary and explosive devices, which caused fires on Israeli farms adjacent to the Gaza Strip. Hamas, however, would keep organizing one return march a week, on Friday, 300 meters [328 yards] away from the border fence in the eastern Gaza Strip. The truce deal follows intensified return march protests on the eastern and northern borders of the Gaza Strip in an unprecedented manner. The night confusion units in the Gaza Strip warned March 23 that they would escalate their activities to cover the entire border, on a daily basis, from 7 p.m. until dawn, near Israeli military and residential compounds. Walla Hebrew news website reported the next day that protesters lobbed explosive devices into Israel from the east. Warning sirens were heard several times over Israel's Eshkol border region. Haim Jelin, former chairman of the Eshkol Regional Council, told the Hebrew-language 103 FM radio station March 24, The state of Israel doesn't understand what's happening in the Gaza vicinity. The civilians' steadfastness has been affected. The prime minister should hear the chaos we face at the fence. Warning sirens and balloons were fired all through the night. Hamas leader Yahya Moussa told Al-Monitor, Hamas had recently stepped up its return marches activities because of Israel's failure to respond to Egypt's previous efforts to reach understandings to break the siege on Gaza. Moussa said Hamas deliberately timed the escalation, as Israeli parliamentary elections are just around the corner April 9. This is the best opportunity to pressure [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu to reach calm. The continued insecurity in southern Israel could destroy Netanyahu's political future. Iyad al-Qara, a political analyst at the Felesteen newspaper in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, Incendiary balloons fired at Israel are the protesters weapon to force Israel to break the siege of Gaza. Hamas had stopped launching these balloons Oct. 10 in exchange for Israel allowing the entry of Qatari fuel to operate the Gaza power plant. On Jan. 9, in the wake of Israel's Dec. 21 killing of four protesters in a return march, flaming balloons were again fired across the border into Israel. Like Moussa, Qara said Hamas is trying to force Netanyahu, who seeks to win the upcoming Israeli elections, to abide by understandings to ease the siege of Gaza, in return for a calm security situation on the Gaza border. Talal Awkal, a political analyst for al-Ayyam newspaper in Gaza, agreed, adding, Whoever wins the upcoming Israeli elections, any new Israeli prime minister will have to accept these understandings as the key to keeping things quiet in the south. Otherwise, the only alternative is military confrontation with the resistance in Gaza. Ayman al-Rafati, an expert on Israeli affairs and a political author for the Hamas-affiliated al-Resalah website in Gaza, believes Netanyahu is indeed making politically motivated concessions and has just two options to deal with the return marches. The first is the war against Gaza, a difficult option with a heavy price to pay, including the loss or capture of Israeli soldiers, he told Al-Monitor. The second option is reaching [agreements] to ease the siege of Gaza in exchange for ensuring calm for residents of the towns adjacent to Gaza. Netanyahu chose this option as an achievement that can be exploited in the upcoming elections. Meanwhile, Felesteen's Qara said Netanyahu's cooperation will end once he gets what he wants. Netanyahu and the next Israeli government will renege on these understandings once the elections are over," he said. However, Moussa warned, Israel's failure to meet its commitments would mean the return of all forms and activities of the return marches, but this time with greater momentum. Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said today that he expects to be able to salvage US military sales to Turkey that have been jeopardized by Ankaras insistence on buying a Russian missile defense system. The Pentagon announced Monday that it had suspended the delivery of parts for Turkey's F-35 jet program amid concerns that the Russians could use their S-400 to spy on the aircraft. Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Shanahan said he retained confidence that Turkey will ditch the Russian system and instead use the US Patriot air defense system, lifting any misgivings about transferring the F-35 to Turkey. I am very confident in the Patriot proposal that we've delivered to Turkey, its availability, its pricing, and very importantly, the industrial participation that comes along with the Patriot system, Shanahan said. I expect we'll solve the problem so that they have the right defense equipment in terms of Patriots and F-35s. The Pentagon also said today that it was looking for secondary sources for Turkish-produced parts for the F-35. Pentagon spokesman Charles Summers called the moves prudent steps to protect the shared investments made in our critical technology. Ankara, for its part, insists the Russian purchase is a done deal. We concluded the S-400 issue, signed a deal with the Russians and will start co-production," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last month. "Later, we may work with [the next-generation] S-500s." Turkey has insisted it will operate the S-400 as a standalone system and will not hook it up to the same network as the F-35. But US defense officials fear that Russian operators could train the S-400 radar on the aircraft, allowing them to better track it in combat. The radar is an electronic intelligence collection platform, said Aaron Stein, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institutes Middle East program. It would store data on the F-35 just by its mere presence in Turkey, and then that data would be consistently updated by Russians who visit Turkey. The US Defense Department had planned to deliver the first two F-35 jets to Turkey in June, after Turkish pilots finish training on the fifth-generation aircraft at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. But the Pentagon now is holding up delivery of US-made F-35 parts to Turkey. The S-400 threat has led the Pentagon to accelerate plans to backfill Turkeys role in building the fuselage and other parts for the jets over the past few months. A defense official told Al-Monitor that a classified report delivered to Congress in November listed several countries that could provide parts to replace the ones Turkey makes. If Turkey goes ahead with its acquisition of the S-400, the United States would need to decide whether to buy back the two F-35 aircraft already purchased by Ankara and send Turkish pilots and maintenance workers training in the United States back to Turkey, the official said. In a letter to leading appropriators, House members called for fresh language last week restricting US funding to support the jets if Turkey buys the S-400. As Shanahan has continued working the issue directly with Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, the Defense Department has opted to continue to offer a discount for the $3.5 billion Patriot system that Reuters reported was set to expire in March. March was not a hard and fast deadline, a Defense Department spokesman told Al-Monitor. We have flexibility. Another official said Turkey would also have the opportunity to have an effective air defense system until the batteries are delivered in 2024, but did not elaborate on what the United States would provide in the interim. Yet even as the Trump administration has kept the option open for Turkey to buy the Patriot system, Ankara appears to be bucking the offer. Akar has indicated that Turkeys S-400 site will be ready by October. And CNBC reported in September that Russia had begun constructing a site for its air defense system. Losing the jets could come at an economic cost to Turkey. Eight Turkish companies are involved in supplying parts for the fighter jet, worth up to $12 billion in business, according to Lockheed Martin, the aircrafts maker. The Turkish lira fell by 2% amid news of the US move to halt equipment deliveries and the ruling partys setbacks in local elections. But experts insist that the decision to buy the Russian system is political, not economic, driven by Erdogans winnowing circle of advisers and increasing closeness with Russia since a 2016 coup attempt. The Turks have made thus far a political decision that the immediate delivery of S-400 matters more to them than F-35, said Stein. The decision-making calculus in Turkey has narrowed considerably and they may not be fully aware of the consequences. Basically 99.9% of the meetings the US takes with the Turks on this issue dont fundamentally matter because those people arent empowered to negotiate. CBD products are hot in Alabama, with everyone from restaurateurs to retailers, large and small, getting in on the action. Take Tree of Life Wellness, a storefront in Attalla off Interstate 59 in Etowah County. Sharing space in a shopping center with two restaurants and a vape shop, Tree of Life has the letters CBD above the door, with a five-pronged leaf symbol and a white cross beside. Inside, customers can buy hair products, food, drink, oil, and even dog treats infused with CBD oil. Last month, the store saw almost 1,000 customers, scarcely two months after it opened. And its owners are planning similar stores in other markets in Alabama. Birmingham already has The CBD store on U.S. 280, and another in Trussville. Were trying to move fast, said Martin Burks, who co-owns the Attalla store. Theres a lot of people out there, and if you dont get your foot in the door early, you may not get in. Cannabidiol, or CBD oil, is made from industrial hemp. Some products with CBD contain a tiny percentage of THC, the intoxicating substance found in marijuana. CBD oil can also be derived from marijuana, and the Alabama Legislature has allowed limited exceptions to the law against marijuana possession for the use of CBD oil. Its not marijuana, co-owner Joseph Farrell said. Its just industrial hemp. Theres nothing in it that gets you high. We even test the products ourselves, beyond what the companies say, just to double check. But a sign on the wall at Tree of Life does tells customers - who must be 19 to purchase anything - that some of the products may cause a false positive on drug screenings. Amanda Mewbourn, who works at the store, explains that can depend on a number of factors, including metabolism and the different testing methods. A few feet away from the sign, a lengthy Notice to Government Agencies states that the products might look like marijuana, but it is actually legal industrial hemp flower," with legal definitions following. The 2018 Agriculture and Nutrition Act changed the legal status of hemp from a controlled substance to an agricultural commodity. Now stores are seeing a proliferation of products, and even chains are starting to stock a few. Just last month, within days of each other, CVS and Walgreens both announced they will sell CBD products. Walmart.com also offers them. Many analysts expect the market for CBD products to explode, but estimates vary widely because its still unclear how big the market actually is. One hemp industry group says the market last year made almost $200 million, and could triple within the next three years. Another pegs it much higher, at nearly $600 million, and says it could grow to $22 billion by 2022. But there is a demand. Revelator Coffee Company began serving CBD oil-infused lattes last month, just in the Birmingham area. Two weeks ago Little Savannah Restaurant and Bar on Clairmont Avenue South began offering a cocktail one night a week. Among the products offered at Tree of Life are dog treats, shampoo and gummy bears, among others. Rock Edmonds, a bartender at Little Savannah, said he doesnt know yet what this Thursdays CBD cocktail will be, but it will probably have lots of takers. Weve sold three times the amount we normally make, specifically for the CBD, Edmonds, a bartender with 18 years experience, said. He compared the demand to the period when customers began ordering cocktails with Red Bull energy drink. Little Savannah gets its CBD oil from Birminghams Magic City Organics. Using a dropper, Edmonds adds about 10 mg of the oil to the drinks. The first week was a blackberry shrub, and then a strawberry/kiwi shrub. Edmonds said it goes best with vodka and gin because of the oils flavor, which reminds him of vinegar. It doesnt overpower (the drink), he said. Its barely noticeable. The attraction of CBD oil for users is its alleged affect on chronic pain and other afflictions. Products range from full spectrum, which has up to .3 percent THC, to broad spectrum, which has no THC. The Tree of Life store itself has white walls and clean display cases, as well as a small water fountain and chairs for customers. Near the door, shoppers can choose from energy drinks and flavored water with CBD oil. In the display cases are dozens of different products: chocolate-covered pretzels, gummy bears and peach rings, shampoo and conditioner, beard oil and vape liquids. A customer can choose from different oils that promise relief from inflammation, or simply calm. Others are labeled Focus, Energy," Mood." There are Hempettes, a filtered cigarette that has no THC. Theres also bath bombs, foot baths, detox drinks and odor sprays, in case you dont like how hemp smells. In coming months, customers may be able to purchase barbecue sauce, macaroni, cat treats and a product similar to smokeless tobacco. Tree of Life has scan codes on the packages, so customers can look up the effects of the products. And the store offers more than just one brand of CBD products, something its owners say makes the store stand out among competitors. Mewbourn said she used to work in healthcare, which got her interested in the medicinal effects of the products. The co-owners, Burks and Joseph Farrell, met when they worked in an ambulance. Farrell has a background in law enforcement, while Burks was a firefighter and EMT. They opened a Vape shop in 2015 and several more after. They are planning a Tree of Life for Albertville and hope to open several locations in the Birmingham area. Some cities categorize the store as healthcare, while in others, it is simply retail. Farrell said not every community is receptive to CBD businesses. Theres five nos for every yes, he said. But I dont think itll be that way by the end of the year, Burks quickly added. As more chains start selling, they expect those barriers to come down. Right now, they say, their role is educational. Everyone pitches in to help when a small-town church hosts a wedding and my grandmothers contribution was to loan the brides her massive Boston ferns for decorating the simple sanctuary. Usually, the brides brothers would show up the day before the wedding to pick up the fluffy plants to carry to the church. The ferns were large and lush enough they had to make sure a bird or small child wasnt hiding amongst the fronds before the young men lifted them into the bed of their truck. Despite being named after the Tea Party city in the North where it was discovered, the beautiful plant has taken up residence in the South and thrives in our humidity. Like adding a final swish of lipstick, porches with ferns look pulled together and fully dressed. Grandmother knew the secret to over-wintering her ferns in the garage, and when shed pull them back out in the spring, they were already shooting out bright green growth. Granddaddy would use an axe to divide them, but sadly, like making jelly, I never learned the secret for growing ferns, so year after year, I have to purchase more. Snatching up the prettiest ferns in town is almost a game, and the phone calls and texts start flying between friends the minute a shipment arrives at the feed and seed or farmers market. Sometimes the Junior League or Marching band will sell them as an easy-as-pie fundraiser because they know everyone in town will need a few. Assuming you still have a real porch and not a pretend puny slab that some home builders think they can trick us into believing is a porch (shame on them), a fern is one of the must-haves. Rocking chairs and swings are always a plus and Ive written before about how smitten I am with a little lamp by the door that whispers, Hey! Ive been waiting for you to get here! But if your porch has summertime ferns that spill over like fountains, your house will holler, Hey everybody! Nice people live here! In past homes, Ive had great porches that had space for swings, tables, lazy dogs, jumping children and guitar players. Sadly, my current porch would only get an 85 out of 100 on the S.C.S. (Southern Charm Scale). Its a tight fit, but weve squeezed a few rocking chairs up there, although they are arranged like a jail-house line-up, which actually makes some family members feel quite at home (married into the family, not blood-kin). It gets a few extra-credit points for being close enough to a pasture where we can hear mooing cows and laughter from children on the other side, but no matter what I try to do to make it comfortable, it never feels quite right until I get the ferns out there in the spring. Porch ferns pull us away from our indoor blinking gadgets and force us to sweep up their fluff, which in turn, leads us to linger a while, wave to dog-walking neighbors, listen to the birds and sit a spell to drink a glass of icy tea. Its the plant that inspires us to have our own version of a Boston (fern) tea party. Leslie Anne is the author of The Majorettes are Back in Town and Other Things to Love about the South. You can read more at her blog: http://leslieannetarabella.com A Fairfield woman who mentored neglected and abused girls for decades, and then started a home called Grace House to care for them, has died. Mama Lois Coleman, 95, died on Sunday. In the 1970s, after raising five children of her own, Mama Lois began tutoring neighborhood children on social etiquette. "I saw so many children who were unkept and untrained," she told The Birmingham News in 2011. "I just wanted to do something. I taught them how to say, 'Yes, m'am, no m'am, thank you, please,' how to answer the telephone, how to increase their vocabulary. Soon, people were seeking her out. "Word got around about this little woman who loved children, Coleman said. They started calling me Mama Lois." Then, girls began to move in with her. In 1992, she formally started Grace House, a ministry to girls from 8 to 18, in Fairfield. Members of Briarwood Presbyterian Church and other congregations helped raise money to buy a two-story house where she could take in girls. She gradually added more homes and increased capacity to take in up to 24 girls at a time, raising them with the help of house parents. Most girls were referred by the Department of Human Resources. Grace House now houses up to 28 girls ages six to 21 at eight homes. I spend time with the kids, counseling and loving up on them, Coleman said in 2011. We just have fun together. Coleman helped raise more than 70 girls, who now live across the country, and still called her Mama. In a 2000 interview with The Birmingham News, Coleman said she dreamed of a world where little girls always live in nice homes, full of prayer, with role models to look up to. She collected dolls and angel figurines and kept them in her office - idealized images of how she feels life ought to be. I do love angels, Mama Lois said. The little children remind me of angels. Coleman started her ministry on a wing and a prayer. "I have no administrative skills," she said. "But we never went broke." She said she was happy in 1998 when the Grace House board of directors hired a new executive director, with fundraising and administrative experience. The ministry continued to expand as Mama Lois withdrew to a less active role. But the lessons taught at Grace House that came from Mama Lois continued through the years. I always taught them to face up to responsibility, tell the truth and be willing to suffer the consequences, she said. They hear about Jesus, they hear about the importance of education, they learn about poise, good grammar and etiquette. Pamela Reed Phipps, who has been executive director of Grace House since 2010, said her legacy lives on. Mama Lois love for the Lord and for girls inspires me every day, she said. Without her, hundreds of girls would have never experienced the loving family care we were able to provide them with at Grace House. Coleman is survived by her five children, 10 grandchildren, 2 great grandchildren and 2 great-great grandchildren, along with the many women she helped raise and who she considered as daughters. Seventy-seven Alabama lawmakers today signed on in support of bills to make it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion in Alabama. The bills introduced today in the Alabama House and Senate would be a direct challenge to the U.S. Supreme Courts Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 that nullified state bans on abortion. The House bills sponsor, Rep. Terri Collins, R-Decatur, said the intent of her bill is to spark a challenge to the landmark ruling. It simply criminalizes abortion, Collins said. It is meant to actually use some of the same language that is addressed in Roe vs. Wade. So, hopefully it just completely takes it all the way to the Supreme Court eventually to overturn. Rep. Rich Wingo, R-Tuscaloosa, who joined Collins as she spoke to reporters about the bill today, said Roe v. Wade was a wrongful decision in the same vein as the Supreme Courts Dred Scott decision in 1857, which held that African-Americans could not be citizens. We fought a Civil War over that and we changed that, Wingo said. The other time they ruled that a human being was not a person is the 1973 Roe vs. Wade, where they said the unborn child is not a person. Collins has 65 co-sponsors for her bill, more than enough to pass the legislation in the 104-member House. Eleven of the 35 senators are signed on to the Senate bill, which is sponsored by Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Range. The bills would make it a Class A felony, the most serious category of felony, for a doctor to perform an abortion. Attempting to perform an abortion would be a Class C felony. The bills would allow abortions in cases where there is a serious health risk to the woman. The woman undergoing an abortion would not be criminally or civilly liable. Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast, issued a statement in response to the legislation, saying lawmakers were playing political games by proposing blatantly unconstitutional bills. HB 314 and SB 211 would be a death sentence for women across this state," Fox said. "They would also criminalize our doctors, forcing them to make an impossible choice: treat their pregnant patients or protect themselves instead. In a state that already suffers from a physician shortage, high rates of infant and maternal mortality, cervical cancer mortality, unintended pregnancy, teen births, rural health care crisis, and opioid addiction, our lawmakers should be focused on increasing access to care - not restricting it." This story will be updated. The Foundation for Moral Law, the non-profit founded by Judge Roy Moore, received more than $85,000 last year from the sale of specialty license plates, data from the Alabama Department of Revenue shows. The tags feature a picture of a coiled snake with the words Dont Tread on Me, below it, images and a message that comes from whats known as the Gadsden Flag. The flag dates back to the American Revolution but is most currently used to symbolize efforts for civil liberties, particularly the Tea Party movement. The tags first went on sale in 2014 after the Foundation met the requirement for 250 pre-commitments for the specialty plates. The specialty plates sell for $50; the foundation receives $41.25 of that cost. In 2015, 1,260 tags were brought, earning $51,975 for the foundation. In 2016, that number increased to 1,836 for $75,735 in revenue. In 2017, 1,987 tags were sold for $81,963; by 2018, 2,075 purchased the tags bringing in $85,593. According to the description of the tags, the money will be used the foundations daily operations, defending the Constitution of the State of Alabama and the U.S. Constitution. The foundation was founded in 2003 by Moore, then Alabamas Chief Justice, as a defense fund related to Moores refusal to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama judicial building. Moore was suspended that same year over the monuments issue. He was reelected Chief Justice in 2013 but suspended and later resigned for defying the U.S. Supreme Court decision related to same-sex marriage. Moores wife, Kayla, serves as president of the foundation. The foundation routinely urges supporters to purchase the tags. A north Alabama physician accused of sexually assaulting patients is free on bail after his Friday arrest. Dr. Michael Dick of Decatur was arrested Friday in Montgomery, where he was attending a licensure hearing. News outlets report Dick was released on bail Saturday. The rheumatologist is supposed to answer to first-degree sexual assault charges in Morgan County. The Alabama Medical Licensure Commission held a hearing Friday regarding Dick's license, which it suspended in October. Spokeswoman Karen Silas says the commission didn't finish the hearing. Dick was arrested after the meeting. Dick was convicted on three misdemeanor charges of harassing female patients. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine on each count, but is appealing. Ten female patients are suing Dick for sexual harassment and misconduct. When State Rep. Mike Ball introduced House Bill 243 in the Alabama Legislature last month, it set the stage for what could be a critical debate on whether medical marijuana should be legalized in Alabama. Ball has for years been a key figure in the gradual acceptance of cannabidiol, or CBD oil, for medical treatment. Ball previously sponsored bills that became Lenis Law and Carlys Law for CBD oil use. Carlys Law, passed in 2014, authorized a UAB study on using CBD oil, to treat seizure disorders. That law expires July 1, 2019. The bill would extend Carlys Law until Jan. 1, 2021. In 2016, Alabama passed Lenis Law, allowing patients who suffer seizure disorders or other debilitating medical conditions to use a product that comes from the marijuana plant. Ball said both those laws need to be extended and updated. Carlys law expires, and we need to extend that, Ball said. There need to be clarifications on Lenis Law. HB 243 would revise Lenis Law, and authorizes those over age 19 diagnosed with a qualifying condition to obtain a medical cannabis card, authorizing the use of cannabis for medical purposes. The bill would establish the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission and require the commission to establish and administer a patient registry system that registers patients with qualifying medical conditions. The commission would issue medical cannabis cards and licenses for the cultivation, processing, transportation, manufacturing and sale of cannabis in the state. Here are five key people in Alabamas upcoming medical marijuana debate: Rep. Mike Ball, Alabama legislator Ball, a Republican who is a former agent for the Alabama Bureau of Investigation, said he brings to the table a pro-law enforcement background that makes it hard to portray him as being sympathetic to illegal drugs. Instead, the debate should be about helping people get access to medicines that can help improve their conditions, he said. This is about helping sick people, Ball said. Dustin Chandler, father of Carly Chandler Dustin Chandler has a disabled daughter named Carly. He also has a law enforcement background, as a former police officer for Pelham and Hoover. Chandler played a key role in lobbying for the use of CBD oil, which has been the only treatment that has helped calm his daughters epileptic seizures. Carly at one time was having 200 to 300 seizures a day, and 9 to 10 grand mal seizures. That was before treatment with CBD oil after the passage of Carlys Law. Her seizures have all but disappeared, Chandler said. As Chandler has heard from others who could be helped by medical research on marijuana, his support has broadened and he worked with Ball on HB 243. Theres data out there showing medical cannabis can help people, Chandler said. If a doctor believes it can help, patients need a safe place to go get and they need to know what theyre getting. We need to set a system up. Chandler understands the skepticism. I guess the fear is its another step toward legalizing everything, Chandler said. No, its not. It regulates everything. Were wanting to regulate it. Chandler notes that as a police officer he often worked on narcotics investigations. Ive made hundreds of arrests of marijuana, Chandler said. Were not touching the legalization. Were talking about the medical side. As he hears from more people who have conditions such as dementia and PTSD that could be helped by medical marijuana treatments, he feels their pain. He wants them to have access to the kind of help Carly received. We need compassionate access and a mechanism to expand research, Chandler said. My daughter changed my whole world, he said. Im a disability advocate. My opinion has changed. I do know what its like to be hopeless and helpless. Nothing in life prepares you for when your child is suffering. Dr. Jerzy Szaflarski, UAB researcher Dr. Jerzy Szaflarski, a professor of neurology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has been the point man for research on the effects of CBD oil treatment in Alabama. Szaflarski declined an interview request for this story. But Chandler has worked closely with Szaflarski on treatment for his daughter and says the researcher has solid evidence for the positive effects of CBD oil. Szaflarski has been so encouraged that hes helped the team working on the medical marijuana bill for Alabama, Chandler said. Weve got a doctor on our team, Chandler said. He believes this is what we need. I wouldnt be so behind this if the doctors werent saying this is what we need. He is able to be the data expert. Hes willing to stand up and testify in a hearing in Montgomery. Szaflarkski has seen the potential for broader treatment options, Chandler said. He was approached by a brain doctor who said it works on tumors, Chandler said, but that was beyond the scope of medical treatment that had been approved in Alabama law. The Rev. Joe Godfrey, director of ALCAP The Rev. Joe Godfrey, executive director of ALCAP (Alabama Citizens Action Program), lobbies for evangelical Christian interests in the Legislature, opposing gambling and alcohol. Godfrey will be a voice against the medical marijuana bill. It opens the door wide open to marijuana medical use, Godfrey said. There will be as much lobbying as we can do, he said. The marijuana industry is pushing this all over the nation. People dont understand whats going on and what will be the results of this. Its taking its toll. Well make people aware of the negative side. Well get blasted as being uncaring, but its just a step toward the recreational marijuana. Godfrey said he understands situations such as Carly Chandler, and he supported Carlys Law. Every time you legalize it, they come back, Godfrey said. They got Carlys Law, then they came back for Lenis Law, and that wont be enough. Its constant incrementalism of trying to push this. Godfrey said evidence is mounting from the 10 states and the District of Columbia, which have legalized marijuana, about its negative side effects for society and on health. But legislators are now subject o lobbying efforts by the legalized marijuana industry in other states, he said. The argument for medical marijuana is based on emotional appeals, with sick patients being brought in for sympathy, Godfrey said. Theyll look at them and feel sorry for them and make their decision on emotion and not the facts, Godfrey said. Its a continual barrage, opening up the door, Godfrey said. Im very disappointed in Republicans. They are promoting the lessened restrictions. We cant count on them to fight it anymore. HB 243 would create more government bureaucracy, Godfrey said. The Republicans have always argued for less government, he said. This puts together a whole new commission, more government bureaucracy, increasing the size of government. Rep. Mac McCutcheon, Speaker of the House When Ball introduced HB 243, a lot of people were surprised to see that the Speaker of the House, Rep. Mac McCutcheon, had signed on as a co-sponsor. The bi-partisan bill has 20 other co-sponsors, including Democrats Rep. John Rogers and Rep. Juandalynn Givan, and McCutcheon. The speakers always been supportive on this, Ball said. McCutcheon could be a key ally in getting enough Republican support for passage of the bill, which starts out in the House Health committee. In addition to those five key figures, Chandler notes the most important people are the voters who may know people who are suffering a long list of afflictions, including opioid addiction, who could benefit from medical marijuana research. A big part of this is the people of Alabama, people sharing their stories, Chandler said. Those stories are very compelling. This is about helping sick people and suffering people of Alabama. This is the best step forward to do that. By Azernews By Laman Ismayilova The 10th Charity Easter Bazaar will be held at the Russian Information and Cultural Center in Baku. The Easter Bazaar will be open to visitors from 15.00 to 18.00 on April 16 and from 11.00 to 17.00 on April 17, Trend Life reported. During the traditional Bazaar, participants can buy handicraft products, including, artistic embroidery, jewelry, ceramics, and wood carving. A charity lottery will be also held as part of the festival. The 10th Charity Easter Bazaar is co-organized by the Rossotrudnichestvo office in Azerbaijan and the Baku-Caspian Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church. Easter traditions throughout the world differ from country to country. In many central and eastern European countries decorating eggs in beautiful patterns is especially popular. For instance, in Poland, families prepare a blessing basket the day before Easter. Filled with colored eggs, sausages, bread, and other food, baskets are taken to church to be blessed. In Sweden children dress up as Easter witches wearing long skirts, colorful headscarves and painted red cheeks, and go from home to home in their neighborhoods trading paintings and drawings in the hope of receiving sweets. In Russia, the neighbor or loved one of a person pierces the branch of the soft blooms, kept on the latter's shoulder. In the Czech Republic, the males of a family spank females with a homemade whip decorated with ribbons. The spanking is lighthearted and is believed to bring health over the next year. On Easter Monday, the President of the United States holds an annual Easter egg roll on the lawn of the White House for young children. Azerbaijan enjoys a tolerant atmosphere for different nations and religions. The national policy is defined on the principles of tolerance and coexistence of various nationalities, ethnic groups and religious minorities. Many religious confessions co-exist there. There are 1,834 mosques, 12 churches and 6 synagogues functioning in Azerbaijan. The government has created all conditions for religious worship in the country. Jefferson County Sheriff Mark Pettway has repeatedly said enforcing gambling laws is not a priority for his office. A department spokesman on Monday said that stance has nothing to do with the sheriffs brothers possible involvement in a bingo establishment expected to open in Graysville. For the first time, Capt. David Agee on Monday publicly addressed questions over the involvement of businessman Bruce Pettway, the sheriffs brother, in that operation. Graysville Mayor Julio Davis last week said a new ordinance allows residents to buy a business license for charitable electronic bingo. He said he hopes revenue from those licenses will help replace revenue lost as the Lowes Home Improvement store closed earlier this year. The ordinance allows qualified nonprofit organizations to buy a bingo hall permit, to be renewed on Oct. 1 of each year. Two different types of permits were created. A $250 Class A permit for only paper card bingo and a $2,500 Class B permit for any and all games of bingo. Bruce Pettways name is listed on a business license obtained in Graysville for the site of the old Lowes building. Bruce Pettway did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Agee said he has no direct knowledge of Bruce Pettways possible involvement in the operation, but said it would not affect their stance on enforcement either way. I dont know that to be true, but it has no bearing on our enforcement, our priorities, Agee said. Any person, any charity that goes and gets a business license and opens one of these businesses, they understand the risk. It's been determined by the Supreme Court that this is illegal gaming activity, so they risk municipal enforcement, county enforce or state enforcement and that applies to anybody. The comments came as sheriffs officials opened the locked doors to a storage facility Monday to show media the hundreds of electronic gambling machines that sit idle and dusty, some from cases as far back as 2011. The visual was meant to be a testament to the burden such investigations are to the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office, which is taking criticism from state officials for not making enforcement of the illegal activity a priority in the department. For the third time in recent weeks, Agee, speaking on behalf of the sheriff, emphasized that violent crimes will take precedence over misdemeanor infractions. I cant think of anybody ever going to jail about this electronic bingo, Agee said. They only thing theyve ever been able to do is get these machines and put them in bingo jail. They sit and sit and sit. That stance has drawn criticism from Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who sent Sheriff Pettway a letter reminding him of his enforcement role as sheriff. In that letter, Marshall requested Pettway advise him, Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr and Bessemer Cutoff District Attorney Lynneice Washington if he learns of any electronic bingo halls opening or planning to open in the county. Washington sent cease and desist letters to two bingo halls Super Highway Bingo on Bessemer Super Highway and Fun -N-Games in Brighton on the grounds that the businesses are operating illegally. The sheriff said he would assist any mayors or police chiefs who find illegal bingo taking place in their cities but said he would not provide manpower nor make shutting down the illegal businesses a priority. Agee reiterated that stance again on Monday. He said there are roughly 400 to 600 seized machines in storage at the facility highlighted Monday, which he asked that the location not be disclosed. That storage at that particular site cost the sheriffs office $7,152 in 2018 alone. There are other sites where the machines are also being stored and he said they have about 1,500 seized machines in their custody. When we conduct these investigations, its very intensive. It has to be done right, Agee said. We have to send in detectives to play the machines so they can testify in court about these machines, pay an expert to say this is a gambling device and not bingo, then we go in to shut down the machines. We have to take them into our custody and put them in storage in a secure location. We have to pay for this. This adds up, he said. Some of these machines sit here for years and years and years. No one ever goes to jail, no one ever goes before a judge, no one ever pays a fine, Agee said. We have to pay for this out of our budget, money we feel could be spent to fund our summer programs for teenagers, we could buy computers, equipment, maintenance. So as far as enforcing and going after these bingo establishments, it is low on our list. Its just not worth it. The other crimes come first. Agee said hes not saying they wont investigate the bingo halls but said its not their focus. And, he said, not one municipality has requested they do so. Asked how the sheriffs office would feel if the Attorney Generals Office comes to Jefferson County to shut down such businesses, Agee said, That is surely his choice. I cant speak for the state, I can only talk about our priorities. Our priorities are what the people are asking us to do. If we have to sit out all night waiting on these car burglars, that is important. If we have to camp out in one neighborhood to catch one burglary, thats important. One burglar can do a lot of damage. Our priorities, we believe, are in line with what the citizens want and thats what were going to concentrate on, he said. Our enforcement is determined by the needs of the community. A spokesman for Marshalls office on Monday said the attorney general would have no further comment on the issue as it related to an ongoing criminal investigation. An amendment to a disaster relief bill authored by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., that would have allocated funds toward aiding recovery from last months Lee County tornadoes did not survive a procedural vote on Monday. Meanwhile, the Lee County Emergency Management Agency renewed calls for volunteers in Beauregard and Smiths Station. Shelby argued his amendment should have been passed because the senators measure, unlike the one passed by the Democratic-led House, provided funding for disasters that occurred this year and is the only legislation that could gain President Trumps signature. The senators bill provides $13.45 billion in disaster relief overall while the House bill allocates $14.2 billion. I hope we will all join together to provide assistance to those who urgently need it today, regardless of whether the state we represent has been struck by disasters covered in this bill, Shelby said Monday on the Senate floor before the vote. Only one of the two options before the Senate seeks to help everyone impacted by disasters and can be signed into law and thats the Shelby amendment. But the measure fell 16 votes shy of the 60-vote threshold to move on to a floor vote; it failed by a vote of 44-49. The House version also failed a procedural in the Senate by a vote of 46-49. The failed votes came the same day the Lee County EMA renewed calls for volunteers and made appeals for donations in tornado-ravaged areas: Minimum size limits for speckled trout and flounder will likely increase this summer due to declining populations for both species. For flounder, the legal size will probably be raised from the current 12 inches to a 15-inch minimum, measured from the tip of the fishs head to the end of its tail. Flounder will also likely be closed to harvest for the month of November, during the species annual spawning run into the Gulf. For trout, the minimum size will likely go up from the current 14 inches to either 15 or 16 inches. Trout are also being considered for a slot limit management system, as is used for redfish, which sets a minimum and maximum size for fish that can be kept, usually with an allowance for one larger, trophy-sized fish in the limit. One option under consideration would set a slot limit of 10 fish between 15 and 22 inches, with one fish allowed to exceed 22 inches. Officials said the changes are warranted due to an explosion in the popularity of Mobile Bay as a fishing destination. For speckled trout, from the mid 1990s until the mid 2000s, the effort went from 35,000 to 50,000 trips a year to over 500,000 trips a year targeting them, said Scott Bannon, head of the Alabama Division of Marine Resources. Thats exponential growth. Thats a lot for a fishery to handle. Lot of effort shift when to trout fishing the housing market got tough, and snapper season got so short. A lot of people have since been targeting those fish. Likewise for flounder, Bannon said. They are in not so great of shape. Weve seen some serious declines in recent years. We have a stock assessment, but anglers know they are tough to come by. Our data shows most people are only catching one or two flounder on rod and reel most trips. Commercially we have also seen a decline. Theres a decline all the way across the Gulf. We are trying to make some changes that will best benefit the resource. In fishery management, one of the golden rules is to ensure that each fish gets to spawn at least once in its lifetime before it reaches a size that anglers are allowed to keep. That hasnt been happening with flounder, partly due to a still somewhat mysterious lifecycle. Female flounder do not reach sexual maturity until they are 14 inches long, but the legal minimum for harvest in Alabama is just 12 inches. That means many juvenile females are harvested each year, before theyve had a chance to spawn. Males, meanwhile, reach maturity at about 12 inches and die after just three years. So the problem has been too many females getting eaten by people before theyve had a chance to participate in the annual spawning run each November. If you move up to 15 or 16 inches for flounder, you dramatically increase the number of fish that stay in the fishery. It is really a no brainer that we will move the minimum size up for flounder. Thats what you want, more adult females making it to breed, Bannon said. State officials are also launching a restocking program for flounder, growing fingerling-sized fish at the Claude Peteet Mariculture Center in Gulf Shores. By the end of the year, we are going to try and produce about 50,000 juvenile southern flounder to release. We have about 35 brood stock in the tank right now. Theyre getting acclimated, Bannon said. Some of the most prominent local fishing guides have been pushing for stricter limits for trout and redfish for years, arguing that the fishery has been getting pounded of late. Social media has been a big game changer for things. People post pictures, they post fishing tips. There are now so many things that work against that fish, Bannon said. There has been good agreement from the public because people know flounder are struggling. We are trying to keep more of those egg-bearing females in the system. Larger fish carry more eggs than smaller and younger fish. A 23-inch long trout that weighs five pounds has six times more eggs than a 15 inch trout, studies show. An 18-inch flounder like this one is an adult female. She has likely made the annual spawning run into the Gulf three or four years in a row.Ben Raines Im in favor of enforcing the highest conservation limit on both species, said Richard Rutland, a prominent Mobile Bay fishing guide. Id like to see a reduction in the bag limit to 5 fish on trout, and a slot limit of 15 or 16 inches up to 20 or 21 inches. I would rather see the lower end of that, personally. Rutland, who fishes most days of the week, year round, said he can see the declines in the fish populations. Particularly, he said, compared to a few decades ago. I am definitely a proponent of raising the minimum limit. We will see something dramatic in one to two years if we do that. You are protecting another year class. What the upper limit does, you are protecting your spawners. A fish that is 3 to 5 pounds produces an exponentially larger number of eggs, Rutland said. You start looking at the science of speckled trout, and especially flounder, you can see how the stock has done nothing but decline. I want the fishery to be busting loose out of control. I want to be in business 20 years from now. If that means we can only catch 5 fish a day, then we should only keep five fish. State officials will make recommendations to the Conservation Advisory Board of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resoures. The board members will weigh public testimony and scientific data and select an option for new limits. Bannon said the public could comment on the possible new limits via email until April 13. He suggested comments be sent by email to either his email: scott.bannon@dcnr.alabama.gov or to chief biologist Kevin Anson at kevin.anson@dcnr.alabama.gov. The public is also welcome to attend the Conservation Advisory Boards May 4, 2019 meeting, where officials will vote on the limit changes. The Southern Poverty Law Center today hired former juvenile court judge Karen Baynes-Dunning as its interim president and CEO. The announcement comes amid a shakeup in senior leadership at the civil rights nonprofit, which has weathered the firing of co-founder Morris Dees and the resignation of several top officials including its CEO and its legal director amid allegations of racial and gender discrimination and harassment in the workplace. As we look inward to build a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace, our determination in fighting for justice and equality in this country and the communities we serve will not waver, said Baynes-Dunning in a statement. Baynes-Dunning, who has served on the SPLC Board of Directors since 2017, succeeds Richard Cohen, who resigned in March for undisclosed reasons a week after Dees was fired. Dees, 82, has publicly denied any inappropriate behavior. But following his ouster in March, media outlets including the Los Angeles Times reported internal SPLC emails in which employees escribed problems with alleged workplace sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racism. Less than a week after Dees was fired, the SPLC hired Chicago attorney and former White House staffer Tina Tchen to conduct a top-to-bottom review of workplace culture. Baynes-Dunning will serve as interim president and CEO while the SPLC conducts a nationwide search for a permanent leader. Cohen called her an excellent choice for the position, citing her leadership and compassion. Baynes-Dunning began her career in antitrust litigation while providing free legal assistance to youth. She was later named executive director of the Court Appointed Special Advocates Program and then appointed judge in the Fulton County Juvenile Court in Atlanta. She has been a visiting professor at Emory University and the University of Alabama. I know Karen to be a tireless advocate and fierce defender of children, youth and families who suffer economic hardship, said Bryan Fair, chair of the SPLC board of directors, in a statement. A child of the South, Karen will help lead SPLC through this period of transition with the same determination she has demonstrated her entire working life. She is caring, collaborative and eager to help facilitate productive dialogue among staff and our partners in the fight for justice, he continued. The work goes on, and we are excited about all that we can achieve with Karen at the helm. Authorities have released the name of a man who died Monday night in a hail of gunfire outside a north Birmingham apartment complex. The Jefferson County Coroners Office identified the victim as Durand Lamar Witherspoon. He was 22. The shooting happened just before 9:30 p.m. in the 1200 block of 12th Street North. Witherspoon was found unresponsive between two apartment buildings and later pronounced dead on the scene by Birmingham Fire and Rescue at 10:03 p.m. Two other victims were taken to UAB Hospitals Trauma Center. One of them - a 14-year-old - has life-threatening injuries. A witness told AL.com he heard arguing and then the gunfire. "Someone said, Ill put a bullet in your mother (expletive) head,'' and the shots rang out. He said dozens of shots were fired, and he immediately called 911. Birmingham police put out multiple evidence markers - at least 57 - to designate evidence left on the scene. Grieving family members said they still dont know much about what happened. The victims aunt, Shemeca Witherspoon, said her nephew left home Monday night with another friend and they apparently ended up at the Fountain Heights apartment building. She said theyve been told some time of argument broke out but they dont know what led to that argument. She said he wasnt a problem child. "Were very saddened by this whole situation,'' she said. Our family needs closure on this. We really do. Birmingham police spokesman Officer Rod Mauldin said preliminary information suggest the argument could have started during a gambling event. Investigators do not yet know how many shooters were involved. No suspects are in custody. He acknowledged the high number of shots fired in a populated area was concerning. Such events, he said, affect the victims, their families and the community as a whole. "The main thing is we want people in the community to come forward,'' he said. If you see something, say something. Witherspoons is Birminghams 28th homicide this year. Of those, five have been ruled justifiable and therefore arent deemed criminal by the Birmingham Police Department. In all of Jefferson County, there have been 43 homicides this year including the 28 in Birmingham. Police are asking anyone with information to call Birmingham homicide detectives at 205-254-1764. Tipsters who want to remain anonymous can call Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777. A Birmingham man took his own life Monday in the parking lot of Legion Field. The deadly self-inflicted shooting happened in front of a Birmingham police officer. The victim was 23 years old and lived near the site of the suicide. The incident happened about 7:30 p.m. in the east parking lot of the stadium in the 400 block of Graymont Avenue. Authorities said the young man was there with his girlfriend and she called 911 to file some kind of complaint on him. When an officer arrived, he was talking with the girlfriend, at a distance away from the man. It was then that the man shot himself. He was pronounced dead on the scene. Here are warning signs to watch for if you fear someone is suicidal and resources that can help those thinking of harming themselves or who fear a loved one might harm themselves. WARNING SIGNS Threatening to hurt or kill oneself or talking about wanting to hurt or kill oneself. Looking for ways to kill oneself by seeking access to firearms, available pills, or other means. Talking or writing about death, dying, ''ending the pain'' or suicide. Feeling hopeless. Acting reckless or engaging in risky activities - seemingly without thinking. Feeling trapped - like there's no way out. Increasing alcohol or drug use. Withdrawing from friends, family, social support and society. Feeling anxious, agitated, or unable to sleep or sleeping all the time. Experiencing significant mood changes. Seeing no reason for living or having no sense of purpose in life. Feeling rage or uncontrolled anger or seeking revenge. HOW TO HELP Ask the person directly if he or she is having suicidal thoughts, has a plan to do so, and has access to lethal means. If you think the person might harm him- or herself, do not leave the person alone. Take seriously all suicide threats and all past suicide attempts, even if he or she minimizes your concerns. Be direct. Talk openly and matter-of-factly about suicide. Be willing to listen and be non-judgmental. Don't debate whether suicide is right or wrong, or whether feelings are good or bad. Don't lecture on the value of life or whether suicide is viewed by some as a sinful, selfish or angry act. Respect that suicidal feelings are most likely related to ending emotional or psychological pain. Get involved. Become available. Show interest and support. Take into account other trusted friends, family members or allies who can be a part of a supportive team. Don't dare him or her to do it. Don't act shocked. This may translate as criticism or judgment and weaken trust between you. Don't be sworn to secrecy. Acknowledge that all suicidal risk is to be taken seriously and firmly and gently explain that you are seeking support. Offer hope that alternatives are available but do not offer glib reassurance. Take action. Remove means, such as guns or stockpiled pills. Get help from persons or agencies specializing in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. Resources in Alabama Alabama Suicide Prevention and Resource Coalition Crisis Center, Inc. (Birmingham) Crisis Services of North Alabama (Huntsville) Lifelines/Family Counseling Center of Mobile Sources: The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and The Alabama Suicide Prevention and Resource Coalition Months before 15-year-old Nia Savage was killed on Valentines Day 2017, James Barber was urging Mobile residents to lock up their guns. That was more than two years ago when Barber, then the citys police chief in December 2016, pushed to have residents remove their weapons from vehicles following a spike in weapon thefts. More than 160 guns were reported stolen from vehicles that year. Savages murder occurred by someone who stole a gun from an unlocked car during Mardi Gras. Following her death, Barber once again pushed for action. Two years later, its more of the same for Barber, who is now the citys executive director of public safety. But the situation appears to be much worse than before: A whopping 1,200 guns were stolen from vehicles in Mobile during 2018. Of those, 80 percent were taken from unlocked cars and trucks. Some of those guns have turned up following tragedies. In particular, a stolen gun take from an unlocked vehicle was used in the Jan. 20 slaying of Mobile Police Officer Sean Tuder. We have to keep saying it and we have said it time and time again, secure your weapons, said Barber last week. Time and time again, were dealing with these unnecessary shootings because of easy access to high-capacity weapons. Preempting local law Barber and the Mobile City Council are weighing options on how to proceed, including a resolution urging legislative action so cities the size of Mobile can adopt reasonable regulations preventing firearm thefts from unlocked vehicles. The councils public safety committee will review the options and other issues pertaining to the citys ongoing gun violence during a 1:30 p.m. meeting Tuesday at Government Plaza. The full council could vote on a resolution by April 9. If the council adopts a resolution, it most likely wont have any teeth. When it comes to gun regulations, state law prevents local governments from acting without the Legislatures approval. Alabama is one of a majority of states in which state lawmakers removed the ability of local governments to regulate guns. In Montgomery, the gun lobby is a potent political force. At the end of the day, I think someone needs to run a story and the caption needs to be a huge question mark What do we do? said state Rep. Juandalynn Givan, D-Birmingham, who has pitched gun control laws before only to see them go nowhere in the supermajority Republican legislature. Restrictions on what cities can do was the result of a 2013 gun rights measure that limited the discretion of sheriffs and other local officials in deciding applications for concealed carry permits. The law required that sheriffs had to provide a written reason for denying someone a permit. The law also loosened a workplace provision that allows most people with concealed carry permits to keep a firearm in their vehicle while at work as long as its locked away. Greg Cochran, deputy director with the Alabama League of Municipalities, said the Legislatures actions mirror a wave of laws throughout the country while President Barack Obama was in office, out of fear among (the National Rifle Association) and the gun organizations that he would limit citizens from having guns. Before that law was enacted, cities could have passed some kind of regulation on gun owners, said Cochran. The Alabama law offers a few exceptions for cities such as giving an employer the authority to prohibit gun possession among employees during their work day, or zoning or business ordinance that restrict where a firearms business can locate. Another provision allows city councils to shut down gun stores when the public good or safety demands it, but for only a short time or whenever the next relevant governing body meeting takes place. Few believe any changes to Alabamas preemption law are coming, but Cochran said the League of Municipalities will examine local gun regulations during a future policy committee hearing. The courts felt like the states have that authority to legislate local action and they have been in favor of the state Legislature doing what they did, he said. The NRA, the pre-eminent gun rights lobbying group, is a strong proponent of firearm preemption laws. The organization claims that local governments often impose clearly unconstitutional gun restrictions, and create confusion by adopting laws that vary widely within a state. The NRA did not respond to a request for comment on the Mobile situation. Safe storage Mobile could urge Alabama state lawmakers to consider a safe storage law requiring people to responsibly store their firearms and ammunition when they are not in use. Eleven states have laws concerning firearm locking devices, but Massachusetts is the only one that generally requires all firearms be stored with a lock in place. Other states are weighing the issue. In New York, Democratic lawmakers want to expand the states gun storage law to cover homes with children. The current requirements only apply to homes with residents who are barred from owning guns, such as convicted felons. In Connecticut, legislation called Ethans Law named after a 15-year-old boy who accidentally shot and killed himself with a gun stored in a master bedroom closet at a neighbors house will criminalize gun owners who do not properly store their weapons. In Tennessee, lawmakers from Memphis are pitching legislation to charge a gun owner with a misdemeanor if they are caught leaving a weapon or ammunition unlocked in their car or boat. Memphis police, in 2018, reported 1,300 stolen guns or just slightly more than Mobile. Memphis has more than three times as many residents as Mobile. Mobile officials have not pushed for a safe storage requirement, and local officials appear hesitant to rally behind punitive measures victimizing those who lost guns to thieves. Andrew McClurg, a law professor at the University of Memphis who has expertise in gun laws, said the most effective deterrent would be for courts to apply ordinary negligence principles of tort law and hold gun owners liable for injuries caused by negligently stored firearms. Its a shame that gun rights organizations take issue with imposing any responsibility on gun owners to safely store their firearms to protect against theft, said McClurg. Data shows literally hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen each year. By definition, they go directly to criminals. A Mobile thing The gun thefts, according to one data set, are highest in conservative states where gun laws are less restrictive. According to the left-leaning Center for American Progress, from 2012 to 2015, the average rate of five states with the highest rates of gun theft from private owners Tennessee, Arkansas, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Alabama was 13 times higher than the average rate of five states with the lowest rates that included Massachusetts and New York. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which promotes gun control and is named after former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, reported that from 2013 to 2017, 9,614 guns originally purchased in Alabama were recovered after being used in a crime in other states. The total annual cost of gun violence, the group estimates, is $4.9 billion, and the toll of the violence has a disproportionate affect on black urban areas. We need to urge the bigger councils and municipalities to do the same thing (as Mobile is considering) so its a statewide initiative rather than a Mobile thing, Mobile City Councilwoman Gina Gregory said during last weeks council meeting. But in Alabama, Mobile may be somewhat of an outlier with regard to a sudden surge in gun thefts from unlocked vehicles. Neither Huntsville nor Montgomery, two cities closest to Mobile in population, reported anywhere close to the number of gun thefts from vehicles in 2018. In Montgomery, police recorded 265 instances in which firearms were stolen during a vehicle break-in. So far this year, there have been 44. In Huntsville, the citys police department has seen a decrease in breaking and entering incidences on vehicles. At this time, stolen weapons are a minor percentage of the break-ins in the single digits, said Kelly Schrimsher, a city spokeswoman. Theres nothing occurring here to raise a red flag. Birmingham police did not respond to multiple requests for information. Mobile, from Jan. 1 to March 27, had 102 guns stolen from vehicles so far this year. It was a similar number compared to a year ago, when 113 guns were stolen from cars and trucks. Gregory said there have been issues in nearby Baldwin County concerning gun thefts. Sheriff Huey Hoss Mack said half of the 109 reports of stolen firearms to his department involved guns being taken out of a vehicle. Most of those vehicles were unlocked, he said. Mack said the number of stolen firearms was up in 2018, compared to 2017. The Baldwin County Sheriffs Department covers about 51 percent of the population in Alabamas fastest-growing county. Obviously, this is a concern not only for law enforcement but for public safety as well, he said. Multiple outlets project that Alabama will lose one seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a result of population-driven reapportionment after the 2020 census.[i] Rather than argue over which district should be eliminated, the re-apportionment offers an opportunity to correct Alabamas current horribly gerrymandered map with six fair districts, centered on each of the states largest cities and statistical areas, resulting in four core-based metropolitan districts (Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, and Montgomery), and two larger regional districts made up of several smaller communities in the east (Auburn, Anniston, Gadsden) and west (Tuscaloosa, Florence).[ii] The new map would eliminate the current ridiculous division of the Montgomery metropolitan area into three different congressional districts and remove the absurd gerrymander that has the Seventh District stretching from north of Birmingham to near Mobile.[iii] The new map would put more districts in play between the major political parties and constituencies, giving voters a real choice of who represents them in Washington, rather than the current seven safe seats in which the sitting representative often runs virtually unopposed. Proposed congressional map for Alabama would eliminate 'ridiculous' gerrymandering. Assuming a 2020 population of five million residents, divided evenly into six districts yields roughly 830,000 residents in each district.[iv] Maintaining entire counties within each congressional district, which greatly simplifies ballots for county election officials, we could have a new map that looks something like the following (current districts in color, new boundaries in black): [i] http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/updated-2020-reapportionment-projections/ [ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_statistical_areas [iii] https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/cong_dist/cd115/st_based/CD115_AL.pdf [iv] https://cber.cba.ua.edu/edata/est_prj.html Alabama Rep. Terri Collins, R-Decatur is introducing a bill that would ban abortions in Alabama and attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade. The bill would ban abortion in Alabama beginning two weeks after conception. The legislation allows an exception if the mothers life is in danger, but not in the case of rape or incest. Just last year, roughly 60 percent of voters across the state ratified a constitutional amendment declaring Alabama as a pro-life state, and this legislation is the next logical step in the fight to protect unborn life, Collins said in a press release. With liberal states like New York rushing to approve radical late-term and post-birth abortions, passage of this bill will reflect the conservative beliefs, principles, and desires of the citizens of Alabama while, at the same time, providing a vehicle to revisit the constitutionally-flawed Roe v. Wade decision. According to a press release from Collins, 63 out of the 105 members of the Alabama House are co-sponsoring the bill. Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Range, is introducing a companion bill in the State Senate. The bill, which will be filed Tuesday, was drafted by Collins, Rep. Rich Wingo, R-Tuscaloosa and the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition and its attorney, Eric Johnston. Our bill is two weeks, Johnston said. When you can prove the woman is pregnant. A man and woman can have sex and you can take her straight into a clinic and determine an egg and sperm came together. The ACLU of Alabama said the bill is doomed to fail and will cost taxpayers money. If you place this in the entire context of the last several years, there has been repeated attacks throughout the South to come up with ways to restrict access to abortion and to that extent sure I understand folks being nervous about the prospects, Marshall said. So far all of the attempts have been unsuccessful and have been enjoined by the federal courts and will continue to be enjoined the federal courts. By Azernews By Laman Ismayilova Music is one of the most wonderful things in the world, able to touch the soul and heal the heart. It's an incredible way to express your feelings in a melody that will live in other people's souls forever. Alp Aliyev is one of those musicians who can immerse the listeners in the world of magical sounds. Young pianist captivates the hearts of music lovers with impressive clarity and deep musical expression. His distinctive and innovative playing allows him to perform in front of all kind of audiences. Alp Aliyev inherited his talent from his parents - his mother, Tatyana Suhorukova-Aliyeva was a prima ballerina of the Azerbaijan Opera and Ballet Theater and his father Abbas Aliyev was a secretary of the Azerbaijan Union of Cinematographers. His passion for music has appeared at a young age and never faded. Aliyev started his musical journey at a very young age. He shared the same stage with Azerbaijan State Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor Fakhraddin Karimov. The concert featured works of such famous composers as Fikrat Amirov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Elmira Nazirova, etc. The support that he got from his music teachers Afa Gambarova, Sevil Lazimova made him love music even more. My teachers had always stood behind me while I was studying at music school ?23. With their support, I had performed together with Azerbaijan State Symphonic Orchestra three times. Afterwards, I performed in Germany, France, said Aliyev. At that time, young pianist realized that music would be forever part of his life. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. I studied with the theorist Zemfira Ismayilova. She gave me a lot of knowledge, the pianist said. In 2015, Alp Aliyev entered the Baku Music Academy. After a year of study, he was transferred to the "SABAH" class for especially gifted students. After that he received a certificate for participation in the international competition Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. He was also a participant of the 10th Gabala International Music Festival. The pianist successfully performed at prestigious Art Duo International Music Competition in Prague, where he took the first place. After entering the Baku Music Academy, I have started improving my skills at a completely new level. I visited Georgia. Then I went to Bulgaria, where I took the 3rd place, the Czech Republic, where I also took the 3rd place. During my student years, I also took 2nd place in the republican music competition, Aliyev said. Life without inspiration is like flowers without fragrance. Musicians, writers, artists have always emphasized the importance of inspiration in the creative process. The pianist would not make a first step without an inspiration. But sometimes inspiration can be lost. Inspiration ... this is the hardest thing to talk about, the pianist admits. I lost my heart many times. I asked myself: Why do I need it? This is exactly what you must overcome, Aliyev said. I get a lot of inspiration from the audience. The minutes that you spend on the stage, 5-10 minutes or maybe an hour are the best moments for each artist. Everyone who has passed this road will immediately understand what I am talking about, he added. I have always said that in order to love any kind of activity one needs to deeply feel it from the inside. So I fell in love with music. I found myself in this circle, near those people who influenced me. I realized that this music is mine, he concluded. In addition to his music activities, Alp Aliyev is a director of Human and Environment Union. The main feature of the project is that it unites such different spheres as art, science and ecology. The first concert of the Human and Environment Union was held on February 28. This project will help me to improve myself as well as to discover something new, Aliyev said. Speaking about his future plans, Alp Aliyev stressed that he will continue his musical activities. I will continue to perform and experience passion and excitement. I also like to work in other areas, to unite them, which will allow me to go beyond the standards, he added. Authorities in Iran have ordered the evacuation of more than 70 villages in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, as the effect of severe flooding spread further across the country. The move on Tuesday came amid a state of emergency in several flood-ravaged provinces. At least 47 people have been killed in the past two weeks from flash floods triggered by the worst rains in Iran in at least a decade. Ali Asghar Peyvandi, the head of Irans Red Crescent, said he feared many villages in Khuzestan will be submerged as flood waters moved south towards the oil-rich province. With the possibility of dams overflowing, we have made preparations to accommodate 100,000 people, he told state television. Khuzestan has an extensive range of dams but officials said water was flowing into them at a fast rate. In some cases water levels were only 70cm lower than the dam crests, they reported. Our dams are more than 95 percent full, Gholamreza Shariati, governor of the province, told state TV. Iranian media said on Tuesday that electricity and telecommunications had been cut in affected areas, roads had been washed away and people were waiting on rooftops to be rescued in some villages. President Hassan Rouhani, accused by critics of mishandling the flooding crisis, has promised compensation to all those affected. On April 2 last year, Abiy Ahmed took over the premiership of a country on the brink of a major catastrophe. Three years of incessant protests across the restive regions of Oromia and Amhara, increasing ethnic violence and a deteriorating economy had brought Ethiopia to the verge of collapse. The ascendance to power of a young, reformist leader, who was delivering a message of unity, prosperity, justice and peace, gave Ethiopians from all walks of life reason to become optimistic about the future. For a while it seemed like the new prime minister, the youngest to hold high office in Africa in recent memory, was living up to the peoples expectations and more. Political prisoners were released, a landmark peace deal was signed with Eritrea, important political and economic reforms were put in place, and corrupt officials and human rights abusers were punished. Abiys initial achievements made many Ethiopia watchers believe the country was finally departing from the age-old politics of authoritarian survival. While much progress was made on many fronts in the first few months of Abiys premiership, some deep-rooted challenges, such as ethnic tensions and internal displacement of peoples, continued unabated. Fortunately for Abiy and his new administration, many across the political spectrum preached patience and the citizens agreed that meaningful change would take time to implement. As a result, the support for the prime minister remained high. However, a year into Abiys first term, public trust in the government seems to be in decline. Ethno-nationalists from different groups are continuing to defy the prime ministers calls for pan-Ethiopian unity, keeping the possibility of conflict alive in several regions, as various groups continue to demand the right to form their own states under the federal system. Issues such as displacement and home demolitions in the area around Addis Ababa, which caused ethnic tensions, mass protests and violence in the past, remain unresolved. People living on the outskirts of the capital are still being displaced, as their houses are being demolished without the due process the constitution affords them. Instead of working to resolve these issues, ethno-nationalist Oromo politicians and officials, undoubtedly emboldened by the fact that an Oromo is now heading the federal government, are exacerbating the situation with inflammatory statements aimed at placating their ethnic group. A video circulating recently on social media reportedly showed the president of Oromia regional state, Lemma Megersa, discussing plans to change the demographic composition of Addis Ababa and influence future election results by providing residence cards to Oromos displaced from Ethiopias Somali region. At a March 31 conference, Lemma declared his words were taken out of context and emphasised that he believed in Ethiopian unity. Meanwhile, tensions in the West Guji district in Oromia region remain high. Thousands of ethnic Gedeos, who fled the area last year to escape ethnic violence at the hands of Guji Oromos are still languishing in refugee camps across the country. 190331151858910 The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which had been active in the region, made a deal with the federal government to lay down arms last year, but there have been reports that certain factions are still armed and in control of certain parts of Guji. The government for months has tried to downplay the power OLF still holds in certain parts of the country but locals continue to report attacks. OLF members were also allowed to return from exile in Eritrea last year, which caused major unrest in Addis Ababas suburbs. Violence unleashed on minorities there killed 23 people in September. Today many people in the area live in fear of ethnic mob attacks. Ethnic tensions are also simmering across Ethiopias Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region state, where over 40 ethnic groups once co-existed peacefully. Self-administration and statehood demands by the Sidamas, the largest ethnic group in the region, and rising Sidama nationalism have caused great tension. Last summer, 15 people were killed in clashes between the Sidama and Wolaita groups. The regional capital, Hawassa, once a budding tourism destination with a rapidly growing industrial scene, is no longer a peaceful city. Although Abiys administration attempted to hold officials who failed to control the violence in Hawassa accountable, such efforts are yet to ease tensions. The violence over the summer last year displaced some 1 million people in southern Ethiopia alone. In the north, new and old conflicts across the North Gondar zone in Amhara Region have displaced tens of thousands of Amharas, as Kemants have made demands for self-administration. Tensions between the Amhara and Tigray regions are rising over border disputes. Meanwhile, the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), which dominated the countrys ethnic coalition for over 27 years before Abiys ascent to power has become a political entity that defies the federal political order. All this is happening under Abiys watch and he does not appear to have a plan to bring the country back on track. As a result, Ethiopians are running out of patience and many prominent politicians, activists and journalists who had previously voiced their support for the prime ministers reform agenda are now questioning it. Today, two conflicting but equally critical opinions on the prime ministers political decision-making strategies are becoming increasingly dominant in the country. The first is the belief that Abiy is a politician only interested in empowering his own constituency Ethiopias largest ethnic group, Oromos. Thus, the people who carry this belief argue that the prime minister is simply using words of unity as a cover while working to replace the old Tigrayan minority domination with the absolute hegemony of the Oromo majority. The second, on the other hand, is the belief that Abiys reform agenda is being hindered by the radicals in his own party who he cannot control. The people who hold this view insist that with a national election looming in just over a years time, Ahmed has no choice but to appease extreme Oromo ethno-nationalist activists and parties. Doing so, they contend, will permit him to claim an electoral victory that would give him a broader constitutional mandate and help his long-term reform efforts. There is no way to confirm whether either of these points of view reflects the reality on the ground. However, one thing stands clear not everything in Ethiopia is going well and some Ethiopians are increasingly concerned that their reformist prime minister may have misplaced priorities. Since he came to power, Abiy has been working hard to change the political narrative across the volatile Horn of Africa region. After successfully forging peace with Eritrea, he started making moves to encourage political and economic integration in the wider region. He attempted to broker diplomatic negotiations between the President of Somalia and the de facto state of Somaliland in Addis Ababa. He also attempted to resolve the offshore rights dispute between Kenya and Somalia. All these efforts, which helped him strengthen his reformist image abroad, did not sit well with the Ethiopian public. Citizens, who are still suffering as a result of ethnic conflicts, started to question whether he is more concerned with his image and his legacy than the immediate needs and the wishes of his people. Abiy Ahmed should indeed be applauded for his considerable achievements. However, it also needs to be acknowledged that, after a year in power, his reform agenda is getting off track. Hence, if he wants to hold on to his image as the man who changed it all for Ethiopia, he needs to reconsider his priorities and focus on resolving ethnic conflicts, reining in ethno-nationalists and protecting innocent civilians. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. PM Abiy Ahmed faces many challenges, but he has achieved much and can do even more, if given a popular mandate. On April 2, 2018, the ruling Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) elected Abiy Ahmed, a little-known reformist leader from the Oromo community, as prime minister, setting the stage for dramatic political and economic liberalisation. A year on, the early euphoria, dubbed Abiymania by the Economist, is giving way to ambivalence and incertitude. But, on balance, Abiys accomplishments over the past year are nothing short of a miracle. Given Ethiopias gargantuan societal divisions and the breadth and depth of its problems, sustaining such a trajectory takes supernatural abilities. And no man can measure up to that challenge. However, to stay on this hopeful path, his administration now needs to deepen democratic practices and institutionalise the sweeping political and economic reforms. Abiy, 42, a former army colonel and intelligence officer owes his meteoric rise to power to four years of street protests mostly by Oromo, later joined by Amhara, youth activists calling for democratisation and an end to economic marginalisation. Key accomplishments Prime Minister Abiy took over a deeply divided coalition and a country facing myriad political, security and humanitarian crises. The second state of emergency in as many years was still in full swing. Tens of thousands were imprisoned in political cases, including journalists. The country had to provide for some 2.4 million IDPs, the highest in its tortured history. Abiys appointment, following a bitter internal power struggle inside the EPRDF, was greeted with unprecedented optimism and hope across Ethiopia and around the world. Exiled EPRDF opponents, hitherto proscribed as terrorists, were invited to return home and pursue peaceful political struggle. The prime minister set up boundary and reconciliation commissions to address disputes over administrative borders, to end intercommunal violence, and to reckon with the abuses of the past regime. He quickly lifted the martial law, released political prisoners and apologised for the violence and excesses of the state. He crisscrossed the country touting his bold philosophy of Medemer (Amharic term for synergic unity). He extended an olive branch to neighbouring Eritrea, ending a two-decades-long cloud of war and stalemate. He laid out plans to partially privatise key state-owned enterprises, including the Ethiopian Airlines, Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, and the sole telecom provider, EthioTelecom. A range of midsized state enterprises, such as sugar plantations and industrial parks, were also slated to be fully privatised. His office is reviewing the ease of doing business index to improve Ethiopias investment climate by streamlining regulation, making it easier to start a business and boosting access to finance. 190401081955303 He has significantly expanded political space. Today there are more private newspapers than at any time over the past 15 years. For the first time in more than two decades, no journalist is behind bars in Ethiopia. Freedom of speech and the press have blossomed in ways never seen before so much that many are now openly calling for placing some limits, including regulation on hate or inciting speech. For the first time since at least the 1970s, there is no rebel group fighting to unseat the government in Addis Ababa by force. In the diplomatic arena, Abiy has used his candour and warm personality to woo and dazzle world leaders. He has revitalised previously fraught diplomatic ties with neighbouring states and key Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The World Bank has provided $1.2bn in direct budgetary support 13 years after lending was suspended following the disputed 2005 elections. In February, the prime minister spoke at the annual meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos extolling his historic reforms and making a pitch to potential investors. Ethiopia is now open for business and visitors. Travellers from all African nations are granted visa on arrival. In March, lawmakers ratified the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. A country that was on the brink of collapse just a year ago is providing much-needed calm to the troubled Horn of Africa thanks to Abiys bold move. In pursuit of regional peace, the Abiy administration has prioritised economic integration as the bedrock of his robust diplomacy. The premier has hosted nearly all East African leaders, some more than once, to broker peace agreements or for bilateral and trilateral negotiations. As part of a confidence-building exercise, Ethiopia has acquired stakes in Eritrean, Djiboutian, Kenyan, Somali, and Sudanese ports. The challenges Abiy has presided over a raft of major political and economic reforms over the last 12 months. But challenges remain. There are millions of internally displaced people across the country. Sporadic ethnic conflicts and pockets of violence persist. A frightening civilian militarisation, particularly in Tigray and Amhara regions, has many on the edge. Regional states are in an arms race. A bungled peace process with the Oromo Liberation Front had created fear and insecurity in Oromia. Recent efforts at patching things up were to no avail. The hope and the hype that accompanied Abiys dramatic rise to power has led to bloated expectations. Each new crisis, both real and perceived, seems to shake the confidence of his supporters. Many are impatient with Abiys extreme tolerance and want him to get tough on non-state armed groups and spoilers who spew divisive rhetoric. The travails of governing a fractured nation with complex political history are taking a toll on Abiy himself. In an unscripted remark at a forum organised by the Office of the Prime Minister last week, Abiy warned spoilers not to test his patience and that he would be willing to go to war to protect Ethiopias integrity. The public mood is also less jovial. In fact, there is growing frustration, if unwarranted, that Abiys reforms ushered in freedom of expression but not much else. The youth, who have been protesting for change since 2014, see Abiy as the direct result of their struggle and sacrifices. But the economy has stalled, unable to deliver jobs for the vast unemployed youth, who made up the bulk of protesters. Abiy maintains that his administration is focused on stabilising large macroeconomic imbalances by renegotiating external loans and instituting stringent fiscal austerity measures. However, a bloated bureaucracy, still adrift and beholden to the status quo, scoffs at the fast-paced reforms. Whereas Abiy talks of the virtues of private enterprise and the need to unleash its dynamism to create jobs for the youth, his unreformed bureaucracy still remains wedded to a statist approach. The public grumbles about weak state capacity and wants corrupt local officials to either emulate Abiy or leave public offices. But both will take time to materialise. Even more worryingly, growing mistrust and schism among Ethiopias already fragmented political elite has further polarised the public. The debate over Ethiopias future is now dominated by two opposing axes: ethno-nationalists and Ethio-nationalists. The former call for a new social contract under the countrys multinational federation. The latter, perhaps by masking their own tribalism under the cover of an amorphous Ethiopian identity, disparage ethno-nationalists as narrow and inward-looking tribalists. Splintered beyond recognition, each of them is busy blaming the other for tearing the countrys social fabric apart. Their squabble is fuelled and amplified by disruptive propaganda on social media and highly partisan networks and newspapers that have mushroomed over the past year taking advantage of the political opening. Prospects for future Abiy is somewhere in the middle, trying to pull the two extremes to the centre. He has prioritised holding the countrys first-ever truly democratic election. To demonstrate his commitment, in November, Abiy appointed Birtukan Mideksa, a former prisoner and opposition leader, to head the National Electoral Board. He has pledged to hand over power if his party loses in a fair, free and inclusive election. He recently signed a code of conduct with the opposition to guarantee the same. The 2020 poll will likely be a referendum on two issues that now dominate the political discourse: the contentious status of Addis Ababa, and the future of Ethiopias federalism. The all-important issue of the economy, especially youth employment, is all but forgotten, demonstrating how Ethiopian politics is driven by elite interests rather than the concerns of average Ethiopians struggling to make ends meet. Addis Ababa has taken the centre stage in Ethiopias political theatre. The constitution recognises Addis Ababas location at the heart of the Oromia state. And it provides for a special interest in recognition of this fact. However, Ethiopias leaders have failed to determine the details of what that actually entails. Meanwhile, Addis Ababa has grown outward by displacing farmers, a sore issue that served as the trigger for the Oromo protests. The prime minister has recently set up an eight-person committee led by the Minister of Peace Muferiat Kamil to determine the citys administrative jurisdiction, a move opposed by his detractors. Abiy wants to seek an electoral mandate to consolidate his far-reaching reforms and tackle contentious issues such as the type of federalism that requires rigorous public consultation and a possible constitutional amendment. Ethiopia needs strong democratic institutions and a conducive environment for a free and fair election. Ethiopians need to develop a democratic culture that encourages civil and responsible dialogue, which involves listening to one another, something that is badly lacking today. After years of authoritarianism, it will take a while to change attitudes and tear down prejudices built over centuries of political and sectarian strife. There are currently more than 107 political parties vying for power. The increasing polarisation of views compounded by the presence of so many actors doesnt bode well for an orderly election and transition to democracy. Rather than coalescing and cobbling together winning coalitions and broader constituencies, the opposition is busy jostling for power while catering only to its narrow hardcore base of support. No party has thus far offered a coherent and serious policy alternative to Abiys EPRDF. As in all transitional countries, the challenges are many, but even amid the discordant narratives, Abiy remains Ethiopias best hope for long-term stability. He is by far the only steady hand who can unite the country and help chart a common future. He should be given more time and support to implement his vision and to institutionalise the important reforms that he has set in motion. Towards that end, Ethiopians need to overcome the current schism and resist the duelling echo chambers proclaiming an existential crisis. We have a unique opportunity to finally transition to participatory democracy. We must approach the year two of the Abiy administration with extreme vigilance, utmost patience, a great dose of civility, and a sense of responsibility to ensure that the democratisation process does not stagnate or backslide. The views expressed in this article is the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. Longtime president says he quit to let citizens take Algeria to the better future they aspire to. Algerias President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has resigned with immediate effect, according to state media, ceding power in the face of massive street protests against his 20-year rule. The ailing, 82-year-old leader announced he was stepping down in a letter published by APS news agency on Tuesday, just hours after the army chief demanded immediate action to remove him from office. My intention is to contribute to calming down the souls and minds of the citizens so that they can collectively take Algeria to the better future they aspire to, Bouteflika said in the letter to the president of the Constitutional Council. I have made this decision to avoid and prevent the arguments which distort, unfortunately, the current situation, and avoid its turning into serious skirmishes, to ensure the protection of persons and property, he added. The announcement prompted celebrations in Algerias capital, Algiers, with hundreds of people singing songs and waving flags in front of the citys central post office. This is a victory for my country, said 25-year-old Kamel, who only gave his first name. We now want the rest of the old guard to leave, we also want the corrupt businessmen to be judged. We have won one political battle, not yet the war. #Urgent Le president de la Republique, Abdelaziz #Bouteflika, a notifie officiellement au president du #Conseil_constitutionnel, sa decision de mettre fin a son mandat en qualite de president de la Republique. pic.twitter.com/cjunX9gwsL APS | (@APS_DZ) April 2, 2019 Translation: President of the Republic, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, officially notified the president of the constitutional council his decision to end his mandate as president of the Republic. No room to waste time The anti-Bouteflika protests broke out in late February when the longtime president, who has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013, announced a plan to seek a fifth term in elections scheduled for April. Hundreds of thousands of people, for several weeks, took to the streets of Algiers and other major cities calling for the presidents resignation. On March 11, Bouteflika sought to defuse the unrest by abandoning his re-election bid. However, he delayed the presidential vote indefinitely and announced he would only step down once a new constitution had been passed and a successor had been elected. But public anger continued to mount, prompting key allies to abandon the president. Ahmed Gaid Salah, the armys chief of staff, last week called for Bouteflika to be declared unfit to rule, and on Monday, the embattled leader said he would quit before the end of his term on April 28. Algerians have been protesting against Bouteflika since late February [Ryad Kramdi/ AFP] On Tuesday, Salah again reiterated his demand for impeachment proceedings, saying: There is no more room to waste time. He added: We decided clearly to stand with the people so all their demands get fulfilled. Pressure had been building during the day on Tuesday with opposition groups demanding Bouteflika go immediately, while hundreds of students marched through Algiers to demand to the replacement of a political system widely seen as incapable of significant reform. Bouteflikas resignation will put his ally, Abdelkader Bensalah, chairman of the upper house of parliament, in charge as caretaker president for 90 days until elections are held. Nazim Taleb of the opposition Rachab movement, speaking to Al Jazeera from Algiers, said a transitional council was necessary to pave the way for a free and fair election in the country. 190304193802355 Bensalah and the army will not facilitate a free election. Bouteflikas most trusted people are still part of the system. They dont want a free election because they might end up in jail, he said. The Algerian people want oversight of the election, to control the process so there can be a fair vote that reflects the peoples will, Taleb said, adding that the Rachab movement was open to including representatives of the army in any transitional body. Credible transition Francis Ghiles, researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, said such an interim council should include elderly statesmen who have historical legitimacy as well as younger members of society, such as human rights lawyers, to create a transitional administration that is credible in the eyes of the millions who have been in the streets for six weeks now. He said Algeria lacked an organised opposition because Bouteflika had smashed every bit of opposition or bought them out. The great challenge for Algeria is to organise this transition, bearing in mind there are no strong well-constituted parties, Ghiles told Al Jazeera from the Spanish capital, Madrid. Meanwhile, Benjamin Brower, a historian at the University of Texas, said he feared Salah, the army chief, was positioning himself to take control of Algeria. He precipitated Bouteflikas resignation today with a speech that he gave earlier in the day calling for an immediate step down of the president, Brower told Al Jazeera. I think thats a person who wants to see himself in some kind of power. But I think the question is whether thats ratified by the demonstrators in the street who have an immense energy and momentum moving into this after six weeks of demonstrations where theyve really driven the political events forward in a way that we havent seen in Algeria perhaps ever. In Algiers, 65-year-old Halima said she intended to continue to protest until Bouteflikas allies also stepped down. We are turning a page in Algerias history, she told Al Jazeera. Bouteflikas removal is not enough. We want all the veterans to leave It is now time for a new generation of leaders to take over. Bouteflika comes out from a polling booth before casting his vote at a polling station in Algiers, Algeria, 29 November 2012 [File: Mohamed Messara/EPA] Djamila Ould Khettab contributed in this report from Algiers. Algerian authorities have seized the passports of seven businessmen under investigation over corruption allegations, the private Ennahar TV reported on Monday. On Sunday, authorities also arrested Ali Haddad, a leading Algerian businessman who was part of the inner circle of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, whose office said he would resign before his fourth term expires on April 28 after more than a month of mass protests against his rule. One of the countrys richest men, Haddad was caught with large sums of money trying to cross into neighbouring Tunisia, local media said. Authorities had on Sunday banned all private aircraft from taking off and landing until the end of the month. Demonstrators in the North African country, an oil and gas producer, want a new generation of leaders to replace a ruling elite seen by many ordinary Algerians as out of touch and unable to jump-start a faltering economy hampered by cronyism. Authorities did not say who was being targeted by the new investigations into corruption and illegal money transfers abroad. Seeking to defuse the demonstrations, Bouteflika said on March 11 he was dropping plans for a fifth term. But he stopped short of stepping down immediately, to wait for a national conference on political change. That further enraged protesters, prompting the army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Ahmed Gaed Salah, to step in by proposing last week to ask the constitutional council to see whether he is still fit for office. Late on Sunday, Ennahar and El Bilad TV channels said that Bouteflika might resign this week. The government has not commented on the reports. Protests continue Despite Bouteflikas resignation, Algerian students on social networks called for large protests to be held on Tuesday in the capital and the rest of the country. Mohamed, a member of a student union in Algiers, said that the departure of Bouteflika is not enough. It does not change anything. He will leave but the same regime, which has ruled Algeria since 1962 and its independence, will stay if we dont continue to protest. What we want is not only Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down, but we also want the creation of a new political system, he told Al Jazeera. Likewise, Amel, a computer engineer who lives in Algiers, said she is not satisfied with Bouteflikas decision. He is only the tip of the iceberg. The ruling elite, who is clinging to power, is trying to distract us with the Presidents resignation. But we are not duped, Amel told Al Jazeera. Amina, an undergraduate student at Algiers School of Architecture, who said that she would take part in a gathering against the government tomorrow, described Bouteflikas last announcement as a small victory. It is a first step but this is not our final goal. We wont be successful if Bouteflika resigns while the old guard remains after April 28. They must all leave. Now more than ever, we need to stay united and peacefully demonstrate against the regime, Amina told Al Jazeera. At least 1,428 people have been infected as the government and aid agencies try to contain the outbreak. Beira, Mozambique The number of cholera cases in cyclone-hit Mozambique has risen sharply in communities affected by flooding. At least 1,428 people have been infected as the Mozambican government and aid agencies try to contain the outbreak, health officials told journalists in the coastal city of Beira on Tuesday. The cholera outbreak has grown rapidly since 249 cases were reported last week. At least 376 new cases were discovered on Tuesday, most of them in Beira city, as the infection rate continues to increase daily. We are extremely concerned, hence we are having constant meetings with government institutions to prevent cases of cholera, Reto Eberhard of the Red Cross told Al Jazeera. 190402052704787 Two deaths have been reported in the cyclone-hit region, Ministry of Health records show. Cyclone Idai crashed into Mozambique on March 14, causing catastrophic flooding which has killed more than 500 people in the country. At least 259 people have been killed in Zimbabwe and 56 in Malawi. Officials in Mozambique have warned the toll is likely to increase as more bodies are expected to be found when the flood waters recede. The United Nations has said some 1.8 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. Education Officials at the health ministry say they have stepped up hygiene awareness and education campaigns in areas impacted by the cyclone. We have been educating people about hygiene, hand wash and other preventive measures in communities, National Director of Medical Assistance Usseine Isse told Al Jazeera. We have been encouraging people to go to the hospitals when they experience symptoms of cholera. It is a dangerous disease and not something to delay treatment, Isse said. Many health centres in the cyclone-affected communities have been swept away by flood waters, while the health centres run by relief agencies are barely enough to support thousands of displaced people. More than 1,400 people have been affected by cholera in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai [File: Mike Hutchings/Reuters] Health ministry officials and relief agencies are scheduled to commence a mass vaccination campaign on Wednesday to limit the spread of cholera. The vaccination exercise is targeted at some 900,000 people affected by the cyclone. The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday took delivery of oral vaccines. Cholera treatment centres are being created to identify and treat all potential cases, UNICEF emergency team leader Jean Manhes told Al Jazeera. Cholera is a serious issue that is being closely monitored, Manhes said. Threats of infection Many badly affected areas in Mozambique and neighbouring Zimbabwe are still inaccessible by road, complicating relief efforts and further heightening the threat of infection. 190327122632293 Tens of thousands of victims of the storm are at risk of infection due to water contamination, health experts warn. Relief agencies intend to step up their emergency response when the flood waters recede and some roads are re-opened. Cholera is endemic to Mozambique, which has had regular outbreaks over the past five years. About 2,000 people were infected in the most recent outbreak, which ended in February 2018, according to the WHO. Al Jazeera condemns decision by Egypts highest court to designate three of its journalists as terrorists. Al Jazeera Media Network has condemned a decision by Egypts highest court to keep three of its journalists on a national terror list, describing the move as a direct attack on press freedom and freedom of expression. In a statement on Tuesday, the Qatar-based network said Egypts Court of Cassation upheld last week a lower court ruling that designated Salem Almahroukey, Ayman Azzam and Mohamed Maher Akl as terrorists. Individuals added to the terrorism list are subjected to a travel ban, asset freeze and passport cancellation. Al Jazeeras journalists were among more than 100 people designated as terrorists by Egypts criminal court in June last year. The list also included journalists and media workers from other news outlets. The three Doha-based journalists, who work for Al Jazeera Mubasher, are known for their dedication and professionalism, the network said. 190329093549733 Al Jazeera sees this as a continuation of the Egyptian authorities efforts to silence Al Jazeera and its journalists and to deter and intimidate the Network from covering developments in Egypt, the statement added. Human Rights Watch, a global rights group, has called Egypts terrorism list, introduced by law in 2015, a mockery of due process, as the consequences of designated terrorists were similar to those for people convicted after a trial. In addition to journalists, the list includes members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, which has been subject to a far-reaching crackdown since the Brotherhoods Mohamed Morsi was removed as president in 2013. Egypt is ranked 161 out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index and was described by the group in 2016 as one of the worlds biggest prisons for journalists. RSF has said that under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisis leadership, Egyptian authorities have waged a witch-hunt against journalists suspected of supporting the Brotherhood and blocked hundreds of news websites. Al Jazeeras website was banned in Egypt in 2017 on charges of supporting terrorism and spreading false news, a claim the network denies. In its Tuesday statement, Al Jazeera said Egyptian authorities have continuously targeted the networks journalists and correspondents since 2013. Highlighting the case of Mahmoud Hussein, an Al Jazeera Arabic journalist who has spent more than two years in an Egyptian prison, without formal charges, the network said: We at Al Jazeera demand the Egyptian authorities cease and refrain from targeting journalists and media professionals and release all detained journalists including Mahmoud Hussein immediately. Hussein was detained in December 2016 on charges of incitement against state institutions and broadcasting false news with the aim of spreading chaos, allegations he and Al Jazeera deny. The UN has called his detention arbitrary, saying Egyptian authorities failed to produce a single piece of evidence that could justify any of the charges brought informally against him. By Azernews By Abdul Kerimkhanov The 2nd of April is another black page in the history of modern Azerbaijan. Today is the 26th anniversary of the occupation of the Kelbajar region by Armenian troops. Kelbajar is located outside Nagorno-Karabakh. It is the most high-mountainous region of Azerbaijan with a territory of 1,936 square kilometers. Before hostilities, population of Kelbajar was 58,000 people. The occupation of the Kelbajar region was accompanied by inhuman mass crimes against the local population, which did not go unnoticed by the international press. On the night of April 7-8, 1993, Armenian troops burned the village of Agdaban in the Kelbajar region, tortured 779 civilians and completely burned 130 houses. The brutality of the Armenians was unlimited: 67 people were killed, among them eight people aged 90-100 years old and two children, seven women were burned alive, two were missing, 12 people were seriously injured. Armenians destroyed in Kelbajar 97 schools, nine kindergartens, 116 libraries, 43 clubs, 42 houses of culture, 9 hospitals, 13,000 private houses and 37,852 hectares of forest area, natural resources, including rich gold deposits. The occupation of Kelbajar by the Armenian side led to the death of 511 civilians, another 321 people were taken prisoner or missing, and 58,000 people were expelled from their homes. After the occupation of Kelbajar, UN Security Council adopted Resolution No. 822, demanding Armenia immediately to withdraw troops from Kelbajar and other occupied regions of Azerbaijan. But this resolution, like the other three, adopted later, is not implemented to this day. In addition, contrary to the principles of the UN and the OSCE, Armenia began artificially settling the territory of the Kelbajar region with Armenians since 1999. Having violated international humanitarian law, Armenia conducts an artificial settlement policy in the occupied Kelbajar region of Azerbaijan and tries to change the demographic composition. The fact of Armenias participation in the conflict, and in particular in the seizure of the Kelbajar region, is confirmed in the collection of the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch / Helsinki. Armenian has been numerously calld to put an end to the policy of aggression and ethnic cleansing, and fulfill its international obligations. The day is not far off when Kelbajar, like the other occupied territories of Azerbaijan, will be liberated from the aggressor, and the civilians of these beautiful lands will return to their lands. Nothing in the world can prevent the Azerbaijani people from restoring justice and territorial integrity of the country. Europe is spending more on its defence. But the spree may be more cyclical than the result of US pressure, analysts say. Browbeating European NATO countries to spend more on their own defence has become a staple of US President Donald Trumps foreign policy. So too has his administrations Buy American drive to boost US arms exports to allies around the world. The tandem push has thrown the United States commitment to NATO into question and tarnished the notion that the alliances collective defence clause is unconditional. Last July, Trump reportedly delivered an ultimatum to NATO allies in a closed-door meeting in Brussels, warning that if they didnt increase their defence spending by January, the US would go it alone. The Trump Administration is ruthlessly transactional and disregards the normal diplomatic route for doing things, Jacob Parakilas, deputy head of the US and the Americas Programme at London think-tank Chatham House told Al Jazeera. I wouldnt be surprised if American diplomats were told to get out and sell weapons, he added. But as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg prepares to meet President Trump in the White House on Tuesday, and address a joint session of Congress in the run-up to NATOs 70th-anniversary celebration in Washington later this week, President Trump appears to be getting more of what he wants. In 2014, only three of the NATO 29 member allies had fulfilled a pledge to spend at least two percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defence. By 2018, seven had met that threshold. And although Germanys continued failure to meet the two percent target could draw further criticism from Trump this week, US arms sales to Europe are rising and projected to climb even further. Buy American When it comes to supplying arms to the rest of the world, the US has long held a commanding lead and its getting wider. US share of total global arms exports soared from 30 percent between 2009-2013 to 36 percent between 2014-2018, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). 190401201937194 The shopping list for US arms is long fighter jets, cruise and ballistic missiles, and guided bombs to name a few. While the Middle East accounted for the majority of US arms exports tracked by SIPRI, tensions elsewhere are also helping to boost sales around the globe. The US is harvesting a worldwide increase in tensions, Aude Fleurant, director of SIPRIs Arms Transfers and Military Expenditure Program, told Al Jazeera. Despite talk among NATOs European allies of reducing reliance on US-made military equipment, US arms sales to Europe are strong. And forecasters see an even bigger spend on the horizon. Europe accounted for 16 percent of US arms sales in 2017. Thats going to increase massively, said Ben Moores, a senior defence and aviation analyst for Janes, IHS Markit which compiled that figure. Moores told Al Jazeera the US is set to deliver $30.4bn in arms globally by 2022, with Europe accounting for $8.6bn or around 28 percent of those sales. Strained relations with Russia have helped boost the sale of US weapons to NATOs European allies. But Moores cautions the increase is not as momentous as it first appears, given the cyclical nature of arms sales and the need for NATO countries to maintain interoperability between member nations weapons systems. 181221002109383 Around every three decades, air forces need to replace ageing fighter aircraft an expensive undertaking. According to Moores, NATO countries are looking to replace US-made F-16 fighter jets, which are upward of 40 years old, with US-made F-35 fighter aircraft which cost around $100m each. Hitting a limit? But Buy American appeared to have hit a limit on Monday. The Pentagon has halted deliveries and activities related to Turkeys F-35 jet operational capability until Ankara backs down from its commitment to take delivery of a Russian S-400 missile defence system. The move marks the first time the US has blocked delivery of the jet to its NATO ally. Ankaras decision to buy Russias S-400 anti-aircraft system is putting it at odds with US politicians who say handing Turkey American premier attack aircraft would be a security risk. S-400 anti-aircraft systems are adaptive. They learn and therefore are dangerous. The US worries if Turkey links the F-35 with Russias S-400 anti-aircraft system, the system will read and record US fighter computer weapons systems, and relay that data to Moscow. As Iran continues to battle floods across the country, FM Zarif says US sanctions impeding rescue operations. Iranian authorities have ordered the evacuation of 70 villages in Khuzestan province near the Dez and Kharkheh rivers due to flood risk, according to state-run IRNA news agency. The announcement comes a day after Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blamed sanctions imposed last year by US President Donald Trumps administration for hampering rescue operations in flood-stricken areas of the country, where 45 people have died so far. Americas maximum pressure policy on Iran is impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedCrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods, Zarif said in a Twitter post on Monday night. The sanctions, he said, have prevented Tehran from getting badly needed equipment, including relief helicopters. This isnt just economic warfare; its economic TERRORISM, he said. .@realDonaldTrump s "maximum pressure"flouting UNSC Res 2231 & ICJ rulingis impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedCrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods. Blocked equipment includes relief choppers: This isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM. pic.twitter.com/EEKTMiXLEi Javad Zarif (@JZarif) April 1, 2019 A senior US official said on Monday the government is considering implementing additional sanctions against Iran that would target areas of its economy that have not been hit before. Iran has been facing major flooding for the past two weeks that have struck hundreds of villages as well as towns and cities in the western half of the country, where in some places a state of emergency has been declared. Local authorities in the stricken areas have repeatedly asked for more helicopters to reach remote and cutoff locations. Iranian state media said on Tuesday that dozens of military and Iranian Red Crescent helicopters are taking part in the relief operation. Britain and Germany have offered to send help, including boats and safety equipment. Iranian media reports said the floods have cut off some 80 intercity roads, as well as roads to nearly 2,200 villages, and that electricity and communications with many places, including in western Ilam and Lorestan provinces, have been cut. Emergency help In Khorramabad the water has risen by as much as three metres in parts and reports are coming in of regions completely submerged with residents stranded on their rooftops, state television news network IRINN reported. The airport in the western city was flooded, with images showing water submerging the runway and cutting the provinces main air link to the rest of the country. The Red Crescents provincial director, Sarem Rezaee, said his organisation had lost contact with much of the region. Telephones are not working, our radio communications are down at this moment we have no news of other cities and villages, he told IRINN, adding roads were flooded and helicopters were unable to take off due to the bad weather. We have requested emergency help from neighbouring provinces but at the present, no one can do anything. Authorities have issued evacuation warnings and state television has broadcast footage showing inundated towns and villages in western and southwestern Iran. State media said officials have warned about the possibility of dams breaking and have ordered emergency water discharges from reservoirs to prevent a catastrophe. Triggered by heavy rainfall several riverbanks have burst. Emergency services are advising people to postpone unnecessary intra-city commutes as well as trips to western and southern Iran, including Khuzestan province, which is expecting heavy flooding in the coming days. The floods have hit Iran particularly hard, coming against the backdrop of a spiralling economic crisis. Trumps decision last year to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal with world powers and restore crippling economic sanctions have caused the Iranian currency to plummet in recent months. The floods first began in the second half of March in the northern provinces of Golestan and Mazandaran and later spread. Iran has seen a decades-long drought but the latest flooding has also been blamed on widespread disregard of safety measures and construction of buildings and roads near the rivers. Last year, at least 30 people were killed by flash floods in East Azerbaijan province. Mohammed Edwan was shot near the Qalandiya refugee camp, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Israeli soldiers have shot dead a Palestinian man and wounded at least three others during an overnight raid in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian health officials said. Mohammed Edwan, 23, was shot near the Qalandiya refugee camp, north of occupied East Jerusalem, the Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday. Edwan was reportedly in his vehicle when he was shot from close range with live ammunition, witnesses told Maan news agency. His body remained in the custody of the Israeli army before being handed over to medics at the scene, who then transferred Edwan to a hospital in Ramallah, where he was pronounced dead. According to the health ministry, the three others who were wounded in the shooting were being treated at the hospital. Local media reported that Israeli forces raided a number of Palestinian homes in several neighbourhoods in the West Bank and that a crowd gathered in the area. They said Israeli forces fired live ammunition as well as tear gas and stun grenades. Two residents said soldiers arrived in the Qalandiya area early on Tuesday to carry out arrests and young men threw stones at them. Three others inside the camp were arrested as part of the wider arrest campaign, Maan reported. The Israeli army said there was a riot during an operation in the nearby Kufr Aqab area, and rocks and explosive devices were hurled at the troops, who responded with fire. A report was received regarding an injured Palestinian. The incident will be examined, the army statement said. Qufr Aqab has been cut off from the rest of Jerusalem by Israels separation fence, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice more than a decade ago. The Israeli army frequently carries out wide-ranging arrest campaigns across the West Bank on the pretext of searching for wanted Palestinians. It says its raids are necessary to detain violent criminals and potential attackers. The Palestinian Authority, which has limited autonomy in parts of the West Bank, says such raids are a breach of the agreements Israel has signed up to under the Oslo II Accord. Najib faces 42 charges linked to theft of $4.5bn from state investment fund after winning election last May. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak is due to face trial on corruption charges on Wednesday after a delay of nearly two months. The trial is the first of several criminal proceedings against Najib, who faces 42 charges. They were brought after the new Malaysian administration reopened investigations into the alleged theft of $4.5bn from the state investment fund, 1MDB, shortly after winning election last May. Al Jazeeras Florence Looi reports from Kuala Lumpur. As flood waters recede, survivors are desperately searching for loved-ones while being stuck in Beira rescue camps. Beira, Mozambique Sara Francisco survived the devastating Cyclone Idai by climbing onto a rooftop with her two young daughters in her rural village of Buzi after most surrounding buildings were swept away by flooding. She was stuck on the rooftop for about 24 hours with no food, surviving only on rainwater while calling out for help with her children. Help eventually came when a villager passed by in a small canoe, taking Fransico, 24, and her daughters to a camp for displaced persons in Beira, 50km northeast of Buzi. But her problems are not over as she still cannot find her missing family members. I cant find my husband, my mother and six siblings. We were together before the floods but since I arrived to the camp, I cant locate them, Francisco told Al Jazeera. I assumed they were rescued by the boats too but it doesnt look like they survived. Every day Im praying to God to find them, she added. I have made repeated calls to their phone numbers but got no response. Some of my relations have gone back to the village to look for them but no one has seen them. I am really, really concerned. Cyclone Idai was one of the worst storms on record to affect Africa and the Southern Hemisphere as a whole. The cyclone caused catastrophic damage in Zimbabwe and Malawi, but Mozambique was the hardest-hit, with Beira, a coastal city of 500,000 residents, and surrounding areas bearing the brunt of the long-lived storm. Mourning the dead For days, rescue teams including government workers and aid agencies deployed boats and helicopters to the flooded areas in search of survivors. Thousands were ferried to safety mostly to Beira, which was partly destroyed by the cyclone. However, thousands remain missing. 190326113310010 Twenty-eight-year-old Eduardo received word that his ageing mother and two of his siblings were among the dead. I cried so hard when I was told they were swept away by the floods. The people around them were helpless in saving them, Eduardo told Al Jazeera. Im inconsolable. I dont know what to do. Im now an orphan, he said. The death toll from the cyclone in Mozambique has topped 500 but officials have warned the toll will rise significantly when the flood waters recede and more bodies will be found. Returning home Mozambiques President Filipe Nyusi last Thursday called off rescue efforts while saluting the efforts of those searching for victims of the cyclone, which he described as the worst humanitarian disaster in Mozambique. Meanwhile, some of the survivors in the rescue camps have demanded to return home. The Mozambique National Institute for Disaster Management is now leading efforts to return some of them back to their storm-stricken villages as the flood waters recede. Speaking to Al Jazeera, the institutes spokesman Vitorini Mondlane, said steps are being taken to return some of the people back to their homes especially those from Buzi. They will be assisted to rebuild their homes. Those who decide not to return home will be allocated plots of land in another location that is not vulnerable to flooding, Mondlane added. 190330064527543 The makeshift camps, mostly built by relief agencies, are crowded with a lack basic amenities. The United Nations has said some 1.8 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The imminent threat of more cholera infections and hunger is still a major concern. The World Health Organization has promised to provide 900,000 doses of cholera vaccines to treat the outbreak. The number of reported cases in Beira alone has increased to 271 as of Tuesday. At least three soldiers killed, one wounded in exchange of fire in disputed Kashmir region, Pakistans military says. At least three Pakistani soldiers have been killed when India and Pakistan exchanged fire across the Line of Control in the disputed region of Kashmir, Pakistans military said, in the latest round of hostilities between the nuclear-armed neighbours. The soldiers were killed in an exchange of fire in the Rawalakot area of Pakistan-administered Kashmir on Tuesday, a Pakistani military statement said. Another soldier was wounded, the military said. Tensions have been high in South Asia since India and Pakistan conducted air raids on each others territory and Pakistan shot down an Indian fighter jet in February. 190227063414443 The military escalation followed a suicide attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir town of Pulwama that killed at least 40 Indian security personnel and which India blames on Pakistan. Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir a territory over which they have fought two of their three wars in full but administer separate portions of it, divided by the Line of Control (LoC). On Monday, an elderly man was killed and five others wounded by Indian shelling in the Nezapir area of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, officials said. Pulwama attack There has been a tenuous ceasefire in place at the LoC since 2003, but both sides regularly violate it, especially at times of high tensions. In 2018, Pakistans military said there had been a marked uptick in Indian shelling across the de facto border, killing at least 55 people mostly civilians and wounding more than 300 others. India says Pakistani shelling across the LoC killed at least 14 security personnel in 2018, according to government data. Since the Pulwama attack, shelling across the Line of Control has increased, with residents reporting almost daily barrages by both sides across the length of the de facto border. Indian authorities blamed Pakistan for the Pulwama attack, sharing a dossier of evidence that they said linked the attack to Pakistan-based armed groups. On Thursday, Pakistans foreign office said Pakistani authorities had investigated the leads provided in the dossier and found no link to Pakistan. While 54 detained individuals are being investigated, no details linking them to Pulwama have been found so far. Similarly, the 22 pin locations shared by India have been examined. No such camps exist, said a statement. Pakistan has come under increasing pressure from the international community to crack down on armed groups operating on its soil, particularly those such as Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) that conduct activities centred around Kashmir. In the wake of the Pulwama attack, Pakistan said it had renewed its crackdown on armed groups, sealing dozens of mosques and schools run by JeM and LeT and taking steps to implement UN-mandated assets freezes on those groups. A day after US halted F-35 delivery, the acting US defence secretary says he expects to resolve row over Russias S-400. Acting US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said on Tuesday that he expected to resolve a dispute with Turkey over its purchase of Russias S-400 air defence system, a day after the United States halted the delivery of equipment related to the F-35 aircraft to Ankara. The US is at an inflexion point in a years-long standoff with Turkey, a NATO ally, after failing to sway President Tayyip Erdogan that buying a Russian air defence system would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft. On Monday, the Pentagon said it had suspended the delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter jet pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo delivery of the S-400. The tough step came after months of warnings from Washington that Turkeys adoption of Russian missile technology alongside US fighter jets would pose a threat to the F-35 technology and endanger Western defences. Unusual NATO member move The purchase of a Russian system is highly unusual for a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Western alliance forged to counter the Soviet Union. 190401201937194 The US suspension announcement came two days before foreign ministers from NATOs 29 members were due in Washington to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance. Last week, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu met in Turkey with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and insisted that the S-400 purchase would go ahead. But on Monday, Shanahan expressed optimism that the US and Turkey would find a way out of the crisis by persuading Turkey to buy the Patriot defence system, instead of S-400s. I expect well solve the problem so that they have the right defence equipment in terms of Patriots and F-35s, Shanahan told reporters at the Pentagon. Shanahan added that he expected the US to ultimately carry out the delivery of F-35s currently at Luke Air Force base to Turkey, after resolving the dispute. Turkish pilots are receiving training on two aircraft at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest of a series of diplomatic disputes between the United States and Turkey including Turkish demands that the US extradite preacher and businessman Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria. Shipments put on hold until Turkey agrees to cancel purchase of Russian-made S-400, Pentagon says. The Pentagon has suspended deliveries of equipment related the F-35 fighter jets to Turkey unless Ankara refuses to take a delivery of a Russian missile defence system. The United States has repeatedly warned Turkey that the Russian S-400 system it aims to buy would compromise the security of the F-35 aircraft, which is made by US company Lockheed Martin. US officials speaking to Reuters news agency on the condition of anonymity said the next shipment of training equipment and all subsequent shipments of F-35 materials have been cancelled. Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo the delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkeys F-35 operational capability have been suspended while our dialogue on this important matter continues with Turkey, the spokesperson said on Monday. 190329112122402 Ankara, which is a production partner in the making of the stealth jet as well as a NATO ally, has so far refused to back down on its planned purchase. The move comes just days after Turkeys Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara was committed to a deal to buy the Russian system and was discussing delivery dates. Last week, four US senators introduced a bipartisan bill that would prohibit the transfer of F-35s to Turkey until the US government certifies that Ankara will not take delivery of the system. Security fears The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest diplomatic dispute to strain US-Turkey relations. The two countries are at odds over the Middle East policy, including the war in Syria and sanctions on Iran, and Ankara has demanded the US extradite Fethullah Gulen, a former imam it accuses of orchestrating an attempted coup. 190220201304820 The US decision on the F-35s is expected to complicate Cavusoglus planned trip to Washington this week for a NATO summit. Reuters reported last week that Washington was exploring whether it could remove Turkey from the production of the F-35. Turkey makes parts of the planes fuselage, landing gear and cockpit displays. In an attempt to persuade Turkey to drop its plans to buy the S-400, the US offered the pricier, US-made Patriot anti-missile system in a discounted deal that expired at the end of March. Turkey has shown interest in the Patriot system but not at the expense of abandoning the S-400. Saudi Arabia has given the four children of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi million-dollar houses and monthly five-figure payments as compensation for the killing of their father, the Washington Post reported. The kingdom is trying to come to a long-term understanding with the Khashoggi family members to encourage them to continue to refrain from criticism in relation to their fathers killing by Saudi agents, the paper reported on Monday. Larger payouts possibly tens of millions of dollars apiece as part of blood money negotiations could be offered in the coming months, the paper said, citing accounts by current and former Saudi officials as well as people close to the family. Negotiations over further payments are expected to take place following the trials of Khashoggis accused killers, according to the officials and others who spoke to the paper on the condition of anonymity. 190328173022316 Saudi operatives killed Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributor who was living in the United States, on October 2, 2018, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he had gone to collect documents for his planned wedding. A critic of the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, Khashoggi had resisted pressure from Riyadh to return home. His body, which Turkish officials say was dismembered, is yet to be found. Big injustice MBS has been accused of ordering the operation to kill Khashoggi, but the kingdom has rejected the claim. The Posts report on Monday quoted a former Saudi official saying King Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud approved the delivery of homes and monthly payments of $10,000 or more to each sibling in 2018 as an acknowledgement that a big injustice has been done and a bid to make a wrong, right. A current official told the Post the payments were in line with the long-standing Saudi custom of providing financial assistance to victims of crime. Such support is part of our custom and culture, the official said. Dismissing the suggestion the family would be obligated to remain silent, he said the payments are not attached to anything else. The houses given to the Khashoggi children are located in the Saudi city of Jeddah, in a compound where their eldest brother Salah lives. The properties are part of an initial settlement and are worth as much as $4m apiece, the Post reported. Salah Khashoggi, a banker, plans to remain in Saudi Arabia, while the other three children live in the United States and are expected to sell their new Saudi properties, the Post said. Salah is leading the financial discussions with Saudi authorities, according to the paper, and his desire to remain in Jeddah with his family has contributed to the siblings deference to the authorities and caution in their public statements over the past six months. No dissident In an opinion piece for the Post last November, Salahs sisters Norah and Razan wrote while their father grieved for the home he had left, he never abandoned hope for his country. He was no dissident, they wrote. The essay did not address who killed Khashoggi. In November, the Saudi public prosecutor indicted 11 unnamed suspects over Khashoggis killing. Five of the suspects could face the death penalty on charges of ordering and committing the crime. If the men are convicted, that could pave the way for the Khashoggi family members to accept financial compensation as an alternate punishment. It is not clear whether the family would have to pardon the killers to get the money. Such an agreement could also close the case under Saudi law, without MBS or senior aides believed to be involved in the killing, facing a trial. Aidan White, director of the US-based Ethical Journalism Network, described the initial payments to Khashoggis children as one of a variety of methods by Saudi Arabia to avoid taking responsibility for his murder. Saudi authorities were also applying secrecy in the trial process and ignoring international standards of justice, he said. The elephant in the room is the United Statess failure to stand up alongside other democratic governments condemning what has happened in the Khashoggi case and demanding the Saudi government be more open and respect international standards of justice, White said, referring to US President Donald Trumps support for Saudi Arabia and the crown prince. Trump said in November: It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event maybe he did and maybe he didnt. In February, Trump refused to provide US Congress with a report determining who killed Khashoggi. Saudi officials describe the murder as a rogue operation that went wrong carried out by a team that intended to return Khashoggi to Riyadh. Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide to MBS, was part of the team and was dismissed soon after Khashoggis killing, although the crown prince reportedly continued to take advice from him as recently as January. Bill would require social media sites to carry warnings on posts the government deems false and remove certain comments. Singapores submission of wide-ranging fake news legislation in parliament has stoked fears from internet firms and human-rights groups that it may give the government too much power and hinder freedom of speech. The law, submitted on Monday, would require social media sites such as Facebook to carry warnings on posts the government deems false and remove comments against the public interest. The move came two days after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said governments should play a more active role in regulating the online platform. Singapore says it is vulnerable to fake news because of its position as a global financial hub, its mixed ethnic and religious population and widespread internet access. 190401111026653 It is ranked 151 among 180 countries rated in the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, a non-government group that promotes freedom of information, below Russia and Myanmar. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Singapores Law Minister K Shanmugam said the new legislation would not hinder free speech. This legislation deals with false statements of facts. It doesnt deal with opinions, it doesnt deal with viewpoints. You can have whatever viewpoints however reasonable or unreasonable, said Shanmugam. Draft anti-fake news law in #Singapore looks like a human rights disaster in the making, with plenty of extra-territorial application to make publishers in #Asia and elsewhere very concerned. The world according to @PAPSingapore @govsingapore censorship & "facts" determination pic.twitter.com/deiDyxW2l6 Phil Robertson (@Reaproy) April 1, 2019 The new bill proposes that the government gets online platforms to publish warnings or corrections alongside posts carrying false information, without removing them. This would be the primary response to counter falsehoods online, the law ministry said. That way, in a sense, people can read whatever they want and make up their minds. That is our preference, added Shanmugam. But Simon Milner, who works on Facebooks public policy in Asia, said after the law was tabled, the firm was concerned with aspects of the law that grant broad powers to the Singapore executive branch to compel us to remove content they deem to be false and proactively push a government notification to users. 190309181352918 Tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google all have their Asia headquarters in the nation, a low-tax financial hub seen as an island of stability in the middle of the fast-growing but often turbulent Southeast Asia region. As the most far-reaching legislation of its kind to date, this level of overreach poses significant risks to freedom of expression and speech, and could have severe ramifications both in Singapore and around the world, said Jeff Paine, managing director of the Asia Internet Coalition, an industry association of internet and technology companies in the region. Under the proposals, which must be approved by parliament, criminal sanctions including hefty fines and jail terms will be imposed if the falsehoods are spread by malicious actors who undermine society, the ministry said, without elaborating. It added that it would cut off an online sites ability to profit, without shutting it down, if the site had published three falsehoods that were against the public interest over the previous six months. It did not say how it would block a sites profit streams. This draft law will be a disaster for human rights, particularly freedom of expression and media freedom, said Phil Robertson, deputy director, Asia division, at Human Rights Watch. The definitions in the law are broad and poorly defined, leaving maximum regulatory discretion to the government officers skewed to view as misleading or false the sorts of news that challenge Singapores preferred political narratives. By Trend United Kingdom appointed new ambassador to the Republic of Azerbaijan, Trend reported citing UK's government. Mr James Sharp has been appointed Her Majestys Ambassador to the Republic of Azerbaijan in succession to Dr Carole Crofts who will be retiring from the Diplomatic Service. Mr Sharp will take up his appointment during July 2019. James Sharp began his professional career at BAE Systems company. He began work in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1987. In 1987-1988 he worked in the South America Department. In 2002-2005, Sharp worked as the ambassador of the kingdom to Kazakhstan and as a non-resident ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. He also worked as director of the Migration Directorate at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2013-2015). In 2017-2018 he worked as a political adviser in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Directorate. In a meeting with NATO secretary-general, Trump says progress has been made by member countries in defence spending. US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that NATO member nations have improved in bearing a greater share of defence costs but added that he hoped to see them spend even more in future years. Weve worked together in getting some of our allies to pay their fair share. Its called burden sharing, Trump said at the White House during a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Trump repeated his complaint that the US pays a disproportionate share of defence costs for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, he added that tremendous progress had been made and said the US relationship with NATO was good and the relationship with Stoltenberg is outstanding. The US president said he would like to see NATO members pay more than two percent of gross domestic product (GDP) for defence. Trump told NATO leaders last year to increase defence spending to four percent of GDP. Trump singled out Germany as not meeting the spending mark. Germany honestly is not paying their fair share, he said. Theyre not paying what they should be paying. Theyre paying close to one percent. The president ran on an America First platform and has suggested he might be willing to pull the US out of NATO if member counties dont significantly boost their defence spending. 190401205045962 NATO tensions Since coming to office, Trump has slapped tariffs on the European Union (EU) and pulled out of both the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal. Trumps desire for better relations with Russia also has alarmed countries that view Moscow as a threat. Trump, two former US ambassadors to NATO said in a recent report, is seen by allies as NATOs most urgent, and often most difficult, problem. The White House meeting with Stoltenberg comes before a gathering of NATO foreign ministers marking the organisations 70th anniversary. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also invited Stoltenberg to address a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday. The invitation was backed by US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and followed votes earlier this year in which Republicans voiced opposition to Trumps plans to draw down US troops in Syria and Afghanistan. Opposition leader dismisses the Maduro-stacked High Court as illegitimate and continues calls for Maduro to step down. Venezuelas chief justice on Monday asked politicians to strip opposition leader Juan Guaido of immunity, taking a step towards prosecuting him for alleged crimes as he seeks to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro. Supreme Court Justice Maikel Moreno said Guaido should be prosecuted for violating a ban on leaving the country when he went on a tour of Latin American countries that back a change in Venezuelas government. The US-backed opposition leader, who has immunity from prosecution as head of the National Assembly, is also accused by Maduros government of inciting violence linked to street protests and receiving illicit funds from abroad. Guaido declared himself interim president in late January, saying Maduros May 2018 re-election was illegitimate. Maduro accuses Guaido and the United States of staging a coup. Maduro, who calls Guaido a puppet of the US, has said that he should face justice, but has not openly called for Guaidos arrest. The chief prosecutors office has opened an investigation of Guaido but has not ordered his arrest or officially charged him with anything. Last week, the Venezuelan government said it was barring Guaido from holding office for 15 years, a move the opposition leader brushed off. On Monday, Guaido dismissed the Maduro-stacked High Court as illegitimate and continued his calls for Maduro to step down. He accused the socialist leader of using the constant blackouts across the country as political capital. The opposition leader has said years of neglect by the government has left the grid in shambles not sabotage as Maduro claims. 190328184741984 He urged Venezuelans to take the streets until Maduro leaves power. We must unite now more than ever, said Guaido at a Caracas university earlier Monday. We must mount the biggest demonstration so far to reject whats happening. Since a massive power failure struck March 7, the nation has experienced near-daily blackouts and a breakdown in critical services such as running water and public transportation. Classes have been intermittently suspended for nearly a week, while workdays tend to end in the early afternoon so millions arent stranded due to cuts to the Caracas metro service. At the same time, frustrated residents are increasingly unable to find water, make phone calls or access the internet. Millions of Venezuelans struggle to understand an announcement by Maduro a day earlier that the nations electricity is being rationed to combat daily blackouts. Power rationing Maduro said late Sunday that he was instituting a 30-day plan that would balance generation and transmission with consumption. He also called on Venezuelans to stay calm but provided no further details. 190330052444040 Office worker Raquel Mayorca said she didnt know if her lights were off because of another power failure or whether it was part of the governments plan. We are worse off now more than ever, she said, adding that the power was out on one side of the street, but working on the other. We do not know if the light went out due to a blackout, or whether they took it away because of the rationing. As the lack of electricity became the latest sticking point in an ongoing political standoff, however, many Venezuelans simply found themselves wondering what the newly announced rationing plan would entail. With few details, it was difficult to assess how effective the plan would be in restoring a consistent supply of power in the long term. Some electricity experts have also said there are no quick fixes to Venezuelas fragile power grid, presenting the prospect that electricity could be shaky and unreliable for the foreseeable future. A woman cooks dinner at her house with the help of a candle during blackouts in Venezuela [Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images] On Sunday, a mass of protesters took to the streets only to be threatened by contingents of alleged government supporters known as colectivos who appeared on motorbikes and quickly dispersed them. Videos posted on social media also showed armed men opening fire to drive residents inside. 190401061302643 Many had resigned themselves to a bleak reality. I havent had water at home for 15 days, said Maria Rojas, a 57-year-old looking for a water source to fill her jugs. You try to find water in the street that more or less safe to drink. Meanwhile, US officials in Washington said Monday they will do everything possible so that Guaidos representative can fill Venezuelas seat in the Organization of American States, a body that promotes economic, military and cultural cooperation among its members. US Ambassador Carlos Trujillo was optimistic about the possibility that a resolution to authorize Gustavo Tarre access to the seat of Venezuela will meet the 18 required votes. We have many friends who are very interested in the Venezuela issue, Trujillo told reporters after a brief ceremony in which he assumed the rotating presidency of the OAS Permanent Council. There are some who have not recognised Guaido but know that what happens in Venezuela is unacceptable. A White House whistleblower has said the Trump administration overruled security experts to give questionable security clearances to more than two dozen people, including the presidents daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Tricia Newbold, an 18-year government employee who oversaw the issuance of clearances for some senior White House aides, said she compiled a list of at least 25 officials who were initially denied security clearances last year due to disqualifying issues in their backgrounds, but then had those denials overruled by senior administration officials. The allegations were detailed in a letter and memo released Monday by Congressman Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The documents, which are based on Newbolds March 23 private committee interview, dont identify the officials on the list but say they include two current senior White House officials, as well as contractors and individuals in different parts of the Executive Office of the President of the United States. According to Ms Newbold, these individuals had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use and criminal conduct, the memo said. The release of the documents sets the stage for another fight between the White House and the Democratic-controlled House, and immediately drew criticism from House Republicans who called the allegations overblown and cherry-picked. Subpoenas expected Cummingss panel has been investigating security clearances issued to senior officials including Kushner, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former White House aide Rob Porter. That probe has picked up steam after The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump ordered officials to grant Kushner a clearance over the objections of national security officials, and after Newbold spoke out to NBC News and other news outlets about her concerns. On Monday, Cummings said he will move this week to authorise his first subpoena in the probe. The subpoena will be for the deposition of Carl Kline, who served as the White House personnel security director and supervised Newbold. He has since left the White House for the Defense Department. 190325135838313 The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. Jim Jordan, the committees ranking Republican, said in a statement that Cummingss probe is a partisan attack and an excuse to go fishing through personnel files. He also said that one person on Newbolds list is a GSA custodian. Also, in a response memo circulated to Republican members, Jordans staff cast Newbold as a disgruntled employee who had only limited knowledge of the reasons security clearances were granted. The Republican document also suggests Newbolds concerns were overblown, saying that four or five of the clearance denials for very serious reasons were a small fraction of about 5,000 employees who work in the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Terrified of going back According to Democrat Cummingss memo, however, Newbold considered the decisions to be part of a systematic problem within her office where the decisions of security clearance reviewers were continuously overridden. Newbold said she raised her concerns up the chain of command in the White House to no avail. Instead, she said, the White House retaliated, suspending her in January for 14 days without pay for not following a new policy requiring documents to be scanned as separate PDF files rather than one single PDF file. Newbold said that when she returned to work in February, she was cut out of the security clearance process. The office also announced a plan to restructure that would remove her from a supervisory role, she said. I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security, Cummingss letter quoted Newbold as telling his committee. 190301014613268 I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office, she was also quoted as saying in the letter Cummings sent to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. Im terrified of going back. I know that this will not be perceived in favour of my intentions, which is to bring back the integrity of the office. In response to Newbolds interview, Cummings is asking the White House to turn over the list she created as well as documents related to the handling of security clearances for several senior officials including Flynn, Kushner and Porter. Flynn maintained his clearance even after the White House learned that he lied to the FBI about his conversations with Russias ambassador and that he was under investigation by the Justice Department for his previous foreign work. Kushner failed to initially disclose numerous foreign meetings on security clearance forms, and, according to the Times, career officials recommended against granting him a clearance before Trump personally overruled them. Porter had high-level access with an interim security clearance even though the FBI repeatedly told the White House of past allegations of domestic violence lodged against him by two ex-wives. Porter resigned after the allegations became public. He has previously denied allegations of abuse. Increased pressure Separately on Monday, the House Judiciary Committee said that it will, this week, issue subpoenas to obtain Special Counsel Robert Muellers full report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. 190401145753073 Attorney General William Barr issued a summary of Muellers findings to Congress on March 24, saying the special counsel did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. Mueller left unresolved the question of whether Trump obstructed justice during the probe, and Barr concluded the evidence was insufficient to charge the president. Barr has said he will issue a redacted copy of Muellers full report by mid-April, but Democrats want it without redactions and have demanded it be given to them this week. The new round of subpoenas signals increased pressure from Democrats on the Republican Trump White House. Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno blames the Wikileaks founder for recent allegations of corruption in local media. Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno on Tuesday said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has repeatedly violated the terms of his asylum in the Andean nations London embassy, according to a local media interview. Moreno told the Ecuadorean Radio Broadcasters Association that Assange does not have the right to hack private accounts or phones and cannot intervene in the politics of other countries, especially those with friendly relations with Ecuador. Without providing evidence, Moreno blamed Assange for recent allegations of corruption in local media and the publication of family photos to social media. A message seeking comment from Kristinn Hrafnsson, who took over from Assange as WikiLeaks editor-in-chief last year, was not immediately returned. But Assanges defence team suggested on Twitter that Moreno was trying to use the scandal to pressure the WikiLeaks founder. Assange took refuge in Ecuadors London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. That probe was later dropped, but Assange fears he could be extradited to face charges in the United States, where federal prosecutors are investigating WikiLeaks. He says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and is putting pressure on him by isolating him from visitors and spying on him. 181206161154470 Ecuador has said its treatment of Assange was in line with international law, but that his situation cannot be extended indefinitely. President pledges constructive dialogue with opposition and vows action on youth unemployment and womens empowerment. Macky Sall has embarked on his second term as Senegals president pledging constructive dialogue with the opposition and reforms to spur development. Clad in a navy blue suit, Sall on Tuesday swore before God and before the nation to serve the people as several visiting African leaders looked on. The 57-year-old leader chose the new city of Diamniadio, some 32km from the capital, Dakar, and a product of his Emerging Senegal Plan (PSE) launched in 2014, to make his address. He urged optimism, saying it seems new economic perspectives are opening up for our country, a reference to Senegals plans to enter the hydrocarbons sector in 2021-22 via two ambitious oil and gas developments. In his brief inauguration speech, he also said he would particularly look to aid the young, pursuing employment and training policies promoting the entrepreneurial spirit and new technologies. He added he would commit to public policies favouring women and girls, ensure decent housing for all and safeguard the environment. Sall, in power since 2012, garnered a 58-percent vote share in Februarys poll, well clear of former Prime Minister Idrissa Seck, who won 20 percent. He became the frontrunner in the election after two prominent opposition figures were excluded from the election. Former Dakar Mayor Khalifa Sall and Karim Wade, son of former President Abdoulaye Wade who was in power from 2000 to 2012, were barred from running due to corruption convictions that the opposition say were politically motivated. Sall and his party deny this. The election sidelined the Socialist Party and the Senegalese Democratic Party which have dominated politics since independence from France in 1960. Although the disqualifications outraged the opposition, Sall insisted he would rule for all Senegalese. I renew my call for a constructive dialogue open to all political, economic and social forces, Sall said. The opposition has so far shown no sign of wanting to grasp any olive branch Sall might extend since he was officially proclaimed as the poll winner on March 5. Alexis Tsipras arrived less than two months after Macedonia agreed to rename itself, ending a 28-year diplomatic row. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has arrived in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, to mark a new chapter in relations after the resolution of a bitter and decades-old dispute earlier this year. This is a historic day. Until now, we only watched opportunities go by and time waste away, Zaev said on Tuesday. The prime minister of North Macedonia was exceptionally cordial, welcoming Tsipras outside the government building and even taking a selfie with him after formally posing for cameras. Zaev then showed Tsipras around his office and pointed to photos of his son and various memorabilia. Our nations are showing how courageous decisions turn what was yesterday an impossibility today becomes reality, he said after the meeting. Tsipras is the first Greek prime minister to visit the neighbouring country since Macedonia was established first as a federal Yugoslav republic in 1945, then as an independent country in 1991. He arrived less than two months after Macedonia agreed to rename itself to North Macedonia on February 12, ending a 28-year diplomatic dispute. Greece claims the name Macedonia for its ancient northern province and its legacy, but eventually agreed to allow its neighbour to use the name with a geographic qualifier added. The row had led to Greece blocking Skopjes entrance into international organisations, including NATO. The two countries are now starting a new chapter on the solid ground provided by the name agreement, Tsipras said. The two leaders pushed the agreement through in spite of fierce opposition from nationalists on both sides of the border, each feeling that their country had conceded too much. In an interview with the Macedonian news agency MIA published on Monday, Tsipras said the deal carried a steep political price. It was now up to him and Zaev to show that their people can only benefit from the path now opened. Reporting from Skopje, Al Jazeeras Maja Blasevska said that the two leaders were focused on the future, with economic cooperation a priority. Both prime ministers said that this is a very important message about this region, about the region and Europe, that countries need to go forward and not look to history, she said. Dozens of contracts have been signed today. Greek and Macedonian sides are expecting to boost economic cooperation. A business forum will be opened today in Skopje. Both prime ministers will attend the opening, which also be attended by representatives from more than 400 companies from both countries. Additionally, Greece is to assume the policing and protection of the Macedonian airspace. General Electric, a giant company with 280,000 employees and $120 billion in revenue, has run into extreme problems during the last few years. The price of its stock has crashed and the dividend has been reduced to practically nothing. This is, I think, the result of very bad management in previous years. Of its major divisions, Aviation (jet engines) and Healthcare (equipment) seem to be doing well. Renewable Energy and Power are more problematic. Both these divisions support the delivery of electricity. Renewable Energy makes wind turbines and Power makes gas and steam turbines. Together these two divisions lost about $500 million on $36 billion sales in 2018. In GEs 2018 10-K report, the poor performance of the Power segment is blamed on renewable energy penetration. The implication is that GE is unable to sell as many gas and steam turbines because these are being replaced by renewable energy, meaning wind or solar power. But wind and solar power require backup plants that provide power when the erratic wind or solar is sleeping. Those plants almost always require gas or steam turbines. Wind and solar cant displace fossil fuel plants, because those plants are needed to carry the full load when wind or solar is not generating electricity. In the 10-K report, GE claims that Renewable energy is in a rapid transition period and is on track to become a fully commercialized, unsubsidized source of energy, successfully competing in the marketplace against conventional energy sources. This claim is hilariously ignorant. GE is repeating the propaganda of the wind and solar industries. GE is part of the wind industry, but it should not substitute propaganda for facts in its 10-K. Wind or solar would become competitive if the price per kilowatt were reduced by approximately 70%. A 70% reduction is not remotely possible in the foreseeable future. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory projects that the cost of wind power will decline by 8% over the next 10 years. Wind or solar is supplementary and erratic power. Large wind installations with thousands of turbines erratically increase and decrease power output. Output of less than 5% of capacity is common in the Texas wind system. Solar power does not work at night or when it is cloudy, and often it dies in the early evening, just as power demand reaches a maximum. If aliens suddenly carried away all the wind turbines in the United States, the electric grid would carry on without a ripple, using the backup plants. The economic contribution of wind or solar is a reduction in fuel consumption in the backup plants when the wind or solar is generating electricity. In a natural-gas plant the fuel to generate a kilowatt hour of electricity costs about two cents. But to generate a kilowatt hour with wind or solar costs about seven cents in favorable locations. (The cost for wind and solar is almost the same.) The cost is seven cents, the benefit is two cents, so the subsidy is five cents per kilowatt hour. Wind or solar would be competitive only if the seven-cent cost per kilowatt hour could be reduced to two cents, a 70% reduction. Where does the five cent per kilowatt hour subsidy for wind come from? About two cents comes from the production tax credit, a 10-year, 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour federal subsidy. About 1.5 cents comes from tax equity financing, a complicated tax scheme authorized by the government that transfers money from the federal treasury to the wind developers. The remaining 1.5 cent subsidy comes from a variety of sources, including higher electric bills. These are approximate numbers given the diversity of wind installations and state policies. The cost of wind power is based on the initial capital cost of construction and the cost of ongoing maintenance. These numbers and the competitiveness of wind or solar power are not mysterious. All serious analysts come to the same conclusions with minor differences. But the industry is prone to quote the cost of renewable electricity at the plant fence, often quoting an unsubsidized number that still includes some of the subsidies. The cost at the plant fence cannot be compared to the cost of fossil fuel electricity because erratic renewable energy cannot be counted on and has to be backed up by fossil fuel plants. Wind and solar impose additional costs that I am ignoring here. For example, special power lines are often needed. In Texas $8 billion was spent on power lines to bring wind energy from west Texas to East Texas. The backup plants often require investment to make them more agile in order to respond to the rapid changes in renewable energy, and are stressed by rapid changes in output, resulting in more maintenance. They have a lower duty cycle, increasing the capital component of the cost per kilowatt hour. Among the pie-in-the-sky miracles touted by the industry is using electricity storage schemes to smooth out the erratic power from wind or solar. There are two semi-practical schemes for storing electricity: lithium batteries and pumped storage. Batteries have a place for short-term storage of power, say 10 minutes. Batteries to smooth the 17,000-megawatt Texas wind system would cost more than 10 times what the entire system cost. Pumped storage involves upper and lower lakes connected by a reversible hydroelectric system. Suitable natural lakes are rare. Pumped storage might be used to store cheap power at night and release it during the day. It is not practical for smoothing wind or solar due to the large lakes required and the cost of the hydroelectric installations. It is not encouraging that General Electric cannot get well-known facts straight. This suggests that the people who write their 10-K reports dont know what they are doing and dont know what they dont know, so they dont bother to have experts within GE review their claims. Norman Rogers writes often about renewable energy and climate change. Information about his book is here. By Trend The 16th meeting of the Azerbaijan- EU Cooperation Council will be held in Brussels April 4, the Press Service of Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry told Trend. Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov will participate in the meeting from the Azerbaijani side, while High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission Federica Mogherini and Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn will participate in the meeting from the EU side. Discussions on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, issues on the EU-Azerbaijan partnership agenda, ongoing negotiations on the new bilateral agreement, the Partnership Priorities, the Eastern Partnership and other issues are planned at the meeting. A recent article that appeared in the March 28 Wall Street Journal, "The Two Americas Have Grown Much Fiercer," by Peggy Noonan, is part of an editorial trend of late decrying the divided state of America in these times. As is typical in these pieces, the author does not place the onus for our fractured state on one side or the other, but instead promotes a theme of "Can't we all just get along?" From the point of view of the "Trumpian" camp, this writer is here to reply with a resounding "no," at least not until the core issue that motivates the tens of millions of Americans who support our sitting president is addressed. Those who try to explain America's current divisions by citing polarization into "extreme" camps miss a major aspect of the Trump phenomenon: Trump really doesn't represent an "extreme" political figure. The "extreme polarization" model might have more teeth if we had elected say, Ted Cruz, who is a doctrinaire conservative on every issue, but Trump really can't be accused of that; this was a major factor in his appeal. Like Reagan, he too was once a Democrat. He has taken positions that are very much at odds with the stereotype of the "Daddy Warbucks" image of a rapacious, uncompromising tool of Big Money portrayed by the Left. For example, just this past week, he overruled his education secretary and insisted that the Special Olympics remain funded. Though there has been some tinkering at the margins, entitlements have not been slashed. Though generally supportive of gun rights, he banned bump stocks and is favorably disposed toward "Red Flag" laws that are staunchly opposed by gun rights advocates. His SCOTUS appointments, while decidedly conservative, are hardly extreme right-wing ideologues. The Left has simply become evil. That is not to say all registered Democrats or Democrat politicians are necessarily evil, but the national-level leadership of the party and their primary backers represent a genuinely evil, oppressive, authoritarian, and not coincidentally anti-Semitic program (under the thin veneer of vicious, rabid anti-Zionism). They either represent this mindset outright (e.g., vice DNC chairman Keith Ellison, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, etc.) or are unwilling to summon the elemental courage to oppose these trends effectively in their own party (e.g., Pelosi, Schumer). What is more, almost uniformly among their leaders to include the likes of Pelosi and Schumer they will stoop to any level of dishonesty and corruption in order to obtain or maintain power (e.g., the Stalinesque Kavanaugh "show trial" hearings, the vote fraud spectacles we saw in Florida and California this past midterm election, advocating for illegal aliens to vote, advocating lowering the voting age to 16, etc.). Most egregiously, there is the outrageous Mueller affair along with the associated scandals of the previous administration (weaponizing the NSA for partisan political purposes, and so on), that even barnyard animals can see was an outright fraudulent and illegal attempt at reversing the result of a presidential election, and distracting from the very real crimes committed by the Obama administration and the Hillary campaign. There is indeed some talk on the street about a shooting civil war. Whether or not it comes to that, we are clearly more divided as a country than we have ever been since the last shooting civil war. But really, whose fault is that? Has Donald Trump divided us? Five years ago, Trump was seen as nothing more than a flamboyant, perhaps slightly eccentric real estate mogul and show biz personality. His audience for television programs like The Apprentice crossed all political lines. All the Hollywood types who trash him today were perfectly happy to party with him and to hang out with him (as long as he was buying). Today, he has been built up into a monster by the Left and its media allies. The present "rage" against him is 100% manufactured and could serve as a case study in mass brainwashing techniques. Consider not only the Mueller debacle, but the recent spectacle of the Jussie Smollett case. These examples illustrate what we "Trumpians" are really so fighting mad about. It isn't so much abortion, or gun control, or any of the other traditional conservative rallying points; it is the rule of law, the very foundation of what America was supposed to stand for. We are perfectly willing to peaceably debate the merits of all of these other issues in the public domain (assuming that there is a viable "public domain" in the form of an honest mass media, but that is another issue). We have already demonstrated during the previous administration that if we cannot have our way within the parameters of the ballot box, we will accept our losses and simply try to convince more voters to see things our way at the next opportunity. What we cannot and will not abide is an opposing side within our national community who insists on simply ignoring the rules, corrupting our national institutions, and trying to impose new "rules" designed to ensure that only its leaders and its agenda will ever prevail going forward. Obviously, we have never perfectly lived up to our ideals as a nation; this would be humanly impossible. There has always been some corruption and malfeasance on both sides of the aisle. But in ten years, we went from being America to being "Obamistan": a high-tech, relatively affluent version of a two-bit banana republic. There has never been an American president who flagrantly abused his power and flouted the rule of law to anywhere near the extent that we have seen with Obama. There has never been a president who, once having left office, devoted all of his energies to blatantly undermining his successor. These facts, combined with the manner in which those who support him have absolutely refused to see his abuses for what they are, and a Democratic Party leadership who seems determined not only to sweep his crimes under the rug, but even worse, to continue with his style of governance, is what has The Rest of Us so damned angry. It remains to be seen if our internal divisions will explode into mass violence, but the likelihood of that will be determined by the extent to which the rule of law is re-established in this country. For if we don't have recourse at the ballot box (our elections are stolen by the likes of Brenda Snipes, "ballot-harvesting", etc.), and there is a wildly uneven application of the law (in the course of a now discredited investigation, Roger Stone is arrested with more firepower on hand than was used to take down Osama bin Laden, while the likes of Comey, Hillary, Obama, Brennan, Lynch walk free), then many Americans will conclude that there is nothing left to defend our rights besides force of arms. The collapse of the Mueller charade has served to move the hands of the civil war doomsday clock back a few notches, but now we need to see real criminals held accountable. Then perhaps we can talk about being one big happy national family again. The radical left just loves Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That much cant be denied. Actress Lena Heady, most widely recognized as Cersei Lannister on HBOs hit series Game of Thrones, went so far as to say that Sandy O should run the world. Thats nothing short of crazy. But why do liberals go so crazy over Sandy O? CNNs Chris Cillizza thinks hes found a concise answer to that question, explained in his article, 129 seconds that perfectly explain why liberals go wild for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He refers to her fiery tirade aimed at Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy (R) after he mocked her Green New Deal proposal on the House floor. The tirade, like much of what weve come to expect of Sandy Os rhetoric, was little than sound and fury that signifies nothing even remotely approaching coherent thought. She suggests that if dont take the Green New Deal seriously in order to, ostensibly, tackle the threat of global warming, well continue to have water problems in Flint, Michigan, or air quality issues in the South Bronx. Of course, Lansing is just 70 miles away from Flint, but has somehow managed to escape the devastation that global warming has wrought in its neighboring city, I guess. Likewise, just across the Harlem River from the South Bronx lies the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Despite being just three miles or so away as the crow flies, global warmings effects on the air quality hasnt prevented it from remaining the wealthiest, toniest neighborhood in the entire city. To imagine that the problems of Flint and the South Bronx have even the slightest correlation to global warming requires a belief that global warming is extremely selective in deciding which locales to ravage. And thats utterly ridiculous. But like the Green New Deal, this isnt about climate change. Its about the reshaping of our economy by granting the federal government the power to redistribute wealth from the Upper East Side to the South Bronx. And indeed, leftist radicals go crazy for that stuff. The problem is, America isnt made up of leftist radicals. If you demand proof of that, allow me to direct you to the recent Senate vote on Ocasio-Cortezs Green New Deal, which was defeated by a slim margin of 57-0. What this tells us is that Senate Democrats are only too happy to tout radical environmental reforms on the stump, but even they refused to vote in favor of this incoherent socialist proposal that includes provisions for the government to guarantee a job with a family-sustaining wage, paid vacations, retirement security, and to provide all people of the United States with health care, affordable housing, and economic security. What any of that stuff has to do with global warming is anyones guess. Her passionate response to Duffys mockery comes as no surprise. After all, she fancies herself the boss. Addressing criticism of the Green New Deal in February, she told her audience, [s]o, people are like, Oh, its unrealistic. Oh, its vague. She continues, and Im like, [Y]ou try. You do it. Cuz youre not. Cuz youre not. So, until you do it, Im the boss. How about that? She was the leading voice arguing for the Green New Deals necessity, saying that the world is gonna end in 12 years if we dont do something right now. She introduced it as a serious solution to the problem she described. And in spite of all of that, she now insists that she was also leading voice arguing for its defeat in the Senate. Why did not one single Democrat senator vote in favor of the Green New Deal? Because I encouraged them to vote present, along w/ others, she tweeted. Even in defeat, she expects the world to continue indulging this fantasy that shes the boss. For some, thats entertaining fantasy, told with passion and charisma. And I think thats what Chris Cillizza means in suggesting that such passionate spectacles are a perfect example of why liberals go crazy over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But what he misses is that it also contains another perfect example of why no one else takes anything she says seriously. The introductory key part of her 129-second speech, according to Cillizza, contains the following: When we talk about concern for the environment as an elitist concern, one year ago I was waitressing in a taco shop in downtown Manhattan. I just got health insurance for the first time a month ago. This is not an elitist issue. This is a woman with a degree in economics and international relations from Boston University, who graduated in 2011. When one considers that only a third of Americans have a four-year college degree, its safe to say that shes been a fairly privileged position since then when it came to finding gainful employment. Yet seven years after having graduated, she was waitressing in taco shop. Now, nothing against waitresses in taco shops. But its safe to say that a woman in her late twenties serving tacos wouldnt be the first person you might ask for financial advice, much less give her your wallet to spend your money how she thinks is wisest. But the fact that shes failed to find financial success prior to taxpayers giving her a cozy six-figure salary isnt the worst of this. She said that she just got health insurance for the first time a month ago. Shes almost certainly lying about having never had health insurance at any point in her life. But lets presume she meant in her adult life, as in after college. First of all, as a worker earning income, wasnt she required by ObamaCares individual mandate to have health insurance? Furthermore, arent all the affordable new options created by ObamaCare the reason that we couldnt repeal it without millions of people dying, or some such? So, despite a law saying she has to have health insurance, and a massive piece of federal legislation designed to make it affordable for people like her, she still could not manage her own healthcare risk. This is not really normal, by the way. According to the CDC, only 12.8% of adults aged 18-65 were uninsured in 2017. Consider the following. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grew up in Westchester County, one of the wealthiest counties with some of the finest schools in New York state. She went to college at Boston University and earned a degree. Yet in spite of all of those advantages, she still managed to fail miserably at caring for herself throughout her adult life until taxpayers gave her an ample salary and health insurance. She got to Congress, and immediately introduces her Green New Deal, meant to reshape the American economy and way of life. Not one single member of her own party voted in favor of it. Absolutely nothing about that story suggests that she should be the boss of anything, much less running the world as some simple Hollywood types suggest. And while radical leftists will continue to go crazy over her passionately inane tirades, shes got a massive credibility problem with any Americans outside that demographic. William Sullivan blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter. The chutzpah is off the charts: Voice of Europe reported on Saturday that the Ishbilia mosque in Seville, Spain, is demanding that King Felipe VI apologize for the Reconquista, the Christian Reconquest of Spain. The mosques president, Yihad Sarasua, addressed the King in a Facebook post: Sir, being the King of Spain, I believe that the historical moment has arrived to carry out the recognition of the vileness, plunder, displacement and murders carried out by orders of the Catholic kings and their most direct collaborators, which culminated with the surrender of Granada and the breach of everything subscribed to the Muslim community. Sirasua claimed: Never has existed such a fierce persecution and eagerness to eliminate a religious community, as was carried out by the old Spanish royalty in the times of Felipe II, an extermination that culminated in the War of the Alpujarres subsequent to the Pragmatic Sanction of 1567. He concluded: As a descendant of the aforementioned kings, what a formidable opportunity you would have to demonstrate to the Muslim community your respect and your discrepancy, with the Islamic theses, apologising to our community for so many atrocities and interceding for the recognition of Spanish nationality for the descendants of Al Andalus, as was done with the Sephardic Jewish community. Sure, Yihad. Right after you folks apologize for the Islamic conquest of Spain that preceded the Reconquista. But of course, you will never, ever do that, because for jihadis and Islamic supremacists, every atrocity they ever commit is the Infidel's fault. But if Yihad Sirasua were inclined to be honest, he would have plenty to apologize for. The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, the first and only comprehensive history of the 1,400-year jihad phenomenon worldwide in the English language, shows that Muslim Spain was anything but pluralist -- it was miserable to live as a Christian there. Christians could never be sure that they would not be harassed. One contemporary account tells of priests being pelted with rocks and dung by Muslims while on the way to a cemetery. The dhimmis suffered severe economic hardship: Paul Alvarus, a ninth-century Christian in Cordoba, complained about the unbearable tax that Muslims levied on Christians. Nor could Christians say anything about their lot, because it was proscribed by Islamic law, and criticizing Islam, Muhammad, or the Quran in any manner was a death-penalty offense. In 850, Perfectus, a Christian priest, engaged a group of Muslims in conversation about Islam; his opinion of the conquerors religion was not positive. For this, Perfectus was arrested and put to death. Not long thereafter, Joannes, a Christian merchant, was said to have invoked Muhammads name in his sales pitch. He was lashed and given a lengthy prison sentence. Christian and Muslim sources contain numerous records of similar incidents in the early part of the tenth century. Around 910, in one of many such episodes, a woman was executed for proclaiming that Jesus was God and that Muhammad had lied to his followers. Far from being a paradise of tolerance, Umayyad Spain became a center of the Islamic slave trade. Muslim buyers could purchase sex-slave girls as young as eleven years old, as well as slave boys for sex as well, or slave boys raised to become slave soldiers. Also for sale were eunuchs, useful for guarding harems. Blonde slaves seized in jihad raids on Christian nations north of al-Andalus were especially prized and fetched high prices. Slave traders would use makeup to whiten the faces and dye to lighten the hair of darker slaves, so that they could get more money for them. A 12th-century witness of the sale of sex slaves described the market: The merchant tells the slave girls to act in a coquettish manner with the old men and with the timid men among the potential buyers to make them crazy with desire. The merchant paints red the tips of the fingers of a white slave; he paints in gold those of a black slave; and he dresses them all in transparent clothes, the white female slaves in pink and the black ones in yellow and red. If the girls did not cooperate, of course, they would be beaten or killed. The primary market for slaves among Muslims was for non-Muslims, as enslaving fellow Muslims was considered a violation of the Qurans requirement to be merciful to one another (48:29); hence Muslim slave traders had to look to non-Muslim communities for merchandise. Yihad Sirasua will never tell you any of that, because if the public knew those facts and others, they wouldnt favor the policies he wants Spain, and the West in general, to adopt. The truth that he doesnt want you to know is in The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS -- truths he and his allies have been working actively suppress. As his letter to the King shows, history has today become a weapon to influence current public policy. Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here. Are the long knives finally out for far-left Jew-hating Rep. Ilhan Omar? She's under investigation for corruption now, and the media coverage is very, very unfriendly: Here's WJLA/ ABC 7's report from James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcasting: WASHINGTON (SBG) - Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., the controversial freshman House Democrat, is soon to learn the results of a probe into her campaign spending as a state lawmaker in Minnesota, Sinclair has learned, with authorities there having recently completed their investigation and preparing to issue rulings in a pair of complaints Omar faces. The complaints were filed last year, while Omar cruised to election to the House of Representatives, by a Republican state lawmaker, Rep. Steve Drazkowski. In referring Omar to the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board, Drazkowski alleged that Omar improperly spent close to $6,000 in campaign funds for personal use, including payments to her divorce attorney and for travel to Boston and Estonia. Drazkowski's filing of the two complaints followed an earlier episode in which Omar repaid $2,500 for honoraria she received for speeches at colleges that receive state funding, a violation of ethics rules for Minnesota lawmakers. "I had observed a long pattern," Drazkowski told Sinclair in an interview from his office in southeastern Minnesota. "Representative Omar hasn't followed the law. She's repeatedly trampled on the laws of the state in a variety of areas, and gotten by with it." O.K., so what do we have here? She took campaign money to pay personal expenses (the divorce is investigation-worthy all by itself, even if she hadn't been accused of using campaign funds to pay for it, given that it may involve immigration fraud with a marriage to her brother). She also took campaign cash to pay for trips to Estonia and Boston. The laws are strict prohibiting that. Besides all of this, she also took an honorarium from a Minnesota university for a speech, which as a public official, is a no-no. It was money she was forced to give back. As her Minnesota rival notes, she does seem to have a long record of thumbing her nose at the rules. What leaps out is how brazen she is about it. A Republican doing that sort of thing would be drummed out of his committee assignments as he wrestled with his legal problems. And hey, that's no speculation - it really happened with California's Rep. Duncan Hunter who's accused of the exact same thing -- spending campaign cash for a trip to Italy. That accused misdeed got him knocked off his House committee assignments, even as his own San Diego back-county voters decided it was a political setup and re-elected him. So now we return to Omar, whose anti-Semitic statements weren't quite enough to get her removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee after she claimed that Jews were "all about the Benjamins, baby." She who smelt it dealt it. She now faces a slew of money-corruption allegations that got Republicans removed from their committee assignments even before such deeds went to court. But there seems to be some sort of exception for her with the Democrats and she knows it. What is it that keeps her from facing any consequences for her own Benjamin activity, and from doing more and more of it? Double standard, anyone? Even the press is noticing, as the ABC 7 report above shows. It's almost we're in ... Somalia. And not because of skin color. Image credit: Lorie Shaull, via Wikmedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 Former Vice President Joe Biden is creepy most famously for his compulsive groping, but a new case shows he's even creepier on the topic of Ukaine. Here's a distilled tweet from Brit Hume: In January of last year, Biden boasted to a friendly foreign policy audience that he used a threat to withhold US aid to get Ukraine to fire its state prosecutor. It worked. Biden did not reveal that the prosecutor was investigating the company employing Bidens surviving son. https://t.co/ZlTYFHU92w Brit Hume (@brithume) April 2, 2019 So the guy was out bragging and praising himself to some friendly swampers in the foreign policy community, telling them what a big corruption fighter he was by getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired ... and didn't mention that that same Ukrainian prosecutor had Biden's own rapacious kid, Hunter Biden, under investigation? The hypocrisy here is positively 'creepy,' at least as creepy as Biden's hand-gropings. Hume links to an important investigative report by the Hill's ace reporter, John Solomon, who actually interviewed Ukrainians involved in the mess. He backlinks to a New York Times report about how the now-fired prosecutor, Viktor Shokin and his ouster looked at the time. Solomon writes: In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didnt immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. I said, Youre not getting the billion. Im going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: Im leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, youre not getting the money, Biden recalled telling Poroshenko. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time, Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat. Ukrainians confirmed to Solomon that Biden's kid was taking in more than $100,000 a month in payments as a board member for the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings, which was under investigation for corrupt practices at the time. Nobody actually knows what he did. The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Bidens younger son, Hunter, as a board member. U.S. banking records show Hunter Bidens American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts usually more than $166,000 a month from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. Solomon's report is long and nuanced, answering many questions a reader may have, Solomon didn't miss anything. What stands out now is why Biden's kid was paid so much under the rationale of adding value to the company. Maybe he did add value, but the only possible way he could have added that much value would likely be from being able to pick up a phone and call his father, who was the vice president at the time. Did Joe Biden amount to Hunter Biden's added value? If so, it suggests that Biden was selling political favors out of his office - and expected no one would notice. Creepy? You bet. Protests are breaking out in the Philippines over China's takeover of Thitu island near the Spratly and Paracel chains in the South China Sea, which is an island recognized in international law as belonging to the Philippines. The Philippine protests are about China. But they're really directed at the Philippines's president, Rodrigo Duterte, who up until now has tried to persuade everyone that he's a tough guy -- who by his actions was all in for bowing to China. The mask is off. The locals are protesting that he's really not that tough. So now he's got this, as reported by Asia Times: Reports of a large armada of Chinese boats surrounding a Philippine-occupied island in the South China Sea has renewed tensions between the two rival claimants in the strategic maritime area. Under rising political pressure, President Rodrigo Dutertes government has reportedly filed a diplomatic protest with China over the issue, a diplomatic break from his administrations conciliatory approach towards Beijing. Opposition figures, meanwhile, are upping the tempo of their criticism that Dutertes government is intentionally soft-pedaling on Chinas maritime assertiveness, politically charged accusations ahead of highly polarized and crucial midterm elections due in May. Seems that appeasing Beijing wasn't such a bright idea after all. A lot of countries are disputing China over those islands, but only Philippines, under Duterte, thought appeasement would be the way to go with the ravenous behemoth to its northwest. Bowing down to China has not only cost the Philippines an island, it's now leading to domestic turmoil. Asia Times continues: They have also called on Duterte to take a tougher stance on rising reports that Chinese vessels are harassing Filipino fishermen in the contested waters, including through the use of high-powered water cannons. So far this year an estimated 617 Chinese fishing vessels suspected of belonging to the Peoples Liberal Army Maritime Militia Forces (PLA-MFF) have reportedly swarmed Thitu Island, which has been occupied by Filipino troops since the mid-1970s. As I noted here last month: ...the activity is directly the result of the Duterte administration of the Philippines' appeasement policies with China. The AFP story notes that the Duterte administration tore down a fisherman's shack on Thitu at the Chinese government's request in 2017. Just as important, yet not cited by AFP, they also squelched the construction of a U.S. military base on Palawan that long, narrow island jutting at an odd angle from the Philippine archipelago which had been in planning for years (author Robert D. Kaplan describes it in Imperial Grunts), which would have provided a measure of deterrence as well as intelligence capabilities to ward off challenges. Taiwanese officials have told me they suspect that some Filipino officials have been bought off. For their efforts, they're now getting...fishing boats, the famous Chinese fishing boats running the genuine Philippine fishermen off their own fishing grounds and denying them access to their island. It shows that appeasing the dragon in the hopes it would eat them last is not working out well for them. China has its choice of countries to kick around, given the six nations that have territorial claims on the Spratlys, and they have chosen the appeasing one, the Philippines. One can only hope that there will be some domestic repercussions in the Philippines for Duterte over this stupdity. The Asian Times story provides a lot more detail about why this performance by Duterte is so objectionable, the quotes are enough to make anyone gag. Here's one from a Duterte military official; Indeed there (is a) presence of Chinese vessels in the area, Edgard Arevalo, Armed Forces of the Philippines spokesperson said on April 1. Whats happening is they remain stationary in the area. Some come and go, thats why its quite inaccurate to report the number because some of them come and go. Although some of them stay for a few days or weeks, the spokesperson said. What an idiot. The Chinese treat him like one, too, with this whopper from China's ambassador: They are actually fishermen. If they are fishing there, they must be fishermen, the Chinese envoy added. The Asia Times also reports that the Duterte government has asked Filipino fishermen to not go to the islands to fish, but to concentrate on fishing in municipal areas instead. Meanwhile, protestors in the streets are openly questioning whether Duterte really made a protest at all. With this much to distrust, it's obvious the island-grab is making an impact in Philippine politics. Duterte ran as a populist, which may well cancel out the appeal of populism and preclude the emergence of a corrective Trump-style, or Bolsonaro-style new leader. Duterte has sucked too much oxygen out of the room for that. But with people wanting him out, it's obvious they want someone who actually cares about the country. I wonder if a tough military leader might now be on the cards. What's clear, though, from this picture, is that appeasing China is no way to make Philippines great again. It's actually the best way to make the Philippines a colony again. ObamaCare is back in the news. The Democrats are once again saying that President Trump and the GOP want to kill provisions protecting "preexisting conditions". It may be good politics but not a solution to what really hurts ObamaCare. In other words, most consumers can not afford the premiums or deductibles. Let me give you a recent example I heard about. A local couple with a couple of kids went to the website to purchase a policy. They found out that annual premiums would hit $5,000 plus a $10,000 deductible. In the end, he did not want to pay $15,000 before the policy kicks in. Unfortunately, no one is talking about the premiums or deductibles. At the same time, the GOP killed itself when the late Senator John McCain killed the repeal and handed the issue to Democrats in the last election. We are in a mess and we need a U.S. House that wants to do something other running a subpoena factory. I love what Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) is proposing. He wants to put the states in charge of health care: The third way is health care freedom led by states, not the federal government. That freedom should include direct primary care, health savings, expanded health sharing organizations, a robust market for actual portable catastrophic insurance unconstrained by mandates, and a functioning safety net to ensure no American falls through the cracks. The president is right to lead on this and if conservatives will follow with a message of health care freedom, there is nothing to fear in supporting Texas v. Azar. Great idea. Put the issue on the laps of governors and legislatures and give them the responsibility and flexibility to create plans that work in Texas, New York, or Wyoming. P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter. I think that President Trump is going after what the Left calls root causes in their typical grab for money to redistribute, purportedly to eliminate some social problem they blame on poverty. But Trump is not seeking a nebulous version of Ultimate Social Justice, he is focused on the real obstacles to immigration reform, and I think he has a specific goal in mind as he threatens a complete border closure. Simply stated, at home, Trump wants big business, as embodied in the US Chamber of Commerce, to grasp that he will not allow them to continue stonewall on open borders, targeting their donations to prevent any legal reform. Ever since NAFTA, huge investments have taken place predicted on the free movement of good across the border. Those investments are now held hostage by Trumps threat. The implicit deal: either loudly and emphatically lobby for a simple revision to immigration law to allow asylum claimants to wait on the southern side of the border while their claims are adjudicated or endure a semi-catastrophic disruption. Trump knows that he has an excellent public case to make for this simple reform. With illegals now well aware that bringing along minors and an asylum claim guarantee admission to the USA, a hundred thousand a month are flooding in. The claims of a manufactured crisis look silly. Even Jeh Johnson, Obamas DHS secretary admits it is real. But with the C of C directing massive donations to Republicans to help sabotage reform, and to Democrats to stonewall it, no progress can be made. If Trump is able to carry out the threat and make it stick, the C of C and its big business constituents might well decide that a push for asylum claim reform is in their interest. Especially since the change in asylum reform would have minimal impact on the availability of laborers. The problem is with families and children. The other target, of course, is Mexico. But remember that Mexicos real interests have nothing to do with impoverished families from below its southern border. There is little reason to sacrifice the welfare of Mexicans, dependent on the border remaining open, simply to annoy the gringos. President Trump has made threats to close the border with Mexico before, and all sorts of people call the current threat an unthinkable measure. That may be the biggest reason of all for him to carry out the threat if last ditch efforts to persuade the C of C to support asylum reform fall short. The unlimited flow of phony asylum seekers could easily bring millions of dependents not men willing and able to work as before, but dependents who need a lot of social services is an existential threat to our social order. Trump faces hardball negotiations with North Korea, China, Turkey, and many others. He cant afford to be seen as making empty threats. Pushing the border crisis into a crisis that impacts the interests of the key obstacles to reform, costly though it will be in the short run, maybe an investment he is willing to make. Of course, there would be media attention to families torn apart by the border closure. Stand by for comparisons to North Koreans cut off from the relatives in South Korea. But the human interest angle would be secondary to reports of layoffs as factories, cut off from parts and other supplies from Mexico, or factories sending their output to Mexico for final assembly that must shut down. The most serious headlines and pressure will be: Trump kills the economic recovery (that Obama started) and the like. But with his credibility enhanced and that of his Democrat critics diminished, Trump already is thinking the unthinkable and may well gamble on doing it. George Clooney is calling for a boycott of Brunei-owned luxury hotels because that nation has an anti-gay death penalty. Did I miss all the protests against Iran for having similar laws? Nope, Hollywood, almost all the media and other Democrats actively supported Barack Obama when he and his administration gave Iran hundreds of billions while they continually pledge death to America. Why arent Clooney and other Democrats supporting Trump for his boycotts and sanctions of Iran instead of condemning him for pulling out if they are so concerned about LBGT rights? Homosexuality in Iranian Criminal Law Homosexuality is against the law in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Sharia, the Islamic legal system, condemns homosexuality as a crime worthy of death. The Iranian criminal threatens gay individuals with lashes and the death penalty. Men always face the death penalty if they were the "passive" partner in a homosexual act. According to the underlying logic, such men behave like women, making them all the more unnatural. The "active" partner faces the death penalty under certain conditions, and otherwise receive 100 lashes. Women receive a sentence of 100 lashes in all cases. After President Obama issued executive orders forcing schools to allow boys and men to invade girls and womens safe space, North Carolina passed sensible bathroom laws that most Americans would support. Democrats throughout the U.S. protested and demanded boycotts. Somehow, they didn't also boycott Iran, Cuba and other countries that would never allow same sex bathrooms. If Obama and Democrats cared so much about same sex bathrooms, why didnt they run it as a campaign issue in 2012 and introduce legislation. Somehow, Democrats support states rights when sanctuary cities and states willingly ignore laws Congress passed, but do not believe in states rights when a state like North Carolina passes a law to go against a dictatorial edict. President Obama and other Democrats talked tough on illegal immigration, called the situation at the border a crisis, passed laws funding border barriers, separated children from parents at the border -- and journalists and immigration groups rarely protested. Obama and other Democrats were not repeatedly called racists and xenophobes. Illegal aliens in custody also died at the same rate during Obamas eight years as during Trumps first two years -- and there was no outcry or protests. The media did not blame Obama for the deaths. Therefore, it is obvious that the attacks on Trump are purely political. FACT CHECK: DID OBAMA SAY THAT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS DISRESPECT THE RULE OF LAW? Those who enter our country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law. And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws, Immigrant deaths under Trump on par with Obama numbers: DHS The number of immigrant deaths under the Trump administration is on par with the number of deaths seen during the Obama administration, according to data obtained by the Washington Examiner. The data show no appreciable change in the death of immigrants held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as Democrats this week were trying to press administration officials on death tolls. Yes, Obama separated families at the border, too President Barack Obama separated parents from their children at the border. Obama prosecuted mothers for coming to the United States illegally. He fast tracked deportations. And yes, he housed unaccompanied children in tent cities. For much of the country and President Donald Trump the prevailing belief is that Obama was the president who went easier on immigrants. Neither Obama nor Democrats created Trump's zero-tolerance policy, which calls for every illegal border crosser to be prosecuted and leads to their children being detained in separate facilities before being shipped to a shelter and eventually a sponsor family. But Obama's policy helped create the road map of enforcement that Trump has been following and building on. The Defense of Marriage Act passed overwhelmingly in 1996 with almost all Democrats supporting it. Obama and Hillary ran in 2008 against same sex marriage. Why werent all the Democrats called homophobes by Hollywood and others? Initially introduced in May 1996, DOMA passed both houses of Congress by large, veto-proof majorities and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in September 1996. By defining "spouse" and its related terms to signify a heterosexual couple in a recognized marriage, Section 3 codified non-recognition of same-sex marriages for all federal purposes, including insurance benefits for government employees, social security survivors' benefits, immigration, bankruptcy, and the filing of joint tax returns, as well as excluding same-sex spouses from the scope of laws protecting families of federal officers (18 U. S. C. 115), laws evaluating financial aid eligibility, and federal ethics laws applicable to opposite-sex spouses. The Civil War statues were up for over 150 years so why did the protests and violence wait for Trump? The media and other Democrats know that when Trump said there were good people on both sides of the issue he was talking about the statues and not praising white Supremacists, Nazis, or members of Antifa. Democrats continue to lie about Trump being a racist to gin up racial hate. George Clooney and many other activists protested loudly about Darfur during Bushs Presidency so why were there so few protests during Obamas years since the killings continued? National Mall protest meant to urge White House to act on crisis in Sudan Thousands of people joined celebrities and lawmakers at a rally Sunday urging the Bush administration and Congress to help end genocide in Sudans Darfur region. The Darfur genocide 15 years on: What has changed? Jewish World Watch (JWW) came into being as a response to the Darfur genocide. The Darfuris remain a vital cornerstone of our work. We continue to monitor and support the refugees living in camps in Chad 15 years after fleeing their homes in western Sudan, as well as the internally displaced persons in the Darfur region of Sudan, and the Darfuri returnees. While Darfur has lost its prominence in the global consciousness, it remains an embodiment of the never again mantra, resuscitated every time other conflicts start to tip the scales towards mass atrocities. What many dont recognize is that the instability in the Darfur region has continued ever since the conflict began in 2003. Darfur and Congo By Nicholas D. Kristof June 20, 2007 1:04 pm June 20, 2007 1:04 pm Ive often been asked why I write so much more about Darfur than Congo, since far more people have been killed in Congo. After all, fewer than half a million have probably died in Darfur, compared to 4 million in Congo. Summary: Democrats do and say whatever is necessary to get their power back. They will seek to destroy anyone who gets in their way no matter what they say or do. They do not want a president to give the power and purse back to the people. Sometimes they are tough on immigration. Sometimes they dont care. They will even spy on opponents and seek to destroy them with fake news about Russian collusion. Today, there is a story out that a whistleblower from the White House is talking about the Trump administration overriding her concerns on security clearances. Where was her concern when Hillary, Obama and so many others were trafficking classified documents on a non-secure computer? My guess is that she, like most bureaucrats, wanted Hillary in the White House no matter how many laws she broke. Photo credit Nearly a decade before Thomas Edison began working on incandescent lamps and a more affordable way to bring the bright world of electricity to Victorian homes, a fine country house near the town of Rothbury in Northumberland, England, was lit entirely by electricity. In those times, there was no national electric grid you could tap into. If you wanted electricity, you had to generate it yourself. Most people did not have the technological knowhow or the inclination to light their houses with electric lamps. Even if some of them did, they probably didnt have the money to bring their desires to fruition. But William Armstrong was an inventor and a wealthy industrialist. Together with architect Richard Norman Shaw, William Armstrong built Cragside, a modest mansion in mock Tudor style set on the slopes of a small hill just outside Rothbury. He then equipped the house with all sorts of wonderful inventions such as a water-powered laundry, an early version of a dishwasher, a hydraulic lift, a hydroelectric rotisserie, a dumb waiter (a small elevator that moved good between floors), among other things. To power all these machines, Armstrong dammed a number of small streams in the area to create a total of five reservoirs. On one of these, he installed a hydraulic engine which drove the many hydraulic machineries in his house. A year later, in 1870, Armstrong installed a dynamo creating the worlds first domestic hydroelectric plant. Electricity from this plant was used to power Cragside and the many farm buildings on the estate. The first room to be electrically lighted was the gallery. Only a single arc lamp hung from the ceiling. Later, the entire house was wired for electricity. At one point there were twelve overhead lamps in the gallery alone, and eight additional lamps that could be turned on when the lamps in the dining room were no longer required. A screw turbine was installed in 2014. As water passes through the spiral blades it causes the screw to turn, thereby harnessing the energy of falling water. Photo credit: Christopher Down/Wikimedia Armstrong continued to extend and improve his power plant increasing its capacity by many fold. But after his death, the house lay abandoned and after nearly a century of neglect, the houses original power source was restored in 2006. A further upgrade in 2014 raised the generators capacity to 12 kW, enough to light all 350 light bulbs in the house. Armstrongs lifelong love affair with water began when he was very young. When fishing one day on the River Dee at Dentdale in the Pennines, he saw a waterwheel in action, supplying power to a marble quarry. It occurred to him that only a small part of the water power was being used to drive the wheel, which made him think how great the force of water would be if its energy could be concentrated in one column. When he returned to Newcastle, he designed a rotary engine powered by water, and this was built in the High Bridge works of his friend Henry Watson. Armstrong subsequently developed a piston engine instead of a rotary one, which he installed in what became the worlds first hydraulic crane. William Armstrong Armstrong became a successful businessman manufacturing hydraulic cranes. He received orders from Edinburgh and Northern Railways and from Liverpool Docks, as well as for hydraulic machinery for dock gates in Grimsby. On average, Armstrongs company manufactured one hundred cranes per year. During the Crimean War, Armstrong designed a light, mobile field gun having greater range and accuracy than any of its rivals. Armstrong than turned over the patents for his guns to the British government, for which he was knighted and was appointed engineer to the War Department. By the 1880s, his company had expanded into ship building. His shipbuilding yard stretched for three-quarters of a mile along Tyneside and was the only factory in the world that could build a battleship and arm it completely. As Armstrong grew older, he began to devote more and more time to his favorite occupations, which wasaside from electrical experiments at Craigsideplanting trees. Armstrong planted over seven million trees and shrubs around his estate, appreciably changing the climate in this corner of Northumberland. After Lord Armstrongs death in 1900, the family fortune was lost and the house was deserted. In 1940, Cragside was taken over by the Army and billeted as part of the war effort. When they left, the property was linked up to the national grid. The house was opened to the public for the first time in 1979. Leading image of Cragside by David Nicholls/Flickr The original hydropower cylinders on the Northumberland estate's grounds from Victorian times. The original hydropower cylinders on the grounds which Lord Armstrong used to power the estate. Photo credit: David Nicholls/Flickr Vienna meeting held between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan marks a new beginning in bilateral negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Peter M. Tase, expert in Transatlantic Relations and Azerbaijani Studies, a senior advisor to the Global Engineering Deans Council and to various European and Latin American governments, told Trend. On March 29, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, in his meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, showed a great level of statecraft and pragmatism throughout the bilateral discussions. It is imperative to emphasize that Azerbaijan has constantly delineated a strong interest towards solving the Nagorno-Karabakh protracted conflict through peaceful means. The Vienna meeting marks a new beginning in the bilateral negotiations and discussions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, this is a useful platform that has and will continue to handle all pending matters that affect both countries, said the US expert. He pointed out that indeed, until now, Armenia and its leadership has been engaged in negotiations only to earn additional time and preserve the current status-quo, a tactic that is unacceptable towards Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani people. The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs and the international community in general must remain on alert and further pressure Yerevan to withdraw its armed troops from the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan and refrain from violating human rights within the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan, noted Tase. Tase further noted that European Union structures in charge of European security must take a closer look to the progress of these negotiations and exert pressure so that Armenian leadership has no more opportunities to buy more valuable time in the negotiations' table, rather deliver concrete results based on what has been discussed and agreed upon with their counterparts from the government of Azerbaijan. The President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan met on March 29 in Vienna for the first time under the auspices of the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group (Igor Popov of the Russian Federation, Stephane Visconti of France, and Andrew Schofer of the United States of America). The meeting was also attended by Foreign Ministers Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and Elmar Mammadyarov. Andrzej Kasprzyk, the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, also participated in the meeting. The statement issued on the results of the meeting reads that the two leaders underlined the importance of building up an environment conducive to peace and taking further concrete and tangible steps in the negotiation process to find a peaceful solution to the conflict. Recalling their conversation in Dushanbe, the leaders recommitted to strengthening the ceasefire and improving the mechanism for direct communication. They also agreed to develop a number of measures in the humanitarian field, said the statement. 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. ASUS appears to have tested one of its upcoming smartphones recently using the Geekbench online benchmark. The device identified by model number ASUS_I01WD is believed to bear the ZenFone 6 or rather the ZenFone 6Z moniker but more on that later and as noted by GSMArena, this is the same model number which was spotted recently in the Wi-Fi Alliance database where it received its wireless certificate. Powered by a top-tier chipset Although Geekbench doesnt reveal the phones market name, the tool does shed some light on some key internal components. The phone will be powered by the Snapdragon 855 chipset supplied by Qualcomm, and this is denoted by the msmnile motherboard as nile is the codename used by Qualcomms fastest mobile chipset to date. Advertisement The octa-core processor is coupled with 6GB of RAM and at the time of testing, the device ran Android 9 Pie. Overall the unit scored 3,527 points and 11,190 points in the single and multi-core tests, respectively. The score is on par with other Snapdragon 855-powered smartphones and seems even slightly higher when compared to the points tallied by the Qualcomm-powered Samsung Galaxy S10 which yielded 3,438 and 10,637 points on average. Other details have not been mentioned but it is believed that the upcoming ASUS flagship will have a less conventional design and could adopt a motorized front-facing camera or a sliding mechanism, borrowing some design elements from OEMs including VIVO and OPPO. Its unclear whether the unusual design language will be used by the entire ZenFone 6 series or if it will be reserved for the top-tier variant. The confusing ZenFone naming scheme Advertisement The ASUS_I01WD spotted at Geekbench will be a flagship phone given the inclusion of Qualcomms top-tier chipset but the final name of the device remains unknown. Fact is that ASUS smartphones arent too consistent with the usual naming scheme adopted by most other OEMs who tend to differentiate between smartphones in the same series using Plus and Lite suffixes. An example of this was the ASUS ZenFone 5 series launched last year. The standard model called simply the ZenFone 5 was a mid-range device and was flanked by the ZenFone 5Q at the lower end (also known as Lite in some markets), and the ZenFone 5Z (not Plus) at the flagship end of the spectrum. Advertisement Having said that, its more likely that the upcoming ASUS_I01WD will be launched as the ZenFone 6Z but this has yet to be confirmed. What has been confirmed via ads in magazines is that the OEM will introduce the ZenFone 6 on May 14 in Valencia, Spain. A series wasnt mentioned in the ad but it is likely that the ZenFone 6 will be part of a lineup, and just as likely that the flagship-grade ASUS_I01WD will be included in it. The same ad also hinted that the ASUS ZenFone 6 will be the OEMs first to abandon display notches in favor of a full-screen design with thin bezels all around, although some leaked early prototypes suggest that ASUS has tested several notch designs for the series. A bezel-less design further fuels the possibility of a motorized camera or slider mechanism to be adopted, and should give the series a higher chance to be competitive in the market space. Google+ shut down today, following a run of a little over seven years. Google+ was supposed to be the search engines big social media platform, but things didnt work out. For a company as big as Google, its hard to fathom how Google+ was not successful. It made many mistakes, which led to the social media platform dissolving on April 2, 2019. Lets talk about those mistakes Google inarguably made. The Beginning Google+ was announced in June 2011, at Googles annual developer conference. Vic Gundotra was in charge of this new social media platform. Google touted this as a new way to interact with your friends. It introduced circles which were essentially groups of your friends within the social network. Allowing you to share content with specific groups only, getting notifications from specific groups, etc. Google+ gave users more granular control than Facebook or Twitter. Advertisement Within the first six months, Google+ had amassed over 90 million users. That might seem like a big number, but seeing as Googles other services have close to a billion users, that is a pretty small number for Google+. It grew pretty steadily, but many started to drop off after the first couple of years. As they were realizing that none of their real-life friends were using the network, and thus they had no reason to use it. Google+ was more of a social network for Google and Android fans. For the first three years, Google+s growth was exponential. Part of this was due to the fact that Google+ was implemented into almost every other Google service on the planet. From comments on YouTube and Blogger, to adding the +1 button on websites, and even getting notifications on other Google sites like Gmail. But then, Google started to break out all of Google+s features into different products like Google+ Messenger, Google Photos, etc. That definitely looked like the beginning of the end, back in 2014. Advertisement The Writing Was On The Wall In 2014, Vic Gundotra left Google. Gundotra was one of the co-founders of Google+ and left some other engineers in charge of the platform. That was really when usage of the product started to drop off. As Google was not putting out many updates to the platform, and adding new features. Following Gundotras departure in 2014, Google started to break out many of Google+s big features and turning them into standalone products. Essentially putting the writing on the wall that Google+ may be dissolved soon. Some of those standalone products include Google Photos, and Google Messenger (which later merged with Hangouts, which is being shut down itself, next year). Now that Google Photos was no longer part of the platform, users had one less reason to go to Google+ and actually use the platform. This is when users began to stop using the platform. Advertisement Though, the writing was on the wall way back in 2014, Google+ did not shut down for another five years. Not Putting Enough Resources Into Google+ Theres really no reason why Google could not be the new social media juggernaut. Google has billions of users around the world, but it just could not get enough people to use Google+. After Gundotra left in 2014, Google stopped giving Google+ as many resources as it once had. While Google did not announce any layoffs, it was quite clear that there were far fewer people working on Google+ than just a year prior. Advertisement Google, like a lot of startups, will start a new project, throw a ton of resources at it and then expect it to keep on growing while being managed autonomously. That cant happen with Google+, or you get the platform that Google+ has been for the past year or so. With all kinds of porn spam all over the place, and little to no actual users on the platform. This is similar to what Google has done with other products like Hangouts, Inbox and YouTube Gaming, which have all been sunset recently, or will be in the near future. All of these products being killed off is really starting to negatively affect Googles brand. As users are not sure if the product they are using will be around in a year. Advertisement The Redesign No One Asked For Google+ did get a redesign in 2015, though virtually no users actually liked the redesign. With many reverting back to the old design before Google+ ultimately got rid of that option. The redesign was meant to make the platform faster and easier to use, but for many Google+ users, it turned out to be the opposite. That is typically how redesigns go on big social media platforms though. Every time Facebook would launch a redesign, users would be upset that things changed. So that was not a surprise. But the experience just got worse once the redesign did launch. Thats not something that Google+ likely wanted to happen, unfortunately. Advertisement The redesign was done to make communities and collections more prominent, as it was targeting Facebook Groups and Pinterest with these features. It did make those two features more front-and-center, but it ultimately alienated its users. Making it tougher to simply make a post on Google+, or engage with posts on the platform. That also affected its engagement numbers as well as the number of users that were using Google+. Google+ Didnt Resonate With Users Like Facebook Did When Google+ launched, it was different and this was on purpose. It launched in a time where the only other social media platforms were Facebook and Twitter (and Twitter wasnt doing that well in 2011, as it was still very new). Google+ was going after Facebooks users and Mark Zuckerberg was scared. A report that surfaced in 2016, said that Mark Zuckerberg had put his employees on lock down to figure out some new features and ways to keep users on its network. This is the only time that Facebook has had a lockdown, showing how big of a threat it believed Google would be with Google+. Advertisement One of the big reasons why Google+ never resonated with its users like Facebook did, was simply because of who was using Google+. On Facebook, its easy to find your friends, family, and classmates. On Google+, that was not the case. One of the biggest complaints we heard about Google+ throughout its seven-year run, was the fact that users dont know anyone on Google+. That makes engagement pretty difficult. If you are commenting on posts of people you actually know, conversation is more natural, and thats what Google+ was missing. Its Circles feature was also pretty confusing for a lot of people. While it may not be that difficult for many long-time Google+ users to figure out, it wasnt easy for new users to figure out how it worked. It was a great feature that just wasnt easy enough to use for everyone to actually use it. Exposing User Data Was The Last Nail In Google+s Coffin Last year, Google announced that one of its APIs on Google+ was exposing user data. The good thing about this was that Google found that no developer was aware of this bug, nor exploiting it. This API that was exposing data was actually found in Spring of 2018 around the time that Facebook was testifying in front of Congress over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Google hid it, until The Wall Street Journal discovered it and reported on it. Then Google decided to sunset Google+ in August 2019. In December of 2018, Google found another bug in another API that was exposing data. It then decided to move up the sunset data of Google+ to April 2, 2019, and would be sunsetting its APIs in the next 90 days. This was by far the biggest mistake that Google made with Google+. When it comes to social media platforms, user data is the most important part of the platform. Without that user data, the platform is essentially useless. Just as Mewe a social media platform that is aiming to take Google+s place, but has very little active users. And the fact that this all came out after Facebooks numerous data breaches, made it a much bigger deal. Rest In Peace, Google+ When Google announced that Google+ would be shutting down in 2019, it also mentioned that very little people actually used the platform. Stating that over 90-percent of users sessions were less than five seconds. In other words, people clicked on the Google+ shortcut, opened the tab and immediately closed it. Showing that Google+ was getting very little traffic. Making it a better option to just close down Google+, rather than fixing the APIs that were exposing user data. Google+ was a great social network, particularly for tech nerds that wanted to keep up with everything in the world of technology. As well as those that wanted to get away from Facebook and its data collection. Unfortunately, it just did not work out as well as Google had hoped it would. You can now add Google+ to the growing list of social media products that Google has tried and retired over the years. Including Orkut, Google Friend Connect, and Google Buzz. Google announced last year that it was shutting down Google+ and Inbox, and today that day has come. The lights are now turned off for both products. Google+ was the first one to dark today. It was originally supposed to go dark in August, but after Google found a second API that was exposing user information, it decided to move that deadline up a full four months to April. The social media network was alive and kicking for a little over seven years, but the latter half of its life, it was holding on by a few strings. Last year, Google announced that more than 90-percent of user sessions on Google+ were less than five seconds. Meaning that there werent many people actually using Google+. Merely opening the site and immediately closing it. Advertisement When it comes to Inbox, it was also announced to be closing around the same time as Google+. But not for the same reasons. Inbox was an experimental email app by the Gmail team, that allowed Google to produce a more innovative email app. Many of the Inbox features have made its way over to Gmail over the years although many have also not made the jump just yet. For a lot of users, Inbox was not their email app of choice. This is because it changed how you interacted with emails, and how you saved them to use later on. Many tried Inbox, but preferred the Gmail app and went back. Which is perfectly fine. But the majority that did use Inbox have been pretty vocal about its demise. We knew that Inbox would be going away at some point, seeing as it was always billed as an experimental app. But even six months after its announcement, many are not ready to move on. Luckily for Inbox users, Spark Email has launched on Android today, which brings a lot of the Inbox features over to Android. But that still doesnt replace Inbox, unfortunately. Advertisement Google routinely announces new products, and routinely kills some of its products. The Google graveyard is getting pretty large these days, with Google+ and Inbox being the newest residents. According to a website called The Google Cemetery, there are over 70 products that Google have killed over the years. And that list is only going to get longer. Google+ was something we expected to get killed off a few years ago actually. After Google started neglecting it, and taking its engineers away to work on other products at the search giant. It was pretty clear that Google had given up on its latest social media ambitions. Though Inbox was a little more of a surprise. It did have many users actually using the app daily, most of which were in the tech industry. For Google+, there is no replacement really. At least not yet. Which means most people are heading back to Facebook and Twitter. For Inbox, users will have to go back to Gmail and re-learn how to use that email service all over again. Seeing as it is vastly different from Gmail now. Samsung will launch two variants of the Galaxy Note 10 later this year, one of which will have a smaller display, according to a report by Korean tech blog The Bell, passed along by PhoneArena. The source claims to cite an unnamed insider from the supply chain but offers no other possible hardware details pertaining to the upcoming phablet series. Shrinking down the Note? Samsung is expected to release a regularly-sized Galaxy Note 10 model this year, with early rumors dating back to October hinting that the 2019 model might carry a 6.66-inch panel. But if the latest reports are based in reality then Samsung will also borrow a page from the Galaxy S10 playbook. Advertisement The smaller model might simply be known as the Samsung Galaxy Note 10e, while the larger-screen variant could retain the Galaxy Note 10 moniker. But another possibility would be for the larger model to launch as the Galaxy Note 10+ and the standard Galaxy Note 10 to be demoted to being the smaller version of the same device. In one way or another, the naming scheme will likely reflect that of the Galaxy S10 series to a degree, but the exact monikers would shed more light on Samsungs plans. The addition of a Galaxy Note 10e model would indicate that the OEM would have developed a smaller variant which could have other missing or downgraded components compared to the base model, or even the Galaxy Note 9. On the other hand, the use of the Note 10+ moniker would indicate that the base model would still represent a considerable upgrade over last years phablet, while the Note 10+ itself will have an even larger footprint and possibly other upgrades over the standard version. As yet theres no clear indication as to whether Samsung will launch an upgraded or downgraded secondary Note 10 model, only that there will be two, and they will be sized differently. Advertisement Smaller model only for select markets The source claims that Samsung already reached out to its suppliers and ordered some components for the manufacturing of both Note 10 models which will enter mass production in May in anticipation of an August unveiling. This isnt all that surprising given the OEMs past launch schedules, but what is somewhat unexpected is that the smaller model will launch only in Europe, according to the Korean publication. However the story will unfold, this would mark a new chapter in the Galaxy Note saga. Historically Samsung launched only one Note model every year since the original device made its debut in 2011, so there really is no frame of reference as to how the OEM might handle this dual-phone strategy beginning this year. Advertisement Assumingly, every Galaxy Note model will be equipped with an S-Pen; otherwise, it would go against what the series stands for, i.e., mobile productivity. But only time will tell if Samsung will differentiate between Galaxy Note models by size and/or cameras only, or by productivity features as well. Last year the stylus received a dedicated camera shutter button for remote photography and the OEM might be looking to improve the S-Pen further with the upcoming models. By Trend At the meeting of the Turkmen government, a proposal was made to join the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Program, Trend reports with reference to the Turkmenistan State News Agency. The possibility of connecting Turkmenistan to the regional technical assistance project "Railway Sector Development in Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation Countries" was discussed at the meeting. President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov said that the CAREC Program is the most important mechanism for promoting economic regional cooperation, especially in such areas as transport, energy and trade. Turkmenistans cooperation on this platform is of a strategic nature, the Turkmen president emphasized. It was also noted that participation in the proposed project will have a positive impact on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the strengthening of partnership relations between the participating states of the program. The CAREC program is being developed at the initiative of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in partnership with the UN Development Program, the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB). The main objective of this program is to assist in the implementation of investment projects in the field of transport, trade and energy, aimed at accelerated socio-economic development of the states of the region of Central Asia. The potential of Turkmenistan in the logistics of transit flows should be assessed taking into account the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran transnational railway line, the Kerki-Ymamnazar (Turkmenistan) -Akina (Afghanistan) railway, the first line of the Asian International Transport Corridor, the railway and road bridges across the Amu Darya, modern airports in Ashgabat, Turkmenbashi and Turkmenabat cities. The worlds richest man, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, accused Saudi Arabia of compromising him by hacking his phone, stealing data, and giving them to The National Enquirer which proceed to attempt blackmailing him. Besides several exposing images of Mr. Bezos, the Saudis are said to have obtained explicit messages exchanged between him and his lover, one Lauren Sanchez. The main reason why AMI considered blackmail a viable option was Bezoss marital status; with the worlds richest man announcing hes getting divorced from his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie, in January, a confirmation of an extramarital affair would have been bound to cost him a significant sum or will cost him now that the controversy came to light. The accusation was laid out by Gavin de Becker, a veteran American security specialist well-known for his work in the public sphere, both in government or celebrity employment. Mr. Bezos hired Mr. Becker after being approached by TNE in early February via email, with its Chief Content Officer Dylan Howard threatening the multi-billionaire with a release of sensitive photos of him unless he makes The Washington Post, a publication in his ownership, agree to drop claims about TNEs coverage of the 55-year-old mogul being politically motivated, among other concessions. Advertisement Instead of yielding to the demands, Mr. Bezos went public with the entire affair almost immediately, detailing it in a Medium post. Amazons top executive and Mr. de Becker previously alleged Mr. Howards bold approach that left the evidence of blackmail in writing was made on behalf of David Pecker, the Chairman of The National Enquirer parent American Media Inc. (AMI). Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Mr. Pecker have a close relationship they nurture to this date, Mr. de Becker said. And while AMI remains adamant it procured the indecent photos of the Amazon founder over his lovers now-estranged brother, Michael Sanchez, Mr. de Becker penned a Saturday column in The Daily Beast wherein he describes how skeptical he was about the entire affair, ultimately concluding the media corporations representatives were flat-out lying. The security veteran specializing in the protection of at-risk individuals said hid investigators concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos phone, and gained private information. Mr. de Becker did not make any claims in regards to how aware AMI was of the Saudi involvement, save for stating the company knew Mr. Sanchez was not the sole source of the compromising materials on Mr. Bezos it was provided with. Advertisement The probe yielded an unsurprising motive Riyadh wanted to harm Mr. Bezos over The Washington Posts coverage of the murder of its correspondent and American resident Jamal Khashoggi. While the official version of the story is unlikely to ever say so, numerous intelligence agencies so far confirmed Mr. Khashoggi was murdered inside a Saudi embassy in Turkish capital Istanbul on October 2, 2018. He came to the consulate to obtain documents for his planned marriage but was strangled as soon as he entered the building, dismembered and dissolved into acid by a 20-men team flown in from Saudi Arabia a day earlier, according to several reports, including those from the Turkish government and The Washington Post. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when Im 90 and reviewing my life, if Im lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me, Mr. Bezos wrote two months ago, reiterating that he is in no way involved with TWPs everyday activities despite what the individuals investigated by the publication such as President Trump might claim. Posted on: April 2, 2019 5:41 PM The Standing Committee of the Church of the Province of the Indian Ocean has expressed its solidarity with the Chagossian people in their fight to return to their island homelands. The UK government retained controls of islands in the Chagos Archipelago when it granted Mauritius independence in 1968. A number of them were evacuated through forced displacement. One of them, Diego Garcia, is home to a US military base. In February, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory opinion to the UN General Assembly in which it said that the United Kingdom is under an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible. The court said that it was of the opinion that, having regard to international law, the process of decolonisation of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when that country acceded to independence in 1968, following the separation of the Chagos Archipelago and that all Member States are under an obligation to co-operate with the United Nations in order to complete the decolonisation. In a communique following its meeting last month, the bishops, clergy and laity that make up the Standing Committee of the Anglican Church of the Indian Ocean congratulated the Prime Minister and Government of Mauritius for drawing to the attention of the International Community through the United Nations the fate of the displaced Chagossian people. They added: The International Court of the Hague recently commented on this dehumanising situation and advised that the United Kingdom should return to the Chagossians and to the Republic of Mauritius this territory which belongs to them. We hope that all parties concerned will be receptive to this appeal of the International Court of The Hague. The communique addressed a number of concerns, and called on Anglicans throughout the Province to review its social commitment in order to make more visible the presence of the God who sanctifies, heals and gives life. Referring to challenges in societies throughout the Province, the communique said: These challenges are many and they touch various aspects of life including family life, violence in schools and in some cities where we face a climate of insecurity. The traffic and use of drugs, which increasingly is affecting children, and the lack of urban planning are sources of great concern. It is also worthy of note that secular society is gaining ground, the presence of God is marginalised and that a large number of Christian parents are not engaged in the Christian formation of their children. The Standing Committee affirmed its intention to be a good steward for God. The management of creation and the Proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ is incumbent on us and it is our duty to work according to the grace of God to turn dehumanising situations into situations that bring hope and joy. Marysville, CA (95901) Today Rain and wind. High 52F. Winds S at 25 to 35 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall around a half an inch. Winds could occasionally gust over 50 mph.. Tonight Rain early...then remaining cloudy with showers overnight. Low 42F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch. By Trend Helicopters of the Iranian Army Ground Forces have been sent to help the population in Pol-e Dokhtar County of Irans western Lorestan Province, Brigadier General Shahin Taghikhani, Iranian Army spokesman, told IRNA, Trendreports. According to Taghikhani, 8 helicopters have been sent to the region for rescuing flood victims. Taghikhani also said that the Commander of the Ground Forces General Kiyoumars Heydari has also gone to Pol-e Dokhtar County. In recent days, heavy rainfall in Iran has caused floods, leaving several towns and villages underwater. jetlites Human Centric Lighting can support the inner clock of passengers and thus reduce the effects of jetlag. Up until today it was available only as a cabin lighting solution. Through this exclusive partnership with jetlite, Recaro is the only seat manufacturer worldwide to explore the potential of individualized Human Centric Lighting integrated into business class seats. In 2017 German start-up jetlite launched its solution to defeat jetlag. It is based on a scientific algorithm focused on optimizing aircraft cabin lighting with respect to flight route, direction, duration and overflown time zones on long-haul flights to suit human biorhythms. Until today, jetlites Human Centric Lighting solution was only available for the cabin lighting. Recaro and jetlite are collaborating to make this concept available as a personally operable feature by integrating it into each business class seat and introducing individualized Human Centric Lighting. Dr. Mark Hiller, CEO and Shareholder of Recaro Aircraft Seating: We are working hard to soon make jetlites Human Centric Lighting concept available as an individual feature integrable in business class seats. Once launched into the market, it will provide airlines with a point of real differentiation against the competition. At the same time, it will improve passenger comfort and hence contribute to greater customer retention. A couple of years ago we developed our scientifically proven jetlite algorithm to battle jetlag, said Dr. Achim Leder, CEO of jetlite. Lufthansas implementation of the technology as a cabin lighting solution in its A350-fleet was a big step forward for the company. Our system, however, truly comes into its own when it is integrated into each individual seat. That is exactly what the collaboration with Recaro is about: to develop a truly bespoke lighting experience tailored to each passenger. The British Museum is currently facing repatriation demands from Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Easter Island; the idea that it is a better host to the Parthenon Marbles than Athens state-of-the-art Acropolis Museum is preposterous, as is the idea that the Rapa Nui dont know how to look after Hoa Hakananaia, the Easter Island stone statue they believe is the living incarnation of a prominent ancestor. Prospect The Armenian-American maestro, a three-time Grammy nominee (he conducted Dmitri Hvorostovskys final album, Russia Cast Adrift), was named artistic director of the theater in Yerevan in 2016 and was given the additional job of general director the following year. The new culture minister dismissed him from the latter post, saying that it is against Armenian law for one person to hold both titles. Musicians and staff, who say Orbelian has raised standards there, are protesting. Panaorama (Armenia) The Responsible Finance & Investment Foundation (RFI) has partnered with Dubai Islamic Bank and UNHCR to organise a roundtable on April 28 about strategic philanthropy and Islamic finance as a part of the RFI Summit 2019 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The roundtable will bring together leading humanitarian, development and Islamic finance organisations for a discussion about how Islamic financial institutions can become more strategic with their philanthropy. It will also include discussion about how humanitarian organisations can work cooperatively to more effectively and efficiently using the participatory and inclusive model of Islamic social finance to improve outcomes. The outcome of the roundtable will be a set of recommendations by the participants to improve the allocation, distribution and impact created by philanthropic giving by Islamic financial institutions. These recommendations will be presented during the RFI Summit 2019 for discussion during the unconference session which will identify the RFI Summits outcomes in line with the theme A New SRI: Can Sustainable, Responsible & Islamic Finance Deliver More Impact Together? Blake Goud, CEO of RFI Foundation commented: We are excited to partner with excellent institutions from the Islamic finance and humanitarian sectors to find ways to improve Islamic financial institutions use of their philanthropic capital. As Islamic financial institutions become more engaged in taking advantage of their natural fit with responsible finance, they can improve the impact they create for society across multiple levels: operationally, indirectly through the financing they provide, and by more strategic philanthropy. Mohamed Abdulla Al Nahdi, deputy chief executive officer of Dubai Islamic Bank commented: We welcome the opportunity to partner with the RFI Foundation on this roundtable and discuss how Dubai Islamic Bank is rethinking its approach to philanthropy. We are focusing our efforts to create more tangible and measurable impact while contributing to comprehensively addressing important issues of a global nature including education, healthcare, housing, livelihoods, SME development and cash assistance for those in need. Houssam Chahin, Menas head of Private Sector Partnerships at UNHCR, said: We appreciate the opportunity to join hands with the RFI Foundation and Dubai Islamic Bank as a strategic philanthropy partner for this roundtable as a strategic philanthropy partner for this roundtable. Our commitment towards the increasing number of refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and host communities is guiding us to diversify our partnerships. In 2018, only 51 per cent of the $8.2 billion required to cover the needs of UNHCRs persons of concerns was met. Islamic social finance, primarily Zakat, promotes more intentional use of charitable resources, including by Islamic financial institutions and the public, to address the root causes and immediate needs of refugees and IDPs in the Mena region and globally. The Strategic Philanthropy & Islamic Finance Roundtable will be held at INSEAD Abu Dhabi from 9am to 12pm on April 28, the day before the RFI Summit 2019 is held at Abu Dhabi Global Market. TradeArabia News Service What now after COP26? With the frenetic weeks of COP26 over and disputes over its actual achievements still in full spate, here are a few developments that may help put the United Nations climate conference into perspective. Income Tax-Enforcement investigation on cards. The purchase took place just weeks after the company had been sold for $40 million, the filings said. Mumbai: The deal involving acquisition of a Chennai-based based payment processing company by German firm Wirecard may come under the scrutiny of Indian tax authorities. According to sources, the I-T department and Enforcement Directorate are all set to launch a probe into the murky deal, which is under the scrutiny of authorities in Singapore for allegations of money laundering and document forgery. German payment processor Wirecard last week said local staff at its Singapore office may have committed crimes as found by an investigation by outside law firm Rajah & Tann. It acknowledged that the authorities in Singapore may find a few local employees criminally liable for some of the irregularities uncovered. On October 27, 2015, Wirecard purchased the Chennai-based Hermes Tickets when it bought the payment businesses of its parent, Great Indian Retail Group, and a 60 per cent stake in another subsidiary, Great Indian Technology. The transactions price tag was 230 million euros in cash, plus 110 million euros in prospective earnout payments over three years. A recent Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation (SIRF) report said that after a seven-month investigation, it has obtained thousands of pages of documents that suggest a minimum 175 million euros and perhaps as much as 285 million eurosfrom Wirecards 340-million euro purchase of an India-based payment processor in October 2015 did not go to the seller (Hermes Tickets promoters). Also, a lawsuit was filed in London by former minority shareholders of the Indian company, Hermes I-Tickets, owned by Ramu Ramasamy and Palaniyapan Ramasamy, was sold to a Mauritius-based buyer and then resold just three weeks later to Wirecard for at least $200 million more. In the 2017 suit, the former minority investors claim they were duped into selling their shares in the first transaction and are seeking compensation from the previous owners, according to legal filings. Wirecard bought Hermes, which specialised in selling travel tickets, for 216 million euros ($244 million) upfront with an option to pay a further 110 million euros. The purchase took place just weeks after the company had been sold for $40 million, the filings said. According to reports, Wirecards compliance manager Royston Ng has quit but the company said it has no connection to Wirecards investigations into financial irregularities in Singapore. Directed by Omung Kumar, Vivek Oberoi essays the role of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the biopic. Vivek Oberoi and director Omung Kumar at the poster launch of the film. Mumbai: In a major relief to the makers of 'PM Narendra Modi' biopic, the Bombay High Court on Monday disposed of the public interest litigation (PIL) filed to stay the film's release. The petitioner lawyer Tausif Sheikh told ANI: "We had filed a PIL against 'PM Narendra Modi.' In our PIL we have made 10 respondents, first is Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Censor Board of India, Election Commission of India and all the producers and actor of the film." "Accordingly, everyone appeared before the court and the Censor Board of India said that they have not certified the film yet. So the question of releasing it on April 5 doesn't arise," he said. "They stated that they have only certified the trailer so that it has been released. The EC stated that they have issued a notice, show-cause notice, for violating the Model Code of Conduct," Sheikh added. Sheikh said: "The producers appeared before the court and the court has disposed of the matter. EC was authorised by the court to take the decision. Observing that the EC has already initiated proceedings, the petition came to be disposed of." Vivek Oberoi, who essays the role of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the biopic, visited Siddhivinayak Temple ahead of the film's release. "Our film 'PM Narendra Modi' is about to release. So we have come here to take the blessings of Lord Ganesha. This is a place where all the wishes come true. So we are hoping for the same." Commenting on the recent judgment, he said, "The court's judgment is also a blessing of Lord Ganesha." The film's producer Sandip Ssingh also expressed his happiness and said, "I am really grateful that the law has done to justice to our film and hopefully the film will release very soon." The court noted that the Election Commission (EC) has already issued a notice to the makers of the film 'PM Narendra Modi' over allegations of breach of the Model Code of Conduct in view of the Lok Sabha elections. The Court disposed of a PIL filed by Satish Gaikwad, a resident of Pune, who said the film if it is permitted to be released for public viewing, would violate the Model Code of Conduct imposed by the EC. The plea also questioned the timing of the film's release and claimed that if released, it was likely to earn Prime Minister Modi electoral mileage. The petitioner also demanded that the trailer of the film should either be removed or deleted from all social media sites. "We have conveyed the urgency in front of the Chief Justice that the film would be released on April 5. EC's standing counsel is of the view that we have not got the notice up till now," the petitioner had said. The EC, however, told the court that it had already sought replies from the makers. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) told the court, through its lawyer Advait Sethna, that it had already granted requisite certificates for the trailer on March 20. He also stated that the film is scheduled to be examined for certification this Wednesday and would be cleared for release if it meets all the necessary criteria. The National Students' Union of India, the Congress party's student wing unit of Goa, on March 15 had urged the Election Commission to ban the release of the biopic, alleging that the movie was a "propaganda by the BJP to influence" voters during the Lok Sabha elections. The biopic came under the scanner of the ECI after Congress and Left parties complained to the electoral body saying that it violates the Model Code of Conduct. The film depicts the journey of Modi from his humble beginnings to his years as a chief minister and finally his landmark election as the Prime Minister. Are you lost in the wild? Sorry, but the page you're looking for has not been found Try checking the URL for errors, goto home or try to search below. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, is providing up to $100 million in financing to the Middle East Glass Manufacturing Company (MEG), Egypts leading maker of glass containers. The partnership is designed to support the firms capital expenditure programme, create new jobs, and boost Egypts manufacturing sector. IFCs debt financing package will help MEG ramp up production of its containers, which are used by a variety of companies, from beverage makers to pharmaceutical firms. This will help MEG expand its international footprint and continue to grow its annual exports. It will also help the company expand locally and create and preserve thousands of jobs. The financing package is part of a larger effort by IFC to support Egypts manufacturing sector, which is a major employer and, through exports, a key source to foreign currency. Manufacturers like MEG are a crucial part of Egypts economy, said Sahar Nasr, Egypts Minister of Investment and International Cooperation. Not only are they creating jobs and opportunities locally, but by branching out internationally, they are demonstrating the attractiveness of the Egyptian business environment and that Egyptian companies have the potential to make a mark on the world. Abdul Galil Besher, chairman of MEG, said: This investment is a testimony to our talented, high-performance workforce led by a disciplined, innovative management team who continues to drive our 38-year journey and constantly transform the business by providing all of our customers, in Egypt and in our export markets, with superior service and high-quality, competitively priced products. Manufacturers are a key source of skilled jobs in Egypt and have important linkages with businesses, large and small, across the country. Dr Karim El Solh, chief executive officer of Gulf Capital, a main shareholder in MEG, said: We have worked closely with the IFC across a number of transactions and, most recently, to finance MEGs continuous expansion plans. The strategy of expanding the company aggressively across new geographies and into new product lines has firmly positioned MEG as a leader in the glass market in the Middle East and Africa. The company today has state-of-the-art production facilities and a strong management team and is well positioned to continue its impressive growth trajectory. This investment from the IFC highlights the increasing confidence in the broader Egyptian economy and the resurgence of foreign direct investments into the country. As well as the financing package, IFCs advisory services arm will help MEG substantially reduce its energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. That is part of an IFC push to bolster resource efficiency in the manufacturing sector and help companies compete internationally. Our strategy in Egypt focuses on investing in companies with strong export potential, which boosts the local economy and helps create jobs, said Tomasz Telma, IFC global director for Manufacturing, Agribusiness and Services. Supporting a leading Egyptian manufacturer, like MEG, will ensure it continues to contribute to Egypts economic development. In fiscal year 2018, IFC invested $1.5 billion in Egypts private sector to help create jobs, improve local infrastructure, and boost economic growth. That figure, which includes funds mobilised from other investors, represents a record for IFC in Egypt. The investments have been geared towards helping private sector companies grow, expand and create jobs. TradeArabia News Service This is the second arrest of a BMC engineer in two days since the 40-year-old bridge collapsed. On Monday, police arrested assistant engineer S F Kakulte, working with the bridges department of the BMC. (Photo: ANI) Mumbai: An executive engineer of Mumbai's civic body was arrested Tuesday in connection with the last month's foot overbridge (FOB) collapse outside the iconic CSMT station here in which six people were killed, police said. This is the second arrest of a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) engineer in two days and third since March 14 when the deck of the 40-year-old bridge connecting the area near the Times of India building with the CSMT station, collapsed during evening rush hours. On Monday, police arrested assistant engineer S F Kakulte, working with the bridges department of the BMC. Last month, police arrested structural auditor Neerajkumar Desai. "The accused Anil Patil was arrested by Azad Maidan police this evening. He worked with the bridges department of the civic body between September 2014 and December 2018," said DCP, Zone I, Abhishek Trimukhe. Patil has been booked under section 304A (Causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The DCP said both the engineers were aware that such incidents (like bridge collapse) might happen, but acted negligently. "During our investigation it came to light that they had knowledge of their job and due to their negligence the incident took place," the DCP said. Patil will be produced before court Wednesday, he said, adding that a court remanded Kakulte in police custody till Arpil 5. Kakulte was booked under IPC section 304A (causing death by negligence). A preliminary report into the collapse submitted by the BMC had said the structural audit of the foot overbridge at CSMT railway station in south Mumbai was not carried out properly. It suggested major lapses when the structural audit of the FOB was carried out on August 13, 2018. Desai, who worked with a private firm, had allegedly gave clearance for continued use of the ill-fated bridge after a structural audit, police had said. The IAF is on high alert since India carried out airstrikes at JeMs Balakot terror camp in Pakistan on February 26. There have been a series of incidents of Pakistani drones coming close to the Indo-Pak border in various areas in the last four weeks following the Balakot air strikes. New Delhi: The Indian Air Force (IAF) on early Monday morning scrambled two Sukhoi-30 fighter jets after Army radars sighted a large Pakistani drone or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) along the Indo-Pak border in the Khemkaran sector in Punjab, official sources said. This resulted in Pakistan also scrambling two of its F-16 fighter aircrafts close to the border. Soon after Sukhoi-30 were scrambled, Pakistani UAV retreated back to its base. However, no side violated the air space, with the fighter jets of both countries staying within their own boundaries. The IAF is on high alert since India carried out airstrikes at JeMs Balakot terror camp in Pakistan on February 26. The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) retaliated the next day, on February 27, by attempting to target Indian military installations. However, the IAF thwarted their plans and brought down an F-16. There have been a series of incidents of Pakistani drones coming close to the Indo-Pak border in various areas in the last four weeks following the Balakot air strikes. Last month, a UAV which intruded into Rajasthans Ganganag-ar was shot down by the Army. Also last month, a Sukhoi-30 fighter jet of the IAF shot down a Pakistani military drone in Bikaner sector of the Indo-Pak border using an air-to-air missile. On February 27, India had lost only one MiG-21 aircraft. flown by Wing Commander Abhin-andan Varthaman had shot down one of the Pakistani F-16 aircraft which had intruded into Indian airspace. During the dogfight, his MiG-21 was hit and he had to eject into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir where he was arrested by Pakistan Army. Later on Wg cdr Varthaman was released by Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistan on Monday for the first time indicated that it used F-16s on February 27. Pakistan is under pressure as it could face action from the US for using F-16s against India as these jets were given to it only for self-defence and not to attack any other country. India has got wreckage of AMRAAM missile which Pakistan can only use in F-16s to proved that PAF used the US-supplied aircraft in the February 27. Pakistan again claimed on Monday that it had shot down two Indian aircraft on February 27 and denied that its F-16 aircraft was brought down by Indian MiG-21. As regard Pakistan Air Force action for strikes across LoC it was done by JF-17 from within Pakistan airspace. Later when two Indian jets crossed LoC they were shot down by the PAF. Whether it was F-16 or JF-17 which shot down two Indian aircraft is immaterial, said Pakistans military spokesman Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor in a statement. He said that even if F-16 have been used as at that point in time complete PAF was airborne including the F-16s, The fact remains that Pakistan Air Force shot down two Indian jets in self-defence. Emisat is meant for electromagnetic measurement, Isro said while declining to reveal any further information about the satellite. Isros PSLV-C45 carrying Emisat and 28 other satellites lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota. (Photo: PTI) Sriharikota: India scripted history by successfully launching Emisat, a military satellite, and 28 foreign nano satellites on-board its polar rocket from here Monday, in a complex mission which marked many a first for Isro. The rocket, PSLV-C45, in its 47th mission, injected the 436 kg Emisat, aimed at electromagnetic measurement, and 28 co-passenger satellites belonging to Lithuania, Spain, Switzerland and the US, into their designated orbits, Isro said. The rocket lifted off majestically in clear skies bursting orange flames at 9.27 am from the second launch pad at this spaceport at the end of the 27-hour countdown. The mission marked several firsts to the credit of Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) as it manoeuvred satellites in various orbits and orbital experiments including on maritime satellite applications. Emisat is meant for electromagnetic measurement, Isro said while declining to reveal any further information about the satellite. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Isro scientists on the successful launch of EMISAT satellite on board polar rocket PSLV-C45 from Sriharikota. Today, PSLV C45 has successfully injected Isro made Emisat in 748 km orbit as well as 28 customer satellites in 504 km orbit, Isro chief K. Sivan said at the Mission Control Centre. After completing its main function, the PS4 (fourth stage) is now marching towards the 485 km orbit to do its function as orbital platform for experiments, he said. Elaborating, Mr Sivan said, This time three innovative experiments have been attached. One is AMSAT (Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, Automatic Identification System, and the third one is built by the students of IIST (Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology. On Mondays launch, he said this particular mission was very special for Isro as there were many firsts in it. First time a PSLV was flown in a new configuration of four strap on motors.. First time a PSLV is carrying out three orbital missions in a single flight, the first time PS4 (fourth stage) is powered for carrying out experimental platforms and of course a new PSLV team did this function, he said. The AAP has also accused the Congress and Gandhi of being arrogant and blamed them for not forging an alliance in Delhi. New Delhi: The Opposition parties job number 1 is to defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi has said, expressing confidence that a post-poll alliance is absolutely possible after the Lok Sabha elections as all parties are united in defeating the BJP. Mr Gandhi said secular formations are in place in various states and that the BJP will be facing strong Opposition candidates all over the country. For the entire Opposition, the job number one is to defeat Mr Narendra Modi and save democracy and the Constitution. To stop the BJP from destroying Indias institutions and its social fabric. To stimulate growth, propel economy, create jobs, ensure harmony and address injustice and inequality. In this, we are all united, Mr Gandhi told PTI in an interview. On whether he foresees a poll outcome which will allow space for a post-poll alliance of Opposition parties, the Congress chief said, Yes, absolutely. It is the people of India who are standing up to counter Mr Modi. Asked about differences within the Opposition ranks, with some even blaming the Congress for not putting up a united fight, Mr Gandhi said secular forces are together in various states to defeat the BJP. There is an understanding among all Opposition parties that the BJP has to be defeated in the interest of the country. The BJP is attacking and destroying our institutions. It has played havoc with our economy. It has hurt India. It has to be fought in nations interest, he said. About the Opposition not coming together the way it was envisaged some months ago, he said, Across India, the Opposition is putting up strong candidates to take on the BJP. He cited the example of West Bengal and said a secular formation is going to win there. In UP, there is an alliance. Congress is not part of that alliance but there is an alliance. In Maharashtra, there is an alliance. In Jharkhand, there is an alliance. In Jammu and Kashmir, there is an alliance. In Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, there is an alliance. Where isnt there an alliance? he asked. He said some parties in UP chose not to have the Congress as part of the alliance they formed. Its okay. The Congress will build its ideology and roots in UP. We will fight our battle. Entire nation is united against the BJP, he said. The Congress has been left out by the Samajwadi Party(SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance in UP and it has failed to forge an alliance with the Left in West Bengal and with the ruling AAP in Delhi. The decision of the party to field Mr Gandhi from Wayanad in Kerala has also hurt the CPI-M, which is peeved by the action and has claimed that it will use all its force to defeat him. The Congress chiefs recent outbursts against West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee also did not bode well for the Opposition unity as it evoked an angry reaction from the TMC chief who said he is just a kid. The AAP has also accused the Congress and Mr Gandhi of being arrogant and blamed them for not forging an alliance in Delhi. The high court, while staying the sessions courts order, had refused to interfere with the ECs notification. New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the notification issued by the Election Commission (EC) for holding byelections in Talala Assembly constituency in Gujarat on April 23 along with the Lok Sabha polls. A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Sanjiv Khanna stayed the polls while hearing a petition filed by Congress MLA Bhagvan Barad who contended that despite stay on sessions courts conviction of two year sentence to him, the speaker of the Assembly Rajendra Trivedi disqualified the MLA, declared the seat vacant and the EC announced the bypolls. Mr Barad moved the Gujarat high court challenging his disqualification and the EC notification. The high court, while staying the sessions courts order, had refused to interfere with the ECs notification. The magistrate had suspended the sentence and released him on bail. Later, Mr Barad had challenged the order before a sessions court which had stayed his conviction on March 7, 2019. The court was hearing a petition filed by Barad challenging his disqualification by assembly spe-aker Rajendra Trivedi following his conviction in more than two decades old theft case early this month and also declaration of by poll in Talala, the seat which he won in the 2017 polls. On the same day, the magistrate had suspended the sentence and released him on bail. Later, he challenged the order before a Sessions court which stayed his conviction on March 7. However, on March 5, the Speaker disqualified Barad and also notified the assembly seat as vacant. On March 15, the high court had quashed the Sessions courts March 7 order staying his conviction in the case. However, on March 27 the High Court refused to interfere. Hardik Patel moves SC: Meanwhile Hardik Patel who wanted to contest in Gujarat in the Lok Sabha polls under Congress ticket moved the Supreme Court on Monday challenging the High Court order refusing to stay the conviction of two years sentence awarded by the lower court. He said contesting the elections was very crucial to him and the High Court order stood in the way of his fighting the polls. He sought stay on the conviction to enable him to file his nominations. The BJP has stitched an alliance with the BDJS and Kerala Congress in Kerala for the Lok Sabha elections. Thiruvananthapuram: Setting the stage for a high-voltage triangular fight, BJP president Amit Shah on Monday announced that Thushar Vellappally of the Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), an ally of the saffron party in Kerala, will be the ruling NDAs candidate against Congress chief Rahul Gandhi in Wayanad Lok Sabha seat. The BDJS is a fledgling party founded by Mr Vellappally in 2015. This is the partys first Lok Sabha outing in which it will contest on five out of the 20 seats in Kerala. The announcement about BDJS chiefs candidature was made by Mr Shah on Twitter. I proudly announce Shri Thushar Vellappally, president of Bharat Dharma Jana Sena as NDA candidate from Wayanad. A vibrant and dynamic youth leader, he represents our commitment towards development and social justice. With him, NDA will emerge as Keralas political alternative, tweeted Mr Shah. The BJP has stitched an alliance with the BDJS and Kerala Congress in Kerala for the Lok Sabha elections. The BJP is contesting from 14 seats and Kerala Congress from one. Mr Vellappally, 49, is the son of Vellappally Natesan, who is the general secretary of the influential Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) Yogam, which works for the welfare of Ezhava community, a backward caste with a sizeable population in the state. The BDJS president is currently also the vice-president of the SNDP. In his first reaction after the announcement, Mr Vellappally said, People of the state will support son of the soil against an outsider. The Congress had announced on Sunday that Mr Gandhi will contest the coming Lok Sabha elections from Wayanad besides the Gandhi family stronghold Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. This is the first time Mr Gandhi is contesting from a second seat. While thanking Mr Shah, Mr Vellappally tweeted; Sir thanks for giving me the opportunity and big thanks for the kind words. This behind the curtain drama of the Left and Congress we will expose to our countrymen. I am with you in this fight to eradicate foreign rule from our motherland. NaMo again. Mr Vellappally claimed that the main fight in Wayanad would be between him and Mr Gandhi, and the LDF would be pushed to the third position. Mr Vellappally enjoys considerable influence over the Ezhava community which once had stood with the Communist parties. The Left faced a scare when BDJS was formed in 2015. Mr Vellappally took his party to the BJP-led NDAs camp. In the Assembly elections in 2016, the BDJS had secured four per cent votes. Though the party could not win any seat, it helped the NDA secure 14 per cent votes, making it a political force to reckon with. During the recent Sabarimala agitation, Mr Vellappally stood with the Sabarimala Karma Samithi, a Sangh Parivar-backed outfit which led the movement against the entry of women of menstruating age into the temple. A day after Congress president Mr Gandhis candidacy from Wayanad was confirmed, Deshabhimani, the Malayalam mouthpiece of the ruling CPI(M), put out editorial in which he was addressed as Pappu, a derisive name coined by the Congress rivals. The CPI(M) dismissed it as a mindless mistake. The editorial, titled This Pappu Strike Will Complete the Collapse of Congress, said Mr Gandhis decision to contest from Kerala happened to be out of fear of failure in his traditional stronghold, Amethi. Meanwhile, Union minister K.J. Alphons and sitting Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor were among the 32 candidates who filed their nominations on Monday for the April 23 Lok Sabha elections in Kerala. Says elephant figures unrelated to her party symbol. New Delhi: Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati has justified in the Supreme Court the installation of her statues across many cities in the state, saying it represented the will of the people. Ms Mayawati has filed her affidavit in response to an observation made by a bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi that she should be asked to pay up for using public money spent on installation of her own statues and of elephants, the BSPs party symbol In her affidavit, Ms Mayawati said that when she was the CM, the state legislature sought to pay tribute to her for her tireless work for the welfare of Dalits by getting her statues installed. The will of the people was expressed by the state legislature with a proposal to install the statues of the answering respondent at the memorials to show respect to the contemporary woman Dalit leader who has decided to sacrifice her life for the cause of the underprivileged communities, said the affidavit. She said the apex court itself had ruled that the expenditure approved by the state legislature may be unwise but it could not be adjudicated by the courts and should only be debated in the legislature. She urged the court not to adjudicate on the issue of statues. She said the construction of elephant statues in memorials had nothing to do with her party symbol and it is a mere coincide-nce. It is incorrect and mi-sleading to correlate the statues of elephants inst-alled at the memorials with the BSPs symbol. The elephants standing in the welcome posture are inalienable part of the Indian culture and no parallel can be drawn betw-een the elephants and the party symbol. She pointed out that elephant statues adorn the Rashtrapati Bhavan, temples and are regarded as a welcome symbol in mythology. She said, Certainly, I could not go contrary to the wishes of the state legislators in installing my statues near the statue of Shri Kanshi Ram, for whom the nation has raised the demand of conferring Bharat Ratna posthumously. Case related to the plight and living conditions of foreigners in Assam camps. New Delhi: Taking a serious view of the submission that at least 70,000 declared illegal migrants in Assam have vanished or mingled with the local population before they could be deported, the Supreme Court summoned the state chief secretary, on Monday, for his personal appearance on April 8. Expressing his displeasure at the chief secretarys absence at the court on Monday, Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi told solicitor general (SG) Tushar Mehta that the chief secretary (CS) should be present at the court on April 8 and he would not be allowed to return to the state till the court so permitted. When the CJI observed that a non-bailable warrant would be issued to secure his presence, the SG assured the court that he would ensure the appearance of the chief secretary on the next date of hearing. The Assam government, in its affidavit, admitted that 70,000 individuals who were declared foreigners by the tribunal are untraceable now. The case related to the plight and the living conditions of foreigners in Assam detention centres. In the last hearing, the CJI told the SG that only 52,000 have been declared as foreigners, though the NRC identified that there are 40 lakh illegal immigrants. Further, only 166 have been deported so far. The court wanted to know from the state and the Centre an action plan on improving the living conditions at the detention centres. It also wanted to know as to how long it would take for the illegal immigrants to be deported. The SGs submission that 70,000 people have vanished, irked the bench. It observed that if declared foreigners could vanish like this, what would happen to those whose proceedings are yet to be finalised by the foreigners tribunal? The SG assured the court that the state was doing its best to deal with the problem of illegal migrants in Assam. State finance minister Thomas Isaac said this was not CPI(M)s style and it could be a mistake. Thiruvananthapuram: A day after Congress announced that Rahul Gandhi would contest from Wayanad in Kerala, the ruling CPI(M) courted controversy by referring to the Congress chief as Pappu in the party newspaper, Deshabhimani. The editorial, titled Pappu strike to complete the collapse of Congress, alleged that Gandhi decided to contest in Wayanad fearing defeat from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. As the editorial kicked up a controversy with the Lok Sabha polls only days away, CPI(M) tried to douse the ambers saying it was an inadvertent mistake. State finance minister Thomas Isaac said this was not CPI(M)s style and it could be a mistake. However, Marxist veteran V.S. Achutanandan, who had once described Rahul Gandhi as Amul Baby, said the Congress chief was behaving like a child and not rising up to the situation. What change is going to take place if Rahul is contesting from Wayanad?... The Left will take on Rahul and BJP together. But what about the Congress?. Their stand that BJP is their prime enemy will be demolished with Rahul Gandhi contesting from Wayanad, he said in a Facebook post. Pappu is perceived as a social media slur coined to target Gandhi and is often used by the BJP to attack the Congress President. P.M. Manoj, the resident editor of the daily, admitted that the reference was inappropriate and an inadvertant mistake, which would be looked into. In his Facebook post, Manoj said abusing a politician was not the politics of the daily and the party. Abusing a politician is not our politics and the reference was unintentional. We will check the mistake and rectify it, he said. The state Congress leaders lashed out at the newspaper and the Communist party with senior leader Oommen Chandy saying the people will give a befitting reply to the LDF. The CPI(M) was following the BJPs footsteps, he said. Opposition leader in the assembly Ramesh Chennithala said BJP and CPI(M) have similar views on Gandhis candidature in Wayanad. Thrithala MLA V.T. Balram, who was always vocal against the ruling LDF, demanded an apology from the editor-in-chief P Rajeev, who is the Left candidate from Ernakulam constituency. The Election Commission had barred the ruling BJP in Gujarat, in 2017, from using the word Pappu. He slammed the Congress and other mahagathbandhan allies for misleading the nation in the name of development and governance. Patna: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar kick-started 2019 election campaign with their rallies at Bihars Jamui and Gaya on Tuesday. Addressing the rally, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi lambasted the Opposition parties for seeking proof of military operations against terror camps and remarked they appear spokespersons for Pakistan more than political parties representing India. Mr Modi said the electorate must decide whether they want the madadgars (helpers) of Pakistan to be in power...Those who are out to destroy the morale of armed forces by seeking proofs. He slammed the Congress and other mahagathbandhan allies for misleading the nation in the name of development and governance. Whenever Congress and its allies come to power, governance and development goes into reverse gear. Terrorism, corruption, the credibility of country and morale of our armed forces decline whenever they come to power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said. This was Mr Modis first political rally in Bihar after election schedule was announced. A number of NDA leaders including deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi and LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan were present during the event in Jamui and Gaya. Mr Paswans son Chirag Paswan is in fray from Jamui constituency and Vijay Manjhi of JD(U) is contesting from Gaya seat against former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi. Hitting out the Congress and its allies during the rally, PM said that the Opposition parties have ganged up against the government because it is working to maintain the credibility of the country. The Prime Minister also used the occasion to criticize the grand old party for coining the term Hindu terror. When today the whole world is standing with our country few Mahamilawti leaders are speaking Pakistans language. But dont worry your chowkidar is alert and need your blessings to finish all pending works and serve the nation. CBRE, one of the worlds largest commercial real estate services and investment firms, has appointed seven senior-level staff - Bruno Trenchard, Asma Dakkak, Vaughan Sears, Zahy Khouri, Jenna Caffola and Mohammed Al Subhi - to its expanding regional team as part of its strategic growth in the Middle East. Trenchard has been appointed as a senior consultant with CBRE Middle Easts Strategic Advisory team. He brings diverse, international experience in conducting feasibility studies, highest and best use studies, and valuations. Trenchard, who has solid international experience from Africa, Central Asia, Europe. Australia and the Middle East, will be working with the hotel and hospitality team, assisting them in the expanding operations in the region. Dakkak joins the strategic advisory team as a senior manager, providing real estate development advice. She has extensive experience in developing detailed industry and economic research and macroeconomic analysis of the Dubai Real Estate Market. Her ability to garner insight from detailed market intelligence will prove invaluable to CBREs investment advisory service to Government entities, developers and investors across the Middle East, said the company in a statement. Sears has been named the senior consultant for CBREs strategic advisory team in Abu Dhabi. He will provide hospitality advisory services to clients across the Mena region and will lead on feasibility studies, advisory, valuations and operator search and selection. Vaughan brings over five years of regional experience to the team. Khouri take over his new role as senior analyst in CBREs strategic advisory team. Previously he was with Marriott International where he worked extensively with operational finance and crisis management. Khouri will be an integral part of CBREs growth and diversification into Saudi Arabia where he will support the team on feasibility studies, and research reports, with a focus on real estate projects. Al Subhi joins as a valuation analyst with extensive experience in the real estate industry. He is proficient in sales and projects management with a focus on lateral research, feasibility studies and valuation advisory. He has worked on the valuation advisory side of various property asset classes, including mixed-use development sites, offices and retail spaces. Al Subhi is a Taqeem-registered valuer with experience within the Saudi real estate markets, said the statement from the real estate firm. Caffola joins CBRE as senior surveyor within the valuation and consultancy division, it stated. With over a decade of professional experience in commercial property and a sound knowledge of the RICS Valuation Professional Standards, she will provide valuation and development advisory services to financial institutions, investors, developers and business entities. Caffola had previously worked with clients including Majid Al Futtaim in Dubai as well as Standard and Poors and Moodys Investor Services in London, said the CBRE in its statement. Hijazi has joined the CBREs strategic advisory team as a surveyor. He will be providing real estate development advice to government entities, developers and investors across Saudi Arabia. He has extensive experience in valuation and market analysis, having previously executed high profile and complex assignments throughout the kingdom, including projects in Jeddah, Makkah, Madinah and capital Riyadh, said the statement. He also worked in joint projects between valuation and consulting and was responsible for conducting advisory assignments on a variety of property types including residential, retail, hospitality and industrial sectors, it added. On the appointments, Simon Townsend, the senior director and head of strategic advisory team at CBRE (Mena and Turkey) said: "We are delighted to welcome these seven new consultants to our team in the Middle East, a region which is extremely important to our global operations." "This further demonstrates CBREs ongoing investment and commitment to continuing our growth to provide unrivalled independent expertise to our diverse portfolio of clients across the region," he noted. "We firmly believe that every new member of the CBRE team, all of whom bring with them a wealth of international knowledge and industry expertise, will play an integral role in further supporting us in our continual offering of a broad range of integrated services, delivered at the level our clients have come to expect," he added.-TradeArabia News Service A party insider said that Chugh was unhappy as Delhi BJP did not consult him before fixing his programme. NEW DELHI: Alleging mistreatment, BJP national secretary and co-incharge of the party in the national capital, Tarun Chugh, did not attend Prime Minister Narendra Modis Main Bhi Chowkidar in Chandni Chowk constituency. As per the party plan, Mr Chugh was scheduled to join party chief Amit Shah, Union minister Dr Harsh Vardhan and Delhi BJP incharge Shyam Jaju at a banquet hall in Chandni Chowk constituency, but he did not turn up at the venue A party insider said that Mr Chugh was unhappy as Delhi BJP did not consult him before fixing his programme. A BJP office-bearer told this newspaper that Mr Chugh wished to attend the event at Talkatora Stadium. Being state unit co-incharge, Mr Chugh was expecting that leaders would ask him where he wished to attend the event in the city. No one asked him in this regard. Mr Chugh came to know that he was supposed to attend the programme in Chandni Chowk with Mr Shah and others. Mr Chugh felt that the state unit humiliated him by not consulting or respecting his wishes, he added. A senior party functionary said that to register his displeasure, Mr Chugh absented himself from the meeting and watched the event on TV with some party workers at a location unknown to many. Mr Chugh did not turn up at Chandni Chowk, but tweeted a picture with some workers watching the event in a room, he added. Attempts to contact Mr Chugh proved futile. Downplaying the development, Delhi BJP general secretary Rajesh Bhatia said that Mr Chugh might have been busy with some other engagements, thats why he was not able to join others in Chandni Chowk. Mr Bhatia, however, refused to say anything about Mr Chughs tweet. Several Delhi BJP office bearers, meanwhile, alleged that they did not get passes for the event. People coordinating from the state to block level told many office bearers that district or block president had handed over passes for Talkatora Stadium. Several office bearers missed the event due to mismanagement, he added. Pervez Musharraf will get all legal rights if he appears before the court on May 2, the Supreme Court said. Islamabad: Pakistans Supreme Court Monday directed the trial court to announce verdict in high treason case against former military ruler Pervez Musharraf if he does not appear. The top court pronounced that the trial court was allowed to announce decision after hearing the prosecution if the former military ruler remains absent. It was further stated that no petition will be accepted to postpone the hearing. Pervez Musharraf will get all legal rights if he appears before the court on May 2, the Supreme Court said. Pervez Musharrafs counsel had earlier took the stance that the former military ruler himself wanted to record statement after coming back and appearing before the court. Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Asif Saeed Khosa had inquired that what will happen if Pervez Musharraf did not come back despite assurance. The chief justice had pronounced that the apex court cannot let the accused take advantage after skipping the hearing on purpose. Action should be taken against the suspect if he does not keep his promise, the CJP said. The treason case against Mr Musharraf started in November 2013 months after the PML-N government came to power. Even the Supreme Court, led by incumbent CJP Khosa, had directed to conclude the trial expeditiously. However, the trial could not be concluded in the last six years due to several reasons. The special court initially directed the federal government to include three more individuals for initiating treason charges against them. Due to that order, the proceedings remained suspended for a couple of years. Later, the SC set aside the special court order and directed for the conclusion of the trial against Musharraf only. In the meanwhile, the former army chief went abroad due to medical reasons. He has yet to return. Meanwhile, several judges who were part of the special court have either retired or been elevated to the apex court. The case remained a reason for civil-military tensions during the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz)-led government. The treason case proceedings have almost halted after the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI)-led government took over. Speaking to supporters in Ankara after Sunday's polls closed, Erdogan had said the election was a victory for the AKP. Ankara: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party suffered a major upset on Monday after local election results showed it lost the capital Ankara, Istanbul and Antalya after a decade and half in power. Losing the countrys two major cities would be a stunning defeat for Erdogan, a former Istanbul mayor himself, whose ability to win at the ballot box has been unparalleled in Turkish history. Erdogan campaigned hard, portraying Sunday's vote for mayors and district councils as a fight for the nation's survival, but the election became a test for his Justice and Development Party (AKP) after Turkey slipped into a recession for the first time in a decade. The Opposition CHP party candidate for Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, was leading by nearly 28,000 votes with most ballot boxes counted, Supreme Election Board (YSK) chairman Sadi Guven said. Imamoglu won almost 4.16 million votes while the AKP candidate, former premier Binali Yildirim, won 4.13 million. Both claimed victory in the early hours following a tight race for the country's largest city after results showing them in a dead heat. "We want to start working as soon as possible to serve people," Imamoglu told reporters on Monday. "We want to cooperate with all institutions of Turkey to quickly meet the needs of Istanbul." In Ankara, opposition mayoral candidate Mansur Yavas had 50.89 percent of votes ahead of the AKP's Mehmet Ozhaseki on 47.06 percent, Anadolu state agency reported, with 99 percent of ballot boxes counted. "Ankara has won. The loser in Ankara is Ozhaseki, dirty politics has lost," Yavas told supporters who were waving Turkish flags and setting off fireworks at a celebratory rally. But in a sign of possible turmoil ahead, AKP officials said they would challenge the alleged invalidation of tens of thousands of votes in both cities. AKP secretary general Fatoih Sahin said the party will appeal in Ankara, saying the gap between the candidates "will narrow down and I believe it will eventually turn into a positive result for us." Speaking to supporters in Ankara after Sunday's polls closed, Erdogan had said the election was a victory for the AKP. Riders board a Roaring Fork Transportation Authority bus at the Brush Creek Road/Highway 82 intercept lot in this Aspen Daily News file photo. A federal grant has been awarded to fund improvements, including more paved parking spaces and real bathrooms, at the park and ride. An open house to deliver info and solicit feedback on the project is planned for April 10. Global technology major Siemens has signed the first power services agreement with Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA), one of the worlds largest premium aluminum producers, for an H-class gas turbine in the UAE. As part of the new 20-year service agreement, Siemens will provide maintenance and repairs as well as onsite personnel support for the gas turbine and its generator at the planned over 600-megawatt (MW) combined cycle project feeding EGAs Jebel Ali power plant in Dubai. The power block will see the first use of Siemens H-class technology by the aluminum smelting industry anywhere in the world. Siemens power generation services will offer industry leading flexibility and reliability, allowing the power plant to maintain stable power production. "This services deal supports the first use of Siemens H-class turbine technology in the UAE, and the first use in an aluminum facility globally," remarked Gianluigi Di Giovanni, the senior Executive VP for Siemens Power Generation Services in the Middle East and North Africa. We have been successfully supporting industrial customers for many years, and we fully understand the vital role that reliable energy plays in enabling a company such as EGA through its shareholders to reach its business goals," he added. As part of the agreement, Siemens will offer its Power Diagnostic Services, part of the companys Omnivise digital services portfolio, designed to remotely monitor and detect abnormal operating conditions of equipment. It helps power plant operators react quickly and proactively to avoid unscheduled downtime and production losses. Siemens monitoring experts can remotely solve more than 85 per cent of all alarms without a service team doing troubleshooting onsite. Reduced downtime and fewer turbine visits result in a higher availability and reliability of the energy assets, it stated. The new power block is being developed by a joint venture of Mubadala and Dubai Holding. EGA intends to buy the facilitys output for 25 years following commissioning. The shareholders of the joint venture signed an agreement in November with Siemens to install the UAEs first combined cycle H-class gas turbine at the new power block. The new power block is set to boost the efficiency of power production at EGAs Jebel Ali smelter, lowering emissions and reducing the consumption of natural gas. The H-class power plant is expected to lower greenhouse gas emissions from EGA's power generation at Jebel Ali by some 10 per cent, it added.-TradeArabia News Service Dentons is delighted to be formalising its longstanding relationship with 130-year-old firm Fisher Jeffries, said Ian Dardis, Dentons Australia CEO. Fisher Jeffries has an excellent reputation in South Australia as a specialist commercial firm, built on an intimate understanding of the local business market. And, as Australias defence hub, we see the combination with a leading local firm as having benefits for both domestic and global clients, he added. Australia region chair, Doug Stipanicev, who moved to Dentons from Gadens after the firms combined in 2016, said that growth has been a strategic priority of the firm in Australia. Since combining with Dentons, we have opened offices in the major Australian markets, connecting our talented lawyers to clients across Australia, he said. Clients will now benefit from working with a truly national team with financially integrated offices across Australia and more than 80 partners in the region. Thomas said that the combination with Dentons will help launch the South Australian firm into the global marketplace and bring even more benefits for clients. The two Australian partners are among 15 promotions across the firms offices with nearly half of them having trained at the firm and 50% female. When the promotions take effect on 1st May it will take the partner headcount to 458. HSF adds renewables expertise to Tasmanian windfarm deal A new windfarm in Tasmania consisting of 48 turbines will be located on the eastern shore of Lake Echo. The project is the first Australian investment for PowerChina, which is sponsoring the project along with Goldwind. The sponsors have been advised on the project financing by a team from Herbert Smith Freehills. The deal team was led by partners Gerard Pike, Jon Evans, Toby Anderson and Alison Dodd, who were supported by senior associates David Ong and Caroline Rowe, and solicitors Dinisi Sirimanne and Beryl Yan. What if Lebron called Tesla and had them lock me in my car last night? He got that kind of juice for sure. Smh. BEN BALLER (@BENBALLER) March 30, 2019 Thanks! Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2018 Baller is such a huge presence on the showbiz scene that hes a celebrity himself. When hes not making headlines for the pieces he creates on demand, he used to make them for his support of Tesla and the good work Musk was putting in. This context is necessary to better appreciate the irony of the recent predicament he found himself in.A few days ago, Baller took to social media to lament having ended up trapped inside his car. You can see the footage at the bottom of the page as well.I wish this was a f***ing joke, he says. Im locked inside my f***ing Tesla. I know Ive been the Tesla fan, Ive said so many good things about Tesla. But Ive been locked in the car now for 37 minutes f***ing waiting for roadside assistance.To prove that hes telling the truth, he tries all the possible ways of opening the front door from the inside, including pulling on the handle. In case of a power outage or if the cars computer dies, this should act as the manual release, but in this case, its simply not working. Either hes not pulling hard enough, or the malfunction is so severe that not even the manual release is working.Ironically, in December, Baller created his first custom piece that he offered as present. He reached out to Musk and offered him a $400,000 diamond and ruby ring, as his way of thanking him for creating almost 50,000 jobs to Americans and putting USA back on the map as a serious contender in the auto industry.Musk said thanks and (probably) accepted the generous present. Time to give it back or, at the very least, give the guy a proper explanation for what went wrong.Baller was eventually freed from his Tesla and found it in his heard to laugh it off. Such door malfunctions are not rare and they sometimes have tragic consequences. One Florida driver died this February after crashing his Model S , when the car caught fire and he became trapped inside.Please note that the video below contains graphic language that may offend. National Oilwell Varco has opened its Fibre Glass Systems manufacturing facility in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, which is seen as a major stride forward for Saudi Aramcos In-Kingdom Total Value Add (IKTVA) localisation programme. With 24,000 sq m of manufacturing space, this facility will be the first local manufacturer of spoolable and jointed GRE pipe. It will also make GRE high-pressure line pipe and downhole tubing and casing. The opening of the complex was attended by a high-level corporate delegation from Saudi Aramco, including president and chief executive officer Amin Nasser; Mohammed Y Al Qahtani, senior vice president of Upstream; and Ahmad A Al Sa'adi, senior vice president of technical services. NOVs new Saudi facility is bigger than its original plant in Houston, Texas, US, and is the first reinforced thermoplastic pipe (RTP) manufacturing hub in the kingdom. Bringing composite solutions from NOV's Fiberspar and STAR product lines to the kingdom will allow the company to help its customers eliminate corrosion in their applications, reduce installation and maintenance costs over their pipe's lifecycle, and more cost-effectively transport higher quality resources to the market, said NOV. "Saudi leadership has consistently sought out improvements that will drive higher levels of efficiency, safety, and environmental stewardship. Expanding the use of composite materials represents the latest advancement in that journey. We're excited for the future and proud of this landmark development, which will drive the proliferation of these solutions into other Middle East markets while improving the lives of people in this region and around the world," the company said. The development has been hailed as an important driver for Saudi Arabias economic and social blueprint Vision 2030 and for Saudi Aramcos iktva programme, which seeks to achieve 70 per cent localisation of its supply chain by 2021. Speaking at the inaugural event, Al Qahtani said the opening of the state-of-the-art production facility was a special day for all concerned, and the kingdom. It is expected that the facility will become a major hub for the GCC and Middle East North Africa (MEA) regions. Al Qahtani said: It is also an important validation of Saudi Vision 2030 and Saudi Aramcos localisation program, iktva, which is helping to drive it. Bringing sophisticated technologies to the kingdom is one component. Being able to export high quality products with Made in Saudi Arabia on them will surely be another, he said. And with 50 per cent Saudization here already (on a path toward 90 per cent), most of the work will be done by Saudis, he added. Above all, it confirms that the desire to locate here is growing, that it is getting easier to do business here, and that increased share in a global energy hub is very likely to be the result, Al Qahtani noted. He pointed out that market volatility in recent years had intensified the companys efforts on operation efficiency, cost avoidance, and reliability. Al Qahtani said that it was his belief that, there are even more innovative ways to monetise each barrel of oil using advanced oil-based materials, which is why we are examining new outlets for our products. He added that the increased deployment of nonmetallics in the companys pipeline network was part of its forward looking strategy. As part of our nonmetallics strategy, Saudi Aramco is turning crude oil into advanced polymeric materials to meet the industrys growing demand for nonmetallic pipes, flow lines, and other applications because of their superior cost, efficiency, and environmental advantages over their metal counterparts. The new NOV facility, Al Qahtani said: Ticks all of the boxes for us at Saudi Aramco. NOV is not a reactive company that lets others carry the load. They are helping to bring the win-win nature of Vision 2030 and iktva to life, adding tremendous value to Saudi Aramco. Clay C Williams, chief executive officer, NOV, said that his team was delighted to be in Dammam to celebrate the opening of its newest and largest, and most technologically advanced facility. Despite market challenges in recent years, Williams said NOV had stuck to its course with its partners. We were committed to our plan of building a truly world-class facility in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I want to thank everyone here for seeing this through, for your confidence to execute the project. I am excited about the future of NOV, the future of Saudi Aramco and the future of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he added. Williams said his company remains committed to the training of Saudi talent and to the aspirations of the Kingdoms Vision 2030. NOV is a leading provider of technology, equipment, and services to the global oil and gas industry that supports customers full-field drilling, completion, and production needs. Since 1862, NOV has pioneered innovations that improve the cost-effectiveness, efficiency, safety, and environmental impact of oil and gas operations. The Saudi Aramco delegation was taken on a tour of the new Dammam facility after the official opening ceremony, it stated. TradeArabia News Service She then pulled in next to a patrol cruiser on a separate traffic stop, which, obviously, led to her arrest. The woman has been identified as Amy Ann Dillion and she blew .21, after failing several field sobriety tests.The story is almost too hilarious to be true but a red flag for any other driver out there who might think drunk driving isnt that big of a deal. From the post on the official Facebook page of the Tulsa Police Department, its clear that Dillion was so drunk on the night of her arrest that she was hardly aware of what was happening to her.Officer Martin and Officer Badgett were on a traffic stop at 6300 E. 38th St. While on the stop a driver drove up to our stop driving on a rim (she had wrecked her car on something, unknown what it was), the post says. We could hear her coming from a block away. We quickly ended our original stop and stopped her. After rolling up to the stop, she turned into Normandy. When asked how much she had to drink, she stated two tequila shots (said this as she could barely stand upright).Dillion was traveling with a full margarita in her cupholder and couldnt tell the police how shed come to lose her tire. A concerned citizen called to report a car being driven on its rims about 15 minutes before she pulled in next to the police car, so she must have traveled quite a distance.Dillion was arrested for DUI second offense, operating a motor vehicle with defective tires, transporting an open container, and driving without a license. More charges are pending if shes found to have wrecked something before she was pulled over. We really shouldnt be surprised considering Pagani Automobili is already in the country, which shows that there is a market for hypercars. But of all the days for these cars to surface locally, it had to be on April 1. So the question now is this: Did a Bugatti Chiron and a Koenigsegg Agera S really arrive in the Philippines? Starting with the Bugatti, there are two photos of the Chiron which shows it parked beside a truck. At first glance, it may seem real, but try to take a closer look especially at the rear quarter photo. The background is certainly somewhere in the Philippines. However, the Chiron appears to have been edited in. That said, credit where credit is due. Whoever edited the photo did a good job; they even adjusted the lighting and shadows to make it seem legit. But unfortunately, there is no Bugatti Chiron in the Philippines just yet, at least none that we know of. As for the Koenigsegg Agera S, we can say that the photos are definitely real. The question now is whether it is parked in a garage locally or somewhere else. A source of ours who actually follows Koenigsegg builds told AutoIndustriya that this specific Agera S is not in the Philippines but is in Singapore. Dont let that one photo of an Aston Martin with a conduction sticker fool you as well, it is not in the same garage. The Aston Martin garage, while similar in appearance, is actually located in a dealership building in Pasong Tamo, but look at the windows behind the Koenigsegg; you can see several high rise apartments that you wouldnt see from the Aston Martin garage in Makati. Looking up the vehicle on the Koenigsegg Registry, it is chassis #098 and was built in right-hand drive configuration; definitely not in the Philippines. Sorry to burst the bubble, but these limited-run hypercars didnt arrive in the Philippines. But if you do look hard enough, you will find some rare gems that are actually here. Democratic 2020 candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) released 12 years of tax returns Monday night, a dig at her Republican opponent President Trump, who has notoriously refused to do the same since the 2016 election. Why it matters: Klobuchar is the fourth Democrat who's gunning for the White House to release her tax returns, increasing pressure for other Democratic hopefuls to do the same. Klobuchar's family tax documents are from 2017 to 2006, whereas some candidates have finished and released this year's. Joe Biden advisers believe coverage of allegations of inappropriate behavior is being stoked by rival Democrats a dynamic that could actually fire up the vice president at a time when others see success as increasingly improbable. Why it matters: Several around Biden think advisers to Bernie Sanders are at least partly behind the anti-Biden campaign. One prominent backer thinks Biden will run, and "is ready to kill Bernie." I got this text last night from a source close to Biden: "VP directed staff this evening to reach out to supporters and donors with a simple message full steam ahead." Why you'll hear about this again: A second woman went on the record Monday to say that a past display of affection by Biden had made her feel uncomfortable. Amy Lappos of Connecticut told the Hartford Courant that Biden rubbed noses during a 2009 political fundraiser in Greenwich when he was vice president: "It wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head." Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted "right wing trolls" from "the dark recesses of the internet" for circulating misleading photos of Biden embraces. Go deeper: 2020 Democrats, establishment figures split over defense of Joe Biden Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) is the latest GOP official linked to a federal corruption case in North Carolina in which businessman Greg Lindberg, who was indicted early Tuesday, asked officials to convince North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey to dismiss his deputy, Politico reports. Details: FEC records show that Lindberg donated $150,000 to Walker's campaign during the 2018 midterm elections after Lindberg had already donated more than $78,000 to another Walker-affiliated campaign. Walker told Politico that he has not been charged in the investigation. Go deeper: Chairman of North Carolina GOP indicted in federal campaign finance probe The Trump administration and Congress will host a flurry of NATO events this week, timed to the alliance's 70th anniversary. Why it matters: The past couple of years have been tough for NATO, with Europeans still struggling to pull their own weight on defense spending and warily watching President Trump to see if he'll pull the plug on the alliance. Although such concerns can be overcranked the U.S. military is doing more in Europe than it was two years ago the alliance is still strained by unpredictable disruptions from its largest and most important member. Details: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will visit President Trump Tuesday and then address a joint session of Congress. Also this week, Vice President Mike Pence will join NATO foreign ministers and experts at a policy conference, and Secretary Mike Pompeo will host all 29 NATO foreign ministers at the State Department. Between the lines: Stoltenberg will be the first NATO secretary general to address Congress, and his bipartisan invitation is a clear signal of congressional concerns about Trump's posture toward the alliance. If the Senate takes up the NATO Support Act, which passed the House overwhelmingly, it could become harder for a U.S. president to withdraw from the alliance. What to watch: Because this is a "ministerial" meeting, world leaders will be staying home (after the experience of last summers summit in Brussels, which was dominated by Trumps antics, they may have figured less is more). Expect mild buzz, perhaps new announcements on defense spending or a discussion of the growing threat from China. Trump remains the wild card, of course, and it's anyones guess what will surface in his Twitter feed or remarks alongside Stoltenberg. Eyes will then shift to the next NATO leaders meeting scheduled for December in London. That summit seems unnecessary there's little business for leaders to conduct that ministers can't handle and also has the potential to be disrupted by Trump. Derek Chollet is EVP and senior advisor for security and defense policy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. John Kasich CNN commentator, possible Trump challenger, and former Ohio governor has a book coming in October from Hanover Square Press, "It's Up to Us: Ten Little Ways We Can Bring About Big Change." What he's saying: "Fix things where you live," Kasich writes, "connect with other people, live a life bigger than yourself, and tell politicians what you expect out of them." Martin Fayulu, the former Exxon executive who election observers said won the Democratic Republic of the Congos presidential vote in December, says longtime president Joseph Kabila is still "holding the reins" despite having officially stepped down. The backdrop: Term limits kept Kabila out of the presidential race, and his hand-picked successor finished third. Despite Fayulus clear popularity, though, Congos little-trusted electoral commission declared another candidate, Felix Tshisekedi, the winner. The international response was fairly muted, in large part because this was Congos first peaceful transfer of power and there were concerns a struggle for power could spark civil war. Speaking today at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., Fayulu said Tshisekedi had struck a "secret deal" with Kabila that gave him the presidency and the country a "complete defeat of democracy." Asked how he was sure a secret deal had been struck, Fayulu said Kabila's representatives came to him recently and said Tshisekedi wasnt upholding his end of their deal. Fayulu said these representatives asked him to meet with Kabila, but he declined. Fayulu said hes also refusing to meet with Tshisekedi, who will be in Washington this week, because Congolese people would think he was being "bought." Fayulu is demanding a broader dialogue involving himself, Tshisekedi and Kabila to be followed by new elections. What hes saying: "The Congolese people understand that they have been sold out and ... that this is simply a new extension of the Kabila system, a system that was not able to bring solutions to the people for 18 years and is certainly not going to be able to do so under a president in name only." "Mr. Kabila certainly does not want Mr. Tshisekedi to succeed where he failed. They will both be looking to have an unstable balance ... and it will of course be the Congolese people who will suffer the most." The bottom line: I asked Fayulu how Kabila could be convinced to give up the reins. He said the first step, ensuring he was off the ballot in December, was accomplished. Now, he says, "you have to let the truth of the elections be known." Fayulu said a "compromise solution" would then be possible, but "under this compromise, Kabila would have to leave completely." Kaspersky Lab released a third-party research report Tuesday arguing that the U.S.' publicly announced logic behind a federal ban on Kaspersky's wares is based on a faulty understanding of Russian law. The big picture: Kaspersky has been locking horns with the Department of Homeland Security and lawmakers after both independently banned Kaspersky software from government systems. The third-party report, written by Professor Kaj Hober of Uppsala University, Sweden, is part of a transparency offensive meant to counter the reputational hit. Details: The public reasoning for the U.S. ban is that Russian law would allow Moscow to seize data from Kaspersky with no recourse or oversight. That's a big deal for antivirus companies, because modern antivirus programs frequently upload suspicious files to the cloud for analysis. On federal systems, that may mean sensitive or classified files. According to Hober, that argument doesn't hold water. Hober writes that Russia can only grab data from telecommunications firms, companies that distribute information or chat apps, and Kaspersky is none of those. But, but, but: The public reasoning is not necessarily the only reasoning. Several media reports claim Russia has used Kaspersky software in a more hands-on approach to espionage converting the feature that searches for malware into a feature searching for classified documents. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Switzerland-based Sulzer will exhibit state-of-the-art mass transfer solutions for the process industry at AchemAsia 2019 - International Exhibition and Conference on Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, to be held next month in China. Sulzer's core strengths are flow control and applicators. It specialises in pumping solutions and services for rotating equipment, as well as separation, mixing and application technology. The event will take place from May 21 to 23 in Shanghai. The company will also be showing advanced augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences that will allow visitors to have a closer look at the equipment as well as how it integrates into industrial plants, said a statement. As the leader in separation and mixing technology, Sulzer Chemtech is well-aligned with the theme of this years event - sustainable chemical production in China. To support this, the company will showcase real-world applications of its revolutionary separation technologies, for example for bioethanol production. By using tablets with Sulzer Chemtech AR app, visitors will be able to interact with 3D models of facilities, where they will see how Sulzers equipment fits into large-scale processing plants as well as accessing relevant information on the products, in the form of text, videos and pictures. A VR app will also allow visitors to explore Sulzers comprehensive range of column internals and static mixers, including the next-generation random packing NeXRing. In addition, a VR headset will be available on stand to virtually walk through a number of process plants featuring Sulzers solutions. Visitors to the stand will be guided through these experiences by industry experts from Sulzer Chemtech, who will also be available to discuss their key mass transfer solutions for process manufacturing, it stated. TradeArabia News Service President Trump's threat to close the southern border is designed to "pressure everybody" on illegal migration, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner told Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" Monday evening. Details: "I think the presidents definitely made increased awareness to the issue," Trump's son-in-law told host Laura Ingraham. "I think hes weighing all the options." Ingraham asked Kushner if the goal of the strategy was to pressure Mexico. "No, I think it's to pressure everybody," he replied. The backdrop: Kushner's language tempers the threats Trump made in a series of Twitter posts Friday to close the U.S.-Mexico border or "large sections" of it this week unless Mexico "immediately" stops "all illegal immigration." The big picture: On the show, Kushner also discussed with Ingraham Trumps 2020 strategy, the Mueller Report and the presidents prison reform work. On the Mueller report, Kushner said he hoped for "cooler heads" over media coverage of the fallout from the investigation findings. "We're all on the same team," he said. "We're all here for America." On the Russia investigations, Kushner said he would testify on Capitol Hill but dismissed the probes as "nonsense harassment investigations." He wished House Democrats luck in their investigations into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Lego's education unit is making its biggest product debut in three years, unveiling Spike Prime, a new kit that aims to mix the company's familiar bricks with motors, sensors and introductory coding lessons. Why it matters: Lego isn't alone in trying to use its toys as a gateway for STEM education, with startups like LittleBits and Sphero also entering the space. The details: The kit will sell to schools for about $330 and be available in time for the next school year. Aimed at middle schoolers, creations made with Spike Prime can be controlled via a drag-and-drop programming language built on Scratch via apps for iOS, Android, Chrome OS ands PCs. Axios traveled to Lego's home town of Billund, Denmark for a behind-the-scenes look at the product and its development. The mix of bricks, motors and sensors can be used to create everything from a rudimentary printer to a virtual meteorologist that taps the Internet to tell you the weather from anywhere in the globe all in lessons that fit into a typical 45-minute class period. While the ostensible goal of Spike Prime is for students working in pairs to build specific robots, the real mission is to teach students science, technology, engineering, art and math skills in a way that's fun and engaging. "Theres a great connection between confidence in STEAM and general confidence," Lego Education president Esben Strk Jrgensen said in an interview. The most noticeable difference between Spike Prime and its predecessors from the Mindstorms line are the bright colors and personalization options that make it a lot more approachable than past products. "We want it to be as intuitive as the brick, the opposite of being intimidating," Jrgensen said. Lessons learned: Jrgensen said that not every product it has aimed at the classroom has been a hit, but the failures have also been meaningful. One recent example is 2014's StoryStarter, which aimed to use Legos as a starting point to help students express themselves. StoryStarter didn't take off, but some of its focus on storytelling was added to Spike Prime in an effort to make the product appeal to a wider range of students. Unlike past robotics efforts, for example, Spike Prime contains Lego minifigures and other elements designed to give the projects more personality. The themes of the lessons are also aimed to be more engaging, with projects in categories such as "life hacks" and "invention squad" as well as ones designed to prepare students for robotics competitions. Jrgensen said he knows the bar is high to engage middle schoolers: I have a 15 year old at home," he said. "Its not easy Fun Fact: Spike Prime also contains 11 new Lego elements, ranging from a large Technics base to new clips to bricks that help bridge the world of Lego and Technics. That's a lot for one new product and sure to have Lego die-hards clamoring to get their hands on the product. Although Spike Prime is only being sold through Lego's education channel, those products will be available online for individuals that really want one. For more, check out this video. And we'll have more on Lego's education efforts and our trip to Denmark in Wednesday's Login. 1 big thing ... Scoop: Mike Bloomberg might still run Mayor Bloomberg receives the Leadership in Public Service award from Vice President Biden at the Clinton Global Citizen Awards in 2013. (Ramin Talaie/Getty Images) Michael Bloomberg might still run for president in 2020, especially if former Vice President Joe Biden winds up not getting in, according to people who have discussed the matter with the former New York mayor. These people tell me that Bloomberg, 77, who announced March 5 that he wouldn't run, might reconsider if a centrist lane were to open up. tell me that Bloomberg, 77, who announced March 5 that he wouldn't run, might reconsider if a centrist lane were to open up. The most likely scenario for that would be if Biden, 76, whose displays of public affection have burst into a major issue, were to stay out or fade fast. Why it matters: Bloomberg would be a voice of more moderate practicality in a field where the early campaigning has been dominated by leftish idealism. Bloomberg, estimated by Forbes to be worth $58 billion, could spend unlimited amounts to argue that no one in the race had done more to promote action on climate and guns. estimated by Forbes to be worth $58 billion, could spend unlimited amounts to argue that no one in the race had done more to promote action on climate and guns. So Bloomberg, at least at first, could command a hearing and impose a footprint in a way that few candidates can. The people who have talked to Bloomberg caution that if he were to revisit the decision, he might well wind up in the same place. But we're told Biden's presumed candidacy was a fairly significant factor in Bloomberg's decision, after massive spending on data and polling. Biden's presumed candidacy was a fairly significant factor in Bloomberg's decision, after massive spending on data and polling. The race looked like "a bloody fight for the same slice of voters," a source said. looked like "a bloody fight for the same slice of voters," a source said. But Bloomberg really wanted to go, according to numerous friends. really wanted to go, according to numerous friends. "He's a data guy," one of them said. "He couldn't get the math to work." Be smart: Bloomberg's second thoughts speak volumes about how Democrats view the allegations' damage to Biden, who has spent days dealing with wall-to-wall coverage of whether his touchy-feely, gregarious style is fine or a bit creepy. 1 big thing: A Mexican tale in Storm Lake The Arceo family's Storm Lake outlet. Photo: Steve LeVine/Axios STORM LAKE, Iowa In 1991, Manuel Arceo emigrated to the United States, finally settling three years later in the small Washington state city of Chehalis. There, he parlayed his cooking skills into Plaza Jalisco, a restaurant he named after his native state in Mexico. A quarter-century later, Arceo and several of his brothers are the owners of 14 restaurants in three states including an improbable five here in Iowa. Against the toxic U.S. debate around Hispanic immigrants, the Arceos' story illustrates a lesser-told dimension of the decades-long Mexican influx into the country a familiar tale of pluck aligning with bedrock American tradition. around Hispanic immigrants, the Arceos' story illustrates a lesser-told dimension of the decades-long Mexican influx into the country a familiar tale of pluck aligning with bedrock American tradition. "There's a lot of business for everybody," says Efreen Arceo, one of Manuel's eight brothers, who manages Plaza Mexico, the family's outlet in Storm Lake. What's happening: Until around 1980, Storm Lake, a city in northwest Iowa, was, like the rest of the state, almost entirely white. But then a first wave of immigrants arrived Tai Dams, an ethnic minority from Vietnam and Laos. Many of the adults went to work at local pork and turkey slaughtering houses, Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the local paper, tells in his lyrically crafted book, "Storm Lake." Today, about 54% of Storm Lake's approximately 15,000 people are immigrants, mostly Hispanic. They have swelled the local population, going the opposite direction from the rest of the state, in which 71 of 99 counties have lost residents over the last decade. approximately 15,000 people are immigrants, mostly Hispanic. They have swelled the local population, going the opposite direction from the rest of the state, in which 71 of 99 counties have lost residents over the last decade. While schools in much of the state are short of students and are consolidating, and towns are aging as young people move away, Storm Lake has a housing shortage and the schools are bulging with children. The immigrants have infused Storm Lake with a surprising Hispanic feel, with Spanish-language downtown storefronts, including Mexican restaurants like La Juanita and Plaza Mexico. Going against the national trend: Storm Lake, like the state, went for President Trump in 2016. In the 2018 midterms, it re-elected Rep. Steve King, the anti-immigrant Republican congressman. But Jose Ibarra, a member of the city council, says Storm Lake's non-immigrant population is not hostile to the relative newcomers. of the city council, says Storm Lake's non-immigrant population is not hostile to the relative newcomers. Ibarra, sales manager of a local electronics store, moved here along with his family in 1999. Two years ago, after seeing that the city council had no immigrant members, he became the top vote-getter in the election. of a local electronics store, moved here along with his family in 1999. Two years ago, after seeing that the city council had no immigrant members, he became the top vote-getter in the election. "We are in the middle of a very red area," Ibarra tells me, describing some anti-immigrant hostility in the more rural countryside. "But Storm Lake is different. We don't have any race issues." Getting to Iowa: In 2000, the Arceos opened a Des Moines restaurant. Four years later, Efreen began looking for another location, and in Storm Lake he noticed a vacant McDonald's. He bought it for $140,000, figuring that, between the heavily immigrant meat packing workers and local Buena Vista University, there would be plenty of customers. It has turned out that way. And Efreen figures the town is better for the immigrants, too. While other parts of the state are moribund, Storm Lake "has more people and more business. It's good for the stores, for everybody." Pittsburgh's city council passed legislation restricting military assault rifles in a 6-3 vote on Tuesday, and the democratic mayor is expected to sign the bill, reports AP. Why it matters: The decision comes almost 6 months after a shooter killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. However, Pennsylvania prevents municipalities from regulating guns, and gun advocates say they are prepared to sue to stop the restrictions if the legislation goes through, per AP. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission has granted ExxonMobils request to throw out a shareholder-pushed resolution urging the oil giant to disclose targets that would drastically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Why it matters: The investment community is becoming an alternative battleground between publicly traded companies and climate change as U.S. government policy on the matter retreats under President Trump. Activist investors, including those that filed this resolution with Exxon, are worried about what they characterize as the SEC ramping up their scrutiny of resolutions under Trump. Where it stands: The non-binding, but symbolically significant resolution, filed by the New York public pension fund and Church of Englands endowment, called for disclosure of short-, medium- and long-term targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from company operations and products that are in line with the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The SEC, which governs this process known as shareholder democracy, said in a letter Tuesday to Exxon and obtained by Axios that such a resolution would result in micromanaging the company. The proposal seeks to impose specific methods for implementing complex policies in place of the ongoing judgments of management as overseen by its board of directors, the SEC wrote. Read the letter: For the record: An Exxon spokesman declined to comment. Thomas DiNapoli, who as New York Comptroller manages NYs pension fund, says he will keep pushing Exxon. Contrary to the SEC Staffs determination, investors efforts to engage on climate risk concerns do not micromanage Exxon, DiNapoli said. "We are asking the company to disclose its plans to address a long-term threat to its business. Go deeper: Investors ramp up pressure on Exxon over climate change President Trump threatened to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border within one week as a way to stop illegal immigration, disrupting millions of legal border crossings and asylum seekers in the process. Why it matters: On Friday, Trump added that he was prepared to close off trade and commercial ports of entry, the New York Times reports. A complete shutdown could cost the U.S. billions of dollars in trade $26 billion in food imports alone, per the Department of Agriculture. By the numbers: $346 billion in goods were imported to the U.S. in 2018, while $265 billion were exported to Mexico, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. That's a daily average of $1.675 billion worth of trade flowing between the U.S.-Mexico border. Here are some of the goods that would affected if Trump were to close the U.S.-Mexico border: Auto parts: The auto industry would only survive the border's closure for one week, said Kristin Dziczek, the vice president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research. Every automaker with an auto plant in the U.S. depends on parts imported from Mexico. The auto industry would only survive the border's closure for one week, said Kristin Dziczek, the vice president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research. Every automaker with an auto plant in the U.S. depends on parts imported from Mexico. Produce: Fresh fruits and vegetables imported from Mexico are worth $10.8 billion each year. Tomatoes from Mexico are the No. 1 importer to the U.S., worth $2.18 billion, Forbes reports. Fresh fruits and vegetables imported from Mexico are worth $10.8 billion each year. Tomatoes from Mexico are the No. 1 importer to the U.S., worth $2.18 billion, Forbes reports. Avocados: If imports from Mexico stop, Americans risk running out of avocados in three weeks time, Steve Barnard, president and chief executive of Mission Produce, told Reuters. If imports from Mexico stop, Americans risk running out of avocados in three weeks time, Steve Barnard, president and chief executive of Mission Produce, told Reuters. Alcohol: The U.S. imports 183.8 million liters of tequila from Mexico each year, which accounts for 1.3 billion of total tequila imports. The U.S. imports 183.8 million liters of tequila from Mexico each year, which accounts for 1.3 billion of total tequila imports. Oil: Mexico is the No. 1 importer of U.S. diesel and gasoline. Rail terminals, which move some of the refined fuels, could be affected by the closures, but it's still uncertain, Reuters reports. What they're saying: Several politicians have spoken against the border closure. The Republican mayor of El Paso, Texas, said Tuesday closing the border would "detrimental, almost draconian" to the region's economy, The Guardian reports. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that Trump economists are studying the potential impact of closing the U.S.-Mexico border. "Certainly, we're looking at all options when it comes to closing the different ports of entry," she said. The bottom line: Mexico was the second largest supplier of goods imports to the U.S. in 2017, according to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Economists predict prices will go up at grocery stores and U.S. industries would come to a standstill. By Abdul Kerimkhanov The 2nd of April is another black page in the history of modern Azerbaijan. Today is the 26th anniversary of the occupation of the Klbajar region by Armenian troops. Klbajar is located outside Nagorno-Karabakh. It is the most high-mountainous region of Azerbaijan with a territory of 1,936 square kilometers. Before hostilities, population of Klbajar was 58,000 people. The occupation of the Klbajar region was accompanied by inhuman mass crimes against the local population, which did not go unnoticed by the international press. On the night of April 7-8, 1993, Armenian troops burned the village of Agdaban in the Klbajar region, tortured 779 civilians and completely burned 130 houses. The brutality of the Armenians was unlimited: 67 people were killed, among them eight people aged 90-100 years old and two children, seven women were burned alive, two were missing, 12 people were seriously injured. Armenians destroyed in Klbajar 97 schools, nine kindergartens, 116 libraries, 43 clubs, 42 houses of culture, 9 hospitals, 13,000 private houses and 37,852 hectares of forest area, natural resources, including rich gold deposits. The occupation of Klbajar by the Armenian side led to the death of 511 civilians, another 321 people were taken prisoner or missing, and 58,000 people were expelled from their homes. After the occupation of Klbajar, UN Security Council adopted Resolution No. 822, demanding Armenia immediately to withdraw troops from Klbajar and other occupied regions of Azerbaijan. But this resolution, like the other three, adopted later, is not implemented to this day. In addition, contrary to the principles of the UN and the OSCE, Armenia began artificially settling the territory of the Klbajar region with Armenians since 1999. Having violated international humanitarian law, Armenia conducts an artificial settlement policy in the occupied Klbajar region of Azerbaijan and tries to change the demographic composition. The fact of Armenias participation in the conflict, and in particular in the seizure of the Klbajar region, is confirmed in the collection of the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch / Helsinki. Armenian has been numerously called to put an end to the policy of aggression and ethnic cleansing, and fulfill its international obligations. The day is not far off when Klbajar, like the other occupied territories of Azerbaijan, will be liberated from the aggressor, and the civilians of these beautiful lands will return to their lands. Nothing in the world can prevent the Azerbaijani people from restoring justice and territorial integrity of the country. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova Growing inflow of tourists coming to Azerbaijan contributes to the development of "non-cash" economy in the country as well as boosts revenues. In January-February, 364,200 foreigners and stateless persons from 152 countries visited Azerbaijan, which is 3.3 percent more than in January-February of last year. According to the export review of the Center for Analysis of Economic Reforms and Communications of Azerbaijan, the value of foreign currency transactions by bank cards in the two months amounted to 173.6 million manats ($102.15 million). The amount of transactions in February amounted to 85.3 million manats ($50.19 million). In recent years, the volume of non-cash payments in Azerbaijan increased by 70 percent due to the development of tourism. Last year, foreign citizens spent 1.278 billion manats ($0.75 billion) in Azerbaijan via bank cards, which is 25 percent, or 256 million manats ($151 million) more than in 2017. In total, in 2018, Azerbaijan was visited by 2.849 million foreign citizens and stateless persons from 196 countries, which is 5.7 percent more than in 2017. Movement towards a non-cash economy is officially one of the priorities of financial regulators in a number of countries, both developed and developing. The development of a cashless environment is something for which financiers and the state are fighting for understandable reasons. The velocity of circulation of cash is lower than that of electronic ones, the cash flow is less transparent, and therefore more adapted to the shadow economy. According to the state program on the expansion of digital payments in 2018-2020, the annual volume of non-cash payments in Azerbaijan will reach about 17 billion manats ($10 billion) by 2021. In general, volume of non-cash payments through Azerbaijans national payment system reached 274 billion manats ($161.22 billion) in 2018, which is 32 percent more compared to the figures from the previous year. The share of cash payments made up 52 percent, which is 8 percentage points less than the figure for 2017. International experts believe that the full use of non-cash settlements in Baku will lead to an increase of $1.9 billion in revenues, including business income by $1.4 billion, governments revenues by $400 million, consumers income by $100 million. --- Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova Development of entrepreneurship is one of the important terms for country's socio-economic growth. A center for rendering services to entrepreneurs and business incubation has opened in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani Deputy Minister of Economy Sahib Mammadov said. Mammadov made the remarks in Baku at the opening ceremony of the center, Trend reports. The opening of the center is aimed at developing the private sector and rendering support to entrepreneurship in Azerbaijan, he said. Mammadov stressed that Azerbaijan makes maximum efforts to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy and also takes measures aimed at raising the level of entrepreneurial activity. "The opening of new centers for rendering services to entrepreneurs will greatly improve the level of quality of private business, as well as positively affect the strengthening of the mechanism of small and medium-sized businesses in Azerbaijan," he said. Mammadov said that support will be rendered to the novice entrepreneurs, as well as to young people having innovative ideas through the newly opened center. The conditions will also be created for the implementation of start-ups aimed at improving the business sphere in Azerbaijan, he said. In addition, Sahib Mammadov noted at the briefing that the reforms carried out in Azerbaijan contributed to the acceleration of the development of the private sector, as well as strengthening of the capabilities of the real sector of the economy. The Azerbaijani Entrepreneurship Development Fund has issued preferential loans worth 2.3 billion manats to 35,000 entrepreneurs up till now, he said. These loans are envisaged for implementation of the projects worth 5.1 billion manats. Mammadov stressed that a stable base has been created to support entrepreneurship in the country, which is being improved with the support of the public sector. This stable base is aimed at improving the business sphere in Azerbaijan and creating optimal conditions for improving the quality of business and the services being rendered to the population, he said. The Azerbaijani Entrepreneurship Development Fund was established on the basis of the National Fund for Entrepreneurship Support, operating in the country since 1997. This year, the fund intends to issue preferential loans worth 160 million manats. Recently, new categories of entrepreneurship approved in Azerbaijan. Previously, the categories of entrepreneurs in the country were divided into small, medium and large enterprises, the new category includes also the micro businesses which covers companies with a staff of one to ten people and an annual income of up to 200,000 manat ($ 117 682). Development of small and medium-sized businesses leads to the growth of entrepreneurship which is one of the priority directions of Azerbaijans economic policy. Small and medium-sized businesses play an important role in development of the country's economy. The share of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Azerbaijans foreign trade is planned to increase to 40 percent after 2025. The Agency for the Development of Small and Medium Business of Azerbaijan was established in 2017 to ensure the consistency of reforms, as well as the improvement of the business regulation system and the application of effective coordination, enhancement of the role and competitiveness of small and medium-sized businesses in the country's economy, and the compliance of the management system of this sphere with modern requirements. Recently, Center for Analysis of Economic Reforms and Communications of Azerbaijan and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) organized the international conference titled "Economic Reforms: Development and Diversification of Entrepreneurship" in Baku, to further strengthen ties between the Eurasian region and OECD countries, expand cooperation in the economic and social development of the region, and discuss ways to solve existing problems in these areas. The conference was attended by high-ranking representatives of the government of Azerbaijan and international organizations. --- Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Damen Marine Components (DMC) has signed its first order with Tersan Tersanecilik, a Turkish shipyard. The order is for a single, customised Barke rudder with a surface area of 16 sq m and a Commader rotary vane steering gear that delivers a torque of up to 430 kNm. Tersan Tersanecilik is based at Yalova City on the Sea of Marmara, and the equipment will be installed on a 108-metre Factory Freezer Trawler vessel, said a statement. Designed by Skipsteknisk, design number STL191L, she is currently in build for the Russian fishing fleet operator JSC PT Okeanrybflot, it said. In addition to the hydraulic components of the rotary vane, DMC will deliver indicators and controls; follow-up, non-follow-up in Main Bridge, follow-up in wings and follow-up in AFT. The system is classified RMRS KM, ICE3, AUT 2, REF, Fishing Vessel and is scheduled for delivery in December this year. Damens Barke rudder is ideal for vessels such as large fishing trawlers. It is a highly robust and reliable design that delivers excellent manoeuvring performance while at the same time being noise and vibration-free. With the flap linkage sheltered in a streamlined housing it is protected from ice, sand and floating objects and the mechanical components are contained in a grease-lubricated housing. Additional features that make the Barke rudder a dependable steerage solution is its overload protection; the flap linkage is safe from impact in the event of excessive force being applied and rudder movement is restricted should the flap become blocked. The flap linkage and bearings are designed with minimum clearance to ensure the least possible vibration, noise and wear. Nazim Yasar, project manager at Tersan Tersanecilik, said: We are interested in developing our relationship with DMC and this first step was already done by placing on order for rudder and steering gear system. This would be a good opportunity for both parties to do a business for future projects, Yasar added. TradeArabia News Service By Laman Ismayilova Music is one of the most wonderful things in the world, able to touch the soul and heal the heart. It's an incredible way to express your feelings in a melody that will live in other people's souls forever. Alp Aliyev is one of those musicians who can immerse the listeners in the world of magical sounds. Young pianist captivates the hearts of music lovers with impressive clarity and deep musical expression. His distinctive and innovative playing allows him to perform in front of all kind of audiences. Alp Aliyev inherited his talent from his parents - his mother, Tatyana Suhorukova-Aliyeva was a prima ballerina of the Azerbaijan Opera and Ballet Theater and his father Abbas Aliyev was a secretary of the Azerbaijan Union of Cinematographers. His passion for music has appeared at a young age and never faded. Aliyev started his musical journey at a very young age. He shared the same stage with Azerbaijan State Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor Fakhraddin Karimov. The concert featured works of such famous composers as Fikrat Amirov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Elmira Nazirova, etc. The support that he got from his music teachers Afa Gambarova, Sevil Lazimova made him love music even more. My teachers had always stood behind me while I was studying at music school 23. With their support, I had performed together with Azerbaijan State Symphonic Orchestra three times. Afterwards, I performed in Germany, France, said Aliyev. At that time, young pianist realized that music would be forever part of his life. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. I studied with the theorist Zemfira Ismayilova. She gave me a lot of knowledge, the pianist said. In 2015, Alp Aliyev entered the Baku Music Academy. After a year of study, he was transferred to the "SABAH" class for especially gifted students. After that he received a certificate for participation in the international competition Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. He was also a participant of the 10th Gabala International Music Festival. The pianist successfully performed at prestigious Art Duo International Music Competition in Prague, where he took the first place. After entering the Baku Music Academy, I have started improving my skills at a completely new level. I visited Georgia. Then I went to Bulgaria, where I took the 3rd place, the Czech Republic, where I also took the 3rd place. During my student years, I also took 2nd place in the republican music competition, Aliyev said. Life without inspiration is like flowers without fragrance. Musicians, writers, artists have always emphasized the importance of inspiration in the creative process. The pianist would not make a first step without an inspiration. But sometimes inspiration can be lost. Inspiration ... this is the hardest thing to talk about, the pianist admits. I lost my heart many times. I asked myself: Why do I need it? This is exactly what you must overcome, Aliyev said. I get a lot of inspiration from the audience. The minutes that you spend on the stage, 5-10 minutes or maybe an hour are the best moments for each artist. Everyone who has passed this road will immediately understand what I am talking about, he added. I have always said that in order to love any kind of activity one needs to deeply feel it from the inside. So I fell in love with music. I found myself in this circle, near those people who influenced me. I realized that this music is mine, he concluded. In addition to his music activities, Alp Aliyev is a director of Human and Environment Union. The main feature of the project is that it unites such different spheres as art, science and ecology. The first concert of the Human and Environment Union was held on February 28. This project will help me to improve myself as well as to discover something new, Aliyev said. Speaking about his future plans, Alp Aliyev stressed that he will continue his musical activities. I will continue to perform and experience passion and excitement. I also like to work in other areas, to unite them, which will allow me to go beyond the standards, he added. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova Art Tower Gallery will host the exhibition of Azerbaijani photographer Maya Bagirova on April 14. The exhibition will include black and white photographs of Paris, Trend Life reported. The project is organized as part of Francophonie Weeks in Baku. A series of photographs by Maya Bagirova can be described by the word "impression". The student of one of the leading photography schools in Europe- Speos Paris Photographic Institute, Maya Bagirova has discovered Paris through the photography. Walking through an unfamiliar city, she became acquainted with its history and wonderful atmosphere. Maya Bagirova moved to Paris in 2016. She is a participant and winner of a number of photo contests. The exhibition is co-organized with the support of the Office of the Icherisheher State Historical-Architectural Reserve, the Ministry of Culture of Azerbaijan, the French Embassy in Azerbaijan and the Arts Council Azerbaijan. Media partners of the event are Azernews.az, Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az. The days of French language, will run until April 15. The embassies of France, Belgium, Costa Rica, Greece, Hungary, Morocco, Mexico, Moldova, Romania, Switzerland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia in Azerbaijan, as well as the European Union have joined the festival. The International Organisation of La Francophonie was created in 1970. Its mission is to embody the active solidarity between its 88 member states and governments (61 members and 27 observers), which together represent over one-third of the United Nations member states and account for a population of over 900 million people, including 300 million French speakers. IOF organizes political activities and actions of multilateral cooperation that benefit French-speaking populations. Its actions respect cultural and linguistic diversity and serve to promote the French language, peace and sustainable development. Overall, the days of French language and culture are annual spring event in Azerbaijan that brings French-speaking people together. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend A seminar titled "A New Look at Sovereignty in the Modern World" was held in Minsk, Belarus with the organizational support of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Minsk Dialogue expert initiative and the Austrian Embassy in Belarus, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Embassy in Belarus. The seminar included experts and scholars invited from many countries, among whom was Benyamin Poghosyan, Vice President for Research Head of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense Research University in Armenia and Executive Director of the Political Science Association. The event was also attended by Ambassador of Azerbaijan to Belarus Latif Gandilov and second secretary of the embassy Jeyhun Mammadov. During his speech, Poghosyan voiced anti-Azerbaijani and anti-Turkish thoughts. He also noted that ancient historical ties link Armenia with Russia. Poghosyan said that at one time Russia allegedly liberated the lands of southern Armenia from the Persian empire, and the Christian population of Armenia, which was under pressure from Muslims, was saved. Poghosyan went on to say that Russia currently manages energy production in Armenia, the sphere of mobile operators and the railway, noting that the presence of a military base and air defense system in Armenia is important for the country's security. He also noted that Armenia has established ties with the EU, the US and NATO, but cannot accept projects that will harm relations with Russia. Poghosyan added that, due to its location between Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenia ceded a certain part of its sovereignty to Russia in order to defend itself. Speaking after the Armenian representative, Dustin Dehez, Managing Partner of Germanys Manatee Global Advisors consultancy, said that Poghosyans words about Armenia having ceded a certain part of its sovereignty to Russia were surprising, and he does not understand the logic of losing sovereignty for ensuring its security. Latif Gandilov, in his turn, noted that he did not intend to speak at the event, but the statement of new facts by the Armenian side forced him to express his opinion. The ambassador said that on May 28, 1918, the territory of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was 114,000 square kilometers. After Azerbaijan regained its independence in 1991, the territory of Azerbaijan after it left the USSR amounted to 86,600 square kilometers 20 percent of which was occupied by Armenia. Gandilov also said that after the creation of the USSR, the Irevan Khanate was transferred to the Armenians in order to form a state for them, along with Zangazur. The ambassador emphasized that the territories of the 7 districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh are twice the size of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Despite the adoption of 4 UN Security Council resolutions in 1993-1994 in connection with the occupation of the territories of Azerbaijan by Armenia and the demand for the unconditional release of the occupied territories, Armenia still does not fulfill these conditions. The ambassador also said that not a single Azerbaijani is inhabiting the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and Armenians are pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing. As a graphic example of this policy, he pointed out the genocide committed on February 26, 1992 against the population of Khojaly. As an independent state, Azerbaijan currently cooperates on an equal footing in the region with international organizations and states, pursuing an independent foreign policy, as stated by Gandilov. The ambassador said that Azerbaijan is directly cooperating in ensuring the energy security of Europe. Azerbaijan has implemented such large projects as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars gas pipeline, while the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) will be commissioned this year. Gandilov thanked Dustin Dehez for the truth in connection with the sovereignty of Armenia. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova Seed Exchange project, through which country's agriculture sphere will enter a new development stage, will begin soon. Currently, preparations are underway in Azerbaijan to establish a seed exchange, the head of the Seed Fund, Emin Aliyev, told Report. We are currently studying foreign experience, application of this experience as well as exchanging ideas, Aliyev emphasized. The ministry official noted that, mainly the West European experience will be studied in the creation of the Seed Exchange. Seed Exchange is an online project that will be a single tool and using this Internet application, farmers, producers and seed companies will be able to choose seeds, carry freight, insure, review resumes and select consultants for agrotechnical consulting, and later even apply for trade financing or lending. It will play the role of a single platform for producers and importers of seeds, individuals and legal entities engaged in seed production. Agriculture is important for providing ecological balance, raising the level of socio-economic development in rural areas and protecting rural lifestyle, although its primary function is to produce foodstuffs and raw materials. The revival of agriculture sector plays an important role in the development of rural regions, where 47 percent of Azerbaijans population lives. Azerbaijan is in need of quality seeds to grow its own products on order to both meet local demand and increase exports. The State Seed Fund was established due to the country's increased need for new high-yielding and drought-resistant types of seeds, and in order to strengthen food security and state support for agricultural development of Azerbaijan in general. This year, the Fund also envisages the implementation of the ToxuMart project, as well as the creation of its network stands in various parts of Baku. Recently, the Agriculture Minister of Azerbaijan signed a protocol with Turkey in order to cooperate in the seed production. The goal of the bilateral agreement is to ensure efficiency and innovation in the agricultural sector. --- Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend United Kingdom appointed new ambassador to the Republic of Azerbaijan, Trend reported citing UK's government. Mr James Sharp has been appointed Her Majestys Ambassador to the Republic of Azerbaijan in succession to Dr Carole Crofts who will be retiring from the Diplomatic Service. Mr Sharp will take up his appointment during July 2019. James Sharp began his professional career at BAE Systems company. He began work in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1987. In 1987-1988 he worked in the South America Department. In 2002-2005, Sharp worked as the ambassador of the kingdom to Kazakhstan and as a non-resident ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. He also worked as director of the Migration Directorate at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2013-2015). In 2017-2018 he worked as a political adviser in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Directorate. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova An Action Plan has been approved, by the order of the head of the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan Ramiz Mehdiyev, for holding the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Baku, Trend reports. The relevant structures have been given instructions for carrying out the work stipulated by the Action Plan. The 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee will be held in Baku from June 30 to July 10. The agreement to organize the 43rd session of the World Heritage Committee in Baku was signed by Azerbaijan's Minister of Culture Abulfaz Garayev and UNESCO Deputy Director General Ernesto Ottone Ramirez. The document features the responsibilities of both Azerbaijan and UNESCO on the organization of the event. In addition, the document touches upon issues on the organization of the Young Professionals Forum to be held ahead of the session. Azerbaijan became member of UNESCO on June 3 1992, after restoration of its independence. In 2003, Azerbaijan and UNESCO signed the framework agreement on cooperation in the areas of culture, science, education and communication, which allowed Azerbaijan to become one of the donors of UNESCO. In 2017, the organization marked the 600th anniversary of the death of the great Azerbaijani poet and thinker Imadaddin Nasimi. Moreover, last year UNESCO also celebrated the 200th anniversary of the first settlement of Germans in Azerbaijan. In 2013, with the support of UNESCO the 900th anniversary of Azerbaijani poetess Mahsati Ganjavi was celebrated in Paris. Baku will also host several UNESCO events during 5th World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue. The second meeting of the heads of international organizations and the ministerial conference will be held in Baku as part of the 5th World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue in Baku. The decision was made at a meeting of the international working group Baku Process held at the UNESCO headquarters. The program and documents of the concept of the 5th World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue were discussed at the meeting with the participation of officials of the UNESCO Secretariat, the UN Alliance of Civilizations, the EU, the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) and other members of the working group. Azerbaijani Culture Minister Abulfas Garayev reminded that the Baku Process was launched in 2008 at the initiative of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and as part of this process, the World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue has been held four times, adding that the Baku International Humanitarian Forum, ministerial conferences and other international events have been held six times over the past 10 years. UNESCOs Director of Partnerships and Outreach at the Social and Human Sciences Sector Magnus Magnusson noted that UNESCO will hold five events as part of this forum. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend The footage dedicated to the anniversary of the victory of the Azerbaijani army in the April 2016 battles was distributed on Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyevs official Facebook page, Trend reports on April 2. The footage was published along with a comment: "We are proud of our heroes! APRIL 2016". --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova Turkey imported 78,000 tons of crude oil from Azerbaijan in January 2019. According to Turkeys Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) report, the volume of crude oil imported by Turkey from Azerbaijan increased by 5 times in January compared to December of last year, AZERTAC reports. In the first month of the year, the share of Azerbaijani oil was 2.53 percent in Turkey's total oil imports. Turkey imported 15,700 tons of crude oil from Azerbaijan in December last year. Turkey imports crude oil from Azerbaijan mainly through Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan export oil pipeline (BTC). At present, the BTC pipeline mainly transports the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) oil and Shah Deniz condensate from Azerbaijan. In addition, other crude oil and condensate volumes, including Turkmen, Russian and Kazakh oil are transported via the pipeline. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline has been established to ensure access to crude oil produced at ACG field in the Caspian Sea under the "Contract of the Century". The length of the pipeline is 1,768 km, 443 km runs through Azerbaijan, 249 km - through Georgia and 1,076 km - through Turkey. Daily transport capacity of the pipeline is 1.2 million barrels. The crude oil delivery to the first tanker at the Ceyhan terminal took place in the summer of 2006. From that time until the end of 2018, BTC transported more than 417 million tons (about 3.12 billion barrels) of crude oil and was loaded into the world market by loading 4085 tankers at the port of Ceyhan. The first delivery of approximately 600,000 barrels of Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) crude oil, transported through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, was loaded on the British Hawthorn tanker on June 4, 2006 and dispatched from the new Ceyhan Offshore Terminal. Being a strategic project, it is the first direct link between the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean. In 2018, approximately 34 million tons (255 million barrels) of crude oil was exported through BTC. BTC Co. shareholders are BP (30.1 percent); SOCAR (25 percent); Chevron (8.9 percent); Equinor (8.71 percent); TPAO (6.53 percent); ENI (5 percent); Total (5 percent), ITOCHU (3.4 percent); INPEX (2.5 percent), Exon Mobile (2.5 percent), ONGC (2.36 percent). This pipeline, which is considered to be the main artery of energy export in the region, has played an important role in the extraction of the Caspian Sea's rich energy resources and bringing them to the world markets. --- Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov Tajikistan and South Korea intend to establish cooperation in the field of tourism. Recently, the parties signed a corresponding document. The Chairman of the Tourism Development Committee under the Government of Tajikistan, Nu'mon Abdugaforzoda, met in Dushanbe with the President of the International Tourism Association of the Republic of Korea. As the Committee for the Development of Tourism of Tajikistan told Avesta, during the meeting, the sides discussed prospects and opportunities for cooperation between Tajikistan and South Korea in the tourism sector. In particular, the parties discussed issues of holding a business forum of travel agencies of the two countries, the organization and holding of thematic exhibitions, the possibility of studying the experience of South Korea. The sides also discussed the possibility of organizing courses for training workers in the tourism sector in Tajikistan and interchange with tourists. Following the meeting, the Tourism Development Committee of Tajikistan and the South Korean Association of International Tourism signed a Memorandum of Cooperation. In 2018, as many as 1,336 South Korean citizens visited Tajikistan, according to the Tourism Development Committee of Tajikistan. Diplomatic relations between Tajikistan and the Republic of Korea were established on April 27, 1992. The Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Dushanbe has been operating since June 20, 2008. The political and trade-economic relations of the two countries are based on agreements in the field of trade, mutual protection and encouragement of investments, rejection of mutual requirements for obtaining visas for holders of official and diplomatic passports. In 2017, the volume of trade between Tajikistan and the Republic of Korea is about $ 16 million. Almost the entire volume of trade comes from the supply of South Korean goods to Tajikistan. In Tajikistan, there are 16 joint ventures with funding from South Korea. Tajikistan intends to use the experience of Korea, equipment and new technologies to establish domestic production of household appliances, hygiene products, household chemicals and high-quality competitive light industry products based on local raw materials. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Iran's Energy Ministry has been declared an Iranian side of the Iran-Afghanistan Joint Economic Commission, Iranian Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian said. This decision was approved by the Iranian Cabinet of Ministers, Ardakanian added, Trend reports referring to the Young Journalists Club (YJC). During the meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers, the Iranian sides responsibilities were handed over to the Iranian Energy Ministry upon the Foreign Ministrys proposal. The Iranian minister added that the Iranian Energy Ministry and the Afghan side discussed the water issues. From now on, the ways of increasing trade turnover and economic issues will be also discussed. The Iranian Energy Ministry is the responsible body of the Iranian side in joint economic commissions with such countries as Russia, Germany and Tajikistan. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz The Bahrain Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has held a meeting with Batelco, the kingdom's leading telecom company, over the latest developments in the company's separation process. This is the latest in a series of meetings and public consultations the TRA has held with the industry in order to ensure the successful implementation of the 4th National Telecommunications Plan (NTP4), including the separation of Batelco into two entities, said a TRA statement. The separation guildelines issued by TRA last year states that the authority expects that Batelco will implement separation by the transfer of staff and assets to the Separated Entity (SE) from Batelco. The new entity is to be efficiently resourced to deploy and operate the NBN and associated wholesale products and services, as outlined in NTP4. The TRA is satisfied that the project remains on track and that ultimately the requirements of the sector will be fully addressed. The TRA considers the separation process as fundamental to the new industry structure, which will result in the establishment of a new economic regulatory framework in line with governments policy directions under the fourth National Telecommunications Plan. Ultimately, the new framework should result in enhanced services for consumers, unprecedented broadband speeds and state of the art suite of services to support the business sector. The TRA is confident that its work will contribute to Bahrain becoming the strategic investment destination of choice and a regional centre for information technology and digital communications, the TRA statement said. - TradeArabia News Service By Trend Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in a message expressed congratulations over holding successful local and municipality elections, Trend reported citing IRNA. In his message to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Rouhani described the recent elections as indication of Turkish peoples participation in determining their fate and rule of democracy. He also wished happiness and dignity for Turkish brothers and friends. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Helicopters of the Iranian Army Ground Forces have been sent to help the population in Pol-e Dokhtar County of Irans western Lorestan Province, Brigadier General Shahin Taghikhani, Iranian Army spokesman, told IRNA, Trend reports. According to Taghikhani, 8 helicopters have been sent to the region for rescuing flood victims. Taghikhani also said that the Commander of the Ground Forces General Kiyoumars Heydari has also gone to Pol-e Dokhtar County. In recent days, heavy rainfall in Iran has caused floods, leaving several towns and villages underwater. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov Kazakhstan's economy had a raw material focus so far. State budget revenues and the volume of financial injections from foreign countries are directly dependent on the fuel and energy and mining industries. Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the law On ratification of the protocol on amendments to the agreement between the Government of Kazakhstan and the Government of Russia on trade and economic cooperation in the supply of oil and oil products to Kazakhstan on December 9, 2010. The document is published on the official portal of legal information. The protocol was signed in Moscow on October 3, 2018. The protocol features a list of petroleum products banned or restricted for export from Russia to Kazakhstan, as well as the list of petroleum products prohibited or restricted for export from Kazakhstan outside the customs territory of the EAEU. It is stipulated that such a list is tentatively coordinated with the interested state authorities by the executive authorities before drawing up indicative balances. The lists are approved by the competent authorities of both countries prior to the compilation of an indicative balance of production, consumption, supply, import and export of oil and oil products. The document will help simplify the procedure for regulating the oil and oil products market between Russia and Kazakhstan and will allow removing some restrictions on their supply for Russian companies. In addition, the protocol establishes exemptions for prohibited or restricted for export petroleum products. Thus, bans or restrictions are applied without prejudice to the lease agreement of the Baikonur complex between the governments of Russia and Kazakhstan of December 10, 1994, do not apply to petroleum products exported as humanitarian aid in accordance with the legislation of Kazakhstan, as well as petroleum products exported from Kazakhstan for the purpose of carrying out laboratory researches and tests. Kazakhstan ratified the treaty on March 2. The first President of the Republic, Nursultan Nazarbayev, signed the document. According to the changes, the parties in the mutual oil trade do not apply export customs duties. In addition, in accordance with the law, the oil exported from January 1, 2014, from Russia to Kazakhstan, for accounting purposes, is subject to customs declaration in Russia if it was exported outside the EAEU. Diplomatic relations between Kazakhstan and Russia were established on October 22, 1992. The trade turnover of Kazakhstan and Russia amounted to $ 17.6 billion in 2018. This is 7.2 percent higher than the previous year. According to the figures for January-November 2018, Russia ranks first in terms of imports to Kazakhstan. Russia's share among the countries supplying products to Kazakhstan is 37.3 percent. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov Kazakhstan has firmly taken the first place in the Central Asian region in terms of the intensity of its relations with Israel, the volume of cooperation activities and their diversification. Livestock has always been considered one of the main directions in the agricultural sector of Kazakhstan, being an integral element of the food security of the state, providing employment and income generation. Kazakhstan has enormous opportunities for the development of livestock. This is primarily due to the country's natural competitive advantages, such as favorable natural and climatic conditions, the presence of pastures and the proximity of markets. Kazakhstan is negotiating the terms of export of livestock products to Israel, Malaysia and South Korea, said Prime Minister Askar Mamin. He recalled that the government is faced with the task of increasing exports of processed agricultural products by at least 2.5 times, Kapital.kz reports. It is necessary to ensure compliance with the veterinary and phytosanitary safety requirements. In 2017, all regions of Kazakhstan received status free from foot and mouth disease. The conditions and restrictions on the export of livestock products to Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been agreed, Mamin said. Kazakhstan should become a reliable supplier of high-quality and environmentally friendly products, the head of government said. In this regard, I instruct the Ministry of Agriculture, together with akims, to ensure a stable epizootic situation, to take over special control over the accounting and movement of animals, the conditions of storage and acquisition of veterinary drugs, as well as timely vaccination. Take organizational measures for the timely treatment of cultivated areas from pests, said Askar Mamin. He added that in March 2019, the Kazakh phytosanitary service inspected 30 flour mills, which were recommended for inclusion in the register of wheat flour exporters in China. "We should continue to work on reducing veterinary and phytosanitary barriers and expanding markets," he concluded. In 2011, Kazakhstan adopted the project Development of the export potential of cattle meat. In accordance with this document, the country had to make a breakthrough in the export of meat, and by 2020 to reach the level that Kazakhstan had at the time of independence - 180,000 tons per year. The implementation of this project will make beef cattle the leading branch of agriculture. The task is to get away from importing meat and become one of its major suppliers to foreign markets. Diplomatic relations between Israel and Kazakhstan were established on April 10, 1992. Israel exported mainly technological equipment and chemicals to Kazakhstan and imported mainly minerals and metals from the Central Asian country. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov The nature of Iranian-Pakistani relations is strategic and there are many prerequisites for more extensive cooperation between the two states. The Iranian Embassy reported that Irans exports to Pakistan increased by about 38 percent in the 11 months of the past 1,397 Iranian year, which ended March 20, 2019. According to the Iranian embassy in Islamabad, trade between Iran and Pakistan has increased significantly, Iran Daily reports. During 1397 year, Iran exported products worth $ 1,128 billion to Pakistan. The mass of exported goods increased by 28 percent and amounted to 2,489 tons. According to the latest figures, Pakistan ranks eighth in popularity in Iranian exports, while China is in first place, Iraq is in second place and the United Arab Emirates is in third. Despite banking problems and customs issues, trade between Iran and Pakistan is growing but is still below its capabilities. The leaders of Iran and Pakistan have already agreed to increase bilateral trade to $ 5 billion in the next five years. Iran is an economically developed country in South-West Asia and is the largest economy in the region, second only to China, Japan, India, Turkey, Indonesia and South Korea in Asia in terms of GDP. From November 5, 2018, the U.S. Treasury Department is authorized to impose sanctions on individuals and legal entities that provide material or technological assistance to the Central Bank of Iran; National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and its Affiliates (NICO); companies implementing the management of ports operating in the field of shipping, shipbuilding, maritime freight, as well as enterprises of the Iranian energy sector, carrying out significant transactions for the purpose of purchasing, selling and transporting oil and petrochemical products from Iran. Diplomatic relations between Iran and Pakistan were established in August 1947. Iran became the first country in the world to recognize the sovereign status of Pakistan. Iran has consistently supported Pakistan in its crisis years, especially during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war. In turn, Pakistan provided military assistance to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Both countries are members of the Islamic G8, the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) and observers in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Iran and Pakistan are close neighbors enjoying the similarity of views on most regional and international issues. Today, Iran and Pakistan are well aware that solving economic problems, strengthening the security of the two countries is possible only with close cooperation. Iran-Pakistan relations have not always been at a high level. But in fact, the stability of the region depends largely on these countries. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova Azerbaijan's tourism potential was successfully presented at the UITT (Ukraine International Travel and Tourism Exhibition) 2019 international tourism fair, which was held on March 27-29 in Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The Azerbaijan Tourism Board and partners from the tourism sector of the country have demonstrated Azerbaijan's potential in this area, new tourist routes, as well as leisure opportunities during the beach season, which starts in Azerbaijan from June and lasts until mid-September, AZERTAC reports. The seminar was also held in the framework of the exhibition, in which the Azerbaijan Tourism Board and its partners made a presentation for representatives of the Ukrainian tourism sector. UITT is Ukraine's leading travel and tourism event. UITT is a traditional annual meeting place for international tourism organizations, national and regional tourism committees, tour operators and travel agencies, government representatives, air companies, hotels, carriers and media. The tourism relations between Ukraine and Azerbaijan are based on the documents signed in July 1998. Tourism has become one of the priorities of the country's economy and there are wide opportunities for tourism development today. In Azerbaijan and Ukraine, special events, frequently dedicated to the culture of both countries, are held. Azerbaijan is among the top five CIS countries in terms of the number of tourists coming to Ukraine. As many as 57 640 Ukrainian citizens visited Azerbaijan in 2018, which is also one of the best indicators among the CIS countries. Ukrainians made up 2 percent of 2,849,600 tourists visited Azerbaijan in 2018. Mostly young people from Ukraine come to Azerbaijan to visit Baku and the nearby cities. Families who visit Azerbaijan, stay for a longer period in the country. Spa and health resort, gastronomic tour lovers, as well as business travelers make up the majority of tourists. Annually, leading hotels, motels and tour operators of the western regions of Ukraine take part in the International Tourism Exhibitions in Baku. Ukraine will also be represented at the Azerbaijan International Travel and Tourism Fair (AITF 2019) to be held in Baku in April 2019. In the tourism sphere, the Embassy of Ukraine organizes on an ongoing basis presentations, exhibitions of tourism, sanatorium and resort potential in our countries. In this context, a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between the city of Truskavets and the Azerbaijan Tourism Association. Trustkavets, Ukraine's central resort city, is keenly interested in cooperation with the tourist regions of Azerbaijan. It was recently decided to promote Truskavets and Naftalan resorts both as part of health tourism in both countries. In recent years, the flow of Azerbaijani tourists to Ukrainian Truskavets, where Carpathian sanatorium is located, has increased. Azerbaijan takes the third place after Russia and Belarus in terms of the number of tourists coming to the sanatorium every year. --- Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz The new McLaren Senna GTR, the most extreme track car yet from McLaren Automotive and its newest Ultimate Series model, will make its global debut at the 77th Goodwood Members Meeting, on April 6. First announced at the Geneva International Motor Show in 2018 with the surprise unveiling of a concept version, the final validation prototype McLaren Senna GTR will take to the historic Goodwood Motor Circuit at the head of a very special celebration of McLaren cars. Featuring a McLaren P1 GTR, a McLaren P1 and road-going McLaren Senna alongside the new GTR, the track parade will also include the famous XP5 McLaren F1 prototype. For several years XP5 held the world record for the fastest production road car and will, for the first time, be joining its 21st century McLaren Ultimate Series descendants. Free from the constraints of road car legislation and motorsport competition rules, the track-only McLaren Senna GTR advances circuit driving capability to another level entirely. With 825PS (814bhp) and torque of 800Nm (590lb ft) available from its 4.0-litre twin turbocharged V8 engine and a lightest dry weight of 1,188kg, the new GTR has an astonishing power-to-weight ratio of 694PS-per tonne. In combination with aerodynamic downforce in excess of 1,000kg and suspension derived from McLarens GT3 race programme, this ensures the new McLaren Senna GTR is the Ultimate expression of track driving performance and excitement. The first of the 75 customers who have secured a McLaren Senna GTR all cars were sold shortly after the concept made its Geneva debut at prices from approximately BD542,000 plus taxes are due to receive their cars this September. The dynamic debut of the new McLaren Senna GTR comes 12 months after the original McLaren Senna starred at the 76th Goodwood Members Meeting and just days after confirmation that the unique LEGO McLaren Senna, constructed using almost 500,000 LEGO bricks, will be on display at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July. -TradeArabia News Service KBR announced today that it has been awarded a contract by Saudi Aramco for its market-leading Supercritical Solvent Deasphalting (SDA) technology ROSE. Under the terms of the contract, KBR will provide a three-product ROSE technology licence, basic engineering design, and proprietary equipment for Saudi Aramco's residue upgrading and clean fuels project at the Riyadh Refinery in Saudi Arabia. The proven three-product ROSE scheme will be designed to meet Saudi Aramco's specific objectives for their project, KBR said. KBR's highly efficient ROSE technology requires up to 60% less energy than other technologies and is designed for ease of operation, safety and high reliability. Leading KBR's line of environmentally friendly technologies, ROSE is setting the industry standard for assisting refiners in complying with the new International Marine Organization (IMO) fuel regulations that take effect in 2020 (IMO2020). "We are honoured that Saudi Aramco has selected the ROSE process for their clean fuels project at the Riyadh Refinery," said John Derbyshire, KBR president, technology. "This award underscores our market leadership in residue upgrading solutions to help our clients address IMO2020 compliance challenges and improve the profitability of their refining assets." As the market leader in SDA technology, KBR has licensed over 90% of the world's installed SDA capacity and continues to see a strong demand for the ROSE technology globally, it added. - TradeArabia News Service Bakersfield, CA (93308) Today Cloudy skies. High 61F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Becoming cloudy with occasional rain late. Low 47F. Winds SE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph. Judi and Rob McCarthy are in the business of giving especially when it comes to Kern County, their former home. By Naved Ashrafi for TwoCircles.net Sir Syed Ahmad Khanthe founder of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU)died on 27th March 1898. A day before his death anniversary, a group of AMU students reportedly turned hostile to their own alumna Arfa Khanum Sherwani at the unprecedented Women Leadership Summit 2019 organized by AMUs Womens College Students Union (WCSU) during 26-28 March 2019. Support TwoCircles It was alleged by the protesting students that Sherwani had put some objectionable content on her social media profiles at two different instance that went against the classical pristine ethos of Islam. She allegedly ridiculed the hijab and used Quranic phrase bismillah (in the name of Allah) to justify her un-Islamic act of celebrating Holi on social media platforms. Online hullabaloo and trolling preceded the actual protest when on 20th March the lady journalist from The Wire tweeted her picture with the text holi khelungi keh ke bismilla (I shall celebrate Holi invoking Allahs name). Though, not put in verbatim, the quoted text was from a master-piece of 17th century Sufi saint Hazrat Syed Abdullah Shah Qadri popularly famed in the sub-continent as Baba Bulleh Shah. One has all liberty to pursue a critical debate on why bismillah was used by the journalist or one may out rightly reject the Holi celebration questioningin feminist parlanceits very rationale or terming it a festival to commemorate Bahujan burning; but all that should be done with a spirit of rational decency on cultured line of arguments. Bulleh Shah and his Poem Bulleh Shah (1680-1757) was a Sufi saint and a Punjabi poet who lived in the land we now identify as Pakistan. He belonged to the Qadri Silsilahprincipal spiritual school of Sufism and Hazrat Shah Inayat Qadri was his murshid (spiritual master). He was contemporary of Sufi mystics like Hazrat Shah Abdul Lateef Bhitai, Hazrat Sachal Sarmast, Hazrat Waris Shah and Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir. His poem hori khelungi keh kar bismillahotherwise termed as un-Islamic by social medias ignorant trollswas written with deep hues of Sufism making ample references to the Quranic verses in the couplets: bismillah (Quran, Chapter 01:Verse 01), Ill-Allah (47:19), fana-fillah (55:26-7), alastu-bi-rabbikum (07:172), qaalu-balaa (07:172), la-ilaaha-ill-allah (47:19), nahnu-aqrab (50:16), man-arafa-nafsahu (59:19), faa-summa-wajhullah (2:115), Rasulullah (48:29), Muhammad-sal-lallah (48:29), fazkuruni (2:152), washkuruli (2:152), subh-han-allah (37:159, 52:43), sibghatullah (2:138), and allahus-samad (112:2). This poem entirely engrossed in Quranic context reflects upon the relationship between a devotee and her God which Bulleh Shah visualises as a relationship of love. It must have not irked people [even those who cultivate certain kind indifference to social-syncretism] as the poem nowhere mention mythological figures like Vishnu, Prahalad, Holika and Hranyakashyap! I shall be curating over deeper insights in to the poem on some other day, let me now focus more Islamic-unIslamic debate prevailing on the campus. Point of Debate On 8th February, what Sherwani put out rightly in her tweet on niqab, seemed more an irrational injunction than a sensible comment. Her tweet looked ostentatious, thespian and fancy. Many things, other than niqab, for which Quran certainly doesnt ask are a part of Islamic traditions globally owing to greater macro-environment, spatial-temporal dynamics and theological/cultural evolution. This may include diverse ways of offering 5-times prayers by Muslims in different parts of the world, different Prophetic narrations on a single subject mentioned in Hadith literature by different Imams, getting yourselves photographed for a passport to perform Hajj, and of-course syncretic Sufi tradition of rejoicing basant at the shrine of Hazrat Nizmuddin Auliya in Delhi. Sherwani or this author may not be an authority to dictate on what Quran ordains for the people to follow because we lack theological legitimacy. Still, if we do so, we shall be akin to that small crowd of AMU who in 2017 made it to ban the campus for Shehla Rashid as her more than one-month older post on Facebook immediately cropped up and allegedly made a case for blasphemy. Crowd ruled this injunction without delving in to the nuances of theology and consulting the university experts in departments of Theology, Arabic, Islamic Studies and Office of the Nazim. So, people, including this author, at AMU were not cosy with Sherwani but it is very unfortunate that this popular despondency turned awful on social media. Trolls started putting continuous filth on social media and nobody came out with a strong rejoinder written with subtlety, legitimacy and authority contesting the journalist. Later, Sherwanis 20th March tweet turned the simmering popular angst in to the high-voltage drama! What is at Stake in AMU? Many orthodox Islamic students group operate on the campus with no legal sanction from the university administration. They represent one or the other faction of Balkanised Indian Islam of Sunni, Barelvi, Deobandi, Salafi, Wahabi, Shia and so forth. Each of these groups have been considering themselves as the true saviour of pristine Islam thereby calling the other religious groups as defiant sect. Now, burying the hatchet, they have found a common enemy for themselves i.e. Cultural Education Centre (CEC). Latter is an institution run by the university for promoting co-curricular excellence among the university students. The centre, formerly known as General Education Centre (GEC), was constructed in 1950s with the aid of Ford Foundation, USA. As of now, the centre has many clubs that organize National level programs like AMU Literary Festival, national music festival Sur, national fest on theatre Ensemble. These orthodox Islamic groups have now started calling themselves saviour of Aligarh Tehzeeb and vicegerent of Sir Syed. Because CEC is a post-Sir Syed phenomenon, and does not fall under his mission of creating Muslim youth equally conversant with the Quran and the Modern Science concomitantly, it must be abandoned and deserted, they argue. Once Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was lamented by his contemporary orthodox Muslims as Darwin inspired natury jogi who used to dine with spoon and forks and who mis-interpreted Quran in broad-day light (which earned him fatwas). With all this in the backyard, orthodox boys have now started to induct Sir Syed in their orthodox sphere as the BJP has done to an atheist (Bhagat Singh) and a communist (Raja Mahendra Pratap)! Tehzeeb of Aligarh and Sir Syed Now, it is very much pertinent to unravel Sir Syeds perception of religion, education, society, and freedom. While Sir Syed had best arrangements for religious education at Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College under experts like Allama Shibli Nomani, Sir Syeds quest for secular education was aimed at reclaiming those rights of Indians that were forfeited by the British. In a lecture, he said, Indian must be educated to such a high level that they may be capable for reclaiming their own rights. Similar view was endorsed by Sir Syed at Amritsar Town Hall which shows the pragmatism of Sir Syed regarding the aims of religious and secular education. He enlightened people to deal with social problems and religious traditions in a rational and empirical way. New problems are now solved empirically and not by intuition while sitting in mosque, hospice and khanqah, he asserted. To Sir Syed, reason was an important touchstone to testify religious dogmas as he clearly put in one of his lectures, I have devised human nature as an important tool to testify if the religious doctrines are congruent to the human nature or not. Historian Khaliq Ahmad Nizami maintains that Sir Syed propounded two tenets for his concept of nation. Sir Syed, argues Nizami, had put that a nation (qaum) is not premised upon the religions (mazahib) and that all the dwellers of India constitute one nation (qaum). Sir Syed was a great champion of freedom of expression. In Tahzibul Akhlaq, he wrote that stifling the free opinions whether due to religious fear, or social apprehensions or government oppression was extremely bad thing. So, Sir Syed had left a legacy of knowledge, wisdom, scientific temper, reason, empiricism, and freedom of expression without tinkering with the spiritual domain of man. He discouraged short-sightedness, ignorance and dogmatism. A certain kind parochialism and ignorance that has crept within a section of students is alarming, for it is against the Aligarh trend historically known as the Aligarh Tehzeeb. Shakeel Badayuni, poet and lyricist, carried this tradition by writing many devotional numbers for Bollywood films sans any religious prejudice. He had written, in the eulogy of Prophet Muhammad, numbers like beech bhanwar me aan phansa hai, bekas pe karam kijiye Sarkare Madina. Notably, Shakeel is one of those lyricists who had composed highest of Bhajan numbers. Hasrat Mohani was a revolutionary alumnus of the Aligarh College, who coined Inquilab Zindabad, and participated in Constituent Assembly Debates, and was among the founders of Communist Party of India. He was that maulana who loved Lord Krishna and wrote poems for his beloved. Majaz, another champion of revolutionary zeal, who invoked surkh-aandhi (red thunderstorm) of communism in his celebrated piece Inquilab, penned down famous Nazre Aligarh that later became University Tarana (Anthem of the University). Then, there are Majrooh Sultanpuri, Josh Malihabadi, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Aale Ahmad Suroor, Ismat Chughtai, Shaharyar and others. Apart from these people, there is Allama Iqbal who had written extensively on Lord Ram, Lord Shiva, Guru Nanak, Gautam Buddha, Swami Ramteerth and others. Iqbal was closely associated with the Aligarh Movement and is still considered as a great asset of the Aligarh phenomenon. Reclaiming Aligarh Celebrating pluralism and diversity has been a relic of Aligarh from the distant past. If debating on issues with rationality, talking about socialism and communism, organizing literary and music festivals, rejoicing Bulle Shah and Amir Khusrau is against the spirit of Aligarh, will AMU now afford to disown Shakeel Badayuni, Majaz Lakhnawi, Hasrat Mohani, Allama Iqbal, and even Sir Syed? Aligarh should keep its spirit alive and Bulleh Shah must not haunt it! University administration must keep a vigilant eye on campus dynamics and should come out of any impunity. Next year, AMU will complete hundred years of its existence as university and it is high time to renew pledges with great zeal and scientific temper. Note: All quoted text in the article is from Sir Syed aur Aligarh Tehreek by Kahliq Ahamd Nizami. Naved Ashrafi is a research scholar at AMU. One person has died and two were critically injured in a fire Tuesday morning at KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, the second significant fire at a chemical plant in the Houston area within three weeks. The fire at the KMCO plant on Ramsey Road, just northeast of town, erupted about 10:55 a.m. Firefighters extinguished the blaze late Tuesday afternoon, the fire marshal's office said in a tweet about 4:20 p.m. Responders are continuing to monitor the scene and put out "hot spots," the office tweeted, while investigators are conducting interviews at the scene and seeking to determine where the fire started and what caused it. "We are working with the company to determine exactly what chemicals are on site and in the warehouse that is on fire," said Harris County Fire Marshal's Office spokeswoman Rachel Moreno.. Moreno said the company believes the fire began when a transfer line carrying isobutelyne, a flammable gas, ignited. HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM INVESTIGATES: Dangerous chemicals and a serious lack of information at plants around Houston. She said helicopter ambulances transported the two injured workers to the hospital, where they are in critical condition. "My heart and our hearts go out to the families of those who were injured, and the person who passed away as a result of the situation," said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who joined Moreno and Sheriff Ed Gonzalez at the news conference, held at a gas station near the facility. KMCO has activated its incident command center and dispatched its emergency response team to help first responders extinguish the fire, president and CEO John C. Foley said in a statement. "We are deeply saddened to confirm at this time that there have been injuries and one fatality," Foley said. "Those injured have been transported for medical treatment. Our hearts and prayers go out to the individuals involved, as well as our first responders, employees, and our community." The blaze at KMCO comes almost three weeks after a tank farm at a petrochemical holding facility in Deer Park also caught fire. Investigators have yet to get to determine a cause for the blaze at Intercontinental Terminals Inc., where 11 of 15 tanks in the farm caught fire, sending up a plume of smoke and stoking concerns about air quality in the area. No serious injuries in that incident were reported and daily press briefings ended on Monday. "Texas is failing to protect people from chemical fires and explosions and rogue releases of toxic air pollution. It is untenable," said Elena Craft, senior director for climate and health at the Environmental Defense Fund, in a written statement following Tuesday's blaze. "The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality must inspect every single facility every single year. That should be a bare minimum." WITNESSES WEIGH IN: KMCO contractors, deputy describe chemical fire explosion in Crosby In the KMCO fire, Matt Loesel of the federal Environmental Protection Agency said real-time air monitoring using aircraft and a bus-mounted mobile unit have not found any hazardous readings of any substance. The incident prompted several school districts to issue a shelter in place. Emergency officials also issued a shelter in place for residents within a 1-mile radius. They have been lifted. Houston ISD canceled all outdoor activities Tuesday afternoon at the following campuses located in the northeast portion of the district: Robinson, Oates, Hilliard and Elmore elementary schools; Furr and North Forest high schools; and Fonwood Early Childhood Center. KMCO contractors Brian Balcerowicz and Cesar Mendoza were in the control room when the explosion happened about 10:55 a.m.. That meant they were just a couple of feet away from danger, the former observed. "They said there had been a problem and stay in the control room," Balcerowicz said. "About five minutes later we heard and felt the explosion." The operator then told everyone to leave the premises. Balcerowicz noted that the control room was a safe place since it was explosion-proof. KMCO OWNERS: What we know about the company, at HoustonChronicle.com Corey Prantil, 31, felt his house shake at about 10:55 Tuesday morning. From his location about two and a half miles northeast of the KMCO plant, the ground shook, his windows rattled and it sounded like someone was trying to break in through the front door. "I thought 'Oh Jesus,' went outside and drove down the road to the plant," Prantil said. "I got down there saw where lab was, and the plant was on fire." Prantil said he had not been contacted by any local authorities to shelter-in-place but knew the local schools were shutting off their HVAC systems and keeping students inside as a precaution. He watched smoke fill the sky from his back porch about an hour after the blast, looking to see whether the wind was pushing the black smoke closer to his house. It was. The conflagration reminded him of what happened at the Arkema plant during Hurricane Harvey, when several of their tanks caught fire after the site was flooded by torrential rains. As a state trooper who responded to that blaze, he was troubled by that company's refusal to answer basic questions about the chemicals they had on hand and how much fluid was leaking into nearby floodwaters and neighborhoods. STATEMENT ISSUED: Chemical company president apologizes for fire at Crosby facility Prantil said the Arkema incident, coupled with the fire at an Intercontinental Terminals Company plant in Deer Park in late March, should prompt local officials to take more action to police Houston-area chemical facilities. "It seems like Houston is the capital of plants blowing up recently," Prantil said. "I think Harris County needs to step up on enforcement. a whole lot doesn't get said by these companies, and I don't think that's right." Ernest Roder lives across Clara Wilson Road from the plant. Roder, 71, was working with his son on a tractor in his metal farm building when they felt a concussion. "My first thought was a sonic boom," Roder said as he waited out the commotion in his house. "But it was too loud. My son thought something dropped in the shop. When we walked outside we saw the smoke and knew exactly what it was." Roder, who has lived on the street for nearly 50 years, said he wasn't alarmed by the fire, figuring if he needed to evacuate someone would tell him. "It never has bothered me," Roder said of the plant. "Unless it gets worse we'll just wait it out inside the house." About a mile west of the plant, flecks of soot and charred debris laid sprinkled across Lacy Roberts yard. She put on nitrile gloves and picked them up so her dogs would not try to lick them, placing the black and gray flakes inside a freezer-sized plastic bag. Still, she's worried about what she and her dogs may have already been exposed to. "It could be anything; they haven't said what it was yet," Roberts said. "If I find more I'll add it to the collection." Jasper Scherer and Julian Gill contributed. 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. Shanghai (Gasgoo)- SAIC Motor announced its 2018 annual performance on April 1, saying its full-year revenue grew 3.62% year on year to RMB902.19 billion and the net profit attributable to shareholders of the company climbed 4.65% to over 36 billion. Besides, the automaker posted basic earnings of RMB3.082 per share, compared to RMB2.959 for 2017. SAIC Motor witnessed a robust growth of its self-owned car brands despite the overall downturn of the auto market last year. In 2018, it Roewe and MG brands achieved total annual sales of around 730,000 units, up 36.5% over a year ago, and its Maxus hit 126,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 14.5%. Besides, new energy vehicles (NEVs) and oversea business shored up the development of the automakers self-owned brands. SAIC Motor saw its NEV sales skyrocket 120% from the previous year to around 142,000 units in 2018. Of that, Roewe and MG NEVs sales aggregated up to 97,000 units, surging 119% year on year. Regarding overseas business, SAIC Motor sold around 277,000 vehicles outside China last year, and was honored the No.1 automaker in China by annual export volume for three consecutive years. Meanwhile, it kept reinforcing its global deployment in production, operation and marketing. According to the annual report, SAIC Motor has built 3 overseas complete vehicle manufacturing bases in Thailand, Indonesia and India and set up a total of 11 marketing service centers in such regions as Europe, North America, South America, Africa, the Middle East. The annual sales in Thailand, Britain, Indonesia, Chile, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East have already hit around 10,000 units each. The long-awaited summit of Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan in Vienna confirmed the preservation of the current format of the negotiations that makes possible to reach the agreements necessary for the Karabakh settlement. The contacts of the leaders and foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan provide a reliable basis for developing joint mechanisms for overcoming the conflict. Mediators of the Karabakh peacemaking process spoke in favor of preserving the existing bilateral format, insisting that there is no need to invent a new framework for the sake of novelty. What is involved here is the confidence-building measures and facilitating cooperation between the countries of the region, and not about the expansion of the circle of participants. The atmosphere of the summit demonstrates that there was no significant misunderstanding between the parties, although Pashinyan had earlier stated that he would insist on the inclusion of the self-proclaimed NKR in the negotiation process. The noticeable exacerbation of the situation on the contact line on the eve of the Vienna summit demonstrated the possible risks due to the conflicting statements by the Armenian side since an attempt to expand the negotiation format could nullify the entire negotiation process and lead to a new aggravation of the situation in the conflict zone. Baku from the very beginning, defined this step as undermining the mechanisms of political settlement, adversely affecting the general atmosphere of the negotiations. Given the possible aggravation, Aliyev and Pashinyan agreed on the need to intensify the process, continue the substantive negotiations previously proposed by the Azerbaijani side. It can be assumed that the position of Baku turned out to be dominant on the summit. Meanwhile, Nikol Pashinyan avoids speeding up the negotiations, since, at the moment, he is worried about the internal political situation in the republic. Pashinyan fears a gradual loss of legitimacy within his team, as well as a loss of influence on the security forces and the economic bloc of the government, which are capable of incriminating the incumbent prime minister of his inability to withstand external threats. Pashinyan feels and tries to prevent this by speaking of "three rooms", implying intra-government groups. Yerevan's reserved position during the Vienna summit was obviously predetermined by the position of the mediators. However, taking into account the threat of conspiracy on the sidelines of the Armenian parliament, the Prime Minister is afraid of the "Karabakh factor", which is promoted by the provocative rhetoric of Armenian Defense Minister David Tonoyan, who during the military aggravation in April 2016 served as deputy defense minister. Tonoyan never concealed his pro-American views. As a representative of Armenia to NATO, since 2005, he has maintained close contacts with the CIA. The inclination for adventures of the current minister of defense alarms Pashinyan, especially since after his appointment the ambitious Tonoyan repeatedly stated the need to revise the Armenian military doctrine. Given that the Karabakh crisis is the eternal Achilles heel for all Armenian politics, Pashinyan tries not to comment on the situation on the contact line without having to do so, while Tonoyan reckons neither with the Prime Minister nor with the prospects that open to Armenia in case of the problem settlement. Although the statement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs did not refer to the agreements in St. Petersburg, Vienna and Geneva and only mentioned the verbal agreements reached between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, further negotiations will take place in the framework of the Madrid principles. Official Yerevan diligently bypassed the recommendations of US National Security Adviser John Bolton and did not raise the issue of the de-occupation of the Azerbaijani territory. Nevertheless, Baku as a whole positively perceives the negotiation process, believing that it is possible to establish contact with the current leadership of Armenia. Azerbaijan made an important diplomatic move, linking the "importance of creating an environment conducive to peace" through the "humanitarian actions." The parties should consider restoring popular diplomacy. Negotiations of representatives of the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of Karabakh can be an effective tool for overcoming the crisis in the relations between nations. If Nikol Pashinyan is really ready for peace and a solution to the conflict, he should support this initiative, since being a people's prime minister he cannot but take into account the power of a public resource. It would be the best fit for the spirit of cooperation in the humanitarian sphere. Family and friends continued to arrive, gathering across Lewis Avenue as police and crime scene investigated the scene of a body found in an alley off Lewis Avenue near Delaware Drive in Port Arthur. The man was identified as Javier Palacias, 22, of Port Arthur. Det. Mike Hebert says they have been looking for Palacias for two weeks. He had 3 outstanding warrants and was a suspect in an aggravated assault two weeks ago that occurred within two blocks of where his body was found Monday night. Det. Hebert says they had been trying to get him into custody "for the safety of the community, but also for his own safety." That incident, in which the victim was shot in the leg with an AK-47 and has since lost one leg and is fighting to keep his other leg, may have led to retaliation investigators suspected. Germany is currently serving as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. From the beginning of April, it officially takes over the chair as part of a "dual presidency" with France. Deutsche Welle explains details of the presidency in its article UN Security Council: Germany, France share presidency. What is a "dual presidency?" Germany and France are both currently serving on the UN Security Council. France has a permanent seat, meaning that it is always a member of the UN's most senior body. Germany was elected to serve on the Security Council for a two-year term throughout 2019 and 2020. The two EU countries each occupy the chair for one month France in March, Germany in April. As a symbol of their close cooperation, they decided to dovetail these into a first "dual presidency" France has described it as a "twinning arrangement." The presidency will formally pass from France to Germany at the end of the month, but in practice there will hardly be any change, as both countries will continue jointly to occupy the chair. This closer UN cooperation was agreed by Berlin and Paris as part of the Treaty of Aachen. What is their agenda? One focus is crisis prevention in Africa. Germany and France want to see continued support for the UN mission in Mali, and close collaboration on peace and security in Burkina Faso. They also want to make things easier for humanitarian aid workers worldwide by ensuring that they are better equipped and protected. German foreign minister Heiko Maas plans to present an initiative to this effect in New York at the beginning of April. Another main focus is combating the small arms trade in the Balkans: They want to see better cooperation with the authorities in this area, and for this to serve as an example for other regions. Germany, in consultation with France, also wants to recruit more women to participate in politics, and is also campaigning to stop sexual violence in conflicts. Disarmament is another important issue. In April, Germany will chair a Security Council meeting on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. What have Germany's priorities been in the Security Council to date? From the beginning, Germany has placed an emphasis on promoting the idea of the UN; i.e., international cooperation and collaboration. Germany and France have adopted their multilateral approach in opposition to the growing nationalism of people like Donald Trump. The "dual presidency" already symbolizes this idea, but Germany and France have also coordinated closely with the other European members of the Security Council (currently the United Kingdom, Belgium and Poland). The EU countries are working together to preserve international agreements and treaties, like the Paris Climate Agreement and the INF Treaty on nuclear disarmament. Within the Security Council, Germany and France are also insisting that UN resolutions must be adhered to: Germany's Permanent Representative to the UN, Christoph Heusgen, for example, was recently strongly critical of the United States for breaking international law by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and for its opposition to the UN resolution on the Golan Heights. Why does the UN seem so powerless when it comes to major crises? The Security Council is indeed often divided over the big questions in global politics. For example, the Council has been unable to agree a resolution on Syria for years now, because the United States and Russia are pursuing different interests in this regard, and both have veto rights within the UN's most senior body. The Security Council has also been unable to agree a common approach to the crisis in Venezuela:Germany, France and the other European countries supported a US resolution that called for aid to be delivered and the holding of fair elections. Russia and China, however, used their vetoes to block this resolution. Yet again the UN Security Council was divided in its evaluation of a conflict, simply reflecting the division in the international community of states. Will Germany get a permanent seat on the Security Council? Germany has been campaigning to be given a permanent seat on the Security Council ever since German reunification in 1990. Just recently, in the Treaty of Aachen, Germany and France declared a reform of the United Nations and a permanent seat for Germany to be one of their common goals. Germany has many arguments on its side: It's the fourth-largest contributor to the UN budget, the biggest provider of troops within the UN framework, and is active throughout the world in areas that matter to the UN, such as climate policy, human rights, and disarmament. Germany is not alone in campaigning for reform: Brazil, Japan and India are also fighting for new seats on the UN Security Council. In practice, though, the UN is moving towards reform "one millimeter at a time," as a UN diplomat commented recently. Germany must make the most of its time as an elected member in the highest UN council it won't be a permanent presence there any time soon. Aside from being the first entirely academic building built at Lamar University in some 40 years, the $65 million Science and Technology Building boasts a state-of-the-art makers space and a design unlike any previous structure on the Beaumont campus. The interdisciplinary building was designed in part to promote collaboration between the different degree programs, Lamar spokeswoman Shelly Vitanza said. The building officially opens on Wednesday with a 1 p.m. ceremony. I think its going to be a real hangout space, Vitanza said. Its very inviting. The natural light permeating the building creates an atmosphere that she called soft and homey. Large teaching labs and smaller workrooms, along with upgraded traditional classrooms, will offer students more hands-on experience and instruction, Vitanza said. The makers space boasts the equipment students need to take their ideas into the real world, Vitanza said, allowing them an opportunity to get their hands dirty fabricating with 3-D printers and other tools. More Information New building What: Grand opening of Lamar's Science and Technology Building When: 1 p.m. Wednesday Where: Rolfe Christopher Drive behind the Speech and Hearing Building See More Collapse Some interdisciplinary student research teams have already been approved to use the space to work on projects, even though classes will not be held in the building until the fall semester. The four projects approved so far tackle issues like the lack of health care in rural areas and the effect of contaminated floodwaters on coastal ecosystems, with students majoring in everything from nursing to biology to engineering. Everyone will use the building, Vitanza said. Lamar Chief Financial Officer Craig Ness said the recent and continuing upgrades to the campus are to ensure the longevity of the university. Its part of what you have to do to be a good steward of the institution, Ness said. You look and see what you have to do to make the future of the university work. Near the Science and Technology Building, the Wayne A. Reaud Administration & Honors College, the Center for Innovation, Commercializiation and Entrepreneurship and , across campus, the new Setzer Student Center were all part of the effort to improve the impression given to those pulling into Lamar. It begins to present a more modern look to the campus, Ness said. If you come in off Rolfe Christopher, even without anything else being done, your impression is, Were coming up to a campus. Vitanza said there are bright, open spaces throughout the building where students can gather to collaborate, read or study and an honor system based micro market, for snacks where students can select their goods and check themselves out. I just took a former student on a tour and he said he just couldnt believe this was on the Lamar University Campus, Vitanza said adding that the alum called it absolutely gorgeous. Vitanza said those who have toured the building were consistently wowed. Because the Texas State University Systems allows for 1 percent of the total budget to be used for art, a committee commissioned pieces to reflect the purpose of the new building. A 25-foot-by-12-foot tile mosaic mural by Dixie Friend Gay greets those who enter the building. Its water and air and all the natural resources that humankind cannot live without, Vitanza said. Its a Southeast Texas swamp, with lily pads and water just stunning. Another piece, a 14-foot tall kinetic statue by 92-year-old New Orleans-based artist Lin Emery, stands on the grounds slowly shifting and changing with the breeze. Vitanza said the buildings design, art and function set it apart from every other building in Southeast Texas. Ness said other less noticeable improvements are being made around campus as well, though most are on an as needed basis. He cited a move last summer to dedicate $500,000 each year to renovate classrooms determined by committee to be the most deserving. Improvements are also being made campuswide to ensure compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, making crosswalks and older buildings fully accessible. haley.bruyn@beaumontenterprise.com twitter.com/HaleyWrites_BE Port Arthur Police Department is investigating a body found on Delaware Drive, according to Detective Mike Hebert. Hebert said at this time it is considered an "unattended death," but the investigation is ongoing. The Vidor Police Department is back at full staff after swearing in five new officers Tuesday afternoon. Most of the officers are coming to the force with previous experience, Chief Rod Carroll said. We have one who has 27 years prior with the (Jefferson County) Sheriffs Office and only one coming straight out of the academy. In the period of 2003 to 2018, companies with European capital invested nearly $210 billion in the Turkish economy, Arda Ermut, the president of the Investment Office said on Saturday during a presentation in Austria. Daily Sabah reports in its article European companies invested $210 billion in Turkish economy from 2003 to 2018 that Austrian-capitalized companies also invested $10.5 billion in direct investments in the country in the same period. Ermut recalled that the number of Austrian companies operating in Turkey has neared 1,000. Ermut remarked that the world is experiencing a recession in terms of foreign direct investment (FDI), saying, "In 2018, when investments declined all over the world and developing countries like Turkey saw decline in direct investments, we attracted $13.2 billion in foreign direct investment, achieving a 14 percent rise compared to 2017, which was a very positive signal." Highlighting that a large portion of direct investment in Turkey come from Europe, Ermut said that European countries had a share of nearly 65 percent in 2018. Explaining that European-capitalized companies invested nearly $210 billion in Turkey from 2003 to 2018, Ermut stated that Austrian-capitalized companies also invested $10.5 billion in direct investments in the country in the same period. Ermut recalled that the number of Austrian companies operating in Turkey has neared 1,000. Underlining that Turkey's geographical position offers great advantages to Austrian companies wanting to operate in other countries in the region, Ermut said, "Turkey and Europe are two important and strategic partners. Its young and growing population has made Turkey an important market for European exporters. In addition, the Customs Union Agreement, which has been in force since 1996, enables Turkey to trade with European Union countries without customs duties. In terms of investments, Austria ranks fourth on the list of countries from which we attracted the most foreign direct investments in 2018. Therefore, Austria is an important partner for us. We would like to see more Austrian investors in Turkey in the upcoming period." Indicating that talks in Austria have been held in a more positive atmosphere than last year, Ermut said that Austria is currently one of the largest sources of FDI. He emphasized that they want to further channel this situation to Turkey. "As we have done so far, we will continue to follow the investment agendas of Austrian companies and to support them at every stage of their investments," he added. Ermut stated that the rising extreme right-wing discourses in the world have negative effects on the economy as well, leading to the introduction of more protectionist economic approaches and negatively affecting direct investments. Recalling that global investment reached an all-time high at $2 trillion in 2007, Ermut remarked that this declined to $1.2 trillion in 2008-2009 due to the global economic crisis. According to Ermut, investments rose again, however, due to the political developments in 2018, they again dropped to the same level as in the crisis period. Pointing out that the world has been going through a challenging process in terms of direct investments in the last three years, Ermut noted that Turkey has managed to overcome this proces s thanks to its decisive characteristics and proper steps. The president of the Investment Office also stressed that they have been determining Turkey's investment-related needs, adding that they also determine industries with strategic importance and develop promotion strategies accordingly. The runoff election will be held in Ukraine on April 21. The winners of the first round will compete to become the head of state: head of the Servant of the People political party Vladimir Zelensky (30.26%) and incumbent President Pyotr Poroshenko (15.99%). Leader the Batkivshchyna party Yulia Tymoshenko with 13.36% was out of the race. "The main reason why Tymoshenko was the third is that the votes were taken by Vladimir Zelensky. The main protest electorate voted not for Tymoshenko, but for Vladimir Zelensky. It partly reflects young people's preferences, partly - the populations fatigue from politics and politicians in general," member of the Russian Presidential Council on Interethnic Relations Bogdan Bezpalko said. According to him, the results of the first round of Ukraine's elections coincide with the results of surveys, which were conducted before the election. "The current top three correspond to electoral preferences. The inclusion of Crimea into Russia, that is, the loss of a number of voters in the Southeast, the war in the Donbas, as a result of which some people cannot vote, and the fact that it was the first time when such a large number of presidential candidates took part in the voting were among objective reasons," Bogdan Bezpalko stated. He believes that Tymoshenko will not dispute the election results, but will agree with the winner after the runoff. "Zelensky routs Poroshenko with almost twice as many votes, so Vladimir Zelensky will most likely win. We will have to deal with this candidate, who is Igor Kolomoisky's man. If we generally evaluate these election's results in relation to Russia, I think we should not expect something from him. Zelensky will have a certain time lag due to the fact that he can redirect a significant part of social discontent to his predecessor, previous President Poroshenko. However, Ukraines citizens shouldnt expect much either, because it's unlikely that Vladimir Zelensky will go against the IMF conditions, refuse to raise prices for gas and other utilities, that he will refuse to privatize and dismantle elements of the welfare state in Ukraine." A member of two Councils under the President of the Russian Federation - for Civil Society and Human Rights and for Interethnic Relations, Alexander Brod, said several participants in the electoral race declared total fraud. "Regarding the voting day, I can say that our colleagues, civil control experts were outraged by the interference of foreign diplomats in the voting process. First, these are the U.S. ambassador's repeated calls to go to the polls, be active ... Experts also discovered 'bad apartments' in Kiev and other regions, where 400, 380, 287 voters were registered. Information about the presence of people who have died, people who do not live in this area for a long time was received from almost from all the subjects," Brod said, noting that there were acts of bribery. "There were also criminal incidents at polling stations. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at one of the polling stations, there were brawls. The head of the electoral commission got into a fight with an observer. Some observers and journalists were forcibly removed from some voting station. A member of the election commission, who recorded what was happening at the polling station, was beaten up," the human rights activist noted. The Medicare for All Act has the potential to affect anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists, according to Anesthesia Business Consultants President and CEO Tony Mira. Four takeaways: 1. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and 106 House Democrats introduced HR 1384 in late February. It proposes extending Medicare coverage to all Americans, allowing coverage for certain services, doing away with copays and deductibles and changing the way physicians are reimbursed. 2. The bill calls for giving hospitals a lump sum payment each year to cover their annual expenses, including wages and salaries. Each institution would negotiate their budgets with a regional office established by HHS. The budget would be based on volume of services, actual expenditures, wages, provider capacity and more. 3. The bill would establish a fee schedule to compensate clinicians and groups based on expertise and value. ABC estimates the change could reduce physician income by up to 30 percent. However, groups could opt to be paid under their institution's global budget rather than the Medicare for All fee schedule. 4. The Medicare for All Act, which would be implemented over two years, was tabled in late March after House Democrats introduced a separate bill to strengthen the ACA. However, Medicare for All is likely to be a central topic in the 2020 presidential election. More articles on anesthesia: How to select anesthesia quality measures 4 strategies Anesthesia makes up 16% of out-of-network claims for in-network admissions 33 statistics Florida brings CRNA care without physician supervision closer to reality 5 key details The trial began for the now-closed Forest Park Medical Center in February, according to D Magazine. Here are six takeaways from the trial: 1. Forest Park Medical Center Dallas was a physician-owned surgical hospital that operated as an out-of-network facility. 2. The government has accused the physicians and others of paying and receiving over $40 million in kickbacks and bribes for patient referrals. 3. The scheme included various purported sham marketing services agreements in which money was paid by Forest Park Medical Center Dallas to entities owned or controlled by the physicians in exchange for their patient referrals. 4. The government has also accused the defendants of fraudulent behavior by inducing patients to use its out-of-network facility by waiving or substantially reducing coinsurance or patient-responsibility and concealing this from the patients' payers. 5. The government has also implicated those involved with violations under the Travel Act for interstate commerce, according to an article published in D Magazine. 6. At trial, the government's valuation expert testified that specific marketing services agreements were not commercially reasonable and that the fair market value of the services could not be reasonably determined. More articles on healthcare: 10 things to know about total joint replacement in ASCs for 2019 10 ASC closures in the past year, and the reason why New Jersey men plead guilty to defrauding investors in fake ASC 5 details Here are seven updates on ASC companies and industry-relevant companies to note: Nashville, Tenn.-based Surgery Partners subsidiary Surgery Center Holdings will commence a $430 million senior unsecured notes offering. In New Jersey, a father and son team pleaded guilty to defrauding investors who thought they were purchasing shares of an ASC, based on a press release from the New Jersey attorney general's office. Read more. Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare plans to convert Houston-based Cypress Fairbanks Medical Center into a freestanding emergency room by April 18. Battle Creek, Mich.-based Brookside ENT and Hearing Center closed after the center fell victim to a data hack that wiped out all of the practice's files. Pain Concepts of Meridian, MS sold its 21,000-square-foot ASC/MOB property in Meridian, Miss., for $6.8 million. University Federal Credit Union provided $7 million for the refinancing cash-out of Serene Hills Commons, a medical office building in Lakeway, Texas. The building houses Leawood, Kan.-based Muve Health's Muve Lakeway Ambulatory Surgical Center. As Women's History month comes to a close, Deerfield, Ill.-based Surgical Care Affiliates is celebrating the completion of a successful all-women medical mission trip to Honduras supporting One World Surgery. In a ruling issued March 28, a judge in Arkansas temporarily barred the owner and operator of De Queen (Ark.) Medical Center from transferring the facility's assets, according to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. "There is a real and present danger that the assets of [De Queen Medical Center] are being dissipated and not used for providing the [hospital's] essential medical services, including payment of employees and healthcare professionals," Sevier County Circuit Judge Tom Cooper's order said. De Queen Medical Center is one of several hospitals owned and operated by Kansas City, Mo.-based EmpowerHMS, which has experienced financial troubles in recent months. Electricity was temporarily shut off in some parts of the hospital in February due to nonpayment, and the hospital recently stopped providing patient care, according to the report. In addition to barring De Queen Medical's owners from transferring its assets, the judge also appointed the hospital's director of nursing as temporary receiver. She will take over management of the hospital's bank accounts, licenses and interactions with vendors and employees, according to the report. More articles on healthcare finance: Post-merger results: Advocate Aurora sees revenue, outpatient volume grow Missouri hospital struggles to regain Medicare contract due to two-night rule 11 recent hospital, health system outlook and credit rating actions House and Senate Democratic committee leaders are requesting that the HHS Office of Inspector General probe whether CMS Administrator Seema Verma stuck to federal regulations and ethics requirements in her agency's awarding of contracts, according to Bloomberg. The request is from Frank Pallone Jr., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee; Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform; Ron Wyden, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Finance; and Patty Murray, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. In a March 29 letter, the committee leaders cite a Politico report, which states that Ms. Verma "employs a team of private consultants who write her speeches, polish her brand and travel with her across the country." Contracts and subcontracts approved by Ms. Verma reportedly included a $2.25 million contract with Porter Novelli, an international public relations firm. "Our committees have long-standing interests in ensuring responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and that funds are spent on advancing agency initiatives not for the personal benefit of agency political leaders and their well-connected associates," the committee leaders wrote. They asked the inspector general to review whether Ms. Verma's actions regarding the contracts complied with federal regulations and ethics requirements. Republicans are developing a "really great" replacement for the ACA, President Donald Trump said, but a vote on that healthcare plan can wait until after the 2020 presidential election, CNBC reports. In a series of tweets Monday night, President Trump said the healthcare plan "will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win back the House." His comments suggest President Trump is willing to debate the healthcare plan during the 2020 election campaign, rather than trying to draft a proposal sooner. Recently, President Trump has renewed his initial campaign promise to repeal and replace the ACA. The president's remarks come just one week after the U.S. Justice Department said it supports a judge's ruling that the entire ACA should be invalidated. After the lawsuit was backed by the Justice Department, President Trump said the Republican Party would be known as "the party of healthcare." Read the full report here. Lawmakers in Illinois are considering legislation that would impose patient limits on hospital nurses, according to NPR Illinois. Under the proposed legislation, hospitals would be required to limit nurses to four patients or fewer. Units like maternity wards, intensive care units and emergency rooms would see lower patient-to-nurse ratios. While nurses with the Illinois Nurses Association argue patient limits would improve care outcomes and safety, hospital administrators said evidence isn't conclusive on the success of nurse-to-patient ratios. A.J. Wilhelmi, president and CEO of the Illinois Health and Hospital Association, said the limits could raise healthcare costs by more than $2 billion each year, according to NPR Illinois. "There is no conclusive evidence that these one size fit all nurse staffing ratios actually improve patient outcomes or the quality of care," he said. University of Louisville (Ky.) is extending its timeline to find a joint-venture partner to purchase and operate KentuckyOne facilities based in Louisville, including Jewish Hospital, after an initial request for proposals did not result in potential partnerships, according to the Courier Journal. The school launched its search in February, and the request for proposals came with a March 8 deadline. On Monday, University of Louisville President Neeli Bendapudi, PhD, said the proposals submitted in that time did not produce a suitable partnership. "Several potential partners told us they simply needed more time to review the opportunity and present a strong proposal," she said in a letter to the university community, as reported by the Courier Journal. Jewish Hospital has been up for sale since 2017. Dr. Bendapudi said KentuckyOne parent CommonSpirit Health has agreed to extend an academic-affiliation agreement, which allows medical professionals who work for University of Louisville to perform certain services at Jewish Hospital and KentuckyOne's Frazier Rehab Institute. This 90-day extension will buy University of Louisville more time to search for a partner. Read the Courier Journal report in full here. The first official meeting between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, dedicated to the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement, was held on Friday in Vienna. Both sides, as well as the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, praised the outcome of these talks. At the same time, next day, Armenian Defense Minister David Tonoyan, while on a visit to the United States, said that Armenia was refusing to liberate occupied territories "in exchange for peace and is ready for a new war for new territories. This provocation was condemned by the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan, and in three days there was no reaction from official Yerevan to the Minister's statement. Head of the BakuNetwork Expert Council, Elkhan Aleskerov, discussed Vienna meeting and prospects of Armenia's aggressive policy in an interview with Vestnik Kavkaza. - What do you think about contrast between Aliyev and Pashinyan's statements on need to take humanitarian measures to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and Tonoyan's statement on transition of Armenia to new "war" formula? - First of all, it should be noted that negotiations were extremely positive. For the first time ever, President and new Prime Minister officially sat down at the negotiating table to discuss the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement, and the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs and Foreign Ministers contributed to their meeting. It should be noted that after a series of Pashinyans demands and attempts to introduce a third party to the settlement process, the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs and leading countries of the world said that it's impossible to change the negotiation format. Pashinyan's attempt to push the so-called separatists of Nagorno-Karabakh - who are part of the Karabakh clan, previously led Robert Kocharyan, former Prime Minister who is currently imprisoned - to the negotiating table has failed. As a result of these negotiations, parties didn't make official statements, but there is an important aspect - parties agreed to hold humanitarian events. Indeed, if we're talking about peace negotiation process and creation of a peaceful atmosphere for settlement, the humanitarian factor, in particular the issue of exchange of prisoners of war, is extremely relevant. Previously Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev offered Pashinyan to exchange prisoners of war based on the "all for all" principle, widely accepted in the world. Unfortunately, Armenian side then refused to exchange prisoners, which hindered the establishment of peaceful atmosphere around negotiation process. In any case, this issue was raised at the meeting. I think this will be an important element of future negotiations, and after exchange of prisoners of war the settlement process will proceed in a more confidential atmosphere. Foreign Ministers were also instructed to continue negotiation process in the current format. Unfortunately, against this background, Armenian Defense Minister Tonoyan made an extremely inadequate statement. It's nonsense, because, first of all, Tonoyan doesn't have the authority to make such political statements that don't fit Pashinyan's actions. This indicates that there's either inconsistency of positions, or an attempt by Defense Minister to thwart peace talks between political leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Second of all, he openly declares that he gave instructions to seize new territories, personally confirming the fact that Armenia is occupying Azerbaijani territories, that there are no so-called "self-defense forces of Nagorno-Karabakh" on the occupied lands, just Armenian army, which he ordered to prepare plans for the new offensive operation. Third of all, Tonoyan showed that Armenia is not interested in the right of Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to self-determination, because he focused solely on territories. That's how Armenian Defense Minister proved that Yerevan is waging an aggressive territorial war against Azerbaijan. There's also the fact that Tonoyan made this statement in New York, in other words, he wanted to get support from Armenian diaspora in the United States. He said that just to get more money from them. There are also other reasons for his statement, because due to attacking Azerbaijani side and occupying Azerbaijani lands, Armenia cannot get any approval from the international community, which means that Defense Minister either tried to make a provocation, or is simply bluffing to create confusion and damage negotiation process between leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia. Overall, it's simply an expression of hostility. I think that Tonoyan's statement should be condemned by the Minsk Group co-chairs as inappropriate to peaceful nature of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement. - Is there any possibility that there's some truth to David Tonoyan's statement that Armenia is currently able to begin offensive operation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, taking into account strengthening of Azerbaijani security? - David Tonoyan is not a military man, and he's not able to assess the state of Armenian army, although he has been in charge of the Defense Ministry for some time. There are no offensive units in Armenia, Armenian army is at front-line positions in the occupied territories. Overall, no Minister of Defense in the world would openly declare plans to prepare offensive units and begin offensive operation to seize new territories in addition to already occupied ones. This statement simply doesn't fit the logic of the world military theory. In addition, Armenia has no advantage at the contact line or in any other sectors. Armenia is incapable of waging war because it's in disastrous economic situation: there's lack of finances, lack of prospects for the future. In the end, Tonoyan made a very inappropriate statement, which only brings chaos into the conflict settlement process and, at best, gives Pashinyan's team opportunity to earn some points in the eyes of radical part of Armenian society. - How do you think Armenia should build its foreign policy, taking into account the fact that military option of the conflict settlement is unavailable for it? - Theory and practice show that development of Armenia largely depends on peaceful relations with Azerbaijan, especially because Nagorno-Karabakh is located on the western side of the ridge of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains. Armenia itself is in an economic crisis, and it's very costly for it support itself and, at the same time, support occupied territories of Azerbaijan. Trends that have existed over the past 20 years show that Armenia as a state is fading away. People just leave the country. At the same time, Yerevan has to spend resources on the unnecessary transportation of military from northern and eastern borders of Armenia to semi-desert, burned-out area near Aghdam, where they must be fed and supported all the time. Armenian politicians are turning the country into hopeless region, and this leads the country to a dead end, in which there is no future. Even nearest neighbors are turning their backs on the republic a recent visit of new Georgian President to Azerbaijan and Armenia showed this well, since Salome Zurabishvili officially said that Armenia is occupying Nagorno-Karabakh. Earlier, Georgia avoided these statements. Similar statements were recently made by official Iran. In other words, Armenia as a state is becoming incapable, no one relies on it economically and no one is interested in closer cooperation politically. Previously, Yerevans tactic was to strengthen relations with Moscow by all means, but after the change of power, Armenian government began to do what no reasonable government that needed support from the outside would have done - withdrew its general from the post of CSTO Secretary General and now blocks initiatives of more powerful states on the appointment of a new one. Armenia has damaged military bloc it really needed. And this situation was created by Pashinyan, who doesn't have a clear concept of state development. The hope that Pashinyan will behave like democratic leader elected by the people didn't come true, because he was appointed as acting Prime Minister at a time when parliament was surrounded by his supporters. Less than 50% of voters participated in the parliamentary elections, and statements that he has support of 70% of citizens are false, because over 50% of voters simply didn't vote. Now Pashinyan makes foreign policy mistakes, which are preamble of his domestic political mistakes. Economic situation doesn't help his case, and all promises are just temporary. After some time, even citizens of Armenia themselves won't treat him as a serious leader of the country, if he doesn't deal with key problems of Armenia. The number one problem that hinders any development of the republic is of course the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and Yerevan's intention is to continue to occupy Azerbaijan's territory no matter what. As global warming progresses, up to 1 billion people could be exposed to disease-carrying mosquitoes for the first time, increasing the risk of developing deadly diseases, according to a study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The study, led by researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., examined how two of the most common disease-carrying mosquitoes would move as temperatures intensified over the next 50 years. They analyzed temperatures on a month-by-month basis, projecting risk resulting from the spread of these mosquitoes through 2050 and 2080. The mosquitoes, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, carry several viruses that cause diseases which could result in death, including dengue, chikunguyna and Zika. The researchers found that as temperatures rise and the mosquito movements change, almost the entire population in the world could be exposed to them at some point in the next 50 years. The tropics would be at risk from the diseases these mosquitoes transmit all year long, while seasonal risks would increase everywhere else in the world. "The risk of disease transmission is a serious problem, even over the next few decades," said Colin J. Carlson, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Georgetown University's biology department and co-lead author of the new study. "Places like Europe, North America, and high elevations in the tropics that used to be too cold for the viruses will face new diseases like dengue." Surgeons at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Hospital on March 25 performed the first kidney transplant between a living HIV-positive donor and an HIV-positive recipient, reports The Washington Post. Three things to know: 1. As of March 28, both patients were recovering in the hospital. For the first time in a year, the transplant recipient no longer requires dialysis. 2. The donor, 35-year-old Nina Martinez, and the recipient, who wished to remain anonymous, have different strains of the virus. Both will take antiretroviral medications indefinitely to control their infections. 3. Surgeons across the U.S. have performed 116 organ transplants from deceased HIV-positive donors to HIV-positive recipients. This surgery is the first such transplant involving a living HIV-positive donor. The medical breakthrough could help increase the pool of available organs for the 1.1 million Americans living with HIV, according to The Washington Post. "Society perceives me, and people like me, as people who bring death," Ms. Martinez told the publication March 23. "And I can't figure out any better way to show that people like me can bring life." More articles on clinical leadership & infection control: New York county executive: County saw 500+ immunizations after ban on unvaccinated kids 26% of people in Congo think Ebola outbreak isn't real, survey finds Johns Hopkins All Children's dodges millions of dollars in fines for safety issues This shocking and survival video was captured on camera by Stephan Mantler, a mountain guide and owner of tour company Hafjall. In the video, the tourists who were visiting the Breiamerkurjokull glacier, can be seen running to safety as the huge wave approaches the shore. The video has also captured the rumbling sound like thunder as the pieces of the glacier crash into the water to which people start running to higher ground as waves approach them. According to ABC News, the tourists all managed to make it out safe, despite the icy, rocky terrain they had to traverse. This video was posted by Mantler on Facebook and has been widely shared online. It has also garnered one lakh views and comments to its name. Lakeland Dairies and LacPatrick Co-operative have formally completed the merger of the two societies. The new society formed by the merger will be known as 'Lakeland Dairies' and will collect milk from around 1,350 Northern Ireland dairy farmers. Lakeland Dairies is now the second largest dairy processor on the island of Ireland with a cross-border milk pool of 1.8 billion litres, produced by 3,200 farms on the island of Ireland. The co-operative will have a combined annual turnover in excess of 1bn. At the first board meeting of the new society, Alo Duffy was appointed chairman of the co-operative together with two vice-chairs, Colin Kelso and Alan McCay. Michael Hanley, the current chief executive of Lakeland Dairies, will continue to serve as the group chief executive in the new society. He said that after completing the merger process, it must now focus its efforts on driving the business forward and delivering the strongest possible milk price for the farmer. "Significant work will have to take place to make the new organisation as efficient as possible and to return the strongest possible milk price back to dairy farmers in line with market conditions. "We will leave no stone unturned to ensure that we establish the most effective platform from which to conduct our business in the future. "Lakeland Dairies is farmer-owned and farmer-controlled and we exist for the benefit of our milk producers." Lakeland was assisted by legal advisors at Belfast-based commercial practice Cleaver Fulton Rankin. Its director Hilary Griffith said: "We are delighted to have been involved in this landmark merger on behalf of our client, Lakeland Dairies. "It is a clear example of an agri-food company which takes a strategic and ambitious approach to its growth. "It is not only an important merger for our client, but also the Northern Ireland dairy farming and agri-food market as a whole." Your columnist spends a lot of time at speaking at conferences and presenting to smaller groups on economics, policy and political matters. Often the most interesting events take place in corporate suites. Interacting with executives at the business coal face is always informative. One such meeting last week showed that however much is going on in the world that is of relevance to business, Brexit is absorbing a huge amount of the attention for companies of all kinds. Millions of hours that could have been spent on product development, innovating to boost productivity and finding cost savings have instead been spent on the implications of Brexit. The opportunity cost of Brexit for firms in Ireland almost certainly dwarfs the hundreds of millions of euro of taxpayers' money spent by government on preparing for it. Brexit has also distracted businesses from other big picture issues they need to keep abreast of. Italy more than anything else keeps the top people in Brussels awake at night. It could reignite the euro debt crisis at any time. Another big risk for Europe is France. It will hold its next presidential election in three years. The incumbent, Emanuel Macron, has shown leadership in the foreign affairs sphere and delivered real reform at home. But his support levels are tracking his predecessor Francoise Hollande who didn't even try for re-election in 2017. The rolling insurrection in France since the end of last year - in the form of the Gilets Jaunes movement - is in part a reaction to the reforms Macron has implemented. If he cannot turn things around, either the hard right and hard left, which are both anti-EU, could win the presidency in three years - their combined support reached 40% in the first round of the 2017 contest. If that were to happen there would be a rupture. As sure as night follows day a ruptured France would lead to a ruptured Europe. A much less dramatic European issue, but one that business needs to watch, is Germany's shift towards France when it comes to a greater role for government in the economy. Traditionally, the French have advocated a big role for the state in steering the economy and believe history shows this approach to be successful - the global success of Airbus is often held up as an example of the sort of champion companies governments can create if they put their minds to it. France's neighbours across the Rhine have painful memories of what happens when the state and big business get too cosy. But while Germans have long been standard bearers of market discipline and rigorous competition in EU market constructs, foreign takeovers of significant companies and a more hostile geopolitical environment have led to rethink. Berlin's position on supporting companies and whole industries has been shifting towards the long-held view in Paris. Even if it is premature to label the new Franco-German consensus as motivated by protectionism, this new consensus raises issues that businesses and consumers, particularly ones in the European periphery, need to be alive to. Another issue of relevance to many businesses is the main fear driving the new interventionism - China. Europe's stance on that country has undergone a major change in a short time. Earlier this month the EU's diplomatic service declared the rising Asian superpower a "strategic rival". French president Macron has declared that Europe's era of naivete towards China has ended. Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart visited Paris last month, with an entourage in tow similar to the ones US presidents bring on foreign trips (these optics are not accidental). What was originally set up as a bilateral meeting between the two presidents morphed into something different. Macron invited along his German counterpart, Angela Merkel, and the European Commission president, Jean Claude Junker. Europeans have been talking about a "strategic partnership" with China for many years. It was neither strategic nor a partnership. China's interest in the EU as a partner waned after the euro crisis. Indeed, it saw the weaknesses - economic and political - of that period as an opportunity to increase its influence in Europe via individual countries. It did this most notably by making (much-needed) investments in vital infrastructure in crisis-hit countries, including Greece and Portugal. Half a decade ago that was not looked at askance by the continent's power players. Today, all has changed and Chinese investment in Europe has led to the introduction of a new screening framework at EU level which will prevent foreign takeovers if they are deemed a security threat. Brexit is vital for Ireland, but it should not distract from changes afoot further afield that will have consequences for the business environment here. It is only three weeks since Wolf and Woodsman crisps first made an appearance in the shops. But already, the team responsible for bringing the product to market is excited and looking forward to taking the next step in building the business. It is this drive and passion for the authentic sweet potato crisps that has got them this far, and it is likely to play a big part in helping them to achieve their goals in the coming years. The business was set up by brothers Jonny and Andrew Laverty and their childhood friend David Knowles as a result of a chance encounter with another entrepreneur. A discussion between Jonny and David ensued and three years on they have launched the first in a range of sweet potato crisps. Jonny (29) explains: "David and I already run a gym together, in Lisburn, called White Wolf Crossfit. "We were at a fitness competition and we got chatting to a guy who owned a nutrition company that sells protein bars and powders and I thought I would like to do something similar. "David and I had a chat about it on the plane on the way home and the idea really went from there." While most people dream of setting up their own business, Jonny and David decided to implement their vision. They recruited Andrew to help them develop their plan and together the trio identified a gap in the market, developed a product and created an exciting and dynamic brand to attract potential business. Jonny continues: "We'd always noticed that no-one was really making sweet potato crisps, they were quite hard to get, so we decided to take forward that idea. "We actually played around with different ideas in my kitchen before we settled on something we really liked. "We had experience of setting up a business before, but we'd never created a product and taken it to market, so this was all new to us. "The gym is really about providing a service, not creating a tangible product, so it's been a bit of a learning curve, but we're getting there, I hope." While they had identified a gap in the market, the business partners were also keen not to replicate other products on sale. To this end, the crisp they have developed is cut slightly thicker to give it more crunch. They have also come up with two flavours to date, which they believe set them apart from their competition. Jonny continues: "It has been a lot of hard work to get to the point we're at today. "We had the initial idea three years ago and we had to come up with the right product, then we had to get machinery sorted out. "Packaging and building the brand was also really important to us, we wanted to build on the brand we have already created at the gym and we came up with the name, Wolf and Woodsman. "We also had to source packaging and we found a supplier in China and there was a lot of going back and forward on the internet to get that secured. "Having the product's nutritional profile took quite a while as well, tests would be done and then more tests would be done, but it was absolutely essential to get that information correct. "Throughout the whole process, we were getting feedback and changing things around until we were happy with the packaging and the product. "People really seem to like what we have come up with, we get lots of positive comments and that's great because it reinforces that you were right to put in so much time and effort to get it right." They also worked hard on social media to raise the profile of the brand and were rewarded when they secured their first order with a well-established name. "So far we have developed two flavours, peri peri salt and chipotle and lime," he continues. "At the moment we only have the peri peri salt in the shops, the chipotle and lime tends to have more of a kick so we want to get the peri peri salt established before launching the second flavour. "Our first order was to supply a box of 50 to Rademon Estate, which was a brilliant feeling. "There is definitely something very satisfying about seeing an idea that was in your head, that you have developed, on the shelves for people to buy. "Looking to the future, we want to export and we're initially looking at Ireland and then, down the line, we would like to get in to shops in England, Scotland and Wales. "We are targeting the likes of farm shops and we're not trying to be McCoys or Tayto, we're just trying to be ourselves and make a success from our crisps. "We're also not trying to get into the supermarkets at the moment either. "The best piece of advice I've had so far has come from my brother. "For me, I find if I think in the long term, and think about the long-term vision too often, then I can get quite anxious and think that maybe I'm not moving fast enough. "It was actually Andy who told me to stop thinking about the long-term goals and think about the next step. "He said it can be something as simple as going for a coffee and having a chat with someone but to concentrate just on that. "You should just focus on what's in front of you because opening one door will always open another couple of doors. "It's a good piece of advice when I'm stressing about things." Two prominent centres for religious orders in Belfast and Downpatrick have gone on the market with the combined value of almost 2.5m. The administrative building of a former convent, Good Shepherd Centre on the Ormeau Road and Carolan Road and Parmenie Pastoral Centre on Irish Street in Downpatrick are seeking developers who may be interested in residential, office and possibly care home use. Good Shepherd Centre is a B1 listed building dating back to 1850. It was formerly used for office accommodation spanning three floors that include a number of cellular offices with larger meeting rooms, staff facilities and toilets. The property is heated by gas which was installed in 2008. It sits in 1.3 acres of land and also includes a gate lodge which was renovated in 2008. The gate lodge is currently leased to the Belfast Buildings Trust on a 50-year contract. The centre, gatehouse and surrounding grounds have gone on the market for 1.75m. Meanwhile in Downpatrick, Parmenie Pastoral Centre is seeking offers over 500,000. The site is one acre and comprises 9,000sq ft of accommodation with 14 bedrooms. It was built in 1962 and has been home to the Brothers of the De La Salle Order in Downpatrick for almost 60 years. Listed by TL Graham and Son the property is "in excellent condition" and "suitable for a variety of alternative uses" including a care home and residential properties, subject to planning. Built in 1962 the building includes large open plan spaces including hallways, a common room, recreation room, sitting room, kitchen and dining room, parlour, prayer room and more. TL Graham and Son Chartered Surveyors and Property Consultants said: "It is not often that a well-maintained property such as this, with excellent redevelopment potential, comes on the market at a competitive price. The Parmenie Pastoral Centre is in superb condition and may be suitable for a variety of commercial and residential uses, subject to the appropriate statutory approvals. "The property's attractive U-shaped design means it would lend itself very well to alternative uses such as a residential care home, a nursing home, a charity headquarters, offices or a business call centre. Expand Close The Parmenie Pastoral Centre in Downpatrick / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Parmenie Pastoral Centre in Downpatrick "It may also be suitable for redevelopment for residential apartments. Located in the popular tourist and market town of Downpatrick, it may also have potential as a boutique hotel." The property market has benefited from a number of religious congregations downsizing or moving in recent years. In 2016 members of the Carmelite nuns in Newry moved to join another congregation in Waterford after 90 years at their monastery in Glenvale. The move led to the sale of 75 acres of farmland for 725,000. Connor Manning, a partner at Irish law firm Arthur Cox specialising in corporate and commercial law, agreed there had been a slowdown in M&A activity The value of Ireland-linked mergers and acquisition activity plunged in the first three months of this year to just 2.1bn (1.8bn) from 20bn (17bn) in the first quarter of 2018, figures show. The slump tallies with a sharp decline in M&A activity across the world. A number of deals involving Irish companies were announced in the first quarter of the year, but most have yet to be completed. They also include the 18.5m (15.8m) takeover of Dublin-based Dedsert, which trades as BetBright, by 888. Also on the list is the decision by UK-listed Domino's Pizza UK to buy a 15% stake in Irish firm Shorecal, the vehicle owned by Charles and Adrian Caldwell in Northern Ireland and which owns a number of Domino's Pizza outlets in Ireland, for 12.5m (10.7m). There has been a marked slowdown in the activity in the first three months as investors and businesses fret about geopolitical issues such as Brexit and its wider implications. That has also caused turmoil for sterling. There's also a wider malaise over the global economic outlook. Data compiled by Refinitiv shows there were 77 merger and acquisition deals with Irish involvement in the first quarter of 2019, which is down from the 85 notched up in the first three months of 2018. Last week, Dublin-based financial services firm IFG said it had agreed to a 240m (205m) sale to UK private equity firm Epiris. That deal was not included in the value of deals collated in the survey. Connor Manning, a partner at Irish law firm Arthur Cox specialising in corporate and commercial law, agreed there had been a slowdown in M&A activity. "It's fair to say that the volumes would be down in the first quarter compared to last year," he said. "We don't know whether that is relating to Brexit, or whether it's relating to something wider in terms of whether this is the start of a downturn or not." He said investors should have a "good sense" by the summer of how the environment is playing out. "Even in a downturn, we'd expect to be pretty active, but the nature of the deals might change slightly," he added. The data prepared by Refinitiv shows that during the first quarter Arthur Cox was the joint top leading legal adviser to deals with an Irish link. It has worked on four deals with a total value of $233.8m (178m). However, in the first quarter of 2018, it worked on 11 deals with an aggregate value of $547.8m (417.4m). Rival law firm McCann FitzGerald touched just one deal during the first quarter, according to Refinitiv, but had worked on nine in the first three months of 2018. Figures from Refinitiv last week showed that global mergers and acquisition activity fell 17% in the first quarter. In Europe, activity tumbled 67% to $927bn (706bn), according to the data. The Czech Republic has decided to put Georgia on the list of safe countries, according to the Georgian Interior Ministry. The Czech Republic is the 12th country in the EU/Schengen zone to put Georgia on the safe country list. The other countries to list Georgia as a safe country are Bulgaria, France, Lichtenstein, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Iceland, Luxembourg, Ireland, Estonia and Denmark. "Putting Georgia on the safe country least is a demonstration of the countrys political stability, economic development and positive environment for human rights protection and safety," Agenda.ge cited the Georgian Interior Ministry as saying. The resolution has already taken effect. Therefore, Georgian asylum-seekers applications will be examined in an accelerated mode. When beef baron Larry Goodman's ABP Food took a 50% stake in Wexford-based Slaney Foods, the parent of Slaney Meats, back in 2016, the move culminated in Irish Farmers' Association protests. Farmers and suppliers were concerned about falling beef prices and the arrival of powerful ABP as a shareholder. But fast-forward to today and Slaney is one of Europe's top beef producers, supplying over 25 countries, including China. Low prices are still a big concern for farmer suppliers, but fears around the acquisition seem to have been allayed. Not that the protests were likely to have given Mr Goodman many sleepless nights. If any Irish businessman is deserving of the moniker 'survivor', it is him. Now 81, and still actively involved in ABP Foods, the family beef business which had a turnover of 2.8bn (2.4bn) in 2018, he has come out the other side of a Beef Tribunal, a horse-meat scandal, two recessions and business exposure following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Goodman business empire - which includes his wife Kitty and sons Laurence (37) and Mark (35) - now straddles the food, property, pet food and renewable sectors and employs 11,000 people, mostly outside of Ireland. The deeply-private businessman, who is the sixth generation of a livestock and meat-exporting family, runs a tight ship and at top level surrounds himself with a team of loyal allies who are expected to put in the hours, sources said. Mr Goodman is the executive chairman of the company which has grown to become one of Europe's leading privately owned agri-businesses with 51 production sites across Europe. Day-to-day operations at ABP are handled by a management team consisting of chief executive Frank Stephenson, COO Finbarr McDonnell and a team of divisional heads, one of whom is Goodman's youngest son Mark, who is managing director of ABP's international division. His eldest son, Laurence, heads up the family's property interests as well as running his own property development business - Urban Life. In fact, it is understood that Mr Goodman and Mr Laurence are the Irish state's biggest landlords, earning an 8m rent roll for office space to three government departments at the Baggot Street property, now known as Miesian Plaza. They also own an office block on Nassau Street in the capital, which they hope to redevelop. The family also has investments in the Blackrock and Hermitage clinics. But beef remains where it's mainly at for the business. Customers include supermarket private labels and restaurant and takeaway chains, while pet food has also been a growth sector in recent years. Earlier this year, ABP took control of Longford-based pet food manufacturing firm C&D Foods after it purchased the remaining 15% stake owned by CEO Philip Reynolds. The company already had an 85% stake in the business after the purchase of 50% in 2008 and a further 35% in 2011 in what is now one of the biggest European pet food suppliers. Brexit remains a significant threat to the business, however, as the UK is a big net importer of beef. Ireland accounted for 75% of UK beef imports in November of last year, according to recent trade statistics. And although ABP has hedged against this in Northern Ireland with a 50% stake in Linden Foods and a factory investment in Scotland, a source close to the meat industry said: "Brexit is potentially significant for them but it all depends on how the UK manages its beef tariffs. "But if there is anyone in the meat industry can find ways to deal with the challenge it's ABP. They are so well-connected internationally, so well-resourced, ABP will have a response to anything that arises." The type of post-Brexit bilateral deals the UK may strike with other trading blocs - including Mercosur (the South American trading bloc) which includes beef and other meat producers like Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay - will be a key concern. Some farmers fear that Brexit-related price pressures would not be passed on to consumers by dominant beef producers such as ABP, and farmer suppliers would take the hit rather than supermarket multiples. "This is a fear among some farmer suppliers. Goodman is respected in the industry for paying and paying on time. But he is seen by some as ruthless," said one farming source. Brexit-proofing is also likely to be a component in the company's strategy of growing new markets. Just two weeks ago, ABP announced that due to "extremely" positive demand it was extending its range of online beef products for Chinese consumers on the JD.com platform, which is one of the largest business-to-consumer online retailers in China with 301.8 million users. The Chinese market opened to boneless cuts from six approved Irish beef plants in June 2018 and demand has since been strong. By the end of 2019 it is estimated that more than 1,000 tonnes of Irish beef will have been landed in China. When Dundalk-born Mr Goodman founded the business in 1954 it was not long before he raised his sights beyond the local market. One of his first acquisitions was Anglo-Irish Meats in the late 1960s and he hoovered up factories around Ireland while expanding into Russia and the Middle East. His ability to build up trust with customers and suppliers as well as handsome EU subsidies helped him to grow the empire. He also had strong political allies in the likes of former Taoisigh Charlie Haughey and Albert Reynolds. But the road to success was not without bumps. In the 1990s the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait brought difficulties. Mr Goodman's beef empire had given hundreds of millions in credit to the Iraqi government which defaulted on the debt. The banks then pulled the plug and the Irish Government was recalled from holidays to pass special legislation to protect the Goodman business, given its importance to the Irish economy. Peter Fitzpatrick, Ireland's first examiner, was appointed to run the Goodman empire. By 1995, Mr Goodman had reassumed control of the business with the help of private backers and by 1999 he had paid them off and assumed full control. But more controversy followed. The Beef Tribunal arose out of a World In Action ITV investigation into irregularities in Ireland's beef and cattle trade. The tribunal ultimately found that no wrongdoing had been done by Larry Goodman or his company, but it led to the collapse of two governments. The company was also embroiled in a horse-meat scandal five years ago, when equine DNA was found in burgers produced by a subsidiary. But it was also subsequently cleared in relation to this when it was found that contamination originated from a third-party source. Mr Goodman appeared before the beef tribunal in 1993 and the media-shy businessman has kept a low public profile since. One of the biggest challenges facing the business these days appears to be Brexit, but sources said that Mr Goodman and his team will face it head on, just like they have in the past. "Goodman has a remarkable mind and he is very driven. That is the core of his success and around him he has very capable, mature, steady, strong people." He hasn't hired 'yes men', added the source, who believes that business will be well set for the foreseeable future, even if Goodman steps back from the leadership of the group. Another said Mr Goodman - although he has been at the centre of controversy from time to time - has played a huge role in developing the Irish beef industry by providing an extremely efficient route to market for meat produced in Ireland over the past 50 years. Julian Dunkerton looks set to rejoin the Superdry board (SuperGroup/PA) Julian Dunkerton is to become chief executive of Superdry after winning a long-running battle to return to the fashion chains board in a victory that has triggered a mass exodus of current management. Following a bitter months-long campaign, Mr Dunkerton emerged victorious following a shareholder vote that saw him scrape over the line with 51.15% of investor backing on Tuesday. His return sparked a flurry of resignations, with Superdry chairman Peter Bamford and chief executive Euan Sutherland resigning with immediate effect. The directors had previously said they would resign or not seek re-election if Mr Dunkerton returned to the company. In their stead, Mr Dunkerton has been appointed interim chief executive, while Boohoo man Peter Williams has been appointed as Superdrys chairman. Finance chief Ed Barker and remuneration committee char Penny Hughes also quit the fashion chain. Mr Williams and Mr Dunkerton said: We are very pleased to be joining the board of this great British company. We look forward to rebuilding the Superdry brand and the business. Mr Dunkerton has been a vocal critic of Superdrys management for several months, ripping into Mr Sutherland and claiming he has presided over a catastrophic decline. During his war to reclaim a board seat, he was acting with co-founder James Holder and together the pair own 29% of Superdry. Mr Dunkerton vowed on Tuesday to set Superdry back on the path to growth and success. He said: We have a wonderful opportunity to take this brand and this business to the next, exciting phase of its growth and development. I cant wait to get started and to work with the directors, the talented staff and our partners to deliver the future of Superdry. The hard work starts now. In the build-up to Tuesdays vote, investor advisory firms PIRC and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) both recommended shareholders vote against the shake-up. But big City investors including Investec Asset Management, Schroders and Spanish bank BBVA are thought to have voted in favour of Mr Dunkerton. Dennis Millard, Minnow Powell, Sarah Wood and John Smith have given three-months notice under their contracts and will stand down as Superdry directors with effect from July 1. The Pump House is currently owned by the Northern Ireland Science Park - but this could change A First World War ship, a 12th century castle and a social housing project are among local buildings shortlisted for a prestigious architecture prize. The Royal Society of Ulster Architects hand picked eight of the best new designs out of 23 hopefuls. Success could mean the chance to win the Liam McCormick Prize - Northern Irelands building of the year. The winner will then be considered for a UK-wide RIBA Nationa Award for architectural excellence, to be announced in June. The contenders include Killyleagh castle which has been extensively repaired in line with conservation principles. The restoration of HMS Caroline, Thompson Dock Pumphouse and Alexandra Dock is another contender with a historical theme. Dating back to 1914, HMS Caroline was the last surviving ship of the Battle of Jutland and has been restored as a floating museum. Expand Close The HMS Caroline. Picture: Michael Cooper Michael Cooper / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The HMS Caroline. Picture: Michael Cooper Looking to contemporary transport, the Colin Town Centre Transport Hub is the west Belfast terminus for the new Glider service. Expand Close Colin Town Centre Transport Hub / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Colin Town Centre Transport Hub Business life is respresented by City Quays 2, the new home to UTV is the second speculative commercial office building that forms part of a wider development of Belfast Harbour around Clarendon docks. On Divis Street, the new facility for Raidio Failte serves the Gaelic speaking community across Ulster and beyond. Expand Close Raidio Failte / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Raidio Failte In Co Down, country living is represented in modern Barn style house built for a semi-retired couple. In south Belfast, a social housing project of 15 apartments has been turning heads on Fitzroy Avenue. Closeby in the south of the city, an ambitious refurbishment of an existing house and extension to create a five-bedroom paradise. Judges will visit the shortlisted properties throughout April, with this years RSUA Design Awards to be announced in the Ulster Museum on May 17. Ciaran Fox, Director of RSUA, said: This years shortlist is brilliantly diverse with no two projects alike. From a distinctive local transport hub to the restoration of a ship from the first world war, there is much to celebrate. Theresa May and her party colleagues at the Commons yesterday The DUP voted against all four alternatives to the Prime Minister's Withdrawal Agreement as MPs failed to reach a consensus on a Brexit option last night. For the second time in a week, no motion received a clear majority in the House of Commons. Read More Two of the motions would have succeeded had the DUP backed them so the decision by the party's 10 MPs to oppose them was hugely significant. DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds told UTV that if the issue of the backstop was addressed "we would be in business". European Parliament Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt tweeted: "The House of Commons again votes against all options. A hard Brexit becomes nearly inevitable. On Wednesday, the UK has a last chance to break the deadlock or face the abyss." The Ulster Unionists said the DUP could not "abdicate its responsibility in this farcical situation". The party accused its rival of "attempting to close the stable door after the horse carrying the backstop has bolted". A proposal from former Chancellor and Tory grandee Kenneth Clarke for a customs union arrangement with the EU was rejected by just three votes. A demand for a second referendum was defeated by 12 votes. A Norway-style deal put forward by Tory MP Nick Boles by 21. He immediately declared he would no longer sit as a Conservative, blaming the party for refusing to compromise on a means of leaving the EU. Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay told MPs that the default outcome was now a no-deal Brexit on April 12, but said it was still possible to leave with a deal - and avoid holding European Parliament elections in May - if the Commons approves an agreement this week. Cabinet will meet today for five hours to thrash out a way forward. Mr Barclay told MPs: "This House has continuously rejected leaving without a deal, just as it has rejected not leaving at all. Therefore the only option is to find a way through which allows the UK to leave with a deal. The Government continues to believe that the best course to take is to do so as soon as possible." SNP MP Joanna Cherry's proposal to give MPs the power to block a no-deal Brexit by voting to revoke Article 50 was rejected by a margin of 101 votes. UUP leader Robin Swann said: "This whole Brexit process has been handled shambolically from the very start and the outcome of (these) votes are symptoms of the pitiful negotiating positions adopted by the UK's government and its ineffectual partners in the face of EU and Irish government intransigence. "If we're not careful there is the very real possibility of the UK leaving the EU without a sensible deal." Mr Swann continued: "The DUP can't abdicate its responsibility in this farcical situation. They are attempting to close the stable door after the horse carrying the backstop has bolted. "I hope for Northern Ireland's sake, and our place within the UK, that the Withdrawal Agreement containing the backstop, does not now slip through as the hard Brexiteer allies of the DUP jump ship to rescue their ideologically pure Brexit at the expense of the integrity of the UK. "The DUP had repeated opportunities to stop this and they missed them. It's time they stopped putting their party first and started putting the Union first." DUP leader Arlene Foster earlier denied reports that seven of her 10 MPs backed the Withdrawal Agreement and the party was divided on the way forward. "No, there's no splits within the Democratic Unionist Party," she said. "I'm not quite sure where that's coming from." When pressed on her party's possible support for a softer Brexit, she said: "We have a very simple way of judging all this, it's what will protect the Union and what will respect the referendum result and that's always been our position. "We have been very clear about our one red line and that remains the position. It's of no surprise to anyone that the Union will always be our first priority and that still remains the case." Asked if she would prefer staying in the EU compared to Mrs May's Brexit plan, she replied: "We do not like the current Withdrawal Agreement - I think everyone is very much aware of that - and the reason we don't like it is because of the backstop issue. "The fact that it separates Northern Ireland out from the rest of the UK puts an internal border within the UK and makes us subject to rules and regulations which the rest of the UK will not be subject to, without having any say in those rules and regulations." Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said it was "disappointing" that no Brexit solution had secured a majority, but the margin on the Clarke motion was "very narrow indeed" compared with three "overwhelming" defeats for Mrs May's deal. Business leaders were scathing over the continued failure of MPs to agree a way forward on Brexit. Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, said: "Parliamentarians are playing a reckless game of chicken which will end in disaster unless enough MPs can be persuaded to back a clear outcome which avoids a chaotic no-deal Brexit." MPs have again rejected a series of alternatives to the PM's Brexit deal. A call for a customs union after Brexit was defeated by just three votes, a referendum on any deal was rejected by 12 votes, the Common Market 2.0 plan lost by 21 votes and cancelling Brexit to prevent a no-deal scenario was defeated by 101. So what happens next? Today, April 2 Theresa May has scheduled a five-hour Cabinet meeting instead of the usual 90 minutes. The first three hours will be a political Cabinet without civil servants - fuelling speculation senior Tories will consider the prospect of a snap election, the timing of the Prime Minister's departure or the potential for ministerial resignations if there is a change in Brexit strategy. Tomorrow, April 3 Backbench MPs will again take charge of the Commons timetable to consider Brexit plans under Tory MP Sir Oliver Letwin's scheme to break the Parliamentary deadlock. Thursday, April 4 After latest round of votes failed to find a clear winner, Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said: "If the House were to agree a deal this week it may still be possible to avoid holding European parliamentary elections." That could be an indication the Prime Minister might risk a fourth showdown on her Withdrawal Agreement in the hope that more Tory Eurosceptics will accept the choice is between her plan and a softer Brexit. Wednesday, April 10 An emergency summit of EU leaders will consider any request by the UK for a longer delay to Brexit. To be granted a further postponement the Government will have to set out what purpose it would achieve and it will almost certainly involve taking part in the European elections. Friday, April 12 The UK is scheduled to leave the EU on April 12 after MPs rejected the Prime Minister's deal last week. Thursday, may 23 If EU leaders have agreed extension to the Article 50 process, UK will elect MEPs to European Parliament. Breakaway Independent Group of MPs intends to set up a new political party - Change UK - to fight the elections on a pro-EU platform. Nigel Farage will seek to continue as MEP, this time for new Brexit Party. Sunday, june 23 Mrs May warned MPs before they rejected her deal a long extension would "at least delay and could destroy Brexit". Three years after the referendum, it is possible the UK will still be in the European Union, have newly elected MEPs and will be contributing to the Brussels budget. A general election? The current House of Commons has so far proved unable to agree a Brexit plan, so PM could be tempted to call a snap election to break deadlock. But would her MPs allow her to fight another contest as leader? And would a new election give whoever occupies Number 10 a majority to steer such a divisive issue through Parliament? A fresh referendum? The call for a new referendum was defeated by just 12 votes and campaigners seized on the fact it had more MPs voting in favour than any other option. A soft brexit? The narrow defeat for a customs union will increase pressure on Mrs May to move in favour of the measure. But it would tear the Tory party apart as critics believe it robs the UK of the ability to strike trade deals with countries such as the US. The parents of a Belfast boy who required heart surgery have said they fear a no-deal Brexit will disrupt cross-border children's cardiac services. Joseph Loughran (7) needed life-saving surgery when he was born in 2012 after his heart stopped twice. The major operation was carried out in the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, but since 2015 there have been no cardiac services for babies and children with serious heart conditions. A review concluded a regional unit was no longer sustainable in Belfast, meaning parents must now travel to an all-Ireland service in Crumlin. The Irish News reported that the Republic's Department of Health wrote to GPs to say they would protect the service in a no-deal Brexit and "we expect cross-border services... such as the Paediatric Congenital Heart Service, to continue". Joseph's parents Brian and Sarah said "expects" fell short of the "cast-iron guarantee" they need. Last month their son travelled to Dublin for a three hour procedure to have a metal stent fitted. His condition also means he will have to be monitored for the rest of his life. "We found out at the end of the summer Joseph needed the procedure as his blood pressure had started to go up - and we started pushing to get it done before Brexit," said Mrs Loughran. "I had no concern, no angst about the doctors doing the procedure. The actual angst and the stress about him getting it done was the scheduling of it - was it going to be before Brexit, before the nurses strike. "The strike did lead to it being postponed and me and Brian were watching the news every night, thinking what if this going to be put back and back after Brexit. "Thankfully it went ahead on Valentine's Day - but what about the families coming after us?" The family of Arlene Arkinson have vowed never to stop looking for her body (Family handout/PA) The family of a teenager abducted and murdered almost 25 years ago have vowed never to stop looking for her body. Arlene Arkinson, 15, disappeared in August 1994 following a night out. An inquest into her presumed death concluded on Tuesday in Belfast after more than a decade of stop-start hearings. A coroner will deliver his findings on a future date. Arlenes sister Kathleen said: She was 15 when she went missing, she would have been 40 now on 20 April. Arlene was from the village of Castlederg in Co Tyrone. Expand Close Arlene was last seen in a car driven by Robert Howard the chief suspect and convicted child killer and rapist died in prison in 2015 aged 71 (Kent Police/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Arlene was last seen in a car driven by Robert Howard the chief suspect and convicted child killer and rapist died in prison in 2015 aged 71 (Kent Police/PA) She went missing after attending a disco at Bundoran in Co Donegal in the Irish Republic. She was last seen in a car driven by Robert Howard. The chief suspect and convicted child killer and rapist died in prison in 2015 aged 71. Howard was charged with murdering the 15-year-old, but acquitted in 2005. The jury was not told the predator, originally from County Laois in the Republic, had a history of sexual violence. By the time of his trial, he was already serving a life term for killing and raping London teenager Hannah Williams. Efforts to recover Arlenes body have failed. Ms Arkinson said: It was us that suffered, dragged through the mud, what the police gave us was unbelievable but we are still standing here and I will be here until Arlene is found. I will never give up looking for Arlene and I would like to thank the public for their prayers and keep Arlene in their prayers. Her barrister Henry Toner QC told the coroners court lines of inquiry had been investigated as far as they could be and evidence-giving had been concluded. Mr Toner confirmed the family knew Arlene was dead and believed she was murdered by Howard. He said the family had suffered so much since 1994, and the extent of Arlenes suffering would never be known. This is the final day of hearings, but their suffering will continue long beyond the conclusion of this inquestHenry Toner The inquest opened in November 2007. The barrister said: This extended process has added to the suffering of those who loved Arlene. This is the final day of hearings but their suffering will continue long beyond the conclusion of this inquest. He said some witnesses who gave evidence to the inquest were not honest in their accounts. He added: Some came to defend lies they told 20 years ago and the family have no thanks for those witnesses. This inquest has heard sufficient evidence to establish such truth about Arlenes death as can be found. Judge Brian Sherrard said he had drawn up draft conclusions, but it would be the autumn before they were ready for delivery. A special hearing will be convened in Omagh courthouse, close to the scene of Arlenes disappearance. The coroner said: This has been a very long process and the effort of course at all stages and now is to allow our community as a whole, and the Arkinson family in particular, to understand the loss of Arlene, who was of course a valued member of our community. The bonfire at Bloomfield Walkway in 2018. Pallets have been collected for this year already. Materials for a Belfast bonfire have been removed. Pallets had been collected for a controversial bonfire at the Bloomfield Walkway site in the east of the city off the Newtownards Road over recent days. Residents in the area have complained, said UUP Councillor Jim Rodgers saying it was "far too early" for material to be gathered for the July bonfires. He also said residents in the area would welcome the bonfire's removal as it had been the source of problems. Read More Last year the bonfire was at the centre of controversy which ended in the High Court intervening and private, masked contractors moving in to take way the material to reduce its height after it was found to pose a "serious threat" to homes in the area. The court heard the the pyre was under the control of "sinister forces" within the east Belfast UVF. UUP Councillor Jim Rodgers said that was a concern for many in the community, although he did not know who was organising the bonfire. He pallets piling up in April was "far too early". He said there had been a lot of good people involved in the bonfire over the years but "others come in and want to do their own thing". "For bonfires to be successful everyone has got to be consulted so we do not have a small group of people dictating to the community. "It is not in the interests of loyalism to have confrontations around bonfires. They tie up resources of the police, the Fire Service and the ambulance. "Health and safety has to be number one - it is of paramount importance and in Bloomfield Walkway they need to lift the pallets and store them elsewhere." In a statement, Belfast City Council said: Council has this morning worked with Department for Infrastructure as the landowner, elected members and community representatives to remove materials from this site. The Department for Infrastructure spokesperson said: "The Department has been liaising with the Council and the material at Bloomfield walkway has now been removed." Parents have spoken of their devastation after an east Belfast nursery school was ransacked in a burglary over the weekend. Police believe entry was gained to Glendhu Nursery School between Friday and Sunday and a number of electronic items, including laptops and iPads were stolen. Money was also taken and the inside of the school was heavily damaged in the burglary. The stolen items cannot be replaced as they are not covered by insurance, but parents of children at the school have started a gofundme fundraising campaign. The campaign has raised over 1.5k of its 2k target in less than a day. Ashleigh Peden's daughter attends Glenhu and she said the incident was upsetting for the entire school community. "They stole money, laptops, an iPad with all the kids work on, and have trashed the place. The nursery receives little funding as it is, and then this happens. How anyone could do this is beyond belief," she wrote on social media. "This is such a lovely nursery and were all devastated." Alliance Party leader Naomi Long said the break-in was "really disheartening for pupils, parents and teachers" and encouraged people to support the fundraising campaign. East Belfast DUP MLA Joanne Bunting said that anyone with information about the burglary should contact police. Expand Close Glendhu Nursery School. cq18nc/fKo5rP8cPTFW8ZsWXgLAm4j5G / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Glendhu Nursery School. For a small nursery to have money and vital equipment stolen is unspeakable and abhorrent," she said. "I have no doubt this is extremely distressing and frustrating for the pupils, staff and parents who work so hard within extremely tight budgets to create a safe and enjoyable place for the children. "It is utterly appalling that someone would sink so low as to steal from nursery children." Police confirmed that they are investigating the incident. "It is believed that entry was gained to the premises sometime between 2.30pm on Friday 29 and 11am on Sunday March 31. A sum of money and electronic items were reported stolen," a PSNI spokesperson said. A number of candidates for Belfast City Council have criticised the content of independent unionist councillor Jolene Bunting's election posters. Posters from Ms Bunting have been erected in the Court Ward in west Belfast and include slogan's like "veterans before immigrants" and "local homes for local people". Sinn Fein councillor Ciaran Beattie accused Ms Bunting of attempting to introduce "politics of hate" ahead of the local government elections on May 2. He said that Ms Bunting was "plumbing the depths in her campaign". This is a blatant and disgraceful attempt to inject the politics of hate into this election, something which has been typical of Jolene Buntings time on Belfast City Council," Councillor Beattie said. This must be opposed by all right-minded citizens. There can be no place for discrimination and intolerance of any kind within our political system. Read More Ms Bunting was given an interim suspension from Belfast City Council last September for failing to comply with the Local Government code of conduct after 14 complaints against her were received. Expand Close Posters from independent unionist councillor Jolene Bunting. Credit: Sinn Fein / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Posters from independent unionist councillor Jolene Bunting. Credit: Sinn Fein She was suspended pending the outcome of a standards watchdog investigation. Complaints against her included appearing at a rally with leaders of Britain First and a meme posted on social media which was described by other councillors as "racist and offensive". Last week a judge ruled that Councillor Bunting's four month interim suspension from council should be upheld due to her attendance at events where anti-Islamic speeches were made. Responding to Mr Beattie's comments Ms Bunting said her policies were about "putting local people first" and that she was standing behind them. "I believe that we should put natives first and that's what they have an issue with, that I want to put people who were born in this country ahead of visitors to the country," she said. "It's absolutely ridiculous to say that it's racism, I just feel that we should put veterans before people coming into our country." Alliance Party candidate Micky Murray said that Ms Bunting's posters were "blatant, everyday racism". "Disgusting behaviour from an elected representative," he said. His party colleague Councillor Kate Nicholl said that Ms Bunting's "hateful words have very real consequences to people who are marginalised as it is". Azerbaijani President, Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev has visited a military unit of the Special Forces of the republic's Defense Ministry, according to the presidential press service. The DUP has accused Theresa May of "sub-contracting out the future of Brexit" to Jeremy Corbyn, after the Prime Minister said she would hold talks with the Labour leader to find a way forward for Brexit. Speaking on Tuesday evening, the Prime Minister also said she would ask the EU for a further extension to Article 50 beyond the April 12 deadline. Mrs May said she would try to strike a compromise deal with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, but it would have to include her current deal. Read More "I'm offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and try to agree a plan that we would both stick to to ensure we leave the EU and we do so with a deal," she said. In a party statement on Tuesday night, the DUP said Mrs May's announcement "comes as little surprise". The Prime Ministers lamentable handling of the negotiations with the EU means she has failed to deliver a sensible Brexit deal that works for all parts of the United Kingdom. That is why she has not been able to get it through parliament," the statement read. "Her announcement therefore tonight comes as little surprise. Though it remains to be seen if sub-contracting out the future of Brexit to Jeremy Corbyn, someone whom the Conservatives have demonised for four years, will end happily. "We want the result of the referendum respected, and just as we joined the Common Market as one country we must leave the EU as one country. "We will continue to use our position within Parliament and with the Government to argue strongly the case for Northern Ireland and the integrity of the United Kingdom. "We remain consistent in judging all Brexit outcomes against our clear unionist principles. Theresa May's Brexit deal has already been rejected by MPs in the Commons on three occasions, however she said she is aiming for the Withdrawal Agreement to be agreed by MPs before May 22 "so the UK need not take part in European Parliamentary elections". Sinn Fein MP Elisha McCallion said it is clear that the Government and Parliament has "no plan, no strategy and no clue what it is doing". Theresa May had said she will ask for an extension but it cannot be an extension for no reason," she added. The British Parliament cannot continue to keep talking to itself about fantasy options that arent on the table. The only way to avoid a crash out is the Withdrawal Agreement. That is not open for renegotiation. The DUP and British parliament need to realise this." SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said he was glad the Prime Minister has "decided to ditch the ERG and DUP" version of Brexit. "Really important now that we see real leadership from across the Westminster parliament," he added. "The bottom line is still clear - the Good Friday Agreement and frictionless border needs to be protected." The Fire Service has said a blaze in Lurgan was set deliberately. Fire broke out at a vacant building on Orient Circle before spreading to the next property on Tuesday at around 1.15am. The outbuilding was completely gutted while windows in the vacant property were smashed. There were no reports of any injuries. Police and the Fire Service attended the scene and they are treating it as arson. Anyone with information is asked to contact police on 101 or anonymously through Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Police have issued a fresh appeal into the circumstances surrounding the death of 17-year-old Tara Wright. Ms Wright was found dead in a car outside Belfast City Hospital on March 24. Her death is believed to be connected to a single-vehicle crash on the Ballygowan Road in Castlereagh in the early hours of that morning. PSNI Inspector Nigel Henry said police have revisited the scene of the crash as part of their investigation and are focusing on the events leading up to Tara Wright's death. We believe that the silver Mercedes car Tara was travelling in was in the area of Gourleys Bar near the roundabout in Ballygowan around 1.25am on Sunday 24th March 2019," he said. "We would like to hear from anyone who noticed this car between 11pm on Saturday 23rd March and 1.30am on Sunday 24th March. I would also like to thank all of those who have come forward with information already and ask again for anyone who witnessed a grey coloured MG car between Ballygowan Road the Belfast City Hospital during the early hours of Sunday, 24th March to contact us. If you have dash cam footage which you believe is relevant to this investigation, you can contact us on 101, quoting reference number 227 of 24/03/19. Four men aged 20, 21, 28 and 30 arrested in the wake of the incident have since been released on bail and continue to assist police with their enquiries. Police search for Lisa Dorrian near the Ballyhalbert caravan park where she vanished in 2005 Police have launched a fresh large-scale search for murdered Bangor woman Lisa Dorrian at a former airfield site close to the Co Down caravan park where she disappeared 14 years ago. Almost two-dozen specially trained officers arrived in Ballyhalbert yesterday morning to pursue a major line of enquiry. An operations trailer equipped with computers and a mapping suite has been set up in a car park area beside the disused airfield. A buggy will also allow officers to access marshy ground behind the caravan park. Detective Superintendent Jason Murphy, who is leading the investigation into Lisa's disappearance in 2005, said a number of other areas will be searched in the coming days. "The determination of the PSNI to bring those who killed Lisa Dorrian to justice is as strong today as it has ever been," he said. "The purpose of the search operation is two-fold: firstly, I want to recover Lisa's body and allow the Dorrian family to finally put Lisa to rest. "And, secondly, I am looking for evidence relating to her disappearance." The senior officer described the relationship between police and Lisa's family as very positive and confirmed that they were notified in advance of the planned search and have been updated on the current position of the investigation. Police believe Lisa was secretly buried by two men known to each other, only one of whom was known to Lisa. Earlier this year DS Murphy revealed that he believes the killer and his accomplice share a close "bond" which is why they have not given each other up. "I firmly believe that the answers to Lisa's disappearance lie with a small number of people," he said. "They may believe that they are bound by a common bond and have maintained their silence as a result. That silence will be a heavy and lifelong burden. We can help to unlock that burden, but we cannot do so whilst they remain silent." One theory is that the killer summoned his father to help transport Lisa's body in a car before she was buried near the spot where she vanished. Security sources do not believe the murder was premeditated, meaning that her disappearance was rushed. However, the initial police investigation focused on a group of criminals who Lisa owed money to, allowing the real killer and his accomplice time to cover their tracks and remove DNA traces. The last person to see Lisa alive in February 2005 was Mark Lovett, then 17 years old. He told police that he and Lisa fled the caravan where they were partying after hearing noises and seeing flashing lights outside. No one has been charged with the 25-year-old's murder. Police have pursued more than 3,500 lines of enquiry and carried out almost 400 searches. Extensive air, water and land searches around Ballyhalbert, including the use of underwater search teams, failed to yield results in 2005. A 2012 search of land owned by Jimmy Seales in Comber - who was convicted of an unrelated killing - also proved futile despite information that a vehicle used in Lisa's disappearance had ended up in landfill there. A 2016 search for the missing shop worker focused on another area of farmland just outside Comber. It was launched after police received fresh information about the murder and saw specialist teams being brought in to look for human remains, however nothing was found. A number of items were removed for further examination but were of no assistance in the probe. Lisa's father John and sisters Joanne and Michelle have always vowed to never give up looking for her and renewed their resolve following the death of her mum Patricia, in 2015. "We are confident in the investigation and its ability to find Lisa," they previously said. "The people responsible for hiding my sister's body should know that we will never give up on Lisa, she is too precious. "We will campaign until the day she is found and can be laid to rest with our mum." Last night the Dorrian family said they had no comment to make at this time. CCTV footage of the suspected gunman behind the murder of Jim Donegan (PSNI/PA) Mr Donegan was shot outside a school in Belfast A 33-year-old man arrested in connection with the murder of Jim Donegan outside a school in Belfast has been released unconditionally. Mr Donegan, 43, was shot dead as he waited to collect his 13-year-old son from St Marys Christian Brothers Grammar School in west Belfast in December. Read More The man was arrested on Tuesday morning under the Terrorism Act, which requires suspects to be either charged, released pending a report to the PPS or released unconditionally. In the wake of his murder, police said that Mr Donegan had a "number of enemies" and was known to them. Also known as JD, he lived in the Lisburn area with his family. CCTV footage, released by police, shows his killer emerge from Clonelly Drive as he walked towards his target at around 3.10pm. Detectives said the same killer had been waiting for his victim at the scene five days earlier but Mr Donegan did not pick up his child that day. A man accused of the horrific and bloody killing of a retired teacher was ordered to stand trial for murder on Tuesday. By way of a preliminary investigation, lawyers for 34-year-old Michael Owens had contested that he had a case to answer but having heard evidence from a number of witnesses at Antrim Magistrates Court, District Judge Nigel Broderick ruled there was a Prima Facile case against the alleged killer. With Owens appearing in the dock rather than by video link, a brother and supporters of his alleged victim Robert Flowerday sat in dignified silence just a few feet away in the public gallery to hear the judge's ruling which commits the alleged killer to the senior Crown Court. Owens, from the Lisburn Road in Glenavy, is in custody charged with the murder of popular former Antrim Grammar School teacher Robert Flowerday on a date unknown between 27-30 January last year and burglary with intent to steal on the same dates. He is further accused of burglary of Mr Flowerday's home on December 6, 2017. The body of the 64-year-old retired maths teacher was found at his home on the Mill Road in Crumlin on Sunday, January 28, after police called to his house because a member of the public raised concerns. Previous courts have heard claims the retired teacher sustained injuries of the most horrific nature and that there was a preliminary finding of a positive DNA result which allegedly connects Owens to the murder scene. In an unsuccessful previous bail application, Detective Sergeant Walsh chillingly outlined: I have seen what this man is capable of. These injuries are of the most horrific nature, inflicted on an elderly man, in his own home, defenceless and theres been no remorse shown whatsoever and I think that certainly I have a duty to protect the public and the vulnerable. He also alleged that Owens had confessed to a witness to the murder. Following the ruling of Judge Broderick in court on Tuesday, Owens was afforded the opportunity to comment on the charges or call evidence but he declined. Expand Close Robert Flowerday / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Robert Flowerday Remanding him back into custody, the judge returned the case to Antrim Crown Court and ordered Owens to appear before the higher court for his arraignment on a date to be fixed. A man who denies sexually abusing his younger stepsister in the family home told police "that's just perverted", a jury heard yesterday A man who denies sexually abusing his younger stepsister in the family home told police "that's just perverted", a jury heard yesterday. The defendant, who cannot be named due to a reporting restriction, is standing trial at Belfast Crown Court on 10 charges spanning from May 2002 to September 2005. The jury heard the alleged abuse began when the girl was aged seven and the defendant was 14. Crown prosecutor Philip Mateer QC said the two families came together in 2001 when the complainant's father married the defendant's mother. The complainant, now aged 23, claimed the abuse first occurred in the family home in Omagh, and continued until she was around 10. Mr Mateer said she recalled it took place "every few days, when he decided he wanted it to", adding: "He would get her to bring him tea, coffee or sandwiches down to the room, and that would be the excuse to get her down there." The defendant, now aged 30 and living in south Down, is also accused of sexually assaulting and abusing his stepsister in their bathroom, and behind sheds in an outside area. Mr Mateer said that in August 2012, when she was 17, the complainant went to the PSNI and made a series of allegations. Mr Mateer said that the defendant said to police: "All she is saying is lies. Why would I want to do that to her? She was a seven-year old girl. That's just perverted." At hearing. Members of the Parachute Regiment facing protesters on Bloody Sunday A man shot and wounded as he remonstrated with soldiers on Bloody Sunday was later allegedly subjected to repeated raids on his home, the High Court heard today. Michael Bridge claims he was targeted with increasing frequency around the anniversary of the killings in Derry, and also threatened with prosecution by the Army. Mr Bridge, 72, is seeking damages over injuries he sustained when British soldiers opened fire on civil rights demonstrators in January 1972. Thirteen people were shot dead by the Parachute Regiment, while a fourteenth victim later died of his wounds. Civil actions were brought by victims and their families after a major tribunal established the innocence of all those killed and wounded. The Saville Inquiry's findings in 2010 prompted the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, to publicly apologise for the actions of the soldiers. He described the Bloody Sunday killings as "unjustified and unjustifiable". More than 1.8m has already been paid out in settlements and awards made in 16 other compensation cases. In court today counsel for Mr Bridge opened his claim by describing the events leading up to him being shot in the leg. He had been on the civil rights march as a steward when demonstrators were hit by water canon, gas and rubber bullets at the William Street barricade. Ronald Bentley QC said his client headed towards the Rossville Flats, where he was informed that 17-year-old Jackie Duddy had been fatally wounded. He saw the then Father (later Bishop) Edward Daly and others crouching over the dying teenager. The court heard Mr Bridge, an amateur boxer at time, turned towards the paratroopers with his arms raised in anger. "He admits that he gave the soldiers, in his words, a mouthful," Mr Bentley said. "Witnesses have suggested he actually said 'Shoot me you b*******, shoot me', or 'If you're good enough to shoot other people you're good enough to shoot me'." According to his barrister Mr Bridge was on his own, in open ground, and posing no threat when he was hit by a bullet. The Saville Inquiry concluded that he threw either a half brick or stone towards the soldiers, although he doesn't remember any such action. Mr Bridge was shot in the leg by a lieutenant identified only by the cipher Solider N. He is convinced it had been an attempt to kill him which failed only because he was a moving target, the court was told. Subsequent claims by Soldier N that Mr Bridge was carrying some sort of smoking object were found to have been a false "invention", counsel said. "A specific lie was made up in relation to this man, as opposed to the general lies referred to previously in this case," he added. It was claimed that Mr Bridge targeted by the security forces after Bloody Sunday. "His home was repeatedly raided, he was regularly stopped in the street," Mr Bentley contended. "The frequency of these events increased substantially around the date of Bloody Sunday when there was an annual march taking place." Challenging the claims being introduced, David Ringland QC, for the Ministry of Defence, argued that they were "bland contentions" raised without prior notification. But Mr Bentely continued: "One of the allegations would be that the Army threatened to prosecute Mr Bridge for armed robbery. "He immediately went to the police who said that's nonsense, there's absolutely nothing in it." With Mr Ringland repeating his opposition to the new material, the judge agreed that he was entitled to seek more details. Adjourning the hearing, Mr Justice McAlinden suggested police records could be checked for any reference to the alleged incidents. Sinn Fein has said any Government plan to prevent the prosecution of former soldiers for Troubles-related crimes would be an insult to bereaved families. Mid Ulster MLA Linda Dillon was speaking after it was reported that new legislation is being prepared to provide a statutory presumption against prosecution. It would mean veterans wouldn't be charged if the alleged offence took place more than 10 years ago. Ms Dillon said legislation was reportedly delayed due to the Brexit crisis but "it clearly showed the intent of the British Government to cover-up its crimes in Ireland". She added: "From Bloody Sunday to the Ballymurphy massacre, Springhill, the New Lodge and in hundreds of other cases, the British Army were responsible for murder and mayhem on our streets." Ms Dillon claimed that the army "actively colluded with unionist death squads, imported weapons and tortured and oppressed entire communities". She continued: "Any attempt to absolve them from that is an affront to justice and an insult to grieving families who have spent decades campaigning for the truth. "It would also be a direct breach of the Stormont House Agreement which was signed up to by both governments and the political parties and provided for the establishment of legacy mechanisms to deal with the past." Ulster Unionist MLA Doug Beattie said any statute of limitations was unacceptable. "It would apply to terrorists as well and it would mean a de facto amnesty," he said. "British soldiers had to adhere to the laws of armed conflict, military and civil law and the rules of engagement while the terrorists adhered to nothing. We don't require any further laws when we know we operated within the law." Twenty-six years pass since the occupation of Azerbaijans Kalbajar district by Armenia. Launching a large-scale military operation on March 27 in 1993, the Armenian armed forces occupied Kalbajar on April 2. As a result, 511 people were killed in Kalbajar, which has a territory of 1,936 square meters. As many as 321 people were captured and went missing. Fifty-five soldiers were killed during the fights, while 132 settlements were captured by the Armenian Armed forces. Armenian occupiers destroyed more than 500 industrial, construction, catering and retail facilities, 97 schools and 76 health facilities. Kalbajar districts 53,340 residents became IDPs. After the occupation of Kelbajar, Resolution 822 was adopted at a meeting of the UN Security Council on the unconditional withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from Kalbajar and other occupied regions of Azerbaijan. Workers at the company which ensures electricity is supplied to homes and businesses in Northern Ireland have given notice that they will take industrial action Workers at the company which ensures electricity is supplied to homes and businesses in Northern Ireland have given notice that they will take industrial action. Members of the Prospect trade union at the System Operator for Northern Ireland (SONI) - who operate the electricity transmission system - will begin action on April 8. It will initially consist of action short of striking. The move comes after SONI staff voted strongly in favour of action up to and including strike action. SONI said that they were "deeply disappointed" with the staff's decision to strike. Workers at the EirGrid-owned company have not received an annual pay award since 2015. The union said there has been no breakthrough in negotiations, as SONI had failed to improve on previous offers. Prospect negotiations officer Angela Moffatt, who represents the workers, said: "SONI have failed to improve their previous offers, despite last ditch talks initiated by Prospect via the Labour Relations Agency. "We made a generous proposal which compromises on our claim and allows for an arbitrated solution. Still not good enough for EirGrid/SONI though. "This smacks of the kind of arrogance we've become used to, sadly." Ms Moffatt claimed there will be limited, if any, capacity to cover the functions staff withdraw. "We envisage disruption for third parties - in particular NIE Networks, Mutual Energy & Renewable Energy Participants," she said. "If our members are forced to continue their action, we see an upsurge in cost and disruption to other SONI stakeholders and participants. "Ultimately somewhere down the line that cost and disruption will pass to the consumer." General Manager of SONI, Robin McCormick said that they believed the strike action was "unnecessary and avoidable". "SONI remains open and willing to engage with the union, as we have been doing over the past 12 months," he said. We value the vital work of our staff and we ensure they receive competitive salaries, which are regularly benchmarked. This is in addition to pay increments and performance related payments which we continued to pay during the period concerned. The actions of the union are demanding on the business, unsettling for industry, and concerning for consumers. As a result of this industrial action, the operation of the all-island wholesale electricity market may be affected. This has the potential for financial impacts which will ultimately be borne by all electricity users. While we will do our utmost to maintain core services and security of supply as a priority, the action by the union means that we may be operating the NI power system with a greater level of risk at certain times." The sister of missing Bangor woman Lisa Dorrian has made an emotional plea for those who know where her body is buried to come forward and help police locate her remains. Joanne Dorrian was speaking at a police press conference at Ballyhalbert Caravan Park as searches for her sister's body entered a second day. Lisa was last seen alive at the caravan park on February 27 2005, police believe she was murdered and her body buried somewhere in the vicinity. Nobody has ever been charged in connection with her murder. Detective Superintendent Jason Murphy is leading the investigation and said the searches had been prompted by "new information" but wouldn't be drawn further. Read More Joanne said that her family could never have imagined Lisa may be buried in the area. "When Lisa first went missing we walked these fields, we thought we were just looking for her because she had just ran out in the night and she'd fallen and maybe just passed away in the cold," she said Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Detective Superintendent Jason Murphy from the Major Investigation Team with Lisa Dorrian's family at the scene of searches taking place in Ballyhalbert. Pic PSNI. Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 2nd April 2019 Detective Superintendent Jason Murphy pictured with Lisa's sister Joanne. The scene beside Ballyhalbert caravan park on the Ards Peninsula, Co. Down, where the PSNI have begun a fresh search for Lisa Dorrian. The woman from Bangor disappeared from the caravan park in 2005. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com Lisa Dorrian Photopress Belfast / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Detective Superintendent Jason Murphy from the Major Investigation Team with Lisa Dorrian's family at the scene of searches taking place in Ballyhalbert. Pic PSNI. "Obviously we then knew that the police were looking at it as a murder investigation. "To think that Lisa could be here where we are today, it's just so hard to imagine. We're grateful for everything the police are doing to find Lisa and to give her what she deserves." Joanne described the impact Lisa's disappearance had on the Dorrian family and appealed for anyone with information to come forward. "People can't imagine what this feels like, they can't imagine what it feels like not knowing where she is," she said. "My mum passed away a few years ago and she never got the answers that she needed. It has ruined her life and it has ruined our lives, none of us have been the same ever since this has happened. "This is for Lisa, this is not for us. The people that know where she is knew Lisa and knew the kind of person that she was. They knew the funny person that she was and I'd just ask them to remember that and if they can come forward and help us to get some sort of peace, that's all that we can ask for." Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Police search for Lisa Dorrian Photopress Police search for Lisa Dorrian near the Ballyhalbert caravan park where she vanished in 2005 Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 2nd April 2019 The scene beside Ballyhalbert caravan park on the Ards Peninsula, Co. Down, where the PSNI have begun a fresh search for Lisa Dorrian. The woman from Bangor disappeared from the caravan park in 2005. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 2nd April 2019 The scene beside Ballyhalbert caravan park on the Ards Peninsula, Co. Down, where the PSNI have begun a fresh search for Lisa Dorrian. The woman from Bangor disappeared from the caravan park in 2005. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 2nd April 2019 The scene beside Ballyhalbert caravan park on the Ards Peninsula, Co. Down, where the PSNI have begun a fresh search for Lisa Dorrian. The woman from Bangor disappeared from the caravan park in 2005. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 2nd April 2019 The scene beside Ballyhalbert caravan park on the Ards Peninsula, Co. Down, where the PSNI have begun a fresh search for Lisa Dorrian. The woman from Bangor disappeared from the caravan park in 2005. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 2nd April 2019 The scene beside Ballyhalbert caravan park on the Ards Peninsula, Co. Down, where the PSNI have begun a fresh search for Lisa Dorrian. The woman from Bangor disappeared from the caravan park in 2005. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Police search for Lisa Dorrian Detective Superintendent Murphy said that he believed the answers to Lisa's murder "remained in Ballyhalbert". More than 400 searches have taken place across Northern Ireland for Lisa's body, but police have decided to "refocus efforts locally on Ballyhalbert and events of the day she disappeared". Detective Superintendent Murphy said the new searches had been prompted by technological advances and new information provided to police. He said the answers to Lisa's disappearance were "held by a small number of individuals" and appealed to those involved to contact police directly before the "net tightens". Beleaguered rural retailers have warned that spiralling insurance costs could ultimately put them out of business following a recent spate of ATM thefts. Retail NI boss Glyn Roberts said small, family-owned businesses feel like "targets" in their local communities, with many threatening to get rid of cash machines if the raids continue. His comments follow confirmation by police that eight ATMs have been stolen in seven separate incidents in Northern Ireland so far this year, while a further heist was foiled in January. They also come after the PSNI, which is "not putting a figure on the amount of money lost", said they believe that "several gangs" could be involved in the raids. Mr Roberts told the Belfast Telegraph that the situation was "increasingly dire" with tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage being done to local retailers as a result of these thefts. "You have damage to premises, disruption to trade and higher insurance premiums when a crime like this occurs - so it's the prefect storm for already struggling retailers," he said. "Our members are extremely worried that they might see their insurance premiums rise following these sustained ATM attacks. "There is a very real fear among members, both those who've been victims of this crime and those who have ATMs but who haven't yet been targeted. "Rising insurance costs would be a further burden because our members already pay substantial premiums on insurance generally and I would be concerned for their livelihoods. "A lot of ATM retailers already saw their rates bills rise by 4,000 to 8,000 a year as a result of losing the rural rate relief scheme so many are already struggling to pay their rates. "On top of that, transaction charges are being levied... and what it will mean is that ATMs will be too costly and too dangerous for our members to have in their stores in the future." Detective Chief Inspector David Henderson, who is leading the investigation, spoke at police headquarters following the latest theft of an ATM from outside a shop in Co Antrim. A digger, which had been stolen from a nearby site, was used in the raid at the Nisa shop on Brook Street in Ahoghill which happened around 3.25am yesterday and caused considerable damaged to the building. "Once again the public and business community have today learned of another ATM theft; of another business targeted by these brazen thieves who have struck at the heart of a rural community," Mr Henderson said. "As in all of these ATM thefts, the actions of these criminals have not only caused immediate financial harm to the business that was targeted, but they have understandably caused fear in the community and impacted upon a vital service many local people rely on. "In areas where ATMs have been stolen, local people may have to travel considerable distances to find an alternative way to withdraw money and the livelihoods of the business owners who have worked for years to build up their businesses is also jeopardised. "There's also the loss of very expensive machinery, which cause delays in production, damage to the local economy and the likelihood of criminal finances being redirected back into funding further organised crime or terrorism." Mr Henderson said police are "actively looking at it being several gangs involved" but said there was "no evidence paramilitaries were involved", although they may be skimming off "some of the criminal assets". Shop owner Walter Millar - who marked 30 years of being in business yesterday - said the latest ATM to be stolen "will certainly be missed" by the community in Ahoghill but there is now "a fear" about replacing it after the theft. He admitted that he initially thought a call about the theft was an April Fools' Day prank. "From what I can tell, they've used a digger that they've taken from a building site down the road, ripped the machine out, used a people carrier with the roof cut off to get the cash machine into it and then drove away," Mr Millar said. "The wall of the kitchen at the back of the shop has been ripped out and there's a fair amount of damage done, but we won't know the extent of the damage until we get inside. "It's been a difficult time, given the current economic climate, and things like this doesn't help at all." DUP leader Arlene Foster - who recently warned that the ATM raiders would end up killing someone - met ACC Barbara Gray and the PSNI's ATM task force yesterday. "The loss of ATMs across Northern Ireland has been a devastating blow for many rural areas and particularly for the businesses who have seen such destruction of their premises," she told press after the meeting. "There is also the cost to construction firms with damaged and stolen plant as well the as the cost to shop owners. "We have been encouraged by actions taken by the police in recent weeks but people would like to see results and ultimately those responsible brought to justice." There were four ATM thefts in February - in Moira, Antrim (two) and Omagh - and three last month, in Dungannon, Newtownabbey and Irvinestown. Northern Ireland's Secretary of State is under no legal obligation to introduce compensation payments for survivors of historical institutional abuse, the High Court has heard. Counsel representing Karen Bradley also insisted it was wrong to think she has the power to legislate on the redress scheme recommended by a major inquiry. A man subjected to beatings and sexual ill-treatment during his time at a children's home is seeking an order for the proposed payments to be implemented. Now in his seventies and identified only as JR80, he has brought the case on behalf of other survivors. But Tony McGleenan QC said: "The contention that the Secretary of State has the capacity on a free-standing basis to address all the applicant's concerns in respect of the redress scheme is untenable." In 2017 the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) Inquiry published a report recommending compensation ranging from 7,500 to 100,000 to those who suffered neglect and assaults at homes run by religious orders and the state between 1922 to 1995. With no functioning Assembly at Stormont since devolution collapsed, the challenge is aimed at having the Secretary of State and Executive Office compelled to take immediate steps on the pay-outs. The court heard that up to 30 people who suffered abuse have died since the report was issued. JR80's lawyers argued that elderly victims are dying amid a complete loss of democratic accountability and branches of government "pass the parcel" over responsibility for implementing the redress scheme. During the hearing it emerged that the head of the Civil Service in Northern Ireland plans to ask the Secretary of State to put draft legislation dealing with the redress scheme before Parliament. The request is expected to be made after a consultation process is analysed over the Easter period. On day two of the hearing Mr McGleenan set out how, under devolution, the Secretary of State has no power to control Stormont departments. "That link was fractured in 1998 and has never been reconnected," he said. "There's no means by which the Secretary of State can step into the arena and direct the Northern Ireland departments." Counsel submitted that the Northern Ireland Act anticipated the current political hiatus with a "built in design feature" that functions should be discharged by the departments. He continued: "There's no identified obligation on the Secretary of State to intervene." Philip McAteer, for the Executive Office, said it agreed that the compensation arrangements should be put in place. But he stressed: "It doesn't have the power, the authority, funding approval or funding itself to implement a redress scheme." The court was told the Executive Office has pursued the only option open to it, with the request due to be made for Mrs Bradley to lay three pieces of proposed legislation before Parliament. Responding to queries, Mr McAteer contended that the redress recommendations were a matter for either the Northern Ireland Assembly or Westminster. The hearing continues. Relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday (Niall Carson/PA) A former soldier investigated over the shooting of 13 civilians in Londonderry has criticised the Government as gutless. The 77-year-old known as Sergeant O said a statute of limitations should be introduced to prevent future historical investigations from taking place. He said it should apply to events in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Northern Ireland. Expand Close Soldiers take cover behind their sandbagged armoured cars while dispersing rioters with CS gas in Londonderry, where a civil rights march resulted in 13 men being shot dead (PA) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Soldiers take cover behind their sandbagged armoured cars while dispersing rioters with CS gas in Londonderry, where a civil rights march resulted in 13 men being shot dead (PA) Sergeant O was one of 17 former members of the Parachute Regiment to have their actions following a civil rights march in Derry in 1972 examined. Last month, Northern Irelands Public Prosecution Service (PPS) announced it will prosecute one of the 17, a man known as Soldier F. The decision to prosecute just one sparked disappointment among some of the families of those killed. But it also prompted anger among a number of military veterans. Thirteen civil rights demonstrators were shot dead on January 30 1972, a day which has become known as Bloody Sunday. Expand Close Top row, left to right, Patrick Doherty, Bernard McGuigan, John Jackie Duddy and Gerald Donaghey, bottom row, left to right, Gerard McKinney, Jim Wray, William McKinney and John Young, who were killed on Bloody Sunday (Bloody Sunday Trust/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Top row, left to right, Patrick Doherty, Bernard McGuigan, John Jackie Duddy and Gerald Donaghey, bottom row, left to right, Gerard McKinney, Jim Wray, William McKinney and John Young, who were killed on Bloody Sunday (Bloody Sunday Trust/PA) Soldier F will face charges for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick ODonnell. In an interview with Forces News, Sergeant O said it was a relief to be told he would not be put before a judge, and that his claims that he had not done anything wrong had finally been proved right. He described serving in Northern Ireland in the 1970s as utterly hell on wheels with riots every night of the week, but he insisted that he has no regrets. Ive been often castigated for it was a job well done. It was well done. Id do it again, the exact same waySergeant O Part of the United Kingdom was in upheaval and it was our job to try to calm it down. We did it to the best of our ability, he said. Ive been often castigated for it was a job well done. It was well done. Id do it again, the exact same way. Sergeant O revealed that at one stage he and his family were placed under police protection. He maintains the IRA knows where he is. I would like to say no but Im not that naive. They know a certain amount. The IRA, or the Irish contingent, whoever they are if they want to come for me, then theyll come, he said. Sergeant O also said he backs the campaign for a statute of limitations to be introduced to prevent historical investigations taking place. The Government is entirely gutless, he said. They should draw a line under it as theyve done for the IRA terrorists. Theyre fine, theyre waving their letters of comfort. They should do the same for the British Army. Not only for Ireland but for Afghanistan and Iraq. Wipe the slate clean and say get on with your life. Meanwhile, large numbers of bikers are expected to roar into London next week to protest against the prosecution of Soldier F. Rolling Thunder ride organiser Harry Wragg said: Our ride is not directed at the victims, it is directed at the British Government. Our argument is with the Government, not the victims of Bloody Sunday or any other event. He added: Where are they pulling the evidence from, why are the British Government allowing this to happen? Participants in the demonstration on April 12 are due to travel from across the UK, including the Lake District, Wales and the home counties. They had planned to travel to Westminster but that date coincides with the new no-deal Brexit date. It is uncertain whether they will be allowed to proceed to Parliament, the organiser said. Bloody Sunday helped galvanise support for the Provisional IRA early in the Troubles. An image of a Catholic priest waving a bloodstained handkerchief as he tried to help a victim to safety went around the world. A public inquiry conducted by a senior judge shortly after the deaths was branded a whitewash by victims families and a campaign was launched for a new public inquiry. Relatives sought to right the wrongs of false claims that their loved ones had been armed. A fresh probe was eventually ordered by then prime minister Tony Blair in 1998. A decade-long investigation by Lord Saville concluded that the troops killed protesters who posed no threat. British summertime may have arrived, but this week may feel like winter is coming back as the mercury plunges. Forecasters are predicting the possibility of snow today, with wintry showers and a cold north easterly wind making daytime temperatures feel close to freezing. The Met Office said today could be bright and showery with sunny spells. However, the showers will be heavy, perhaps wintry and thundery at times, with snow on hills. The maximum temperature is expected to be 9C. The outlook for tomorrow through to Friday is little better. It is expected to be a rather cloudy and showery few days. Again, those showers will be heavy at times, with snow on the hilltops. BBC NI weatherman Barra Best said: "We have to remember it's still springtime, despite what the change in the clocks suggests. "It's only summertime according to them. "It's always been more likely that we get snow at Easter rather than Christmas, and Easter's still a couple of weeks away. "Early April is always a transitional period in weather for us, so there's always every chance it can still feel like winter." Across the UK, some areas are bracing themselves for temperatures as low as -5C. Met Office forecaster Craig Snell said: "It's going to be a very different week to the week just gone." Two people were hospitalised after a group of masked men forced their way into a home in west Belfast on Monday night. Police are investigating following the report of an aggravated burglary in the Britton's Parade area of Ballymurphy. They received a report just after 10:15pm that three masked men forced entry to a house in the area. There were three occupants in the house at the time, two adults and a young child. Upon entry one of the masked men is reported to have gone into the living room and grabbed the female occupant by her neck and forced her upstairs where he carried out a search. The other two suspects made their way into the kitchen area where it was reported they attacked the male occupant with a knife. He sustained injuries to one of his hands, and to his face and head. The intruders subsequently made off on foot. The male was taken to hospital for treatment to his injuries, while the female was also taken to hospital for treatment to shock. Detective Sergeant Dave Stewart appealed for anyone with information on the attack to come forward. "This was a brutal and vicious attack which must have been a frightening experience for the occupants of this house, who have understandably been left shaken by their ordeal," he said. "I want to appeal to anyone who was in the Britton's Parade area last night and saw three males acting suspiciously, in the time before the incident was reported to us or in the period afterwards. "If you have information you believe may assist our investigation, call detectives at Musgrave on the non emergency number 101, quoting reference number 1395 of 01/04/19. "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." A woman has been arrested after the seizure of cannabis in Dublin (Niall Carson/PA Wire) A woman has been arrested after the seizure of about 240,000 euro worth of cannabis in Dublin. Gardai said a 12 kilogram package of herbal cannabis was discovered during a search of a house in the Lucan area on Tuesday. The operation was part of an ongoing investigation targeting organised crime groups operating in the area. The Revenue Commissions Customs Service was involved in the operation, along with officers from the Ronanstown garda drugs unit and the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau. The woman, aged 44, was arrested at the scene. She is being detained at Lucan garda station. A shootout occurred in a restaurant in Turkey's Antalya province yesterday evening, Turkish media reported. As a result of the shootout, one died and two people were injured. According to media reports, all the victims are citizens of Turkey. The cause of the incident is not reported. Work is underway to apprehend criminals. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaving The Merrion Hotel in Dublin with Nick Clegg (right) after a meeting with politicians to discuss regulation of social media and harmful content (Niall Carson/PA) Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has assured senior Irish politicians he will work with governments to establish new policies in a bid to regulate social media. The Facebook boss met with Hildegarde Naughton, James Lawless and Eamon Ryan three members of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News at a hotel in Dublin to discuss plans on how to regulate the internet. The firms founder and chief executive told the politicians that issues around child protection and age verification are of huge concern to him. He also visited the technology giants offices as part of his visit to the Republic. Facebooks European headquarters is in the Irish capital. We'd a constructive meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. I made the case for independent regulation & the need for a change in social media business models, so we can support local content creators & give citizens real control over their own personal data. #DigitalRights @europeangreens pic.twitter.com/YDeas0l4LT Eamon Ryan (@EamonRyan) April 2, 2019 Mr Zuckerberg refused to answer questions from the media about online child safety as he left the Merrion Hotel. But according to the Irish Times, Mr Zuckerberg praised Europes introduction of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which tightened up rules regarding data privacy. The social network founder said GDPR was a good foundation that encoded a lot of important values around people being able to choose how their data is used, and at the same time making sure that companies have the ability to use information for safety purposes. He added that it was almost inevitable that every country was going to want comprehensive privacy legislation. Ms Naughton described the meeting as positive and constructive. We went through a number of issues including child protection and the need for a robust age verification system, she said. He said it was an area of huge concern to him and that he is looking forward to working with law enforcement agencies and legislators in relation to that. We have to balance the state of privacy of users as well as safety. He stated he had a lot more work to do. Our committee is working on a number of pieces of legislation including an online safety commissioner as well as looking at and protecting democracy. I mentioned the importance around age verification because you have right now paedophiles online lying about their age and preying on young children and grooming them. This is something he acknowledged, he knew it was a problem and he stated that he wanted to work with law enforcement agencies and policy makers to make more robust laws. The International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News is made up of international parliamentarians and investigates issues like data privacy, safety, security and sharing. The three TDs, who are also members of the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, have been vocal in demanding the regulation of social media platforms in recent years. Irelands Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon has a number of inquiries ongoing into Facebook and associated organisations. The TDs, who described Mr Zuckerberg as quiet, unassuming, pleasant and smart, held an hour-long meeting with him days after he called for increased government oversight of the internet in areas like harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. Mr Lawless said: Our focus was also on electoral integrity and what has been happening around the world on the rules in managing election campaigns. He agreed legislation is needed, he is working on those internationally to be able to see who is running campaigns, who is paying for campaigns and who is being targeted. It shouldnt be about the private companies dictating what goes online when it comes to democracy and child protection and safety, we as legislators have responsibilities to put in place rules that we think should be followed and dictating to companies about how behaviours are conducted online. Mr Ryan said: I pressed him about the article he wrote on regulation and I made the point that it cant be self-regulation it has to be European regulation and that has to include funding journalism and having a courts procedure rather than a self-appointed board to look at difficult decisions. The French president has said the EU cannot be held hostage to the UK political crisis. Irish Premier Leo Varadkar travelled to Paris to meet with Emmanuel Macron, where he thanked France for its ongoing solidarity with Ireland in the difficult Brexit period. Im fully aware of the tremendous difficulties such a situation would bring about for Ireland, said the French president. Good to return to the Elysee Palace today to meet @EmmanuelMacron for discussions on #Brexit and the #futureofeurope pic.twitter.com/nUAqfdA05c Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) April 2, 2019 We will never abandon Ireland or the Irish people, no matter what happens, because this solidarity is the very purpose of the European project. Our priority shall be the good functioning of the EU and the single market. The EU cannot sustainably be the hostage to the solution to a political crisis in the UK. Mr Macron said that credible justifications for an Article 50 extension for the UK could include an election, second referendum or alternative proposals for the future relationship, such as a customs union. The EU would be open to such proposals, but it was for London to put them forward, he said. A long extension involving the participation of the UK in European elections and European institutions is far from evident and certainly not (to be taken) for granted. He added: We cannot spend the coming months sorting out yet again the terms of our divorce and dealing with the past. Mr Varadkar said although Brexit would be the main topic of conversation, the EU should not let itself be consumed by the issue. Expand Close Emmanuel Macron with Leo Varadkar at the Elysee Palace in Paris (Christophe Ena/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Emmanuel Macron with Leo Varadkar at the Elysee Palace in Paris (Christophe Ena/AP) The UK is being consumed by Brexit, but Ireland and France and the European Union shouldnt be consumed by Brexit, we have a positive agenda for the EU which we want to deliver, he said. At the last European Council meeting, we gave the UK some time and space to come up with a way forward, as it stands they will leave the EU on April 12 without a deal. However, there is still time for the Prime Minister to come to the council with proposals proposals that are credible and have a clear pathway to success and we need to be open to any proposals she might bring forward to us. Id like to talk about what we can do to assist the Prime Minister to secure the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement including the backstop, Mr Varadkar told the media in Paris. Recognising that the Withdrawal Agreement cannot be opened but if the UK changes its red lines, we could make changes to the declaration on the future relationship. Also, well need to consider how we may respond to any request for a long extension, and we want to avoid a rolling extension, so any extension must have a clear purpose and plan. Well need to talk about what we will do in the event of a no deal, which will be particularly difficult for Ireland, and from our point of view, well want to pursue our twin objectives, to protect the Good Friday Agreement on which peace in Northern Ireland is based, and protect the integrity of the single market and customs union, (on) which Irelands economic model has been based for decades. Speaking ahead of the talks, Mr Macron said the remaining 27 EU nations will continue to show unity and solidarity with Ireland. A dispute between the five adult children of former billionaire Sean Quinn and the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) has been settled after they consented to having judgements totalling 440m entered against them. The High Court in Dublin was told on Tuesday morning by Bernard Dunleavy SC, counsel for the Quinn children, that the children's proceedings against the former Anglo Irish Bank could be struck out. He said the court did not have to make an order on costs. However, the court also heard from IBRCs counsel Paul Gallagher SC that judgments in the sum of 88,157,351 could be entered against each of the children in favour of the bank. He said there would be a stay on the execution of these judgments on terms agreed by the parties. The agreement was reached on Monday night following over a week of talks between both sides. Mr Dunleavy said the outcome of the talks was that all of the proceedings have been resolved. In their action, the children had claimed loan guarantees and share pledges given in connection with 2.34bn in loans from Anglo to Quinn Group companies in 2007 and 2008 were invalid. IBRC had a counterclaim seeking to recover 82m from each of the children. In a separate case, the IBRC alleged the children were involved in a conspiracy to strip 455m in assets from their international property group. This action will now not go ahead. Under the terms of the agreement, the Quinn children have committed to giving full disclosure in relation to the Quinn assets allegedly put beyond the reach of the IBRC. Mr Justice Garrett Simons congratulated both sides on reaching an agreement. He said this was a very sensible outcome. None of the Quinn children, Sean Jr, Colette, Ciara, Aoife or Brenda, were in court on Friday morning. While IBRC is not seeking a costs order against the Quinns, it is seeking costs from two third parties in the case, former Quinn group executives who had been due to give evidence had the trial continued. The court will deal with this matter at a later date. The agreement comes just days after the Quinns suffered a significant setback in the case when Mr Justice Simons ruled they could not amend their statement of claim to include an allegation they were under the undue influence of their father when they signed loan guarantees and share pledges. The judge also refused to allow them to file supplementary witness statements. The loans the children signed off on were predominantly used to cover losses made by their father following his disastrous speculation on Anglo shares using complicated financial instruments known as contracts for difference. The stock market bets would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Quinn Group and Mr Quinns bankruptcy. The children were the shareholders in the group and their signatures were required for the loans to go through. They claimed loan guarantees and share pledges they gave in connection with the borrowings were invalid on a number of grounds, including the alleged undue influence of their father and "unconscionable bargain" - that the guarantees they were asked to sign were unfair and contrary to common sense or good conscience. They had also alleged negligence and breach of duty by Anglo, especially to advise them of the risks they faced. Had they known the risks, they would not have signed the guarantees, they claimed. The children also alleged that "signature switching" took place. This was an allegation that having signed an earlier draft of a share charge, the signature page was then wrongfully appended to a later revised draft by persons in Quinn Group. This allegation was only being made in relation to some of the transactions they claimed were invalid. The case was first initiated in 2011 and had been due to run for six months. But after opening statements lasting five days, the parties decided to enter talks. In a statement, the IBRC said: An agreement has been reached following discussions over the last number of days. Pursuant to the agreement, the Quinn family has agreed to the dismissal of all of their claims against IBRC, as well as their separate claims against the Central Bank and various other parties. The statement said the Quinn family had provided IBRC with full disclosure and would likewise relinquish any entitlement to any assets which IBRC has a claim to. It said the Quinns acknowledged IBRC had valid and enforceable claims on such assets. The statement said final orders, including orders for judgments against the Quinn children, would be obtained in the separate proceedings taken by IBRC against the Quinn family. This was a reference to the conspiracy proceedings. The final orders in that case are expected to be sought tomorrow. The statement continued: IBRC views this settlement as being in the best interests of creditors, in circumstances where it has received full disclosure from the Quinn family and where the very lengthy litigation that has been in being since 2011 will be brought to a conclusion. The appeal will be heard at the Court of Session in Edinburgh (Jane Barlow/PA) An anti-abortion group that lost its legal challenge against a Scottish Government move to allow women to take abortion pills at home is to return to court. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) believes the decision by ministers to enable women to self-administer the drug misoprostol is unlawful and a threat to their health. Judge Lady Wise rejected the groups arguments following a hearing at the Court of Session last May. It has always been our intention to fight this case all the wayJohn Deighan, SPUC Scotland The SPUC is appealing against the decision and will return to the Edinburgh court on Tuesday. Chief executive of SPUC Scotland John Deighan said: Clearly, the original decision was disappointing but it has always been our intention to fight this case all the way. After thorough consideration of the judgment and in tandem with legal advice we are now ready for the appeal. We owe it to our supporters who continue to make donations to cover our legal costs. The SPUC will argue that taking an abortion-causing drug at home is not consistent with the Abortion Act of 1967. A 22-year-old man who was stabbed to death after being chased through the streets in London has been described as a special individual whose family fled war in Congo. The victim was named locally as Calvin Bungisa on Tuesday, as family described him as a happy man who was always laughing. Scotland Yard believes he was pursued by several suspects who fled in a car after murdering him in Kentish Town, north-west London, at about 8.30pm on Monday. The killing came on the same day Prime Minister Theresa May hosted a summit on knife crime at Downing Street. The family came here from the Congo for protection - there was a war there - and now this has happened in London Uncle Claude Mampuila, 54, said the family had lost someone special. He was always laughing, dancing and happy with people. He was not any trouble and very good, Mr Mampuila said. The family came here from the Congo for protection there was a war there and now this has happened in London. Mr Bungisa was killed amid a separate spate of unprovoked stabbings around Edmonton in north London, and at a time of heightened focus on the scourge of knife crime. Two men, believed to be in their 20s, were stabbed in an incident in Empire Way in Wembley, north-west London on Tuesday night. They were taken to hospital for treatment where their injuries were said to be non-life-threatening. Mr Bungisa was pronounced dead at the scene about half an hour after police were called. No arrests have been made. Detective Chief Inspector Mark Cranwell, who leads the murder investigation, said several men are believed to have chased the victim from Vicars Road and down Grafton Road before they fled in a car. Police tape blocked off the crime scene, where a blue police tent sat in the middle of the road. A small group of floral tributes were placed beneath a row of small candles by the manned police cordon. A woman, who said she was the victims cousin, said: He was not like other boys around here. He had a good home, a good girlfriend and he had things going for him. He was not the sort of boy to get into trouble. He kept himself to himself. Another uncle, Jean, told the Evening Standard that he was well known in the local community and doted on his family. He was full of life. He was very popular with everyone. He always had a smile on his face. He loved his family so much. His father died a year ago almost to the day, the uncle said. While formal identification is yet to take place, the mans next-of-kin have been informed. A post-mortem examination is scheduled. Anyone with information can contact police on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. Islamic State bride Shamima Begum has revealed she is coming to terms with the prospect she may never return to Britain, but insisted she was brainwashed by the extremists she ran away to join as a schoolgirl. Speaking for the first time since the death of her third baby in March, the 19-year-old said she really regretted everything and wants a second chance. She told The Times that she had left London for Syria as a 15-year-old believing everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion. I have kind of accepted that I will have to stay here, I will have to make this like a second home Ms Begum married Dutch fighter Yago Riedijk and the pair fled the caliphate as its last bastion in Baghuz crumbled earlier this year. The teenager, who has Bangladeshi heritage, has since been stripped of her British citizenship. I have sat down and thought about how long I would have to stay here. And I have kind of accepted that I will have to stay here, I will have to make this like a second home, she said. Then in the late stages of pregnancy, Ms Begum appeared to have little remorse when she was found in the al-Hawl refugee camp in February. Her apparent defiance prompted public anger back in the UK, but some argued that she was a victim of grooming and should be allowed to come back to Britain. Since I left Baghuz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again, she said. I was brainwashed. Expand Close Shamima Begum going through security at Gatwick airport (Met Police/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Shamima Begum going through security at Gatwick airport (Met Police/PA) The teenager attributed her early display of remorselessness to the threats she faced from extremists in al-Hawl. Anything I said against Dawlah (IS), they would immediately attack me, so I was afraid of that, she said. Ms Begum was speaking to the Times from the al-Hol camp, where she and her baby were moved to out of concern for their safety after she went public. Her son, Jarrah, died on March 8 aged three weeks and was buried in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of the facility. It was reported last month that Ms Begums family had begun legal proceedings to review the Home Secretarys decision to strip her of British citizenship. Sajid Javids move was only permissible under international law if it does not leave her stateless. Ms Begum was one of three schoolgirls to leave Bethnal Green to join IS in 2015. On Monday it was reported that an IS fighter being held in Syria had claimed to be one of at least seven students and ex-students from the University of Westminster to join the caliphate. Zakariyya Elogbani, who grew up in east London, told the BBC he abandoned a degree in business management in 2014 before joining the extremists. Mohammed Emwazi, the IS executioner known as Jihadi John, also studied at the university until 2009. An MP who was the target of a neo-Nazi murder plot has called for more action to protect democracy as her would-be assassin faced life behind bars. Jack Renshaw, 23, bought a 19-inch (48cm) Gladius knife to kill West Lancashire MP Rosie Cooper and exact revenge on a female police officer who was investigating him for child sex offences. The plan was scuppered by whistle-blower Robbie Mullen, who was at a meeting in a pub when Renshaw announced that he was going to kill Ms Cooper in July 2017 and reported the threat to Hope not hate. Expand Close Jack Renshaw plotted to kill MP Rosie Cooper (Steve Parsons/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Jack Renshaw plotted to kill MP Rosie Cooper (Steve Parsons/PA) It came just a year after Labour MP Jo Cox was stabbed and shot by a fellow far-right extremist, Thomas Mair. Renshaw, from Skelmersdale, Lancashire, had admitted making preparations to kill his local MP and making a threat to kill police officer Victoria Henderson. But he denied membership of banned extreme right-wing group National Action along with Andrew Clarke, 34, and Michal Trubini, 36, from Warrington. A jury at his retrial was discharged, having failed to reach verdicts after more than 48 hours of deliberations and prosecutor Duncan Atkinson QC said he could not seek a third trial. A few moments ago a trial finished at the Old Bailey. Now that the trial is over, were able to finally tell the full story of how HOPE Not hate smashed the banned terror group National Action and foiled a murder plot. pic.twitter.com/cttixMTixb HOPE not hate (@hopenothate) April 2, 2019 Afterwards, Ms Cooper said: I was targeted, not as Rosie Cooper the person, but as Rosie Cooper the MP. I was to be murdered to send a message to the state. Our way of life, our democracy and our freedoms are being attacked by the likes of Renshaw and extremist groups like National Action. Weve got to do so much more to protect our democracy, to ensure that good, dedicated, hard-working public servants are not put off entering public life because they fear for their safety, or indeed their lives. We really must do more to protect our way of life. Hope not hate chief executive Nick Lowles praised the bravery of Mr Mullen, but criticised police for being too slow to act. He said: National Action was part a new, more extreme breed of neo-nazis that vilified Jews, celebrated and encouraged violence, and lauded Hitler. They wanted to ignite a race war in Britain. While we welcome the various prosecutions which have taken place, the authorities and police have been too slow to act and missed too many warning signs about the changing nature of the far-right terror threat. The Christchurch terrorist attack shows that there is a global network of far-right activists who are inspiring each other to launch violent attacks. This is no time for complacency about the threat we face from far-right terrorism. It can be reported today that Renshaw is a convicted paedophile who was jailed last June for 16 months after he groomed two underage boys online. Jurors at Preston Crown Court found him guilty of four counts of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity. He also received a three-year prison sentence two months earlier when he was found guilty of stirring up racial hatred after he called for the genocide of Jewish people. National Action leader Christopher Lythgoe, 32, of Warrington, and his right-hand man Matthew Hankinson, 24, from Merseyside who were present when Renshaw outlined his plans, were convicted of membership last year. Expand Close Adam Thomas and his partner Claudia Patatas (West Midlands Police/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Adam Thomas and his partner Claudia Patatas (West Midlands Police/PA) National Action is the first extreme right-wing group to be proscribed by the Government since the Second World War. In December 2016, it was banned by the then home secretary Amber Rudd over its support for the murder of Batley and Spen MP Ms Cox. Lythgoe reacted to the news by telling members that they would just shed one skin for another. Meanwhile, disillusioned Mr Mullen, 25, began leaking information about National Action to campaign group Hope Not Hate. By July 2017, Renshaw was on police bail for making hate speeches and under investigation for child sex offences. He decided on suicide by cop rather than face a seven-year stretch in prison. He bought a large machete to take revenge on a female investigating officer and kill his local MP. Renshaw unveiled his plan at the Friar Penketh pub in Warrington on July 1 2017 to Clarke, Hankinson, Lythgoe and Mr Mullen. Earlier that day, he had met convicted National Action members Darren Fletcher, 28, Adam Thomas, 22, and his partner Claudia Patatas, 39, in Liverpool. Describing the meeting in the Friar Penketh, Mr Mullen, from Widnes, Cheshire, told jurors: He said he was going to kill his local MP, Rosie Cooper. I said Are you sure? and he said Yeah. He said he would kill her, then try to take some hostages to lure the police officer that was investigating him to try to kill her because she was the reason behind it all. He said his mind was made up. He had bought a machete. Giving evidence, warehouse worker Clarke said: National Action was immature. I was tired of it. I was thankful for the ban. Office worker Trubini, who qualified as a teacher in Slovakia, said: I would not jeopardise my job to be a member of a group that had no real impact. After the jury was discharged, Renshaw was remanded into custody to be sentenced on May 17. Matthew Collins, Hope not hates head of intelligence, said: We continually warned that National Action had not stopped recruiting and training after its ban in December 2016 and we were proven right when Robbie Mullen first came to us in April 2017. At the time, police didnt seem to have any idea that the group was still active, despite its ban. Ruth Smeeth MP, who warned Ms Cooper after learning of the danger after being altered by Hope not hate, said it had been a truly shocking case. She said: Two years after the devastating murder of my colleague Jo Cox, we narrowly averted what could have been another appalling crime. I cannot overstate Hope not hates role and what might have happened had Robbie Mullen not been able to report Jack Renshaws plans. We all owe Robbie a huge debt of gratitude for what he did. Mr Mullen said: By reporting Jack Renshaws murder plot and giving evidence in this court my life has changed. But I know I had no other choice. Jack Renshaw was days away from trying to kill an MP, Rosie Cooper. Kay Smith is terminallyb ill and wants to be able to choose to end her own life (Chris James/Dignity in Dying Scotland/PA) Nearly nine in 10 people in Scotland support legalising assisted dying, according to a new poll. The Populus survey, commissioned by campaign group Dignity in Dying Scotland, found 87% backed the move for terminally ill people with less than six months to live, with medical approval and safeguards. Just 8% of people were opposed while the remainder said they did not know. The results, from a survey of 1,057 adults last month, were released as the campaign group starts a national advertising drive calling on people to help legalise assisted suicide. Campaigners want the Scottish Parliament to legislate to allow terminally ill, mentally competent adults to have the choice of an assisted death. People with terminal illnesses who back assisted dying and those who have lost loved ones who would have chosen the option if it were legal in Scotland feature in the campaign. Expand Close The campaign features people whose loved ones wanted to chose assisted suicide (Dignity in Dying Scotland/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The campaign features people whose loved ones wanted to chose assisted suicide (Dignity in Dying Scotland/PA) Liz Wilson, 45, from Cumbernauld is one of those taking part. Her husband Craig died from cancer in December and she said had begged to go to Switzerland where assisted dying is legal but was unable to travel. She said: Craig was only 45 when cancer took over his whole body. It was horrific to watch him suffer in the way he did. No amount of palliative care could help him. For Craig, while he was dying a minute was like an hour and a day like a year. He begged to go to Switzerland but it was sadly too late. She added: I dont believe anyone should have to go through what Craig did. I have promised to campaign to change the law so no-one else has to. Dawn Morton, 34, from Dunfermline also features in the campaign. She was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2014 and now needs 24-hour ventilation and care. Ms Morton wants to be able to choose assisted suicide to spare her six-year-old daughter Abigail from watching her die in pain. She said: I couldnt afford to go to Switzerland and it is important to me to be around as long as possible for my daughter, but I dont want her to see me die badly and in pain. I wish the choice of assisted dying was available in Scotland so I could decide when the time was right for me. This campaign is all about love and putting the voice of people who have lived and are living through the injustice of the current law at the heart of the debateDignity in Dying Scotland director Ally Thomson Dignity in Dying Scotland director Ally Thomson said: Most Scots believe that dying people should not be forced to suffer at the end of life and that there are currently too many bad deaths. Their views cannot be ignored. The law in Scotland needs to change. She added: This campaign is all about love and putting the voice of people who have lived and are living through the injustice of the current law at the heart of the debate. A cross-party group of nine MSPs recently joined together to call for assisted suicide to be legalised in Scotland. Previous attempts to change the law at Holyrood have failed. Chief executive of the Care Not Killing umbrella group opposing assisted suicide, Gordon Macdonald, said: The last time MSPs voted on the issue of assisted suicide, they rejected Patrick Harvies Assisted Suicide Bill by 82 to 36. Most members realised then that the risks of legalising assisted suicide were too high and would put vulnerable people at risk of harm to justify taking that step. He said instead of encouraging suicide more money should be made available for palliative care. Detectives investigating the drive-by shooting of a 17-year-old girl have urged anyone with information to speak out on the first anniversary of her murder. The Metropolitan Police said they have made good progress in the inquiry into Tanesha Melbourne-Blakes death, with four arrests made, but are certain other people can help. Tanesha was shot in Chalgrove Road, Haringey, north London, at about 9.35pm on April 2 2018 by a gunman in a silver-grey Vauxhall Meriva people carrier. She died at the scene and the car, with the registration KS56 NKG, was found burnt out in Barnet five days later. Expand Close Dozens of tributes were left at the scene after Tanesha was murdered (Jonathan Brady/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Dozens of tributes were left at the scene after Tanesha was murdered (Jonathan Brady/PA) Detective Inspector Beverley Kofi, who is leading the investigation, said: It is now one year since Taneshas murder and we are determined to catch the people responsible and bring them to justice. Whilst we are making good progress, with a number of arrests made, we continue to urge people with information to come forward. Im certain someone in the community holds vital information that will lead to prosecutions. I can assure you anything you provide will be treated in the strictest confidence. If you are worried about contacting police, please think about Taneshas family her loss is something they will never get over. We need people to come forward and do the right thing. Renewed appeal for information on the first anniversary of Tanesha Melbourne-Blake's murder https://t.co/38htBsW6SW pic.twitter.com/gxRTdkMtoK Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) April 2, 2019 A 31-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder on April 6 2018 and released under investigation pending further inquiries. Two men, aged 18 and 22, were arrested on March 14 on suspicion of murder. The teenager was released under investigation and the 22-year-old was bailed until mid-April. A 50-year-old man was arrested on March 25 and has also been released under investigation. Anyone with information should contact the police incident room in strict confidence on 020 8358 0100. Alternatively, call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. Information can also be passed on anonymously at www.fearless.org. The United States has been looking for places were its interests with Russia overlap, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in Pennsylvania, according to U.S. Department of State website. "I think the President has been clear, were always looking, have been looking for every opportunity to find places where we can work with the Russians, places were our interests overlap. I did some of that when I was the director of CIA, where we worked on counterterrorism together very effectively, effectively for both countries," Pompeo said. Answering the question is theres an opportunity for some kind of a reset with the U.S. relations with Russia after the Mueller report, the Secretary of State admitted that there are places where Russian and U.S. interests dont overlap. However, Pompeo expressed hope that Washington can have conversation with Moscow where they understand the things that matter to the U.S. and the things that it's going to ensure happen or dont happen. Linda and Stuart Allan, the parents of Katie Allan, and their lawyer Aamer Anwar (centre) have called for action to tackle prison deaths (Andrew Milligan/PA) The number of deaths at Scottish jails are nothing short of a massacre, according to the parents of a student who took her own life while behind bars. Katie Allan, who was jailed in March 2018 aged 20 for a hit-and-run while drunk, killed herself at HMYOI Polmont after being tormented by other inmates, her parents said. After investigating deaths inside Scottish prisons, Katies parents have said the country effectively has a death penalty due to the lack of mental health support and inaction to protect prisoners. Speaking at the Scottish Parliament a year after their late daughter was jailed, Linda and Stuart Allan called for action to tackle what she described as a genocide behind the doors of the cells. Scotland has a death penalty - it is no longer a jostling public spectacle around the gallows, it is a hidden and visible genocide behind the doors of the cells of our prison estateLinda Allan The family, with the help of Glasgow University, where Mrs Allan is an honorary clinical professor, studied prison deaths from 2008 up to December 2018. Mrs Allan, who worked as a nurse registrar in the NHS before her daughters death, said: Our campaign attempts to present to government ministers, academics and society the stark reality of what is going on in the halls of our prisons no gloss over, no excuses, no spin, no soundbites and ask for honest consideration. What we have discovered is that Scotland has a death penalty it is no longer a jostling public spectacle around the gallows, it is a hidden and visible genocide behind the doors of the cells of our prison estate. Expand Close Stuart Allan speaking at a press conference and a cross-party briefing of MSPs at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh (Andrew Milligan/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Stuart Allan speaking at a press conference and a cross-party briefing of MSPs at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh (Andrew Milligan/PA) Mr Allan, a data inputter at a telecommunications company, described the horrific statistics they found by looking into the 258 prisoner deaths over the last decade as nothing short of a massacre. He said: In 2008, 35% of prisoner deaths were from suicides but in 2016, 2017 and 2018 this has rocketed to over 50%, with the volume of prison deaths increasing in that time. Forty per cent so thats 32 of the 82 deaths in prison who have taken their own life were under the age of 30. Twelve of those 32 had taken their own life within one week of being in prison. He added: Sixty-seven families await a fatal accident inquiry (FAI) to be completed on their loved one some of those are going back as far as prisoner deaths from 2014. The familys lawyer Aamer Anwar said the Allans had lost faith in the Scottish Prison Service, which appears more interested in spin and cover-ups. They believe an FAI system held on average now two years after a suicide is not fit for purpose, it is set up to fail families and hide what is truly happening, he said. The SPS treats prison suicides as hidden dirty secrets but there is nothing inevitable about suicides. Over half of those imprisoned today in Scotlands prisons have definable mental health problems and prison is not fit for purpose for dealing with them. Katie Allan and many others were failed by a system which keeps repeating the same mistakes. Expand Close Former Glasgow University student Katie Allan, who took her own life in prison Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Former Glasgow University student Katie Allan, who took her own life in prison After listening to Mr and Mrs Allan, Labours shadow justice minister Pauline McNeil said: What I heard this morning was that the Scottish Government needs to take urgent action around young offenders and mental health in prisons. And to hear that 67 grieving families still dont know how their loved one died what sort of country are we living in? It cant continue like this. Lib Dem justice spokesman Liam McArthur said: The justice system has failed family after family. It has been two years since the Scottish Government accepted Scottish Liberal Democrat proposals to expand the mental health workforce in prisons. However, so far there are just two new staff across Scotlands 15 prisons. Calling for an independent review into the bureaucratic and broken FAI system, Mr McArthur added: No more families should have to face agonising waits of up to a decade for answers about their loved ones deaths or be asked to make a financial contribution towards this process. Families cant have closure and the justice system cant learn lessons, putting more lives in danger. A Scottish Prison Service spokesman said its thoughts were with the friends and family of Miss Allan. He said it is awaiting the FAI into her death and a report from the Chief Inspector of Prisons with any recommendations for changes to be made. A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: Our thoughts continue to be with the family and friends of Katie Allan and William Lindsay (who also took his own life at Polmont). The mental and emotional well-being of prisoners is taken very seriously by the Scottish Government and Scottish Prison Service and we are increasing mental health support for those detained in prison. Frontline prison and healthcare staff are crucial to managing suicide risk and we recognise the hard work they do every day to support young people in custody in what can be distressing circumstances. She added: Clearly any death is a tragedy and lessons that need to be should be learned and acted upon. Nonetheless, the most recent independent annual HM Inspector report made clear that Scotlands prisons are generally stable and secure environments. The investigations, and the timing for initiating a fatal accident inquiry, are matters entirely for the Lord Advocate, operating independently of Government. Jacob Rees-Mogg has warned the Prime Minister people did not vote for a Corbyn-May coalition. European Research Group (ERG) chairman Mr Rees-Mogg criticised the Prime Minister for planning to collaborate with a known Marxist in Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Conservative MP for North East Somerset said the move would lose Tory votes, and warned history did not show success for political leaders who tried to get policy through the Commons on the back of Opposition votes. I think getting the support of a known Marxist is not likely to instil confidence in ConservativesERG chairman Jacob Rees-Mogg Speaking after a meeting about Theresa Mays latest statement, Mr Rees-Mogg said: I think getting the support of a known Marxist is not likely to instil confidence in Conservatives. This approach to Government is an unsuccessful one and it also lacks democratic legitimacy. People did not vote for a Corbyn-May coalition Government they voted for a Conservative Government, which became a confidence and supply with the DUP. This is a deeply unsatisfactory approach its not in the interests of the country, it fails to deliver on the referendum result and history doesnt bode well for it. This is a deeply unsatisfactory approach - its not in the interests of the country, it fails to deliver on the referendum result and history doesnt bode well for itERG chairman Jacob Rees-Mogg Mr Rees-Mogg cited the examples of former prime ministers Robert Peel, who was forced to resign and split the Tory party, and Ramsay MacDonald. who was forced to resign after including opposition leaders in a cross-party national government. However, he claimed to still support Mrs May as leader and, although he didnt whoop and holler with delight, neither did he expect a glorious outcome from the Prime Ministers statement. Expand Close Eurosceptic Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks in the House of Commons during a Brexit debate ahead of a second round of votes on alternative proposals to the governments Brexit deal (PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Eurosceptic Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks in the House of Commons during a Brexit debate ahead of a second round of votes on alternative proposals to the governments Brexit deal (PA) The Conservative MP for North East Somerset said he had been willing to accept a second-rate Brexit rather than to hold out for something perfect and end up with no Brexit. When asked if he could back a deal struck with Jeremy Corbyn, he told journalists Well, I wouldnt hold your breath Im not a Marxist in case you hadnt noticed. He added: What was announced today was an attempt to overturn the referendum that wanted a clear Brexit, to do a deal with a socialist who doesnt want Brexit and is not in line with the Conservative Partys manifesto commitments or with the referendum. This is all about getting further and further away from the Brexit people voted for, which is very serious. ERG member Andrew Rosindell said he was shocked and dismayed as he left the meeting. Another ERG member, Simon Clarke, retweeted former foreign secretary Boris Johnson and commented This is absolutely right from Boris Johnson. Tonights statement is incredible. This is absolutely right from @BorisJohnson. Tonights statement is incredible. https://t.co/rDqJxlqEp6 Simon Clarke MP (@SimonClarkeMP) April 2, 2019 Mr Johnson had tweeted: It is very disappointing that the cabinet has decided to entrust the final handling of Brexit to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. It now seems all too likely that British trade policy and key law making powers will be handed over to Brussels with no say for the UK. As it is, we now face the ridiculous possibility of being forced to contest the European elections more than three years after leaving the EU and having to agree to exit terms that in no way resemble what the people were promised when they voted to leave. The PM and cabinet have concluded that any deal is better than no deal, and this is truly a very bad deal indeed - one that leaves us being run by the EU. I can under no circumstances vote for a deal involving a customs union as I believe that does not deliver on the referendum Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) April 2, 2019 The MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip added under no circumstances would he vote for a deal involving a customs union. He tweeted: The PM and cabinet have concluded that any deal is better than no deal, and this is truly a very bad deal indeed one that leaves us being run by the EU. I can under no circumstances vote for a deal involving a customs union as I believe that does not deliver on the referendum. A huskys close shave has brought it viral stardom and inspired dog owners to share their own poochs entertainingly short haircuts. Hannah Gomez, 19, said she was shocked after her four-year-old Siberian Husky Jojo returned from a new grooming parlour with the new trim, which has been shared tens of thousands of times on Twitter. In response to the cut, Ms Gomez, from Texas, told the Press Association: It was something I was not expecting! He has reacted to the cut just fine, she added. He seems unbothered by it and is still extremely happy. Many found Jojos haircut somewhat amusing. However, others were inspired to share their own dogs close shaves. Some even shared before and after pictures of the over-zealous shearing their hounds have received. My Sheamus was caught in the same situation, here is a before and after the "just a trim to clean him up" #dog pic.twitter.com/fgaigo5eaP Gary O'Donoghue (@garchief) March 31, 2019 But dogs are not the only pets to have been on the receiving end of such fur-removals. Happened to mine also pic.twitter.com/A6ZllgfQg1 Christina (@ChrisReaa) March 31, 2019 If only pets could speak. An Egyptian province on the Red Sea is to impose a ban on disposable plastics, prohibiting everything from single-use straws to plastic bags in an effort to fight pollution and protect the environment. The ban will apply to restaurants, supermarkets, grocery stores, pharmacies and on cruise ships that dock off the shores of the province, called Red Sea. It will also apply to hotels in the resort of Hurghada, the provincial capital, and elsewhere in the province. Plastic spoons, forks and knives, cups and dishes will also be among the banned items. Expand Close Divers collect plastic and other debris in the sea off Egypt (Thomas Hartwell/AP) AP / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Divers collect plastic and other debris in the sea off Egypt (Thomas Hartwell/AP) Its a fight against the sea of plastic that people carelessly discard, provincial governor Ahmed Abdallah said. And it all ends up in the Red Sea. The ban will come into effect from June, he said, adding that it was first proposed by the Hurghada Environmental Protection & Conservation Association to protect the provinces threatened and endangered species. The organisation said it will launch campaigns across the province to clean up islands, beaches and famous diving areas around Hurghada, one of Egypts most popular beach resorts and diving centres. Mr Abdallah accepts the campaign will be an uphill battle, and did not elaborate on how the ban will be enforced. His hope is that by saying no to plastic, Egypt will draw more environment-conscious tourists. In 2017, Egypt launched an EU-funded initiative to encourage people to limit their use of plastic bags and to shift to more environmentally friendly alternatives. The country produces 970,000 tons of plastic waste per year. Expand Close The Red Sea (Thomas Hartwell/AP) AP / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Red Sea (Thomas Hartwell/AP) The environmental affairs agency said last year that Egyptians use around 12 billion plastic bags a year, causing severe problems to the Nile River and the countrys two seas the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Single-use plastics have added to the problems, as have items like coffee stirrers, plastic bags, straws and bottles. Egypts vital tourism industry has been hit hard by extremist attacks and political turmoil following the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled long-time autocrat Hosni Mubarak. The once multibillion-pound tourism industry, a vital pillar of the countrys economy and source of work for millions of people, has been decimated. The sector suffered a further blow after an Islamic State bombing brought down a Russian passenger plane over the Sinai peninsula in 2015, killing all 224 people on board. Egypts government has tried to lure tourists back by promoting new archaeological discoveries and boosting security around historical sites. Aides to Joe Biden are striking a more aggressive tone as the former vice president faces scrutiny over his past behaviour toward women. In a statement, Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted right wing trolls from the dark recesses of the internet for conflating images of Mr Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends in his official capacity during swearing-in ceremonies with uninvited touching. The move came on a day in which a second woman said Mr Biden had acted inappropriately, touching her face with both hands and rubbing noses with her in 2009. The allegation by Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, followed a magazine essay by former Nevada politician Lucy Flores, who wrote that Mr Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014. Expand Close Lucy Flores has accused Joe Biden of inappropriately kissing her on the back of the head (Michelle Rindels/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Lucy Flores has accused Joe Biden of inappropriately kissing her on the back of the head (Michelle Rindels/AP) The developments underscored the challenge facing Mr Biden should he decide to seek the White House. Following historic wins in the 2018 midterms, Democratic politics is dominated by energy from women. The allegations could leave the 76-year-old Mr Biden, long known for his affectionate mannerisms, appearing out of touch with the party as the Democratic presidential primary begins. Ms Lappos said that she and other Himes aides were helping out at a fundraiser in a private home in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2009 when Mr Biden entered the kitchen to thank the group for pitching in. After he finished speaking, he stopped to talk to us about how important a congressional staff is, which I thought was awesome, Ms Lappos said. She said she was stunned as Mr Biden moved toward her. He wrapped both his hands around my face and pulled me in, said Ms Lappos, who is now 43. I thought, Oh, God, hes going to kiss me. Instead, he rubbed noses with me. Expand Close Joe Biden has not yet declared if he will run for the White House (Niall Carson/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Joe Biden has not yet declared if he will run for the White House (Niall Carson/PA) Mr Biden said nothing, she said, then moved off. She said the experience left her feeling weird and uncomfortable and was absolutely disrespectful of my personal boundaries. The Hartford Courant first reported Ms Lappos assertion. Mr Russo did not directly respond to Ms Lappos, instead referring to a Sunday statement in which Mr Biden said he does not believe he has acted inappropriately during his long public life. The former vice president said in that statement: We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. I don't think that this disqualifies him (Joe Biden) from running for president, not at allNancy Pelosi, House Speaker Mr Biden has not made a final decision on whether to run for the White House. But aides who were not authorised to discuss internal conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity said there were no signs that his team was slowing its preparations for a campaign. Asked about the accusations against Mr Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: I dont think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all. She declined to elaborate. Mr Bidens potential Democratic rivals have not rushed to back him up. Over the weekend, presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand came closest to calling out the former vice president. Ms Warren said Mr Biden needs to give an answer about what occurred. Ms Gillibrand said: If Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic hell have to engage on further. Ultraviolet, a womens advocacy group, tweeted: Joe Biden cannot paint himself as a champion of women and then refuse to listen and learn from a woman who says his actions demeaned her. Good intentions dont matter if the actions are inappropriate. Do better, Joe. And thank you @LucyFlores for coming forward. Police acting superintendent Mike McIlraith shows New Zealand politicians an AR-15 style rifle similar to one of the weapons a gunman used to slaughter 50 people at two mosques (Nick Perry/AP) New Zealand politicians have voted overwhelmingly in favour of new gun restrictions during the first stage of a bill they hope to rush into law by the end of next week. The bill would ban the types of weapons a gunman used to kill 50 people at two mosques last month. The bill was backed by both liberals and conservatives, with only a single politicians from the 120 that sit in Parliament voting against it. The vote was the first of three that politicians must pass before the bill becomes law. We are compelled to act quicklyStuart Nash, New Zealand's police minister The countrys police minister Stuart Nash said far too many people have access to dangerous guns and politicians were driven by the need to ensure public safety. We are also driven by the memory of 50 men, women and children who were taken from their loved ones on the 15th of March, Mr Nash said. Their memory is our responsibility. We dont ever want to see an attack like this in our country again. We are compelled to act quickly. Seemingly drawing a distinction with the US, where gun possession is constitutionally protected, Mr Nash said that, in New Zealand, gun ownership remains a privilege and not a right. Conservative politician David Seymour voted against the bill, saying it was too rushed. Doing it in nine days before politicians go on their Easter break is starting to look more like political theatre than public safety, he said. But Mr Seymour was so busy explaining to reporters his reasons for opposing the bill that he missed a procedural vote in which he could have tried to slow its passage. Many New Zealanders were shocked at the firepower the gunman was able to legally obtain and favour the legislative changes. Expand Close Flowers near the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand (Vincent Thian/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Flowers near the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand (Vincent Thian/AP) Some are opposed. More than 14,000 have signed a petition filed in Parliament which says the law changes are unjust for law-abiding citizens and are being driven by emotions. The bill would ban military-style semi-automatic guns and high-capacity magazines. It would also ban semi-automatic shotguns that could be fitted with detachable magazines and pump-action shotguns that can hold more than five rounds. The bill would not ban guns often used by farmers and hunters, including semi-automatic .22-calibre or smaller guns that hold up to 10 rounds, or shotguns that hold up to five rounds. Venezuelas chief justice has asked for opposition leader Juan Guaido to be stripped of immunity, taking a step towards prosecuting him for alleged crimes as he seeks to oust President Nicolas Maduro. Supreme Court Justice Maikel Moreno said Mr Guaido should be prosecuted for violating a ban on leaving the country when he went on a tour of Latin American nations that back a change in Venezuelas government. The opposition leader is also accused of inciting violence linked to street protests and receiving illicit funds from abroad. It is unclear when the pro-Maduro National Constituent Assembly will consider whether to remove Mr Guaidos immunity from prosecution as head of the National Assembly. Mr Guaido dismissed the Maduro-stacked high court and Constituent Assembly as illegitimate and continued his calls for Mr Maduro to step down. We must unite now more than ever, said Mr Guaido at a Caracas university earlier on Monday. We must mount the biggest demonstration so far to reject whats happening. Expand Close Juan Guaido talks during a rally in Caracas, Venezuela (Natacha Pisarenko/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Juan Guaido talks during a rally in Caracas, Venezuela (Natacha Pisarenko/AP) Venezuelan security forces have detained Mr Guaidos chief of staff, but had yet to move directly against the opposition leader, whose claim to be interim president is backed by dozens of countries that say Mr Maduros re-election last year was rigged. Since a massive power failure struck March 7, the nation has experienced near-daily blackouts and a breakdown in critical services such as running water and public transportation. Classes have been suspended for nearly a week. At the same time, frustrated residents are increasingly unable to find water, make phone calls or access the internet. Millions of Venezuelans struggle to understand an announcement by Mr Maduro a day earlier that the nations electricity is being rationed to combat daily blackouts. Mr Maduro said late on Sunday that he was instituting a 30-day plan that would balance generation and transmission with consumption. He also called on Venezuelans to stay calm, but provided few details. Expand Close A woman collects water from a spout in a tunnel, in Caracas (Ariana Cubillos/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A woman collects water from a spout in a tunnel, in Caracas (Ariana Cubillos/AP) Mr Maduro appeared on state TV Monday to announce that an engineer with 25 years of experience, Igor Gaviria, will serve as the next electricity minister, heading the state-run Corpoelec. He is replacing a military general, Luis Motta Dominguez. Ive lost him to a period of rest, Mr Maduro said, adding that students will return to classrooms on Wednesday. Expressing her confusion, office worker Raquel Mayorca said she did not know if her lights were off because of another power failure or whether it was part of the governments plan. We are worse off now more than ever, she said, adding that the power was out on one side of the street, but working on the other. We do not know if the light went out due to a blackout, or whether they took it away because of the rationing. Mr Maduro blames the blackouts on US-directed sabotage, an allegation that M Guaido routinely dismisses as the desperate talk of a government that has presided over the collapse of infrastructure in a country which was once among the wealthiest in Latin America. Expand Close Supporters of Juan Guaido attend a rally in Caracas (Natacha Pisarenko/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Supporters of Juan Guaido attend a rally in Caracas (Natacha Pisarenko/AP) As the lack of electricity became the latest sticking point in an ongoing political standoff, many Venezuelans simply found themselves wondering what the newly announced rationing plan would entail. With few details, it was difficult to assess how effective the plan would be in restoring a consistent supply of power in the long term. Some electricity experts have also said there are no quick fixes to Venezuelas fragile power grid, presenting the prospect that electricity could be shaky and unreliable for the foreseeable future. On Sunday, a mass of protesters took to the streets only to be threatened by contingents of alleged government supporters known as colectivos who appeared on motorbikes and quickly dispersed them. Videos posted on social media showed armed men opening fire to drive residents inside. Many Venezuelans had resigned themselves to a bleak reality. I havent had water at home for 15 days, said Maria Rojas, a 57-year-old homemaker looking for a source to fill her jugs. You try to find water in the street that is more or less safe to drink. The island of Ireland has a proud tradition stretching back centuries of sending Christian missionaries of many denominations to all parts of the world, but few can have been as remarkable as Cookstown woman Maud Kells. She spent more than five decades in one of the most dangerous countries in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, using her nursing skills to help women in remote areas to deliver their children safely. Before her arrival in 1964 a large proportion of babies died at birth or shortly after. Maud helped to train local women in maternity care and also had a hands-on role in building a hospital and nursery in the jungle village of Mulita. It was there that she almost lost her life after being lured from her home one night in January 2015 on a hoax maternity call. As she returned she was grabbed by one of two robbers who had got into her compound, and in a struggle was shot once. Miraculously the bullet passed through her, missing her lung, a major artery and her spine, although she did suffer a fractured rib. Incredibly, after recuperating in Northern Ireland she was later to return to the village to ensure that her life's work was being continued. To say that Maud has a deep faith is not to do it justice. Her faith is what motivates her and what inspired her to go to the Congo at first and to continue her work through various civil wars and other disturbances, which forced her to flee the country on occasion. Now she has written a book on her incredible life and it reads as much as an adventure story as the biography of a truly Christian woman. Maud, in her typically modest way, would insist that she has done no more than many other missionaries. While many may share her vision, few have dedicated their lives so entirely to helping those less fortunate than themselves and in bringing the true message of Christianity to people through good works as well as good words. Her life has been lived by a set of values which are so rarely seen in the modern world, where instant gratification is the order of the day and the overwhelming desire is so often to outdo one's neighbour, rather than seek to help him or her. Maud holds the OBE for her sterling work and was also the Belfast Telegraph's Woman of the Year in 2015. But, frankly, she deserves such recognition every year. Jeremy Corbyn could succeed Theresa May as the next Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn could succeed Theresa May as the next Prime Minister It never rains but it comes down in bucket-loads for the Prime Minister. Every time Theresa May listens to a news bulletin she must assume that things could hardly get worse for her than they already have. Well, alas for her, that has happened. It was the news, which just seemed to slip out, that Labour now lies five points ahead of the Conservatives in the opinion polls. When, a few years ago, the arch Left-winger Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party the Tories were throwing their hats in the air and whooping with glee. But that joy was shortlived. Ill-advisedly, May called a totally unnecessary general election, assuming that the Tories' slender majority in the Commons would expand to anything between 50 and 100 seats. They believed (and indeed even some Labour MPs feared) that Corbyn would be routed at the polls. But in the event the Conservatives lost their majority in the Commons and the so-called 'loser' Corbyn achieved almost pop star status. In the ensuing months that popularity has not faded, even though his performances in the House of Commons have not, overall, been great. The Tories' general election campaign, led by the colourless May, was so pathetic as to be laughable. And Corbyn, once briefly the laughing stock of Westminster, is now seen as a serious contender for the keys of Number 10. The Tories should be alarmed. So, those reckless Conservative MPs who, despite all this, are still clamouring for an early general election would be well-advised to heed the unequivocal one-word advice of the former Tory Prime Minister Sir John Major. It was simply: "Don't." It has accurately been called the Parliament of Chaos and might equally be named the Parliament of Shame and Dishonour. When the-then Prime Minister David Cameron called the EU referendum, Parliament solemnly promised to adhere to the result. Well, that has not happened. To their great shame, many MPs have broken that promise and have done everything in their power to prevent the referendum majority from getting its rightful way. This is simply a scandal and those guilty of this campaign should not be allowed to forget it. There is, apparently, honour among thieves, but not among our so-called political elite. The prospect of a Conservative Party leadership election merely has to be whispered before we are presented with unofficial lists of runners and riders as numerous as the field for the Grand National. Two possible runners, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, have both in the past described the Prime Minister's withdrawal agreement as reducing the UK to an EU vassal state. Suddenly, with the news that May could soon be leaving Downing Street, they have changed their tune. Both have suddenly decided that her agreement would be better than nothing and have chosen to support it. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the British electorate is becoming a trifle cynical. I have spoken to many people who say they will never vote in a parliamentary election again. What an indictment. Over the past few months, amid all the turmoil of Brexit, numerous junior or middle-ranking ministers have either been sacked or resigned. Yet the departments which each of these people represented seem to have bumbled along happily, without any serious handicap, without them. In short, the Prime Minister has barely bothered to replace them. All of which makes you wonder why the taxpayer has to fork out these relatively high salaries for people whose presence, or absence, seems to make no difference at all. Some years ago Belgium managed very nicely, thank you, without a government at all, while politicians argued endlessly over varying kinds of alliances to be able to form an administration with a working majority. So, would anyone be bothered or inconvenienced in even the slightest way if politicians decided to go on strike? Yasmin, a Rohingya who was expelled from Leda High School for being a child of a refugee, helps her younger sister to study in Leda camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, March 5, 2019. Human Rights Watch on Tuesday called on Bangladesh to offer Rohingya refugees formal secondary education, saying school officials in the southeast had expelled scores of Rohingya children because they lacked citizenship papers although they were born inside the country. Bangladesh has not provided legal pathways for Rohingya children to attend school, with the country maintaining a rule prohibiting refugees from receiving formal education or enrolling in schools outside refugee camps, the New York-based group said in a statement. The Bangladeshi governments policy of tracking down and expelling Rohingya refugee students instead of ensuring their right to education is misguided, tragic, and unlawful, said Bill Van Esveld, HRWs senior researcher on childrens rights. Education is a basic human right. Rohingya boys and girls who live in camps located in Coxs Bazar district receive an informal primary education through NGOs but, beyond that, they receive no secondary education. The global rights watchdog said it had interviewed 13 Rohingya refugee students who were expelled from six secondary schools near the refugee settlements in the district on Jan. 23 and 28, as well as Feb. 14, when school administrators went to classrooms and read out a government-issued notice ordering their expulsion. Abul Kalam, Bangladeshs commissioner for refugee relief and repatriation, said Dhaka had not made a decision on the education of the Rohingya refugees and their children. If anything comes, we will see later, he told BenarNews. Md. Saleh Uddin Chowdhury, a secondary education officer in Coxs Bazar, confirmed Tuesday that expulsions had taken place, but he did not provide numbers. We dont have permission to enroll any Rohingya children in our schools, he told BenarNews. There had been incidents where refugee children had used falsified documents to enter secondary schools, he acknowledged. If we get any information regarding those kind of unauthorized admissions, we will cancel them immediately, he said. HRW said the expelled secondary students were among the 34,000 registered Rohingya refugees living in camps in Ukhia and Teknaf sub-districts. However, their legal status was distinct from the 740,000 Rohingya who fled their homes in Myanmars Rakhine state almost two years ago. In August 2017, Myanmar launched a brutal crackdown in the wake of attacks on police outposts by Rohingya insurgents. The expelled students were born in Bangladesh after their parents fled Myanmar as refugees in the early 1990s, the rights group said. Human Rights Watch said the children had attended non-formal primary schools in refugee camps but had no access to secondary education, which would let them go to a university or even become an accredited high school graduate. So, Rohingya families paid for Bangladeshi birth certificates or obtained other documents to allow their children to pass as Bangladeshi nationals in order to continue their education, HRW said. The refugees came from Myanmar, which has long denied citizenship and basic rights to the Rohingya despite their communitys longtime roots in Rakhine. The education they deserve The statements by Chowdhury, the education officer in Coxs Bazar, jibed with previous media reports that Bangladesh schools had quietly admitted Rohingya children. But HRW quoted a Rohingya community leader as saying that police, intelligence, and other officials had visited four Bangladeshi secondary schools in the Teknaf sub-district on Jan. 15 and 16, and ordered them to expel Rohingya students. Parents and refugee leaders claimed that school officials could easily find out which students were Rohingya by examining their enrollment records for their parents names and addresses, HRW said. According to the watchdog, the solution to children who had been compelled to falsify their identities to go to secondary school should not be expulsion, but to let them get the education they deserve. About four years ago, several Rohingya children were also expelled from their schools, Abu Sayed, a Rohingya camp leader, told BenarNews. Some of them are going to schools inside camps now, some gave up their studies, and some parents appointed private tutors to teach their kids, he said. We will not stay in this country, he said. But as long as we are here, if our children can get the opportunity for an education, they will get it so they can be prepared for their future. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held a telephone conversation, according to the Kremlin website. The President of Azerbaijan gave the assessment of his meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, which was held in Vienna on March 29. The Russian leader drew attention to the importance of intensifying the negotiation process between Azerbaijan and Armenia. "Russia's readiness to provide further assistance in finding solution on the key aspects of the settlement, including through the OSCE Minsk Group, was expressed," the Kremlins press service said. Discussing issues on the bilateral agenda, the parties confirmed their mutual intention to expand mutually beneficial cooperation in various fields. The Philippine Supreme Court sided with rule of law advocates Tuesday by directing the government to release documents covering thousands of killings carried out under the Duterte administrations controversial war on illegal drugs. The justices also denied an appeal from Solicitor General Jose Calida that the documents should be kept strictly between the government and the Supreme Court, said Brian Keith Hosaka, a court spokesman. Calida was ordered to submit to the Supreme Court the police reports, copy-furnishing the petitioners, Hosaka said. According to the court, the government must prove it had documented all killings, especially those committed during legitimate police anti-drug operations. The court gave the solicitor generals office 15 days to submit the details of about 3,800 suspects killed in what police claimed were legitimate operations between July 2016 and November 2017. All the drug operations were legitimate and sanctioned, national police Chief Oscar Albayalde said, adding that raids resulting in deaths or violent encounters were automatically investigated by the internal affairs division. Yes, of course, Albayalde said, when asked if the police would follow the courts directive. That is an order by the Supreme Court, so we need to comply. Calida, on the other hand, described the directive as patently irrelevant. A very important decision The court ruled on petitions filed by the Center for International Law (CenterLaw) on behalf of the residents of 26 slum areas in central Manila and the Free Legal Assistance Group (Flag), where deadly counter-narcotics raids had unfolded. This is an emphatic statement by the highest court of the land that it will not allow the rule of law to be trampled upon in the war on drugs. It is a very important decision, CenterLaw President Joel Butuyan said. Neri Colmenares, a human rights lawyer, welcomed the high courts decision and called on the government to cooperate. This will help us see the true situation of human rights in the country in the time of Dutertes drug war, especially now that Tokhang-style killings are being done against activists and critics of the regime, Colmenares said. Tokhang is a combination of two Filipino words that mean knock and plead where police knock on doors and ask occupants to voluntarily undergo drug tests. Critics have said this was a creative way of rounding up drug suspects, many of whom were later killed. Rights lawyer Chel Diokno said he was pleased with the courts move to side with victims of extrajudicial killings, adding it was a major step toward getting justice for drug-war victims. But this is just one part of the many cases we filed on the war on drugs. The killings must stop. We will fight until the end to get the justice, he said. Since Duterte took power in mid-2016, about 5,000 suspected drug dealers and addicts have been killed in what police described as shootouts during law-enforcement operations. Human Rights Watch officials have said that thousands of others were killed, but their deaths were considered under investigation or blamed on vigilantes. Mark Navales in Cotabato City, Philippines, contributed to this report. Residents displaced by fighting between military forces and suspected militants line up for food and non-food items being distributed by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Marogong town in the southern Philippine province of Lanao del Sur, March 31, 2019. Tens of thousands of civilians uprooted during military offensives targeting militant suspects in three southern Philippine provinces were short on food, humanitarian aid workers told BenarNews as they delivered relief supplies to displaced people. As the Philippine armed forces pounded remnants of Islamic State-linked groups in mountainous areas of Lanao del Sur province on Sunday, a convoy of trucks loaded with relief goods rolled into the town of Marogong, about 1,247 km (775 miles) south of Manila. Hundreds of refugees then lined up to receive packets of food. That is enough for a family of five to survive for 15 days, Zehabudin Guro, chief of the Iligan city office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told BenarNews, referring to the food packs that contained a bag of rice and 12 small cans of sardines each. The relief goods provided by the ICRC also included non-food items such as hygiene kits, mosquito nets, sleeping mats, blankets and plastic pails. But those supplies were not enough for tens of thousands of refugees who have fled their homes in Lanao and the nearby provinces, Bukidnon and Maguindanao, aid workers said. Meher Khatcherian, the outgoing ICRC station chief in Iligan, said living conditions were difficult for those in evacuation centers. They have limited access to water and sanitary facilities, he said. Food is not sufficient. On March 22, the ICRC issued a statement that clashes between government security forces and non-state armed groups had displaced about 50,000 residents of the three provinces. ICRC said it had distributed aid to about 1,800 families, or about 9,000 Lanao del Sur residents, who were affected by army operations against militants who may have fled during the 2017 siege of Marawi city. A five-month battle between government forces and IS-linked militants who took over the southern city reduced Marawi to ruins before the fighting there ended in October 2017. The battle left about 1,200 dead, most of them militants. It is not exactly known how many enemy fighters survived, but military intelligence reports said that a sizable number of pro-IS fighters were trying to recruit anew and launch fresh attacks in the Philippine south. Affected families being served on Sunday mostly came from four towns in Lanao del Sur where the military had been carrying out operations since late last year Guro told BenarNews. The violence did not end even although Muslims in the province and other parts of the southern Philippines had voted through a historic plebiscite in January in favor of a new autonomous region, which had been touted as an alternative to IS-inspired groups. An evacuee sorts out a wash basin and a sleeping mat among relief items distributed by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Marogong, a town in Lanao del Sur province, southern Philippines, March 31, 2019. [Froilan Gallardo/BenarNews] Political violence The Philippines is scheduled to hold local elections in May, and intense rivalries among political clans have led to a spike in violence in the south, locals said. Dayan Ayonga, a 36-year-old mother of five, smiled as she struggled to carry the aid package she received. A male relative had to help her cart it to a waiting motorcycle. Ayonga said local political rivalries were an added burden that forced many war refugees like her to walk several kilometers (miles) to reach distribution points for aid packages. I belong to a clan who is opposed to the town mayor. So I was not included in the master list of qualified evacuees of the town, Ayonga told BenarNews. Local politician Zia Adiong said the humanitarian situation was aggravated by a lack of funding for the new Bangsamoro Autonomous Region on Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), now effectively controlled by former Muslim guerrillas. Under legislation that created the new region called Bangsamoro, the rebels gave up their goal of creating an independent state in exchange for broader autonomy, including control over many local government functions such as taxation and education. As part of the deal, the estimated 10,000-strong secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) formally assumed leadership of the autonomous region in February. Adiong said the Department of Budget and Management had yet to release 31 billion Philippine pesos (U.S. $590 million) allotted for the new BARMM, a zone made up of at least five southern provinces where MILF will oversee self-rule. Right now, the towns under the new BARMM are living on a shoestring budget until the (government) releases the money, Adiong said. The referendum was the final step in a peace pact that MILF signed with Manila four years ago. It culminated decades of conflict that has killed about 150,000 people and stunted growth in the resource-rich southern region. But, according to analysts and military officials, smaller Muslim factions that splintered from MILF have allied with the IS group, which has been trying to establish a home base in Southeast Asia after it lost territory in the Middle East. Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha (left) speaks with volunteers about combatting wildfires during his visit to Fort Kawila army base in Chiang Mai province, April 2, 2019. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha set a seven-day deadline for temporarily easing air pollution in northern Thailand, as he traveled to Chiang Mai on Tuesday to get a close-up look at a smog blanketing the region. Arriving by helicopter at Fort Kawila in Chiang Mai, Prayuth spoke to officials and civilian volunteers who were fighting agricultural fires that had been burning for weeks and whose smoke created the smog. Today, I order (officials) to improve the situation in seven days as a short-term measure, Prayuth said as he delivered tools and face masks to fire fighters at the fort. These troubles need time to solve because these largely stem from man-made fires along with other causes. So we need to make those who set fires to clear farmland understand this, Prayuth said without detailing potential long-term solutions. At its peak on Saturday, fine particles measured 700 micrograms per cubic meter of air, far worse than the countrys safety level of 50, according to government officials and the Air Quality Index, a website that measures air pollution worldwide. The Thai military deployed helicopters to dump huge buckets of water on hotspots while planes seeded clouds to produce rain for deterring the air pollution, which can lead to health issues including rashes, dizziness and even death. On the ground, firefighters armed with hoes and shovels worked to contain the blazes. Chiang Mai Gov. Supachai Iamsuwan responded to Prayuths order, according to a report in the Singapore-based Straits Times newspaper. We will ramp up all operations and solve the problem within seven days. We will go down to the smallest (fire) in the villages, he said. Many of the fires have been blamed on farmers burning corn and sugar cane fields following the harvest so the land can be planted again during the next growing season, according to officials. Prayuth said hot spots in the region had been reduced from 3,000 to 1,900 by Tuesday. The wildfires are relatively more serious this year because of the heat, Thanakrit Chanthajamrassilpa, district chief of Mae Sariang in Mae Hong Son, told reporters. Once they broke out they were even more severe because of abundant flammable substances. Much worse this year By Tuesday, fine particles measured 260 micrograms per cubic meter in Mae Hong Son province, west of Chiang Mai, followed by Chiang Rai at 165 and Chiang Mai at 147 still above the countrys safety level, according to the World Air Quality Index. All three locations are top Thai tourist destinations. The pollution has taken its toll, a village official near Chiang Dao Cave in Chiang Mai told BenarNews It has affected tourism. Many locals did not earn income because no tourists came, Kamron Inta said. What we want from the government are wildfire funds, fire walls and vigilant teams. In downtown Chiang Mai, residents held signs Stop Burning! The smog problem affects our health, and called on Prayuth to declared Chiang Mai a disaster area and ban corn farming over 1.58 million acres. The smog is much worse this year than last year. It is a good opportunity for the prime minister to see it for himself and take it seriously, Chiang Mai resident Nathika Prakobboon said. I hope we dont face this again next year. Nikom Putta, president of the Ping River Basin Conservation Group, called on the government to be more involved. I think the government must solve the problem by educating locals to make them feel they own the forest, he told BenarNews. For those who grow corn, the government should find them an alternative option to stay away from burning. We must blame food companies who benefit from them and have them help solve the problem, too, he said. Russia will lend its neighbour Belarus up to $600 million so Minsk can refinance outstanding loans it previously took from Moscow, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Monday, Reuters reported. Belarus is also set to receive $200 million from the Russia-led Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development by the end of April, in what would be the seventh tranche of funds designed to help stabilise the countrys budget, Siluanov said. Kabul Zaboab Simintov (59) is standing in front of his house in Kabuls streets, where on any given day there is a risk of a bomb attack, with a kippah on his head as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It is late afternoon, the shops are open and there is a lot of traffic in downtown. He is not worried to wear the head covering openly on the streets like some Jews in Berlin-Neukolln would be. All my neighbors in Kabul know me. No one here has a problem with Jews. Simintov isnt just one of many Jews. He is the only Jew who lives in Afghanistan. Thats what he says and official governmental agencies say exactly the same. BILD reporters paid Simintov a visit in Kabul. Its true, I am the last Jew who lives here. My family immigrated to Israel and so did many others. Most of them left Afghanistan when Israel was founded and after the communists took over the country for a brief time. According to estimates, up to 40,000 Jews lived in Afghanistan until the early 19th century. His family, he has five siblings altogether, have moved to Israel. His wife and his two daughters, too. He has vowed to never move there. I dont speak hebrew. I am an Afghan. Why should I live in a different country? Simintov was born in Herat and has always lived in Afghanistan. No matter what has happened to him in the past. Even when the Taliban invaded the country, he did not escape and remained in the city. The terrorists arrested Simintov and kept him in prison for three weeks. Afterwards, they let him go. They thought I was a missionary who wanted to convert people to Christianity. When they realized that I was a Jew, they let me go. Today, he lives in a 161-square-foot apartment in a house in downtown. He used to work as a dealer in precious stones. Now, he takes care of the synagogue which is located on the same floor as his apartment. He has lamps and prayer stones from friends in Israel. As the only living Jew in the country, he prays here in solitude. The authorities in Kabul are aware of the synagogue. Simintov knows President Ashraf Ghani personally. The synagogue was almost destroyed by a bomb attack, which was aimed at the German embassy in Afghanistan, when two trucks exploded. I felt the walls shaking, said Simintov. Young Muslim Afghans helped him rebuilt the place. Simintov: I am very happy that my Muslim friends support me so much and I hope that more Jews from all over the world will come for a visit. Currently, I am looking urgently for a Torah for the synagogue. So far, someone has yet to send him the Hebrew bible to Kabul. Lesen Sie auch BILD Interview with Afghan Minister There is no other path than negotiations with the Taliban BILD asked Afghan Minister of Foreign Affairs Salahuddin Rabbani, what is going to happen to womens rights when the Taliban returns? Simintov is not afraid of future attacks. However, he is sceptical of the peace talks between the US and the Taliban. I hope that Afghanistan will never again be ruled by the Taliban. Because then they will think that I am a spy. And I wont let anyone destroy my synagogue again Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, my take on the first leg of the Trump-O'Reilly History Tour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Media Advisory, April 2, 2019 Contact: Steve Jones, (415) 305-3866, sjones@biologicaldiversity.org Court Hearing in Houston to Challenge Trump EPA's Permit for Dumping Drilling, Fracking Waste Into Gulf Administration Permitted Oil Companies' Wastewater Without Studying Risks HOUSTON Arguments will be heard by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administrations approval of a permit allowing oil companies to dump wastewater from offshore drilling and fracking into the Gulf of Mexico. The Center for Biological Diversity sued last year because the permits were issued without evaluating the dangers to marine species, water quality and the environment. The Clean Water Act permit issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in September 2017 allows drilling companies to dump unlimited amounts of waste fluid, including toxic chemicals used in fracking, into federal Gulf waters off Texas and Louisiana. Federal records show more than 75 billion gallons of drilling wastewater were dumped into the Gulf in 2014. Letting oil companies dump toxic fracking waste into the Gulf without ever studying the impact is reckless and illegal. The Trump administration cant keep ignoring federal law in their giveaways to the oil industry, said Kristen Monsell, the Centers lead attorney in the case. Marine life and coastal communities are being threatened by this hazardous water pollution and need the courts to protect them. What: Hearing before the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Center for Biological Diversity, et al, v. U.S. EPA, et al. (Case No. 18-60102) When: Wednesday, April 3, at 9 a.m. Where: Courtroom 11-D, Bob Casey Federal Building, 515 Rusk Street, Houston, TX Who: Lead attorney Kristen Monsell is representing plaintiffs Center for Biological Diversity, Healthy Gulf (formerly Gulf Restoration Network) and Louisiana Bucket Brigade. Background The Centers lawsuit notes that the EPAs issuance of the permit failed to comply with federal environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act and National Environmental Policy Act. The suit aims to force the agency to prohibit the dumping of fracking chemicals and other dangerous waste fluids into the Gulf unless, and until, the agency adequately studies and discloses the risks. At least 10 chemicals routinely used in offshore fracking could kill or harm a broad variety of ocean species, including marine mammals and fish, Center scientists have found. The California Council on Science and Technology has identified some common fracking chemicals to be among the most toxic in the world to marine animals. Discharging fracking chemicals into the Gulf raises grave ecological concerns because the Gulf provides important habitat for whales, sea turtles and fish as well as being federally designated critical habitat for imperiled loggerhead sea turtles. Dolphins and other species in the Gulf are still suffering the lingering destructive effects of 2010s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The funds raised will be used to support CIC's current portfolio of 25 companies and enable investment in new opportunities arising from both the University of Cambridge and the wider Cambridge ecosystem. Cambridge Innovation Capital plc (CIC), the venture capital investor focused on intellectual property rich technology and life science businesses in the Cambridge ecosystem, has completed a funding round of GBP150 million, bringing the total amount of capital raised to date to GBP275 million. The financing was supported by a geographically diverse range of new institutional and strategic investors, with the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Endowment Fund contributing the cornerstone investment. The financing is one of the largest private financing rounds in Europe this year and more than doubles the financial resources available to CIC. The funds raised will be used to support CIC's current portfolio of 25 companies and enable investment in new opportunities arising from both the University of Cambridge and the wider Cambridge ecosystem. Victor Christou, CEO of CIC, commented, "The Cambridge ecosystem holds one of the richest seams of scientific knowledge and technological innovation in the world. Since our inception in 2013, CIC has invested over GBP125 million in IP-rich technology and life science companies among which are leaders in fields as diverse as surgical robotics, flexible electronics, microbiome science, genomic diagnosis and edge intelligence and AI decision making software. Professor Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, added, "CIC has grown since its launch to become a key part of the Cambridge ecosystem. It has provided support and investment to a portfolio of leading-edge businesses, each of which has the potential to substantially improve people's lives. The University is delighted with what CIC has achieved to date and so has decided to participate in this funding round. We look forward to continuing our close relationship with the CIC team." The MoU will strengthen South-South collaboration in advancing health sciences research Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India recently signed an MoU with the African Union (AU) represented by Scientific Technical and Research Commission (AU-STRC) in New Delhi. The MoU will strengthen South-South collaboration in advancing health sciences research; enhance local capacity and ownership. Recognizing the common health challenges faced by limited public health resources the current initiative aspires to intensify cooperation and collaboration to develop cutting-edge, innovative and sustainable solutions catering to the health needs of respective regions of the globe. The programme would focus on training and strengthening capacity of health professionals, researchers, regulators and industry staff; support research collaborations for developing preventive tools and improved diagnostics for diseases which are regional priorities in India and Africa strengthening product development and manufacturing capacities for drugs and diagnostics. Dr. Balram Bhargava, Secretary DHR and DG, ICMR said that this MoU is a major step to help enrich global health research and stitch it to regional needs of India and Africa. The deliberations charted through series of discussions with leading experts will ensure advancements in strategic and multifaceted regional cooperation to optimize available resources towards contesting shared challenges in health sciences. Mr. Jain has an experience of more than 40 years in the healthcare industry The Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) has announced appointment of industry veteran Sudarshan Jain as Secretary General of the group with effect from April 8, 2019. Mr. Jain has an experience of more than 40 years in the healthcare industry with leadership position in leading Indian and multinational companies. Formerly a Managing Director at Abbott Healthcare Solutions. Glenn Saldanha, President, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance said, Over the years, IPA has played a pivotal role in placing Indian pharmaceutical companies on the global map and we are happy that now Mr. Sudarshan Jain will be deeply involved in the activities of the group. With his rich experience and vision, I believe he will effectively steer efforts of IPA in the areas of advocacy, knowledge sharing and best practices, and represent interests of Indian companies at national and international forums. Sudarshan Jain said, "India occupies a place of pride and is rightly described as the pharmacy of the world. The pharmaceutical industry is at an exciting stage and there is opportunity for Indian companies to make a difference, both in access and innovation. IPA member companies have contributed significantly to the growth of Indian industry and I am glad to be associated with the group. IPA will continue to be a catalyst in shaping policy environment to unleash the potential of Indian industry in line with national priorities." He is currently member of the board of a number of companies in the healthcare space and also associated with leading educational institutions. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and St. Stephans College, New Delhi. Human value systems The three Rs Recognition - an awareness of who the consumer is as a citizen. I think we're only starting to find our new identities in South Africa, post-apartheid and we have to take that into account that each citizen is just finding out who they are now. Representation - that all levels of the business are represented in core groups and that there's active and meaningful representation. This is really specific when we speak about women and when I speak about women, I speak about 'womxn' with an 'x' in the word. It's not women in general, it's people who identify as a woman. Redistribution - how is this going to impact our economy? How is it going to make a difference to our community? Is it something that has longevity or is it going to harm the way in which we live? Women empowerment Communicate with your consumers It's really about how do you customise information; how do you customise branding and advertising to actually start speaking to active consumers. Cooper has founded her own trends agency called Nicola Cooper and Associates, specialising in trend analysis, researching, trend talks, workshops and strategies tailored for business.She started off by saying that as someone who specialises in fashion, lifestyle and pop culture, at the end of the day when shes standing in retail spaces, she believes it's all about the consumer and what they had to deal with before they even entered that space and what they are dealing with on a day-to-day basis from the zeitgeist and specifically from a South African zeitgeist.The big takeaway is that they are really about human value systems and I think that we're starting to see that more and more. That's really how we're starting to identify just what is happening behind the brand and what is happening with the people behind the brand. And does that align with who I am personally and what I stand for with the future that I believe in?She says more than anything trends are always a response to what is happening in the technological, economic and political social spheres. So, when they're developing strategy for businesses, specifically South African businesses, there are three Rs that they like to keep into account.They are: recognition, representation and redistribution and Cooper says these are really important facets to the South African consumer.Cooper says it's also really about how far women empowerment has come. Over the past couple of years, we've seen the fourth wave, neo-feminism rise. She says it's evident if we look at the #MeToo movement, Harvey Weinstein and what's happening in the world and the profound ripple effect that it's having on our community here in South Africa and specifically for women or 'womxn'.One of the things I really believe in is the idea of brands really taking a stand. This is something that consumers are demanding more of. If I'm going to align with the brand's personality, I want to know what it stands for. You saw that with the Colin Kaepernick Nike campaign where people wanted to boycott it as a result but we also saw a lot of people in support of that, wearing Nike on the red carpet. But I also think what they did with Caster Semenya was incredible.When we look at popular culture, we're starting to see what's happening especially on Twitter where we're able to have conversations with other women, asking them, 'Are you feeling the same way as me?'I can see how the standard of beauty has been altered because of technology because we're taking pictures of their stretch marks and other women were going, Actually, I have those too and maybe it's not such a bad thing. So, technology has really changed things for women because now we are a community and not just in our own geographical boundaries but to reach out and really communicate with women. Social media has had this profound effect on people that didn't have a voice in the past.Cooper mentioned the recent issue with Woolworths and their Valentine's campaign, which got a lot of public criticism and then, as a result, the campaign was pulled. She says the amount of money that could have been saved on an entire campaign would have been substantial if they just had the diversity in that workspace; if they just had people that weren't heterosexual; people that weren't female stereotypes; people that weren't male stereotypes. In this case, social media rose up and demanded that it was pulled down.She also mentioned documentaries such as Surviving R Kelly, Leaving Neverland and Fyre Festival. Really what is happening is that people are taking charge and realising that if something is not happening then we're going to speak about it and then something is going to happen. So, because we have these platforms to engage with women and because we're able to communicate directly with women, it's a really important conversation.It's quite ironic because Cooper works with a number of South African retailers and one of the retailers that she works with, one of their platforms had 70,000 followers on Facebook. But they hadn't spoken to their consumers. That 70,000 people wanting to speak to them and they were ignoring them.She said that the first thing they usually ask brands is, 'Have you spoken to your consumers? Have you tweeted them, have you spoke to them on Facebook? Have you engaged with them?' And a lot of them are just petrified of taking that first step and opening that communication. The irony is that communication happens anyway so you may as well be a part of that conversation and it's really important to lead that conversation.Cooper said one of the biggest trends isor identifying your consumer as a real person: as a woman, as a man and as an African.Cooper ended off and said that a lot of the time while working with beauty brands, she sees them using a copy-and-paste approach of a European, white female with pale skin and blue eyes and then they wonder why the consumer is not responding. Well because they don't see themselves in it, she says."So, a lot of the times we fight with global brands to give them the information to take to their global marketing space to say, 'Actually, we need to generate new content that represents the people on this continent, the people of South Africa and woman specifically.'"Some essential truths that brands should really consider if they want to effectively communicate with their consumers. For more, you can follow Cooper on Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn Ten times more content is needed today than a decade ago. Gone are the days of traditional targeting and random media distribution. To truly make an impact in today's noisy world, brands must start embracing data and draw insight from all available sources, including past campaigns, to better understand and target customers on a 1:1 basis. Charl van Rooyen, Head of MediaCom Beyond Advertising: South Africa Data is creativitys ally Closing the communication cycle Drill down and focus on a theme or topic where your creative content will make an impact; Connect with people in moments and places of high emotion and energy, which will increase the profitability of your message; Add energy to campaigns, or subtly develop or adjust content in parallel with real-world events, allowing emotions to be turned into action; Build anticipation over several stages of the campaign by holding the audiences attention over a period of time; Continue engaging with audiences after a campaign has peaked; Use past campaign performance as a guide for optimisation, and; Use split tests to ensure you understand why one creative performs better than another. A match made in media heaven But...isnt data and the creative process complete polar opposites? At first glance, it seems to be the case. But by combining these two resources, brands can create meaningful connections. Data is rational, creativity seems irrational; data is knowledge, and creativity is a product of imagination.However, using data to inform the creative process helps to take brand campaigns to the next level. In fact, if you have the data, and you have the means to analyse and extract insight from it, the more understanding of what content and what connections you want to make will come from it.Even if you dont realise it, data already plays a massive role in creative decision-making, but normally, data-based decisions are made about business objectives - not creative processes. The trick is to start thinking about data differently and utilise it in more than one department - especially in content creation.Content marketing expert Greg Weinstein, a founding partner of, says that ...technological advancements in market research can supercharge the creative process by providing rich insights into highly targeted niche consumer groups. When used correctly, data is not the enemy of creative; it can be its most powerful ally.I completely agree with this statement. Data-led advertising has quickly grown to become one of the biggest contributors to the digital advertising realm. Mostly because, with the strategic use of data that brands already own, they can reach targeted audiences with customised messages at the ideal moments - the moments when your connections make important decisions.This, along with personalised content, can be a powerful tool to deliver effective campaigns that drive desired actions from audiences. Finding the right balance between leveraging data and creativity at the same level of importance can be hard. But its important to keep in mind that the integration of the two is becoming more important, especially to optimise engagement, human impact and sales.My topline guidelines for brands that want to serve the right content to the right customer and ensure their communication executions are constantly evolving are to:The biggest oversight, in my opinion, is not closing the communication loop. Although many agencies claim to craft digitally-led connections, very few (if any) use data after the first phase of their creative process. Once creative has been sent into the digital sphere, it should be seen as malleable. If data shows that the creative needs to be adapted in order to create even more effective connections, the content should evolve. Creative and creativity is not a stagnant thing.This is how MediaCom stands out. By being the first agency in Africa to use a data-led approach in creating and distributing creative content. We create the right connections and then serve the right content at the right time (not just at the beginning of a creative process).We achieve this by implementing historic insights and future targeting, and then creating and managing high-performing creatives and campaigns that are catered to individuals, as opposed to large, awkward audiences. We do this because we believe that you will only reach real humans with real problems by using data-led communication tactics like these. And at the end of the day, its all about reaching and engaging people. In its ongoing pursuit to provide South African brands with innovative ways to reach customers through in-store media, Smart Media has introduced its Basket Liners offering. Positioned at the bottom of shopping baskets at retail outlets, these liners provide another way to drive engagement with consumers. As in-store advertising innovators, we want to inspire confidence with retailers and entrench loyalty from advertisers through the media space. These Basket Liners provide us with yet another way to create magical moments that help drive sales, says Mark Uria, CEO at Smart Media.The Smart Media commitment to the customer service experience involves finding new and dynamic ways to reach people. To this end, the Basket Liners provide unobtrusive, yet visible means to keep a brand message with shoppers throughout their journey from arriving at the store through to the point of sale.This is another way Smart Media works with its brand customers and continue growing its long-term relationships with them across targeted media platforms. Whether it is through a digital window screen or light boxes, barrier sleeves or holographic displays, Smart Media ensures it aligns to the strategic objectives of clients and deliver a 360-degree in-store experience to shoppers that want a different experience.The Basket Liners are designed to deliver a varied advertising approach for brands that are looking to be seen by as many shoppers as possible.As far as the eye can see, the in-store experience is fundamentally changing. New touchpoints are emerging and brands (and their customers) are seeing for themselves a dynamic new environment. And this is one Smart Media is proud to be a valued partner to.For more information, go to: http://www.smartmedia.co.za/in-store-advertising/#moving-media Three Pakistani soldiers were killed and one was critically injured amid cross-border gunfire and and shelling between India and Pakistan today, Inter-Services Public Relations of Pakistan said. The deceased soldiers were identified as Subedar Muhammad Riaz, Lance Havaldar Aziz Ullah and Sepoy Shahid Mansib. Pakistani media reports claim that one elderly man was also killed and five other local Pakistanis, including two women, were injured in the attack, Sputnik reported. One Indian soldier was also killed, while five others sustained injuries in the hostilities, which flared up on Monday. The exchange of fire between the two armies has spread to more areas along the line of control (de facto border). This job expired on 7 May 2019. Today marks the third anniversary of Azerbaijani armys victory in April 2016 clashes. On the night of April 2, 2016, Azerbaijan's frontier positions were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side. Six civilians were killed, including two children aged under 16, and 26 people were injured as a result of shelling of Azerbaijans settlements located along the line of contact by Armenia. Numerous public and private facilities, including civil infrastructure, were severely damaged as a result of the offensive, 232 houses, 99 power transmission line poles, three electric power substations, kilometers of water and gas pipes were destroyed. The Armenian Armed Forces launched the guided-missiles at social institutions, including schools, hospitals and places of worship. Large-caliber artillery shells fell during the prayer service in one of the mosques. In order to suppress the Armenian provocation, ensure safety of the civilian population, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces command made a decision to take urgent response measures in the Aghdere-Tartar-Aghdam and Khojavand-Fuzuli directions. As a result, during the four days of fighting, Azerbaijani Armed Forces liberated the heights near the Talish village, as well as the Seysulan point, which could pose a threat to the safety of Goranboy district and the city of Naftalan. The Lele Tepe strategic height located in the direction of the Fuzuli district and allowing controlling a vast territory was taken under control. Also, as a result of the April fighting, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces ensured control over the roads in the Aghdere-Madaghiz direction. As many as 30 tanks, up to 15 armored guns and fortifications belonging to the Armenians were destroyed, 320 Armenian soldiers were killed and more than 500 servicemen of the enemy were wounded during the clashes. The military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on April 5 at 12:00 with the consent of the sides. As a result of the successful counteroffensive, more than 2000 hectares of territory were liberated from the Armenian occupation, even a larger territory came under the control of the Azerbaijani army. Azerbaijani Armed Forces have fortified the liberated lands. In general, the April clashes have demonstrated the attention paid by Azerbaijani President and Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev to the army, as well as high fighting efficiency of the Azerbaijani army and the ability of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces to liberate the occupied territories at any time. Azerbaijani armys victories in the April battles have laid the foundation of the liberation of Azerbaijani lands from the Armenian occupation. Political scientist Rovshan Ibrahimov, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that the situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone has changed in three years after the four-day April battles for Karabakh. "There has been a change in power in Armenia, and a new milestone was launched as part of the talks on a peaceful settlement of the conflict. First of all, I mean the first official meeting of the President of Azerbaijan with the new head of Armenia, the Prime Minister of the Republic. I think that the format of further negotiations was also discussed at the meeting. If we consider the potential for the resumption of full-fledged hostilities, then Azerbaijans military power has grown significantly in three years," he said. "In fact, the liberation of part of the Azerbaijani territories on April 2, 2016 indicated the possible consequences of resuming active hostilities. The change of power in Armenia also became the Armenian society's response to the results of the April battles, as the former Armenian authorities demonstrated their inability to adequately resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and their desire to use it as an excuse to explain unresolved political, economic, social and demographic problems in Armenia. Ultimately, the four-day war's destruction of the myth of the Armenian army power has contributed to the fall of the Kocharyan and Sargsyan regime," Rovshan Ibrahimov noted. Against this background, Armenian Defense Minister David Tonoyan's statement about Yerevan's transition to the 'new war for new territories' formula damages the negotiation process, the expert noted. "His speech was intended for the Armenian diaspora in the United States and was populist in nature with the aim of receiving more money from radical Armenians in the U.S. These words are all the more provocative because they were said immediately after the Vienna meeting - if this continues, it can cause an escalation of tension in the conflict zone, up to the resumption of hostilities. If current Prime Minister Pashinyan cannot control his government, which has no unified approach to such important issues as the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement, then anarchy will rule in Armenia in the near future," he warned. The next meeting of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea will be held in Nur-Sultan on April 16-17, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of Kazakhstan Aibek Smadiyarov said. "All parties have confirmed their participation," TASS cited him as saying. The first meeting of the High-Level Working Group on the Caspian Sea was held on February 19-20 in Baku. It was attended by delegations from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan. UNDP Expert Paul Schuler highlights the improvement in all six dimensions in Core 2018 PAPI__Photo: thanhnien.vn , , , , , , , Citizens becoming more satisfied with public services but still concerned about the environment, poverty and corruption were the key findings of the 2018 Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) report, which was released on April 2 in Hanoi.This years report marks a decade since the first PAPI research was carried out in 2009. Over the past decade, some 117,000 Vietnamese citizens from all walks of life around the country have been interviewed in person and shared their experiences with national and local authorities in governance, public administration and public services.Speaking at the reports launching ceremony themed 10 years of listening to the voices of Vietnamese citizens, UNDP Vietnam Resident Representative a.i Caitlin Wiesen said PAPI continued to serve as a powerful instrument to promote good governance in Vietnam, providing a tool for listening to citizens expectations of government and enabling them to participate in the governance process.Regarding the key findings at the national level from 2011-18, Dr. Paul Schuler, UNDP International Expert on Quantitative Research and Quality Control for PAPI, praised the improvement in all six dimensions in Core 2018 PAPI, namely participation at local levels, transparency in local decision-making, vertical accountability, control of corruption in the public sector, public administrative procedures and public service delivery.Accordingly, citizens have reported less corruption in health care and education, greater satisfaction with most basic public services, and more interactions with local officials. Scores also rose for the processing of construction permits and municipal single-window services. However, the results show no progress in levels of bribery for obtaining land use rights certificates, or in diversion of public funds by officials, and more than half of the respondents said water quality in their localities had worsened over the past three years.The 2018 report also examines public views on gender equality and leadership positions, showing that a majority of voters have no preference for either male or female candidates. Commenting on this, Australian Ambassador to Vietnam Craig Chittick said the findings highlight important opportunities for more women to be elected to political positions, however suggested more efforts made to end societal stigma against women in elected positions, especially among female voters.Regarding the provision of basic public services, the 2018 results reveal a striking divergence. The public health care, for example, saw continued improvement, especially in the increased number of respondents covered by health insurance, with the coverage rate rising from 80 percent in 2017 to 87 percent in 2018. However, the general progress in this area is not necessarily enjoyed equally by all groups, especially ethnic minorities, Ambassador of Ireland to Vietnam Cait Moran stressed.Experts at the ceremony agreed that PAPI Index serves as a forum for citizens to express their interests and concerns, for the authorities to better understand citizens expectations, and for central and local authorities and citizens to work together towards a constructive government, a government of the people, by the people and for the people.- Joe Adu '07, director of technology at PathAI. Photo: Ian MacLellan I enjoyed my psychology coursework, the summer research, and the independent study I did with Professor Rick Thompson. Those experiences exposed me to real-world applications of technology, but it was my Bowdoin experience as a whole that shaped my career. Bowdoins emphasis on the common good had a great impact on me and influenced my decision to work with mission-driven organizations like PathAI. My goal is to harness the reach and scale of technology to advance the common goodto ameliorate the human condition in some way. In addition, I work with various stakeholders to find effective and innovative solutions to organizational challenges. Knowing how to work with different types of people, plan for and embrace change, and think critically about complex unfamiliar issues are, in my opinion, paramount to being successful in my role. My liberal arts education has helped me to excel in those areas. I had the opportunity to work with the Bowdoin Information Technology department for work-study to satisfy the student contribution component of my financial aid award. I started at the IT help desk in Coles Tower, where I helped troubleshoot and resolve student technology issues. The help desk especially taught me about the human aspect of ITbefore I could help someone with a technology challenge, I needed to connect with them on a human levelgain their trust and obtain essential details to inform the issue resolution process. I quickly learned that it was first and foremost a customer service role, and that the technology was secondary. When someone visits the help desk, theyre typically not in the best mood because theres been some type of service interruption and they need help. I needed to exercise empathy and patience. I had just stumbled upon psychology as a major around that time, and I was beginning to learn about sociological imagination from my sociology coursework; the material from both subjects were relevant and helpful in my IT role. Of course, I also learned a great deal about technology while working at the help desk. Perhaps, the one Bowdoin experience that had the greatest influence on my decision to pursue a career in technology was the work I did with the consulting arm of the Bowdoin IT department. I worked on various projects and really enjoyed talking with then CIO Mitch Davis. He seemed to have the most inspiring job, because he got to work with cutting-edge technology and figure out how technology could enable and enhance innovation at Bowdoin. That career path was foreign to me, as my sights were previously set on becoming a neurosurgeonthe neuroscience program was the main reason that Bowdoin even popped up on my list of prospective colleges. Mitchs mentorship exposed me to the IT profession and enabled me to envision myself in his job. That caused me to reassess why I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Ultimately, I wanted to help people, and that desire was largely influenced by my childhood in Ghana, where we did not have enough doctors to treat illnesses and prevent deaths from basic afflictions. I wanted to be part of the solution, and as my interest in technology deepened and I acquired more knowledge in the technology field, I became determined to leverage that skill towards the same goal of helping people. PathAI is a digital pathology company that uses machine learning to better understand and treat diseases like cancer. As director of technology at this early phase of the companys life, my job is dynamic and multi-faceted. My team is responsible for the enterprise technology infrastructure, which includes both on-premise and cloud-based environments. My most important responsibility is to be a change agent that enables the company to fulfill its mission to be the worlds pathologistto advance the diagnosis and treatment of disease and improve the lives of patients and their families. I find it exciting to devise creative and innovative solutions to both technical and non-technical organizational challenges, including information security, which is thorny and important. I love many things about my job, including working with fellow Polar Bear M. Jackson Wilkinson 05, but my favorite aspect of working at PathAI is the companys ambitious mission. As a kid, I wanted to be a doctor so that I could help sick people feel better. Even as I developed a strong interest in and decided to pursue a career in technology, my original desire to help people never changed. I quickly realized that technology has the potential to significantly enhance our ability to tackle the worlds biggest problems, including treating and eradicating previously incurable diseases. It gives me great pride to be part of an organization that is going to change the face of medicine by helping detect, diagnose, and treat diseases faster and more accurately than ever imagined. We are leveraging technology in the field of pathology, drug development, and in global health by partnering with the likes of the Gates Foundation to bring AI-driven technology to the regions and people that need it the most in a cost-effective way. How cool that as a high school senior, I received a Gates scholarship to help pay for college, and now I work for a company that is partnering with the Gates Foundation towards a shared goal of improving global health? The greatest challenge of my job is to constantly maintain the right balance between being reactive and proactive in a fast-growing startup. As the first IT director at PathAI, I need to ensure that the department has the necessary capabilities to respond appropriately to constantly evolving organizational priorities and a fast-growing workforce. Moreover, it is important to anticipate the future needs and challenges of the organization and lay the necessary groundwork to ensure that PathAI continues to thrive and innovate without major IT blockers. If I focus disproportionately on responding to immediate challenges, then I risk being unprepared for future challengeskeeping in mind that future in the world of a startup like PathAI may be a matter of weeks and not months or years. Likewise, sliding the lever too much to the other side and focusing primarily on looming opportunities could have the unintended effect of hindering progress due to too many obstacles and improperly addressed issues. It is difficult to identify the one greatest challenge currently facing the tech sector, but security is certainly a notable and formidable one. It is clear, from the proliferation of high-profile data breaches and security incidents, that security has not always been a core design component of many technology products and systems. Even when the systems and products themselves are built securely, education around security best practices has been lacking. You can build a fortress, but how do you keep a trusted person from handing over the keys to the first person who comes knocking at the gate? That is the threat of social engineering, which targets end-users as the weakest link within the security infrastructure. Consequently, information security must necessarily focus on educating end-users on ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. I think that recent advancements in the application of machine learning to improving healthcare is very exciting. I also think that blockchain has great potential due to its many applications beyond cryptocurrency. When I am not working, I am usually spending time with my wife Jenny 07, and our two kids Jackson and Max. Our boys are a great blessing and a joy to be around. They keep us very busy, but when time permits, I play soccer and volunteer on a couple of local non-profit boards. I recently also joined the Bowdoin Alumni Council and have really enjoyed the opportunity to continue serving the college as chair of the Councils Nominations Committee. One major focus of the Alumni Council right now is to communicate our work more broadly within the alumni body in hopes of increasing engagement with the College and deepening the impact of our work. If I had one more day to spend at Bowdoin, Id probably spend it on the Quad. The Quad was largely a work-free zone for me and my friends, which is ironic given its central location on campus. Bowdoin can be such a fast-paced environment, and as I reflect on my four years on campus, Im especially grateful for the afternoons on the Quad when it seemed like time stood stilljust soaking in the sun and enjoying the company of friends. Twelve jurors were selected on Monday as the 10-day trial for a man accused of murdering another man in Birdtail Sioux First Nation commenced. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Advertisement Advertise With Us Twelve jurors were selected on Monday as the 10-day trial for a man accused of murdering another man in Birdtail Sioux First Nation commenced. Dakota Catlyn Jordan Pratt has pleaded not guilty in Brandon Court of Queens Bench to second-degree murder in relation to the death of 21-year-old Vincent Scott Bunn. Bunn was found dead on the steps of a home in Birdtail Sioux First Nation during the early morning hours of Sept. 2, 2016. Few details were revealed as the Crown opened its case, but it was noted that Pratt has admitted to stabbing Bunn and that an autopsy found Bunn suffered 13 sharp force injuries and 32 blunt force injuries. However, Crown attorney Rich Lonstrup assured the jury that by the end of the week they will understand the "full context" in which Bunns life was taken. "You ultimately will be the judge about whether (Pratt) was acting reasonably in self-defence, whether he was too intoxicated and whether he was in too provoked a state of mind to formulate the intent of murder," Lonstrup said. "The Crown says the evidence will show that Dakota Pratt inflicted harm that was intended to kill Vincent Bunn or that was intended to cause him bodily harm that he knew would likely cause death the evidence when taken in full will not support intoxication, self-defence, or provocation as defences." Sgt. Keri Vaters, a forensic identification specialist with the RCMP, testified she was notified of the stabbing at approximately 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 2, and arrived on scene at approximately 9 a.m. to document evidence. In photographs taken by Vaters on scene, Bunn can be seen lying on the outside stairs of a home with a silver blade snapped off from its handle laying on top of him. A knife handle was found nearby, Vaters said, and further testing confirmed the handle matched the broken blade. A trail of blood droplets led to two neighbouring homes, Vaters testified, one of which had blood stains leading into a basement bedroom and the other had blood marks on a deck leading to a back door. When asked by defence lawyer Matthew Gould if she was aware at the time Pratt had admitted to killing someone in self-defence, Vaters said she was not, but noted it would not have affected how she documented evidence. "Were you told that (Pratt) said he was attacked while sleeping in his basement?" Gould asked. "At some point and time I was, but I dont recall when," Vaters said. "If you had been aware of an attack that occurred in the dark in the bedroom, would you have tried to recreate the scene as you believed it to be at the time of the offence?" Gould asked. "I go there to view the scene itself and see what is there," Vaters said. "I dont know how the residence was prior to my attendance, I only know what is there at the time." When questioned on whose blood trail was left between the houses, Vaters said she did not know. There were three areas where fingerprints or handprints were collected, Vaters said, but they were unable to be run for identification. There were also no fingerprints visible on the knife, Vaters said, and there was no evidence to suggest someone had attempted to clean up anything at the scene. Family members and civilian witnesses are expected to testify as the trial continues today. edebooy@brandonsun.com Twitter: @erindebooy OTTAWA - Text messages between Jody Wilson-Raybould and one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's top advisers suggest she initially tried to prevent her move out of the prestigious Justice portfolio by arguing it would send the wrong message to Indigenous Peoples. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA - Text messages between Jody Wilson-Raybould and one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's top advisers suggest she initially tried to prevent her move out of the prestigious Justice portfolio by arguing it would send the wrong message to Indigenous Peoples. But Wilson-Raybould's exchanges with Gerald Butts, Trudeau's former principal secretary, became increasingly angry and ominous-sounding as the day of the Jan. 14 cabinet shuffle approached. In one of her final texts before the shuffle, she told Butts he should "know I will be prepared for tomorrow. And I know why this is happening." Butts has submitted the text messages to the House of Commons justice committee, in response to Wilson-Raybould's written submission last week, which supplemented her nearly four hours of oral testimony at the committee in February. None of the texts directly mentions SNC-Lavalin but Butts told the committee last month that he had numerous conversations with Wilson-Raybould during the week before the shuffle in which she stated her belief that she was being punished for refusing to intervene in the criminal prosecution of the Montreal engineering giant. Wilson-Raybould, who made history as Canadas first Indigenous justice minister, resigned from cabinet a month later. Butts resigned shortly thereafter. Wilson-Raybould maintains she was improperly pressured by the Prime Minister's Office last fall to override the director of public prosecutions, who had decided to proceed with a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin on bribery charges related to contracts in Libya, rather than negotiate a remediation agreement, a sort of plea bargain. Trudeau told Wilson-Raybould on Jan. 7, while she was vacationing in Bali, that he was moving her to Indigenous Services to replace Jane Philpott whom he was moving to Treasury Board to fill the void left by the retirement of Scott Brison. Wilson-Raybould refused to take on Indigenous Services, since it would put her in charge of the Indian Act she'd spent her life fighting. Trudeau agreed to move her to Veterans Affairs instead. At the moment those discussions were taking place, protests were erupting across the country in support of a northern British Columbia First Nation, 14 members of which had been arrested by the RCMP for blocking an access road used by workers on a natural gas pipeline project. Wilson-Raybould noted those protests in a Jan. 8 text to Butts. "Timing of 'pushing' me out (which will be the perception whether true or not) is terrible," she wrote. "It will be confounding and perplexing to people. This is not about me believe me when I say this but this is about an approach to Indigenous Peoples This situation is only going to deepen and I am very worried about it. I am getting texts/emails from indig leaders and B.C. etc. Just felt I had to text." Butts responded: "Nobody is 'pushing you out.' In fact, the PM has taken the extraordinary (in my experience unique) step of offering an alternative cabinet post to you." On Jan. 10, Butts asked Wilson-Raybould if it was her preference to have her chief of staff, Jessica Prince, move with her to Veterans Affairs. She responded: "Yes, it is my preference." But two days later, she implied that moving Prince out of Justice was part of a plan to install a new chief of staff who would be more supportive of intervention in the SNC-Lavalin file. On Jan. 12, as she was about to depart Bali, Wilson-Raybould texted Butts to say: "For what it is worth, I feel compelled to say one last time that what is being proposed is a mistake irrespective of where I am going. There is no way to fully explain this. "My eyes are wide open on this shift. What I know as you must is that there is a robust and proud record of what our government has done through my work and that of the (Department of Justice) I stand behind this hard work and all of my decisions and legal advice." Butts wished her a safe trip and added: "I know this is tough but we have very good ideas to make it all work from a comms perspective. Theres an opportunity here for you to show people a side of yourself and your talent that you did not get as (minister of justice and attorney general). I really want to help. Starting with asking Jess to go with you." She responds with: "I guess you want me to take Jess to make room for new PMO (chief of staff) (Mathieu or elder) to support incoming PS" apparently assuming her parliamentary secretary, Arif Virani, was going to be named justice minister and that his chief of staff would be either Mathieu Bouchard or Elder Marques senior staffers in the Prime Ministers Office whom Wilson-Raybould has since accused of exerting inappropriate pressure on her to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case. In fact, Trudeau appointed Montreal backbencher and former law professor David Lametti to the justice portfolio. Bouchard and Marques remain at PMO. "Nope, I want to know your preference," Butts replied. "I told you my preference," she texted back. "As to the 'very good ideas' you guys might want to consider sharing them with me. But know I will be prepared for tomorrow. And I know why this is happening." "Yes, you do because the PM told you why it is happening," Butts responded, describing a cascading series of moves made necessary by Brison's departure. "Nobody wanted to move but everyone pitched in for the sake of the team." OTTAWA - Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand says Canada is not doing enough to combat climate change. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Julie Gelfand arrives for a news conference in Ottawa, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld OTTAWA - Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand says Canada is not doing enough to combat climate change. Gelfand delivered her final audits Tuesday before her five-year term expires, looking at fossil-fuel subsidies, invasive aquatic species and mining pollution. But her final conclusions as the country's environmental watchdog say it is Canada's slow action to deal with the warming planet that is most "disturbing" to her. "For decades, successive federal governments have failed to reach their targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, and the government is not ready to adapt to a changing climate," she said in a statement Tuesday morning. "This must change." Gelfand's rebuke came a day after Environment Canada scientists sounded an alarm that Canada is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world, causing irreversible changes to our climate. Gelfand said neither Liberal nor Conservative governments have hit their own targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Canada is not on track to hit its 2030 target, despite policies like the national price on carbon that took effect this week. Gelfand's audit says the Liberals are not keeping a promise to get rid of "inefficient" fossil-fuel subsidies, which are undermining efforts to combat climate change, encouraging wasteful consumption of fossil fuels and discouraging investments in cleaner energy sources. Canada has pledged to eliminate inefficient subsidies by 2025 as part of both the G20 and G7 economic groups of nations, and the Liberals also campaigned on a promise to get rid of them. Gelfand concludes that both Finance Canada and Environment Canada have defined "inefficient" so broadly they can't decide what subsidies fall into that category. Finance Canada's work on the subsidies focused exclusively on fiscal and economic considerations without giving any attention to the social and environmental issues at play. For its part, Environment and Climate Change Canada only looked at 23 out of more than 200 federal organizations when it compiled an inventory of potential subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry, Gelfand found. Last year Canada began a peer review with Argentina that sees each investigate and report on the other's fossil-fuel subsidies. Last week Environment Minister Catherine McKenna started a public consultation on the subsidies to aid that peer review. The draft assessment she released last week says her department has concluded that none of the federal non-tax subsidies for fossil fuels actually is "inefficient." The assessment identified just four subsidies, including support to help Indigenous communities keep electricity prices down; funding for electric and alternative-fuel vehicle infrastructure, such as charging stations; and funding for research on clean technologies for the oil-and-gas sector. Philip Gass, a senior energy researcher for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said Tuesday using the World Trade Organization definition of subsidies, his organization found several that could or should be phased out. The IISD list shows more than $1.2 billion in fossil-fuel subsidies from the federal government, and an even greater amount from provincial governments. Gelfand's audit looked only at federal subsidies. Gass said the government's report on fossil-fuel subsidies is a good step toward transparency but that the reasoning behind the conclusion there are no inefficient subsidies is still confusing. "We need a more ambitious approach and (to) have a better plan," he said. Gelfand's audit is the second attempt to audit Finance Canada's fossil-fuel subsidy programs. In 2017, the auditor general made an attempt but was blocked when the department refused to cough up the needed documents. Eventually the department gave in, resulting in the audits released Tuesday. Gelfand also looked at the current impact of invasive aquatic species, most of which are accidentally introduced to Canadian waters on the hulls of ships coming from international waters and many of which harm native marine life after arrival. She found that although Canada has made commitments to prevent invasive species from taking hold in Canadian waters, neither Fisheries and Oceans Canada nor the Canada Border Services Agency did what they promised to do. She says a lack of understanding of whether provincial or federal authorities are responsible is interfering with efforts to prevent invasive species from getting established. MONTREAL - Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques is scheduled to perform his first spacewalk next Monday, venturing outside the International Space Station alongside NASA colleague Anne McClain. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques is seen on a live monitor from the International Space Station during a video conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor General Julie Payette and a group of students at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Monday, Jan. 14, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick MONTREAL - Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques is scheduled to perform his first spacewalk next Monday, venturing outside the International Space Station alongside NASA colleague Anne McClain. The purpose of the roughly seven-hour walk is to connect jumper cables that will give an alternative power source for the 17-metre Canadarm2, according to the Canadian Space Agency. Canadarm2 is a sort of robotic hand that is crucial to maintaining the space station. The agency said the two astronauts will also "upgrade the ISS's wireless communications system" and install other equipment used for experiments. In a briefing Tuesday, NASA said another task has been added to the spacewalk, removing a defective piece so a mechanical arm can later install a nickel-hydrogen battery. In case of a power outage on the space station, the cables to be installed by Saint-Jacques and McClain will allow the Canadarm2 to make repairs to the station without the need for a spacewalk. "Any time we send the astronauts out to conduct (a spacewalk), there's risk associated with performing those operations," NASA flight director Rick Henfling said. "There's nothing unique that the crew members have not been exposed to as far as training on the ground." He said Saint-Jacques and McClain have performed similar tasks during training in a pool that simulates the weightlessness of space. "We're highly confident in their abilities to execute the tasks on this spacewalk," he said. OTTAWA - Joshua Boyle's criminal trial heard allegations Tuesday from his estranged wife about his violent tendencies towards her before, during and after their captivity in Afghanistan, and the sordid details of their sexual lives that are now subject to charges he faces. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Caitlan Coleman leaves court in Ottawa on Wednesday, March 27, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick OTTAWA - Joshua Boyle's criminal trial heard allegations Tuesday from his estranged wife about his violent tendencies towards her before, during and after their captivity in Afghanistan, and the sordid details of their sexual lives that are now subject to charges he faces. On the second day of her cross-examination, Caitlan Coleman talked about Boyle's increasingly unsettled state as their time as hostages wore on, and her hope the beatings she suffered in captivity would end with their release. The couple were kidnapped in October 2012 by a Taliban-linked group during a backpacking trip while Coleman was pregnant with the first of the couple's three children all of whom were born before the family's high-profile rescue by Pakistani forces in 2017. Boyle had violent tendencies before their kidnapping, but he became increasingly abusive towards her, Coleman testified. There was a reprieve of about two weeks after the couple returned to Canada in October 2017, raising her hopes that his behaviour had changed for good. Instead, she said, trouble started anew and Boyle was arrested on Dec. 31, 2017. In February, Coleman wrote an email to Boyle's sister, Heather, saying she was "sorry that your brother has deteriorated like this," that he "always had mental health problems, but he was not a violent person before captivity." That email wasn't entirely true, she said. "I was trying to outline some of the abuses, but at the same time be compassionate to her. My wording was not necessarily always 100 per cent correct, especially as far as adjectives," she said. "I exaggerated how good Josh was before captivity and I think I wanted to yes, I exaggerated it out of compassion to make him sound a bit more sympathetic to his sister." Boyle, 35, has pleaded not guilty to several offences against Coleman, including assault, sexual assault and unlawful confinement that allegedly took place after the couple returned to Canada. He was arrested in the early hours of Dec. 31, 2017 after Coleman ran shoeless into the frigid Ottawa cold, wearing mutiple layers of socks to protect her feet, as she frantically knocked on doors for help. Police arrested Boyle that night after hearing Coleman's description of what she went through. The focus of questioning Tuesday turned to the couple's sexual lives, including bondage and sado-masochism activities, which Coleman says she agreed to only because Boyle didn't want to hear no for an answer. She reviewed an inventory of items from Boyle's so-called "BDSM" bag mouse traps, ropes, clamps, blindfolds taken from Air Canada flights, dog toys used as gags, and a prescription for erectile dysfunction which was organized in a photo taken by police investigators. Defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon went through each item with her, then reviewed details of Coleman's earlier testimony, asking her about her memory of an incident on Nov. 27, 2017. Coleman had previously told court about how on that night she refused Boyle's request to try anal sex. An argument ensued. Coleman said she threatened to take their three children, Boyle hit her and ordered her to the bedroom where she described being tied up naked on the couple's bed. Coleman testified on Tuesday that she couldn't recall exactly how she got on the bed. Greenspon pored over details of her earlier testimony about her rocky relationship with Boyle, the allegations of domestic violence and forced sex, repeatedly asking Coleman if what she said was an accurate recollection of events. The back-and-forth was punctuated near the end of the day when Greenspon and Coleman sparred over the details of her statement to police, and parts of the transcription Coleman disputed. "Sorry, I'm a little uncomfortable with how this is a little bit intimidating sometimes," Coleman told Greenspon, sitting at the opposite corner of a table in an adjacent room, her testimony being fed into the main courtroom via video feed. "I know you don't mean to be, but it's kind of triggering to how Josh treated me at times." "Oh, I see," Greenspon said. "I'm sorry," she continued. "You've never done anything to me, but it's a little reflective of some times in my past." Greenspon is expected to finish his cross-examination Wednesday, with one of Coleman's sisters scheduled to take the stand in the afternoon. OTTAWA - As federal Liberal MPs prepared to debate whether former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and former health minister Jane Philpott should stay in their caucus, Wilson-Raybould wrote to them to explain her actions in the SNC-Lavalin affair and why she still wants to be a Liberal MP: Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Raybould, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, arrives on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 2, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang OTTAWA - As federal Liberal MPs prepared to debate whether former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and former health minister Jane Philpott should stay in their caucus, Wilson-Raybould wrote to them to explain her actions in the SNC-Lavalin affair and why she still wants to be a Liberal MP: I am writing to all of you, members of the Liberal Caucus, to share some of my thoughts and observations about recent events and what they mean for us as a Party. I hope they are helpful to you. There were many reasons I ran for the Liberal Party of Canada in 2015, including commitments on addressing climate change, the challenges of our criminal justice system, Indigenous reconciliation, and building an economy that supported all Canadians. For me, and I believe for our Party, all of these progressive policy commitments had underlying them a firm belief in the need for a transformation in our political culture, and the pursuit of a more responsive, representative, and less partisan approach to the governing of the country. This commitment to a changed politics was not just about specific policies, such as proportional representation, but about every aspect of how we organize ourselves to govern, and the responsibilities that each of us carry. We committed to break old and cynical patterns of centralizing power in the hands of a few unelected staffers, the marginalization of hundreds of Members of Parliament with expertise and insights to offer, and the practice of governing in the shadows, out of sight of Canadians. I believed we were going to uphold the highest standards that support the public interest, and not simply make choices to create partisan advantage. As part of committing to this transformative and progressive path, we were also committing to a government and caucus that represented all Canadians. Diverse and inclusive, our Caucus was to be a microcosm of Canada not just geographically, but demographically. Indeed, I believe we understood that to build a stronger Canada, we needed to reflect that Canada. This includes the challenges, opportunities, tensions, and insights that arise when seeking to forge a common path and understanding in a context of real diversity and difference. This is a vision that reflects the future. Young people identify in dozens of different ways before they identify with a political party and they privilege diversity of experience, background, and belief and upholding the experiences of all, over simply following the paths laid out with those who claim to hold power. I still believe all of these things as I know all of you do, too. I believe it is what the country needs, and I believe our collective future well-being as a country demands action on such a vision. And indeed, one of the main reasons I had no hesitation to stand up for what I believed to be right and necessary for the country since September 2018 regarding SNC-Lavalin was because of my belief in that vision. In 2015, I believed the Liberal Party held such a vision, and I still believe the Liberals can and must advance such a vision. I do believe fundamentally that the Prime Minister also still shares this vision. Now I know many of you are angry, hurt, and frustrated. And frankly so am I, and I can only speak for myself. I am angry, hurt, and frustrated because I feel and believe I was upholding the values that we all committed to. In giving the advice I did, and taking the steps I did, I was trying to help protect the Prime Minister and the government from a horrible mess. I am not the one who tried to interfere in sensitive proceedings, I am not the one who made it public, and I am not the one who publicly denied what happened. But I am not going to go over all of the details here again. Enough has been said. Growing up as an Indigenous person in this country I learned long ago the lesson that people believing what they wish about you does not, and cannot ever, make it the truth rather than letting authority be the truth, let the truth be the authority. Indeed, if I had succumbed to interpreting the beliefs of others to be the truth, I never would have been able to push forward in the face of the racism and misogyny that far too many Indigenous women, and others, still experience every day. Ultimately the choice that is before you is about what kind of party you want to be a part of, what values it will uphold, the vision that animates it, and indeed the type of people it will attract and make it up. If indeed our caucus is to be a microcosm of the country it is about whether we are a caucus of inclusion or exclusion; of dialogue and searching for understanding or shutting out challenging views and perspectives; and ultimately of the old ways of doing business, or new ones that look to the future. As I have stated recently to the constituents of Vancouver Granville, it has been my great privilege to serve as their Member of Parliament over the past three and a half years and to continue to have their confidence. With the support, guidance, and participation of Canadians our government has accomplished much and, of course, there is important work yet to be done. My nomination has been confirmed and it is my intention to stand for re-election as the Liberal candidate for the 2019 federal election and to continue with this work. Respectfully, Hon. Jody Wilson-Raybould, P.C., Q.C., M.P. Member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville TORONTO - A veteran television reporter who left CTV after a woman accused him of lewd behaviour at the Ontario legislature was fired for repeated sexual misconduct involving young women, new court documents allege. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. TORONTO - A veteran television reporter who left CTV after a woman accused him of lewd behaviour at the Ontario legislature was fired for repeated sexual misconduct involving young women, new court documents allege. In an untested filing in Superior Court, CTV and its owner Bell Media say they began investigating complaints against Paul Bliss after a former freelancer, Bridget Brown, went public in January 2018 with accusations against him. "The investigation revealed that Mr. Bliss had been engaging in sexual activities in the workplace with multiple individuals on multiple occasions for over 10 years," Bell Media says in its statement of defence. "The investigation also revealed that Mr. Bliss continued to send sexually inappropriate messages using work resources, despite being warned by Human Resources previously that the conduct was not acceptable." The document served on Tuesday was filed as part of a $7.5-million defamation lawsuit Bliss launched a year ago against CTV, Bell Media, Brown and others. Bliss claimed in his unproven suit that the network broadcast and published "false, malicious, irresponsible" stories about his suspension and subsequent departure from the network. CTV has previously refused to confirm it fired Bliss but the filing makes clear that's what happened. The investigation, it says, prompted the network to terminate the reporter for cause. The statement of defence includes part of the termination letter given Bliss on March 6, 2018. "...you admitted to consuming alcohol and repeatedly engaging in sexual activities, including intercourse, as recently as within the last year, after hours in the workplace," the letter states. "You also admitted to entering into romantic relationships with young women with whom you could exert some influence to assist them in their careers." Brown, who lives in Calgary, said the #MeToo movement of women coming forward with stories of sexual harassment prompted her to write a blog post in January 2018 about an incident that had occurred a dozen years earlier. In her post, she alleged an unnamed but "award-winning" CTV reporter had shown her around and they ended up in his office at the legislature. There, she said, he began kissing her and pushing on the top of her head to signal he wanted oral sex. Brown said she told him she wasn't interested but he then exposed himself and performed a sex act in front of her. In his claim against the network and Brown, Bliss denies her allegations, saying he kissed her and engaged in mutual fondling. He says he contacted the network after reading the blog. He cites several CTV and other reports on his suspension and departure related to Brown's allegations, which he suggests were part of her effort to sell a book she was writing. "The defamatory words have created damaging speculation respecting Mr. Bliss and his ability to interact and work with people, and has lowered his reputation in the general public," according to his statement of claim. His union also grieved his termination. Brown, who worked as a freelance producer with CTV and Bell Media, maintains she never consented to any sexual contact with Bliss and that she made no statements that named him, even if CTV did. She also maintains what she said in her blog was fair and justified. In its defence against Bliss's defamation claim, CTV raises several arguments, including that the various statements it made about Bliss were "substantially true" and were otherwise fair comment made in good faith in reporting on matters of public interest. Other women with similar stories came forward as a result of the publicity, the network says. Bliss has said such allegations are "false, malicious, irresponsible and defamatory." Reached in Calgary on Tuesday, Brown refused to comment on the advice of her lawyer. However, she did say a year ago that she found "virtually everything in the statement of claim" to be false. ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - The precious northern cod population off eastern Newfoundland and Labrador has increased slightly, but fisheries officials say they are still concerned about the critical state of the stock. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 2/4/2019 (986 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. In this Oct. 29, 2015, file photo, a cod to be auctioned sits on ice at the Portland Fish Exchange, in Portland, Maine. The precious northern cod population off the eastern coast of Newfoundland and Labrador saw a slight increase over the last year but fisheries officials say they are still concerned about the critical state of the stock. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ AP/Robert F. Bukaty, File ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - The precious northern cod population off eastern Newfoundland and Labrador has increased slightly, but fisheries officials say they are still concerned about the critical state of the stock. A federal report released Tuesday said northern cod's spawning stock biomass -- fish that can reproduce -- was higher than predicted last year, representing a four-per-cent bump from 2018. The stock is currently assessed at 48 per cent of the limit reference point, meaning it is about halfway out of the fisheries department's "critical" zone. Biologist Karen Dwyer of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) said this year's rise surpassed negative projections after further study of 2017's mortality numbers. The report also said the stock's natural mortality rate -- meaning deaths unrelated to fishing -- has declined since 2017. Despite the incremental good news, Dwyer said the department advises keeping cod removal at the "lowest possible levels" until population numbers clear the critical zone. The commercial cod fishery, once the backbone of the province's fishing industry, collapsed and was placed under a moratorium in 1992, throwing thousands out of work and sparking protests. Northern cod has a long way to go to get back to population levels of the 1980s but Dwyer said the signs of improvement leave little evidence to support the common perception that hungry harp seals are depleting the stock. The Canadian Sealers Association called for an increased seal hunt last year to protect the cod and caplin stocks. Dwyer said Monday that by comparing cod's natural mortality rates with the rising harp seal population, there's no discernable relationship between the two, suggesting the cod predators have little to do with the stock's overall fate. "The fact is that this cod stock has started to improve and has shown significant increases over the time period where harp seals have been very high," Dwyer. The report said there is a 63-to-73 per cent possibility that the stock will be greater in 2022 than it is today, but only a six-to-nine per cent chance that it will reach the limits of the critical zone by that same year. The Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union issued a news release saying the numbers suggest a sustainable, responsibly managed cod fishery is possible in the province. "As northern cod markets rebuild, modest increases in the harvest rates can simultaneously build capacity on land without having any significant impact on the growth of the stock," the statement from FFAW-Unifor president Keith Sullivan read. "As it stands, the way DFO is managing this fishery will leave the inshore harvesters and coastal communities shut out of the fishery of the future." Cork Port is expected to take advantage of a lack of space in Dublin Port for large cruise ships when Brexit forces authorities in the capital to handle increased amounts of freight and cargo. Transport Minister Shane Ross described a decision by Dublin Port to significantly reduce its intake of cruise ships in the next two years as a temporary blip. But the port's decision has triggered frustration among tourism services and cruise companies, especially if the 50m annual industry is damaged. In the Dail, Mr Ross said he was keen to reduce any adverse impacts on tourism. He said Dublin Port authorities had briefed him about its priorities for Brexit and the need for extra cargo space. Given space constraints, it was explained that cruise berths will have to be limited for a period from 2021 onwards to allow this construction work to take place, while ensuring the port can continue to handle large cargo volumes, the minister explained. "It is expected the period of disruption will be two to three years and will impact on three cruise seasons." While the cruise culls were regrettable, Dublin Port intended to build cruise calls back up to 150 ships for the 2024-2025 season, TDs were told. However, other ports are expected to take advantage of the changes. Mr Ross added: While Dublin Port is important in attracting cruise liners to Ireland through Dublin, the benefits that accrue to other ports around our coast are significant. In the meantime, Cobh continues as a dedicated cruise berth and will remain so post-Brexit. The Port of Cork is working with Belfast Harbour to see if it can take some of the additional business which may be lost as a result of Dublin Port's infrastructural works. "In addition, Failte Ireland continues to support the development and promotion of the cruise tourism sector. The Irish Examiner reported recently that tourism services had labelled Dublin Port's decision to curtail the use of its facilities by cruise ships and to axe turnarounds for liners in future years, as a massive blow nationwide. The fear is cruise liners will choose other European destinations. Suppliers here are anxious, given 150 cruise ships come into Dublin Port annually with over 200,000 visitors. Fianna Fail's Robert Troy queried what could be done to minimise cruise liner disruption. Mr Ross said tourism services, port authorities and others would meet in the next two weeks over concerns. The Exchequer recorded a deficit of 966m in for the first three months of 2019. That was an improvement of 149m in the State's financial position on a year-on-year basis, ahead of the 411m profiled in the budget. The policy manager for the Freight Transport Association of Northern Ireland has warned that a no deal Brexit is a Withdrawal Agreement 2.0 which could mean a border in the Irish Sea as well as a hard border between the Republic and the North. Seamus Leheny told RTE Radios Morning Ireland that it has been difficult for companies in the North to plan for Brexit because they dont know whats happening. Thats the problem, the lack of clarity, the fact that everything is up in the air. He said it was the ultimate irony that a no deal exit could come about because of fears re the backstop. The Governments no deal contingency plans did not ease the fears of businesses who feared an unlevel play field. A no deal Brexit is ten times worse than the withdrawal agreement, added Mr Leheny. Trade in Northern Ireland is reliant on supply chains, he explained. Seventy per cent of products from the Republic are ingredients/components and are in the high volume/low value category. Northern Ireland exports to the UK are made up from ingredients/components from the Republic so if there are regulatory controls or tariffs that will have a major impact, he warned. It will make business economically unviable, claimed Mr Leheny. Contingency planning involving moving some elements of their business to the Republic would cost a lot of money and people are not making decisions because they dont know whats happening. Any plans to allow Northern Ireland be used as a back door to the UK will not last long because the WTO will eventually take legal action and England will get fed up with Northern Ireland being used as a back door, he said. The chief executive of Retail Northern Ireland has warned that the latest ATM robbery is causing major problems for small family-owned businesses. Commenting on the robbery in Ahoghill, Co Antrim early on Monday involving a stolen digger, Glyn Roberts told RTE radios Morning Ireland that such crimes are attacking small businesses that are the backbone of the rural economy, providing an invaluable service to the local community. Update 9.10pm: Gardai in Blanchardstown have condemned the reckless attack which took place outside a secondary school in the Corduff area. At around 3.40pm this afternoon, a lone gunman appeared to target a man in his 20s who was waiting outside Riversdale Community College on Blanchardstown Road North. No one was injured in the incident and the gunman fled the scene in the direction of Corduff Grove. Gardai arrested a number of people at the scene who were released following searches. Searches were carried out this evening in the Corduff area with the assistance of the Emergency Response Unit and Armed Support Units. No further arrests have been made at this time. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin The attack took place in broad daylight at a time when school was about to finish and students would have been exiting the building and parents were arriving to collect their children. Superintendent Noel Carolan is appealing for anyone who was in the vicinity of the Community College between 3pm and 3.40pm to contact Blanchardstown Garda Station. In particular, Gardai are looking for anyone who may have dashcam footage from Blanchardstown Road North or Corduff Grove. They are also appealing for any person who observed any unusual activity in the vicinity of the Community College in recent days to make contact at Blanchardstown Garda Station at 01-6669700 or the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station. Calls for greater support for gardai following 'traumatic' shooting incident at Blanchardstown school Update 7.30pm: Two men narrowly escaped injury this afternoon after a gunman fired shots outside a secondary school in Blanchardstown. The gunman approached the two men at around 3.30pm and fled the scene after missing his target. There are reports that the incident could be related to an ongoing feud in the area. Gardai conducting searches in Corduff following shooting incident this afternoon. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin Responding to this afternoon's incident, local Fianna Fail TD Jack Chambers said that it "marks a very alarming precedent". "This latest incident will have proven traumatic for parents and students who were in the immediate vicinity, there is no doubt that innocent people felt frightened." Deputy Chambers called for national resources to be deployed to provide back up for local Gardai. When gangland tensions heightened in the inner city in 2016, there was a very specialist Garda response to contain violence and protect the broader public. For such an incident to occur in a residential area within yards of a school in the middle of a weekday afternoon is not normal and should not be treated as a normal part of everyday life. Sinn Fein councillor for Mulhuddart Paul Donnelly urged anyone with information to speak to An Garda Siochana. "It beggars belief that a person would put the lives of school children in danger like this," said Cllr Donnelly. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin Two men escape uninjured after attempted shooting outside Blanchardstown school Update 5.20pm: Two men have narrowly escaped injury after a shooting outside a secondary school in West Dublin. It happened outside Riversdale Community College when the gunman approached the men just after 3.30pm this afternoon. He missed his target and fled the scene. Gardai from Blanchardstown, who are at the scene, say their investigation is still live. Gardai have confirmed that they were alerted to a shooting incident in the Corduff area (Blanchardstown Road North) at approximately 3.40pm. They said that no persons were injured during the incident. According to RTE, gardai believe that a man who was waiting to collect a student from the school was the intended target. There are reports that the incident could be related to an ongoing feud in the area. South Africa: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela remembered Today marks the one year anniversary of the passing of struggle stalwart Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela. Mam Winnie, as she was affectionately known, passed away on this day last year at a Johannesburg hospital after a long illness at the age of 81. Madikizela-Mandela was one of the greatest icons of the struggle against apartheid. She fought valiantly against the apartheid State and sacrificed her life for the freedom of the country, which saw her landing in jail on numerous occasions for her resistance. Madikizela-Mandela kept the memory of her imprisoned husband Nelson Mandela alive during his years on Robben Island and helped give the struggle for justice in South Africa one of its most recognisable faces. She dedicated most of her adult life to the cause of the people and for this, she was known far and wide as the Mother of the Nation. She will be remembered today at a wreath-laying ceremony at Fourways Memorial Park. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. A High Court challenge has been brought over a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to grant an industrial emissions licence to a chicken rearing plant in Co Limerick. The action has been taken by environmental activist Peter Sweetman in respect of the EPA decision of February 6 last to grant the licence to Mr Michael Noel O'Connor to operate a facility that rears 74,000 broiler chickens at Rathcahill West, Templeglantine, Newcastlewest, Co Limerick. At the High Court James Devlin SC for Mr Sweetman said it is his client's case that the EPA decision is flawed and should be set aside. The EPA failed to consider relevant matters, lacked jurisdiction to make the decision and failed to properly take into account the EU Habitats, Waste Water and Environmental Impact Directives when it decided to award the licence. Counsel said his client has concerns about 'poultry litter' from the facility which produces broiler chickens, which are chickens that are used as meat. This litter is cleared from the sheds every six to eight weeks when straw bedding is removed and the shed floors are washed down with water, counsel said. These emissions, counsel said, is then used as compost at a mushroom facility, but most of it is spread on land. Counsel said the licence was granted by the EPA, which does not know the location of the land where the litter is being spread. It is also his client's case that the EPA finding that the spreading of the litter will not affect the integrity of any protected site is not a justified conclusion. In his action against the EPA, Ireland and the Attorney General Mr Sweetman seeks an order quashing the decision to award the licence. He also seeks various declarations including that the EPA erred in law and acted contrary to the EU Directive on waste by failing to quantify or make provision for the proper management of waste from the operation. He further seeks a declaration that the decision was based on an assessment that does not contain complete, precise or definitive findings capable of removing all doubt to the effect of the site on protected sites. Mr O'Connor is a notice party to the proceedings. Permission to bring the challenge was granted, on an ex-parte basis, by Mr Justice Seamus Noonan. The case will come back before the court in June. The medical files of over 7,500 children are being reviewed over allegations their teeth were "damaged" by orthodontic services in Dublin. According to the Irish Times, it is alleged children had braces left on for longer than intended leading to damage. Others had to get false teeth because the appliances were not removed when they should have been. The HSE audit relates to some patients who received treatment between 1999 and 2002. Retired consultant orthodontist Ted McNamara, who made the original complaint, said it was disappointing the HSE had still not published the review, which was completed in 2015. I was complaining for up to 14 years about damage to childrens teeth. It was obvious there was a problem, but no one did anything about it for years. The audit of orthodontic services began in 2015 after the HSE received a highly critical report commissioned from two UK experts into the allegations. The Irish Times said it sought a copy of the review under freedom of information three years ago but this request was refused. The HSE said it was not yet finalised for publication and was with its lawyers. Last week, a spokeswoman told the publication it was in effect a scoping report commissioned to advise the HSE on what actions to take if there was a risk of harm to patients. The HSE cannot, as a matter of course, commit to the publication or otherwise of such reports prior to their completion, as the benefits of publication must be balanced with the requirement for patient confidentiality, and our obligation to afford natural justice to all other parties concerned. It comes as the Government prepares to launch its oral health policy this week, which is expected to recommend the roll-out of free dental care to children from next year. Dr Anne Twomey is a dentist in Carrigaline in Cork and says the scale of the problem is stark. "Over 10,000 children have a general anaesthetic every year to have rotten teeth removed from their mouths. That is for a preventable disease," she said. "The number one reason why any child in Ireland is hospitalised for a general anaesthetic is to have teeth removed. I'd like to see that number coming down. "The only way that number will come down is if resources are put in there to prevent it." Tanaiste Simon Coveney has said he agrees that a no-deal Brexit is increasingly likely with every day that passes. Speaking at Leaders' Questions, Mr Coveney said no-deal Brexit preparations have intensified significantly in recent days and that will continue. What we need to do and what we are doing now is to intensify our discussions with the European Commission on how we protect the Good Friday Agreement while at the same reassuring other EU countries that Ireland is protecting the integrity of the Single Market, he added. Ireland is not going to allow a situation where the UK leaving the European Union without a deal drags Ireland out of the Single Market with it. We cannot allow that situation, he said. While Westminster continues to debate #Brexit in search of way forward - All businesses linked to UK in Ireland should be preparing for the potential impact of No-Deal. Dont ignore this possibility - Theres a lot of help, funding & advice available, access it and be informed! https://t.co/wIS5XOU4En Simon Coveney (@simoncoveney) April 1, 2019 "By that, I mean that a response of checks in EU ports on all Irish products is not a runner. It would cause significant damage to our economy and we will not allow it." Pressurised by Fianna Fail's Deputy Leader Dara Calleary to reveal what plans are being developed to ensure no hard border returns while maintaining our EU obligations to the single market. Every part of this House wants to work with the Government in preparation for a hard Brexit but we need the information. "We need to see the details of the plan so that we can share it and get it out there. Hope is no longer a strategy. Surely that detail should be shared with this House. "It is the detail that is relevant to every single citizen of this island, in all 32 counties, he said. I presume that detail is being discussed in Paris today, and will be discussed with Chancellor Merkel on Thursday but is not being discussed in this House. "I presume the Taoiseach and President Macron are not discussing their Kylie collections today: they must be discussing this level of detail, he added. Mr Coveney said to present this as the Irish Government having a plan that it goes to Brussels with to look for approval for is not accurate. I think we are well prepared in many ways. We go through the detail of that preparation on quite a regular basis with stakeholders and many others. "I will bring two Brexit papers to Cabinet this evening when it meets at 8.30pm on the Taoiseach's return from Paris, he said. The Taoiseach has referred to the conversations that have begun on that issue. There was a meeting last Friday and those discussions will continue into this week. We must find a way to protect the Single Market's integrity but also avoid physical border infrastructure on the Border. "That is something on which we do not have an agreed plan but this week, and presumably into next week if necessary, we are working on this in the context of a no-deal Brexit, he said. A 'black escalation level' had to be declared at Cork University Hospital (CUH) as there was such a severe backlog of patients in the emergency department. A black escalation, according to HSE guidelines, means the emergency department (ED) and other parts of the hospital are in a "critical position and clinically unsafe. Because of the extreme congestion being experienced at the hospital people were warned on Monday night that they would have to wait over 12 hours for treatment. There were 70 admitted patients waiting for beds at CUH yesterday when management moved the status of its ED down to high demand. Tanaiste Simon Coveney was quizzed by Opposition leaders and TDs in the Dail about the need to issue a status black escalation warning. Sinn Fein president, Mary Lou McDonald said she understood a status black escalation was declared on Monday night when the hospital was at maximum capacity and when it was deemed unsafe to admit further patients. She said there were reports that during the status black escalation up to eight ambulances were lined up outside CUH's emergency department waiting to transfer patients. I am told that one of those ambulances was forced to wait for more than four hours. That is the sort of situation that puts patients and staff at serious risk and it is unacceptable, she said. Mr Coveney said Ms McDonald was right that a serious challenge had arisen in CUH and they were responding with the seriousness that was needed. We need to and are putting the extra resources and the priority systems in place to respond to that in accordance with the needs of patients there, Mr Coveney added. .@MaryLouMcDonald has called on the Govt to take radical action on capacity crisis in our hospitals. Last night in Cork, the patients attending the Emergency Department faced extreme delays of up to twelve hours, with services reaching breaking point. pic.twitter.com/ub9OjqqCTf Sinn Fein (@sinnfeinireland) April 2, 2019 Ms McDonald also pointed out there were more patients on trolleys in University Hospital Limerick than in Dublin's nine hospitals combined on Monday. I am sure the Tanaiste will agree this is shocking, she said. A spokesperson for CUH said its ED was experiencing severe congestion over the last 24-48 hours due to "increased patient attendances". She said management were implementing additional measures and patient safety was the "utmost priority". - additional reporting by Evelyn Ring Delays of up to 12 hours at Cork hospital during 'status black' warning Update 3.55pm: Major crowding issues at Cork University Hospital on Monday evening and Tuesday morning dominated proceedings in the Dail during Leaders' Questions. Tanaiste Simon Coveney was questioned by Opposition leaders and TDs about the need to issue a 'Status Black' escalation warning at the hospital, with patients attending the emergency department facing extreme delays of up to 12 hours and with services reaching breaking point. A status black escalation is declared, I understand, when the hospital is at maximum capacity and when it is deemed unsafe to admit further patients, Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald said. There were 70 patients on trolleys in Cork University Hospital this morning, with 570 patients on trolleys across the State. Yesterday, in Limerick there were more patients on trolleys than in Dublin's nine hospitals combined, according to the INMO. I am sure the Tanaiste will agree that this is shocking, she said. There are also reports that during the status black escalation up to eight ambulances were lined up outside the accident and emergency at Cork University Hospital waiting to hand over patients, she said. I am told that one of those ambulances was forced to wait for more than four hours. That is the sort of situation that puts patient and staff at serious risk and it is unacceptable. In response, Mr Coveney said the number of patients waiting on trolleys in Cork University Hospital was 55 and on Tuesday morning the Health Service Executive, HSE, trolley system reported 431 patients waiting on trolleys nationally. This is an increase on the same day last year when there were 296 patients on trolleys, he said. The number of patients waiting on trolleys at Cork University Hospital this morning is exceptionally high. The HSE identified specific issues and challenges on the site, he said. "The first was a significant capacity demand mismatch, with high rates of attendance and admission and a low rate of discharges." The hospital remains in a full-capacity protocol, with the highest trolley count this year on the site. Key actions are now underway in Cork University Hospital to improve the position for patients and these actions include full mobilisation of all resources, escalation meetings with both the group chief executive officer and chief compliance officer and meetings scheduled with consultants, Mr Coveney added. The Deputy is right that a serious challenge has arisen in CUH as of last night and again today. We are responding with the seriousness that is needed. We need to and are putting the extra resources and the priority systems in place to respond to that in accordance with the needs of patients there, Mr Coveney added. In response 2 @MaryLouMcDonald Tanaiste just described the situation for staff in Cork University Hospital last night as difficult Am sure that staff working in the intolerable unsafe conditions created by govt policy would use a very different word @INMO_IRL @IMO_IRL @SIPTU Louise HoHoHoReilly TD for Dublin Fingal (@loreillysf) April 2, 2019 Ms McDonald responded by saying the status black escalation, as the Tanaiste knows, is essentially a declaration that a hospital is no longer safe. It was dangerous. I described the scenario for the Tanaiste, with ambulances lined up outside the hospital and one that I know of that waited for more than four hours to hand over a patient. "This is a very serious accident waiting to happen and it is playing out on this Government's watch, she said. A woman has been jailed after she tried to pass her boyfriend heroin via a kiss while he was under escort on his way to prison. Marta Zasada, 26, had the heroin wrapped in tin foil and under her tongue when it was detected by gardai in Bandon in Co Cork. Clonakilty District Court heard that on December 12, 2017, Ms Zasada's boyfriend, Emil Hudi, was being transported to prison when he asked his escorts if he could contact Ms Zasada to get some money. But when the escorts and Mr Hudi met with Ms Zasada, of 8 Meadowlands in Bandon, gardai believed she was nervous and noted she had no money with her. Sgt Paul Kelly told Judge James McNulty that they asked Ms Zasada to open her mouth and found the heroin wrapped in foil under her tongue. The Judge asked: "Was the suspicion that she was to hand over the heroin by mouth kissing?" Sgt Kelly said: "That is correct, Judge." Ms Zasada has 34 previous convictions, with her solicitor Plunkett Taaffe saying her record was entirely linked to heroin addiction. She pleaded guilty to possession for purposes of sale and supply as well as a simple possession charge and a failure to appear in court on a previous occasion. She had been on temporary release from prison last November and unlawfully at large when she returned to her native Poland for drug treatment. She returned to Ireland a fortnight before she was arrested late last month in Bandon. Among her previous convictions was a charge of attempting to get heroin to Mr Hudi while he was in prison. Judge McNulty said of Mr Hudi, who was present in court: "He is bad news. He is certainly bad news for Marta and he is no help to her." The judge said he had prevailed on her to deliver controlled drugs to him while he was under escort on his way to prison, in what he described as "a tormented kind of love". "There they are, now stuck in a fatal attraction and a fatal addiction." He sentenced her to nine months in prison on the more serious drugs charge with another three months to be served concurrently on the simple possession and placed her on a probation bond for one year. On her release from prison, he said she may wish to consider turning left at the exit of Limerick Prison, and staying away from Bandon and Mr Hudi. The husband of a terminally ill woman who has sued over the alleged misinterpretation of her CervicalCheck smear test has told how their lives have been turned upside down since her cancer diagnosis. My wife told me over the phone. I was in shock and I broke down. I will never forget that phonecall, he told a High Court judge of the cancer diagnosis a few days before Christmas 2015. That Christmas was a difficult time for all of us. We knew there was something big coming down the line, he told Mr Justice Kevin Cross. On the third day of the woman's action against laboratories and the HSE, her husband said the recurrence of her cancer two years later was "like being back in another big hole again." When they got the news last year that the cancer was inoperable, her husband said "it was like being hit by a bus." Earlier the legal team representing the mother of two yesterday opposed mediation talks while it said the HSE denies primary liability in the case. Patrick Treacy SC for the mother of two said his side was opposed to it and he said it was incomprehensible to the woman and her husband how the HSE can deny primary liability. Counsel said to spend days in mediation when the HSE are saying it has no primary liability is a a fools errand and it would put the mediation to nought. The mother of two who is in her 40s now has Stage 4 cancer and has had palliative chemotherapy and her prognosis is between 12 months to 22 months. She cannot be identified by order of the court.Along with her husband, she has brought an action against the HSE and three laboratory companies including the one in Austin Texas which tested her smear slide in 2010 and reported it as negative. Mr Justice Kevin Cross said he was reluctant to direct mediation take place when there was opposition to it, but he urged all sides to have discussions. I am not going to force you in to something you dont want to do, the judge added. Eoin McCullough SC for the laboratories applied to the court for a direction that mediation take place this week.Patrick Hanratty SC for the HSE supported the application. Mr Treacy said the womans prognosis is extremely serious and it was inhumane to delay her case. Mediation he said had come on to the landscape on Monday. The womans legal team he said who were experienced in this type of mediation, had a certain jaundiced view especially in CervicalCheck cases where the HSE do not accept primary liability. Mr Treacy said he could not see how mediation will achieve anything that negotiation wont. He pointed out that negotiation between the legal teams would also be much quicker and could go on in the background as the case continued. The couple have sued the HSE along with two companies which provided medical diagnostic services in the State, Sonic Healthcare (Ireland) Ltd with registered offices at Sandyford Business Park, Dublin and Medlab Pathology Ltd with offices at Sandyford Business park, Dublin and US laboratory Clinical Pathology Laboratories Incorporated of Austin, Texas. It is claimed they all owed the woman a a duty of care in the provision of the cervical screening programme and in the provision of all services associated with it. The woman on September 17, 2010 underwent a cervical smear test as part of the national cervical screening programme. Her sample was sent for review and a laboratory report showed the sample was satisfactory for assessment and there was no evidence of the presence of abnormal tissue. It is claimed there was an alleged failure to correctly report and diagnose and there was an alleged misinterpretation of the woman's smear slide taken in 2010 and that her cancer was allowed to develop and spread unidentified, unmonitored and untreated until she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in December 2015. The claims are denied The case before Mr Justice Kevin Cross continues tomorrow. A man who was serving a 40-year driving ban when he led gardai on a high-speed car chase has been jailed for two and a half years. Judge Karen O'Connor said that Graham Taylor (29) drove his car at speeds at up to 120kmph in a 50kmph zone and forced other road users to take evasive action to avoid crashing into his car. She said he was old enough to know better and it was fortunate nobody was injured. Taylor of Kiltalown Park, Tallaght, Dublin has eleven previous convictions for dangerous driving. He was convicted by a Dublin Circuit Criminal Court jury following a trial earlier this year of three counts of endangerment and three counts of dangerous driving in Tallaght on June 19, 2016. Taylor, who was disqualified from driving for 40 years in 2012, continues to deny the offences. Judge O'Connor noted that reports before court from a clinical psychologist and the Probation Services showed that he is desirous of a better life and is turning a corner. She suspended the last year of a three and a half year sentence on condition he engage with addiction services, drug treatment, and victim and offence focused work. She also imposed a ten-year driving disqualification. His 121 previous convictions include 11 dangerous driving, burglary, handling stolen property, criminal damage, assault of a garda and road traffic and public order offences. Detective Garda David Jennings told Dean Kelly BL, prosecuting, that he was stopped at lights at 12.30pm at the junction of Brookfield and Cheeverstown Roads when he saw a Volkswagen Passat being driven by a person he recognised as Taylor turning onto Brookfield Road. Det Gda Jennings said he moved his vehicle to block the path of the Passat but it took off at high speed. He said gardai began to pursue the Passat while it drove at high speed on the wrong side of the road overtaking other cars, went the wrong way around roundabouts and forced other motorists to mount the pavement to avoid a collision. He said at one stage, the gardai were travelling at 120kmph in a 50kmph zone and the Passat was pulling away from them. Gda Jennings said the gardai lost sight of the car after it approached a bend at high speed on the wrong side of the road at Lidl on Fortunestown Lane, before going the wrong way around a roundabout at City West Road. He said the pursuit, which lasted about two minutes, took place during moderately heavy traffic and the roads were wet and slippery, with light rain falling. The garda agreed with Karl Monahan BL, defending, that there had been no collisions and no injuries. Mr Monahan said Taylor was now the father of a young child and had strong family support. He said Taylor wished to undertake an electrical apprenticeship and recognised that it was time to change his life. He said Taylor succumbed to drug use at an early age and first went into custody as a 17-year-old. He submitted there was a risk of institutionalisation given the time Taylor had spent in the prison system. Counsel said Taylor was using his time in custody well, doing courses and linking in with services. - Additional reporting by Declan Brennan A telecommunications firm sacked a pregnant woman in spite of her pleas that her absences from work were due to her suffering morning sickness. The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has ordered the telecommunications company to pay the woman 16,460 after finding that it discriminated against her on the grounds of her being pregnant when dismissing her. The woman told the WRC hearing that she was deeply hurt, upset, and shocked at the manner in which the company dealt with her. The woman commenced working as a retail sales consultant at the firms store in the west of the country on December 18, 2017, after relocating from Dublin for the job. On December 22, 2017, the worker fell ill at work and was admitted to hospital the same day after a referral from her GP. Six days later, the woman - earning 9.45 an hour - returned to work and told her immediate boss that her illness was due to her being 12 weeks pregnant. The woman had lost 10kg in weight at the start of her complicated pregnancy. The woman missed more days in January 2018 due to morning sickness and returned to work on January 20, 2018, as she was feeling better and eager to get back to work. However, on January 23, 2018, the companys Area Manager arrived at the store to tell the woman that it was time for her Probation Review. In the review, the Area Manager raised one instance where the employee didnt wear her uniform and he also raised the matter of her accessing unauthorised websites while working. The Area Manager then pointed out the dates on which she was absent on certified sick-leave and then abruptly concluded the meeting by saying: Your performance has failed so this is your last day. The worker pleaded with the Area Manager that the certified sick leave was due to her suffering from morning sickness in the first trimester of her pregnancy. She explained that she should not require as many sick days once she progressed past the difficult early stage of her pregnancy. However, she said that the Area Manager did not give this any consideration. The woman claimed that her dismissal was due to her being pregnant. The woman stated that the other issues raised were both trivial and irrelevant and appear to have been manufactured in order to facilitate her immediate dismissal. In its submission to the WRC, the firm denied that the worker had been discriminated against. The firm stated that the workers performance fell below the required standards and she was given comprehensive feedback at the probation review. The firm stated that a view was taken that she was not showing progression within the role and as she did not show any enthusiasm to learn about any aspect of the role, it was better to terminate the probation. The firm employs over 100 staff and stated that the worker was not negatively treated because she was pregnant. The firm pointed out that it has a maternity leave policy in place and is fully supportive of any colleagues that avail of this leave. The firm stated there are five colleagues currently on maternity leave with a further five due to commence leave shortly. In her findings, WRC Adjudication Officer Emer OShea stated that the worker gave credible and consistent evidence denying any performance issues. Ms OShea stated that no direct evidence was provided by the workers line managers or by the decision-makers in the dismissal process. Ms OShea found that the employer has failed to rebut the claimants prima facie case for discrimination. Along with ordering the firm to pay the 16,460 to the ex-worker, Ms OShea is also requiring the firm to review with its Human Resources (HR) policies to ensure that they comply with the Employment Equality Act. Several members of staff at University Hospital Kerry have been assaulted over the past year. That is according to UHK General Manager Fearghal Grimes, who has been speaking at the launch of a new scheme designed to reduce crime and improve safety. Fianna Fail TD James Lawless wants Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to put his money where his mouth is and reveal his intentions for Facebook in relation to the adoption of GDPR rules worldwide. Mr Lawless is one of a number of Irish politicians who will meet with Mr Zuckerberg in Dublin today. He told RTE radios Morning Ireland that he is looking forward to meeting Mr Zuckerberg as this is an area on which he has been working for some time. The Fianna Fail backbencher introduced the Social Media Transparency Bill to the Dail two years ago in light of the US elections and online interference. The issue of electoral interference and harmful content is huge worldwide, he said, especially in light of the recent shooting in New Zealand, and he believes moderators are struggling to keep on top of managing content. Mr Zuckerberg is appealing to people by saying all the right things. He's on this kind of charm offensive now, he's coming around speaking to parliamentarians and regulators around Europe this week. James Lawless Does he mean what he says? I know the UK Information Commissioner yesterday highlighted that, yes he's saying all the right things over the weekend and recently, but at the same time he's appealing the fine that was imposed on him by the UK Commissioner last year." Mr Lawless said he wants to find out Mr Zuckerberg's intentions after saying he wanted Facebook to adopt GDPR type rules worldwide. However, he pointed out that last year Mr Zuckerberg transferred around 500 million data sets out of Dublin the night before GDPR came into force. In light of this action, Mr Lawless said he wants Mr Zuckerberg to put his money where his mouth is. Mr Lawless warned that Mr Zuckerberg cannot continue to resist the notion that Facebook is still just a platform rather than a publisher. "The old idea was that a newspaper or broadcasting show was a publisher because it had some editorial control and a platform was a computer that was pretty much dumb, that didn't have any knowledge other than the binary code. "Facebook has gone far beyond that, its very sophisticated, it targets people with algorithms in great detail depending on all their habits and shopping preferences and cultural preferences. Two primary schools in Dublin have warned parents they will not be able to celebrate Christmas if there is a change of patronage. It comes as one of eight Catholic primary schools in the Portmarnock-Malahide-Kinsealy area is to transfer to a non-denominational model. Two of the schools have written to parents claiming that Christmas, Easter and St Patrick's Day would no longer be marked. One of the schools also told parents that a large number of teachers would consider leaving if there was a change in patronage. Parents will be asked to vote on whether or not they want their child's school to change from a religious ethos or not. In a statement, Educate Together said students at their multi-denominational/equality-based schools are "exposed to different beliefs and perspectives in a respectful way that encourages critical thinking". "Christmas is, of course, marked in Educate Together schools nationwide; just as our schools endeavour mark Diwali, Eid, Vaisakhi and other religious festivals throughout the school term," they added. CEO of Educate Together Paul Rowe says their model celebrates the identity of all students. "Educate Together schools are based on an equality principle in which the identity of all children are guaranteed equal respect," he said. "That means the schools mark all kinds of celebrations, religious and non-religious cultural events in an appropriate way." The Government and Health Minister Simon Harris came under severe attack in the Dail over fresh delays in cervical tests for women who had to be retested. Opposition TDs sought answers from Tanaiste Simon Coveney over the delays involving a third party contractor, Medlab, with Mr Harris blamed for being the direct cause of the backlogs. Fianna Fail's Lisa Chambers said the situation has gone beyond serious. The Minister for Health single-handedly caused this backlog and he has failed to get to grips with it, said Ms Chambers. MedLab treats patients and deals with women in rural Ireland, so women in all of those constituencies in rural Ireland wait much longer than other women. "The wait to get a smear result has increased from five or six weeks to eight months. "Women are being told their tests have expired and must come back in for another repeat smear, having sought the repeat test in the first place because they were worried, she added. It was meant to be a reassurance smear test. What is the Government doing to fix it? Where is the extra capacity? Where are the extra resources? When will the backlog be cleared? she asked Mr Coveney. Solidarity TD Joan Collins called for answers since it emerged that many of the women facing delays are now being forced to seek private medical care in order to get a timely response. Joan Collins I want clarification on what is happening. Why is this happening? How can a private smear test be prioritised over the 78,000 women?, she said. In response, Mr Coveney said the HSE has sourced additional capacity and has been working on it for a number of weeks in a number of countries and is trying to finalise arrangements so this capacity can be incorporated into the CervicalCheck programme. This is a capacity issue. We cannot develop increased capacity here in Ireland in the short term so we need to source it in other parts of the world, he said. "This is what the HSE is endeavouring to do at the moment and, for the first time, I have a note that suggests it has secured capacity and is trying to finalise contractual arrangements in this regard. Fortescue Metals Group has given the green light to a $US2.6 billion ($3.7 billion) mine and processing joint venture that will enable it to sell higher grade iron ore in China and around the world. The company believes the project, scheduled to deliver its first product in the June half of 2022, will increase its earnings and cash flow, generating bigger shareholder returns. "The Iron Bridge project will deliver a premium product with iron content of 67 per cent," FMG chief executive Elizabeth Gaines said. Credit:Bloomberg Iron ore prices have surged this year after a dam disaster has slashed the production of the world's biggest producer, Vale, in Brazil. A key benchmark price for iron ore closed on Monday at $US87.90, up 1 per cent. But Fortescue chief executive Elizabeth Gaines said the miner had not accelerated the project in response to the recent price surge. For years, executives at Wynn Resorts concealed allegations of sexual misconduct against company founder Steve Wynn, according to a long- awaited report by Massachusetts casino regulators released Tuesday. Casino mogul Steve Wynn Credit:AP The 200-page report by the state Gaming Commission doesn't make a recommendation about the fate of the company's Massachusetts casino licence or its nearly $US3 billion ($4.3 billion) Boston-area resort slated to open in June. But it concludes by saying recent reforms touted by the company - notably the resignation of Steve Wynn as CEO and the ousting of every official who knew about the allegations but failed to report them - do not "erase the fact that the corporate failures revealed in this investigation are significant, repetitive and reflective of the company's historical governance practices." "Inaction and failures," the report concluded, contributed to a culture "where employees were reluctant to report allegations against Mr. Wynn to management." The Lord is my shepherd, but He also has a sideline as an Instagram influencer. As congregations dwindle in mainstream churches, "hipster" worshippers are spreading the word on social media, bringing a young, cool crowd to Christ. At first glance, these Christian accounts are hardly different to anything else on Instagram. Biblesandcoffee, an account run by a 27-year-old woman from Los Angeles, posts beautiful shots of her home, bookshelves artfully crammed with hundreds of Bibles. In another picture, she clutches an iced coffee, showing off a flawless gel manicure. In curling calligraphy, the cup has a message saying: "A little coffee, a lotta Jesus." Hillsong Church is attracting young worshippers, who are spreading the message through social media. Credit:JESSICA LEHRMAN Other Christian accounts post inspirational quotes laid over images of pretty landscapes. "The Lord is my light and my salvation", says a post on daily_bibleverses, on top of a sepia-toned picture of New York. Another shows a woman with tousled hair and sunglasses slack-jawed with joy. "Nothing can separate you from the love of Christ", says the caption. Arguably the leader of fashion-conscious faith is Hillsong, a Sydney-based church established in 1983 by Bobbie and Brian Houston, an Australian couple with almost a million Instagram followers between them. Hillsong's website and social media accounts are full of pictures of young, attractive types wearing ripped jeans who just happen to be singing hymns. Wendy McDougall still remembers the first photo she sold. It was 1979, and she was just 17 when the Angels bought a dramatic live shot she had taken of lead singer Doc Neeson in full flight. "Yes, I suppose I was underage at a lot of shows when I started out," admits McDougall, who is now 57. "Fortunately [Sydney radio station] Double J put on a lot of free all-ages shows. I saw the Angels with Split Enz when they played on the roof of the swimming pool building in the middle of Victoria Park." Mick Jagger. Credit:Wendy McDougall Four decades on, McDougall has selected 140 photos from her vast archive for an upcoming exhibition, It's Only Rock 'n' Roll But I Like It. The process has got her thinking about the journey from being a teenage girl obsessed with music to becoming one of Australia's best-known rock photographers who last year won the Australian Women in Music Award for photography. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's first budget won't decide the vote of Queanbeyan's Greg Walton, but the builder said promised tax cuts and increased access to the instant asset write-off would help his family of three get ahead. Since returning to Australia after seven years living in the UK, Mr Walton and his wife Liz have focused on getting restarted while raising their three-year-old daughter. Mr Walton saw the federal budget as a pitch to low and middle-income voters, rather than the top end of town, and welcomed its promise to increase the instant asset write-off threshold from $25,000 to $30,000. A plan to cut the 32.5 per cent income tax rate to 30 per cent in 2024 would also help his family, he said. Greg Walton, with his wife Liz and daughter Willow, welcomed a promise to increase access to the instant asset write-off. Credit:Elesa Kurtz "Having a surplus and not increasing taxes, it's a good budget as far as budgets go." "No other family should have to go through this horrendous pain. One death is too many. We would please ask that the media now leave us in peace to deal with our loss. Paramedics were initially unable to reach the form worker, who was trapped under rubble when the scaffolding collapsed. He was pronounced dead at the scene a few hours after the incident. The scaffolding collapse at Macquarie Park. Credit:Nine News The second man rescued, 39, suffered injuries to his lower body and was taken to Royal North Shore Hospital where he remains in a stable condition. He was due to undergo further surgery on Tuesday. Another two workers were laying bricks at the top of the structure and were able to jump to safety. A video has emerged capturing heated scenes between workers and police officers, who tried to maintain order in the minutes following the collapse. The workers can be seen milling helplessly around the rubble, desperate to rescue those trapped underneath. "You're wasting time," one called at the police. "We need action." "My brother's down there," another cried. Mr Cassaniti's death was described as shocking and heartbreaking by Australia's political leaders. "I am just so saddened about the death of young scaffolding apprentice Christopher Cassaniti. To his parents and workmates my heart goes out to you," Prime Minister Scott Morrison tweeted on Tuesday morning. Opposition leader Bill Shorten also sent his condolences and described Mr Cassaniti's death as shocking. "As a father of 3, it is incomprehensible what his family must be going through at this time - and I think I speak for everyone when I say they are in our thoughts," Mr Shorten tweeted. At the building site on Tuesday, about 30 workers were brought food as they gathered outside demountable offices, waiting to speak with counsellors. A small number could be seen re-entering the building site, which was otherwise deserted. The assistant state secretary of the CFMEU, Robert Kera, described the mood as "extremely sombre". "A lot of them are grief-stricken," he said. "A lot of them got together [this morning] in a show of solidarity and support." Mr Cassaniti was a CFMEU member. Mr Kera said the union was liaising with SafeWork NSW and was very keen to establish the primary cause of the scaffolding collapse. It was "extremely difficult" to say when building work would recommence on the site. "The emotional welfare of the workers is our primary concern," Mr Kera said. "We haven't even considered a return to work." SafeWork said it had sent inspectors to the site on Monday. An operation also had been launched on Monday to ensure businesses understood the safety requirements for workers using scaffolding and working from a height. Mr Cassaniti died before rescue workers could get to him under the debris. Credit:Facebook Days before the incident Mr Cassaniti's mother sang the praises of her son, who turned 18 last Wednesday. "We wish you all the best that the world can dish out and May God be forever in your heart and bless you with much joy, happiness and most importantly health," she had posted to Facebook. On Monday evening, friends of the former St Patrick's College student posted tributes in memoriam. "You were a fantastic bloke and had a heart of gold," Benjamin Betros said. March was a month of extremes in Queensland as heat records were smashed and a cyclone lashed the state but April has heralded the return of average Autumn temperatures. The mercury plummeted to 15 degrees in Brisbane on Sunday for the first time in 2019, which was described by the weather bureau as the River City's coldest morning since November 10. On Monday, Brisbane's top temperature was on par with the April average, signalling a return to the norm. Credit:Fairfax Media - Bradley Kanaris The Bureau of Meteorology's March climate summary highlighted how hot it was in parts of the Sunshine State and the record-breaking rain relief brought by ex-Tropical Cyclone Trevor. Last month Queensland's top temperatures were 1.62 degrees above average. The minimums were 2.03 degrees above average, the third-warmest on record for March, and the overall temperature was 1.83 degrees above average, the fifth-warmest on record for March. The arrival of southern white rhino Carrie last year at Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast has raised awareness about the species with at least one rhino being killed by poachers in South Africa everyday and the threat of habitat loss and political conflict. Baby rhino Carrie has formed an incredible bond with the other female rhinos in Australia Zoos African Savannah since she was born, her zookeeper Kat Hanson being in absolute awe of her and how confident she is. Carrie is a new arrival at Australia Zoo as part of the Save the Rhino project. Credit:Robert Irwin/Australia Zoo We often see her running around at full speed with the other rhinos following closely behind, Ms Hanson said. Carrie has become a favourite among visitors to Australia Zoo with Sunshine Coast local Robyn Ellis visiting in March and saying "it was a privilege to see her rolling around in a mud bath and running around with her mum." Threats left on an answering machine sent a Gold Coast school into lockdown on Tuesday for the second time in two months. Police were called to Helensvale State School on Lindfield Road just after 8.30am. Officers remained at the scene for 90 minutes verifying whether the threat was authentic. It was later deemed a hoax. The Local Government Association of Queensland has strongly rejected legislation reforms proposed by the state government, concluding a special meeting on Tuesday with a near-unanimous verdict on the reforms. At a general meeting of Queensland mayors and councillors in Brisbane, the LGAQ rejected proposals such as proportional representation for undivided councils, public funding for campaigns, and compulsory preferential voting. The local government association voted to reject compulsory preferential voting for council elections. Credit:Fairfax Media LGAQ president and Sunshine Coast mayor Mark Jamieson said while the state government had backed down on some issues ahead of the March 2020 council election, the association felt it was important for the meeting to go ahead and give its members an opportunity to vote on issues that may reappear in the future. "I'm pleased to say that 77 councils of Queensland who were represented here today have voted in the main, by a significant majority, to support all the positions that we've put," he said. New flood risk maps have been released by Brisbane City Council, removing 26,000 properties from flood risk areas and downgrading a further 25,000 properties. Environment, parks and sustainability chair David McLachlan said new technology and modelling had enabled the council to upgrade the maps, available online, to better inform residents of the risks. Brisbane's situation on a flood plain means it is a permanent risk for the city. Credit:Glen Hunt Nearly 6000 properties have been added to the map, with all residents affected to be notified by post. "The updated maps provide a better user experience for residents with improved delineation between overland flow and other sources of flooding, highlighting key areas at risk from overland flow flooding and allowing users to better understand some of the likely consequences of this type of flooding," Cr McLachlan said. A truck has rolled, ruptured its fuel tank and spilled 50 litres of diesel onto a Brisbane road during the morning peak-hour. It took about three hours for the spill to be cleared but by 10.40am the previously blocked left lane had reopened and the slippery surface had been cleaned by council workers. Police asked drivers to slow down and there were light delays in the area during the Wednesday morning commute. Credit:Rob Homer Emergency services were called to Beaudesert Road and Sussex Road in Acacia Ridge in Brisbane's south just after 7.30am on Wednesday. A Queensland Fire and Emergency Services spokesman said the truck's 200-litre tank was not full at the time of the crash but 50 litres of fuel had still spilled across both roads. A north Queensland cane farmer fears acid-spraying ants will take over his home again if the state does not match federal government funding. Frank Teodo from Edmonton, south of Cairns, said he was living in a nightmare after yellow crazy ants crawled onto his face in the middle of the night and spat acid into his eyes, temporarily blinding him. I woke up in the middle of the night with a big nest of ants on me face, then they went into defence mode and started spraying acid, he said. You couldnt make a movie that scary. They burnt the lens of one of me eyes. A woman was allegedly held captive, repeatedly raped and threatened with death for four days by a man she met through a dating app. Robert Wilson, 32, allegedly imprisoned a 39-year-old Vietnamese woman in his home in Darley, a suburb of Bacchus Marsh, from March 25 to 29, raping her on multiple occasions, blackmailing her, stealing her money and asking her if she wanted to die while holding a crossbow to her head. Mr Wilson arriving at court on Tuesday evening. Credit:Nine News They met through dating app Badoo about two months ago, according to the victims statement. The woman's statement described how Mr Wilson's behaviour became extremely controlling, forcing her to change her Facebook relationship status, deleting contacts on her phone that he didnt like the sound of, then asked her to move in to his home around March 15. Eurydice Dixon's murderer will not be sentenced until late this year because the judge, his lawyer and a leading psychologist all have holidays booked. Prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court for an adjournment to obtain a psychiatric report on Jaymes Todd, who pleaded guilty to murder and three sexual offences in November. Jaymes Todd pleaded guilty to Eurydice Dixon's murder. Credit:Jason South Ms Dixon was raped and murdered in Carlton North's Princes Park while walking home from a comedy club in the city on June 12 last year. Todd, 19, from Broadmeadows, admitted following the 22-year-old for five kilometres across the city from Flinders Street Station. A Bacchus Marsh man who met a woman on a dating app allegedly imprisoned her for four days, threatened her with a crossbow and repeatedly sexually assaulted her. The 32-year-old was arrested on Tuesday morning and is expected to face the Melbourne Magistrates' Court. This man has been charged with kidnapping and raping a woman he met on a dating app over four days. Credit:Nine News He started a relationship with the 39-year-old Vietnamese national several weeks ago, police said, and picked her up about 6.30pm on Monday last week and drove to his house in Grey Street, Darley, a suburb of Bacchus Marsh. There, it is alleged he imprisoned the woman and threatened her with the crossbow and other weapons. Victoria's Police Commissioner has moved to block the release of a report into police failures in the hours that led up to the Bourke Street massacre. An elite police team refused multiple requests to intercept James Gargasoulas before he drove his car down Bourke Street on January 20, 2017, killing six people and injuring dozens of others. A lawyer for the police told a coronial inquest on Tuesday that a report into police inaction and a statement from then assistant commissioner Doug Fryer were "sensitive" documents and police would fight to keep them secret. Gargasoulas was jailed in February for at least 46 years for what the sentencing judge called one of Australia's "worst examples of mass murder". A grandfather who used a tomahawk and large knife to murder his love rival, attempted to kill his estranged wife and injured two neighbours who intervened will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars in Western Australia. Etem Duga, 77, had been married to Vickie Fidel for more than 40 years when she left him, obtained a violence restraining order to keep him away from their matrimonial home and began dating 73-year-old Philip Fidel. Duga was found guilty of murdering Mr Fidel at his Yokine unit where Ms Fidel was also living, attempting to murder Ms Fidel and John Jacobs, and endangering the life of Rupert Rudd in October 2016. He was sentenced in the WA Supreme Court on Tuesday to life in prison, with a minimum of 20 years before he can be eligible for parole. The median house in Perth has lost nearly $100,000 in value in the past five years, with suburbs in Mandurah and the eastern fringes hit the hardest by the drop, according to new figures. CoreLogic's March home value index report, released Monday, showed Perth had gone from being Australia's most expensive city to live in in 2006, to one of the cheapest in 2019. Perth property values have dropped, on average, by $100,000 in the past five years. Credit:Arsineh Houspian The housing price plummet has allowed more first homebuyers to enter the market, but for sellers it has seen the value of the average Perth dwelling drop from $540,556 in 2014 to $442,716 in March 2019. The downward trend is losing some of its steam, but CoreLogic predicts the 'bottoming-out' of the housing market is yet to come. We'll leave you with some bedtime reading. First to Economics editor Ross Gittins, who says that while tax cuts are a poor substitute for wages growth, they will keep the "surprisingly weak" economy turning. Read here. Senior economics writer Jessica Irvine looks at those $158 billion tax cuts in more detail. Read here. The Herald's editorial says with the polls stacked against them, the government has little option but to try to win votes with its big-spending budget. Read here. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is congratulated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison after delivering the Budget speech in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday 2 April 2019. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen From around the web: Nice reminder from press gallery doyenne Michelle Grattan over at The Conversation. "The government points out that its tax cuts are the most generous since John Howards time. But two things might be noted about this comparison. The 2007 tax package has since been much criticised for being irresponsible and Howard did not win the election of that year," writes Grattan. "One of the biggest challenges facing the Opposition between now and polling day is fighting an inherent reluctance in the electorate to hand an economy to Labor," writes the Australian Financial Review's Philip Coorey. That's it from me. Thank you for joining me on the blog tonight. No doubt we'll be resuming the catch-up one Saturday in May when we'll find out if the Treasurer tonight pulled the proverbial rabbit out of his hat. We will end our live coverage of (the day after) the budget here. Today, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg began selling his first budget in earnest. He fronted the National Press Club in Canberra and took his $7.1 billion surplus to question time. But Labor wanted to talk about spending on the NDIS (why is an underspend here being used to prop up the surplus?) and a "backflip" on the government's "energy assistance" supplement. Despite Newstart recipients initially being excluded from the one-off payment, Frydenberg announced they would get the bonus this morning, costing a further $80 million. Labor leader Bill Shorten will give his budget reply speech tomorrow night. We have had some early indications of Labor's position on new budget items. This includes possible support for $2 billion in savings from a change to the way welfare recipients report their income to the government. Meanwhile, the Senate censured Fraser Anning for his comments in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attack. He stayed for most of the speeches criticising him, but left after Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young began calling him a disgrace. And all the while, we creep closer and closer to an election. As Scott Morrison told Channel Nine this morning, the big vote will either be on May 11, 18 or 25. Washington: One week after India became the fourth country in the world to target and shatter a satellite in low Earth orbit with a missile, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine condemned the unilateral move on Monday. The International Space Station. Credit:NASA During a town hall meeting, Bridenstine called the test "unacceptable," saying. "Intentionally creating orbital debris fields is not compatible with human space flight." According to a NASA assessment last week, the Indian space test increased the likelihood of small debris hitting the International Space Station (ISS) by 44 per cent over a period of 10 days. The risk is expected to eventually return to normal. Debris impact can have catastrophic repercussions in space, which is why NASA tries to track the trajectory of potentially dangerous pieces. Latest News Welcome to the future of digital media We preview the exciting new world of interactive digital content to feature in Australian Broker Property market peak might not have been reached, say PEXA Report into property settlements in Australia suggests we are not quite at top of market An SME lender, which has itself recently diversified into new markets, is encouraging mortgage brokers to do the same and is offering the tools and support to aid them in the process. OnDeck Australia expanded into equipment finance with a soft launch in late 2018. The move followed a noted rise in capital expenditure among Australian businesses, much of it to buy equipment. Considering recent industry events, which have revealed the perils of relying on a single revenue stream, OnDeck has urged mortgage brokers to help meet the needs of the 25% of SMEs that plan to seek additional business financing in the next 12 months. Head of sales Michael Burke said, There is clearly strong demand for SME finance, making this a revenue channel that brokers cannot afford to overlook. OnDeck works closely with brokers during the first steps in the journey, providing training and sharing best practice. If the broker prefers, an OnDeck BDM can speak with customers directly on the brokers behalf, though at all times the relationship belongs to the broker. OnDeck also provides a portal that gives brokers access to marketing tools, such as send ready designs with the brokerages logo and brand colours. Data collected by the SME lender suggests that one in four of a mortgage brokers existing home loan clients are also business owners, providing a ready base for brokers to market their services in the SME lending space. In order to provide additional education and support for new revenue channels, OnDeck is running equipment finance information sessions for brokers in Melbourne and Sydney this month, hosted by CEO Noah Breslow. Breslow will also be a keynote speaker for the AltFi Australasia Summit 2019 in Sydney, on 15 April. Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC New Yorks 2020 budget is in the bag! Lawmakers approved a $175 billion budget on Sunday that reforms the states cash-bail system, taxes drivers to raise big bucks for the citys decaying subway system, and earns New York second place in the race to outlaw single-use plastic bags. The Empire states bag ban which follows Californias plastic-bag prohibition as the second in the country was among the big-ticket items included in the budget package, and allows cities to opt of an additional five-cent tax on paper bags. City legislators approved a law introduced by Park Slope Councilman Brad Lander to charge shoppers a nickle for plastic bags in 2016 a fee that businesses were entitled to keep, and would have amounted to a $100 million annual giveaway. But the then Republican-ruled state Senate introduced a bill to kill the municipal fee in early 2017, and Cuomo who described the law as deeply flawed and vowed to create a state-wide taskforce to address the scourge of plastic bags signed it into law a day before the so-called plastic-bag tax was set to kick in. The 2020 Budget also makes New York the first state to institute a congestion pricing program, which will tax drivers heading into Manhattan anywhere south of 60th Street beginning Dec. 31, 2020, and is expected to generate $1 billion annually to the MTA, which the agency could use to secure bonds for up to $15 billion, according to AM New York. Congestion pricing is only one of three new revenue sources for the Transit Authority, which will net $365 million annually from a mansion tax on the sale of properties over $25 million, and $320 million per year through a new tax on purchases made online. Legislators voted through a justice reform package that will eliminate cash bail for misdemeanor and non-violent crimes, ensuring 90-percent of defendants await trial outside of a jail cell. The states reform package follows policies enacted by District Attorney Eric Gonzalez in 2017, which sees nearly all Brooklyn defendants facing misdemeanor charges be released without bail with exceptions usually involving sex crimes and allegations of domestic violence and has resulted in the number of monthly Kings County admissions to Rikers Island being reduced by 58 percent since the borough-wide policy took effect, according to spokesman Oren Yaniv. The budget additionally makes a temporary 2 percent property tax cap enacted in 2012 permanent, enhances school funding by 3.8 percent, and state health funding 3.6 percent over last year. Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC Just hours after closing arguments were completed, a jury has reached a verdict in the second trial of the Brooklyn man accused of murdering Queens jogger Karina Vetrano, it was reported. Chanel Lewis, 22, was found guilty of committing the Aug. 2, 2016 murder and sexual assault of Vetrano, who was brutally beaten and choked after going out for a run blocks from her 84th Street home. Lewis was arrested for the crime six months after it occurred, tied to the homicide through DNA evidence recovered at the scene. NY1 reported that applause broke out in the courtroom after the guilty verdict was announced on April 1. Queens Chief Assistant District Attorney John Ryan hoped that the outcome would give the [Vetrano] family some closure and comfort knowing her killer will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. A vibrant, young womans life came to an abrupt and violent end at the hands of a then-20-year-old Brooklyn man, Ryan said on Monday night. Ms. Vetranos death was brutal. She was pulled from a park pathway, sexually assaulted and, in her last moments of life, she gasped for air as the defendants hands tightened around her neck. Mondays verdict marked the end of Lewis second trial, and came nearly five months after a mistrial was declared in the first case just before Thanksgiving 2018 due to a deadlocked jury. The quick verdict also came about after Lewis defense team filed a motion against the DNA evidence, submitting an anonymous letter which claimed that the case was racially-biased and that detectives had collected DNA samples from more than 300 black men. The motion was ultimately dismissed. Vetranos body was found among the tall reeds of Spring Creek Park hours after her father reported her missing on Aug. 2, 2016. A six-month search for her killer turned up nothing, even though forensic detectives recovered enough genetic evidence from the crime scene to create a DNA profile of her killer. The profile did not match anyone in the states DNA databank up to that point. Police caught a break in the case in February 2017 when an NYPD lieutenant recalled seeing Lewis weeks earlier near the park where Vetrano was killed on an unrelated matter. Detectives questioned Lewis and obtained from him a DNA sample which was said to match the DNA profile of Vetranos killer. According to trial testimony, Lewis entered the park on the night of the murder, apparently angered by a neighbor playing loud music. He encountered Vetrano while she ran through the park and, without saying a word, went on the attack, repeatedly punching her in the face and tearing her clothes off. After sexually assaulting her, prosecutors said Lewis choked Vetrano to death, even as she fought back. Crime scene investigators later recovered her killers DNA from under her fingernails. An autopsy later revealed that Vetrano suffered tears to her genitalia indicative that she had been sexually assaulted. The investigation further revealed that Lewis cellphone data indicated that it pinged from phone towers near Spring Creek Park at around the time the murder took place. Detectives also learned that, even before he was considered to be a suspect in the Vetrano murder, he had searched the internet on his cellphone for information about Vetrano and criminal proceedings, including double jeopardy, Miranda rights and the death penalty. (The death penalty is no longer carried out in New York state on capital murder charges). Acronis announced its 2019 World Backup Day Survey into the data protection habits of users around the globe revealed that 65.1 percent of the consumers surveyed said either they or a family member lost data as a result of an accidental deletion, hardware failure or software problem - a jump of 29.4 percentage points from last year. Yet for the first time in its four-year history, Acronis' World Backup Day Survey also showed that nearly all consumers (92.7 percent) are backing up their computers - an increase of more than 24.1 percent from last year and the single largest year-over-year increase. "At first glance, those two findings might seem completely incompatible - how can more data be lost if nearly everyone is backing up," said James Slaby, Director, Cyber Protection at Acronis. "Yet there are hints at why these numbers look this way in the survey. People are using more devices and accessing their data from more places than ever before, which creates more opportunities to lose data. They might back up their laptop, but if they didn't back up the smartphone they just forgot in a cab, they're still losing data." Acronis' 2019 World Backup Day Survey targeted users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Germany, Poland, Spain, France, Japan, Singapore, Bulgaria, and Switzerland, polling consumers and, for the first time, business users. The increasing number of CEOs, CIOs and other executives losing their jobs as a result of data breaches, online attacks, and IT missteps prompted Acronis to incorporate their data concerns and practices into the study. The addition of business users revealed several differences in how and why consumers and corporations protect their digital assets. Only 7% of Consumers Don't Even Try to Protect Their Data The number of devices being used by consumers continues to climb, with 68.9 percent of households reporting they have three or more devices - including computers, smartphones, and tablets. That's up 7.6 percent from 2018. Given the amount of data used and the stories about people losing their homes to fires and floods, as well as data losses due to high-profile ransomware attacks and security breaches, the increase in reported backups suggests consumers are at least trying to protect their data. This year, only 7 percent of consumers said they never back up, while nearly a third of last year's respondents (31.4 percent) did not back up their personal data. They also report valuing their data more, with 69.9 percent reporting they would spend more than $50 to retrieve lost files, photos, videos, etc. Last year, fewer than 15 percent would have paid that much. To protect their data, 62.7 percent of consumers keep it nearby, backing up to a local external hard drive (48.1 percent) or to a hard drive partition (14.6 percent). Only 37.4 percent are using the cloud or a hybrid approach of cloud and local backups. The lack of cloud adoption presents another apparent disconnect. Consumers overwhelmingly said that having access to data is the greatest benefit of creating backups, with a significant majority selecting "fast, easy access to backed up data, wherever I am" above all other features. Yet just over a third of them back up to the cloud, which would give them the ability to retrieve files from anywhere. The type of data consumers are most concerned with losing seems to be contacts, passwords, and other personal information (45.8 percent), followed by media files like photos, videos, music, and games (38.1 percent). Fewer than half of consumers are aware of the online attacks that threaten their data, such as ransomware (46 percent), cryptomining malware (53 percent) and the social engineering attacks (52 percent) used to spread malware. Education on these dangers seems to be slow, as the number of consumers who know about ransomware only increased 4 percent since last year. Companies Aggressively Protect Data in the Cloud Since an hour of downtime costs an estimated $300,000 in lost business, corporate users clearly know the value of their data. And since CEOs and C-level executives are being held more accountable for their data protection and security postures in the wake of a rash of high-profile incidents, leadership is taking a more active interest. That helps explain why the business users who responded to Acronis' World Backup Day Survey are already prepared to protect their files, apps, and systems - with a significant majority citing safety and security of their data as the benefits that are most important to them, ranking them first and second, respectively. The 2019 survey is the first time companies were included in the annual poll, and the responses came from businesses of all sizes - including 32.7 percent small businesses with under 100 employees, 41.0 percent medium businesses with between 101 and 999 employees, and 26.3 percent large enterprises employing 1,000 people or more. Regardless of the company size, the majority make protecting their data a priority by backing up their company data monthly (35.1 percent), weekly (24.8 percent), or daily (25.9 percent). As a result, 68.7 percent said they did not suffer a data loss event during the past year that resulted in downtime. These companies were also clearly aware of the latest risks to their data, which is why they reported being either concerned or highly concerned about ransomware (60.6 percent), cryptojacking (60.1 percent), and social engineering attacks (61.0 percent). In practice, businesses of all sizes rely on cloud backups, with 48.3 percent using the cloud exclusively and 26.8 percent using a combination of local and cloud backup. Given their data protection concerns of safety and security, their reliance on the cloud is understandable. That's because for safety ("reliable backups so data always available for recovery"), an offsite cloud backup ensures their data survives even if a fire, flood or natural disaster destroys their facilities. In terms of security ("data protected against online threats and cybercriminals"), the cloud provides a buffer that such malware attacks have difficulty breaching. Defending Against New Malware As modern threats to data continue to evolve at breathtaking speed, both individuals and companies need to look for secure data protection solutions that provide the full range of protection - including flexible local, hybrid, and cloud-based backups and active anti-malware solutions. Only Acronis backup solutions - Acronis Backup for businesses and Acronis True Image for personal use - include an active, artificial intelligence-based defense against ransomware that detects and stops ransomware in real time and automatically restores any affected files. The technology is so effective it stopped 400,000 ransomware attacks last year. The latest version of this integrated defense, called Acronis Active Protection, was recently enhanced to recognize and stop cryptomining malware as well. Added in the fall of 2018, the updated defense stopped tens of thousands of cryptomining attacks within the first month it was available. Cyber Protection Recommendations for World Backup Day Whether you are concerned about personal files or securing your company's business continuity, Acronis has four simple recommendations to help protect your data: Always create backups of important data . Keep copies of the backup both locally (so it's available for fast, frequent recoveries) and in the cloud (to guarantee you have everything if a fire, flood, or disaster hits your facilities). . Keep copies of the backup both locally (so it's available for fast, frequent recoveries) and in the cloud (to guarantee you have everything if a fire, flood, or disaster hits your facilities). Ensure your operating system and software are current . Relying on an outdated OS or app means it lacks the bug fixes and security patches that help block cybercriminals from gaining access to your systems. . Relying on an outdated OS or app means it lacks the bug fixes and security patches that help block cybercriminals from gaining access to your systems. Beware of suspicious email, links, and attachments . Most virus and ransomware infections are the result of social engineering techniques that trick unsuspecting individuals into opening infected email attachments or clicking on links to websites that host malware. . Most virus and ransomware infections are the result of social engineering techniques that trick unsuspecting individuals into opening infected email attachments or clicking on links to websites that host malware. Install anti-virus software and enable automatic updates so your system is protected against common, well-known malware strains. Windows user should confirm that their Windows Defender is turned on and up-to-date. Read more about the survey results here: www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/world-backup-day-2019-survey-results. Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC Cops are searching for two scoundrels wanted in connection with a Sunday robbery that left a bullet in a victims leg in East New York. According to police, two men equipped with firearms exited a car at 5:05 a.m. on March 31, approached a 29-year-old man at Van Siclen Ave. and Hegeman Ave. and demanded he fork over his property. The victim refused and was shot in the right leg as he attempted to run from the crooks, according to law enforcement sources. The suspects then grabbed the wounded victims necklace and fled in an unknown direction, police said. Paramedics rushed to the scene and transported the victim to Brookdale Hospital in stable condition, officials said. Police described one suspect as a 5 foot, 10 inch man with a thin build who was last seen wearing a black hooded shirt. Cops described the second suspect as a 5 foot, 5 inch man with a thin build. He was also last seen wearing a black hooded shirt. Anyone with information in regard to this incident is asked to call the NYPDs Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website at www.nypdcrimestoppers.com, on Twitter @NYPDTips or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577. Thong tin tren uoc mot quan chuc cap cao cua chinh quyen Trump cong bo voi phong vien hom 1/4. Quan chuc giau ten nay cho biet cac lenh trung phat moi co kha nang se uoc ban hanh vao thoi iem ky niem ngay My rut khoi hiep uoc hat nhan voi Iran a ky vao nam 2015 cung voi mot so cuong quoc hat nhan khac tren the gioi. Viec rut khoi nay a uoc Tong thong Trump tuyen bo rong rai vao hoi thang 5/2018. Anh minh hoa Muc ich cua cac lenh trung phat moi nay la nham gia tang ap luc, buoc cac doanh nghiep muon hop tac voi Iran phai suy nghi lai va thay rang hop tac lam an voi Iran hien tai la hanh ong nguy hiem. Chinh phu My du kien se ua ra cac bien phap bo sung nay trong vong vai tuan toi. Mot trong nhung bien phap ma My a su dung nham gay ap luc cho Iran la lenh trung phat ap vao dau hoa xuat khau. Viec giam so luong mien tru se han che xuat khau dau tu Iran, nha san xuat lon thu tu trong OPEC. Trung Quoc, An o, Nhat Ban, Han Quoc va Tho Nhi Ky co the se gia han quyen mien tru sau khi quyen nay het han vao thang 5 toi se khien luong dau mo xuat khau cua Iran con 1,1 trieu thung mot ngay, theo chuyen gia phan tich cua Eurasia hoi au nam. U.S. considering additional Iran sanctions, perhaps in May: official (Reuters) - The U.S. government is considering additional sanctions against Iran that would target areas of its economy that have not been hit before, a senior Trump administration official told reporters on Monday. The official said the administration aimed to follow through with new sanctions around the first anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and several world powers, which President Donald Trump announced last May. "We just want a continued chilling effect," the official said. "We want businesses to continue to think doing business with Iran is a terrible idea at this point." Trump announced last May that the United States would pull out of a 2015 international agreement designed to deny Tehran the ability to make nuclear weapons and he ordered sanctions be imposed again on the country. The deal, agreed by the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China and Iran, sought to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb in return for the removal of sanctions that had crippled its economy. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration hoped to take the additional measures in the coming weeks. "The more we can do around the anniversary, the better," the official said, while adding that it takes time to put such sanctions together and that the U.S. Treasury Department was working on them. One of the tools the United States has employed includes sanctions on oil imports from Iran. Washington has granted waivers to eight Iranian oil buyers, but could change that. The official said the United States had the ability not to give those waivers at all. "That, I think, is where we're headed," the official said. Reducing the number of waivers would limit oil exports from Iran, the fourth-largest producer in OPEC. The United States set an earlier target of driving Iranian oil exports to zero, and the official said that goal had not changed. U.S. domestic oil production would help offset such a change, the official said. China, India, Japan, South Korea and Turkey are likely to be given waivers after they expire in May that could cap Irans crude oil exports at about 1.1 million barrels per day, U.S.-based analysts at Eurasia Group said earlier this year. That would remove Italy, Greece and Taiwan from the current waivers list. 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 Consumer durables major Haier has had a steady run in India since foraying into the market a decade-a-half ago. Fifth in the pecking order of domestic durable brands after LG, Samsung, Voltas and Whirlpool (this is as per industry estimates), the only Chinese player in this club is signing up for the race to the third spot. The company has set its sights at the number three position after LG and Samsung and is looking to double turnover to Rs 7,000 crore from Rs 3,500 crore now by the end of 2020. Experts are sceptical though. They point to the strength of the two players that Haier ... Cash-crunch hit private carrier on Tuesday said it has grounded 15 more aircraft due to non-payment of rentals to lessors, taking the total number of grounded planes to 69. The fleet strength in the airline has, however, has come down to 20 now. Till last month, the Mumbai-headquartered airline, which is now under the new ownership, had taken 54 planes out of operations due to lease rental defaults. ALSO READ: Jet pilots write to DGCA, management; seek interest on delayed salaries ".... an additional 15 aircraft have been grounded due to non-payment of amounts outstanding to lessors under their respective lease agreements," said in a filing to the stock exchanges. Last week, the airline had informed the government it has 35 aircraft in operations. On March 25, Jet Airways' board approved a resolution plan formulated by SBI-led domestic lenders. Under the plan, lenders decided to take control of the airline and make a fund infusion of Rs 1,500 crore. A Pune-Nagpur flight of IndiGo--an A320 Neo was grounded soon after takeoff Tuesday due to "excessive engine vibrations"--sixth such incident in the past two weeks alone, an airline industry source said. The plane is powered by the already troubled engine. This is the sixth incident of midair glitches in the P&W engine-powered planes of in the past two weeks alone, as the carrier continues to grapple with P&W engine issues even after three years of A320 Neo induction when the problem was first reported which led to the grounding of several planes at frequent intervals. Queries seeking a detailed response to these half-a- dozen incidents sent to the airline's chief spokesperson C Leekha, and India head Palash Roy Chowdhury remained unanswered, while one of the airline spokespersons said the aircraft could not complete its journey and made a comeback after the pilot observed "engine caution" message. "After takeoff from Pune, the pilot observed engine caution message forcing the aircraft to return. The aircraft is being investigated by our technical team now," she said seeking to downplay the incident and refused to comment on other similar incidents. As per the source, on April 1, in another incident, the engine of a A320 Neo (VT ITB) from Jaipur to Hyderabad, also failed midair after detecting oil chips and was forced to return to Jaipur and subsequently grounded. "Another of A320 Neo (VT-ITJ) is also grounded in Guwahati for the past 10 days after its engine reported high vibrations. The aircraft is now awaiting engine replacement," said the source. A quick check at one of the aircraft tracking websites did not show any record for this plane. On March 29, flight from New Delhi to Istanbul was made to land in Kuwait after getting a snag warning in one of the two PW engines powering the A320 Neo. Earlier, another A320 Neo (VT IZJ) was also diverted to Kuwait after its engine failed when the plane was enroute to Doha. Then on March 21, yet another A320 Neo (VT-IZH) made a midair return while operating to Delhi from Hyderabad owing to similar engine glitches, the source added. Besides, the airline was also forced to change the P&W engine of its brand new A321 Neo after it experienced heavy vibrations during a flight last week, as per the source. At Willamettes May 19 commencement ceremony, the university will award honorary degrees to Punit Renjen, CEO of Deloitte Global and Atkinson Graduate School of Management alumnus from the class of 86, and to astrophysicist Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, co-discoverer of the first radio pulsars, who will deliver the undergraduate commencement address. At 9 a.m., Renjen will deliver the commencement address for the Atkinson Graduate School of Management, and Jonathan Mayes, senior vice president of external affairs and chief diversity officer at Albertsons Companies, will speak to College of Law graduates at 11:30 a.m. At 2:30 p.m., Bell Burnell will address graduating seniors from the College of Liberal Arts. More information about the commencement ceremonies, including schedules, speaker biographies, interactive campus map and live-streams are available online. Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Honorary Doctor of Science Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student in 1967, co-discovered the first radio pulsars. The discovery was recognized by the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, but even though she was the first to observe the pulsars Bell was excluded from the recipients of the prize. An advocate for inclusion in science during her academic career as a professor and dean, she earned the 2018 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and donated $3 million in prize money to support graduate students from underrepresented groups. Punit Renjen: Honorary Doctor of Business Administration Renjens work ethic took him from his hometown in Rohtak, India, to Willamettes Atkinson Graduate School of Management, where his business acumen caught the attention of a journalist and the eye of a partner at Touche Ross, which later became Deloitte. After earning his masters from Willamette, Renjen has spent his career with the Deloitte organization and was appointed CEO of Deloitte Global in 2015. Deloitte operates in 150 countries, with more than 263,900 professionals. Renjen was named among the 100 most influential business leaders from schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International, the premier accrediting body for graduate business programs. Jonathan Mayes: College of Law Commencement Speaker Mayes graduated from Willamette Law after receiving his bachelors in social science from Warner Pacific College in 1978. He serves as senior vice president for external affairs and chief diversity officer for Albertsons. Hes been honored by the San Francisco Bay Area Minority Bar Coalition and has served as an industry and community leader in many organizations, earning the Alumnus of the Year award from Warner Pacific College and the Martin Luther King Jr. Service Award from Willamette University for his work fostering diversity and inclusion. Sonic branding as AdWeek put it, is the process of distilling a multimillion dollar brand into a few seconds of sound. This is best illustrated in answering the question, have you ever heard the sound of Visa? Most would most probably say no. Well, two years ago, the brand rolled out sensory elements including sound, animation and haptic (vibration) cues to signify a completed transaction in digital and retail environments. So, while you could not see the brand at work, you could now hear it. The multisensory Visa branding debuted in ... Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal. They do not reflect the view/s of Business Standard. Global trade growth is expected to be lower in 2019 than it was last year, the World Trade Organization forecast on Tuesday. This could have a major impact on the outbound shipment from India. The WTO revised growth to 2.6 per cent from its earlier estimates of 3.7 per cent. This is lower than the 3 per cent growth recorded in 2018. It attributed its dismal outlook to widespread tensions and economic uncertainty. It, however, said trade growth could rebound to 3 per cent in 2020, but this is dependent on easing of trade tensions. "The fact that we don't ... Britain was no nearer to resolving the chaos surrounding its departure from the European Union (EU) after Parliament failed on Monday to find a majority of its own for any alternative to Prime Minister Theresa Mays divorce deal. After a tumultuous week in which Mays divorce strategy was rejected by lawmakers for a third time, despite her offer to quit if it passed, the future direction of Brexit remains mired in confusion. ALSO READ: Brexit deal: EU completes preparations for possible 'no-deal' scenario In a bid to break the impasse, lawmakers on Monday voted on ... Asserting that its manifesto is completely implementable by a "competent and wise government", Congress on Tuesday said that its promise of amending the AFSPA was about striking a balance between rights of armed forces and human rights. Addressing a media briefing hours after the release of the poll manifesto, former union minister and senior Congress leader P Chidambaram said, "We will amend the law (AFSPA). We will balance the rights of security forces and human rights and would remove immunity only in three cases namely enforced disappearance, sexual violence, and torcher. I have been a Home Minister and we recognise that armed forces require a certain amount of immunity but we also realise that human rights have to be respected. We will need to balance that." Chidambaram also responded to BJP's claims of Congress manifesto being impossible to implement and said that it may be impossible for BJP to implement but not for Congress. "I concede that it's unimplementable by a BJP government but what do you assume that a future government can't implement it. The BJP won't answer and the Prime Minister won't touch upon the subject of jobs, farmer's distress, women and children security, the neglect of public education and healthcare institutions so why would they concede that it is implementable. It's implementable by a competent and wise government and Congress will provide it," he said. Chidambaram also asserted that 54 pages of Congress manifesto have been completely made according to the feedback given by citizens of India. "These are the things that people want to be addressed by a future government. We think our economy will be stronger and poverty will be considerably reduced at the end of five years," he said. The senior Congress leader also reaffirmed promise of implementing a single-slab GST and said, "World-over GST is standard single rate and we will follow the same practice. We cannot predict the appropriate rate as of now." He also said that Congress, if voted to power will repel the sedition law because it has become redundant with time. "Sedition is a colonial-era law. Many eminent people have said that sedition must go. Sedition is no safeguard at all. It must go because it has become redundant due to subsequent laws," he added. Setting the narrative for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the Congress party on Tuesday released its manifesto in which special focus has been on youth and farmers. Congress has promised the creation of jobs to fill vacancies and providing a minimum support income of Rs 72,000 per year for poor families. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Armed Force (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) has been withdrawn from three districts of Arunachal Pradesh, sources from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said on Tuesday. According to sources, the law and order situation in six districts of Arunachal Pradesh was reviewed before March 31 for the validity of the 'disturbed area' designation under AFSPA. Arunachal Pradesh has nine districts where AFSPA was in action before the withdrawal of the same from three of them. The AFSPA grants special powers to the Indian Armed Forces in 'disturbed areas'. According to The Disturbed Areas (Special Courts) Act, 1976, once declared 'disturbed', the area has to maintain the status quo for a minimum of three months. Earlier in the day, the Congress party released its manifesto ahead of the impending polls in which included a promise to amend the AFSPA. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Days after denying her parliamentary ticket, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday appointed former Union Minister Ananth Kumar's wife Tejaswini Ananthkumar as the vice-president of party's Karnataka unit. Making the announcement, Karnataka BJP president BS Yeddyurappa tweeted, "I am very delighted to announce that Smt. @Tej_AnanthKumar has been appointed as state vice president of @BJP4Karnataka. Wishing her all the very best." Tejaswini was recently denied ticket from the South Bengaluru parliamentary constituency, a seat her husband represented since 1996. BJP has fielded 28-year-old Tejasvi Surya as its candidate from the seat in this Lok Sabha election. Despite the denial of ticket, Tejaswini had reaffirmed her support to the party and had said that she was shocked but will stand by the party's decision since the nation comes first. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Monday said that it expects to receive Boeing's final software enhancement for its 737 MAX jets over the "coming weeks" for approval. "The FAA expects to receive Boeing's final package of its software enhancement over the coming weeks for FAA approval," CNN reported quoting FAA. "Time is needed for additional work by Boeing as a result of an ongoing review of the 737 MAX Flight Control System to ensure that Boeing has identified and appropriately addressed all pertinent issues," they added. Boeing confirmed the statement, without giving a reason behind the timeline change. The new notification will lead to the fleet remaining grounded in most countries that are awaiting a safety nod, following the devastating crashes involving the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in the last few months. Nearly 160 people on board an Ethiopian Airlines flight lost their lives after the 737 MAX jet, enroute to Kenya from Adis Ababa, crashed just a few minutes after takeoff last month. This was the second accident within a span of five months which involved the jet, leading to numerous airlines and countries grounding the aircraft. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Captain Shalini Singh joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Tuesday in the presence of the party's spokesperson Sanjay Singh. In addition to Shalini, the former state vice-president of BJP's youth wing Shailendra Pandey was also inducted into the AAP. Speaking at a press conference here, Sanjay Singh said, "We are delighted to welcome a Captain from the Indian Army, brave daughter of the country, Captain Shalini Singh and somebody who has given 15 years of his life to BJP, is committed to serving the society and a former state vice-president of BJP (youth wing) Shailendra Pandey in AAP's family." It may be noted that Shalini is the widow of Late Major Avinash Singh Bhadauria who was awarded the Kirti Chakra posthumously. She joined the Indian Army as a Captain on her own in September 2002. Speaking at the occasion, Shalini said: "I come from a background where we keep nation before the self. I have decided to join AAP because I have seen how the AAP government has transformed Delhi in last four years." Delhi goes to polls in the sixth phase of the Lok Sabha elections on May 12. 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.) TDP supremo and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Tuesday hit out at Narendra Modi for comparing the Polavaram project to an ATM. "Polavaram is the lifeline of Andhra Pradesh - it is not ATM for me, but ATW (anytime water) for the state," said Naidu addressing a public meeting at Madanapalle. Naidu was referring to Prime Minister's remarks during a public meeting at Rajahmundry where Modi alleged that the Andhra chief minister was using the Polavaram irrigation project on the Godavari as an ATM. Claiming that Modi did not want the completion of Polavaram project, Naidu alleged that the Prime Minister was not releasing funds for the project. "Polavaram project needs Rs 58,000 crores but the Centre gave us only Rs 7,000 crores. Is the PM giving money out of his pocket, " Naidu questioned. He said his government was making all efforts to complete the project and provide water by July. He assured to provide drinking water to every household within two years. Naidu also lashed out at YS Jaganmohan Reddy alleging that the YSRCP leader keeps on committing crimes and hatching conspiracies and heaping criticisms on the basis of caste. The TDP chief also alleged that the Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao was intimidating film stars in Hyderabad and was forcing them to campaign for Jaganmohan Reddy. He alleged that actors like Mohan Babu, Jayasudha and Ali never visited the state when it was hit by natural calamities. Furthermore, Naidu accused the cinema artists of having all their assets in Hyderabad and were being threatened by KCR. "We will not spare such people campaigning for YSRCP," he said. Referring to Jagan Reddy's appeal to people to give him a chance, Naidu said "Jagan is asking to vote for him once. Do we consume poison for once? Do we jump off the cliff once?" Naidu also accused Reddy of getting money bags from Narendra Modi and K Chandrashekhar Rao. Hitting out at Modi for the Godhra incident, Naidu said Modi is acting like an anarchist after coming to power. Voting for YSRCP is equivalent to voting for Modi, he added. Naidu also said if voted to power he will take the responsibility of filling all the vacant posts in the state, and will take the responsibility of future of the youth. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Philippines government has filed a strong protest against China as hundreds of Chinese vessels were seen near a Philippines-administered island in the South China Sea. CNN quoted Jason Ramon, chief of public affairs for the Philippine military's western command, as saying that at least 275 Chinese ships and boats have been spotted this year around Thitu Island, also known as Pag-asa Island in the Philippines. Stating that Chinese ships "come and go" from the area, armed forces spokesperson Edgard Arevalo said that it is difficult to know the number of ships around the island at any one time. "The information that we got is, the more likely intention is to establish their presence in the area," he said. Zhao Jianhua, China's ambassador to the Philippines explained that Beijing was trying to verify and quantify the number of vessels around Thitu. He further stated that the said ships might be "unarmed" fishing vessels. Thitu Island is a disputed territory. Several countries including China, Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam have claimed Thitu as their own. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress has promised to probe the alleged irregularities in Rafale jet deal in the party manifesto, a member of the manifesto committee said on Tuesday morning. Congress manifesto committee member Bhalchandra Mungekar told ANI, "We will initiate an inquiry into Rafale deal on the first day after coming to power and we have included this in the manifesto." The Congress poll documents, said Mungekar, has been named as 'people's manifesto' which is scheduled to be released today by party president Rahul Gandhi. "We have vowed to take all steps needed to undo the damage done to the country by the Modi government in the last five years and bring in 'achhe din' in real means," he said. According to sources, the big-ticket promise in the manifesto will be NYAY, the minimum income guarantee scheme for the 20 per cent of India's poorest families, which has already been unveiled by the Congress president. To emphasise on the scheme, the Congress has coined a new slogan of 'Gareeb Parivar, Bahattar Hazzar'. The country will vote in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Firing a fresh salvo at the Congress and Biju Janata Dal (BJD), Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday accused the two political parties of conspiring to keep the poor people in the country poorer and deceived them by treating the community as a "vote bank". Addressing a public rally here, Prime Minister Modi said, "Parties like Congress and BJD conspired to keep the poor of the country poorer. They deceived the poor. They treated them as vote-bank and because of this, people like Dana Manjhi do not even get an ambulance." Attacking the Congress, the Prime Minister claimed that the Congress looted the poor in the last 70 years for its own personal gains and did not care about the well-being of the poor. "Do you have trust in those who have looted the poor? Seventy years have passed and these people have looted you. Will you forgive them? Such has been their intentions," he said. Accusing the BJD government of blocking central government's schemes which were not reaching the poor and backward communities, Prime Minister Modi said that despite "non-cooperation" from the state government, his administration continued to work for the betterment of their lives. "If BJP had formed the government here (in 2014), the work in Odisha would have been much faster, better and at a bigger scale. Whatever could not be done in the last 70 years, the same could have been achieved in the last five years. Despite non-cooperation from the state government, we did our best to bring about the change in your lives," he added. "In the last two decades, the coal mafia, chit fund scam took place. Corruption has increased in the state due to these people. You trusted BJD for 19 years. But now the time has come for a change," Modi asserted. Highlighting the works done by his government, the Prime Minister elaborated, "Twenty-four lakh houses in Odisha have got electricity connection free of cost. After 70 years of independence, 3,000 villages of Odisha got electricity for the first time. All of these things were not done by Modi, India's voters are the ones who made it happen. More than 400 Eklavaya model schools have been opened for the children of tribals." "Without taking a single leave in last five years, I worked diligently to bring transformation in the country. It was possible because people supported me. The credit for the transformation in the country goes to the people of the country," he said. Continuing his tirade against the Congress, the Prime Minister claimed that the previous governments headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi did not even think of a separate ministry for the tribals. "Like Atal Bihari Vajpayee created a separate tribal ministry, I ensured to create a separate fisheries ministry for the welfare of the community," he said. Further taking a swipe at the BJD, Modi reiterated his accusation that the state government was blocking the 'Ayushman Bharat Yojana', which aims to provide a cover of Rs 5 lakh per family per year and the poor can avail medical treatment free of cost. "The BJD took advantage of you all. They do not have any concerns for the poor," he said.Urging the electorate to vote for the BJP, the Prime Minister added, "Vote for a 'double engine' government where BJP is in power both at the Centre and in Odisha, so that development ushers in at a faster pace. Please vote in huge numbers to make this 'chowkidar' (watchman) strong." The seven-phase Lok Sabha elections will begin from April 11 to May 19 and counting of votes will take place on May 23. Odisha has 21 Lok Sabha and 147 Assembly seats and the state will witness simultaneous elections in the first four phases -- April 11, 18, 23 and 29. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday accused the Congress of "neglecting" architect of Indian Constitution BR Ambedkar and plotting various conspiracies to "defeat" the Dalit icon. "Recall how the Congress treated architect of our Constitution, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. How he got neglected? Congress plotted many conspiracies to defeat him. Congress did everything possible to have Babasaheb defeated. It conspired to have his memory erased from the public mind. It is important that youth of today knows about these facts," he said at a public rally here where Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) leader Chirag Paswan, son of party president Ram Vilas Paswan, is in the fray. The Prime Minister claimed that the Congress remembered honouring its own family members, but "forgot" about Ambedkar. It was due to BJP's efforts that Ambedkar was posthumously awarded the country's highest civilian award Bharat Ratna, he said. In a veiled reference to Congress party's manifesto, which promised to amend the AFSPA Act, Prime Minister Modi said, "I want to request the people to listen and keep in mind different types of promises and statements which are being made in regard to security, Kashmir and our armed forces. The people should give a befitting reply in this election." Trashing the claims of the Opposition that BJP was doing away with reserved category quota, Modi remarked that "no one can remove reservations". "When Morarji Desai and Atal Bihari Vajpayee's governments were in power, they were making such statements. Even in Modi government, they are saying the same thing. I want people of Bihar to give a befitting reply to those who are spreading rumours about reservations. Be it Modi or anyone else, no one can remove reservations," he emphasised. Continuing his tirade against the Congress, the Prime Minister claimed that the Congress did not do 'vikas' (development) for the Dalits and Other Backward Classes, but only cared about their 'vikas'. Asserting that good governance goes into "reverse gear" when Congress and its allies are in power, Prime Minister Modi said, "When they are in power, terrorism, violence, corruption, prices and black money rises. When Congress is in power, the nation's prosperity, credibility and morale of our armed forces go down." Questioning the Opposition's demands for proof over the air strike, the Prime Minister said, "After Pulwama attack, our valiant and brave armed forces killed terrorists (deep inside Pakistan). When the entire world is talking about us, the 'mahamilawati' is asking for proof. They are finding ways to demean our armed forces. They are speaking in the language of Pakistan. They are making statements on behalf of Pakistan".Modi said that electorates should give befitting reply to those questioning the valour of the armed forces. Bihar, where 40 Lok Sabha seats are in stake, will vote in all the seven phases of the General elections from April 11 to May 19. 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.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said the Congress party hates the labour class and looks down upon those who do menial jobs to sustain their livelihood. Referring to the Congress party as 'Mahamilavat,' he said: "The 'Mahamilavat' hates everyone who does his job. They hate 'Chowkidar', 'Chaiwala', 'Jhadoowala', 'Safaiwala.' They cannot see a person prospering and progressing in his life by doing his work. This is the only reason why the 'Chowkidar' is being abused," said Prime Minister Modi, while addressing an election rally. He said that before 2014 there were bomb blasts all across the country in which thousands of innocents were being killed, but after the NDA came to power at the Centre all this stopped. "Before 2014, in various cities across the nation, there were bomb blasts in which innocent people were killed. The blasts occurred in Hyderabad, Delhi, Ayodhya, Kashi, Jammu and elsewhere," he said. "The Indian Mujahedeen and Hizbul Mujahideen created an atmosphere of terror but they all went into silos after 2104. Where these sleeper cells have gone? The police are the same. The intelligence agencies are the same. The information network is the same. Skills are the same. Then what has changed," asked Prime Minister Modi. "They all have been silenced not by Narendra Modi but by your vote that you gave to us. The Chowkidar's government was formed in Delhi and that changed the situation," he said. He alleged that the Congress government 'set free' the terrorist that the security forces arrested for the sake of of 'vote bank' and 'appeasement.' "There was no shortcoming in our security forces. The shortcoming was in political will and freedom. Our security forces arrested terrorists risking their lives but the Congress government set them free for the of vote bank and appeasement," he said. "The Congress leader said that I am 'Chowkidar' of the toilet. In Kumbh Mela, when I washed the feat of Safaikaramchari (sweepers), they hurled all sorts of abuses on me. This is an insult to all those who wash toilets, an insult to those who work hard to earn their living, an insult to the poor," said Prime Minister Modi. Starting from April 11, Bihar will go to polls for 40 Lok Sabha seats in seven phases. 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.) The Congress, which released its election manifesto on Tuesday, promised to amend the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act or the AFSPA, that grants special powers to the Indian armed forces in 'insurgency-hit areas', if the party came to power after the ensuing Lok Sabha elections. The party said in the manifesto, "Amend the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 in order to strike a balance between the powers of security forces and the human rights of citizens and to remove immunity for enforced disappearance, sexual violence and torture." The Congress said that the AFSPA Act and Disturbed Areas Act in Jammu and Kashmir will be reviewed if the party came to power after the polls. "The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Disturbed Areas Act in Jammu and Kashmir will be reviewed. Suitable changes will be made in the text of the laws to balance the requirements of security and the protection of human rights," the party said in the manifesto. Apart from Jammu and Kashmir, the AFSPA Act is applicable in Nagaland and Manipur and some parts of north-eastern states. According to The Disturbed Areas (Special Courts) Act, 1976, once declared 'disturbed', an area has to maintain the status quo for a minimum of three months. Under AFSPA, the armed forces are given powers to arrest, use force and even open fire on anyone who violate the law. But over the years, civilians have levelled allegations of army excesses in the insurgency-hit areas. Human right groups have been demanding the scrapping of the AFSPA act, claiming the law gives "sweeping powers" to the soldiers to act against civilians. Activists have also alleged extra-judicial killings in those areas where AFSPA is in force. Notably, renowned Manipuri activist Irom Sharmila launched an indefinite fast for 16 years (2000-2016) in protest against the controversial act. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Setting the narrative for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the Congress party on Tuesday released its manifesto in which special focus has been on youth and farmer. From opening vacancies for job creation to providing a minimum support income of Rs 72,000 per year for the poor families - the party went all out to woo the voters. The Congress manifesto also pledged to investigate Rafale plane deal along with several deals the party entered into by the BJP Government in the last 5 years. Pitching for 'Ujjwal Bharat', the Congress promised to work on employment, industry, infrastructure, cities, urbanisation and urban policy, rural development, informal and organized sector, agriculture, farmers and farm labour, economic policy, NYAY scheme, taxation and tax reforms, banking and financial sector, science, technology and innovation, security, foreign policy, internal security, border security, ex-servicemen, Central Armed Police Forces, anti-corruption and many others. The 55-page manifesto talks about five crucial issues - Kaam (employment and growth), Daam (an economy that works for all), Shaan (pride in hard work and soft power), Sushashan (good governance), Swabhimaan (self esteem for the deprived), Samman (life of dignity) - which the Congress party said "it will deliver" on. Targeting the youth, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said that if voted to power, the party plans to open avenues of employment and provide new ways to keep the youth engaged. He said the Congress will fill all 4 lakh vacancies in the Central Government and institutional vacancies before March 2020. "Congress manifesto to focus on five main themes. This NYAY scheme will do two things... First poor will have money in their pockets... Second, the economy will start running which was stalled due to demonetization. Modi ji promised 2 crore jobs but we know the truth. There are 22 lakh positions vacant, we will fill all this post by 2020," Congress president Rahul Gandhi said while releasing the manifesto. The manifesto also promised of creating an estimated 10 lakh Seva Mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local body, launch a 'Water Bodies Restoration Mission' and 'Wasteland Regeneration Mission' to create 1 crore jobs, exempt new businesses from applicable laws and regulations (except Minimum Wages Act and tax laws) for a period of 3 years, encourage State Governments to fill their vacancies, reward businesses for job creation, provide businesses with fiscal incentives for employing more women, and require businesses with over 100 employees to start an apprenticeship programme. "Congress pledges to give the highest priority to protecting existing jobs and creating new jobs. In order to underline the link between the growth of the industry and services sectors and rapid creation of jobs, Congress will create a new Ministry of Industry, Services and Employment. All of the 4 lakh vacancies as on 1 April 2019 in the Central Government, Central Public Sector Enterprises, Judiciary and Parliament will be filled before the end of March 2020. As a condition for devolution of funds to the healthcare and education sectors and to Panchayats and Municipalities, Congress will request State Governments to fill all vacancies, estimated at 20 lakh, in the 2 sectors and in local bodies," the manifesto said. Congress promised to abolish all application fees for government examinations and posts and pledged to create lakhs of new jobs for qualified teachers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, technicians, instructors and administrators through a massive expansion of the education and health sectors. Para-state workers such as Anganwadi workers, ASHA workers, rozgarsahayaks, preraks, and anudeshaks, form the backbone of the public service delivery system. In addition, the ASHA programme will be expanded and a second ASHA worker will be appointed in all villages with a population exceeding 2500 persons. The party promised to reward job creating by lowering the direct tax rates and contributions to the CSR fund. The Congress manifesto reiterated the promise made by Rahul Gandhi in an election rally about providing Rs 72,000 to the deprived. "To ensure that no Indian is left behind, Congress will provide a Minimum Income Support Programme (MISP) or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) under which Rs. 72,000 a year will be transferred to the poorest 20 per cent families in India. We will provide special respite to farmers and farm workers, not just through "Karz Maafi" or a loan waiver but by setting farmers on the path to "Karz Mukti," or Freedom from Indebtedness," the manifesto said. "Debt is a civil liability and we will not allow criminal proceedings to be instituted against a farmer who is unable to pay his/her debt," the manifesto said while underlining that to ensure priority to the issues affecting the agriculture sector, the Congress will bring in a separate "Kisan Budget" and establish a permanent Commission on Agricultural Development and Planning consisting of farmers, agricultural scientists and agricultural economists to examine and advise the government on how to make agriculture viable, competitive and remunerative. It also said that BJP's Fasal Bima Yojana (Crop Insurance Scheme) will be re-designed as it has so far only enriched the insurance companies at the cost of the farmers. "We will direct insurance companies to offer crop insurance and charge premiums on the principle of no profit, no loss," the manifesto said. Rahul Gandhi promised to increase employment days to 150 from 100 under MNREGA and bring in a separate budget for farmers. "The Prime Minister had spoken about MGNREGA. He mocked and said it is a bogus and useless scheme. Today, everyone knows how much it helped the country. So, now we want to guarantee jobs for 150 days, instead of 100 days, under the scheme," Rahul Gandhi said. Giving details of Minimum Support income, the manifesto said that the target population will be 5 crore families who constitute the poorest 20 per cent of all families. Each family will be guaranteed a cash transfer of Rs. 72,000 a year. As far as possible, the money will be transferred to the account of a woman of the family who has a bank account or who will be urged to open a bank account. There will a Design phase (3 months) followed by a Pilot and Testing phase (6-9 months) before roll-out. On its economic policy, the party promised to achieve the target of 3 per cent of GDP by 2020-21 and remain under that limit. "Congress will respect the autonomy of the RBI in matters reserved to the RBI under the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1939, including the formulation of monetary policy. However, the Governor shall periodically render an account to a committee of Parliament," the manifesto said. Congress promised to review all laws, rules and regulations governing investments within 3 months. Instruments that are inconsistent with a market economy or outdated or obstructionist will be repealed. The party also promised to simplify taxation and enact the Direct Taxes Code for "simplicity, transparency, tax equity, easy compliance and impartial administration." The party promised to replace existing GST with GST 2.0 based on a single, moderate, standard rate of tax on all goods and services. "GST 2.0 will be easy to administer, easy to understand by the taxpayer, and easy to comply with. We are confident that GST 2.0 will promote growth, new businesses and employment. The website under GST 2.0 will be re-designed and made user-friendly with inputs from the taxpayers," the manifesto said. It also promised to abolish the e-way bill and allocate a share of GST revenues to Panchayats and Municipalities. Talking about "Shaan" or pride, the Congress said it will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government and will ensure that defence spending is increased to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces. "We will expedite all modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces in a transparent manner, categorically address any remaining anomalies in one-rank one-pension for our Armed Forces, and improve social security, education and health facilities for our Paramilitary Forces and families," the manifesto said. Apart from promising improvement in infrastructure for the forces, the party also talked about removing the anomalies in the implementation of OROP, implement a policy of compensation to the families of martyrs that will include full pay and allowances, bring a policy that will allow Armed Forces personnel who retire after a period of colour service or earlier lateral entry into the civil services based on their qualifications It also promised to allow Armed Forces personnel who retire before the age of 40 years to enter the Central Armed Police Forces at suitable levels based on their qualifications and physical fitness. For the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF), Congress promised to increase its strength and have at least 33 per cent of women in the forces. "At any given time, an adequate number of battalions will be on rest, recuperation and training and will not be deployed on operational duties," it said and promised to enhance the status of the jawan and the benefits to the families of jawans in cases were the jawan dies in action. "We will set up a Committee to draft new Service Rules for personnel of the CAPFs," it said. Talking about good governance, the party said: "We believe that self-regulation is the best way to correct the abuse of media freedom. We will amend the Press Council of India Act, 1978 to strengthen the system of self-regulation, protect the freedom of journalists, uphold editorial independence and guard against government interference." It also talked about enforcing anti-corruption laws and initiate an investigation in several deals entered into by the BJP Government in the last 5 years and, in particular, the Rafale deal. "Congress will also investigate the circumstances under which a number of scamsters were allowed to leave the country and will take determined steps to bring them back and face legal proceedings. The party also promised to decriminalise laws that are directed against civil violations and can be subjected to civil penalties, such as making 'defamation' a civil offence. "Omitting Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (that defines the offence of 'sedition') that has been misused and, in any event, has become redundant because of subsequent laws," it said. Congress also pledged to scrap the "opaque" Electoral Bond Scheme "that was designed to favour the ruling party and set up a National Election Fund to which any person may make a contribution. "Congress will ensure that EVMs and VVPATs are tamperproof. During counting, the count in at least 50 per cent of the EVMs will be matched against the physical count of the voting slips in the corresponding VVPATs," the party manifesto said. The party also promised to will pass the Constitution (Amendment) Bill to provide for reservation of 33 per cent of seats in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha and in the Rajya Sabha. "We will amend the Service Rules to reserve for women 33 per cent of appointments to posts in the Central Government," the manifesto said. Talking at length about the preparation of manifesto, Rahul Gandhi said: "It is a massive step by the Congress party. When we started a year ago, I spoke to Mr Chidambaram and others and told them that this manifesto must reflect the wishes of the people of India. Whatever is in the manifesto must be truthful. I made it clear that nothing in this can be a lie, because we live in a time where we hear a large number of lies every day." Convener of Manifesto Committee Rajiv Gowda said NRI's from 12 different countries were consulted during the preparation of the manifesto and 20 sub-committees were formed for wider consultations. Former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, who was present in the manifesto launch event, said, "In Congress' manifesto, all section of society has been taken care of. The focus of the manifesto is to spell on the vision of Congress party." "Unemployment, farmer distress and women safety are the top three issues. Our manifesto is about marrying wealth and welfare. Our manifesto will focus on this and lay out the path to ensure this happens," Congress leader P Chidambaram said. UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and other Congress top leaders were present during the launch of party's manifesto for the general elections. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The devastating Nepal rainstorm, which swept the districts of Bara and Parsa, has claimed the lives of 35 people as of Tuesday, according to Province 2 Minister for Internal Affairs and Law, Gyanendra Kumar Yadav. "As per the statistics, 35 people are confirmed dead and hundreds of others are injured," Yadav told the media after the conclusion of a cabinet meeting. The Province 2 government has announced a compensation of three lakhs to the next of kin for the victims of Sunday's rainstorm along with announcing free treatment for the injured victims. The victims who lost their homes to the storm were forced to sleep out in the open on Monday, even though the central and local authorities scurried to provide the affected with tarpaulins and temporary shelter for protection. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Days after accusing China of breaching the median line in the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan on Tuesday stated it is "determined to deal with any reckless military adventure by the bully across the Taiwan Strait," according to the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Apparently referring to China, the ministry made this statement while thanking the United States for its support during what is being hailed as a "rare incursion" by media channels. "Your unwavering friendship and support are treasured, @AmbJohnBolton. We're determined to deal with any reckless military adventure by the bully across the #Taiwan Strait. Provocation only makes us stronger & as you said: 'Surrender is not an option'," the Taiwanese ministry tweeted. This comes as China has upped its calls for reunification with the island nation, which has been de facto independent from the mainland since 1949's civil war. Meanwhile, the United States on Monday (local time) backed Taiwan's protest against China, after two J-11 fighter jets crossed the median line on March 31. "Chinese military provocations won't win any hearts or minds in Taiwan, but they will strengthen the resolve of people everywhere who value democracy. The Taiwan Relations Act and our commitment are clear," USA's National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted. Taiwan alleged that China violated an agreement by crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait. Sunday's apparent breach led to a tense 10-minute standoff between jets belonging to the two countries, as Taiwan's military scrambled fighter jets to deal with the incursion, according to local media. "At 11 a.m., March 31, 2 PLAAF J-11 jets violated the long-held tacit agreement by crossing the median line of the #Taiwan Strait. It was an intentional, reckless & provocative action. We've informed regional partners & condemn #China for such behaviour," Taiwan's foreign ministry tweeted. To deal with the threats from across the border, Taiwan has submitted a request to its long-time ally, the United States, for purchasing F-16 jets and M-1 tanks to enhance its military capabilities, according to its President Tsai Ing-wen. This has been condemned by China, which views Taiwan as a part of its internal affairs. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi Government on Tuesday accused the Centre of revising the component-wise cost for the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) Phase IV project without assigning any "reason or justification". In a statement, Transport Minister Kailash Gehlot's Office said: "The component-wise cost has been revised by the Government of India unilaterally without assigning any reasons or justification. The equity component of the Delhi Government has been increased from 8.08 per cent to 16.36 per cent." Accusing the Centre of increasing the project cost from 20.77 per cent to 31.44 per cent, the statement said that these kinds of unilateral changes by the government without taking the Delhi Government into confidence are not "comprehensible". It also raised concerns over the approval of only three Corridors out of the six approved by the Delhi Cabinet. "The Delhi Government had approved all the six Corridors proposed by the Delhi Metro in Phase-IV vide Cabinet Decision dated 19/12/2018. However, the Government of India thereafter on 09/03/19 approved only three Corridors out of the six approved by the Delhi Cabinet," the statement read. After the revision, the entire amount towards land acquisition was apportioned to the Delhi Government whereas in the earlier three phases it was apportioned between Government of India and the Delhi Government equally. Expressing dismay over the Centre not communicating the revisions to the Delhi Government, it claimed that Centre unilaterally made changes to the proposal. "The unilateral changes are not only against the federal system of Government but also substantially increased the financial burden on the Delhi Government," it read. On March 8, the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi had approved three of the six corridors proposed under Phase-IV of the Delhi Metro. The three corridors comprise of Aerocity to Tughlakabad (15 stations), RK Ashram to Janakpuri West (25 stations) and Maujpur to Mukundpur (six Stations). The three corridors consist of both underground (22.359 km) and elevated (39.320 km) sections.The project comprises three priority corridors with a total length of 61.679 kms. Out of the total length, 22.359 kms will be built underground and 39.320 km will be constructed as an elevated section. "These corridors will consist of 46 stations, of which 17 stations will be underground and the rest 29 stations will be constructed as elevated sections," the Centre had said in a statement.The total completion cost of three metro corridors will be Rs 24,948.65 crore. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday wrote a letter to President Ram Nath Kovind accusing Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh of allegedly violating the model code of conduct. On March 25, Singh had said that as a party worker, he "genuinely" wanted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to win the ensuing Lok Sabha elections while observing that Narendra Modi should become the Prime Minister again. This, however, has been construed as a violation of the MCC by the ECI, sources said earlier today. "As a worker of BJP, I genuinely want the party to win. We want that once again Narendra Modi should become the Prime Minister. It is important for the nation and society that Narendra Modi should become the Prime Minister again," Kalyan had told reporters in Aligarh. Singh, who served two terms as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (1991-1992 and 1997-1999) was appointed the Governor of Rajasthan in 2014. A Governor is considered to be a neutral post and the person occupying the office is not supposed to side with any political party. Seven phase elections in the country will begin from April 11 and go on till May 19. 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 Enforcement Directorate on Tuesday filed its reply before the Patiala House Court over the bail plea filed by separatist leader Shabir Shah, an accused in the terror funding case. Additional Sessions Judge Satish Arora slated the matter for arguments on April 29. The agency in its reply opposed the bail plea filed by the Kashmiri separatist. Advocate Naveen Kumar Matta is representing the Enforcement Directorate, while Advocate MS Khan was appearing for Shah. The witnesses in the case are scheduled to record their statements in connection with the main trail case on May 23 According to ED, Shah was involved in illicit activities along with Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad's hawala operator Mohd Aslam Wani. Wani and Shah were arrested by the ED in 2017 for the offence of money laundering. This year in January, Wani was granted bail by Delhi High Court while Shah remained in judicial custody. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently hosted a panel discussion on 'role of philanthropy in India's human, social and economic progress'. The discussion saw participation from experts and leaders from the government, private sector and civil society. The panel included Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog, Vidya Shah, CEO, EdelGive Foundation; Ashish Dhawan, Chairman, Central Square Foundation and Rodger Voorhies, President, BMGF. The discussion highlighted various themes around philanthropy and the role it plays in enabling and supporting a country's social development. The panelists also shed light on the means to create synergy between the government and the private sector, as effective partners working towards a common cause. The conversation also brought up the subject of how private philanthropy can be leveraged as an effective instrument to help solve some key developmental challenges. "Philanthropy has a key role to play in the development of our country. Indian philanthropists are paving the way and it's encouraging to see that they are making changes in many lives. However, philanthropy should be combined with technology and innovation, which has the potential to make real grassroot level changes. Philanthropy will be a catalyst of growth & development in India, therefore there is the good reason to be optimistic about the future of philanthropy in India," said while discussing the role of philanthropy in a country's social development, Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog. "India is making great strides to tackle some of its most persistent development challenges, and private philanthropy can play an important role in helping drive this progress. We believe that when people have the right tools, information, and inspiration, their giving will accelerate the pace of positive change in the world," said Rodger Voorhies, President of Global Growth & Opportunity, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This panel discussion was hosted under the Aksha platform of the Gates Foundation. The aim of Aksha is to bring forth ideas, solutions, innovations, data and evidence on what's working, and what is not. It provides an opportunity to share learnings and best practices that can be applied in the local context with an aim to deliver our collective vision of the India where every person has the opportunity to lead a healthy and productive life. 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.) IT major HCL Technologies said on Tuesday that its acquisition of US-based Strong-Bridge Envision has been completed. HCL had recently agreed to acquire the Seattle-based company to enhance its digital transformation consulting capabilities. According to reports, the deal was worth 45 million dollars. "We would like to inform you that the aforesaid acquisition has been completed with effect from April 1, 2019," HCL informed stock exchanges in regulatory filings. Strong-Bridge Envision is now part of its global digital and analytics called HCL Mode 2 services. HCL has struck almost a dozen acquisitions in India and overseas since 2015. It sealed the biggest acquisition by an Indian IT company in December last year by acquiring select software businesses from IBM Corp for 1.8 billion dollars. The company made three other acquisitions in 2018. It agreed to acquire Germany's H & D International Group for 35 million dollars, life sciences and consumer services provider C3i Solutions from US drugmaker Merck & Co for 60 million dollars and US-based Actian Corporation for 330 million dollars. . (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) 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 Apr 2, 2019 | By Thomas NASA has announced three finalists in an ongoing design competition, the latest stage of the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations (NASAs) 3D-printed Habitat Challenge. Finalists were awarded a share of the $100,000 prize purse and include SEArch+/Apis Cor, out of New York who took first place, Zopherus from Rogers, Arkansas who came in second, and Mars Incubator out of New Have Connecticut who took the third spot. SEArch+/Apis Cor won the top place as well as $33,954.11. Using resources available on-site in these locations, SEArch+/Apis Cor proposed the MARS X HOUSE, offering a robust, durable 3D-printed habitat using autonomous robotics. The unique shape of their habitat allows for continuous reinforcement of the structure. Light enters through trough-shaped ports on the sides and top. "Winning this latest phase of NASAs Habitat Challenge is an incredible honor for all of us at SEArch+," said Melodie Yashar, Co-Founder of SEArch+. "Were thrilled and humbled by the support from NASA and congratulate the other winning teams in our shared efforts to create human-centered design concepts for Mars and beyond." Team Zopherus won the second place and $33,422.01. The team Zoperhous suggested that their modular structures could be printed by an autonomous rover that prints a structure and then moves on to the next site. The virtual design from team Mars Incubator won the third place and $32,623.88. The group showed a modular design consisting of four distinct spaces, including one for growing plants. The challenge, which began in 2015, has seen teams competing to design shelters suitable for the Moon, Mars and optimistically beyond. For the fourth level of the third phase of the competition, eleven team entries were scored and the three contestants were scored based on 'architectural layout, programming, efficient use of interior space, and the 3D-printing scalability and constructability of the habitat.' As per the NASA, the teams will go on to compete in a showdown with a prize pool of $800,000. The final competition phase will take place in early May. After evaluation by a panel of judges, NASA and challenge partner Bradley University of Peoria, Illinois, decided the winners. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Union Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday slammed the Congress manifesto alleging that some of the ideas in it are "positively dangerous" and are an agenda for the "balkanisation" of India. Addressing the media here, he also lashed out at Congress for promising in its manifesto to amend the Armed Force (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), if voted to power, and said that the party has made the document to "favour the terrorists". "This manifesto has ideas which will divide India. Some of the ideas are positively dangerous in the Congress manifesto. They are for an agenda for the balkanisation of India," he said. Jaitley said, "Even though there was a drafting committee, but it appears that some of the important points have been drafted by the Congress president's friend in 'Tukde, Tukde gang' when it deals with Jammu and Kashmir." Attacking Rahul Gandhi, he claimed that the Congress leader has made promises out of ignorance. "When out of ignorance, Rahul Gandhi makes unimplementable and dangerous promises, I am sure the country will not be in a mood to oblige him," he said. The Finance Minister also pointed out that the Congress manifesto has not made a mention about displaced Kashmiri Pandits. "Seventy years of mistakes have dragged Jammu and Kashmir to where it is today. We are establishing a rule of law, while Congress wants to establish rules of terrorists and insurgents. The country cannot forget the historic mistake committed by the Nehru-Gandhi, and they are trying to continue that agenda. Moreover, there is no mention of displaced Kashmiri Pandits in the Congress manifesto," Jaitley said. He said that while his party has been fighting terrorism, Congress today talks about removing the sedition law. "We have been fighting terrorism for the last 72 years. We actively began fighting terrorism after 26/11. We have been successful in curbing anti-India protests in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and south India. But, today they want to remove the sedition law. As per their manifesto, they will remove section 124-A of the IPC. People who say such things have no right to get one vote from this country," the Minister said. He alleged that Congress wants to change the law of bail and as per their election manifesto not giving bail will be considered as violation of the statute. "They want to make changes in the CRPC. They want to change the way in which the law of bail functions. Now not granting bail will be considered as a violation of law. Congress has claimed to amend AFSPA. The area in which AFSPA is imposed one needs to get a sanction to register a criminal complaint against security personnel, but the manifesto says that will not be needed. It says investigation will be carried out against army officials without any sanction. They have made a manifesto which will favour the terrorists," Jaitley said. Sharpening his attack on the Congress chief, he said, "Rahul Gandhi stated that we will fill 28 lakh jobs. The next sentence of the Congress manifesto says 20 lakh jobs are in the state governments. He must at least read what he is saying." Slamming the party's NYAY scheme, he said, "The Congress party on the first day of announcing the scheme did not reveal that the NYAY will be a collective scheme of the Centre and the states. I have come to know some bits about it today. This will not be a scheme by the central government but will also get some resources from the states." The Congress party released its manifesto earlier today. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah on Tuesday appealed to the public at a rally here not to vote for former finance minister P Chidambaram's son Karti in the impending Lok Sabha polls, while calling the latter a 'scamster'. Shah, who was addressing an election rally here, said, "I appeal to the people of Sivaganga parliamentary constituency to vote for NDA candidate against scamster Karti Chidambaram in order to strengthen the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi." Karti, son of former Union minister P Chidambaram, is contesting the Lok Sabha elections from Sivaganga parliamentary seat on Congress ticket. "In their manifesto, the Congress has announced that all should get bail and no one should be put behind bars. Probably, it is meant for Karti Chidambaram," the BJP president quipped. Karti is facing a probe in the INX media case. He was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation in 2018 and had spent several nights in Delhi's Tihar jail. Meanwhile, Shah drew a parallel between Prime Minister Modi and UPA leaders in the state, and said: "On one side, it is Narendra Modi is who is working for the betterment of the country while on the other side, there are leaders like Kanimozhi, A Raja, P Chidambaram, and Karti Chidambaram. It is up to the people of Tamil Nadu who they want to choose." Shah also said that the Democratic Alliance (NDA) will emerge victorious on more than 30 seats in Tamil Nadu. The BJP is in alliance with the AIADMK, the DMDK, and the PMK to contest all 39 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Voting in Tamil Nadu will be held on April 18. 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.) President Ram Nath Kovind on Monday (local time) met and discussed wide-ranging issues of mutual interest with his Chilean counterpart Sebastian Pinera and the two sides signed three Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) in the fields of mining, culture and disability. President Kovind who arrived in Chile on a three-day visit is on the last leg of his three-nation tour that included Bolivia and Croatia. During bilateral talks between the leaders, Chile announced that it will allow visa-free entry to Indian nationals holding a valid visa of the United States of America. Welcoming Chile's decision President Kovind said it would promote both cultural and business ties between the two countries. Thanking Pinera for his strong condemnation of the Pulwama terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, President Kovind noted that the two countries have also agreed to work together to strengthen the global response to defeat and destroy terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. In addition, both India and Chile agreed to explore opportunities for other cooperation in the defence, space research and explorations. On the same day, President Kovind addressed students and faculty of the University of Chile on the topic 'Gandhi for the Young'. The University also presented a Rectoral Medal to the President. Researchers from the University of Chile briefed the President on "Strategy for the development of a space programme for Chile". The President interacted with scientists, including those who were involved in building Chile's nanosatellite, which India Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched in 2017. President Kovind also addressed the India-Chile Business roundtable in Santiago and said that Chile is India's window to Latin America and to the Pacific Alliance. The President invited Chile's sovereign funds to invest in the Indian infrastructure sector. The President emplaned for India later in the day. "As we depart from Chile, the First Lady and I would like to thank President @sebastianpinera and the friendly people of Chile for their warmth and affection. May our ties grow as tall as the Andes and Himalayas," the President posted on his official twitter handle. Prior to Chile, the President visited Croatia and Bolivia from March 25 to March 30. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development Consultancy Service (NABCONS) for setting up the India-Africa Institute of Agriculture and Rural Development (IAIARD) in Malawi, a landlocked country in southeastern Africa. Ministry of External Affairs signed on Tuesday with NABCONS for setting up IAIARD, an attempt to complement the efforts of the Government of India to enhance capacity in the areas of agro-financing and entrepreneurship development for African countries. "IAIARD will be a pan-African institute wherein trainees not only from Malawi but also from other African countries, will receive training to develop their human resources and build their capacity," said an official statement. "IAIARD will develop training programmes in the areas of micro-financing and agro-financing, among others," the statement further said. Indian government will bear the entire expenditure on faculty from India, the travel, logistics and training course expenses for students from other African countries for an initial period of three years. "This institute will be the first of its kind developed in an African country by India. This will further strengthen bilateral relations with Malawi and India's relations with the African Union," said the statement. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) During a high-level meeting, India and Russia reviewed the implementation of decisions taken at 19th annual bilateral summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi in October last year. The review meeting took place during the official visit of Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale to Russia on April 1-2, 2019. He met Russian Deputy Foreign Minister (DFM) Igor Morgulov for Foreign Office Consultations. They discussed preparations for the forthcoming high-level meetings including India's participation in the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, which is slated for September 2019. "During discussions with DFM Igor Morgulov, the talks covered preparations for the next bilateral summit, cooperation in the formats of SCO, RIC and other bodies. There were wide-ranging discussions on the evolving situation in Afghanistan," read a press release from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Foreign Secretary Gokhale also met DFM Sergey Ryabkov and the two held discussions covering the regional and international issues including those relating to disarmament and non-proliferation, and co-operation between India and Russia at various multilateral fora. The Foreign Secretary called on Deputy Prime Minister and Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Russian Far East Federal District, Yury Trutnev. "Foreign Secretary's meetings were in-depth and productive, characteristic of the special and privileged strategic partnership between India and Russia," further said the statement. "The meetings resulted in enhanced mutual convergence and coordination of views on all major regional and international issues in the spirit of long-standing and time-tested friendship between India and Russia," read the press release. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India's recent test of anti-satellite (A-SAT) missile has been termed as "a terrible, terrible thing" by NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, as reported by Engadget. According to Bridenstine, as per Engadget report, the anti-satellite missile test could "endanger astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS)." It is estimated that the risk to the ISS has increased by 44 per cent over the last ten days. Though the astronauts are safe and the ISS could be maneuvered if needed to avoid the debris, Bridenstine stressed that these activities are not sustainable or compatible with human spaceflight. It is being said that the missile that shot down the satellite reportedly created at least 400 pieces of orbital debris, including 60 larger than 6-inch in size. NASA or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. India's successful anti-missile test, a part of Mission Shakti, had been announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a televised address to the nation on March 27. After the US, China, and Russia, India is the fourth country to have anti-satellite missile capability. An official statement from the Government of India had claimed that the test was at a level low enough to ensure that any debris generated would fall back to Earth within weeks. Under the Mission Shakti, a joint mission of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the anti-satellite missile test was conducted in which one of India's existing satellites operating in the lower orbit was shot down with a missile. The Ministry of External Affairs in a statement stated that the technological test was carried out to verify that India has the capability to safeguard its space assets. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian Air Force and Army will destroy three to four unexploded bombs fired by the Pakistan Air Force in the Mendhar area along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, said a source. The Pakistani bombs were fired on February 27 and did not explode after being released from their Mirage-III combat planes. Pakistan also fired 11 H-4 and 5 AMRAAM missiles on Indian military targets on February 27. Pakistan attacked Indian troops in the area. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An IndiGo Pune-Nagpur flight returned a few minutes after taking off following a snag in the aircraft's engine on Tuesday. "After take-off from Pune, the pilot observed engine caution message. The aircraft returned to Pune. It is currently being inspected by a technical team," said IndiGo in an official statement. The Pune Airport Authority said, "There was some engine problem in Nagpur flight and the flight has been landed safely." The reason for the glitch is yet to be ascertained. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP on Tuesday released its 15th list of candidates for the impending polls, including two from Gujarat and one from Kerala. The party has fielded actor Suresh Gopi from Kerala's Thrissur while Sharda Ben Patel and Darshana Jardosh will be contesting from Gujarat's Mahesana and Surat, respectively. Polling for 26 Lok Sabha seats at stake in Gujarat will be held in a single phase on April 23. Kerala, which has 20 Lok Sabha seats, will also go to polls in a single phase on April 23. 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.) The Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Tuesday shot off a letter to the Election Commission (EC) over what it called certain "brazen" violations of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), barely about a week before the 17th Lok Sabha election commences. Nilotpal Basu, a member of the Polit Bureau of the CPI-M, addressed the letter to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora. He listed a couple of complaints over the BJP's alleged violations of the MCC, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address to the nation last month on the successful launch of anti-satellite test (A-SAT) missile. "You would kindly recall that we had pointed out to you the impropriety of the public broadcast by the Prime Minister on the destruction of a defunct satellite in low orbit with missile as a demonstration of our technology capability. The fundamental question was whether the Prime Minister, who is also a candidate of the BJP, can use the office and the prerogatives to try and influence for the sake of electoral benefit? However, the Commission chose to restrict the question to the role of the DD and gave the broadcaster a clean chit," Basu wrote in the letter. "Now, our attention has been drawn to a tweet by Doordarshan News @DDNewsLive for urging people to watch live the PM's addresses for his #MainBhiChowkidar programme through video conferencing. The print-out of the tweet is appended herewith," he said. Basu accused the BJP of making an "unabashed attempt" to use the situation post-air raid at a JeM camp in Balakot by utilising the "exploits" of the armed forces for electoral purposes. "The Commission had taken note and passed an order to categorically forbid such use of the armed forces in the election campaign," Basu said in the letter. Basu said that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath recent comments on referring the Indian Army as "Modi ji Ki Sena" (Modi's Army) was a "clear violation" of the MCC. "Similarly, there is another blatant attempt by the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi himself to rouse communal passions by implicitly referring to the outcome in an NIA Court, by equating the accused to the entire Hindu community in an election meeting in Wardha," he further stated. Urging the EC to take up the matter, Basu said, "In our opinion, these are gross violations of the MCC and has the potential of completely vitiating the social atmosphere in the run-up to the elections. We urge you to immediately take appropriate measures for maintaining the sanctity of MCC and the holding of a free and fair election." The Lok Sabha polls with 543 parliamentary seats in the fray are scheduled to be conducted in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. 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.) Former Deputy Chief Minister and BJP MLA from Shimoga KS Eshwarappa has urged the Muslims to "believe" the party if they want tickets for the ensuing polls. "Congress uses you only as a vote bank and does not give you the ticket. We will not give Muslims tickets because you do not believe in us," Eshwarappa said on Monday while responding to a query by minority leader Iqbal Ansari in Koppal. Eshwarappa emphasised, "Believe us, we will give you tickets and other things". In January, Eshwarappa had referred to former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah as "mad". "Siddaramaiah lost the CM's post. Since then, he has become like a 'pagal'," he had said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Tuesday said the proposed NYAY scheme which guarantees minimum income is 'implementable' and the Congress party if voted to power will have an expert group to ensure its proper execution. He also slammed the NDA government for allegedly terming the scheme as an unfeasible proposition, and said that if the present government thinks that NYAY is not implementable, then it should step down. "If someone says they cannot implement NYAY, then they should vacate the chair. NYAY is implementable and we will have an expert group to implement it," said Chidambaram, while speaking at an event in the capital. He said that the Congress party will "first design the NYAY scheme and then pilot it for testing and subsequently roll out it in a phased manner." We cannot have a situation where the bottom 20 per cent population is living in abject poverty," he said. Talking about the benefits of the scheme, the veteran politician said that NYAY will help "remonetise" and stimulate production. "When the poor consume more, then it will stimulate production. More production means more jobs. NYAY will give mobility to the poor. Schemes similar to NYAY will ensure that the people come out of poverty," he said. Chidambaram also clarified on the GST 2.0 which is enlisted in the Congress manifesto is GST in a real sense of the term while the GST implemented by present dispensation is not a GST at all. "What the NDA implemented is not GST. Even Arvind Subramaniam said it is not GST. We will implement true GST. That is why it is called GST 2.0. It is better to implement a fresh GST," he said. "There will be a single standard rate with input credit at every level while exports will be zero-rated. Moreover, compliance will be made simple and e-way bill will be abolished," he said. Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi's campaign, Chidambaram said: "As the election approaches, drum beats go louder and louder. Modi goes from place to place but utters no word about jobs, farmers' problems. He only talks about Pakistan. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan on Monday expressed "deep concern" over the threats resulting from space debris generated by the recently conducted Anti-Satellite weapon (ASAT) test by India. "The reports that some of the space debris created by this test has been pushed above the apogee of the International Space Station (ISS), increasing the risk of collision are deeply worrying," Pakistan's Foreign Office (FO) said in a statement. It said that, as such, this ASAT test should be "a matter of grave concern" for the international community not only in terms of generation of space debris but also because of its ramifications for long term sustainability of peaceful space activities "Pakistan remains a strong proponent of non-militarisation of outer space. We will continue to work with like-minded countries to address gaps in the international legal regime governing the exploration and use of outer space with a view to ensuring that no one threatens peaceful activities and applications of space technologies for socio-economic development," the statement added. It would also be amiss to ignore the military dimension of such actions and its implications on the global and regional peace, stability and security, the statement said. The statement further warned that in the absence of strong legal instruments, other states could also follow suit by demonstrating such capabilities. On March 27, India successfully tested an anti-satellite missile by shooting down its own decommissioned satellite that was on a 'Low Earth Orbit' at a height of 300 kilometres from the earth's surface. Making the announcement about the test, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India's feat is only for its own defence needs and not for use against any country. Prime Minister Modi had also assured the international community that this test does not violate any international treaties or law and that India remains committed against the arms race in space. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Ram Nath Kovind who is making a transit halt in Cape Town on Tuesday afternoon addressed the Indian community here. Addressing the gathering here, President Kovind noted that it was a privilege for him to visit Cape Town this year to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. "As we pay tribute to the Mahatma and his ideas of peace and non-violence on this occasion, it is natural to be reminded of the role South Africa played in his journey from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to Mahatma Gandhi," he said. The President arrived in Cape Town on a transit halt after a three-nation tour of Croatia, Bolivia and Chile. "The 21 years he spent in South Africa from 1893 till 1940 turned him into a true stalwart of freedom and justice. In the honour of his 150th birth anniversary, we have begun the celebrations in the over. And I take this opportunity as a part of the celebrations of Gandhi's birth anniversary," Kovind added. The President added that there were many similarities between India and South Africa before each country got its independence. "That was the struggle and cruelty that our people were facing from the rulers. It was Gandhi who got the idea that if South Africa is facing such as a problem then it may also happen in India. Rather we can also say that a little bit of credit of India's freedom goes to South Africa as well," Kovind said. India stood along with the people of South Africa in their trials and tribulations during the apartheid regime. India tried to join when Nelson Mandela visited India in 1990 after his release from Robin Island, the President said. "We are honoured to confer Mandela with the Bharat Ratna Award -- India's highest national honour -- the same year," he added. President Kovind also stated that he will have the opportunity to pay his tribute to Mandela at the Robin Island on Wednesday. "South Africa is home to one of the largest Indian diaspora and we take great pride in their success and accomplishments. Most of you belong to the communities and families that arrived in this beautiful country several generations ago and opted to settle here. Many of you recently came here as professionals, entrepreneurs and businessmen. Despite the distance and passage of time, South Africans of Indian origin have kept India close to their hearts," the President added. The visit of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to India as chief guest for the Republic Day celebrations in January 2019 opened another chapter in our bilateral relations, Kovind said. "Our economic engagements are one of the key ingredients of this vibrant partnership. Indian companies in South Africa are adding values by opening new avenues of growth in this country. South African companies are also partnering in India's growth and collaborating in our flagship initiatives like Made In India, Digital India, Clean India and Smart City programmes," the President noted. The Indian government is committed in deepening its ties with the Indian community settled abroad. "I would urge you to benefit out of the schemes and plans that we have put in place. We have made our Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) schemes simply for more people to benefit. We are also reaching out to those who are in distress and needy. In the last four years, we have rescued over 90,000 people caught in violence, strife and natural disasters overseas," he added. "May our two nations continue to chart new paths and forge new ties to unleash the creative energies in ensuring peace and prosperity not just for ourselves but for the entire humanity ably guided by the Mahatma and Madiba," Kovind said. President Kovind was on a three-nation tour to Croatia, Bolivia and Chile from March 25th to April 2nd. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Ram Nath Kovind on Monday (local time) addressed students and faculty of the University of Chile in Santiago on the topic of "Gandhi for the Young". From Chile to China, from Mexico to Malaysia on October 2, the International day of non-violence, this year, the will commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of the Mahatma, Kovind said. "The humanism of your thought leaders is so deeply reflected in Mahatma Gandhi's teachings. For me, he was the 'experimental Gandhi', defying class and race boundaries. A 'creative Gandhi', who transformed salt into a powerful symbol of a mass movement. And the 'determined Gandhi', who with his frail body walked through the villages of India with a lamp of truth amid the all-pervading darkness of violence that marked our independence," the President added. "A close associate of Gandhi once told that the Mahatma was a combination of 'Kranti', that is revolution, and 'Shanti' that is peace. This made him an inspiring illustration of courage and struggle; the courage to retain the clarity of thoughts and conviction even amid the worst form of turmoil," he added. The President further added in his statement that Gandhi also inspired many other revolutionaries who were leading the freedom struggle such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Gandhi's guiding principle was truth, and his entire life was a continued exercise on the path of discovering and pursuing 'Satya', that is truth. He believed morality to be the foundation of life and conduct, Kovind said. "Mahatma Gandhi belonged to all cultures and he drew from all religions. While deeply rooted in Hinduism, Gandhiji was also influenced by Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism and Islam as also by thinkers such as Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau," the President noted. "Gandhiji was a unique persona who inspired both the East and the West, who forged new pathways for human endeavour, while at the same time maintaining the strength and sanctity of tradition and spiritual roots," he added. During his speech, President Kovind stated that Gandhi, also known as the 'Father of the Nation' in India, carried his concept of universal love to teach how to live in harmony with nature. He also advocated both sustainability and ecological sensitivity at a time when the industrial revolution and increasing mechanisation were the mantras guiding the He promoted concepts which are enshrined in the sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations, the President said. "Our global initiative to set up the International Solar Alliance (ISA) and offer solutions for climate change is inspired by him," Kovind stated. "Many of Gandhi's concepts which seemed out of sync with the that he lived in are today becoming increasingly relevant and finding their own momentum," he added. Many of the policies of the Indian government are also inspired by Gandhi, including the Swachh Bharat programme with its emphasis on sanitation and public health and the fight against climate change, the President said, while adding, "We follow Gandhi's footsteps in our fight for gender equality and the upliftment of all disadvantaged sections of the society." "To all those who are adrift today in a sea of doubt and scepticism, Gandhi's life, thought and philosophy would inspire them to regain inner strength and confidence," the President noted. "Mahatma Gandhi was more than just a man, he was an ideology, an institution that still resonates more than a hundred years after it was developed," Kovind added. Following this, President Kovind, who is on a three-day visit to Chile that culminates on April 4, also addressed the India-Chile Business Forum, where he said that Chile is India's window to Latin America and to the Pacific Alliance. The President invited Chile's sovereign funds to invest in the Indian infrastructure sector. The President emplaned for India later in the day. President Kovind was on the last leg of his three-nation tour. Prior to Chile, the President visited Croatia and Bolivia from March 25th to March 30th. On Sunday, the President addressed the Indian community here and said it has integrated well into the Chilean society and established a good reputation for itself and for India. During his presence, along with his Chilean counterpart Sebastian Pinera, India and Chile signed three Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) in the field of mining, culture and disability. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Priya Dutt, daughter of late veteran actor Sunil Dutt, who is contesting from Mumbai North-Central Lok Sabha seat on a Congress ticket, claimed that both democracy and Constitution are presently in "danger". "In the last five years, those who raise their voice against the government are tagged as anti-nationals. They are asked to leave and go to Pakistan," Priya said while campaigning in Kherwadi area of Bandra on Tuesday. "Such type of situation is there in the country these days, that people like us have to prove our nationalism and prove that we are also the citizens of this country. Both democracy and constitution are in danger under the present situation," she added. Dutt had entered electoral in 2005 and has been contesting from Mumbai North-Central Parliamentary constituency since then. She had fought three general assembly elections too, the last one in 2014. She lost the last LokSabha polls to BJP'sPoonamMahajan. Maharashtra will go to polls in four phases, starting April 11. Counting of votes will take place on May 23. There are 48 Lok Sabha seats at stake in Maharashtra. . (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A delegation of senior Russian officials arrived this week on an unannounced visit to North Korea, local media reported on Tuesday. "Vladimir Kolokoltsev, minister of Interior of the Russian Federation, and his party arrived here on Monday," the Korean Central News Agency said in its reports. The visit comes amid speculations that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might be preparing to visit Moscow for his first-ever summit with President Vladimir Putin anytime this month. Earlier, Kim Chang-son, known as Kim Jong-un's de facto chief of staff, visited Moscow and Vladivostok, amid speculations that the leader's Russia trip might be imminent. The North Korean leader had visited China four times since last year for summits with Chinese President Xi Jinping, including the latest one in January. He, however, has not travelled to Russia since taking office in late 2011. At present, North Korea is seeking to intensify its diplomatic ties with Russia since it reached an impasse with the United States on denuclearisation following the Hanoi summit held in February between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined urgent hearing on Patidar leader Hardik Patel's plea seeking suspension of his conviction in a case of rioting and arson in Mehsana district of Gujarat during the Patidar quota stir in 2015, in a setback to his hopes to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. Patel, 25, had moved the apex court challenging the order of the Gujarat High Court which had in August last year suspended his jail sentence but not the conviction. He had joined Congress on March 12 and was given a party ticket to contest the election from Jamnagar in Gujarat. Patel's counsel today mentioned the matter before a bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra which declined urgent hearing by saying when the conviction was given in August 2018, then why should it be heard now. His petition had pleaded for urgent hearing since the last date for filing the nomination papers is April 4. The state will go to polls on April 23. A trial court in Mehsana had sentenced the Patidar leader to two years imprisonment in July last year for his involvement in rioting and arson during a Patidar quota protest in 2015. As per rules and the Representation of the People (RP) Act, a candidate who is convicted and is facing a prison term of two years or more, cannot contest polls unless the same is stayed by a court. On July 23, 2015, a rally demanding reservation for the Patidars had turned violent in Visnagar and the office of then BJP MLA from the area Rishikesh Patel was ransacked. An FIR was lodged against eight people. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Tuesday set aside the order of Delhi High Court granting bail to Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali, an accused in terror funding case. "We set aside the order of the Delhi High Court. The petition filed by the NIA is allowed," a division bench of the apex court comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and Ajay Rastogi said while setting aside the order. A special NIA court on March 20 allowed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to question Altaf Shah, son-in-law of Kashmiri separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani, besides Zahoor Watali and Naval Kishore inside Tihar jail for three days in connection with the case. Special NIA Judge Rakesh Syal had permitted the agency to conduct the interrogation on any three days between March 24 and April 5. According to ED, Watali, an influential businessman, is allegedly known to some Pakistani leaders and Kashmiri separatists. It has also alleged that Watali is known to Kishore, who was a UAE-based businessman. In the previous hearing on Friday, ED's counsel Nitesh Rana had submitted that the agency wanted to question the accused in Tihar Jail to confront them with some documents and fresh evidence in connection with the case. Last year, the Delhi High Court had granted bail to Watali. He was arrested for his alleged role in the terror-funding case involving Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed. Watali was then asked to furnish a personal bail bond of Rs 2 lakh with two surety of the same amount and surrender his passport. For long, Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali has been acting as one of the major financial conduits for Hurriyat leaders and for secessionists and anti-India activities under the garb of business. Watali is also said to have floated various shell companies from where money is transferred into other bogus and illegal bank accounts which are used to channelise funds to Hurriyat leaders. During the NIA probe, various incriminating documents relating to various shell companies in UAE, UK and property papers in India have seized from his premises as well as the premises of his associates. According to sources, Naval Kishore Kapoor is a close associate of Watali and has remitted Rs 5.6 crore in various installments to Watali for which he has not been able to produce any document regarding the source of funds. The duo ran a network of bogus and shell companies. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Kayts Court in Sri Lanka has extended the remand of 8 fishermen from Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu till April 7. The fishermen were arrested and imprisoned by the Sri Lankan Navy after their boat met with an accident on January 13. Straying of Indian and Sri Lankan fishermen into each others' waters is a recurrent problem as territories on the sea are not clearly demarcated. In January this year, Sri Lankan Navy reportedly apprehended nine fishermen near the shore of the Delft Island. The body of a 55-year-old Rameswaram fisherman was recovered by the Sri Lanka Navy during a dedicated rescue mission to locate a group of distressed Indian fishermen near the Delft Island. Last year in October, at least five Indian fishermen belonging to Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu were detained by the Sri Lankan Navy from Neduntheevu in northern Sri Lanka, following which Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to secure the release of fishermen lodged in Sri Lankan prisons. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Justifying statues built in Uttar Pradesh with taxpayers money during her regime, former UP Chief Minister and BSP supremo Mayawati on Tuesday told the Supreme Court that the state legislature showed respect to a Dalit woman leader. "With the statues, the state legislature had shown respect to a Dalit woman leader. How could I defy the will of the state legislature," Mayawati stated in her affidavit before the apex court in reply of a petition accusing her of glorifying herself. "Whether the money should have been spent on education or hospitals "is a debatable question and can't be decided by a court," the affidavit read. In February, Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi had said he was of the tentative view that the BSP chief has to reimburse the taxpayers' money used in building the statues. But he stopped short of passing an order to hear what Mayawati had to say. The top court is hearing a 2009 petition against the profusion of statues of Mayawati, her mentor Kanshi Ram and elephants - her party BSP's symbol - built at parks in Lucknow and Noida with taxpayers' money when she was the Chief Minister between 2007 and 2012. The statues of bronze, cement and marble had critics accusing her of self-obsession and megalomania. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 17-year-old girl was killed for attending school in Sanpura village of Muzaffarpur district in Bihar. A group of seven men allegedly killed the girl on Friday night even as they kept her family locked inside their own house when they tried to protest. Villagers have alleged that the community from which the girl comes does not want women to study past matriculation. The girl's defiance to pursue higher education had therefore enraged the community members leading to this incident. The seven accused had allegedly held the victim's brother and wife hostage inside their own house while they carried out the brutal killing. Speaking to ANI, SSP Manoj Kumar, Muzzafarpur said: "A girl has died under suspicious circumstances. The victim's family along with their neighbours has already cremated the body. The FIR filed mentions some serious accusations based on which he have arrested three people. The evidences were tampered with and so we have taken action based on the FIR but the story narrated in the FIR makes it worthy of a serious investigation." He further added: "The Deputy SP is leading the investigation team to get to the root of the incident and the truth will come out soon. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday said that there was a demand for him to contest from Kerala as South of India feels that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is hostile towards it. In response to a question on him contesting from the Wayanad Lok Sabha seat, Rahul said that there was a "demand for me" since a "very strong feeling" exists in the South of India that the people of the region are not being carried along with rest of the country by the Modi government. "South India feels hostility from Mr Narendra Modi," he said. He added, "They feel that they are not being included in the decisions of this country. So, I wanted to send a message to South India that we are with you and we are standing with you. That is why I am standing from Kerala." On March 31, senior Congress leader AK Antony had announced that Rahul Gandhi will be contesting from Wayanad parliamentary constituency in Kerala in addition to Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, with an aim to strengthen the unity of north and south. Kerala, which has 20 Lok Sabha seats, goes to polls in a single phase on April 23. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) British lawmakers on Monday voted against all four possible alternative plans for Theresa May's Brexit Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union (EU), after rejecting the deal tabled thrice in the Parliament. While the voting continued in the British Parliament on Monday (local time), lawmakers rejected all the proposed alternatives, which included plans to hold a second referendum, retaining much closer economic ties after leaving the EU, or stopping Brexit to prevent a no-deal departure, Al Jazeera reported. The second referendum proposal garnered the most votes in favour - 280 - but was beaten by 292 votes against. The next option that proposed UK to stay in a permanent customs union with the EU was rejected by 276 to 273 votes. The so-called divorce deal of May was rejected for the third time in the British Parliament on March 29 by 58 votes, with the EU warning that a no-deal Brexit is now a 'likely scenario'. The UK is set to crash out of the EU on April 12, unless the British Parliament passes May's deal or the government is able to secure a long extension to Brexit. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told Al Jazeera that the government would continue to seek support for a "credible" plan for leaving the EU. "This house has continuously rejected leaving without a deal just as it has rejected not leaving at all," Barclay was quoted as saying. "Therefore the only option is to find a way through which allows the UK to leave with a deal," he added. May had earlier announced that she would step down if her deal was passed in the British Parliament. Despite the rejection, calls from parliamentarians regarding May's resignation have magnified. Adding to the crisis, May had also previously rejected calls for a second referendum, putting forth her resolve to honour the outcome of the 2016 vote and leave the EU. On March 31, more than six million people signed a petition, put online on March 20, urging the British government to stop the process of the UK's withdrawal from the EU. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Uttar Pradesh DGP commended police constable Manvi, for displaying the "highest human virtues of kindness" by assisting an old woman and by providing her with food. In a letter, DGP OP Singh said that Manvi, who is posted in Dhanghata area in Sant Kabir Nagar district, saw an old woman outside a bank trying to get her work done. Manvi later helped her and took the woman to her home and provided her with food. "DGP OP Singh commended Const. Manvi, in an appreciation letter, for exemplifying highest human virtues of kindness along with her duty. She not only empathetically comforted a hassled old lady outside a bank, helped her with her work but also offered her food. Congratulations Manvi," read a post on the official Twitter handle of the Uttar Pradesh police. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Taking a jibe at Congress for failing to eradicate poverty from the nation, Uttar Pradesh deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma on Tuesday mocked the grand old Party's "Garibi Hatao" slogan and dragged the children of AICC general secretary (UP East) Priyanka Gandhi into the political slugfest. He said the Congress has used 'garibi hatao (eradicate poverty)' slogan as a "ploy" to stay in power for many years, while adding Priyanka Gandhi's children will be the next generation of crusaders in fight against poverty. Speaking at an event here, Dinesh Sharma said, "The country first Prime Minister (Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru) expressed worry regarding poverty and talked about eradicating it. Then his daughter took it forward with the slogan "Garibi Tatao". After which, her son (former Prime Minister Rajeev Gandhi). He took both forward-poverty and the slogan. Then his wife (Sonia Gandhi) also said." "Now, what is left, Vadra ji will say "Gareebi Hatao" and their children Miraya and Raihan will also call for eradication of poverty," he added. Accusing Congress party of "exploiting poor", Sharma said, "It has been 70 years since independence, for 3/4th of its duration there was Congress govt. But poverty was not eliminated. Poor became poorer, rich became richer. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Venezuela's Chief Justice Maikel Moreno has requested to strip National Assembly President Juan Guaido of his parliamentary immunity, alleging that he had violated a travel ban by visiting Colombia in February. "It is public...that the Supreme Court agreed on measures against citizen Juan Guaido, such as the prohibition from leaving the country without the authorization from this high court, and it is public that Juan Guaido violated this order," Xinhua quoted Moreno as saying. Guaido proclaimed himself as the President on January 23 and was immediately supported by the United States, which recognises him as the official interim President of the Latin American nation. The self-proclaimed President was also accused of having inconsistencies in his financial disclosures, according to Anadolu Agency who quoted state comptroller Elvis Amoroso. Amoroso alleged that Guaido had undertaken 91 international trips since 2015, for which he spent around USD 30 million without accounting for the source of the money. Embattled President Nicolas Maduro, meanwhile, has refused to step down from his post, despite calls from the international community which sees the previous elections, which Maduro won, as rigged. Venezuela has been in the throes of a political and economic crisis, worsened by sanctions by the United States on main agencies like the PDVSA. The South American country was also hit with a blackout, which left 21 out of 23 states without power for days. The Maduro government has alleged that the main Guri hydroelectric power plant was "sabotaged," blaming the USA and Guaido for it. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Om Prakash Rajbhar, UP minister and president of Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), on Tuesday said that he will take a decision on his party's course on an alliance with the BJP for Lok Sabha elections on Saturday. "Whatever is to happen, will happen on April 6. Nobody would have hoped for what will happen on that day," a visibly upset Rajbhar told ANI here. Rajbhar, who is a Cabinet Minister in UP government, said: "Our voters are not slaves of any party. They will vote where we want them to vote." He said that his party was trying to seal a poll pact for the Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh and accused its ally BJP of misleading the SBSP. "They have given seats to another ally Apna Dal but they are misleading us," he said. A meeting of SBSP leaders was scheduled to take place in Lucknow on Monday to discuss the prevailing political situation in the state. However, the meeting was postponed until Saturday. Rajbhar has been critical of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath-led UP government and has attacked it on several occasions. Uttar Pradesh, where 80 Lok Sabha seats are at stake, will go to polls in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. (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 advanced on Tuesday, 02 April 2019, as sentiment for equities bolstered in the wake of better-than-expected factory activity data in China and the United States, In addition, a progress in trade talks between the world's top two economies also boosted investor sentiment. The reduction in the value-added tax to 13 percent from 16 percent effective from 1 April 2019, , boosted market sentiment. At closing bell, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index added 0.2%, or 6.46 points, to 3,176.82. The Shenzhen Composite Index, which tracks stocks on China's second exchange, added 0.11%, or 1.94 points, to 1,757.60. The blue-chip CSI300 index fell 0.07%, or 2.64 points, to 3,971.29. The U. S. ISM index for manufacturing rose from a two-year low Monday. That followed better than expected China manufacturing PMIs for March, assuaging growth concerns, though manufacturing data for Europe came in at the lowest since 2013. Meanwhile, U. S.-China trade talks will resume when Vice Premier Liu He leads a delegation to Washington later this week. China's manufacturing activity grew for the first time in four months in March with quicker rises in output and overall new work, according to a private report released yesterday, which also showed the fastest growth in eight months. The Caixin China General Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index, which measures the manufacturing sector and is weighted toward private companies, came in at 50.8 in March, rebounding 0.9 percentage points from the previous month, Caixin magazine and research firm Markit said. A reading above 50 signals growth while one below 50 means contraction. The Caixin PMI is a private survey focusing on smaller businesses and offers a first glimpse into the operating environment. It is closely watched as an alternative to the official PMI. The official PMI for March released on Sunday was 50.5, compared with 49.2 in February. Meanwhile, risk sentiments also bolstered amid signs of progress in US-China trade talks. Beijing said it would continue to suspend additional tariffs on US vehicles and auto parts after April 1 in a goodwill gesture after Washington delayed tariff hikes on Chinese imports. A delegation led by Vice-Premier Liu He will be in Washington this week for another round of talks. CURRENCY NEWS: China's yuan strengthened against the U. S. dollar on Tuesday. Prior to market opening on Tuesday, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) set the midpoint rate at 6.7161 per dollar, 32 pips or 0.05% firmer than the previous fix of 6.7193. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Dr Reddys Laboratories announced that it has entered into a confidential settlement agreement with Celgene for its Abbreviated New Drug Submissions (ANDS) related to a generic version of REVLIMID brand capsules, (Lenalidomide) pending before Health Canada. Pursuant to this confidential settlement, the parties agreed to discontinue all legal proceedings involving certain of Celgene's Canadian patents related to Lenalidomide and the Company's ANDS for a generic versions of Celgene's Lenalidomide capsules pending before Health Canada. Other terms of the agreement are confidential. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Key equity benchmarks firmed up in mid-morning trade amid positive cues from other Asian shares. At 11:29 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, was up 83.35 points or 0.21% at 38,955.22. The Nifty 50 index was up 20.85 points or 0.18% at 11,690. The Sensex was trading below 39,000 mark after crossing that level in early trade. The Nikkei India Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) eased to a six-month low of 52.60 in March compared with 54.30 in February. The latest figure highlighted a loss of growth momentum. Consumer goods was the brightest spot in March, followed by the intermediate and then investment goods categories. The data was announced during trading hours today, 2 April 2019. Meanwhile, India's Supreme Court reportedly dismissed a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circular that gave firms 180 days for debt resolution, failing which the issue would be taken under the country's bankruptcy. Several companies, especially power firms, had sought intervention of the Supreme Court saying the time given by the central bank was not enough time to tackle the debt issue, reports added. Among secondary barometers, the BSE Mid-Cap index was up 0.33%. The BSE Small-Cap index was up 0.05%. The market breadth, indicating the overall health of the market, was positive. On BSE, 1115 shares rose and 986 shares fell. A total of 115 shares were unchanged. IT shares were mixed. Hexaware Technologies (up 1.71%), Oracle Financial Services Software (up 1.37%), TCS (up 0.90%), MindTree (up 0.60%), Infosys (up 0.51%) and Tech Mahindra (up 0.01%), edged higher. Wipro (down 0.08%), Persistent Systems (down 0.11%), MphasiS (down 0.3%) and HCL Technologies (down 1.35%), edged lower. Most pharmaceuticals shares declined. Piramal Enterprises (down 2%), Divi's Laboratories (down 1.11%), Wockhardt (down 0.62%), Alkem Laboratories (down 0.49%), IPCA Laboratories (down 0.37%), Glenmark Pharmaceuticals (down 0.3%), Aurobindo Pharma (down 0.19%), Strides Shasun (down 0.07%), Dr Reddy's Laboratories (down 0.06%) and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (down 0.02%), edged lower. Sun Pharmaceutical Industries (up 0.06%), Cadila Healthcare (up 0.58%) and Lupin (up 1.64%), edged higher. Cipla was down 0.34%. The company's wholly owned subsidiary in USA i.e. Cipla Technologies LLC, has signed a binding term sheet with Pulmatrix Inc., ("Pulmatrix") for an investment in Phase 2 ready asset co-development and licensing opportunity for Pulmazole (Inhaled ltraconazole) for an upfront consideration of USD 22 million. Entry into a definitive agreement is contingent upon Pulmatrix raising additional funds from the market. Upon signing the definitive agreement, the co-development cost towards development and the total free cash flow in relation to commercialization of Pulmazole will be further shared by both the parties in a phased manner. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 1 April 2019. On the economic front, the output of eight core industries, comprising 40.27% of the weight of items included in the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), rose 2.1% in February 2019. The cumulative output has improved 4.3% in April to February 2018-19. Overseas, Asian stocks were trading higher Tuesday following overnight gains on Wall Street. US stocks ended higher Monday, boosted by better-than-expected economic reports, momentarily allaying fears of flagging economic growth. Investors were also hopeful for a resolution to the US-China trade conflict, with a Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Liu He set to visit Washington later this week. On Monday, the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index showed that activity in the sector accelerated, coming in at a stronger-than-expected 55.3 in March versus a two-year low of 54.2% a month earlier. A reading above 50 indicates an expansion in activity. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Infosys Ltd is quoting at Rs 760.35, up 0.7% on the day as on 12:44 IST on the NSE. The stock is up 33.34% in last one year as compared to a 14.32% gain in NIFTY and a 26.4% gain in the Nifty IT. Infosys Ltd rose for a fifth straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 760.35, up 0.7% on the day as on 12:44 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 0.37% on the day, quoting at 11711.95. The Sensex is at 39050.13, up 0.46%. Infosys Ltd has added around 3.8% in last one month. Meanwhile, Nifty IT index of which Infosys Ltd is a constituent, has added around 1.8% in last one month and is currently quoting at 15840.65, up 0.66% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 39.52 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 86.81 lakh shares in last one month. The benchmark April futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 762.15, up 0.2% on the day. Infosys Ltd is up 33.34% in last one year as compared to a 14.32% gain in NIFTY and a 26.4% gain in the Nifty IT index. The PE of the stock is 23.59 based on TTM earnings ending December 18. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Mahindra & Mahindra rose 0.76% to Rs 665.70 at 10:31 IST on BSE after the company announced incorporation of a new step down subsidiary company in Jordan. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 1 April 2019. Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 4.67 points, or 0.01% to 38,867.20 On the BSE, 51,000 shares were traded in the counter so far compared with average daily volumes of 3.86 lakh shares in the past two weeks. The stock had hit a high of Rs 668.40 and a low of Rs 662.35 so far during the day. Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) announced incorporation of a new step down subsidiary company in Jordan. Mahindra Armored Vehicles Jordan, LLC. ('MAVJL') is incorporated with effect from 31 March, 2019, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Mahindra Emirates Vehicle Armouring FZ LLC ('MEVA'), a step down subsidiary of the company in which 88% of the shares are held by Mahindra Overseas Investment Company (Mauritius) (MOICML), a wholly owned subsidiary of the company. M&M reported 11.44% fall in net profit to Rs 1076.81 crore on 12.89% rise in total sales to Rs 13070.36 crore in Q3 December 2018 over Q3 December 2017. M&M enjoys a leadership position in utility vehicles, and is the world's largest tractor company, by volume. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Key benchmark indices were trading higher in early trade, tracking positive global leads. At 9:20 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, was up 45.72 points or 0.12% at 38,917.59. The Nifty 50 index was up 0.85 points or 0.01% at 11,670.00. Among secondary barometers,the BSE Mid-Cap index was up 0.09%. The BSE Small-Cap index was up 0.08%. The market breadth, indicating the overall health of the market, was positive. On BSE, 573 shares rose and 461 shares fell. A total of 55 shares were unchanged. Overseas, Asian stocks were trading higher Tuesday following overnight gains on Wall Street. US stocks ended higher Monday, boosted by better-than-expected economic reports, momentarily allaying fears of flagging economic growth. Investors were also hopeful for a resolution to the US-China trade conflict, with a Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Liu He set to visit Washington later this week. On Monday, the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index showed that activity in the sector accelerated, coming in at a stronger-than-expected 55.3 in March versus a two-year low of 54.2% a month earlier. A reading above 50 indicates an expansion in activity. Back home, Tata Motors was down 0.40%. Tata Motors Commercial and Passenger Vehicles Business sales in the domestic market for FY19 (April 2018 - March 2019), grew by 16% with 678,486 units as compared to 586,507 units over the same period Last year. In March 2019, the company witnessed its sales drop by 1% to 68,709 units as against 69,409 units sold in March 2018, as weak consumer sentiments continued. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 1 April 2019. TVS Motor Company was up 0.42%. The company registered sales of 325,345 units in March 2019 as against 326,667 units in March 2018. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 1 April 2019. Eicher Motors was up 2.50%. The company's total sales fell 20% at 60,831 units in March 2019 over March 2018. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 1 April 2019. Maruti Suzuki India was up 0.65%. The company has announced a price increase upto Rs 689 (Ex- Showroom - Delhi) across models on account of regulatory compliances. The new prices are effective from 1 April 2019. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 1 April 2019. Cipla was up 0.05%. The company's wholly owned subsidiary in USA i.e. Cipla Technologies LLC, has signed a binding term sheet with Pulmatrix Inc., ("Pulmatrix") for an investment in Phase 2 ready asset co-development and licensing opportunity for Pulmazole (Inhaled ltraconazole) for an upfront consideration of USD 22 million. Entry into a definitive agreement is contingent upon Pulmatrix raising additional funds from the market. Upon signing the definitive agreement, the co-development cost towards development and the total free cash flow in relation to commercialization of Pulmazole will be further shared by both the parties in a phased manner. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 1 April 2019. On the economic front, the output of eight core industries, comprising 40.27% of the weight of items included in the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), rose 2.1% in February 2019. The cumulative output has improved 4.3% in April to February 2018-19. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Four political parties in Manipur, here on Tuesday, announced that to "save democracy and India" they would support the two Congress candidates in the Lok Sabha polls in the state. The parties, which has formed a secular democratic front to extended support to the Congress, are the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S), the Trinamool Congress Manipur, the Democratic Janata Party Manipur and the Manipur Samajwadi Party. JDS-S President Manihar Goswami said, "We have discussed the issues facing the state and are of the view that only a party like the Congress can save democracy and India. That is why we are extending support." The announcement was made at the Congress office in the presence of Manipur state Congress unit chief Gaikhangam, three-time Chief Minister Okram Ibobi and others. --IANS il/pg/pcj (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Eight police personnel were killed and six others wounded after Taliban militants attacked a police camp in Afghanistan's Balkh province overnight, the police said on Tuesday. "The Taliban armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades stormed an Afghan Local Police (ALP) base camp in Shaikhah village of Sholgara district. In an ensuing gunfight, eight police personnel were killed and six others wounded," provincial police spokesman Adel Shah Adel told Xinhua news agency. Several militants were also killed and wounded during the gun battle, but their number could not be specified as the militants evacuated their casualties after the fighting, the official said. An investigation into the incident was ongoing. The Afghan National Defence and Security Forces remain in control of most of the country's population centres and all of 34 provincial capitals, but Taliban insurgents control large portions of rural areas, staging coordinated large-scale attacks against Afghan cities and districts since early 2018. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Hyderabad court on Tuesday sentenced veteran Telugu actor-producer M. Mohan Babu to one year imprisonment in a cheque bounce case. The 23rd Metropolitan Special Court, which convicted Mohan Babu in the nine-year-old case, also directed him to pay Rs 40.75 lakh towards the defaulted amount. His production house Lakshmi Prasanna Pictures was also found guilty and the court imposed Rs 10,000 fine on it. Well-known director Y.V.S. Chowdary had filed the case against the actor in 2010 after he allegedly failed to pay the amount. Mohan Babu had issued a cheque for Rs 40.75 lakh to Chowdary towards the payment for movie "Saleem" released in 2009. However, the cheque bounced on account of insufficient funds. As Mohan Babu failed to pay the amount, the director approached the court. According to Chowdary's lawyer Satya Sai Baba, Mohan Babu made an agreement with the director for Rs 1.55 crore to direct the movie. He had paid Rs 1.10 crore in different instalments. Under the final instalment, he issued cheque for Rs 40.75 lakh after deducting the tax. Meanwhile, Mohan Babu said in a statement that he will challenge the conviction in a higher court. He alleged that Chowdary misled the court and claimed that he had paid the entire amount towards "Saleem" and the cheque was issued for another film to be made under his banner. "However as "Saleem' did not do well, I told Y.S. Chowdary that I will not be making the next film. I asked him not to deposit the cheque in the bank but he went ahead resulting in the cheque bounce," said Mohan Babu. He was the producer of "Saleem", starring his son Vishnu Manchu and Ileana D'Cruz. Mohan Babu, who was earlier with Telugu Desam Party and served as member of Rajya Sabha till 2001, joined YSR Congress Party last week. --IANS ms/pg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Indian Army Captain Shalini Singh, also wife of late Major Avinash Singh Bhadauria, who was killed in action in September 2001, on Tuesday joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) here. Along with her, the former Vice President of Delhi BJP Purvanchal Morcha, Shailendra Singh, also joined the party. "We are proud to announce that the country's brave daughter, Captain Shalini Singh, as well as Shailendra Singh are joining the AAP. We welcome both of them," AAP MP Sanjay Singh told the media here. Shalini Singh, who joined the Army just three months after her husband was killed in Doda in Jammu and Kashmir, said she was joining the party as she believed in the ideology of the AAP and wanted to work for the betterment of the country. Speaking to the media, she said she joined the AAP as she had "seen how the party has transformed Delhi in the last four years". Echoing the sentiments, Shailendra Singh, who was part of the BJP for 15 years, said the AAP was doing good work whereas the "BJP has become all about Modi". "The ideology of the BJP was the country came first, then party and then person. But since 2014, the BJP has become all about Modi and party has taken a backseat," he said. He accused the BJP of sidelining those who worked for it for years. --IANS nks/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A teenager riding his bike lost his life after he came in contact with a Chinese 'manjha' (thread used for flying kites) that slit his throat in north Delhi, police said on Tuesday. The incident occurred on Monday noon when the victim, identified as Ravi, was on his bike going to take cooler grass wood from a market at Nirankari Colony. "When Ravi reached at GTB nagar area, he came in contact with Chinese manjha and collapsed on the bike. His throat was found deeply cut. He was taken to a hospital where he was declared brought dead," a senior police officer said. "We have registered a case against unknown persons and are investigating," he added. Ravi was a resident of Yograj Colony and worked in a factory. The Chinese manja was banned by Delhi government two years ago after many riders suffered critical injuries and a few of them died in national capital. --IANS sp/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Tripartite MOU with Tianshan Aluminium, Binjour QLD Sydney, April 2, 2019 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Emerging bauxite producer, Australian Bauxite Limited ( ASX:ABX ) (ABx, ASX Code ABX) considers its Binjour Project located 115kms southwest of Bundaberg Port (see Figure 1 in link below) to be the best source of gibbsite-trihydrate (THA) bauxite in Queensland that is suitable for low-temperature alumina refineries and sweetener circuits in some high-temperature refineries.- ABx, Rawmin & Tianshan Aluminium have executed an MoU for the sale of 0.5 to 1.5 million tonnes per year of bauxite from Binjour Project, Queensland- Trial mining site has been selected for Binjour Project- Contractors for Trial Mining have been selectedSince discovering Binjour in 2011-12, ABx has expanded the size of the resources and worked with landholders, local government, state government, port authorities and logistics companies to develop a viable strategy for developing the Binjour Bauxite Project. Significant progress has been made with logistical solutions to deliver bauxite onto large bulk carrier ships at the Port of Bundaberg.Subject to satisfactory results from the planned trial mining and processing testwork at Binjour, ABx and its marketing partner, Rawmin Mining and Industries Pvt. Ltd (Rawmin) are planning to commit to project development in late 2019, commencing with a mining lease application.Memorandum of Understanding TermsA delegation from Tianshan Aluminium Co.Ltd (Tianshan) reviewed the Binjour project and held meetings with government and port authorities in August 2018. Negotiations progressed with a Memorandum of Understanding now finalised for the delivery of bauxite from ABx's bauxite mines in Australia and from Rawmin's bauxite mines in India to Tianshan's new low temperature refinery in southern China, which is nearing completion. The planned combined tonnage commences at 0.5 million tonnes, growing to more than 1.0 million tonnes.Seasonal ComplementationBinjour project will be at maximum production during the Queensland Dry Season from April to November. ABx's bauxite mines in Tasmania achieve optimum production in Summer from December to May. Rawmin's bauxite mines in north-western India achieve maximum production in the Indian dry season from November to May but are restricted by the Monsoon months June to September each year.Coordinated production and shipments from all 3 sets of mines will achieve a reliable year-round delivery to the customer of bauxite at a consistent specification.All bauxite is gibbsite-rich trihydrate (THA) bauxite with very low content of the monohydrate alumina minerals boehmite and diaspore which require high temperature refining. These bauxite specifications in Table 1 (see link below) are ideally suited for low-temperature alumina refineries.Bauxite PricingSales will be done at market prices prevailing at the time of sale, based on a mutually acceptable price index.Port AgreementAn MoU Agreement for access to the preferred stockpile site at the Port of Bundaberg is well advanced.Engineering studies are in progress regarding the port stockpile, handling and shipping to ensure the port can handle the planned tonnages of bauxite from the Binjour Project without impacting negatively on any other port user.The port MoU is expected to be concluded during April-May.TRIAL MINING SITE SELECTEDSenior staff from ABx have recently held discussions with private landholders about access to a site where the Binjour bauxite layer occurs at surface and contains a spectrum of medium-grade bauxite grades that are suitable for conducting trial mining to assess:1. Mineability - hardness, density in-situ, moisture, size distribution2. Optimum method for grade control to identify and discard clay-rich layers3. Screening performance, yield, size distribution, grade upgradeability4. Handling characteristics, angle of repose, stockpile density5. Trucking performance6. Rehabilitation characteristics, regeneration rates, soil natureVariability of grades and thicknesses of bauxite will be assessed for resource estimation purposes.Discussions with local mining and screening contractors have succeeded in assembling the suite of equipment needed to carry out the required trial mining, grade control and screening performance testwork. ABx recruits employees locally and to work with local contractors as much as practicable.The paramount company policy is that:ABx endorses best practices on agricultural land, strives to leave land and environment better than we find it.We only operate where welcomed.To view tables and figures, please visit:About Australian Bauxite Ltd Australian Bauxite Limited (ABx) (ASX:ABX) has its first bauxite mine in Tasmania & controls the Eastern Australian Bauxite Province. ABx's 11 bauxite tenements in Queensland, New South Wales & Tasmania totalling 662 km2 are all 100% owned, unencumbered & free of third-party royalties. ABx's bauxite is gibbsite trihydrate (THA) bauxite that can be processed into alumina at low temperature. ABx has committed a large proportion of its expenditure into Research and Development to find ways to capitalise on the main strengths of its bauxite type which is very clean, free of all deleterious elements and partitioned into layers, nodules, particles and grains of different qualities that can be separated into different product streams using physical, chemical and geophysical methods. ABx has declared large Mineral Resources in northern NSW, southern NSW, Binjour in central QLD & in northern Tasmania. ABx's first mine commenced at Bald Hill near Campbell Town, Tasmania in December 2014 - the first new Australian bauxite mine for more than 35 years. ABx aspires to identify large bauxite resources in the Eastern Australian Bauxite Province and has created significant bauxite development projects in 3 states, Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania. Its bauxite deposits are favourably located for direct shipping of bauxite to both local and export customers. ABx endorses best practices on agricultural land, strives to leave land and environment better than we find it. We only operate where welcomed. The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined an urgent hearing of Patidar leader Hardik Patel's plea for a stay on his 2018 conviction in a 2015 rioting case that has all but ended his chances of contesting in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. The Patidar leader, who had joined the Congress on March 12, had sought the stay to pave way for him contesting the general elections that kick off on April 11. A bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra declined to hear the matter urgently observing that the conviction sought to be stayed relates to a 2015 case. The conviction and sentence in the case was pronounced in July 2018. Patel, who was being projected to be a candidate for the Jamnagar seat in Gujarat, has challenged the March 29 Gujarat High Court order rejecting his plea. The High Court did not accept his plea that said "an irreparable loss" would be caused to him if he was not able to contest the Lok Sabha elections. The Patidar leader sought the stay of the Mehsana court decision convicting him for involvement in the rioting and arson case at Visnagar during the Patel agitation in 2015. The Mehsana court had ordered a two-year imprisonment in July 2018. So long as he remains convicted, Patel stands barred from contesting polls. --IANS pk/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) British MPs have again failed to agree on proposals for the next steps in the Brexit process. The Commons voted on Monday four motions for leaving the EU, including a customs union and a Norway-style arrangement -- keeping the UK in the single market -- but none gained a majority, the BBC reported. The votes were not legally binding, so the government would not have been forced to adopt the proposals. The plan Theresa May negotiated with the EU has been rejected three times. May now has until April 12 to either seek a longer extension from the EU to take a different course or decide to leave the EU without a deal. She will meet her cabinet on Tuesday morning to discuss what to do next. The option defeated by the narrowest margin was a proposal for a customs union, losing by only three votes. That would see the UK remain in the same system of tariffs - taxes - on goods as the rest of the EU -- potentially simplifying the issue of the Northern Ireland border, but preventing the UK from striking independent trade deals with other countries. The motion calling for a confirmatory referendum received the most votes in favour, totalling 280, but still lost by a margin of 12. Following the failure of his own motion to stay in the Single Market - known as Common Market 2.0 - Nick Boles resigned from the Conservative Party. In a point of order following the results, the MP for Grantham and Stamford said he could "no longer sit for this party", adding: "I have done everything I can to find a compromise." As he left the Commons, MPs were heard shouting, "don't go Nick", and others applauded him. He later tweeted that he would remain an MP and sit in the Commons as "an Independent Progressive Conservative". Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said the "only option" left was to find a way forward that allows the UK to leave the EU with a deal. "The government continues to believe that the best course of action is to do so as soon as possible," he said. "If the House is able to pass a deal this week it may still be possible to avoid holding European elections." Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said it was "disappointing" that none of the proposals secured a majority, but he said he wanted to remind the Commons that Mrs May's deal had been "overwhelmingly rejected". He added: "If it is good enough for the prime minister to have three chances at her deal, then I suggest it's possible the House should have a chance to consider again the options we had before us... so the House can succeed where the prime minister has failed - in presenting a credible economic relationship with Europe for the future that prevents us crashing out with no deal." --IANS pgh/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Calcutta High Court will examine the legal validity of the Delhi Special Police Establishment (DSPE) Act as well as that of the CBI which derives its power to investigate from the legislation. Hearing an appeal by Chandan Biswas, sentenced by a special CBI court in 2018 for corruption, a bench of Justice Protik Prakash Banerjee directed that the matter be posted before Acting Chief Justice Biswanath Somadder for setting up a Constitution bench to decide the issue. A BSNL official, Biswas was convicted by a Special CBI court for criminal conspiracy and cheating and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Justice Banerjee's order came on amicus curiae Phiroze Edulji's submission that the case was related to an interpretation of the Constitution and therefore involved substantial questions of law. The order noted that the Constitution bench must examine the following questions arising in the case. "Whether the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, is a valid piece of legislation? Whether the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is an organ or a part of Delhi Special Police Establishment? "In a Constitution having a federal form with distinct feels of legislation apportioned to the federal legislature and/or the federating legislature with corresponding executive power where law and order and their maintenance are part of the power given to the federating states whether a federal police force even for investigation can be made by Central legislation without following the procedure established by the Constitution for Central legislature making laws which would be enforceable in each of the states," said the order. In 2013, a Gauhati High Court order held that the CBI was neither an organ nor a part of the DSPE and cannot be treated as a police force constituted under the DSPE Act, 1946. The Gauhati High Court had declared the formation of the CBI "unconstitutional" and quashed the 1963 executive order under which the investigation agency was formed. This verdict was stayed by the Supreme Court and the matter is still pending before it. --IANS ssp/rtp/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The death of six farmers in police firing in Madhya Pradesh's Mandsaur in 2017 had given farmers across the country a platform to vent their anger that had been brewing over farm distress, and leading to a series of nation-wide protests. Nearly two years on, Mandsaur is now set to see a neck-and-neck fight between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, with the odds seem to be in favour of the saffron party. The Mandsaur parliamentary constituency has been a Jana Sangh-BJP stronghold with its veteran Laxminarayan Pandey having represented it in the 5th, 6th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th Lok Sabhas. In 2009, Meenakshi Natrajan of the Congress snatched Mandsaur from Pandey but lost it to BJP's Sudhir Gupta in 2014. In 2019, Natrajan is once again in the fray. Political observers say national and local issues will play an equal role in influencing the voters this time around. The constituency comprises eight Assembly seats spread over three districts -- Mandsaur, Malhargarh, Suwasra, Garoth (all in Mandsaur district), Neemuch, Manasa, Jawad (all in Neemuch district) and Jaora (in Ratlam district). The BJP had won seven of them in 2018 -- against the widespread belief that it would lose most of them owing to the farm distress. Except in Jaora, the winning margin between the BJP and Congress candidates was over 2,000 votes in six constituencies. In Jaora, the BJP won with a thin margin of 511, while the Congress candidate pulled through in Suwasra by a mere 350 votes. Rebels in the Congress and the selection of wrong candidates, besides higher polling in urban pockets helped the BJP in the Assembly elections, said Ajay Lodha, the editor of a local daily. "Congress-rebels led to the party's defeat on four seats while our calculations say the party chose wrong candidates for the other four. Yet, there was one victory, albeit with a narrow margin," he added. Notably, the voting turnout in the Assembly segments ranged between 79 and 86 per cent, which Lodha said happened due to higher balloting in the urban pockets. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the overall polling turnout was a little over 71 per cent while it was 56 per cent in 2009. "The voting percentage has been consistent in the rural areas. Higher overall turnout means people from urban pockets voted in great numbers," Lodha explained. "So, electoral calculations show the BJP can win if the voter turnout remains high in the Lok Sabha elections. Else, Congress gets to benefit." The voters in urban areas, he said, are more focused on issues such as nationalism that are important in the national perspective while their counterparts in the rural areas are concerned about farm issues such as fall in crop prices and drought. Many farmer leaders, politicians visited Mandsaur after the 2017 firing, which became the precursor for widespread protests against "anti-farm policies" of the BJP government. Several rallies were held in the national capital, which saw farmers participating in huge numbers. The issue also offered the opposition leaders a common ground, perhaps, for the first time, to rally against the BJP. BJP's Sudhir Gupta, a first-time parliamentarian, is approaching voters with the development work he initiated in the area, particularly in relation to the railway facilities, while Natrajan, hoping for a comeback, is banking on her connect with her constituents through a 'padyatra' that she undertook through all the villages in the constituency. (Saurabh Katkurwar can be contacted at saurabh.k@ians.in) --IANS spk/vm/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress candidate from Kerala's Alathur constituency, Remya Haridas, on Tuesday filed a police complaint against Left Democratic Front convenor A. Vijayaraghavan for his "sexist" and "lewd" remarks against her. "I came to know about the lewd remarks made by Vijayaraghavan aimed at me on Monday night. It is not a slip of tongue but he has been repeating the same comments to malign my image," Haridas told the media after filing the complaint. "The CPI-M on one hand claims to fight for women's rights but on the other hand, a senior party leader like Vijayaraghavan has been spreading abuses about me," she added. "I am surprised that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who often speaks of women's upliftment, is silent on the matter," she said. At a rally near here on Monday, Vijayaraghavan, a Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader, had said that the "lady candidate from Alathur" had called on Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) leaders like Panakkad Sayyid Hyderali Shihab Thangal and P.K. Kunhalikutty and "I do not know what will happen to her now". Kunhalikutty was haunted for over a decade by an alleged sexual assault case, before it was cleared by the apex court. Congress leaders including Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala, State Congress President Mullapally Ramachandran and All India Congress Committee General Secretary Oommen Chandy also demanded strict action against Vijayaraghavan. But Vijayaraghavan and the CPI-M dismissed the criticism. "I am not such a person who will pain anyone by insinuations and I assure Haridas that she need not worry about it. There is nothing personal in it and it was only a political speech," said Vijayaraghavan, who has earlier been a member of both the houses of the Parliament. Haridas' CPI-M opponent, P.K. Biju, who is aiming for a hat-trick win this time, claimed that "baseless things" are being raked up by the Congress as they know they are on a back foot here. --IANS sg/mag/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said the Congress and the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha have hatched a conspiracy to keep the people poor for their vote bank "Parties like Congress and BJD conspired to keep the poor of the country poor. They deceived the poor. They treated them as vote bank," said Modi while addressing an election rally at Bhawanipatna in Kalahandi district. Modi said Odisha is going to repeat the history created by Uttar Pradesh in 2017 and Tripura in 2018 as he urged the people to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to achieve 'double engine' growth at the Centre and at the state. He said that eight lakh people in Odisha got pucca houses in five years of BJP government at the Centre while 24 lakh houses got free electricity connections and 3,000 villages got electricity for the first time after Independence. Besides, 40 lakh poor households got free gas connections under Ujjala scheme and 50 lakh toilets were built in the state, Modi added. "All of these things were not done by Modi. It is your vote that brought positive changes in the country," he said. Maintaining that the BJD government is neck deep in corruption, the Prime Minister asked the people: "Do you want mining mafia and chit fund looters or a Chowkidar." He said the BJD is the enemy of poor farmers. The party has been a wall between PM-KISAN scheme and farmers as Odisha has no farmer being enrolled under the scheme, he added. "I have worked for you despite no cooperation of state government. This Chowkidar has taken advantage of Centre's schemes to help you," said Modi. He said 19 years are enough for the development of the state but BJD leaders have taken the votes for granted. "You trusted the BJD for 19 years, but it's now time for transformation and to bring BJP again. You need to vote for double engine growth," said the Prime Minister. Odisha will have simultaneous polls in four phases on April 11, 18, 23 and 29 for both the 21 Lok Sabha and 147 Assembly seats. --IANS cd/mag/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP on Tuesday hit out at Congress over its poll promises over Jammu and Kashmir and amending the sedition law and Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts (AFSPA), saying these were "dangerous" and will break the country. Addressing a press conference soon after Congress manifesto was released, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said it out of ignorance, the Congress President (Rahul Gandhi) makes "unimplementable and dangerous promises". "I am sure the nation would not be in a mood to oblige him for implementing the kind of promises which are contained in this manifesto," he said. The senior BJP leader claimed that some ideas in the manifesto are "positively dangerous" and agenda for 'balkanisation' of the country. "Even though there was a drafting panel, it appears some of the points have been drafted by Congress President's 'tukde-tukde' friends when it deals with Jammu and Kashmir and national security. The Nehru-Gandhi family committed a historic mistake regarding Jammu and Kashmir and the nation can't forgive them for that. The Congress manifesto takes ahead that agenda dangerously. "There mistakes have dragged Jammu and Kashmir to a situation where it is today. We are establishing rule of law, Congress wants to establish rules of terrorists and insurgents," he said. Jaitley also slammed the Congress over the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits finding no place in the manifesto and said the biggest failure in independent India was the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pundits. On Congress's promise of amending the sedition law and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, he said it was Congress's tradition that they withdrew laws like The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). "No nation over the last 72 years has dealt with terrorism like India. Our fight against terror didn't start after 9/11 Mumbai terror attacks. Punjab, North East, we have seen many struggles. We lost a part of Jammu and Kashmir. "A provision that Nehru, Indira, Rajiv Gandhi and even Manmohan Singh didn't dare touch, they say sedition would be done away with, that treason won't be a crime anymore, such a party doesn't deserve a single vote," Jaitley said. He said the AFSPA was essentially a sanctioning law for disturbed or insurgency-hit areas and deals with internal subversion. "Those who laid lives for the nation, you want them to be prosecuted at the behest of relatives of terrorists, or their friends. Ingratitude is the biggest sin a party can commit," he said. Earlier on Tuesday, the Congress released it's manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls, stressing that dialogue was the only way to understand the aspirations of the people of the three regions of Jammu and Kashmir to find an honourable solution to their issues. It also promised to review the AFSPA and sedition law among others. --IANS bns/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a sharp attack, Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackery on Tuesday demanded that the Congress should be derecognized and banned from fighting the 2019 elections as it was propagating "an anti-national agenda". Reacting to the Congress election manifesto, the NDA ally asked: "What kind of government they (Congress) want - those of traitors and anti-nationals, or of patriots and nationalists?" He said that such a party had no right to contest the elections and the Election Commission must derecognize and bar the Congress from the electoral battle. Terming the Congress manifesto promising to end poverty in India within a decade as "full of lies", he said that even Congress President Rahul Gandhi's grandmother, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had promised 'garibi hatai' but nothing happened all these years. Thackeray also countered the Congress arguments on the need to hold talks with the Kashmiri separatists to resolve the Jammu and Kashmir problems. "There cannot be any talks with such separatists. We have always been against negotiations with them," he said, while attending an election rally for the BJP-Sena candidate in Palghar constituency. --IANS qn/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday promised to provide Rs 72,000 a year to the poorest families and fill 22 lakh government vacancies if his party won the Lok Sabha battle and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of wrecking the economy. Unveiling the Congress manifesto, the Congress President also challenged Modi, who he said was scared, to engage in a debate with him on issues such as corruption, foreign policy and national security. "The five main themes of our manifesto (are) NYAY scheme... Garibi par waar, 72,000 (war on poverty with Rs 72,000 cash support), employment to youth by filling 22 lakh government vacancies and employment to 10 lakh youth in gram panchayats, guaranteeing jobs for 150 days under MGNREGA instead of 100 days, 6 per cent GDP will be used in education and no permission required for starting a new business(for three years)," he said after releasing the party manifesto here. Gandhi promised to present a separate budget for the farmers on the lines of the now discarded railway budget and said if his party was voted to power, farmers who fail to return bank loans will no more face criminal but only civil cases. Accusing the Prime Minister of wrecking the economy, Gandhi said that there was an "economic emergency" in the country. Blaming demonetization and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for what he said was an economic mess, Gandhi said his party was determined to set right the situation. To repeated questions, Gandhi said the narrative for the Lok Sabha election had already been set -- and it was all about economic issues and misery. Hitting out at the Prime Minister, Gandhi said that Modi made fun of the MGNREGA scheme dubbing it bogus and useless. "Today everyone knows how much it helped the country. So now we want to guarantee jobs for 150 days, instead of 100 days, under the scheme." Gandhi said the Congress government will allow anyone to start business without permits or clearances with tax holiday for the first three years to encourage entrepreneurship and create thousands of jobs across the country. The Congress President said that he had told the members of the Manifesto Committee a year ago that it should not be drafted in closed rooms but should reflect the wishes of the people of India. "I also said that whatever is going to be put in the manifesto has to be truthful. I do not want a single thing in the manifesto that is a lie because we have been hearing a large number of lies spoken every day by our Prime Minister," he said. Responding on BJP's criticism that the NYAY scheme was "not workable", he said: "I agree it is not doable for the BJP. But it is doable for the Congress." Asked why he was also being fielded by his party from Wayanad in Kerala apart from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi said: "South India feels hostility from Narendra Modi... They feel they have not been included in decision making." He said his candidature would send out a message that "we are with you, I am with you." When a journalist queried about lack of alliances in some states, Gandhi said the Congress had teamed up with allies in Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Jammu and Kashmir. "We have alliances across the country. I don't know which newspapers you are reading." Asked if the journalists were interacting with "a future Prime Minister", he retorted: "Ask the people this question." --IANS bns-ps/mr/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress on Tuesday promised to remove anomalies in 'one rank, one pension' (OROP) and formulate a policy of compensation for families of the Services personnel who lost their lives on duty. The Congress also promised to formulate and implement a policy that will allow armed forces personnel, who retire after a period of completing service or earlier, lateral entry into the civil services based on their qualifications. The party made these declaration in its manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections, released on Tuesday. Under the UPA governments, the Congress accepted the principle of OROP and took three steps in 2006, 2010 and 2013 towards implementing the same, said the manifesto. "In February 2014, the UPA government decided to close the gap for all retirees in all ranks. Ex-servicemen feel the BJP government has not implemented OROP to their satisfaction. The Congress promises to remove anomalies in implementation of the OROP," it said. The Congress vows to formulate and implement a policy of compensation to the families of "martyrs", which will include full pay and allowances, funding children's education, government job for a member of the martyr's family and suitable monetary compensation. "We will also allow armed forces personnel who retire before the age of 40 years to enter the paramilitary forces at suitable levels, based on their qualifications and physical fitness," the manifesto said. The Congress has promised to substantially expand the capacity of the armed forces medical corps and hospitals to cater to the needs of ex-servicemen and their families. The party also assured revising the procedure to determine the disability of injured armed forces personnel and make the determination final, subject to an appeal only at the instance of the disabled person. "All pending appeals filed by the Ministry of Defence will be withdrawn," it said. --IANS rak/rtp (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The deliberate and premeditated plan, which involved at least two other women, was aimed at obtaining money from a supermarket in Bradford. Farida Ashraf waited for eight months after her accident before making her claim in the hope that CCTV footage would have been erased. Judge David Hatton QC sitting at Bradford Crown Court gave Farida Ashraf, who studied law at Bradford College, a suspended jail sentence of 21 months. She will also be electronically tagged and placed under a curfew. Praising insurer Aviva for pursuing the case, the judge said: Fraudulent insurance claims are rife currently certainly in this city. There has to be a deterrent in the form of a sentence of imprisonment. Employees of supermarket were caused stress and anxiety as a finger was pointed at them for having been negligent when they clearly were not. He added: This is a case properly and responsibly brought by the insurance company and one that should have been brought by CPS but that is water under bridge. The case was taken by Aviva after Mrs Ashrafs original claim was thrown out of court in 2016, when CCTV footage revealed two female accomplices placing a pallet of orange juice cartons on the floor of Al-Halal supermarket in Bradford so that Ashraf could pretend to stumble over it. Ashraf then, eight months later, sent a letter to the supermarket claiming for injuries that would have cost Aviva up to 60,000. Her claim included for injuries to her right wrist even though the video showed her falling onto her left wrist. The judge in the original case found that Ashraf had put forward a wholly fraudulent and dishonest claim. Determined to bring her to justice, Aviva which represented the supermarket took out a private prosecution on the basis of fraud by misrepresentation. Damian Rourke, partner with global law firm Clyde & Co, which acted for Aviva, said: Figures clearly show a significant increase in so-called slip-and-trip fraud. Its important that businesses and the public know that insurers like Aviva will take proactive steps to deter and punish criminals who harm businesses and ultimately can cost staff their jobs. There a perception that nobody is doing anything about fraud and I think its important that business know that insurers like Aviva are standing up for them. Richard Hiscocks, Avivas director of casualty claims, said: This staged accident is a clear example of a fraudster trying to claim some easy cash and she now has a criminal conviction to show for it. Aviva takes a zero-tolerance approach to fraud and well do everything we can to defend our customers against such claims. The two women who appear to place the pallet on the floor have yet to be identified and Aviva are keen to hear from anyone that can identify them. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) reported that insurers had detected 113,000 fraudulent insurance claims in 2017 worth 1.3bn. In 2015, insurers noted a 36% rise in fraudulent slip-and-trip claims on the previous year to 27,000, worth 351m. A Czech model convicted for attempting to smuggle heroin from Pakistan to Abu Dhabi challenged her sentence in the Lahore High Court on Tuesday. An additional district and sessions court in Lahore on March 20 had sentenced Tereza Hluskova to eight years and eight months in jail and fined her Rs 113,000 after she was arrested in 2018 on charges of carrying eight and a half kg of heroin from Lahore's Allama Iqbal International Airport. In her appeal filed before the High Court through her lawyer, Hluskova requested that the ruling of the sessions court be set aside as it negated the true facts of the case, Geo News reported. The 21-year old model said she was innocent and had come to Pakistan on a three-month family visit visa for Islamic studies. During the hearing in March, Additional Sessions Judge Shehzad Raza had pronounced her guilty and handed her an eight year and eight months prison term. The hearing was also attended by the Deputy Secretary of the Czech Embassy. The court in its verdict had said the prosecution was successful in confirming Hluskova guilty of smuggling heroin and that she had failed to prove her innocence. The court had also said she had the right to appeal her sentence. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi attacked the Pawar political clan in Maharashtra, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) President Sharad Pawar on Tuesday advised him to "not to worry about my family". In a restrained but hard-hitting counter to Modi's tirade, the 78-year-old Maratha strongman reminded him that "the PM's office is like an institution" and he must be extremely careful while speaking about other people. "Wherever he goes, Modi first launches personal attacks on the Gandhi family. He must not forget that the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi taught a lesson to Pakistan and created not only history but geography also," Pawar told an election rally. "After Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, his widow Sonia Gandhi did not leave the country but carried on her duties and responsibilities to the country. Does it behove a person of the PM's stature to keep insulting the Gandhis like this?" Pawar asked. The former Union Minister and three-time Maharashtra Chief Minister also accused Modi of not accepting responsibility or exercising caution by making such utterances. Pawar pointed out that in his five-decade long political career, he had listened to speeches by all Prime Ministers including Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao and others but "there was nothing in Modi's speech" on Monday. "There are so many burning issues at the national and state levels concerning the commoners, farmers, youth, unemployed, women, but Modi did not discuss these. Instead he chose to launch direct personal attacks against the opposition leaders. No other leader in the past has ever done this," Pawar said. "My mother is from Kolhapur and she has imbibed very good culture in me. Modi has no need to worry about my family. Ajit Pawar is also an excellent administrator," Pawar said in defence of his nephew. The Maratha strongman's response came to a sharp onslaught by Modi in Wardha on Monday in which he singled out Pawar, his family and the NCP and asked the people of the state to defeat the Congress-NCP in all the 48 Lok Sabha seats in the state. --IANS qn/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Authorities on Tuesday closed all educational institutions in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district where a child, a woman and a Border Security Force (BSF) officer were killed on Monday in Pakistan shelling. All these institutions were within 5 km distance of the Line of Control (LoC). Due to indiscriminate targeting of defence and civilian facilities by Pakistan along the LoC, a six-year-old girl, a woman and an inspector of the BSF were killed while 13 others were injured on Monday. After heavy firing exchanges between the Indian and Pakistani armies the previous day, there was calm along the LoC on Tuesday. --IANS sq/bc/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In order to better tackle fake news and improve quality of content on its platform, Facebook might hire a new generation of digital-era journalists and news publishers. In a discussion with Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Europe's largest publisher Axel Springer, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday talked over how the platform should create more high-quality news for its over 2 billion users globally. "I don't know how many fake accounts you think Facebook has, but it seems to be quite a big amount. Some people are saying 700 million. I have no clue, but that has to be dealt with as a very serious problem," said the 34-year-old CEO. "We have to make a business in order to finance investigative journalists and correspondents, and big foreign networks, they cannot afford to do that for free," he added. Zuckerberg said he would focus on making sure what makes the offering and it's structuring on Facebook attractive for the hundreds of thousands of journalists, bloggers, digital native publishers, legacy publishers, that they are attracted to put their best content on that platform. "We're not going to have journalists making news. What we want to do is make sure that this is a product that can get people high-quality news," said the Facebook co-founder. Facebook could have a direct relationship with publishers in order to make sure that the content is really high-quality. "There's a whole set of questions around how do we build a service that is contributing to high-quality journalism through increasing monitorisation," said the American tech entrepreneur. The Menlo Park-based online social media and social networking service company is battling the menace of fake news and misinformation on its platform, especially during election times, including in India where it has removed thousands of fake accounts, groups and pages linked with political parties. --IANS na/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A commotion broke out here on Tuesday after police baton charged a large number of ICT school coordinators holding a sit-in demonstration demanding "justified salary" and clearing of "pending remuneration". The protesters accused the private implementing agency - a group company of the crisis-hit Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS) - of depriving them of "justified salary" under the ICT@schools scheme. "As per the government order, a sum of Rs 3,49,356 in a year was allotted per school in West Bengal on account of maintenance of capital infrastructure, and operational expenses and others. We, as ICT school coordinators, are drawing a remuneration of about Rs 4,600 per month which is too low as compared to the government's allocation. We demand justified salary and clearing of pending remuneration," West Bengal ICT School Coordinator Welfare Association President Swapan Pan said. The company which has been "entrusted with the responsibility of recruiting us and giving us salary is paying less than what we are entitled to", they alleged. Some computer teachers including women were agitating and had come to submit a deputation demanding increase of their salaries before the implementing agency's office at city's Minto park area. According to locals, police carried out a baton charge to disperse the agitators after traffic flow was partially affected because of the gathering. A senior police official said the police tried to push them back when they forcibly tried to enter the office. Under the centrally sponsored scheme, many state government aided schools were approved by the centre in 2011-12 for implementation of the scheme in West Bengal under Build Own Operate and Transfer model. For the implementation of the project, state government undertaking Webel Informatics had been engaged for consultancy, management and evaluation of the scheme, which, in turn, selected the private implementing agency through open bidding process. Refuting all the allegations, an IL&FS Group official said: "We are compliant with all the conditions of the contract with the state government." --IANS bdc/ssp/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Russia had wide-ranging discussions on evolving situation in Afghanistan during Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale's two-day visit to the country. An External Affairs Ministry release said that during the visit which concluded on Tuesday, the Foreign Secretary met Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov for foreign office consultations. The discussions reviewed the implementation of the decisions of the 19th Annual Bilateral Summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi in October last year. Both sides also discussed preparations for the forthcoming high-level meetings, including India's participation in the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in September this year. "The talks covered preparations for the next bilateral summit, cooperation in the formats of SCO, RIC and other bodies. There were wide-ranging discussions on evolving situation in Afghanistan," the release said. The Foreign Secretary also met Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov. Their discussions covered regional and international issues including those relating to disarmament and non-proliferation and cooperation between India and Russia at various multilateral fora. --IANS ps/pgh/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor Irrfan Khan, who had been keeping a low profile and maintaining a distance from the media by hiding his face behind a mask, finally faced the shutterbugs on Tuesday as he was spotted outside the airport here. Irrfan was spotted at Mumbai airport in the early hours of Tuesday. The lower half of his face was first covered with a black mask, but he later removed it for the paparazzi. The "Piku" actor, who returned to India earlier this year after getting treated for neuroendocrine tumour at London, looked in the pink of health in a pink t-shirt which he teamed up with a floral print shirt and denim jeans. "Irrfan was leaving for Rajasthan for personal work," a source in the know told IANS. There has been a buzz that Irrfan will soon start shooting for the sequel to his 2017 film "Hindi Medium", opposite Kareena Kapoor Khan in London. --IANS sim/rb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, his office said in a statement on Tuesday. Netanyahu's office did not elaborate on which issues the two leaders will be discussing in their meeting. The office said that Netanyahu and Putin spoke by telephone on Monday over "regional issues" that included Syria, Xinhua news agency reported. The meeting will be held five days before Israel's April 9 election in which Netanyahu is seeking to be re-elected for a fifth term. Shifting from a long-held US foreign policy, President Donald Trump last Thursday recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a territory Israel captured from Syria in a war in 1967 and later annexed. The move triggered international condemnations. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is fighting rebel groups in Syria's eight-year civil war, with Russian support. --IANS soni/vd (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.) In association with Flipkart, Japanese brand JVC on Tuesday launched six new smart LED TVs in India starting at Rs 16,999. The product suite includes 4K "Ultra HD" intelligent smart TVs and "Full HD" smart LED TVs available in four screen sizes -- 40-inch, 43-inch, 49-inch and 55-inch. The TVs come equipped with features such as "Quantum Backlit Technology", Miracast support, and more than 500 licensed applications and up to 1 million hours of content to view, JVC said. The products will be available on Flipkart from April 6. "The need and hunger for content in the smart TVs is increasing day by day and we assure our customers of providing the largest app base as well as inbuilt content in today's times in these smart TVs," Sharan Maini, Director - Business Development at JVC India, said in a statement. JVC entered India in partnership with Veira Group, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for consumer durables in India, in association with Flipkart. Viera Group said it currently has its manufacturing unit in Noida having a capacity of up to one million units per annum. --IANS gb/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Jharkhand government on Tuesday shifted the Additional Director General of Police (ADG) Special Branch to New Delhi at the direction of the Election Commission of India (EC). The state government issued the notification regarding removal of the ADG following the Election Commission on Monday ordering the transfer of senior IPS officer Anurag Gupta posted as ADG Special branch. The EC has directed Gupta to report to the Resident Commissioner Jharkhand at New Delhi by 1 p.m. on Tuesday. The poll panel has also made it clear that he should not be allowed any leave or given any duty which entails visiting Jharkhand, till the completion of the election process. The opposition parties had written to the EC seeking the police officer's removal. The opposition parties had also submitted memoranda in this regard to the Chief Electoral Officer of the state. Many senior leaders of the Congress party had also met the Chief Election Commissioner in New Delhi and demanded Gupta's removal from his post. Anurag Gupta is facing an FIR in connection with the 2016 Rajya Sabha elections. On March 29, 2018, an FIR was registered against Gupta under sections 171(B)(E), 171(C)(F) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for interference in the election process, misuse of official position, breach of conduct and service rules, while disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against him. --IANS ns/bc (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Even before the dew on the just set up Lokpal could dry up, its members are seeking status of serving High Court judges with pay and perks, including bungalow accommodation, in Lutyens Delhi. Attorney General K.K. Venugopal told the five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi that he has been told that members of the Lokpal are demanding status equal to the High Court judge. "We are in great difficulty. A bureaucrat gets one LTC, but a judge gets four," the AG told the court. At this, CJI Ranjan Gogoi said, "If there is a retired Supreme Court judge heading a tribunal, then other members of the tribunal would be seeking the same perks and privileges." --IANS pk/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o on Tuesday unveiled the cover of her debut picture book for children 'Sulwe', which touches upon colour bias and self-esteem, and hopes to inspire children to see their own unique beauty. The upcoming title revolves around Sulwe, whose skin is the colour of midnight. "She is darker than everyone in her family. She is darker than anyone in her school." Coming from the Kenyan-Mexican actress who herself battled colour discrimination since childhood, the book features a "magical journey in the night sky" that opens Sulwe's eyes and changes everything. "I wrote 'Sulwe' to inspire children (and everyone really) to love the skin they are in and to see the beauty that radiates from within," the 36-year-old announced on Twitter on the International Children's Book Day. The 48-page book is published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers and is expected to hit stores in October. The debut book has been illustrated by artist-filmmaker Vashti Harrison. Brooklyn-based Nyong'o's first feature film role was in the film "12 Years a Slave", for which she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. --IANS sj/mag/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Covering malware trends in 2018, in its annual Android security report, Google has revealed that malware installed from Google Play grew by a 100 per cent last year. Click-fraud apps, also called "adware" accounted for 55 per cent of all Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs) installed through the Play Store, followed by trojans at 16 per cent, Google said in its report on Monday. Click-fraud apps mostly targeted users in the USA, Brazil and Mexico. Previously, Google treated click-fraud apps as a mere Play Store policy violation. The company contends that if it removed click-fraud stats, it would show PHAs installed from the official store declined by 31 per cent year over year, ZdNet reported. In addition, 28 per cent of malware outside the Play Store were backdoors, while 25 per cent were trojans, 22 per cent were hostile downloads and just 13 per cent were accounted for click-fraud apps. About PHA installs from outside the Play Store, Google claims Android's Google Play Protect anti-malware system prevented 1.6 billion PHA installation attempts last year and stopped 73 per cent of PHA installs from outside the store, marking a 20 per cent improvement. Google attributes the dominance of trojans outside the store to the "Chamois" family of malware, which are often pre-installed on popular Android devices from certain original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The backdoor apps mostly targeted Android users in Russia, Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam, Google said. --IANS rp/bc (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US Senate has blocked billions of dollars in disaster relief for states across the country as Republicans and Democrats clashed over President Donald Trumps opposition to sending more food and infrastructure help to Puerto Rico. Senate Democrats opposed a separate measure drafted by Republicans on Monday, saying the $600 million included in it for Puerto Rico's food stamp programme was not enough to meet the US territory's needs as it attempts to recover from Hurricane Maria. The Democrats were backing a House-passed relief bill containing hundreds of millions of dollars more for Puerto Rico than the GOP version, but it, too, failed to advance as Republicans opposed it, the Washington Post reported. Most Republicans refused to endorse the recovery bill passed this year by the House. They cited Trump's opposition to the bill's Puerto Rico funding as well as their own concerns that the bill lacked money for states like Iowa and Nebraska that have since been devastated by flooding and tornadoes. The vote on the GOP bill was 44 in favour and 49 against. The House Democratic bill failed on a vote of 46 to 48. Sixty votes were needed for either piece of legislation to advance. According to the New York Times, the effort begins anew on Tuesday, when Senate Democrats will propose a measure that would allocate billions of dollars that would help Iowa and Nebraska, as well as Puerto Rico, said a Senate Democratic aide. Trump has been pressuring Democrats to support a disaster relief measure that does not include the money they want for Puerto Rico and he went on the attack late Monday on Twitter. "The Democrats today killed a bill that would have provided great relief to farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any 'place' in history," he tweeted. Puerto Ricans "are great but their government can't do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works", the President said. He claimed last week that he had taken better care of Puerto Rico than any living human being. But Puerto Rico's Governor Ricardo Rosello, a Democrat, described Trump as a "bully" and threatened during an interview on CNN to punch him in the mouth. Rosello has publicly called on Congress to approve House Democrats' version of the bill - although without specifically opposing the Senate GOP version. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Armando Vega Gil, bass player and co-founder of the Mexican rock band Botellita de Jerez, killed himself on Monday, after being accused of sexually abusing a minor. He was 64. The Mexico City prosecutors' office said that while they could not confirm if Gil had killed himself, a man's body was found at a Mexico City home on Monday, reports billboard.com. The rock band's Twitter account said "with grief we announce our colleague Armando Vega Gil died this morning (on Monday)". Gil published a letter saying he would kill himself "to leave the way clear" for his son after he was accused of assaulting a young woman. Before he died, Gil posted a suicide message on Twitter strongly denying the accusations that had been made anonymously via the @MeTooMusicaMX account on Twitter. "Let me make it clear that my death is not a confession of guilt, on the contrary it is a radical declaration of my innocence," he wrote (in Spanish) on Twitter. He added: "Don't blame anyone for my death, this suicide is a voluntary, free and personal decision. Hasta pronto." Gil wrote that given the power of social media, he believed that he would not be able to clear his name and that he wanted to make sure that his son's life was not blighted by the accusations. --IANS dc/rb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An apex body of NGOs in Mizoram on Tuesday called an indefinite shutdown in the state from April 8 and a boycott of the Lok Sabha election to protest the Election Commission's decision to set up special polling stations for voters among the Reang tribal refugees. The Election Commission last month announced 15 special polling stations would be set up at Kanhmun village at the Mizoram-Tripura border to facilitate voting by Reang refugees living in camps in Tripura for Mizoram's lone Lok Sabha seat. Announcing its opposition to the move, the NGO Coordination Committee (NCC) Chairman Vanlalruata said all polling officials and personnel would be prevented from going to their respective polling stations with election material and devices including EVMs and VVPATs. "We have been demanding that arrangements be made to facilitate Reang refugee voters lodged in Tripura camps to cast their votes in their respective polling stations in the districts concerned in Mizoram, not in the special polling stations at Kanhmun," he told the media. The NCC threatened to boycott the April 11 Lok Sabha polls and assembly by-election to Aizawl West-I seat if the special polling stations are set up. "We would re-consider our decision if the Election Commission show positive response before April 8," Vanlalruata said. The NCC has also asked all the owners of commercial vehicles and private vehicles being hired by the Election Commission not to venture out or let their vehicles be used for election-related duties or to transport security forces and polling officials. Terming the NCC's decision "unfortunate," state Election Department officials said it is regrettable that the NGOs "made decisions which prejudice democratic activities". "Mizoram Chief Electoral Officer Ashish Kundra appealed to the civil society groups to review their decision in the greater interest of the democracy," an official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said. The Election Commission has been apprised of the matter, the official said. There are around 12,000 eligible voters, from among the 35,000 refugees sheltering in seven relief camps in northern Tripura for the past 22 years after they fled from Mizoram in the wake of communal tensions. The migrants are originally residents of nine (out of the state's 40) assembly constituencies in the three Mizoram districts of Mamit, Lunglei and Kolasib. Abeda Nanda Baidya, Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Tripura's Kanchanpur, where some of the refugee camps are located, told IANS over phone that the Election Commission had also set up special polling stations at Kanhmun for the refugees in the Assembly elections last year. The North Tripura district administration would have to arrange vehicles and security to help these tribals to cast their votes, he added. Following an agreement signed in Delhi in July last year, foodgrain and other relief supplies to the Reang refugees was to be stopped from October 1, 2018, to compel them to return to their respective villages in Mizoram. However, following their appeal, it was extended by the Union Home Ministry till March 31, 2019 and then again till September 30. --IANS sc/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold two rallies in West Bengal on Wednesday to give a big push to the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Lok Sabha election campaign in the state. The Prime Minister has, so far, held three rallies in the state -- in north Bengal's Cooch Behar, in Dalit Matua community-dominated Thakurnagar in the North 24 Parganas and in West Bardhaman district's industrial city Durgapur. On Wednesday, he will first address a rally in north Bengal's Siliguri, followed by a rally at Kolkata's iconic Brigade Parade Ground. Modi's Kolkata rally will be the first covered rally in the history of Brigade Parade Ground, that has hosted several rallies over the decades. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's mega anti-BJP rally on January 19, that brought leaders of 23 opposition parties on one stage, was also held here. Three massive stages have been set up along with mammoth metal hangers to provide shade on the ground. The party is expecting 8-10 lakh at the rally. "Nine hangers, each nearly 100x100 square feet, are being installed in three rows. We are arranging hangers to protect party activists and supporters, who would be waiting at the ground since morning to listen to Modi, from falling ill due to the heat. This is the first time a political party has planned a covered rally here," state BJP President Dilip Ghosh. "Modiji will sit on the main dais in the centre along with the senior BJP leaders and MPs from South Bengal. The second stage would be occupied by the party district presidents and district observers, while state office-bearers will sit on the third stage," he said. Enthusiasm is also high in Siliguri for Modi's rally, the venue of which had to be changed following denial of permission by the local administration. The BJP, which won only two seats in Bengal in 2014, aims to substantially increase its seat count in the state under its "Look East" policy. A good show in the region would offset any possible reverses in its strongholds like UP, where the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) have formed an alliance. The BJP leaders are also sceptical of the party repeating its magical performance of 2014 in the Hindi heartland. North Bengal's Cooch Behar and Alipurduar go to vote in the first phase of polling on April 11. Siliguri, which falls under the Darjeeling Lok Sabha constituency, will vote in the second phase on April 18, along with neighbouring Jalpaiguri and Raigunj. --IANS mgr/ssp/rtp/pcj (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Landlocked between two economic giants, India and China, Nepal can serve as the bridge for trade between the world's two fastest growing economies, a win-win situation that reduces costs and transportation time, a leading industrialist has said. "Nepal could be a corridor to move goods between India and China that cuts down transport time and saves money. It is in a fantastic position to create a win-win situation for all three," Vaidya said. He pointed out that Nepal borders the lesser developed parts of both neighbours," Suraj Vaidya, a past president of Nepal's industry chamber FNCCI said at a panel discussion with Nepali Finance Minister Yuba Raj Khatiwada. "Nepal has Tibet on one side, which is a remote region sparsely populated, while on the Indian side there are the populous states of West Bengal and Bihar," Vaidya, who heads the diversified VOITH group added. The event was held as part of the two-day Nepal Investment Summit 2019 organised by the Investment Board Nepal (IBN) and the World Bank to promote the Himalayan nation as an investment destination post the political stability ushered in by the new constitution adopted in 2015. The third of its kind after 1992 and 2017 , the summit was attended by potential investors from 40 countries, apart from top officials of multilateral agencies like the Asian Development Bank (ADB), World Bank and International Finance Corporation. The ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) enjoys two-thirds majority in Parliament. The Chinese and Indian presence dominated at the summit, where, out of over 700 foreign delegates participating, 265 were from China and 120 from India, according to the IBN. As many as 77 viable projects (50 public and 27 private) worth $32 billion were showcased at the event. Vaidya said while the situation is "tough" for a a small country sandwiched between the "giants" India and China, Nepal's location can also be turned into its advantage. India and Nepal have an open border and the Indian currency circulates freely in Nepal. Under the Treaty of Trade, India provides, on a non-reciprocal basis, duty free access to the Indian market for all Nepal-manufactured articles barring a short negative list of cigarettes, alcohol and cosmetics, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Director General (Investment Operations) Dong-ik Lee said logistics is a high return and high value added sector that Nepal can leverage, being located between China and India. ADB Vice President (South Asia/Central and West Asia) Shixin Chen highlighted three sectors that Nepal can leverage based on its location - supply chain logistics, infrastructure and tourism. "Nepal is at the front gate of being a middle income country and the investors should realize this potential and opportunities that lie ahead. The government of Nepal as well as the private sector are collaborating to create an investor friendly environment," he said. Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency CEO Keiko Honda suggested that Nepal diversify its search for investments by attracting competitors from countries other than India and China. The Managing Director and Asia Head of Bengaluru-based CDC India, Srini Nagarajan, whose company has major investments in Nepal, suggested that a hedging mechanism be devised for the Indian and Nepali currencies to further facilitate bilateral trade and investment. Finance Minister Khatiwada, who was the central bank's Governor between 2010 and 2015, in his response noted that Nepal is at the end of its fiscal and political transition, which would be complete by next year. "Nepal is in transition now, moving towards giving higher role to the private sector in terms of taking it as a catalytic source of growth and sustained development process of the country," he said. He pointed out that Nepal has reduced poverty by 1 per cent every year over the past 20 years despite a prolonged Maoist conflict it went through. "Social mobilization and community participation has been an important factor in managing and maintaining development in Nepal," Khatiwada said. "Social transformation is helping the economic transformation in Nepal, but this is incomplete without technological advancement. Hence, Nepal needs investment in technology transfer to support this transition." The minister told reporters that the Nepal needs investment of about $20 billion per annum, of which the government and domestic private industry could provide around $5 billion each, requiring the balance $10 billion to come from foreign investors. Noting that the globalised world today offers very few "white spots left to discover, World Bank Country Manager Faris Hadad-Zervos told reporters that Nepal has a lot of potential but its business environment needs to be even more competitive than its neighbouring giants. "Accountability has been missing in the delivery of projects. Laws are important but not a sufficient condition to ensure that private sector opportunities are actually implemented at the local level," he said. At the summit inauguration, Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli described the country as "virgin land" offering tremendous opportunity for investment, and said Nepal will "actively pursue" bilateral investment protection treaties with foreign countries, as well as Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements. The last word came from the NCP Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal at the summit's valedictory, where he said Nepal had created "a unique peace reference for the world." "A very important part of the Peace Agreement (ending the over decade long Maoist insurgency) has been the integration of ex-combatants into the army. Nepal now wants to focus on economic development and prosperity," he said. (Biswajit Choudhury attended the Nepal Investment Summit 2019 at the invitation of IBN. He can be reached at biswajit.c@ians.in) --IANS bc/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A new legislation on gun restrictions following the Christchurch shootings passed its first hurdle in New Zealand's Parliament on Tuesday. Lawmakers voted 119-1 in favour of the bill which bans military-style semi-automatic (MSSA) rifles like the ones used by a white supremacist in March 15 rampage at two mosques which claimed 50 lives. New Zealand's Police Minister Stuart Nash said the attacks in Christchurch exposed the considerable weaknesses in the country's current firearms law. According to him, the most critical weakness in the firearms law was that too many people had legal access to too many semi-automatic firearms capable of causing significant harm, Xinhua news agency reported. "We are driven by one objective. We are driven by the need to ensure public safety is as strong as it can be. We are also driven by the memory of fifty men, women and children who were taken from their loved ones on March 15. Their memory is our responsibility. We don't ever want to see an attack like this in our country again. We are compelled to act quickly," said Nash. New Zealand's current firearms legislation came into force 35 years ago. It dates from the 1980s, a time when the country was more isolated from the rest of the world, he said. There were strong import controls and no Internet market place or social media. "Since this time, firearms technology has shifted, the weapons market has become global and there are a significant online community and trading environment. To bring the firearms legislation more up-to-date and substantially reduce loopholes and risk, major change is needed. This Bill takes the first steps to modernize the Act," said Nash. He said that the legislation was not directed at law-abiding firearms owners who have legitimate uses for their guns. "Our actions are instead directed at making sure March 15 never happens again. Semi-automatic firearms which are commonly used for hunting, pest control, stock management on farms, and duck shooting will not be affected." Meanwhile, the government will implement a buyback scheme for the newly-banned firearms which are surrendered. The government is currently working on the details of the buyback scheme and will make announcements shortly. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said: "The cost of the buyback scheme would cost around 100 to 200 million New Zealand dollars." "We recognize it is a substantial amount of money but we are committed to doing this. We will find the money to do this because it's about making New Zealanders safe. We will remove these guns from our communities," said Police Minister Nash. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Nair Service Society (NSS), the socio-cultural body of the Hindu Nair community in Kerala, on Tuesday made it clear that it will continue to remain equi-distant vis-a-vis all political fronts in the Lok Sabha polls. This was stated by NSS General Secretary Sukumaran Nair. On the Sabarimala temple issue, the NSS said that both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress tried to reap political capital. "When it came to protecting the traditions and customs of the temple, neither the state nor the Central governments come out with laws to protect it. Only the Congress-led UDF took legal steps while the BJP took to (organising) protests." Kerala goes to the polls on April 23 to elect 20 MPs. --IANS sg/mr/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday promised to provide Rs 72,000 each year to the poorest families and fill 22 lakh government vacancies among others if his party won the Lok Sabha elections. "The main theme of our manifesto will be NYAY scheme, employment to youth by filling 22 lakh government vacancies, guaranteeing jobs for 150 days under MGNREGA instead of 100 days, 6 per cent GDP will be used in education," he said after releasing the party manifesto here. Hitting out at the Prime Minister, Gandhi said that Narendra Modi made fun of the MGNREGA scheme dubbing it bogus and useless. "Today everyone knows how much it helped the country. So now we want to guarantee jobs for 150 days, instead of 100 days, under the scheme," he said. Gandhi said the Congress government will allow anyone to start business without permits or clearances with tax holiday for the first three years to encourage entrepreneurship and create thousands of jobs across the country. The Congress President said that he had told the members of the Manifesto Committee a year ago that it should not be drafted in closed rooms but should reflect the wishes of the people of India. "I also said that whatever is going to be put in the manifesto has to be truthful. I do not want a single thing in the manifesto that is a lie because we have been hearing a large number of lies spoken every day by our Prime Minister," he said. --IANS ps-bns/mr/pg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress President Rahul Gandhi's decision to also contest from Left-ruled Kerala apart from Amethi has created further fissures in the opposition ranks ahead of the first phase of Lok Sabha elections on April 11. While there were suggestions earlier of opposition parties fielding common candidates against the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, the idea has mostly failed to materialize. In some states, opposition parties are fighting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and also among themselves. Gandhi's decision to pick the Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala has drawn strong reactions from the Left. CPI-M leader Prakash Karat said the Congress had "lost the plot" by deciding to contest against the Left instead of the BJP. Kerala is now the only state where the Congress' main opponent is the Left. Gandhi's decision to also be a candidate in Kerala has invited scorn from the BJP, which is determined to defeat the Congress President in Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. The Congress is also battling the stridently anti-BJP Trinamool Congress and also the increasingly also-ran Left in West Bengal. The Congress and the Left failed to shake hands in the state that was once a Left bastion. And in Delhi, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) could not shed their antagonism and jointly take on the BJP for the city's seven Lok Sabha seats. The Congress has, however, sewed up alliances in Bihar with the RJD and smaller parties, with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra, with the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and others in Jharkhand, with the DMK in Tamil Nadu, with the Janata Dal-Secular in Karnataka and with the National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir. In Jammu and Kashmir, however, the Congress and the National Conference will be engaged in "friendly contests" on two seats in the Kashmir Valley. But while the NCP is a friend in Maharashtra, it will contest all the seats in Gujarat, a decision likely to queer the pitch for the Congress. The worst is the Uttar Pradesh story. The Congress is contesting all 80 Lok Sabha seats largely on its own and in the process taking on both the BJP as well as the SP-BSP-RLD combine -- something that has angered BSP chief Mayawati more than anyone else. The Congress made the move after the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party divided Uttar Pradesh mostly among themselves, leaving only two seats -- Rae Bareli and Amethi -- for the Congress. The Congress and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) had joined hands for the Assembly polls in Telangana but are now fighting the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections separately in Andhra Pradesh. Political analyst Subrata Mukherjee, who taught at Delhi University, said that "much better performance was expected" from the opposition on forging alliances. "The election is much more important for the Congress than it is for the BJP as it has to present itself as a viable alternative. The BJP has shown better skills at political accommodation. They (opposition) should have sorted out the alliances six months earlier," Mukherjee told IANS. Like most political pundits, he felt that while the opposition parties may be interested in protecting their own turfs, there should have been "better give and take" to present a united picture vis-a-vis the BJP. (Prashant Sood can be reached at prashant.s@ians.in) --IANS ps/vm/mr/in/am (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath has asked Congress workers in the state to campaign in their own districts only and not venture out. On the instructions of Kamal Nath, the party's state General Secretary Rajiv Singh on Monday issued an order to all party officials and workers that they should work in their respective districts for Congress candidates. It was communicated that disciplinary action will be taken against those who violate these instructions. --IANS hindi-mag/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An international team of scientists has for the first time identified a potential source of methane gas on Mars, almost six years after NASA's Curiosity rover first detected hints of the gas on the Red Planet, and which may aid in future space missions. The team, including researchers from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, have found that methane gas detected by the Curiosity rover in 2013 may have been released from a layer of permafrost containing bubbles of the gas that was fractured by a geological event, the Guardian reported on Monday. On June 16, 2013, instruments on Curiosity recorded a spike in methane in the Gale crater -- a 96 mile-wide bowl where the rover landed in August 2012. In the study, reported in the Nature Geoscience journal, the team analysed data from planetary fourier spectrometer (PFS) on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, to look for methane in and around the Gale crater from December 2012 to July 2014. While the Curiosity rover measured a methane concentration of 5.78 parts per billion (ppb) in the Gale crater on June 16, 2013 the PFS recorded 15.5 ppb in the column of atmosphere above the crater, the report said. The location, known as Aeolis Mensae, has a number of geological faults that may have fractured nearby permafrost and released any methane trapped inside. Alternatively, incoming meteorites might have broken the ice open, the report noted. "Remarkably, we saw that the atmospheric simulation and geological assessment, performed independently of each other, suggested the same region of provenance of the methane, which is situated about 500 km east of Gale," said Marco Giuranna from the varsity. The apparent presence of methane on Mars has fuelled intense speculation that the gas could emanate from microbial Martians beneath the surface. Even if microbes were not the culprit, Giuranna said the gas would make the planet more habitable because it could be used as a source of carbon and energy. Humans could also potentially make use of methane trapped beneath the Martian soil to make chemicals and rocket fuel. --IANS rt/pg/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 99-year-old Australian woman, known to be Prince Harry's "biggest fan", died, just days after receiving a birthday card from the royal and his wife Meghan. Daphne Dunne passed away peacefully on Monday, her family was quoted as saying by the BBC. Australia is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, with the Queen as head of state. Dunne featured heavily in Harry's Australia trips and has pictures on Instagram of several encounters with the prince in recent years. The widow earlier said she'd had "a very special friendship" with the prince, the BBC reported. Just days ago, she received a birthday card from the couple, the report said. "Dear Daphne, my wife and I send our warmest wishes to you on the occasion of your 99th birthday on Friday," the Duke and Duchess of Sussex wrote, according to Australian media, signing the card simply "Harry and Meghan". Dunne was among the cheering crowd and was greeted warmly by the royals during their 2018 Australia visit. After meeting the couple, the Australian said, "it was lovely to meet the duchess, Meghan. Harry is a wonderful man and I'm so happy he had found happiness, they both deserve the absolute world together". Dunne's first husband, Lieutenant Albert Chowne, died in 1945 while fighting in Papua New Guinea and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, which Dunne was wearing when she first met Prince Harry in 2015. She later married John Patrick Dunne. --IANS soni/pcj (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Priyanka Gandhi might be making headlines for her campaign dress code, but theres plenty of mileage coming of it, and not just for her. A news video online showcases a vendor outside the Congress headquarters here who says his hottest selling item nowadays is a printed cotton sari, featuring photographs of Priyanka Gandhi and Late Indira Gandhi, her grandmother, on either side of the drape. Priyanka Gandhi, often likened to her grandmother, is certainly helping the vendor make a killing. I am selling as many as 100 pieces of the sari everyday, claims the vendor. While the 'kurta-pyajama' look has worked well for most 'netas', Gandhi's Indian attire, an appropriate choice for the campaign trail, is inviting reproofs for not being true to her style. The newly appointed Congress general secretary drapes a sari that helps connect her with the audience and also enables her to create the aura of her grandmother. Many claim that her choice for Western casuals like denims, shirts and trousers, while being in the national capital, is more her look than Indian ethnics. However, one can safely assume that Priyanka Gandhi is well versed in the art of power dressing, and can step it up or pull it down a notch when required. Exactlly a month ago the Congress General Secretary's change of display picture on Twitter -- from a sari-clad look to one in a pair of jeans -- had the social media world in a tizzy. She changed her Twitter profile picture the one in which she was in a maroon sari with a long-sleeved blouse. Her new avatar flaunted jeans and a blue shirt and received both flack and admiration. --IANS sim/pcj (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India on Tuesday said it was saddened by the damage due to the devastating thunderstorm that struck Nepal's Bara and Parsa districts and was ready to provide all assistance required. "We are deeply saddened to learn of the loss of life and damage to property in Nepal following the devastating thunderstorm that struck Bara and Parsa districts of Nepal," the Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement. "Government of India is ready to provide relief assistance as may be required by Nepal. Our Embassy in Kathmandu and Consulate in Birgunj are in touch with the concerned authorities," it added. According to local media, 28 persons, including four Indian nationals, were killed and hundreds injured in Bara and Parsa due to the storm on Sunday night. --IANS bns/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Leg-spinner Shreyas Gopal snared three wickets in three overs as Rajasthan Royals rode his devastating spell to restrict Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) to 158/4 in 20 overs in their IPL game here on Tuesday. Given the ball in the seventh over, Gopal (3/12) first broke skipper Virat Kohli (23; 25b; 3x4) and Parthiv Patel's 49-run partnership for the opening wicket, then cut short AB de Villiers and Shimron Hetymer's stay at the crease in his next two overs as the visitors were reduced to 73/3 in 10.1 overs. Put in to bat, Patel top-scored for RCB with a patient 41-ball 67 -- his knock laced with nine fours and a six -- while Marcus Stoinis was unbeaten on 31 off 28 balls and Moeen Ali played a nine-ball 18 run cameo to help the struggling outfit post a competitive total. Patel and Stoinis joined hands for a 53-run stand for the fourth wicket. In the final over, Jofra Archer (1/47) leaked 17 runs with Moeen smashing him for a six and a four as RCB managed to score 51 runs in the last five overs. RCB were off to a good start as Kohli looked in positive frame of mind from ball one, working K. Gowtham through midwicket for a couple of runs. The skipper, who hasn't been in his peerless best so far, found the boundary the same over as 10 runs came off it. Kohli edged a fifth-stump outswinger from Dhawal Kulkarni in the next over but the ball raced to the third man as he was stationed quite square. Facing most of the deliveries in the early stages, Kohli was looking good when Patel joined him to welcome Archer by hitting him for three fours in the fifth over. At the end of six overs, RCB were 48/0, but just after the Powerplay, Gopal removed Kohli with a superb googly that beat the right-hander all ends up to crash into the stumps through the gate. Gopal did not stop, sending the other 'big fish' de Villiers back in the hut in the ninth over for just 13 with another wrong' un that stopped on the batsman forcing him to punch the ball back to the bowler. As if to complete the trio, Gopal accounted for Hetmyer (1) as well two overs later, the big-hitting West Indian failing to read another googly that turned away from him to take the outside edge for Jos Buttler to complete a sharp catch behind the stumps. Patel and Stoinis tried to steady the ship from there on with the Australian struggling to get going. Patel tried his best to drag the team to a fighting total but holed out to Ajinkya Rahane at long on off Archer in the 18th over, looking to up the ante. From then on, Stoinis and Moeen hit a few boundaries to end on a high. Brief scores: Royal Challengers Bangalore 158/4 (Parthv Patel 67; Shreyas Gopal 3/12) --IANS dm/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Power companies will immensely benefit from the Supreme Court's Tuesday order striking down the RBI's February 12 circular which stated a time-bound resolution of bank loans, the Independent Power Producers Association of India (IPPAI) said. "Definitely it is going to help the power companies as it will release the pressure of projects being referred to the NCLT (National Company Law Tribunal) for no fault of theirs. Hopefully the government and the policy makers will look up to the power sector again to find solution along with today's relief. "Without fuel supply agreement, a time-bound solution (like the February 12 circular) had no meaning. Now companies can plan for going forward on reviving the stuck projects with fuel and power supply agreements," IPPAI Director General Harry Dhaul told IANS. The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) February 12 circular related to the resolution of the stressed assets, calling it "unconstitutional" and "ultra vires". Power companies such as Essar Power, GMR Energy, KSK Energy, and Rattan India Power, as well as the Association of Power Producers (APP) and the IPPAI had, in August 2018, moved the apex court, challenging the constitutional validity of the circular. Daizy Chawla, Senior Partner, Singh & Associates, said though the judgment, by which the Supreme Court has set aside the impugned circular dated February 12, 2018 on the ground that Section 35AA of Banking Regulation Act under which it is issued is ultra vires, will be a big relief for those companies which were directly hit by the said circular. "However, this does not mean that action against the said entities cannot be taken under the IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code). Moreover, the Hon'ble Apex Court has also not gone into the other issues or decided with respect to other issues which the power companies were emphasizing as the reasons for their stress," she said. Rating agency Moody's, however, termed the Supreme Court order as being credit negative for Indian banks. "Voiding of the February 12 circular is credit negative for Indian banks. The circular had significantly tightened stressed loan recognition and resolution for large borrowers. But, with the voiding, this may now have to be watered down. "The resolution of stressed loans impacted by the circular will be further delayed as the process may have to be started afresh," said Srikanth Vadlamani, Vice President, Financial Institutions Group, Moody's Investors Service. Private power producers had pleaded in the Supreme Court that the RBI circular would further accentuate the already existing grave problems afflicting the health of the sector while challenging the validity of the central bank's order. Several power companies, as well as the APP and the IPPAI, had challenged the validity of the RBI circular in various high courts seeking a stay on insolvency proceedings, arguing that the circular would push even those power assets that were close to achieving loan restructuring into insolvency. In its arguments while challenging the circular, the APP said: "Ministry of Power's admission that non-payment of dues (Rs 40,846 crore) and delay in recovery of amounts from discoms, majority of which are Government-owned impairs the ability of IPPs to service debt in timely manner. "The HLEC (High Level Empowered Committee of the Power Ministry) Report also notes that delay in payments by discoms is a major stress factor." --IANS ana/sn/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Tuesday commenced hearing on the correctness of the payment of compensation to the landowners whose land has been acquired as well as when the award granting compensation would come into effect. As the five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi took up the matter, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said the question to be adjudicated by the court include the import and meaning of word "pay" under Section 24(2) of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. He said that the question to be addressed by the constitution bench, which also includes Justice N.V. Ramana, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna, is whether "pay" under Section 24(2) necessarily implies depositing in the account of the beneficiary whose land has been acquired. The matter was last heard by the bench of then Chief Justice Dipak Misra (since retired), Justice A.K. Sikri (now retired), Justice A.M. Khanwilkar, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice Ashok Bhushan on March 6, 2018. The court will also examine whether the duration of five years after which the award would cease to survive would include time consumed in the courts on account of legal proceedings or excluded it. The matter was referred to the Constitution bench following conflicting judgments by two benchs of the top court - each bench with three judges. The three-judge bench headed by then Chief Justice R.M. Lodha had, in 2014, held that if the compensation for acquiring land under Land Acquisition Act, 1894, has not been paid to the landowner or deposited with the competent court and the same was retained in the government treasury, then it (land acquisition) would be treated as having lapsed and would be covered under the new 2013 land acquisition law entitling landowners a higher compensation. "The deposit of a compensation amount in the government treasury is of no avail and cannot be held to be equivalent to compensation paid to the landowners/persons interested," Chief Justice Lodha, along with Justice Madan B. Lokur and Justice Kurian Joseph, had said. But this was overruled by a majority of a three-judge bench comprising Justice Arun Mishra, Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel and Justice Mohan M. Shantanagoudar on February 8, 2018. Justice Shantanagoudar dissented. The February 2018 verdict had held that 2014 judgment was passed without taking into account the provisions of the 2013 law on land acquisition. Subsequently the matter was referred to the then Chief Justice Misra by two separate two-judge benches headed by Justice Arun Mishra and Justice Goel (since retired and now NGT Chairman) respectively after another three-judge bench taking exception to February 8, 2018, judgement directed all the High Courts not to proceed with the hearing of land acquisition matters pending before them. The three judge bench headed by Justice Lokur, by its February 22, 2018 order, had urged the other top court's smaller bench (of the strength of two judges each) hearing land acquisition matters to defer the hearing. Justice Lokur's bench had objected to how a three-judge bench could over-rule the judgement passed by another bench of same strength. --IANS pk/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath on Tuesday ordered reinstatement of security outside the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) office here, after having it withdrawn on Monday night citing election deployment. The Chief Minister issued a statement saying, "I have ordered the reinstatement of security of RSS office. But BJP leaders who are crying hoarse over the matter and raising fears of an attack there, must go through the proper process to ask for it." Kamal Nath said, "We may have ideological differences with the RSS and the RSS may have been opposing us but I am not in favour of removal of security from its office." "The RSS office is one of the six places from where security has been withdrawn. I do not want to go into details but our government does not have double standards on security like the BJP government had. "The Congress office had no security for the past 15 years, when there was permanent security outside the BJP office. We have continued to maintain that security cover," he said. The removal of security personnel from the RSS office on Monday night did not go down well with BJP leaders, who alleged that it was too sudden and they were not informed about it. Congress leader and former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh who is contesting from the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat, too said: "It is not proper to remove security provided to the RSS office in Bhopal. I request Chief Minister Kamal Nath to immediately provide adequate security." --IANS hindi-mag/in/mr/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah on Tuesday said the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) will form at the Centre a poor-friendly government like the ones formed by former AIADMK Chief Ministers M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) and J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu. Campaigning for BJP Lok Sabha candidate Tamilisai Soundararajan, Shah told a rally here, "In 2014, the BJP did not have a big alliance in Tamil Nadu. But we won and gave ministerial berths to two MPs from Tamil Nadu -- Pon Radhakrishnan and Nirmala Sitharaman, daughter of the soil." Stressing that the BJP had a big electoral alliance this time with parties like the AIADMK, the PMK and the DMDK, Shah said a survey had predicted the NDA winning over 30 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, people wanted Narendra Modi to become the Prime Minister again, he said and added, "The NDA will not only win the Lok Sabha elections but also the Assembly polls". Taking a dig at the DMK-Congress alliance, the BJP leader said it had people like Karti Chidambaram, Kanimozhi and A. Raja against whom there were corruption charges. According to Shah, the 13th Finance Commission had given the state just Rs 94,000 crore, but the 14th Finance Commission under the Modi government allocated Rs 5.45 lakh crore. The BJP chief said the new government headed by Modi would provide more funds to Tamil Nadu to implement more developmental projects. Shah also brought up the issue of Kashmir and said it was a part of India and the Modi government would not give it away to anyone. Pointing out to the Air Forces strikes in Balakot, he said while the NDA government destroyed terror camps in Pakistan, the Congress wanted talks with that country. The BJP chief received a thunderous response when he asked "Should we not seek revenge against Pakistan that carries out terror attacks in India". --IANS vj/rtp/pcj (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Singapore Airlines has grounded two Boeing 787-10 aircraft after routine inspections found issues with the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 TEN engines, according to a statement issued by the carrier on Tuesday. It said that some of the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 TEN engines on Singapore Airlines' Boeing 787-10 fleet were found to have "premature blade deterioration". "Pending engine replacements, two SIA 787-10 aircraft have been removed from service," the statement cited by Xinhua news agency added. Singapore Airlines's 787-10 aircraft are currently deployed to 11 destinations -- Bangkok, Denpasar, Fukuoka, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Nagoya, New Delhi, Osaka, Perth, Taipei and Tokyo. It said it was operating other aircraft for these flights to minimize schedule disruption to its customers. However, it admitted that as capacity may be lower on the substitute aircraft, some customers may be affected. The airlines declined to comment on the number of travellers affected, saying it was "actively getting in touch with customers" to re-accommodate them on various other flights. The statement by the carrier showed that the airline had been in consultation with Rolls-Royce and completed all its engine inspections on its 787-10 fleet while a remaining check will be completed on a 787-9 with its subsidiary Scoot Airlines by April 3. "We regret the inconvenience caused and sincerely apologize to customers whose travel plans are affected and seek their understanding," said the airlines. The grounding followed the suspension of all Boeing 737 MAX flights in its airspace in Singapore on March 12 by the country's Civil Aviation Authority in the wake of two fatal accidents involving Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in less than five months. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress President Rahul Gandhi said on Tuesday that he had decided to contest also from Kerala because south India feels "hostility" from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Asked why he was also being fielded by his party from Wayanad in Kerala apart from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi told the media here: "South India feels hostility from Narendra Modi... They feel they have not been included in decision making." He said his candidature would send out a message that "we are with you, I am with you... This is the message." When a journalist queried about lack of alliances in some states, Gandhi said the Congress had teamed up with allies in Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. "We have alliances across the country. I don't know which newspapers you are reading." --IANS mr-rak/pg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Situated on the northern bank of the Ganga river, Begusarai in north Bihar has earned the "Leningrad of Bihar" and "Little Moscow" monikers, and is again drawing national attention because the CPI has fielded its firebrand leader Kanhaiya Kumar while the BJP has pitted against him its top Bhumihar leader and union minister Giriraj Singh. In all this, the RJD's Tanveer Hasan, the 'mahagathbandhan' candidate, may not be creating much media hype, but his presence has made the contest traingular and also dimming Kanhaiya's chances as the anti-BJP votes are likely to be divided between the RJD and the CPI. An analysis suggests that if it had been a two-cornered contest, Kanhaiya had a good chance to spring a surprise on the BJP. Kanhaiya, a former president of the JNU Students' Union, came into the limelight after his arrest for an "anti-national sloganeering event" on the campus in 2016. His emergence as a youth leader fuelled hopes in the CPI of its revival and the party fielded him as its candidate. The "anti-national" tag has stuck with Kanhaiya after the JNU incident and this was perhaps the reason Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah decided to field Giriraj Singh, seen by many as an anti-Muslim face in Bihar, from Begusarai despite his wish to re-contest from Nawada. Giriraj Singh was insisting he would contest from Nawada but after it went to the LJP in the seat-sharing deal between the NDA allies, he was persuaded to contest from Begusarai. So, how did Begusarai get its monikers? It was from the prolonged struggle between the landless and the landlords organised under the banner of the communist parties. The BJP's Bhola Singh won the seat in 2014, defeating Tanveer Hasan by a margin of over 58,000 votes. Bhola Singh, a former Communist leader, had switched sides to the BJP. With 34.31 per cent of vote-share, Hasan secured nearly 370,000 votes while Bhola Singh got nearly 428,000 votes or 39.72 per cent. The CPI's Rajendra Prasad Singh with nearly 200,000 or 17.87 per cent of the votes. According to an estimate, Bhumihars constitute about 19 per cent of voters in Begusarai, followed by Muslims (15 per cent), Yadavs (12 per cent) and Kurmis (7 percent) of the 19 lakh electorate. The Bhumihar vote holds the key and this is evident from the fact that in at least 11 of the past 16 Lok Sabha polls, nine of the MPs elected have been Bhumihars. Before the last delimitation in 2009, there were two parliamentary constituencies in Begusarai district - Begusarai and Balia. They were then combined as Begusarai while Balia ceased to exist. Five of the seven Assembly seats of Begusarai district used to fall in Balia. Since 1952, the Congress won the Begusarai seat eight times and JD-U twice. The CPI won the seat only once when its candidate Yogendra Shrama emerged victorius. The RJD, the BJP, the Janata Party and the Janata Dal claimed the seat on one ocassion each, as did an independent. The CPI was more powerful in Balia parliamentary seat, which it won four times. But since 1999 the CPI started declining from both Balia and Begusarai. With both Giriraj Singh and Kanhaiya being Bhumihars, much depends on who would garner maximum support from thier caste. Giriraj Singh is banking on the Bhumihars, upper castes, Kurmis and Extremely Backward castes, while the RJD is banking on Muslims, Yadavs and backward class voters. The CPI had hoped that the RJD would not field any candidate to make Kanhaiya's win a certainity, but it announced Hasan's candidature. Under the present circumstances, Kanhaiya seems to have an uphill task ahead. If he manages to split the crucial Bhumihar vote, the direct beneficiary would be Hasan. But the RJD won't have it easy too. Due to a large industrial presence in Begusarai, the trade union movement has dominated the political discourse in the area and the CPI has a strong mass base. Kanhaiya has been aggressively campaigning since the last two months in Begusarai and seeking support from every caste and community. He has invited his friends to Begusarai for campaigning. Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mewani recently campaigned for him. Begusarai will vote in the fourth phase of Lok Sabha polls that will be held on April 29. The result, as in the rest of the country, will be out on May 23. (Brajendra Nath Singh can be reached at brajendra.s@ians.in) --IANS bns/vm/am (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In an electoral battle between two un-equals, age wise or otherwise, a star war is on for supremacy in Karnataka's Mandya Lok Sabha constituency where polling is due on April 18 in the first phase. In what could have been a sure victory for Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) candidate and Kannada-Telugu films actor Nikhil Kumaraswamy, in the party's bastion, the dramatic entry of multilingual south Indian actress Sumalatha Ambareesh in the fray as an Independent has queered the pitch and divided the people across the constituency in the old Mysuru region, about 100 km southwest of Bengaluru. Though 55-year-old Sumalatha is not new to the electorate in the key constituency, which her late husband and Kannada rebel star M.H. Ambareesh represented thrice, once as a JD-S member and twice as a Congress member, 29-year-old Nikhil, a novice in politics, is betting on the party's stronghold to debut in Parliament, more as the son of Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy and grandson of JD-S supremo and former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda. The sudden death in Bengaluru on November 24, 2018 of the 66-year-old Ambareesh has snatched Mandya of its demigod, as he was not only a son of the soil, but also the most popular leader of the district, through which the river Cauvery flows southwards. The loss was so huge that Ambareesh's body had to be flown on November 25 to Mandya from Bengaluru for allowing lakhs of his people, including his legion of fans, to pay homage to him from Mandya, Mysuru and Chamarajanagar districts. "The outpouring of grief, love, affection and respect lakhs of people have for Ambareesh is to be seen to be believed. He was everything for the people of Mandya and could identify with anyone, irrespective of age, caste, creed or gender. I was moved by their warmth and feelings to Ambareesh, who cared so much for them. I am contesting to represent him politically too and continue his legacy of serving them," said Sumalatha while electioneering with Kannada stars campaigning for her to win the battle. Though Ambareesh was with the Congress for over a decade and served as Union Minister of State of Information and Broadcast in the first UPA government (2006-07) and a cabinet minister in the Siddaramaiah government in the southern state (2013-16), he did not contest in the May 2018 assembly elections for health reasons. "As the Congress allowed JD-S to contest from Mandya under the seat-sharing pact as pre-poll allies, I decided to contest as an Independent for the sake of Ambareesh and the people of Mandya who were very dear to him," recalled Sumalatha. Mandya was one of the two Lok Sabha seats the JD-S won in the May 2014 elections, with Hassan being other from where Gowda's another grandson, Prajwal, is contesting in place of Deve Gowda, who has represented for a record 6 times since 1991. Prajwal is the son of state PWD minister H.D. Revanna. Nikhil's mother Anita Kumaraswamy is a member of the state assembly from the Ramanagara segment, As Ambareesh was an icon in the film industry, a dozen Kannada actors and actresses, including popular heroes Darshan and Yash, have joined the campaign for Sumalatha, as her husband was a legend and considered a part of the triumvirate along with matinee idols Rajkumar and Vishnuvardhan. Nikhil debuted in the tinsel world with a Kannada-Telugu bilingual film "Jaguar". His latest film, "Seetharama Kalyana" in Kannada, was released recently. His third film "Kurukshetra" is under production. As Nikhil too belongs to the politically dominant Vokkaliga community in the state, especially in the old Mysuru region, the JD-S hopes he will be able to defeat Sumalatha at the hustings and allow the party to retain the constituency, in which the party had won all the 8 assembly seats in the May 12, 2018 elections. "Deve Gowda and Kumaraswamy are very popular in the old Mysuru region, especially in this (Mandya) district, as they are treated as 'son of the soil' despite hailing from Holenarsipur (in Hassan district). The party's symbol - a woman carrying paddy on her head - and its manifesto represent lakhs of farmers and rural folk across the state," party spokesman Ramesh Babu told IANS. With the JD-S heading the 10-month-old coalition government even after winning only 37 seats in the 225-member house in the assembly polls, and Kumaraswamy waiving a staggering Rs 48,000 crore in farm loans, the party is upbeat on Nikhil benefiting from the goodwill farmers and the rural electorate have for the Gowdas. "In the assembly elections, our party won 25 of the 55 seats in the old Mysuru region, which is the highest in the state. Since then, our party has consolidated its presence with a slew of pro-farmers and pro-people policies and programmes for the socio-welfare development of them. These have generated a lot of goodwill to our party, and Nikhil is bound to benefit from this," Babu asserted. (Fakir Balaji can be reached at fakir.b@ians.in) --IANS fb/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With a large amount of cash being seized by the Income Tax (IT) Department from a cement godown in Vellore district that belongs to a DMK official, suspense continues over whether the Lok Sabha polls for the Vellore seat in Tamil Nadu will be held as scheduled on April 18 or will be postponed. On Monday, IT officials found bundles of cash stuffed in cartons and gunny bags in a cement warehouse belonging to a DMK official who is said to be close to party Treasurer Duraimurugan. The cash haul runs into several crore of rupees. Following the seizure, the immediate question is whether the April 18 Lok Sabha polls for Vellore constituency will be cancelled and held on a later date. Duraimurugan's son D.M. Kathir Anand is the DMK candidate for the Vellore seat. In 2017, the Election Commission (EC) had postponed the by-election for the R.K. Nagar Assembly constituency after complaints of large-scale bribing of voters. The IT officials had raided the residences and business premises of Tamil Nadu Health Minister C. Vijayabaskar, his relatives as well as people close to him and his business associates. "We have seized cash totalling Rs 5.5 crore. We have also seized documents showing Rs 89 crore changed hands in R.K. Nagar," an IT official had then told IANS. In 2016, the EC had postponed polls for the Thanjavur and Aravakuruchi Assembly seats following reports of large-scale bribery of voters. Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Satyabrata Sahoo said that after completion of search operations the IT department will give a report. The EC will thereafter take a decision on the issue. There are 23 candidates in the fray in Vellore constituency. "I am ready to face the elections whether held on April 18 or later," R. Suresh, MNM candidate from the Vellore constituency, told IANS. "After the IT raids and seizure of sacks of cash, many who have been voting for the DMK have told me they would vote for me this time," he added. He, however, questioned why the IT department was raiding only DMK officials and not AIADMK officials also. Suresh is fighting against the AIADMK's A.C. Shanmugam and the DMK's Anand among others. According to a senior IT department official, the cash was shifted from Kingston College belonging to Duraimurugan Educational Trust in Vellore to the cement godown in the intervening night between March 29-30. Anand has moved the Madras High Court to halt IT raids on their premises. A couple of days back, IT officials raided the house of Duraimurugan in Vellore and seized Rs 10 lakh in cash. The college campus run by Anand was also searched by IT officials. The IT raid was condemned by Duraimurugan who said it was an act of political vendetta. The IT department's lens perhaps turned on Duraimurugan after he announced a cash incentive of Rs 50 lakh for the best performing party worker. AIADMK's A.C. Shanmugam also promised two wheelers to six top performing party officials. Meanwhile, the ruling AIADMK on Tuesday urged the Election Commission to trace the branch of the bank from where the seized cash was withdrawn and the name of the account holder. The AIADMK has also complained to the poll body alleging that T.T.V. Dhinakaran's AMMK party was giving gift boxes containing cash. It also alleged that the DMK was transporting cash in vehicles painted as a 108 ambulance and has stocked gifts for voters in the marriage hall inside the party headquarters. It said that the DMK's Central Chennai Lok Sabha candidate Dayanidhi Maran was using Sun TV vehicles for transporting cash. --IANS vj/pg/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Film: "The Highwaymen"; Director: John Lee Hancock; Cast: Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelsen; Rating: ** Take away the two still-charismatic veteran actors in the lead role, and what have we got here? A rambling, meandering Cowboy-Western which is high on swag but really low on substance. "The Highwaymen" must have sounded like a swell premise for a film. Two retired Texas rangers in the 1930s are summoned to apprehend "Bonnie & Clyde". Yes, the same outlawed couple whom Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway played to immortal notoriety in the film "Bonnie & Clyde". There is a difference, though. This time in "The Highwaymen", we look at the legend of Bonnie and Clyde from the opposite perspective. We only see them as shadowy criminals, nothing more while the focus is on the pair of actors who play the law enforcers given the responsibility of nabbing the couple before they create more havoc and grow more heroic in the eyes of the public. This is the US in the 1930s. The well-mounted film captures the laconic violence of those times when civil rights were not very clearly marked out. There is a nice green-and-red feel to the film where the aching acres of land are silhouetted in the shadows of violence. The rest of the film relies almost completely on the chemistry between Costner and Harrelson. Both the actors are in brilliant unharnessed form, though Harrelson was far more powerful and moving in the recent in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri". Here in "The Highwaymen", he is required to tail Costner who makes a comeback after a hiatus. And a welcome one at that. Seen as a vehicle for two of America's finest veteran actors, "The Highwaymen" works fine up to a point. But then the minute the plot begins to explore in some detail the relationship between Hamer (Costner) and Gault (Harrelson) and the way they respond to the violence that gripped America's psyche from the Days of the Wild Wild West, the film begins to come apart at the seams. There are many uncomfortable passages in the plot. Serious debate points such as the open sales of arms in the US and the ethics of gunning down a woman outlaw, seem to appear unscheduled in the narrative. In the final reckoning, "The Highwaymen" creates no real impact outside its cops-and-robbers aspirations. There is so much that could have been felt and expressed about the evolution of the culture of the heroic outlaw in the US over the years. All we see is two swift gunmen, played by actors who remain relevant in their 60s, giving the audience a good time in a film that John Wayne would have enjoyed. I am not sure about Clint Eastwood. It is relevant that this film demystifies Bonnie and Clyde during the same week that Warren Beatty (who played Clyde) turns 82. The legend lives on. --IANS skj/rb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of wrecking the economy and said there was an "economic emergency" in the country. Blaming demonetization and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for what he said was an economic mess, Gandhi said after releasing the Congress manifesto here for the Lok Sabha polls that his party was determined to set right the situation. Among other things, Gandhi promised that a Congress government would allow entrepreneurs to start new ventures without permission for three years to give a boost to the economy. Farmers who are unable to return loans they take from banks will no more face criminal but only civil cases, he added. The Congress leader also pledged to increase government spending on education and health. "The BJP is spreading hatred... We want to unite the country," he said, and accused the Prime Minister of lying on issues such as providing 2 crore jobs to youths. To repeated questions, Gandhi said the narrative for the Lok Sabha election had already been set -- and it was all about economic issues and misery. Asked if the journalists were interacting with "a future Prime Minister", he retorted: "Ask the people this question." --IANS mr-rak/pg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) It is a battle of Manjhi versus Manjhi in Gaya parliamentary constituency. In a direct contest, the ruling NDA and the opposition Grand Alliance (Mahagathbandhan) have fielded candidates belonging to the Mushahar Dalit community, considered among the most deprived and marginalised sections of society. For the first time in three decades, the BJP candidate is not contesting the polls as the seat went to its ally JD-U this time under the seat-sharing formula. The reserved constituency of Gaya is considered the stronghold of the BJP. The party has won the seat four times in the last 20 years - in 1998, 1999, 2009 and 2014. With the Gaya seat going to the polls in the first of seven polling phases, the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) chief and former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi is Grand Alliance candidate pitted against NDA candidate Vijay Manjhi of the JD-U. Since 1999, only candidates of the Musahar community, that derives its name from the practice of eating rats after usually hunting for them in paddy fields, have won the seat in successive elections. In last two polls, BJP's Hari Manjhi defeated RJD's Ramji Manjhi. Though there are nearly a dozen candidates are in fray, the stakes are high for Jitan Ram Manjhi. In his early 70s, if Manjhi wins here, he will become an MP for the first time in his four-decade old political career. He had unsuccessfully contested the polls in the past. The BJP, which is supporting its ally JD-U instead of contesting itself, has angered local party leaders and workers, who wanted party to contest polls. Sitting BJP MP Hari Manjhi is reportedly not happy after the party denied him the ticket to favour their ally. There is widespread speculation over whether Jitan Ram Manjhi can break the BJP stronghold, or whether he will meet the same fate as in past. That it will not be easy for JD-U's Vijay Manjhi either, seems the dominant view among people in Gaya, a pilgrim and tourist destination. Scarcity of drinking water during summer is a serious problem both in rural and urban areas of drought-hit Gaya district due to depletion of ground water as a result of over-exploitation for irrigation and drinking. Besides, unemployment is another issue, as despite being a tourist centre, development has lagged behind and people have been forced to migrate outside the state for their livelihood. Vijay Manjhi is hopeful of getting the upper castes votes considered the traditional support base of its ally, the BJP, alongwith votes of the Other Backwward Classes (OBCs), the Economic Backward Classes (EBCc) and other Dalit communities. "We are sure to get the support of the OBCs, EBCs, Dalits and Muslims. Only EBCs and Dalits together make up over 35 per cent of the electorate. Apart from upper castes, if the party manages the support of Muslims, our candidate will be comfortable" JD-U leader Neeraj Kumar said. Jitan Ram Manjhi is confident of getting overwhelming support from RJD's traditional social support base of Muslims and Yadavs, as well as the similar support base of allies like Congress and RLSP among the Koeri other castes. "Our leader Jitan Ram Manjhi is a popular face in Gaya, his home town. He enjoys support of all castes and communities, unlike our rivals," HAM party leader Danish Ruzwan said. The total number of voters in Gaya constituency are 1,329,192, consisting of 705,874 male 623,318 women. The constituency has 6 assembly segments. In the 2015 Bihar Assembly polls, the RJD won 3 seats and one seat was won by its ally Congress. The BJP and JD-U won one seat each. --IANS ik/bc (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Malkajgiri, the largest Lok Sabha constituency in the country in terms of voters, will see a three-cornered contest but the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) appears to be sitting pretty. Spread over parts of Hyderabad and its outskirts, it is called a mini India for being home to large number of people from various parts of the country. About 31 lakh voters, nearly half of them hailing from other states, are eligible to cast their franchise in April 11 elections. A sizeable number among migrants are those with their roots in Andhra Pradesh. It is one of the Lok Sabha seats which the ruling TRS is aiming to win for the first time. This is the third election in the constituency, which came into being following the delimitation of constituencies a decade ago. In the first election held here in 2009, the Congress party's Sarvey Satyanarayana was elected, defeating his nearest rival, the Telugu Desam Party's T. Bheemsen, by over 93,000 votes. The TRS then had an alliance with TDP. In 2014, the TDP's Malla Reddy won the seat defeating M. Hanumanth Rao of the TRS by more than 28,000 votes. TDP had contested the polls in alliance with the BJP. In the simultaneous Assembly elections, TDP won four out of seven Assembly segments. Its ally BJP bagged one seat while TRS candidates were elected in two constituencies. Malla Reddy, who runs engineering colleges, later defected to TRS. In the Assembly elections held in December 2018, he was elected from Medchal, one of the seven Assembly segments, and was inducted in the state cabinet. This time, the TRS has fielded Malla Reddy's son-in-law Marri Rajasekhar Reddy. A newcomer in politics, he is locking horns with Congress party's Telangana unit working president Revanth Reddy and BJP's senior leader N. Ramchander Rao. Both the experienced politicians were defeated in the Assembly elections. Rajasekhar Reddy is banking on his father-in-law and other TRS MLAs as they have been tasked to run the campaign in their respective constituencies. Revanth Reddy, who lost from Kodangal in Vikarabad district, is considered a non-local in Malkajgiri but he is unfazed by the tag. He is confident that people will prefer Congress in the parliamentary elections. A bitter critic of TRS and Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao, he is known for oratory skills and has the ability to enthuse the cadres. Revanth, who quit TDP to join Congress in 2017, and Ramachander Rao, who contested unsuccessfully from the Malkajgiri Assembly segment, are facing a tough task as their parties have no representation from Assembly segments that fall under the Lok Sabha constituency. The BJP candidate hopes that the Narendra Modi factor will help him win the votes of the migrants from others states besides the middle-class among the locals. In the recent Assembly elections, TRS won six Assembly segments. Congress party's Sudheer Reddy, who was elected from L.B. Nagar Assembly constituency, last month announced that he was joining TRS. He was one of the 10 Congress MLAs who defected to the ruling party, dealing a big blow to the opposition party. In the Assembly elections the TRS polled 51.42 per cent votes in all seven segments put together. The 'Prajakutami' or Peoples' Alliance, led by the Congress secured 31.62 per cent votes while the BJP finished third with 9.26 per cent votes. The TDP, which was part of the 'Prajakutami', failed to win a single Assembly segment here. Reeling under the crushing defeat in Assembly polls, the TDP is not contesting the Lok Sabha elections in Telangana. The Congress thus hopes to get the TDP votes. Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Telangana Jana Samithi (TJS), which were also constituents of the 'Prajakutami', have declared their support for Congress candidates. In previous Lok Sabha elections, former IAS officer and Lok Satta Party leader Jayaprakash Narayan and former IPS officer and YSR Congress Party's leader V. Dinesh Reddy were also in the fray, both securing over one lakh votes each. The YSR Congress , which stayed away from Assembly polls, is also not contesting the elections in Telangana. The TRS hopes to get the voters of YSR Congress sympathisers. (Mohammed Shafeeq can be reached at m.shafeeq@ians.in) --IANS ms/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two criminals who robbed a businessman and his son of Rs 1.40 crore at gunpoint here after intercepting their car have been arrested, police said on Tuesday. Aalam Ali, 22, and his accomplice Mustkeem Khan, 19, both resident of Delhi, were arrested on Monday night by the Crime Branch when they came to meet a contact near the Inderlok Metro station. Both were involved in various robberies and were members of the Babloo Khan gang, the police said. Along with their accomplices, they had on March 22 robbed Rs 1.40 crore from a grain merchant and his son near Pitampura, Additional Commissioner of Police Rajiv Ranjan said. "A total of Rs 40 lakh was recovered from their possession. Efforts are on to recover the remaining robbed amount," Ranjan said. The gang members used to follow the victim's vehicle on their scooties and strike when the victim reached an isolate place. They used one scooty to intercept the target vehicle and used firearms to terrify the victim and rob them, the officer added. The gang had robbed Rs 8 lakh at gunpoint on February 15 from another victim, he added. --IANS sp/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Global ride-sharing major Uber has been sued for $10 million by a Washington-based woman on charges of being sexually assaulted by an Uber driver last year. The driver, Raul Rodriguez Vasquez, has pleaded guilty and is serving jail-time. Based on the DNA samples collected during police investigations, the victim was proven right. According to the lawsuit filed last week, the incident occurred on April 1, 2018. The victim claimed that Uber "breached its duties" to her as a customer by failing to "warn her of the risk its services posed to women, and in particular to women who had been consuming alcohol or who were intoxicated", The Verge reported on Monday. The woman is seeking $10 million in damages from both the driver Vasquez and Uber to compensate for the physical and emotional injuries she sustained from the assault. According to media reports, over a period of four years, at least 103 Uber drivers have been accused of sexually assaulting or abusing their passengers in the US alone. A total of 31 Uber drivers have been known to have been convicted for crimes, the report said. In June 2017, the company fired over 20 employees after an investigation into the workplace culture and sexual harassment claims. The same year, the company was sued by a woman who was raped by an Uber driver in India, following which former Uber CEO and Co-founder Travis Kalanick stepped down from his post. In October 2018, Cameron Poetzscher who headed corporate development at Uber was asked to step down amid allegations of sexually harassing female colleagues. --IANS rp/gb/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The National Conference will fight for the restoration of the pre-1953 Constitutional relationship between Jammu and Kashmir and India, former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said on Tuesday. Speaking to the media at Pattan in Baramulla district, the National Conference leader said: "We will fight for the restoration of the pre-1953 Constitutional relationship between the state and India." Abdullah was referring to the later erosion of Constitutional guarantees made to Jammu and Kashmir following the arrest of his grandfather, the late Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, who was the 'Wazir-e-Azam' (Prime Minister) of the state till August 1953. Asked about the controversy about his statement regarding reversion to old nomenclatures such as 'Sadr-e-Riyasat' and 'Wazir-e-Azam' for the Governor and the Chief Minister, Abdullah said: "What is new about my demand? Didn't we have the same designations till 1965?" Asked if he would align with other parties for the protection of Articles 370 and 35A, he said: "Didn't we agree to make Altaf Bukhari the Chief Minister the last time in order to protect these Articles of the Constitution?" He was referring to the united stand of the National Conference and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) when they agreed to have senior PDP leader Bukhari as the Chief Minister last year. After that communication, Governor Satya Pal Malik dissolved the state Assembly in November last year. Asked if his party would align with any other party to form a government after the Assembly elections, he curtly replied: "We will form the next government on our own strength." There are 87 members in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly and the support of at least 44 members is needed to claim a simple majority in the House. --IANS sq/mr/pg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) To boost border security, the Congress on Tuesday promised to increase the strength of border guarding forces, construct integrated border outposts and accelerate the construction of roads along India-China and India-Myanmar borders. The strength of border guarding forces -- the Border Security Force (BSF), the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and the Assam Rifles -- will be increased and they will be posted on or close to the border to prevent infiltration, illegal immigration and smuggling, said the Congress manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections released on Tuesday. The Congress also said it will construct modern and well-equipped integrated border outposts to provide good working and living conditions for the forces and that the distance between two border outposts will be reduced. Giving relief to the forces, it promised that the period of their posting in high altitude border outposts will be reduced to three months at a time. Noting that India's borders must be secure, Congress promised to accelerate the construction of border roads along all borders of India, especially, the India-China border. "We will enhance the capacity of the border roads organisation and create separate divisions to build roads along the India-China and the India-Myanmar borders," it said. In further relief, the Congress said at any given time, an adequate number of battalions will be on rest, recuperation and training and will not be deployed on operational duties. A Committee will set up to draft new Service Rules for paramilitary personnel, it said. Congress also promised to ensure increased representation of women to achieve a minimum of 33 per cent in the force strength of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the BSF. "Every effort will be made to induct more women into the other border guarding forces, namely, ITBP, SSB and Assam Rifles." "We will enhance the facilities of health, education and housing for the personnel of the CAPFs and their families to bring them on par with the facilities provided for the Armed Forces. We will set up schools on the model of Sainik schools to enhance educational opportunities for their children," said the manifesto. The Congress also promised to enhance the status of the paramilitary personnel and benefits to their families if they die in action. --IANS rak/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The contents of the Congress partys election manifesto have the potential to appeal to the voters. The kind of promises made in the manifesto underline that the election must be about real issues. Its greatest strength is that as a document, it is truthful and free of hype and hyperbole. In the Congress President Rahul Gandhis words, nothing in the manifesto is a lie. It is aptly titled Congress will deliver. The claim that it is the voice of the people and reflects their wishes and it has not been drafted behind closed doors seems to be valid. The focus on ... In the case of Dena Bank, its shareholders received 110 shares of BoB for every 1,000 shares. But rarely a shareholder would have shares in the same proportion decided by the merging entities. What happens to the excess stocks that an investor holds? Say, if an individual owns just 100 shares of Vijaya Bank, what allotment will he be entitled to? After allocating the stocks based on the decided proportion, the ... 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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 A woman pilgrim was killed and fifteen others were injured when a bus carrying them overturned on NH-33 in Saraikela-Kharswan district, police said on Tuesday. The incident happened under the jurisdiction of Chowka police station on Monday night when a group of pilgrims, all from Junagarh in Gujarat, were heading to Banaras after visiting Jagannath temple in Puri, the police said. The driver lost control over the wheels following which the vehicle dashed against a roadside wall late Monday night, the Sub-Divisional Police Officer (SDPO) of Chandil, D N Banka said. The woman pilgrim was killed on the spot, he said. Fifteen other pilgrims suffered minor injuries, he added. The police went to the spot after being informed about the accident and shifted the injured to the government-run M G M Hospital here, the SDPO said. An FIR has been registered against negligent driving, Banka said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Around 15 persons, including eight policemen, were injured here on Tuesday in a clash between the police and agitating contractual teachers. The police carried out a lathicharge when the agitators tried to block the road in front of a placement agency's office in Minto Park area demanding salary hike, police said. The agitators were computer teachers appointed in government schools and colleges across the state on contract through the placement agency. The entire area turned into a battlefield when the police resorted to lathicharge to disperse around 300 teachers who were forcibly trying to enter a building where the placement agency's office was located. Six agitators were arrested in connection with the incident, a senior officer of Kolkata Police said. "The placement company was getting Rs 3.50 lakh per school annually from the government and was providing a monthly salary of Rs 4,500 to each teacher for the last 4-5 years. But the teachers demanded a hike," the senior officer of Kolkata Police said. Around 300 private teachers, including 70 women, started demonstrating in front of the office building around 10.30 am. The effort of the police to pacify the agitators went in vain and they put up road blockade. Many of them tried to forcibly enter the office after assaulting policemen guarding the entrance of the building, the officer said. A clash ensued and in the melee, eight police personnel and seven agitators were injured, he said. Vehicular movement was affected on the stretch for around two hours as a result. Later in the evening, the teachers started demonstrating in front of Minister Partha Chatterjee's residence in the southern part of the city. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Three persons have been arrested from Parsudih here for their alleged involvement in a betting racket during an Indian Premier League (IPL) match, the police said on Tuesday. Following a tip-off, during the match between Kings XI Punjab and Delhi Capitals on Monday night, the police conducted a raid at an apartment and arrested them, the Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) of East Singhbhum district, Alok Ranjan, said at a press conference. Four mobile phones, Rs 12,700 in cash, a register, ATM cards and a TV set were seized from the flat, the DSP said, digital wallets were being use to transfer money. "We have got some names and their mobile numbers from the seized register," the DSP said. A investigation has been initiated, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a new lawsuit, the attorney general for the District of Columbia has accused a teacher-exchange program of allegedly misleading, threatening, and exploiting foreign teachers working in the citys public schools. According to the suit , the Washington-based Bilingual Teacher Exchange and other related companies run by Earl Francisco Lopez have been exploiting foreign teachers who want to teach in the United States through a federal visa program since at least 2015. The companies charged teachers exorbitantly high fees, did not provide promised support services, and even threatened teachers with deportation to coerce them into signing contracts. At least 45 foreign-exchange teachers who were recruited by these companies are currently working in traditional public schools and public charter schools in Washington. Many of these teachers come from Colombia and are teaching Spanish-language and bilingual education courses. The U.S. State Departments J-1 visa program allows foreign teachers to work full-time in U.S. schools for three years, with a possible two-year extension. According to the attorney generals office, these teachers do have to pay an annual fee to cover the cost of visa processingbut its typically between $1,000 and $1,500. The Bilingual Teacher Exchange was charging teachers in D.C. between $3,700 and $13,000 in fees. Teachers were misled into thinking that they had to sign a contract with the Bilingual Teacher Exchange in order to work in D.C. schools, the lawsuit alleges. But the Bilingual Teacher Exchange is not a sponsor authorized by the State Departmentits a third-party recruiter and acted as an intermediary for a North Carolina-based company that is a true sponsor. Teachers did not have to work with the Bilingual Teacher Exchange to get a job with D.C. public schools. The Bilingual Teacher Exchange also promised teachers assistance with placement in schools, travel, and orientation, as well as professional development. But the lawsuit alleges that teachers received little to no support from the program, and had to secure their own employment offers and arrange and pay for their own transportation to the United States. The program told teachers that if they didnt make monthly payments or sign subsequent annual contracts after the end of their first year, they would lose their visas and be deported, according to the suit. In reality, the Bilingual Teacher Exchange had no authority to terminate a teachers visa. "[Lopez] was making money over hand over fist, and he was using his apparent authority and power ... to put fear in their hearts, said D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, in an interview. Racine said he was alerted to the issue by the Washington Teachers Union. His office has interviewed with about 15 foreign-exchange teachers so far, and Racine said he hopes that eventually all 45 teachers currently working in the city will file a complaint. During the interviews, there were tears, Racine said. Many of the teachers are permitted under the J-1 visa to bring their family over while theyre here, so many of them had a spouse, as well as kids in D.C. schools, and the last thing they want is to be deported. They were afraid. The J-1 visa program is meant to be a cultural exchangethe department says the programs goals are for foreign teachers to share their culture with Americans, strengthen their English, and learn new skills. But in reality, school districts often use the program as a solution to a teacher shortage. In 2017, Education Week reported about the school districts that hire teachers from the Philippines to fill openings , particularly in shortage areas like special education. This school year, the District of Columbia reported difficulty finding teachers for world languages and English-as-a-second language classes. Racine said the school district doesnt have the supply of bilingual teachers that it needs, so it recruits from Colombia, Spain, and other countries. Lora Bartlett, an associate professor in the education department at the University of California Santa Cruz who has written a book about migrant teachers , said relying on international teachers to fill labor shortages opens the door to exploitation. "[These teachers are] in a very vulnerable position, she said. They see the organizations as their conduit to employment in the United States, ... and they tend to believe what theyre told. There are very few resources for them confirm their legitimacy. Image via Getty Three Indian citizens have been apprehended by US Border Patrol officials for being involved in a smuggling attempt near Hogansburg in upstate New York. US Border Patrol agents assigned to the Massena Border Patrol Station had apprehended six individuals on March 28 for being involved in the suspected smuggling attempt. The agents observed suspicious activity in Hogansburg involving the occupants of two vehicles, to include the exchange of passengers. Border Patrol agents performed a vehicle stop on one of the cars in Hogansburg in the town of Bombay, near the Canadian-US, a press release from the US Customs and Border Protection said. Agents conducted records checks and took biometric data from the driver and passengers of the car. The driver was identified as a citizen of India with no immigration documentation allowing him to enter or remain in the US. The US Attorney for the Northern District of New York accepted the case for prosecution on charges of alien smuggling. Two passengers who got into the car from the other vehicle were also identified as citizens of India with no immigration documentation allowing them to enter or remain in the US. The US Attorney for the Northern District of New York will be prosecuting them for illegal entry. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Thirty-five people, including the bride, were taken ill after eating food served at a marriage ceremony here, a health official said Tuesday. Wedding guests complained of stomach ache, vomiting and loose motions soon after returning to Dausa from the wedding in Jaipur on Monday night. They were rushed to a government hospital. Six of them are still undergoing treatment, Dausa Chief Medical and Health Officer Dr O.P Bairwa said. Health officials said guests had consumed non-vegetarian food and sweets during the feast, which apparently had turned stale due to hot weather conditions. The samples of the food items have been sent to a laboratory for testing. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Four men were arrested for allegedly trying to rob ATM machines in Dwarka's JP Kalan area in the night hours, police said on Tuesday. The accused were identified as Jaibir (23), Sagar (19), both residents of JP Kalan, Chirag (19), a resident of Najafgarh, and Arjun (20), a resident of Dhansa Village, they added. On March 19, the police had received information regarding damaging of ATM machines of Corporation Bank and Axis Bank near the Rawta More, a senior police officer said. The burglars fled the spot after taking the CCTV camera of Corporation Bank. During investigation, CCTV footage was taken from both the banks, in which two to three persons were seen, the police said. On Sunday evening, a police patrolling team apprehended three men from the JP Kalan area after noticing that they were riding a stolen bike, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Dwarka) Anto Alphonse said. The police also noticed that the features of one of the apprehended men -- Jaibir -- were similar to a person seen in the CCTV footage of ATM robberies. During interrogation, the three men confessed to their involvement in the incidents, along with one Arjun (20), the DCP said. Subsequently, Arjun was also arrested and the stolen CCTV camera was recovered from his possession. The accused told the police that they worked as drivers and helpers in Gramin Sewa vehicles. One mobile phone, one motorcycle and a CCTV camera were recovered from the possession of the accused, the police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a blow to Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT) ahead of the general election, 400 hundred supporters and activists of the ruling alliance junior partner led by its senior vice-chairperson Kritimohan Tripura joined opposition Congress on Tuesday. The defectors also opposed the tribal party's demand for a separate state. "The people of the state are confused with the demand for Tipraland and our leaders had cheated us. Now we understand that this demand is not practical. So we have decided to join Congress as it has assured us of development of the indigenous people", Tripura told reporters after joining Congress party here today. The Lok Sabha polls in the two Low Sabha seats in the state will be held on April 11 and April 18. IPFT has been demanding a separate tribal state since it came into being in 2009 by carving out the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC), which constitute two third of the states territory and is home to tribals, who form one third of the states population. The party formed an alliance with the BJP before February 2018 state elections and won eight seats in the sixty member assembly. Dominant partner BJP had won 36 seats. Youth IPFT leader and Belonia divisional head Mrinal Tripura said, "The demand for a separate tribal land in the state is an implausible dream, which cannot be implemented. "People want peace and development. Our leaders only befooled us by the slogan of Tipraland," he added. Major political parties of the state including ruling BJP, Congress and CPI-M have rejected the demand for 'Tipraland'. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) About 1,700 Jan Dhan bank accounts in Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad district have come under the scanner of the Election Commission-deployed surveillance teams for receiving suspicious deposits during the poll season, officials said. They said about Rs 10,000 each, totalling about Rs 1.7 crore, have been deposited in these accounts over the past few days and the instances have come under the scanner of investigative and intelligence agencies for possible abuse by political candidates as bribe to voters. The Income Tax department has launched an investigation into the issue, along with other agencies deployed to check black money and illegal inducements to voters during the ongoing polls in the country. The EC has sought a report from the agencies and they have informed it that the bank concerned in Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh has been asked for a report and preliminary inputs suggest the money was deposited by banking correspondents, they said. The next level of probe is on, the officials said, adding it could be a case of some government scheme money or funds being deposited in these accounts. The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) was launched on August 28, 2014, with an aim to provide universal access to banking facilities for all households. The government had said that it aims for financial inclusion and to ensure access to financial services banking/savings and deposit accounts, remittance, credit, insurance, pension. The Election Commission (EC) has deployed a large team of expenditure monitoring observers in all the constituencies to keep a check on illegal cash and other inducements to voters during the polls. The teams, tasked to ensure a level-playing field for all the candidates trying their luck at the hustings, are being supported by the intelligence and enforcement setups of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), Customs department, the Intelligence Bureau, the Financial Intelligence Unit and the Enforcement Directorate. The seven phase Lok Sabha polls will begin from April 11 and 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.) A local court Tuesday sentenced well-known Telugu actor-producer M Mohan Babu to one-year imprisonment in a 2010 cheque bounce case. The 23rd Special Magistrate Court here also directed him to pay a fine of Rs 41.75 lakh in connection with the case filed by Telugu director Y V S Chowdary. Mohan Babu's film production company, Sri Lakshmi Prasanna Pictures, which was also named in the case, was directed to pay a fine of Rs 10,000 to the complainant, Chowdary's advocate K Satya Saibaba said. 'Devadasu' fame Chowdary had filed the complaint after he received Rs 1.10 crore out of Rs 1.60 crore remuneration that was offered by the film company for directing Telugu film 'Saleem', starring Manchu Vishnu, Ileana DCruz, among others. The movie was released in December 2009. For the remaining amount, Mohan Babu had given a cheque of Rs 40.50 lakh, which got returned for "insufficient" funds, the counsel said. The court sentenced Mohan Babu to one year in jail besides directing him to pay the fine. After a plea was filed seeking suspension of the order, the court allowed it and suspended its order for one month to enable the petitioner to go for appeal in a higher court. The actor had joined the main opposition YSR Congress Party in Andhra Pradesh last month. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Algeria's military on Tuesday demanded the immediate launch of impeachment proceedings against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as it dismissed an announcement he will resign before his mandate expires. Armed forces chief Ahmed Gaid Salah called for "the immediate application of the constitutional procedure for removing the head of state from power", in a defence ministry statement after a meeting of top brass. The statement said the army considered an announcement from the presidency on Monday that Bouteflika would resign by the end of his term on April 28 as invalid because it did not come from the president himself. "Any decision taken outside the constitutional framework is considered null and void," the general said. Without naming anyone, Gaid Salah criticised "the stubbornness, the procrastination and the deviousness of certain individuals who are trying to make the crisis last and make it more complex with the only concern being their narrow personal interests". He said the army's "sole ambition" was to "protect the people from a handful of (other) people who have unduly taken over the wealth of the Algerian people". Bouteflika has come under mounting pressure to step down since his decision to seek a fifth term despite rarely being seen in public after suffering a stroke in 2013. The 82-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, said last month he would pull out of the race and postponed April elections, in moves that angered protesters who saw it as a ploy to extend his two decades in power. Gaid Salah, a long-time Bouteflika ally, last week called on the president to resign or be declared unfit to rule, becoming one of the first of his faithful supporters to abandon him. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Algerian leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika held onto power for some 20 years through a debilitating stroke but the veteran of the independence struggle finally appears to have lost his grip in the face of mass protests. His presidency, the longest in the history of the North African state, survived the Arab Spring uprisings that toppled other leaders in the region. But on Tuesday, after weeks of demonstrations against his rule and a demand from the army to start impeachment proceedings, Bouteflika bowed to the pressure and submitted his resignation, state media said. It was Bouteflika's bid for a fifth term in office earlier this year that sparked public anger and brought hundreds of thousands out onto the streets across the country demanding he step down. Dubbed Boutef by Algerians, he had helped foster peace after a decade-long civil war in the North African country in the 1990s which killed nearly 200,000 people. "I am the whole of Algeria. I am the embodiment of the Algerian people," he said in 1999, the year he became president. In recent years, Bouteflika has had a history of medical problems. A stroke in 2013 affected his mobility and speech, and he has used a wheelchair ever since. He is rarely seen or heard in public. He has also faced criticism from rights groups and opponents who accuse him of being authoritarian. When Bouteflika came to power with the support of an army battling Islamist guerrillas, nobody expected him to stay in office for so long. After his election he addressed critics who saw him as another puppet of the military, saying: "I'm not three-quarters of a president." Paradoxically, it was only after his stroke that Bouteflika was able to consolidate power in a country where the shadowy intelligence service has long been viewed as a "state within a state". Bouteflika was born in Morocco on March 2, 1937 to a family from western Algeria. At the age of 19 he joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) in its struggle against the French colonial rulers. When independence came in 1962, he was appointed minister of sport and tourism at the age of just 25, under Algeria's first president, Ahmed Ben Bella. He became foreign minister the following year, a post he held for more than a decade, but was sidelined after the death of president Houari Boumediene in 1978 and went into self-imposed exile. While he was abroad the military-backed government cancelled the 1991 elections, which an Islamist party had been poised to win, sparking a decade of bloodletting. Bouteflika returned from Switzerland in 1999 to stand for president with the backing of the army which saw in him a potential figure of reconciliation. He initially faced six rivals, but when the opponents dropped out, crying foul, he found himself the only candidate. He proposed an amnesty for rebels who laid down their arms and twice secured public endorsement for "national reconciliation" through referendums. The first, in September 1999, was a major gamble but paid off, leading to a sharp decrease in violence that helped propel Bouteflika to a second term in 2004. His third term in 2009 followed a constitutional amendment allowing him to stand again. His supporters argue that under his stewardship public and private investment created millions of jobs and dramatically lowered unemployment. But a lack of opportunity continues to drive many Algerians abroad as youth unemployment remains high. When the Arab Spring erupted in January 2011, Bouteflika rode out the storm by lifting a 19-year state of emergency and using oil revenues to grant pay rises. For political commentator Rashid Tlemcani, Bouteflika "should have left office at the end of his second term, after securing national reconciliation and conquering the hearts of a large part of the population". In April 2013, Bouteflika was rushed to hospital in France after his stroke, and spent three months recovering. He had already been hospitalised in Paris in 2005 because of intestinal problems from which he never fully recovered. Bouteflika's decision to seek a fourth mandate in 2014 after 15 years in power sparked both derision and criticism from those who questioned his ability to rule. He did not even campaign and voted from a wheelchair, but still won an official 81 percent of the vote. But it was Bouteflika's bid for a fifth term in elections, which had been due to be held in April, that proved the last straw for many Algerians. His candidacy was formally submitted on March 3 while he was in Switzerland for what the presidency described as another round of routine medical tests. On March 10, he returned home, and the next day pulled out of the race, and cancelled the elections. Initial elation from demonstrators, turned to anger when he confirmed he would stay on in power beyond the term of his mandate. They returned to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to push again for him to leave and a string of key allies began abandoning the president. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam Tuesday warned of taking legal action against the Madurai Aadheenam pontiff Arunagirinatha Gnanasambanda Desikar for reportedly saying that the party would merge with the ruling AIADMK. AMMK would take legal action if the pontiff continued making remarks that the party would merge with AIADMK in due course, the party deputy general secretary T T V Dhinakaran said here. Dhinakaran, here for campaigning, hit out at the BJP and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had failed to visit the State when it was ravaged by cyclonic storms. He slammed DMK president M K Stalin for allegedly making scandalous remarks against an inquiry commission probing the circumstances leading to the death of former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa. Dhinakaran said the DMK was confused and shedding crocodile tears over the matter and trying to fool the people. The AMMK leader claimed the AIADMK was trying to postpone the bypolls to 18 assembly seats, citing seizure of huge amount of money in the run up to the elections, fearing that it might lose majority in the State assembly and the government would collapse. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A woman claiming to be an aspiring actor was booked for allegedly misbehaving with police and driving under the influence of alcohol in two separate incidents, a Mumbai police official said Tuesday. In the first incident, the accused Ruhi Singh and her two male friends stopped at a food outlet in suburban Khar in the wee hours of Monday as they wanted to use washroom there, a police official said. However, its owner asked them to leave as the joint was closed for the day. Singh and her friends then allegedly started banging on the doors of the outlet and hurled abuses, following which the staff informed the police. When police personnel arrived at the spot, Singh and her friends allegedly misbehaved with them. They were taken to Khar police station and booked under sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 332 (deterring public servant from his duty) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the official said. Police arrested the two men accompanying Singh and allowed her to leave the police station as women cannot be arrested after sunset as per law. An hour later, Singh, who was allegedly driving in an inebriated state, rammed her car into five vehicles in Santacruz. Her medical tests confirmed presence of alcohol, the official said, following which she was booked under relevant provisions of the IPC for rash driving and driving under the influence of alcohol. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Australian lawmaker who had an egg cracked on his head by a teenage boy for his comments about last month's New Zealand mosque shootings faced a stinging attack on Tuesday in the first sitting of Australia's Parliament since the attacks. Independent Sen. Fraser Anning was the target of widespread condemnation after the Christchurch shootings, in which 50 people died, when he blamed the massacre on immigration policies that he said allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand. Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant has been charged with murder in the shootings. After his comments, Anning faced more criticism for physically striking the teenager who cracked an egg on his head at a Melbourne public appearance 17-year-old Will Connolly, who became known around the world as "Egg Boy." Anning will face an official censure motion in Parliament on Wednesday for the comments, which caused more than a million people to sign an online petition calling for his removal from the national legislature. But when Parliament resumed in Canberra on Tuesday following a monthlong break, one senior fellow lawmaker took the opportunity to lash out at Anning. Echoing Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's comment that Anning should be charged for striking Connolly, acting government Senate leader Simon Birmingham attacked Anning for his lack of humanity after the shootings. "The lack of compassion you have shown demonstrates, frankly, a basic lack of basic humanity," Birmingham told Anning, adding that his conduct "betrays the rights you have to freedom of speech." Birmingham said Anning acted in a way that would potentially fuel more acts of terrorism and violence. "You have failed the test of character I would expect of anybody who is elected to this place," he said. Birmingham's outburst came after Anning arrived at Parliament saying he had "no remorse" over his comments. Anning then used the Senate's question time to bring up the egging incident. He quizzed the government about its response to the episode, asking whether it believed politically motivated violence was acceptable in some circumstances. Birmingham accused Anning of drawing a comparison between his comments about the Christchurch massacre and the egging incident, and said it was an "appalling comparison." Wednesday's censure motion against Anning has support from both sides of Parliament. After New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern previously called Anning's comments on the shootings "a disgrace," her deputy Winston Peters on Tuesday called Anning a "jingoistic moron." "I would call him a four-flushing, jingoistic moron, but you already know that in Australia," Peters said in a television interview with Australia's Sky Immediately after Anning's response to the massacre last month, Morrison said the comments were "appalling and they're ugly and they have no place in Australia." Anning came under blistering criticism over tweets within hours of the massacre, 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 later statement. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad Tuesday addressed an election rally telephonically in a border village in Rajouri district as Pakistan shelling along the Line of Control played the spoilsport. Azad, who reached here on a three-day election campaign trail, was scheduled to address a rally at Laam area of Nowshera sector where the party had made all arrangements, a Congress spokesman said. He said over 3,000 people had assembled to hear the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha despite heavy shelling by Pakistan but he could not attend the rally because the local administration did not allow the landing of his chopper. The landing site was shifted to Qila Darhal, six kilometers from Laam, but the authorities did not allow the landing of the chopper there as well despite permission, the spokesman said. Azad later briefly addressed the people telephonically and sought their support for the Congress candidate, he said. Chief Spokesperson of Pradesh Congress Committee Ravinder Sharma said the people waited for hours altogether to hear the state's former chief minister despite persistent shelling by Pakistan. He said the rally was addressed by local Congress leaders and National Conference who lashed out at the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government for its "failure to ensure safety of the border village residents and the security personnel guarding the border". Condemning Pakistan for targeting civilian population in forward areas, he alleged that the present government has failed to end cross-border shelling. "The Pakistani shelling is intolerable and needs a befitting reply from the government of India," he said, urging the local administration to make contingency arrangements to deal with the situation arising out of the intense shelling. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court in Comoros on Tuesday confirmed Azali Assoumani as the winner of the disputed presidential election held last week in the volatile Indian Ocean archipelago. Azali was declared the winner with 59 per cent of the votes, well ahead of his rivals Mahamoudou Ahamada who scored 15,7 per cent and Mouigni Baraka Said Soilihi, who was a distant third with 5,5 percent of the ballots cast. "Having obtained the absolute majority, Azali Assoumani is proclaimed president of the republic," said the country's judge president Harmia Ahmed. The results were confirmed at a heavily guarded court house in Moroni. The opposition has complained of widespread fraud and irregularities in the elections held in the country on March 24. Observers and community groups have questioned the credibility of the election held on March 24. Violence broke out last week after defeated one of the presidential candidates Soilihi Mohamed, who came fourth in the vote, was arrested. Soilihi Mohamed, a widely respected former colonel, had been named head of an opposition transitional authority just before his arrest. He stands accused of trying to set up a parallel government, according to a government source. The African Union and France have called for restraint in the wake of the political crisis sparked by the disputed vote. Azali's campaign director Houmed Msaidie said his camp was available to dialogue with the opposition "if the opposition asks for it". Comoros has had a volatile political history since independence in 1975 and has endured more than 20 attempted coups, four of which were successful. Azali initially came to power in a coup, then ruled the country between 1999 and 2006, and was re-elected in 2016. He staged the poll after Comorans voted in a referendum, boycotted by the opposition, to support the extension of presidential mandates from one five-year term to two. He could theoretically rule until 2029, critics say. Several opposition figures were arrested around the time of the referendum. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Banaras Hindu University student was shot at by unidentified motorcycle-borne miscreants in front of his hostel in the campus, police said Tuesday. The incident occurred Tuesday evening, when Gaurav Singh, pursuing his masters in the university and residing in its Lal Bahadur Shastri Hostel in the campus was standing outside his hostel, talking to his friends. Some unidentified, motorcycle-borne persons came there and opened fire at him, said a police official, adding the assailants fled the spot. Gaurav sustained bullet injuries in his stomach and was rushed to the trauma centre of the BHU's Institute of Medical Sciences, where he is undergoing treatment, he said. The police are perusing the CCTV footage and have launched a manhunt to apprehend the criminals, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday slammed the Naveen Patnaik-led Odisha government for "not cooperating"with the Centre to bring about speedy development in the state and said he has taken advantage of central schemes to ensure welfare of Odiyas. "The government in Odisha did not cooperate with us. Despite its indifference, we did our best in launching development projects in the state," Modi said, while addressing a rally in this west Odisha town. This chowkidaar (watchman) has taken advantage of Centre's schemes to ensure welfare of the Odiyas, he insisted. If the BJP had formed government in Odisha after 2014 election, the state would have witnessed "speedy development in all sectors", he claimed. Calling upon the people to vote for the double-engine government of the BJP at the Centre and the state, Modi said Odisha should repeat the history created by Uttar Pradesh in 2017 and Tripura in 2018. Listing his government's achievements, he said the NDA government has constructed pucca homes for eight lakh families, provided power connections to 24 lakh homes, gas connection to 40 lakh mothers and sisters. "In the last five years, we have opened bank accounts for 1 crore 40 lakh people, built toilets in 50 lakh homes, ensuring women's safety and security," he maintained. Hitting out at the Congress, Modi said the grand old party has cheated Odisha people over the years by denying the poor their due rights. "Under the Congress rule, middlemen benefitted largely. It is because of this deception, people had to go to migrate to other states, leaving their families," he charged. Without taking a single leave in last five years, this "chowkidar has worked diligently" to bring about a transformation in the country, Modi said. "The credit for the transformation goes to the people of the country, who voted the BJP to power. It is your vote and not Modi who brought positive changes in the country, lit up lives of poor, filled their lives with hopes," he added. 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. Assembly elections in Odisha will be held along with Lok Sabha polls in four phases - on April 11, 18, 23 and 29. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP president Amit Shah Tuesday charged Congress nominee Karti Chidambaram contesting from Sivaganga Lok Sabha seat and DMK's Kanimozhi seeking election from here with being tainted by corruption. Addressing a poll rally here, he hit out at National Conference leader Omar Abudullah for his "Prime Minister for Jammu and Kashmir," line, and asked the people whether they supported the Kashmir leader's remarks. "Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, we will never compromise on the Kashmir issue," he said. The party chief alleged the candidates nominated by Congress and DMK - the likes of Karti Chidambaram, Kanimozhi and A Raja (from Nilgiris) - were tainted by graft. Shah, seeking votes for his party candidate and State unit chief Tamilisai Soundararajan said "when BJP-led government returns to power," at the Centre it would continue contributing even more for the growth of Tamil Nadu. Shah said though BJP's Pon Radhakrishnan alone had won from Kanyakumari in 2014 Lok Sabha polls, his party led NDA made two from Tamil Nadu --Radhakrishnan and Nirmala Sitharaman-- as Union Ministers. He said the BJP government avenged the Pulwama attacks through air attacks on Pakistan. Citing the air strike to avenge the Pulwama attacks, he asked: "Should we not avenge the Pulwama attacks, on which the people at the rally responded positively. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP Tuesday declared two more candidates for the Lok Sabha elections in Gujarat, taking the total number of its nominees to 25 in the state. In its latest list, the ruling party dropped its current MP from Mehsana, but retained the sitting Lok Sabha member from Surat. With this,the BJP has declared candidates on 25 out of the 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state. The saffron outfit has dropped its sitting MPs on nine seats and renominated 16 Members of Parliament, who were elected in 2014. In Mehsana, the BJP has given ticket to Shardaben Patel, the wife of late BJP leader Anil Patel, replacing its sitting MP Jayshree Patel. Mehsana is a crucial seat for the BJP as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's birthplace Vadnagar is located in the district. The BJP retained sitting Surat MP Darshana Jardosh, who has won from the seat two times. Ahmedabad East is the only Lok Sabha seat, where the party is yet to declare its candidate. Veteran actor Paresh Rawal is the sitting MP from Ahmedabad East and he has decided not to contest polls this time citing his busy acting schedule. Among prominent MPs, the party has dropped patriarch L K Advani (91) from the Gandhinagar seat and Union minister Haribhai Chaudhary from Banaskantha. The BJP has fielded its president Amit Shah from Gandhinagar, a prestigious seat held by Advani since 1991. Shah filed his nomination papers from the Gandhinagar seat last Saturday after taking out a massive rally and road show in the constituency. The Congress, on the other hand, has declared only 14 candidates so far and the remaining names are expected to be declared by Wednesday. The last date of filing nominations for elections in Gujarat is April 4. Polling will be held in Gujarat in a single phase on April 23. The BJP had won all the 26 seats in 2014 in the home state of Modi and Shah. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP's Delhi unit will take out rallies in 13,816 booths across the national capital targeting the Delhi government over the non-implementation of the central government's schemes such as Ayushman Bharat health insurance programme in Delhi. At a meeting of office-bearers of the Delhi unit of the party, it was decided that the party will take out 'Ayushman March' from next week and the voters will also be told about the achievements of the Modi government in the past five years, party sources said. Questions will be raised to the Delhi government about why Delhi'ites are being deprived of the benefits of the Ayushman Bharat scheme, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana and the 10 per cent reservation for the economically weaker sections, the sources added. As part of the march, Delhi BJP office-bearers will be visiting metro stations, bus stops, shopping malls, markets and meet resident welfare associations. Pamphlets highlighting the Modi government's achievements will be distributed during the week-long march. The Delhi BJP will also be coming out with a separate manifesto for the national capital focussing on its local issues for the Lok Sabha polls but statehood will not be a part of it. Delhi's ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will focus on the statehood issue during its campaign in the national capital. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A blast caused by an unidentified explosive device wounded three Tuesday at a military academy in Russia's northwestern city of Saint Petersburg, the RIA Novosti state agency reported, citing the defence ministry. "An explosion of an unidentified explosive device took place around 1:30 pm (1030 GMT), in Saint Petersburg in staff premises of an administrative building at the Mozhaisky academy," the ministry said in a statement. It described the device as lacking casing, meaning that it was not a military device such as a mortar shell. Three people received non-life-threatening injuries and were receiving medical treatment, it added. Initial reports said that four cadets were injured in the blast. Police had sealed off the area around the academy, an AFP journalist saw, and cadets and staff were leaving the grounds. Fire engines were also driving out of the gates. A cadet who gave her name only as Natalya said "We are being evacuated." An emergency services official told RIA Novosti that the blast reverberated in a first-floor classroom, causing a staircase to collapse, and around 20 people were trapped. The academy, one of Russia's largest, is overseen by the defence ministry and trains officers to serve in air and space defence and other branches of the armed forces. It is located in the centre of Saint Petersburg, the former imperial capital of Russia whose palaces are a major draw for tourists. The blast came as 11 went on trial in the city at a military court charged with helping to organise a 2017 suicide bombing in the metro that was claimed by a little-known group linked to al-Qaida. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Boeing must perform more work on a proposed fix to its 737 MAX aircraft before it can be submitted for review, US officials said Tuesday, suggesting the planes could stay grounded a while longer. Additional work is needed "to ensure that Boeing has identified and appropriately addressed all pertinent issues," a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said in a statement. "The FAA will not approve the software for installation until the agency is satisfied with the submission," he added. The FAA statement is the bureaucratic equivalent of a "stop" sign after Boeing officials touted their proposed remedy last week during a media tour at the company's manufacturing plant in Seattle, Washington. Boeing's 737 MAX planes were grounded globally last month following the second of two deadly crashes to occur in less than five months. Scrutiny has centered on an anti-stall system developed specifically for the planes that has given pilots problems. A preliminary report into the second calamity -- the March 10 crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 that killed 157 people -- will likely be issued this week, the Ethiopian government said Monday. Boeing last week gathered hundreds of pilots and reporters at its Renton, Washington manufacturing site for a presentation on proposed changes to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which is believed to have been a key factor in the Ethiopian crash and in an October crash of a Lion Air in Indonesia that killed 189 people. Among the changes, the MCAS will no longer repeatedly make corrections when the pilot tries to regain control, and will automatically disconnect in the event of disagreements between the two "angle of attack," or AOA sensors, the company said last week. Boeing is anxious to win approval for a proposed remedy that could get the planes back in the air. But the FAA, which faced harsh questioning last week at a congressional hearing regarding its oversight of Boeing, said it expected Boeing to submit the proposed fix "over the coming weeks" after it undertakes additional work. After that, the proposal will be submitted to a "rigorous safety review," the FAA spokesman said. A Boeing spokesman said Monday the company was continuing to work with regulators to address concerns. "We are working to demonstrate that we have identified and appropriately addressed all certification requirements and will be submitting for FAA review once completed in the coming weeks," the Boeing spokesman said. "Safety is our first priority and we will take a thorough and methodical approach to the development and testing of the update to ensure we take the time to get it right. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BSP and its alliance partner Loktantra Suraksha Party (LSP), an outfit floated by rebel BJP MP Raj Kumar Saini, on Tuesday announced six candidates for the Lok Sabha polls in Haryana. The candidates were finalised in consultation with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati, the leaders of the two parties said. Of the 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana, the Bahujan Ssamaj Party (BSP) will contest on eight and the LSP on two, they said. The candidates whose names were announced at a press conference in Rohtak included farmers, businessmen, social workers and party workers. LSP supremo Saini, BSP senior leader Meghraj and party state president Prakash Bharti said the names were announced after consulting Mayawati. The LSP fielded Ramesh Rao Pilot from Bhiwani-Mahendergarh parliamentary constituency but is yet to finalise a name for the Kurukshetra seat, even though Saini had earlier said that he would seek re-election from there. The BSP has fieldedNaresh Saran from Ambala Lok Sabha seat, Pankaj Chaudhary from Karnal, Kishan Lal from Rohtak, Mandhir Singh from Faridabad and Surendra Sharma from Hisar. The alliance leaders alleged that the parties who have been holding power in Haryana have over the years used Dalits and the backward classes as a votebank. Saini, the sitting MP from Kurukshetra, said that he was fighting for the rights of Dalits and the oppressed classes. Meghraj announced that the names of the remaining candidates will be announced over the next few days. The alliance partners will jointly hold rallies all over Haryana and Mayawati too would be campaigning in the state, Bharti said, adding that the dates were yet to be finalised. The BSP had in February called off its nearly nine-month-old alliance with Haryana's main opposition the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and forged ties with the Saini-led LSP. The development had taken place days after the Om Prakash Chautala-led INLD suffered a humiliating defeat in the Jind bypolls, with party candidate Umed Singh Redhu forfeiting his security deposit. Saini had last year floated the LSP and the candidate fielded by the party in the Jind bypolls had put up a better performance than INLD's Redhu. The INLD and the BSP had entered into an alliance in April last year, which both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress had described as a "marriage of convenience". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Eight people have died in eastern Burkina Faso in what a minister described as a struggle between traditional chiefs, a statement said on Tuesday. "A group of gunmen from villages along the border with Burkina and Ghana attacked the home of the traditional chief of Zoaga," said a statement by Simeon Sawadogo, minister for territorial administration. The attack occurred early on Monday in Zoaga, an area which lies on Burkina's border with Ghana, about 250 kilometres (140 miles) southeast of the capital, Ouagadougou. "This attack unfortunately killed eight people and wounded four," he added, in the latest "twist in a crisis that has rocked the areas traditional chiefdom for some time." The attackers looted and burned shops in a local market before fleeing towards the border, as security forces fanned out to find them. In late January, a clash between rival local factions killed three people, including a former village mayor. Intercommunal violence in Burkina has made it harder for the country's armed forces to fight against jihadist fighters who have infiltrated the region in the past four years. In a separate attack early on Monday, at least seven people were killed in inter-communal fighting in the Sahel region of Burkina, which is close to the border with Mali. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A car belonging to an official aide of Union Health Minister J P Nadda was stolen from Delhi and recovered from Noida on Tuesday night, officials said. At around 10 pm, an information was received by the Noida police that a White Swift Dzire car of Nadda's Officer on Special Duty (OSD) Aditya had been stolen from Barapulla in Delhi, a senior official said. "Four teams of the Noida police were immediately rushed after the OSD shared the GPS live location of his vehicle. The car was recovered from Noida's Sector 2," Noida police chief Vaibhav Krishna said. The senior superintendent of police said the robbers had fled leaving the car behind and that further legal action was being taken. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Centre on Tuesday in the Supreme Court justified certification of Finance Bill, 2017 as a money bill saying it has provisions which deals with salaries and allowance to be paid to members of tribunals from the consolidated funds of India. The top court reserved its verdict on a batch of pleas challenging the constitutional validity of Finance Act, 2017 on the ground that it was passed by the Parliament as a money bill. The Centre contended that certification of Finance Act as money bill was done by speaker of Lok Sabha and court cannot judicially review the decision. A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said, "Hearing concluded. Order reserved". At the outset, Attorney General K K Venugopal, appearing for the Centre said that certification granted by the speaker cannot be challenged in the court of law. The Attorney General justified before the bench also comprising Justices N V Ramana, D Y Chandrachud, Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna the certification of Finance Act as a money bill saying it deals with payment and receipt made from the consolidated funds of India. "It is the whole part which has been certified as a money bill and not in parts. Therefore no part can be severed to say that this cannot be called as a money bill," Venugopal said. He referred to provision for money spent on tribunals from the consolidated funds and said salaries and allowances of tribunal members would come under incidental matters referred in the Article 110 (1)(G) of the Constitution. Article 110 of the Constitution deals with provisions as when can a Bill shall be deemed to be a Money Bill. Venugopal relied on Aadhaar verdict of last year and said that the apex court has held that the main object of Aadhaar Act was to extend benefits to marginalised section of society in the form of aid, grant or subsidy from the consolidated fund. Senior advocate Arvind Datar, who led the arguments for the petitioners, argued that a bill which says that salaries shall be paid to the members of tribunal does not in itself make it a money bill. He sought making the tribunals independent saying their core judicial duty cannot be taken away or at least they can be brought under the control of law ministry or one nodal agency as held in 1997 and 2010 verdicts of the apex court. The top court was hearing a batch of petitions challenging the Constitutional validity of the Finance Bill of 2017. On March 28, the Centre has told the apex court that it cannot question the speaker's decision of certifying a bill as a Money Bill and it is a well settled law. Venugopal said contention that certification of Finance Bill of 2017 as Money Bill was not right cannot be a ground for a challenge to validity of the Bill. He had said that apex court has repeatedly held in its verdicts that certification cannot be questioned and courts cannot inquire into the decision taken by Parliament. Venugopal had said Finance Bill comprises of amendments to several Acts and statutes and the petitioners have challenged only one particular aspect saying it cannot be termed as Money Bill. The apex court had earlier sought the Centre's view on bringing all the tribunals under one central umbrella body for ensuring "efficient functioning" and "streamlining the working" of quasi-judicial bodies. The top court had said it would not like to be bogged down with what is right or wrong and all it wants was that "the tribunals work efficiently and independently". The court had said it is tentatively of the view that directions given by the apex court in its two verdicts of 1997 and 2010 for bringing all the tribunals of the country under one nodal agency should have been "implemented long back". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In what could escalate the tussle between the AAP dispensation and the Centre over DMRC's Phase-IV, the Delhi government Tuesday alleged that the Union government has made some "unilateral changes" in the project, without communicating any reasons. In a statement, the Delhi transport department said, "If the Government of India was of the opinion that only three 'Priority Corridors' were required to be considered in the first stage, it could have very well communicated to the Delhi government and in that case, the Delhi cabinet could also have approved only these three corridors." In early March, three of the six proposed corridors, got the Union cabinet nod. These are: Mukundpur-Maujpur (12.54 km), Janakpuri West-R K Ashram (28.92 km) and Tughlakabad-Aerocity (20.20 km). "The Delhi government had approved all the six corridors proposed by the Delhi Metro in Phase-IV... However, the Government of India thereafter approved only three corridors out of the six approved by the Delhi Cabinet. "Once the project report has been approved by the Delhi government, the Government of India should not have unilaterally made any changes. A clear stand of the Delhi government is that the Government of India should also have approved all the six Corridors of Delhi Metro Phase-IV," the statement said. These kind of "unilateral changes" by the Centre without either taking the Delhi government into confidence or even "without communicating any reasons for its change in stand, is not comprehensible", it said. Secondly, the component-wise cost has also been "revised" by the Centre "unilaterally" without assigning any reasons or justification, the Delhi government alleged in the statement. "Equity component of the Delhi government has been increased from 8.08 per cent to 16.36 per cent," it claimed. "Similarly, the entire amount towards land acquisition has been apportioned to the Delhi government whereas in the earlier three phases, it was apportioned between Government of India and the Delhi government equally," it said. Meanwhile, amid a report that Delhi transport minister Kailash Gahlot had directed his department to tell the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) not to start work on Ph-IV until it got further clarifications on the project's funding, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said, the Delhi government's allegation that their share of expenditure for the three corridors approved by the Centre is "more than its earlier proposal is baseless, false and derived on false assumptions". "It appears to be another propaganda of the Delhi government to stall the Ph-IV project and deprive the people of Delhi from its benefits," it alleged in a statement. "So far, no letter has been received from Delhi government on this matter. It has come to the notice only from the press reports that Delhi government has asked Delhi Metro to stop the work till the matter is cleared," the statement by the ministry said. The fact of the matter is that as per the proposal of three corridors submitted by DMRC in January 2018 (the cost of which was proportionate to the cost of the six corridors approved by Delhi Cabinet earlier) the total liability of city government was Rs 8,872 cr whereas, as per the cost approved by the Centre in March, the total liability of Delhi government has come down by more than Rs 1,000 cr to Rs 7,844 crores, the HUA ministry claimed. The Delhi government in its statement also alleged that its share in the project cost has also been "increased substantially" as compared to that approved by the Delhi cabinet. "Contribution of Delhi government towards three 'Priority Corridors' (including additional 244 cars) has been increased from 20.77 per cent to 31.44 per cent. The above unilateral changes are not only against the federal system of government but also substantially increase the financial burden of the Delhi government, therefore while releasing the amount of Rs 200 crore for the Metro Ph-IV, the above mentioned concerns have been conveyed to the DMRC," the Delhi government's statement said. The Delhi Metro had last year written to the city government and the Centre seeking nod to begin work on the three 'priority corridors' which were approved in March by the Union Cabinet under the Phase-IV project, DMRC sources had earlier said. The HUA ministry also alleged that the Delhi government has been "following a similar propaganda to stonewall the Delhi-Meerut RRTS (Regional Rapid Transit System) project also". "The delay of four years by Delhi government in providing approval for Ph-IV has escalated the cost of the project by about Rs 5000 cr. Similarly, the delay in approving the Delhi-Meerut RRTS projects by two years has led to a cost increase of Rs 3,100 cr, the HUA ministry claimed in the statement. The funding pattern of Delhi Ph-IV project approved by Centre is similar to the metro projects of Kanpur, Ahmedabad-Phase2, Patna, Agra, Surat, etc, and based on the Metro Rail Policy 2017, it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) is planning to upgrade a domestic airport to an one in Ali prefecture of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) seeking to facilitate travel of foreign tourists, including Yatra pilgrims to the holy site, a senior Chinese official said Tuesday. Deputy Commissioner of the prefecture in China's TAR, Ge Qingmin, said, "We are thinking of upgrading an airport in the prefecture. But, the planning is at a very initial stage." He said this in response to queries from reporters on the sidelines of an interactive session where pilgrims who have undertaken Yatra shared their experiences and offered suggestions. "The holy site of Mt Kailash and Lake Mansarovar is located about 200 km from Qunsha airport. It will facilitate foreign travellers taking their journey to this part of the world," Ge said. Earlier, Baimanyangzong, Director General in the Foreign Affairs Office of China's TAR, spoke about the efforts Chinese government has made and further making to ease travel of Yatra pilgrims. The Yatra is undertaken from July to September, one route through the Lipulekh Pass and the other through Nathu La pass. Former MP Tarun Vijay and other people shared the issues faced by pilgrims, and offered suggestions, on improving facilities near the holy site. Vijay and few other yatris also suggested that a holy dip be allowed to pilgrims in Lake Mansoravar as it is a very holy place. He also suggested that a "special travel facility can be offered to pilgrims, which is not passport-based". Li Bijian, a minister and deputy chief of mission at the Chinese Embassy said, "Holy dip has not been allowed by authorities keeping in view the fragility of the environment". "Mt Kailash and Lake Mansarovar are considered holy by many people, but there are environmental issues and, to maintain that environment, any dip is not allowed. However, people can carry back some water," he said during the event. Li said the yatra is an important segment of boosting people-to-people ties between India and Baimanyangzong, who is travelling to India along with a delegation said, three reception centres have been made, and other ancillary works are being undertaken. "In 2018, there was a landslide on the Indian side, and visa validity of many pilgrims had expired. We later extended their visas, so they could undertake the journey," she said. She also said that in China's 12th Five-Year Plan and 13th Five-Year Plan, a lot of monetary allocations have been made to improve infrastructure in the TAR, including building of roads, provision of electricity and telecommunication facilities. Baimanyangzong also said the yatra is an important symbol of friendly relation between India and Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar are located in Ali prefecture. The route through the Lipulekh Pass (Uttarakhand), which involves some trekking, passes through important sites like Narayan Ashram and Patal Bhuvaneshwar. The pilgrims can also see the scenic beauty of Chialekh Valley or the Om Parvat which has the natural occurrence of snow in the shape of 'Om' on this mountain. The route through the Nathu La Pass (Sikkim) is motorable and suitable for senior citizens unable to undertake arduous trekking. From Gangtok, the route passes through scenic places like the Hangu lake, and through the vast landscape of the Tibetan plateau. Customs officials in China have ordered the destruction of three lakh more maps for not mentioning Arunachal Pradesh and Taiwan as part of its territory and decided to file a lawsuit against four persons for trying to export them to the Netherlands, according to a media report. Last month, officials in China have destroyed 30,000 world maps printed in the country for incorrectly showing the borders with India and depicting Taiwan as a separate country. China claims the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. China routinely objects to Indian leaders visiting Arunachal Pradesh to highlight its stand. India says the State of Arunachal Pradesh is its integral and inalienable part and Indian leaders visit Arunachal Pradesh from time to time, as they visit other parts of the country. The two countries have so far held 21 rounds of talks to resolve the border dispute covering 3,488-km-long Line of Actual Control. China also claims the estranged island of Taiwan as its part. The Global Times reported on Tuesday that customs officers in South China's Guangdong Province will destroy more than three lakh world maps with boundary mistakes and file a lawsuit against four suspects for intending to export the maps to the Netherlands. The customs bureau at the port of Wenjindu in China's Guangdong Province recovered 264,983 incorrect world maps in English for export to the Netherlands on January 17, an employee surnamed Wang from the customs' press office told the Global Times. The maps were printed by a company in Dongguan in China's Guangdong province. In total the company had printed 306,057 problematic maps, which will all be destroyed. "Those maps jeopardised China's territorial integrity and will be destroyed soon," Wang said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China's ruling Communist Party's best known Uygur Muslim official who headed the government in the troubled Xinjiang province has been arrested for taking bribes, prosecutors announced Tuesday. The National Supervisory Commission has completed an investigation of Nur Bekri's case and handed it over to the procuratorial organ for review and prosecution, state-run Xinhua agency quoted the Supreme People's Procurate (SPP) as saying. Bekri, 58, held many positions including the chairman of Muslim majority Xinjiang province between 2008-14 where the Chinese security forces are conducting major crackdown against the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, an al-Qaeda linked militant organisation. After his stint in Xinjiang, Bekri worked as deputy head of China's planning body - the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)- and head of the National Energy Administration. He was also the former Mayor of Urumqi, the provincial capital of Xinjiang. Bekri was expelled from the Communist Party on March 16 for "serious violations". Official media reports earlier quoted top anti-graft agency as saying that Bekri has been expelled from the party and removed from public office for serious violations of party disciplinary rules and laws. A Xinhua report last month said investigations found that Bekri took advantage of his positions to help others in promotions, operation of enterprises, and exploitation of mineral resources. He was also found to have taken bribes himself or through relatives. Other charges included living an extravagant life-style and trading power for sex. Bekri has severely violated the party discipline and is suspected of taking bribes, the statement said, adding that he showed no signs of restraint even after the 18th CPC National Congress. The case is serious in nature and has a bad influence, and he should be harshly punished, the Xinhua report quoted an official statement as saying. His illicit gains have been confiscated, it said. Over a million officials of the party, government and the military have been punished in the massive anti-graft drive launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping since he took power in 2012. Critics say President Xi has effectively used the anti-graft campaign to consolidate his power base. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union minister and BJP candidate from Hazaribagh Lok Sabha constituency Jayant Sinha Tuesday said that "Mahagathbandhan" was mooted by the opposition parties as their "corruption shops" were closed after Narendra Modi government took over the reins of the country in 2014. Addressing a meeting at Barhi, the Union minister of state for Civil Aviation said, "The opposition is cooking 'Mahakhichidi' only to create hurdles in the continuation of the developmental works taken up by the Narendra Modi government. "But they (opposition) would fail in their objective as the people have resolved to continue with the Modi government as they have seen developmental works in the past five years which never happened in the last 60 years since independence." After the Modi government came to power, "corruption shops" of the opposition parties were closed and that was the reason why they went for Mahagathbandhan, Sinha asserted. He said, "Our evolve around development and we have come to serve the people." Thanking the people for electing him in the 2014 elections, Sinha said that he knew they have made up their mind to re-elect him as they saw his developmental works in the past five years. Polling for the Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat will be held on May 6. The Congress, which is part of the Mahagathbandhan, has got Hazaribagh as per seat the adjustment among the opposition parties in Jharkhand. The party has not yet announced its candidate for the seat. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress leader Francisco Sardinha and Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) Elvis Gomes on Tuesday filed their respective nominations for the South Goa Lok Sabha seat. Sardinha is a former Member of Parliament, while Gomes, who quit the Goa government service in the run-up to 2017 state Assembly polls to join politics, is AAP's state convener. Sardinha, 73, filed his nomination papers before South Goa district election officer Ajit Roy in Margao town. He was accompanied by Congress MLAs Digambar Kamat and Isidor Fernandes along with a large number of supporters. After filing his nomination, Sardinha expressed confidence of winning the seat. "The people of South Goa are looking for a change and there is already a 'Congress wave'," he claimed. Later in the afternoon, 56-year-old Gomes also filed his nomination papers before Roy and told reporters that this time people will vote for AAP. Gomes, who was AAP's chief ministerial candidate in the 2017 state Assembly polls, had lost his deposit while contesting from the Cuncolim seat in South Goa. Sardinha was Congress' South Goa MP from 2009 to 2014. He lost the last Lok Sabha poll to BJP's Narendra Sawaikar, who has been fielded again by his party from the seat. Sawaikar filed his nomination last week. Lok Sabha elections to the North Goa and South Goa seats in the coastal state will be held on April 23. The last date for filing nominations is April 4. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress on Tuesday assured full statehood to Puducherry but stopped short of making the same commitment for Delhi if it comes to power. In its manifesto, it promised to amend the Government of NCT of Delhi Act, 1991 so the lieutenant governor acts on the aid and advice of the council of ministers, except in matters concerning the "three reserved subjects", a clear reference to land, police and public order. Delhi and Puducherry have legislative assemblies but do not enjoy the powers of a full states. The lieutenant governor plays a critical role in administering Delhi and Puducherry. "Congress promises to amend the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Act, 1991 to make it clear that the Lieutenant Governor shall act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers except in matters concerning the 3 reserved subjects," the Congress manifesto stated under the 'Federalism and Centre-State relations' section. "Congress promises full statehood to Puducherry," it added. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi and the Congress government in Puducherry have been at loggerheads with the offices of the LG, accusing them of not allowing elected chief ministers to function. Highlighting the problems faced by states like Delhi, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has often said he cannot even hire a peon without the LG's consent. The services, which includes transfer of officers, also comes under the purview of the LG. The AAP, which has been seeking an alliance with the Congress in the national capital, has been running a campaign for full statehood for Delhi. The Congress has promised to restore 'Special Category' status to the north eastern states, withdraw the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill and enhance financial assistance to Autonomous District Councils. The party will also give 'Special Category' status to Andhra Pradesh, the manifesto added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Gujarat Congress Tuesday lodged a complaint of model code violation during BJP chief and party's Gandhinagar nominee Amit Shah's March 30 rally cum road show here alleging that loudspeakers were used near hospitals. In its complaint sent to Gujarat Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) S. Murali Krishna through fax, the Opposition party demanded necessary action against Shah for "violating" the poll code. On March 30, Shah addressed a gathering near Sardar Patel's statue in Naranpura area of Ahmedabad before participating in a 4 km-long road show from Naranpura to Ghatlodia. He then left for Gandhinagar to file his nomination papers. In its complaint, the Congress alleged that despite knowing that three big hospitals with emergency and trauma care are situated close to the Sardar Patel statue, loud speakers were used during Shah's rally at the venue. Such use of the loud speakers near the hospitals is a clear violation of the model code of conduct, the party said. CEO Krishna said he has directed collectors of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar to inquire into the matter. "I have received that complaint. I have directed collectors of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar districts to conduct an inquiry into the matter," he said. The Congress claimed that thousands of commuters and local residents were stranded because stages were erected on the entire route of the road show. Roads were also blocked without any prior announcement by the administration or police, it stated. "Common people were stranded for hours due to this road show, as traffic was stopped on busy roads," the complaint stated. The Opposition party urged the CEO to take necessary action against Shah for the alleged violation of model code. Polling in all 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state will be held on April 23. The model code of conduct came into effect on March 10 when the Election Commission of India announced the schedule for general elections, to be held in seven phases beginning April 11. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) AICC spokesperson Sravan Dasoju Tuesday took potshots at the campaign theme of ruling TRS in Telangana that it should win all the Lok Sabha seats in the State to ensure that it gets funds and development projects. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi has failed to achieve anything though it had almost all the MPs on its side in the outgoing Lok Sabha, he alleged. Talking to reporters, the congress leader claimed that TRS had 16 MPs MPs on its side (after MPs from other parties switched over to TRS) in the outgoing Lok Sabha. "Before making a fresh appeal for 16 seats, KCR (TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao) and KTR (TRS working president K T Rama Rao) should first apologise to people for their failure in previous term," he said. Claiming that neither NDA nor UPA was in a position to form government post-Lok Sabha elections, the TRS has been urging people to elect its nominees in 16 Lok Sabha seats, leaving Hyderabad represented by TRS ally AIMIM, to ensure that Telangana gets a better deal. Meanwhile, Congress nominee from Chevella Lok Sabha constituency in Telangana Konda Vishweshwar Reddy Tuesday sought the support of CPI and Telangana Jana Samiti. Reddy met CPI state secretary Chada Venkat Reddy and TJS president M Kodandaram for their parties support in the Lok Sabha polls. Earlier, Congress candidate from Malkajgiri A Revanth Reddy had also sought the support of CPI and TJS. The CPI and TJS were partners in the 'grand alliance' led by the Congress for the Assembly polls in Telangana in December last. The CPI and TJS are contesting only a few seats in the elections. Congress sources claimed that the leaders of Bahujan Left Front (BLF) have extended support to their party. The BLF had contested the Assembly polls in alliance with the CPI(M). Meanwhile, Vishweshwar Reddy claimed that his campaign has been getting good response. However, the ruling TRS misused official machinery to disrupt his canvassing, he alleged. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath Tuesday dismissed the Congress manifesto as a bundle of lies and also targeted the opposition over its handling of national security. Referring to the Pulwama terror attack and the retaliatory air strike by India, at a meeting of BJP's youth workers here, he said the statements by the opposition parties are helping Pakistan which is highlighting them at the international level. On the Congress manifesto released earlier in the day, he said, "It is a bundle of lies and the party has expressed its failure over 55 years in its 55-page manifesto." "Opposition is making negative statements on Pulwama and Balakot and Pakistan is drawing advantage from such remarks by presenting them at the international level in its favour, the chief minister said. He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had adopted a policy of zero tolerance towards terrorism. Adityanath said during the UPA government's 2004-2014 tenure, several terror attacks were termed Hindu terror. Thousands of soldiers were injured in stone-pelting in Kashmir in this period," he claimed. Pakistan used to attack many times and even beheaded our soldier," he said. He said the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party - the two opposition parties which have forged an alliance in Uttar Pradesh - supported the Congress then and looted the country. On Monday evening, he addressed a teachers' conference here, accusing the opposition party workers of being linked to hooliganism. He claimed when women see people carrying SP and BSP flags, they ask why are they flags of 'goondas'. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union Minister Sushma Swaraj on Tuesday slammed the Congress' manifesto claiming it made "traitors and separatists happy". The Congress Tuesday released its manifesto for the April-May Lok Sabha polls. The 55-page document titled 'Hum Nibhayenge' (We will deliver) talks about doing away with the sedition law, as claimed by Union Minister Arun Jaitley in a press conference in Delhi. Among other things, the Congress manifesto promises a sum of Rs 72,000 each to five crore poor families under the 'Nyay' scheme, filling up 22 lakh government vacancies, bringing a separate budget for farmers and fixing a single moderate GST rate. Swaraj was addressing a BJP women workers' meet here for the party's Nagpur Lok Sabha candidate and Union minister Nitin Gadkari. "The Congress manifesto has made deshdrohi (traitor) and algavwadi (separatist) people happy. It is unfortunate for the country that on one side Prime Minister Narendra Modi is giving a befitting reply to Pakistan's terror attacks with surgical and air strikes. On the other hand, the Congress president (Rahul Gandhi) is refusing to accept treason as a crime," she said. While PM Modi has taken back security provided to separatist leaders (in Jammu and Kashmir post the Pulwama terror attack), the Congress chief talks of continuous talks with them, the Minister of External Affairs said. "This is the difference between chowkidar and rajkumar," she said, adding that she was confident people would not vote for a party that made the nation unsafe. "I am confident people will re-elect Modi as PM because they know the nation is safe in his hands," she claimed. She said the Congress failed to corner Pakistan following the 26/11 terror raid on Mumbai in 2008 while the Modi government gave all powers to armed forces to retaliate following the Uri and Pulwama attacks. She said India had isolated Pakistan post the Pulwama attack and the latter did not attend the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) meeting as India was a special invitee. Swaraj said Gadkari had worked for the development of Nagpur, as well as the country, and asked people to re-elect him as their Lok Sabha MP. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Seeking to address the issue of distress in the farm sector, the Congress for the first time promised on Tuesday to have a separate budget for farmers and help them move from "karz maafi to karz mukti" (from loan waiver to freedom from indebtedness). With a special focus on agriculture in its manifesto for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the opposition party alleged that the sector had been driven into a "deep crisis" under the BJP-led government and that farmers were denied an adequate minimum support price (MSP) for their produce for four years. It further alleged that the farmers of the country were left to fend for themselves with little or no support from the government. The Congress also promised to enhance the work days under MGNREGA from the present 100 to 150 and make failure to repay farm loans a civil offence instead of criminal at present. The party also said the NYAY (minimum income guarantee) scheme would ensure that the poor people and farmers would get Rs 72,000 per year, which would fuel the economy and in a way, remonetise what Prime Minister Narendra Modi had demonetised. "In order to ensure priority to the issues affecting the agriculture sector, we will present a separate Kisan Budget," the party said in its manifesto. "We will not stop with just providing 'karz maafi' (loan waiver). Through a combination of remunerative prices, lower input costs and assured access to institutional credit, we will set our kisans on the path to 'karz mukti' (freedom from indebtedness)," it added. On the basis of past experience, the Congress would re-design MGNREGA and provide for increasing the guaranteed days of employment up to 150 days a year in cases where 100 days have been achieved in a block or district, the party said. The manifesto said the Congress governments in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan had waived farm loans, adding that the party "promises to waive the outstanding farm loans in other states as well". Releasing the document, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said the separate budget for farmers would be on the lines of the railway budget and have a special focus on the agriculture sector. "We have envisaged two big things for the farmers -- one, we will have a separate budget for them like the railway budget, so that they know how much is being given to them and how much the MSP has been increased. "The other historic step is that if a farmer is unable to repay his loan, it will be considered a civil offence and not a criminal one. This is a historic step," Gandhi told the gathering at the manifesto release programme. "Today we released #CongressManifesto2019, through which resonates the voice of thousands of Indians we spoke to, as a part of our exhaustive consultative process. This manifesto lists our commitments to the people of India," the Congress chief later said in a tweet. The grand old party said it had heard the cry of anguish of farmers and felt the pain of their acute distress, adding that no criminal proceedings would be allowed against those failing to repay their farm loans. "Debt is a civil liability and we will not allow criminal proceedings to be instituted against a farmer who is unable to pay his/her debt," the party said in the manifesto. Former finance minister and chairman of the Congress's manifesto committee P Chidambaram said, "I conceive that it is un-implementable by the government and why do you assume that the future government wants to implement it." Asked about the BJP's charge that the Congress's manifesto was "un-implementable", he said, "The prime minister would not touch the subjects of farmers' distress, security for women and children. "It is implementable by a competent and wise government and the Congress will provide a wise and competent government and implement this manifesto." Chidambaram said the promises made in the manifesto were for a period of five years, adding, "It does not happen a day after the government assumes office."The Congress also promised to establish a permanent National Commission on Agricultural Development and Planning consisting of farmers, agricultural scientists and agricultural economists to advise the government on how to make agriculture viable, competitive and remunerative. It said the recommendations of the commission should ordinarily be binding on the government and it would subsume the existing Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices and recommend appropriate MSPs. The opposition party also said it would establish a Commission on Marginal Farmers and Agricultural Labour to advise on policies and programmes that will help them earn higher wages and from non-crop based agriculture such as horticulture and floriculture, dairy and poultry farming. "We will completely re-design the BJP government's failed Fasal Bima Yojana (Crop Insurance Scheme) that has only enriched the insurance companies at the cost of the farmers. We will direct the insurance companies to offer crop insurance and charge premiums on the principle of 'no profit, no loss'," it said. The Congress also promised to work with the state governments to digitise land ownership and land tenancy records. It promised that the distortions that had crept into the text and implementation of the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 would be removed and the original purposes of the Acts restored and enforced. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) "Laaj kashi vaatat nahi" (how come they do not feel ashamed) is the question the Congress-NCP combine will pose to the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena in their media and social media campaign for the April-May Lok Sabha polls. The two opposition parties Tuesday announced a joint campaign that aims to shame the ruling dispensation on its "failure" to fulfil poll promises over the past five years. The campaign will be launched in print, electronic and social media and will seek an account from the BJP-Shiv Sena on a range of issues including agrarian distress, women's safety, education and jobs, Congress-NCP leaders said at their joint briefing here. Addressing reporters, NCP national spokesperson Nawab Malik and Congress leader Hussain Dalwai said the campaigns content and details were worked out by the two parties voluntarily. "The campaign aims to highlight the poor show of the BJP and Shiv Sena. How come they not feel ashamed to seek votes despite not fulfilling old poll promises? And therefore, the tag line which speaks the mind of the people," Malik said while explaining the finer points of the campaign. Dalwai said the Narendra Modi government had put the country's economy in a precarious position and claimed the poor, farmers, youth, small traders, Dalits, minorities, tribals and other sections of the society found themselves jeopardised under the BJP's watch. "The sentiment among the people is they (government) should answer on these issues," he added. The parties have also come out with short clips on issues such as farmers' suicide, education, women's safety, as well as alleged failure of the Centre's Ujjwala LPG scheme and others. On the issue of women's safety, the Congress and NCP have latched onto BJP MLA Ram Kadam's "will kidnap the girl despite her rejection if a boy seeks his help" to bolster its point. The NCP-Congress clip shows a character impersonating the BJP lawmaker delivering the remark after a complaint is made to him against some youngsters teasing girls. Kadam, a MLA from Ghatkopar, had found himself at the centre of a controversy in September last year when a video of him allegedly promising to abduct women, for men who seek his help, went viral on social media. The MLA had made the claim at a dahi handi event. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress on Tuesday released its manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls, making a slew of promises, including giving Rs 72,000 each to five crore poor families under the 'Nyay' scheme, filling up 2.2 million government vacancies, bringing a separate budget for and fixing a single moderate GST rate. The 55-page document titled 'Hum Nibhayenge' (We will deliver) focused on addressing the issues of joblessness, farm distress, safety of women and boosting the rural economy, with stress on building a narrative on "real issues" faced by people. The manifesto was released by party president Rahul Gandhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and senior leader P Chidambaram among others. For farmers, Congress promised to put them on the path from "Karz Maafi" (loan waiver), to "Karz Mukti" (freedom from loans). This will be done through remunerative prices, lower input costs, and assured access to institutional credit, the party said, adding it will present a separate "Kisan Budget" every year, if voted to power. Speaking on the occasion at the Congress headquarters, Gandhi said the Congress will allocate 6 per cent of GDP to education, strengthen government hospitals and give high-quality access to poor if voted to power. The party also promised to enact the Right to Act and guarantee every citizen free diagnostics, out-patient care, free medicines and hospitalisation, through a network of public hospitals and enlisted private hospitals. The Congress president alleged that the BJP government had spread hate and divisiveness in its five year rule and his party will work towards uniting India by bringing people together. "Our manifesto process reflects our commitment to a higher vision, that of listening to the 'jan awaaz'. It is not the 'mann ki baat' of one individual but the collective voice of lakhs of people," he said in a preface of the manifesto. With this manifesto, Gandhi said the Congress has offered to people "the only national alternative -- a distinct alternative that is unwavering in its commitment to truth, freedom, dignity, self-respect and prosperity for our people." He promised to make India "strong and united, and a just and prosperous society". On the party's showpiece minimum income guarantee scheme or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), the party's manifesto promised to give Rs 72,000 per year to the poorest 20 per cent households in India. To the youth of India, Congress pledged to make jobs its top priority, saying it will ensure 34 lakh jobs in the public sector by filling all 4 lakh central government vacancies before March 2020, persuading the state governments to fill 20 lakh vacancies and creating an estimated 10 lakh new Seva Mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local bodies. The party said it will also provide a fillip to private sector by incentivising businesses for jobs creation and employing more women. On GST tax, the Congress said it will radically simplify the GST regime with a single moderate rate of tax, zero rating of exports, and exemption for essential goods and services. It also promised panchayats and municipalities a share of GST revenues. The Congress, it said, will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government, and increase it to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces. "We will expedite all modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces in a transparent manner. We will improve social security, and health facilities for our Paramilitary Forces and families," the party said. On education, Congress promised that school from Class I to Class XII in public schools shall be compulsory and free. The party promised to pass in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha the Women's Reservation Bill reserving 33 percent of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies. "Congress will also reserve 33 percent of all posts/vacancies in the Central government for women," it said. With a tagline "Congress Will Deliver", Rahul Gandhi Tuesday released his party's manifesto for Lok Sabha polls, making jobs creation, addressing farm distress, bringing a single moderate rate of GST and giving Rs 72,000 per annum to poor families as key focus if the party comes to power. In the 55-page document, the Congress also promised to come out with separate budget for farmers, fill up 22 lakh government vacancies, allocate 6 per cent of GDP to education, assured 50 more days of guaranteed jobs from current 100 under the MNREGA, boosting healthcare infrastructure and enhance safety of women. "When we started a year ago, I made it clear that nothing in this can be a lie, because we live in a time where we hear a large number of lies every day," Gandhi said, after releasing the manifesto in the presence of former prime minister Manmohan Singh, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and senior party leader P Chidambaram. The document, titled 'Hum Nibhayenge', touched upon a range of key issues including national security, situation in Jammu and Kashmir and in the North Eastern region, foreign policy, defence, state of the rural economy, current tax regime and environmental challenges among others. Referring to Jammu and Kashmir, Congress promised to review the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) as well as deployment of the armed forces, asserting that nothing will be done or allowed to change the constitutional position relating to the border state. "Congress promises the people of J&K talks without pre-conditions. We will appoint the interlocutors drawn from civil society to facilitate such talks," according to the manifesto. In another key promises, the party said it will abolish the provision of sedition in the IPC, scrap the "opaque electoral bonds" introduced by the NDA government, replace the Niti Ayog with a modern Planning Commission and enact an anti-hate crime law to deal with incidents of lynchings. The party also pledged to make defamation a civil offence, change law that allows detention without trial and proposed to set up a national judicial commission to appoint judges. The party said, in place of the electoral bond, a National Election Fund will be set up to financially help recognised political parties. On GST tax, the Congress said it will radically simplify the GST regime with a single moderate rate of tax, zero rating of exports, and exemption for essential goods and services, adding panchayats and municipalities will be given a share of the revenues. For farmers, Congress promised to put them on the path from "Karz Maafi" (loan waiver), to "Karz Mukti" (freedom from loans). This will be done through remunerative prices, lower input costs, and assured access to institutional credit, the party said adding it will present a separate "Kisan Budget" every year, if voted to power. Speaking on the occasion at the Congress headquarters here, Gandhi said Congress will allocate 6 per cent of GDP to education, will strengthen government hospitals and give high-quality healthcare access to poor, if voted to power. The party also promised to enact the Right to Healthcare Act and guarantee every citizen free diagnostics, out-patient care, free medicines and hospitalisation, through a network of public hospitals and enlisted private hospitals. "Our manifesto process reflects our commitment to a higher vision, that of listening to the Jan Awaaz. It is not the 'mann ki baat' of one individual but the collective voice of lakhs of people," he said in a preface of the manifesto. With this manifesto, Gandhi said the Congress has offered to people "the only national alternative -- a distinct alternative that is unwavering in its commitment to truth, freedom, dignity, self-respect and prosperity for our people." He promised to make India "strong and united, and a just and prosperous society." On the party's showpiece minimum income guarantee scheme or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), the party's manifesto promised to give Rs 72,000 per year to the poorest 20 per cent households in India. To the youth of India, Congress pledged to make jobs its top priority, saying it will ensure 34 lakh jobs in the public sector by filling all 4 lakh central government vacancies before March 2020, persuading the state governments to fill 20 lakh vacancies and creating an estimated 10 lakh new Seva Mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local bodies. Armed Forces and Paramilitary Forces Congress will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government, and increase it to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces. "We will expedite all modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces in a transparent manner. We will improve social security, education and health facilities for our Paramilitary Forces and families," the party said. On education, Congress promised that school education from Class I to Class XII in public schools shall be compulsory and free. The party promised to pass in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha the Women's Reservation Bill reserving 33 percent of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies. "Congress will also reserve 33 percent of all posts/vacancies in the Central government for women." The party also promised to "revitalise" institutions like Reserve Bank of India, Election Commission, CBI, CIC, saying Congress will restore their dignity, authority and autonomy while making them accountable to Parliament. Sabha. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP Tuesday slammed the Congress's poll manifesto as "dangerous and unimplementable", and sought to corner the opposition party over the national security issue on its promise of repealing and reviewing certain laws, alleging that it was an agenda of India's "Balkanisation". Senior BJP leader and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley took a swipe at Congress president Rahul Gandhi, wondering if his "friends" from "tukde tukde" gang drafted the parts of manifesto dealing with issues of Kashmir and national security. The BJP began using "tukde tukde" gang to refer to students accused of raising anti-India slogans in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2016 and has generalised the phrase to attack those it accuses of sympathising with Maoists and separatists. Addressing a press conference, Jaitley took aims at the Congress's stand on issues of national security and promises on economy, saying, "When out of ignorance, he (Gandhi) makes unimplementable and dangerous promises, I am sure the country will not be in a mood to oblige" to allow him to execute them. Lashing out at the Congress for promising to repeal Section 124A of the IPC, often termed as sedition law, make bail for accused a provision and not exception and to review the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which is in force in Jammu and Kashmir and parts of the Northeast, he said a party which says that "treason" will no longer be a crime does not deserve a single vote. "Those who lay down their lives for the country, you want them to be prosecuted at the behest of terrorists and their friends. Ingratitude is the biggest sin that any political party can commit. This is what the Congress has done," he said on the party's promise to review AFSPA. The Congress manifesto said that the sedition law has been misused and, in any event, has become redundant because of subsequent laws. Former prime ministers and Congress leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Manmohan Singh did not change the sedition law, Jaitley said, adding that it is no longer a crime for the party's leadership "in the grip of jihadis and Maoists". Some of these ideas are "positively dangerous" and carry an agenda for "Balkanisation of India", he said. Jaitley also ridiculed the Congress's promise of an annual minimum income guarantee of Rs 72,000 for poor families, saying that its leaders have spoken in different voices with some talking of raising taxes to meet the expenditure while a few others speaking of maintaining fiscal prudence. Taking a dig at his predecessor in the finance ministry and Congress leader P Chidambaram, who is the head of the manifesto drafting committee, the BJP leader said the devil is always in the detail when he writes something. Chidambaram had written about maintaining merit-based subsidy and scrapping others to meet the expenditure, Jaitley said, asking which subsidy will fall under it and which not, adding that it was a "bluff scheme". "You make this kind of promises when you know that you are never going to be in a position to implement them," he said. Attacking Gandhi for his claim that Congress governments in states had waived farm loans as his party had promised before assembly polls, Jaitley said the opposition party had not done even "tokenism" on the matter. This party has always deceived the poor with slogans and the manifesto has again taken this approach, he said. The BJP leader also mocked Gandhi's dare to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a debate on issues such as national security and corruption, asking how can you debate with the ignorant. "I think we will look at that. I don't go and debate with non-serious people. How can you debate with the ignorant?" he said. Jaitley in a blog later said, "The manifesto compromises national security and has sham and bluff promises with little detailed understanding of the subjects involved. It is an irresponsible document which is never to be implemented since the Congress looks a certain loser." On the Jammu and Kashmir issue, he said the Modi government has been working to establish rule of law there while the Congress seeks to establish rules of insurgents and terrorists. Its manifesto only brings smiles on the faces of the separatists and the terrorists, he said, accusing the opposition party of not even shedding a tear for Kashmiri Pandits by omitting any reference to their ethnic cleansing from Kashmir Valley. On the Gandhi's promise of filling up 22 lakh government vacancies if his party is elected to power, Jaitley noted that the manifesto says 20 lakhs of them are in states and wondered how the central dispensation can fill them. "He must at least read what he has promised. I seem to have read the manifesto more than the Congress president," he said. On Gandhi's promise for a single, moderate GST rate, Jaitley said he got the wisdom from Singapore which does not have poverty and where rice and Mercedes cars are taxed at the same rate. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress Tuesday said it recognised air pollution as a national public health emergency and promised an action agenda that will place India at the forefront of the battle against global warming. The party said that it will advance India's interests in international negotiations on climate change and "The Congress promises an action agenda that will place India at the forefront of the battle against global warming and for the protection of the At the same time, the Congress will defend and advance India's interests in international negotiations on climate change and the environment," it said in its 55-page manifesto. "The Congress recognises that air pollution is a national public health emergency. We will significantly strengthen the National Clean Air Programme in order to urgently tackle the problem of pollution," it said. The party said that all major sources of emission will be targetted, mitigated and reduced to acceptable levels and added that sectoral emission standards will be set. The manifesto also highlighted its commitment towards protecting coastal zones of the country for which it will reverse the recently "diluted" regulations under which no development zone (NDZ) has been restricted to 50 metres from the high tide line as against 200 metres in the 2011 notification. "The Congress promises to protect the coastal zones of the country. Recent steps that diluted the coastal zone regulations will be reversed. The coast will be preserved without affecting the livelihood opportunities of fishing communities," it said. The party manifesto said the Congress was the first Indian political party to acknowledge the consequences of climate change on June 14, 1972 under former prime minister Indira Gandhi in Stockholm and nothing has been done by the BJP during its rule to control the deteriorating "It is a bitter truth that India's environment has deteriorated. The 2018 Global Environmental Performance Index placed India at rank 177 out of 180 countries. The BJP government has done virtually nothing in the last 5 years to arrest this decline," it claimed. The Congress promised to constitute, by law, an independent, empowered and transparent Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to establish, monitor and enforce environmental standards and regulations. "The EPA will replace all other bodies that currently exercise jurisdiction and powers," it said. The party said it will formulate a comprehensive land and water use policy and plan that will include measures for the conservation of ecosystems, biodiversity and wildlife, without affecting the legitimate rights of local communities. "We will work closely with the state governments concerned to preserve the rich biodiversity of the Himalayan range and the Western Ghats. However, the livelihood opportunities of the people living in these mountains will be protected," it said. The manifesto said that Congress will join hands with state governments to stop the discharge of effluents (waste) into rivers and clean all the rivers in the country. It also promised to impose a complete ban on the import of all types of waste, allow the import of sand for construction and stop the illegal mining of sand in river banks. "We will implement a solid waste management plan in every habitation, village, town and city employing modern technology and machinery. Those engaged in waste management and disposal will be assured appropriate equipment, dignity and safe working conditions," the party said. It also pledged to amend laws governing forests, re-define the role of the forest departments and make local communities the custodians of forests and shareholders of forest resources. "We will work with state governments to increase the forest cover from the current level of 21 per cent to 25 per cent by the year 2025," it said. In its agendas for 2019 elections, the party promised to preserve wildlife habitats, manage and minimise human-wildlife conflict and award compensation for the loss of human lives. "We will promote the welfare of animals and severely penalise cruelty to animals," it said. The Congress also promised to provide clean cooking fuels at affordable prices to all the households of the country. "We will monitor the price of LPG cylinders and mitigate through subsidies the burden of price increases on the homemaker," it said. It also said that if it comes to power, the party will present the national accounts in a form that will account for the costs of environmental degradation and damage. "The annual budget will adopt the core principles of green budgeting," it said. Lastly, the Congress said it will be committed to make India a green manufacturing hub by reducing tariffs and lifting trade barriers for clean technology and provide incentives for the adoption of such technologies. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP president Amit Shah Tuesday dubbed the Congress's election manifesto a "pack of lies" and said it was an insult to the country's people and its brave soldiers. In a statement, he hit out at the opposition party over its promise to repeal Section 124A (sedition law) and review the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, saying it is bringing a smile to terrorists and separatists while lowering the morale of the armed forces. Repealing the sedition law will lead to chanting of slogans like "Bharat tere tukde honge" (India will break into pieces) by anti-national gangs instead of "Bharat mata ki jai" (Hail Mother India), he claimed. "Removing AFSPA will snath armed forces' weapon to attack terrorists," Shah added. Shah said the party was misleading people in the name of its NYAY scheme or the Minimum Income Support Programme (MISP). The Congress, in its manifesto released Tuesday, said it aims to bring NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojana) or MISP to provide Rs 72,000 a year to the poorest 20 per cent families in India and eliminate abject poverty by 2030. Terming NYAY as a scheme of "injustice", Shah said the Congress was just trying to extract votes by misleading with its "big lie" of MISP as it said it will implement the policy once the economy expands and support will be taken from state governments. Congress is doing injustice to people in the garb of doing justice, he said. Shah said this was not the first time the Congress party was lying. It has a long history of lies. Not a single promise has been fulfilled by the party yet, he said. He also took a dig at the party's promise to amend Code of Criminal Procedure. Hitting out at the Congress over former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah's remark on having a separate President and Prime Minister for the state, Shah said, "Will Congress answer how can one country have two Prime Ministers? Is Jammu and Kashmir not a part of India?" He also asked whom was the Congress trying to impress by promising unconditional dialogue with separatists and what is the reason that terrorists, separatists, the Pakistani prime minister and the Congress have same kind of language in their manifestos. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BSP supremo Mayawati told the Supreme Court Tuesday that construction of her life-size statues and the party's symbol, elephant, at various places in Uttar Pradesh during her tenure as state's chief minister represents the "will of the people". She drew the attention of the apex court that even the Congress Party in the past has installed statues of its leaders including Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and P V Narasimha Rao across the country. She also referred to recent instances of installation of statues by state governments, including the statue of Sardar Vallabhai Patel which is known as 'statue of unity' in Gujarat. Besides, she said that present BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh government has initiated construction of a 221 metre high Lord Rama statues in Ayodhya at the cost of state exchequer. Thus, construction of memorials and installation of statues was not a "new phenomenon" in India, she said. "Similarly, other political parties in power at both the Centre as well as state governments have also installed statues of various other leaders at public places at the cost of public exchequer from time to time but neither the media nor the petitioners have raised any questions with respect to them," she said in an affidavit filed in the top court. The Supreme Court is hearing a petition filed in 2009 by an advocate who had alleged that about Rs 2,000 crore was used from the state budget for 2008-09 and 2009-10, when Mayawati was the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, for stalling her statues and BSP's symbol at different places. Mayawati said in her affidavit that construction of memorials and installation of statues in the state are intended to promote the values and ideals of social reformers and not to glorify herself or to promote her party's symbol. The BSP chief said she has dedicated her entire life for upliftment of downtrodden society and for achieving this, "I also took a decision to remain unmarried". Mayawati said that issues related to utilisation of funds for a particular public purpose by the state government are "not justiciable" and funds for construction of these memorials and installation of statues were sanctioned through budgetary allocation after approval of budget by the state legislature. The Dalit leader was responding to the notice and the oral observation of the apex court which had on February 8 observed that Mayawati should deposit public money used for erecting statues of herself and the party's symbol to the state exchequer. Mayawati sought dismissal of the plea, which has alleged that public fund was misued, saying it was "politically motivated" and is in gross abuse of the process of the court. The BSP supremo said "some disgruntled elements could not digest" such an amount of respect for a Dalit woman leader and resorted to filing pleas in the apex court as well as high court. "The will of the people was expressed by the state legislature with a proposal to install the statues of the answering respondent (Mayawati) at the memorials to show their respect to contemporary woman Dalit leader who has decided to sacrifice her life for the cause of the underpriviledged communities which includes Dalits, downtrodden, Scheduled Tribes and economically weaker sections in all the communities," the affidavit said. It further said, "In these circumstances, the statues of the answering respondent (Mayawati) came into being as the will of the state legislature to represent the will of the people. "It is submitted that the funds for the construction of the said memorials and installation of statues have been sanctioned through budgetary allocation after approval of the budget by the state legislature and the passing of relevant Appropriation Act by the state legislature in accordance with the Constitution of India and the rules," the affidavit said. It said it is clearly evident that it is state legislative assembly which controls the amount to be sanctioned out of the demands for grant placed by the government and it is the state legislative assembly which is the final authority to decide the quantum of monies to be sanctioned. These memorials are major tourist attraction in Lucknow and generating huge revenue daily for the state through sale of entry tickets, she said. It said that elephant statues were not for promotion of BSP symbol but only part of architectural design. "They (statues of elephants) were installed as welcome arches since ancient times. Statues of elephants also stand installed in large numbers at Rashtrapati Bhavan starting from the entrance gate itself," it said. "The elephant statue lies on the top of the Speaker's chair in Parliament which is a sign of welcome to all the members of Parliament. They have also been installed at Raj Bhavans and various other historical buildings and temples," the affidavit said, adding, it is a "coincidence" that BSP has been given election symbol 'Elephant'. The affidavit said statues of elephants have been extensively used in various temples and monument in several countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China and Thailand and also at public places at New York, London and Bangkok. "These memorials reflect the aspirations of the oppressed and downtrodden sections of the society who have been marginalised by the caste system," it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi court Tuesday directed the CBI to provide documents, including a list of survivors, to the accused in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual assault case. Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Kulshreshtha directed the Cental Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to provide the name of victims, CDs containing information of the case and other relevant documents to the counsels of the accused for their examination and cross-examination. However, the court asked the probe agency not to reveal photographs of the survivors and their present whereabouts to the defence advocates or the accused. The court passed the order after CBI's special public prosecutor contended that it was not possible to disclose the identities and personal files of the survivors as it contained photographs and information of their current whereabouts. The counsel for the accused told the court they required the details for examination of witnesses and would not disclose identities of the survivors to any third person. The court had on March 30 framed various charges, including criminal conspiracy to commit rape and penetrative sexual assault, against 21 accused and put them on trial. Besides rape and criminal conspiracy, the court also framed charges under various sections of the POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act and other charges. Brajesh Thakur, the alleged mastermind and strongman, was charged with serious charges under the POCSO Act, including Section 6 (aggravated sexual assault). The offence carries punishment of minimum 10 years and maximum of life imprisonment. All 21 accused were charged with criminal conspiracy to commit rape and penetrative sexual assault against minors. The court will hold trial for the offences of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, drugging of minors, criminal intimidation among other charges. Key accused Thakur and employees of his shelter home, as well as Bihar Department of Social Welfare officials were charged with criminal conspiracy, neglect of duty, failure to report assault on the girls. The charges also included cruelty to child under their authority, punishable under the Juvenile Justice Act. On February 7, the Supreme Court ordered authorities to transfer the case from Bihar to a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in Saket District Court complex in Delhi, which would conclude the trial within six months by holding, preferably, day-to-day hearings. Several girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused at an NGO-run shelter home in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. The issue had come to light following a report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A city court Tuesday asked Congress president Rahul Gandhi and CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury to appear before it on April 30 to respond to the charges of defaming RSS by allegedly linking it to journalist Gauri Lankesh's murder. The civil defamation case, seeking a token compensation of Rs one from Gandhi and Yechuri was filed by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh activist Vivek Champanerkar, who has claimed the duo "defamed" the RSS by linking it to the killing of Lankesh. Civil Judge J S Bhatia, who is hearing the case, ordered issuance of summonses to Gandhi and Yechury asking them to appear in the court. The summonses are returnable on April 30. In his prayer to the court, Champanerkar said Gandhi and Yechury are in the habit of blaming the RSS for any act of violence and this needs to be stopped. He urged the court to direct them to stop linking the RSS with such incidents. Champanerkar's counsel Aditya R Mishra said his client filed the civil complaint in the court against the two leaders last week. Lankesh was shot dead outside her house in Bengaluru in September 2017, allegedly by the members of a right-wing extremist group. A Mumbai metropolitan magistrate's court is also hearing a criminal defamation case against Gandhi and Yechury, filed by another RSS activist over the same issue. In the criminal defamation case, complainant Dhrutiman Joshi, an RSS worker and lawyer, has cited some purported remarks made by Gandhi and Yechury against the RSS after the killing of Lankesh, a strong Hindutva critic. "Statements made by the accused and their respective political parties are in utmost sense defamatory and belittle the RSS in the eyes of common public. "There was a definite move by the accused to tarnish the image of the RSS without citing any proof," Joshi had said in his complaint. The Congress chief is also facing another defamation case in a court at Bhiwandi in Thane district over his alleged comments against the RSS regarding Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Jammu and Kashmir administration Tuesday handed over the investigation of major scams in Jammu & Kashmir Projects Construction Corp (JKPCC) to crime branch of the state police, which will register an FIR soon, an official spokesman said. This is a major step towards eradication of corruption in the organisation, stopping and eliminating backdoor appointments and bringing in a culture of transparency, probity and efficiency, he said. After receiving numerous complaints about the functioning of JKPCC, particularly relating to corruption in civil contracts, illegality in appointments at multiple levels and excessive cost and time overruns, the government appointed a fact finding committee to look into all these allegations, he said. The committee looked into the manner of awarding contracts to contractors often on a nomination basis without following transparent tendering procedures, diverting funds from one project to another leading to a large number of incomplete projects, he said. Apart from these, it also looked into irregularities in appointments at various levels, including that of the Managing Director, inefficiency in functioning and huge time and cost overruns in project implementation, reasons for estimates for construction being much higher than those of the PWD, he said. The committee submitted a voluminous report bringing out in detail large irregularities in the operation of the JKPCC and recommended on improving the organisation, the spokesman said. "There are many elements in the findings and observations in the report which are quite alarming and a cause of serious concern," the committee said in its report. For an organisation which is over 50 years old, its operations seem to be riddled with ad-hoc functioning, absence of rules and a lack of systematic procedures, it said. Keeping in view the seriousness of the matter and the findings of the committee, the government has decided a probe by crime branch into execution of construction works and irregular procedures in violation of government orders, the spokesman said. The government has decided to handover the investigation of all works executed or contracted out by the JKPCC to the crime branch, he added. Based on the enquiry of the crime branch, further action against individuals will be taken after registration of FIR, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The cross-LoC trade along the Poonch-Rawalakot route was suspended on Tuesday in view of the heavy shelling by Pakistan on forward areas along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir, officials said. Three people -- a BSF officer, a woman and a five-year-old girl -- were killed and 24 others, including five security personnel, were injured Monday when Pakistan pounded dozens of villages with mortars in different sectors of Poonch district. "The weekly cross-LoC trade was suspended in view of the frequent shelling by Pakistan and tense security situation," the custodian of LoC trade (Poonch), Fareed Kohli told PTI. The cross-LoC trade between Poonch on this side and Rawalakot in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) started in October 2008 and takes place four days a week from Tuesday to Friday on barter system. Kohli said the situation is being monitored and no decision has been taken yet on the resumption of the trade on Wednesday. "The decision will be taken Wednesday morning after a fresh review of the situation," he said. Despite intense shelling, the weekly cross-LoC bus service plied along the route as per schedule on Monday. "A total of 23 passengers from both sides crossed the LoC at Chaka da Bagh crossing point to meet their relatives," the officials said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India's probity watchdog CVC has decided to train its anti-corruption officials in Europe to check graft in the country, officials said Tuesday. The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) is organising a customised vigilance related training programme at the International Anti Corruption Academy (IACA), Vienna, Austria from June 3 to 14, they said citing an official order. The training will be for eligible Chief Vigilance Officers (CVOs) who act as distant arm of the Commission to check corruption in an organisation and others engaged in vigilance related works, the officials said. The body has sought details from CVOs in order to update its database as well as nominate officers for the upcoming international/domestic training to be conducted by the Commission and for proposed customised training in Austria, they said. The training plan of the Commission states that "the officers (CVOs) should not have undergone any foreign training in the last two years as on April 1 of the year in which training is being organised", in order to be eligible for the upcoming international training, the officials said. The IACA is an international organisation based in Laxenburg, Austria dedicated to overcoming current shortcomings in knowledge and practice in the field of anti-corruption, and seeking to empower professionals for the future challenges. Over Rs 240 crore has been allocated to the Personnel Ministry for domestic and foreign training of bureaucrats and augmenting necessary infrastructure during this fiscal in the interim budget presented by the Union government in February. The Personnel Ministry acts as a nodal department for the CVC. In its annual report for 2017 tabled in Parliament last year, the CVC said it had received a total of 23,609 complaints of corruption. Of these, 12,089 were against railway employees and over 8,000 against various banks officials. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Tension prevailed here when a group of Dalits was prevented by the district authorities from installing a statue in memory of a man killed during an agitation in 2018, police said Tuesday. The incident was reported from Gadla village on Monday, Circle Officer Ram Mohan Sharma said. According to police, the Dalits wanted to install the statue of Amresh at Sant Ravidas temple here. Ambresh was killed during Dalit agitation here last year. The group, however, was prevented from going ahead with their plans as model code of conduct is in place due to the upcoming general elections, Sharma said. Meanwhile, security has been tightened in the area, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Congress chief Sheila Dikshit met party president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday triggering fresh speculations on the party's possible alliance with the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The meeting, which last for around 20 minutes was also attended by AICC in charge of Delhi PC Chacko. Dikshit, who has been opposing an alliance with the AAP, had said on Sunday that the decision on tie-up for Lok Sabha polls will be declared in a few days. The decision from Rahul Gandhi on an alliance is expected "anytime" now, sources said. Delhi Congress is divided over the issue with one side claiming that a 4-3 seat sharing formula has been finalised and AAP will be asked to leave three out of the seven parliamentary constituencies in national capital. AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal had however said on Monday that Rahul Gandhi had refused an alliance with his party. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The AAP government on Tuesday challenged in the Delhi High Court its single judge order allowing private unaided schools in the national capital to go ahead with an interim hike in fees to implement the recommendations of the Seventh Central Pay Commission on salaries of teachers and other employees. The petition came up for hearing before a bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A J Bhambhani which recused from hearing it and directed that it be listed for hearing before another bench on Wednesday. The single judge on March 15 had permitted the interim fee hike by quashing a Delhi government circular of April 13 last, which had prohibited private unaided schools functioning on government land from hiking tuition amounts without approval of the Directorate of (DoE). The government order was selectively applied to private schools which were on government land and as per a 'land clause' in the lease agreement, they needed to seek prior approval of the DoE before hiking fees. The court, while setting aside the circular, had said the statements of fees submitted by private schools would be subject to scrutiny by the DoE "with a view to ensuring that the schools were not indulging in commercialisation of by resorting to profiteering, or charging of capitation fee". "The decision for allowing an interim fee hike, as contained in the order dated October 17, 2017, being that of the DoE, there was no justification for jettisoning the said order, in respect of schools governed by the 'land clause', as was done by the impugned order dated April 13, 2018. The impugned order, dated April 13, 2018, therefore, cannot sustain...and is, accordingly, quashed and set aside. "...the 'interim fee hike' would operate immediately, in favour of all private unaided schools, without the requirement of any prior approval," the court had said in its 173-page judgement allowing the plea of Action Committee Unaided Recognised Private Schools which had challenged the circular. The court had also made it clear that "if any school is, in fact, found to be indulging in commercialisation of education, the DoE would be well within its rights in proceeding, against such institution, in accordance with law, and keeping in mind the provisions of the Delhi Schools Act and Rules". The Action Committee, in its plea filed through advocate Kamal Gupta, had contended that the Delhi Schools Education Act equalised all schools, in the matter of pay and allowances to be granted to teachers and employees and therefore, there was no justification to selectively withdraw the October 17, 2017 order which permitted an interim hike of fees to implement the 7th CPC recommendations. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A police complaint was filed on Tuesday after a woman doctor at the RML Hospital in Delhi was allegedly manhandled by the family of a patient. According to sources, the patient was being treated after being diagnosed with bleeding in brain. The sources said that doctors had informed the patient's family members about all sort of tests that she needed to undergo. Following an argument over tests, which were taking time, one of the patient's relatives slapped a female doctor. "In the past six months, this is the fourth incident at the RML Hospital wherein a doctor has been assaulted," a senior doctor said, adding that the administration has lodged a complaint in this regard. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi's Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia Tuesday said the Congress has betrayed the people of the national capital by backtracking from its earlier promise of giving full statehood to Delhi, while it assured the same to Puducherry. "Today, the Congress has crossed all limits. While it has promised full statehood to Puducherry, there is no such mention about Delhi. What enmity do these (the BJP and the Congress) parties have with the people of Delhi," Sisodia said at a poll rally. He said the Congress had assured in its 2009 and 2014 manifestos to grant full statehood to Delhi, but it has now backtracked on its promise. At press conference, AAP's Delhi convenor Gopal Rai said the Congress has met a "step-motherly" treatment to Delhi. "Congress has given step-motherly treatment to the people of Delhi in its manifesto by not supporting full statehood," Rai said. Referring to the Congress manifesto released ahead of the 2015 Delhi elections, Rai said, "When the party had earlier promised full statehood to Delhi, why are they not doing so now. In their present manifesto, they are promising full statehood to Puducherry but not Delhi. Why this step motherly behaviour." The Congress manifesto released Tuesday said, "Congress promises to amend the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Act, 1991 to make it clear that the Lieutenant Governor shall act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers except in matters concerning the three reserved subjects." Rai urged the Congress to review its manifesto and do justice to the people of Delhi by including the promise of full statehood to the national capital. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Over 1,000 doctors from 24 states and three union territories have urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to enforce a ban on Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS), including e-cigarettes and flavoured hookah before it becomes an "epidemic in India", especially among the youth. Expressing concern over media reports that 30 organisations have written to the IT Ministry to prevent the ban on promotion of ENDS, 1,061 doctors in a letter to the Prime Minister said this was a public health matter and commercial interests should not be entertained. In August last year, the Health Ministry had issued an advisory to all states and UTs to stop the manufacture, sale and import of ENDS after the Delhi High Court took strong exception to the Centre for delay in coming up with appropriate measures to tackle the "new emerging threat" of e-cigarettes in the country. In March, the Central Drug Regulator also directed all drug controllers in states and UTs to not allow the manufacture, sale, import and advertisement of ENDS, including e-cigarettes and flavoured hookah, in their jurisdictions. ENDS are devices that heat a solution to create an aerosol, which also contains flavours, usually dissolved into propylene glycol and glycerin. "It will not be an exaggeration if nicotine is considered as poison. It is sad that the ENDS lobby has assembled a group of physicians who are sharing misleading, distorted information to suit the ENDS industry. "I applaud the government of India that in line with their goal of universal healthcare, it took a tough stand against nicotine delivery devices. They must now ensure that this does not get diluted," Dr Pankaj Chaturvedi, Deputy Director and Head and Neck Surgical Oncology Tata Memorial Hospital said. He further said e-cigarettes should not be promoted as a safe alternative and the only way is to completely quit smoking and not initiate use of any tobacco product. Tobacco companies want to hook a new generation on nicotine under the allure of safe smoking, he said. The letter of the doctors network is associated with the Voice of Tobacco Victims (VoTV) campaign. The letter to the Prime Minister quotes a report by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which stated that e-cigarette use in one year from 2017 to 2018, has increased to 78 per cent among high school students and 48 per cent among middle school students. The FDA reported that in the US, traditional smoking has been falling for years among teens. That trend continues as, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), high school smoking fell from 15.8 to 7.6 pc between 2011 and 2017. However, ENDS popularity among teens has outstripped the reductions in traditional cigarettes as e-cigarette usage has risen from 1.5 to 11.7 pc over the same period. Thus, ENDS significantly offset the progress made in the fight against teen smoking, especially because these teens will also take up regular cigarettes over time, they said in the letter. Dr Shiv Choudhary, Head of Cardio-Thoracic Vascular Surgery (CTVS) AIIMS Delhi, said, "Research has proven that ENDS are not safe or alternatives to cessation. "Nicotine dependence is a major health threat. As a doctor, I will never recommend any nicotine product usage without medical supervision, it being a highly addictive chemical. These products should be banned in India." The American Cancer Society (ACS) and The National Academies of Sciences Engineering Medicine (NASEM) are both of the view that young people who begin with e-cigarettes are more likely to transit to regular cigarette use and become smokers. Ashima Sarin, Director, Voice of Tobacco Victims (VoTV) said, "As per the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (2017), there are 100 million smokers in India, which is potentially a large market for makers of ENDS. "The ENDS lobby is spending a lot of money on trying to get an entry into India. Youth who have not tried regular cigarettes are initiating with vaping and end up smoking regular cigarettes or both. Prestigious associations such as The American Cancer Society, The American Heart Association have said it all. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Dave Bautista was missing from the list of Hollywood celebrities who celebrated the reinstatement of James Gunn as the director of the third "Guardians of the Galaxy" film and the actor said it was because he lost his pet dog the same day. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Bautista, who plays Drax the Destroyer in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, said he had planned something for the moment but put it on hold after his dog succumbed to cancer. "I've known for a while, and I had this idea that I wanted to do it as a celebration video. And it wasn't to try to rub it in anybody's faces and open up that can of worms, I just wanted, it was a celebration thing. "But on the day that it was announced, it was the same day that I lost one of my dogs to cancer. We finally had to say goodbye to her and it just, I was just so crushed. I still am. This was just a week ago and I was so crushed," the 50-year-old actor said. Bautista said he is yet to make a comeback on the social media in the aftermath of his dog's death. "I haven't really been back on my social media because, even though it's like a big deal to me, I just don't feel like celebrating anything. I'm just not in that mood. Like my dogs are like my children, and my baby girl, she fought cancer for two years. And we lost her. "And that's why I didn't have a public celebration. But if you know how hard I fought for him, that is how much him being back means to me. And you can imagine. It's a huge statement," he added. Bautista was among the first to come out in support of Gunn when he was fired by Marvel Studios' parent company Disney last August after his old, offensive tweets resurfaced on social media. Last month, Disney reversed its decision and rehired Gunn as the director of the third "Guardians of the Galaxy". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) / -- - People Data Centre Team of Hindustan Unilever declared as the Winner for 2018 - InMobi Technologies Private Limited receives the runners-up award Datamatics Global Services Ltd. (DGSL), a global IT & BPM company, in association with the Market Research Society of India (MRSI) and global MR association ESOMAR, announced the 6th Dr. Lalit Kanodia Laureate Award for Technology Excellence in Market Research 2018 on 18th March 2019, in a ceremony held at The Westin, Mumbai. This award was instituted with the objective of acknowledging and rewarding innovators who have made significant technology-led efforts within the market research industry processes to enhance the quality of consumer insights. People Data Centre team from Hindustan Unilever Limited was adjudged as the winner of the award for their research paper on 'Using AI & image recognition to derive insights from social media.' The paper talks about how Image Analytics can explore moods, settings and occasions from the plethora of images available in social media. InMobi Technologies Private Limited received the runners-up award for their paper 'Cracking location matrix using polygon technology' which explores on developing omni-channel strategies by tracking and integrating off-line behaviour of the consumers with their online journeys. The nominations were reviewed by an independent jury comprising industry experts based on multiple pre-defined criteria such as uniqueness, relevance, quality of solution, potential applicability to other areas and overall cost of implementation; however, the most important criteria was that the solution should already be functional and operational. Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Sandeep Arora, EVP & Head - Consulting & Advisory Practice, Datamatics said, "Heartiest Congratulations to all the winners for their innovative solutions. This year, the contest was very stiff amongst the submitted nominations. However, our eminent jury did a wonderful job of selecting the winning entry. The vision of this award is to promote technology-led innovations in the field of Market Research and we are happy that the award has been a success in the industry so far." Mr. Pravin Shekar, President - MRSI, said, "It gives us immense pleasure to announce that we have celebrated five successful years of the Dr. Lalit Kanodia Laureate Award. The award has recognized some of the best digital technological transformations in the field of Market Research. We are happy to receive such an overwhelming response year after year. "Mr. Finn Raben, Director-General ESOMAR, said, "Technology has played a critical role in Global MR industry by bringing in further transparency and getting in-depth market or customer insights from data. This award has been constituted with a unique approach in establishing the importance of technology in the field of market research. ESOMAR is proud to be associated with this initiative."About Dr. Lalit Kanodia Laureate Award for Technological Excellence in Market ResearchDatamatics launched this award in 2013 in association with the Market Research Society of India (MRSI) and global MR association ESOMAR. The award honours technology-led innovative trendsetters and game changers who through their pioneering efforts and their commitment towards making a difference, have demonstrated some path-breaking ideas to enhance the role of that technology plays within the Market Research industry. About Datamatics Global Services Datamatics (BSE: 532528) (NSE: DATAMATICS) provides Intelligent Solutions for data driven businesses to increase productivity and enhance customer experience. The company's portfolio of service offerings spans across Information Technology Services, Business Process Management, Engineering Services and Big Data & Analytics all powered by Artificial Intelligence. It has established products in Robotics Process Automation, Advanced Analytics, Business Intelligence and Automated Fare Collection. Datamatics services over 500 customers globally across Banking & Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, International Organizations and Media & Publishing. Headquartered in Mumbai, the Company has presence across 4 continents with major delivery centers in the USA, India and Philippines with an employee base of 10,000. To know more about Datamatics, visit www.datamatics.com Safe Harbour Some of the statements in this update that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include our financial and growth projections as well as statements concerning our plans, strategies, intentions and beliefs concerning our business and the markets in which we operate. These statements are based on information currently available to us, and we assume no obligation to update these statements as circumstances change. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. These risks include, but are not limited to, the level of market demand for our services, the highly-competitive market for the types of services that we offer, market conditions that could cause our customers to reduce their spending for our services, our ability to create, acquire and build new businesses and to grow our existing businesses, our ability to attract and retain qualified personnel, currency fluctuations and market conditions in India and elsewhere around the world, and other risks not specifically mentioned herein but those that are common to industry. Source: Datamatics Global Services Ltd. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Dr Reddy's Laboratories through its wholly owned subsidiary Promius Pharma Tuesday announced sale and assignment of the US rights for its marketed dermatology brands to Encore Dermatology. Promius Pharma, LLC, announced the sale of its rights for SERNIVO spray, 0.05 per cent and assignment of its rights to market and distribute, PROMISES topical cream and TRIANEX 0.05 per cent (Triamcinolone Acetonide ointment, USP) in the United States, to Encore Dermatology. "Under the terms of the agreement, Promius Pharma is eligible to receive an upfront payment and future milestone payments contingent upon achievement of certain commercial objectives," Dr Reddy's Laboratories said in a regulatory filing. The company, however, did not disclose how much payment its subsidiary Promius Pharma will receive. Dr Reddy's co-chairman and CEO G V Prasad said the announcement is in line with its renewed strategy to enable us achieve self-sustainability and profitable growth for each of its businesses. "We are confident in Encore's ability to realise the full potential of the enlisted products. We look forward to working with Encore to ensure a smooth transition of these brands and to ensure they are able to quickly deliver these products to providers and patients." says Anil Namboodiripad, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Proprietary Products, and President, Promius Pharma, said. Shares of Dr Reddy's Laboratories were trading 0.11 per cent lower at Rs 2,788 apiece on the BSE. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Election Commission on Tuesday received a factual report on Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's reported remarks referring to the Indian Army as 'Modiji ki sena' and has started examining it to ascertain whether it violated the model code of conduct. The district magistrate of Ghaziabad has furnished a report in this regard. "It is under examination," official sources said. "Congress ke log aatankwadiyon ko biryani khilate the aur Modiji ki sena aatankwadiyon ko goli aur gola deti hai. (Congress leaders would feed biryani to terrorists, while Modi's army gives them bullets and bombs). This is the difference. The Congress people use 'ji' to refer to Masood Azhar to encourage terrorism," Adityanath said at an election rally in Ghaziabad on Sunday. The BJP leader was campaigning for sitting MP and Union minister V K Singh. The Election Commission had on March 19 asked political parties to "desist" from indulging in any propaganda involving actions taken by defence forces during their Lok Sabha poll campaigns. The advisory came days after the poll panel asked parties and their candidates against using pictures of defence force personnel in their campaign material. "...parties/candidates are advised that their campaigners/candidates should desist, as part of their election campaigning, from indulging in any political propaganda involving activities of defence forces," it had said. Former Navy Chief Admiral L Ramdas had Monday said he would approach the Election Commission against Adityanath for his remarks and claimed that many veterans and those in service were upset over it. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The ED Tuesday said it has attached assets worth Rs 315 crore in connection with a money laundering and alleged bank fraud case against a firm promoted by TDP MP Y S Chowdary. It said a provisional order for attachment was issued under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) for attaching immovable and movable properties of Viceroy Hotels Ltd, Hyderabad in a bank fraud case. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had taken up the case on the basis of a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) FIR filed against Best & Crompton Engineering Pvt Ltd (BCEPL) and their officials, who entered into a criminal conspiracy during 2010-2013 for "defrauding Central Bank of India, Andhra Bank and Corporation Bank." The total loss caused to the consortium of banks due to the fraud was to the tune of Rs 364 crore. BCEPL is a part of Sujana Group of Companies, the ED said. Chowdary, Rajya Sabha MP of the Telugu Desam Party, is considered a close aide of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister and party president N Chandrababu Naidu and has been alleged by the agency to be the promoter of Sujana group of companies. Chowdary was a Minister of State (MoS) in the Union cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi before Naidu quit the NDA early last year over the Centre's refusal to grant special status to Andhra Pradesh. The ED, in its statement, said, "Several shell companies were floated and money was circulated among the companies using bogus invoices and part of loan amount was diverted to one Mahal Hotels which is also a shell company floated by the Sujana Group." "After circuitous transactions finally the amounts were paid to Viceroy Hotels Ltd in the guise of business transaction agreement between Viceroy Hotels Ltd and Mahal Hotels Pvt Ltd," the agency said. The company Viceroy Hotels, it said, "admitted their liability towards Mahal Hotels as Rs 315 crore and hence the properties of Viceroy Hotels Ltd to the extent of this amount were provisionally attached." The ED had carried out raids in the premises of these firms in multiple locations including Hyderabad and Delhi in the past. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At least 15 people were injured after lightning struck them in remote Achham district in Nepal, which has been battered by a freak storm that has claimed 31 lives and left a trail of destruction. The lightning struck far-West Achham district on Monday evening injuring 11 persons in Panchadewal Binayak area and four others in Ramaroshan Rural Municipality a day after the massive storm tore down houses, flipped vehicles and toppled trees and electricity poles in Southern Nepal. Massive winds accompanied by hailstorms and rain struck Bara and the adjoining district of Parsa in the central Tarai region on Sunday evening killing at least 31 people and injuring 600 others. Losses to the agricultural, industrial and energy sectors from Sunday night's killer rainstorm are expected to total millions of rupees, officials said. Heavy rain and strong winds lashed the two districts The Nepal Electricity Authority said its estimated losses could be around Rs 150 million due to the damage to the electricity distribution system in Bara and Parsa districts. The Ministry of Agriculture said it had not ascertained the losses, but said they could run into millions of rupees. According to the power utility, around 2,000 electricity poles were knocked down by the powerful rainstorm, disrupting electricity supply to parts of the southern Nepal districts. Rehabilitation works were underway in the storm-hit districts. Dozens of houses have been collapsed leaving hundreds homeless. Many of those who left the villages have moved to makeshift camps. As food scarcity has hit the affected area, the people were living on biscuits, noodles and bread donated by the government and non-governmental organisations. Power supply from India was disrupted as two transmission lines 33 KV Birgunj- Regulae transmission line and 132 KV Raxaul-Parwanipur transmission line, were partially damaged by the storm, according to Nepal Electricity Authority sources. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Finland's defense ministry says a Portuguese surveillance aircraft is suspected of having violated the Nordic country's airspace. Spokeswoman Niina Hyrsky says the aircraft made the alleged airspace violation on Monday at 6 a.m. southwest of the capital Helsinki. Hyrsky declined Tuesday to comment further or give more details but said the matter is being investigated by the Finnish Border Guard. Portuguese Air Force spokesman Lt.-Col. Manuel da Costa told the Associated Press he was not aware of the incident but would look into the matter. Portugal is a member of NATO, but Finland is not. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A fire broke out at a factory manufacturing plastic bags in Samaypur Badli on Tuesday, the Delhi Fire Service said. A call about the incident was received at 11.57 am and 22 fire tenders were rushed to the spot, a senior fire officer said. The fire-fighting operations are underway, he said, adding that no casualty has been reported so far. The cause of fire is yet to be ascertained. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale held talks with Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov in Moscow covering a range of bilateral and regional issues including the evolving situation in Afghanistan. Gokhale visited Moscow from April 1-2. The Ministry of External Affairs said both sides reviewed the implementation of the decisions of the 19th annual bilateral summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin here in October last year. The talks also covered preparations for the next bilateral summit and cooperation under Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Russia-India-China trilateral grouping and other bodies. "There were wide-ranging discussions on evolving situation in Afghanistan," the MEA said. The foreign secretary also met Deputy Minister of Foreign Sergey Ryabkov and discussed regional and international issues including those relating to disarmament and non-proliferation. "Foreign Secretary's meetings were in-depth and productive, characteristic of the special and privileged strategic partnership between India and Russia," the MEA said. "The meetings resulted in enhanced mutual convergence and coordination of views on all major regional and international issues in the spirit of long standing and time-tested friendship between India and Russia," it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Jammu and Kashmir Anti-Corruption Bureau on Tuesday filed a charge sheet against 17 people, including several government officials, in a six-year-old case of fraudulent distribution of over Rs 29 lakh land acquisition compensation in Udhampur district, an official said. A case under various sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act and the Ranbir Penal Code was registered in 2013 after investigation revealed that Rs 29,07,857 was fraudulently disbursed by the accused as compensation while depriving the genuine land holders during land acquisition for four-laning of the Jammu-Srinagar national highway, the official said. The accused in the graft case, including the then Additional Deputy Commissioner and Collector (land acquisition) Nasir Iqbal Parray and the then Patwari, Nasir Iqbal Parray, were booked by the ACB's Doda unit after obtaining the prosecution sanction from the competent authority, he said. The other accused include the then Naib Tehsildar, Tikri-Udhampur, Gopal Singh and the then revenue officer, Madan Lal, the official said. The case will be heard next on May 10, the official added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BSF DG Rajni Kant Mishra said Tuesday that his force is fully prepared to meet any challenge posed by Pakistan which is continuously violating the ceasefire by targeting forward areas along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir. He said the Indian forces are giving a befitting response to the unprovoked mortar shelling and firing by the Pakistan Army, while maintaining that there was no ceasefire violation along the International Border (IB) in the state. Talking to reporters after the wreath-laying ceremony of Inspector T Alex Lalminlun at the BSF frontier headquarters here, Mishra said all the 365 days of the year pose a challenge for the border guards. "We have accepted the challenge and are prepared for it," the director general said when asked about the preparations of the BSF along the IB and the LoC in view of the upcoming five-phased Lok Sabha polls, scheduled to begin in the state on April 11. The BSF DG, who arrived on a two-day visit to Jammu on Monday to review security situation, especially along the forward posts, said Pakistan is targeting civilian areas which is very unfortunate. However, he said the Border Security Force (BSF) is giving befitting replies to Pakistan. On the casualties suffered by Pakistan in the retaliatory action, he said, "We are waiting for the feedback to ascertain the casualties suffered by them." Besides the BSF inspector, a woman and a five-year-old girl were killed and 24 others were injured in intense shelling by Pakistan in various sectors of Poonch district on Monday. Terming the killing of 35-year-old officer as "unfortunate", Mishra said he was posted with the 168th battalion and was manning the 471 forward defence location (FDL) post when a mortar shell landed at his picket. "He suffered critical splinter injuries and achieved martyrdom, while four of his colleagues were injured but their condition is stated to be stable," the DG said. Asked about the message for the troopers on the ground, he said, "Do not get demoralised and we are solidly behind you." Earlier, Mishra joined other ranks of the force and Inspector General of Police, Jammu region, M K Sinha and Jammu SSP Tejinder Singh to pay floral tributes to the slain officer whose body was brought to the BSF headquarters for the wreath-laying ceremony. The Inspector General of BSF, Jammu frontier, N S Jamwal and other officers also laid wreath at the tricolour-wrapped coffin containing the mortal remains of the officers. The body of the inspector is being flown to his home town in Manipur for last rites, a BSF spokesman said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) General officer Commanding (GoC) of strategic Fire and Fury Corps Lt General Y K Joshi Tuesday visited the forward locations in eastern Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir to review the operational preparedness of the force, a defence spokesman said here. Lt Gen Joshi visited forward locations in eastern Ladakh, including the Daulet Beg Oldie (DBO) sector, the spokesman said. He said the GoC was accompanied by General Officer Commanding 'Trishul Division', who briefed him about the operational preparedness being maintained in the sector. The Army officer interacted with troops deployed at the forward posts and complimented them for their high morale and commitment even in the harsh arid terrain of eastern Ladakh and urged them to uphold the highest standards of professionalism of the Indian Army, the spokesman said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Germany said Tuesday it had reduced emissions of greenhouse gases signficantly for the first time in five years in 2018, although it has already abandoned self-imposed targets for the end of this decade. Europe's largest economy -- which is haltingly transitioning away from coal and nuclear to cleaner energy forms -- lowered output of the gases by 4.2 per cent year-on-year, minister Svenja Schulze said in a report. A helping hand came from the unusually mild weather, which reduced the need for heating. But Germany also "drew more energy from wind and the sun and less from coal, oil and gas," Schulze said. It also achieved a slight reduction in emissions from transport. In total, Germany pumped 868.7 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, some 30.6 percent below levels in 1990 -- the year taken as a benchmark for its climate targets. Last year, Chancellor Angela Merkel's fourth government officially gave up on the goal of slashing output by 40 percent by 2020. Experts had long highlighted the goal as unachievable. But Berlin still aims to cut greenhouse emissions by 55 percent by 2030 compared with 40 years before, with a long-term goal of zero net output by 2050. "In the course of this year," minister Schulze aims to pass a far-reaching climate law with a "detailed road map" for energy production, taking into account a planned exit from coal power by 2038. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) growth is expected to be lower in 2019 than it was last year, the forecast on Tuesday, citing widespread "tensions" and economic uncertainty. The had in its preliminary estimates predicted a 3.7 per cent expansion of trade for this year, but has revised that down to 2.6 per cent, marking a decline on the three-per cent growth recorded in 2018. "The fact that we don't have great news today should surprise no one who has been reading the papers over the last 12 months," director-general Roberto Azevedo told reporters in Geneva. In its main annual forecast, the 164-member renewed its concerns about systemic threats that could continue to disrupt the world's economy, notably retaliatory tariffs between China and the United States. There are indications that ongoing talks between Washington and Beijing could resolve the bruising tariff battle, but timelines for a possible deal are not clear. Asked if he saw either side emerging victorious in the trade spat between the world's two largest economies, Azevedo said "there will be many losers." It was therefore becoming "increasingly urgent" that tensions are resolved, he added in a statement. The projections released Tuesday are based on a "relatively smooth" Brexit playing out over the next two years, WTO economist Coleman Nee told reporters. Britain leaving the without a withdrawal agreement, or the various other possible Brexit scenarios that remain in play, will impact global trade, Nee added. "The situation is so fluid. We will have to wait and see what the final outcome is," before fully understanding Brexit's influence on world trade, Nee further said. Popular comic-host Graham Norton is set to host 2019's BAFTA Television Awards. According to The Hollywood Reporter, it marks his return as the ceremony's presenter after 15 years. "It has been almost 15 years since I first hosted the Television Awards and what a pleasure it is to be returning to host once again. 2018 was a stand-out year for television, and I look forward to seeing the brilliant talent in our industry rewarded," Norton said. Clare Brown, director of production at BAFTA, said they are delighted to welcome "The Graham Norton Show" host back to emcee the BAFTA TV Awards. "Graham captures the hearts of the audience both at home and in the room and having hosted the ceremony numerous times throughout the years we look forward to having him on board once again," Brown said. BBC America's thriller "Killing Eve" leads the nominations 14 nods, closely followed by the BBC/Amazon mini-series "A Very English Scandal" with 12. The ceremony will take place on May 12 at Royal Festival Hall, London. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP took potshots at Gujarat Congress leader Hardik Patel after the Supreme Court Tuesday declined urgent hearing to his plea in a riot case, denting his chances of contesting the Lok Sabha elections. Chief Minister Vijay Rupani taunted Patel, saying the SC order has come as a relief for the latter "in a true sense," else he should have "got exposed" in the electoral contest against the BJP. The Congress hit back at the BJP, saying the ruling party was scared of Patel. The apex court refused to accord urgent hearing to Patel's plea challenging the Gujarat High Court's order which rejected his plea to stay his conviction in the 2015 Vispur rioting case. Patel (25) had Monday moved the apex court challenging the March 29 order of the HC which is coming in the way of his contesting the Lok Sabha elections. "Hardik Patel had expressed his desire to contest from Jamnagar. But the court has now given him relief in a true sense else he would have got exposed (by losing the election had he contested)," Rupani told reporters. Patel also came under attack from Gujarat BJP president Jitu Vaghani, who said the ruling party was ready to take him on in the poll ring. Vaghani said he still hoped the SC would give him a chance to contest the upcoming elections. "If you have courage, fight with us in Jamnagar, or anywhere else in Gujarat... I still hope and pray to God that Supreme Court gives him permission to contest elections. "We are ready for you," Vaghani said, addressing a gathering in Jamnagar. The Gujarat Congress said the SC has not yet heard the case and hoped the order, whenever delivered, will go in favour of Patel, who spearheaded the Patidar quota agitation before joining the main opposition party last month. Party spokesperson Manish Doshi said even if Patel does not get a chance to contest the election, he will continue to address rallies and "expose BJP". "We believe the order of the Supreme Court will come in favour of Hardik. The BJP is clearly scared of the young Patidar leader which is why it has opposed his plea so vehemently so that he does not get a chance to contest the election," Doshi said. "Even if Hardik does not get a chance to contest the election this time, he will continue to address rallies for Congress across the state and will expose BJP government over the issues of farmers and youth not getting jobs," he said. Patel had started preparations to contest from Jamnagar on a Congress ticket after joining the party on March 12 and the last date for filing of nominations is April 4. The Sessions Court at Visnagar in Mehsana district sentenced Patel to two years' imprisonment last July for rioting and arson in Visnagar town in 2015 during the Patidar quota stir. The HC in August 2018 suspended the sentence but not the conviction. Under the Election Law -- Representation of the People Act and a related Supreme Court ruling -- a convict facing a jail term of two years or more cannot stand for election unless the conviction is stayed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Uttarakhand High Court on Tuesday rejected an election petition seeking cancellation of BJP candidate Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank's nomination from the Haridwar Lok Sabha seat. Justice Alok Singh dismissed the petition, saying there is no merit in it. Independent candidate Manish Verma had filed an election petition demanding cancellation on the ground that the affidavit supporting his nomination does not reveal the residual amount which is to be paid by Nishank for the services enjoyed by him during his stint as Uttarakhand chief minister. Verma had also claimed that the BJP leader had not disclosed the bank details of his daughters. The returning officer of Haridwar had already dismissed the objections raised by Verma on March 26, saying Nishank's children have independent earnings which are not subject to audit on his behalf. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) "Game of Thrones" star Sophie Turner has revealed that co-actor Kit Harington makes more money than her on the hit HBO show but it does not bother her. The actor, a vocal supporter Time's Up campaign and gender equality, said that Harington received a bigger pay cheque than her because he has a bigger plot in the epic fantasy series, which also involved more night shoots. She said demanding equal pay on the show was a "little tricky". "Kit got more money than me, but he had a bigger storyline. And for the last series, he had something crazy like 70 night shoots, and I didn't have that many. I was like, 'You know what... You keep that money'," Turner told Bazaar UK magazine. The actor, who plays Sansa Stark in the series, said now all her contracts come with an inclusion rider, which ensures a 50:50 male/female workforce on the sets. "Now, you see women in the camera departments, producing, directing. It's exciting," she added. Turner said nowadays people are engaging in conversations about pay more readily. "(Executives are) more willing to listen to people saying, 'I want the same amount of money.' So things are getting done, but it will take a while, I think..." she said. "GOT" returns with its eighth and final season on April 14. Turner will also be seen reprising her role of mutant Jean Grey/Dark Phoenix in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After the Supreme Court quashed an RBI circular on the provisions for declaring a company bankrupt even on a one-day overdue, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Tuesday expressed confidence that the central bank will take a call in line with the present conditions of the market. "We are trying to get the judgement...We will read it and I am sure the RBI will also now decide in the present condition of the market what is to be done with the various aspects contained in that circular," he told reporters when asked to react to the order. The Supreme Court Tuesday quashed the RBI circular of last year that pertains to the provisions for declaring a company bankrupt even on a one-day overdue. The bench headed by Justice R F Nariman said, "We have declared the RBI circular ultra vires." The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had on February 12, 2018 issued the circular saying that lenders have to provide for resolution plan within 180 days in case of large account of Rs 2,000 crore and above. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP's Pauri Lok Sabha seat candidate Tirath Singh Rawat Tuesday claimed he was the true heir to the political legacy of veteran saffron party leader B C Khanduri, whose son is contesting the polls from the constituency on a Congress ticket. He also said even though he was pitted against Kahnduri's son Manish, he had the veteran leader's blessings and was confident of victory from the seat. "I am confident of a win as Khanduriji's blessings are with me and there is tremendous support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. People everywhere will cast their votes to strengthen his hands," Rawat told PTI in an interview. "The Congress on the other hand is sidelined.It is battling for survival as even regional parties do not want the grand old party in their alliance. It is not in a position to throw a challenge," he said. BC Khanduri, a retired major general, wields considerable clout in Pauri and is said to be a deciding factor on the seat as whoever he goes with gets an edge over the opponent. When asked whether being the son of Khanduri gives Manish an edge, Rawat said, "On the contrary it is going to prove counter-productive as he (Manish) is being seen as someone representing an ideology his father had opposed all these years." "My association with Khanduriji goes back several decades. He is my political mentor and I have his blessings. He even played a role in me getting a ticket from the seat.I represent his ideology and I will get the advantage of his reputation and popularity," he said, adding that he was the "true heir" to Khanduri's political legacy. Pauri (Garhwal) was represented by BC Khanduri, a former chief minister, in the 16th Lok Sabha. However, this time he expressed his unwillingness to contest, prompting the BJP to field his political protege Tirath Singh Rawat from the seat where Khanduri's son is trying his luck as a Congress nominee. With both son and disciple digging into Khanduri's loyal support base to outdo each other and the BJP veteran maintaining an impenetrable silence, all attention is riveted on the seat to see which of the two will finally reap the advantage of his legacy. On whether BC Khanduri's silence on who he would support in the polls will leave voters confused, Rawat said there is no confusion as Khanduri has openly said he is a dedicated soldier of the BJP. Rawat also spoke of Manish's elder sister and BJP MLA from Yamkeshwar Ritu Khanduri campaigning aggressively for him in his constituency. He said the biggest factor in these elections is Modi and everyone wants to see him as prime minister again. "There was a wave in support of Modi even in 2014. But it was more in the form of an undercurrent. This time it is palpable," he said. "Modi has taken development to every section. Be it the annual income support scheme for small and marginal farmers, toilets for everyone, rural electrification, Ujjwala or Ayushman Bharat their benefits are reaching people directly and they have made up their mind about seeing Modi again as prime minister," Rawat said. These elections are for development and national pride. The surgical strike after Uri and the air strike against terror targets in Pakistan after Pulwama have taken Modi's popularity to the next level in Pauri, he said, adding that several people from the constituency are in the armed forces. "People have faith in Modi's leadership and they will vote for BJP to strengthen him," he said. There is a large presence of serving and ex-army personnel in the constituency. Veterans such as L K Advani and B C Khanduri were dropped from their Lok Sabha seats by the BJP this time and it seemed that the party's decision had come as it wanted to ease out several of its old guards from electoral after keeping them out of government by introducing an age bar of 75 years. In anticipation of the party leadership's move, senior leaders like Kalraj Mishra and Bhagat Singh Koshyari had announced their unwillingness to contest the coming Lok Sabha polls. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) NC chief Farooq Abdullah Tuesday said those saying articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution were supposed to be temporary are "wittingly or unwittingly affirming" that J-K's accession to India too was "temporary". The former Jammu and Kashmir (J-K) chief minister asserted that people were unfazed by the threats of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) combine on scrapping the articles which provide special status to the state. The National Conference (NC) chief also backed his son and party vice-president Omar Abdullah's comments on Monday that the NC would seek restoration of terms of accession of the state, including the provision for 'Sadr-e-Riyasat' and prime minister posts. The senior Abdullah said those who created a ruckus about assertions of his son were "unqualified and untaught" about historical facts. "It was our party who after Maharaja Hari Singh executed accession with the Union of India, sought unimpeachable constitutional safe guards for our state under the Delhi agreement," he said at a public gathering at Madar-e-Maharban stadium in Ganderbal district in central Kashmir. "Our party has always sought restoration of the relation of our state with the Union of India on the original terms of accession, which only gave three subjects of communication, defense and foreign affairs to the union, rest the Maharaja gave everything to the people of the state," Abdullah added. The former Union minister said the people of Kashmir "will not be fazed or frightened by the threats of BJP-RSS". "We will continue to seek our rights that were infringed upon Those who are saying article 370 and article 35A are temporary are wittingly or unwittingly affirming that the accession was also temporary," he said. Former Prime Minister P V Narsimha Rao in a televised address in Burkina Faso, in Africa, had approved of having 'Sadr-e-Riyasat' and prime minister for the state, claimed the NC president. "He (Rao) has on record said that 'as far as giving autonomy to the state of J-K is concerned, sky is the limit'. When he came back, I asked him that much of special status has been eroded since 1953, to which he answered that once in government, the forum of assembly should be used to undo the erosions," Abdullah said. He said after coming to power in 1996, the government got the autonomy resolution passed with a huge majority in the state legislature. "Those who say that the resolution was cast out are wrong, the documents are still with the Union government and one day the Centre has to implement it. There is no other way peace can return to the state until autonomy of the state is restored," he said. The NC president said the forthcoming elections would decide whether the minorities, including Muslims, walk holding their heads high and chin up. "Today our nation is facing immense hazard in the form of communal strife. We are at crossroads, now it is up to us to decide if India remains secular, progressive in its outlook where in all the communities thrive and draw their sustenance affably or a country which is tangled with the clutches of communal strife and bigotry," he said. "Now it is up to the people. The opportunity has come and we should not let it pass by us unutilized," he added. On one hand there is Gandhi's India which is all inclusive and on other hand there are forces which believe that India belongs to the adherents of only one faith, he said further. "World has seen such fascist forces trying their level best to harm the brotherhood and peace before as well in the form of Adolf Hitler. Today, we are facing modern day Hitlers and Gobbles. Like Gobbles they thrive on falsehood, lies and mendacious politics," Abdullah said. Flaying BJP president Amit Shah and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Abdullah said the Muslims of the country do not need certificates from BJP-RSS on their patriotism. "We are not anti-national. We have given immense sacrifices for the unity of the nation. I have lost many of my party functionaries and workers to the frenzy of conflict. These people don't see that, but when we raise voice for the restoration of our rights, we are being tainted as anti-national," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Chile have agreed to work together to strengthen the global response to defeat and destroy terrorism in all its forms and manifestations as President Ram Nath Kovind held wide ranging discussions with his Chilean counterpart on matters of mutual interest, including cooperation in defence sector. The two sides signed three MoUs in the fields of mining, culture and disability during Kovind's visit here. Kovind arrived here on Sunday on the last leg of his three nation tour that also took him to Bolivia and Croatia. President Kovind discussed wide ranging issues of mutual interest with his Chilean counterpart Sebastian Pinera on Monday, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. "We exchanged views and assessments of our respective neighbourhoods and regions," Kovind said. Thanking Pinera for his strong condemnation of the Pulwama terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir claimed by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed, the President said India and Chile have agreed to work together to strengthen the global response to defeat and destroy terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and hold those responsible, accountable for their brutality against humanity. They also called upon all countries to work towards eliminating terrorist safe havens and infrastructure, disrupting terrorist networks and financing channels. They emphasized the need for stronger international partnership in countering terrorism and extremism, including through increased sharing of information to combat terrorism, also bilaterally, a joint statement said. Both leaders expressed the importance of early finalisation of Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT), the statement said. India offered training slots to Chilean armed forces in the premier defence institutions including for courses in mountain warfare and peacekeeping. The two countries also agreed to explore opportunities for other cooperation in the defence sector. "The two countries should also seize the opportunity to jointly manufacture defence equipment," Kovind said. Noting that the bilateral relations between India and Chile are on an "upward curve", Kovind said, "Today we have signed three MoUs in the fields of mining, culture and disability. These would further enhance our engagement in economic, social and cultural fields." Chile is the sixth largest trading partner of India in the Latin American region. The bilateral trade between the two nations registered an impressive increase of 50 per cent in 2017-18, to reach USD 2.8 billion. Kovind said he is hopeful that the India-Chile Preferential Trade Agreement with increased tariff lines would further contribute towards enhancement of bilateral trade. The President invited Chilean companies to invest in Indian mining, infrastructure, defence and food processing sectors under 'Make in India', 'Smart Cities' and 'Digital India' programmes. "Given our commitment to environment and sustainability, India is particularly keen to strengthen lithium partnership with Chile...Indian companies are also eager to strengthen their presence in Chile especially in IT, pharma, automobiles and mining sectors," Kovind said. He also said that India look forward to work with Chile to promote solar energy worldwide and enhance global action to combat climate change as both the countries are partners in the International Solar Alliance. The two leaders reaffirmed their commitment to reformed multilateralism and for comprehensive reforms of the UN Security Council, including its expansion in both permanent and non-Permanent categories of membership to make it more representative, accountable, transparent, inclusive and effective, reflecting the geopolitical realities of the 21st Century. The Chilean side reiterated its support for India's candidature for a permanent membership in a reformed and expanded UN Security Council, while reaffirming its support for India's candidacy as non-permanent member for the term 2021 2022. On the other hand, India reiterated its endorsement of Chile's candidacy to the same body for the term 2029 2030, the joint statement said. The President also welcomed Chile's decision to allow visa-free entry to Indian nationals holding a valid US visa, saying the step would promote both cultural and business ties between the two countries. Earlier, Kovind reviewed the Guard of Honour along with Pinera at the Presidential Palace 'La Moneda' here. The president laid a wreath at Monument of General Bernardo O' Higgins, who struggled for Chile's independence from Spain. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India shooting down of one of its own satellites was a "terrible thing" as it created about 400 pieces of orbital debris, the chief of NASA has said, warning that the risk of debris colliding with the International Space Station has risen by 44 per cent since the Indian anti-satellite weapon test. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on March 27 that India has achieved a "historic feat" by shooting down its own low-orbit satellite with a ground-to-space missile, making the country a "space power." Only three other countries -- the US, Russia and China -- have anti-satellite missile (ASAT) capabilities. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator Jim Bridenstine said about 60 pieces of debris have been tracked so far and out of which 24 are going above the apogee of the International Space Station (ISS), the point of the space station's orbit farthest from the Earth. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris and an apogee that goes above the international space station. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight that we need to see have happen," he said at a NASA townhall with employees on Monday. "The Anti-satellite weapons test by India last week has resulted in about 400 pieces of orbital debris," he said. Bridenstine said not all of the pieces were big enough to track and the NASA is right now tracking objects which are 10 centimeters or bigger. "Some 60 pieces of orbital debris have been tracked so far, 24 out of which poses risk to the ISS," he said. Soon after the ASAT test, India said it was done in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris. "Whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back onto the earth within weeks." By conducting the test, the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi said, India was not in violation of any international law or treaty to which it is a party to or any national obligation. Interestingly, Bridenstine is the first top official from the Trump administration to come out in public against the India's ASAT test. A day after India successfully carried out its ASAT test, acting US defence secretary Patrick Shanahan warned that the event could create a "mess" in space but said Washington was still studying the impact. Bridenstine said the NASA is "learning more and more every hour" that goes by about this orbital debris field that has been created from the anti-satellite test. "Where we were last week with an assessment that comes from NASA experts as well as the Joint Space Operations Center (part of US Strategic Command).. is that the risk to the International Space Station has increased by 44 per cent," Bridenstine said. "We are charged with commercialising of low earth orbit. We are charged with enabling more activities in space than we've ever seen before for the purpose of benefiting the human condition, whether it's pharmaceuticals or printing human organs in 3D to save lives here on earth or manufacturing capabilities in space that you're not able to do in a gravity well," he said. "All of those are placed at risk when these kinds of events happen," Bridenstine said as he feared India's ASAT test could risk proliferation of such activities by other countries. "When one country does it, other countries feel like they have to do it as well," he said. "It's unacceptable. The NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is," he said. The risk from small debris as a result of the ASAT test to the ISS went up 44 per cent over a period of 10 days. "So, the good thing is it's low enough in earth orbit that over time this will all dissipate," he told his NASA colleagues. The ISS is a habitable artificial satellite, orbitting the Earth at an altitude between 330 and 435 km. It is a joint project between space agencies of US, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada, and serves as a research laboratory for scientists to conduct space experiments. As many as 236 astronauts from 18 countries have visited the space station, many of them multiple times, since November 2000. Bridenstine said a lot of debris from the 2007 direct ascent anti-satellite test by China is still in the space. "And we're still dealing with it. We are still, we as a nation are responsible for doing space situational awareness and space traffic management, conjunction analysis for the entire world," the NASA chief said. "The International Space Station is still safe. If we need to manoeuvre it, we will. The probability of that I think is low. But at the end of the day we have to be clear also that these activities are not sustainable or compatible with human spaceflight," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The on Tuesday termed as a "terrible thing" India's shooting down of one of its satellites that has created about 400 pieces of orbital debris, endangering the (ISS). Administrator Jim Bridenstine said about 60 pieces have been tracked so far and out of which 24 are going above the apogee of the ISS. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris and an apogee that goes above the That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight that we need to see have happen," he said at a townhall here. "The ASAT test by last week has resulted in about 400 pieces of orbital debris," he added. Bridenstine said not all of the pieces were big enough to track and the NASA is right now tracking objects which are 10 centimeters or bigger. "Some 60 pieces of orbital debris have been tracked so far, 24 out of which poses risk to the International Space Station," he said. Bridenstine was addressing employees of the Aeronautics and Space Administration days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a televised address, announced that shot down a in space with a missile, catapulting the country into an elite club of space powers alongside the US, and China Bridenstine is the first top official from the to come out in public against the India's ASAT test. "We are charged with commercialising of low earth orbit. We are charged with enabling more activities in space than we've ever seen before for the purpose of benefiting the human condition, whether it's or printing human organs in 3D to save lives here on earth or manufacturing capabilities in space that you're not able to do in a gravity well," he said. "All of those are placed at risk when these kinds of events happen," Bridenstine said as he feared India's ASAT test could risk proliferation of such activities by other countries. "When one country does it, other countries feel like they have to do it as well," he said. "It's unacceptable. The NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is," the NASA Administrator said. He said the NASA is "learning more and more every hour" that goes by about this orbital debris field that has been created from the anti- test. "Where we were last week with an assessment that comes from NASA experts as well as the Joint Space Operations Center (part of US Strategic Command).. is that the risk to the has increased by 44 per cent," Bridenstine said. The risk from small debris as a result of the ASAT test to the ISS went up 44 per cent over a period of 10 days. "So, the good thing is it's low enough in earth orbit that over time this will all dissipate," he told his NASA colleagues. He said a lot of debris from the 2007 direct ascent anti- test by is still in the space. "And we're still dealing with it. We are still, we as a nation are responsible for doing space situational awareness and space traffic management, conjunction analysis for the entire world," Bridenstine said. The US, he said, is doing it for free with the its taxpayers money from an orbital debris field that was created by another country. "Why do we do that as a nation? Because it's the right thing to do because we want to preserve the space environment," he said. According to Bridenstine, the US is currently tracking about 23,000 pieces of orbital debris that are 10 centimeters or bigger. "At the end of the day we need to be clear with everybody in the world, we're the only agency in the federal government that has human lives at stake here. And it is not acceptable for us to allow people to create orbital debris fields that put at risk our people," he said. Bridenstine said while the risk of the ISS went up 44 per cent, the astronauts are still safe. "The International Space Station is still safe. If we need to manoeuvre it, we will. The probability of that I think is low. But at the end of the day we have to be clear also that these activities are not sustainable or compatible with human spaceflight," he said. India on Tuesday signed an agreement with a development bank for setting up India-Africa Institute of Agriculture and Rural Development (IAIARD) in Malawi. The agreement was signed as a part of India's efforts to enhance capacity in the areas of agro-financing and entrepreneurship development for African countries, the Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement. The ministry signed the MoU with National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development Consultancy Service (NABCONS). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Indian-American man was sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay nearly one million dollars in fine for health care fraud and aggravated identity theft. Babubhai Bhurabhai Rathod of Michigan had pleaded guilty to both charges in August 2018, US Attorney Andrew Birge said. US District Judge Janet Neff also ordered Rathod to pay over USD 939,000 in restitution to federal health insurance programmes Medicare and Medicaid. In 2013, Rathod was sentenced to four years in prisonand was further excluded from participating in Medicare and Medicaidafter being convicted of paying practitioners illegal kickbacks in exchange for patient referrals to his health care companies. While in prison, Rathod faked a drug and alcohol use disorder in order to qualify for admission into the Residential Drug Abuse Programme (RDAP), a programme that allows eligible inmates to lessen the amount of time that they would otherwise serve. He completed RDAP and was released early from custody. Within days of his release in 2016, he began violating his exclusion and supervised release conditions by operating four health care providers across the State of Michigan - Advanced Medical Services (d/b/a Advanced Sleep Diagnostics of Michigan); Sleep Diagnostics of Michigan; EZ Sleep Supplies; and Paramount Home Care. To conceal his ownership of these providers from Medicare and Medicaid, Rathod used a variety of aliases, straw owners, and shell holding companies that were registered to other people. His scheme netted nearly a million dollars in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to which his providers were not entitled. As part of his scheme, Rathod used the name, address, date of birth, Social Security Number, and driver's license of a physician colleague to obtain working capital loans for Advanced Medical Services. He also used the physician's identity, without the physician's knowledge, to personally guarantee those loans. When Advanced Medical Services defaulted on one of these loans, a state-court judgment was entered against the physicianwithout the physician's knowledgeand the physician's bank account was frozen. At sentencing, Judge Neff noted the "breadth, scope, and depth" of Rathod's fraud and remarked that he was "stealing from the government. That is what this is." Judge Neff described Rathod as both "a man for whom the truth is a stranger" and a naturalised citizen who has "taken advantage of opportunities available in this country to steal from it." "The resources it took to unravel Rathod's elaborate scheme reflects our commitment to holding accountable those who would violate their federal programme restrictions," Birge said. Special Agent in Charge, US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General Chicago Region, Lamont Pugh said Rathod intentionally and recklessly tried to circumvent his 20-year exclusion in an attempt to line his pockets with vital taxpayer dollars. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian Army Tuesday destroyed seven Pakistani military posts across the Line of Control in retaliation to the continued ceasefire violations by them for the fifth day, said officials. This inflicted several casualties also on Pakistani troops, they added. Seven Pakistani posts across the LoC in Rakhchakri and Rawalkot forward areas of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) were destroyed, they said, adding there have been several causalities also on the Pakistani side. Three Indian villagers too were injured at Shahpur border area in Poonch district Tuesday in the shelling by the Pakistani army, the officials added. Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations admitted three casualties among their troops at Rakhchakri in Rawalakot of the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. An Indian Defence spokesperson said the Pakistani army began violating ceasefire early Tuesday. The spokesperson said the Pakistani troops violated the ceasefire at 11.30 am with mortar and artillery shelling and firings by small arms along the LoC in Nowshera sector in Rajouri district. This violation was replied befittingly, he added. "At about 1700 hours Tuesday, the Pakistani army again initiated unprovoked shelling with mortars and firing of small arms along the LoC in Shahpur & Kerni sectors in Poonch district," said the Defence spokesperson. "The Indian Army too is retaliating befittingly," he said. Pakistan's ISPR too, in a release, said three of their soldiers were killed Rakhchakri in Rawalakot Tuesday in retaliation by Indian forces along the Line of Control. The ISPR identified their slain soldiers as "Subedar Muhammad Riaz, a resident of Jhang, Lance Havaldar Aziz Ullah from Noshero Feroz and Sepoy Shahid Mansib from Abbotabbad." The ISPR added one of their soldiers too was injured in the retaliation by Indian Army. A BSF inspector and a five-year-old girl were among three persons killed while 24 others were injured Monday as Pakistani troops heavily shelled forward areas along the Line of Control in Poonch district, prompting the Indian Army to retaliate "befittingly", said officials. As a precautionary measure, all schools along the Line of Control in Poonch and Rajouri districts have been closed by authorities in view of the Pakistani shelling. With Pakistan using heavy weaponry and 120 mm mortar bombs targeting civilian areas along the LoC in Poonch, people have been advised to stay indoors, the officials said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 31-year-old Indian national has been sentenced to eight years and nine months in prison on Monday for his involvement in a major call centre scam under which he and his co-conspirators extorted money from American residents by impersonating tax officers, the US Department of Justice said. Nishitkumar Patel, who had pleaded guilty to the charges on January 9, has also been asked by a Florida court to pay USD 2,00,000, forfeit cash and a 2015 Land Rover that was seized in October 2018. According to court documents, Patel connived with the US-based co-conspirators and the India-based call centres to extort money from American residents by impersonating Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officers between 2014 and 2016. The IRS is the revenue service of the United States federal government. During this period, they mislead the victims in believing that they owed money to the IRS and would be arrested and fined if they did not pay their alleged taxes back immediately, as per the documents. The conspirators collected the fraud proceeds by withdrawing cash from prepaid cards purchased and funded by victims; hiring other conspirators (runners) to retrieve money wired by the victims to those runners; and/or hiring runners to open bank accounts into which victims deposited fraud proceeds, revealed the documents. The defendants collected the proceeds by providing the runners with the victims' names, locations, and amounts paid. The runners were directed to retrieve the fraud proceeds in cash and turn the funds over to the defendants, often less a payment to the runner for opening the account or conducting the transaction, according to the documents. Four others have already pleaded guilty for their roles in the scheme. On March 25, Alejandro Juarez was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison. Hemalkumar Shah, Sharvil Patel and Brenda Dozier are currently awaiting sentencing. "We here at IRS CI recognise the heartache and concern these crooks cause innocent people. This is why we are eager to team up with our law enforcement partners to track down these impersonators in whatever corner of the globe they may be hiding in," said special agent in-charge Mary Hammond of IRS Criminal Investigations, Tampa Field Office. J Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, said, "Over the last several years, American taxpayers have been subjected to unprecedented attempts to fraudulently obtain money by individuals impersonating Internal Revenue Service employees." "Victimising taxpayers by impersonating IRS employees is a serious crime," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Jammu and Kashmir police chief Dilbag Singh Tuesday sought to assure the people that all necessary efforts would be made to ensure a peaceful and secure atmosphere for them to exercise their franchise in the Lok Sabha polls. The director general of state police gave the assurance after visiting Baramulla and Kupwara districts of north Kashmir and reviewing the arrangements for the upcoming elections in the two districts. The DGP interacted also with the police officers and personnel of the district police at police lines in Baramulla and Kupwara and emphasised upon them to get fully prepared for the peaceful conduct of the forthcoming elections in the state. "Our men are well trained and well equipped to face any challenge in the field. During the previous years, our personnel have gained much experience and expertise in different fields of policing and have made achievements on different fronts," he said. The J&K Police has ensured peaceful elections in the past and during the upcoming elections also, our forces will make all necessary efforts to ensure a a peaceful and secure atmosphere so that people could exercise their franchise without any fear, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the first Indian-origin US Senator, has raised a solid $12 million over the first quarter of her presidential campaign, setting an early high bar for the Democratic field challenging President in 2020. Harris, 54, officially launched her campaign in January for the next year. Half of the total haul for Harris, a California senator, was raised online, including more than $1.1 million in the final week of March, when she spent heavily to attract more donors ahead of the financial deadline, CNN reported. Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, became the second major candidate to announce her first-quarter fundraising total after South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said he raised over $7 million in the first quarter, the report said. Harris said she received 218,000 individual contributions during the first quarter and 98 per cent of those contributions came in amounts smaller than $100. "A nationwide network of hundreds of thousands of grassroots supporters has stepped up to lay the foundation for a winning campaign," Harris' campaign manager Juan Rodriguez was quoted as saying by the Hill magazine. "This is a campaign powered by the people, focused on making healthcare a right, putting $500 a month in the pockets of working Americans, and giving every public school teacher in America a raise. We're excited by the support we're already seeing." Harris' campaign stressed that she is seeking donations only for the primary election and that 99.45 per cent of her donors can contribute again because they did not hit the maximum for the primary and general election. The campaign's announcement came after Sunday's Federal Election Commission quarterly fundraising deadline. If elected, Harris would create history by becoming the first woman in the White House. ALSO READ: Kamala Harris picks Baltimore as headquarter for 2020 presidential campaign Harris did not disclose how much she has spent during the first three months of the year, nor how much cash she has remained in the bank for the long primary fight, the report said. Her number is certain to be eclipsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Representative Beto O'Rourke of Texas, who each raised about $6 million in the first 24 hours of their campaigns, but it establishes a benchmark for the other Democrats who are competing for donors in an exceedingly crowded environment. Indian-Americans constitute 1 per cent of the American population and are one of the fastest growing minorities in the country. Amid Congress president Rahul Gandhi's remarks that his party was flexible and open to alliances, the AAP Tuesday said it will discuss the prospects of a pre-poll tie up with the grand old party with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and party leaders. "It was just a statement. We will discuss this with Arvind Kejriwal and other party members and let you know," AAP national spokesperson Sanjay Singh said while responding to a question at a press conference held at the party head office here. Earlier in the day, Gandhi, while releasing the Congress's election manifesto, had said his party was open to stitching alliances across the country and was "very flexible" on the issue. On being asked if there was any confusion over a possible alliance with the AAP, Gandhi told reporters, "There is no confusion on this. The situation is actually very clear on this issue. We have constructed alliances. We have been open to construct alliances and we have done it across the country. We are very flexible on this issue." An air of uncertainty has shrouded the Congress alliance with the AAP in Delhi. The Congress party unit in Delhi is divided on the issue with a section for and another against an alliance. The party has been dilly-dallying on the issue and has not been able to take or announce its decision in this regard. The AAP has been criticising the Congress leadership and has accused the party of "arrogance" in firming up an alliance with it in Delhi. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday accused his arch rival and RJD chief Lalu Prasad of being in touch with his associates through telephone in contravention of the rules applicable to those serving prison sentence. The charge made by Kumar, who heads JD(U), was denied by Prasads elder son Tej Pratap Yadav, who said he himself has not been able to talk to his father for more than a month. In an interview to a private channel which is likely to be telecast later this week, but excerpts of which are telecast by channels, Kumar spoke about Prashant Kishor, a formal poll strategist who was inducted by him into the JD(U) last year, denying that he has been sidelined in the party. Kumar also expressed strong displeasure with BJP spokesperson Syed Shahnawaz Husain blaming his JD(U) for his being denied a ticket from Bhagalpur which he had lost in 2014 but had represented previously. It is well known that Lalu keeps telephoning people, rules may be damned, Kumar said. While denying the charge, Tej Pratap Yadav claimed it has been more than a month since I had a word with my father. People meet Prasad on Saturdays, as per the jail manual, and Kumar is making a baseless allegation out of fear that he may be beaten during the Lok Sabha polls. Prasad is serving sentences in a number of fodder scam cases that pertain to fraudulent withdrawal of money from the treasury during the period he was the Chief Minister of undivided Bihar in the early 1990s. He is currently lodged at the RIMS hospital in Ranchi on account of multiple ailments. The Bihar CM also spoke candidly about Prashant Kishor, who after being inducted in the party by Kumar last year was catapulted to the post of national vice-president within a short time. I have excellent relations with Prashant and he has great regard for me. He also gets due respect in the party but if he has any misgivings, it is another matter, Kumar said in response to a query about speculations that Kishor has fallen out of favor with the party boss, resulting in his being sidelined. He is not at all sidelined. He is among our campaigners for the Lok Sabha pollsbut in politics things do happen, Kumar said apparently referring to Kishor being kept out of strategic decisions like decision on candidates. About the impression that being the partys national vice-president Kishor was no. 2 in the party, Kumar said numbers are a matter of analysis. Kumars statement was in sync with his earlier stance wherein he had dismissed talks of Kishor being his political successor with the remark successions take place in a monarchy. He also stressed that working as a political strategist for different parties is different from starting career as a politician as Kishor is now doing. Kumar also expressed strong displeasure with BJP spokesperson Syed Shahnawaz Husain blaming his JD(U) for his being denied a ticket from Bhagalpur which he had lost in 2014 but had represented previously. I am told he (Husain) is a member of his partys state election committee. Does he not know that we never pressed for Bhagalpur. And does he not even remember that when he first got elected from the constituency, it was through a by-election necessitated by Sushil Kumar Modi (Deputy CM) vacating the seat and my pushing his candidature, Kumar said. The only seat the JD-U insisted on was Darbhanga, which finally went to BJP, he said. I would like the BJP to come out with an explanation which could clear the air and would advise him (Husain) to refrain from making comments which could be detrimental to him, Kumar warned. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Centre and the parties that have challenged the validity of various provisions of the Land Acquisition Act to consensually frame the questions of law to be answered by a five-judge Constitution bench. The five-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, asked the parties to submit the questions by Wednesday. "As the questions, which are required to be answered, have not been formulated, we leave it to the counsels of the contesting parties to formulate and suggest questions on which decision of the Constitution bench is required," the bench, also comprising justices N V Ramana, D Y Chandrachud, Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna, said. It added that the matter will be taken up for hearing on April 4. On March 6 last year, the apex court had said a larger bench would test the correctness of two separate verdicts related to land acquisition, delivered by two of its benches of similar strength, which had snowballed into a major controversy. The top court had said it was "prima facie" of a view that a three-judge bench could not hold the verdict of an earlier three-judge bench "per incuriam" (without due regard to the law). It had said the larger bench would consider all the aspects, including the correctness of the decision delivered in the Pune Municipal Corporation (2014) case and other judgments as well as the judgment delivered in the Indore Development Authority case on February 8 last year. Both the Pune Municipal Corporation and the Indore Development Authority verdicts dealt with the issue of interpretation of section 24 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. On February 22 last year, a two-judge bench had referred the matter relating to land acquisition to the Chief Justice of India (CJI) for constituting an "appropriate bench" to deal with the "piquant" situation that had arisen after an order by a three-judge bench, which had virtually stayed the operation of its February 8 verdict. The three-judge bench had, on February 21, observed that if "judicial discipline" and propriety were not maintained, the institution would "go forever", while referring to the February 8 verdict passed by another three-judge bench, which had held that compensation not availed within the stipulated five-year period would not be a ground for cancellation of land acquisition. In its February 8 judgment, the apex court, in a 2:1 majority view, had held that the 2014 verdict of another three-judge bench in the Pune Municipal Corporation case was passed without due regard to the law (as per incuriam) and said that land acquired could not be quashed due to delay on part of the land owners in accepting compensation within five years due to litigation or other reasons. It had held that once the compensation amount for land acquired by a government agency had unconditionally been tendered but the land owner had refused to accept it, this would amount to payment and discharge of obligation on part of the agency. The court had also held that it would not be open to the person who had refused the compensation to raise the point that since the amount had not been deposited in court or paid to him, the acquisition had lapsed. The 2014 verdict was rendered unanimously by a three-judge bench, which had held that "the deposit of compensation amount in the government treasury is of no avail and cannot be held to be equivalent to compensation paid to the landowners/persons interested". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With an eye to dent the BJP, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Tuesday announced it will support Suresh Bansal, the joint candidate of the SP-BSP-RLD combine from the Ghaziabad Lok Sabha seat. The decision of the AAP, which is not contesting this seat despite having fielded a nominee in 2014, is to ensure the defeat of the BJP, a senior party office-bearer said. "AAP's line is clear, that is to remove the Modi-Shah duo from power," party's western Uttar Pradesh unit convenor Somendra Dhaka told PTI. He said Bansal had reached out to AAP's UP in-charge Sanjay Singh and after discussions the decision was taken by party leadership and workers. "Last time we had got around one lakh votes, which means we have presence and supporters in Ghaziabad. We fought the mayoral elections here recently and got good number of votes," he said. Dhaka said an understanding has also been reached with the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) for supporting Jayant Chaudhury in Baghpat and Ajit Chaudhary in Muzaffarnagar. "During the first phase of the polls in UP, we have fielded candidates only from Saharanpur and Aligarh. So, on those seats we will be campaigning for ourselves, while on these two seats (Baghpat and Muzaffarnagar) we are supporting the RLD." "Talks are underway for a similar understanding in Meerut, Kairana and Bulandshahr but nothing has been finalised yet," he told PTI over the phone. Earlier, the AAP's Gautam Buddh Nagar unit had launched an anti-BJP campaign, days after the nomination of the party's candidate Shweta Sharma was rejected by poll officials for failing to find 10 proposers. The party, however, had alleged injustice and claimed the nomination was rejected "under some pressure by the ruling party". In 2014, AAP candidate Shazia Ilmi had polled nearly a lakh votes, while BJP's V K Singh had won the election by securing over 7.58 lakh votes. Ilmi had later quit the AAP and joined the BJP. This time BJP's Singh is among the 12 candidates in the fray along with Congress's Dolly Sharma and BSP-SP-RLD's Bansal. Ghaziabad, which has over 27 lakh voters, goes to polls on April 11 during the first leg of the seven-phased elections. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sitting MP and Maharashtra BJP chief Raosaheb Danve Tuesday filed his nomination from Jalna for the April-May Lok Sabha polls. Among those who were present while Danve filed his nomination papers were chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, Union minister Ramdas Athawale, Assembly Speaker Haribhau Bagde and Maharashtra minister and Shiv Sena leader Arjun Khotkar. Incidentally, Jalna Lok Sabha seat was at the centre of a bitter fight between Danve, who has represented it since 1999, and Khotkar who wanted the Sena to allow him to take on the former. The issue was defused after several rounds of talks between top BJP and Sena leaders saw Khotkar withdrawing his demand and publicly stating that he would help Danve in his re-election bid. Speaking at a rally after Danve had filed his nomination, Fadnavis said, "Khotkar is like his namesake from the Mahabharata, He was going over to the Kauravas (apparent reference to Congress) before Uddhav Thackeray like Lord Krishna won him over and brought him back to the Pandavas (the BJP-Sena alliance)." The Maharashtra CM also took the opportunity to tear into the Congress manifesto which was released in Delhi on Tuesday. Among other things, the Congress manifesto promises a sum of Rs 72,000 each to five crore poor families under the 'Nyay' scheme, filling up 22 lakh government vacancies, bringing a separate budget for farmers and fixing a single moderate GST rate. Calling it an "April Fools' joke", Fadnavis said the Congress came up with the "garibi hatao" (banish poverty) slogan every time polls were round the corner. However, the Congress, in the last 50 years, had only managed to remove the poverty of its own leaders and not of the masses, Fadnavis said mocking the manifesto. Athawale said the Congress was indulging in caste and claimed he was defeated from the Shirdi Lok Sabha seat in the 2009 polls due to the machinations of the NCP-Congress. He added that his differences with the BJP, over his Republican Party of India (A) not being given a single seat by the saffron alliance, had now been ironed out. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Maharashtra minister Vinod Tawde on Tuesday asked the Congress to declare its prime ministerial candidate for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Speaking to reporters here at the state BJP office, he said former Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan had recently said Narendra Modi would not become the prime minister again. "Prithviraj Chavan is a highly educated man, who studied in a foreign university. If you have done a study on the political situation of the country, you should openly say who will be the next prime minister," he said. Tawde said the manifesto of the Congress will have no meaning unless the party defines who it means when it talks about "we will deliver". The 55-page manifesto of the party is titled 'Hum Nibhayenge' (We will deliver). "When talking about 'Hum Nibhayenge' the Congress should make it clear who it is talking about. Is it Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav, Chandrababu Naidu or leaders of Kerala and Tamil Nadu? Unless they make it clear who will fulfil all these promises, the manifesto will have no relevance," he said. Tawde further said Modi's criticism of NCP chief Sharad Pawar has caused tremors in that party and therefore, its leader Supriya Sule said the prime minister does not have the experience of having a family. "While talking about Modi ji's family, she is forgetting Modi ji has a brother, who has children. It is for all to see how he behaves with the children of his brother, unlike the family feud in the NCP," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) NCP chief Sharad Pawar Tuesday cited his mother's influence and said he would not resort to attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally, despite the latter having done so. Launching the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance's poll campaign in Maharashtra at a public rally in Wardha on Monday, Modi had made a stinging attack on Pawar claiming the NCP chief had withdrawn from the Lok Sabha polls as he had realised the situation was not favourable. Modi went on to say Pawar was losing his grip on the Nationalist Congress Party and was weakened by family feuds led by his nephew. "Modi is launching personal attacks wherever he goes. But I will not do so as I am influenced by my mother. Personal criticism does not fit in our culture," Pawar said Tuesday, adding that the prime minister did not need to be bothered about family feuds in the NCP. Pawar was speaking at a meeting organised here for Swabhimani Paksha MP Raju Shetti, who is the opposition alliance's candidate from Hatkanangle, and Kolhapur contestant Dhananjay Mahadik. Praising the Nehru-Gandhi family, he said four generations had sacrificed their lives in the service of the country. "Indira Gandhi worked for removing poverty. Rajiv Gandhi worked for bringing modernisation and technology to the country. Many people thought Sonia Gandhi would leave the country after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, but she stayed back due to her commitment towards it," he said. "Now the fifth generation from the family is serving the nation. The country's PM, however, continues to attack only one family," Pawar claimed. He added that Modi was attacking opponents to divert attention from the failures of his government. "In Maharashtra, 15,998 farmers committed suicide in the last four years. They have been sufferingbecause of lack of fair prices for farm produce. This government came to power promising jobs but, far from creating employment, jobs have been lost due to demonetisation and GST," he alleged. "Fifteen lakh people in Maharashtra and one crore people in the country lost their jobs after demonetisation," the former Union agriculture minister claimed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Rajya Sabha member and leading journalist Swapan Dasgupta Tuesday sought to know West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's viewson the statement made by National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on J&K having a separate prime minister and wondered whether she supports it. "National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah was present during the January 19 rally by Mamata Banerjee. I would like to ask her what is her view reagrding Omar Abdullah's recent statement demanding a separate prime minister for Jammu and Kashmir. "Does she support that statement? If yes what are her views on it, if no then what is her view," Dasgupta, who is affiliated to BJP, said. Omar Abdullah had on Monday said that NC will strive hard to restore the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir that could include having a president and a Prime Minister. The statement, which was made at a rally at Bandipore in north Kashmir, had evoked sharp condemnation from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. BJP favours repealing of Article 370 of Constitution which gives that state special status. Dasgupta along with West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh posed questions at a press conference here on Banerjee and her party, the TMC's manifesto. He referred to the promise in the TMC manifesto of reviving the Planning Commission and a review of the GST if voted to power and wondered whether the party wanted to create a scope for evasion of taxes which has been tapped by the introduction of GST. "In the present form of GST we have seen a huge increase in tax collection which has helped all the states including West Bengal. But she (Banerjee) is saying she will review GST. Is she trying to make a scope for tax evasion?" he said. Later speaking to reporters, Ghosh said the opposition alliance is a "rudderless boat" which does not have any proper leader. "On one hand you have Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is the BJP PM candidate. But who is the PM candidate of opposition alliance?" Ghosh asked. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) From marigold flowers, brass matka 'gift' to the six-point development policy, tribals in Medak parliamentary constituency in Telangana fondly remember all they received from former prime minister Indira Gandhi who had won from here in 1980. Thirty nine years after her win, elders in this constituency recount Gandhi's election rallies with awe, while some believe 'Indiramma' is still "blessing people here from heaven". "Abhi bhi apna dil Indira ko. Khitna sona de, phir bhi dil aur vote Indira ko (Now also, my heart is for Indira. You may give gold, but my heart and vote is for Indira)," says 90-year old Rupla Pathloth, a Lambani tribal farmer from Fareedpur village, when asked about the current elections. Pathloth, who owns two acres of farm land, received a brass water matka (pitcher) from Gandhi in the 1980 parliamentary elections when she defeated S Jaipal Reddy of the Janata Party with over two lakh votes. "Each Lambani tanda had got 10 brass water matka. I too had received one and kept it safely," he said. Recalling Gandhi's election speech, Pathloth said, "She had promised to give us better life and she delivered that promise. Maximum benefits were received during her time." "She had said if voted to power she will give houses to the poor. She kept her promise and gave funds to build my house," said 65-year old Bugrot Ambriya from Mandapur in Jinnaram Mandal. Bhuli Jambla, an 85 year-old Lambani tribal woman, hardly remembers what Gandhi had spoken during an election rally then. But she adds, "I admired her (Gandhi) . She gave life to our community. I remember, she threw marigold flowers from the stage, I had got one." Recalling how his father benefited after nationalisation of banks during Indira Gandhi's rule, farmer Banoth Madhu said, "Tribals were not getting bank loans then and faced problems. When banks were nationalised, my father was able to get a loan amount of Rs 5,000."The bank loans helped tribals to boost farming and provide better education to the children and avail jobs reserved under the six-point formula, he added. Former prime minister had for the first time in Medak implemented the Six-Point agreement, under which reservation in class-IV government posts and gazetted and non-gazetted posts was given to local people. The agreement with the leaders of Andhra Pradesh was reached by the then Congress government in order to quell 1973's violent Andhra movement for a separate state. Many people in Medak also remember Gandhi visiting famous church 'Diocese of Medak of the Church of South India' in 1984. In the visitors' book she had written, "Prime Minister of India visited the cathedral and took blessings on July 19, 1984 at 2pm." Amidst the nostalgia, the tribals also voice concerns over lack of development in the area. Farmers are suffering due to lack of irrigation facilities, education institutions are inadequate and there is unemployment due to closure of Nizam Sugars factory, they said. This constituency has its own identity in Indian as voters of Medak have given a prime minister, a chief minister of Telangana, a Union minister and a Speaker in the undivided Andhra Pradesh assembly. Though the Congress has won this constituency nine times since 1957, it failed to win during the last 20 years. Though the BJP won it in 1999, it has been TRS all the way since 2004. Former speaker Baga Reddy of the Congress, ex-union minister A Narendra, Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, Congress star compaigner M Vijaysanthi, all have won from Medak. In the Lok Sabha elections to be held on April 11 in Telangana, TRS sitting MP Kotha Prabhakar Reddy is re-contesting from the seat, while Congress has declared Gali Anil Kumar as its candidate and the BJP has fielded Raghunanadan Rao. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Tuesday said that people in Delhi were too far away to understand the issues and problems of the North East and urged citizens of the region to stand together for fulfilling their aspirations. Sangma, who is president of National People's Party (NPP), highlighted how unity among people of the Northeast helped foil passage of Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. Regional parties like NPP, United Democratic Party, the Peoples Democratic Front and the Hill State Peoples Democratic Party have come together to field a common candidate under the banner of ruling Meghalaya Democratic Alliance (MDA) on both the two Lok Sabha seats in the state. Jemino Mawthoh, general secretary of the UDP, is the common candidate of the MDA for the Shillong seat while Agatha K Sangma of the NPP is their joint nominee in Tura constituency. The people in Delhi are too far away to understand the issues and problems faced by the people of North East. Different governments at the Centre have come up with different policies, such as the Look Act Policy and Act East Policy and nothing tangible is happening on the ground, Sangma said addressing a rally for MDA candidate Mawthoh at the Polo grounds here. The people of North East were united in opposing the Centres Citizenship Amendment bill and because of this unity, the bill could not be passed, he said and urged the people of the region to stand united to ensure their aspirations are fulfilled. The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, that seeks to provide Indian citizenship to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan could not be tabled in Rajya Sabha on last working day in February and will get lapsed with the end of term of this Lok Sabha on June 3. MLAs and members of the autonomous district councils of the MDA constituents attended the rally. In his address, Jemino recalled how G G Swell, an MP of the All Party Hill Leaders Conference (APHLC), was instrumental in creation of the Hill state of Meghalaya and the setting up of the North Eastern Hill University (NEHU). He said Swell is an example where an MP of the regional parties is able to take forward the issues of the people, rubbishing the Congress claim that it is futile to elect a regional candidate to the Parliament. Election to both the seats is scheduled on April 11 along with the bye-poll for Selsella assembly constituency. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Veteran rocker Mick Jagger is set to undergo heart surgery. According to the Rolling Stone magazine, the 75-year-old musician will have the surgery to replace a valve in his heart. As a result of the treatment and recovery period, the Rolling Stones postponed the North American leg of their 'No Filter' tour, which was supposed to run from April 20 to July 29. The legendary English rock band were due to play 17 shows in the US and Canada. "Mick Jagger has been advised by doctors that he cannot go on tour at this time as he needs medical treatment. The doctors have advised Mick that he is expected to make a complete recovery so that he can get back on stage as soon as possible," the band's representative had said in a statement issued on Saturday. Jagger had also took to Twitter to apologise to his fans. "I really hate letting you down like this. I'm devastated for having to postpone the tour but I will be working very hard to be back on stage as soon as I can," he had tweeted. Drudge Report first reported the saying that the procedure will take place on Friday in New York. The publication added that Jagger is expected to make a full recovery and return to touring this summer. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Several million Muslims have travelled to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhim in Baghdad in recent days to commemorate the revered Shiite figure's death, an Iraqi official said Tuesday. "More than five million pilgrims" have flocked to the glittering shrine from other parts of Iraq as well as the Gulf, Iran, India and Pakistan since Friday, according to Adi al-Kazmi, an official at the site. Many had travelled hundreds of kilometres on foot, by horse or even on camels over several days, caught outside in heavy thunderstorms that hit Iraq at the weekend. Authorities had sealed off many of Baghdad's thoroughfares in recent days to allow pilgrims to reach the shrine, which is located in the city's northern Kadhimiyah neighbourhood. The site features an intricately-designed mosque and includes Imam Kadhim's double-domed mausoleum. Musa al-Kadhim, the seventh of 12 imams venerated by Shiite Muslims, died in 799 while in detention by Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. His death is commemorated yearly with a funeral reenactment that sees a mock coffin carried into the shrine by swaying pilgrims. On Tuesday, huge crowds of praying visitors made their way to the shrine, passing dozens of tents erected by volunteers to provide free tea, sweets, and shelter. A group of men dressed in black gathered in a tightly-packed circle and began rhythmically striking their chests as a sign of mourning. Security forces have set up rings of checkpoints to thoroughly search all pilgrims, and no security incidents were reported. In 2005, at least 965 pilgrims heading to the Imam Kadhim shrine died after a mass stampede along a nearby bridge that was sparked by rumours of a suicide bomber in the crowd. Iraq declared victory against the Islamic State group in late 2017 after three years of fierce fighting that ravaged the country's economy. It is now keen to demonstrate its newfound stability, particularly with religious tourism to its many Shiite sites. Many of its religious tourists come from neighbouring Iran, which announced recently that it and Iraq would introduce reciprocal visa-free travel. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sudin Dhavalikar, who was unceremoniously dropped as deputy chief minister of Goa, Tuesday claimed efforts initiated by late chief minister Manohar Parrikar and Union minister Nitin Gadkari for resumption of mining were stalled at the behest of somebody. In a veiled attack on the ruling BJP, Dhavalikar told reporters that MPs from Goa failed to effectively raise with the Centre the demand for resumption of mining activity, which has been stopped since March last year following a Supreme Court order. Dhavalikar said he was witness to the telephonic conversation in which Parrikar, who was admitted in the AIIMS in Delhi, had requested Gadkari to intervene in resumption of mining activity. He didn't specify the exact period when the purported conversation occurred between the two. "After Parrikar spoke to Gadkari, the issue was taken up seriously by the Centre and it even went up to the office of attorney general," Dhavalikar claimed. He claimed the businessmen linked to iron ore mining industry in Goa were even called to Delhi for discussion on the matter. "But suddenly Gadkari was held back by someone. I do not know who that someone was," he said. The iron ore industry came to a standstill since March 15, 2018, after the apex court quashed 88 mining leases. Mining dependents are hoping for an amendment to either the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) (MMDR) Act or the Goa Daman and Diu (Abolition of Concession and Declaration as Mining Leases) Act, 1987 to circumvent the supreme court ban. Dhavalikar was dropped from Cabinet by Chief Minister Pramod Sawant in the last week of March, after two of total three MLAs of the Maharashtravadi Gomantak Party (MGP) broke away and merged with the BJP. He accused the state government of not doing enough to resolve the issue. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Three motorcycle-borne miscreants looted Rs 3 lakh from a man in Bihar's East Champaran district on Tuesday, police said. The man runs a bank's customer service point (CSP) at Dilawarpur village, the police said. The incident occurred near Dilawarpur High School under the jurisdiction of Kesariya police station when the man was on his way to the CSP at the village, the officer-in-charge of Kesariya police station, Kanchan Bhaskar, said. Three bike-borne miscreants stopped the man's motorbike and snatched a bag containing Rs 3 lakh from him, Bhaskar said, adding, Kumar was on his way to the village after withdrawing money from an ATM at Sahebganj in Muzaffarpur district. They also took his laptop and mobile phone, the police officer said. An investigation has been initiated, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Mizoram Chief Electoral Officer Ashish Kundra Tuesday appealed to a conglomerate of civil societies and student bodies to reconsider its decision to boycott the April 11 Lok Sabha elections in the state and observe indefinite bandh from April 8. The NGO Coordination Committee (NGOCC) Monday said it would boycott polls to the lone Mizoram Parliamentary seat if special polling booths are established in the state for Bru refugees staying in neighbouring Tripura. The Election Commission is setting up 15 exclusive polling booths in the Mizoram-Tripura border Kanhmun village for 12,081 Bru refugees, who are voters of Mizoram and now housed in six camps in Tripura. The step had been taken in the November 2018 state assembly polls too. Kundra urged the civil societies not to deprive the people of their democratic rights and to ensure that people of Mizoram has representation in Parliament. "At a meeting held before the assembly election last year, it was decided that Bru voters living in the relief camps would exercise their franchise inside Mizoram, and it was arranged. Officials of the EC, the NGOCC and the state election department had attended the meeting," the CEO said. He told reporters that as far as he knows, there is no agreement that the Bru refugees will cast their votes in those polling stations of Mizoram where they were enrolled as voters. The NGOCC had earlier threatened to launch agitation if temporary polling stations were set up for the Brus. The organisation was of the opinion that those living outside Mizoram should not be allowed to vote in the state. Thousands of Bru community people had been lodged in the six relief camps in North Tripura district since late 1997 after they fled from Mizoram in the wake of a communal tension. The Centre and the governments of Tripura and Mizoram had taken steps to repatriate the Bru refugees but those efforts did not yield much. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi Tuesday tore into the Congress-led UPA, blaming its "appeasement politics" for the failure of law enforcement agencies to rein in terror activities when it was in power and claiming it raised the "bogey of Hindu terror" to "misdirect" investigation. He also blasted the opposition parties for seeking proof of military operations against terror camps in the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack, saying they appeared more like spokespersons for Pakistan than political parties representing India. Kicking off his Lok Sabha poll campaign in Bihar with two back-to-back rallies in Jamui and Gaya, where candidates of his alliance partners-- LJP and JD(U)-- are in the fray, the prime minister assailed the Congress over a host of issues, including its failure to quell terrorism and lack of development. He also hit out at National Conference leader Omar Abdullah for advocating restoration of the post of prime minister in Jammu and Kashmir, wondering can any country have more than one PM. "I would like the Congress and the RJD, which are part of the same mahamilavat gang, to come clean on the issue," he said. "They appear more like spokespersons for Pakistan than political parties representing India," Modi said launching his campaign at a rally in Jamui where LJP leader Chirag Paswan, son of party president Ram Vilas Paswan, is in the fray. In Jamui, the seat reserved for Scheduled Castes, Modi accused the Congress of having neglected B R Ambedkar like no other party did. He also claimed that his rivals were spreading the canard that the BJP, if voted to power again, will do away with reservations for the backward classes. "Governance goes into reverse gear when the Congress and its allies are in power. Terrorism, prices, violence, corruption, black money rise when Congress is in power; the country's prosperity, its credibility, the morale of the armed forces, respect for honesty decline," he said. Addressing another rally in Gaya in central Bihar, once a hotbed of naxal activities, Modi said the "mahamilavat (great adulteration) gang" was responsible for the surge in ultra-Left insurgency which his government quelled through effective security operations and efforts to reform those involved in such activities. He said the country used to be rocked by terrorist bombing with alarming frequency in all cornersDelhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Varanasi. There was a sudden drop in such incidents after May, 2014. The change was not brought about by me. You effected this change through your vote," he told the rally. The government machinery, he said, was the same but what had changed was "style, policy and will" of the government. "Our agencies were not lacking in ability even before we came to power. But they were not allowed to work on account of the appeasement of the previous government. And to misdirect the probe (bhatkaane ke liye), the bogey of Hindu terror was raised. In a case like Samjhauta Express blast, the role of Pakistan was completely brushed under the carpet," he alleged. Modi's comments came in the backdrop of all accused, including Hindu monk Swami Aseemanand, being acquitted in the Samjhauta Express blast case by an NIA court last month. "Much has been accomplished and much more remains to be done. I assure you that all incomplete works will be completed by this chowkidar of yours..with whom members of the Mahamilavat gang (mahamilavati aur unke pairokar) and sympathizers of terrorists (aatankwadi aur unke madadgar), have a problem," Modi said. Taking on Congress president Rahul Gandhi for his "chowkidar chor hai" barb, the prime minister alleged the opposition party had a disdain for "all those who earn their livelihood through hard work". "These people have only disdain for those who earn livelihood through hard work. Be it a chowkidar, a tea seller or a sanitary worker, when they see that I am wearing the epithet of chowkidar as a badge of honour, they demonstrate their snobbish mindset by calling me a watchman of toilets. "When I wipe the feet of safai karmis at the Kumbh, abuse is heaped on me. Is it not an insult to you?" Modi said in Gaya, also a reserved constituency. Addressing the rally where Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan were also present, Modi lauded the progress made by the state under the NDA, saying "had you not voted out the previous government, Gaya would have needed many more Dashrath Manjhis". Dashrath Manjhi, referred to as the "mountain man", was a famed stone-cutter from the district who carved a road out of a hillock by toiling away single-handedly for years with just a chisel and hammer. Addressing the rally in Jamui, Modi accused the Congress of having done everything to "defeat" Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution. "The Congress did everything possible to have Babasaheb defeated. It conspired to have his momory erased from the public mind. The 'family' remembered honouring its own members with Bharat Ratna but forgot Ambedkar," the prime minister said. He said it was because of the BJP's efforts that Ambedkar was bestowed the highest civilian award years after his death. In an apparent rebuttal of RJD's repeated claim that that the BJP will do away with quotas in government jobs and educational institutions if voted to power again, Modi declared, "Nobody can even touch reservations for the backward classes." "We introduced 10 per cent quota for the economically backward people among the unreserved category...we did it without diluting reservations for SCs, STs and OBCs, without causing strife in society," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) World Autism Awareness Day (WAAD) is an internationally recognised day on 2 April every year to raise awareness of the hurdles that people with autism and others living with autism face every day. Following research by the University of Bristol, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and Autism Independence, a film that tells the stories of Bristol-based Somali families affected by autism and the professionals who support them will be premiered tomorrow [Wednesday 3 April]. The research revealed that cultural stigma surrounding mental health, challenging behaviour and disability means that families in the Somali community often hide their child and dont seek help early. Parents can feel isolated and don't engage with support services for their child. Research also suggests that service providers would benefit from a better understanding of the cultural perceptions of autism and the impact that this has on engagement with services. Like other migrant groups, the Somali community has high numbers of children with autism, many of whom are likely to be severely affected. But there is no Somali word for autism, making it hard to understand and accept. More than 70 families in the Bristol Somali community have one or more children with autism. They are supported by a community organisation, Autism Independence, led by Nura Aabe. Nura came to Bristol from Somalia at the age of ten and her oldest son has autism. Autism Independence works with health, social care and education services to bridge the gap between familys needs and service provision. Building on an NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC West) research project, the film tells the stories of some of the families supported by Autism Independence and their experiences of accessing services. The film aims to increase awareness of autism in the Somali community, while also being a resource for professionals. Nura Aabe, Director of Autism Independence (AI), said: "It's been wonderful and humbling to hear the impact that Autism Independence has had on these families. Its an honour to have been able to help them over the years, and to share their stories with this film. "We hope Overcoming Barriers will challenge the stigma of autism in the Somali community, and that families will benefit from a better understanding of the condition and the support thats out there. The film will also be available to Somali communities in other countries, who share common experiences in terms of their understanding and acceptance of autism." Dr Fiona Fox, Senior Research Associate at NIHR CLAHRC West and the University of Bristol, said: "Our earlier research with Autism Independence shed light on the challenges these families face in getting support for their children. It showed that service providers need to understand cultural views of autism to help them offer the best support for these families. We also identified a need to raise awareness and reduce stigma in the Somali community, and to provide support to encourage families to seek help for their children. "When we shared these findings, many organisations asked for information, resources and training to help them work more effectively with these families. This was where the idea for the film came from." 'Overcoming Barriers: Autism in the Somali community' will be premiered at 10am on Wednesday 3 April 2019 at the Watershed, Bristol. Somali and English versions of the film will be available online following the launch. The premiere, during World Autism Awareness Week, is free but tickets must be booked in advance via Eventbrite. AI and CLAHRC West produced the film with the Therapeutic Media Company, which specialises in films for the health and social care sectors. This project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Account. National Conference (NC) president Farooq Abdullah on Tuesday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a good actor who had surpassed several established actors and a magician who performed many tricks. He also alleged that the BJP-led central government had failed on all fronts and was "milking" the situation in the aftermath of the February 14 Pulwama terror attack to hide its "failures". "The incumbent Modi government failed on all fronts. However, they saw a way out in hiding behind the Pulwama attack. When many CRPF jawans were killed in Chhattisgarh, Modi did not go there. The sacrifice of the CRPF men in Chhattisgarh did not move him, he remained unfazed. "Not just that, when the bodies of the slain CRPF men (in the Pulwama attack) were brought to Delhi, Modi was busy in a shooting. The bodies of the slain CRPF men were kept waiting for the tributes, which were to be paid by him," Abdullah told a rally in Ganderbal. The former Union minister alleged that the Centre took no time after the Pulwama attack to "milk the situation" in order to hide the "farmer distress, price-rise, foreign policy failures and falling economy". "I have not seen such an actor. His (Modi's) eminence in theatrics has surpassed all actors like Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Shahrukh Khan. He is such a magician that I cannot tell you...he plays so many tricks. "He has been doing nothing but lying to people since he took the reins of power. He squandered the mandate of the people. Besides, he wasted the precious time of the nation and its people," Abdullah said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The opposition RJD in Bihar Tuesday took potshots at Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, who shared stage at an election rally at Gaya, wondering whether the prime minister privately expressed regret to the chief minister over the infamous "DNA" remark. "Hope the DNA episode were discussed. And explanations offered that the words had been uttered unwittingly," RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav told reporters here when asked what he thought of the rally where Modi, Kumar and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan put up a joint show of strength for the NDA. Yadav was referring to Prime Minister Modi's remarks made during the 2015 assembly polls, which the RJD fought in alliance with Kumar's JD(U) besides the Congress. Modi, whose projection as the prime ministerial candidate by the BJP had led Kumar to snap JD(U)'s 17-year-old ties with the BJP, had attacked Kumar over the removal of Jitan Ram Manjhi as the chief minister. He had also quipped that the manner in which "a Mahadalit was insulted" indicated that there was "something wrong with the political DNA" of the JD(U) leader. Kumar had taken strong exception to the remark, insisting that it was tantamount to insulting the entire population of Bihar. The bitter rivalry between the two leaders, however, took a back seat over time and Kumar returned to the NDA in 2017 after ending his short-lived alliance with the RJD over the issue of corruption allegations against Tejashwi Yadav, who was then the deputy chief minister. At the Gaya rally, the two leaders showered praises on each other. Modi lauded Kumar for getting all villages across Bihar electrified and said, "I can say from experience (as Gujarat chief minister) that this is no mean feat". Kumar, in his address, thanked the Modi government for extending full cooperation for the state's development including a Rs 50,000 crore aid for building roads. He also urged the people of the state to vote in large numbers for the NDA and help Modi return to power. Tejashwi Yadav, however, maintained that Modi's promises like generous central assistance for development of Gaya a renowned Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimage town into a tourist spot where the footfall would exceed that at the Taj Mahal in Agra were far from being realised. Interestingly, Manjhi who had been at the centre of the 'DNA episode' left the NDA last year and is now a part of the "Mahagathbandhan" led by the RJD and comprising the Congress, Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP and Mukesh Sahni's VIP. The former Bihar chief minister who floated Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) after quitting JD(U), is the Mahagathbandhan candidate from Gaya. Not known for being active on Twitter, the HAM president took to the micro-blogging site accusing the prime minister of pursuing "politics of hate". "You are welcome to the holy city of Gaya. This land has been made pure by luminaries like Buddha and Mahavira. Your politics of hate will find no takers here," tweeted Manjhi. Manjhi's message came in reply to a tweet from Modi earlier in the day in which the prime minister had mentioned that he would be holding two rallies in Bihar - at Jamui followed by Gaya. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister on Tuesday tore into the Congress-headed UPA, blaming its "appeasement politics" for the inability of the law-enforcement agencies to rein in terror activities while it was in power. The bogey of Hindu terror was raised to misdirect investigation, he said at a poll rally here. Addressing a rally in this central Bihar town which had once been a hotbed of naxal activities, said the same "Mahamilavat (highly aduterated) gang" (the opposition alliance) was responsible for the surge in ultra-Left actvities which his government has quelled through effective security operations and efforts to reform those involved in it. The country used to be rocked by terrorist bomb attacks with alarming frequency in all corners Gaya, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Varanasi. There was a sudden drop in such incidents after May, 2014. The change was not brought about by me. You effected this change through your vote, he said, evoking a huge round of applause. The government machinery was the same but what changed were style, policy and will of the government, he said. Our agencies were not lacking in ability even before we came to power. But they were not allowed to work on account of the appeasement politics of the previous government. And to misdirect the probe (bhatkaane ke liye), the bogey of Hindu terror was raised. In a case like Samjhauta Express blast, the role of Pakistan was completely brushed under the carpet, the prime minister alleged. Modis comment came in the backdrop of all the accused, including Hindu monk Swami Aseemanand, being acquitted in the Samjhauta Express blast case by an NIA court. Much has been accomplished and much more remains to be done. I assure you that all incomplete works will be completed by this chowkidar of yours ... with whom members of the Mahamilavat gang and sympathizers of terrorists, have a problem, said evoking hysterical applause. Exuding confidence, he said "Modi will form the government again. Countrymen and Indians abroad are blessing the chowkidar" and thanked the people for giving him and BJP the chance to serve them. Taking head on president Rahul Gandhis chowkidar hi chor hai barb, the prime minister alleged the opposition had disdain for those who earn their livelihood through hard work. These people (opposition) have only disdain for those who earn livelihood through hard work. Be it a chowkidar, a tea-seller or a sanitary worker. When they saw that I was wearing the epithet of chowkidar as a badge of honour, they demonstrated their snobbish mindset by calling me a watchman of toilets. "When I wiped the feet of safai karmis at the Kumbh, abuses were heaped on me. Is it not an insult to you ?, Modi remarked at the venue which, incidentally, falls in a reserved constituency. Speaking at a rally where Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan were also present, Modi lauded the progress made by the state under the NDA, which has been in power for over a decade. Had you not voted out the previous government, Gaya would have needed many more Dashrath Manjhis, he remarked. Dashrath Manjhi, referred to as Mountain man, was a famed stone-cutter from the district who flattened a hillock by toiling away for years just with a chisel and a hammer to carve out a road to make his village more accessible. Modis reference to Manjhi was a veiled attack to the poor infrastructure for which the state had been notorious under the RJD- reign. The Prime Minister said that development projects in the area had been neglected during the UPA rule and were now being resurrected by the NDA government. The delay has, however, resulted in manifold cost escalation of pending projects. He also said that under the NDA rule, tourism has risen by 1.5 times which has brought in money in the area and led to growth of shops and businesses. Modi's two election rallies in Bihar during the day, at Jamui and here, were held in constituencies being contested by allies JD(U) and LJP a pointer to cohesion in the ruling NDA. Almost a decade after security personnel were deployed outside the RSS office in Bhopal, the Congress government withdrew them Monday, only to rescind the decision a day later. The security personnel were withdrawn after the Kamal Nath-led government said they will be deployed on election duty elsewhere. The decision did not go down well with Congress candidate from Bhopal Digvijaya Singh, who tweeted his disapproval Tuesday. "Its not at all proper to remove security provided to the RSS office in Bhopal. I request Chief Minister Kamal Nath to immediately provide adequate security," Singh said. The chief minister has issued directives to reinstate the security outside the RSS office, an official said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi, undergoing extradition proceedings in the UK, intends to appeal for bail in the UK High Court after a second bail application was rejected by a lower court in London last week in the $1-billion Punjab Bank (PNB) fraud and money laundering case. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which represents the Indian authorities through the extradition process in the UK courts, said the 48-year-old intends to appeal against Judge Emma Arbuthnot's decision to turn down his bail plea at the end of a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court last Friday on the grounds that there was a substantial risk he would fail to surrender. Mr Modi intends to appeal his bail decision, but he has not yet submitted the appeal, a CPS spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday. The diamond merchant, who has been behind bars at HMP Wandsworth in south-west London ever since his first bail application was rejected on March 20, can apply for a High Court bail appeal at any time until his next remand hearing on April 26. However, his legal team must give the CPS 48 hours' notice and the bail hearing must be listed within 48 hours of the appeal being lodged in the higher court. We are not making any comment at this time, Modi's solicitor Anand Doobay said, in reference to plans for a bail appeal application. It remains to be seen how Modi's legal team is able to further bolster the bail application after Chief Magistrate Arbuthnot ruled that 1 million pounds offered as security for bail as well as the offer to meet stringent electronic tag restrictions on their client's movements, "akin to house arrest", were not sufficient to convince her that he did not pose a flight risk. This is a case of substantial fraud, with loss to a bank in India of between $1-2 billion. I am not persuaded that the conditional bail sought will meet the concerns of the government of India in this case, the judge noted. The court was told that Modi's son, who had been at a school in London, had now left for higher studies in the US, which led the judge to conclude that Modi not only had a lack of community ties in the UK but also large resources at his disposal to try and flee the country. Modi's attempt to acquire the citizenship of Vanuatu in late 2017 also went against him as the judge said it seemed like he was trying to move away from India at an important time. Clare Montgomery, Modi's barrister, had made a series of offers to try and convince the judge to grant bail, even bringing up his pet dog. He did have a son at Charterhouse (school in London) who has now gone to a university in the States and as a sign of ageing parents, led Mr Modi to get a dog instead. None of these actions are emblematic of someone setting out to flee the country, Montgomery had claimed. It is nonsense to say that he is a flight risk. He does not have a safe haven open to him and he has not travelled or applied for citizenship elsewhere...he only qualifies for leave to remain in this country, she said. CPS barrister Toby Cadman told the judge that there was a substantial risk that the prime accused in the case, "of an amount between $1 and 2 billion, would flee and attempt to interfere with witnesses and evidence. Judge Arbuthnot accepted the Indian government's arguments, noting the very unusual evidence she had seen at this early stage in the case of interference with witnesses and destruction of evidence in the form of mobile phones and a server. The court was told that Modi was the "principal beneficiary" of the fraudulent issuance of letters of undertaking (LoUs) as part of a conspiracy to defraud PNB and then laundering the proceeds of crime. The Congress has promised in its manifesto for the April-May parliamentary election that nothing will be done or allowed to change the constitutional position on Kashmir and that enforcement of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in Jammu and Kashmir will be reviewed if the party is voted to power. In the 55-page document, titled 'Hum Nibhayenge' (Congress will deliver), released on Tuesday, the party dedicated separate sections to Jammu and Kashmir and Northeastern states. Elaborating its vision for Jammu and Kashmir, the party said it has stood witness to the developments in the state since the instrument of accession was signed on October 26, 1947. Affirming that the whole of Jammu and Kashmir is part of India, the party said it also acknowledges the unique history of the state and the unique circumstances under which the state acceded to India that led to the inclusion of Article 370 in the Constitution of India. "Nothing will be done or allowed to change the constitutional position," the party said. Abrogating Article 370 has long been one of the core promises of the BJP. It grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir and limits Parliament's power to make laws concerning the state. The Congress said it has long held the view that dialogue is the only way to understand the aspirations of the people of the three regions of Jammu & Kashmir and find an honourable solution to their issues. The party advocated a "two-pronged" approach in the state if voted to power -- uncompromising firmness on the border and ending infiltration, as well as "absolute fairness" in dealing with the demands of the people and winning their hearts and minds. In significant proposals, the Congress promised to review the deployment of armed forces, move more troops to the border to stop infiltration completely, reduce the presence of the Army and the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) in the Kashmir Valley, and entrust more responsibility to the J&K police for maintaining law and order. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Disturbed Areas Act in J&K will be reviewed, the party said, adding that suitable changes will be made in the text of the laws to balance the requirements of security and the protection of human rights. "Building a Union of states that is India is a project of inclusiveness. Jammu & Kashmir and its problems deserve a large-hearted approach that will eschew muscular militarism and legalistic formulations and look for an innovative federal solution," the party said. Pitching for talks without preconditions, the Congress promised a solution through patient dialogue with all stakeholders in the state. "We will appoint 3 interlocutors drawn from civil society to facilitate such talks," it said. In a politically significant pitch, the party also promised free and fair elections to the state legislative assembly to be held immediately. The party expressed deep concern about the cases of discrimination and harassment of students, traders and others belonging to Jammu and Kashmir in the rest of India and promised their safety and their right to study or do business. The party also made a slew of promises for the Northeastern states with the most significant among them being restoring the special category status to them. The Congress also promised immediate withdrawal of the "widely resented" Citizenship Amendment Bill introduced by the BJP government "against the wishes" of the people of the Northeast, according to the manifesto. In its manifesto, the party also promised an industrial policy for the Northeastern states. "We will ensure that no citizen of India is denied inclusion in the final National Register of Citizens," the party said. The Congress said it will address the issue of illegal immigration into the Northeast through consultation with the states and evolve a consensus on the legislative measures that will secure the identity of the indigenous communities. "We will also engage the neighbouring countries, Bangladesh and Myanmar, to address and resolve the issue of illegal immigration into India," the party said. The Congress said it will strengthen the security of the borders with Bangladesh, Myanmar and China, resolve any border issues through dialogue. The party said it will resolve the pending inter-state issues, including boundary issues, in the Northeast through dialogue or mediation. The seven-phase Lok Sabha polls will begin on April 11 and 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.) Amid continued uncertainty over its tie-up with Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi, Congress President Rahul Gandhi Tuesday said his party was open to stitching alliances across the country and was "very flexible" on the issue. "There is no confusion on this. The situation is actually very clear on this issue. We have constructed alliances. "We have been open to construct alliances and we have done it across the country. We are very flexible on this issue," he told reporters when asked about the Congress' stand on its alliance in Delhi. He also denied that Congres has not been able to firm up alliances in several parts of the state and said the party has stiched alliances with like-minded parties in Maharashtra, Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and some other states. "We have an alliance in Bihar, we have an alliance in Jharkhand, we have an alliance in Tamil Nadu, we have an alliance in Maharashtra, so, I do not know where you are getting (this)..which papers you are reading, but, as far as I can see we have alliances across the country," he said while denying reports about Congress unable to form alliances in several states. An air of uncertainty has shrouded the Congress alliance with AAP in Delhi and the party has left it to Rahul Gandhi to take a decision in this regard. The Congress had earlier decided to go it alone and has also started the process of finalising its candidates for Delhi. The party unit in Delhi is divided on the issue with a section for and another against an alliance. The party has been dilly-dallying on the issue and has not been able to take or announce its decision in this regard. A meeting of top party leaders in this regard was held today on the issue. Delhi Congress chief Sheila Dikshit met party president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday. The meeting, which last for around 20 minutes was also attended by AICC in charge of Delhi PC Chacko. The AAP has been criticising the Congress leadership and has accused the party of "arrogance" in firming up an alliance with it in Delhi. AAP convener and Delhi Chief Mionister Arvind Kejriwal has said that Rahul Gandhi has rejected an alliance with AAP. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday lambasted the opposition parties for seeking proof of military operations against terror camps and remarked they appear spokespersons for Pakistan more than political parties representing India. Addressing his maiden rally in Bihar after announcement of Lok Sabha polls, Modi said the electorate must decide whether they want the madadgars (helpers) of Pakistan to be in power..those who are out to destroy the morale of armed forces by seeking proofs. He also hit out at National Conference leader Omar Abdullah for advocating restoration of the post of Prime Minister in Jammu and Kashmir, saying can any country have more than one PM. I would like the Congress and the RJD, which are part of the same mahamilavat gang, to come clean on the issue. The PM has been mocking mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) of opposition parties as "mahamilavat" (highly adulterated). "They appear more like spokespersons for Pakistan than political parties representing India," the PM said launching a scathing attack at the rivals for their comments post-Pulwama terror attack. The Prime Minister alleged that whenever the Congress has come to power in the country, whether on its own or heading an alliance, governance has gone into reverse gear. Growth rate has dropped while there has been a surge in terrorist activities, violence and accumulation of black money. In a veiled attack on parties like Lalu Prasads RJD, Modi said those who always swore by the name of JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) are now sitting in the lap of the Congress. In an apparent rebuttal of the RJDs repeated allegation that his government was planning to do away with reservations to forward the RSS agenda, he said let alone Modi, nobody can abolish quotas. We have provided 10 per cent reservations for the economically weaker sections among the general category, but we have done so without diluting reservations for SCs, STs and OBCs, he pointed out. With elections approaching, they have begun to scare you with the false propaganda that Modi is out here to do away with reservations. The fact is, we granted constitutional status to the OBC commission despite hurdles created from their side, the Prime Minister alleged. It is a matter of pride for all of us that after getting the constitutional status, the first person to be heading the body Bhagwan Das Sahni hails from this state., he pointed out. They have suddenly discovered the virtues of Ambedkar on whom they had only heaped insults during his lifetime. The father of the Constitution got Bharat Ratna, in recognition of his invaluable contribution to the making of modern India, by our government, Modi asserted. Five places associated with Ambedkar, including London, are being developed as Panch teerth (five places of pilgrimage) by my government, Modi added. Modis maiden election rally in the state was held in the Lok Sabha segment represented by Chirag Paswan, son of Union minister Ramvilas Paswan and the heir apparent of BJPs alliance partner Lok Janshakti Party. You know what depths Bihar had sunken into under the RJDs rule. The team of Nitish Kumar and Sushil Kumar Modi had made great efforts to pull Bihar out of the deep rut. A lot more still needs to be done and for that we need your blessings, he said. In keeping with his rousing style of oratory, Modi ended his brief address by making the crowds chant along with him Main bhi Chowkidar, gali gali mein chowkidar an obvious riposte to Congress president Rahul Gandhis oft-repeated slogan Chowkidar chor hai. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan could be blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) due to "lobbying by India", Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said as he estimated that the country could suffer USD 10 billion loss annually if it remains in the watchdog's grey list. In June last year, the Paris-based FATF had placed Pakistan on the 'grey list' of countries whose domestic laws are considered weak to tackle the challenges of money laundering and terrorism financing. The FATF is working to curb terrorism financing and money laundering and has asked Pakistan to reassess the operation of banned terrorist outfits in the country. Pakistan is under intense international pressure to rein in terror groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) after the Pulwama terror attack. "The Foreign Office is calculating the annual loss if Pakistan is pushed in the black-list by the FATF as India is lobbying for this," Foreign Minister Qureshi told reporters at the Governor's House here on Monday evening. He said the government has calculated that Pakistan will face USD 10 billion loss annually if it remains in the 'grey list'. A group of experts from the FATF recently visited Pakistan to review whether Islamabad has made enough progress on global standards against financial crimes to warrant its exclusion from the watchdog's 'grey list'. During its three-day visit to Islamabad in the last week of March, a delegation of the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on money laundering, a regional affiliate of the FATF, expressed serious reservations over insufficient physical actions on ground against banned groups to block flow of funds and activities. The visiting team members reportedly raised questions over specific and on-ground actions against each of the eight organisations proscribed under international requirements. It wanted break-up of suspected transaction report against each banned outfit and specific actions taken against each entity. The team members said that activities of banned organisations and non-profit organisations are still unchecked at the provincial, district and grass roots level where they can still raise funds and hold meetings and rallies. The FATF noted that Pakistan had revised its terror financing risk assessment but did not demonstrate a proper understanding of the terror financing risks posed by the Islamic State group, Al-Qaeda, Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), Falah-i-Insaniat (FIF), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Haqqani Network and persons affiliated with the Taliban. Prime Minister Imran Khan's government recently banned Mumbai terror attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed-led JuD and its charity wing FIF. It declared JeM and five other groups "high risk". It also arrested over 100 members of the banned outfits including the son and brother of JeM chief Azhar Masood. The government also has taken over the control of the properties of the banned outfits including the JeM, the JuD and the FIF what it says in accordance with the FAFT requirements and the National Action Plan. Ahead of the team's visit, Pakistan wrote to FATF President Marshall Billingslea to appoint any other member as co-chair of the Asia-Pacific's Joint Group, in place of India, to ensure that the FATF review process is fair, unbiased and objective. The Joint Group is a sub-body of the International Cooperation Review Group (ICRG) of the APG. Pakistan is a member of the APG and its case is being presented before the FATF by the APG. India's Financial Intelligence Unit's (FIU) director general is the co-chair of the Joint Group. After obtaining Pakistan's response, the Mutual Evaluation Report will be presented in the Annual General Meeting of the APG that is likely to take place in August. The APG meeting would either accept the report or suggest changes to it. In case of the worst outcome, Pakistan may have to implement yet another Action Plan from October onwards. The FATF's Action Plan implementation deadline is September this year. The review on the implementation of the FATF Action Plan held in February did not go well, which has increased pressure on Pakistan. The next FATF review would take place in June in Washington and before that Pakistan will have to show compliance on 16 points that have been agreed for May in addition to three issues that were left out in the last review. To a question on the suspension of dialogue on the Kartarpur corridor by India, Qureshi said: "Pakistan went to India for a meeting on Kartarpur despite the escalation on borders but India was hesitating for a second meeting scheduled for April 2. I ask India to bring its apprehensions on the table for review by Pakistan but avoid cancelling meetings." "Pakistan had responded to the wishes of the Sikh community from across the world and India had reluctantly accepted the joint venture," he added. India Friday summoned Pakistan's deputy high commissioner in New Delhi and conveyed concerns over the presence of a leading Khalistani separatist in a committee appointed by Pakistan on the Kartarpur corridor project. Indian officials said said they will wait for a response from Pakistan on the issue and they're not going ahead with a previously agreed meeting on the Kartarpur corridor on April 2 in Wagah on the Pakistani side. Last November, India and Pakistan agreed to set up the border crossing linking Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev, to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan on Tuesday expressed "deep concern" over the assessment of international experts on the threats resulting from space debris generated by the recently conducted Anti-Satellite missile (ASAT) test by India. On March 27, India achieved a historic feat by shooting down its own low-orbit satellite with a ground-to-space missile, making the country a space power. Only three other countries -- the US, Russia and China -- have ASAT capabilities. On Monday, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator Jim Bridenstine said India shooting down of one of its own satellites was a "terrible thing" as it created about 400 pieces of orbital debris. The NASA chief warned that the risk of debris colliding with the International Space Station (ISS) has risen by 44 per cent since the Indian anti-satellite weapon test. "The reports that some of the space debris created by this test has been pushed above the apogee of the International Space Station (ISS), increasing the risk of collision are deeply worrying," Pakistan's Foreign Office (FO) said in a statement, expressing "deep concern" over the ASAT test conducted by India. The ISS is a habitable artificial satellite, orbitting the Earth at an altitude between 330 and 435 km. It is a joint project between space agencies of US, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada, and serves as a research laboratory for scientists to conduct space experiments. As many as 236 astronauts from 18 countries have visited the space station, many of them multiple times, since November 2000. The test should be a matter of "grave concern for the international community" not only in terms of generation of space debris but also because of its ramifications for long term sustainability of peaceful space activities, the FO said. It would amiss to ignore the military dimension of such actions and its implications on the global and regional peace, stability and security, it added. Asserting that Pakistan remained a strong proponent of non-militarisation of outer space, the FO said, "We will continue to work with like-minded countries to address gaps in the international legal regime governing the exploration and use of outer space with a view to ensuring that no one threatens peaceful activities and applications of space technologies for socio-economic development." It said in the absence of strong legal instruments, other states could also follow suit by demonstrating such capabilities. India has said the test was done in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris. "Whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back onto the earth within weeks," the Ministry of External Affairs said soon after the test. By conducting the ASAT test, India was not in violation of any international law or treaty to which it is a party to or any national obligation, it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan's top military commanders on Tuesday reviewed the situation along the country's border with India and vowed to defend the nation against "any misadventure or aggression", amid heightened Indo-Pak tensions. The 220th Corps Commanders conference chaired by Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa in Rawalpindi "reviewed geo-strategic environment and ongoing situation along the Eastern border," the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) - the army's media wing - said in a statement. The commanders expressed "strong will, resolve and determination to defend the country against any misadventure or aggression", it added. Tensions between India and Pakistan flared up after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14. India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot on February 26. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured its pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, who was handed over to India on March 1. The Generals reiterated to continue "efforts for bringing enduring peace in the country while supporting all initiatives towards regional peace," the statement said. The forum "expressed its resolve to support government and all stakeholders in implementation of the National Action Plan," it said. The NAP was launched after a deadly Taliban attack on an army run school in Peshawar in December 2014 that killed nearly 150 people, mostly students. "Having achieved stability against terrorism, Pakistan is on positive trajectory of becoming a state where prerogative of use of weapons rests with the state alone and socio-economic development is taking pre-eminence," Gen Bajwa said. The meeting comes a day after the Indian Air Force on Monday scrambled two Sukhoi-30 fighter jets after sighting a Pakistani drone along the Indo-Pak border in the Khemkaran sector in Punjab. Two Pakistani F-16 fighter aircraft were also seen close to the border after the incident. The drone soon retreated to the Pakistani side after the jets were scrambled. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Palestinian was killed during a clash with Israeli forces near Jerusalem overnight, the Palestinian health ministry and residents said on Tuesday. The ministry said Mohammed Adwan, 23, was killed and three others were wounded. Two residents said soldiers arrived in the Qalandiya area early on Tuesday to carry out arrests and young men threw stones at them. The Israeli army said there was a "riot" during an operation in the nearby Kufr Aqab area, and "rocks and explosive devices were hurled at the troops, who responded with fire". "A report was received regarding an injured Palestinian. The incident will be examined," the army statement said. Qufr Aqab is located on the other side of the Israeli separation barrier which divides Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank, but is still considered part of the city. Israeli forces often enter Palestinian towns in the West Bank to carry out arrests in raids that frequently lead to clashes. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee Tuesday said political parties should concentrate on proper implementation of the promises made in their respective manifestos. Claiming that most of the promises made by her party in the earlier polls were fulfilled, the Trinamool Congress supremo said the manifesto of a party is its vision document. "Manifesto reflects a party's ideology and parties will have to use their preferences. You go through all the manifestos. We have implemented more than 200," the chief minister told reporters at the state secretariat. Banerjee declined to comment on the Congress' manifesto released earlier in the day, which has similarity to that of the TMC. "I have no comments on the manifesto of others. It's their prerogative. Proper implementation is very much needed. Commitment is commitment," she said. Banerjee lost her cool when asked whether she advanced her campaign meetings at Dinhata from April 4 by a day keeping in mind the meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Siliguri on the same day. "Don't ask me such questions. Don't teach me. It may suit you but it may not suit me," she said. Banerjee said she was asked to do an extra meeting and that is why she is going to meeting at Dinhata. On the Centre's decision to pull out central forces from Jangalmahal, Banerjee questioned who would be responsible if Maoists active in the neighbouring state try to disturb peace in West Bengal. The Ministry of Home Affairs had turned down a plea of the Mamata Banerjee government to retain 35 companies of central forces posted in once Maoist-dominated Jangalmahal region in south Bengal. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A plea in Delhi High Court Tuesday challenged the appointment of Haryana Director General of Police Manoj Yadava, claiming that the Supreme Court's directions regarding selection, appointment and tenure of service of DGPs were "not being followed". The petition by IPS officer Prabhat Ranjan Deo sought the quashing of the recommendation and empanelment of Yadava by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and his appointment, by February 18 order of the state government. Justice Suresh Kait, before whom the plea came up for hearing, sought certain clarifications from the UPSC and the Haryana government and listed the matter for further proceeding on April 11. Deo, represented by senior advocate Ajit Kumar Sinha and advocate Ashwarya Sinha, said he was not even considered for promotion to the post even though he has a "blemishless record of over 30 years of service". The plea also sought a stay on the appointment of Yadava as the state's DGP. The counsel said that despite being the senior most and fully eligible, Deo was superseded and not even considered by the UPSC in the process of empanelment for the post of DGP. "The senior most and reputed officer such as the petitioner (Deo) will be forced to work under and take instructions from his junior officer, whose eligibility for the post is in question. Such discrimination by the respondents towards petitioner and other senior officer with much more experience than respondent no. 4 (Yadava), who is enjoying a higher position and reputation is totally insulting, humiliating and patently illegal," the petition claimed. It said the apex court's direction was not being complied with and misinterpreted by UPSC wherein Deo, despite being in the shortlisted panel sent by the state government amongst the eligible officers, was not even considered probably on the ground that his tenure was less than two years due to shortfall of four months before superannuation. The apex court had on March 13 clarified its last year's order on police reforms and said the officers who have a minimum of six months tenure left in service can be considered for the post of DGP. In its July last year, the top court had passed a slew of directions on police reforms and had directed the UPSC to consider those IPS officers "who have got clear two years of service" for appointment as DGPs, besides giving due weightage to "merit and seniority". The petition alleged that the UPSC "clearly erred and misinterpreted" the directions of the apex court which indicates that the extended term beyond the date of superannuation should be a reasonable period. "Thus, non consideration of the petitioner on the criterion of an officer to have mandatory two years of length of service remaining is neither in conformity with the spirit of the Supreme Court direction nor in consonance with settled practice as followed by UPSC itself," it said. Deo said that on the date of vacancy, that is October 1, 2018, he clearly had two years of service left and even as on date, he has 18 months of service before superannuation. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The battle of Bengal is all set to heat up with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trinamool Congress president Mamata Banerjee kickstarting their campaign Wednesday in the state that sends third largest number of Lok Sabha members to Parliament. While Modi will address a rally at Siliguri, Banerjee will hold her first public meeting for the general elections in the state at Dinhata, both in North Bengal. Political circles are agog that a war of words are on the cards with Mamata Banerjee deciding to hold her public rally on the same day the Prime Minister will commence his campaign in the state. Banerjee, who was earlier scheduled to begin her campaign meetings on April 4 in North Bengal, has preponed it by a day to address the rally at Dinhata in Coochbehar constituency, which goes to polls in the first phase. West Bengal has a total of 42 Lok Sabha seats, the third largest number after Uttar Pradesh's 80 and Maharashtra 48. After a good performance in last year rural polls and also in a few bypolls, the BJP has pipped CPI(M) as well Congress to emerge as main challenger to TMC in Bengal. The BJP president Amit Shah has set an ambitious target of winning 23 seats in the state. Mamata Banerjee popularly called "Didi", who has been playing an important role in bringing together anti-BJP parties on one platform and whose party see a potential PM candidate in her, is sparing no effort to stop saffron party increase its footprint in the state. "The Chief Minister will address the rally at Dinhata on Wednesday at 3.00 pm," TMC Coochbehar district secretary Rabindranath Ghosh said. The TMC supremo's nephew and MP Abhishek Banerjee will also address two rallies in the district - one at Sitalkhuci and the other at Tufanganj on the same day, Ghosh said. The PM is scheduled to kickstart his campaign in the TMC-ruled state from Siliguri at 1.00 pm and will hold another rally at the Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata at 3.00 pm on the same day. BJP state chief Dilip Ghosh said that apart from the Prime Minister, several other top saffron party leaders will hold rallies in the state in the run up to the seven-phase elections in West Bengal. Party national president Amit Shah, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Union Cabinet ministers-- Rajnath Singh, Smriti Irani and several others will address election rallies in West Bengal, Ghosh told PTI. "How many of these leaders will she counter? She will not find time to talk about her own candidates if she tries to give answer to the addresses of all of them in her rallies," Ghosh said about speculations that Banerjee has preponed her rally by a day to take on what Modi says in his public meeting at Siliguri. The BJP state president claimed that people in North Bengal will go to hear the Prime Minister at Siliguri. "Who will go to Dinhata?" he asked. The distance between Dinhata and Siliguri is about 170 kms by road. Coochbehar and Alipurduars will go to polls in the first phase of the Lok Sabha elections on April 11. Elections for the three seats of Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri and Raiganj in North Bengal will be held in the second phase on April 18. Siliguri is within the Darjeeling constituency, which is one of the two seats BJP won in the 2014 elections. It has, however, fielded greenhorn Raju Bista in place of its sitting MP S S Ahluwalia from the seat. Banerjee had said on Sunday that she will go to Coochbehar in North Bengal on April 4 and then to Assam to address rallies there the next day and will be back to Bengal again for addressing election rallies. "I will address nearly 100 meetings in Bengal," the fiesty leader, who has been trying to cobble up an united opposition alliance against the BJP, had said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) CPI(M) has moved the Election Commission accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of trying to rouse communal passions in the country and using national broadcaster Doordarshan for electoral purposes. CPI(M) Politbureau member Nilotpal Basu in a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora has listed a slew of complaints against the BJP over what it termed were violations of the model code of conduct by the leaders of the saffron party, beginning from the PM's address to the nation last month announcing that India had shot down a live satellite using anti-satellite missile technology. "Another blatant attempt by the Prime Minster Narendra Modi himself to rouse communal passions by implicitly referring to the outcome in a NIA Court, by equating the accused to the entire Hindu community in an election meeting in Wardha," he said. An NIA court recently acquitted Swami Aseemanand and three others in the 2007 Samjhauta train bomb blast case. A total of 68 people, mostly Pakistanis, were killed in the bombing. Slamming the Congress for the 'Hindu terror' metaphor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Monday charged the opposition party with insulting "peace-loving" followers of the religion by linking them to terrorism. Basu also raised the issue of the PM allegedly using the national broadcaster to appeal to voters. "The fundamental question was whether the Prime Minister, who is also a candidate of the BJP, can use the office and the prerogatives to try and influence for the sake of electoral benefit? However, the Commission chose to restrict the question to the role of the DD and gave the national broadcaster a clean chit. "Now, our attention has been drawn to a tweet by Doordarshan @DDNewsLive for urging people to watch live the PM's addresses for his #MainBhiChowkidar programme through video conferencing. The print-out of the tweet is appended herewith," he said. Basu also said the CPIM had also complained to the EC gainst the "unabashed attempt" by the ruling party to use the post Balakot situation and utilise the exploits of the armed forces for electoral purposes. "The Commission had taken note and passed an order to categorically forbid such use of the armed forces in the election campaign. But now in clear violation of that order, the BJP leader and Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath has referred to the Indian Army as 'Modi ji Ki Sena' while addressing a rally in Ghaziabad on Monday, 1st April 2019," he said, adding that these are "gross violations of the MCC" and has the potential of completely vitiating the social atmosphere in run up to the elections. The Election Commission on Monday took cognizance of Adityanath's reported remarks and sought a report from Ghaziabad district administration in this regard. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a scathing attack on the Prime Minister, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao accused him of lying on central allocation to the state and said his campaign speech was "below the level of sarpanch". Rao also said he does not have a desire to be the Prime Minister. Taking exception to Modi's criticism against him that he consulted astrologers, the TRS president asked "if this is what the Premier should talk about". Alleging that the Prime Minister did not speak the truth about allocation of funds to the state, Rao, also referred as KCR by many, demanded that Modi apologise to the people. "What does Narendra Modiji speak? KCR sees horoscope... Is this what is to be spoken, for the Prime Minister to speak? Should persons running the of the country speak like this? In this country, the Prime Minister speaks going below the level of a sarpanch," he said. Rao, who was speaking at an election rally at Warangal, was alluding to Modi's comments on him at a rally in Telangana last week that Rao consulted astrologers which affected governance. "Narendra Modi ji, you are speaking absolute lies today. (You) are bragging that you are giving Rs 35,000 crore (to Telangana). You did not give Rs 35,000 crore. My brothers and sisters should know. Delhi is not taking care of us. We are taking care of Delhi," he said. Telangana gives about Rs one lakh crore to the Centre annually in the form of customs duty, income tax, centre's share in GST and others, he said. What Telangana gets from Delhi is only Rs 24,000 crore, he said. BJP leaders should answer if Telangana is surviving on Central funds, he said. Telangana is among five-six states that support the country, he claimed. Rao said he does not fault the Centre over using the funds. "You are taking and using Rs 75,000 crores of income which is generated from our state. We are not saying it is wrong. But lying after coming here, speaking unwanted things... don't speak like that. I demand that the Prime Minister apologise to the Telangana people. I request (him) not to speak such lies," he said. Saying that both Congress and BJP which does 'golmaal' (bungling) are not useful to the country, he said that a non-Congress, non-BJP federal front government should come to power at the Centre. The national parties do not address issues like farmers not getting remunerative price and problem with Pakistan, but does in states, he alleged. Citing media reports, he said non-Congress, non-BJP parties would come to power at the Centre. He alleged that both the Congress and BJP failed to ensure the country's development as it should have been. Referring to the comments of a state minister that those who addressed people at the venue in Warangal went on to become Prime Minister, he said he has no desire to be PM. "I don't have the desire to be Prime Minister", he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The row between the BJP and the Congress over the 'Hindu terror' tag during the ongoing Lok Sabha poll campaign had its genesis nearly a decade ago when the then Home Minister and Congress leader P Chidambaram coined 'saffron terrorism' against the backdrop of blasts in Samjhauta Express and some prominent Muslim religious places. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday criticised the Congress for coining the term 'Hindu terror', prompting a sharp reaction from the main opposition party. "Congress used the term 'Hindu terror'...it labelled the peace-loving Hindus as terrorists...is there a single incident of Hindu terrorism?" Modi said at a rally in Wardha in Maharashtra. The Congress accused Modi of speaking a lie, claiming that the term 'Hindu terrorism' was defined by his ministerial colleague and senior BJP leader R K Singh when he was the Union Home Secretary. Modi had also claimed that it was Sushil Kumar Shinde, who as Union Home Minister used the term. Chidambaram brought up the issue of what he called "saffron terrorism" while addressing the annual conference of the DGPs, and IGPs on August 25, 2010. "... I wish to caution you that there is no let up in the attempts to infiltrate militants into India. There is no let up in the attempts to radicalise young men and women in India. Besides, there is the recently uncovered phenomenon of 'saffron terrorism' that has been implicated in many bomb blasts of the past...," Chidambaram had said. The then home minister's statement that raised many an eyebrow came as the country witnessed blasts in a Maharashtra town Malegaon in 2006 and explosion of the Samjhauta Express in Haryana, blast at Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad and bombing at Ajmer Sharif Dargah, all in 2007. However, the Congress quickly distanced itself from Chidambaram's comment, saying "terrorism does not have any colour other than black". "Saffron or bhagwa or kesariya (Hindi equivalents of saffron) is not the issue here. The issue is terrorism. Terrorism does not have any colour other than black," Congress' then general secretary and head of the media cell Janardan Dwivedi said on August 28. Dwivedi also said "saffron colour has been part of our ancient tradition and is associated with our freedom strggle". Senior Congress leader Sushil Kumar Shinde, who succeeded Chidambaram as the Union Home Minister, on January 20, 2013, also waded into the row when he accused the BJP and the RSS of conducting "terror training" camps to spread "saffron terrorism" in the country. "Reports have come during investigation that BJP and RSS conduct terror training camps to spread terrorism...Bombs were planted in Samjhauta express, Mecca Masjid and also a blast was carried out in Malegaon. "We will have to think about it seriously and will have to remain alert," he said at a Congress conclave in Jaipur. As his remarks came under attack from BJP and RSS, Shinde later said, "This has come so many times in the papers...It is not a new thing that I have said today." "This is saffron terrorism that I have talked about. It is the same thing and nothing new. It has come in the media several times," he said. To a question if it was Hindu terrorism or saffron terrorism, Shinde said, "This is saffron terrorism (that) I have stated." A month later, Shinde had expressed regret for his comments in Jaipur. In a statement on February 20, 2013, Shinde said his comments had created a misunderstanding. "It has been understood to mean that I was linking terrorism to a particular religion and was accusing certain political organisations of being involved in organising terror camps". "I had no intention to link terror to any religion. There is no basis for suggesting that terror can be linked to organisations mentioned in my brief speech in Jaipur." Shinde said "Since a controversy has been created on account of my statement, I am issuing this clarification and expressing regret to those who felt hurt by my statement. I will continue to perform my duties to the best of my ability to ensure harmony is maintained in social fabric of India." Two days after Shinde's comments in Jaipur, Union Power Minister and BJP leader R K Singh, as the then Union Home Secretary, tried to justify Shinde's remarks. Singh said on January 22, 2013 that at least 10 people having close links with the RSS and its affiliated organisations were named accused in various acts of terror across India. "Yes, during investigations of Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Dargah Sharif blasts, we have found names of at least 10 persons who have been associated with the RSS at some point or the other," Singh had said. Singh also said "We have evidence against them... there are statements of witnesses". After his retirement, Singh joined the BJP in 2013 and distanced himself from the phrase, saying he had never used it. "The term saffron terror was coined by (then) Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde. I never used that term," he said. After joining the BJP, Singh also lauded the party for "its hardline orientation on issues of national security". "BJP and its other associates like RSS never compromise on this. Other parties tend to compromise due to their vote banks," he had said in December 2013. Singh became an MP in 2014 after fighting the Lok Sabha polls on a BJP ticket from Bihar. Later, he became a union minister in the Modi government. Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, who also faced accusations of having used the term 'Hindu terror', clarified he only mentioned 'Sanghi terrorism' and never coined 'Hindu terrorism'. He said terror activities cannot be defined on the basis of religion. He also used the word 'Hindu fundamentalists' to describe right-wing terror. "Terrorism in the country arises from fundamentalists among the Hindus and the Muslims," he had said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will skip a meeting of Group of Seven ministers this week in France, the State Department said Tuesday, amid persistent tensions between Europe and President Donald Trump. Officials did not explain Pompeo's absence. But the move comes amid a long list of disagreements, including the US rejection of international agreements on ending Iran's nuclear program and fighting climate change. The State Department said that Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan would represent the United States and be joined by David Hale, the top-ranking US career diplomat, at the talks Friday and Saturday in Dinard on the coast of Brittany. Sullivan "will engage in discussions on a broad range of issues, including the deteriorating situation in Venezuela, destabilizing Iranian behaviour in the Middle East, the responsible conduct of states in cyber space and the final denuclearization of North Korea," a State Department statement said. Pompeo will already be seeing several of his G7 counterparts Wednesday and Thursday in Washington at a 70th anniversary gathering of the NATO alliance, but he has no announced conflicting engagements later in the week. The Group of Seven is the longstanding club of major industrialized democracies, with their summits often steering the global agenda. Besides the United States and France, the group includes Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan. French President Emmanuel Macron is hoping to push an ambitious agenda at the G7 summit in August in the resort of Biarritz, for which the foreign ministers meeting is meant to prepare. The French hosts are no doubt mindful of lessons from the last G7 in Canada, where Trump refused to sign the final communique and openly criticized his host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, over trade policies. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Puducherry Chief Minister V Narayanasamy Tuesday expressed gratitude to Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for promising in the party's manifesto that it would procure full statehood for the Union Territory, if elected to power after the Lok Sabha polls. The manifesto was released in Delhi today by AICC. Addressing reporters at the party office here, Narayanasamy said, "the specific announcement in the manifesto that the Congress would procure statehood for Puducherry now a Union Territory shows that the party and its leader have concern for the welfare of the people here." He said, "the demand for statehood had been raised for years together as the present constitutional status of Union Territory had been standing in the way of getting sufficient grants from the Centre and most of the time the plea had fallen on deaf ears." Noting that 70 percent of the budgetary requirements of Puducherry were met through Central grants in the past, the senior Congress leader claimed that now the grant has been reduced to26 percent. Puducherry has not been included in the Central Finance Commission as it is a Union Territory, he pointed out. Once Puducherry is accorded statehood there would be several fiscal benefits on par with full fledged states. The elected governments here had been facing hiccups because of "intervention and negative stand" on part of the Lt Governors towards decisions taken by the government. "This unenviable predicament would become a thing of the past once Puducherry becomes a state," he contended and thanked the AICC leader for accommodating the promise of statehood for Puducherry. Repeated representations to the NDA government for grant of statehood had proved futile, he alleged. Narayanasamy also said that other important promises relating to promoting welfare of farmers and implementation of guaranteed minimum income for the poor families are most welcome and would ameliorate the poor and other sections let down by the NDA government during last five years. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Internet-based "fake news" is fomenting prejudice and hatred, Pope Francis said on Tuesday, warning our culture "has lost its sense of truth and bends the facts to suit particular interests". He issued the stark warning in a letter to young people around the world following last October's youth-themed bishops' synod. "There are huge economic interests operating in the digital world, capable of exercising forms of control as subtle as they are invasive, creating mechanisms for the manipulation of consciences and of the democratic process," the pope wrote. Social networks encourage contact between people who already think alike, precluding them from debate, he said. "These closed circuits facilitate the spread of fake and false information, fomenting prejudice and hate." The Argentine pontiff cited prolific Catholic teenager and Internet user Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia in 2006. "He saw that many young people, wanting to be different, really end up being like everyone else, running after whatever the powerful set before them with the mechanisms of consumerism and distraction," the pope wrote. "As a result, Carlo said, 'everyone is born as an original, but many people end up dying as photocopies'. Don't let that happen to you!" "It is not healthy to confuse communication with mere virtual contact," the pope wrote. "Indeed, the digital environment is also one of loneliness, manipulation, exploitation and violence... blocking the development of authentic interpersonal relationships." In the wide-ranging document, the pope also warned of the dangers of historical revisionism, as exploited by increasingly powerful populist politicians. "If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future that he holds out, doesn't it then become easy to draw them along so that they only do what he tells them?" "He needs the young to be shallow, uprooted and distrustful, so that they can trust only in his promises and act according to his plans."The synod recognised that many young people no longer see the Church as significant in their lives, but rather as "a nuisance, even an irritant", the pope said. Some of the reasons for this are understandable, including "sexual and financial scandals; a clergy ill-prepared to engage effectively with the sensitivities of the young... the passive role assigned to the young within the Christian community." It is important for the Church to be "living", so it can "look back on history and acknowledge a fair share of male authoritarianism, domination, various forms of enslavement, abuse and sexist violence". "With this outlook, (the Church) can support the call to respect women's rights... while not agreeing with everything some feminist groups propose. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan on Tuesday urged the US to play its role in resumption of Indo-Pak dialogue to resolve all outstanding issues, amid tensions with India following the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent aerial strike by Indian jets on a training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed in Balakot. Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo spoke over telephone on Tuesday afternoon and exchanged views on the current situation in the region, the Foreign Office said. Both sides agreed that de-escalation was important for peace and stability in South Asia, it said. Qureshi said that Pakistan-US ties were important for promoting regional peace and stability. He appreciated US' role and efforts in deescalating tensions in the region. He informed Pompeo about the de-escalatory measures taken by Pakistan including the handing over of the Indian pilot. "He also urged US to play its role for resumption of dialogue between Pakistan and India to find solutions to all outstanding disputes," the FO said. Tensions between India and Pakistan flared up after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14. India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot on February 26. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured its pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, who was handed over to India on March 1. The FO said that the two leaders agreed to continue to pursue the Afghan reconciliation process. They also discussed Pakistan's facilitating role and agreed that the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad's forthcoming visit to Islamabad would provide an opportunity to further build on the gains made so far. Qureshi reiterated that intra-Afghan dialogue was an important component of the reconciliation process. He also emphasised the need to enhance interaction at the leadership level. The foreign minister also briefed Secretary Pompeo about efforts and progress in the implementation of Pakistan's National Action Plan, the FO said. The NAP was launched after a deadly Taliban attack on an army run school in Peshawar in December 2014 that killed nearly 150 people, mostly students. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress president Rahul Gandhi Tuesday challenged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to debate with him on national security, corruption and foreign policy. Gandhi, while addressing a gathering at its manifesto release event at the party headquarters here, claimed that the prime minister was "scared" and did not want to have a "real debate". Asked about BJP's pitch on issues pertaining to "Hindus" and nationalism, the Congress chief said: "We all are Hindus, but the country needs employment, there is a need to help the farmers in the country, the country needs NYAY, there is a need to take care of women, give reservation to women." "Narendra Modi is trying to hide, he is scared, he doesn't want to have a real debate. I challenge Narendra Modiji that he should debate with me on corruption, on national security, on foreign policy," Gandhi said. Gandhi has been repeatedly daring the Prime Minister to debate him on national security issues, especially the Rafale fighter jet deal, asserting that when it happens truth will be in front of the people. He also asked the media persons to question the prime minister as to why he is "scared of facing a press conference". "You ask me questions, but you are scared of him. Ask him 'Mr Prime Minister why are you scared of the people of India, why are you scared of the press'...We will defeat him in the polls," Gandhi said. Asked if he would be the next prime minister, Gandhi said it was up to the people of India to decide. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, in his remarks at the event, said that it was a unique day in the history of the Congress party as it was releasing a "forward looking document which sums up the aspirations of the people of India". "The purpose of manifesto is to spell out the direction of the Congress party to move forward at a faster speed towards an inclusive economy and polity," he said. Referring to the Congress' NYAY scheme, Singh said the UPA made "very impressive progress" of bringing people out of poverty. "We must better that record and we must make sure that in the year 2030 we would have got rid of poverty from this land of ours," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress president Rahul Gandhi will launch the Maharashtra phase of his party's Lok Sabha poll campaign from Vidarbha during a two-day visit beginning April 4, party sources said. Gandhi is scheduled to hold public rallies in Nagpur, Chandrapur and Wardha, which are among the seven Lok Sabha constituencies that will vote on April 11 in the first round, the sources said. In Pune, which will vote on April 23 in the third phase, he is set to hold an interactive session with students, they said. Gandhi had held rallies in Mumbai and Dhule last month before the model code of conduct came into force on March 10. Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is also likely to campaign for the party in the state, the sources said, adding programme details have not been finalised yet. The Congress is contesting 25 out of the total 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra, which sends the second highest number of MPs to the Lower House of Parliament. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the party had won only two seats. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Google's India and South East Asia President Rajan Anandan has put in his papers after an eight-year stint at the American tech giant. Anandan, also an investor in multiple startups, is slated to join venture fund Sequoia Capital. He will work with Google till the end of this month. Vikas Agnihotri will take on the interim responsibility. He is currently serving as Google's Country Director for Sales. "We are grateful to Rajan for his huge contribution to Google over the past eight years. His entrepreneurial zeal and leadership has helped grow the overall internet ecosystem in India and Southeast Asia," Google President Asia Pacific Scott Beaumont said in an emailed statement. Anandan had joined Google from Microsoft India in 2010. Previously, he was also been associated with Dell India and McKinsey & Company. In a tweet, Anandan said: "8 amazing years. 850million internet users across India and SEA. Many billions of revenue and fastest growing region in the world. Incredible team that thinks big and executes superbly. Thank you @GoogleIndia #GoogleSEA. Loved every minute." Some of companies in which Anandan has invested include WebEngage, Instamojo, Capillary Technologies, TravelKhana, and EasyGov. Sequoia Capital Managing Director Shailendra J Singh, in a Linkedin post, said Anandan will join the leadership team at the firm, in addition to the six current managing directors. Anandan will focus on developing 'Surge' programme for startups by acting as an investment advisor and mentor to the founders. Surge aims to engineer rapid early progress for startups, by enabling disproportionate access to capital, talent, network and decades of company-building knowledge. "Rajan's deep understanding of technology, significant operating expertise and track record of growing tech businesses across the region will help Surge founders scale and build the transformational businesses of tomorrow," Singh said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 28-year-old rickshaw rider was stabbed to death while his friend sustained injuries after a quarrel erupted in outer Delhi's Raj Park area, police said Tuesday. The incident took place on Monday night when Anil, the deceased, along with his friend Raju Ram, had come to Raj Par area to meet his sister, they said. When Anil and Ram were at a eating point, a quarrel erupted. The accused persons called their accomplices, a senior police officer said. They started thrashing Anil and stabbed him at least four to fives times on his chest and fled from the spot, police said, adding they also stabbed Ram while he was trying to save Anil. Both the victims were rushed to Sanjay Gandhi Hospital where Anil was declared brought dead while Ram sustained stab injury on his leg. A case under section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code has been registered and police have identified some suspect, police said, adding further details are awaited. Anil is survived by his wife and two sons aged seven and five years, they added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) S&P Global Ratings Tuesday said it has revised its outlook on Tata Steel to positive from stable. The diminishing prospect of Bhushan Power and Steel Ltd's (BPSL) acquisition and the sustained high steel prices in India are key factors for the outlook revision on Tata Steel, S&P said in a statement. "The positive outlook reflects our view that stable prices and improvements in earnings combined with our expectation that the acquisition of BPSL would not happen, are likely to improve Tata Steel's credit ratios in the next 12 months," it said. The US-based rating agency also noted that Tata Steel will continue to support its 100 per cent subsidiary Tata Steel UK Holdings (TSUKH) when needed. "In line with the rating action on Tata Steel and in view of stable operating performance in TSUKH, we are revising our outlook on TSUKH (also) to positive," it added. Besides, the agency said it expects Tata Steel to successfully divest its European business housed under TSUKH in the next two to three months. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Macky Sall on Tuesday embarked on his second term as Senegal's president pledging "constructive" dialogue with the opposition and reforms to spur development. Sall urged optimism as "it seems new economic perspectives are opening up for our country," a reference to Senegal's plans to enter the hydrocarbons sector in 2021-22 via two ambitious oil and gas developments. Clad in a navy blue suit, the trained geologist swore "before God and before the nation" to serve the people as several visiting African leaders looked on. Also present was Mark Green, administrator of the US development agency USAID. Sall, 57 and a self-declared "social liberal", chose the new city of Diamniadio, some 32 kilometres (20 miles) from Dakar a product of his Emerging Senegal Plan (PSE) launched in 2014, to make his address. "In vesting their confidence in you once again your fellow citizens have validated your record and backed your social project, to say the least," said Constitutional Court president Pape Oumar Sakho. Sall garnered a 58 percent vote share, well clear of former prime minister Idrissa Seck on 20 percent, with the rest of the pack left trailing to win easily in a single round on February 24. Helping to clear Sall's path to victory was the authorities' invalidation of several opposition candidacies including those of Karim Wade, the son of presidential predecessor Abdoulaye Wade (2000-12), as well as popular Dakar mayor Khalifa Sall. Both were disqualified over convictions for misuse of public funds. The election sidelined the Socialist Party and the Senegalese Democratic Party which have dominated since independence from France in 1960. Although the disqualifications outraged the opposition, Sall insisted he would rule "for all Senegalese, hence "I renew my call for... a constructive dialogue open to all political, economic and social forces." The opposition has so far shown no sign of wanting to grasp any olive branch Sall might extend since he was officially proclaimed as poll winner on March 5. Sall, who left the ceremony for the presidential palace in an open-topped saloon with his wife, also said he would particularly look to aid the young, pursuing employment and training policies promoting "the entrepreneurial spirit and new technologies." He added he would commit to "public policies favouring women and girls," ensure "decent housing" for all and "safeguard the environment". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Enforcement Directorate Tuesday told a Delhi court that jailed Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah generated funds from Pakistan and other countries to carry out unrest in the Valley. The agency made the submission before Additional Sessions Judge Satish Kumar Arora while opposing Shah's bail application in a decade-old money laundering case for alleged terror financing, in which the accused is currently lodged in Tihar central jail here. ED's special public prosecutor N K Matta told the court that Shah was "involved in generation of huge proceeds of crime from various countries, including Pakistan, to carry out unrest in Kashmir and amassed huge wealth in the form of immovable and movable assets." Advocate Samvedna Verma, appearing for ED, told the court that if granted the relief, Shah may use his influence in threatening the witnesses and may not be available for facing the trial. "Accused Shabir Shah is involved in channelizing the illegal money sources from foreign countries, i.e., Pakistan, avoiding banking channel to fund the terror organisations in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of the country and if released on bail, he may use his influence in pressurizing/ threatening the witnesses and may not be available for facing trial," the agency said. It also alleged that Shah was in regular touch with Hafiz Sayeed, Chief of Pakistan-based banned terror outfit, Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD). There are serious allegations against Shah and further investigation in the case was going on and the properties were being identified, the ED said, adding that it was trying to establish the money trail. Advocate M S Khan had moved the bail application on behalf of Shah on the ground of parity after the Delhi High Court recently granted bail to co-accused and alleged hawala dealer Mohammad Aslam Wani in the case. The case was registered in 2007 for the alleged offence committed in 2005 and the accused was arrested on July 25, 2017. The court had in August 2017 denied bail to Shah after ED submitted that it was probing whether he had received money from "enemy countries" like Pakistan to promote terrorism in India. Shah was arrested in connection with the August 2005 case in which the Special Cell of Delhi Police had arrested Wani, claiming that Rs 63 lakh was recovered from him, out of which Rs 52 lakh was allegedly to be delivered to Shah. The agency had earlier issued summonses to Shah in the case, the prosecution had said, adding that Wani had claimed that he had given Rs 2.25 crore to Shah. Investigating agencies such as the National Investigation Agency (NIA) have cracked down on Hurriyat leaders, arresting Syed Ali Shah Geelani's son-in-law -- Altaf Ahmed Shah, also known as Altaf Fantoosh -- and several other Kashmiri separatists. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP president Amit Shah held a massive roadshow here Tuesday night campaigning for the party candidate Tejasvi Surya in Bangalore South, signifying the importance attached to retaining its traditional stronghold for decades. Shah flew in here from Tamil Nadu only for the roadshow, which was a show of unity by the city unit as there were rumblings of protest to the candidature of political greenhorn Surya, who was preferred over former union minister Ananth Kumar's widow Tejaswini. Hundreds of enthusiastic BJP workers cheered Shah chanting "Modi, Modi" as the "Rath", a modified vehicle, covered a litte more than a kilometre distance with state unit party chief B S Yeddyurappa, Surya, legislators from Bangalore South constituency and Tejaswini accompanying him. Hours before the roadshow, Tejaswini was appointed as the BJP state unit vice-president in an apparent placatory move after denying her the ticket to contest from Bangalore South Lok Sabha constituency, which Ananth Kumar had represented for six terms. The show began from Banashankari temple and concluded near a convention hall at J P Nagar, with thousands of people gathered all along the route. Soon after the roadshow, Shah left for New Delhi. Tejaswini's attendance gave a boost to the roadshow, as she was sulking after being denied the ticket, leaving her supporters angry and agitated. She has been active in public life through not-for-profit organisation Adamya Chetana. In a surprise move, BJP had announced the ticket to 28-year-old Surya, with just hours left for the deadline for filing of nominations for the first phase of polls in Karnataka. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray on Tuesday said his party and the BJP are bound by Hindutva and the two decided to enter into a pre-poll alliance after overcoming differences that soured their ties in the past. In an interview to Sena MP Sanjay Raut in party mouthpiece 'Saamana', Thackeray said he agreed to the alliance after BJP president Amit Shah came to him twice to sort out the issues. The Sena, which has often been critical of the BJP, its leadership and policies of the NDA government, entered into a seat-sharing pact with the ruling party recently. The BJP and Sena agreed to contest 25 and 23 seats, respectively, in Maharashtra which has 48 Lok Sabha constituencies. "...You ask me why did we agree to an alliance again. The whole world is a witness. BJP president Amit Shah came to me not once, but twice. And when the alliance was charted out, we put forth the problems of people. Even the chief minister was present when all this happened," Thackeray said. Shah wanted the sourness between both the parties to end, he said, adding he also agreed to the BJP chief's views. To another query, Thackeray said in the course of discussions, the issues that caused the sourness between the two saffron parties were "ironed out". "Like before, Hindutva is the thread that binds the BJP and the Sena together," he asserted. He also hit out at the opposition parties, saying if they come to power, they would "quarrel" for the prime minister's post as they lack a leader to bind them together. The way the opposition parties have come together now ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, they had made a similar move after the Emergency -- since there was immense anger among people -- and formed the Janata government which lasted for 22 months, he noted. "Then they at least had a face in Jayaprakash Narayan. Now, there is no face to bind the opposition in the country. If the opposition comes to power, there will be quarrelling among them for the prime minister's post," he claimed. "We (Sena and BJP) have Hindutva as a common thread. Hindutva is nationalism," said Thackeray, whose party is an ally of the BJP at the Centre and in Maharashtra. To a query on BJP veteran L K Advani, Thackeray said during the last five-ten years of his father late Bal Thackeray's life, the younger generation took over the Sena and the patriarch guided them, but intervened and spoke only when it was necessary. "Change is a natural process. But it doesn't mean you forget them after making them retire. You have to be forever grateful to them. Because, the Sena supremo, Atalji, Advaniji sowed the seeds in an extremely difficult environment. They risked their lives in spreading Hindutva," he said. Asked if he stood by his earlier statement that the Sena rotted in 25 years of alliance with the BJP, Thackeray said his father extensively travelled across Maharashtra to spread his party. "However, we became inattentive after the alliance (with BJP). This carelessness is no more there. Spreading of one's ideology is not a crime," he said. "Should I keep the Sena limited to the seats which we received as part of the alliance formula? Should we not take our party to other places as well? Because Sena is not a party but an ideology," the 58-year-old leader said. Asked if he had also become a "chowkidar" after tie-up with the BJP, Thackeray said he was just a common man. "I am a Shiv Sainik. I don't need to be separately called a chowkidar. A soldier is a soldier who safeguards the common man and fights for their rights. I don't need to separately become a chowkidar," he said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently added "chowkidar" to his Twitter handle profile and asked people to take the #MainBhiChowkidar pledge against corruption. Several BJP leaders and ministers later followed suit. Asked if the Sena will get a better share in portfolio allocation after the Lok Sabha polls, Thackeray said maintaining relations was the responsibility of both the alliance partners. But, the first priority was to win the elections and the opposition, however weak, cannot be ignored, he added. On the leadership of Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Thackeray said he does not have personal enmity against anyone. "Since they are both younger to me, I look at them as kids. Both these kids are trying to find a stability in the present environment. We will know about their success and failure later. However, I don't see a specific shape of his (Rahul Gandhi's) leadership," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha fired a fresh salvo at Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, charging him with "wasting" money on hiring a "choreographed crowd" that chanted his name "before, during and after" speeches which lacked "content and depth". In a series of stinging tweets, Sinha, who is all set to quit the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and seek re-election from Patna Sahib on a Congress ticket, also accused Modi of "arrogance" and "EVM misuse" and advised him to "go for a real press conference" and take questions from journalists "who cannot be bought and can question you in the larger interest of the nation". "Honourable outgoing Sirji. Why are you wasting so much money on different channels and on the paid and choreographed crowd who chant your name at any given time - during, before and after your speeches on the signal of the conductors. Your speeches lack content and depth these days and have gone to the extent of becoming highly repetitive and irritating," Sinha tweeted. "Sirji, I still remain your well-wisher despite your EVM misuse and in spite of all your arrogance. My humble suggestion for you at this eleventh hour would be to become straight and go straight. Don't hire or go for paid channels. Instead go for a real and genuine Press Conference with peoplewho cannot be bought, who can question you in the larger interest of the nation," he said in another tweet. "Go for the press who are not sycophants and cannot be silenced by money and muscle power -- instead of going for a conducted tour, well-rehearsed, well-practised, choreographed slogan chanting and with people of press of the choice of the one man show and two man army," Sinha said in yet another tweet. "Your addresses right from London were conducted and choreographed, where you abused doctors and had your own conducted questions put by your own paid anchor, well known till recently," he said in his final tweet of the day, referring to a question-answer session at Westminster compered by Bollywood lyricist Prasoon Joshi -- said to be a BJP supporter -- wherein Modi's comment about Indian doctors visiting abroad on tours sponsored by pharma companies had evoked strong condemnation from the medical fraternity back home. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday claimed people in South India "feel hostility" from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said he decided to contest from Wayanad in Kerala to send out the message that he stands with them. The Congress announced on Sunday that party chief Gandhi will contest from Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala, besides his traditional stronghold of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. "There is a feeling in South India, a very strong feeling in South India, that they are not being carried (along) by the current government. South India feels hostility from Mr Narendra Modi, they feel that they are not being included in the decisions of the country," Gandhi said. "So, I wanted to send a message to South India that we are with you and I am standing with you. That is why I am standing from Kerala," he said in response to a question after the launch of the party's manifesto. The Congress' announcement that the party chief will contest from Wayanad evoked sharp reactions from the Left and Right of the political spectrum. The CPI(M) and CPI said the move signalled the Congress wanted to take on the Left which would work towards defeating him in the elections from Wayanad. BJP chief Amit Shah reacted to the development saying Gandhi has "fled to Kerala as he fears that Amethi voters will seek an account from him". Addressing a rally in Wardha, Maharashtra, on Monday, the prime minister said the Congress is scared to field its leaders from constituencies where the majority dominates in terms of voter-base. He, however, did not name Gandhi. The Congress is hoping to further consolidate its position this time in Kerala. Top Congress leaders have contested from the South earlier as well. Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi has in the past contested from the Bellary Lok Sabha seat in Karnataka, while Rahul Gandhi's grandmother, former prime minister Indira Gandhi, contested from Chikamangalur in Karnataka. Wayanad district is in the north eastern part of Kerala and houses various tribal groups of the state. The area was badly affected due to last year's floods. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Sri Lankan novelist has been arrested for writing about homosexuality in the Buddhist clergy and charged with violating international human rights law, officials said Tuesday, outraging free speech advocates. Shakthika Sathkumara, 33, was arrested in the north-central town of Polgahawela on Monday and remanded in custody for nine days after monks complained about his writing. The short story contained indirect references to homosexuality among the clergy, who hold considerable sway in the Buddhist-majority nation of 21 million. The story was published on Sathkumara's Facebook page and in local Sinhalese language publications. "A group of monks complained that the reference to homosexual activities among the clergy insulted Buddhism," a police spokesman said. Buddhist monks are expected to be celibate. Homosexuality is also outlawed in Sri Lanka under an 1883 colonial-era law, but it is rarely enforced. The police spokesman said the monks who complained refused to settle the matter out of court and insisted on Sathkumara being prosecuted. He was taken before a local magistrate who charged him with inciting "religious hatred" under the United Nation's international human rights treaty, to which Sri Lanka is a signatory. Local activists decried what they called abuse of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to clamp down on free speech. "The police have abused their powers and carried out an arbitrary arrest," the Free Media Movement, a local watchdog, said in a statement. "We condemn this action of the police. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh Tuesday asked Pakistan to stop promoting terrorism from its soil and warned India would exert so much pressure that Islamabad will be forced to take action against terror activities. At the same time, Singh said India was ready to offer assistance to Pakistan if it alone is not able to stop terror activities from its soil. Addressing an election rally here, the senior BJP leader said earlier India was considered a weak nation, but that notion has now changed in the entire world after Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014. "India is no longer a weak country and has emerged a strong nation," he said. You have seen in Uri (September 2016), some terrorists from Pakistan killed 17 of our soldiers in their sleep and after that (terror attack) our Prime Minister took a decision. And our soldiers crossed the Line of Control and launched a surgical strike on terror launch pads and eliminated them (terrorists), Singh said. Referring to the February Pulwama attack in which 42 CRPF personnel lost their lives, the Home Minister said "the fidayeen terrorists are trained in Pakistan Following the incident, the IAF carried out air strikes inside Pakistan and succeeded in killing a large number of terrorists. I would like to tell Pakistan that it has to desist from its act and has to stop training terrorists. "Terror activities should not happen from Pakistan and if Islamabad thinks it alone cannot be able to stop terror activities then it can seek assistance from India and it will be ready to assist. But, terrorism has to end from Pakistan soil, he said. India will exert so much pressure and take so many measures that Pakistan will be forced to act to stop and spreading terror activities from its soil, Singh warned. On the economic front, Singh said India has become the fastest growing economy and it is now being acknowledged as a powerful nation across the world. India is becoming a world power". We will be among the three biggest economies in the world by 2028. He appealed to the people of Telangana to vote for BJP Lok Sabha candidates in the upcoming Parliament elections. You may have elected TRS in the December 2018 Assembly, I have no complaints, but now vote for BJP candidates. TRS will not be able to make government in Delhi because it is a state party and hence, I appeal to you to support BJP candidates in the polls and ensure return of the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre, Singh said. Comparing the performance of the NDA government with the previous regime, the Home Minister said the Manmohan Singh government constructed only 25 lakh houses in five years but under Modiji 1.30 crore houses were built and handed over to the people in four-and-half years, he said. Ever since Modijis government came, the prices have been under control, he said. Singh sought to know asked whether the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi government was doing anything to resolve the problems of turmeric and red jowar (sorghum) farmers in the state. Is the Telangana government doing something or not, and over 4,500 farmers have committed suicide in Telangana in the last five years, he said. Singh assured farmers that all arrangements will be made to purchase turmeric crop and if need be a turmeric board will also be set up. Similarly efforts will be made to provide remunerative prices to sorghum farmers, he said. Over 170 farmers had filed their nominations from Nizamabad, from where TRS President and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao's daughter K Kavitha is seeking re-election. This is in protest against the alleged failure of the TRS government to ensure minimum support price for turmeric and red jowarproduce. He said the Centre has increased the Minimum Support Prices (MSPs) of 22 crops and introduced the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) wherein Rs 6,000 per year was being given to farmers and efforts were on to double farmers income by 2022. Singh said he has been informed that the people of Telangana are not being benefited from the central government schemes. He accused the TRS government of not extending central sponsored schemes in the state. The Modi government provided free LPG connection to the poor households while over 14 crore beneficiaries were provided loans under Mudra schemes, Singh added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Alexandra Shipp, who portrays superhero Storm in "X-Men" films, has taken a sly dig at the makers, saying her character has little to do in the franchise. According to IndieWire, at the press tour of her latest film "X-Men: Dark Phoenix", the 27-year-old actor was asked about her reaction to the merger of 20th Century Fox with Disney, the parent company of Marvel Studios. "I would and I wouldn't because Storm barely has anything to say as it is. I don't know about (the other actors) but like we never talk. So it would be really nice if we weren't piled into yet another jam-packed cast, in which you only see me in the back of the shot like f***ing sasquatch," Shipp replied. When posed a query about whether she would like to see the on-screen romance and marriage between her character and Black Panther, the actor said she would instead prefer a stand-alone film on Storm. "No! No, I don't think Storm needs T'Challa, and I think she needs her own movie. It doesn't have to be me, it just needs to be made. A woman does not need a man in order to give her validity and she has also been around longer than him," Shipp said. "Dark Phoenix", which stars Sophie Turner in the lead, also marks the return of James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, and Tye Sheridan. It will release in the US on June 7. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Syro-Malabar Church head, Cardinal Mar George Alencherry was Tuesday directed by a court here to appear before it over a complaint, alleging misappropriation of church property and the resultant loss in a land deal worth crores of rupees. Directing the appearance of Alencherry, who is the Major Archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Church on May 22, a Judicial Magistrate Court here also tasked others connected to the allegations to appear on the same date. Apart from the Cardinal, the court issued summons to priest Joshy Pothuva and a middle-man Saju Varghese for their appearance. The proceedings in the magistrate court were initiated on a private complaint, alleging that the congregation suffered a huge loss in a land deal. The complainant alleged that the property of the church was misappropriated using forged documents after conspiracy. The complaint in the court comes after police registered a case against Alencherry and three others over allegations of irregularities in land deals in the Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese. The FIR was registered nearly a week after the Kerala High Court ordered the police to do so in March 2018 against the cardinal, priests Puthuva and Sebastian Vadakkumpadan, and middleman Varghese on a petition filed by Shine Varghese from Cherthala. Shine had moved the High Court, saying that the Ernakulam Central Police had not registered an FIR on his complaint against the cardinal and others over the land deals. They were named in the complaint alleging criminal conspiracy, criminal breach of trust and cheating in sale of over three acres of land, worth crores of rupees, belonging to the Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese. Alencherry, who is also the major archbishop of the archdiocese, is the first accused in the case, police had said. Earlier, a six member church committee, which probed the alleged irregularities, said it had found numerous instances of violation of canon and civil laws and had recommended necessary action against those responsible. The committee also said the cardinal "seems to have fully known and involved" in alienation and purchase of lands by the archdiocese between April 1,2015 and November 30, 2017. The panel, comprising priests, was appointed by Alencherry. A group of priests of the Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese had taken to the streets recently, urging Alencherry to keep off all responsibilities of the archdiocese in view of the high court order to launch a police probe on alleged irregularities in a land deal involving him. A meeting of over 200 priests had also urged police to commence a probe after registering an FIR against Alencherry and others on the complaint over the alleged irregularities. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP Tuesday appointed union minister Ananth Kumar's widow Tejaswini as the state unit vice-president in an apparent placatory move after denying her the ticket to contest from Bangalore South Lok Sabha constituency, which her husband had represented. Tejaswini was sulking after the BJP announced political greenhorn Tejasvi Surya as the Bangalore South candidate, leaving her supporters angry and agitated. "I am very delighted to announce that @Tej_AnanthKumar has been appointed as state vice president of @BJP4Karnataka. Wishing her all the very best," Karnataka BJP Chief Yeddyurappa tweeted. BJP announced the ticket to 28-year-old Surya, withjust hours left for the deadline for filing of nominations forthe first phase of polls in Karnataka. Maintaining an unbroken record, Ananth Kumar had won the Bangalore South seat six times. The decision had led to disappointment among late Ananth Kumar's supporters and some state leaders, as it waswidely expected that the BJP would field Tejaswini given heractive participation in scripting her husband's victories. Tejaswini was also confident about fighting the poll on BJP ticket and had started a door-to-door campaign, as the Karnataka BJP had proposed only her name. The discontent among BJP leaders against Surya's candidacy was visible, with senior legislators from the constituency including former Deputy Chief Minister R Ashoka and V Sommana not attending his nomination filing. Tejaswini, though had insisted that she remained loyal to party and accepted their decision to ensure that Narendra Modi became Prime Minister again, was not involving herself in any campaign related activities. Active in public life through not-for-profit organisation Adamya Chetana, Tejaswini had worked as a scientist at the Aeronautical Development Agency between 1993 -1997 and also on the Light Combat Aircraft (LCATejas) project. During her student days, she was very active in Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), and has also served as its State Joint Secretary and National executive member. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Venezuela's top court called on the ruling Constituent Assembly Tuesday to strip opposition leader Juan Guaido of parliamentary immunity. The decision by the Supreme Court of Justice could open the way for President Nicolas Maduro's rival Guaido, recognised as interim president by more than 50 countries, to be prosecuted. The court ruling cited Guaido's violation of a ban on his travel outside Venezuela when he visited Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Paraguay from late February to early March. It came as Guaido and Maduro are locked in a battle for power in the oil-rich country, which is facing a crippling and deepening economic and political crisis. The competition has been escalated into a geopolitical struggle, drawing in the United States and its allies that support Guaido, and Russia, Cuba and China backing Maduro. Though unpopular in a country spiraling ever deeper into economic chaos, Maduro has the upper hand at home, thanks to loyalty from his military chiefs and, more recently, the presence of 100 Russian troops. Abroad, Guaido is buoyed by US sanctions against Maduro's regime funnelling funds his way, and efforts to have his envoys recognized over Maduro's in diplomatic missions and international organisations. Maduro, who so far has heeded US warnings to not arrest Guaido under threat of unspecified repercussions, appears nonetheless more confident since Moscow's overt protection. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) UK opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn said Tuesday he would be "very happy" to sit down with Prime Minister Theresa May and discuss a joint Brexit policy that could resolve the current impasse. Corbyn's comments came after May decided to seek a further "short" Brexit deadline extension from the European Union to give her time to forge a new approach and get her current deal with Brussels approved by parliament. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The 22-year-old son of the UK's intelligence chief has been killed in a car crash on a private Scottish estate, police said on Tuesday. Sam Younger, the son of Alex Younger, the head of MI6, died after the crash in Stirlingshire on Saturday, Police Scotland confirmed. Police Scotland said Younger's death was "being treated as unexplained, however there does not appear to be any suspicious circumstances". A report was being compiled to be submitted to the procurator fiscal, the Guardian newspaper reported. A spokesman would not confirm reports that a male friend of Younger was injured in the crash, it said. Younger was a former pupil of Dulwich College, one of the UK's leading public schools. Younger's family said they wished for privacy and space to remember and celebrate their "wonderful son." Kieran Oberman, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh's School of Social and Political Science, was Sam's personal tutor. "We are devastated by the tragic of his death and our thoughts are with his family and friends," the BBC quoted Oberman as saying. Alex Younger has been chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) a position known as "M" since November 2014. The appointment followed a career of more than 20 years as an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the official name for MI6. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) UN chief Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday against growing hatred of Muslims, less than a month after a deadly attack on mosques in New Zealand killed at least 50 people. His remarks came during a speech at Egypt's Al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world's foremost religious institution, where he met Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb. "Around the world, we are seeing ever-rising anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia," the UN secretary general said. He cited the March 15 New Zealand mosque attacks by a white supremacist as well as a 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and is believed to be the deadliest against Jews in US history. Guterres warned of a surge in hate speech he said was "entering the mainstream, spreading like wildfire through social media". "We see it spreading in liberal democracies and as well as in authoritarian states." Guterres is on a two-day trip to Egypt, Following his visit to Al-Azhar, he was scheduled to meet President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. On Sunday, he attended an Arab League summit in Tunisia. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Uncertainty persisted over alliance between the AAP and the Congress, even after party president Rahul Gandhi Tuesday said the Congress is "open and very flexible" for a tie-up with other parties. Delhi Congress president Sheila Dikshit, and AICC in-charge of the Delhi Congress P C Chako met Gandhi at his residence to discuss the issue. Later, she huddled with other leaders of the Delhi Congress at her residence in a meeting that continued for several hours. However, Dikshit maintained silence over it. When asked about the Congress' stand on alliance in Delhi, Gandhi told reporters, "There is no confusion on this. The situation is actually very clear on this issue. We have constructed alliances." "We have been open to construct alliances and we have done it across the country. We are very flexible on this issue," he said. Chacko was present in both the meetings. He did not comment on whether a final decision was made on alliance with the AAP. "The process is on for selection of candidates. This is a preliminary discussion, ultimately the party president will take a decision. We will announce candidates on all seven seats," he said emerging from the meeting at Dikshit's residence. Others who joined the meeting included AICC spokesperson Pawan Khera, AICC co-incharge of Delhi Congress Kuljit Singh Nagra, Delhi Congress working presidents Rajesh Lilothia and Haroon Yusuf, spokesperson Jitendra Kochar, Yoganand Shahtri, Ragini Naik. Lilothia said the Delhi Congress maintains its opposition to alliance with the AAP because it will "ruin" the party. "This stand was clearly stated by the Delhi Congress president during the meeting with Rahul Gandhi," Lilothia said. Dikshit, who has been opposing an alliance with the AAP, had said on Sunday that the decision on a tie-up for Lok Sabha polls will be declared in a few days. She had met Gandhi over the issue along with Delhi Congress leaders last month as well. There is unanimity against alliance with the AAP, she had said after the meeting. The decision from Gandhi on an alliance is expected "anytime" now, sources said. The Delhi Congress is divided over the issue, with one side claiming that a 4:3 seat sharing formula has been finalised and the AAP will be asked to leave three out of the seven parliamentary constituencies in national capital. AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal had, however, said on Monday that Gandhi had refused an alliance with his party. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Indian national Tuesday was sentenced to eight years and nine months in prison for his involvement in an India-based call centre scam, the US Department of Justice said. Nishitkumar Patel, 31, who had pleaded guilty to the charges on January 9, has also been asked by a Florida court to pay USD 2,00,000, forfeit cash and a 2015 Land Rover that was seized in October 2018. According to court documents, Patel connived with the US-based co-conspirators and the India-based call centres to extort money from American residents by impersonating Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officers between 2014 and 2016. The IRS is the revenue service of the United States federal government. During this period, they mislead the victims in believing that they owed money to the IRS and would be arrested and fined if they did not pay their alleged taxes back immediately, as per the documents. The conspirators collected the fraud proceeds by withdrawing cash from prepaid cards purchased and funded by victims; hiring other conspirators (runners) to retrieve money wired by the victims to those runners; and/or hiring runners to open bank accounts into which victims deposited fraud proceeds, revealed the documents. The defendants collected the proceeds by providing the runners with the victims' names, locations, and amounts paid. The runners were directed to retrieve the fraud proceeds in cash and turn the funds over to the defendants, often less a payment to the runner for opening the account or conducting the transaction, according to the documents. Four others have already pleaded guilty for their roles in the scheme. On March 25, Alejandro Juarez was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison. Hemalkumar Shah, Sharvil Patel and Brenda Dozier are currently awaiting sentencing. "We here at IRS CI recognise the heartache and concern these crooks cause innocent people. This is why we are eager to team up with our law enforcement partners to track down these impersonators in whatever corner of the globe they may be hiding in," said special agent in-charge Mary Hammond of IRS Criminal Investigations, Tampa Field Office. J Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, said, "Over the last several years, American taxpayers have been subjected to unprecedented attempts to fraudulently obtain money by individuals impersonating Internal Revenue Service employees." "Victimising taxpayers by impersonating IRS employees is a serious crime," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) / -- Ensures better job opportunities and job readiness Introduces cost-effective learning packs to increase the learnability quotient of students Wiley (NYSE:JWa) (NYSE:JWb), a global leader in research and education, has announced a series of blended learning programs in India under the umbrella brand, WileyNXT. The programs were designed in consultation with the Wiley Innovation Advisory Council (WIAC), a group consisting of senior industry leaders and academia. Certifications through WileyNXT will provide students and professionals with better access to new-tech jobs as well as expertise in critical thinking and problem-solving which have been identified as major gaps for organizations. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/845159/Wiley_Logo.jpg ) WileyNXT will launch two programs for engineering graduates. The first is a three-month Accelerator Program targeted at final year students preparing for campus placements. The second is a four-year Integrated Program that will run parallel to the college curriculum and augment the university degree. This Integrated Program will be taught through a contextual learning model that draws on the student's own experiences and will supplement the conceptual learning provided by the college. During both programs, engineering graduates will go through rigorous training in in-demand and future technologies as well as enhanced problem-solving, analytical and critical thinking skills. The four-year program will be free in the first year, with students who qualify able to enrol in subsequent years for a nominal fee. "India is going through a serious talent deficit problem following the onset of industry 4.0. The India Skills Report 2019 states engineers are the most in demand at 57.09% with Karnataka ranked 7th in terms of employability index. It is time to enhance college with skills-based programs to make students future ready and increase their learnability quotient," said Managing Director of Wiley India, Vikas Gupta. "WileyNXT offers world-class content from Wiley authors and is endorsed by more than 50 leading organizations ensuring that it aligns with industry needs. It harnesses new technologies and enriches the learning experience providing students with the skills necessary to excel in their future careers." The WileyNXT four-year program will be available in three different modules - Java full stack, Machine Learning and Data Engineer. Features of this course include the WileyNXT self-assessment credit system, live assessment, e-book library from Wiley's range of best sellers, respective simulators for each program and over 500 business problems for students to use. For more details kindly contact your college, email us directly at support@wileynxt.com or visit http://www.wileynxt.com. About Wiley Wiley is a global leader in research and Our online scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly journals, and our digital learning, assessment, certification and student-lifecycle services and solutions help universities, academic societies, businesses, governments and individuals to achieve their academic and professional goals. For more than 200 years, we have delivered consistent performance to our stakeholders. The company's website can be accessed at http://www.wiley.com. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress on Tuesday said if voted to power it will make the office of National Security Advisor as well as the National Security Council accountable to Parliament, and define their powers under the law. In its 54-page Lok Sabha polls manifesto titled "Congress Will Deliver", the party also promised to establish the office of the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) to be the principal adviser to the government on matters relating to defence. "National security is dependent on a sound defence policy, a sound foreign policy and wise leadership. National security is not enhanced by chest-thumping or exaggerated claims," the Congress said, laying out its vision for the country's security. The party asserted that it will reverse the "trend" of declining defence spending under the NDA government and ensure that it is increased to meet the requirements of the armed forces. "We will expedite all modernisation programmes of the armed forces in a transparent manner," the party said. In its manifesto, the Congress promised to take "strategic and hard" measures to defend the territorial integrity of India and ensure the safety of the people. "The Congress will provide a statutory basis to the National Security Council (NSC) and the office of National Security Adviser (NSA). Their powers and functions will be defined under the law and both authorities, and the agencies under them, will be accountable to Parliament," the manifesto said. Alleging that the BJP government left the National Security Advisory Board in "limbo" between January 2015 and October 2016 and then "truncated" the body, the Congress promised to re-establish the NSAB, provide a statutory basis to the body, appoint experts from different disciplines, and ensure that it will function as a permanent, professional advisory body advising the NSC and the government. The party also promised to rapidly expand domestic capacity to manufacture defence and security equipment. "We will create manufacturing capacities in the public sector and in pre-qualified, security-cleared private sector companies," it said. The party vowed to keep a vigilant eye on the security situation and take every measure that is required to maintain law and order and to provide a sense of security for every citizen. The Congress said it had put in place the Multi-Agency Centre and the NSG regional hubs and had also proposed to establish the National Counter-Terrorism Centre and NATGRID, alleging that the BJP government "dismantled the preparatory work and wasted five years". "The most serious threats to internal security emanate from terrorism, infiltration of militants, Maoism or Naxalism and caste or communal violence. The Congress believes that each of these threats deserves a separate and distinct response," the manifesto said. The grand old party promised an "uncompromising" approach and "hard measures" to put an end to terrorism and to the infiltration of militants. The Congress said it in the case of Maoism, it will resolutely fight violent activities, while also address developmental challenges in the areas concerned. The party said it will enlist support of the people and win over the Maoist cadres. The party asserted that in the case of caste or communal violence,it will put down such violence with a firm hand using the police forces at its command, apprehend the instigators and bring them to justice. "There will be no room for self-appointed vigilante groups and moral policing brigades," the party said. The Congress promised to take strong action with respect to crimes against women, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and minorities. It said the law will be applied on the perpetrators without fear or favour and they will not be allowed to walk on the streets with a sense of impunity. The Congress said it will hold the district administration responsible for riots, caste or communal violence, large scale crimes against women, and for the widespread breakdown of law and order. It also promised to remove "anomalies" in the implementation of the One Rank One Pension scheme. The party also hit out at the Modi government's foreign policy in its manifesto, alleging that it has been reduced to "the whim of one man". "Our national interest has been the casualty. We promise to reverse these damaging developments and repose faith in our diplomatic corps to advise on, formulate and conduct foreign policy," the party said. Congress asserted that it implacably opposed to terrorism anywhere in the world and promised to work with other countries to eliminate terrorist groups, terrorist acts and cross-border terrorism. The party said that it will persuade the United Nations to constantly review the list of terrorists and to expand the scope of sanctions. The promise comes amid hectic efforts by India along with countries such as the US, France and the UK, to get JeM chief Masood Azhar sactioned by the UN. The Congress said it will take determined steps to persuade other countries to compel Pakistan to verifiably end its support to the terrorist groups that it shelters. "We will re-double the efforts to win for permanent membership India in the UN Security Council and the Nuclear Suppliers Group," the party said. The Congress promises to establish effective mechanisms with neighbouring countries, especially Sri Lanka and Pakistan, to resolve the problems faced by fishermen, to eliminate conflict, coercive action and loss of lives, and to improve livelihood opportunities for India's fishing communities. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress on Tuesday vowed to take determined steps to persuade other countries to compel Pakistan to verifiably end its support to terrorist groups, if voted to power. In its 54-page manifesto for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls titled "Congress Will Deliver", the party said it would persuade the United Nations (UN) to constantly review the list of terrorists and expand the scope of sanctions. The promise comes amid hectic efforts by India, along with countries such as the US, France and the UK, to get Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar sactioned by the UN. The Congress hit out at the Narendra Modi government's foreign policy in its manifesto, alleging that it had been reduced to "the whim of one man". "Our national interest has been the casualty. We promise to reverse these damaging developments and repose faith in our diplomatic corps to advise on, formulate and conduct foreign policy," the party said. It added that it was implacably opposed to terrorism anywhere in the world and promised to work with other countries to eliminate terrorist groups, terrorist acts and cross-border terrorism. "The Congress will take determined steps to persuade other countries to compel Pakistan to verifiably end its support to the terrorist groups that it shelters," the manifesto stated. Later, senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, at a press conference, said, "If talks and terror do not go together, why are they talking about the Kartarpur corridor? They should not. "So, these are attractive phrases...the point is, we have to follow a foreign policy that is realistic and that completely protects our self interest, our national interest -- what we have set out in the foreign policy section. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian IT major Wipro Tuesday said its divestment of Workday and Cornerstone On Demand business to Illinois-based Alight has been almost completed and it has received USD 95.27 million from the transaction. In February, Wipro had said it would sell its Workday and Cornerstone On Demand business to Alight for cash consideration of up to USD 110 million. While USD 100 million was to be paid at closing, the balance USD 10 million is slated to be a deferred consideration payable at the end of 12 months based on achievement of targets. "...the divestment of Wipro's Workday and Cornerstone On Demand Business in various jurisdictions, except Portugal, France and Sweden, has been completed effective March 31, 2019, and aggregate consideration of USD 95.27 million out of USD 100 million has been received towards the same," Wipro said in a regulatory filing. The impact of this divestment is expected to reflect in the financials of the company for the quarter and year ended March 31, 2019, it added. Wipro said the divestment of Workday and Cornerstone On Demand business in Portugal, France and Sweden is likely to be completed during the quarter ending June 30, 2019, subject to completion of requisite regulatory formalities and customary closing conditions. Upon completion of such divestment, Wipro will receive the remaining consideration of USD 4.73 million from Alight Solutions LLC and its group companies, the filing said. Wipro, in February, had said the divestiture will result in approximately 350 employees in Wipro's Workday and Cornerstone On Demand teams moving to Alight. Standalone revenue of the business was USD 49.7 million for 2017-18 (0.6 per cent of Wipro's consolidated revenue for the said fiscal). In July last year, the Bengaluru-based firm had partnered Alight Solutions to take over the latter's captive operations in India - Alight HR Services India - for a consideration of USD 117 million. In September, Wipro had bagged an over USD 1.5 billion engagement from Alight Solutions LLC, its biggest deal till date. Wipro had acquired the Workday and Cornerstone On Demand business as part of its Appirio buyout. The said business has multiple customers across the US, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Three years after the Supreme Court refused the plea of Congress President Rahul Gandhi, who is facing proceedings in a criminal defamation case, to scrap the penal provision, his party manifesto promised Tuesday to repeal the colonial-era law. Not only Gandhi but other leaders including BJP's Subramanian Swamy and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had failed to get the offence decriminalised by the apex court. The apex court on May 13, 2016 had rejected their pleas to scrap the over 150-year-old penal provisions and they were asked to face criminal defamation cases lodged against them. A bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra (since retired) had said the "reputation of one cannot be allowed to be crucified at the altar of the other's right of free speech". In the manifesto released on Tuesday, the Congress party promised to omit Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code and make 'defamation' a civil offence. Gandhi is facing trial in a criminal defamation case pending in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra, for allegedly blaming RSS for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. As per section 499 of the IPC, defamation could be through words spoken or intended to be read, through signs, and also through visible representations. These can either be published or spoken about a person with the intention of damaging the reputation of that person or with the knowledge or reason to believe that the imputation will harm his reputation. If found guilty of criminal defamation, section 500 of the IPC entails an imprisonment of up to two years, with or without fine. However, criminal defamation is a compoundable offence and parties can seek a closure of the case by reaching a compromise. The criminal defamation case was filed by Rajesh Kunte of RSS against Gandhi who had pleaded not guilty. Kunte had filed the case after watching Rahul Gandhi's speech at an election rally in 2014 in which he had claimed that the RSS was behind the killing of Mahatma Gandhi. Swamy was also facing three criminal defamation cases in Tamil Nadu filed by the then J Jayalalithaa government for allegedly making certain comments against her. Kejriwal was facing a number of defamation cases and several of them have now been settled. The cases against him were filed by Union Ministers and BJP leaders Arun Jaitley, Nitin Gadkari, Congress leader Kapil Sibal's son Amit Sibal and others. The apex court, in the judgement delivered on a batch of 27 pleas, had held that the right to freedom of speech and expression is "absolutely sacrosanct" but "is not absolute." The top court, which had analysed the two penal provisions and section 199 of the Code of Criminal Procedure dealing with prosecution for defamation, did not agree with the contentions that criminalising defamation attacks freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19 (2) of the Constitution and there cannot be reasonable restriction on free speech. However, it had clarified that since the offence of criminal defamation has its own gravity, the magistrates have to be extremely careful in issuing summons. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a bid to sensitize women across the country to use their vote to reject the "current environment of hate and violence", several women's rights activists and civil society groups will organise marches in 143 districts across 20 states on April 4. The marches will held in villages, blocks, 'talukas', cities, colleges and markets under the banner of "Women March 4 Change". In Delhi, the march will start from Mandi House at 11 am and will culminate at Jantar Mantar. Social activist Shabnam Hashmi said that the purpose of the march is to ignite women all over the country to use their vote to reject the current environment of hate and violence and to claim their constitutional rights as citizens of a democratic republic. "The present government has led a war against its own citizens mob lynching, hate speeches, invoking draconian laws against peaceful protests, arresting people and calling them 'seditious', 'anti-national' and 'urban naxal'," Hashmi said. The social activist said women, dalits, adivasis, Muslims, de-notified tribes, students, workers, farmers, artists and writers, journalists and human rights defenders among others have been harmed and many have been killed. "The shrill cry of war, escalation of hostilities on the border, the glorification of masculine aggression, the perennial creation of false 'enemies' within, we will not tolerate this any longer," she said. An RTI activist, Anjali Bhardwaj said that inequality has become one of the biggest challenges in the country and it disproportionately impacts women and marginalised communities. "Today we have reached a situation where 9 families own 50 per cent of the country's wealth - this has been made possible by the crony capitalist government which has weakened all institutions that empower people to hold the system accountable. We see starvation deaths across the country," Bhardwaj said. Highlighting how the government has systemically weakened fundamental rights, especially of women, gender and education activist Dipta Bhog claimed the flagship program of this government 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao' was a "scam" on women and girls of the country because more than 50 per cent of the budget of the scheme was spent on publicity. "Sex ratio has continued to drop, with this trend now also being seen in southern states. Statistics show more than 40 per cent girls drop out of school. In fact it appears that the government is suppressing data and not making it public like - percentage of muslim girls dropping out," she said. Flagging the issues of women farmers, Soma KP said past five years have seen every effort to undermine the Forest Rights Act 2006 and its entitlements to forest dweller communities. Only 17 per cent of the potential forest area has been recognized under forest rights, within which women's claims are systematically challenged, she said. "Women forest dwellers have rights to forest land under the Forest Rights Act but these rights are seldom claimed and instead state machineries and corporate sector use the power of the state use various forms of violence to capture forest lands and displace women impacting adivasi," she said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Mark Boal, the writer of films such as "Hurt Locker" and "Zero Dark Thirty", is all set to venture into the television arena with spy thriller "Intelligence". The 46-year-old scribe, who most recently worked on Netflix's feature "Triple Frontier", will write and direct the show, which has landed a series commitment from Showtime, reported Variety. The show will explore real stories from around the world, including secret inner workings of power and how espionage intersects with politics, finance, media and Silicon Valley. The first season will look into the behind-the-scenes history that led to the 2016 US Presidential election. The follow-up seasons will explore major world events through the lens of covert operations. The show is a co-production between Showtime and Michael Ellenberg's Media Res studio. Boal will also executive produce alongside Hugo Lindgren, Megan Ellison, Alan Poul and Jason Horwitch. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hitting out at the BJP-led government over the banning of a book on the Rafale deal, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Tuesday said the current regime was "scared" of any book on the defence "scam". The book titled "Nattai Ulukkum Rafale Bera Uzhaal" (the Rafale scam that is rocking the country) and written by social activist S Vijayan has been printed by Tamil publishing house Bharathi Puttakalayam, based in Teynampet, Chennai, and was scheduled to be released on Tuesday. "It doesn't take much to conclude who is scared of the Rafale Scam and any book talking about it. The most corrupt govt in independent India's history, which had indulged in corruption in Rafale deal at the very top to help his cronies," Yechury wrote on Twitter. According to reports, the publisher of the book was served a hand-written letter banning the book's release and sale and all copies of the book were seized. However, Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa, in a tweet, clarified that neither the Election Commission (EC) nor the Chief Electoral Officer's (CEO) office had given any instructions for the seizure of the book. "Clarification from CEO TN Regarding the seizure of books neither the ECI nor the CEO office had given any instructions. I have directed DEO, Chennai to look into it and give his report immediately," he said. Yechury also raised the issue of the launch of "NaMo TV", over which both the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had complained to the EC on Monday alleging violation of the Model Code of Conduct. "So anyone can start a TV channel anonymously without any govt approval? Or is it a special privilege accorded to the ruling party? Will the EC please take note of what is going on, or will democracy be continued to be corroded by the BJP with impunity?," the CPI(M) leader said in another tweet. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The domestic equity market's movement on Tuesday is likely to be driven by the release of PMI data for the manufacturing sector and March sales numbers by auto firms. Moreover, the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) will begin on Tuesday its meet for the first bi-monthly policy statement for 2019-20, which is set to be released on Thursday, April 4. Apart from these factors, the investors will also track closely stock-specific action, movement of against the US dollar, oil prices and FII inflows. On the global front, US manufacturing activity rebounded a bit more than expected in March, according to an industry report released on Monday, as production, new orders and hiring all picked up. British MPs on Monday again failed to agree on proposals for the next steps in the Brexit process. The voting was held for four motions for leaving the EU, but none gained a majority. Prime Minister Theresa May had earlier announced that she would step down if her deal was passed in the British Parliament The S&P BSE Sensex trimmed gains in the fag-end of the session on Monday to end at 38,837, up 164 points or 0.42 per cent. The broader Nifty50 index, too, slipped from the day's high of 11,738.10 to settle at 11,656, up 32 points or 0.27 per cent. GLOBAL CUES Asia shares extended their rally on Tuesday as factory activity surveys from China and the United States boosted investor confidence, triggering the largest one-day sell-off in the US Treasury market in nearly three months. MSCIs broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.3 per cent to a seven-month high after rallying more than one percent in the previous session. Australian shares gained 0.8 per cent while Japans Nikkei advanced 0.4 per cent, extending its gains for a third session. US stocks rallied on Monday, starting off the second quarter on a strong note, as upbeat manufacturing numbers from China and the United States eased worries about slowing global growth. Oil prices rose to fresh highs for the year on Tuesday, after a US official said Washington is considering more sanctions on Iran and a key Venezuelan export terminal halted operations. STOCKS TO WATCH Jet Airways: The carrier missed a $109 million loan repayment due to HSBC Bank this week, according to a Bloomberg report. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited: HAL has announced a record turnover of over Rs 19,400 crore (provisional and unaudited) for the financial year that ended March 31. Karnataka Bank: Bank targets Rs 1,44,000 crore business turnover for FY20, says MD and CEO of the bank, Mahabaleshwara M S NMDC: The public sector miner produces 32.44 MT and sales of 32.38 MT iron ore in FY19 Cyient: Delivery of order worth $5 million delayed due to delay in regulatory clearances. Godrej Properties: The company sold over 2,900 homes, its highest-ever booking, with a booking value in excess of Rs 2,100 crore in Q4 FY19 Gateway Distriparks: The firm has completed the acquisition of the entire stake held by private equity Blackstone in its subsidiary for Rs 850 crore Back in February 2018, when the Reserve Bank of India introduced its revised framework for resolution of stressed assets in its controversial February 12 circular, the banking sector and beleaguered companies alike were left shaking. The Supreme Court today struck down the circular, declaring it unconstitutional and ultra vires (acting or done beyond one's legal power or authority). What did the circular say? The circular completely revamped the rules tackling non-productive assets (NPAs). It came at a time the banking sector's profitability was taking a hit, bad loans has spiralled to a whopping Rs 10 lakh crore, and the PNB scam was beginning to unravel. "The Reserve Bank of India has issued various instructions aimed at resolution of stressed assets in the economy, including introduction of certain specific schemes at different points of time. In view of the enactment of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (IBC), it has been decided to substitute the existing guidelines with a harmonised and simplified generic framework for resolution of stressed assets", read the circular. Under the new framework, the apex bank discontinued programmes for banks to restructure their defaulted loans such as corporate debt restructuring (CDR), sustainable structuring of stressed assets (S4A), strategic debt restructuring (SDR), among others, and made the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code as the main tool to deal with defaulters. The framework made it mandatory for banks to identify signs of incipient stress in loan accounts and classify stressed assets as Special Mention Account (SMA), immediately on default. Even a single day's default in debt servicing would require reporting to the RBI and implementation of Resolution Plan. Furthermore, lenders were asked to finalise a resolution plan in case of a default on large accounts of Rs 2,000 crore and above within 180 days, failing which insolvency proceedings would be invoked against the defaulter. Banks, too, would face penalties in case of failure to comply with the guidelines. Significantly, the RBI asked lenders to weekly report credit information, including classification of an account as special mention account (SMA) to the Central Repository of Information on Large Credits (CRILC) on all borrowers having an aggregate exposure of Rs 5 crore and above. Some experts, including Krishnan Sitaraman, a senior director at Crisil, hailed the move as long- term positive for the banking sector. The logic was that the revised framework would establish an ecosystem where NPAs would not only get recognised on time but also see faster resolutions- something the previous dispensations like asset restructuring failed to do. Media reports at the time suggested that around Rs 2 lakh crore worth of stressed loans could possibly land in bankruptcy court as a result of this new framework. Also read: Power stocks rise after SC quashes RBI's February 12 circular on stressed assets Why was it opposed? The stringent new norms were criticised in various quarters, including by a parliamentary committee. While the initial brickbats focussed on the fact the circular would further erode banks' profitability as provisions surged, before long beleaguered companies started moving court on the grounds that the circular blanket-termed all defaulters as wilful defaulters when many sectors were under stress due to unforeseen circumstances beyond their control. The power sector, for instance, cited factors such as fuel shortage and regulatory clearances that hit their cash flows and credit rating. The Independent Power Producers Association of India, Association of Power Producers (APP), the Sugar Manufacturing Association from Tamil Nadu as well as groups representing shipyards and textile makers, among others, had challenged this circular. Also read: Supreme Court sets aside RBI's February 12 circular on bad loans, calls it 'unconstitutional' What was the RBI's stand? As recently as mid-March, the RBI steadfastly maintained that there would be no dilution in its stand with regard to February 12 circular. "It is reiterated that the Reserve Bank maintains its stand on all aspects of the Framework as has been consistently articulated in its communications, including the clarification given during the post-monetary policy press conference on February 7, 2019," the central bank said in a statement amid reports that it was beginning to toe the government line and was considering relaxation of some of the norms. What will happen now? The Supreme Court held that reference under IBC now has to be on case-specific basis and with authorisation of central government, The Economic Times reported. All the cases that had already been referred to bankruptcy court in line with the circular will now be reportedly reversed. (Edited by: Sushmita Choudhury) Also read: SBI Recruitment 2019: 2,000 vacancies for probationary officers; here's all you need to know! Also read: Congress promises to introduce simpler taxation system with 'GST 2.0' in poll manifesto 02 Apr 2019, 12:36 PM Robert Vadra gets anticipatory bail in money laundering case Putting a stop to the Enforcement Directorate's push for Robert Vadra's custodial interrogation in a money laundering case, a special CBI court in Delhi today granted his anticipatory bail plea. The court also allowed anticipatory bail to Vadra's close aide Manoj Arora. Both of them have to furnish a personal bail bond of Rs 5 lakh, ANI reported. RBI asks banks to reveal bad loans, tweaks NPA disclosure norms The Reserve Bank of India Monday asked banks to disclose bad loan divergences in their financial statements if the additional provisioning exceeds 10 per cent of profit before provision and contingencies.it has been decided that henceforth, banks should disclose divergences, if "the additional provisioning for NPAs assessed by RBI exceeds 10 per cent of the reported profit before provisions and contingencies for the reference period". Vipin Anand assumes charge as new Managing Director of LIC Vipin Anand Monday took charge as the Managing Director of the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). Anand was appointed as LIC MD by the government last month.Prior to this, he was in charge of LIC's western zone, Facebook takes down several Congress linked pages for 'inauthentic behaviour' The first phase of great India election festival will kick-off from April 11 and the news of foreign and domestic intervention to influence the democratic process in India has already started trickling in. Facebook has not only removed hundreds of pages, groups and accounts that were linked to Pakistan's military's public relation arm, Inter-Service Public Relations (ISPR), but has also removed nearly 700 pages and accounts linked to individuals associated with the Congress' IT Cell that were created to meddle with the Indian elections. Why record GST collection in March may be too little, too late for Modi govt Even as speculations are rife that the government is sharply falling short of its tax collection target for the financial year 2018-19, the monthly accounts of the central government for February show that the fiscal deficit of Rs 8.51 lakh crore is now 134 per cent of the revised estimate of Rs 6.24 lakh crore. AAP complains to Election Commission against launch of NAMO TV Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday filed a complaint to the Election Commission of India (ECI) against recently launched NAMO TV, which covers Prime Minister Narendra Modi's campaigns live. In a letter to the ECI, the AAP has asked if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) approached the Media Certification committee for approval. The BJP on Sunday announced the launch of the new television channel NaMo TV, with PM Modi's picture on its logo, on multiple direct to home (DTH) platforms as part of its voter outreach. Tata Motors owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) Tuesday said it plans to launch multiple electrified models, including hybrid and battery operated vehicles in India, starting this year. Towards the end of 2019, JLR India will introduce its first hybrid vehicle from the Land Rover portfolio, the company said in a statement. In the second half of 2020, the company plans to launch its first battery electric vehicle, the Jaguar I-PACE, it added. The company plans to launch the products in India over the next few years in line with JLR's global commitment to introduce electrified options on its entire product portfolio by 2020, it said. "JLR's focus is to commit itself to a more sustainable future and our engineers have developed just the right products to lead us on this path," JLR India President and Managing Director Rohit Suri said. The introduction of electrified vehicles in JLR's India portfolio is in line with the government's thrust towards electric vehicles, he added. The company is encouraged by the introduction of FAME-II by the government and its focus on expansion of the charging infrastructure in the country, Suri said. "This is bound to help with faster adoption of all kinds of electric vehicles in due course," he added. Hannover Messe 2019, the world's largest industrial exhibition, opened at Hannover, Germany on Monday. The event is showcasing the path ahead for tomorrow's factories with in-depth coverage of Industry 4.0 technologies, artificial intelligence, 5G, lightweight construction and the future of work. Over five days, from 1 to 5 April, it will feature 6,500 companies from 75 nations. The event was formally opened by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in partnership with Stefan Lofven, Prime Minister of Sweden, which is the nation being honoured as this year's partner country. "HANNOVER MESSE is the only platform worldwide that provides a holistic, integrated perspective on the key themes and trends shaping the future of the industry," said Dr. Jochen Kockler, chairman of the Managing Board of the show's organiser, Deutsche Messe. The show's lead theme is "Industrial Intelligence" - the banner under which companies from all around the world are showcasing more than 100 application examples of machine learning. This year, for the first time, the event is showcasing a large-scale 5G test-bed. Network equipment providers and users will use the test-bed to demonstrate the kinds of functionality that the new mobile telephony standard will be able to deliver. "The ability to transfer large volumes of data in real time, while maintaining high standards of data security is absolutely fundamental to the digital integration of industry," Kockler said. The network will comprise eight showcases, all connected via the 5G standard, with highlights including industrial robots managed and controlled via 5G and a model automotive production plant. Also Read: Siemens launches next level of digital solutions in manufacturing at Hannover Messe Also Read: Snapchat goes 'desi', introduces four Indian languages Microfinance Ireland (MFI) saw an increase of 9% in the demand for its services last year. Minister of State for Trade, Employment, Business, EU Digital Single Market and Data Protection, Pat Breen released the 2018 annual results at a reception today. In 2018, the not-for-profit lender, established in 2012 to deliver the Governments Microenterprise Loan Fund, approved 5.4m in loans to 384 micro businesses, helping to support an additional 856 jobs in the process. The performance in 2018 brings to 4,808 the number of new jobs supported by MFI since it was established as part of the Governments initial Action Plan for Jobs. This has been achieved through the provision of 28 million in approved loans to 1,951 businesses. The results for 2018 shows a continuation of the trend towards a more regionally-balanced spread of loans, with loans approved for businesses in all 26 counties. Counties other than Dublin accounted for 78% of all loans provided. Launching the results at MFIs offices in Clonskeagh, Dublin, today Minister Breen said, "Microfinance Ireland plays a very important role in providing an alternative source of funding to micro-enterprises old and new who may be having difficulties in accessing finance from commercial providers. The increased demand for its services reflects the continued value of the initiative. MFIs performance is proof that the Government strategy to create jobs by supporting start-ups and micro-enterprises is delivering results." Microfinance Ireland CEO, Garrett Stokes added, "Despite an improved economy and availability of bank funding, there is still significant growing demand for Microfinance Ireland loans. This demand is reflected in the records number of businesses seeking support from Microfinance Ireland in 2018. This continued strong growth highlights the ongoing need for the services MFI provides to start-ups and small businesses that are still finding it difficult to obtain credit through the Banks." Source: www.businessworld.ie Cairn Homes has commenced a formal sales process with a view to forward selling the Citywest Quarter comprising 282 apartments. Cairns appointed agents Savills and Hooke & MacDonald are guiding a sale price of 90 million for the development, reflecting an average unit price of 319,150. Cairn recently commenced construction of this development. Cairn homes say there continues to be significant demand from institutional investors seeking high-quality blocks of apartments. The development separately contains 123 houses, 42 duplex units and 14 apartments which will be offered for sale to individual homebuyers in the private market. The first delivery of the apartment blocks is expected in the final quarter of 2020, with final delivery expected by the end of the third quarter of 2021. The Irish homebuilding company yesterday welcomed the successful grant of planning permission from An Bord Pleanala for the development of its 385 unit Griffith Avenue site, comprising 377 apartments and eight houses. In recent weeks, Cairn has also received successful grants of planning permission for its developments at Marianella, Rathgar for 107 apartments and at Cross Avenue, Blackrock for 221 units, comprising seven houses and 214 apartments. In a statement yesterday, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Stanley said, "We are pleased to today announce that we have commenced a sale process for the Citywest Quarter development comprising 282 apartments. The sale process is aimed at institutional investors. We are now active on 14 individual sites in the Greater Dublin Area and continue to see significant demand for our new homes from individual buyers, and from institutional buyers for some of our larger apartment sites." He added, "Today also marks a significant achievement as we welcome An Bord Pleanalas permission for our development in Griffith Avenue. This is the seventh successful planning permission Cairn has received through the Strategic Housing Development process in the past 14 months for a total of 2,100 units. This reflects the quality of our design and our engagement with the various planning authorities and has been a significant support for Cairns ambitious growth plans." Source: www.businessworld.ie Ireland will not allow its desire to keep the Irish border open if Britain leaves the European Union without a deal to result in checks on Irish goods at ports on the European mainland, Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said on Tuesday. "We have to find a way of ensuring that we protect the single market's integrity and that we avoid physical infrastructure on the (Irish) border," Coveney told parliament, referring to meetings that had begun at official level with the European Commission on how to manage the border in a no-deal Brexit. "Ireland is not going to allow a situation where the UK leaving the European Union without a deal drags Ireland out of the single market with it. What I mean by that is checks in EU ports on all Irish products, that is not a runner and would cause significant damage to our economy so we will not allow it." (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie St. Petersburg is set to host the Arctic: Territory of Dialogue 5th International Arctic Forum on 910 April, with President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin speaking at the plenary session on 9 April. The main theme of this years Forum is The Arctic. An Ocean of Opportunity. The event will provide an opportunity to share perspectives on a range of issues affecting the comprehensive development of the Arctic. These will include the rational use of natural resources, environmental safety, transport, protecting the interests of indigenous populations, and other aspects related to sustainable growth in the region. The plenary session will be moderated by John Fraher, Senior Executive Editor for Energy, Global Business and Finance at Bloomberg. A number of meetings are planned between Vladimir Putin and visiting heads of state, including President of Iceland Guni Thorlacius Johannesson, President of Finland Sauli Niinisto, Prime Minister of Norway Erna Solberg, and Prime Minister of Sweden Stefan Lofven. Discussions are expected to focus on current and future bilateral relations, current topics on the international agenda, and regional issues, with particular emphasis on collaboration in the Arctic. Source: www.kremlin.ru Official Forum website: 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. The number of coal-fired power plants in development globally decreased for the third consecutive year in 2018 but not in China, a new report has found. The report, by environmental nongovernmental organizations Global Energy Monitor, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, found a 20% drop in newly completed coal-fired plants around the world last year and a 53% drop over three years, as well as a 39% decrease in construction starts on such projects. But the amount of coal power capacity under construction increased 12% in 2018 from the year before, an increase the researchers said was due primarily to China, after examining satellite photos that revealed the nation had quietly resumed construction of a number of sites previously reported to have been suspended by central government rules. Additionally, the China Electricity Council (CEC) in March proposed increasing Chinas coal power cap to 1,300 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, up 290 GW on current levels. While this would not necessarily breach Chinas pledges under the Paris Agreement, another coal power construction spree would be near impossible to reconcile with emission reductions needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, Lauri Myllyvirta, senior analyst at the Greenpeace Global Air Pollution Unit, said in an accompanying press statement. The report, titled Boom and Bust 2019, analyzed data from a database compiled by Global Energy Monitor that identifies, maps, describes and categorizes all coal-fired generating units around the world. Burning coal is one of the major sources of carbon dioxide emissions, the main driver behind global warming. In March 2016, Chinas Ministry of Environment and Ecology tightened the approvals process for new coal-fired plants in order to slow the pace of growth. Seven months later the environment ministry and the National Development and Reform Commission issued joint guidelines that said a planned 150 GW worth of coal-fired plants would be canceled or suspended. According to the report, Chinas government had suspended 170 GW of coal-fired plant projects by 2017 and green-lit a record low of 5 GW of new coal capacity for construction in 2018. But satellite imagery showed that development continued at nearly half of these projects: about 50 GW of projects that had already begun construction, and another 28 GW which were in pre-construction stages. Meanwhile the March proposal from the CEC, which represents Chinas power sector, indicates the industry group is pushing for a huge expansion of coal in China, and would allow for hundreds of new coal plants to be added, including plants that had been suspended under central government restrictions, the report said. Many have blamed Chinas efforts to stimulate a slowing economy for the nations backslide on years of progress since coal consumption peaked in 2013. While Chinas coal consumption rose for a second consecutive year in 2018, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, coal only accounted for 59% of the countrys energy consumption the first time it had fallen below 60%, and down from 64% in 2015. The report also pointed out that China finances more than half of the worlds global coal power capacity, including domestic plants and plants outside its borders. Abroad, this is primarily achieved through state-owned enterprises. State-owned financial agencies in China, Japan, and South Korea were found to be the largest sources of funding for coal plants outside their borders. The amount of coal power capacity in pre-construction stages declined for the third consecutive year, including in China and India, which have the largest capacity globally. Despite the apparent reversal of construction suspensions, Chinas planned new coal capacity has fallen a whopping 86% since the end of 2015. Indias has dropped 83%. However, the Boom and Bust 2019 report warns that global climate goals cannot be met without a full halt in new coal plants and a rapid retirement of operating coal plants. Contact reporter Ren Qiuyu (qiuyuren@caixin.com) Pricey Purchase Plan for Popular WeChat Account Draws Regulator Scrutiny By Shi Rui and Han Wei / Apr 02, 2019 02:31 AM / Business & Tech The Shenzhen Stock Exchange demanded that an online education company disclose more about its eye-popping plan to pay 1.5 billion yuan ($223 million) to acquire a popular WeChat account. The regulator listed 29 questions on the business operation of the target asset and the buyers financing plan and financial facts, requiring a reply by April 5. Shenzhen-listed Qtone Education Group raised market eyebrows in late March with a plan to make a share-for-share acquisition of Wu Xiaobo Channel, a WeChat account focusing on business analysis and opinion articles managed by Hangzhou Bajiuling Culture and Innovation which is controlled by finance journalist Wu Xiaobo and his wife Shao Bingbing. The inquiry reflects regulators caution over mergers and acquisitions of assets in new-media formats. The Wu Xiaobo Channel has more than 2 million followers and was valued at 2 billion yuan in a financing round in 2017. The account makes money from several WeChat-related routes: advertising, subscriptions, and even online finance courses. Related: Popular WeChat Account Valued at 2 Billion Yuan Snapped Up By Education Firm (ANSA) - Rome, April 2 - Europe is concerned over Italy's economic "regression", European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told Premier Giuseppe Conte in Rome Tuesday. Rome must make "further efforts" to stoke growth, the EC chief told the Italian premier. In other remarks, Juncker recognised Italy was coping with a heavy migrant burden and said the EU should show greater solidarity. Conte reacted by saying "the economic slowdown was forecast" and that the framework of the DEF economic blueprint "will not change." He said he was counting on approving by the end of the week a growth decree "with measures able to give impetus to growth both effective and potential". On migrants, he said coordination of coast guards was no use unless burden sharing changed. CAMEROUN :: We are taking part this year of the 19th Annual Africa Conference at The University of Texas,Austin :: CAMEROON The 2019 Africa Conference will critically examine the highly intricate and contested processes of identity formation and its significance for African societies. Furthermore, the conference will engage with discussions on identities that are intimately linked to notions of African diaspora across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. The primary aim of the conference is to reflect on the varying and varied forms of social practices and processes through which identities are constructed, contested, negotiated, and reconfigured in relation to one another. Simultaneously, the conference intends to create an intellectual space for examining the politics of identity that systematically marginalizes, excludes, disempowers, and denudes certain social groups. Beyond the specific emphasis on Africa, the overarching focus of the conference is to engage with different theoretical inflections that have emerged in the existing scholarship on imbricated identities as well as to probe into the ways in which they have been challenged and reformulated within the academia. For the past eighteen years, the Africa Conference has encouraged an interdisciplinary dialogue about the African continent for scholars from around the world, and we look forward to hosting a diverse group of scholars once more. Please review the Call for Papers link for further information. We look forward to seeing you from March 29 31, 2019! Previsualiser la video YouTube UT Africa Conference: A Snapshot Olivier Tchouaffe Thanks to Olivier J. Tchouaffe, PhD, Spokesman of The Committee For the Release of Political Prisoners CL2P Welcome to the 2019 Africa Conference held at The University of Texas at Austin. This years theme is: IDENTITIES. (ANSA) - Rome, April 2 - Europe is concerned over Italy's economic "regression", European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told Premier Giuseppe Conte in Rome Tuesday. Rome must make "further efforts" to stoke growth, the EC chief told the Italian premier. In other remarks, Juncker recognised Italy was coping with a heavy migrant burden and said the EU should show greater solidarity. Conte reacted by saying "the economic slowdown was forecast" and that the framework of the DEF economic blueprint "will not change." He said he was counting on approving by the end of the week a growth decree "with measures able to give impetus to growth both effective and potential". On migrants, he said coordination of coast guards was no use unless burden sharing changed. Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini said in response to Juncker's concern over an Italian economic "regression" that "if we'd listened to Europe we'd be in our underpants now". He said that "in the last few years European bureaucrats have damaged the Italian economy... "Luckily, on May 26 (at the EP elections) things will change," he said. Conte went on to have an hour-long meeting with OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria at the premier's office. Afterwards, Gurria said said the encounter had gone "very well". He said it was "intense, cordial and productive". But on the government's two flagship measures, the quota 100 early retirement scheme and the citizens' wage basic income, Gurria said, the premier "has not changed his mind" despite an OECD call Monday for both to be scrapped. In its country report Monday the OECD said the measures would make Italian finances unsustainable. Gurria added that "we both concur that the Italian economy will slow down. Because the slowdown will be global and European," the latter largely due to Germany. "For Italy GDP (growth) will be around zero. We think a bit less, the premier a bit more, but we concur on the slowdown". news, latest-news Two missing library books have been returned to the Australian National University, 26 years after they were first borrowed from the Chifley Library. Together the books, part of a 16-volume set on 18th century French literary criticism, would have racked up close to $100,000 in late fees. But staff decided to take pity on the secondhand book dealer who recently stumbled across the pair at a deceased estate auction in Queensland. Buyer Yarran Jenkins discovered the ANU stamp inside the two books late last year and diligently sent them home to the university to reunite the set. Head librarian Roxanne Missingham said it was still something of a mystery how the books found their way thousands of kilometres up north, after they were first checked out in March 1993 and marked as missing in 2007. Late fees are usually capped at $220 after four weeks, but Ms Missingham said the library's $6 per day rate put the fine considerably higher for both books; close to $100,000. "We've decided to waive the fees this time," she laughed. "We do that sometimes, we can be merciful." Like many universities, students at ANU with outstanding library fines cannot graduate until they settle their accounts, but Ms Missingham said it did not appear that the borrower of the books ran into such a dilemma in the '90s. The "donations" are among more than 1400 books that have been gifted to the library since a savage storm in February 2018 left its lower level - and much of the ANU's humanities collection - underwater. An estimated 300,000 volumes costing millions of dollars were lost in the deluge when the nearby Sullivans Creek burst its banks, including parliamentary papers, manuscripts and microfilm. "We've been dealing with the grief as well," Ms Missingham said. "Some staff have spent years working with academics to select magnificent materials not easy to replace, it took years to get it all on the shelves, [the collection] had just turned 50." For the next three months, fans and dehumidifiers ran around the clock to safely air out the bottom level, which will be refurbished and converted into study space in the coming months. "We'll not have books [down there] ever again," Ms Missingham said. Sodden books were loaded into minus 18-degree freezers to buy the team time to plan their preservation. More than a year on, Ms Missingham said the freezers were still full but the library was almost out of time to restore their contents. Texts held by other Australian libraries would be the first pulled from the cold storage and "experimented on", she said, as librarians worked with expert restorers to dry out pages and remove mould. The final book to come out of the frost will be a rare text on Aboriginal languages; one of about 35 damaged in the ANU's collection not held by any other library in the country. "I'm hopeful we can save it," Ms Missingham said. Replacements of other texts have since flooded in from as far afield as the UK and Canada. One ANU academic, Jane Simpson, donated more than 300 books from her late father's collection, spending hours poring through titles to replace what was lost. Donald Simpson, a neurosurgeon and professor, had heard about the Chifley Library disaster shortly before he died in 2018, Professor Simpson said. "All his life he was interested in history, and collected books," she said. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/a58cf896-d750-4b9a-a67c-e887500c6990/r0_267_5000_3092_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg comment, editorial The Sultan of Brunei, once the world's richest man, may not realise it, but he is well on the way to killing the geese that lay his golden eggs. Hassanal Bolkiah, who is second only to Queen Elizabeth II as the world's longest reigning monarch, raised eyebrows when he signed off on Draconian, sharia-style laws for the tiny majority Muslim state in 2014. The sting was taken out of the worst of them when it was also announced they would be rolled out piece-meal and over an extended time frame. It seems a fair bet many diplomats, who saw the legislation which, amongst other things, imposed death by stoning as the penalties for homosexuality and adultery, as an attempt to divert local attention away from the foundering economy, thought he would change his mind. That, unfortunately, has not happened. Five years have flashed by and the new laws come into effect on Wednesday. While George Clooney, Elton John and the United Nations have all been quick to condemn the latest development, our government seems to have been caught flat footed. One gay couple, who contacted the Smart Traveller website to find out if the new laws applied to them as they were flying to Europe on Royal Brunei Airlines and would be stopping over in the Sultanate, were reportedly told "if you act heterosexual you should be fine". Smart Traveller now warns prospective visitors to the country the anti-gay and anti-adultery laws apply to everybody, whether they be Muslim, non-Muslim or just passing through on a plane or ship. Penny Wong, to her credit, tweeted that the new penal code is in breach of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and that the Labor Party is "deeply concerned". It seems remarkable, in view of the international campaign that has been waged against Islamic state, the Taliban and al-Qaeda since September 11, that Bolkiah - whose personal extravagance is legendary - would think arbitrarily cruel and barbaric "punishments" for consensual acts that are perfectly legal in most countries are acceptable. Penny Mordaunt, the UK secretary of state for international development, perhaps said it best when she tweeted: "No one should face the death penalty because of who they love. Brunei's decision is barbaric and the UK stands with the LGBT+ community and those who defend their rights". Bolkiah can hardly be surprised Elton John and George Clooney are leading the charge for a boycott on the many luxury hotels he owns across Europe and America. Australian activists are reportedly mobilising in an attempt to have Royal Brunei Airlines banned from flying to this country. In this age of social media these are significant developments. Unlike pariah states such as North Korea and Iran, his nation of less than 500,000 is heavily dependent on foreign trade. The Sultan could pay a very heavy price for retreating into medieval intolerance and brutality. His country's economy is in such poor shape he has had to turn to China for billions of dollars in investment funding. If Bolkiah loses the goodwill of the West Brunei risks becoming a client state "ruled" by a figurehead taking his instructions from foreign masters. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/77d1ab38-c4df-474f-b9d1-442fbcafb13f/r0_46_900_554_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news An ACT parliamentary committee has called for a public inquiry into the underperformance of Canberra schools in NAPLAN testing, after more than four independent reports found students were lagging behind their interstate counterparts from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. The committee's reccomendations, tabled in the assembly on Tuesday, come amid growing calls for the controversial national test to be scrapped due to concerns about the high stakes comparison of school data online. Canberra Liberal Elizabeth Lee said that, despite attempts by some in the sector to "sugar coat everything", research pointed to problems beneath the surface in ACT school results. While Canberra students perform well at first glance, when compared to those of similar backgrounds they fall behind in most areas tested. During public hearings held by the committee last year, researchers went to war with the education directorate over the numbers, as the government attempted to hose down findings of underperformance from both the Grattan Institute and the Australian National University. Chair Michael Pettersson said 18 of the committee's 20 recommendations were unanimously backed by members. But, while they had heard about the value of standardised testing, members also agreed there needed to be ongoing consideration of how such data was published, he said. Principals and the Australian Education Union had shared stories of NAPLAN's toll on students and teachers, as parents shopped around based on school results. The majority of teachers surveyed by the union also backed growing calls to scrap the test, reporting results arrived too late to be of practical help in classrooms. While Ms Lee agreed NAPLAN should only be used as a point-in-time diagnostic tool, she questioned whether the test should be scrapped because the government did not like expert analysis of its results. She said the committee had decided to launch its own inquiry into standardised testing following "a long, concerted campaign by the union and some could argue even the minister" to discredit NAPLAN. ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry said she was still looking through the report's recommendations on Tuesday but said ACT schools performed well in NAPLAN, which she described as "a good data resource that could be improved". Her main concern was that the way the data was used was harming schools, she said. Last year, Ms Berry spearheaded a federal review into the publication of NAPLAN results on the My School website. The review, led by expert Bill Louden, will hand down its findings to ministers in June but the Education Council has already approved the reporting of NAPLAN results in line with previous years for 2019. Last year, delivering the test across the territory cost $1.4 million or approximately $65 per student, a slight decrease from 2011 and one the committee found comparable to other standardised tests. But it recommended the government push for a comprehensive national review of the NAPLAN test and even explore the possibility of introducing PISA-style sample testing. Ms Berry noted any change in the format of NAPLAN would require negotiation with the federal government. ANU policy analyst Andrew Macintosh, who called for a public inquiry into ACT school performance during his evidence to the committee, said a review was long overdue. "We formally raised problems with the directorate in 2014 and things have only gotten worse since then," Professor Macintosh said. "There appears to be similar trends [of underperformance] in ATAR results too...but there's an unwillingness to admit there's a problem." Ms Lee said that if the numbers could be explained by other states playing catch up with the ACT's good results or problems with the data, then a formal investigation would test the theory. The committee also urged the minister to push for national research on why some states achieve higher gains than others "with a focus on the fact the ACT is consistently making progress below the national average at both primary and secondary levels on a like-for-like basis". /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/ddadc833-62c8-42d9-b8d5-53f6f78c0aa7/r0_101_2000_1231_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news A new bid for a gun range between Goulburn and Canberra has been called a "badly camouflaged" version of a previously withdrawn project on the same block of land. The criticism came from a local resident opposed to the shooting range, speaking at a council meeting last month. The new application was submitted by Fiona Burns, the wife of the former chief executive of Australian Target Systems Paul Burns. Paul Burns' company withdrew plans to build a large rifle range outside the small town of Collector last year. The company said it's not involved in the new bid despite the involvement of Mr Burns, now a board member of Australian Target Systems. Mr Burns spoke at a council meet in favour of the new proposal, but a spokeswoman for Australian Target Systems said the company was not involved. She did not want to comment further. The original project was much larger in scale and was set to cater for NSW Police's counter-terrorism training, but it faced opposition from residents mainly concerned about the noise intruding on their quiet rural lives. Now, Mr Burns had told council he and his wife hoped to build "a world class facility that Queanbeyan will be proud of". The application said they were a family of "recreational shooters" who needed the range so their son could practice. The Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Council report on the application recommended the new project be approved. But earlier in March, councillors deferred a vote until April, until they could hold a workshop. Australian Target Systems' proposal to cater for NSW Police counter-terrorism training was withdrawn in July last year, which disappointed some residents because the council ultimately didn't get the chance to outright refuse the project. Ms Burns' application seeks to build a private range on a much smaller portion of the land. Local farmer John Reardon said the proponents had offered no assurances at a recent council meeting that it wouldn't end up being the "full blown national combat centre" originally proposed. "When they withdrew it ... we all thought we could get back to normal life again," Mr Reardon said. He said it would be devastating if the project went ahead with the noise making the area where Mr Reardon's family had lived for six generations near unliveable. It proposed operating seven days a week between 10am and 5pm and three nights a week from 5pm to 10pm, to cater for 35 users at the southern end of a 1900 hectare plot of land off Collector Road. It also includes plans for a 78 metre by 24 metre hangar. The council's own documents referred to the application as ambiguous forcing it to take a conservative approach. Speaking at a council meeting on March 13, Mr Burns told council he hoped to build "a world class facility that Queanbeyan will be proud of". He said he had modified the original plans, which "removed the noise issue completely" for properties two kilometres from the range. But Collector residents had previously described still being able to hear gunfire from the range some four kilometres away when Mr Burns was hosting a NSW police training event on the proposed site in 2017. Mr Burns said several of the conditions council had put on the development "were not reasonable". This included potentially limiting the operation to five days and three nights a week as well as following the recommendations of an independent noise consultant. This consultant recommended annual noise testing and a website and 24-hour hotline for noise complaints. Speaking against the project at the same council meeting was Defence public servant Greg Akhurst, whose own property borders the proposed site of the range. He described the new proposal as a "badly camouflaged version" of the withdrawn project, which was then-described as an immediate need of Australian police and defence forces. "Twelve months later, Australia is still as safe as it was and the company is still trading," Mr Akhurst said. Local Tim Duck told the council not one shot had been fired for audio tests during the acoustic tests for the last application. "All we have is speculation based on modelling," Mr Duck said. Mr Duck said council shouldn't approve the new project unless it was clear it met the NSW's Environmental Protection Agency's noise requirements. Even then, council notes on the current project that the agency's approval didn't mean it was not inaudible to the gun range's neighbours, rather "the noise satisfies what is deemed as an acceptable level". The council report on the application said there 50 public submissions on the project. While the council report recommended the application be granted conditional approval, the council voted to hold a workshop before putting the application to a vote on in April. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/5f309c44-ea4c-4490-bdff-9c6e833e30cd/r0_288_5338_3304_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, act-politics Survivors of institutional child sexual abuse and their families have spoken of their hurt after Canberra's Catholic archbishop said priests would encourage people to self-report abuse to the authorities instead of breaking the seal of confession. Ministers of religion must now report allegations of child abuse to the ACT Ombudsman, regardless of whether the accusation came through the confessional. But Catholic Archbishop Christopher Prowse's declaration last week that priest would not comply with the laws, and that the clause was "obsolete" due to separate laws requiring all adults to report child sex abuse to police has caused anger and hurt among some survivors. Anti-child abuse campaigner Damien De Marco said the church had its priorities wrong. "It's hard to believe the church leadership is insinuating that a priest's ex-communication is a worse outcome than a little child being raped," Mr De Marco said. "No one's current job can ever be more important than stopping a child's life being destroyed." Another survivor said his reaction to the comments was "one of disappointment". "Essentially the message they're sending to parishioners at the moment is people are still not protected. That's a big concern to me. I still have children in the Catholic education system and my thoughts are for them," he said. "Maybe times have changed with general public reporting but from an internal point of view if the priest is the person in the church someone reports to they still need to be covered by mandatory reporting." The survivor also said the remarks showed the church still saw itself as a law unto itself. "I think given the history of what's happened in the past, not only does it show complete disrespect for those who've experienced institutional abuse, it shows an archaic mentality moving forward," he said. "I think the church needs to have full accountability as every other member of the community does, I don't see why there is one rule for them and another for everyone else." The mother of a different abuse survivor said the comments had caused her more anguish, and went against everything she had been taught the church stood for. "These people are supposed to be caring, loving people, they don't even care what is happening to children. When will people wake up and stop going to mass?" she said. "What the brothers did to my son, I'm so full of anger. It won't go away. The thing is they don't seem to get it, or be suffering or anything. I'm beginning to think the whole religion is evil." However practising Catholics have also come out against the church's position on the confessional laws. The Concerned Catholics of Canberra-Goulburn Archdiocese group formed in 2017 to press for changes in the running of the church. The group's spokesman, Professor John Warhurst, said: "The law of the land must always take precedence over church law". The church has repeatedly said it is highly unlikely abusers will disclose their activities through the confessional and even if they do, priests have no way of identifying them. However the ACT Attorney-General Gordon Ramsay has said the laws are required to "effect cultural change" and no institution has demonstrated that they should be exempt. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/4a1df028-26da-40da-950c-dceefdc33bfb/r0_65_1000_630_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news The Priorities for Change report, which the Australian Public Service review panel released last month, is one of the most inauspicious such documents produced in the Commonwealth in the past 30 years and therefore one of the most inauspicious in the Commonwealth's history. It is dwarfed by the Coombs royal commission report in 1976, the Reid review report in 1983 and the three white papers dealing with public service, budget reform and non-departmental organisations that the Hawke government produced in the 1980s. And it is way below the standard of the Ahead of the Game report brought to light in 2010 during the Rudd government. The panel's chairman, David Thodey, says the report "presents our current view" and invites people to "challenge our thinking". For that, there's ample scope. The report kicks off with eight brief paras in which it purports to set out "APS history and tradition". Most of this is given over to praise "proud history", "remarkably durable", "positive picture", "true to enduring values" and so on. There are a couple of lines about the effects of World War II but there's nothing about changes since the Coombs commission. This history wouldn't last two minutes in a preschool and gives the impression, reinforced in much of the rest of the report, that the panel is unconcerned about the lessons of experience. Oh, there are a few snapshot statistics about 2018, but no trends and scant detail. After this, things quickly run into the sand. Let's take a few general points to begin. The first thing that smacks the reader between the eyes is the report's suffocating language. No befuddling management cliche or nonsensical jargon is left out and meaning is consequentially obscured and confused. For example, the report says the public service needs "an operating model that dynamically responds to new and shifting priorities, with a culture and shared ways of working that allow teams to come together to tackle priorities for government and the Australian people". You wouldn't need to be Pauline Hanson to ask: "Please explain?" Second, while fretting about the APS's policy-analysis capacity, the panel doesn't much trouble itself with analysis. That is, it tends to confirm the thing it frets about. Thus, in saying what it thinks is "needed", the report provides dot points on "context" and "what has shaped our thinking" but there is no connecting analytical content. For example, it recommends "a move towards common pay and conditions across the service". There is, however, no analysis of the existing policy, no suggestion about how that might be changed and no outline of possible institutional implications. When questioned by a journalist on this recommendation, Thodey seemed not to understand what it meant. It's not, apparently, "standardised" pay and conditions but perhaps it's a move to greater equity. He said: "It's saying we're trying to move towards an environment that would have greater transparency and more common terms because one of the problems ... is there's so many of them out there." Got it? If you have, you must be able to see through mud. Third, many of the report's suggestions are either pure motherhood or pure puzzlement. For example, on the "strategic allocation of funds", it recommends: "A budgeting framework that retains fiscal discipline and aligns spending with government priorities." That motherhood notion is as old a government itself yet the review provides no suggestions about how to make it real in the here and now. On the puzzlement front, we're told a "stable spine of common digital platforms that can operate across the APS for core enabling services" is needed. What that might be and what it should encompass is unsaid, with the secretaries board left "to oversee the development of this spine, subject to any direction by government". It's hoped the board can keep the "spine" as "stable" as possible. There's nothing worse than a wobbling, jelly-like spine. When the review's report gets closer to putting a little flesh on some of its bones, it is no less disappointing. First, it proposes a single "aspiration" for "a trusted APS, united in serving all Australians". It sees this aspiration as an "organising principle", saying trust is "founded on integrity, transparency and reliability" and that a "united" public service will be "characterised by joined-up leadership and a flexible operating model with collaboration the norm". This echoes the view of Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Martin Parkinson, whose "vision" is for "a cohesive and capable APS confident in its values, clear in its purpose and proud of it culture". These aspirations, however, are about states of being: being trusted, being united, being proud, etcetera. They're forms of organisational narcissism, where looking good comes before doing good. It should be the other way round. That is, the APS will be trusted and can be proud when it performs its tasks effectively, efficiently and properly. The review has the cart before the horse. Yet even if the "aspiration" were to be changed to one of doing, there's little reason to think it would be helpful in any significant ways to staff on the frontline of customs work, in naval stores, on a social-security counter, those in the rarefied stations of central office policy or anywhere else. It's one thing for individual departments to have "vision statements" but to layer them with a public-service-wide one is a stretch too far. Certainly, to see something like "a trusted APS, united in serving all Australians" as an "organising principle" is ridiculous. Second, the review has great hopes in a more powerful secretaries board, which it would like to have "decision-making rights" so it could be "driving cross-portfolio policy and delivery outcomes". This suggestion appears to derive from the review's fundamental misconception that "the secretaries board is the APS's principal service-wide governance body". It is not: the cabinet is, an elementary fact that the review's analytical shyness allows it to overlook. Think of it this way: would the prime minister, treasurer and ministers for foreign affairs and defence be happy to have the secretaries board, all of whose members have time-consuming day jobs and most of whom would have no interest in or knowledge of foreign affairs and defence, "driving [their] cross-portfolio policy and delivery outcomes"? It doesn't bear thinking about. There may be sense in the review's suggestion for committees of officials "mirroring" cabinet committees, as is probably now the case in some instances. But to give the secretaries board legislative powers to do things that rightly belong to ministers is a notion that should be consigned quickly to a waste-management (no pun intended) facility. Third, the review picks up on a suggestion by (a former departmental secretary and public service commissioner) Andrew Podger that the PM&C; secretary should be recognised in legislation as the "head of the service" and the commissioner should similarly be designated as the "head of people". Thodey says these "roles and responsibilities should be clearly understood", although, except for a couple of imprecise suggestions affecting the commissioner, the report gives them no definition, leaving the impression that the panel doesn't understand them. Fourth, the report rightly emphasises the importance of community "confidence in the appointment, performance management and termination of [departmental] secretaries". Yet, apart from saying there should be a "codified process" using "selection criteria", that process is unexplained save for the observation that the panel is thinking about an advisory panel of the PM&C; secretary, the public service commissioner and a "ministerial nominee". Well, forget that. Any "ministerial nominee" would typically bring along the name of a person the minister would like in the job, leaving the panel with the easy and limited task of crafting an accommodating recommendation. So the "codified process" would be knocked for six and public confidence further undermined. Curiously, the review is unable to bring itself to discuss the problems associated with fixed-period appointments for secretaries or other matters related to their tenure, notwithstanding these matters also critically affect public confidence and the public service's ability to advise governments effectively. Fifth, the panel urges the need to "reconfigure teams and deploy skills when and where needed". At the same time, after 10 months on the job, the panel is "still exploring" the desirability of minimising "machinery-of-government changes". While there's something to be said for both of these objectives, there's a tension between them. Bringing bits and pieces of departments together to do certain jobs and then disassembling them is akin to mini machinery-of-government changes, and it's a long-standing practice. Keeping machinery-of-government changes to a minimum is about maintaining organisational stability and continuity. Regrettably, the panel doesn't analyse these tensions or their related history; nor does it adequately discuss means of coordinating activities other than by the physical bringing together of teams. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't get within a bull's roar of articulating principles that might be used in making decisions about the wider machinery of government, still less reflect on previous attempts to do so. Sixth, the review panel sees a "formal, focused professionalisation of all APS roles delivered through a new 'professions model'" as key to improving staff capability. This would be brought forth by the public service commissioner and supported by a "dedicated, suitably resourced [of course] APS academy to source, design, deliver and/or leverage relevant capability-building initiatives". There is no explanation as to how this might be set up or how it could work, and no case is made for an "APS academy" because it's likely there isn't one. The professionalisation suggestion appears to have been conjured from thin air and puffed up by another lapse into historical blindness. The fact is the public service was professionalised in the 1960s, principally through patient and intensive enterprise bargaining. In short, the essence of what the review panel suggests was attended to 60 years ago. The Thodey crew likes to boast about how it is setting the public service up for the 2030s the problem is, though, if it can't look back, it almost certainly can't look forward. Seventh, while ministers (departments' chief executives) barely warrant a mention in the review panel's report, it does make some recommendations on relations between the public service and ministers and their offices. Based as they in part are on a second-rate Australia and New Zealand School of Government paper commissioned by the panel, these recommendations add nothing new other than to suggest there should be "new positions for senior public servants in ministerial offices". Departmental liaison officers might be one thing but the idea that ministers might give up a part of their staff allocation to senior officials selected by departmental secretaries, possibly to "keep an eye" on them, is, to say the least, innovative and unworldly. It may be desirable to move away from the version of ministerial offices spoofed in the TV program Utopia but who wants to go back to the days of Yes, Minister? One could go on, but these examples of the Thodey report's flakiness are typical of the document as a whole. Equally unimpressive is what the report doesn't say. There is a long list, but let one example suffice. Nothing is said about the ways in which the use of labour hire and contractors to perform standard line jobs is exposing the public service to cronyism, nepotism and corruption in its staffing. These phenomena were the motive force behind the great reforms in the British civil service in the 19th century and, in turn, they shaped colonial administrations and the Commonwealth's. The door is now being opened for these ills to be let back in and the Thodey review has nothing to say about their grave risk. The review claims to be concerned about public trust and confidence in the public service, yet it has not a word to say about the greatest contemporary threat to that trust. Thodey's report includes a section on implementation. It says it has drawn on experience, but it appears neither the relevant ministers nor the senior officials involved in the highly successful (if extended) implementation of the Coombs royal commission and the Reid report were consulted. If they had been, the panel would have learned that the key to successful implementation is not merely, as it suggests, to have an "authorising environment" and "support" from government but to have a minister willing to take charge, get decisions from cabinet and then force their implementation. As things stand, there's not much in the Thodey report that could or should be implemented. It's possible some irons can be pulled from the fire although such hopes must rest on a degree of optimism unwarranted by the review's record. It seems to have been too much influenced by the evils of the innovative mindset that requires the lessons of experience to be suppressed in favour of doing something different. Anything it doesn't matter what, just so long as it's different. In this warped world, analysis doesn't matter. A couple of weeks ago, Parkinson, the leading proponent of innovation in the public service, urged a meeting of his fellow economists to be analytical, fearless and persuasive. The review panel report is none of these things. It shies away from analysis, it steps around awkward problems like labour hire and contractors, remuneration policy and the mixed blessings of the efficiency dividend, and its clotted language and half-baked proposals are not just unpersuasive, they're off-putting. The Thodey review could be a special problem for the ALP if gets lucky in the forthcoming election. If the Review maintains its current trajectory the ALP should consider starting again with a genuinely independent review, with proper terms of reference and powers and run by people with sound qualifications for the task. Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant. pdg@home.netspeed.com.au /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/d3ca727c-c24b-4210-83f0-c4987714823d/r0_235_4256_2640_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg (ANSA) - Cagliari, April 2 - Labour and Industry Minister Luigi Di Maio has freed up 'social buffers' for lay-off pay for 60,000 workers in 18 crisis-hit areas in Italy, trade unions told ANSA Tuesday. Almost 800 of the workers who will received the subsidies are in Sardinia, said the Sardinian engineering unions from the former Alcoa plant. The unions spoke to deputy cabinet chief at the industry ministry, Giorgio Sorial. Modified On Apr 15, 2019 01:32 PM By Dinesh for Nissan Sunny The new sedan will replace the current-gen Sunny, which is over 8 years old New Nissan Sunny to make its debut in the US on 12 April 2019. A camouflaged version was spotted testing overseas recently. Looks significantly different when compared to the outgoing model. Expected to be offered with both petrol and diesel engine options. If launched in India, expect it to undercut the Honda City, Maruti Suzuki Ciaz, Hyundai Verna and the Toyota Yaris. The tenth-gen Nissan Sunny, which was unveiled in 2010 and launched in India in 2011, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Thankfully, Nissan is set to unveil the eleventh generation sedan this year. Set to be showcased on 12 April 2019, the new Nissan Sunny is likely to be launched in the US first, where it is sold as the Nissan Versa. A heavily camouflaged test mule of the upcoming Sunny was spied recently. The spy images suggest that the new Sunny will continue to be a long compact sedan like the current model and offer generous legroom for rear passengers. In its current generation, the Sunny is 4455mm long, making it longer than all compact sedans barring the Maruti Suzuki Ciaz (4490mm). In terms of design, the new Sunny will look different from the current model and is likely to be more in line with the likes of the new-gen Micra and Altima, both of which are not available in India. Given its upswept headlamps and the coupe-ish roofline, the design appears to be modern at first glance, much like that of the current-gen Hyundai Verna. The rear also looks similar to the current Verna, especially with those pointy tail lamps. From what is visible in the spy shots, the cabin layout of the new Sunny might just be similar to the global-spec Kicks and the Euro-spec Micra. It gets a touchscreen infotainment system that is housed inside the dash while the AC vents take the top spot in the central console. The India-spec Kicks, on the other hand, gets a floating touchscreen infotainment screen flanked by the central AC vents. Pictured: Euro-spec Nissan Micra Like before, the Sunny is expected to share its platform with the Euro-spec Micra, which is based on an updated version of Nissans V-platform. The current-gen India-spec Sunny and Micra are also based on the V-platform. Under the bonnet, the new Sunny is likely to get Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliances brand new 3-cylinder turbocharged 1.0-litre petrol engine - the 1.0-litre IG-T 100PS. The 1.0-litre 3-cyl turbo-petrol (1.0-litre DIG-T 117 PS) that was recently introduced on the Euro-spec Micra cant be ruled out either. While IG-T can be had with a 5-speed manual or Nissans Xtronic CVT, the DIG-T is only available with a 6-speed manual for now. Given that the Sunny is a competitively-priced car in most of the markets where it is offered, expect the current engines to be on offer as well. So, as far as the diesel engine is concerned, it should get the updated 1.5-litre K9K engine that powers the new Micra. This engine is also expected to make its debut in India with the next-gen Duster. Engine 1.0-litre IG-T 1.0-litre DIG-T Power 100PS 117PS Torque 160Nm 180Nm with 20Nm overboot Transmission 5-speed MT, CVT 6-speed MT Nissan India is yet to confirm if the new Sunny will be offered here. We expect the Japenese carmaker to bring the new sedan here eventually, especially since the current version is now one of the oldest sedans in its segment and has not been doing too well on the sales chart either. Where other compact sedans like the Ciaz, City and Verna have an average monthly sales of around 3,000 units, the Sunnys average monthly sales are below 50 units. The current-gen Sunny is priced between Rs 6.99 lakh and Rs 9.93 lakh (ex-showroom Delhi) in India. Also Read: Maruti Ciaz 1.5 Diesel Launched; Priced From Rs 9.97 Lakh Image Source Read More on : Sunny diesel 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. South China's Guangdong Province on Tuesday opened a new bridge across the Pearl River estuary, the latest major transport project in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The Nansha Bridge at the Pearl River Estuary, seen here on March 28, 2019. [Photo: IC] The Nansha Bridge links Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, and the city of Dongguan, a manufacturing powerhouse. It followed the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, which also crosses the estuary of the busy waterway, in October last year. The 12.8-kilometer eight-lane bridge is designed for a traffic speed of 100 kilometers per hour, according to Guangdong Province Traffic Group, an investor and constructor of the bridge. The project is also the first to employ China's self-developed 1,960-megapascal cable wire, a technological breakthrough that will boost future bridge construction in China. Also known as the Humen Second Bridge, the Nansha Bridge is expected to greatly relieve traffic pressure in the area. The Nansha Bridge at the Pearl River Estuary, seen here on March 28, 2019. [Photo: IC] The Bay Area, consisting of Hong Kong and Macao, as well as nine cities in Guangdong Province, aims to boost joint development of the two special administrative regions and the Chinese mainland. Covering 56,000 square kilometers, the area had a combined population of about 70 million at the end of 2017, and its GDP reached around 10 trillion yuan (about 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2017. (ANSA) - Rome, April 2 - OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said a meeting with Premier Giuseppe Conte Tuesday had gone "very well". He said it was "intense, cordial and productive". But on the government's two flagship measures, the quota 100 early retirement scheme and the citizens' wage basic income, Gurria said, the premier "has not changed his mind" despite an OECD call Monday for both to be scrapped. In its country report Monday the OECD said the two measures would make Italian finances unsustainable. Gurria added that "we both concur that the Italian economy will slow down. Because the slowdown will be global and European," the latter largely due to Germany. "For Italy GDP (growth) will be around zero. We think a bit less, the premier a bit more, but we concur on the slowdown". Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of ride-hailing company Uber, and the companys directors won the dismissal of an investor lawsuit that sought to hold them liable for a fight over trade secrets that slowed Ubers push into autonomous vehicles. The lawsuit by California investor Lenza McElrath sought to pin damages on Kalanick and board members for the cost of its high-profile battle with Googles parent company Alphabet Inc , which accused Uber of stealing self-driving technology. The ruling on Monday by Delaware Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock dismissing the lawsuit closes a difficult chapter for Uber, which paid $245 million to Alphabet in February 2018 to settle their trade secrets fight. Uber is scheduled for an IPO this month. Its rival Lyft Inc made a soaring stock market debut last week, opening with a share price of $87.24 but it was down 10 percent on Monday. Michael Barry, a lawyer with Grant & Eisenhofer in Wilmington who represented McElrath, declined to comment. An Uber spokesman said the company was pleased with the courts decision to dismiss this meritless complaint. The decision can be appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court. The dismissed lawsuit accused Kalanick and Ubers directors of breaching their fiduciary duties to investors by approving Ubers $680 million deal in 2016 for Ottomotto LLC. The self-driving trucking company was founded and staffed by former employees of Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet. Uber struck the deal shortly after Otto founder Anthony Levandowski resigned from Waymo. Just months after the deal closed, Waymo sued Uber in federal court over allegations that Levandowski brought with him thousands of secret files. The Waymo fight set back Ubers self-driving development and led to the shuttering of its autonomous trucking efforts. The lawsuit said the Uber board ignored intellectual property risks from the Otto deal and should have been more skeptical of Kalanicks judgment. The Court of Chancery judge, however, said there was no evidence that the board simply rubber-stamped a deal. A due diligence report on the deal had been prepared but directors did not review it in full before the board gave its initial approval, and the board had some discussion of potential legal liability from acquiring Otto. Their decision ultimately damaged Uber, wrote Glasscock. Nonetheless, a failure to follow best practices is not necessarily a breach of fiduciary duty. (Additional reporting by Heather Somerville in San Francisco.) The Rockefeller Foundation will end funding and dismiss the staff at its 100 Resilient Cities program, the largest privately funded climate-adaptation initiative in the U.S., the foundation announced Monday. Rockefeller will shift some of its resilience funding to the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, with a $30 million grant to the councils Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience, the foundation said in a press release. Rockefeller also announced a $12 million grant to allow continued support and transition time to the 100 Resilient Cities network through much of 2019. With a new grant in place to the Atlantic Council and new structures within the Rockefeller Foundation to carry forward its resilience work, the grant that funds 100RC will conclude in 2019, the foundation said in its release. The 100 Resilient Cities program was started by Rockefeller in 2013 to help U.S. cities including Boston, Miami, New York and Los Angeles as well as cities overseas prepare for threats related to climate change. Bloomberg News reported last week that the foundation was planning to disband the program. A spokesman for Rockefeller, Matt Herrick, said the 100 Resilience Cities program isnt shutting down. Instead, he said, it is transitioning to other offices, including the foundations Jobs and Economic Opportunities initiative. The work will continue in one form or another through 2019, he said. Tough Day Andrew Brenner, a spokesman for 100 Resilient Cities, said by email that Monday was a tough day. This morning our staff of 86 was informed that their last day would be July 31, 2019 myself included with severance following, Brenner said by email. He said he believed that the change would result in the closure of the organizations offices in New York City, Mexico City, London and Singapore. The shift of the 100 Resilient Cities program comes as U.S. cities face increasing pressure from climate change, especially following a string of major natural disasters over the past two years. And it coincides with a pullback in climate adaptation work by the Trump administration, which has reversed policies designed to prepare communities for global warming. Read more: Rockefellers Climate Resilience Program Said to Be in Jeopardy The program, to which Rockefeller provided $164 million in grant money, pays for cities to hire chief resilience officers who develop and then implement strategies for coping with climate change. The initiative also gives cities access to the organizations staff and external consultants, as well as to a global network of cities trying to grapple with similar problems. For participating cities whose chief resilience officers have not yet completed their initial two-year contracts, the foundation will continue to pay those officers salaries for the remainder of their two-year commitments, Herrick said. The foundation described its decision as a new phase of its leadership on climate and resilience, and said the grant to the Atlantic Council establishes a new platform for this important work to evolve and continue. Asked why the foundation was closing the program, Herrick said that 100 Resilient Cities had mostly achieved its objectives. The history of the foundation, when it begins programs or initiatives, is that those do not carry forward in perpetuity, Herrick said in a phone interview Monday. We anticipate a successful conclusion to the goals set by 100 Resilient Cities. Network Established As for the network that the program was intended to create, so that cities could help each other deal with climate change, that network will continue in some capacity or another, Herrick said. Jobs within 100RC will end on July 31, Herrick said. We will do everything we can to help 100RC staff as they explore new opportunities. They are amazing colleagues and their work has been so important. The 100 Resilient Cities initiative was created by Judith Rodin, who was president of Rockefeller from 2005 to 2017. The foundation chose Raj Shah, who had run the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Obama administration, to succeed her. I am immensely proud of the work achieved by 100 Resilient Cities to integrate resilience in cities and communities around the world, Shah said in Mondays press release. The Foundation is committed to working with cities and CROs to ensure this work is institutionalized. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. (ANSA) - Rome, April 2 - Monuments worldwide turned blue in the night between Monday and Tuesday for World Autism Awareness Day, including Rome's Palazzo Montecitorio, the seat of Italy's Lower House. The Empire State Building in New York and Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro were among landmarks shining blue lights, the color chosen by the United Nations to raise global awareness on autism for the 12th edition of World Autism Awareness Day on April 2. Autism affects an estimated 600,000 families in Italy (one in 100 children). Doctors and experts have called for effective "inclusion" practices of those affected by this condition, which refers to a broad range of neurodevelopmental disorders causing impaired communication and social skills. According to the latest data, autism is on the rise, also due to more effective screening practices that enable early diagnosis and intervention. One in 56 children worldwide are diagnosed as having the disorder for a total of an estimated 60 million people. The Assisi-based Istituto Serafico, which promotes assistance and inclusion projects, has highlighted that individuals with the disorder often face economic challenges: "The elevated cost of therapies literally bring families to their knees". "It is estimated that they spend on average between 1,000 and 2,000 euros a month for their entire lives", the institute said, stressing that the national healthcare system doesn't always offer support and "very long waiting lists don't allow early intervention". The Italian Society of Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry (Sinpia) called for more investments on neuropsychiatric disorders. A key objective, said Maria Nicoletta Aliberti, a child neuropsychiatrist at the Group INI-Istituto Neurotraumatologico Italiano, is inclusion "not just in schools but in all contexts" in order to promote the right of those affected by the disorder to lead normal lives. Another fundamental objective is scientific research as no cure currently exists though early detection and treatment is key in helping children. And the Italian Autism Foundation (FIA) has launched a campaign to raise funds - #sfidAutismo19 - on April 1-19 while the Foundation Policlinico Tor Vergata has organized an 'Autism Friendly' day. Cemtech MEA 2019 ICR Research By Published 02 April 2019 Over 200 delegates from the global cement industry came together for Cemtech Middle East & Africa 2019, held at the Grand Hyatt Dubai between 17-20 February. The event featured an extensive technical programme alongside an international exhibition of service and product suppliers. Guest of honour, Eng Ahmad Al-Rousan, secretary general, Arab Union for Cement and Building Materials (AUCBM), delivered a welcome address to begin the Cemtech MEA 2019 conference programme. Mr Al-Rousan noted that the event is coming in a time when the cement industry is facing a very big change and big problems. In total, AUCBM member countries have 175 integrated plants and over 30 grinding mills, delivering a cement capacity of 353Mta. However, actual production for 2018 was 240Mt. One of the major factors contributing to this supply-demand gap are the ongoing wars in some of its member countries. Mr Al-Rousan stated that this conference is very important to exchange experience and to discuss all of these problems [...] and to see what we want to happen in the future. International Cement Reviews Managing Director, Thomas Armstrong, also considered how oversupply remains the dominant issue facing the cement sector in the Middle East and African region, with a 55-60 per cent capacity utilisation rate in 2017. The options for cement producers are clear: export the surplus and optimise your operations to remain profitable in an increasingly competitive environment. These topics remained the focus of discussion over the coming two days. Global outlook Paul Roger, Exane BNP Paribas (UK), delivered a demand and pricing outlook for global cement markets over the 2019-22 period. Mr Roger, who expects worldwide dement to grow by 2.8 per cent (excluding China) in 2019, outlined some of the most important issues that producers will face in the medium-term. These include the impact of tighter environmental regulations, expansion of Chinese groups overseas, low-cost equipment reducing barriers to entry and consolidation after mergers such as Lafarge-Holcim and Heidelberg-Italcementi have reshaped the industry. Overcapacity markets Tony Hadley delivered an analysis and outlook of the cement sector in the sub-Saharan and northern regions of Africa. As such, Mr Hadley reflected that previously We have talked about the turmoil and that has probably come to a head in many parts of Africa. In emerging markets large overcapacity has led to some producers altogether leaving the market and moving to more-established regions. Meanwhile, new entrants are expanding capacity at too fast a pace and consequently crashing prices. Looking ahead it seems more likely that larger multinationals will move away from mergers and acquisitions to focus on internal development strategies. Hettish Karmani, U-Capital (Oman), looked at corporate performance in GCC markets and gave an outlook for the region in 2019. In terms of economic performance, the GCC region is expected to record around 3.9 per cent GDP growth in 2019. While total installed capacity of the cement sector is still expected to increase slightly, as a whole capacity growth is expected to slow considerably as a result of oversupply. However, demand is expected to show minor growth compared to 2018 and reach 81Mt in 2019. Seyed Parhizgar of Khalagh Tadbir Pars Co (Iran) presented a market report for the Iranian cement industry, which recorded 58.1Mt of cement production in 2018. This figure was a slight increase from the 57.5Mt recorded in the previous year. However, capacity reached 85Mta in 2017 and did not increase into 2018. This still leaves a significant amount of overcapacity and an underperforming utilisation rate. Mr Parhizgar noted that cement exports, the usual solution to this issue, are one method which the industry is using to deal with overcapacity. Nevertheless, competition is high and Iranian cement and clinker exports have been falling since a high of 18.9Mt was recorded in 2014, declining to 12Mt in 2018. However, it is hoped that Irans high-quality raw materials and competitive pricing will enable it to remain competitive in international markets. Plant tour The conference programme included a plant tour to Arkan Building Materials 4.5Mta facility in Al Ain on Wednesday, 20 February. The facility was constructed by Sinoma in 2012 and features a five-stage, twin-string preheater and 10,000tpd kiln. Two Loesche LM60.6 vertical raw mills grind raw material at a capacity of 400tph, while cement grinding is carried out by three additional LM56.3+3C/S mills at a capacity of 210tph. Solutions and technical progress In terms of trade in MEA, Javier Martinez of GlobBulk Consulting (Spain) examined clinker exports and the potential of Algeria as an export market. After a period where consumption outpaced the amount which domestic suppliers could produce, the country is now ready to export. Mr Martinez explored how high capacity and suitable distances from plant to port mean that around 8Mta of cement exports could feasibly be achieved in the future. However, it is essential that the industry uses logistics experts to design suitable export operations, whilst port infrastructure is upgraded. Pritish Devassy, Al Rajhi Capital (Saudi Arabia), provided an economic context for the cement sector in Saudi Arabia and considered methods which could stabilise the industry in the country and reduce the gap between demand and supply. Solutions consisted of shutting down old capacity alongside potential mergers and acquisitions between players. However, Mr Devassy also suggested that it may be more profitable to start a new company, rather than buying an established one through the open market. Finally, although it would likely be financed by players external to the country, planned mega-projects such as Neom provide a positive outlook for cement demand. Moving on to sustainability in north Africa, Giuseppe Colaiacovo, vice-president of Italys Colacem SpA, spoke about the companys operations in Tunisia. After acquiring Les Ciments Artificiels Tunisiens (CAT) in 2000, Colacem quickly set to work on improving sustainability at the plant. Since the country is the largest producer of olive oil outside of the EU, the company has partially substituted fossil fuels with waste from this booming industry. In 2018 the company managed a substitution rate of 10.9 per cent, saving 20,000t of CO 2 emissions over the year. Programme highlights and manufacturing trends Peter Hoddinott highlighted the important issue of health and safety leadership in cement manufacturing. Across the industry there are approximately 500 fatalities and over 50,000 lost-time injuries per year, a figure that is gradually improving. Mr Hoddinott noted how leading factors such as near-miss reports and feedback alongside training hours are the most effective methods to monitor and improve health and safety in cement plant operations. Furthermore, the good leadership required for health and safety has been linked to soaring financial results. The theme of the importance of health and safety was picked up by further presentations such as UAE-based Stevin Rock, which highlighted it as one of the companys main priorities. The focus of the presentation was the large limestone reserves of the UAE, with the companys Khor Khuwair quarry having reserves of over 2.5bnt alone. As one of the worlds largest quarries, it supplies 60Mta of finished products through various channels. In particular, it is located next to Saqr port, which is amongst the biggest in the MENA region and can process over 50Mta of cargo. However, another berth will be commissioned in March 2019 to expand it to 80Mta. Products are currently exported to GCC countries, India and Madagascar amongst others, while domestically its materials have been instrumental in the construction of various projects such as the Burj Khalifa, Dubai airport and Palm Jumeirah island. DG Khans Arif Bashir (Pakistan) presented a case study of the construction and commissioning of Pakistans largest cement facility at 9000tpd. Alongside this project, cement capacity in the country is expected to rise from 48Mta in 2018 to 63.26Mta in 2019. Providing a background for the new capacity, Dr Bashir stated that the reason the cement industry is growing in the country is because there are a lot of interesting projects coming up, with China alone investing around US$68bn in new infrastructure projects. InterCem Engineering looked at the growing trend for modular grinding plants, describing its role as supplier to the first European network of regional grinding plants. The facilities can be dropped into the centre of high-demand markets due to their modular qualities and can be set up quickly at a relatively small investment. The facilities are placed at strategic locations to benefit from rail links or river ports. For further information, see ICR February 2019, which covered the commissioning of the first of these facilities. Another presentation highlight was delivered by Robert Feldmann, McKinsey & Co (Germany), who picked up on the increasingly important theme of digital transformation and AI. Mr Feldmann showed the results of a case study that may have been the worlds first fully-autonomous AI asset optimiser for a vertical raw mill and kiln in a cement plant. At the end of a 24-month process, the system resulted in a 12 per cent performance boost compared to the manual mode. For the full report on the project, see ICR February 2019. Cemtech Awards This year three outstanding presentations from the programme were recognised at the Gala Dinner that celebrates the successful conclusion of the conference. The winners for Cemtech MEA 2019 were: Construction and commissioning of Pakistans largest greenfield cement plant: Dr Arif Bashir, DG Khan (Pakistan) H&S leadership in cement manufacturing: Peter Hoddinott (UK) Asset optimisation case study artificial intelligence to boost core asset profitability in cement: Robert Feldmann, McKinsey & Co (Germany) The prizes were awarded by AUCBM Secretary General, Mr Al-Rousan. Exhibition The event included a 22-stand exhibition, highlighting the latest manufacturing solutions from international and regional technology suppliers. Cemtech MEA 2019 included suppliers from a range of areas, including milling, online analysers, silo explosion protection, bagging/packaging, clinker coolers and logistics. Cemtech 2019 schedule While Cemtech MEA 2019 has now concluded, Cemtech events for the rest of the year have been announced. Cemtech Asia 2019 Cemtech Asia will be held at Avani+ Riverside Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, between 16-19 June, sponsored by SCG (Thailand). The conference theme is: Cement in Asia pathways to a low-carbon future. The technical programme will focus on low-carbon technologies, while also examining the full spectrum of cement manufacturing technology. This event will also feature an exhibition of international product and service suppliers. Cemtech Europe 2019 This year Cemtech Europe will be held at the InterContinental Hotel in Berlin, Germany, between 30 September-3 October. Send speaker proposals and exhibition enquiries to info@cemtech.com. Government promises not kept for Hongshi Shivam Cement ICR Newsroom By 02 April 2019 Nepal's Government has come up short in respect to keeping its word on infrastructure and energy promises to the Chinese Hongshi Shivam Cement Co, according to a report in the Nepali Times. The Nepalese government signed a foreign direct investment (FDI) deal with the cement producer in 2017 to help establish its cement plant with a local partner. However, the government failed to build the road to the plant and erect a transmission line. Hongshi Shivam Cement constructed its own dirt track as the government did not tarmac the road or build the bridges it had agreed to. Another 12km road had to be built by the cement producer to the limestone quarry. Hongshi Shivam Cement says it spent NPR1.2bn (US$10.75m) to build the roads the government had promised. In addition, the Nepal Electricity Authority has not yet built the 21-pylon transmission line from the Bardaghat substation to supply 40MW of power fro the grid the cement plant. Hongshi Shivam has had to rely on diesel-thermal captive power plants. Although the cement manufacturer has a licence to produce 12,000tpd of cement, the lack of electricity supply has cut its output to 5000tpd, said Liu Xuguwang, Hongshi Shivam Cement's plant manager. Published under SCG Cement signs deal for more solar power 02 April 2019 Thailands SCG Cement has signed a memorandum of understanding with Constant Energy for the deployment of 50MW of solar plants, according to PV Tech. Franck Constant, CEO of Constant Energy, has stated that the various projects are likely to range from 1-5MW in size and that Constant Energy will be the 100 per cent investor. The project will include rooftop, ground-mounted and floating technology. The 50MW of solar power will be installed in multiple provinces of Thailand over a three-year period. Constant Energy has already started the engineering process for the first plant, with the permit and licensing processes expected to be completed in the 2Q19. Published under (ANSA) - Rome, April 2 - Italy is in recession and the government is sticking its head in the sand like an ostrich instead of taking effective measures to stoke growth, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani said Tuesday. "Italy is in recession. The government is pretending nothing is happening and like ostriches is putting its head in the sand," said the Forza Italia No.2 on his arrival for a Confindustria forum in Rome. "There's a lot to be done and it seems to me that the government is not doing anything". US Portland and blended cement shipments slip 1% in December ICR Newsroom By 02 April 2019 Total shipments of Portland and blended cement in the USA reached 6.176Mt in December 2018, according to the latest data from the US Geological Survey (USGS). When compared with a volume of 6.244Mt in December 2017, this represents a 1.1 per cent YoY decrease. The leading cement-consuming states were Texas, California, Florida, Ohio and New York, which accounted for 44 per cent of the December shipments. The total includes 838,444t of imports in addition to 5.337Mt delivered by US producers. Imports advanced by 15 per cent from 729,261t in December 2017. However, US producers saw their domestic deliveries slip by 3.2 per cent YoY from 5.515Mt. The leading producing states in December 2018 were, in descending order, Texas, California, Missouri, Florida and Alabama. In terms of masonry cements, shipments totalled 150,000t, down by 7.3 per cent YoY. Leading consuming states were Florida, Texas, California, Georgia and North Carolina, with a combined share of 61 per cent of the US masonry cement market. Clinker production (excluding Puerto Rico) slipped slightly YoY to 6.5Mt in December 2018. Texas, California, Missouri, Florida and Alabama were the countrys key clinker-producing states. Full-year 2018 In the full-year 2018, total Portland and blended shipments reached 97.678Mt, up 2.3 per cent from 95.46Mt in 2017. Imports increased by 10.1 per cent from 11.256Mt in 2017 to 12.388Mt last year while domestic sales by US producers amounted to 85.29Mt, a 1.3 per cent YoY rise from 84.204Mt in 2017. Masonry cement deliveries remained stable at 2.4Mt in 2018. There was also no change in clinker output in 2018, keeping level with the 77Mt reported in 2017. Published under ROME - Invitalia, on behalf of the Commissioner General's Office for Italy at Expo 2020 Dubai, has published a Request for Proposal (Rfp) aimed at selecting Technical Partners from private, public and research bodies, also through consortiums with companies, that represent Italian know-how and leading, sustainable technological innovation. These will be able to participate directly in creation of the Italy Pavilion through the various forms of contribution defined by applicable legislation and set out in the tender documentation. The Request for Proposal is aimed at all operators interested in becoming Technical Partners, including those that did not respond to the previous call for Expression of Interest, on 09 November 2019, aimed at assessment of the interest of relevant operators and goods areas. The Rfp follows completion of the international contest and awarding of the Project for the Italy Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, with the Concept and initial rendering images being published on the website of the Commissioner's Office. As defined in the winning project, the Italy Pavilion shall be an Innovation Hub offering a creative and innovative interpretation of the specific theme selected by Italy: "beauty that connects people". This will not simply entail an exhibition structure but one that also demonstrates the best of Italian ingenuity, offering visitors an unforgettable experience, and presenting multidisciplinary skills, talent and ingenuity to the world, which can act to promote new educational, professional and business opportunities. Through this Request for Proposal, the Italy Pavilion shall be created with the contribution of Technical Partners, called to provide the best building, systems, technology and exhibition components, capable of demonstrating the highly innovative capabilities involved today in sustainability, circular economy and digital architecture. Attached to the Request for Proposal, interested Operators can find the specific goods area with the list of technical components required, to be used in building and commissioning of the Italy Pavilion. In return for their contribution, Technical Partners of the Italy Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai will be part of a global showcase that is unique for its reputation and brand building. They will also receive extensive visibility in external, internal and virtual spaces and will be able to undertake co-marketing and B2B and B2C activities during the six months of the event, which is expected to draw some 25 million visitors from all over the world. The procedure is managed entirely through the Invitalia e-procurement platform, where all information on conditions, collaboration methods and specific details are available, along with evaluation criteria for proposals received, for awarding of technical partnership contracts. The deadline for presentation of offers, which are binding for Rfp participants, is 6.00 PM on 6 May 2019. The full text and all the details for participation in the Rfp procedure can be found at https://gareappalti.invitalia.it/ and https://italyexpo2020.it/en/ TEL AVIV - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has issued a stern warning to Lebanese Premier Saad Hariri, on behalf of his Israeli counterpart Benyamin Netanyahu, during a recent visit to Israel and Lebanon, Maariv reported on Tuesday. According to the report, Israel has warned the Lebanese government of the potential consequences connected to a new plant to build precision-guided missiles which, according to Israel, Hezbollah has set up in Lebanon. Through Pompeo - Maariv added - Israel has told Lebanon that the initiative attributed to Hezbollah risks sparking an escalation between the two countries. Tension over the past few months was recorded between Israel and Lebanon with the discovery and destruction by the Israeli army of military tunnels built by Hezbollah along the border between the two countries that reached Galilee. CAIRO - The Egyptian governorate of the Red Sea, which manages well-known beach resorts such as Hurghada, has decided to ban disposable plastic in all restaurants, bars, supermarkets, food stores and pharmacies to protect the environment starting in June, according to local websites including Egyptian Streets. Plastic plates, cups and caps will be banned, among others. The governorate will not authorize the production of plastic bags. ''The decree vies to protect the environment and species at risk that are severely affected by the ingestion'' of plastic, which ''also damages human health'', said the Association for the protection and conservation of the environment in Hurghada. Along with this stunning area known to divers, the governorate also boasts other localities famous for their corals and colored fish like El-Qusair, Ras Ghareb and Marsa Alam (Sharm El-Sheikh is in the governorate of southern Sinai). Jeremy Lorenz of Michigan now holds the state record for yellow perch after catching a two pound five ounce fish on Ocoee Number 3 in Polk County, on March 26. The previous record was a tie, of a two pound three ounce fish taken by Trenton McCoy in January of 2017 and the same size fish taken by Richard Marsich in July of 2018. Mr. Lorenz was visiting a cousin, Eric Reed of Birchwood, to fish for a few days. After purchasing a three day license, Mr. Lorenz and his cousin headed to Ocoee Number 3. Mr. Reed had fished there only once and both anglers headed out early with pan fish in mind, on the dreary Tuesday morning. This would be an exploratory trip. They were on the water by 9 a.m. With minnows as bait, they fished several holes in windy, drizzly conditions that lasted throughout the day. With just a few minnows left, Mr. Reed saw a bald eagle. He referred to something the mens grandfather had taught them as children, to watch and learn from nature. They headed to the spot the eagle was circling and decided this would be their last hole before heading to shore. Just before 4:30 p.m. Mr. Lorenz felt the familiar run of the line and thought it might be a bass. He asked Mr. Reed to ready the net. The net was under the anchor and Mr. Reed reached for the fish with his hands, surprised to see such a large perch. Cautioning his cousin, not to pull too aggressively, he cradled the fish and lifted it in the boat. Mr. Lorenz, an angler the majority of this 41 years, was also shocked. The length of the fish, 15.75 inches, was one of the largest yellow perch he had seen. He said, Im a captain and Ive fished Lake Erie my entire life and Ive never seen a perch this large. Mike Jolley, Region 3 Reservoir Fisheries manager said, We are happy to see angler success and hear these great stories. As for the two cousins fishing, the day couldnt have ended better when Mr. Reed pointed to the bald eagle diving and catching a fish in the same area. He said, Maybe grandpa was with us. To find state record fish or to learn more about fishing, visit tnwildlfie.org. Lee University held a poster presentation in celebration of International Womens Day. Forty-seven posters on topics pertaining to womens issues were featured this year in two main categories: Bible & Religion (19 posters), and Politics, Law, and Society (28 posters). Each year, the poster session provides students with the platform to explore how we, as humans, have and can bring equality and justice into the world, said Julie Burchfield, librarian at the Squires Library and poster session coordinator. Our students raised awareness of how women have positively contributed to society by discussing obstacles women have and have yet to overcome. Posters covered a wide range of topics such as womens suffrage, cultural gender bias and violence against women, Feminist theology in South Korea, and women in the legislature. Students from several different majors were represented including Bible and Theology, communication studies, humanities, intercultural studies, and political science. The posters were judged by 25 staff and faculty of various disciplines, and cash prizes were awarded to the top four posters in the Bible & Religion category, and to the first, second, and third best posters in the Politics, Law, and Society category. The highest score from the Bible and Religion division went to Kennedy Brown for her poster Sacred Feminine: God-Language, which highlighted the experiences of women that illuminate the ways in which theological God-language has been abused in the church. Chris Absher took second place with his poster Overcoming the Maleness of the Historical Jesus, Chloe Emery took third with Empowerment Through Divine Imagery: Saint Hildegard of Bingen, and Emma Posey won fourth with A Christological Theology of Childbirth. The highest score from the Politics, Law and Society division went to Madison Allen and her poster titled Are You In or Out? What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of being a Female Professor on a Christian Liberal Arts University? Her poster addressed the complex implications of inequality, polarization, and the marginalization of women at the workplace. Richard Farris poster, Sugar, Spice, and AK-47s: Examining Female Participation in Terrorist Groups, took second place, and Chanmony Miller won third with Hidden in Plain Sight: Another Look at Child Sex Trafficking. Bryan College on Tuesday announced Governor Bill Lee will deliver the address at Bryans spring commencement ceremony. The commencement ceremony will take place on Saturday, May 4, at 9:30 a.m. on the Triangle Lawn at the Dayton Campus. We are delighted that Governor Lee has chosen to address our graduates at this springs commencement ceremony, said Bryan College President Stephen Livesay. Our graduating students are very fortunate to have the opportunity to hear him speak about his successes in both the private sector and the political arena. His experiences will be invaluable to the Class of 2019 as they prepare for the next chapter in their lives. We are honored to welcome the governor to our campus. As a seventh-generation Tennessean, Governor Lees roots run deep in this state. He was raised in Franklin where he still resides today with his wife Maria on his familys farm. After attending Williamson County Schools, Governor Lee attended Auburn University, where he studied Mechanical Engineering. After graduation, he returned home to Franklin to join the family business his grandfather started in 1944. He held several roles at Lee Company before becoming President of the company in 1992. Under Governor Lees leadership, the company grew into a comprehensive facilities solutions and home services company. It now employs more than 1,200 individuals and has won numerous awards for work culture and business accomplishments. Governor Lee and his wife Maria are people of strong faith. They are active in Grace Chapel Church and in numerous faith-based ministries, which have taken them all over the world to serve people in need, including to Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. He is the father of four adult children, Jessica, twin sons Jacob and Caleb, and Sarah Kate, and grandfather of five grandchildren. Bryan will honor 131 seniors at graduation ceremonies on Saturday, May 4. Plans call for services to be held on the college Triangle on Saturday at 9:30 a.m., respectively. In case of inclement weather, the services will be moved to Rudd Auditorium. Anyone who has read Chattanoogan.com over the years, knows that I am conservative. I value stability, having things as they have been and resistant to change just for the sake of change. But, change in and of itself is not bad. Advances in technology, medicine, aeronautics, and energy have given us modern marvels that make our lives less labor intensive than they were 30-40 years ago. Which of you reading this would give up your smartphone or laptop with internet connection? I love jet air travel to new sights at distant destinations. Couldnt do that 50 years ago. Change in social awareness is equally necessary. What rationale person would embrace a return to slavery, endorse human trafficking, or embrace religious genocide? The right kind of change does not destroy infrastructure, or societies, it creates whole new industries with their employment opportunities, and helps change how we think about and care for our world and each other. We live in a world that is constantly changing and evolving. Some of it good change, some of it less so. And it would appear the topic du jour, is climate change. So, conservative that I am, let me shock you - I believe that climate change is real. The sun rises every day causing the temperature where you and I live to rise as the sun ascends in the sky. And then the temperature falls as it descends into sunset and night. The earth rotates on its 23.4 degree axis around our sun, causing the northern and southern hemispheres to experience seasonal rise and fall of local temperatures. Polar ice caps melt in the long hours of summer sun and freeze in the long night of winter. (Did you know that the tilt in the earths axis changes over a 41,000 year cycle varying from 22.1 24.5 degrees from perpendicular? And this change in the axis contributes to our solar climate change cycles.) I also believe that if you denude and burn the Amazon Rain forest in Brazil for development of farmland, or belch noxious pollutants into the air with no regard for air quality, (like Chattanooga 30, 40, 50 years ago and China and many third world countries today) you create air that you cannot breathe and which destroys plant, animal and human life. I dont think that any rationale thinking person can seriously argue that we humans have not affected the world around us. But, I also do not buy into the argument that we here in the U.S. are primarily responsible for changes we see occurring in the weather patterns and cycles. It is a human problem. And, it is a solar cycle problem as well over which we have no control. Much of the climate change argument centers on how we use hydrocarbon energy resources to fuel our energy needs. We burn coal, gas and oil to fuel power plants and create electric energy. We capture natural gas and refine oil so we can burn gas, kerosene and diesel to power our cars, trucks, planes, and trains and use natural gas to heat our homes. And, in doing so, we emit CO2 and carbon into the atmosphere. All of it burned to generate energy to fuel our needs. Aside from the lame and somewhat myopic argument that clean energy initiatives would destroy our infrastructure, I would submit that clean energy initiatives like the New Manhattan Project proposed by Senator Lamar Alexander would actually create whole new industry sectors with their employment opportunities in research, development, manufacturing, installation, service, and repair. Similarly, initiatives that would filter out CO2 and other carbon emissions leaving breathable O2 (oxygen) just make good sense. And, I like that his proposal embraces current energy sources with the focus on converting their use to more efficient means with the goal to eliminate their harmful effects on our lives. -- Google coal gasification and plasma gasification for converting municipal waste into energy. This is no New Green Deal Senator Alexanders proposal is a New Clean Deal. If you were a scout when you were young (Boy Scout, Girl Scout, Cub or Brownie) you no doubt remember what your troop leader said when you went camping we clean up after ourselves, and we clean up any messes left by those who used the campsite before us, because those who come after us, will need to have a nice campsite to enjoy. Folks, its the responsible thing to do. If we and our progeny take this approach, we demonstrate responsible stewardship. After all, you are not really the owner of your home, farm or business you are the legal caretaker of it (the steward) for just a short period of time. Because when you are gone, you wont be taking it to the grave with you, someone else will be its steward for a while. Since its founding, our predecessors have always endeavored to make our nation a better place in which to live. Its the Scouting way. This is change for the better that I can embrace. My 71-year-old brother-in-law recently told me, You know Wes, I was 50 years old before I ever saw Lookout Mountain, coming off the [Missionary] Ridge cut. I really dont want to see the air I breathe. I would much rather see the beauty of the Earth that God created and has placed in our care. I can get behind Senator Alexanders New Manhattan Project. It is a positive approach to our stewardship of this magnificent planet. Its the New Clean Deal. Wes Kliner Ooltewah I am Hamilton spotlights Margo Williams, a retired principal who returned to be the interim principal at Ooltewah Elementary for part of this school year, and Billie Jenno, also a retired administrator, who served as interim assistant principal at the school. I am Hamilton spotlights the contributions of alumni, teachers, parents, students, support workers, and community members in providing opportunities for children in the classrooms of Hamilton County Schools. Ms. Willams retired as principal at Westview Elementary at the end of the 2017-2018 school year after serving as principal for 19 years. She also served as the principal at Ganns Middle Valley Elementary. Ms. Jenno retired as principal of Wallace A. Smith Elementary in 2012. She has also filled in as an interim administrator at Allen Elementary, Harrison Elementary, East Brainerd Elementary, Middle Valley Elementary and Rivermont Elementary since her retirement. Dr. Bryan Johnson, superintendent of Hamilton County Schools; and Dr. John Tharp, executive director of the Harrison Bay Learning Community presented the shirts to Williams and Jenno at Ooltewah Elementary. We are so thankful for all these ladies did for Ooltewah Elementary this year during our season of change, said Dr. Frank Fischel, principal of Ooltewah Elementary. Dr. Fischel joined Ooltewah Elementary as the new school principal in early February. He came to Chattanooga from Flanders, N.J. where he was principal at Mountain View Elementary. TDOT officials said Tuesday they believe that an oversize load caused a frightening bridge collapse at the busy intersection of I-24 and I-75. One person was injured when a beam fell shortly before noon on Monday. Hospital officials said that person was in critical condition. TDOT officials said that driver apparently ran into the beam after it fell. The incident caused a massive traffic backup. TDOT was able to get one lane open on Monday night. TDOT is drawing up plans to get a side barrier again on the bridge and be able to open it for two lanes. The lanes will be narrower than they were before because the collapsed beam is not being replaced. TDOT Chief Engineer Paul Degges said an examination of the collapsed beam showed that five different steel strands had been cut in the same area of each strand. He said, "It was like somebody ran a pair of scissors through there." The beam has 23 3/8 inch steel strands in all. Mr. Degges said the collision with the bridge may have happened shortly before the fall, or it could have been as much as three days earlier. He said it was likely the top of whatever struck the bridge was made of steel. He said TDOT cameras in that intersection are for traffic monitoring and not for investigative purposes. He said the cameras do not record. Mr. Degges said TDOT has been working with the Tennessee Highway Patrol to try to find which operator may have struck the bridge, but has not yet had any success. "No one has come forward with any video," he said. He said the THP checked arrivals at its Manchester truck weigh station for that morning without finding a possible culprit. However he said the collision may have come prior to Monday. The TDOT official said he expects the cost of the damage to the agency to be around $300,000. He said that bridge, which dates to 1959, is slated to be torn down within 18 months as a major reconfiguration of that intersection takes place. He said vehicles are not allowed to carry equipment that rises above 16 1/2 feet without a special permit. Mr. Degges said several bridges are hit each year in Tennessee and sometimes substantially damaged. He said often the offenders are caught and their insurers end up paying for the damage. It is highly offensive of the Weekly Fig to be selling raw food without the appropriate licensure and inspection. The farms have inspections for their retail sales. When there is a change in custody for retail sales of raw food products, a permit is required with inspections. It is common knowledge. I know that all raw foods sold to the public require a permit and inspection from the Department of Agriculture. It is a measure to ensure that consumers are protected in handling of food products with appropriate storage, temperature, and many other criteria. If Weekly Fig was handling food to consumers appropriately, they would not oppose a Department of Agriculture inspection. All grocery stores that offer meat and vegetables for sale to the general public are inspected. The arrogance of attempting to bypass laws intended for protection of the public through subscription sales is unacceptable. Weekly Fig was participating in retail sales of raw food products and is therefore subject to inspection. Department of Agriculture, please hold the Weekly Fig accountable, because the good guys that follow rules should not have to compete with this low bar nonsense from Weekly Fig. April Eidson * * * I would have to agree with Mrs. Eidson. With Hepatitis and other diseases becoming more prevalent, there needs to be health compliance by everyone serving the public. Joey Blevins Jordan: media, 11 convicted for pro-ISIS propaganda Three university students found guilty of propaganda online (ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, APRIL 2 - The Jordanian judiciary has sentenced 11 people to jail and forced labor for ''pro-ISIS propaganda'', pan Arab media reported on Tuesday, quoting a Jordanian government statement. Three university students were among the 11 convicted, according to the statement. The three students, along with the others, were found guilty of promoting the so-called 'Islamic State' with slogans and propaganda on social media. Jordan has harshened measures against anyone sympathizing publicly and on social media with terrorist groups such as ISIS. (ANSAmed). The 189th Annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be held Saturday and Sunday. The Conference will be broadcast from Salt Lake City, Utah in as many as 80 languages and to over 7,400 Church buildings in more than 100 countries. General Conference will be streamed live on the home page of the ChurchofJesusChrist.org and may also be viewed on BYUtv, the Mormon Channel and other cable, satellite and radio channels. Or viewers may watch at the Chattanooga Stake Center located at 3067 Ooltewah Ringgold Road. It is expected that over 16 million members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including over 1,000 from the greater Chattanooga area, will participate. All are welcome. General sessions for individuals and families will be on Saturday and Sunday at 12 and 4 p.m. A general priesthood session will be held on Saturday at 8 p.m. The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square will provide the music, along with other Church choirs and the congregation. Messages will be delivered by The First Presidency, including the prophet, President Russell M. Nelson, and his two counselors; members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; and other General Authorities and General Officers of the Church. President Nelson, who just returned from Rome, Italy, where all 15 apostles were gathered for the dedication of the Rome Italy Temple, recently tweeted, The Lord stands at the head of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As modern-day Apostles of Jesus Christ, the message we share today is the same that Apostles shared long ago that God lives and Jesus is the Christ. Christ is Risen! And, as prophet and senior apostle, President Nelson will reiterate this message again. Following General Conference, talks will be published online and in print. Talks are always spiritual and inspired. We invite everyone to join us this Easter weekend and celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. One of the most popular Avengers has long been Captain America, played to perfection by Chris Evans. For nearly 10 years, Evans has embodied the honorable, patriotic character. Soon, his time as Captain America will come to an end, as it is being reported that his final appearance as the character will be in the upcoming film Avengers: Endgame. As it turns out, Evans was initially drawn to a different, much darker superhero. Will Evans continue to play Captain America? Chris Evans made his first appearance as Captain America in the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger. Critics and audiences both loved his earnest, sincere approach to the character, and loved the energy that he brought to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Evans reprised his role in The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Avengers: Infinity War, and Spider-Man: Homecoming. He also makes a cameo appearance as Captain America in the recent hit film Captain Marvel. For several years, there was speculation about whether Evans would continue to play Captain America after the grand finale of Avengers: Endgame. While initially, he said that he might not be done with the character, in 2018 he admitted he wanted to get off the train before he is pushed off. Although it is sad news for fans, Evans might be on to something it seems a smarter move to stop playing the character while audiences still love seeing him rather than continuing for many more years and wearing out his welcome. That doesnt mean that Evans wont miss his role as the Captain he stated recently that he considers it an honor to have donned the costume and shield of Captain America. He admitted to being incredibly emotional after the last day of filming on Avengers: Endgame. Chris Evans loves the Dark Knight Although he made his fortune as Captain America, Chris Evans grew up loving a hero from the DC universe. In a recent interview, Evans admitted that even though he wasnt considered a cool kid in his younger days, and enjoyed Warner Bros. cartoons such as Bugs Bunny, he did love the character of Batman. He especially loved the movies that starred Michael Keaton as Batman, even though he said that he probably shouldnt say, since after all, Batman is DC while he works for Marvel. Whats next for Chris Evans? Although he will be retiring from the role of Captain America after the April release of Avengers: Endgame, Evans has a very busy schedule after his contract with Marvel ends. He is attached to star in several big-budget films, including the spy thriller The Red Sea Diving Resort and the science-fiction film Infinite. Evans will also take a leap into the world of television acting in 2019 when he plays the lead in Defending Jacob. The series, which will be streamed on Apple TV+, tells the story of a father who is confronted with the accusation that his young son could be a murderer. The show will likely be a great test of Evans dramatic acting abilities and co-stars Marck Bomback and Adam Schulman. Another upcoming project of his that is gaining a lot of buzz is the film Jekyll. Evans will be playing the only living descendant of the famed Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and has to deal with the demons that the realization causes him. Not much else is known about the film yet, but with Ellen DeGeneres as the producer, it is bound to be a huge film that draws a lot of attention. With a wealth of talent, good looks, and audience appeal, theres no doubt that Chris Evans will only continue to grow in his career. Kourtney Kardashian, Scott Disick, and Sofia Richie are just one big happy family. In past months, Kourtney Kardashian was not the biggest fan of Scott Disicks young girlfriend. Kourtney Kardashian (Photo by Jeff Schear/Getty Images for TAO Chicago) | Sofia Richie (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Theatre Box) The mother of three believed her ex would be better off with someone his own age other than a woman 15 years his junior. After a few months of getting to know each other, Kourtney Kardashian and Sofia Richie have built a solid relationship and now consider each other friends. Their relationship was rocky in the beginning In September 2017, it was revealed Kourtney Kardashians ex and father of her children, Scott Disick, was dating 18-year-old model Sofia Richie. It is not clear how the two initially met and came to be a couple, but they seemed to be very serious about each other pretty early on in their relationship. The two were always spotted together either on vacations, dinner dates, and even on shopping trips. In the early months of their relationship, many people were concerned the relationship was not good for either Disick or Richie. The thought of Sofia Richie dating someone so much older than did not sit well with her family. As for Kourtney Kardashian, her reaction to Scott Disick dating a girl 15 years his junior was not a positive one. It has been revealed that Kardashian did not approve of Richie in the beginning and believed her ex was making a huge mistake. The initial reaction from Kourtney when she found out that Scott was dating Sofia was not positive, an insider revealed. Like most people, she thinks Sofia is way too young for him and doesnt get it. Kardashian actually didnt believe Disick and Richies relationship would last but after the first few months of them dating, the reality star started to see just how serious the relationship was. They began spending time together After a few months of dating, Scott Disick decided it was time for Sofia Richie to meet his and Kourtney Kardashians three kids. Though Kardashian was hesitant about it, she finally allowed her kids to finally meet the woman who was making her ex very happy. Kourtney didnt think it would last and she never thought Sofia was going to meet her kids, says the source. But now, Sofia spends a lot of time at Scotts, so Kourtney allowed her to meet the kids. She has met them a few times. Once Sofia Richie met the Disick children, the model began spending a lot more time with the family, including Kourtney Kardashian. In December 2018, Kardashian, Disick, Richie, and the kids spent a pre-Christmas vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. It wasnt a surprise that Sofia went away with them it was a family trip. Sofia and Scott are together, they are in love and shes part of the family now, a source revealed to Us Magazine. It has been said that Kourtney Kardashian appreciates the way Richie treats her kids and because of that, decided to give the young model a chance. Everyone really likes Sofia. Shes really sweet and shes so good with the kids. They all get along, its crazy. When you get to a stage with your ex and you can be around him and his new [girlfriend], thats a great stage to be in, and Kourtney knows how lucky they are. Kourt and Scott make sure to make everything as normal as possible for the kids, the source revealed. Kardashian, Disick, and Richie are a big, happy family now Now that Scott Disick and Sofia Richie have been dating for a year and a half, Richie is now considered part of the family. After traveling together and getting to know the rest of the Kardashian family, Sofia Richie and Kourtney Kardashian are now on better terms. It has been said that Kourtney Kardashian sees Scott and Sofia all the time, an insider reveals. They are in a good place. Unlike most exes, Kourtney Kardashian is happy Scott Disick has moved on with someone who cares deeply for him. Kardashian has come to terms with the fact that Scott Disick and Sofia Richie are very much in love and are not breaking up anytime soon. Richie is going to be around for a long while and Kourtney Kardashian has sweeping any hard feelings she had under the rug. Though they are not the best of friends, Kourtney Kardashian and Sofia Richies relationship is just getting better with time! Meghan Markle has made headlines since she was first linked to Prince Harry. As their relationship progressed from an engagement announcement to their royal wedding, to the big announcement they were expecting their first child, the headlines have not only continued but have at times seemed to plague Markle even more. Part of the reason Markle makes headlines so often is that shes very different from the royal women who came before her. Not only is she an American, but she was also an actress prior to her marriage with Prince Harry. While Markle has made significant (and surprising) changes to the way she acts since become a Duchess, some people feel she has a long way to go. This makes people wonder whether Meghan Markle is acting too much like a celebrity for the royal family. Heres what we know. Meghan Markle was a celebrity Meghan, Duchess of Sussex | Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images One thing people need to realize is that Meghan Markle was a celebrity before becoming a Duchess. Common sense states that she cannot simply change the way shes been doing things over night. Markle and Prince Harry have only been a couple since around the summer of 2016, and they did not marry until last year. Given time, Markle will undoubtedly settle into her new position better but the nonstop media attention is not helping. Is she acting too Hollywood for the royal family? Many experts state that Meghan Markle just acts too Hollywood or too much like a celebrity for the royal family. As the world knows, the British royal family has always seemed above reproach and incredibly proper in their dealings with the outside world. Markle, however, has done several things that just do not fit that image. One example was her baby shower, which some state was in poor taste. Ann Pasternak, royal author, recently spoke to The Royal Box about this. According to her, Meghan has got to realize 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 behavior. You cannot have your freedom and this privilege. Pasternak went on to explain that it isnt so much about acting like an American movie star, but rather that she has become the focus of attention. She went on to explain why this was such an issue. She cannot be this international star on a global stage. That is the monarch, the Queen 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 recognize who has to be the main event. Some think Markle is a welcome change Meghan, Duchess of Sussex | Mark Cuthbert/UK Press via Getty Images While Meghan Markle may have plenty of naysayers, there are also those who support her because they welcome her as a breath of fresh air to an archaic way of doing things. For starters, Markle does significant charity work. While the royal family has always been charitable, Markles focus is very different. She is an avid supporter of female rights, equality in general, and her efforts are overall more in touch with the working class. Markle is also very modern when compared to the rest of the royal family. While there is nothing wrong with classical tastes and mannerisms, it just does not help to connect the British royal family with their public in the modern world. Meghan Markle, on the other hand, both dresses and acts in a way that is much more in line with the current way of thinking. This is one of the primary reasons she has garnered so many fans in such a short period. Kate Middleton and her close friend, Rose Hanbury are reportedly in a massive feud, which has led to speculations of a cheating scandal between the royal bestie and Prince William. But, before their falling out, the Duchess of Cambridge and Marchioness of Cholmondeley had a special bond with each other. Up ahead, we take an inside look at Kate Middleton and Rose Hanburys friendship, including the alleged reason why they are no longer close. Kate Middleton and Rose Hanburys friendship Kate Middleton and Rose Hanbury | Stephen Pond/Getty Images From royal events to downtime in the countryside, the Duchess of Cambridge and her former best friend, Rose Hanbury have enjoyed many experiences together. Heres what Kate Middleton and Rose Hanburys friendship was like before their falling out. They are neighbors in Norfolk, England Prince William and Kate Middleton might call Kensington Palace their royal residence, but its not the only place they call home. In addition to the palace, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex also have a home on Sandringham Estate (where the couple spends Christmas with the royal family every year) called Anmer Hall. Their vacation home is located in the English countryside in Norfolk, just a few miles down the road from Rose Hanbury and her husband, David Rocksavage, the Marquess of Cholmondeley. Their families go way back Kate Middleton and Rose Hanbury might be (or have been) royal besties, but Roses connection to royalty began before she met and became close with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. According to Hello! Magazine, Roses grandmother, Lady Rose Lambert was one of Queen Elizabeths bridesmaids in her wedding to Prince Philip in 1947. Rose and her husband were very close with Prince William and Kate Middleton. | Stephen Pond/Getty Images She attended royal events Kate Middleton did not shy away from inviting her best friend into her royal life. In July 2017, Hanbury accompanied Prince Harry to a royal banquet, hosted by Queen Elizabeth in honor of King Felipe and Queen Letizias state visit to the United Kingdom. They went on double dates together The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were quite fond of Rose Hanbury and David Rocksavage. And, according to The Sun, the four of them used to double date. Additionally, Rose and David participated in many activities at Sandringham Estate. Its all going to be quite Downtown Abbey. Dinners, picnics, hunting, shooting the whole point of Sandringham fishing and parlour [sic] games. And lots of Kates favourite [sic]: charades, one member of their inner circle described. Rose Hanbury | David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Chris Levine Rose was once one of Kate Middletons closest confidantes Prince William and Kate Middleton have a close inner circle in Norfolk known as the Turnip Toffs (because they own farmland in the English countryside). And, although they have a tight relationship with the entire group, Rose Hanbury was Kates closest friend and confidante before their alleged feud. Kate and Rose ended their friendship after a massive feud Last week, The Sun reported on an alleged feud between Kate Middleton and her best friend, Rose Hanbury. It is well known that Kate and Rose have had a terrible falling out. They used to be close but that is not the case any more [sic], a source told the outlet. William wants to play peacemaker so the two couples can remain friends, given they live so close to each other and share mutual friends. But Kate has been clear that she doesnt want to see them any more [sic] and wants William to phase them out, despite their social status, they added. Rose is at the center of a royal cheating scandal On the heels of their falling out, some suggest Prince William cheated on Kate Middleton with her former best friend. However, the royal family has not confirmed (or denied) the allegations, which likely stem from the fact that no one really knows why the Duchess of Cambridge and Rose Hanbury are feuding. What to look for: a real push by Clarence House to focus on Meghan and Harry as new parents, am increase in Wills and Kate doing more events (theyve been yelled at for not doing their share) together, and likely a general increase in photo and story access to bribe the tabs. Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) March 30, 2019 If the reports are true, the palace would do its best to cover things up. According to tweets from reporter Nicole Cliffe, the royal family might try to distract the public. What to look for: a real push by Clarence House to focus on Megan and Harry as new parents, am [sic] increase in Wills and Kate doing more events (theyve been yelled at for not doing their share) together, and likely a general increase in photo and story access to bribe the tabs [tabloids], she noted. Some believe that if Prince William actually cheated on Kate Middleton, the public likely wouldnt hear about it. After all, its the royal family they have an impressive communications team and would do anything to avoid negativity surrounding the United Kingdoms favorite couple (and future king and queen consort). Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! On Sunday, March 31, Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle was shot multiple times outside of a clothing store he owned in South Los Angeles. According to CNN, t wo other victims were injured in the attack. Nipsey Hussle | Prince Williams/Wireimage The suspect has not yet been caught but law enforcement sources believe the shooting was personal. Having strong enemies is a blessing. is the last thing Hussle tweeted prior to the attack. Having strong enemies is a blessing. THA GREAT (@NipseyHussle) March 31, 2019 According to the Los Angeles Times, detectives believe that though the gunman likely has gang affiliations, his motive was probably personal in nature. Nipsey Hussles relationship with the LAPD The shooting took place just a day before Hussle was supposed to meet with LAPD Chief Michael Moore and Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff to discuss ways he could assist the community in combating gang violence. A weekly gang task force met at the Watts Civic Center on Monday (the day the meeting was supposed to take place), where Moore spoke to residents about coming forward with information regarding violent crimes. We (@LAPDChiefMoore and I ) were meeting , at the request of @NipseyHussle with him and @rocnation tomorrow at 4pm to talk about ways he could help stop gang violence and help us help kids. Im so very sad https://t.co/rcGtvw9c6L Steve Soboroff (@SteveSoboroff) April 1, 2019 We will conduct lawful investigations and bring them to justice, he said. A resident spoke up to say that social media was inspiring violence. We see social media as absolutely driving violence. Ill just say it, said Moore. He went on to say that social media allows for an attitude of disrespect and it gets settled on the street. He urged the 70 residents in attendance of the meeting to do what they could to keep social media respectful. After the meeting, Moore spoke of Hussles deathhow he tragically lost his life in a place where he was working to improve the community. How Nipsey Hussle used his gang experience to help his community When Hussle was a teenager, he was a member of the Rollin 60s, a Crips gang offshoot, according to the LA Times. We dealt with death, with murder, he told The Times in 2018. It was like living in a war zone, where people die on these blocks and everybody is a little bit immune to it. I guess they call it post-traumatic stress, when you have people that have been at war for such a long time. I think L.A. suffers from that because its not normal yet we embrace it like it is after a while. Later in life, Hussle dedicated much of his time to bettering his community and helping to combat local gang violence. Throughout the years as he fostered success in his music career he chose, rather than to leave to come back and reinvest. And to reinvest and try to address the various underpinnings that fostered this environment, said Moore. Read more: Who is Nipsey Hussles Girlfriend Lauren London? Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! When the legal drama Suits premiered back in 2011, Meghan Markle got her well-deserved big break as Rachel Zane. As the years went by, fans of the show admired her more and more, and when she began dating Prince Harry, she became a household name. Suddenly, the Meghan Markle effect took the world by storm, with everyone copying her signature messy bun hairstyle, classy jewelry choices, and elegant outfits. Brides everywhere are even wearing gowns similar to the one Meghan wore when she exchanged vows with Harry. Having grown up in Los Angeles, California, and risen to fame in the world of acting, Meghan is definitely a celebrity in her own right. However, some people are wondering if she is a little too Hollywood for the royal family and if Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles will have to step in. Is Meghan a rule-bender? She certainly is! While she does her best not to actually break the rules altogether, Meghan definitely enjoys putting her own personal touch on things. At times, her dresses may be slightly too short for the queens preference, and on more than one occasion, she has worn outfits that bare her shoulders! While the Duchess of Sussex always looks amazingly styled and perfectly put together, we have to say that it doesnt seem that she minds the fact that Queen Elizabeth may raise her eyebrows just a little. She isnt quiet about her friendships He is not here for all the scrutiny #MeghanMarkle is facing. https://t.co/MuV9C8pS28 O The Oprah Magazine (@oprahmagazine) March 24, 2019 While Kate Middleton certainly has close friends, we dont really know who many of them are! However, with a life in the spotlight, Kate surely needs plenty of friends with whom she can talk, lean on for support, and let loose when she needs to. Meghan, on the other hand, has many close friends, most of which have connections to Hollywood just as she does. The Duchess of Sussex is tight with all of her former Suits co-stars, as well as Amal Clooney, Priyanka Chopra, and many more. She had a star-studded baby shower It was a huge deal when Meghan traveled to New York for a lavish baby shower hosted by her good friend Serena Williams! Photographers were lined up in the citys snowy streets to get as many pictures as possible of Meghan as well as her famous guests. It was widely speculated that the baby shower was frowned upon by the queen and other members of the royal family, as they usually dont have such high-profile parties. Meghan is somewhat demanding It recently came to light that Meghan is a little difficult to work for! Supposedly, she wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and starts emailing and texting her staff only half an hour later. This has been a little tough for her assistants and support staff, and it has been reported that more than one person has resigned from their position as an employee of the duchess. Will Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles be forced to step in? While Meghan doesnt seem to be completely going against royal protocol, she does tend to do her own thing! This leaves many royal fans wondering if one of the other royals, such as the queen or Prince Charles, will have to have a talk with Meghan and possibly Harry and ask her to conform just a little more to royal rules. At this time, it does not appear that it is likely to happen! While the news media and the public may speculate that the royals feel that Meghan is too Hollywood, no one in the family has made a statement expressing their disapproval! This makes us extremely happy, because we just love Meghan and her rule-bending ways, and we dont want to see her change a bit! West Bank: Palestinian killed in clashes with Israeli army Media, three wounded at refugee camp north of Jerusalem (ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, APRIL 2 - A Palestinian was killed in clashes with the Israeli army last night near the refugee camp of Qalandia north of Jerusalem, Palestinian media report. According to the reports, Mohammed Ali Dar Adwan, 23, was killed by a vehicle while the camp was being searched. The same sources said that three others were wounded during clashes. (ANSAmed) Can Christians get political without hurting the Gospel message? Christian Post Reporter | 02 April, 2019 by Napp Nazworth Christians involved in politics today face three difficult trends, Michael Gerson argued. Polarization, confirmation bias, and dehumanization present challenges for all Americans, and Christians should counter, rather than contribute to these problems, Gerson, a conservative Washington Post columnist, said in the Tuesday keynote address for Advocacy Day, a Baptist General Convention of Texas conference to educate Christian Texans on involvement in politics. Gerson began by telling the audience that political advocacy, while important, is not the most important type of advocacy for a Christian. "The most profoundly positive and powerful form of advocacy is advocacy for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against you," he said. Polarization "We live in a landslide country," Gerson explained, where most of us live in areas where either Republicans or Democrats easily win in landslide elections. In 2016, he noted, 80 percent of counties voted for either Trump or Clinton in a landslide. In the 1970s, that number was 25 percent for presidential elections. This leads to many of us living in a bubble, where we interact little with people who vote differently. "We live increasingly in homogenous political communities, in silos of the mind," he said. Gerson pointed to a 2016 report by Pew Research Center. In describing one of the findings of the report, Gerson quoted former Pew Vice President Paul Taylor, who wrote: "These days Democrats and Republicans no longer stop at disagreeing with each other's ideas. Many in each party now deny the other's facts, disapprove of each other's lifestyles, avoid each other's neighborhoods, impugn each other's motives, doubt each other's patriotism, can't stomach each other's news sources, and bring different value systems to such core social institutions as religion, marriage and parenthood. It's as if they belong not to rival parties but alien tribes." To resist this polarization, Gerson said, Christians "must start with an adjustment of attitude" by loving those on both sides of our polarized life. This means Christians need to learn how to be doorkeepers and "to live on the edge of the inside," Gerson said, quoting Franciscan author Richard Rohr. Rohr wrote: "To live on the edge of the inside is different than being an insider, a 'company man,' or a dues paying member. Yes, you have learned the rules and you understand and honor the system as far as it goes, but you do not need to protect it, defend it, or promote it. ... A doorkeeper must love both the inside and the outside of his or her group, and know how to move between these two loves." Confirmation bias One of the most "unsettling" findings in political science, Gerson continued, is "the more knowledge that political partisans have, the more stubborn they become in their ideological beliefs." Those with little political knowledge aren't the biggest problem in American politics, Gerson contended, "it's people who use their brainpower to support the views of their tribe." Read more from "Can Christians get political without hurting the Gospel message?" on The Christian Post. Christian college nursing, education students getting blacklisted, CCCU president says Christian Post Reporter | 02 April, 2019 by Napp Nazworth Some Christian schools have encountered hospitals and schools that refuse to accept their nursing and education students for jobs and internships, Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, told The Christian Post. The students are being turned away due to the colleges' understanding of marriage as between one man and one woman. The problem is not widespread, Hoogstra explained, but it is an issue that the CCCU has been dealing with and is concerned about for the future. "There have been small pockets in the United States where Christian colleges that have held a traditional understanding of marriage have had some of their professional programs impacted," she said. "For instance, there have been some public schools that will not allow teachers into their schools. Not because they have witnessed the student teachers in any way being bigoted or discriminatory, but because they have a penalty against a school that has a traditional understanding of marriage. "In terms of nursing placements, this has repeatedly been a conversation between the public hospitals and nursing placements for student nurses. It's not widespread yet, but there are pockets of it, which concerns us." Hoogstra clarified that it has nothing to do with the personal beliefs of the students, but the positions of the schools. "It could be the student has a very open understanding of marriage, but it doesn't matter, it's a categorical ban because the institution holds a particular historic understanding of marriage." Concerns over the religious freedom of Christian colleges were also heard at CCCU's Feb. 1 President's Conference in Washington, D.C. During that event, Shirley Mullen, the president of Houghton College and vice chair of CCCU's board of directors, noted the "standard western narrative of progress has assumed that deeply-held religious beliefs ... result in intolerance, conflict, violence, oppression." And while many view Christian higher ed as "very monolithic internally," in fact, Christian education is "often really tough-minded, thoughtful dialogue." Hoogstra was in Austin Tuesday to lead a workshop on religious freedom for Advocacy Day, a two-day event at Woodlawn Baptist Church sponsored by the Texas Baptists' Christian Life Commission. Read more about "Christian college nursing, education students getting blacklisted, CCCU president says" on The Christian Post. Megachurch pastor John Ortberg: Christians often dismissive of science for 'no good reason' Christian Post Contributor | 02 April, 2019 by Samuel Smith Silicon Valley megachurch pastor and author John Ortberg is calling on Christians to be less dismissive of scientific discoveries, suggesting that passing uninformed judgments on scientific theory is not a way to love God with "all your mind." Ortberg, the pastor of the 4,000-member Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, spoke before hundreds of pastors, scientists and scholars gathered last week in Baltimore, Maryland, for a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the BioLogos conference. The 61-year-old Ortberg is a member of the advisory council of the BioLogos Foundation, an advocacy organization that promotes Evolutionary Creationism that was founded with the goal of ushering harmony between science and biblical faith. With the theme of the conference being "Beyond Conflict," the church leader outlined on Wednesday four gifts that he feels Christians should bring to the broader world. The first gift is "humility." Ortberg's talk comes at a time in which many Christians particularly from a Young Earth Creation background can be dismissive of points of a scientific consensus and discovery if they somehow conflict with their literal interpretations of the Bible. Ortberg, who studied clinical psychology at Fuller Seminary, explained that he grew up in a Baptist church where he experienced a kind of writing-off of scientific theories. "A woman in our church asked me, 'Why do you need to study [Sigmund] Freud when we have the Bible?'" he recalled. "I asked her, 'Have you ever actually read Freud? Can you name something he has actually written? Do you know the difference between projection and reaction formation or how you distinguish between the conscience and the ego ideal, or the difference between suppression and repression?' Whatever you think of [Freud], he is one of the dominant minds of the 20th Century." Ortberg stressed that Freud was a brilliant neurologist, doctor and follower of psychoanalysis. "[Y]ou're telling me you think he can be dismissed and you can't even tell me the title of a single thing he wrote?" Ortberg recalled asking the woman. Read more from "Megachurch pastor John Ortberg: Christians often dismissive of science for 'no good reason'" on The Christian Post. NIH Director Francis Collins details his path to Christ after living as an atheist Christian Post Contributor | 02 April, 2019 by Samuel Smith National Institutes of Health Director and world-renowned biologist, Francis Collins, shared the long process of how he was led to faith in Christ after an encounter with a terminally-ill patient left him pondering one of life's great existential questions. Collins, a 68-year-old evangelical geneticist who is credited with discovering genes associated with a number of diseases and is the founder of the Human Genome Project, took off his federal government hat this week to take part in a conference hosted by an organization he founded over a decade ago. Collins spoke to over 300 pastors, scientists and scholars gathered at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore's Inner Harbor for BioLogos 2019, a two-and-a-half day conference hosted by the BioLogos Foundation, which exists to show that faith and science are not in conflict through the advocacy of Evolutionary Creationism viewpoints on origins. The conference celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the first BioLogos conference and the launch of the organization's website, which has served as an online resource for many pondering questions around the intersection of faith and science. Shortly after launching BioLogos, Collins stepped away when he was asked by former President Barack Obama to serve as the head of the U.S. agency primarily responsible for biomedical and public health research. On Wednesday evening, Collins gave a 20-minute speech detailing how he was led from a life of atheism to a walk with Christ by confirming God's truths in the physical and scientific realities presented throughout the world. While many Christian scientists wrestle with how they can bridge what they have learned in their fields with their faiths, Collins says that his faith has never come into conflict. "More than ever, the world needs to hear the synthesis of science and faith is possible, not just forcing it and saying, 'This will have to do,'" Collins explained. "It is joyful. It is an opportunity for worship. I didn't always know that." Collins then told the crowd that he couldn't believe that he was standing before them speaking at the BioLogos conference when reflecting back on who he was at the age of 21 or 22, as a graduate student in physical chemistry at Yale University. At that point in Collins' life, he had adopted a sense of "metaphysical naturalism," what he called a "reductionist attitude" or the belief that "nothing really matters except what can be measured through science." Collins believed at the time that faith was basically a superstition left over from an earlier age that should be shrugged off to "move forward." He explained that this belief partly came from the fact that he was raised in a home where faith was not considered overly important. "[I]t was convenient to assume there was not a God," he said. "By the time I was a graduate student, I was an atheist. It was not a particularly well-thought through position. But it was my position and it is not so different, I suspect, than many others around me at that time or ones that we would find today in a university undergraduate dormitory or graduate classroom." Although he loved second-order differential equations, Collins eventually felt compelled to switch studies and apply to medical school in order to learn about the science of the human body. He was accepted at the University of North Carolina. While at UNC, Collins said he maintained his atheism. However, he recalled that there were Christian medical students who would invite him to come sit with them at lunch. He explained that he tried to avoid them as much as he could because he thought they were "weird." But over the course of his time in medical school, the experiences he was having began to change. It was no longer just an intellectual exercise to think about life and death. "Because as a third-year medical student, one is then put into the clinical experiences of sitting at the bedside of people that have terrible diseases, most of which at that point we really didn't have answers or our answers were pretty incomplete," Collins said. "That began to trouble me because I saw in their eyes what someday might be my circumstance." Collins said he would wonder how he would handle the situation if it were him in the hospital bed with an incurable, fatal disease. "I watched how they handled it, these good North Carolina people," he said. "Many of them seemed quite at peace. They talked about their faith. I thought, 'Why aren't you angry at God? Why don't you shake your fist at what God has done to you?' But that is not what happened. They were at peace. They felt like God had been good to them and they had been blessed and they look forward to what came after." At the age of 26, Collins said there was one elderly female patient he looked after who suffered awful chest pains because of severe cardiac disease. During her episodes of chest pain, he said she would pray and seem at peace. Collins said she would share her faith with him regularly and that made him uncomfortable. "But one day, she made me really uncomfortable because she told me, 'Doctor, I have shared my faith with you and you seem to be somebody who cares for me. What do you believe doctor?'" Collins shared. "I don't think anybody in an honest, open way had really ever asked me that question. I realized I was utterly lacking a response." Collins said he felt like he had neglected the most important question that any of us ever really asked: "Is there a God and does that God care about me?" "At that point, 26 years, I had managed to set that aside in the pursuit of other issues. And I was supposed to be a scientist," he said. "It was interesting finding answers and collecting evidence to see what those answers should be. I had never spent more than five minutes thinking about this particular question or what the answer might be. That really bothered me." Continue reading about Francis Collins on The Christian Post. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday. The visit to the wall was part of Bolsonaros three-day trip to Israel. According to CBN News, it is also the first time a sitting Brazilian president has joined Israeli leaders at the wall in Jerusalem. Bolsonaro has said the trip is about partnering with Israel in economics, security and technology. "Recognizing the historical bonds of Jerusalem with the Jewish identity and also that the city is the political heart of the State of Israel, I announced today that Brazil will open a Brazilian office to promote trade, investment and exchange in innovation and technology," Bolsonaro said in a statement. As part of his work with Jerusalem, Bolsonaro is hoping to eventually move the Brazilian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. "As previously stated during our campaign, we intend to transfer the Brazilian Embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. Israel is a sovereign state and we shall duly respect that," he wrote in a Facebook post last November. He later told CBN News that moving the embassy is important. "Each country has the right to decide where its own capital is, and the capital of Israel became Jerusalem, therefore we are studying the possibility of making that decision at the right time. When Trump took over, it took him almost 9 months to make that decision, I'm now in my third month," the president said. However, others say that such a partnership with Jerusalem may strain Brazils relationship with Palestinians. The Palestinian Authoritys foreign ministry issued a statement after Bolsonaro announced the trade mission in Jerusalem, saying it was a blatant violation of international legitimacy and its resolutions and a direct aggression against the Palestinian people and their rights, as well as an approval to American and Israeli pressures aimed at perpetuating the occupation and settlement activities, the Judaizing and annexing of occupied Jerusalem, and the forceful imposition of the Israeli law on it. Photo courtesy: Getty Images/Uriel Sinai/Stringer (RNS) Former Southern Baptist Convention President Ronnie Floyd has been nominated to lead the denominations Executive Committee, based in Nashville, Tenn. An Arkansas megachurch pastor who serves as part of President Trumps unofficial group of faith advisors, Floyd would succeed former Executive Committee President Frank Page, who resigned last year due to an inappropriate relationship, according to the denominations official news service. A vote on Floyds nomination is scheduled for Tuesday at a meeting of the Executive Committee in Dallas. That group of about 80 Southern Baptist leaders, along with its Nashville-based staff, acts on behalf of the convention in between its annual meetings. We firmly believe he is the man God has uniquely prepared and gifted to lead our Executive Committee at this challenging time in our nations and our denominations history, Steve Swoffard, chairman of the presidential search committee, wrote in a letter announcing Floyds nomination on Sunday (March 31), according to Baptist Press. Floyd was president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2014 to 2016. He also served as chair of the Executive Committee in the mid-1990s. He is currently president of the National Day of Prayer Task Force. During his three decades as pastor of Cross Church, which has campuses in Arkansas and Missouri, the congregation has baptized more than 22,000 people, according to a biography posted on the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee website. The congregation claims more than 9,000 attendees and reports that it has given more than $1 million annually to the denominations Cooperative Program which mainly funds mission work and seminary education since 2015. As SBC president during the 2016 presidential race, Floyd expressed concerns about then-candidate Trumps comments about women and minorities but met with him, saying it was important for religious leaders to meet with candidates. Floyd also told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he led a prayer for President Trump during a 2017 meeting at the White House. I prayed for protection for the president and the vice president because we live in a very difficult day in our country. I prayed for God to lead them and for them to rely on the Lord for strength and for wisdom, he said. Floyds nomination comes at a tumultuous time for the SBC. Recent news reports have detailed alleged abuse at Southern Baptist churches. J.D. Greear, the current SBC president, has called on the convention to investigate churches that have covered up abuse. Some Executive Committee members have urged caution before investigating churches. The topic of abuse and a proposed amendment to the SBCs constitution that would allow the denomination to remove churches that show clear indifference to addressing the crime of sexual abuse will be discussed at the SBCs annual meeting in June. READ THIS STORY AT RELIGIONNEWS.COM Article originally published by Religion News Service. Used with permission. Photo courtesy: RNS/Matt Miller/Baptist Press Israel: Netanyahu warns Hariri report 'Hezbollah precision missiles plant will have consequences' (ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, APRIL 2 - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has issued a stern warning to Lebanese Premier Saad Hariri, on behalf of his Israeli counterpart Benyamin Netanyahu, during a recent visit to Israel and Lebanon, Maariv reported on Tuesday. According to the report, Israel has warned the Lebanese government of the potential consequences connected to a new plant to build precision-guided missiles which, according to Israel, Hezbollah has set up in Lebanon. Through Pompeo - Maariv added - Israel has told Lebanon that the initiative attributed to Hezbollah risks sparking an escalation between the two countries. Tension over the past few months was recorded between Israel and Lebanon with the discovery and destruction by the Israeli army of military tunnels built by Hezbollah along the border between the two countries that reached Galilee. (ANSAmed). Yes, its beginning to look a lot like Christmaswhich, for many of us, feels like a rush into chaos. Celebrating Advent during this season slows us down and helps our hearts and minds be reoriented around the coming of Christ.Yes, its beginning to look a lot like Christmaswhich, for many of us, feels like a rush into chaos. Celebrating Advent during this season slows us down and helps our hearts and minds be reoriented around the coming of Christ. Group behind 'hate map' is 'morally bankrupt': Christian conservatives call out corruption, hypocrisy Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Conservative groups that have suffered due to being tagged on the controversial hate map of the Southern Poverty Law Center say the organization has no moral authority to label others as it grapples with racial discrimination and sexual harassment allegations of its own. Todays SPLC is aggressively anti-Christian and morally bankrupt, both inside and out. It has long lost any claim as the moral arbiter of hate, Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel and vice president of U.S. advocacy for Alliance Defending Freedom told The Christian Post. The ADF is an alliance-building legal organization based in Arizona that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith. The group unites attorneys, ministry leaders, pastors, and like-minded organizations in a common purpose a shared commitment to defending religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage and family. The SPLC was founded in 1971 to take on legal cases related to racial injustice, poverty and the death penalty. The organization, which began tracking the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1980s, has since broadened its field of threats to include conservative groups like the ADF whose ideology it does not agree with. The vaunted civil rights organization currently lists the ADF as a hate group among 20 other organizations in Arizona because of their sexual politics. In a report in The Washington Post Magazine last November, the SPLC noted that the ADF filed an amicus brief in the 2003 landmark Supreme Court case that struck down a Texas law criminalizing gay sex. Lawyers for the ADF wanted to uphold the states right to decide whether it is reasonable to believe that same-sex sodomy is a distinct public health problem, the brief noted, because it clearly is. Its really bad that you want these people thrown in jail for consensual activity, Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLCs Intelligence Project told The Washington Post. Its literally barbaric in our opinion. And that was the thing that really pushed ADF over the top to us. Earlier this month, the nations wealthiest civil rights organization fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, and president, Richard Cohen, a week later, due to allegations of sexual harassment and racial bigotry. Bob Moser, a former writer for the SPLC who is gay, wrote in the New Yorker on March 21 that the organization which has amassed an endowment of nearly half a billion dollars is a scam. A part of that scam was to also use the widening scope of its hate map, to raise funds. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before Id even begun it, Moser wrote. He quickly lost faith in the organization after realizing that leadership did not practice what the organization preached when it comes to issues of race and gender. Nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staffthe help, one of my black colleagues said pointedly, Moser explained. The professional staffthe lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raiserswere almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay, Moser continued. The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like wed become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam. In a statement on the scandal at the SPLC, Bryan Fair, the Thomas E. Skinner Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law and chair of the Southern Poverty Law Centers board of directors, who happens to be black, chose to highlight a laundry list of the organizations important ongoing work while hitting back at the suggestion that their fundraising is a scam. Were doing this work because countless people continue to face discrimination and exploitation. They deserve justice. I resent the suggestion that were doing it merely for fundraising purposes, as some have said, Fair argued. I would not be serving on the board if this were true, and I know that Julian Bond, a true civil rights icon, would not have served on our board for many years had he thought that the organization took on cases and causes for the wrong reasons, he continued. Right now, as you may have read, were facing some internal workplace challenges. But were meeting them in the same way that were meeting every other challenge that we face with a fierce commitment to do justice. I can assure you that we will continue to work as hard as we can to combat the forces of hate and bigotry and to seek justice for the most marginalized people in our country. Because of the SPLCs "hate map," however, organizations like the ADF have suffered hits to their fundraising and security and believe it's time to get rid of it. For ADF, the SPLCs baseless accusations have resulted in our exclusion from the Amazon Smile donation program. Microsoft has removed us from its non-profit pricing for its software, we have armed guards at our offices, and we have been forced to hire plain-clothes police officers to protect attorneys when they speak on hostile campuses, Tedesco said. The recent revelations about the inner workings of the SPLC, he said, shows that the organization isnt a neutral watchdog. Recent reports have highlighted once again that todays SPLC is a corrupt fundraising machine that has become nothing more than a partisan progressive hit operation. Nobody should rely on the SPLC as a neutral watchdog. Investigative reporters, charity watchdogsand most recentlyformer employees have been raising the alarm that SPLC is partisan and unreliable for years, he said. It is time for the media, major corporations, and big tech companies to cut ties with the SPLC once and for all. Todays SPLC has zero credibility and its making hate pay business model should be rejected by all. Christopher Gacek, a senior fellow at the conservative Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., agrees. He told CP that while tracking the work of the Klan was strategic for the SPLC in the early days of the organizations operations, he doesnt think they should be using a "hate map" at this time, especially with trained law enforcement already tracking true hate crimes. They should not be doing the hate map, Gacek said. In August 2012, 28-year-old Floyd Lee Corkins II opened fire inside the FRC's headquarters. At the time, according to his parents, Corkins was volunteering at a community center for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. The FRC was targeted for its strong opposition to gay marriage, which landed it on SPLC's "Active Anti-Gay Groups" list. Corkins reportedly had a bag packed with Chick-fil-A sandwiches and a box of ammunition when he said, "I don't like your politics," and shot a security guard in the FRC's lobby. Weve been interacting with them (SPLC) over this (hate map) for nine years. One of the big effects of it was that a guy who was using the hate map came to our building and wanted to kill everybody in our building and shot our building manager and he told the FBI that he had been using the SPLC material. One of the things we have always been concerned about is security, Gacek said. No one should be using the hate map and it should be discontinued. It should have been discontinued after the shooting. He argued that for companies like Amazon to continue to use the SPLCs data as a standard to determine who can fundraise on their platform is also inappropriate. ADF was on it and was kicked off it, he said, referring to the Amazon Smile program. ADF is not a hate group. Its ridiculous this claim that they are. Its like YouTube tagging Prager videos. Its just absurd. When Amazon does this its just extremely lazy and it just shows the prejudices of the organization, he continued. I think anything coming out of the SPLC is rotten fruit from a poisonous tree and organizations need to stop playing around with this until they come clean about whats going on inside the organization and how long its been going on. Megachurch pastor John Ortberg: Christians often dismissive of science for 'no good reason' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Silicon Valley megachurch pastor and author John Ortberg is calling on Christians to be less dismissive of scientific discoveries, suggesting that passing uninformed judgments on scientific theory is not a way to love God with all your mind. Ortberg, the pastor of the 4,000-member Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, spoke before hundreds of pastors, scientists and scholars gathered last week in Baltimore, Maryland, for a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the BioLogos conference. The 61-year-old Ortberg is a member of the advisory council of the BioLogos Foundation, an advocacy organization that promotes Evolutionary Creationism that was founded with the goal of ushering harmony between science and biblical faith. With the theme of the conference being Beyond Conflict, the church leader outlined on Wednesday four gifts that he feels Christians should bring to the broader world. The first gift is humility. Ortberg's talk comes at a time in which many Christians particularly from a Young Earth Creation background can be dismissive of points of a scientific consensus and discovery if they somehow conflict with their literal interpretations of the Bible. Ortberg, who studied clinical psychology at Fuller Seminary, explained that he grew up in a Baptist church where he experienced a kind of writing-off of scientific theories. A woman in our church asked me, Why do you need to study [Sigmund] Freud when we have the Bible? he recalled. I asked her, Have you ever actually read Freud? Can you name something he has actually written? Do you know the difference between projection and reaction formation or how you distinguish between the conscience and the ego ideal, or the difference between suppression and repression? Whatever you think of [Freud], he is one of the dominant minds of the 20th Century. Ortberg stressed that Freud was a brilliant neurologist, doctor and follower of psychoanalysis. [Y]oure telling me you think he can be dismissed and you cant even tell me the title of a single thing he wrote? Ortberg recalled asking the woman. Far too often, Christians pass judgments on statements from the scientific community with no good reason at all. [Martin] Luther called [Nicolaus] Copernicus an upstart astrologer possibly because Copernicus dedicated his work to the pope, Ortberg explained. Within two generations and Mark Noll writes about this in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind all the reformation churches accepted a new view of the solar system. He warned that moving slowly before passing theological judgments on scientific theory is one of the ways that we can love God with all of our minds. The second gift that Christians should bring the secular society is curiosity. Ortberg argued that too often, religious leaders abuse their authority and too many people are led to believe whatever religious authorities tell them to believe. I recently read a book about curiosity and the interpretation from the author on Genesis 3 was very interesting, the pastor said. [The argument] was the story of the fall and the Bible is actually anti-curiosity, that curiosity is what led to the fall and that people are supposed to believe whatever religious authorities tell them to believe. However, he detailed that human beings have a need to make sense of the world. It is a need that, he said, will never go away. But the effort within some churches to stifle curiosity runs counter to the fact that science was largely historically inspired by spiritual and metaphysical questions. The work of historians of science will often tell us that to a very significant extent, that what helped for science to emerge in humanity was religious thought, in particular, Christianity, Ortberg said. [It was] the view that the universe was the product of an orderly God, a reasonable God and yet a God who is also unpredictably creative so that it would require empirical research. He cited English mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead who said that it was the medieval insistence on the rationality of God that made it possible for science to emerge. Additionally, he stated that the explosion of technology in the Middle Ages happened largely in monastic communities. Mechanical clocks were invented by monks because they needed to know when to pray, Ortberg said. When we first read about the invention of eyeglasses in a sermon around 1300, [it was] because monks needed to pour over texts. Ortberg argued that a lack of curiosity is a sin. The gift that Ortberg spent the most time explaining was the gift of knowledge. The prophet, speaking for God, said that my people will perish with lack of knowledge, he continued. We live in a day, of course, when the question of who has knowledge is hotly contested because knowledge means authority and authority means power. Although many are led to believe that something has to be proven in a scientific or mathematical way in order to constitute knowledge, Ortberg noted that there are many questions in the world that science cant answer. One such question is the classic line from William Shakespeare: To be or not to be. It is better for things to be than not to be. It is better for us to be than not to be. It is better for you to be. This is not a preference or an opinion. It is not cultural. It is not biologically programmed. It is knowledge, Ortberg said. It is true. But it is not scientific knowledge. "People often assume that faith is opposed to knowledge in our day. It grew by inviting rational consideration often in opposition to authority." Today, people are urged to consider lifes most important questions as matters of preference or tradition but not of knowledge, he said. In other words, to a large extent, we live in a day where educated people teach us to believe that where knowledge is most desperately needed, it has become most apparently unavailable, he explained. As a result, we are plagued by skepticism, cynicism, confusion, uncertainty, doubt and eventually despair. At the basic level, Ortberg said that knowing right from wrong is essential to humanity. Even in a secular age, I find it fascinating that the defining hallmark of sanity in the judicial system is the capacity to know right from wrong, he stressed. A conversation with faith and science has so much business to add to lifes knowledge. Pastors and church leaders need to be stewards of moral and spiritual knowledge rather than stewards of tradition, history and values because people perish for lack of knowledge," he added. Ortberg concluded by sharing his fourth and final gift that he believes Christians should bring to the larger society: song. The pastor said that one way to communicate the great story and evoke wonder is through song because a good song has rich cognitive contents and expresses unity as well as joy that reaches the core of the human soul. That is why the beauty of creation and song often go together, he said. Pastor Greg Laurie: 'Only Way to Being a Christian Is to Be Born Again' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Pastor Greg Laurie of California megachurch Harvest Fellowship spoke to his congregation about how not to be born again, answering the question that if one doesn't become a Christian by birth, merit or ceremonial traditions, then how one can start a personal relationship with Jesus. Part of a new series, called "Life," Pastor Laurie started the sermon by stating that "the goal of every Christian should be to know, learn (about) and become more like Jesus." He read out John 1:15, which reads: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." The pastor underlined that "Jesus is God." He is "co-equal, co-eternal, co-existent with the Father and the Holy Spirit," he explained. "Jesus could not have identified with us more closely than He did. It was total identification without any loss of identity," Laurie told the congregation. "If you don't believe that Jesus is God, then you can't be a Christian." But, he continued, "Jesus was also fully man," referring to John 1:14, "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." The pastor explained that nothing can be more divine than Jesus calming a storm or the veil in the temple ripping from top to bottom after His death, and "nothing could be more human than His crucifixion and death. He became human without ceasing to be God." If you want to know what God's like, just look at Jesus, Laurie stressed. It's important for us to know that God, who became a man, shined His light on humanity, the pastor said, explaining that humans are not good, but God is good. He added that things can change overnight if we began to live the way God wants us to live. The pastor then read John 1:12, 13, "Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God." You cannot be born again of blood, Laurie said, and explained that you're not automatically a Christian because you were born in a Christian family. "The only way to being a Christian is to be born again," he said. You cannot become a Christian by a human decision or desire either. Using an example, Laurie said you do not become a surfer by buying a surf board, and that to be a surfer, you have to surf. To be a Christian, he continued, "you have to humbly come before God, admit your sinfulness and turn from those sins and embrace Christ as your Savior and Lord." You cannot be born again with human will, the pastor said. "No one can do this for you, only God can. So, it's not by descent, desire or determination but by receiving Christ." It's not about following rules, he concluded. "It starts with saying, 'God, I'm a sinner; Jesus come into my life; force me of all of my sins." Pastors daughter dies after surviving house fire that killed parents, sibling Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Darryn Keahey, 17, died Monday, a month after her father a Texas pastor mother and sister died in a suspicious house fire. This morning at 6:30 a.m., Darryn joined her family in heaven. She was a strong young lady who fought until the end. This is a difficult time for the family and we ask that you will pray for us and give us PRIVACY as we prepare for the days ahead, the teenagers aunt, Janelle Stone-Williams, shared Monday in an update on a GoFundMe campaign seeking to raise funds to help the family. As information becomes available, it will be shared. We are grateful for the overwhelming support in this season and seasons to come. The announcement comes just 12 days after Stone-Williams shared that Darryn is doing amazingly well. Darryn had been hospitalized since the Feb. 28 fire at her home that killed her father, Pastor Eugene Keahey who led Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Sandbranch, mother, Deanna Wilson-Keahey, and sister, Camryn Keahey. Stone-Williams said she was rescued from the fire through a second story window by the Cedar Hill Police. The pastors older daughter, Lauryn, 20, was studying at Spelman College in Atlanta when the fire broke out, Stone-Williams said. Police told NBCDFW that an investigation into the cause of the fire remains ongoing. Cedar Hill Police previously characterized the fire as suspicious and explained that they were investigating it as a criminal matter. They are currently working with the Dallas County Medical Examiner's office and the State Fire Marshal's office to determine the cause of death. Facebook posts made by the pastor prior to the fire triggered concern by investigators. About three weeks before the fire, Keahey changed his cover photo to a picture with the words, "We all have secrets." Shortly before the fire was reported, at 3:57 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 28, the pastor posted a cryptic message online referring to "this difficult time in my life" and ended with the phrase, "Good Night Y'all." It was also reported that Keahey and his wife, who once taught elementary school, were going through financial difficulties prior to their deaths. The home in which they were found dead was sold at a foreclosure auction in January. Ahead of a memorial service two weeks ago for the pastor and his deceased family members, he was fondly remembered by those who knew him. "He had a lot of impact on Sandbranch," neighbor and church member Betty Bivens told WFAA. "He fought for running water in Sandbranch." Pastor Keahey and Board members with Sandbranch Development and Water Supply Corporation fought to bring water to the impoverished Sandbranch neighborhood in 2016. "He had all the world of impact down here, Ivory Hall told WFAA. Everybody loved him. He would walk these streets down here to see if you needed anything." And according to Bivens, her pastor was a fighter. "We lost a good fighter. We lost one of the best fighters in the world," she said. Testosterone being given to 8-y-o girls, age lowered from 13: doctors Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment WASHINGTON Medical doctors and a mom of a trans-identifying child are urging the government to shut down medical operations that are harming children. Their efforts to resist the medicalization of gender has led them to discover that government-funded research now allows wrong sex hormones such as testosterone to be given to girls as young as 8. At a Thursday panel at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Dr. Michael Laidlaw addressed the medical harms of hormonal treatments and surgical interventions being performed on young people who believe they are the opposite sex. Doctors administering these treatments are advocating these harmful practices on increasingly younger children, he explained. Today, medical scenarios such as girls as young as 13 and 14 undergoing double mastectomies and 17-year-old boys with penises of 9-year-olds, developmentally speaking, because of chemical puberty blockers, are now showing up, Laidlaw, a Rocklin, California-based endocrinologist, explained in his remarks. Under the nebulous concept of "gender identity," children as young as 8 are receiving injections for gender transition treatment, he explained. The phrase was defined in a recent court case as a person's "core internal sense" of their own gender and that it was the "primary factor" in determining their sex, not biology. This is false, the endocrinologist said. No blood test, genetic testing, or brain imaging scans can find a "gender identity," Laidlaw said, adding "there is no objective test to diagnose this, yet we are giving very harmful therapies on the basis of no objective diagnosis." To date, hormone blockers such as Lupron, which is used to treat both prostate cancer patients and children with precocious puberty, has never been through an FDA-approval process for the purpose of blocking normal puberty, and is prescribed off-label. Laidlaw refers to puberty blockers as a form of "chemical conversion therapy" and noted that the largest professional association for endocrinologists, The Endocrine Society, now recommends delaying puberty in gender dysphoric youth at Tanner stage 2, which is soon after the pubertal signals in the brain begin to occur. The reason that Jazz Jennings, transgender star of the TLC series "I am Jazz," has reportedly never had any sexual sensations or orgasms is because his natural puberty was halted at this stage and was not allowed to occur, the California doctor explained. These puberty-blocking drugs also disrupt normal brain and bone development, putting kids at future risk of osteoporosis, he said. In England, Oxford professor Michael Biggs discovered through a freedom of information request that at the Tavistock gender clinic, children reported greater self-harm with these particular medications, and girls exhibited greater emotional problems and dissatisfaction with their bodies, Laidlaw noted. "Now you'd think if you had these side effects of these medications, wouldn't you want to stop?" Laidlaw asked. During his presentation, he played video clips of two doctors active in the medical transitioning of children, Ilana Sherer and Johanna Olson-Kennedy. Sherer explained that puberty blockers are given to children at age 8 or 9, when they are in third and fourth grades. Olson-Kennedy is doing a 5-year study, for which she has received a $5.7 million National Institutes of Health research grant, and in one of her publications, it shows that mastectomies have been done on girls as young as 13. In the clip Laidlaw showed, Olson-Kennedy is seen on tape insisting adolescents have the capacity to make life-altering decisions, including to have their breasts removed. "And here's the other thing about chest surgery: If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them," she says in the video. Laidlaw asked those in attendance: "Is that correct? Can you just get a new organ, mail-order it and have surgeons put it in? You cannot." "This whole thing is an experiment on children. We are ignoring the voices of desisters and people who have come out of this and recognize their sex. And the NIH is allowing unethical research to be conducted on adolescents, in my opinion." Laidlaw and his colleagues used FOIA requests to obtain more information about Olson-Kennedy's study at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and found that in 2017 they lowered the minimum age for cross-sex hormones from 13 to 8. "Imagine giving 8-year-old girls testosterone," Laidlaw said. "They are in 3rd or 4th grade. This is unbelievable. But this is going on." Marian Rutigliano, an internal medicine specialist from Baltimore, explained in her remarks how those who have dared to resist these untested gender treatments have been systematically smeared, bullied and silenced by trans-activists and noted how entrenched transgender ideology has become in the upper echelons of professional medical associations. Respected figures in the medical and psychological fields, such as J. Michael Bailey, Kenneth Zucker and James Caspian have borne the brunt of the transgender activists' wrath, the Baltimore doctor explained. In recent years, these men have had their reputations ruined, their families harassed and doxxed, their research and scholarship misrepresented, and their clinics shut down, among other things, she said. The nation's largest LGBT rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, had a leading role in co-authoring the American Academy of Pediatrics 2016 professional guidelines on care for transgender-identifying children, she noted, and the lead author of those guidelines was a 25-year-old trans-identified female and is not a doctor. Out of the 12 authors, only five were physicians. Of the 66,000 pediatrician members of the AAP, "the input was really from less than 30 people," Rutigliano said, adding that one of the contributors of the guidelines included a physician who was the director of a transgender health clinic at which 100 percent of the kids who came in were considered "appropriate for transition." In response to a question from The Christian Post on how the NIH could have approved a study on chemical puberty blockers and why it was allowed that the age of administering cross-sex hormones be lowered from 13 to 8, Laidlaw said he did not know how the oversight processes work or how it got past any relevant committees. "We've done Freedom of Information requests to get something as simple as consent forms and were not able to get them, so there's some sort of potential cover-up going on," he said, noting that members of Congress are looking to potentially investigate this. Rutigliano added that a problem complicating the matter is that a sort of "consensus" exists that these medical treatments are fine, which then influences reviews that institutional review boards conduct on the worthiness of a research study. "It's kind of like the jury has already decided," she said. Laidlaw added: "There are laws governing this; ... laws have been broken." A mother of a trans-identifying child, "Elaine," also spoke Thursday, imploring people to speak out against the transgender medicalization and "gender-affirmative" therapies. "Its not acceptable for doctors to remove healthy limbs from children, so why is it acceptable for doctors to remove healthy reproductive organs from children?" she asked, her voice wavering at times. "The 'experts' tell parents that it is harmful to question their childrens beliefs, that they must support their childrens medical transition, which includes a lifetime dependence on hormones, and that if parents do not comply, their children will be at higher risk of suicide," she said. "These parents are being lied to as their children are harmed and their families are torn apart." Children who are confused about their bodies, "need proper therapy and guidance, not drugs and surgeries. And the medical practices that are abusing them need to be shut down," she said. Elaine is now a part of the Kelsey Coalition, a newly formed group of apolitical parents who have trans-identifying children that have been harmed by physicians, therapists and clinics throughout the United States, according to its website. They believe that "gender identity" should not be conflated with sexual orientation. "We, as parents of these [trans-identifying] young people advocate for our children because we love them. Many of us are going through unimaginable grief because we love them," she said. Worlds most expensive painting, a $450M image of Jesus by Da Vinci is missing Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The worlds most expensive painting, a centuries old image of Jesus known as the Salvator Mundi attributed to legendary Italian artist Leonardo Da Vinci, has disappeared in Abu Dhabi. The painting, which was purchased for $450 million in 2017 by Saudi prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, is now missing, The New York Times reports. Al-Saud is believed to have acted as a proxy for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who was named the new Saudi Culture Minister in 2018. The Abu Dhabi culture department announced about a month after the painting was purchased that it would be displayed in the world-class Louvre Abu Dhabi museum. But a scheduled unveiling of the painting last September was canceled without explanation, the Times said. Officials with the culture department are now refusing to answer questions about the painting, but staff of the Louvre Abu Dhabi say privately that they have no knowledge of the paintings whereabouts, the report notes. And while art experts are hoping that the painting will resurface soon, some argue that depriving the world of the work would be tragic. It is tragic, Dianne Modestini, a professor at New York Universitys Institute of Fine Arts and a conservator who has worked on Salvator Mundi, told The New York Times. To deprive the art lovers and many others who were moved by this picture a masterpiece of such rarity is deeply unfair. Martin Kemp, an Oxford art historian who has studied the painting, called it a kind of religious version of the Mona Lisa and Leonardos strongest statement of the elusiveness of the divine. Even he had no clue where the painting might be. I dont know where it is, either, he told the Times. Professor Kemp said the Salvator Mundi is believed to have been painted around 1500, and was one of two similar works listed in an inventory of the collection of King Charles I of England after his execution in 1649. The painting disappeared from the historical record in the late 18th century. The painting later resurfaced in the collection of a 19th century British industrialist but attributed to one of Da Vincis followers. It was reclaimed as a Da Vinci work in 2005 and brought to professor Modestini of NYU for restoration. Since the latest disappearance of the painting there have been renewed concerns over the works authenticity but Modestini called them nonsense. Some art experts are speculating that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman might have decided to keep the painting for himself while others are thinking more sinister things might have happened to the painting. Isn't it against conservative Muslim dogma to have an image of one of the prophets, i.e. Jesus? How does Salvator Mundi end up in Saudi Arabia or UAE? Could disappearance be a religious matter? critic James Stevenson asked on Twitter. Let's only hope Muhammad bin Salman didn't chop it up and use it for firewood ((: wrote James Chikonamombe. Archaeologists discover ancient seal bearing the name of an official from the court of biblical King Josiah A tiny clay impression from the 8th century BC, which bears an inscription mentioning a member of the court of the biblical King Josiah, was recently located in the City of David in Jerusalem. Excavations held at the Givati Parking Lot in the City of David uncovered a tiny clay impression, also known as a bulla, that included a reference to Nathan-Melech, who was identified as "Servant of the King." The biblical Nathan-Melech is mentioned in 2 Kings 23:11: "He removed from the entrance to the temple of the LORD the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan-Melek. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun." Dr. Anat Mendel-Geberovich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Center for the Study of Ancient Jerusalem told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that it is likely a reference to the biblical figure. "Although it is not possible to determine with complete certainty that the Nathan-Melech who is mentioned in the Bible was in fact the owner of the stamp, it is impossible to ignore some of the details that link them together," explained Mendel-Geberovich to the Middle Eastern news outlet. The recent find represented the first archaeological evidence for the biblical figure of Nathan-Melek, according to the Times of Israel. Archaeologist Dr. Yiftah Shalev of the Israel Antiquities Authority explained to the Times that the two inscriptions on the bulla "paint a much larger picture of the era in Jerusalem." "What is important is not just that they were found in Jerusalem, but [that they were found] inside their true archaeological context," explained Shalev. "It is not a coincidence that the seal and the seal impression are found here." The bulla will be presented along with another artifact in the Israel Exploration Journal. Courtesy of The Christian Post Home Secretary orders 'urgent investigation' into asylum seeker rejection letter that claimed Christianity wasn't a peaceful religion The Home Secretary Sajid Javid has ordered an "urgent investigation" into a letter sent to an Iranian Christian asylum seeker explaining that his application had been turned down because Christianity was not the peaceful religion he claimed it to be. The Home Office letter was met with widespread disbelief and consternation after excerpts were published to Twitter by the asylum seeker's caseworker, Nathan Stevens. The claimant said in his application that he had found "peace, forgiveness and kindness" in Christianity in contrast to the "violence and revenge" of his former Muslim faith. An official in the Home Office challenged his interpretation, though, and quoted several passages from the Bible to refute his claim, including Matthew 10:34 where Jesus says, "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword." The official then cited Revelation 2:22-23 and chapter 9:3-6, stating, "Similarly, the book of Revelation is filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence." The official 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 Home Office responded at the time by saying that the letter was inconsistent with its policies and that it was working with faith communities to improve its guidance and training. Church of England Bishop the Rt Rev Paul Butler was among those to have expressed outrage about the letter, saying that the use of the Bible quotes represented "such a profound misunderstanding of the texts and practices of faith communities" and that the management structures and ethos of the Home Office needed "serious overhaul". "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. In the House of Commons yesterday, Tory MP Sir Edward Leigh questioned the Home Secretary on what was being done in response to the letter. He asked Mr Javid whether he would acknowledge that "amongst his officials, they may be so worried about being accused of Islamophobia or anti-Semitism that they overcompensate by becoming Christian critical and they don't understand that Christianity is the cornerstone of all our freedom". In his response, Mr Javid said an investigation was underway and that he would not rule out further action being taken. "I found the letter totally unacceptable," he said. "It is not in accordance with policies at the Home Office in any way. I have ordered an urgent investigation and not ruled out any further action." Mystery surrounds the location of a $450m painting of Jesus by Leonardo Da Vinci The world's most expensive painting, a centuries old image of Jesus known as the "Salvator Mundi" attributed to legendary Italian artist Leonardo Da Vinci, has disappeared from sight in Abu Dhabi. Art experts are clueless as to where the painting, which was purchased for $450 million in 2017 by Saudi prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, actually is, The New York Times reports. Al-Saud is believed to have acted as a proxy for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who was named the new Saudi Culture Minister in 2018. The Abu Dhabi culture department announced about a month after the painting was purchased that it would be displayed in the world-class Louvre Abu Dhabi museum. But a scheduled unveiling of the painting last September was cancelled without explanation, the Times said. Officials with the culture department are now refusing to answer questions about the painting, but "staff of the Louvre Abu Dhabi say privately that they have no knowledge of the painting's whereabouts," the report notes. And while art experts are hoping that the painting will resurface soon, some argue that depriving the world of the work would be "tragic." "It is tragic," Dianne Modestini, a professor at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and a conservator who has worked on "Salvator Mundi," told The New York Times. "To deprive the art lovers and many others who were moved by this picture a masterpiece of such rarity is deeply unfair." Martin Kemp, an Oxford art historian who has studied the painting, called it "a kind of religious version of the 'Mona Lisa'" and Leonardo's "strongest statement of the elusiveness of the divine." Even he had no clue where the painting might be. "I don't know where it is, either," he told the Times. Professor Kemp said the "Salvator Mundi" is believed to have been painted around 1500, and was one of two similar works listed in an inventory of the collection of King Charles I of England after his execution in 1649. The painting disappeared from the historical record in the late 18th century. The painting later resurfaced in the collection of a 19th century British industrialist but attributed to one of Da Vinci's followers. It was reclaimed as a Da Vinci work in 2005 and brought to professor Modestini of NYU for restoration. Since the latest disappearance of the painting there have been renewed concerns over the work's authenticity but Modestini called them "nonsense." Courtesy of The Christian Post SKOPJE - Greek Premier Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday morning travelled to Skopje, in an official visit considered as historic by both sides - the first by a Greek premier to the Macedonian capital since the former Yugoslav country's independence in 1991. The visit was organized after an agreement between the two countries on the new name of what is officially now the Republic of North Macedonia. Tsipras, who was welcomed at the airport by Macedonian Defense Minister Radmila Shekerinska, is travelling with a delegation of ministers who will sign bilateral agreements with their counterparts. After talks with Macedonian Premier Zoran Zaev and Parliament Speaker Talat Dzaferi, Tsipras will attend in the afternoon a bilateral economic forum with entrepreneurs from both countries. A Lafayette man has been charged with attempting to fatally poison his engineer colleague over a period of several years, court records show. Police arrested David Xu, a 34-year-old senior materials engineer at Berkeley Engineering and Research, on Thursday evening. Since 2017, Xu had allegedly been trying to poison a coworker to death by putting cadmium, a toxic metal, in her food and water, court records show. ALSO: Millions of dollars worth of cocaine found in chip bags and bowls The documents said the woman, also an engineer, sometimes noticed "a strange taste or smell from her water and food" after she had left it unattended in her office. Upon consumption, the woman experienced "immediate and significant health problems" and sometimes sought hospital care. Last year, two of the victim's relatives who drank from her water bottle also got sick. Surveillance footage obtained by police reportedly shows Xu pouring a substance into the woman's water bottle on Feb. 11 and March 4, Berkeleyside reported. Water samples taken from the bottles on those dates tested positive for a toxic amount of cadmium. Blood samples from the victim and her two relatives showed elevated levels of cadmium in their systems. ALSO: American could face 10 years in prison for gun in luggage Xu is being held without bail in Berkeley City Jail, court records show. He was charged with three felonies, including premeditated attempted murder resulting in great bodily injury. His arraignment is set for April 2 in Oakland. Berkeley police would not comment on the case because it remains under investigation. Xu completed a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley in 2012 and passed the State of California's Professional Engineering examination a year later, the San Francisco Business Times announced in 2013. Read Michelle Robertson's latest stories and send her news tips at michelle.robertson@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. Royal Dutch Shell Plcs position on climate change is misaligned with about half of the trade associations its a part of, and the disagreement with one is so severe the company will let its membership lapse next year. The findings were issued in a first-of-its-kind report on whether the companys association with lobbying groups is undermining its work on climate change. The report is likely to reverberate across the industry, with most of Shells peers also members of the same groups and already facing enormous pressure from shareholders to line up their business models with the Paris climate accord. Shell will leave the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers association next year because of its climate-change policy stance. It also named nine other groups that it disagrees with, including the powerful American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but said it will engage further with them. RELATED: Shell executive balances two energy worlds The publication of this report is a first step to greater transparency around our activities in this area, Shell said in the report. Shells investors, and more broadly civil society, must be confident that we engage constructively with others on climate change. Trade associations have long been a target of environmental activists who support tougher regulation on the industry. Following investor pressure, Shell said last year it would prove through greater reporting that it isnt funneling money into institutions that hinder progress on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Of the nine groups its misaligned with but will stay a member, Shell only disagrees with some of their positions. For example, it said the API fought to repeal rules around methane emissions in 2017, while the company wanted those to stay. Shell said it found a material misalignment with the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, something it cannot rectify. Unlike Shell, the group neither supports carbon pricing or hasnt publicly supported the goal of the Paris accord, the Anglo-Dutch oil major said. RELATED: Dire climate conclusions add pressure on energy industry AFPM works on myriad issues for its members, and like any family, we arent always fully aligned on every policy, but we always strive to reach consensus positions on policies that are in the best interest of our membership and the communities and consumers that rely on us, Chet Thompson, the groups chief executive officer, said in an emailed statement. One of Houstons monikers is the air-conditioning capital of the world, therefore its a guarantee that the air conditioning is running most months of the year. What can you do to make sure the unit is running efficiently? Aaron Childress, general manager of One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating in Houston, offers tips on how to ensure that the air conditioning unit continues to function properly, and how to keep cool. According to Childress, if you do not get maintenance done every year, you are lessening the life of the unit. Some people think they can get away with out getting maintenance done on their unit, Childress said. Maintenance isnt to prevent problems from happening, but you are trying to reduce the amount of problems from happening. Childress notes that some companies will sell tune-ups for units, in the $50 price range, but in reality they are just visually inspecting the unit. We dont do that, Childress said. We actually clean the unit. We clean the leaves out and wash the outside unit. We will spend 60-90 minutes on a unit. Childress says that the number one failure of an air conditioning unit is dust and dirt. It is important to get the filters replaced on time. A common misconception is keeping the filters in for the maximum three months before changing them. We have a lot more run time in the summer. A lot of people have constant run time. That means that the filter is picking up dust 24/7. It needs to be changed more often, Childress said. Another thing that is important in helping the unit to run efficiently is to make sure that the outside unit is clear of debris. If there are bushes around it, keep them trimmed, giving the unit six to eight inches of room around it. If there is obstruction, this will cause the unit to work harder, making the energy bill go up. Childress suggests raising the temperature in your home one or two degrees in order to save on the energy bill, but do not raise the temperature too much. Then it will just take more energy to bring the temperature back down overnight. A ceiling fan or portable fan can help make the home still comfortable with the small temperature raise. It is also helpful to make sure that doors and windows are properly sealed, so that no outside air can get inside. When we get to 100 degrees, that is really when the air conditioning, even the new units, are struggling to keep up, Childress said. The easiest thing someone can do is to shop around for energy rates. I often tell people to check www.powertochoose.com. You put in your zip code and it gives so many choices. Just by switching over, they save money, Childress said. Childress says that having a long term relationship with an air conditioning company is the best way to save money overall. Longtime customers will often get benefits such as discounted rates or loyalty points. Some companies also offer repair coverage plans. For more information, visit www.onehourheatandair.com/locations/houston-tx. rebecca.hazen@chron.com Animal lovers from Bellaire and beyond are invited out on Saturday, April 13, to celebrate their pets, receive a special animal blessing and visit with pet experts and and rescue organizations at Bellaire United Methodist Church and Evelyns Park. Bellaire UMC has been hosting its Blessing of the Animals event since 2011. Because the church is right across Bellaire Boulevard from the park (at Newcastle Street), the annual event is being held at the the same time as Evelyns Bark. The fun, fur-filled block party will run from noon to 3 p.m. God has blessed us with pets of all species, shapes and sizes. These pets are our constant companions and they provide us with unconditional love, said Pastor Seann Duffin in a news release. Its been great to work on this event with Evelyns Park, and we want the entire community to join us as we celebrate, honor and bless the wonderful pets we hold so dear. Animals from dogs and cats to fish and hamsters and people from all faith backgrounds are welcome at the church on the south side of Bellaire for a special service that will include a prayer, homily and group blessing from the churchs pastors for the pets. Then, the pastors will be available to bless each animal individually. Professionals from Nikky LaWell Photography will provide for the first 250 participants a free photo of their pets individual blessing. Also, representatives from nine pet rescue organizations will be on the churchs front lawn showing off some of their lovable animals that are ready and waiting to find a forever home. In some years, the churchs event has brought around 350 attendees, with 175 to 250 families, but the number of pets is harder to nail down, according to Bellaire UMC lay leader Steve Smith, who said some families and individuals bring just one pet and others bring two or three. Park Director at Evelyns Park Patricia King-Ritter said about 300 people came out for an Evelyns Bark event in 2015 before the park had opened. Now with the beautiful new space the park offers, she expects a larger turnout this year. Animals bless us with their playfulness and affection and simply through their trusting presence. Were expecting over 500 people and their pets, and we want them to enjoy a day in the Park with their beloved companions, King-Ritter said. Were thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Bellaire UMC to provide our community with such a wonderful celebration of all Gods creatures. During the special event, pets can sniff, wander and explore the park that is normally off limits to them. Pets that attend need to be friendly and on on a leash, in protective carriers, cages, fish bowls or terrariums. The park is located at 4400 Bellaire Blvd., and the church is just across the street at 4417 Bellaire Blvd. For further information, visit www.bellaireumc.org/bota or www.evelynspark.org. Southwest Airlines does not expect to fly the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes until June, a decision that comes as the Federal Aviation Administration said it will receive Boeing's software upgrades in the "coming weeks" for FAA approval. Southwest, the largest carrier at Hobby Airport, has 34 of the Max 8 planes in its fleet -- the largest of any U.S. airline, surpassing American Airlines' fleet of 24 Max 8 planes and United Airlines' fleet of 14 Max 9 planes. On the heels of the school shooting at Santa Fe High School, U. S. Rep. Brian Babin (TX-36) is proposing legislation that would prevent such occurrences before they happen. Babin was in Liberty County meeting with law enforcement leaders from across his nine-county district explaining how his bipartisan Threat Assessment, Prevention, and Safety Act (TAPS) works. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy, it is unfathomable to think we still are not doing enough to prevent the indiscriminate shootings, stabbings, bombings, and other mass casualty events occurring all too often in our schools and communities, Babin said. The congressman hosted four such meetings that were attended by law enforcement officers from the U. S. Marshal Service, Texas Rangers, Sheriffs, Constables, Police chiefs, and other representatives from local police departments and schools. The TAPS Act promotes utilizing the process of Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management (BTAM) for determining the credibility and seriousness of potential threats and interrupting and managing those on a pathway to violence. For decades this process has been in place to identify, investigate, assess, and mitigate threats in order to counter targeted violence. Pioneered by the U.S. Secret Service, BTAM has proven successful in protecting our presidents and foreign dignitaries. The TAPS Act would spread this process to local law enforcement. Thankfully, weve found a bipartisan solution. Our local leaders and law enforcement are the professionals with the boots on the ground who have dedicated their lives to protecting our communities from violence, and I am thrilled to have received their overwhelmingly positive support for the TAPS Act. For Dayton Police Chief Robert Vine, its the first time that a congressman has sat down with him and other to explain what the Act really does. Its encouraging that we have somebody like him giving this the attention that it deserves, the police chief said. Speaking for myself, I hope this wont be just a springboard, but that other congressmen will get involved and flesh it out before another attack occurs, he said. While the bill addresses preventative measures, Vine also said he hoped that a spotlight on mental health reform. Once we recognize the problem, what do we do with it? he asked. How does it get fixed? The chief said the mental health component could be costly but needs to be effective. Currently, when they have a mental health issue, the person is arrested and taken to jail. A follow-up with a mental health professional is done. An arrest is not going to solve the problem. Thats where your multi-disciplinary experts work with them. What will happen when they get out? Vine questioned. He said there had to be enough resources to solve the issue at hand, and for what would happen once they are released. Vine said the meeting was less of a training and more of an informational presentation. It just helped us to understand what the Act was, and we should help to get behind it and hope that it would lead to more information. Any time we talk about it and bring awareness to it, I think were doing something positive and being progressive or pro-active, he said. The chief said he worries that enough is still not being done to prevent these types of incidents. By the time the first shot is fired, were too late. County commissioners are in the process of tightening security at the county courthouse, a move that has been long in coming. We dont have wands at the city council meetings here in Dayton, but we do have officers present to participate in the meetings but also provide a measure of security as well, Vine said. While the chief said he was all for security and awareness, he said he also didnt want to compromise that home-style or small-town approach. Were not Houston or New York, but we have to be prepared as much as we can, he said. They also now have a Babin representative in the same building and it makes things more convenient for getting some assistance. To learn more about the TAPS Act, please visit www.babin.house.gov/taps. dtaylor@hcnonline.com KOBELCO Construction Machinery USA an excavator manufacturing company with a facility in Katy at 22350 Merchants Way near North Mason Road recently completed its 1,000th excavator and celebrated the event on March 27. According to a news release, the 1,000th KOBELCO machine produced is the SK210LC-10 model. KOBELCO dealer, Southeastern Equipment, sold the unit to A Crano Excavating, a family-owned residential and commercial developer based in Akron, Ohio. The SK210LC-10 was given to A Crano Excavating at the celebration event. About a dozen people met Saturday morning with District 132 state Rep. Gina Calanni where she talked about bills filed in the current session of the Texas Legislature. She said legislators have filed many bills addressing issues that occurred after Hurricane Harvey. The intent is how can officials make sure better programs are in place for the next time a disaster occurs, she said. The first bill she introduced, HB 880, would limit what school districts pay in severance to outgoing superintendents to only one years salary. Calanni said representatives of the Texas Association of School Boards and Texas Association of School Administrators spoke against the bill in a committee hearing about two weeks ago, but it was supported by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Last year, the Katy Independent School District paid outgoing superintendent Lance Hindt $750,000 in severance pay, an amount that equaled two years of his base pay. Its a common-sense measure, said Calanni, who added that she didnt want money for education going to pay administrators leaving districts. Between 2013-17, school districts in Texas paid $18.3 million to 341 outgoing superintendents, she said. I want to make sure that children have every tax dollar available to them, said Calanni. Katy Mayor Chuck Brawner and At-Large Councilman Chris Harris recently visited Austin and spoke in support of Calannis HB 1308, which would amend the Transportation Code to give Katy police officers the same authority as Department of Public Safety troopers when it comes to enforcing state safety standards for overweight vehicles. District 18 state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst introduced a similar bill, SB 636, which reads in part, Some smaller cities in Texas face a constant threat of danger and disruption posed by commercial motor vehicles that exceed vehicle weight and size restrictions, especially a city like Katy (pop. 18,000) that is located along I-10. Heavy trucks often leave the interstate to cut through the town in order to avoid delays. S.B. 636 addresses this issue by including police officers from these cities among the police officers eligible to apply for certification to enforce commercial motor vehicle safety standards. Calanni said its not a matter of the city of Katy receiving revenue from the expanded enforcement but to prevent them (truckers) from tearing up the road. She referred to the bill as providing pothole protection. Other concerns shes addressed in legislation relate to womens health, trafficking and protecting children. HB 992 would establish a womens health advisory committee, HB 3375 would establish an annual medical examination for foster children and HB 2170 relates to human trafficking awareness training for legislators. karen.zurawski@chron.com South Africa on Tuesday joined the international community in expressing concerns over the U.S. administration's decision to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Israeli soldiers sit in a position on the border with Syria on the Golan Heights as smoke rises following explosions of mortar shells, July 16, 2013. [File photo: AP/Ariel Schalit] The unilateral decision by the U.S. government in this regard represents a serious violation of the UN Charter, international law and applicable United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, particularly Resolution 497, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) said. Such unilateral declarations constitute a severe setback to the rule of law and international norms, DIRCO said in a statement. On March 25, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a proclamation recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, marking a major shift in U.S. policy in the Middle East. The Golan Heights was seized by Israel from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967. In 1981, Israel passed a law that effectively annexed it - a move that remains unrecognized internationally. The South African government will not support any unilateral action by the U.S. government that undermines efforts of creating peace and stability in the Middle East, DIRCO said. South Africa calls upon the UNSC to exercise its mandate in preserving international peace and security and implement its relevant resolutions, supported by International Law, to restore the Golan Heights, an integral part of the Syrian territory, from Israeli occupation, DIRCO said. VATICAN CITY - People must react to xenophobic ideas and anti-migrant ''closures'', Pope Francis said in the third chapter of his post-synodal exhortation Christus Vivit (Christ Lives). The pontiff presented migrants as a ''paradigm of our times'' and stressed that many youths are forced to migrate. ''In many countries of destination, the phenomenon of migration has sparked alarm and fears, often fomented and exploited for political ends'', the pontiff said. This promotes a ''xenophobic mentality'', a mentality of closure against which ''we must react with decision''. The Church in particular is concerned for those fleeing war, violence, political or religious persecution, natural disasters due to climate change and extreme poverty, said the pontiff. ''They are looking for an opportunity, they dream of a better future''. Other migrants are attracted by western culture, sometimes harboring unrealistic expectations that expose them to strong disappointment, the pope said. ''Unscrupulous traffickers, often connected to drug and arms cartels, exploit the weakness of migrants'', the pope noted, stressing the vulnerability in particular of unaccompanied migrant minors. Young migrants also suffer for being uprooted from their culture and religion. Francis in particular asked youths not to fall prey to those who want to ''put them against other youths arriving in their country, describing them as dangerous''. The Katy Prairie Conservancy is ready to celebrate its commitment to the coastal prairie. As part of the celebration, KPC will host its 2019 Bash: Our Roots Run Deep, focusing on the organizations deep commitment to the conservation and enhancement of our coastal prairie. The annual fundraiser brings together community members who support of KPCs mission to protect the coastal prairie for the benefit of its wildlife and all Texans forever. Over the last two years, KPC has protected an additional 5,832 acres of land, restored another 300 acres of tallgrass prairie, and created 45 new acres of wetlands. The honoree for the bash is Forrest Wylie, an avid conservationist and lover of the outdoors. His donation to Katy Prairie Conservancy of a conservation easement on Spread Oaks Ranch, on the banks of the Colorado River, ensures the protection of prairie, wetlands, Columbia Bottomlands, agriculture, ranching, and hunting for generations to come, organizers said in a news release. The guest emcee for the event is Michael Hagerty, senior producer for Houston Matters on Houston Public Media and a veteran broadcast journalist. The bash will be held at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 2, at Houston Country Club, One Potomac Drive in Houston. Underwriting opportunities for the gala are available from $5,000 up to $25,000. Single tickets are $250 ($150 for students). Visit katyprairie.org/KPCevents for more information about the event or to purchase tickets. You can also email adodson@katyprairie.org or call 713-523-6135. rkent@hcnonline.com Meet Marshall a black, 2-year-old Staffordshire Bull Terrier with a beautiful smile. Hes Fort Bend County Animal Services longest term resident. Its a title he would be quite happy to lose, said Rene Vasquez, director of Fort Bend County Animal Services. He's been in the shelter so long, he gets overexcited when people come to visit him, Vasquez said. But if you let him run around outside for a minute and get some energy out, he'd love nothing more than to sit in your lap and cuddle. Marshall and about 141 of his friends could be at risk of euthanasia if the shelter doesnt find a solution to its overcrowding issues. Over the last three months, the animal shelter, located in Rosenberg, has had to convert its individual indoor/outdoor cages into two separate holding areas to double the space available for incoming dogs, Vasquez said. PETS OF THE WEEK: Harris County Animal Shelter rescues dumped Chihuahuas Technically, right now we have 78 cages, Vasquez said. Because were so full, were using the inside as one cage and the outside as one cage. So right now, we have about 140 dogs. We dont have anymore room. The last few months have been overwhelming. The overcrowding isnt because the county is receiving more dogs at intake - its not - but instead because its choosing to euthanize fewer dogs, Vasquez said. About 10 percent of dogs or roughly 10 to 15 dogs that the county agency receives are euthanized, he added, noting that employees at Animal Services do everything to prevent euthanasia and even work with difficult cases to ensure adoptability. We do our best, he said. Vasquez said the shelter will do everything it can to reunite pets with their owners, but the process isnt easy, as only five percent of the animals that come in are microchipped. Every other month, the agency puts out a push list of its oldest residents to area rescues, animal organizations and other interested parties to attract attention to the adoptable pets. FOUR -LEGGED SPECIALISTS: Officials in Houston tout law to allow support dogs in federal courtrooms They will basically be on an urgent list that we need help, and if we cant get it, these animals could be at risk of being euthanized just because we dont have anywhere for them to go, Vasquez said. Animal Services also uses social media and partnerships with area law enforcement to push the list out to those looking for a pet. The shelter will offer discounts or waive fees altogether to encourage adoptions, he said. But the shelter is open admission, meaning that if it receives a complaint about roaming dogs on the street, field officers will pick up the pups and bring them in, he added. That puts a strain on shelter services, and dogs whove been in the shelter the longest like Marshall could potentially end up on the push list or euthanized, Vasquez said. Vasquez said the overcapacity at Fort Bend Animal Services can be compared to that of Harris County, where staff regularly see a weekend intake of hundreds of dogs and cats. LARGE RESCUE: 76 dogs, puppies found stacked in cages rescued from Needville property Last week, Fort Bend County Animal Services field officers picked up about 40 dogs, which Vasquez said may not seem like a lot but the surge can easily overwhelm the shelter. For now, Vasquez said the community can do its part to help reduce the overcrowding. Theres two things that we always stress is being a responsible pet owner, having pets on a leash and in a fence in your house, he said. Being responsible for the animals not to have to get picked up and become our problem. The second way to help the animals in the shelter is to please come adopt, rescue or foster them, he added. Fort Bend County is little and I know were not the Harris, BARC and Montgomery (animal shelters) but we exist and we have just as good dogs, he said. If youre looking for a furry friend, visit the Fort Bend County Animal Services website. michelle.iracheta@chron.com Contractors Brian Balcerowicz and Cesar Mendoza were in the control room of the KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, just a couple of feet from danger, when an explosion shook the facility Tuesday morning. "They said there had been a problem and stay in the control room," Balcerowicz said. "About five minutes later we heard and felt the explosion." KMCO OWNERS: What we know about the company, at HoustonChronicle.com The operator told everyone to leave the premises. Balcerowicz noted that the control room was safe since it was explosion-proof. He added that his wife, at home nearby, and his mother, in Channelview, also felt the explosion. Balcerowicz later pointed out that the smoke from the fire at the plant was growing whiter, indicating that firefighters had gained the upper hand. "The whiter the smoke, the cooler the burn," he said. The windows of Harris County sheriff''s deputy Gary Hendry''s patrol car rattled in the blast about 10 a.m. He said he was the first to radio in the situation. "I saw my neighbor called me and told me that their pictures were knocked off the wall," he said. "There were about five or six more explosions. I know the explosion was central so it was inside of a cluster of tanks. I do know that the fire team was on scene pretty quickly." HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM INVESTIGATES: Dangerous chemicals and a serious lack of information at plants around Houston. Hendry said there are 240 tanks on-site. The smoke plume was blown toward the downtown area, he said. "They're getting their second dose, unfortunately, after the Deer Park incident a couple of weeks ago," he added. "But the firefighting efforts have been successful so far." 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. If you've ever been on a flight and your skin felt dried out like a prune by the time you landed, here's great news: The Houston-based skin care line Sunday Riley has teamed with United Airlines to provide moisturizing amenity kits for flights, in United Polaris lounges and at United Club locations with shower facilities. ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Carolina Herrera collection shows fall can be bright, cheery and fun "We love being able to elevate the amenity offering and connect with an entirely new audience as they get to pamper themselves in the air," said Sunday Riley, founder and CEO in a release. "With these new exclusive products, customers around the world can feel and look their best while on their journey," Sunday Riley's kits feature a handful of travel-size products. Passengers flying in United's Polaris business class cabin will receive a kit of four products: a lip balm infused with pomegranate seed oil, a lightweight face cream, shea butter and rosehip oil hand cream, and lastly, a toner cloth containing peppermint extract to instantly refresh and balance skin. Premium Plus passengers will receive a kit with the lip balm and hand cream, and Premium Transcontinental flyers will have the lip balm. In March, Sunday Riley teamed up with the Captain Marvel film for its release in theaters. The Sunday Riley x Captain Marvel Collaboration celebrated 10 years of the brand's best-selling face serum by giving the bottle and packaging a limited edition Marvel-ous makeover. The beauty company was founded in 2009 by Riley. The company stoked controversy last year after an internal email showed that employees were encouraged to write positive product reviews on Sephora. STAY IN THE KNOW: Get caught up on what's going on around Houston. From sports to news and entertainment, check out the newsletters we're offering. Two mothers left behind as their daughters were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, have been working together ever since to make schools safer and produce some good from their terrible loss. Around 400 educators, administrators, public safety officials, mental health professionals, solution providers and community members and leaders gathered at the McKinney Conference Center in Northwest Houston March 29-30 for the first National Summit on School Safety. The event was presented by Safe and Sound Schools, the Region 4 Education Service Center and Crime Stoppers of Houston. Michele Gay and Alissa Parker had never met until the massacre that took 28 lives. But Parkers daughter Emilie had just days earlier shopped for the perfect birthday present to give Josephine, Gays daughter, for her party. It was supposed to take place the day after the shooting. Today, Gay and Parker are co-founders of Safe and Sound Schools, a national nonprofit dedicated exclusively to school safety. Sandy Hook shooting Dec. 14, 2012, was the last day before winter break, so Sandy Hooks students were doing fun activities like building gingerbread houses, and performing in concerts and class plays. Just the week before, the whole school had participated in a lockdown and evacuation drill. The reality turned out much differently. SANDY HOOK TRAGEDY: Houstonians recall Sandy Hook victims and push for gun law changes Gay almost kept Josephine home from school that day, but she wanted to see her friends. So she dropped her daughter off. Minutes later, she got a call from the school superintendent that there had been a shooting at one of the Newtown Public School District schools and that all the schools were in lockdown. Terrified as she got in her car, Gay just wanted to know where the shooting had occurred. What school? Soon, the roads filled up with first responders. She followed them and began to realize they could only be going toward the elementary school. But she could only get as far as the firehouse. Meanwhile, Parkers husband called and said the news was saying the shooting had been at the elementary school and advising people not to go there because first responders were still trying to get there. Instead, she picked her younger daughter up at the preschool and was told after all to go to the school. As she approached Sandy Hook, she encountered many cars and first responders as well as media outlets that were starting to arrive. Inside the school, Parker met a sea of people just running every which way. A teacher recognized her and let her know Emilie had been evacuated first. So she joined a group of parents at the firehouse who still didnt know where their children were. SANTA FE SHOOTING: Ten months later, families still seek answers The room filled up, and then we just sat and waited, she said. Gay also found her way to the chaos at the school but could not find Josephine. Reliving the day Both mothers learned within hours that their daughters had been killed. The next day, Parker realized that Josephine had also been lost and immediately picked up an invitation for the birthday party that would never happen. She called Gay. They shared and cried with one another and bonded as they began to work through their grief. They attempted to comprehend just what in the world had happened. Parker said their four other daughters also formed an instant bond. You could hear the sniffles in the room on Friday as Gay and Parker told their story. Gay said they shared not to break peoples hearts once again but in order that people would think critically about all that went wrong that day in December, and ways that communities and schools could prevent it from happening in other places. If we dare to walk this walk, we dare to take this apart, theres a tremendous amount we can learn, she said. HOUSTON POLICE: Acevedo pushes elected officials for gun reform Parker said the two main objectives with an incident like Sandy Hook are speeding up the response in the school and slowing down an attacker. One major thing that went wrong was that after the intruder shot through the floor-to-ceiling glass at the schools entrance, he walked in and within seconds killed the schools principal, school psychologist and lead teacher that had been meeting in the front office. Nobody was left to alert lockdown mode over the public address system. Immediately the schools leadership was gone, leaving no one in charge. Parker said school staff members should have contingency plans in case someone is hurt and cant do their normal role. Also, miscommunication like 911 calls without correct or full information and alert calls going out to the entire school district caused mass panic, congestion on roads as first responders were trying to get to the school and a breakdown of mental health resources that were inundated by people reacting to hearing the alert. Gay said that looking back, she had never really seen first responders in schools prior to the tragedy but now understood that needed to change. I remember looking at the sea of resources and suddenly thinking very differently about how we as communities work together to ensure that our schools are safe, she said. While response efforts will never be perfect, Gay said having them go as smoothly as possible is important not only for physical safety but also psychological safety. She urged the attendees to build connections with people that they can lean on in times of trouble and to check their pillars of support like faith, friends, family or the community because you may one day be faced with a very difficult day like we were, because you are pillars yourselves for your own communities, for your own families, for your own, for your own colleagues. For programs and resources on school safety, click here. tracy.maness@hcnonline.com The Conroe Municipal Court cleared hundreds of outstanding warrants last month during a warrant round up. According to information from the court, hundreds of courts across Texas participate in some type of warrant amnesty or roundup period to clear outstanding warrants every year. The roundup allows those with Class C Misdemeanors (fine only offenses) to clear the warrant. Conroe Municipal Court Warrant officers, Jackie Everitt and Raymond McCreary with the assistance of the Conroe Police Department, coordinated a smooth and productive round-up, said Christina Roley, court administrator. Preceding the roundup was a two-week amnesty period in which defendants were given the opportunity to avoid arrest, setup payment plans and possibly get a fine reduction in order to satisfy their obligation with the court. Judge Mike Davis said his court is a Safe Harbor. (Safe Harbor) describes courts that citizens can enter without fear of being arrested, Davis said. The Texas Municipal Courts Education Center, which I am a board of directors member, encourages all municipal courts to become Safe Harbor courts as a best practice. cdominguez@hcnonline.com 3 1 of 3 courtesy of the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constable's Office Show More Show Less 2 of 3 courtesy of the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constable's Office Show More Show Less 3 of 3 Two men were arrested and charged with possession of a controlled substance after one was apprehended for shoplifting at a Spring Walmart. Dustin Harris, 28, of The Woodlands, is being charged with possession for a controlled substance and received a citation for theft. Trey Arteaga, 23, of Montgomery, is being charged with possession of a controlled substance, according to a Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constables Office press release. Some League City elected officials see approval of Proposition A on the May 4 ballot as crucial to address drainage mistakes from the past and reduce flooding risks amid the citys rapid growth. Proposition A is probably the most important program the city has ever attempted, Mayor Pro Tem Todd Kinsey said of the measure to sell $73 million in bonds to fund a variety of detention ponds and levee improvements. These drainage projects will go a long way to correct issues that exist around the city (from) before zoning and modern building standards were implemented. Also on the ballot are Proposition B, which would provide a $72 million bond for 10 mobility projects, and Proposition C, which asks residents to boost the citys sales tax by .25 percent to the state-maximum 8.25 percent in what city officials say is a way to limit and possibly eliminate the bonds potential impact on the property tax rate. Flooding seen as threat to citys future City Councilman Chad Tressler believes the bundle of projects proposed through Proposition A could represent a giant step toward reducing the impact rapid growth has had on drainage. This list goes a long way toward addressing our local issues while demonstrating to neighboring communities that we are serious about moving forward with addressing the issues to minimize our risk for future flood events and will help pave the way toward cooperation on regional solutions for the larger projects, he said. The list of projects provides a reduction in risk of flooding caused by localized issues that are largely attributable to imperfectly designed retention, inadequate drainage plans and new/higher construction creating ponding, he said. Hurricane Harvey caused flooding in about 25 percent of the homes in League City, Tressler said. City Councilman Larry Millican said the projects outlined in Prop A stem from engineering studies conducted after Hurricane Harvey on flooding that affected 8,800 homes and businesses in the city. Echoing warnings by Mayor Pat Hallisey, Tressler said, Even those who didnt flood will see an impact if we experience repeated events. Property values will go down for everyone if people fear living in League City, and businesses will avoid League City for safer regions that demonstrate a commitment to risk mitigation. Millican noted that a city survey last year identified flooding and drainage as the second-most important element for the residents behind mobility. The flood and drainage projects are just like the mobility projects, he said. The citizens want them completed as soon as possible. The projects in Prop A will harden the infrastructure in these neighborhoods to help prevent flooding in the future rain events, he said. Flooding of homes and neighborhoods wears on citizens mental state and economic climate in the city. City Councilman Nick Long pointed out that this is the first comprehensive bond package presented to voters in more than two decades. This bond referendum will allow the city to address pending needs and address most of the debt needed to fuel this growing city for the next five to seven years, he said. Kinsey said city officials are still waiting on the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state to fund some important drainage efforts. Theyve provided the funding for the northern reaches of Clear Creek, but they really need to provide funding for the lower section of Galveston County, he said. I fear they made the top of the funnel larger, but the neck is still the same size and its filled with debris. League City has applied for a total of more than $64 million in federal and state grants from FEMA, the Texas Water Development Board and the Texas General Land Office. So far, the city has received about $3.4 million through FEMA and has been approved for about $6.8 million through the Texas General Land Office and $1.1 million from the FEMA Public Assistance Program. "Additionally, the city has several projects still in formulation phases as we continue to work with FEMA representatives," city spokeswoman Sarah Greer Osborne said. Those projects would include repairs to damages to 19 lift stations, 16 other facilities, nine drainage ditches and two parks. "On a larger scale, City Manager John Baumgartner is working with other jurisdictions in both Harris and Galveston counties, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, to develop solutions that will significantly lower water levels in Clear Creek and Dickinson Bayou during future storms or flooding events, with a goal of securing grant funding for major projects," Osborne said. Kinsey said that Proposition A would represent an ambitious start that will take the better part of a decade to complete. The biggest Proposition A project would be construction of a detention pond south of FM 517 to control flow rates into Dickinson Bayou. Projected to cost $15.6 million, it would require purchasing approximately 460 acres of drainage area from Magnolia Bayou and Bordens Gully. Other projects on the Proposition A bond include: $11.6 million to purchase land and construct a new detention pond by FM 646, Hill Avenue, Washington Street, Meadowlark Lane and Weeks Avenue. $9 million for a four-phase Bay Ridge Flood Reduction Project. This effort would include levee improvements and protection from drainage flows across Texas 96 and adding capacity to the current detention pond and a pump station. The work also would aim to improve drainage and capacity within the neighborhood adjacent to Gum Bayou and widen Gum Bayou from Texas 96 south to the city limits. $7.6 million for a two-phase Magnolia Creek and Cedar Gully Channel Improvement Project. This work would include improving waterway flowing into existing ponds in Westwood and Magnolia Creek and culvert modifications at Summer Place to better control flow rates. Other measures would include regrading slopes, planting vegetation and installing erosion-control measures. $5.8 million to purchase land to build a detention pond east of Blue Wing Drive and west of Bordens Gully. $3.5 million to increase capacity and efficiency of Bradshaw Ditch between Texas 3 and Texas 96 south to the city limits. $3.5 million to increase capacity and efficiency of drainage flows through Bordens Gully to Interstate 45. $3.5 million to purchase land and construct detention ponds on the northern and southeastern side of the Oaks of Clear Creek subdivision. $3.2 million to reconstruct portions of Wesley Drive for improved drainage to Corum Ditch. The money will also be used to purchase land and construct a nearby detention pond. tyler.johnson@chron.com A Crosby Middle School student who went missing Friday, prompting an extensive search, has been found safe, authorities said Tuesday evening. The Harris County Sheriff's Office said in a tweet that the girl, 12-year-old Hannah Evelyn Diaz, had been "found safe with the assistance of" the Texas Department of Public Safety. "The circumstances of her disappearance remain under investigation at this time," the sheriff's office continued. Members of the Crosby community and the Harris County Sheriffs Office had spent days searching for Hannah. She was last seen wearing a green army hoodie, blue jeans and gray socks with no shoes. Hannah was also carrying a black backpack with a kitty-face and ears while carrying her laptop, charger, and phone. She left between the hours of midnight and 8:30 a.m. on Friday. Volunteers formed a command center in the Newport area to hand out fliers, go door-to-door and look for anything that might lead to her whereabouts. Search parties were even dispersed by the Harris County Missing Persons Unit throughout the Houston area. Before she was located, Hannahs father, David Diaz, said she likes to hang out in movie theaters, Main Events and malls. Hannah never spent a night away from home, David said, tearing up. Everywhere we went, she went. She preferred to play the flute than to go outside. BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: Get your Houston breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox David Diaz said then that he wanted Hannah to know that she was not in trouble, and that he just wanted her to come home. Shes never been grounded longer than two days. Two days of being grounded was the most. The worst shes ever done is not pay attention in Pre-AP Social Studies class. Shes very respectful, shes very polite; this is not her, David said. David Diaz said the family was grateful for the whole Crosby community coming together to help find Hannah. It brought me to tears to see how Crosby (is helping), David Diaz said before her discovery. They had horses, drones, food, gas, water. The assistant superintendent was there, the principal, theyre all talking to the kids. Ive never seen a community do what they did. kaila.contreras@chron.com Serbia: Western Balkans Digital Summit to open on April 4 Event to be attended by 3,000 participants (ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, 2 APRIL - The second digital summit of the Western Balkan economies, to be attended by 3,000 participants from 30 economies in the Western Balkans, Europe and worldwide, will open in Belgrade on April 4. Over the course of two days, the international summit will bring together the region's ministers for information society and digital agenda, European Commission officials and representatives of the global IT industry and business representatives, as well as representatives of startups. The Digital Summit, to be held at the Palace of Serbia within the framework of the Serbia Digital Week, is one of the symbols of regional cooperation, initiated by the Berlin Process. (ANSAmed). Three vehicle crashes that claimed three lives occurred in an approximate 36-hour span in Montgomery County starting Saturday night. A man riding a reportedly stolen motorcycle without a helmet was struck shortly before 10 p.m. Saturday by a vehicle on FM 1314 near East Davis. Shaun Reynolds, 38, struck a vehicle with his 2009 Suzuki when the driver failed to yield as she was exiting a private driveway, said Conroe Police Department Sgt. Jeff Smith. The driver Reynolds struck may face charges for failing to yield, but no charges related to his death are expected, Smith said. About five hours later, a 911 call came into the Montgomery County Hospital District at 3:05 a.m. Sunday about a three-vehicle wreck with one vehicle on fire around FM 1485 and Wilderness Drive. Medics, along with the East Montgomery and Porter fire departments, arrived at the scene and found a person dead inside a fiery vehicle. Another wrecked vehicle was overturned and crews had to cut into the vehicle to remove the trapped person who was hospitalized in critical condition at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands. A person in a third wrecked vehicle was also hospitalized at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands, according to a release from the Montgomery County Hospital District. Finally, around 10:30 a.m. Monday, a man about 55 years old in a red Ford F-250 truck hit a log-carrying tractor-trailer after he failed to yield at a stop while driving westbound on the U.S. 59 underpass as he tried entering the feeder. The pickup truck driver died on impact, while the driver in the tractor-trailer tried to avoid hitting him, said Splendora Police Chief Wally Wieghat. The wreck, Wieghat explained, remains under investigation, but there is no reason to think the tractor-trailer driver was at fault. Tire skid marks showed where the driver tried to avoid the oncoming pickup driver, who a witness said ran the stop sign, Wieghat continued. There was no way he could avoid him, Wieghat said. Wieghat added that the tractor-trailer driver volunteered a blood sample. These latest fatalities culminate a near three-week period of vehicle-related deaths in Montgomery County. A 21-year-old Cleveland man crashed into a power line and died March 13 on FM 1485. On March 17, an Arkansas man in New Caney fatally struck a 17-year-old pedestrian from Porter and surrendered the following day. According to media reports, a motorcyclist March 23 ran a red light and was killed in oncoming traffic in Conroe. jose.gonzalez@chron.com More than 100 people, including family members, gathered last week to honor veterans of World War II and later at the Veterans Appreciation and Awards Dinner at Carriage Inn-Conroe last week. The assisted living facility at 750 Longmire Road teamed up with Conroe VFW Post 4709, Tri-County Behavioral Healthcare Veteran Services Liaison Ashley Taylor, Linda Green with DeGeorge at Union State a senior living facility for homeless veterans and Heritage Oaks Assisted Living Facility to gather and recognize the veterans. The WWII veterans were presented with hand-made, multicolored quilts from The Golden Needle Quilt Guild that included a similar block of the design with a message of gratitude. The Conroe VFW also presented the veterans with a pin, military bible, and a certificate of appreciation for the veterans service. It was a beautiful ceremony, said John Jack Sikorski, 93, who served in the U.S. Army as a combat engineer during WWII. I was very proud to be a part of it. The presentation from the VFW and the quilts, that was very nice (and his favorite part). According to statistics from the National World War II Museum and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII, only 496,777 were alive in 2018 with 348 dying each day. Of those, 28,811 live in Texas. It is one of the largest gatherings of Korean War Veterans and World War II veterans that I have ever attended,VFW Post 4709 Commander Floyd Stewart said regarding the ceremony at Carriage Inn-Conroe. The World War II generation is leaving, Stewart said. There are very few of them left that we can pay our respects. It was very emotional and heart warming just to be able to tell them thank you for your service and see the smiles that were on their faces. Several of the military veterans honored were 90-plus years old, including the oldest WWII vet at the ceremony, William Wallace, 99, who served in the U.S. Army. Another WWII and U.S. Navy Veteran, Morris Bateman, 103, was unable to attend the ceremony, but was still delivered his awards along with four WWII vets who were also unable to attend and live at Heritage Oaks Assisted Living Facility. One of the WWII vets on the list of honorees unable to attend, Robert Barnett passed away last week. The ceremony included a pledge, anthem, and prayer with each veteran individually honored for their service. The ceremony also included a table for to honor, reflect, and remember those missing in action and prisoners of war. More Information WWII Veterans: Morris Bateman, U.S. Navy DeWayne Carpenter, U.S. Army Bill Chilcoat, U.S. Navy Tom Holland, U.S. Army and Marine Corps Jim McFarland, U.S. Navy Manuel San Roman, U.S. Navy Don Robinson, U.S. Army John "Jack" Silkorski, U.S. Army William Wallace, U.S. Army Homer Wilson, U.S. Navy Frank Norman Woodruff, U.S. Air Force Joe Caposella Robert Barnett Moses Attaya Gene Johnson See More Collapse Terri Lisenbe with Carriage Inn Conroe said the annual event is hosted to express love to the veterans and to honor them. She believes the community experiences freedom only because of the veterans willingness to serve the country and make sacrifices that she said has made all of the difference. During the ceremony, she observed the veterans not only feeling honored but noticed a sense of humility and brotherhood as they were able to experience together. I believe there are times that veterans will feel alone or their life is coming to a close and that they are not making as much of a difference as they would like to, but truly they have made life-impacting differences that we are benefiting from to this day, Lisenbe said. You could just see strength come into them and a since of pride for our nation just to stand taller, to sing louder, and smile a little bit more. They just said that is so nice, thank you for doing that, they just really did feel special, she added. Carriage Inn hopes to continue to host the public event for the veterans and is planning another veterans appreciation event from 11-1:30 p.m. on June 29 that will include a Conroe Cruisers car show and barbecue. mellsworth@hcnonline.com courtesy of the Montgomery County Jail A Houston man allegedly shot his girlfriends estranged husband in the leg Sunday morning in Conroe following a dispute over a ownership of a truck. Austin Kyle Lyon, 24, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony. Following the dispute, Lyon grabbed a firearm from his vehicle and shot the other man in the 1300 block of Briar Cliff Street, according to a Montgomery County Sheriffs Office release. It was a busy Monday night for contestants in the Montgomery County Fairs Junior Non-Livestock Auction. Sales from the 75 items put up for auction raised more than $170,000 90 percent of which goes directly back to the students who created the works. The Fair Association expects an additional $30,000 to $40,000 coming in the next week, when students will have the chance to raise more money toward their final sale price in an add-on period that ends March 11. The nights biggest sale went to 8-year-old Hunter Phillips and his handicraft project a wooden plaque painted with the American flag and wood-burned with the Pledge of Allegiance, which sold to Keystone Concrete for $9,000. There was a lot of thought that went into that project, Marmack said. Both of Hunters parents are veterans. Five percent of the sale price covers the auctions overhead costs and five percent goes to the Montgomery County Fair Associations general scholarship fund, said officer-in-charge Maggie Marmack. The Junior Non-Livestock Auction is one of the fairs biggest events more than 900 students submitted 1,500 works in categories ranging from baked goods to horticulture at Saturdays Junior Non-Livestock Show. The Grand Champion, Reserve Champion, third, fourth and fifth place selections were chosen to be auctioned off in 15 categories. The 2018 auction raised more than $200,000 total. mrincon@chron.com Investigators with the Montgomery County Fire Marshals Office are hoping the public can help identify the person who started a fire at the Holly Creek Apartments in The Woodlands that severely damaged the complex and injured a teen girl. Fire Investigators with the Montgomery County Fire Marshals Office were joined on scene by certified fire investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Working together, they determined the fire was deliberately set in a first floor apartment and a criminal investigation is now underway. Arson of a habitation is a first degree felony, punishable by fines and a sentence of 5-99 years or life in prison. On March 28, fire fighters responded the complex as residents were scrambling to evacuate Building 6 after a fire broke out in a first floor unit. According to the MCFMO, residents reported hearing the sound of glass breaking just before they discovered the fire and called 911. The building, constructed over 30 years ago, was not equipped with fire sprinklers or a fire alarm system and the fire quickly spread to adjacent occupied units, fire officials stated in a release. Deputies with the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office were already at the complex on an unrelated call for service and quickly began alerting residents to the growing fire. 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. MCSO deputies alerted arriving firefighters that one victim was still believed to be trapped above the fire. Three Woodlands firefighters forced entry into a second floor apartment and rescued a 15-year-old girl from her bedroom in zero visibility conditions, the release stated. She was pulled from the building and treated for smoke inhalation by paramedics with the Montgomery County Hospital District. The girl was transported to the hospital in stable condition. Additional fire crews were on scene within minutes and were able to contain the fire before it could spread to any other buildings in the complex. If you have any information, you may contact the MCFMO directly at 936-538-8288 or you can call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-392-STOP (7867). cdominguez@hcnonline.com An Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston priest has been removed from ministry after an allegation surfaced that he raped and impregnated a girl in South America, according to church leaders. Jesus Suarez was suspended from his most recent assignment at St. Philip of Jesus Catholic Church on Villita Street in northeast Houston, according to an archdiocese statement. The complaint alleged that Suarez sexually assaulted a minor that "may have resulted in the birth of children" in his native country of Colombia before he immigrated to the United States in 1994 to serve as a priest, the statement read. The archdiocese has since referred the complaint to the Houston Police Department, according to the statement. HPD spokeswoman Jodi Silva declined to elaborate on the allegation because the priest identified by the archdiocese has not been charged with a crime. "Investigators are following up on all tips received from the archdiocese," Silva said. ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: 42 priests facing abuse claims on Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston list Philip Wilhite, pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Conroe, identified Suarez as a former parochial vicar at the Montgomery County parish. He learned of the priest's removal on Friday, he said. "All prior assignment parishes and his present one are being advised so that if there was any sexual misconduct by him with minors in these parishes, those victims would contact civil authorities," Wilhite wrote Saturday in a Facebook post. He shared a letter from Auxillary Bishop George Sheltz, who is filling in for Cardinal Daniel DiNardo while he recovers from a stroke, that would be read during Mass on Saturday and Sunday at each of the churches where Suarez served. The memo identified the parishes as St. Vincent de Paul, St. Pius V, Sacred Heart and St. Cecilia. The archdiocese did not say how long Suarez, who was not included in the Jan. 31 list of credibly accused clergy, served at each assignment and a spokeswoman declined to answer additional questions. Suarez has been at St. Philip as early as 2010, according to a church bulletin. The archdiocese did not say when the complaint was lodged and when Suarez was removed. Michael Norris, head of Houston's Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests, said the archdiocese was made aware of the Suarez allegations last week and that church leaders "took action to remove him from ministry on Friday." "We are happy that he was removed from ministry today," Norris said in a statement. "Now, the most pressing questions is whether Fr. Suarez hurt any children during his time in the United States." INVESTIGATION: Houston police open criminal probe into Catholic priest The archdiocese said it has received no other allegations of child sex abuse about Suarez. Sacred Heart Catholic Church is where another accused priest, Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, was accused of molesting two children. Two accusers now adults came forward to Conroe Police Department last year for abuse alleged to happened from 1998 to 2001. He was arrested in September on four counts of indecency with a child. He was slated to appear in a Montgomery County court on Thursday but the hearing was pushed back to May 13. A grand jury is expected to convene by then and decide whether to indict La Rosa-Lopez, Assistant District Attorney Tyler Dunman said. The Houston Police Department's Special Victims Division is looking into at least one other priest, according to the archdiocese. The church has forwarded at least two child sex abuse complaints against Father John Keller, a priest at Prince of Peace Catholic Community, to the authorities. Keller has been temporarily removed from ministry pending the outcome of the investigation. nicole.hensley@chron.com massarah.mikati@chron.com A U.S. Marshal has been charged with drug possession following an arrest Saturday morning outside a strip club on San Antonio's North Side, police said. Reynaldo Chavera, 31, has been charged with possession of less than one gram of a controlled substance, Bexar County booking records show. Officials with the U.S. Marshals Service said Monday he has been placed on administrative leave. In the contest for Pearland City Council Position 5, incumbent J. David Little is touting council accomplishments from his term, while challenger Sheila Pope says she brings a fresh perspective and wants to help the city improve communication with residents. Little, an attorney who has been in his post since May 2017, said that infrastructure improvements such as a wastewater treatment plant signal that the City Council has been proactive in planning for future needs. Anyone who has lived here for a while can see the growth, not only in population but in industry and in the economy as well, Little said. In order to keep up with that growth, we had to put money into things like infrastructure, fire, police and (emergency medical services), and we have to plan on doing that in the years to come as well. I know wastewater treatment plants dont sound glamorous, but theyre important, he said. That kind of infrastructure is critical to the success of a city, and now its done. Weve also worked to renovate some of our parks, our streets other public places like that, all of which is important when it comes to the quality of life we provide for residents. If elected, Pope, a small-business owner and a licensed professional counselor, wants to help achieve what she considers as three essential goals bringing awareness to residents regarding resources available to them, developing innovative ways to attract businesses that preserve the citys small-town feel and creating programs that allow the community and businesses to work together in a spirit of inclusiveness. Idea for communication hub Pope, who is producer and host of the Conversations with Dr. Pope show on Houston Media Source Television, said that if she wins, she would like to spearhead development of a centralized communications hub for the city that incorporates tools such as television and social media. Ive been talking with the Texas Land Office to coordinate and get information out to homeowners about potential grant money they might be able to get if they were affected by (Hurricane Harvey), she said. This is something that should be very visible through the city, but I find that so many people dont know about it. So, the city needs to be able to communicate those things to our residents better. Little was elected in 2017 to serve the unexpired term of Greg Hill, who resigned to make a successful bid for Judge with County Court at Law No. 1. Little said he is proud of the councils approval of an ordinance to thwart potential operation of illegal massage parlors that could be fronts for potential sex trafficking. He said the ordinance provides rules for massage establishments that want to maintain a storefront in Pearland. You have to be able to see into their front window, their hours and licenses must be clearly posted basically they became more regulated so that we dont have issues down the road, he said. We had received some calls from people who were concerned about illegitimate massage parlors, he said. When our officers checked it out, it wasnt exactly what we thought it was, it wasnt as bad, but it allowed us to take a step back and say, We need to make sure that we keep this from happening because next time we might not be this lucky. Continued focus on landfill Little said that if re-elected, he will continue to push for an end to odors blamed on the Blue Ridge Landfill, which is to the west of Shadow Creek Ranch. This has to stop, he said. It needs to be taken care of. Pearland residents have complained of odors since 2915. The city has sued the landfill seeking corrective action. The landfill, owned and operated by Republic Services Inc., has said that it has taken steps to control odors and that it has implemented a plan reached with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for better site monitoring and community reporting. Pope noted that few women have served on the citys council. There have only been three women to hold a seat, she said. I know theres a need for great community leaders and I bring with me a wealth of knowledge and community leadership, but I also think its time that theres a female voice on council. How can we keep ignoring that voice? We need someone in there that can see things through a different lens but (who) carries the same intelligence someone who can talk and collaborate with council. Addressing what some perceive as an east-west divide in Pearland, Pope said it is the councils job to bridge that divide and help everyone feel included. You used to look out in pastures and see cows along 288, she said, and thats a thing of the past. People like the small-town feel, but its also important for us to bring in businesses in an innovative way and bridge that gap between them and the residents, and I think we can do that. I have a small business. Im pro small business, but its also important that we try to maintain the charm that brought people to Pearland to begin with, she said. BalletForte, Fort Bend County's pre-professional ballet company, presents the light-hearted and timeless ballet, "Coppelia," April 6-7 at the Stafford Centre, 10505 Cash Road in Stafford. Student, senior and military tickets are $10. "Coppelia," one of the most frequently performed and well-loved comic ballets, is a story of a young couple in love and their battle between idealism and realism. Watch BalletForte's "Coppelia" come to life in two shows only: Saturday, April 6, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, April 7, at 2 p.m. And, as a special treat for young audience members, BalletForte is offering a special Backstage Pass for both shows. For $10 extra, young fans will receive a flower headpiece to wear during the show and take home, a special badge, a tour backstage, opportunity to meet some of the cast and a "Coppelia cupcake" to take home. Click on "BP" for Backstage Page at checkout at www.balletforte.org. Directed by Michael Banigan and Dianne Jarrell, BalletForte provides a training ground and professional quality performance opportunities for serious dancers from the Houston area. BalletForte Company members audition for and are accepted into summer programs offered by professional ballet companies nationwide. BalletForte, which includes more than 40 area dancers, has been performing "The Nutcracker" every December since 1996. As a member of Regional Dance America, the company attended the Regional Dance America-Southwest festival in Albuquerque this past week before returning home to continue rehearsals for "Coppelia." BalletForte is a nonprofit organization. Group rates are available for "Coppelia" by calling 281-799-7554. A visit this week to Creekside Park Village Green may include some unexpected added color as local artist Anat Ronen works on an interactive Italian village street scene mural painted on the wall next to Crust Pizza Co. This is a street scene of a very different place than here because of the sea and the mountains. This is some Mediterranean country, so maybe Italy or Spain, Ronen said, describing her mural that stretches from floor to ceiling. The piece also has an interactive element to it. Ronen is using a style called trompe loeil, which means fooling the eye in French. The viewing point, the perspective would be as if you are going down the hill and seeing houses. This particular style takes the surroundings into the painting because some of this floor will continue into it, Ronen said. If youre standing (in front of it), it will look as if youre inside the picture. SAVE THE DATE: Preparations for 2019 Woodlands Waterway Arts Festival in full swing Ronen started the mural Tuesday morning and expects to finish it by the end of the day Thursday. She said she hopes the mural adds a pop of color to the monochromatic color scheme at the Village Green. Its a beautiful place here, but there are only so many colors. This will add a lot of dimension and fun, Ronen said. The idea is to give a little gift for the public to interact with. Ronen started as a self-taught artist more than 10 years ago. She lives on the southeast side of Houston now, but shes originally from Israel. The piece is commissioned by The Woodlands Art Fund, which is directed by Robert Heineman. Hes also the vice president of planning and design with The Woodlands Development Company, a subsidiary of The Howard Hughes Corporation. This isnt the first time that Ronen has created a piece in conjunction with the corporation. Shes done sidewalk and street art at an art crawl event at Hughes Landing this past November and has completed a mural in Bridgeland, a northwest-Houston-area master-planned community also being developed by the Howard Hughes Corp. NEW TERRITORY: Relay For Life in The Woodlands has new location for annual day of celebration I think its great that properties and developers choose this, because its a win-win situation. They support artists and the arts, and we get to do our thing, Ronen said. I think its great that they are using local artists first, and I think its going to benefit everybody. For this permanent mural, Ronen worked with officials from the corporation on the vision for the scene to establish a relationship and trust between the two parties. Shes in the process of doing the same thing for the wall on the other side of the Village Green center, for which he hopes to create a scene that children pose with. jane.stueckemann@chron.com Mercedes-Benz of The Woodlands is facing a lawsuit after company officials fired a 19-year-old employee who was serving on a Harris County jury claiming he abandoned his job. The lawsuit, filed Friday pro bono by Houston-area law firms Terry & Thweatt PC, Berg Plummer Johnson & Raval LLP, Pierce & ONeill LLP and Nathan Somers Jacobs, is seeking salary compensation for Zachary White for violating Texas law that prohibits employers from terminating employees because of jury service. According to the suit, White, who began working at the dealership in October 2018, received a jury summons from the Harris County District Clerk Office in January. When White informed his supervisor at Mercedes-Benz of The Woodlands, his supervisor told him to ignore the summons. White reported for jury service Feb. 5 in the 133rd state District Court of Harris County where he was ultimately selected as an alternate juror in a commercial dispute. On the last day of the trial, the bailiff informed everybody in the courtroom that one of the jurors had been fired from his job, said Lee Thweatt. Nobody had ever heard of anything like that happening before. LOCAL EPIDEMIC: Montgomery County suicide prevention forum set for May 16 In lengthy trials, Thweatt explained, alternate jurors are often selected in case one of the selected 12 jurors is unable to attend each day. Those alternate jurors sit through the trial like the 12 selected jurors but do not participate in the deliberation at the end of a trial. I sent a note to the trial court judge saying if that is what happened, I am happy to represent the young man for free, Thweatt said. I had no prior relationship with him, nobody did. The case before Judge Jaclanel McFarland was being argued by four law firms, two for the plaintiff and two for the defense. Thweatt said because the nature of the Whites case, all four law firms agreed to represent White. When the trial ended Feb. 28, Thweatt learned the dealership sent White a letter dated Feb. 25 informing White he was being let go from his job at the dealership. In the letter from the dealerships human resources department, company officials state White agreed to work Fridays and Saturdays while serving the jury Monday through Thursday but did not show up for work. The letter claims White abandoned his job and as of Feb. 25 he was no longer employed with Mercedes-Benz of The Woodlands. However, the lawsuit calls the letter false and self-serving and claims White was not scheduled to work any other days which is why he did not report for work on Fridays and Saturdays during his jury service. NEW TERRITORY: Relay For Life in The Woodlands has new location for annual day of celebration He did not abandon his position as this letter incorrectly states, the lawsuit states noting White was in communication with the companys human resources department. Zach spoke to the human resources director about his jury service on February 11, 2019. He also exchanged text messages on February 22, 2019 about the trial schedule with (the human resources director) and told her in those text message exchanges when the trial was finished. Judge Jaclanel McFarland said White was in her courtroom during the time he said he was. Mr. White did appear for jury service as he was summoned to do, McFarland said. He was chosen for a jury in the 133rd state District Court and participated faithfully. The law is very clear that no jury can suffer any consequences for serving on a jury. Additionally, White claims the dealership agreed to pay him his regular wages while serving on the jury but when he received his last paycheck, he was not paid for the time he served. At the time it was made, it was a nice gesture, and one that is not required under Texas law for Mercedes-Benz of The Woodlands to fulfill, as employers in Texas are not required to pay their employees for serving on a jury. The trouble is that it was an empty gesture by Mercedes-Benz of The Woodlands, the lawsuit states. Officials with Mercedes-Benz of The Woodlands did not return phone calls Tuesday and had not filed a response in the district clerks office to the lawsuit. McFarland said jury service is an important duty for citizens. Our democracy does not work without citizens participating, she said. One way citizens participate in our government and the only time that our government summons us to do anything is jury service. Jury service and juror are very important in the judicial process. cdominguez@hcnonline.com A fundraising effort by The Woodlands Charities was so successful last year, organizers are bringing it back in 2019. The second annual Chef Showdown is scheduled for May 3 at The Woodlands Resort and Conference center, beginning at 6 p.m. Amy Milstead, one of the organizations founders and directors, explained how the event works. We have five teams with six people each, and they each have an item they have to prepare. They have a celebrity chef from the resort that will be there with them. Hell teach them how to prepare it, Milstead said. This years menu is based on a Cinco de Mayo theme. Mexican cuisine such as guacamole and fajitas is to be prepared by chefs that are to don colorful sombreros instead of classic chef hats. These chefs arent your typical professional cooks, though. Theyre people in the community your insurance agent, real estate broker and people in the community who might want to come out and raise money for a good cause, Milstead said. The chef teams will work for donations, doing their best work in the kitchen to garner the most money for their team. Not only will that determine the winning team, but the proceeds have a deeper impact. That organization has selected to raise money for the Assistance League of Montgomery Countys Operation School Bell program this year. The program identifies economically disadvantaged children within the county whose families may not be able to buy them new school clothes and then sets them up with a shopping spree. The program provide funds for more than 4,000 children across the county to receive new clothes each year. The Assistance Leagues Director, Carolyn Jones said the organization is thrilled to be this years beneficiary. Think youve got the skills needed to be a chef? The Woodlands Charities is still looking for chef teams and sponsors to participate. Interested parties can sign up on the organization's website. There, attendees can also purchase tickets or tables for the event. See More Collapse Its very exciting. They are a very accomplished, enthusiastic group of very impressive individuals, Jones said. Not only will attendees be raising money for the Assistance League, but theyll also get to hear a presentation about the work the group does in the community. Were really proud to not only receive the funds but participate and make it happen. Usually when you get a grant they just present you with the check, but this has been a really cool collaboration, Jones said. jane.stueckemann@chron.com Pete Buttigieg, the small-town Indiana mayor running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is pledging to grant statehood to the District of Columbia, prepare America for the job consequences of automation and artificial intelligence, and confront threats to U.S. security if he wins the White House, according to campaign aides. Buttigieg, a veteran of the Afghanistan war who is openly gay, has also expressed support for key liberal policy priorities, including dramatically expanding government health insurance, granting paid family leave and giving America's undocumented population a pathway to U.S. citizenship, the aides said. "The center of gravity of the American people is way to the left of the center of gravity of Congress and, in many ways, to the left of the national Democratic Party," Buttigieg said earlier in an interview with The Washington Post. Buttigieg announced Monday that he had raised about $7 million in the first quarter of 2019, a surprisingly large sum for an outsider candidate. Still, the mayor has faced some criticism from the left for his positions on some issues, including for saying he was "troubled" by the Obama administration's decision to grant clemency to Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who leaked classified military documents. Buttigieg has also said that while he supports "Medicare-for-all," he does not seek to end private health insurance. That appears to represent a break with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has called for virtually eradicating private health insurance in favor of a single-payer government-run insurance system. "No serious progressive should want Pete Buttigieg anywhere near national public office," Current Affairs, a left-wing publication, said in an recent editorial, citing his time at the corporate consulting firm McKinsey and arguing that he is similar to too many "CV-padding corporate zombies." Conservatives have also criticized Buttigieg, noting that he praised then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed ban on large sodas (which was later struck down in court), while alumni of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign have bristled at Buttigieg's criticism of her message in that race. Buttigieg's aides broke his policy priorities into three main areas: the economy, which includes confronting automation, improving infrastructure and requiring higher tax rates on people with higher incomes; "freedom," including Medicare-for-all, greater consumer protections and paid parental leave; and security, including confronting climate change and limiting presidential authority over declaring war. Here's a look at some of the policy proposals Buttigieg aides say are central to his run for the White House. - - - Structural changes to U.S. democracy Buttigieg has repeatedly talked during the campaign about the need to implement structural changes to U.S. democracy, part of a broader push among liberals to overhaul the rules of American elections. "Democracy is front and center right now, but some very important dimensions (like electoral college reform, DC statehood) get way too little attention," Buttigieg said on Twitter. "We must not become the first generation to see USA get less democratic versus more." House Democrats recently passed a set of proposed democracy measures that include making the District of Columbia the 51st state in the union. Washington has a larger population than two states but doesn't have voting members in Congress, and D.C. pays more in federal taxes than about 20 states, The Washington Post has reported. Buttigieg has backed D.C. statehood and told The Post that Puerto Rico has the right to become a U.S. state "if they want it," which would probably add two Democratic members to the U.S. Senate. Similarly, Buttigieg has called for the abolition of the Electoral College, a difficult obstacle that would require a constitutional amendment but that comes amid liberal frustration over losing several recent presidential elections despite winning the popular vote. (As a workaround to the difficulty of a constitutional amendment, several states have pushed an "interstate compact" in which states would agree to allocate their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote, regardless of the winner in their state.) Buttigieg has also called for the need to end gerrymandering, the practice of drawing congressional districts to particular partisan advantage, according to his campaign aides. He has also called for "packing" the Supreme Court, or unilaterally having the president expand the number of justices on the court. "We definitely need to do structural reform on the Supreme Court," Buttigieg told The Intercept. "Adding justices can be part of the solution but not in and of itself; it's not enough." - - - Plan for artificial intelligence A 2017 study from McKinsey found that automation could force as many as 70 million U.S. workers to find another way to earn money, with demand for American workers dropping by 20 percent. Buttigieg has said six times as many jobs were lost because of automation from 2000 to 2010. Buttigieg's aides said preparing for this scenario would be a top priority if he were elected. Buttigieg has pointed to his decision as mayor to offer new city positions to some sanitation workers who had lost their jobs because the city had automated some functions. Buttigieg's campaign has released few details about exactly how he would prepare America for the impact of artificial intelligence on the federal workforce, but the mayor is expected to announce more fleshed-out policy positions. He has served as chairman of the U.S. Conference of Mayors' task force on automation. "We need to begin softening the expectation that the workplace can supply your sense of identity," Buttigieg told Vice about the effect of automation. "You're going to be more resilient if your sense of who you are is not only with your workplace." Medicare-for-all Medicare-for-all is a proposal, championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Senate and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., in the House, to move every American to a single government-run insurer that charges no deductibles or premiums. Doing so would significantly increase government expenditures - by as much as $33 trillion over a 10-year period, according to one conservative think tank - while offering health insurance to the Americans who lack it and preventing millions more from being forced into medical bankruptcy. It would require enormous tax increases to finance, although supporters say the increases would be offset by zeroing out every family's spending on premiums and deductibles. Buttigieg has said "Medicare-for-all is the best framework." Still, his campaign has said private insurance can stay for now. Buttigieg previously told ABC News that he did not believe Medicare-for-all required eliminating private insurance, noting that many countries with single-payer systems also allow private forms of supplemental insurance. - - - Federal protections for LGBTQ community Aides also cited Buttigieg's support for the Equality Act, a bill in Congress aimed at outlawing discrimination against the LGTBQ community. The measure would amend federal civil rights law to explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected groups, according to the Human Rights Campaign. It would ensure nondiscrimination protections in areas such as employment, housing, credit, education and jury service, the group says. Conservatives have criticized the legislation, arguing that it risks violating Americans' religious liberty. "The bill essentially nullifies federal and state religious freedom protections by handing authority to the U.S. Department of Justice to interpret and investigate claims of discrimination," a columnist for The Federalist, a conservative publication, wrote. - - - Paid family leave The United States is the only country in the developed world that does not require businesses to give paid leave to new mothers, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found. Those given such benefits from their employers are likely to be much higher up the income ladder, said Heather Boushey, executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Buttigieg aides said he would support paid parental leave, pointing to how he has pushed as South Bend mayor for paid leave for city employees. Albany Computer glitches appear to be plaguing some New York schools taking the state's online standardized tests on Tuesday and officials are advising schools that havent started the tests to wait until Wednesday. Questar's computer-based testing system experienced delays at some schools this morning. We are in contact with schools across the state and are keeping them informed, state Education Department spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said in a prepared statement. Despite these intermittent delays this morning, more than 48,000 test sessions have already been submitted today. All student data is automatically saved on the local device. We are advising schools that have not yet started testing today to have students begin tomorrow. We have a nine-day testing window to allow flexibility. Questar is the private vendor that provides the tests. Students this week are taking English and math test for grades 3-8. The tests dont count for student grades but measure a schools overall performance. A statement on the SED website said: Questar has reported a slowness with students being able to submit the test. Please have students who are encountering this issue to wait about 5-10 minutes before trying to submit again. If students test sessions cannot be submitted, please keep the computers open and quarantined until we can advise you further, the notice added. More for you Computerized tests for Grades 3-8 hit a snag Matt Hamilton, spokesman for the New York State United Teachers union said they have been getting sporadic reports of slowdowns with the online versions of the tests. Last year at this time, there were also snags, with the English test, although they appeared to be more severe than what was happening on Tuesday morning. Those problems included faulty internet connections, blank screens and outright crashes. rkarlin@timesunion.com 518-454-5758 @RickKarlinTU When you hear "3D-printed home," you may envision a far-fetched, futuristic concept. Thanks to Icon, a construction company that uses 3D printing, and nonprofit New Story, though, the concept is quickly becoming a reality and may be a major advancement in creating affordable homes for underserved communities. According to Icon, the first permitted 3D-printed home is just 350 square feet, and located in Austin, Texas. The tiny home serves as "proof-of-concept for sustainable homebuilding that will allow for safer, more affordable homes for more families, faster than ever," per a press release. The Mississippi man had been hiding out in a bare-bones apartment in Egypt for nearly three years when FBI agents tracked him down in connection with an elaborate campaign fraud scheme allegedly orchestrated by a former U.S. congressman. Jason Posey, who had served as an aide to U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman, ultimately flipped on his old boss, pleaded guilty and testified at Stockmans federal court jury trial in Houston about the multiyear $1.25 million scam that pilfered campaign funds from super-wealthy Republican donors. Stockman, 62, of Clear Lake, a right-wing firebrand who served two nonconsecutive terms in Congress, is now serving a 10-year term in a federal lockup after being convicted of 23 criminal counts, including mail and wire fraud, violating federal election law, making excessive campaign contributions and lying on a federal tax return. CONVICTION: Former U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman convicted in massive fraud scheme Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal sentenced the former aide Tuesday to 18 months in federal prison for wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering charges. Posey, 48, of Tupelo, Miss., will serve an additional three years of supervised release. He remains free on bond and was ordered to surrender to prison officials. Prior to sentencing, Posey told the judge that he took responsibility for his choices. I will carry that shame, embarrassment and humiliation with me for the rest of my life, the defendant said. Prosecutor Robert Heberle asked the judge to consider that Posey provided valuable cooperation to the government about Stockman, but noted that he also obstructed justice and played a key role in a sophisticated scheme that cheated voters. Poseys lawyer, Philip Hilder, said Stockman took advantage of Poseys abiding loyalty to a man he idolized and considered a father figure. He followed him to Egyptwhy would anybody do that? Hilder asked. Hilder also reminded the judge of something Posey said on the witness stand, recalling a day the new congressional aides were going around introducing themselves and their jobs in the office. Posey said, Im Jason Posey and I just do what Im told. The judge commended Posey for helping prosecutors try and convict his former mentor, adding that its also important that he be held accountable for his actions. This was corruption, it was greed. Nothing fancy, Rosenthal said. The kind of political corruption that Mr. Stockman got Mr. Posey involved in and that Mr. Posey facilitated over an extended time in repeated ways does present a risk of corrosion in some of our basic institutions, and that matters. In addition to his prison term, the judge also ordered Posey, who now works as a short-order cook, to repay $350,000 to the conservative Ed Uilein Family Foundation and another $214,718 to the companys CEO, Richard Uihlein. Another Stockman aide, Thomas Dodd, 40, of Houston, received an identical prison sentence for aiding in the scheme last year and is jointly liable to repay some of the same stolen funds. Stockman represented a swath of East Texas in Congress before mounting an unsuccessful bid to unseat U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in 2013. FRAUD ODDITIES: 34 surprising facts revealed during ex-Congressman Steve Stockmans fraud trial Dodd and Posey offered crucial testimony in Stockmans jury trial last year, outlining for prosecutors how they helped cover deficits in the candidates campaign coffers by making bogus campaign contributions in their parents names. Stockman and his aides lied to executives at conservative foundations and funneled the donations through shell nonprofits and dozens of bank accounts, then the conservative lawmaker spent it on a variety of personal and campaign expenses. Stockman blew the funds on a hot-air balloon ride, a shopping trip and tuition for a Christian summer camp, among other expenses. Stockman left a well-documented trail of wire and mail fraud that prosecutors pored over with witnesses at trial. Posey told the jury that in the aftermath of their risky donation scheme he agreed to spend years in Cairo because Stockman suspected that he and his staff were being investigated by law enforcement. He knew he was being sent there to get him out of the investigators access, said Heberle, the prosecutor. Posey had left rural Mississippi for Washington, D.C., in the 1990s to get an education in conservative ideals, his lawyer said. He met Stockman during his first term in office, and the lawmaker became a role model to the young man, Hilder said. Stockman hired Posey during his second campaign for Congress. Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send her tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com. A utility worker is dead after escorting an oversized load in far southeast Houston, police said. The worker was raising power lines around 10:45 p.m. Monday to make way for cargo near Galveston Road and Clear Lake City Blvd. A heavy fire destroyed the second floor of an apartment building and displaced almost 50 residents Monday on San Antonio's West Side, according to fire officials. The fire was reported shortly after noon at the Marbach Park apartment complex in the 1800 block of Horal Street. Thick, heavy smoke was billowing out of the building, visible from downtown San Antonio, some 10 miles away. "That thing was blazing," San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood said. Firefighters initially attacked the blaze in an effort to extinguish it quickly, but a breezeway in a stairwell collapsed, forcing them to retreat. "This was a fast-moving fire," Hood said. "We had to go defensive on it." FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox As the firefighters tamed the flames, residents at the apartment complex watched in horror and awe. One woman dressed in all black with an apron tied around her waist rushed to the scene in tears as the flames consumed the building. Police officers had to escort her to safety. About an hour after the fire was reported, the blaze was under control, but the building had been devastated. Eight of the 16 units that composed the building were destroyed but all of them were affected in some way, either by the fire itself or the tons of water firefighters dumped into the building. No one was injured in the blaze and two pets were saved, a cat and a dog. No firefighters were injured in the battle either. "Really a best case scenario for this incident," Hood said. "If this would've happened at 3 a.m. you could imagine the devastation." About 100 firefighters responded to the two-alarm blaze, and many will remain on site to make sure the fire is totally extinguished and recover any property from the first-floor apartments. The Red Cross will assist the residents displaced by the fire. "A lot of these people are probably going to lose everything," Hood said. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | cdowns@mysa.com | @calebjdowns Republican Army veteran Wesley Hunt announced his candidacy Tuesday for Texas' 7th Congressional District, the seat currently held by U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, D-Houston. Hunt's candidacy, first reported by ABC 13, comes just three months into Fletcher's tenure. She was one of two Democrats to flip a GOP-held Texas congressional seat in 2018, beating Republican John Culberson. In an announcement video, Hunt emphasized his military background, without mentioning Fletcher by name. "When I flew Apaches over Iraq, I was guided by three words: duty, honor, country," Hunt says in the video. "The men and women that I served with didn't focus on things that divided us. We were bonded together by a shared mission that was larger than ourselves. We need more of this spirit in Washington, and that is why I am running for Congress." In the 90-second clip, Hunt also said he would focus on border security and balancing the national budget. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Cornell University, Hunt works in Houston for the home-builder Perry Homes. Before Fletcher beat Culberson, Republicans had controlled the seat since George H.W. Bush first won it in 1966. The largely suburban district runs from Houston's affluent west side out to the Harris County suburbs, taking in the Energy Corridor and bordering Cypress at its northern point. The other Democrat to flip a Republican-held seat, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas, already has drawn a challenger, as well. Republican Tania Burgess filed earlier this month for the seat, which previously was held by Republican Pete Sessions. Culberson, meanwhile, joined the Clark Hill lobbying firm last week. He served nine terms in Congress before Fletcher ousted him by about five points in November. Democrats in the Texas House and Senate who are pushing for an assortment of gun control measures have found Republican allies for bills that would enact criminal penalties for gun owners who fail to safely store their weapons at home, and that would launch a state awareness campaign around gun safety. Bringing attention to safely storing firearms can save lives and just might have saved the life of my dad, said Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, a co-sponsor of the awareness campaign bill, at a press conference at the Capitol on Tuesday. In 1990, Goodwin said, a burglar shot and killed her father with a gun he found in the home. Had that gun been in a gun safe, he might still be here today, she said. Several bills also would increase criminal penalties for failing to store firearms out of the reach of children, as required by state law. Others would eliminate taxes on firearm safety equipment and related materials. Lawmakers said they are hopeful that after mass shootings at a high school in Santa Fe and at a church in Sutherland Springs, they have more bipartisan support than ever before, especially on the gun storage measures. Improving gun storage laws was one of Republican Gov. Greg Abbotts main recommendations out of roundtable discussions he convened last spring after the shootings. For subscribers: Abbott proposes 40-page recommendation to beef up school safety Republican Rep. Rick Miller, R-Sugar Land, joined with Democrats as a co-sponsor of the awareness campaign bill in the House. And Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, is sponsoring one of the bills increasing penalties for leaving firearms accessible to children. Im very optimistic about the support that Im seeing among my colleagues for getting past the political knee-jerk reactions to this and looking at what really makes sense, Donna Howard, D-Austin, said. So Im very hopeful that were going to see some movement this session. Howard said nearly 200,000 children in Texas live in homes with unlocked, loaded guns, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. In just the last two weeks, she said, three Texas children have been injured or killed after being accidentally shot by another child in the family. Two of the three shootings occurred in the Houston area. In mid-March, KPRC-TV reported that two 16-year-old cousins were playing with a gun when one of them accidentally shot and killed the other in Klein, Texas. Later that week, KHOU reported that a 16-year-old boy was showing his 14-year-old cousin a gun and accidentally shot and injured her in Katy, Texas. And last week, NBC DFW reported that a 3-year old accidentally shot and injured his 5-year-old brother in Dallas. In our state and our country, we believe in the right to bear arms, Howard said. However, that right comes with the great responsibility of ensuring that others who may cause harm, either intentionally or unintentionally, to themselves or others, do not have access to those guns. For subscribers: Reynolds files legislation to 'close the notorious gun show loophole' Democrats also plugged bills Tuesday that would close the gun show loophole by requiring sellers to background check potential buyers who dont already have a handgun license. Others would allow higher education institutions to opt out of the 2015 campus carry law that allows licensed gun owners to carry concealed handguns in most buildings at public universities. A Houston company helping diagnose patients with machine learning and artificial intelligence has raised $11.9 million in Series A venture capital financing. Medical Informatics Corp. said Tuesday that Intel Capital and TMC Ventures, the investment arms of Intel Corp. and the Texas Medical Center, respectively, contributed to their fundraising that will allow the company to enter more hospitals and develop its AI for new clinical uses. "This investment has really accelerated out ability to work across the country," Emma Fauss, co-founder and CEO of Medical Informatics, told the Chronicle. The company's FDA-cleared product, Sickbay, is tackling two industry challenges. The first is collecting data. At HoustonChronicle.com: Deal boosts medical device innovation in Houston Currently, physicians working in a critical care unit must be physically in a patient's room to examine data on the monitoring devices, which can include a heart monitor, ventilator or intracranial pressure monitor. Sickbay, however, allows physicians to access real-time data on their phone, tablet or PC. It can also provide access to years of historic data on the patient, a departure from monitoring devices that typically store data for no more than 72 hours. These traditional monitors aren't connected to anything but the patient, so they don't have anywhere to send or store such massive amounts of information. The second challenge is using data to detect symptoms faster than what could be diagnosed through observation. Sickbay, for instance, is used at Texas Children's Hospital in a department that treats babies born with one ventricle in their heart. The body needs two ventricles because the right ventricle pumps blood to the lungs and the left ventricle pumps blood to the body's circulation system. These babies must undergo a series of surgeries to reroute how blood flows through the body. And there's a higher chance of heart issues such as cardiac arrest between the first and second surgery. At HoustonChronicle.com: 50 years later, artificial hearts still mesmerize "They can deteriorate very quickly without any warning," Fauss said. So Medical Informatics developed an algorithm that taught a computer to recognize patterns in heart rate, breathing and blood oxygen levels that occur before such heart issues. Fauss said it can detect heart problems one to two hours before a physician might observe the symptoms. The company's $11.9 million venture capital raise was led by Data Collective Venture Capital, with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco. And Medical Informatics was among 14 companies to receive a combined $117 million from Intel. Fauss said Intel's focus on security was a major reason for partnering with the company. Intel can help ensure that Medical Informatics has strong cybersecurity and digital security protections. She added that the data Medical Informatics uses is primarily managed by the hospitals and secured by the same procedures those hospitals use to protect other medical information. Canadian tech group welcomes move to make Global Talent Stream permanent Two-week processing time for work visas 'a game-changer,' says Council of Canadian Innovators CIC News Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif Sans Font Size A A Canadas Global Talent Stream pilot has been a game-changer for high-growth Canadian startups and the federal governments proposal to make it permanent would be a welcome move, the Council of Canadian Innovators says. Introduced in 2017 under Canadas Temporary Foreign Worker Program, the Global Talent Stream works to fast track work visa applications for eligible foreign workers with skills required by Canadian employers in fields such as Information Technology and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The program allows employers to submit whats known as a facilitated Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), which waives the requirement to prove they tried recruiting in Canada first, and expedites the approval process. If the LMIA finds there are no Canadian workers available to do the job, a work visa can be obtained in as little as 10 business days, allowing employers quick access to critical, highly skilled labour. The proposal to make the popular pilot permanent, which was announced in the 2019 federal budget, followed calls to do so from business associations including the Council of Canadian Innovators, which represents more than 100 of Canadas fastest growing technology companies. Benjamin Bergen, the councils executive director, said in a statement to CIC News that making the pilot permanent will help Canadian tech leaders in their ongoing efforts to access the talent they need to scale-up globally. Highly skilled talent is like jet fuel for fast-growing companies, Bergen said. The two-week visa processing time has been a game-changer for Canadian scale-ups looking to build a team around uniquely skilled workers with global experience from outside of Canada, Bergen said. The council pointed to a forecast by Canadas Information and Communication Technology Council (ICTC) that said there will be 216,000 job vacancies in the sector by 2021. Attracting skilled digital workers worldwide is the immediate solution for industry leaders to grow their businesses and reduce opportunity costs caused by talent scarcity, the forecast reads. The government did not specify how many work visas it has approved through the Global Talent Stream since its introduction. A spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada was looking into this for CIC News. Employers who use the stream must develop a Labour Market Benefits Plan that details how they will provide lasting benefits for the Canadian labour market and the broader Canadian economy, such as job creation or knowledge transfer. In its 2019 budget, the federal government said the Global Talent Stream has generated commitments from Canadian employers to create 40,000 new jobs for Canadians and permanent residents, develop more than 10,000 co-op placements and invest more than $90 million in skills development and training. The federal government pledged $35.2 million over five years beginning in 2019-2020 to support the Global Talent Stream, with $7.4 million per year ongoing. To learn more about how the Global Talent Stream works, visit this dedicated page. 2019 CICNews All Rights Reserved When you think of tech talent hotspots, New York City, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley are likely the first to come to mind. But Silicon Valleys job market continues a volatile trajectory as todays tech job seekers, many of whom are millennials, opt for more affordable and inclusive tech hubs to call home. With the rising costs of rent for not just talent but businesses as well, employers have come to understand how much they have to gain by expanding to lesser-known regions and creating new tech hiring hotspots. Benefits include access to more talent, less hiring competition from fellow employers, lower cost of living which often means lower salary ranges, and more. As a result, tech is moving away from being centrally located in major metro areas and instead reaping these benefits, which only smaller regional cities can offer. Heres a look at the regional hotspots for tech hiring that will continue to attract more and more of the best tech job seekers in 2019. Denver Up first is Denver. Well-known for their welcoming startup scene, Denver has become especially inviting to tech industry ventures and entrepreneurs. However, the city still retains the ability to attract major tech giants like Apple and Facebook, who recently expanded their offices in the area. Why Denver? For starters, the region itself is a desirable place to live regardless of your occupation due to the quality of living the area provides, the mild climate, affordable housing options, and enviable cost of living compared to other tech hubs. But for tech talent and employers its especially appealing as the tech industry continues to flourish in the region. The area has one of the countrys lowest unemployment rates, especially in IT, resulting in increased demand for engineer and developer roles. The city is also home to a large, reliable population of tech workers jumping between startups and more established companies like Apple. With even more talent looking to relocate here, expanding or being based out of Denver creates an ideal situation for employers facing a growing talent gap stateside. The city ranks as the 8th best place for IT pros to live and work, according to CompTIAs Tech Town Index 2018. It also ranks as the 15th fastest-growing tech market in the country with growth in tech jobs YOY hitting 81.4 percent in 2018. Expect to see this tech hiring hotspot continue to thrive throughout 2019 and the years to come. Atlanta Atlantas cost of living sits around 4 percent lower than the national average, making it a top location for job seekers and employers alike. Along with the warm climate and active nightlife, the city has taken strides to provide more tax incentives for startups in hopes of developing an environment perfect for tech-driven businesses, and it seems to be working with more than 76,000 IT jobs posted between 2017 and 2018. In fact, Atlanta grew its tech talent pool by 34.7 percent between 2012 and 2017, beating out talent growth in the Bay Area during the same period. The city also has a reliable tech talent pipeline thanks to Georgia Tech. Plus, the mix of large companies building out massive hubs and tech-centered companies expanding in the area, like Google, make the region even more attractive as a tech talent hotspot for 2019. As the VP of recruiting at a tech staffing agency with an office in Atlanta, its no surprise to find this location on numerous top tech hiring hotspot lists as it has been on a clear trajectory as an emerging tech hub for years. Expect this growth to continue in the months and years to come. Boston While Boston doesnt offer the same affordability as some other regions on this list, the major draw for employers is the reliable talent pipeline the regions high-end, tech-driven educational system provides. Home to both Harvard and MIT, Boston is well-known for the high number of patents produced in the area and this reputation for innovation is what attracts top tech employers looking to net in-demand tech experts fresh from school. Over 82,000 open tech jobs were posted in 2017, and the area has an expected growth of 6 percent in IT jobs over the next five years, according to CompTIAs 2018 Index. While its especially attractive to employers, both new tech graduates and more experienced tech professionals are looking to set up roots in the area due to its high quality of living and desirable location with close proximity to other tech hubs like NYC. The only downside to the region is the rising cost of living, however, it still sits well below what talent will find in California or New York. Charlotte (North Carolina) Youll be hard pressed to find a ranking of top cities in the U.S. that doesnt include Charlotte at or near the top, which has been the case for the past several years. The region has seen massive growth in population size over the past ten years in large part thanks to the low cost of living and new housing and commercial developments. The region saw 44,464 open IT job postings between 2017 and 2018 and ranks as the best place for IT pros to live and work, according to CompTIA. More and more companies are choosing to relocate or expand here due to the wide array of tech talent available. Charlotte is also a major banking center, with Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and more hiring tech talent across all levels. The proximity to Raleigh makes this region especially attractive to tech talent given Microsoft and Googles recent expansion in the city. Philadelphia Last but not least is Philadelphia, a city just beginning its rise as a major tech talent hotspot. Typically overshadowed by Boston, DC, or NYC, Philadelphias proximity to all of these major tech markets is what helps draw talent in since contractors can still manage commuting here, even if based primarily in NYC. Like Boston, Philadelphia has built a reliable talent pipeline thanks to the high-quality educational system and nearby universities. Housing developments continue to expand in Philly as more talent relocates here, and the cost of living is much more affordable than other metro areas, which is a significant selling point for tech talent and employers alike. Expect to see an influx of tech talent moving here as cost of living and rent prices in tech hubs like NYC and the Bay Area continue to outpace average salaries in the industry. When it comes down to it, the biggest selling point of relocating to a specific city for prospective tech talent often comes down to the cost of living and how far their salary will get them. For employers, the main determining factor is whether or not there is a reliable talent pipeline in the area, more often than not provided by nearby universities and colleges. Which is why the cities found here will remain regional hotspots for tech hiring in 2019 and beyond. Facebook appears to be mounting something of a charm offensive lately. A commitment to fund journalism to the tune of about $300 million over the next three years was followed on Saturday by an op-ed from CEO Mark Zuckerberg in The Washington Post suggesting ways in which the giant social network could (and should) be regulated. And, on Monday, the Facebook co-founder revealed in an interview with Mathias Dopfner, the CEO of German publisher Axel Springer, that he is considering paying news publishers for their content, something Dopfner and othersincluding News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdochhave been calling for for years. Is this a genuine attempt to help media, or another part of a long-running PR campaign by a company desperately afraid of getting caught on the wrong side of antitrust legislation? What exactly a dedicated news section (or surface as Zuckerberg insists on calling it) would look like remains unclear. Much of the conversation with Dopfner is vague: the Facebook CEO says how much he cares about quality news, and the Axel Springer CEO repeatedly asks him to pay for it, citing the recently adopted EU copyright directive known as Article 11, which entitles publishers to charge platforms a so-called snippet tax for using their content. Zuckerberg suggests that, while users want news on the platform, they dont necessarily want their News Feeds to be clogged with stories. It sounds as though Facebook is considering a standalone tab or section that contains quality news, which, according to a report from Recode based on anonymous sources at Facebook, might be selected by human editors instead of an algorithm. (Coincidentally, perhaps, Apple launched its News+ subscription service, which is also powered by human editors, last week.) Facebook has tried multiple versions of similar features in the past. For example, in 2017, after the company said it was de-emphasizing news in the News Feed (because most users said they didnt want them there), it experimented with a separate, standalone tab for news. It turned out to be a very short-lived experiment, for two related reasons: virtually no one went there, and publishers complained bitterly that their traffic from Facebook declined sharply. Zuckerberg told Dopfner he was willing to consider showing users news even if they hadnt already chosen to follow or share stories from those providers. Facebook has experimented with a number of different ways of paying publishers for content, including Instant Articles, the mobile-focused feature that optimizes articles for smartphones and distributes them through the Facebook app. Although some publishers continue to work with the company, others have complained that Facebook doesnt give them enough traffic or advertising revenue in order to make it worth their while, so many have decided to support Googles competing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) effort instead. Facebook also paid a select group of news publishers to create short-form video not long ago, including The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and CNN. That effort also ended with a whimper, after many companies geared up new video units to produce such material only to find that Facebook had no plans in place to share any kind of revenue with them. The companys focus then shifted to Facebook Watch, its portal for longer-form video, where it also started paying publishers to create content. Facebooks video push was been criticized, as well, for shifting gears or moving goalposts multiple times; the cost of creating Facebook-specific content has been cited in the demise or sharp decline of multiple digital news outlets, including Mic.com. Even the practice of selecting news headlines using human beings instead of (or in addition to) algorithms has an ignominious history at Facebook. At one point, the company had a feature called Trending Topicsan attempt to compete with the breaking news environment of Twitterand items in that section were selected in part by human editors. But a Gizmodo article about alleged anti-conservative bias on the part of these editors triggered a firestorm of criticism that eventually led to Zuckerberg appearing before Congress. The human editors were fired and the entire feature was eventually killed in June of last year. Even after it was dead, the Facebook CEO went out of his way to meet with right-wing commentators and spokesmen, in an attempt to reassure them that Facebook wasnt biased. Sign up for CJR 's daily email Given this background, its hard to see Zuckerbergs latest musings about a standalone news feature as anything more than an attempt to repackage some of the things that have already either failed badly or continue to limp along without making much of an impact either on the industry or on Facebooks bottom line. The company knows that it is still in the eye of a storm when it comes to its role in distributing fake news, so it might be hoping that any effort made to even try to select quality news would be seen favorably by regulators and some journalists. It has already taken a few (controversial, naturally) steps down the road by announcing last year that it was going to survey users and assign trust rankings to news publishers. (It quickly became clear that the concept of user-assigned trust as it applies to news companies is fraught with complicationsplenty of people seem to trust Breitbart News, for example). Some publishers, including Axel Springer, might be satisfied to get some money from Facebook for their content (which, according to Recode, might take the form of ad revenue sharing rather than direct payments). But in return for what could be a pittance of paymentgiven the fact that traffic to this new feature might be slimis it worth giving Facebook even more control over your content? Zuckerbergs latest announcement, ultimately, reinforces how powerful Facebook iseven if you dont think its a great deal, you probably have to go along with it anyway. 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. On Friday, The Cut published a first-person piece by Lucy Flores, a member of the Nevada State Assembly. Flores recounts an incident that took place in 2014, when she was running for lieutenant governor of the state. Just before walking onstage at a campaign event, Vice President Joe Biden came up behind her, smelled her hair, and kissed the back of her head. Flores describes the calculations she made about whether to come forward with the story: I worried about the doubts, the threats, the insults, the minimization, she writes. The immediate passing of judgment and the questioning of motives. Accounts of Bidens behavior toward women have been published in the past, albeit before Harvey Weinstein was discredited and #MeToo seized everyones attention. More recent reminders have done little to tarnish Bidens reputation. What made Flores decide to finally share? Bidens likely presidential run, she says. Im not suggesting that Biden broke any laws, Flores concludes, but the transgressions that society deems minor (or doesnt even see as transgressions) often feel considerable to the person on the receiving end. When deciding to share a story of abuse, harassment, or anything on the broad spectrum of transgression, a person is making a journalistic judgment. She decides that the newsworthiness of what she has to sayin other words, the importance of speaking out, the potential impact of the story, and the information she would give the publicoutweigh whatever harm it might do to her life in the short term. If we take the experiences of other women as examples, that harm might include accusations leveled against her, scrutiny of her life and sexual behavior, and attempts to discredit her story by pointing out its political motivations. Flores embraced the skeptics. Politics was definitely the impetus, she told CNNs Jake Tapper on Sunday. Frankly, the reason why I felt so compelled to finally say something was because over the years, as this behavior was documented, as it was frankly dismissed by the media and not taken seriously. A number of women have spoken openly about deciding whether to make news, most notably Christine Blasey Ford, whose reluctance to become a figure in the press was front and center in her testimony before Congress during Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Blasey Ford had tried to inform Congress of her assault while remaining anonymous, sending a letter to her senator, Dianne Feinstein. When Blasey Fords identity was leaked, she eventually agreed to testify publicly. I didnt want to go the media route, Ford told the Judiciary Committee. But then, she said, My motivation in coming forward was to be helpful. The vetting of newsworthiness is not simple. In January 2018, when Babe.net published an anonymous account of a womans creepy date with Aziz Ansari, readers wondered: If women arent coming forward with a crime should they be coming forward at all? Is there room for gray areas in #MeToo? Many women make this calculation on a daily basisShould I talk to HR?and some decide that their stories do not count as #MeToo stories, because they arent severe enough, or their harasser isnt famous. The first-person essay is something of an answer to this dilemma. When victims of harassment write a piece themselves, they know exactly what will be published. The result often incorporates the uncertainty about whether to come forward at all, and the insecurity that women and others feel when they are victims of harassment. Women are able to air their own doubts about coming forwardto say, Im not sure if this countsin anticipation of the criticisms that might be made of them. Sign up for CJR 's daily email This insecurity is a crucial component of every #MeToo story, from Weinstein to Biden; #MeToo has made womens uncertaintya feeling inherent to being abusednewsworthy in its own right. Floress vulnerability is front and center: she describes her embarrassment when Biden smelled her unwashed hair. So is her uncertainty about whether her story will count for anything; Floress story is tagged as METOO on The Cuts website, but she never mentions the movement. RELATED: On the confessions of fallen men Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Nausicaa Renner is digital editor of CJR. This winter, I drove to LaGrange, Georgia, to report on a policy that makes it impossible for residents without Social Security numbers and government-issued identification to get water service for their homes. LaGrange, a small city, may be best known in other parts of the country for an apology, offered by its police chief in 2017 for his departments historic inaction in the 1940 lynching of a black man. It is also a city where ICE regularly conducts raids in residential neighborhoods with concentrations of Latino families, according to those residents. In LaGrange, I interviewed a middle-aged immigrant, an undocumented construction worker, over lunch at a restaurant. This was my first time in decades of reporting that Id interviewed a person whose undocumented status was a major focus of the story. We sat in a private spot, so no one would overhear our conversation. In my story, which was recently published by In These Times, I refer to the undocumented person as Emilio, though that is not his name. I describe him as in his fifties, a father of two children and a husband, an individual whose history with LaGrange goes back more than 20 years. I do not use the names of his children or his wife. I do not name his familys neighborhood. I do not detail his jobs, past or current. I omit the name of the restaurant, as I have here, as well. The Media Today: Alex Jones, diminished Those details and omissions were the product of a careful negotiation, which followed our hour-long interview. From the outset, we had agreed that I would not use his real name. Once our interview ended, I reviewed with him every detail he had shared verbally, as well as visual details he had shared just by sitting across a table from me. I explained to Emilio I would not tell readers what he looks like, such as the shape of his hands and his face. Could I give his precise age? No, he only wanted me to say he is in his fifties. Could I write about difficult personal details he had shared, details that would let readers know why water service is so essential to his family? No; to be more specific could give away who he is and might prompt his deportation. Could I say what region of his country hed immigrated from? No; I could only say he was from Latin America. I couldnt talk about the cadence of his Spanish, what dish he chose to eat, what he wore, how he walked, whether he smiled, what his eyes look like. His is a very small town; as unlikely as it may seem, the right combination of a few personal details would risk pointing a giant red arrow at his head. Sign up for weekly emails from the United States Project Had I interviewed a candidate for public office at that same table, I would never have afforded him or her the opportunity to edit the scene or our conversation; I would see that as an ethical lapse in my duty to voters and residents and my audience. This story was different. Of necessity, I had to undo a foundational teaching from my journalism education: be as specific as possible. For Emilio, I couldnt make the reader see. I had to find a way to communicate the essence of this man after removing signifiers of his humanity detail by detail IN THE 1980S, I attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Professors taught students to illustrate policies by gathering personal experiences from sources and offering those anecdotes to readers. The more detail I could offer, the better I could place a reader in another persons shoes, the more I could reveal about the human impact of a damaging policy. To make that point, teachers and mentors often mentioned Gene Roberts, a famed editor for The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer who began his career covering the civil rights movement in North Carolina and Virginia. In What makes a great reporter, a column for the now-defunct Washington Journalism Review, Roberts described a blind editor at the News-Argus, the Goldsboro, North Carolina paper where Roberts began: He was tall, 6 foot 7, he walked with an aluminum cane and wore a battered fedora that must have been a relic of the days when he could still see movies like The Front Page. Many is the day Henry would have a story read to him, and then call in a member of his staff, often called Roberts, and enjoin: Make me see. You arent making me see. It took me years to appreciate it, but now I think that Henrys demand may be the ultimate test of great reporting. For Emilio, I couldnt make the reader see. I had to find a way to communicate the essence of this man after removing signifiers of his humanity detail by detail, in much the same way the policies he grapples with do. After I interviewed Emilio, I reached out to Jack Doppelt, the Medill journalism professor who had taught my legal reporting class at Medill in downtown Chicago 32 years ago. We do our best, but we are off because we cant put ourselves fully in the shoes of somebody whos at risk, said Doppelt, whose current research concerns whether vulnerable populations should be covered differently and, if so, how. And we have to go through not just the question of losing specificity, but the question of how do we actually include things in the story that still make the story alive and important. I had handled those questions with Emilios help. While Doppelt called such an act generally unethical, he also said the consequences of publishing an identifying detail, even unwittingly, could be dire. I believe with vulnerable populations that it should be done, Doppelt told me. Not only is it okay, it should be done. Ultimately, I found the specifics I needed in Emilios inner life. I asked him for his emotional reaction to the circumstances in which he found himself. How did he feel when he discovered that his city was denying him a water account? He had lived there for years, after all, and worked and raised his children in the US. At first, you feel impotent and sad, he told me. Because these are services everyone needs and they deny it. Those words, while brief, give him his humanityand, I hope, wont give him away. ICYMI: Flores, Biden, and deciding whats newsworthy Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Allison Salerno is an independent print and audio reporter based in Athens, Georgia. Her recent work has appeared on NPR stations, on Southern Foodway Alliance's Gravy podcast, and in In These Times, among others. Her website is allisonbsalerno.com. Last week, four hours of footage of Alex Jones, of InfoWars, surfaced on YouTube. The conspiracy-theory promoter didnt upload the videos himself. Instead, Jones appears in four hours of video footage in a taped deposition, in which he tries to explain why he spent years falsely claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax. The deposition was released to HuffPost and uploaded to YouTube by law firm Farrar & Ball. Nine family members of loved ones who died in the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012 are suing Jones, including Scarlett Lewis, who is suing Jones for intentional infliction of emotional distress. (Lewis is represented by Mark Bankston of Farrar & Ball.) Its been a moment of intense media scrutiny for Jones, who has a penchant for off-the-cuff monologues and bloviation. In February, Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis ruled that Jones would have to answer questions in a deposition as part of the defamation lawsuit filed by Sandy Hook families against him. (Jones has repeatedly contested the defamation allegations.) In his taped deposition, Jones relies on ignorance and a lack of preparation as reasons for why he cant answer basic questions; he does an about-face and says he now believes the Sandy Hook shooting to have happened. Still, he cant help himself: he is defiant throughout the deposition, lacking remorse when hes asked about the time he made the address of Sandy Hook father Leonard Pozner public. (I mean, the guys running an anti-free speech foundation, Jones quips. Pozner is not running an anti-free speech foundation.) He doubles down on the same falsehoods he spread about Sandy Hook, and he reveals his sources to be YouTube and 4Chan. ICYMI: Students wrestle with the cost of free speech online Much of the media coverage of Joness deposition has thus far focused on his excuse for spreading conspiracy theories. He told lawyers during his deposition that he had a form of psychosis that made him believe the Sandy Hook shooting was staged. (This is an old trick: in 2017, during his child custody trial, Jones claimed that his Infowars persona was performance art.) Pozner makes an appearance in an episode of This American Life, released in mid-March, shortly before Joness testimony was made public. The episode described the origin story of Jones, of InfoWars, the spread of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, and how Jones had made Pozners life hell in the wake of Pozners sons death. After Joness deposition was released, Charlie Warzel wrote a piece for The New York Times about how Joness only real undoing has happened under oath. While tech platforms have enabled him over the years and allowed him to reach ever-wider audiences, the legal system might be the most effective means of defanging him, Warzel argues. Media could fact-check Jones, but while he had his own platforms, he had an audience, and no amount of fact-checking or Pinocchios could hold him to account. Under oath, Joness power dwindles. Jones is arguably less powerful now without his platforms than he ever has been. In August, he was de-platformed, or had his accounts deactivated, from YouTube, Apple, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Spotify; in September, Twitter followed suit and banned Jones and InfoWars. The crackdown came not specifically because of Jones spreading conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook being a false-flag operation, but for promoting violence and hate speech across his platforms more broadly. Still, this likely wont be the last we hear from Jones: the lawsuit that led to the release of his deposition video is just one of a number of suits filed against Jones by Sandy Hook families. More on Alex Jones: This American Life s illuminating episode about Jones origin story, and the effect InfoWars has had on one father of a child killed during the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. The decision to ban Jones from tech platforms forced tech companies into a politicized battle over free speech and acceptable discourse. This was never more clear than when Twitter declined to follow its contemporaries footsteps and immediately ban Jones, sticking to its free speech principles, CJRs Mathew Ingram wrote in August. Charlie Warzel on why courtrooms are kryptonite for conspiracy theorists like Jones: But this new set of viral clips busts the myth of Alex Jones, presenting him in a situation he can neither engineer nor spin. Hes a man who has lost control of the narrative. And its this performancemore than any ruling from any judgethat poses the greatest threat to the Infowars empire. Sign up for CJR 's daily email Other notable stories: Months before The New Yorker published allegations of sexual harassment against CBS Newss Jeff Fager, The Washington Post had the story but didnt publish it, writes Irin Carmon, one of the women who had been reporting on the story. I dont believe there is just one reason the Post rejected the Fager story. I think it was a little of everything, Carmon wrote. I doubt Ill ever really know. But much of my job has involved asking people, mostly women, to truthfully tell their stories even when it might harm them or the institutions they care about. I figured the least I could do was to try to do the same. In conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner, Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea of a news tab to surface more high-quality news, and suggested Facebook may pay publishers for their stories. A year ago, Facebook announced there would be less news on its platform. A look at why The New York Times and The Washington Post resisted Apples Apple News+ offerings, from Vanity Fair s Joe Pompeo. A United Arab Emirates hacking team, staffed by former US intelligence agents, hacked the phones of Al Jazeeras chairman, a BBC journalist, and others, according to a new Reuters report . CJRs Zainab Sultan interviews Bill Keller on his time at The Marshall Project as he prepares to retire. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has filed a petition asking a US district judge to rule that grand jury material in the Mueller report can be released, Politicos Josh Gerstein reports . In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr discusses the night her father, New York Times media critic David Carr, passed away. ICYMI: My Brain on Cable News Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Maya Kosoff is a freelance reporter based in New York City. She's written for Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Allure, and Business Insider. A New York state lawsuit is renewing longstanding questions about where some members of the billionaire Sackler family have invested the wealth they amassed from Purdue Pharma LP, the drugmaker accused of helping ignite the U.S. opioid epidemic. One place where some of the Sacklers about $13 billion fortune appears to have flowed is to Mundipharma, a worldwide network of independent associated companies that Sackler family members control through trusts and other investment vehicles. One of those vehicles, Rosebay Medical Co., was named Thursday as a defendant in an amended complaint filed by New Yorks attorney general. Rosebay was described as one of two ultimate parents of Purdue in a 2014 securities filing by another drugmaker, and it partly owns some Mundipharma units outside the U.S. The Mundipharma network of companies, which generate more than $3.4 billion in annual revenue, has offered new ways for the Sackler empire to expand globally even as Purdue Pharma faces the threat of bankruptcy. Mundipharma units have boosted sales of OxyContin in countries like China, but theyve also focused on less controversial products such as biosimilars, cheaper versions of complex biological medicines that are in increasing demand globally. In the U.S., states, cities and counties have begun to zero in on the Sackler family holdings amid fears that Purdue itself could declare bankruptcy. More than 1,600 suits against opioid makers have been consolidated in federal court in Ohio, and other cases are pending in state courts. Purdue and other drugmakers have said they didnt act improperly in marketing their painkillers. The New York lawsuit alleges that the Sackler family wrongfully obtained profits from Purdue, regularly moving money out to shield it from legal claims. The state said it was seeking a judgment ordering the Sacklers to return assets to Purdue, and Sackler family members deny the claims. Brooklyn-born physicians Arthur, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler bought the forerunner to Purdue Pharma in 1952. Shortly after Arthur died in 1987, his brothers bought his interest in the company. Arthur Sackler and his heirs have never had a financial interest in the sale of OxyContin, according to a February statement by Jillian Sackler, Arthur Sacklers widow. Mundipharma itself hasnt been alleged to have engaged in any wrongdoing related to the U.S. opioid epidemic, and a representative didnt respond to questions about the New York lawsuit against Purdue Pharma and Rosebay. Purdue Pharmas opioid drug provides life-changing relief for the millions of pain patients who have needed it, the Sackler family members named as defendants in the New York attorney generals complaint said in a statement on March 28. We have always acted properly and are committed to supporting solutions that save lives by preventing addiction and abuse of prescription medicines and treating those who are suffering from addiction, the family members said in the statement. In emailed response to questions, Mundipharma representatives in Asia and Europe highlighted the moves that the group has made to move away from painkillers. In 2015, opioids accounted for 86 percent of the networks European sales of 935 million euros ($1 billion), according to Mundipharma International. This year the group is targeting European revenue of 1 billion euros, with less than 40 percent coming from OxyContin and other opioids. Mundipharma expects its European biosimilar business will grow to 37 percent of sales, up from just 3 percent in 2015. That shift is the result of a complete redesign of the companys business model, spokesman Patrice Grand said in a statement, with Mundipharma now looking toward growth in biosimilars as well as treatments for cancer, diabetes and respiratory diseases. Distribution Rights Mundipharma companies last year announced agreements with drugmakers such as South Korean biosimilar producer Celltrion Inc. and Swiss giant Novartis AG to acquire distribution rights for their non-opioid products in some European, Asian and Latin American countries. Outside the U.S., the network has units from Singapore to India and from China to the U.K., and while the companies are closely held, some have disclosed information about their ownership and directors. Trusts for the benefit of Richard and Jonathan Sackler owned half of Mundipharma Research Ltd. in Cambridge, England, according to a 2015 filing. Rosebay Medical, one of the defendants in New York States complaint, is one of the two owners of Mundipharmas Australian business, according to data from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Eleven Sackler family members served on its board at different periods of time between 1998 and 2012, the commissions database shows. Rosebay Medical is also one of the two current shareholders in Mundipharma Pharmaceuticals Sdn. Bhd., the networks Malaysian branch, according to the Companies Commission of Malaysia. Court filings say that OxyContin earned Sackler family members more than $4 billion from 2008 through 2015. And despite its efforts to diversify, the Mundipharma network still has a lot riding on the sale of opioids. In China, Mundipharma has provided support for government-backed pain-management programs. The group last year acquired the China rights to Tramal, an opioid-based painkiller, from a German pharmaceutical company. Any efforts by drugmakers like the Mundipharma companies to promote emerging-market demand for opioids have the potential to be dangerous, warns Jason White, chair of the World Health Organizations expert committee on drug dependence. Medical professionals in middle- and low- income countries may not be aware that a number of Western countries, particularly in North America, went through this years ago and that people have now realized the problems, White said. NEW YORK Novartis AG must face a U.S. government lawsuit accusing it of paying millions of dollars in kickbacks to doctors so they would prescribe its drugs, after a federal judge ruled in a decision released on Monday that the government had offered evidence of a company-wide kickback scheme. U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe in Manhattan also rejected the Swiss drugmakers bid to keep key government evidence out of the case, and ruled that the government does not have to prove a direct quid pro quo agreement between Novartis and doctors for the company to be liable. The ruling means that, unless Novartis settles, the case is headed for trial. We are disappointed in todays decision and look forward to presenting our case at trial, Novartis spokesman Eric Althoff said in an email. We continue to believe that the government has insufficient evidence to support its claims. The case began in 2011 as a whistleblower lawsuit filed by Oswald Bilotta, a former Novartis sales representative. Such lawsuits, brought under the federal False Claims Act, allow individuals to sue on behalf of the government, which may choose to intervene. The U.S. government and the state of New York both intervened in the case in 2013, accusing Novartis of paying doctors kickbacks so they would prescribe several of its drugs, including hypertension drugs Lotrel and Valturna and diabetes drug Starlix. Those kickbacks included speaking fees for doctors at sham educational events, the lawsuit said, with one doctor being paid to speak at his own office eight times. The company also treated doctors to lavish meals, including a $9,750 dinner for three at a Japanese restaurant, according to the lawsuit. Government health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid were billed millions of dollars from 2002 to 2011 for drugs prescribed by doctors who took kickbacks, the lawsuit said, violating the False Claims Act. The government is seeking damages of three times what it was billed for allegedly fraudulent claims. Novartis has previously settled U.S. allegations that it used illegal methods to promote its medicines. In 2010, it agreed to pay $422 million to settle various civil and criminal allegations, including claims of paying kickbacks to doctors. Novartis pleaded guilty to mislabeling one drug as part of that settlement, but otherwise did not admit wrongdoing. In October 2015, Novartis agreed to pay $390 million to settle claims that it paid rebates to specialty pharmacies to push two of its drugs, without admitting wrongdoing. OMAHA, Neb. Officials in the Omaha area are reevaluating the citys flood-control measures, shortly after heavy rains caused dozens of counties and cities in the state to declare a state of emergency. A flash flood event caused by heavy rain in the Papillion Creek Basin is Omahas biggest flooding vulnerability, John Winkler, the general manager of the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District, told the Omaha World-Herald. About a third of Nebraskas population lives in the area. Heavy rain in the northern part of the basin, followed by more in the southern part of the basin would trigger a flood, Winkler said. Thats what would overwhelm us, Winkler said. The predictions are based on a 100-year storm event, which would deliver 7 inches of rain in 24 hours over a wide area of the basin. The Papillion Creek covers 400 square miles across Washington, Douglas and Sarpy counties. The flooding concerns come after state officials say recent flooding caused nearly $1.4 billion in losses and damage. After the things weve seen in the past few days, I dont think wed dispute the power of water at all, said Amanda Grint, water resources engineer with the NRD. One main concern with the Papillion Creek is that flooding can occur quickly and with little warning. Youre probably lucky if you have hours, Winkler said. The NRD will finish updating its watershed management plan this spring. The plan examines development plans, meteorological data and funding available for projects. The NRD, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other groups are also beginning a comprehensive risk analysis for Omaha. The three-year study is scheduled to be completed in 2021. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Art dealer Mark Weiss and his company have paid $4.2 million to settle a lawsuit with Sothebys auction house after an Old Master painting he once owned got caught up in a forgery scandal that shocked the art world. Details of the settlement are set out in Weisss court filings for a trial that started Monday over the painting, Portrait of a Gentleman, which was attributed to the Dutch Golden Age artist Frans Hals. The painting was drawn into a scandal after technicians hired by Sothebys discovered pigments in paint that could only have been used four centuries after the artists death. Sothebys declared the artwork a forgery in 2016 and reimbursed U.S. real estate investor Richard Hedreen, whod paid $10.8 million for the piece in 2011, it said in its court filings. Its still suing Fairlight Art Ventures LLP, a vehicle owned by hedge fund manager David Kowitz that co-owned the painting with Weiss company, Mark Weiss Ltd. Fairlight and Weiss firm paid 3 million euros ($3.4 million) for the painting in 2010, according to Sothebys court filings, before selling it to Hedreen in a so-called private treaty sale organized through the auction house the following year for $10.8 million. Fairlight says it shouldnt have to return funds to Sothebys because it wasnt a direct party to that deal. Nobody has proven that the piece is either genuine or a fake, its lawyer Nigel Rowley said by phone Monday. Sothebys decided to refund Hedreen without proper evidence and this was not a decision that contractually they were required to take, he said. A Sotheby spokeswoman said the company was confident of its case against Fairlight. Clients transact with Sothebys because they know we will keep our promises if problems arise, the Sothebys spokeswoman said by email. Weisss lawyer didnt immediately comment. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Former executives at Wynn Resorts Ltd. hid from Massachusetts gaming authorities allegations that Steve Wynn sexually harassed women, investigators working for the regulator said in a report Tuesday. The report comes as the Massachusetts Gaming Commission considers whether to revoke Wynn Resorts license in the state. The company is planning to open the $2.6 billion Encore Boston Harbor resort in June. Its the only casino in the Boston area. Inaction and failures on the part of the identified former executives at this publicly traded company, which was led by its founder at the time, appear to have contributed to a culture where employees were reluctant to report allegations against Mr. Wynn to management, the 200-page report said. Wynn, the companys founder and former chief executive officer, stepped down in February of 2018 following reports that he sexually harassed a number of employees over his career. He has denied that any of his sexual relationships were non-consensual. He later sold all his holdings in the company. The commission has scheduled hearings over the next three days. At the start of Tuesdays session, Wynns Chief Executive Officer Matthew Maddox apologized and told the commission the company is changing from one that was about a man to one that has values. Our company was shaken to its core, Maddox said. We were in crisis and many of us were in denial. He said he later realized there were many victims and many of them felt powerless. For that, I am deeply remorseful, he said. The commissioners will later enter closed-door deliberations. Once a decision is made on the license, the commission will issue a written finding, although exactly when that happens hasnt been decided. Deeply Troubled The company has taken a number of steps to distance itself from its founder, including naming a new chairman, CEO and four female board members. Wynn Resorts was fined $20 million, the largest penalty ever imposed by Nevada regulators, in February but the company didnt lose its license to operate there. We are deeply troubled that certain former executives did not follow company protocols when becoming aware of allegations against the companys founder, former chairman and CEO, Wynn Resorts said in a statement Tuesday. The company has undergone a corporate transformation and has begun a deep look at its management, policies, procedures and culture, it said. BEACHWOOD, Ohio -- City Council did not approve on Monday legislation that would have had the city seek nearly $10 million in grant money from the Ohio Department of Transportation to carry out a project to redesign the Chagrin Boulevard-Richmond Road intersection and the Chagrin Boulevard bridge over Interstate 271. With Council President Brian Linick not in attendance, council voted 3-3 on the measure. Council had until April 20 to request the grant that, if approved, would have led to a $15.8 million road project. The Ohio Department of Transportation was offering the possibility of a grant for a project it saw as improving safety and traffic flow. The project proved to be a controversial one, as about 50 residents attended a two-hour public meeting March 13, many to voice their opposition. Much of that opposition centered on the projects plan to allow only right turns onto and off of Bryden Road, just north of the intersection. The project also called for forming two designated turning lanes onto Chagrin Boulevard from northbound Richmond Road. One of the lanes would allow traffic, after making the turn, to directly enter the I-271 southbound entrance ramp. The other turn lane would have taken traffic directly across the Chagrin Boulevard bridge, without stopping for a traffic signal, to the entrance ramp for I-271 northbound. Plans also called for adding another westbound lane on the bridge, and a short extension on Chagrin Boulevard eastbound. Some residents believed that, unless Chagrin Boulevard were widened in Woodmere, just across the bridge to the east, traffic would not flow any easier. In addition to getting about $1.7 million from the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA), the City of Beachwood would have had to contribute $4 million to complete the project. Mayor Martin Horwitz recommended that council apply for the grant. Horwitz told council Monday (April 1) that a survey was taken a few years ago as part of the citys master plan process and, in that survey, businesses top two concerns were assuring public safety and improving traffic flow. "The results of this (project) may have future impact on development," Horwitz said before the vote was taken, noting that Ahuja Medical Center last week announced an expansion that will result in 1,000 new jobs. Horwtiz said that not all of the new employees will be exiting I-271 at Harvard Road to get to Ahuja, 3999 Richmond Road, and that many will likely be using Richmond Road and Chagrin Boulevard. Eighty-thousand people travel this intersection daily, Horwitz said. We rarely have the opportunity to get potentially $9.5 million funding from the state, which may not come our way again. The state had already provided $532,000 to study the area. Mike Hobbs, of the city's engineering firm, GPD Group, told council that if a city turns down money from the state, it has been typical in the past for the state to not be as willing to grant future money to that city. Councilwoman June Taylor, who voted to seek the grant, told her council colleagues that someday soon, the Chagrin Boulevard bridge would need repairs and that the state may not be as willing then to grant Beachwood money to help pay for those repairs. Joining Taylor in voting to accept the grant were Councilmen Eric Synenberg and Justin Berns. Berns said Beachwood is used to being a leader, and that it should take on the task of improving the Chagrin-Richmond areas traffic situation. "Just maintaining what we've got is not moving forward," Berns said. "It's always difficult to play catch-up, not to be a leader." Councilman James Pasch, who ran Mondays meeting in Linicks absence, said that after growing up where he did, in New Jersey, where traffic was heavy, he does not see the Chagrin-Richmond intersection as being all that clogged. Its not that I dont believe that we would derive some benefit from this project. The question is do we derive a benefit that is a $4 million value? he said. "And, as far as businesses go, if you spent the $4 million you'd spend on a road and used it as business incentives, it'd probably attract more businesses." Joining Pasch in voting against seeking the grant were Councilman Alec Isaacson and Councilwoman Barbara Bellin Janovitz. Linick, after a March 18 council Committee-of-the-Whole meeting, said he was against seeking the grant, stating of the project, "The ends don't justify the means." Im very happy that its turned down, Halburton Road resident Karen Tindel said after Mondays meeting concluded. I just feel it was a waste of money. We dont need it. The traffic problem is not that bad, and to remove the left turn in (on Bryden) and close our neighborhood in was uncalled for. Horwitz said of the project not taking place: "Theres not a lot to say. Its not going to happen. I understand why the council members had the opinions they did and the reasons they voted the way they did. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The prosecutors leading the ongoing corruption investigation into Cuyahoga Countys government plan to call County Executive Armond Budish, members of his cabinet and other high-ranking county officials to testify if three people indicted in the probe take their cases to trial, court records reveal. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yosts office filed potential witness lists in the felony cases against Chief Talent Officer Douglas Dykes, former IT administrator Emily McNeeley and ex-director of corrections Ken Mills in recent weeks as part of the pre-trial discovery process. The trio were charged in a January indictment that accuses them of committing separate, unrelated crimes. No trial date is set, but a pre-trial telephone conference is scheduled Thursday. The lists, which were filed on March 22, March 26 and April 1, read like a whos who of county government. Budish, whose office was raided Feb. 14 as investigators carried out a search warrant, is the only potential witness, aside from investigators, whose name appears in all three lists. He has not been publicly identified as a target of the investigation or accused of committing any crimes. Two of Budishs former chiefs of staff, Earl Leiken and Sharon Sobol Jodan, are on the potential witness lists. Maggie Keenan, Budishs budget director, and Robert Triozzi, who resigned from his law director post in December after he was subpoenaed to appear before a special grand jury, are also expected to be called to the stand. Yost took over the case as a special prosecutor in February after Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael OMalley recused himself. Two of OMalleys assistant prosecutors, Paul Soucie and Matthew Meyer, stayed on the case along with investigator Robert DeSimone. They are working alongside two FBI agents under the supervision of Dan Kasaris, a deputy in Yosts office. The case was originally assigned to Common Pleas Court Judge Nancy Fuerst. She recused herself after reviewing the case and asked the courts top judge, John J. Russo, to seek a visiting judge to avoid the appearance of a conflict with the county courts judges. The witness lists, filed separately in each case, offer a road map to the three prongs that the investigation has focused on thus far. Ken Mills and the county jail Mills is charged with falsification and telecommunications fraud because he is accused of lying to Cuyahoga County Council at a May 22 meeting about his role in blocking the hiring of necessary nursing staff for jail facilities, prosecutors said. The statement came before the first of eight inmate deaths over a period of eight months. Mills also faces misdemeanor charges of falsification and obstruction of official business because he is accused of lying to investigators about his interactions with a high-level Cuyahoga County official, prosecutors said. Budish is the first witness listed in Millss case. Prosecutors also plan to call Budishs chief of communications, Eliza Wing. Investigators seized Wings notebooks and other items in a second February raid. The list also includes Gary Brack, who was ousted from his position as the jails medical supervisor after he accused Mills at the May 22 meeting of creating an unsafe environment at the jail, and Jane Platten, chief of staff to MetroHealth CEO Akram Boutros. Budish personally demanded that Boutros and Platten remove Brack from the jail after the meeting, three sources told cleveland.com. Boutros is not named as a potential witness. Also listed as witnesses in Millss case are Cuyahoga County Sheriff Cliff Pinkney, former sheriff Frank Bova, Cuyahoga County Council President Dan Brady and councilman Michael Gallagher, who asked Mills during the May 22 meeting who was responsible for the nursing blockade. Prosecutors also plan to call to the stand Joel Commins, a jail inspector at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. Commins in December 2017 found the jail to be in compliance with state standards before the U.S. Marshals in November delivered a blistering report about conditions in the jail. In the next inspection in November 2018, Commins delivered a report that found the county jail to be largely out of compliance. Dr. Thomas Tallman, MetroHealths director of correctional medicine, and the county jails associate warden Vic McArthur, are expected to be called to testify. Douglas Dykes and Human Resources Dykes sought approval in 201 to shift $13,500 in moving expense perks for incoming Chief Information Officer James Hay into a $15,000 signing bonus because Hay didnt actually relocate for the position, prosecutors say. His request was rejected. Dykes then lied to a county employee and said Triozzi signed off on the request and filed paperwork based on that lie to pay Hay the money, prosecutors say. Prosecutors plan to use a statement that Dykes made in an interview with Cleveland 19 news reporter Paul Orlousky, according to court filings. Orlousky, who is also on the witness list, questioned Dykes in a 2017 interview about the expenses to Hay. Theres a piece of tax that we didnt want him to have to pay or assume, and so as a result, we wanted to honor the 13.5 we originally talked about, Dykes said in the interview, which re-aired after his February arraignment. Orlousky said in the piece that he asked Dykes about his motivation for making the payments. Dykes responded, Our executive wants results, the piece said. In addition to Budish and Hay, prosecutors plan to call Triozzi; Sobol Jordan; Director of Employee and Labor Relations Ed Morales; Inspector General Mark Griffin; and the countys internal auditor, Cory Swaisgood, if Dykes takes his case to trial. Emily McNeeley and the IT department McNeeley, Cuyahoga Countys former IT general counsel and director of special initiatives, faces 17 charges. They include felony counts of telecommunications fraud, tampering with government records and having an unlawful interest in a public contract for her work on two projects. McNeeleys potential witness list is the lengthiest of the three, and includes 52 names. In addition to Budish, Sobol Jordan, Griffin and Swaisgood, prosecutors plan to call several executives from Westlake-based Hyland Software and Colorado-based Ciber Inc., two firms at the heart of the projects underlying McNeeleys criminal charges. McNeeleys wife, who works for Hyland, is also listed as a witness. McNeeley blind-copied two Hyland employees in a January 2017 email to County Executive Armond Budish and other county officials, according to records provided to cleveland.com. The email praised Hyland and said the county is in a strong position to move this project forward. Ciber was involved in a 2013 investigation that resulted in Pennsylvanias former turnpike commissioner, Mitchell Rubin, pleading guilty to a bribery charge, according to published reports. Rubin is McNeeleys father, a relationship she did not disclose, records say. Rubin is on the witness list, as is a representative from the Pennsylvania Attorney Generals Office, which prosecuted Rubin. Also listed in McNeeleys case are representatives from Plante Moran, an accounting and business advisory firm. The firm repaid more than $123,000 in consulting fees to Cuyahoga County as part of a settlement agreement reached with prosecutors. The county hired Moran to screen vendors for IT projects, but the company failed to inform them about Cibers troubled past, prosecutors said. Plante Moran denied any wrongdoing as part of the settlement and agreed to cooperate with the investigation, prosecutors said. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A list of best practices issued amid national criticism over prosecutors handling of Empire actor Jussie Smolletts case directly contradicts one aspect of the criminal probe into Cuyahoga County Armond Budishs administration. After the Smollett case garnered national criticism, the National District Attorneys Association issued a list of best practices for handling sensitive, high-profile cases. The NDAA said the five recommendations outlined in its March 27 memo are intended to ensure the publics confidence in sensitive, high-profile cases. The NDAAs best practices recommend that an entire prosecutors office should be removed from a case if the chief prosecutor recuses himself or herself. First, when a chief prosecutor recuses him or herself, the recusal must apply to the entire office, not just the elected or appointed prosecutor. This is consistent with best practices for prosecutors offices around the country, the NDAA said. A pair of Cuyahoga County assistant prosecutors and one of the countys investigators are working on the case, even though Ohio Attorney General Dave Yosts office took over the criminal investigation in January. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Mike OMalley recused himself from the case, but reached a deal with Yosts office to keep the two assistant prosecutors and the investigator working on it. Yost agreed to take oversight of the criminal investigation from OMalley in a deal that allowed two Cuyahoga County assistant prosecutors, Matthew Meyer and Paul Soucie, as well as investigator Robert DeSimone to remain on the case. The three now work out of the Attorney Generals Cleveland office, instead of the Cuyahoga County Justice Center, and report to supervisors in Yosts office instead of OMalley. Two weeks after Yosts office took the case, investigators carried out a Feb. 14 raid at the countys downtown headquarters and seized Budishs cellphone, two computers and several boxes of documents. Budishs personal criminal lawyers, former U.S. Attorney Steve Dettelbach and criminal defense lawyer Larry Zukerman, have publicly argued that OMalleys entire office, including Meyer and Soucie, have a conflict of interest in the case. Yost disagreed and defended the move in an interview with cleveland.com. Two law professors told cleveland.com that they did not see an immediate conflict with Meyer and Soucie based on publicly available information. Dave ONeil, a spokesman for Yost, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Zukerman said in a text message that Budish and his team agree with the NDAAs recommendation. When he was appointed U.S. Attorney in 2009, Dettelbach immediately recused himself from overseeing the federal corruption investigation that landed former County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora and dozens of other officials in prison. Dettelbach and Carole Rendon, his first assistant who would later become his successor, each worked for a law firm that had represented some key players before he took office. Barbara McQuade, U.S. attorney for eastern Michigan, stepped in to oversee the case. But two assistant U.S. attorneys in Dettelbachs office, Ann Rowland and Antoinette Bacon, stayed on the case under McQuades direction, a move that would have also contradicted the NDAAs recent recommendations. The NDAA released its statement establishing prosecutorial best practices in high profile cases after the Chicago-based Cook County States Attorney Office drew criticism when it announced it had dropped criminal charges that accused Smollett, a black, openly gay actor on the popular Empire series, of lying to police and faking a hate crime. The statement also outlined four other best practices: a prosecutor should not take advice from politically connected friends of a defendant; any agreed diversion program or alternative-prosecution agreement should also require the defendant to admit responsibility for the action; Cook County attorneys should not have moved to expunge Smolletts record of the crime so quickly; and hate crimes should be vigorously prosecuted and not subjected to higher burdens of proof due to the misguided decisions of others. To comment on this story, please visit Tuesdays crime and courts comments page. Update: This post has been updated to include information about the previous corruption investigation into Cuyahoga County government. Independence High School Senior Hannah Fleming was selected to attend the United Nations International Affairs Seminar Tour. The seminar was broken into parts that were held at the UN Headquarters in New York City as well as in Congress in Washington, D.C. This UN Seminar has been sponsored by the Christian Church in Ohio since the early 1960s. It is organized on a bi-annual basis to allow 45 junior and senior high schools students from Disciples congregations around Ohio to experience first-hand how faith and government work together. Fleming found out about the opportunity through her parent's church, who was sponsoring the seminar. The application process included writing essays about what Fleming thinks is the most important topic addressed in the UN charter, and the other about immigration. Her essay on immigration took a more legal stance using a separation of church and state approach. Her first essay regarding the most important part of the UN charter was focused on the idea of internal peace and security. She wrote that she believed that everyone deserves to feel safe and tragic occurrences in a country can leave people feeling lost emotionally and physically. Fleming with U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Her second essay about immigration touched on the tragic circumstances that immigrants must endure either attempting to cross into America or for those still living inside the borders. Part of her essay read, "What is shocking, though, is that in a nation that boasts of western progress, developments, and acceptance, we are blindsided by politics instead of seeking ethical truth regarding the long-lasting immigration situation. The important thing to remember is that we are all human." She attended the seminar from February 22 until March 2 and made an appointment to meet with Independence's congressional representative, David Joyce. She and the other students met Senator Sherrod Brown and U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They also volunteered at Capital Area Food Bank and served meals in the Bronx. In between the meetings, the group of students spent time discussing faith-based solutions for problems in the world today. CLEVELAND, Ohio In a little over six weeks, Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing CLASH says its supporters collected 10,000 voter signatures that could put lead safe legislation on the November ballot. The advocacy group will submit the signatures today to the City Council clerk. Clevelands charter requires 5,000 voter signatures for citizens to put the bill before City Council to consider. If council doesnt adopt the legislation, it can go before voters. The advocacy groups proposed legislation would require owners of most Cleveland rental homes to prove their properties are lead-safe by 2021 or face fines. It also includes protections for tenants and requires landlords include whether a home is lead safe in any advertisements. The 10,000 signatures represent thousands of hours of work, sometimes in harsh winter conditions, which signifies the level of community support for tackling Clevelands lead poisoning process through local legislation, organizers said. The premise is to test homes before children are poisoned, a strategy in line with recommendations by the Ohio Childrens Budget as well as the proposed Federal Lead Safe Housing for Kids Act, said Yvonka Hall outreach director for the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus and an expert in health disparities. Councils clerk has 10 days to validate the number signatures, which are then sent to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections to verify the signatures belong to registered voters who live in Cleveland. Rebecca Maurer, an attorney for CLASH who helped write the legislation, also presented it to members of the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition, which is working on policy recommendations for City Council. The Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition declined to work off of CLASHs legislation, but is considering policy recommendations with similar preventive approaches. The Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition plans to make policy recommendations to City Council by May 1. CLASH members are hopeful the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition also will call for mandatory lead safe testing of rental properties, Maurer said in a release. We all have the same goal: protecting our Citys children from lead poisoning. We hope we can achieve that goal collaboratively, she said. But if not, CLASH is prepared to head to the ballot box in November. The City Council Clerk Patricia Britt has 10 days to validate the signatures. If at least 5,000 of the signatures are found to be valid within that time frame, the proposed ordinance would likely be introduced at the nest regular city council meeting, which is April 15, a city council spokeswoman said. The ordinances would then hold hearings on the proposed ordinance and make a recommendation within 60 days to the entire council, which has another 30 days to take action. If it does not pass the ordinance, the charter allows it to be put it before voters. If the petitions are rejected, CLASH would have 15 additional days to gather more signatures. This post will be updated. CLEVELAND, Ohio Cuyahoga County Council members on Tuesday sharply criticized Chief Technology Officer Michael Young for rising costs and long delays associated with the countys $25 million IT overhaul. Councilwoman Sunny Simon described the so-called ERP project as a calamity and said she considered the projects long delays and escalating costs to be inexcusable. Councilman Mike Gallagher accused Young of opposing councils request to hire a project manager because the manager would oversee Youngs own work. You dont want eyes on this project, thats whats going on, Gallagher said. The testy remarks came two weeks after the disclosure that the oft-delayed project would be delayed again, this time for as long as six months, and would leave few dollars left in the projects budget. Young became the target of the frustration Tuesday, when he appeared before councils Finance and Budget Committee. Committee Chair Dale Miller noted how the project did not appear on pace, per a report on last weeks progress, to meet the new completion deadline of December 2019, which is a year later than originally anticipated. Councilman Scott Tuma said he has little faith the project will be complete by its new target date. Tuma also noted that one goal of the project was to create a more cost-effective IT system, and that goal is off to a horrible start. Councilman Scott Tuma said he has little faith the project will be complete by its new target date. Tuma also noted that one goal of the project was to create a more cost-effective IT system, and that goal is off to a horrible start. Council members repeated their call Tuesday for the administration to hire a full-time manager to keep the project on pace. A consultant hired by council to monitor the project reported last month that the work is about 50 percent complete and a manager is needed to help Young. Young said that hiring a project manager is not what the project needs. Rather, he said, the focus should remain on filling vacancies among mid-level managers who are in charge of pushing employees to complete their day-to-day tasks. Simon cut Young off. Weve asked for this, our consultant has asked for this she said, And youre the one person saying no to this, and its a mess because of this continual refusal to take advice. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and refers to a plan that originated in 2010 to spend up to $25 million to connect the countys computer systems. CLEVELAND, Ohio Four men and a woman embarked on a series of armed robberies that left a trail of violence, including a deadly shootout at a Cleveland gas station and a separate shooting that killed one of the suspect, prosecutors said. The group carried out nine armed robberies during a five-week span, including one that ended in the shooting death of In and Out Beverage store clerk Mohamed Shahin during a Feb. 5 incident in Clevelands Glenville neighborhood. Two of the robbery suspects were also shot during the crime spree, including one who was killed, Cuyahoga County prosecutors said. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael OMalley said in a statement that his office is evaluating the case to determine if it could seek the death penalty against any of the suspects. This was a gang of gun-toting robbers that preyed on commercial businesses in Cuyahoga County, OMalley said. The 45-count indictment made public Tuesday charges three men and a woman in connection with the crime spree. Andre McKelvey, 18; his brother, Robert McKelvey, 21; Keysean Smith, 20; and Kadijah Akram, 20, are charged in connection with the series of armed robberies that extended into the suburbs. The McKelvey brothers and Smith are set to be arraigned on Thursday, while Akrams arraignment is scheduled April 15. All four are being held in the Cuyahoga County Jail. Not named in the indictment is Adriante Moore, 18, who was killed as he tried to rob three men on March 3, prosecutors said. Moore committed several armed robberies with the group, prosecutors office spokesman Tyler Sinclair said. Only the McKelvey brothers and Smith are charged with aggravated murder in Shahins death. Akram is charged in seven of the robberies, including one that happened after the deadly shooting in Glenville. The spree began Jan. 13 with the armed robbery of a Family Dollar on Dunham Road in Maple Heights, the indictment says. A pair of masked robbers walked into the store at 8:34 p.m. and pointed guns at employees, police said. They stole merchandise and cash before they left. On both Jan. 28 and Feb. 2, the group robbed three different businesses in quick succession, the indictment says. On Jan. 28, they robbed a Family Dollar on West 130th Street in Cleveland; a Verizon Wireless on Warrensville Center Road in University Heights; and a Dollar General on St. Clair Avenue in Cleveland. On Feb. 2, they robbed a BP gas station on South Green Road in University Heights; a Sunoco gas station on East 185th Street in Cleveland; and a Gas USA on West 117th Street in Cleveland. Akram was not charged in connection with the Gas USA robbery. The robbery spree turned deadly during the Feb. 5 shootout at the In and Out Beverage on Lakeview Road in Cleveland. Andre McKelvey and Smith tried to rob the store about 8:45 p.m. but Shahin -- a 33-year-old old, recently-married store clerk -- pulled out a gun and exchanged gunfire, police said. Shahin shot Andre McKelvey in the neck. Smith returned fire and struck Shahin in the head, killing him, prosecutors said. Andre McKelvey ran about a half-mile away from the store before he collapsed. He was taken to University Hospitals, where investigators arrested him. Smith ran away after the deadly shootout. U.S. Marshals found and arrested him Friday at a home on Lansing Avenue in Cleveland. Robert McKelvey acted as a getaway driver after the deadly shootout, according to court records. U.S. Marshals arrested him Friday at a home in Bedford Heights. The robbery spree continued even after the deadly shootout. On Feb. 18, Smith robbed a Family Dollar store on St. Clair Avenue in Cleveland, the indictment says. Moore died after being shot during a March 3 attempted robbery. Shots were fired when he tried to rob three men ages 17, 18 and 18 on Woodland Avenue in Cleveland, according to police and Sinclair. Moore ended up dead on the ground near a parking lot with gunshots to his chest, arm and thigh, according to police reports and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner. The two 18-year-olds were arrested, but later released from police custody. They have not been charged in connection with the shooting. AKRON, Ohio A suspect has been arrested after police say shots were fired during a fight at a bar in the North Hill neighborhood. Kevin L. Cook, 36, of Akron, is being held in the Summit County Jail on a charge of felonious assault, police say. According to police, the fight occurred at about 1:30 a.m. Friday at the Northside Tavern on the 900 block of North Howard Street. Police say two women, ages 25 and 28, were involved in an altercation inside the bar and that when they attempted to leave, a male followed them outside and fired several shots at them. One of the women ran from the bar while the other went to her 2019 Ford Taurus and tried to drive away. The woman jumped from the vehicle and ran after the car was hit by bullets, police say. A large brick also was thrown through the rear window of the car. The male suspect began chasing the woman. Police say another unknown suspect then went to the Taurus and stole a purse and cell phone. Cook was arrested late Sunday night at a residence in the Kenmore neighborhood. To comment on this story, visit Mondays crime and courts comment section. AKRON, Ohio Police say a man was wounded in the leg Sunday night in a shooting in the West Akron neighborhood. Officers were called to the 500 block of Grace Avenue at about 8:30 p.m. after reports of shots being fired. Two vehicles at the scene were struck by bullets, police say. While on the scene, a 22-year-old man arrived at Cleveland Clinic Akron General Hospital with a leg wound. Police did not release his condition. No arrests have been made and the shooting remains under investigation. Anyone with information can call detectives at 330-375-2490 or 330-375-2TIP, or the Summit County Crimestoppers Inc. at 330-434-COPS. Tips also can also be sent by text to TIPSCO at 274637 (Crimes). Callers can remain anonymous. To comment on this story, visit Mondays crime and courts comment section. COLUMBUS, Ohio A state legislator from southwest Ohio is facing multiple charges after he was stopped by the State Highway Patrol last week on suspicion of driving under the influence. WCPO Channel 9 reports State Rep. Sedrick Denson, D-Bond Hill, has been charged OVI, driving under a suspended license and drug possession. The 31-year-old Denson was arrested at 2:45 a.m. Friday after being pulled over after he was seen driving erratically on Interstate 670 near downtown Columbus, according to 10tv.com. Denson reportedly identified himself as a state representative several times after being pulled over, 10tv.com reports. The trooper reportedly smelled alcohol and also suspected Denson might be under the influence of drugs, 10tv.com reports. A suspected Adderall pill inside was found in a plastic bag in the car, reports say. While Denson did participate in field tests, he refused to have his chemical testing, WCPO reports. Denson released a statement Monday saying he made an error in judgment," but he said the Adderall pill was not his and he believes he was not impaired. Though I believe I wasnt impaired, I regret not using greater caution under the circumstances, Denson says in the statement. "... I regret refusing further testing that would have established that I was not impaired. The Trooper discovered a single prescription pill that he believed to be Adderall during a search of my car. I am not prescribed and do not use this medicine. The fact that it was in my vehicle is concerning and very serious." Denson is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday morning. To comment on this story, visit Mondays crime and courts comment section. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Rear Admiral Donna L. Cottrell will be the third woman in a row to serve as the U.S. Coast Guards Ninth District Commander, overseeing all the Great Lakes. Cottrell replaces Rear Admiral Joanna Nunan, the first woman in the U.S. Coast Guard to succeed another woman as district commander. She moved to Cleveland to take Rear Admiral June Ryans spot. Cottrell is a native of Wellington. She graduated from Ohio University with a bachelors degree in education in 1982; from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 1997 with a master of science degree in aeronautical science; from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 2004 with a master of science degree in information resource management; and from the U. S. Naval War College in 2011 with a master of arts degree in national security and strategic studies. Since 2017, Cottrell has served as director of the Joint Interagency Task Force. She previously served as the deputy to the assistant commandant for capability and was responsible for identifying and sourcing new and extended capabilities, competencies and capacity to meet U. S. Coast Guard mission requirements. She also assisted in developing a policy for Coast Guard staffing, training and equipping. From 2014 to 2016, Rear Admiral Cottrell served as the Coast Guard District Thirteen Chief of Staff where she directed field and staff activities in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Rear Admiral Cottrells personal awards include two Legion of Merits, two Meritorious Service Medals, three Coast Guard Commendation Medals, the Global War on Terrorism Medal, and the Navy Achievement Medal. Want more Lake Erie news? Follow RocktheLake on Facebook. Rotunda Rumblings The baby with the bathwater argument: Republican Attorney General Dave Yost on Monday urged a federal appeals court to only overturn the Affordable Care Acts individual mandate, not other parts of the act such as protections for pre-existing conditions, according to cleveland.coms Jeremy Pelzer. In the brief, Yost and Montana AG Tom Fox argued that if the appeals court upholds a lower-court ruling tossing the entire law, it would deprive millions of non-elderly Ohioans and Montanans of coverage for pre-existing conditions. Popular demand: A proposed constitutional amendment to award Ohios presidential electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote moved another step forward Monday, as Yost OKd the measures summary language, Pelzer reports. The proposal still needs to pass the Ohio Ballot Board before supporters can gather the nearly 443,000 signatures to place it on the November ballot. Interestingly, the measure is opposed by organizers of a similar effort, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which 11 states have signed onto so far. How much? On average, Ohio medical marijuana at least the stuff sold legally at dispensaries has been going for $471 an ounce, cleveland.coms Laura Hancock writes. Thats higher than nearby states with medical marijuana programs but the price is expected to go down with more growers and dispensaries competing against each other. Cant you CBD? Despite its precarious legal status, CBD continues to be sold in stores across Ohio, the Dispatchs Patrick Cooley reports. Shops are opting to ignore a ruling by the Ohio Pharmacy Board that deemed the substance illicit, but proponents say since it is derived from hemp, it is not technically in the same group as cannabis. If at first you dont succeed: The conference committee negotiating the differences between the Ohio House and Senate versions of the two-year transportation budget is meeting Tuesday morning, after taking a break over the weekend. The committee hasnt been able to reconcile differences between the level of the fuel tax. The General Assembly was supposed to have passed the bill by Sunday. Lordstown: Workers at the Lordstown General Motors plant made concessions to the tune of $118 million per year to keep the factory open, but GM decided to close anyway, per Bloomberg. Thats left many of the 1,400 workers who are out of a job feeling like theyve been stabbed in the back. We did everything they want, said Sonja Smith, a 24-year veteran of the plant. This is their payback. Yo, Yost: Court filings indicate Yost could be planning as many as seven more lawsuits against pharmaceutical middlemen, the Columbus Dispatchs Marty Schladen reports. Yost was also sure to take a shot at former Gov. John Kasich in a statement to the Dispatch, saying, This work was delayed because of a lack of information available through the prior gubernatorial administration. Capital crimes: Yost also released the 2018 Capital Crimes Annual Report, a summary of crimes that received the death sentence since 1981. All told, 56 inmates have been executed since 1981, including one in 2018. Cry me a river: Researches say most streams in Ohio will be more vulnerable if proposed changes to federal clean water restrictions are approved, the Dispatchs Beth Burger reports. Thats while Gov. Mike DeWine is proposing the creation of a fund to address water quality in the state, though DeWine previously sued to weaken the federal restrictions as attorney general. The Dignity of Work Strikes Back: In the apparent sequel to Sen. Sherrod Browns visit to the early-voting states, Cincinnati City Councilman and former U.S. Senate candidate P.G. Sittenfeld said he will go on a 24-hour dignity of work tour starting today. Per a release from the Cincinnati Democrats camp, Sittenfeld will be meeting with people whose jobs are important but too often unheralded and stream the whole thing on Facebook Live. Antonios time to shine: PRIZM News, an LGBT publication, profiled state Sen. Nickie Antonio, a Lakewood Democrat and the first openly lesbian member of the Ohio Legislature. Besides Antonios life, writer Celina Nader also focuses on Antonios work tackling discrimination at the state level. Support group: Antonio and Sen. Andrew Brenner, a Columbus-area Republican, announced Monday they are forming the bipartisan Ohio Developmental Disabilities Caucus to explore new and innovative ways to provide support and improve the quality of life for disabled Ohioans. Its first meeting is Tuesday. Anti-Semitism: U.S. Rep. Troy Balderson, a Zanesville Republican, authored a letter asking the U.S. Department of Justice to monitor increased anti-Semitic hate crimes and provide statistics in its year-end report, the Dispatchs Jessica Wehrman reports. The letter was co-signed by the rest of the Ohio Republican delegation. Woodward at Kent: Bob Woodward, the famed Washington Post reporter and editor, will speak at Kent State University in May, per cleveland.coms Emily Bamforth. Tickets are free and open to the public, but Woodward already sold out one venue, necessitating a move to a larger space. RIP: Former state Rep. Dixie Allen of Dayton has died, per the Dayton Daily News Laura Bischoff. Allen was first appointed to the House in January 1998 as a Democrat and won re-election four times. She switched parties to Republican in 2006 and was appointed a Montgomery County commissioner. Allen was 84. Full Disclosure Five things we learned from the April 9, 2018 financial disclosure form of state Sen. Hearcel Craig, a Columbus Democrat. 1. Craig reported earning up to $999 each from two Ohio tax refunds and pastoral services at Triumphant Church of God and New Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, $1,000 to $9,999 for pastoral services at the Unity Temple Church of Christ, $10,000 to $24,999 in Social Security benefits and $65,476 as a state representative. 2. Craig has a retirement fund with the Public Employee Retirement System and mutual funds from the Public Employee Deferred Compensation program and the Ivy Asset Strategy Fund. 3. Craig reported owing more than $1,000 at some point in 2017 to Wells Fargo, Telhio Credit Union, Lexus Financial, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macys Citi, Care Credit, Capital One, OneMain Financial, National Tire and Battery, Gap, Fifth Third Bank and Merrick Bank. 4. Craigs campaign reimbursed him $2,205.32 for travel. Craig also reported receiving more than $100 in meals from his campaign. 5. Craig reported receiving gifts from the King Arts Complex, Columbus Chamber of Commerce, Experience Columbus, YWCA Columbus, Community for New Direction and Columbus Community Helping Hands. On The Move President Donald Trumps third-favorite sheriff, Richard Jones, has been once again named the Trump campaigns Butler County chair, per the Journal-News Michael Pitman. Jones, whos become a frequent Trump ally on cable news, said 2016 was really the most fun I ever had on a campaign. Straight From The Source If we tax about one cent per fart per Ohioan a day, then were looking at 15 cents a day for 365 days, which would add up to just over $54 per Ohioan a year. Thats not too much extra per person a year and if you multiply that by the millions of people in Ohio, were looking at some serious fart cash. -A fake quote from Democratic Ohio House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes in an April Fools Day Columbus Underground story about a proposed tax on flatulence in Ohio. WASHINGTON, D.C. - Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Tuesday said he backs President Donald Trumps decision last week to seek $300 million for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative instead of the $30 million Trump initially requested when he submitted his budget to Congress. I believe I am the only EPA administrator in the history of the agency to go swimming in the Great Lakes, said Wheeler, a Butler County native who graduated from Case Western Reserve University. I love the Great Lakes and I completely agree with President Trump. All three budgets that Trump has submitted to Congress since entering the White House called for significant cuts to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which provides money to clean up and protect the worlds largest system of freshwater lakes. Trumps first budget would have ended the program, and his next two proposals called for providing $30 million. Each year, Congress overruled Trump and provided $300 million. At a Michigan campaign appearance last week, Trump reversed himself, saying he would back a $300 million funding level for the program and that he has always supported the Great Lakes. I support the Great Lakes, said Trump. "Always have. They are beautiful. They are big, very deep, record deepness, right? And I am going to get, in honor of my friends, full funding of $300 million for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which you have been trying to get for over 30 years. So, we will get it done. In Tuesdays testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, Wheeler did not say why the Trump administration has regularly suggested large cuts to the Great Lakes cleanup program. He did say he is working with the Office of Management and Budget to request more money for the program, and that hell follow the presidents direction on where to find extra money for the program. Wheeler also told Bainbridge Township Republican Rep. Dave Joyce that hes been collaborating with Canadas environmental minister on how to protect the Great Lakes and improve its water quality, and the two are planning a joint visit to an area of the Great Lakes where they can visit Canada and the United States on the same day. Joyce noted that the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative money has been used for dozens of environmental cleanup programs in the region since 2010, including efforts to clean up the Cuyahoga and Ashtabula rivers and reduce phosphorus levels in the lake that cause algal blooms. It is because of continuing success stories like this that year after year, this subcommittee has consistently, on a bipartisan basis, rejected proposed cuts to the GLRI from both current and previous administrations, Joyce said. CLEVELAND, Ohio Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich is writing another book due out in October. The new tome, titled Its Up To Us: Ten Little Ways We Can Bring About Big Change, will be published by Hanover Square Press with a release date of Oct. 22, 2019. Preorders are available now. It will be Kasichs fifth commercial release following his most recent book, Two Paths: America Divided Or United, in 2017. We are thrilled to be publishing Its Up To Us and look forward to sharing Governor Kasichs hard-won experiences and life lessons to help Americans bridge the deep divide in this country, said Peter Joseph, Hanover Square Press editorial director, in a release. In these pages, we hope readers find the inspiration and guidance needed to help bring about the positive change we all want to see. The cover art for former Gov. John Kasich's upcoming release, "It's Up To Us." The release announcement describes the book as Kasichs prescription for what ails America. Fix things where you live, connect with other people, live a life bigger than yourself, and tell politicians what you expect out of them, Kasich writes in the book. Throughout our history, it has been the voice and the demands of the people that have jump-started the movements that have brought about significant change in this country, including civil rights, womens suffrage, ending the war in Vietnam, and growing environmental awareness. Kasich, a Republican, served two terms as governor before leaving office in January. He subsequently became a political commentator on CNN and has given several public speeches around the country. As hes done so, hes reportedly been mulling a third presidential bid, having done so unsuccessfully in 2000 and 2016. His very public break with Republican President Donald Trump and Kasichs outspoken criticism of the president have endeared him to some conservatives who disdain the president. The timing and subject matter of Kasichs book will fuel speculation that he is running for president again, either as an independent or as a primary challenger to Trump. Presidential hopefuls often release books in the run-up to primary season as a way to generate press or get their broader message to the public. A spokesman for Kasich was not immediately available. COLUMBUS, OhioRepublican Attorney General Dave Yost asked a federal appeals court Monday to keep much of the Affordable Care Act, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Here are three takeaways: - Yost and Montanas attorney general stated in an amicus brief that a lower-court ruling was wrong to invalidate the entire ACA because the individual mandate is unconstitutional. - Their brief argues if the ruling is upheld, it will deprive millions of coverage for pre-existing conditions. - Yosts stance comes in contrast to predecessor Mike DeWine, who sought to overturn the entire health-care reform law in a separate lawsuit back in 2011. AS&H in co-operation with Clifford Chance advises Public Investment Fund on the sale of its 70% shareholding in SABIC to Saudi Aramco Abuhimed Alsheikh Alhagbani Law Firm (AS&H) in co-operation with Clifford Chance advised Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabias sovereign wealth fund, on the sale of its 70% shareholding in Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) for US$ 69.1 Billion to Saudi Aramco. SABIC, with global operations in over 50 countries and consolidated production volume across its various business units of 75 million metric tons, recorded net income of USD $5.7 billion, annual sales of USD $45 billion, and total assets of USD $85 billion in 2018. The transaction will unlock significant capital for PIFs continued long-term investment strategy in line with the goals and ambitions of the Kingdom as part of Vision 2030. The share purchase agreement was signed on Wednesday, 27 March 2019. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The team was led by Mansoor Alhagbani (AS&H Partner, Head of Capital Markets, Riyadh) and Omar Rashid (Clifford Chance Partner seconded to AS&H as AS&H Co-Head of Corporate) and supported by Rizwan Butt (Senior Associate) and Mashael Al-Shebaiky (Associate). A team of M&A, anti-trust and banking and finance specialists from our Riyadh and London teams are also advising on the different aspects of the transaction, including a core team of partners comprising Guy Norman, Yasser Al-Hussain, Gareth Camp and Nelson Jung and associates including Michael Rueter and Reema Al-Hamoud. Mansoor Alhagbani commented: We are proud to have advised PIF on this truly landmark transaction for the Kingdom and the region. This work reflects our strong corporate and capital markets practices in Saudi Arabia. It is also a testament to the strength of our team in Riyadh that we were able to respond to a challenging timeline and at the same time, deal with numerous complex issues that arose during this transaction. We would like to thank PIF for putting their trust and confidence in our team on such an important mandate. Omar Rashid remarked: "We are proud to have successfully supported PIF on this strategic and transformational transaction for the Kingdom and the Middle East region and look forward to continuing to support them to achieve a successful closing for this historic deal. AS&H in co-operation with Clifford Chance regularly advises Saudi and international clients on key corporate and ECM transactions and mandates and recently advised SABB on its USD 5 billion statutory merger with Al-Awwal Bank, Sahara on its proposed business merger with Sipchem, Tenaris on its acquisition of a majority stake in Saudi Steel Pipe Company, NADEC on its acquisition of Al-Safi Danone as well as Savola Group on Saudi Arabia's first accelerated book-built block trade. You might not expect it, but the majority of the American workforce is a pretty happy lot. This was revealed in the first CNBC/Survey Monkey Workplace Happiness Index, announced at the @Work Talent + HR Summit on Tuesday. The quarterly index measures how Americans feel about their jobs across five key categories pay, opportunities for advancement, recognition, autonomy and meaning. CNBC and SurveyMonkey poll 8,664 professionals nationwide across a wide swath of industries March 1318. Data has been weighted for age, race, sex, education, employment status and geography using Census Bureau's Current Population Survey to reflect the demographic composition of United States employed population. The CNBC/SurveyMonkey Workplace Happiness Index is an optimistic 71 out of 100, while the survey found 85 percent of respondents are either somewhat or very satisfied with their jobs. "Meaningfulness" was the biggest contributor to overall happiness, with 17 out of 20 possible points contributed to the overall index score of 71. Recognition, or how much colleagues value employee contributions, added 15 points, and autonomy, or work/life balance, added another 15. Opportunities for advancement was the biggest "drag" on the overall index. Despite the overall optimism, only 9 percent of workers gave top ratings across all five categories of the Workplace Happiness Index. Twenty-seven percent of workers surveyed say they are not well paid, and 30 percent have seriously considered quitting their job in the last three months. "Our study clearly reveals that workplace happiness is richly nuanced. While a big majority of U.S. workers are at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs, there are a lot of negatives when it comes to how people relate to their work," said Jon Cohen, SurveyMonkey's chief research officer. The survey found that providing workers with opportunities to advance their careers may be the best way to keep them from leaving. Just 13 percent of workers who say their companies provide "excellent" opportunities for advancement were thinking of quitting their jobs. But there are no guarantees, and the survey did not reveal a single solution to keeping employees happy. "If companies want to hire and retain great employees, they need to open up feedback loops to get at the 'why' learning what makes people happy and productive," Cohen said. Survey Methodology: This SurveyMonkey online poll was conducted March 13-18, 2019, among a national sample of 8,664 workers in the United States. Respondents for this survey were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. The modeled error estimate for this survey is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points. Data have been weighted initially for age, race, sex, education, and geography using the Census Bureau's American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States age 18 and over, then weighted for age, race, sex, education, employment status, and geography using Census Bureau's Current Population Survey to reflect the demographic composition of United States employed population. Full results available here. Fentanyl issues could derail the prospects of a U.S.-China trade deal if the Chinese government does not crack down on the highly-addictive pain reliever in good faith, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Monday. "We may eventually get a trade deal, but it won't be quick, it won't be easy, and you certainly shouldn't be buying stocks just because you think a we're on the verge of some kind of breakout," the "Mad Money" host said. The world's two largest economies are far from reaching an agreement in part because China has not stopped the inflow of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, into the United States, Cramer said. It has contributed to the ongoing opioid epidemic in America that led to 18,000 deaths last year, he noted. The People's Republic of China on Monday followed through on a pledge, though short of immediacy, it made in December to list the drug as a controlled substance. The new rule goes into effect May 1st. Cramer said he doesn't see this as a win for President Donald Trump, who has called on his counterpart to hold fentanyl "distributors and pushers" accountable by death penalty. The Chinese, however, have blamed the U.S. for its abuse. "There was no serious push by the Communist Party [of China] to put a stop to this. Every time China's banned one kind of fentanyl, their manufacturers just change the formula a little bit to something that's now legal," Cramer said. "This new ban is supposed to change all of that, but given China's track record when it comes to upholding international agreements, consider me skeptical." Get Cramer's full insight here TOKYO, April 2 (Reuters) - SoftBank Group Corp said it will issue 500 billion yen ($4.49 billion) in bonds, its largest ever such issue, targeting Japan's retail investors. The six-year bonds will have a coupon of between 1.3 percent and 1.9 percent to be decided next week, SoftBank said in a regulatory filing on Monday. The proceeds will be used to cover redemptions. Subscriptions will run from April 15-25, with 11 underwriters including Nomura Securities, the brokerage subsidiary of Nomura Holdings, and Daiwa Securities . SoftBank has 700 billion yen of bonds maturing in the current financial year. The tech conglomerate decided on its largest ever such float after determining there was strong demand from retail investors. ($1 = 111.3500 yen) (Reporting by Sam Nussey; Editing by Sam Holmes) Russia@ (Adds delivery impact on training in paragraph 19) WASHINGTON, April 1 (Reuters) - The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey, marking the first concrete U.S. step to block delivery of the jet to the NATO ally in light of Ankara's planned purchase of a Russian missile defense system. U.S. officials told their Turkish counterparts they will not receive further shipments of F-35 related equipment needed to prepare for the arrival of the stealthy jet, two sources familiar with the situation told Reuters on Monday. The Pentagon confirmed the Reuters report that the equipment delivery had been stopped. "Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey's F-35 operational capability have been suspended," Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mike Andrews, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has refused to back down from Ankara's planned purchase of a Russian S-400 missile defense system that the United States has said would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft. The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest of a series of diplomatic disputes between the United States and Turkey including Turkish demands that the United States extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria, and sanctions on Iran. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the next shipment of training equipment, and all subsequent shipments of F-35 related material, had been canceled. The aircraft is built by Lockheed Martin Corp. A Pentagon official had told Reuters in March that the United States had a number of items it could withhold in order to send Turkey a signal that the United States was serious about Ankara dropping its ambition to own the S-400. Turkish officials in Ankara were not immediately available for comment. Turkey has said it will take delivery of the S-400s in July. NATO SUMMIT The U.S. decision on the F-35s was expected to complicate Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu's visit to Washington this week for a NATO summit. On Sunday, Erdogan suffered one of his biggest electoral losses in decades in local elections. "Certain Russian weapon systems are seen as inherently threatening to the United States regardless of who is operating them and for what purpose," Andrew Hunter, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. "Because Turkey is not just an F-35 purchaser, but an industrial partner, blocking delivery of these systems represents a major escalation by the United States as it threatens to impose serious costs on both sides," Hunter said. Reuters reported last week that Washington was exploring whether it could remove Turkey from production of the F-35. Turkey makes parts of the fuselage, landing gear and cockpit displays. Sources familiar with the F-35's intricate worldwide production process and U.S. thinking on the issue last week said Turkey's role can be replaced. The United States and other NATO allies that own F-35s fear the radar on the Russian S-400 missile system will learn how to spot and track the jet, making it less able to evade Russian weapons. In an attempt to persuade Turkey to drop its plans to buy the S-400, the United States offered the pricier American-made Patriot anti-missile system in a discounted deal that expired at the end of March. Turkey has shown interest in the Patriot system, but not at the expense of abandoning the S-400. Turkey has engaged with U.S. negotiators in recent days about buying the Patriot system, a person familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity. The system is made by Raytheon Co. Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar in March said that despite some issues, Turkish pilots were continuing their training at an air base in Arizona on the F-35, each of which costs $90 million, and that Ankara was expecting the aircraft to arrive in Turkey in November. By halting jet deliveries, the Pentagon could subsequently delay training of Turkish pilots. Two additional jets are scheduled to arrive in Arizona in April and a significant delay could impact Turkey's November target date for operations. U.S. lawmakers also have expressed alarm over Turkey's planned purchase of the Russian system. Four U.S. senators last week introduced a bipartisan bill that would prohibit the transfer of F-35s to Turkey until the U.S. government certifies that Ankara will not take delivery of the S-400 system. Following news of the halt, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, one of the bill sponsors, said she was glad to hear the administration was "to delay the transfer of F-35 equipment to Turkey to help ensure U.S. military technology and capabilities cannot fall into the hands of the Kremlin." (Reporting by Mike Stone and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington; editing by Will Dunham, Howard Goller and Lisa Shumaker) * Upbeat China, U.S. manufacturing data boost sentiment * OPEC oil output hits 4-yr low on Saudi cuts, Venezuela blackouts * U.S. production steadies, rig count lowest in nearly a year Money managers raise net longs on U.S. crude futures (Adds settlement) NEW YORK, April 1 (Reuters) - Oil climbed about 2 percent to new 2019 highs on Monday, with Brent crude touching $69 a barrel, after positive signs for the global economy and tighter supplies drove both benchmarks' largest first-quarter gains in nearly a decade. Brent crude ended the session up $1.43, or 2.1 percent, at $69.01 a barrel after rising to $69.19, its highest since November. The global benchmark rose 27 percent in the January-March period. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures settled up $1.45, or 2.4 percent, at $61.59 per barrel, after reaching their highest in nearly five months at $61.72. WTI gained 32 percent in the first quarter. "It was the 1-2 punch in terms of positive manufacturing PMI data from China and the U.S., two big economies, and that has emboldened the bulls in the market," said John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital Management in New York. "The big headwind was the string of weak economic data and that has been relieved today, so the bullish narrative is not being held back." U.S. stocks rallied after upbeat manufacturing numbers from the United States and China eased worries about slowing global growth. China's manufacturing sector unexpectedly returned to growth for the first time in four months in March. U.S. manufacturing numbers also came in better-than-expected in March, helping investors overlook soft retail sales data for February. The United States and China said they made progress in trade talks that concluded on Friday in Beijing, with Washington saying the negotiations were "candid and constructive" as the world's two largest economies try to resolve their trade war. China's State Council said on Sunday that the country would continue to suspend additional tariffs on U.S. vehicles and auto parts after April 1, in a goodwill gesture following a U.S. decision to delay tariff hikes on Chinese imports. "This bull market in energy that has entered its fourth month in duration appears capable of continuing," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch and Associates. Production cuts from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries helped push the group's supply to a four-year low in March, a Reuters survey found, as top exporter Saudi Arabia over-delivered on the group's supply-cutting pact while Venezuelan output fell further due to U.S. sanctions and power outages. Analysts have turned cautiously optimistic on the oil market, a monthly Reuters poll showed on Friday, lifting their forecast for the average Brent price in 2019 for the first time in five months to $67.12. Hedge funds and money managers raised bullish wagers on U.S. crude to the highest in more than five months, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said on Friday. Brent crude speculators also raised net long positions by 13,429 contracts to 322,035 in the week to March 26, data from the Intercontinental Exchange showed. That was the highest level since late October. On the supply front, booming American production has steadied, with the U.S. government reporting on Friday that domestic output in the world's top crude producer edged lower in January to 11.9 million barrels per day. U.S. energy companies last week reduced the number of oil rigs operating to the lowest level in nearly a year, cutting the most rigs during one quarter in three years, energy services firm Baker Hughes said. Meanwhile, oil prices are being propped up by U.S. sanctions on Iran and Venezuela along with voluntary supply cuts by the OPEC and other major producers. Output from OPEC countries fell by 280,000 barrels per day (bpd) from February to 30.4 million bpd, according to a Reuters survey, its lowest monthly rate since 2015. Washington has instructed oil trading houses and refiners to further cut dealings with Venezuela or face sanctions themselves, sources told Reuters, and has urged Malaysia and Singapore to be vigilant for illicit Iranian crude in its waterways. (Additional reporting by Noah Browning in London, Aaron Sheldrick in Tokyo; Editing by Marguerita Choy and David Goodman) When it comes to managing their money, most people are content on their own. That could backfire. Despite reports that many workers are living paycheck to paycheck and not even half of all adults would be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense, the majority of Americans are declining any financial help or advice. To that point, 75 percent, of Americans manage their own finances, with no help from a professional or online service, according to a new CNBC and Acorns Invest In You Savings Survey . Only 17 percent said they use a financial advisor. John Holloway, 33, who co-owns a life insurance brokerage in Roswell, Georgia, says he's determined to do it alone, even while supporting a family. "I like to challenge myself," he said. Admittedly he's made some mistakes, like neglecting to save early on, he said. Now Holloway sets aside whatever he can and sticks with a 70/30 split of stocks to bonds in his investments. As of his most recent tally, he has about $250,000 stashed away, including home equity, he said. For most people, lacking the know-how to handle your own finances comes at a high cost, according to the National Financial Educators Council, or NFEC. Americans said money mistakes cost them $1,230, on average, last year alone, the NFEC found, not to mention the toll that can take on long-term savings goals. Over time, the stakes get much higher. "With debt and living expenses on the rise in much of the country, the importance of setting financial goals and sticking to them has never been greater," said Jerry O'Flanagan, the executive vice president of consumer banking at First National Bank of Omaha. However, most people are coming up short, he added. "They're not spending enough time on it." With debt and living expenses on the rise in much of the country, the importance of setting financial goals and sticking to them has never been greater. Jerry O'Flanagan executive vice president of consumer banking at First National Bank of Omaha An American Airlines flight traveling from Philadelphia to Orlando, Florida, was diverted to North Carolina on Tuesday after the pilots reported the smell of electrical fumes in the cockpit, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The crew deployed oxygen masks and landed the Airbus 321 jet at Wilmington International Airport. "Our maintenance team is currently inspecting the aircraft," American said in a statement. "We never want to disrupt our customers' travel plans, and we are sorry for the trouble this has caused." BROOKLYN COLLEGE, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2019/03/02: Democratic Presidential candidate US Senator Bernie Sanders launches first presidential campaign rally with more than 10000 in attendance at Brooklyn College. (Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images) Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent running as a Democrat, kicked off his 2020 presidential bid with a whopping $18 million fundraising haul in the first quarter, his campaign announced Tuesday. The average donation was $20, the campaign said as it touted Sanders' continuing appeal to small-dollar donors. Sanders' campaign chairman, Faiz Shakir, told reporters that 99.5 percent of donations came from people who gave $100 or less. Combined with money Sanders had left over from previous campaigns, the total first-quarter number stood at $32 million. The 2020 campaign has $28 million on hand. Sanders' first-quarter sum gives him the early lead in the 2020 Democratic money race. Sen. Kamala Harris posted a $12 million take, while the relatively obscure South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg announced he raked in $7 million. The Sanders campaign also sees the senator's appeal to grassroots voters and supporters as a key to taking on President Donald Trump in 2016. Shakir said nurses and teachers were among the top backers during the first quarter. "It reflects something about grassroots support for this campaign. It matters on how you're going to take on Donald Trump. He's put lobbyists in the White House," Shakir said. "You have either titans of industry running government or you have special interests running it. So how do you take him on?" Bank of America said it will help low- and moderate-income people in the U.S. become homeowners by extending $5 billion in mortgages. The five-year program, called Neighborhood Solutions, also includes grants for down payments and closing costs and mortgage packages with small down payments, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said Tuesday in a release. "We know many of our clients want the power to own their first home, which can sometimes be challenging," D. Steve Boland, the bank's consumer lending head, said in the statement. The new programs will "aid them in overcoming barriers and put sustainable homeownership within reach." The announcement is the latest by a big U.S. bank aimed at helping underserved communities. Last month, J.P. Morgan Chase said it was pledging $350 million for job training programs. For Bank of America, the mortgage program is a reminder of its recent past. Thanks mostly to its purchase of Countrywide Financial during the 2008 crisis, the bank had more than $70 billion in regulatory settlements tied to improper mortgage and foreclosure activities. The bank said that included in the new program are grants for eligible borrowers of up to $10,000 for a down payment or closing costs. Another program gives credits worth up to $7,500 toward costs including title insurance and recording fees. It wasn't immediately clear what makes borrowers eligible for these enticements. Bolt is launching its electric scooter service in Madrid, following a rollout last year in Paris. It's a phenomenon that's seen wild popularity and infamy in some U.S. cities. Now, the electric scooter craze looks set to gain further ground in Europe. Estonian ride-hailing firm Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, is launching its electric kick scooter-sharing service in Madrid, following a rollout last year in Paris. Rides in the Spanish capital will cost 15 cents a minute, on top of a 1 euro minimum charge. Customers need to scan a QR code to unlock the scooters and can leave them on the street once a trip is complete. "Beating the traffic is a big issue in cities like Madrid and a lot of trips are much more efficiently covered with an electric scooter rather than a car with a driver," Bolt co-founder and CEO Markus Villig said in a statement. "By bringing Bolt scooters to Madrid, we're solving two things at once: reducing car rides as well as saving time and money for our customers." The move marks another stepping stone in the start-up's drive toward new mobility options beyond car-hailing. It recently went through rebranding, changing its name to Bolt, which is the same name it used for the Paris scooter service. It also mirrors Uber's aim to become a one-stop shop for mobility. The ride-hailing giant made its own push into the e-scooter market last year following the acquisition of bike-sharing firm, Jump. Bolt is also looking to branch out into another key area for Uber food delivery. It recently announced plans to launch a competitor to Uber Eats in Estonia, Finland and South Africa this summer. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Tuesday announced a ban on state-funded travel to South Carolina, citing a measure on the books that enables faith-based foster agencies to "discriminate" against gays and others. "The State of South Carolina recently enacted a measure that sanctions discrimination against families in the placement of children in need of homes," said Becerra, a Democrat. "The State of California strongly stands against any form of discrimination." Becerra said the ban becomes effective April 15 and will prohibit state-funded and state-sponsored travel to South Carolina. According to Becerra's office, the "discriminatory provision" in the South Carolina law, known as H-4950 and enacted on July 5, 2018, was "buried deep within a general budget bill." It said the provision contains wording that "enables private faith-based child-placing agencies to discriminate against those who do not conform to their religious belief or moral convictions, including members of the LGBTQ community." Becerra's office pointed out a California law that went into effect in 2017, Assembly Bill 1887, prohibits state-funded or state-sponsored travel to states that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Nine other states were previously subject to California's travel ban: Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas. The ban could force California public university athletes to stay across state lines for games in South Carolina, including students from the University of California and the California State University. "South Carolina's discriminatory measure comes on the heels of other actions taken in the state prior to enactment of H-4950," Becerra's office in a release. Specifically, it said South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, requested in 2018 that the Trump administration "waive all applicable anti-discrimination regulations" for a faith-based foster care agency that was receiving public funds. As a result, the California Attorney General's office said, agencies in South Carolina were able to take information on the faith of people applying to become foster parents and then use it to reject families "solely on the basis of those beliefs." McMaster did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, McMaster's spokesman, Brian Symmes, sought to make light of the news from Becerra, quipping on Twitter: "En route to EMD headquarters to figure out if the governor needs to declare a state of emergency. How will South Carolina recover?" https://twitter.com/BrianSymmes/status/1113179324524494850 Chick-fil-A has previously faced criticism and boycotts for its donations to anti-LGBTQ groups and CEO Dan Cathy's public comments opposing gay marriage. The chain is famously closed on Sunday for religious reasons. In the last two weeks, Chick-fil-A has missed out on two potentially lucrative airport contracts after local politicians raised concerns over the company's anti-LGBTQ history. New York State Assemblyman Sean Ryan tweeted Thursday that he was disappointed in the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority's decision to put a Chick-fil-A at Buffalo Niagara International Airport. Just a day later, Ryan tweeted that he spoke with the food court's vendor, who told him that Chick-fil-A would no longer be a part of the project. Ryan tweet "We hope in the future the NFTA will make every effort to contract with businesses that adhere to anti-discriminatory policies, and we're confident another vendor who better represents the values of the Western New York community will replace Chick-fil-A as part of this project in the very near future," he said. In San Antonio a week earlier, the City Council voted 6-4 to remove Chick-fil-A from its seven-year concession plan for one of San Antonio International Airport's terminals. The day before the vote, ThinkProgress reported that the private company's foundation had donated more than $1.8 million to three anti-LGBTQ organizations, including the Salvation Army, according to its 2017 tax filings. While City Council member Roberto Trevino said in a statement after the vote that he opposed including Chick-fil-A because of its discriminatory behavior, the San Antonio Express-News reported that Mayor Ron Nirenberg argued against including the chain because it would lose revenue on Sundays. Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened an investigation into San Antonio's decision to exclude the restaurant on the grounds of religious freedom. "Recent coverage about Chick-fil-A continues to drive an inaccurate narrative about our brand," Chick-fil-A said in a statement. "We want to make it clear that our sole focus is on providing delicious food and welcoming everyone. We do not have a political or social agenda." The Chinese flag flies outside the People's Bank of China in Beijing, China, on Friday, Dec. 23, 2011. China's central bank is seeking a police investigation into the circulation last week on social media of what it called false information saying it had announced a cut in a key bank reserve ratio. On Friday, private chat groups on China's popular social media platform WeChat shared what appeared to be a paragraph pasted from a story by the official Xinhua news agency saying that the People's Bank of China had announced a cut in the reserve requirement ratio (RRR), to take effect on April 1. No such move had been announced. Both Xinhua and Tencent, which operates WeChat, did not have immediate comment. "The central bank has officially sent a letter to the police for investigating the case and punishing those who have published false information," the Finance News, a PBOC publication, said in a commentary on Tuesday that was reposted on the central bank's official Weibo account. The commentary said monetary policy moves are "by no means a trivial matter", stressing even if the false information was intended as an April Fool's joke, those who started it would face legal consequences. "Although the rumours of an RRR cut have lost traction, we believe this does not mean that the relevant rumour-mongers cango unpunished," it said. China has been stepping up efforts to police potentially destabilizing content on its already stringently censored internet. China has announced five RRR cuts in the past year to free up more cash for banks to boost lending to private firms, and further cuts are widely expected. The central bank publication cited criminal laws that could see punishment of up to five years in jail for those who caused "serious consequences" by fabricating and disseminating false information affecting securities and futures trading. "This kind of irresponsible behaviour should not be tolerated, otherwise the rumours will continue to make waves in the market or become more daring," it added. President Donald Trump's threat to close the Mexican border could have a potentially devastating effect on the U.S. economy and there are few places where that would be felt more immediately than in the American auto industry, NBC News reports. "Security is more important than trade," Trump said Tuesday afternoon when asked by reporters if he was concerned about the hit to the U.S. economy. Roughly 37 percent of the imported parts used on U.S.-made vehicles are imported from Mexico, including critical pieces like the wiring harnesses used on 70 percent of all vehicles assembled in the States. Disrupting that flow could idle many of the more than 1 million employees at U.S. auto assembly and parts plants. Read more from NBC News: Trump and McConnell clash on closing the U.S.-Mexico border House panel authorizes subpoenas on White House security clearances, 2020 census States are ground zero in the fight against child marriage "It would be a major disruption" if a border shutdown were to last more than a couple of days, said David Cole, director-emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research. How long manufacturers could sidestep a border closure would depend, said Cole, "on how much inventory they keep in stock." But as automakers have migrated to a just-in-time manufacturing process, where most parts arrive at an assembly plants just days, and sometimes even minutes, before they're needed, there is little to fall back on. "If Mexico doesn't immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week," Trump tweeted last Friday. tweet The president's threat is the latest move in an ongoing battle that began when Trump was still a candidate. He had repeatedly pressed manufacturers like Ford and General Motors to shift vehicle production back from Mexican plants though there has been little move in that direction. Trump also pressed trade partners Mexico and Canada to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Renamed USMCA, the new treaty has yet to be ratified by Congress and observers like Cole believe the impact on the auto industry will be relatively marginal. The impact of a border shutdown, however, could be far more substantial, considering the U.S. imported $59.4 billion worth of Mexican-made auto parts last year. At the same time, American automakers and auto parts manufacturers send $32.5 billion worth of parts and vehicles south of the border. All told, that works out to an average of about $250 million worth of automotive goods every single day. In some instances, automakers would be able to keep their plants running if the parts they would be missing are minor, such as plastic trim. They would have to stockpile the vehicles, however, until the shutdown ended and parts were again made available. But other parts would make it difficult to continue production. Wiring harnesses, for example, are some of the first parts installed on an assembly line. Were Trump to move in the coming weeks it could hit automakers at a particularly vulnerable time, spring traditionally bringing the industry's strongest sales. NBC News reached out to a number of automakers for their reaction to the border shutdown threat. While none wished to go on the record, several said they are "monitoring the situation." "Any action that stops commerce at the border would be harmful to the U.S. economy, and in particular, the auto industry," said Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council trade group. "Access to Mexico's market place and North American integration are critical to operations in the U.S." Since NAFTA came into force on Jan. 1, 1994, automakers have broadly integrated their U.S., Mexican and Canadian operations. At the same time, Mexico has evolved from an industry backwater to become one of the world's largest automotive manufacturers. The NAFTA agreement has contributed to that growth, as have the many other free trade agreements the country has negotiated. Low labor costs are the other contributing factor. Whether Trump will go ahead with the border closure remains to be seen, with reports from the White House indicating some officials are pushing back, warning the president of the potential impact on the U.S. economy. But acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said on Sunday that heading off that move would require "something dramatic." The latest threat comes at a time when the auto industry is struggling to cope with a variety of other Trump trade moves. That includes the tariffs on imported aluminum and steel that, according to both Ford and General Motors, cost them each about $1 billion last year. The president is meanwhile considering several other trade measures. He has until next month to decide whether to follow up with new tariffs on imported cars and car parts. Because of the large number of foreign-made parts used on American assembly lines, the cost could be substantial. Toyota has warned the move could increase the price tag of a Kentucky-made Camry sedan by as much as $1,600. "There is nothing the auto industry hates more than chaos, which makes it difficult to plan ahead," said analyst Cole. But when it comes to actions that could impact the auto industry, he added, chaos is the way the administration operates. Cows eat from a feeder at the Smilaire Registered Holsteins farm, a dairy supplier to Sartori Co. cheese, in Waldo, Wisconsin, U.S., on Tuesday, July 3, 2018. A new report sees few reasons for optimism in the U.S. agricultural sector, pointing to the global slowdown impacting demand, the continued trade war with China and flooding in the nation's farm belt. "U.S. agriculture will face challenges in 2019 as slowing domestic and global economic growth rates, trade talks continue and weather casts uncertainty in the short- and long-term markets," the latest quarterly rural economic review from CoBank's Knowledge Exchange division said. According to CoBank, U.S. commodity markets remain focused on negotiations between U.S. and China to resolve the trade war that has caused retaliatory tariffs on a wide range of U.S. farm products, including soybeans and pork. And the ratification in Congress of the trilateral U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, a replacement for NAFTA, also faces hurdles. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a report Monday it expects China's demand for oilseeds and related products to grow in the current marketing year but at a slower pace due to African swine fever. The disease has devastated domestic hog production in Asia's largest economy, reducing the need for feed. For calendar 2018, the U.S. shipped $3.14 billion worth of soybeans to China, down 74 percent from 2017, when it was $12.25 billion, according to WISERTrade data. "Soybean exports to China are still well under where they were in 2017 before the trade dispute started last year," Dan Kowalski, vice president of CoBank's Knowledge Exchange division, said in an interview Monday. "So we're still far away from where we need to be." The report said "a slowing global economy may force animal protein and dairy sectors to scale back planned production increases as the year unfolds." It also raised concern for grain demand and points out the continued financial stress of American farmers. "U.S. agricultural producers and markets are in for a challenging year with economic uncertainty," Kowalski wrote in the report. CoBank said the agriculture sector is "still seeking relief" and adds that the poor fall weather and wet start to the year affected the Midwest and could result in "elevated risk" for some industry players. William Barr, U.S. attorney general, attends the 2019 Prison Reform Summit and First Step Act celebration in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S, on Monday, April 1, 2019. In a letter sent to Barr on Monday, the committee chairs wrote that they hope to avoid a "compulsory process." They added, however: "if the Department is unwilling to produce the report to Congress in unredacted form, then we will have little choice but to take such action." Six House committee leaders, including the Judiciary Committee's Jerrold Nadler and the Intelligence Committee's Adam Schiff, are demanding that Attorney General William Barr send them the nearly 400-page Mueller report without redactions along with all of the evidence that supports its findings or face subpoenas. Democratic leaders in Congress want everything they can get from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report, and they want it now. The lawmakers set Tuesday as a deadline for Barr to give up the goods. The House Judiciary Committee plans to vote to authorize subpoenas for the report at a markup hearing Wednesday. "The allegations at the center of special counsel Mueller's investigation strike at the core of our democracy," the Democrats wrote. "Congress urgently needs his full, unredacted report and its underlying evidence in order to fulfill its constitutional role, including its legislative, appropriations, and oversight responsibilities." They also want Barr to testify before Nadler's Judiciary Committee "not in a month, as you have offered, but now." Their topics for Barr will include his initial summary of the principal conclusions from the Mueller report and his decision to "initiate a redaction process that withholds critical information from Congress." The Democrats also asked Barr not to interfere with Mueller testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee or other panels after his report is released. Read the Democrats' letter to barr here. In addition to Nadler of New York and Schiff of California, the other House committee chairs who made the demand are Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts, Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters of California, Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel of New York. The Justice Department declined to comment on the letter to Barr. Barr, who was confirmed by the Senate in February, has faced mounting criticism from Democrats since he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to merit a charge of obstruction of justice against President Donald Trump. The attorney general shared that decision, as well as the report's conclusion that the special counsel did not establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, in a four-page summary less than two days after Mueller delivered his long-awaited report. Barr said he expects to deliver a version of the Mueller report to lawmakers by mid-April, "if not sooner." But Democrats have called on Barr to give them the entire report without any redactions something Barr has already signaled he will not do. Barr had recently assured lawmakers that the White House had no plans to exert executive privilege to review the report before it was shared with other parties or the public. Trump said to "just release it," his close ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told CNN last week. In a letter sent to Congress on Friday, Barr said the material from the report potentially being redacted includes grand jury-related information, as well as information that could reveal U.S. sources and methods or confidential details about ongoing investigations. Barr and Republicans have cited federal rules to support their claim that information in the report about grand juries cannot legally be made public. But Democrats have pointed to other high-profile probes involving special investigators, such as those surrounding the Watergate and Monica Lewinsky scandals, in which grand jury information was released to Congress. "Congress can and has historically been provided with sensitive, unredacted, and classified material that cannot be provided to the general public," the Democrats argued in the letter to Barr. Mueller spent nearly two years investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, as well as possible Trump-campaign collusion and the possible obstruction of justice by Trump himself. The president, who had long criticized Mueller's probe as a "witch hunt," touted Barr's four-page summary as a "total and complete exoneration" of him and his campaign, even though the report explicitly says it "does not exonerate" Trump on the question of obstruction. Trump weighed in on Twitter on Tuesday morning, accusing Nadler of hypocrisy and suggesting he and "Shifty Adam Schiff" will never accept the results of Mueller's report. Trump TWEET In 1998, Rep.Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton. No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM! Trump TWEET There is no amount of testimony or document production that can satisfy Jerry Nadler or Shifty Adam Schiff. It is now time to focus exclusively on properly running our great Country! CBD buds of chocolate by Chronic Candy are displayed at the Big Industry Show at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Aug. 31, 2018 The agency wants data on CBD's safety in food products and feedback on how it might regulate manufacturing, marketing and labeling, according to a notice posted Tuesday in the Federal Register. The Food and Drug Administration has set its first public hearing on legalizing CBD in food and drinks, to figure out how to regulate the newly legalized cannabis product. The hearing will take place on May 31. "It's critical that we address these unanswered questions about CBD and other cannabis and cannabis-derived products to help inform the FDA's regulatory oversight of these products especially as the agency considers whether it could be appropriate to exercise its authority to allow the use of CBD in dietary supplements and other foods," Gottlieb said in a statement Tuesday. For more on investing in health care innovation, click here to join CNBC at our Healthy Returns Summit in New York City on May 21. CBD, short for cannabidiol, is a non-psychoactive compound found in the cannabis plant that promises to relax the body without altering the mind like THC. Congress legalized CBD derived from hemp in December. This was supposed to lead to a surge in consumer products infused with the cannabis compound. However, the FDA's rules prohibiting the addition of CBD to food and drinks have kept most large companies on the sidelines, though a number of start-ups have jumped in anyway. Facing calls from Congress, the FDA has privately been searching for a solution. It will now take its efforts public, first with the meeting, which will take place at its headquarters near Washington, D.C. Gottlieb said the working group plans to share its findings as soon as this summer. "This is a complicated topic and we expect that it could take some time to resolve fully," he said. "Nevertheless, we're deeply focused on this issue and committed to continuing to engage relevant stakeholders as we consider potential paths forward." The FDA and the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday issued warning letters to three companies Advanced Spine and Pain's Relievus, Nutra Pure and PotNetwork Holdings for allegedly making unproven claims about their CBD products, such as helping to treat cancer and Alzheimer's disease. "The FDA continues to be concerned about the proliferation of egregious medical claims being made about products asserting to contain CBD that haven't been approved by the FDA, such as the products and companies receiving warning letters today," Gottlieb said. Nutra Pure President CJ Montgomery in an email to CNBC said that compared with "many other CBD-related companies making over-the-top health claims," the language his company used was "quite minor." He said the company removed the language "out of an abundance of caution" but is "still seeking affirmation from the FDA on the few remaining issues." The other two companies did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. Several measures that would affect other types of savings are included in the bill. The proposal, known as the Secure Act, was backed by the top Democrat and Republican on the tax-writing Ways and Means committee. A key House committee on Tuesday unanimously passed a bill intended to increase the flexibility of 401(k) plans and improve access to the accounts, particularly for small businesses and their employees. The most comprehensive changes to private retirement plans in more than a decade are gaining momentum in Congress. "Americans currently face a retirement income crisis, with too many people in danger of not having enough in retirement to maintain their standard of living and avoid sliding into poverty," committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., said Tuesday. The bill is one of the few proposals with a significant chance of becoming law amid a bitterly divided Congress. Elements of the bill have been debated among members for years and enjoy wide support among both industry groups and advocacy organizations. On Tuesday, Neal called the legislation "a major bipartisan accomplishment." "The Ways and Means committee is where we find solutions and get things done for the American people," he said. The last time Congress passed major retirement legislation was in 2006. The Pension Protection Act focused on underfunded accounts and reforms to that system. Since then, lawmakers have debated proposals to address the popularity of 401(k)s and individual savings accounts. But those efforts have stalled on their own, said Paul Richman, chief government officer at the Insured Retirement Institute, a trade group. He said the Secure Act aims to "modernize" the system. "It's packaging them all into a comprehensive piece of legislation that would address many of these little issues that have cropped up over the years," he said. "We think that it's a good chance for Congress to take some positive, bipartisan action and advance this bill." The Senate Finance committee introduced a companion bill late Monday. It is expected to pass with backing from both sides of the aisle. "There's a lot of pent-up momentum for this, and that's why it's so bipartisan in nature," said Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank. "They're now getting to the point where there's momentum to get it across the finish line in both the House and the Senate." In the House, Neal said he is also working on a second retirement bill with ranking Republican Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas. He said he hopes the committee will consider that legislation before Congress goes on recess in August. WATCH: Most Americans are rejecting financial help here's why that will cost them in the end IBM's Chair, CEO and President Ginni Rometty has a powerful message for workers and employers in all strata of society: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway and it is shaping up to be one of the most significant challenges and opportunities of our lifetime. We are already seeing jobs, policies, industries and entire economies shifting as our digital and physical worlds merge. According to the World Economic Forum, the value of digital transformations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is estimated at $100 trillion in the next 10 years alone, across all sectors, industries and geographies. "As a result, we face an imminent and profound transformation of the workforce over the next five to 10 years as analytics and artificial intelligence change job roles at companies in all industries," Rometty said while giving a keynote address at the CNBC's At Work Talent & HR: Building the Workforce of the Future Conference in New York on Tuesday, April 2. In February, the executive was appointed to Trump's American Workforce Policy Advisory Board along with 24 other leaders. While only a minority of jobs will disappear, the majority of roles that remain will require people to work with the aid of analytics and some form of AI and this will require skills training on a large scale, Rometty said. "I expect AI to change 100 percent of jobs within the next five to 10 years," the IBM CEO said. Rometty's call to action comes at a time when the AI skills gap and the future of work exhibit a growing sense of urgency. The technology sector accounts for 10 percent of U.S. GDP and is the fastest part of the American economy but there are not enough skilled workers to fill the 500,000 open high-tech jobs in the U.S., according to the Consumer Technology Association's Future of Work survey. Yet the tech industry is concerned that school systems and universities have not moved fast enough to adjust their curriculum to delve more into data science and machine learning. As a result, companies will struggle to fill jobs in software development, data analytics and engineering. "To get ready for this paradigm shift companies have to focus on three things: retraining, hiring workers that don't necessarily have a four-year college degree and rethinking how their pool of recruits may fit new job roles," Rometty said. To address the issue IBM is investing $1 billion in initiatives like apprenticeships to train workers for what it calls "new collar" jobs a phrase Rometty has coined for workers who have technology skills but not a four-year college degree. She noted the company is crafting 500 apprenticeships with the goal of making this "an inclusive era for employees." The "new collar" jobs could range from working at a call center to developing apps or becoming a cyber-analyst at IBM after going through a P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School) program, which takes six years starting with high school and an associate's degree. IBM is also helping to catalyze a national movement to close the skills gap. IBM and the Consumer Technology Association announced the launch of the CTA Apprenticeship Coalition, to create thousands of new apprenticeships in 20 states in January. It provides frameworks for more than 15 different apprenticeship roles in fast-growing fields, including software engineering, data science and analytics, cybersecurity, mainframe system administration, creative design and program management. New apprenticeships will be modeled in large part on IBM's successful apprenticeship program, which launched in 2017, is registered with the United States Department of Labor and has grown nearly twice as fast as expected. The apprenticeships created by this Coalition provide pathways to tech jobs in all parts of the country from Kansas to Minnesota to Louisiana not just in traditional tech hubs on the coasts. Its goal is to widen the aperture when it comes to hiring by placing the focus on skills rather than specific degrees. From early-career professionals to mid-career transitions and everything in between, these apprenticeships represent a new pathway to success in 21st century careers, including the growing number of new collar roles where a traditional bachelor's degree is not always required. They also offer an opportunity to build in-demand skills without taking on student debt. Besides IBM, coalition members include Canon, Ford, Sprint, Toyota and Walmart. In this tight job market, where the talent chase has become so intense, Rometty has some advice for employers at businesses of all sizes. It's a shift in thinking she has adopted at IBM. "Bring consumerism into the HR model. Get rid of self service, and using AI and data analytics personalize ways to retrain, promote and engage employees. Also move away from centers of excellence to solution centers." As she sums it up: "In today's world company's need to be agile and realize their workforce is a strategic renewable asset." Large cross-border mergers and acquisitions "almost disappeared" in the first-quarter of 2019, according to a new report. In its latest analysis of global M&A (mergers and acquisitions), research firm Mergermarket found that only one "mega deal" any deal worth more than $10 billion was agreed between firms based in different countries. Researchers found that in total, only nine "mega deals" had been struck in the first three month of this year, down from 14 in the first quarter of 2018. Of those nine, more than 70 percent were cases of U.S. corporates taking out competitors in their domestic market. U.S. miner Newmont's $12.8 billion acquisition of Canada's Goldcorp was the only "mega deal" to arise from a cross-border transaction. The report showed that the global value of deals made in the first-quarter of 2019 hit $801.5 billion a 15 percent decrease from the same period in 2018. Meanwhile, the number of deals registered globally fell from more than 5,000 to just 3,558. Cross-border M&A accounted for just 30 percent of global deals, compared to an average of around 40 percent between 2015 and 2018, the research showed. Outbound M&A from China saw a significant decline, reaching its lowest level since the second half of 2014. However, the U.S. domestic market bucked the trend, with its M&A transaction value gaining almost a third year-on-year while the value of global deals fell by 15 percent. The total value of U.S. M&A in the first quarter reached $414.2 billion, accounting for 51 percent of global M&A value. The most valuable deal to be completed in the U.S. was Bristol-Myers Squibb's $89.5 billion acquisition of domestic rival Celgene Corporation. Meanwhile, Europe's deals were valued at $122.9 billion, marking a year-on-year decline of more than 20 percent. Mergermarket said economic uncertainty and rising protectionism led to Europe's lowest quarterly value since the third-quarter of 2012. The deal analyst attributed the overall global decline in mergers to several issues, including market volatility and economic headwinds. Geopolitical tensions including Sino-U.S. trade tensions and uncertainty around Brexit were also contributing to the slowdown in M&A, Mergermarket said. Despite the downturn, Beranger Guille, global editorial analytics director at Mergermarket, said the data was no reason for pessimism. "Vigorous private equity activity and a healthy domestic deal flow in the U.S. should give hope to dealmakers for the rest of 2019," he said in a press release Tuesday. His views support the stance of analysts at consulting firm A.T. Kearney, who said in a report this week that major retail and consumer companies would look to M&A to strengthen their portfolios ahead of an expected economic slowdown. Philippe Houchois, equity research analyst at Jefferies, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" on Wednesday that he expected to see more deals being made in the autos sector as political resistance to M&A in the sector subsided. Meanwhile, Philip Noblet, head of U.K. investment banking at Jefferies, told Reuters last week that British firms may look to M&A to protect themselves from negative Brexit consequences. "The amount of pressure on these companies will accelerate in the coming months and for some the choice will be between domestic consolidation and restructuring," he said. The shrine is a place for prayer and spiritual cleansing, said its administrator. The Archbishop of Cagayan de Oro promotes the criteria set by the Bishops' Conference to elect public officials. The latter suggests the faithful form "circles of discernment". Manila (AsiaNews/Agencies) The Philippines is set to vote on 13 May. Campaigning must be kept outside the Kamay ni Hesus (KNH) shrine. Security personnel have been ordered to escort candidates, or anyone else engaged in any form of political activity, out of the famous pilgrimage site in Lucban (Quezon province). The shrine is a place for prayer and spiritual cleansing, said Fr Joey Faller, KNH administrator, People should Respect the shrine and devotees and carry out their political campaign elsewhere. Located in the village of Tinamnan, the shrine is one of the favourite destinations for Lenten pilgrims, many of whom come from outside Quezon. Fr Faller, known as the healing priest, warns politicians against putting up campaign posters and streamers outside the complex. The priest, however, said he was ready to meet any candidate who wanted to join him in prayers for a peaceful, honest and orderly election. They can see me anytime. And together we will pray and call on Gods help to bless our country and the Filipino people, he explained. The shrines administrator urges candidates to discuss issues affecting communities and offer solutions to problems. No more empty promises, character assassination and guns, goons and gold. The people have had enough of these for so long and look where we are now, he said. To all voters, he says, choose wisely. Use your sacred vote as a potent weapon to improve your lives and change what is wrong around us. Mgr Antonio Javellana Ledesma, archbishop of Cagayan de Oro (Mindanao Island), also calls on Filipinos to vote responsibly, seeking Gods guidance to elect worthy candidates. To do so, they can apply the criteria set by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to pick public officials. For this purpose, the CBCP urges voters to form circles of discernment to openly discuss election-related issues and options in choosing their leaders. Group discernment should be more enriching and enlightening instead of relying on ones solitary perceptions, Ledesma noted. The entire community is a stakeholder in the choice of its leaders, the archbishop explained. Candidates should be elected not on the basis of personal favours given to the voter, but on their record of public service and commitment to work for the common good. The global economy is "highly likely" to fall into a recession if the U.S. and China don't reach a trade deal within three months, according to Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi. His prediction was based on current "extraordinarily fragile" business sentiment that was a result of a protracted tariff fight between the two largest economies in the world that started last year. The U.S. and China are now negotiating a deal, with representatives from both countries expected to meet in Washington this week. "Business sentiment across the globe is extraordinarily fragile," the economist told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday. He added that a survey conducted by Moody's recently showed that confidence among companies was at its weakest since the end of the financial crisis a decade ago. "Businesses are really on edge and I think it's because of this trade war. And if it's not settled in the next couple (to) three months, I think a global recession is highly likely," said Zandi. If talks between the U.S. and China break down and end without a trade deal, that could hurt business sentiment further and lead companies to reduce hiring, he said. When that happens, unemployment would rise, causing consumers to lose faith in the economy, he explained. "The difference between an expanding economy and a recessionary one is simply faith faith that the economy is going to be okay. And if you lose faith, no central banks are going to get that back. That's a recession," said Zandi. Brexit problem Adding to risks facing the global economy is the potential that the U.K. would leave the European Union without a withdrawal agreement. On Monday, the British parliament again failed to break a deadlock surrounding the country's departure from the EU. Lawmakers thrice rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's divorce deal but couldn't find an alternative. Zandi said his "very subjective" guess is that there's a one-third probability that Brexit would happen without a deal, which "feels uncomfortably high." "If we have a no-deal Brexit ... certainly the U.K. economy and the EU economy will be in recession, and I think the rest of the global economy will be not too far behind. So I think that'll be a real problem as well," he said. Signs of slower growth in several major European economies are already threatening countries globally, noted Frederic Neumann, managing director and co-head of Asian economics research at HSBC. If Brexit pushes Europe into a recession, emerging economies particularly those in Asia could get hit through two channels, he said. For one, "Europe would disappear as a big driver of demand for exports," Neumann told CNBC's "Capital Connection" on Tuesday. Secondly, a weaker Europe would lead to a rally in the U.S. dollar as investors seek safer investments, he said. "A stronger dollar is never good for (emerging markets)," Neumann added. WATCH: Moody's chief economist says China trade battle is weighing heavily on business confidence Japanese lawmaker Tomomi Inada has ambitions to be the country's next prime minister. Akio Kon | Bloomberg | Getty Images Tomomi Inada wants to take on Japan's political "boys club." The former defense minister told CNBC she intends to run for the top post of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in 2021 in a bid to succeed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who currently holds that position. If successful, she could become Japan's first female leader. Under current rules, Abe cannot seek a fourth consecutive term as president of the party, who has traditionally served as prime minister when the LDP controls parliament. The party has governed Japan for most of its post-World War II history. Inada who is a staunch nationalist and close Abe confidante wants to build on his achievements and pursue further reform, such as reining in the country's massive debt, she told CNBC at the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong last week. "I'm aiming for it in two years," the lawmaker said of her plan to run for party president at the next vote. There's still a mentality that politicians should be male. Tomomi Inada member of parliament, Japan Abe, who has been in power for more than six years, is set to become Japan's longest serving prime minister this year. His term as party leader runs until September 2021. He has tried to reinvigorate the world's third-largest economy and slay years of on-and-off deflation through his trademark "Abenomics" program. He has had some success: a weaker yen, a higher stock market and an end to the worst of falling prices. But a sustained rise in inflation to a targeted 2 percent, one of his key objectives, has yet to be achieved. 'Crucial stage' for reform Inada emphasized that Abe has done the right things, but said his policies have been fortunate to coincide with broader global economic strength. It's something she suggested Japan can't always rely on and will eventually need "severe" or even "painful" changes in areas such as the labor market and social security system. "The crucial stage for reform to firmly strengthen the economy's foundation and growth will, in fact, be from now on," she said. Inada has no illusions about the difficulty of making it to the top of the male-dominated LDP. She said it will likely require multiple attempts as it has for many of the men who succeeded. "It generally takes two or three times," said Inada, who turned 60 in February. "So I have to get going." Tomomi Inada, a key advisor to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Akio Kon | Bloomberg | Getty Images Few women have tried and none have succeeded. On example is current Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, who contested the LDP leadership election in 2008, but lost, finishing a distant third. Veteran lawmaker Seiko Noda failed in 2015 and 2018 to secure the 20 signatures from party members required to get on the ballot. "There's still a mentality that politicians should be male," Inada said, adding she favors setting targets and incentives to help increase the number of female politicians. Japan ranked 165 out of 191 countries in percentage of women in parliament as of Jan. 1 this year, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a global organization of national parliaments, and UN Women, which promotes gender equality. Women accounted for 10.2 percent of Japan's lower house of parliament and 20.7 percent of the upper house, the data show. As part of his economic program, Abe has sought more participation by women in the economy due to its shrinking workforce as a result of Japan's rapidly aging population and declining birth rates. Still, Japan came in 110 out of 149 countries and economies ranked in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report issued in December. The study examined four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, as well as political empowerment. Japan's result was the lowest among the Group of Seven nations, though four spots higher than the year before. A lawyer by training and a member of parliament since 2005, Inada is not easy to characterize. A self-described conservative who has been loath to criticize Japan's wartime history, she has taken progressive stands on acceptance of foreign workers and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) advocacy. Wary of China's pursuits Hawkish on national security, she backs Abe in support of revising Japan's constitution that restricts its military. "We should think to become a strong country, so to speak," she said, "one in which we protect ourselves." Inada said she is wary of how China is pursuing its geopolitical and economic ambitions, including territorial claims in the South China Sea and the Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project. "Force, not rules, is their methodology," she said. "They are really trying, little by little, to change the status quo. I'm extremely concerned." Calls by CNBC to the press section of the Chinese foreign ministry office in Hong Kong seeking comment on Inada's remarks were not answered Tuesday. I think real champions are not those who never fall, but those who can pick themselves up again after falling. Tomomi Inada member of parliament, Japan President Donald Trump alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., talks to the media about Robert Mueller's report upon arriving for the Senate Republican Policy luncheon in the Capitol on Tuesday, March 26, 2019. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told President Donald Trump the Senate will not revisit health care reform before the 2020 elections, the Kentucky Republican said Tuesday. McConnell said he spoke with the president Monday afternoon and told him the Senate will not do anything "comprehensive" regarding health care until Republicans gain full control of Congress. Trump reignited the fight over the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, when his administration put its weight behind a lawsuit challenging the law's constitutionality late last month. McConnell, who spoke to reporters after the weekly Senate Republican lunch on Capitol Hill, has long vowed to overturn the law. The Senate came just short of doing so in 2017 following a battle within the party over how best to replace Obamacare. Both Republicans and Democrats think the GOP's repeal effort was a driving force behind Republicans losing 40 House seats in last year's midterms. McConnell's comments came after Trump tweeted Monday night that Republicans "are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare." He claimed they will vote on it in 2021 after "Republicans hold the Senate & win back the House" in next year's elections. Trump repeatedly criticized Obamacare, pledging throughout his presidential campaign to do away with the health care law put in place by his predecessor, President Barack Obama. In March, the Department of Justice went further than it had before in trying to scrap the Affordable Care Act, supporting a federal judge's ruling that Obamacare is unconstitutional. An estimated 30 million people would lose their coverage if Obamacare is repealed without another plan in place. However, McConnell said he doesn't suspect the courts will strike down Obamacare "anytime soon." "There's no point in pushing the panic button," he said. "The court system takes a long time to resolve these issues." When asked if McConnell saw any difference between himself and the president on health care, the majority leader said, "Not any longer." The senator added that Trump accepted the Senate would not focus on health care for now and "that he would be developing a plan that he would take to the American people during the 2020 campaign." Trump would suggest the proposal is what he would advocate "in a second term if there were a Republican Congress," McConnell said. The GOP currently holds 197 seats in the House, meaning it would need 21 more to win a majority. In a series of tweets Wednesday morning, Trump denied that he asked McConnell for a vote before the election, adding that health care "will be a great campaign issue." Tweet 1 Tweet 2 The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. CNBC's Christina Wilkie contributed to this report. The owner of a pro-Trump super PAC funded solely by billionaire bank executive and poker player Andrew Beal used more than $300,000 in donations to finance a conspiracy-theory-driven Facebook meme campaign to support Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. That year, Beal contributed $350,000 to RallyPAC, which was founded and managed by Jake Hoffman, according to Federal Election Commission Records. Most of those donations were funneled toward an obscure media advisory firm called Rally Forge LLC for the purpose of what was only described at the time as "social media." The owner of the firm is the same Jake Hoffman who ran RallyPAC. CNBC verified that he owned both organizations by matching the address on the PAC's initial FEC registration form to Hoffman's business address in Queen Creek, Arizona. His name appears on both the PAC's forms as its treasurer and as the statutory agent for vendor Rally Forge. Hoffman's LinkedIn account shows he is the president and CEO of the media consulting business. The PAC made four payments totaling $316,000 to Hoffman's company. He confirmed to CNBC that he then put some of his firm's content on a Facebook channel titled "I Love My Country." The material posted on the site during the period from the first payment to Rally Forge in September 2016 into the first week of November includes right-wing memes that touched on a wide range of conspiratorial talking points against the Democratic nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton. The memes quoted Trump's accusations that Clinton had been controlled by Wall Street executives and also compared her email scandal to the secret recordings made by disgraced President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Hoffman said that his social media campaign reached millions of voters in the climactic months of the 2016 presidential election. "The digital creative my firm produced was delivered through channels like 'I Love My Country' and reached tens of millions of people in the final weeks of the 2016 election," Hoffman said. "RallyPAC, in collaboration with Rally Forge LLC, ran the most impactful digital operation in 2016 with little resources, given the historic levels of spending by both Democrats and Republicans alike." CNBC couldn't verify Hoffman's claims about the posts reaching that many people. The "I Love My Country" page had more than 120,000 followers as of Tuesday. Hoffman did not answer follow-up requests for information about who works for him and to show specific examples of his own work. Rally Forge's website says it "only takes on clients that we believe in" and "we only work with those that fight for truth." According to a video recording posted on his Twitter account, he attended Trump's inaugural and is pictured with Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. A Facebook representative did not return a request for comment. Beal, the super PAC's sole donor, declined to comment through a representative. However, people close to Beal expressed concern about how his money was being used and questioned whether the PAC was a scam. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I have a personal beef with scam PACs, this possibly being one of them. It really pisses me off to see this," said one of the Beal associates. This person added that Beal does not recall his motivation for writing checks to Hoffman's PAC three years ago, nor does he remember speaking with Hoffman during the campaign. Beal, according to this person, has not heard from him since Trump's election. Beal is the founder and chairman of Texas-based Beal Bank. Forbes ranks him as having a net worth of $9 billion. He is also a household name among poker fans, as he has taken on some of the world's top players. He created his own pro-Trump super PAC, called Save America From Its Government, during the last presidential election. He spent over $3 million funding it. Beal also acted as an economic policy advisor to Trump's campaign. Beal is listed as Daniel Beal on FEC filings. He is known as Andrew, which is his middle name. The revelations about Hoffman come a year after Facebook deleted hundreds of U.S. accounts that peddled fake news to voters during the 2016 election. "The people behind the activity also post the same click bait posts in dozens of Facebook Groups, often hundreds of times in a short period, to drum up traffic for their websites," Facebook announced at the time. Hoffman's company also has done work for the nonprofit right-wing organization Turning Point USA, according to Turning Point's latest tax filing, which covers a year from June 2016 through June 2017. The organization, founded by staunch Trump supporter Charlie Kirk, contracted Rally Forge for media and advertising services, the filing shows. The "I Love My Country" page has dozens of memes highlighting comments Kirk has made about government overreach while blasting Democrats for having what they describe as a "liberal agenda." The page's most recent post claims Planned Parenthood is an "abortion factory" and "it's killing innocent children." The site has a video section with clips featuring titles such as "Socialism is Slavery of all to All" and "Victimhood is all about Power." While it is not illegal for super PACs to dedicate their finances to such trolling campaigns, ethics experts warn that similar campaigns are ongoing in the buildup to the 2020 election particularly as right-wing groups look to undermine Democrats who could potentially challenge Trump. "This is a very active social media with these people trying to tell Democratic activists who to pick and not to pick," said Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer in President George W. Bush's administration. "The PACs are probably paying for that. It isn't just bloggers at home." Painter cited social media attacks against former Vice President Joe Biden, who has not declared whether he will run, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Biden is currently embroiled in a controversy, with two women claiming they felt uncomfortable when he touched them without their permission. Klobuchar has been accused of having a bad temper and treating her staff poorly. Painter said Hoffman likely created the super PAC to line his own pockets as well as to help Trump. "Super PACs are a way to make money, and this guy has a huge incentive to do this. There's a lack of a system administering it, and that leads to self-dealing," he added. Facebook itself explained that fake news accounts and postings are often created for financial benefit. "These networks increasingly use sensational political content regardless of its political slant to build an audience and drive traffic to their websites, earning money for every visitor to the site," Facebook said last year. San Jose, California GerardoBrucker | Getty Images Silicon Valley's high home prices aren't the only thing prospective homebuyers there should worry about. There are also the property taxes. Homeowners in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara region of California had the highest rise in property taxes in the nation from 2007 to 2017, a median increase of $2,625, according to an analysis by ValuePenguin. The personal finance website analyzed the median real estate taxes paid and home value in 283 of the nation's largest metropolitan areas to determine how property taxes have changed in that 10-year period. Residents in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara region paid a median tax bill of $6,966. The median home value there in 2017 was $957,700, ValuePenguin found. The average U.S. property tax bill has gone up by $481 between 2007 and 2017, according to the analysis. Kingston, New York, where residents saw their taxes go up by a median $1,573 from 2007 to 2017, was the place with second-highest increase in property levies. The median tax bill there was $5,499 in 2017. Santa Cruz-Watsonville, California, rounded out the top three, with a median property tax hike of $1,540 in that 10-year span. The median property tax bill there was $5,128 in 2017. Property taxes are used to fund state and local governments, which then use the money on police departments, road maintenance and public schools. "These account for very large amounts of your take-home pay," said Maxime Croll, head of insurance at ValuePenguin. "You should understand and consider those property taxes before you buy your home." Higher values; higher taxes Properties offered for sale in San Francisco Barbara Muncker | picture alliance | Getty Images Calculating affordability Tony Anderson | DigitalVision | Getty Images SHANGHAI, April 2 (Reuters) - China has chosen a new chairman for sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp (CIC), two sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, filling the top role after two years of vacancy. Peng Chun, chairman of Bank of Communications (BoCom), will become CIC's chairman, three people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. BoCom is China's fifth-biggest lender. "Chairman Peng has already left for CIC. BoCom will make a public announcement soon," one of the sources said. CIC managed $941 billion as of the end of 2017, the most recent year for which a figure is available. It could not immediately be reached for comment. BoCom declined to comment. Bloomberg reported Peng's move earlier on Tuesday. Peng, 57, had a stint at CIC as vice general manager between 2010 and 2013. Headquartered in Beijing, CIC was founded in 2007 to help China earn a higher return on its foreign exchange reserves. CIC has invested in overseas companies including online property rental firm Airbnb, Canadian mining company Teck Resources to U.S. private equity house Blackstone . (Reporting by Li Zheng and Andrew Galbraith Writing by Samuel Shen Editing by Tony Munroe & Kim Coghill) -sources@ * Oil-purchase strategy blamed for record Q4 loss of $700 mln * Unipec bought 4.2 mln bpd of crude for Sinopec in 2018 * Trader expected to be less active after loss, change of strategy * Expected to trade more conservatively after Chen Bo departure SINGAPORE, April 2 (Reuters) - China's Sinopec Corp has ended a five-year crude oil purchasing strategy to rein in the speculative derivatives activity of its trading arm Unipec after a record trading loss late last year, four people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Sinopec, Asia's largest crude oil buyer and its largest refiner, in January abandoned a buying formula used since 2014 to establish performance targets for Unipec and aimed at driving down its crude feedstock costs to a pre-set discount to global oil benchmarks. Under the strategy, Unipec had raked in a total 16.6 billion yuan ($2.5 billion) in net profit between 2014 and 2017, including a record year in 2016 at 6.17 billion yuan, according to Sinopec's annual reports. The formula-based cost target, though, was blamed by two of the sources for driving speculative trades that led to a nearly $700 million loss for Unipec in the final quarter of 2018. "The headquarters believes that the purchasing scheme may be accountable for the trading debacle," said one of the sources, "They are struggling to find a better way to manage (Sinopec's) buying, but chose to drop it for now." The changes are expected to make the state trader a less active player than in recent years in both physical and derivatives markets, the sources said, although it is not possible to quantify the exact impact on volumes. Unipec cut back its over-the-counter (OTC) paper activities shortly after news of the fourth-quarter loss broke, said a trader active in derivatives. "They used to be doing more OTC trades, like taking positions in forward curves for Brent and Dubai, but I don't see them doing that anymore," the trader said. Ending the purchase strategy will see Unipec - which last year bought some 4.2 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil for Sinopec refineries - reduce its activities in both paper and physical markets, said the sources. The sources declined to be named because of the sensitive nature of the matter. Sinopec declined to comment on the change in purchasing strategy. Adding in global oil products trading, crude oil for China's independent refiners and liquefied natural gas, Unipec handled more than 7.3 million bpd of oil equivalent last year, on par with top independent trader Vitol SA. MORE CONSERVATIVE APPROACH Over 2017 and 2018, Unipec was asked to buy crude at $1 a barrel below a weighted average of benchmark crudes U.S. West Texas Intermediate, North Sea Brent and Middle East Dubai, two of the sources said. "That's an aggressive goal but it gave Unipec large scope to optimize purchasing cost through active paper and physical trades, and also the freedom to market their trading cargoes to refineries as they saw fit," said a trading executive familiar with Unipec's strategies. But it also was a factor in the fourth-quarter loss, which occurred amid an unexpected plunge in global oil prices that caught many traders off-guard, and led to Unipec posting a net loss of 4 billion yuan for the whole of 2018 as reported by Sinopec last month. The trading executive said the trader would likely now be less active and less aggressive in benchmark spot markets such as Dubai and curb its exposure in Brent-WTI spread trades. Sinopec in January blamed "inappropriate trading strategies" in crude oil hedging for the record fourth-quarter loss, without giving further details. With the departure of former president, Chen Bo, who was suspended in December for the loss, traders expected Unipec to err on the conservative side under new management. Chen, a chemical engineer by training who joined Unipec around 1993 as a crude desk operator and worked his way up to the presidency in 2013, was known in the industry as an aggressive front-line crude oil trader. The new acting president Chen Gang, a Unipec veteran, has spent most his career on the products desk and risk management. ($1 = 6.7096 yuan) (Reporting by Chen Aizhu; Additional reporting by Florence Tan; Editing by Tom Hogue) AMSTERDAM, April 2 (Reuters) - The Dutch security service advised the government on Tuesday not to use technology from countries with active cyber-hacking campaigns against the Netherlands, such as China and Russia. The recommendation came as the Dutch government is weighing options for a new 5G telecommunications network in the coming years and seeks to replace its domestic emergency services network, known as C2000. The AIVD security agency flagged Chinese and Russian attempts at digital espionage as a major security risk. "It is undesirable for the Netherlands to exchange sensitive information or for vital processes to depend on the hardware or software of companies from countries running active cyber programs against Dutch interests," the AIVD said in its annual report. Prime Minister Mark Rutte has refused to rule out doing business with Chinese technology companies, even as key allies the United States and Australia restricted Huawei Technologies from accessing its next-generation mobile networks on national-security grounds. Washington has said that Huawei is at the beck and call of the Chinese state, warning that its network equipment may contain "back doors" that could open them up to cyber espionage. Huawei says such concerns are unfounded. (Reporting by Anthony Deutsch Editing by Robin Pomeroy) WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said on Tuesday that Congress should consider whether to shrink the government's emergency oil reserve as the boom in domestic oil production has cut reliance on petroleum imports. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which stores crude oil in a series of salt caverns at heavily guarded sites on the Texas and Louisiana coasts, was authorized by Congress after the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s sparked a U.S. fuel crisis. It has been tapped by presidents during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and conflicts in oil-producing countries. Most recently, it was tapped by President Barack Obama in June 2011 in coordination with partners in the International Energy Agency (IEA) responding to supply disruptions in Libya and other countries. The SPR currently holds 649.1 million barrels of oil, far more than required under agreements with the IEA. Perry, noting that the United States was now the globe's largest oil and gas producer, said the world had changed since the reserve was created and that Congress should debate the proper size of the SPR. "Do we need that big of a reserve, particularly with the growth of the pipeline infrastructure we have and the growth in that infrastructure that's going to occur over the next decade?" Perry said during a Senate hearing. Perry suggested the bigger network of pipelines could ease the transfer of crude from oilfields to consumers. An appropriate topic for Congress to debate is whether the government should rent part of the reserve to the private sector for storage, Perry said. Over the past several years, Congress has authorized sales of nearly 290 million barrels to fund SPR improvements, the federal budget and a drug program. The sales, some of which have occurred, will reduce the reserve's size to about 410 million barrels by the end of 2027. Last month, the Energy Department authorized a sale of up to 6 million barrels mandated by law to improve the SPR. Metal pipelines and other SPR infrastructure are constantly exposed to moist, salty air. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Peter Cooney) * Exxon prepares to sell onshore, offshore fields in Nigeria * Also seeking sale of assets in Equatorial Guinea, Chad * Top U.S. oil company focusing on U.S. shale, Guyana LONDON, April 2 (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil recently held talks on the sale of a suite of oil and gas fields in Nigeria as the company focuses on new developments in U.S. shale and Guyana, industry and banking sources told Reuters. The potential disposals are expected to include stakes in onshore and offshore fields and could raise up to $3 billion, two sources said. "Exxon is actively divesting in Nigeria," one source who was briefed on the divestment plans said. Exxon declined to comment. The Irving, Texas-based company is one of the largest oil and gas producers in Nigeria, with 106 operated platforms. Its oil output in the West African country reached 225,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2017, its website says. Exxon officials have held talks in recent weeks with several Nigerian companies to gauge their interest in the fields. One source said Exxon was soon due to open a "data room" - which would provide technical information on the fields, such as seismic and production details - in Nigeria. The discussions focused on a number of onshore fields Exxon shares in joint ventures with Nigerian state oil firm NNPC, including oil mining leases 66, 68, 70 and 104, one source said. Exxon's share of oil production in those fields reached 120,000 bpd in 2017, the last year for which data was available. Exxon is also weighing the possible sale of stakes in offshore fields in Nigeria, two sources said. It is looking into offering for sale assets in Equatorial Guinea and Chad, according to two sources. The Nigerian government has in the last decade supported a drive by domestic firms such as Oando, Seplat and privately held Aiteo to expand their operations in the country as international companies including Royal Dutch Shell sought to lower their presence due to oil spills resulting from pipeline sabotage. Exxon recently launched the sale of its stake in Azerbaijan's largest oilfield, which would mark its retreat from the former Soviet state after 25 years. Exxon announced earlier this year plans to boost its capital spending from $26 billion in 2018 to $30 billion in 2019 and up to $35 billion next year as it seeks to develop oilfields in Guyana and the U.S. Permian basin as well as gas projects in Mozambique and the U.S. Gulf Coast. In an analyst presentation last month, Exxon said it would accelerate its divestments to around $15 billion by 2021. (Additional reporting by Gary McWilliams in Houston; Editing by Dale Hudson) by Sumon Corraya Created in 2007 by Fr Franco Cagnasso, the initiative attracts young people even from the remotest parts of the country, and has become a reference point amid Dhakas chaotic life. Dhaka (AsiaNews) The Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME) has developed a one-year, eight-part plan for personal and spiritual discernment called the Samuel Programme, which is aimed at Bangladeshi youth. Created in 2007, the programme is the brainchild of Fr Franco Cagnasso. Sister Annamaria Panza, of the Missionaries of the Immaculate Conception [MDL), a female congregation inspired by PIME, currently runs it. "The purpose of this programme is not to turn all young people into priests or nuns, but to help them understand that God has sent them into this world for a good reason," Sister Annamaria told AsiaNew. Its goal is to help Catholic youth understand their vocation in their religious and marital life. The programme includes a number of meetings during the year. Usually the sisters invite local missionaries and others who work abroad in various parts of the world to speak and share their life experiences with frankness. The latter is the key to the success of the initiative, so much so that for many young people coming from the remotest parts of the country the programme has become a point of reference amid Dhakas chaotic life. One of the eight meetings was held on 29 March at the Catholic church of Mirpur, founded by the PIME Fathers almost 26 years ago and handed over to the local archdiocese at the end of 2018. Some 53 college-level students, from local hostels, seminaries and novitiates, attended the event whose topic was prayer. Sister Annamaria explains that "not all the young people we receive take religious vows. But everyone remembers us fondly. "Through this programme, they learn to live their lives honestly, to follow Christian values. God has a plan for all of us, and it is our task to carry it out. If we practise good ideals of life, we are also ready to hear God's calling." Every year the programme organises a visit outside Dhaka to a charity, where people serve without personal interest. "We invite them to participate and often they continue to carry out works of charity in the family, even after the end of the course," the nun said. Father Dominic Montu Hasda, who is an ethnic Santal, is a PIME missionary in Papua New Guinea. In his address, he spoke about the mission in that country, which has "a Christian majority, but has great need for missionaries for lack of local religious vocations". Labanno Cruze, who joined an MDL school for nuns in 2017, said that she understood her vocation thanks to this programme and realised the importance of prayer". April 2 (Reuters) - The chief executive of the Tennessee Valley Authority said on Tuesday the U.S.-owned power generator expects to get more than 60 percent of its energy from non-carbon-emitting sources by 2020, compared with over 50 percent in 2018. Bill Johnson, who turned 65 in January, announced his retirement as CEO at TVA in November. His last day is Friday. He is expected to be named as the new CEO of California energy company PG&E Corp, which sought bankruptcy protection in January amid potentially staggering liabilities related to wildfires, according to a source familiar with the matter. Johnson would not comment on the PG&E rumors. Since Johnson became CEO of TVA in 2013, the company has spent about $15 billion to modernize its generating fleet, reduced carbon emissions by retiring coal units and cut debt by $3.5 billion, all while keeping consumer electric prices basically flat. "Our generating fleet is now very diverse and clean," Johnson said, noting the changes were driven by the mandate in the TVA Act "to produce energy at the lowest feasible rate." TVA's energy mix is now about 40 percent nuclear, 20 percent natural gas, a little over 20 percent coal, 11-13 percent hydro and the rest renewables and energy efficiency. That compares with 60 percent coal, little gas, 30 percent nuclear and the rest hydro in 2005. TVA shut several coal-fired units over the past few years despite efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to prop up the coal industry. In February, TVA's board voted to shut two more coal plants - Bull Run in Tennessee by 2020 and Paradise in Kentucky by 2023 - for economic reasons despite strong opposition from the Trump administration. When those plants shut, Johnson said coal will only represent about 17 percent of TVA's energy mix. "I expect the fleet to look pretty similar for the next decade," Johnson said, noting there is "the potential to add a significant amount of solar if customers demand it." TVA signed agreements for about 700 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity for specific customers, including Alphabet Inc's Google and Facebook Inc. On Monday, the company issued a request for proposals to add 200 MW of solar power. "It would not surprise me to see solar get into the thousands of megawatts," Johnson said, noting more solar could require more gas-fired capacity to balance the renewable energy source when the sun stops shining. (Reporting by Scott DiSavino Editing by James Dalgleish) April 2 (Reuters) - The founder and former chief executive of Jumio Inc will pay $17.4 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges that he defrauded investors in the mobile payments and identity verification start-up before it went bankrupt, the regulator said on Tuesday. Daniel Mattes was accused of overstating the Palo Alto, California-based company's revenue more than tenfold, making $14.6 million by selling his shares from April 2014 to February 2015, hiding the sales from Jumio directors, and falsely telling Jumio lawyers that the directors approved the sales. Mattes, 46, who lives in Wels, Austria, also told at least one investor he was not selling his shares because there was "lots of great stuff coming up" at the privately held company and "he'd be stupid to sell at this point," the SEC said. The SEC said Mattes agreed to disgorge $16.76 million including interest and pay a $640,000 civil penalty. Former Chief Financial Officer Chad Starkey will pay $421,000 to settle SEC charges related to Jumio's financials and Mattes' stock sales. Neither Mattes nor Starkey admitted or denied wrongdoing. "Company executives must provide investors with accurate information irrespective of whether their companies are publicly or privately traded," Erin Schneider, the SEC associate regional director in San Francisco, said in a statement. Jumio filed for Chapter 11 protection in March 2016, after restating its financials the prior September, and was bought by the venture capital company Centana Growth Partners. Airbnb, Coinbase and WeWork are among Jumio's current clients. Mattes is now chief executive of 42.cx, an artificial intelligence startup he founded that is based in Vienna. In a phone interview, Mattes said he was "a little bit emotional about this whole topic" because he was no longer with Jumio, but wanted to "move on with my life" and agreed to settle. "I created a market over the years, ramped the company up," Mattes said. "The company was worth a lot, then it was worth nothing, and now it's thriving and even better than ever." A lawyer for Starkey did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York Editing by Leslie Adler) (Adds investor comment, market details) BRASILIA, April 2 (Reuters) - Senior Brazilian officials charged with steering pension reform through Congress insisted on Tuesday that they had ended recent political finger-pointing that threw the government's key reform bill into doubt, but some U.S. big banks were not convinced. Brazilian stocks hit a nearly three-month low and the real fell to a six-month low last week on growing signs of political infighting and skepticism that President Jair Bolsonaro was fully committed to the political consensus-building needed to get lawmakers to pass his pension reform bill. The message on Tuesday, however, from Vice President Hamilton Mourao, Labor and Pensions Secretary Rogerio Marinho and the government's leader in the lower house, Vitor Hugo, was that Bolsonaro is listening and ready to work with Congress. "A page had been turned," Hugo said. But it will take more than rallying cries of unity in Brasilia to convince some of Wall Street's biggest beasts that their clients should put any more of their money into Brazil. Strategists at Morgan Stanley and Citi this week issued notes recommending caution, warning that although last week's slide makes Brazilian assets more attractive, it is still too early to load up on them. "Brazil is entering crunch time in its pension reform process, with a corresponding increase in volatility," Citi's emerging market credit team wrote in a note. Both sovereign and corporate Brazilian high-yield bonds are the most vulnerable across the emerging market fixed-income universe, they added. Markets have since recovered from last week's slide, but some investors argue they are still not seeing enough compensation for the risks involved. "Risk premia across (Brazilian) assets remains relatively low compared to past episodes of stress, which make us reluctant to add risk at current levels," wrote Morgan Stanley strategists on Tuesday, adding that they will only consider adding exposure to Brazil if the real falls to 4.20 per dollar. The real closed on Tuesday at around 3.8550 per dollar, pulling back from last week's slide past 4 per dollar. The government's plan targets over 1 trillion reais ($260 billion) in savings over the next decade from a radical overhaul of the social security system to shore up the public finances, revive the economy and boost investor confidence in Brazil. But the proposal is likely to be watered down as lawmakers extract concessions and exemptions. A survey run by transparency group Atlas Politico on Tuesday showed that the government currently has the support of 171 of the 308 lawmakers needed for the bill's passage in the lower house, which would send the proposal to the Senate. (Reporting by Jamie McGeever and Marcela Ayres in Brasilia Additional reporting by Rodrigo Viga Gaier in Rio de Janeiro Writing by Jamie McGeever; editing by Diane Craft and Susan Thomas) (Recasts lead, adds background) MILAN, April 2 (Reuters) - Exor, the holding company of the Agnelli family, remains committed to Fiat Chrysler (FCA), chairman John Elkann said, in comments that may dampen speculation the Italian carmaker could be the target of a takeover. "Our permanence in the capital of FCA has given its successive leadership teams the latitude to plan for the long term rather than having to react to daily pressures," John Elkann, who is also Fiat Chrysler chairman, said in a letter to Exor shareholders published late on Monday. "This approach and mindset remain as relevant to us today as ever and our commitment to FCA and to participating in its bold and profitable future is also unchanged." Exor, Fiat's biggest shareholder with a stake of 29 percent, has been diversifying its asset base in recent years after buying U.S. reinsurer PartnerRe in 2015. Media reports last month said France's Renault wanted to restart merger talks with Japan's Nissan Motor . within 12 months, after which it could be eyeing a bid for Fiat. The president of Peugeot family holding company FFP said he would support a new deal and suggested Fiat Chrysler was among the options. Elkann said the next 20 years in the car industry were set to witness a great level of change and suggested the Agnelli family, the founders of Fiat, would not passively stand by. "We are determined that we and Fiat Chrysler will play our part actively and ambitiously in this new and exciting era," he said in the letter. After the death of former CEO Sergio Marchionne last year, speculation about the future of Fiat Chrysler has intensified. Marchionne, who had created the group by merging a troubled Fiat with Chrysler of the U.S., had advocated industry mergers to share the cost of building electric and self-driving cars. Carmakers around the world are looking to tie-ups to cope with rising competition, the rise of electrification and the threat of a trade war between the United States and China. (Reporting by Stephen Jewkes Editing by Silvia Aloisi/Keith Weir) north@ (Recasts) BANGKOK, April 2 (Reuters) - Thailand is providing delegates to an Asian finance minister and central bank summit with face masks this week as smoggy air pollution hits alarming levels. The air quality index (AQI) in Chiang Rai, where Thailand will host the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors' meeting this week, reached levels considered unhealthy at 240 to 250, government data shows. "Masks were prepared, but (we) have not seen anybody wearing them in the hotel," Nadhavudh Dhamasiri, a senior Finance Ministry official, told Reuters. Some 300 officials are expected for the meeting, with some already arriving. There are no plans to change the meeting venue or schedules, officials said. "We have not prepared special measures because the dust situation is improving and has not affected the meeting schedules," Nadhavudh added. Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha traveled north to see the pollution for himself and ordered agencies to alleviate the problem within seven days, starting with 1,900 spots across nine provinces, including Chiang Rai. The government has already given out nearly 2 million masks to residents in the area, he said. "The smog problem in nine northern provinces is due to agriculture burning in forests, which happens every year," Sate Sampattagul, Head of the Climate Change Data Centre at Chiang Mai University, told Reuters. The smog was worse this year because of a drought and more illegal burning, he added. (Reporting by Panarat Thepgumpanat, Orathai Siring and Satawasin Staporncharnchai; writing by Chayut Setboonsarng; editing by Christian Schmollinger) - panel chair@ (Adds FAA comment, background) WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee is investigating claims by a number of whistleblowers that aviation safety inspectors, including some who worked to evaluate the now-grounded Boeing 737 MAX, were not properly trained or certified, the committee chairman said on Tuesday. More than 300 Boeing 737 MAX jets have been grounded worldwide after two crashes - in Indonesia in October and in Ethiopia last month - killed nearly 350 people. Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican, said in a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration that the FAA may have been notified about the training and certification concerns as early as August 2018 - before the Indonesia crash - citing information from the whistleblowers and documents. The letter did not disclose if the whistleblowers worked for Boeing, the FAA or another entity. The FAA has come under criticism for delegating some of its certification responsibilities to Boeing and other manufacturers. In his letter, Wicker asked acting FAA administrator Daniel Elwell to provide answers to detailed questions by April 16. Asked about the claims, the FAA referred to Elwell's testimony at a Senate hearing last week in which he said "the FAA welcomes external review of our systems, processes, and recommendations." The FAA has a "very good whistleblower program", Elwell said at the hearing, and added: "There were no comments made by employees to our knowledge." Wicker's letter said the whistleblowers alleged that safety inspectors without proper safety training could have been participants on the Flight Standardization Board that evaluated the 737 MAX 8 to "determine the requirements for pilot type ratings, to develop minimum training recommendations, and to ensure initial flightcrew member competency." Wicker's letter also says the committee is "led to believe that an FAA investigation into these allegations may have been completed recently." Boeing said last week that it was reprogramming software on its 737 MAX passenger jet to prevent erroneous data from triggering an anti-stall system that is under mounting scrutiny following the two deadly nose-down crashes. The worlds largest planemaker said the anti-stall system, which is believed to have repeatedly forced the nose lower in the Indonesia accident, would only do so one time after sensing a problem, giving pilots more control. On Monday, Boeing and the FAA said Boeing's planned software fix and training revision would be submitted to the FAA for approval in "the coming weeks." The company previously said it planned to deliver the fix for government approval by last week. (Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Sonya Hepinstall) Arabia@ (Adds nuclear regulators not responding to senator's question about the approvals on information sharing with Saudi Arabia, last two paragraphs) WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - U.S. senators from both parties on Tuesday asked Energy Secretary Rick Perry for details about recent approvals for companies to share nuclear energy information with Saudi Arabia, with the lawmakers expressing concern about possible development of atomic weapons. Saudi Arabia has engaged in "many deeply troubling actions and statements that have provoked alarm in Congress," Senators Bob Menendez, a Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Republican, told Perry in a letter, a copy of which was seen by Reuters. The senators said Congress was beginning to reevaluate the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and they believe Washington should not be providing nuclear technology or information to Saudi Arabia now. The Trump administration has been quietly negotiating a deal that would potentially help Saudi Arabia build two reactors. Last week news reports revealed that since November 2017, Perry has authorized so-called Part 810 approvals allowing U.S. companies to share sensitive nuclear information with the kingdom. The approvals were kept from the public and from Congress. The senators asked Perry to provide them by April 10 with the names of the companies that got the 810 approvals, what was in the authorizations, and why the companies asked that the approvals be kept secret. U.S. Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat, also asked the Energy Department in a separate letter what was in the approvals. While 810 agreements are routine, the Obama administration made them available for the public to read at Energy Department headquarters. Lawmakers say the department is legally required to inform Congress about the approvals. Perry approved the seven recent authorizations as the administration has tried to hash out nonproliferation standards with Saudi Arabia. Such a pact, known as a 123 agreement, would have to be agreed before U.S. companies can share physical exports of materials and equipment to build reactors. The kingdom has resisted standards on reprocessing spent fuel and enriching uranium, two potential paths to making nuclear weapons. The United States has been competing with South Korea, France, Russia and China on a potential deal to help build reactors in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is expected to announce the winner this year. Lawmakers from both parties have been concerned about Saudi Arabia's bombing campaigns in Yemen, which is on the brink of famine, and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, last October in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Concern in Congress grew last year after the kingdom's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told CBS that "Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible." Perry has said the 810 approvals were kept from the public for corporate proprietary reasons. He has also said that if Saudi Arabia relies on China or Russia for building nuclear reactors those two countries don't give a "tinker's damn" about non-proliferation. Many non-proliferation experts dispute the notion that a deal with China or Russia would be riskier. These people say the United States has many other levers it can pull to influence nuclear behavior. At another Senate hearing, the five members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, including Chairman Kristine Svinicki, would not say whether the NRC raised any concerns over the 810 approvals in a required consultation with the Energy Department. Svinicki said the NRC's consulting role on the approvals is narrow and delegated to staff. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat who asked the question of the NRC at the hearing, told Reuters in an interview that the commissioners' lack of knowledge about the approvals was "stunning." "It's kind of scary because we do rely on them to provide input into this process and not a single commissioner knew anything about what input they may or may not have provided." (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by David Gregorio and James Dalgleish) source@ * Firms offer to sell assets in Spain, Belgium, Britain - source * Goal of 400-500 mln euros in synergies would not be affected * Offer is "extensive" - Thyssenkrupp CEO (Recasts, adds details from source, context) FRANKFURT/DUESSELDORF, Germany, April 2 (Reuters) - T hyssenkrupp and Tata Steel see little scope for making more concessions to try to win regulatory approval for a planned joint venture, a person familiar with the matter said, casting doubt over whether the deal will go ahead. The firms, which have been working for three years on a deal that would create Europe's second-biggest steelmaker, submitted proposals to the European Commission on Monday aimed at addressing its concerns over the deal's impact on competition. Thyssenkrupp Chief Executive Guido Kerkhoff, who is currently trying to break up the elevators-to-submarines conglomerate, has in the past said it would not be a disaster if the joint venture did not go ahead. The Commission has until June 5 to review the firms' proposals and make a decision. The source said the companies' concessions included selling two hot-dip galvanizing plants in Spain and Belgium that supply the automotive industry. They also proposed selling packaging steel activities operated by Tata Steel in Britain and Belgium, the source said, adding the Commission had dropped its concerns in the area of electrical steel. "The offer is extensive and substantial. At the same time, it is acceptable to the joint venture partners and no risk to the industrial logic of the joint venture," Kerkhoff said in a statement on Tuesday. Thyssenkrupp declined to comment on the contents of the proposal. Tata Steel was not immediately available for comment. The source said the groups would not make far-reaching concessions that would question the entire joint venture, which was set up to reduce overcapacity and create a stronger and more competitive player. Along with packaging, automotive steel has been one of the areas of competitive concern for the Commission. A second source with direct knowledge of the matter said selling Galmed, Thyssenkrupp's hot-dip galvanizing line in Spain, would not be enough to win over the Commission as it also has concerns in markets such as Germany, France and the Benelux countries. The planned joint venture is targeting 400-500 million euros ($448-$560 million) in annual synergies, a goal that would still be achievable under the proposals made on Monday, the first source said. Overall, the assets offered for sale account for a low single-digit percentage of the joint venture's pro-forma sales of 17 billion euros, that source added. Thyssenkrupp and Tata Steel could limit the field of potential buyers, which might include Salzgitter and ArcelorMittal, to industry players, the source said, adding materials supply contracts could be an added incentive. ($1 = 0.8927 euros) (Additional reporting by Foo Yun Chee in Brussels; Editing by Kathrin Jones, Keith Weir and Mark Potter) involving Steve Wynn@ (Adds statement from Wynn's lawyer, details from report, comment from Wynn Resorts CEO) BOSTON, April 2 (Reuters) - Massachusetts gaming regulators on Tuesday released an investigative report concluding that former executives of Wynn Resorts Ltd concealed sexual misconduct allegations against the casino operator's billionaire founder, Steve Wynn. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission released the report at the start of a three-day hearing focused on whether Wynn Resorts should retain a license needed to run a $2.6 billion casino built outside of Boston expected to open in June. Brian Kelly, Steve Wynn's lawyer, said his client "denies all allegations of non-consensual sex and nothing in this report changes that." The report by the commission's investigations and enforcement bureau followed a January 2018 article by The Wall Street Journal detailing allegations that the billionaire had engaged in a decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct. His subsequent exit as the company's chief executive and sale of his stake in Wynn Resorts made him one of the most prominent executives to lose his job amid the #MeToo movement, which has highlighted longstanding patterns of sexual harassment and abuse in major U.S. institutions. The report recommended commissioners consider recent reforms Wynn Resorts has adopted. The company said it has improved its human resources functions, arranged for Wynn to leave without severance and parted ways with anyone who did not investigate or report allegations against him. Wynn Resorts Chief Executive Matt Maddox said he was "deeply remorseful" for what happened. Wynn Resorts shares were up 4.29 percent at $134.89. Union Gaming analyst John DeCree in a report said he expected the company will keep its license but be forced to pay a fine and face additional oversight. The Las Vegas-based company received its Massachusetts license in 2013, allowing it to move forward with building the 671-room "Encore Boston Harbor" in Everett, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts investigators concluded that over several years, some executives and employees disregarded company policies when it came to sexual misconduct allegations against Wynn involving other employees. The 199-page report said certain executives also took steps to conceal allegations involving Wynn, leading in one case to a confidential $7.5 million settlement in 2005 with a manicurist. The report said those actions "appear to have contributed to a culture where employees were reluctant to report allegations against Mr. Wynn to management." The commission is not expected to issue a decision for several days or weeks. Nevada casino regulators, following a similar investigation, in February fined the company $20 million. (Reporting by Nate Raymond Editing by Scott Malone and Nick Zieminski) * Brent rises to $69.50, highest since mid-November * U.S. crude tops $62 for first time since early November * U.S. crude inventories seen lower in weekly reports * China's PMI eases concern about slowing oil demand (Updates prices, adds quotes, previous dateline TOKYO) LONDON, April 2 (Reuters) - Oil hit a 2019 high above $69 a barrel on Tuesday on the prospect that more sanctions against Iran and further Venezuelan disruptions could deepen an OPEC-led supply cut, and as the market became less worried that demand may slow. The United States is considering more sanctions against Iran, whose oil exports have been halved by existing measures, an official said. A key crude terminal in Venezuela, also under U.S. sanctions, has halted operations again. Brent crude rose 10 cents to $69.11 a barrel by 0826 GMT, having touched $69.50, the highest since mid-November. U.S. crude was up 11 cents at $61.70 after rising above $62 for the first time since early November. "The supply cuts have been there for a while but Venezuela is not improving," said Olivier Jakob, analyst at Petromatrix. "That is taking a lot of oil away from the market." Further supply losses from Iran and Venezuela could widen an OPEC-led production cut that took effect in January, designed to prevent a price-sapping rise in inventories. Supply from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries hit a four-year low in March, a Reuters survey found, because top exporter Saudi Arabia cut more than it had agreed to and due to the involuntary declines. This week's reports on U.S. supplies are expected to show crude inventories fell, a sign that the OPEC curbs are having the impact producers intended. Six analysts polled by Reuters estimated, on average, that crude stocks fell by 1.2 million barrels in the week to March 29. The first of this week's supply reports, from the American Petroleum Institute, is due at 2030 GMT. Oil's pattern on the price charts could lead to further gains. Brent is trading just below the 200-day moving average and a move above this mark would provide additional technical support, Jakob said. Healthy data on the world's biggest economies, the United States and China, also bolstered prices. Figures showing a rebound in U.S. factory activity in March and a return to growth in Chinese manufacturing eased concern that an economic slowdown could weaken oil demand. "China's PMI number was the most significant monthly increase since 2012, which should ease concerns around a potential threat to oil demand," said Stephen Innes, head of trading and market strategy at SPI Asset Management. (Additional reporting by Aaron Sheldrick in Tokyo; Editing by Dale Hudson) by Nirmala Carvalho Members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh destroyed the Little Flower Higher Secondary School in Chinnasalem. Damages total US$ 145,000. Some women tried to strangle the nuns. Mumbai (AsiaNews) A mob of Hindu radicals devastated a Catholic school in Tamil Nadu and tried to strangle some of the teaching nuns. Their fury was sparked by the suicide of a 15-year-old girl, disappointed by her bad school results. "It is evident that the violence unleashed against the school and the destruction inflicted were premeditated and organised," said Sister Devaseer Mary. "The criminals wanted to strike at the nuns". Sister Devaseer Mary is the provincial superior of the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who run the Little Flower Higher Secondary School in Chinnasalem, about 260 kilometres south-west of Chennai (Madras), the capital of the State of Tamil Nadu. In an official statement released following the incident, the superior explains that the school was founded 74 years ago to provide an education to the children of poor families. At present, it has 2,150 students, including 117 very poor girls from neighbouring villages who are housed in the school hostel. Over the years, more than 45,000 students, boys and girls, have attended the school. All of them, regardless of ethnicity or religious beliefs, received a quality education, enabling them to have a dignified life and find their place in society. The attack follows the suicide of Poongulazhi, a 10th grade student. On 25 March, the young woman took her life in her village of Kallakurichi, not far from the high school she attended. The parents told the authorities that they did not find any farewell messages. The next day the parents, accompanied by 200 members of the ultra-nationalist Hindu paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), attacked the school and the nuns. The whole building was devastated: classrooms, desks, windows, auditoriums. The attackers did not spare the chapel, which was turned upside down, the statue of Our Lady decapitated, the altar smashed. A group of women even tried to strip the nuns and strangle them with their rosary beads. The damages to the school are estimated to be around 10 million rupees (US$ 145,000). The Council of Tamil Nadu bishops condemned the incident, calling on the government to immediately launch an investigation, take action against the guilty and protect the sisters and the school. For Sister Mary, "It is really painful and shocking that after carrying out murderous attacks on persons and causing deliberate destruction to the properties, the gangsters came along with the police to demand enhanced compensation which is not justifiable. It is a very cruel act which expresses their violent mindset. * President stands down after weeks of demonstrations Army chief of staff had demanded action to remove him * Pro-Bouteflika oligarchs had been banned from travel (Adds Bouteflika comments, background) By Lamine Chikhi and Hamid Ould Ahmed ALGIERS, April 2 (Reuters) - Algeria's ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika resigned on Tuesday, succumbing to six weeks of largely peaceful mass protests driven by youth and pressure from the powerful army against his 20-year rule. Hundreds took to the streets of the capital after state media announced the 82-year-old's departure, capping a wave of protests demanding the removal of an aging elite seen by many as out of touch with ordinary people and presiding over an economy riven by cronyism. Bouteflika's supporters had sought to stop the dissent by telling Algerians not to return to the dark days in the 90s when some 200,000 were killed in civil war, warning even of a scenario like in Syria, embroiled in an eight-year-long conflict. The protests stand in stark contrast to Algeria's neighbor Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in a NATO-backed uprising that took much of 2011 and sent the country into chaos. Only one person was confirmed to have died during the protests, a man around 60 years old who suffered a heart attack, with most rallies peaceful and with protesters cleaning up the streets before going home. Bouteflika announced he was standing down in a one-sentence statement carried by state news agency APS, followed by a letter - his primary means of communication since suffering a stroke in 2013 and disappearing from public view. "I have taken this step because I am keen to put an end to the current bickering," Bouteflika said in the letter. "I have taken the suitable measures needed for the continuity of the nation's institutions during the interim period." His departure came after the army chief of staff had dramatically ratcheted up the pressure, demanding immediate action to declare him unfit for office under the constitution. The military had stayed in their barracks during the protests but step by step increased pressure on Bouteflika's camp, first only indirectly in an army magazine saying the military shared the same vision as the people. Then chief of staff Lieutenant General Ahmed Gaed Salah proposed last week to invoke a constitutional clause to remove him. Bouteflika on Monday had said he would quit before the end of his term on April 28 without giving a date. He had also vowed to undertake unspecified measures for the sake of stability, triggering new protests by students demanding a new political system. Salah eventually said it was time to go for the only leader many Algerians have known, some 70 percent of whom are under 30 years old. "There is no more room to waste time ... We decided clearly ... to stand with the people so all their demands get fulfilled," Salah said after a meeting with senior officers, APS said. Hundreds took to the streets in the evening, waving Algerian flags or driving in convoys through the city center, where on Feb. 22 mass protests broke out. "The army and the people are one" and "Game over," banners read. Pressure had been building during the day with opposition groups demanding Bouteflika go immediately, while hundreds of students marched through the capital Algiers to demand the replacement of a political system widely seen as incapable of significant reform. "Bouteflika's decision (to resign by the end of his term) will change nothing," Mustapha Bouchachi, a lawyer and protest leader, told Reuters earlier on Tuesday. Bouteflika's resignation will put Abdelkader Bensalah, chairman of the upper house of parliament, in charge as caretaker president for 90 days until elections are held. Bouchachi had suggested Bouteflika's nomination of a caretaker government was a move to perpetuate the current political system. "What is important to us is that we do not accept the (new caretaker) government. Peaceful protests will continue." A veteran of Algeria's war for independence, Bouteflika was first elected president in 1999 and established himself by ending a civil war with Islamist militants that killed an estimated 200,000 people. But the country remains mired in corruption and, in a sign that the end for Bouteflika's rule had been approaching, several oligarchs close to his camp were banned from traveling abroad in the past few days, part of a crackdown against his allies. "The gang has made big money illegally taking advantage of its closeness with decision-makers," Salah said, according to APS. The protests have been driven by the country's youth and lawyers demanding the removal of a ruling elite seen by many as out of touch with ordinary Algerians. (Additional reporting by Mohamed Elsherif and Dalia Nehme Writing by Ulf Laessing Editing by John Stonestreet and James Dalgleish) * Brent rises to $69.50, highest since mid-November * Supply losses in Venezuela, Iran weigh * OPEC cuts more oil than pledged, Russia yet to reach target * Coming up: API data on U.S. crude stocks at 4:30 p.m. EDT (New throughout, updates prices, market activity and comments) NEW YORK, April 2 (Reuters) - Oil prices hit their highest of 2019 on Tuesday, with Brent crude approaching $70 a barrel, on the prospect that more sanctions against Iran and further Venezuelan disruptions could deepen an OPEC-led supply cut. Brent futures reached a session peak at $69.50 a barrel, the highest since Nov. 13. The global benchmark was 22 cents higher at $69.23 a barrel, a 0.3 percent gain, by 1:08 p.m. EDT (1708 GMT). U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude gained 75 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $62.34 a barrel. The session high was $62.50, the highest since Nov. 7. "Today's multi-month highs in WTI and Brent are keeping this bull move alive as prices are beginning to advance more than we had expected," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch and Associates. "But despite attainment of our $62 upside WTI target, we will caution against accepting profits prematurely given a recent burst of bullish momentum." The United States is considering more sanctions against Iran, the fourth-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), an official said. Meanwhile, a crude terminal in Venezuela, also under U.S. sanctions, has halted operations again due to power problems. Further supply losses from Iran and Venezuela could widen an OPEC-led production cut. OPEC supply hit a four-year low in March, a Reuters survey found, due to the involuntary declines and as top exporter Saudi Arabia cut more than agreed. Russia, the biggest non-OPEC producer in the so-called OPEC+ group, has yet to reach its production-cutting target. Russian oil output declined to 11.3 million barrels per day (bpd) last month, energy ministry data showed. While the country's output was down by around 112,000 bpd from the October 2018 level, Russia has pledged to cut output by 228,000 bpd from that level. Investors will watch weekly U.S. crude inventory data. Analysts in a Reuters poll estimated that stocks fell 1.2 million barrels in the week to March 29. Data from industry group the American Petroleum Institute is due out at 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT), while U.S. government data is to be released on Wednesday. Oil's pattern on the price charts could lead to further gains. Brent is just below the 200-day moving average and a move above this mark would boost technical support, said Olivier Jakob, analyst at Petromatrix. Investors have worried for months that weak global economic data could slow demand for crude, but healthier data this week from the United States and China bolstered prices. Figures showing a rebound in U.S. factory activity in March and a return to growth in Chinese manufacturing eased concerns about a global economic slowdown. (Reporting by Stephanie Kelly in New York; additional reporting by Alex Lawler in London and Aaron Sheldrick in Tokyo; Editing by Marguerita Choy and David Gregorio) Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan's president, looks on during a news conference at the Presidential Palace in Taipei, Taiwan, on Saturday, Jan. 5, 2019. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen has called for Chinese warplanes that cross a maritime line separating the two sides to be "forcefully expelled." Her comments in a Facebook post on Monday came after two Chinese fighter jets crossed a maritime line separating mainland China from the self-ruled island of Taiwan on Sunday. In a post showing the Taiwanese leader giving orders on the phone, Tsai condemned the incursions as an "outright provocation of regional security and stability." "I have ordered the military to forcefully expel any incursions across the 'median line' immediately," she said, according to a CNBC translation of her post written in Chinese. The so-called median line on the Taiwan Strait separates mainland China from the island. Taiwan scrambled aircraft to drive away the Chinese planes on Sunday, the self-ruled island's defense ministry said. China has repeatedly sent military aircraft and ships to circle Taiwan during drills in recent years and worked to isolate the island internationally. Beijing views Taiwan as a renegade Chinese province and has sought to bring the island under its control by force if necessary. According to risk consultancy Stratfor, the incident on Sunday is "one of the most serious incursions by People's Liberation Army Air Force fighter jets on the Taiwanese side of the maritime border this century." The White House is looking for ways to limit the economic damage that will result if President Donald Trump makes good on his recent threats to close the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Larry Kudlow, the Director of the National Economic Council. Kudlow said that the Trump administration was exploring whether it could permit trucks carrying freight to cross the border if it is sealed. He cautioned that the president has not made any final decisions. "We are watching it and looking for ways to allow the freight passage, some people call it truck roads, and there are ways you can do that which would ameliorate the breakdown in supply chains," Kudlow told CNBC's Sara Eisen Tuesday. Kudlow, who until joining the Trump administration was a CNBC contributor, said he supported Trump's immigration policies "fully." "The question is: Can we deal with that, and not have economic damage? And I think the answer is: We can, and people are looking at different options." "Particularly if you can keep those freight lanes, truck lanes, open, that's probably the nub of it," Kudlow said. Kudlow said that allowing workers to cross the border could be more difficult. "I don't want to comment on it because we are playing right now what you want to do is stop the emergency and the breakdown, and you want to try to limit whatever harm that does," he said. "It's a very difficult task. I think it's doable." Trump, who has declared the border situation a national emergency, threatened Friday to shut down "the Border, or large sections of the Border," if Mexico does not "immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States throug (sic) our Southern Border." The president's threat raised some concerns in the business community. "U.S. trade with Mexico exceeds $1.7 billion daily, and nearly half a million people legally cross the southern border every day as workers, students, shoppers, and tourists," said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a statement. "Even threatening to close the border to legitimate commerce and travel creates a degree of economic uncertainty that risks compromising the very gains in growth and productivity that policies of the Trump Administration have helped achieve," Bradley said. The potential closure also alarmed lawmakers in the president's party, though some suggested that the president's threat was a negotiating tactic. "It's part of the way he negotiates, but I'm not sure that's a particularly good idea and I'm not sure it gets the desired result," said Majority Whip Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., according to Politico. The president's threats come as he seeks congressional approval for a trade deal to replace the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Securing that deal, which the president refers to as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and which his Democratic critics call NAFTA 2.0, could give the president an important policy win ahead of the 2020 presidential election. A little more than a week after President Donald Trump and the Republican Party launched a messaging blitz aimed at rebranding the GOP in 2020 as "the party of great healthcare," Trump on Monday night appeared ready to shelve the issue, following a week of legal setbacks and internal party strife over the best way to proceed. "Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesn't work," Trump wrote in a series of three tweets Monday night. "Premiums & deductibles are far too high Really bad HealthCare! Even the Dems want to replace it, but with Medicare for all, which would cause 180 million Americans to lose their beloved private health insurance." TRUMP TWEET TRUMP TWEET 2 TRUMP TWEET 3 Setting aside Trump's claims about the potential impact of a "Medicare for All" system, the key line of Trump's Monday Twitter message was this: "Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win back the House." The announcement represented a clear shift away from the urgency with which Trump talked last week about the need to devise a replacement for Obamacare and effectively created a two-year window for Republicans to come up with an alternative. It also relieved pressure that had been mounting in both the White House and the Republican-controlled Senate in recent days to produce a replacement bill within months, one that could somehow advance through a Democratically controlled House. Monday night's abrupt announcement was not unlike Trump's surprise declaration in a tweet a week ago, on March 26, that the GOP would become the "party of great healthcare." That tweet came on the heels of a controversial decision by the Justice Department to support a lawsuit aimed at dismantling key provisions of Obamacare. Both the White House pivot and the DOJ decision caught Republicans off guard on Capitol Hill. It led to grumbling within the president's party that he was stepping on the good news stemming from the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. According to Attorney General William Barr, Mueller's two-year probe uncovered no evidence that Trump's campaign coordinated with Russia in 2016 and did not amass enough evidence to merit pursuing obstruction-of-justice charges against the president. Nonetheless, Trump spent the next several days bringing up health care at nearly every one of his public appearances. On seemingly parallel tracks, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel appeared on the Fox News and Fox Business channels to tout Trump's pivot to health care, while top Trump health care official Seema Verma placed an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal warning of the dangers of Medicare for All proposals. GOP TWEET The only place it seemed health care did not take center stage, however, was in Michigan, where Trump held a raucous campaign rally on Thursday night. There, the president devoted only four minutes of an 80-minute speech to promoting the GOP as the party of "great health care." Like Trump, the crowd of his core supporters seemed equally blase about health care. Instead of cheering Trump's promise to protect patients with pre-existing conditions, rally goers instead chose to boo the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whose 2017 vote against repealing Obamacare dashed his party's plan to adopt a GOP replacement. Enthusiasm for a sustained push to introduce an Obamacare replacement was equally hard to find on Capitol Hill, where on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters he had "made it clear" to the president in a call the day before that, "we were not going to be doing [an Obamacare repeal bill] in the Senate." Asked whether there was "any daylight" remaining between him and the president on health care, McConnell smiled. "Not any longer," he replied. With so little gusto for tackling health-care reform from the president, his core supporters or congressional Republicans, it's easy to see how Trump's announcement extending the symbolic deadline for a GOP replacement plan to 2021 was the best available option for both the president in his party. The move leaves Trump free to continue attacking both Obamacare in its current form, and 2020 Democratic candidates over their Medicare for All proposals. But it relieves him and his party of the need to come up with a replacement plan before the 2020 election. It's a strategy that worked well for Trump in 2016, when as a candidate, he railed against Obamacare and pledged to "repeal and replace" the bill with something much better, but never quite explained what that might be. On Monday morning, shades of this 2016 campaign tactic were already visible in at least one of Trump's tweets: "The cost of ObamaCare is far too high for our great citizens," Trump wrote. "Good things are going to happen!" Nonetheless, if last fall's midterm elections were any indication, it may be Democrats, and not Trump, who stand to gain the most should the president continue to make health care a 2020 campaign issue. "This was clearly a winning issue for the left in 2018," said former Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, a Trump critic who lost his House seat in November. "It was the issue they ran a lot of generic campaigns on and that yielded them 40 House seats," Curbelo told the Los Angeles Times. "So if the president wants to double down on that or have a repeat of 2018, then this makes perfect sense. It's just completely reckless and tone-deaf." Democrats in Congress shared Curbelo's view of which party would benefit most from campaigning on health care. "I just won my Senate race," Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told The Washington Post last week. "And I talked about health care, a lot." President Donald Trump speaks as he meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, April 2, 2019, in Washington. President Donald Trump on Tuesday reiterated his threat to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, insisting that any economic damage from the move would be overshadowed by the benefits of greater security. Asked at the White House whether shutting the border would hurt the U.S. economy, Trump replied, "Sure, it will have a negative effect on the economy," noting that Mexico is "a very big trading partner." "Trading is very important. The borders are very important. But security is what is the most important," Trump said at a joint appearance with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. "All you hear me talking about is trade, but let me just give you a little secret," Trump continued. "Security is more important to me than trade. So we're going to have a slower border or a closed border." Trump's remarks came as the top Republican in Congress, the nation's most influential business lobby, and even Trump's own top economic advisor all cautioned that the impact on American businesses of closing the massive U.S.-Mexico border could be disastrous. "Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Tuesday. "I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing." Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, went a step further, warning in a statement Monday that "even threatening to close the border to legitimate commerce and travel creates a degree of economic uncertainty that risks compromising the very gains in growth and productivity that policies of the Trump Administration have helped achieve." Stephen Moore, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, stands for a photograph following a Bloomberg Television interview in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, March 22, 2019. Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images Court records from Stephen Moore's divorce paint President Donald Trump's nominee for the Federal Reserve Board as a brazen philanderer who openly talked about his mistress in front of his kids and then continued shorting his ex-wife on tens of thousands of dollars of alimony and child support even after a judge held him in contempt of court. "I have two women, and what's really bad is when they fight over you," Moore said to the couple's children in front of his wife Allison "at their son's graduation ceremony," court records claim. Other court records show Moore, who is a distinguished visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, has a $75,000 IRS tax lien against him for unpaid taxes on his 2014 filing. The lien relates to a deduction he took for both alimony and child support to his ex-wife. He has said he is contesting that amount. Despite that and the revelations from the Moores' divorce, Trump continues to back Moore's nomination to the Fed, according to a senior White House official who spoke to CNBC. "POTUS completely behind him," that official said in an email, using the acronym for "president of the United States." The conduct by Moore, a conservative economist, as alleged by his former wife Allison Moore, stands in sharp contrast to his publicly published positions on marriage. "What is irrefutable is that marriage with a devoted husband and wife in the home is a far better social program than food stamps, Medicaid, public housing or even all of them combined," Moore wrote in a 2014 Washington Times article in which he contended the nation's economic success would depend on a "culture of virtue," strong families and parents, and a resurgence of the Protestant work ethic. "Name a government program that can take the place of a father." But more than three years before that, Moore was not acting like a devoted husband, Allison Moore said in a divorce action filed in August 2010 after two decades of marriage. And then when the couple split, she claimed, he did not pay her or their three children what he had agreed to, she said. It was only after a judge's contempt order, and a threat in that order to have Moore arrested so he could purge that contempt, that he began paying Allison alimony and child support. Allison and Stephen Moore on Monday both issued statements using friendly language about each other, with Allison saying they had "reconciled through our divorce." A nomination already under fire Trump on March 22 said he would nominate Moore to the Fed's board of governors, after he read a Wall Street Journal column Moore had co-authored entitled "The Fed is a Threat to Growth." The column slammed the hike in interest rates by the central bank in the latter half of 2018, which Moore claimed was preventing the economy from maximizing the growth it should be realizing from Trump's financial policies. A bitter end, and then a reconciliation A F-35 fighter jet is seen as Turkey takes delivery of its first F-35 fighter jet with a ceremony at the Lockheed Martin in Forth Worth, Texas, United States on June 21, 2018. The United States has halted delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey, marking the first concrete U.S. step to block delivery of the jet to the NATO ally in light of Ankara's planned purchase of a Russian missile defense system. U.S. officials told their Turkish counterparts they will not receive further shipments of F-35 related equipment needed to prepare for the arrival of the stealthy jet, two sources familiar with the situation told Reuters on Monday. The Pentagon confirmed the Reuters report that the equipment delivery had been stopped. "Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey's F-35 operational capability have been suspended," Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mike Andrews, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has refused to back down from Ankara's planned purchase of a Russian S-400 missile defense system that the United States has said would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft. The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest of a series of diplomatic disputes between the United States and Turkey including Turkish demands that the United States extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria, and sanctions on Iran. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the next shipment of training equipment, and all subsequent shipments of F-35 related material, had been canceled. The aircraft is built by Lockheed Martin Corp. A Pentagon official had told Reuters in March that the United States had a number of items it could withhold in order to send Turkey a signal that the United States was serious about Ankara dropping its ambition to own the S-400. Turkish officials in Ankara were not immediately available for comment. Turkey has said it will take delivery of the S-400s in July. Venezuela's Supreme Court has called for opposition leader Juan Guaido to be stripped of his parliamentary immunity, in a move that could soon lead to his imprisonment. On Monday, Supreme Court Justice Maikel Moreno said Guaido should be prosecuted for violating a travel ban, after the National Assembly leader toured several Latin American countries a few weeks ago. The pro-government Constituent Assembly is expected to back the request over the coming days. It comes at a time when Guaido and President Nicolas Maduro are locked in a battle for power in the oil-rich, but cash-poor, country. The court ruling fueled has fears that Guaido could soon face arrest at the direction of Maduro. However, analysts told CNBC on Tuesday that such a move remained unlikely given the threat of U.S. military intervention. The Supreme Court has already banned Guaido from holding office for a period of 15 years and arrested his chief of staff on terrorism charges. Pedestrians walk past a Walgreens store in New York. Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images Walgreens Boots Alliance on Tuesday reported quarterly earnings and revenue that missed analysts' expectations, and it lowered its forecast for 2019 in what CEO Stefano Pessina called the "most difficult" quarter since acquiring European drugstore chain Alliance Boots in late 2014. The company now expects full-year earnings for 2019 to be roughly flat, compared with its previous forecast of 7 to 12 percent growth. It also said it will cut more than $1.5 billion in costs by fiscal 2022, up from the $1 billion it announced last quarter. "A number of the trends we had been expecting and preparing for impacted us significantly more quickly than we had anticipated," Pessina told analysts on a call to discuss Walgreens' performance during the second quarter of fiscal 2019, which ended Feb. 28. Walgreens' shares slid by more than 12 percent, on pace for their worst day since Aug. 6, 2014, when they lost 14.3 percent. The company dragged down its competitors, sending CVS shares tumbling 3.4 percent and Rite Aid's stock down by 7.4 percent, though it trades for less than $1 a share. For more on investing in health-care innovation, click here to join CNBC at our Healthy Returns Summit in New York City on May 21. Missed estimates Walgreens reported adjusted earnings of $1.64 per share during the quarter, missing analysts' estimates of $1.72 per share, according to data compiled by Refinitiv. Revenue also fell short, coming in at $34.53 billion. Analysts had been looking for $34.56 billion. It generated $1.16 billion in net income, or $1.24 per share, down from $1.35 billion, or $1.36 per share a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, which excluded foreign currency fluctuations and a few other items, Walgreens said it earned $1.64 per share, below the $1.72 per share analysts were expecting. Generic drug prices declined and pharmacy benefit managers paid Walgreens less, weighing on the pharmacy chain in the quarter, Pessina said. Walgreens also faced "consumer market challenges" in the U.S. and the U.K., he said. Weak cold season Same-store sales declined 3.8 percent, which Walgreens said was primarily because of a weak cough, cold and flu season compared with the previous year. Walgreens is working with LabCorp, Humana, Sprint and others on everything from offering senior care services to selling phones in their stores. Co-Chief Operating Officer Alex Gourlay told analysts Walgreens is "pleased" with the progress it's making on its partnerships. He said the company is working closely with Kroger's executive team to "determine how best to unlock future growth and synergies." Walgreens paired with the Kroger in October to sell groceries in some Walgreens stores and expanded the pilot in December. Drugstores are also trying to diversify their products and experiment with new ways to get people into their stores. Walgreens said last week it will sell CBD products in about 1,500 of its stores, following rival CVS. CVS is changing its business model after buying health insurer Aetna for $70 billion late last year. No deals now Pessina said Tuesday that still isn't interested in pursuing any deals right now. "We are constantly reviewing a certain number of companies," he said. "Don't ask me the names I cannot give you the names, but of course, until now, we have not found the right numbers to do a combination with these companies." Executives tried to ease concerns that it would cut costs too much and starve the business. Chief Financial Officer James Kehoe said Walgreens will invest about $1 billion over the next three years between operating expenses and capital. "Approximately 80 percent is operating expense, so think about it for a minute. In one year, we'll be putting in $300 million to boost the partnerships and to boost our capabilities on digitalization of the company, so we're not going through the business for the sake of hitting cost cutting," he said. Executives from Walgreens and rival CVS Health have warned investors in recent months that profits might not be all that fat this year. The Trump administration has been pressuring drugmakers and pharmacy benefits managers to lower consumer prices, both of which may cut into the bottom line for drugstore chains. Emmanuel Dunand | AFP | Getty Images Brexit may look like a confused mess for many, but the big banks are still making calls. The U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has seen her preferred deal with Europe rejected three times, but the very same U.K. lawmakers that voted it down have themselves failed twice to agree on any alternatives. On Tuesday, May called an extended meeting of her senior ministers to try to formulate a plan as the clock ticks down to Europe's next deadline April 22. Whether the government heaves toward a no-deal departure, calls a snap general election, works out a softer Brexit or doesn't even leave the European Union are all given similar credibility. CNBC takes a look at what Wall Street thinks will happen next. Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs said Brexit has cost the U.K. 600 million ($783 million) a week since the 2016 referendum, with economic growth declining by around 2.5 percent. "The resulting uncertainty over the future political and economic relationship with the EU has had real costs for the U.K. economy, which have spilled over to other economies," Goldman analysts said in a note to clients this week. The bank also sees a 15 percent chance of a no-deal Brexit which would cause a 17 percent decline in the pound. The bank has assigned a 35 percent probability of Brexit not happening at all. J.P. Morgan The inability of lawmakers, so far, to forge a clear path forward has given May a tiny bit of wiggle room to potentially return to the Houses of Parliament with a fourth shot at getting her provisional agreement over the line. With parliamentary convention dictating that the vote may have to somehow differ in substance from previous attempts, the bank suggests there could be a run-off vote against another option. Of the alternatives that lawmakers have been looking into, J.P. Morgan predicts Parliament will coalesce around a single "softer Brexit" option this week. The bank's greatest probability is a general election at 30 percent, with May's agreement or a long extension to the U.K. exit placed at 20 percent. A second referendum or a no deal are both the least likely options at 15 percent each. Citi Citi doesn't indicate preferences or probabilities to any Brexit outcome. However, the bank is not alone in noting that the ruling Conservative Party appears to be hardening toward a "no-deal" Brexit. Around 200 Conservative lawmakers have reportedly signed a letter to the prime minister demanding a "managed" no-deal exit. But Citi still expects the U.K government to back away from the cliff edge. The bank noted that a general election would only increase uncertainty and would possibly strengthen the hand of the separatist Scottish National Party (SNP). On the prospect of May returning her vote to Parliament, Citi believes it would once again be defeated. Deutsche Bank The chances of Britain crashing out of the European Union without a deal on April 12 have increased to one in four, according to Deutsche Bank. The German lender said Monday that it was now bearish on the pound as confusion over the U.K.'s withdrawal from Europe continued. The bank raised its estimate for the chances of a no-deal Brexit to 25 percent from 20 percent and is targeting an exchange rate of 90 pence per euro. On Monday, the euro was buying 85.61 pence. Deutsche's base case scenario, which holds a 30 percent probability, is that any consensus agreed by Parliament will fail to be enacted by the government and a general election will be required. In its note, Deutsche said new elections should not be viewed positively and not just because of the potential for a left-wing Labour government. "More relevant, in our view is the fact that polling suggests the result could be similar to that in 2017, which has led to the current parliamentary deadlock," said Deutsche Bank macro strategist, Oliver Harvey. UBS A pedestrian with an umbrella walks in front of the Wynn Palace casino resort, operated by Wynn Resorts Ltd., in Macau, China, Jan. 31, 2018. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission accused Wynn Resorts on Tuesday of hiding allegations of rape against former CEO Steve Wynn. The commission, which is weighing whether to revoke the company's state gaming license, made the allegation in a report detailing how Wynn Resorts handled the accusations against its former top executive. If the commission decides to revoke the license, it would jeopardize the company's $2.6 billion resort project in the Boston area. Wynn Resorts won the Massachusetts gaming license in 2013. The regulators said they spoke with more than 100 people as part of their investigation. In the 199-page report, parts of which were redacted, the commission said that "over the course of years, a limited group of executives and employees in positions of authority at the Company, including in the legal division, were aware of certain allegations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Wynn involving employees, but they disregarded Company policies when it came to handling those allegations." It added: "The investigation also shows that in some instances particular Company executives, with the assistance of outside counsel, were part of affirmative efforts to conceal allegations against Mr. Wynn that came to their attention." The allegations of sexual misconduct became known to the public after a January 2018 article in The Wall Street Journal said several women claimed Wynn had harassed or assaulted them. Wynn has denied the allegations though he said at the opening hearing on Tuesday that he didn't know the details of his own company's code of conduct policies. Wynn sold his entire stake in the company by March 2018, after he resigned from his position. In response to the report, Wynn Resorts said the company has cooperated fully with the Massachusetts commission's investigation and its review over the past year, "providing thousands of pages of documentation, and allowing full access to company executives and answering every question." The report did confirm remedial measures the company has taken in the wake of the allegations. Among them: that Steve Wynn had completely separated from the company within weeks of the allegations coming to light and that the board established a special committee that conducted an in-depth review of the allegations. Wynn didn't receive any severance when he left. It also said "the company has implemented enhanced training and human resources policies, operations and structural changes, and new internal controls, including controls related to Company use of outside attorneys." Wynn Resorts also said in an updated statement on Tuesday that any employee who was aware of allegations of sexual assault against Wynn are no longer with the company. This includes Wynn Las Vegas President Maurice Wooden and General Counsel Kim Sinatra. The report says that the changes don't erase the company's corporate failures. Wynn Resorts plans to open Encore Boston Harbor Resort in Everett, Massachusetts in June. If this week's hearing results a loss of its gaming license, the $2.6 billion project on the Mystic River will be hurt. Wynn Resorts' name was removed from the project to distance it from the allegations against Steve Wynn. The company's stock is up 5 percent in trading Tuesday. The shares, which have a market value of $14.3 billion, have lost about 27 percent of its value over the past year, but are up more than 34 percent since January. The Nevada Gaming Commission also recently reviewed Wynn Resorts, assessing a record $20 million fine but allowing it to keep its casino license. CNBC's Contessa Brewer contributed to this report. There's a case study that business schools use as an example of how companies can manage a crisis of public trust. It involves Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical giant, and how the company reacted after seven people died from ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol in 1982. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg probably heard it while she was a student at Harvard back in the 1990s, when it was more fresh on people's minds. Johnson & Johnson, the top maker of Tylenol, had a very tough job in explaining how a mystery killer was able to inject poison into bottles of Tylenol before it ended up on pharmacy shelves. So how did the company manage the situation? It started by recalling all of its products, costing it millions, which showed that public safety came first. Its executives apologized profusely, and showed a lot of raw emotion in responding to the fatalities. And it worked with federal regulators to introduce tamper-proof packaging to assuage people's fears. Within a year, its sales had rebounded to where they were, and critics were praising the company for how they responded to the crisis. Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee is well aware of the case. On a new podcast interview with the author and philosopher Sam Harris, McNamee opened up about how he tried to steer Facebook's executives down a path of taking more responsibility for abuse on its platform. And he brought up this J&J case as an example of how to manage a crisis effectively. McNamee claimed on the podcast to have predicted early on that the Facebook platform could be used for ill, including in misinformation campaigns. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, he had noticed memes that were denigrating presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, which disturbed. McNamee said he tried to warn Facebook, but he wasn't effective in getting the message across. "You (Facebook) gotta do what Johnson and Johnson did," McNamee said he told executives at the company. "They defended their customers even though they didn't put the poison in." McNamee saw clear parallels to Facebook, which also didn't view itself as "technically responsible" for the ways that third parties abused its platform, including the Russians. "I thought Facebook could convert a potential disaster into a winning situation by opening up to the investigators and working with the people who used the product to understand what had happened," he noted in the podcast interview. "For three months, I begged them to do this and I realized they were never going to take it seriously." This isn't the first time that McNamee has hailed J&J as an example of how to manage obstacles in a business that is built on trust. He also referenced it in his 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post, where he provided a roadmap for fixing Facebook that he hoped would be a call to action for the company. And he's not alone. Others in Silicon Valley have raised the J&J case to the attention of Facebook executives. Michael Dearing, a longtime investor and former eBay executive, noted on Twitter that Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, probably "aced" her business history class at Harvard, where she would have learned about the Tylenol scandal. Dearing noted that J&J's then CEO James Burke "choked up" more than once about the fatalities, which showed that he cared. Meanwhile, Facebook's executives have been criticized for their robotic delivery, and in deflecting criticism and denying responsibility. "Be like (James) Burke," advised Dearing in a tweet. "Be human, say the truth no matter how it makes you look." tweet While the cases are different in many respects, both in the sector and the time period, three public relations experts told CNBC that they agree with Dearing and McNamee. J&J struck the "right emotional chord," said Bob Pickard, a seasoned communications executive. "Facebook's strategy of denial and evading responsibility followed by reluctantly engaging in corrective action...doesn't match the reality of what's needed." 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. Memoirs of Ambassador Kesavapany to be released in Singapore on April 5 Ambassador K Kesavapany (friends call him Pany) over the past eighty-odd years has racked up more than a few interesting stories and experiences. Now people can read about his illustrious life in a book titled From Estate to Embassy: Memories of an Ambassador, written in association with renowned author Anitha Devi Pillai. The book will be officially released in a function at PGP Hall in Singapore on April 5 where Foreign Affairs Minister of Singapore Dr Vivian Balakrishnan will be the Guest-of-Honour and the event will be moderated by Ravi Velloor, veteran journalist and Associate Editor, Straits Times. Ambassador K Kesavapany is bubbling with energy even as he crosses 80 years of age. Photo: Connected to India This biography documents K Kesavapany's journey from the Malayan estates in the late 1930s to his move to Singapore when he was headhunted to join the Singapore Civil Service in the 1970s, and from his entry into Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to his subsequent sojourns abroad in Australia, Turkey, Geneva, Jordan, Indonesia, Russia, United Kingdom and Malaysia. After retiring from his last post with the MFA, he took on the position of Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. Author Anitha Devi Pillai has indicated many of her favourite sections in the book which chronicles many novel parts of Panys life. Book cover of From Estate to Embassy: Memories of an Ambassador which captures important moments of the illustrious life of Ambassador K Kesavapany. Photo courtesy: goodsreads One of my favourite sections in the book is the opening paragraph where Amb Pany talks about an exchange with Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore. That paragraph is special for many reasons - one it was the way it was narrated to me - I could almost visualise it happening right in front of me, she said. He is such a good orator, I was spellbound half the time listening to his stories, she added. Kesavapany is known for his seasoned diplomacy. However, his diplomatic skills were put to the test when he organised the first ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Singapore in 1996. He considers this one of the highlights of his diplomatic career. Following his return from Geneva the same year, where he was ambassador to the UN and the WTO, he was made Singapore's high commissioner to Malaysia. Singapore Indian Association (SIA) was awarded the prestigious Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award (PBSA) on January 9, 2017 at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in Bengaluru for its contribution to the Indian community in Singapore. K Kesavapany, President of SIA went to Bengaluru to receive the award from then President of India Pranab Mukherjee. Photo: Connected to India This book also delves on the next phase of his journey where he holds several prominent portfolios in Singapore's social and academic scene, including Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He is a Governor on the Board of the Singapore International Foundation and President of the Singapore Indian Association (SIA). He is also a board member of the Energy Institute of Singapore (EIS), founding committee member of the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS), Term Trustee of Singapore Indian Association, SINDA, member of the Rotary Club of Raffles City (RCRC). As the founding committee member of the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS), Ambassador Kesavapany played a key role in promoting awareness about dyslexia, bringing it from initial years of many Singaporeans not wanting to admit that their children were dyslexic until wide acceptance of it as a learning difference today. K Kesavapany is also the president of Inter-Religious Organisation (IRO) of Singapore. He is seen here with past President Ervad (Priest) Rustom M. Ghadiali. Photo: Connected to India DAS hopes that his story will inspire Singapores younger generation to contribute to society, using the impact he has made on the lives of people with dyslexia over the past two decades as an example. Ambassador Kesavapany drew inspiration himself from the late President of Singapore SR Nathan who was his lifetime mentor in social service. Judy Terry is a marketing professional and a former local councillor in Suffolk. Few people watching the horrors of Grenfell unfold on the news in June 2017 would have been left dry-eyed. How could this happen in Londons richest borough, in the worlds fifth richest country? The Government quickly initiated a fire safety review, by Dame Judith Hackitt. She published her initial findings, Independent Review of Building Regulations & Fire Safety in December 2017. In the introduction, Dame Judith noted that the regulatory system for ensuring fire safety in high rise and complex buildings are not fit for purpose. Some headlines were: Clarity of roles & responsibility poor; Competency of key people inadequate; Compliance, enforcement & sanctions too weak; Route for residents to escalate concerns unclear & inadequate; System of product testing, marketing & quality assurance unclear. Her final report, Building a Safer Future published in May 2018 further castigated the regulatory system and those supposed to be responsible for delivering quality buildings: Ignorance: regulations and guidance not always read by those who need to leading to misunderstanding & misinterpretation; Indifference: primary motivation to do things as quickly & cheaply as possible, ignoring concerns raised by residents or building workers; Failure to prioritise safety, using ambiguity of regulations & guidance to game the system. Reading these comments is enough to make your blood boil. The first phase of the Grenfell Inquiry has ended, and will undoubtedly address the serious shortcomings, with its own recommendations, in due course. However, it is worth remembering that, despite other major incidents across the country (and, indeed, the world) in previous decades, nothing had changed to ensure no repetition, leading to lives being sacrificed. Ironically, Fire Service professionals were only too aware of the inherent dangers, but were not listened to. Yet research shows that 80 per cent of fire deaths occur in the home, and fire sprinklers, coupled with smoke alarms, reduce the risk of death or serious injury by over 80 per cent. People are also 57 per cent less likely to die in a fire in a room where sprinklers are installed. So, on 14th May 2012, Suffolk Fire & Rescue launched Building the Safer Suffolk Sprinkler Coalition, with influential government and industry leaders, pledging support for these lifesaving systems to protect people, homes, businesses, colleges and schools. Introducing the document, the then-Chief Fire Officer, Andy Fry, said, we are well aware of the life safety, social, economic and environmental benefits of fire sprinklers, when too often fires, which could have been contained if sprinklers had been installed, destroy lives and property. He highlighted the benefits of a joint project with Havebury Housing in Haverhill, where sprinklers were installed to protect vulnerable tenants in nine purpose-built flats. The organisations Health & Safety Manager, a former fire officer, emphasised: the safety of our tenants is paramount and we are engaged in a number of initiatives, including installing smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, as well as sprinkler systems at a number of sites, from apartments to offices, building a strong relationship with Suffolk Fire & Rescue, which shapes our approach to fire safety. Whilst comparing actual cases, where sprinklers had enabled fires to be put out quickly, with those where people died and businesses were completely destroyed, Andy Fry went on to dismiss myths about costs, appearance, installation and operation. He reiterated the benefits: Build fire safety into the fabric of buildings for their full life; Save peoples lives, and make firefighters work less dangerous; Reduce the size of fires and damage; Improve business continuity; Reduce social and environmental impact of fires. Although not mentioned in the document, the Fire Service was aware that some domestic electrical products were unsafe. When I sought advice after my own three-year-old cooker had spontaneously set itself alight (I was lucky to be in the kitchen at the time, and was able to put it out) I was warned not to purchase a particular manufacturers replacement. I was also warned never to go out and leave a washing machine in mid-cycle. It is alleged in some reports that an electrical appliance caused the Grenfell fire so one has to wonder if appropriate advice, as well as sprinklers, could have averted the tragedy. The on-going investigations will no doubt clarify. Meanwhile, Suffolk County Councils Scrutiny Committee has put the Grenfell first phase report on a future agenda, to assess whether the issues raised so far are being fully addressed. A progress report on whether Building the Safer Suffolk Sprinkler Coalition had the desired impact increasing use of sprinklers will, hopefully, form part of that debate. Although the dangers of certain cladding products on high-rise buildings was not included in this document, no doubt it will also be on the agenda, supported by an analysis of planning applications over the last decade, any cladding materials employed, as well as use of fire doors. Whether planners and councillors receive appropriate training, ensuring that they ask the right questions, and take specialist advice on relevant planning applications should also be included. It will be argued that building regulations are a separate issue, but consents can be qualified allowing councillors to demand updates on any specific requirements to be brought back to Planning Committee. Given Dame Judith Hackitts conclusions that some contractors prioritise speed and cost, instead of safety, and game the system, it is appropriate for local authorities to enforce compliance and take responsibility for public safety. Dominic Walsh is a policy analyst for Open Europe. MPs have once again rejected every Brexit option, following indicative votes that were far from indicative of a workable route out of the impasse. However, in a warning shot for Brexiteers, Ken Clarkes motion in favour of a permanent customs union with the EU lost by just three votes, while the Kyle-Wilson second referendum plan fell short by twelve. It is clearer than ever that if the Commons does not pass the deal, the likely outcome is a softer Brexit or no Brexit at all. It is unclear what will happen next, but there is much speculation that one or more of the options which did the best will be pitted against the Governments deal in a run-off vote. Even here, it is unclear which option is the real plan B. The customs union option lost by the fewest votes, but the second referendum option received the most votes in favour (though both received less than the Governments deal did on Friday). Of these two, the customs union option would be easier for this Government to accept, and therefore deserves further attention. There is a huge level of confusion in the current debate about what a customs union does and doesnt do, and what it would mean for the UK to be in one with the EU after Brexit. Customs unions: what they do and dont do Customs unions are a form of trade area in which countries do not impose tariffs on each others goods, but agree on a common external tariff on goods from elsewhere. There are several customs unions in operation around the world today the EU itself is one, and the arrangement between the EU and Turkey is another (though this is a partial customs union which does not cover agricultural goods). Other examples of customs union include the Southern African Customs Union (comprising South Africa and four of its neighbours), as well as Mercosur (which comprises Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay). A more comprehensive explanation of customs unions and why, in the long-term, it makes sense for the UK to trade with the EU from outside a customs union can be found in Open Europes 2017 report, Nothing to Declare. Customs unions eliminate the need for checks on Rules of Origin (RoO). RoO checks are used to establish whether a product is really where it claims to be from and thence whether it qualifies for preferential treatment. However, customs unions do not remove the need for other border checks regulatory controls, VAT, excise and so on. As such, a customs union alone would not prevent a hard border in Ireland. The backstop contains a customs union, but it also contains a whole host of provisions related to regulations in order to meet its objectives. For this reason, any long-term UK-EU customs union would be as well as, not instead of, the backstop in the Prime Ministers Withdrawal Agreement. It has also become received wisdom that, if the UK was in a customs union with the EU, it would not be able to sign its own independent trade deals after Brexit. This isnt strictly accurate either. Being in a post-Brexit customs union would still mean more trade policy independence than the UK enjoys as an EU member, though this independence would be limited compared to non-customs union forms of Brexit. In a customs union, the UK would not have to be in the EUs Common Commercial Policy; it would therefore be legally able to sign independent trade deals (which we cannot do now). We just wouldnt be able to vary our tariffs from the EU in order to do these deals, so any trade deals would be limited to non-goods areas services, investment, data, procurement, labour mobility and so on. Could the UK have a say in EU trade deals as a member of a customs union, as Labour Party policy proposes? To an extent but it depends on what one means by a say. A voice at the table is certainly possible. Turkey has a (weak) consultation mechanism as part of its customs union with the EU, and the UK could certainly seek a more robust version of this. UK negotiators could join the EUs delegation for future FTAs, which would add heft to the EUs negotiation team. However, what is far less likely to be on offer from the EU is a formal veto for the UK, a non-EU member, over the EUs trade policy. A customs union is not Single Market membership, and it is certainly not EU membership. It would not require the UK to accept free movement of people, and nor would it require full alignment with single market regulations though some alignment in goods would be required under the backstop to make the customs union operational and, in particular, to keep the Irish border open. Nor would a customs union require membership of the Common Agricultural Policy or the Common Fisheries Policy the backstop, which contains a customs union, entails neither of those things. Customs unions are often accompanied by so-called level-playing field requirements on issues such as state aid (indeed, Labours policy of a comprehensive customs union without harmonisation on state aid is unlikely to be on offer) but the same is true of most standard trade deals, including the much vaunted EU-Canada trade deal (CETA). If our goods exports are to be granted tariff-free access into the EUs market, then measures to limit unfair competition are not unreasonable. How would a permanent customs union as the future relationship be different to the backstop? If it were accepted by the Government and won a majority, a version of the customs union proposal from last night could be written into the Political Declaration on the future relationship with the Withdrawal Agreement left intact. The Political Declaration, of course, is non-binding; a commitment to negotiate a customs union would not necessarily bind a future government with a Parliamentary majority against this. This is true even if the negotiating objective was written into domestic law via the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) since no Parliament can bind its successors, a future Parliament could remove this commitment. In that sense, it is unclear in what sense a customs union could be made permanent now although naturally, a commitment to negotiate one would have political and moral force. From the Governments point of view, a customs union as the long-term relationship with the EU is an inferior option to the temporary customs union contained in the backstop. The latter envisages the UK having a fully independent trade policy at some point in the future on the condition that any alternative arrangements that replace the backstop also prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland. Thanks to the Joint Instrument agreed with the EU at Strasbourg, the EU cannot hold the UK in the backstop against its will the UK would only remain in the backstop if it failed to propose any workable alternatives. Conversely, the Clarke proposal would see the UK remaining in a customs union by choice. In the long run, it is not clear that this level of alignment with the EU on trade policy would be politically sustainable. Moreover, the main benefits of a customs union at least in the medium-term are already contained in the backstop. The backstop would prevent customs checks on the Irish land border and in the Irish Sea, would preserve manufacturing industries embedded in cross-border supply chains by eliminating the need for new checks on rules of origin, and could only be replaced by an alternative which met the same objectives. Neither is it the case that a customs union would fully supersede the backstop. Indeed, from a Unionist perspective the most controversial elements of the backstop are the potential regulatory barriers to trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and a customs union would do nothing to address these. It is also unclear whether some of the other protections the UK won in the backstop would be preserved if a customs union became the long-term goal of the Government. For example, the UK could technically mount a legal argument against having to apply all EU trade deals in the backstop. Whilst it cannot unilaterally apply lower tariffs than the EU, there would be an arguable legal case for the UK maintaining EU external tariffs on a third country if the EU lowers its own tariffs with that country. This gives the UK some valuable wiggle room it isnt the case that the EU can simply sell other countries access to our market without our control. Whether such a loophole would be sustainable in a long-term customs union with the EU is far less clear. Overall, a customs union in the Political Declaration would be neither a silver bullet nor a disaster Adding a customs union to the Political Declaration, therefore, seems rather unnecessary in policy terms. It adds very little in the medium-term that the deal does not already contain, would not wholly replace the backstop, and loses the key benefit of being envisaged as a temporary arrangement. Moreover, the political advantage of a customs union that it might win a majority in Parliament is far from clear, on last nights evidence. Many of the MPs who did not vote, including at least half the Cabinet, would likely vote against a customs union if the choice was forced. However, precisely because it would be a rather unnecessary addition to the current deal, it is hard to argue that a customs union would be the disaster for Brexit that it is often made out to be. As discussed, a customs union cannot meaningfully be made permanent now. Whatever is written into the Political Declaration, a future Conservative government could leave a customs union, if it met two tests: a parliamentary majority for doing so, and a credible alternative for the Irish border. While the trajectory set by a customs union would indeed be somewhat inferior to the current deal, it is hard to sustain the argument that it would be exponentially worse. Hundreds of Conservative MPs have voted three times for a deal which contains a temporary customs union. Why should a non-binding commitment to a more long-term customs union be a deal-breaker for these MPs, to the extent that risking Brexit itself would be preferable? The debate within Westminster and the Tory party has become so febrile that people risk losing their sense of perspective. An outcome which would be sub-optimal but ultimately superfluous is painted variously as either a total betrayal of Brexit or as the missing solution the country needs. The truth is that it is neither. Henry Newman is Director of Open Europe. If all Conservative MPs had voted with the Government last Friday, Brexit would have been secured. Instead, power has been handed to Brussels, with the EU deciding what comes next. At the European Council meeting on 22nd March, EU leaders agreed that the UK could have an extension of Article 50 until May 22nd, but only if the Commons passed the Withdrawal Agreement last week. That didnt happen. So the new default is a No Deal exit on April 12th unless a further extension is secured. After Fridays vote, Donald Tusk announced that EU leaders will meet for an emergency session on April 10th. Having spent months maintaining that the EU wasnt really focused on Brexit, theres now a special summit just to decide what to do next. Although we can guess what might happen, no one actually knows what the 27 leaders will do in conclave. Will they agree an extension? If so, for how long and on what conditions? Every country has to agree to any extension so Lithuania, say, could, in theory, determine the path of Brexit. The UK will also have to accept any extension. The Prime Minister might refuse to agree a long extension, as she has previously hinted. But Parliament, under Oliver Letwins direction, will surely attempt to instruct her to do otherwise. And several key Cabinet figures, including the Lord Chancellor, have made clear that they would leave the Government if it sought to pursue No Deal. On the other hand, she could face a Cabinet revolt if she agrees a long extension. There are three broad options from the EUs point of view: first, refuse any extension beyond that already granted, i.e: 12th April this would probably force a No Deal. Second, allow only a short extension until, say, 22nd May while ruling out further extension. Third, offer a long extension, with various possible conditions. The EU is unlikely to go for the first option which could see it blamed for No Deal something Brussels is determined to avoid. The second option would leave the UK little time to ratify a deal, but would create serious pressure for Parliament actually to make some decisions. Because the UK would not have made full preparations for European elections, extension beyond June would be very difficult. The third option would almost certainly mean European elections in the UK. On Sundays Sophy Ridge programme, the Shadow Foreign Secretary suggested that these could be avoided. But the requirement for members to hold European Parliament elections is there in black and white in the Lisbon Treaty. The European Commission, which sees itself as the guardian of the EU treaties, is not flexible on this point. Camilla Cavendish, the former Downing Street policy chief under David Cameron, argued recently that accession countries such as Bulgaria were able to appoint MEPs and this precedent could be used by the UK. That is technically true, although Bulgarian MEPs were only appointed for a few months until by-elections could be held. However, those states had an accession treaty which provided a treaty-level vehicle for a legal derogation from the existing EU treaty provisions on elections. The UK does not. The EU chose the deadline of April 12th because that date marks the point at which domestic preparations must be made for European elections. Any long extension beyond then will almost certainly require the UK to start preparing to hold these elections. The UK can make whatever legal or political arguments it likes against holding European elections, but that misses the point. It is the leaders of the EU27 who will determine the conditions of any extension, not the UK. The EUs position on extending Article 50 has evolved. Friday March 29th used to be an almost immutable date, only to be bent if a second referendum seemed likely. Then the prospect of a technical extension emerged, to allow the UK to complete ratification, only on the condition that the deal had already been approved by the Commons. But ten days ago, the EU agreed to a different sort of delay a flextension before the UK had signed off the deal. The European Council hoped that the looming deadline would force a decisionbut it didnt. Some reports suggest that the mood on the continent is shifting further. Although there is scant enthusiasm for a No Deal, an exasperated sense is growing in different EU capitals that Parliament may be simply incapable of agreeing to anything. My European contacts tend to wrap together the Speakers interventions blocking the Government, the repeated failures of the Meaningful Votes, and the confusion over indicative votes conflating them all into one big bundle, labelled UK chaos. Whether this is a fair diagnosis of the political position is irrelevant some of the EU sees things like this and is determined to insulate itself from being infected by the British troubles. EU states are also determined to avoid the UK requesting rolling extensions every few weeks. European leaders will be looking to the upcoming European elections, scheduled for late May. These will be an especially important test for Emmanuel Macron, whose project for European reform has stalled, as he has become mired in domestic trouble. Before last months European summit, he was threatening to push the UK out without a deal. He was talked around by Angela Merkel, who felt it was wrong for the EU to force the UKs hand. Macrons tough talk may be a show its not clear that he would actually want to press a No Deal, which would be damaging for France including the Pas-de-Calais, just before Mays elections. But the threat cannot be discounted. Overall, its unclear how the dynamic will work next week. May will be asked to present a plan for how to take things forward, but European leaders have previously found her presentations lacking, to put it mildly. Might the EU make a general election or a new referendum a condition of any extension? Perhaps, although that would seem to be interference in domestic politics. The EU could demand a softer Brexit is reflected in an updated political declaration, but thats difficult when Parliament has so far refused to coalesce around one, as last nights debacle over the second indicative votes showed. Might there be some last-minute movement on the backstop? This would be a logical thing to do (after all, adding some clearer exit from the backstop would almost certainly allow the deal to pass the Commons). But UK negotiators are holding out little hope, despite Merkels recent insistence that alternatives can be found. There is now no single EU view about what to do next. There are concerns that a long extension could mean the UK using its veto over new budget negotiations to leverage further concessions. Some argue that the uncertainty must end, the boil should be lanced, the plaster ripped off. Others fear the disruption of No Deal, especially with some parts of the Eurozone slowing down again and Ireland heavily exposed. Now more than ever, as a result of the refusal by MPs to back the Withdrawal Agreement, its Brussels and not the Government which is in the driving seat, and we dont know which way they will turn. Theresa Mays strategic aims, if that is quite the right way of describing them, are as follows. First, to avoid the UK having to participate in European elections after May 22. Second, to draw Labour into co-operating with her deal. Third, if that cant be done, to ensure that they take the blame for not doing so. Fourth, if they are so drawn, to somehow keep her Party onside. Fifth, to try and head off Oliver Letwin and company from restricting her room for manoeuvre. Sixth and above all, to survive as Prime Minister. This is her chicken game. At first glance, her statement this evening, coming in the wake of a mammoth Cabinet session, looks like business as usual. Corbyn will either be lured into signing off on her deal, thus having his fingerprints all over it (and sharing the blame among those who hate it). Or he will find reasons not to do so. In which case, he can be blamed for playing petty, partisan politics. In that event, and assuming that the Speaker allows the deal to be put to the Commons, she will then gird up once again for that game of chicken. Its my deal or my-deal-plus-something-else, she will warn the European Research Group. That something else could be a customs union or, just possibly, a Norway-type option. Or even, according to one reading of her words, a second referendum. The ERG, as well as others, can count. Ken Clarkes customs union motion yesterday failed by only three votes by 273 to 276. Peter Kyles second referendum motion failed by 12. But it got more votes than Clarkes proposal did, falling by 280 to 292. The Prime Ministers deal fell last time round by 49, but got 286 votes more than either of those other two options. But though it may appears that nothing has changed, Mays words marked a very big policy shift indeed. Perhaps, if her deal comes back to the Commons, it will gain more votes than other options. (Who will select them, by the way?). But perhaps it wont. In which case, this is the first time that crucially as she put put it the Government stands ready to abide by the decision of the House. [Our italics.] In other words, if the Commons votes instead for a customs union, or for a revived Norway-type plan, or even arguably for a second referendum, the inference is that she would be willing to tack any of those objectives on to the Withdrawal Agreement. She thus seeks both to head off Letwins push for a Bill that would constrain her, and to give the EU reason to opt for a further limited extension. However, there is an obvious tension between at least two of those six aims namely, between ultimately letting opposition MPs help to decide Brexit policy, and satisfying Conservative MPs who want manifesto pledges honoured (and the referendum result respected). By reaching across the House, even in shadow form, many of those who make up the Partys pro-Brexit majority will view her as a potential Robert Peel, ready to split her party to achieve a greater good, as she sees it. Her red lines, having turned pink, are dissolving altogether. As we write, ERG reaction is, unsurprisingly, very hostile. No Cabinet member has resigned. But it is clear that this decision will have been contentious, and we await firm details. Initial EU reaction appears to be very doubtful sceptical of whether the Prime Minister can get anything through the Commons fast enough to avoid those European elections. And what of her own survival? Unless she wins her chicken game fourth time round or the EU itself delivers No Deal she is heading at speed towards the slaughter house. 100% Website akhbarak.net uses latest and advanced technologies. It is very popular on the web, it's within the 1 million most visited websites of the world at position 4301 by Alexa. It supports HTTPS and GZIP compression. The main html page has a size of 148215 bytes (144.74 kb uncompressed) and 24922 bytes (24.34 kb compressed). This CoolSocial report was updated on 2021-11-07, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want. 100% Website tufak.org.tr uses latest and advanced technologies like: Boostrap. It supports HTTPS. The main html page has a size of 57958 bytes (56.60 kb uncompressed). This CoolSocial report was updated on 2020-11-04, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want. Close Modern executives are busy trying to find any way to optimize their business for the 21st century, which usually requires an extensive exploration of expensive digital technology or the hiring or a consultant to help you chart out the future. As many intelligent executives are starting to realize, however, there are easier ways to supercharge your company and equip your workforce for success than by investing in new tech or hiring outsiders for workforce training. Investing in employee mental health produces serious results and should be the primary focus of any executive trying to nurture a better workforce. Here's why mental health should be an executive priority, and what you can do to help your rank and file workers when it comes to wellness. Employee burnout costs businesses dearly Businesses should be focusing on the mental health of their employees because it's the right thing to do, yet it's also a selfish endeavor that will make them money in the long run. In a competitive marketplace, many executives fear that if they empathize with workers they'll face lower profits and the loss of business, yet there are plenty of reasons to believe that ignoring employee wellness backfires in the long run. As the Harvard Business Review illustrates, employee burnout is a real phenomenon that can disrupt your business and permanently ruin workers who would otherwise be superstars. Burnout at work can drain employees of their motivation and lead to lackluster commercial results, which is why it's important for executives to consider things like loneliness and mental wellness alongside of profit margins. You need to be focused on instilling a positive company culture that makes your rank and file workers feel like welcomed members of the family rather than strangers being exploited for profit. The future of business is in bringing people together rather than ripping them apart, so don't believe that you need to fragment your workforce into a remote empire in order to cut down on costs or bolster efficiency. As a matter of fact, many businesses that employ remote workforces see workforce morale drop as working from home might take a toll on your mental health. These businesses have become so obsessed with cutting operational costs and outsourcing as much of their operations as possible that they've forgotten the bottom line and have drifted into dangerous territory. For executives who want to remain relevant for years to come, you need to put workers first regardless of the headlines crowing about the rise of the machines. Automation isn't enough Many executives think that the can bypass any problem surrounding a human workforce by heavily automating their existing business operations, but the truth of the matter is that automation and digitization isn't enough. Human workers are always going to be part of the equation, which is why it's so imperative to have a robust HR department focused on bettering the everyday wellbeing of your rank and file employees. If the executives at the top of the company hierarchy start to only think of themselves, they'll face more than worker's revolt on their hands, and will soon see the entire foundation of their business empire crumbling before them. Some companies are going the extra mile in caring about the mental health of their employees by championing company-sponsored vacations. While this may raise eyebrows around some, it's a simple matter of fact that workers who have time off and enjoy regular vacations are more productive than those who slave away at the office all day. As the German model illustrates, giving your employees plenty of time off makes them ready and willing to work when they do eventually head back to the office, helping you avoid burnout and any workers compensation claims that might ensue. Beyond sponsoring vacations and paying your workers fair wages, instilling a positive company culture that focuses on more than just profits is an important part of making mental health an executive priority. This is because only executives and senior management officials have true control over the company's culture; rank and file workers contribute to the culture and become ingrained in it, yet they can't steer what direction it's going in. Your executives will want to think about diversity and inclusion at all times, as it's important to make your workers feel welcome and at home if you're serious about their mental wellness. Besides the fact that investing in employee health pays off handsomely in the long run, you should be focusing on mental health as an executive priority because it's the right thing to do. Businesses which lose sight of the wellbeing of their workers quickly fail, as every company needs a dedicated workforce to keep chugging forwards. Make mental health an executive priority in your business, and you'll soon see the positive results derived from having a workforce that's happy and content. See Now: What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Obamacare Close Marijuana's legalization is still a tense prospect in many places, with proponents and critics of the plants lining up to either champion or tear down the viability of making it more widespread. Frequently, debates surrounding the future of marijuana center on its impact on public health, and nowhere is more attention being paid than on the impact of legalization on car accidents. Does marijuana legalization lead to more car accidents, and if so, how are authorities responding? Here's everything we know about legal weed and the way it's changing our roadways. Studies provide mixed results Marijuana has only been legalized for long in a handful of places across the developed world, but a number of studies have already been initiated to track its impact on driving and public health in general. Thus far, the results from these studies have been relatively mixed, with some asserting that marijuana legalization leads to a direct increase in road collisions whereas others find no such correlation between the two. The National Transportation Safety Board notes that the number of drug-impaired drivers across the country has been ticking upwards, however, leading many to believe that the prevalence of weed is making roads riskier. With the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety also releasing figures claiming that legalized marijuana was linked with a 6 percent upward tick in record collisions, it also appears likely that critics of the substance have some merit. It's relatively logical that an increased amount of marijuana usage would likely lead to an increase in car accidents, given that the substance impairs one's ability to drive and thus an increase in usage is generally risky. Other studies have nonetheless found no link between legalized marijuana and a notable uptick in car accidents, however, so it remains to be seen if an authoritative answer has been arrived at. One 2017-era study noted that states which legalized marijuana saw a general uptick in car crashes in general, for instance, but that those crashes couldn't necessary be contributed to the substance. Other factors, like population growth, must also be taken into consideration. Outside of the United States, research into legal marijuana's impact on drivers is similarly inconclusive, perhaps because not enough time has passed since early legalization to determine the substance's true reach. Police in Canada have made it resoundingly clear that early data suggest no spike in pot-impaired driving after legalization, for instance, demonstrating that the fault is perhaps with the differences between law enforcement in the two nations. Parsing whether legal weed is causing more pedestrians their lives is evidently challenging on both sides of the border. More research is needed If one thing is clear, it's that additional research is needed before marijuana's legalization can safely be said to have a major impact on driving and pedestrian livelihoods one way or another. With a hodge-podge of legalization efforts currently dotting the map, the status of marijuana is uncertain in many key areas where it should be studied but can't be easily due to its outlawed status. The main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, THC, is still unfamiliar to many scientists who haven't had legitimate opportunities to study it or how it affects the human brain. Driving while impaired with any substance, including marijuana regardless of its legal status, is outlawed in all 50 states and virtually all foreign countries. Nonetheless, critics and proponents of weed can come together and agree that law enforcement officials and researchers need better training and tools to determine whether a driver is under the influence of drugs. As the substance continues to grow more popular with the public at large, it's likely such training and tools will be provided. Two in three Americans now support legalizing it, for instance, a figure that demonstrates why marijuana is of such interest to those looking into traffic fatalities. See Now: What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Obamacare Close Men across the world are being mislead by shady medical officials and misleading marketing teams that promise to reinvigorate their masculinity with the "powerful help" of testosterone replacement therapy. Testosterone replacement therapies that purport to solve hypogonadism, or a condition where testicles can't produce enough testosterone on their own, are often times dangerous and produce long-lasting harm in the patients that receive them. Why are testosterone replacement therapy services still popular despite the hidden dangers of this treatment, and how much of a risk are you really at when you receive it? Here are the hidden dangers of testosterone replacement therapy and why it's becoming increasingly studied with skepticism. Testosterone replacement therapy is widespread The extent to which testosterone replacement therapy, or TRT, has become widespread in this day and age is truly mind-boggling. According to one study, TRT has already managed to become one of the most widely prescribed medications in America today, with many older men in particular relying on it as a remedy for a number of health problems. Some medical experts are beginning to sound warning alarms about TRT, though, and insist that there are many hidden dangers to the therapy that most people are unaware of. Companies like AbbVie churn out products like AngroGel, which supposedly act as a wondrous salve that help restore your masculinity by replenishing your diminished testosterone levels. For the most part, the marketing efforts for TRT are centered around libido and sexuality; men who are suffering from erectile dysfunction are routinely the main target of TRT marketing initiatives. This is because companies understand that they've created a powerful medical product that mostly speaks to cultural fears more than it does actual biological realities. One extensive study of the effects of TRT products found that they overpromised and underdelivered, which should come as little surprise given the gaudy marketing that usually surrounds such drugs. The misleading potential of TRT has led many helpless patients to spend huge sums of money on therapy treatments that produce lackluster results or nothing notable at all. More than being a scam, however, TRT therapies can be hidden dangers that pose serious risk to the health of those using them. The health impact of TRT Marketing efforts for TRT services largely focus on the promise of restoring youthful vitality, alertness, and sexual functionality. In reality, though, the health impact of TRT services can be disastrous for those receiving them. For instance, a study recently showed that TRT increased risk of heart attack, stroke or death by 30 percent. The ongoing "low-T boom" is largely a result of direct-to-consumer marketing. Most patients don't actually have insufficient levels of hormones, but they're impacted by targeted advertising that warns them to "talk to a doctor" if they're feeling tired, as it could be a sign of low testosterone. As Dr. Michael O'Leary of the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital told Harvard Health Publishing, TRT services are pushed ceaselessly on aging men in an effort to get them to feel vulnerable about their low testosterone levels. The long-term health effects of TRT are still largely unknown. For instance, those who rely on hormone supplements temporarily may not know if they may end up needing such supplements permanently because of a temporary dependence. The so-called "testosterone trap" can lure many aging patients in only to force them to remain on a strict drug regimen for the rest of their lives. This is far from what most people understand TRT services to be, yet it's a serious risk that anyone embracing such services is exposed to every time they receive treatment. Furthermore, there's strong evidence that men involved in TRT services see an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases, which remain a leading cause of death in the developed world. Following a recent spate of studies and attention being paid to TRT services over the past few years, doctors have been prescribing TRT less as older men find themselves bailing from the practice. This is good news, as the negative impacts of TRT were largely unknown to many who found themselves relying on such therapy over the years. Besides increasing your risk for cardiovascular disease and potentially making you dependent on a drug regime, the other long-term effects of testosterone replacement therapy are largely unknown. The hidden dangers of testosterone replacement therapy lurk under the surface regardless of whether you know of them or not, however, so it's imperative to do your homework before embarking on a risky medical procedure. See Now: What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Obamacare The 2019 Caribbean Cruise Trends Report by Cruise Industry News is now available for free download. The PDF report goes in-depth with the leading Caribbean destinations to see how they set themselves apart in a crowded, competitive market, as well as looking at global industry trends, port deals and more. Plus there are trends reports, news out a number of new destinations, and much more. Click here to download. The Caribbean has been the single largest sailing region for the cruise industry since its launch in the late 1960s. For 2019, an estimated 39 percent of the global cruise capacity will be deployed in the Caribbean and that is consistent with the past five years. Thus, the Caribbean is maintaining its market share as the industry continues to grow and expand globally. With nearly 28 million passengers expected to cruise this year on a global basis, a record 11 million will sail in the Caribbean, up 5 percent from last year and more than ever before, according to the 2019 Cruise Industry News Annual Report. Supporting the Caribbeans role in the industry is its year-round summer weather, a variety of customer friendly destinations, proximity to homeports and the worlds largest cruise market (the United States), as well as a robust air-sea program from European markets, on top of which the Caribbean has also been politically stable and safe. Also giving a boost to the market has been the relatively recent addition of Cuba on cruise itineraries. In addition, ports and destinations throughout the Caribbean have been upgrading and expanding their port facilities and passenger attractions. Cruise lines have also built and added their own ports to the mix and vastly upgraded their private island destinations. The combination of these developments supports the continued growth of the industry throughout the region. MSC Cruises announced today that Christian Hein has been appointed Managing Director for MSC Kreuzfahrten, its Munich-based business for Germany. Hein has a broad managerial experience in sales and revenues management in the travel industry, including Lufthansa and Eurowings where he was in charge of global sales. He joins MSC Kreuzfahrten from insurance multinational AXA, where he was most recently head of sales for Germany, according to a press release. In connection with this, Michael Zengerle becomes Senior Vice President, Institutional Affairs and Strategic Development, a newly-created role within MSC Kreuzfahrten designed to offer further support to MSC Cruises business in the German market. In this capacity, Zengerle will work closely with the Companys senior management at global headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland mainly focused on strategic development and other relations including with government and regulatory authorities, ports and associations. Gianni Onorato, MSC Cruises CEO, said: Over the years, in Germany we have become the number one international cruise brand as well as the 10th tour operator overall. With 13 more next-generation ships on order including five LNG-powered we see room for additional growth together with our travel trade partners to serve the growing demand for our product and experience from German consumers. We welcome Christian Hein to our global team to lead this next phase of development of our business in Germany and look forward to Michaels continued contribution from his new position. BRIDGEPORT A year after chewing out staff royally for bullying statistics none of them believed, members of the city school board were pleased Monday to see more robust numbers. Its not that anyone wants high numbers, Board member Hernan Illingworth explained. We want numbers to be real, Illingworth said. We know what is happening in our schools. We want reports to reflect that. In the 2018-19 school year through March, there have been 327 accusations of bullying reported throughout the district. Of those, 43 were verified, based on the states definition. To be deemed a bully in Connecticut, a student must repeatedly cause physical or emotional harm to another student or the students property. It cant be a one-time occurrence and it has to be directed toward the same victim. Last year, the district reported 19 verified cases and 71 cases that were investigated. The relatively small number outraged not only members of the school board but members of city council who talked about forming a task force until they learned the district already had one. Addressing bullying has been one of Schools Superintendent Aresta Johnsons goals this school year. All of October 2018 in the district was dedicated to bully awareness, with many schools receiving stipends to run programs to draw attention to the problem. Dementred Young, director of social work and the districts safe school climate specialist, told members of the boards Facilities Committee there also is a poster contest for students with the prize money contributed by himself and Johnson. Time has been spent during principal meetings on how to document incidents and conduct investigations. There have been parent workshops, speakers and a uniform bullying report form developed to make it easier for schools to be consistent. Ca'Tisha Howard, a school counselor in the district and co-chair of the districts Bullying Task Force, said there have also been visits to schools in search of best practices. She described a Be Kind campaign at Roosevelt School that starts on the school grounds with signs. Walking up to the building, it feels so welcoming it makes me want to walk through the doors to see what else is going on, Howard said. Board Member Maria Pereira applauded the improvement but also pointed out that several schools, such as Wilbur Cross, continue to report unrealistically low numbers. So far this year, there has been only one bullying allegation reported Assistant Superintendent Janet Brown Clayton said principals at schools with very low numbers will be asked to make presentations on antibullying efforts so that others in the district can try the same things. lclambeck@ctpost.com; twitter/lclambeck BRIDGEPORT A local man who police said robbed a city bank with a fake bomb was arrested in Waterbury. Richard Herbert, 61, of uncertain address, was taken into custody Monday on an outstanding warrant charging him with first-degree robbery, breach of peace and first-degree threatening. During Herberts arraignment Tuesday afternoon in Superior Court here, Senior Assistant States Attorney Tatiana Messina urged Judge Eugene Calistro to set a high bond for Herbert, pointing out that the defendant has 38 previous felony convictions in Connecticut alone. Herbert is currently on probation for a Milford larceny conviction. The judge ordered him held in lieu of $250,000 bond. Thank you, your honor, Herbert told the judge before he was taken away by judicial marshals. Herbert is accused of robbing the Peoples United Bank branch in the Stop and Shop supermarket on Fairfield Avenue on Jan. 23. Police responded to a call of a bomb in the bank. When officers arrived there, they cleared out the supermarket and brought in a bomb-sniffing dog which determined that the small brown box left on the tellers counter did not contain explosives, police said. Police said a bank teller told them that a man, dressed in a hat, gloves and a scarf, approached her work station, placed the box on the counter in front of her and told her, Dont try to call anyone. The man demanded hundred-dollar bills and no dye pack, and then told the teller, I am going to leave this bomb here and if you do anything, I will detonate the bomb, police said. He then fled with between $2,000 and $3,000. Police said witnesses told them the man had gotten onto a city bus after fleeing the bank. Detectives said they later obtained the surveillance video from the bus and saw a recording of the robber changing his clothes and appearance in the bus. They said they were able to get a clear photo identifying Herbert as the bank robber. Two brothers, who federal authorities say put workers health at risk in the illegal removal of asbestos, were ordered Monday to pay fines and perform community service. Rezart Rakaj, 35, of Ansonia, and Kliton Rakaj, 39, of Monroe, were sentenced in New Haven federal court for offenses related to the illegal and dangerous removal of asbestos at a New Haven property they were renovating in 2015. U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton sentenced each defendant to one year of probation, a fine of $9,500, and 50 hours of community service. According to court documents and statements made in court, in November 2015, Rezart and Kliton Rakaj, who are brothers, and another family member purchased a commercial property located at 206-220 Wallace St. in New Haven. Prior to purchasing the property, the Realtor informed the purchasers that the property contained asbestos, and that a prior potential purchaser had already obtained a bid of approximately $117,000 for the legal asbestos abatement of the property. Shortly after the purchase was completed, the defendants chose not to engage a hazardous materials firm to perform lawful asbestos abatement and instead employed workers who spent multiple days demolishing portions of the property, ripping out piping, breaking tiles, and conducting other renovation and construction activities, including the removal of significant quantities of friable asbestos. On Nov. 20, 2015, inspectors from the City of New Haven Health Department, acting on an anonymous complaint, discovered the illegal asbestos removal project at 206-220 Wallace St. The inspection revealed multiple instances of illegal removal of asbestos containing air cell pipe wrap and asbestos-containing mag block tank and boiler insulation, both of which contain significant quantities of dangerous, friable asbestos. Inspectors observed workers removing asbestos-containing material and throwing it to the floor. The workers performed no wetting, used no negative air machines to create the required vacuum effect within workspaces and set up no critical barriers or protective sheeting to guard against the release of dangerous asbestos fibers into the environment. Though the workers wore dust masks and suits, the masks were not designed for use in asbestos abatement and failed to provide protection against asbestos fibers. Similarly, because the suits were worn repeatedly over the course of days and not decontaminated and disposed of after use, they did not protect the workers against exposure. Inspectors also observed and photographed 100-150 standard garbage bags filled with suspected asbestos-containing material. These defendants recklessly cut corners and endangered the lives of their workers, John Durham, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut said in a release. The U.S. Attorneys Office is committing to prosecuting all who deliberately harm the environment and risk public health in order to save money. The illegal removal of asbestos insulation and the associated removal of scrap pipe and boilers from old buildings continues to be a problem throughout the Northeast, said EPS-CID Special Agent in Charge Tyler Amon. Inhalation of asbestos fibers can result in lung cancer and it therefore poses significant health risks to all exposed. EPA will continue to hold accountable those who commit such offenses. On Nov. 16, 2018, Rezart and Kliton Rakaj each pleaded guilty to one count of illegal asbestos removal in violation of the Clean Air Act. In addition to the sentence imposed Monday, the defendants also face a fine from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration This investigation is being conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Criminal Investigation Divisio, with the assistance of the City of New Haven Health Department and U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Elena L. Coronado and Sarala V. Nagala. GREENWICH Alexandra Bartholomew, an elementary school principal in Michigan, will take over the top job at New Lebanon School this July, Interim Superintendent of Schools Ralph Mayo announced Tuesday. I am incredibly excited and honored to be joining the New Lebanon School and larger Greenwich community, Bartholomew, who leads Anderson & McGrath Elementary School in Grand Blanc said in a statement. I look forward to getting to know and partnering with our families, students, and teachers as we build upon a fabulous legacy and look toward the future. New Lebanons current principal, Barbara Riccio, in January announced that she will retire effective June 30. Riccio has worked in the Greenwich Public Schools for 25 years and as an educator for more than 35 years. She has served as the principal of New Lebanon since 2011. Bartholomew has experience in planning the logistics of a schoolwide move into a new building, and hosting welcome events for families experiences that will guide her at New Lebanon School, a brand-new building that students moved into nearly two months ago. In her previous jobs, Bartholomew has implemented strategies to close opportunity gaps for students, support and retain teachers, and partner with families, district officials said. Alexandra is an experienced building administrator who brings a wealth of knowledge of instructional practices, professional learning, and school improvement planning to our school district, Mayo said in a statement. Each of these skills will support the work that is currently taking place at New Lebanon School. The programs and services she has initiated have helped improve the academic achievement at, and overall climate of, her school, he said. We are very excited that she will be joining our leadership team and I look forward to helping her transition to her new position in July, Mayo said. Bartholomew, who began her career at Rauner College Prep in Chicago, was a finalist for the Sue Lehmann Excellence in Teaching Award, Teach For Americas highest honor. As a recruitment manager for TFA since 2016, Bartholomew has recruited students committed to educational equity as teachers in public schools. At Anderson & McGrath, Bartholomew brought about a 100 percent retention rate of teachers. She has also implemented strategies to improve student performance, reduce behavior issues through restorative practices and mindfulness, and engage parents, increasing event attendance by 300 percent and donation revenue by 50 percent. Her move from Michigan will be a homecoming of sorts, too. Bartholomews grandfather brought his family to Greenwich in the 1960s, and her father and uncle attended Greenwich Public Schools. Bartholomew said she is excited to live and work in Greenwich and to reconnect with family friends. jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.com Brand equity or its value is based on how much profit a brand makes, how strong the brand is in comparison to the competitors and the role that the branding plays in the product purchase. A Nike logo matters for shoe purchases, a Keebler Elf matters a little, but not as much in cookie purchasing. The number one brand in the world, Apple, is presently worth $214 billion. Branding is the process of creating a name, logo, symbol, and personality to represent your product or service. Brands become valuable when customers associate high value and quality products or services with your brand. Branding is vital because it creates a memorable imprint on the consumers brain that helps establish awareness and long-term loyalty. It provides a consistent image so consumers know what to expect. Satisfaction is based on meeting or exceeding expectations. A stable, positive image is essential. New entrepreneurs spend so much time building their new products that the importance of branding is often forgotten. The branding process can seem daunting for a new entrepreneur, but a few simple steps can start the process. 1. Establish a brand identity. Base your brand identity on the products key value proposition, which is the number one reason why customers purchase your product or service. The proposition should be able to be stated in a clear, succinct manner. Base all subsequent communications on this image. Lyft stresses, Rides in minutes, whereas Uber claims to be The smartest way to get around. Thumbtack helps you find experienced professionals. While conducting sales training, I found that veteran sales reps typically struggle to state their companys value position. The reps would usually report what product they sell, in feature-specific terms. For example, the reps would say, We sell after-market automotive parts. They would struggle to say why the customers buy their product in value-specific terms. Instead, the value proposition should be, We sell auto products that cannot be found anywhere else, to repair your antique and valuable vehicles easily and quickly. Value and quality always matter first and foremost. Related: The 8 Laws of Branding 2. Consider the look of the brand. Part of a brand identity involves the visual representation of it, which includes the logo, the colors, type font, and other design aspects. Research on the effects of color has shown that color is a critical aspect of branding. Between 62 and 90 percent of the customers initial product assessment is based on color. For example, red represents power and energy, or passion and love, and green exemplifies nature, health, fertility, and good luck. These meanings are culturally based. Keep color consistent throughout your webpage and any social media you use so that customers associate these feelings with your brand. Font and logos can create a great deal of emotion. Google fonts is a library of 915 fonts, most of which are available for use with an open license. Many sites demonstrate the best Google Fonts to use. The most important thing is readability and accessibility. Creativity can lead to pretty, artistic fonts, but these are not as easy to read. Studies have found that Arial is easiest to read, but harder to read fonts, are more memorable because you have to slow down to read. Again, be consistent across all sites and postings. Make sure that that your branding strategies are distinct from competitors and memorable, like the Lyft mustaches. 3. Create brand awareness. Once you have your brand's value proposition and image, you can use the Internet to build awareness. Know where your target market is. Know what sites they frequent online and what influencers they follow. Some of these data can be found by merely spending time browsing and doing research. For any B2B business, customers likely use LinkedIn and trade associations or organizations unique to that industry. If you are looking to start an online catering service, your customer might be frequenting wedding websites or other party idea sites. Secondary data sources like Nielsen provide much of this information for a fee. Related: 5 Startup Branding Trends to Watch for in 2019 Start producing content on your sites and as many external sites as possible that your target market might read. Produce as much different content as possible that may provide value to your customer. Give readers a reason to come back and learn more. Referring to the catering company example, discuss wedding planning topics at least weekly. Businesses that blog regularly get 97 percent more inbound business. Link to as many other social media channels that you can. Make it easy for other people to share or link to your material by using linking buttons. Press releases are especially useful and can increase your search ranking with Google. If appropriate to your company, post online videos and podcasts. The more you saturate the Internet, the more likely the customer can find your product. 4. Build trust, credibility and loyalty. Once you begin to establish your clientele, make sure you consistently provide outstanding customer service and products. Customers will come back time after time if you provide a quality product and add value. Create a referral program. Give customers rewards to bring more customers to you. This tactic works by both bringing in more customers and keeping your current customers happy because they are receiving added benefits. Promote your product by encouraging happy customers to rate your product and provide feedback online. Related: 13 Fun Facts That Will Make Your 'About Me' A Lot Less Boring As you continue to build your business, do not change your brand. Do not change the logo, slogan, or any part of your brand identity. You spent all this time and money building awareness and loyalty. Why would you intentionally throw that away? Changing the brand or re-branding will erode this value. Coca-Cola has the fifth most valuable brand in the world, and they have never changed their logo. PepsiCo is known for frequently changing their logo. While PepsiCo has the 22nd most valuable brand, its brand equity is $40 billion less than Coca-Cola. The only time it ever makes sense to rebrand is when a brand has been destroyed beyond repair (Valujet). If you think that changing your brand on a slumping product will improve your sales, you do not understand your business. Keep your customers engaged long term. Keep your conversations active and current so that customers want to participate in your communication efforts continually. The more people are involved, the more other people will want to be included due to social proof theory. Repeat customers spend 300 percent more on average than new customers. Related: Como venderle una idea a Netflix How Young Entrepreneurs Can Tread Their Paths in Event Management? Branding Strategies That Create Customers Who Spend 300% More Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved Two Arkansas men are accused taking turns in a bulletproof vest and shooting each other. Charles Eugene Ferris, 50, was on his back deck drinking with his neighbor, Christopher Hicks, 36, on Sunday when the incident happened, according to a police report. Ferris was wearing a bulletproof vest and told Hicks to shoot him with the vest on. Hicks shot Ferris in the chest one time with a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle, according to the report. The bullet hit Ferris in the top left corner of his chest, and the vest stopped the bullet. The shot still hurt Ferris and left him with a red mark on the chest. Ferris then took the vest off and Hicks put it on. Ferris was angry about getting shot and how much it hurt, so he "unloaded the clip into Christopher's back," according to the report. None of the rounds penetrated the vest, but Hicks suffered bruises. Ferris went to a local hospital, and staff members there notified law enforcement. Ferris initially told deputies a story about being paid $200 to protect an "asset" and that he was shot guarding the "asset" from a man wearing a white suit near a bicycle and walking trail. Ferris later told deputies about drinking with Hicks and how they shot each other with bulletproof vests on after deputies spoke with Ferris' wife. Both Ferris and Hicks were arrested on suspicion of aggravated assault. A court hearing is planned for May 13. A former middle school teacher is suing a New York school district after she was fired over a topless selfie. News 12 Long Island reports Lauren Miranda, a 25-year-old math teacher at Bellport Middle School, was recently fired when a topless photo she sent began circulating throughout the district. Miranda sent the photo to a fellow co-worker she was dating and is not sure how students were able to obtain the image. "That picture was never posted. How it got out is the million dollar question," she said. "My career has been ruined, my reputation has been tarnished and I have been stigmatized." Miranda's attorney, John Ray, believes the district's decision to fire the teacher was discrimination as has filed a $3 million gender discrimination lawsuit against the South Country School District "Anytime a man has ever exposed his chest, no one has commented or had any problem with it whatsoever. But when a woman displays her chest, as happened here, she gets fired from her job," he said. Miranda said she would be willing to drop the lawsuit if she was reinstated, but the superintendent told her that wasn't going to happen. "He said, 'How can I put you in front of a classroom where boys would be able to pull out their phone and look at this image of you?'" she claimed. The school district superintendent released a statement, saying only, "The district does not comment on active litigation." Milford's Board of Aldermen took a stab at reducing the number of young adults who get hooked on tobacco products when the board voted unanimously April 1 to raise the age for buying tobacco products in Milford from 18 to 21. The new city ordinance applies to the sale of cigarettes, tobacco products, electronic nicotine delivery systems and vapor products. Republican Alderman Ray Vitali (R-5), vice chairman of the Milford Prevention Council, brought the idea of raising the age to the full board, and he got plenty of support from the community and his fellow aldermen. School officials, health officials and even a local high school student attended the Board of Aldermen's meeting April 1 to speak in favor of the new age restriction. Jenn Paradis, executive director of the Beth-El Homeless Shelter, said she has seen the harm tobacco products inflict on young people, adding that the use of tobacco products represents an at-risk behavior that often leads to others. "As a provider that serves at-risk youth, those experiencing homelessness and hunger, we have a vested interest in ensuring that we do all we can do to prevent the influx of youth into our shelter systems," Paradis said. John Dixon, CEO of Bridges, spoke in favor of the new ordinance, as did School Supt. Dr. Anna Cutaia, joined by a group of local educators. Jonathan Law High School Principal Fran Thompson, who has been vocal over the years about the growing number of teenagers using electronic cigarettes, spoke on behalf of the educators. "Jonathan Law is no different than other high schools across the country," Thompson said. "The use of electronic cigarette products follows the national trend, and we've seen a significant increase in the past five years among high school students. It is my opinion, and that of my colleagues here tonight, that this is a national health epidemic for this age group." Thompson also said school officials see vaping spreading to the middle schools. Morgan Taylor, a student at Jonathan Law High School, said vaping is a problem at her school, and she thinks raising the age to buy tobacco products will help curtail use. The ordinance approved in Milford cites a number of statistics, including that 95% of adult smokers began smoking before they turned 21. It says tobacco industry documents show that individuals who start smoking by the age of 18 are almost twice as likely to become lifetime smokers compared to those who start smoking after they turn 21. The ordinance also states that e-cigarette aerosol that users breathe can contain harmful and potentially harmful substances, including nicotine and cancer-causing chemicals. In adopting the ordinance Monday night, Vitali said Milford joined five other communities that had already done so in Connecticut Hartford, Wallingford, Southington, South Windsor and Bridgeport. Trumbull's Town Council also voted Monday night to increase the age to 21. There is movement at the state level to raise the age to 21 as well. According to a March 5 article at CTNewsJunkie.com, a bill that would prohibit the sale of cigarettes, tobacco products, electronic nicotine delivery systems and vapor products to people under the age of 21 received strong support during a recent public hearing. If Connecticut passes the bill it would join Massachusetts, California, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey and Oregon in raising the age from 18 to 21, according to CTNewsJunkie. Per Milford's new ordinance, retailers that violate the new ordinance face a fine of $100 for the first offense and $250 for the second offense. The ordinance also requires businesses that sell tobacco products to post signs stating that people have to be 21 or older to buy them. Alderman Ellen Beatty (D-1) said she wants to see follow-through on the ordinance to gauge what impact it has, and Vitali agree that is a good idea. Alderman Nick Veccharelli (D-2) said he initially had some concerns about the ordinance, pointing out that local businesses might be hurt when their customers go to another town to buy their tobacco products. But he said he's proud Milford has taken this position. Even if businesses take a hit it's worth it if it saves the the lives of young people, he said. Zee Zulfiqar, who owns Krauszer's on Pond Point Road in Milford, said he doesn't have a problem with the ordinance. "It's good for the people," Zulfiqar said. "I have no objection." Don Eng contributed to this article. The chairman of North Carolina's Republican party and three other people, including a top political donor, were indicted on bribery charges related to programs receiving federal funds, prosecutors said. Robin Hayes, 73, and the others made their initial court appearances Tuesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler in federal court in Charlotte, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office. Police say a New York man who believed an intruder was in his home was operating a meth lab. According to Plattsburgh police, Cory Favreau, 37, called 911 for a trespassing complaint. Officers responded Sunday morning to his home on Champlain Street. Favreau told police he heard something in his attic and believed there was someone in his house. Officers checked the home and didn't find anyone suspicious. They did, however, find numerous items consistent with the manufacture of methamphetamine, Chief Levi Ritter said. Due to the hazardous chemicals found, three residents had to be evacuated. After obtaining a search warrant, the police narcotics unit and New York State Police said they found several items used to make meth. Favreau was arrested and charged with one count of manufacturing meth and one count of endangering the welfare of a child. He was arraigned Monday morning in Plattsburgh City Court, where he was remanded to the Clinton County Jail. The scene was cleared by Sunday afternoon. It was only 200 days ago, on his 601st day in office, that President Donald Trump exceeded 5,000 false or misleading claims. Now, on his 801st day, the count stands at 9,451, according to The Fact Checker's database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement the president utters. That's a pace of 22 fishy claims a day over the past 200 days, a steep climb from the average of nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in Trump's first year in office. Of course, not every day yields 22 claims. The president's tally expands when he's giving a speech, usually at a campaign rally. At such events, he runs through many of his favorite lines, such as that he passed the biggest tax cut in history, that his U.S.-Mexico border wall is already being built and that the U.S. economy today is the best in history. All three of those claims are on The Fact Checker's list of Bottomless Pinocchios. At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 28, for instance, Trump made 64 claims that ended up in the database. Many have been previously covered in our fact checks, but here are some fresh statements that are worthy of attention. - - - "They [Hillary Clinton] had a tiny, little crowd, and I had I'd like to say more, but I can't have more than this because every seat is gone, and outside you have 25,000 people. And I remember leaving, and I said so she's got 500 people, and I had 32,000 people including the people outside. So she's here at prime time 7:30, I'm here at 1 in the morning. She has 500 or 600 people, I have 32,000." As usual, Trump inflates the number of people attending one of his rallies. The Detroit Free Press reported that night that DeVos Place in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Trump held a midnight rally, has a capacity of 4,200, far less than the 32,000 he claimed. Clinton held her rally the same day at nearby Grand Valley State University; it was described as a "capacity crowd" at a venue that holds 4,100 people. - - - "I support the Great Lakes. Always have. . . . And I'm going to get, in honor of my friends, full funding of $300 million for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which you have been trying to get for over 30 years. So we will get it done. It's time. It's time. It's time." Trump is being very misleading here. His administration has continually tried to eliminate or reduce funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a program for restoring the ecosystem of the Great Lakes that started under the Obama administration in 2010. Federal funding ranged from nearly $300 million to $450 million a year under Obama. Trump's 2018 budget request would have zeroed out all funding - the administration wanted "responsibility for funding local environmental efforts and programs to state and local entities" - and his 2020 budget would have cut it by 90 percent. Notwithstanding Trump's proposed cuts, Congress appropriated nearly $300 million in 2019. - - - "They [Great Lakes] are beautiful. They are big, very deep, record deepness, right?" Lake Superior is 1,332 feet deep, but it is not even the deepest freshwater lake in the United States. The deepest is Crater Lake, a volcanic crater in southern Oregon, with the deepest measured depth at 1,949 feet. Lake Tahoe and Lake Chelan are also deeper than Lake Superior, so it ranks fourth in the United States. Lake Baikal in southern Russia is the world's deepest lake. It is an estimated 5,387 feet deep. Lake Baikal is also the world's largest freshwater lake in terms of volume. Worldwide, Crater Lake ranks ninth, and Lake Superior does not even make the top 20; it is the 37th-deepest lake in the world. - - - "In the last two years, we've embarked on an unprecedented economic revival. Unprecedented." By just about every metric, Trump inherited a thriving economy that was doing far better than he claimed on the campaign trail. He frequently said the unemployment rate was 42 percent, when it was actually 5 percent - a number he embraced once he took the oath of office. - - - "In Texas, you heard we won the case [on the Affordable Care Act]; now it has to be appealed, and then we will go to the United States Supreme Court." The Trump administration originally did not seek a sweeping repeal of the Affordable Care Act. It simply asked that the court nullify provisions that protected people with preexisting health conditions. So the court ruled beyond the administration's position. But Trump now declares that is a win. The refusal to defend the law was a flip-flop from Trump's pledge to retain protections for people with preexisting health conditions. Few legal experts think the ruling will survive the appeal process. - - - "The deductibles and Obamacare are so high, on average $7,000. You don't get to use it unless a really great tragedy hits, and then you don't really want it because you don't give a damn about your deductible, right?" Deductibles vary according to the type of plan people buy. Trump appears to be referring to "Bronze plan" deductibles, which are $6,258 when prescription drugs and medical spending are in the deductible; the deductibles for Silver, Gold and Platinum plans are much lower. Silver plans are the most common choice in the marketplace and have equivalent deductibles of $4,375. The Affordable Care Act included subsidies that helped keep premiums low for most people on the exchanges. Trump eliminated cost-sharing reduction payments that compensate insurance companies for offering mandatory discounts on out-of-pocket spending to lower-income customers. Ironically, that led to even bigger premium subsidies as companies increased premiums to make up for the loss of income. - - - "Remember this because it's very important, and I'm speaking now for the Republican Party: We will always protect patients with preexisting conditions, always." The House and Senate GOP plans backed by Trump probably would have resulted in higher costs for people with preexisting conditions in some states, according to the Congressional Budget Office. As noted above, the Trump administration did not defend the Affordable Care Act against a lawsuit that would end protection for preexisting conditions. - - - "The Democrats are now advancing an extreme $100 trillion government takeover called the Green New Deal." The estimate Trump is citing comes from a Republican-aligned think tank; it's actually $93 trillion, and it factors in things that are not in the resolution, such as building high-speed rail at a scale at which air travel becomes unnecessary. - - - "I love campaigning against the Green New Deal. I want [Democrats] to make that a big part of their platform. No more airplanes, no more cows. One car per family. . . . And we had a problem because when they didn't want the airplanes they were saying, 'Well, how do you get to Europe?' " In reality, the Green New Deal resolution has no teeth and wouldn't become law if it passed. So these claims are based on a retracted FAQ about a nonbinding resolution. In these documents, proponents of the Green New Deal mused about ending air travel. As problematic as those lines were, none made it into the resolution. High-speed rail would become an airplane alternative for some travelers under the terms of the Green New Deal, but it wouldn't end commercial air travel. Travelers who prefer flights over high-speed rail would still have a choice. As for cows, Trump is referring to a line in the FAQ intended to be an ironic reference to the effect of cow emissions. - - - "We lost 1 in 4 auto manufacturing jobs over the last few decades." This statement lacks context. The auto and auto parts manufacturing sectors reached a peak of 1.3 million jobs in June 2000. The number of jobs decreased by more than half, to 623,000, in June 2009, the end of the Great Recession. The number of jobs now tops 1 million, but much of that growth predates Trump. Only about 55,000 auto and auto parts jobs have been created since he took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. - - - "We lost over the last six, seven years with Mexico $100 million. Before NAFTA, we made $40 [billion] to $50 billion." Trump frequently exaggerates the size of trade deficits - with Mexico, it was $78 billion in 2018, $69 billion in 2017 and $62 billion in 2016. Countries do not "lose" money on trade deficits. A trade deficit simply means that people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first country. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as currencies, economic growth, and savings and investment rates. As for the trade deficit with Mexico before the North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States ran trade deficits in goods (Trump's preferred metric) with Mexico five out of the 10 years before the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, according to the Census Bureau. In the years when the United States ran a goods surplus, it was never more than $5 billion and usually about $1 billion to $2 billion. But what matters is not the deficit or surplus but rather the level of trade between the two countries. Cross-border trade in goods was about $100 billion in 1994, compared with more than $500 billion in 2018. According to the Commerce Department, U.S. exports of goods and services to Mexico supported an estimated 1.2 million jobs in 2015 (the latest data available). - - - "Last month alone, more than 76,000 illegal immigrants arrived at our borders to be apprehended. We have to apprehend them. Do you know what a great job - I mean seriously think of that, 76,000 people, many of which are rough people." Trump says there are 76,000 "illegal immigrants," but almost 53,000 of the total are family units, unaccompanied children or "inadmissibles" who present themselves at the border seeking asylum. It's a different situation from that of the mostly single men who tried to cross the border in large numbers in the early 2000s. Under Trump, the Customs and Border Protection agency has been releasing a combined total, but the "inadmissibles" - who numbered 9,653 in February - are not part of the apprehensions. Inadmissibles include "individuals encountered at ports of entry who are seeking lawful admission into the United States but are determined to be inadmissible, individuals presenting themselves to seek humanitarian protection under our laws, and individuals who withdraw an application for admission and return to their countries of origin within a short timeframe." Nevada set sales records, with tax reveneus to match, when it got off to a running start in the first months of legalized recreational cannabis in just a matter of months. Neighboring California, long noted for red tape, has been much slower rolling out adut use sales but it is still pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month in cannabis tax revenues. And then there is Massachusetts. The glacial pace of regulators charged with approving dispensaries to sell cannabis, as well as scattered locations for those dispensaries, have left the commonwealth receiving a fraction of hoped-for tax revenues -- a really small fraction. State officials had projected $63 million in tax revenue this first year, but as of March 1 they had collected only $5.9 million, according to the Boston Globe. Related: Cannabis Banking Bill Wins Approval in Crucial House Committee What's the problem? Is it possible that fewer people in Massachusetts use cannabis than those in California and Nevada? Maybe. However, experts say the issue in Massachusetts involves a confluence of creaky bureaucracy and odd dispensary locations. The first dispensaries did not open until the end of November, much later than the July opening date first set by officials. The locations have also been outside of major metropolitan areas -- unlike places such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver and Seattle, all of which had dispensaries on or soon after the date marijuana sales became legal in California, Colorado and Washington. In contrast, the first dispensary in the Boston area just opened in March in Brookline. The Boston Globe dug through the statistics to see how much difference there has been in Massachusetts as compared to other states. They found that about $45 million in marijuana was sold in Massachusetts, or about $6.60 per resident. Thats much lower than the per resident numbers in Nevada ($30), Colorado ($8.70) and California ($8.17) Despite the low numbers, the states Administration and Finance Secretary Michael Heffernan told lawmakers he is still not willing to say they will not reach $63 million by June, saying its too early in the birthing of this particular industry to be able to actually calculate if were on or off track for our revenues. Related: New Poll Finds Highest Support Ever for Weed Legalization Competition forming On top of everything else happening in the state, Massachusetts also faces competition. Officials in adjoining states who see the potential financial benefits of legalizing marijuana have started to line up support for legalization efforts of their own. Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York all have started making moves toward legalization. In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo has made legalized marijuana part of her proposed state budget and projects $4.9 million in new revenue from weed sales. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has included legalization on the agenda for the first 100 days of his third term. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont made legalization part of his campaign and part of his agenda this year. How this will impact sales in Massachusetts is unknown. However, some experts told the North of Boston Media Group that they expect it to at least impact prices over the course of the next few years. To stay up to date on the latest marijuana-related news make sure to like dispensaries.com on Facebook Related: Sluggish Bureaucracy Is Blamed for Disappointing Marijuana Tax Revenues in Massachusetts Small Businesses Face 6 Challenges in the Weed Market Harnessing Data to Optimize the Cannabis Consumer Experience Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved MEXICO CITY - Until last week, U.S. officials held up El Salvador as proof that foreign aid could help curb migration. The partnership between the two countries drew praise from diplomats, members of Congress and even America's top border enforcement official. Then President Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing economic assistance to the Central American country and its neighbors Guatemala and Honduras. "They haven't done a thing for us," the president said Friday. The claim baffled development officials and Salvadorans, who saw the country's cooperation with the United States on security, civil society and economic development as a success story, inasmuch as it achieved the Trump administration's goal of slowing the flow of migrants heading north to the United States. In the past three years, El Salvador's homicide rate and migration flows have declined sharply. More than 72,000 Salvadorans were apprehended crossing the U.S. border in 2016. By 2018, the number had plummeted by more than half, to fewer than 32,000. "The decision to cut funding contradicts the results of what we have accomplished together," Raul Lopez, El Salvador's vice minister of justice, said Monday. "The fact is that migration from El Salvador is declining, thanks to our work." The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on programs aimed at bringing stability to one of the world's most dangerous countries. Money has been spent to train police officers, fund after-school programs and improve local governance. U.S. officials argued repeatedly that those programs were successful, and they offered the crime and migration statistics that they said proved their assertion. "What (El Salvador is) doing is working, both on the security front and on the economic opportunity front," U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said in July. Trump said he was cutting off aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras because the countries haven't curbed migration to the United States. He has accused those three countries of allowing their citizens to join migrant caravans destined for the U.S. border. Analysts have been quick to point out that cutting off assistance to Central America could cause migration to increase because programs aimed at improving security and economic opportunity could cease. They say the case of El Salvador, a nation of 6.5 million people, is still more confounding. Migration from Guatemala and Honduras has surged in the past two years. But in cutting aid to El Salvador, Trump is punishing a government that has overseen a dramatic reduction in migration. McAleenan, speaking last year at the Bipartisan Policy Center, described El Salvador as a model: "We want to achieve those same successes in Honduras and Guatemala as well." The U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, the capital, did not respond to requests for comment. Analysts caution against attributing reductions in migration solely to U.S. aid. They say changes in migration are likely the result of a variety of causes, many of them beyond the control of governments. "There has been no serious look at the historical relationship between development and migration that would convince anyone that economic development of any form across the developing world leads to sudden decreases in migration," said Michael Clemens, co-director of migration at the Center for Global Development in Washington."Demographic forces are so much stronger." Over the past decade, the Salvadoran population aged out of the so-called youth bulge, when a disproportionate number of people were 15 to 29 years old - the period when people are most likely to migrate. Guatemala and Honduras are several years behind El Salvador demographically, which might help explain discrepancies in their migration rates. Migration from the three nations of Central America's Northern Triangle rose rapidly from 2012 to 2016, much of it from undocumented minors fleeing growing threats of gang violence. According to the Center for Global Development, more than 8 percent of 17-year-olds from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras arrived at the U.S. border from 2011 through 2016. In a separate study linking violence to migration, it found that for every 10 additional killings in those three countries, six more children migrated to the United States. In 2015, El Salvador had 103 homicides for every 100,000 residents, more than 20 times the rate in the United States. In response to the violence and the surge in undocumented minor immigrants, the Obama administration launched an aid package for the three countries in 2015, known as the Alliance for Prosperity. In El Salvador, the aid funded programs to train security personnel, provide jobs to at-risk youths, increase tax collection and a flurry of other projects. Many were aimed specifically at deterring migration, such as assistance for recent deportees, so they wouldn't attempt to migrate again. "The truth is that we are really appreciative of these partnerships," said Lopez, the Salvadoran justice official. "They've made a big impact here. "The question we have now is, 'Why would we stop doing something that is working?' " El Salvador is the smallest nation in the Northern Triangle. Its size in relation to Guatemala and Honduras - and the relative strength of its government - make it an easier place to implement development programs, U.S. officials say. The U.S. government - in speeches, news releases and interviews - emphasized the success of its assistance programs. Between 2015 and 2017, the U.S. Agency for International Development boasted last year, "El Salvador saw a 61 percent reduction (in homicides) in the municipalities in which USAID operates. This compares to a 42 percent reduction nationwide." "USAID assistance helps to stem the flow of irregular migration by creating greater economic opportunities for Salvadorans," the agency said. Some former U.S. officials agree that it is difficult to control migration through aid. But because most of the Salvadoran migrants were fleeing gang violence and other security problems, they say, there was a clear-cut role for the U.S. government - which it played effectively. Marcela Escobari was assistant administrator of USAID for Latin America and the Caribbean during the Obama administration. "U.S. development programs are never going to eliminate migration flows," she said. "But when there are sudden increases in migration that are attributable to insecurity, we have been able to implement anti-violence programs that have proven to be successful." While analysts say cutting aid to El Salvador is likely to contribute to an increase in migration in the long term, the country's institutions could feel the impact more quickly. "You might not see the jump from one week to the next," said Geoff Thale, vice president for programs at the Washington Office on Latin America. "But the impact on program participants and their circles will be real." "People will be cut off from alternatives that offer them some hope and some sense that their future in El Salvador will be better," he said. "Programs that contribute to reducing insecurity by strengthening the rule of law will disappear, and anti-corruption efforts that make investment and economic growth more viable will stall." Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, October 24) Globe Telecom earned this year's Asia's Best Workplace of the Year award during the Asia Corporate Excellence & Sustainability Awards (ACES). The said awards body gives recognition to the continent's most successful individuals and companies in terms of leadership and sustainability. This year, Globe Telecom was lauded for its initiative to provide its employees the best working environment possible, as well as various opportunities for holistic development. "We are glad to be recognized as Asia's Best Workplace of the Year at the prestigious ACES. Being an integral part of the company's and nation's success, we put a premium on ensuring our employees find purpose and meaning in their work," said Globe's Chief Human Resource Officer Renato Jiao. "By allowing their work to serve a purpose beyond just livelihood, we ensure the ability of our people to lead happy and meaningful lives. This, more than anything else, is what sets Globe apart from any other company." ACES annually presents the Asia's Best Workplace of the Year to the company that best represents a people-centric approach and a strong commitment towards employee empowerment and enrichment. Holistic growth for employees Globe provides employees opportunities for continuous learning through its program called Globe University. The program offers over 100 skills and leadership training courses. Over 2,900 people have benefited while almost 1,000 leaders have emerged from these courses alone. These courses are powered by digital learning tools, and taught by our expert partners in the field using different methodologies. Every quarter or semester, Globe also holds an organization-wide town hall event called Ka-Globe Jam. This is where its senior leaders led by Globe President and CEO Ernest Cu summarize and celebrate quarterly business results, achievements and milestones of the company. Through the feedback mechanism of The Hub, Globe identifies employee concerns regarding any company policy, standard or process. Globe also allows employees to strike a work-life balance in its headquarters in Taguig City through various in-house facilities such as a gym, bank, salon, pharmacy and carwash, among others. Keeping in mind that every employee has unique needs, Globe has created the My Choice Flexible Benefits Program. It gives employees the flexibility to customize their company benefits in order to suit not only their own personal needs, but that of their dependents as well. On top of their leave credits, the company had also decided to give each employee two days of volunteer time-off per year devoted to corporate social responsibility work. In 2017, volunteerism in Globe reached an all-time high of 52.8 percent of the total employee base, with over 3,000 employees contributing over 60,000 man-hours. These initiatives are centered on the company's belief of continuously spinning the Circle of Happiness from employees to customers and shareholders. I recently resigned from the Bridgeport Board of Education. My resignation was the result of the leadership of the boards move away from concerns over the welfare of children, staff and parents, and towards protecting his own position of power. I have always been and will continue to be an advocate for public schools. I enjoyed a long career in public education and I have seen how an education can transform a childs life. In running for the board my goal was to bring an insiders perspective to the board. My understanding was that, with ideas being shared from many different perspectives, a collaborative resolution could always be achieved. I was prepared to be the voice for the children, the staff and the parents. I was totally unprepared for the nastiness and back-stabbing of ego-driven politics. I was initiated to ego-driven politics early on with the ugliness of the Bradley-era boycott. It was devastating to the district and destroyed my naive illusions of public service. In spite of this, I was resolved to be the voice for those in the classroom. With the BOE election of 2017, the departure of Sauda Baraka and Howard Gardner, and the subsequent appointment of John Weldon as chair, it became immediately apparent that personal power was more important than getting business done for the betterment of the district. The first action of Chairman Weldon was to stack Joe Sokolovic, Maria Pereira and myself onto the same two committees. Attendance in the other four committees was so poor that often business wasnt getting done if they even met at all. The disintegration of parliamentary process and decorum was embarrassing. In some committees, executive staff were being threatened. Suddenly, staff and administrators were publicly excoriated and berated. During public meetings, members of the staff had their competency questioned, there were innuendos concerning certain administrators, and some even suffered threats of summary firing. Parliamentary procedure meant nothing as mechanisms like calling the question when debate became oppositional and calls to adjourn meetings before business was discussed became the norm. Aside from two committees, no work was getting done. Worse, not once did I hear debate about what was best for children. It became clear to me that working for the betterment of the children, staff and parents was not the motivating factor for the majority of the members of the board. Then came Chairman Weldons new bylaws. It hasnt taken two months for anyone paying attention that these bylaws were written with one mission and that was to consolidate decision-making into one person, the chair. No longer does the board operate as a democracy. The chair has the power to deny agenda items submitted by other members, cancel any meeting including a committee meeting, serve as chair at all meetings including committee meetings, consult with legal counsel at board expense without board approval, authorize legal counsel to serve as parliamentarian and serve as ex-officio member of all committees, just to mention some of the most egregious power grabs. At a recent Personnel Committee meeting, Mr. Weldon refused to allow Ms. Pereira to ask a question of a candidate being interviewed. He only acquiesced after I urged him to. A few days before that Mr. Weldon refused to include six items to the agenda presented by Ms. Pereira. Then came the secretiveness of the Quarterly Recognition Ceremony. Mr. Weldon, who wrote his own personal bylaws, conveniently ignored said bylaws in planning this meeting. He swore central administrators to secrecy, all the while conferring with other board members. He purposefully left some of us out of the process. I am a believer in the democratic process. As such, I would never willingly give up my right to vote. When I was elected to the board, it was emphasized time and again that we were nine equal members. In reading Roberts Rules of Order, I discovered that the parliamentary rules governing the board were designed to give all opinions an equal voice. Under Mr. Weldon, I saw my rights to be a participant in the democratic process dwindle to the point where I felt ineffective in executing my duty as a board member. His ego-driven policies have absolutely nothing to do with helping children. They only have to do with helping John Weldon secure his little fiefdom in Black Rock. Under Mr. Weldons regime, it became apparent that the business of the Board of Education had nothing to do with children. Worse, his ego-driven leadership and the division he causes could very well lead to further cuts in the school districts budget, the loss of our superintendent, and another devastating state take-over. Once his fiefdom falls, who will remain to help the children? NCUA headquarters The NCUA in March issued two prohibition notices, which bar individuals previously associated with credit unions from any future participation in the affairs of a federally insured financial institution. Violation of a prohibition order is a felony offense punishable by imprisonment and a fine of up to $1 million. The name and details from last months prohibition order follow: New Zealand Reconsiders Mass Surveillance Former Prime Minister and the current New Zealand National Party, Simon Bridge (pictured) said in a live television interview on Friday 25th March that it might be time to revisit an internet surveillance programme canned by the previous National-led Government. Back in 2017 Edward Snowden said new evidence shows former Prime Minister John Key lied to New Zealand about mass surveillance plans. "A Lie, a Cover-Up, and a Stolen Election: @nzherald's new evidence shows former PM of New Zealand John Key lied to his country about mass surveillance plans in the final days before the vote -- and won," In September 2014, Snowden and journalist Glen Greenwald said the GCSB and NSA were working together on a mass surveillance project called Speargun. Speargun is a mass surveillance programme, which Mr Snowden and Mr Greenwald claimed would allow the Government to tap into the communication of New Zealanders. Project Speargun, which was revealed by the US National Security Agencys whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2014, was cancelled in 2013, according to then-Prime Minister John Key for being too intrusive. "It was set too broadly," he told NZME in 2017. "What we ultimately did, when it comes to Speargun, in my opinion, I said it's set too far. I don't even want to see the business case." Snowden claimed Project Speargun would have allowed the Government to tap into New Zealanders' communications. Bridges has called for a royal commission of inquiry into the security and intelligence failings that allowed a white supremacist to amass an arsenal and shoot 100 people in Christchurch earlier this month, killing 50 of them. The alleged gunman wasn't on any watch lists here or in his native Australia. There, has also been criticism as intelligence agencies have been too focused on the potential threat from Islamist extremists, and blind to that posed by the far-right. Bridges said that he's not sure if a mass surveillance programme like Speargun would have uncovered the killer's plans. "But I think what we can say is what I think is that we were overly cautious, and I think we need to revisit that." He said at present, our intelligence agencies, the domestic-focused SIS and foreign spying GCSB, are "doing their work with both hands tied behind their back". "Speargun was really about going on the highways and getting the traffic. What we've done is just gone down a few driveways... I can't say hand on heart it would have changed this, of course I can't, but I can say it would have made New Zealanders safer that we should be thinking more about our cybersecurity settings. At the moment we went down a few driveways. I reckon we need to go wider than that." Speargun's replacement, Cortex, has a much narrower focus - protecting key institutions from cyberattack. "The risk profile of New Zealand has changed, right?" said Bridges. "We've gone from low terrorist risk, to high risk. You've got ISIS out there threatening, you've got a Turkish President showing this and inflaming crowds, you've got the risk of copy-catting. So we do need to look at these things. I'm not saying it's easy, but I think we need to think about change." NewsHub NZ NewsHub NZ You Might Also Read: US Surveillance System Exposed By Snowden Goes Dormant: Cette annonce nest plus disponible et aucune proposition ne peut etre transmise. Gender Mainstreaming Training a Djibouti Gender mainstreaming Training - First Responders Government Agencies and CNDH Consultancy-Terms of Reference Background The objective of the Better Migration Management (BMM) program is to improve the migration management in the Eastern African region in response to the needs identified by the countries of the Khartoum Process, and, in particular, to address the trafficking of human beings and the smuggling of migrants within and from the Horn of Africa in a rights-based and migrant-centered way. The BMM program has four components: 1. Policy Harmonization, strengthening national approaches to migration management through a whole-of-government approach to migration and border governance as well as enhancing migration coordination; 2. Capacity Building, providing training and assistance to enhance migration-related criminal investigations and prosecutions; 3. Protection of Vulnerable Migrants, improving the identification, assistance, and protection of vulnerable migrants, especially children on the move and women; and 4. Awareness-Raising, raising knowledge of migration options and host/local communities. Even if there is not yet detailed gender disaggregated data about migrants within the Republic of Djibouti, a presence of a significant number of woman migrants was observed in Djibouti City and in the regions. Those women are more vulnerable to gender based violence or discrimination and to respond effectively to their specific needs, identifying and taking care of women request specific tools and protection mechanisms in complementary to what is already proposed to the other migrants. Within Component 2, GIZ-BMM plans to implement a set of capacity-building actions, to strengthen the government bodies as first responders in identifying migrants and providing them the adequate needed assistance. In this framework and based on the National Gender Policy 2011-2021 put in place for all the women in the Republic of Djibouti, a gender mainstreaming training session will be organized. This session will be the opportunity to come back on the juridical corpus and also identification and protection mechanisms. The targeted agencies for this support include the first responders government bodies such as ONARS (future migrants assistance agency), National Police, Coast Guard, Gendarmerie and Prefectures. In parallel and in a complementary way, the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH) has received already capacity building actions both in technical and organizational terms, enabling them to more and better promote and protect human rights. Being one of the fundamental human rights, gender equality is indissoluble from the CNDH strategy and all its related actions. In that regards, strengthening their level of gender knowledge both on the body of law and on protection mechanisms is also planned. In that sense and to attain the program results 2.2.2 of Component 2 plus 3.6.1.2 of Component 3 and to meet the overall objective of strengthening the capacities of the governmental agencies and the CNDH to identify and assist migrants, especially Women and Children and VoTs, GIZ-BMM is looking for a consultant to develop two training modules on mainstreaming gender. In fact gender is not at the charge of one specific stakeholder but of different ones acting in a complementary way. Through this consultancy, we will keep in mind that all the participants are acting as part of an overall system. Consultancy This consultancy has two major objectives. The first one is to evaluate the capacities on gender mainstreaming of the relevant staff of all the targeted agencies. From the results of this assessment, the second aim of this consultancy is to develop two training modules, one for the CNDH and another one for the other government agencies identified as the first responders. This assignment must be implemented in accordance with the international conventions and national laws related on gender It is expected that the consultant will be resident in Djibouti during the pendency of the consultancy and will be available to travel to four of the regions of the Republic of Djibouti. Outcomes In accordance to the objectives of this assignment and taking into account the context, the consultant is expected to deliver the following outcomes: -Taking into account the National Gender Policy, conduct a capacities assessment on gender mainstreaming for the targeted agencies in general and in particular with migration management; -Design two training modules of two days each for the governmental agencies mentioned above and the CNDH; -Facilitate 2 workshops of 2 days each: one workshop for the CNDH staff plus close partners and one for the government agencies mentioned above; -All the tools, reports, training modules or any other kind of working documents have to be done in French and will remain the property of GIZ-BMM; -Write a comprehensive report on the activity, including description of the activities, recommendations for improvement and way forward to more be able to answer to the particular needs of woman as one of most vulnerable migrants. Required Qualifications and Experience -Advanced university degree in gender studies, development, political studies, law or any related field; - Strong experience and knowledge in gender and rights based approaches; - Knowledge on gender equality at the institutional level; -Fluent in French and working knowledge of English; -Knowledge in counter trafficking/mixed migration; -Ability to work in a collaborative manner with teams members and with multiple stakeholders of various levels from national to sub-national levels; -Good understanding of the context of the Republic of Djibouti. Duration and timeframe for the consultancy -Timeframe: as soon as possible; -Total days: 22 working days. To apply -Applications have to be submitted before Wednesday the 10th of April 2019; -Sent your CV, technical and financial offers to the all following email addresses. All kind of expenditures will have to be mentioned in the financial offer, including transport and accommodation costs if applicable; -On your application, please specify the full title of the consultancy; -Kindly note that if one of the documents listed above is not provided your application will not be eligible. loula.abdi@giz.de samatar.antoine@giz.de fleur.siri@giz.de Emplois & Services, Emplois 2 avril, 2019 204 vues au total, 0 vues cette semaine This WWII vet wants to find, thank the girls who gave him a gift news Attorney General William P. Barrs summary of the Mueller report is scandalous for reasons that have little to do with collusion. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III nearly two years ago to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian governments efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, as he put it then. Muellers report, submitted to the Justice Department on April 22, is titled: Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. This was supposed to be the last word on Russian interference, a definitive investigation that would show the United States and the world, in detail, how it happened and, as a subsidiary question, whether Trump campaign officials were involved. But Barr kissed off the central charge of the investigation with a few paragraphs of summary material already in the public domain. He wrote that the report outlines the Russian effort to influence the election and documents crimes committed by persons associated with the Russian government in connection with those efforts. But Barrs letter provides no such information. If Barr doesnt give a full public accounting, and soon, he will have squandered Muellers heroic efforts and done a disservice to the national interest. The immediate reaction has been, predictably, a sandbox fight about whether Trump colluded with Moscow. No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION, Trump tweeted. Thats false: The probe explicitly didnt exonerate Trump, and the attorney generals letter doesnt mention collusion, focusing on the high legal standard of conspiracy and not whether Trumps campaign sought Russian help, as it clearly did. But Trump is free to claim vindication. Thats politics. The outrage is Barr has also made this a win for Moscow, which claims vindication despite indisputable Kremlin-committed crimes. Thats unacceptable. In short, Russia did not elect Trump, pro-Putin media personality Evgeny Popov tweeted in response to Barr. Russian President Vladimir Putins spokesman also asserted vindication, falsely stating, that our country has not interfered in the domestic affairs of other countries. Alexey Pushkov, a Russian senator, crowed about Barrs findings, saying, Democrats will still shout that there was a conspiracy. Conspiracy theory maniacs dont need facts. This is exactly why the world needs Muellers facts. How can Barr betray what was always the central purpose of the investigation? I applauded the night Mueller was appointed because, while Democrats were often leaping to conclude that there was high-level collusion nearly everybody had lost track of the most important issue: Russia, arguably our leading global adversary, had successfully interfered in a U.S. presidential election undermining confidence in our system of government and was ready to do it again. Barrs summary a news release addressed to lawmakers contained not one full sentence from the Mueller report. Barr seemed determined to exonerate, declaring Trump had not obstructed justice, even though Mueller drew no conclusion. Barrs letter, though saying Mueller found no conspiracy, didnt address what we colloquially call collusion. As Trump himself helpfully informed us, collusion is not a crime, and even his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, claimed he never said there was no collusion between Russia and Trumps campaign. That Mueller found no conspiracy is a relief, sparing us the crisis of having a president who betrayed the country. Ironically, the probe ended where it began. The pretext for firing James Comey, which set everything in motion, was the former FBI director declining to charge Hillary Clinton but releasing derogatory information about her, detailing how extremely careless she was with classified information. Trump now occupies that same netherworld between guilt and innocence: While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. Perhaps congressional investigations and spinoff cases by federal prosecutors in New York and Washington will add clarity. More likely, nobodys mind will change. Trump will be the same man of dubious integrity he was before Mueller indicted or procured guilty pleas from 34 people, including six prominent Trump advisers. Even if Barr squelches the report, Muellers exercise had some benefit. The lurking prosecutor served as a check on Trumps excesses at a time before Democrats took control of the House. Mueller made it difficult, for example, for Trump to lift sanctions against Russia. But now Putin is using Barrs words to exculpate Russia, even as it prepares to sabotage our 2020 elections. And Trump, who famously cant see any reason to disbelieve Putin, isnt about to blow the whistle. Barr owes it to his country to let the world see exactly what Russia did. Dana Milbank is syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group. Global shares rebounded in the first quarter as dovish monetary policy was able to overcome global growth concerns and US-China trade war fears were reduced by the prospects of a deal. A decidedly accommodative Federal Reserve and another round of targeted long-term refinancing operations (TLTRO) from the European Central Bank were able to help buoy equities in two of the worlds largest financial markets. An admirable performance from the United States and European equity markets was met with a resurgent desire for risk exposure as emerging markets rallied alongside the developed world. The respective policy announcements offered meaningful contributions to the first quarter rebound, as quantitative easing won out over further tightening a key concern for equity markets in the latter half of 2018.Meanwhile, the US-China trade war remains unresolved though confidence of a slowly approaching deal has waxed and waned through the past year. A mood of optimism swept over market participants in the first quarter as officials from both countries touted progress and the potential for a resolution. See the complete Q219 Equities Forecast as well as outlook for other major currencies, gold, and oil. ---Written by Paul Robinson, Market Analyst and Peter Hanks, Junior Analyst for DailyFX.com Channel 4 News has long enjoyed a reputation as a niche current affairs programme with a markedly Leftist take on the world. I often watch it, usually in a state of contentment. Because it is so niche, and there is no expectation of political impartiality, I find myself expostulating far less frequently than when the BBC is guilty of less egregious bias. Auntie is so powerful, and so eager to insist on her neutrality, that when she betrays even slight evidence of partiality in her news coverage, some of us are apt to howl our objections. Channel 4 News' veteran anchorman, Jon Snow, 71, said: 'I have never seen so many white people in one place, its an extraordinary story But it is no longer possible to be so indulgent towards Channel 4 News after its veteran anchorman, Jon Snow, last week provided some revelatory proof of anti-Brexit bias. He seemed to be speaking on behalf of a whole tribe of metropolitan liberals who regard Leave voters with a mixture of contempt and disbelief. Flags Last Friday there was a Leave march in Whitehall and Westminster, and the 71-year-old journalist took up a vantage point to observe it. The episode can easily be viewed on YouTube. I thoroughly recommend it. Against a background of apparently well-behaved people, some of whom were carrying flags, Snow had a somewhat overwrought air. I was reminded of correspondents in war-torn foreign climes who, forgivably, look rather anxious as bullets whizz around their heads. As we speak there are crowds rallying outside Downing Street, Snow informed viewers in excited tones. Weve just got these pictures in... police are now wearing riot gear. Police dogs are patrolling. The mood has changed. In actual fact, the police seemed remarkably relaxed and, in the coverage I saw, they didnt appear to be wearing riot gear, if by that is meant helmets, shields and other defensive paraphernalia. Nor was there any evidence of patrolling dogs, or even of dogs hoping to be stroked. Snow raced on, approaching his fevered crescendo. Its been the most extraordinary day, he announced. A day which has seen... I have never seen so many white people in one place, its an extraordinary story. Riot gear. Police dogs. An extraordinary day and an extraordinary story. Above all, an unprecedented preponderance of white people. If one had started watching Snows report after it began, one might have thought he was describing an ugly demonstration by violent supporters of the Ku Klux Klan rather than a march of generally peaceable Brexiteers. His remarks have up to this moment attracted more than 2,000 complaints to the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom. Channel 4 has said that it regrets any offence caused by [Jon Snows] comments, while the perpetrator himself has so far kept schtum. Its his contention that he had never seen so many white people in one place that is most astonishing. I perfectly understand that he lives in a multi-racial city where there are sometimes almost as many non-whites as whites in sizeable gatherings of people. But its surely not yet a crime to be a white person in a largely white crowd. If those on the march were overwhelmingly white (and Snows observation is disputed by some witnesses), it was probably because they mostly came from outside London, where, believe it or not, there are still many white people. The BBC presenter Andrew Marr wrote at the time that he would have been sacked if he had yelled the same thing in public. Channel 4 merely warned Snow to watch his step in future advice he seems not to have heeded What would Jon Snow have said if he were reporting on a march dominated by black people? Would he have mentioned it? I doubt it. Either it wouldnt have occurred to him, or he would have refrained from doing so for fear of being accused of racial stereotyping. Why shouldnt white Brexiteers be allowed to make their point without racial aspersions being made against them? Despite Snows insinuations, they werent scary and threatening. But I suspect that their crime, in his eyes, was to emanate from outside the M25, which circles his hallowed metropolis. Am I being unfair? I dont think so. Admittedly, I may be more inclined to find fault because he has form. In 2017, it was reported that Snow had chanted f*** the Tories at Glastonbury. He said he had no recollection of this, but did not deny it had happened. The BBC presenter Andrew Marr wrote at the time that he would have been sacked if he had yelled the same thing in public. Channel 4 merely warned Snow to watch his step in future advice he seems not to have heeded. What is most objectionable about his sneering and disdainful mischaracterisation of Brexiteers last Friday is that it was divisive at a time when we already have far too many divisions. The fact is, Leavers are not made up exclusively of the white provincial (and, Jon Snow probably thinks, half-witted) people at whom his comments were seemingly directed. Hostile Indeed, research carried out by the polling company Ipsos Mori suggests that almost a third of Britains black, Asian and other ethnic communities voted Leave in the 2016 referendum. Even in Jon Snows precious capital city, many more Asians may have backed Leave than is generally supposed. Dr Rakib Ehsan has noted in a paper for the London School of Economics that in Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow (in each of which boroughs the Asian population is above 25 per cent) there was a strong Leave vote. Are they also to be dismissed in supercilious terms by Jon Snow? I dont suppose he would dare do that. Much easier to write off those who supported Leave as white bruisers from the sticks. There is, of course, a long and lamentable record of metropolitan, liberal-minded Remainers referring to Leave voters in a condescending and sometimes hostile way. A year ago, the Lib Dem leader Vince Cable declared that too many [Leave voters] were driven by nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink. What evidence does he have for that? Prejudice In 2017, the novelist Ian McEwan suggested the deaths of 1.5 million oldster Brexit voters over the next two years would help swing a second referendum in favour of Britain staying in Europe. With highly questionable accuracy, he added: A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth. As a writer, McEwan is free to say whatever he wants, however inflammatory. But presenters on Channel 4 (which has the status of a public service broadcaster) are not supposed to abominate Leavers publicly or, indeed, Tories as Jon Snow has done. Leavers come from all classes and backgrounds and from every part of the United Kingdom. There is absolutely no reason to suppose they are any more or less stupid than Remainers. And, just like Remainers, they hold deeply felt and usually well-considered views. We rightly blame the Government and the Commons for their failure to find a way out of our national crisis. But what hope is there if broadcasters enjoined to be impartial demonstrate such prejudice? Watching Jon Snow marvel at the alleged whiteness of Leave marchers, and hearing the contempt he and so many in the metropolitan chattering classes express for millions of their fellow countrymen, its hard not to feel gloomy about the future cohesion of our nation. London's boldest gym chain, Gymbox has announced the launch of the ultimate hangover cure for the festive season: the Hangxiety workout. When post-party anxiety meets the hangover from hell, this class promises that it will leave last nights mistakes dripping from every pore. Exercise meets exorcism in a hardcore burst of HIIT, followed by a juicy yoga flow to steady those alco-shakes and a mediation session to clear your aching mind. Rounding off with an IV Vitamin drip or booster shot administered by a team of medical experts, a rejuvenating dose of vitamins that help ease general worry and reduce oxidative stress in your body perfect for the morning after the night before. Hangxiety launches just in time for the party season, taking place at the Elephant & Castle club on December 3, 10 and 17. Topshop has sent customers swooning over their new Austin Floral Print Angel Sleeve Midi Dress, which fans have likened to designer brand Rixo. Last summer, the high street brand sparked a frenzy over its polka dot sleeveless dress, and it looks like they've done it again with the latest creation, which went on sale at the end of last week and is already sold out online in all sizes. When the brand posted a picture of the dress on Instagram fans were seriously impressed, with one saying: 'Obsessed with this dress.' Influencer Lizzi Richardson posted a picture of herself in the dress and described it as a 'gorgeous summer dress'. Joey Taylor proudly shows off the new must have garment from the high street brand on social media, which has been likened to designer brand Rixo Blogger Lizzi Richardson shows off the floral patchwork print design in full view on social media, as it is tipped to be this season's ultimate must have Instagrammer Emma Kehoe is among many happy customers showing off the Topshop Austin Floral Midi Dress on social media Aileen Cameron shows off the side split design in all its glory, as she too takes to social media to pose in the popular dress The Austin dress ticks all the boxes, as it boasts flowing short sleeves, as well as a round neck and cut out back detail. The design also features patchwork floral detail, as well as side split detail, and smock-style detail to shape the chest area. One blogger, Emma Rose Thatcher, shared a picture of her in the floral dress, which she captioned: 'This dress is 39 and set to be a sell-out.' When Topshop shared a picture of the item on its Instagram account the post received a lot of attention. The Topshop dress boasts round neck detail, ruffle sleeve detail and cut out are in the back, as well as floral patchwork print Emma Rose thatcher adds a pop of colour to her ensemble with a pair of red strappy heels, as she models the highly coveted design on her social media The Topshop design features loose flowing sleeve detail, as well as a seam across the bust for a more feminine style One swooned: 'Love these', while another added: 'Love the shape.' A third gushed: 'These prints are errrraythang', with another writing: 'They are gorgeous!!!' While another jumped to purchase the item before it sells out. They shared: 'That floral print. Purchased this first thing this morning.' Topshop's dress retails for 39 and comes in all sizes from 4 to 18, although stock is selling out quickly The Topshop dress has been likened to Rixo dresses, which can retail from 300 upwards. The Chelsea Psychedelic Print dress (above), which is made of different prints costs 335 Other Instagrammers have noticed a likeness to Rixo designs, which retail for over 300. Another fan commented: 'Rixo vibes!!!' A separate user shared: 'Looks like Rixo.' The Austin dress currently comes in sizes 4 to 18, although they are selling out fast. Instagram users can't help but compare the Topshop design with Rixo creations on social media. While some are drawing likenesses between Rixo and Topshop, others are simply swooning over the prints Another Instagram user commented on Topshop's post 'Rixo vibes' because of the style and print Topshop shoppers are also desperate to know if the dress will come in petite. With one commenting: 'Are you going to make this in petite version??! Please do!!!! I would love to get one but not if its too long for me!!' A second quizzed: 'Please tell me this will be available in petite?' Although it is unknown whether the mid-length dress will be released in other ranges, it does come in a top version for 32 - 7 less than the dress. They are often carted off to charity shops or left to gather dust in the attic, but your favourite books from childhood could actually be your next big money-maker, an expert has revealed. Titles including The Velveteen Rabbit and the Cat In The Hat can be worth thousands of pounds at auction, according to British antiques expert David Harper. Meanwhile a perfectly intact copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar could fetch more than 12,000. They are often carted off to charity shops or left to gather dust in the attic, but your favourite books from childhood could actually be your next big money-maker. A first edition of The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), pictured, is estimated to be worth as much as 12,085 Where The Wild Things Are, pictured, the 1963 book by American writer and illustrator Maurice Senda, has enjoyed one of the biggest increases in value. It is worth 5,000 today The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), left, is worth an estimated 6,971 today. Right, The Giving Tree (1964), written and illustrated by Shel Silverstein, is worth some 3,491 Mr Harper, who conducted the research in collaboration with HomeProtect Insurance, explained that unlike obvious investment pieces like vintage watches or rare designer handbags, children's books are more likely to be overlooked. He continued: 'A children's book worth hundreds or thousands of pounds, may have an old price ticket inside the cover of just a couple of pounds. 'It could be that its a bit thumbed and looks valueless, so its likely to be thrown away or given to a local charity, only later to be discovered by an eagle-eyed collector.' Dr Seuss' The Cat in the Hat (1957) is worth 831. Right, The Tiger Who Came To Tea, first released in 1968, would fetch an estimated 641 A first edition of 1985 classic The Polar Express is worth an estimated 475 today, experts say How much are YOUR books worth? The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), 12,085 Where the Wild Things Are (1963), 5,090 The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), 6,971 The Giving Tree (1964), 3,491 The Cat in the Hat (1957), 831 The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968), 641 Histoire de Babar (1931), 538 The Polar Express (1985), 475 The Gruffalo (1999), 161 The Little Engine that Could (1930),127 The estimated value of first edition books in 2019 based on year-on-year percentage increase in value between 2004-2016. Advertisement If you think you might have stumbled across a valuable title, go straight to the inside cover and double check for the edition and date. Then put the title into an internet search alongside these details. Where The Wild Things Are, the 1963 children's picture book by American writer and illustrator Maurice Senda, has enjoyed one of the biggest increases in value in the last 12 years. In 2004, a first edition of the title was worth 1,540. In 2019 Mr Harper estimates it could be worth as much as 5,000 at auction. Histoire de Babar (1931), left, is worth 538. Right, The Gruffalo (1999) could fetch 161 The Little Engine that Could, first published in 1930, could fetch as much as 127 today This represents a 200 per cent increase, which Mr Harper claims is significantly more than the value increase seen by gold over the same period. However for a book to be successful, it must be both complete - no missing pages - and in excellent condition. Mr Harper added: 'Any damage or missing pages can decrease value significantly. 'Most 20th century books also need to have their original dust-jacket to be of collectable value.' Korea's number one beauty brand, Innisfree, has finally launched in Sydney with a collection of best-selling products under $63. The popular store opened its doors in Sydney's Queen Victoria Building with crowds of more than 800 lining up outside for a chance to shop the affordable range. The company has 1,700 stores in 14 countries, with its first Australian store opening in Melbourne Central in June 2018. The Sydney store is selling more than 650 products across skincare, makeup, body care, hair care and home fragrances as well as a selection of beauty tools. Innisfree opened its doors in the Queen Victoria Building with crowds of more than 800 eagerly awaiting customers - and nothing costs over $63 It will also be offering personalised make-up and a nature inspired, immersive retail experience. Innisfree's philosophy revolves around all things ethical and offer skincare with naturally-derived ingredients. 'We are thrilled to have opened the doors to Innisfree in Sydney and to see Sydney-siders celebrating our revolutionary products in such large numbers,' Brian Jeong, Innisfree Australia's General Manager said. The Queen Victoria Building opening day sales broke all opening sales records locally and globally for the past three years. That is out of 1,700 store in 14 countries. The Sydney store will be selling over 650 products across skincare, makeup, body care, hair care and home fragrances as well as a selection of beauty tools Innisfree's philosophy revolves around all things ethical and offer skincare with naturally-derived ingredients The best-selling product has been the Green Tea Seed Serum ($39), accounting for a third of the sales on the opening weekend. It is so loved by their customers all over the world that 13 bottles are sold every minute. The serum has been specifically made for hydration, works to instantly replenish moisture loss from cleansing and it helps boost the effectiveness of the skincare routine. Customers can't stop raving about this product online with many saying it is a product they 'swear by'. The best-selling product has been the Green Tea Seed Serum ($39), accounting for a third of the sales on the opening weekend Another product customers are going mad for is the $10 Matte Mineral Setting Powder 'Absolute favourite! I go through bottles of these,' one person said. 'Green Tea Seed Serum is my go to serum! So hydrating and refreshing,' someone else said. Another product customers are going mad for is the $10 Matte Mineral Setting Powder. According to Innisfree's website, the silky loose powder controls excess oil for a soft, natural-looking, matte finish. Fans can't stop raving about it online, with some going as far as to describe it as their 'fave loose setting powder ever'. 'I can vouch for this! Sometimes I even just wear it by itself to mattify my oily skin and it makes my face matte and SILKY SOFT for literally hours,' one happy customer said. 'This is the best setting powder, l have used it for three years now and still love it and always go back to it,' said another. A man who bought a cutlery set from Australian retailer Myer has revealed his surprise at discovering his purchase was actually a returned engagement gift. Sam Mangan, a public relations expert from the Gold Coast, Queensland, purchased the Maxwell Williams set on the weekend for $299. Not long after opening it, Mr Mangan claimed he discovered an unopened card which revealed the gift had been intended as an engagement present. Since his discovery, Mr Mangan has embarked on a mission to reunite the card with its rightful owners - and is pulling out all the stops in a bid to track them down. Scroll down for video Sam Mangan claimed he found this handwritten card (pictured) inside a cutlery box set which he purchased from Myer over the weekend The cutlery set, which came with the card, from Myer is valued at $299 'Sorry, Damo, Candice and Layla, your gift has been handed over by Jarred and Rach when they returned it and didn't even open it to look at the card,' he said on an Instagram story. 'What a gift. How rude is that?' Also posting a clip on his feed, Mr Mangan called on his followers to 'please help me find them. 'Tag a friend, hey tag an enemy, I don't care or otherwise tag someone who loves to return a gift.' As well as appealing to social media, Mr Mangan also spoke to local radio station Hot Tomato where he regaled the tale of his find and asked for listeners to help him return the card. Mr Mangan took to social media to try and reunite the couple with their card (pictured left) which was found inside a cutlery box (pictured right) Mr Mangan told Daily Mail Australia he has since been contacted by one of the girls who gifted the present - and he was informed the couple are currently on their honeymoon. He said he's found the whole situation to be 'a bit of a laugh' and something many can relate to. 'I couldn't stop laughing [when I found the card] to be honest. It's something so many people can relate to, but for the card to be left inside is just priceless,' he said. Mr Mangan (pictured) said his mission to track down the owners of the card was a 'bit of a laugh' Mr Mangan said he didn't think the card was left in the box intentionally. He believed it was probably returned to the store following the engagement party when the couple realised they already owned cutlery sets. Mr Mangan said he hopes to reunite the card and its owners, and put an end to the mystery - once and for all. A 16-week-old baby is gaining attention online for his incredible head of hair, which is longer and thicker than his two-year-old brother. Boston Marin Simich was born on December 4, 2018, to proud mother Tara Simich, who was elated to see her son had thick hair just like her husband Steve. 'The long locks come from his dad,' the Perth-based CEO of fitness company The Jungle Body told FEMAIL. Scroll down for video A 16-week-old baby is gaining attention online for his incredible head of hair, which is longer and thicker than his two-year-old brother Boston Marin Simich was born on December 4, 2018, to proud mother Tara Simich , who was elated to see her son had thick hair just like her husband Steve (right) 'My husband Steve has the exact same hair with identical hairlines.' Little Boston, who is a natural in front of the camera, usually has his hair styled in a mohawk - or if it's humid it stands up on its ends. 'Baby wash doesn't really cut it as it's so thick so I am using a natural adult shampoo,' Tara said. What a lid! Boston has had thick hair since he was just a few days old His brother Jagger has a similarly styled quiff but has far fewer strands than Boston does. The pair receive lots of compliments online, but many of them are directed at Boston's mop of hair. 'Oh my god that hair. Why do boys always get the good hair? My daughter is 14 months now and I'm flat out getting her hair in half a pony tail,' one woman commented on Instagram. Boston (left) and his brother Jagger (left at 14 weeks) have had very different hair experiences 'Oh my god that hair. Why do boys always get the good hair? My daughter is 14 months now and I'm flat out getting her hair in half a pony tail,' one woman commented on Instagram 'Look at that volume! Such a cutie,' said another. Tara commented to those asking about his hair that she suffered serious heartburn throughout her pregnancy. It is an old wives' tale that heartburn is a sign your infant will have a lot of hair. Jill Dando's brother has revealed his personal theory about who shot his sister outside her home in Fulham 20 years ago. Ahead of a new BBC One documentary which airs tonight, The Murder of Jill Dando, Nigel, 66, appeared on Lorraine to have his say on one of the most high profile unsolved murder cases in the UK. While TV presenter Lorraine Kelly discussed the many theories suggested at the time, including a professional hitman and also a stalker, Nigel explained his own idea. 'I tend to think it wasn't a professional hit. I think you can rule out the Serbian hitman, which was a popular theory that was doing the rounds at the time,' said Nigel, whose sister was murdered aged 37. 'For what it's worth, my belief is that it was just a misguided individual on the street on the day, with a firearm, who knew where Jill lived, and who just 'struck lucky'. 'For whatever reason, that person was in that street and did what that person did. I doubt we will ever know now because of the passage of time.' Nigel Dando, 66, appeared on Lorraine this morning to reveal his personal theory about who shot his sister outside her home in Fulham 20 years ago The brother of the former BBC broadcaster (pictured) explained that he doesn't think a hit man was responsible but instead believes a 'misguided individual' on the street on the day just 'struck lucky' Proceeding to explain his theory, Nigel revealed that Jill's lifestyle at the time meant she wasn't guaranteed to be in a certain place at any given time. 'I think it was a relatively random act [given] Jill's lifestyle at the time, as she wasn't regularly at home. You couldn't say that every 'Monday morning at 11 'o' clock she would be there.' He added: 'On the day in question, she had left her fiance Alan's home in Chiswick and had briefly gone to her home in Fulham to pick something up. Then I think she was off somewhere else in London for a fitting for her wedding dress, of course they were going to get married shortly. So it was that random.' BBC Crimewatch presenter Jill Dando, 37, was shot dead outside her west London home in April 1999 Nigel went on to say that the police carried out an exhaustive check of CCTV and plotted Jill's journey. 'There were photographs and thousands of phone calls being made in that area at the relevant time and there was nothing that jumped out for example that suggested she was being followed at her home that day,' he explained. 'Neighbours talked of a strange man in the streets and various descriptions of that person. If it was that person who pulled the trigger we'll never know now.' He added on the multiple theories: 'All avenues have to be investigated by police. In the early days, who knew what it might be or more importantly what the motive might have been.' 'The weeks have turned to months, and the months have turned to years, and the years have turned to decades, and no one has been convicted of Jill's murder so I tend to think it wasn't a professional hit.' Speaking to the Scottish presenter (left), Nigel also explained that he doesn't think his familt we ever get the answers they've been after for 20 years. 'I doubt we will ever know now because of the passage of time,' he said on today's show While knowing who was responsible for his sister's murder was important for Nigel, he was more keen to know why and the motive behind it When asked by the Scottish presenter why now felt like the right time to speak out and share his beliefs, Nigel explained: 'There were times particularly in the aftermath of the murder that I was asked to do a lot of interviews. I did what I could, but I was concerned anything I might say my inadvertently prejudice police inquiries.' And he revealed that even 20 years on, it's still tough to relive the horrific ordeal. 'It was a very difficult time and difficult to come to terms with as it is now 20 years on. But you can't live in the past,' Nigel said. 'Personally, I can't become obsessive about it. You never forget but you have to move on.' Theories behind the unsolved murder IRA revenge killing One theory is that the IRA targeted the BBC broadcaster because of her links to police through her work presenting Crimewatch Wayne Aird was serving a life sentence in prison for killing a man two months after Jill Dando was shot He claimed the IRA was responsible for her death but had not been brought to justice due to concerns it may jeopardise the Northern Ireland peace process Paedophile ring In 2014, an anonymous source who is believed to have worked with Jill Dando revealed she was trying to expose a VIP paedophile ring just months before her death The friend reportedly told the Daily Express: 'I don't recall the names of all the stars now and don't want to implicate anyone, but Jill said they were surprisingly big names.' Stalker Dando had a large following due to her TV career, leading the police to believe an opportunistic individual may have been responsible The police identified 140 people who were 'obsessed' with the star. Adding to the theory, one of Jill's neighbours revealed he had seen a sighting of the possible killer - a 6ft white man aged around 40. In the statement he said he heard a surprised cry from Jill 'like someone greeting a friend', suggesting she may have known her murderer Joe the barman In 1996 Kenneth Noye was sentenced to life in prison for a road rage killing with the help of a Crimewatch TV appeal - could this have been an act of revenge? Serbian mafia 15 days before Jill's murder Serbian journalist Slavko Curuvija was shot dead outside his home in Belgrade Detectives were informed Serbian mobsters who were residing in the UK plotted the assassination over drinks at a nightclub A message sent to detectives claimed they carried out the hit in revenge for the Nato-led bombing of a Serbian TV station - but this theory has since been discredited by the Daily Mail A professional hit Barry George, 58, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001, but was acquitted seven years later after his conviction was quashed and a retrial ordered After his release, a review suggested the killing had signs of a professional hit - particularly the 'hard contact execution - which involves pressing the gun against the head to silence the shot and minimise the blood on the killer's clothes An intelligence report identified two suspects from a known London crime family, suggesting the murder could have been in retaliation for a Crimewatch investigation Advertisement But the real question that continues to haunt both Jill's brother and his family is not so much who committed the crime, but more why. 'It is important to know who did it but for me, to an extent, it's more important to know why,' he explained. 'What was the motive? I'm not aware Jill had any enemies at all that she had upset anybody. What you saw was what you got with Jill. That's what for 20 years has baffled her nearest and dearest.' Speaking to the BBC on Monday, Nigel said: 'I will eventually find answers... no matter how long it takes.' He added the unsolved case 'still leaves the questions open of who killed Jill and why. At the moment these questions are still open-ended and still haven't been answered.' One of the more prominent theories led police to believe a Serbian hit man may have been responsible. In the early hours of April 24, a Nato missile hit the Belgrade headquarters of Radio Television Serbia an equivalent of the BBC. Nato chiefs said the station was targeted because it was used to broadcast inflammatory propaganda. Seventeen RTS staff were killed in the attack. Two days later Jill Dando was shot dead on her doorstep in Gowan Avenue, Fulham. Michael Mansfield QC told the court that the National Criminal Intelligence Service had a dossier which suggested the killing was in retaliation for the Belgrade TV station bombing. But on Sunday, The Daily Mail discredited the theory, revealing that an MI5 officer paid a secret visit to the Old Bailey during the trial to reassure the prosecution team there was no credible evidence to support the defences contention. The first jury to hear the case also rejected Mr Mansfields theory. In the documentary airing tonight, the detective who led the first Jill Dando murder investigation has claimed it is unlikely anyone else will stand trial for killing the BBC Crimewatch presenter. Hamish Campbell, a Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police at the time of the killing, helped convict Barry George of shooting the broadcaster dead outside her home in Fulham 20 years ago. Former stuntman Mr George, 58, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001, but was acquitted seven years later after his conviction was quashed and a retrial ordered. The case remains unsolved, but Mr Campbell revealed how he does not believe anybody else will ever stand trial for murdering Miss Dando, 37, outside her west London home in April 1999. Hamish Campbell (pictured), the detective who led the first murder investigation, has said he does not believe anybody else will ever stand trial for murdering Miss Dando He said: 'Sometimes I felt we were a day away from solving it and other times, I thought 'no, we're a long way away'. 'Senior officers were asking 'what are the likelihoods of this case being resolved?' 'We had over 2,000 people named as potential suspects or responsible. Some actions to trace and eliminate one person might take a day. One action might take two weeks. 'But there's thousands of them and that's the issue of managing stranger homicides.' The new documentary reveals the decision-making happening behind the scenes of the inquiry into Miss Dando's murder. It will show how a particle of gunshot residue in the pocket of a coat police found in Barry George's house became the key forensic evidence against him. Former stuntman Barry George, 58, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001, but was acquitted seven years later after his conviction was quashed and a retrial ordered The new documentary reveals the decision-making happening behind the scenes of the inquiry into Miss Dando's murder The gunshot residue evidence was discredited at George's 2007 appeal, when his murder conviction was quashed. It was deemed inadmissible as evidence at his 2008 retrial, when he was cleared. Mr Campbell and the Metropolitan Police faced criticism after Mr George was cleared, but maintained that they had never used the convicted sex offender as a scapegoat. He said: 'There's always been the view, in the media and elsewhere, that the police chose Barry George somehow as a scapegoat and for want of a better word, a patsy, for the investigation team because we couldn't solve it. 'That is somewhat insulting and completely untrue, and wrong.' It comes days after Mr George told the Daily Mail that he would continue to 'fight for justice' following the Government's refusal to compensate him for the years he spent in prison. Compensation is only paid when the court quashes a conviction because a new fact has emerged to show beyond reasonable doubt that the applicant did not commit the offence. 'How can you be acquitted unanimously by judge and jury, which means you (regain) innocent status, but then get told you are not innocent enough?' he asked us last week. Mr Campbell, pictured in 2000, and the Met Police faced criticism after Mr George was cleared, but maintained that they had never used the convicted sex offender as a scapegoat 'How more innocent than innocent can a person be? I spent years in custody and then they have looked at the thing and decided I'm not innocent enough.' Miss Dando's family still remain 'hopeful' her killer will be brought to justice one day. Speaking during the documentary, her brother Nigel said: 'I would just like to know, why someone would want to kill her.' The film will also show how BBC director general Tony Hall, then Head of News at the BBC, was targeted with threatening phone calls in the weeks after Jill Dando's murder. 'We had three calls, as I recall, to the BBC switchboards in London and Belfast,' he said. 'I listened to the voice of one of them, which said basically, I was next. I mean they were threatening me. I have no idea what that amounted to, Was it a real threat? Was it not a threat? 'You know there are often copycat things that happen after these sorts of events, and the police took it seriously, but I don't know.' The Murder of Jill Dando airs on Tuesday at 9pm on BBC One. Advertisement Julie Bishop made sure all eyes were on her as she threatened to upstage Treasurer Josh Frydenberg delivering his first and possibly final Budget on Tuesday night. Donning a dazzling blue sequin midi dress, the former foreign minister appeared visibly enthusiastic ahead of her colleague's big day in Canberra. Ms Bishop was photographed in a Rachel Gilbert gown jumping with her hands in the air and reveling in the limelight - just minutes before Mr Frydenberg took to the dispatch box to announce the nation's finances were finally back in black . The 'Orla Dress', designed by the famed Australian designer, retails at $1,299.00 and can be purchased from a number of retailers, including David Jones and The Iconic. Former foreign minister Julie Bishop had all eyes on her as her party set about delivering its budget Donning a dazzling blue sequin midi dress, the former foreign minister appeared visibly enthusiastic ahead of her colleague Josh Frydenberg's first budget delivery in Canberra Ms Bishop is often commended for her wardrobe choices, earning herself the title of 'Minister of Fashion' alongside her former titles of Deputy leader of the Liberal party and Foreign Affairs Minister. She now joins the likes of Nicole Kidman, Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Olivia Palermo, Karlie Kloss, Heidi Klum and Princess Beatrice who have donned Ms Gilbert's dresses in the past. Ms Bishop's sparkly showing during the Budget announcement took some of the attention away from Mr Frydenberg, who announced a Budget surplus for the first time in 12 years. The Government is hoping a swag of tax cuts unveiled on Tuesday night will boost its popularity ahead of the election, which is expected to be called within days. Ms Bishop dazzled in a blue sequin midi dress, appearing visibly enthusiastic ahead of her colleague, Josh Frydenberg's, first budget delivery The 'Orla Dress', designed by the famed Australian designer, retails at $1,299.00 and can be purchased from David Jones or The Iconic Low and middle-income earners are set to receive more than $1,000 a year in tax cuts, or $21 a week, on top of the $500 in tax relief they received last year. Ministers are tonight celebrating the country being 'back in black' with the first Budget surplus since John Howard's long-serving treasurer Peter Costello delivered his last Budget 12 years ago - before the global financial crisis hit. Mr Frydenberg, 47, says his first Budget, with a $7.1 billion surplus for 2019-20, was the result of 'responsible decisions - difficult but necessary decisions.' The Treasurer hailed his financial plan as one designed to make life easier for 'average families' on a median household income of $74,800 a year. Mr Frydenberg, 47, says his first budget, with a $7.1 billion surplus for 2019-20, was the result of 'responsible decisions - difficult but necessary decisions' The wife of Australian Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, Amy and their two kids Blake and Gemma were also spotted as he delivered his biggest speech to date as Treasurer Treasurer Josh Frydenberg kisses his wife Amie Frydenberg after delivering his much-anticipated Budget 'Their cost of living pressures will be eased... there will be more money in their pocket,' said Mr Frydenberg. Ms Bishop, 62, famously announced her retirement from politics earlier this year, after a humiliating defeat in her run for the top job. 'I will not recontest the seat of Curtin at the next election,' the former Liberal deputy leader and foreign minister told Parliament in late February. In a short House of Representatives speech, the former corporate lawyer said she was proud to have served 'my beloved Liberal Party, my state of Western Australia, and my country.' She is retiring from her ultra-safe Perth electorate of Curtin, months after receiving just 11 votes in the Liberal Party leadership ballot to succeed Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister. A popular Thai drag queen manages to make everything that she touches much more glamorous including her 73-year-old father and 92-year-old grandmother. Pangina Heals, who co-hosts the RuPaul's Drag Race spinoff Drag Race Thailand, clearly enjoys the enthusiastic support of her family, who have let her work her hair, makeup, and wardrobe magic on them. Recently, the 29-year-old shared pictures of the drag makeovers she performed on dad and grandma, and the results are absolutely enchanting. A family affair! Drag Race Thailand co-host Pangina Heals (seated) has given members of her family drag makeovers, including her 73-year-old father (standing) Family bonding: Pangina dressed her dad up in drag last year, and has shared several pictures and videos of the event Reveling in it! Her dad seemed to enjoy himself while posing in the costume Matchy-matchy: The drag queen (right) wore similar makeup to her dad for the occasion Parenting goals: Pangina said her dad (pictured without makeup) loves and supports her Supportive: The Drag Race Thailand co-host tweeted that her dad 'did drag with me to say to the world that art, love, and acceptance [do] not have a barrier' Pangina Heals, whose given name is Pan Pan Narkprasert, first gave her dad a drag makeover last June. Dad was put in a blonde bobbed wig, and his face was painted with dramatic eyeshadow and red lipstick. He also gamely dressed up in a pleather dress with in bright primary colors with decorative eyes on the shoulders. Makeup artist Monticha Sriyoschati was enlisted to help out with the over-the-top beauty look. 'Dressing my dad in drag for the first time,' Pangina wrote, sharing a video of her dad's reaction. 'Her name is Chokaree Heals. My dad said love has nothing to do with gender and he did drag with me to say to the world that art, love, and acceptance [do] not have a barrier or walls.' Later, she added: 'LOVE is support and understanding and I am so blessed!' Up for it: Dad gamely sad while professionals did his makeup and outfitted him with a wig Cute: Dad patiently waited while he got his dramatic makeover for the cameras Attitude! Dad posed with his final look, complete with a blonde wig and drawn-on brows All in the family! Dad was given the drag name 'Chokaree Heals' to go with his son's 'LOVE is support and understanding and I am so blessed!' Pangina wrote Acceptance: Pangina (pictured as a boy with dad) noted that while trans people are accepted in Thailand, drag is still a new concept Then, in October, she dressed up her 92-year-old grandmother in drag, too. Grandma got a huge, voluminous blonde wig oozing with Hollywood glamour. The same makeup artist gave her smoky shadow, fake lashes, and bold red lipstick, and grandma dressed in a sunny yellow dress with a fur collar. 'My grandma is hip AF,' Pangina wrote. And most recently, in February, Pangina's aunt got a makeover, too, dressing up in a big brown wig, fuchsia lipstick, oversized lashes, and dramatic eyeliner. 'My Aunt joins the drag party! She is speech impaired and a beautiful soul. She is the reason why I am so animated because of the way we communicate,' Pangina captioned the image. Pangina who counts Wonder Woman, Barbra Streisand, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey as major influences is clearly thrilled to have such a supportive family. But she is aware that not everyone is so lucky. You go, grandma! She also gave her 92-year-old grandmother a fabulous drag makeover Transformation: Granny (pictured before the makeover) looked unrecognizable after getting her hair and makeup done Mid-makeover: She admired herself in a mirror once the wig and dress were in place 'My grandma is hip AF,' Pangina wrote of his grandmother's glam new look While Pangina says that Thailand is accepting of trans people, drag is still more unfamiliar to them. 'We're very open to the trans community and showgirls,' she said, according to The Standard Hotel. 'We call transgender woman "type two," so we're very, very open with that. 'But people don't know about drag as much. They don't understand what it is for men who live the lives of men to dress up as women. Yes, it's all under the same umbrella, but it's different, so we're trying to educate people that this is an art form. 'Whether you're doing it for money, for booze, for cash, for fame, for your happiness or other people's happiness, this art exists and people need to know that this art is available for the LGBT community to express themselves.' And that's why she hopes her makeovers serve to show others that to accept their loved ones. 'A family that drags together stays together! Please help spread awareness. Love is understanding,' she wrote on Instagram. Checking them off the list! Most recently, in February, Pangina's aunt got a makeover, too Star: Pangina (pictured) is a co-host of the RuPaul's Drag Race spinoff Drag Race Thailand She is one of the most respected names in the French fashion sphere and while she may be over sixty, Carine Roitfeld has no intention of becoming invisible. The former editor of French Vogue, 64, who lives in Paris, reveals the secrets to her incredible looks in this month's issue of Porter Magazine- and they're surprisingly simple. The creator of CR Fashion Book sticks to a chic uniform of heels and pencil skirts to show off her 'pretty' legs, and never wears trainers or skinny jeans. And while she shuns sugar and gluten, she does indulge in a vodka shot every evening when she gets home, as well as three cigarettes a day. Roitfeld, who spends her time surrounded by younger models, said she does not feel intimidated by youth, but admitted she's had to adapt to accept her age. Carile Roitfeld, 64, at the Love Ball for the Naked Heart Foundation in Doha, Qatar, in March 2019. The fashion legend and former editor of French Vogue said she never wears trainers Roitfeld, pictured at the Cannes Festival in May 2018, said she's had to learned to dress age-appropriately, but is lucky to have 'pretty legs' 'It's not easy as it used to,' she said. 'The truth is, no one likes to get older, not so much because of wrinkles, but because of health.' While she's not a big drinker, Roitfeld admitted she indulges in a shot of vodka when she gets home every day and smokes three cigarettes. Over the years, Roitfeld has remained faithful to her uniform of pencil skirts and heels, although she thinks she's become 'cooler' with age and will wear the odd pair of trousers here and there. Roitfeld with her granddaughter Romy (left) and daughter Julia (right). Roitfeld says she has stayed faithful to her skirt and heels 'uniform' The former editor of French Vogue says she's lucky she has pretty legs. The fashion editor used to do ballet but switched to boxing after breaking her back a few years ago From left to right: Fashion designer Riccardo Tisci, the late Karl Lagerfeld, Carine Roitfeld and Kim Kardashian photographed in 2014 in Paris. Roitfeld had a special relationship with the late fashion designer, who used to call her 'Madame Roitfeld' One thing she won't budge on is trainers, which she never wears. Roitfeld also detests Ugg boots and flipflops. She's had to learn to be 'age-appropriate', by covering her decolletage and opting for tights over bare legs as well as longer sleeves. While younger models like Kaia Gerber - Cindy Crawford's daughter - and Gigi Hadid call her their 'fashion mother,' Roitfeld said she does not feel threatened by youth, as she's already 'proved herself'. When it comes to dating, Roitfeld - who is separated from Christian Restoin, her partner of 40 years - wanted to make it clear that she's not a 'cougar,' and that her love life is not a priority. Carine Roitfeld with Gigi Hadid at the Tommy Hilfiger show during the Paris Fashion Week in February 2019. Roitfeld says she does not feel intimidated by being surrounded by youth as she's already proved herself Yara Shahidi is on the cover of this month's edition of Porter Magazine, which is out this Friday globally To see the full interview, buy the latest issue of PORTER, on sale globally on Friday 5th April, 2019. Also available as a Digital Edition, or go to Porter Subscription Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg started his week off with quite an unexpected task. The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was at work early on Monday morning and heading to the bathroom when he ran into a couple who wanted to get married just 45 minutes before they had to be at the hospital for a scheduled C-section to deliver their baby. So the Democratic presidential hopeful stepped in as a last-minute officiant, pronouncing them man and while with just enough time for them to speed off to the maternity ward and welcome their little one. Surprise! South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg officiated a wedding at his office on Monday morning when a couple came in and asked in to perform the ceremony last-minute They do! They only had a few minutes before they needed to head to the hospital, where the bride had a C-section scheduled Buttigieg shared the development on Facebook on Monday, including pictures from the ceremony. In the mix: Buttigieg, 37, is one of several Democrats running for president 'I never would have guessed how this morning would begin for me,' he began the post. 'Unstructured time is rare especially these days, but I got to the Mayor's office early today after my morning run, and took a few minutes to read the news and answer text messages before my first meeting. 'After going out into the hall to use the restroom, I ran into a young couple coming out of the elevator, saying I was just the person they were there to see.' Buttigieg admitted that he was reluctant to stop and talk, given that he only had a few moments of free time and he tried to hint that he didn't really have the time to spare for an unplanned meeting. 'That's when Mary and Gabe explained that she was on her way to the hospital for a 9:00 a.m. appointment for a C-section. And they were hoping they could be married before she delivered.' That's unexpected! He shared the story on Facebook on Monday, saying he was running to the bathroom when the couple stopped him and asked him to marry them Yes way! He later said on Twitter that he wouldn't have believed it if he read it somewhere else It was already 8:15am, cutting things quite close but the couple had their paperwork ready and hoped to be quickly squeezed in. 'Obviously there's only one answer to that question,' Buttigieg wrote. 'I corralled a few staff members as they were trickling into the office, to serve as witnesses, and filled out the paperwork. 'Their rings weren't ready, so one of my colleagues found a ribbon that would do the trick. A few minutes later, Gabe and Mary, newly married, left my office with just enough time to get to the hospital.' An attached photo shows a heavily-pregnant Mary slipping a ring onto Gabe's finger while Buttigieg smiles over them. Then, later that afternoon, they sent Buttigieg's office a photo of their new baby, Jade Katherine Jones. Welcome to the world! Later, the couple sent his office a picture of their new baby Jade Katherine Jones It's true! The groom Greg (short for Jibrail) confirmed the story and called it a 'surreal day' 'It's moments like this that I'll miss when my term as mayor comes to an end,' the mayor wrote. 'Congratulations to the newlyweds and new parents, and welcome, Jade, to this unlikely and lovely world!' The Facebook post has had 66,000 likes and reactions, and later spread to Twitter when Independent Journal Review editor Josh Billinson shared the story. 'If I just saw this I would think it was made up,' Buttigieg replied. 'But this really is how the work day began this morning.' Supporters went wild for the story, which is only the latest in surprising and touching tales about the Indiana mayor. Last month, writer Ashley C. Ford shared a story from another of the mayor's constituents named Donald F. Zimmer. Zimmer recalled meeting Buttigieg some time after he first became mayor in 2012, and say the mayor swooped in to translate for an Arabic-speaking patient at a hospital. Warm fuzzies: Writer Ashley C. Ford said she's heard several heartwarming stories from locals, and shared one from a doctor at the local hospital Renaissance man: Donald F. Zimmer recalled Buttigieg, who speaks seven languages, turning up to translate for a patient's mother who only spoke Arabic 'First time I ever met him I was working in the ER, very shortly after finishing residency, and was caring for a little Somali boy who had almost hanged himself,' Zimmer said. 'We had no Arabic translator that I could talk to his mother through and we were working on getting one of the phones. Then all of a sudden this young guy in a suit shows up, and just starts translating. 'The boy was gravely ill and I didn't really bother to ask who the new translator was but he spent almost an hour with the mother and I was helping to talk about his prognosis and then he took her up to the floor. 'During the whole event he never really mentioned who he was. About an hour later he came down and shook my hand before leaving. I thanked him for his help and asked him how long he [had] been at the hospital. 'He casually replied, "I don't work for the hospital. I'm mayor Pete." He shook my hand and left without another word. He's musical! Twitter users have also been impressed to learn that Buttigieg plays the piano and has joined Ben Folds on stage for a performance Performance: In 2015 he joined Ben Folds and the South Bend Symphony Orchestra on stage and played piano Talent: Two two posed for a picture on the night of the show 'I learned later that he simply heard over the police scanner that we needed an Arabic translator at the hospital for this tragic situation and just wanted to help. Buttigieg speaks seven languages: Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari, and French. He was his high school's valedictorian, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and a Rhodes Scholar. After graduating, he joined the Navy and was deployed to Afghanistan for seven months. He also plays the piano. In yet another surprising anecdote about him circulating on Twitter, in 2015 he joined Ben Folds and the South Bend Symphony Orchestra on stage and played along on the instrument. 'He is a fine piano player!' Ben Folds tweeted in response to the story. The Queen of the Netherlands looked chic in grey coat dress as she visited a museum in Rotterdam on Tuesday. Queen Maxima, 47, was visiting the Nederlands Fotomuseum to view their whole scope of its work, including three of their main exhibitions. The mother-of-three paired her collared dress with large tear drop sliver earrings and her blonde locks were worn down straight. Queen Maxima, 47, was visiting the Nederlands Fotomuseum to view their whole scope of work The Queen of the Netherlands looked chic in grey coat dress as she visited a museum in Rotterdam on Tuesday The mother-of-three paired her collared dress with large tear drop sliver earrings and wore her blonde locks down The Dutch Queen looked enthralled as she was given a guided tour of the museum and she looked closely at some of the exhibition's photos. The museums goal is to become the number one international platform for photography from the Netherlands. Opening 30 years ago in 1989 the museum wants their collection of photos to be a mirror image of Dutch photography. The wife of King Willem-Alexander also wore a gold bangle and paired her dress with a green clutch and gloves. The Dutch Queen looked enthralled as she was given a guided tour of the museum and she looked closely at some of the exhibition photos Queen Maxima visited the to Fotomuseum in Rotterdam on Tuesday and looked at their current exhibitions Museum officials talk the Dutch Queen through their collections as she looks on at the photos The wife of King Willem-Alexander also wore a gold bangle and paired her dress with a green clutch and gloves Current exhibitions at the museum include an installation Shadows by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaars and Robert F. Kennedy Funeral Train The Peoples View. Last week the Dutch Queen eagerly drank beer from a tankard as she attended the 300th anniversary of the Brewery Bavaria in Lieshout, Netherlands. While yesterday she joined Crown Princess Mary to attend the third World Conference of Women's Shelters. Current exhibitions at the museum include installation Shadows by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaars and Robert F. Kennedy Funeral Train The Peoples View Opening 30 years ago in 1989 the museum wants their collection of photos to be a mirror image of Dutch photography. Pictured - Queen Maxima viewing one of the collections The wife of King Willem-Alexander also wore a gold bangle and paired her dress with a green clutch and gloves, as she viewed the exhibitions White people are candidly revealing all the times they have escaped punishment for their wrongdoings because of the color of their skin, from getting caught stealing multiple times to spitting in a cop's face. Twitter user @Freeyourmindkid started the eye-opening conversation on Saturday when he asked: 'White people - What is the most outrageous thing that you've gotten away with as a white person that you know damn well a black or brown person would have never gotten away with?' Following the prompt, thousands of people flocked to the comments section of the post to share their shocking stories using the hashtag #MyWhitePrivilege.' Honestey: White people are sharing all the times they have gotten away with things because of the color of their skin, from traffic violations to stealing Raising awareness: Twitter user @Freeyourmindkid started the conversation on Saturday when he asked people to share their stories using the hashtag #MyWhitePrivilege Shocking: One woman admitted that she spit in a police officer's face as a teen and didn't' get into trouble Nothing to fear: Jeff Tiedrich recalled cracking jokes with a state trooper after he was pulled over for a burned-out taillight Many people recalled having casual encounters with police officers after they were pulled over for traffic violations, admitting that didn't even end up getting tickets. '[I was] pulled over for a burned-out taillight. Never once did it occur to me to think about where my hands were, or how fast I went for my wallet,' Jeff Tiedrich explained. 'By the end of the encounter, the state trooper and I were both standing by the side of my car, cracking jokes. And that is #MyWhitePrivilege.' One woman who ran a stoplight downtown in the middle of the night said she had a cheeky response for the cop who pulled her over and he found it charming. 'I said, "Don't you have something to do?' And laughed. He laughed. I didn't get a ticket. I got asked out,' she said. Meanwhile, Barbara Gregory recounted being supremely cautious when she was pulled over, only to be told she didn't need to be. Reoccurring trend: A woman named Charlotte said she has had police officers pull over and offer her rides homes Financial boost: Nick Barrett admitted he got financing to buy a house as a pizza cook Srazy: A woman named Ashley admitted she argued with a police officer about a speeding ticket, and he ended up apologizing to her No deterrent: A woman said she would always get off with just a warning when she was caught stealing No questions asked: Adrienne Carmack recounted calling the police in Allston, Massachusetts, when she lost the key to her bike lock 'Got pulled over and kept my hands visible, on the wheel. Asked the cop for permission to reach into my glove box to retrieve paperwork. Cop chuckled & told me, 'YOU don't need to work about that,' she wrote. One woman admitted that she actually argued with a police officer who pulled her over and he ended up apologizing to her. 'Last week I got a speeding ticket. I argued with the cop (speed limit recently changed), told him to have a good day, rolled my window up in his face, drove off,' she tweeted. 'Thirty minutes later he's at my house apologizing and he voided my ticket because he confirmed the change.' Another person recalled being grossly disrespectful to a police officer and not having to deal with any real consequences. 'As a teen I spat in a cop's face when he broke up a party I was at and all he did was drive me home and tell my mom that I was a "trouble-maker,"' she tweeted. Back in the day: One woman even recounted being allowed to board a flight with a library card Candid confession: One mom admitted she doesn't have to worry about her white sons when the step outside A date instead of a ticket: One woman who ran a stoplight downtown in the middle of the night said she had a cheeky response for the cop who pulled her over and he found it charming Looking back: One woman explained that people believed her pain was real and took care of her when she gave birth to her kids Say what? One woman revealed she ended up getting asked out on a date by the cop who pulled her over after she ran a stop sign in the middle of the night 'he'd still be in prison': A woman named Audrey claimed cops tried to get her to claim her marijuana was her black boyfriend's drugs Incredibly stupid: One woman recalled a white friend getting away with reversing down a highway off ramp Treatment: A woman named Laura recalled being given pain medication while the black woman in the ER with her was interrogated Others credited their white privilege with helping them get away with stealing when they were younger. 'A LOT of shoplifting when I was younger: even when I was caught all I got was a slap on the wrist,' one woman tweeted. 'But nobody was watching the white girl in the polo shirt; they were too busy scrutinizing the Hispanic and Latinx kids.' Another woman shared a similar story, writing: 'I got caught stealing multiple times as a teenager and they never called the cops. They just let me go with a warning. Every. Single. Time.' Some recounted times when it looked like they could have been stealing, but they never got questioned. Adrienne Carmack recalled calling the police in Allston, Massachusetts, when she lost the key to her bike lock. Reckless: One person claimed to get out of a DUI with nothing more than $100 bill Confession: One woman admitted she will sit in hotel lobbies and use their free WiFi as a non-paying guest without getting kicked out Unjust: A woman named Tracy claimed she got to skip the line at an immigration office because she is white Nothing bu smiles: A man named Tom said he wore pants with a security tag hidden in the pocket for two months, and no one said anything Catering: One woman pointed out that white people can go into any salon and people will know how to cut, color, and style her hair Worry-free: Barbara Gregory recounted being supremely cautious when she was pulled over, only to be told she didn't need to be Unfair treatment: A woman recalled getting away with shoplifting because she was a white girl in a polo shirt '(White) firefighters showed up didn't ask for any id, proof that the bike was mine, or proof that I lived at the address and cut the u-lock off without question,' she wrote. A man named Tom said he wore pants with a security tag hidden in the pocket for two months, and no one said anything. 'I was in & out of stores setting off sensors dozens of times - never stopped once, would just get a wave & a smile,' he said. Some people shared stories that weren't necessarily outrageous but just as unjust. 'Got financing to buy a house as a 30-year-old pizza cook. I've never been denied a line of credit actually,' one man tweeted. A woman named Tracy claimed she got to skip the line at an immigration office because she is white. In their own world: While many people used the hashtag to raise awareness for systemic racism, ring-wing critics mocked the conversation and claimed white privilege doesn't exist Not getting it: One woman referenced Jussie Smollett's case to try and claim white privilege doesn't exist Triggered: Those denying white privilege didn't seem to truly understand the definition of it Struggle: They failed to recognized that while they may have had difficult times the color of their skin didn't make things more difficult for them Open your eyes: One woman tweeted that she wished people 'could see the world for how it really is' 'Renewing my Greencard I was seriously taken from the back of an hours-long line & put directly in the interviewer's office. I thought I was in trouble for something, it scared me,' she tweeted. 'In & out in 15 min. It wasn't till I was leaving that I realized it was #MyWhitePrivlege.' One woman even recounted being allowed to board a flight with a library card pre-9/11 when she showed up at the airport without an ID. While many people used the hashtag to raise awareness for systemic racism, ring-wing critics mocked the conversation and claimed white privilege doesn't actually exist. '#MyWhitePrivilege Has gotten me nothing, don't be fooled by what the media claims. I still have the same problems as everyone else,' one person tweeted. '#WhitePrivilege is a liberal scam! And worst of all, it's a gigantic distraction. I refused to be distracted!' someone else wrote. Those who used the hashtag to deny the existence of white privilege fail to recognize that while they may have had difficult times the color of their skin didn't make things more difficult for them. 'I wish people could see the world for how it really is, so we could try to change it,' one woman wrote. 'I'm white, I have privilege. So this world allows me opportunities people of color have to work way harder to get. If you say "I don't see color" you're also ignoring white privilege in IMO.' A young mother who was left by her long-term partner after giving birth to their premature baby boy has bounced back from her terrible ordeal. Lisa Burling, from Sydney, was left by her partner who broke up with her over the phone just two days after she gave birth to their premature baby. Unemployed and with two sons under three-years-old to raise by herself she has said it was like a bomb had 'dropped'. The mother-of-two used to have it all, with a fulfilling career, a little boy and a supportive partner, but it all went out the window when her significant other broke the news, two days after the birth of their premature baby, she wrote for Kidspot. Suddenly a single mother, Lisa had to fight her way back and dream 'little dreams' to get her life back on track. Lisa Burling, from Sydney, was dumped by her partner just two days after giving birth to their premature son Lisa pictured moments after the birth of her son Nate. Nate was born at only 32 weeks and had to stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) Already mother to one son, Luca, Lisa went through emergency labour with her second son, Nate, when he was just 32 weeks. After giving birth to Nate, Lisa noticed she had a missed call from her partner. But she said she'll never forget the moment she called back. 'He was out he was leaving me. It wasnt working, he wasnt happy and that was it. Done and dusted,' she wrote. 'I hung up, took a deep breath and I sobbed on the floor of a cold, impersonal hospital room for what was probably five minutes, but seemed to be hours.' Lisa with her son Nate, who is now a healthy young boy who just graduated from pre-school (pictured) The young mother said it felt like the universe was playing a joke on her. She said she hoped to wake up and realise it had just been 'a big, fat, ugly' dream. Lisa decided to turn her life around and had to accept the fact that she was indeed an unemployed single mother-of-two, something she thought would never happen to her. Slowly but surely, Lisa rebuilt her life. Instead of big dreams she could not have achieved, Lisa focus on 'little dreams,' she knew she could make come true. The woman, who is now a successful entrepreneur, said her ability to dream saved her and her boys from being ever worse off than they initially were. In just three years, Lisa has turned her life around and is now a successful businesswoman. Lisa had two sons, Luca and Nate. By the time she was dumped the two boys were under three years old. The family is now happy and the boys are all grown up 'Fast forward to today, and I am an entrepreneur with an award-winning PR consultancy, LBPR. Ive been awarded as a businesswoman in my own right and am a proud ambassador for the AusMumpreneur Network and Inspiring Rare Birds,' she wrote. Lisa had previously moved to London at age 23, and while she loved her UK life, she decided to move back to her country of origin to spend some more quality time with her family and friends when she reached 33. There, she started working as a PR in Sydney and rekindled an old romance with who would become the father of her children. Lisa said she thought she would spend of her life with her then partner. While she had doubts, she let him make decisions for the both of them and the pair moved to a smaller, quieter town two hours away from Sydney. The mother-of-two said she felt this was what she thought she ought to be doing in her early thirties, but felt 'unfulfilled' as a stay-at-homer mother. Even though she was 'a bit bored,' Lisa said she did not want to break up her family. But all changed when Nate was born andher partner left her. Lisa wrote Dream a Little dream, which retraces her story as a single-mother. and gives tips on how to bounce back. A young woman learned the hard way that it's probably not a good idea to hire someone to tempt and 'catch' a boyfriend cheating. Alysha Bush, 23, and Kourbine Lee, 23, broke up last year after Alysha suspected that Kourbine was unfaithful and hired another woman named Paula to hit on him and see if he'd take the bait. When Paula told Alysha that she and Kourbine had hooked up, Alysha dumped in but she's now learned on the Snapchat show Second Chance that Paula was lying to her, and Kourbine had been faithful all along. Former couple: Alysha Bush, 23, and Kourbine Lee, 23, broke up last June after a year and a half of dating Debate: They reunited on the Snapchat show Second Chance to discuss Alysha's accusation that Kourbine cheated A&E airs a popular short-form reality show on Snapchat called Second Chance and the twist in the latest episode has left fans reeling. Former couple Alysha and Kourbine sat down in front of the cameras to rehash their relationship, which had spanned from January 2017 to June 2018. They stayed together for a year and a half despite the relationship being long distance, with Kourbine living in California and Alysha attending school in Arizona. 'We were already so far apart, there was just lack of communication, we were subliminally trying to make each other jealous over social media,' Alysha admitted to BuzzFeed. 'I went to Vegas with him and his family friends and he was very distant from me, he was looking and kind of hitting on other girls in front of me in Vegas.' So Alysha came up with a plan to try to trap her boyfriend by hiring a woman named Paula Contento to come onto him. Far away: They'd been long distance, with him in California and her in Arizona Lack of trust: Alysha suspected Kourbine of being unfaithful and decided to test her theory Paul worked out at the same gym as Kourbine, and Alysha paid her $50 to tempt Kourbine to cheat and report back. 'I was like "Hey girl, I'm at this point in my relationship where I really just think he's cheating on me and I just want to catch him because there's been all these suspicious things that he's done and red flags that I've been putting up with for the longest time and it's been months now so I just want to catch him,"' she said. Paula agreed, and later told Alysha that Kourbine asked her on a date and they hooked up afterward. The two split up but things weren't over. Five months later they appeared on the Snapchat show, sitting in chairs across from each other and discussing what went wrong. On camera, Alysha asks Kourbine to be honest and admit that he cheated. He tells her unequivocally that he did not. Cheater? She paid a woman at his gym $50 to hit on him and report back and the woman said the two had sex Sneaky: Kourbine insisted he was innocent and when they got the woman, Paula, on the phone, she admitted that she made it up 'I know that you did,' she answers. When he asks how she 'knows,' she says, 'The girl you cheated with I paid her 50 bucks to hit on you!' 'Why would you pay a girl to talk to me? That's some crazy s***! When it's established that they're talking about Paula, Kourbine insists that she was one of his clients for personal training. 'That's not what she told me,' Alysha says. 'She told me you guys had sex.' When Kourbine insists that Paula is lying, they pull her up on a video chat to ask her outright to settle the debate. Paul repeats what she had told Alysha: That Kourbine had taken her to a 'really fancy restaurant,' and afterward they hooked up. Well then! Kourbine seemed exasperated after he was vindicated, and Alysha apologized on camera but seemed flustered 'See,' says Alysha. 'Why would you sit here and lie?' Kourbine asks Paula. Paula begins to answer that she 'lied because...' when both Kourbine and Paula cut her off. Alysha is clearly shocked, and Kourbine looks satisfied. 'I didn't think that she deserved you, so I lied. Clearly, she doesn't value the faithful, amazing man that you are,' Paula says. 'What have I been saying?' Kourbine says to Alysha. Speaking to BuzzFeed, Paula admitted that her 'tactics were indeed sneaky.' 'I lied to Alysha. I think I did it mostly because at the time, I was going through things of my own, and it angered me that a woman would set her man up the way she did instead of simply communicating with him. So I took her $50 dollars and I lied to her.' Still, she thinks she wasn't portrayed fairly. 'I dont think I was fairly portrayed in this situation because thats not who I am,' she said. 'I am neither a liar, nor a homewrecker. I am the opposite of that. Viral: Twitter users have gone wild over the clip, and have shared some judgements on the people involved 'I am also all about women empowerment and if the same situation were to happen again, I think I would just tell the girl to keep her money, and encourage her to talk to her man instead. 'I definitely do regret lying to her. Especially when she clearly had some major insecurities of her own.' Alysha, meanwhile has apologized to Kourbine, and Kourbine admitted that his communication skills could have been better. The pair briefly got back together but have since broken up again. Since the episode aired, a recording of it has been viewed over 14 million times on Twitter and viewers have reacted with shock and disdain. 'She coulda used that $50 for therapy. She clearly has trust issues,' wrote one. 'Whoa, whut? Yeah, maybe she doesn't actually deserve him,' wrote another. A month after her big sister Jana revealed that she's remodeled their parents' bedroom, Jessa Duggar has given her own hope a bit of a makeover. The 26-year-old reality star and mother-of-two wrote on Instagram that she decided to go for a more 'minimalist' look in the house she shares with husband Ben Seewald, 23. With the transformation finished in the master bedroom and living room, the Counting On star share before and after pictures of her work. New day, new room! Jessa Duggar recently redecorated a couple rooms in her house, including the living room (pictured after the redecoration) Get rid of everything! She said she wanted to go for a more 'minimalist' look Slide me Transformation: The 26-year-old reality star and mother-of-two shared before and after pictures of her home decorating project 'Here's a little glimpse into a Seewald home project that was completed recently,' she wrote on March 29. 'Decided on a whim that I wanted to become more of a minimalist.' She said she repainted her living room, which started as a light green and is now a light gray shade called Revere Pewter. That was a bit of project, which she seems to have done all by herself while her husband was at a late night meeting. She said she went to Lowe's with her sons, three-year-old Spurgeon and two-year-old Henry, and picked up paint and supplies. She didn't finish painting until 1am. 'Ben was pleasantly surprised when he walked in the door,' she said. She sold off some of their furniture, including the coffee table and end tables, on Facebook Marketplace, and used the money to buy a new rug, plants, and secondhand throw pillows. New touches: She sold furniture online and used the money to get some secondhand throw pillows and plants Bye: The wall decor is gone, save for one framed photo above the fireplace Mom troubles: She admitted the kids' corner was still a bit cluttered Project: She said she took her kids to Lowe's at 7pm and was up painting until 1am Family: Jessa is married to 23-year-old Ben Seewald and together they have two kids, three-year-old Spurgeon and two-year-old Henry. They are expecting a third She also did away with much of the wall decor that was hanging, save for a photo above the fireplace. The 'kiddoes corner' is still quite cluttered with toys, she admitted. 'It may not be HGTV worthy, but its the hub of our home and we feel like it's a massive transformation!' she wrote. 'Loving the lighter colors and having less in the room and the fact that, by selling some things, we werent out a penny and actually made some cash! It definitely makes this little the area feel a lot bigger!! And its been wonderful having more floor space for the kids to wrestle and built things.' She then moved onto the master bedroom, giving it its own 'minimalist makeover.' She painted the dark gray walls the same light color as the living room and did away with some of the furniture. 'We decided to sell our chunky bed frame, nightstands and lamps on fb marketplace as well!' she wrote. 'We didnt really use the nightstands when we were in bed, and they were just becoming random junk collectors. Sparse: The couple also redid their master bedroom, putting the box spring of their bed right on the floor Something fresh: They tossed their bed frame and end tables and repainted the walls 'Originally, we thought we would get a simpler headboard/frame to replace, but while we were talking it over, it was actually Ben who said "I kinda like the simplicity of having our bed on the floor like this." I thought about it for a min, and decided I agreed! 'I realize this isnt for everyone,' she went on, 'but we do have a tall mattress and, with the box spring, our bed sits at about couch height. I LOVE IT. 'We've found that we all pile into bed a lot more to read stories or snuggle. It-s easy for the two-year-old to climb up and down on his own, and if a little monkey accidentally falls out of bed it-s not likely to be an incident to call the doctor over.' She also brought the living room rug into the bedroom, added new photos to the walls, and painted her changing table with some inspiration from Pinterest. Decor: She hung a photo from her honeymoon and propped a mirror up on a round box Switched: She moved the rug from the living room into the bedroom DIY: The couple has a changing table in the bedroom, which she repainted The rooms certainly look different, but the reactions on social media have been mixed. Jessa's sisters Jinger, Joy, and Jill, and her sister-in-law Anna, have all praised the makeover, as have some of her fans. Others have had criticism and advice, though. 'All about the minimalist lifestyle, but this looks like a dorm room. Sorry!' one commented on the pictures of the bedroom. 'Girl no! Google low bed frame and look how u can have that low bed and in a sophisticated adult way. Everything else looks good,' wrote another. Before shot! The Duggar kids remodeled their parents' bedroom while they were away And the after! Oldest sister Jana, 29, ran the show, designing the space and directing her siblings Handiwork: She showed off before and after shots on Instagram last week Impressive: They transformed a dark, dated nook into a cute sitting space and added a fold-away desk and a closet Old: The bedroom had been the same since the Duggars finished building their house and moved in in January 2006 Totally different! Jana and her siblings didn't just redecorate, they also painted, add cabinets, and installed this window seat On March 1, Jessa's big sister Jana took to Instagram to share before-and-after photos of her parents Jim Bob and Michelle's master bedroom, which she and her younger siblings totally remodeled themselves. Later, she posted videos of her mom and dad's reactions as they saw the results for the first time. The Duggar family Michelle, 52, Jim Bob, 53, and their 19 children moved into their 7,000 square-foot Tontitown, Arkansas home in January 2006. The family, including the small children, actually built the home themselves with the help of some contractors, putting together two Kodiak Steel Homes house kits to create the massive living space with one bedroom for the parents, one for all of the girls, and one for all of the boys. So the kids are no stranger to home renovations, which is why they were up to the task when Jana enlisted them to help redo their mom and dad's room. The old bedroom was dated and had been unchanged since their move-in nearly a decade and a half ago. In addition to a large bed and en-suite bathroom, it included two reclining chairs one which Michelle could use while nursing her many babies. In fact, the youngest child in the Duggar clan would traditionally live in the parents' bedroom for the first year or so of life, before moving on to the gender-appropriate dorm with his or her siblings. Dated: They also remodeled the master bathroom, which had old-looking cabinets and decor A job well done: The new bathroom looks lighter, clear, and prettier Out with the old! Jana certainly has a knack for home design, which she showed off Her next gig? The renovation has some fans wondering if she is gearing up to announce her own DIY show on TLC But Michelle hasn't been been pregnant since giving birth to her youngest, nine-year-old Josie, in 2009, so Jana felt it was about time her parents had a nice, grown-up room for themselves. According to sister Joy Anna: 'Jana actually said that, mama, you worked so hard and youve never had an elegant room that feels like a queens palace and we wanted to do that for you.' On March 1, Jana proudly showed off pictures of their hard work. 'This is what weve been working on the past week and a half we surprised my parents while they were away and redid their room!' she wrote. 'So grateful to all the family and friends who pitched in to make this happen!' They replaced the old-fashioned dark brown wood bed frame with a more modern one with a gray headboard. They updated the bedspread and throw pillows, and added bedside tables with pretty lamps. The room was repainted a lighter hue, and the wall featuring the window was outfitted with cabinets, display shelves, and a cozy window seat. In a nook that once awkwardly held a dresser, they built a brand new closet and set up a collapsible desk. Fast! With lots of kids to help out, they seem to have redone the whole bedroom in a matter of days A project: Nearly all of the adult siblings have gotten married and moved out Cute: Jana showed off the decorative shelf and fold-away desk in the nook Loving it: Her parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, seemed thrilled with the results Even the bathroom got more modern cabinetry, a new mirror and lighting, and new decor like a shower curtain, rug, and shelves. Jana later shared behind-the-scenes pictures and videos of the renovation in action, with many of her younger siblings brandishing tool boxes. 'My brothers are the BEST! They built the cabinets from scratch and worked so diligently on everything else!' Jana wrote. Her sister-in-law Anna who is married to her brother Josh and is thought to live in the same house as Jim Bob, Michelle, and the kids also pitched in. 'Anna is amazing she made the window seat cushion! Couldnt have done this project without each and every person!' Jana wrote. Finally, Jana uploaded a string of videos showing her parents' reaction as they walked into their room for the first time after the renovation. Surprise! Jana shared a video of the couple walking into their room and seeing it for the first time since it was redone Wow! Both had huge smiles on their faces and Michelle couldn't stop exclaiming over the pristine new room Approved! Michelle gushed that it was 'stunning' and 'too beautiful to be true' Affection: While her mom gave her a loving squeeze, her dad offered up an awkward side-hug 'We surprised my parents while they were away and remodeled their room for them. This is the reveal and them seeing it for the first time!' she captioned the post. 'Sometimes you have to find ways to give back to those that have given so much to you! We love and appreciate you so much Mom & Dad!' The two seem truly blown away by the work, with Michelle calling it 'stunning' and 'too beautiful to be true' and Jim Bob offering his eldest daughter an awkward side-hug. The family doesn't share front-facing hugs between non-married partners of the opposite sex even among family believing that the full body contact threatens to stir up impure and inappropriate thoughts. Throughout the video, Jana can be heard walking her parents through what they changed and the benefits of the remodel. Her professional run-through has fueled speculation that Jana may have her own reality show in the works. Every burger connoisseur know there's nothing more satisfying than indulging in a delicious bun filled with a succulent patty and sauce bursting with flavour. As restaurants and burger joints go head-to-head to produce the tastiest gourmet foods on the menu, the best burgers have now been revealed. The buns are packed with everything from 'secret sauces' to mouthwatering patties oozing with American cheese. Here, Deliveroo has rounded up Australia's top 10 most popular burgers. Every burger connoisseur know there's nothing more satisfying than indulging in a delicious bun filled with a succulent patty and sauce bursting with flavour (pictured a diner tucking into a Betty's Classic Burger) Mary's mouthwatering $13 Mary's Burger has never disappointed any foodies around Sydney, as it's filled with a succulent beef patty, cheese, tomato, onion, lettuce and its signature sauce Australia's top 10 popular burgers Altered Beast $13.50 - 8bit American Cheese $14 - Burger Project Belles Chicken Sandwich $19 - Belles Hot Chicken The Betty's Classic $12 - Betty's Burgers Cheeseburger $16 - BL Burgers Huxtaburger $12.90 - Huxtaburger Little Beef Burger $10.90 - Ribs & Burgers Mary's Burger $13.50 - Mary's Ume Burger $15.60 - Ume Burger Zinger Burger $6.55 - KFC Advertisement The list was compiled after five million burgers were ordered by customers via the food delivery service app over the past three years. Among the biggest orders was the $13.50 Altered Beast by 8bit, which comes complete with beef, bacon, cheese, grilled onions, lettuce, 8bit sauce and barbecue. Burger Project's $14 American Cheese was also a crowd favourite, filled with grass-fed beef, cheese, onion, pickles, and its signature rose mayonnaise. Mary's $13.50 Mary's Burger has never disappointed foodies, as it's filled with a succulent beef patty, cheese, tomato, onion, lettuce and its secret sauce. Diners can't get enough of the $19 Belles Chicken Sandwich, available at Belles Hot Chicken, as it was one of the most ordered meal. The $12 Betty's Classic from Betty's Burgers is one of the most popular foods from its menu, made with Angus beef, lettuce, onion, cheese, and Betty's 'special sauce'. Diners can't get enough of the $19 Belles Chicken Sandwich, available at Belles Hot Chicken, as it was one of the most ordered meal And it isn't the gourmet options diners enjoyed. Foodies were also ordering KFC's iconic Zinger Burger, which made the top 10 list for the most popular burgers It's a simple classic but BL's humble $16 Cheeseburger made with beef patty, American cheese, white onion, pickles, ketchup and mustard on a milk bun has proved to be a popular hit. Made with grass-fed beef, cheese, tomato, lettuce and pickles, Huxtaburger's $12.90 Huxtaburger comes with a mix of sauces, including tomato, mayo and mustard. Available on the children's menu, Ribs & Burgers' kid-size $10.90 Little Beef Burger is a crowd pleaser among parents because it's centred on premium ingredients with no added chemicals. Ume's classic $15.60 Ume Burger also topped the list, for its delicious signature beef pattie, Wagyu mince sauce, tomato, onion, mayo and American cheese. And it isn't the gourmet options diners enjoyed. KFC's iconic $6.55 Zinger Burger nabbed a spot in the list of the top 10 most popular burgers after becoming the go-to food to order. 'It's clear that Aussies are huge fans of the burger,' Deliveroo's country manager Levi Aron said. The top 10 list comes as Deliveroo is set to launch Australia's first edible billboard made entirely out of burgers, all of which are free for hungry pedestrians to enjoy The top 10 list comes as Deliveroo is set to launch Australia's first edible billboard made entirely out of burgers, all of which are free for hungry pedestrians to enjoy. The wall will be filled with favourites from the top list all under one billboard at Martin Place in Sydney on Thursday, April 4 between 12pm to 6pm. The billboard will stand at a whopping six metres high and four metres wide. It will be assembled to encourage Aussies everywhere to embrace their 'food freedom', while celebrating Deliveroo having sold five million burgers since their launch Down Under three years ago. 'We want to take a moment to celebrate our five million milestone by giving away over 2,000 burgers to Deliveroo customers,' Mr Aron said. Mesh surgery should only be used as a last resort with women having to opt-in after being informed of the risks, according to new official guidelines today. The advice, from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), recognises there is public concern about mesh procedures. Currently, there are restrictions on the controversial procedure, which is used for stress urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse. Scroll for video NICE declared two years ago the implants should be outlawed for prolapse a common childbirth issue that causes the organs to fall out of place Thousands of women have been maimed by the controversial implants globally, left on the brink of suicide, unable to work and reliant on wheelchairs Nice said these will remain in place until all operations and complications are registered on a national database. After that, only expert surgeons based at specialist centres will carry out operations for the common disorders usually stemming from natural childbirths. The new guidelines have been drawn up by the NHS standards watchdog following a long-running campaign by the Daily Mails Good Health team. It highlighted how thousands of women have suffered constant pain, nerve damage and ruined sex lives as a result of the plastic mesh breaking up and migrating to other parts of the body. Last year, the Government suspended use of vaginal mesh pending an ongoing review. In a series of recommendations, NICE today said women should only be offered the procedure if non-surgical interventions are either rejected or fail. Where it is agreed to use surgical mesh or tape, women must be informed of the risks which could include dyspareunia painful sexual intercourse pain and other problems. Pain felt like shards of glass cutting my insides Cynthia ONeill had the mesh put in in 2009 When Cynthia ONeills gynaecologist suggested her problems were psychological, she exploded with anger. The 71-year-old, left, had the mesh procedure in October 2009 and said that within months she knew there was something seriously wrong. The pain felt like shards of glass cutting and investigations revealed parts of the mesh had broken away, causing internal lacerations. The retired mother of three, from Wetherby, West Yorkshire, had been recommended surgery to insert a plastic mesh to support her bladder. The surgeon said I wouldnt know it was there, she said. Its now been nearly ten years of pain all the time, its the norm to me now. Its absolutely shocking. To her fury, when she went back to see her gynaecologist about the pain, he said it wasnt related to the mesh. But investigations revealed five pieces had eroded and had to be removed. The former secretary is still waiting for an operation to remove the rest of the mesh. She said: I feel I have this piece of plastic inside me thats festering it should never have been implanted. Advertisement Last night, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), and The British Society of Urogynaecology (BSUG), welcomed the guidelines. But furious campaigners said the measures have not gone far enough and that the procedure should be banned. Kath Sansom, of Sling The Mesh, said failure to do so was clearing the way for the next generation of women to be harmed. Its Groundhog Day. They [NICE] are ignoring the elephant on the kitchen table. And they have opened the floodgates for thousands of women, including our daughters and granddaughters, to be maimed by mesh in future. NHS data shows more than 100,000 patients have undergone a mesh procedure for incontinence or prolapse in the past decade, after its introduction as a cheaper alternative to pelvic repair operations involving the patients own tissue. If implanted near the vagina or bowel, experts say it can set up an infection which may degrade the material. This causes it to break up and fragments can burrow into tissue. Studies have suggested anything between 10 and 40 per cent of patients have suffered damage. While not issuing a blanket ban, the guidance states women should first consider the range of non-surgical options. For urinary incontinence, these include lifestyle interventions such as caffeine reduction, modifying fluid intake and weight loss; physical therapies, such as pelvic floor muscle training; behavioural therapies, such as bladder training programmes; or medication. Those suffering with pelvic organ prolapse can ease symptoms by losing weight, pelvic floor muscle training and pessary management. If women decide on surgery, any complications should be investigated by consultants. Women considering surgery should use new patient guides to help determine options. Complications related to the device should be reported, with details put in a national database. Dr Paul Chrisp, from Nice, said: [The guidelines] will ensure each woman is able to decide which option is best. Experts say medical devices are poorly regulated. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: Nices new guidelines will help women make more informed choices. It's a controversial implant hailed as a 'quick fix' despite maiming thousands of women across the world. But health officials were yesterday accused of ignoring women injured by vaginal mesh by failing to ban the procedure. Last year, the Government suspended use of the brittle devices, common for incontinence and prolapse, pending an ongoing safety review. But the procedure can be offered to women on the NHS in England again, once certain conditions are met, the watchdog NICE said. Hoping to persuade chiefs to overturn their decision, four women mothers, wives and grandmothers have told MailOnline exactly how vaginal mesh ruined their lives. And their array of horrifying side effects range from constant suicidal thoughts, being unable to have sex and left reliant on crutches to walk. Clueless doctors had, for years, dismissed Natalie Finbow's crippling pains as being just down to scar tissue and even warned her real agony was 'all in your head' I didn't even realise I had vaginal mesh - until the 'poisonous' shards of plastic cut my husband's penis during sex When Natalie Finbow was fitted with vaginal mesh for incontinence a decade ago, she could not imagine the daily agony it would eventually cause her. Nor did the 52-year-old have any idea the seemingly harmless implant could cut her husband Adrians penis during sex and cause it to bleed. A U-TURN ON THE PROLAPSE MESH BAN Health chiefs today announced a dramatic U-turn on the proposed ban on 'barbaric' vaginal mesh implants, prompting fury among campaigners. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence declared two years ago the implants should be outlawed for prolapse a common childbirth issue that causes the organs to fall out of place. However, the Government body has backtracked on its decision, despite having no new scientific evidence to prove the procedure is safe. Furious victims of the procedure have slammed the announcement by NICE, which advises the NHS. Kath Sansom, founder of campaign group Sling The Mesh (STM), described the guidelines as being an 'institutional betrayal of women'. Currently, there are restrictions on the controversial procedure, which is used for stress urinary incontinence as well as pelvic organ prolapse. NICE said these will remain in place until all operations and complications are registered on a national database. After that, only expert surgeons based at specialist centres will carry out operations for the common disorders usually stemming from natural childbirths. Advertisement In a stark admission to MailOnline, the grandmother, from Tharston in Norfolk, revealed that is exactly what happened and not just the once. Mrs Finbow, an author, did not know the poisonous mesh was to blame for the gruesome accidents with her 54-year-old partner until four months ago. She paid to have private scans, which showed the extent of the damage caused by the brittle implant inside her, after doctors had dismissed her for years. They said her crippling pains were caused by scar tissue and even warned her real agony was all in your head. Now, Mrs Finbow, who is reliant on crutches to walk because of the pain, is unable to leave her house without fearing she will wet herself. And if she squeezes her legs too tight to hold it in, she said she can feel the vaginal mesh implant slicing her insides. The sheer agony means she can no longer work. In tears, she told MailOnline that she feels like she has been robbed of life, adding: 'I was living the dream. But I've changed completely. My confidence, everything, it's just gone. 'What's the point of being here? I look out the window and it's glorious sunshine and I can't get out. I look at my husband and I feel I'm robbing him of his life too. Mrs Finbow, who has nine grandchildren, added: This year will go by and nothing will be done again. I lose another year of my life.' She described the NICE guidance as being 'unbelievable', adding: 'It's plastic, it's poison, and I just want it out of my body and to have our life back.' Six years ago Karen Preater was an active and confident mother with a successful career, working as an account manager for a Yellow Pages. Now aged 42, Ms Preater takes a cocktail of 19 pills a day and relies on a walking stick to get around My sex life has been totally destroyed by mesh and surgery to remove the brittle implant is 'not an option' Six years ago Karen Preater was an active and confident mother with a successful career, working as an account manager for a Yellow Pages. But, just one day after being given a vaginal mesh implant to treat her mild urinary incontinence five years ago, her life was turned upside down. The mother-of-three quit her job within a month because she didn't know if the pain would ever stop, and couldn't drive herself or her children anywhere. Now aged 42, Ms Preater takes a cocktail of 19 pills a day to cope with the excruciating pain caused by the device and relies on a walking stick to get around. And she has heartbreakingly revealed she is in constant pain, can't urinate normally or have sex, suffers from depression and is racked with guilt over the person she has become. 'This [mesh] has definitely changed me as a person,' she told MailOnline. 'I live in a nice area of North Wales and the long walks with the dog or swimming with the children just don't happen any more. 'The intimate side of my life is totally destroyed. We did what we could but I would be in massive amounts of pain for days afterwards so it wasn't enjoyable for either of us. 'The weight of guilt is the worst thing, over how my children's lives have been affected they have to help me so much but I get annoyed and cry easily.' As soon as she came out of the operating room in 2014 Ms Preater, from Rhyl, knew something was wrong because she had excruciating pain in her left thigh. 'It was like a sharp pain which was constant and got worse whenever I moved,' Ms Preater said, adding she couldn't walk because it was unbearable to put any weight on my leg. Despite expecting a quick recovery, Ms Preater spent eight nights in hospital laying in agony and being given morphine while doctors tried to find a painkiller suitable to send her home with. The pain has now spread to her hip, thigh and groin. And she revealed she also suffers numbness in the top of her leg and a 'crawling ant sensation' all over her back. One doctor has admitted her agony is down to nerve damage caused by the mesh, which was attached too tightly to her bladder and in the wrong position on one side. Removing it would be 'extremely high risk', may not work and could even make it worse, something Ms Preater said is 'not an option'. So she must live with it. 'I would rather live with incontinence,' she told MailOnline. 'It was manageable, I just wanted to find out how to stop it getting worse. They sold mesh to me and made it sound fantastic. 'I wouldn't want this to happen to anybody else. The new guidelines are not fit for purpose and they just haven't listened to any of us.' Jackie Harvey initially thought everything was 'wonderful' after she was fitted with vaginal mesh I couldn't sit, put on socks or even tie my shoelaces because of the unbearable pain from my mesh Jackie Harvey initially thought everything was 'wonderful' after she was fitted with vaginal mesh to treat her incontinence 15 years ago. But five years later, the 50-year-old could no longer sit, put on socks or even tie her shoelaces because of the unbearable pain she was in. Now, Mrs Harvey, from Bainbridge in Northern Ireland, compares herself to a slug because of the devastating effect the 'quick fix' of mesh has had on her life. The mother-of-two even claims she was never warned of the risks of the procedure, with her consultant acting like it was 'the best thing since sliced bread'. In a fierce attack on mesh, Mrs Harvey, who runs Northern Ireland's Sling The Mesh branch, branded the implant 'a quick fix but a lifetime of misery'. She paid 7,500 to have the mesh removed in England but still endures 'substantial' pain in her back and legs. Mrs Harvey, who has Bupa healthcare, was referred to a private consultant in 2005 when she went to her GP complaining of mild stress incontinence. Just four weeks later, then aged 36, she was under the knife having a TVT implant fitted. With everything initially going to plan, Mrs Harvey put it down to age when she started experiencing leg pain a year later. Things then took a dramatic turn for the worse when the discomfort became so severe she would leave dropped objects on the floor because it was too agonising to bend down. 'I thought my spine would break,' Mrs Harvey said. 'I became a slug. I lost interest in going out because I couldn't walk far and needed a seat.' Mrs Harvey eventually went to see a consultant in 2015, who referred her to a spinal specialist and for an MRI scan. However, the medics could find nothing wrong and refused to accept mesh may be to blame for her symptoms. 'I thought I was going crazy,' Mrs Harvey said. Things finally became clearer when Mrs Harvey read about Sling The Mesh later that year, with sufferers reporting the same symptoms she was battling every day. Determined to have her implant removed, Mrs Harvey refused to wait the 18 months required to have her implant taken out on the NHS and paid to go private. Sarah Smith was filled with hope when told a simple medical procedure could repair two of her problems caused by childbirth. But instead of being fixed, the operation left the 37-year-old mother-of-two feeling suicidal (pictured with her daughter Evie) I felt like I was being ripped open with a knife - the agony made me want to end it all Sarah Smith was filled with hope when told a simple medical procedure could repair two of problems she had suffered with since childbirth. But instead of improving her life, the operation left the 37-year-old feeling suicidal after her vaginal mesh eroded into her urethra. Ms Smith, a mother to Oliver, 10, and Evie, eight, likened the pain to childbirth and being ripped open with a knife. She had a vaginal mesh fitted at 30 years old after giving birth to her 'whopper' baby boy caused her to suffer prolapse and urinary incontinence. Her doctor described the mesh as 'tape' and reportedly gave no explanation of its potential risks. It was sold to her as being quick, easy and successful. But the mother-of-two knew something was wrong as soon as she came around from the surgery, which nurses reportedly 'dismissed'. The zookeeper soon fell into a deep depression and became unable to get out of bed or hold her two young children. Ms Smith also endured agonising pain across her lower abdomen, legs and pelvis, which she likened to 'a permanent UTI'. She blames mesh for her being unable to pass 'more than a teaspoon of urine' for months, which forced her to be fitted with a catheter. Ms Smith also claims the implant 'flared up her bowel', causing her to 'soil herself for nine days'. Despite her symptoms, she claims doctors insisted it would all settle down in time. In a brutally honest interview, she told MailOnline she was even tempted to veer her car off the road and told her partner their children would be better off without her. Ms Smith, from Bedford, was eventually referred to a specialist, who removed her mesh on May 30 last year. Although no longer in pain Ms Smith still battles incontinence, which causes her to 'pour out urine' while mucking out the animals. In the past five years, Ms Smith estimates she has spent 5,500 on incontinence pads alone. She fears she may have to sell her home after prescriptions and travelling to hospital appointments has left her 20,000 in debt. The deadly Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is spreading faster than ever, health officials have warned. Data shows 73 people were struck down with the killer virus last week - the highest weekly toll since the start of the outbreak last August. And more cases are being diagnosed outside of areas where health workers are, suggesting officials are losing control of the battle to contain it. More than 1,000 people have been infected with Ebola in the African nation, while the death toll is rapidly approaching 700 people. The number of cases of Ebola being reported has saw a sudden spike in March with the past two weeks both posting record numbers of people being diagnosed Health workers in the city of Butembo carry a newly admitted Ebola patient to a treatment centre last week, which had the most new cases of any week since the outbreak began Ebola, which causes fevers, uncontrollable bleeding and organ failure, is ravaging the north east of the African nation. Efforts to control the outbreak had been reasonably successful and, just weeks ago, officials hoped it would be over by September. But signs are now emerging of it spreading out of health workers' grasp as violence and mistrust of medics are making it difficult to pin down. Last week 73 new cases were recorded, following 56 in the week before both were record numbers. The previous worst weeks, which happened in January and November, had spikes of around 50 cases. And a cause of major alarm for officials is that the cases appear to be spreading in areas away from treatment centres. This means there is a higher chance the patients have spread the infection before they are diagnosed, because it may take longer for them to get treatment. A total of 679 people have died in the outbreak, which has infected 1,089. Only 331 patients have recovered a death rate of 62 per cent. In the past two months, five Ebola centres have been attacked, some by armed militiamen. This violence has led French medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) to suspend its activities in two of the most affected areas. Another challenge has been a mistrust of first responders. A survey conducted in September by medical journal The Lancet found that a quarter of people sampled in two Ebola hotspots did not believe the disease was real. Ebola kills people by causing extreme fevers, weakness, uncontrollable bleeding and eventually organ failure pictured, Red Cross workers carry a coffin in Butembo last week THE HISTORY OF EBOLA IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO SINCE THE KILLER VIRUS WAS FIRST DISCOVERED THERE IN 1976 CASES DEATHS DEATH % STRAIN AREA 1976 318 280 88% Zaire Yambuku (Equater) 1977 1 1 100% Zaire Tandala 1995 315 250 79% Zaire Kikwit 2007 264 187 71% Zaire Luebo/Mweke 2008/09 32 15 47% Zaire Luebo/Mweke 2012 36 13 36% Bundibugyo Orientale 2014 69 49 71% Zaire Equater 2017 8 4 50% Zaire Likati 2018 (May) 54 33 61% Zaire Kinshasa 2018-ongoing 1,089 679 62% Zaire North Kivu/Ituri WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said new approaches to community outreach were showing signs of progress and that some previously hostile local residents had recently agreed to grant health workers access. One treatment centre that closed in February after being torched by unknown assailants reopened last week. The government recently said it has managed to 'limit the geographical spread' of the disease, but new figures suggest it is still spreading to new areas. 'I think all of us in the field are aware that we're very far from being near the end of this outbreak,' said Tariq Riebl, a member of the International Rescue Committee. 'The increase in cases also shows we are catching up with all the transmission that we haven't previously been aware of.' In recent weeks, more than 40 percent of new cases in the hotspot towns of Katwa and Butembo had no known links to other cases, meaning doctors have lost track of where the virus is spreading. People in the UK are more likely to have sex while drunk or taking illegal recreational drugs than any other country, a survey found. The Global Drug Survey - of 22,000 people around the world - found that, overall, 64 per cent of Britons had had sex while having drunk alcohol. In comparison, the figure was 60 per cent in Eurozone countries and 55 per cent in the US. And 13 per cent of Britons admitted to having combined sex with cocaine. By contrast, the figure was just eight per cent in Eurozone countries and seven per cent in the US. The most commonly used drugs combined with sex were alcohol, cannabis, MDMA and cocaine. Users said MDMA in particular enhances 'intimacy'. The research highlights how 'chemsex' - taking drugs during sex was found to be widespread among heterosexual men and women as well as gay men. However, homosexual men were 1.6 times as likely as heterosexual men to have used drugs with the specific intent of enhancing sexual experience in the last year. The Global Drug Survey found that overall Britons were around 67 per cent more likely to have sex while on cocaine than people in the Eurozone countries People taking drugs during sex is a health policy concern as they are more likely to practice unsafe sex - spreading sexually transmitted diseases. The research analysed responses from the UK, the US, the Eurozone countries, Australia and Canada. Around 7,000 people from the UK took part in the study - and of these around 13 per cent took cocaine during sex. When it came to other drugs the strongest effect was seen in the use of the banned drug mephedrone - known by its slang name of 'meow meow'. Britons were 320 per cent more likely to take mephedrone than people in the Eurozone. There was one exception among drugs - British people were less likely to have sex while high on cannabis than people in the US, Canada, Australia and the Eurozone. Dr Will Lawn, of University College London, who carried out the research with colleagues, said respondents from the UK were the most likely to combine drugs with sex, compared with the US, other European countries, Australia and Canada. He added: 'While using drugs in combination with and to specifically enhance the sexual experience tends to be associated with gay and bisexual men, we found that in our sample, men and women of all sexual orientations engaged in this behaviour. He said harm reduction messages relating to substance-linked sex in general should therefore not only be targeted towards gay and bisexual men, as they are relevant to all groups. HOW DOES THE UK COMPARE TO THE REST OF THE WORLD? PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE WHO COMBINED ALCOHOL WITH SEX OVER THE PAST YEAR UK: 64.1% EU: 59.9% Australia: 58.5% US: 55% Canada: 52.6% PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE WHO COMBINED COCAINE WITH SEX OVER THE PAST YEAR UK: 12.7% Australia: 10% Canada: 8.9% EU: 8.4% US: 7.4% Advertisement Users were asked about which drugs they used in combination with sex, in addition to questions and whether they used drugs to specifically enhance their sexual experience, and how these drugs affect the sexual experience. The researchers found alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy, and cocaine were most commonly used. But the drugs GHB/GBL and ecstacy, were rated most favourably - with users saying MDMA increased 'emotionality/intimacy' the most, while GHB/GBL increased 'sexual desire' the most. The authors of the research point out that the Global Drugs Survey is not a representative sample, as the survey respondents were self-selecting - meaning that the estimates of prevalence will be substantially larger than the general population. However, they said the relative differences between groups are expected to be reliable. The researchers say that understanding how and why people use drugs is essential if we are to deliver harm reduction messages that are in touch with peoples' lived experience. 'By engaging with your audience and accepting that drugs provide pleasure as well as harms, you can deliver harm reduction messages in a more trustworthy and nuanced manner,' said Dr Lawn. Senior author Professor Adam Winstock, founder and director of the Global Drug Survey added: 'Our study is by far the largest to date to investigate the relationships between sex and drugs. 'Previous studies have rarely compared men and women, and people of different sexual orientations. 'Furthermore, by appreciating how different drugs affect sex we can tailor our harm reduction messages. These pragmatic messages can save lives.' I was diagnosed two years ago with a hiatus hernia, and now it is causing problems, with reflux so bad it disturbs my sleep. Im sick of taking tablets. My GP who has referred me to hospital told me I may be offered surgery, but that this means having your chest cut open. What do you advise I do? Anne ODonoghue, Ealing, West London. A hiatus hernia occurs when part of the stomach protrudes up through the diaphragm via the opening usually occupied by the oesophagus (gullet). It is extremely common its estimated that a third of people over the age of 50 have one (though younger people can have them, too, as a result of pregnancy or obesity, for instance). In my view, surgery is an attractive option, when compared with a lifelong prescription of medication (file photo) The herniation puts pressure on the gullet and stomach, which can, in turn, lead to symptoms such as heartburn, acid reflux, wheezing and burping. Any heartburn can be treated with acid suppressants. Typically, this will be a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) such as omeprazole or lansoprazole which cuts acid production in the stomach. However, this will do little for the recurrent regurgitation that you are experiencing. In my view, surgery is an attractive option, when compared with a lifelong prescription of medication. While PPIs can help, and generally are well tolerated, they have been linked to longer-term effects, such as an increased risk of infection and possible raised risk of osteoporosis. Also, surgery is not necessarily as invasive as you have been told. These days, a laparoscopic (keyhole) operation is performed, which does not require opening the chest. The most common technique is now what is known as a Nissen fundoplication. This involves tightening the valve (sphincter) at the bottom of the oesophagus, as well as closing the opening, so that the stomach cannot protrude up. A review of 12 trials has shown that doing this via keyhole led to a 65 per cent reduction in complication rates, compared with open surgery. The surgery itself requires around three days in hospital. Another approach, called the Belsey operation, which does involve a chest incision, is reserved for unusual cases (for example, where patients are very overweight) and is now rarely offered. It must be acknowledged that a proportion of patients around 10 per cent does require heartburn medication following successful surgery, to prevent recurrent heartburn, though the issue of regurgitation will have been abolished. I hope that your consultation with the specialist is supportive and that they are in agreement with what I have outlined here. There is certainly reason for optimism. Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with multiple pulmonary embolisms, for which I am being treated. In my circumstances, would you advise air travel? John Slater, by email. The answer to your question is yes, but with certain provisos. Undoubtedly, your treatment will involve prescription of what are often called anticoagulants (and more commonly known as blood thinners), and these will be giving you a high degree of protection. A pulmonary embolism is essentially a blood clot in the lung. Clots can arise for all sorts of reasons for example, recent surgery, prolonged immobilisation (such as on a long flight), heart failure, obesity, pregnancy or advancing age. Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with multiple pulmonary embolisms, for which I am being treated. In my circumstances, would you advise air travel? (file photo) These all encourage blood to pool in the deep veins in the legs and pelvis and a clot to form what we refer to as a deep vein thrombosis, or DVT. If a lump of clotted blood breaks away, lodges in the lungs and blocks the fine blood vessels, this impairs the ability of the lungs to oxygenate the blood, which can be life-threatening. It is likely that your diagnosis followed symptoms such as chest pain, breathlessness or a cough, or you may even have collapsed. Write to Dr Scurr To contact Dr Scurr with a health query, write to him at Good Health Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT or email drmartin@dailymail.co.uk including contact details. Dr Scurr cannot enter into personal correspondence. His replies cannot apply to individual cases and should be taken in a general context. Always consult your own GP with any health worries. Advertisement Anticoagulants will have been commenced immediately. This medication does not dissolve the blood clots, but prevents new ones from forming. The clot itself will normally disperse naturally. Anticoagulants are prescribed for at least three months and possibly indefinitely. If you are still taking them, then you are protected if travelling by air, although youd be advised to wear compression stockings for added protection, as well as remaining hydrated and walking down the aisle of the aircraft every two hours. Compression stockings available without prescription from most good pharmacies work by squeezing the superficial veins in the legs, increasing blood flow through the deep veins and reducing the pooling of blood. I have had patients about to undergo very long-distance flights (six to 12 hours) requesting sleeping tablets to help them during the journey however, I would vigorously recommend against this, as sleeping in a seat on an aircraft, with the legs downwards for hours on end, is asking for trouble, even in otherwise healthy individuals. Its vital to keep the blood flowing through the veins of the legs by constantly using those muscles. If you are no longer taking the anticoagulants and are embarking on a long-haul, or even short-haul, flight, then talk to your GP about having a single injection of the blood-thinner heparin. This provides a temporary period of anticoagulation and can be self-administered. It should be repeated before the return flight. Check with your medical adviser, but my view is that if you are currently taking oral anticoagulation, then there is no need to worry. One morning last fall, four-year-old Joey Wilcox woke up with the left side of his face drooping. It was the first sign of an unfolding nightmare. Three days later, Joey was in a hospital intensive care unit, unable to move his arms or legs or sit up. Spinal taps and other tests failed to find a cause. Doctors worried he was about to lose the ability to breathe. 'It's devastating,' said his father, Jeremy Wilcox, of Herndon, Virginia. 'Your healthy child can catch a cold - and then become paralyzed.' Joey, who survived but still suffers some of the effects, was one of 228 confirmed victims in the U.S. last year of acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, a rare, mysterious and sometimes deadly paralyzing illness that seems to ebb and flow on an every-other-year cycle and is beginning to alarm public health officials because it is striking more and more children. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it may bear similarities to polio, which simmered among humans for centuries before it exploded into fearsome epidemics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Braden Scott gives a thumbs up as he pauses while practicing on the piano in Tomball, Texas. He was diagnosed with the mysterious syndrome called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, in 2016 and was paralyzed almost completely. But since then he has recovered much of his muscle function. His parents believe a lot of it has to do with thousands of hours of physical therapy Fauci, who published a report about the disease Tuesday in the journal mBio, said it is unlikely AFM will become as bad as polio, which struck tens of thousands of U.S. children annually before a vaccine became available in the 1950s. But he warned: 'Don't assume that it's going to stay at a couple of hundred cases every other year.' Other countries have reported cases, including Canada, France, Britain and Norway. But the size and pattern of the U.S. outbreaks have been more pronounced. More than 550 Americans have been struck this decade. The oldest was 32. More than 90 percent were children, most around 4, 5 or 6 years old. Most had a cold-like illness and fever, seemed to get over it, then descended into paralysis. In some cases it started in small ways - for example, a thumb that suddenly wouldn't move. Some went on to lose the ability to eat or draw breath. Many families say their children have regained at least some movement in affected limbs, but stories of complete recovery are unusual. Health officials cannot say how many recovered completely, partly or not at all, or how many have died, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says deaths are rare. Scientists suspect the illness is being caused chiefly by a certain virus that was identified more than 55 years ago and may have mutated to become more dangerous. But they have yet to prove that. And while doctors have deployed a number of treatments singly or in combination - steroids, antiviral medications, antibiotics, a blood-cleansing process - the CDC says there is no clear evidence they work. Rachel Scott, right, helps suction the mouth of her son, Braden. He was seven on July 4, 2016, when he uncharacteristically decided he didn't want to go swimming. He had trouble swallowing and felt tired and weak. His parents took him to an urgent care center, then to a hospital. Within days he could only move one hand. Late one night his father and a nurse were sitting beside Braden in the hospital when they noticed he had just stopped breathing Braden Scott uses a device to support his left arm as he practices on the piano. AFM is a rare but mysterious illness seems to ebb and flow every other year and is beginning to alarm public health officials Many parents say that when they first brought their child to the emergency room, they quickly realized to their horror that the doctors were at sea, too. 'Everyone is desperate for some magical thing,' said Rachel Scott, a Tombal, Texas, woman whose son Braden developed AFM in 2016 and has recovered somewhat after intensive physical therapy but still cannot move his right arm and has trouble swallowing and moving his neck. A growing number of experts agree that physical therapy makes a difference. 'These kids can continue to recover very slowly, year over year. ... It's driven by how much therapy they do,' said Dr. Benjamin Greenberg of UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, one of the nation's foremost experts on the condition. Wilcox, Joey's father, said his son made huge improvements that way. Joey can run and use his arms. Still, muscle tone is weak in his right leg and shoulder, and he still has left-side facial paralysis. 'He can't completely smile,' his dad said. Other stories are more tragic. Katie Bustamante's son Alex developed AFM in 2016. The suburban Sacramento, California, mother realized something was wrong when she asked the boy, then 5, why he wasn't eating his yogurt. Alex replied that his thumb had stopped working and he couldn't hold his spoon. That morning was the start of 17 months of hospital stays, surgeries, therapy, and struggles with doctors and insurers to find a way to restore his ability to breathe. It ended one morning last May, when the Bustamantes woke up to find Alex had died. 'Everyone is desperate for some magical thing' to cure the kids, said Rachel Government officials need to step up, Bustamante said. 'I want them to research it and find the cause, and I want them to find a way to prevent it,' she said. 'This is growing. This shouldn't be happening.' More and more experts feel certain the main culprit is an enterovirus called EV-D68, based on the way waves of AFM have coincided with spikes of respiratory illnesses caused by EVD-68. Enteroviruses are a large family of viruses, some of which, such as polio, can damage the central nervous system, while many others cause mild symptoms or none at all. In the U.S., doctors began reporting respiratory illnesses tied to EV-D68 in 1987, though usually no more than a dozen in any given year. Then, in what may have been one of the first signs of the AFM waves to come, a 5-year-old boy in New Hampshire died in 2008 after developing neck tenderness and fever, then weakened arms and deadened legs. The boy had EVD-68, and in a report published in an obscure medical journal, researchers attributed his death to the virus. The first real burst of AFM cases hit in 2014, when 120 were confirmed, with the largest concentrations in California and Colorado. What ensued was an even-year, odd-year pattern: Cases dropped to 22 in 2015, jumped to 149 in 2016, and fell again, to 35 in 2017. Last year they reached 228, a number that may grow because scores of illnesses are still being investigated. In keeping with the cyclical pattern, just four cases have been confirmed this year so far. While doctors have deployed a number of treatments singly or in combination - steroids, antiviral medications, antibiotics, a blood-cleansing process - the CDC says there is no clear evidence they work CDC officials consider an illness AFM based on scans and other evidence showing a certain kind of damage to the spinal cord. Proof of an enterovirus infection is not required for a case to be counted, mainly because such evidence has been hard to come by. So far, CDC investigators have been able to find evidence of enteroviruses in the spinal fluid of only four of 558 confirmed cases. Scientists are using more sensitive spinal-fluid tests in hopes of establishing the connection between AFM and EV-D68 more firmly. That, in turn, could spur more focused work on treatments and maybe even a vaccine. Meanwhile, Fauci's agency has put out a call for researchers to apply for federal funds, and is tapping a University of Alabama-anchored network of pediatric research centers to work on the illness. The CDC is pledging a greater focus, too. Parents have accused the agency of doing little more than counting cases and have complained that when they tried to contact CDC, they encountered only automated phone trees and form responses. CDC officials have begun holding meetings and calls with families, set up a scientific task force and working to monitor cases more closely. Fauci suggested it would be a mistake to assume that surges will take place every other year forever. The next one 'may be in 2019, for all we know,' he said. Prostate cancer rates and deaths plummeted or became stable in 44 countries between 1980 and 2012, thanks to better screening, according to a new study. About one in nine men are estimated to develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives, making it the third most common form of the disease in the US, and the second worldwide. Prostate cancer was once hard to detect, but since a blood test for the disease was approved - in 1994, in the US - death rates have been declining in most countries. But, importantly, the test has fallen out of favor after many doctors became concerned it led to over-diagnosis and undue fears for men. Since that shift, diagnosis rates have stagnated or fallen in high-income countries like the US, according to new research from the American Cancer Society (ACS). Prostate cancer is still the third most common form of the disease, but rates have fallen or stabilized in 44 countries worldwide, thanks to better screening, a new study reveals 'Average risk, asymptomatic men ages 50 or older with a life expectancy of ten years should discuss the benefits and harms of prostate cancer screening with their healthcare provider to determine what screening is right for them,' said lead study author MaryBeth Freeman, a senior associate scientist at ACS. The standard belief for most cancers is that the earlier they can be diagnosed the better - but that isn't necessarily the case in prostate cancer. Although one in nine men are estimated to develop the disease at some point in their lives, prostate cancer is slow growing, and typically doesn't strike until after age 60. The blood test identifies a substance in the blood, called PSA (prostate-specific antigen) in the blood, that is seen at high levels in men with prostate cancer. It quickly became popular in countries like the US, where it is used alongside rectal exams, to diagnose the disease. But public health officials at the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) never actually recommended the blood test. In fact, in 2009, a pair of studies from the US and Europe found that it only led marginally better survival rates in Europe, and provided no statistically measurable benefit in the US. Moreover, doctors ended up treating patients that had small, benign tumors that wouldn't have been fatal to the patients, many many men underwent unnecessary radiation therapy and/or surgery. So the USPSTF advised doctors to rein in testing. Instead of performing the test as a matter of course, health officials now recommend that doctors explain the benefits and risks to patients and let men decide for themselves if they want to undergo the blood test, or stick to rectal examination. Striking the right balance between under-testing and overdiagnosis is an ongoing challenge for doctors. The new study, presented at the American found that rates of prostate cancer have fallen in 44 countries. The US has seen the largest decrease, and cancer rates have stabilized in 33 countries. But death rates have only fallen in 14 countries, though they've become stable in 54 countries, suggesting gaps in approaches from country to country, and between how effective diagnoses and treatments are, respectively. 'The decreasing or stabilizing incidence rates in many high-income countries, including the United States, was not a surprise given the recent drop in enthusiasm about PSA testing over concerns of over-diagnosis,' said Freeman. 'Further research is needed to identify the causes of prostate cancer, to develop more specific early detection methods and to find new treatments.' Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 31) Four of the 62 candidates came to CNN Philippines last Senatorial Forum and bared their plans should they clinch a seat in the May polls. Political reforms are top of the minds of community organizer Bernard Austria and lawyer Joan Sheelah Nalliw. Austria vowed to push for changes in the political party system, while Naliw promised to work to adopt the proposed draft federal constitution of President Rodrigo Dutertes consultative committee. Walang loyalty sa party, kaya walang malinaw na programa para sa taongbayan, walang malinaw na prinsipyo kung anong gagawin. Kaya nangyayari sa atin, nagkekengkuyan tayo Yung iba pwedeng sumayaw, yung iba gumagastos ng 400 billion sa pangangampanya, Austria said Sunday. [Translation: There is no loyalty to the party, so there are no clear programs for the people, their principles are unclear on what they should do. So whats happening with us is that we make fools of ourselves Others can dance, while others spend P400 billion on their campaign.] READ: Dela Rosa defends HNP's campaign style: 'No one listens to issues in sorties' Meanwhile, Naliw said, We really need a system change here. Kasi kung gusto natin ng pagbabago, dapat overhaul na siya. Hindi lang baguhin yung piecemeal legislation kasi sistema na ang problema. [Translation: We really need a system change here. If we want change, we need an overhaul. We cant change things through piecemeal legislation because the system itself is the problem.] But Austria said it is not the Constitution that has a problem, but the political party system, which he said can be fixed by letting them receive funding from the government. Aside from overhauling the Constitution, Naliw also vowed to push for the Freedom of Information bill, which has languished in several Congresses. Labor lawyer Sonny Matula and doctor Willie Ong, meanwhile, will be prioritizing issues they are most familiar with. Matula said he will push for an end to contractualization, a national minimum wage, social security enhancement and the protection of workers right to organize unions. Ong said he will be using his oversight function as a senator on the Universal Health Care law, which he views to be insufficient to solve the countrys health woes. Drug war, China The Senate bets took a slightly different stance from the administration on the drug war and the countrys deals with China. READ: Senate bets: Review or stop Duterte drug war While Naliw wants the governments drug war to continue, she also said the government should review its approach. Ong is also against stopping the drug war, but reminded the administration that the drug problem is not just a criminal problem, but also a health concern. Austria said drug addicts are victims and should not be killed. He said the government should protect their rights and dignity. For his part, Matula wants to create a high-level commission which would investigate the killings related to the drug war and urged the government to look into its drug campaign. Meanwhile, Austria, Matula and Ong all said that the government should be cautious in its dealings with China, amid concerns of the Philippines falling into a debt trap. READ: With Sri Lankan port acquisition, China adds another 'pearl' to its 'string' Solving water woes Most of the four Senate bets at the forum said consumers should be saving water in response to the dwindling water supply. Tayo din mismong mga tao may responsibility sa pag-conserve ng tubig na ito. Isipin po natin, hindi lang po tayo ang nakikinabang dito, kundi ang buong sambayanan, Naliw said. [Translation: We, ourselves, have the responsibility to conserve water. Think about it, we are not the only ones who are benefitting for his, but all other people.] Ong and Austria said the government should invest in technology to save more water in irrigation. Baka dati yung technology masiyadong maraming tubig na gagastos, baka may crops na konting tubig lang ang kailangan, Ong said. [Translation: Maybe old technology uses too much water, maybe there are crops that would need less water.] Austria also said water utilities should be brought back under the control of the government because private water concessionaires have failed to deliver services. READ: Senate hopefuls urge government to take back control of the country's water resources Easing traffic Austria, Naliw and Ong said traffic congestion in Metro Manila can be eased if national government offices are transferred to nearby provinces. Kaya nagkakatrapik tayo dito sa Metro Manila kasi nandito yung development, nandito yung focus, Austria said. [Translation: The reason why Metro Manila is so congested is because development is focused here.] Ong also said cities should be made walkable. Dapat maganda yung pwede mong lakarin, covered ang walkway, mayroong upuan para hindi na lahat sasakay, he said. [Translation: The walkway should be good and covered, there should be somewhere to sit on so that not all would have to ride a vehicle.] A six-month-old baby girl who underwent surgery in the womb with an experimental laser technique that had never been used on a fetal heart before is finally going home. Ivy Finn then needed three open-heart surgeries after she was born - a tough ask for a fragile body. But last week, doctors, stunned at her progress, said Ivy was finally strong enough to go home to Jacksonville, Florida. For doting parents Rachel and Geoff Finn, it is the moment they have been dreaming about for a year. It was in May last year that doctors told Rachel, then-five months pregnant, that her unborn baby had rare congenital heart defects that meant she would likely not survive past birth. But they referred them to staff at Texas Children's Hospital, who offered to try they a new procedure that might give the baby a chance of survival, reported CBS News. In July, doctors performed the surgery in-utero - and it was a success, breaking new ground medically, and offering Ivy a lifeline against the odds. Ivy Finn (left and right) was diagnosed before she was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome and an intact atrial septum. These are congenital heart defects that make it difficult for blood to throw through the body properly Cardiologists in Jacksonville, Florida, told Ivy's parents that she would likely not survive past birth. Pictured, left to right: Dad Geoff, brother Bear and mom Rachel with Ivy Rachel and Geoff were thrilled when they learned they were expecting a second child and that their four-year-old son, Bear, would be a big brother. However, at Rachel's 20-week ultrasound, doctors revealed that the baby had a heart defect. 'We went from being super positive to everything spiraling downward. Everything was doom and gloom,' she told The Florida Times-Union. Ivy was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a birth defect in which the left side of the heart does not from correctly while the baby is in the womb. Because the left side of the heart is unable to pump oxygen-rich blood throughout the body, the right side is responsible for pumping blood to both lungs and the rest of the body. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 960 babies are born in the US every year with this defect. Problems quickly arise soon after birth including difficulty breathing, a weak pulse, and a bluish skin color. Sufferers may need to take medications to lower blood pressure and strengthen the heart muscles for the rest of their lives. Several hospitals turned away Ivy's case due to the severity of Ivy's condition and the risk it posed to Rachel's health. Pictured: Geoff with Ivy But doctors at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston offered to try a new, experimental procedure called a thulium laser-assisted fetal atrial septal stent placement. A laser burns a very small hole in the septum and then a stent is inserted so blood can flow properly. Pictured, left and right: Ivy Surgery is another option to help restore heart function by increasing blood flow throughout the body. However, if the defect is severe or surgeries leave the heart weak, then a heart transplant is necessary. But there were even more problems, Ivy also had a a condition known as an intact atrial septum. This is when a natural hole between the heart's upper chambers where blood pumps through is closed. With those two conditions together, pediatric cardiologists told the Finns there were no chance of survival after delivery. Several hospitals turned away Ivy's case due to the severity of Ivy's condition and the risk it posed to Rachel's health. Their cardiologist then referred them to Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. Staff said the traditional procedure of creating a hole in the atrial septum would not work, according to The Times-Union. But doctors were trying out a new, experimental procedure called a thulium laser-assisted fetal atrial septal stent placement. A laser burns a very small hole in the septum and then a stent is inserted so blood can flow properly. It would be the first time such a laser was used on a fetal heart, reported The Times-Union. Believing it was her only chance of survival, the Finns agreed and drove from Jacksonville to Houston. The surgery was performed In July 2018, and it was a success. The Finns agreed and drove from Jacksonville to Houston. The surgery was performed In July 2018, and it was a success. Pictured: Rachel with Ivy Ivy was born in September 2018 and has had three open-heart surgeries since. Her parents were told last week they can finally take her home. Pictured: Bear and Rachel with baby Ivy The couple moved to Houston temporarily so Ivy could receive care at Texas Children's Hospital. Rachel was induced on September 13, and Ivy had her first of three open heart surgeries just six days later. After six months of monitoring her progress, doctors told Rachel and Geoff that they were finally able to take Ivy home. 'She has one more surgery probably right around the two to four year range. And then after that it's really just how long is her heart going to be able to kind of keep up,' Geoff told CBS News. In the future, Ivy will likely need a heart transplant - but the Finns say they are just so grateful at their daughter has defied the odds. 'There aren't any words to describe how thankful we are that we have her because we really did not think we would,' Rachel said. 'She's just amazing.' The Finns started a GoFundMe page to help cover the cost of Ivy's medical bills and their living expenses in Houston. So far, they've raised more than $28,000 out of a $33,000 goal. The UK's biggest doctors' union has apologised to its members and promised to launch an urgent investigation into 'abusive' sexism in its ranks. Chair of the British Medical Association, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, said he was 'appalled' to hear about the behaviour against female doctors. Accusations even included senior doctors 'braying loudly' as they guessed the bra size of a colleague. Another was sexually propositioned at a meeting and some have been subjected to thigh squeezing and bottom patting, senior figures revealed. Dr Zoe Norris, pictured, and Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer described the misogynistic behaviour they and their colleagues have suffered, revealing they have been bullied, overlooked, put down and 'stabbed in the back' In response to their allegations, the BMA has said people found to be acting disrespectfully to colleagues will be 'dealt with accordingly' (stock image) Sexism against women in the BMA has been reported by GP Online and prompted a public apology from the organisation of 160,000 doctors. Two senior members of the BMA's General Practitioners Committee, its board for GPs, revealed their own experience in a column. They described the misogynistic behaviour they and their colleagues have suffered, revealing they have been bullied, overlooked, put down and 'stabbed in the back'. FEMALE GPS PAID A THIRD LESS THAN MALE COLLEAGUES An interim report has found male GPs earn about a third more than female GPs in the NHS. The gender pay gap is 33 per cent for GPs and 17 per cent for doctors, the report says. This means that for every 1 earned by female doctors in the NHS, male doctors earn 1.17. Women are also outnumbered in senior medical roles, with 32,000 male consultants to 18,000 female, according to the initial findings of an independent review into the gender pay gap in medicine. The review of the gender pay gap in medicine, led by Professor Dame Jane Dacre, was commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in April last year. While two-thirds of doctors who start training are women, they represent fewer than half of consultants, the DHSC said. Health Minister Stephen Hammond said: 'The founding principle of the NHS is to treat everyone equally, yet women employed in the health service are still experiencing inequality. 'Its disappointing to see that the numbers show that two-thirds of senior medics are men despite more women starting training and it is essential we understand the underlying causes of the gender pay gap if we are to eradicate it from modern workplaces like the NHS.' The final report will be published in September. Advertisement Dr Zoe Norris and Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer said: 'The time is now to blow open the lid on this outdated culture.' The pair also claimed a number of female leaders had stepped down from roles rather than face 'conscious belittling, tiresome innuendo or being patronised'. They added: 'There must be a wholesale culture shift away from drinking and dinners, taps on the shoulder to take on roles, under-the-breath comments, factions and back-stabbing.' In response to their allegations, the BMA has said people found to be acting disrespectfully to colleagues will be 'dealt with accordingly'. Dr Nagpaul, chair of the BMA council, said in a statement: 'I am appalled to hear of the treatment my colleagues describe and of similarly unacceptable behaviours. 'I want to say Im sorry to them, and offer my heartfelt apologies on behalf of the whole association. 'Abusive behaviour has no place in the BMA and I recognise the courage that it takes to come forward with such allegations and so I thank them for that. 'In order to be truly representative we cannot afford to lose valued members as a result of inappropriate behaviour going unchallenged, and ultimately, it will be the profession that loses out if we do. 'Let me be clear sexist, disrespectful, discriminatory and abusive behaviour will not be tolerated in this association and must be stamped out.' The apology comes less than a week after NHS figures revealed GPs in the health service are worst affected by a gender pay gap. Female doctors are paid on average around a third less than their male counterparts earning 1 for men's every 1.17 'disappointing' figures showed. Women are also outnumbers in senior medical roles, making up only slightly more than a third of consultants 18,000 women to 32,000 men. Dr Zoe Norris and Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer, pictured, said in their column: 'The time is now to blow open the lid on this outdated culture' Dr Norris and Dr Bramall-Stainer called for change and said: 'The culture of an organisation is defined by the worst behaviours tolerated by the most senior individuals. Chair of the British Medical Association, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, said he was 'appalled' to hear about the behaviour against female doctors 'Other organisations have worked to tackle this. Now it's the turn of the GPC. This is a call for true and genuine leadership to grasp the nettle and change for good.' Dr Nagpaul said it was vital the BMA make positive changes to make sure all members have equal opportunities. He said he wants the organisation to be modern, progressive, respectful and inclusive, and urged members to reflect on their own behaviour. He added: 'We will be launching an urgent investigation in response to [these] allegations, and we are reaching out to affected members to invite them to be an integral part of this. 'We would also ask that any member who feels they have experienced discriminatory or abusive behaviour to contact us. 'Going forward, we will be reviewing and identifying additional ways in which members can safely and effectively raise concerns. 'These processes must be there to ensure that members feel supported. 'For those who fail to meet the high standards set by the BMA, they must be dealt with accordingly.' A jet lag 'brain switch' that controls the body clock may hold the key to a cure for Alzheimer's disease, according to new research. Experiments on fruit flies found turning it off killed rogue proteins that destroy neurons. They had been genetically engineered to develop a devastating condition called Huntington's disease, which has features of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and motor neuron disease. The US team induced 'jet lag' in the afflicted flies and unexpectedly found it protected their neurons. The flies with jet lag were essentially moving four hours east every day. The traveling flies were more resilient than the flies who stayed on one schedule Although fruit flies might seem completely different from humans, the neurons that govern flies' sleep-wake cycles are strikingly similar. They then identified and tested a gene called HOP (heatshock organizing protein) which is regulated by the body's circadian rhythms. It is also responsible for protein folding - a process linked to neurodegenerative illness. When knocked down, it stopped Huntington in its tracks. The findings published in Cell Reports offer hope of a medicine to combat dementia, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, Huntington's and other disorders caused by faulty brain proteins. Study leader Professor Ravi Allada, a circadian rhythms expert at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, said: 'It seems counter-intuitive, but we showed a little bit of stress is good. 'We subtly manipulated the circadian clock, and that stress appears to be neuro-protective.' Misfolded proteins, known as prions, shut down brain cells - eventually starving them to death. This process can destroy movement or memory or even kill, depending on the disease. It is thought to take place in many forms of neurodegeneration. Safely disrupting would treat a wide range of diseases. Dr Allada and colleagues suspected HOP made an interesting target. They blocked it in the flies with the same protein that causes Huntington's and, once more, were shocked by the results. This restored their arrhythmic circadian clocks - as well as reducing the aggregation of diseased proteins and the number of neurons killed by them. Dr Allada said: 'We thought inhibiting this gene that helps your proteins fold properly would make things worse, but they got better. It again shows a little bit of stress is probably good.' The researchers now plan to test the technique in a fruit fly model of Alzheimer's. Dr Allada believes targeting the HOP gene will be an early intervention for combating progression of various neuro-degenerative diseases. Paradoxically, jet lag from travelling through different time zones could boost the brain - contrary to popular belief. Patients with neurodegenerative diseases often experience profound disruptions in their circadian rhythms, or sleep-wake cycles. They may sleep more than usual or lose the ability to stay asleep. This can lead to nighttime wandering, increased agitation, general stress and a decreased quality of life. Dr Allada said: 'We have long known that a disrupted clock is an early indicator of neurodegenerative disease. 'In many cases, sleep disruption precedes any other symptom. But we didn't know whether the circadian disruption is a cause or consequence of the disease.' Fruit flies that have the mutant Huntington's gene also demonstrate similar symptoms. These include reduced lifespan, motor deficits, neurodegeneration, disrupted circadian rhythms and an accumulation of diseased proteins in the brain, which clump together and cause neurons to die. Dr Allada said: 'Normally, fruit flies wake up, get very active, then go to sleep and become inactive. 'It's a 24-hour pattern. In the Huntington model, there is no rhythm. The flies wake up and fall asleep all the time.' His researchers altered the flies' circadian rhythms two different ways either by changing the daily timing of light-dark cycles - causing them to live a 20 instead of 24 hour day - or through mutating a body clock gene. Dr Allada said: 'We essentially gave the flies jet lag for every day of their lives. It is like travelling four hours east every day.' In both cases, the mutant Huntington disease proteins aggregated less and fewer neurons died. Dr Allada expected jet lag to inflict even more damage on the brain. He said: 'We had wondered if the clock played a role in the disease. It turned out that the clock was important - but in a manner that we did not predict.' His team were so fascinated they took the study one step further by screening through dozens of clock-controlled genes. They pinpointed HOP - suggesting all brain cell death from prion disease could be prevented. A mother has revealed how her instinct helped to save her daughter's life not just once - but twice. Janine Clarke, 31, of Liverpool, rushed Amelia Nilsen to hospital when she noticed she was acting 'different to normal' - after four doctors dismissed her fears and said there was nothing wrong. Hours later she underwent emergency brain surgery because doctors found part of her brain was slipping into her spine - a condition called chiari malformation. Four months later, Amelia was back in hospital because Ms Clarke was concerned about her high temperature of 40.2C (104.4F). She eventually suffered two strokes, thought to be caused by an infected mass on her heart that also triggered sepsis. The family, who were living in Brisbane, Australia, at the time, were told to expect the worst as Amelia struggled for 15 weeks in hospital. Fortunately, she pulled through, and the family moved back to the UK in May 2018. But now, two years old, Amelia is still unable to talk, walk, eat solid food or use her right arm because of the strokes. Amelia Nilsen, now two years old, suffered two strokes while in hospital at ten months old (pictured). She was taken into hospital by her mother, Janine Clarke, 31, when her temperature was high, leading to a diagnosis of a gut infection, sepsis, and a rare genetic condition Ms Clarke, pictured with her partner Jay Nilsen, 30, and their other child, Lucas, three, were living in Brisbane, Australia. At six months old, Amelia was given emergency brain surgery hours after her Ms Clarke rushed her into hospital insisting that she was 'acting different to normal' Discussing Amelia's chiari malformation diagnosis, Ms Clarke said: 'Amelia wasn't playing with her toys or taking her bottle like normal one morning. 'She couldn't quite co-ordinate. I observed her for a few hours before taking her to hospital where the doctor said everything seemed fine.' Ms Clarke insisted she got a second opinion from another doctor at Lady Cilento Childrens Hospital. Ms Clarke, who has another child, Lucas, three, with her partner, Jay Nilsen, 30, a joiner, said: 'I felt like I was being a nuisance but I had to make sure that they weren't missing anything. 'Even though the doctors kept telling me that she was moving her limbs okay I knew she wasn't moving them as good or as much as she normally would have done. 'I wouldn't leave the hospital until they ran more tests. I stood my ground and demanded they look into things further.' It was until the fourth doctor that Amelia was given an MRI. They reportedly told Ms Clarke: 'We will give her an MRI if you're convinced there is something wrong.' Ms Clarke and Mr Nilsen were told to go for a walk for a couple of hours while the medical team looked at the scan results. Within the hour, they were told to come back to hospital immediately, where they were told Amelia needed emergency brain surgery for a chiari malformation. The exact cause of chiari malformations is unknown. It tends to be present from birth, but is normally only found in adulthood when symptoms develop or when an MRI scan is done. Symptoms include dizziness, trouble with balance, blurred vision and muscle weakness. Amelia has been in the midst of genetic testing when her health took a turn for the worst in November 2017. Pictured, before she was taken back to hospital Amelia is is still unable to talk, walk, eat or use her right arm because of the strokes WHAT IS SHWACHMAN-DIAMOND SYNDROME? Shwachman-Diamond syndrome is an inherited condition that affects many parts of the body, particularly the bone marrow, pancreas, and skeletal system. The major function of bone marrow is to produce new blood cells. These include red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the body's tissues; white blood cells, which fight infection; and platelets, which are blood cell fragments that are necessary for normal blood clotting. In Shwachman-Diamond syndrome, the bone marrow malfunctions and does not make some or all types of white blood cells. People with Shwachman-Diamond syndrome have an increased risk of several serious complications related to their malfunctioning bone marrow. Shwachman-Diamond syndrome also affects the pancreas, which is an organ that plays an essential role in digestion. Many affected individuals have problems with bone formation and growth, most often affecting the hips and knees. Low bone density is also frequently associated with this condition. Researchers are not sure how common Shwachman-Diamond syndrome is. Several hundred cases have been reported in scientific studies. Source: US National Library of Medicine Advertisement Ms Clarke said: 'We were barely able to kiss her goodbye before they wheeled her into theatre. 'Looking back they [the doctors] probably thought I was being an over cautious mother but something just didn't seem right and my gut feeling was that something was wrong.' But the family's woes were far from over. When Amelia was ten months old, she was in the midst of genetic testing when her health took a turn for the worse. Ms Clarke said: 'When Amelia was six weeks doctors realised her immune system was low but they just put it down to an infection and assumed she would get better on its own. 'But Amelia wasn't putting on much weight and had frequent loose stools. 'I kept mentioning it and a doctor said he would put forward her for genetic testing in October 2017.' The results were yet to come through when one morning, in November 2017, Amelia suddenly came down with an extremely high temperature. Fearing the worst, her parents rushed her to hospital where it was found that Amelia had an infection in her gut. Ms Clarke said: 'They were pumping her with antibiotics, giving her transfusions and injections to boost her immune system. She was so poorly.' After a few days in hospital Amelia's condition deteriorated dramatically and she was taken to intensive care. Once there, the genetic test results came back and revealed Amelia had ShwachmanDiamond syndrome. Shwachman-Diamond syndrome is an inherited condition that affects many parts of the body, particularly the bone marrow and pancreas, characterised by a weak immune system. Despite the best efforts of doctors, Amelia was unable to fight the gut infection quickly, and was hit with sepsis ten days later. 'That's when they became really concerned,' Ms Clarke said. 'Her organs sort of began to shut down. But the doctors were worried she wasn't strong enough to be operated on.' Genetic test results came back and revealed Amelia had ShwachmanDiamond syndrome, which affects the bone marrow and number of blood cells Amelia's family were told to expect the worst while their daughter was in hospital for 15 weeks - but she pulled through and in May 2018, they moved back to the UK 'She developed a vegetation (an infected mass) on her heart, and then pieces of the vegetation broke off and caused blood clots in her arms and legs.' 'She developed a vegetation (an infected mass) on her heart, and then pieces of the vegetation broke off and caused blood clots in her arms and legs.' The cause of the vegetation were never determined, according to Ms Clarke. The blood clots caused a block of blood flow and oxygen to the brain, and Amelia suffered two strokes. Ms Clarke said: 'They suspected she had them a few days after developing the sepsis. It was confirmed after she had CT scans. We were devastated. 'We literally never left her bedside and watched in awe of the doctors and nurses who worked around the clock to help save our baby girl. 'The doctors said when they took her off the ventilator they didn't know if she would survive or breathe by herself, and if she did, what quality of life she would have. 'We had a family meeting and were just told to prepare ourselves for the worst. 'How does she go from a happy baby to this? It all happened within a few weeks, we couldn't process it.' After spending five weeks in ICU, Amelia went from strength to strength and was moved onto the baby ward in the hospital and then after, some time the rehabilitation ward. After spending a total of 15 weeks and three days in hospital, Ms Clarke and Mr Nilsen were finally able to take Amelia home. Ms Clarke said: 'The strokes have caused her the most damage. She still can't use her right arm and she's not talking even though she's just turned two. 'She eats mashed up food because of the strokes but she still can't drink properly and is fed her fluids through a tube.' Due to the ShwachmanDiamond syndrome, Amelia can catch infections easier, and therefore her parents must be careful about her coming into contact with ill people or children. 'Once every 12 days Amelia has blood tests and an injection to boost her white blood cells,' Ms Clarke said. 'She is the strongest, happiest, most determined little girl that we know. She has a long road ahead of her but we will all be there to help her every step of the way and watch her grow and achieve whatever she sets her mind too.' The family took part in a 5k Stroke Resolution Run at Croxteth Park on March 31 to raise awareness of strokes in young children. You can donate to their fundraising by clicking here. The family took part in a 5k Stroke Resolution Run at Croxteth Park on March 31 to raise awareness of strokes in young children Where you live can affect your stress levels. And a recent study showed just that when it named Louisiana the most stressed state in the US. A new review, compiled by WalletHub, determined the Creole State to be the worst when it came to tension in work and personal life. Louisiana had among the worst rates of poverty, the most average hours worked per week and the highest crimes rates per capita. The bottom five all fell in the south: Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia. Meanwhile, Minnesota took the top grade as the least stressed state in the country. The North Star State had the best median credit score and lowest ratio of people in poor health, and had among the lowest poverty levels and divorce rates. Rounding out the top five were states mostly in Middle America: Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa - and Massachusetts on the east coast. RANKED - THE MOST STRESSED STATES IN AMERICA FROM 1 TO 50 WalletHub Privacy Policy Advertisement THE MOST STRESSED STATES... 1. Louisiana 2. Mississippi 3. Arkansas 4. Kentucky 5. West Virginia 6. New Mexico 7. Alabama 8. Nevada 9. Alaska 10. Oklahoma Advertisement ...AND THE LEAST STRESSED STATES 1. Minnesota 2. Utah 3. Massachusetts 4. North Dakota 5. South Dakota 6. Iowa 7. New Hampshire 8. Wisconsin 9. Hawaii 10. Montana Advertisement Although stress levels reached their lowest point in 2016 in nearly a decade, they've been on the uptick ever since. During the 10-year period when stress was declining, Americans commonly identified 'money, work and the economy' as their biggest sources of worry. Today, anxiety centers on the current political climate, uncertainty of our nation's future and fear of violence. Negative stress can manifest physically including headaches, elevated blood pressure, and chest pain. These can all raise the risk of - or worsen - diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma and arthritis. Additionally, the increase of cortisol, known as the stress hormone, can increase the amount of fat tissue in the body and cause weight gain. To reach its findings, WalletHub compared the states across four key dimensions: work-related stress, money-related stress, family-related stress, and health and safety-related stress. Several categories were looked at including average hours worked per week, percent of the population living in poverty, job security, divorce rates and the share of adults getting adequate sleep. After assessing each state's provisions, the researchers provided grades out of 100, with the least amount of points indicating a better score. Minnesota scored just 26.81 out of 100 while Louisiana earned 59.94 out of 100. WORK-RELATED STRESS Alaskans work the most average hours per week at 41.6 hours while Utahans work the fewest at about 37.7 hours North Dakota nabbed the top spot for the lowest job security and Arizona was named the state with the highest job security In a surprising twist, Alaska came in first as the state with the most average hours worked per week. Researchers have found that working long hours is linked to a multitude of ailments including heart disease, diabetes, stroke and mental health problems. Meanwhile, Utah had the lowest average of weekly work hours. A recent analysis from Business.org found that Alaskans worked an average of 41.6 hours per week - above the national average of 38.8 hours - while Utahans worked about 37.7 hours per week. Despite being among the least stressed states, North Dakota had the lowest job security. Meanwhile states on the west coast, with the exception of Massachusetts, had the highest job security. MONEY-RELATED STRESS Mississippi came first in the highest percent of its population living in poverty at almost 20 percent, while just eight percent did in New Hampshire Mississippi also came in first for the lowest median credit score and the least-stressed state of Minnesota came out on top with the highest average Mississippi, which came at number two for the most stressed states overall, was found to have the highest poverty rates. According to a 2017 report from the US Census Bureau, nearly 20 percent of people live in poverty in Mississippi. Meanwhile, New Hampshire, which was in the top 10 of least stressed states, came in first for the lowest poverty rate. In US census data, just eight percent of persons in the Granite State were found to live in poverty. Mississippi also came in first for the lowest median credit score while Minnesota came out on top with the highest average. Experian's 2017 State of Credit Study found that the average credit score in Minnesota is 709, which is above the national average of 673. The same ranking found Mississippi's average to be 647. FAMILY-RELATED STRESS Hawaii took the number one spot as the state with the least affordable housing with prices 81 percent higher than Iowa, which had the most affordable housing Nevada was ranked the state with the highest divorce rate at around 12.3 per 1,000 people, two times higher than the rate of Utah Surprisingly, Hawaii took the number one spot as the state with the least affordable housing. Unsurprisingly, California and New York took second and third, respectively. Meanwhile stated in mainly Middle America had the most affordable housing with Iowa, ranked among the least-stressed states, coming in first. HawaiiNewsNow reported in September that the average price of a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Hawaii climbed to $904,954, up from $654,648 in 2017. In a stark contrast, according to real estate site Zillow, the median listing price for a home in Iowa is $170,000 - a 81 percent difference from Hawaii. Also impacting family stress were divorce rates. Nevada was ranked as the state with the highest divorce rate at around 12.3 per 1,000 people, which was two times higher than the rate of Utah. HEALTH AND SAFETY-RELATED STRESS Hawaii was ranked first for the lowest average hours of sleep every night and South Dakota had the highest average hours of sleep FBI statistics show that Mew Mexico had a violent crime rate of 596.7 per 100,000 residents while Maine had just a rate of just 76.9 per 100,000 people In the ranking, New Mexico was named the state with the highest crime rate per capita and Maine came in first with the lowest. FBI statistics show that Mew Mexico had a violent crime rate of 596.7 per 100,000 residents, while Maine had a rate of just 76.9 per 100,000 people. Hawaii was ranked first for the lowest average hours of sleep every night. South Dakota, which was the fifth-least stressed state, had the highest average hours of sleep. It is well-known that those who get less than the recommended eight hours of sleep each night have higher levels of stress. The American Psychological Association's 2017 Stress in America Survey found that 40 percent adults who reported less than eight hours of snoozing said their stressed has increased in the past year - compared to 25 percent of adults with more than eight hours. A group of 'concerned' mothers in Wisconsin passed out letters in their neighborhood warning other parents about an anti-vaxxer in their community. In the letter, which was posted to Imgur and has since gone viral, the moms called out the woman by name and wrote that she 'does not believe in vaccinating herself or her family.' The mothers state that this woman's decision puts several people at risk of catching communicable diseases include those who are immunocompromised or 'medically fragile'. 'Please use caution when sharing work or personal space with this individual, eating foods prepared by this individual, or attending gatherings at this individual's house,' the letter reads in part. 'The unvaccinated pose a unique threat to infants, who often don't yet have a full course of vaccinations completed, and can quickly become deathly ill or die.' A group titled 'Concerned Moms of Wisconsin' passed out letters (pictured) to their neighborhood outing an anti-vaxxer and warning other residents to 'use caution around her' The mothers then go on to list the states in which outbreaks of preventable diseases including chickenpox, measles, mumps and whooping cough have occurred. 'Nearly all outbreaks of disease were started by unvaccinated individuals, who pass along vaccine-preventable diseases to those without adequate protection,' they write. The letter sparked fierce debate on social media, with some people supporting the group's cause and others denouncing them. 'Don't care how stupid a person is. If you are going to send something like this SIGN your name! Otherwise you are a coward,' one user wrote. 'I understand "the goal" of this, but it seems like it could quickly devolve into an unsubstantiated witch-hunt,' wrote another. This has certainly been true in the case of the recent measles outbreak in the US, which recently hit a tally of 387, surpassing the total in 2018 of 372, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first measles vaccine was introduced in 1963 and, by 2000, it was considered to be eradicated in the US. However, the highly infectious disease has been spreading among people who are unvaccinated or live in states that allow non-medical exemptions for vaccines, federal health officials say. Cases have been confirmed in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas and Washington. Of those states, six - Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Oregon, Texas and Washington - allow exemptions for philosophical and/or personal beliefs. Wisconsin, where the letter writers live, is one of 17 states that allow non-medical vaccine exemptions. According to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, there have been no confirmed measles cases in residents since 2014. However, last year, an unvaccinated Wisconsin man suspected of being exposed to the disease was accused by police of breaking mandated quarantine so he could go to the gym. The 57-year-old and his wife were charged with one count each of exposing the public to communicable disease, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Washington and New York, particularly, have been struggling to contain their respective measles outbreaks. In January, Washington declared a public health emergency after a measles outbreak that has affected 73 people in Clark County and one in King County, where Seattle is. Sixty-three of the cases are in residents who have not been vaccinated. Fifty-three cases are in children aged 10 and under. Meanwhile, in New York, there have been at least 371 confirmed cases in Brooklyn, Queens and Rockland County since October 2018 - all in Orthodox Jewish communities. Just last week, Rockland County in upstate New York took an unusual step and banned unvaccinated people under age 18 from being in public places for 30 days. Officials also declared a state of emergency. However, cases have continued to rise. 'People who don't believe in vaccines often hold other views that are at odds with widely accepted facts related to science and medicine,' the letter reads. 'Protect yourself, your family, and your community by using caution when interacting with these people.' In January, anti-vaxxers were named one of the top threats to global health in 2019 by the World Health Organization (WHO). The anti-vaccine movement joined air pollution and climate change, HIV, and a worldwide influenza pandemic on the list. 'Vaccine hesitancy', as the WHO called it in a statement, 'threatens to reverse progress made in tackling vaccine-preventable diseases.' It took blood, toil, tears and sweat... not to mention some Grinch-style prosthetics, a foam fat suit and hours practising those speeches in front of a mirror to turn Gary Oldman into the most authentic screen Churchill ever as the stars of Darkest Hour tell Event When the cast of Darkest Hour gathered for an initial read-through of the script, they were in for a surprise. Everyone was in the standard dress-down code of jeans and T-shirts, ready to sit round a table and speak their lines for the first time. It was a relaxed, informal gathering, albeit with a serious purpose. Then the door opened and in walked Winston Churchill. Or rather, in walked Gary Oldman, in full prosthetics, three-piece suit complete with fob watch and brandishing a cigar. As he walked, slowly and slightly stooped, to his place at the head of the table, everyone stood up, as if to attention. Gary Oldman's depiction of Winston Churchill is markedly different from the caricature we have grown used to over the decades It was spine-tingling, recalls screenwriter Anthony McCarten, the Oscar-nominated author of The Theory Of Everything. And from that moment I never really saw Gary Oldman at all. For the next three months while we were shooting, I worked with Winston Churchill. McCarten is not the only person to be mesmerised by Oldmans nuanced rendition. It has been hailed by members of the Churchill family as the finest-ever screen characterisation of their formidable ancestor. Churchills granddaughter, Emma Soames, insists no one has ever before captured the complexity of the man with such adroitness. I watch so many portrayals of him with dread, she says. But Oldman was quite magnificent. It was like watching a familiar Shakespeare soliloquy. You knew the words, but this was the actor who brought a whole new meaning to them. Winston Churchill was prone to self-doubt and was not the man of iron resolve he is often portrayed as being For her, she added, this was definitive. It was Grandpapa born again on screen. Oldmans depiction is markedly different from the caricature we have grown used to over the decades. Churchill in Darkest Hour is not the resolute, unswerving man of common assumption. Nor is he a grumbly, grouchy curmudgeon. This Churchill is witty, romantic, quixotic, prone to giggles as much as to bursts of anger. And he is plagued with self-doubt. The film focuses solely on his first month as Prime Minister in May 1940, when the odds were stacked against Britain and the only certainty appeared to be defeat to the grim forces of oppression gathering on the other side of the Channel, and our collective nerve was frayed apparently beyond recovery. Churchill, with a long history of political and strategic errors behind him, including planning the disastrous Gallipoli campaign some 25 years before, hardly seemed the man equipped to galvanise the nation. Indeed, there were many in his own Cabinet who regarded him as an empty vessel capable only of a lot of noise. He arrived at the top with few expecting him to last long. In truth, he was among the doubters. At the point we meet him he was quite fragile in many ways, says McCarten. Because of what happened later, he is always given to us as a man who never wavered. What is always thought to be his great strength as a leader is that this was a man who knew what he was doing from day one. I disagree. To my mind what made him great was that he was a man capable of changing his mind. Churchill in Darkest Hour is not the resolute, unswerving man of common assumption. Nor is he a grumbly, grouchy curmudgeon A crucial scene in the film which was invented by the creators to convey Churchill's understanding of public will on the subject of war with the Nazi machine Ben Mendelsohn as King George VI; Lily James as Elizabeth Layton Kazuhiro Tsuji is the man behind the prosthetics in How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Planet Of The Apes, among many others. He was crucial in helping Oldman bring the great man to life A scene from the film. The movie's creators have carefully recreated life in London in 1940 In order properly to project this interpretation, McCarten and the films director Joe Wright knew everything depended on the casting. The whole point of this project was to give a different Winston to those we had seen before, says Wright. Gary was at the top of the list of those who we felt could surprise us. It was a bold idea. While he may have been physically perfect for the role of Sid Vicious in Sid And Nancy in 1986, the slim, wiry Oldman does not exactly appear born to play the rotund, booming, upper-crust Churchill. Indeed, ten years previously he had turned down the chance to take on the role in another film, convinced he did not have the requisite dimensions. I had always been fascinated by Churchill, says Oldman. Yet he wasnt someone who I was looking to play. It wasnt the psychological or the intellectual challenge that was the hurdle, it was the physical component. You need only look at me and look at Churchill But once Wright had persuaded Oldman that he was, in fact, the only candidate equipped to play the great man, the actor set about working out how to do it. It all starts with the voice. I had to convince myself that I could sound like him, he says. So I got one of his speeches and a phone recorder and started to experiment. But to help him properly locate the Churchill larynx, Oldman needed more than just a few recordings. I had to be able to look in the mirror and see him, or at least the spirit of him, looking back at me, he adds. I felt that Kazuhiro Tsuji was the only person who could help me get there. Clemmie (Kristin Scott Thomas) comforts her husband (Oldman) in Darkest Hour. Churchill said later that he would not have made it through the war without his wife A scene from the film. The film focuses solely on Churchill's first month as Prime Minister in May 1940 Oldman as Sid Vicious in the 1986 movie Sid And Nancy. This role was one Oldman was naturally physically right for Tsuji is the man behind the prosthetics in How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Planet Of The Apes, among many others. It was daunting, the idea of creating a likeness that everyone has their own image of already, admits Tsuji, whom Oldman had to talk out of retirement to work on Darkest Hour. The hardest part was that Gary has an oval head shape, while Churchill had a more compressed, round face. Garys eyes are close to each other, Churchills are totally opposite. Their proportions and head sizes were completely different. Tsuji took dozens of casts of Oldman to create not only a face, but a foam body suit that enabled the actor to find a Churchillian posture. Each morning, ahead of shooting, the disguise took four hours to apply; then, after the cameras had stopped rolling, two hours to remove. In between, Oldman spent the day carrying his own body weight in prosthetics and padding. Alongside Oldmans Churchill, simmering under a Thirties coiffure is Kristin Scott Thomas, playing his wife of 56 years, Clemmie. The great woman behind the great man. She was his pillar, says Scott Thomas. They completely adored each other and they had the most fantastic rows. Churchill says in one of his letters that he wouldnt have been able to live through the war without Clemmie by his side. It was clear that she was very supportive yet had very strong ideas about politics and about what should be done in the world and how things should be run and she would tell Winston so. There is a scene early in the movie that speaks loudly of their relationship. Churchill has just been summoned to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the King. He knows what this means: he is about to become Prime Minister. It is a position he has craved since the nursery, yet he is stricken with fear that he may not be up to the job. As she fusses with his collar, Clemmie attempts to bolster his ego, listing his unique strengths. But he shoots down her every insistence. You have such a sense of humour, she says. Ho, ho, ho, he replies, infusing each ho with a weary self-deprecation. Close, but no cigar: the men whove been Churchill before IAN MCNEICE When, for the 2010 series of Doctor Who, Matt Smith landed his Tardis in wartime Britain, naturally he met Churchill. It was not McNeices first appearance as the PM he had played the role in the stage play of The Kings Speech, among others which was perhaps no surprise given his close physical resemblance. Ian McNeice (left) and Timothy Spall (right) Richard Burton (left) and John Lithgow (right) RICHARD BURTON The finest actor of his generation was not at his best in the 1972 television series The Gathering Storm: too slim, too gruff, too Welsh. When it was remade in 2002, however, Albert Finney produced what many then reckoned the finest-ever characterisation. JOHN LITHGOW At 6ft 4in and an American, Lithgow might not be the most obvious candidate to play Churchill. But his turn as the post-war Churchill in the 2016 Netflix series The Crown is full of subtlety and with a fine rendition of the voice. TIMOTHY SPALL In the 2010 movie The Kings Speech, Timothy Spall looks the part but produces a performance so caricatured and wooden he appears to have misjudged the movie as a comedy. ROBERT HARDY He inhabited the part of Churchill so completely in the 1981 TV series The Wilderness Years that Hardy spent much of the rest of his life dressed and talking like the great man. Robert Hardy as Winston Churchill speaking to the House of Commons in 'Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years' Advertisement Scott Thomas says: How he managed in those weeks in May to instil a sense of bravery and pride in Britain was extraordinary. And the film does a fine job in locating exactly how he did it. According to McCarten, Churchills trick was to weaponise the English language. This is a film devoted to the writers proposition that words can make a difference, he says. Whatever his political shortcomings up to this point, there was no denying that Churchill had long been a master of English. A journalist before he was a politician, a Nobel Prize-winning historian before he was a statesman, he published more words than William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens combined. Strung through the film are three of his finest verbal moments, the trio of grand, rallying speeches he made in those early days of his premiership. How he set about writing and delivering them is the core of the piece. And Churchills way of doing things dictating to his secretary Elizabeth Layton (played by Lily James) while in bed with a whisky and soda for breakfast, or in the bath, or in a broiling temper is beautifully realised. His speeches were a team effort, says McCarten. It was just the rest of his team were dead! Repetition, crescendo, the final appeal to the emotions all his rhetorical devices were invented by the Greeks, perfected by the Romans. And he stole lines shamelessly. Georges Clemenceau [French prime minister during WWI] said we will fight before Paris, we will fight in Paris, we will fight behind Paris. Blood, toil, tears and sweat was lifted from John Donne. The plagiarist in Winston was alive and well. Collective efforts, perhaps, but it was his delivery that made the words sing. Churchills speeches are some of the greatest in the English language, says Oldman. He was remarkable because he didnt go in for purple prose, or overload with metaphor or imagery. He understood the people he was speaking directly to, and made sure that what he said went right to the heart of the nation. However compelling the language might be, merely delivering three familiar, historic speeches would not make much of a film. What Wright does so successfully is contextualise them, to wrap them in their place and time. And what a time. Churchill came to power after Neville Chamberlain resigned. He was not the choice of many in his own party and his appointment seemed to surprise the King, who wanted his old friend Lord Halifax to take the reins. With invasion assumed to be imminent, Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was particularly keen on negotiating a way out. Churchill, vehemently against any idea of giving in to the monstrous Nazi machine, felt at this point very much alone. To reinforce his sense of beleaguerment, much of the film was shot in the claustrophobic confines of the War Rooms under The Mall in London. Across five years, 115 Cabinet meetings took place there. It was the heart of planning and strategy. Unchanged since August 1945, the bunker provides an unequivocally authentic backdrop to the movie. This is not a set, this is where it happened. And the backdrop is indicative of Wrights quest for authenticity, which ran from having Churchills own tailors make Oldmans suit to buying the same brand of Cuban cigar he puffed. Yet for all the historical detail, for all the scenes shot at the real 10 Downing Street (We had to do so many takes I reckon I walked through the front door more often than Churchill did, says Oldman), one of the most significant scenes came entirely from McCartens head. It involves Churchill, teetering on the brink of accepting that the only way forward is to seek a settlement, taking a ride on the London Underground. Here he enters into conversation with the ordinary British public and assiduously seeks their views. After being told that they are united in a desire to fight on, he heads off to Cabinet to inform his appeasing colleagues that there will be no surrender. It is powerful drama. But there is no evidence Churchill ever went anywhere near the Tube. Gary Oldman had doubts that he could play the legendary Prime Minister, but director Joe Wright was convinced he was the only actor who could pull it off We needed to show how, at this critical moment when he was wavering, the opinion polls showed the public will, particularly among the working class, was to fight, says McCarten. Now, we could have done it with a secretary coming in to the room with the poll returns. That may have been true, but it is dramatically boring. We somehow had to render that thought in a dramatic way. It undoubtedly works. And as he goes to the House of Commons to deliver the most sublime of all parliamentary speeches, produced to perfection by Oldman in surely Oscar-winning form, we see the first proper suggestion of what Churchill went on to become: the greatest Prime Minister of them all. All great leaders need luck, says McCarten. And the biggest luck Winston had was that the times were commensurate with his talents. He was not the right leader for every time. But he was absolutely right for that time. Though the truth is that the greatest luck was ours: the world was lucky that Churchill was there. Darkest Hour is released on January 12 The first thing that hits you when you walk on to the Prague set of Britannia, Skys new Roman invasion epic, is a terrible malodorous pong. Then theres the thick morning mist, intermingling with the smoke from the braziers, the wooden-wheeled war machines and the chariot-busting ten-foot spikes surrounding a military camp. Its a serious assault on the senses. Sorry about the smell. Its horse s***, basically, says David Morrissey, in full generals uniform behind a desk covered in scrolls. Freshly delivered on site thanks to all of these Kelly Reilly as Cerra, warrior princess. Except I wouldnt really call her a princess, says Reilly. To me that conjures up pretty people in castles. This is not like that. Its dark and dirty. He waves outside his luxurious tent to all of the horses, clomping around in dank woodchips and mud. Most of them are tethered next to tents, surrounded by pikes, catapults and scorpios (a sort of torsion-powered mega-catapult, like the dragon-killing weapon in Game Of Thrones.) The tents, which run back for hundreds of metres, are all in straight lines a sign, if you hadnt guessed it already, that this is a Roman camp. Its cold, too: beneath his woollen tunic, resting on his leather-studded skirt, Morrissey has a hot water bottle. Weve been shooting for five months, he says. A few weeks ago it was boiling hot, we were cursing the heat, and now were cursing the cold. But thats fine from a Romans point of view, Britain in 43 AD is supposed to be hell on Earth. Theres a coffee cart 100 yards walk from Morrisseys tent, but in every other aspect this could be Britannia in 43 AD. Britain, of course, was the one place that Julius Caesar couldnt conquer. In that year the Emperor Claudius sent Aulus Plautius (Morrisseys character) to lead an army to have another go. Britannia tells their story. But the crucial thing to remember, says Morrissey, is that the all-conquering Roman army had failed here before. So the soldiers were frightened of it. Theyre coming to a strange, savage place. Zoe Wanamaker as Regni queen Antedia. Think Tina Turner in Mad Max, she laughs Cerra shows her mettle. The drama follows a long feud between the Regni and their Celtic rivals the Cantii Britannia is set in 43 AD. In that year the Emperor Claudius sent Aulus Plautius (Morrisseys character) to lead an army to have another go. Britannia tells their story Mackenzie Crook as druid leader Veran. We dont speak to Crook on set but only because hes rarely there every day involves four hours in make-up On the way to the Roman camp set we drive by what looks like a whole field of smouldering remains. That was the Regni camp, says production designer Tom Burton. Yesterday we burned it down. It was all catapults and immolation. The Regni were one of the two main Celtic tribes the Romans came up against when they invaded the Kent coast and set off inland to conquer southern England. Zoe Wanamaker, head to toe in leather with her face tattooed and her hair rising high like a halo (think Tina Turner in Mad Max, she laughs) plays their queen, Antedia. Basically I want Kelly Reillys head on a pike, she says. She castrated my son on their wedding night. Mums dont tend to like that. The incident shes referring to is the source of a long feud between the Regni and their Celtic rivals the Cantii, whose king is played by Ian McDiarmid, aka the emperor in the Star Wars movies. Kelly Reilly plays his daughter Cerra, a fierce, headstrong warrior princess. Except I wouldnt really call her a princess, says Reilly. To me that conjures up pretty people in castles. This is not like that. Its dark and dirty. What Britannia decidedly isnt is Game Of Thrones. It doesnt have the same money, says producer Rick McCallum (they have five to six times the budget we do) and anyway, says writer Jez Butterworth, hes never watched Game Of Thrones. I dont have time, he says, what with kids and everything else going on. Watch the first minute of Britannia and its clear that the series is something very different to Thrones there are horses and mud and swords and devilry, but this is way weirder than Westeros. Morrissey explains: Yes, this is the invasion where the Romans work with the two tribes, the Regni and the Cantii, to conquer Britain. But theres a third element, the druids, and thats where things get interesting. My characters quite obsessed with them. Its quite odd. You feel that although hes supposed to be at the sharp end of the Roman conquest, his main objective is to find out what the druids belief system is. Watching Britannia you feel that the druids are Butterworths real interest too. Every scene involving Mackenzie Crook as Veran, the druid leader described as having the wisdom of the Dalai Lama mixed with the madness of Charles Manson, is shot like a dream. We dont speak to Crook on set but only because hes rarely there every day involves four hours in make-up. Producer Rik McCallum tells us how Crook shaved his head and even drilled holes in his nails for the part, before an entire facial prosthetic and contact lenses transformed him in to the druids spooky leader. Its Veran who leads the more prosaic characters, like Aulus, on their trippy voyages into the underworld, which are shown as spiritual, hallucinatory excursions that are more like prog-rock videos than historical drama. Im as interested as the next person in historical events, says Butterworth, but turning it in to drama? Im not interested in that remotely. If you want something to be historically accurate Im not sure that long-form television drama is the place you should go for it. For me, theres got to be a really good and personal and quite visceral reason to want to do it, he says, adding that this is his very first TV drama. The reason was this: I wanted to explore the idea of these two pantheons of gods Roman and druid coming together. One thing you know about Jez, says Morrissey, is his knowledge of pre-Christian, pagan Britain is massive. So hes able to draw on that. Mackenzie Crook is amazing. He looks fantastic but he also has that spiritual, worshipping side and that belief that the gods and the power that they have over us is real. Its about hell and heaven, where youre going, the life before you and the life after you. Yet Britannia is also, says series producer Rick McCallum, about Britain today. Were definitely in the wackiest of times politically. In Britannias world you have three divergent peoples, all of whom have moral codes of behaviour that are at odds with each other. If you look at the world were living in right now, whether its the American election or Brexit, its very apparent that there are some very strong groups of people with incredibly divergent points of view. It really is tribal. Back on set its dark now. The braziers are lit and extra artificial smoke is wafted across the camp. Morrissey is addressing his men. I am Rome, he bellows. And where I walk is Rome. Hes about to find out what Britannia has to say about that. All episodes of Britannia are available from January 18 on Sky Atlantic and Now TV Chord Poly + Mojo 899 There are some gadgets you carry because you secretly hope that people will dart an envious glance and wonder: Who is he? Then there are others where youre mainly hoping someone will ask: What on earth is that? Chords Mojo and its new wireless module Poly deliver effortlessly on this front, looking midway between something from Star Trek and the sort of fancy spirit level tradesmen carry to remind you that they know more about this than you do. The Mojo, released two years ago, is a headphone amp and DAC (digital to analogue converter), which adds a proper, hi-fi sparkle to your music But to a certain niche group, carrying one of these 5in gadgets marks you out as a man of taste and distinction. This is the chosen weapon of a small, snobbish band of elite hi-fi warriors. Its not for the faint-hearted. British hi-fi company Chord is one of the few electronics firms with the distinction of actually making products in the UK and exporting them to China, rather than the other way round. So what actually is it? This is the point at which many will glaze over. The Mojo, released two years ago, is a headphone amp and DAC (digital to analogue converter), which adds a proper, hi-fi sparkle to your music (and also gives you the power to actually drive big headphones properly, which most phones cant do). Still with me? The Poly, which clicks neatly on to the end, is a wireless module, so you can stream music via wi-fi in gorgeous-sounding quality, from either your phone or a PC, then add sparkle via the Mojo. The Mojo also gives you the power to actually drive big headphones properly, which most phones cant do Basically, its the missing link between having CD-quality lossless music on a phone, and your ears. If your ears are fine-tuned enough to be annoyed by the duff sound quality of Bluetooth, you might want to consider this. But be warned, this is not a gadget for novices. There is no app (yet), and if youre not comfortable with advanced gadget-wrangling, youll end up leaving this thing in a drawer before you get it connected to services such as Apple AirPlay. But when it gets going, it really is a choir-of-angels moment and a much needed balm after a decade of awful-sounding music delivered poorly via our mobiles. I received a letter from Phoenix Life in October regarding an outstanding sum of money in my father's name. I sent my identification details, but was unable to answer some questions about my father as I had become estranged from him, my mother and my three brothers for several years although I went to my father's funeral in 2003. I phoned Phoenix Life and was told that, because two of my brothers had not sent any paperwork, it could not release the money. The firm needs a letter from both of them declaring they have no interest in the money. I have no idea where they live. M.H., Somerset. Frozen out: A family split left one reader unable to collect his share of his father's estate Tony Hazell replies: Being estranged from your family can throw up all sorts of difficulties in situations like this. Thankfully, Phoenix Life has taken a common sense approach. Normally, payment is made to one executor so the money can be distributed correctly. However, in view of your situation, Phoenix Life has decided to handle things a little differently. It has an obligation to take all reasonable steps to find potential claimants, but it now accepts it would be inappropriate to ask you to help any further. Therefore, it has paid your quarter share directly to you. Where has my personal savings allowance gone? On my HMRC coding notice for 2016/17 I had a personal allowance of 11,000 and a personal savings allowance of 1,000, giving me a tax-free income sum of 12,000. On my tax letter for 2017/18, the personal allowance changed to 11,500. When I queried why there was no personal savings allowance, I was told this was included in the personal allowance, which suggests my total tax-free sum has been reduced by 500. There is no personal savings allowance on my 2018/19 letter either, so where has it gone? Mrs J. H., Essex. Tony replies: Well spotted. The personal savings allowance did appear on coding notices in 2016/17 and has since vanished. But don't worry, you are still receiving it as is everyone else. I asked HMRC why it's no longer there and was told it's because it is not actually a tax allowance, it's an allowance on interest earned on savings. It often appears that the lower your income, the more complex tax becomes. As you correctly state, the personal allowance gave 11,500 of tax-free income for 2017/18. It is 11,850 for this tax year, which ends on April 5, increasing to 12,500 for 2019/20. The allowance covers income from all sources, including wages and pensions. On top of this, those on low incomes receive a 5,000 starting rate for savings income, giving a potential 16,850 of tax-free income this year. This is mainly of use to pensioners who are on low incomes but who have accumulated savings during their working lives. The starting rate is eroded by any earned or pension income above the 11,850 personal allowance. For example, if you earned or had a pension of 13,850, you would lose 2,000 of the savings starting rate, reducing it to 3,000. Anyone earning more than 16,850 does not qualify for the savings starting rate. Then we come to the personal savings allowance to which you refer. This allows basic-rate taxpayers and non-taxpayers to earn a further 1,000 tax-free interest per year. The allowance for higher-rate taxpayers is 500, while very high earners paying additional-rate tax lose this allowance altogether. Finally, whoever told you the savings allowance has been absorbed into the main personal allowance is just plain wrong. I'm 92 and E.on has hiked my energy payment by 30 I have received my energy from E.on for many years. In November, it informed me my direct debit was going up by 30 a month, despite my account being in credit. I have phoned the firm and got nowhere. I have also sent two emails, only to receive an electronic notification that its staff were 'very busy'. I am 92, widowed and I can't afford to pay such a large bill increase. Mrs J. B., Essex. Tony replies: I sent your letter to E.on as soon as I received it and waited for a response. And waited. And waited. And waited. I chased it. And chased it. Eventually I received a simple statement telling me that your direct debit had been put back to the level it had been previously. That's great news but why couldn't it just do this when you phoned it the first time? And why did it take so long to provide me with such a simple piece of information? Perhaps it was just 'very busy' again. The boss of Joules is stepping down after almost nine years at the firm. Colin Porter will leave the fashion chain before May 2020. The 57-year-old, who started his career as a fashion buyer at Sir Philip Green's Arcadia Group, joined Joules in November 2010. He took over as chief executive from founder Tom Joule in 2015 after starting out at the company as managing director. Reaching out: Joules is known for its Breton-striped tops and colourful wellies and raincoats During his time at Joules, Porter, who is married and has two grown-up children, oversaw the firm's debut on the stock market in 2016, giving it a value of 140m. Shares ended flat at 288p yesterday after his departure was announced, valuing it at 253m. The retailer, known for its Breton-striped tops and colourful wellies and raincoats, was founded in Market Harborough more than 25 years ago and has become a favourite among middle-class families. Porter is not thought to be planning a move to another executive role. He recently joined menswear firm Moss Bros as non-executive chairman. It's all change in the UK supermarket sector as Aldi gobbles up more customers than Morrisons, and Asda overtakes Sainsbury's to become the 'second largest retailer in Great Britain'. A whopping 13 million households shopped at an Aldi store in the last 12 weeks, according to the latest Kantar data. That's more than shopped at its rival Morrisons, the UK's fourth biggest supermarket. New customers and a 10 per cent spike in sales helped the German discounter dominate a record 8 per cent share of the market as the cut-price players continue to disrupt the supermarket status quo. Aldi is disrupting the status quo by achieving record customer numbers,according to Kantar Sainsbury's meanwhile saw its long-held title of UK's second biggest supermarket threatened by none other than its takeover target Asda. The Walmart-owned chain chalked up a 15.4 per cent market share, Kantar said, beating Sainsbury's share of 15.3 per cent. Kantar's head of retail and consumer insight Fraser McKevitt explained however that, despite being overtaken by Asda in main store sales, Sainsbury's remains 'the biggest seller of food and drink out of the two retailers'. Kantar's figures also do not include Argos. Britain's 'Big Four' supermarkets - Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons - have all come under pressure as savvy British shoppers from all warps of life increasingly seek out value for money. 'Asda's performance has been fuelled by attracting a greater number of affluent households and shoppers making more regular trips,' McKevitt said. Sainsbury's, which is grappling to get its takeover of Asda through the competition watchdog, suffered a 1.8 per cent slump in sales during the period, news which sparked a slight dip in the orange supermarket's shares on Tuesday morning. Lidl was the second fastest growing supermarket in the pack, and Tesco grew by 0.5 per cent to retain its crown as the UK's biggest grocer, with a 27.4 per cent share of the tightly contested market. Asda overtook Sainsbury's to become the UK's second biggest supermarket in the last 12 weeks on store sales Overall, the market grew 1.4 per cent in the last three months. This is the slowest rate for a year, but the figures are skewed by the late falling of Easter this year and the date of Mother's Day, Kantar said. Although Easter is a way off yet, British shoppers have already spent 146million on Easter eggs and nearly half of UK households have bought hot cross buns. Another noticeable trend is shoppers opting for more sustainable options. Kantar said sales of loose fruit and vegetables grew twice as quickly as those wrapped in plastic as shoppers' scrutiny over single-use plastics continues. A wave of top tier resignations could lie ahead for Superdry after its co-founder Julian Dunkerton was voted back onto the fashion firm's board. Dunkerton, who founded the brand in 2003 alongside James Holder, will become a director again after his election scraped over the line at a shareholder meeting on Tuesday. He received just 51.15 per cent of the total votes. Peter Williams, the chairman of Boohoo, is also set to become a director after gaining the same level of approval. Julian Dunkerton (above) founded Superdry in 2003 alongside James Holder Chairman Peter Bamford said: 'Whilst the board was unanimous in its view that the resolutions should be rejected and 74 per cent of shareholders other than Julian and James (Holder) have voted against, there was a narrow overall majority in favour and we accept that outcome.' The result is expected to trigger a dramatic board clear out at the struggling firm. Its current members previously threatened to resign en masse, or not seek re-election, if Dunkerton returned to the company. The most likely departees are current chief executive Euan Sutherland and Bamford, who have both come under harsh criticism in recent months, with Dunkerton publicly slamming the company's strategy. Last month, Dunkerton said the retailer's management has presided over a 'catastrophic decline'. 'The company is in such a weakened state that it has floundered on one season's collection, but the real issues facing the business are far more fundamental, strategically and operationally,' he thundered. Julian Dunkerton (right) pictured together with co-founder James Holder (middle) and current CEO Euan Sutherland (left) who could step down imminently following today's votes Dunkerton and Holder have together been campaigning for an overhaul while Superdry's shares suffered a steady decline from 15.26 this time a year ago to lows of 3.54 in December. They own 29 per cent of the group and have seen millions wiped of the value of their holding. Following his narrow success at today's AGM, Dunkerton said: 'My co-founder James Holder and I are delighted that our fellow shareholders have responded positively to our proposals and recognised that, at our core, we have the very best interests of everyone involved with Superdry. 'Our interests as major shareholders are fully aligned with theirs and, together, we can set Superdry back on the path to growth and success.' Superdry shares fell 5 per cent after the company's AGM, as shown on this 1-day graph The news sent shares down 5 per cent to 5.23 on Tuesday afternoon. Superdry has suffered falling sales both in stores and online. It blamed the warm weather last year for weak sales of its of its signature coats and outdoor gear. It has also faced flak for launching a children's range and for resorting to heavy discounting before Christmas. Superdry founder Julian Dunkerton was reinstated as the fashion chain's chief executive last night after a bitter power struggle saw almost the entire board resign. At a dramatic showdown in the City of London, 51.5 per cent of shareholders backed his plan to return and revive its ailing fortunes. The knife-edge decision marked a humiliating defeat for Superdry chairman Peter Bamford and chief executive Euan Sutherland, who quit along with six of the other seven directors. Mates no more: Superdry chief exec Euan Sutherland, left, with the company's founder Julian Dunkerton, right The mass exodus followed a five-month public battle between co-founder Dunkerton and bosses at the fashion chain he set up in 2003. Seizing the job as chief executive last night following his victory, Dunkerton outlined plans to 'rebuild the Superdry brand and the business', adding: 'The hard work starts now.' But the company's shares fell 8.8 per cent, or 48p, to 500p. Dunkerton, Superdry's largest shareholder with an 18.4 per cent stake, left the business in March last year to pursue other business interests. But it has since suffered a decline in sales and profits, sending shares down almost two-thirds. He and co-founder James Holder accused Sutherland and his top team of presiding over a 'catastrophic' fall in the share price, blaming a change in strategy for hitting sales. Superdry has cut the number of products it stocks and shifted production to the Far East to save money. It has also launched a childrenswear range which Dunkerton is expected to ditch. The row climaxed yesterday after Dunkerton demanded shareholders vote on his plans to return and turn around its fortunes. As well as backing him, they also approved his plan to appoint former Boohoo chairman Peter Williams to the board. The coup sparked a string of resignations as finance boss Ed Barker and remuneration committee chairman Penny Hughes followed Sutherland and Bamford out of the door. Four other directors Dennis Millard, Minnow Powell, Sarah Wood and John Smith handed in their notice and step down on July 1. Superdry's corporate brokers UBS and Investec also quit. Company secretary Simon Callander is the only board member to remain. Williams has now stepped in as chairman, with Dunkerton appointed interim chief executive. Bamford noted that 74 per cent of investors other than Dunkerton and Holder, who own 28 per cent of shares between them, had voted against the proposals. Institutional investors Investec, Schroders and BBVA are thought to have backed Dunkerton. Dunkerton, who is married to 32-year-old designer Jade Holland Cooper, said the turnaround is likely to take two years. 'There may be a bit of turbulence in the beginning but it won't be as dramatic as anyone has said,' Dunkerton said. 'We will point this company back in the right direction, quickly and efficiently. The opportunities are greater now than they were two years ago.' At a stormy meeting, Superdry shareholders lashed out Sutherland and his team. Chas Howes, who is a former Superdry finance boss and owns 64,000 shares, accused the company's bosses of 'lining their pockets' while presiding over a poor performance. 'Financial performance has been appalling,' Howes said. 'You recently bought shares [at] under 4, deliberately taking advantage of a disaster you have created when minority shareholders have suffered.' John Olive, an individual investor, added: 'Frankly the board should depart, let us move on, bring Mr Dunkerton back and let's have some sense about the business that we're in.' Dinesh Jain accused Sutherland and Bamford for failing to take responsibility. He said: 'It's as if everything is Julian's fault and nothing is your fault and you have refused to accept responsibility.' The bow sections of the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier were built at Appledore A consortium of British and international companies is circling the historic Appledore shipyard in Devon. Three firms one British and two foreign are putting together an offer either for a long lease or a joint venture with the shipyard's owner, Langham Industries. Another six companies have expressed an interest in building vessels at the site. The yard has been shut since March 15 when submarine builder Babcock International's lease ran out. Babcock left Appledore, near Barnstaple, which has been a shipbuilding hub since 1855, after it failed to find enough work. The closure put 196 jobs at risk, though around half have been relocated by Babcock. Langham Industries boss Chris Langham, 67, said: 'We're doing everything to make the yard attractive to someone taking over or to an incoming operator.' London housing developer L&Q is to build 20,000 homes in the North West A major London housing developer is to build 20,000 homes in the North West. L&Q said the 4billion investment was part of its plan to expand beyond the South East, where land is more expensive and in short supply. It said that at least half the homes will be 'genuinely affordable'. And it will cater for people aged above 55 and those with special needs. As part of the plans, L&Q is in talks to buy Manchester-based Trafford Housing Trust (THT), which it said would provide a 'gateway' into the northern market. THT has around 9,000 homes under management. This compares to L&Q's portfolio of 90,000 mainly in London and the South East. The two firms already have a joint venture together. David Montague, L&Q's boss, said: 'We are excited by the opportunity to invest with a partner that shares our social purpose, values and ambition, has excellent local knowledge and a strong reputation for innovation and delivery.' The City watchdog has issued an unprecedented warning over the high-risk Isas introduced by George Osborne. Regulators urged the public to think twice before putting their cash into an Innovative Finance (IF) Isa, a product launched by the then Chancellor in 2016. It came after savings firm London Capital & Finance collapsed, owing 237million to 11,500 investors. Risk: Regulators urged the public to think twice before putting their cash into an Innovative Finance (IF) Isa, a product launched by the then Chancellor George Osborne in 2016 IF Isas allow savers to put their nest eggs into speculative investments such as mini-bonds. The money is lent directly to companies with the promise of higher returns than regular savings accounts offer. Gains are tax-free but investors' cash is not legally protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, meaning if the company the money is lent to goes bust they stand to lose everything. The Financial Conduct Authority said it has seen evidence that IF Isas are being marketed alongside safe-as-houses cash Isas. The FCA also reported widespread confusion over how IF Isas work. 'Investments held in IF Isas are high-risk with the money ultimately being invested in products like mini-bonds or peer-to-peer investments,' the watchdog said. 'Anyone considering investing in an IF Isa should carefully consider where their money is being invested before purchasing.' Trading firm London Capital & Finance went bust earlier this year, owing 237million. It claimed to offer savers returns of 8 per cent and said their cash would be invested in start-ups through mini-bonds held in an Isa. But, in fact, the cash was given to just 12 firms in what its administrators have said was a series of 'highly suspicious transactions'. And it appears that the money was not kept in Isas after all. Investors are now expected to get back just 20 per cent of what they gave to LCF, and the Serious Fraud Office is investigating. There will also be an independent inquiry into whether the FCA failed in its duty as a regulator. If Isas were announced by Osborne in 2015 to support the growth of so-called peer-to-peer lenders. Traditionally, a saver would deposit their money in an account at a bank, which would then lend the cash out. The bank would pay the saver a small amount of interest and lend at much higher rates, pocketing the difference as profit. Peer-to-peer firms cut out the middleman and mean almost all the interest goes straight to the saver, giving much higher returns. However, up to 85,000 of savings are protected by law if a bank goes bust. There is no protection at all for money that is invested with peer-to-peer firms. Martin Samworth's office at the glass and steel London headquarters of CBRE the world's largest commercial property services group directly overlooks Debenhams' flagship Oxford Street store. The view might be regarded as a metaphor of the collapse of the High Street and the Brexit arrow aimed at property values. The ebullient 59-year-old Samworth, who has risen to the very top of New York-quoted CBRE as the company's international president, Advisory Services, based in London, takes a different view. Backing Britain: Martin Samworth of the world's largest commercial property services group CBRE Not only does he see recovery opportunities on Britain's high streets but he also reports inward investment in property is as strong as ever and the prices of upmarket homes in the UK's biggest cities are coming back. 'The high street is going through a significant change. But the prime end of the market will continue. People want to socially interact. They want to go out and add a leisure experience,' Samworth says. An indicator of continuing overseas interest is the offer for the UK-based real estate investment trust RDI by the Australian predator Cromwell. And AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould argued recently that British property firms were undervalued. Over lunch in his capacious office, Samworth, pictured, shows little anxiety about what is next for the British market. If his confidence sounds like estate agent's bluster we shouldn't be surprised. Samworth joined property company St Quintin directly from Birmingham Polytechnic where he studied estate management. Some 36 years later, his feet have barely touched the ground. When we meet, he is hotfoot back from Singapore and is heading to Australia. The roots of CBRE can be traced back to America's most recognised realtor Coldwell Banker (CB), founded in San Francisco in 1906. In 1998, it merged with the international arm of Richard Ellis (RE), the British firm founded in 1773. CBRE is unrecognisable, no longer dominated by stiff, traditional surveyors. It embraces new technology, the flexible office model associated with Wework and has its own embryonic investment bank. Last year, worldwide revenues hit 16.4billion and it had 90,000 staff. As the possibility of a disruptive Brexit looms, much has been made of the damage to the UK's global reputation. But Samworth is confident, in spite of survey data suggesting commercial construction and civil engineering might be stalling. 'International investment in the UK continues. There is a strong appetite and I think in one or two parts of the world they may have pressed pause. 'But in the last six months you have seen some of the most high-profile buildings sold. There has been a diverse appetite from Koreans, Americans and the Middle East. 'The Chinese may have pulled back because of restrictions on outbound investment. US-based opportunity funds are back doing business.' They are attracted by 'where the pound is, there is still a foreign exchange advantage.' It is not just London catching the imagination. He says: 'Manchester and increasingly Birmingham now is an attraction for global investors both commercial real estate and residential. We are selling quite a few high-end flats in Birmingham, some to the Chinese.' One attraction is new infrastructure. 'London is, I think, second only to Dubai in terms of the amount of infrastructure coming on stream 258billion was the last figure I saw, way ahead of New York and Moscow.' If the uncertainty over Brexit were to be lifted, Samworth is in no doubt as to what would happen. 'There is investment waiting that has been deferred. 'That could take place and we will see something of a bounce.' He offers a brighter perspective amid the gloom from some. The Russians and Chinese may be less active but other overseas investors are keeping the faith with global Britain. Savers have just three days to use their tax-free Isa allowance before losing it. Banks and building societies are enticing savers with new top easy-access accounts paying as much as 1.5 per cent. The best deals are usually online but even in branches savers can earn up to 1.35 per cent or 135 on a 10,000 lump sum. However, they should watch out for onerous terms and conditions among top payers such as allowing just one withdrawal a year, or slashing the rate after 12 months. Isa deals: Banks and building societies are enticing savers with new top easy-access accounts paying as much as 1.5 per cent The advantage of putting savings into a cash Isa is that any interest is automatically tax free. You have until the close of business this Friday to use your 20,000 allowance for the current tax year. On April 6, you get a new 20,000 allowance, which you have until April 5, 2020, to use. Paragon's Limited Edition Easy Access Cash Isa at 1.45 per cent, OakNorth's Easy Access Cash Isa at 1.44 per cent, and Shawbrook's Easy Access Cash Isa at 1.43 per cent are among the top online deals. If you are looking for a branch-based account, Newcastle BS paying 1.35 per cent, Virgin Money with 1.16 per cent and Coventry BS at 1.15 per cent are among the best payers with a wide network. Smaller providers include Kent Reliance at 1.4 per cent and Market Harborough BS and Monmouthshire BS at 1.15 per cent. There are better cash Isa rates on offer but they have stricter terms and conditions. For example, Santander's eIsa pays 1.5 per cent. But to qualify for the account you must also be a Santander 1/2/3 World or Select customer. The rate is also only payable for a year. After this your money will be transferred into the bank's Isa Saver, which pays as little as 0.35 per cent so you must remember to switch again to a better deal. Leeds BS new Limited Edition Online Access Isa Issue 11, out yesterday, pays 1.46 per cent. There are no withdrawal restrictions, but the account only runs until May next year. Skipton Online Bonus Cash Isa, launched this morning, pays 1.42 per cent, including a 0.42 percentage point bonus for the first 16 months. Virgin Money's Double Take E Isa pays 1.45 per cent. You can make just two withdrawals and no more, though you can close the account by transferring to another Isa. Nationwide pays 1.4 per cent on its Loyalty Single Access Isa, but you must have been a member of the society for at least a year. The best rate available to new customers is 1.3 per cent. You are also restricted to just one annual withdrawal; more and your rate will drop to 0.5 per cent. Savers should watch out for onerous terms and conditions among top payers such as allowing just one withdrawal a year, or slashing the rate after 12 months Yorkshire BS's Single Access deal pays 1.46 per cent and limits you to withdrawals on one day a year. The Nationwide and Yorkshire accounts are available online and through branches. Leeds BS branch-based Double Access account pays 1.3 per cent but just two withdrawals are allowed annually. Any more and 30 days' interest is lost. And Newcastle BS Easy Access is paying 1.35 per cent including a 0.6 percentage point bonus for a year, after which your rate will drop to 0.75 per cent unless you switch. If you are willing to tie up your money for a year, you can earn 1.78 per cent from OakNorth Bank, 1.77 per cent from Shawbrook Bank or 1.75 per cent from Charter Savings Bank online. In the High Street, Yorkshire and Clydesdale banks pay 1.6 per cent fixed for a year to their current account holders. Kent Reliance pays 1.6 per cent, Yorkshire BS 1.55 per cent and Leeds BS 1.51 per cent. It takes just a few minutes to open an account online if you have your National Insurance number (find it on your payslip, P60 or letters about tax, pensions or benefits). To meet this year's Isa deadline your cash must reach the account before midnight, Friday. In branch, you will have to take proof of who you are, such as a passport or driving licence. You also need proof of where you live from a recent council tax bill, a bank statement or utility bill. If you have trouble getting this information together in time for Friday, you can still open an account quickly with existing savings or current account providers as they have already completed these checks. Once your money is there, you can move it to a different cash Isa or a stocks-and-shares Isa later. Finally, beware advertisements for a new type of Isa which can appear on comparison sites with headline-grabbing rates of more than 6 per cent. These might look like an ordinary savings account but are much riskier. The City regulator yesterday warned that savers should 'carefully consider' where their money is invested before putting it into an innovative finance Isa. The Financial Conduct Authority says it has seen evidence that the riskier products were being promoted alongside cash Isas. These Innovative Finance Isas are offered by peer-to-peer lenders which, through their websites, match up savers and borrowers both individuals and small businesses. They are riskier as the borrower might find they cannot afford to pay the interest promised, or default on their loan altogether. Unlike other Isas, your money is also not covered up to 85,000 by the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme if the firm goes bust. sy.morris@dailymail.co.uk Her husband has quite the reputation for awkward kisses - and it seems Dr Jill Biden does too. During an event at the White House on Thursday, she planted a kiss on the cheek of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. The encounter happened at the podium in the State Dining Room of the White House, shortly after Michelle Obama marked the fifth anniversary of a nationwide initiative supporting veterans. Scroll down for video Dr. Jill Biden (right) plants a kiss on the cheek of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos at a White House event And Mrs Obama said the next president of the United States should continue to make a 'national priority' of supporting service members, veterans and their families. The first lady and Dr. Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, created 'Joining Forces' in 2011 to help retiring and returning service members find jobs, help spouses transfer professional licenses after they move to another state and provide other support. Mrs Obama said that more than 1.2 million veterans and spouses have been hired or trained since the launch. She announced that 40 companies have pledged to hire more than 110,000 veterans and spouses over the next five years. Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, appeared with her and said the online retailer will hire 25,000 veterans over the period, nearly one-fourth of the total. Mrs Obama said service members don't stop learning when they hang up the uniform and are eager to 'find their next mission' and use their training and talent to serve the country at home. The encounter happened at the podium in the State Dining Room of the White House on Thursday Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, appeared at the event that marked the fifth anniversary of a nationwide initiative supporting veterans The first lady and Dr. Biden created 'Joining Forces' in 2011 to help retiring and returning service members find jobs. Above, Mrs Obama with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (right) and Kathleen Carroll, head of Amazon's military outreach program (center) From left, Amazon's head of military outreach Kathleen Carroll, Amazon fouder Jeff Bezos and Dr. Jill Biden participate in an event announcing commitments from more than 50 companies that have pledged to hire and train veterans and military spouses Giving them the opportunity is the least the nation can do, she told an audience of business leaders. 'So we need to keep up this momentum,' the first lady said. 'And I will say this again and again and again: No matter who is in the White House next, this should absolutely continue to be a national priority with national leadership coming from this building.' The announcement was part of a month-long series of events by Mrs Obama and Dr Biden to mark the program's anniversary. President Barack Obama, Biden and their wives were headed to nearby Andrews Air Force Base later on Thursday to open a USO comedy show in observance of Military Appreciation Month. Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, said the online retailer will hire 25,000 veterans over the next five years Mrs Obama announced that 40 companies have pledged to hire more than 110,000 veterans and spouses over the next five years First lady Michelle Obama speaks as Jeff Bezos (right) the founder and CEO of Amazon, listens, during an event in the State Dining Room of the White House First lady Michelle Obama hugs Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com during the event The event marks the anniversary of 'Joining Forces' and the 75th year of the USO, a military service organization. Former 'Daily Show' host Jon Stewart is headlining the extravaganza for some 1,500 service members and their families. David Letterman, former host of 'The Late Show,' is scheduled to appear, and producer and writer Judd Apatow is among the comedians who are expected to perform. Obama leaves office in January. A two-horse spill in the $100,000 San Simeon Stakes at Santa Anita on Sunday led to the 23rd equine fatality at the Southern California track in just over three months. Footage from the race posted by PETA shows Arms Runner injure his right front leg and fall in the Grade 3 race on turf causing a trailing horse, La Sardane, to go down as well. La Sardane, a five-year-old mare was able to get back on her feet and walk back to her barn under her own power. She didn't sustain any injuries, according to a statement issued by the track. The accident occurred only two days after Santa Anita reopened after it was closed for nearly a month as the park looked into the spate of fatalities. Arms Runner and Martin Pedroza race in the San Gabriel Stakes at Santa Anita Park on January 05, 2019 in Arcadia, California. The horse was euthanized after a fatal accident at the park on Sunday A few horses and riders are seen on the track while members of the California Horse Racing Board weigh new safety and medication rules in the wake of multiple horse deaths at Santa Anita Park, in Arcadia, California, March 28 Jockey Ruben Fuentes who rode La Sardane didn't ride the rest of the day. He was a late replacement for scheduled rider Joel Rosario. Arms Runner was tended to by track veterinarians and vanned off. Track stewards said the horse trained by Peter Miller was euthanized. Arms Runner had three wins in 13 career starts and earnings of $125,292, according to Equibase. Jockey Martin Pedroza, who was aboard Arms Runner, rode later in the day. The accident occurred as the horses crossed the dirt surface during the transition from the hillside turf course to the main turf course. The majority of the fatalities at the Arcadia track since December 26 have occurred on the main dirt surface. Arms Runner injured his right front leg and fell in the Grade 3 race causing trailing horse, La Sardane, to fall as well. The five-year-old mare was able to get back on her feet and walk back to her barn under her own power Samples and measurements are taken on the sand track at Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia, California on March 7, having started in response to a recent spate of horse deaths 'While this incident happened during competition on a track that has been deemed by independent experts to be safe, we are working closely with the California Horse Racing Board to understand if there was anything additional that we could have done to prevent today's tragedy,' according to a statement issued by the track. 'Today's incident speaks to the larger issue of catastrophic injuries in horse racing that The Stronach Group together with our industry stakeholders are working to solve throughout California and across the country.' The rest of the nine-race card was completed after the accident. The track closed March 3 so officials could inspect and renovate the dirt surface after the series of fatalities that have drawn national attention outside the sport and criticism from animal rights groups. PETA animal rights activists protested the death of 22 horses at the Santa Anita Racetrack on March 14. The activists called on the Los Angeles District Attorney to open a criminal investigation, while the racetrack suspended racing while it is investigated the incidents This image provided by Benoit Photo shows Law Abidin Citizen and jockey Tiago Pereira, second from left, outlegging Mesut (Geovanni Franco), left, Air Vice Marshal (Martin Garcia), third from left, and Cistron (Rafael Bejarano), right, to win the Grade III, $100,000 San Simeon Stakes, Sunday, March 31 Track officials have not announced a singular cause for the unusual number of deaths. The Stronach Group, which owns Santa Anita, announced an immediate reduction in the amount of anti-bleeding medication Lasix allowed on race days. The California Horse Racing Board approved the measure and it took effect Friday. A proposed rule that would eliminate the use of whips, except in cases where a horse's or jockey's safety is involved, still requires the approval of various state agencies. President Trump sent a trio of tweets late Monday criticizing Puerto Rico's government and its 'crazed and 'incompetent' mayor of San Juan while claiming money has already been allocated for the island's recovery from a devastating hurricane. 'The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any "place" in history,' Trump tweeted. 'The people of Puerto Rico are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt,' he added. President Trump (left) on Monday lashed out at Puerto Rico and the 'crazed and incompetent' mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz (right) Senate Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican disaster aid bill, saying it doesn't do enough to help Puerto Rico, which prompted Trump to lash out on Twitter 'Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can't do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works,' the president tweeted Trump then mentioned the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz 'Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can't do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works. 'FEMA & the Military worked emergency miracles, but politicians like the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health.' The 'crazed and incompetent' mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, responded to the president's attacks. She tweeted late Monday: 'Pres Trump continues to embarrass himself & the Office he holds. 'He is unhinged & thus lies about the $ received by PR. HE KNOWS HIS RESPONSE was innefficient [sic] at best. 'He can huff & puff all he wants but he cannot escape the death of 3,000 on his watch. 'SHAME ON YOU!' The 'crazed and incompetent' mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, responded to the president's attacks. She tweeted late Monday: 'Pres Trump continues to embarrass himself & the Office he holds' In another tweet, Cruz wrote: 'Mr President I am right here ready to call you on every lie, every hypocrisy and every ill fated action against the people of Puerto Rico' In another tweet, Cruz wrote: 'Mr President I am right here ready to call you on every lie, every hypocrisy and every ill fated action against the people of Puerto Rico. 'My voice,and the voices of the people of Puerto Rico, will continue to unmask your insentive [sic], incapable & vindictive ways.' Senate Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican disaster aid bill, saying it doesn't do enough to help Puerto Rico. The move tossed long-sought relief for victims of hurricanes, floods and western wildfires into limbo. The vote escalated a fight between Democrats and President Trump, who opposes further rebuilding aid for the U.S. island territory, which was slammed by back-to-back hurricanes in 2017. The 44-49 vote fell short of a majority, much less the 60 votes required to overcome a Democratic filibuster. It sent GOP leaders back to the drawing board but seemed unlikely to kill disaster aid efforts outright, since there is much political support to send aid to Southern farmers, wildfire-ravaged California towns and Midwestern flood victims. Trump allies such as Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., are among the strongest backers of the legislation, which has already faced significant delays. Trump is seen above shaking hands with Cruz during the president's visit to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria on October 3, 2017 'We will get this done eventually,' Perdue said, promising relief to struggling farmers in his state. The path forward is not clear, but a leading option is for the Senate to pass a much more narrowly drawn bill simply to get the issue into a House-Senate conference committee. House Democrats insist the talks must produce a final measure with help for Puerto Rico. The amount of money in dispute is relatively small, but Trump feels antipathy toward Puerto Rico's government and Senate Republicans backed him up - for now - in denying Democratic demands for more aid to rebuild its badly damaged water systems and to ease the requirement that Puerto Rico financially match a portion of the federal government's aid contribution. Democrats say Trump has been slow to release already-appropriated funding for Puerto Rico and has exhibited little urgency in helping the island. Trump poor-mouthed the island's government at a meeting with Senate Republicans last week and suggested Puerto Rico has gotten too much disaster help compared with states such as Texas, using inflated numbers to make his case. 'Just as we leave no soldier behind on the battlefield, we help our fellow Americans when there's a disaster, wherever the disaster strikes. We do not abandon them. Period,' said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. The $13.5billion Senate measure mostly mirrors a $14.2billion measure passed by the House in January, combining aid to Southern farmers, California communities devastated by last summer's wildfire, and hurricane-hit states such as Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Hurricane-damaged military bases in Florida and North Carolina would receive rebuilding funds. Democrats want to add almost $700million more to unlock further disaster aid for Puerto Rico and several states, including help to rebuild badly damaged water systems. Democrats are also trying to force the administration to release billions of dollars in rebuilding funds that have already been approved. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the measure is the fastest way to get aid to the hurricane-slammed South and the badly flooded Midwest, along with nutrition aid to Puerto Rico, where food stamp benefits have already been cut. 'It's our only sure path to making a law with anywhere near the urgency these Americans deserve. It is the only bill on the table with any provision for the Midwest flooding,' McConnell said. Democrats say Trump has been slow to release already-appropriated funding for Puerto Rico and has exhibited little urgency in helping the island. The above image shows a woman carrying her granddaughter in her home as plastic sheet replaces the roof in April 2018 'And it's the only bill on the table that could earn a presidential signature in time to deliver urgent relief on the nutrition assistance in Puerto Rico.' The political momentum for the measure - strongly backed by Trump's allies in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, among other states - has only been heightened by massive flooding in Midwestern states such as Nebraska and Iowa, whose nominating caucuses are the first test for Democrats hoping to challenge Trump next year. The GOP measure would make Midwestern states eligible for more aid, and by blocking the bill, Democratic presidential contenders in the Senate are likely to face criticism. Trump has yet to veto a spending bill despite some tough talk, and he has signed off on $600million to ease food stamp cuts in Puerto Rico. 'I have taken better care of Puerto Rico than any man ever. We have $91billion going to Puerto Rico. We have $29billion to Texas and $12billion to Florida for the hurricane,' Trump said last week. 'They have to spend the money wisely. They don't know how to spend the money and they're not spending it wisely.' Trump's $91billion estimate, said a White House spokesman, includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements, along with $41billion that's already been approved. Actual aid to Puerto Rico has flowed slowly from federal coffers. Women's clothing giant Noni B has been accused of not allowing staff to take toilet breaks, with one employee claiming she was forced to urinate in a mop bucket. Staff who work for the Noni B group - which also includes retailers Rockmans, Millers and Rivers - have complained to the union about their working conditions. The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA) said it would challenge the company's plans to make 'a number of roles' redundant. But Noni B has rubbished workers' explosive claims, saying the wellbeing of its staff is 'paramount and accusing the union of running a 'deeply concerning' campaign to secure a better enterprise agreement. Staff who work for the Noni B group - which also includes Rockmans, Millers and Rivers - have complained to their union about their working conditions and staff shortages Alana Davis - who worked at Rockmans in South Australia in 2017 - claims she was told by her manager to wear two sanitary pads on top of each other, so she wouldn't need to go to the toilet. On her first shift, Ms Davis - who is on medication which requires her to drink water regularly - claims she was told to not drink anything after 6am so she wouldn't need to go to the toilet. Rockmans' manager reportedly threatened to fire Ms Davis on the spot when she called asking for permission to close the store temporarily so she could go to the toilet, as they had rostered her on a busy Sunday shift alone. 'She told me to call security, and that if security couldn't [man the store] then I'd instantly lose my job,' Ms Davis told Daily Mail Australia. The SDA wasn't surprised when they got the call from Ms Davis, telling her they'd received similar complaints in the past about Rockmans - Noni B's sister brand. Following their phone call, the SDA went to her store to talk to employees about their rights. 'They (the union) were hot onto it, they rocked up in store and made it subtle,' Ms Davis said, revealing her managers were unaware she'd gone to the unions. A few weeks later she was fired after speaking with the SDA for a second time behind the back of the store's management team. 'My manager said to me 'it's just not working out. We've been told you're not happy and today's your last shift',' Ms Davis said. The SDA wasn't surprised when they got the call from employees of the Noni B Group, telling them they'd received similar complaints in the past about Rockmans - Noni B's sister brand According to disgruntled employees, Millers' understaffing is just as bad as Rockmans, with workers forced to go an entire shift without a toilet break. 'Going to the toilet meant closing all the doors to use the shopping centre ones, but you obviously had to wait for customers to leave and that was almost impossible on sale days,' said a former employee. Some workers have claimed this has led to urinary tract infections, with one woman even reporting to have been forced to use a mop bucket as a toilet in the store. SDA National Secretary Gerard Dwyer claims the union has been hit with dozens of complaints by Noni B employees about understaffing and cuts to part-time hours. 'The SDA has received numerous complaints from a range of employees regarding multiple work practices that fall short of good industrial standards or breach workplace regulations,' Mr Dwyer said. 'These practices have included setting out to unilaterally cut hours for part-time workers by 20% without proper consultation and understaffing stores which has placed excessive sales demands and work tasks on remaining retail staff. Some workers have claimed not being allowed to go to the toilet has led to urinary tract infections, with one woman even reporting to have been forced to use a mop bucket as a toilet in the store 'In some cases, this deliberate understaffing meant retail employees were at times left in stores alone and could not take toilet breaks or were forced to lift heavy boxes and work up ladders in an unsafe manner. Noni B is said to employ 7000 staff across Australia. In a statement released on Tuesday, Noni B said it was important for any team members with a problem to discuss it with their manager. 'Team members have always been told that, when working alone, they can close the store if necessary. This was further communicated to all store managers last week to ensure there is no misunderstanding,' the statement read. 'If the SDA is aware of any safety issues that it has not raised with the Group, the Group remains ready and willing to meet with SDA representatives to understand and, if appropriate, clarify or address them.' Tax cuts of more than $1000 for 10 million Australians, huge payments for bosses who hire apprentices, billions for your commute and a Budget surplus for the first time in 12 years. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's 2019 budget can be revealed as an election year splurge packed full of goodies to tempt voters to back Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the May election. 'The budget is back in the black and Australia is back on track,' Mr Frydenberg told Parliament on Tuesday night, as he crowed about the country's first surplus since John Howard was in power in 2007. At the heart of the pre-election budget is a massive tax break of up to $1,080 per person which the Treasurer hopes voters will be cheering. The biggest winners are the 4.5 million taxpayers who earn between $48,000 and $90,000 a year. They will walk home with the maximum bonus at tax time in July. Scroll down for video Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, 47, cradled his son Blake after revealing his pre-election Budget splurge with tax cuts for tens of millions of Australians... just in time for voters to go to the polls Mr Frydenberg smooched wife Amie after hailing his $7.1 billion surplus to Parliament on Tuesday evening The Frydenberg family - Amie, Blake and daughter Gemma in a sparkly dress and fascinator- watched on with Prime Minister Scott Morrison's wife Jenny Former foreign minister Julie Bishop was in a chipper mood for her last budget as a sitting MP. Her sparkly blue number is a $1,300 Rachel Gilbert gown. A black tie event is typically held in Parliament on Budget night The young Mr Frydenberg, 47, said his first budget, with a $7.1 billion surplus, was the result of 'responsible budget management'. 'It restores our nation's finances without increasing taxes,' he told Parliament in his first Budget address. The budget is back in the black and Australia is back on track Josh Frydenberg in his budget speech Wife Amie and children Gemma and Blake watched on as Mr Frydenberg hailed his financial plan as one designed to make life easier for 'average families' on a median household income of $74,800 a year. 'Their cost of living pressures will be eased... there will be more money in their pocket,' said Mr Frydenberg. One of the big Budget winners are apprentices, he said, with the government announcing a plan to hire 80,000 young people and double incentive payments for employers to $8000. People struggling with their power bills are also coming out on top, with a $125 cash handout due to land in bank accounts in the coming weeks. Losers include first home buyers and university students, who don't come home with much; high income earners, who get little; child sex offenders, who will be named on a public register; and bikies, the focus of a $100 million police crackdown. Budget bromance: Mr Frydenberg hugs the prime minister, as deputy PM Michael McCormack applauds The government has floated the tantalising prospect of high speed rail from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to regional cities, and has pledged to slash the personal income tax in the coming years. But only if the Coalition is re-elected. 'We want Australians to earn more and keep what they earn,' Mr Frydenberg said tonight, repeating eight times that the Coalition won't raise taxes. Labor leader Bill Shorten has already branded the budget a 'political leaflet'. The Opposition says the budget will essentially be redundant if Labor wins the election. Mr Morrison expected to visit Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove over the next fortnight to call a May election. Today's budget draws the battle lines. Below, Daily Mail Australia takes an in depth look at how the budget affects YOU. BATTLE LINES: Scott Morrison is expected to call an election in the coming days - after offering millions of voters a $1000 tax cut FEDERAL BUDGET 2019'S WINNERS Middle income earners: People who earn between $48,000 and $90,000. They will walk home with the maximum $1,080 offset come tax time Apprentices: There is a new plan to hire 80,000 apprentices in industries suffering skills shortages. The incentive for bosses to place apprentices has been doubled to $8,000 Small business-people and sole tradesmen: The instant asset write-off has been boosted to $30,000 a year meaning they will be able to deduct office equipment and tools at tax time Domestic violence victims: $380 million will be poured into efforts to stop violence against women in the wake high-profile killings of several women Cancer patients: Expensive drugs have been listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme, breast cancer MRIs will be claimable on Medicare, plus millions for the McGrath Foundation Retirees: Superannuation rules tweaked so people aged 65 and 66 will have 'more flexibility' Advertisement FEDERAL BUDGET 2019'S LOSERS First home buyers and university students: Little in the budget for these big groups of young people The unemployed: No increase to the dole (Newstart) High income earners: Only a tiny tax cut of $135 for now Child sex offenders: People convicted of sex offences will be named and pictured on a 'publicly available' register Bikies: The government has plunged almost $150 million into 'strengthening law enforcement efforts to combat outlaw motorcycle gangs' to fight the scourge of ice Foreign spies: There is an extra half-a-billion for ASIO and $35 million to 'counter activities that seek to undermine Australia's sovereign democratic institutions' Big banks: $600 million boost for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority to deal with banking royal commission fallout Christmas Island detention centre workers: The government will close the Christmas Island refugee facility in July just months after the Coalition re-opened it Migrants - Migration cap to be reduced to 160,000 from 190,000 Advertisement Mr Morrison and wife Jenny left the House of Representatives hand in hand after the speech What the budget means for you If you want a tax cut... The magic number in Mr Frydenberg's tax plans: $126,000. The ten million taxpayers who earned up to that amount got a tax break The magic number is $126,000. The 10 million taxpayers who earn up to that amount will get a tax break of up to $1,080 per person. That's because the government has more than doubled last year's low and middle income tax offset. How much money taxpayers take home depends on your wage. - Taxpayers who earn between $1 and $37,000 will get a tax break of up to $255. Some 2.3 million taxpayers will get this amount. - Taxpayers who earn between $37,001 and $47,999 will get a tax break of between $255 and $1,080. Some 1.7 million taxpayers will get this amount. - Taxpayers who earn between $48,000 and $90,000 will get the full tax break of $1,080. 4.5 million taxpayers will get this amount. Couples would take home a maximum $2,160 a year. - Taxpayers who earn between $90,001 and $126,000 will get tax break starting at $1,080, with the number falling as salaries get bigger. 1.6 million taxpayers are in this bracket. - Taxpayers who earn $126,001 or more will get a $135 tax break The money will be available when Australians submit their tax returns for the financial year from July 1 onwards. The tax break will be available for four years. This graph shows how the tax cuts are broken down per bracket - with 4.5 million taxpayers getting the full cut of $1,080 The Treasurer wants to cut taxes even more by changing the tax brackets between now and 2024-25. It would result in 13.3 million people paying lower taxes but it's two elections away. If those plans did go ahead, by 2024-25, people earning up to $45,000 would pay 19 per cent tax; people earning between $45,001 and $200,000 would pay 30 per cent tax; and people earning over $200,000 would pay 45 per cent tax. The massive cuts come about after some stronger-than-expected royalties from higher iron ore prices. If you're struggling with high electricity bills More than 3.9 million welfare recipients will receive a cash handout to ease the cost of high electricity prices. Singles will be paid $75 and couples $125 under the so-called energy assistance payment. Age and disability support pensioners, single parenting payment recipients, carers, former servicemen and women and their dependents will be eligible. But the unemployed won't get a cent. Nor will self-funded retirees who don't receive a part-pension. Cash handouts all round: Many taxpayers will get both the energy payment and their tax return Mr Frydenberg says the government will pay out the $285 million rebate by July. It looks likely to pass Parliament, with Labor leader Bill Shorten ridiculing the rebate as a 'con ... worth about $1.45 a week', but still saying he will support the measure. If you are a young person Apprentices are the biggest winners and live music got a surprise boost - but young people looking for action on housing affordability or for help with university will be disappointed. The biggest budget item for young people is a $525 million skills package, which creates 80,000 new apprenticeships in industries with skills shortages and give apprentices a $2,000 'incentive' payment. Employers will have more reason to hire apprentices. They will be paid $8,000 per placement, double the current incentive. Struggling areas with high youth unemployment will get ten trial 'vocational training hubs' at local schools. The live music industry will get a $30 million boost. Most of it will comes in the form of grants to support live music venues. Live music got a $30 million boost in the budget and young people who want an apprenticeship were also big winners Youth mental health services have won millions including extended early psychosis services, $265 million for headspace clinics, and $6.1 million for a trauma recovery centre. The government has plunged a further $2 billion into an effort to fight climate change, which would affect future generations. There's nothing for first home buyers and only a few references to university students. Teachers who ply their trade in very remote areas for four years will have their uni debts extinguished. The government is also funding new scholarship placements for indigenous students and is trying to improve the number of Aboriginal children finishing high school. If you are a woman After the hideous killings of too many women including the alleged murder of Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon the government has boosted domestic and family violence funding. $328 million has been poured into stopping domestic and family violence, including a plan to close loopholes that stop state agencies from hearing about violent incidents heard by the Family Court. Big money was poured into stopping violence against women and for a donor milk bank for premature babies The budget includes big efforts to help breast cancer patients, including MRI screenings funded by Medicare and money for the McGrath foundation to supply 41 breast cancer nurses. There's a $150 million effort to build new female change rooms at sporting grounds and swimming facilities across the country. The government will build an AFLW (AFL Women's league) facility in Queensland and redevelop a current facility in Victoria, Carlton's Ikon Park. Some $675,000 will be handed to a program to women to join the male-dominated construction industry. If you have kids Healthy Harold has been saved from the axe and will be funded for years. So will efforts to get 350,000 kids into pre-school education. Almost half-a-billion will be poured into getting kids into 15 hours of preschool each week for kids attending preschool in 2020. Australian education icon Healthy Harold will continue to prosper with Life Education Australia receiving $5 million in federal funding. The government was planning to slash funding a few years ago We will continue to work with the states and territories to support a longer term plan, said Mr Frydenberg. Mums of premature babies will win out when a donor milk bank service is expanded to keep little bubs alive. If you run a small business... Companies that turn over less than $10 million will get a bigger tax deduction when they buy work gear. The instant asset write-off has been boosted to $30,000 up from $20,000 meaning businesses will be able to deduct more office gear, tools and vehicles. Pick your tools up... small business people who turn over less than $10 million will be able to write off tools, office equipment and other items on tax up to the value of $25,000 The deduction starts from tonight and will last until June 30, 2020, with the government claiming businesses will be able to use the money to hire more workers. The government has passed tax cuts for small and medium sized companies (SMEs) and promises to slash taxes further if it's re-elected. If you drive, fly or catch the train... More has been plunged into a mammoth effort to make Australians' commutes easier and to fix troubled roads. Infrastructure funding will jump $25 billion to $100 billion over the next 10 years in a bid to connect Australia's job-creating cities with regional population centres. High speed rail is on the agenda with the Treasurer saying a 'fast-rail vision for Australia' is at the centre of its plan. The government has put $40 million towards investigating five fast rail corridors: from Sydney to Parkes via Bathurst and Orange; Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast and Melbourne from Traralgon to Albury-Wodonga. A National Faster Rail Agency will also open its doors. $2 billion has been committed to a 'bullet train' between Geelong and Melbourne, provided the state government stumps up the same amount. The train will travel at 160km/h, the fastest in the nation. The federal government is investigating high speed rail corridors from Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne to regional cities including Parkes, the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Geelong, Traralgon and Albury-Wodonga $75 billion has been plunged into infrastructure projects across the country over ten years. Westconnex construction works in Sydney are seen above Other headline-grabbing projects in the budget include: $2.2 billion to make roads safer , including improving bush highways, fixing black spots and a road safety office , including improving bush highways, fixing black spots and a road safety office Funds to develop business cases for trains from Melbourne to Tullamarine Airport , and connecting a rail link to Sydney's forthcoming second airport , and connecting a rail link to $253 million for ' congestion-busting' projects in Sydney and the NSW Central Coast, $194 million for Adelaide, $730 million for North Queensland roads in Sydney and the NSW Central Coast, $194 million for Adelaide, $730 million for North Queensland roads $2.6 billion on 'priority regional and urban transport infrastructure in Queensland, including the Gateway Motorway extension from Bracken Ride to Pine River, the M1 upgrade and almost half a billion for the Bruce Highway An extra $1.6 billion for West Australian roads and railway projects $1 billion to improve freight networks, including road upgrades along the east coast of Australia If you're thinking about retiring... Superannuation rules have been tweaked especially for semi-retired people who work one day a week or volunteer. People age 65 and 66 will be able to make voluntary super contributions without having to work a minimum of 40 hours a month from July 1, 2020. Th eage limit for spouses to contribute to their partner's super will also jump from 69 to 74. The government has tweaked superannuation rules for so people aged 65 and 66 have 'more flexibility' (stock image) People over 70 currently can't receive contributions made by another person on their behalf. Elderly people who want to stay at home for longer will have more support after the government funded a further 10,000 places. If you're ill... X-rays and ultrasounsd may get cheaper with the government investing $200 million to index Medicare rebates for life-saving scans. Breast cancer MRI scans will be covered by Medicare. Some medicines will be substantially cheaper, as will life-saving diagnostic scans Two new drugs have been added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) for treatment of an aggressive skin cancer and an advanced breast cancer. Bavencio, used to treat the rare skin cancer metastatic merkel cell carcinoma, and Ibrance, which slows the growth of breast cancers, have both been listed. The PBS subsidy slashes the cost of Bavencio from $150,000 a year and Ibrance from $55,000 a year to about $40.30 per script. If you're sick of the banks behaving badly... The big regulators that police the banks will get a half-a-billion dollar top up, after a royal commission found them asleep on the job. Former High Court judge Hayne denounced ASIC (the Australian Securities and Investment Commission) and APRA (the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) for failing to take the banks to court. 'Much more often than not, when misconduct was revealed, little happened beyond apology,' Mr Hayne's said in his scathing report. ASIC's budget will balloon by 25 per cent, or $400 million, and APRA's bottom line was boosted $150 million, in the hope the financial cops will be 'better able to stamp out misconduct', Mr Frydenberg announced. If you enjoy watching the ABC and SBS You can still tune in. The government has guaranteed $4 billion over three years to both public broadcasters, including tens of millions for local news and current affairs, which bosses were worried would be cut. If you're a drug user The scourge of the drug ice will be fought with a $340 million National Drug Strategy, with a huge chunk of that going toward police efforts to fight bikies. If you're patriotic... Celebrating with a meme: Scott Morrison's budget surplus post Mr Morrison said he wants to honour Captain James Cook's journey to Australia 250 years ago because he gets a 'bit of a bad show'. His government has offered $12 million to support the Cooktown 2020 festival and fund a replica of Captain Cook's ship, Endeavour, to circumnavigate Australia. The Opposition scolded the PM for his 'Captain Cook fetish' when he made the announcement the week before Australia Day. But Mr Morrison said he wants 'to help Australians better understand Captain Cook's historic voyage and its legacy for exploration, science and reconciliation. 'That voyage is the reason Australia is what it is today and it's important we take the opportunity to reflect on it.' Birmingham prison is being brought back in-house permanently after it plunged into crisis under private management. HM Prison and Probation Service took over the jail from private firm G4S in August. The unprecedented move was announced at the same time as Chief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke published a scathing assessment of the prison, which is one of the largest in the country. The initial 'step-in' was for at least six months - before being extended to the summer. Scroll for videos Prisons Minister Rory Stewart said he was confident HMP Birmingham has made good progress since it was taken back from private firm G4S's control in August Staff had been beaten up by marauding prisoners, guards were hiding in offices and drugs were openly taken as ministers took back control of the prison. Pictured: Lawless inmates during a riot inside the facility in 2016 The Government announced yesterday that HMPPS has decided, with the full agreement of G4S, to end the contract seven years early. Prisons Minister Rory Stewart said: 'I am confident that HMP Birmingham has made good progress since the 'step-in' but to build on this, the prison needs stability and continuity. 'That is why we have mutually agreed with G4S that the public sector is better placed to drive the long-term improvements required and the contract will end. 'Our priority remains the safety of prisoners and staff but this move to restore and consolidate order at one of our most challenging jails will ultimately make sure that we are better protecting the public.' A still from video footage of the riot at HMP Birmingham in 2017 shows rubbish and debris strewn on the grounds He stressed the Government still believes in a 'mixed economy' of providers, saying some private jails are among the best performing. 'Indeed, G4S itself is running excellent prisons at Altcourse and Oakwood, and this Government believes passionately that private providers should continue to play a crucial role in our system,' Mr Stewart said. Mr Clarke triggered the 'urgent notification' scheme to demand immediate action at HMP Birmingham following an inspection visit last summer. The Government announced today HMPPS decided - with the full agreement of G4S - to end the private firm's contract seven years early The chief inspector's report, which detailed findings prior to the Government's intervention, revealed that inmates walked around 'like zombies' while high on drugs in scenes likened to a war zone. Prisoners flouted rules without challenge from staff, many of whom were 'anxious and fearful' as they went about their duties, the assessment found. G4S was awarded a 15-year-contract to run the jail in 2011. The firm will pay 9.9 million to cover additional costs associated with the step-in and essential maintenance works. G4S custodial & detention services managing director Jerry Petherick said: 'HMP Birmingham is an inner-city remand prison which faces exceptional challenges including high levels of prisoner violence towards staff and fellow prisoners. 'We believe that it is in the best interests of staff and the company that management of this prison is transferred to HMPPS and we will work closely with the Ministry of Justice to ensure a smooth transition over the next three months. 'We will continue to deliver high quality services at the other four major UK prisons that we manage and I would like to pay tribute to all of our employees who provide an outstanding service at these prisons, often in a demanding operating environment.' Mark Fairhurst, national chairman of the Prison Officers Association, said the announcement means HMP Birmingham will be returned to 'where it rightfully belongs'. An attacker wearing a red 'Make America Great Again' hat used a sword to slash another man's hand after an argument outside a roller-skating rink, police say. The attacker fled the scene on Friday night outside the Church of 8 Wheels in San Francisco on Monday. The man wearing the hat featuring President Donald Trump's campaign slogan approached the victim and the two started arguing. When the victim tried to grab the hat, the attacker pulled out a sword and cut him, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Police are searching for the suspect who reportedly shouted homophobic slurs at a separate man before leaving his victim bleeding profusely on the sidewalk. A red 'Make America Great Again' hat could be seen lying on the ground near pools of blood after a man was slashed across the hand outside Sacred Heart Catholic Church Police said the victim pulled the MAGA hat off the attacker's head while the pair were arguing outside Church of 8 Wheels roller disco event Pictures from the scene showed the red MAGA hat left on the sidewalk near a pool of blood outside the popular roller-skating disco event at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Police said the victim tried to grab the hat when the suspect pulled out his sword and slashed the victim's hand. Officer Robert Rueca, a police spokesman, told the San Francisco Chronicle: 'We are still investigating what led up to the assault with the sword or edged weapon. 'We know the suspect was wearing the hat. During the incident the hat came off of the suspect. The suspect and the weapon remain outstanding.' Sgt. Michael Andraychak on Monday confirmed the sword attack but declined to offer any further details. The victim, whose name was not released, was treated at a hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. The man was attacked with a sword outside the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in San Francisco The red MAGA hat was made popular by President Trump during his 2016 campaign Scott Sweeney, who was in the area the night of the attack, said he saw a man with a MAGA hat and a sword tucked into the back of his jacket about 30 minutes before the incident. The man was shouting homophobic slurs at him, Sweeney said. He added: 'In my mind I didn't think it was a real sword until we came out later and police were on the scene and there was blood and the hat on ground.' David Miles, who runs the roller rink at the former Sacred Heart Catholic Church, said he didn't see the attack but ran out to help the victim. Miles said officers asked him if a man dressed as a pirate had come into the roller rink, but he hadn't seen anyone like that. Boeing and US aviation regulators say the company needs more time to finish changes in a flight-control system suspected of playing a role in two deadly crashes. The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it anticipates Boeing's final software improvements for 737 Max airliners 'in the coming weeks.' Boeing was expected to complete the work last week, but FAA spokesman Greg Martin said the company needs more time to make sure it has identified and addressed all issues. Chicago-based Boeing offered the same timetable as it works to convince regulators that it can fix software on the planes. A worker walks next to a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane parked at Boeing Field in Seattle. Aviation regulators said Monday that Boeing needs more time to finish changes in a flight-control system suspected of playing a role in two deadly crashes (File Photo) 'Safety is our first priority, and we will take a thorough and methodical approach to the development and testing of the update to ensure we take the time to get it right,' said Boeing spokesman Charles Bickers. Boeing needs approval not just from FAA, but elsewhere, including Europe and China, where safety officials have indicated they will conduct their own reviews. The planes have been grounded around the world since mid-March. The news from the FAA suggests that airlines could be forced to park their Max jets longer than they expected. Airlines that own Max jets are scrambling other planes to fill some Max flights while canceling others. 'We are aware that the resumption of service for our 737 Max aircraft may be further delayed, and our team will work with all customers impacted by any flight cancellations,' said American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein. Wreckage is piled at the crash scene of an Ethiopian Airlines flight crash near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Monday, March 11, 2019. A spokesman says Ethiopian Airlines has grounded all its Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft as a safety precaution American Airlines had been pointing toward a late-April return of its 24 Max 8s. Over the weekend, Southwest Airlines announced that its 34 Max 8s will be removed from the schedule through May instead of mid-April. United Airlines has idled its 14 Max 9s through June 5. Separately, US regulators and Boeing are awaiting a preliminary report from Ethiopian investigators into the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 jet shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa. The report will be scrutinized for information from the plane's data recorders that might suggest similarities between the doomed flight and the Oct. 29 crash of a Lion Air Max 8 into the Java Sea off Indonesia. The two crashes killed 346 people. Data from the Indonesian plane indicates that pilots unsuccessfully fought the automated anti-stall system for control of the plane, which plunged into the sea shortly after takeoff. According to published reports, the same system activated on the Ethiopian Airlines flight. Boeing is making changes in an automated system that is designed to prevent the plane's nose from rising, which can lead to a dangerous aerodynamic stall. The changes include relying on readings from more than one sensor before the anti-stall system activates and pushes the nose down, and making the system's actions less severe and easier for pilots to handle. Boeing has said it will pay to train pilots on the technology. Two American Airlines pilots who attended a session with Boeing experts last week expressed satisfaction with the manufacturer's changes. American's chief 737 pilot, Roddy Guthrie, said Boeing added 'some checks and balances in the system that will make the system much better.' Congress, meanwhile, is looking into the relationship between Boeing and the FAA. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee said Monday that it had requested records from both Boeing and the FAA related to the certification of the 737 Max. Drug enforcement officials in New York say they've seized narcotics labeled with a photo of infamous Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar. The Drug Enforcement Administration said Monday agents found 77 pounds of suspected heroin mixed with fentanyl during a search of an apartment in Harlem. They valued the drugs at more than $10million. Investigators said some of the kilos were wrapped in tape with photos of Escobar and labels reading 'Pablo' and 'Escobar' and were found inside a bedroom closet. $10 million worth of heroin fentanyl was seized in Harlem in New York along with $200k cash Many of the heroin bricks were all wrapped with a photo of late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar Escobar, who died in 1993, was the ruthless boss of the Medellin cartel and was once considered the 'king of cocaine.' He died in 1993 Other labels bore recipient code names and images of airplanes. Several clear plastic bags were also filled with loose powder. Ray Donovan heads the DEA's New York City office and says agents also made two arrests and seized $200,000 in cash, a money counter, drug records and a kilogram press. Ariel Hernandez faces charges of criminal possession of a Controlled Substance while Luisuidyn Garcia Mena is charged with conspiracy. Agents and investigators had been tracking the pair for some time and had been conducting surveillance on the duo. Officers allegedly noticed Hernandez and Garcia Mena meeting inside a black car before heading into the apartment building. Agents found $1,200 in cash inside the car along with two cellphones and fake IDs. Agents and investigators recovered approximately $200,000, a money counter, drug records and a kilogram press Just two milligrams of fentanyl is considered a lethal dose. When mixing with heroin, there is no way for the consumer to know just how much fentanyl is laced in the product. 'Opioid-related deaths are at a record high and it is our job to investigate those responsible for illicit drug distribution,' said Donovan. 'This organization used a photo of Pablo Escobar, who was known as the King of Cocaine, to mark their product. Albeit, this seizure was not cocaine, it shows a sign of the times, that heroin/fentanyl are the traffickers most profitable and plentiful product and the public's deadliest threat,' he added. Escobar was the ruthless boss of the Medellin cartel and was once considered the 'king of cocaine.' He died in 1993. The drugs were found at an apartment in Harlem and were hidden inside a bedroom closet He was a subject of the popular Narcos series on Netflix. Special Narcotics Prosecutor Brennan said: 'The amount of fentanyl and heroin seized is a chilling reminder of the daunting threat lethal opioids pose to vulnerable substance users and those tempted to try readily available drugs.' New York State Police Acting Superintendent Keith M. Corlett said: 'I applaud the dedication and hard work of the agencies that make up the New York Drug Enforcement Task Force. Together, and with these arrests, we are putting a stop to a dangerous drug operation, along with its associated violence. 'The seizure of these dangerous drugs no doubt saved lives. One arrest at a time we are sending a message that those who deal in these deadly and illegal substances will be held accountable, and their crimes will not be tolerated in New York.' Boris Johnson has left it to his father, Stanley (pictured), to shed light on the exemplary wartime record of Wilfred Johnson - father and grandfather of Stanley and Boris respectively No one could accuse Boris Johnson of shying away from burnishing his leadership credentials. But he has left it to his father, Stanley, to shed light on the exemplary wartime record of Wilfred Johnson father and grandfather of Stanley and Boris respectively. Stanley, always an ardent supporter of his eldest sons prime ministerial ambitions, chose to break his silence in a public talk in Barnstaple, Devon. Recalling how his father, who died in 1992 aged 85, made a bold and principled decision which saved many lives, Stanley homed in on August 17, 1944. That was the date, he explained, on which Wilfred, a Wellington bomber pilot, took off from RAF Chivenor in Devon, loaded with depth charges intended for German U-boats. But before he could close in on his target, one of the Wellingtons engines plummeted to the ground presenting Wilfred with a grim dilemma. He couldnt fly long on one engine, said Stanley. His father had to return to base but also jettison the depth charges so as to ease the burden on the Wellingtons surviving engine. If he had returned via the shortest route, Stanley Johnson said, the bombs 'would have dropped on the villages of Fremington and Bickington. Instead, he opted for a longer route to drop them harmlessly and his plane crash-landed on the final approach, killing two of his crew. He was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. I think in recognition of a piece of skilful flying, reflected Stanley. Wilfred is pictured here in his flight suit Yet, if he returned to Chivenor by the shortest route, these would have dropped on the villages of Fremington and Bickington. Instead, Wilfred opted for a longer, circuitous route, allowing him to drop the depth charges harmlessly over open country, before heading back to Chivenor where, as he made his final approach, he clipped a telegraph pole and crash-landed. Two of his crew were killed, whilst his co-pilot lost an arm. Wilfred himself was severely injured, spending a protracted time recovering in hospital. Wilfred, grandfather of Boris, took off from RAF Chivenor in 1944, flying a Wellington bomber in loaded with depth charges intended for German U-boats. But when one of the engines fell to the ground, Wilfred had to jettison the charges and return to base He was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. I think in recognition of a piece of skilful flying, reflected Stanley. The medal was accompanied by a personal letter from King George VI saying that he greatly regretted not being able to make the presentation in person. Distinguished Flying Cross: The medal was accompanied by a personal letter from King George VI saying that he greatly regretted not being able to make the presentation in person. Fancy dresser Irons cuts a dash with wife Jeremy Irons proved himself a natty dresser when he attended the Coliseums annual Russian Ballet Icons Gala. The 70-year-old Oscar winner wore a Slavic peasant shirt called a Kosovorotka and a black collarless coat. Joining him was his actress wife of 40 years, Sinead Cusack. It was a rare outing for the thespian couple, who have two adult sons. Jeremy has previously opened up about the difficult times they faced in their relationship. He said: Im impossible, my wifes impossible, lifes impossible. No marriage is what it seems. I will say that it is very difficult to be everything to one person. Jeremy Irons proved himself a natty dresser when he attended the Coliseums annual Russian Ballet Icons Gala with his actress wife of 40 years Sinead Cusack Hailing from one of Britains most illustrious acting dynasties was no guarantee that Jack Fox brother of Victoria star Laurence was going to flourish on stage. Five years after his theatrical debut in Dorian Gray in London, the 33-year-old screen star admits hes still recovering from being slated by critics who branded him hopelessly miscast. I was not very good in it, he tells me at the Essentiel Antwerp launch party in Sloane Square. Id love to do more theatre, but its a question of timing and whether anyone even wants me to do it. Its scary. Is Glastonbury not the lure that it once was? There arent enough female headliners, there isnt a big enough pool of artists at that level, complains the Somerset festivals organiser Emily Eavis. Were having to try and get people out of retirement in order to play. Perhaps Emily should send a distress call to chart-topping centenarian, Dame Vera Lynn. Your festival needs you! Liberal senator Arthur Sinodinos has broken government ranks to call for an increase to the Newstart allowance. Senator Sinodinos said the jobless allowance, which has been going backwards in real terms for 25 years, should be higher. 'That's probably a slightly radical thing for me to say here,' he told the ABC's Q&A program on Monday night. 'I'm putting a personal view, I'm not necessarily talking on behalf of the government here. But my observation is that this does raise an issue that should be considered at some stage.' Liberal senator Arthur Sinodinos has called for an increase to the Newstart allowance which he said has been going backwards for 25 years People on the unemployment benefit receive $538.80 per fortnight. In comparison, aged pensioners take home $834.40. There are approximately 850,000 people receiving Newstart and Youth Allowance in Australia, according to the latest statistics. However, middle-income earners are expected to benefit the most from the budget which Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will announce on Tuesday. An estimated four million people will receive a payout from the government to assist with power prices. Singles are expected to get $75 and couples will receive $125. People on the dole and those reliant on self-managed super funds won't be receiving a dollar from the $285 million program. Senator Sinodinos questioned the government's decision to exclude those receiving the employment benefit. 'I'm not sure what's happened in relation to Newstart. I'm not sure exactly what the rationale there (is),' said Senator Sinodinos. 'The short answer is, I don't know why.' 'My observation is that this does raise an issue that should be considered at some stage,' Senator Sinodinos said on Q&A on Monday More than half of people on the Newstart Allowance live below the poverty line, according to the Australian Council of Social Service. Welfare advocates have described the Newstart allowance as 'unnecessarily cruel', but the coalition government has steadfastly resisted calls to raise the rate. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is also expected to adjust the tax threshold from $90,000 to $120,000. This means some tax payers will experience tax cuts of up to $1350 per year. Breast and skin cancer patients will also be offered access to cheaper medicines. Mr Morrison on Monday added two new drugs to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme which he said was only possible because his government knew how to manage the national economy. 'The PBS, to me, spells H-O-P-E,' he told reporters in Canberra. 'We are in the war against cancer and the fight against cancer. What fuels our army on this is the strong economy and the strong budget. Without that, you're going into battle with nothing.' A 'sadistic' and 'cruel' father smeared chilli sauce in the eyes and mouths of his two young sons after beating them with a stick for misbehaving at school. Abdiwali Ahmed Aden, 44, bruised and potentially scarred his sons, eight and 10, after hitting them with a stick in Western Australia in 2016. Aden was sentenced to two years and nine months jail for 'extreme violence' last week, according to a report by The West Australian. The court heard now Aden came to Australia as a refugee from Somalia in 2007. He was previously found guilty of stamping on his wife's head until she passed out in a jealous rage in 2013. Abdiwali Ahmed Aden, 44, rubbed chilli sauce in his children's eyes. He also bruised and potentially scarred his sons, eight and 10, after hitting them with a stick Rubbing chilli sauce in his boys' faces 'went so far beyond what might be regarded as punishment for misbehaviour as to be sadistic cruelty' District Court Judge Gillian Braddock said. Aden left his children with injuries that were still visible when doctors examined the pair 10 days later because of 'excessive beating' to their arms, legs and backs. He found out his children were in trouble at school before thrashing them with a stick and rubbing chilli in their eyes. Aden's wife urged her husband to stop but he continued. She went to police to report the abuse the following week. 'To subject anybody, but especially a young child, to assault by applying chilli sauce to the vulnerable part of the face ... is so remarkable and cruel, it is hard to believe that any father would do such a thing,' Judge Braddock said. Aden admitted using a stick to discipline his boys but insisted he only hit their hands and arms during a trial in December. The father whacked his eldest son's ankle so hard that he struggled to walk from swelling in a previous fit of rage. Aden watched his mother be murdered in Somalia and had a traumatic upbringing before arriving as a refugee to Australia in 2007, the court heard. He wanted his sons to have an education and was angry when he found out they were misbehaving at school. 'What was required perhaps of you for these boys was stern advice, perhaps encouragement,' Judge Braddock said. 'Even a smack in some circumstances would not put you in the place where you are now.' A top Victorian detective has admitted to having a sexual relationship with informant lawyer Nicola Gobbo at the height of Melbourne's gangland war. Detective Senior Sergeant Tim Argall had an 'episode of physical intimacy' with Ms Gobbo, now known as Informer 3838 or Lawyer X, after becoming involved with her as a police source in the mid-1990s. He told a royal commission into police use of informers on Monday that their relationship was later more social than professional. The pair would regularly see each other in court in the late 1990s when she was a barrister at Melbourne Magistrates' Court, and he was working as a detective. The Lawyer X royal commission heard detective Senior Sergeant Tim Argall (pictured) had an 'episode of physical intimacy' with Gobbo in 1997 - the pair would often get drinks together 'I don't think it was after court. There was probably some other contact or arrangement to catch up, and it eventuated from that,' Argall said when asked what led up to their sexual relations in 1997. The public inquiry is investigating Gobbo - who gave Victoria police information about the crimes of some of Melbourne's most notorious underworld figures - many of which she represented in court. The scandal has called into question the convictions of a number of these criminals due to concerns the information she gave police could have been protected by lawyer-client privilege. The commission heard that during the height of Melbourne's gangland war in the 2000s, Senior Sergeant Argall, Ms Gobbo and former drug detective Paul Dale would go out drinking together. Dale has also claimed to have had a sexual relationship with Ms Gobbo, and has previously said under oath that he had sex with the lawyer-turned-informant. By the early 2000s she was a well-known barrister who knew a lot of police officers. The blurred boundaries of Ms Gobbo's professional and personal life is the focus of the Lawyer X royal commission into the Management of Police Informants - included her providing personal legal advice to the same police handler she'd had sex with Ms Gobbo's barrister Rishi Nathwani suggested to Sen Sgt Argall that police sometimes logged tips from her as Crime Stoppers reports or through search warrants on the then-barrister's chambers to protect her identity. He denied knowledge of both. Former assistant commissioner Jeff Pope, who was Ms Gobbo's handler in 1999, took to the stand on Monday afternoon saying in his 'very vague recollection she was very keen to assist and seemed to be reliable'. Mr Pope was in the middle of a law degree at the time he signed her and admitted knowing she was a barrister, but said he wasn't sure he was aware of her duties of confidentiality and legal professional privilege. Ms Gobbo was registered a third time between 2007 and 2009 while representing some of the most prominent figures in Melbourne gangland war, including Carl Williams and drug lord Tony Mokbel. Detective Inspector Gavan Segrave, who endorsed Ms Gobbo's 1999 informer registration, earlier revealed he had made a conscious decision to hide his prior involvement with her when advising an assistant commissioner for a legal case around her third recruitment in 2010. Notes kept by Segrave and Pope show that Gobbo's 1999 registration as a police informant was approved by the senior officer in charge of the Victoria Police Asset Recovery Squad - then Inspector Superintendent Brett Curran. Curran is the current chief of staff to Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton, and is yet to give evidence to the royal commission which continues on Tuesday. Gobbo worked as a defence lawyer for many of Melbourne's organised crime figures, including Tony Mokbel (pictured) - while passing information to Victoria Police about her clients whilst representing them - leading to the prospect of many convictions being overturned The editor of a New Zealand fishing newspaper has defended an article calling Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern 'dumb as a plank' after she banned military-style assault rifles. Days after the Christchurch shooting which left 50 Muslim worshippers dead, Ms Ardern announced a blanket ban on semi-automatic assault rifles and a gun amnesty program involving a buyback scheme. An April issue of Fishing and Outdoors later published a scathing article on gun reform criticising the PM's gun control efforts while labelling her police minister a 'lapdog'. The story, titled, 'Cops treat NZ gun owners as criminals: Firearm laws ignorantly fiddled with', claimed that the government had called for legislation that already exists. Fishing and Outdoors editor Graham Carter (right) has defended publishing an article calling New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern 'dumb as a plank' The article, which was written by journalist John McNab, pointed out that the government called for legislation that already exists 'Our Dumb-as-a-Plank New Zealand Prime Minister and lapdog New Zealand Police Minister have announced a ban on assault rifles that are and have been banned for the last 'thirty-five years,'' reporter John McNab wrote, according to the NZ Herald. McNab was referring to the law which makes 'full auto' guns illegal even as defence force weapons. The writer went on to say the prime minister's comments were 'disingenuous and misleading the general public'. 'This is what happens when dumb people are put in charge of stuff they don't understand, and who are too dumb to either admit it, or to listen to facts from people who do understand the stuff in question. 'Then we have all the flower powder puffs coming out of the woodwork who know little if anything about the issues here,' he wrote. When contacted by the publication, editor Graham Carter defended the story and accused Ms Ardern and her associates of 'electioneering.' Carter, a gun enthusiast, said he doesn't think banning semi-automatic weapons is a 'bad thing' but said he believes the issue should be handled by someone 'who knows what the hell they're doing.' He criticised the government's buyback initiative saying most gun owners would not be willing to cooperate and claimed some have already buried their weapons. 'There's guys out there that collect guns and they don't even shoot them ... they're law-abiding citizens, why should they be penalised?' he said. He also called the police 'hopeless' for their role in gun control. The paper's advertisers told the Herald the article wasn't unusual for the publication which is known for being 'forthright' and 'telling it like it is.' 'We're happy to advertise because we feel that he is one of the few journalists to call a spade a spade,' Lloyd Darroch of the Aakron Xpress in Auckland said. Venom from one of the world's most dangerous spiders could have the potential to reduce the severity of a stroke, according to one scientist. Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience professor Glenn King said a molecule found in the Fraser Island funnel-web's venom could inhibit damage to the brain. 'Venoms are extremely complicated mixtures of ion-channel modulators, in this case the spider venom shuts off a specific ion pathway in the brain that is responsible for triggering massive cell death after stroke,' professor King told ABC Radio Brisbane. 'You can't stop neurons that have already died, but you could give this drug eight hours after stroke and still get massive protection of the brain.' Venom from one of the world's most dangerous spiders could have the potential to reduce the severity of a stroke, according to one scientist (pictured, stock image of funnel-web spider) Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience professor Glenn King (pictured) said a molecule found in the Fraser Island funnel-web's venom could slow damage to the brain Strokes are the third biggest killer in Australia, with more than 56,000 people suffering one in 2017, according to The Stroke Foundation. Currently doctors only have a four-and-a-half hour window from the moment a patient suffers stroke to prevent long-lasting side effects. 'When you have a stroke, oxygen doesn't flow to certain parts of the brain and the brain switches the way it uses its fuel and you get lactic acid doses and the brain becomes acidic,' professor King said. Treatment can only be administered once a patient is in hospital, and that comes after brain scans and an analysis from the doctor who then decides what avenue to take. For many living in rural towns, that's crucial time lost when added onto the time it takes to get the hospital. Professor King said the the venom from the spider could be developed into a drug that even paramedics could administer it in a matter of minutes. 'This potentially could be the most profound application of this molecule.' The drug has already been successfully tested on rodents but Professor King said it was still a long way off from hitting the market. In the meantime, he and his team are looking to raise money to speed up the clinical trials. According to Mr King, the Queensland Government and National Health and Medical Research Council have thrown their support behind the trials. To help raise money, University of Queensland has started its own campaign Not if, When the Campaign to Create Change. The Stroke Foundation says stroke is the third biggest killer in Australia - more than 56,000 people suffered one in 2017 (stock image) Former Manchester United player turned ambassador Dwight Yorke has admitted he thought Western Australia's iconic quokkas were in fact koalas. Yorke was in town on Sunday to promote Manchester United's planned July 10-day visit when he made the remark to West Coast star Nic Naitanui, 7News reported. 'What's this thing here? I was expecting this... what do you call it?' Yorke asked Naitanui in front of their entourage, to which he replied, 'koala'. Former Manchester United player turned ambassador Dwight Yorke (pictured right) has admitted he thought Western Australia's iconic quokkas were in fact koalas Following a quick sea-plane ride over the city to get a birds-eye view of Optus Stadium, Yorke (pictured left with Nic Naitanui right) indulged in some fishing for crayfish. Despite his confusion, Yorke wasted no time posing for the obligatory selfie with the lovable critter, which is a type of marsupial like kangaroos and wallabies. 'Obviously, if it's good enough for Federer and those guys who are taking selfies, and Matt Damon, I'm sure I can fit into that category - it'd be nice,' he said. While he initially believed he would be seeing koalas, Yorke confessed he thought the quokkas were rocks and then rats when he encountered them for the first time. The close encounter on Rottnest Island was just a small part of the league player's whirlwind tour, which started with an early-morning sea-plane ride. Yorke (pictured far left) was in town on Sunday to promote Manchester United's planned July 10-day visit when he made the remark to West Coast star Nic Naitanui (pictured top right) Following the quick trip over the city to get a birds-eye view of Optus Stadium, the pair also indulged in some fishing for crayfish. Tourism Minister Paul Papalia told Perth Now he hoped to take many more Manchester United players to Rottnest island for selfies when they arrive in July. Yorke said he thinks the players will look forward to the experience. '[It is] one of the great opportunities for playing for such a great club, you get to travel, you get to meet the fans and Perth is a wonderful city,' he said. NASA has told India that blowing up one of its own satellites with a ballistic missile was a 'terrible thing' that created 400 pieces of space debris. Jim Bridenstine, head of NASA, said that some of the debris is now moving towards the International Space Station, creating a risk for astronauts on board. Bridenstine said the explosion had created 60 pieces of debris that are large enough to track - meaning 10cm (6ins) or larger - and of those, 24 are moving into a position where they could threaten the ISS. Jim Bridenstein, head of NASA, has slammed India's mission to blow up one of its own satellites as a 'terrible thing' that put the International Space Station at risk India last week launched a ballistic missile which successfully destroyed a satellite, becoming one of just a handful of countries to possess the technology 'That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,' he said. 'That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight. 'It's unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is.' The US military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk for the ISS and for satellites. They are currently tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters. As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44 percent over 10 days, Bridenstine said. But the risk will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere. India announced last week that it had used a ballistic missile interceptor to destroy one of its own satellites at a height of 300 km (186 miles), in a test aimed at boosting its defenses in space. Few satellites operate at the altitude of 300 km, from which experts say the collision debris will fall back to earth, burning up in the atmosphere in a matter of weeks, instead of posing a threat to other satellites. 'That's why we did it at lower altitude, it will vanish in no time,' G. Satheesh Reddy, the chief of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation, told Reuters in an interview. America is currently tracking 23,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10cm (6ins) - the smallest that can be detected - and say the India test added at least 60 objects of this size 'The debris is moving right now. How much debris, we are trying to work out, but our calculations are it should be dying down within 45 days.' In 2007, China destroyed a satellite in a polar orbit, creating the largest orbital debris cloud in history, with more than 3,000 objects, according to the Secure World Foundation. Since the impact altitude exceeded 800 km (500 miles), many of the resulting scraps stayed in orbit. Critics say such technology, known to be possessed only by the United States, Russia and China, raises the prospect of an arms race in outer space, besides posing a hazard by creating a cloud of fragments that could persist for years. Shanahan said the Indian test was a reminder about how space was becoming increasingly contested, and underscored the necessity of creating a Space Command - a stepping stone toward President Donald Trump goal of creating a Space Force. 'It really speaks to: Why we need to stand up Space Command. Think about the importance now of rules of engagement, the authorities, the tactics, techniques and procedures,' Shanahan said. Amazon Australia's revenue has jumped to $292million this year as shoppers increasingly ditch physical stores to buy goods online. The online retail giant has barely been in Australia for two years but is already posing a threat to Australia's favoured retail stores including Kmart. In documents filed to the corporate regulator on Friday, the American e-commerce site recorded a revenue of $292.3million in 2018, with an after-tax loss of $5.3million. This is a whopping increase on their revenue of $17.3million and an $8.9million loss recorded in 2017 - the year of their launch. Amazon announced their Australian prospects in April 2017 and launched on December 5, meaning 2018 was the company's first full year of business. Amazon Australia's revenue has jumped to $292million this year as shoppers increasingly ditch physical stores to buy goods online Most of their 2018 revenue came from retail sales ($106million) while 'third party seller services' provided $23million. Chairman of Retail Doctor Group, David Kindl, told Daily Mail Australia that Amazon was not creating new sales but making dollars from existing retailers. 'Amazon are a definite threat to retailers like Kmart and Big W and Myer and all specialty stores,' he said. 'It's just interesting that Amazon announce record revenue at the same time that Big W is announcing the closure of 30 stores. 'That's the story. Amazon is a great alternative for many shoppers, they're right on their strategy, Amazon has a long-term strategy to come in and dominate the market.' Mr Kindl used Amazon's domination in the US market as an example, explaining that more than 50 per cent of the population are members of their Prime system. 'Amazon will be trying to grow in Australia and they've invested in warehousing, they've increased their product range and they're growing. They're right on track. 'I think they're on track to grow and take money off local retailers.' The online retail giant has barely been in Australia for two years but is already posing a threat to Australia's favoured retail stores like Kmart Despite the threat, Mr Kindl believes in-store retailers can have the upper-hand when being cost-competitive and offering a customer experience. 'If you're the favourite shop of a customer then they're less likely to go online,' he said. 'I think Kmart are doing a fabulous job at all levels of their business. They're growing stores, they've got a great product mix and they've got a lot of customers that are big fans of their store offer. 'If they keep doing that, they'll be able to beat Amazon and thrive in an environment where Amazon is hurting other retailers.' Anastasia Lloyd-Wallis, the head of consumer insights and projects at Retail Doctor Group, said that customers continue to be persuaded by Amazon's convenience and discount prices. Other retailers who can't offer the same experience are going to struggle to keep up. 'I think what Amazon are doing is there getting their customers to be a part of Amazon world,' Ms Lloyd-Wallis told Daily Mail Australia. Amazon announced their Australian prospects in April 2017 and launched on December 5, meaning 2018 was the company's first full year of business 'I think what we're going to see... is that the businesses and retailers that haven't focused on who is our target customer and what is our point of difference are going to be the ones who struggle. 'Like we saw yesterday with Big W. These retailers that are not differentiated in any way.' Ms Lloyd-Wallis said she thinks that Kmart should remain strong despite the threat as they've created a 'niche' for themselves. 'They've got this Kmart community, people are having Kmart kids parties now,' she said. 'They're really understood who their customer is and what their customer is wanting.' Ms Lloyd-Wallis believes Kmart are giving the millennial consumer the experience they desire and have a prominent social media following. Brands like Target and Best and Less 'that are competing purely on price' are more likely to struggle, according to Ms Lloyd-Wallis. Chairman of Retail Doctor Group, David Kindl, told Daily Mail Australia that Amazon are not creating new sales but are making dollars from existing retailers 'When Amazon launched in December, I remember after the first month everyone was saying ''the revenue is terrible''. This was always Amazon's strategy, it's a long-term strategy,' Ms Lloyd-Wallis said. 'They've only been in the market here for 15 months, they're right on track for where they want to be. 'I think we're going to see them go from strength to strength.' An Amazon spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia they were 'delighted' with their first year in operation. 'We have been delighted with the response from customers to our Australian offering, and to the number of products, services and categories we have added in our first year,' the spokesperson said. 'But it's still day one and we're just getting started.' 'Our focus is on continuing to grow our offering for Australian customers and investing in our local business, creating jobs and economic opportunity for thousands of small businesses across the country.' Australian entrepreneur and businessman Dick Smith described the likely growth of Amazon in Australia as a catastrophe and 'complete madness'. 'Hundreds of thousands of Australians will lose their jobs,' he told Daily Mail Australia in reference to their 2018 revenue. Australian entreprenur and businessman Dick Smith described the likely growth of Amazon in Australia as a catastrophe and 'complete madness' '(Amazon) will destroy capitalism as we know it. It requires sharing... the Amazon model, controlled by the wealthiest person in the world, is built on sheer greed.' Mr Smith described Australians as 'stupid' for falling to Amazon's online market but admitted prices would be cheaper. 'We'll have huge numbers of people without jobs but cheaper products,' he said. Mr Smith said Amazon would 'affect any conventional retailer' and those employed in the industry. 'Always predicted it (Amazon) would be unbelievably successful, he (Jeff Bezos) will take so much money out of Australia, you will not believe it,' Mr Smith said. 'The greed is unlimited of these people, it's capitalism gone mad.' Fraud victims are being betrayed by police who fail to investigate tens of thousands of swindlers. Officers routinely drop probes into bank scams, which cost the UK 190billion a year, because the crime does not 'bang, bleed or shout', a damning report has warned. Incredibly, one force dropped 96 per cent of cases it received from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau even though some had good evidence, including identified suspects, said the police watchdog. HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) said some forces were deliberately 'seeking reasons' not to investigate, with teams set up to 'suppress demand', effectively a form of rationing of police services. The report said: 'As we were told by one officer, 'fraud does not bang, bleed, or shout'. Faced with those choices, chief constables and police and crime commissioners have difficult decisions to make.' The 108-page report said the failures led to 'fraudsters feeling they can act with impunity and victims feeling confused and disillusioned'. The alarming findings come as Money Mail continues its acclaimed Stop The Scammers campaign, a major drive which has won Government support demanding fairer treatment for victims. Last month we revealed how the number of fraud victims tricked into handing over life-changing sums to sophisticated criminals had doubled in a year to more than 84,000. Experts say Britain is facing an 'authorised' fraud epidemic, where unsuspecting bank customers are conned into transferring huge amounts of money from their accounts to ones run by a gang. According to the annual Crime Survey for England and Wales, which conducts face-to-face interviews with people to glean their experiences of offences, there were 3.3million incidents of fraud in the year to June. But only 640,000 frauds were reported to investigators, about 11 per cent of all recorded crime. HMIC said fraud was not considered a priority by police when compared to other crimes, such as violence, gun crime, drug trafficking and child sexual exploitation. But inspectors said scams could have a 'devastating impact' on the victims, causing 'enormous psychological and emotional damage'. The proceeds of fraud can also be used to fund serious organised crime and terrorism. The watchdog's withering report said an 'inconsistent' approach to investigating fraud by the 43 police forces in England and Wales was leaving the public at 'high risk' of becoming victims. Too many people who had been scammed by swindlers were 'not receiving the level of service they deserve' with problems at all levels in law enforcement. One analyst told HMIC: 'Everything is against fraud. It is not a priority, not sexy, people don't report it and it is difficult to prove, which takes time, resources and money.' The report said: 'As we were told by one officer, 'fraud does not bang, bleed, or shout'. Faced with those choices, chief constables and police and crime commissioners have difficult decisions to make.' But it added: 'Although we understand why fraud may not be considered a priority for some organisations, it does not follow that we accept that the current position should be allowed to prevail.' The report said: 'Sadly, we have found too many examples of processes that are inefficient and organisations that are not being properly held to account for their performance. As a result, many victims of fraud are not receiving the level of service they deserve.' A Home Office spokesman said: 'We have been clear that the law enforcement response to fraud needs to improve as this type of crime can have a devastating impact on victims. We will carefully consider the recommendations and work closely with law enforcement to implement them.' Advertisement President Donald Trump embraced Alice Marie Johnson, the woman whose cause was championed by Kim Kardashian West, on stage at the White House on Monday while shocking those in attendance by praising the media for covering her case. Johnson was serving a life sentence in a federal prison for drug trafficking until last year, when Trump commuted her sentence. She ended up serving 21 years in prison. Trump was joined at the White House by Johnson and other former prisoners to celebrate legislation passed by the Congress and signed by the president overhauling the criminal justice system. Trump says he wants to follow up on criminal justice reform with efforts that help federal inmates find jobs after they leave prison. Congress passed legislation last year called the First Step Act that gives judges more discretion when sentencing some drug offenders and boosts prisoner rehabilitation efforts. Trump says Americans with criminal backgrounds are unemployed at rates up to five times the national average, which stood at 3.8 per cent in February. Scroll down for video President Trump (left) and Alice Marie Johnson (right) have a laugh in the East Room of the White House on Monday Johnson was serving a life sentence in a federal prison for drug trafficking until last year, when Trump commuted her sentence The president leaned in and joked, 'Are you sure?' The audience in the White House laughed and applauded Trump embraced Johnson, whose life sentence for a non-violent drug offense he commuted last year Johnson's cause was championed by reality television star Kim Kardashian West (left), who asked Trump to grant her clemency during a meeting in the Oval Office last year Ivanka Trump embraces Johnson during the celebration at the White House on Tuesday. Johnson spent 21 years behind bars He says a Second Step Act will focus on 'successful re-entry and reduced unemployment for Americans with past criminal records'. His goal is to cut that unemployment rate for ex-prisoners to single digits within five years. The White House says Trump's budget proposes more than $500million to help prisoners succeed after their release. During the event, Johnson took to the podium and spoke. She thanked the president for commuting her sentence and she also praised the news media for having 'magnified my story.' The president then leaned in and joked, 'Are you sure?' The audience in the White House laughed and applauded. Trump then took to the podium after Johnson spoke, according to The Hill. 'Alice said "I want to thank the media." I sort of bent over and said, "Are you sure?" 'And I do too. I think its fantastic. Thats great,' the president said. I want to thank our incredible president, President Donald John Trump, Johnson said. I just told him I finally get a chance to hug you and properly say thank you for believing in me. And Id like to thank all of the advocates who have fought so long for me, who have been working behind the scenes trying to magnify my case.' During the event, Johnson took to the podium and spoke. She thanked the president for commuting her sentence and she also praised the news media for having 'magnified my story' Trump commuted Johnson's sentence after Kardashian West personally lobbied the president to do so in an Oval Office meeting last year. The president also acknowledged Van Jones, a CNN host and a former official in the Obama administration who has also promoted the cause of criminal justice reform. Kardashian has joined forces with an organization called #cut50, which Jones co-founded, a bipartisan organization aimed at cutting the prison population in all 50 states. Clutching their application forms, these are the founding members of our Hospital Helpforce. They are the first intake of the 33,000 Daily Mail readers who pledged to give their precious time to their local NHS. The group of nine volunteers went along to the University Hospital of North Tees to discuss possible roles, meet current volunteers and start the full application process. While the vast majority of pledgers have just received their welcome letters and pin badges, these are the first to be matched with their local NHS trust and start the application process The hospital in Stockton-on-Tees is part of one of the handful of trusts that have established volunteer programmes, enabling it to start the placement process more quickly than expected. While the vast majority of pledgers have just received their welcome letters and pin badges, these are the first to be matched with their local NHS trust and start the application process. Speaking at their introductory meeting, Roz Tinlin of Helpforce, the charity that we ran our campaign with, said the commitment by readers would transform lives. We all know that volunteering has a massive impact on the hospital, she said. You have an impact on patients, you have an impact on staff because youre helping release their time for more clinical high needs stuff, youre having an impact on your own life quite often youre getting new skills. Questions & Answers Hows my application doing? Readers who signed up should have received a pin badge and welcome letter. Emails have also been sent to pledgers asking when they would like the application process to start. So far, more than 15,000 have responded ASAP, more than 6,000 have said in three months, over 2,800 in six months and 400 have opted out. What about my match? Helpforce is working to find those who replied ASAP the closest match to their postcode from one of the 159 NHS trusts taking part and the charities Royal Voluntary Service and British Red Cross. Most of the ASAP group will have already been sent another email with their match. After they have all been processed, Helpforce will move on to those who opted to start later. So what happens next? The volunteer manager of the trust or charity will get in touch. Each trusts processes will vary but they will probably invite you to an information session. This will allow you to discuss options and start checks and paperwork. When will I start? It will depend how quickly the checks and references come back, which is out of the trusts control. Experts suggest this process can take several weeks. Will everyone get a placement? Theres capacity for over 22,000 volunteers with opportunities being created all the time. Pledgers will be notified if there are no opportunities nearby. What if I havent heard back? Pledgers can email us at volunteers@helpforce.community with any questions. Advertisement If youre just sitting holding a patients hand and talking to them for ten minutes or youre getting them a newspaper or greeting people and taking them to a ward theres so many things that you can do that will really help. Or it might just be that you just want to give something back because you appreciate what the NHS does for you. What youre doing is so special, you should never underestimate that. The Mails Hospital Helpforce campaign, which ran in December, is set to boost the number of volunteers to the NHS by a third, with a staggering 1.8million hours pledged. Some 33,064 people promised to give their time. The first meeting was held as work continues behind the scenes to match the thousands of pledgers who signed up to volunteer with their local NHS trusts and charities in the coming months. North Tees hospital currently has around 300 helpers in a variety of roles including befriending patients, taking them to appointments, and operating a library service and radio station. Julie Hunter, 56, a retired sales manager from Stockton-on-Tees, signed up to help after reading about the campaign in the Mail. I really wanted to give something back, she said. Its my local hospital and something Id always been interested in doing but I didnt know how and never had the time before. This is such a good idea. North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust is hoping to use some of its new volunteers to start a home from hospital service pilot project to help stop patients becoming stuck in hospital. Delayed discharges are a major cause of bed-blocking where someone is medically fit to leave hospital but has to stay because they do have the right support at home. On the day of discharge, patients who do not have family will be driven home by a buddy. Buddies will carry out neighbourly checks such as making sure their heating still works and that they have basic supplies of food and drink as well as essential medication. They will stay in contact with the patient for 28 days and will take them to any follow-up appointments. Barbara Bright, chief of staff at North Tees trust, said it has been overwhelmed by the response from readers. The campaign has already produced a wonderful flurry of applications from such a diverse group of volunteers, she added. The Mails Hospital Helpforce campaign, which ran in December, is set to boost the number of volunteers to the NHS by a third, with a staggering 1.8million hours pledged ISIS bride Shamima Begum has said she regrets everything she did in Syria - and has begged for a second chance in the UK. Ms Begum, who travelled to Syria to join the so-called Islamic State from Bethnal Green, east London, in February 2015, has admitted she was 'brainwashed'. The 19 year old, who lost three children prematurely while living in Baghuz, spoke out for the first time after the death of baby Jerrah in an interview with The Times. She told the newspaper: 'Since I left Baghuz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again. 'I was brainwashed. I came here believing everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion.' Begum also told the paper she was 'bored by Brexit' adding: 'It goes on and on without end. I ask the sisters to flick on to the cartoon channel just to get away from it.' ISIS bride Shamima Begum has said she regrets everything she did in Syria - and has begged for a second chance in the UK Ms Begum (right), who travelled to Syria to join the so-called Islamic State from Bethnal Green, east London, in February 2015 with two school friends, has admitted she was 'brainwashed' She said: 'Since I left Baghuz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again' She claimed that her earlier comments to reporters in the refugee camp were influenced by the fact that she was worried ISIS fanatics would burn her tent down. She also revealed how she 'fell under the influence' of extremists online, including Scottish ISIS member Aqsa Mahmoud. Ms Begum has also said she regrets talking to journalists about her situation because she was so desperate to return to the UK. She added: 'The responsibility that I had now, towards him, to get me back to the UK - I was just really desperate, and I just blurted out everything, I tried to answer every question really quickly, I did it out of desperation, maybe not all my answers were clear.' Ms Begum has claimed she makes weekly visits the unmarked grave of her son near the al-Roj refugee camp, where she reads verses from the Qu'ran. The Londoner, who moved to the refugee camp after fears for her life, reportedly needs guards to accompany her during the trips. The baby died soon after UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid refused to allow Begum into the country and revoked her citizenship. A lawyer representing the family wrote to the Home Secretary and urged him to reverse the move following the death of the teenager's new-born son last month. Now Ms Begum has admitted she was radicalised online after feeling 'slightly depressed' and 'looking for a purpose'. She added it was 'easy to manipulate' her at the time because of a disconnect with her family. She is now being helped by other women in the camp who are de-radicalising her by talking openly about ISIS. She claimed she did not know about some of the 'really bad things' the terrorist group were doing. The news comes after her 'heartbroken' Dutch terrorist husband Yago Riedijk, 27, said Ms Begum was 'the perfect wife'. He is being held in a Kurdish detention centre in north-eastern Syria and faces six years behind bars if he returns home. Baby Jerah died soon after UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid refused to allow Ms Begum into the country and revoked her citizenship The news comes after her 'heartbroken' Dutch terrorist husband Yago Riedijk, 27, said Ms Begum was 'the perfect wife' The ISIS fighter spoke about his love for his wife in an interview with The Times. He said: 'We got very close very quickly. The perfect wife. She was so young and innocent. It was very easy for me to love her.' He married Begum just 10 days after meeting her in IS territory and has also come out and defended the decision to do so despite her being just 15 at the time, and him 23. Riedijk also dismissed claims that his wife had a deeper role in the organisation, saying that she was 'just a housewife'. Shortly after their wedding, he was arrested and jailed by ISIS in Raqqa for seven months. Jailed on spying charges, he was tortured and interrogated during his incarceration, with his wife claiming that it triggered her loss of faith in the Islamic caliphate. In his interview, Riedjik, who's from Arnhem in the Netherlands originally, claims that he and his wife were naive victims of ISIS and repeatedly calls for forgiveness for both. Riedjik, whose ISIS alias was Abu Sarayah, added that he and his wife had loved their children 'so much' and that their deaths had a huge impact on Begum. Australia has ranked among the top three dishonest countries in the English-speaking world, according to a new study. Over 40,000 teenagers from eight countries took part in a joint study by the Australian Catholic University (ACU) and London's UCL Institute of Education. The teenagers, who were all aged 15, were given 16 mathematical questions and asked to indicate their knowledge ranging from 'never heard it' to 'know it well.' Teenagers were given 16 mathematical questions -three didn't exist- and asked to indicate their knowledge on them (file image) Most dishonest countries 1. Canada 2. USA 3. Australia 4. New Zealand 5. England 6. Ireland 7. Northern Ireland 8. Scotland Advertisement ACU Professor Philip Parker said that three of the mathematical concepts were fake and results showed who was most likely to lie. 'Boys were most likely to say they knew concepts that didn't actually exist,' he said. The study found Canadians were the most dishonest, followed by Americans and Australians. It used the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to survey the teenagers. 'Australian teenagers scored high on the bulls**t calculator, but unlike the US and Canada our gender differences were also large with a greater than .40 difference between boys and girls,' Professor Parker said. Australia ranked third place and the study found that teenage boys were more likely to lie (file image) Professor John Jerrim from the UCL Institute of Education said despite this study being among the first to study lying empirically, more research needs to be done. 'This is an important first step in understanding the seemingly ubiquitous phenomenon of bulls**t,' he said. 'It is critical that a developmental perspective is now taken with respect to bullshitting so that we can understand what leads individuals to develop such habits, and whether it turns out to be associated with better or worse social and labour market outcomes,' Professor Jerrim said. Royal Marines could be kitted out with Iron Man-style jet suits under plans being considered by the Defence Secretary. Weighing 60lb, the 340,000 3D-printed suits could one day be used by Marines to assault an enemy ship by flying over the water, sources said. As he witnessed the kit in action in Portsmouth yesterday, Gavin Williamson said he wanted to turbocharge the Royal Navy so it was modernising faster than its enemies. Pictured, 23-year-old engineer Alex Wilson, from London, flew in the suit across a patch of grass. Mr Wilson said the product, built by start-up firm Gravity, was like riding a bike. The suit can go as fast as the human body can stand, about 180mph. It has five kerosene-fuelled micro gas turbines, two attached to each arm and one at the back, and is controlled by body movement Weighing 60lb, the 340,000 3D-printed suits could one day be used by Marines to assault an enemy ship by flying over the water, sources said He added: Our competitors are moving fast so we need to move faster. Weve got to be ambitious, weve got to be bold, we have to be the revolutionaries. The Royal Navy has always been at its best when it has been willing to embrace new technology. Mr Williamson announced the service would be handed 75million for mine-hunting robots and for a new unit called NavyX that will draw in experts to identify cutting-edge drone equipment. He was briefed on several products that could be bought by the military at QinetiQs Portsdown Technology Park. He watched as 23-year-old engineer Alex Wilson, from London, flew in the suit across a patch of grass. Mr Williamson was briefed on several products that could be bought by the military at QinetiQs Portsdown Technology Park Royal Navy personel demonstrating their underwater drone during a visit to the Portsdown Technology Park in Portsmouth Mr Williamson announced the service would be handed 75million for mine-hunting robots and for a new unit called NavyX that will draw in experts to identify cutting-edge drone equipment While not as slick as the suits worn by Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr in the superhero movies, the effect was the similar. Mr Wilson said the product, built by start-up firm Gravity, was like riding a bike. The suit can go as fast as the human body can stand, about 180mph. It has five kerosene-fuelled micro gas turbines, two attached to each arm and one at the back, and is controlled by body movement. Sailors will also be given drone mine-hunters to help keep the sea lanes clear. Mr Williamson imagined a future where the job could be done without endangering the lives of sailors and divers. He added: In many ways it sounds like science fiction. But this is a reality we will make happen. He said the world was more perilous, citing threats from terror, mass migration, climate change and aggressor nations. Mr Williamson imagined a future where the job could be done without endangering the lives of sailors and divers. He added: In many ways it sounds like science fiction. But this is a reality we will make happen More than 1,000 councillors have written to the Education Secretary to urge the Government to pump billions of extra funding into schools. The letter to Damian Hinds calls on ministers to reverse spending cuts and ensure special needs funding is adequate. It follows a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) which last year revealed that total school spending per pupil in England has fallen by eight per cent in real terms between 2009-10 and 2017-18. The letter to Damian Hinds calls on ministers to reverse spending cuts and ensure special needs funding is adequate. The letter is due to be handed in to the Department for Education (DfE) headquarters in Westminster today [File photo] The letter, due to be handed in to the Department for Education (DfE) headquarters in Westminster today, said: Many schools are now desperately overwhelmed as more students are competing for fewer resources. The current settlement is not tenable. Referring to the letter, Southwark councillor Maggie Browning, the National Education Unions councillors network convener, said: The cuts to school budgets have reached epidemic levels. A DfE spokesman said: School funding in England is at its highest ever level. Nonetheless, we do recognise the budgeting challenges schools face. A Miami social media influencer who flaunted designer bags and her red Lamborghini online has been arrested by Colombian authorities for her family's alleged massive money laundering scheme. Colombia-born Jenny Ambuila, 26, lived a lavish lifestyle in Miami frequently posting her designer digs, expensive car, and her luxury vacations in Europe on Facebook and Instagram. But her jet-set fairy tale lifestyle came to a bitter end when she was arrested on Friday along with her father Omar Ambuila and mother Elba Chara and another customs official while on vacation in Colombia. Prosecutors say Ambuila's father worked as a mid-level customs officer at the Colombian sea port of Buenaventura and allegedly pocketed millions of dollars in exchange for letting untaxed goods pass into the country. Colombian social media influencer based in Miami Jenny Ambuila, 26, was arrested Friday for money laundering along with her parents after authorities investigated the flashy purchases she flaunted on social media Ambuila was arrested on Friday after Colombian authorities investigated her purchases including her red Lamborghini worth more than $300,000. Ambuila pictured above wearing an Hermes belt, a $3,000 Celine luggage bag tote, and Dior sunglasses Jenny Ambuila was arrested on Friday along with her father Omar Ambuila (right) and mother Elba Chara (together with Jenny left in matching Chanel bags). Omar is accused of accepting millions of dollars in bribes in his role as inspector at Colombian sea port Buenaventura Jenny Ambuila has been charged with money laundering and is currently under house arrest in Colombia. She didn't respond to social media requests for comment. Her parents are in prison on additional charges of aiding smugglers and corruption. Their arrests are a part of a Colombian investigation to stop smuggling into local markets before they're flooded with contraband goods. Authorities hope their arrests can help untangle a larger web of corruption at the sea port. 'This is a fundamental case in our fight against smuggling. We are going after all of this corrupt structure, and the resources behind them,' Andres Jimenez, a Colombian prosecutor, told a local radio station. Ambuila has been charged with money laundering and is currently under house arrest in Colombia. Ambuila pictured above clad Dior sunglasses, a Chanel Boy bag, and Hermes belt Colombian authorities investigated her flashy purchases which she claims she bought by developing businesses that included an ice cream shop and a forex trading service. Pictured above lounging in $600 Chanel pearl espadrilles, a Louis Vuitton hold all, passport holder, and suitcase as well as a Chanel handbag Authorities hope their arrests can help untangle a larger web of corruption at the sea port. Ambuila pictured above in her Chanel shoes, belt, and designer handbag as well as Louis Vuitton suitcase and travel bag The Office of the Public Prosecutor in Colombia said Ambuila, who was the head of the Internal Work Group of Cargo control of the Dian for the past 27 years, made a monthly salary $3,000 as a ports inspector, according to El Tiempo. Jimenez says he received at least $600,000 in bribes since 2012 in overseas payments and could have received much more. Those illicit funds were then allegedly sent to Ambuila's daughter to the University of Miami, where she studied from 2013 to 2017 and earned a bachelor's degree in finance. 'In exchange for their illicit act, these two people (Ambuila and the other official of the Dian) and other alleged accomplices would have received millionaire dividends that were hidden through front companies or were turned over to their relatives to acquire goods and services that would exceed their economic capacity,' prosecutors said. 'For example, the two officials did not have salaries over 6 million pesos, however, they recorded income and purchases for much higher amounts with no clarity of their origin,' they added. She's a venture capitalist, a Miami University graduate, and self-declared social media influencer who shows off her lavish vacations and designer digs in pictures like this one juggling bags from Hermes, Burberry and Dolce & Gabbana Her family's arrest follows in investigation into her extravagant posts online. Pictured above posing with a red Chanel Boy bag and $995 Valentino rock stud sandals, and a $6,000 Cartier love bangle Jenny lived a life of luxury frequenting stores like Gucci and Dolce&Gabanna and travelling to Milan and Paris, flaunting her ritzy trips on her Facebook and Instagram page jennylifestyler (where she has 10,000 followers), which she's since made private. On it she describes herself as a venture capitalize, for exchange trader, and social media influencer. But her extravagant and flashy posts are exactly what led to speculation of her family. Investigators looked into her social media profiles and investigated her purchases - most prominently her 2017 purchase of a Lamborghini Huracan Spyder, worth more than $300,000, which she often posted on Instagram. Busted: Omar Ambuila is pictured above being arrested in Colombia on Friday March 29 Elba Chara and her husband are currently in jail on charges of money laundering, aiding smugglers and corruption Jenny Ambuila listens to the charges against her being read out as she stares blankly while wearing on a Gucci shirt on her vacation Colombian authorities announced the arrest on social media on Friday She also bought a Porsche Cayenne while living in Miami. 'People assume that because they can't make it you can't make it either,' Ambuila wrote in a May 2017 Facebook post where she shows a photo of the Lamborghini. 'Prove them wrong.' She told authorities she bought her luxury purchases by developing businesses that included an ice cream shop and a forex trading service. 'She did set up some companies on paper,' Jimenez told Colombia's Blu Radio. 'But they did not make enough earnings to afford her that type of lifestyle.' On Friday during her arrest Ambuila, dressed in a Gucci T-shirt, stared blankly ahead as an officer read out the charges against her. Investigators are hoping to close in on other alleged members of Buenaventura's smuggling network in the coming months. 'The amount of money that smuggling moves in this country is huge,' Jimenez says. 'We are hoping this investigation goes all the way to the top.' Investigators, with the support of U.S. agencies, fathered evidence into the family for more than a year. Sir Rod Stewarts youngest daughter, Renee, has not been lured by his rock n roll lifestyle. The 26-year-old dancer has embarked on a more spiritual path by qualifying as a yoga instructor just like mum Rachel Hunter, who trained two years ago. The former supermodel, 49, who was married to Rod, 74, for 16 years until 2006, proudly shared this snap online of her and Renee in matching whites from Sattva Yoga Academy in Rishikesh, India, where The Beatles did their ashram stint in 1968. Clutching her certificate with a euphoric smile, the brunette, who was named by her dad after the Left Banke song, Walk Away Renee, says she is absolutely left speechless by her achievement. Sir Rod Stewarts youngest daughter, Renee, has not been lured by his rock n roll lifestyle. The 26-year-old dancer has embarked on a more spiritual path by qualifying as a yoga instructor just like mum Rachel Hunter, who trained two years ago Poppy plays TV socialite... now theres a stretch! She made a fleeting appearance in Guy Ritchies King Arthur and Matthew Vaughns Kingsman: The Golden Circle. But model Poppy Delevingne, who has complained that her characters in film keep dying in the first ten minutes, has reasons to be cheerful. Producer Kris Thykier, the man behind Sky series, Riviera, claims her starring role in the second series will be her big break. Shes sensational, he tells me at a party in Mayfair. This is the one. We needed someone who was a British socialite who would fit within the Riviera world. Shes surpassed all of our expectations. Shes going to be a big star. Poppy Delevingne, who has complained that her characters in film keep dying in the first ten minutes, has reasons to be cheerful. Producer Kris Thykier, the man behind Sky series, Riviera, claims her starring role in the second series will be her big break. She has previously made fleeting appearances in Guy Ritchies King Arthur and Matthew Vaughns Kingsman: The Golden Circle 26 years on, Kate Moss is still Vogue's cover queen 26 years on, Kate Moss is still Vogues cover queen Supermodel Kate Moss was just 19 when she first appeared on the front of Vogue (near right). Now, 26 years on, the Croydon-born mannequin is gracing the front page of the fashion bible once more. I am thrilled to announce Kate Moss as British Vogues cover star for the May 2019 issue, says editor Edward Enninful. Enninful apparently burst into tears when he heard he hadnt been invited to meet the Queen at London Fashion Week last year. Now he can weep with joy after crowning Kate as the fashion queen. Supermodel Kate Moss was just 19 when she first appeared on the front of Vogue (left). Now, 26 years on, the Croydon-born mannequin is gracing the front page of the fashion bible once more (right) Birds Of A Feather maneater Lesley Joseph claims that the Pope himself flirted with her at a recent meeting. The sitcom actress enjoyed a private audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican, along with seven other celebrities who took part in the TV travelogue programme Pilgrimage: The Road To Rome in which they trekked from the Alps to St Peters Square. We were all taken with how incredibly approachable the Pope was, says Lesley. He laughed, joked and had a real twinkle in his eye. He was almost flirtatious. When I told him my age, he said: You dont look 72, and I replied: Ah bless you. I blessed the Pope! The whole thing was surreal.' Is Glastonbury not the lure that it once was? There arent enough female headliners, there isnt a big enough pool of artists at that level, complains the Somerset festivals organiser Emily Eavis. Were having to try and get people out of retirement in order to play. Perhaps Emily should send a distress call to chart-topping centenarian, Dame Vera Lynn. Your festival needs you! A man has been airlifted to hospital after being stabbed in the back in a children's play park. The man was stabbed near to the Marconi Nature Reserve, in Chelmsford, Essex at around 5.45pm today in what police say was a 'targeted attack'. He managed to walk to a nearby road and was then airlifted to hospital. A man has been airlifted to hospital after being stabbed in the back in a children's play park. Police are pictured at the scene Information on his condition has not been revealed by police who rushed to the scene with paramedics. An Essex Police spokesman said: 'We were called at around 5.45pm today, Monday, April 1, with reports a man had suffered a stab wound to the back in Central Park. 'We received reports that he was approached by a man close to a children's play area and attacked, in what we believe to be a targeted attack. 'The man then walked to Meteor Way before being taken to hospital by air ambulance for his injury. Enquiries are ongoing.' Five police cars were called to the park entrance on Meteor Way. The incident is believed to have happened around 100 meters from the main pathway next to the River Cann. After being stabbed the man walked to a nearby road and was airlifted to hospital in this air ambulance The group of police foresic officers have been seen walking down the pathway towards the nature reserve wearing blue gloves Five police cars were called to the park entrance on Meteor Way Officers have been searching the wooded area next to the nature reserve The air ambulance landed around 6pm on the land behind Chelmsford Squadron Air Training Corps near to the Teledyne e2v building. The air ambulance took off at just after 7pm. Police officers blocked off all access to the pathway that runs parallel between the Marconi Nature Reserve and the the Teledyne e2v building on Waterhouse Lane. Officers have been searching the wooded area next to the nature reserve. They have also set up a cordon further along the pathway closer to the River Cann, near Meteor Way. The group of police forensic officers have been seen walking down the pathway towards the nature reserve wearing blue gloves. An Australian ISIS fighter who wants to come home has claimed he didn't know he was joining a bloodthirsty terror group when he fled four years ago. Mohammed Noor Masri, 26, fled Sydney for ISIS in 2015 and is now living in a refugee camp in Syria with his wife and three sons. He claims he did not understand the group's brutality even though stories and images of its public executions and torture were broadcast around the world. Mohammed Noor Masri, 26, (pictured) said he wants to get his Australian pregnant wife Shayma Assaad and their three boys one out of Syria In a desperate bid to be allowed back into Australia, Masri told the Sydney Morning Herald he was misled into joining an organisation he now considers to be 'evil'. Masri claimed he travelled to Syria not as a terrorist but as an inquisitive albeit misguided person seeking to learn more about Islam. He claimed he didn't fight but rather worked as an air-conditioning service tradesman in a hospital. Masri also told how he saw ISIS fighters starve children to death to save food for fighters. 'There was kids that were dying from malnourishment. I seen kids die actually, seen it with my eyes,' he said. He said he made a mistake in joining ISIS and regrets it. There are more than 2,500 displaced children from families with perceived or actual associations with ISIS living in camps (similar to al-Hol camp pictured) in North East Syria The 26-year-old said he was prepared to face a lengthy jail term in Australia for his 'mistake' if allowed to return with his family. He said he would prefer to be prosecuted in Australia or under international law, which recognises such things as 'human rights'. According to Masri, he surrendered to Kurdish forces at Baghouz - a former IS stronghold in eastern Syria - about a month ago. His situation highlights the challenge for the Morrison government faces after being pressured to repatriate Australian ISIS extremists for prosecution. There are more than 2,500 displaced children from families with perceived or actual associations with ISIS living in camps in North East Syria, Save the Children states. But the Australian government has repeatedly said it is not prepared to change its stance on dealing with such people as far from the country as possible. In the interview, Masri claimed he stuck to his profession while living under the Islamic State and was never involved in killing, assaulting or enslaving anyone. A German woman, living in al-Hol camp which houses relatives of Islamic State (IS) group members Fighters from the al-Qaida linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), now called the Islamic State group, marching in Raqqa, Syria Australians begging to come home after fighting with ISIS Oliver Bridgeman, 21 Olive Bridgeman, 21, (pictured) claims he went to Syria to be a humanitarian worker. The 21-year-old from Toowoomba in Queensland's Darling Downs claimed he travelled to Syria to be a humanitarian worker. Queensland's Darling Downs claimed he travelled to Syria to be a humanitarian worker. He previously assured his mother and father he hadn't been fighting in the war-torn nation, where ISIS terrorists are battling for control. His passport has been cancelled by the Australian government and he has been stuck in the war-torn area since 2016. Mahir Absar Alam, 26, Mahir Absar Alam, 26, (pictured), was caught just outside Baghouz. Alam joined Islamic State just four weeks after it declared its so-called caliphate in 2014. He has allegedly expressed regret for joining. The 26-year-old faces spending time in a prison camp in Syria, and could be taken to Iraq for trial or possibly be deported back to Australia, where he could be prosecuted. Ahmed Merhi, 27 Ahmed Merhi, 27, (pictured) has begged Australia to help him escape. Sydney terrorist Ahmed Merhi has begged Australia to help him after he was sentenced to death by hanging in Iraq. The former Granville Boys High School student, from Sydney's west, travelled to Syria in 2014 or 2015. At the time, he claimed he was travelling to the war-torn region to perform aid work. Janai Safar, 24 Janai Safar, 24, (pictured), previously vowed never to return to Australia. Safar is living in a refugee camp in northern Syria after its defeat. She left Australia to allegedly join the jihadi terror group in 2015. She previously vowed she'd never return to Australia. 'It was my decision to come here to go away from where women are naked on the street. I don't want my son to be raised around that,' she said. Zehra Duman, 24, Zehra Duman, 24, (pictured) hit headlines in Australia when she fled to Syria in 2014. Duman, from Melbourne, is believed to be held at the al-Hawl refugee camp in Syria with her two-year-old son and six-month-old daughter. She claims she has been trying to leave ISIS for two years. The 24-year-old said she knows Australians would be angry with her but insisted: 'My kids have a right to be treated like normal kids.' Khaled Sharrouf's children: Zaynab, 17, Hoda, 16, and Humzeh, eight Zaynab (top left), Hoda (top right), and Humzeh (bottom, middle) are in the al-Howl camp. The Australian terrorist's remaining three children have been held at the al-Hawl refugee camp in north-eastern Syria since mid-march. Their Sydney-based mother, Tara Nettleton, smuggled the children out of Australia after her husband left to join the caliphate. Nettleton is believed to have died in 2016, while Sharrouf and his two eldest sons were believed to have been killed in an airstrike in 2017. Advertisement 'I didn't see any heads or severed bodies and stuff like that. I wasn't the type of person to be running around the shops too much ... and I don't like to see beheadings. I don't like to see those sort of scenes. Nor do I agree with it,' he said. The 26-year-old met and married Australian woman Shayma Assaad - the sister of one his friends who was killed - while living in Syria. He told the publication he travelled to Syria to start a family based on the advice of a respected friend - but he now wants his three boys: Alae, 3, Dawood, 2 and Umayr, 1, to return to Australia. If Masri was allowed to to return to Australia, he would face a minimum charge of entering a declared terrorism area - the IS' former capital of al-Raqqa in Syria. The charge alone carries a maximum jail term of up to 10 years. 'I'm an Australian citizen and Australia's a pretty fair country And they give people chances, especially if it's a first offence. I know it's a big offence, but I'm not someone who's known to have a criminal record,' he said. Smoke rises after an air strike during fighting between members of the Syrian Democratic Forces and Islamic State militants in Raqqa, Syria in 2017 Inhaling sugar could be a way to tackle lung infections, research suggests. Scientists made the discovery while investigating white blood cells called macrophages, which remove harmful organisms from the immune system. The Manchester University team said macrophages in the lungs need the right level of glucose to function properly. Stimulating the cells with more sugar might help the immune system fight off bronchial infections responsible for coughing fits and pneumonia, they say in the journal Nature Immunology. President Trump hinted at a security clearance scandal involving his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at a prison reform event on Monday evening at the White House. The president was making remarks at an East Room celebration of the First Step Act, a law that Kushner helped to spearhead. Former inmates, including Alice Johnson, the grandmother that Kim Kardashian lobbied the president to free, participated in the summit that ran into the evening. Reflecting on efforts by Kushner, whose father served hard time, to reform the criminal justice system, Trump said the senior White House official 'extremely complex' life now that he lives in Washington. 'Jared had a very easy life. He was doing phenomenally in New York, and everything he touched just turned to gold, and then one day he said, I want to come down and I want to have peace in the Middle East, and I want to do criminal justice reform, and I want to do all these wonderful things, and his life became extremely complex,' the president said to laughter. President Trump hinted at a security clearance scandal involving his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at a prison reform event on Monday evening at the White House Former inmates, including Alice Johnson, the grandmother that Kim Kardashian lobbied the president to free, participated in the summit that ran into the evening Reflecting on efforts by Kushner, whose father served hard time, to free them, Trump said the senior White House official 'extremely complex' life now that he lives in Washington. Kushner is pictured at the event with wife Ivanka Trump embraces Alice Johnson during a celebration of the First Step Act in the East Room of the White House Kushner has been caught up in allegations of election meddling and was accused his first year in the administration of intentionally lying about foreign contacts. Hours prior to the president's remarks, Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump were named in a whistleblower complaint that alleged the White House mishandled dozens of security clearance requests. Still, the president said, he doesn't believe his son-in-law regrets taking the job, which he does voluntarily without pay. 'And he wouldn't trade it, I don't think he'd trade it, because what he's doing is incredible, and he is doing great in the Middle East, and I think you're gonna have some day before we're finished, I think you're gonna have something very important signed,' Trump told Kushner. 'So you're doing a great job. Thank you.' Security specialist Tricia Newbold told House Democrats that her boss approved security clearances despite red flags The president had not commented on the security clearance allegations directly as of Monday night. His White House press staff did not address the latest allegation of presidential misconduct, either. A career official in the White House security office was revealed hours earlier to be behind the claims that Kushner and his wife and other people in President Donald Trump's administration were granted security clearances despite 'disqualifying issues' in their backgrounds, such as concerns about foreign influence, drug use and criminal conduct. Tricia Newbold, an 18-year government employee who oversees the issuance of clearances for some senior White House aides, said she compiled a list of at least 25 officials who were initially denied security clearances last year because pf 'red flags' in their background checks. She says senior Trump aides interfered in the process to clear a string of staffers. Newbold says the actions were not taken 'in the best interest of national security,' and she felt compelled to tell lawmakers about the problem. Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, a Democrat and the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, revealed the allegations in a Monday letter. The New York Times had previously reported that President Trump personally interfered in the process to get Kushner a clearance after former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly stripped aides of their temporary clearances. Ivanka Trump has denied that she received preferential treatment in the security clearance process. Karsashian was not at the Monday evening event at the White House. She's seen here with Johnson at a November summit on criminal justice in Hollywood Inquiry: Elijah Cummings (left), the Democratic chair of the House Oversight Committee, is leading the probe into how White House aides including Michael Flynn (right), were vetted Newbold told investigators in a March 23 interview with committee staff that she compiled a list of aides who did not meet the criteria for clearances but received them anyway. Her testimony is sealed, and Cummings declined on Monday to release it in spite of demands from Republicans on the committee to do so. They claimed he was cherry-picking parts of her interview to embarrass the White House as much as possible. According to a letter that Cummings sent the White House demanding the production of documents, National Security Advisor John Bolton, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, ex-Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and former Staff Secretary Rob Porter are on Newbold's list along with Kushner and his wife. 'According to Ms. Newbold, these individuals had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct,' a memo that Cummings sent the White House says. Newbold told investigators, according to Cummings' memo, that she's afraid to return to work. She was suspended in January for 14 days without pay for failing to follow a new office, policy on PDFs. She claims its was retaliation for talking to Congress. A Gold Coast primary school has been placed into lockdown as police investigate a threat made against it. Parents of students at Helensvale State School were sent a text message telling them not to take their children to school if they hadn't already on Tuesday morning, the Gold Coast Bulletin reported. 'Please note due to a threat made to school we are in lockdown. If you have not dropped students please keep with you until further notice,' the text message read. Parents of students at Helensvale State School (pictured) were sent a text message telling them not to take their children to school if they hadn't already on Tuesday morning 'If you have already dropped students to school please be advised they are safe and being cared for.' A Queensland Police spokeswoman said officers went to the school to 'verify the authenticity of an alleged threat'. Police were told about the concerns at the school about 8.30am on Tuesday. The threat is the second made against the school in two months, after it was locked down on February 19. The lockout was lifted at 10.10am. A GUN-toting jihadi known as the ISIS matchmaker has been found in a refugee camp in northern Syria, it was reported last night. Tooba Gondal, now 25, left her home in Britain and went to live in the groups de facto capital of Raqqa. The former student, who uses the pseudonym Umm Muthanna Al Britaniyah, has now reappeared in Ain Issa camp with her two children after a failed escape attempt. Tooba Gondal, now 25, left her home in Britain and went to live in the groups de facto capital of Raqqa The daughter of a successful London businessman had been trying to flee from ISIS-held Baghuz the groups final holdout to the Turkish border two months ago, it was claimed. Speaking from the camp, she told the Rojava Information Centre she wanted to come home. According to the centre, which published the interview on Twitter, she said: The British public are scared, they dont want to deal with us. But they must. We cant stay in this camp for the rest of our lives, they must deal with us. We are not threat to their society, we just want a normal life again. Gondal, pictured holding an AK-47 in Syria, encouraged young girls to flee to Syria and marry ISIS killers Tooba Gondal, 25, was a Jihadi 'matchmaker' who groomed British girls for ISIS fighters in Syria She said she wanted to be repatriated back to the UK, adding: The women and the children [of ISIS] became the victims if I did not harm anyone, if I committed no harm in Syria for four years, what kind of threat can I be to Britain? In 2016 the Mail on Sunday reported how her poisonous outpourings on the internet had glorified the murderous acts of Islamic State terrorists. They were meant to lure young British Muslim women to travel to Syria as Jihadi brides. Through her prolific output on social media, she was said to have commanded a powerful influence on her following of largely young girls. In her rants, she called Britain a filthy country and praised the 2015 terror attack on a Paris theatre. Gondal, who lived in Walthamstow, east London, and was a student at Goldsmiths, University of London, is the eldest daughter of a successful London businessman. She lived in the ISIS-controlled city of Raqqa, pictured, from early 2015 Her propaganda fell quiet in 2016, leading to speculation as to her whereabouts. The Rojava Information Centre said after the death of her first husband, a Lebanese recruiter, she married at least one more man, a Pakistani fighter who was also killed. Following his death, she spent a year and a half always having to move from one village to another in the Deir Ezzor region as ISIS was eradicated. She said: We didnt know whos on the left attacking us, whos on the right... who are we even with... it was a complete mess. She was stopped at a checkpoint close to the Turkish border, detained and taken to the refugee camp. Gondal has a strong presence on social media from Syria, pictured, and often posts inflammatory messages about the UK, taunting security forces for not catching her Runaway schoolgirl Shamima Begum has said she now regrets moving to Syria and was brainwashed by ISIS. Her latest interview contrasts sharply with her unrepentant comments after she was found in a refugee camp in February, when she said a lot of people should have sympathy for me. But following criticism, the schoolgirl from Bethnal Green, east London, has softened her tone, now saying: When I first came out ... I was still in the brainwashed mentality. I really regretted everything I did, and I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again. Advertisement A charity set up to save vulnerable children from homelessness and the workhouses of Victorian Britain wants to trace the families of the first youngsters it took in 150 years later. Action for Children which started life as the National Childrens Home in 1869 has released images of some of the first children it rescued in the hope that their descendants will come forward to find out more about them. Set up by Methodist minister Thomas Bowman Stephenson, it made sure that youngsters were fed, cared for and had somewhere safe to sleep every night. As well as children sleeping rough, those taken into care included those whose parents had died or were living in abject poverty and wanted to give their children a better life. The gallery of 30 images of some of the children who were cared for in the homes between 1869 and 1919 can be found online at www.actionforchildren.org.uk/archive. These are the children the charity want to trace... Left: Edward Maltby. Thirteen years old when admitted, father and mother dead. Left in the charge of a stepmother who constantly ill-treated him. He had slept on the streets for several nights. Went to Canada 15 May 1873, engaged by the Rev S Rose, to be employed in the Printing Office and board with Bob Self in the family, Mt Wilson fireman. Centre: Mary Ann Annett called 'Annie', admitted to Bonner Road, London, in 1871 Born 2 December 1863 an illegitimate child. Father's name William Sale, by occupation silk dyer, has gone to America. Mother died 28 March 1867. Went to America with father, 1875. Right: Mary Anne Leigh 1871-1880 Bonner Road, London Left and centre: Both unnamed, Birmingham 1882-1909. Right: Unnamed, Bonner Road, London Left: Annie Augusta Barfield, called 'Augusta', admitted to Bonner Road, London on June 8 1871 aged 12 months, then Edgworth, Lancashire, in 1876. Up for adoption in Leicester on June 15 1881, returned because 'not suitable' 22 August 1881. Centre: Billy Buster, Harpenden, Harpenden, 1918 Authorities say multiple injuries from a sharp object killed a University of South Carolina student who police say was kidnapped after she got into the wrong car while waiting for an Uber. The brief statement Monday from Clarendon County Coroner Bucky Mock did not specify what kind of weapon was used to kill 21-year-old Samantha Josephson. Authorities have charged 24-year-old Nathaniel David Rowland with kidnapping and murder. Arrest warrants say after Josephson got into his car early Friday, Rowland attacked her, causing numerous wounds to her head, neck, face, upper body, leg, and foot. Police say Josephson's body was found Friday afternoon in Clarendon County, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) from Columbia by turkey hunters. Her cause of death was revealed after her father promised to dedicate his life to improving the safety of ride sharing services. Scroll down for video Samantha Josephson, 21, was found dead on Friday in Columbia, South Carolina after she mistakenly got into a car thinking it was her Uber ride Surveillance video shows the fateful moment the 21-year-old mistook a car for the Uber she ordered outside a bar in Columbia, South Carolina, early Friday morning The first dark car Samantha went up to was not her ride, her father said. So she jumped into a second similar looking car, Seymour Josephson said. 'Samantha was by herself. She had absolutely no chance. None. The door was locked, the child safety locks were on,' her father said Sunday night at a candlelight vigil in Columbia. Seymour told his daughter's friends they can help by always taking rides or walking around town in groups of two or more because there is safety in numbers. 'If there is somebody else in that car, there is actually a chance,' he said. He now plans to speak to ride sharing services about better identifying their vehicles. Nathaniel David Rowland, 24, was arrested for allegedly killing 21-year-old Samantha Josephson after she got into his car in Columbia at about 1.30am on Friday thinking it was her Uber ride Rowland, 24, is charged with kidnapping and murder in Josephson's death. Josephson's blood and cellphone were found in his car the next night when he was arrested two blocks from Five Points, authorities said. Rowland remains in the Richland County jail. It wasn't known if he had a lawyer. Josephson's boyfriend, Greg Corbishley said he saw a clear future with her and remembered their last conversation Thursday when she thanked him for letting her just be herself. 'Even in the short time she was here, how many people she positively impacted with her energy,' Corbishley said. Josephson's parents said they had planned to come to Columbia on Saturday to see their daughter in the city and the university she loved one last time before she graduated in May and moved on to law school at Drexel University in Philadelphia. They still came, but while her father went to the candlelight vigil, her mother was at the Richland County jail for a hearing scheduled for the man charged with killing her daughter. Her father Seymour Josephson spoke Sunday night at a vigil (seen above). 'Samantha was by herself. She had absolutely no chance. None. The door was locked, the child safety locks were on,' her father said Josephson is seen in family photos with her parents. Her mom read a statement to the court Sunday Rowland decided not to appear, but a judge gave Marci Josephson a chance to talk. She read out a statement which said: 'There are no words to describe the immense pain, his actions have caused our family and friends. He's taken away a piece of our heart, soul and life. Shame on him. We thought he would be here to see his evil face. 'I can not fathom how someone could randomly select a person, a beautiful girl and steal her life away. His actions were senseless, vile and unacceptable. It sickens us to think that his face was the last thing that my baby girl saw on this earth. 'His selfish, unspeakable and violent actions have created a hole in the universe.' She described her daughter as bubbly and full of life and said she was due to graduate college in May and start law school in September. The grieving mother urged the judge to deny bail for Rowland. 'He should never be given the right to walk free again for what he did to my daughter, or given the opportunity to hurt anyone else,' she said. The night after Josephson was kidnapped, a Columbia police officer noticed a black Chevrolet Impala about two blocks from the Five Points bars where Josephson was kidnapped. Josephson is seen visiting Paris in February 2018. She was out with friends and got into a car she thought was her Uber when she disappeared Surveillance images released by the Columbia Police Department show Josephson wearing an orange shirt and black pants and talking on the phone seconds before she disappeared The driver ran but was arrested after a short chase. Investigators said there was a child safety seat in the back of the car and the child safety locks were enabled, meaning Josephson would have not been able to escape. Security footage from the area shows Josephson getting into the black Chevy Impala when she was leaving after a night out with a group of friends in the Five Points area. She left the bar Bird Dog alone and was spotted getting into the car that she and her friends believed was an Uber that she had ordered, a witness told the Daily Gamecock student newspaper. When Josephson's actual Uber driver arrived moments later, the driver cancelled the ride when she didn't show up for the pick-up, witnesses said. Surveillance images released by the Columbia Police Department also show the final image of Josephson before she disappeared. She was seen wearing an orange shirt and black pants, and talking on the phone. Throughout the day on Friday, Josephson's friends and family were unable to get in touch with her and an urgent search was launched. Josephson got into the car seen above, which she and her friends mistakenly believed was the Uber she had ordered Josephson's father (with her above) in her hometown of Robinsville, New Jersey Josephson's body was said to have been found Black Bottom Road, pictured Police say the suspect previously lived in the area where Josephson's body was found. An Uber spokesman was unable to immediately comment when reached by DailyMail.com. The company does urge riders to check that the details of the driver and the car match the information in the app, which provides the driver's name and photo, as well as the make and model of the car and a license plate number. Drivers are also provided the rider's name and should be able to specify who they are picking up when asked. Josephson's blood and her cell phone were found Rowland's black Chevy Impala, as well as bleach and cleaning products, according to police. They said the child safety locks were enabled on Rowland's car meaning she would have not been able to escape Security footage appears to show Josephson getting into the black Chevy Impala at around 2am on Friday. Rowland was arrested driving that car, police say 'In cases when you are helping someone request a ride through Uber who may have had a few drinks or is unfamiliar with the app, help them double check that the driver and vehicle match the details in the app before they get in the car,' wrote Wade Stormer, Uber's law enforcement liaison, in a blog post. 'Taking the extra step to double check these details is an important safety measure,' he continued. A GoFundMe set up to help with funeral costs had raised more than $60,000 by Monday night. Social media giants will be hit with fines if they allow the sale of knives to under-18s on their platforms under new laws that will be announced next week. Selling illegal items such as drugs and weapons on the internet will be listed in a Government White Paper as clearly defined harms, which social media firms will be required to prevent. Retailers who sell knives to under-18s can be prosecuted under current laws but the new proposals will target online vendors by making it an offence to deliver weapons to minors. Social networks will also be required to take down violent gang videos and other content that glorifies a violent way of life, reported The Telegraph. Social media firms will be required to prevent the selling of illegal items such as drugs and knives on the internet (stock image) It was revealed yesterday that the Metropolitan Police had asked Google-owned YouTube to remove 136 videos, a request the firm agreed to. The proposals will create a legal duty of care for tech firms and a regulator to police them. It would have the power to fine web giants up to 4per cent of their global revenues, which would add up to 4 billion in the case of Google, and could even jail tech firm bosses for breaking the new laws. The news of the White Paper came as the childrens commissioner, the victims commissioner and anti-knife crime campaign group the Kinsella Trust claimed that social media firms turned a blind eye to violence on social networks. At a summit at Downing Street yesterday they met the Prime Minister who warned that we cannot simply arrest ourselves out of the knife crime epidemic. Theresa May also said schools, hospitals and other public bodies would have a duty of care to report young people who are at risk of drifting towards violence. Childrens commissioner, the victims commissioner and anti-knife crime campaign group the Kinsella Trust claimed social media firms turned a blind eye to violence on social networks (stock image) However Dr Mary Bousted of the National Education Union, speaking to the Daily Telegraph, warned: Neither the blame for, or the solution to, violent crime can be laid at the door of schools or frontline hospital staff. Patrick Green, from the Ben Kinsella Trust, told the Daily Telegraph: These firms have the creativity to come up with fantastic technology that changes peoples lives. If they applied that creativity to this problem, they could do a lot more. Bodies representing both frontline police offices and police chiefs said that the Governments knife crime measures need extra cash if they are going to succeed. New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has blasted Senator Fraser Anning as a 'jingoistic moron' and a 'fluke' over his anti-Muslim comments following the Christchurch massacre. Mr Peters, 73, spoke out against the Queensland politician ahead of the Australian's Senate censure motion on Tuesday. The New Zealand leader pulled no punches labelling Anning 'a national, absolute, democratic aberration' and calling his response to the attack a 'disgrace.' 'I could call him a four-flushing, jingoistic moron, but you already know that in Australia,' he told Sky News. New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters (right) labelled Queensland Senator Fraser Anning a 'moron' and a 'fluke' ahead of the Australian Senate's censure vote on Tuesday He called Anning an 'absolute fluke' saying he landed in the Senate 'by pure accident,' referring to how he was elected with just 19 votes. 'It means you have to clean up your political system to avoid that sort of person making it into politics,' he said. Senator Anning has come under fire after he suggested there was a 'link between Muslim immigration and violence' shortly after the Christchurch mosque attack. He later released a statement condemning 'any form of violence' but reiterated his anti-Islamic views and said Muslims are 'usually the perpetrators.' The senator was even involved in a public scuffle with a 17-year-old boy who smashed an egg on his head after making the controversial remarks. He has been criticised by both Australian and New Zealand politicians including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Prime Minister Scott Morrison who called his comments 'disgusting.' A man has been tackled by members of the public after egging controversial Senator Fraser Anning The 69-year-old has remained unapologetic and said he had 'no remorse' during his appearance in Parliament on Tuesday. In a previous interview, Senator Anning said: 'All I've said is that countries that have Muslim immigration invariably have escalation in violence and terrorist attacks and murders. 'And we don't learn from countries who have allowed this indiscriminate immigration, which is what we have in this country.' The situation resulted in a petition calling for his resignation which garnered more than one million signatures. Australia's Senate will vote to publicly admonish the senator in a censure which Senator Anning called a 'blatant attack on free speech. The fake German heiress accused of duping people out of millions of dollars in a socialite scam was allegedly sent dozens of flirty text messages from a married banker as she tried to get a $22 million loan from him. Anna Sorokin, also known as her alias Anna Delvey, is currently on trial for allegedly duping elite circles in Manhattan from 2013 to 2018 and bilking friends, banks and hotels to the tune of $275,000. During the 28-year-old's trial on Monday, her defense attorneys told the court that a banker at the private equity fund Fortress sent Sorokin 158 texts when she was trying to secure the loan. The employee, Dennis Onabajo, was tasked with vetting her loan application and it was later rejected. Anna Sorokin, also known as her alias Anna Delvey, is currently on trial for allegedly duping elite circles in Manhattan from 2013 to 2018 and bilking friends, banks and hotels to the tune of $275,000 'I'm forcing myself not to kiss you because you are insanely beautiful,' he is alleged to have texted her, according to the New York Post. The text was sent in March 2017 after Fortress rejected her $22 million loan. He is also allegedly texted her after a meeting at the SoHo hotel where she was staying - 11 Howard - and said: 'Let me come upstairs and say a proper good-bye'. Her attorney brought up the flirty texts when he was questioning the banker's boss Spencer Garfield on Monday. The judge refused to let the attorney question Garfield in detail about the texts after saying he was not aware of the exchanges. Onabajo left the company about two months after Sorokin's loan was rejected. Sorokin was trying to secure the $22 million loan to open a private arts club by allegedly lying about having a $67 million fortune. Sorokin was trying to secure the $22 million loan to open a private arts club by allegedly lying about having a $67 million fortune Sorokin is accused of swindling various people and businesses out of tens of thousands of dollars in a 10-month odyssey for a taste of the high life Garfield testified that Sorokin's loan was rejected because she couldn't produce proof of her fortune. Her attorney argued that Sorokin couldn't be guilty of attempted grand larceny if she wasn't close to getting the loan in the first place. Another New York banker testified last week that Sorokin seemed to 'speak the language' of the financial world during her attempt to obtain a multimillion-dollar loan. Ryan Salem of City National Bank told the court last Thursday that his bank denied a request to finance a private arts club Sorokin proposed building. But despite a host of red flags, the bank agreed to lend Sorokin $100,000 that she promised to repay within days. Salem said the financial statements the one-time darling of the New York City social scene provided in support of the loan 'didn't add up.' A bank official testified Thursday about Sorokin's attempt to get a $22 million loan to open a private arts club. Financial statements she provided in support of the loan 'didn't add up' The one-time darling of the New York City social scene turned heads on the first day of her trial on Wednesday when she showed up to court in a sleek, low cut black dress and a choker Prosecutors say the faux heiress left a significant paper-trail in her bid to defraud banks and is accused of swindling various people and businesses out of tens of thousands of dollars in a 10-month odyssey for a taste of the high life. 'We always believed that she had money,' Salem said, referring to a fortune of some $67 million that Sorokin claimed to have at her disposal overseas. 'She seemed to speak the language. She understood the financial jargon that you need to know to interact and transact in this environment. Sorokin's lawyer says she never intended to commit a crime and planned to pay back any money she borrowed. Jurors viewed dozens of emails last week between Salem and Sorokin, who became increasingly hard to pin down when the bank demanded repayment. Salem, who spent the day on the witness stand, said his dealings with Sorokin hurt his credibility within the bank. 'I went to bat for somebody who at the end of the day was not somebody to go to bat for,' he said. It was a stark contrast to the Rikers Island prison uniform and unkempt appearance she sported during an earlier court date. She is pictured above in February during a hearing The faux heiress turned heads on the first day her trial on Wednesday when she showed up to court in a sleek, low cut black dress and choker. Her attorneys have enlisted the services of stylist Anastasia Walker, who has worked with the likes of Courtney Love, T-Pain, and G-Eazy, and who is dressing her in Yves Saint Laurent, Michael Kors and Victoria Beckham. She is accused of swindling various people and businesses out of tens of thousands of dollars in a 10-month odyssey for a taste of the high life. Her attorneys had also reportedly tried to get her into stilettos but the Department of Corrections deemed them to be too dangerous. An Instagram account titled AnnaDelveyCourtLooks has since been created and features two variations of the outfit she wore during the first day of the trial. It is not clear who is paying for Sorokin's designer court outfits. During the trial so far, the jury has heard that Sorokin lived in luxury New York hotel rooms she couldn't afford, promised a friend an all-expenses paid trip to Morocco and then stuck her with the $62,000 bill, and peddled bogus bank statements in a quest for a $22 million loan. Sorokin, jailed since her arrest, faces deportation to Germany regardless of the outcome of the trial because authorities say she overstayed her visa. She denies the charges and insists she was always trying to be seen as a businesswoman. A frog that reproduces by regurgitating its young could hold the key to treating stomach ulcers. The gastric-brooding frog was discovered in Queensland in 1972 and stood out from other frogs for its unusual mating method. Females would ingest their own eggs, which would emerge as baby froglets weeks later from the mother's mouth. Scientists found that the female frog was able to secrete a hormone which stopped the stomach acid from destroying the eggs. Initially it was hoped that the frog would hold the key to treating stomach ulcers but unfortunately the mysterious amphibian has not been seen in almost 40 years. A frog that reproduces by regurgitating its young could hold the key to treating stomach ulcers (pictured, Gastric-brooding frog) Monash University professor and amphibian expert Dr Reid Tingley said the frog's ability to neutralise its own stomach acid may lie in the incubation process. 'There's this substance that the stomach produces inside the female frog, which turns off production of hydrochloric acid,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'Hydrochloric acid helps to digest food and would break down the eggs. But the frog is able to secrete a particular substance that turned off the hydrochloric acid, so it didn't digest the eggs.' Hydrochloric acid and pepsin can contribute to the formation of a stomach ulcer and cause severe pain. While Dr Tingley said he was no expert on what caused an ulcer or treatment, he said he could see how the gastric-brooding frog might be able to help out someone in pain. 'I guess it could help in the sense the frogs have this chemical to stop digestion.' While experts may have a vague idea of the benefits, Dr Tingley pointed out there is little research on the matter because the frog is now classed as extinct. 'Basically, there's this global classification called International Union for Conservation of Nature,' Dr Tingley said. 'The frog has been classified as extinct and usually that's not a judgement that's taken likely, but based on the available evidence.' The gastric-brooding frog is divided into two families: the Rheobatrachus silus and Rheobatrachus vitellinus. The R.silus was discovered in the north of the state in 1973, though went extinct in 1981. The R.vitellinus was found in the south of the state and disappeared in 1985, one year after it was discovered. Dr Tingley said that a deadly kind of fungus might be to blame for the disappearance of the gastric-brooding frog. The report claims the same fungus has already wiped out 90 species of frogs. The gastric-brooding frog was only ever found in Queensland and stood out from other frogs for its unusual mating method While experts may have a vague idea of the benefits, Dr Tingley pointed out there is little research on the matter because the frog hasn't been seen since the 1980s 'The report shows that a sickness called Chytrid fungus originated in Korea decades ago and spread all around the world because of the pet trade and humans moving around.' Eventually making its way to Australia, the fungus thrived in cool and moist environments - the typical habit of the gastric-brooding frog - and wiped out a range of frog species. Despite being classified as extinct, the Global Wildlife Conservation has renewed calls for searches of the frog - the species has been placed on its list in 'The Search for Lost Species project'. Though Dr Tingley is adamant the search will return any results. 'One of the species occurred in the Eungella National Park, while the other one was found in the Conondale Range. It has been 40 years now since the frogs were last sighted and it's not like they lived in the middle of nowhere. 'They were found in national parks and you would've thought someone walking through them would've spotted them by now.' A woman who died in mysterious circumstances on board a Qantas flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne was an avid traveller who had flown the same route many times before. Aleisha Tracy, 33, died just hours into the 16-hour flight on Sunday. She was heading home after a holiday in the US. Her devastated friends said they had 'no idea' how Ms Tracy died, given she had no known medical conditions and was 'happy and healthy' before she got on board QF94. Victoria Police said Ms Tracy's death would be for the coroner to investigate, and a post mortem examination was due to be carried out on Tuesday. Aleisha Tracy, 34, died on a flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne. Her mysterious death has stunned friends and family Aleisha Tracy (left) and David Loiterton, who posted a touching tribute to her on Facebook. He described Ms Tracy as a 'one of a kind friend who was always there' Ms Tracy posted her Qantas boarding pass when she left Melbourne on March 24 to start her holiday in the US. She died on the flight home on Sunday What we know about Ms Tracy's death Flight departs LA at 10.40pm Hours into the flight theres a medical emergency on-board Flight attendants are assisted by two doctors on the plane The flight lands around 9am at Melbourne Airport Paramedics and police meet the plane and go on board Ms Tracys family is notified of her death Friends pay tribute to her online as the coroner begins investigation Advertisement A close friend David Loiterton paid tribute to Ms Tracy, a National Broadband Network operations centre employee, on Facebook, just hours after her death. 'Aleisha Tracy I'm devastated. I will miss you brightening up my day. I will miss your hilarious stories ... I will miss your bargain stories. I will miss your messages and seeing your face pop up,' Mr Loiterton wrote. 'I will miss your famous selfie pose. I will miss us looking at each other and knowing what we mean.' Photos of Ms Tracy's United States trip were posted to social media in the days before her fateful flight home. Her Instagram account shows holiday snaps of Las Vegas and hauntingly a photo of her Qantas boarding pass. Just a year ago, Ms Tracy commented on social media about traveling between LA and Melbourne - a route she had flown many times before. 'The 787 is maybe suitable for a trip to Bali. But that is it,' Ms Tracy wrote. 'Melbourne to LA - the only advantage of this flight is the fact it doesn't arrive at 6am in the morning like the A380 does. But that is it.' Qantas confirmed its cabin crew was assisted by two doctors on-board the flight in trying to save Ms Tracy. Medical services met the aircraft upon arrival in Melbourne Airport. Another friend of Ms Tracy told Daily Mail Australia the popular woman's family and friends were mystified as to how she may have died on the flight. 'We are completely at a loss,' he said. Aleisha Tracy was no stranger to overseas travel and had previously given advice on long haul flights coming from the United States to Melbourne. She died on a flight from LA on Sunday A friend Sherlyn Moynihan described Ms Tracy (pictured) as an 'entertainer who always had people in stitches' It is understood Ms Tracy was in the prime of her life and was excited about moving into a new apartment. Mr Loiterton described Ms Tracy as a 'one of a kind friend who was always there'. 'I will miss hearing about your up coming holidays. I will miss talking about all the shows that we like,' he wrote. 'I am truly blessed to have known you. Thank you for such a beautiful friend. I will miss you. Xo.' Friend Sherlyn Moynihan described Ms Tracy as an entertainer who always had people in stitches. '(I) loved sitting in the back of the car just listening and laughing at her stories and how she made us all giggle,' she wrote. 'It breaks my heart to see her leave and go just like that in a split second .. all I know is she touched my heart and soul.' A passenger who claimed to be on the flight posted online that everything that could have been done for Ms Tracy on-board was done. 'We were on this flight and the QANTAS staff, could not be faulted, they were amazing. A very sad situation and my thoughts are with the family,' she posted on social media. A Qantas spokesman today described the incident as 'tragic' but would not reveal any further information on the matter. Ms Tracy's family declined to comment. A body has been found in a North Carolina lake according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police. Although the victim has not yet been identified, it's the same area where Vatsla Watkins' car had been spotted on March 22 Watkins has not been seen since March 18 and a local TV station, Fox 46, reports that the body that has been recovered is Watkins. Vatsla Watkins was last seen leaving her family's Myers Park home on March 18 A local television station is claiming the body that was found Sunday is Watkins Although the victim has not yet been identified, it's the same area where Vatsla Watkins' car had been spotted on March 22 The body was found in Lake Wylie on Sunday evening. The cause of death is under investigation. The corpse was found floating in the water and spotted by a boater. CMPD's Lake Wylie Boat Patrol and the Charlotte Fire Department responded to the scene to retrieve the body. CMPD and Charlotte Fire teams had previously searched the lake by boat looking for Warkins but called off their search at 5pm on Friday afternoon. The 39-year-old mother of two and wife of former Mecklenburg County GOP chair Curtis Watkins has been missing since mid-March. Watkins' posts are often happy pictures of her and family, including many of her and her daughter in handmade matching outfits She ran a popular Instagram account and blog called Fashion Behind The Seams that was dedicated to designs and style. She has more than 9,000 Instagram followers. The 39-year-old woman is pictured with her husband and two children At this point, only one local television station is naming Watkins as the victim. Her Mercedes Benz was found parked in a parking lot by the lake four days after she vanished. Watkins, a mother-of-two, was well known in the Charlotte area. She ran a popular Instagram account and blog called Fashion Behind The Seams that was dedicated to designs and style. She has more than 9,000 Instagram followers. A gang of thieves who allegedly drove a bobcat into a closed shopping centre to steal an ATM have been caught on camera. Police rushed to a shopping centre in Moama in southern New South Wales following reports a bobcat had been driven through the front doors at 4.30am on February 25. When they arrived, officers found an ATM had been stolen from inside the shopping centre and another had been significantly damaged. A gang of daring thieves who allegedly drove a bobcat into a closed shopping centre to steal an ATM have been caught on camera CCTV footage shows the bobcat (pictured), which is believed to have been stolen, smashing an ATM CCTV footage shows the bobcat, which is believed to have been stolen, smashing into an ATM, while a man in white makes his way into the shopping centre. A crime scene was established and officers located and seized several items related to the investigation, including a crowbar and a Mitsubishi Triton utility. These confiscated items will reportedly undergo forensic examination. Detectives from the State Crime Commands Robbery and Serious Crime Squad and Murray River Police District are currently investigating the incident. Following their initial inquiries, detectives executed a crime scene warrant at a caravan park in Deniliquin - close to the border of Victoria - at 9.30am on Tuesday. They have since released CCTV footage and images of a bobcat and a white Mitsubishi Triton utility in a bid to prompt witnesses to come forward. Police rushed to a shopping centre in Moama (pictured) in southern New South Wales following reports a bobcat had been driven through the front doors at 4.30am on February 25 Police have confiscated several items, including a crowbar (pictured), found at the scene of the robbery in Moama Police have urged anyone with information or dashcam footage of the bobcat or the Mitsubishi driving in the Moama area at the time of the incident to come forward. Strike Force Burrandoot investigators will liaise with Victoria Police as they continue their investigations into the robbery. Anyone with information that may assist Strike Force Burrandoot investigators is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. Police released CCTV footage and images of a bobcat and a white Mitsubishi Triton utility (pictured) in a bid to get help from the general public Minnesota election officials have reportedly completed their investigation into alleged campaign finance violations by controversial House Rep. Ilhan Omar. The Somali-born Democrat, who has been the subject of headlines in recent months for her comments about Israel, allegedly spent $6,000 in campaign funds for personal use. Omar, one of the first two Muslim women elected to the United States Congress this past November, is alleged to have used campaign money to pay a divorce lawyer as well as to take trips to Boston and Estonia, according to Sinclair. The allegations, which were made last year by Republican state lawmaker Steve Drazkowski, have been probed by the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board. House Rep. Ilhan Omar is being investigated by Minnesota state election officials for allegedly misusing campaign funds for personal expenses The board is expected to issue a ruling on the investigation sometime within the next month to six weeks, according to Sinclair. In the summer of 2016, Omar paid legal fees to attorney Carla Kjellberg, who represented her in the dissolution of her marriage. But Omar has denied the accusation that she used campaign funds for her divorce, saying that the money she paid to Kjellberg was reimbursement for crisis management services that she received during her run for the Minnesota state House, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. This is the third time that accusations of misusing campaign funds were brought forward by Republican state legislator Steve Drazkowski. In his first complaint, Drazkowski accused Omar of improperly accepting a speaking fee from Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, which is a violation of state ethics rules. Omar paid the colleges back $2,500, according to Drazkowski. I had observed a long pattern, Drazkowski told Sinclair. This is the third time that accusations of misusing campaign funds were brought forward by Republican state legislator Steve Drazkowski (above) Representative Omar hasn't followed the law. She's repeatedly trampled on the laws of the state in a variety of areas, and gotten by with it. Omar provoked outrage in February when she suggested that supporters of Israel were urging lawmakers to have 'allegiance to a foreign country'. The first-term Minnesota Congresswoman's repeated criticisms of Israel and a powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington have been widely condemned as anti-Semitic. Omar, a former Somali refugee, was assailed by Democrats and Republicans alike for the comments. Several lawmakers expressed outrage, warning that Omar was peddling in age-old anti-Semitic tropes about Jews having dual allegiances. She later apologized for the comment but Republicans have kept citing it as evidence of creeping bigotry. President Donald Trump, who routinely cites his support of Israel, said: 'The Democrats have very much proven to be anti-Israel. 'There's no question about that. And it's a disgrace. I mean, I don't know what's happened to them but they are totally anti-Israel. Frankly, I think they're anti-Jewish.' Two motoring experts have revealed the dangers of letting your car's fuel tank get below a quarter full. Letting your tank get below a quarter full could be causing serious damage to the motor - costing drivers more in the long run for repairs, experts say. 'There are dangers in two ways, one is that the sediment and rubbish thats in the fuel tank can end up in the fuel filter and that in itself requires some servicing work,' Steve Spalding from the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland told Yahoo 7. But according to Mr Spalding, the bigger risk is the fuel pump which can be very expensive to fix. Putting off filling up your car's fuel could be pushing it to breaking point, eventually leading to more costs in damage and repairs 'It could easily cost $500 to $1000 and if you run a fuel pump dry, theres a fair chance that it wont be recoverable and then youll end up in expensive repair and a tow.' But Robert Younus from the NRMA says it's typically older model cars that run the risk of damage from not filling up your tank quick enough. 'Cars with steel tanks tend to get more damage, but newer model cars with plastic tanks don't really get damaged,' Robert Younus told Daily Mail Australia. As for the theory that E10 fuel is bad for your car, the NRMA says some cars are actually recommended to use the cheaper unleaded petrol, saying cars from 2015 onward usually have a sticker in the fuel cap which says what petrol is best. Mr Younus said the technology of newer cars is actually helping people get to the service station sooner, by a beeping that comes on when cars get below certain kilometers left in the tank. 'Over the last 10 years the NRMA has seen a massive decrease in out-of-fuel call outs because of the technology in petrol tanks,' Mr Younus said. Checking the wheel alignment, keeping your load light and inflating tyres correctly are other ways to save the hefty mechanic fees. The NRMA says some cars are actually meant to use the cheaper unleaded petrol, saying cars from 2015 onward usually have a sticker in the fuel cap which says what petrol is best - and some even recommend to use E10 The children of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received multimillion-dollar homes and are being paid thousands of dollars per month by Saudi Arabia. His four children - two sons and two daughters - have each been given houses in Jeddah worth up to $4million each, it has been claimed. They are also being given payments of at least $10,000 per month with an additional payment totalling tens of millions of dollars apiece to be made once the trial of Khashoggi's alleged killers is completed. The payments 'are aimed in part at ensuring [the children] continue to show restraint in their public statements,' the Washington Post reported, after speaking with Saudi officials involved in the negotiations. Jamal Khashoggi's four children are being paid tens of thousands of dollars each per month and have been given houses in Jeddah worth millions by Saudi Arabia (pictured, Khashoggi's eldest son Salah shakes hands with Mohammed bin Salman) The houses are located within a compound in Jeddah, with the largest property being given to eldest son Salah, who is the only child living permanently in Saudi. The three other children - daughters Noha and Razan, and son Abdullah - live in the United States and are expected to sell their properties. But Saudi Arabia denied the payments amounted to 'blood money' aimed at buying the family's silence, saying it was simply part of Arab culture. Saudi often provides financial assistance to victims of violent crime. Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post and a critic of Saudi Arabia's ruling family, was killed inside the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul in October last year. Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has been accused of ordering Khashoggi's killing, but the kingdom claims the prince was not involved. Saudi Arabia initially said it had no knowledge of Khashoggi's fate but later blamed rogue agents for his death. Khashoggi's four children are also set to receive much larger payments, possibly totalling tens of millions each, once the trial of his alleged killers concludes in Riyadh Its public prosecutor has charged 11 people over his murder without naming them, and they are currently on trial in Riyadh. A recording taking from Turkish microphones planted inside the consulate is said to reveal a 15-man hit squad tried to take Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia. At one point he was sedated, it is claimed, before a bag was put over his head. Khashoggi can be heard screaming 'I can't breathe. I have asthma. Don't do this' before dying a short time later, the Post previously reported. At one point a buzzing noise can be heard, assumed to be from an electric saw as his body is cut into pieces. His remains have never been recovered. Amid global fallout from the death, Saudi Arabia released a picture of Bin Salman shaking hands with Salah in an attempt at reconciliation. But the image was widely viewed as an attempt to intimidate the family by powerful Saudi authorities. A former cheerleader facing fraud charges over a $30,000 insurance pay-out had her bail conditions suspended to allow her to go jet-setting across the globe. Regan Yerbury had been required to report to Sutherland police station, south of Sydney, every Wednesday since she was charged with dishonestly obtaining financial advantage in November last year. But her father paid $10,000 surety, allowing the 23-year-old to go ahead with her six week holiday in Morocco, Dubai, Portugal, America and Mexico earlier this year. Regan Yerbury (pictured) spent six weeks globe trotting after her father paid $10,000 surety, allowing her bail conditions to be suspended Regan posted a picture of herself cave-swimming in Tulum, Mexico in January this year The 23-year-old visited Morocco, where she went camel riding (pictured). She also visited Dubai, Portugal, America and Indonesia earlier this year Yerbury, her mother Karen and a senior NSW Police officer are alleged to have made a fraudulent car insurance claim, which resulted in a $30,571.17 settlement from agency Eric Insurance Limited. Her mother and the senior officer are also facing charges, the Daily Telegraph reported. Yerburys strict bail conditions were suspended between December 29 and February 10, which is when her envy-inducing trip took place. She kept her Instragram followers up-to-date with her travels, posting multiple bikini-clad pictures from Jamaica and snaps of her ringing in the new year in Cancun. And she also snapped pictures while riding a camel in Morocco. Ms Yerbury was in Chefchaouen, Morocco (pictured) earlier this year. The city is famous for its blue aesthetic She took this picture in the bathroom while on holiday in Cuba in January this year The 23-year-old enjoyed a camel ride in the Sahara Desert, Morocco in late-January 'Jesus you need a travel show,' one friend commented on a picture. 'Just need someone to fund,' she responded. Having returned to Australia, Yerbury and her mother appeared in the Sutherland Local Court on Tuesday where their cases were adjourned. Neither Ms Yerbury, her mother or the officer are yet to enter a plea. They will reappear in court on June 11. The end of 2018 was celebrated in Cancun. SHe captioned the imaged: 'NYE you were wild' Ms Yerbury rang in the new year in Cancun with her friends (pictured) before heading to Morocco Jared Kushner said that senior Democrats on Capitol Hill were an embarrassment for our democracy for alleging that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Talking about this nonsense further especially after two years and being wrong so many times is not productive, Kushner told Fox News on Monday. He spoke a week after Attorney General William Barr wrote a summary of the Mueller report which found that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russia to tilt the election in 2016. Kushner was asked if he felt liberated by Barrs summary and the end of the Mueller investigation. Jared Kushner criticized Democrats and the news media over the Russiagate matter during an interview on Fox News on Monday President Trump (left) and his aides did not collude with the Russian government during the 2016 election, according to a summary of the Mueller report written by Attorney General William Barr (right) I was never worried, the presidents son-in-law, who also serves as his senior adviser, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. I never thought the notion that we did that. We ran a great campaign. The president had a great message. That's why we won. Kushner was asked about statements made by senior Democratic lawmakers, including Representatives Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters, and Eric Swalwell. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that despite Barrs summary, there was ample evidence of collusion. They were on this Russian collusion thing that is crazy, Kushner said in response. Kushner also blasted the news media for its reporting on the Russia probe, saying it was repeating errors made when it was thought that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in the 2016 elections. The media got the election wrong, the presidents adviser said. They thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. Their data was wrong. Their analysis was wrong. Not a single person got fired. Not a single person apologized. We're in a very unique time. People let their hatred for Trump overtake their rational ability to look at things objectively. I think that when the dust settles and this whole administration is over, I think people will look back on these historic gains that have been achieved. On the other hand you can say because the media is so distracted with Russia, Russia, Russia and all of these crazy conspiracy theories, weve been able to operate underneath that level and just really be effective. Kushner also blasted Democratic lawmakers like Reps. Adam Schiff (left) and Eric Swalwell (right) for their emphasis on the Russia collusion allegations The number of times that CNN wrote things about me that I would then call and say thats not true, they would say well we have a source. It is what it is. I hope that going forward and everybody will look at it and have cooler heads and focus that were on the same team. While the Mueller investigation has ended, Kushner could still be vulnerable to scrutiny from lawmakers over the issue of White House security clearances. A White House whistleblower said on Monday that the Trump administration overruled security experts to give questionable security clearances to more than two dozen people, including Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump. Tricia Newbold, a White House security adviser, told Democrats in Congress that clearances were initially denied to dozens of administration officials because of concerns over possible foreign influence, conflicts of interests, questionable or criminal conduct, financial problems or drug abuse. Even though the Mueller investigation is over, Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump (seen above), are now faced with questions over security clearances they obtained - reportedly over the objections of career White House officials She said President Donald Trumps former White House personnel security director, Carl Kline, personally overruled the career officials judgments in the cases of two senior officials. Newbolds allegations were laid out in a letter sent to the White House on Monday and released by Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee. I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security, his letter quoted Newbold as telling his committee. I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office. Cummings said he plans to subpoena Kline and warned that more subpoenas would be issued if the White House does not provide requested documents. In his letter to the White House, Cummings referred to three unnamed senior White House officials whose security clearance cases are addressed in some detail by Newbold. Two sources familiar with the information obtained by the Oversight Committee said two of those three senior officials are Ivanka Trump and Kushner, her husband. Asked about the whistleblowers assertions, Kushner said in an interview on Fox News Channel that he had complied with various investigations. I disclosed all of my holdings for the Office of Government Ethics, and what I did with them is they told me what to divest, what to keep, what rules to follow. We followed all that, Kushner said. Two bricklayers who were working on scaffolding that suddenly collapsed - killing a teenager and leaving another man fighting for his life - have revealed their own miraculous escape from the carnage. The two men were working on the 'nbn Lachlan's Line project' in Macquarie Park in Sydney's north-west on Monday when the 17-metre section of scaffolding they were standing on collapsed. Apprentice Christopher Cassaniti, 18, was killed and another worker, 39, was seriously injured. SafeWork New South Wales inspectors attended the site after the collapse, and a spokesman said the two bricklayers made an incredible leap to safety. Apprentice Christopher Cassaniti (pictured with parents Patrizia and Rob), 18, was killed and another worker, 39, was seriously injured Patrizia Cassaniti (pictured with her husband at the scene) runs a coffee and food truck near the construction site where her son Christopher was killed SafeWork New South Wales inspectors attended the site after the collapse (pictured), and a spokesman said the two bricklayers made an incredible leap to safety 'The tradesmen had been working from the bottom level of scaffolding when the structure suddenly collapsed. Another two workers were laying bricks at the top of the structure and jumped to safety,' SafeWork NSW said in a statement. 'It is not yet known what caused the scaffolding to collapse, however SafeWork will employ significant resources to fully understand how the tragedy occurred.' Meanwhile, Mr Cassaniti's family said they feel 'devastated and empty' after his death. 'Christopher was a gentle, kind and hardworking young man full of life and love for his family. He was adored by everyone who was lucky enough to meet him,' his uncle Joe Cassaniti said. 'While nothing can bring our son back, we don't want his death to be just another statistic. 'No other family should have to go through this horrendous pain. 'We will miss him dearly. One death is too many. 'We would please ask that the media now leave us in peace to deal with our loss.' The family called for more to be done to ensure workplaces are kept safe. 'We ask that the government step in and take immediate action and implement stringent measures regarding safety on construction sites,' his family said in a statement. 'Crucial safety checks and procedures need to be at the front and centre of every construction site. 'We await the outcome of the investigation as to what went wrong.' Harrowing: This is the harrowing moment tradesmen frantically tried to save two of their friends trapped under a mountain of collapsed scaffolding at a construction site Mr Cassaniti - whose mother Patrizia served him and colleagues from her coffee van near the site - was in his first job and was pictured celebrating his 18th birthday with workmates just five days before he died. On his birthday on 27 March, Mrs Cassaniti posted a moving message on Facebook about her son which hinted at a difficult birth before the overwhelming joy of his arrival. She wrote: 'Today, 18 years ago, was one of the most terrifying moments of my life that was then fulfilled with much relief, joy and happiness. 'Christopher Cassaniti was born 2.7kg and 47cm and my tiniest baby has now grown to be the tallest of the whole family in both sides. He is compassionate and shy yet strong and forever helpful. 'We wish you all the best that the world can dish out and May God be forever in your heart and Bless you with much Joy, Happiness and most importantly health. 'I love you. Happy 18th Birthday Christopher, always Mum, Dad (Rob Cassaniti) and brothers Adriano Cassaniti and Michael Cassaniti.' Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) state secretary Darren Greenfield told reporters on Monday the boy's parents were shattered. 'As you'd expect, they're devastated to lose their 18-year-old son.' 'He's new to this industry, early in his working life. To lose his life doing a job is atrocious.' On his birthday, Mr Cassaniti's mother paid a moving tribute (pictured) to her son. She wrote on Facebook: 'Today, 18 years ago, was one of the most terrifying moments of my life that was then fulfilled with much relief, joy and happiness' He added: 'These workers were working on the ground as far as I'm aware and it's come down on top of them. You can imagine 15 metres to 17 metres high, four layers of scaffolding - that's a lot of steel.' It comes as police, SafeWork and others try to work out why the collapse happened. Dave Noonan, CFMEU national secretarty, said it was too early to speculate and an investigation is under way. 'What we do know is that this working platform has failed and failed catastrophically,' he told Sunrise. 'As I have said, if scaffolding is erected safely, maintained properly and not overloaded they don't fall down. Somewhere along the line there has been obviously a problem. The scenes there yesterday were absolutely traumatic. And chaotic.' Tributes poured in for Mr Cassaniti from devastated friends on Monday night. His older brother Adriano posted on Facebook on Monday: 'You were such a ball of energy and so hard working, you will be sorely missed by all your family and friends. Nothing more could I have asked for in a little brother.' Benjamin Betros added: 'You will be dearly missed by all mate. You were a fantastic bloke and had a heart of gold.' An Uber driver weeping openly during his Massachusetts court appearance on charges of raping a passenger was admonished by a judge before being held on $100,000 bail. Mayanja Daudah, 37, was asked by Boston municipal court Judge Richard Sinnott to 'please knock it off' as the father-of-12, including three sets of twins, sobbed through an explanation of how he had only started driving two weeks ago, according to CBS Boston. The rideshare driver is charged with two counts of rape after a woman he picked up in his car early Saturday morning in Somerville, Massachusetts, claimed he sexually assaulted her twice. Scroll down for video Mayanja Daudah, 37, an Uber driver charged with two counts of rape could not help crying during his court appearance in Boston which drew a rebuke from the judge Defense attorney Kim Giampietro (left) says her client tried to kick the accuser out of the car for trying to smoke marijuana in his front seat 'This happened while on Storrow Drive, while the vehicle was in motion,' the prosecutor AlexaRae Wright, setting the crime in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. He then pulled over near the Hatch Memorial Shell, the renowned outdoor concert venue in Boston and allegedly raped her again. The prosecution said that the woman's phone rang giving her an opportunity to escape. 'She ran from the vehicle. She was observed running by a bystander,' said Wright. 'She was seen hysterically crying with her pants unbuttoned. Daudah ended up voluntarily coming to the police and giving a different version of events. Judge Richard Sinnott unmoved by Daudah's tears told him to 'please knock it off' during the court appearance Daudah being escorted by State Police voluntarily came in to speak with authorities after he was accused According to the accused driver's attorney, the passenger he picked up was the one behaving strangely upon their meeting. 'She insisted on climbing in the front,' according to defense attorney Kim Giampietro who alleges the passenger was also seeking to smoke pot, but that Daudah then kicked her out of the vehicle, according to WHDH. The judge also ordered Daudah, a Ugandan citizen, to surrender his passport. The first assault on the passenger happened allegedly along Storrow Drive on the Esplanade, the park that sits next to the Charles River in Boston The second rape allegedly occurred after Daudah pulled over near the Hatch Memorial Shell, a famed outdoor concert venue in Boston Immigration and Customs Enforcement initially placed a detainer on him, but the agency said that he is 'not subject to removal at this time' on Monday. Daudah will also be required to wear a GPS monitor if he makes bail and makes his next court appearance in May. 'What's been reported is horrible and something no one should ever go through,' Uber said in a statement. 'We stand ready to support law enforcement with their investigation.' One in four Australian cars could be affected by defective Takata airbags which have killed 24 drivers across the globe. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released a compulsory recall amid heightened fears the dangerous airbags could cause injury to motorists. The Japanese airbags, which can explode with too much force and hurl shrapnel into drivers and passengers, have injured more than 300 people and killed 24. One Australian, seven Malaysians and 16 Americans have died from the faulty airbags which were first voluntarily recalled by a number of vehicle suppliers in Australia in 2009. One in four Australian vehicles could be affected by defective Takata airbags which have killed 24 drivers across the globe The compulsory Australian recall applies to all vehicles subject to existing Takata voluntary recalls and about 1.3million additional vehicles that have not been voluntarily recalled. Suppliers of vehicles with the faulty airbags are required to replace them in Australian vehicles by December 31, 2020. 'Some vehicles will be recalled immediately, and others on a rolling basis, scheduled based on various factors including relative safety risk,' the ACCC recall says. 'This means that not all vehicles will be recalled straight away.' The 'critical' Takata airbags, called 'alpha', pose the greatest safety risk. The ACCC says there are about 25,000 of the alpha airbags yet to be replaced. Deployed Takata airbags are seen on the driver and passenger side of a 2007 Dodge Charger. TAKATA ALPHA CRITICAL AIRBAG RECALLS LIST Make and model - Year range BMW 3 Series E46 - 12/2001 - 03/2003 Honda Accord, CR-V - 2001-2002 Honda Civic - 2001 Honda Accord - 2001-2002 Honda Civic, Accord, Accord Euro, CR-V, Jazz, MDX - 2001-2003 Honda Jazz - 2004 Lexus SC430 - Lexus SC430 Mazda6, RX-8, Mazda 6 - 2003-2004 Nissan N16 Pulsar, Y61 Patrol, D22 Navara, T30 X-Trail - 2000-2004 Nissan N16 Pulsar, D22 Navara, Y61 Patrol, T30 X-Trail - 2001-2003 Toyota Corolla, Avensis Verso - 2000-2004 Toyota Echo, Rav 4 - 2002-2003 SOURCE: ACCC Advertisement All states apart from Victoria have banned registration renewals for cars with the alpha type Takata airbags. The high risk airbags were installed in certain Honda, Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Mazda and Lexus cars, with models sold between 2001 and 2004. 'Critical airbags pose a heightened safety risk and are a subset of the Takata bags being recalled,' the ACCC said. Honda Australia said more than 40,000 of their vehicles are still out there with potentially dangerous airbags, despite replacing 95 per cent locally, Cars Guide. 'We door-knocked every single person that was affected by the airbag recall, and that got a 30 or so per cent positive response,' Honda Australia director Stephen Collins said. 'Of those door-knocks, 70 per cent we found the car, and of that 70 per cent a third of owners booked their car in, a third said they understood but didn't want to complete the recall, and the other third gave many excuses as to why they didn't want to, including that they were busy, that nobody sits on that side of the car or that Honda was trying to sell them another car. 'There is still 43,531 vehicles left to have their airbags replaced,' Mr Collins said. Another person has died from shrapnel hurled by a faulty Takata air bag inflator. Honda says the death happened in Buckeye, Arizona last June Honda are in the process of trying to locate 34,000 airbag inflators in 26,000 cars - 4,200 are the 'Alpha' type and are the greatest risk. Other vehicle companies working to replace the defective airbags include Toyota, BMW and Subaru. The latest person to die from an exploding Takata airbag inflator was an Arizona man. Armando V. Ortega, 55, of Yuma, died June 11, 2018, three days after his 2002 Honda Civic was involved in a crash in near Phoenix, according to the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Honda said in a statement that the Civic driver was hit by shrapnel and injured. He later died at a hospital. About 100 million inflators are to be recalled worldwide. A recalled Takata airbag inflator is shown after being removed. During a crash, the inflators can explode with too much force, hurling shrapnel into drivers and passengers Takata used ammonium nitrate to create a small explosion to inflate the bags. But it can deteriorate due to high temperatures and humidity and explode too forcefully, spewing metal fragments. The deaths and recalls forced Takata into bankruptcy with its assets purchased by a company owned by a Chinese investment firm. The owner of the Civic, identified by Arizona officials as Ortega, purchased the Civic used less than three months before the death. But there is no federal requirement that used car sellers have the cars repaired or inform buyers of any unrepaired recall problems. Honda said it did not know the car had been sold until recently. The Civic in the crash has been under recall since December 2014 due to a faulty driver's front air bag inflator. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released a desperate recall amid heightened fears the dangerous airbags could cause injury to motorists Honda said it mailed 12 recall notices over three years to the previous owners. The company also said it made more than 20 phone calls in an effort to reach the owners, but Honda records show the repairs were never done. Honda said the death was first reported to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on March 11 2019. The safety agency notified Honda on March 14, and it inspected the car with Honda on Friday and determined that the inflator was blown apart in the crash. 'The rupture was confirmed at this inspection, and we announced the findings the same day,' Honda spokesman Chris Martin said. Honda said it has sufficient supplies of replacement inflators, and it urged people to get recalled vehicles repaired as soon as possible. Older vehicles, especially from the 2001 through 2003 model years, are most at risk, the company said. A Texas teacher has been arrested for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old male student after investigators found bodily fluid in a classroom. Edna Mabel Longoria, 39, was charged last week with having an improper relationship with the student at Veterans' Memorial High School in Mission. The health science teacher turned herself into police last Thursday after the student notified school administrators of their alleged sexual relationship. Edna Mabel Longoria, 39, was charged last week with having an improper relationship with the student at Veterans' Memorial High School in Mission, Texas The teen boy told police he had engaged in multiple sexual encounters with Longoria in a classroom at the school. Investigators then 'located multiple biological fluids' from the classroom where the boy said the sexual encounters occurred, according to the arrest affidavit. The boy told police the alleged encounters started on February 22. Police also obtained texts and Snapchat messages between the pair that they described as 'inappropriate' and contained 'material of sexual nature'. The health science teacher turned herself into police last Thursday after the student notified school administrators of their alleged sexual relationship The school district said Longoria was on administrative leave following her arrest. Longoria was released from jail on a $50,000 bond on Thursday. The school district issued a statement saying: 'The safety and well-being of students is a top priority at Mission CISD and its schools. 'Officials take seriously all allegations that may affect the safety and well-being of our students.' Mexico City May Soon Have World's Largest Urban Park Mexico City - Once the home of Lake Texcoco, the land on which Mexico City's new airport was to have been located could become the world's largest urban park, thanks to a project designed by Mexican architect Inaki Echeverria back in 2010 and the support of the National Water Commission (Conagua). The new director of Conagua, Blanca Jimenez Cisneros, is working to integrate the architect's Parque Ecologico Lago de Texcoco project, which was originally planned to encompass an area of 14,000 hectares, into a 35,000-hectare ecological park that would incorporate nature, culture and infrastructure on the edge of the metropolitan area of Mexico City. The park's design includes a strong environmental focus that Echeverria dubs "cultural ecology:" the architect's proposal includes plans for massive reforestation, the reintroduction of native plant and animal species, and restoration of the lake to replenish the Valley of Mexico's water supply and prevent flooding in Mexico City and Mexico state. If built, the Lake Texcoco park would also include areas for water sports, sailing, biking and hiking and a museum suspended above Lake Nabor Carrillo. It remains to be decided what will become of the partially-built structures at the site of the cancelled airport. According to the law, such projects must restore the site to its original condition. Union officials have called for new laws and safer work environments after apprentice Christopher Cassaniti, 18, was crushed by scaffolding on Monday Union officials are calling for a safety crackdown and industrial manslaughter laws to be brought in across the country following the death of an 18-year-old apprentice who was crushed by scaffolding. Christopher Cassaniti was working at the Lachlan's Line site in Macquarie Park, Sydney, on Monday when part of the scaffolding 'catastrophically' collapsed on top of him. Mr Cassaiti, who just days earlier celebrated his 18th birthday, and a 39-year-old colleague were buried under the steel poles. His colleague was pulled from the rubble in a critical condition and remains in the intensive care unit of Royal North Shore Hospital. Speculation has been rife as to what caused the collapse, with incorrect ties and a construction hoist both blamed for the disaster, but CFMEU national secretary Dave Noonan would not be drawn on what he believed had gone wrong. 'What I will say is this - when scaffolding is used and erected correctly according to specifications, properly maintained and the ties are left in, and it's loaded only in accordance with the safe working loads that are appropriate to its design, then it doesn't fall down,' Mr Noonan said. 'Somewhere in that chain, something has gone wrong.' Distraught colleagues desperately tried to free Mr Cassaniti from the collapsed scaffolding when it went down on Monday afternoon Rescue workers flooded the construction site, but were not able to save Mr Cassaniti Mr Noonan, who has been working in construction since 1985, said while scaffolding failures could occur, more often than not they had been caused by human error. He said Mr Cassaniti's death should be a serious wake-up call to the government to better fund safety mechanisms on building sites. With development booming around the country, the union boss said he knew there was a lot of pressure on commercial builders, and this could sometimes lead to corners being cut. 'The role of the union and of government safety regulators is to make sure sites are compliant,' he said. 'But the regulators are heavily under resourced. There's a lot of money put in by governments to stop unions looking after their members, but not into safety regulations.' Mr Noonan and the CFMEU are calling for industrial manslaughter laws, which in Queensland mean a business or member of management can face criminal charges over a workplace death, to be brought in around the country. A business found guilty of the offence can receive a fine of up to $10million, while an individual charged can face a jail term of up to 20 years. 'We need uniform industrial manslaughter laws across the country,' he said. 'It's too early to know if that applies in this case, but there are certainly circumstances that do warrant criminal prosecution of industrial companies. 'We know regulators are under-skilled, under resourced and don't take enough of a hard line with dodgy safety practices.' Ganellan, the company responsible for the project, said Mr Cassaniti's death was 'a tragic accident', and the first death they had experienced on site in 20 years of operation. Patrizia Cassaniti (pictured with her husband at the scene) runs a coffee and food truck near the construction site where her son Mr Cassaniti was killed 'We extend our deepest sympathies to his family, co-workers and friends and continue to offer them assistance in any way we can,' the company said in a statement. 'Another injured worker is receiving treatment at Royal North Shore Hospital. A number of our senior leadership team visited the hospital on Monday afternoon, and our thoughts and best wishes for recovery remain with him and his family. 'This is clearly a distressing time for everyone who was on site and we are making support services available to all of those who have been affected. 'We will continue to assist emergency and investigative authorities in any way requested while at the same time looking after our people.' Last year, SafeWork began a safety blitz on more than 1,000 construction sites in NSW. Constant issues with scaffolding led them to launch a specific operation to target non-compliant scaffold structures on Monday. 'SafeWork Inspectors observed wide-spread non-compliance with scaffold safety last year and will continue to focus on scaffolding throughout 2019 under a new compliance program, Operation Scaff Safe,' Secretary for the Department of Finance, Service and Innovation and SafeWork regulator, Martin Hoffman, said. Under Operation Scaff Safe, which commenced on Monday, SafeWork Inspectors will visit sites across NSW to ensure that businesses understand the safety requirements involved in creating a safe environment for workers using scaffolding and working from a height. Mr Hoffman said SafeWork's priority is workers returning home safely when they leave for work that day and believes better compliance and education around scaffolding will help to ensure that. Workers heard a loud bang as a mass of twisted steel and concrete gave way at the building site, which will form part of a block of 900 flats, on Monday (pictured) Workers at the Lachlan's Line site have remained quiet after the horrific accident, with one man on Monday telling Daily Mail Australia he was 'too shattered' to talk. 'They are unable to work, they are extremely traumatised,' Mr Noonan said of the staff. 'They've seen a workmate killed and another critically injured.' A spokesman for Synergy Scaffolding Services told Daily Mail Australia they intend to cooperate with the investigation. 'We are devastated, shocked and saddened to hear of the passing of a young man at the site and we send our sincere condolences to his family.' 'Synergy Scaffolding Services considers the safety, wellbeing and welfare of workers and the broader community as paramount. We adhere to all safety regulations, ensure all staff are suitably qualified and undergo specific training and inductions.' After the collapse, workers on site rushed to the scene to start pulling away the scaffolding, working desperately to save their mates. They did not stop until police forced them away, with officers resorting to pepper spray on some to get them to stand down. A mission to create a concrete suburb: The Lachlan's Line project The 13-storey block where the collapse happened was part of a huge project by Greenland Australia called 'Lachlan's Line'. The plan was to develop 900 apartments across six blocks at Macquarie Park. In an update provided earlier this year, the building was said to be closing in on completion with scaffolding being brought down. Up to 350 construction workers were at the site every day, which was run by by construction company Ganellen. The company's website described the apartment block as one that: 'Offers superior design, green open spaces and an unparalleled lifestyle'. 'Perfectly positioned above a bustling town square at the heart of the new Lachlan's Line masterplan, this prestigious new community is located at the gateway to the booming suburb of Macquarie Park.' Following Monday's accident, Ganellen said in a statement: 'Our immediate concern and focus is on the safety of our people and according for those who were in the vicinity of the accident, and ensuring the site is safely secured.' Advertisement Pictured: Shattered workers comfort each other at the Macquarie Park apartment block on Monday afternoon The CFMEU was at the building site until late on Monday night and returned again on Tuesday morning to offer support to workers and aid in the investigation where possible. 'Counselling is being undergone by a lot of workers,' Mr Noonan said on Tuesday. 'The site won't be operating today. There will be a gathering tomorrow to decide what is to be done [going forward].' Devastated workers have begun posting tributes to Mr Cassaniti, with colleague Ahmed Elcheeky remembering the apprentice as 'one of the most humble, respectful and polite kids I've ever met'. '[Mr Cassaniti] always had a smile on his face and never even so much as heard a swear word come out of his mouth ever. 'I remember locking up with you every day after everybody had left work and dropping you off at your bus stop. 'Such a tragic day. So sad that such an innocent kid gets taken so early in his life. 'My heart goes out to his family and his mother Patricia. I can't imagine how hard this would be on you. I hope you know the Future Form Group Australia family is here for you always.' 'You were such a ball of energy and so hard working, you will be sorely missed by all your family and friends. Nothing more could I have asked for in a little brother,' Mr Cassaniti's older brother Adriano Cassani (left) posted on Facebook. He's pictured with the teenager and youngest brother Michael (right) Mr Cassanti (pictured celebrating his 18th birthday with workmates last Wednesday) has been remembered as a friend who saw the best in everyone Workers on site were left 'shattered' and many are undergoing counselling in the wake of the tragedy Friend Oscar Zounis said Mr Cassaniti 'made us laugh, made us smile, always made the best of our days'. 'Not a shred of bad in you,' he wrote in the emotional Facebook tribute. 'We all love you brother and know you're resting well. We love you brother.' Bella Mineo said the teenager 'occupied a very special place in her heart'. 'You have been my friend since the first day of kindergarten... words can't express how much this hurts,' she wrote. 'You were full of positivity, always smiling, always seeing the best in everyone. You are an angel. 'Those special memories of you will always bring a smile to my face. It hurts me that someone so precious had to pass. Forever in my heart 'Fly high Christopher Cassaniti... Loving you always.' Mr Noonan said the union was now calling on construction workers around Australia to take a moment to assess whether their job site was safe. 'If [workers] are concerned it's unsafe, they should not do the work,' he said. 'If there are concerns, workers should call the union.' Figures for 2018 are not finalised, but in 2017, Safe Work reported 30 people died while working on a construction site. The co-deputy leader of the Greens Party showed her clear disgust for controversial Senator Fraser Anning by flipping him the bird on Tuesday. Larissa Waters posted a photo to Instagram of her middle finger in front of the Queensland senator, who was standing outside her window. 'That moment when Fraser Anning talks to media outside your parliamentary window and you cant help yourself,' she captioned the photo. Larissa Waters took to Instagram on Tuesday and posted a photo where her middle finger is up at Queensland Senator Fraser Anning who is standing outside her window 'That moment when Fraser Anning talks to media outside your parliamentary window and you cant help yourself,' she captioned the photo. Mr Anning is seen standing in front of a microphone with three others who are recording. The post has since received 2177 likes with multiple users sharing their jokes about the post and tagging their friends. 'Any eggs you could throw?' one user asked referencing the moment Mr Anning was egged in the head by Will Connolly, 17. 'Shame you didnt have an egg,' another posted. 'Yeah rise above by calling out white supremacy with sass and conviction,' another wrote. 'These times call for a dozen free range eggs. Thats a perfect window to aim out of,' someone else posted. 'No eggs were harmed in this communication,' one joked. 'Any eggs you could throw?' one user asked referencing the moment Mr Anning was egged in the head by Will Connolly, 17 (pictured) The senator has been widely condemned since his shocking comments on the Christchurch mosque shooting, which saw 50 Muslims lose their lives The senator has been widely condemned since his shocking comments on the Christchurch mosque shooting, which saw 50 Muslims lose their lives. He said 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 program that allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place,' he tweeted shortly after the shootings on March 15. In a follow-up statement, he said he opposed to any form of violence within our community and totally condemned the actions of the gunman. 'What it highlights is the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence,' he said. Eurydice Dixon's murderer will not be sentenced until late this year because the judge, his lawyer and a leading psychologist all have holidays booked. Prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court for an adjournment to obtain a psychiatric report on Jaymes Todd, who pleaded guilty to murder and three sexual offences in November. The Melbourne comedian was raped and murdered in Carlton North's Princes Park while walking home from a comedy club gig in the city on June 12 last year. Eurydice Dixon's (pictured) murderer will not be sentenced until late this year because the judge, his lawyer and a leading psychologist all have holidays booked The Melbourne comedian (pictured) was raped and murdered in Carlton North's Princes Park while walking home from a comedy club gig in the city on June 12 last year Todd, 19, from Broadmeadows, admitted following the 22-year-old for five kilometres across the city from Flinders Street Station. Dr Rogers said prosecutors wanted a specialist report from Professor James Ogloff, who heads psychological services at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health. He is on holidays for all of June, won't be able to complete a report until July 8 and is the only expert in Victoria with appropriate expertise to assess Todd, she said. There might be another expert in Western Australia who could help, or alternatively a report by a Forensicare specialist could be obtained, but there is a three-month waiting list for that too, Dr Rogers said. But Todd's barrister Tim Marsh said prosecutors were aware of issues with Todd, including a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, since his first court appearance. 'It was also noted in national and international media the same day,' Mr Marsh said. Jaymes Todd, 19, (right) pleaded guilty to murder and three sexual offences in November To begin a plea hearing and then have to wait months to complete it would be 'highly disadvantageous' for his client, he said. Mr Marsh also noted the defence would rely on the 'swift resolution' of the case to mitigate the sentence, and it was 'not a matter I would relinquish lightly'. Justice Stephen Kaye said he was concerned about the 'regrettable' delay, but it was important the court be properly informed with two reports. Mr Marsh and Justice Kaye noted their own time off in July, meaning the earliest the matter could return to court would be August. A pre-sentence plea hearing will be held August 15 and 16, with the sentence to follow. A couple who beeped a woman driver at a McDonald's drive-thru had no idea it would spark weeks of harassment and end in their car being blown up. The pair were at the 24-hour fast food restaurant at Warrawong in Wollongong, south of Sydney, on February 22. As a car was allegedly about to hit their vehicle, the couple honked their horn at the driver and a 'relatively minor' altercation ensued. Scroll down for video A couple who beeped a woman driver at a McDonald's drive-thru had no idea it would spark weeks of harassment and their car being blown up (pictured, a 31-year-old woman is arrested on Tuesday morning) As a car was allegedly about to hit their vehicle, the couple honked their horn at the driver and a 'relatively minor' altercation ensued (pictured, a 33-year-old man is arrested on Tuesday morning) What would follow would be a six week long nightmare for the couple, including stalking and death threats, police said. The offended woman driver took her complaint to Wollongong police and complained to her partner. She also allegedly followed the car and recorded the number plate. The next day, the couple who beeped the woman found the window of their ute had been smashed. Then followed a 'barrage of online threats' before the couple's Ford Rodeo was targeted. Their vehicle had been parked in the driveway before a 'sophisticated' improvised explosive was placed on it in the early hours of March 5. While the car was not destroyed, Detective Superintendent McLean said the explosion had the potential to injure or kill a person. 'This was an act of grievance-fuelled violence,' he told reporters. Police later arrested a 33-year-old man at Warrawong BP on Tuesday morning, before they later arrested his 31-year-old partner. A pipe bomb, drone and baton were also seized during searches of a car and house. Both the man and the woman remain at Wollongong and Lake Illawara Police stations where local detectives and Fixated Persons Investigation Unit investigators are interviewing them. The man is expected to be charged with using an explosive with an intent to harm, reprisals to a witness, using a carriage service to menace or harass and stalking and intimidation. His partner is expected to face similar charges. The Fixated Persons Investigations Unit - a specialist squad set up in 2017 to target potential would-be terrorists or lone actors - was brought in to handle the case after the threats continued. While the car was not destroyed, detective Superintendent Michael McLean said the explosion had the potential to injure or kill a person An Adelaide man who posted social media comments in support of the Christchurch mosque massacres has failed in a bid to have his access to the internet restored. Chad Rolf Vinzelberg faced Adelaide Magistrates Court on Tuesday seeking to vary his strict bail conditions to allow him to search for work online. He came to the attention of police following the Christchurch massacres after posting comments on Facebook. Chad Rolf Vinzelberg, 37, tried to appeal his total internet ban but was denied. Vinzelberg supported the Christchurch massacre on Facebook, which lead to his arrest The court was told on Tuesday that his posts included comments such as 'so happy to see this happen', 'can't wait to see more of this' and 'well done mate'. The comments prompted police to go to his Smithfield home where they seized weapons including a fake pistol, knives and a medieval mace. He was subsequently charged with one count of aggravated possessing a firearm without a licence and four counts of using or possessing a prohibited weapon. Representing himself on Tuesday, the 37-year-old blamed the media for 'making a mountain out of a pile' in relation to his comments. He told the court he had lost his job following his arrest and was finding it hard to find work without access to the internet. But magistrate Brett Dixon refused his request to allow him to go online, reminding him that anything that required him to use the internet was prohibited. At his previous appearance, a lawyer for Vinzelberg told the court that many of the seized weapons were mounted ornamental items that were found in his 'man cave'. Vinzelberg will return to court in December. A heartbroken mother who found her son critically injured at the base of a cliff tracked him down using the 'Find my iPhone' app. Kim Goodrick, 53, from Eureka in New South Wales, panicked when her 15-year-old son stopped replying to her messages, and didn't arrive at the pickup point they had set after a day out with friends. She told Daily Mail Australia her son - who we have chosen not to name - is 'generally really great at replying to messages', so she knew something was not right immediately. She used the inbuilt iPhone app to track her son, presuming he would be with his phone, and followed it to Cape Byron. A heartbroken mother who found her son critically injured at the base of a cliff tracked him down using the 'Find my iPhone' app She said she and her husband were driving up to the lighthouse when they noticed all the emergency personnel. She was told her son had fallen off a notorious cliff above Tallow Beach. Emergency services have responded to at least seven rescues in the very same location in four years. The friend who he had been with was stranded at the top of crumbling rocks, and had been standing there for three hours, hoping the platform didn't give way beneath him. He had called emergency services when Mrs Goodrick's son fell, and spent hours patiently waiting to be rescued. She said she and her husband were driving up to the lighthouse when they noticed all the emergency personnel 'My husband was convinced my son was dead,' Mrs Goodrick said. Emergency services later confirmed he had survived the fall, but suffered extensive injuries. He landed on his skull, and suffered a neck fracture, multiple skull fractures and a serious brain injury. 'He is in intensive care, sedated - they are slowly reducing sedation after 10 days, he is starting to move and open his eyes but it's early days. 'He's improving but is still classed as critical,' she said. 'Moving forward, the best case scenario is that we have a two year recovery period. That is best case. She used the inbuilt iPhone app to track her son, presuming he would be with his phone, and followed it to Cape Byron 'He will never be the person he was.' Mrs Goodrick wants to thank two fishermen who were in the area at the time and who stayed with her son prior to emergency services arriving. 'Two amazing fishermen, Adrian Miller and Chris Keevers, saw him fall near the water and helped him. 'They got him to a safe place, put a towel under his head and cared for him for nearly an hour before rescue arrived. 'They are absolute heroes. They had no training, but they did the right thing.' The teen, who Mrs Goodrick described as 'an avid skiier, and sensible boy who understands risks,' may not have known how perilous the area he was exploring was. The teen, who Mrs Goodrick described as 'an avid skiier, and sensible boy who understands risks,' may not have known how perilous the area he was exploring was She said the area lacked signage, and that he and his friend 'never would have taken the risk' had he known the dangers, and that he 'always obeys warning signs'. He had been looking forward to an international exchange to Italy for six months later this year, and has dreams of being a paleontologist. 'There has been a lot of trolling online - he's stupid and all of that. But he's not stupid. He had so much to live for and he would have never taken that risk if he had known,' she said. 'My son is such a sensible boy, for this to happen to him was just incomprehensible. It was only after I started to read the media reports and after talking to police I understood he really didn't understand the risk and neither did his friend. 'I believe if he had they would never have attempted to go up there. 'I'm not trying to blame people, I think it's definitely a system failure. It's a negligence thing. All I want is to minimise the risk of this happening again. 'People will always take risks but at least they've been warned if there is a sign,' she said. A Sydney school has decided to ditch electronic devices in a bid to reduce distractions. With the electronic age well and truly upon us, Reddam House School, in Sydney's eastern suburbs, has made the controversial choice to rewind the clock as it reintroduces paper textbooks for students. The school's return to hard-copy comes about five years after its primary and junior high school classes brought in the use of e-text books on iPads. A Sydney school has decided to ditch electronic devices in a bid to reduce distractions (stock image) Principal Dave Pitcairn told Sydney Morning Herald teachers had found the devices were distracting for students and hindered learning. '(Students) could have messages popping up and all sorts of other alerts,' he said. He said their Year 11 and 12 students had still been using hard-copy books during that time and preferred it. 'The ease of navigation through the textbook was easier with the hard copy. I believe they learn better the more faculties they use, the more senses they use in research and reading and making notes.' The school will also phase out iPads, however, a bring-your-own device policy will be put in place with laptops listed as a preference. Reddam House School, in Syndey's eastern suburbs, has made the controversial choice to rewind the clock as it reintroduces hard-copy books for students The school's choice was discussed on Channel 7 breakfast show on Tuesday and drew mixed reaction from parents, with some saying digital devices were a necessity in modern education. 'I dont really think thats setting them up for the future,' one person said. Others supported the plan, saying: 'Its a perfect idea. My son is in Year 8 and I know they are constantly on their phones.' Daily Mail Australia has approached Reddam House School for comment. Advertisement The aircraft carrier, named after the 16th president of the United States is leaving its port in Norfolk, Virginia, for its new deployment. The Navy won't give a precise route the carrier group will take, according to The Virginian-Pilot, but it's expected to circumnavigate the Earth on the way to its new home in San Diego, California. 'We're doing the maiden deployment of the second half of the ship's life,' said the commanding officer, Capt. Putnam Browne. The USS Abraham Lincoln deploys from Naval Station Norfolk, in the vicinity of Norfolk, Virginia, Monday, April 1 Sailors man the rails as the USS Abraham Lincoln deploys from Naval Station Norfolk to its eventual new home in San Diego, California The nuclear powered vessel went through its mid-life refueling and overhaul in Virginia and became the first in the Nimitz class aircraft carrier able to accommodate the F-35C Lightning II aircraft. In order to be less predictable, the Navy changed how it deploys its carrier groups. 'I hope that we're going to do some interesting things and I expect that this will be a very interesting deployment,' Capt. Browne said. Some of the Navy families have already left the East Coast for their new homes, according to the newspaper. Colleen and Rob Hudler, back, of Saint Louis, Missouri, perch in the bed of a truck to see off their son, Seaman Keegan Hudler, as the USS Abraham Lincoln deploys on Monday Eladio Pacheco waves farewell to his son as the USS Abraham Lincoln deploys from Naval Station Norfolk 'I'm pretty excited about that since my family's all over there, all in California,' said Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Carlos. According to Command Master Chief Jim Stedding, 60 to 70 percent of the carrier's sailors are deploying for the very first time. America's fifth Nimitz class carrier's keel was laid on November 3, 1984 at Newport News, Virginia, and was christened and commissioned on November 11, 1989. The Lincoln was also part of Operation Fiery Vigil after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The operation was the largest peacetime evacuation of active duty military personnel and family members on record. It also hosted the infamous 'Mission Accomplished' banner and speech by President George W. Bush in 2003 where he announced that major combat operations in Iraq had come to an end. A 68-year-old step-grandfather gave his wife money to play bingo so he could molest her young granddaughters, aged seven and nine, while she was out. The rapist, who can't be named for legal reasons, was jailed for six years on Monday after pleading guilty to 31 sexual offences, including seven counts of rape, in Queensland's Maryborough District Court. The court heard the two sisters, from the Fraser Coast, about 250 kilometres north of Brisbane, were routinely abused by the man while in his care, Sunshine Coast Daily reported. A man has been convicted for sexually abusing two girls, aged seven and nine The nine-year-old girl recalled the abuse to police, telling them her step-grandfather had been 'putting his rude part into my rude part.' The young girls were first abused by the man in July 2018 when they stayed with him for a week. The man began to touch his young victims inappropriately before increasing the offending to get them to perform sexual acts and reciprocate them. The sisters stayed at the predators place a number of times each week, for a number of weeks, after the first instance of abuse. The girls were even abused when the man's wife was asleep in the house. A 68-year-old step-grandfather gave his wife money to play bingo so he could molest her young granddaughters The rapist, who can't be named for legal reasons, was on Monday jailed for six years after pleading guilty in Queensland's Maryborough District Court (pictured) He used lollies to keep them quiet about the abuse, claiming they would not be given the treats if they told anyone about what was happening. The abuse became known after the older girl confided in her mother. The predator then told police of his offending. After the allegations first came to light, the man's wife ended their relationship. The abuse is the first time the man has been convicted of such an offence and he will be eligible for parole in August 2020. Todd Glover, 36, is accused of sexually assaulting two teenage girls at a casino A Texas veterinarian who is accused of raping two teenagers at a Louisiana casino allegedly used medication from his practice to incapacitate them. Todd Glover, 36, from Santa Fe, is alleged to have given drinks to 'Jenny Doe' and two other minors at the Coushatta Casino Resort on December 1, 2018. The drinks were allegedly laced with medication normally reserved for animals. In documents obtained by ABC13 the victims only realized something untoward had happened after they woke up from the deep sleep the medication placed them in. The lawsuit alleges the victims were unconscious and that Glover 'proceeded to engage in non-consensual sexual acts with Jenny Doe'. Texas Rangers along with State Troopers raided Glover's veterinarian office. In the lawsuit, one of the girls, identified only as Jenny Doe, said Glover spiked the drinks of three girls with medication from one of his practices The Texas State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners also joined the Rangers at the Animal Hospital of Santa Fe as they searched for clues. Glover was then charged in January with rape and battery, charges which he denies. 'Despite being aware of the fact that (the victim) could not legally or ethically consent to an exchange of sexual acts, Glover exploited and took advantage of (her),' the lawsuit alleges. 'No person could reasonably believe that (she) could give valid consent for sexual contact.' 'This lawsuit seeks to hold Dr. Glover and the business entities he is affiliated with accountable not only for sexual assault but also for the lack of safety measures taken to ensure the powerful drugs used in animal clinics not fall in to the hands of people like Todd Glover,' said the plaintiffs' attorney, Samantha Martinez. Glover allegedly raped the girls once the drinks rendered them unconscious Martinez said Glover and the girls knew each other prior to the trip to Louisiana, although the type of connection was not immediately clear according to the Houston Chronicle. The girl and her family are seeking more than $100,000 in damages. As a result of the allegations against him, Glover's licence has been temporarily suspended and he is no longer allowed to practice. The lawsuit also accused Glover's businesses of improperly securing medication. Authorities with the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners allege Glover did not keep proper records of several controlled substances used to treat pet ailments, including ketamine, tramadol and diazepam. A man is accused of holding a Vietnamese woman he met on a dating app captive for four days. Police allege the 32-year-old man from Darley, 49km northwest of Melbourne, repeatedly sexually assaulted the woman and threatened her with a crossbow during the horrific ordeal last week. Detectives from the Sexual Crimes Squad arrested a man on Tuesday as part of an investigation into the incident. Police allege the 32-year-old man from Darley (pictured), 49km northwest of Melbourne , held a woman captive for four days The man met the 39-year-old woman via a dating app several weeks ago, and they began a relationship, police said. Police claim the man picked the woman up in a vehicle from a suburban business about 6.30pm on March 25, and drove her back to his home in Darley. After arriving at the home, police allege the woman imprisoned inside and threatened with a number of weapons, including a crossbow. She was allegedly repeatedly sexually and physically assaulted over a four-day period. (File picture) A man is accused of holding a Vietnamese woman he met on a dating app several weeks ago The woman's friends contacted the man asking for information on her whereabouts, prompting him to release her the following day, police claim. She went to a friend's house and reported the matter to police. The woman was later taken to hospital via an ambulance with serious head and body injuries. The man in expected to be charged later today. He is likely to face Melbourne Magistrates' Court shortly. Anyone with further information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 A 47-year-old mum has been left distraught after her autistic seven-year-old son purchased a rare $10,000 Coles Stikeez collectable she could not afford. Sydney mum Donna Jacob is now begging for a refund after her son bought one of only 100 Golden Billy Banana toys produced on eBay. Her son purchased the toy using her computer, which automatically filled in her credit card information. She only discovered the sale once eBay sent a confirmation email. Sydney mum Donna Jacob is now begging for a refund after her son bought one of only 100 Golden Billy Banana toys produced on eBay Ms Jacob said she instructed her young son, an avid collector of the Coles collectables, not to buy the Golden Billy Banana. Ms Jacob said it was ridiculous that the large purchase could be made within three clicks. 'It's certainly nothing we've budgeted for and nothing we can afford,' she said to Channel Seven. She quickly made a plea to the online seller for a refund on the item but was ignored. She received a similar response from PayPal, which the payment was directed through. They said the purchase was known as 'friendly fraud' and she was unlikely to get her money back. 'Between PayPal and the bank, there should be at least one stopper that says "hang on, this isn't right," and no-one did,' she said. eBay finally extended a lifeline after being contacted by media outlets and have promised to refund the $10,000 purchase. A Jetstar 787 Dreamliner is undergoing safety assessments after both if its engines suddenly accelerated while trying to land in Japan. Flight JQ15 from Cairns to Osaka was preparing for descent when an alert indicated a surge in speed for both its engines while approaching to Kansai International Airport on Tuesday. A Jetstar spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the aircraft did not have to undergo an emergency landing and passengers who were booked on the plane's return trip were moved to alternative flights. Flight JQ15 from Cairns to Osaka was preparing for descent when an alert indicated a surge in speed for both its engines while approaching to Kansai International Airport on Tuesday (stock) 'An engine fluctuation is when the engine speed varies temporarily, not necessarily causing the aircraft itself to increase speed,' the spokeswoman said. 'During this time both engines continued to operate and our pilots followed procedures, landing the flight normally.' 'Our engineers are assessing the aircraft in Japan, and we are working with the ATSB, CASA, GE and Boeing to investigate the cause of the fluctuations,' she said. The Boeing 787-8 GE engine was first used in 2006 and is the fastest selling 'high-thrust jet engine' in the company's history. Advertisement The Cabinet is at war with itself today over claims 14 ministers spoke out against a long delay to Brexit to avoid No Deal next week. A list of names leaked within minutes of Theresa May's speech setting out the plans last night after ministers were finally given back their phones and allowed to leave No 10 after a nine-hour showdown. But after the claim of 14 critics appeared in newspapers, No 10 Director of Communications Robbie Gibb and Energy Minister Claire Perry broke the usual rules on Cabinet secrecy to say just four ministers opposed the plan. Government sources have backed up Ms Perry's account of the meeting to MailOnline. But the leaks prompted claims the Prime Minister went with the minority - a group of 10 ministers including Amber Rudd and Michael Gove who backed a further delay - escalating the anger of already furious Brexiteers. In an extraordinary intervention Ms Perry blasted a cabinet colleague 'behaving reprehensibly' for leaking the figures. She tweeted: 'There were only FOUR cabinet members who spoke explicitly in favour of no extension and No Deal'. Mr Gibb said a front page story on the Daily Telegraph - which pictured the 14 ministers including Sajid Javid, Jeremy Hunt and Liam Fox - 'isn't true'. The angry row emerged after Mrs May used a bombshell speech to the nation to vow to 'break the logjam' in Westminster by offering talks with Mr Corbyn - who favours a customs union - in a last-ditch bid to find a compromise, saying she would ask Brussels for more time to reach a deal. She faced a furious backlash from Brexiteers as Jacob Rees-Mogg declared she was working with a 'known Marxist' and said: 'People did not vote for a Corbyn-May coalition government'. Boris Johnson accused her of betraying voters and the DUP said she was 'sub-contracting the future of Brexit to Jeremy Corbyn'. Mr Corbyn accepted the offer of talks but some Labour MPs voiced suspicions that the PM was trying to 'dip Mr Corbyn's hands in the mess' of Brexit. Mrs May's dramatic move reduces the chance of a No Deal exit on April 12, but leaves little time for a deal if Britain is to leave before May 22 and avoid voting in European Parliament elections. Theresa May (pictured last night in Downing Street) admitted Brexit would have to be delayed further as she offered talks with Jeremy Corbyn on a new joint plan for the final UK-EU relationship In an extraordinary intervention Ms Perry blasted a cabinet colleague 'behaving reprehensibly' for leaking the figures. She tweeted: 'There were only FOUR cabinet members who spoke explicitly in favour of no extension and No Deal'. Jeremy Corbyn, pictured last night reading the Political Declaration at his offices in Parliament, said he was 'happy' to meet the PM but did not rule out a further no-confidence motion It was claimed that at the Cabinet summit, 14 ministers - Gavin Williamson, Liam Fox, Liz Truss, Sajid Javid, Chris Grayling, Jeremy Wright, Andrea Leadsom, Jeremy Hunt, James Brokenshire, Baroness Evans, Stephen Barclay, Alun Cairns and Brandon Lewis - spoke out against a long delay. 'This is a decisive moment': May's full statement last night I have just come from chairing seven hours of Cabinet meetings focused on finding a route out of the current impasse one that will deliver the Brexit the British people voted for, and allow us to move on and begin bringing our divided country back together. I know there are some who are so fed up with delay and endless arguments that they would like to leave with No Deal next week. I have always been clear that we could make a success of No Deal in the long-term. But leaving with a deal is the best solution. So we will need a further extension of Article 50 one that is as short as possible and which ends when we pass a deal. And we need to be clear what such an extension is for to ensure we leave in a timely and orderly way. This debate, this division, cannot drag on much longer. It is putting Members of Parliament and everyone else under immense pressure and it is doing damage to our politics. Despite the best efforts of MPs, the process that the House of Commons has tried to lead has not come up with an answer. So today I am taking action to break the logjam: I am offering to sit down with the Leader of the Opposition and to try to agree a plan - that we would both stick to - to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal. Any plan would have to agree the current Withdrawal Agreement it has already been negotiated with the 27 other members, and the EU has repeatedly said that it cannot and will not be reopened. What we need to focus on is our Future Relationship with the EU. The ideal outcome of this process would be to agree an approach on a Future Relationship that delivers on the result of the Referendum, that both the Leader of the Opposition and I could put to the House for approval, and which I could then take to next week's European Council. However, if we cannot agree on a single unified approach, then we would instead agree a number of options for the Future Relationship that we could put to the House in a series of votes to determine which course to pursue. Crucially, the Government stands ready to abide by the decision of the House. But to make this process work, the Opposition would need to agree to this too. The Government would then bring forward the Withdrawal Agreement Bill. We would want to agree a timetable for this Bill to ensure it is passed before 22nd May so that the United Kingdom need not take part in European Parliamentary Elections. This is a difficult time for everyone. Passions are running high on all sides of the argument. But we can and must find the compromises that will deliver what the British people voted for. This is a decisive moment in the story of these islands. And it requires national unity to deliver the national interest. Advertisement Amid tense exchanges in Downing Street, Mr Williamson called it 'completely ridiculous' to seek help from a Labour leader he said was 'unfit to govern'. On the other side, nine ministers - David Gauke, Philip Hammond, Greg Clark, David Lidington, Damian Hinds, Claire Perry, Michael Gove, Amber Rudd and Geoffrey Cox - backed a further delay. Health Secretary Matt Hancock appears to have argued against No Deal but called for a short extension to the Article 50 process. Michael Gove made the critical intervention yesterday in the marathon Cabinet meeting that led to the Prime Minister's dramatic offer to Jeremy Corbyn last night. Despite several Cabinet ministers pushing hard for Theresa May to sanction a No Deal departure, the Environment Secretary was one of the key voices to call for a compromise approach. 'We have to change the way we do this,' he told her. 'We have to deal with the facts as we find them, not as we wish them to be.' There were also two significant flash points. Several sources described a clash between energy minister Claire Perry and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox after she 'went on a rant about Right-wing extremists' and 'nutters' in the Conservative Party. A source said: 'Geoffrey Cox boomed from the other end of the Cabinet table 'enough of the language, that is not the way to speak'. The Prime Minister had to step in and say 'enough'.' According to The Times, Mr Cox told Ms Perry to 'tone it down' but was in turn accused of 'mansplaining'. Ms Perry - who was among those supporting a long delay - also voiced support for a national unity government involving Labour. However Gavin Williamson, who was among the 14 to reject a long extension, said Labour could not be trusted because they were too 'tribal'. In a second clash, Treasury chief secretary Liz Truss asked for an economic and societal impact assessment of not leaving the EU. Her boss, Chancellor Philip Hammond, snapped 'we know all the economic facts'. Just before the meeting began, ministers were handed a nine-page document written by Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill, which set out the painful steps the UK would have to take to pursue No Deal, including imposing direct rule in Northern Ireland. No-one was left in any doubt about Mrs May's determination to avoid the No Deal cliff edge. Then ministers listened to a lengthy presentation from Tory Party chairman Brandon Lewis and Sir Mick Davis, the chief executive of the Conservative Party, on General Election planning. They listed a series of 'scary' facts about the party's position in the country, including polling, focus groups, details of target seats, and party fundraising. Ministers, one source said, have 'never appeared more united as they were against the prospect of a General Election'. Having ruled out an election, they turned to discussing the Brexit alternatives. Despite Mrs May's clear intention to avoid No Deal, Brexiteers combined with the 'born again' Brexiteers Remainers who have converted to Brexit to urge the PM to push ahead with the idea in an attempt to make the Commons choose between it and her original agreement. But Chief Whip Julian Smith argued that the Commons would not allow it, and Parliament would one way or another ensure there was always a Remain option, whether to Revoke Article 50 or ensure a second referendum. In the afternoon, after a lunch of sandwiches, discussion turned to whether to seek another extension of Article 50, meaning Brexit would be delayed and, most toxically, whether to speak to Jeremy Corbyn to try to attract Labour votes. This met with fierce opposition. Energy Minister Claire Perry reportedly 'went on a rant about Right-wing extremists' and 'nutters' in the Conservative Party. Geoffrey Cox told Ms Perry to 'tone it down' but was in turn accused of 'mansplaining' A general election was 'discussed' by the Cabinet yesterday morning but there was little enthusiasm and ministers ruled it out. Ministers had their phones taken away to avoid leaks, were only allowed a sandwich and a stroll around the garden in a short break and were then locked inside Downing Street sipping Chilean red wine while Mrs May prepared her speech. Who was on which side of the Cabinet divide? Against a long extension (14): Gavin Williamson Penny Mordaunt Liam Fox Liz Truss Sajid Javid Chris Grayling Jeremy Wright Andrea Leadsom Jeremy Hunt James Brokenshire Baroness Evans Stephen Barclay Alun Cairns Brandon Lewis Against No Deal, but for short extension (one) Matt Hancock For a long extension (9): David Gauke Philip Hammond Greg Clark David Lidington Damian Hinds Claire Perry Michael Gove Amber Rudd Geoffrey Cox Advertisement In her statement the PM said it was a 'decisive moment in the story of these islands' and called for 'national unity to deliver the national interest' as she appealed to Mr Corbyn for a compromise. Mrs May said the current divorce deal with Brussels could not be changed but promised to renegotiate a new political deal on what Britain's future relations with the EU might look like. She said: 'Today I'm taking action to break the logjam. I'm offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and try to agree a plan that we would both stick to to ensure we leave the EU and we do so with a deal. 'Any plan would have to agree the current Withdrawal Agreement - it has already been negotiated with the 27 other members and the EU has repeatedly said it cannot and will not be re-opened.' Mrs May said if she and Mr Corbyn could not agree a way forward she would present 'a number of options for the future relationship that we could put to the house in a series of votes to determine which course to pursue'. 'Crucially, the Government stands ready to abide by the decision of the House. But to make this process work the opposition would need to agree to this too,' she added. Mrs May went on: 'This debate, this division, cannot drag on much longer. 'It is putting Members of Parliament and everyone else under immense pressure and it is doing damage to our politics. 'Despite the best efforts of MPs, the process that the House of Commons has tried to lead has not come up with an answer.' However Mrs May has promised to step down before the next phase of negotiations, which could complicate her attempts to reach a deal with Labour. The Tories have promised to leave the Single Market and Customs Union so they can end free movement of people and strike new trade deals after Brexit but Labour's policy is to keep a customs union. Mrs May made clear she wanted to save the prospect of leaving on May 22 - despite the EU making clear the deal had to be agreed last week to lock in this date. Failure to persuade the EU to agree that schedule would mean taking part in European Parliament elections next month, which the PM has repeatedly said she does not want. Jeremy Hunt (left), Liam Fox (centre) and Sajid Javid (right) were among the senior Tories to speak out against a long delay From left: Chris Grayling, Liz Truss, Gavin Williamson and Penny Mordaunt spoke out against an extension in Cabinet Stephen Barclay (left), Alun Cairns (centre) and Baroness Evans (right) were also among the 14 ministers who spoke out The fourteen dissenting Cabinet ministers also included (from left) Andrea Leadsom, James Brokenshire, Brandon Lewis and Jeremy Wright Ministers were finally released from Downing Street at around 6.30pm last night after Mrs May made her speech including Andrea Leadsom (left) and Alun Cairns and Gavin Williamson (right) The PM said if agreement with Mr Corbyn (pictured leaving home yesterday) proved impossible, the decision will be passed to Parliament - and promised to follow MPs' orders. Talks with Mr Corbyn have been tried before and failed WHAT HAPPENS NEXT WITH BREXIT? WEDNESDAY APRIL 10: EU SUMMIT Another summit with EU leaders where May will ask for a new delay beyond April 12. May's new plan is to strike a cross-party consensus in London and persuade EU leaders it means the deal can be delivered in time for Brexit on May 22. She may have to accept a longer extension that means holding EU elections, as Brussels has made clear this is a red line - and will take a decision on delay without Britain and it must be unanimous. EU officials including Michel Barnier have warned that the risk of an accidental No Deal is increasing if May arrives with no plan. THURSDAY APRIL 11: PM'S FACES MPs Theresa May will return from Brussels with a likely nine to 12 month extension and will outline her plans in the the Commons in the wake of the EU summit. FRIDAY APRIL 12: BREXIT DAY Britain is due to leave the EU without a deal on this date if no delay is agreed. Advertisement Donald Tusk hinted that the EU could approve a further Brexit delay after Theresa May once again asked for more time. The president of the European Council called for 'patience' as Mrs May seeks to agree a Brexit plan with Labour which can win Parliament's backing. Tusk said that 'we don't know what the end result will be', with Britain's future still uncertain just 10 days before a possible cliff-edge exit. The foreign ministers of Germany and France called for more clarity from London on Tuesday. 'I'm tempted to say let us know if something changes,' said France's Jean-Yves Le Drian at a joint press conference the two held in New York. 'Three years after their decision, the British must come up with a clear line because otherwise, sadly, it'll be a hard Brexit in coming days.' German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas declined to comment on the request for an extension but urged London to move swiftly: 'That we're long past five after midnight - they must know that in London, too. Finishing her statement, Mrs May said: 'This is a difficult time for everyone. Passions are running high on all sides of the argument. 'But we can and must find the compromises that will deliver what the British people voted for. This is a decisive moment in the story of these islands. And it requires national unity to deliver the national interest.' In response, Mr Corbyn said: 'We will meet the Prime Minister. 'We recognise that she has made a move, I recognise my responsibility to represent the people that supported Labour in the last election and the people who didn't support Labour but nevertheless want certainty and security for their own future and that's the basis on which we will meet her and we will have those discussions.' In a furious backlash Boris Johnson said the decision to hand control to Mr Corbyn meant the Cabinet had concluded 'any deal is better than no deal' while Mr Rees-Mogg accused the PM of handing power to a 'known Marxist'. Prime Minister Theresa May arriving to give a press conference inside Downing Street, London, where she offered to sit down with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to try to agree a plan Jeremy Hunt waits to enter No 10 after being allowed to leave cabinet for a Commons statement - but his colleagues were locked in Brexit crisis talks for more than six and a half hours Emmanuel Macron (right) with Irish leader Leo Varadkar in Paris yesterday. The French president warned that another Brexit delay must have a purpose to be granted by EU leaders Brexiteers blast 'reprehensible' plan to push laws to block No Deal through the Commons in a single day as John Bercow rules it IS allowed John Bercow (pictured yesterday in the Commons) ruled rebel MPs can try to push through laws to block No Deal in a single day despite Brexiteer fury at the 'reprehensible' plot John Bercow ruled rebel MPs can try to push through laws to block No Deal in a single day despite Brexiteer fury at the 'reprehensible' plot. Labour MP Yvette Cooper has published draft laws that would oblige the Government to seek a long deal to Brexit next week if there is not a deal by April 10. She wants to use Commons time grabbed by Tory rebel Oliver Letwin tomorrow to ram the law through the Commons in a matter of hours. Veteran Brexiteer Sir Bill Cash complained the idea was 'unconstitutional' and urged the Commons Speaker to block it. But Mr Bercow told him pushing through laws in a single day was 'not particularly unusual' in itself, pointing out the Government does so in an emergency. The Speaker has repeatedly been accused of helping Remainers to frustrate Brexit and has threatened to block any further votes on Mrs May's Brexit deal. The procedure has been used in recent months to pass laws relating to Northern Ireland, which does not currently have functioning devolution. The rebels will only be able to push through their draft law in a day if they have a majority of MPs on their side. The House of Lords can still block the law even if they pass it in the Commons. After Ms Cooper published her two-clause Bill, Sir Bill, chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, said he had 'grave concerns' about the idea of a bill 'effectively being rammed through in one day'. Sir Bill said: 'This is a reprehensible procedure in the context of this vitally important issue of our leaving the European Union. It is unconstitutional. 'It is inconceivable that we should be presented with a bill which could be rammed through in one day.' Advertisement He said: 'You do find that leaders who decide to go with the opposition rather than their own party find their own party doesn't plainly follow. 'I'm not sure this is the way to conciliate people to persuade them if they haven't moved already to move at this stage. 'I think getting the support of a known Marxist is not likely to instil confidence in Conservatives.' Mr Johnson said: 'It is very disappointing that the cabinet has decided to entrust the final handling of Brexit to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. 'It now seems all too likely that British trade policy and key law making powers will be handed over to Brussels - with no say for the UK. 'As it is, we now face the ridiculous possibility of being forced to contest the European elections more than three years after leaving the EU and having to agree to exit terms that in no way resemble what the people were promised when they voted to leave. 'The PM and cabinet have concluded that any deal is better than no deal, and this is truly a very bad deal indeed - one that leaves us being run by the EU. I can under no circumstances vote for a deal involving a customs union as I believe that does not deliver on the referendum.' The PM's DUP allies in Northern Ireland said: 'The Prime Minister's lamentable handling of the negotiations with the EU means she has failed to deliver a sensible Brexit deal that works for all parts of the United Kingdom. That is why she has not been able to get it through Parliament. 'Her announcement therefore comes as little surprise. Though it remains to be seen if sub-contracting out the future of Brexit to Jeremy Corbyn, someone whom the Conservatives have demonised for four years, will end happily. 'We want the result of the referendum respected, and just as we joined the Common Market as one country we must leave the EU as one country. 'We will continue to use our position within Parliament and with the Government to argue strongly the case for Northern Ireland and the integrity of the United Kingdom. 'We remain consistent in judging all Brexit outcomes against our clear unionist principles.' The Commons had failed to find a majority for any alternative Brexit plan in a series of indicative votes on Monday night. MPs rejected staying in the customs union or the single market, as well as holding a second referendum or cancelling Brexit altogether. Tory MP Nick Boles, who had put forward plans for a soft Brexit compromise, dramatically quit the Tories in the Commons chamber moments after the votes. The possible breakthrough yesterday came as rebel MPs led by Conservative Sir Oliver Letwin and Labour's Yvette Cooper plotted to seize control of Parliament again today. The MPs will try to change the law today to force the PM to stick to her plan to ask Brussels for another Brexit delay. MPs have again voted down all alternative Brexit options put to it in a second of votes aimed at finding a replacement for Theresa May's (pictured returning to Downing Street last night) Brexit deal - and Philip Hammond (pictured last night) will call on the cabinet to compromise and consider a second referendum on her deal MPs rejected all four options for Brexit. Analysis by the Institute for Government shows almost no Tories backed Nick Boles plan - prompting his resignation - while Labour abstentions doomed a second referendum. Labour and SNP abstentions could have got a customs union over the line Top mandarin's bombshell No Deal warning Extracts from Sir Mark Sedwill's letter to ministers which warns of dire consequences including direct rule in Northern Ireland if Britain leaves with No Deal Britain's highest-ranking civil servant has issued a doomsday analysis of how the country would be affected by a No Deal Brexit. In a bombshell letter to ministers, extracts of which have been leaked to the Daily Mail, Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill says leaving the EU without a deal would hamper the police and security services and lead to the return of direct rule in Northern Ireland. Sir Mark's 14-page letter, sent ahead of yesterday's Cabinet showdown, warns: No Deal would result in a 10 per cent spike in food prices and the collapse of some businesses that trade with the EU; The Government would come under pressure to bail out companies on the brink; It would hamper the ability of the police and security services to keep people safe; It would lead to the reintroduction of direct rule in Northern Ireland for the first time since 2007; A recession will hit the UK and the pound's depreciation will be 'more harmful' than in 2008; Our legal authorities and judicial system would be put under 'enormous pressure'. Sir Mark's letter warns that No Deal would have wider consequences for the UK's economy, security and constitution. It was sent to every member of the Cabinet last week. It is understood ministers asked for Sir Mark's assessment to ensure they were complying with their duty to govern in the national interest. Advertisement Letwin and Cooper will launch their plot to stop No Deal by passing a law compelling Theresa May to ask for a long delay to Brexit. If it passes the Remainers intend to force their bill to delay Brexit through the Commons and the Lords on Thursday. Sir Oliver said: 'This is a last-ditch attempt to prevent our country being exposed to the risks inherent in a No Deal exit'. Ms Cooper added: 'We are now in a really dangerous situation with a serious and growing risk of No Deal in 10 days' time. 'The UK needs an extension beyond April 12'. Emmanuel Macron had earlier also lashed out at the crisis in Westminster warning that the EU could not 'be held hostage' to the Brexit crisis and suggested that the UK might not get an Article 50 extension - unless they soften Brexit. Speaking as Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar visited Paris, the French president warned that Brussels would be 'open' to a further extension to Article 50 only if it was accompanied by firm plans for its use. He said credible justifications for an Article 50 extension could include an election, second referendum or alternative proposals for the future relationship, such as a customs union. But he warned: 'A long extension involving the participation of the UK in European elections and European institutions is far from evident and certainly not (to be taken) for granted. 'Our priority shall be the good functioning of the EU and the single market. The EU cannot sustainably be the hostage to the solution to a political crisis in the UK.' He added: 'We cannot spend the coming months sorting out yet again the terms of our divorce and dealing with the past.' The Mail yesterday saw leaked extracts of a bombshell letter from Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill warning ministers how disastrous No Deal could be. It warned the Cabinet that No Deal would make Britain 'less safe', lead to a recession, a hike in food prices and even risk the break-up of the kingdom. But former Brexit Secretary David Davis said it was simply a 'nonsense Whitehall scare story'. Mr Davis warned the Tories are now in a 'much worse' state than before Tony Blair's 1997 Labour landslide and it risks becoming 'a ruin' if Mrs May demands a snap poll. Pro-Remain Cabinet ministers Business Secretary Greg Clark, Justice Secretary David Gauke and Caroline Nokes, Minister of State for Immigration, arrive for yesterday's cabinet But Eurosceptics including Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay and Penny Mordaunt Secretary of State for International Development are pushing for No Deal if Mrs May cannot get her deal through Tory MP Nick Boles looks forlorn after he sensationally resigned from his party last night - blaming the Conservatives refusal to compromise for the failure to find a way forward Semi-naked climate change protesters interrupted the Commons debate on Brexit alternatives as they stripped off in the public gallery Rebel MPs will try to decide on a soft Brexit AGAIN on Wednesday - setting up a fourth vote on May's deal before the end of the week - but what happens after that? Brexit rebels are set to make a third fresh attempt to wrestle control away from the Government tomorrow despite Monday night's disaster in the Commons. MPs failed for a second time to make their minds up on a way out of the EU impasse as the bitterly divided political parties could not find a majority for any of four options they had themselves come up with. The results were a severe blow for de-facto backbench leader Sir Oliver Letwin, who led the charge to circumvent the Prime Minister and hold the so-called indicative votes. What power there is in a bitterly divided Westminster seems to be moving back towards the Prime Minister and her Government. But former Cabinet minister Sir Oliver will tomorrow make a third attempt to discover if the seemingly entrenched MPs on all sides of Brexit are prepared to go over the top in search of a compromise. What actually happens will depend on what is likely to be a fraught day of horse trading by MPs as they attempt to build consensus. Expectations that a third round of indicative votes will come up with any viable plan, so divided are MPs. What is decided - if anything - could determine whether the Prime Minister brings back her meaningful vote for a fourth attempt this week. It is thought she could seek a straight vote on her deal if MPs remain deadlocked, or seek to run it off against any rival plan - like a customs union - if the Commons manages to present a united front. What happens next: Wednesday: Sir Oliver Letwin has control of the Commons agenda for a third day. After Monday's inconclusive results, the rebels are trying to pass a Bill to block No Deal instead. If their plans are approved, there will be a second reading vote on the principle of the draft law at 7pm followed by more debate on the detail and a vote to approve it at 10pm. Thursday: Allies of the PM have the day pencilled in for a possible fourth attempt to get her deal through the Commons. They believe that, with the majority against her coming down from 230 to 149 then to 58 last week, they have momentum on their side. Ministers are considering an unprecedented parliamentary 'run off' pitting Mrs May's deal against the soft Brexit option chosen by MPs in the hope of focusing the minds of Tory eurosceptics. What happens next? What are the rebel MPs doing tomorrow? Oliver Letwin secured control of the Commons agenda tomorrow, a third day after he staged indicative votes on Brexit yesterday and last Wednesday. Tomorrow, the MPs have a different plan - to pass a draft law requiring the Government to seek a delay to Brexit if there is No Deal. How do they do it? Before they can use the time in the Commons they have secured, the MPs must win a vote on the rules known as a Business of the House motion. Tomorrow's motions says the principle of the new law would be debated until 7pm. After this there is until 10pm to debate any proposed amendments to the law before another vote to finalise it at 10pm. Is it allowed? Yes, in principle and if a majority of MPs vote for the Business of the House motion. Laws have been passed by the Government in a single day before though it remains unorthodox for backbench MPs to have control of the Commons at all. Can it be stopped? Yes, if opponents of the idea can win votes on the issue and block the Business of the House motion. This seems unlikely as Sir Oliver has won his previous votes with a majority of around 40. What will the Lords do? Unclear. Forcing the Bill through would require the cooperation of the Lords as there are no timetabling rules in the Upper House. Brexiteers would have a better chance of blocking it in the Lords. In practice, Labour signalled in January the Lords would be unlikely to outright block a draft law passed by MPs in the Commons. What will the EU do next? An emergency summit will be held on April 10. Britain can use this to ask for a longer delay to Brexit - perhaps to the end of the year or even longer. Mrs May has told MPs a long delay will mean holding European Parliament elections on May 22. What is No 10's plan? Mrs May is ploughing on for now. Downing Street is insistent the deal remains the best way of securing an orderly Brexit and appears set on another vote at some point. No 10 may now consider whether to call a snap general election if MPs try to pass laws to force May to pursue their option next week. Will May go for a long extension or No Deal? Nobody knows for certain. The Prime Minister has publicly ruled out personally going for a long extension but also admitted Parliament will rule out No Deal. Will May resign now her deal has failed again? Again, nobody knows for sure. Her announcement on Wednesday night that she would stand down was contingent on the deal passing. In practice, it drained Mrs May of all remaining political capital. Most in Westminster think her Premiership is over within weeks at the latest. As her deal folded for a third time on Friday, she faced immediate calls from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn so stand down with instant effect. What is clear is there is already a fight underway for the Tory leadership. Does is all mean there will be an election? Probably, at some point. The Commons is deadlocked and the Government has no functional majority. While the Fixed Term Parliaments Act means the Government can stumble on, it will become increasingly powerless. Mrs May could try to call one herself or, assuming she stands down, her successor could do so. Would May lead the Tories into an early election? Unlikely. Having admitted to her party she would go if the deal passes, Mrs May's political career is doomed. While there is no procedural way to remove her, a withdrawal of political support from the Cabinet or Tory HQ would probably finish her even if she wanted to stay. How is an election called? When would it be? Because of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act passed by the coalition, the Prime Minister can no longer simply ask the Queen to dissolve the Commons and call an election. There are two procedures instead. First - and this is what happened in 2017 - the Government can table a motion in the Commons calling for an early election. Crucially, this can only pass with a two-thirds majority of MPs - meaning either of the main parties can block it. Second an election is called if the Government loses a vote of no confidence and no new administration can be built within 14 days. In practice, this is can only happen if Tory rebels vote with Mr Corbyn - a move that would end the career of any Conservative MP who took the step. An election takes a bare minimum of five weeks from start to finish and it would take a week or two to get to the shut down of Parliament, known as dissolution - putting the earliest possible polling day around mid to late May. If the Tories hold a leadership election first it probably pushes any election out to late June at the earliest. Why do people say there has to be an election? The question of whether to call an election finally reached the Cabinet last week. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay warned the rejection of Mrs May's deal would set in train a series of events that will lead to a softer Brexit - meaning an election because so many MPs will have to break manifesto promises. MPs voting to seize control of Brexit from ministers has only fuelldd the demands. Labour has been calling for a new vote for months, insisting the Government has failed to deliver Brexit. Mr Corbyn called a vote of no confidence in the Government in January insisting the failure of the first meaningful vote showed Mrs May's administration was doomed. He lost but the calls did not go away. Brexiteers have joined the demands in recent days as Parliament wrestles with Brexit and amid fears among hardliners promises made by both main parties at the last election will be broken - specifically on leaving the Customs Union and Single Market. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen wants Mrs May replaced with a Brexiteer. He believes it would push Remain Tories out of the party and then allow a snap election with more Eurosceptic candidates wearing blue rosettes. What might happen? Both main parties will have to write a manifesto - including a position on Brexit. Both parties are deeply split - in many cases between individual MPs and their local activists. Under Mrs May, the Tories presumably try to start with the deal. But it is loathed by dozens of current Tory MPs who want a harder Brexit and hated even more by grassroots Tory members. Shifting Tory policy on Brexit to the right would alienate the majority of current MPs who voted to Remain. Labour has similar splits. Many of Labour's MPs and activists want Mr Corbyn to commit to putting Brexit to a second referendum - most with a view to cancelling it. Mr Corbyn is a veteran Eurosceptic and millions of people who voted Leave in 2016 backed Labour in 2017. The splits set the stage for a bitter and chaotic election. The outcome is highly unpredictable - the Tories start in front but are probably more divided on the main question facing the country. Labour is behind but knows it made dramatic gains in the polls in the last election with its promises of vastly higher public spending. Neither side can forecast what impact new political forces might wield over the election or how any public anger over the Brexit stalemate could play out. It could swing the result in favour of one of the main parties or a new force. Or an election campaign that takes months, costs millions of pounds could still end up in a hung Parliament and continued stalemate. This is the current forecast by polling expert Sir John Curtice. A troll is bombarding a family with offensive social media messages mocking their seven-year-old daughter who is dying from a brain tumour. An account documenting Kiara Buonomo's battle for survival has been targeted by a series of sick posts which began shortly after she was diagnosed last year. The cruel taunts include one that tells the youngster, from Springburn, Glasgow, to 'hurry up and die' and tell the family that they are wasting NHS money. One featured a picture of Kiara with the caption: 'Am dying yasss hurry up this time f* sake yous will never have to hear ma mongo horrible voice again.' Kiara Buonomo (pictured, in hospital) was diagnosed with brain cancer in January last year. She only has months to live Another said: 'Ugly c*** Kiara will be deed soon.' Kiara's mother, Natasha Kinlan, has complained to police and has now spoken out in a bid to help catch the sick individual responsible. Ms Kinlan, 30, told the Daily Record that the mystery troll's messages are destroying her family. She said: 'It's sickened us. We have enough to think about without the extra stress of this.' Kiara was diagnosed with brain cancer in January last year. She has undergone a brain operation in a bid to clear most of the cancer, but doctors have told her there is now nothing they can do. Kiara's mother hat the mystery troll's messages attacking her daughter (pictured) are destroying her family Her mother said she was diagnosed when she was six years old, when doctors found a mass in her brain. They removed 95 per cent of it, but the cancer has now returned and is at stage four. She said: 'A couple of weeks after Kiara was diagnosed in January last year, we began to receive pictures on Snapchat saying 'hurry up and die' and they told us we were wasting NHS money. 'They were calling Kiara ugly when she is clearly beautiful.' 'The way they are talking now is vile, about rape and other things. It is horrible. 'I want these people brought to justice.' Police Scotland said: 'Police are aware of this and inquiries are ongoing.' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has hit back at Liz Cheney after being called out by the House Republican leader in a Twitter spat over constitutional history. Cheney slammed Cortez after she claimed last week that the 22nd Amendment was created to stop President Franklin D. Roosevelt running again, despite him dying two years before it passed. In a scathing outburst on Twitter, Cheney wrote: 'We knew the Democrats let dead people vote. According to @AOC, they can run for President too.' Straight away Ocasio-Cortez hit back, tweeting a link to a Newswekk article on the subkect: 'Hey Rep. Cheney, I see from your dead people comment that you get your news from Facebook memes, but the National Constitution Center + Newsweek are just two of many places where you can clarify your misunderstanding of the history of the 22nd Amendment.' House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney took to Twitter to slam Ocasio-Cortez over the claim The Freshman congresswoman was widely mocked after saying: 'They had to amend the Constitution of the United States to make sure Roosevelt did not get reelected.' Tweeting a link to the NBC interview Cheney mocked Ocasio-Cortez for her lack of knowledge The article she linked to says the legislative process for the 22nd Amendment began in 1944, before FDR's death. Quoting an online post from the National Constitution Center, the article appears to support the freshman Congresswoman's claim. 'Talk about a presidential term-limits amendment started in 1944, when Republican candidate Thomas Dewey said a potential 16-year term for Roosevelt was a threat to democracy,' the center reportedly wrote on its website. 'In March 1947, a Republican-controlled Congress approved a 22nd Amendment, with an exception that would exclude a president in office from term limits during the ratification process.' Cheney then replied: 'Hey @AOC, I know youre busy so I thought this short video would be helpful to introduce you to the basics of the Constitution. 'If youre still trying to figure out how a bill becomes a law, they have a great video on that, too.' AOC hit back by tweeting a link to a Newsweek article which appeared to confirm her theory But Cheney wasn't finished and tweeted her own link to a YouTube video which appeared to dispell AOC's claims 'They had to amend the Constitution of the United States to make sure Roosevelt did not get reelected,' Ocasio-Cortez said Friday during a night hall event with MSNBC with Chris Hayes. Ocasio-Cortez was referring to the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution which passed in 1947. The text of the amendment states, 'No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.' However, FDR, served for 12 years as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. The amendment for the implementation of presidential term limits was made two years after FDR died and was ratified in 1951. While it was most likely a rebuke of FDR for his decision to ignore the two-term precedent set by George Washington, it could not have prevented him from running again. Harry and Meghan (pictured at New Zealand House in London) were spotted at Ilapothecary in Notting Hill The Duchess of Sussex visited a wellbeing boutique that offers a range of homeopathic treatments for new mothers and products that are 'blessed with healing chants', it can be revealed. Accompanied by her husband Prince Harry, Meghan who is just weeks away from giving birth to her first child - spent two-and-a-half hours at the flagship Ilapothecary store in Kensington, west London, on Friday. Natalie Portman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Donna Karan are customers at the store, according to the shop's website, where products on offer include a Feminine Happy Oil. The 46 sandalwood and rose-based aromatherapy oil is said to 'hold the energy of joy and happiness'. It is not known which treatments Meghan opted for at the New Age shop, but its 135 Happy Hormone Equilibrium session can last up to 90 minutes and claims to assist in the recovery from childbirth. One treatment last more than 90 minutes and includes 'massage, chakra balancing and hands-on-healing to restore your nervous system and address any underlying issues or blockages to assist you to feel light, clear and happy'. Ilapothecary's website says it uses 'cutting-edge synergy of naturopathy, homeopathy, herbology and phyto-actives'. Our products are infused with powerful remedial ingredients to counteract the stresses of modern living, environmental and digital pollution, mental stress and body fatigue,' it says. 'Ilapothecary products nurture mind, body, skin and soul; to strengthen, balance, hydrate and heal.' Pictured: The Ilapothecary store in Notting Hill, Kensington, that Harry and Meghan spent more than two hours in on Friday Pictured: Inside Ilapothecary in Notting Hill, which Harry and Meghan visited on Friday with just weeks to go until they welcome their newborn Meghan visited a boutique in Kensington which counts Feminine Happy Oil (left) and Protective Aura Day Cream (right) among its products The shop in Notting Hill bases its product names on numerology, a mystical belief that says there is a relationship between numbers and world events. The venue also plays vibrations that staff claim attune the body 'with the natural frequency of the universe'. It also offers a 26 Calm Butterfly's Soothing Balm, a lavender-based cream for pregnant women used to combat scar tissue, as well as 'bring inner strength and determination'. The shop also sells 39 Protective Aura Day Cream, a regenerating cream that stimulates the immune system, combat pollution and stress, and boosts a sense of 'completion and fulfillment'. Harry may have been tempted to try the Beardy Balm at 29 for a 30g tub, which 'nourishes unruly beards, softens stubble, conditions, heals and soothes skin, and leaves a deliciously attractive lingering scent'. The store in Notting Hill also hosts 'gong baths' in which customers immerse themselves in the sound of the instrument Gwyneth Paltrow (left, at the GLAAD media awards in Los Angeles) and Natalie Portman (right, with husband Benjamin Millepied) are both lovers of the brand The shop invited customers who didn't have 'that Friday feeling' to try one of its 'Beat the Blues' products on the day of Meghan and Harry's visit On the day of the royal couple's visit, the shop's Instagram account invited followers who didn't have 'that Friday feeling' to try one of its 'Beat the Blues' products. Ilapothecary staff claim to be able to use castor oil, a popular skin moisturiser, which it says also assists in post-birth recovery. Meghan and Harry's visit as reported by Pop Sugar is the couple's latest foray into New Age thinking and sets the royal husband and wife apart from the traditionalism of William and Kate. Meghan is known to have a love of natural remedies and treatments. In an interview with food blogger eyeswoon in November 2017, shortly after announcing her engagement, Meghan said: 'It may be very California girl of me to always have my tinctures of holistic remedies. I travel with all sorts of little homeopathic medicine because its whats familiar with me.' What is numerology? Numerology is an umbrella term for beliefs that attribute divine properties to numbers. Followers of numerology say that there is a link between their symbology and world events. It is usually associated with paranormal beliefs or astrology. Numerology in various forms runs throughout cults but also in mainstream religion. The number seven is believed to be special by Christians because the Bible claims that is the number of days God took to create the world. And Jesus was said to have asked God three times if he could avoid being crucified, only to be put to death at 3pm. Advertisement Harry's father, Prince Charles, told government officials in 2016 that he treats his cows with homeopathy. Ilapothecary was founded by former nurse Denise Leicester - who blesses her products by singing and chanting at them in the shop. Its website boasts that she is a 'sound healer', 'holistic body worker' and 'spiritual philosopher'. According to the site, her first brand Ila was named after the Hindu goddess of truth, despite the Ila deity being primarily known for sex changes. The androgyne deity was also thought to represent speech, but not necessarily the concept of truth. Leicester merged her first venture's name with the medical term apothecary to name her shop Ilapothecary. Stella McCartney and May Lindstrom also reportedly use Leicester's products. The royal couple's visit to the store comes after it was revealed that the duchess has also been working with a doula ahead of the birth, which is expected in late April. With just weeks to go until the due date, the doula has been providing emotional support. Although doulas offer advice on births, they are not medical professionals. A source told Us Weekly that Meghan is focusing on 'calm and positive' energy around the birth. Why does Denise Leicester chant and sing to wellbeing products? The founder of the wellness shop in Kensington, West London, blesses her products with healing chants before they are used. Former nurse Denise Leicester says on her shop's website that you can 'think your way to better skin' and claims she can heal people using crystals. The ever-controversial practice of homoeopathy is offered alongside 'tailored teas and positivity prescriptions to rebalance and restore you from inside out'. The store also offers this SOS Body Balm (left) and Keep Calm Hand and Body Lotion (pictured, right) Leicester, who used to be a midwife, also thinks that numbers have a symbolic worth and she reflects this in the naming of her products. Remedies numbered from 0 to 101 on the Ilapothecary website feature a brief description detailing the significance of their number. Examples include: 'Remedy No. 11' (which is an face serum for men) '11 is a spiritual messenger and one of the Master Numbers,' the description reads. 'The most intuitive of all numbers, it is associated with faith and psychics.' 'Remedy No. 19' (women's body oil) '19 holds the energy of joy and happiness, and represents self-determination, independence and exploration. It is also a virtuous number that brings good news.' Remedy No. 28 (a bubble bath) '28 is a number for centring. It represents receptiveness, partnerships and wealth, as well as independence and self-determination.' Remedy No. 33 (beard balm) 'One of the master numbers, 33 is the Master Teacher offering divine help and guidance. It represents family, harmony and self-expression.' Remedy No. 77 (aromatherapy oil) 'A number of positive energy, which tells you to expect miracles in your life.' Advertisement Meghan and Harry visited Ilapothecary in Notting Hill with just weeks until she is due to give birth to their child. The store's products include calming infusion sticks (left) and calming body oil A four-year-old girl died of a rare meningitis infection just days after complaining of head and stomach pains. Courtney May, 20, said daughter Evie was her 'happy, normal self' at breakfast but then began being sick and having seizures. The youngster, of Radcliffe, Greater Manchester, was rushed to Manchester Children's Hospital where scans revealed she had brain damage. Evie was put in an induced coma, but she never recovered and died days later. Tests found she had contracted Meningococcal type B, a bacteria which infected her spine and brain. A vaccine has been given to babies against the infection since 2015, meaning Evie missed out by a matter of months. Evie May, four, pictured left and right, with baby brother Carter, died of a rare strain of meningitis just days after complaining of a headache and stomach pains Mother Courtney, pictured with (from left) Carter, partner James and Evie, said her daughter had never been ill before and she still 'cannot get her head around what happened' Courtney said Evie, big sister to nine-month-old Carter, was round at her friend's house on March 22 when she began to feel ill. It was just a normal Friday morning and she'd been her 'happy, normal self', she said. 'We'd gone out for breakfast, but then she didn't want anything to eat. She said she had a headache. We went back home and then my friend came to pick us up to go to her house in Moston. 'When we got out of the car she said she had bellyache. I said 'are you going to be sick?' 'I tried giving her Calpol. She was sick in the toilet. Then she fell asleep on the sofa. Then she was waking up and speaking to me as normal.' The pair went back home, but Miss May said Evie was 'heavier than normal' and feeling sleepy. She added: 'I took her into the house and took her temperature. It was 40.1C. I rang 111 and they sent an ambulance straight away. 'I tried to wake her up and her eyes shot open. Her pupils went massive. Her arms and her legs went stiff. I didn't know what was going on. 'She was trying to go to sleep. The ambulance came within 10 or 15 minutes. They told me she was having a seizure.' The paramedics put the blue lights on and sped Evie and her worried mother to North Manchester General Hospital. Miss May said: 'I was petrified. She was still having seizures. They thought it could've been down to her temperature. I was absolutely terrified. When I think of seizures, I think of shaking. She was just going stiff. We got to hospital at 6.30pm. 'When they arrived, medics put a cannula in Evie's hand and told her mother her consciousness was 'going'. Miss May, pictured right with Evie, said her daughter was an 'amazing and beautiful chatterbox' and is trying to raise awareness of the condition to stop other parents going through the same ordeal. Pictured right is Evie with stepfather James and brother Carter Miss May said what followed was a 'blur' with Evie given a CT scan, and gave her antibiotics, antiviral medication and anti-epileptic medication. Doctors said Evie had suffered brain damage and she was put in an induced coma and was taken to Manchester Children's Hospital for specialist care at around 3am on Saturday. She was put on a ventilator and transferred to the paediatric intensive care unit. She spent four days there getting treatment. What is Meningococcal group B? The Meningococcal group B bacteria causes life-threatening infections worldwide, including meningitis and blood poisoning, and is the leading infectious killer of babies and young children in the UK. There are 12 known groups of meningococcal bacteria, and group B (MenB) is responsible for about 90 per cent of meningococcal infections in the UK. Meningitis and sepsis caused by meningococcal group B bacteria can affect people of any age but are most common in babies and young children. Meningococcal infections tend to come in bursts. In the past 20 years, between 500 and 1,700 people every year, mainly babies and young children, have developed MenB disease, with around 1 in 10 dying from the infection. Many of those who survive have a permanent disability, such as an amputation, brain damage or epilepsy. A vaccine was introduced in 2015 and is recommended to be administered to babies when they turn eight weeks, 16 weeks and one year old, as part of the NHS's routine vaccination programme. The MenB vaccine used is called Bexsero. It's given as a single injection into a baby's thigh. England was the first country in the world to offer a national, routine, publicly funded MenB vaccination programme using the Bexsero vaccine. Source: NHS Advertisement But tragically, there was nothing that could be done to save her from the deadly infection. Miss May said: 'I just broke down. I just sat there thinking "why has this happened?'' 'I still can't get my head around it now. I was hoping for the best, that she was going to get better. She's never been ill or in hospital. 'She's only ever been happy and healthy. I am 20-years-old and I have never heard of Meningococcal type B. 'The nurses said there was nothing they could have done. She had it in her spine and her brain.' 'I want to make sure that people know about this. I thought a rash was usually a sign of meningitis. But eight times out of ten people don't get a rash. I thought she had a normal bug.' Paying tribute to her daughter, Miss May added: 'She was amazing. She was always happy. 'She was a chatter box. She had a massive smile and big brown eyes. When you looked at her you could fall into her eyes. She was beautiful. She was like a little mum to her baby brother Carter.' Miss May said the days since her death have been 'dreadful' and that she keeps thinking Evie is going to run into a room 'any minute'. But she said strength and solidarity of her loved ones has got her through. Miss May said: 'I have got a lot of good support around me. I have got lots of family and friends.' Evie has also given the gift of life to others - she has donated her heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and pancreas. A lthree-year-old girl has been given her heart in a life-saving transplant, and Miss May the thought of gestures like that provides her with a shred of comfort. She added: 'She [Evie] will live through other people. She has given that little girl a chance.' A GoFundMe page has since been set up to raise money for her funeral. A model convicted for attempting to smuggle 1million of heroin from Pakistan to Ireland has today filed a court appeal to have her sentence overturned. Tereza Hluskova was sentenced to eight years and eight months in prison last month in the eastern city of Lahore, the capital of Punjab province. The 22-year-old Czech model was arrested in possession of 19 lbs (8.5kg) of heroin in January 2018 at Lahores Allama Iqbal International Airport. Tereza Hluskova, 22, from the Czech Republic, has launched an appeal against her eight-year prison sentence for drug smuggling Hluskova was caught attempting to smuggle 1million of heroin from Pakistan to Ireland Czech model Tereza Hluskova broke down in tears last month as she was sentenced to prison She was heading to Ireland via Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, the court said. In her appeal filed to the Lahore High Court, Hluskova has requested that her sentence is overturned because 'it negated the true facts of the case'. Hluskova has claimed that she came to Pakistan to work as a model and that someone put narcotics into her luggage. Hluskova wept after she was handed the sentence in the eastern city of Lahore, the capital of Punjab province The story gained attention when Hluskova was captured smiling and posing for photos with Pakistani investigators after she was arrested at the airport Previous reports said Hluskova was stopped with a haul of the Class A drug stashed in 'statues' in her luggage. The story gained attention when Hluskova was captured smiling and posing for photos with Pakistani investigators after she was arrested at the airport. Two other men were also arrested and were due to face drug trafficking charges after police went through the model's phone. In a video, released online, a Pakistani customs official is shown 'discovering' the drugs hidden in the suitcase while Hluskova looks on. She then puts her head in her hands. Hluskova said strangers approached her and put ornaments in her luggage and that she had no idea they were full of drugs In November last year, a man was jailed for three years after he threatened terrorist attacks on Pakistan if Hluskova (pictured) was not released She says in the video: 'They gave me something for luggage, three statues or something. They said it was gifts. I didn't know there was something inside'. In November last year, a man was jailed for three years after he threatened terrorist attacks on Pakistan if Hluskova was not released. Nikolai Simeonov Ivanov, 21, from Bulgaria, sent threatening emails and text messages to a news website in Pakistan. Ivanov admitted that he did not realise the consequences of sending the threats, a court heard. Shocking footage shows the moment a teenager is kicked in the head and the body by her ex-girlfriend and three friends as she begs for mercy. Aimee Purdey, who was 18 at the time, is seen curled up in a ball as the gang laugh and call her names during the attack filmed on a mobile phone. Simone McDermott, 19, lured Aimee to her lat in Crumpsall, Manchester, at 1am sending her a text saying 'I miss you' only to be violently ambushed. McDermott, who had been in a relationship with Miss Purdey but had began an affair with fellow attacker Melissa Marriott, also recruited neighbour Siobhan Wait to join in. She begged 'let me go, please let me go' as they carried out their vicious assault, which was filmed by a fourth woman, Victoria Houghton. Aimee Purdy (pictured) was left with bruising to her head and body and underwent a CT scan after doctors found a footprint on her forehead. One of her finger nails was so badly damaged in the assault it fell off her finger McDermott stamped on Miss Purdy's back and head six times during the attack, prosecutors said, and in the two minute video one the attackers could be heard shouting 'give her here - I'll have a go', while another said 'I'm gonna break your face'. Miss Purdy was left with bruising to her head and body and underwent a CT scan after doctors found a footprint on her forehead. One of her finger nails was so badly damaged in the assault it fell off her finger. McDermott later claimed she carried out the attack to get her ex-lover's mobile phone as she believed the device contained an intimate picture of her. At Manchester Crown Court, the shocking video was played to a judge as McDermott and her friends Marriott, a college student from Blackley; Siobhan Wait, also of Blackley, and Victoria Houghton, of Wythenshawe, admitted assault with intent to rob. McDermott stamped on Miss Purdy's back and head six times during the attack, prosecutors said, and in the two minute video (pictured) one the attackers could be heard shouting 'give her here - I'll have a go', while another said 'I'm gonna break your face' Ms Purdey, who was 18 at the time, is seen curled up in a ball as the gang laugh and call her names during the attack filmed on a mobile phone The girls, all aged 19, were handed suspended sentences and sobbed in the dock as they avoided being sent to jail. Judge Timothy Smith said Marriott had 'orchestrated a pre-planned, vicious, cowardly ambush and assault'. Ms Purdey, now 20, from Denton, Manchester, hit out at the sentence yesterday telling the Manchester Evening News: 'I wanted them to do (immediate) custodial sentences. 'They were saying in court they are young and that they have been through stuff but I've been through stuff. I don't go around battering people or jumping on people or even being mean to people. 'I'm annoyed about (the sentence). I just don't think justice has been fully served.' Aimee Purdy (left) was attacked by ex-girlfriend Simone McDermott (right, outside Manchester Crown Court) on January 3 last year Katherine Pierpoint, prosecuting, said: 'Miss Purdy sent a message asking if she was being set up but McDermott responded saying 'no, I have missed you'. 'However it is clear from the messages that this was a set up. When Miss Purdey arrived in the communal hallway, McDermott closed the front door behind her and Miss Purdy heard laughing coming from upstairs before becoming aware of three women running down. 'The front door was blocked by McDermott and Miss Purdey was then set upon by the group. She recalls being kicked to the floor and being kicked, stamped on to the head, body and legs. She could hear shouting about getting her phone, so she hid it. 'In the video she was was lying on the floor, her knees curled up to her chest and her hands are over her face. The main aggressor was Marriott who was seen to kick the complainant to the back of the head with full force - although McDermott was equally as violent. 'Wait was in close proximity and played a lower role whilst Houghton filmed the incident and kicked out. All four were encouraging each other and were laughing.' Miss Pierpoint added: 'Marriott pulled her back by the head and punched her in the face as the complainant pleaded 'please let me go'. Victoria Houghton, left, and Siobhan Wait, right, admitted taking part in the vicious attack 'McDermott grabbed the complainant and began dragging her backwards by her coat as she was curled up in a protective position with her hands round the back of her head. 'Words can be heard 'give her here, give her here, I'll have a go' and 'get your f***ing foot off me, I'm going to break your face'. 'At one stage Miss Pursey was on her back with her hands over her face and Marriott and McDermott are standing over her as Houghton kicks out to the top of the complainant's head. 'McDermott follows up that with a number of stamps, six times, of the back of the complainant's head and back. Words are heard 'get her phone.' Houghton is still filming and you can hear laughing in the background. 'Miss Purdey describes the end of the incident being thrown out of the front door and she was petrified they were going to chase her and hurt her again. She hid down a side street and immediately called the police who found her in an extremely distressed state.' Victoria Houghton filmed that attack and could be heard laughing in the background, prosecutor Katherine Pierpoint said The girls were arrested an hour later and police found the footage on Houghton's phone and also recovered text messages sent by Marriott to McDermott threatening Miss Purdey, saying: 'I'll smash her head in, throw her down, I'll stab her. Never hated anyone so much'. McDermott initially claimed Miss Purdey had attacked her and her friends intervened but she later admitted the assault. In a personal statement read to the court, Aimee, who now has a new girlfriend, said the assault left her too scared to leave her room and go out for three months and when she did finally venture out she had to have a friend with her. The victim said she struggles to sleep and suffers nose bleeds because of the repeated punches to her head. The court heard the injuries may have been worse had the attackers been wearing regular shoes rather than Ugg boots. Melissa Marriott, pictured left outside Manchester Crown Court, and right, hugging Simone McDermott Erimnaz Mushtaq, defending McDermott, said her client 'always accepted wrong-doing' and is 'deeply remorseful.' Brigid Baillie, defending Marriott, said her client acted because she believed the victim had 'intimate photos' of her client on her phone and this 'seemed to wind her up'. David Taylor, defending Houghton, pointed out her client was 'not the instigator' of the attack and her actions had been 'totally out of character'. Patrick Williamson, defending Siobhan Wait, said his client had played a 'subordinate role' amounting to one kick to a leg and one punch to the back of the head. At a sentencing hearing yesterday, judge Timothy Smith handed McDermott and Marriott, both now 19, two years in a young offenders' institution, suspended for two years. They were each ordered to carry out 280 hours' unpaid work and complete up to 30 days rehabilitation activity. Houghton, pictured leaving Manchester Crown Court, left, was said to be 'ashamed and disgusted with herself' for filming the incident. Right, Siobhan Wait They were also ordered to pay their victim 750 compensation each. Houghton was given 14 months, suspended for two years, in a young offenders' institution while Wait was given 13 months, suspended for two years, in a young offenders' institution. Each is required to complete 180 hours' unpaid work and must pay their victim 250 compenstion. All four were handed five-year restraining orders stopping them from making contact with Aimee. Marriott and McDermott admitted assault with intent to rob. Siobhan Wait, and Victoria Houghton, pleaded guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Following the hearing, Aimee described how the assault had affected her life. She told the M.E.N: 'I have trust issues with people. I struggle to form friendships. I've only recently got into a new relationship a full year after it happened. 'I'm still very worried about leaving the house. I will only go out with my friends. I don't like walking on my own even if it's just to the shops. I'd prefer to be with someone else.' The estranged wife of former Afghanistan hostage Joshua Boyle has described the moment she tried to escape her husband once he told her she wasnt allowed to leave their bedroom. Caitlan Coleman, 33, from Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, fled her apartment in Ottawa, Canada, with only $20 stuffed in her bra - which she had hidden from her allegedly abusive husband. She put on three pairs of socks - as she didnt have access to any shoes after being confined by Boyle, 35, to their bedroom - before knocking on her neighbors' door in December 2017, Ottawa court heard on Monday. Caitlan Coleman (left), the estranged wife of former Afghanistan hostage Joshua Boyle (right), has described the moment she tried to escape her husband once he told her she wasnt allowed to leave their bedroom Caitlan Coleman, 33, from Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, made the statement during her husband's assault trial in Ottawa, Canada, on Monday morning (seen above with her infant daughter in this undated file photo) But as she was yelling for help, her husband came up from their apartment after her. His tone was very caring and very concerned for me, which was not a tone that I had heard from him in at least a long time, Ms Coleman said according to the CBCnews. However, this soon changed to a threatening whisper, Ms Coleman claimed, and her husband warned her to return to their home. But instead of following him back downstairs, Ms Coleman told the court that she headed to a Bronson Avenue pizza shop, with staff there letting her use their phone to call her mother. Boyle, his American wife Caitlan and their three children were freed in October in Pakistan. They are pictured above with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau following their release She then called a cab to the hotel where her mother - who had been visiting her - was staying. Boyle called 911 and police located Ms Coleman at her mothers hotel. I was concerned that they would believe Josh's story over me, because Josh had always told me nobody would believe me, she told the court. Ms Coleman made the statement during her husband's assault trial in Ottawa, on Monday morning. Boyle, 35, has pleaded not guilty to a number of criminal charges for alleged offenses against Ms Coleman, including assault, sexual assault and unlawful confinement, following their rescue from the Taliban. Appearing via video from another room in the courthouse, Ms Coleman told the court that on the night of her escape Boyle summoned her to his study and started to rant at her. She claimed that her husband said she would from then on be confined to their bedroom and that hed limit her time with their children. The court heard the experience reminded Ms Coleman of her time in captivity in Afghanistan when Boyle would order her to stay in a bathroom area, which she recalled as the darkest period of my whole life. When Ms Coleman tried to tell Boyle that he wasnt being rational and that it might be related to his PTSD, he told her to shut up and allegedly hit her face. Ms Coleman said this is the point she started to think about escape, having only previously stayed for her children, the court heard. Former Taliban hostage Caitlan Coleman arrives at the courthouse for his criminal trial in Ottawa last Wednesday Boyle is seen left with his father, Patrick Boyle, as they arrive at the court in Ottawa last Monday I made the decision that I was going to run for it run for help. It took me a while to get up my courage to do it. But I did, she said. Boyle and his wife were taken hostage in 2012 by a Taliban-linked group while on a backpacking trip in Afghanistan. The couple had three children during their five years in captivity. She had their first son in 2013, their second in 2015 and their daughter in 2017. At some stage during the captivity, she also miscarried another baby girl. The family was rescued in 2017 by Pakistani forces. Boyle was arrested in December that year. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. A partial gag order was lifted as the trial started, revealing that all but one of the 19 charges relate to his American wife. The other victim in the case has not been named in accordance with a legally mandated publication ban. Boyle and his wife were abducted in 2012 by a Taliban-linked militant group while on a backpacking trip in Afghanistan Pakistani troops rescued the family in an operation October 11 aimed at their captors from the Taliban-linked Haqqani group Defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon questioned Ms Coleman repeatedly as to whether she was a violent person, citing her persona in online forums when she was a teenager. I couldnt tell you with any certainty what was written 20 years ago, responded Ms Coleman, who later referred to a number of her internet posts as teenage melodrama. The defence also asked Ms Coleman about her ability to see reality while she was in a fit of rage, according to The Guardian. She responded: I had trouble seeing reality with Joshua. Thats why I stayed with him as long as I did. Earlier in the case Ms Coleman claimed her husband struck her, tied her ankles and wrists with rope and forced her to have sex during an incident following the couple's forced captivity in Afghanistan. She described in documents how Boyle, who she says tricked her into going to Afghanistan in 2012 where they were kidnapped by the Taliban, also piled onto her suffering during the five years they were held against their will. The couple was rescued in Pakistan near the Afghan border in October In late January, Boyle was determined fit to stand trial - though he was transferred from prison to a secure mental health facility for further assessment and psychiatric treatment. The pair married in 2011 during a different trip in Central Asia. Before setting off when she was pregnant, they split up briefly. Boyle, who denies abusing her and says she was neglectful of their children and him in captivity, explained in his own court submissions how they met online. They both, he said, had an interest in BDSM and travel. 'We both enjoyed BDSM. We both wanted to travel by way of backpacking, and we both wanted to see the world,' he said. He contended that his wife knew about his plans to travel to Afghanistan and that she did nothing to look after the children in captivity. Boyle even claimed their captors referred to him as the children's mother and father because his wife apparently did so little. Before marrying Ms Coleman, Boyle was married to the sister of Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr and the daughter of a senior al-Qaida financier who had contacts with Osama bin Laden. A frightening crime spree has seen three people charged with a series of alleged armed carjackings and thefts following a high-speed police chase. The dangerous two-hour chase, allegedly involving two men, aged 26, 22, and a 21-year-old woman, took place in Melbourne's south-east on Monday. The trio were allegedly armed with a gun when they stole several vehicles starting at 12.36pm. Scroll down for video Soon after, dash cam footage captured a stolen Mitsubishi Triton speeding through a red light a Ford before slamming into a mother's Holden SUV turning right, rolling it into a traffic light. The three people then allegedly fled the damaged Mitsubishi and carjacked a man driving a blue Ford Falcon ute after threatening him with a gun, police claim. The Ford ute crashed into a white Toyota shortly after in Cranbourne. Police allege the trio then abandoned the car and stole yet another vehicle before crashing into a truck on the South Gippsland Highway in Cranbourne. The trio were allegedly armed with a gun when they stole several vehicles starting at 12.36pm Soon after, witnesses said they saw police chasing the group on foot. 'It's frightening in this day and age,' one witness told Nine News. A 26-year-old Cheltenham man has been charged with aggravated carjacking, eight counts of theft of a motor vehicle, three counts of arson and several other charges. Police then chased the group down on foot and tackled them as they tried to escape A 22-year-old Parkenham man was handed similar charges of aggravated carjacking, four counts of theft of a motor vehicle and several counts of burglary. Both men appeared in Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Tuesday. A female was charged with two counts of theft of a motor vehicle but was released on bail to appear in court on the 3rd of September. Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. A father who raped his 15-year-old daughter after mistaking her for his wife has been jailed for two-and-a-half years in Hong Kong. The High Court heard the construction worker, 59, returned home 'stinking of alcohol' before crawling into his daughter's bed on the night of March 22 last year. His child, referred to as X, tried to tell her father but she was unable to stop the drunken man. He stopped at some point during sex after realising he'd mixed up the two. A father who raped his 15-year-old daughter after mistaking her for his wife has been jailed for two-and-a-half years at the High Court in Hong Kong (shown) The girl told a psychologist she held no grudges against her father and had forgiven him, court documents reveal. But X was furious with her social worker, who reported the case to police without her consent, and accused her of splitting up her family. The father - known as YCK, to avoid the identification of his daughter - was offered to plead guilty to a charge of incest, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, to avoid a rape charge that could result in life behind bars. But he refused to put his family through the ordeal of a trial and pleaded guilty to rape to avoid doing so. The girl told a psychologist she held no grudges against her father and had forgiven him - but was angry at her social worker for reporting it to police without consent (file image of Hong Kong) Judge Amanda Woodcock said: 'This is an unusual case with peculiar facts,' before jailing the parent for two and a half years, The New Zealand Herald reports. Woodcock acknowledged the father's remorse by pleading guilty to spare his family from taking the stand. The court heard the construction worker was born in mainland China and married his wife there before moving to Hong Kong by himself in the late 1970s. The couple were reunited in Hong Kong in 2000 and went on to have their daughter and a son. A former Mississippi Gulf Coast police officer has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the death of her three-year-old daughter, who was left in a patrol car while her mother had sex with a supervisor. Cassie Barker, 29, received the maximum sentence for manslaughter on Monday in Harrison County court after having pleaded guilty last month in the September 2016 death of her daughter Cheyenne Hyer. Barker admitted to leaving Cheyenne strapped in a car seat in her patrol car for four hours while the mother was with her then-supervisor, Sgt Clark Ladner, at his home in Kiln after wrapping up a 12-hour shift just before 9am. The car's air conditioning was turned on, but it wasn't blowing cold air. Outside the car, temperatures reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit that day. Cheyenne was unresponsive and had a temperature of 107 when Barker returned after having sex with Ladner and then falling asleep. At Monday's sentencing, Judge Lawrence Bourgeois said Barker failed in her responsibility to 'protect and serve' as a mother and as a police officer. 'You left your own flesh and blood in that car while you were in an air conditioned house to have sexual relations,' the judge told the expecting mother. When given the chance to address Bourgeois, Barker fought back tears as she said: 'I want to say that the only person I owe an apology to was my daughter because nobody else was in her life but me.' Scroll down for video Former Mississippi Gulf Coast police officer Cassie Barker was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday for the September 2016 death of her three-year-old daughter Cheyenne Hyer, who was left in a patrol car while her mother had sex with a supervisor Barker is seen leaving a Harrison County courtroom in handcuffs after her sentencing Monday Barker was originally charged with second-degree murder but made a deal with state prosecutors to have the charge downgraded to manslaughter in exchange for her guilty plea. At last month's hearing, Harrison County Circuit Judge Bourgeois told the mother: 'I don't know what I could ever do to you that could be worse than what you've already experienced... You will forever be entombed in a prison of your own mind.' Both the prosecution and Cheyenne's father, Ryan Hyer, had asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence. Hyer described his ongoing emotional suffering at Barker's sentencing on Monday,, claiming that he still has haunting dreams of his daughter's final moments, according to WLOX. Barker pleaded guilty to manslaughter under a plea deal with prosecutors last month. The former Long Beach police officer is pictured in her mugshot 'Every time I see a patrol car, I see Cheyenne gasping for air,' Hyer told the judge. 'I have blamed myself for every what if, should have and could have. My life has been a complete hell without Cheyenne. This will never get easier.' He added: 'Theres no sentence big enough that will ever bring her back to us.' Recounting the moment he learned of Cheyenne's death when authorities came to his Florida home, Hyer said: 'I thought it was mistake.' He said he told the officers they must be wrong because the girl's mother was a police officer and would protect her. Barker took a shot at Hyer in her statement to the judge, saying: 'The last time I spoke to him was in July [2016]. He doesnt even know what her favorite toys are.' Hyer admitted that he hadn't seen Cheyenne since he left Mississippi to live in Jacksonville, Florida, a year before the girl's death after he caught Barker cheating on him with her police supervisor. He also admitted that he hadn't been paying child support because 'it never came up'. Cheyenne was left strapped in a car seat in her mother's patrol car for four hours on September 30, 2016, while Barker was having sex with her then-supervisor, Sgt Clark Ladner, at his home in Kiln. The car's air conditioning was turned on but it wasn't blowing cold air as temperatures outside the car reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit Cheyenne's father, Ryan Hyer, asked the judge to impose a maximum sentence for Barker Both Barker and Ladner were in the wake of Cheyenne's death. Ladner did not face any charges as he claimed he was unaware that the child was in the car when he was with Barker. It was later revealed that this wasn't the first time Barker was caught leaving her daughter alone in the car. The officer was disciplined in April 2015 after leaving Cheyenne, who was two years old at the time, alone in the back of her personal vehicle outside a strip mall in Gulfport. A passerby saw Cheyenne in the car and called the police. Barker was suspended for one week without pay and her one-year probationary period was extended by 90 days. The Department of Human Services also took temporary custody of Cheyenne. Hyer has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Long Beach Police Department and the Department of Human Services claiming that both parties were negligent when they failed to tell him about the first incident. In court on Monday, Barker fought back tears as she told the judge: 'I want to say that the only person I owe an apology to was my daughter because nobody else was in her life but me' Lauren Connelly (pictured) died after being in a road crash after a 12-hour shift at the hospital she worked at in Greenock Health chiefs are being urged to provide sleep pods to help medics recover after long, gruelling night shifts. It comes after the tragic death of junior doctor Lauren Connelly, 23, killed in a road crash after a 12-hour shift. The Scottish Conservatives will this week unveil a series of proposals designed to protect the health and welfare of NHS workers. These include the provision of sleeping facilities, weight management sessions, blood pressure checks and general health monitoring. Dr Connelly, from East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, died in 2011 after her car veered off the M8 as she drove home following a night shift at Inverclyde Royal Hospital in Greenock, Renfrewshire. Her death has led to rules guaranteeing trainee medics a minimum rest period of 46 hours following a string of night shifts, which will come into force in August. Tory health spokesman Miles Briggs said: We should look at having sleep pods in hospitals so staff can rest for their drive home. Simple measures like that will make a difference and prevent people from potentially having accidents like weve seen in the tragic case of Lauren Connelly. An example of the sleep pods which could be introduced to help doctors with long shift work People who work in our NHS are superheroes in many peoples eyes but they are not superhuman. They need to be looked after and their wellbeing taken into consideration. Young medics are working incredibly hard and I know some who are sleeping in cars in car parks before they drive home because they are absolutely shattered. The Tory proposals, which have been welcomed by medical leaders, will be discussed during a Holyrood debate on the NHS workforce. Doctors who work long gruelling night shifts could be provided with sleep pods under new plans Lauren Connelly died in 2011 after her car veered off the M8 as she drove home following a night shift at Inverclyde Royal Hospital (pictured above) Dr Kathleen Ferguson, of the Association of Anaesthetists, said: Working in a high- intensity role and at times when our bodies and brains believe we should be sleeping is not easy, its not healthy and performance may be affected. The opportunity to close your eyes and switch off even for a short period feels like a lifeline. It was recently disclosed that junior doctors are working more than 90 hours a week in parts of Scotland. Tory health spokesman Miles Briggs (pictured above) suggested sleep pods as a way to combat the exhaustion doctors face A Scottish Government spokesman said: The safety of our staff and patients is of the highest priority, and we continue to engage with medical staff to agree further changes to ensure that staff are well rested, fit for work and achieve a good work/life balance. A Government working party is considering how the 48-hour week laid down in the European Working Time Directive can be applied to junior doctors. Dr Connellys father, Brian Connelly, welcomed the Tory proposals. These are important initiatives which may improve the working lives of junior doctors, he said. Reducing their tiredness will improve their health and safety and lead to safer care for patients. However, a substantial reduction in working hours is required to eliminate the fatigue which too many junior doctors experience. They work shift rotas which are supposedly designed to meet the Working Time Directive but which actually put them at risk from the fatigue and accidents the legislation was intended to protect them from. The fundamental question is why should anyone be too tired to drive home safely after their work? Surely no one should be so exhausted that they cannot drive home safely. Welfare recipients will soon automatically report their employment incomes, in a measure expected to save billions of dollars. In the federal budget's single biggest savings measure, the government expects to bank $2.1 billion over five years by 'simplifying and automating' the social security reporting system. From July 1, people who receive Centrelink payments and are also employed will automatically input their fortnightly income, rather than calculating and reporting their earnings. Government officials expect the measure will 'greatly reduce' the likelihood of welfare recipients being overpaid, and subsequently being chased for the money. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (pictured) delivered his first federal budget on Tuesday night Eligibility measures and maximum payment rates will not be affected. Another major savings measure is expected to reap $78 million over four years by 'better targeting' employment support for refugees. Newly-arrived refugees will only be required to enter into employment services once they have been receiving income support for 12 months, rather than the current requirement of six months. The government says it will save $77.9 million over four years as a result of 'streamlining' refugees through programs like the Humanitarian Settlement Program, Adult Migrant English Program and Jobactive, 'assisting refugees to focus on settlement and language assistance during their first 12 months after arrival'. This measure is supposed to allow refugees to focus on settlement and language services during their first year in Australia. The federal government hopes expect the budget's biggest savings measure will 'greatly reduce' the likelihood of Centrelink welfare recipients being overpaid (stock image) Cashless welfare card trials are also being extended for another year to June 2021, at a cost of almost $129 million. The budget locks in one-off energy assistance payments for pension and welfare recipients of $75 for singles and $125 for couples, to help pay for power bills. However, economists and welfare advocates will be disappointed to learn the fiscal document is silent on raising the rate of Newstart. Critics are furious the 'unnecessarily cruel' unemployment allowance has not lifted in real terms for more than 25 years. Liberal senator Arthur Sinodinos is the latest person to break with government ranks to join their calls for an increase. Newstart recipients are given $538.80 per fortnight, while aged pensioners take home $834.40. British frontline troops would struggle to fight off a Russian attack, experts have warned, as new figures reveal some Army units are missing up to a third of the soldiers they need. Following a parliamentary question by Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, Ministry of Defence data uncovered that a number of battalions are lacking the necessary numbers for full functionality. Of the 30 infantry battalions included in the data, 12 were lacking more than 20% of their required numbers for full effectiveness, and some were operating with less than 30% of their target personnel. Only three met or exceeded their target. The figures revealed that the Mercian Regiment, 2nd Battalion, had only 72% of its target strength (pictured: A soldier from B Company 2 Mercian in an exercise in Oman) Research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute Dr Jack Watling told the Guardian that Russian ground units already have far higher infantry numbers in their equivalent units. He said: 'You need three times as many men as the enemy when attacking. 'A battalion that is missing 10% of its strength can probably compensate for the shortfall. Having lost 30%, you are not going to be able to generate the combat power to stand up to two enemy battalions, even in the defence.' The Scots Guards, 1st Battalion, had only 460 personnel in October last year - 34% below its workforce requirement of 697. The Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment, 2nd Battalion, was 31% below its target size with only 330 personnel. A 2012 report states that the Army and Capita believe several external factors have been hampering their ability to recruit (pictured: The Mercian Regiment firing a Javelin Anti-Tank missile in Salisbury Plain, 2016) The Welsh Guards, 1st Battalion, was operating at 72% of its target strength, and the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment, also 1st Battalion, was at 74%. The Mercian Regiment, 2nd Battalion, also had only 72% of its target strength. In 2012 the Army sought to reform its recruitment approach by entering into a ten-year-long, 495million contract with Capita Business Services Ltd. In December the National Audit Office found that Capita had consistently missed targets, reporting: 'Capita has missed the British Armys (the Armys) annual targets for recruiting new soldiers and officers every year since 2013. 'The total shortfall each year has ranged from 21% to 45% of the Armys requirement. The size of the shortfall has increased over the last three years and, in 2017-18, Capita Business Services Ltd (Capita) recruited 6,948 fewer regular and reserve soldiers and officers than the Army needed. In December the National Audit Office found that Capita had consistently missed targets (pictured: 2 Mercian battlegroup in Oman) 'The shortfall has been largest for regular soldiers. Since the contract began, Capita has missed the Armys annual target for regular soldiers by an average of 30%, compared with 4% in the two years preceding the contract. 'Capita has performed better in recruiting regular officers, achieving 95% of the Armys requirement in 2017-18 (661 recruits). 'Recruitment shortfalls can result in the Army placing greater strain on existing personnel to maintain operations and limit its ability to develop the capabilities it needs in the future.' The report states that the Army and Capita believe several external factors have been hampering their ability to recruit. These include: 'An improving UK economy with historically low levels of unemployment; a shrinking recruitment target population that is less likely to commit to a long-term career in the Armed Forces; and a public perception that the Army is reducing in size and is non-operational, making it less attractive to join.' Responding to the figures, Mr Francois said: 'These numbers make starkly apparent what ministers have been seeking to hide for some time, which is that the frontline strength of the regular army is now being seriously eroded by the lack of recruits to refresh infantry battalions, because of the calamity that is the Capita recruitment contract. The new figures were uncovered by a parliamentary question from Mark Francois 'This has gone beyond the simple criticism of an ineffective contractor: this now directly affects the defence of the realm. These people are so incompetent that they are now impacting our national security and ministers should sack them without hesitation.' Following the figures' publication on the Parliament website, an MoD spokesperson said: 'The Ministry of Defence remains committed to maintaining the overall size of the Armed Forces and we have a range of measures under way to improve recruitment and retention. The challenge is kept under constant review. 'Importantly the Services continue to meet all their current commitments, keeping the country and its interests safe.' An Army spokesman said it was meeting its operational commitments, adding that the 'workforce requirement' is not a minimum threshold - but it represents the number of positions in each battalion. Terrifying footage shows a massive water spout dwarfing high-rise buildings as it barrels towards the edge of a Malaysian city. At least 50 houses in the Tenjung Tokong suburb of the city of George Town on Penang Island were damaged after the swirling waterspout ripped over the land on Monday. The horrifying storm shook the city's 200,000 residents as it buffeted buildings across the island for around 15 minutes before it moved away from the area. The ferocious vortex of swirling water and air rises hundreds of feet into the clouds, high above the city's skyscrapers in George Town on Penang Island on Monday The ominous darkness spreads over the ocean as the storm thunders towards the city where it caused damage to at least 50 homes and terrified residents A 75-year-old resident, Nona Khalid, told the Malay Mail: 'The sound of the wind was deafening and I saw part of the roof of my house being flown away by the wind.. indeed it was very scary and took place for the first time in the 50 years I have been staying here.' Three video clips have been shared online and have been viewed nearly 100,000 times in just 12 hours. In the first video, the enormous waterspout is seen moving towards the high-rise buildings of the Tanjung Tokong suburb. The clip shows the massive columnar vortex moving towards a beach and smoothly dissipating as it runs out of water. Another video shows the waterspout scattering in front of the beach from another camera angle. In the clips a woman can be heard saying: 'Oh wow, what a fantastic phenomenon.' She then adds: 'It is really a tornado.' According to local media, the freak weather incident took place at around 1.30pm. Waterspouts are tornadoes which form over the water and the most powerful of them can suck up moisture from the seas or lakes over which they form, creating a thundering column. Debris can be seen swirling through the air (left) as the storm breaks over the land and the glass of a bus shelter lay completely shattered across the pavement (right) The speed of the rare phenomenon is incredible as it tears across the surface of the ocean and onto land The waterspout lasted for around 15 minutes on the island but could be seen swirling around the area of around 40 minutes They are often much weaker than tornadoes on land and generally form in subtropical regions. Waterspouts have a five-part cycle starting with the formation of a dark spot on the water surface, then a spiral pattern. This is followed by the formation of a spray ring and then the funnel, before finally disappearing. Paedophiles' names, aliases, photos and the nature of their crimes will be made public with the Federal government announcing it will establish a national child sex offender registry. The register will also detail offenders' date of birth, their physical description and the 'general location and nature' of their offending, budget documents said. The announcement, led by Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton, will please some child safety advocates. But it will raise concerns about people taking vigilante action against offenders. There are more than 17,000 convicted paedophiles in Australia. Western Australia alone has more than 3,500 on its register for a population of less than 2.7 million Paedophiles' names, aliases, photos and the nature of their crimes will be made public with the Federal government announcing it will establish a national child sex offender registry Budget papers make it clear the register will be 'publicly available' and hosted by the secretive national crime fighting body, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC). Police agencies in every state and territory will provide, vet and manage the information included on the $7.8 million register. 'Protection of our most vulnerable our children remains one of the highest priorities of the Morrison government,' Mr Dutton said in a statement. The Budget papers don't specify what the rules would be for perpetrators whose victims would be identified if they were named - such as mums and dads who abuse their children. The papers also do not elaborate on what crimes would land offenders on the register. For instance, former A Current Affair reporter Ben McCormack was convicted of a child pornography charge, but not physical offences against children. It's not known whether that sort of offending - he expressed he was a 'proud ped' - would land a person on the register. Mr Dutton (pictured) has previously floated the idea of a child sex offender registry but the government was not known to be forging ahead with the plan Mr Dutton has previously floated the idea of a child sex offender registry but said the government would consult with the states. But the register was announced as a funding commitment in the second budget paper on Tuesday evening. A police source said he was 'very concerned' about the announcement, and wondered how the government will compel the states and territories to join the scheme. Child advocates Bravehearts opposed the proposal when Mr Dutton suggested the measure in January, branding it a political stunt. Founder Hetty Johnston said: 'The bottom line is that all dangerous and repeat sex offenders should not be on a register, they should be in jail. What acts land a person on the child sex offender registry? Former A Current Affair Ben McCormack described himself as a 'proud ped' in a messages that saw him plead guilty to a child pornography charge. But he did not offend against a child 'No offender should be released until the risk they pose is of a level that can be managed in the community. A register will not keep children safe.' But Mr Dutton said: 'It will send a clear message that Australia will not tolerate individuals preying on the most vulnerable members of the community - our children'. The sex offenders register is likely to become another issue dividing the parties at the coming election. Labor has previously said any changes must be 'evidence-based and effective'. The Federal party has pointed out former prime minister Tony Abbott once ruled out the measure. 'It would be good to know what has changed since then,' a spokesperson told the ABC. Worst of the worst: Half of the nation's convicted paedophiles re-offend within four years. Warren Hayter (left) abused disabled boys across several states, while the NSW government is fighting to keep Michael Guider in jail Budget papers also revealed the government will set up a national museum and memorial for victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse. It will provide $2.5 million to consult stakeholders on potential options and form of a 'national museum or memorial'. Commuters and construction workers are being promised a $100 billion pipeline of road and rail projects in Tuesday night's federal budget. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has pledged to dispatch 'cranes, hard hats and heavy machinery' across the country over the next decade. Mr Frydenberg expects the projects to ease congestion in major cities, better manage population growth, improve road safety and unlock hidden potential in regional towns. Scroll down for video Commuters and construction workers are being promised a $100 billion pipeline of road and rail projects in Tuesday night's federal budget Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has pledged to dispatch 'cranes, hard hats and heavy machinery' across the country over the next decade 'A strong economy needs ongoing investment in roads, rail, bridges, dams and ports,' he told parliament. 'We know you want to be there for the school drop off, to help the kids with their homework and spend more time together at the dinner table.' 'Tonight, I can announce that the Coalition Government is boosting our infrastructure spending to $100 billion over the decade.' The federal government is also topping up a near-depleted $1 billion fund for 'congestion-busting' projects. The Urban Congestion Fund has also been increased four-fold from $1 billion to $4 billion including a $500 million Commuter Car Park Fund. There will now be $4 billion to spend on 'immediate, practical' measures to cut travel times in major cities, removing bottlenecks and upgrading key travel corridors. The government has copped criticism for the overwhelming number of such projects already announced in coalition-held seats. However, with a federal election due next month, its four-fold funding boost will be a welcome sign for other MPs looking to spruik local projects in their electorates. The treasurer has also announced a $500 million 'commuter car parking' fund, which is expected to take tens of thousands of cars off the roads by improving access to public transport hubs. He is also promising to spend $2 billion on a fast-rail service between Melbourne and Geelong, slashing travel times in half. Money for other fast rail and major road projects has been progressively rolled out over the past few months. Mr Frydenberg said a commitment to high speed rail was 'central' to the government's rail vision for the future of Australia Mr Frydenberg said a commitment to high speed rail was 'central' to the government's rail vision for the future of Australia. 'To make this vision a reality, we are providing $2 billion in this Budget for fast rail between Melbourne and Geelong, slashing travel times in half,' he said. 'Work is under way to develop fast rail corridors in other areas - Sydney to Wollongong, Newcastle, Bathurst, Orange to Parks, Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast, Melbourne to Shepparton, Toralgan to Wodonga.' A high speed train would cut travel time from Melbourne to Sydney and Sydney to Brisbane to as little as three hours and just one hour between Sydney and Canberra. There will now be $4 billion to spend on 'immediate, practical' measures to cut travel times in major cities, removing bottlenecks and upgrading key travel corridors In March Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the government was committed to projects that would have real and positive impacts for voters. 'A Melbourne-to-Brisbane fast rail link is a very ambitious program,' he said. 'We're focusing on projects that we know are going to make a big difference to people right here and now.' Billions will also be spent on road safety measures, key freight routes and access to major ports. 'In this Budget there is an additional $2.2 billion for safer roads,' Mr Frydenberg said. '$1 billion to improve freight routes and access to ports (and) $100 million for regional airports. New Bombali ebolavirus found in Kenyan bat Until recently, five ebolavirus species were known, with three of these - Bundibugyo, Sudan and Zaire ebolaviruses - associated with large human outbreaks. The latter is responsible for the devastating 2013-16 outbreak in West Africa and the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the reservoirs of ebolaviruses have remained enigmatic, though fruit bats have been implicated and demonstrated as the reservoir for related Marburg virus. Last year a sixth ebolavirus species, Bombali virus, was found in saliva and faeces from bats in Sierra Leone. Professor Olli Vapalahti, University of Helsinki, Finland, and Professor Omu Anzala, University of Nairobi, Kenya, are leading a research project focused on developing enhanced preparedness for emerging infectious disease threats, and the researchers have identified Bombali ebolavirus in an Angolan free-tailed bat (species: Mops condylurus) captured in the Taita Hills, southeast Kenya. No ebolaviruses have been previously reported from wildlife in Kenya or other countries along the east coast of Africa. The researchers recovered high amounts of Bombali ebolavirus in bat tissues, including its full genome, confirming that productive infection does occur in this species. The bat was also shown to have antibodies towards the virus. There is no current evidence that Bombali virus infects people, Professor Vapalahti underlines: "Evidence against apparent human infection was obtained by screening febrile patients reporting to clinics in the Taita Hills who have had contact with bats: no signs of Bombali virus infection or past exposure were uncovered." "However, vigilance and ongoing monitoring are important to understand this viral infection and the risks it may pose to people, and further research is ongoing", notes principal investigator, disease ecologist Dr. Kristian Forbes, University of Arkansas, USA. THE FINDING INCREASES UNDERSTANDING ABOUT EBOLAVIRUS DIVERSITY AND GEOGRAPHY Given the vast distance between the identification sites in Sierra Leone and Kenya (ca. 5500 km) and that the bat species involved is not believed to travel large distances, Bombali virus is likely to be transmitted across its range in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Although recently found, it is obvious that Bombali virus, along with other ebolaviruses, has been around since ancient times. The bat biologist expert of the team, Dr. Paul Webala from Maasai Mara University, emphasizes that despite being occasional virus carriers, bats are essential components of global ecosystems serving critical functions such as insect pest control, seed dispersal and plant pollination, and their conservation is vitally important. "In fact, previous eviction and culling attempts in response to possible disease outbreaks have backfired and may actually expose humans to potential risks of transmission", Dr. Webala states. Dr. Tarja Sironen, University of Helsinki, concludes: "This finding increases our understanding about ebolavirus diversity and geography, and highlights the role that insectivorous bat species may play, in addition to fruit bats, for ebolavirus maintenance in nature." The bat samples were collected at the University of Helsinki Taita Research Station and processed in Biosafety Level-3 laboratories of the Veterinary Faculty at the University of Helsinki. Positive samples were transferred to a Biosafety Level-4 laboratory at the Public Health agency of Sweden for further investigation. The study will be published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA. ### This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 31) A Senate bet sees giving government funding to political parties as the key to reforming the political party system in the country. Community organizer Bernard Austria said during CNN Philippines Senatorial Forum on Sunday said adopting this system would lessen the indebtedness of political parties and candidates to private donors with vested interests. Yung iba gumagastos ng P400 billion sa pangangampanya, eh saan naman nila babawiin yun? Yung mga sponsor nila, kung hindi man sila, siyempre may hihingin yun. Mas maganda kasi ang political party may utang sa taongbayan, Austria said Sunday. [Translation: Others are spending P400 billion for their campaign, how would they get that back? Their sponsors, if not they themselves, would definitely ask for something in return. It would be better if a political party is indebted to the people.] Austria said the country should look into adopting a system similar to Germany and Spain, where political parties receive funding from the government, depending on factors like the number of votes a party received in the elections. United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France and Japan are also some of the countries where political parties are partially funded by the government. The House of Representatives approved in 2012 a bill which sought to set up a state subsidy fund for registered national political parties for their development and campaign expenditures. The measure got stuck in the Senate on second reading. Similar measures are currently pending in both houses. Got a question or tip? Contact us at bizmojoidaho@gmail.com. San Diego could be set to ban electric scooters after a spate of recent accidents on the city's sidewalks. Two people were seriously injured over the weekend in separate scooter crashes in the city, and last month a tourist died after a horror crash. A 62-year-old man fractured his neck on Sunday near Mission Bay Sportcenter and a 39-year-old sustained a life-threatening injury when he fell off his scooter on the Mission Beach Boardwalk. The San Diego Police Department said both men were rushed to hospital after the incidents and are currently receiving treatment. Two people were seriously injured on the Mission Beach Boardwalk in separate incidents over the weekend This weekend's crashes are the latest in a long line of accidents involving electric scooters in the city. Last month a tourist died after crashing into a tree while riding a dockless scooter, marking the first fatality in the city of San Diego involving the scooters. Christopher Conti, 53, from Woodstock, Georgia, was knocked unconscious during the collision along 10th Avenue near B street on Wednesday, March 13, San Diego police said. A lawsuit filed earlier this month against the city of San Diego and Bird, a dockless scooter operator, is asking for changes, namely geo-fencing that would prevent scooters from being operated on sidewalks, parks, and similar areas. On Feb 20, the San Diego Active Transportation & Infrastructure Committee voted unanimously to forward recommendations for regulating the dockless industry to the full city council. An incident from December last year in which a scooter rider slammed into a pedestrian on the boardwalk "Our goal with these regulations is to make companies and their riders more responsible, more safe and more accountable," said mayoral representative Greg Block. Since they were brought in back in February 2018, San Diego now has six dockless companies and what the city estimates are about 20,000 shared bikes, e-bikes and scooters. A recent study by UCLA researchers, which looked through medical records at two hospitals in Los Angeles, found that head injuries were the leading cause of scooter injuries. The study found that 40 percent of the people injured at head injuries. The results suggest there were low rates of adherence to existing regulations with regards to a riders age and low rates of helmet use, the study's authors said. The fifth victim of the Edmonton stabbings was saved by police at a nearby cordon, a senior officer revealed today. The news comes after officers probing the spate of 'random' stabbings in the area in just four days arrested a man in his 30s. Officers who arrested another two men for GBH in connection with the stabbings have released one man on bail, and been granted extra time to question the second. Speaking outside Edmonton Police Station, North Area BCU Commander Helen Millichap said the latest victim, who is in a 'critical but stable condition', was helped by local police officers. She said: 'My understanding is that when the victim was assaulted this morning the way he would have received help was by going to that cordon. 'The investigation is progressing with pace. The description that we have already given into the public domain is the description we are still giving. A picture shows the moment policemen arrested a man in Edmonton Green, north London this morning - five hours after the latest of five stabbings in the area The fifth victim of the Edmonton stabbings was saved by police at a nearby cordon 'We have made three arrests in regards to this and the investigation is progressing with pace. 'Because of the way the suspect acted and the geographical location of the areas and the description given of the suspect it is likely that the events are linked. 'Until we can unequivocally say that these events were linked I asked the public to remain alert.' A man was arrested outside a Lidl supermarket in Edmonton Green, north London, at around 10am today five hours after the latest attack to devastate the area. Timeline of stabbings Saturday March 30 7.02pm: A woman, aged 45, is left in a 'critical condition' after she is knifed in the back in Aberdeen Road, Edmonton. Sunday March 31 00.15am: A man is stabbed in Park Avenue and rushed to hospital with non-life threatening wounds. 3.55am: A 23-year-old man is stabbed in Silver Street, Edmonton, before being found at Seven Sisters Tube station. 9.43am: A man is knifed in the back in Brettenham Road in another 'bloodbath attack'. Tuesday, April 2 5.05pm: A man, in his 30s, is found with knife injuries in Aberdeen Road, Edmonton after being stabbed in Fairfield Road. Advertisement Pictures show him being taken away by police after four of five officers pulled up in a car and sprinted towards him with handcuffs. Police have released the first suspect arrested on bail, but officers have been granted extra time to quiz the second. Commander Millichap added: 'The first suspect is bailed in relation to this investigation, the second suspect, we have been given permission by a court for questions until tomorrow morning. 'We are not asking people to stay inside, we are not locking down anywhere, people deserve answers about this investigation. 'We are taking an open-minded approach to these incidents. The man with life-threatening injuries is still in a critical condition in hospital. 'The victims appeared to have been approached from behind, they do not appear to have been in gauged in conversation, these are currently very unprovoked attacks.' The latest victim, believed to be in his thirties, was walking with a friend in Fairfield Road just after 5am today when he was attacked. Emergency services were scrambled to nearby Aberdeen Road where they found him suffering 'life-threatening' injuries. He is currently in hospital in a 'critical but stable condition'. His friend was unharmed. Two other men arrested for GBH in connection with the first four stabbings are also still in custody. Today's attack comes after four other people were 'attacked at random' by a knifeman on a 14-hour rampage in the same area of north London over the weekend. Three men aged between 23 and 52 and a 45-year-old woman were stabbed as they walked alone in Edmonton on Saturday night and Sunday morning. The female victim, who is still fighting for her life in hospital, was attacked in Aberdeen Road - one street down from where today's attack took place. Pictures from Aberdeen Road in Edmonton, north London, this morning show the road cordoned off by police after a fifth stabbing in the area in four days A graphic shows where the five Edmonton stabbings took place over the period of just four days. Today's attack was in Fairfield Road - one street down from Aberdeen Road - the scene of one of the other four attacks Terrified locals spoke of the disturbing rate of near-fatal incidents in the area over the period of just four days. Police have said the latest attack has 'not yet been formally linked' to the other four, but the culprit or culprits could be suffering from mental health issues. There is nothing to suggest the stabbings are terror related. An eyewitness who watched the man being arrested told MailOnline: 'This man was suddenly surrounded by police about two feet from the entrance to the Lidl. 'Three officers had been following him around the corner and another two or three came from the other side. Teenage boy taken to hospital with serious injuries after stabbing in Salford A teenage boy has been taken to hospital with serious injuries following a stabbing in Salford. Police were called to Tatton Street, Ordsall, at 2.45pm on Tuesday to reports a 17 year old had been knifed. It is unclear whether his injuries are life-threatening. The small residential street has been cordoned off by police following the attack. Photos from the scene show an officer standing guard. No arrests have been made, a GMP spokeswoman said. She said: 'Shortly before 2.45pm on Tuesday 2 April 2019, police were called to Tatton Street in Ordsall to reports that a 17-year-old boy had been stabbed. 'Officers attended and the boy was taken to hospital to be treated for serious injuries. 'No arrests have been made and enquiries are ongoing.' Advertisement 'He was put in handcuffs and held there for about 15 minutes before being led into a police van. 'At one point I could hear one of the officers ask him if he had taken anything or was on any medication. 'The man looked unresponsive. He was standing up but had his eyes closed and simply shook his head when asked questions. He didn't actually say anything. 'At first I thought he may have been a shoplifter because it was just outside Lidl but apparently it's connected to the stabbing earlier and possibly this knifeman who has been randomly targeting people around Edmonton.' Shop worker Fatma Oruc, 17, said of today's arrest: 'There were police officers surrounding a man and he was black. He was wearing a hoodie. 'They stayed for five to 10 minutes and handcuffed him and he was taken away.' She said the man was standing up and seemed calm. Employees at furniture store Dogtas said the man arrested was wearing a green hoodie with a grey sweatshirt underneath, 'dirty' blue jeans, and blue trainers. He did not appear to say anything or make any effort to get away from officers. One Dogtas employee said: 'A police car pulled up and four or five police officers sprinted over and arrested a man outside the window. 'They arrested and searched him. Two more police cars turned up as they went through his wallet - they looked like they were checking it was the right guy. 'The man didn't say anything for the whole time. It lasted around 15 to 20 minutes.' Police officers and a forensic investigator are pictured in Aberdeen Road, Edmonton today where a man was found stabbed in the early hours of Tuesday Despite the three arrests, neighbours say they are still frightened to walk around the area alone. Tarek Elmadkhoun, 32, said this morning: 'It happened just outside my door. My wife heard some talking at 5am. She's a bit worried. 'I just moved here one week ago. To be honest it's a bit worrying. My wife doesn't speak English. She doesn't know what to do.' Kelvin Ojo, 36, added: 'It's scary now, this is not normal. 'It's been peaceful for a while until all this drama started coming up. Now I'm starting thinking about moving from this area, I'm not liking it. 'It could happen to anyone - my friends, my family, it could happen to me. It's really scary. 'We don't even know this guy they are talking about, so it's really scary.' A large police cordon is in place blocking off several streets in the area, with uniformed officers standing guard. Investigators in forensic suits are taking photographs of the area and looking for clues. Forensic teams are pictured scouring the street where today's victim was found with knife wounds Police officers and forensic teams (pictured) are working to see if today's stabbing is linked to the other four over the weekend Forensic investigators scour the scene of today's stabbing for clues this morning A black jacket, metallic blanket and medical equipment marks the scene in Aberdeen Road, where the victim was found. In Lawrence Road, which is a short distance from the scene of the latest stabbing, there was also a police cordon guarded by uniformed officers while a police dog was led round an adjacent park. It was unclear what the latest police activity related to. Mike Kalongi, 28, who lives near the scene of today's incident, said: 'It's getting a bit close. 'It's a bit scary. I usually go to the gym at night, but over the last few days I decided not to. 'I'm going shopping. I usually have my headphones on but I want to stay aware and try not to be a victim. It's scary. It's really scary.' 'Police evidence' bags are pictured in the street in Aberdeen Road where a man was found stabbed this morning in Edmonton, north London Forensic evidence is pictured in a bag next to a roll of police cordon tape in Aberdeen Road Connor McCoy, 21, who also lives close to the scene of the latest attack, said: 'I presume it's a follow-on from what happened prior. 'I just hope they catch the guy and it gets prevented.' Mr McCoy said he still feels safe in the area, but added: 'I just hope that the slightly more defenceless people can feel safe living in this street. 'I hope that something happens, something to deal with knife crime.' Sham Povunash, 17, added that the stabbings came as a shock to residents of an area he described as 'quiet'. He said: 'The gangs don't come here, this is a really quiet area - it's not dangerous at all. It seems random.' Police officers are pictured in Aberdeen Road, Edmonton, this morning where a man was found stabbed in the early hours An above-ground view shows Aberdeen Road in Edmonton today where police are looking for clues into the five stabbings in the area in four days A Met Police spokesman said this afternoon: 'Police investigating a stabbing in Fairfield Road in Enfield this morning have made an arrest. 'A man aged in his 30s was arrested in the Edmonton Green area this morning. 'He has been taken into custody at a north London police station. 'At this time police retain an open mind as to whether this incident is linked to the incidents in Enfield over the weekend. 'Police advise members of the public to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activity to police.' Today's assault follows a fatal knife attack in Kentish Town, north London at 8.30pm last night. A murder probe has been launched after the victim, a man in his twenties, died in the 32nd homicide London has seen so far this year. A man in his thirties was stabbed in Aberdeen Road (pictured) in the early hours of this morning - after a woman, 45, was knifed there over the weekend Schools in Edmonton brought in extra security yesterday and police have urged anyone walking on their own through the area to take extra care. Patrols were stepped up as detectives questioned the two men on suspicion of GBH after they issued a description of a suspect. But investigators are said to be unsure whether either of the suspects in custody is the knifeman and are therefore encouraging caution among those in the area. One suspect in custody was named locally as Mark Williams, who is in his 40s and was flagged as a risk to the local council after he was reported missing for a week. A neighbour told how she had asked the local housing officer from Enfield Council to check on Mr Williams on Friday afternoon because she was worried having not seen him for a week. Others said police had repeatedly been called to his address over anti-social behaviour and concerns over large groups gathering there. Locals said he was known in the local area as Footsy and would often be seen walking around with a tennis racquet and a ball. Yesterday morning, a Section 60 order was put in place, allowing officers to stop and search anyone in the area to prevent further violence. This lasted until 1.50am today. A Met Police spokesman said this morning: 'Officers were called at approximately 05:05hrs on Tuesday, 2 April to reports of a man stabbed in Aberdeen Road, N18. 'Police and London Ambulance Service attended and found a man, believed to be aged in his 30s, suffering a stab injury. 'He is reported to have been walking with a companion when he was attacked in Fairfield Road. The victim then made his way to Aberdeen Road, where he was found by police. 'The other person did not suffer any injuries. The suspect is described as a tall, skinny black man, wearing a hoody. 'The victim has been taken to an east London hospital; at this time his condition is being treated as life-threatening.' Today's stabbing follows a fatal knife attack in Kentish Town, north London, which saw a man in his twenties murdered A murder probe is underway after yet another fatal stabbing on the capital's streets which saw a man in his 20s knifed to death in Kentish Town, north London Detective Superintendent Luke Marks, of the North Area Command Unit, added: 'I am aware that events from the weekend have caused a huge amount of worry and concern among the community, and that this incident will cause further alarm. 'While at this stage the incident has not yet been formally linked, the location and manner of this attack will be of concern to the public. 'Our advice continues that the public remain vigilant, and to contact police regarding anyone acting suspiciously. 'You will see additional uniformed patrols in the Edmonton area; if you have any concerns, please speak with my officers immediately.' The first attack happened around 7pm on Saturday, with a 45-year-old woman stabbed in the back by a man. She is the most seriously injured and police described her condition as 'critical'. Crime scene: Plumber Roger Blackman (pictured right) helps police officers at the scene of the fourth Edmonton stabbing on Sunday Forensics experts work at the scene of all four attacks yesterday as the investigation continues The second assault happened shortly after midnight that night, with a 52-year-old man attacked on nearby Park Avenue. He was rushed to hospital but has since been discharged, police revealed yesterday morning. The third attack happened near Seven Sisters tube station shortly before 4am on Sunday, with a 23-year-old man injured. He remains in a 'critical but stable condition'. The fourth attack happened around 9.45am on Sunday, with a 29-year-old male victim also stabbed in the back. He remains in hospital but doctors expect him to survive his injuries. The fifth attack took place at 5.05am on Tuesday in Fairfield Road, Edmonton. The victim was a man in his thirties who was walking alone with a friend. He stumbled to nearby Aberdeen Road where he was found by police. He is in hospital in a life-threatening condition. His friend was unharmed. A victim's belongings and medical paraphernalia was strewn across the scene of another Edmonton stabbing in Fore Street Local plumber Roger Blackman was first on the scene of the fourth stabbing and saw the attacker run off, leaving the victim with blood pouring from a wound. Speaking to MailOnline on Sunday night, he said: 'I heard a scream, I looked to my right, I saw a guy run off, then another scream. I saw blood pouring out of the back of him, I went to my van to get some towels to stem the flow. 'I saw the guy turn around and run off, he was literally about 10-15 feet away from where I was. I was in the back of my van so I'm always aware of what's going on around me. 'The victim was screaming, oh my God, oh my God, why has this happened to me. There was blood pouring out of his gash. It was a great big gash, about a three-inch wound. 'I was visiting my mum for mother's day. You hear about it in the papers and now it's happened in front of your mother's house. It does make you wonder, it makes you think about going out.' Residents of the area say they have been left scared to go out alone following the attacks. Part of the police cordon is pictured yesterday Opening a summit in Downing Street yesterday morning, Prime Minister Theresa May said tackling knife violence is a 'priority' for ministers as well as families, young people and communities across the country. More than 100 experts will meet this week after the Government unveiled new plans which could see frontline workers in schools, hospitals and police stations accountable for failing to 'spot warning signs' of violent crime among young people. Home Secretary Sajid Javid floated the idea of a so-called 'public health duty' intended to help spot the warning signs that a young person could be in danger, 'such as presenting in A&E with a suspicious injury, to worrying behaviour at school or issues at home'. He stepped up stop and search operations following a week-long crackdown on knife crime known as Operation Sceptre. A homeless man has been charged with allegedly attacking an American musician after he stepped off a Melbourne tram. The 32-year-old US man was allegedly assaulted at the intersection of Bell Street and Plenty Road about 11.20pm on Wednesday. The tourist had recently played at a music festival and was heading home when the 27-year-old man with no fixed address allegedly chased him down. The victim was left with serious injuries including bleeding on the brain and a broken jaw, Detective Senior Constable Matthew Coleiro, from Victoria Police, said. The 32-year-old US man was allegedly assaulted at the intersection of Bell Street and Plenty Road about 11.20pm on Wednesday (pictured) The alleged bashing was captured on CCTV. A man can be seen leaning over the unconscious 32-year-old as he lay in the middle of a car park. The victim eventually regained consciousness 20 minutes later. He then sought help from a passerby, who called an ambulance. The musician had been due to fly back to the US on Saturday after performing at a music festival last week. On Tuesday, the 27-year-old man (pictured) was charged with intentionally causing serious injury in circumstances of gross violence, commit offence while on bail and other assault-related offences The victim cannot remember the incident due to memory loss and remains in hospital. On Tuesday, the 27-year-old man was charged with intentionally causing serious injury in circumstances of gross violence, commit offence while on bail and other assault-related offences. He is due to face Melbourne Magistrates Court. Anyone with information on the alleged incident is urged to contact police. The body of a 17-year-old who went missing from his family home has been found by police. Fireun Hunter disappeared from his house on Scotland's Isle of Arran late on Saturday night. His sister was the last person to see the teenager at their home in Whiting Bay at about 11.15pm. Officers found the body near Glenashdale Falls at about 5pm yesterday. Police Scotland said there are no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death. Fireun Hunter (pictured) disappeared from his house on Scotland's Isle of Arran late on Saturday night. His body was found at 5pm yesterday Officers found Fireun's body near Glenashdale Falls at about 5pm yesterday on the Isle of Arran (pictured on map) in Scotland The teenager's family have been informed and grieving mother Mandy Hunter said on Facebook: 'Its bad news. Fireun's body has been found. She added, in response to messages of condolence: 'He was a very mature and sensible young man. It makes no sense.' Paying tribute to the teenager on Facebook, one person wrote: 'So sad. Poor boy. Thinking of family and friends.' Another said: 'How very sad another young life away to soon. Thinking of everyone and the community.' Fireun's mother described him as a 'very mature and sensible young man' saying his death 'makes no sense' An Ayrshire Police Division spokesperson said a report will be submitted to the Procurator Fiscal, the Daily Record reports. For confidential support, log on to samaritans.org or call the charity on 116123. An emergency amber alert has been activated by officials this morning for a missing 16-year-old girl last seen in Dawson Springs, Hopkins County, Kentucky. Lauryn Sizemore was reported missing from her home at 9.30am on Saturday and is believed to be with her step-grandfather Glenn Eugene Harper. The 56-year-old is thought to be driving a 2004 maroon Hyundai Sonata, with Kentucky temporary tag 9555994. Lauryn Sizemore (pictured) was reported missing from her home at 9.30am on Saturday and is believed to be with her step-grandfather Glenn Eugene Harper Investigators said Harper told a friend he was going to Texas. His brother and father live near Houston. Lauryn is described as 4'8" with a lazy eye and weighs around 128lbs. She was last seen wearing a grey hoodie. Her step-grandfather has gray hair and brown eyes. Anyone with information should call 911 or Dawson Springs Police at 270-797-2277. Investigators said Harper (pictured) told a friend he was going to Texas Tesco is now locking knives in locked glass cabinets in a bid to stop them being stolen by teenagers intent on using them to stab rivals in the streets. The supermarket giant has made the move in its store in Edmonthon, north London, amid escalating violence sweeping the capital which has seen 32 victims stabbed to death this year alone. Police are now urging other stores to follow suit as they step up patrols in Edmonton, where an attacker remains on the loose after knifing a victim - after four people were 'attacked at random' in the same area during a 14-hour rampage over the weekend. Tesco is now locking knives in locked glass cabinets in a bid to stop them being stolen Prime Minister opens summit on knife crime which is like a 'disease rotting society' Opening a summit in Downing Street yesterday morning, Prime Minister Theresa May said tackling knife violence was a 'priority' for ministers as well as families, young people and communities across the country. More than 100 experts will meet this week after the Government unveiled new plans which could see frontline workers in schools, hospitals and police stations accountable for failing to 'spot warning signs' of violent crime among young people. Home Secretary Sajid Javid also granted police new powers to increase stop and search activity following a spate of bloodshed across London and the rest of England since the start of 2019. Mr Javid told the summit violent crime, 'is like a disease rotting our society.' Advertisement The storage unit has a combination lock to make sure it is only accessible to members of staff. Tesco said the cabinet in the Edmonton store was a trial, 'as part of a broader set of measures.' Southbury Police posted a letter on Twitter which officers have circulated to supermarkets in Edmonton. It reads: 'London is in the middle of a knife crime epidemic which is making national news. Enfield is having its fair share of knife crimes were people are being seriously injured or killed. 'Many of these knife crimes are as a result of kitchen knives being used. The police are doing their best to combat this threat but as you know we are extremely stretched with numbers and are facing an uphill battle.' Police said Tesco fitted the cabinet after 'several shopliftings of their knives from youths who we all know won't be using them for cooking.' No knives have been stolen since, police confirmed. Enfield MPS replied: 'Something very straightforward and very easy to implement in every department store is this locked cabinet for knives. Hopefully we can get more & more stores to follow this procedure. We all play a part in reducing #knifecrime.' Officers have now called upon Sainsburys and Dunelm to follow suit. Before: Tesco used to sell knives straight from the shelf but has taken measures to lock thm away amid a spate of fatal stabbings in the capital Southbury Police posted a letter on Twitter which officers have circulated to supermarkets in Edmonton The scene on Aberdeen Road, Enfield, where a man was found suffering from life-threatening injuries after being stabbed Timeline of stabbings Saturday March 30 7.02pm: A woman, aged 45, is left in a 'critical condition' after she is knifed in the back on Aberdeen Road. Sunday March 31 00.15am: A man is stabbed in Park Avenue and rushed to hospital with non-life threatening wounds. 3.55am: A 23-year-old man is stabbed at Silver Street, Edmonton, before being found at Seven Sisters tube station. 9.43am: A man is knifed in the back on Brettenham Road in another 'bloodbath attack'. Tuesday, April 2 5.05pm: A man, in his 30s, is found with knife injuries in Aberdeen Road, Edmonton after being stabbed in Fairfield Road. Advertisement The force added: 'We agree that the vast majority of kitchen knives will be taken from kitchen drawers. 'The fact is however that youths are stealing knives from these stores. To quote a large supermarket soundbite 'every little helps. 'We never said it would stop knife crime, but if it even saved one life.' Morrisons has banned the sale of knives altogether in some London stores. The manager of one branch in Peckham, south London, said he decided to act after noticing pupils swipe them on the way to school. This comes as the 'Edmonton knifeman' is believed to have struck again after a man was stabbed in the early hours today. The man, believed to be in his thirties, was walking with a friend in Fairfield Road, Edmonton just after 5am when he was attacked. Emergency services found him suffering 'life-threatening' injuries. Four people were 'attacked at random' in the same area by a knifeman over the weekend. A graphic shows where the five Edmonton stabbings took place over the period of just four days. Today's attack was in Fairfield Road - one street down from Aberdeen Road - the scene of one of the other four attacks Three men aged between 23 and 52 and a 45-year-old woman were stabbed as they walked alone in Edmonton on Saturday night and Sunday morning. The female victim, who is still fighting for her life in hospital, was attacked in Aberdeen Road - one street down from where today's attack took place. Two men arrested for GBH in connection with four of the stabbings are still in custody. A Tesco spokesperson said: 'At Tesco we take the safety of our customers, colleagues and the communities we serve very seriously, which is why in 2016 we removed knives from sale in our Express stores and from our home delivery service. 'We continue to introduce new ways to strengthen how we sell knives responsibly, including exploring more stringent security measures in-store and working with our suppliers to increase security around knife packaging to prevent theft and ensure customers can still purchase products safely.' The federal budget isn't all about tax cuts and spending on roads, infrastructure, national security, and hospitals. The 2019-20 federal budget will splurge taxpayers' money on a long list of bizarre projects, from a festival light show in Tasmania and a fruit and vegetable court of appeal to eradicating pesky ants and easier access to donor milk for premature newborns. There's bad news for Australia's ant population with $18.3 million allocated towards eradicating red imported fire ants, while additional $9.2 million towards controlling the yellow crazy ant numbers in North Queensland. More funding will go towards eradicating Australia's ant population, Pictured is the destructive red imported fire ant, one of the world's most invasive species Originally from South America, red fire ants were first detected in Queensland in 2001 and are regarded as a severe threat to Australias biodiversity. International Union for Conservation of Nature lists them as one of the world's most invasive species. Yellow crazy ants have also caused extensive ecological damage and are also regarded by the IUCN one of the top 100 worst invasive species. Another $1.3 million will be spent on wiping out the Argentine ant on Norfolk Island. But there's great news for the Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) which hopes to attract more visitors to its Dark Mofo festival with a spectacular new light show, thanks to a $1.5 million injection from the federal government. The popular event is a midwinter version to MONA's annual Festival Of Music and Art in Hobart each January. The annual Dark Mofo festival (pictured) in Hobart was a bigger winner in 2019-20 Budget Premature newborns will have better access to donor breast milk thanks to a $2 million boost to the Australian Red Cross Blood Service. More than 4000 Australian babies each year are born at least eight weeks earlier than the 40 week full term. The World Health Organisation recommends breast milk for premature babies to give them the best chance of survival and believes the funding could prevent up to 20 newborn deaths each year. A research program will also look into the benefits of donor milk. Premature babies will better access to donor breast milk (pictured), thanks to the budget Meanwhile, a new fruit and vegetable Court of Appeal will be established to review decisions in disputes between supermarkets and suppliers under the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct, while a new Postal Industry Ombudsman will investigate complaints about postal services. The struggling live music industry will boosted by a $30.9 million injection of federal funding, while more aspiring female pilots will be able to spread their wings thanks to $4million funding boost to increase their participation in the male-dominated aviation industry. Our Pacific neighbours will also get an extra 1000 hours of Australian television content, courtesy of a $17.1 million funding boost. Dr Isyaka Mamman (pictured outside Tameside Magistrates court) was questioned by detectives last month over allegations of gross negligence after 48-year old Shahida Varven collapsed whilst giving a sample of her bone marrow An NHS doctor in his 80s has been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and prescription fraud after a patient died during a routine hospital procedure. Dr Isyaka Mamman was questioned by detectives last month over allegations of gross negligence after 48-year old Shahida Varven collapsed whilst giving a sample of her bone marrow. Police are investigating whether a hypodermic needle the haematologist used pierced soft tissue around Mrs Varven's heart and not the breastbone as it should have done. She died shortly after the procedure began despite attempts to revive her. The investigation emerged as he went to a court to ask for a change in his bail conditions so he could fly to Nigeria for his granddaughter's wedding. The request was refused. The court heard that officers found various prescription medication-only medication in different names at the doctor's home in Royton, near Oldham, Greater Manchester plus legal documents belonging to him showing various dates of birth. When he applied for registration as a doctor in the UK in 1964 he submitted a document giving his date of birth as September 1936. The court also heard that Mamman had previously been summoned before the General Medical Council in 2005 where he was suspended from medical practise for 12 months after giving a total of five different dates of birth with regulators concluding he gave decreasing birthdates to improve his chances of getting jobs in the NHS. According to the GMC Mamman attended a university in London in 1958 and qualified in 1964. Ages he has given on his passport plus to the GMC have ranged from 71 to 82. In 2001 he used one of the dates of birth to get British citizenship. Mamman who denies wrongdoing is currently on bail pending further inquiries and has not been charged with any offence. The tragedy occurred on September 3 last year after Mrs Varven was admitted to an unnamed hospital for a consultation with Dr Mamman about having a sample of bone marrow taken. The doctor who has worked for the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust at the haemotology unit for 14 years was intending to take a sample from Mrs Vaven's hip but the procedure was unsuccessful due to the patient's build so he took a sample from her sternum. Initially it was thought the process was successful and a sample was taken but a short time later Mrs Varven collapsed. She temporarily regained consciousness after Dr Mamman and other staff tried to revive her but she collapsed again and died shortly afterwards. NHS investigators carried out an internal probe before passing the matter onto police and Dr Mamman was suspended on November 23. He was arrested on March 15 and interviewed but released on bail with conditions to live and sleep at his home address and that he should not practice medicine. He was also told to report to Oldham Police Station each Monday between 10-2. At Tameside magistrates court where Mamman's date of birth was not given, defence lawyer Asif Akram said: 'As far as this is concerned he is on police bail and he has not been charged with any offence. He has been a professional doctor for over 25 years. He's worked at the hospital he's currently employed by for 14 years. 'Dr Mamman is a professional person, a doctor for a significant period of time. In 2005, Dr Mamman was suspended for 12 months following an investigation by the General Medical Council. 'His recorded date of birth was different when he applied to a different position within the NHS. Dr Mamman's explanation for this is that in Nigeria there is no proper system for documenting when an individual is born. What authorities rely on in Nigeria is a document made by parents or guardians. This incident is in no way related to the issue you must decide on today. 'As for police bail, he has reported when required and has assisted police when interviewed answering all of their questions. Dr Mamman insists there was no negligence on his part and his actions did not contribute to the death of this woman. 'He has continually helped and assisted police in interviews. In interviews, police have not put any allegation to him. He was simply asked his account of what happened on the dates in question. 'In summary, Dr Mamman is a professional person. He has been a doctor for a substantial period of time. He is a member of the local community. He has a wife and three children in this country. One of his children lives at home with him. Dr Mamman has lived at that same address for 9 years. He is cooperating fully with this investigation as he wants to clear his name.' At his disciplinary hearing in 2005, the GMC was told Mamman who attended University College Ibadan, in Nigeria enrolled at the University of London in September 1958 to study for a degree in medicine under their 'Scheme of Special Relation' with university colleges overseas. At the time he said his date of birth was September 16 1936 and he graduated in April 1964. When he first applied for GMC registration he gave the same date of birth but later altered it September 16 1941 and later October 16 1947. He worked at hospitals in Peterborough and Gillingham but regulators began investigating when he was appointed by Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust as Trust Staff Grade Doctor in haematology. He gave colleagues a Nigerian passport showing his date of birth as September 16 1941 but with 'manuscript amendments' showing a birthdate from 16 August 1941 to 16 October 1947. He also produced a UK passport gave his date of birth as September 16 1947 and even provided another legal document from his uncle showing his date of birth as October 16 1947. Inquiries revealed he had also given October 16 1944 as his date of birth when he worked in Peterborough. At his disciplinary hearing Mamman claimed the inconsistencies in his birthdays were down to the fact there no system for the registration of births and deaths in Nigeria. He claimed a 'western cultural trait' of treating dates of birth as important was 'not part of his initial upbringing' said said he had since tried to establish the correct date. Dr Isyaka Mamman said the first recorded date of birth of September 16 1936 was one assigned to him by the Nigerian authorities when he was student. He said his 'official date of birth' as decreed by the High Court of Justice in Nigeria was October 16 1947 which would made him just ten years old when he enrolled at London University. He said documented dates of birth were as a result of human error on the part of the passport authorities in Nigeria and the UK and denied altering his age to improve his chances of getting a job in the UK. An instructor at a boarding school in central China has been fired after he was filmed kicking and slapping a female student in class. Shocking footage of the incident last week shows the 21-year-old commander, dressed in camouflage gear, arguing with the student at the Jiangxia Vocational Technical School in Wuhan, Hubei province. He then loses his temper and kicks her twice, prompting the girl to retaliate by slapping him. The man then violently slaps the student in the face three times. Shocking footage of the incident last week shows the 21-year-old commander, dressed in camouflage gear, arguing with the student before slapping her at the Jiangxia Vocational Technical School in Wuhan, Hubei province The schoolgirl is filmed trying to block the blows but the drill instructor kept slapping her The instructor was employed to maintain a military-style approach to learning at the boarding school, according to Chutian Metropolis Daily. He had caught the second-year student trying to sneak out of campus without permission last Monday, the report said. The instructor had asked her to hand in a written evaluation, but she did not do it. The pair then got into an argument on Wednesday, leading the man to slap the schoolgirl. School spokesperson Zeng Qingbin confirmed to reporters that the man had been dismissed after the incident. He added that police were called to the scene but no charges were filed. The instructor had caught the second-year student trying to sneak out of campus without permission last Monday, the report said. The pair then got into the fight on Wednesday 'Corporal punishment is strictly forbidden in our school. No matter the circumstances, instructors cannot hit students,' Zeng said. The man was also fired by the company that employed him as a contractor, the report added. The school and the instructor have apologised to the student and her parents. The family was given a compensation of 1,000 yuan (114), which they donated to a fund for the girl's class. Many vocational high schools in China employ drill instructors to instil discipline and order in a military-style environment. The school in Wuhan has about 2,000 students and had been using contractors to maintain a regimented routine on the campus for years, according to Zeng. A shopkeeper is fighting for his life after he was stabbed eight times in a frenzied attack inside his convenience store. Steven Van Meeteren was alone inside Carmichael's Corner Store in Wyong, 89km northeast of Sydney, when he was set upon by an unidentified group. Two men and a woman entered the premises on Tuesday morning while a fourth person, believed to be a second woman, kept watch outside. Police believe one man held Mr Meeteren down while another stabbed the 41-year-old eight times in the chest, 9News reported. Scroll down for video Steven Van Meeteren (pictured) was alone inside Carmichael's Corner Store when he was set upon by an unidentified group Mr Meeteren was left lying lifeless on the floor for 10 minutes, before a prospective customer entered the store. Had the customer not entered the store when she did, it's not known whether Mr Meeteren would have survived much longer. Emergency services attended the scene around 9.30am, and medical staff were forced to give Mr Meeteren emergency surgery and a blood transfusion in a park. Two men and a woman entered the premises on Tuesday morning while a fourth person, believed to be a second woman, kept watch outside (pictured) He was then placed in an induced coma and transported to Royal North Shore Hospital via a helicopter. He has since undergone further surgery. Police have described the incident as a 'horrific' and 'callous' attack. Eight year's ago Mr Meeteren (pictured) was victim to a similar incidence, during which he was stabbed inside his shop Ron Pearson, a friend of Mr Meeteren's, broke down in tears after he heard about the attack. Other local residents described the shop owner as a 'good bloke' and a 'sweet man'. This isn't the first time Mr Meeteren has been the victim to a brutal attack. Eight years ago, he was stabbed inside his convenience store. The four individuals police believe were involved in the most recent attack were last seen fleeing on foot away from the scene. It's thought all four suspects were wearing hoodies. Police are continuing to investigate the incident. A crane has collapsed onto one of the biggest cruise ships in the world leaving eight people injured. The Oasis of the Seas was in dock in the Caribbean when the crane crashed into the 1billion vessel causing the huge 228,225-tonne liner to list. A construction crane came down and smashed into the stern of the boat, which has a capacity of 6,300 people, into the area its AquaTheatre is located. The four-deck luxury liner which is the fourth largest in the world was in dry dock near Freeport in the Bahamas when the accident happened on Monday at around 1.45pm local time. A construction crane crashed into the Oasis of the Seas cruise ship while it was in dry dock near Freeport in the Bahamas The crane came down on the ship's stern near where the cruise ship's AquaTheatre is located A video of the aftermath was posted on YouTube and has been viewed more than 6,000 times. One dock worker could be heard in the footage saying: 'I was right there on the dock. I just missed by the grace of God. Big accident.' Only crew were on board the liner at the time and no guests were present. All the eight injured people are thought to be dockyard workers, but none are thought to be in a life-threatening condition. A spokesman for Royal Caribbean which owns the liner said: 'We are responding to a construction site incident at the Great Bahamas Shipyard, where Oasis of the Seas is currently in dry dock. A video of the aftermath was posted on YouTube showing the crane after it smashed into the huge cruise ship 'We are accounting for the whereabouts of all site personnel. We are aware of damage to the dock structure and to construction cranes. We are assessing damage to the ship.' The ship, which had been based at Port Canaveral, Florida, was undergoing routine maintenance on Grand Bahama Island, Royal Caribbean officials said. Nearly 500 people were struck down with norovirus on board the Oasis of the Seas in January and the huge cruise ship had to change course and head to its home port at Port Canaveral in Florida. When the ship launched in 2008 she was the largest cruise ship in the world. A group of climate change protesters who stripped off in the House of Commons include a former charity CEO, a relationship counsellor and a new age marriage officiant. The gang of largely-naked 'Extinction Rebellion' demonstrators interrupted a debate on Brexit yesterday evening when they stood up in the public gallery with messages painted on their bodies. There were 20 protesters in the public gallery, with 14 stripping off and eight sticking themselves to the glass with superglue. Among those who stripped off was Mark Ovland, a 36-year-old Buddist teacher from Devon, who was previously one of the so-called 'Totnes Two' after gluing themselves to the door of an oil industry conference earlier this year. Another who took her clothes off was activist Rosa Van Kesteren, a Phd student from Bristol. Among the protesters in Parliament yesterday was new age 'celebrant' Isla MacLeod (left) and former charity boss Oliver Baines (right) Mark Ovland (left), a 36-year-old Buddist teacher from Devon, and university worker Rosa Van Kesteren were among those who stripped off Among those taking photos of the stunt were Swedish website worker Eveline Utterdahl and biologist Iggy Fox Ms Van Kesteren, who studied Eating Practices at Coventry University, was previously one of three women fined for stripping off at the launching of an aircraft which ran on biofuels 2013. The trio, who painted 'bare faced cheek' on their bodies, questioned the plane's green credentials. Also among those who stormed Parliament's public gallery yesterday was Oliver Baines, a 68-year-old from St Austell in Cornwall. He was CEO of a charity called the Cornwall Rural Community Charity, which helps groups in the South West, until he left in 2005. Taking photos for the group were Iggy Fox, a 24-year-old wildlife biologist from London, and Eveline Utterdahl, blogger from Gothenburg in Sweden. Isla Macleod, from Bruton, Somerset, was also involved. The 34-year-old describes herself as a 'celebrant' and hosts new age wedding ceremonies in woodland and fields. Her website states: 'With my grounding in Buddhist practices, training in Shamanic healing and ongoing exploration of the feminine mysteries and Celtic mythology I am able to draw on various strands for inspiration and hold ceremonies in a deep and powerful way, working on all levels, seen and unseen.' The group stripped off in protest at lack of action over climate change yesterday evening MPs were debating Brexit when the group pushed up against the glass of the public gallery Fox meanwhile has worked at animal sanctuaries around the world, with his Instagram feed showing pictures from his trips around Indonesia, Bali and South America. Also named by the group as having taken part in the protest as former teacher William Cooke, English literature student Savannah May and Bell Selkie, a 48-year-old counsellor. Last November, Miss Selkie glued her hand to a revolving door of the Department of Business, Environment and Industrial Strategy during a similar protest. Speaking yesterday's demo interrupted the Brexit debate, Savannah, from west London, said: 'Personally I don't care that much about Brexit. I think it's fine that people do but I think there are bigger things right now.' Cooke, 36, was part of a group who brought London to a standstill in November last year when they lay down in roads to stop traffic. The Bristol-based former teacher said on that occasion that he didn't mind being arrested because it wouldn't affect his job. He compared those demonstrations to those carried out by Rosa Parks during the Civil Rights movement in the US, and the suffragettes in the UK in the early 20th century. Demonstrators Dimi Shoe and William Cooke were pictured outside Parliament after the stunt Mr Cooke was previously involved in a climate protest on the streets of London, which he compared to the suffragette movement Speaking after yesterday's stunt, Ms Utterdahl said: 'The reaction from people in the public was amazing. They were laughing and cheering it on. I heard people say "Good for them" and "This is incredible". 'Most people didn't want to leave the gallery and only left when forced to by guards. I talked to some of them outside afterwards and they were impressed with the whole action, especially the glue part. 'I saw both guards and people on the other side of the glass smile and laugh. The atmosphere was cheerful and happy.' Extinction Rebellion, which describes itself as a non-violent direct action and civil disobedience group, said the protest was an attempt to draw politicians' attentions to the 'climate and ecological crisis'. MPs were seen taking a glance up at the protest and Speaker John Bercow maintained that the debate on the second stage of the Brexit alternatives would proceed despite the protest. Scotland Yard said officers were sent in an attempt to 'negotiate' with the activists, before adding: '12 arrests have been made for outraging public decency.' The protest caused shock among MPs, most notably former Labour leader Ed Miliband The ISIS bride who wants to come home to the US has claimed she would be a model citizen if she was allowed to return, insisting she 'didn't hate America'. Hoda Muthana, 24, left Hoover, Alabama in 2014, in order to join ISIS in Syria, where she would later call on Twitter for US Muslims to 'spill all of the blood' by launching terror attacks during Memorial Day events. Now, having lost two of her three jihadi fighter husbands and living in a squalid refugee camp, she claims ISIS took over her social media account and that with therapy she could become a model citizen as she begs to return home. The ISIS bride who wants to come home to the US has claimed she would be a model citizen if she was allowed to return, insisting she 'didn't hate America' 'Before I came, I've never done any crime and I'm sure I'm not going to be doing any crimes in the future,' she told Fox News, 'I know I've come to Syria and look like I am a supporter of the worst terror group in history.' 'I didn't hate America. I didn't hate anything. I just thought it was obligatory when I started practicing I was very scared of the concept of hellfire. The Koran told me to go.' Hoda Muthana pictured in her high school yearbook The 24-year-old claims she was radicalized online after joining social media once given a smart phone at the age of 18. Despite her desire to return to the US with her one-year-old son, the Trump administration has declared that Muthana is not an American citizen and has barred her from coming home. Ahmed Ali Muthana, Muthana's father, filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to affirm that his daughter has US nationality and to let her return along with her toddler, whose father was a Tunisian jihadist killed in battle. And earlier this month, Judge Reggie Walton sided with the government and denied a request for expedited consideration of Muthana's case. Walton said there was no proof there would be 'irreparable harm' if her case is handled in a normal - rather than an expedited - fashion. The brewing legal battle hinges on a murky timeline of bureaucratic paperwork in 1994 when Muthana was born and her father left a position at Yemen's mission to the United Nations. Muthana has had a child in the time she has been away from the U.S. - he is now 19 months old The US Constitution grants citizenship to everyone born in the country -- with the exception of children of diplomats, as they are not under US jurisdiction. In the lawsuit, Ahmed Ali Muthana said he was asked by Yemen to surrender his diplomatic identity card on June 2, 1994 as the Arab country descended into one of its civil wars. Hoda Muthana was born in New Jersey on October 28 of that year and the family later settled in Hoover, Alabama, a prosperous suburb of Birmingham. Hoda's first husband was Australian extremist Suhan Abdul Rahman who was killed in battle The State Department initially questioned Hoda Muthana's right to citizenship when her father sought a passport for her as a child because US records showed he had been a diplomat until February 1995, the lawsuit said. But it said the State Department accepted a letter from the US mission to the United Nations that affirmed that he had ended his position before his daughter's birth and granted her a passport. Muthana went to Syria in 2014 when IS was carrying out a grisly campaign of beheadings and mass rape and turned to social media to praise the killings of Westerners. During her time as a jihadi bride in ISIS's then-capital Raqqa in Syria, she would use social media to spread hatred against non-Muslims and call for terror attacks in the US. In a 2015 tweet she wrote: 'You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! 'Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades..go on drive by's + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them.' [sic] She said she had become increasingly disenchanted with the lifestyle over the last few weeks as they ran out of food. The bloodshed was more severe in person, she said, than she could have ever imagined and becoming a mother made her more sensitive to it. A juror who found Chanel Lewis guilty of murdering Queens jogger Karina Vetrano during a dramatic retrial has said he felt pressure to convict him. The juror questioned whether the 22-year-old New Yorker was guilty when speaking outside court on Monday night following the verdict. 'He seems like such a good kid. Did he really do this?' the juror, a white male in his 30s, said. A jury found Chanel Lewis, 22, guilty of murder and sexual abuse at his retrial on Monday Karina Vetrano, 30, went missing on August 2, 2016, after she was last seen jogging near her home in Howard Beach 'I kept thinking "How tall is Karina? How tall is Chanel?" She looked pretty buff me too,' he told the New York Post. Although the juror had his doubts, he said he still felt satisfied with the outcome. He would also not clarify why he felt pressure to return a guilty verdict when talking with the publication. 'I feel like justice was served', he explained. 'For both sides of the family its an awful, awful situation.' Vetrano's body was found dumped near her family's home in Howard Beach soon after the 30-year-old vanished while out jogging in August 2016. She was punched in the face, thrown to the ground, violently sexually assaulted and then strangled in a marsh, about a block away from her house. Karina is pictured above in a photo taken right before she left to go jogging with her mother in the background Authorities said that the victim fought for her life until the very end, biting her attacker so hard that her teeth cracked. The closely watched murder case initially baffled investigators, who for months were unable to find anyone who matched DNA that was found under the victim's fingernails from when she fought back. Lewis was arrested six months into the murder investigation after police said he provided a DNA swab that linked him to the scene and victim. Despite that DNA evidence and a taped confession, the first trial ended in a hung jury in November. Lewis' attorneys repeatedly said during the retrial this month that the DNA evidence was suspect and that his confession was coerced by detectives who wore him down until he finally gave them what they wanted. Vetrano's family and supporters erupted into applause when Lewis was found guilty on all counts. 'Jubilation. Justice. Justice has been served,' Vetrano's father Phil said when he left the courtroom. Vetrano parent's Phil and Cathy left the court holding hands after the verdict and said: 'Justice has been served' Vetrano's family and supporters erupted into applause when Lewis was found guilty on all counts The juror was one of 12 people to find Lewis guilty after five hours of deliberation. Lewis will be sentenced on April 17 and faces life in prison. Lewis' attorneys, the Legal Aid Society, called the outcome 'a complete miscarriage of justice'. They had unsuccessfully sought a hearing on Monday after getting an anonymous letter saying that police had pursued two white suspects before taking DNA samples from hundreds of black men - in what the defense called a 'race-biased dragnet' - and coming to focus on Lewis. They claimed the letter alerted them to so-called exculpatory evidence about other potential suspects that they say was withheld from them. Lewis said he hit Vetrano in the face around five times before dumping her in the bushes, but denied sexually assaulting her It included a claim that NYPD officers had repeatedly said in the first two weeks of the investigation that they were 'looking for two jacked up white guys who are from Howard Beach'. His attorneys further claimed that police used a 'race-biased dragnet' to collect DNA samples from 360 black men in Howard Beach before targeting Lewis and that detectives coerced his confession. 'Our client did not receive a fair trial,' the Legal Aid Society said on Monday, adding that it would appeal. The New York Police Department said in a statement that the anonymous letter was 'riddled with falsehoods and inaccuracies,' the investigation was painstaking and 'the evidence clearly shows that Chanel Lewis is responsible for her death.' The confession video was played to jurors last week during which Lewis said: 'I got angry. It went red, and then one thing led to another. I got scared and threw her in the bushes.' Lewis said he hit Vetrano in the face around five times before dumping her in the bushes, but denied sexually assaulting her. A Chinese man who was abducted by a stranger 21 years ago and sold to a city more than 700 miles from home has finally found his parents. The 29-year-old was lured away on his way home from school at the age of eight after a man offered him a dumpling. He was then sold to another family in northern China who changed his original name Xu Wenbin to his current name Zhang Hao, according to police. Zhang Hao hugs his mother and father as the family in China meet for the first time in 21 years The man, 29, and his mother cry in each other's arms during the reunion ceremony last week Mr Zhang was born in a small town called Wulangmiao near the city of Hanzhong in north-western China's Shaanxi Province. On one fateful day in 1998, a youthful Zhang was approached by a strange man who turned out to be a human trafficker at the village of Liujiacun, according to an online statement from Hanzhong Police. The stranger offered Zhang a momo, a type of dumpling, and told the boy to follow him, police said. That was the last time the child's parents had heard of him. Mr Zhang was kidnapped on his way home from school by a stranger who offered him a dumpling. The above picture shows Mr Zhang as a child (right) before being abducted and sold According to police, the human trafficker used a momo (file photo above) to lure away the boy According to Xinhua News Agency, Zhang was kidnapped by the stranger and sold to another family. The report did not reveal the identity of the other family, only explaining that Mr Zhang had grown up in the northern province of Hebei far away from his native land of Shaanxi. Police said Zhang's birth parents, Xu Jinhua and his wife, had never stopped looking for their child after finding him missing. Police officers helped collect the DNA samples from the couple and submitted them to China's national DNA database for abducted children, hoping to re-connect them with their long-lost son. Good news arrived last December when police found a match to Mr and Mrs Xu's DNA samples in the database. A policeman in Hanzhong confirms that Mr Zhang and the couple have biological relationship The middle-aged couple couldn't stop crying after meeting their long-lost son after 21 years Police said the matching profile belonged to a man named Zhang Hao, who was living in the Hengshui County of Hebei Province, which is about 1,180 kilometres (733 miles) away. Last Thursday, officers arranged the couple to meet Mr Zhang, whom they had missed day and night for two decades. As soon as Mr Zhang entered the village, Mr and Mrs Xu recognised him despite the fact that the two parties had live apart for such a long time. Footage released by Hanzhong Police shows Mr Zhang, holding many presents in his hands, quickly going up to his mother to hug her. The pair cried in each other's arms. A special ceremony was held during the reunion. Ding Cheng, a deputy director at the Hanzhong Public Security Bureau, announced in front of the family: 'According to the information from the national DNA database for abducted children and DNA-based kinship analysis, we confirm abducted child Zhang Hao from Hebei has biological genetic relationship with you two. 'You are mother, father and son.' The middle-aged couple broke down in tears. Villagers hold a banner that reads 'welcome home' as Mr Zhang is reunited with his parents The Chinese authorities set up a national DNA database for abducted children in 2009 to help families find their missing sons and daughters. It is completely free to have one's sample recorded in the database and the service can be done via local police stations. The authorities are yet to reveal how many families the database has helped reunite. But according to previous media reports, 200,000 children are estimated to be missing in China every year. Among them, only 0.1 per cent or 200 would be able to see their parents again. Last month, a politician in China called for an amendment to the law to impose the death penalty on those convicted of trafficking women and children. The proposal was initiated by Zhang Baoyan, who has been a long-time advocate for women's and children's rights in the country. Ms Zhang said that the current penalty of five to 10 years' imprisonment 'is relatively lenient' and not harsh enough to deter child kidnappers. A man in central China has been arrested for secretly dating 19 women at the same time and swindling them out of their savings. Police in Zhengzhou, Henan province started investigating after several single women reported that they were scammed by a man posing as a 'rich kid' online. The suspect has fathered children with four of the victims while two others have recently become pregnant, Chinese media reported. Police in Zhengzhou, Henan province started investigating after several single women reported that they were scammed by Tan (pictured above) posing as a 'rich kid' online The suspect, Tan, would wear fake designer clothing and carry 'expensive' bags during their dates, and had been in a relationship with 19 women over two years Following investigations, police in the Zhengdong district located the suspect, surnamed Tan, on March 22 and detained him. After losing his job as a an alcohol promoter in 2017, the man came up with the plan to date women while pretending to be a rich kid online, according to Henan newspaper Dahe Daily in a report yesterday. He would wear fake designer clothing and carry 'expensive' bags during their dates, and had been in a relationship with 19 women over two years. One of the victims, surnamed Wang, had no idea that her lover was a scammer until their child was born. She had met Tan on messaging app WeChat in June 2017 and quickly 'fell in love' with him, who had told her that his parents are senior officials and would shower her with lavish gifts every time they met. One of the victims, Wang, had no idea that her lover was a scammer until their child was born. They met in June 2017 and had a relationship until the man disappeared in September 2018 Last March, Tan proposed to another victim, Yang, with a fake five-carat diamond ring (pictured), prompting her to lend him money for his 'business' She would transfer several hundred thousands of yuan to him without suspecting anything. He had also taken her car with him, she told reporters. Wang then found out she was pregnant last January, but Tan didn't mention anything about them getting married. After giving birth to a baby boy in September, Tan completely disappeared 'without a trace' and she couldn't find him anywhere. 'He was always wearing designer clothing and he seemed so cultured,' she said. 'He was always very sweet to me.' The woman said he even talked her out of getting an abortion when she told him she was pregnant with his child. Another victim, surnamed Yang, who also met the man on WeChat, was scammed out of 150,000 yuan (17,000) in total. Tan had told her that he was a postgraduate student and did not have a close relationship with his parents. After giving birth to a baby boy in September, Tan completely disappeared 'without a trace' and Wang couldn't find him anywhere. He had also taken her car with him At the police station, the love cheat admitted to scamming the women out of their money Last March, Tan proposed to her with a fake five-carat diamond ring, prompting her to lend him money for his 'business'. At the police station, the love cheat admitted to scamming the women out of their money. 'I really couldn't afford the luxury items, the fake ones were quite good,' he told reporters. The case is under further investigation, the report said. So far, 17 victims have filed police reports and the remaining two have yet to come forward. Police have warned members of the public about the dangers of meeting people online and fake dating profiles. Authorities in China have been ramping up efforts to crack down on dating sites, which have long been plagued by scammers and fraudsters. Last June, police in Guangdong arrested 1,310 suspects involved in 13 online dating fraud rings. The scammers, who posed as attractive women and models, used messaging app WeChat to trick men into buying expensive tea products. Each gang could approach up to 1,500 victims per month, according to police. A father-of-one who left the UK to fight ISIS wrote about his joy at killing a jihadi and riding around 'Mad Max-style' in an armoured car, a court heard. Aidan James, 28, is on trial in London for terror offences after spending four months with the Kurdish militia in 2017 in Iraq and Syria. After arriving in Iraq he linked up with the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) which has been considered a terrorist organisation by the UK since 2001. The Old Bailey heard he received training using sniper rifles, heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades and later became a 'squadron commander' meaning he would 'sacrifice himself for the boys'. Today a jury heard James, of Merseyside, wrote a journal of his experiences and detailed how he was 'very happy to get rid of another rat' when he shot an ISIS fighter from 500 yards away. Aidan James, 28, pictured, is accused of terror offences after travelling to Iraq and Syria to fight against ISIS for the proscribed group the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) In an entry from December 2017 he wrote: 'Got a kill today, 500m roof top in front of us, one Daesh patrolling, one shot, he went down. 'Very happy to get rid of another rat.' Another passage said: 'We sat on the floor of an armoured hummy (Hummer) with a 50 calibre machine gun like something out of Mad Max. Shot RPG, holy crap the noise on that is crazy. 'On the machine guns and sniper training in the last few days. Some power in them guns.' Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC said James, of Formby, Merseyside, documented his activities in the war torn region after leaving the UK in August 2017. He said after James left his home in Formby, Merseyside 'for the most part' his movements came from 'his own record, came from his journal and his journal entries.' James, who denies three terrorism offences, also posted photos of himself in Syria on social media and even informed counter-terror cops he knew he faced arrest on his return, it was alleged. On December 15, James wrote conflict between the Kurds and Turkey was looming and added: 'The war is long from over but I am playing my part in this war and feel good to be a part in history and with the revolutionary force of YPG. Daesh [ISIS] is the biggest threat the world has seen since Hitler, so anything I can do in these operations is good. Then, on December 27, he summarised his experience, writing: 'Making moves to leave. Had an amazing time here and met some cracking people. Since I have been here my storys [sic] are pretty good and memories for life.' 'I have evaded Iraq police, hiding in hotel office. Chilled with PKK in the mountains. Snook across the Syrian border under cover of night. Lost good friends and met great ones, fought on the front line numerous times. Killed Deash soldiers, been shot at many times by ISIS and our own guys. 'Drove Humvees, sat on roof as drove through desert, been attacked by suicide vehicles many times. Mortar fire, sniper, RPG, drones. Chilled with a donkey. Arrested our commander, shot at our commander, witnessed torture, rescued a lad from torture, saved a few lives. Fought the Syrian Assad regime. Turkey trying to kidnap me.' James crossed back into Iraq on January 9, using a blow up boat to cross the Euphrates, having left the YPG academy writing: 'cba with all that brainwashing anymore, done with it.' He also described receiving the training in a 'safe house' for foreign fighters by banned terror group PKK in Iraq, jurors heard. The court heard he was given the combat nicknames Gabba and Servan - meaning mountain and warrior - during a month of weapons training with the PKK. Mr Heywood said: 'These journal entries show that Mr James had undergone a typical period of training with the YPK divided on topics, sections, including ideological, political aims with the organisation, weapons training, tactics, specific drills on someone and all these designed to equip him to fight under its cause and under its flag. 'He not only attended a place of training as the charge suggests, but he completed it.' Jurors heard a diary entry on September 25 2017 read: 'I'm now Squad's commander, which is good, more responsibility because I will sacrifice myself, no problem for my boys.' He claimed to have joined a para-military soldier from Britain, who cannot be named for legal reasons and a legionnaire from America in the PKK camp and kept in touch with British counter-terror police. Mr Heywood QC said: 'Mr James took the opportunity to make contact with Prevent team whose email he had. 'He sent to the Prevent address of Merseyside Police, 'I've been informed that I will be charged with offences when I go home'. 'You will see he is in correspondence with the officer, indicating where he was and what he was doing. 'In communications with police, Mr James sent, 'one of my friends died last night' and he refers to Jack Holmes.' Father-of-one James, pictured, 'fuelled violence in Syria' through his actions, the Old Bailey heard Mr Heywood QC said his diary also revealed 'misgivings' he had over his militia groups' leadership. One entry he read said: 'Ideology comes before all else here. It's just basically a f***ing brainwash.' The court previously heard James 'fuelled violence and devastation in Syria' by joining the PKK in the fight against ISIS. Prosecutors argued he had 'picked his cause' and meant his motives were the advancement of the Kurdish people as much as fighting terrorists. James was under counter-terror police investigation on the Prevent programme when he fled to the war-torn region, the court heard, and even had his passport confiscated. It was eventually returned to him three months later and he was told not to leave the country, but fled within weeks. Opening the prosecution case today, Mark Heywood QC told the Old Bailey: 'The prosecution case against Mr James is that, as a citizen and resident of this country, someone did not know and had never been to Iraq or to Syria before, someone who had no prior military knowledge or experience whatever, and no official sanction at all, he went there for four months to fight. 'And the prosecution's case is that he picked one particular cause and he joined in. 'To do so, he planned, trained and he equipped himself here first in what you may find in due course to be in an amateurish way, to go there for the specific purpose of taking part in the violence. 'Then, with the help of a network of others, he went first to Iraq and there he underwent training, including with weapons, for about a month. 'After that he travelled towards the border with Syria and trained across the border there for a further period of just over a month, each of these three stages, preparation, training one, training two, with the same purpose. 'The prosecution case against Mr James is that he went as an individual to Syria to fight, and in fact in a particular way with guns and explosives. 'In doing so, he set out to advance a political and ideological cause - that of Kurdish people or at least part of these people and because his intended use or threat of active violence was of that kind and for those purposes, the law says that what he wanted to do was terrorism, even if his eventual fighting was against other terrorists, others who had gone to Syria with their own cause to pursue.' James, who appeared in the dock clean shaven and wearing a white shirt, dark tie and grey trousers, denies one count of engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts and two of attending a place used for terrorist training from August to December in 2017. The court heard he had been arrested four months before he left for Iraq and was even put on a Prevent deradicalisation programme, but that his bail was later cancelled, allowing him to leave the country. He also purchased body armour and military equipment for his journey. Jurors heard James, who lived lived with his mother and older brother, suffered from health problems in the past but 'these problems are not likely to affect your considerations in this case in due course'. Mr Heywood QC added: 'The preparations he made and his attendance at training places each of them amount to criminal offences because the law does not permit engaging in conduct in preparation for terrorism or attendance at terrorist training places, anywhere in the world. 'Now Mr James denies that his purpose was in doing these things was a terrorist one and denies that he is criminally liable for attending any place of transit either. 'At the time and since, he has said that his aim was to combat Islamic State. In reality, it was not just that, it was more than that, there was much more to it. 'He had picked his cause and it was the cause of just one of the many groups of people that inhabit that part of the world and would like it to be their own - that group is the Kurdish people in some instances. The PKK has been considered a terrorists organisation by the UK since 2001. Pictured are PKK supporters waving their flag in Rome in 2007 'You won't have to decide whether he did engage in conduct in preparation or rather conduct in preparation for violence and fighting with weapons in Syria or whether he went to training places for the same purpose: he did, the evidence clearly shows it, and in this trial he will have to accept just that. 'The main question for your to decide is whether his purpose for preparing and his going to places of training was in fact terrorist in nature and so whether he is criminally liable for doing those things or not.' Months before he left the UK, James was arrested and interviewed after posting his travel plans on Facebook and was forced to cancel a flight to the region. But he had his passport returned to him less than three months later and was told not to travel - but he fled in a matter of weeks. Mr Heywood said: 'You should know whilst here before the end of August he was under engagement by police under the Prevent programme, designed to stop people travelling among other things. 'On the April 19 he made posts about his proposals to travel. 'Mr James posted, 'The road to Rojava starts here. A few weeks from now we will be in Syria fighting side by side with brothers in arms against the sick regime'. 'After that he came to the attention of the police.' Mr Heywood QC said officers warned him of the dangers of travelling to the region four days before he was arrested on April 28 after they believed their 'engagement' had failed. They seized his passport and a diary detailing his plans to travel when they searched his mother's home following his arrest and he was 'forced' to cancel a flight he had booked to travel to Syria, the court heard. Mr Heywood QC said it was returned on July 17 that year and added: 'They were returned to him on that occasion, his passport which had been taken on the day of the arrest and his journal. 'He was reminded again, don't travel. In fact as you will hear, he was then already planning to travel. 'It was clear from a journal entry he made the same day... 'I'm still planning to go to Syria with Jonny to fight this most important of battles against the sick ideology of Daesh'. 'His journal entries show that his intentions in fact remained steady. Overall it may have dimmed for a time but it had certainly not gone away. 'Having had his passport returned the defendant immediately began making preparation to fight.' Two days later, he added: 'Getting ready for leaving. It feels like my only option...I have no friends, none I can trust. I have no purpose, no self-worth or future, so going away to Syria/Iraq to help bring stability and stop the world's biggest evil and threat to the equality and solidarity and freedom of our lives, then this is what I'll do.' On August 27 James sent a message saying: 'Landed safe mum' and the next day posted on Facebook an image if himself in camouflage hat, body armour, a rucksack and flashing a 'V' sign, with the word: 'Yes to an independent Kurdistan.' James underwent physical training and received body armour in north Wales before receiving help to travel to Syria via Iraq in August 2017, jurors heard. He conducted internet searches of 'how to join YPG' before leaving the UK, the court heard. Mr Heywood said: 'It was done in a way which was informed by a recruitment process. Other entries will suggest that did engage in such a recruitment process.' James received training in a 'safe house' after arriving Iraq and before travelling to Syria in the following month before slipping in to Syria, jurors heard. The prosecutor said: 'He undertook himself further training, including weapons training at places in Syria where the relevant training was delivered by the YPG. 'Which training included an ideological component and he then went on to fight with the YPG in Syria using a series of weapons including firearms.' He said: 'In the United Kingdom, Parliament has given the Home Secretary power to outlaw or proscribe certain organisations linked to terrorism and that process of outlawing or proscribing implies that the Secretary of State has concluded that the organisation either commits or participates in acts of terrorism, or it prepares for terrorism and it promotes or encourages or is otherwise concerned to terrorism. Mr Heywood said: 'You will hear evidence that tends to associate Mr James with two organisations to a lesser or greater extent and that is the PKK and the YPG.' The court heard the YPG was another Kurdish group linked to the PKK but not proscribed by the UK Government. 'The YPG which Mr James became involved in is not in the UK a proscribed organisation. 'By contrast, now I'm going to refer to yet a further group, another Kurdish group, it is listed and is proscribed in this country and has been since 2001, and that group is the PKK. 'That is a group which is linked, says the prosecution with these other groups I have mentioned.' The trial, expected to last two weeks, continues. Jack Renshaw (pictured) admitted purchasing a 19-inch replica Roman sword to assassinate Rosie Cooper, the MP for West Lancashire, after he was arrested on suspicion of child sex offences last year A neo-Nazi who plotted to kill a Labour MP with a machete is a convicted paedophile who was jailed last year for trying to groom two underage boys, it can be revealed today. Jack Renshaw admitted purchasing a 19-inch replica Roman sword to assassinate Rosie Cooper, the MP for West Lancashire, after he was arrested on suspicion of child sex offences last year. The 23-year-old, from Skelmersdale in Lancashire, also pleaded guilty to making a threat to kill detective Victoria Henderson, who was investigating him for grooming, but denied membership of National Action. Today a jury at his re-trial failed to reach a verdict on whether Renshaw remained a member of the far-right terrorist group after it was banned. But it can now be reported that the former BNP youth leader is a convicted paedophile who was jailed last June for 16 months after he groomed two underage boys - aged between 13 and 15 at time - using a fake Facebook profile. Jurors at Preston Crown Court found him guilty of four counts of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity. He was jailed in June 2018 for 16 months for the grooming. Jack Renshaw (pictured above) had previously attended National Action rallies before plotting to kill an MP Jack Renshaw (left) had plotted to kill Labour MP Rosie Cooper (pictured right outside the Old Bailey last year) He also received a three-year prison sentence two months earlier when he was found guilty of stirring up racial hatred after he called for the genocide of Jewish people. National Action leader Christopher Lythgoe, 32, of Warrington, and his right-hand man Matthew Hankinson, 24, from Merseyside, who were present when Renshaw outlined his plans, were convicted of membership last year. The plan was scuppered by whistle-blower Robbie Mullen, who was at a meeting in a pub when Renshaw announced that he was going to kill Ms Cooper in July 2017. It came just a year after Labour MP Jo Cox was stabbed and shot by a fellow far-right extremist, Thomas Mair. National Action is the first extreme right-wing group to be proscribed by the Government since the Second World War. In December 2016, it was banned by the then home secretary Amber Rudd over its support for the murder of Batley and Spen MP Ms Cox. The North West contingent continued to meet in pubs and train together at a new mixed martial arts gym in Warrington, it was alleged. Picture above shows swords recovered by police from the ringleader of banned Neo Nazi terror group National Action Mrs Justice McGowan remanded Renshaw in custody ahead of sentence on a date to be fixed. Renshaw was arrested on 11 January 2017 for stirring up racial hatred in relation to two speeches he made, and as a part of the investigation his phone was examined. DC Henderson discovered evidence of Renshaw's perverted affairs with the underage boys and arrested him again on 19 May. Renshaw had told DC Henderson in interview that she was fabricating evidence for 'the two worst things anyone could be - a homosexual and a paedophile'. He was released on bail and began researching DC Henderson in preparation for the revenge attack. The paedophile was so determined to stop the detective revealing his paedophilia that he plotted to kill his local MP in a pub, take hostages and lure in Ms Henderson to silence her before committing 'suicide by cop'. Who is Jack Renshaw and what are his offences? 2010 Becomes involved with the EDL and joins the BNP aged 15 against his parents' wishes September 2013 Studies politics at Manchester Metropolitan University and becomes the face of the BNP Youth 2014 Declares in a blog that Jewish people are traitors and should be killed. He also appears in a video titled 'BNP Youth Fight Back' September 2015 Is forced to leave university after an investigation into his incitement of racial hatred April 2016 - He called for counter protesters at a rally in Blackpool to be put 'in the chambers' and called Nazism 'natures politics' Yorkshire Forum for Nationalists 2016 tells people that Hitler was wrong in showing Jewish people mercy November 2016 Faces criminal charges over incitement to racial hatred January 11 2017 - Arrested for hate crimes and terror offences after the arrest of National Action members across the UK January 19 May 2017 arrested for child grooming July 1 2017 tells friends he would murder Rosie Cooper and take hostages in a pub July 5 2017 charged by the CPS under pressure from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism April 2018 found guilty of stirring up racial hatred after calling for the genocide of Jewish people June 2018 jailed for 16 months for grooming April 2 2019 - trial for membership of National Action where the jury was unable to reach a verdict Advertisement He told the Old Bailey he spent just under a month planning to kill Ms Cooper to 'send the state a message'. Renshaw had criticised Adolf Hitler for what he believed was showing Jewish people 'mercy'. Jurors heard a speech he delivered to the Yorkshire Forum for Nationalists in 2016 in which he said: 'I do actually have some problem with the statement 'Hitler was right' in many senses but you know where he was wrong? 'He showed mercy. He showed mercy to people who did not deserve mercy. 'As nationalists, we need to learn from the mistakes of the National Socialists and we need to realise that no, you do not show the Jew mercy.' Renshaw had planned to make a 'white jihad' video explaining his motives for the terror attack. But he was arrested on 5 July 2017. Renshaw was convicted of four counts of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, between February 2016 and January 2017, and two counts of inciting racial hatred. He had also conducted internet searches during May 2017 in relation to cutting of the jugular artery and how long it would take to die after suffering such a wound in preparation for his plan. The plan was foiled by whistle blower Robbie Mullen, who was at a meeting in a pub when Renshaw announced that he was going to kill Ms Cooper in July 2017. After the pub meeting, Mr Mullen, from Widnes, Cheshire, reported the threat to Hope Not Hate and Renshaw was arrested. Mr Mullen, who was granted immunity from prosecution, told jurors: 'He said he was going to kill his local MP, Rosie Cooper. I said 'Are you sure?' and he said 'Yeah'. 'He said he would kill her, then try to take some hostages to lure the police officer that was investigating him to try to kill her because she was the reason behind it all. 'He said his mind was made up. He had bought a machete.' Renshaw said he would wear a fake suicide vest so he would be killed by police, Mr Mullen added. The defendant declined to give evidence in his retrial, but in his first trial last year explained his reasons for targeting Ms Cooper. He said: 'I wanted to send a message to the state that if you beat a dog long enough it bites - she just happened to be my local MP.' Meghan McCain has defended Joe Biden after the former Vice President was hit by claims that he inappropriately touched women. The View host called the rumored 2020 hopeful 'one of the truly decent and compassionate men in all of American politics.' She explained that the politician had been there for her when her father, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain died in August of brain cancer, as his son suffered the same diagnosis before his death in 2015 aged 46. Taking to Twitter she said: 'He has helped me through my father's diagnosis, treatment and ultimate passing more than anyone of my father's friends combined. Meghan McCain has defended Joe Biden after the former Vice President was hit by claims that he inappropriately touched women (pictured on March 30, 2019) The View host called the rumored 2020 hopeful 'one of the truly decent and compassionate men in all of American politics.' It comes as the former Vice President was accused of touching another woman, in 2009, without her consent in a way that made her feel uncomfortable (pictured on March 26, 2019) 'I wish there was more empathy from our politicians not less.' It comes as the former Vice President was accused of touching another woman, in 2009, without her consent in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. A Greenwich, Connecticut woman says the alleged incident occurred at a fundraiser for Democratic Congressman Jim Himes. 'It wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head,' Amy Lappos, 43, told The Hartford Courant. 'He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.' The story told by the congressional aide amplified claims by White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and others that 'Creepy Uncle Joe' is disqualified from holding the presidency. Biden launched an all-out defense of his conduct over the years with women on Monday as mounting allegations of inappropriate contact threatened to end his anticipated White House bid before it began. Two incidents involving the wife of a former defense secretary and the daughter of a sitting senator are under refreshed scrutiny. Ash Carter's wife says this photo of Biden touching her shoulder was 'misleading' and that he was helping her get through the nervous occasion Biden's spokesman disputes that the gesture was inappropriate - and noted that another image from the same event that's going around was doctored to make it look like the former VP was touching Stephanie Carter's breast Taken out of context and cropped, the former VP was accused of touching a child inappropriately by some social media users in the above photo. The child is his grandson and it was taken before at Biden's son's funeral in 2015 Other allegations against Biden that have emerged were 'photoshopped' and are 'forgeries,' said a spokesman for the potential presidential candidate in a lengthy statement. 'These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while. And to this day, right wing trolls and others continue to exploit them for their own gain,' Bill Russo claimed. He argued that real pictures of Biden with women he appears to be touching inappropriately are 'misleading' and have been misconstrued as he fought off damaging allegations to the longtime public servant's reputation. A Greenwich Connecticut woman says the alleged incident occurred a fundraiser for Democratic Congressman Jim Himes He provided a link to a cropped photo of the former vice president comforting his grandson, Hunter, at son Beau Biden's funeral in 2015. Taken out of context and cropped, the former VP was accused of touching a child inappropriately by some social media users. Another touched up photo appears to show Biden putting his hands on a woman's breast. Both his hands are visibly on the woman's shoulders. A third hand on her chest was photoshopped in. The photos were making the rounds again on Sunday, as demonstrated by a tweet from a Trump supporter that Biden's spokesman provided as evidence of his charge that the former vice president is being unfairly maligned. A former Nevada politician first raised the issue of Biden's intimate gestures toward women when he was in the White House. Lucy Flores said he made her feel uncomfortable when he kissed her on the head and put his hands on her shoulder before she went on stage at a campaign event. 'I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?' Flores wrote. 'I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, "I didn't wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual f**k?" She claimed, 'He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn't process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused.' Flores does not allege that Biden sexually assaulted her. She told CNN that she merely wants to bring attention to what she sees as a whitewashing of Biden's contact with women. 'This isn't the first time and wasn't the only incident where he was acting inappropriately with women,' Flores said on 'State of the Union' on Sunday. 'There's been documentation in photos, videos, stories that were written.' She said, 'Part of the reason why I finally decided to say something was those behaviors were not being taken very seriously. They were not being considered from the perspective of the woman on the other side of that power dynamic, on the receiving end.' Flores says she had no prior relationship with Biden, who campaigned for her in 2014, that would make it appropriate for him to kiss her head and touch her shoulders the way he did. 'You don't expect that kind of intimate behavior from someone so powerful and someone who you just have no relationship whatsoever to, to touch you and feel you and be so close to you in that way,' she said. At first, the former VP's spokesman said that neither Biden nor his staff had an 'inkling' that Flores was upset, and that none of them 'recall' such an incident taking place. As the inferences that Biden, who could announce a presidential campaign any day, is not suited for office grew, the former Delaware senator apologized to the Flores, a former lieutenant governor candidate, and anyone else who was offended. He said he offered 'countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort' that may have been photographed all of them innocent in nature. Biden leans in to say something to Maggie Coons, next to her father Sen. Chris Coons after Biden administered the Senate oath to Coons in 2015 In this Sept. 9, 2012 file photo, Vice President Joe Biden talks to customers, including a woman who pulled up her chair in front of the bench Biden was sitting on, during a stop at Cruisers Diner in Seaman, Ohio. She's not sitting on his lap, but the photo played that way Lucy Flores accused Biden of grabbing her shoulders and planting a 'big slow kiss' on the back of her head while she was campaigning for lieutenant governor in Nevada (pictured) Appearing on 'Fox News Sunday,' after the statement's release, Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway said, 'I think Joe Biden has a big problem here. Because he calls it an affection and handshake but his party calls it inappropriate.' 'But all of these post-#MeToo allegations and insinuations really don't comport with probably Joe Biden's conduct over the years. If anybody just types in 'Creepy Uncle Joe," videos you come up with a treasure trove,' Conway said of the potential challenger to his boss. His spokesman claimed Monday, as the fallout continued that Flores' references to documented instances of untoward behavior that 'crossed a line between affectionate or supportive behavior and somethinghowever unintentionalmore inappropriate or unwelcome' misconstrued the facts. Russo brought up photos with Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, and Sen. Chris Coons' daughter, in which Biden appeared to be touching the women without their consent. 'Each was ostensibly captured by a photo that some have interpreted in a way that is reflected consistently, and without scrutiny, in the reporting. Ms. Flores herself has cited the Carter photo as an example of the behavior she experienced,' he said. 'Here's the problem: in neither case is the often repeated and recirculated interpretation true. Both Stephanie Carter and Senator Coons have now felt compelled to speak out to put these ugly urban legends to rest.' Carter and Coons, a Deleware Democrat, have defended Biden in statements on the incidents. 'She did not think of it as anything,' he told The Washington Post. 'All three of my kids have known Joe their whole lives.' In a Medium post, the former secretary of defense's wife said the still image of Biden's hands on her shoulders while her husband was being sworn in as defense secretary has been taken out of context. She said in the post that she was taking back the story behind the viral, 2015 photo of Biden putting his hands on her shoulders. Carter said she didn't appreciate the attention she received as a result of the still shot that was 'misleadingly extracted from what was a longer moment between close friends' and the 'snarky' tweets that ensued. Russo quoted Carter in his long statement on Biden's conduct on Monday afternoon. 'So, one now-fabled photo was, in fact, 'misleadingly extracted' from a consoling 'moment between close friends,' and the other captured a grandfatherly word of praise and offer of support for the daughter of long-time friends of the Biden family,' Russo said. He said that media reports on the incidents were wrong then, and the photos should not be used by Flores or anyone else trying to establish a pattern of misconduct now. 'In other words, the familiar characterizations of these two photos that have been uncritically perpetuated, turn out to be very false. The Carter and Coons accounts are not 'updates' of old stories: they are corrections of false ones,' he argued. Biden in a Sunday morning statement offered a blanket defense of the conduct that Flores described and and the 'countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort' that he's provided as a friend and public servant over the years. 'And not once - never - did I believe I acted inappropriately,' he said. 'If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention.' He said he may not 'recall these moments the same way' that the women do. 'But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. I will also remain the strongest advocate I can be for the rights of women,' the former vice president said. 'I will fight to build on the work I've done in my career to end violence against women and ensure women are treated with the equality they deserve.' Kendra Barkoff Lamy, spokeswoman for Biden when he was the VP, said in a Saturday tweet that she doesn't recall the VP getting handsy or treating women inappropriately an any way when she worked for him. 'I can say unequivocally that I was never uncomfortable with how he treated me or other women. He dedicated his career to womens empowerment, safety & equality. Thats one reason why I worked for him,' she stated. Lappos did not return a request for comment from DailyMail.com but told the Hartford Courant, 'I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody. She said, 'Theres absolutely a line of decency. Theres a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. Its not cultural. Its not affection. Its sexism or misogyny.' Biden's current spokesman, Russo, declined to comment directly on the charge. He referred DailyMail.com to the VP's weekend statement apologizing for anything he may have done at any time in his career that made a woman feel uncomfortable. A ten-month-old boy is in intensive care after a senior nurse allegedly gave him an enema using scalding hot water in Kazakhstan. Baby Nurislam was taken to hospital in the city of the Shymkent with a respiratory infection which doctors managed to treat, but which left him constipated. As a result, medics prescribed him an enema, but mother Arainur Kalkaman said the boy started howling in pain as soon as it was administered. Nurislam Kalkaman, a ten-month-old boy from Kazakhstan, was left fighting for his life after allegedly being given an enema with boiling hot water Mother Arainur Kalkaman said the botched procedure has left her son in terrible pain and bleeding every time he needs to use the toilet, with doctors unable to say if he will survive Mrs Kalkaman demanded the nurse stop the procedure but claims the nurse refused to do so, saying 'she knew better'. After the procedure was finished, Mrs Kalkaman rushed to check on her crying child and saw that he was badly burned. She said: 'I saw that the skin on my son's bottom was badly burned. His right buttock was covered with horrible giant blisters. 'I cannot convey the horror that I experienced when I saw it. I stormed into the office of our doctor shouting that they had burned my son.' Nurislam was rushed in the intensive care unit in a critical condition where he is still fighting for his life. Arainur said she tried to stop the procedure as soon as her son started screaming but a senior nurse refused because 'she knew better' The hospital in the city of Shymkent (pictured) has suspended the nurse in question and set up a task force to investigate alongside the police His heartbroken parents are now pleading to the Kazakhstan Healthcare Minister Yelzhan Birtanov to intervene and provide their son with urgent medical care. Nurislam's father Yerbolit Samenov said: 'Doctors do not say much and we do not know what the future holds for our son. 'He was put in the intensive care unit last Thursday. Since then he has been living on painkillers. 'All I know is that his condition is very grave. He is crying in pain and bleeding every time he needs to poo.' The parents reported the incident to the police as an internal investigation has been launched in the hospital. According to Amangeldy Nurlybaev, the head doctor of the hospital, a special commission, including the hospital top managers, has been created to investigate the incident. The nurse who allegedly gave the child the scalding-hot water enema has been suspended. The police have not commented on the incident yet. Advertisement Julie Bishop has been mocked online after stealing the show during Tuesday's budget announcement in one of her final appearances in federal parliament. The former foreign minister ensured all eyes were on her as she threatened to upstage Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's delivery of his first and possibly final budget. Ms Bishop looked like she was ready for a night on the town in a $1,299 sparkling dark blue sequin midi dress designed by Rachel Gilbert, dazzling earrings and painted pink nails. The animated backbencher was photographed jumping with her hands in the air and reveling in the limelight - just minutes before Mr Frydenberg took to the dispatch box to announce the nation's finances were finally back in black. 'Celebrating a budget surplus!' Ms Bishop later posted on Twitter. Former foreign minister Julie Bishop had all eyes on her as her party set about delivering its budget She has since been inundated with a barrage of backlash online for her performance. 'Julie Bishop turns up to budget night in a $2000 dress. She is really in touch with the everyday people,' one man tweeted. Another added: 'More like celebrating how the poorest get nothing, while the rich get it all.' Many commented on Ms Bishop's tweet to suggest her budget celebrations may be premature ahead of next month's federal election. Others saw the funny side. 'Julie Bishop reminding everyone how many votes she got during the last leadership spill,' one man tweeted with a picture of her waving her hands in air. Another added: ''Speak up Josh! Julie Bishop's sparkling blue top is louder than you!' Trendy fashionistas appreciated the stunning outfit. Ms Bishop has since been inundated with a barrage of public online backlash for her show-stealing performance 'I love Julie Bishop's style going out with glitz and glamour this budget,' one woman tweeted. Another added: 'I know I shouldn't be focusing on your clothes but on your achievements as a Minister (which are too numerous to list) BUT what a fabulous dress! There was some support from voters. 'Wish I was celebrating you as PM,' one commented. Another added: 'Politics is going to miss you. Thanks for all you have done.' Donning a dazzling blue sequin midi dress, the former foreign minister appeared visibly enthusiastic ahead of her colleague Josh Frydenberg's first budget delivery in Canberra Many commented on Ms Bishop's tweet (pictured) to suggest her budget celebrations may be premature ahead of next month's federal election Ms Bishop is often commended for her wardrobe choices, earning herself the title of 'Minister of Fashion' alongside her former titles of Deputy leader of the Liberal party and Foreign Affairs Minister. The 'Orla Dress', designed by the famed Australian designer, can be bought from retailers such as David Jones and The Iconic. She now joins the likes of Nicole Kidman, Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Olivia Palermo, Karlie Kloss, Heidi Klum and Princess Beatrice who have donned Ms Gilbert's dresses in the past. Ministers are tonight celebrating the country being 'back in black' with the first Budget surplus since John Howard's long-serving treasurer Peter Costello delivered his last Budget 12 years ago - before the global financial crisis hit. Mr Frydenberg, 47, says his first Budget, with a $7.1 billion surplus for 2019-20, was the result of 'responsible decisions - difficult but necessary decisions.' The Treasurer hailed his financial plan as one designed to make life easier for 'average families' on a median household income of $74,800 a year. Ms Bishop dazzled in a blue sequin midi dress, appearing visibly enthusiastic ahead of Josh Frydenberg's first budget delivery Ms Bishop, 62, famously announced her retirement from politics earlier this year, after a humiliating defeat in her run for the top job. 'I will not recontest the seat of Curtin at the next election,' the former Liberal deputy leader and foreign minister told Parliament in late February. In a short House of Representatives speech, the former corporate lawyer said she was proud to have served 'my beloved Liberal Party, my state of Western Australia, and my country.' She is retiring from her ultra-safe Perth electorate of Curtin, months after receiving just 11 votes in the Liberal Party leadership ballot to succeed Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister. The sister of a missing 15-year-old girl believes the teen willingly left with a family friend who is more than 30 years her senior, claiming that he brainwashed her. Domeanna Spell vanished after getting off the school bus at Port Barre High School in Louisiana around 7am on Thursday. Her sister Jerrie Cradeur believes the teen then walked across the street and got into a car with 47-year-old Cory 'Shane' Disotell. 'He probably has her believing that she's safe with him and that she's madly in love with him,' Cradeur told KATC. Scroll down for video The sister of missing 15-year-old Domeanna Spell believes the teen willingly left with 47-year-old family friend Cory 'Shane' Disotell (pictured together), claiming he brainwashed her 'He probably has her believing that she's safe with him and that she's madly in love with him,' sister Jerrie Cradeur (pictured) said on Monday. 'I do believe he did brainwash her' 'I do believe he did brainwash her. It was told to me that he is manipulative and he would have done it.' Cradeur revealed that Disotell had become 'really good friends' with her and Domeanna's parents. 'They even got a deer lease together because they were really close friends,' she said. 'Domeanna started babysitting for his granddaughter, and come to find out there was no granddaughter there for her to be babysitting.' Disotell had been giving Domeanna money every weekend, leading her parents to believe that she was babysitting for him. But Cradeur now believes they were secretly having a relationship. Domeanna vanished after getting off the school bus at Port Barre High School in Louisiana last Thursday. Cradeur believes she then walked across the street and got into a car with Disotell It is believed Domeanna and Disotell could be traveling in a silver 2003 Honda Civic with the Louisiana license plate 995CGK (pictured) 'She probably left on her free will, and I don't think he would harm her in any way,' she said. 'But he is said to be aggressive.' Cradeur told DailyMail.com on Monday that she believes the missing teen may have changed her hair color to burgundy and swapped her glasses for colored contact lenses. She also revealed in a Facebook comment that Domeanna 'claims she is in love' with Disotell. The FBI has since joined the search for Domeanna, along with the US Marshals Service, Port Barre police, Louisiana State Police, and the St Landry Parish Sheriff's Office. Cradeur revealed that Disotell had become 'really good friends' with her and Domeanna's parents and that her parents thought she was babysitting his granddaughter every weekend But Domeanna's family recently found out that there was no granddaughter to be babysat. Cradeur believes the pair were secretly meeting and in a relationship 'We are working diligently and tirelessly, leaving no stone unturned,' Port Barre Police Chief Deon Boudreaux told KATC. 'I'm extremely thankful for the help and support we are receiving not only from these agencies, but also from the public that are reaching out to us with information.' 'Family and friends of Domeanna expressed her love for her, miss her dearly, and are praying for her safe return.' It is believed Domeanna and Disotell could be traveling in a silver 2003 Honda Civic with the Louisiana license plate 995CGK. Authorities believe they may be headed to Mississippi, where Disotell has relatives. Social media posts indicate Disotell is divorced with children (he is pictured with his ex-wife) Domeanna is described as 5ft 2in, weighing 105lb, with light brown hair and blue/hazel eyes. Disotell is described as 5ft 8in and weighing 155lb. According to online records and social media posts, Disotell is divorced with children. If he is in fact with Domeanna, Disotell could face charges for contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile because the pair left without permission or consent from the teen's parents. Cradeur said there have been sightings of her sister, which gives her hope. But she will keep searching until Domeanna comes home. 'I will keep fighting,' she said. 'I will keep looking, even if its months from now.' 'I will still share the posts on Facebook until we find her, and she comes home.' President Donald Trump called himself '[t]he bet thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico' on Tuesday, amping up a more than year-long feud with the island's Democratic Party leaders. Trump had already sent a trio of tweets late Monday criticizing Puerto Rico's government and the 'crazed and incompetent' mayor of San Juan for squandering aid money following Hurricane Maria in 2017. 'Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA,' he griped. Puerto Rico is part of the United States, a territory. Its residents are U.S. citizens. 'The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump,' he boasted. 'So many wonderful people, but with such bad Island leadership and with so much money wasted. Cannot continue to hurt our Farmers and States with these massive payments, and so little appreciation!' President Trump (left) on Monday and Tuesday lashed out at Puerto Rico and the 'crazed and incompetent' mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz (right) Trump called himelf '[t]he best thing that has ever happened to Puerto Rico as he boasted about sending the island $91 billion in post-hurricane aid money 'The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any "place" in history,' Trump tweeted Monday. 'The people of Puerto Rico are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt,' he added. 'Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can't do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works. 'FEMA & the Military worked emergency miracles, but politicians like the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health.' The 'crazed and incompetent' mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, responded to the president's attacks. She tweeted late Monday: 'Pres Trump continues to embarrass himself & the Office he holds. 'He is unhinged & thus lies about the $ received by PR. HE KNOWS HIS RESPONSE was innefficient [sic] at best. 'He can huff & puff all he wants but he cannot escape the death of 3,000 on his watch. 'SHAME ON YOU!' Senate Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican disaster aid bill, saying it doesn't do enough to help Puerto Rico, which prompted Trump to lash out on Twitter 'Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can't do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works,' the president tweeted Trump then mentioned the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz In another tweet, Cruz wrote: 'Mr President I am right here ready to call you on every lie, every hypocrisy and every ill fated action against the people of Puerto Rico. 'My voice,and the voices of the people of Puerto Rico, will continue to unmask your insentive [sic], incapable & vindictive ways.' Senate Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican disaster aid bill, saying it doesn't do enough to help Puerto Rico. The move tossed long-sought relief for victims of hurricanes, floods and western wildfires into limbo. The vote escalated a fight between Democrats and President Trump, who opposes further rebuilding aid for the U.S. island territory, which was slammed by back-to-back hurricanes in 2017. The 44-49 vote fell short of a majority, much less the 60 votes required to overcome a Democratic filibuster. It sent GOP leaders back to the drawing board but seemed unlikely to kill disaster aid efforts outright, since there is much political support to send aid to Southern farmers, wildfire-ravaged California towns and Midwestern flood victims. Trump allies such as Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., are among the strongest backers of the legislation, which has already faced significant delays. Trump is seen above shaking hands with Cruz during the president's visit to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria on October 3, 2017 The 'crazed and incompetent' mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, responded to the president's attacks. She tweeted late Monday: 'Pres Trump continues to embarrass himself & the Office he holds' In another tweet, Cruz wrote: 'Mr President I am right here ready to call you on every lie, every hypocrisy and every ill fated action against the people of Puerto Rico' 'We will get this done eventually,' Perdue said, promising relief to struggling farmers in his state. The path forward is not clear, but a leading option is for the Senate to pass a much more narrowly drawn bill simply to get the issue into a House-Senate conference committee. House Democrats insist the talks must produce a final measure with help for Puerto Rico. The amount of money in dispute is relatively small, but Trump feels antipathy toward Puerto Rico's government and Senate Republicans backed him up - for now - in denying Democratic demands for more aid to rebuild its badly damaged water systems and to ease the requirement that Puerto Rico financially match a portion of the federal government's aid contribution. Democrats say Trump has been slow to release already-appropriated funding for Puerto Rico and has exhibited little urgency in helping the island. Trump poor-mouthed the island's government at a meeting with Senate Republicans last week and suggested Puerto Rico has gotten too much disaster help compared with states such as Texas, using inflated numbers to make his case. 'Just as we leave no soldier behind on the battlefield, we help our fellow Americans when there's a disaster, wherever the disaster strikes. We do not abandon them. Period,' said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. The $13.5billion Senate measure mostly mirrors a $14.2billion measure passed by the House in January, combining aid to Southern farmers, California communities devastated by last summer's wildfire, and hurricane-hit states such as Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Hurricane-damaged military bases in Florida and North Carolina would receive rebuilding funds. Democrats want to add almost $700million more to unlock further disaster aid for Puerto Rico and several states, including help to rebuild badly damaged water systems. Democrats are also trying to force the administration to release billions of dollars in rebuilding funds that have already been approved. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the measure is the fastest way to get aid to the hurricane-slammed South and the badly flooded Midwest, along with nutrition aid to Puerto Rico, where food stamp benefits have already been cut. 'It's our only sure path to making a law with anywhere near the urgency these Americans deserve. It is the only bill on the table with any provision for the Midwest flooding,' McConnell said. Democrats say Trump has been slow to release already-appropriated funding for Puerto Rico and has exhibited little urgency in helping the island. The above image shows a woman carrying her granddaughter in her home as plastic sheet replaces the roof in April 2018 'And it's the only bill on the table that could earn a presidential signature in time to deliver urgent relief on the nutrition assistance in Puerto Rico.' The political momentum for the measure - strongly backed by Trump's allies in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, among other states - has only been heightened by massive flooding in Midwestern states such as Nebraska and Iowa, whose nominating caucuses are the first test for Democrats hoping to challenge Trump next year. The GOP measure would make Midwestern states eligible for more aid, and by blocking the bill, Democratic presidential contenders in the Senate are likely to face criticism. Trump has yet to veto a spending bill despite some tough talk, and he has signed off on $600million to ease food stamp cuts in Puerto Rico. 'I have taken better care of Puerto Rico than any man ever. We have $91billion going to Puerto Rico. We have $29billion to Texas and $12billion to Florida for the hurricane,' Trump said last week. 'They have to spend the money wisely. They don't know how to spend the money and they're not spending it wisely.' Trump's $91billion estimate, said a White House spokesman, includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements, along with $41billion that's already been approved. Actual aid to Puerto Rico has flowed slowly from federal coffers. A mother saved her son's life when a small cougar pounced on him outside their Canada home last week. Seven-year-old Zack Bromley had ventured to the waterfront area of their home in Lake Cowichan when the cougar started to run toward him. The family's mesh fence bought Zack some time to run, but the animal came through the fence and jumped on him. Seven-year-old Zack Bromley suffered injuries to his head, neck and forearm. His mother, Chelsea, saved his life by jumping on the cougar Zack had ventured to the waterfront area of their home (pictured) in Lake Cowichan when the cougar started to run toward him. The family's mesh fence bought Zack some time to run, but the animal came through the fence and jumped on him According to Global News, Zack was also wearing a thick hoodie, which helped protect him from the cougar's claws and teeth. The cougar then bit down on the child's forearm. Zack's mother, Chelsea, heard the commotion and ran outside to help. Zack's father, Kevin Bromley, told the news outlet that his wife 'jumped on top of this thing, but it wouldn't let go of Zack's forearm so she then had to pry this cougar's jaw open'. It was when Chelsea screamed for help that the cougar let go and ran off. 'There was blood everywhere,' Bromley said, adding that his wife rushed their son into the home and called rescue crews. Zack was takento a nearby hospital with injuries to his head, neck and arm. Wildlife officials tracked and killed both cougars. The experts said the animals appeared 'quite thin', and may have been starving According to Bromley, his daughter spotted a second cougar (file image) nearby, but that animal wasn't involved in the attack He also has stitches on his arm and behind his ear. Zack's parents said he will make a full recovery, but they are trying to make sure 'this doesn't impact him mentally or traumatically'. According to Bromley, his daughter spotted a second cougar nearby, but that animal wasn't involved in the attack. The parents said they are thankful that it wasn't a much bigger cougar because 'it would have been over'. Wildlife officials tracked and killed both cougars. The experts said the animals appeared 'quite thin', and may have been starving. A necropsy will be performed on the animals to determine their condition at the time of the attack. Ryanair has become one of Europe's top ten polluters and the only company in that group not running coal-fired power plants. Data from the European Commission shows that the airline is estimated to have pumped out 9.9 megatons of CO2 last year, the 10th worst. Power plants - seven of which are German - form the rest of the line up, with the Belchatow plant in Poland taking the top spot. The second largest fossil-fuel power station on the planet, it spews an estimated 38.2 megatons of CO2. But despite the Commission's evidence that Ryanair's emissions were up 6.9 per cent, the airline's spokesman said: 'Ryanair is Europe's greenest and cleanest airline. Passengers travelling on Ryanair have the lowest CO2 emissions per km travelled than any other airline.' A Ryanair jet taking off from Leeds Bradford airport, the airline states they were 'Europe's greenest and cleanest airline' Europe's top ten polluters in megatons of CO2, with Ryanair coming in 10th and the rest being coal-fired power plants Europe's Transport and Environment research group (T&E) outlined how airline emissions rose 4.9 per cent last year and have risen some 26.3 per cent in the last five years. The Irish airline had figures for those periods of 6.9 per cent and 49 per cent respectively. T&E's aviation manager Andrew Murphy said: 'When it comes to climate, Ryanair is the new coal. 'This trend will only continue until Europe realises that this undertaxed and under-regulated sector needs to be brought into line, starting with a tax on kerosene and the introduction of mandates that force airlines to switch to zero-emission jet fuel.' T&E say that instead of tackling the problem governments were backing a controversial UN offsetting scheme known as Corsia. Andrew Murphy of T&E said: 'When it comes to climate, Ryanair is the new coal' (pictured: a Ryanair jet on the runway in Malaga, Spain) These offsetting schemes enable airlines to invest in cheaper alternatives but their projects may not come to fruition and place responsibility on a third-party. Mr Murphy argued: 'Aviation is Europe's biggest climate failure. The worst thing we can do in response is to put all our hopes in an offsetting scheme that gives airlines a license to grow indefinitely. 'But that is exactly what airlines have cooked up at the industry-dominated UN aviation agency. The time has come for a big change in Europe's aviation policy. A woman who claimed she had been raped was caught out when police found CCTV of her shopping in Morrisons. Abbie Will told officers she was hit over the head by a man who then sexually assaulted her. The 20-year-old's claims sparked a week-long investigation before detectives found footage of her doing her food shop at the store in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Abbie Will told officers she was hit over the head by a man who then sexually assaulted her - but she was caught out by CCTV footage Will yesterday admitted wasting police time at Aberdeen Sheriff Court. The court heard that Will told officers she was raped on December 22, 2016, between 6.30pm and 7.30pm, on a grassy area next to the Peterhead Academy in Aberdeenshire. Officers found security camera footage of her walking in the direction of the school, but noticed she was wearing the same clothes on her return home and her outfit had not been handed in to check for her attacker's DNA. Fiscal depute Sally Macauley said officers reported that she appeared 'normal and not dishevelled.' Security cameras from the academy were checked but Will could not be seen on them so police scoured CCTV around the area for evidence. Ms Macauley said Will was picked up entering Morrisons at 6.29pm and leaving at 7.02pm - meaning the man 'would not have had the opportunity' to rape her. The 20-year-old's claims sparked a week-long investigation before detectives found footage of her doing her food shop at the store in Aberdeenshire 'Police found the allegation to be false,' Ms Macauley added. Will admitted to wasting police time and causing their publicly-funded resources to be diverted unnecessarily at the sheriff court yesterday. Sheriff Morag McLaughlin released the 20-year-old on bail to allow for the preparation of a social work report. She has previously pleaded guilty to crimes including threatening to kill police officers and threatening to damage a police station and will be sentenced in connection with those offences at a later date. Will also has an earlier conviction for making false emergency calls. Former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign-to-be has launched an all-out defense of conduct some women have said made them physically uncomfortable, claiming news media misinterpreted some photos and others are Photoshopped fakes. Allegations have mounted in the past week of inappropriate contact, threatening to end Biden's 2020 White House hopes before a formal campaign gets off the ground. Spokesman Bill Russo said Monday in a lengthy statement that the women involved now say nothing unseemly happened, and argued that right-wing antagonists purposefully concocted photos designed to turn up the temperature of outrage. 'These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while. And to this day, right wing trolls and others continue to exploit them for their own gain,' Russo claimed. A Trump supporter posted a crudely touched-up photo Sunday on Twitter, appearing to depict Biden groping the breast of Stephanie Carter, former Defense Secretary Ash Carter's wife, with his right hand during Mr. Carter's swearing-in ceremony. In the original picture, both of Biden's hands are visible on the woman's shoulders. Joe Biden's spokesman complained Monday about Photoshopped images like this one, which shows the former vice president groping Stephanie Carter while her husband Ash was sworn in as secretary of Defense in February 2015 In the original news photo of Carter's first speech as the Pentagon chief, Biden's hands are both on Mrs. Carter's shoulders. She blogged that she was not uncomfortable and Biden is a close friend Biden spokesman Bill Russo also complains about unedited pictures that show his boss nuzzling women in public and otherwise invading their personal space. Chris Conns' daughter Maggie, 13, was with her father when Biden swore in the Delaware senator in January 2015 Biden has acquired the nickname 'Creepy Uncle Joe' for his habit of crossing the line between kind and handsy. He leaned in to a kiss with Chuck Grassley's wife Barbara when swearing in the Iowa senator in January 2017 Hand position: This was the meeting with Lucy Flores (right) which she wrote about for New York magazine - and at which Biden posed with both her and Eva Longoria, putting his hand high on her chest Nuzzling: Biden put his hands on the shoulders of this woman at the Cruisers Diner in Seaman, Ohio, during a September 2012 campaign stop. She had moved his chair in front of the bench where he was sitting between two other bikers The tweet juxtaposed the phony Biden photo with a genuine one depicting former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken groping a model during a military flight back to the U.S. following a USO benefit concert. That picture led to Franken's resignation from Congress. In a more pointed example of a deceptively edited photo, Biden was pictured in an animated conversation, wagging his finger at a Florida town hall attendee during the 2008 presidential campaign season. A Photoshopped version that has circulated on social media since 2012 replaces Biden's arm with a phony one holding a gun, which is extended into the woman's mouth. Russo also provided a link to a cropped picture of the former vice president appearing to clamp his hand over the mouth of his grieving grandson at Beau Biden's 2015 funeral. The original news photo provides context, showing a comforting embrace. Republicans are calling Biden 'Creepy Uncle Joe,' hoping to end his hopes of unseating President Donald Trump, after a week that saw two women accuse him of touching them improperly in past years. A Greenwich, Connecticut woman told The Hartford Courant that her uncomfortable, nonconsensual moment happened at a 2009 fundraiser for Democratic Congressman Jim Himes when Biden was the sitting vice president. YOU'VE GOT IT ALL WRONG AND BIDEN'S THE VICTIM HERE, SAYS HIS SPOKESMAN (BUT JOE ISN'T ADDRESSING HANDSY BEHAVIOR IN PERSON) Joe Biden spokesman Bill Russo issued a statement on April 1, 2019 defending the former U.S. vice president against allegations of improperly touching women during his years in office: 'In the coverage so far of Lucy Flores essay in New York Magazine, reports have made repeated references to supposedly similar, well-documented instances in which the Vice President crossed a line between affectionate or supportive behavior and somethinghowever unintentionalmore inappropriate or unwelcome. One such instance involved Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, and the other Senator Chris Coons daughter. Each was ostensibly captured by a photo that some have interpreted in a way that is reflected consistently, and without scrutiny, in the reporting.Ms. Flores herself has cited the Carter photo as an example of the behavior she experienced. 'Heres the problem: in neither case is the often repeated and recirculated interpretation true. Both Stephanie Carter and Senator Coons have now felt compelled to speak out to put these ugly urban legends to rest. 'As Stephanie Carter relates her own experience, she had a fall earlier in the day of her husbands swearing-in as Defense Secretary and was uncharacteristically nervous. Sensing that she was ill at ease, the Vice President gave her a hug and later, thanking her for her encouragement of her husband in this new and demanding phase of his career, kept his hands on my shoulders as a means of offering his support. She writes that the infamous photo was misleadingly extracted from what was a longer moment between close friendssent out in a snarky tweet. Ms. Carter is now reclaiming her storythe true one. 'Senator Coons has reclaimed his daughters story. The Washington Post has now reported an interview with the Senator in which he states that his daughter, who has known Vice President Biden all her life, views him as a grandfather figure. Mr. Biden was whispering praise for her composure and offering to connect her with his own daughter so that they could talk about the challenges of having fathers in the political spotlight. She was not bothered, the Senator told the Post; she did not think of it as anything. 'So, one now-fabled photo was, in fact, misleadingly extracted from a consoling moment between close friends, and the other captured a grandfatherly word of praise and offer of support for the daughter of long-time friends of the Biden family. In other words, the familiar characterizations of these two photos that have been uncritically perpetuated, turn out to be very false. The Carter and Coons accounts are not updates of old stories: they are corrections of false ones. 'And they are not the only ones. There are other, even more insidious examples of claims about the Vice President that have no foundation: the use of photoshopped images and other manipulations of social media. Perhaps most galling of all, a cropped photo of the Vice President comforting his grandson outside of his son Beaus funeral has been used to further this false narrative. 'These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while. And to this day, right wing trolls and others continue to exploit them for their own gain. 'The Vice President has issued a statement affirming that in all the many years in public life that he has shaken a hand, given or received a hug, or laid his hand on a shoulder to express concern, support; or reassurance, he never intended to cause discomfort. He has said that he believes that women who have experience any such discomfort, regardless of intention, should speak and be heard, and that he will be among those who listen. 'But the important conversation about these issues are not advanced, nor are any criticisms of Vice President Biden validated, by the continued misrepresentation of the Carter and Coons moments, or a failure to be vigilant about a cottage industry of lies.' Advertisement This image has circulated on social media for years, but it's completely fake In the actual picture, the then-senator got into a heated discussion with a Florida woman at a town hall event while he was campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008 'It wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head,' said Amy Lappos, 43. 'He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.' Lappos' story amplified claims by White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and others that Biden should be disqualified from holding the presidency. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi played defense on Tuesday, acknowledging that Biden should give people more personal space but arguing that he shouldn't be drummed out of the White House race. 'I don't think it's disqualifying,' she told Politico. 'He has to understand in the world that we're in now that people's space is important to them, and what's important is how they receive it and not necessarily how you intended it.' The recent news cycles about Biden began with a complaint from a former Nevada state lawmaker who claimed Biden nuzzled the back of her head and made a point of smelling her hair during a public campaign event. Lucy Flores said he also kissed her on the head and put his hands on her shoulders before she went onstage. 'I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?' Flores wrote. 'I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, "I didn't wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual f**k?"' When the faked image of Biden was circulated online this past weekend, it was tweeted alongside a genuine picture of former Democratic Sen. Al Franken groping an entertainer after a USO show 'He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head,' she recalled. 'My brain couldn't process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused.' Flores has not claimed Biden sexually assaulted her. She told CNN that she merely wants to bring attention to what she sees as a whitewashing of Biden's contact with women. She felt 'uneasy, gross, and confused,' she said. Amy Lappos, 43, says she felt uncomfortable when Joe Biden touched her at a fundraising event in 2009 'This isn't the first time and wasn't the only incident where he was acting inappropriately with women,' Flores said on the 'State of the Union' program. 'There's been documentation in photos, videos, stories that were written.' 'You don't expect that kind of intimate behavior from someone so powerful and someone who you just have no relationship whatsoever to, to touch you and feel you and be so close to you in that way,' she said. Appearing on 'Fox News Sunday,' Conway said, 'I think Joe Biden has a big problem here. Because he calls it an affection and handshake but his party calls it inappropriate.' 'But all of these post-#MeToo allegations and insinuations really don't comport with probably Joe Biden's conduct over the years. If anybody just types in 'Creepy Uncle Joe," videos you come up with a treasure trove.' Russo complained Monday about Flores' references to documented instances of untoward behavior that 'crossed a line between affectionate or supportive behavior and somethinghowever unintentionalmore inappropriate or unwelcome.' He griped about photos of Biden with Stephanie Carter and Sen. Chris Coons' daughter Maggie. The latter was a cringe-inducing moment because of the then-13-year-old girl's facial expression. Taken out of context and cropped, the former VP was accused of touching a child inappropriately by some social media users in the above photo. The child is his grandson and it was taken at Biden's son's funeral in 2015 'Each was ostensibly captured by a photo that some have interpreted in a way that is reflected consistently, and without scrutiny, in the reporting. Ms. Flores herself has cited the Carter photo as an example of the behavior she experienced,' he said. 'Here's the problem: in neither case is the often repeated and recirculated interpretation true. Both Stephanie Carter and Senator Coons have now felt compelled to speak out to put these ugly urban legends to rest.' Carter and Coons, a Delaware Democrat, have defended Biden in statements on the incidents. 'She did not think of it as anything,' he told The Washington Post. 'All three of my kids have known Joe their whole lives.' In a Medium post, Stephanie Carter said the image of Biden's hands on her shoulders while her husband was being sworn in as defense secretary has been taken out of context. She wrote that she didn't appreciate the attention generated by news coverage of a photo 'misleadingly extracted from what was a longer moment between close friends.' Biden himself said Sunday that the 'countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort' that he's provided as a friend and public servant over the years. 'And not once - never - did I believe I acted inappropriately,' he said. 'If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention.' He said he may not 'recall these moments the same way' that the women do.' 'But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. I will also remain the strongest advocate I can be for the rights of women,' the former vice president said. 'I will fight to build on the work I've done in my career to end violence against women and ensure women are treated with the equality they deserve.' President Trump admitted Tuesday that there's more to his feud with the House Judiciary chairman than the release of special counsel report on Russian election meddling. Congressman Jerrold Nadler was once Assemblyman Nadler of New York City. He refused to support a prized development project of Trump's, earning the nickname 'Fat Jerry' from the real estate mogul who has a way with biting monikers. Trump hasn't let the slight go. He indicated that his problems with Nadler are personal, as he harangued him in the Oval Office for demanding the unredacted Mueller report. 'Nothing you give them, whether it's Shifty Schiff or Jerry Nadler, who I've known he's been fighting me for half of my life in Manhattan and I was very successful, thank you but Nadler's been fighting me for years and years in Manhattan, not successfully,' he told reporters in a revealing statement. Now the President of the United States, he said he will prevail against Nadler once again, just like he did then and just like he did over Democratic charges of collusion. 'After $30 million, we're going to start this process again because Jerry Nadler wants to start it or because Schiff wants to start it? I'll rely on the attorney general to make decisions, but I will tell you: anything that's given to them will never be good enough,' he said of the House Judiciary and Intelligence chairmen. Nadler swatted back in a CNN interview. He called president a 'bully' and corrected the record about his position on the Mueller report. President Trump admitted Tuesday that there's more to his feud with the House Judiciary chairman than the release of special counsel report on Russian election meddling. It goes back decades to a fight they had over a Trump development project in New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler was once Assemblyman Nadler of New York City. He said Tuesday, in response to the president's assault on him, that Trump is a 'bully' and his document request has nothing to do with their personal history He said his quest to get the entire unredacted document is 'not at all' about the Republican president with whom he has a long-running rivalry. 'The president, as you can see, is a bully. The Mueller investigation looked into very serious allegations and very serious matters that we have a responsibility as the oversight body to look into,' he asserted. 'And we are asking that the entire Mueller report and all the underlying documentations be given to Congress, so we can examine it and fulfill our responsibility of looking, of protecting the rule of law and looking into questions of obstruction of justice and personal enrichment and abuses of power.' Trump had whacked Nadler earlier on Tuesday as hypocrite for demanding the unredacted Mueller report even though he was against the public release of the independent counsel report revealing the lewd details of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr's 1998 report on Clinton's conduct in office became the basis for impeaching the Democratic president. Nadler voted against the report's release. Trump claimed in a tweet that Nadler was 'strongly opposed' to any information from that report being made available. 'In 1998, Rep. Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton. No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM!' he claimed. Trump bashed Nadler for demanding the unredacted Mueller report - even though he was against the public release of the independent counsel report revealing the lewd details of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky Independent counsel Kenneth Starr's 1998 report on Clinton's conduct in office became the basis for impeaching the Democratic president. Clinton is pictured here with Lewinsky in the Oval Office Nadler told Charlie Rose in 1998 on the day that Starr delivered his report that grand jury testimony, including 'statements that may or may not be true, by various witnesses, salacious material, all kinds of material, that it would be unfair to release' needed to be reviewed Trump claimed in a tweet that Nadler was 'strongly opposed' to any information from that report being made available. Nadler rebutted him later in the day Trump tagged morning news program 'Fox & Friends' to signal that he was referring to a segment on the show. Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, appeared on the show from Capitol Hill to blast Nadler and other Democrats demanding a copy of the unredacted Mueller report and the underlying evidence. Nadler said Tuesday afternoon on CNN that Trump and his allies were overlooking a key historical difference between Starr's report and the one he's trying to get his hands on now. 'The president, apparently, forgets that Ken Starr's report, all 400 and some odd pages of it had already been given to the entire Congress, which is what we're asking now, and Congress already had it. The question was, should that report, with all the salacious personal sexual material in it be given to the public after Congress,' he said. Nadler told Charlie Rose in 1998, on the day that Starr delivered his report, that grand jury testimony from the Bill Clinton investigation, including 'statements that may or may not be true, by various witnesses, salacious material, all kinds of material, that it would be unfair to release' were included in boxes of documents the independent counsel dropped off. He said Starr 'made it clear' to legislators that 'by law' much of the material 'must be kept secret' unless the House votes to release it. The congressman said he assumed that someone, staff or ranking members on the relevant committees, would have to go over the report to 'determine what is fit for release, and what is as a matter of decency and protecting peoples privacy rights, people who may be totally innocent third parties, what must not be released at all.' Nadler told Rose it would be up to the House Rules committee to determine how 'to how handle the report,' and Congress would proceed from there. Starr notably provided the full unredacted report to Congress, and it fell to lawmakers to determine how much of it to make public. They voted 363- 63 to make the full report, which included details about Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, available online two days after Starr turned it over to them. Nadler was in opposition to the full release of the 445-page report, but he did not suggest in his interview with Rose that a redacted copy of the report be made private. After 'Fox & Friends' played a truncated clip of Nadler talking about the Starr report on Charlie Rose's show in 1998 on Tuesday morning, Jordan said, 'Oh how times have changed' The president said later that he was moving on to other issues. It didn't last very long Democrats are asking for the Mueller report to be made public now. They are also demanding to see the unredacted document for themselves. It's Trump's hand-picked attorney general who is refusing them, making the circumstances not entirely similar to the situation in 1998, when Starr gave Congress the information and lawmakers policed themselves. Conservatives are ignoring the nuance. After 'Fox & Friends' played a truncated clip of Nadler talking about the Starr report on Charlie Rose's show in 1998 on Tuesday morning, Jordan said, 'Oh how times have changed.' 'The obvious reason is because this is now about President Trump, who they're out to get,' Jordan charged. Trump gave a revisionist history of Nadler's position and the events that led to the release of the Starr report as he lambasted him in the Oval Office later, 'He thought it was a disgusting, terrible thing to even think about giving the Starr report but now we should give the Mueller report,' the president claimed. 'And actually the Mueller report is actually much tighter. The Starr report went to Congress; the Mueller report goes to the attorney general. So there's a big difference.' Trump claimed, 'They made that because the Starr report got out of control with respect to going to Congress, which I guess lots of people had it, they shouldn't have had it and did bad things with it, so now they limited it to the attorney general and they did that for that reason. 'So Jerry Nadler thought the concept of giving the Starr report was absolutely something you could never do, but when it comes to the Mueller report, which is different on our side, that would be something that he should get. It's hypocrisy and it's a disgrace,' he added. The president insisted that Nadler and House Intel Chair Adam Schiff were 'disappointed' with the special counsel's assessment that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia in 2016. 'I guarantee you they go into a room between Nadler, Schiff and they laugh like hell about how they kept this thing going for three years. They laugh like hell,' he fumed. 'How high up in the White House did it go? You will all get Pulitzer Prizes. You should have looked at it a long time ago. And that's the only thing that's disappointing to me about the Mueller report.' He mistakenly said three times that reporters should investigate the 'oranges' of the Mueller report when he meant to say origins. 'The Mueller report I wish covered the oranges of how it started, the beginnings of the investigations, how it started. It didn't cover that and for some reason, none of that was discussed,' he said. Nadler at no point defended Clinton's conduct in the '98 interview that Republicans are leaning on now to demonstrate that he's blinded by contempt for Trump. He candidly told Rose that Democrats were distancing themselves from Clinton, regardless of whether he committed crimes or engaged in behavior that was impeachable, because he behaved immorally. 'He's clearly engaged in very reprehensible, unfortunate and immoral conduct,' he said. Nadler said he could take the position that Clinton shouldn't be impeached but did something 'pretty terrible, which I don't want to defend in an election campaign or any other forum' but he could not know that without reading the report. He further rejected the notion that an 'impeachable offense is whatever the House says it is.' He said, 'To impeach a president is to undo an election, is to undo the sovereign will of the American people, that's a very serious step, the Constitution means it can be taken only in very unusual circumstances.' Nadler is now in charge of the Judiciary Committee, twenty years later, and has to make the call on the Mueller report. He will demand the power on Wednesday to subpoena the report from the Justice Department and compel testimony from at least four former top Trump aides. Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, former Communications Director Hope Hicks, former White House Counsel Don McGahn and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus are in the Judiciary Committee's cross-hairs. A fifth person, Ann Donaldson, is also on the list. She was chief of staff to McGahn when he worked at the White House. Nadler has insisted on an April 2 deadline for Attorney General William Barr to turn over Mueller's completed report about Russia's election interference in 2016. He warned Monday that his patience is running thin. Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and former Communications Director Hope Hicks, former White House Counsel Don McGahn and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus are in the Judiciary Committee's cross-hairs Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler has insisted on an April 2 deadline for Attorney General William Barr to turn over Mueller's completed report about Russia's election interference in 2016 Priebus was Trump's chief of staff when the president dismissed James Comey as FBI director Barr told Nadler and three other congressional judiciary committee leaders in a letter on Friday that his department is actively scouring the report for material that must be shielded from public view under federal law. That includes classified information, material that would compromise U.S. intelligence sources and methods and anything that could jeopardize criminal cases. Republicans made similar hurry-up demands of Barack Obama's State Department in 2015 and 2016 after former Secretary Hillary Clinton turned over more than half of the emails on her private server for archiving. It took a group of government agencies more than a half-year to prepare those records for public release. Democrats still want the unredacted Mueller report, and Nadler said Monday that he will compel DOJ to produce if it does not volunteer the document. 'We the members of the Judiciary Committee, the House of Representatives and the entire American public are still waiting to see that report. We will not wait much longer,' he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. 'We have an obligation to read the full report, and the Department of Justice has an obligation to provide it, in its entirely, without delay. If the department is unwilling to produce the full report voluntarily, then we will do everything in our power to secure it for ourselves.' The judiciary committee's Wednesday vote would not automatically result in subpoenas, but it would authorize Nadler to issue them. He told CNN 'Situation Room' host Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday that he wants to give the attorney general the opportunity to provide the documents he's requesting. 'I don't know if they'll change his mind, but they'll change the outcome,' he said of the subpoenas he's threatening to rain down. 'We will get that material one way or the other from him if possible, by subpoena if necessary.' Nadler said Monday that the individuals in question were sent document requests on March 4, 2019 by the committee in relation to its investigation into 'alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption, and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates, and members of his Administration.' Democrats believe those individuals may have been in possession of documents associated with the special counsel investigation. Hicks served as the president's spokeswoman during his campaign and worked in his communications office until she left the White House in March of 2018. She helped construct a statement on his son's meeting at Trump Tower with a lawyer he believed he was meeting to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton. Bannon also worked on the Trump campaign in the general election and served as a senior adviser to the president until a few months after the president fired James Comey. Priebus departed the White House shortly before Bannon did. He did not work for the campaign but worked closely with Trump and his staff in the general election as chairman of the national party. The women of The View have largely spoken out vouching for former Vice President Joe Biden, amid allegations of inappropriate contact lodged by multiple women during his time in office. Whoopi Goldberg, Meghan McCain and Joy Behar defended Biden on Monday's airing of the daytime talk show, while Abby Huntsman questioned the motives of women speaking out across the #MeToo movement, in general. Sunny Hostin was the only woman to bring up the power dynamic at play with a political figure such as Biden, but called his responses to allegations 'appropriate,' adding, 'I dont know if well see any more smelling of hair and kisses.' That bothered Goldberg, who then said, 'That p****s me off. Im telling you I dont want Joe to stop doing that.' From Biden's perspective, he spoke of 'countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort' that he's provided as a friend and public servant over the years, in a statement on Sunday. 'Not once - never - did I believe I acted inappropriately,' he said. 'If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention.' Whoopi Goldberg (pictured), Meghan McCain and Joy Behar of The View have spoken out vouching for former Vice President Joe Biden, amid allegations of inappropriate contact lodged by multiple women during his time in office A former Nevada politician first raised the issue of Biden's intimate gestures toward women when he was in the White House. Lucy Flores said he made her feel uncomfortable when he kissed her on the head and put his hands on her shoulder before she went on stage at a campaign event. 'I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?' Flores wrote. 'I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, "I didn't wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual f**k?" She said, 'He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn't process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused.' Former Nevada politician Lucy Flores (left) first raised the issue of Joe Biden's (right) intimate gestures toward women when he was in the White House Biden is now also accused of touching another woman, in 2009, without her consent in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. A Greenwich, Connecticut woman said the alleged incident occurred at a fundraiser for Democratic Congressman Jim Himes. 'It wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head,' Amy Lappos, 43, told The Hartford Courant. 'He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.' Amy Lappos, 43, of Greenwich, Connecticut said Biden made her uncomfortable at a fundraiser for Democratic Congressman Jim Himes On The View, McCain agreed with Goldberg that she didn't want Biden to stop his 'smelling of hair and kisses.' McCain likened what Behar called Biden's 'affectionate' way of being to that of her father, the late Senator John McCain. 'Theres a certain kind of retail politician that loves people,' the lawmaker's daughter said. 'I would put Bill Clinton in that category and my father in that category, and certainly, I would put Joe Biden in that category. Hes the only politician other my father to go into the crowd and shake everyones hands. That means something when you are in Iowa.' McCain went on to differentiate what Flores alleged occurred with the kind of sexual misconduct Roger Ailes has been accused of. 'I agree women should be heard,' McCain said. 'I worked at Fox News during the Roger Ailes time. There is a very big difference between things like that and things like this.' On The View, Meghan McCain (pictured) said that she didn't want Biden to stop acting in such a way Joy Behar (left) echoed those sentiments, saying, 'Its a long way from smelling your hair to grabbing your hoo-ha. Lets tell the truth. But she felt annoyed or uncomfortable, and we have to accept that. I dont think it rises to the point weve been listening to like Harvey Weinstein and the rest of these people. It just doesnt look like that' Behar echoed those sentiments, saying, 'Its a long way from smelling your hair to grabbing your hoo-ha. Lets tell the truth. But she felt annoyed or uncomfortable, and we have to accept that. I dont think it rises to the point weve been listening to like Harvey Weinstein and the rest of these people. It just doesnt look like that.' Behar then described her own interactions with Biden. 'We all know Joe Biden. Hes been here. When I met him in Florida before he was vice president, hes so friendly. Hes a close talker. He comes right up into your face, and youre thinking, "I hope my breath is good." Or more important, "I hope his is,"' she said. 'He talks close, he touches. Thats what hes like. I feel it would be unfortunate if we got rid of everybody whos an affectionate kind of person. Those are nice people too.' Goldberg said that she'd like to see women speaking up in the moment when something is amiss. 'Listen, in the old days we would call Joesome folks of a certain age would say hes overly familiar,' Goldberg said. 'Most politicians when theyre doing this with you, they areJoe is a hands-on kind of guy. Ive never heard anyoneshe [Flores] says she felt violated. I have to take her at her word. But it would have been nice if she turned to him and say, "You know what, I dont really like this. Please dont do this, Mr. Vice President. Im not comfortable with this." Something, because hes standing right there.' Goldberg drove that point home again a moment later, saying, 'I want women to get to the place where they can say, "Hey, you just made me uncomfortable,"' She added: 'This idea that you have to tiptoe away from this, or you have to carry it. You do not have to carry it. If someone makes you uncomfortable, tell them.' In reference to Flores' allegations against Biden, Goldberg directed her comments at the former Nevada Lt. Governor candidate, saying, 'He came down to do you a favor. He was at your fundraiser. You had every right to say "Dont do that Joe."' Flores does not allege that Biden sexually assaulted her. She told CNN that she merely wants to bring attention to what she sees as a whitewashing of Biden's contact with women. She said: 'Part of the reason why I finally decided to say something was those behaviors were not being taken very seriously. They were not being considered from the perspective of the woman on the other side of that power dynamic, on the receiving end.' Sunny Hostin (pictured) was the only woman on The View to bring up the power dynamic at play with a political figure such as Biden, but called his responses to allegations 'appropriate,' adding, 'I dont know if well see anymore smelling of hair and kisses' Hostin made this point on The View on Monday, saying: 'Im sort of in the middle on this in the sense, I do believe with this particular situation there was a power dynamic. Youre talking about the vice president of the United States. She [Flores] was running for lieutenant governor. She may not have wanted to offend him. 'A lot of women get put in that kind of situation where theyre offended, and theyre uncomfortable, but they may not say anything. Thats one thing.' In response to Flores' allegations, Biden said he may not 'recall these moments the same way' that the women do. 'But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. I will also remain the strongest advocate I can be for the rights of women,' he said. 'I will fight to build on the work I've done in my career to end violence against women and ensure women are treated with the equality they deserve.' On the View, Hostin gave Biden credit for the way he reacted to the claim, after spokespeople first denied any inkling that Flores may have been bothered by Biden's actions. 'I think that is the appropriate response,' Hostin said. 'Perhaps he didnt intend to make her uncomfortable, but shes saying, "You did make me uncomfortable."' Flores says she had no prior relationship with Biden, who campaigned for her in 2014, that would make it appropriate for him to kiss her head and touch her shoulders the way he did. 'You don't expect that kind of intimate behavior from someone so powerful and someone who you just have no relationship whatsoever to, to touch you and feel you and be so close to you in that way,' she said. Biden said he offered 'countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort' that may have been photographed all of them innocent in nature. On Monday's airing of The View, Abby Huntsman (right) said, 'I always wonder when these things come out, what is the motive for this person? Is it simply to let people know, I was uncomfortable, which you could have done in private? Or is it because you want someone else to win and you want him to have doubts about announcing or the presidency?' Huntsman didn't confined her comments to Biden and his potential bid for the 2020 president On Monday's airing of The View, Huntsman said, 'I always wonder when these things come out, what is the motive for this person? Is it simply to let people know, I was uncomfortable, which you could have done in private? Or is it because you want someone else to win and you want him to have doubts about announcing or the presidency?' Huntsman didn't confined her comments to Biden and his potential bid for the 2020 president. 'Ive had concerns about the #MeToo movement from the beginning about getting to this place where you cant have normal interactions with each other,' she added, before turning her comments back to allegations brought by Flores against Biden. 'This was uncomfortable, and thats her place. Are we going to get to a place where we cant shake hands or hug each other? I worry about that.' Before the conversation was over, Goldberg, McCain and Behar had vouched for Biden. 'Joe Biden is a good and decent man,' McCain said. 'I vouch for his character and in my personal experience.' Goldberg agreed, saying, 'Im doing the same.' 'Me too,' Behar added. 'Fake news' is stirring up prejudice and hatred and is a sign our culture is 'bending facts to suit particular interests,' according to the Pope. The pontiff's stark warning was issued in a letter to young people around the world following an array of scandals. 'Social networks encourage contact between people who already think alike, precluding them from debate,' he said. 'These closed circuits facilitate the spread of fake news and false information, fomenting prejudice and hate,' the pope wrote. 'Fake news' is stirring up prejudice and hatred and is a sign our culture is 'bending facts to suit particular interests,' the pope said in a stark warning to young people around the world 'There are huge economic interests operating in the digital world, capable of exercising forms of control as subtle as they are invasive, creating mechanisms for the manipulation of consciences and of the democratic process,' he said. The Argentine pontiff cited prolific Catholic teenager Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia in 2006. 'He saw that many young people, wanting to be different, really end up being like everyone else, running after whatever the powerful set before them with the mechanisms of consumerism and distraction,' the pope wrote. 'As a result, Carlo said, "everyone is born as an original, but many people end up dying as photocopies". Don't let that happen to you!' 'It is not healthy to confuse communication with mere virtual contact,' the pope wrote. 'Indeed, the digital environment is also one of loneliness, manipulation, exploitation and violence... blocking the development of authentic interpersonal relationships.' In the wide-ranging document, the pope also warned of the dangers of historical revisionism, as exploited by increasingly powerful populist politicians. The pontiff said social media encourages contact between people who already think alike, precluding them from debate 'If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future that he holds out, doesn't it then become easy to draw them along so that they only do what he tells them? 'He needs the young to be shallow, uprooted and distrustful, so that they can trust only in his promises and act according to his plans.' The synod recognised that many young people no longer see the Church as significant in their lives, but rather as 'a nuisance, even an irritant', the pope said. Some of the reasons for this are understandable, including 'sexual and financial scandals; a clergy ill-prepared to engage effectively with the sensitivities of the young... the passive role assigned to the young within the Christian community.' It is important for the Church to be 'living', so it can 'look back on history and acknowledge a fair share of male authoritarianism, domination, various forms of enslavement, abuse and sexist violence'. 'With this outlook, (the Church) can support the call to respect women's rights... while not agreeing with everything some feminist groups propose.' Packiam Ramanathan, 73, has been cleared of murdering her husband Kanagusabi Ramanathan at their east London home after jurors heard she suffered decades of bullying and abuse at his hands An elderly woman who clubbed her partly-paralysed husband to death after claiming he abused her for decades was cleared of murder today in just 30 minutes. Packiam Ramanathan, 73, killed her 76-year-old spouse Kanagusabi Ramanathan at their home in East Ham, east London, on 21 September. The Old Bailey in London heard paramedics found the wheelchair-bound victim, who suffered from blood cancer, lying dead in one of the bedrooms and a post mortem found he died of multiple head and neck injuries. A blood-stained wooden stick was found in a hall cupboard and Mrs Ramanathan admitted killing her husband with the weapon due to 'decades of bullying' including being referred to as 'w***e' and 'c**t'. She told the court she snapped after discovering he was already married to another woman and had fathered three children with her. The jury believed her version of events and took just 30 minutes to acquit the pensioner of murdering her former factory worker husband. The couple are originally from Sri Lanka and have also lived in Germany before moving to London in 2007. Prosecutor Sally O'Neill QC said she launched 'a brutal and sustained attack' on her defenceless husband he was lying in his bed and was probably motivated by anger'. But Stephen Kamlish QC, defending, said Mrs Ramanathan was 'a properly abused slave' who 'snapped' after being made to feel 'invisible' by her abusive partner. She had earlier admitted manslaughter and was remanded in custody by Judge Anuja Dhir QC ahead of sentence on Friday. Mrs Ramanathan had told the court her husband beat her and frequently accused her of infidelity with a fishmonger who called her 'darling'. The Old Bailey heard she was 'married off' to her husband aged 37 in Sri Lanka after her parents died. The Ramanathans then fled the country in 1983 as refugees to Bavaria, Germany, in 1985, and lived in a camp for two years. It was in these two years, while Mr Ramanathan worked in a factory and as a security guard at a German Army base, that the abuse began, the court heard. He would return to her drunk and begin to ask about her former sexual partners which she denied having. Once, he became so drunk he hurled a paperweight at her leaving a scar on her forehead to this day. In 2005, when the couple went back to Sri Lanka, Mrs Ramanathan refused to return to Germany with her husband and stayed with her family for two years. The couple reunited in 2007 and moved to the flat in East Ham. When they returned to Sri Lanka again in 2012, Mrs Ramanathan once more refused to accompany her husband back to the UK and spent another two years in her home country. After coming to England in 2014, she visited her homeland again the following year and had only been living with her husband for six months at the time of his death having been 'summoned back' after almost three years abroad. Ms O'Neill said: 'It may well be that she resented being asked or required to return to London to look after her husband who was becoming increasingly dependent on her.' The couple had been arguing about money and Mr Ramanathan had written a letter to the Sri Lankan police the day before his death accusing his wife and brother-in-law of theft and fraud over a property that had been entrusted to him in Sri Lanka. Mrs Ramanathan's niece, Mathusha Fernando, went to the flat with her husband on the day of her uncle's death after he failed to call her in the morning and they were let in by the pensioner. Ms O'Neill said: 'They passed Mr Ramanathan's bedroom. The court heard Mr Ramanathan, pictured, was beaten to death with a wooden stick and his wife admitted manslaughter, for which she will be sentenced on Friday 'The door was partly open and Mathusha could see Mr Ramanathan lying on his back in bed; she thought he was asleep. 'When they got into the kitchen, the defendant asked Mathusha to sit down then said "I have beaten him". 'I am telling you what has happened. I have hit him, beaten him, he died.' But Mr Kamish told jurors: 'She has never lifted a finger against anyone in her life. 'She has never even killed an insect and yet the prosecution want you to convict her so she can be described for the rest of her life as a murderer. 'This is an unfair prosecution, it is not only unfair in the facts of the prosecution, but in the way, it has been prosecuted. 'The only real issue is why she killed her husband. The fact that she did it with this pole has been admitted. 'The prosecution left out much of the abuse from their evidence. They will tell you that she is not even entitled to put forward a defence of loss of self-control because the abuse was not bad enough. 'He called her a "whore". He was saying to her "Whore make us some tea", or "c**t you f****d the fish monger". 'Everyone has admitted she was a slave but not just a slave - a properly abused slave.' Jurors heard in 2012 she walked along the train tracks at Newham railway station waiting for a train to kill her but at the last moment pulled back. Mr Kamlish added: 'This case is a textbook case of snapping, finally, after having the fortitude not to snap over such a long time.' He said Mrs Ramanathan 'had a bit more peace' during her spells in Sri Lanka. But that ended when her husband tried to 'scare her enough to get her back, or to have her thrown out of her own family house so that she'll have nowhere else to live and be forced to come back'. Mr Kamlish said: 'When she got back in 2018 she was subjected every single day to the abuse and the words and the accusations about f***ing other young men. 'She's 73, but he had a campaign against her to make her life hell.' Detective Sergeant Anthony Atkin, the investigating officer from the Met's Homicide and Major Crime Command, said: 'The jury carefully considered the evidence placed before them and felt that this was a sad case whereby Packiam Ramanathan had killed her husband, Kangusabi. 'In a moment, for one or a number of reasons, she lost self-control therefore is not guilty of murder but of manslaughter, to which Packiam had already pleaded guilty to. 'This was a tragic case whereby an elderly, vulnerable man lost his life and the circumstances surrounding how and why needed to be put to a jury in order that they could listen to Packiam's account and test this against the evidence. 'I thank them for their time and careful deliberations following which they came to this verdict. I hope this will give some closure to Kangusabi's family.' Disgraced entrepreneur Martin Shkreli has been placed in solitary confinement as authorities investigate allegations he used a cellphone to run his business from prison. The US Bureau of Prisons launched the probe last month after the Wall Street Journal reported that Shkreli - once dubbed the most hated man in America - had secretly been contacting executives at his company, Phoenixus AG, using a contraband smartphone. Two sources have now told Forbes that Shkreli has since been put in solitary confinement at Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Dix, New Jersey. The 'Pharma bro' is also alleged to have used the illegal device to regularly update his social media pages and is even said to have fired the company's chief executive last month. 'When there are allegations of misconduct, they are thoroughly investigated and appropriate action is taken if such allegations are proven true,' the Bureau of Prisons said last month. Martin Shkreli (above) has been accused of using a contraband cell phone to operate his pharmaceutical company from behind bars Shkreli, 35, is serving a seven-year sentence for fraud after he lied to investor in two failed hedge funds 'This allegation is currently under investigation.' The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) wouldnt confirm that Shkreli had been placed in solitary confinement, saying it would not release information about an individual inmate's conditions of confinement. Shkreli, 35, is serving a seven-year sentence for securities fraud at the Federal Correctional Institution, a low security prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey. He was found guilty of lying to investors in two failed hedge funds and cheating them out of millions. The Bureau of Prisons said federal prisoners caught in possession of cellphones face up to an additional year behind bars if convicted. Shkreli also could face additional disciplinary sanctions within the prison if he is found to have conducted business. In their investigation, the WSJ claim Shkreli 'remains the shadow power' at his drug company. His current sentence is unrelated to the 2015 furor he caused when he raised the price of a life-saving drug for cancer and AIDS patients from $13.50 a pill, to $750 a pill Shkreli is currently serving a seven-year sentence for securities fraud at the Federal Correctional Institution, a low security prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey If forecasts hold true, the company - in which Shkreli owns a 40% stake - could be worth $3.7 billion by the time he's served his sentence. Shkreli had been charged with eight counts of securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, for his role managing MSMB Capital Management and MSMB Healthcare between 2009 and 2014. The case was unrelated to the 2015 furor he caused when he raised the price of a life-saving drug for cancer and AIDS patients from $13.50 a pill, to $750 a pill. He earned the nickname 'Pharma Bro' for his maverick persona and often questionable conduct. In 2015, he paid $2 million at auction for an unheard Wu-Tang Clan album, which he later surrendered to authorities as part of a forfeit in his sentencing. The young Chilean student who suffered horrific injuries during a shocking a hit-and-run incident on Sunday night had only been working as an Uber Eats delivery cyclist for two weeks. Javiera Paz Verdugo Morgado has been living in Perth on a working holiday visa since August 2018 with the hope of starting her master's degree next month. To earn funds for her education, the 23-year-old signed up to deliver food, but was tragically hit by a white Land Cruiser and dragged for 100 metres while working in Carlisle. She suffered broken ribs, a fractured chest, wrist and heel, and will need a skin grafts to replace a significant portion of her torso that was ripped off during the hit-and-run. She currently remains in a serious condition in Royal Perth Hospital's trauma unit. The young woman who suffered horrific injuries after she was involved in a hit-and-run incident had only been working as an Uber Eats delivery cyclist for two weeks Javiera Paz Verdugo Morgado has been living in Perth on a working holiday visa since August 2018 with Carlos Canales De La Cerda Saens (left), and the pair married in December Javiera Paz Verdugo Morgado (pictured) is in hospital in a serious but stable condition after suffering extensive injuries while delivery food in the Perth suburb of Carlisle on Sunday night A friend also living in Perth told Daily Mail on Tuesday the 23-year-old 'is conscious, but very badly hurt and with multiple fractures.' Friends and family have created a GoFundMe page to help cover Ms Verdugo's mounting hospital bill, and are asking people to donate as 'everyone knows being on a working holiday visa means things may not be made easy'. Ms Verdugo's brother, Erwind, thanked his community for their ongoing support. He told Daily Mail Australia his sister is on the long road to recovery after having emergency surgery. Doctors told the family Ms Verdugo's helmet 'without a doubt' saved her life. 'My mother is currently doing all the paperwork in order to travel to Javiera's side as soon as possible,' Erwind said. Friends and family have created a GoFundMe page to help cover Ms Verdugo's mounting hospital bill She suffered from broken ribs, a fractured chest, wrist and heel, as well as needing skin grafts for a significant portion of her torso Doctors told the family Ms Verdugo's helmet 'without a doubt' saved her life Ms Verdugo's brother, Erwind, thanked his community for their ongoing support Uber has previously come under fire for its lack of security for drivers and riders in a modern day gig economy. The company appeared to change procedures and began offering insurance for all riders and drivers. Ms Verdugo's family said they have not yet clarified where to go from here with the company, but her older brother is expecting to meet with figureheads at the company on Wednesday to discuss insurance options. She was hoping to begin studying her masters degree this month after working hard to further her English skills, and currently has a degree in finances from Chile. She traveled here with Carlos Canales De La Cerda Saens, and the pair married in December. Advertisement MPs are playing a 'dangerous game of brinkmanship' with the country's future, Yvette Cooper said today as she launched an audacious attempt to block a no-deal Brexit. The former Labour minister warned that politicians were 'running out of time' after she tabled a new bill that would force Theresa May to ask the EU for another extension to Article 50 to after April 12 if her deal fails to pass first. It came as rebels seemed to have abandoned hopes of holding a third round of so-called indicative votes on Wednesday, after two previous votes on Brexit alternatives chosen by backbenchers ended in deadlock. 'We are all running out of time. There is only 10 days until the danger is we crash out with no deal at all,' she told Sky News. 'We have been trying to condense into two days what should really have been done by the Prime Minister two years ago. 'There is too much of a game of brinkmanship going on, everyone just wants to leave this until the final couple of hours and hope that someone else blinks first. 'That is a really dangerous way to make decisions, it's a really high-risk game with the future of the country.' Yvette Cooper accused MPs of trying to 'leave this until the final couple of hours and hope that someone else blinks first' after tabling the bill to delay Brexit Tory former minister Sir Oliver Letwin, who is also backing the bill, said 'We realise this is difficult. But it is definitely worth trying' Following the failure of MPs to unite behind an alternative to Mrs May's plan on Monday, the group, including Ms Cooper and Conservative former minister Sir Oliver Letwin aim to pass the bill through the Commons on Thursday. They want to ram through the draft laws tomorrow - holding a vote on the principle of their plan at 7pm and then to finish the process at send it to the Lords at 10pm. The timetable exploits a rarely used but existing procedure for agreeing emergency legislation in a single day. Even if the rebels pull off the plot the draft law will still need to go through the Lords - which Ms Cooper and Mr Letwin have no control over. The single-clause bill requires the Prime Minister to table her own motion seeking MPs' approval for an extension to the Article 50 process of Brexit talks to a date of her choosing. The group behind the bill, which also includes former Tory chair Dame Caroline Spelman, Commons Brexit Committee chair Hilary Benn, former attorney general Dominic Grieve and Liberal Democrat Norman Lamb, are aiming to have it approved ahead of the emergency EU summit on April 10. Speaker Bercow says he will allow rebel bill's one-day passage Speaker John Bercow has suggested that he would allow the Cooper-Letwin Bill through the Comons in a single day if necessary. He made the remark, likely to spark fury among Brexiteers, in the House on Tuesday. Eurosceptic Sir Bill Cash, chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, had said he had 'grave concerns' about the idea of a bill 'effectively being rammed through in one day'. Sir William said: 'This is a reprehensible procedure in the context of this vitally important issue of our leaving the European Union. It is unconstitutional. It is inconceivable that we should be presented with a bill which could be rammed through in one day.' Mr Bercoew replied 'I rather imagine anyone within a 50-mile radius of this place would be aware of your views on this important matter given the force and frequency with which you have raised them. 'The House voted to give precedence tomorrow to a business of the House motion which has not yet been tabled. So we await that. 'Although this is an unusual state of affairs, it is not unknown for a bill to be pushed through the House in one day. 'Bills being brought forward and taken through their various stages in one day in Government time are not particularly unusual at all.' Advertisement Ms Cooper called on the Prime Minister to 'put forward a proposal, including saying how long an extension she thinks we need to sort things out'. 'If the Government won't act urgently, then Parliament has a responsibility to try to ensure that happens even though we are right up against the deadline,' the former Treasury minister said this morning. Sir Oliver, a former minister, was said to have acted after deciding that a no-deal Brexit was 90% certain to happen unless action was taken. He had earlier said: 'This is a last-ditch attempt to prevent our country being exposed to the risks inherent in a no-deal exit. 'We realise this is difficult. But it is definitely worth trying.' MPs rejected a call for a customs union with the EU by just three votes on Monday, while a demand for a second referendum was defeated by 12 and a 'Common Market 2.0' deal by 21. Number 10 officials are understood to have indicated that if the Prime Minister could not get her Withdrawal Agreement through on a fourth vote then she would seek a longer extension to the Brexit process 'possibly until the end of the year'. But she is believed to favour a no-deal Brexit rather than the possibility of revoking Article 50 if the choice came to it. Tory sources believe that winning over Labour MPs to back the deal may be a more likely prospect than persuading the DUP to change position, something which may make adding a customs union a more attractive prospect as it would meet one of Jeremy Corbyn's key aims. But such a move would cause deep splits within the Cabinet, with Brexiteer ministers strongly opposed to anything which would prevent the UK being able to strike free trade deals. Tuesday's Cabinet meeting began with a 'political' session in the absence of civil servants, which one Government source said was aimed at finding 'which option could the party stomach and which option could the country stomach'. Chancellor Philip Hammond is understood to be urging colleagues to accept a compromise which prevents either a no-deal scenario or no Brexit at all. That could include either a customs union or a second referendum - the two most popular options in the indicative votes process. Mr Barnier said that unless MPs vote for the Withdrawal Agreement within the next few days, the only remaining options for the UK are to quit the EU without a deal or seek an extension to Article 50. A no-deal Brexit was 'never our desired or intended scenario' but 'becomes day after day more likely', he said. Speaking in Brussels, Mr Barnier said: 'An extension would carry significant risks for the EU. Therefore a strong justification would be needed.' While the Withdrawal Agreement would not be reopened, Brussels is ready to 'rework' the UK/EU Political Declaration on the future relationship, he said. Mr Barnier warned that a no-deal Brexit would not end wrangles over the Irish border, citizens' rights and the UK's financial liabilities, which would be reignited within months in a more difficult atmosphere. The Government and Parliament both appear to be totally deadlocked ovr Brexit, with just 10 days to go until the UK is due to lave without a deal. The Cooper-Letwin bill would seek to delay it further to avoid a no-deal Brexit 'If there is no deal and the UK wants to discuss trade or other subjects, we will put the same subjects back on the table,' he told MEPs on the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs. 'If there is no deal, the atmosphere will be different. The lack of a deal means a lack of faith, a lack of deal means a rupture in confidence between us,' he added. In his letter to ministers, obtained by the Daily Mail, Sir Mark Sedwill warned of likely consequences of a no-deal Brexit, including: President Donald Trump said Tuesday he's leaving healthcare reform until after the election because Republicans may win back the House but his move comes after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear the Senate would not pass a repeal and replace to Obamacare. 'If we get back the House and the assumption - we keep the Senate and we keep the presidency, which I hope are two good assumptions - we're going to have phenomenal healthcare,' President Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday. 'I think we're going to have a great healthcare package. I think the Republican Party will become the party of healthcare,' he noted. President Trump said he's leaving healthcare reform until after the election because the GOP may win back the House and keep the Senate, making it easier His move came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he talked to Trump and made it clear the Senate would not pass a repeal and replace He offered no details on what would be in a GOP healthcare plan. 'When the plan comes out, which we will show you at the appropriate time, it's much better than Obamacare. So when the plan comes out, you'll see it, it's possible the Democrats would want to do it. I mean it's much better for the people, but I'm assuming they won't because the Democrats never do anything that necessarily is going to be anything other than political,' he added. Trump did an about-face on his plan to push healthcare legislation as his administration moves on trying to get the Affordable Care Act struck down in the courts. The change in strategy came after McConnell said he talked on the phone to the president on Monday and made it clear to him that Republicans will not move forward on a comprehensive package to replace Obamacare. 'We had a good conversation yesterday afternoon and I pointed out to him the Senate Republicans' view on dealing with comprehensive health care reform with a Democratic House of Representatives,' McConnell told reporters in the Capitol on Tuesday. McConnell noted Republicans had the chance to do comprehensive reform in the last Congress and 'were unable to do so.' 'I made clear to him that we were not going to be doing that in the Senate,' McConnell said. 'He did say, as he later tweeted, that he accepted that and he would be developing a plan that he would take to the American people during the 2020 campaign. Trump said in a series of tweets Monday night the effort would take place after the 2020 elections. The move was an immediate turnaround after Trump caught Senate Republicans off guard in a private meeting last week by announcing the intended focus on health care. Senate leaders immediately said they would leave it to the White House to try to concoct a bill that could make it through the Democratic-controlled House. 'The Republicans...are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare,' Trump claimed, in tweets he fired off after 10 pm Monday night. 'In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win....back the House,' he said. President Trump doesn't expect to prevail in the effort to strike down Obamacare, as he seeks to fashion the GOP into the 'party of health care' Trump highlighted the issue, writing that: 'Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesn't work. Premiums & deductibles are far too high - Really bad HealthCare!' 'Even the Dems want to replace it, but with Medicare for all, which would cause 180 million Americans to lose their beloved private health insurance,' he said, pointing to the plans favored by some Democratic presidential candidates. The the president talked up the still non-existent plan. 'It will be truly great HealthCare that will work for America. Also, Republicans will always support Pre-Existing Conditions. The Republican Party will be known as the Party of Great HealtCare,' the president wrote, misspelling healthcare. 'Meantime, the USA is doing better than ever & is respected again!' he added. Trump announced the reversal on Twitter Monday night Trump's decision to pull back from one of the top-ranked issues for the year reflected public reticence by leading Republicans. McConnell told Politico last week: 'I look forward to seeing what the president is proposing and what he can work out with the speaker,' in a line pointing to the challenge that would entail. 'I am focusing on stopping the 'Democrats' Medicare for none' scheme,' McConnell added. Just Thursday, Trump tweeted: 'The Republican Party will become the Party of Great HealthCare!' He said the party would be 'Moving forward in Courts and Legislatively!' Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Politico last week: 'I look forward to seeing what the president is proposing and what he can work out with the speaker' rather than taking the issue on himself Democrats had already seized on the issue, having campaigned heavily on healthcare in 2018. On Tuesaday, the House is set to vote on a resolution 'condemning the Trump Administration's Legal Campaign to Take Away Americans' Health Care.' The president is also focused on the healthcare fight in the courts. Trump is telling associates he does not expect a Republican-backed lawsuit to strike down all of Obamacare in the courts will prevail even as he champions an effort to make the GOP the 'party of health care.' Trump made the surprise decision to talk up health legislation last week immediately after the release of a summary of Robert Mueller's Russia probe, and last week was encouraging his party to make it a signature issue going into the 2020 elections. But he has told confidants he thinks his administration won't prevail in the lawsuit it joined, where state attorneys general and GOP governors are seeking to strike down the entire Obamacare law, Axios reported. The publication reports that it is the president himself who is behind the effort, following inside coverage last week that the decision was a product of a bitter internal fight that split acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney from two cabinet secretaries. A federal judge in Texas ruled in December that the entire law was unconstitutional due to its insurance mandate, since Congress and the president already reduced the penalty for failure to get insurance to zero. The Trump administration joined the lawsuit after the internal split and intervened in a filing before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. A couple dozen members of the New Jersey Citizen Action group protest outside the Capitol as the Senate holds a second day of voting on health care legislation on Tuesday, July 25, 2017 The Supreme Court could once again be called to decide the fate of Obamacare, as a Texas Judge's ruling makes its way to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Sisters and Tea Party members of Atlanta, Georgia, Judy Burel (L) and Janis Haddon (R), protest the Obamacare in front of the U.S. Supreme Court March 27, 2012 in Washington, DC. The Supreme Court continued to hear oral arguments on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Opponents of the Affordable Care Act rally before the Supreme announces its decision about the constitutionality of the President's efforts on health care reform Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney pushed for the legal move to join the lawsuit by Republican state attorneys general and governors It is not yet clear what type of plan the administration believes could clear the Democratic House and GOP-controlled Senate. But a conservative policy analyst told the Washington Examiner the administration is vetting policy ideas with three conservative think tanks. The administration has been 'having conversations' on health care and has been in contact with the conservative Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, and the the Mercatus Center affiliated with George Mason University, according to the report. Trump said last week his subordinates were 'working on a plan now.' Meeting: Amy Lappos, 43, says that Joe Biden appeared to be about to kiss her when they met in 2009 The second woman to accuse Joe Biden of inappropriate touching has told how she was convinced he would kiss her and slammed his response to the growing outcry as 'disgusting.' Amy Lappos, 43, of Greenwich, Connecticut, was a Democratic congressional aide when she met Biden at a fundraiser in the state. When he went to leave, he rubbed noses with her and she believed he was going to kiss her. 'I used to joke around that the vice president tried to make out with me but it's really not funny,' she told WTNH News 8. Lappos said she came forward Monday solely because of how Biden responded to the first accusation of inappropriate touching, by Lucy Flores, a former candidate for Nevada lieutenant governor. In his response to Flores, Biden said through a spokesman that he offered 'countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort' that may have been photographed all of them innocent in nature - over years on the campaign trail. He has yet to speak about the allegations in person, echoing Bill Clinton's response to renewed allegations of sexual assault which emerged while his wife was campaigning in the 2016 election. Lappos said: 'I saw that statement this morning and I was really disgusted by it. He uses the word affection in there and that's disgusting. 'Who wants affection in the workplace? That's not where we should be setting the bar. As a progressive party we should be setting the bar where the bar should be - that men respect the personal space of women.' Lappos, now a non-profit worker, described how in 2009 when she was an aide to Congressman Jim Himes she was approached by Biden as he left a fundraiser. Fundraising encounter: This is the night Amy Lappos says Biden held her by the head and rubbed noses with her. It is unclear if the photographs are from before or after that moment Speaking out: Amy Lappos, 43, a former Democratic Congressional aide, said she was making her account public because of Joe Biden's 'disgusting' response to Lucy Flores' describing how he kissed her head and smelled her hair 'When Lucy Flores came forward I read her story and that's exactly how I felt,' she told the channel. 'He reached out and put his hands behind my head and pulled me close and I thought 'He's going to kiss me.' 'He started rubbing noses with me and he was still holding on to my face and rubbing noses and then stopped, and he was talking. Someone asked my today what he said and I don't remember, I just remember thinking: "Is he going to kiss me?" 'It wasn't sexual - I don't think - but it was incredibly uncomfortable and it was not how he greeted the Congressman.' She also told the Hartford Courant: 'I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody. The story told by the congressional aide amplified concerns inside the Democratic party that 'Creepy Uncle Joe' - the front runner in every poll of candidates and likely candidates - is disqualified from holding the presidency. Biden launched an all-out defense of his conduct over the years with women on Monday with a spokesman blaming 'trolls.' Two incidents involving the wife of a former defense secretary and the daughter of a sitting senator are under refreshed scrutiny. Lucy Flores accused Biden of grabbing her shoulders and planting a 'big slow kiss' on the back of her head while she was campaigning for lieutenant governor in Nevada (pictured) Stephanie Carter, wife of Obama defense secretary Ash Carter says this photo of Biden touching her shoulder was 'misleading' and that he was helping her get through the nervous occasion of her husband being sworn in Other allegations against Biden that have emerged were 'photoshopped' and are 'forgeries,' said a spokesman for the potential presidential candidate in a lengthy statement. 'These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while. And to this day, right wing trolls and others continue to exploit them for their own gain,' Bill Russo claimed. He argued that real pictures of Biden with women he appears to be touching inappropriately are 'misleading' and have been misconstrued as he fought off damaging allegations to the longtime public servant's reputation. But Flores - and Lappos - do not claim any element of photoshopping in their accusations against Biden. Flores, a former Nevada politician, was first to rais the issue of Biden conduct, saying he made her feel uncomfortable when he kissed her on the head and put his hands on her shoulder before she went on stage at a campaign event. 'I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?' Flores wrote for New York Magazine. 'I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, 'I didn't wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual f**k?' She claimed, 'He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn't process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused.' Flores does not allege that Biden sexually assaulted her. She told CNN that she merely wants to bring attention to what she sees as a whitewashing of Biden's contact with women. 'This isn't the first time and wasn't the only incident where he was acting inappropriately with women,' Flores said on 'State of the Union' on Sunday. 'There's been documentation in photos, videos, stories that were written.' She said, 'Part of the reason why I finally decided to say something was those behaviors were not being taken very seriously. They were not being considered from the perspective of the woman on the other side of that power dynamic, on the receiving end.' Flores says she had no prior relationship with Biden, who campaigned for her in 2014, that would make it appropriate for him to kiss her head and touch her shoulders the way he did. 'You don't expect that kind of intimate behavior from someone so powerful and someone who you just have no relationship whatsoever to, to touch you and feel you and be so close to you in that way,' she said. At first, the former VP's spokesman said that neither Biden nor his staff had an 'inkling' that Flores was upset, and that none of them 'recall' such an incident taking place. As the inferences that Biden, who could announce a presidential campaign any day, is not suited for office grew, the former Delaware senator apologized to Flores and anyone else who was offended. He said he offered 'countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort' that may have been photographed all of them innocent in nature. Biden leans in to say something to Maggie Coons, next to her father Sen. Chris Coons after Biden administered the Senate oath to Coons in 2015 In this Sept. 9, 2012 file photo, Vice President Joe Biden talks to customers, including a woman who pulled up her chair in front of the bench Biden was sitting on, during a stop at Cruisers Diner in Seaman, Ohio. She's not sitting on his lap, but the photo played that way But his spokesman claimed Monday, as the fallout continued that Flores' references to documented instances of untoward behavior was in fact her seeing the work of trolls. Russo brought up photos with Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, and Sen. Chris Coons' daughter, in which Biden appeared to be touching the women without their consent. 'Each was ostensibly captured by a photo that some have interpreted in a way that is reflected consistently, and without scrutiny, in the reporting. Ms. Flores herself has cited the Carter photo as an example of the behavior she experienced,' he said. 'Here's the problem: in neither case is the often repeated and recirculated interpretation true. Both Stephanie Carter and Senator Coons have now felt compelled to speak out to put these ugly urban legends to rest.' Carter and Coons, a Deleware Democrat, have defended Biden in statements on the incidents. 'She did not think of it as anything,' he told The Washington Post. 'All three of my kids have known Joe their whole lives.' In a Medium post, the former secretary of defense's wife said the still image of Biden's hands on her shoulders while her husband was being sworn in as defense secretary has been taken out of context. Flores has yet to respond to being told by the spokesman that she misunderstood internet pictures. Two pensioners in Hong Kong have brushed with death after being smashed by a falling window when they were doing grocery shopping, according to local reports. The window reportedly fell seven storeys from a rented apartment above a market stall and hit 65-year-old Siu and 69-year-old Kwan. Police have detained a female tenant in the building in relation to the incident. The two shoppers, 65-year-old Siu and 69-year-old Kwan, are seen being hit by the window The incident occurred in the Sham Shui Po district in downtown Hong Kong yesterday morning The heavy window landed directly on Siu's head. Kwan, who was standing next to Siu was slashed by glass debris, reported Hong Kong news outlet on.cc. Both Siu and Kwan sustained wounds on the head and received first aid from paramedics before being taken to hospital, it is said. The wrecked window is seen by the market stall after plunging seven storeys down a flat The tower block was built in 1963 and refurbished in 2008. It has a total of 27 apartments The incident occurred in the Sham Shui Po district in Kowloon, downtown Hong Kong, yesterday morning. It is reported that the window, measuring half a metre wide (1.64 feet) and one metre (3.28 feet) long, had come loose outside a seventh-floor apartment. It had bashed through a roof above the market stall before landing on the unfortunate shoppers. A couple had just moved into the flat in question in the morning. It is said that the wife, 27-year-old Han, opened the window to hang laundry outside at around 9am. The window became disconnected from the hinge and plunged down. The window bashed through a roof above the market stall before landing on the shoppers Police have detained a female tenant in the building after carrying out an investigation After a preliminary investigation, police detained Han on suspicion of 'allowing objects to fall from height'. According to Hong Kong law, residents in the city could face a six-month prison term and a fine up to HK$10,000 (976) if they 'allow objects to fall from a building'. Both victims sustained non-life-threatening injuries and have been discharged from the hospital, according to Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao. A Papua New Guinean national studying in Queensland has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a young woman at a bar in 2017. Married father-of-three John Kanekunga, 34, was at the Mad Cow Tavern in Townsville on November 22 when he approached a 19-year-old woman from behind. The Townsville Magistrates Court heard how Kanekunga wrapped both of his arms around the woman before groping her breasts. Married father-of-three John Kanekunga, 34, was at the Mad Cow Tavern (pictured) in Townsville on November 22 when he approached a 19-year-old woman from behind He then slid his hands down her dress and grabbed her crouch, the Townsville Bulletin reported. The 19-year-old woman was left devastated and crying, which got the attention of security. Security escorted Kanekunga from the tavern, where he then argued with them outside. Police officers nearby heard the argument and came to investigate, at which time the victim told them what had happened and Kanekunga was arrested. Kanekunga studies in Australia and returns home to Papua New Guinea regularly. His lawyer, Tracy Brown, told the court her client was heavily intoxicated at the time and is deeply ashamed of his actions. She asked the court to impose a heavy fine to avoid a conviction being recorded against Kanekunga, which would likely impact on his chances of returning to Australia. However, Magistrate Ross Mack denied the request and imposed a conviction. His lawyer asked the court to impose a heavy fine to avoid a conviction being recorded against Kanekunga, which would likely impact on his chances of returning to Australia Kanekunga pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault and was sentenced to 18 months jail, wholly suspended. While handing down the sentence Magistrate Mack had some choice words for Kanekunga. 'Young women go to hotels they should reasonably expect they can do whatever they like there within the bounds of normal behaviour and not be groped, molested or otherwise touched by drunk old men who should know better,' he said. 'It is difficult to imagine a less attractive proposition than you that night for a young 19-year-old girl.' Runaway ISIS bride Shamima Begum has said she 'is bored of Brexit' because it 'goes on and on without end'. Ms Begum, who travelled to Syria to join the terror group from Bethnal Green, east London, in February 2015, stays up to date via a TV in the tent she shares with other ISIS brides in the al-Roj refugee camp. But the 19-year-old revealed she often switches the channel to watch cartoons because she's fed up of Brexit talk. Begum told The Times: 'It goes on and on without end. Its so boring now that I ask the sisters to flick on to the cartoon channel just to get away from it.' Runaway ISIS bride Shamima Begum has said she is 'bored by Brexit' an often turns the channel to cartoons to escape it Begum, who has lost three children prematurely since joining ISIS, was speaking for the first time after the death of her baby Jerrah. She told the newspaper: 'Since I left Baghuz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again. 'I was brainwashed. I came here believing everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion.' She claimed that her earlier comments to reporters in the refugee camp were influenced by the fact that she was worried ISIS fanatics would burn her tent down. She also revealed how she 'fell under the influence' of extremists online, including Scottish ISIS member Aqsa Mahmoud. Ms Begum (right), who travelled to Syria to join the so-called Islamic State from Bethnal Green, east London, in February 2015 with two school friends, has admitted she was 'brainwashed' She said: 'Since I left Baghuz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again' Ms Begum has also said she regrets talking to journalists about her situation because she was so desperate to return to the UK. She added: 'The responsibility that I had now, towards him, to get me back to the UK - I was just really desperate, and I just blurted out everything, I tried to answer every question really quickly, I did it out of desperation, maybe not all my answers were clear.' Ms Begum has claimed she makes weekly visits to the unmarked grave of her son near the al-Roj refugee camp, where she reads verses from the Qu'ran. The Londoner, who moved to the refugee camp after fears for her life, reportedly needs guards to accompany her during the trips. The baby died soon after UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid refused to allow Begum into the country and revoked her citizenship. A lawyer representing the family wrote to the Home Secretary and urged him to reverse the move following the death of the teenager's new-born son last month. Now Ms Begum has admitted she was radicalised online after feeling 'slightly depressed' and 'looking for a purpose'. She added it was 'easy to manipulate' her at the time because of a disconnect with her family. She is now being helped by other women in the camp who are de-radicalising her by talking openly about ISIS. She claimed she did not know about some of the 'really bad things' the terrorist group were doing. The news comes after her 'heartbroken' Dutch terrorist husband Yago Riedijk, 27, said Ms Begum was 'the perfect wife'. He is being held in a Kurdish detention centre in north-eastern Syria and faces six years behind bars if he returns home. Baby Jerah died soon after UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid refused to allow Ms Begum into the country and revoked her citizenship The news comes after her 'heartbroken' Dutch terrorist husband Yago Riedijk, 27, said Ms Begum was 'the perfect wife' The ISIS fighter spoke about his love for his wife in an interview with The Times. He said: 'We got very close very quickly. The perfect wife. She was so young and innocent. It was very easy for me to love her.' He married Begum just 10 days after meeting her in IS territory and has also come out and defended the decision to do so despite her being just 15 at the time, and him 23. Riedijk also dismissed claims that his wife had a deeper role in the organisation, saying that she was 'just a housewife'. Shortly after their wedding, he was arrested and jailed by ISIS in Raqqa for seven months. Jailed on spying charges, he was tortured and interrogated during his incarceration, with his wife claiming that it triggered her loss of faith in the Islamic caliphate. In his interview, Riedjik, who's from Arnhem in the Netherlands originally, claims that he and his wife were naive victims of ISIS and repeatedly calls for forgiveness for both. Riedjik, whose ISIS alias was Abu Sarayah, added that he and his wife had loved their children 'so much' and that their deaths had a huge impact on Begum. Joe Biden has a Hagar the Horrible cartoon on his office desk. It depicts Hagar being blasted in a boat by a huge storm and shouting up at the Heavens: Why me?. And God replies: Why not? Biden was sent the cartoon by his father, after his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a horrific car accident 45 years ago. It was intended to help him avoid trying to over-rationalise the tragedy and understand that bad stuff happens to all of us. Biden was given this Hagar the Horrible cartoon strip by his father after his wife and child were killed in a car accident But few people have had stuff as bad as Joe Biden. Three years ago, he lost another child his brilliant, handsome, charming son Beau, to brain cancer at just 46. It was a few days after Beaus death that Biden rang to thank me for a column I wrote praising his son as the best president America will never have. You know, he said, theres no worse thing in the world than losing a child. Nothing. Im sure hes right, and yet hes had to endure this horror twice, and hes lost a wife too. Joe Biden with his first wife Neilia and baby daughter (top) who died in a car accident in 1972. Below Biden attends the funeral of his son Beau who died of brain cancer in 2015. So Joe Bidens lived a long, tough, often horribly sad life. Despite this, hes dedicated himself to public service with, by common consent, great skill, tenacity, hard work and charm establishing him as one of the most famous and admired politicians in America. He ticks just about every box required to run for the highest office: First, Bidens incredibly experienced, having spent eight years as Barack Obamas vice-president. Second, he knows better than most how Washington really works and understands the vital importance of crossing the aisle to get stuff done. Some of his best friends are Republicans. Third, what you see with Biden is what you get: hes an honest, decent, intelligent and wise man. Fourth, hes ferociously loyal and commands great respect within his own party. Just ask President Obama, who repeatedly relied on his No2 to bail him out of tricky situations. Vice President Joe Biden shares a joke with President Barack Obama at the White House in 2017 Fifth, he is a loving family man with no whiff of affairs. No wonder then that hes has been so widely touted as the perfect candidate for the Democrats to put up against Donald Trump in 2020. And yet today, before hes even declared hes running, his whole potential campaign lies in the balance. Bidens been accused of being too handsy by two women. Neither claims he sexually assaulted them. They just say he was a bit tactile for their liking. One, Lucy Flores, who was running as a Democratic candidate for Nevadas lieutenant governor in 2014 when then Vice-President Biden flew in to support her, says he smelled her hair and kissed her on the back of the head at a campaign event in 2014. Im not suggesting I felt sexually assaulted or sexually harassed, she said. I felt invaded. I felt there was a violation of my personal space. And its being dismissed as if its just Biden being Biden. Boys will be boys. No big deal. It IS a big deal. Joe Biden with Lucy Flores, who is accusing him of inappropriate behavior, as the pair stump for Nevada democrats ahead of the November 2014 election The other, Amy Lappos, a former aide to a Democratic congressman, says Biden touched her face with both hands and rubbed noses with her at a private home fundraiser a decade ago. She called on Biden not to run, saying: Uninvited affection is not OK. Objectifying women is not OK. Biden responded by saying: In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once never did I believe I acted inappropriately. Biden with Amy Lappos, who has also accused him of touching her inappropriately Twitter has exploded with supposedly incriminating photos of Biden hugging women, but it's also exploded with myriad photos of him hugging men. He thus appears to a very enthusiastic non-gender-specific hugger. But the big question being asked is whether Bidens a hugger or harasser? The answer appears to be that it depends whos being embraced. Some women, like his two current accusers, find this kind of thing a bit creepy. Other women dont. One of Bidens supposed victims, Stephanie Carter, was given the Biden handsy treatment while her husband Ash Carter was sworn in as defense secretary in 2015. But yesterday, when the clip raged away online as damning evidence that hes a touchy-feely pervert, she fiercely defended him, saying: The Joe Biden in MY picture is a close friend helping someone get through a big day, for which I always be grateful. Joe Biden is also accused of touching Stephanie Carter in an inappropriate fashion when her husband Ash was sworn is as Defense secrtary in 2015 - but she says his gestures were not untoward and merely a sign of their friendship Other high profile women raced to defend Biden too. Ambassador Susan Rice said: In my experience, he is warm and affectionate with women (and men). But never have I found his actions inappropriate or uncomfortable. Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Senator John McCain, tweeted: Joe Biden is one of the truly decent and compassionate men in all of American politics. He helped me through my fathers diagnosis, treatment and ultimate passing more than anyone of my fathers friends combined. I wish there was more empathy from our politicians not less. Abby Huntsman, daughter of Americas ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman, and McCains co-panellist on The View, offered a wider observation: Ive had concerns about the Me Too movement from the beginning, about getting to this place where you cant have normal interactions with each other. Are we going to get to a place where we cant shake hands? I worry about that. I think a lot of people, male and female, worry about that, because nobody any more seems entirely sure of the rules of social engagement. The problem for Biden is that most of the liberals now defending him would be ripping him to pieces if he were a Republican. Just remember the vicious treatment meted out to Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. So, as with everything in US politics these days, hyper-partisanship dictates moral judgement and Republicans are gleefully returning faux outrage fire with faux outrage fire. Biden's defenders say he is equally tactile with men as he is women, proving the gestures are in no way sexual Of course, theres currently a sitting president who paid off porn stars and admitted to p*ssy-grabbing. So when it comes to a moral bar for the White House, Donald Trump has set it spectacularly low. But whilst that should help Biden, its now harming him because Democrats are terrified Trump will simply use Bidens own handsy behaviour to nullify his own vulnerable problem with women. My own view of Bidens handsy crisis is that it all surely comes down to intent. Did he intend to be a sleaze-ball? Did he intend for these women to feel uncomfortable? Did he intend to get any sexual gratification or power trip from his behaviour? I believe the answer to all those questions is a resounding no. Joe Bidens not a predator, hes just an overly-tactile man who thought he was being friendly. But he's discovering now that Times Up for that kind of friendliness, and as a result well probably never see Joe Biden hug another human being in public again. Again, I ask three questions: Is that a good thing? Is that a win for women? Is that where MeToo wants to take everyone? Bidens probably looking at that Hagar the Horrible cartoon in his office today and wondering why the Gods are throwing this latest curveball at him. But I suspect it gives him proper perspective too. And as a result, I hope he resists the temptation to bow to this insane puritanical pressure and announces that he WILL run. Because right now, hes the best hope the Democrats have of beating Trump. And frankly, if a man as inherently decent, civilised, patriotic, compassionate, loyal and empathetic as Joe Biden is deemed unfit to be President of the United States, then nobody is fit for it. A man allegedly held a woman he met on dating app Badoo captive for four days and repeatedly beat, raped and threatened to kill her with a crossbow. Robert Wilson, 32, is accused of bashing the 39-year-old Vietnamese woman last week so badly she couldn't see. He also held a crossbow to her head shouting 'do you want to die,' beat her with a metal pole and handcuffed her, police allege. Wilson allegedly threatened to turn her into a 'money making machine' by pimping her out and forced her to bank transfer him $3,000. He finally released her from his home in Darley, Victoria when her friends began messaging him on Facebook. Police allege Robert Wilson (pictured) held a woman captive for four days at his home Wilson was arrested at his home on Tuesday and was charged with seven offences, including three counts of rape and one count of false imprisonment. He did not apply for bail or appear in the dock when his case was mentioned in Melbourne Magistrates Court on Tuesday night. Wilson was remanded in custody to reappear in court on Friday. Police statements from the victim describe how Mr Wilson's forced her to change her Facebook relationship status and move in to his home around March 15. On March 25, Wilson allegedly picked her up from a suburban business and drove her back to his home, where he punched her in the face and head before raping her. Police alleged the woman was threatened with weapons, including a crossbow and repeatedly sexually and physically assaulted over the four-day period. Darley man Robert Wilson, 32, allegedly imprisoned a 39-year-old Vietnamese woman in his home (pictured) from March 25 to 29 She was allegedly strangled and repeatedly asked 'do you want to die?' when she wouldn't give him her bank login details. Police alleged Wilson transferred thousands into his account after the victim gave him her bank account details because she feared for her life. Her friends grew worried and contacted the man, asking for information on her whereabouts, prompting him to release her the following day. She went to a friend's house and reported the matter to police before she was later taken to hospital where she remains with serious head and body injuries. In his statement to police, Mr Wilson claimed the woman agreed to lend him money, they had consensual sex once a day during the four-day period and had agreed to work on their relationship. Two New Jersey students have been charged with disrupting their schools WiFi system to avoid taking exams. Police said the 14-year-old boys, who are 9th-graders at Secaucus High School, in Hudson County, used a special app to overload the connection and make it impossible for teachers to give web-based tests. The WiFi connection was down for several days in March and the school - home to more than 600 students - was unable to teach many of its lessons as much of the curriculum is based online, police said. Police said the 14-year-old boys, who are 9th-graders at Secaucus High School, in Hudson County, used a special app to overload the connection and make it impossible for teachers to give web-based test One day we were supposed to be doing work on our Chromebooks, but we had no activity whatsoever to do in class because the WiFi shutdown, Diego, a 10th grader, told The Jersey Journal. It interrupted the whole class, unfortunately. Alyandra, a junior at Secaucus High, explained that the boys were also thought to be taking requests from other students to shut down the WiFi on certain days. He was doing it to get out of tests and stuff like that, she told the publication. [One of the boys] was doing it also for [his friend], so she wouldnt have to take a test during the class. It was a big prank, really. The WiFi connection was down for several days in March and the school - home to more than 600 students - was unable to teach many of its lessons as much of the curriculum is based online, police said (file photo) The students were arrested on March 28 and charged with computer criminal activity and conspiracy to commit computer criminal activity before being released to their parents. The boys' names have not been released. The charges stem from an investigation that began after school officials notified police last Thursday. Secaucus Schools Superintendent Jennifer Montesano said the school's WiFi network has been restored and is now fully operational. Three people have been wounded after an explosion at a Russian secret service training centre in St Petersburg. Colonel Rifat Zakirov, a sapper, was hurt trying to defuse an explosive device found under a staircase at the GRU Mozhaisky Military Space Academy on Tuesday. Colonel Nikolay Kurday was also taken to hospital while local media reported a female teacher at the academy was wounded by shrapnel. All three had non-life-threatening injuries, according to Russia's Defense Ministry. Colonel Nikolay Kurday (left) and Colonel Rifat Zakirov (right) were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries after an explosion at a secret service training facility in St Petersberg A female teacher at the Mozhaisky Military Space Academy was also reported to have been injured by shrapnel after the unidentified device blew up on Tuesday afternoon Soldiers were evacuated after the bomb, initially reported to be a mine but later described as 'selfmade', was found underneath a staircase A fire truck is seen outside the Mozhaysky Military Space Academy, which was targeted by a bomber on Tuesday afternoon The incident unfolded in the early afternoon after an 'unidentified' object was found on the second floor of the building. Some reports suggested the device was a TM-57 anti-tank mine, but later reports suggested it was 'self-made'. Military chiefs ordered an evacuation of the building and called in the Academy's own mine-clearing unit to deal with the device. Colonel Zakirov was hurt as the sappers attempted to cover the device with body armour before it could be disposed of, accidentally detonating it. Emergency services rushed to the scene of the blast, while several windows were blown out on the second floor. Ten students were reportedly trapped after the blast destroyed the staircase. Local news website Fontanka reported that the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device with an equivalent of 200 grams of TNT. Windows on the upper floor of the building were blown out by the force of the bomb, which is also believed to have destroyed a staircase Fire crews were among emergency services which rushed to the scene of the blast, located in the Petrogradsky District of St Petersberg Authorities have not revealed who might be responsible for the killing or whether the suspect it was a terrorist attack An ambulance leaves the scene of the bomb blast watched by evacuated soldiers Jonnie Meek (pictured) died at Stafford Hospital following his taking part in a trial for new milk A new inquest is to be held into the death of a disabled boy at scandal-hit Stafford Hospital after it emerged that milk medics gave him may have killed the youngster. Jonnie Meek, who suffered from de Grouchy syndrome, which causes deformities, mental disabilities and growth problems. The youngster was fed through a tube and also suffered from lactose intolerance. When he was three years old, medics tried feeding him on a new milk they were trialling. He was dead within three hours, leaving his devastated parents John Meek and April Keeling demanding answers. Up to 1,200 patients died as a result of poor care at Stafford Hospital, which is run by Mid Staffordshire NHS Hospital Trust, between January 2005 and March 2009. Staff shortages meant that patients were sent home misdiagnosed or prematurely and some in the hospital were left unwashed for a month. An initial inquest recorded Jonnie's 2014 death as being down to 'natural causes' after he contracted pneumonia in his right lung. But the High Court has ordered a second inquest after fresh evidence emerged, suggesting the milk could have killed him. John Meek and April Keeling (pictured) branded the original verdict on their child's death 'ridiculous' and a whistleblower came forward to suggest they had been brushed off Lord Justice Hamblen said it was 'necessary and desirable' for a new inquest to reveal the true cause of Jonnie's death. Lauren Tew (pictured) accused staff at the hospital of fabricating a witness statement in her name The court heard the boy, from Cannock, suffered from 'complex health problems', including the rare congenital disability de Grouchy syndrome and lactose intolerance. He was fed by a tube into his stomach and doctors were trying him on the new feed on the day he died. The judge said an initial post mortem examination recorded 'no reason to suspect the change of feed played a part in the death'. The parents said the verdict was 'ridiculous' and a nursing assistant who was in the room during the trial accused hospital staff of inventing a witness statement in her name. Lauren Tew, 26, who has since left the hospital, said Jonnies anxious mother was palmed off by nurses and a doctor who said things were normal. Ms Keeling said the skin on his hands began to darken, his mouth swelled up and he became fidgety after the trial. But a nurse who checked his condition at 2pm and then again 3pm recorded it as normal. WHAT IS DE GROUCHY SYNDROME? De Grouchy syndrome, also known as 18p Deletion Syndrome, is a genetic defect caused by the loss of part of the 18th chromosome and is present from birth. Nicknamed after French scientist Jean de Grouchy, who discovered it in 1963, the condition is thought to affect as many as one in every 50,000 babies. The disorder causes physical deformities, growth problems and mental disabilities. Typical signs of de Grouchy syndrome include moderate to severe learning disabilities, slower growth in childhood, a round face and 'drooping' mouth, and deformed ears. Other signs are an unusually small head, brain and heart defects, a short or webbed neck, abnormal teeth, widely spaced eyes, or an undersized jaw although these are less common. Outlook for patients varies and depends on how severe their deformities are some babies only survive for a few months while others can live into adulthood. The condition cannot be cured. Source: Contemporary Clinical Dentistry Advertisement At 3.30pm she recorded that he was coughing and gave him suction to clear his airways and at 3.40pm he was placed on high oxygen and an emergency team summoned. He was pronounced dead at 4.11pm, two days after his third birthday. Consultant paediatrician Dr Martin Farrier conducted an independent review in October 2015. He said the 'most likely' cause was an allergic reaction to the new feed, the judge continued. A further review cited 'asthma exacerbation', allergic reaction and administration of a 'less hypoallergenic milk'. The case reached court after an application by the NHS Cannock Chase Clinical Commissioning Group for quashing of the first inquest. It said the new evidence showing the finding that the death was caused by pneumonia 'cannot stand' and the substantial truth had not been revealed. Lord Justice Hamblen, sitting in London with Mr Justice Stuart-Smith, quashed the original verdict. 'In the circumstances, we are satisfied that it is necessary and desirable for a new inquest to be heard,' he said. The family, who were not in court today, were helped in their search for the truth by NHS campaigner Julie Bailey, whose efforts resulted in the inquiry into the scandal-hit hospital in 2008. No date was set for the new inquest to be held. Jonathan Greggain leaving Carlisle Crown Court today after Sellafield Ltd was fined 380,000 when the production worker was contaminated with plutonium Sellafield Ltd has been fined 380,000 after a production worker was contaminated with plutonium. Jonathan Greggain, 51, was working within a glovebox (sealed container) at the nuclear fuel reprocessing and decommissioning site in Seascale, Cumbria, when he felt a pricking sensation on his left hand as he handled a conductivity probe. But, one of the legs of the probe had corroded in the acidic environment and effectively become a dangerously sharp object, Carlisle Crown Court heard. Tests later revealed he had sustained an internal dose of plutonium, which has slightly increased his risk of developing cancer. Mr Greggain, who was present in court for Tuesday's hearing, is back at work but took six months off following the incident. In his victim personal statement, he said he had been diagnosed with depression and that the legal proceedings had made him 'stressed, depressed, frustrated, angry and disappointed'. Sellafield pleaded guilty on Tuesday to failing to discharge its general health, safety and welfare duty to its employees, contrary to Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work Act, on or before February 5 2017. Sentencing, Judge James Adkin said: 'It is agreed that hand working within gloveboxes is a frequent activity at the Sellafield site. Jonathan Greggain, 51, was working within a glovebox (sealed container) at the nuclear fuel reprocessing and decommissioning site in Seascale, Cumbria, (pictured) when he felt a pricking sensation on his left hand as he handled a conductivity probe 'By its plea the defendant has accepted that its employees were exposed to risk while carrying out work within the glovebox in question and that they did not take all reasonably practicable steps to ensure they were not. 'The system of work in place before the incident meant that a probe would only be replaced when it was found to have corroded.' However, he added that it could fairly be considered as an 'isolated incident' as Sellafield had 670 gloveboxes on site used for delicate handling of radioactive materials. Nigel Lawrence QC said plutonium entering the bloodstream via a wound was 'by far the most dangerous pathway to individuals' with deposits remaining in body tissues for the lifetime of the person affected. He said Mr Greggain received some eight times the statutory dose limit per year, although the defence pointed out the effective dose would be received over 50 years from intake and not on the day of the incident itself. Mr Lawrence continued: 'The bottom line, bearing in mind the high risk environment we are concerned with, is that we should have been talking about a proactive system rather than a reactive one.' James Ageros QC, for Sellafield, said the conductivity probes are now replaced every six months regardless of their condition. A full review of all gloveboxes and potential sharp objects within them had been undertaken and all others were in acceptable order, the court heard. He said everyone at the company, including chief executive officer Paul Foster who sat in the courtroom, 'express their deep regret and remorse for this incident'. In reaching sentence, Judge Adkin noted that Sellafield Ltd was a taxpayer funded non-profit making organisation and that much of the funding is devoted to trying to ensure operations are safe. Sellafield Ltd was also ordered to pay prosecution costs of 96,753. Following sentencing Dr Mina Golshan, deputy chief inspector and director of the Office for Nuclear Regulation's Sellafield, Decommissioning, Fuel and Waste Division, said: 'This case does not point to any broader concern about the control of risks and hazards across the Sellafield site and was instead related to a specific event and the outcome of our subsequent investigation. 'Sellafield Ltd has already learned lessons from this event, implementing improvements to help prevent a recurrence, and we expect it to continue to seek reasonably practicable improvements in all areas of its work affecting safety.' A spokesman for Sellafield said: 'Safety and security are our highest priority and we are extremely disappointed that our robust and thorough safety arrangements were unable to prevent the incident in February 2017. 'We apologise for the adverse effects this has had on the welfare of our employee. 'This is a matter we take extremely seriously as reflected by our guilty plea. 'This was an isolated incident that did not cause wider risk to workers beyond this task, nor any broader safety concerns. 'It is not indicative of a failure of the business as a whole.' Heart-stopping police bodycam footage shows the moment two hero officers rescue a man trapped in the upper floor of a burning home. The two Utah officers were on patrol in West Valley City when they noticed bright orange flames coming from the bottom unit of an apartment complex early Monday morning. The cops sprung into action, shouting 'fire' and pounding on doors to evacuate the apartment. The officers then notice the silhouette of a man waving his arms for help while he's stuck in a second story unit in the apartment with flames roaring behind him. Heart-pounding police bodycam footage shows the moment Utah officers save a man trapped on the second floor of a burning home on Monday morning The West Valley City officers launched their heroic rescue Monday and drove through a fence to bring the squad car up to the second-story window of the burning home to save a man Crash: Cops plowed their car through this fence in order to reach the trapped man The cops are seen shouting for the man to jump from the second-story window, but paralyzed with fear, he could not. Then an officer is seen getting behind the wheel of his vehicle, crashing through a fence, and parking the car next to the window where the man was stuck. An officer then clambers on top of the hood of the car to be close to the man and coax him out of the window. 'Jump! You're good, you're good, we got you! You can do it! Jump! Stick your leg out!' the officers are heard saying, encouraging him to jump out of the window. Waving for help: The man is seen above waving for help as orange flames fill his room Cops drove through the fence then up to the second-story window, clambered on top of the car, and coaxed the stuck man down Jump! This cop stood on the hood of the cop car and shouted for the man to jump, putting his arms out to catch him Coming down: Finally the man mustered the courage to leap from the window to safety Safe landing: The man, whose face is blurred, is pictured jumping and falling down onto the squad car, finally free from the flames The West Valley City Police Department shared video of the heroic rescue on social media on Monday The man then lunges out of the window and an officer catches him on top of the hood of the car. The two then clamber to the ground together and escape the scene as the house is engulfed in flames. 'These officers did not give up. They used every tool available to them to save this mans life, even if the only "tool" they had was a patrol car,' The West Valley City Police Department posted on Facebook on Monday evening. 'Under the direction of an amazing leader and supervisor who was now on scene, that initial officer rammed his patrol car through a fence and brought it right up alongside the burning building. With no time to spare, the officers piled onto the hood of the patrol car and gained just enough height to grab hold of the man, support him and pull him to safety as his home burned behind him,' the department added. 'As you will see in the video, there are extraordinary and heroic actions on the part of several officers and a WVCPD supervisor,' the department added, commending the officers' courage. Jacob Hourmouzus, 17, lost his life after being electrocuted along with a friend while trying to rescue a dog One of two teenage boys from California who died when they were electrocuted after jumping into an irrigation canal to rescue a dog has been named and pictured. The freak accident took place at 12.15pm Pacific Time on Monday near an orchard along Dixon Avenue West in Dixon, California. According to California Highway Patrol, the two boys walked into a Solano Irrigation District Canal to save the dog. One of the boys reportedly touched some kind of an electrical source - possibly a gate - that caused an electric current to travel through the water, reported Fox 40. First responders who were later summoned to the scene found both teens lying unresponsive in a nearby field. It is unknown at this time who pulled them from the canal. Paramedics attempted to revive the children before transporting them to the Kaiser Permanente Vacaville Medical Center, where they both died. Candy Carrillo, the mother of one of the deceased teens, identified her son to Sacramento Bee on Tuesday afternoon as 17-year-old Jacob Hourmouzus. Carrillo said her son and his friends were riding four-wheelers in the orchard when they saw that a dog had jumped into the irrigation canal. Video courtesy FOX40 Two teenage boys from California were electrocuted on Monday after jumping into this Solano Irrigation District Canal in Dixon to rescue a dog The water-filled ditch is located near an orchard and a field in Solano County Hourmouzus and another boy waded into the water, but the current in the canal was swift and the high school senior apparently grabbed onto a pipe or a gate for balance, which for some reason had live electricity coursing through it, according to the mother. 'I think there was negligence with the city and the county,' Carrillo told the paper. 'They killed my son and he should not have died this early.' She later continued, speaking of the local authorities: 'They could have put up signs, they could have fixed the downed power lines, or the short circuit that they had.' Turning her attention to her late son, Carrillo described the teen as 'an amazing person' who was kind, caring, lovable and 'very vocal.' She shared a memory of Jacob convincing her to take a friend into their home and sharing his room with him because the other boy had been evicted and had no family to care for him. It is believed one of the boys touched some kind of an electrical source - possibly a gate First responders are pictured administering first aid to one of the children, who died According to the Solano County Sheriffs Office, the dog that prompted the ill-fated rescue survived and was taken away by Solano County Animal Services to be treated for its injuries, according to The Reporter. Dixon High School said in a statement posted on Facebook that the boys were students there. Principal Stephanie Marquez characterized the fatal incident as a 'tragic accident' and announced that counselling services will be available to students and parents today. Two Fort Valley State University students were killed over the weekend after their vehicle collided with a tractor-trailer. Students Precious Waters and Kearsten Robinson, both 19, died in the fiery crash Saturday night. Georgia Harris, 55, the driver of the truck, was also killed in the accident. Best friends, Waters and Robinson, were traveling together in a Honda when they pulled onto Georgia State Route 49 shortly after 10pm. Best friends, Precious Waters (left) and Kearsten Robinson (right), both 19, were traveling together in a Honda when they pulled onto Georgia State Route 49 shortly after 10pm. Georgia State Patrol said the car, which was driven by Waters (right), crossed the center line and struck an 18-wheeler that was driven by Georgia Harris, 55. Harris was also killed in the accident Georgia State Patrol said the car, which was driven by Waters, crossed the center line and struck Harris' 18-wheeler and both vehicles caught fire. Police said the truck's fuel tank ruptured and exploded upon impact, causing both the car and truck to catch fire. The truck belonged to South East Carriers of Lawerenceburg, Tennessee. Authorities said the crash is still under investigation. On Monday, Fort Valley State University tweeted that a candlelight vigil will be held Tuesday evening at the C.W. Pettigrew Center Lawn. Police said the truck's fuel tank ruptured and exploded upon impact, causing both the car and truck to catch fire (pictured) 'Join Fort Valley State Universitys Student Government Association and members of the #FVSU Family for a candlelight vigil, remembering students Precious Waters and Kearsten Robinson,' the tweet reads. The university also released a statement on Monday that said the students 'were both full of life and potential'. 'The Fort Valley State University family expresses our most sincere condolences to the families of sophomores Precious Waters and Kearsten Robinson, both members of the Class of 2021. 'They each enhanced student life and the academic environment at this university. 'Their joy and smiles will be missed by everyone who knew them, and there will be a void on campus wherever their spirit was present,' the statement reads. Waters and Robinson were both sophomores. They were both popular on campus and a part of the university's dance team, P.H.A.S.E.S. Robinson (right) was a biology major and Waters (left) was an elementary and special education major Robinson's mother, LaToya Carter, shared on Facebook that a funeral service for her daughter will be held on Thursday. 'I want to thank everyone for their calls, words and prayers during this difficult time,' Carter wrote. Several friends and family members shared memories of Robinson, who was described as being 'a true angel' who always 'kept a smile on her face'. Waters and Robinson were both sophomores. They were both popular on campus and a part of the university's dance team, P.H.A.S.E.S. Robinson was a biology major and Waters was an elementary and special education major. Students sold baked goods and lemonade to raise money for the girls' families. Several students at the university are taking the deaths really hard, prompting one professor to halt classes on Monday. 'Continue to pray for Fort Valley State University students. They are taking the death really hard. Having to stop a lecture to console is never a good feeling,' one professor shard on Facebook. 'Please recommend they seek counseling. And let them know that ITS OKAY TO RECEIVE COUNSELING,' she added. The university is encouraging students who are in need of counseling services to call student affairs on 478-825-6291. Ford would have to take a 'long, hard look' at its British operations if the UK leaves the EU without a deal, the US carmaker said today. The motoring giant's Europe chairman Steven Armstrong also said they are stockpiling engines and parts ahead of April 12. If MPs don't vote for Theresa May's deal, or any of the alternatives, then the Britain could crash out of the bloc in ten days' time. Speaking in the Netherlands today Mr Armstrong said today that if 'frictionless trade' between Britain and the EU ends then Ford 'will have to consider seriously the long-term future of our investments in the country'. He added: 'A No Deal Brexit would be a disaster for the automotive industry in the UK and within that, of course, I count Ford Motor Company.' Ford's Europe chairman Steven Armstrong says the business would have to take a 'long, hard look' at its British operations if the UK leaves the EU without a deal Armstrong said Ford is stocking engines in Europe and components in Britain alongside bringing more vehicles into Britain, the company's third-largest global market where it builds 1.3 million engines but no vehicles. Ford has two large factories in the UK, the largest being its giant Dagenham plant. Yesterday the UK head of German industrial giant Siemens said Britain is becoming a 'laughing stock' over Brexit and risks leaving the trading bloc with a 'hugely damaging' No Deal. Juergen Maier, CEO of Siemens pictured at a Labour in for Britain Pro-EU campaign event in 2016, says the UK is becoming a 'laughing stock' over Brexit After Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal was rejected by parliament for a third time last week there is pressure from rival factions for a no-deal exit, a much softer divorce or an election. Juergen Maier said today: 'Where the UK used to be beacon for stability, we are now becoming a laughing stock. 'It has been clear for weeks, that the only way that this will be resolved is through compromise between the government and parliament'. Maier said it was becoming hard for him to win support from his board for investment decisions as Britain heads towards a 'hugely damaging No Deal Brexit.' 'Enough is enough. We are all running out of patience. Make a decision and unite around a customs union compromise that delivers economic security and stability,' he said in a letter to Politico. In year to September 2018, Siemens UK generated revenue of 5billion ($6.53 billion), the company's website said. At the end of September 2018, the company had 15,000 employees in Britain. Prime Minister Theresa May, pictured at a knife crime summit at No 10 yesterday, is struggling to keep a grip on Brexit In response the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman said: 'The PM has been clear over a period of months that she understands business wants certainty. 'That is why she has been working very hard to persuade Parliament to support her deal in order that business can have that certainty and security going forward. 'We haven't yet been able to achieve that but the Prime Minister fully understands that business is seeking certainty.' The warning came days after a former governor of the Bank of England also delivered an excoriating verdict on Britain's handling of Brexit - but said the UK should now leave without a deal. Lord Mervyn King said the country should depart on World Trade Organisation rules with a six-month delay to ensure adequate preparation, insisting there was little evidence it would lead to job losses. He claimed the economic costs of leaving with No Deal would actually be no different from staying in. Lord King claimed the economic costs of leaving with No Deal would actually be no different from staying in (file photo) Lord King told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme: 'My own personal preference would be to go back to Europe and say we have a clear strategy which is we want to leave without a deal. 'But we would like to take six months to complete the preparations to avoid the dislocation. 'I think we would have to take advice from the government and officials as to how long they now think it would take before our country is ready to leave without a deal.' Asked whether it was really possible to do so in six months, Lord King said: 'It depends on how far the preparations have got. 'And the government haven't been as explicit on that as they might.' The former governor said people should not worry about the economic impact of leaving the EU without any formal agreement. 'I don't think it is obvious there would be jobs lost at all,' he said. 'There would be some short-run dislocation costs. The more wild exaggerated view that somehow we're going to have queues of lorries on the M20 for five years or more is pretty absurd. 'I don't believe that with adequate preparation, or in the long term, that the economic costs of leaving would be very different from staying in.' Video captured a Southwest Airlines flight attendant rapping the safety rules to a plane full of passengers. The woman addressing the travelers over the broadcast system, named Adele, busted into the short rhyme and received cheers and applause at its end. The clip was recorded by Robert Stratton on a flight from Los Angeles heading to Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 23. 'Ive never had a flight like that before, it was great to start with,' Stratton said. 'Everyone on board really enjoyed it.' Adele started the performance by prompting the people on board the plane to help her out with the beat. 'Stomp, stomp, clap,' she chanted four times, as the crowd joined in. As the woman introduces herself as Adele, the person taking the video can be heard hyping her up, briefly making her lyrics inaudible. As clapping continues, the woman waves her hand from side-to-side and carries on with her performance. Video captured Southwest Airlines flight attendant Adele rapping the safety rules to a plane full of passengers en route to Utah from Los Angeles on March 23 Adele started the performance by prompting the people on board the plane to help her out with the beat, chanting, 'Stomp, stomp, clap,' four times. A passenger clapping is shown 'Fasten your seat belts, make them nice and tight,' she raps with a smile. 'Ya better do' em good, we're gonna check if they're right,' she goes on, wagging her finger in front of her face, with a slight bob in her step as she works the aisle . The hyping up continues with excited cheers throughout the cabin as the rap goes on. 'Fasten your seat belts, make them nice and tight,' she raps with a smile. 'Ya better do' em good, we're gonna check if they're right,' she goes on, wagging her finger in front of her face, with a slight bob in her step as she works the aisle 'Seats back and trays, locked it up right, pretty soon the ground will be out of sight,' she bangs on over the speakers. 'Laptop computers powered down and stowed away. Are we ready to go? Whatta ya say?' she carries on, to the great joy of all around her. 'Welcome aboard SWA,' she says to finish, with her mic-drop moment being swapped out for the polite placement of her mouthpiece into its holder. The Russian government has reportedly used a new law which allows it to remove news stories that are critical of Vladimir Putin. Russian news website TJournal claimed a story posted by several news outlets on Sunday night about graffiti on the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Yaroslav was ordered to be taken down by the Prosecutor General's Office. Sunday's incident was the first time the controversial emergency law has been used. Local media said the graffiti emblazoned on the Internal Affairs building 'accused Putin of being a homosexual'. The news stories concerned graffiti (pictured) which appeared on the pillars outside the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Yaroslav calling Putin a homosexual After being notified by the Prosecutor General's Office, Russia's censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, pulled all news stories relating to the graffiti. At least five news outlets in Yaroslavl were ordered to delete their coverage of the graffiti - according to reports. One local newspaper, Yarkub, said that it received a letter from Roskomnadzor demanding the story be taken off its website, and then a phone call. 'Roskomnadzor asked us to remove the "news by reference." Twice,' a statement from Yarkub read. 'At first it was a letter asking for the material to be removed before midnight. Then the head of the Yaroslavl office called the chief editor's phone. 'We consider the situation as an act of censorship, and absolutely groundless. The head of the Yaroslavl Roskomnadzor declined to answer the question of what laws we violated.' Vladimir Putin's new laws made it a criminal offence to 'disrespect the government' in news articles The new law penalizing expressions of 'disrespect toward the government' went into effect on March 29. Russia's parliament last month passed two controversial bills outlawing 'disrespect' of authorities and the spreading of what the government deems to be 'fake news'. The first ban refers to 'blatant disrespect' of the state, its officials and Russian society, and repeat offenders face up to 15 days in jail. The second bill prohibits sharing 'false information of public interest, shared under the guise of fake news,' the TASS state news agency reported. Both new crimes carry heavy fines. Two guards have been cleared of excessive force after they dragged a heavily pregnant black woman off a train in Sweden earlier this year. Footage showing the unnamed woman being hauled from the carriage for allegedly being without a ticket in Stockholm caused fury across the country in February. The clip showed the woman appearing to be pushed down onto the bench while her child watched on and she was later taken to hospital where she and her baby were reportedly given the all-clear. The prosecutor said she had escalated the situation by showing contempt for the officers and resisting their orders. In the clip which emerged in February from the metro station in Stockholm the heavily pregnant woman can be seen being hauled off the carriage by two guards The woman's young daughter was also on the train with her. After she put her arm around her mother, the woman was dragged further away and pushed on to a bench at the station Prosecutor Lucas Eriksson, as reported by the Local, said: 'They print out a fine which she throws on the ground. You need it to continue the journey and the guards then kindly ask her to leave the train. 'There is surveillance footage from inside the train as well and you can see there how she resists. It's the woman's behaviour that escalates the situation.' The prosecutor added his regret for the situation and given the circumstances it would not have been wrong for the officers to let her carry on. 'Sometimes it's simply not worth it. She had a child with her, I'm sorry for the child,' the Local reported Eriksson as saying. Following the incident the two guards were suspended while the police launched their own assault investigation. In the viral clip the woman is being pulled by two men as her young daughter walks behind with another woman. Her daughter was then taken by a third guard who spoke to her as she sobbed uncontrollably Swedish police were investigating the case as a potential assault but the prosecutors have since cleared them of wrong doing As the child puts her arm around her mother, the guards drag the woman further away and push her onto a nearby bench. Two guards pin her down while a third guard takes the child away to talk to her as she sobs uncontrollably. A second video shows the woman, with her pregnant stomach exposed, lying on the ground of the station as she is surrounded by guards. Despite the outrage the prosecutor cleared them of wrongdoing, the Local reported. Mohamed Fathy Hussein Zayan, 54, has been charged with attempted abduction after he allegedly tried to kidnap a five-year-old girl An Egyptian man is behind bars after he allegedly tired to kidnap a five-year-old girl at a West Virginia mall. The young girl's mother reportedly thwarted the kidnapping attempt by pulling a gun out and scaring off the man. Mohamed Fathy Hussein Zayan, 54, has been charged with attempted abduction after he allegedly grabbed the girl at Huntington Mall in Barboursville on Monday night. The girl had been shopping with her mother inside an Old Navy store when Zayan 'grabbed the child by the hair and attempted to pull her away', according to the criminal complaint. She tried to stop her kidnapper, dropping to the floor as he was 'still pulling her away'. That's when the girl's mother pulled out a handgun and told the man to let go of her daughter. The mother told investigators that the man released her daughter and sprinted out of the store and back into the mall, according to WSAZ. She gave officers a description of the suspect. Officers and mall security then spotted Zayan walking near the food court and arrested him. The young girl's mother reportedly thwarted the kidnapping attempt by pulling a gun out and scaring him off Officers and mall security then spotted Zayan walking near the food court and arrested him Zayan, who is from Alexandria, was arraigned at the Cabell County Courthouse on Monday night. Since he only speaks Arabic, an interpreter was used over the phone during the arraignment. Zayan's cash bond was set at $200,000. He was forced to surrender his passport and ordered to stay in West Virginia. He is currently being held at Western Regional Jail. The preliminary hearing is scheduled for April 8. Three people were left with electrical burns after a hot air balloon crashed into power lines in California on Monday morning. Two suffered minor injuries and one person was airlifted to hospital after the 8.10am incident with what authorities described as 'moderate to major burns' along her torso and left arm. One of the 29 passengers said as they hurtled toward the wire at around 15mph, he believed the captain who appeared 'out of it' - was playing a joke on them. The balloon was from a Napa-based Balloons Above the Valley tour. Scroll down for video Balloons Above the Valley hot air balloon containing 29 people hit power lines Monday around 8.10am in Yountville, California The group hit the tops of trees after the first set of power lines and had to tell the pilot to take the balloon back up Joanne and Anton Lang were on vacation in Napa Valley and claimed the pilot seemed 'out of it' 'He just never pulled up. He just never operated the balloon. I thought he was going to pull, like seriously, an April Fool's joke,' Anton Lang told KPIX 5. 'We all thought he was going to give us a scare or something silly. And he I don't know what happened. He just flew right into the power lines. Owner: Passengers said the pilot identified himself as Bob. Bob Barbarick (pictured) founded Balloons Above the Valley in 1977 'We hit the power line. It was a bare, steel wire and we hit and we dragged it for a distance. Time went by a minute or two before it cracked. The wire cracked. And when it cracked, it arced, and that arc is what burned the woman.' The pilot identified himself to passengers as 'Bob' and said he has 42 years of experience. Balloons Above the Valley's website states that Bob Barbarick founded the company in 1977, has 7,000 flight hours under his belt and is the 'last pioneer of hot air ballooning in the USA still flying'. Lang a New Jersey man on vacation with his wife Joanne - claimed that even after the incident in the Yountville area, the captain didn't spring into action to save them. With vineyards below, there aren't many safe places to land a balloon in the Napa Valley area. 'We hit the tops of trees after the first set of power lines. "Bob, you've got another set of power lines coming. You've gotta get up!" And then, you know, he got us up. It was at our request, not his action. He failed us,' Lang alleged. They said he was unhelpful and before the crash Anton believed it was an April Fool's joke Battalion Chief Jason Martin of CalFire said the person who called 911 was in the hot air balloon and 'she did not know where she was at'. A construction worker witness told KTVU: 'It came down a pretty good speed...You can't operate them. So when they come down, they come down.' Lang said he helped the badly burned woman out of the vehicle when they reached the ground. 'Did he not see it? Was he depressed? Was he on medication? Was he.it's been haunting me all day,' Mr Lang asked. A weekday trip costs $189 per person for a three-and-a-half hour time slot, including one hour in the air after the opportunity to watch them being heated up with propane before their sunrise suspension in the air. Joanne Lang claimed about the pilot: 'He didn't take control of anything.' The FAA said the hot air balloon they were on should be inspected for every 100 hours of flight time. The agency is currently investigating the incident. Balloons Above the Valley did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment. John Bercow ruled rebel MPs can try to push through laws to block No Deal in a single day tomorrow despite Brexiteer fury at the 'reprehensible' plot. Labour MP Yvette Cooper has published draft laws that would oblige the Government to seek a long delay to Brexit next week if there is not a deal by April 10. She wants to use Commons time grabbed by Tory rebel Oliver Letwin tomorrow to ram the law through the Commons in a matter of hours. Veteran Brexiteer Sir Bill Cash complained the idea was 'unconstitutional' today and urged the Commons Speaker to block it. But Mr Bercow told him pushing through laws in a single day was 'not particularly unusual' in itself, pointing out the Government does so in an emergency. The Speaker has repeatedly been accused of helping Remainers to frustrate Brexit and has threatened to block any further votes on Mrs May's Brexit deal. John Bercow (pictured today in the Commons) ruled rebel MPs can try to push through laws to block No Deal in a single day today despite Brexiteer fury at the 'reprehensible' plot Labour MP Yvette Cooper (pictured today on Sky News) has published draft laws that would oblige the Government to seek a long deal to Brexit next week if there is not a deal by April 10 The procedure has been used in recent months to pass laws relating to Northern Ireland, which does not currently have functioning devolution. The rebels will only be able to push through their draft law in a day if they have a majority of MPs on their side. The House of Lords can still block the law even if they pass it in the Commons. After Ms Cooper published her two-clause Bill today, Sir Bill, chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, said he had 'grave concerns' about the idea of a bill 'effectively being rammed through in one day'. Sir Bill said: 'This is a reprehensible procedure in the context of this vitally important issue of our leaving the European Union. It is unconstitutional. 'It is inconceivable that we should be presented with a bill which could be rammed through in one day.' Mr Bercow said: 'I rather imagine anyone within a 50-mile radius of this place would be aware of your views on this important matter given the force and frequency with which you have raised them. 'The House voted to give precedence tomorrow to a business of the House motion which has not yet been tabled. So we await that. 'Although this is an unusual state of affairs, it is not unknown for a bill to be pushed through the House in one day. 'Bills being brought forward and taken through their various stages in one day in Government time are not particularly unusual at all.' Veteran Brexiteer Sir Bill Cash complained the idea was 'unconstitutional' today and urged the Commons Speaker to block it After publishing her Bill today, Ms Cooper warned MPs are playing a 'dangerous game of brinkmanship' with the country's future. The former Labour minister warned that politicians were 'running out of time' after she tabled a new bill that would force Theresa May to ask the EU for another extension to Article 50 if her deal fails to pass first. It came as rebels seemed to have abandoned hopes of holding a third round of so-called indicative votes on Wednesday, after two previous votes on Brexit alternatives chosen by backbenchers ended in deadlock. 'We are all running out of time. There is only 10 days until the danger is we crash out with no deal at all,' Ms Cooper told Sky News. 'We have been trying to condense into two days what should really have been done by the Prime Minister two years ago. 'There is too much of a game of brinkmanship going on, everyone just wants to leave this until the final couple of hours and hope that someone else blinks first. 'That is a really dangerous way to make decisions, it's a really high-risk game with the future of the country.' Advertisement Smithsonian Magazine's 16th Annual Photo Contest received 48,000 submissions from 207 countries and territories between March 27 to November 30 2018. Photographers were invited to submit images under six categories: 'Natural World,' 'The American Experience,' 'Travel,' 'People,' 'Altered Images' and 'Mobile' and editors selected 10 finalists from each section. Rory Doyle from Cleveland, Mississippi will take home the Grand Prize award of $2,500 this year for his touching photograph of a cowboy hat clad father holding his newborn son, titled 'Newest Cowboy in Town.' Readers were also given the opportunity to browse through 60 finalists and vote for a Readers' Choice winner which goes to Carla Rhodes for her lovable photograph of two lizards titled, 'Giddyup, Partner.' Today marks the opening of Smithsonian Magazine's 17th Annual Photo Contest and they will be accepting submissions through November 30, 2019. In addition to the $2,500 cash prize offering, The Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel are sweetening the deal with a four-night hotel stay on Sanibel Island and $1,000 flight voucher. Below are the eight dazzling images that won first place in their correlating categories. GRAND PRIZE WINNER, 'Newest Cowboy in Town' by Rory Doyle from Cleveland, Mississippi was submitted under 'The American Experience' category. Doyle also had another image selected as a finalist in this category as well READERS' CHOICE, 'Giddyup, Partner': A lava lizard hitches a ride atop a marine iguana on Fernandina Island, Galapagos. 'Witnessing the mutualistic relationship between the two reptiles was truly magical,' said photographer Carla Rhodes Carrying: This image by Willem Kuijpers won first place in the 'People' category. Young boys in Trapani, Italy assist in carrying heavy floats bearing sculptures that depict scenes from the Passion of Christ during the day-long Misteri di Trapani procession on Good Friday 'The Painful Aftermath' by Jassen Todorov won in The American Experience section. The picture taken by airplane reveals the devastating aftermath of fires that ripped through Santa Rosa, California fires in 2017 'GRVTY2 No.4': 'Imagine, dream, bend and break the rules. My photo series GRVTY2 tries to see the world in an unexpected way. Places you see every day, either by traveling or on a screen, are turned into something else,' said photographer Daniel Garay who won in the Altered Images category Anuroop Krishnan's image titled 'Red-Fronted Lemur' was taken in Kirindy Mitea National Park, Madagascar and won in the Natural World category 'Spring Snow' by Denis Karasev depicts a fashionably dressed woman walking in Moscow at night, winning first place in the Travel section Master Nathaniel Simpson, 26, appeared in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Monday morning to face charges over the incident This is the dramatic moment an Ohio suspect steals a police cruiser left unlocked by an officer chasing him on foot before taking cops on a chase through residential streets. In the newly-released dash cam video the man can be seen making his way to the vehicle as the police officer desperately runs after him. The shocking footage, taken from five different police vehicles and including shots from inside the stolen cop car, then shows the four minute chase through Beachwood to recover the vehicle. The chase, which left two officers with minor injuries and four police cruisers damaged, came following reports of a stolen pickup truck. When that GMC was spotted by an officer pulling into a parking lot the driver jumped of the vehicle, running from law enforcement who gave chase on foot. The footage shows the suspect appear back in shot, jumping into the unlocked cruiser as the officer can be heard telling him 'I'll shoot' and not to take the vehicle. As the suspect reaches a dead end road he drives the cruiser, which was carrying weapons, up an embankment and the police fire shots. Dash cam video from inside the stolen police vehicle shows the man making his way to the cruiser as a police officer desperately runs after him through Beachwood An officer gives chase on foot as the two disappear from shot but the footage shows the suspect reappearing, making his way to the unlocked police car As the suspect reaches a dead end road he drives the cruiser, which was carrying weapons, up an embankment and the police fire shots The man is then seen driving on the wrong side of the road and appearing to stop for police before speeding off again during the chase He also breaks red lights and stop signs during the chase through residential streets Officers who disabled the vehicle with their shots were able to eventually bring it to a stop, arresting 26-year-old Master Nathaniel Simpson One of the pursuing officers can be heard saying: 'Units be advised, he's trying to get the rifle out of the center console; he is trying to get the rifle.' Another adds: 'He's not going very fast right now.' The man is then seen driving on the wrong side of the road and appearing to stop for police before speeding off again. He also drives through red lights and stop signs during the dangerous chase through residential streets. Officers who disabled the vehicle with their shots were able to eventually bring it to a stop, arresting 26-year-old Master Nathaniel Simpson, Fox 8 reports. Simpson appeared in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Monday morning to face charges over the incident which happened at the beginning of last month. This is the bizarre moment a conwoman pretended to trip over a crate of orange juice in an attempt to claim 3,000 compensation. Farida Ashraf, 41, was caught on CCTV stumbling over the pack at Al-Halal supermarket in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 2013, and claimed it caused injuries to her shoulder, shin, calf and hip. But the cameras also caught the moment two accomplices deliberately placed the crate on the floor moments before Ashraf walked into it. The footage shows her barely connecting with the package before walking out of the shop unaided. It was used against her by insurers Aviva in a private prosecution that saw Ashraf admit fraud at court and she was today handed a 21-month suspended sentence. Farida Ashraf (left) has been handed a suspended jail sentence for fraud after admitting trying to con insurers out of 3,000 in a 'tripping' scam at a supermarket using a pre-placed crate of orange juice, ringed Ashraf, 41, was caught on CCTV stumbling over the crate, pictured, and she claimed it caused her injuries to her shoulder, shin, calf and hip But the cameras actually caught her merely looking back at the crate before leaving, pictured The original incident took place in February 2013, and Bradford Crown Court heard Ashraf then waited almost a year to make the compensation claim. The court was told Ashraf hoped 'memories had faded enough and that CCTV had been erased' so that the compensation would be processed without being questioned. But Aviva launched an extensive investigation which ended in a civil court case in 2016 which found Ashraf's claim was 'fundamentally dishonest'. Aviva then decided to pursue a private prosecution after the police and CPS declined to investigate. Prosecuting, Nicholas Lumley QC described Bradford as 'something of a hotspot' for insurance fraud, putting it ahead of places such as London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool. He said: 'It is, we think, the first private prosecution arising out of a public liability insurance claim.' Mr Lumley said she had hoped memories would have faded by then and the CCTV from the Al-Halal premises would have been erased but a suspicious staff member had kept it. But the CCTV cameras also caught her walking out of the shop afterwards without any sign of injury, and the court heard she waited nearly a year to make the compensation claim 'hoping memories would have faded and CCTV would have been erased' CCTV also showed how the crate was placed behind Ashraf by a pair of accomplices, pictured Ashraf's bogus claim had led to staff at the store having the finger pointed at them while she even tried to blame her respected solicitors for instigating the claim without her permission. The court also heard her actions had run up huge legal bills, with the private prosecution thought to have cost 50,000 and the previous civil case hitting 'six figures'. Sentencing her, Judge David Hatton QC said these cases would not be tolerated. He told Ashraf, who had no previous convictions, the scam had been 'premeditated and planned'. He said: 'You no doubt anticipated that the insurance company of the supermarket would pay up with little or no questions. Happily, they did not. 'Fraudulent insurance claims are rife currently and certainly are so in this city and there has to be a deterrent in the form of a sentence of imprisonment.' The incident took place at Al-Halal supermarket in Bradford and the court heard the town is a 'hotspot' for insurance fraud Ashraf will also have to comply with an electronically-monitored curfew between 9pm and 6am for the next six months. Judge Hatton agreed to make a costs order in favour of the prosecution from central funds saying that the case had been 'properly and responsibly' brought by the insurance company. Speaking after the hearing, Richard Hiscocks, Aviva's director of casualty claims, said: 'This staged accident is a clear example of a fraudster trying to claim some easy cash - and she now has a criminal conviction to show for it. 'Aviva takes a zero-tolerance approach to fraud and we'll do everything we can to defend our customers against such claims.' Damian Rouke, a partner with global law firm Clyde & Co, which acted for Aviva, added: 'This case is a warning to anyone thinking about taking a fall or slipping on a rug in order to claim money. 'Aviva and the courts will not tolerate this kind of fraud. Phoney falls are costing UK policyholders millions of pounds and increase the cost of insurance for everyone.' Omega Market cashier George Tahhan, 22, disarmed a would-be robber in Porterville, California on Friday Shocking security camera footage shows the moment a California cashier wrestled with a shotgun-wielding thug attempting to rob his convenience store. George Tahhan, 22, is the store clerk at Omega Market in Porterville, California who subdued the would-be thief on Friday. The store's surveillance video system shows the robber storming into Tahhan's store and pointing a shotgun directly at the brave cashier. Tahhan initially put his hands up and complied with the gunman's demands for money from the store's cash register, handing the assailant several bills. When the gunman tried to jump over the counter, however, Tahhan's fight or flight reflexes kicked in. 'He said, "Give me the 20s and the 100s." Because of that, he got mad and tried to jump [the counter],' Tahhan told ABC 30. The 22-year-old grabbed the shotgun's barrel with his hands and cradled it to his chest as the gunman tried to pull the weapon away. The gunman was wielding a shotgun when he stormed into the convenience store demanding money from Tahhan's cash register. Tahhan initially complied with the robber, handing him dollar bills that he was holding in his hand When the gunman tried to hop the counter, however, Tahhan leaped into action Tahhan grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and cradled it against his chest refusing to let go. The gunman eventually gave up and ran out of the store Eventually the attacker gave up and let go of the firearm before fleeing the store. 'I just look at his eyes, he looks at my eyes, and he just runs. He just leaves the gun and runs,' Tahhan said. Authorities who arrived on scene shortly after determined the unregistered shotgun wasn't even loaded. No arrests have been made in connection with the incident and investigators are still searching for the gunman, according to ABC 30. The brave cashier told reporters he was just trying to protect himself and the business Tahhan told reporters he doesn't think the suspect will come back to the store anytime soon. He also said he doesn't think what he did was anything special even though customers kept telling him how brave he was. 'I'm just trying to protect myself and protect the business,' Tahhan said. Police are investigating two devices placed on train tracks in protest at delays in Britain leaving the EU. British Transport Police say two 'malicious obstructions' have been found, one near Yaxley, near Peterborough, on 21 March and another at Netherfield, Nottinghamshire on 27 March. A note found strapped to one of the devices stated: 'Government betrayal. Leave means leave. We will bring this country to its knees if we don't leave.' This note was found strapped to a device designed to bring train lines to a halt last week A device was placed on the track near Yaxley, Cambridgeshire (pictured) last month, which police say was designed to disrupt train services in protest over Brexit delays Another device was found near the small station of Netherfield near Nottingham, pictured The contraptions were designed to tell signal workers that a train was stuck on the line, bringing lines to the halt. They failed to disrupt services due to rules introduced to comply with EU regulations, the Daily Mirror reported. The first device was found the day before a convoy of vehicles caused long tailbacks on motorways around the UK in protest at Britain's delayed EU departure. The second device was found two days before pro-Brexit demonstrators surrounded Westminster and a man closed down Eurostar services by climbing on the roof of a tunnel near St Pancras. A British Transport Police spokesman said: 'In both incidents, colleagues from Network Rail had identified devices on the rail tracks which were intended to cause disruption to railway services. 'The items failed to disrupt services as intended. Detectives are now working closely with the rail industry to investigate these incidents.' The two devices were placed around 45 miles apart ahead of two major pro-Brexit protests The line near Yaxley is used by East Coast mainline services between London and Edinburgh Acting Chief Constable Sean O'Callaghan from British Transport Police, said: 'This was a serious and deliberate attempt by someone to cause significant sabotage and disruption to Britain's rail network. 'We are urgently investigating the circumstances behind both incidents and are working extremely closely with our national partners, including the rail industry. 'It is important to highlight that these acts were intended only to delay services and not cause damage to the infrastructure, however this failed on both occasions. 'The railway has a number of substantial safeguards in place to prevent and detect this type of sabotage and we are now working tirelessly to identify those responsible. 'We're are currently keeping an open mind on why someone would put their life at risk to place these items on a live railway, however our early assessment has led us to believe it relates to Britain's exit from the European Union.' The second device was found shortly before a protest in Parliament Square over Brexit ACC O'Callaghan added: 'We'll continue to monitor this situation extremely closely and have circulated advice to rail operators and indeed Network Rail. 'Anyone with information should contact British Transport Police by sending a text to 61016 or by calling 0800 40 50 40.' Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen left meetings in Europe and rushed back to Washington D.C. amid a White House meltdown over President Donald Trump's threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border. She returned to the United States early Tuesday morning and will head to the border on Wednesday, according to reports. She was scheduled to be in Europe all week for meetings with interior ministers from G7 countries. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen left a series of G7 meetings in Europe and rushed back to Washington D.C. White House staffers are said to be panicked over President Donald Trump's threat to close the border But a U.S. Coast Guard G5 that she usually uses took off from London's Stansted Airport just 24 hours after it landed, Politico's Playbook reported, and returned to Washington D.C. Her swift turn around came amid reports of panic among White House staffers over Trump's proposal to close the border. 'As Washington was asleep, Secretary Nielsen made some decisions on border response and decided she needed to oversee those personally. So we asked our Deputy to tap in and take over the trip,' a Department of Homeland Security official told ABC News. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders defended the president's move and said it was not a 'threat.' 'The president is not threatening. The president taking his job as commander in chief very seriously in terms of protecting the American people,' she said on Fox News Tuesday of his call to close the border. She later told reporters at the White House the president 'is not working on a specific timeline' to close the border. If the border closes, economists project a rapid rise in the cost of many everyday goods for U.S. households. Nearly $1.7 billion of goods and services flow across the border daily, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 'Closing the U.S.-Mexico border would inflict severe economic harm on American families, workers, farmers, and manufacturers across the United States. U.S. trade with Mexico exceeds $1.7 billion daily, and nearly half a million people legally cross the southern border every day as workers, students, shoppers, and tourists,' the Chamber said in a statement opposing Trump's threat. Americans would run out of avocados in three weeks if the border closed, Reuters reported. In addition to avocados, the majority of imported tomatoes, cucumbers, blackberries and raspberries come from Mexico. Auto parts, flat-screen TVs, computer hardware and medical devices, would be affected by the close, as would cotton, buttons, zippers and threads, The New York Times reported. Trump on Monday renewed his warning that he would completely close America's southern border if Mexico doesn't immediately take steps to choke off the northward flow of migrants into the United States, including tens of thousands of asylum-seekers. 'Mexico must use its very strong immigration laws to stop the many thousands of people trying to get into the USA,' Trump wrote Saturday on Twitter. He retweeted the message Monday morning for emphasis. An aerial view of the U.S.-Mexico border barrier in Tijuana, Mexico 'Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border! This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico!' White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told Fox News Sunday that the situation at the border was at 'melting point' and said the president was serious in his threat. 'It certainly is not a bluff. You can take the president seriously.' The president will visit the border himself when he goes to Calexico, California on Friday. Far-right extremists in Britain have viewed ISIS terror and bomb-making manuals, the security minister told MPs. Appearing before the Defence Committee to discuss global Islamist terrorism, Ben Wallace also highlighted how some 'individuals are starting to pose significant danger'. 'The methods that are bringing these people to our threshold is predominantly through the internet,' Mr Wallace said during his evidence on Tuesday. Security Minister, pictured today in Parliament, warned far right terrorists were using terrorist training manuals developed by Isis to 'learn how to make bombs' Mr Wallace, pictured, said almost half of all extremists being sent to the Government's Prevent programme are from the far right 'Historically, in the past, they had no friends, they sat on their own, they couldn't talk to anyone else - now they live in a virtual safe space. 'They communicate through the internet... sometimes we find them actually looking at Isis terror manuals to learn how to make bombs - obviously for a different reason.' He said the internet has given the far right 'better organisation and better momentum', but that they are yet to reach the level of 'determined conspiracy or cultural religious depth' of the Islamists. 'But individuals are starting to pose significant danger, it's why Prevent in my view is very important to head them off,' Mr Wallace added. He also said that nearly half of those in the so-called 'Channel' part of the Prevent programme, dealing with individuals at risk of being drawn into terrorism, were involved with the far-right. 'Forty-three per cent are extreme right-wing neo-Nazis compared to 45 per cent for the Islamists,' he said. Mr Wallace said the prevalence of the right-wing threat is higher in different parts of the country - highlighting the North East and North West as particular examples. He also referred to the period of the early 2000s when he said the banned extremist group al-Muhajiroun and hate preacher Anjem Choudary 'were fomenting and recruiting', adding: 'Before these people crystallised into Isis fighters and volunteers - that is where we are seeing the far right. 'It is a bubbling group of extremists and we need to get in there using Prevent, using diversion, to prevent them becoming tomorrow's terrorist groups.' Asked whether the far-right threat is a new phenomenon, Mr Wallace said there have always been 'neo-Nazis at large'. 'But it is a recent phenomenon that they are more capable, more organised and more able to live in a global community, which is also the same as Isis (or) Daesh,' he said. As many as 81 women who were filmed without their knowledge while receiving medical treatment - including gynecological surgery - at a California hospital filed lawsuits last week, according to Supreme Court documents. For an 11-month period between July 2012 and June 2013, roughly 1,800 women were secretly recorded at the womens center of the Sharp Grossmont Hospital, in San Diego. Motion-sensor cameras installed in three of the operating rooms captured videos of births, emergency C-sections, hysterectomies, miscarriages and a number of other medical procedures. Women were also said to be filmed undressing in the rooms, as well as while they were unconscious during their respective operations or procedures. Their faces and genitals are visible among many of the 15,000 video files, the lawsuit claims. None of the women say they were aware or were told they were being filmed at the medical center. For an 11-month period between July 2012 and June 2013, roughly 1,800 women were secretly recorded at the womens center of the Sharp Grossmont Hospital (pictured), in San Diego Laptop motion-sensor cameras installed in three of the operating rooms captured videos of births, emergency C-sections, hysterectomies, miscarriages and a number of other medical procedures Women were also said to be filmed undressing in the rooms, as well as while they were unconscious during their respective operations or procedures (stock image) I am a mom of four girls. I lead by example,' affected patient Jessica Lincoln told NBC 7. Im a pretty black and white person as far as what is right and what is wrong, and this is wrong. In a statement, the hospital revealed the cameras - which were inside laptops on anesthesia carts in the operating rooms - had originally been deployed to tackle a rising issue of theft at the facility. Although the cameras were intended to record only individuals in front of the anesthesia carts removing drugs, others, including patients and medical personnel in the operating rooms, were at times visible to the cameras and recorded, a spokesperson said. 'The purpose of the these cameras was to ensure patient safety by determining the cause of drugs missing from the carts,' spokesperson John Cihomsky added to Buzzfeed News. Victim Jessica Lincoln (above) described the surveillance system as 'just wrong' A class-action lawsuit against the hospital was originally filed against Sharp Grossmont in 2016, but the court denied the suit on the basis of its class certification. The 81 plaintiffs refiled the action with the Supreme Court last week. As well as claiming a breach of privacy for being filmed without their consent, the women also accuse the hospital of being grossly negligent in storing their recordings. The files were said to be saved to desktop computers, some of which werent password protected, according to court documents. They also made no logs of who accessed the footage or when. Sharp Grossmont say they did delete half of the footage but couldnt confirm whether the files were recoverable or not. Sharp violated their right to privacy and breached its fiduciary duty in the most egregious way by secretly recording them, allowing non-medical personnel to view the recordings without making any effort to track who was viewing them, and then destroying some of the recordings, the complaint reads. The hospital has previously said the patients consented to being recorded in a generic patient admissions form, but those taking legal action believe the agreement doesnt supersede their constitutional right to privacy In a statement, the hospital revealed the cameras - which were inside laptops on anesthesia carts in the operating rooms - had originally been deployed to tackle a rising issue of theft at the facility One of the plaintiffs, Melissa Escalera, says she was secretly filmed giving birth to her daughter by emergency cesarean in September 2012. She said shes taking legal action against the hospital for a systematic and shocking breach of her rights to privacy as a patient. When I arrived in an ambulance and was wheeled into the operating room on a gurney, my concern was with my daughter who was in distress and coming six weeks early, Escalera told NBC 7. It was a highly stressful and emotional time for my family and my doctor. No one ever asked me to record one of my most tender, life-changing moments. I would have never agreed to be recorded in that vulnerable moment, she continued. The hospital has previously said the patients consented to being recorded in a generic patient admissions form, but those taking legal action believe the agreement doesnt supersede their constitutional right to privacy. These videos captured images of cesarean births, birth complications, dilation and curettage to resolve miscarriages, hysterectomies and sterilization procedures, the complaint details. Patients were undressed, exposed and at their most vulnerable during these procedures. Former Sharp physician Dr. Patrick Sullivan has also filed a lawsuit against the hospital, relating to alleged malpractice at the facility Former Sharp physician Dr. Patrick Sullivan has also filed a lawsuit against the hospital, after they allegedly harassed him and forced him to resign, because he criticized the safety measures of a number of practices. His 48-page complaint also claims the hospital later reinstalled the hidden cameras in 2016, to record patients and doctors without their consent. A spokesperson for sharp refuted the claims that the hospital reinstalled the surveillance cameras. New laptops were installed in the ORs in support of SurgiNet, a preoperative and anesthesia information system, the statement to Times of San Diego read. Like all new laptops, they came with built-in cameras; however, software was never installed on those laptops to activate the cameras. No surveillance occurred. Primarily, Sullivans lawsuit claims Sharp failed to address and rectify dozens of safety hazards, including severe under-staffing, medication shortages and perpetuating hostility in the workplace. A man has been left with horrific facial injuries after two teenage boys allegedly hurled a rock threw his windshield while he was driving. William Wehner, 64, had the bones in his face broken and will need reconstructive surgery as a result of the incident. He was driving down the street in Burlington, Kentucky, at around 10.30pm on Saturday night when the boys, who had been having a sleepover in one's home nearby, allegedly hurled the rock from the side of the road. It was raining heavily at the time and the boys ran away as soon as the rock crashed through the man's windshield, police say. This is the 5lb rock that was thrown at William Wehner on Saturday as he was driving in Kentucky He was able to contact the emergency services and was transported to the hospital where he remains. The boys were apprehended after police investigating the incident asked local school police resource officers who they thought might have been involved. When deputies went to one of the boy's homes, they say he confessed and said his friend had been involved too. The 14-year-old, who allegedly threw the rock, has been charged with 1st degree assault and criminal mischief. The 15-year-old has been charged with criminal mischief and accessory to assault. Around an hour before Wehner was hit, the 15-year-old is said to have thrown a rock at a different car but it bounced off the side. The rock smashed through the man's car windshield and hit one side of the man's face. The two teenage boys ran away and were arrested the next day A spokesman for the Boone County Sheriff's Office told DailyMail.com the pair would be tried as juveniles. Their names are being withheld because of their age. The spokesman added that Wehner was probably trying to concentrate on 'just staying in his lane' when the rock came hurtling towards him. 'It was raining like hell. It was raining cats and dogs,' he said. He added that he did not know how fast the man was going at the time. The boys had initially planned to throw sticks at the cars but, for some reason, decided instead to launch rocks. It is unclear if they are remorseful. The heartbroken father of murdered Queens jogger Karina Vetrano is speaking out after his daughter's killer was convicted, saying it feels like 'a weight has been lifted'. Phil Vetrano held hands with his wife Cathie on Monday as they left court after 22-year-old Chanel Lewis was found guilty on all four counts of murder and aggravated sexual abuse in the brutal killing 30-year-old Karina in 2016. 'It feels like a weight has been lifted. I woke up with a different feeling,' Vetrano said on Tuesday. 'There's no more of that, "Ok, now we got to put him away." Now it's done,' he added. The day after the guilty verdict, Vetrano returned to the very site where his daughter was slain in Howard Beach's Spring Creek Park in New York and sat at her makeshift memorial where rocks have been laid out in the shape of a butterfly. Phil Vetrano, the father of slain New York jogger Karina Vetrano, is speaking out after his daughter's killer was convicted of murder yesterday saying, 'It feels like a weight has been lifted'. Phil pictured above in court Monday On Tuesday he said: 'I woke up with a different feeling. There's no more of that, "Ok, now we got to put him away." Now it's done'. Pictured above Monday with wife Cathie Phil Vetrano held hands with his wife Cathie on Monday after 22-year-old Chanel Lewis was found guilty on all four counts of murder and aggravated sexual abuse in the brutal killing of 30-year-old Karina in 2016 'It actually gives me peace here. It's the only place I can go to get peace,' he said to the New York Post. He said he visits the site every day to speak to his late daughter and feed the animals that wander about. When asked about the case, he credited his daughter with its success. 'She had her hand in this. She's very powerful,' he said. Following her death the Vetranos family hung a large set of silver angel wings from their second-floor window in honor of Karina. 'My son made those wings. he drew them out, he made them with a plasma cutter. That's my baby's wings,' Phil said. Karina Vetrano was brutally murdered on August 2, 2016 after she went out jogging, and her body was found face-down, dumped near her family's home in Howard Beach. On Monday, a jury delivered the guilty verdict just hours after they began deliberating following the closing arguments. His previous trial ended in a hung jury in November. On Monday Chanel Lewis, 22, was found guilty of strangling and sexually abusing Karina Vetrano in Queens in August 2016. Dad Phil pictured with Karina above Phil shared a note to those following Karina's case on her memorial fund GoFundMe page saying: 'Justice for Karina was served late last night. And it was served mightily and swiftly' Vetrano's family and supporters erupted into applause when Lewis was found guilty on all counts - first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree murder and aggravated sexual abuse. Following the conviction, Phil Vetrano updated a GoFundMe Page for Karina's memorial fund saying: 'As most of you already know by now justice for Karina was served last night. And it was served mightily and swiftly. 'Unlike the first trial this time we had a sane unbiased jury. They saw, heard and comprehended the evidence. It was proven to the world that the beast did what was done to my baby. 'I thank you all for being there for us from the beginning. Now for the first time in 3 years we are in a new position. I dont know what to expect but at least we have a monster off the street.' On Monday as he left the courtroom he victoriously cheered: 'Jubilation. Justice. Justice has been served.' Lewis' sentencing is scheduled for April 17 and he faces life in prison without parole. A jury found Chanel Lewis, 22, guilty of murder and sexual abuse at his retrial on Monday Karina Vetrano, 30, went missing on August 2, 2016, after she was last seen jogging near her home in Howard Beach Lewis' attorneys, the Legal Aid Society, called the outcome 'a complete miscarriage of justice'. They had unsuccessfully sought a hearing on Monday after getting an anonymous letter saying that police had pursued two white suspects before taking DNA samples from hundreds of black men - in what the defense called a 'race-biased dragnet' - and coming to focus on Lewis. They claimed the letter alerted them to so-called exculpatory evidence about other potential suspects that they say was withheld from them. It included a claim that NYPD officers had repeatedly said in the first two weeks of the investigation that they were 'looking for two jacked up white guys who are from Howard Beach'. His attorneys further claimed that police used a 'race-biased dragnet' to collect DNA samples from 360 black men in Howard Beach before targeting Lewis and that detectives coerced his confession. 'Our client did not receive a fair trial,' the Legal Aid Society said on Monday, adding that it would appeal. Vetrano's family and supporters erupted into applause when Lewis was found guilty on all counts Karina Vetrano, 30, was murdered as she ran on a park trail in Howard Beach, Queens, back in August 2016. Police said she had been raped and strangled. She is pictured above in a photo taken right before she left to go jogging with her mother in the background The New York Police Department said in a statement that the anonymous letter was 'riddled with falsehoods and inaccuracies,' the investigation was painstaking and 'the evidence clearly shows that Chanel Lewis is responsible for her death.' Chief Queens Assistant District Attorney John Ryan called the case 'horrifying.' The closely watched murder case initially baffled investigators, who for months were unable to find anyone who matched DNA that was found under the victim's fingernails from when she fought back. Lewis was arrested six months into the murder investigation after police said he provided a DNA swab that linked him to the scene and victim. Despite that DNA evidence and a taped confession, the first trial ended in a hung jury in November. Lewis' attorneys repeatedly said during the retrial this month that the DNA evidence was suspect and that his confession was coerced by detectives who wore him down until he finally gave them what they wanted. The confession video was played to jurors last week during which Lewis said: 'I got angry. It went red, and then one thing led to another. I got scared and threw her in the bushes.' Lewis said he hit Vetrano in the face around five times before dumping her in the bushes, but denies sexually assaulting her. The 30-year-old went missing on August 2, 2016, after she was last seen jogging near her home in Howard Beach. Her mother, Cathie Vetrano, tried calling her daughter on her cell phone, but there was no answer. Her father, Phil Vetrano, found her body face down in weeds off a path while helping police search for his daughter. Lewis' attorney said the crime scene had been corrupted by various people, including Vetrano's father, and therefore couldn't be trusted. They also argued that Lewis in his confession was just repeating information he learned from news reports about the murder. Bianna Golodryga is reportedly leaving CBS This Morning less than six months after she joined the program as a co-anchor. Insiders confirmed to HuffPost that Golodryga has been moved off the program by the new president of CBS News, Susan Zirinsky, who felt that the show had too many anchors. Zirinsky, who took the reins on March 1, appears to have followed the 'first one in, last one out' rule by axing Golodryga over the other anchors, Gayle King, John Dickerson and Norah O'Donnell. Sources say the president had hoped to have Golodryga stay at CBS and work at other news programs, but the 40-year-old has decided to move on. When joining CBS last fall, Golodryga signed a deal guaranteeing her slot as a co-anchor on This Morning which allows her to leave the network if she is removed from that role. Bianna Golodryga is leaving CBS News after having been removed as anchor of CBS This Morning by the network's new president, insiders have confirmed Golodryga has served as a co-anchor of CBS This Morning for less than six months. She is seen left with co-anchors Norah O'Donnell (second left), Gayle King (second right) and John Dickerson (right) shortly after joining the program as a permanent anchor in October Rumors about Golodryga's potential departure from CBS This Morning have been circling for weeks as Zirinsky, the network's first female president, is expected to make a number of talent changes. HuffPost reported that while this week's confirmation came as no surprise to many network insiders, staff at CBS and CNN, where Golodryga is a contributor, were stunned to hear that the co-anchor is being ousted after less than a year. Susan Zirinsky officially took over as president of CBS News on March 1 Though CBS is aiming to cut $100million from its budget across the board, there is little evidence that Golodryga's removal is financially motivated, as her salary was only a fraction of O'Donnell and King's. Golodryga was hired by CBS from Yahoo News in September 2017. During her first year she served as a correspondent and occasionally filled in as co-anchor on This Morning. She became a full-time anchor on the morning program in October. Executives at other networks have allegedly expressed interest in bringing Golodryga on should she leave CBS. In the meantime she is expected to remain on hand at CNN, where she appears weekly on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Rumors about Golodryga's possible departure from This Morning have been circling for weeks. Pictured (left to right) King, Jeff Glor, O'Donnell, Dickerson and Golodroyga on set last year CBS This Morning is one of the network's most valuable programs, bringing in close to $100million annually. The broadcast averaged 3.35 million viewers in February, ranking third for viewership behind Good Morning America and Today - the former leading in total viewers and latter leading in the critical 25-54 demographic. However, the show has been damaged by instability behind the desk. After Charlie Rose - who founded the show with King in 2012, was removed in November 2017, Face the Nation host John Dickerson joined King and Norah O'Donnell. Months later, Golodryga was added as a fourth anchor. CBS This Morning has been without an executive producer for several months following the sudden departure of Ryan Kadro in December. King's future on the show was mired in uncertainty earlier this year as her $5.5million contract is coming to an end, but sources say she is on the brink of finalizing a new one. She could soon find herself with a new set of co-anchors as its rumored Dickerson will be leaving the program after just one year and O'Donnell may soon take over as anchor of CBS Evening News. HuffPost reported that Zirinsky is considering bringing Anthony Mason and Tony Dokoupil on should Dickerson and O'Donnell leave. The potential replacements joined King on Friday's program as guest anchors. President Donald Trump says he's 'ready to close' the border if Congress doesn't change America's immigration laws. 'I'm ready to close it, if I have to close it,' he told reporters on Tuesday in the Oval Office. Trump complained that the U.S. has the 'worst, dumbest immigration system in the world,' and he said he's lobbying congressional Democrats to change it. Specifically, he wants them to end the 'catch and release' policy that allows illegal immigrants to roam freely in the U.S. while they wait for their cases to be adjudicated by immigration judges. That can take years, based on the backlog. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have proposed the hiring of more judges to reduce the wait period. But Trump has rejected their spending requests and argued on Tuesday, 'We have to get rid of judges.' 'If we don't make a deal with Congress, the border's going to be closed, 100 percent,' he insisted. 'Then we're going to close the border, that's going to be it.' He immediately amended the statement to say that it could be large portions of the border and not every legal port of entry. 'Sure, it's gonna have a negative impact on the economy,' he told a reporter asking about the risks. 'But to me, trading is very important, the borders are very important ... but we're gonna he security in this county. That's more important than trade.' President Donald Trump says he's 'ready to close' the border if Congress doesn't change America's immigration laws The White House admitted earlier in the day that he had no 'specific timeline' for the border clamp down he said he'd authorize unless Mexico takes action to 'immediately stop ALL illegal immigration.' It appeared to be walking back the threat that would have significant repercussions on the economy. Trump had said in a Friday tweet, that if his conditions were not met, 'I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week.' 'Well keep it closed for a long time. Im not playing games,' he told reporters later in the day. 'Mexico has to stop it.' His spokeswoman admitted Tuesday, as she spoke to reporters outside the White House, that Trump doesn't actually have a day in mind to shut the border down, though. 'The president's not working on a specific timeline,' she said. 'He's working to look at all of the options on the table.' President Donald Trump has no 'specific timeline' for the border clamp down he said he'd authorize unless Mexico takes action to 'immediately stop ALL illegal immigration' Trump has been claiming since October of last year that he will close the border if illegal immigrants continue to enter the U.S. at record rates. He said Friday, as he spoke to reporters during a dike tour in Florida, that he'd follow through, if Mexico didn't break up newly-formed caravans. 'So, Mexico is tough. They can stop them, but they chose not to. Now theyre going to stop them. And if they dont stop them, were closing the border. Theyll close it,' he said. He said a border closure would hurt Mexico more than it would the United States. 'Mexico has a trade surplus with the United States, for many years, of $100 billion a year, at least,' Trump argued. 'Mexico has taken a big portion of our car business. Mexico is doing very well because of the United States. And, frankly, they have to stop the illegal immigration.' If the border were to totally shut down it would hamper tourism and trade o nboth sides of the border. Trucks delivering goods would be temporarily barred from traveling between the United States and Mexico. While it is impossible to estimate the total economic cost of a border closure, experts anticipate losses in the billions. In 2017, the U.S. and Mexico did $558 billion in business with one another. Mexico is the United States' third largest trading partner after Canada and China. Trump's acting chief of staff warned Sunday that the president isn't bluffing. He said it would take 'something dramatic' to change Trump's mind. It remains unclear what legal authority Trump has to close the border, in any case, and the White House was not able to answer the question on Tuesday. 'The Democrats are leaving us absolutely no choice at this point,' Sanders said instead. 'We've already had to move roughly 750 personnel from ports of entry.' Trump has been claiming since October of last year that he will close the border if illegal immigrants continue to enter the U.S. at record rates 'Well keep it closed for a long time. Im not playing games,' he told reporters on Friday Nearly half a million people, 465,000, come through legal ports of entry each day. Sanders said that problems at the border are already creating long lines 'and eventually maybe that it's the best decision that we close the border' because border agents are spread too thin. 'This isn't our first choice,' she noted as she spoke to press after a television hit. The president would prefer to sit down with Democrats and fix the problem, she insisted. As far as the economy is concerned, she said, 'He certainly doesn't want to hurt that, but the the same time his number one job as president is to protect life, protect Americans.' Asked about a date of closure, she admitted that Trump doesn't have one. 'We're hoping that Mexico will continue to step up like we've seen them them do over the last couple of weeks we hope that continues, and we can work with them so that we don't have to do that,' Sanders said. Trump also threatened to cut off aid to Central America, including non-governmental organizations, until migrants from the countries stop forming caravans to America. The State Department said Friday evening that it had halted the flow of money to programs designed to improve conditions in the country. Trump said it officially stopped coming on Monday. He acknowledged in a Tuesday tweet that Mexico had stepped up its apprehensions of illegal immigrants from those countries, shortly before he altered his criteria for closure to action by the Democratically-controlled Congress. 'After many years (decades), Mexico is apprehending large numbers of people at their Southern Border, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They have ALL been taking U.S. money for years, and doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for us, just like the Democrats in Congress!' he said The so-called 'naughty document' on which Winston Churchill carved up Europe with Josef Stalin is set to go on public display for the first time. Britain's wartime leader made the secret pact with Moscow in 1944 as the Allies closed in on victory over Nazi Germany. The sheet of paper showed the percentages of Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia which would be under Soviet or British control. It is going on display at London's National Archives in an exhibition called Britain's Cold War Revealed, which begins on Thursday. 'Naughty document:' This 1944 scrap of paper shows Winston Churchill's secret pact with Josef Stalin to carve up post-war Europe between Russia and the Western allies Wartime allies: Russian dictator Josef Stalin (left) and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (right) made the agreement which Churchill acknowledged could be seen as 'callous' What was in the 'naughty document'? The 'naughty document', also known as the Percentages Agreement, revealed Churchill and Stalin's plans to carve up post-war Europe. Churchill revealed its existence in one of his World War II memoirs. The note begins by saying that it was written by the PM during a meeting with Stalin at the Kremlin. It reads: Roumania Russia - 90 per cent The others - 10 per cent Greece Great Britain, in accord with USA - 90 per cent Russia - 10 per cent Yugoslavia 50/50 per cent Hungary 50/50 per cent Bulgaria Russia - 75 per cent The others - 25 per cent Advertisement The phrase 'naughty document' was coined by Churchill himself, who recognised that it could come over as 'callous'. Churchill said his American allies would be 'shocked if they saw how crudely he had put it'. The document contains a handwritten tick believed to have been scrawled by Stalin as he approved the carve-up of post-war Europe. The exhibition's chief curator Mark Dunton told the Daily Telegraph: 'This was the result of late night discussions between Churchill and Stalin, they both had a fair bit of whiskey. 'I think it's important that this document is going on display because there's so much significance in that little square of paper. 'It's potentially incredibly significant - the fate of millions being decided with the stroke of a pen as a result of a casual meeting.' The document did not discuss Poland, which Churchill had hoped to keep in the Western fold but which fell into Moscow's sphere of influence in 1945. Despite his talks in Moscow Churchill also contemplated an 'Operation Unthinkable' war with Russia to drive Stalin's forces out of Eastern Europe. Destruction: A map showing the destruction after an H-bomb attack on London, which is part of a Cold War exhibition at the National Archives which begins on Thursday Cold War danger: A recreation of an under-the-stairs nuclear fallout bunker, with a 'Protect and Survive' booklet sitting on a chair Visitor: A woman looks at the exhibition at the National Archives in London (left) which includes documents relating to the Cambridge spy ring (right) By the late 1940s the wartime alliance had broken down, prompting the foundation of NATO to safeguard the Western alliance. Churchill also coined the term 'iron curtain' to describe the new political division of Europe between East and West after the war. The Berlin crisis of 1948-49, in which Stalin blockaded West Berlin in a failed bid to force the Western Allies out, was one of the early flashpoints of the Cold War. The new exhibition in London, which runs from April 4 until November 9, marks 70 years since the birth of NATO. Announcing it last year, Mr Dunton said: 'People will have the opportunity to explore our Cold War documents and learn more about this period of secrets and paranoia. 'The pervasive threat of nuclear war impacted everyday life for millions of people and this thought-provoking exhibition will offer a unique look into political and ideological tensions between the East and West.' A collection of civil defence posters are on display during the preview of the National Archives new exhibition Advertisement National Geographic's new travel photography competition is entering its second week and is attracting stunning pictures from across the globe. Some of the jaw-dropping pictures entered into the Travel Photo Contest show daredevil slackliners in the USA, a crowded shipyard in Bangladesh and a new-born lion in the jaws of its mother in Africa. Another picture shows a dramatic cow race in a paddie field in Indonesia. The annual competition is accepting entries until May 3 at 12pm and asks for pictures in three categories: nature, cities and people. This years grand prize winner will receive a 5,700 prize and be featured on National Geographics Travel Instagram account, @natgeotravel. Motherhood - Sonalini Khetrapal took this picture of a lion with its cub in Masai Mara, Kenya. She said: 'We were lucky to find new born lion cubs in the plains of Masai Mara, Kenya. The mother is extremely protective of the cub and was often seen hiding them behind the bush and away from predators. In this instance, as the cub unknowingly walked very close to the side of a cliff, the mother lioness quickly tried to grab it from its head to protect it from falling over. It looks dangerous, but it is an endearing way for the lioness to pick up the cub and place it back to safety Where the city ends and the ships begin - Azim Khan Ronnie captured these ships in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The 500 enormous vessels used to transport bricks, sand and other goods, are either being built or are docked for maintenance work in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Shipbuilders in Bangladesh began exporting their ships to other countries in 2009, and it has since become a growing trade in the area If you fall... Rise again! - Abhishek Sabbarwal captured a daredevil slackliner in Yosemite National Park in California. He said: 'This was my first ever hike to taft point in Yosemite National Park. I had seen so many beautiful pictures of this location before. After reaching the point, I saw these slackliners. It was amazing to watch these guys over the high cliffs. The setting sun made it even more awesome with its rays beaming through the valley. What a sight! Felt really lucky to be at the right place at the right time Need for Speed, Indonesia - Dale Johnson captured this cow race. He said: 'The mud flies as the cows race through the rice paddies during the traditional pacu jawi on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Ridge life - Aya Okawa snapped this stunning Honolulu sunset. Houses squeeze onto the unique ridges carved by aeons of rainfall on volcanic rock. Gentoo being chased by a fur seal by Clive Beavis. He said: 'This image was captured on a recent visit to Antarctica. I had this shot in mind, though no idea how I would get it. I had seen a similar photo in a Nat Geo publication. Lucky for me, a young southern fur seal decided to chase a group of Gentoosright towards our Zodiac. It even has its mouth wide open to add to the drama. Right place, right time for this shot. :) The Dream by Naveen Srikantachari - Naveen said: 'It was a quiet morning at Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, Sun was opening up and the mist from the night was clearing. As we made a drive through the wood we saw this beautiful leopardess perching on her favourite tree. Ever since i started wildlife photography I wanted to photograph a leopard on the tree. But it took over three years to find it. I love everything about this picture, A prowling leopardess, A beautiful tree with the white flowers, soft sunlight, it was just a perfect setting like a DREAM. Gardian by Francesco Riccardo Iacomino - The white Camargue horses are living in the wild, but are being guarded and managed by the "guardians, French Cowboys Ascend by James Vodicka. A sea turtle ascends to the surface for a breath, near Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused White House adviser Jared Kushner of conducting foreign policy 'via WhatsApp' and mocked him with a biting comment: 'What is next? Putting nuclear codes in Instagram DMs?' The freshman lawmaker snapped at the presidential son-in-law's diplomacy skills during a debate in a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing Tuesday. 'Folks are suggesting that we are conducting foreign relations with folks with security clearances via Whats App. I mean, every day that we go on without getting to the bottom of this matter is a day we are putting hundreds if not potentially thousands of Americans at risk. I mean, really, what is next? Putting nuclear codes in Instagram DMs? This is ridiculous,' she said. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused White House adviser Jared Kushner of conducting foreign policy 'via WhatsApp' Jared Kushner's lawyer said he used WhatsApp to communicate with world leaders 'We need to get to the bottom of this,' the New York Democrat added. The committee released a letter to the White House counsel last month that reported Abbe Lowell, Kushner's personal attorney, confirmed Kusher used the messaging service WhatsApp to communicate with world leaders. Lowell could not say whether or not Kushner shared classified information but noted the president's son-in-law took screen shots of his WhatsApp messages and sent them to his official White House email account or to the National Security Council so they could be preserved, as required by the Presidential Records Act. Ocasio-Cortez's comments came as lawmakers were debating the need for additional subpoenas after Tricia Newbold, an 18-year government employee who oversees the issuance of clearances for some senior White House aides, said she compiled a list of at least 25 officials who were initially denied security clearances last year because of their backgrounds. Those officials - including Ivanka Trump and Kushner - received security clearances despite 'disqualifying issues' in their backgrounds, such as concerns about foreign influence, drug use and criminal conduct. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the chairman of the committee, argued for the subpoena of Carl Kline, who served as the White House Personnel Security Director under the Trump Administration. Kline, through his attorney, offered to come before the panel but, Cummings said, there 'is a catch.' 'He will come in voluntarily, but he will not answer any of our questions about specific officials, about specific security violations, or about specific security clearance adjudications. Instead, he will only talk about general policies,' he said. 'This is clearly not sufficient.' Then he turned over the mic to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican head of the panel, and the two men got into a bickering match over the committee's interview of Newbold. Jordan complained Cummings scheduled the meeting with her on a Saturday and didn't tell the Republicans until the day before. Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings (left) and Republican Rep. Jim Jordan (right) got into a heated back-and-forth in the committee hearing on subpoenas for the White House 'You picked a Saturday on a week we're not even in session and then don't tell us until the day before,' he said. 'I've been on this committee 10 years, I've never seen anything like this,' he noted. Cummings said under his breath: 'Please.' 'Never seen anything like this. I haven't,' Jordan continued. 'Yeah. You've done it,' Cummings charged. 'I haven't,' Jordan said. And then there was loud laughter from Cummings. Kline was Newbold's supervisor at the time. He has since left the White House for the Defense Department. The committee voted 22-15 to subpoena Kline. The vote was along party lines with Democrats voting yes and Republicans voting no. Cummings pointed out Newbold came forward at risk of retaliation from the White House. The Oversight panel found Kushner used WhatsApp and Ivanka Trump used her private email for work Start of the probe: DailyMail.com revealed in February that Trump's then staff secretary Rob Porter - who was dating White House communications director Hope Hicks - was accused by both his ex-wives of physical abuse and that the FBI knew about the allegations. The revelation broke open the security clearances scandal Security specialist Tricia Newbold told House Democrats that her boss approved security clearances despite red flags 'She came forward because the system at the White House is so dysfunctional that she believes that Congress needs to intervene. In other words, she's crying out. She's begging us to do something,' he said. Newbold claims senior Trump administration officials overturned her recommendations to deny security clearances to some officials last year. She said she raised her concerns up the chain of command in the White House to no avail. Instead, she said, the White House retaliated, suspending her in January for 14 days without pay for not following a new policy requiring that documents be scanned as separate PDF files rather than one single PDF file. Newbold said that when she returned to work in February, she was cut out of the security clearance process and removed from a supervisory responsibility. Cummings' panel has been investigating security clearances issued to senior officials including Kushner, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former White House aide Rob Porter, who dated Trump's communications director Hope Hicks before a DailyMail.com investigation of his ex-wives; spousal abuse allegations. He quit in disgrace when DailyMail.com revealed he was accused of physical abuse by both his ex-wives. A Maryland man who was filmed tackling and abusing a pelican has been extradited to the Florida Keys and jailed on animal cruelty charges. William Hunter Hardesty, 31, was booked into jail in Key West late Monday, according to a statement from Monroe County Sheriff's spokesman Adam Linhardt. Hardesty is accused of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and is being held on $80,000 bond. The suspect was arrested on March 15 in Ocean City, Maryland, after the disturbing video of him jumping on a federally-protected pelican next to the Key West Historic Seaport went viral on social media. Scroll down for video William Hunter Hardesty, 31, was jailed in Key West, Florida, on animal cruelty charges on Monday, two weeks after he was filmed tackling a pelican. The Maryland native is seen above in a new mugshot released by authorities after he was extradited to Florida Hardesty shared a video of himself abusing the federally-protected pelican next to the Key West Historic Seaport on Facebook last month and it quickly went viral Authorities said Hardesty had failed twice to grab hold of the bird and that the video was taken during his third and only successful attempt. The footage showed him leaning over a harbor's edge holding out something in his hand. As soon as the curious bird gets close enough, Hardesty launches himself into the water and lands directly on top of it as they both disappear below the surface. When he comes back up for air, Hardesty can be seen holding onto the pelican with two hands while two people behind the camera erupt in a fit of laughter. The suspect spends the next 12 minutes antagonizing the visibly-distressed bird as it repeatedly snaps its beak at him before finally slipping out of his grasp. The video was met with widespread outrage on social media as viewers slammed Hardesty's cruelty and claimed to have reported him to Florida authorities. One person wrote: 'We need to get a petition to have this MF charged.' Another commented: 'Idiot!! I do hope you serve time. I also hope that smack in the face left a mark ... a BIG one.' The video opens with Hardesty holding something over the water to entice the pelican. When the bird floats close enough, Hardesty leaps into the water and lands directly on top of it Hardesty antagonizes the pelican for about 12 minutes before it snaps its beak in his face and is finally able to escape its captor's grasp and fly away The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission later issued a statement confirming that it was investigating the incident. 'We never want to harm wildlife, and that's what he was doing,' said Officer Bobby Dube, a spokesman for the commission's Florida Keys division. Pelicans are protected under Florida's Endangered and Threatened Species Rule, which states: 'The intentional feeding or the placement of food that attracts pelicans and modifies the natural behavior of the pelican so as to be detrimental to the survival or health of a local population is prohibited.' Hardesty is seen in a mugshot taken after his March 15 arrest in Ocean City, Maryland Fox Baltimore reported that Hardesty was previously arrested along with one other for assaulting and robbing a person outside a bar in 2016. Police responded to the robbery incident at a bar called in Crofton, Maryland. Police found two men hiding behind a dumpster and the victim identified them as his attackers. Hardesty and Eugene George Morris III, 24 at the time, of Edgewater, were later arrested. Hardesty was charged with robbery, second-degree assault, theft, destruction of property and resisting arrest. Advertisement An incredible trove of letters written by Isambard Kingdom Brunel more than 175 years ago have been discovered hidden among some old maps and charts. Experts say the 'remarkable and extremely rare' find - one of the largest collections of Brunel's writings to be uncovered in recent years - provides significant new insights into Britain's greatest engineer, during the most prolific years of his life. A total of 15 documents authored by Brunel from 1832 to 1846, were found tucked into an old yellowing folder at Bristol Port by Roger Henley, a retired engineer, who was sifting through papers in the archive room at Bristol Port Company's St Andrew's House in Avonmouth. The incredible discovery was made by Roger Henley, a retired engineer, who was sifting through papers in the archive room at Bristol Port Company's St Andrew's House in Avonmouth They give a new perspective on the period in which he launched the SS Great Britain, was appointed engineer to Clifton Suspension Bridge and completed the Great Western Railway. One surprising revelation shows how Brunel was concerned about the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution. Bristol Port has donated the entire collection to the SS Great Britain Trust and Brunel Institute, where they are being transcribed and prepared for display to the public. Nick Booth, head of collections at the SS Great Britain Trust, said: 'The documents provide a remarkable and unique insight into Brunel in his formative years. 'It is extremely rare to receive a single letter or report written by Brunel, so we are enormously grateful to receive such a generous donation of a whole collection. 'It will allow us to tell the story of Brunel in Bristol, right next to the floating harbour which he wrote about over 175 years ago.' A total of 15 documents authored by Brunel from 1832 to 1846, were found tucked into an old yellowing folder and were signed by the engineer Bristol Port has donated the entire collection to the SS Great Britain Trust and Brunel Institute, where they are being transcribed and prepared for display to the public Most of the correspondence is from Brunel to the directors of the Bristol Dock Company and addresses the problem of the city's floating harbour becoming laden with mud, causing large vessels to run aground. Mr Henley said: 'There are thousands of rolls of historic papers in the archive room and as I was going through them, I found a yellowing folder, inside of which were a stack of carefully penned, hand written documents. 'They didn't stand out until I got to the bottom of the first letter and to my amazement realised it was signed I.K. Brunel. There are four letters from 1833 to 1846 and five reports from 1832 to 1842, as well as quotes from Brunel for completing work on the Southern Entrance dock The Port's gift of the letters is one of the largest individual donations to the SS Great Britain Collection in recent history 'I didn't need an introduction to that name! It was an incredible moment and a surreal feeling to realise I had in my hands original letters penned by the world's greatest engineer.' Terence Mordaunt, the co-owner of Bristol Port Company, officially handed over the collection. 'The history and heritage of Bristol docks has always been extremely important to us and to make this discovery of Brunel writing to our predecessors at the Port 175 years ago was extraordinary,' he said. 'We are delighted they will now be made available to the public to read and enjoy.' The SS Great Britain Collection forms part of the world's finest collection of original source Brunel materials at the Brunel Institute. The Port's gift of the letters is one of the largest individual donations in recent history. They revealed that Brunel was surprisingly ahead of his time in worrying about the environmental impact of building modern Britain In some of the letters, Brunel was surprisingly ahead of his time in worrying about the environmental impact of building modern Britain. He cited the waste created by his Great Western Railway, as well as other industries such as a local cotton mill, iron merchants, and ship, locomotive and bridge builders, all polluting water supplies. Brunel described the issue as 'in some measure unavoidable' but added that 'I fear still more from the apparent tendency of all persons to use the Float as a good receiver for that which cannot easily be got rid of elsewhere.' Isambard Kingdom Brunel is widely viewed as the greatest ever British engineer Nick Booth said: 'It's a fascinating insight into a side of Brunel we have not seen before. 'It would be going too far to suggest Brunel was an environmentalist - he was a Victorian engineer after all - and his concerns are foremost about the implications for trade. 'But this does provide a glimpse of genuine concern about pollution and is perhaps another way Britain's greatest engineer was way ahead of his time.' When the Bristol Dock Company first employed a nervous young engineer named Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a consultant it was a feather in his cap. A decade later Brunel was one of the most famous men in Britain - and no longer afraid to speak his mind in the most forthright of language, even to his clients. In a report addressed to the directors of Bristol Docks on January 31 1842, - while the SS Great Britain was still being built onsite - he berated them for failing to act upon his earlier recommendations to prevent ships getting stuck in the mud of the city's floating harbour. He attacked them for a 'general abandonment of care' and the 'monstrous abuses by which the Channel of the upper part of the Float has been wilfully and wantonly choked up'. Brunel repeatedly cites the recommendations he had made in previous years: 'I need hardly remind you that these measures were never adopted.' He added later that 'past experience leads me to conclude that it is useless to continue to recommend the adoption of a system which is not practically carried out.' Brunel went on to recommend further measures - at a cost he estimated of 6,000 to 6,500 - and finished with his characteristic sign off 'I am Gentlemen, your obedient servant, IK Brunel'. Mr Booth said: 'It is fascinating to document how Brunel develops over this 14-year period, the most formative years of his career, and how he gets more confident and full of conviction with his language. 'You also get a sense of how systematic he was in keeping all his reports to refer back to.' In his early letters the language is carefully balanced, while in later correspondence he criticises various ideas or actions of others as 'useless'. The SS Great Britain, which was built by the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, pictured in the Bristol docks The Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon Gorge in Bristol. The Bridge was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and opened in 1864 He describes issues as 'evils' and even criticises the original Act of Parliament which created the Floating Harbour in Bristol as being wrong in the first place. Mr Booth explained: 'This is a first real insight into Brunel's work on Bristol docks, and we begin to see how the way things are now can be traced back to Brunel. 'He mentions many things that remain part of the fabric of the city today - Clifton Suspension Bridge, of course, but also Cumberland Basin, the Princess Street Bridge and how Overfill Yard became Underfill Yard. 'It's a really important account of the dock and harbour's history.' President Donald Trump reportedly issued a mea culpa to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for retweeting a Photoshopped graphic in November that showed him and 10 other adversaries behind bars for treason. Trump told Rosenstein days later that it was a mistake to distribute the image, and explained that he didn't notice it depicted his own Justice Department's top deputy, according to a former DOJ official who spoke to ABC News. The president appeared hours after the retweet to be well aware of what he had done, however. When a New York Post reporter asked him: 'Why do you think he belongs behind bars?' Trump responded: 'He should have never picked a special counsel.' President Donald Trump reportedly fell on his sword in a conversation with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, admitting it was a mistake to retween an image showing him behind bars for treason The image Trump retweeted in late November included nine of Trump's partisan opponents behind bars, along with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy AG Rosenstein The cartoonish image made famous on the day before Thanksgiving included a caption: 'NOW THAT THE RUSSIA COLLUSION IS A PROVEN LIE, WHEN DO THE TRIALS FOR TREASON BEGIN?' Among the 'imprisoned' Democrats in the collage were former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton, her former campaign chairman John Podesta and top aide Huma Abedin; and former Attorney Generals Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder. Also joining them were Rosenstein, fired FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Trump has grumbled about Rosenstein's decision to hire Mueller as speical counsel to investigate Russia's role in trying to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections. Trump seemed to understand just hours after the retween that he had labeled his Justice Department number-two a treasonous traitor, telling a reporter that it was because 'he should have never picked a special counsel' Rosenstein made the call because then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had advised Trump's campaign on foreign policy issues, recused himself. Sessions feared that since he had been behind the scenes during Trump's unlikely path to victory, he might become a witness in a case he was supervising. At the top of Mueller's agenda was determining whether Trump or anyone inside his presidential campaign colluded with Moscow, which was responsible for a hacking campaign that exposed emails and documents from foe Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman. Mueller's final report, according to Attorney General William Barr, found no evidence of such collusion. A campaign is being launched to urge tourists to stop riding donkeys up steps on a Greek island. For decades, donkeys of Santorini have made four or five return journeys up 520 wide, cobbled steps on the cliff-side path that leads to the town of Fira. The plight of the donkeys, which are marched from fields at dawn in temperatures regularly more than 86F, has been labelled 'Santorini's grubby little secret'. In recent years there has been an increase in donkeys suffering spinal injuries, saddle sores and exhaustion. For decades, donkeys of Santorini have made four or five return journeys up 520 wide, cobbled steps on the switchback path that leads to the town of Fira Now, activists in collaboration with the cruise-line industry, have set up the initiative in Santorini to inform holiday makers about the stress put on the animals. Nikos Zorzos, the island's mayor, told The Guadian: 'The campaign is about to start'. 'Representatives from the cruise liner association were here in my office this week promising to raise awareness [of the problem] and from our side we'll be distributing information leaflets. Our mules and donkeys are part of our tradition. Younger owners, especially, have understood that they need to be looked after.' The animals have long been used to ferry people from the Santorini's port to its main settlement. The plight of the donkeys which are marched from fields at dawn in temperatures regularly more than 86F has been labelled 'Santorini's grubby little secret' When the five-cabin cable car was introduced on the island, donkeys were used less frequently by travellers ascending the steps. But when the volcanic isle became a popular tourist hot-spot, attracting up to 17,000 holiday makers each day from cruise-ships, demand for the donkey rides increased. The animals who walk up in lines of two to ten, offload at a 'donkey station' just before the summit of the steps and then return for their next load, often bumping into walkers or squeezing them into walls that look over steep drops. Santorini, which stretches to 77 square kilometres and has a population of 25,000, has grown in popularity to the point where Mayor Nikolos Zorzos has limited the number of cruise ship passengers that can disembark to 8,000 a day from a peak of 18,000 in 2016 because of over-crowding. More than 108,000 people signed an online petition last summer deploring what it described as the 'mindless and unnecessary torture [of equines]' used by tourists to ride the steps. There was further anger when pictures were posted on social media of the overweight tourists riding donkeys up the steps. In response the Greek government introduced legislation making it illegal to burden animals with 'any load exceeding 100kg (15st), or one-fifth of [their] body weight.' Activists in collaboration with the cruise-line industry, have set up the initiative in Santorini to inform holiday makers about the stress placed on animals The Our In Their Hooves campaign was then launched to try and make holiday makers aware of the donkey's suffering. 'Our In Their Hooves campaign aims to encourage tourists to stop and think before using donkey taxis to climb the steep steps at Fira port,' said Catherine Rice, PR officer at The Donkey Sanctuary, which launched the initiative. Cruise liner firms signed up to the campaign after receiving complaints from passengers after the treatment of donkeys. As part of the campaign cruise liners will be screening an animated video created by the British animal welfare charity on board ships. 'Asking our guests to put themselves 'In their Hooves' is an important part of our destination sustainability plan for the island,' said Maria Deligianni, who represents the eastern Mediterranean for the Cruise Lines International Association, said 'asking passengers to put themselves 'In their Hooves' is 'an important part of the destination sustainability plan for the island'. Santorini has turned its donkeys into a money-spinning feature. Soft toys, t-shirts and trinkets bearing donkey motifs are sold in gift shops at the top of the steps and around the main town of Fira, the island's capital. The island brews signature yellow and red donkey beers and donkey riding tours are marketed in travel agencies. But there has been growing animal welfare concerns and in 2017 German tourist Susan Chopin was trampled to death after one of the donkeys bolted and charged into tourists who were walking up the steps. The 67-year-old, who was on a cruise with her husband and another couple, had just celebrated her birthday. Advertisement Wintry weather is set to continue in London tomorrow morning, with heavy rain and hail forecast to hit commuters as they make their way to work. Heavy snow caused travel chaos across much of the UK earlier on Wednesday, with drivers and commuters alike facing treacherous weather conditions. The snow and hail even hit the capital, which is usually unaffected by severe weather conditions felt across northern areas of the country. And the cold snap is set to continue into tomorrow with the Met Office warning that heavy showers, thunder and hail are expected in the morning. A severe weather warning for snow has been issued as wintry conditions continue to affect much of the UK. The Met Office has put out a yellow alert for snow on high ground above 300 metres in Wales overnight and into Thursday morning. Outside the Royal Exchange buildings in the City, a cafe with outdoor seating was left empty and a worker was left to get the chairs in after the snow and hail started Forecasters are warning that some roads and railways are likely to be affected, with longer journey times for travellers. The warning, which covers much of southern and central Wales, is currently in place from 4am to 11am on Thursday. Rain, sleet and snow are expected to affect driving conditions on Thursday morning, particularly in Wales and the West Midlands. A chilly Wednesday night is predicted, with temperatures set to drop just above or below zero degrees in several parts of the country. The capital experienced a sudden rush of hail this afternoon and people were forced to put up their umbrellas to shield them from the hail Several people tweeted about the unexpected snow in London, with some poking fun at the online reaction to the weather There may be some sunny spells, however, with maximum temperatures of 11C. Londoners took to social media to share photos and video of the rare snowfall on Wednesday, with one even joking that producers would one day make films about this day, as two flakes of snow were seen falling on one mans jacket. Temperatures could plunge as low as 5C, with parts of the UK having been hit with severe yellow weather warnings, with some places having experienced thunder and lightening this afternoon. One man, James Whaling joked and tweeted: 'PICTURED: Two flakes of snow on my jacket. In London. In April. Theyll make films about this.' This is while others cited the end of the world and some even jokingly blamed the Brexit chaos for the conditions. One brave man donned his cycle shorts and a lightweight jacket to tackle the roads in London as the hail started to come down Other shocked Londoners posted jokes and memes about the weather, including this user who jokingly labelled Wednesday 'Snowmageddon' In the London Bridge area, one man was clearly affected by the cold spate of weather and was pictured blowing his nose and trying to keep up his umbrella at the same time Disbelieving Londoners took to social media to share photos and video of the capital, as snow fell across it on Wednesday James Whaling tweeted and joked that people would make films about the day that it snowed in London at the beginning on April The snow provoked a barrage of tweets from people confused by its presence, while others poked fun at the shock caused by the weather Andrew Duncan said: 'Snow and thunder in London as UK hit by spring chill. I blame Brexit.' Others took the opportunity to highlight the stark reality of climate change with one claiming the weather in London today was the 'ticking of the climate change clock'. One woman said she had been having a conversation with her sister when she noticed the poor weather conditions and questioned when spring was coming. This morning the M55 was home to a 24-car pile up after police responded to a number of crashes following a burst of hail and snow in Lancashire. Snow covered the area of Nenthead in Cumbria after temperatures dipped below freezing overnight, with poor weather conditions set to continue People made the most of the weather and took their children out on sleds as Cumbria became blanketed in snow The Met Office has warned snow may hit mountain areas in Wales and Scotland over the coming days, with up to eight inches threatening the Grampian mountains One person expressed his concern regarding the weather and said that the capital was 'messing' with him, due to to snowy spring conditions Authorities have urged drivers to slow down or in some cases even stay at home as parts of England and Scotland become caked in snow. Lancashire Roads Police said there had been no casualties but that the situation had been 'carnage'. In other parts of the country, those in North Wales were also hit by the snow and farmyard animals such as sheep were battling against the weather on a hill top. In Scotland roads were closed as whiteout conditions spread across the A9, which connects the central belt to Inverness and the Highlands. This is while blizzard conditions were reported in parts of Cumbria and Northumberland with some residents having to shovel snow in order to get their cars down the road. One person described the snow as 'utterly crazy' and suggested that it could be the end of the world Some people questioned when spring would be arriving as the cold spells continued to plague London today One Twitter user said that today's strange weather conditions were due to the 'ticking of the climate change clock' One person joked that the recent poor weather conditions were down to the UK's exit from the European Union The iconic black cab was pictured in London driving through the snow which can be seen gathered on the windscreen of the taxi The sky looked grey today in London as small snowflakes fell in the London Bridge area which is home to the Shard building One cyclist battled the elements and had put his scarf around his face in order to protect himself from the cold burst All wrapped up! People were making sure they had their hoods up as they walked through the streets of London Speaking to MailOnline this afternoon meteorologist Alex Burkill at the Met Office said it was likely the conditions in London were more like hail, as temperatures across the capital remain at around 2/3C. 'There are some thundery showers around in central London and so its more likely hail. It's too warm for snow in London when heavy showers develop they will bring temperature downs there has been sleet and snow and across other parts of the country. 'In London it will be get to 2/3, it's cold enough for a bit of sleet or snow when we say bye to the showers over the next few hours it will be dry perhaps tomorrow morning rush hour there will be more showers pushing in again mostly rain, but heavy hail is not out of the question. 'For places like Cumbria they have really seen the worst of it. Areas that will be hit the most will be parts of Wales and south west England.' There was a pile up of cars on the M55 in Lancashire which was caused by a microburst of hail and snow, police advised motorists to stay home Pictures taken on the M55 show a multi car pile up (left and right) as the treacherous weather conditions caused havoc for motorists A red car off the A9 near Tomatin was pictured abandoned and covered in snow following heavy snow fall across the area A snowplough on the A938 near Carrbridge during snowy weather which hit the UK over night after temperatures dropped The extreme conditions didn't stop this group of ramblers climbing Snowdon in jogging pants and trainers earlier today Daffodils were covered in a blanket of snow in the village of Catton, Northumberland, after temperatures dipped below freezing overnight Temperatures dipped below freezing across the board overnight and are expected to remain in single figures for most of today. Forecasters said a deep area of low pressure was centred over the UK, bringing with it the potential to drive showers and produce long spells of wet and changeable weather. Met Office meteorologist Mark Wilson said: 'In the north of the UK there will be more persistent rain and hill snow today, particularly on higher ground in southern Scotland and northern England. A car makes its way along a snow covered road in Allendale, as the Met Office issues a severe yellow weather warning for some parts of the country Snow can be seen moving across the north of the country with warnings being in place in the highlands, after the morning rush hour was hit today following the extreme weather conditions UK has fifth wettest March on record Last month was the fifth wettest March on record, the Met Office has said. Provisional figures show the UK had an average 132.9mm of rainfall. The all-time record for March is 150.3mm, which was set in 1981. The amount of rain varied across the country. By March 18 enough rain had fallen to make it the wettest March on record in Northern Ireland. North-west England and north Wales saw their second wettest March. By contrast, Scotland as a whole recorded its fifth wettest March, Wales its seventh and England its 16th. Two named storms, Storm Freya and Storm Gareth, passed over the UK during the month, bringing heavy rain, strong winds and snow to many parts of the country. Provisional figures also show that the average mean temperature across the UK was 6.8C - high enough to rank as the 10th warmest March on record. There was an average 115.6 hours of sunshine, which was some way below the record of 169.5 hours set in 1929, but slightly above usual for the time of year. Met Office temperature and rainfall data goes back to 1910, while sunshine data begins in 1929. Advertisement 'There is a weather warning in force. There could be some snow to lower levels, but essentially it's a high-ground feature and it could cause some localised disruption over high routes.' Parts of Cumbria, Northumberland and Durham were in the warning area in England, while north of the border it covered parts of Dumfries and Galloway, East and West Lothian, East Ayrshire and South Lanarkshire. Up to 1.9 inches of snow could accumulate above 200m and up to 3.9 inches above 400m, the Met Office said. The band of rain and hill snow will push eastwards through Wednesday, while Scotland and Northern Ireland are expected to see strong winds with coastal gales. There will be sunshine and some rain for the southern and western parts, although showers are forecast to be heavy with hail and thunder mixed in. Temperatures will remain on the cold side, with around 5C or 6C the maximum for many and 10C expected in the south-east. Little change in the conditions is expected for Thursday, although the focus for most of the showers will be in the south-west of the UK. Hill snow will persist across high areas in the north, while in the south-west some drier and brighter weather is expected to arrive. There is an improving picture towards the end of the week, with brighter, drier and warmer conditions expected for many parts on Friday and into the weekend. The Met Office had previously warned that the northern half of the country, particularly around the Welsh mountains, the Pennines and Scottish mountains would be dusted in snow on Wednesday. Met Office meteorologist Helen Roberts said the country could expect a continuation of sunshine combined with heavy, blustery showers. 'Probably more of a risk than the snow, or more of a hazard, is going to be ice because temperatures will drop very quickly in clear slots,' she warned. One woman, in a pink coat, was seen shovelling snow out of the path of her car in order for her to get to work in Cumbria earlier today At a time where the UK usually sees flowers and plants blooming, the roads have become caked in snow, as in this area of Allendale Hill snow, sleet, showers and gales are expected for parts of the UK as the chilly snap keeps hold and cars struggle to battle through the tricky conditions Many roads were impassable this morning making the morning commute havoc! This lady was finding it difficult to get moving in Cumbria A man walking his dogs braves the cold weather conditions and even wraps the dogs up in all weather jackets for their morning stroll Ms Roberts said a low pressure system was dominating and prolonging the wintry conditions. She added: 'Its quite a deep low and it's not moving anywhere very quickly, it's just swirling around these showers across the country.' However, the weather is expected to gradually move towards drier spells later in the week, with temperatures drifting upwards. Thursday will still see some showers, but eastern areas may escape the rain. Like a scene from a postcard! The snow was captured falling heavily in Northumberland, with the classic red telephone box in shot Long queues were seen on the northbound on the A9 near Carrbridge during snowy weather which had plagued parts of the UK Killhope mining museum was covered in snow in County Durham and looks like a winter wonderland in this scenic picture as snow continues to fall across the area A man rides a quad bike along the snow making tyre marks in the deep snow and he wraps up warm to brave the wintery conditions Sarah Hinkson, 37, draped herself across four seats on the Hammersmith and City line before performing a sex act in front of shocked passengers A woman who performed a sex act on a Tube train for ten minutes and claimed she was itching a rash is being hunted by police. Sarah Hinkson, 37, draped herself across four seats on the Hammersmith and City line before performing a sex act in front of shocked passengers. Passenger Anthony Burton heard a stamping noise and turned to see Hinkson stamping her foot against the seat. I was quite taken aback, he said. And Hinkson did not stop until she was arrested by police officers at Kings Cross station. Mispa Majid, prosecuting, told City of London Magistrates Court: Ms Hinkson is charged with outraging public decency on a London Underground train. On Sunday 24 February 2019 Mr Anthony Burton witnessed the defendant on board the Hammersmith and City line train when he boarded the train at Paddington. Mr Burton thought at the time of the train he observed Ms Hinkson. Ms Hinkson states she was itching a rash at the time, and that is her defence. Mr Burton who is visually impaired in one eye told the court he boarded at Paddington after being escorted into the front carriage with his guide dog by London Underground staff. He said: I was suddenly aware of a banging noise and I thought it was something mechanical but I noticed that to my right there was a lady who was laying out across three or four seats. She was banging her foot against the seat or the glass which was making the noise. There was not anybody standing in the way, I could see her quite clearly. Mr Burton was asked whether his impaired vision had affected what he had seen. I tend to turn my head to look at things so I could clearly see her, he told the court. Her boots were on the floor beside her and the next thing I noticed about her was her hand and where her hand was. All I could see of her hand was the top of her wrist area because the rest of her hand was in her trousers. It was around her crotch, it was blatantly obvious which part of her body it was. I was quite taken aback. Mr Burton told the court that he contacted the police after seeing there were children nearby at risk of seeing Hinksons actions. Mispa Majid, prosecuting, told City of London Magistrates Court: Ms Hinkson is charged with outraging public decency on a London Underground train' He said: There were a couple of children running about through the carriage and they came close to her vicinity, their parents were further down the carriage. It was at that point I felt uncomfortable. I thought to myself she is not aware of her surroundings. I felt that something should be done, that this lady was doing this and she was totally unaware of herself or people around her. Police attended at Kings Cross station approximately ten minutes after Mr Burton first saw the 37-year-old where she was arrested. The court heard the mother-of-one was mostly unresponsive in her interview but denied masturbating. When asked what she was doing, Hinkson told officers: Rash on my inner thigh, I was scratching a rash on my inner thigh. It comes and goes Chair Magistrate Diane Lennon found Hinkson guilty, stating: We were asked to consider an offence of outraging public decency. Mr Burton clearly saw indecent acts taking place over a material period of time. We find the Crown has proven this incident occurred beyond all reasonable doubt. Hinkson, of Acton, denied but was convicted of one count of outraging public decency by behaving in an indecent manner on February 24. She did not attend court and a warrant has been issued for her arrest. Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno on Tuesday said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has 'repeatedly violated' the terms of his asylum in the Andean nation's London embassy, according to a local media interview. Moreno told the Ecuadorean Radio Broadcasters' Association that Assange does not have the right to 'hack private accounts or phones' and cannot intervene in the politics of other countries, especially those with friendly relations with Ecuador. Assange took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. Julian Assange, pictured on the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been hiding out in the consulate since 2012 Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno, pictured, accused the Wikileaks founder of hacking phones and intervening in the affairs of other countries from his London consulate That sexual assault investigation was later dropped, but Assange fears he could be extradited to face charges in the United States, where federal prosecutors are investigating WikiLeaks. He says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and is putting pressure on him by isolating him from visitors and spying on him. Ecuador has said its treatment of Assange was in line with international law, but that his situation 'cannot be extended indefinitely.' Tracy Morgan revealed his doubts about Jussie Smollett's hate crime claims and took a few shots at the Empire actor during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday. When asked about his latest career news, Morgan jokingly announced that he'd been cast on Empire, saying: 'Contractually all I've got to do is not fake a hate crime'. Fallon then asked: 'You don't buy that story?' - referring to Smollett's claims that he was the victim of a racist, homophobic attack by two men in downtown Chicago in January. Morgan replied: 'Nah man! First of all, racist people don't be jumping nobody in the polar vortex. It's too cold. You be racist in the spring.' 'Racists don't be watching Empire,' the Last O.G. star added. Morgan also joked that the story didn't add up because Smollett was seen holding his Subway sandwich after the attack. 'He didn't let that Subway sandwich go,' he said before Fallon changed the subject. Tracy Morgan took a few shots at Jussie Smollett over the Empire star's hate crime claims during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday Morgan jokingly announced that he'd been cast on the Fox drama Empire, saying: 'Contractually all I've got to do is not fake a hate crime' The comedian then shared his doubts about Smollett's story, stating that 'racists don't be watching Empire'. Smollett is seen above on the show alongside Tajari P Henson Morgan's comments came one week after a felony case accusing Smollett of staging the hoax hate crime was dropped last Tuesday. The 36-year-old walked out of court a free man after secretly completing 16 hours of community service and forfeiting $10,000 in bond. The Illinois Assistant State's Attorney's sudden decision not to pursue charges was met with widespread condemnation from critics including the furious Chicago police chief and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who believe Smollett should be punished for his alleged lies. Morgan's comments came one week after prosecutors dropped a felony case in which Smollett was accused of staging the hoax hate crime in January Chris Rock also took a few shots at Smollett while on stage at the 50th NAACP Image Awards Fellow black comedian Chris Rock also took a few jabs at Smollett at the 50th NAACP Image Awards on Saturday. 'They said no Jussie Smollett jokes,' Rock said as he took the stage to presenting the award for Outstanding Comedy Series to ABC's 'black-ish'. 'Yeah, I know, but what a waste of light skin. Do you know what I could do with that light skin? That curly hair, my career would be out of here. I would be running Hollywood. What the hell was he thinking?' Rock added: 'You are known as "Jessie" for now on. You don't even get the "u" anymore. That "u" was for respect. You ain't getting no respect from me.' In response to Rock's jokes, 'black-ish' star Yara Shahidi made her stance in the Smollett controversy obvious. Smollett, who lost to 'Grey's Anatomy' star Jessie Williams in the Supporting Actor in a Drama Series category, did not attend the awards. Michael Cunnett, 38, was jailed for seven months today for punching two easyJet crew members after downing four pints of Stella ahead of the 9am flight in February A groom was thrown off his honeymoon flight to Egypt after punching two members of the cabin crew when they told him not to smoke on board. Michael Cunnett, 38, had downed four pints of Stella ahead of the 9am flight from Gatwick in February when he launched a foul-mouthed homophobic tirade. He punched two easyJet staff members before being carted off the plane by police as his new wife shouted: 'Look at what you've done. You have f****** off our honeymoon!' Lewes Crown Court heard that the plasterer continued his abuse, calling one officer a 'baldy c***', before knocking himself out by headbutting the cage in the squad car. Cunnett, from Epsom, Surrey, was jailed for seven months and ordered to pay 500 in compensation to each of the victims for the vile attack. Flight attendant Andre Bogley, who was floored by two punches before another crew member intervened, said: 'He didn't know my sexuality, but I am a gay man and proud of it. 'It is not a lifestyle choice, it is natural and no one deserves to be discriminated against for their sexuality. 'Many people struggle with it, and deal with mental health problems on a daily basis. His remarks to me were personal. 'If he travels again, my hope is that he will treat people with respect and acknowledge that he lives in a diverse society which is something that should be embraced, not ridiculed.' Ryan Richter, prosecuting, said cabin crew had spotted that Cunnett was being louder than the other passengers as he boarded the flight in February. He lashed out at the crew members who had asked him not to smoke an e-cigarette. David Forsyth, defending, said Cunnett, was 'fully aware that his behaviour was reprehensible' and was 'thoroughly embarrassed and ashamed'. Lewes Crown Court, pictured, heard that he was escorted off the plane by police officers who he abused, calling one of them a 'baldy c***'. His wife was heard shouting: 'Look at what you've done. You have f****** off our honeymoon!' Judge David Rennie said the four pints he had drunk brought out his 'true character'. Cunnett accepted that other passengers would have been frightened and alarmed. He admitted interfering with the performance of cabin crew, two common assaults and criminal damage. Judge David Rennie added: 'It was like a child having a tantrum. You chose to drink four pints and to behave in a foul-mouthed, highly abusive manner. Something of your true character did reveal itself. 'We do have to ask why airports are selling that amount of alcohol outside of usual licensing hours. 'An attack on the perceived sexuality of these men was utterly shameful. People like you find yourself on the edge of society. 'Only an immediate custodial sentence can be justified.' The Most Extensive and Reliable Source of Information Related to the Mexican Drugs Cartels. You will not find this level of coverage anywhere else, join us! Send information, pictures or videos, you remain 100% anonymous. Envia fotos, videos, notas, enlaces o informacion todo 100% Anonimo. Borderland Beat? We love to have you in our team, send Sol Prendido or HEARST an email! Want to be a contributor or citizen reporter forBorderland Beat?We love to have you in our team, sendoran email! WARNING: Posts may contain strong violent material, discretion is advised. COMMENTS: We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. A 17th century masterpiece that was stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War has finally been returned to the descendants of the Jewish art collector it was stolen from. The painting, by Dutch master Salomon Koninck, titled 'A scholar sharpening his quill', was stolen in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of France, and sent to Adolf Hitler's headquarters in Munich. The painting vanished at the war's end, and resurfaced only in November 2017 when a Chilean art dealer tried to sell it via Christie's auction house in New York. Christie's identified the piece and contacted the FBI to begin the process of restitution. Michel Vernay, 71, and his brother Laurent, 65, traveled from Paris to New York for a ceremony Monday at the French consulate to receive the painting, which dates back to 1639. 'A scholar sharpening his quill' (1639) by Dutch master Salomon Koninck was returned to the descendants of a Jewish art collector at a ceremony at the French consulate in New York The brothers are the great-grandsons of famed art collector Adolphe Schloss, who died in 1910 aged 68, and were also accompanied at the event by Eliane Demartini, another rightful heir of the looted art. During the Second World War, a Nazi division was created with the sole purpose of studying Jewish life and culture to inform the propagandist mission against the Jews. The Einsatzstab Reichleiter Rosenberg (ERR) moved around Europe confiscating artwork and other items of cultural significance relating to 'the enemies of the Reich'. The massive operation, which saw thousands of artworks plundered, were then recorded and photographed, leaving a detailed record of what was stolen. After the outbreak of the war, the Schloss heirs moved the Schloss Collection from Paris to Chateau de Chambon, a town in Southern France, in an attempt to protect the collection from looting by the Nazis. Due to its value and significance, the ERR were ordered to locate and loot the Schloss Collection. In 1943, they ultimately succeeded and 262 paintings, including 'A scholar sharpening his quill', were taken to a depot located at the Jeu de Paume, a prewar museum in Paris that was operated by the ERR during the war. Afterwards, the painting was selected by the Nazis to be transported to the the 'Fuhrerbau,' Hitler's headquarters in Munich, from where it and many other paintings disappeared in the aftermath of the war. The painting resurfaced in November 2017, when a Chilean art dealer dubbed the 'Consignor' attempted to auction it. When the painting arrived in New York from Chile, it was determined that it did in fact belong to the Schloss collection and had been looted some seven decades before. Due to its value and significance, the ERR were ordered to locate and loot the Schloss Collection. In 1943, they ultimately succeeded and 262 paintings, including 'A scholar sharpening his quill', were taken to a depot located at the Jeu de Paume, a prewar museum in Paris that was operated by the ERR during the war When the Consignor was informed, she said her father had purchased the painting from Walter Andreas Hofer in Munich in 1952. Hofer was Hermann Goring's chief purchasing agent and as such was a key player in the confiscation and looting of Jewish art collections during the Nazi era. In 1950, after being tried in absentia by a French military tribunal for his role in art plundering during the war, Hofer was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. 'A scholar sharpening his quill' (1639) by Dutch master Salomon Koninck French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian spoke at the event, which had extra significance given the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe. Restitution 'puts the spotlight on all the looting and Jewish disappearances,' said Michel Vernay, a retired engineer. 'It's like a monument in tribute to what happened in the past,' he said. Theft and looting is an integral part of the process of genocide, said Vernay, whose mother lost half her family at the Auschwitz death camp. 'People are deprived of their ability to exist in society, to exercise their profession, then they are deprived of their nationality, their resources and their property, and when they are alone, without resources, homeless and defenseless, it's easy to end their lives.' Laurent Vernay described every restitution as a small victory but added: 'One painting is not as important as any single life that was taken,' he said. The brothers are convinced that the return of antisemitism is not a passing phenomenon. 'It's up and down but its always there,' Laurent said. 'I have no sentimental feeling about it,' said Michel, who was seeing the painting for the first time. 'I was born after the war, after it had vanished.' The artwork is an inheritance that is shared with more than 20 people, he said. 'As a painting cannot be split, I hope there will be a French museum able to purchase it and mark it as artwork recovered after being stolen.' Even though, there are 170 paintings still missing out of the 333 in the Schloss collection, the brothers have no plans to search for them. 'If you spend your life looking for them, then you don't live,' said Laurent. 'That was the position of my father, and I decided not to do too much.' Both Michel Vernay and Eliane Demartini deplored the way that French museums have dragged their feet when it comes to returning Nazi-looted artwork. Restitution 'puts the spotlight on all the looting and Jewish disappearances,' said Michel Vernay (pictured), a retired engineer. 'It's like a monument in tribute to what happened in the past,' he said French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (pictured) spoke at the event, which had extra significance given the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe 'If you spend your life looking for them, then you don't live,' said Laurent. 'That was the position of my father, and I decided not to do too much' In the United States 'there is a real procedure and a pride to be able to restore these works,' Michel said, while in France such restitutions have been done in a haphazard way. French museums, including the Louvre, limit themselves to displaying recovered artwork under the label 'MNR' (for 'National Museums - Recovered') until the descendants recognize the pieces and step forward to claim them. 'For me, who is 70 years old, these works of art were looted 75 years ago, I have no memory of them,' said Michel. 'To exhibit them, saying 'find your artwork' for people who had not even been born or were a year or two old during the war, and who are more than 80 years old today -- excuse me, that's really a joke,' he said. 'It's not frustration but eventually some anger comes up because there is no movement.' Le Drian, the foreign minister, reminded them that the French government committed themselves last year to 'accelerate and intensify the work of identifying and returning to their owners' looted works of art. 'The fight that you have carried out along with your lawyers' to recover the artwork 'is also our fight,' he said. ERR records and photographs of art and cultural artifacts looted by the Nazis are digitized and available in an online database created by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, and this database includes a photograph of the painting taken by the ERR during the Second World War. Former FBI Director James Comey is warning that calls to probe the FBI and special counsel's Russia probe would lead to 'terrible cycle' of investigation. Comey's own interactions with Trump before the president fired him were a subject of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Now, withe the completion of the Mueller report, Trump and Republican allies called for an investigation of the Mueller probe, the Clinton email investigation, and any FBI misconduct that occurred. Trump himself on Tuesday renewed his call to look at the origins of the Russia probe the 'beginnings and where it started, the whole situation.' The president said some 'very bad people started something that should have never been started' and that they 'did things that were very, very bad for our country and very, very illegal and you could even say treasonous.' 'What would be the crime you'd be investigating?' former FBI Director James Comey said when asked about calls for an investigation of the Russia and Clinton email probes Comey was asked in an interview with CNN whether he was fearful of what may come amid calls by Trump and powerful officials such as Trump ally Judiciary Chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham. 'I don't fear it personally. I fear it as a citizen, right? Investigate what? Investigate that investigations were conducted? What would be the crime you'd be investigating?' Comey asked. Then Comey was asked whether he and the FBI could have done more to 'lock her up' chants that were a staple of Trump's 2016 campaign. Audience members continue to erupt into the cheer at Trump's rallies. Hillary Clinton has faulted Comey's decisions in the email investigation with contributing to her loss President Donald Trump is calling for the Mueller probe to be 'looked at' and claiming total exoneration 'So it's a terrible cycle to start. He's already started it with calling for the locking up of his political opponents, including people like me and so it would just be more of that dangerous step and would I hope, though they'll continue to disappoint me, the Republicans would finally stand up and say we don't that kind of thing,' Comey added. Then interviewer Christianne Amanpour brought up the 'lock her up' chants that erupted at Trump rallies during the 2016 campaign, and whether he or the FBI somehow could have done more to shut it down. 'That's not a role for government to play,' responded Comey. 'The beauty of this country is people can say what they want even if it's misleading and it's demagoguery.' 'The people should have shut it down were Republicans who understand the rule of law and the values that they claim to stand for. Shame on them, but it wasn't a role for government to play,' he said. David Blaine denies sexual assault allegations made against him by women and will cooperate with authorities, his publicist has said. New York police confirmed on Monday that Blaine is under investigation following a Daily Beast report that the department had taken statements from two female accusers. 'David denies the accusations that have been reported and he takes these allegations seriously,' a Tuesday statement from Blaine's publicist, Jill Fritzo, said. 'He intends to cooperate with any investigation.' A publicist for magician and showman David Blaine said he denies the allegations Blaine - who turns 46 on Thursday - had previously refused to comment on the allegations stating that he had not been contacted by the NYPD as the reason. Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea, speaking at an unrelated news conference, had declined to discuss any details about Blaine's case and wouldn't say whether police had sought to interview him. One accuser is reported to have filed a claim a year ago and another only last week. Police sources told the New York Post that one of the illusionist's accusers told law enforcement that in 1997, he hypnotized her into performing a sex act on him at his apartment. Citing unnamed sources, the report said one of the alleged victims claims she was attacked by him in his Manhattan apartment in 1998, which may fall outside the statute of limitations. Around the time at least one of these newly uncovered allegations is said to have occurred, Blaine made a name for himself by performing his first public endurance feat. On April 5, 1999, he performed a stunt where he was buried in a coffin for seven days underneath a three-ton water-filled tank with only liquids to sustain himself. Blaine is pictured in the coffin A few sexual assault offenses in New York carry no time limit for criminal prosecution, like rape in the first degree, but some, like forcible touching and rape in the third degree, must be prosecuted within 2-5 years from the time of the alleged act, or from the time the alleged victim turned 18. Among other things, the difference between rape in the first degree and rape in the third degree in the state of New York is whether the alleged perpetrator used physical force or the threat of immediate death, physical injury or kidnapping, and potentially the age of the victim. Blaine is known for stunts like being buried underground for seven days without food or water in New York in 1999. He also stayed in a plexiglass case suspended 30ft above the Thames River in London for more than 40 days in 2003. On Tuesday his website still showed he is to begin a seven-date tour of the UK and Ireland in June. Reports of these latest allegations come days after tickets went on sale for Blaine's upcoming tour. Blaine was accused of raping former model Natasha Prince (pictured) in 2004 in London in 2016. He was questioned by detectives with Scotland Yard but not prosecuted The NYPD said in a statement on Monday it 'takes sexual assault and rape cases extremely seriously, and urges anyone who has been a victim to file a report so we can perform a comprehensive investigation, and offer support and services to survivors'. The Daily Beast had previously reported that a former model Natasha Prince alleged Blaine raped her in London in 2004, an allegation he denied. Prince alleged that Blaine drugged and anally raped her at a private home in the Chelsea area of London in the summer of that year, The Daily Beast reported. Blaine was questioned in 2017 but Scotland Yard detectives later declined to take further action after investigating her claim, the news website said. A Denny's customer was brutally attacked by a 'delivery' man who was berating employees at a restaurant in California. Fred Ibonie, 35, had left work just before 2.30am when he went inside the Denny's located on Mowry Avenue in Fremont for a late-night dinner. While waiting on his to-go order, Ibonie saw a man, who claimed he was a delivery man for DoorDash, berating employees for not taking his order right away. Ibonie said he yelled at the man and told him to 'calm down'. Denny's customer, Fred Ibonie (left and right, after the attack), 35, was brutally attacked by a 'delivery' man who was verbally attacking employees at a restaurant in California Ibonie's attacker knocked out three of his teeth, split his lip, and fractured one bone in his nose and one in his mouth According to Ibonie's GoFundMe page, the man started yelling at him. The man continued yelling at the Denny's staffers, and when another customer wouldn't move for him, he shoved them out the way. That's when the delivery man and the customer he shoved went outside. 'I knew there's no way the guy that got shoved should be out there alone. I stepped outside hoping to mediate the situation before it escalated,' Ibonie wrote on GoFundMe. But as soon as he walked outside the man 'sucker punched' him. Ibonie's attacker knocked out three of his teeth, split his lip, and fractured one bone in his nose and one in his mouth. Ibonie, who is a waiter, said he only intervened because he knows how it is when dealing with difficult customers late at night. Ibonie said he can barely talk, eat or drink The man then fled the scene and Ibonie's mother rushed him to Washington Hospital's emergency room. A photo of Ibonie at the hospital shows blood around his mouth from the attack. 'I am in an incredible amount of pain, am un-insured and am unable to go to work,' Ibonie wrote on GoFundMe. He created the account to help raise funds Ibonie, who is a waiter, said he only intervened because he knows how it is when dealing with difficult customers late at night. 'I don't like seeing people treated that way especially people who work in the same business as I do,' Ibonie told KTVU. 'We get treated badly by people all the time.' Ibonie said he can barely talk, eat or drink. The incident occurred at the Denny's located on Mowry Avenue in Fremont (pictured). Ibonie has plans to press charges against the suspect if he is identified. Police are still investigating the incident Authorities confirmed that the suspect, who is described as being in his early 20s, is not employed by DoorDash. Denny's released a statement to the station that said they are 'shocked by the violence that took place'. 'We are looking into the details of this unusual situation and the status of our guest that was injured.' The investigation is ongoing and police are hoping to find the suspect using surveillance video from the area. Ibonie has plans to press charges against the suspect if he is identified. A former North Carolina judge and well-respected community leader has been charged with having sex with a 14-year-old girl over the weekend. Daniel Green, 64, was arrested early Sunday morning after police were called to the Baymont Inn in Ashville for a report of a suspected sexual assault of a child. The Ashville Police Department said the underage victim was known to Green prior to the encounter. Scroll down for video Former North Carolina judge Daniel Green (left and right), 64, has been accused of having sex with a 14-year-old girl Green was arrested Sunday after police were called to the Baymont Inn in Ashville for a report of a suspected sexual assault of a child Green was charged with first-degree statutory sex offense with a child; disseminating obscene material by watching porn with the minor; contributing to the delinquency of a minor and providing alcohol to someone under age 21, according to the Ashville Citizen Times. During his initial court appearance on Monday, a judge told Green that he could face a life sentence if convicted of the most serious offense, reported WSOC. Green was released after posting $75,000 bond. A graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Law, Green served as a district court judge for two years in the 1980s and as a North Carolina Superior Court judge for seven months in 2002. He has been practicing law in the Hickory area for nearly 40 years and currently has a private practice specializing in real estate, family law, wills, and estates. Green, a one-time chairman of the Catawba County Democratic Party, was told by a judge he could face a life sentence if convicted of statutory rape (pictured in court Monday) Last year, the North Carolina Bar Association honored Green with the Citizen Lawyer Award, which is given to jurists who 'volunteer service and leadership.' An article published by the Bar Association announcing the award painted a glowing portrait of Green as a pillar of his community who is deeply involved in his church and local politics, as well as in various charitable enterprises. As Dan sees it, lawyers are specially situated in their communities as they have studied law and justice it is a lawyers responsibility to work towards the furtherance of those principles in any way possible, the article stated. For four years, Green served as chairman of the Catawba County Democratic Party. He is the current president of the board of directors for the Western Piedmont Symphony and a member of the Hickory Sunrise Rotary Club. Since 1991, the attorney and philanthropist has been hosting foreign exchange students as part of the AFS Intercultural Program. Advertisement Tens of thousands of mourners gathered in Brooklyn Tuesday for the funeral of a popular rabbi who survived the Holocaust and despised the internet. Huge crowds were pictured in Borough Park for the funeral of The Skulener Rebbe, Rabbi Yisroel Avrohom Portugal, who died aged 95 on Monday in New York City. Images from the scene shows with as many as an estimated 100,000 mourners lining the streets to pay their respects to the religious leader. People openly wept as others climbed lampposts and crowds were controlled by a huge police presence and metal fences. The funeral saw the whole area shutdown with road closures and blocks and shops not opened out of respect. Huge crowds were pictured in Borough Park for the funeral of The Skulener Rebbe, Rabbi Yisroel Avrohom Portugal Rabbi Yisroel Avrohom Portugal died aged 95 on Monday in New York City surrounded by his family Images from the funeral showed as many as an estimated 100,000 mourners lining the streets to pay their respects It was announced during the service that those with a smart phone should not touch the body or the coffin The rules did not appear to deter some from using their phones to snap pictures of the funeral Many of the members of the crowd were overcome with emotion at the event (pictured one boy holds a cellphone while another has his head in his hand) The funeral saw the whole area shutdown with road closures and blocks and shops not opened out of respect The popular Rabbi and fixture in Brooklyn Hasidic neighborhoods had survived the Nazi death camps The Skulener Rebbe Rabbi Yisroel Avrohom Portugal came to the United States in 1960 after he was jailed in Romania Portugal died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, surrounded by his family, on Monday after being admitted in February People openly wept as others climbed lampposts and crowds were controlled by a huge police presence Thousands lined the streets and rooftops of Borough Park in Brooklyn, New York for the funeral procession The Skulener Rebbe, Rabbi Yisroel Avrohom Portugal, who died aged 95 on Monday in New York City The popular Rabbi and fixture in Brooklyn Hasidic neighborhoods had survived the Nazi death camps and came to the United States in 1960. He died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, surrounded by his family, on Monday after being admitted in February. His body then needed to be transported to Baltimore to Brooklyn, which meant he was unable to be buried on the same day as his death, which is Hasidic custom. There were chaotic scenes at the funeral where the police lost control of the crowd and the hearse ran over the leg of an NYPD officer, NBC New York reports. Another officer was said to have been hit in the head with a drone. NYPD police commissioner James P. O'Neill said the officer run over had a possible broken ankle. O'Neill added: 'There was a drone that came out of the sky and hit a police officer. The drone apparently ran out of gas... and it landed on the officer's head.' In the 1980s Portugal, a strict opponent of Internet use, would reportedly would set fire to a television each year on the eve of Passover. In 2013 he was also one of the organizers of the Orthodox anti-Internet rally at Citi Field. Alexander Rapaport, executive director of the soup kitchen Masbia, told Forward: 'When people came to Boro Park and wanted to see something very Hasidic, they wanted to get a feel of a Hasidic rebbe, they always ended up at Skulen.' It was announced during the service that those with a smart phone should not touch the body or the coffin, The Lakewood Scoop reports. The body needed to be transported to Baltimore to Brooklyn, which meant he was unable to be buried on the same day as his death, which is Hasidic custom Portugal was a strict opponent of Internet use and would reportedly set fire to a television each year on the eve of Passover There were chaotic scenes at the funeral where the police lost control of the crowd and the hearse ran over the leg of an NYPD officer. Another officer was said to have been hit in the head with a drone It was announced during the service that those with a smart phone should not touch the body or the coffin Rabbi Portugal was called 'a truly inspiring and special individual that we should all aspire to be like' by Assembly Member Simcha Eichenstein Portugal was born in 1924 in Romania to Rabbie Eliezer Zusia Portugal. He founded the Skulen Hasidic dynasty and his son later served as the rebbe of thegroup when his father died in 1982. Both men had settled in Bucharest following World War II but left Romania for the United States in 1960 after United Nations officials intervened. A year earlier they had been jailed for teaching Torah and helping Jewish children, reports say. Assembly Member Simcha Eichenstein said: 'As a community we mourn the petira of the Skulener Rebbe zatzal, one of the last surviving remnants of the pre-Holocaust generation - a leader that was deeply respected by all. 'Rabbi Portugal was a truly inspiring and special individual that we should all aspire to be like.' Portugal will be buried at a synagogue in Monsey. His wife, Reizel Portugal, died in 2005. They had eight children together and it is understood Yeshaya Yaakov Portugal, will succeed Yisroel Avrohom Portugal as rebbe of the Skulen Hasidic group. Yehiel Rosenfeld, 36, has been charged with reckless endangerment after allegedly losing control of his drone. Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told senior Irish Politicians 'he had a lot more work to do' to make social media safer. The 34-year-old assured senior Irish politicians Hildegarde Naughton, James Lawless and Eamon Ryan he will work with governments to establish new policies in a bid to regulate social media during a meeting at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. The three members of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News described the Facebook boss as 'quiet, unassuming, pleasant and smart.' Former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, now serving as Facebook's head of global affairs and communications, was also at the meeting. Facebook 's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg (pictured in Dublin on Tuesday with his chief lobbyist Nick Clegg) told senior Irish Politicians 'he had a lot more work to do' to make social media safer during a meeting at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin Mr Zuckerberg told the politicians that issues around child protection and age verification are of 'huge concern' to him. Ms Naughton described the meeting as 'positive and constructive'. 'We went through a number of issues including child protection and the need for a robust age verification system,' she said. The three members of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News described the Facebook boss as 'quiet, unassuming, pleasant and smart' 'He said it was an area of huge concern to him and that he is looking forward to working with law enforcement agencies and legislators in relation to that. We have to balance the state of privacy of users as well as safety. 'He stated he had a lot more work to do. 'Our committee is working on a number of pieces of legislation including an online safety commissioner as well as looking at and protecting democracy. 'I mentioned the importance around age verification because you have right now paedophiles online lying about their age and preying on young children and grooming them. 'This is something he acknowledged, he knew it was a problem and he stated that he wanted to work with law enforcement agencies and policy makers to make more robust laws.' The TDs held an hour-long meeting with him days after he called for increased government oversight of the internet in areas like harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. Mr Lawless said: 'Our focus was also on electoral integrity and what has been happening around the world on the rules in managing election campaigns. 'He agreed legislation is needed, he is working on those internationally to be able to see who is running campaigns, who is paying for campaigns and who is being targeted. 'It shouldn't be about the private companies dictating what goes online when it comes to democracy and child protection and safety, we as legislators have responsibilities to put in place rules that we think should be followed and dictating to companies about how behaviours are conducted online.' Mark Zuckerberg assured senior Irish politicians Hildegarde Naughton, James Lawless (right) and Eamon Ryan he will work with governments to establish new policies in a bid to regulate social media during a meeting at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin The TDs held an hour-long meeting with him days after he called for increased government oversight of the internet in areas like harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability Mr Ryan said: 'I pressed him about the article he wrote on regulation and I made the point that it can't be self-regulation it has to be European regulation and that has to include funding journalism and having a courts procedure rather than a self-appointed board to look at difficult decisions.' Mr Zuckerberg also visited the technology giant's European Headquarters as part of his visit to the Republic. But he refused to answer questions from the media about online child safety as he left the Merrion Hotel. The International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News is made up of international parliamentarians and investigates issues like data privacy, safety, security and sharing. The three TDs, who are also members of the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, have been vocal in demanding the regulation of social media platforms in recent years. Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon has a number of inquiries ongoing into Facebook and associated organisations. According to the Irish Times Mr Zuckerberg praised Europe's introduction of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which tightened up rules regarding data privacy. The social network founder said GDPR was a good foundation that encoded a lot of important values around people being able to choose how their data is used, and at the same time making sure that companies have the ability to use information for safety purposes. He added that it was almost inevitable that every country was going to want comprehensive privacy legislation. A 74-year-old California woman is finally getting $150,000 in back child support payments, nearly 50 years after her divorce. Now Toni Anderson, of Carlsbad, wants parents across America to know that it's never too late to get what you're owed. Anderson's ex-husband Don Lenhert was ordered to pay child support for their three-year-old daughter Lane in 1971. Lenhert, who had been married to Anderson for two years, was meant to make monthly payments of $210 for the first two-and-a-half years, and then send $160 per month to Anderson until Lane turned 18. Toni Anderson, 74, is finally getting $150,000 in back child support payments, nearly 50 years after her divorce Anderson's ex-husband Don Lenhert was ordered to pay child support for their three-year-old daughter Lane in 1971. Anderson is pictured with Lane, now 52, on a trip to Hawaii Instead Lenhert vanished, quickly leaving the country with his girlfriend. 'The first check bounced and then he went off to Canada with his girlfriend and had two more kids,' Anderson told CNN. 'He completely disappeared.' That left Anderson to take care of Lane completely on her own, forcing the single mother and daughter to live 'paycheck to paycheck'. Anderson said there were times where she was working two jobs and living off food steps. And she was constantly traveling to provide for her daughter. 'I had to raise myself,' said Anderson, who is now 52. 'In the long run it affects you, you have a lot of abandonment issues.' Anderson said she put the child support payments in the back of her mind over the years, working hard to send her daughter to college and take her on vacations. Lenhert vanished, moving to Canada with his girlfriend. That left Anderson to take care of Lane completely on her own, forcing the single mother and daughter to live 'paycheck to paycheck' Anderson said she put the child support payments in the back of her mind over the years, working hard to send her daughter to college and take her on vacations But last year Anderson realized there was no statue of limitations for child support payments in California. She went to the San Diego County Child Support Services Offices with the original 1970 court order and discovered not only was Lenhart back in the US - he was living in Oregon. Anderson filed a motion for the unpaid child support. But she wanted more than what would have been a total of $30,000 if Lenhart had paid her on time. 'He was only supposed to give me like a $160 a month,' she told KGTV. 'Well, that was 50 years ago. That, today, is a lot more money.' Lenhart and Anderson's lawyers settled for a total payment of $150,000, taking into account both the original court order and accumulated interest and penalties. Anderson will first receive a large lump sum and Lenhart will have two years total to complete the entire payment. Anderson said there were times where she was working two jobs and living off food stamps. And she was constantly traveling to provide for her daughter Last year Anderson realized there was no statue of limitations for child support payments in California and took the original court order (pictured) to the San Diego County Child Support Services Offices Lenhert, who had been married to Anderson for two years, was meant to make monthly payments of $210 for the first two-and-a-half years, and then send $160 per month to Anderson until Lane turned 18 Lenhart's lawyer claimed he hadn't paid child support for five decades because he thought he and Anderson agreed with a handshake that he wouldn't need to. 'I was glad to pay Ms Anderson the child support that was owed and I wish her only the best in the future,' Lenhart said in a statement last week. 'I hired a private investigator to locate her so I could offer her payment. I am pleased we were able to reach an agreement.' Anderson couldn't believe her eyes when Lenhart, who was not required to attend the hearing, decided to meet her in court last week. 'I didn't expect him to show up,' she told NBC. 'I was really shocked to see him.' Anderson filed a motion for the unpaid child support. But she wanted more than what would have been a total of $30,000 if Lenhard had paid her on time When she asked her ex-husband why he had come, Lenhart's answer brought tears to both of their eyes. 'Because I have to come and ask for your forgiveness,' he told her. 'It was just a big-time closure for both of us,' Anderson said. 'The forgiveness was big on both of our parts.' While the money will no doubt help Anderson, who is retired, Lane said it can not pay back everything she missed as a child. 'Not having a mother around because she was so busy working, you can't put a price on lost childhood,' she said. 'There's no amount of money that can replace it.' But both Lane and Anderson are glad that their story is now inspiring parents, especially mothers, to hold their exes accountable - no matter how much time has passed. Jillian Robinson, 18, was detained after she was seen suspiciously lurking in the area where the churches had been set ablaze in Orem, Utah A Utah teen was arrested on Friday after she allegedly set fire to two Mormon churches and scrawled 'Satan Lives' on the walls, according to local authorities. Jillian Nicole Robinson, 18, was detained after she was seen suspiciously lurking in the area where the churches - belonging to the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - had been set ablaze. When officers from the Orem Police Department arrived at the scene, they reported seeing smoke coming from the inside and discovered that a door was broken. 'They went inside and saw several fires had been set throughout the Church,' the department said in a Facebook post calling the antics their 'daily shenanigans.' The police added: 'They were able to put the fires out with a fire extinguisher that one of the officers had in his patrol car. 'Once inside, you didn't have to be a detective or arson investigator to tell that these fires had been intentionally set by someone.' Crews assess the damage after two LDS churches were set on fire in Orem, Utah Fire damage is seen to one of the churches and a hymnal after the arson in Utah Police began monitoring other churches in the area and discovered a 'suspicious female lurking about.' Officers spoke with the woman and discovered that she had a bottle in her backpack that 'smelled like gas', a lighter, a power drill, and a sharpie among other items. When authorities asked Robinson, she told them that 'she didn't start the fire'. The police determined that she was in the process of lighting another church on fire and estimated that the total damage came to about $600,000. Robinson was charged with arson, burglary, criminal mischief and possession of burglary tools. She is being held at the Utah County Jail with a bond of $20,000. The Orem Police Department arrived to the area and found that a church had multiple fires spewing from it According to court documents, obtained by Fox 13, Robinson denied any involvement but eventually wrote a voluntary witness statement. She said: 'I acted alone in the fire that was started at the church on 1200 North. I was angry and all wanted to do was set a small fire and it got out of control. I fled the scene and didn't look back. I felt like playing with fire because of my crazy life at home, this was not a hate crime.' 'Keep your rage in a cage, if it's not yours don't touch it, eat it don't tweet it, hugs not drugs and the more you weigh the harder you are to kidnap, the department added, along with a meme from the Maury Povich show. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced its termination of a controversial experiment that has resulted in the death of thousands of cats over a 37 year period. USDAs Agricultural Research Services (ARS) lab has been intentionally infecting cats with the disease toxoplasmosis since 1982, and then euthanizing them as part of an effort to eradicate the food-borne illness. The announcement comes just days after a report conducted by NBC News revealed that one study carried out at the ARS lab in Maryland saw scientists purchase hundreds of cats and dogs from Asian meat markets, put them down and then fed them to healthy cats. Toxoplasmosis research has been redirected and the use of cats as part of any research protocol in any ARS laboratory has been discontinued and will not be reinstated, the USDA said in a statement. USDAs Agricultural Research Services (ARS) lab, who has been intentionally infecting cats with the disease toxoplasmosis since 1982, announced the end of the experiment on Tuesday (pictured: cat activist Hannah Shaw attends an event to end the Department of Agriculture's scientific testing on kittens on June 7, 2018) The announcement comes just days after a report revealed that one study carried out at the ARS lab in Maryland (above) saw scientists purchase hundreds of cats and dogs from Asian meat markets, put them down and then fed them to healthy cats Senator Jeff Merkley applauded the USDA for discontinuing the deeply disturbing experiment, insisting April 2 was a good day for our four-legged friends of America. The cannibalism experiments are believed to have been carried out between 2003 and 2015, including 400 dogs from Central America, and more than 100 cats from China. The non-profit, White Coat Waste Project who authored the book USDA Kitten Cannibalism said the sinister nature of the experiment was an indication the agency had gone too far in protecting the US food supply. Some of these cats and dogs were purchased by the government from the same Asian meat markets that the U.S. Congress roundly condemned in a House Resolution, the organisation said. Cats were being used by USDA because they're the only host animal that produces the parasite eggs that cause toxoplasmosis. The cannibalism experiments are believed to have been carried out between 2003 and 2015. The 14 healthy cats currently at the facility are in the process of being adopted Cats were being used by USDA because they're the only host animal that produces the parasite eggs that cause toxoplasmosis (pictured: Reps. Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., left, Mike Bishop, R-Mich., and Hannah Shaw, an animal advocate know as "Kitten Lady," pose during a event in Rayburn Building on bipartisan legislation to end the Department of Agriculture's scientific testing on kittens on June 7, 2018) The USDA didnt address cat cannibalism in its statement. However, they did say the research in toxoplasmosis had reached its end, and fulfilled its primary function. While there is still additional research needed in this area regarding human health, this research area is outside of USDAs stated mission, the department said. They also added that no cats have been euthanized or infected with the disease since September 2018, and the 14 healthy cats currently at the facility are in the process of being adopted. Anthony Bellotti, who founded the White Coat Waste Project, an organization dedicated to combating government spending on animal testing called the decision a a historic victory for taxpayers and animals, according to NBC. After 3,000-plus kittens killed and $22 million squandered, we applaud the USDA for its wise decision to permanently end its taxpayer-funded kitten experiments and adopt out the survivors, Bellotti said, adding that he was elated the USDAs kitten slaughterhouse has finally been relegated to the litterbox of history. Irish police are hunting for a gunman who opened fire outside a school in a west Dublin suburb as part of a suspected feud involving two criminal families. Officers raced to the scene outside the Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown around 3.40pm. A garda spokesman confirmed no-one was injured in the incident and the investigation is ongoing. Gardai raced to the scene at Riversdale Community College in Corduff, Blanchardstown in Dublin around 3.40pm today Nobody was injured in the incident and gardai have appealed for the public's help for information following this afternoon's incident Local TD Jack Chambers said there had been a recent escalation in violent crime in West Dublin, but firing shots outside a school during the day 'marks a very alarming precedent' The incident is believed to have been as a result of a feud between two criminal families in the area. Local TD Jack Chambers said: 'There has been a recent escalation in violent crime in the West Dublin area as of late but the fact that someone could consciously attempt to cause grave harm by firing gun shots outside a school in broad day light marks a very alarming precedent. 'This latest incident will have proven traumatic for parents and students who were in the immediate vicinity. There is no doubt that innocent people felt frightened.' The Fianna Fail politician said local gardai were doing their best to increase their visibility but he said additional resources were needed. 'For such an incident to occur in a residential area within yards of a school in the middle of a weekday afternoon is not normal and should not be treated as a normal part of everyday life,' he added. Gardai today searched the area looking for evidence to link the gunman to the crime A South Carolina state senator who represents the area where a fifth grader died after an elementary school fight last week says it was only a small scuffle. Sen. Margie Bright Matthews said on the Senate floor Tuesday that Raniya Wright was not kicked or attacked by several students. The Democrat says the 10-year-old didn't bang her head in the March 25 fight at Forest Hills Elementary School in Walterboro. Bright Matthews says Raniya kept arguing with the other girl in the principal's office, then suddenly grabbed her head, complained of pain, threw up and lost consciousness. Raniya Wright (left), the fifth grader from Forest Hills Elementary School in Walterboro, South Carolina who died two days after a fight with a classmate, did not suffer any blows to the head, according to State Senator Margie Bright Matthews (right) The girl's mother, Ashley Wright, said her daughter was the victim of bullying and that 'nothing was done,' but school officials and law enforcement have not commented on the allegation. Ashley Wright is seen left with her daughter in this undated file photo She died two days later at a hospital. Bright Matthews says she has spoken to Raniya's grandmother as well as school and law enforcement officials. 'Ive head a lot of people say, "Oh, they were kicking her. They ganged her." None of that,' Bright Matthews said on the floor of the State Senate. 'Thats so far from the truth - not even the banging of head. 'The head was not even an issue.' Bright Matthews said that Raniya and another girl were arguing all day and that it eventually turned into 'pushing back and forth,' according to The Post and Courier. The class substitute teacher intervened, and an assistant principal who happened to walking down the hallway and passed by the classroom escorted the two kids to the principal's office. 'Normally good kids act out when theres a substitute teacher,' the state senator said. A makeshift memorial was set up at Forest Hills Elementary School in Walterboro on Monday Even as they were being led to the principal's office, 'they were still going back and forth between them, with their mouths.' It was in the principal's office that Raniya began to complain about pain in her head. 'She grabbed her had, then she was taken to the nurses office, which is steps away,' Bright Matthews said. 'Then she became nauseous, vomited, and by the time she was taken to the hospital, she was unresponsive and medevaced to MUSC.' The state senator said she received a phone call the next day from Raniya's grandmother. 'Oh my God, shes non-responsive. They cant get a lead in her. My grandbaby is going to die!' the grandmother told Bright Matthews. 'I was shocked,' the state senator said of the conversation. The girl's mother, Ashley Wright, said her daughter was the victim of bullying and that 'nothing was done,' but school officials and law enforcement have not commented on the allegation. Bright Matthews would not say if bullying played a role in Raniya's death, though she did say she did not believe new anti-bullying legislation was warranted in this case. 'Imagine what the school is feeling, what the teacher who was out is feeling, what the principals feeling, the assistant principal, the nurse, and more importantly the other girl on the other side,' Bright Matthews said. An autopsy on Raniya was conducted on Friday, but the results won't be announced for several weeks. Another fifth-grade student involved in the fight has been suspended. President Donald Trump incorrectly stated that his father was born in Germany Tuesday while both praising the country and complaining it doesn't pay its fair share. Trump repeated an error he has repeated in public at least twice, this time adding to the story of his father's supposed European birth. He made the claim while seated next to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian politician who has publicly praised Trump for encouraging allies to spend more on defense. Trump once again vented that some a re 'not paying their fair share,' then turned to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 'I have great respect for Angela and I have great respect for the country,' the president said. 'My father is German, right? Was German,' Trump said. President Donald Trump stated Tuesday that his father was born in Germany, though he was born in New York 'Born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany.' 'But they're not paying what they should be paying,' Trump added, pointing to a goal that all allied nations spend 2 per cent of their GDP on defense. But as the Guardian pointed out when Trump made a similar claim last year on a trip to Europe, Fred Trump was born New York. He went on to build a major real estate business and pass on great wealth to his children. It was Fred Trump's father, Friederich Trump, who was born in Germany, in the village of Kallstadt. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1885, entered the restaurant business, moved to Seattle, the Yukon, eventually returning to Germany. He was expelled from Germany in 1905, documents uncovered in a German archive revealed, apparently for having failed to perform military service. BORN IN THE USA: Fred Trump at The Plaza Hotel on June 1, 1991 in New York City Friederich Trump was born in Germany, moved to the U.S., returned, and was expelled Trump's grandfather Friederich Trump was born in Kallstadt, Germany, which his son called a wonderful place Real estate developer Fred Trump, father of Donald Trump, Queens, NY, 1980. Trump has stated on multiple occasions that his father Fred, left, was born in Germany Trump's mother was born in Scotland. The president invoked his ancestry in what may have been an effort to soften the threat to impose tariffs on European countries doing business with Iran. 'I was there many, many years ago. Meaning, my parents were born in the European Union. I love these countries; Germany, Scotland, they are still in there right?' he said. Trump also made the claim at the NATO summit last year in Brussels, so he at least was keeping his story straight with Stoltenberg. 'I have great respect for Germany. My father is from Germany,' Trump said then. Then he groused: 'Both of my parents are from the E.U., despite the fact they don't treat us well on trade.' Kallstadt was formerly part of Bavaria, in southern Germany. Oddly enough, according to earlier reports, Trump's father had previously claimed Swedish heritage to avoid anti-German sentiment. Trump repeated the claim in 'Art of the Deal.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment about why Trump said his father was born in Germany. Shopper are shunning plastic-wrapped fruit and veg and buying more loose produce, figures show. Supermarket sales of unpackaged fresh produce are growing at twice the rate of those in plastic, data firm Kantar said. It is the latest sign consumers back moves to reduce plastic waste, which the Daily Mail has long campaigned for with its Turn the Tide on Plastic drive. It comes as 528,285 people volunteered to join Keep Britain Tidys Great British Spring Clean backed by the Daily Mail which runs until April 23. More than a fifth of all fruit, vegetables and salads sold over the past 12 weeks were bought loose, according to Kantar. Fraser McKevitt, the companys head of retail research, said: Consumers are applying pressure on retailers when it comes to packaging and making their feelings known in the fruit and vegetable aisles. Sales of loose fruit, veg and salads grew by 6 per cent in the 12 weeks to March 24, Kantar said. Sales of packaged produce rose 3 per cent over the same period. Richard Hyman, an independent retail analyst, said: These numbers underline just how big a topic packaging has become. Some issues attract a lot of publicity but fail to gain traction and change the publics behaviour. The subject of packaging, and particularly plastic, is clearly moving the dial and shoppers are voting with their spending. It comes as paper bags for fruit and vegetables are returning to major supermarkets Research by Mintel recently found half of all adults say plastic pollution is a top environmental concern for them, with a similar proportion saying they supported shops going plastic-free. It comes as paper bags for fruit and vegetables are returning to major supermarkets. Tesco said it would try them in selected stores, pledging to sell 45 types of fruit and veg loose instead of packaged. It followed a similar decision by Morrisons last year. The countrys biggest supermarkets were among a string of businesses to sign a plastics pact with the charity Wrap last year. It commits them to making all plastic packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025. Helen Bird, of Wrap, said: Citizens have clearly been inspired to do their bit when it comes to tackling plastic waste and are looking for practical ways, such as buying fresh produce loose, to reduce the amount of plastic packaging they bring home. You can still sign up for the Great British Spring Clean at gbspringclean.org. The mother of an apprentice tradesman who was crushed to death at a building site has paid tribute to her 'guardian angel' in a moving Facebook post. Christopher Cassaniti, 18, died at Macquarie Park in north-west Sydney on Monday when a 15metre tower of scaffolding collapsed on top of him. His mother Patrizia, who served coffee at a mobile truck down the road, was on the site within minutes after the disaster and was told her son was trapped. Late on Tuesday night she posted a photo with her 'beautiful boy' on Facebook. She captioned it: 'My Guardian Angel... sooo much pain.' The mother of an apprentice tradesman who was crushed to death at a building site has paid tribute to her 'guardian angel' in a moving Facebook post. She captioned the above photo: 'My Guardian Angel .. sooo much pain.' Patrizia Cassaniti (pictured with her husband at the scene) runs a coffee and food truck near the construction site where her son Christopher was killed Happy family: Christopher Cassaniti (centre) celebrated his milestone birthday with proud parents Patrizia and Rob It comes as speculation mounts as to what caused the collapse which also hospilatised a 39-year-old trademsan. Union bosses believe that human error was the most likely cause. CFMEU national secretary Dave Noonan hinted that the scaffolding was either not put up properly or overloaded. He told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday: 'When scaffolding is used and erected correctly according to specifications, properly maintained and the ties are left in, and it's loaded only in accordance with the safe working loads that are appropriate to its design, then it doesn't fall down. 'Somewhere in that chain, something has gone wrong.' Police and SafeWork NSW are investigating. Last year the safety watchdog issued 100 notices for breaches of scaffold safety rules amid fears developers were riding roughshod over regulations in order to meet tight deadlines during Sydney's building boom. During visits to 1,000 construction sites in the year to November 2018, regulators issued $265,000 worth of fines for various safety breaches. Tragic: Christopher Cassaniti, 18, died in the collapse at Macquarie Park, north-west Sydney on Monday. He is pictured on holiday in Hawaii Harrowing: This is the harrowing moment tradesmen frantically tried to save two of their friends trapped under a mountain of collapsed scaffolding at a construction site The firm which erected the scaffolding at Macquaire Park, Synergy Scaffolding Services, said safety of workers is paramount. 'We adhere to all safety regulations, ensure all staff are suitably qualified and undergo specific training and inductions,' it said in a statement. On Tuesday harrowing video emerged from the scene showing frantic tradesmen trying to save their two trapped colleagues. Blood-curdling screams echoed around the building site as tradesmen in hard hats and high-vis jackets rushed to free the men. They were desperate to help but police held them back, fearing that dislodging just one piece of steel would cause tonnes of twisted metal and concrete to collapse further and crush the men to death. 'You're wasting time. We need access,' a tradesman can be heard shrieking in mobile phone footage which showed a policewoman ushering the workers back. Amid the screaming and shouting a policeman said into a megaphone: 'Oi everybody, we need you guys to help us,' before he lowered the device because his radio interfered. Amid the carnage a policeman (right) took a megaphone and said: 'Oi everybody, we need you guys to help us,' before he lowered the device because his radio interfered Frantic: Workers desperately tried to free their colleagues for 20 minutes until the wailing stopped and they were ordered to move away A policeman (pictured) approached the agitated men and said: 'If you move one piece the whole thing may collapse. It's like a jigsaw puzzle.' 'We are helping,' one tradesman shouted as another yelled: 'You've got a whole army here - we're ready.' Another policeman approached the agitated men and said: 'If we move the wrong piece more will collapse. It's like a jigsaw puzzle.' 'Give us instructions then, let's do something,' a tradesman replied. 'Come on let's start,' one yelled. The policeman explained: 'If you move anything, boom, collapse...' At that point an unknown man screamed: 'My brother's down there.' The policeman continued: 'Listen, listen. Let the ambos stabilise it and as soon as they say ready we'll get it.' Mr Cassaniti, 18, died in the collapse at Macquarie Park, becoming the fifth person to die at a construction site in Australia this year. His 39-year-old colleague was pulled from the debris and raced to hospital in critical condition where he has now stabilised. Brexiteers have reacted with fury to Theresa May's plan to agree a way forward with Jeremy Corbyn. Jacob Rees-Mogg said the PM was 'getting the support of a known Marxist' and called her move to break the deadlock 'an attempt to overturn the referendum result'. His European Research Group colleague Steve Baker said he was 'too depressed' to appear on Sky News in the wake of Mrs May's announcement. And former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who quit the Cabinet last year, warned ministers they were heading towards 'exit terms that in no way resemble what the people were promised when they voted to leave'. Boris Johnson, pictured in London this week, warned ministers they were heading towards 'exit terms that in no way resemble what the people were promised when they voted to leave' The ERG hardliners watched Mrs May's statement in dismay from a committee room in the Commons with an 'audible gasp' when she promised talks with Corbyn, the Guardian reported. ERG member Andrew Rosindell said he was 'shocked and dismayed' as he left the meeting. Mr Johnson, who is not an ERG member but has been one of the most prominent Brexiteers on the Tory benches, said the move was 'very disappointing'. He said: 'It now seems all too likely that British trade policy and key law making powers will be handed over to Brussels - with no say for the UK. 'As it is, we now face the ridiculous possibility of being forced to contest the European elections more than three years after leaving the EU and having to agree to exit terms that in no way resemble what the people were promised when they voted to leave.' 'The PM and cabinet have concluded that any deal is better than no deal, and this is truly a very bad deal indeed - one that leaves us being run by the EU. 'I can under no circumstances vote for a deal involving a customs union as I believe that does not deliver on the referendum.' Mr Rees-Mogg criticised the Prime Minister for planning to collaborate with 'a known Marxist' and said the move would lose Tory votes. Jacob Rees-Mogg (pictured) said the PM was 'getting the support of a known Marxist' and called her move to break the deadlock 'an attempt to overturn the referendum result' He said: 'You do find that leaders who decide to go with the opposition rather than their own party find their own party doesn't plainly follow. 'I'm not sure this is the way to conciliate people to persuade them if they haven't moved already to move at this stage. 'I think getting the support of a known Marxist is not likely to instil confidence in Conservatives.' The North East Somerset MP said he had been willing to accept a 'second-rate' Brexit than to hold out for something 'perfect' and end up with no Brexit. But when asked if he could back a deal struck with Mr Corbyn, he said: 'Well, I wouldn't hold your breath - I'm not a Marxist in case you hadn't noticed.' 'This is all about getting further and further away from the Brexit people voted for, which is very serious,' he said. ''This is a deeply unsatisfactory approach - it's not in the interests of the country, it fails to deliver on the referendum result and history doesn't bode well for it.' Mr Rees-Mogg cited the examples of former prime ministers Robert Peel, who was forced to resign and split the Tory party, and Ramsay MacDonald. who was forced to resign after including opposition leaders in a cross-party national government. Robin Tilbrook, pictured, has launched a High Court battle claiming that the UK has already left the EU The leader of the English Democrats has launched a High Court battle claiming that the UK has already left the EU. Robin Tilbrook argues that Britain left the union on March 29 as originally planned, saying the PM's extension was not legally valid. The legal bid will be seen as a Brexiteer equivalent to Gina Miller's battle with the Government over triggering Article 50 in 2016. Speaking to MailOnline last night Mr Tilbrook said the argument that Britain had already left was 'very strong'. In the judicial review application, the English Democrats argue that Mrs May did not have the power to extend the exit date past March 29. 'Her purported request for an extension of the date of departure and the Government's purported agreement to such an extension is and was unlawful and is and was null and void,' the legal argument reads. Mr Tillbrook hopes the case will be brought before a court in the coming weeks. The case comes after a former appeal court judge suggested the way the extension was handled could have been unlawful, and a group of Tory MPs wrote to the Prime Minister asking to see the legal advice she received. The English Democrats argue in their legal application that Theresa May (pictured last night) did not have the power to extend the exit date past March 29 Parliament's website asserts that the Commons and Lords agreed a legally valid extension to the original date. Mr Tilbrook said: 'What we're hoping to achieve with it is a declaration that we're already out. If you've read it, you can see that the argument's very strong. 'We've done it all, we started a month or so ago. We've served all the paperwork in advance and we've issued it today. 'I fully expect it to be heard fairly soon. I've asked the High Court for it to be heard on an expedited basis. I think the argument's strong that we're out. 'The Government's proceeding on the basis that we're still in. We're saying that's not the case. If there's a declaration from the High Court that we're out, the Government's got a new reality to deal with.' Mr Tillbrook says that, if a judge finds in his favour, he will save taxpayers Britain's 39billion divorce bill and end the Brexit impasse. The government has yet to state its defence in the case, but wrote to Mr Tilbrook last month claiming he had failed to identify a decision capable of judicial review. A spokesman for the Department for Exiting the European Union said today: 'As a matter of international law, the date of the UK's exit from the EU was changed following the decision of the EU Council held on 22 March and the exchange of letters between the UK and EU on 25 March. We reflected this change in domestic law when we made the relevant statutory instrument on Thursday 28 March.' The legal bid will be seen as a Brexiteer equivalent to Gina Miller's battle with the Government over triggering Article 50 in 2016 (pictured, Ms Miller in London last week) The case comes after former appeal judge Sir Richard Aikens wrote an article suggesting that the government may have acted illegally when Mrs May delayed 'exit day' without prior parliamentary approval. Sir Richard wrote: 'The way the government has acted, by trying to force Parliament to agree to what it has done unilaterally without prior parliamentary approval, is, at the least, highly unsatisfactory. It must be arguable that the government has acted illegally.' Following Sir Richard's piece, four Conservative MPs last week wrote to Theresa May suggesting delaying Brexit in the way she did was illegal. Sir Bill Cash, who was among the four, wrote: 'We ask that you fully explain the actions taken by your Government and why you say that what it has done and is doing is legal. 'We are gravely concerned that you are unlawfully seeking to extend the UK's membership of the EU.' Tory MP Sir Bill Cash is among those who have suggested the delay may have been illegal Despite the claims, Thom Brooks, Professor of Law and Government at Durham University Law School, said he 'doubted' the latest legal case would succeed. 'I think the idea is that Parliament voted to leave on 29 March, this date has passed without a new Act of Parliament and so we're out,' he told MailOnline. 'But Parliament did agree for the PM to have more time and both the UK and EU have agreed our 'deal' remains, or at least for now. This is through temporary extensions. 'Someone was bound to try this - but I'm not expecting a Miller-like result.' The legal argument was posted online next to a donation button for the English Democrats but Mr Tilbrook insisted the High Court battle was 'not an electioneering position'. He said: 'What we're trying to do is we're trying to raise money, obviously bringing a case like this is enormously expensive and we're trying to raise money for the case. 'We asked people to help us to bring a case, we have brought a case and we're going to pursuit it. 'The whole point of our case is that we're out. This isn't an electioneering position, this is a legal case. We're all pretty confident that our legal case is a strong one.' If the case is successful then the UK will be outside the EU on WTO trading terms, Mr Tilbrook said. He went on: 'I don't think from a standing start people on the Leave side were arguing for leaving on WTO terms. 'What we thought we would get if we negotiated properly was some sort of arrangement and agreement with the EU. 'But the negotiations have been conducted in a way that I'd certainly hope any provincial solicitor would have done a better job of it.' Gina Miller launched her high-profile legal challenge in 2016, saying that Parliament had to approve the triggering of Article 50. The High Court and later the Supreme Court both found in her favour, forcing MPs to vote on the formal start of the Brexit process. Ms Miller has since become a prominent advocate of a second referendum on Brexit. A father of two died of sepsis at a troubled hospital after his treatment was delayed for five days, a report has revealed. Simon Smith should have been given antibiotics soon after he was admitted with an excruciating pain in his leg in July last year. But staff at Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley, West Midlands, failed on seven separate occasions to give him the drugs, according to a damning assessment of his care. Simon Smith should have been given antibiotics soon after he was admitted to hospital with an excruciating pain in his leg in July last year The Daily Mail has long campaigned for better diagnosis and treatment of sepsis, which claims 52,000 lives a year in Britain. Mr Smith, 51, was displaying classic signs of the illness a high temperature and raised heart rate when he was admitted. Staff at the hospital, where his wife Hayley works as a data collector, initially gave him painkillers and said he should be given antibiotics if his condition deteriorated, notes made on his first night in hospital indicate. But he was not given the drugs until he went into multi-organ failure five days later, according to a 38-page internal review of his treatment seen by the Daily Mail. He was then taken into intensive care and spent three months there before he was discharged in October. However, he had not fully recovered and a fortnight later he was taken back into hospital. He died on November 1. His widow, 47, said: I have lost everything. He was my best friend and my husband for 25 years. All they gave him for five days was painkillers he was in the worst pain he had ever felt, his temperature was spiking. Mr Smith, an installer, was eventually diagnosed with osteomyelitis an infection in the bone of his leg. This triggered sepsis a violent immune response which attacked the organs of his body. The report reveals a series of failures in Mr Smiths care, including lack of communication, poor record keeping and a failure to act on his deteriorating condition. Between his admission on July 27 and the multi-organ failure on August 2 there were seven missed opportunities to commence antibiotics, it found. Sepsis has been a priority for the NHS for three years, following the Mails campaign, with doctors required to immediately check all suspected cases and rapidly give patients antibiotics. However, there has been repeated criticism of Dudley Group NHS Trust over how it dealt with the issue. Last year Care Quality Commission inspectors raised concerns that senior consultants resented the NHS focus on sepsis. Health Minister Caroline Dinenage has criticised the hospital doctors frankly unacceptable attitude. The hospital then commissioned an investigation of 229 deaths. Diane Wake of Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust said: I would like to offer my heartfelt condolences to Simon Smiths family. She said a review of Mr Smiths care highlighted significant areas of learning. She added that sepsis care had improved at Russells Hall, with the number of deaths from the condition falling in the four years to December 2018. A woman carrying two Chinese passports, a thumb drive with malware on it, four cellphones, a laptop and a hard drive was able to get into Mar-a-Lago while President Trump was there after she lied and told Secret Service agents she was a member. Yujing Zhang, 32, has been charged with with making false statements to federal agents and illegally entering a restricted area after she briefly gained access to the Palm Beach resort over the weekend. President Trump spent the weekend at his Florida resort with his wife Melania and their son Barron for his spring break. The woman approached a Secret Service agents at a checkpoint outside Mar-a-Lago on Saturday afternoon and allegedly said she was a member who wanted to use the pool. Yujing Zhang, 32, has been charged after she got into President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort (above) while he was there over the weekend after telling Secret Service she was a member She showed her Chinese passports as identification, according to court documents. Agents said Zhang wasn't on the membership list but a club manager thought she was the daughter of a member. When asked if the member was her father, Zhang did not answer definitively and agents thought it might because of a language barrier and admitted her. Zhang's story allegedly changed when she got inside the club and told a front desk receptionist she was there to attend the United Nations Chinese American Association event scheduled for that evening. No such event was scheduled and agents were called to question Zhang. Zhang allegedly told an agent inside that she was there for the Chinese American event and had come early to familiarize herself with the club and take photos. She showed him an invitation in Chinese that he could not read. The agent said Zhang was taken off the grounds and told she could not be there. She then allegedly became argumentative and was taken to the local Secret Service office for questioning. President Trump spent the weekend at his Florida resort with his wife Melania and their son Barron for his spring break. He is pictured above during a press conference on Friday at Mar-a-Lago Trump left Mar-a-Lago with Melania and their son Barron on Sunday evening after spending the weekend there Agents said it became clear that Zhang could speak and read English well. Zhang told agents she had traveled from Shanghai to attend the nonexistent Mar-a-Lago event on the invitation of an acquaintance named 'Charles,' whom she only knew through a Chinese social media app. She allegedly said she wanted to speak with a member of President Trump's family about Chinese and American foreign economic relations. The woman denied telling the checkpoint agents she was a member wanting to swim. Zhang was found with four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive and a thumb drive containing computer malware. She did not have a swimsuit. Zhang was charged with making false statements to federal agents and illegally entering a restricted area. She remains in custody pending a hearing next week and her public defender, Robert Adler, declined comment. There is no indication Zhang was ever near the president. There is also no indication that she is connected to Li Yang, a Chinese native, Republican donor and former Florida massage parlor owner. Yang recently made news after it was learned she was promising Chinese business leaders that her consulting firm could get them access to Mar-a-Lago where they could mingle with the president. Shocking footage emerged of dozens of rats 'the size of kittens' roaming around in a children's playground in the New York. Clarissa Alayeto lives at the Patterson Houses in the Bronx and said she was compelled to record video footage of the huge rats currently plaguing her area. The footage shows dozens of rats running around just a couple of feet away from a playground as onlookers scream in the background. Shocking footage emerged of dozens of rats 'the size of kittens' roaming around in a children's playground in the New York. The rats are pictured here congregating at a tree 'This is a rat playground, and the sad part is our kids come out and the play here. Its a health hazard,' Alayeto told Pix 11. 'They [authorities] are always chasing the smoke and not putting out the fire. There are bigger issues. 'Its not just picking up the trash, its finding out why you have garbage bags on the fence and why we dont have trash receptacles,' Alayeto said. Last April Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a citywide $32 million initiative implemented at ten developments to crack down on rodents. It included plans for new trash cans and using dry ice to suffocate the rats in their dens. A spokesperson for New York Housing Authority said the Patterson Houses is not in the Neighborhood Rat Reduction zones, but would continue to be monitored and treated regularly by staff. Clarissa Alayeto said she was compelled to record video footage of the huge rats currently plaguing her area (pictured) The rats suddenly appeared in the last couple of weeks and are the 'size of rats' Clarissa Alayeto claimed there are no trash receptacles in the area so bags build up The spokesman added: 'NYCHA staff are in the process of ordering thick plastic garbage cans with lids and installing wire mesh over window wells to deter rodents. Dry ice cannot be used here.' In July 2017, de Blasio announced the Neighborhood Rat Reduction Initiative, a $32 million multi-agency plan to reduce the citys rat population by 70 percent in New York City's most infested areas. Methods include cementing dirt basements in public housing, buying better waste containers and increasing trash pickup and enforcement of rat-related violations. The city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) launched dry ice extermination in parks to prevent secondary poisoning for hawks and wildlife a method the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved for use as a pesticide. It is not clear how many rats currently live in New York City. Previous estimates have put the rat population at anywhere from 250,000 to tens of millions, with the most recent estimates putting it at two million. There are 8.5 million people living in New York City. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 1) Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo on Monday said Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jianhua agreed the loan agreements of the Philippines with Beijing are negotiated "on equal footing." Lawmakers have expressed concern over the Philippines' disadvantage in loan agreements with China, including the New Centennial Water Source Kaliwa Dam Project and Chico River Irrigation Project. Panelo, in a meeting with the Chinese envoy Monday afternoon, discussed the controversial deals. "On Philippine loan agreements with China, both officials share a similar view that the terms of the agreements were competently and fully negotiated by both parties on equal footing," Panelo said in a statement. He then quoted Zhao on the Philippines' growing economy as reason for the deals. "According to Ambassador Zhao, it is the strong and robust economy of the Philippines that led the Chinese Government to extend preferential credit terms for the country's infrastructure plans," he said. Former President Benigno Aquino III called the Duterte government's deals with China "dangerous." Earlier, Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio warned that "in case of default by the Philippines in repayment of the loan, China can seize, to satisfy any arbitral award in favor of China, patrimonial assets and assets dedicated to commercial use." The Supreme Court magistrate said the assets may pertain to oil and gas resources in the exclusive economic zone in the West Philippine Sea, including the gas-rich Reed bank. Francistown Industrial Court Judge, Galesite Baruti on Monday ordered Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) not to hire or engage anybody for the position of Chief Operations Officer (COO) pending trial completion. Jonathan Raheem Hosseini who was expelled from the position under controversial circumstances appealed to court citing the Corporation and its outgoing Chief Executive Officer, (CE0) Dr Stefan Peter Schwartzfischer as first and second respondents respectively. On Monday Hosseinis efforts paid the first dividends as he successfully registered a victory in his first open court appearance in the matter in which he is challenging as unlawful, the manner in which outgoing CEO - Schwartzfischer and others pushed him out of the Corporation. The Industrial Court issued an order against both the BPC and Schwartzfischer interdicting and restraining BPC and Schwarzfischer from taking any action that advances or attempts in any manner whatsoever to hire, employ, engage and, or fill up the position of Chief Operations Officer. The position has been advertised in both Mmegi newspaper edition of 8th March 2019 and in the Sunday Standard Newspaper dated 10th to 16th March 2019. The court interdicted the corporation from advertising the post or any other subsequent recruitment method in whatever form, pending the outcome of the applicants case filed at the Industrial Court of Botswana at Francistown under case number ICF 232/18. The case has been set for hearing on 16 May 2019. If Hosseini is successful, the court could order that, he be reinstated as COO of BPC. Speaking to Botswana Guardian Hosseini said Mondays court order shows that there can be no effort by anyone in BPC to pre-empt the courts eventual ruling. As you know, an independent disciplinary panel appointed by the BPC Board itself found me not guilty of the charges that were thrown at me. BPCs subsequent action was misguided and unlawful, and I am confident that the court will confirm this fact and correct the injustice. I look forward to returning to BPC and completing what I started. In the matter, Justice Baruti appeared together with C. T Morapedi a nominated member of the Union and P Kelailwe a nominated member of Business Botswana. Hosseini was represented by Attorney Mere, while attorney Tango Rubadiri appeared for BPC. Democratic presidential contender Kirsten Gillibrand is co-sponsoring a constitutional amendment that would abolish the electoral college, the voting process that kept Hillary Clinton from winning the White House. 'Every American should know that their vote counts equally no matter what state they live in, and that's why we need a more democratic system that guarantees one person, one vote,' she said in a statement. 'The Electoral College has distorted the outcome of elections and disenfranchised millions of voters, and I think that's wrong. I believe that it's time to get rid of the Electoral College, and I am ready to fight in Congress and around the country to pass this Constitutional Amendment to do that,' the Democratic senator from New York noted. Democratic presidential contender Kirsten Gillibrand is co-sponsoring a constitutional amendment that would abolish the electoral college Hillary Clinton lost the election due to the electoral college process The popular vote versus the electoral college vote in 2016 The Electoral College consists of 538 electors and a majority of 270 is required to be elected president. A state's number of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for the Senators. The founding fathers established it in part out of fear that a tyrant could manipulate public opinion and win the presidency. It was also done to give extra power to smaller states. But the process came under fire in the 2016 election after Clinton won the popular vote - with 65,845,063 votes to President Donald Trump's 62,980,160. Trump, however, won the electoral college with 304 votes to Clinton's 227. The president had previously railed against the electoral college but in the past month has become one of its biggest supporters. 'The brilliance of the Electoral College is that you must go to many States to win,' he said in a series of tweets in late March. 'The Cities would end up running the Country. Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all power - & we can't let that happen.' 'I used to like the idea of the Popular Vote,' he wrote, 'but now realize the Electoral College is far better for the U.S.A.' In all but five presidential elections, the winner of the election received the most votes. Two of those five times came in the last 19 years, the other being the time George W. Bush beat out popular vote winner Al Gore in 2000. President Trump used to want to abolish the electoral college but, in the last month, has become one of its defenders The proposed constitutional amendment - whose main sponsor is Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz - would abolish the Electoral College system and provide for the direct election of the President and Vice President by a popular vote among voters in each state, territory, and the District of Columbia. Also signing on to the legislation are Sen. Dick Durbin, the Number Two Democrat in the Senate, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. A constitutional amendment can be proposed by a two-thirds vote in both the House (about 290 votes) and Senate (67 votes) and needs to be ratified by 38 states. Several other presidential contenders supported abolishing the electoral college at a We the People forum in Washington D.C. on Monday. 'It doesn't reflect the will of the people,' former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro said. Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke said he came to the realization it needed to go after he thought about how he and his wife would explain the 2016 election result to their kids. 'The night after the presidential election in 2016, Amy and I were were talking to each other like how are we gonna explain Ulysses and Molly, and Henry,' he said. 'This is one of those bad compromises we made at day one.' In the 2000 election, George W. Bush won the electoral vote while Al Gore won the popular vote At a CNN townhall in March, Warren noted her support for abolishing the process. 'Every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College,' she said. Bernie Sanders first called for the electoral process to be changed in the weeks after the 2016 election. 'We have one candidate who had two million more votes than the other candidate but she is not going to be sworn in as president, and I think on the surface that's a little bit weird,' he told CNN in November 2016. Sen. Kamala Harris has said she is 'open to the discussion' about abolishing the electoral process. Sen. Cory Booker said at a CNN townhall in March that he wanted the person who won the popular vote to be president but also said the upcoming election should be held under the current rules. 'I believe very simply that in presidential elections, the person with the most votes should be the president of the United States. But I want to tell you, for us ever to get to a point where we can address that issue, we have got to win this next election under the rules that are there now,' he said. Hospitals are treating 21 young patients every day for knife wounds and other assaults, official figures suggest. At least 4,502 victims aged 11 to 25 attended casualty units or urgent care centres with injuries from stabbings or similar assaults last year. The figures will be a huge underestimate because only 60 per cent of hospitals were able to provide data to MPs. The real total for 2018 is likely to be around 7,600. At least 4,502 victims aged 11 to 25 attended casualty units or urgent care centres with injuries from stabbings or similar assaults last year The statistics were obtained under freedom of information laws by the all-party group on knife crime, which represents 40 MPs and peers. NHS figures last month showed admissions for under-16s had doubled in five years. John Poyton of Redthread, a charity that works in emergency departments to deter young people from violence, said: These figures are just the tip of the iceberg, with the real number of young people attending hospital after assault with a weapon likely to be much higher. Hospitals and GP surgeries are anchor institutions in our communities and the NHS has a pivotal role to play in treating youth violence as well as preventing it. Theresa May is this week hosting a major summit on the knife crime crisis, which is being attended by more than 100 experts and ministers. On Monday she unveiled joint plans with Home Secretary Sajid Javid which would see nurses, teachers and police officers having legal duties to report possible offenders. Writing in the Daily Mail they said knife crime should be treated as an infectious disease. Their proposed public health strategy is very similar to that deployed in Glasgow, where stab wounds have halved in the space of 12 years. Potential offenders or victims would be referred to violence reduction units where they would be offered mentoring to help change their ways. But the plans for nurses, teachers and police officers to report suspicious behaviour prompted a backlash among unions who said they were being scapegoated. Labour MP Sarah Jones, who chairs the all-party group, said: Todays figures show how stark this crisis is with thousands of young people being hospitalised by violence. But its worrying that almost half of NHS trusts were unable to give us accurate information on young knife victims. We have been calling for a public health approach to knife crime for some time so its encouraging that the Prime Minister has finally accepted this. But the first part of a public health response is about diagnosing the problem we cant do that unless we know where the violence epidemic is most acute. An NHS spokesman said: Violent crime destroys lives, and with official stats showing a steep rise in the number of people particularly worryingly teenagers needing urgent hospital care for wounds in recent years, its clear that this problem has grown. As the NHS delivers our long-term plan for the health service we will improve urgent care, building on progress which has saved 1,600 extra lives through better trauma services. A Government spokesman said: We are working to tackle the concerning rise in violence through our serious violence strategy. This week the Prime Minister hosted the serious youth violence summit and the Home Secretary announced a consultation on a legal duty to ensure public bodies are identifying those at risk of becoming involved in such crime. Fifth victim of serial slasher knifed yards from police A knifeman behind a string of random stabbings claimed his fifth victim yesterday, police believe. The latest attack took place just 150 yards from a police cordon after an earlier knifing. The victim, a man in his 30s, staggered to get help from nearby officers after being stabbed at around 5am. He was targeted as he walked down a residential street with a friend. His injuries are said to be life-threatening. The latest attack took place just 150 yards from a police cordon after an earlier knifing. The victim, a man in his 30s, staggered to get help from nearby officers after being stabbed at around 5am Two other men were arrested on Sunday. One was bailed and the other remains in custody. Forensic officers searched the house of one suspect All five attacks have taken place within a few streets of each other in Edmonton, north London. A 45-year-old woman and three men were targeted in a 14-hour spree at the weekend. She and a man of 29 were left with life-changing injuries. The suspect has been described as a tall and skinny black man in a hooded top. A man in his 30s was arrested outside a Lidl supermarket at around 10am yesterday. He remained in custody at a north London police station last night. Two other men were arrested on Sunday. One was bailed and the other remains in custody. Forensic officers searched the house of one suspect. Met Police Chief Superintendent Helen Millichap said detectives believe one person is likely to be behind all five stabbings and warned the public to stay vigilant. She said: The actions of the suspect, the fact the incidents are in a similar area and the descriptions given mean we are potentially only looking for one individual perpetrator. A man aged 22 who was knifed to death in the street by a group of young men was named last night as Calvin Bungisa. His uncle Jean said Mr Bungisa who was killed in Kentish Town, north London, on Monday was full of life and very popular. Advertisement Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has stepped down after 20 years in office and weeks of massive nationwide protests aimed at pushing him out of power. The announcement followed a call from the powerful army chief for the ailing president, 82, to 'immediately' take up his proposal to bow out while respecting the constitution. The official APS news agency said that Bouteflika had notified the Constitutional Council of his decision to end his mandate. Thousands of Algerians took to the streets tonight after the country's president stepped down after 20 years in office Large demonstrations had protested against plans by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to seek another term of office Jubilant citizens headed to the centre of Algiers to celebrate the resignation of their 82-year old president Algerian president Abdelaziz Boutefika, pictured in May 2017 has resigned from office after 20 years in the post. He had faced street demonstrations and a loss of confidence by the military Army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah had earlier in the day convened a meeting of the top military hierarchy, making clear that the call for Bouteflika to step down had the backing of the military There was no immediate word on who would take over. Under the constitution, the president of the upper house, the Council of Nations, steps in as interim leader for a maximum of 90 days so that elections can be organised. Army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah had earlier in the day convened a meeting of the top military hierarchy, making clear that the call for Bouteflika to step down had the backing of the military. The Defence Ministry communique referred to Bouteflika's entourage as a 'gang' and said it had made 'fraud, embezzlement and duplicity its vocation'. He has rarely been seen in public since a 2013 stroke. His resignation caps six weeks of peaceful protest marches calling for him to make an exit. It was preceded by calls for him to submit to Article 102 of the Constitution that would declare him unfit for office. The Defence Ministry statement Tuesday appeared to be a final warning. Bouteflika came to the presidency after its darkest period, the 1990s Islamic insurgency. After taking power in 1999, he managed to bring back stability to a country devastated by killings and distrust. As president, age and illness took its toll, and corruption scandals dogged him and associates. On Monday, Bouteflika claimed he would step down at the end of April, although demonstrators believed this was a ploy to cling on to power Algerians have blamed Bouteflika for the stagnant economy which has failed to cash in on the nation's oil and gas wealth Boutelflika, centre, was filmed handing in his resignation to the Constitutional Council's president Demonstrators took to the streets to celebrate the president's resignation after several weeks of protests Bouteflika is accused of failing to create an economy that could offer enough jobs, despite the nation's vast oil and gas wealth. In a country where secrecy surrounds the leadership, it has never been clear whether Bouteflika was fully in charge or whether the powerful army was pulling the strings. Car horns sounded on the streets before crowds of flag-waving people emerged from their homes and converged in the centre of the capital Algiers to celebrate. Long accused of clinging to power, the veteran leader faced mounting pressure to step down after his decision to seek a fifth term despite rarely being seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. The 82-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, said last month he would pull out of the bid for another term, and on Monday his office said he would resign before his mandate expires at the end of the month. The moves failed to satisfy protesters who feared a ploy to extend his rule and the armed forces chief called for him to leave power. Youths cheered and waved the Algerian national flag at Grande Post square, the epicentre of the protest against his rule in downtown Algiers The US State Department noted the development and said it was up to the people of Algeria to determine their future Under Algeria's constitution, the speaker of the upper house of parliament, Abdelkader Bensalah, 77, will act as interim leader for up to 90 days during which time a new presidential election will be organised The announcement of his resignation sparked jubilation in the capital. Youths cheered and waved the Algerian national flag at Grande Post square, the epicentre of the protest against his rule in downtown Algiers, an AFP cameraman reported from the scene. The United States said the future of Algeria was now up to its people. 'Questions about how to navigate this transition in Algeria, that is for the Algerian people to decide,' State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters. Algeria's constitution says that once the president officially resigns the speaker of the upper house of parliament, 77-year-old Abdelkader Bensalah, would act as interim leader for up to 90 days during which a presidential election must be organised. The resignation came shortly after the military demanded impeachment proceedings be launched against Bouteflika immediately as it dismissed the announcement he would resign before his mandate expires. The military had pulled its support from the president making it impossible for him to continue with his role Bouteflika had planned on seeking a fifth term in office despite having been confined to a wheelchair since 2013 following a stroke Armed forces chief Ahmed Gaid Salah called for 'the immediate application of the constitutional procedure for removing the head of state from power', in a defence ministry statement after a meeting of top brass. The statement said the army considered an announcement from the presidency on Monday that Bouteflika would resign by the end of his term on April 28 as invalid because it did not come from the president himself. 'Any decision taken outside the constitutional framework is considered null and void,' the general said. The recovering ice addict daughter of a former NSW premier went on a spate of break and enters stealing thousands of dollars worth of property, despite receiving $800 a fortnight from a family trust. Harriet Wran, 30, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to having crystal methamphetamine and more than 30 stolen laptops, mobile phones and credit cards in her possession. Wran, the daughter of former Labor Premier Neville Wran, was arrested at a service station in Wyong, on the NSW Central Coast, about 2am last Wednesday. When asked outside court if it's a tough time, Wran told media: 'Yeah it is'. Wearing jeans, a loose shirt and bright orange-coloured flat shoes, Wran was supported by her lawyer Alex Angel-Graham during the brief court mention. Harriet Wran, 30, leaving Wyong Local Court on Wednesday after pleading guilty to drug possession and stolen goods Wran with lawyer Alex Angel-Graham leaving Wyong Local Court after she pleaded guilty to three charges including drug possession, having stolen goods in her car and not displaying her P-plates WHAT HARRIET STOLE: - Unopened mail addressed to homes in Shelly Beach and West Gosford - An academic transcript - Five Visa and Mastercards - One iPad - Two Apple iPhones - Three Apple macbook laptops - Three other laptops - A Samsung mobile phone - Seven unopened USB sticks - A black wallet - Assortment of unopened toll notices - A medicare card - One handsfree car kit Advertisement Court papers revealed Wran was stopped by highway patrol officers after being seen driving a Holden ute in an industrial estate - an 'area of high suspicious activity' - on the Pacific Highway, at North Wyong, on March 27. Officers searched Wran's ute and found 0.96 grams of crystal methamphetamine, as well as drug paraphernalia and more than 30 other items. Among the suspected stolen items police found six credit and debit cards, three mobile phones, six laptops, an iPad, unopened mail and an academic transcript. Police suspect all the items were stolen during a recent spate of break and enters in the area. Court papers also showed that since Wran was released from prison in September 2016, she has been receiving an $800-a-fortnight payment from a family trust fund. Wran moved back in with her mother at their sprawling property in Ravensdale, near Wyong, at the beginning of the year. Recovering ice addict Harriet Wran (pictured last year) has been arrested for drug possession two-and-a-half years after she was released from jail Wran (right with her mother Jill in 2016), 30, was jailed for her role in a robbery which led to the murder of drug dealer Daniel McNulty in August 2014 She will continue to reside there while on bail. Bail documents revealed the prosecution case against Wran is regarded as 'strong'. 'Some of this property has been proved to have come from various break and enters recently,' Senior Constable Damien Slade said in the documents. 'The offences are not in the high scale of seriousness but they may lead to other more serious offences, which the accused has not been charged with. 'Police do not believe the accused will receive a custodial sentence if convicted.' Wran will return to court on May 15 to be sentenced. A man who was in the passenger seat of the ute when police stopped Wran fled the scene and ran into nearby bushland, dumping a large amount of stolen mail. He remains on the run. Wran's latest drama comes two years after she was released from prison. She was jailed for two years for her role in a robbery which led to the murder of drug dealer Daniel McNulty in August 2014. Wran was with her ex-boyfriend Michael Lee and his friend Lloyd Haines when they spontaneously robbed Mr McNulty at his squalid inner-Sydney housing commission flat. When asked if she was having a tough time, Wran told the media 'Yeah it is' Wran leaves Wyong Local Court in the passenger seat of a silver ute Wran was arrested after a sleepless six-day ice bender and served a two-year minimum jail term for being an accessory after the fact of murder and robbery Wran has been studying an agribusiness degree at the University of New England while recovering at her mother's Ravensdale property (pictured) A struggle broke out and 37-year-old Lee stabbed Mr McNulty to death. Lee was sentenced to at least 13 years for the 'senseless' stabbing murder. Haines, 31, who knew Lee had a knife but did not think he would use it, was jailed for at least 11 years. Harriet Wran: Timeline 10 August 2014: Drug dealer Daniel McNulty is murdered in Redfern 13 August 2014: Wran is arrested and charged with murder July 2016: Wran is sentenced to four years in jail with two years non-parole for being an accessory, with the sentence starting on 13 August 2014 September 2016: Wran is released from jail on parole 27 March 2019: Wran is arrested at a service station for possessing drugs Advertisement Wran was arrested after a sleepless six-day ice bender. She said she thought the men would only rob Mr McNulty, not kill him. Wran served a two-year minimum jail term for being an accessory after the fact of murder and robbery. When she was released in 2016, she said: 'It's going to be a long process and it's going to be hard.' 'I won't pick up drugs again,' she said. 'I never thought in a million years I'd end up in jail, let alone for murder. I've never intended for anyone to get hurt in my life; it was almost not real to begin with.' Wran (pictured in 2016) was arrested in 2014 after a sleepless six-day ice bender and served a two-year minimum jail term for being an accessory after the fact of murder and robbery In November last year photos posted to Wran's social media accounts showed her riding horses in between working on her mother Jill's 50-hectare farm. She has been studying an agribusiness degree at the University of New England while recovering at the $2million Ravensdale property. Neville Wran was the Premier of New South Wales from 1976 to 1986. He died in April 2014. He was known for his 1978 campaign slogan Wran's Our Man. Wran will be sentenced on May 15. Zain Qaiser, 24, at the Old Bailey in London in April 2017 A computer hacker who funded his luxury lifestyle by blackmailing 700,000 out of porn website users was today warned he could face up to ten years in jail. Former computer science student Zain Qaiser, 24, conducted the 'most serious attack' ever investigated by the National Crime Agency, Britain's equivalent to the FBI, which involved hacking millions of porn users around the world. And high roller Qaiser splashed the cash on hotels, a designer watch and a casino splurge, a court heard. He blackmailed countless X-rated users' computers with corrupt adverts and threatened them with criminal prosecution if they refused to pay a ransom of up to $1,000, Kingston Crown Court was told. Qaiser is also accused of creating several alias to set up advertising accounts and blackmailing advertising firms who refused to 'turn a blind eye' by threatening to spam their advertising space with pornography from 2012 to 2014. Joel Smith, prosecuting, said Qaiser initially began alone but later acted with a team of cyber attackers including members from Russia and America. Mr Smith said: 'The defendant's offending began as a single entity but it became more sophisticated when he sort out the assistance from other more sophisticated cyber attackers. 'He wasn't a puppet, but he caught the attention of others who became involved. 'The defendant was involved in infecting advertisements on pornographic websites with malicious software, known as ransomware. 'He would contact online advertising brokers who would sell space on websites. 'When a user clicked on the adverts they were taken to another page which was infected with a malicious piece of software known as an exploit kit. Kingston Crown Court heard how Qaiser blackmailed countless X-rated users' computers with corrupt adverts, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they refused to pay a ransom of up to $1,000 'The message would state that an offence had been committed and the police were aware and that a fine would need to be paid in order to avoid police action and unlock the computer.' Mr Smith said that the users thought the advert would lead to 'further pornographic content' - but instead their screens would freeze and a message would pop up demanding a payment of up to $1,000. It is believed millions of porn users were affected by the virus but an exact figure cannot be placed because the majority did not report the attack 'out of fear and embarrassment.' But the former City University student of Barking, east London, also blackmailed two advertising companies who refused to 'turn a blind eye' to his corrupt adverts, the court heard. Mr Smith said: 'It appears that some brokers were happy to turn a blind eye to the defendant's malware and continued to take money from him even after becoming aware that advertisements had been infected with malware.' But some brokers 'took it more seriously' and banned or suspended the defendant, the court heard. Mr Smith said: 'He responded with blackmail and with online attacks. 'The blackmail took the form of contacting the brokers online and threatening to attack the servers and even place child pornography on their sites. 'This would have an obvious impact on their reputation.' Qaiser even launched a personal cyber attack against one advertising director and regularly sent messages by an account under the name of K!NG to the companies saying he will 'f*** them up,' the court heard. After failed attempts to secure advertising space he allegedly created several alias including real names and photographs from unsuspecting members of the public, the court heard. Online messages recovered from his laptop after he was arrested in February 2017 showed he agreed to split the gainings 50/50 with a cyber attacker from Russia. But the former student spent his ill gotten gains, which amounted to 700,000, on a 5,000 Rolex watch and a 2,000 stay at a hotel in leafy Chelsea, the court heard. He also splashed almost 70,000 in a casino - 15,305 of which he lost. Qaiser was charged with ten counts including three of blackmail, three of false representation and four counts of an unauthorised act with intent to impair the operation in February 2017. But while on bail he allegedly laundered 134,000 from the psychiatric hospital he was admitted to. Mr Smith said: 'This is the most serious cyber attack ever investigated the National Crime Agency. 'The maximum sentence for this type of crime is ten years.' Wearing a red jumper, clean shaven Qaiser remained expressionless throughout the sentencing hearing. He faces 11 charges including three counts of blackmail, four counts of unauthorised act with intent to impair the operation of a computer, three charges of fraud by false representation and one count of possessing criminal property, namely 115,839. Qaiser initially denied all the counts and told police that his phone and laptop was hacked. But in March this year he changed his pleas to guilty. The sentencing hearing is due to conclude tomorrow. The Queen paid tribute last night to the nations army of volunteers including two heroes highlighted by the Mails Hospital Helpforce campaign. Ron Knight, 88, and Louise Munro, 24, met the monarch at a Windsor Castle reception to mark the centenary of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. The pairs inspirational stories were featured as part of the Mails Christmas campaign, which saw 33,000 readers step forward to become NHS volunteers in their free time. Ron Knight, 88, and Louise Munro, 24, met the monarch at a Windsor Castle reception to mark the centenary of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations The NCVO represents 14,000 member organisations a third of the voluntary sector workforce in England and operates closely with the Mails charity partner Helpforce. Miss Munro, Helpforce Volunteer of the Year, last night described meeting the Queen as the greatest moment of my life. She said: I dont think I will ever feel like that again. The Queen told her: Its quite a gathering. She also chatted to Mr Knight, who wore his Royal Marine regimental tie. He said afterwards: She asked me about my volunteer work and I told her how I worked with patients who are having injections in their eyes. She exclaimed That cant be very nice! but said what a good idea it was to have someone to comfort them. Miss Munro, from Morecambe, Lancashire, began volunteering at Royal Lancaster Infirmary after suffering chronic ill health that left her in hospital for long periods of time. She said: A volunteer once told me that no thanks are needed when you have managed to get someone to smile. Its true once you start volunteering you get hooked on the highthat comes from leaving someone in a better position than you found them. Weve had a bump of people putting their names forward as a result of the Daily Mail in Lancashire. Its been a fantastic campaign. The two stars of the Helpforce campaign before meeting the Queen Life-long Mail reader Mr Knight, 88, became a West Suffolk Hospital volunteer after losing his wife Betty to Alzheimers in 2008. His grief was made worse by the death of his grandson Graeme, 23, in a climbing accident followed by the loss of his daughter Alison Graemes mother. He said volunteering three days a week gave him the will to keep going. After Betty died I was devastated. I just didnt know what to do with myself. I felt lost, he said. But I visited a friend in hospital and saw a pamphlet about volunteering and put it my pocket. When I read it at home I thought I can do that! I dont know what I would have done without it it has given me a sense of purpose. Frankly, the work helps me as well as the medical staff, who often thank me after my shift, and, of course, the patients. Mr Knight, a Korean War veteran, said meeting the Queen was one of the most important moments in his life, adding: Im a royalist. I would have walked from Suffolk if Id had to. He added: I think the Daily Mails campaign has been marvellous. Its been hugely successful in getting a new generation of volunteers to step forward and hopefully they will find themselves as fulfilled as I have. I cant applaud the newspaper enough and hope I can keep going for another ten years. Why not? Last nights reception celebrated the achievements of voluntary action over the last century and highlighted its contribution to millions of lives. Guests included volunteers of all ages and areas of life. Buckingham Palace said one of the Queens key roles is to support and encourage voluntary service through her involvement with more than 600 patronages, including the NCVO. Helpforce is working in partnership with NHS England to help fund and transform volunteering in and around hospitals, taking pressure off frontline staff. Donald Trump is bad for the environment, Sir David Attenborough claimed yesterday. The veteran naturalist added that while the world was becoming more aware of environmental issues, the problems had got bigger. Politicians needed to take action, Sir David said, but some never change their opinions, adding that Mr Trump could be in that category. The veteran naturalist added that while the world was becoming more aware of environmental issues, the problems had got bigger Sir David told the BBC: You, me and the rest of the human species are critically dependent on the health of the natural world. If the seas stop producing oxygen, we would be unable to breathe, and there is no food that we can digest that doesnt originate from the natural world. If we damage the natural world, we damage ourselves. Asked what he would say to those who are not working for the good of the environment, Sir David replied: I would do the same as I do to anybody else I would say, These are the facts. But there are some people who are never going to change their opinion, and it could well be that Mr Trump is one of them. Sir David, 92, named Australias Great Barrier Reef as the natural wonder he most wanted his great-grandchildren to be able to see. Iran is behind a wave of cyber-attacks on key elements of UK infrastructure such as the Post Office, spies believe. The postal service and local government networks were hit in a major assault just before Christmas, it was reported last night. Private sector companies, including banks, were also allegedly compromised in what was described as an ongoing campaign. The postal service and local government networks were hit in a major assault just before Christmas, it was reported last night Analysis by cyber security experts in California concluded that a group connected to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was responsible. They said the group was also behind the attack on the parliamentary network in 2017. Britains relationship with Iran has plummeted since it imprisoned UK- Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in 2016 for alleged spying. The National Cyber Security Centre said it was aware of a cyber incident affecting some UK organisations in late 2018. A spokesman stressed it was working with victims and advising on mitigation measures. A group of Google employees are trying to remove a member of a newly-formed AI ethics board because her opinions do not match theirs. Kay Coles James, president of conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation, was brought on-board last week by Google to provide a different viewpoint to that of Google's left-wing staff. The board, called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), consists of experienced industry experts who work in the field of artificial intelligence research. Ms Coles is now at risk of being exiled from her latest post by the protest-prone employees. Activists have lashed out at Ms Cole, who was selected by the search giant for her role so the council could offer a range of backgrounds and experience, saying she is 'anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant'. Scroll down for video Kay Coles James, pictured here with President Donald Tump (right) is the president of the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation and was selected to its advisory panel made up of external experts despite her views contradicting those of Google's The protesters say in the open petition: 'In selecting James, Google is making clear that its version of 'ethics' values proximity to power over the wellbeing of trans people, other LGBTQ people and immigrants.' Google staffers are known for their willingness to protest, with employees previously voicing discontent at a range of the firm's endeavours. Google bosses are known to cave in to the demands of its staff, with it deciding not to renew a contract with the US military in June 2018 when the staff again protested. The group lobbying for her dismissal accepts that Ms James was brought on board to offer a diverse range of viewpoints and balance out Google's well-known left-wing viewpoint. Outlandish claims from the campaigners, who call themselves 'Googlers Against Transfobia', include the possibility her conservative opinions could build discrimination into super-smart machines. WHO IS KAY COLES JAMES? She is currently the president of the Heritage Foundation - the first African American woman to hold this position. She served as the director for the United States Office of Personnel Management under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005 Before that she she served as Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources. Ms James is also a member of the NASA Advisory Council and is the president and founder of the Gloucester Institute, a leadership training centre for young African Americans. Advertisement Neither Google nor the Heritage Foundation immediately responded to requests for comment. Petition backers said it launched with 580 signatures from academics, Google employees and others, including technology industry peers. It currently sits at 1,098 Googlers who have signed the petition. Google set up the external AI ethics council to guide the tech giant away from morally questionable uses of its technology and encroaching on the privacy of its customers. It is intended to advise the search giant on matters relating to the development and application of its artificial intelligence research. Google has been embroiled in past controversies regarding the use of its AI, as well as the way it protects the data it gathers. Criticism of Ms James includes her history of being 'vocally anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant'. Comments include a recent tweet, which read: 'If they can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically' WHO IS ON GOOGLE'S AI ETHICS BOARD? Alessandro Acquisti - s a Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University Bubacarr Bah - Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University. De Kai - Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Dyan Gibbens - CEO of Trumbull, a Forbes Top 25 veteran-founded startup Joanna Bryson - Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath Kay Coles James - President of The Heritage Foundation Luciano Floridi - Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford William Joseph Burns - Former US deputy secretary of state Advertisement It established an internal AI ethics board in 2014 when it acquired DeepMind but this has been shrouded in secrecy with no details ever released about who it includes. The firm is a world-leader in many aspects of AI and the eight people recruited for the advisory board will 'consider some of Google's most complex challenges'. Members of the board include Joanna Bryson, an associate professor at the University of Bath and William Joseph Burns, former US deputy secretary of state. The controversy over hwo is included on the board comes as the world grapples with balancing potential benefits of artificial intelligence with risks its could be used against people or even, if given a mind of its own, turn on its creators. Google chief Sundar Pichai said in a published interview late last year that fears about artificial intelligence are valid but that the tech industry is up to the challenge of regulating itself. Tech companies building AI should factor in ethics early in the process to make certain artificial intelligence with 'agency of its own' doesn't hurt people, Mr Pichai said in an interview with The Washington Post. Google chief Sundar Pichai says that fears about artificial intelligence are valid but that the tech industry is up to the challenge of regulating itself. The AI ethics board was specially curated to steer the Mountain View-based firm away from any controversies by ensuring it fully considers morality while developing its artificial intelligence (file photo) The California-based internet giant is a leader in the development of AI, competing in the smart software race with giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft. Last year, Google published a set of internal AI principles, the first being that AI should be socially beneficial. Google vowed not to design or deploy AI for use in weapons, surveillance outside of international norms or in technology aimed at violating human rights. The company noted that it would continue to work with the military or governments in areas such as cybersecurity, training, recruitment, health care and search-and-rescue. AI is already used to recognize people in photos, filter unwanted content from online platforms and enable cars to drive themselves. Advertisement NASA has announced three finalists in an ongoing design competition tasking engineers to dream up sustainable dwellings that can be 3-D printed on Mars. Finalists split a prize pot of $100,000 and include SEArch+/Apis Cor, out of New York who took first place, Zopherus from Rogers, Arkansas who came in second, and Mars Incubator out of New Have Connecticut who took the third spot. The three contestants were chosen out of a pool of 11 candidates and were scored based on 'architectural layout, programming, efficient use of interior space, and the 3D-printing scalability and constructability of the habitat.' From here, according to NASA, teams will go on to compete in a showdown with a prize pool of $800,000 -- the final competition phase slated to take place in early May. The remaining teams represent the final contestants out of a competition started in 2015 through NASA's Centennial Challenge -- a program that engages the public to come up with innovative solutions. Scroll down for video NASA has announced three finalists in an ongoing design competition tasking engineers to dream up sustainable dwellings that can be 3-D printed on Mars. Mars incubator design represents a modular look at space dwelling and allows for plenty of natural light. In recent years, the topic of exploring Mars has gained traction, attracting not only NASA but the likes of private aerospace companies like SpaceX, owned by tech mogul, Elon Musk. Recently, NASA also partnered with internet search giant Google to release data and satellite pictures of Devon Island in Nunavut, Canada -- a site dubbed frequently referred to as 'Mars on Earth' -- in correlation to its Haughton-Mars Project where the agency simulates Mars missions. 'We are excited about this new partnership with Google on the Haughton-Mars Project and about the data products being released,' said Dr. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist with the Mars Institute and director of the NASA. 'They allow us to share with the world some of the Mars-like wonders of the site and the fieldwork that we do,' In other Mars related news, NASA also completed its first test flight of a helicopter that is set to explore Mars in 2021. Zorpheus' design would be constructed by an autonomous roving printer that prints a structure and then moves on to the next site The unique shape of Search/Apis Cor's habitat allows for continuous reinforcement of the structure. Light enters through trough-shaped ports on the sides and top Scientist hope that the aerial vehicle will help them analyze the surface of the red planet to glean important information on conditions there. In addition to lifting the vehicle inside an extremely thin atmosphere, scientists will also be tasked with operating the vehicle from exceptionally long distances -- a feat they describe as extremely difficult. SpaceX says it hopes to send humans on the first crewed mission to mars sometime in the 2020's according to a recent announcement from Musk. The mission will utilize the company's cutting edge rocket ship dubbed the 'Starship' which was recently revealed to be sporting a gleaming, stainless steel design. His Excellency the Former President Lieutenant General Dr. Seretse Khama Ian Khama notes with serious concern the allegations levelled against him in the Botswana Guardian newspaper of 15th March 2019 under the headline Khama lied to SABC. The article is set on a tone of malicious intent whose purpose is to discredit Former President Khama, cast him in bad light as a liar who will stop at nothing to tarnish the image of this country. The writer accuses Former President Khama of being reckless and selfish. The article further casts aspersions of treason and sabotage on the part of the Former President. These very serious allegations are not to be taken lightly. By intentionally ignoring the basic facts on the ground since this is no longer a breaking story, one can tell from the article that the writer has an agenda. His Excellency the Former President Lieutenant General Dr. Seretse Khama Ian Khama dismisses these allegations with the contempt they deserve. The allegations are preposterous and border on deformation of character. It is very disappointing to note that the Botswana Guardian did not bother to get the Former Presidents side of the story. Basic tenants of journalism require that a story be balanced and both sides be afforded a chance to respond, unfortunately this is glaringly missing in this article. Former President Khama and none of his staff were ever contacted by your publication. This was obviously a deliberate attempt to tarnish the good name of the Former President. Furthermore, the story lacks credibility as reinforced by the writers own admission that he or she did not speak to anyone from the DIS since Brigadier Peter Magosi was unreachable. Unfortunately the said officers have been charged by the Directorate of Intelligence Service. It is common cause that due to the continued mistreatment and harassment of the Former President Khama by the current administration, his security detail and protocol was withdrawn and instructed not to accompany him on his trip to India for the 60th Tibet Uprising Celebrations. The Former President was never officially informed of the withdrawal but only heard it verbally from the affected officers. Apparently the officers received the instruction through telephone calls. The Former President, having not received any communication in writing from the Directorate of Intelligence Service then proceeded with them on the trip. The constitution requires that the Former President be protected twenty four hours every day, furthermore he is entitled to four international trips and there are no conditions as to who and where he should visit. Had your esteemed writer bothered to enquire, this information would have been freely availed. Needless to say the article was a shoddy piece of someones fertile imagination, seasoned with personal disdain and intolerance of Former President Khama. This is further evidenced by the fact that in the entire article, there is not a single sentence addressing His Excellency the Former President Lieutenant General Dr. Seretse Khama Ian Khama with his full title. We live in a democratic country and it is acceptable to differ on opinions, however we need to do it respectfully. The role of journalists is to report news in a fair and balanced manner, and this is all we ask from our media. Furthermore the article is clearly misplaced on the front page since it is an opinion piece, therefore should have been properly placed in the opinion section. It is very important that the press remain impartial in their reporting regardless of political persuasion. The Botswana Guardian lied about the Former President Khama, this is unprofessional and unethical. His Excellency the Former President Lieutenant General Dr. Seretse Khama Ian Khama More than three-quarters of the newly-formed ice in the Arctic Ocean melts before it leaves its 'nursery', warns a study. The shallow Russian shelf or marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean are broadly considered to be the 'nursery' of Arctic sea ice. Experts found that only 20 per cent of it actually reaches the Central Arctic, where it joins the Transpolar Drift. This dramatic loss of ice is influencing sea-ice transport across the Arctic Ocean as it loses an important means of transporting nutrients, algae and sediments. They estimate that 80 per cent of the young ice melts before it has a chance to leave its 'nursery', a 30 per cent rise since 2000, when the figure was 50 per cent. Scroll down for video Sea ice is melting in its 'nursery; in the shallow seas around Russi in the Arctic Ocean. Rising sea water temperatures is causing the vast majority to melt before it makes it into the ocean.Here, the Arctic Ocean from Polar 6 airplane of Alfred Wegener Institute Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany monitored and analysed the sea ice's movements with satellite data from 1998 to 2017. In winter, the Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea constantly produce new sea ice. That is due to extremely low air temperatures down to minus 40 degrees Celsius, and a strong offshore wind that drives the young ice out to the open sea. In the course of the winter, the sea ice is eventually caught up in the Transpolar Drift, one of the two main currents in the Arctic Ocean. In two to three years' time, it transports the ice floes from the Siberian part of the Arctic Ocean, across the Central Arctic, and into the Fram Strait, where it finally melts. Two decades ago, around half the ice from Russia's shelf seas made this transarctic journey. In two to three years' time, it transports the ice floes from the Siberian part of the Arctic Ocean, across the Central Arctic, and into the Fram Strait, where it finally melts. Today only 20 per cent does; the other 80 percent of the young ice melts before it can become a year old and reach the Central Arctic. Experts found that only 20 per cent of the sea ice that forms in the shallow Russian marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean today. The dramatic loss of ice is influencing sea-ice transport across the Arctic Ocean, according to the research. Here, a view of Arctic Ocean from Polar 6 research aircraft They estimate that 80 per cent of the young ice melts before it has a chance to leave its 'nursery'. In 2000, that figure was 50 per cent. The study also said that as the sea ice dwindles. Here, a research aircraft flies over Arctic Ocean during IceBird sea ice thickness campaign Study first author Dr Thomas Krumpen, a sea-ice physicist at AWI, said: 'Our study shows extreme changes in the Arctic: the melting of sea ice in the Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea is now so rapid and widespread that we're seeing a lasting reduction in the amount of new ice for the Transpolar Drift. 'Now, most of the ice that still reaches the Fram Strait isn't formed in the marginal seas, but comes from the Central Arctic. 'What we're witnessing is a major transport current faltering, which is bringing the world one major step closer to a sea-ice-free summer in the Arctic.' This trend has been confirmed by the outcomes of sea-ice thickness measurements taken in the Fram Strait, which the AWI sea-ice physicists gather on a regular basis. Sea ice is formed in a 'nursery' in the shallow Russian seas of the Arctic Ocean Around 80 per cent of the young ice melts before it has a chance to leave. Pictured: Jorgen Christison, first officer on Polar 6 checks the propellers before taking off for IceBird sea ice measurements from Station Nord 'The ice now leaving the Arctic through the Fram Strait is, on average, 30 per cent thinner than it was 15 years ago,' said Dr Krumpen. He said this could be rising winter temperatures in the Arctic and a melting season that now begins much earlier or this ice is no longer formed in the shelf seas, but much farther north. 'As a result, it has far less time to drift through the Arctic and grow into thicker pack ice.' Those ice floes that the Transpolar Drift still carries to the Fram Strait are mostly formed in the open sea, in regions of the Arctic Oceans far from the coasts. Consequently, compared to ice from the shelf seas, they contain 'significantly fewer particles' such as algae, sediments and nutrients. This is because waves, wind and tides stir up far more particles from the seafloor in shallow coastal zones than on the high seas. Whereas in the past sea ice from the shelf seas transported this mineral load to the Fram Strait, Dr Krumpen said that today the melting floes release it on their way to the Central Arctic. As a result less material reaches the Fram Strait, and with a different composition. Study co-author Dr Eva-Maria Nothig said: 'Instead of Siberian minerals, we're now finding more remains of dead algae and microorganisms in our sediment traps.' Long term, she said the altered sea-ice-based particle transport is likely to produce lasting changes in the cycles and ecological processes of the central Arctic Ocean. The findings were published by the online journal Scientific Reports. Neanderthal's living 120,000 years ago were forced to eat each other as climate change made hunting nearly impossible. Evidence claims that our ancient ancestors were forced to become cannibals as a warming world became absent of game for meat. Scientists analysed the remains of six humans found in a cave in France, which was occupied by Neanderthals around 100,000 years ago. Neanderthal teeth marks were found on the bone fragments at the site pointing to evidence that they practiced cannibalism. The analysis also found evidence that they used instruments to smash open their skulls and bones to expose marrow and brains. They also found the hominids were battling prolonged and severe bouts of malnutrition from analysis of their teeth, lending credence to the study's claims. Twenty years ago, the remains of the now-extinct species of human were found in the Moula-Guercy cave in France, 80 meters above the modern Rhone River. Scroll down for video The analysis also found evidence that they used instruments to smash open their skulls and bones to expose marrow and brains. Here, Cut marks on the skull of an adolescent Neanderthal, a victim of cannibalism, found at Baume Moula-Guercy in France Earth was transitioning form an ice age into a much warmer climate and the large animals hunted by the Neanderthals would have been the first to go extinct. There has been debate over whether the site was proof that starving and malnourished neanderthals hunted and ate each other as an act of dire necessity. Now, researchers at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), say that their research is the 'best evidence' that the neanderthals ate each other. 'The work at the Moula-Guercy cave allows us for the first time to demonstrate the existence of the practice of cannibalism by European Neanderthals,' said Doctor Alban Defleur, of Universite de la Mediterranee at Marseilles and CNRS. The six humans - two adults, two teenagers and two children - were analysed and experts claim it could have been murder of necessity to feed the masses. 'Cut marks are spread over 50 per cent of the human remains and distributed over the entire skeleton from the cranium, jaws, and bones in the hand,' the team wrote. 'Percussion marks are visible on all the skulls, all the long bones and other bones of adults and children.' The feast of their peers involved dismembering them and stripping their carcasses of all available meat. Analysis of the bones and teeth found in the cave shows the hominids were battling prolonged and severe bouts of malnutrition. Evidence from chemicals found in these samples reveal they struggled to adapt as the world underwent rapid heating in the inter-glacial period. Neanderthal's living 120,000 years ago were forced to eat each other as climate change made hunting nearly impossible. Evidence claims that our ancient ancestors were forced to become cannibals as a warming world became absent of game for meat Neanderthal's living 120,000 years ago were forced to eat each other as climate change made hunting nearly impossible. Pictured here, bones found in a cave in Belgium also showed signs of cannibalism Earth was transitioning form an ice age into a much warmer climate and the large animals hunted by the Neanderthals would have been the first to go extinct. The knock-on affect would have been significant and, experts claim, enough to drive Neanderthals to cannibalism. 'The change of climate from the glacial period to the last interglacial was very abrupt,' palaeontologist Emmanuel Desclaux from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) told Cosmos. This is not the first evidence that cannibalism existed among our ancient ancestors. Ancient bones discovered in the Goyet caves in Belgium similar gruesome butcheries carried out by Neanderthals more than 40,000 years ago. Researchers said at the time, in 2016, that the skeletal remains were the first known evidence of cannibalism among groups north of the Alps. They said that bodies were likely skinned and cut up, with bone marrow extracted. Four of the bones found at this site indicate Neanderthals even used the remains of their deceased relatives as tools. The new research paper is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Analysis of the bones and teeth found in the cave shows the hominids were battling prolonged and severe bouts of malnutrition. Evidence from chemicals found in these samples reveal they struggled to adapt as the world underwent rapid heating in the inter-glacial period Hundreds of human bones discovered in plastic bags underneath a building site in Kent have been found to date back to the Middle Ages after being studied by police. The bones of up to six people - including a child - were studied by forensics after being found six feet underground. Workmen were forced to stop excavations as police swept the scene on January 21. A Kent Police spokeswoman said: 'The bones, which have been analysed by experts, were found to be from around the middle ages. 'As such, Kent Police will no longer be investigating the discovery.' Scroll down for video Police analysed the bones (pictured here near where they were found in Whitstable, Kent) and found them to date back to the Middle Ages One of the rubble bags that were found stuffed full of bones by workmen digging at the site. They were forced to stop excavations as police swept the scene on January 21 Contractors using a digger found a rubble bag in Whitstable, Kent, and Canterbury Archaeological Trust's archives manager, Andrew Richardson said: 'There are quite a few bones there - we think at least four individuals based on the number of long bones, perhaps more.' 'I think it's very much what I would have expected. They are most likely out of a churchyard. 'When bones are broken up like they were, they have often been moved from time to time, so you get disarticulated bones in pits. 'They had probably been redeposited several times before whoever dug them up found them. 'The question would be from which churchyard they were taken from before - but we don't have the answer to that.' Kent Police said at the time: 'A number of bones were found in one small area of the site in Shaftesbury Road, which has been undergoing excavation work for the past six months. 'Experts confirmed the bones are human and are now working to establish their age. This process could take several weeks. 'No further bones have been found at the site despite further excavation as a result of this discovery. Contractors using a digger found the first rubble bag buried six feet below ground at the location (pictured) Realising the bag contained bones, the builders called police, who found a second bag with a forensics team. The site (pictured) will soon be turned into housing 'Enquiries remain ongoing and officers will review whether any further action needs to be taken in due course.' Nine houses and eight flats are to be built at the site, which was formerly a Days Garage. While the history of the land is unclear, city councillor Brian Baker recalled a car firm being there 60 years ago. He said: 'I lived in Middle Wall at the Days Garage end in the early 1960s. 'My brother and I often played with the son of the garage's owner, in the scrap cars parked in the compound. 'Although this is now a dry area, it was once the beachline, before the Island Wall was built to prevent the sea encroaching onto the land.' An amphibian named Romeo, once known as the world's loneliest frog is now shacked up with his new mate, Juliet, after spending a decade alone. The Sehuencas water frog was in isolation in an aquarium in Bolivia as scientists thought he was the last surviving member of his species. After years of searching, in January, a team of researchers discovered a small group of the species in a Bolivian cloud forest. The five frogs, among which was a female named Juliet, were captured to become part of a breeding programme before reintroduction in the wild. They are now living together in his tank at a Bolivian aquarium and are said to be mating - fuelling hope for the endangered species. Scroll down for video Romeo, once known as the world's loneliest frog, has found his match in Juliet, left. The Sehuencas water frog had been in isolation for a decade before researchers discovered a small group of the species in a Bolivian rainforest They were introduced on March 1 after being cleared of chytridiomycosis, which has decimated amphibian populations throughout the Neotropics region. The fungal disease affects frogs, toads and salamanders and has caused a dramatic population collapse in more than 400 species in the past 50 years. Juliet was introduced moved into Romeo's aquarium, where he made a mating call for the first time since 2017, a sign that he is eager to breed. They are now living together in his tank at a Bolivian aquarium and are said to be mating - fuelling hope for the beleagured species. With a lifespan of 15 years, time was running out to find Romeo a mate to ensure the survival of the species 'Romeo has been really sweet to Juliet, following her around the aquarium and sacrificing his worm meals for her,' said Teresa Camacho Badani, chief of herpetology at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d'Orbigny in Bolivia, which is working on the project with the GWC. 'After he's been alone for so long, it's wonderful to see him with a mate finally.' Romeo, who was also found in a cloud forest, has a lifespan of a lifespan of 15 years, meaning he has limited time to breed with Juliet. But, according to the GWC, he hasn't worked out amplexus - the mating position for frogs where the male holds the female until he can fertilize her eggs. Some species of frog need to go into amplexus for weeks or even months, but it isn't known how long it lasts for the Sehuencas. Single and ready to mingle: A frog, dubbed the loneliest frog in the world, may have found a match after ten years in isolation in an aquarium in Bolivia. Lovesick Romeo, a Sehuencas water frog, was collected by biologists ten years ago as his species was in danger of becoming extinct Romeo attracted international attention as he was the last known member of his species and found himself lacking in any company. His keepers collaborated with Match.com in an attempt to find him a partner. Pictured here, Teresa Camacho Badani looking at Juliet in January Romeo attracted international attention as the last known member of his species and found himself lacking any company. His keepers even collaborated with Match.com in an attempt to find him a partner, where he was described as 'not fussy' and a 'pretty simple guy'. The four other Sehuencas water frogs, two males and two additional females, brought from the cloud forest are also showing signs that they are ready to breed. They are currently at the same aquarium a Romeo and Juliet, but are together in a separate tank. Completely aquatic, the Sehuencas frog was once found in great numbers at the bottom of small streams and rivers or in ponds deep in mountain forests. The species has likely declined due to habitat loss and degradation due to agriculture and logging, as well as water pollution and chytridiomycosis disease. Soon, you may be able to use your iPhone as a portable charger. Apple is reportedly considering adding 'bilateral wireless charging' to its next-generation iPhone 11, which would let you charge other devices using the smartphone. Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities, who has correctly predicted the tech giant's moves in the past, predicted the charging upgrade in his latest note to investors, according to MacRumors. Scroll down for video Apple is reportedly considering adding 'bilateral wireless charging' to its next-generation iPhone 11, which would let you charge other devices using the smartphone Bilateral wireless charging, or two-way wireless charging, would let iPhones that support the Qi charging standard provide battery juice to other devices. This would be particularly useful for users who own a pair of Apple's AirPods headphones, which now come with a wireless charging case. With two-way charging, users could place their AirPods, or even another smartphone, on top of the next-generation iPhone to get a battery boost. 'We expect the new [late 2019] iPhone models will support two-way wireless charging,' Kuo wrote in the report, according to MacRumors. 'Though the iPhone is not the first high-end smartphone to be equipped with two-way wireless charging, this new function could make it more convenient for users to charge the new AirPods and create a better integrated user experience of the iPhone and the AirPods.' To allow for two-way charging, Apple will most likely need to equip the new iPhones with bigger batteries, Kuo said. Apple released a wireless charging case with the second-generation AirPods (pictured). Two-way charging would let users place their AirPods case on the iPhone to get a battery boost Apple wouldn't be the first gadget maker to introduce two-way wireless charging. Samsung's new Galaxy S10 and S10+ have a feature called 'Wireless Powershare' that operates similarly The batteries will not only get bigger in size, but also in capacity, he added. Batteries for the follow-up to the iPhone XS Max will increase by 10 to 15 percent, while batteries for the iPhone XS successor could jump to become 20 to 25 percent larger, MacRumors said. The successor to the iPhone XR won't see as much of a battery boost, however, as Kuo expects the battery to increase no more than by about 5 percent. Apple would be debuting bilateral wireless charging for the first time in its device lineup if it chooses to with the iPhone 11. Meanwhile, other smartphone makers have introduced similar features already. Huawei's Mate 20 Pro, introduced last September, features bilateral wireless charging. Samsung then followed suit in February with its Galaxy S10 and S10+, which feature 'Wireless Powershare.' It transforms Samsung's flagship phones into mobile power banks, allowing users to place another Samsung device, such as another phone, their wireless earbuds or smartwatches directly on top of a phone to charge it. Advertisement For a second year in a row Singapore Airlines has been named as the best airline in the world in the TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice Awards, with Jet2.com named the best in the UK and Europe and Southwest Airlines hailed as North America's best carrier. Award winners were determined using an algorithm that took into account the quantity and quality of airline reviews and ratings submitted by travellers worldwide over a 12-month period on TripAdvisor Flights. The No2 airline in the world for 2019 has been named as Qatar Airways, with the top five also comprising EVA Air in third, Emirates in fourth and Japan Airlines in fifth. For a second year in a row Singapore Airlines has been named as the best airline in the world in the TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice Awards. Pictured is one of its suites class cabins Qatar Airways picks up the gong for the No.2 airline in the world and the prize for the best business class (pictured) In the global awards the best first class cabin gong goes to Emirates, best business class to Qatar, best premium economy to Air New Zealand and best economy to Singapore Airlines. Singapore Airlines regularly impresses airline awards judges and TripAdvisor users have been similarly taken with the carrier. One reviewer said: 'As a retired cabin crew, I am probably more critical than most people, especially as I used to train cabin crew. I used Singapore Airlines three times on a recent trip to New Zealand and back, and was so impressed, especially with the consistency of standards. I flew on the A380, in economy. I had plenty of legroom, the food was excellent and the crew so friendly and helpful. EVA Air is named as the third best airline in the world. Pictured is one of its business class seats Emirates has picked up two major accolades - fourth place for best airline in the world and first prize for its first class cabin (pictured here) Air New Zealand lands the gong for the best premium economy cabin (pictured) of any airline in the world 'Crews at Singapore Airlines have to undergo three-and-a-half months training, and it shows. Every interaction I had was greeted with a warm and genuine smile. Nothing was too much bother, and often my needs were anticipated before I could make a request. If I made the trip again, I would definitely use Singapore Airlines.' Qatar has also garnered lavish praise, with one reviewer saying that its service is 'one of the best in the business'. A reviewer said of third-place EVA Air, meanwhile, that it's an airline that is 'above the rest', adding: 'In economy I had real cutlery, menu for food service, seat reclines more than the average in industry, great service - tooth brush and accessories in washroom, friendly/efficient staff.' Southwest has been named as the best airline overall in North America - and No.6 in the world Jet2.com takes home five prizes - best overall airline in the UK, best overall in Europe, best economy cabin in Europe, best low cost airline in Europe and No.9 in the world And fourth-place Emirates received this write up: 'Although we flew to Milan from NY in the economy section of the plane, we felt as though we were in First Class. The service provided by the staff was excellent. The attendants were top notch and were always visible and anticipating your needs during the flight. Over the course of the eight-hour flight we were provided with two meals, and as many drinks as we wanted at no cost we cannot express enough how much we enjoyed our flight on Emirates.' The rest of the top 10 is made up of Southwest (sixth), Azul (seventh), Air New Zealand (eighth), Jet2.com (ninth) and ANA (10th). In the European ranking the best overall major airline award goes to Virgin Atlantic, and best low cost airline to Jet2.com. Jet2.com also picks up the top prize for best economy and Virgin Atlantic also wins the best premium economy award. Jet2.com's award-winning economy cabin. Steve Heapy, CEO of Jet2.com and Jet2holidays, said: 'To win five prestigious awards from TripAdvisor is an achievement we are truly proud of' Virgin Atlantic wins two awards - best major airline in Europe and best premium economy cabin in Europe (pictured here on a Dreamliner) The best premium economy prize for North America goes to American Airlines (pictured) Best business class in Europe goes to KLM and best first class to Swiss International Air lines. In North America the best major airline award goes to Delta, best low cost airline to Southwest and best Canadian airline to WestJet. Southwest also picks up the best economy cabin for North America gong, while the best premium economy prize goes to American Airlines and best business class to Air Canada. Feeling gong-ho: Singapore Airlines' economy cabin (pictured) snares the award for best on the planet Air Canada picks up the award for the best business class in North America (pictured) Steve Heapy, CEO of Jet2.com and Jet2holidays, said: 'To win five prestigious awards from TripAdvisor is an achievement we are truly proud of, as it shows that Jet2.com is a world leader when it comes to delivering first-class customer service. The awards are living proof that our investment in customer service is working, because they are based on the experiences of paying customers. 'Winning five awards shows that our family friendly formula, low fares, brand new aircraft and generous 22kg baggage allowance are a big hit with customers, and all of these great benefits are complemented by our fantastic Jet2.com team who work tirelessly every day to look after each and every customer.' Singapore Airlines CEO, Mr Goh Choon Phong, said: 'We are very pleased to be back-to-back winner of the Best Airline in the World accolade in these prestigious awards. We wish to thank our customers for their ongoing support, as well as our staff from all around the world who go the extra mile every day to deliver the best travel experience to our customers.' Etihad is launching a brand new anti-jet lag app that will offer passengers a personalised plan on how to try to beat it. The Abu Dhabi-based airline will release the app, called the Jet Lag Adviser and developed by Panasonic and Detalytics, on a trial basis. The app asks passengers a range of questions about their circadian rhythm, height, weight, nature of travel and other information about their flight times, routes and the number of time zones they will fly through. Etihad's new anti-jet lag app that has been developed alongside Panasonic and Detalytics Using artificial intelligence, the programme then comes up with a tailored plan on how to reduce the risk of jet lag. This incorporates the pre-flight, flight and post-flight phases, and provides a schedule of tips for specific times such as when to sleep, how much light exposure there should be, when to exercise, when to hydrate, and the type of food to consume. Throughout each phase of travel, the Jet Lag Adviser will send reminders with recommended actions to passengers via the app. Those using the app will also receive a combination of generic route-based and personalised 'jet lag impact scores', which gives them a summary of how severe jet lag may be on that route in general and their own travel specifically. The app was unveiled at the Aircraft Experience Expo in Hamburg. Robin Kamark, Etihad Aviation Group chief commercial officer, said: 'Etihad is committed to providing choice and a superior experience to our guests, and we are continually looking at new ways to do just that. The Abu Dhabi-based airline is to trial the Jet Lag Adviser. It uses artificial intelligence to come up with a tailored plan on how to reduce the risk of jet lag 'With the Jet Lag Advisor, we can now leverage artificial intelligence to improve the travel experience. 'This will be the first of many wellness initiatives we will explore together, and we are excited about our partnership with Panasonic and the possibilities that lie ahead.' And Hideo Nakano, chief executive officer of Panasonic Avionics Corporation, added: 'Panasonic is continually innovating to digitally transform the passenger experience, and wellness is an integral part of that. 'We are delighted to be working with Etihad Airways to introduce technology that can help their passengers reduce jet lag, and so enhance their travel experience.' It is the unassuming suburban home where TV great Graham Kennedy spent his childhood days. And the late television star's humble beginnings have now been marked by a permanent plaque at the small red brick duplex in Melbourne's Balaclava. Kennedy lived at the address for 17 years until he started his television career on the late night variety show, In Melbourne Tonight. Legend: Graham Kennedy's childhood home in Melbourne has been marked by a permanent plaque to honour the late TV great Humble: Graham lived in the small red brick duplex in Melbourne's Balaclava for 17 years until he started his television career on the late night variety show, In Melbourne Tonight When he left the show 12 years later in 1969, he was widely regarded as The King of Australian TV. 'Graham Kennedy, "The King" of Melbourne radio and television lived here from about 1940,' the plaque reads. 'As a young child, he moved with his mother into his grandparents house at this address. 'Graham Kennedy, "The King" of Melbourne radio and television lived here from about 1940,' the plaque reads. 'He attended Euston College, on the corner of Chapel and Carlisle Streets, then Caulfield North Central School.' The broadcasting great would go on to own more noteworthy properties in his later years, including a waterfront home in Kirribilli that sold for $3.35million in 2018. Kennedy also owned a home in the south-east Melbourne suburb of Frankston - where he would famously broadcast his 3AK radio show from a specially constructed studio. Kennedy (pictured) died in 2005 aged 71 and was posthumously appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the Australia Day honours the following year He died in 2005 aged 71 and was posthumously appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the Australia Day honours the following year. The year before the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia celebrated his life by paying tribute to late presenter in an online exhibition. More than 75 rare items were made open to the public ranging from a 1958 half-smoked cigarette to his first filmed TV appearance. She gripped the country with her portrayal of Home Secretary Julia Montague in the BBC hit Bodyguard. And Keeley Hawes, 43, has admitted there was 'no escape' from the show after the fate of her character was sealed - and she even received questions about her exit when on the set of The Durrells in Corfu. Speaking in an interview with this week's issue of Radio Times, Keeley confessed the small Greek island was the 'best place' for her to be after her Bodyguard character's dramatic death was aired. Iconic role: Keeley Hawes, 43, has revealed there was 'no escape' from Bodyguard after the fate of her character was sealed last year (pictured in February) She said: 'This is the best place for me right now, I think! Being away from it all is amazing in the middle of nowhere on a small Greek island. 'Although I've still heard what's going on. It seems there's no escape from Bodyguard. Even here in my Corfu bubble people come up and ask me about it!' And Keeley, whose dramatic finale was viewed by 17.1 million people, said she had already moved on from the series by the time the episode reached screens. She said: 'The reaction is the nicest thing in the world but, I mean, I've done three things between Bodyguard and this all completely different and being here now is wonderful. Greece: The actress confessed the Greek island of Corfu was the 'best place' for her to be after her Bodyguard character Julia Montague was killed (pictured with co-star Richard Madden) 'A total escape on a beautiful island. That's the fun part of my job, isn't it?' Since Bodyguard, in which she starred alongside Richard Madden as her alter-ego's personal protection officer PC David Budd, the actress has appeared in BBC1's Mrs Wilson and Channel 4's Traitors. She is also set to star alongside Toby Stephens in Summer of Rockets, Stephen Poliakoff's upcoming BBC2 series. The stat also spoke to the publication about how difficult it was for her to say goodbye to The Durrells - which will air its fourth and final series from Sunday. She said: 'Saying goodbye is incredibly sad I can barely talk about it. Talented twosome: Bodyguard bagged a total of six nominations at the forthcoming Television BAFTAs, with Keeley receiving a nod for Best Actress Busy: Since Bodyguard, the actress has appeared in BBC1's Mrs Wilson and Channel 4's Traitors 'But it's the right thing to do it's always better to go out on a high. And I really hope that people will be happy with the way we've decided to end their story. 'Because it's tricky. Everyone's really invested in The Durrells. I've really invested in them! So, I hope we've done the right thing by the fans and the Durrell family. 'And that it's a satisfying conclusion to this chapter of their lives. Simon Nye [the series writer] has created the perfect end.' Last week, Bodyguard bagged a total of six nominations at the forthcoming Television BAFTAs, which will take place on Sunday, May 12. Keeley has received a nod in the Best Actress category, with her character's death scene up for the Virgin Media Must-See Moment prize. The smash-hit BBC drama has also received recognition in the Director Fiction, Editing Fiction, Sound Fiction and Drama Series categories. The fourth and final season of ITV's The Durrells will begin on Sunday, April 7. Read the full feature in this week's issue of the Radio Times, on sale now. She is set to star as Georgia Wells in her first television role for decades. And Kate Beckinsale, 45, has revealed she only felt able to take on jobs like The Widow - which required a six-month stint in South Africa - after her daughter Lily, 20, left home. Speaking to this week's issue of Radio Times, she said: 'The last time I did a TV series I was getting my A-level results. And I remember I did Emma on ITV a long time ago. New role: Kate Beckinsale, 45, has revealed she only felt able to take on jobs like The Widow - which required her to spend six months in South Africa - after her daughter Lily, 20, left home 'When I was younger I got a bit blindsided by suddenly finding myself pregnant and having to be a mum. 'I've been saying for years, "When my daughter goes to college, then I'm going to be able to go off and do jobs that are far away."' It wasn't long after Lily had moved away for college that Kate was offered the lead role in the ITV drama - which was created by the sibling duo behind The Missing, Liar and Baptiste. Flew the nest: It wasn't long after Lily had moved away for college that Kate was offered the lead role in The Widow (Pictured in the 1998 TV movie Emma) She said: 'They said, "Do you want to go to South Africa for six months and do The Widow?" 'It felt like, "OK, it came around a little bit sooner than I was anticipating it's a bit of a leap of faith and I'm a bit scared and I don't really want to but OK."' The actress, who gave birth to daughter Lily with Michael Sheen when she was 26, has also revealed how she never had a concrete career plan - but believes she may now be able to find out what her 'sensibility is'. Play by ear: The actress, who gave birth to daughter Lily with Michael Sheen when she was 26, has also revealed how she never had a concrete career plan (Pictured in The Widow) Plot: The Widow follows Kate's character Georgia, whose aid-worker husband had been reported dead after a plane crash in the Congolese jungle three years ago She said: 'I've never had a plan, but not having a plan has meant that I've had this quite schizophrenic career where I could do various low-budget things and then I'll suddenly do an action thing, and then I'll do something like The Widow. Chaos: But her life was thrown into chaos when she caught a glimpse of her supposedly dead husband on a news broadcast when in northern Wales 'So, it's interesting: now that my daughter is a bit older, I want to find out what my sensibility is.' The Widow follows Kate's character Georgia, whose aid-worker husband had been reported dead after a plane crash in the Congolese jungle three years ago. But her life was thrown into chaos when she caught a glimpse of her supposedly dead husband on a news broadcast when in northern Wales. Speaking of the series, which began streaming on Amazon Prime on March 1, Kate said: 'I was sent three scripts but I didn't know how the story ended, so it was a little bit of a gamble. 'I was a little bit nervous of that. I thought, "Hang on what if I end up not liking it?" In fact, it was terrifying. 'In a way it makes sense not to know: Georgia starts out not really knowing what she's doing or where she's going, and I was in the same position.' The Widow will air on ITV at 9pm on Monday, April 8. Read the full feature in this week's issue of the Radio Times, on sale now. Stalled work on the Kazungula Bridge development has been returned to normalcy with the contractor, Daewoo International re-mobilising to full capacity. Daewoo International in early this month had issued a contractually enforceable notice to suspend works on the bridge project as a result of delayed or non-payment of amounts due from the employer, a joint 50/50 partnership between the governments of Botswana and Zambia. Following intervention and facilitated interactions between President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi and President of Zambia, Edgar Lungu as well as ministers responsible, work returned to full capacity on Monday April 1. Minister of Transport and Communications, Dorcus Makgato jointly met the contractor with her Zambian counterpart yesterday to map a commonly understood and agreed way forward. The project that was initially anticipated to be completed sometimes this year is now expected to be completed in 2020. Necessary consultations have since taken place, and the employer has moved swiftly to correct by paying all the arrears, and obtaining the contractors agreement to not only lift the prevailing suspension conditions, which have, lately, been in force, but to assure that the project will be delivered to the required standards and specifications by 2020, Makgato said. According to Makgato, as part of resolving the problem, a required minimum amount of US Dollars 16.62m, which has been overdue, is in the process of being transmitted to the contractor. Makgato further says an added control measure with direct ministerial oversight has been put in place as of yesterday to ensure that such disruptions are avoided in the future. Because of its strategic importance to the SADC region, and wider trade-facilitation across Africa and beyond, both the governments of Botswana and Zambia recognise their mutual commitment to having the Kazungula Bridge Project completed soon and in the most cost-effective way. She's gained worldwide recognition for her portrayal as a ruthless assassin in BBC's Killing Eve. And Jodie Comer spoke about breaking stereotypes with her role as Villanelle in the drama series for May's issue of Elle UK, ahead of the show's season two premiere later this month. Interviewed by Killing Eve's developer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the actress, 26, candidly discussed battling her struggles with body image as a prominent figure in the TV industry. Dazzling: Jodie Comer spoke about breaking stereotypes with her role as Villanelle in Killing Eve for May's issue of Elle UK, ahead of the show's season two premiere later this month The screen star, who first forged a career in acting during her teenage years, admitted she's 'always worried' about her appearance. Remember Me actress Jodie detailed: 'Growing up as a teen, I always struggled with my weight and body image. Always worrying about the way you look or your weight for certain roles that has always been a big insecurity of mine. A big thing is trying to accept that, with acting, the reason for getting a part or not getting part isnt always about your talent or how talented people think you are; a lot of it is about your looks.' Candid: Interviewed by Killing Eve's developer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the actress, 26, discussed battling her struggles with body image as a prominent figure in the TV industry 'I always struggled with my weight and body image': The screen star, who first forged a career in acting during her teenage years, admitted she's 'always worried' about her appearance On overcoming her insecurities, the blonde insisted she's learnt to place more importance on her skilled craft. The Liverpudlian beauty shared: 'What Im trying to do and I feel like Im succeeding a little bit in is to be accepting of the fact that I always put a stress on myself having to look a certain way, when you are who you are. 'Your ability to act, or whatever your job is, is worth so much more than how you look. Priorities: On overcoming her insecurities, the blonde insisted she's learnt to place more importance on her skilled craft Over the past year, Jodie has won critical acclaim for her portrayal as merciless Villanelle, who spent the last series being hunted by MI5 security officer Eve Polastri - played by Sandra Oh. The Justice star has mastered her villainous roles in TV after playing stony-hearted University graduate Kate Parks in award-winning series Doctor Foster. Speaking on taking the fierce factor up a notch in Killing Eve, she enthused: 'I relish it. 'I think its fun getting people roused up, so then when they meet you, theyre like, Oh, youre not a b***h or homewrecker. Its fun to see people have gone with it and theyve believed it. On playing an unconventional baddie, Jodie elaborated: The thing is, she could easily be just a murderous villain, but there are so many loveable qualities about her. 'When I first read the script and I read assassin, I thought, Ah, f**k, Im not assassin the stereotype of what a female assassin is and felt a bit deflated. But I related to Villanelle. The actress went on to reflect on the early beginnings of her career, and insisted Killing Eve has 'changed things' in her life. My first TV job was an episode of hospital drama The Royal Today when I was 14', she said. 'But I think Killing Eve is definitely the role that has changed things for me. I dont feel like theres a show like this, or a character like Villanelle, who breaks so many rules. Impressive: Jodie has won critical acclaim for her portrayal as merciless character Villanelle, who spent the last series being hunted by MI5 security officer Eve Polastri - played by Sandra Oh Jodie, who stars in the series alongside a predominantly female cast, gushed about the positive energy among actresses in the industry. She said: I did have a moment last year at the Critics Choice Awards. I was with Phoebe, Sandra and Fiona and I was like, This is so f******g cool. 'To be on set not just with women, but these women in particular being encouraged by them, learning from them and laughing with them its just special. The past five projects Ive been a part of have all been written by women and Im aware thats rare, but thats something I want to continue and be conscious of and seek out', she added. Positivity: Jodie, who stars in the series alongside a predominantly female cast, gushed about the positive energy among actresses in the industry (pictured with Phoebe and Sandra at the Golden Globes in January) The TV star was joined by director Phoebe, 33, for the candid interview, with the Fleabag star echoing Jodie's comments about the industry's 'exciting' atmosphere. She shared: 'Theres a kind of feminine energy in the industry right now, which is exciting. With Killing Eve, Sandra was the first on board. Out soon: The May issue of ELLE UK is on sale from April 4 'I wrote her this love letter that was a little bit over the top, but she wrote back to me and said, I want to talk about your heart, your vagina and your ideas. She said, When I work with women, I want to live in their vagina for the year. I was like, the door is wide open, Sandra, please come running in. She went on to detail the writing process with leading character Villanelle: What I found really liberating with her was that shes not ruled by insecurities. I feel like its such a human thing to be ruled by your insecurities, particularly for women. I feel like when Im on set working with people I love, with my head in the work, all those things fall away. I stop caring about any of that s**t. 'When women are given the chance to really work or really have a character that does deeper than skin deep, then it suddenly all disappears', she added. The May issue of ELLE UK is on sale from April 4. For Folks Sake: Morris Dancing And Me Rating: Secrets Of The Royal Babies Rating: Barry doesnt hold with it at all. Women in the workplace, thats all well and good. Votes for women, female emancipation, why not? But women doing Morris dances? Never! The very thought is sacrilege. Theyre called Morris Men for a reason not Morris Persons. Its important to retain the artistic purity, he pleaded. When a woman joins the team, the quality goes. Its a bit like a male voice choir: put two ladies in the choir and the quality wont be the same. The Manchester Morris Men are pictured above in For Folks Sake: Morris Dancing And Me. But women doing Morris dances? Never! The very thought is sacrilege. Theyre called Morris Men for a reason not Morris Persons Barrys argument might have sounded more convincing if he hadnt been wearing bright lipstick and a milkmaids flouncy dress, playing the Betsy a Morris version of the panto dame. The gentle, quirky documentary For Folks Sake: Morris Dancing And Me (BBC4) was full of amiably eccentric characters like Barry, a gap-toothed grandfather whose pewter beer tankard was rarely far from his hand. Some of them treated Morris traditions as a matter of grave national importance, but to most it was far more serious than that. These rural dance steps, performed in flowery boaters and jingling breeches, represented the scaffolding of English civilisation. Without them, the country faced collapse and ruin. You might suppose that, if this hop-and-skipping, penny-whistling ritual is so important, all new dancers would be welcomed Morris Men, Morris Women, even children ... Morris Minors. Film-maker Richard Macer threw himself into the Morris milieu, learning the steps to Constant Billy, a dance that involved much thwacking of sticks. But he was a townie who couldnt quite grasp Morriss bumptious appeal But when the chief dancer at one village in East Anglia suggested his wife might help with the musical accompaniment, the furore turned so nasty that the couple were forced to flee to a distant land. The villagers took a vow of silence and refused to speak of the scandal for five years. Even now, the names of the exiles will not pass their lips ... though some whisper that the couple moved to the West Country, that mire of iniquity. Film-maker Richard Macer threw himself into the Morris milieu, learning the steps to Constant Billy, a dance that involved much thwacking of sticks. But he was a townie who couldnt quite grasp Morriss bumptious appeal. A good deal of middle-class intellectualising went on, and the more he thought about it, the less he understood. He never got to the bottom, either, of why the chaps were so determined to exclude their ladyfolk. Photos from the Twenties, after all, showed Morris dancing was popular for girls, his own grandmother among them. The men-only chauvinism appears to date from the Sixties revival. Fashion-watchers debated whether the Duchess of Sussex (above) was frankly American enough to parade her heir in overalls on Secrets Of The Royal Babies (ITV) [File photo] Speculation is rife about breaks with tradition threatening that other great British institution, the Royal Family. Specifically, will the next Windsor toddler be dressed in sensible shorts, like an Enid Blyton character, or might the palace wardrobe see the advent of ... dungarees? This question was addressed without irony on Secrets Of The Royal Babies (ITV), as fashion-watchers debated whether the Duchess of Sussex was frankly American enough to parade her heir in overalls. Other pressing issues included: is the Duchess expecting twins? (Answer: wait and see.) Will she have a girl or a boy? (Yes.) Will George and Amal be the godparents? (Oh, but think how hurt Elton and David would be.) We did learn that Princess Diana gave birth standing up while sucking on ice cubes, which I cant say I wanted to know. And apparently, Queen Victoria was given chloroform while delivering her ninth child. Hang on, we saw that scene on Sunday night in ITVs drama Victoria and there was no chloroform. You cant believe everything on telly, you know. Blow-out of the night: Tony Robinson was munching his way across America in Around The World By Train (C5), tucking into vast burgers none bigger than the Po Boy of New Orleans, a shovelful of bread and meat. Ya want fries with that, Sir Tone? They've been married over a decade, but they looked like high school sweethearts in love again. Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O'Connell were spotted catching a flight in Toronto on Sunday after attending the Canadian Screen Awards the night before. The 46-year-old X-Men actress and the 45-year-old Stand By Me actor were dressed in casual outfits that made them look like teenagers again. Blast from the past: Rebecca Romijn, 46, and Jerry O'Connell, 45, looked like high school sweethearts in their casual wear as they caught a flight out of Toronto The 5ft11in model walked through the airport in a gray Gucci hoodie with roses framing the logo and a tight pair of charcoal jeans ripped at the knee. She opted for a minimal makeup look and had her golden locks tied back in a bun. Her casual trainers contrasted with the chic Burberry raincoat she carried over her arm. Keeping it casual: The 5ft11in model walked through the airport in a gray Gucci hoodie with roses framing the logo and a tight pair of charcoal jeans ripped at the knee No fuss: Jerry wore a burgundy high school varsity jacket with white leather sleeves. He had on a light gray pair of jeans and wore pair of white sneakers Jerry wore a burgundy high school varsity jacket with white leather sleeves. He had on a light gray pair of jeans and wore pair of white sneakers. He toted along a stylish patterned leather bag for the trip ahead. The Billions actor posted a photo to Instagram the day before showing himself seemingly in the same v-neck shirt and letter jacket he wore to the airport, while Rebecca wore the Burberry jacket she'd carried along. Repeat outfit: The Billions actor posted a photo to Instagram the day before showing himself seemingly in the same v-neck shirt and letter jacket he wore to the airport, while Rebecca wore the Burberry jacket she'd carried along The two showed of they most stylish looks on Saturday at the Canadian Screen Awards, which honors the best in Canadian films and English-language Canadian television. Though both are Americans, one of Jerry's first starring roles was in the Canadian television series My Secret Identity, which aired for three seasons from 1988-1991. He also currently leads Carter, a satire about a Canadian actor famous for starring in an American crime series. After he has a meltdown and returns home, his old neighbors can't separate his real-life persona from his TV one and ask him to investigate small-time crimes. Stunning elegance: The two showed of they most stylish looks on Saturday at the Canadian Screen Awards, which honors the best in Canadian films and English-language Canadian television Broad comedy: Jerry also got on stage to help present for the intimate award show. During a gag with actress Catherine Reitman, he stripped off his shirt and jacket to reveal a bunched-up corset The two actors matched each other with striking blue outfits, her in a 1920s flapper style dress with tassels and lace, and him with an elegant black and blue tuxedo. The comic actor also got on stage to help present for the intimate award show. During a gag with actress Catherine Reitman, he stripped off his shirt and jacket to reveal a bunched-up corset. Lionsgate has released new posters for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, which features new and returning characters alike. The posters include a new look at Keanu Reeves' title character, enjoying some time with his growing pooch. There are also glimpse at other returning characters like Winston (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick) from The Continental Hotel and The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), plus five new characters introduced in this action-packed sequel. John is back: Lionsgate has released new posters for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum featuring Keanu Reeves' title assassin plus brand new characters Winston: There are also glimpse at other returning characters like Winston (Ian McShane, above), the proprietor of The Continental Hotel Bowery King: Laurence Fishburne is featured as The Bowery King in a new John Wick 3 poster At the end of John Wick: Chapter 2, John Wick (Reeves) was deemed excommunicado by the assassin's group known as the High Table. This was because he broke their laws by killing a High Table member (Riccardo Scarmarcio) inside The Continental Hotel, where no 'business' is to be conducted. Chapter 2 ends with Wick going on the run, as a massive $14 million contract is put out on his head, with Chapter 3 - Parabellum introducing some of the killers gunning for this contract and the chance to take out the legendary John Wick. Continental concierge: This was because he broke their laws by killing a High Table member (Riccardo Scarmarcio) inside The Continental Hotel, where no 'business' is to be conducted. On the run: Chapter 2 ends with Wick going on the run, as a massive $14 million contract is put out on his head, with Chapter 3 - Parabellum introducing some of the killers gunning for this contract and the chance to take out the legendary John Wick Among the new characters are Halle Berry's Sofia, a fellow assassin and one of John Wick's friends, seen in the poster with two of her own dogs. Also featured is Anjelica Huston's The Director, described by the film's director, Chad Stahelski in an interview with Collider as, 'someone who was responsible for [Wicks] upbringing and his protection.' Mark Dacascos' Zero is also featured in the posters, who has been described as the primary assassin going up against Wick, who has a vendetta against him. Sofia: Among the new characters are Halle Berry's Sofia, a fellow assassin and one of John Wick's friends, seen in the poster with two of her own dogs The Director: Also featured is Anjelica Huston's The Director, described by the film's director, Chad Stahelski in an interview with Collider as, 'someone who was responsible for [Wicks] upbringing and his protection' Zero: Mark Dacascos' Zero is also featured in the posters, who has been described as the primary assassin going up against Wick, who has a vendetta against him Another franchise newcomer is Asia Kate Dillon as The Adjuticator, another member of the High Table, who gets her own poster. Comedian Jason Mantzoukas is also featured as The Tick Tock Man, another deadly assassin going after Wick, who may feature prominently in the plot given the tagline on all the posters is, 'Tick Tock, Mr. Wick. The final poster reveals a brand new character, Said Taghmaoui, who was cast in November but it wasn't revealed until this poster's debut that he's playing a character known simply as The Elder. The Adjuticator: Another franchise newcomer is Asia Kate Dillon as The Adjuticator, another member of the High Table, who gets her own poster Tick Tock: Comedian Jason Mantzoukas is also featured as The Tick Tock Man, another deadly assassin going after Wick, who may feature prominently in the plot given the tagline on all the posters is, 'Tick Tock, Mr. Wick' The Elder: The final poster reveals a brand new character, Said Taghmaoui, who was cast in November but it wasn't revealed until this poster's debut that he's playing a character known simply as The Elder John Wick and John Wick: Chapter 2 director Chad Stahelski returns to direct John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. While they aren't given a shiny new poster, the cast also features Robin Lord Taylor as The Administrator, martial arts sensation Tiger Hu Chen as Triad and Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman from The Raid franchise as new assassins Wick must face. Lionsgate has given John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum a May 17 release date, going A Dog's Journey and The Sun Is Also a Star. Advertisement She's an actress, businesswoman and a mom of three. And now Jessica Alba is looking to net a tidy profit on the sale of her former mansion home in Beverly Hills. Alba, 37, has just listed a Franklin Canyon property she owns for $6.195 million, two million more than she paid for it a decade ago, according to Variety.com. Up for sale: Jessica Alba has just listed a Franklin Canyon property she owns for $6.195 million, two million more than she paid for it a decade ago, according to Variety.com Has new digs: The 37-year-old actress and businesswoman currently lives in a larger and more secluded Beverly Hills home with husband Cash Warren and their three children Alba and her husband Cash Warren now reside with their children in a larger mansion in the Beverly Hills neighborhood and she clearly feels it's time to sell. The Spanish-style residence comprises three bedrooms and five bathrooms over 5,300-square-feet and sits on almost a half acre behind security gates. The property also includes a self-contained apartment of two bedrooms and two bathrooms with lounge and kitchen above a four-car garage. Spacious: The Spanish-style residence comprises three bedrooms and five bathrooms over 5,300-square-feet and sits on almost a half acre behind security gates Compound: The property also includes a self-contained apartment of two bedrooms and two bathrooms with lounge and kitchen above a four-car garage Updated: The main home features a stone tiled entrance hall leading to a staircase to the upper level and opening onto the open-plan living space on the ground floor Airy: The living areas have distressed hardwood floors and the decor is predominantly white walls and ceilings The main home features a stone tiled entrance hall leading to a staircase to the upper level and opening onto the open-plan living space on the ground floor. The living areas have distressed hardwood floors and the decor is predominantly white walls and ceilings. There are plenty of windows and French doors giving the home plenty of natural light and facilitating indoor/outdoor living. An office/library has floor-to-ceiling bookcases. All mod cons: An office/library has floor-to-ceiling bookcases Luxury: There are plenty of windows and French doors giving the home plenty of natural light and facilitating indoor/outdoor living The kitchen has white cabinetry on a dark wood floor with a central u-shaped island with breakfast bar. There are top of the range stainless steel appliances and a small office-style work area in one corner. The formal dining area opens out onto a patio with a built-in outdoor kitchen and a pizza oven. Upstairs, the master suite includes a walk-in closet and a sitting area with a fireplace. It has French doors which open out onto a private terrace. The grounds include a lagoon-inspired swimming pool, wood decks, lush landscaping and plenty of seating areas. Cook's delight: The kitchen has white cabinetry on a dark wood floor with a central u-shaped island with breakfast bar and a small office-style work area in one corner Ready to be lived in: There are top of the range stainless steel appliances and several sinks Her new crime mini series, The Act, premiered on March 20 on Hulu. So keeping with the recent onslaught of promotion for new drama, young star Joey showed some creativity and donned a custom denim jacket with The Act stitched on the back. And on Sunday, the 19-year old paired it with denim short-shorts for a lunch date in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. Young star: Joey King was spotted coming out of a popular restaurant in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles on Sunday Going for casual-cool, the actress also wore a black T-shirt and rocked a pair of checkered Vans sneakers. She was also seen carrying an emerald green backpack and a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses while heading out of the restaurant. And, on this day, she added some volume to her close-cropped dark locks that were shaved short for her role as Gypsy Blanchard in The Act. Casual-cool: The actress wore an all-denim ensemble for her lunch date at a popular restaurant Promo style: King helped promote her new series, The Act, with a custom denim jacket, which she wore with denim shorts and a pair of checkered Vans sneakers The new hairdo was part of her transformation to play one-half of the mother-daughter duo at the center of a scandalous story that shocked many in 2017. King, who rose to fame playing little sister to Selena Gomez in the 2010 movie Ramona And Beezus, did not take to the request to cut her hair short, at first. 'There was a bit of me being like, well, do I have to? Is there a way we can make it not?" she told reporters at a TV critics Association panel as reported by E! News. 'But at the end of the day, I realized this role and this show, I connected with it a lot. It just meant so much to me and I would've done anything to be able to portray Gypsy's story and to play her, so I have zero regret. I'm so happy that I did, and now I'm spiking it, like what's up?' Life imitating art: The 19-year old added some volume to her close-cropped dark locks that were shaved short for her role as Gypsy Blanchard in The Act Disturbing story: The Act premiered on Hulu March 20 King portrays a young victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, alongside Patricia Arquette, who plays her mother Dee Dee Blanchard. The elder Blanchard repeatedly told her daughter that she had ailments that included things like leukemia, asthma, muscular dystrophy, which stunted her development, resulting in the mental capacity of a seven-year old. Dee Dee ended up being found murdered in 2015,and Gypsy (Joey King) and her boyfriend were convicted of the crime. The Act also stars AnnaSophia Robb, Chloe Sevigny and Calum Worthy. They were one of the most volatile couples in Married At First Sight history. And months after the cameras stopped rolling, Susie Bradley and Billy Vincent are still going at it. The drama started on Monday, when Susie took to Instagram to express regret about getting into a public fight with Billy on social media. At war again! Married At First Sight's Susie Bradley and Billy Vincent got into another social media feud this week 'I'm new to all the trolling following being on a show like MAFS' the 25-year-old explained. 'And I lost my mind a little bit last night,' she continued. 'I'm not commenting back to anything that Billy says or any nasty things that people say because filming wrapped up five months ago. 'I wished Billy well in our final commitment ceremony, even though it wasn't shown. And since the show, I've been lucky enough to find love'. Taking the high road: 'I'm not commenting back to anything that Billy says or any nasty things that people say because filming wrapped up five months ago,' said Susie The mother-of-one then called her new boyfriend, NRL star Todd Carney, the 'best person in the whole wide world'. She finished by urging people to judge her on who she 'actually is' instead of what they saw on an 'edited reality show', clearly referring to her negative portrayal on MAFS. Susie's message didn't seem to go down well with her former TV husband, who also jumped on Instagram to hit back at the blonde. Happiness: The 25-year-old then called her new boyfriend, NRL star Todd Carney (pictured), the 'best person in the whole wide world' 'I have well and truly moved on since the experiment,' Billy said sternly. 'But moving on, it doesn't mean I forget how I was treated.' He continued: 'I don't forget because I don't want it to happen again. 'And what people fail to realise about me is, just because I'm kind and I treat people with respect and I'm an anti-bullying campaigner, it doesn't mean that I won't respond - I will OWN you. 'I have well and truly moved on since the experiment,' Billy said in a response video. 'But moving on, it doesn't mean I forget how I was treated' 'And on a final note, f**k yes I'm salty... Because I was set up with somebody who used the whole experiment as a holiday in Sydney'. The MAFS exes engaged in a nasty war of words on Saturday, when Billy accused the Susie of secretly texting her now-boyfriend Todd Carney during filming. Responding to a follower on Instagram, the 28-year-old barista wrote: 'You saw the suitable for TV version - not Susie's threatening violence or texting her assumed boyfriend right in front of me'. Warring exes! Billy (right) accused Susie (left) of 'texting Todd Carney during filming' - as their bitter feud shows no signs of slowing down It didn't take long for Susie to deny Billy's allegations, insisting that she did not start dating Todd until after their TV marriage fell apart. 'Oh Billy - get off it!,' she wrote. 'You know I didn't start seeing Todd until the show had finished, you are actually blatantly lying. 'And threatening violence? Really, darling. It's time to drop the act, you're not on telly anymore'. Ouch! Responding to a follower on Instagram, Billy wrote: 'You saw the suitable for TV version - not Susie's threatening violence or texting her assumed boyfriend right in front of me' Todd, a disgraced NRL player known for his infamous 'bubbler' incident in 2014, was first pictured with Susie in Brisbane on February 15. At the time, Married At First Sight was still airing on television but Susie and Billy's relationship had long since ended. Last week, following Billy and Susie's official departure from the show, the aged care nurse went public with Todd on Instagram. 'Oh Billy - get off it!' It didn't take long for Susie to deny Billy's allegations, insisting that she did not start dating Todd Carney until after their TV marriage fell apart 'I have waited so long for the day to come where this saying makes complete sense and now it finally does...' Susie wrote on Instagram, paying tribute to her boyfriend. '"One day someone will walk into your life and make you see why it never worked out with anyone else". 'Todd, You are 100 per cent that person and I am so incredibly in love with you'. She's refused to speak to the media since her unceremonious exit from Married At First Sight in February, instead opting to comment about the show on social media. But ahead of the show's upcoming reunion episodes, Ines Basic, 28, has finally broken her silence. The Queensland legal assistant broke her media ban during an interview with The Kyle And Jackie O Show on Tuesday, talking on the phone while the shock-jocks were having a conversation with her co-star Martha Kalifatidis. When quizzed on whether she's spoken to her former flame Sam Ball since filming, Ines was quick to say no. 'My biggest turnoff was when he read my personal texts out to Australia. I was like, "Yuck! Why would you do that?" And then after that I was like, "Ew, I would never talk to you again!''' she said. Ines also dispelled rumours that she's dating Jessika Power's brother Rhyce by confirming that she's single. She's back! Ines Basic, 28, has given her first interview since leaving Married At First Sight, speaking to The Kyle And Jackie O Show on Tuesday 'Ew, I would never talk to you again!' When quizzed on whether she's spoken to her former flame Sam Ball since filming, Ines was quick to say no 'I'm so solo. I'll definitely keep my eye out... um I'm so solo. Like, too solo I think.' she explained. The brunette then went on to confirm rumours she was poised to become The Bachelorette before Angie Kent nabbed the role. 'I actually did get asked while filming Married At First Sight if I was interested in being picked for it, because they thought I'd be real funny, and I was like, "Oh, I don't know. This is already, like, so heavy",' she revealed. 'I'm so solo!' Ines also dispelled rumours that she's dating Jessika Power's brother Rhyce by confirming that she's single 'I actually did get asked while filming Married At First Sight': The brunette then went on to confirm rumours she was poised to become The Bachelorette before Angie Kent (pictured) nabbed the role Finally, Ines broke her silence on her controversial kiss with Martha back in February. 'Yeah, we made out. You're not best friends until you make out with each other!' she mused, before confirming the pair did nothing more than kiss. 'It was my birthday and we were just having a really good time and we hooked up!' Kyle and Jackie O weren't shy to probe Ines on whether she would consider dating women following her catastrophic on-screen romances. 'I could never date a chick. Um, no I like men too much,' Ines responded. 'It was my birthday and we were just having a really good time and we hooked up!' Finally, Ines broke her silence on her controversial kiss with Martha back in February She recently packed her bags and relocated from Melbourne to Byron Bay. And on Tuesday, Elyse Knowles published a lengthy blog post explaining why she swapped city life for a more relaxed pace in northern New South Wales. Firstly, she said that 'change can bring opportunity' and she was looking forward to finding 'fresh beginnings and a new perspective' on life. 'It's a little green hub!' Elyse Knowles (pictured) has revealed she swapped 'busy' city life for Byron Bay because the community is 'more aware of its carbon footprint' Elyse added that moving to a new area 'challenges you to go out and meet new people, find new habits and just live your life in a slightly different way. It's refreshing and very liberating.' Her second reason for relocating to Byron Bay is that the community aligns more with her environmentalist values. She said the residents are 'consciously aware of their carbon footprint', adding: 'People care about more than just their actions... They care deeply about the effect their actions have on other people, species and industries. It's a little green hub!' Fresh start: Elyse published a lengthy blog post on Tuesday explaining why she moved interstate with her boyfriend Josh Barker and their dogs Lastly, Elyse said that living in a busy city like Melbourne can be 'consuming and exhausting', but Byron Bay allows her to visit the beach at any time. 'Life has been quite nuts over the last few years. Just so crazy busy,' she explained. 'What could be better than living in a place where some of the most beautiful beaches in this country would literally sit on our doorstop? Nothing! So Byron it was.' 'They care deeply about the effect their actions have on other people, species and industries': Elyse explained that she strongly supports Byron Bay's community values Elyse concluded by saying that the people who live in Byron are more aware of their surroundings and aren't 'focused down on their phones as much'. The model and her boyfriend Josh Barker moved to Byron Bay just a few weeks ago. Taking to Instagram last month, Elyse revealed how excited she was to embark on this new chapter in her life. Life's a beach! Elyse said that living in a busy city like Melbourne can be 'consuming and exhausting', but Byron Bay allows her to visit the beach at any time 'We have always had this dream, we have decided to make it reality,' she wrote. 'The new adventure has begun! We have packed up our lives and we are moving to Byron Bay! I can't believe it's happening and it's real now! So excited for our new adventure with my man @joshy.barker.' Josh also shared the news with his own social media followers, but clarified that the move was more of a '12-month working holiday'. He's the genius behind Channel Nine's ratings hit Married At First Sight. And while Pete Cunningham has arranged 30 weddings during his three years on the show, his own love life hasn't exactly been smooth sailing. The 30-year-old producer first met his boyfriend Anthony Ikin in 2007 when he was 18, but it took them more than a decade to finally tie the knot. The real-life love story behind Married At First Sight: How producer Pete Cunningham (right) was dumped by his first boyfriend aged 18 - but went on to marry him a decade later Despite having an 'instant connection' and falling in love, Pete was left heartbroken when Anthony decided as teenagers they should just be friends. As reported by the Courier Mail, choreographer Anthony knew they had 'something special' but made an 'educated decision' to break up. He said: 'Rather than listen to my heart, I made an educated decision [to break up but remain friends] and I'm so glad I did because Pete went on to do the most amazing things and it is so important to follow your own passion.' Long road: After falling in love as teenagers, Pete was left heartbroken when Anthony decided in 2007 they should just be friends. Pictured at their wedding in New Zealand last year Producing superstar: Pete worked on shows like The Biggest Loser, The Celebrity Apprentice, The Voice and The Only Way Is Essex before joining the MAFS team Anthony explained that when the couple reconciled in early 2016, Pete had decided what he wanted to do in his career and their lives fell into place. The couple married on New Zealand's stunning Waiheke Island in May 2018, around 11 years after first breaking up as teenagers, and will soon be moving to Los Angeles. Pete, who started off his career as a runner, now works behind the scenes on MAFS and helps choose the 20 singletons from about 10,000 applicants. Back together: Pete (left) reconciled with choreographer Anthony Ikin (right) in early 2016 when he returned to Australia after a period living and working in the UK He explained that he admires the contestants for being 'vulnerable' enough to marry a stranger in front of the entire country. 'Our wedding took just over 12 months to pull together and we'd been close for so long, so I have a lot of empathy for people who allow themselves to be vulnerable by marrying a stranger in front of millions of viewers,' Pete said. 'They open themselves to endless judgments.' Married At First Sight continues Tuesday at 7:30pm on Channel Nine The Vanderpump Rules girls stripped off to skinnydip in the sea during a trip to Mexico that quickly descended into full-on meltdowns. Brittany Cartwright, 29, Stassi Schroeder, 30, Katie Maloney-Schwartz, 31, and Kristen Doute, 35, were all shown on Monday's episode getting topless as they frolicked in the sea in Puerto Vallarta. Lala Kent who recently admitted being an alcoholic but proudly got 'f***d up' doing shots on the trip last summer went the furthest, getting completely naked. Trip tradition: Lala Kent got naked while going skinnydipping with her gal pals in Mexico on Monday's episode of Vanderpump Rules As they ran around and giggled, their nipples and privates blurred onscreen, only Scheana Shay, 33, and Ariana Madix, 33, stayed clothed. 'I'm down with being naked, and I'm down with the ocean,' Ariana said. 'But I'm not down with being naked in the ocean. You don't know what kind of weird fish is gonna swim up in some unprotected crevice.' She made up with it with a drunken night out even shown kissing Kristen and Stassi, and admitting: 'There was kissing. Lots of kissing.' Top off: The women have been jumping topless together in the water on recent trips Good times: Arms were raised as the topless crew jumped into the waves Clothes off: Lala stripped off completely to frolic in the ocean with her friends Stayed out: Ariana Madix did not join in the skinnydipping session Party time: Stassi Schroeder and Ariana were shown kissing as the group partied together It was a light-hearted moment for a trip that started with Tom Schwartz, 36, and wife Katie Maloney-Schwartz, 31, loudly fighting as soon as they got to their room. It then ended with a full meltdown that left Beau Clark sobbing out-of-control during his latest fight with girlfriend Stassi Schroeder. 'How are we gonna have a future if you don't f***ing trust me?' he cried as they lay in bed in the early hours. No trust: Beau Clark sobbed during a fight over Stassi not trusting him 'You have some dark s*** that you need to get out, but you're putting it on me, and I don't deserve it. You need to figure out your s***.' The bickering had actually started the previous night when Stassi who had been the first to suggest skinnydipping changed her mind and wanting to go to bed early, annoyed Beau who still wanted to party. 'We're literally having the same fight that we did before,' she admitted of her 30th birthday meltdown. Same fight: Stassi noted that they were having the same fight as her 30th birthday They made light of it the next morning, with Stassi smiling in bed as she said: 'Dude, this was like the least drunken-brat ever.' 'Progress,' they said in unison, laughing. She admitted then: 'I don't know why it happens but there are some nights where I've been drinking just way too much and all of a sudden I just turn. And I'm not self-aware enough to pull myself out of it.' Pillow talk: Beau and Stassi talked about their recent arguing in bed That same side emerged the following night when she resented Beau wanting to drink while she wanted them to go to bed. 'You have this thought that all I want to do is go out and not be with you,' he told her, upset. 'It's like this abandoned child thing. When have I abandoned you?' Abandoned child: The lack of trust was starting to bother Beau She replied: 'I don't want to be with someone that at 3 in the morning wants to f***ing go still party. 'I'm not gonna go to sleep alone I'm not. I don't want to.' He reminded her: 'I f***ing worship you. You are my heart. You are my future. Don't treat me like this. The future: Beau begged Stassi to stop treating him poorly 'I know the way I am to you, I am so f***ing solid gold,' he told her. He insisted later in a confessional: 'We keep having the same fight over and over and over again. 'It's massively frustrating to have your girlfriend treat you like you're gonna cheat on her when you've done nothing for that to even happen.' Massively frustrating: Stassi's behavior was 'massively frustrating' to Beau He told her: 'I worship you. You are my f***ing heart. You're my future don't treat me like this. 'I'm not Jax,' she said of her ex Jax Taylor, 39, who cheated on her. Jax had, in fact, earlier pranked Stass by approaching her in the water and saying: 'I just want you to know I still have feelings for you.' Good one: Jax Taylor joked to his ex Stassi that he still had feelings for her 'You're so f***ing lame,' she told him. Jax then made it clear he was really trying to make her treat Beau better, telling her: 'Beau is a good one, man. You've got a gem.' 'You're giving me advice right now, which is f***ing hysterical,' she said, with him saying she has 'dated some s*** guys' and her replying presumably referring to him as much as anyone 'I'm very much aware.' Sage advice: Stassi found it funny that Jax was giving her relationship advice 'Listen, I'm just saying, cut the guy some slack,' Jax continued. 'Honestly, I have a little bit of a man crush on him. So just loosen up a little bit. Pick and choose your battles.' In a confessional, Stassi said: 'After 10 years of Jax acting like a caveman on spring break, now he's waxing poetic? Man crush: Jax asked Stassi to loosen up a bit with Beau 'And, I hate saying this, but he's not wrong.' 'I don't think Stassi realizes how lucky she is to have Beau,' Jax said. 'He's probably one of the nicest guys I've ever met.' The episode had started with another huge blowout, between Tom Schwartz, 36, and wife Katie Maloney-Schwartz, 31, but one that was quickly patched up. Huge blowout: The episode started with Tom Schwartz arguing with wife Katie After apologizing for not taking his wife's concerns serious enough, Tom told her to 'prepare to get injected with love' quickly admitting: 'That didn't sound right or romantic.' 'If I've learned anything about this little ordeal it's don't take the upgrade,' he joked of the first-grade seat he took out there, sparking Katie's resentment. He later admitted to their friends that he had been 'a little bit checked out of our relationship' predicting in a confessional: 'I think vacation sex is back on.' Back on: The restaurant owner was hoping that vacation sex was 'back on' with Katie Lala Kent who recently admitted being an alcoholic was shown drinking during the trip despite having been sober in the previous weeks. 'I have not been drinking lately because I was a hot mess with losing my dad,' the 28-year-old admitted. 'But my mind is just in a positive space so I feel like I could have a few drinks. I just wanna celebrate with these guys.' Ariana Madix, 33, also had a tearful heart-to-heart with Lala over her explosive behavior in the run-up to the trip, worrying it was a negative display of grief. Few drinks: Lala after abstaining from alcohol decided to get drunk in Mexico But Lala defiantly told her: 'When people come for me like that and you expect me to not rip your f***ing head off, you're out of your mind.' As she was shown pounding back shots, she bragged: 'Lala does not have regrets. I commit. I either don't drink at all or we gettin' drunk. And tonight I'm getting f***ed up.' She later claimed to have a 'full-on panic attack' on the bus back from the club which clearly cleared at the hotel. 'There was more alcohol that helped,' she admitted, with Tom Sandoval saying she 'puked it out and now she's rallying. Vanderpump Rules returns next Monday on Bravo. She's been taking on an intensive F45 challenge for the past two months. And on Tuesday, The Bachelorette's Georgia Love triumphantly shared the results of her gruelling workout routine. Posting to Instagram, the 30-year-old shared a photo of herself flaunting her incredibly toned figure in activewear and boasted about her achievement. 'I made it!': The Bachelorette's Georgia Love (pictured) showed off her body transformation on Instagram on Tuesday after undergoing a gruelling eight-week F45 challenge '8 week Challenge over and out!' she captioned the snap. 'Even with four weekends away, a wedding, hens party and Lees week long birthday extravaganza/festival of food, I lost 2.2kg, 1.1kg of straight body fat, 1.5cm circumference off each thigh, 1.1cm off my hips and 1cm off my abdomen. Georgia added: 'Theyre not the biggest numbers but I did this as a personal challenge, not for weightloss. So the fact I did lose some is a bonus to the much more important part which is that I feel amazing!' 'I lost 2.2kg, 1.1kg of straight body fat, 1.5cm circumference off each thigh, 1.1cm off my hips and 1cm off my abdomen' Georgia shared the details of her overhaul, but said the transformation wasn't about weight loss 'It's been really easy for me to follow': Georgia previously admitted she wasn't finding the challenge all that difficult. She is pictured here in October last year Speaking to Confidential in February about the eight-week challenge, Georgia said: 'My New Year's Resolution was to do a new task and stick to it. I'm three weeks in and it's been really easy for me to follow.' Georgia says she signed up to the F45 program as a 'mental challenge', and wasn't motivated by weight loss or fitness goals. 'I don't have an issue with my body or feel any pressure to lose weight,' the Melbourne based beauty told Confidential. 'I know I'm a healthy and fit person, [so] it's more a mental challenge for me.' Fit and fabulous! Georgia previously told Confidential she signed up to the F45 program as a 'mental challenge', and wasn't motivated by weight loss or fitness goals Over the past few weeks, Georgia has been treating fans to glimpses of her workouts. Among the posts she shared a photo with her 209,000 Instagram followers, was an image of herself performing Pilates. She wrote beneath the image: 'Challenge Week 3; breaking up my @f45_training sessions with pilates @studiopp so my body and my mind don't get bored or slack'. Mixing up her routine! Georgia recently shared a photo of herself performing Pilates Georgia shot to national fame after appearing on the 2016 season of The Bachelorette. The beauty fell in love with 37-year-old plumber Lee Elliot, and the pair have been inseparable since. Late last year, they moved into a Melbourne home together, accompanied by Georgia's cat Pawdrey Hepburn. On Tuesday night, an entire episode of Married At First Sight will be dedicated to Mike Gunner and Heidi Latcham's final vows ceremony. But it seems the Gold Coast electrician, 44, has already spoiled the ending - as his recent Instagram activity leaves no doubt that he is no longer with Heidi. Last month, Mike seemingly confirmed what he really thinks about his on-screen wife by 'liking' a derogatory comment about her. 'Misfortune of being paired with a basket case': Resurfaced Instagram comments seemingly reveal Mike Gunner's (left) true feelings about his MAFS bride Heidi Latcham (right) Mike publicly endorsed a fan's comment, which read: 'One of the decent guys on the show with the misfortune of being paired with a basket case.' The comment was left under a video shared by the MAFS Funny Instagram account of Mike partying on the Gold Coast on Saturday, March 9. Appearing to confirm he is no longer with Heidi, 38, Mike also liked another comment that read: 'Hope he's having fun and maybe even meeting someone new.' That's not nice! Last month, Mike appeared to confirm what he really thinks about Heidi by 'liking' a derogatory comment (above) describing her as a 'basket case' Looking for a new lover? Appearing to confirm he is no longer with Heidi, 38, Mike also liked another comment that read: 'Hope he's having fun and maybe even meeting someone new' While the outcome of the final vows is unknown, a teaser trailer for the MAFS finale appears to show Mike dumping the radio presenter. In an emotionally-charged promo, Mike breaks down in tears as he tells a distraught Heidi: 'I just hate saying goodbye like this.' According to a recent report by Woman's Day magazine, Mike is now dating a Gold Coast woman named Casey Stewart. 'I hate saying goodbye like this': While the outcome of the final vows is unknown, a teaser trailer for the Married At First Sight finale appears to show Mike dumping Heidi (pictured) Casey, 26, happens to be the daughter of Gina Stewart, who is perhaps better known as the Internet phenomenon 'The World's Hottest Grandma'. 'Mike and Casey have been spending a lot of time together and she stays at his place on the Gold Coast a lot,' a source said. 'They're planning to go public after the show, once Mike's commitments finish.' Married At First Sight continues Tuesday at 7:30pm on Channel Nine Her Instagram handle claims she's 'hot like a sunrise'. And former Married At First Sight bride Cheryl Maitland surely turned up the heat while on holiday in Bali this week. On Monday, the reality TV star, 28, flaunted her ample cleavage in a mismatched neon pink and yellow two-piece. 'Bikinis as bright as my future!' Former MAFS star Cheryl Maitland showed off her ample cleavage in a neon two-piece during her Bali getaway on Monday Cheryl captioned the Instagram photo: 'Bikinis as bright as my future!' She also revealed her toned frame and flat tummy in the racy swimsuit as she perched herself on a yellow cushion sun bed. The hairdresser showed off her enviable curves in the scantily-clad ensemble as she held a coconut drink in her hand. Living in her bikini! The hairdresser has showed off her enviable curves in numerous scantily-clad ensembles while on her luxurious vacation Keeping her fans updated on her holiday adventures, Cheryl also took to Instagram on Saturday while dining at Bikini Restaurant in Bali's Seminyak. Sporting a white bandeau bikini top, matching briefs and a slinky white mesh dress, Cheryl joked in the post's caption that it's the only restaurant where you can wear a bikini at dinner. 'The only place you can have dinner in your bikinis. By far the best restaurant in Bali,' Cheryl told her fans. 'The only place you can have dinner in your bikinis': Keeping her fans updated on her holiday adventures, Cheryl also took to Instagram on Saturday while dining at Bikini Restaurant in Bali's Seminyak Cheryl has been enjoying her luxurious Bali getaway with pal Jordan Cayless and boyfriend, Dean Gibbs. The couple have been inseparable since getting together in 2017, with Dean often taking photos of Cheryl for her popular Instagram account. Cheryl made headlines after appearing on Married At First Sight in 2017, after her relationships with Jonathan Troughton and Andrew 'Jonesy' Jones ended in tears. Her initial match with Jonathan fell apart, and she was later paired up with Jonesy, but their romance didn't last either. After the cameras stopped rolling, she found love with Dean, a tradie from Melbourne. American heavy metal rocker Metallica have added a second Melbourne show to their WorldWired tour to Australia later this year. The US rockers are set to perform two concerts in the Victorian capital on October 22 and 24 at Marvel Stadium, after tickets to their first Melbourne show sold out. The popular rock band's highly-anticipated tour Down Under will now feature six stadium shows due to 'continued overwhelming demand,' according to a Live Nation press release on Tuesday. Rock on! Metallica have added a second Melbourne show to Australian WorldWired tour in October. Pictured James Hetfield, 55, performing in Kansas City, US in 2019 The Nothing Else Matters favourites, who last visited Australia in 2013, will not be adding any further shows to the Trans-Tasman leg of their tour. Tickets for the second Melbourne show go on sale at 2pm Tuesday, April 9. However, fans can order presale tickets on Wednesday, April 3 at 1pm. The legendary rock band, consisting of Lars Ulrich, 55, James Hetfield, 55, Kirk Hammett, 56, and Rob Trujillo, 54, recently wrapped up their WorldWired tour in the United States. High demand: The popular rock band's highly-anticipated tour Down Under will now feature six stadium shows due to 'continued overwhelming demand,' according to a Live Nation press release on Tuesday. Pictured Metallica performing in Denmark in 2017 Upcoming tour: Tickets for the second Melbourne show go on sale at 2pm Tuesday, April 9. Pictured: Lars Ulrich, 55, (left), James Hetfield, 55, (centre) Kirk Hammett, 56, (right) The band will kick off their 25-show Europe tour in May, beginning in Portugal. The popular US rockers will also play in England, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In October, Metallica will head Down Under for a series of spectacular shows. In an added bonus, they will be supported by American band Slipknot. Will this be one of their greatest shows ever? Metallica recently announced they're touring Australia and New Zealand in October 'We're headed back Down Under in October and our friends in Slipknot will be joining us!' Metallica tweeted last month to their 5.73 million followers. 'Tickets for our six-city tour in Australia and New Zealand go on sale Monday, March 18th.' This is the first time Metallica have toured Australia since 2013. 'We're headed back Down Under in October and our friends in Slipknot will be joining us!' Metallica tweeted last month to their 5.73 million followers Double act: In an added bonus, the Nothing Else Matters favourites will be supported by American band Slipknot They are set to kick off their tour in Perth on October 17, before heading to Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland, New Zealand. METALLICA DATES OCTOBER 17: Optus Stadium, Perth OCTOBER 20: Adelaide Oval, Adelaide OCTOBER 22: Marvel Stadium, Melbourne OCTOBER 24: Marvel Stadium, Melbourne OCTOBER 26: ANZ Stadium, Sydney OCTOBER 29: 0QSAC, Brisbane OCTOBER 31: Mt. Smart Stadium, Auckland Advertisement Metallica are best known for their heavy metal hits Enter Sandman and Nothing Else Matters. Last year, the group made Forbes' 30 top-earning musicians for 2018. They placed at no.25 on this list, tying with Elton John after earning a staggering $46 million last year. Topping the list were Irish rockers U2, who netted a staggering $118 million. For ticket purchases, visit Livenation.com.au. Advertisement Jodie Comer and screen obsession Sandra Oh reunited at the red carpet premiere of Killing Eve season two, which has thus far won glowing reviews from critics ahead of its US release on Sunday. Actress Jodie, 26, portrays the psychopathic assassin Villanelle/Oksana Astankova, who's obsessed with her tracker, MI5 officer Eve Polastri, 47, (Sandra), in the BBC America spy drama. The pair play enemies with an unhealthy obsession with one another in the show, developed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, which starts when Eve tries to capture the criminal mastermind. Assassins: Jodie Comer, (left), and screen obsession Sandra Oh, (right) reunited for a very glamorous Killing Eve season 2 premiere at ArcLight in LA on Monday night Early reviews of the show have been glowing, with The Guardian awarding the series four stars and penning: 'Killing Eves new season is compulsively watchable, the most defiantly rocknroll of televisions crime procedurals. Like its assassin, the show is snarky and bombastic, always drawing blood with a smile... 'Like its hero, Eve, its purposeful and droll, consumed by paranoia and occasionally lacking focus. Sure, itll be hard for Killing Eve to top its first season, but harder, still, to resist watching it try.' Ahead of the comeback, The Good CNet echoed: 'Fast-paced, quick-witted, funny and sexy, Season 2 has just the right amount of irony and satire to counterbalance the darker themes that come with a show about a textbook psychopath turned professional assassin and a brilliant yet insecure woman having a harsh midlife crisis.' In preparation for the show's return, the leading ladies hit the red carpet dressed in monochrome, where Jodie was dressed to the nines, opting for a beautiful black strapless dress, which had a low-backed detail. Werk! Two-time Golden Globe winner Sandra Oh went bra-less beneath a trendy white Giorgio Armani pantsuit for the premiere All stars: (L-R ) David Madden, Sally Woodward Gentle, Fiona Shaw, Jodie Comer, Sandra Oh, Sarah Barnett, Gina Mingacci, Courtney Thomasma and Francesca Gregorini Shhhh! Comer portrays the psychopathic assassin Villanelle/Oksana Astankova, who's obsessed with her tracker, Eve, in the hit show Returns this Sunday on AMC! Korean-Canadian 47-year-old Sandra serves as associate producer and plays the titular MI5 officer Eve Polastri in the BBC America spy drama The Reviews: Killing Eve Season Two captivates critics The Guardian Rating: Jake Nevins writes: 'Killing Eves new season is compulsively watchable, the most defiantly rocknroll of televisions crime procedurals. Like its assassin, the show is snarky and bombastic, always drawing blood with a smile... 'Like its hero, Eve, its purposeful and droll, consumed by paranoia and occasionally lacking focus. Sure, itll be hard for Killing Eve to top its first season, but harder, still, to resist watching it try.' Slash Film Chris Evangelista writes: 'The writing and direction of remains impeccable one sequence, in which Eve frantically tries to cook a meal after returning home from stabbing Villanelle, is both hilarious and unsettling with its crash-cuts and tonal mix of comedy and terror its the performances that continue to drive the show... 'Oh and Comer are phenomenal, with each actress bringing their own specific styles Oh balances inner turmoil with outward excitement, while Comer finds the perfect way to blend her characters psychotic tendencies with a touch of something deeper lurking underneath. We know its only a matter of time before these two come face to face again.' The C Net Patricia Puentes writes: 'Fast-paced, quick-witted, funny and sexy, Season 2 has just the right amount of irony and satire to counterbalance the darker themes that come with a show about a textbook psychopath turned professional assassin and a brilliant yet insecure woman having a harsh midlife crisis... 'And bonus: It takes place in Paris and London and is set to the melancholic, sultry tunes of indie pop bands Unloved and Cigarettes After Sex.' Advertisement She wore stunning shoes which had a diamante strap, wearing her caramel coloured locks slicked back and teal moon-shaped earrings selected by stylist Elizabeth Saltzman. Her appearance came amid an interview conducted with ELLE UK, in which Jodie candidly discussed battling her struggles with body image as a prominent figure in the TV industry. Remember Me actress Jodie detailed: 'Growing up as a teen, I always struggled with my weight and body image. Always worrying about the way you look or your weight for certain roles that has always been a big insecurity of mine. A big thing is trying to accept that, with acting, the reason for getting a part or not getting part isnt always about your talent or how talented people think you are; a lot of it is about your looks.' On overcoming her insecurities, the blonde insisted she's learnt to place more importance on her skilled craft. Impressive: Jodie has won critical acclaim for her portrayal as merciless character Villanelle, who spent the last series being hunted by MI5 security officer Eve Polastri Gal pals: Jodie wore diamante ankle-strap heels, and teal moon-shaped earrings selected by stylist Elizabeth Saltzman as she posed with Sandra Chic: The Grey's Anatomy alum's chic suit featured a blazer with a single button and wide-leg trousers Close: Sandra and Jodie clearly have a strong bond and held one another's hands, while looking into one another's eyes Wow thing: Jodie looked incredible in her stunning black dress and it's been said she has had a real hand in Villanelle's wardrobe for the second season The Liverpudlian beauty shared: 'What Im trying to do and I feel like Im succeeding a little bit in is to be accepting of the fact that I always put a stress on myself having to look a certain way, when you are who you are. 'Your ability to act, or whatever your job is, is worth so much more than how you look. Speaking on taking the fierce factor up a notch in Killing Eve, she enthused: 'I relish it. 'I think its fun getting people roused up, so then when they meet you, theyre like, Oh, youre not a b***h or homewrecker. Its fun to see people have gone with it and theyve believed it. Got a moment? Jodie could be seen signing autographs outside the venue for keen fans Meanwhile, Grey's Anatomy alum Sandra's chic Giorgio Armani suit featured a blazer with a single button and wide-leg trousers and she went braless underneath. Sandra flaunted her silver pedicure in nude stilettos selected by stylist Elizabeth Saltzman. Hairstylist Ted Gibson coiffed Oh's side-parted ponytail and make-up artist Danielle Kimiko Vincent made sure she was ready for her close-up. The National Theatre School grad made sure to greet waiting fans with pictures and autographs before she made her way inside the cinema. Hey girl! Sandra and Jodie proved their friendship is a little stronger in real life as they took one another's hand So weird to see: In the series, Eve and Villanelle only get close to one another a handful of times, so fans will love to see them standing together at the premiere Glam: Hairstylist Ted Gibson coiffed Oh's side-parted ponytail and make-up artist Danielle Kimiko Vincent made sure she was ready for her close-up Her public: The National Theatre School grad made sure to greet waiting fans with pictures and autographs before she made her way inside the cinema The ex-wife of Alexander Payne's premiere came two days after she became the fourth Asian celebrity ever to host NBC sketch show, Saturday Night Live. Aside from showcasing her 'charming' and 'affable' comedic chops, Sandra also got to publicly celebrate her first anniversary of becoming an American citizen. Four-time SAG Award winner, Sandra, also shared a big laugh with her castmate Fiona Shaw, who plays the M15 Russian section head Carolyn Martens. The Irish 60-year-old sported a red pout and wore a green painting-printed creation featuring puffed sleeves and gold-strapped mule kitten heels. 'Tishy!' The ex-wife of Alexander Payne's premiere came two days after she became the fourth Asian celebrity ever to host NBC sketch show, Saturday Night Live Also celebrating season two was showrunner/head writer Emerald Fennell in pink stripes and executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle in a floral blouse and cute mules. Downton Abbey star Lesley Nicol opted for an all-navy look featuring a fabulous caped coat and a pop of color with a floral striped scarf. Mrs. Doubtfire alum Mara Wilson flashed her lacy teddy beneath her skirt suit and Reverie actress Jessica Lu slipped into jumpsuit culottes. Hilarious: The four-time SAG Award winner also shared a big laugh with her castmate Fiona Shaw, who plays the M15 Russian section head Carolyn Martens Eccentric: The Irish 60-year-old sported a red pout and wore a green painting-printed creation featuring puffed sleeves and gold-strapped mule kitten heels Friends in high places: Jodie, Sandra Oh and Fiona all posed for a photo together once inside Playing around: Jodie and Sandra laughed their heads off as Fiona pretended to turn her backs to them Pals: David, Fiona, Sarah Barnett and Jodie all hung out together once inside The Good Place actress D'Arcy Carden donned a short-sleeved patterned sweetheart top and black high-waisted trousers selected by stylist Erica Cloud. Veep funnyman Sam Richardson looked dapper in a Ted Baker shirt and Scotch & Soda suit. While Grey's Anatomy actor Alex Landi was likely wearing his fave brand Nifty Genius. Boss ladies: Also celebrating season two were showrunner Emerald Fennell (L) in pink stripes and executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle (R) in a floral blouse and cute mules Mrs. Patmore! Downton Abbey star Lesley Nicol opted for an all-navy look featuring a fabulous caped coat and a pop of color with a floral striped scarf Not-so-basic black: Mrs. Doubtfire alum Mara Wilson (L) flashed her lacy teddy beneath her skirt suit and Reverie actress Jessica Lu (R) slipped into jumpsuit culottes Slick: The Good Place actress D'Arcy Carden donned a short-sleeved patterned sweetheart top and black high-waisted trousers selected by stylist Erica Cloud From Tamara Joy's Melbourne cottage to Jessika's Perth apartment - it's no secret that Airbnb properties were used throughout the filming of Married At First Sight this season. And now fans have been left wondering whether Ning Surasiang's cosy Queensland home is also an Airbnb rental. Prior to Ning's vow renewal ceremony with 'husband' Mark Scrivens on Monday night's episode, viewers saw the mother-of-three 'return home' for a week to ruminate on her marriage. Rental? Married At First Sight's Ning Surasiang has been accused of using an Airbnb. Pictured on Monday night's episode While the 32-year-old was seen wheeling her luggage through what looked to be her bedroom, it quickly became apparent the interior looked very different to what was shown during Ning's homestay week. Fans took to Twitter to complain about the apparent lack of continuity, with one tweeting: 'Do the producers realise we can tell the difference in houses? Nings house from the homestay is not the same house as now.' Another added: 'Oh is Ning back in her real house? Doesn't look like the Airbnb. #MAFS' Spot the difference! While the 32-year-old was seen wheeling her luggage through what looked to be her bedroom (left), it quickly became apparent the interior looked very different to how it looked during Ning's homestay week (right) Not impressed! Fans took to Twitter to complain about the apparent lack of continuity, with one Tweeting: 'Do the producers realise we can tell the difference in houses? Nings house from the homestay is not the same house as now' Daily Mail Australia has reached out for comment. It comes after MAFS bride Tamara Joy confirmed that several of the participants' homes are actually rentals. The HR manager, 29, told Daily Mail Australia last month that her property during homestays was actually a $150-per-night Airbnb located in Hoppers Crossing, Melbourne. That's sneaky! It is not disclosed on Married At First Sight that some of the properties are actually rented for the purposes of filming. Pictured: The exterior of Ning's 'home' during Monday's episode 'Homestays' are supposed to offer a glimpse into the contestants' daily lives and it is assumed that filming takes place in their actual homes. 'It's not my house, just an Airbnb,' said Tamara, before adding: 'I was just in it for the homestay [with Dan Webb].' Tamara's homestay episode aired on Monday night. There was no indication given that the Hoppers Crossing property was a rental. Whatever happened to 'reality' TV? Married At First Sight's Tamara Joy recently confirmed her Melbourne property during homestays (pictured) was actually a $150 per night Airbnb Mystery solved! 'It's not my house, just an Airbnb,' Tamara told Daily Mail Australia. Pictured is the exterior of Tamara's Airbnb rental home The property, which is billed on Airbnb as a 'sun-filled family home en route to Great Ocean Road', features three bedrooms and two bathrooms. It is currently being rented out to the public for a reasonable $150 per night. A week earlier, eagle-eyed fans took to Twitter to question whether MAFS producers hired Airbnb rentals for the contestants' homestays. Several viewers refused to believe that Billy Vincent, a 28-year-old barista and part-time actor, could afford a palatial home in Byron Bay. Millie Bobby Brown is certainly making the most of her time in Australia. The 15-year-old Stranger Things actress has been filming Godzilla vs. Kong at Warner Bros. Studios on the Gold Coast since January. And during a rare day off, she visited Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, where she cuddled a koala. Meeting the locals: Millie Bobby Brown is certainly making the most of her time in Australia, cuddling a koala at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary with her friend, Julian Dennison Taking to Instagram on Sunday, Millie shared a photo of herself holding the native marsupial alongside friend and co-star Julian Dennison, 16. Clearly settling into the Australian way of life, Millie sported an iconic Akubra hat in the photo. 'Family pic ty to @currumbinwildlifehospital for givin [sic] us a tour of all the little bubbas that are poorly...' she captioned it. Hat's off: Clearly settling into the Australian way of life, Millie sported an iconic Akubra hat in the photo Bonding: It's not the first time Millie has gotten up close with a koala. At the beginning of March, she shared a series of photos of herself holding another cuddly creature 'Each of you have the biggest hearts and the love you share with the animals is so very special... xoxo'. It's not the first time Millie has gotten up close with a koala. At the beginning of March, she shared a series of photos of herself holding another cuddly creature and captioned it: 'The love of my life'. Wild child: Last week, the animal lover paid a visit to Australia Zoo, where she was hosted by Bindi and Robert Irwin Feeding time at the zoo: 'Wow. Wow. Wow. The most magical day with these special souls. Thank you so much for what you do for the world,' she captioned a series of photos Last week, the animal lover paid a visit to Australia Zoo, where she was hosted by Bindi, 20, and Robert Irwin, 15. 'Wow. Wow. Wow. The most magical day with these special souls. Thank you so much for what you do for the world,' she captioned a series of photos. 'Animals at your zoo receive love and care every single day with your loving keepers. And thank you for letting come visit the zoo and see animals that I'd never thought I'd see. Best day ever.' She isn't shy about flaunting her figure. And Instagram model and swimwear designer Sahara Ray was at it once again on Monday, showing off her bodacious booty in a barely-there bikini. Soaking up the sun at the beach, the 25-year-old was clad in a tiny black G-string two-piece for the occasion. Bottoms up! Justin Bieber's 'ex-fling' Sahara Ray flaunted her bodacious booty in tiny black g-string bikini during a day at the beach on Monday Her suit featured high waisted bottoms and a triangle bikini top, and accentuated her deep bronzed tan. The blonde revealed her natural complexion by going makeup free and tied her beachy waves up in a top knot on her head. Keeping the accessories to a minimum, Sahara decorated her look with two dainty silver necklaces. She's not shy! The Instagram model and swimwear designer isn't shy about flaunting her figure on social media Sharing the sultry snap to Instagram, the beauty penned an inspirational quote by late philosopher Alan Watts in the caption. ''Philosophy is persons expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect Alan Watts,'' she wrote. 'If you aren't familiar with him, check him out. Please listen to his YouTube videos. Racy: Sahara often delights her fans with racy photos on the platform. Pictured in another photo shared this week 'Even though he's dead I feel like I am deeply connected to him - like he's one of my dearest friends. 'My whole perception on life changed when I stared to study his teachings a few years ago,' she added, gushing. 'Love you all so much, P.S. so excited to launch my new swim collection in one month!' Sahara is the daughter of Australian big wave surfer, Tony Ray. She first made headlines in 2016 when she was rumoured to have enjoyed a steamy holiday romance with Justin Bieber in Hawaii. Advertisement They've been building their dream $9million mega-mansion just outside Byron Bay for two years. And construction on Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky's sprawling property is nearing completion, with new aerial photos showing a 50-metre rooftop infinity pool and a spa with ocean views taking shape. The multi-level pad, which sits on 4.2 hectares at Broken Head and overlooks the Seven Mile Beach, also boasts intricate landscaping and lush palm trees dotted around. Big plans: Construction on Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky's sprawling $9million Byron Bay property is nearing completion, two years after they started building The Thor actor, 35, and Spanish model and actress, 45, are expected to move their young family in - India Rose, six, and twin sons Tristan and Sasha, four. It's been claimed the property will feature a gym, steam room, media room and game room, as well as six bedrooms and state-of-the-art appliances. Builders have worked hard to bring Chris and Elsa's vision of a dream home to life, since getting approved for the knockdown-rebuild by Byron Shire Council in March 2017. The couple, who left California for Byron in 2015, have brought Hollywood-style living to the quiet coastal town - which has garnered mixed reactions from locals. Thor blimey! Stunning aerial photos show a 50-metre rooftop infinity pool and spa with ocean views taking more shape Lavish: The multi-level pad also boasts intricate landscaping and lush palm trees dotted around Some critics previously condemned the construction in a Byron Bay community group on Facebook. 'Looks like the new Woolies,' one user wrote. Another user sarcastically added: 'Way to live minimally. I wonder what the environmental footprint is like.' However, real estate expert Nerida Conisbee told news.com.au in January that the famous family are inadvertently boosting the local economy by attracting buyers to the area. 'There's always been a lot of celebrities who have loved living up in that area but they (the Hemsworths) are very high-profile and they are giving the area a very high profile as well,' she said. Mega-mansion: The impressive property sits on 4.2 hectares at Broken Head and overlooks the Seven Mile Beach New digs: The Thor actor, 35, and Spanish model and actress, 45, are expected to move their young family in - India Rose, six, and twin sons Tristan and Sasha, four 'This would definitely be pushing Byron Bay up the list in terms of international visibility.' The publication reports that, 'the median property price in Byron Bay recently reached $1.75million' which is higher than many prices in Sydney. In September last year, an insider told Woman's Day that the couple feel disheartened by all the negativity after the property was likened to a 'prison' and a 'hospital' due to its size. Dream home: It's been claimed the property will feature a gym, steam room, media room and game room, as well as six bedrooms and state-of-the-art appliances New pastures: Builders have worked hard to bring Chris and Elsa's vision of a dream home to life, since getting approved for the knockdown-rebuild by Byron Shire Council in March 2017 'All the negativity is a real headache for Chris and Elsa because the last thing they want is to upset their neighbours,' a source told Woman's Day. 'They insist they went into this with every good intention, and they're not disturbing anybody by building themselves a dream home in the region they both love. 'It's a shame from their point of view that people are giving them a hard time and choosing to be negative, but they're going full-steam ahead and can't wait for it to be finished.' From outsider sidekick to the leader of the pack, Norman Reedus' character - Daryl Dixon on The Walking Dead - has made quite the transformation on the hit AMC show. Now, with nine seasons under his belt, the 50-year old actor put fans and studio executives on notice that he wants Daryl to live on into the foreseeable and uncertain future. 'I don't want to go anywhere. Ill burn down that whole studio if they got rid of me,' Reedus recently revealed to ET, while noting that he's fully aware that 'you never know' when your time will be up. Laying down the gauntlet: Norman Reedus has let fans and AMC execs know that he doesn't his character Daryl to be killed off the hit post-apocalyptic show 'I always said I wanted to just walk off into the sunset with a dog, but now so many people are doing that, that I don't know,' the Florida native added. 'I don't know how Id want to die. I dont want to die ever, so I don't want to put it out there. I don't want to give anyone any ideas.' From the outset of the show in 2010, central characters have been killed off, which has been one of the many ways the show has been able to keep fans constantly on edge. Surveying the field: 'I don't want to go anywhere. Ill burn down that whole studio if they got rid of me,' Reedus recently revealed to ET Mass extinction: Original leading man Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes) left the show in season eight in 2018 Bye bye: Longtime castmember Lauren Cohan (Maggie Greene) exited TWD in season nine Just last fall, in season eight, the show's original leading man Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes) bid farewell. Lauren Cohan's Maggie Greene followed suit in the most recent season nine. There's also word that season 10 will be Danai Gurira's last as Michonne. 'I've seen so many people come and go on that show, it's a bummer to me, Reedus said. 'Their ghosts are always with me. It's a very heavy thing to take with you.' The end is near! Danai Gurira's Michonne is set to leave the world of walkers (zombies) behind in the upcoming season 10 More bloody action! Season 10 of The Walking Dead is slated to premiere in the fall of 2019 Initially in 2010, the series centered on sheriff's deputy Grimes as he woke up from a coma to discover the world in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. He would eventually become the leader of a group of survivors from the Atlanta, Georgia region that included his wife, Lori, and son, Carl. Despite his exit from the show in 2018, Lincoln will reprise his role in at least three planned spinoff films. Production on the first Lincoln-led film is set to kick-off sometime this year. Season 10 of The Walking Dead has been slated to premiere in the fall of 2019. Reedus and Melissa McBride (Carol Peletier) will be the only original castmembers features in the new episodes. She denied rumours she was dating Married At First Sight star Dino Hira earlier this month after he was caught 'liking' her racy snaps. But the friendship between 'The World's Hottest Grandma' Gina Stewart, 48, and the meditation guru appears to be as strong as ever if her Instagram activity is anything to go by. Sharing a book written by Dino, 35, The Maxim Hot 100 model praised the reality TV contestant for helping her fight her anxiety problems. Gina revealed she 'couldn't put down' his self-help book A Miner Who Wins Inner Peace, while recommending it to her more than 143,000 Instagram followers. 'I just got my hands on this amazing book. As most of you know I suffer from severe anxiety which I deal with every single day,' she said. 'My good friend Dino Hira wrote this book - I've just started it and I just know it's going to change many people's lives.' In response, Dino thanked the model for her feedback while calling her an 'inspiration'. Gina's budding friendship with Dino comes as her daughter Casey Stewart, 26, is linked to Married At First Sight contestant Mike Gunner. A report emerged in Woman's Day last month that Mike, 44, and Casey had been spending time together at his Gold Coast home. Grateful: Sharing a book written by Dino, 35, (right) The Maxim Hot 100 model (left) praised the reality TV contestant for helping her fight her anxiety problems Help from Dino: 'I just got my hands on this amazing book. As most of you know I suffer from severe anxiety which I deal with every single day,' she said in an Instagram clip (pictured) Just like her famous mother, Casey is a burgeoning model, although she currently works in construction. And she isn't afraid to flaunt her sensational figure online, with her Instagram account featuring photos of her dressed in skimpy bikinis and busty ensembles. Gina, meanwhile, told Daily Mail Australia she and Dino are nothing but 'good friends' but that 'any girl would be lucky' to date a man like him. 'I have a lot of respect for him and how he managed himself on Married At First Sight,' she gushed. 'He's a good friend and is all about kindness, compassion, forgiveness and love. Any girl would be lucky to be with such a man.' MAFS' Martha Kalifatidis has responded to rumours she's dating Samuel Ball, 26, after photos resurfaced of them in Byron Bay this week. The Bondi-based makeup artist, 30, revealed they unintentionally 'bumped into each other' in the trendy NSW coastal town on Christmas eve last year. Martha, who chose to continue her romance with her 'husband' Michael Brunelli, 27, during their final vows on Monday's episode, told The Kyle and Jackie 'O' show on Tuesday: 'I was in Byron with my family.' Scroll down for video Fake news! Married At First Sight's Martha Kalifatidis has denied rumours she's dating Sam Ball. Pictured together in Byron Bay in December 2018 'We were having Christmas there and Sam lives down there... His family live down there. 'Byron is such a small town and we just bumped into him.' Martha continued to shut down romance rumours as she revealed her friendly catch-up with the tattooed tradesman was nothing more than a chance encounter. 'He was just literally walking past and I screamed out and he came and sat and had a few drinks with my parents,' she said. Getting cosy: The pair were spotted in Byron Bay in December last year. At the time, MAFS had finished production but the cast had yet to film the reunion Earlier on Monday, NW magazine published claims Martha has been secretly meeting up with Samuel 'for months'. A source told the publication that Sam and Martha 'only had eyes for each other' as they enjoyed cosy drinks in Byron Bay, however she confirmed this is not true. Another eyewitness claimed they spotted the pair meeting up for a second date in Sydney two months later, in February. 'I wouldn't want to intrude on that': Sam, who was paired with Elizabeth Sobinoff (left) on MAFS, denied he is fating Martha 'Even though they were doing their best to fly under the radar, at one point Martha got up and sat on Sam's lap,' an insider said. 'They were being really affectionate with one another.' After the photos of Martha and Sam in Byron Bay were first published late last year, Sam denied they are romantically involved. Interesting: Sam and Martha (pictured) were featured together in promotional photos for Married At First Sight, despite being paired with other people on the show 'I think Martha is a beautiful person, but, you know, she's quite happy in her relationship, and I wouldn't want to intrude on that,' he told E! News in February. 'I thought a couple of the girls looked good, but I would never intrude on anyone, especially Michael [Brunelli] and Martha's relationship.' They've never been ones to hold back with their opinions on My Kitchen Rules. And in an interview with Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday, the series' 'villains' Austin and Josh Bonwick come out swinging against the Channel Seven reality show. In a sensational spray, the brothers slammed their co-stars, compared 'sketchy' producers to 'something out of North Korea' and and advised would-be contestants to sign up for MasterChef or watch Gordon Ramsay videos on YouTube instead. 'It's like something out of North Korea': MKR's Josh and Austin have made sensational claims against the show - slamming producers, revealing ex-stars' 'mental trauma' and advising people to join MasterChef instead In dramatic episodes playing out on MKR this week, a bombshell is dropped at the dinner party when it is revealed rivals Piper O'Neill and Victor Aeberli are sleeping together. But Josh and Austin have claimed there is a reason the sex scandal is painting Victor and Piper in such a negative light. 'The only reason Victor and Piper are made to look like the super, super villains, the last villains is because they p***ed production off,' they explained. 'A lot of other people were sh*tty on the show and they could have gone another way with any of the teams. 'Anyone could have been the villain with how they were behaving. The only reason Victor and Piper are getting the short end of the stick is because they actually made things difficult for production every day.' 'They pissed production off': Josh and Austin claimed Victor (left) and Piper (right) were being painted in such a negative light because they annoyed producers behind the scenes Austin added that the controversial 'knife spinning' incident, which was heavily promoted in trailers, caused chaos behind the scenes and frustrated production. Explaining the aftermath of the incident and extra costs added to the production as a result of it, Austin said: 'They had to segregate Victor and have a separate hotels, different flights, separate Cabcharges and everything.' Austin also claimed that while most of the contestants would sort out their disagreements in front of the cameras at the dinner parties, Victor had a different approach. 'With Victor, he'd go straight to the production and say "this person said this about me" and it would just make it so complicated,' Austin claimed. Intimidating: Victor (pictured) menacingly twisted his knife during Sunday night's dramatic episode Austin continued to call out MKR's producers and hinted that there's a lot more drama behind the scenes than people realise. 'I think that this whole show has a lot of secrets and they've kept secrets for a year and then the new cast thinks it's normal, no one ever speaks up,' Austin explained. 'There's a lot of dis-functionality that goes on. It's just sketchy. If you do anything negative towards production, things go quiet and all of a sudden, that person's gone. It's like North Korea.' Meanwhile, Josh said if producers sensed drama between contestants was about to be resolved off-screen, they would subtly step in to ensure no one 'cleared the air' without the cameras rolling. 'It's like someone stabbing someone to the point of death, then reviving them so they can do it again the next day. Why? Because it's not fun if you resolve it at the start,' Josh described the situation. 'I think that this whole show has a lot of secrets': Austin described some parts of the show as 'sketchy' and said there's more to the production than meets the eye. Pictured: MKR judges Manu Feildel (left) and Pete Evans (right) The home-schooled brothers also believe that the way some people are portrayed on the show can have lasting effects on their lives. 'I don't like Piper, I don't like her at all. I think she's a terrible person but she's a mother of two kids, she's still married and she's 35, she's not 25, she's got a lot more to lose than what we do,' Josh said. 'And the fact of the matter is after this, she's done after this! Her reputation is ruined.' 'Her reputation is ruined': Josh believes Piper's 'sex scandal' will have lasting consequences in her life Josh also mentioned that he had had conversations with last season's contestant Hadil Faiza, who was booted off the show after launching a verbal attack against another team. 'I've learned that she had so much mental trauma from the aftermath of how everything was portrayed,' he said. 'She was in very heavy situations that took place over a couple of weeks and then faced another year or half year of public backlash.' 'They're going to up the stakes and the sex, the scandals and lies': Josh said MKR was getting more and more dramatic, to compete with high-rating dating shows like Married At First Sight Meanwhile, Austin admitted MKR is 'not always a fun show' to take part in and said he advises his fans to reconsider auditioning. 'If you're a fan of the food, go to MasterChef. [MKR is] like psychological war, this competition,' he said, admitting he didn't like the more dramatic direction the show was taking. Josh agreed, adding: 'To compete with things like Married At First Sight, of course they're going to up the stakes and the sex, the scandals and lies. 'Let's face it, if you want to watch someone cooking you could just watch reruns of Gordon Ramsay on YouTube.' Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Channel Seven for comment. Did they or didn't they? Turns out they didn't. Jersey Shore's Ronnie Ortiz-Magro and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Jen Harley posted videos to Instagram Monday that appeared to show them getting married at a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas. The 33-year-old reality star and his 31-year-old onoff girlfriend eventually revealed it was all a joke. Duped: Jersey Shore's Ronnie Ortiz-Magro and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Jen Harley posted videos to Instagram Monday that appeared to show them getting married at a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas but it was all an elaborate joke The couple began the day innocently enough, documenting a fun day off of riding motorcycles with each other and hiding some amusement rides. But then Ronnie and Jen both shared videos of the couple driving a three-wheeled motorcycle up to A Little White Wedding Chapel and through its World Famous White Chapel Tunnel of Love. The couple pulled up at the window. Jen wrote 'We do,' over her video, while Ronnie added a sticker reading 'Just married.' Back together? The couple began the day innocently enough, documenting a fun day off of riding motorcycles with each other and hiding some amusement rides Tying the knot? But then Ronnie and Jen both shared videos of the couple driving a three-wheeled motorcycle up to A Little White Wedding Chapel and through its World Famous White Chapel Tunnel of Love Do they? The couple pulled up at the window. Jen wrote 'We do,' over her video, while Ronnie added a sticker reading 'Just married' In a subsequent video, Jen showed off a large diamond ring on her finger. She also shared a sweet photo of their daughter, Ariana Sky Magro, surrounded by the extended family at a long table, though they were all there for the little girl's birthday, not a wedding. Another video showed the whole family singing Happy Birthday to the little cutie, who turns one soon, though she didn't seem to pay much attention. Fake ring: In a subsequent video, Jen showed off a large diamond ring on her finger Family gathering: She also shared a sweet photo of their daughter, Ariana Sky Magro, surrounded by the extended family at a long table, though they were all there for the little girl's birthday, not a wedding There were plenty of reasons to guess it was all an April Fools' Day prank. Ronnie and Jen would have needed a marriage license prior to getting married at the chapel for it to be a legal marriage though they could have gotten it up to a year before getting married. Jen also reposted a video she shot last April 1, in which she claimed her water broke and she was headed to the hospital. She quickly laughed and said it was an April Fools' Day prank, but it confirmed that she's willing to take serious matters lightly. She apparently gave birth not too long after that, but the first video was a joke. She has a history: Jen also reposted a video she shot last April 1, in which she claimed her water broke and she was headed to the hospital. She quickly laughed and said it was an April Fools' Day prank, but it confirmed that she's willing to take serious matters lightly Trickster: She apparently gave birth not too long after that, but the first video was a joke Gotcha! The two put the matter to rest when Ronnie posted a video reading 'APRIL FOOLS' shortly before midnight on the West Coast But the two put the matter to rest when Ronnie posted a video reading 'APRIL FOOLS' shortly before midnight on the West Coast. Though they didn't get married, their new posts seem to suggest the two are now back together. It's a total reversal for the couple, after Ronnie accused the mother of his child of domestic battery in January. The Jersey Shore star filed the report in regard to a New Year's Eve incident when Jen reportedly through a glass ashtray at his face, injuring him, according to Us Weekly. She was previously arrested in 2018 for dragging Ronnie with her car, though she wasn't charged due to a lack of evidence. She loves to spend her free time on the beach and Monday was no exception for socialite Victoria Silvstedt who headed to a Miami beach. The 44-year-old showed off her ample assets wearing a blue and white striped bikini which had a frilly detail at the neckline. She teamed it with a white Broderie Anglais skirt which was super short in design and showed off her long legs. Looking good: Victoria Silvstedt, 44, showed off her ample assets in a striped frilly bikini and tiny white mini skirt as she topped up her tan on Miami beach on Monday Her blonde locks were tied up and piled on top of her head and she carried a straw hat in hand, making sure she was sun-safe. Proving she's all about the details, Victoria wore a pair of silver studded gladiator sandals and hid her eyes behind designer shades. Walking to the beach, she soon lay down on a lounger as she made the most of the glorious sunshine. Wow thing: She teamed her bikini with a white Broderie Anglais skirt which was super short in design and showed off her long legs Details: Her blonde locks were tied up and piled on top of her head and she carried a straw hat in hand, making sure she was sun-safe Victoria's appearance in Miami comes after she enjoyed a festive break away to St Barts. The Swedish beauty has enjoyed a lengthy stint in the spotlight after being chosen to represent her country in the Miss World pageant in 1993. After her pageant days, the Scandinavian stunner was spotted by Hugh Hefner and went on to become a Playboy Playmate. Jetting all over the place: Victoria's appearance in Miami comes after she enjoyed a festive break away to St Barts Since her career rocketed, she has modelled for some of the world's most prestigious fashion houses, including Chanel, Dior and Valentino. Despite the glamorous veneer to her lifestyle as a young model, she revealed there was a dark side in a recent interview with Female First . Victoria said: 'I started very young to model in Paris when I was 18, I remember like starving myself to fit into the clothes and it was an amazing experience but you know I did shows for Valentino, Chanel, so it was really prestigious. 'But it never felt like it was my thing, I'm not like a runway skinny model, I'm more curvy. It was torture, I put myself through starvation, you know torturing myself.' Ksenija Lukich led the fashion pack at the Delta Air Lines VIP and 10 Year Australian Anniversary event in Sydney on Tuesday. The 29-yer-old turned heads in a loose-fitting navy playsuit in a retro design featuring stripes throughout. A pop of colour came courtesy of her bright, shiny red lipstick, and she added some generous highlight to her cheeks. All stripe on the night! Ksenija Lukich (pictured) wore a retro playsuit as she led the A-list arrivals at the Delta Air Lines Anniversary event in Sydney on Tuesday The beauty wore her caramel locks down around her shoulders and rosy blush on her cheeks. Red toe polish complimented her lipstick and she wore a showpiece watch on her wrist. She finished the look with an envelope clutch, open sandal heels and a black Gucci belt. Pretty! The 29-yer-old turned heads in a loose-fitting navy playsuit in a retro design featuring stripes throughout Lovely: A pop of colour came courtesy of her bright, shiny red lipstick, and she opted for a black Gucci belt Also at the event was Jodi Anasta, who showed off her slim figure in a fitted black dress. The frock clung to her body, and featured a satin fabric and spaghetti straps, bearing the beauty's shoulders. The 34-year-old wore her hair slicked back and opted for a neutral makeup palette, a pair of pointed stiletto boots and leather bum bag completing the look. Sleek: Also at the event was Jodi Anasta, who showed off her slim figure in a fitted black dress Edgy: The frock clung to her body, and featured a satin fabric and spaghetti straps, bearing the beauty's shoulders Turning heads: The 34-year-old wore her hair slicked back and opted for a neutral makeup palette, a pair of pointed stiletto boots and leather bum bag completing the look Elle Ferguson went along Joel Patfull and looked angelic in a white dress with an unusual 1980s silhouette. The fashion blogger paired the dress, with flared shoulders and a fitted skirt, with clear, bejeweled heels and flaunted her slim pins. She carried a simple blue clutch and her makeup featured a peachy palette with heavy highlight and apricot-nude lips. On trend: Elle Ferguson looked angelic in a white dress with an unusual 1980s silhouette Touches: The fashion blogger paired the dress, with flared shoulders and a fitted skirt, with clear, bejeweled heels and flaunted her slim pins The blonde wore her hair in loose waves around her shoulders and completed the look with white toenail and fingernail polish. Joel opted for black slacks and a black shirt with a denim jacket and chunky sneakers with eye-catching laces. Elle also posed with Richard Reid, the entertainment reporter donning a quiff and a very elaborate suit consisting of metallic brocade along the jacket. Likely pair: Elle went along Joel Patfull who opted for black slacks and a black shirt with a denim jacket and chunky sneakers with eye-catching laces Made up: She carried a simple blue clutch and her makeup featured a peachy palette with heavy highlight and apricot-nude lips Bright! Elle also posed with Richard Reid, the entertainment reporter donning a quiff and a very elaborate suit consisting of metallic brocade along the jacket Instagram mode Jade Tunchy attended the event alongside her partner Lachie Brycki. The 23-year-old was rugged up in a beige woolen coat under which she wore a black turtleneck and pale blue jeans with black heels. Lachie looked casual in a fitted blue shirt with a triangular design, dark blue jeans and brown dress shoes. Social currency: Instagram mode Jade Tunchy attended the event alongside her partner Lachie Brycki Warm: The 23-year-old was rugged up in a beige woolen coat under which she wore a black turtleneck and pale blue jeans with black heels On trend: She wore a pair of pale, high-waist jeans and statement rings on her fingers Playful: Nadia Fairfax was all white on the night in a loose cotton jumpsuit in a silk fabric which skimmed her frame Nadia Fairfax was all white on the night in a loose cotton jumpsuit in a silk fabric which skimmed her frame. The actress opted for a light makeup palette with dewy skin, a touch of pink gloss and her blonde hair worn down around her shoulders. The 29-year-old completed the look with statement earrings and a pair of strapped brown heels. She's the stunning Neighbours actress, who's a fixture on red carpets. And on Tuesday, Jodi Anasta debuted shorter locks while attending the Delta Airlines VIP Australian Anniversary party in Sydney. The 34-year-old turned heads as she paraded her new look in a form-fitting black dress with thin straps. New look: Jodi Anasta debuted shorter locks at the Delta Airlines VIP Australian Anniversary party in Sydney on Tuesday Jodi completed her look with a black patent-leather satchel bag and a pair of black ankle boots. The former Home and Away actress flaunted her blemish-free complexion and opted for a natural makeup palette, adding a soft grey smokey-eye and pink lip gloss. Her new bob haircut was the highlight of her look, and it was worn loosely and slicked back highlighting her flawless visage. Before and after: Jodi swapped her luscious long locks (right) for a sleek bob haircut (left) The red carpet appearance comes after the mother-of-one got candid about how dating has been hard while juggling her career and being a single parent. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph's Confidential on Saturday, the actress said: 'I do date occasionally, but I find it really difficult between two cities, and when I'm in Sydney, I'm 'mum'.' The brunette flies to Melbourne from Sydney four times a week to film Channel Ten soap Neighbours. Challenges: Jodi Anasta, 34, said 'it's really hard to date' while juggling a career with motherhood... more than three years after her split from from NRL star husband Braith, 37. The former couple are pictured in August 2015 'It's really hard to date, but I do find time occasionally,' Jodi added. The model also told Confidential that she isn't a fan of dating apps, and hopes to meet someone who can handle her work and family commitments. Jodi and NRL star Braith Anasta, 37, confirmed their separation in 2015 after three years of marriage, and their divorce was finalised in March 2017. Braith told Yahoo Lifestyle in September 2016 how the former couple co-parent daughter Aleeia. 'I have her every week, Monday to Friday, I'm a lucky dad and she's amazing, she's a beautiful girl who is growing up quick so I'm very, very lucky,' Braith said. He said at the time that there is no animosity between the pair, and that they remain friends. Piers Morgan was clearly feeling in a very cheeky mood on Tuesday morning's filming of Good Morning Britain. The 54-year-old branded his producers 'pathetic and utterly gutless' during an awkward stand-off which saw him get taken off the air for 12 seconds - upon his own request. Moreover, the outspoken presenter was forced to apologise for repeatedly swearing, after he insisted the word 'a**e' was fine to use and was no worse than saying 'bum'. Oh dear: Piers Morgan branded GMB producers 'pathetic and gutless' after he was taken off-air during a stand-off on the show on Tuesday The trouble first started when bosses played what Piers deemed to be a 'boring' sound effect while Laura Tobin presented the weather. Piers said: 'It's the trouble with the director, he is going a bit rogue. Lashing out at our meteorologist expert - we need to put him back in his box.' He then dared producers to take him off air for 20 seconds, insisting that they would lose viewers if they did so. Naughty: Piers had dared producers to take him off air for 20 seconds, insisting that they would lose viewers if they did so, but they only managed to do it for 12 Susanna, 48, had said that she thought the producer was in charge and Piers contested it saying: 'He thinks he is, he thinks he is.' He continued: 'See how many ratings you get with your test card.' At first, producers didn't rise to it, but Piers goaded them further, saying: 'You see, no power. He doesn't dare do it.' Unfazed, Piers said: 'Leave it up for another 20 seconds, go on. See how difficult this gets. Go on, go on. Leave it up there. Now you're actively costing us viewers' As soon as the card came down, Piers said: 'You blinked. You see? There you go, how long was that for? 12 seconds before you blinked. Pathetic, utterly gutless' But that was enough and producers decided to play him at his own game and put the 'technical difficulties' test card up for 12 seconds. Unfazed, Piers said: 'Leave it up for another 20 seconds, go on. See how difficult this gets. Go on, go on. Leave it up there. Now you're actively costing us viewers.' As soon as the card came down, Piers said: 'You blinked. You see? There you go, how long was that for? 12 seconds before you blinked. Pathetic, utterly gutless.' In trouble again: Piers was also told off for repeatedly saying the word 'a**e' while discussing the naked protesters who invaded Parliament Stop right now! Susanna tried to place her hand over Piers' mouth during his rant After the show, Piers may have had a point to prove as he tweeted a picture of himself and Susanna and wrote about how well the show was doing. He penned: 'BREAKING NEWS: Yesterdays BAFTA-nominated @GMB smashed our all-time ratings record: 25.3% audience share, peaking at 34%! Thanks for watching. 'Even @susannareid100 may crack a smile when she hears about this.' TV anchor Piers obviously feels he can do no wrong on the show. In 2017, it was reported that viewers had increased by 10% after he joined the ITV show in 2015 At the time, Piers said the rival BBC Breakfast news show must be feeling threatened. He said back then: 'I am encouraged by our share of the audience which has got right into them and we have rattled them. They are rattled for the first time in quite a few years and that is quite pleasing.' Time to celebrate: After the show, Piers tweeted about the show's impressive ratings - just to make a point 'I am very competitive, if there are two snails going up the window I would bet with you and I would want my snail to win, I dont go into these things to lose. 'I think we are more entertaining and provocative. So if you want opinionated fare in the morning there is only one place to go, if you want solid and dare I say it, predictable fare, you can tune into Dan.' He also shared a photo of himself with his female co-hosts, writing: 'Pierss angels... with one miserable devil. @CharlotteHawkns @susannareid100 @Lauratobin1.' Line-up: He also shared a photo of himself with his female co-hosts, writing: 'Pierss angels... with one miserable devil. @CharlotteHawkns @susannareid100 @Lauratobin1' Credit where credit's due: The cheeky chappy also thanked a viewer online, who praised his presenting efforts The cheeky chappy also thanked a viewer online, who praised his presenting efforts. The viewer had written: 'Well like him or not, I am 50 and breakfast tv has always been dull and boring. 'But with @piersmorgan and @susannareid100 at the helm you just never know whats going to happen, and yet still they tell us the news in a way that gets the point across..' Meanwhile, Piers was also told off for repeatedly saying the word 'a**e' while discussing the naked protesters who invaded Parliament over Brexit. Susanna had said to him: 'How are you allowed to say that?' But Piers was sure there was no problem, with him replying: 'I don't think it's that rude, is it? It's no different to saying bum.' Carrying on, Piers said: 'They are, a bunch of a**es in parliament. I can't say it? I'm being told I can't say a**es. 'Just popped out again. I'd like to apologise for anybody who was offended by the use of the word a**e.' She's a fashion blogger and social media star boasting more than 187,000 Instagram followers. So it comes as no surprise to see Nadia Fairfax putting her best foot forward at the Delta Air Lines 10 year Australian anniversary event in Sydney on Tuesday. The 29-year-old blonde bombshell looked nothing short of stylish in a silk trouser suit, as she joined the likes of Jodi Anasta and Ksenija Lukich at the event. Suits you! Nadia Fairfax stuns in a silk trouser suit at the Delta Air Lines Sydney anniversary event Nadia wore high-waisted and flared trousers which highlighted her long legs. She teamed the look with a matching shirt, which she tucked in at the waist. Nadia - who is the daughter of former Australian rugby star Russell Fairfax, 67, - wore simple heels and accessorised with drop earrings. Chic: Nadia - who is the daughter of former Australian rugby star Russell Fairfax, 67, - wore simple heels and accessorised with drop earrings Fancy seeing you here! The blonde bombshell looked nothing short of stylish as she joined the likes of Jodi Anasta (pictured) and Ksenija Lukich at the event She wore natural-looking makeup and her hair out and over her shoulders, neatly styled. Nadia appeared to be solo on the evening, despite being in a new relationship with Sydney-based financier, Michael Wayne, 31. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the news in February, with it coming after her split with longterm boyfriend, Nick Adams, who is based in New York. New man! Nadia appeared to be solo on the evening, despite being in a new relationship with Sydney-based financier, Michael Wayne (pictured), 31 'He admires her work ethic': A 'friend' told the publication how the pair are a perfect match A 'friend' told the publication how the pair are a perfect match. 'He's her biggest champion and isn't threatened by her success,' they said. 'He admires her work ethic and the fact she's a a social butterfly whilst he's happy to sit back in the shadows away from the social scene.' Married At First Sight's Mike Gunner and Heidi Latcham confessed their love for each other during their final vows ceremony on Tuesday. And despite choosing to stay together, the pair were pictured arriving at the reunion separately amid reports they split two days after final vows. Photos show the pair arriving in separate cars on January 23, while every other couple arrived together. Is it over? Married At First Sight's Mike Gunner (right) and Heidi Latcham (left) were pictured arriving at the reunion on January 23 separately, amid reports they split just 'two days' after final vows Both Mike and Heidi appeared downcast outside the show's studio in Sydney's Lilyfield. Mike arrived almost one hour before Heidi did, with producers keeping them apart until they reunited on camera. On Monday, New Idea claimed the couple called it quits just two days after filming their final vows. Drama! Mike arrived almost one hour before Heidi did, with producers keeping them apart until they reunited on camera According to the magazine, Heidi, 38, ended her relationship with the electrician, 44, after discovering he 'had felt pressured to say he loved her'. 'Heidi couldn't deal with it,' the source said, adding that Mike was already flirting with other girls at bars within a week of the split. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Nine for comment. Quick split! According to New Idea, Heidi, 38, ended her relationship with the electrician after discovering he 'had felt pressured to say he loved her' - just two days after their final vows 'Misfortune of being paired with a basket case': In March, Mike seemingly confirmed what he now thinks about his on-screen wife by 'liking' a derogatory comment about her In March, Mike seemingly confirmed what he now thinks about his on-screen wife by 'liking' a derogatory comment about her. Mike publicly endorsed a fan's comment, which read: 'One of the decent guys on the show with the misfortune of being paired with a basket case.' According to a recent report by Woman's Day magazine, Mike is now dating a Gold Coast woman named Casey Stewart. Casey, 26, happens to be the daughter of Gina Stewart, who is perhaps better known as the Internet phenomenon 'The World's Hottest Grandma'. 'Mike and Casey have been spending a lot of time together and she stays at his place on the Gold Coast a lot,' a source said. Moving on! According to a recent report by Woman's Day magazine, Mike is now dating a Gold Coast woman named Casey Stewart (left), the daughter of Gina Stewart, who is best known as Internet phenomenon 'The World's Hottest Grandma' During their final vows, Mike gushed: 'Heidi, you make me a proud husband and you are a strong and determined lady, who only ever wanted to be loved. 'Despite the ups and downs, I can't walk away. There is a magnetic pull towards you, that is so great. I simply need to be with.' As Mike then admitted he was in love with Heidi, the beauty responded: 'Oh my god, do you really? I love you, I love you so much.' Ulrika Jonsson has spoken about sex education with her daughter Martha in a rare joint interview. The 51-year-old presenter said she was 'surprised' how knowledgeable her 14-year-old daughter was on the subject, ahead of their appearance on Channel 4's Let's Talk About Sex on Friday. Speaking about their stint on Tuesday's Lorraine, Ulrika also confessed she had her first sex education lesson at the age of just six while growing up in Sweden. Family chat: Ulrika Jonsson has spoken about sex education with her daughter Martha in a rare joint interview, ahead of their appearance on Channel 4's Let's Talk About Sex Despite their close mother-daughter bond, Ulrika admitted she and Martha are worlds away when it comes to the sex education they received at school. '[There was] nothing to do with relationships or feelings or what can be considered to be normal, from a girls point of view it was definitely about,' she said of her own sex education. 'Sex is something that might happen to you and if you get pregnant than the world comes to an end, so all you should do is try not to become pregnant.' Open: The 51-year-old present said she's been 'surprised' by her daughter's knowledge around sex education, admitting on Tuesday's Lorraine they never had the so-called 'talk' True: Ulrika also admitted she had her first sex education lessons at the age of just six, as she grew up in Sweden The former Gladiators host then admitted she's been 'surprised' by her daughter's own knowledge of sex, given they never actually sat down and had the so-called 'talk.' 'Apart from the fact I learned she's a very articulate, she's always been a bit of an social justice warrior,' she said. 'She's fighting that corner of things, it was quite surprising, we always have an open dialogue, I've never had the conversation about sex. '[We've been] making lots of silly jokes to relax things, you've got to joke about it. 'I was shocked and surprised by some of the things you knew... the possibility of learning things at home, now you have the internet too, and Martha would say things and I'd say ''where did that come from?'' Truthful: Martha echoed Ulrika's point that they're an open household when it comes to talking about sex, and she went onto add: 'We talk about it sometimes we're very open about it' Supportive: Martha then insisted that schools need to be more open in regards to teaching different types of sexual relationships Martha echoed Ulrika's point that they're an open household when it comes to talking about sex, and she went onto add: 'We talk about it sometimes we're very open about it, Mum asks questions she doesn't want to know the answer to. 'It's often talked about with mum and the rest of the family.' Ulrika then confessed she first learned about sex education when she was just six years old growing up in Sweden, telling Lorraine they were told that 'a man and woman lie together and make a baby.' 'It felt really nice nobody was giggling out of embarrassment it was age appropriate, the Swedish definitely have a very unembarrassed approach to sex, it's a normal, lovely thing that happens between two people.' Important: The teen added: 'It's really important at school, my sex ed was all heterosexual, the teacher touched on gay relationships, we talked about it, but it wasn't on the curriculum' Star: Ulrika is most well known for her stints presenting Gladiator and Shooting Stars. She has four children including Martha, and has been married to Brian Monet since 2008 Casual: Ulrika cut a stylish figure in a simple black mesh blouse, while Martha was effortlessly chic in a black and white ensemble Martha then insisted that schools need to be more open in regards to teaching different types of sexual relationships. She added: 'It's really important at school, my sex ed was all heterosexual, the teacher touched on gay relationships, we talked about it, but it wasn't on the curriculum.' During Let's Talk About Sex, celebrities and their children are also shown different examples of sex education throughout the years, and Ulrika said that some of the earliest lessons left her daughter stunned. 'Martha was horrified by some of the things from the 1950s and 60s, when I was at school it was absolutely no better. 'Finding some way in getting the message across in some contemporary modern way, whether it's young people presenting it themselves.' Hometime! Following their interview, Ulrika and Martha were seen leaving the ITV studios in London Nice and warm: Battling the chilly weather, Ulrika was all bundled up in a green jacket, while Martha donned a fur-lined denim cover-up She is gearing up for the release of the final season of the epic smash-hit series Game Of Thrones in just under two weeks. And Maisie Williams has detailed the emotion while filming for the show's final scenes while stunning in a striking new shoot for S/Magazine - shot by renowned celebrity photographer, Rankin. After serving in the role of Arya Stark for a decade, the British actress, 21, cemented her star status by executing a series of flawless poses for the shoot in which she also described the difficulty of handling fame. Work it: Maisie Williams, 21, has detailed the emotion while filming for the show's final scenes while stunning in a shoot for S/Magazine - shot by celebrity photographer, Rankin Maisie looked incredible in the edgy circus-inspired photoshoot, in which she swings from ropes and poses with aerial hoop. Her dyed pink tresses are tousled to perfection and her porcelain features enhanced with a sensational slick of make-up. Showing off her style credentials, Maisie stuns in a series of incredible ensembles - including a star-print skirt and chic white coat, complete with matching thigh-high boots. Speaking of filming her final few scenes for Game Of Thrones with the publication, Maisie revealed: 'This whole season was really, really emotional. When I came to shoot my final scene, I had already watched a lot of people wrap and seen all the tears and heard all the speeches. Like a pro! After serving in the role of Arya Stark for a decade, the British actress cemented her star status by executing a series of flawless poses for the shoot Quirky: Maisie looked incredible in the edgy circus-inspired photoshoot, in which she swings from ropes and poses with aerial hoop Stunning: Her dyed pink tresses are tousled to perfection and her porcelain features enhanced with a sensational slick of make-up 'It was just a really beautiful day, and a really great final scene for me. It felt like the right time to say goodbye to Arya,' she revealed. After taking on the role of Arya at the age of 12, Maisie revealed that she found stardom tricky to navigate over the years. 'There are times when people feel like they own you, especially when youre going through your adolescence and trying to figure out who you are and really put a stamp on your personality. That was really, really confusing as a 15-year-old,' she explained. However, Maisie was quick to note that she was thankful for her fans: 'Its bizarre, but obviously amazing, when you go to a place youve never been in your life on the other side of the planet and theres hundreds of people screaming at you. The scale of the show is unbelievable.' Style credentials: Maisie stuns in a series of incredible ensembles - including a star-print skirt and chic white coat, complete with matching thigh-high boots Relaxed: Maisie was seen stepping out with a male friend in New York on Monday Looking good: The actress cut a stylish figure in a chic coat and leopard print boots by Coach. She also was seen with her Coach Signature bag She also expressed her delight at being taken seriously as an actor by her more experienced co-stars - including Lena Headey. Maisie revealed that despite being in school one week, or signing autographs the following week, Lena always respected her. Williams plays Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, the youngest Stark daughter who finally returned to Winterfell and reunited with her siblings Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright). The actress is one of just a handful of characters who have managed to appear in (and survive) all eight seasons of Game of Thrones. 'People feel like they own you': After taking on the role of Arya at the age of 12, Maisie revealed that she found stardom tricky to navigate over the years 'The scale of the show is unbelievable': However, Maisie was quick to note that she was thankful for her fans 'Respected': She also expressed her delight at being taken seriously as an actor by her more experienced co-stars - including Lena Headey Popular role: Maisie is gearing up for the release of the final season of the epic smash-hit series Game Of Thrones in just under two weeks Maisie already has a thriving career outside of Game of Thrones, voicing Cammie MacCloud in Netflix's animated series GenLock. Williams will also be seen on the big screen later this year in 20th Century Fox's superhero movie The New Mutants, which hits theaters August 2. She is also slated to star in The Owners, which is currently in pre-production, which follows a group of friends who plan a heist that goes awry. The talent also recently voiced Goona in the animated film Early Man. Maisie photographed by RANKIN for S/magazine Spring 2019 issue, on newsstands from April 3rd 2019. Status Quo star Francis Rossi has heartbreakingly revealed he dreams late bandmate Rick Parfitt is still alive, two years after his death aged 68. The iconic frontman, 69, paid tribute to his friend of five decades on Tuesday's episode of Lorraine. Rhythm guitarist Rick died on December 24, 2016, after contracting an infection arising from a pre-existing shoulder injury. Scroll down for video Much missed: Status Quo star Francis Rossi has heartbreakingly revealed he dreams late bandmate Rick Parfitt is still alive, two years after his death aged 68 Rock on: The iconic frontman, 69, paid tribute to his friend of five decades on Tuesday's episode of Lorraine (pictured performing in Germany in 2015) Rockin' All Over The World hitmaker Francis said: 'I dreamed about him a lot for the first year or so, suddenly you'd be somewhere and Rick would be there and I'd say "I thought you were dead".' 'The day he did actually die, he left the room on a stretcher and they said he was gone, and then he was on life support, I dream he's still there and we just carry on as if nothing's happened. Discussing the emotional impact his bandmate's passing had on him, Francis said: 'We used to joke about which one of us would die first. Still there: Rockin' All Over The World hitmaker Francis said: 'I dreamed about him a lot for the first year or so, suddenly you'd be somewhere and Rick would be there and I'd say "I thought you were dead"' Best friends: Rhythm guitarist Rick died on December 24, 2016, after contracting an infection arising from a pre-existing shoulder injury (pictured in 1990) 'I was on the bus coming back from somewhere and I listened to a song of his that I liked, and I had a little tear there. The rocker died after suffering from an infection due to complications with a pre-existing shoulder injury . Rick is survived by his third wife Lyndsay, who he was married to for a decade, their twins Tommy and Lily, and his adult children Rick Jnr and Harry. Candid: He added: 'The day he did actually die, he left the room on a stretcher and they said he was gone, and then he was on life support, I dream he's still there and we just carry on as if nothing's happened' Emotion: He said: 'I was on the bus coming back from somewhere and I listened to a song of his that I liked, and I had a little tear there (pictured in November 2015) As a member of Status Quo, Parfitt found success globally with hits such as Rockin' All Over The World and Whatever You Want. The band carved out a place in musical history with their thumping rock sound, which shot them to stardom in the 1970s. One of the most celebrated live performances of Parfitt's career came at Live Aid on July 13 1985, when he opened the historic 16-hour concert with Status Quo in a 15-minute slot at the original Wembley Stadium which was broadcast around the world. She's months away from a TV acting debut in season two of Sky Atlantic's Riviera. And Poppy Delevingne showcased her incredible figure as she posed up a storm in a very revealing bikini for a sultry Instagram post on Monday. The 32-year-old fashionista showed off her toned abs and slender legs in the tiny ensemble as she told fans she had enjoyed the weekend. Stunning: Poppy Delevingne showed off her toned abs and sensational figure in a TINY bikini for a sizzling Instagram snap on Monday Facing away from the camera while she posed, Poppy couldn't help but smile as she closed her eyes for the photo. The model swept her blonde locks back into a messy bun, while she wore light touches of make-up to highlight her natural beauty. Poppy showed off her gorgeous interior design as she posed in the bathroom, giving fans a glimpse of hanging plants and an elaborately decorated sink. New role: The style star is due to appear in the new series of Riviera in two months' time as Daphne, the socialite daughter of Lady Cassandra, who will come into the fold in series two The style star, who's been married to James Cook since 2014, is due to appear in the new series of Riviera in two months' time. Poppy will play Daphne, the socialite daughter of Lady Cassandra, who will come into the fold from the very start of series two. In the drama, widower Georgina Clios (Julia Stiles) is desperate to discover more about the mysterious death of her billionaire husband Constantine. However, she learns that she actually never knew anything about him at all. Poppy's part in the popular thriller, which picked up an audience of 23million back in 2017, follows her success in films such as Kingsman: The Golden Circle and Legend Of The Sword. She also starred alongside Antonio Banderas and Clemence Poesy in 2017 biographical drama Genius. Jude Law was full of the joys of spring when he was pictured accompanying his mother Maggie to get a hat for his upcoming wedding to Philippa Coan. The actor, 46, had a big smile on his face as he spent the day with his mother at exclusive milliners, Jane Taylor, on London's King's Road, no doubt thinking about his big day. Jude was dressed casually on the day, wearing a country themed khaki waistcoat over a simple black top, jeans and smart black shoes. There for her: Jude Law looked delighted as he took his mother Maggie shopping for a hat ahead of his wedding to Phillipa Coan on the King's Road in Chelsea on Tuesday Lovely day: It must have been a successful visit as when the pair left the store, as Jude and his mother looked very happy and he lovingly placed his arm around her It must have been a successful visit as when the pair left the store, as Jude and his mother looked very happy. Alfie star Jude placed his arm around his former school teacher mother, as they made their way back to their car. Jude and 32-year-old psychologist Phillipa's springtime nuptials are thought to be happening next month in France, surrounded by showbiz pals. The place to be: The pair headed to exclusive milliners, Jane Taylor, on London's King's Road Loved-up: A source previously said of the planned nuptials: 'The wedding will be a good old fashioned knees up with plenty of booze and dancing.' (Jude and Phillipa pictured in 2016) The Sun previously reported that the Sherlock Holmes star has asked his eldest son Rafferty, 22, whom he shares with ex wife Sadie Frost, to be his best man. A source revealed to the publication: 'The wedding itself will be a good old fashioned knees up with plenty of booze and dancing. 'All his old pals are going from when he was growing up in London and just starting out in his career. Low-key look: Jude was dressed casually on the day, wearing a country themed khaki waistcoat over a simple black top, jeans and smart black shoes So happy: He beamed from ear to ear as he had his picture taken ahead of walking into the store Support: Jude's chic mother, a former school teacher cut a chic figure as she walked behind him 'Jude and Phillipa have been going out together for years and get on really well, so this is the next natural step.' It appears as though the nuptials will be an A-list affair with several of Jude's actor pals reported to attend including Jonny Lee Miller, Ewan McGregor, Brad Adams and Sean Pertwee. Jude previously opened up about his romance with Phillipa in an interview with Modern Living. Not long now: It's thought that Jude and Phillipa are going to marry in France next month, surrounded by their celebrity pals Star-studded: It appears as though the nuptials will be an A-list affair with several of Jude's actor pals reported to attend including Jonny Lee Miller, Ewan McGregor, Brad Adams and Sean Pertwee Follow me: Jude relished spending the day with his mother as he led her into the exclusive shop Trendy: He whipped off his sunglasses as he stepped back outside Close bond: The Sun previously reported that the Sherlock Holmes star has asked his eldest son Rafferty, 22, whom he shares with ex wife Sadie Frost, to be his best man He said: 'Shes mine and no one elses. Im very, very happy. Our relationship is a very private thing, and I think part of the fact it works so well is exactly because of that.' This will be the second time lucky for father-of-five Jude, who was previously married to designer Sadie from 1997 until their divorce in 2003. The former couple share three children together, Rafferty, 22, daughter Iris, 18 and 16-year-old Rudy. Jude also has an nine-year-old daughter Sophia with model Samantha Burke and Ada, three, with musician Catherine Harding. The star famously dated fellow A-lister Sienna Miller, with Jude famously issuing a public apology to her after having an affair with his children's nanny. Ex-wife: This will be the second time lucky for father-of-five Jude, who was previously married to designer Sadie from 1997 until their divorce in 2003 (pictured in 2018) She confirmed she's expecting her third child over the weekend, just 10 months after giving birth to her second son Hart. And pregnant Miranda Kerr showed off her blossoming baby bump as she promoted her organic skincare line Kora at Space NK in London on Tuesday morning. The supermodel, 35, looked positively glowing as she placed a protective hand on her tummy after announcing her happy news with Snapchat CEO husband Evan Spiegel, 28, on Saturday. Oh baby! Pregnant Miranda Kerr showed off her blossoming baby bump as she promoted her organic skincare line Kora at Space NK in London on Tuesday The former Victoria's Secret Angel wore a pretty LBD with a skater hem and cut-out floral design on the skirt and chest. The Australian entrepreneur teamed her mini-dress with towering white stiletto heels as she posed alongside a selection of her products. Miranda wore her brunette locks in loose waves and opted for natural make-up to accentuate her beautiful features. The international cover girl's appearance comes just days after announcing she was pregnant with her third child. Bumping along: The supermodel, 35, looked positively glowing after announcing her happy news with Snapchat CEO husband Evan Spiegel, 28, on Saturday Chic: The former Victoria's Secret Angel wore a pretty LBD with a skater hem and cut-out floral design on the skirt and chest Glowing: Miranda wore her brunette locks in loose waves and opted for natural make-up to accentuate her beautiful features Miranda and husband Evan confirmed their happy news to Daily Mail Australia on Saturday. Shortly after the announcement, the beauty debuted her baby bump as she attended the Gruner & Jahr Spa Awards ceremony in Baden-Baden, Germany. Miranda looked stunning in a sweeping blush pink gown as she was awarded the Beauty Idol prize for her role as founder of natural skincare brand, Kora Organics In a statement, the model's representative said: 'Miranda, Evan, Flynn and Hart are looking forward to welcoming the newest member to their family.' Elegant: The Australian entrepreneur teamed her mini-dress with towering white stiletto heels as she posed alongside a selection of her products Entrepreneur: The international cover girl's appearance comes just days after announcing she was pregnant with her third child The pregnancy news comes just 10 months after Miranda welcomed son Hart with Evan in May 2018. Miranda is also mother to son Flynn, eight, who she shares with ex-husband, Orlando Bloom, 42. The model and the Snapchat founder married in a 'small but lavish' ceremony in May 2017 at Evan's home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. The bride wore a stunning, bespoke Dior wedding dress as the couple tied the knot in in an intimate backyard ceremony, in front of just 45 friends and family. Baby joy! Miranda and Snapchat CEO husband Evan Spiegel, 28, confirmed they are expecting their second child together on Saturday (pictured together in February 2018) Mama to be: The mother-of-two is looking forward to welcoming her third child later this year Miranda and Evan went public with their relationship in June 2015 after first meeting at a Louis Vuitton dinner in New York City in 2014. Speaking to E! News, the model gushed over their romance and said she knew he was 'The One' almost immediately, saying: 'He's just a really kind person - very genuine, very authentic. 'I really appreciate that about him. And also, he's very intelligent. We started out as friends, and eventually, it developed into more.' Shortly after the birth of the couple's first son, Hart, last year Miranda gushed about being in 'baby bliss'. 'Ready for you, London!' Miranda posed for a snap in her dressing gown as her glam squad got her ready ahead of the Kora launch Jet-setter: The model mother kept her Instagram followers updated with her moves around the capital after jetting into London from her weekend in Germany New pals: Miranda was joined by British TV presenter Lisa Snowdon, 47, at the Kora event Ladies' day: Lisa mingled with former Made In Chelsea star Caggie Dunlop, 29, inside Taking to Instagram at the time, Miranda wrote to her fans: 'Thank you so much for all of your warm wishes. 'Evan, Flynn and I have been in baby bliss for the last 17 days with our new arrival, baby boy Hart. We feel so very blessed.' Miranda was previously married to actor Orlando Bloom for three years from 2010 to 2013. The Pirates Of The Caribbean star announced his engagement to long-term girlfriend, pop star Katy Perry, 34, five weeks ago. She recently hit back at claims she has had plastic surgery to enhance her famous curves. And Carol Vorderman, 58, flaunted them in all their glory as she arrived back in the UK, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, following the Bahrain Grand Prix. Showing off her unique sense of style, Carol wore a military inspired khaki jumpsuit which was form-fitting in design. Stunning: Carol Vorderman, 58, flaunted THOSE curves under an unzipped military inspired jumpsuit as she arrived back in the UK on Tuesday after the Bahrain Grand Prix Doing her thing: Showing off her unique sense of style, Carol wore a military inspired khaki jumpsuit which was form-fitting in design Choosing to unzip it at the front, the former Countdown star wore a neon green tight top underneath, which clung to her shape. She also wore a bright pink pair of trainers as she headed out of the airport, pushing a trolley full of luggage and carrying a backpack. Carol appeared to be in good spirits on the day as she stepped off her long-haul flight after watching Lewis Hamilton win the Grand Prix. Certainly eye-popping! The Countdown queen had caused a stir when she showed off her figure in skintight high-waisted trousers last month (pictured) Last week, the Countdown presenter took to social media to insist she hadn't had any cosmetic enhancements and that she was just the 'same old Vorders'. Addressing her 3,393K following, she wrote on Twitter: 'Caught ordering an uber today after a meeting.....an old @KarenMillen top and old jeggings from @marksandspencer.... but it's the same old Vorders.' The former Countdown brainbox, known for her ability with figures, became the first person to take the Rear of the Year title twice in 2014. Racy: Choosing to unzip it at the front, the former Countdown star wore a neon green tight top underneath, which clung to her shape Casual: She also wore a bright pink pair of trainers as she headed out of the airport, pushing a trolley full of luggage and carrying a backpack Nothing to see here: Last week, the Countdown presenter took to social media to insist she hadn't had any cosmetic enhancements and that she was just the 'same old Vorders' At the time, Carol said: 'I am both surprised and flattered to win the award for a second time particularly at this stage of my life. 'As I said when I won it in 2011, I always suspected there were a lot of people out there who were glad to see the back of me. It now appears there were even more than I thought.' While the TV star recently revealed that her 50s have been the best decade of her life, she admitted it hasn't been without hardship. Great times: Despite coming off a long-haul flight, Carol appeared in a fun and giggly mood Wow: The former Countdown brainbox, known for her ability with figures, became the first person to take the Rear of the Year title twice in 2014 Big cases: It's fair to say that stylish Carol didn't exactly pack light for her trip Back to the grind: Touching down at London's Heathrow airport, no doubt Carol was keen to get back to work The personality reflected on her struggles with depression as a result of hormones fluctuating during the menopause. 'I went through the year 2015 and I started feeling really low,' she previously explained on Loose Women. 'I found it became so low it was like a physical pain, it felt like genuine depression. At times I would think about how I could stop that feeling. 'GP's would say here's an anti-depressants, I didn't want to go to a GP, it was almost suicidal thoughts if you like, but I would have never done it because I've got kids.' Millie Mackintosh ensures she keeps her Vitamin B quota fulfilled with a host of stunning gifted stays, press trips and promotional getaways. And the Made In Chelsea beauty appears to be keen to plot her next venture as she took to Instagram on Tuesday to share a sizzling bikini snap and reveal she was yearning for some sunshine after returning to the London drizzle. Just days before, she was littering her feed with images from her trip to lavish fitness retreat The Body Camp Ibiza, which she made clear in the caption was a gifted stay - similarly to her past four trips, including the Maldives, Azerbaijan and Finland. Hot stuff: Millie Mackintosh appears to be keen to plot her next venture as she took to Instagram on Tuesday to share a sizzling bikini snap and reveal she was yearning for some sunshine after returning to the London drizzle Millie looked incredible in the image as she reclined in the sunshine while sporting a sizzling black bikini which showed off all her best bits. Her perky cleavage was encased in the triangle cup bikini while she pulled the waistband high on her hips to draw the eye to her stomach. She covered up with a light black wrap however allowed the pull-over to fall away from her body and show off all her best bits. Taking to the comments was her husband Hugo Taylor, who was clearly in awe as he penned: 'Look at those legs', with a series of star Emojis. Lucky Millie's jet-set gifts 2019 January: The Westin Maldives Miriandhoo Resort Millie jetted on the second leg of her honeymoon with husband Hugo Taylor during which she thanked the resort for 'hosting her'. January: Soho Farmhouse The lucky star was invited on a weekend away to the exclusive location where she was hosted by bargain designer site The Outnet. January: Chenot Palace Health Wellness Hotel in Azerbaijan Ahead of the BAFTAs in February, Millie was welcomed for a detox holiday, during which she wrote on a snap: 'They have kindly invited me to experience the #chenotmethod in preparation for the bafta awards'. March: Arctic TreeHouse Hotel in Finland Millie tagged herself in snaps from her 'Press trip' to the luxurious resort. Although it is unknown what press publication she is working in conjunction with, she has stuck to Instagram guidelines for influencers to clearly mark when they have not paid for a trip themselves. March: The Body Camp Ibiza Millie was lucky enough to indulge her love of exercise at the idyllic and luxurious fitness retreat. On the website, the retreat is describes as: 'The Body Camp is a perfect mix of physical, intellectual and spiritual development. A place to make new friends, set goals, change habits, learn more about nutrition, exercise and much much more'. Millie could not resist sharing a number of sizzling shots from her getaway Advertisement Millie herself added the caption: 'Back in london and its bloody freezing! #takemeback' - as she yearned for her idyllic Ibiza trip. Previous exotic getaways of Millie's have also been thanks to companies gifting her the glamorous holidays. In January, for instance, Millie jetted on the second leg of her honeymoon with husband Hugo Taylor 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. work it! Just days before, she was littering her feed with images from her trip to lavish fitness retreat The Body Camp Ibiza, which she made clear in the caption was a gifted stay - similarly to her past four trips, including the Maldives, Azerbaijan and Finland Flexible: Millie often treats fans to a glimpse of her lavish getaways on social media 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. 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. Baring all: Millie shared a topless snap of herself following a mud treatment at the Chenot Palace Health Wellness Hotel in Azerbaijan in January He took a break from The Only Way Is Essex to focus on himself and his relationship with Gemma Collins. And James Argent was spotted zooming down Brentford High Street in his trusty blue scooter on Tuesday. The television personality, 31, arrived in style as he surprised Sam Mucklow and Liam Gatsby during their coffee run. Arriving in style: James Argent makes grand arrival on his blue scooter on Tuesday as he surprised Sam Mucklow and Liam Gatsby while they filmed TOWIE Arg appeared in jovial spirits as he donned his matching helmet to ride down the street in his beloved moped. Stopping outside the dry cleaners, Arg bumped into Sam, 26, and Gatsby, 30, who were thoroughly delighted to be reunited with their old pal. Clutching their coffees, the pair embraced Arg after he parked up his scooter. Zoom zoom: The television personality, 31, arrived in style as he surprised Sam Mucklow and Liam Gatsby as they headed out for coffee There he goes: Arg appeared in jovial spirits as he donned his matching helmet to ride down the street in his beloved moped Catch-up: Arg bumped into Sam, 26, and Gatsby, 30, who were thoroughly delighted to be reunited with their old pal Casually-clad: The reality star cut a casual figure in a black tracksuit and Gucci bag Reunion: Clutching their coffees, the pair embraced Arg after he parked up his scooter Surprise: Gatsby and Sam could hardly believe their eyes as Arg arrived Driving around: Arg is often spotted out in Essex on his scooter, which he bought because he struggled to pass his driving test Off he goes: The pair looked thrilled to see their pal out and about Expensive taste: He popped into the dry cleaners to pick up his 350 classic check Burberry scarf The reality star cut a casual figure in a black tracksuit and Gucci bag and popped into the dry cleaners to pick up his 350 classic check Burberry scarf. Earlier in the day, Liam and Sam bumped into fellow cast member Clare Brockett, who recently joined the series with her daughter Chloe. Gatsby, who was clad in an all-white tracksuit, appeared starry-eyed as he chatted to Clare. Earlier in the day, Liam and Sam bumped into fellow cast member Clare Brockett, who recently joined the series with her daughter Chloe Keeping warm: Sam wore his hair in his signature slicked back look and wore a green padded coat Crush: Gatsby, who was clad in an all-white tracksuit, appeared starry-eyed as he chatted to Clare Turning heads: Clare cut a chic figure in a white lace peplum shirt and leather leggings Last week, the aspiring rapper told MailOnline he had a crush on the taxi driver at TOWIE's launch party at Sheesh. He said: 'I want a girlfriend now, I think I will have to date someone in the public eye because its hard to trust if girls are with me for my fame. 'Theres a mum [Clare], shes pretty fit, her daughters pretty fit [Chloe, 18]. Shes a salt. Scott Disick went out with Sofia Ritchie, why cant I? 'Theyre trying to get in a younger audience with the new TOWIE cast. Ive got my eye on Chloe and her mum.' Sparks flying? Last week, the aspiring rapper told MailOnline he had a crush on the taxi driver at TOWIE's launch party at Sheesh After filming their scenes, Arg, Gatsby and Sam all headed out for a slap-up brunch, enjoying poached egg, salmon and beans on toast. Arg and his girlfriend Gemma haven't featured in the current series, but managed to dodge the show's biggest ever cull. In February it was reported that Gemma had begun talks with TV producers to land her own reality show, after winning an army of new fans on Dancing On Ice. Eyes on her: Liam told us: 'Theres a mum [Clare], shes pretty fit, her daughters pretty fit [Chloe, 18]. Shes a salt. Scott Disick went out with Sofia Ritchie, why cant I? Fan: 'Theyre trying to get in a younger audience with the new TOWIE cast. Ive got my eye on Chloe and her mum' Boys: Gatsby and Sam larked around in-between filming after they grabbed a drink Ladies man: Sam lived up to his Lothario status as he was spotted hugging a crew member Break: Arg took a break from The Only Way Is Essex to focus on himself and his relationship with Gemma Collins Best of friends: Arg beamed with joy as he hugged the pair, while a soundman recorded their get together Delicious: After filming their scenes, Arg, Gatsby and Sam all headed out for a slap-up brunch, enjoying poached egg, salmon and beans on toast Taking a break: Arg and his girlfriend Gemma haven't featured in the current series, but managed to dodge the show's biggest ever cull Reality queen: In February it was reported that Gemma had begun talks with TV producers to land her own reality show, after winning an army of new fans on Dancing On Ice A source told The Sun that the TOWIE star has been bombarded with big money deals after being eliminated from the skating show, but is taking some time off before making a decision. It comes after Arg also confirmed that he would be open to appearing on a reality show with her, as he makes a return to TV following a stint in rehab. The source said: 'Gemma has been inundated with big money offers for different shows. She's spent the last couple of weeks weighing up her options and deciding what the next step is in her career. 'Shes hoping to film in Essex, London, Marbella and even Los Angeles to visit close pal Jonathan Cheban.' Ulrika Jonsson has revealed she has split from her third husband Brian Monet after counselling was unable to save their 11-year marriage. The 51-year-old former weather girl told Best magazine: 'You can only resolve problems with another person. If I'm honest, getting another divorce aged 51 is not where I thought I would be, so who knows? 'I just don't know what shape my future will take. I can't contemplate dating again. Then again, I've said I will never marry again before, and I did. I've been content being out of the limelight. I haven't craved it but, that said, I do need to live.' 'Getting another divorce age 51 is not where I thought I would be': Ulrika Jonsson has revealed she's SPLIT from third husband Brian Monet after 11 years of marriage Real: The TV star said she feels she owes it to her social media followers to be honest about her life and tells them if she is having bad times. She said: 'Let's just say I am a work in progress. I will die being unfinished - but that's probably not a bad thing' Ulrika has said that she has taken to Instagramming to take her mind off things and even posted a shot a couple of months ago, in which she looked very down. She wrote: 'It's been quite the couple of days.' And last August, she wrote on social media: 'Yesterday was a tough day. Dealing with a lot of things. And yes, I know there are always people worse off. 'But thats not how it works. Please dont feel obliged to leave kind comments - Im not fishing for sympathy. Youre a kind lot, I know. #copingnotcoping #mentalhealth #keepingbusytoday.' Honesty: Ulrika shared this image to Instagram a few months ago and wrote: 'It's been quite the couple of days' Nothing to say: Ulrika didn't mention her split from Brian when appearing on Lorraine on Tuesday alongside her daughter Martha to discuss sex education It's not known when mother-of-four Ulrika and Brian split but MailOnline has contacted a spokesperson for comment. Ulrika and Brian, who is believed to be 50, tied the knot in 2008 and share one son, Malcolm, 10. They began their relationship in 2006. In 2014, Brian also adopted her daughter Bo, now 18, from the presenter's relationship with German hotel boss Markus Kempen. Last August, she shared this snap writing: 'Yesterday was a tough day. Dealing with a lot of things. And yes, I know there are always people worse off. But thats not how it works. Please dont feel obliged to leave kind comments - Im not fishing for sympathy. Youre a kind lot, I know. #copingnotcoping #mentalhealth #keepingbusytoday' Ulrika's lost loves: Through the ages 1990 - John Turnbull Ulrika's first marriage was to cameraman John, however things ended in tears after five years when she cheated on him. She blamed her actions on her ages, as she previously said: 'I was so young. I didnt know myself. I did some not very nice things. I was unfaithful, which is more than not nice'. 1996 - Hunter Shortly after her divorce, Ulrika sought comfort in the arms of Gladiator's star James Crossley, after meeting while she acted as host on the show. After their romance, she said: 'Well, I guess I was infatuated with James. It was a physical thing. And what a nice man he turned out to be' - as she referenced him selling stories about their romance to the papers. 1998 - Stan Collymore Ulrika dated former footballer Stan for a year however their relationship was marred with controversy when she was a victim of domestic abuse. 2000 - Markus Kempen German hotel boss Markus Kempen was her next love and the father of her daughter Bo, now 18. Just days after Bo was born in November 2000, the businessman told his girlfriend that he was leaving the UK to find work abroad - Ulrika hadn't even taken their child home from the hospital by then. 2002 - Lance Gerrard-Wright Husband number two Lance was supposed to be the prize for the female contestants on Mr Right, a 2002 TV dating show she presented. They married in 2003. She had their daughter Martha in 2004 and they separated in 2005. 2002 - Sven-Goran Eriksson Ulrika and the football manager stunned the sport and showbiz world when she confirmed widely-publcised reports of an affair between the duo while he was dating Nancy Dell'Olio. As a result of the affair she was given a column in The News Of The World in 2003 where she would frequently comment on his private life. She was dropped in 2007 after he left as England manager. 2007 - Brian Monet Ulrika and Brian tied the knot in 2008 and share one son, Malcolm, 10. They began their relationship in 2006. In 2014, Brian also adopted her daughter Bo, now 18, from the presenter's relationship with German hotel boss Markus Advertisement Happier times: Ulrika has two other children, Cameron, 24, from her marriage to John Turnbull (1990-1995) and Martha, 14, from her union with Lance Gerrard-Wright, (2003-2005) Ulrika has two other children, Cameron, 24, from her marriage to John Turnbull (1990-1995) and Martha, 14, from her union with Lance Gerrard-Wright, (2003-2005). In 2012 Ulrika put the 'stresses and pressures' of the past few years to one side to renew her wedding vows to Brian in a beautiful ceremony in Barbados. Speaking to Hello! magazine at the time the former Celebrity Big Brother contestant said she 'wanted to do something special' after a tough few years which saw her battle depression and a chronic back condition. Not so Mr Wright: Ulrika's daughter Martha, 14, is from her union with Lance Gerrard-Wright, (2003-2005) - the couple were pictured in 2003 Ulrika told the magazine: 'Hard times either force you apart or bring you closer together.' 'The stresses and pressures we have experienced over the past couple of years, I am thrilled to say, have made us stronger.' In the magazine interview Ulrika also opened up about how her chronic back pain had taken her 'down the lonely road of depression. Speaking about her third husband Monet she said he was 'more than just my husband'. Not to be: In 2014, Brian adopted her daughter Bo, now 18, from the presenter's relationship with German hotel boss Markus Kempen, (pictured in 2000) Ulrika gushed: 'He is a jaw-droppingly brilliant father who has the same values of parenthood as I do. His patience knows no bounds; his love for our children is unconditional and their love for him completes our family entirely.' Ulrika told the publication that she was 45 when she first started getting symptoms of the menopause, which brought on 'anxiety' and a 'major panicky meltdown,' as well as 'memory loss, sleeping problems, depression.' The TV star said she feels she owes it to her social media followers to be honest about her life and tells them if she is having bad times. She said: 'Let's just say I am a work in progress. I will die being unfinished - but that's probably not a bad thing.' In 2017, the star spoke to the Daily Mail's Weekend magazine about her marriage, admitting Brian occasionally riled her. She said: He gets on my nerves and I get on his, but I feel that I can be myself with him and Ive never felt that with anyone. I know Ive changed, and the menopause has been to blame for some of that, but thats how it is, isnt it? I cant stop time. Lost love: Ulrika has a son, Cameron, 24, from her marriage to John Turnbull (1990-1995) - pictured in 1994 When I look at younger people I think, Ha-ha, your time will come too. Her first marriage, to cameraman John Turnbull, lasted from 1990-95, and ended badly. She said: I was so young. I didnt know myself. I did some not very nice things. I was unfaithful, which is more than not nice. Then came a doomed relationship with German hotel boss Marcus, who walked out on her when their daughter Bo was just a few weeks old. Blow out the candles: Ulrika hasn't posted a picture of Brian on her Instagram since August 2017 when Brian treated her to a birthday cake on her 50th Husband number two was Lance Gerrard-Wright, who was supposed to be the prize for the female contestants on Mr Right, a 2002 TV dating show she presented. Ulrika married him in 2003. She had their daughter Martha in 2004 and they separated in 2005. In 2002, there was that jaw-dropping affair with then England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson. Katie Piper has revealed she had to have stitches after 'smashing her arm down on a glass' and being rushed to hospital during a very 'dramatic' Mother's Day. The TV personality, 35, admitted she's become 'clumsy' as a result of being blind in one eye following on from the acid attack she suffered at the hands of an ex-boyfriend and accomplice back in 2008. The mother-of-two appeared on Tuesday's Loose Women and revealed she suffered the accident when she cut herself while at home celebrating the special day with her two daughters Belle, five, and Penelope, 16 months. Accident: Katie Piper has revealed she had to have stitches after 'smashing her arm down on a glass' and being rushed to hospital during a very 'dramatic' Mother's Day She told panellist Andrea McLean: 'It was the minor injury unit so it wasn't a big thing. 'It's just where I can't see out of my left eye, the left side of my body always gets a couple of knocks - I'm a bit clumsy. 'And I was talking with my hands which my mum always tell me is a bad habit, I was really animated and I smashed my arm down on a glass but unfortunately it went quite deep so I had to have stitches. 'A lot of drama for Mother's Day! Just I'm actually fine.' Tough: The TV personality, 35, admitted she's become 'clumsy' as a result of being blind in one eye following on from the acid attack she suffered back in 2008 Katie also revealed that she was six weeks post burns surgery at the time and had been excited to get back to her every day routine with her family. She said: 'It's funny because I'm six weeks post some burns surgery and I was thinking "Oh I can get back to running and going to the gym" and then I did this on Sunday and now I can't lift anything.' Katie initially revealed the accident on her Instagram stories while she was in the hospital on Mother's Day. She explained: 'Just ended my Mother's Day in A&E! The down side of being blind in one eye is no peripheral vision, which means you don't notice the drinking glass by the side of you... Set back: The mother-of-two appeared on Tuesday's Loose Women and revealed she suffered the accident when she cut herself while at home celebrating Mother's Day Drama: She said: 'I'm six weeks post some burns surgery and I was thinking "Oh I can get back to running and going to the gym" and then I did this on Sunday and now I can't lift anything' 'Is it really bad that I'm thrilled it was the left hand and not the right one so I can still use my phone [sic].' Sharing pictures of her bandaged arm, she added: 'An X-ray and five stitches later and I'm going home. 'Have to say the NHS staff were so kind and helpful. We are so lucky to access to free medical care when we need it [sic]'. With the exception of her A&E trip, Katie seemed to have a lovely Mother's Day, as she showed off the cupcakes her husband Richard Sutton had bought her and revealed she'd gone for meals with her family and in-laws. Ouch: Katie initially revealed the accident on her Instagram stories while she was in the hospital on Mother's Day Treats: With the exception of her A&E trip, Katie seemed to have a lovely Mother's Day, as she showed off the cupcakes her husband Richard Sutton had bought her Surgery: The philanthropist has undergone more than 200 surgeries after she was attacked with sulphuric acid in 2008 in a horrific act ordered by her ex-boyfriend Burns: The acid, some of which Piper had swallowed, blinded her in her left eye, and caused partial thickness and full thickness burns The philanthropist has undergone more than 200 surgeries after she was attacked with sulphuric acid in 2008 in a horrific act ordered by her ex-boyfriend. The acid, some of which Katie had swallowed, blinded her in her left eye, and caused partial thickness and full thickness burns. She still requires regular surgery and treatment as a result of her severe facial burns. Speaking on Loose Women on Tuesday, Katie said when asked how many operations she has now undergone: 'I don't even know. I stopped counting because I see it as positive.' She added of her surgeon, based in Pakistan: 'My original NHS burns surgeon was out there, he's done all my surgery and it was nice to see where he's from and see the country. There's that a familiarity, we've got a good relationship.' She's a legendary Australian entertainer known for her flamboyant style and larger than life personality. And on Tuesday, Maria Venuti joined daughter Bianca at the opening of Saturday Night Fever in Sydney. The 78-year-old appeared in high spirits at the event, looking fabulous in a sequinned jumpsuit and a silver and zebra-print jacket. Night out! Maria Venuti, 78, (pictured) joined daughter Bianca at the opening of Saturday Night Fever in Sydney on Tuesday Maria wore a bright pink lip and oversized hoop earrings. Daughter Bianca meanwhile wore a plunging white dress, which featured bell sleeves. On the night, the duo joined the likes of Kyly Clarke, Danielle Spencer and Kerri-Anne Kennerley. Girls' night! Daughter Bianca (L) meanwhile wore a plunging white dress, which featured bell sleeves Maria was rushed to hospital in November 2016, after suffering a stroke when a stalker broke into her Sydney home. 'Initially, one of the nurses told me it (the stroke) was catastrophic - 'one of the biggest bleeds I have ever seen'' Bianca told New Idea last year. She was in a coma at the Royal North Shore Hospital for five-weeks before regaining consciousness. Health battle: Maria was rushed to hospital in November 2016, after suffering a stroke when a stalker broke into her Sydney home It was reported in January last year, that Maria wouldn't be able to 'sing or speak' at Australia Day celebrations in Sydney. At the time, Bianca told The Daily Telegraph that her mother will still be 'fabulous' despite her health battle. 'Her life doesn't have to stop because she had a stroke. She can still be fabulous and inspire people more than ever,' Bianca said. She added: 'She just wants to get back out there and help people.' She is a model and passionate advocate for the research and treatment of scoliosis, a condition in which the spine is abnormally curved. And Martha Hunt has expressed her admiration for Princess Eugenie after she decided to let the world see her scoliosis scar at her wedding to Jack Brooksbank in October last year. Speaking to Grazia magazine, the 29-year-old Victoria's Secret model gushed about the royal, as she said: 'It was very inspiring and made me so proud.' Grateful: Martha Hunt praised Princess Eugenie on Tuesday for her 'inspiring' decision to show her scoliosis scar on her wedding day as the model says she's 'proud' of the royal Martha continued: 'When I had the opportunity to meet her in London, over the summer, we discussed some of the insecurities we had as young women dealing with this illness. 'So seeing her wedding gown was so important because scoliosis was getting representation, because when we were younger we didn't hear anybody talking about it so openly.' In December, Princess Eugenie revealed her trauma at having a spinal operation as an 12-year-old girl as a result of her scoliosis. Open discussion: Martha continued, 'When I had the opportunity to meet her in London... we discussed some of the insecurities we had as young women dealing with this illness' Honest: Princess Eugenie let the world see her scoliosis scar at her wedding to Jack Brooksbank in October last year The Queen's granddaughter said that the life-changing operation left her feeling 'angry' and 'empty', but she learned to accept her 'visible difference' opting to show her scar to the world on her wedding day in October. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the Princess said she was left 'reeling' and scared at the thought of being 'different'. At the age of 11 Eugenie was told she would need surgery and when she was 12 she had titanium added to her spine to rebuild it as a result of a curvature. The Princess told the paper: '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.' Candid: At the age of 11 Eugenie was told she would need surgery and when she was 12 she had titanium added to her spine to rebuild it as a result of a curvature Advocate: Martha has also been candid about her struggle with scoliosis, and has shown fans the long scars on her back and abdomen from surgery to correct the condition At the time of her surgery, where doctors essentially break and rebuild the spine, Buckingham Palace downplayed it as minor but after an eight hour operation, titanium rods inserted, the young girl was left with a prominent scar. It is this scar that Eugenie chose to show the world at her wedding to Jack Brooksbank at St George's Chapel. While Martha has also been candid about her struggle with scoliosis, and has shown fans the long scars on her back and abdomen from surgery to correct the condition. In a tweet from 2016, the fashion model stated that 'Scars are uniquely beautiful and they tell a triumphant story about you.' Tori Spelling is in more hot water over her ongoing lawsuit with City National Bank. The 90210 star reportedly skipped a hearing on at the end of March and a judge subsequently issued a bench warrant for Spelling, according to E! News. Despite her legal woes, Tori didn't seem the least bit fazed as she was spotted on a girls trip in Israel with Jennie Garth just days later. Legal woes: Tori Spelling is in more hot water over her ongoing lawsuit with City National Bank after she skipped a hearing prompting a judge to issue a bench warrant, according to E! News According to a report, the actress was scheduled to be in court on March 29 but failed to show so a judge issued a bench warrant and set her bail at $5,000. Tori was not taken into custody and the hearing was continued until May 1, however, should she go AWOL a second time, the warrant can be activated and police may take her in. The hearing was part of her years long lawsuit with City National Bank who sued Tori and husband Dean McDermott for failing to make payments on a $400,000 loan. Last year the court ruled on a default judgement in the case due to the pair missing the deadline to respond to the suit. The beginning: The bench warrant was connected to a lawsuit filed against Tori and husband Dean McDermott by City National Bank for failing to make payments on a $400K loan At the time, the court ordered that Tori and Dean would need to pay back over $250,000 but they have yet to do so. In February the couple were served with documents to assess their finances as part of the bank's efforts to recoup their payment. It seems that court appearances and strapped finances were not enough to stop Tori from taking a working vacation this week. The blonde nineties star posted a photo alongside her 90210 costar Jennie Garth from Tel Aviv on Sunday. In court: A judge set Tori's bail at $5,000 but didn't take her into custody; if she skips her next hearing in May the warrant can be activated 'Best Friends in life and business... So excited to be in Israel filming an amazing commercial for @castrofashion_kids with my bestie @jenniegarth #90210 #donnaandkellyforever,' she captioned. The actresses recently signed on to the 90210 reboot, along with their other former colleagues from West Beverly Hills High. Tori, however, will have to juggle her financial problems amid the reboot. In addition to her ongoing lawsuit with City National Bank, Tori and Dean are on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars with American Express, CitiBank, the IRS and California State Tax Board. Coronation Street actress Beverley Callard has let slip the 'return' of her on-screen ex husband Jim McDonald. The actress, who plays Liz McDonald on the ITV soap, accidentally spilled the beans on the plot as she chatted on Loose Women on Tuesday. As the soap star, 62, discussed the upcoming storyline, she revealed that viewers may likely see infamous Jim making another appearance. Secrets: Coronation Street actress Beverley Callard has let slip the return of her on-screen ex husband Jim McDonald Beverley even compared their character's complicated relationship as being similar to Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew. She told the panel: 'We've got some really good stuff coming up. The summer and autumn are quite amazing.' 'In fact, I quite think that Andrew and Fergie are like Liz and Jim... they've been married twice to each other!'. 'I'm with Simon (who plays her on-screen son) tomorrow and I know already... he rang me up last night and said "Have you seen these scenes? We won't be able to do it for laughing!" Return: As the soap star, 62, discussed the upcoming storyline, she revealed viewers would likely see infamous Jim making another appearance Gossip: Beverley even compared the character's complicated relationship as being similar to Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew Long-serving character Jim originally starred in the soap from 1989 to 2000 with his another appearance in 2011. But the infamous conman was back on-screen as part of an explosive storyline last year when he and Liz discovered the premature daughter they long thought dead is actually alive. Actress Beverley was praised for her performance in the 1992 scenes when her baby daughter was born prematurely and died hours later, especially as such a plot had not been substantially covered in soap before that point. But it turned out Jim, who was been in and out of prison, returned to try and foil ex wife Liz by trying to scam money by claiming their daughter was still alive. The Irishman and his accomplice Hannah Gilmore tried to convince Liz that she was their daughter and that there had been a mix up at the hospital in 1992. But the plot thickened when Liz discovered her 'daughter' Hannah was actually Jim's secret lover. A spokesman for Coronation Street told MailOnline that there are currently no plans for Jim to return. It's the project that's been in the works for over 10 years, and now Leonardo DiCaprio's live-action Akira is finally getting the go-ahead. It was revealed on Tuesday that the 44-year-old actor's film has received $18.5 million in tax credits under the California Film Commission's Film & TV Tax Credit Program 2.0. The project is among 18 other films that have been selected to receive the tax benefits as part of the condition that its entirety is filmed in California. Scroll down for video Sealed the deal: It was revealed on Tuesday that Leonardo DiCaprio's latest venture, Akira, has been awarded with $18.5 million in tax credits to produce the 1988 anime film into a live-action movie; seen in 2018 New version: According to the Film Commission, 'The big-budget film is expected to generate $92 million in qualified spending - that includes $43 million in wages to 200 below-the-line crew members and more than 5000 extras and stand-ins' The movie will be produced by Leonardo's Appian Way Productions that he founded in 2004 alongside Andrew Lazar. Thor: Ragnarok's Taika Waititi is set to direct the project that will film in California over the course of 71 days despite being set in Tokyo in the year 2060. 'We are thrilled with the opportunity to shoot Akira in California,' said Ravi Mehta, Warner Bros Pictures EVP of physical production and finance, in a statement on Tuesday. Working together: The movie will be produced by Leonardo's Appian Way Productions company that he founded back in 2004 alongside Andrew Lazar. Thor: Ragnarok's Taika Waititi is set to direct the project that will film in California over the course of 71 days - despite being set in Tokyo in the year 2060 Taking home the big bucks: The project is among 18 other films that have been selected to receive the tax benefits, as part of the condition that its entirety is filmed in California 'The availability of top-notch crew members, plus the wide variety of location choices and predictable weather are second to none.' With Akira by far the winner of the tax benefits on $18.5 million, second place saw Stillwater receiving $7.31 million and then Two Days taking home $7.11 million. According to the Film Commission: 'the big-budget film is expected to generate $92 million in qualified spending - that includes $43 million in wages to 200 below-the-line crew members and more than 5000 extras and stand-ins.' Premise: The original Akira released in 1988, is based around the Japanese government when they drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo after ESP experiments of children go awry It was also reported that 55 films applied for the tax credit benefit during the February 25 - March 1 application period, while only 18 were chosen. The original Akira released in 1988, is based around the Japanese government when they drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo after ESP experiments of children go awry. Leonardo's latest movie alongside Brad Pitt, which is directed by Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, was also granted the credit back in 2017. Untitled at the time of the application, the state awarded it with $18 million - once again, the highest amount of the 11 winners with 54 applicants. Will Smith was seen shooting scenes for his new film Bad Boys For Life in Miami, Florida on Tuesday afternoon. The 50-year-old sprung into action after taking over from his stand-in, who was earlier spied on set during rehearsal. Stand-ins are commonly used in Hollywood - they fill in for the actor while the film crew gets the cameras and lighting set up. Double take: Will Smith was seen shooting scenes for his new film Bad Boys For Life in Miami on Tuesday. His stand-in was also spied on set during rehearsal (right) Stop or I'll shoot! The 50-year-old was seen here running with a gun in his hand Unlike body doubles, stand-ins do not appear on camera, so they don't need to look alike. However, Will's stand-in did have a similar build and was wearing similar clothes. The true Will was also surrounded by beautiful women during the rehearsals. Armed and dangerous: The Aladdin actor wore a button down black sweater, dark jeans and black dress shoes Action shot: Proving he hasn't aged a bit, Smith ran through a scene while on set carrying a silver pistol Wearing a cleavage flaunting crop top, one of the girls flexed her insane abs while flirting with the celebrity in a clip. Proving he hasn't aged a bit, Smith ran through a scene while on set carrying a silver pistol. The Aladdin actor wore a button down black sweater, dark jeans and black dress shoes. Womanizer: The true Will was also surrounded by beautiful women during the rehearsals With his muscles bulging through the shirt, Will looked focused and completely in character as he made a mad dash for it. Also filming with Will was his comedic co-star, Martin, 53, who wore jeans and a maroon bomber jacket. At one point, a scene unfolds showing a man lying dead on a gold Nissan with Lawrence fleeing the disturbing occurrence. Lawrence had a band aid on the right side of his head. Getting ugly: At one point, a scene unfolds showing a man lying dead on a gold Nissan with Lawrence fleeing the disturbing occurrence He looked terrified as he left the man wearing white pants and a Hawaiian shirt. In another scene, the father of three looked to be explaining something serious to the Big Momma's House actor as he assertively talked with his hands. Earlier in March, the two men were also spotted on set in Atlanta while filming a very action packed scene for the film. Sunny set: Filming with Will was his comedic co-star, Martin, who wore jeans and a maroon bomber jacket Listen up: The father of three looked to be explaining something serious to the Big Momma's House actor as he assertively talked with his hands And action! Will seen filming another scene Cool: He rocked a button up top with matching trousers, adding sunglasses Jada Pinkett Smith's husband sped through the streets on a motorcycle with Lawrence in the side car. The duo weren't able to go too fast however, as their vehicle was attached to a trailer with the camera equipment fixed to it. Production has been ongoing in Atlanta for just over two months now with the movie actually based in Miami. Amazing: Action scenes were seen filming Incredible: The stunt doubles were spotted filming an exciting scene Popular franchise: The first Bad Boys was released in 1995 with the sequel Bad Boys II following in 2003 In the first Bad Boys movie, it was revealed Smith's character Mike Lowrey is quite wealthy, with his parents leaving him a fortune. The new story follows Marcus, who is now a police inspector, while Mike is in a midlife crisis. They unite again when an Albanian mercenary, whose brother they killed, promises them an important bonus. Also returning from 1995's Bad Boys and 2003's Bad Boys II is Joe Pantoliano's Captain Howard. The rest of the cast is populated by franchise newcomers, including Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig and Charles Melton. The cast also features popular musician DJ Khaled. Sony Pictures has set Bad Boys For Life for release on January 17, 2020, which already has plenty of competition lined up. Also opening on that date is Warner Bros' Just Mercy starring Michael B Jordan and Universal's The Voyage of Dr Dolittle starring Robert Downey Jr. Sony is already developing a fourth Bad Boys movie, while there will also be a TV spin-off debuting this summer. Paris Jackson and her boyfriend Gabriel Glenn looked very much in love as they went on a PDA filled outing. The 20-year-old daughter of Michael Jackson stepped out with he beau in Los Angeles on Monday. Over the weekend the duo took the stage alongside one another to perform at a club with their band The Soundflowers. Out and about: Paris Jackson and her boyfriend Gabriel Glenn held hands and kissed during a stroll in Los Angeles on Monday Jackson seemed content as she stepped out makeup free in a bohemian striped long sleeve sweatshirt that she appeared to wear as a dress paired with stitched moccasin style booties. Paris leaned into her usual hippie style with her hair down and her skin au naturale. The young beauty smiled sweetly at the cameras during their walk and flashed a peace sign with one hand. Her boyfriend Gabriel was casual in jean and a T-shirt with his hair down, nearly as long as Paris'. Kisses: The couple was dressed down in their relaxed hippie style and stopped for an intimate smooch under the shade of a tree Each of them donned layers of beaded necklaces, rings and bracelets to accessorize their looks. The couple held hands as they strolled and stopped for an intimate kiss under some shaded trees. Paris and Gabriel played their first concert together at The Mint in Los Angeles over the weekend and received a ton of support from the young model's family. Happy and healthy: The 20-year-old daughter of Michael Jackson seemed like she was doing well following a recent hospitalization Her mom Debbie Rowe was in attendance along with her older brother Prince, 22. Younger brother Blanket was not at the show but that is likely because he is just 17-years-old. Additionally, Paris' close friend and godfather Macaulay Culkin and his girlfriend Brenda Song were in the crowd. The show came just weeks after Paris was hospitalized after a friend called police for what was said, at the time, to be a suicide attempt. Paris denied that she had attempted to take her own life, shutting down the reports as erroneous. On stage: Over the weekend, the couple took to the stage with their band The Soundflowers for a performance in Los Angeles Cheerleaders: Paris was supported in the crowd by mom Debbie Rowe, brother Prince and god father Macaulay Culkin Sources later confirmed to DailyMail.com that the King of Pop's daughter had been 'partying' very hard and cut herself with kitchen scissors after she had gotten out of control. The insiders claimed that Jackson continued to act wild once in the hospital and doctors wanted to hold her but her family agreed to send her to rehab in order to secure her release. Paris, however, told friends that she didn't think she needed any sort of treatment. The star's hospitalization followed the release of HBO's two-part documentary Leaving Neverland which accused her late father of the repeated molestation James Safechuck and Wade Robson. She recently wowed the red carpet in a sheer cut-out gown black frock at the NAACP Image Awards. But on Monday, Kate Beckinsale opted for a far more casual look in Los Angeles while boyfriend Pete Davidson, a constant presence during her recent public appearances, remained in New York. The 45-year-old actress teamed stylish black track pants and a white Givenchy T-shirt as she made her way to work Designer diva: Actress Kate Beckinsale stepped out in a casual look on her way to work in Los Angeles, on Monday. She teamed stylish black track pants and a white Givenchy T-shirt She accessorised her ensemble with white heels and a Gucci handbag. Her luscious brunette waves cascaded down her delicate shoulders as she attempted to keep a low profile with a pair of chic over-sized sunglasses. Kate was seen making her way to an awaiting car, toting along with her a black and pink cat carrier with her pet cat Clive safely inside. Stylish: The 45-year-old actress was seen making her way to an awaiting car, toting along with her a black and pink cat carrier with her pet cat Clive safely inside Low key look: Her luscious brunette waves cascaded down her delicate shoulders as she attempted to keep a low profile with a pair of chic over-sized sunglasses Her casual look comes after she turned heads at the at the NAACP Image Awards in a very sheer geometric gown. The dress, by Julien Macdonald, featured a plunging neckline showed off her cleavage and another strategic cut-out revealed her taut tummy. Kate, who is in a relationship with SNL comedian Pete Davidson, spoke to the Radio Times about her return to television in the ITV series The Widow. 'The last time I did a TV series I was getting my A-level results. And I remember I did Emma on ITV a long time ago,' she said. Stunner: Her casual look comes after she turned heads at the at the NAACP Image Awards in a very sheer geometric gown. The dress, by Julien Macdonald, featured a plunging neckline showed off her cleavage and another strategic cut-out revealed her taut tummy TV comeback: Kate, who is in a relationship with SNL comedian Pete Davidson, spoke to the Radio Times about her return to television in the ITV series The Widow. 'I've been saying for years, "When my daughter goes to college, then I'm going to be able to go off and do jobs that are far away."' It wasn't long after Lily had moved away for college that Kate was offered the lead role in the drama. She said: 'They said, "Do you want to go to South Africa for six months and do The Widow?" 'It felt like, "OK, it came around a little bit sooner than I was anticipating it's a bit of a leap of faith and I'm a bit scared and I don't really want to but OK."' The dysfunctional family of superheroes in The Umbrella Academy are here to stay. Netflix announced on Tuesday they'll be renewing the series for a second season. Seven stars from the first 10 episodes will be reprising their roles for the dark, imaginative show. To the rescue: Netflix announced on Tuesday they'll be renewing The Umbrella Academy for a second season starring Ellen Page, 32 The Eisner Award-winning comics from Gerard Way will live on as the streaming platform is adding another batch of episodes coming up. Ellen Page, 32, who plays Vanya Hargreeves, along with Tom Hopper, 34, as her brother Luther, will headline the second season about the group of disbanded superheroes who reunited after their adoptive father's death. Trained to save the world are the rest of the clan played by David Castaneda, 29, Emmy Raver-Lampman, 30, Robert Sheehan, 31, Aidan Gallagher, 15, and Justin Min, 29. As they work to solve their father's murder and prepare for an apocalypse the estranged siblings hold down other jobs outside of their powers. In the present day, Vanya, played by Ellen is a violin player and Luther, played by Tom, is an astronaut. Then there's Emmy's character, Allison, who's a famous actress, Klaus who's portrayed by Robert is a party animal with a drug addiction, David plays Diego, a vigilante and Aidan's role of Ben is a ghost only able to converse with Klaus. Gangs all here: Trained to save the world are the rest of the clan played by Tom Hopper, 34, David Castaneda, 29, Emmy Raver-Lampman, 30, Robert Sheehan, 31, Aidan Gallagher, 15, and Justin Min, 29 Excellent Ellen: Ellen, who plays Vanya Hargreeves, along with Tom Hopper, 34, as her brother Luther, will headline the second season Further casting announcements for the renewal are still being released. After opening to mixed reviews, the renewal will follow a 76 percent rating among critics and 86 percent from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes. Some critics, such as The Hollywood Reporter's chief TV critic, Tim Goodman, said the show 'fails to inspire.' A twisted tale: Some critics, such as The Hollywood Reporter's chief TV critic, Tim Goodman, said the show 'fails to inspire' With 8 graphic novels already written for the comics turned into a series, there will be plenty of additional plot and story line to center the second season around. Created by Universal Content Productions for Netflix, Gerard hopes the TV format will stay true to his writings, which appears to be the plan. 'The idea is not to deviate too much. We want to stay on course with what the comics are doing,' showrunner Steve Blackman told THR. Scary: Donning a supernatural look, Page got into character for her role of Vanya Hargreeves during the first season Musician magic: Ellen's character is a talented violin player with impressive super powers 'Having that plan ahead of time allows us to set some things up now for later seasons, things that you'll see and later be like, 'Oh, I get that now, they did that for this reason.' That's what we're thinking ahead to,' he finished. Blackman will serve alongside executive producers Jeff F. King, Mike Richardson, Keith Goldberg and Gabriel Ba to bring the comics to life. Gerard is also co-producing. Season two's return date is not yet decided, but production will start up again this summer in Toronto. Kate Mara and Jamie Bell proved they are a perfect match while out in LA this week. The pregnant 36-year-old and her husband, 33, both wore Adidas attire for a stroll around the Silver Lake Reservoir. Matching: Kate Mara, 36, was seen out in Los Angeles on Tuesday wearing Adidas head to toe in a look that perfectly complimented her husband, Jamie Bell, 33 Sweet: The couple shared a loving kiss during the outing Kate, who's pregnant with her first child, wore navy blue joggers with a band t-shirt underneath a black Adidas track zip up. She carried a paper mug in her hand and had a purse dangling at her side. Her husband of two years wore dark blue jogging pants and an Adidas top. All comfort: Both were wearing sunglasses as they strolled around the nature filled area in sneakers Bell's sweater, however, was a green crew neck instead of a zip up. Both were wearing sunglasses as they strolled around the nature filled area in sneakers. The pair shared a sweet kiss as they enjoyed their morning outing together. It's been less than a month since Kate announced her pregnancy on Instagram with Bell. Kate has been married to the English actor since 2017. The duo confirmed their pregnancy last month on social media while sharing a snap at the Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Viewing Party in West Hollywood, California. 'Went on a date with our bun in the oven,' Mara wrote in the caption for her roughly 301,000 followers. Jamie already has a son named Jack, 5, with ex, Evan Rachel Wood, who he met while co-starring in the music video for Green Day's 2005 song Wake Me Up When September Ends. After a year of dating, the couple called it quits in 2006, but five years later they rekindled and married in 2012, before later separating again in 2014 after having the boy. Exciting news: Kate and Jamie cryptically posted their pregnancy announcement on Instagram in February Kate and Jamie co-starred in the 2015 superhero movie Fantastic Four and started dating in late 2015. They later got engaged in January 2017 and announced in July 2017 that they had secretly married. Aside from House of Cards, which she is best known for, Kate also starred in the 2018 drama Chappaquiddick as Mary Jo Kopechne. Inseparable: Jamie sweetly kissed his bride on the cheek while roaming through Disneyland together last October Coming up, the strawberry blonde will appear in a new TV movie titled, A Teacher. Jamie can next be seen in the musical drama Rocketman, based on the life of Sir Elton John, 71. Welsh actor Taron Egerton, 29, will portray Elton while Jamie will play his longtime songwriter Bernie Taupin. Rocketman, also starring Richard Madden as Elton's manager, John Reid, and Bryce Dallas Howard as his mother, Sheila Eileen Dwight, is scheduled for release on May 24 in the UK and May 31 in the US. Lydia Bright made a 'heartbreaking' plea as she shared her two of her younger foster brothers were mugged at knife point on Tuesday. The former TOWIE star, 29, said the attack took place over a bike at a bus stop outside Miller & Carter steak house, in Woodford Green, Essex at 4.45pm. In an Instagram post, she informed her 997k followers: 'Absolutely heartbroken. My two, young teenage foster brothers where mugged today at knife point.' 'Absolutely heartbroken': Lydia Bright made an emotional plea as she revealed two of her younger foster brothers were mugged at knife point on Tuesday Lydia did not identify which of her younger foster siblings were mugged. The reality star bemoaned the 'trauma' was 'unbearable' for her siblings as she reassured her fans the police had been called regarding the incident. With a huge following just shy of a million on social media, Lydia urged anyone to come forward with any more information. She went on: 'The trauma this will cause them after they have already experienced so much grief is unbearable and all over a bike. What happened: The former TOWIE star, 29, said the attack took place over a bike at a bus stop outside Miller & Carter steak house, in Woodford Green, Essex at 4.45pm 'The police have been called and whilst I would like to leave them to do there jobs. I just cant sit here and do nothing especially knowing I can reach so many. 'If anyone has any information please DM me and I can forward it to the right people.' (sic) Lydia said her younger brothers were left 'shaken up' by the incident but they were not physically hurt. Heartbreaking: The reality star bemoaned the 'trauma' was 'unbearable' for her siblings as she reassured her fans the police had been called regarding the incident (London, Feb 2019) A MET spokesperson confirmed the incident: 'Police were called at approximately 14:45hrs on Tuesday, 2 April to reports of a teenage boy robbed in High Road, Woodford Green. 'The victim reported that a group of males approached him and demanded his bicycle. One male assaulted him while another threatened him with a knife. 'The males took the bicycle and made off. The victim was not seriously injured. Officers attended the scene but the suspects could not be traced. 'No arrests; enquiries continue.' History: The former TV star's mum Debbie Douglas (London, May 2018) has fostered more than 200 children in the last 25 years while bringing up her four biological kids including Lydia MailOnline approached Lydia Bright's representatives for further comment. The former TV star's mum Debbie Douglas has fostered more than 200 children in the last 25 years while bringing up her four biological kids including Lydia. Lydia admitted her childhood was 'very chaotic' while her parents did a lot of short term fostering which saw a lot of kids move into their family home temporarily. She told The Sun's Fabulous magazine: 'My mum has bundles of energy and shes very passionate about children. 'She thrives in organised chaos, she wouldnt be able to live a normal life. She likes business and craziness, she likes having so much on her plate. 'My childhood was very chaotic, we always had a very busy household.' Their relationship reportedly lasted just two days after choosing to stay together at their final vows ceremony on Tuesday night. But Married At First Sight's Mike Gunner was determined to keep up appearances during a live interview with The Kyle and Jackie O Show on Wednesday morning. The 44-year-old electrician awkwardly tried to claim he was still dating Heidi, 38, before dodging a series of tricky questions about their relationship. 'Yeah, no, we are... we are, absolutely,' he stammered when asked if he and Heidi were still together three months after filming their final vows. Mike, who is doing interviews in Sydney alone while Heidi remains on the Sunshine Coast, added: 'I'm sitting here holding her hand right now. You can't see that?' Unsatisfied by Mike's answers, Kyle Sandilands decided to call Heidi live on air, despite the fact she was presenting her own radio show on Sea FM in Queensland. 'We ARE together!' Married At First Sight's Mike Gunner awkwardly insisted he's still with Heidi Latcham during an interview with The Kyle and Jackie O Show on Wednesday morning 'Hello, how are you going guys? Is my beautiful wife there?' Mike said uncomfortably as he waited to speak to Heidi. The stilted conversation that followed between Mike and Heidi certainly didn't sound like an exchange between a husband and wife. 'How did you feel about it last night, Heids?' asked Mike, who had watched the final vows ceremony by himself in Sydney. Hmm! Mike, who is doing interviews in Sydney alone while Heidi remains on the Sunshine Coast, said: 'I'm sitting here holding her hand right now. You can't see that?' Pictured right: Radio host Kyle Sandilands 'Oh God!' Unsatisfied by Mike's answers, Kyle Sandilands decided to call Heidi (pictured) live on air, despite the fact she was presenting her own radio show on Sea FM in Queensland 'Yeah, I liked it. I liked... Oh God. Just all the emotions. And it just brought back so much. It was so good!' Heidi spluttered. 'Are you still together? Why aren't you together, you two?' Kyle then asked. 'We are together! She just can't do any media because of her early working hours,' Mike replied, before Heidi explained: 'I'm doing my radio show!' Awkward! The stilted conversation that followed between Mike and Heidi certainly didn't sound like an exchange between a husband and wife. Pictured on Married At First Sight At the end of the interview, Kyle asked Mike whether he was telling the truth or if there was something else going on behind the scenes. Once again, Mike played it cool and simply responded: 'Anything's possible...!' On Monday, New Idea reported that the couple decided to call it quits just two days after filming their final vows in December. According to the magazine, Heidi ended the relationship after discovering her husband 'had felt pressured to say he loved her'. Married At First Sight continues Sunday at 7pm on Channel Nine Kim Kardashian was ready to celebrate a new launch on Tuesday. The Calabasas, California native was seen heading to the party for the release of her Versatile Collection of sunglasses with Carolina Lemke eyewear. And the TV siren brought as her guest her 63-year-old momager Kris Jenner. Both were dressed in head-to-toe black as they wore edgy sunglasses making them look ready to star in a female version of Men In Black. The original 1997 film starred Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Women in black: Kim Kardashian was ready to celebrate a new launch on Tuesday with her mother Kris Jenner. Both were dressed in head-to-toe black as they wore edgy sunglasses Their inspiration? The ladies looked ready to star in a female version of Men In Black. The original 1997 film starred Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, pictured Kim was in a power suit which consisted of a belted jacket, black tailored slacks and pointy black boots. The wife of Kanye West carried a Hermes black alligator purse with gold hardware. And the Selfish author wore her own sunglasses that she designed for the Carolina Lemke collection. Mom Jenner was in a similar look but she traded in her heels for a pair for sneakers. Ready to impress: Kim was in a power suit which consisted of a belted jacket, black tailored slacks and pointy black boots Comfir mommy: Mom Jenner was in a similar look but she traded in her heels for a pair for sneakers She loves this move: The sister to Khloe and Kourtney pouted as she flashed a peace sign. Here she is seen with Keltie Knight Kris also had on a pair of shades from her daughter's new line. They were in what appeared to be a showroom with tiled floors and floor-to-ceiling windows. Earlier in the day the cover girl took to Instagram to share the news that the designs were finally on sale after weeks of promoting the line. Posing in all black with the sunglasses on, the mother-of-three said in her caption, 'Drop 1 All of the @carolinalemkeberlin sunglasses are available now at CarolinaLemke.com - Im wearing Sahara in this pic in gold! #Lemke_Partner.' Who's buying Kardashian launched her Versatile Collection with Carolina Lemke eyewear on Tuesday, she announced on Instagram Come and get it! The 38-year-old TV star took to Instagram to share the news that the designs were finally on sale after weeks of promoting the line After coming out with her own makeup line and perfume collection, Kardashian collaborated with Lemke to make her first set of glasses. The shades are futuristic oversized glasses that look like something out of the Matrix. In a few of her promos, Kim posed with several look-alike models who had the same makeup and hair. The campaign was shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, with makeup by Mario Dedivanovic, hair by Chris Appleton, and styling by Danielle Levi. Mogul: After coming out with her own makeup line and perfume collection, Kardashian collaborated with Lemke to make her first set of glasses So many Kims: In a few of her promos, Kim posed with several look-alike models who had the same makeup and hair The ads were inspired by the '80s and '90s. Prices for the glasses start at $90. In early March the socialite puckered up for the camera after stripping down to just her black underwear for the steamy photo shoot. The Keeping Up With The Kardashians mainstay modeled her own retro-inspired shield sunglasses for the German eyewear designer. She was flanked by topless mannequins, all wearing the same shades as the occasional actress. Kim flashed plenty of her abundant cleavage as she pouted for the photo shoot. Le look du jour: The campaign was shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, with makeup by Mario Dedivanovic, hair by Chris Appleton, and styling by Danielle Levi Future's so bright: The Keeping Up With The Kardashians mainstay modeled her own retro-inspired shield sunglasses for the German eyewear designer Also on Tuesday morning Kris took to social media to help plug the line. The mother-of-six tried on several pairs of the sunglasses as she was at home in Hidden Hills, California. Jenner seemed to like the futuristic look that she said went well with her short, black hair. The KUWTK producer looked best in the pink shades. Good mommy: Also on Tuesday, Kim's momager Kris Jenner took to social media to help plug the line She's used to sauntering down a catwalk in full glam. And Kendall Jenner looked supremely comfortable dressed down for an afternoon of errands in Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon. The 23-year-old model covered up her famous figure in a pair of brown slacks and rocked a yellow sweater that said 'art that kills' across her chest. Model behavior: Kendall Jenner looked supremely comfortable dressed down for an afternoon of errands in Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon Kendall was joined by a gaggle of handlers as she took to city streets for a rare day off from her usually packed schedule. The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star stayed warm underneath a large yellow sweatshirt with red block lettering across the top. Jenner's long legs were covered in brown corduroy slacks which she paired with patent leather boots. A message? The 23-year-old model covered up her famous figure in a pair of brown slacks and rocked a yellow sweater that said 'art that kills' across her chest Busy bee: Kendall was joined by a gaggle of handlers as she took to city streets for a rare day off from her usually packed schedule She kept her short brunette hair tied back into a messy bun and wore slim black lenses over her eyes. A recent New York Times piece by Amy Chozick revealed that the Victoria's Secret stunner had little information but some 'faith' in the Fyre Festival and was reportedly paid $250,000 for a promotional post, with pals Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin and Emily Ratajkowski also taking part in collaborations. 'You get reached out to by people to, whether it be to promote or help or whatever, and you never know how these things are going to turn out, sometimes its a risk,' she said. Bright: She kept her short brunette hair tied back into a messy bun and wore slim black lenses over her eyes Kendall frequently uses her massive social media following as a platform to collaborate with businesses and brands. 'I definitely do as much research as I can, but sometimes there isnt much research you can do because its a starting brand and you kind of have to have faith in it and hope it will work out the way people say it will,' she said. The luxury music festival cultivated by Billy McFarland and Ja Rule was heavily promoted by models and influencers, with fans flocking to purchase tickets to the exclusive event in the Bahamas in April-May 2017. Two documentaries about the event and its rise to becoming an all-out failure showed attendees stranded on an island without adequate food, water or shelter, much of which was live tweeted during the challenging ordeal. Caroline Manzo, a former Real Housewife Of New Jersey who was on the first five seasons, has said she was offered a return gig on the series as a 'friend.' The 'friend' designation is of a recurring guest-star rather than a full-time regular, and Caroline, 57, was 'angry' at this 'insult' of a proposal, which she rebuffed. 'I was one of the original women that built this show,' she insisted on the latest episode of the podcast Dear Albie, hosted by her sons Albie, 32, and Chris, 30. Throwback: Caroline Manzo, a former Real Housewife Of New Jersey who was on the first five seasons, has said she was offered a return gig on the series as a Friend Caroline had only warm words for Real Housewives producer Andy Cohen, saying he was not part of the conversations she had with executives about the 'friend' role. 'Andy never reached out to me, 'cause it has to go up the food chain, okay? It didn't reach up to that level, you know,' she explained. When the offer to come back in a reduced capacity was floated to her, 'I'm like: "Listen, I helped build this show. And I don't wanna be - sound like a b****, but I suppose I have to,"' she remembered. 'You're not gonna figure me out after five years being away, to see: "Well, gee, does she blend?" Whether I blend or I don't blend, I'll always be Caroline, okay?' she said. 'Pay me what I'm worth': The Friend designation is of a recurring guest-star rather than a full-time regular, and Caroline, 57, was 'angry' at the 'insult' of a proposal, which she rebuffed 'And that's something I swore to my family and I swore to all my viewers and everything over the years. You'll always get me. So if me's not good enough for you, or maybe the paycheck was something you didn't wanna write at this point - which is my guess - that's the bottom line. I'm not thirsty,' Caroline went on. 'And I told them this. I am - we live a very happy, comfortable life. We've gotten used to being off television, and I told them this as well.' She held that 'either I come back full-blown Caroline Manzo, Housewife Of New Jersey, and you pay me, or I stay home and I watch you.' Caroline has put her foot down and demanded: 'Pay me what I'm worth. Okay, you got an OG here, and I'm gonna be arrogant, okay?' Family time: 'I was one of the original women that built this show,' she insisted on the latest episode of the podcast Dear Albie , hosted by her sons Albie (left) and Chris (right) She said that 'It's just a matter of respect, okay? I was one of the original women that built this show. I was one of the women that they still talk about, okay? Don't come back to me like I'm a newbie and I'm gonna fall for your bulls***, because I'm not.' Caroline's line in the sand is: 'You come back to me and you give me what - a reasonable compensation and a reasonable position, you know, where I feel I've earned and belong, okay, then I'll come back. I'm nobody's Friend. I am not Friend Of. I am not Housewife Maybe. I am Housewife. Okay? So you do it or you don't.' She called the show 'that psycho world,' and snapped that 'you're gonna treat me the way I deserve to be treated, okay, and if you don't, I live my life happily ever after. Guess what? There's no thirst here. My house is paid for. Life is good.' Caroline thundered that 'it just gets me angry that you pick up the phone and you call me like I'm a fool. Ten years I'm playing this game. There's no fool.' Spectator sport: She held that 'either I come back full-blown Caroline Manzo, Housewife Of New Jersey, and you pay me, or I stay home and I watch you' She explained: 'Bottom line is, I told the production company - they wanted me back to see how I would blend with the women. That's an insult. I helped build that show. 'I wasn't the cause of the success. I was part of that puzzle, a very, very important puzzle. Point is: you don't insult me like that. You don't insult me like that by saying: "Let's see how you do." You know how I'm gonna do. Okay? You know how I'm gonna do, you know how I'm gonna blend and you know what I'm gonna bring.' Caroline said: 'It's very insulting, and in those few minutes, those few phone calls brought me right back to why I left, because you are talking to no fool, and you have insulted me.' She revealed: 'I was gonna come back, guys' before the 'insult.' Multiple former Housewives on various franchises have been willing to come back in the Friend role - and some of these have been upgraded back to Housewife status. 'They need you back!': When Caroline posted a clip of her Dear Albie episode to Instagram, she got a warm comment from her sister-in-law Jacqueline Laurita The latter category includes Luann De Lesseps of the New York City franchise and two Atlanta women, Porsha Williams and Sheree Whitfield, People pointed out. When Caroline posted a clip of her Dear Albie episode to Instagram, she got a warm comment from her sister-in-law Jacqueline Laurita. Jacqueline, herself a former Real Housewife Of New Jersey, took a swipe at current cast member Teresa Giudice, whom she and Caroline have feuded with in the past. 'You are the REAL queen of that show and Teresa knows it! Thats why she doesnt want you back and is always talking bad about you publicly. Shes scared of you,' Jacqueline wrote in her comment on Caroline's Instagram post. Taraji P. Henson is opening up about how she still struggles with mental health. In her cover story in Variety's Power Of Women New York issue, the Empire star shared personal details about her longtime battle with depression and anxiety, and how stardom has contributed to her condition. '[Fame] was fun at first, but the older I get, the more private I want to be,' she revealed. 'I think there's a misconception with people in the limelight that we have it all together, and because we have money now and are living out our dreams, everything is fine. That's not the case.' Getting real: Taraji P. Henson opened up about her struggles with mental health and how fame has contributed to her struggles in more recent years The 48-year old actress added: 'When they yell 'cut' and 'that's a wrap,' I go home to very serious problems. I'm still a real human. I suffer from depression. My anxiety is kicking up even more every day, and I've never really dealt with anxiety like that. It's something new.' In order to help with her mental health, the Washington, DC native meets with a therapist on a regular basis to help her get through her darkest moments. 'That's the only way I can get through it, she confessed. 'You can talk to your friends, but you need a professional who can give you exercises. So that when you're on the ledge, you have things to say to yourself that will get you off that ledge and past your weakest moments.' Revelation: 'My anxiety is kicking up even more every day, and I've never really dealt with anxiety like that,' she confessed in the cover story in Variety's Power Of Women New York issue In an effort to end the stigma of mental illness in the African-American community, Henson founded The Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation in honor of her late father, who also struggled with mental heath issues after he returned from serving his country in the Vietnam War. 'Everyone was always asking me, 'Do you have a charity?' Well, dammit, this is going to be my calling, because I'm sick of this,' she said. 'People are killing themselves. People are numbing out on drugs. Not everything is fixed with a pill.' Taking action! To help end the stigma of mental illness in the African-American community, Henson founded The Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation in honor of her late father; she is pictured in her hometown of Washington, DC in February 2019 Henson's father died in 2006 at the age of 58 after battling liver cancer. 'My dad fought in the Vietnam War for our country, returned broken, and received little to no physical or emotional support,' the Empire star wrote in her 2016 memoir Around the Way Girl. 'I stand now in his absence, committed to offering support to African Americans who face trauma daily, simply because they are black.' Along with Henson, Variety's Power Of Women New York issue also includes cover stories with Gigi Hadid, Kacey Musgraves, Bette Midler and Christiane Amanpour. Their Warner Bros film The Kitchen is set for release in August. And stars Tiffany Haddish and Melissa McCarthy were front and center of the Hollywood studio's CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas on Tuesday. The 39-year-old Girls Trip star and the 48-year-old Bridesmaids comedienne both turned heads in bright dresses for the promotional event. All stars: Tiffany Haddish and Melissa McCarthy were front and center of the Hollywood studio's CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas on Tuesday The major studio's demonstration of its upcoming slate was named 'The Big Picture'. And Melissa was as pretty as a picture for her red carpet turn, in a leopard print dress worn with firetruck red heels by Clergerie. Tiffany, meanwhile, wore her own full length dress, albeit in a colorful stripe pattern. The pair are set to star in The Kitchen alongside Elizabeth Moss and Margo Martindale. According to its synopsis on IMDb, the film deals with 'the wives of New York gangsters in Hell's Kitchen in the 1970s [as they] continue to operate their husbands' rackets after they're locked up in prison.' Bright on! The 39-year-old Girls Trip star and the 48-year-old Bridesmaids comedienne both turned heads in bright dresses for the promotional event Stripes: Tiffany, meanwhile, wore her own full length dress, albeit in a colorful stripe pattern Red ruby slippers: Melissa was as pretty as a picture for her red carpet turn, in a leopard print dress worn with firetruck red heels by Clergerie Fun times: In a separate photo op, the Ghostbusters actress goofed around with her director husband Ben Falcone on the red carpet before the event In a separate photo op, the Ghostbusters actress goofed around with her director husband Ben Falcone on the red carpet before the event. The pair are involved in the production of another Warner Bros film slated for release in 2019: Superintelligence. The comedy -to be directed by Falcone- centers on Melissa's character Carol Peters, whose life 'is turned upside down when she is selected for observation by the world's first superintelligence - a form of artificial intelligence that may or may not take over the world.' The couple later took to the stage in elaborate dragon costumes to entertain the crowd and promote their film. McCarthy's ensemble was a showstopper with its sparkling red sequins that came complete with a red and gold cape and a green dragon protruding from behind her head. She added a red headset, matching arm bands and long pointy add-ons to her fingers on her left hand. Falcone looked creature-like in a black sequined costume that had dark green scales and frontal armor. Comic relief: McCarthy and Falcone later took to the stage in elaborate dragon costumes to entertain the crowd and promote their film Working it: The dynamic duo had the crowd laughing with their outrageous outfits and banter Strike a pose: The comedian hammered home her routine with a classic move Melissa has been married to Ben since 2005. They first met when they were at the famous improvisation theater, The Groundlings in Los Angeles. 'We immediately were improvising with each other and immediately gravitating toward each other, writing-wise,' Melissa recalled. They she talked about one of their early skits, 'The first day, everybodys doing their biggest, probably most unrealistic, poorly done characters. And Ben got up there and did this very strange inmate that sat on a chair quietly. I just thought it was the funniest thing. I thought: I like that creepy guy.' The two went on to get married and even perform in the hit movie, Bridesmaids together in 2011. He was the inspiration for Jeff Bridge's character in the Big Lebowski. And now friends of Jeff Dowd are asking fans to chip in to help him pay his medical bills. The 69-year-old film rep and producer recently underwent surgery in Los Angeles and a GoFundme campaign is seeking to raise $25,000 to help him out. Needs help: Friends of Jeff Dowd, dubbed the original 'Dude', are trying to raise $25,000 to cover medical expenses related to recent hernia surgery. Dowd is pictured in June 2018 in LA Calling Dowd 'the Original Dude', the GoFundMe page explains that a scheduled hernia surgery on February 28 turned into a double hernia procedure. A week later, he was back in the hospital having contracted an infection. 'His kidneys stopped working and he was unable to digest food. Jeff was in the ICU for about a week, without his wits, and had a close scrape at the door on St. Patricks Day. Thank Heaven his luck stayed around,' the page states. Following his close call, Dowd was transported to the Rehabilitation Center of Santa Monica on march 20th to begin rehab and is now 'back on his feet.' However, he 'is now facing medical bills from co-pays/deductibles and ongoing costs such as nursing and outpatient rehab.' The GoFundMe page continues: 'Hes been unable to work day-to-day with his responsibilities as a film rep and his bills are now behind. A few of us have chipped in to cover a few short term obligations, however these needs are greater now that he is heading into long-term recovery.' Money: A GoFundMe page, set up by friends of Dowd to collect donations, explains how a routine surgery turned into a near-death experience that's left him needing rehab care Beloved character: Dowd was the inspiration for the Jeff Bridges character in Ethan and Joel Coen's 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Bridges is pictured with co-star John Goodman Dowd is known for being one of the Seattle Seven, a group of radical anti-Vietnam activists involved in an violent anti-war protest in Seattle in February 1970 who served time in jail. He got to know Ethan and Joel Coen during the making of their debut movie Blood Simple released in 1984. The brothers went on to base the character of The Dude in 1998's the Big Lebowski on Dowd and as portrayed by Jeff Bridges, it has become their most famous and beloved character. Dowd also helped create Robert Redford's Sundance Film Institute and Sundance Film Festival that's held each year in Park City, Utah. The new NSW cabinet unveiled by NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her deputy John Barilaro has received a mixed reaction from peak bodies around the state. The new-look line-up, announced on Sunday, gives a renewed focus to the regions after the countryside swung away from the coalition at the state election. Andrew Constance will remain in charge of transport and Brad Hazzard will hold on to health but the Nationals' Paul Toole will take charge of regional transport and roads. Fellow Nationals Melinda Pavey and Adam Marshall have also been given prominent roles in areas that hurt the Liberal/Nationals coalition on March 23. Ms Pavey is bringing "fresh eyes" to the water portfolio partly replacing Niall Blair who stepped away from the regional water portfolio after massive fish kills in the Murray-Darling river system. Mr Blair announced straight after the election that he would go to the backbench. Mr Marshall will take the remainder of Mr Blair's former territory - as Minister for Agriculture and Western NSW. NSW Farmers welcomed Mr Marshall's appointment, with president James Jackson saying in a statement on Sunday that it comes at a critical time for the agricultural industry. Fair Trading Minister Matt Kean has been given the newly combined energy and environment portfolio. While NSW Farmers also welcomed Mr Kean's appointment, the Nature Conservation Council of NSW pointed out this was the fifth environment minister in eight years. Along with Ray Williams, former environment minister Gabrielle Upton announced on Saturday she would not seek reappointment in the ministry. "NSW desperately needs stability, strength and competence in the environment portfolio to ensure nature gets the protections it needs and deserves," the council's chief executive Kate Smolski said in a statement on Sunday. "Matt Kean has his work cut out for him to reverse the disastrous reputation of the Coalition on nature and climate action, we hope he will rise to the challenge." The NSW Business Chamber's chief executive Stephen Cartwright said Mr Kean will bring a "fresh approach" to the issue of energy reliability and pricing, but that it is paramount he consults more regularly with stakeholders in this portfolio. The cabinet has the right mix of experience and fresh ideas, Mr Cartwright said in a statement. He welcomed the retention of deputy Liberal leader Dominic Perrottet as treasurer. Mr Perrottet "has earned the opportunity to continue to manage the state's finances," Mr Cartwright said. In other changes, Rob Stokes has been returned to the planning portfolio in the new cabinet, with development - particularly in Sydney - becoming a major issue. David Elliott has been made police minister, while Sarah Mitchell takes over from Mr Stokes as Education Minister. Anthony Roberts moves from planning to the counter terrorism and corrections portfolio, while MP Damien Tudehope has taken on finance. Critics have been quick to point out there are fewer women with portfolios than there were before the reshuffle. There are now only five female portfolio holders including Ms Berejiklian - that is one less than before the shake-up. Three of those women are Nationals. Ms Berejiklian, asked if her party had a problem with women, said half of her parliamentary secretaries are women and half of the six new Liberals to join parliament are women. Brisbane will soon get a new mayor after the man who has held the top job for eight years steps down. Graham Quirk has one week left in the role before he retires, making way for councillor Adrian Schrinner who was elected to take on the job by the Liberal National Party on Sunday. The timing of Mr Quirk's announcement means the party got to choose his replacement instead of the public. The 41-year-old Mr Schrinner on Sunday said he was "deeply humbled" to be elected to take over the Lord Mayoralship. "I love this city. I was born here, I grew up here and now I'm raising my own family here. Brisbane is in my blood," Mr Schrinner said in statement. "My goal as Lord Mayor will be simple - to make sure the Brisbane of tomorrow is even better than the Brisbane of today." Mr Schrinner paid tribute to Mr Quirk. "I could not have had a better mentor, teacher and friend to prepare me for the important job of Lord Mayor," he said. "I've learned so much from him over eight years serving by his side, and I thank him for being so generous with his time and his wisdom over those years." Mr Schrinner said he will be driven by a focus on building the critical infrastructure needed by the city and on protecting its unique lifestyle and green space. He announced a plan for five new "green bridges" to reduce traffic congestion and improve public and active transport. The program, which will cost at least $550 million, will include the already announced Kangaroo Point to CBD river crossing, as well as Toowong to West End, St Lucia to West End, Breakfast Creek and Bellbowrie. "I plan to spearhead the biggest investment in parks and green space our city has ever seen," Mr Schrinner said. Party leader Deb Frecklington said she congratulated Mr Schrinner "on being appointed Lord Mayor of Australia's biggest Council". "I look forward to working with him and the rest of Council to tackle several significant issues, including busting traffic congestion. "I also take this opportunity to again thank former Lord Mayor Graham Quirk for his passion and professionalism in the top job over the past eight years." Mr Schrinner will officially become Brisbane's 17th Lord Mayor at a special council meeting on Monday, April 8. He currently holds the deputy mayor position and beat Peter Matic in the ballot. Krista Adams will become Deputy Mayor. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will hand down his first federal budget on Tuesday but Labor is promising to overwrite it immediately if it wins the May election. The budget will be a virtual election campaign blueprint, but Labor says if it is elected it will deliver its own budget before September. "If we win, we will bring down a major economic statement in the third quarter of the year, which will in effect be the first budget of a Shorten Labor government," shadow treasurer Chris Bowen told ABC's Insiders on Sunday. "We need to reset the economic settings. We need to update the forecasts with the new government in place." The coalition will deliver a surplus in the 2019/20 financial year Mr Frydenberg on Sunday announced $285 million to help almost four million Australians cover their energy bills. The Energy Assistance Payment will be paid into eligible accounts before July, and will mainly help pensioners and veterans. "This is money that is going to go into people's pockets to help meet the cost of their next power bill," Mr Frydenberg told Nine's Weekend Today Show. Mr Frydenberg pushed back against criticism that the government's surplus was built on huge underspending in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. He also argued that wages, which have stagnated in recent years, are picking up compared to this point last year. But Mr Bowen said the coalition had over-estimated wage growth in every single budget it had handed down. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is expected to call an election for May 11 or 18 within days of Tuesday's budget being handed down. A student priest who raped his dying friend's 12-year-old son has been jailed for a decade. Paul Pavlou, 59 was studying to become a priest in 2003 when he offered "respite" to the family of his friend who had terminal cancer. But Pavlou used the opportunity to gratify his "lascivious and depraved desires" and raped his friend's 12-year-old son on three occasions. After the attacks, Pavlou would tell the victim that he loved him and that he was a "special child" and a "child of God", the County Court has been told. The victim reported the rapes to police 13 years later, but Pavlou initially claimed he couldn't recall molesting the boy. He later pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual penetration of a child under 16. His victim, who is now an adult, said he cried himself to sleep for years after the "evil" crimes. In sentencing on Monday, Judge Greg Lyon said Pavlou's actions deserved "utter condemnation". Pavlou, who has already been in custody for 203 days, must serve seven years in jail before he is eligible for release on parole. The wait is finally over. You can now get meals for your four-legged friends delivered to your door, visit a bin chicken exhibition at the zoo, see a giant Alf Stewart wax figure, share your hotel bed with strangers for a cheaper rate and buy a weather-proof wedding dress. But more excitingly - pizzas with no crusts, a McPickle burger, purple apples and candied pepperoni thick shakes are now on the menu. Well, not really. It's just a selection of jokes and bogus announcements doing the rounds on Monday for April Fools' Day. For travellers keen to make new friends and save money, Travelodge Hotels offered a new bedshare service that could save you up to 50 per cent. As well as sharing a room, towels, toilet paper and all other amenities are shared between guests. A new exhibition featuring Australia's famous 'bin chicken' - also known as the white ibis - has also been promised by Wild Life Sydney Zoo. In response to demand by international visitors, the zoo joked, five of the majestic, dumpster diving birds will have their own home at the zoo in Darling Harbour from Monday. Menulog is sure to steal a pizza your hearts with MenuPet - a dedicated service to deliver meals to your four-legged friends. In other pizza news, Deliveroo is saying ciao to crusts - removing all crust options from its app due to overwhelming anti-crust customer feedback. Other April Fools' Day pranks include: * Sportsbet and the NSW government setting up a multi-million dollar deal sponsorship deal that would see the Sydney Opera House sails turn blue every day. * Every NSW police station will have a police cat. * Outdoor retail shop Kathmandu has created the world's first all-weather, all-terrain wedding dress. * Audible has announced a three-second audiobook for bored fish inspired by the belief they have three-second memories. * Undercover Victoria Police officers to get access to a range of new uniforms, styled as formal, sporty and biker casual. * The Bureau of Meteorology is updating the way rainbows look in Australia. Colours will now appear in alphabetical order. * Tunes by Kanye, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj will be among some of the songs played on floating stereos in the ocean in a new plan by Gold Coast universities to scare off sharks. * You'll be able to ride on champion racehorse Phar Lap which is being converted into an animatronic display at Melbourne Museum. * McDonald's announced a new McPickle burger - featuring juicy pickles layered between melted cheese, ketchup on a toasted sesame seed bun. * A brand new apple variety - the Purple Prince - with bright purple skin and crisp white flesh will be available at the Dandenong Markets. * Madame Tussauds gets the green light to launch Sydney's first-ever giant figure - proposing four concepts, including Ian Thorpe, Megan Gale, Kylie Minogue and Ray Meagher (aka Alf Stewart). Home prices recorded their 17th consecutive month of price falls in March, but the rate of decline could be easing even as it spreads. Figures tallied up by CoreLogic showed a 0.6 per cent decline in property prices across the country in March, with Sydney recording a 0.9 per cent drop and Melbourne falling 0.8 per cent as Brisbane and Darwin shed 0.6 per cent. The March drop in average Australian home prices was the smallest of the month-on-month declines since October. "While the pace of falls has slowed in March, the scope of the downturn has become more geographically widespread," CoreLogic analyst Tim Lawless said. Of the 46 capital city sub-regions monitored by the real estate analysis company only seven areas were able to avoid annual falls - a dramatic shift from the 30 areas holding up in positive territory at the same time last year. Canberra recorded no change in home values in March, while prices increased 0.6 per cent in Hobart. The data released on Monday also highlighted that rents dropped across Australia's capital cities over 12 months - down 0.1 per cent - for the first time since Corelogic started tracking the metric in May 2005, with average Sydney rental prices falling 3.1 per cent over the year. "Sluggish rental conditions are likely the result of higher rental supply coupled with a reduction in rental demand," Mr Lawless said. CORELOGIC HOME VALUES: Sydney: Down 0.9% in March, down 3.2% in past three months Melbourne: Down 0.8% in March, down 3.4% in past three months Brisbane: Down 0.6% in March, down 1.1% in past three months Adelaide: Down 0.2% in March, down 0.5% in past three months Perth: Down 0.4% in March, down 2.9% in past three months Hobart: Up 0.6% in March, up 1.2% in past three months Darwin: Down 0.6% in March, down 3.9% in past three months National: Down 0.6% in March, down 2.3% in past three months. A young woman screamed when she saw her boyfriend throw her cat Chau Chau off the balcony of their 45th floor apartment in Melbourne's CBD, a court has been told. Melbourne University commerce student Kaiqi Chen says she saw her cat "in the air" before rushing down to find one-year-old Chau Chau dead on the pavement on Elizabeth Street. Her boyfriend Cheng Lu has pleaded not guilty to animal cruelty and reckless endangerment over the incident in April 2018 and is facing a contest hearing in Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday. TWISTS AND TURNS OF THE TURNBULL/MORRISON GOVERNMENTS There have been many highs and lows for the Liberal-National coalition since the 2016 federal election. -- 2016 JULY * The coalition under Malcolm Turnbull scrapes back into power with a one-seat majority, scoring 50.4 per cent of the two-party vote. NOVEMBER * Proposed same-sex marriage plebiscite is defeated in the Senate. * Government restores the building industry watchdog DECEMBER * Government passes controversial backpacker tax. -- 2017 JANUARY * Turnbull reshuffles cabinet after an expenses scandal forces the resignation of health minister Sussan Ley. FEBRUARY * PM hoses down reports he was berated by US President Donald Trump over a refugee swap deal. * Cory Bernardi quits the Liberals to start his own Australian Conservatives party MARCH * Small business tax cuts pass parliament, but broader plan stalls. APRIL * Turnbull unveils plans to make it harder to become an Australian citizen. MAY * Treasurer Scott Morrison hands down his second budget, announcing a gradual thaw of the Medicare rebate freeze that almost cost Turnbull the election. JUNE * New bank levy clears parliament. * Turnbull responds to Chief Scientist Alan Finkel's review of the energy market with new rules to restrict gas exports and a plan to scrap a process that allows power companies to raise prices. * Major school funding overhaul, aka Gonski 2.0, clears parliament with crossbench support. JULY * Citizenship debacle begins with Greens senator Scott Ludlam resigning. Coalition two-party position slips to 45 per cent. AUGUST * Pauline Hanson wears a burqa in parliament. Attorney-General George Brandis describes it as an "appalling thing to do". SEPTEMBER * Cabinet minister Fiona Nash and crossbencher Nick Xenophon referred to the High Court over their dual citizenship. OCTOBER * The High Court boots Barnaby Joyce from parliament because of his dual New Zealand citizenship, while federal minister Matt Canavan and Nick Xenophon can remain. NOVEMBER * 61.6 per cent of Australians say yes to same-sex marriage in a postal survey. * Turnbull announces a royal commission into misconduct in the financial sector. DECEMBER * Barnaby Joyce wins by-election and tells parliament that he is separated from his wife. * Same-sex marriage is legalised after new laws clear federal parliament. * Labor senator Sam Dastyari quits parliament over his Chinese donor connections. -- 2018 JANUARY * Turnbull pledges a year of "rewards" for Australians after two years of economic reforms. FEBRUARY * After news of his affair with a former staffer breaks in the media, Barnaby Joyce resigns as deputy prime minister and Nationals leader. MARCH * Turnbull says Liberal win in South Australian election is an endorsement of the government's energy plan. APRIL * Turnbull loses his 30th consecutive Newspoll and shrugs it off as ministers rally around him MAY * Katy Gallagher case in the High Court leads to more citizenship resignations, this time on the Labor side and crossbencher Rebekha Sharkie. JUNE * The government's $144 billion personal income tax cut plan passes parliament. JULY * A "super Saturday" of five by-elections brings no wins for the government, with four seats returning to Labor and one crossbench MP. AUGUST * Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott speak out over the direction of the government. * Malcolm Turnbull defeats Peter Dutton 48-35 in a party room leadership ballot. Dutton resigns from front bench. * Turnbull resigns, but Dutton loses to Scott Morrison 45-40. * Female Liberals claim to have been bullied. Julia Banks decides to resign at next election over issue. SEPTEMBER * Morrison seeks to reset energy policy. Flags possible royal commission into energy. * Morrison makes first overseas trip as PM, to Indonesia. * Morrison announces a royal commission into aged care. * Liberal MP Ann Sudmalis announces she's quitting parliament, blaming "bullying" branch stackers. * Morrison strikes a $4.6 billion peace deal with Catholic and independent schools. OCTOBER * Morrison reveals he is considering moving Australia's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. * Government makes an embarrassing backdown after senators voted in favour of Pauline Hanson's "it's OK to be white" motion. * Liberals' Dave Sharma loses the Wentworth by-election to independent Kerryn Phelps. * Government make a national apology to victims of institutional child sex abuse. NOVEMBER * Labor's Daniel Andrews decisively wins the Victorian state election. Federal Liberals blamed for loss. * Julia Banks quits the Liberal Party to sit as an independent, bagging her party's right faction. * Government announces an April 2 budget will be in surplus, with an election to follow in May. -- DECEMBER * Morrison says Australia would recognise West Jerusalem as Israel's capital but maintain its embassy in Tel Aviv. * Nationals MP for Mallee Andrew Broad stands down as an assistant minister over the "sugar daddy" scandal, then decides not to stand at next election. -- 2019 JANUARY * Minister Kelly O'Dwyer announces she is quitting to spend more time with her family, as does former minister Michael Keenan and NT frontbencher Nigel Scullion. * Liberal candidate in Gilmore, Grant Schultz, is axed in favour of former Labor president Warren Mundine. Schultz decides to run as an independent, with the backing of disgruntled party members. FEBRUARY * Former Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop says she is retiring, as does Defence Minister Christopher Pyne. * Government holds longest-ever question time to delay defeat on a disability royal commission motion. * Medevac laws pass parliament contrary to government's wishes, triggering reopening of Christmas Island facility. MARCH * Indonesia free trade deal signed. * Nationals launched bid for coal-fired power, as Michael McCormack and Barnaby Joyce exchange fire. * Former minister Craig Laundy retires. * Debate over extremism after Christchurch mosque shooting. * Liberals/National coalition re-elected in NSW election APRIL * Federal budget brought forward a month to deliver pre-election sweeteners and a surplus. KEY ECONOMIC POINTS COALITION * Unemployment rate around five per cent. * Tax rates for individuals and small and medium-sized business being lowered. * Downward pressure on electricity and gas prices. * $75 billion, 10-year infrastructure plan. * Industry policy covers breadth of the economy, beyond mining, tourism and agriculture to services, the defence industry, medical industry, and science and technology. * Trade strategy to secure more bilateral and multi-lateral agreements, especially in the Asian region. * Cuts to red tape, saving about $6 billion. * Budget on track for surplus in 2019/20 - first in 12 years. * GST carve-up changes legislated. -- LABOR * Proposes an Australian Investment Guarantee package to help drive business investment and create jobs. * Budget surplus is more about strong global conditions than good management. But plan to deliver surpluses over the medium term. * Overall annual tax take is up by more than $100 billion since 2013. * Forecasts for investment growth, wages, consumption are down. * Debt has doubled since coalition came to power in 2013. * Government has failed to properly fund schools and hospitals, which Labor would prioritise. * Tough decisions are made to find budget savings such as paring back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions. * Review of dole payment level. Kingmakers, it's said, don't usually become kings. Labor leader Bill Shorten, one of the ultimate political animals of his generation, will be striving in the federal election to break the mould. It is his second and, if unsuccessful, almost certainly his last bid for the top job. In 2016 he cut Malcolm Turnbull's majority to one member. Shorten, 51, has trade unions in his blood from both sides of his family. He grew up with union leaders yarning and plotting around the kitchen table. At Melbourne's Xavier College he did the numbers for house elections and at Monash University, where he did an Arts/Law degree, political intrigue consumed him. A friend at that time was quoted in a profile in The Monthly: "It was his ability to do it around the clock. When we were all reeling around hungover after some big night, he'd be hard at it, ringing around, meeting people...Bill had a shocking disregard for his classes, because he was focused on this quest for political aspiration...He just used to borrow our notes and scrape through." While scraping through, he became president of Young Labor, a delegate to the ALP national conference and worked for the Labor state government and frontbencher Gareth Evans. After graduating he had a short stint with a Labor law firm and then joined the ailing Australian Workers' Union. Within seven years he was the AWU's national secretary. His rise in the union was relatively smooth. It was helped by his grasp of economics (he did a part-time MBA), his easy manner on the workplace floor and his ability to gain the trust of employers. He reformed the union's structures and reversed its membership decline. His rise in the faction-ridden Victorian party was rockier. But he steadily wrested control of the dominant Right. He was clearly a coming man, if still unknown outside Victoria. That changed in April 2006 with the collapse at the Beaconsfield mine in northern Tasmania and the dramatic fortnight-long search and rescue effort for two trapped miners. Shorten, as their union leader, rushed there and quickly became the public face of the operation. He did well by all concerned - the miners and their families, the community, mine safety, and himself. Back in 1999 Shorten won preselection for the state seat of Melton, but didn't go ahead, preferring to stay with the union. By 2007 he felt ready for a bigger stage. He decided on the safe federal Labor seat of Maribyrnong and there was nothing incumbent Bob Sercombe, though a frontbencher, could do to stop him. Shorten went to Canberra in the election that swept Labor under Kevin Rudd back to power. Rudd resisted pressure to put him straight into the ministry. However he became parliamentary secretary for disability services and was soon laying the foundations for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. He championed the disabled. He soon moved upwards and over the course of the Rudd/Gillard governments held the financial services, workplace relations and education portfolios. He also plotted, being a major figure in the overthrow of Rudd by Julia Gillard and then, in a desperate attempt to reduce the damage, the return of Rudd. When the dust had settled and a rampant Tony Abbott was prime minister Shorten became opposition leader by a new process that delivered a somewhat ambiguous outcome. Against the Left's Anthony Albanese, he won a sufficient majority of caucus votes to wipe out his rival's lead on the party members' vote. In 2016, on the back of a ferocious "Mediscare" campaign, Shorten ran Malcolm Turnbull (who'd overthrown Abbott the previous year) desperately close. Since the election and the Liberal leadership spill which ended in Scott Morrison taking the top job, Labor has consistently been in front on a two-party preferred basis. But Morrison, like Turnbull before him, has been preferred PM. Perhaps that will be Shorten's fatal flaw - his competence not quite counter-balancing his reputation for intrigue and plot. Scott Morrison was being followed by a media pack outside the MCG not long after taking over as prime minister. He paused to shake the hand of a Geelong Cats supporter. "What's your name, then?" the man asked. He was later booed when his image appeared on the big screen inside the famous grounds. Eight months later, ScoMo, as he is known, is hoping for better name recognition - and voter attitude. The 50-year-old father-of-two ran Tourism Australia before a successful stint as state director of the NSW Liberal Party. He was elected to federal parliament in 2007, his NSW electorate of Cook marking the point of arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay. After the defeat of the Labor government in 2013, Morrison rose to prominence by spearheading the "stop the boats" approach to border protection as immigration minister to Tony Abbott. His hardline stance toward asylum seekers bewildered some observers, given his devout Christian beliefs. But he professed a deep belief in the righteousness of crushing the evil people-smuggling trade and preserving the safety of those on board rickety boats. During a nine-month stint as social services minister, Morrison was also forced to sell the Abbott government's deeply unpopular 2014 budget, which was laced with a cocktail of deep welfare cuts. However, Morrison was more pragmatic in the role of treasurer, performing back-flips on a range of unpopular government policies. Immensely unpopular measures including a Medicare levy hike, superannuation changes and big business tax cuts were each eventually cast aside like water off a duck's back. Just days before taking the Liberal leadership in August last year, Morrison stood in the prime minister's courtyard and was asked to rule out having any leadership ambitions. "This is my leader and I'm ambitious for him," he told reporters, throwing his arm around Turnbull with a grin. In reality, he has always held aspirations to lead the Liberal Party, despite being largely unknown by ordinary voters. He saw off Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for the leadership, having become a "consensus candidate" who many colleagues hoped would bridge a divide between the party's warring moderate and conservative wings. He split the vote of the party's right faction and scored the so-called "Anyone but Dutton" vote from some on the left. However since that time he's sought to bring the Liberal tribes together. A recent example was the revamp of the party's climate policy, which received strong backing from moderates but also kudos from conservatives when he held out hope of a coal-fired power station in north Queensland. He's spent months neutralising some key trouble spots for the coalition and building his profile as the nation's leader. In September he announced a royal commission into problems in the aged care sector, while also striking a peace deal with Catholic and independent schools. A month later he delivered a much-awaited national apology to survivors of institutional child sex abuse. However, he's been unable to make the polls move into positive territory for the government. Along with coalition colleagues, Morrison was breathing a sigh of relief when Gladys Berejiklian won the March 23 NSW election. The trick now for ScoMo is to turn a burst of confidence into an unlikely victory. A senior officer who endorsed 'Lawyer X' Nicola Gobbo's role as a Victoria Police informer later remained mute as the force was embroiled in legal action over her controversial recruitment. Detective Inspector Gavan Segrave approved Ms Gobbo as a "credible" source of information for police in 1999. A criminal barrister-turned snitch, Ms Gobbo was first registered as an informer in 1995 and again from 2007 to 2009 while representing some of the most prominent figures in Melbourne gangland war, including Carl Williams and drug lord Tony Mokbel. Inspector Segrave told a royal commission into police use of informers on Monday that the first he heard of her third recruitment by police was in 2010. Between April and August that year Ms Gobbo pursued legal action against Victoria Police over her informing, which ended in a confidential settlement and an order from then-chief commissioner Simon Overland that police immediately stop accepting tips from her. Inspector Segrave made the discovery while acting as a superintendent in the covert services division, which required him to receive reports and provide advice to an assistant commissioner in relation to Ms Gobbo's legal case. But he did not reveal his prior involvement with her. "It's not my practice to talk about any investigations I've been involved in with people other than those who need to know," Insp Segrave said. But counsel assisting the commission, Megan Tittensor, took issue with that explanation. "Why would Victoria Police, who are dealing with this litigation in 2010, the upper echelons in 2010, not need to know about this registration back in 1999?" she asked. Inspector Segrave said he believed the 2010 legal action only related to her later period of registration. "So you made a conscious decision in 2010 not to tell anyone in Victoria Police you'd had prior dealings with this person as an informer?" Ms Tittensor asked. "Yes," Det Segrave replied, saying he was conscious of the need to "ensure security around a range of things pertaining to investigations". The detective was also quizzed on Monday about his first meeting with Ms Gobbo in May 1999 at the Emerald Hotel, where members of the drug squad handed her over to himself and Ms Gobbo's next handler, then detective Jeff Pope. Inspector Segrave was unable to independently recall much of that meeting or any of the subsequent meetings he had with Ms Gobbo in May and June 1999, which he accepted at times lasted between two and four hours. Mr Pope, who went on to become an assistant commissioner, is expected to give evidence later on Monday. A company which carried out lighting work at the MCG has been slammed for false productivity claims after a 10-month investigation by Victoria's energy watchdog. The work at the MCG wasn't part of the breaches, instead the false claims were linked to 39 regional commercial enterprises. Wattly Pty Ltd has been forced to surrender 37,919 energy efficiency certificates after the Essential Services Commission found widespread breaches. The company, which has offices in Melbourne and Sydney, was conducting work for the Victorian Energy Upgrades program in a bid to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The company says it is a leader in environmental certificate creation and trading. Wattly claims to have saved clients gigawatt hours of energy, millions of dollars and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 2.5 million tonnes of CO2e. On its website, Wattly says it replaced 11,000 globes with energy-efficient lighting at the MCG, which the company claims will save more than 8500 tonnes of carbon emissions over 10 years. Commission chairman Ron Ben-David said while light installations were carried out by a subcontractor, Wattly had to take blame for the upgrades. "It is unacceptable that Wattly did not have the required internal processes in place to identify the problem," he said in a statement issued on Monday. "Wattly must also engage an independent auditor to evaluate its processes and procedures to ensure this does not happen again." Since 2009, the energy upgrades program has seen millions of inefficient energy products replaced in households and businesses. AAP has approached Wattly for comment. Stricter gun laws promised after the Christchurch mosque shootings will be urgently debated by New Zealand lawmakers this week. A ban on military style semi-automatic (MSSA) rifles and a raft of other changes pledged following the March 15 terror attack have been officially introduced to parliament and will be rushed through a first reading on Tuesday, the government says. The bill also creates a new series of gun-related criminal offences, some punishable with up to 10 years' jail, and gives owners of weapons now deemed illegal until the end of September to hand them over to police. Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters told reporters on Monday the government aimed to enshrine the changes in law by April 12. "You cannot be a serious New Zealander, without having a shared regret that we have not worked in prior times much faster on this issue," he said. The laws are expected to go through a truncated consultation process before passing final readings next week. Most legislation introduced in New Zealand is debated and consulted on for at least half a year, although passing laws in urgent sittings is not uncommon. The specific changes include bans on MSSA firearms, any parts, magazines or ammo that can covert other guns to MSSAs, and pump-action shotguns that can carry more than five cartridges. But .22 calibre semi-automatics and small-capacity shotguns have been exempted from the new rules. The laws look likely to receive near-unanimous support in parliament, with the conservative opposition National Party giving its backing and even the farming lobby group Federated Farmers not opposing a tightening of rules. The lone political hold-out so far has been the leader and sole MP for the libertarian Act party, David Seymour, who has raised concerns the bill is being pushed through too fast. Six days after the terror attack, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced an immediate ban on the sale of the high-powered rifles to prevent panic buying and stockpiling, along with plans to permanently restrict the weapons. The 28-year-old Australian man arrested over the attack is thought to have used two of the rifles, legally bought but then modified, along with three other weapons. New Zealand's government is still mulling the details of a planned buyback scheme, which will have an estimated cost of up to $NZ200 million ($A192 million). About 200 people had already voluntarily turned their weapons in to police before Monday's announcement, officials say. There is currently no figure for how many of the weapons are in circulation as New Zealand does not maintain a register for firearms, although one is now also being considered as part of a second stage of promised law changes. But there are an estimated 1.5 million firearms in the country - roughly one for every three citizens and more than double the rate in Australia. Under the old rules, pest control was legally considered a reason to own a military-style semi-automatic weapon. The last significant changes to New Zealand gun laws were made in 1992, following a shooting in the seaside, South Island town of Aramoana that killed 13, with several attempts at reform failing since. Sydney FC defender Alex Wilkinson admits Melbourne Victory did his team a big favour but he's well aware they could snatch it away again this week. Victory's 2-0 win over ladder leaders Perth Glory on Saturday breathed fresh life into second-placed Sydney FC's quest for a record extending third-consecutive Premiers Plate. The Sky Blues are six points behind Perth with four rounds remaining. Glamour clubs Sydney and third-placed Victory meet in the latest edition of their Big Blue rivalry at the SCG on Saturday. Kevin Muscat's champions are only one point behind Sydney and hell bent on overtaking their hosts. If Sydney FC can retain momentum and the leaders continue to stumble, the Sky Blues' penultimate round home clash with the Glory on April 18 could yet prove decisive. Wilkinson doesn't mind acknowledging the battle for top spot is on Sydney's radar as they prepare to face Victory. "We've had some great battles against Melbourne Victory over the years and it's one that we always look forward to and hopefully we can come away with a very important three points," Wilkinson said on Monday. "We're still pushing for that top spot though and Victory did us a bit of favour over the weekend by beating Perth, because it gets us that little bit closer. "We still think we are a good chance of gaining that Premiers Plate until it becomes mathematically impossible, and if we can keep building and winning games it will be all to play for against Perth in a few weeks." He's facing the prospect of setting a new record for fewest sitting days spent in the Senate, but the Liberal Democrats' Duncan Spender is clear about what he wants to achieve. David Leyonhjelm's former chief of staff will be sworn in to parliament on Tuesday, which could also mark the start of his final week in parliament. With two Senate days scheduled before an election is due, Senator Spender is on track to eclipse Charles MacKellar - who lasted eight sitting days in 1903 - if he fails to win a seat at the May election. Senator Spender told AAP he would make the most of the opportunity by pushing to ensure Senate estimates continues into next week - even if an election is called. He said the Senate could continue to operate even after the government enters caretaker period, but doesn't know whether the opposition will support his motion. That throws down the challenge to Labor, which has badgered the government over a lack of parliamentary action yet wouldn't want to miss a second on the campaign trail. While the Liberal Democrats are fierce advocates of free speech, Senator Spender doesn't believe supporting a censure motion of independent Fraser Anning is at odds with libertarian values. The Senate will vote on Tuesday to admonish the Queenslander for blaming the Christchurch terror attacks on Muslim immigration. He defends Senator Anning's right to make the widely-condemned remarks along with his own right to support censuring them. Senator Spender also intends to vote against Labor's bid to torpedo regulations which prevent long-term casual workers from claiming annual leave entitlements. He says industrial relations laws are a "dog's breakfast" that primarily benefit lawyers rather than employers or workers. Senator Spender will make a maiden speech on Wednesday where he hopes to focus on some of the lesser-known positions of his party. The Liberal Democrats' founder will be one of three new faces sworn in to parliament on Tuesday, along with Labor's Raff Ciccone and Tasmanian Liberal Wendy Askew. Senator Ciccone is set to be re-elected for a six-year term at the election after replacing factional ally Jacinta Collins at the top of Labor's Victorian ticket. Senator Askew is taking her brother David Bushby's seat as he leaves parliament to take the plum job of Australia's consul-general in Chicago. Australians aged 65 and 66 will be able to make voluntary superannuation contributions without meeting the work test from mid-2020, under a plan to be unveiled in Tuesday's federal budget. Currently, they can only make voluntary concessional and non-concessional contributions if they work a minimum of 40 hours over a 30-day period. This will align the work test with the eligibility age for the age pension, which is scheduled to reach 67 from July 1, 2023. About 55,000 people will benefit from the change. As well, the government plans to increase the age limit for spouse contributions from 69 to 74 years. Currently, those aged 70 years and over cannot receive contributions made by another person on their behalf. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said on top of the changes, the government would extend access to the bring-forward arrangements, which currently allow those aged less than 65 years to make three years' worth of non-concessional contributions, which are capped at $100,000 a year, to their super in a single year. This will now be extended to those aged 65 and 66. Tasmania's public sector teachers have rejected a state government pay offer on the eve of two days of industrial action that will force some schools to close early. The Australian Education Union's Tasmania branch on Monday rejected the Liberal government's pay offer of seven per cent over three years. "Teachers are not willing to lock-in three years of under-funding and under-resourcing for our kids," branch president Helen Richardson said. The AEU wants a pay rise of three per cent per year. Before the union announced its decision, the state government on Monday accused the AEU of not acting in good faith over the planned strikes. "For AEU bosses to hold a meeting at 4pm today to discuss whether to call off the strike action is simply ridiculous," Minister for Education and Training Jeremy Rockliff said. "They have had all weekend to call off the strike action." Mr Rockliff said the union should have conducted a full ballot of teachers and cancelled industrial action while members consider the government's offer. But the union says the government could have avoided this week's strike by considering a counter-offer following the rejection of a previous pay offer two weeks ago. The latest pay offer is 0.25 per cent higher than the previous offer. "We call on the premier to put quality education ahead of his political game playing which is causing unnecessary disruption and uncertainty for parents," Ms Richardson said. School stop-work meetings will go ahead as planned in Burnie on Tuesday and in Launceston and Hobart on Wednesday. The government has published a list of schools that will be forced to open late or close early. The government and public sector unions have been at loggerheads for the best part of a year over pay and conditions. Police have swooped on people allegedly linked to bikies on the Gold Coast, warning they're going to keep raiding outlaw motorcycle gangs until they change their ways. More than 70 officers raided some 16 places on Monday charging 18 people with a total of 52 offences, Detective Inspector Brendan Smith says. "People associated with OMCGs needed to understand they will be continually targeted until they change their offending behaviour," he said in a statement. "If they don't change, we will back as many times as necessary to prevent offending behaviour." Police will allege that in these raids they found a stolen vehicle, a stolen trailer, steroids and dangerous drugs including cocaine, Methylamphetamine - Ice- and cannabis. They also allegedly found a shortened firearm and Category R weapons such as a conductive energy weapon, nunchucks and knuckle duster. The accused men, women and teenaged girl range in age from 16 to 61. They are due to appear in the Southport Magistrates Court on April 15. Police investigating the disappearance of a Brisbane man more than a month ago hope a refrigerator dug up in the man's back yard will help find him. David Thornton, 58, was last seen on February 22 in his home suburb of Goodna, west of Brisbane, and has not made contact with friends or family since. He was only reported missing by family members on March 12 and his disappearance is being treated as suspicious. On Monday, Queensland Police Service released footage of a fridge or freezer excavated from the man's backyard during the search. "It's been sent off to the lab for testing and hopefully we'll have a better idea what's happening on Tuesday," a spokesman told AAP. Police started digging up the backyard of Mr Thornton's home on Saturday evening. On Monday morning detectives ordered the excavation resume after fresh information from a member of the public. Forensic experts are also combing the inside of the house, where Mr Thornton lived alone. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) President Rodrigo Duterte and his cabinet examined possible interventions to mitigate the adverse effects of the ongoing El Nino across the country that has damaged over 5 billion worth of agricultural products. In a statement, Presidential spokesman Sal Panelo identified various proposed measures that were taken up in Monday's cabinet meeting, among these, were the creation of a Department of Water and a Department of Disaster Resilience, and water conservation campaigns. Officials also recommended the "dredging of waterways, replacing tunnels and aqueducts, installing water tank systems in all Department of Health hospitals" and increased funding for water treatment plants as additional solutions. The El Nino has lead to rice and corn production losses worth over 5 billion since the start of 2019, affecting 138,859 farmers across 12 regions. "The agenda last night was with respect to the effect of the dry spell what are we going to do about it to diminish the effects of this dry spell and we discussed about the water problem, how to do something about it," Panelo told CNN Philippines' Newsroom. To remedy the water crisis which struck Metro Manila last month, Panelo said the National Economic and Development Authority proposed an executive order to create a National Water Management Council (NWMC). The NWMC will be composed of the National Water Resources Board (NWRB) and the River Basin Control Office under the environment and natural resources department. "This will streamline and consolidate planning and regulation of all water and river basins in the country," Panelo said in a statement. Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles first raised changes to the NWRB on March 17, saying they sought to place the agency under the Office of the President. He said they were still drafting the executive order on the proposal at that time. Customers of water concessionaire Manila Water suffered from days-long water shortages during the first week of March. Manila Water attributed the service interruptions to the depleting supply of the La Mesa reservoir in Quezon City due to the dry spell. Panelo also said the President has ordered a review of the concessionaire agreement with Manila Water and fellow water provider Maynilad. Education union officials are taking their fight for more public school funding to Parliament House, flanked by some high profile supporters. Labor leader Bill Shorten, his deputy Tanya Plibersek, and Greens leader Richard Di Natale are due to join Australian Education Union campaigners in Canberra on Tuesday morning. The union has been highly critical of the federal government's public school funding arrangements, saying the coalition's plans will leave 99 per cent of institutions below the national resource standard. The demonstration comes just hours before Treasurer Josh Frydenberg hands down the federal budget. Labor is promising a $14 billion boost to public schools if it wins the federal election next month, with the Greens also throwing their support behind the union's national campaign. Two people have been arrested over a series of threats and car bombing in Wollongong, south of Sydney. A specialist NSW police unit targeting would-be terrorists arrested a 33-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman in the Illawarra on Tuesday morning and took them to separate police stations. Detectives began investigating reports of harassment and intimidation following a "minor altercation" in a carpark at Warrawong on February 22. The threats continued and escalated until, on March 5, a car bomb went off and the Fixated Persons Investigations Unit were brought in to handle the case. The unit was set up in 2017 to focus on the detection, intervention and prevention of so-called 'lone actor' and 'fixated person' threats across NSW. Police are expected to address the media in Sydney later on Tuesday. The Brisbane family of an Egyptian-Australian man detained for more than a year without charge in Cairo have called on the federal government to help get him out of Egypt now he's been released. Hazem Hamouda was arrested in January 2018 when he arrived in Cairo for a holiday, and was accused of having links to the banned Muslim Brotherhood and spreading falsities online. He was released from prison in February but was blocked from leaving Egypt and his family fears he could be re-arrested at any time, Mr Hamouda's eldest daughter, Lamisse Hamouda told AAP on Tuesday. The sole New Zealand politician opposing changes to the country's gun laws has missed a vote to slow the reforms because he was grandstanding to reporters outside the debating chamber. Kiwi members of parliament on Tuesday began the fast-tracked process to introduce bans on military-style semi-automatics, as well as other changes, in response to last month's terror attack on mosques in Christchurch. The government had been looking to get the unanimous support required to speed up the process of passing the bill without resorting to special urgency measures, hoping to put the new laws in place by the end of next week. The libertarian ACT party's leader and only MP, David Seymour, had put a cog in the works by pledging opposition. However, as the house sat and held the vote in the afternoon, Seymour was not in the debating chamber. Instead, he was outside explaining to reporters why he would be voting against the proposal. "What this government is proposing to do is suspend, in all sincerity, public consultation and parliamentary scrutiny of its law-making so it can rush through a law in nine days," Seymour said. The first vote is now set to be held shortly, with the next stage of consultations to begin later in the evening. Seymour will be the only member of the 120-seat parliament to oppose the laws, which also include strict new firearms penalties and bans of some modifications. The changes were announced six days after the shooting that killed 50 people and injured 50 more. Chau Chau was a playful young cat living in a 45th-floor Melbourne apartment until his owner's boyfriend threw him off the balcony. The fatal fall of the innocent kitty has been declared a "tragic accident" after 20-year-old Cheng Lu admitted he used "a bit too much force" when trying to put the cat outside to teach it a lesson for scratching. Magistrate Costas Killias on Tuesday dismissed charges of animal cruelty and reckless endangerment against Mr Lu, finding the university computer sciences student threw the cat over the balcony but had no criminal case to answer. "This was a terrible accident which led to the death of an innocent and apparently, on all accounts, playful pet. But it was not deliberate," he said. The magistrate compared the event to a driver accidentally hitting a dog, versus one who actively ran one down out of a dislike of dogs. "I have every sympathy for the poor cat that found itself in this situation, but I have to satisfy myself ... whether it was intentional or not," Mr Killias said. There was no intended cruelty, he found. Mr Lu told the court he only meant to throw Chau Chau onto the balcony after the kitten scratched his leg from under a couch in April 2018. "I grabbed the cat and put the cat outside but I might have used a bit too much force,' Lu said, with the aid of a Chinese interpreter. "I only intended to put the cat on to the balcony, not over the balcony." The court was previously told Mr Lu launched Chau Chau using a rugby pass-like motion. Kaiqi Chen, Chau Chau's owner and Mr Lu's then girlfriend - they've since broken up - watched from the bathroom as her beloved pet sailed "in the air" over the balustrade. She raced outside to where Chau Chau's body lay in the street. The cat had landed just steps from passers by on Elizabeth Street. "Lu Cheng kept saying 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry' on the phone," Ms Chen said. Senior Constable Tom Roberts had argued the physics of Chau Chau's trajectory, flying two-and-a-half metres through the air from inside the apartment to over the balcony, didn't add up to an accident. "The cat went so far the only inference that can be drawn was the intention was to put the cat over the balcony," he said. Mr Kilias rejected that argument and said multiple inferences could be drawn, underpinning his reasonable doubt. Senator Fraser Anning has been excoriated in parliament, with a senior cabinet minister savaging him for lacking basic humanity after the Christchurch mosque massacres. The Queenslander used Senate Question Time to quiz the government about its response to a teenager cracking an egg on his head which prompted physical retaliation from the 69-year-old. Acting government Senate leader Simon Birmingham delivered a brutal take-down of Senator Anning, backing Prime Minister Scott Morrison's comments that he should face the full face of the law for lashing out at the boy. "The way you have conducted yourself in the time since betrays the rights you have to freedom of speech," Senator Birmingham said. "The lack of compassion you have shown demonstrates, frankly, a basic lack of basic humanity." Australian man Brenton Tarrant has been charged with murder after 50 people were shot dead at Christchurch mosques a little more than two weeks ago. After the right-wing extremist's attacks, Senator Anning said the real cause of the bloodshed was an immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand. On Tuesday, he asked whether the government believed politically-motivated violence was acceptable in some circumstances, referencing the egg incident. Senator Birmingham said Senator Anning had acted in a way that would potentially fuel more acts of terrorism and violence. "You have failed the test of character I would expect of anybody who is elected to this place." The cabinet minister said Senator Anning had made an "appalling comparison" by comparing the egging to his own comments. He said senators would deal with his actions through a censure motion on Wednesday, which has support across the parliament. "We also trust that the people of Queensland will deal with you as you deserve to be dealt with at the next election," Senator Birmingham said. Winners and losers in the 2019 federal budget. -- WINNERS Taxpayers - $158 billion of additional tax relief for those earning up to $126,000 a year West Australians - Rules around $69 billion GST revenue distribution to the states have changed, with WA the main beneficiary Older energy users - $285 million to help almost four million Australian pensioners and others cover their energy bills Job Seekers - 80,000 new apprenticeships announced and extra 1.25 million jobs over the next five years Small Business - Instant asset write-off increased to $30,000 and expanded to businesses with a turnover of up to $50 million Sports Women - $150 million funding package for women's sport Farmers - $6.3 billion in drought support and $3.3 billion for those affected by floods The sick - $80 billion for better access to life-changing equipment, services and medicines Schools - $300 billion for upgrades to libraries, classrooms and play equipment -- LOSERS Big Banks - $600 million boost for financial regulators ASIC and APRA to deal with banking royal commission fallout Terrorists - $570 million boost for national security agencies and $328 million to fund prevention, response and recovery initiatives Tax and welfare cheats - The Tax Office and other agencies to crack down on welfare cheats and tax dodging Migrants - Migration cap to be reduced to 160,000 from 190,000 -- Aboriginal art has been uncovered in the Blue Mountains by workers trying to remove a 20-tonne boulder teetering over railway tracks. Sydney Trains on Tuesday revealed the existence of the handprint artwork on a cliff at Glenbrook. The train line below has been out of action since Saturday after a boulder became dislodged. The boulder was temporarily secured with heavy-duty chain mesh on Monday and was expected to be quickly removed thereafter, before the cultural discovery. "We need to ensure that this important artwork is appropriately preserved," Sydney Trains advised commuters in a Facebook post on Tuesday. "What this means for you, is that the process will take longer than first anticipated, but we need to get this right, and make sure the artwork is preserved while returning services to normal as quickly as possible." Commuters have been warned trains may not run between Penrith and Springwood until early next week. The tax rate for small and medium-sized businesses will be lowered to 25 per cent by 2021-22 as federal government seeks to fast-track benefits for the national economy's "engine room". Companies with a turnover of less than $50 million will pay the new company tax rate five years ahead of schedule, with the current rate already having been lowered to 27.5 per cent. "Small businesses are the engine room of the economy," Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told federal parliament in his budget speech for the 2019/20 year on Tuesday "We want small businesses to prosper and we are backing them to do so." The coalition government is also increasing the instant asset write-off threshold from $25,000 to $30,000 and expanding the eligibility to businesses with a turnover of less than $50 million. The threshold was previously businesses with a turnover of $10 million or less. The new measure - which is available until June 30, 2020 - means an estimated 22,000 extra small to medium sized businesses will be able to deduct purchases of eligible assets costing less than $30,000. "And it can be used every time a new asset is purchased, allowing a cafe to get a new fridge or grill, a plumber to buy new tools, or a courier a new van," Mr Frydenberg said. The benefit is already helping 350,000 businesses across Australia, Government will also increase the tax discount rate for unincorporated small businesses from its current 8 per cent to 13 per cent in 2020-21, and 16 per cent by 2021-22, up to a cap of $1000, will increase. As well, the government will stump up an extra $60 million in grants to help small to medium sized businesses to access export markets such China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia, which all have free trade agreements with Australia. Businesses will also be able to access government's $79.2 million investment in new energy efficiency measures, including $50 million in grants to eligible businesses and community organisations, which are expected to deliver 63 million tonnes of emissions reductions. Booming mining sector profits are tipped to deliver $8 billion more than expected in company tax receipts over the next four years. The federal government expects 2018/19 revenue from company taxes to come in $1.2 billion higher than predicted in the mid-year fiscal outlook (MYEFO) at $93.7 billion, according to the budget papers handed down on Tuesday. And company tax receipts will beat MYEFO predictions by another $3.4 billion in 2019/20 at $98.9 billion, and climb by a total of $8 billion over the four years 2022/23, to $104.7 billion. Federal budget papers say the up-tick in 2019/20 would be a result of delays between when profit is accrued and when company tax is paid. "In addition, while commodity prices are assumed to decline over 2019/20, the continued period of elevated prices relative to the 2018/19 MYEFO further improves mining profits and company tax in that year," budget papers said. The government acknowledged the strength in company tax receipts - which are forecast to grow by 10.8 per cent in 2018/19 and 5.5 per cent in 2019/20 - largely reflected strength in expected mining profits. "However, these profits are not anticipated to fully flow through to company tax receipts over the forward estimates," budget papers said. This was in part because several LNG companies had accumulated a large stock of losses from previous investments, which could be used to reduce tax payable in the coming years, the government said. ISIS and the rise of gangster jihadism New research by terrorism expert Jytte Klausen shows how Europe's criminal underworld is feeding ISIS. The federal coalition has promised to get rid of government debt within a decade and plans to set a cracking early pace by paying down more than $10 billion a year, if it's returned to government. Commonwealth net debt - which is gross debt minus the value of government assets - probably peaked at $373.5 billion in this financial year, which ends on June 30, according to the budget papers handed down on Tuesday. The national debt is still expected to be an eye watering $361 billion in 2019/20, when the federal budget is forecast to return to surplus for the first time in 12 years. But after this, debt should start rolling down faster with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg telling parliament during his budget speech the coalition's goal was to eliminate commonwealth net debt "by 2030 or sooner". In 2020/21 net debt is projected to fall by $12 billion and then another $16 billion the following year. By the end of the forecast period in the budget, net debt should stand at $326 billion, or 14.4 per cent of gross domestic product. But the interest bill on the government's net debt will be cut to $8.7 billion, well down on the massive $14 billion due this financial year. "This is money that could have built 500 schools or a world-class hospital in each state and territory," Mr Frydenberg told parliament. The federal election will be held in May. "This is our moment of truth, and we cannot be found wanting," former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke told an enthusiastic crowd Beto O'Rourke, the youthful Democrat who seized national attention last fall with an unexpectedly strong Senate campaign in conservative Texas, formally launched his presidential candidacy Saturday in his hometown of El Paso, vowing to bring a unifying dynamic, progressive values and generational change to American politics. "This is our moment of truth, and we cannot be found wanting," he told an enthusiastic crowd of at least 1,000. Speaking from a spot only blocks from the border with Mexico, he underscored some of his most vigorous differences with the man he hopes to succeed in the White House -- Donald Trump -- without ever naming the US president. While Trump seeks to build a border wall and threatened just days ago to close the frontier if Mexico fails to stem the influx of undocumented immigrants, O'Rourke described America as "a country of immigrants and asylum seekers and refugees (who) are the very premise of our strength, of our success and, yes, our security." In an implicit rebuke to Trump, O'Rourke said that his hometown was safer because of its immigrants, not more dangerous. In an implicit rebuke to Trump, Beto O'Rourke told supporters his hometown was safer because of its immigrants, not more dangerous If elected he said he would pursue comprehensive immigration reform, reunite immigrant families separated at the border and "bring millions more (undocumented immigrants) out of the shadows." Speaking energetically as he roamed about a stage with the sleeves of his Oxford shirt rolled, the 46-year-old listed his priorities: remaking an economy "that works too well for too few and not at all for too many"; moving toward "high-quality universal healthcare"; and seizing the nation's "last best hope of averting a (climate) catastrophe." He called for the US to wind down its foreign wars, strengthen its alliances, and "end these love affairs with dictators and strongmen." His message clearly was geared not just to El Pasoans but to Democrats nationwide as the party gears up for an extended campaign to see who will challenge Trump in 2020. O'Rourke pointed out that he helped boost voter turnout in Texas -- particularly among the young -- to some of its highest levels in years. He had made his intention to run for the presidency known in mid-March, and in a single day raked in a huge $6.1 million in donations, giving himself instant relevance in the crowded Democratic field. Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke pointed out that he helped boost voter turnout in Texas -- particularly among the young -- to some of its highest levels in years He since has been campaigning -- usually before large crowds -- in early-voting states including Iowa and New Hampshire. And on Saturday, O'Rourke -- who during his Senate campaign visited every one of Texas's 254 counties -- continued his peripatetic ways, heading from his El Paso kickoff to rallies in Houston and Austin, the state capital. The 46-year-old former congressman and onetime punk rocker was born Robert O'Rourke but widely known as "Beto." His nearly successful campaign in November against incumbent Senator Ted Cruz brought him national attention. Some Democrats hope O'Rourke might even be able to turn reliably red Texas to Democratic blue, though first he would have to wade through the huge field of 16 Democrats now in the running -- including a popular fellow Texan, Julian Castro. Other Democratic rivals include senators Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar. The Democratic frontrunner, former vice president Joe Biden, is not even officially in the race, but polls show him as the leading contender for the party's nomination, with 29.2 percent support, according to the RealClearPolitics average of the six latest surveys. Sanders is second at 21.8 percent, followed by Harris at 9.8 and O'Rourke at 9.2. The newest rising star of the pack is Pete Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a military veteran, who would be the youngest and the first openly gay president should he win. O'Rourke is an unorthodox candidate, with a comparatively thin political resume and with a seeming allergy to being labeled a liberal. During his six years in Congress, O'Rourke was more politically cautious, joining the House's centrist coalition. But as the Democratic presidential field tilts leftward, he has hit on several progressive talking points. In addition to supporting a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, he backs marijuana legalization and champions the Green New Deal, a sweeping climate change mitigation framework. He called Saturday for paid family leave, equal pay for women and an end to for-profit prisons. On his first major campaign tour, which took him to eight states including New Hampshire, South Carolina and Ohio, he met people in coffee shops, school gyms and taquerias, offering a unifying vision packed with optimism but short on policy specifics. Twenty-five years ago, this tranquil valley about 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of Rwanda's capital Kigali, became a killing field A trickle of water flows out of a lush green valley in Rwanda, the two villages on either side of the life-giving spring living peacefully with each other for years. Then the horrors of the 1994 genocide changed all that. Those on one side of the valley in the village of Giheta turned on their neighbours across the way in the village of Ruseke. Gangs of machete-wielding men hacked their neighbours to death following the outbreak of inter-ethnic violence, a genocide in which over 800,000 mainly Tutsi people were killed between April to July 1994, according to the UN. Today, that water source brings the people back together. Some 70 people were massacred in the valley during the inter-ethnic violence in which 800,000 mainly Tutsi people were killed in 1994 But 25 years ago, the tranquil valley, its rich farmland lined with banana, mango and avocado trees about 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of Rwanda's capital Kigali, became a killing field. Whipped up by extremist propaganda, the people of Giheta -- from the ethnic Hutu majority -- attacked their longtime neighbours in Ruseke from the Tutsi minority. Some 70 people were massacred. "It was a big shock for us," said Daphrosa Mukarubayiza, 57, whose husband and son were killed. "These were people who we used to socialise and drink together with. We shared everything." Elders in the communities spoke of how people would gather to chat as they waited for their water containers to fill, exchanging gossip and news, a peaceful place that brought everyone together. After the genocide, both villages still relied on the water, but took it in turn to avoid having to meet, if at all possible. - Fear and distrust - Jean-Claude Mutarindwa, 42, was a youth from the village of Giheta when the genocide took place. Unlike his brothers, he did not pick up a machete to kill and that helped him lay the foundation for reconciliation. Villagers in the valley are now relearning to share all they have, including the water from the spring "I told myself that since I was part of the village, I had a duty to participate in this act of love, asking them what we could do for them to forgive us," Mutarindwa said. "The task was complicated." In 2005, the two villages relived the trauma of the killings when trials took place in the community-run courts called "Gacaca". That same year, the first concrete gestures of rapprochement also took place. Mutarindwa convinced his neighbours in Giheta to cross over to Ruseke and help them farm their fields. Jean-Claude Mutarindwa, 42, a Hutu who did not take part in the genocide helped lay the foundation for reconciliation with his Tutsi neighbours "To ask for forgiveness was not easy at all: the first time we crossed to ask for forgiveness, we were about 100 people," Mutarindwa. "Amongst us, people were afraid." But when they came back home safely, the next time nearly 200 came. On the third trip, the whole village of Giheta came to help. The two sides held a deeply emotional reconciliation -- and a big party -- in the centre of Ruseke. For those in Ruseke, it seemed the right time to let go. "I felt ready to forgive," Mukarubayiza said, who knew Mutarindwa since they had met at the same church. "In a gesture of humanity, I told Jean-Claude to ask his people to come to ask forgiveness." Jean-Claude Mutarindwa, (R) with Daphrosa Mukarubayize, 57, a Tutsi, whose husband and son were killed, said she felt ready to forgive and build reconciliation After the ceremony of reconciliation, the children of each village led the way. Soon they were making friends across the shared waters of the spring. Life resumed its natural course. Still, not everyone shares this optimism. Josepha Mukaruzima, 70, from the village of Ruseke argues that those who asked for forgiveness were not those guilty of the crimes. Grudgingly she has accepted the situation, but feels true reconciliation requires more. "It is far from being enough," she said. "It misses many things, it is superficial." Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani (2L) left the 30th Arab League summit shortly after it began Sunday, state media said, without explaning why Arab leaders slammed the US decision to recognise the Golan Heights as Israeli territory at a summit in Tunis on Sunday, but struggled for further unity as Qatar's emir left the meeting early. In a final declaration the Arab League summit said it "affirmed that the Golan is occupied Syrian territory according to international law, the decisions of the United Nations and the Security Council". A separate statement dedicated solely to the issue called Washington's move "invalid and illegitimate". "It is true that America is the strongest military force in the world, but its decision is absolutely worthless," League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit told a closing news conference. President Donald Trump signed a proclamation Monday in which the United States recognised Israel's annexation of the strategic plateau that it seized in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Israel's move has not been recognised internationally, and three UN Security Council resolutions have called for it to withdraw from the territory. Trump's shift on Golan had already drawn a string of angry reactions from Arab capitals, despite proving problematic for key regional US allies such as Saudi Arabia. The decision has also drawn criticism from other Security Council members and been rejected by the European Union. The united front shown at the Tunis summit on the issue failed to mask other deep divisions inside the Arab League, as it struggles with major headaches such as a diplomatic crisis in the Gulf and conflicts in Syria and Yemen. In an apparent sign of the tensions, Qatar's Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani quit the gathering "after attending the opening ceremony", the Gulf state's official QNA news agency reported, without giving any further details. A Tunisian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Qatari leader had walked out during the speech of League chief Aboul Gheit, and "has left Tunisia". Qatar is at the centre of a bitter Gulf standoff since June 2017, when Saudi Arabia along with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain severed ties with Doha. The Saudi-led bloc accuses Doha of supporting extremist groups and being too close to Iran, charges Qatar denies. The meeting in Tunis had brought together Saudi King Salman and the emir for a rare encounter. But an appeal by Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi for the region to "overcome its differences" appeared to have little impact as the Qatari ruler left prematurely. In his opening speech Aboul Gheit had blasted Turkey and Iran for their "interference" in Arab countries, insisting that Tehran and Ankara had worsened regional crises. Former vice president Joe Biden (R) has been accused by a former Democratic lawmaker, Lucy Flores(L), of an inappropriate kiss Former vice president Joe Biden insisted Sunday he has never acted inappropriately towards women as a growing row about a kiss on the campaign trail cast a shadow over his expected run for the White House. The 76-year-old Biden is the clear favorite to win the Democratic nomination to take on Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election even though he has yet to declare his candidacy. But several of his rivals have now weighed in on the allegations from a former state lawmaker who has recalled being "mortified" when Biden planted a "big, slow kiss" on the back of her head on the sidelines of a rally in Nevada five years ago. The New York Post on Saturday ran a gallery of photographs of Biden's "most touchy-feely moments," embracing and kissing women at public events over the years. His 39-year-old accuser Lucy Flores said in a new television interview that Biden's behavior meant he should not run for president shortly after Biden released a statement trying to quell the storm. "In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once -- never -- did I believe I acted inappropriately," Biden said in his statement released by his spokesman on Twitter. "If it is suggested that I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention. "I may not recall these moments the same way, and I may be surprised at what I hear. But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will." Flores, who was a state lawmaker at the time, had been running for the post of Nevada lieutenant governor when Biden appeared at a rally to offer support when Barack Obama's number two. - 'Disqualifying' behavior - In response to Biden's statement, Flores said she was "glad he's willing to listen" but added that his behavior should rule him out from seeking the Democratic nomination against a president who has himself faced multiple accusations of sexual harassment. "For me it's disqualifying," she told CNN. "Yes, of course I want him to change his behavior. And I want him to acknowledge this was wrong. I want this to be a bigger discussion about how there is no accountability structure within our political space either for instances in which women feel that there was inappropriate behavior or more serious instances." Biden has previously acknowledged that his "tactile" behavior could land him in trouble, especially in the #MeToo era which has already torpedoed the careers of several US politicians, including the former Democrat senator Al Franken. Snators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, who are also running for president, both said Flores' account should be regarded as credible while another Democratic candidate, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, said it was "very disconcerting." Asked if the allegations were disqualifying, Bernie Sanders -- who is running second to Biden in the opinion polls among Democrat supporters -- said it was a decision only Biden could make. "I'm not sure that one incident alone disqualifies anybody, but her point is absolutely right. This is an issue not just for Democrats or Republicans, but the entire country has got to take seriously," he told CBS. Biden has had a reputation in Washington for awkwardly touching the wives, mothers or daughters of senators during swearing-in ceremonies, and he came under criticism for massaging the shoulders of new defense secretary Ash Carter's wife in 2015. White House advisor Kellyanne Conway claimed on Fox News that Biden had a "a big problem," adding that there was multiple footage of him behaving in a "creepy" way. Trump himself suffered a major embarrassment during the 2016 campaign when an old recording of him bragging about assaulting women was made public although he has since disputed whether it was actually his voice. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (R) was greeted on arrival in Israel by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he began a visit to Israel on Sunday and announced a new Jerusalem trade office, but his pledge to move the embassy was on hold. Netanyahu has been hoping Bolsonaro would follow through on his controversial promise to move the embassy to the disputed city, giving the Israeli premier a boost just ahead of April 9 elections. The two leaders instead spoke of opening a Brazilian trade, technology and innovation office there and Netanyahu expressed hope a bigger announcement was not far off. "I'm going to tell you a secret: I hope that this is a first step toward the opening, when the time comes, of a Brazilian embassy in Jerusalem," Netanyahu said as they gave pre-dinner statements to journalists. Bolsonaro will walk a diplomatic tightrope during the three-day visit as he seeks to shore up ties with Netanyahu while avoiding angering key Arab trade partners. Months after promising to move the embassy -- a step already taken by US President Donald Trump -- Bolsonaro has yet to announce a timetable. Speaking to reporters Thursday, he suggested he was in no hurry to make a decision. "Trump took nine months to decide, to give his final word, so that the embassy was transferred," Bolsonaro said. Moving the embassy would please Bolsonaro's evangelical Christian support base, but would also risk provoking commercial retaliation from Arab states, some of which are major importers of Brazilian meat. The Palestinian leadership froze contacts with the White House after Trump's move. - Western Wall visit - Bolsonaro is expected to visit Jerusalem's Western Wall alongside Netanyahu on Monday -- a controversial move in itself. Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the first high-ranking American official to visit the Western Wall with an Israeli premier. The site, one of the holiest in Judaism, is in mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem, annexed by Israel in a move never recognised by the international community. President Jair Bolsonaro said "my government is firmly resolved to strengthen the partnership between Brazil and Israel" It could be taken as tacit approval of Israel's sovereignty over the site. On Sunday afternoon, Netanyahu and Bolsonaro met at the premier's Jerusalem office and the two countries signed six agreements on areas including defence cooperation, public safety and technology. Earlier in the day at an airport welcoming ceremony, Netanyahu said "we are making history together," adding that they had "opened a new era in relations between our two countries". Bolsonaro spoke of his Christian faith and why the trip was moving for him for that reason, noting a previous pilgrimage to the Jordan River, as well as improving ties. "My government is firmly resolved to strengthen the partnership between Brazil and Israel," he said. "Cooperation in the areas of security and defence is also of great interest to Brazil." Netanyahu became the first Israeli prime minister to visit Brazil when he travelled there for Bolsonaro's January 1 inauguration. In their discussions then, the two right-wingers talked up their budding "brotherhood" which they said would boost military, economic, technological and agricultural cooperation. Netanyahu is facing a tough challenge from centrist former military chief Benny Gantz in Israel's elections, whilst also facing indictment on corruption allegations. Pompeo's visit this month and Netanyahu's trip to the United States to meet Trump last week -- cut short due to a flare-up in the Gaza Strip -- were widely seen as boosting his campaign. He has sought to present himself as Israel's essential statesman, and Bolsonaro's visit may include similar rhetoric. Both Netanyahu and Bolsonaro have good relations with Trump. During the Brazilian leader's visit to Washington this month, the US president heaped praise on Bolsonaro, announcing a special relationship that he said could even see the Latin American country join NATO. For years Bolsonaro was little more than a marginal congressman, but his Trump-like campaign in 2018, promising to combat corruption and end politics as usual, propelled him to a surprise victory. burs-mjs/del Algerian protesters gather during a mass demonstration against ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in the capital Algiers on March 29, 2019 Protest-hit Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Sunday named a new government headed by recently appointed Noureddine Bedoui, a statement from the presidency said. State television reported that armed forces chief Ahmed Gaid Salah, who has called for Bouteflika to step down, remained as deputy defence minister. Veteran politician Ramtane Lamamra, who was appointed deputy prime minister and foreign minister on March 11, was not named in the new administration. Ailing Bouteflika, who has rarely being seen in public since a 2013 stroke, has come under mounting pressure to quit power since his decision to seek a fifth term sparked huge demonstrations. Bouteflika said earlier this month he would pull out of the race and postponed April elections, in moves that angered Algerians who see it as a ploy to extend his two decades in power. Faced with persistent public anger, a succession of veteran Bouteflika loyalists have deserted the president in recent days. On Tuesday, chief of staff Gaid Salah, who was appointed in 2004, called for him to step down or be declared medically unfit. The chief of staff cited Article 102 of the constitution, under which a president can be removed if found unfit to rule. Long a faithful Bouteflika supporter, Gaid Salah said on television it was "imperative" to find a way out of the crisis "which responds to the legitimate demands" of the people in line with the constitution. Despite the calls, huge crowds thronged the streets of Algeria's capital on Friday for a sixth successive week, saying the moves by his key allies to abandon Bouteflika were not enough. The new era name has a huge impact on daily life and anticipation is at fever pitch to see what will replace the era that marked Emperor Akihito's reign -- "Heisei" or "peace prevails everywhere." With one month to go until the historic abdication of Emperor Akihito, Japan will Monday unveil the name of the new era that will be ushered in when his son ascends the Chrysanthemum Throne. It may appear trivial to outsiders, but the announcement of a new era name is a massive event in Japan that will be marked with special newspaper editions, calligraphy shows and public festivities. Although the Gregorian calendar is widely used in the world's third-largest economy, Japan is the only country still using Chinese-style imperial calendars for private and public documents as well as computer records. The new era name therefore has a huge impact on daily life and anticipation is at fever pitch to see what will replace the era that marked Akihito's reign -- "Heisei" or "peace prevails everywhere." Highly secretive talks have been ongoing for months to pick a name for the new era, which should have a "positive meaning and be ideal for the Japanese people," according to government sources cited in local media. The final selection will be made on Monday when a nine-member panel reportedly including Nobel Prize-winning stem cell scientist Shinya Yamanaka will whittle down the final choice from at least five possible names put forward by scholars. The new name must adhere to stringent guidelines. It should consist of only two "kanji" or characters, be easy to read and write, and not employ common names. The new name is also unlikely to start with the first letter of any of the last four eras: Heisei, Showa, Taisho and Meiji. Company names are excluded as well as the most popular choices in private guessing competitions, amid fevered speculation online as to what the new name could be. The ailing Akihito will step down on April 30 and his son Crown Prince Naruhito will take over the next day. - 'Festive sentiment' - Japan has had nearly 250 eras or "gengo" since adopting the system in the 7th century, and in recent times, one era has run the entire length of a monarch's rule. But the announcement of a new era is a real headache for calendar publishers featuring both Western and imperial dates, while central and local governments must scramble to change dates on official documents. The tech sector is also bracing for the transition, amid fears there could be a computer glitch similar to the "Y2K" bug that sparked concerns ahead of the year 2000. Others view the change in era name as a bonanza. For example, companies that manufacture private ink seals -- commonly used in Japan to sign official documents -- are expected to benefit and they have already reported strong advance orders. Financial traders are also pinning their hopes on the new era name to bolster a shaky market. "New era-related shares such as printing companies have already been bought widely," said Toshikazu Horiuchi, a broker at IwaiCosmo Securities. "We hope this festive sentiment will boost the entire market," he added. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga will put the nation out of its misery around 11:30 local time (0230 GMT), revealing the name handwritten on a paper board. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is to hold a news conference shortly afterwards. "I will pay attention that the new name will be widely accepted by the people and deeply rooted in their lives," Abe has told parliament. A memorial for Justine Damond is seen near the alleyway were she was found dead in Minneapolis on December 28, 2018 -- a policeman accused of murdering the Australian in the Minnesota city is about to face trial Jury selection began Monday in the murder trial of a former Minnesota police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman in 2017, provoking outrage in the United States and in the victim's home country. Police say Mohamed Noor shot Justine Damond in Minneapolis in July 2017 while in the passenger seat of his police car. She had approached the cruiser after calling police to report a possible rape in the dark alley behind her home. Damond was shot once in the abdomen and died at the scene. Noor was fired from the police force and charged with second-degree and third-degree murder, as well as second-degree manslaughter. He has pleaded not guilty. The murder charges carry sentences of up to 25 years for the second-degree charge and up to 10 years for the third-degree. The prosecution has claimed Noor acted unreasonably -- shooting at someone he did not clearly see, while his partner was in the line of fire. Noor's attorneys have indicated they plan to mount a self-defense argument. Attorney Tom Plunkett has said his client "acted as he has been trained and consistent with established departmental policy." - Noor's work history barred - Dozens of prospective jurors were given initial instructions Monday and handed questionnaires. Court proceedings ended by late morning and were scheduled to resume Wednesday. The presiding judge, Kathryn Quaintance, has barred prosecutors from presenting evidence of Noor's past work history. That history includes an incident in which Noor allegedly pointed a gun at a motorist during a traffic stop, and occasionally refused to respond to police calls, according to The Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. Minnesota Public Radio reported that Noor was deemed "asocial and socially introverted" in his pre-employment psychological test, but that there were no signs of disqualifying mental illness. Damond's killing caused international outrage. The 40-year-old Australian had moved to the United States to marry her American fiance, Don Damond, whose name she had already legally adopted, changing from her maiden name Ruszczyk. Her Australian relatives and the country's government demanded an explanation, while protests in Minneapolis led to the resignation of the city's police chief. Across the country, prosecutors have had difficulty securing convictions against officers accused of wrongful shootings that often include racial overtones. Trials have mostly resulted in hung juries or acquittals, which at times have caused civil unrest in American cities. Another Minnesota officer, Jeronimo Yanez, was fired from his job but acquitted after fatally shooting black motorist Philando Castile in 2016. There were several days of protests in Saint Louis, Missouri in 2017, after a judge concluded there was not enough evidence to convict former officer Jason Stockley for shooting Anthony Lamar Smith after a 2011 car chase. In Chicago, Jason Van Dyke was convicted of murder for killing black teen Laquan McDonald. The 17-year-old was shot 16 times, with most of those bullets striking him after he fell to the ground. In the classrooms where the men learn their lessons, the mood is serious. Dozens of ex-militia killers stroll around an open camp beneath mist-shrouded volcanoes in Rwanda. They are learning to reintegrate into the country whose government they have spent years trying to overthrow. These are men who helped carry out Rwanda's horrific 1994 genocide, and then formed a rebel army that has been fighting ever since. After the carnage of the Rwanda genocide, which began 25 years ago this April, the men who carried out the massacre of at least 800,000 mostly Tutsi people fled west to neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. Some of them are former members of Rwanda's army. Others had joined the militia known as the "Interahamwe", club and machete-wielding Hutu gangs that carried out the killings targeting the Tutsi minority. Chased out of Rwanda, they formed a notorious rebel army, the Hutu fighters of The Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda, known by its French acronym, FDLR. Each batch spends three months in the camp, before they can return to the families and homes they left decades before But after a quarter of a century haunting Congo's forests, many of these veterans were exhausted and wanted to give up the fight. So a stream of rebels have returned home. Rwanda houses them at Mutobo, a camp some 100 kilometres (60 miles) northwest of the capital Kigali and beneath the Virunga mountains, seeking to reintegrate them into society. - 'Rwanda is my country' - Joseph Kabalindwi, a 50-year old former rebel major, said he laid down his arms in 2014 "to promote peace." Kabalindwi was one of 1,563 former FDLR fighters who returned to Rwanda in November 2018, after Congo refused to keep them on their soil any longer. But he says he is happy to be back. "Even though I left the country a long time ago, I remained Rwandan," said this ex-major with conviction. "Rwanda is my country, and I wanted to go home." There is no fence around the camp, but Rwanda keeps a close eye on the former rebels. The government's Rwanda demobilisation and reintegration commission, which runs the Mutobo camp, has handled 11,000 fighters from rebel forces since 1997. Each batch spends three months in the camp, before they can return to the families and homes they left decades before. There is no fence around the camp, but Rwanda keeps a close eye on the former rebels They are then also issued with identity papers and a one-off payment of 60,000 Rwandan francs (66 dollars, 58 euros) to start their new life. - 'Miracle from God' - In Mutobo, the former FDLR receive civic education classes aimed at combating the bloody ideology that led to the genocide. The former guerrillas also learn how to participate in the reconstruction and development of the nation, and, for men who have spent years in military fatigues, training to reacquaint them with civilian life. In November, Kabalindwi's brothers came to visit. They had last met in 1994. "They were very happy to see me," he said with a smile. "Some of us died in the forests of Congo, so for me it is a miracle from God to find someone who is still alive." When he and his comrades returned to Rwanda, many believed that they would be killed immediately. Instead, they have been surprised by their reception. "Since we have been here, fear is gradually diminishing," Kabalindwi admitted. For many FDLR fighters, mistrust of Kigali is the main obstacle to their return - as well as the fear of facing justice for the crimes they committed. Bernard Ntuyahaga, a former army major, was convicted over his role in the death of 10 Belgian soldiers with the UN peacekeeping force In the classrooms where the men learn their lessons, the mood is serious. Focus Twiringiyimana, a 47-year old ex-FDLR fighter, takes detailed notes at a sewing machine, while the teacher at the blackboard offers instructions. Twiringiyimana passed through the camp a year ago, but has returned for training to become a tailor. For his old FDLR comrades still fighting in the bush, he offers a simple message. "They should come back to the country, to work for their own development," Twiringiyimana said. "They are only wasting time and it will do them no good". - Out of Belgian jail - Not everyone in the camp joined the FDLR. One newcomer is Bernard Ntuyahaga, a former army major, who arrived in December 2018 from Belgium after serving 20 years in prison. He was convicted over his role in the death of 10 Belgian soldiers with the UN peacekeeping force, who were slaughtered in 1994 as they protected the then Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. She was also murdered. Ntuyahaga, now in his late 60s, returned to Rwanda in December against his will, after exhausting all legal efforts to remain in Belgium. Now he is taking classes in civic education. Focus Twiringiyimana passed through the camp a year ago, but has returned for training to become a tailor "Within just the few months I have spent here, I already feel comfortable," he said. There is, at times, an echo of official rhetoric. It is unclear if he believes it, or if he is wary of criticising the government policies. "I am hopeful for the years that I have left to live," he added. "Reiwa": the new era "Reiwa": Japan Monday revealed the name of the era that will define the new emperor's reign when he ascends the Chrysanthemum Throne next month following the first abdication in around 200 years. The new imperial name consists of two characters: "Rei", which can mean "order" but also "auspicious" and "Wa", usually translated as "peace" or "harmony." After weeks of fevered speculation and top-secret discussions, the two "kanji" characters were unveiled to reveal a name that will last as long as new emperor Naruhito's rule. No caption Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the term "Reiwa" came from the "Manyoshu", an anthology of Japanese poems dating back 1,200 years that "symbolises our nation's profound public culture and long tradition". "Just like amazing plum flowers in full bloom that signal the arrival of spring after bitter cold, each and every Japanese person can hope for the future and make their own flowers blossom," added the prime minister. "It is the first time it comes from a Japanese text" rather than Chinese, noted Abe, often considered a nationalist. Crowds gathered around Japan to watch live broadcasts of the announcement, many cheering as the chief cabinet secretary held up a board with the name inked in stylised black calligraphy. Japan is the only country still using Chinese-style imperial calendars for private and public documents as well as computer records so the new name has a huge impact on daily life "It has a nice sound and you get a good feeling when you read it. It's a very good choice I think," said 24-year-old Shun Fujimoto as he joined a chaotic scrum for a special edition of the papers at Tokyo's busy Shimbashi station. Eight-year-old Manato Nagayama also managed to get his hands on a copy of the extra edition but admitted: "I cannot yet write those two kanji." His father told AFP it was a "historic" moment. "That's why I brought my son here so he could get a special edition. It's an experience that only comes along very rarely. He is only eight and is already seeing two eras." The 85-year-old Emperor Akihito will step down on April 30 in favour of Crown Prince Naruhito, who will take the throne the next day. - 'Emperor burger' - It may appear esoteric to outsiders, but the announcement of a new era name is a massive event in Japan, marked with calligraphy shows and public festivities. Although the Gregorian calendar is widely used in the world's third-largest economy, Japan is the only country still using Chinese-style imperial calendars for private and public documents as well as computer records. Chef Patrick Shimada has created a three-kilogram, $900 burger to celebrate the new emperor and new era The new name therefore has a huge impact on daily life and people tend to recall major events in public and private life by when they fell in a certain era. A highly secretive nine-member panel including a Nobel Prize winner whittled down various options for the new name in closed-door talks. The era name must adhere to strict guidelines. It should consist of only two "kanji" or characters, be easy to read and write, and not employ common names or the first character of any of the last four eras: Heisei, Showa, Taisho and Meiji. Company names are excluded as well as the most popular choices in private guessing competitions, amid widespread speculation online as to what the new name could be. To prevent leaks, the panel were locked away in a special room in the prime minister's office, swept for bugs, and their phones confiscated. A sea lion 'wrote' out the new era name with a brush in its mouth No official translation was immediately available but Ryan Shaldjian Morrison, a lecturer at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies and Japanese literature expert, told AFP: "To my mind, 'venerable harmony' is the most appropriate English translation." Japan is marking the announcement of the new era in a wide variety of ways, some less serious than others. A sake company offered a vintage bottle from the first year of the Heisei era (1989) to anyone who correctly guessed the new name, while a grand hotel is marking the occasion with a three-kilo wagyu beef burger served between gold-dusted buns for an eye-watering $900. Less politically correctly, a sea lion in Yokohama "wrote" out the new era name with a brush in its mouth for assembled journalists and visitors. Japan has had nearly 250 eras or "gengo" since adopting the system in the 7th century, and in recent times, one era has run the entire length of a monarch's rule. But the announcement of a new era is a real headache for calendar publishers featuring both Western and imperial dates, while central and local governments must scramble to change dates on official documents. The tech sector is also bracing for the transition, amid fears there could be a computer glitch similar to the "Y2K" bug that sparked concerns ahead of the year 2000. To general bemusement, the name caused an unexpected rush of traffic to the website reiwa.com, home of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia. Fentanyl and its analogues are 50 times more powerful than heroin and blamed for a massive opioid epidemic in the United States China announced Monday it will launch a crackdown on all fentanyl-like substances from May 1 following US pleas for Beijing to control a drug fuelling a deadly opioid crisis. China is suspected of being the main source of a powerful painkiller 50 times stronger than heroin that has caused record overdose deaths in the United States. The issue has figured in trade talks between the United States and China, with Beijing promising to list any type of fentanyl when presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a tariff truce in December. "The US is concerned about all variants (of fentanyl), and it has all been resolved," Liu Yuejin, deputy director of the National Narcotics Control Commission, said at a press conference. Designating all fentanyl analogues as controlled substances from May 1 aims to prevent smugglers from skirting the law by changing formulas to make drugs similar to the painkiller. Liu outlined further work China would undertake, including inspections of key bio-medical and chemical industrial parks, cleaning up drug-related information online and cutting off criminals' online communication channels. Chinese authorities will also urge courier companies to implement real-name registration for parcels, stepping up customs checks for high-risk international packages and enhancing enforcement co-operation. Sellers often ship fentanyl via express package services. These are big steps which would have a significant impact, said Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration. China produces 85 percent of the world's synthetic opioids, he said. "Without China's co-operation the United States would not be able to put a dent in the current opioid epidemic that has taken so many lives," Vigil told AFP. American officials attending the press conference declined to comment. Wang Hesheng, deputy director of China's National Health Commission, indicated some analogues of fentanyl with legitimate medicinal, industrial and scientific purposes would not be included in the listing. - 'Horror drug' - In December, Trump said the move against the "horror drug" could be a "game changer" because China has the death penalty for major narcotics offences. America's deadly addiction to opioids The action comes as China's top trade negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, prepares to return to Washington this week for more talks following discussions in Beijing last week. "The Chinese government will step up co-operation with other countries including the US to join hands to tackle the global challenge fentanyl presents," Liu Yuejin said. Still Liu repeated China's denial of responsibility for the US's deadly opioid crisis, saying US allegations of large scale trafficking from China "lack evidence and are contrary to the facts". Admitting the existence of some cases of Chinese and American criminals working together, Liu said the "amount was extremely limited," and China "cannot possibly be the major source to the US". Instead, Liu blamed American's abuse of prescription opioids, pharmaceutical industry influence, US pharmacies and doctors "excessive prescription", lax enforcement and American culture conflating drugs with "freedom, individuality and liberation". "If the US really wants to resolve the fentanyl substance problem, they have more work to do domestically," he said. - 'Extremely important' step - Vigil agreed that "corporate greed in pharmaceutical industry" and overprescription of opioids had driven a lot of the epidemic in the US. "If China stems the movement of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids to the United States it would have a huge impact, but it would not stop the epidemic," he said, adding American politicians need to take action. The US Justice Department has indicted several Chinese individuals on allegations of manufacturing and distributing illegal drugs. Asked about the cases, Liu said China was working with US law enforcement, but had not found evidence that the individuals had broken Chinese law. Diplomats invited to attend the briefing said Beijing's action marked an important step for combatting the drug trade. "What China did today was extremely important," said Stefan Thorsell, a police and customs liaison officer for the Swedish embassy in Beijing. "Even though Sweden is a small country we have problems, not as big as the United States, but we have problems with fentanyl as well," he said. Thousands marched in Hong Kong on Sunday to protest against the government's plans to approve extraditions with mainland China, Taiwan and Macau A fugitive billionaire has vowed to launch a legal challenge against Hong Kong's controversial plan to sign an extradition agreement with Macau, Taiwan and mainland China, his lawyers said Monday, adding he has fled the financial hub. Hong Kong property tycoon Joseph Lau is wanted in Macau where he was convicted in absentia for bribery in the gambling enclave in 2014. He remains a free man because Hong Kong and Macau do not currently have an extradition agreement. Hong Kong's government has recently announced plans to overhaul its extradition rules, allowing the transfer of fugitives with Taiwan, Macau and mainland China on a "case-basis" for the first time. The proposal has sparked large protests and mounting alarm within the city's business and legal communities who fear it will hammer the financial hub's international appeal and tangle people up in China's opaque courts. Lau has applied for leave to legally challenge the government's extradition proposal, according to a court application obtained by AFP, which also states that he has chosen to "exile himself from Hong Kong". "The bill, once enacted, would hang over those it affects like a cloud," Lau's lawyers wrote in the application filed in the city's High Court. "He has felt compelled to leave Hong Kong until there is more clarity on the extradition bill," lawyer Gerard McCoy told AFP. The application asks the court to declare that any extradition agreement cannot be applied retroactively and argues that the city's leader Carrie Lam is being granted too much discretionary power to decide cases under the proposal. - Protests and alarm - Thousands of protesters hit the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday to demonstrate against the new extradition proposal, which will be discussed in the city's legislature on Wednesday. Even a number of pro-Beijing politicians and prominent businesspeople have joined a growing chorus of opposition, while Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said it may issue travel warnings if the extradition agreement included China. The proposal comes at a time of roiling distrust over how Beijing wields its authoritarian legal system -- and as two Canadian nationals languish in Chinese custody following the arrest of a top Huawei executive in Vancouver. The Hong Kong government backtracked last week under pressure and exempted nine primarily economic crimes from the list of offences that could be covered by the new extradition law. Critics fear any extradition agreement could leave both business figures and dissidents in Hong Kong vulnerable to China's politicised courts, fatally undermining a business hub that has thrived off its reputation for a transparent and independent judiciary. The sudden plan to overhaul Hong Kong's extradition agreement was sparked by a high-profile murder in Taiwan where a Hong Kong man allegedly strangled his pregnant girlfriend during a holiday trip and then fled. Historically Hong Kong has baulked at extraditing to the mainland because of the opacity of China's criminal justice system, and the death penalty -- which has been abolished in Hong Kong. Lau made headlines in 2015 when he spent a combined $76.9 million at auction to buy two rare diamonds for his young daughter. He argues his trial in Macau was unfair because he was unable to attend due to ill health and that the city has refused to grant him a right to a retrial. China's President Xi Jinping shakes hands with New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern before their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Monday New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday played up her country's "critically important" ties with China while President Xi Jinping called for "mutual trust" amid tensions stemming from security concerns over Chinese telecom giant Huawei. The two leaders made the remarks as they met at Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Ardern's first trip abroad since the Christchurch mosque attacks. "Your visit to China fully reflects the importance that you and the New Zealand government attach to China-New Zealand relations," said Xi, calling the island nation a "sincere friend and partner". The trip is also Ardern's first trip to China since she was elected in late 2017 -- an unusually long wait for the leader of a nation that signed a pioneering free-trade deal with Beijing in 2008. Relations between Beijing and Wellington have been strained in recent months after New Zealand's intelligence agency last November halted plans for Chinese-owned telecom giant Huawei to participate in a proposed 5G network, citing "significant security risks". But Ardern said Monday her visit to Beijing aims to further her country's "critically important relationship" with China -- New Zealand's largest trading partner, with two-way trade totalling NZ$27 billion ($18.4 billion) in 2018. Ardern had repeatedly played down the spat with Huawei. Last month she said New Zealand was in talks to minimise the security risks posed by using the Chinese telecom giant's equipment in 5G infrastructure, raising the prospect of a compromise on the issue. In his opening remarks to Ardern, Xi urged both countries to "adhere to mutual trust (and) the principle of mutual benefit" as bilateral relations between the countries face a "new trend". -'Greatest common denominator'- The New Zealand prime minister also held talks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang before her meeting with Xi. The two discussed ways for New Zealand to participate in Beijing's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a global trade infrastructure programme that includes Pacific island nations that traditionally fell under the spheres of influence of Canberra and Wellington. Li urged both sides to aspire for the "greatest common denominator" and that "when each side's businesses invest in each other's businesses, they can enjoy a fair, transparent, convenient environment". Ardern called for upgrading New Zealand's free trade agreement with China and said the country "welcomed high-quality foreign investment", her office said in a statement after the meeting. Her short visit to China comes in the wake of a mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch last month that left 50 people dead and prompted her to overhaul New Zealand's gun laws. A longer trip had been planned, was but shortened to just a day following the attack. Both Xi and Li expressed condolences for those killed in the shooting. Sibeth Ndiaye took over from Benjamin Griveaux as government spokeswoman after he quite to run for mayor of Paris French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed his Senegalese-born media advisor as government spokeswoman, one of three new faces for his cabinet as it gears up for the European Parliament elections next month. Sibeth Ndiaye, a 39-year-old born in Dakar, only obtained French citizenship in 2016 while working as a communications advisor for Macron's presidential campaign. She replaces Benjamin Griveaux, whose resignation last week came ahead of a run for Paris mayor next year. "France has given me a lot. Today, it's my turn to give something back," Ndiaye said at a handover ceremony in Paris on Monday, praising her parents for helping her and her sisters "break through glass ceilings". After growing up with a politician father and a mother who was president of Senegal's Constitutional Council, Ndiaye moved to Paris to study at university and became a leftwing student activist before joining the Socialist Party in 2002. "Her nomination is a strong endorsement of diversity in a high-profile job, a promotion and a sign of the president's trust," Philippe Grangeon, one of Macron's top advisers, told French daily Le Monde. Ndiaye gained notoriety after a documentary of Macron's grassroots campaign was released shortly after his sweeping win of the presidency in May 2017. The film, "Behind the Scenes of a Victory," shows an outspoken Ndiaye who doesn't hesitate to harangue reporters over what she considers unfavourable coverage. Later in 2017 French news weekly L'Express reported that she had said she was "perfectly ready to lie to protect the president", though she later denied making the statement. Ndiaye is a relative rarity as a black woman in a French government. Rama Yade, also born in Senegal, held several ministry positions in president Nicolas Sarkozy's government. Christiane Taubira of French Guiana was justice minister under ex-president Francois Hollande. - Turnover - The three new faces in the government are all aged under 40 and keep Macron's pledge for a gender-balanced cabinet intact. Cedric O, a 36-year-old former treasurer for Macron's campaign whose father is South Korean, has replaced digital affairs minister Mounir Mahjoubi, who is also planning to compete for the Paris mayor job. The reshuffle was prompted by the departure of European Affairs Minister Nathalie Loiseau to head Macron's Republic on the Move list for the European Parliament vote on May 23-26. Her job, which saw her handle the tricky Brexit dossier, was taken by Amelie de Montchalin, 33, a Republic on the Move lawmaker heavily involved in drafting the French budget. "Working on European matters will require plenty of combativeness and plenty of energy," she told BFM television on Sunday. In total 10 members of Macron's government have quit their posts so far in his term, a relatively high turnover after less than two years in office compared to previous presidencies. In October, Gerard Collomb, one of the most experienced politicians in Macron's camp, unexpectedly quit as interior minister. That came just weeks after the popular environment minister Nicolas Hulot resigned without warning, criticising Macron's green credentials. Brunei, an absolute monarchy ruled for 51 years by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, says it will implement the new penal code this week The United Nations decried Monday new "cruel and inhuman" laws set to take effect in Brunei this week which impose death by stoning for gay sex and adultery, and amputations for theft. "I appeal to the government to stop the entry into force of this draconian new penal code, which would mark a serious setback for human rights protections for the people of Brunei if implemented," UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet said in a statement. Brunei, an absolute monarchy ruled for 51 years by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, has said it will implement the new penal code starting Wednesday. Brunei first announced the measures in 2013, but implementation has been delayed, in the face of opposition by rights groups, and as officials worked out the practical details. The new law stipulates the death penalty for a number of offences, including rape, adultery, sodomy, robbery and insulting or defaming the Prophet Mohammad. It also introduces public flogging as punishment for abortion as well as amputation for theft, and criminalises exposing Muslim children to the beliefs and practices of any religion besides Islam. Bachelet pointed out that a wide range of UN rights experts had "expressed their concerns about the cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments contained in the Penal Code order". Her comments came after a long line of politicians and celebrities, including George Clooney and Elton John, condemned the new laws and called for a boycott of hotels owned by the sultanate. Homosexuality has long been illegal in Brunei, which practises a stricter brand of Islam than neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia, but it will now become a capital offence. The law applies only to Muslims. - Last execution in 1957 - Bachelet urged Brunei to uphold a long tradition of not applying the death penalty laws that have remained on its books. The country last carried out an execution in 1957. She stressed that international law imposes very stringent restrictions on the use of the death penalty, which can only be applied for the crimes of murder and intentional killing, and only after all due process requirements have been met. "In reality, no judiciary in the world can claim to be mistake-free, and evidence shows that the death penalty is disproportionately applied against people who are already vulnerable, with a high risk of miscarriages of justice," Bachelet said. "I urge Brunei to maintain its de facto moratorium on the use of capital punishment." The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also warned that the new laws could encourage violence and discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. "Any religion-based legislation must not violate human rights, including the rights of those belonging to the majority religion as well as of religious minorities and non-believers," she said. Israel says it is loosening restrictions on fishermen off the blockaded Gaza Strip Israel loosened restrictions on fishermen off the blockaded Gaza Strip on Monday by allowing them to travel up to 15 nautical miles into the Mediterranean in one area, the largest distance in years. The decision comes after Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules Gaza, said it had been engaged in Egyptian-brokered talks with Israel on easing parts of the blockade in return for calm. Israel has not commented on the negotiations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is widely seen as wanting to avoid a severe escalation in the Gaza Strip ahead of April 9 Israeli elections. "The fishing zone in the Gaza Strip has been expanded to a maximum of 15 nautical miles (28 kilometres)," said COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry unit that oversees such regulations. It did not say in which areas the zone would extend to 15 nautical miles. The Gaza fishermen's union said the zone was set at six nautical miles in the north -- the area next to Israel -- as well as 12 off central Gaza and 15 in the south near the Egyptian border. The distance is the largest allowed in years by Israel, which has fought three wars with Palestinian militants in the enclave and has blockaded it for more than a decade. Miriam Marmur, spokeswoman for Gisha, an NGO that monitors restrictions on Gaza, however noted that it remains short of the 20 nautical miles agreed to under the Oslo accords of the 1990s. Gisha also said enforcement of the zone has in the past led Israeli soldiers to fire toward fishermen and to seize vessels for those accused of violating it. "The enforcement of such a complicated demarcation of various permitted distances is likely to endanger the lives of fishermen and threaten their equipment," it said. The distance has fluctuated in recent years from between three nautical miles up to 12 in certain areas. In late February, Israel extended part of the zone to 12 nautical miles while other areas remained at six. On Sunday, Israel reopened its goods and people crossings with the Gaza Strip after having kept them closed for nearly a week following a rare long-distance rocket strike from the Palestinian enclave. Restrictions had also been placed on the fishing zone. The rocket fire wounded seven Israelis and led to Israeli retaliatory strikes across the Gaza Strip, another serious flare-up between the two sides. The reopening of the crossings came after tens of thousands of Palestinians protested along the Gaza border with Israel on Saturday, marking the one-year anniversary since demonstrations and clashes erupted there. Four Palestinians were killed on Saturday during protests and clashes, but unrest was limited and fears of mass bloodshed were averted after Egyptian-led negotiations. Gisha, citing UN figures, says the number of fishermen in Gaza has dropped from nearly 10,000 in 2000 to 3,700 now registered. Of those, about 2,000 are engaged in fishing on a daily basis, it says. No-one has sought justice for Kim Jong Nam (pictured in 2001) who was assassinated with a nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur's international airport The spectacular assassination of the North Korean leader's half-brother -- smeared in the face with a banned nerve agent -- made headlines around the world but two years later its organisers have escaped accountability, analysts say. Malaysian prosecutors dropped a murder charge Monday against the Vietnamese woman who was the only remaining suspect in the 2017 killing of Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur's international airport. Doan Thi Huong is expected to walk free next month after she admitted "causing injury", and her Indonesian partner was released last month. Several North Koreans are believed to have been involved in the murder but four fled Malaysia the same day, and authorities allowed the others to leave within weeks amid a diplomatic standoff with Pyongyang. The dead man -- long exiled from his homeland after falling from grace following a bizarre attempt to visit Tokyo Disneyland -- was ostracised again in death, analysts say, with no-one willing to seek justice for him. "Nobody tried to fight for Kim Jong Nam's rights," said Shin Beom-cheol, an analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. When a person is killed abroad, his or her government usually steps in, Shin said, but added: "In Kim Jong Nam's case, North Korea did not exercise the right for diplomatic protection -- rather, it was the one who killed him." And while the United States and South Korea might have taken on that role in the past, they are likely to remain on the sidelines following Monday's developments to avoid jeopardising their ongoing if stuttering dialogue with the North. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has long backed engagement with Pyongyang, held three summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last year. And Kim has met US President Donald Trump twice since the assassination, but the human rights abuses the North is widely accused of were not a key issue at any of the summits. "As for Malaysia, its diplomatic relations with Indonesia and Vietnam were far more important than serving justice for Kim Jong Nam," Shin added. - Bloodline - Pyongyang has never admitted to killing Kim Jong Nam -- it says the dead man was a North Korean citizen called Kim Chol, and that the accusations are an attempt to smear it. As their father Kim Jong Il's eldest son, Jong Nam would have a claim to be the legitimate successor in a still hierarchical society where traditional values often hold sway. After he was sidelined he led a luxurious but marginal existence in the Chinese territory of Macau, only for his killing to be widely seen as the fatal outcome of a power game in the regime's ruling dynasty. The Kim family tree is littered with figures who met violent deaths or were forced into exile after being marked out by a regime which has never loosened its grip on power in three generations. Jong Nam's death evoked the fate of Jang Song Thaek, the young ruler's uncle by marriage once seen as number two in the system, who was executed in Pyongyang in 2013 for treason and corruption in a brutal display of who was now in charge. Analysts warn the final outcome of the Kim Jong Nam case could encourage his killers to target his son Kim Han Sol, who is believed to be under US protection. "There is definitely a chance that this kind of impunity will embolden North Korea to commit similar acts in the future," said Park Won-gon, a professor of international studies at Handong University. Kim Han Sol, in his early 20s, is believed to have graduated from his studies at the Sciences Po university in France but his current whereabouts are unknown. A shadowy dissident group known as the Cheollima Civil Defence posted an online video of him months after the killing and claimed it had guaranteed his safety. Recent media reports have suggested the mystery organisation has links to US intelligence. If Han Sol is under US protection it would be hard for Pyongyang to mount a similar attack, Park said, but urged his protectors to take extra precautions. "Kim Han Sol still remains a very serious challenge for the North Korean leadership," he added. "He is the rightful heir if you consider the tradition of the eldest and the Paektu bloodline." The Boeing 737 MAX 8, operated by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed on March 10, southeast of Addis Ababa A preliminary report from the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 Max in which 157 people died in Ethiopia will be released on Monday, the foreign ministry said. "The Ethiopia Ministry of Transport will give a preliminary report into its investigation of the ET 302 plane crash later on Monday," said Nebiat Getachew, Ethiopia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman. No details were provided about exactly when the report would be released, or what it might contain. The Boeing 737 MAX 8, operated by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed on March 10, southeast of Addis Ababa. Families in 35 nations were left bereaved when the plane went down just minutes after takeoff from the highland capital on a flight south to neighbouring Kenya, and nose-dived into a field. A source with knowledge of the investigation has said an anti-stall system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), was activated shortly before the crash. Boeing designed the MCAS system, which lowers the aircraft's nose if it detects a stall or loss of airspeed. However, the same MCAS system was implicated in the October crash of a 737 MAX 8 airliner off Indonesia which left 189 people dead. In the Indonesia crash, initial investigations found problems with the MCAS system, when sensors of the plane's flight details sent wrong information. The pilot had tried repeatedly to regain control and pull the nose up but the plane smashed into the sea. Aside from the tragedies of all the casualties, the two crashes have been major blows to aviation giant Boeing, triggering the US manufacturer's biggest crisis in decades with the MAX 8 model grounded worldwide. Ethiopian Airlines is Africa's largest carrier and in many ways the international face of the nation. US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad's trip has already seen him stop in London and Brussels as he seeks global support for an Afghan peace deal US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad was in Kabul on Monday to meet with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and other officials, as part of an ongoing drive to find a way out of Afghanistan's 17-year-old war. The Afghan-born US adviser said on Twitter he had spoken with government representatives and "discussed the urgency of making progress on intra-Afghan dialogue." Khalilzad's visit to Kabul comes ahead of an expected new round of talks with the Taliban in Doha, reportedly due to begin in mid-April. Previous talks in the Qatari capital, where the Taliban has a political office, concluded last month with Khalilzad saying "real strides" had been made. On the table were proposals to get foreign armed forces out of Afghanistan, and for the Taliban to guarantee the country cannot be used as a springboard for terror groups to launch future attacks. The State Department last week said Khalilzad's trip was "part of an overall effort to facilitate a peace process that brings all Afghan parties together in inclusive intra-Afghan negotiations". So far, however, US-Taliban talks have not included the Kabul government. The Taliban have long refused to speak with Kabul, deeming the administration of Ghani -- who is seeking re-election this year -- puppets of the West. But a senior Taliban official told AFP they may consider meeting Afghan government officials in future Doha talks "as independent politicians". Afghanistan remains on edge ahead of a new fighting season in the spring, and fears abound of an increase in Taliban attacks to gain leverage at the negotiating table. On Saturday, Taliban fighters attacked a convoy carrying Afghanistan's vice president Abdul Rashid Dostum in the northern province of Balkh. The attack killed one of Dostum's bodyguards, but the former warlord escaped unhurt. A spokesman for Dostum said he would not be attending the Doha talks -- but representatives from his political party would go. Khalilzad's trip has already seen him stop in London and Brussels as he seeks global support for a peace deal. Des militants du MRC Archives The Secretary General of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) has cancelled a protest, called by the Vice President of the party for April 6. Mr Emmanuel Simh during a press briefing in Yaounde few days ago, announced that the party will embark on a nationwide protest against adopted laws surrounding the organisation of regional elections in Cameroon . Barely three days later, a press release from the secretary general of CRM, Christopher Ndong, postpones the said march while calling on militants to rather go out on April 13. "Following its meeting of March 31, 2019, the governing body of the party, decided to organize public demonstrations on Saturday, April 13, 2019 from 10am to 18pm across the country (not April 6, as announced last Thursday ), announced Mr. Ndong. The party intends to use the march to denounce the arrest and detention of over 150 members of their party, including the leader, Maurice Kamto. Militants are also preparing to denounce the mismanagement of public funds of the failed 2019 African Cup of Nations. They want Cameroon to hold municipal elections before regionals. This is not the first protest Christopher Ndong has cancelled, called by some members of the party. Many are wondering if communication within the party is suffering from the arrest of Maurice Kamto. Christopher Ndong is said to have told these members that only he ,could make such declarations on the party. The march was called on the 17th of March by some clique of communicators of the CRM party. However some party dictates say the organisation of a protest on April 6, wasnt welcomed because memories of a failed coup detat on President Paul took place on April 6, 1984. To them ,Cameroonian authorities could read a different meaning out of their endeavours. Many are wondering why the supposed interim head of the party, Mamadou Mota, whose position mandates him to take over, in case the sitting president Kamto is unavailable, has gone low on the eventualities. Reports say since February, he has not been seen. La Liberte Presse, an online news site focused in the West , reports that a visit led by the said Mamadou Mota to Bafang in the West region, didnt hold as he failed to show up. He was supposed to send a message to the youths of the area, as part of a campaign to comfort families of those who were arrested during the January 26, protest. Sympathisers of the party are expressing fear that a leadership tussle could spring from the range of the leadership of the party, following Kamto's detention. The latest flooding in Iran comes after northern areas were hit late last month, including Agh Ghaleh, shown in this picture released by the Fars news agency on March 23, 2019 Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused the United States of impeding aid efforts and "economic terrorism" on Monday as authorities ordered the immediate evacuation of flood-stricken cities in western Iran. US sanctions are "impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedcrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods," Zarif tweeted, referring to search and rescue operations being conducted after huge rainfalls triggered vast flooding. "Blocked equipment includes relief choppers," the tweet read, adding that "this isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM." The evacuation was ordered after rivers burst their banks, dams overflowed and vast areas were cut off from communication. A chronic shortage of rescue helicopters in Iran, due to US sanctions, has forced the emergency services to request help from military helicopters and amphibious armoured personnel carriers to assist in the rescue operations. The authorities declared a "situation red", the highest level of alert, in Lorestan province with four or five cities "completely critical", state television news network IRINN reported from Khorramabad, the region's capital. "In Khorramabad the water has risen by as much as three metres (nearly 10 feet) in parts... and reports are coming in of regions... completely submerged with residents stranded on their rooftops," it added. The Red Crescent's provincial director, Sarem Rezaee, said his organisation had lost contact with much of the region. "Telephones are not working, our radio communications are down... at this moment we have no news of other cities and villages," he told IRINN, adding roads were flooded and helicopters were unable to take off due to the bad weather. "We have requested emergency help from neighbouring provinces but at the present no one can do anything." The airport in the western city of Khorramabad was flooded, with images showing water submerging the runway and cutting the province's main air link to the rest of the country. Authorities in Lorestan ordered evacuations in many regions, bringing in the armed forces to forcibly remove those who do not comply, local media reported. - 'Lost all contact' - The authorities said Pol-e-Dokhtar and Mamulan cities were already half submerged, with one fatality reported in Mamulan. Images on local media show water gushing through streets in Pol-e-Dokhtar where the water level had reached 1.5 metres (five feet). Every village in the vicinity of the two cities had been surrounded by flood waters while all five dams in Lorestan had reached capacity and four of them were overflowing. "We have lost all contact with Pol-e-Dokhtar," the Lorestan Governor General Mousa Khademi told the semi-official ISNA News Agency. "We do not have any information on the situation there... we do not know how many people have been affected by the floods," he added. Numerous rivers had burst their banks and landslides blocked many roads, said the reports. Media outlets showed images of collapsed bridges and oil and gas pipelines destroyed by the flood. The main railway line linking Tehran to the south of the country had also been blocked by the flood. This is the third major flood to hit Iran in the past two weeks with unprecedented rainfalls in the mostly arid country that had endured a decades-long drought until this year. The first occurred in the northeast of the country on March 19 and the second struck the west and southwest of Iran on March 25 with a combined toll of 45 people killed. The present flood has again struck in the west and southwest following heavy rain that is set to continue into Tuesday. Apart from Lorestan half a dozen other provinces are also facing critical circumstances, with the emergency services reporting 23 out of Iran's 31 provinces have been affected and could face floods. With the consecutive floods the reservoirs of many dams have reached full capacity forcing emergency discharge, as much as 1,800 cubic metres per second in some cases, to prevent them from breaking. Veteran Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to seek a fifth term set off demonstrations against his 20-year rule Algeria's ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika will resign before his mandate expires on April 28, his office said, after a succession of loyalists deserted him in the face of massive protests. The 82-year-old, who has rarely been seen in public since a 2013 stroke, has been clinging to power as pressure mounted for weeks over attempts to prolong his 20-year rule. Bouteflika will resign "before April 28, 2019", after "important decisions" are taken, the presidency said in a statement on Monday, without elaborating. He would take "steps to ensure state institutions continue to function during the transition period", the statement carried by the official APS news agency said. Algeria has been rocked by huge protests since the veteran president announced in February that he was seeking a fifth term in office. Bouteflika said last month he would pull out of the race and postponed April elections, in moves that angered demonstrators, who saw it as a ploy to extend his two decades in power. As the ire failed to subside, a number of high-profile loyalists have deserted the president. On Tuesday, armed forces chief of staff General Ahmed Gaid Salah, who was appointed by Bouteflika in 2004, said the president should either resign or be declared medically unfit to govern by parliament using its constitutional powers. Abdelaziz Bouteflika And on Wednesday key coalition ally the National Rally for Democracy, (RND) headed by recently sacked prime minister Ahmed Ouyahia, called for Bouteflika's resignation "with the aim of smoothing the period of transition". Under the constitution, once his resignation is tendered, the speaker of Algeria's upper house of parliament, Abdelkader Bensalah, would act as interim leader for up to 90 days during which a presidential election must be organised. The announcement on Monday was greeted by the beeping of some car horns in Algiers, but there was little sign of euphoria as people insisted the whole ruling system must change. "Bouteflika quits and then what happens?" asked Sofiane, a 25-year-old doctor. The Movement for the Society of Peace, a moderate Islamist party, said "the president's resignation... without reforms could end up conspiring against the popular movement". "The move is just a way of keeping the political system with all the wrong turns that have led us to the current situation," it said. - Graft probes - As rumours swirl of frantic behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, prosecutors said they had banned corruption suspects from leaving Algeria after launching graft probes against unnamed individuals. The authorities did not say who was being targeted by the new investigations into corruption and illegal money transfers abroad, but they followed the arrest of the president's key backer, businessman Ali Haddad. Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013 Haddad, who Forbes magazine describes as one of Algeria's wealthiest entrepreneurs, was detained overnight Saturday to Sunday at a border post with neighbouring Tunisia, a security source said, without giving reasons for the arrest. On Sunday, the Algerian authorities also banned all private aircraft from taking off and landing until the end of the month. The statement on Bouteflika's impending resignation came after he named a new government made up mainly of technocrats under recently appointed premier Noureddine Bedoui. The administration unveiled Sunday -- which was supposed to steward the country towards a transition -- included Gaid Salah remaining in his position as deputy defence minister. The appointments failed to curb calls for Bouteflika to leave, as hundreds of people in Algiers demonstrated overnight against the announcement. Huge protests have been held across Algeria demanding ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika leave power Algerian media outlets were awash with speculation that the announcement of the new government would pave the way for Bouteflika's resignation. The news website TSA described the administration as a "result of compromise between the army command and the presidency". The El Moudjahid daily, traditionally viewed as close to power, ran a headline reading "The Beginning of the End?" and said the army's proposal for Bouteflika to go "is the only one that offers a clear and convincing way out". The idea of Bouteflika's inner circle retaining their grip on power through a substitute leader has drawn short shrift from protesters dealing with high unemployment and economic hardships. Young people have made up a key part of the demonstrations in a country where half the population is under 30. US non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch charges that Chinese officials have sought to muzzle discussion on Beijing's treatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities before the UN Human Rights Council Diplomats and activists on Monday denounced intense Chinese lobbying, pressure and even threats to rein in criticism of Beijing during last month's session of the UN Human Rights Council. Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged that the Chinese mission in Geneva had sent a letter to a number of missions urging them to stay away from a US-organised event on March 13 about China's treatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province. The letter, signed by Ambassador Yu Jianhua and seen by AFP, tells countries "not to co-sponsor, participate in or be present at this side event... in the interest of our bilateral relations and continued multilateral cooperation." HRW slammed these "threats", with the organisation's Geneva director John Fisher warning that the public outcry over the treatment of Muslim minorities had "sent China into panic mode." Chinese officials, he said in a statement, are now "using public as well as private pressure to block concerted international action." The Chinese mission did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation and comment. But several diplomats confirmed to AFP that their missions had received the letter ahead of the event. It took place on the sidelines of the rights council's three-week session and focused on allegations that upwards of one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic minorities are being held in detention centres in Xinjiang. China maintains instead that the Uighurs and others are at "campuses" for vocational training set up to counter radicalisation. Xinjiang, which shares a border with several countries including Pakistan and Afghanistan, has long seen violent unrest, which China claims is orchestrated by an organised "terrorist" movement seeking the region's independence. But many Uighurs and Xinjiang experts say the violence stems 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. - 'Stage-manage everything' - On Monday, several diplomats backed HRW's claim that China had exerted significant pressure on countries to speak on its behalf during the conclusion of a review of its rights record before the council on March 15. "They were doing their best to stage-manage everything," a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP. A US-organised event in March sought to focus attention on China's treatment of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province "When you see how few countries spoke up about Xinjiang, I am sure it did have an effect," the diplomat added. "They are not staying idle," another Western diplomat said. According to HRW, Chinese officials pressured the UN to remove elements provided by UN experts and NGOs from the so-called Universal Periodic Review (UPR) report and tried to block the accreditation of Uighur activist Dolkun Isa. A UN official told AFP that "receiving pressure from governments attempting to silence critics is fairly common, but a particularly high number of these complaints come from China about the credibility of participants." "This session was particularly bad," acknowledged the UN official, who asked not to be named. HRW also charged that China had intentionally pushed friendly states to flood the speakers' list for the 20 minutes allocated to countries' concluding remarks. Nearly 100 countries requested the right to speak -- over three times more than usual in this situation -- but only 13 were permitted to take the floor. China blames unrest in Xinjiang province on an organised "terrorist" movement, while Uighurs say it stems from Chinese cultural and religious repression 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. Non-governmental organisations were also given a chance to speak, but there too, groups praising China grabbed six of the 10 available speaking slots. "It speaks volumes that China felt it necessary to twist arms and mount propaganda displays to try to suppress scrutiny of its rights record," Fisher said. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, shown here in 2009, helped foster peace in Algeria after a decade-long civil war in the 1990s Abdelaziz Bouteflika is Algeria's longest-serving president and a veteran of the independence struggle who has held on to power for some 20 years despite ill health. The 82-year-old survived the Arab Spring uprisings that toppled other leaders in the region. But after weeks of demonstrations against his rule, veteran loyalists including army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah have deserted the president. It was Bouteflika's bid for a fifth term in office earlier this year that sparked public anger and brought hundreds of thousands out onto the streets across the country demanding he step down. Dubbed Boutef by Algerians, he had helped foster peace after a decade-long civil war in the North African country in the 1990s which killed nearly 200,000 people. "I am the whole of Algeria. I am the embodiment of the Algerian people," he said in 1999, the year he became president. But in recent years, Bouteflika has had a history of medical problems. A stroke in 2013 affected his mobility and speech, and he has used a wheelchair ever since. He is rarely seen or heard in public. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, shown here in 1973, served as Algerian foreign minister for more than a decade He has also faced criticism from rights groups and opponents who accuse him of being authoritarian. When Bouteflika came to power with the support of an army battling Islamist guerrillas, nobody expected him to stay in office for so long. After his election he addressed critics who saw him as another puppet of the military, saying: "I'm not three-quarters of a president." Paradoxically, it was only after his stroke that Bouteflika was able to consolidate power in a country where the shadowy intelligence service has long been viewed as a "state within a state". - Long spell in exile - Bouteflika was born in Morocco on March 2, 1937 to a family from western Algeria. At the age of 19 he joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) in its struggle against French colonial rule. When independence came in 1962, he was appointed minister of sport and tourism at the age of just 25, under Algeria's first president, Ahmed Ben Bella. Abdelaziz Bouteflika casts his ballot on 16 September 1999 in Algiers He became foreign minister the following year, a post he held for more than a decade, but was sidelined after the death of president Houari Boumediene in 1978 and went into self-imposed exile. While he was abroad the military-backed government cancelled the 1991 elections, which an Islamist party had been poised to win, sparking a decade of bloodletting. Bouteflika returned from Switzerland in 1999 to stand for president with the backing of the army which saw in him a potential figure of reconciliation. He initially faced six rivals, but when the opponents dropped out, crying foul, he found himself the only candidate. He proposed an amnesty for rebels who laid down their arms and twice secured public endorsement for "national reconciliation" through referendums. The first, in September 1999, was a major gamble but paid off, leading to a sharp decrease in violence that helped propel Bouteflika to a second term in 2004. His third term in 2009 followed a constitutional amendment allowing him to stand again. His supporters argue that under his stewardship public and private investment created millions of jobs and dramatically lowered unemployment. Fidel Castro and Abdelaziz Bouteflika attend a ceremony in Havana, Cuba on April 15, 2000 during an official visit by the Algerian president But a lack of opportunity continues to drive many Algerians abroad as youth unemployment remains high. When the Arab Spring erupted in January 2011, Bouteflika rode out the storm by lifting a 19-year state of emergency and using oil revenues to grant pay rises. For political commentator Rashid Tlemcani, Bouteflika "should have left office at the end of his second term, after securing national reconciliation and conquering the hearts of a large part of the population". - Voting in a wheelchair - In April 2013, Bouteflika was rushed to hospital in France after his stroke, and spent three months recovering. He had already been hospitalised in Paris in 2005 because of intestinal problems from which he has never fully recovered. Bouteflika's decision to seek a fourth mandate in 2014 after 15 years in power sparked both derision and criticism. Abdelaziz Bouteflika is pushed in a wheelchair next to his nephew before casting his ballot at a polling station in Algiers while running for re-election on April 17, 2014 He did not even campaign and voted from a wheelchair, but still won 81 percent of the vote. But it was Bouteflika's bid for a fifth term in elections, which had been due to be held in April, that proved the last straw for many. His candidacy was submitted on March 3 while he was in Switzerland for what his office described as another round of routine medical tests. On March 10, he returned home, and the next day pulled out of the race, and cancelled the elections. Initial elation from demonstrators turned to anger when he confirmed he would stay on in power beyond the term of his mandate. On March 31 Bouteflika named a new government and one of his key backers, business tycoon Ali Haddad, was arrested. A day later the presidency announced Bouteflika would resign before his mandate expires on April 28, in a statement carried by the official APS news agency. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman's visit to Pakistan in February 2019 -- he is seen here with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (L) -- is at the centre of an apparent probe into Pakistani journalists accused of trying to undermine the visit Pakistan's interior ministry ordered investigations into six journalists who had posted pictures online of murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Monday. RSF said it was "appalled" to learn of the investigations, adding that it "condemns this latest case of intimidation, especially given the Pakistani police's past behaviour towards dissident journalists". The investigations had been ordered in a letter dated March 13 from the cybercrime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency, part of the interior ministry, the group said in a statement. AFP has been unable to independently verify the letter, which has been widely circulated on social media, and Pakistani officials have not responded to requests for comment. According to RSF, the FIA letter named the journalists as part of what it called "a targeted social media campaign" against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman during his visit to Pakistan in February. The campaign consisted of "repeatedly posting photos of Jamal Khashoggi.... throughout the crown prince's visit", the watchdog said. The visit came five months after the crown prince came under intense pressure following the murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi had been a fierce critic of the prince, and his killing ignited a diplomatic crisis. Pakistan, long allied with Saudi Arabia, was seeking much-needed investment during the visit. The letter said posting Khashoggi's pictures online "conveyed a very disrespectful message" towards the visiting crown prince. Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF's Asia-Pacific desk, said: "This kind of harassment of journalists, whose only crime is posting content online that displeases the authorities, is symptomatic of the treatment that the Pakistani political establishment reserves for dissidents." "The six journalists targeted by these investigations by the FIA are known for being outspoken on social networks, which are now the only place where they can express themselves freely," he added. Pakistan routinely ranks among the world's most dangerous countries for media workers. Coverage critical of the country's powerful military is considered a red flag, with reporters at times detained, beaten and even killed for running afoul of the security establishment. During his visit to Islamabad, the Saudi crown prince ending up signing investment deals worth up to $20 billion. New York's sprawling, heavily used subway system badly needs funds for maintenance and upgrades After years of delay, New York state lawmakers on Monday approved charging a toll for drivers heading into downtown Manhattan with the goal of relieving traffic congestion and raising funds for the city's subway system -- a first for a US city. The toll, similar to measures taken in London, Stockholm and Singapore, will begin at the latest by December 31, 2021, according to a measure approved by the New York State Assembly in Albany. Nearly all vehicles transiting below 60th Street in Manhattan will need to pay a toll, according to the measure, although some practical details still need to be ironed out. A panel of experts must now decide the exact amount to be paid. Estimates are that passenger vehicles will pay at least $12 a day, while trucks will pay $25. The measure, supported by the state's Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo -- reelected to office in November -- has been praised by environmental advocates but denounced as unfair in nearby New Jersey and neighborhoods around Manhattan like Queens. Drivers say the toll will especially hit workers that live in areas far from public transportation and who rely on their cars to drive to and from work. Many of the bridges and tunnels leading to the island of Manhattan already charge tolls. The new toll would be on top of those fees. In a country that has long favored cars over public transportation, and in a metropolis like New York where the use of on-demand ride share services like Uber and Lyft has exploded, the goal to raise money for the subway system appears unusual. It could serve as a model for other cities with heavy traffic congestion like San Francisco or Los Angeles. The legislation specifies that the toll money must be directed mainly towards upgrades of the New York subway system, and aims to raise $15 billion over an unspecified period of time. In recent years the city subway has suffered an embarrassing number of delays and accidents, the price of years of neglect and a failure to properly invest in upgrades. The measure should also help New York reach its official goal of an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Other measures dear to environmentalists approved in the state's $175 billion budget -- the first passed since Democrats took control of both houses of the state legislature in January -- include a ban on onetime-use plastic shopping bags, to take effect in March 2020. Those stuck in the camp inside despair of overcrowded conditions and the long wait for asylum When thousands of people fleeing war and poverty began arriving on their Greek island, many on Lesbos welcomed them. Four years later a sprawling local camp is packed with desperate asylum-seekers and migrants -- and islanders' patience is wearing thin. In the small village of Moria, local people living next to one of the region's largest migrant camps have grown tired of their role at the centre of Europe's migration crisis, while those trapped inside despair of overcrowded conditions and the long wait for asylum. Coastal patrols see a continuing stream of arrivals, although far lower than at the peak of the crisis "There's a great indignation among locals. Europe must understand this burden, Greece shouldn't lift it by itself, it should be shared, every state must take its part," said Nikos Trakellis, Moria village chairman. He said it was as yet unclear how the issue would affect voting in local and European elections in May, with fears that the far-right could capitalise on anti-immigration sentiment across the bloc. Abdul from Pakistan has found work at a restaurant on the island, but many other newcomers struggle "There are issues every day... all their sewage, the dirt we breathe it," he said, accusing migrants from the camps of stealing livestock and food. At around 7,000, refugees and migrants on Lesbos currently outnumber the local population by 2.5 to one. According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, the situation is even more explosive on the island of Samos, at six to one. But it's not as if the migrants and refugees want to stay on Lesbos. Ibrahim Adamou, a 27-year-old from Togo, spent six months in the Moria camp, witnessing "disgusting" conditions and sleeping "on the ground, in the cold". He has been offered an asylum hearing in October. - Search for freedom - "Europe must not disappoint us," said Lesbos' outgoing mayor Spyros Galinos. Most migrants want to move on to wealthier EU states such as Germany and France to rejoin relatives and find work unavailable in crisis-hit Greece. But EU borders have been closed for the past three years "We are still waiting for pressure on the Moria camp to be lifted. They keep coming and this creates a bottleneck," he told AFP. Most migrants want to move on to wealthier EU states such as Germany and France to rejoin relatives and find work unavailable in crisis-hit Greece. But EU borders have been closed for the past three years. Both economic migrants and war refugees register for asylum regardless of their chances of success, clogging the system. "I thought I would find freedom in Europe," said Mohamed from Syria. He said he has been trapped on Lesbos for three years. The camp's deputy commander Dimitrios Vafeas admitted "there's a huge waiting list" to process claims. "We have arrivals every day, 90 percent of them Afghans. It's important to continue accelerating the transfers to the mainland," he told AFP. Over 875,000 migrants arrived on the Greek islands in 2015 according to EU border agency Frontex The government has already transferred hundreds of the most vulnerable refugees to camps elsewhere in Greece. They are replaced within days by new arrivals. Living under such confined conditions further saps the fragile health of camp residents. Caroline Willemen, Lesbos coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said people suffered ailments associated with poor hygiene, diarrhoea, respiratory problems and mental illness. Most people at the camp meet the criteria for resettlement in other EU countries, argued Stratis Skountianellis, a lawyer specialising in refugee cases. In the past people would only stay on the islands for a maximum of two days, according to UNHCR's representative in Greece, Philippe Leclerc. "But the slow workings of Greek bureaucracy, and pressure by certain EU member states to keep migrants on the islands, have created overpopulation and suffering on both sides," he said. - 'Like a cyclone' - Trakellis, the Moria village leader, said the 2015 crisis hit "like a cyclone". "Wherever you looked, there were refugees and migrants. Yes, we welcomed them but how long can you last? People are tired." Residents in Moria found their island at centre of Europe's migration crisis According to EU border agency Frontex, Greece in 2019 registered some 5,500 migrant and refugee arrivals in the first two months of the year, just behind Spain. That number is a third higher than the 2018 equivalent. Current arrivals are nothing compared to the million people that crossed over to Europe in 2015, most fleeing war in Syria, followed by Iraqis and Afghans. "Over 875,000 migrants arrived on the Greek islands in 2015," said Frontex spokeswoman Ewa Moncure. This fell to 56,500 last year, just behind Spain at 57,000. Italy, led by a populist government vehemently opposing migration, was a distant third at 23,000. George Manoussos, a crew member on a Greek coast guard patrol boat, was on duty at the height of the crisis. "Many thousands of people arrived, by day or by night. We were seeing dots everywhere on our radar... sometimes we had to choose between eight boats," he told AFP. "Every boat is a potential shipwreck," said Manoussos, who is still haunted by the memory of dead children plucked from the sea. According to EU border agency Frontex, Greece in 2019 registered some 5,500 migrant and refugee arrivals in the first two months of the year Mountains of discarded lifejackets -- too poorly made to be of use in a real emergency -- are a poignant reminder of the risks the migrants and refugees took to get this far. Manoussos noted that there are fewer sinkings now, after a 2016 EU-Turkey deal to stem the flow of arrivals, in addition to beefed up patrols by NATO and Frontex. As the situation grinds on intolerance has increased. A backlog in processing claims for asylum has helped lead to overcrowding in the camp "We feel that Europeans forgot about the refugees. This policy allows people to become more xenophobic, racist, it is frightening," said Efi Latsoudi, member of local support group Lesvos Solidarity. Last April, Afghan families protesting about living conditions in the camp were assaulted by far-right militants throwing stones and flares. A monument erected to drowned migrants has also been repeatedly vandalised. "People feel betrayed by Europe, the richest northern European countries don't accept refugees," adds Lena Altinoglou, owner of a Lesbos restaurant employing migrants. "They want to turn our island into a concentration camp," she argues. Former Minneapolis Police officer Mohamed Noor (C) arrives with his lawyers Thomas Plunkett (R) and Peter Wold (L) for the beginning of his trial on April 1, 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota Jury selection began Monday in the murder trial of a former Minnesota police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman, provoking outrage in the United States and in the victim's home country. Prosecutors say Somali-American Mohamed Noor opened fire on Justine Damond in Minneapolis in July 2017 while seated in the passenger seat of his squad car. The 40-year-old yoga instructor had approached the cruiser after calling twice to report a possible rape in the dark alley behind her home. The Australian, whose maiden name was Ruszczyk, had moved to the US to marry her fiancee Don Damond. She was shot once in the abdomen and died at the scene. Damond's killing sparked outrage in Minneapolis and her native country, which since has translated to intense interest in the case as it moves to trial. Controversial police shooting cases in the US have proven difficult to prosecute, however, with few officers sent to prison. Outside the courthouse Monday, a spokeswoman from the organization "Justice for Justine" called for accountability. "Systemic issues extend far beyond this one shooting, this one officer, this one trial," Katherine Hamburg told reporters. No caption "The fight for justice must continue until the institutions and cultures that shield police from accountability are dismantled." Dozens of prospective jurors were given initial instructions Monday and handed questionnaires. Court proceedings ended by late morning and were scheduled to resume Wednesday. Prospective jurors were to turn in written answers to 66 questions, including whether they owned firearms or knew anyone of Somali decent. Prosecutors also filed a nine-page list of potential witnesses that included Matthew Harrity, Noor's partner on the night of the shooting. - Noor's work history barred - Noor was fired from the police force after the incident and charged with second-degree and third-degree murder, as well as second-degree manslaughter. A memorial for Justine Damond is seen near the alleyway were she was found dead in Minneapolis on December 28, 2018 -- a policeman accused of murdering the Australian in the Minnesota city is about to face trial He has pleaded not guilty. The murder charges carry sentences of up to 25 years for the second-degree charge and up to 10 years for the third-degree count. The prosecution has claimed Noor acted unreasonably -- shooting at someone he did not clearly see while his partner was in the line of fire. Noor's attorneys have indicated they plan to mount a self-defense argument. Attorney Tom Plunkett has said his client "acted as he has been trained and consistent with established departmental policy." Minnesota Public Radio said Noor was deemed "asocial and socially introverted" in his pre-employment psychological test, but that there were no signs of disqualifying mental illness. Police officers involved in controversial shootings are rarely sent to prison, because juries and judges are loath to second guess officers' split-second, life-or-death decisions. Trials have mostly resulted in hung juries or acquittals, which at times have caused civil unrest in American cities where racial tensions are already high. Several days of demonstrations followed Justine Damond's 2017 death The Damond shooting enraged many of the victim's neighbors, who mounted a campaign for police reforms. The city's police chief at the time was forced to resign within days. Another Minnesota officer, Jeronimo Yanez, was sacked but acquitted after fatally shooting black motorist Philando Castile in 2016. There were several days of protests in another Midwestern city -- Saint Louis, Missouri -- in 2017, after a judge concluded there was not enough evidence to convict former officer Jason Stockley for shooting Anthony Lamar Smith after a 2011 car chase. In Chicago, Jason Van Dyke, who is white, was convicted of the 2014 murder of black teen Laquan McDonald. The 17-year-old was shot 16 times by the former officer, with most of those bullets striking the teen after he fell to the ground. The United States is suspending deliveries related to the F-35 fighter jet to Turkey The United States said Monday it was halting all deliveries and joint work with Turkey on the F-35 fighter jet program after the NATO ally insisted on a major arms purchase from Russia. After months of warnings, the United States said that Turkey's decision to buy Russia's S-400 missile system was incompatible with remaining part of the emblematic US warplane program. "Until they forgo delivery of the S-400, the United States has suspended deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey's F-35 operational capability," Pentagon chief spokesman Charles E. Summers Jr. said. "Should Turkey procure the S-400, their continued participation in the F-35 program is at risk," he said in a statement. US officials have voiced concern that, with Turkey in both camps, Russia could obtain F-35 data to improve the accuracy of the S-400 against Western aircraft. The Pentagon said that it had started to look at secondary sources to produce parts for F-35s that were being developed in Turkey. "We very much regret the current situation facing our F-35 partnership with Turkey, but the (Defense Department) is taking prudent steps to protect the shared investments made in our critical technology," Summers said. Turkey had planned to buy 100 F-35A fighter jets, with pilots already training in the United States. The plane's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, said that contracts with Turkish companies to build parts for the F-35 had been expected to reach $12 billion. Among the eight Turkish companies involved in the purchase, Ayesas has been building a panoramic cockpit display for the F-35 and Fokker Elmo makes 40 percent of the electrical wiring and interconnection system, according to Lockheed Martin. - Growing tilt to Russia - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (left) meets his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu in Antalya The purchase of a Russian system is highly unusual for a member of NATO, the Western alliance forged to counter the Soviet Union. The US suspension announcement comes two days before foreign ministers from the 29 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are due in Washington to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance -- and hours after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party suffered a surprise rout in elections in major cities including Istanbul. Erdogan, whose relations with the West have soured sharply as he cracks down on dissent at home, has increasingly looked to Moscow as a partner. Russian tourists have made Turkey their top destination, providing a vital economic boost. Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov traveled to Turkey, where Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu insisted that the S-400 purchase would go ahead. "We have an agreement with Russia and we are bound by it," Cavusoglu told reporters. Hoping to offer an alternative, the United States last year approved the sale of Patriot missiles to Turkey -- a deal to which Ankara said it was open. Four senators last week proposed legally barring the transfer of F-35s to Turkey if it buys the S-400. One of the senators, Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, praised the Pentagon suspension and pledged to "continue working in the Senate to prevent this dangerous possibility from becoming a reality." - Rocky ties with US - American pastor Andrew Brunson, freed from prison in Turkey, prays for US President Donald Trump at the White House in October 2018 Turkey's relations with the United States plunged last year when President Donald Trump imposed tariffs, battering Turkey's lira, over the jailing of an American pastor detained as part of a mass roundup following a coup attempt against Erdogan. The pastor, Andrew Brunson, was freed and Trump appeared to grow fond of Erdogan, speaking to him before his sudden decision to withdrew US troops from Syria. But tensions quickly resurfaced with the United States fearful that Erdogan will strike US-allied Kurdish fighters in Syria and a Turkish court trying a US consulate staffer, Metin Topuz, on charges of spying. Topuz, a Turkish citizen, is accused of ties to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish preacher who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States. Erdogan has repeatedly demanded that the United States extradite Gulen, whom the Turkish leader accuses of fomenting the coup. The Tanzanian government has been imposing "restrictive" laws on political parties with police attacking or banning internal opposition meetings, the rights coalition said Tanzanian civil society groups have called on the government and security forces to protect fundamental human rights, in a rare outspoken criticism of the rule of President John Magufuli. The coalition, the Civil Society Organisations Directors Forum, made up of 65 influential rights groups from across the East African nation, said they had watched with alarm the deterioration of rights over the past two years. "Democratic rights, freedom of assembly and association is getting worse," the group said in a joint statement, released late Monday. "For us, this situation can be viewed as a threat to national unity and disruption of national peace." Critics say Magufuli has unleashed a wave of oppression since his election in 2015, cracking down on opposition figures. "Leaders should respect national laws and the constitution," the statement read, saying the security forces should ensure "political meetings are protected, instead of banning and disrupting them." The police were "suppressing multi-party politics", the group said, noting that "internal meetings of opposition parties have been attacked or banned." They also called on Magufuli to hold talks directly with opposition parties and leaders, warning of "restrictive" laws on parties they said violated the constitution. The group includes the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) and the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition (THRDC), both key civil society groups, as well as organisations from Zanzibar, the semi-autonomous Indian Ocean archipelago. All said they were concerned that a deterioration in basic rights would undermine peace in Tanzania, and wanted to raise a red flag warning that the country was headed in the wrong direction. "Being citizens of the United Republic of Tanzania, with a constitutional duty to protect national solidarity, unity, justice and peace, we have seen it advisable to speak up and advise our political and government leaders," the statement read. "Our fear is that, if this condition persists, we will build a nation with a big group of people who feel that they have been excluded and discriminated," it added. Last month, Freeman Mbowe, head of Tanzania's main opposition party Chadema, 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. Infirmieres de l"hopital de Deido Capture d"ecran Three female nurses at the Deido District Hospital in Douala have been suspended for three months, for failing to uphold the ethics of their profession, faced with a delicate case. The news of their suspension , was read over state radio, in a communique, signed by the Minister of Public Health Dr. Manaouda Malachie. Videos over social media showed these nurses, filming the corpse of a dead student , and making comments over it. Seemingly, one of them shared over social media, which then went viral. Lycee Deido: Suspension des infirmieres (c) CRTV Cameroonians were in shock when they watched the video,and questioned if nurses had become journalists. The Minister of public health minister in a tweet, expressed disdain towards their actions, while extending condolences to the victims family. 17 year old Bleriot, a lower sixth student of Government Bilingual High School Deido, was stabbed to death on the school campus last Friday, March 29, by former students of the school. His attackers, having been dismissed from school during the first term for drug use and absenteeism, came back on the last day of school for the second term, to attack students and seize their belongings. Bleriot in an attempt to help some female students, was stabbed and rushed to the Deido district hospital. It was at this moment that the three nurses, Mbella Adelle Louise Marie, Ntongni Nana, and Loungi D. Celestine, forgot they were nurses, and instantly became citizen journalists, by filming and sharing the sensitive images from the scene. Sources from the ministry of public health had earlier indicated that these nurses, would be sanctioned. The no-nonsense Public Health minister, Dr. Manaouda Malachie says no court cases will follow the sanctions. Cameroonians had long awaited such a move from the minister and have been congratulating this bold step of his, he has began his journey, on a good footing.Dr. Manaouda was appointed in January 2019 during the last cabinet shake up. He took over from Andre Mama Fouda. US President Donald Trump said he is '100 percent' prepared to shut down the US-Mexico border to force action to deter illegal immigrants President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is "100 percent" prepared to close down the US-Mexico border, warning Congress and Central American governments to take action to stem the flow of migrants into the country. Delays were already rising at several key border crossings as Trump ratcheted up pressure on Democrats in Congress to toughen US laws against illegal immigrants, threatening to hurt the US economy in the name of border security. "It is a national emergency on the border," Trump said. If Mexico does not stop migrants from transiting across its territory, and if Congress does not act, he said, "the border's going to be closed, 100 percent." "Sure it's going to have a negative impact on the economy," he said. "Security is more important to me than trade." Trump said Democrats were blocking reforms for political reasons but could fix the problem "in 45 minutes." He was not specific, but Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has asked Congress to give border officials the power to forcibly repatriate Central American illegal immigrants, including children who arrived alone, back to their countries. The threat to close the border, which handled some $612 billion worth of trade in 2018, sent shivers through the economy, and drew warnings from allies of the president. "Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country, and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said. His call was backed by the Chamber of Commerce, which said in a statement that while it backed immigration reform, closing the border "would inflict severe economic harm on American families, workers, farmers and manufacturers across the United States." - 100,000 migrants a month - Border closure threat: motorists wait in line to cross the border into California from Mexicali, Mexico Homeland Security officials said they were preparing for the possibility of a shutdown of at least some border entry points as they divert staff to deal with the flood of migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, expected to hit nearly 100,000 a month. Nielsen cut short an official trip to Europe to return for meetings early Tuesday on the border crisis, and on Monday Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said he would be meeting Nielsen and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the crisis. Officials said facilities for handling the migrants -- who for the moment cannot be sent back after they cross the border and request asylum -- are overtaxed and understaffed, creating hazardous conditions. "We are in a full blown emergency. The bottom line is all options are on the table right now," a senior Homeland Security official, who declined to be named, told journalists Tuesday. "The volume of vulnerable populations that's arriving is unsustainable... The humanitarian situation cannot be ignored and the security situation cannot be ignored." Trump said Mexican officials had reacted to his threat to close the border last week by clamping down on the caravans of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in the three Central American countries. Mexico "made a big step over the past two days," he said, adding that they would have to continue if they don't want the border closed. He also defended his decision to cut off "hundreds of millions of dollars" in US aid to the three countries, accusing them of arranging the caravans of migrants. The three "don't do anything for us," he said. - Long lines at border ports - On Monday, Nielsen ordered an "emergency surge" of personnel to deal with the situation, including moving 750 staff to areas of the border where the migrants arrive. Many were being diverted from official ports, leading to slowdowns in processing arriving visitors and commercial vehicles. Delays for incoming traffic were three hours at Brownsville, Texas, for the second straight day, and more than two hours in other areas. On the Mexican side, Andres Morales Arreola, head of operations for border crossings in Chihuahua state, said the border between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso had "collapsed" because so many US border officials have been reassigned to deal with the migrant influx. Long lines have formed at the border since Thursday, with wait times of up to eight hours for those trying to cross. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Armando Cabada Alvidrez called on the city's bustling manufacturing sector to temporarily cut back shipments to the US in order to reduce the backup. However, White House chief economist Larry Kudlow said they were working to minimize the economic impact from a closure of the border -- including keeping truck lanes open. "The question is, can we deal with that and not have any economic damage?" he told CNBC television. "I think the answer is we can and people are looking at different options, particularly if you can keep those freight lanes, those truck lanes open." CHICAGO (AP) - Jussie Smollett, a successful but not A-list actor, burst into the world's consciousness in January after he reported being the victim of a racist and anti-gay attack. In the two months since, a number of figures in Chicago and beyond have gained international attention and emerged as supporting characters in the saga. A look at those involved: THE CELEBRITY Actor and musician Jussie Smollett went from child star to one of the few actors to play a black, gay character on prime-time TV on Fox's "Empire." His name-recognition skyrocketed when he made a report to Chicago police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in late January. Weeks later, his celebrity turned to notoriety when he was indicted, accused by police of staging the attack because he was unhappy with his pay on "Empire" and was looking to promote his career. On Tuesday, tables turned again for the actor when prosecutors dropped the charges. Afterward, Smollett stood in front of a media crush , thanking his family and supporters. THE PRESIDENT President Donald Trump increased attention on the case when, two days after Smollett reported the attack, he told reporters at the White House that he saw a story about Smollett. "It doesn't get worse, as far as I'm concerned," Trump said. Smollett said his attackers yelled, "This is MAGA country," a reference to Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan. Two days after prosecutors drop charges against Smollett the president tweeted that the FBI and Department of Justice will "review the outrageous Jussie Smollett case" and called the case "an embarrassment to our Nation!" THE MAYOR This comboination of file photos shows, from top left clockwise, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, attorney Mark Geragos, President Donald Trump, actor and musician Jussie Smollett, Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx and Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson. Smollett, a successful but not A-list actor, burst into the world's consciousness in January 2019 after he reported being the victim of a racist and anti-gay attack. In the two months since, a number of figures in Chicago and beyond have gained international attention and emerged as supporting characters in the saga. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford, Richard Vogel, Manuel Balce Ceneta, Paul Beaty, M. Spencer Green) Mayor Rahm Emanuel jumped to support his city after Smollett was first charged, saying the accusations against the actor "will never trump Chicago's collective spirit." When charges were dropped, a visibly angry Emanuel appeared at a news conference and called the move by prosecutors "a whitewash of justice." He said Chicago "saw its reputation dragged through the mud." Emanuel's administration on Thursday sent Smollett a letter, ordering him to pay $130,000 to cover the cost of the investigation. THE POLICE SUPERINTENDENT Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson was chosen to lead the department after his predecessor was fired when video was released showing a white police officer fatally shoot unarmed black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times. Johnson said he was angry and offended that another black man would exploit racial divisions for his own gain. He called Smollett's case a "scar that Chicago didn't earn and certainly didn't deserve" and said the actor should apologize. When charges were dropped, Johnson said Smollett still owes the city an apology - and that he should have been willing to prove his innocence. THE PROSECUTORS Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx removed herself from the Smollett case before he was charged, saying she had discussed the case with a Smollett family member. The case was handed to First Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Magats. Foxx defended the decision by her staff to drop charges, saying the matter was handled properly. She pointed to Smollett forfeiting his $10,000 bond and doing community service. THE DEFENSE ATTORNEYS Smollett turned to celebrity defense attorney Mark Geragos, whose clients have included Michael Jackson and Colin Kaepernick, when he was charged. Geragos called the 16-count indictment that Smollett faced "prosecutorial overkill." When charges were dropped, Smollett walked out of a Cook County courtroom with attorney Patricia Brown Holmes, who told reporters that her client "was a victim who was vilified and made to appear as a perpetrator." Holmes is known locally for being special prosecutor in the trial of three Chicago police officers who were acquitted of lying to protect their colleague who shot McDonald. THE BROTHERS Abimbola "Abel" and Olabinjo "Ola" Osundairo told police Smollett hired and paid them $3,500 to help stage an attack on himself that included shouting slurs, dousing the actor with a chemical and draping a noose around his neck. The brothers testified before a grand jury and later said they regretted their involvement . After charges were dropped, the brother's attorney, Gloria Schmidt, said they "were fully prepared to testify in any criminal proceeding" in the Smollett case. ___ Follow Caryn Rousseau on Twitter: https://twitter.com/carynrousseau ___ Check out the AP's complete coverage of the Jussie Smollett case. FILE--In this March 26, 2019, file photo, Actor Jussie Smollett smiles and waves to supporters before leaving Cook County Court after his charges were dropped in Chicago. Smollett went from child star to one of the few actors to play a black gay character on primetime TV on Fox's "Empire." His name-recognition skyrocketed when he made a report to Chicago police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in late January. Weeks later, his celebrity turned to notoriety when he was indicted, accused by police of staging the attack because he was unhappy with his pay on "Empire" and was looking to promote his career. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty) President Donald Trump speaks to reporters during a visit to Lake Okeechobee and Herbert Hoover Dike at Canal Point, Fla., Friday, March 29, 2019. President Trump increased attention on the Jussie Smollett case when, two days after Smollett reported the attack, he told reporters at the White House that he saw a story about Smollett. "It doesn't get worse, as far as I'm concerned," Trump said. Smollett said his attackers yelled, "This is MAGA country," a reference to Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan. Two days after prosecutors drop charges against Smollett the president tweeted that the FBI and Department of Justice will "review the outrageous Jussie Smollett case" and calls the case an embarrassment to our Nation!" (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) FILE--In this March 26, 2019, file photo, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appears at a news conference in Chicago, after prosecutors abruptly dropped all charges against "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett, abandoning the case barely five weeks after he was accused of lying to police about being the target of a racist, anti-gay attack in downtown Chicago. Emanuel jumped to support his city after Smollett was first charged, saying the accusations against the actor "will never trump Chicago's collective spirit." When charges were dropped, a visibly angry Emanuel appeared at news conference and called the move by prosecutors "a whitewash of justice." He said Chicago "saw its reputation dragged through the mud." Emanuel's administration on Thursday sent Smollett a letter, ordering him to pay $130,000 to cover the cost of the investigation. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford, File) FILE--In this March 26, 2019, file photo, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson speaks during a news conference after prosecutors abruptly dropped all charges against "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett, abandoning the case barely five weeks after he was accused of lying to police about being the target of a racist, anti-gay attack in downtown Chicago. Johnson was chosen to lead the department after his predecessor was fired when video was released showing a white police officer fatally shoot unarmed black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times. Johnson said he was angry and offended that another black man would exploit racial divisions for his own gain. He called Smollett's case a "scar that Chicago didn't earn and certainly didn't deserve" and said the actor should apologize. When charges were dropped, Johnson said Smollett still owes the city an apology and that he should have been willing to prove his innocence. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford, File) FILE - In this Dec. 2, 2015, file photo, Kim Foxx, then a candidate for Cook County state's attorney, speaks at a news conference in Chicago. Foxx, who became the state's attorney, removed herself from the Smollett case before he was charged, saying she had discussed the case with a Smollett family member. The case was handed to First Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Magats. Foxx defended the decision by her staff to drop charges, saying the matter was handled properly. She pointed to Smollett forfeiting his $10,000 bond and doing community service. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File) CHICAGO (AP) - A brewing battle over Chicago's demand that Jussie Smollett recoup the city more than $130,000 for an investigation into his report of a racist, anti-gay attack and the "Empire" actor's apparent determination not to pay it could ultimately land in a civil court, where a jury could have to answer the question that was supposed to be answered in criminal court: Was the attack staged or not? The first legal skirmish in the wake of a shocking decision by Cook County prosecutors earlier this week to drop all criminal charges against Smollett could come as soon as the end of next week, the deadline for Smollett to send in a money order or cashier's check for $130,106 - plus 15 cents. His legal team has signaled he doesn't intend to pay, which will likely prompt the city to sue Smollett in Cook County Circuit Court. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has said the false claims by Smollett damaged the city's reputation, denounced Tuesday's dismissal of 16 felony counts against Smollett as a "whitewash." Emanuel said Thursday, as his law department chief sent a letter to Smollett and his attorneys seeking payment for overtime worked by detectives and officers who looked into the actor's claim, that demanding he pay would help establish that he did in fact orchestrate the attack. Smollett's lawyers shot back Thursday, saying it is city officials "who owe" Smollett "an apology - for dragging an innocent man's character through the mud." They added: "Jussie has paid enough." The downside of paying for Smollett is that it would be perceived as an admission of guilt, and he's still adamant he's told the full truth about the incident that he says happened Jan. 29 in downtown Chicago. Prosecutors and police say the evidence is clear that he concocted it as a publicity stunt. The upside of paying now is that there would be no drawn-out process keeping the question of whether he's lying or not in the headlines. Among the potential downsides for the city: It could end up spending far more in legal fees than it's asking Smollett to recoup and can ever hope to get from him. If he doesn't pay the around $130,000 now, the municipal code stipulates that the city could then triple the amount it's demanding from Smollett - to more than $390,000. Actor Jussie Smollett talks to the media before leaving Cook County Court after his charges were dropped, Tuesday, March 26, 2019, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty) And while the current mayor seems committed to seeing the process through, his successor may not be. Emanuel's in his last days in office. A new mayor will be elected Tuesday. With charges dropped, Smollett seemed to dodge what would have been emotionally grueling criminal proceedings, culminating in a trial with days of public testimony. All that could be in his future again if he doesn't pay the fine by next week and the city, as expected, files a lawsuit in response. The issue on which the outcome of a civil trial would hinge would be the same: Does the evidence show that Smollett, who is black and gay, made up the attack about two masked men shouting slurs, wrapping a rope around his neck and pouring a substance on him? At a civil trial, much of the same evidence would be on display. But to the city's advantage, the threshold of proof will be much lower than it would have been for prosecutors. The city won't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Smollett staged the attack, only that it's more likely true than not true that he did, said Larry Hyman, a Chicago attorney with no ties to the case. The spokesman for City Hall's law department, Bill McCaffrey, wouldn't spell out exactly how the city would respond if Smollett doesn't pay next week, saying the city "is not committing to any future legal actions." The city has sought to reclaim money before over reports that were purportedly false - and succeeded. A University of Iowa physician, Gary Hunninghake, reported that he was attacked and stabbed while jogging in Chicago in 2010. After contradictions in his account, he eventually conceded he'd stabbed himself. A year later, he was ordered to pay more than $15,000 to reimburse the city for costs of the investigation. ___ Follow Michael Tarm on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mtarm ___ Check out the AP's complete coverage of the Jussie Smollett case. CHICAGO (AP) - When prosecutors dropped the charges that accused Jussie Smollett of orchestrating a fake attack, the outrage was swift and overwhelming. Smollett saw his record wiped clean without offering so much as an apology. Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted the decision as a "whitewash of justice" and billed Smollett $130,000 for the cost of the police investigation. President Donald Trump called it a "national embarrassment" and promised a federal probe. The Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association said it was "an affront" to prosecutors across the state. But for all of the public fury, the two agencies that handled the case - the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office - insist their relationship is strong, even if they didn't agree on the outcome. "I've heard people saying the relationship is broken and fractured, but that is absolutely, patently false," police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. "This is like a marriage, and these relationships need work. But at the end of the day, we all at heart are crime fighters." The person who has taken the most heat for the decision is State's Attorney Kim Foxx, who was elected in 2016 on a promise to reform an office that many believed was too quick to help police put minorities in prison. She said she recused herself from Smollett's case before he was charged because she had spoken with a Smollett family member when he was still considered a victim. Even so, she defended the decision of her top assistant to drop the charges in exchange for Smollett's agreement to forfeit his $10,000 bail payment. FILE - In this Feb. 22, 2019, file photo, Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, right, speaks at a news conference as Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson listens in Chicago. The outrage was swift and overwhelming: How could prosecutors in Chicago drop charges against former "Empire" cast member Jussie Smollett for allegedly orchestrating a fake attack and allow him to wipe his record clean without so much as an apology? But for all of the public outrage, the Chicago Police Department and Cook County State's Attorney's Office insist their relationship is strong, even if they didn't agree on the outcome in Smollett's case. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File) She said Smollett never would have gone to prison because the 16 charges were the lowest possible form of felony, "a step up from a misdemeanor," and prosecutors needed to focus their resources on violent crime. She said Smollett was offered the same deal as many other defendants who don't have a criminal record. Smollett, who is black and gay, claimed he was attacked and beaten by two masked men who shouted slurs and yelled, "This is MAGA country," an apparent reference to President Donald Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." Smollett also said the men doused him with a chemical and put a noose around his neck. Police worked for weeks to unravel the case, eventually concluding that Smollett paid two brothers $3,500 to stage the Jan. 29 attack because he hoped it would promote his career. Prosecutors "cannot be influenced by politics or celebrity," and cases should be decided on their merits and independent of police influence, Foxx told television station WGN. Even though Smollett's case did not call for jail time, his alleged actions were "nothing short of despicable and shameful," said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor who has long criticized what he calls the cozy relationship between the police department and previous state's attorneys. Smollett should have been "made an example," including requiring him to admit his actions, said Futterman, who also praised Foxx for scrutinizing cases more closely. The actor maintains his innocence and says he was unfairly treated by police. Foxx's office also should have explained its decision to police before charges were dropped "as a common courtesy," Futterman said. Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson learned of the decision shortly before it became public, while attending a police cadet graduation ceremony. Foxx told WGN that she spoke to Johnson both during the investigation and after her office's decision to drop the charges. "I think our relationship is one of mutual respect," she said. "We share a commitment to this city." Guglielmi credited Foxx with changes that have improved the relationship between police and prosecutors and improved the chances of obtaining convictions, including teaching officers how to write better reports. He also said she put prosecutors inside police districts every day to "get involved on the front-line level" on cases such as gun offenses. Even so, rank-and-file police officers were infuriated by the Smollett decision. The Fraternal Order of Police planned to protest the dismissal Monday outside the state's attorney's office, but said nobody was available Friday to comment. Coincidentally, Foxx and Johnson likely owe their jobs to the same case. Emanuel fired former Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in 2015 following the release of dashcam footage showing a white police officer fatally shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who had only a small knife. He hired Johnson, a lifelong Chicagoan and career police officer, to lead the department in 2016, hoping he could help repair trust between the police and residents. Foxx defeated two-term State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, whose loss was attributed to voter outrage following release of the video, which showed officer Jason Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times. Alvarez did not charge Van Dyke with murder for 13 months, and the charges came just hours before the video was made public under a court order. Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder in October and was sentenced in January to less than seven years in prison with the possibility of going free in three years with credit for good behavior. Three other officers who were charged with lying about the shooting to protect Van Dyke were acquitted by a judge in January. Futterman questioned Emanuel's reaction to Smollett's case, saying the mayor did not address false arrests, civil rights violations and the police code of silence "until his hand was forced." He said blaming Smollett for harming the city's reputation is unfounded. "I think this case says more about Smollett than it does about Chicago," Futterman said. "This as a solid investigation that the Chicago Police Department can stand behind. I don't see Smollett's own shameful actions as being a stain on Chicago." Johnson, for his part, says he's ready to put the Smollett case behind him. "Cops are resilient people," he told the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday. "We go to court all the time and don't get the outcomes that we're looking for. We're accustomed to it. ... We move on." ___ Check out the AP's complete coverage of the Jussie Smollett case. CHICAGO (AP) - The Latest on Jussie Smollett (all times local): 4:15 p.m. The Rev. Al Sharpton is defending Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, who has been criticized after her office dropped charges against actor Jussie Smollett. The civil rights leader was in Chicago on Saturday at the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. The Chicago Tribune reports Sharpton portrayed Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as a hypocrite. Emanuel has criticized prosecutors' actions in the "Empire" actor's case. Smollett was charged with falsely reporting to police that he was the victim of an attack. Sharpton said "there is a marked difference between how they reacted to this and how they reacted to the Laquan McDonald case." Sharpton said there was no outrage when video showing a white officer fatally shooting the black teen was withheld. Emanuel spokesman Matt McGrath said "this isn't worthy of a response." FILE - In this Dec. 1, 2016, file photo, Kim Foxx, left, greets Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson at her swearing in ceremony as the new Cook County State's Attorney in Chicago. The outrage was swift and overwhelming: How could prosecutors in Chicago drop charges against former "Empire" cast member Jussie Smollett for allegedly orchestrating a fake attack and allow him to wipe his record clean without so much as an apology? But for all of the public outrage, the Chicago Police Department and Cook County State's Attorney's Office insist their relationship is strong, even if they didn't agree on the outcome in Smollett's case. (Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune via AP, File) ___ 10:15 a.m. The Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office insist their relationship is strong, even if they didn't agree on the outcome in Jussie Smollett's case. When prosecutors dropped the charges that accused Smollett of orchestrating a fake attack, the decision drew a swift backlash from critics, including the mayor and police superintendent. They were outraged that Smollett saw his record wiped clean without offering so much as an apology. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says the relationship is like a marriage and sometimes needs work, but both organizations are crime fighters. Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx tells WGN that she spoke to the police superintendent about the decision to drop the case. She says their relationship is one of mutual respect. COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - Police arrested a man Saturday in connection with the death of a college student who apparently got into the suspect's car thinking it was her Uber ride. Nathaniel David Rowland, 24, was arrested early Saturday after a police officer noticed him driving a black Chevy Impala, the same type of car that Samantha Josephson got into as she left a bar shortly after 2 a.m. Friday in the city of Columbia's 5 Points area, Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook said at a news conference. Rowland tried to run, but the officer was able to catch up to him, Holbrook said. When they returned to the car, he said, the officer saw what appeared to be blood in the car. "We believe ... that she simply mistakenly got into this particular car thinking it was an Uber ride," Holbrook said of Josephson, noting that surveillance video captured her getting into the car. "She opened the door and got into it and departed with the suspect driving." Rowland will be charged with murder and kidnapping, Rowland said. It was unclear if he had an attorney. Holbrook said hunters found Josephson's body late Friday afternoon off a dirt road in rural Clarendon County, which is about 65 miles (105 kilometers) southeast of Columbia. This undated photo provided by the Columbia Police Department shows Nathaniel David Rowland. Police in South Carolina say they've arrested a suspect in connection with the death of a college student. Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook said at a news conference that 24-year-old Rowland was detained early Saturday, March 30, 2019, and that blood was found in his car. (Columbia Police Department via AP) KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Early results in Ukraine's presidential election showed a comedian with no political experience with a sizable lead over 38 rivals but far from a first-round victory, while the incumbent president and a former prime minister were close contenders to advance to the runoff. The strong showing of Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Sunday's voting appeared to reflect Ukrainians' desire for new blood in a political system awash in corruption and a new approach to trying to end the war with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east that has wracked the country for nearly five years. With 20 percent of the polling station protocols counted, Zelenskiy had 30 percent, while incumbent President Petro Poroshenko was a distant second with about 17 percent and Yulia Tymoshenko with 13, the elections commission said early Monday. The results were closely in line with a major exit poll. The top two candidates advance to a runoff on April 21. Final results in Sunday's first round are expected to be announced later Monday. The election was shadowed by allegations of widespread vote buying. Police said they had received more than 2,100 complaints of violations on voting day alone in addition to hundreds of earlier voting fraud claims, including bribery attempts and removing ballots from polling places. Zelenskiy stars in a TV sitcom about a teacher who becomes president after a video of him denouncing corruption goes viral and his supporters hold out hope that he can fight corruption in real life. Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, reacts as he responds to a journalist question during a press conference, after the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March. 31, 2019. Exit polls indicated Zelenskiy would get about 30 percent of the vote, far short of the absolute majority needed to win the first round. Most exit polls said incumbent Petro Poroshenko received the second-biggest support, which would put him and Zelenskiy in a runoff on April 21. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) "This is only the first step to a great victory," Zelenskiy told reporters after the exit poll was announced. "Zelenskiy has shown us on the screen what a real president should be like," said voter Tatiana Zinchenko, 30, who cast her ballot for the comedian. "He showed what the state leader should aspire for - fight corruption by deeds, not words, help the poor, control the oligarchs." Campaign issues in the country of 42 million included Ukraine's endemic corruption, its struggling economy and a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine that has killed 13,000 people since 2014. Concern about the election's legitimacy have spiked in recent days after Ukraine's interior minister said his department was "showered" with hundreds of claims that supporters of Poroshenko and Tymoshenko had offered money in exchange for votes. Like the popular character he plays, Zelenskiy, 41, made corruption a focus of his candidacy. He proposed a lifetime ban on holding public office for anyone convicted of graft. He also called for direct negotiations with Russia on ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine. "A new life, a normal life is starting," Zelenskiy said after casting his ballot in Kiev. "A life without corruption, without bribes." His lack of political experience helped his popularity with voters amid broad disillusionment with the country's political elite. Poroshenko said "I feel no kind of euphoria" after the exit poll results were announced. "I critically and soberly understand the signal that society gave today to the acting authorities," he said. It is not clear whether he would or could adjust his campaign enough to meet Zelenskiy's challenges over the next three weeks. Poroshenko, 53, a confectionary tycoon when he was elected five years ago, pushed successfully for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to be recognized as self-standing rather than a branch of the Russian church. However, he saw approval of his governing sink amid Ukraine's economic woes and a sharp plunge in living standards. Poroshenko campaigned on promises to defeat the rebels in the east and to wrest back control of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 in a move that has drawn sanctions against Russia from the U.S. and the European Union. Speaking at a polling station Sunday, the president echoed his campaign promises of taking Ukraine into the EU and NATO. The president's priorities persuaded schoolteacher Andriy Hristenko, 46, to vote for him "Poroshenko has done a lot. He created our own church, bravely fought with Moscow and is trying to open the way to the EU and NATO," Hristenko said. Ukraine's former prime minister, Tymoshenko, shaped her message around the economic distress of millions in the country. "Ukraine has sunk into poverty and corruption during the last five years, but every Ukrainian can put an end to it now," she said after voting Sunday. During the campaign, Tymoshenko denounced price hikes introduced by Poroshenko as "economic genocide" and promised to reduce prices for household gas by 50 percent within a month of taking office. "I don't need a bright future in 50 years," said Olha Suhiy, a 58-year-old cook. "I want hot water and heating to cost less tomorrow." A military embezzlement scheme that allegedly involved top Poroshenko associates as well as a factory controlled by the president dogged Poroshenko before the election. Ultra-right activists shadowed him throughout the campaign, demanding the jailing of the president's associates accused in the scandal. Zelenskiy and Tymoshenko both used the alleged embezzlement to take hits at Poroshenko, who shot back at his rivals. He described them as puppets of a self-exiled billionaire businessman Igor Kolomoyskyi, charges that Zelenskiy and Tymoshenko denied. Many political observers have described the presidential election as a battle between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskyi. Both the president and the comedian relied on an arsenal of media outlets under their control to exchange blows. Just days before the election, the TV channel Kolomoyskyi owns aired a new season of the "Servant of the People" TV series in which Zelenskiy stars as Ukraine's leader. "Kolomoyskyi has succeeded in creating a wide front against Poroshenko," said Vadim Karasyov, head of the Institute of Global Strategies, an independent Kiev-based think tank. "Ukraine has gone through two revolutions, but ended up with the same thing - the fight between the oligarchs for the power and resources." ___ AP journalists Mstyslav Chernov in Kiev, and Jim Heintz and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow, contributed to this report. ___ A previous version of this story removed Kolomoyskyi falling off Forbes' list of billionaires; the reference was to Poroshenko but an editing error applied it to Kolomoyskyi. Election officials start counting ballots at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Election officials start counting ballots at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Election officials start counting ballots at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Election officials start counting ballots at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) A local man walks past an election poster depicting a Ukrainian soldier with a sign reading 'Go for vote, we protect you,' during the president elections in Mariinka, near a contact line not far from Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. The exit poll released Sunday after voting stations closed indicated that Zelenskiy received about 30.4 percent of the nationwide vote, followed by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko with 17.8 percent and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko with 14.2 percent support. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka) Ukrainian government soldiers, members of the local election commission count ballots in a tent used as a polling station during the presidential elections in Mariinka, near a contact line not far from Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the comedian and actor whom exit polls show leading Ukraine's presidential election, said Sunday he has made a major step toward victory. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gestures while speaking at his headquarters after the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. The exit poll released Sunday after voting stations closed indicated that Volodymyr Zelenskiy received a majority of votes in the nationwide vote. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gestures while speaking at his headquarters after the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. The exit poll released Sunday after voting stations closed indicated that Zelenskiy received about 30.4 percent of the nationwide vote, followed by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko with 17.8 percent and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko with 14.2 percent support. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Ukrainian comedian and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy waves to the media before casting his ballot at a polling station, during the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March. 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) Ukrainian comedian and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy, left, is surrounded by journalists after voting at a polling station, during the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March. 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) JERUSALEM (AP) - A cease-fire deal appeared to take hold between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers on Sunday, with Israel expanding the permitted fishing zone and easing some tight restrictions on movement through its two main crossings with the Palestinian enclave. Egyptian mediators have worked in recent days to broker a cease-fire agreement, but talks have been repeatedly interrupted by Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli military reprisals. The violence has heightened tensions just over a week before Israeli national elections. In a sign that Egyptian efforts have made progress, the Gaza fishermen's committee said Israel would be extending the permitted fishing zone along the Mediterranean coast to a maximum of 15 nautical miles (28 kilometers), up from the previous limit of nine nautical miles (17 kilometers). Fishing had been off-limits since Gaza militants launched a rocket toward Tel Aviv last week, touching off rounds of short but intense cross-border fighting between the bitter enemies. Israeli officials confirmed that the reopening of the fishing zone would go into effect Monday. The lifting of some restrictions on the passage of people and cargo in and out of Gaza further indicated a strengthening of the cease-fire, which Hamas officials say would see Israel easing its blockade in exchange for guarantees of quiet. Israeli and Hamas officials confirmed that the Erez and Kerem Shalom border crossings were re-opened, in a very restricted fashion, for the first time since violence flared up last Monday. Israeli soldiers take positions on the Israel and Gaza border during a Palestinian protest, Saturday, March 30, 2019. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have rallied at points near the Israeli border to mark the first anniversary of weekly protests in the Gaza Strip, as Israeli troops fired tear gas and opened fire at small crowds of activists who approached the perimeter fence. At least one Palestinian was killed and 24 protesters were wounded by live fire, according to Palestinian medical officials. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov) The first steps toward the restoration of calm were nonetheless punctuated by exchanges of fire along the border. Just hours after Israel announced the re-opening of its main Gaza crossings Sunday, a mortar shell was launched from the Gaza Strip toward Israel, the army said. The projectile did not cross into Israeli territory but did set off air-raid sirens in the country's south. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and no immediate Israeli response. Earlier Sunday, Palestinian militants launched rockets into Israel during the night, and the military responded with tank fire. Four Palestinians, including three teenagers, were killed by Israeli fire on Saturday as tens of thousands of people took part in mass rallies that marked the first anniversary of demonstrations along the Israel-Gaza perimeter fence. Dozens of activists approached the fence during Saturday's demonstration, hurling stones and explosives toward Israeli forces. Israel says it is defending its border but has come under heavy international criticism for the large number of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators who have been shot over the past 12 months. Nearly 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, while one Israeli soldier was killed last summer by a Palestinian sniper in Gaza. ___ Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion contributed reporting. TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iranian media says a man has shot dead seven members of his wife's family in the southwestern city of Dezful. The state-owned IRNA news agency said Sunday the shooter wielded a Kalashnikov rifle killing five men and two women, before shooting himself. The agency reported the shooter survived and is in hospital, but did not release his name. Gun violence is rare in Iran, where citizens are only allowed to own licensed hunting rifles. In January 2017, a man gunned down five people in a rampage in the central Iranian city of Arak. A month earlier a man killed 10 relatives in a remote rural area in the country's south. JERUSALEM (AP) - The Israeli prime minister warmly received far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday, touting newfound amity between the two countries. Benjamin Netanyahu's red-carpet welcome for Bolsonaro comes days ahead of a tough re-election bid for the long-time Israeli premier on April 9. During his first state visit to Israel, the Brazilian leader is also expected to decide whether to follow President Donald Trump's lead and move the Brazilian Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that he has repeatedly promised. During a press conference late Sunday, Bolsonaro said that Brazil would open a trade and innovation office in Jerusalem but stopped short of announcing a formal embassy move. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war, as the capital of a future state. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its undivided capital. Brazil, like other Latin American countries, has long sided with the Palestinians at the United Nations and other global bodies. But Bolsonaro has found common ground with Netanyahu's right-wing government. His support of Israel is also likely to delight his evangelical base. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, shake hands during a joint media conference at the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem, Sunday March 31, 2019. Bolsonaro is in Israel on a four day official visit. (Debbie Hill/Pool via AP) After landing, Bolsonaro opened his speech with the words "I love Israel" in Hebrew. "My government is firmly decided to strengthen the partnership between Brazil and Israel," he added. Netanyahu returned the praise, addressing Bolsonaro as a "good friend." "We are pleased that after years of relations that were a little hesitant, you have decided - we decided together - to open a new era of partnership and cooperation in all areas," he said. The two leaders signed several agreements on Sunday pledging defense, cyber security and police cooperation between their countries. The high-profile photo op was likely to give Netanyahu a political boost as he runs on his reputation as a seasoned statesman in this year's heated re-election campaign. But Netanyahu has faced criticism at home and abroad for cozying up to authoritarian leaders - such as Hungary's Viktor Orban, Italy's Matteo Salvini, Russia's Vladimir Putin and the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte - in his push for Israel's international acceptance. Some of Netanyahu's new allies, such as Orban and Duterte, have come under fire for making anti-Semitic comments, adopting a revisionist approach to painful chapters in Jewish history and stoking animosity toward Jews at home. Bolsonaro, a former army chief, has drawn condemnation for his disparaging remarks about gay people, women, indigenous groups and black people during his 28-year career as a Brazilian congressman. Rights groups have raised alarms about his administration's hard-line approach to security and protection for police officers who commit crimes. Israeli activists protested outside the airport as Bolsonaro landed, raising a rainbow flag with the words "The Holy Land doesn't want homophobes here" in Portuguese. For the remainder of his four-day trip, Bolsonaro is set to visit Israeli security forces and pay his respects at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. ___ This story has corrected the spelling of Orban's first name to Viktor. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, during a joint media conference at the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem, Sunday March 31, 2019. Bolsonaro is in Israel on a four day official visit. (Debbie Hill/Pool via AP) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro meet at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, Sunday, March 31, 2019. (Heidi Levine/Pool Photo via AP) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, second left standing, watch as numerous economic agreements are signed by their ministers, at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, Sunday, March 31, 2019. (Heidi Levine/Pool Photo via AP) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, second left standing, watch as Mr. Egal Unna, Chief Executive Director of the new Cyber Technologies, seated left, and Mr Agusto Heleno, Minister of State of the Brazilian Institutional Security Cabinet, seated right, sign economic agreements at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, Sunday, March 31, 2019. (Heidi Levine/Pool Photo via AP) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro meet at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, Sunday, March 31, 2019. (Heidi Levine/Pool Photo via AP) L'artiste Longue Longue capture d'ecran Reports say Cameroon music icon Longue Longue has been arrested this Tuesday morning around Sawa Hotel in Douala. Although reasons for his arrest, has not been made clear, eyewitnesses say he had swallowed more than he could chew, especially on the political issues of his country, Cameroon. Some elderly colleagues of his, reportedly revealed that Longue Longue, didnt listen to any advice from them. The news of his arrest this Tuesday morning, comes weeks after he debunked a rumour on his arrest, blaming the media organ who first claimed he had been arrested, for being unprofessional. In a video circulating over social media few days ago, the iconic artist, Longue Longue, revealed his total support for opposition candidate Maurice Kamto, whom he claimed could have won the October 2018 presidential elections by 500%, if the votes were recounted. Cameroonian courts ruled against this plea from most candidates who participated in the 2018 presidential race, that was marred by an increased tension in the Anglophone regions. To Longue Longue, the arrest and detention of Kamto, is politically motivated. He further stated he wasnt afraid of anyone, nor arrests and would speak on the topic, no matter what. The author of hit single, Ayo Africa, challenged Biya's regime to organize another election city-by-city, neighborhood-by- neighborhood and see the outcome. Many people believe that his arrest this day, could be linked to these comments he made on the arrest and detention of Maurice Kamto, president of Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM), a strong opposition leader in Cameroon, since the 2018 elections. Longue Longue is the author of the hit song Ayo Africa, which depicts slavery, slave trade, and how Africans continue leaving as slaves despite claims of independence. TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) - The Arab League rejected the U.S. recognition of Israeli control over the Golan Heights and other Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel at an annual summit on Sunday, showcasing unity on one of the few issues that unites the regional bloc. Arab leaders also reiterated their commitment to resolving the conflict based on the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, in which they would recognize Israel in return for a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights as well as east Jerusalem and the West Bank, lands occupied in the 1967 war. This year's Arab League summit, held in Tunisia, comes against a grim backdrop of ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, rival authorities in Libya and a lingering boycott of Qatar by four fellow League members. Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir skipped the meeting as they contend with mass protests against their long reigns. Syria, a founding member, was expelled in 2011 during the early days of the uprising against President Bashar Assad. Representatives from the 22-member league - minus Syria - jointly condemned President Donald Trump's recognition of Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights and his decision last year to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. In their final statement after the daylong summit, the leaders affirmed that the Golan, a strategic plateau once used to shell northern Israel, is "Syria's occupied territory." Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi, center left, stands with Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz, left, Jordan's King Abdullah II, center right, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during the group photo with Arab leaders, ahead of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (Zoubeir Souissi, Pool photo via AP) At the opening of the summit, King Salman said Saudi Arabia "absolutely rejects any measures undermining Syria's sovereignty over the Golan Heights" and supports the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with east Jerusalem as its capital. He added that Iran's meddling was to blame for instability in the region. Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in proxy wars in Yemen and Syria, and back opposing groups in Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq. Calling the meeting "the summit of resolve and solidarity," Host-country Tunisia's President Beji Caid Essebsi decried "regional and international interventions" in Arab affairs. Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit said Iran and Turkey have "worsened some crises and created new problems," calling on Arab leaders to "unite as one force under one umbrella against the regional interventions." One of the few things that have united the Arab League over the last 50 years is the rejection of Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights as well as east Jerusalem and the West Bank, territories that the Palestinians want for their future state. The international community, including the United States, largely shared that position until Trump upended decades of U.S. policy by moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem last year and recognizing Israel's 1981 annexation of the Golan earlier this month. U.S. officials say both moves recognize reality on the ground and contribute to Israel's security. The Arab leaders meeting in Tunisia condemned those policies but did not announce any further action. That's in part because regional powerhouses Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have cultivated close ties with the Trump administration, viewing it as a key ally against their main rival, Iran. Both face Western pressure over their devastating three-year war with Yemen's Houthi rebels, and Riyadh is still grappling with the fallout from the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents last year. In Syria, small protests against Trump's Golan move were held and state media criticized the Arab summit. "The Golan is not awaiting support from the Arabs, and not a statement to condemn what Trump has done," the Thawra newspaper said in an editorial that accused Arab leaders of taking their orders from the U.S. and Israel. The Arab League had been expected to consider readmitting Syria, but there was no reference to the subject in the final statement. The United Arab Emirates reopened its embassy in Damascus last year, and other Arab states have voiced support for restoring relations. But Saudi Arabia and Qatar have actively supported the rebels trying to overthrow Assad, and other states view his government as an Iranian proxy that should continue to be shunned. Some countries were represented by their heads of state on Sunday, while others sent lower-level delegations. The UAE sent the lesser-known Fujairah ruler Hamad bin Mohammed al-Sharqi rather than the powerful Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed or Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres attended the meeting, along with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and African Union Commission chair Moussa Faki. Guterres reiterated international support for an Israeli and a Palestinian state "living side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders, and with Jerusalem as capital of both states." "There is no Plan B: without two states, there is no solution," he said. In a rare sign of easing tensions, King Salman and Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, sat at the same sprawling table at Sunday's opening session. It was the first time the two leaders have appeared in the same room since Saudi Arabia led the boycott of Qatar nearly two years ago over Doha's ties to Iran and its support for regional Islamist groups. But Qatar's emir left the summit after the opening session and did not address the summit or attend the closed-door meeting later in the day, according to Qatar's state-run news agency. It did not give a reason for his early departure. ___ Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Sarah El Deeb In Beirut contributed to this report. Saudi Arabia's King Salman attends the opening session of the 30th Arab League summit in the Tunisian capital Tunis, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting for the annual summit are united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues. This year's summit comes against a backdrop of ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, rival authorities in Libya and a lingering boycott of Qatar by four fellow League members. (Fethi Belaid/Pool Photo via AP) Saudi Arabia's King Salman attends the opening session of the 30th Arab League summit in the Tunisian capital Tunis, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual summit are united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues. This year's summit comes against a backdrop of ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, rival authorities in Libya and a lingering boycott of Qatar by four fellow League members. (Fethi Belaid/Pool Photo via AP) Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz, left, speaks with Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi during the group photo with Arab leaders, ahead of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (Zoubeir Souissi, Pool photo via AP) Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi, right, stands with Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz , center, and Emir of Kuwait Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah during the group photo with Arab leaders, ahead of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (Zoubeir Souissi, Pool photo via AP) Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi, center, gestures as he stands near Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz, left, and Jordan's King Abdullah II, right, during the group photo with Arab leaders, ahead of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (Zoubeir Souissi, Pool photo via AP) Arab leaders pose for the camera, ahead of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. (Zoubeir Souissi, Pool photo via AP) From left, Iraq's President Barham Salih, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour and Lebanese President Michel Aoun pose during the group photo with Arab leaders, ahead of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (Zoubeir Souissi, Pool photo via AP) Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani attends the oppening of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (Fethi Belaid/ Pool photo via AP) Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani attends the oppening of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (Fethi Belaid/ Pool photo via AP) Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani attends the oppening of the 30th Arab Summit in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (Fethi Belaid/ Pool photo via AP) Tunisian protesters burn a representation of the Israeli flag at a demonstration against the Arab Summit, in downtown Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) A Tunisian protester hold a key, a symbol of support for Palestinians right to return, at a demonstration against the Arab Summit, in downtown Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit are united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues. This year's summit comes against a backdrop of ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, rival authorities in Libya and a lingering boycott of Qatar by four fellow League members. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) A Tunisian protester clashes with riot police who are trying to keep demonstrators from reaching the conference palace where Arab leaders are meeting, in downtown Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues. This year's summit comes against a backdrop of ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, rival authorities in Libya and a lingering boycott of Qatar by four fellow League members. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) Tunisian riot police keep demonstrators from reaching the conference palace where Arab leaders are meeting, in downtown Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues. This year's summit comes against a backdrop of ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, rival authorities in Libya and a lingering boycott of Qatar by four fellow League members. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) A Tunisian protester holds a portrait of Syrian President Bashar Assad, at a demonstration against the Arab Summit, in downtown Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Leaders meeting in Tunisia for the annual Arab League summit on Sunday were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies seen as unfairly biased toward Israel but divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) WASHINGTON (AP) - After losing in Congress, President Donald Trump is counting on the courts to kill off "Obamacare." But some cases are going against him, and time is not on his side as he tries to score a big win for his re-election campaign. Two federal judges in Washington, D.C., this past week blocked parts of Trump's health care agenda: work requirements for some low-income people on Medicaid, and new small business health plans that don't have to provide full benefits required by the Affordable Care Act. But in the biggest case, a federal judge in Texas ruled last December that the ACA is unconstitutional and should be struck down in its entirety. That ruling is now on appeal. At the urging of the White House, the Justice Department said this past week it will support the Texas judge's position and argue that all of "Obamacare" must go. A problem for Trump is that the litigation could take months to resolve - or longer - and there's no guarantee he'll get the outcomes he wants before the 2020 election. "Was this a good week for the Trump administration? No," said economist Gail Wilensky, who headed up Medicare under former Republican President George H.W. Bush. "But this is the beginning of a series of judicial challenges." It's early innings in the court cases, and "the clock is going to run out," said Timothy Jost, a retired law professor who has followed the Obama health law since its inception. FILE - In this March 28, 2019 file photo, President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Mich. After losing in Congress, Trump is counting on the courts to kill off "Obamacare." But some cases are going against him, and time is not on his side as he tries to score a big win for his re-election campaign. Two federal judges in Washington, D.C., this past week blocked Trump's Medicaid work requirements and small business health plans. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File) "By the time these cases get through the courts there simply isn't going to be time for the administration to straighten out any messes that get created, much less get a comprehensive plan through Congress," added Jost, who supports the ACA. In the Texas case, Trump could lose by winning. If former President Barack Obama's health law is struck down entirely, Congress would face an impossible task: pass a comprehensive health overhaul to replace it that both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Trump can agree to. The failed attempt to repeal "Obamacare" in 2017 proved to be toxic for congressional Republicans in last year's midterm elections and they are in no mood to repeat it. "The ACA now is nine years old and it would be incredibly disruptive to uproot the whole thing," said Thomas Barker, an attorney with the law firm Foley Hoag, who served as a top lawyer at the federal Health and Human Services department under former Republican President George W. Bush. "It seems to me that you can resolve this issue more narrowly than by striking down the ACA." Trump seems unfazed by the potential risks. "Right now, it's losing in court," he asserted Friday, referring to the Texas case against "Obamacare." The case "probably ends up in the Supreme Court," Trump continued. "But we're doing something that is going to be much less expensive than Obamacare for the people ... and we're going to have (protections for) pre-existing conditions and will have a much lower deductible. So, and I've been saying that, the Republicans are going to end up being the party of health care." There's no sign that his administration has a comprehensive health care plan, and there doesn't seem to be a consensus among Republicans in Congress. A common thread in the various health care cases is that they involve lower-court rulings for now, and there's no telling how they may ultimately be decided. Here's a status check on major lawsuits: - "Obamacare" Repeal U.S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, ruled that when Congress repealed the ACA's fines for being uninsured, it knocked the constitutional foundation out from under the entire law. His ruling is being appealed by attorneys general from Democratic-led states to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The challenge to the ACA was filed by officials from Texas and other GOP-led states. It's now fully supported by the Trump administration, which earlier had argued that only the law's protections for people with pre-existing conditions and its limits on how much insurers could charge older, sicker customers were constitutionally tainted. All sides expect the case to go to the Supreme Court, which has twice before upheld the ACA. - Medicaid Work Requirements U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington, D.C., last week blocked Medicaid work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas approved by the Trump administration. The judge questioned whether the requirements were compatible with Medicaid's central purpose of providing "medical assistance" to low-income people. He found that administration officials failed to account for coverage losses and other potential harm, and sent the Health and Human Services Department back to the drawing board. The Trump administration says it will continue to approve state requests for work requirements, but has not indicated if it will appeal. - Small Business Health Plans U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates last week struck down the administration's health plans for small business and sole proprietors, which allowed less generous benefits than required by the ACA. Bates found that administration regulations creating the plans were "clearly an end-run" around the Obama health law and also ran afoul of other federal laws governing employee benefits. The administration said it disagrees but hasn't formally announced an appeal. Also facing challenges in courts around the country are an administration regulation that bars federally funded family planning clinics from referring women for abortions and a rule that allows employers with religious and moral objections to opt out of offering free birth control to women workers as a preventive care service. LONDON (AP) - Britain's Parliament is deadlocked over plans to leave the European Union. The country's ruling Conservative Party is fractured by an undeclared leadership contest. Opposition parties are baying for an early general election. A power vacuum has paralyzed the heart of Britain's government, dismaying both the European Union and the British public. In the next two weeks, British Prime Minister Theresa May will lead the U.K. through domestic and international negotiations that will decide the fate of Brexit and determine the future of generations. Her task, as it's been for almost three years, is to bridge the increasingly bitter divide that separates those who want to sever links with the EU and those who want to keep the ties that have bound Britain to the bloc for almost 50 years. "In any other circumstance, they would have rolled her by now, either formally or informally," said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. "She's the default because no one else wants the job." The power vacuum means May has almost no leverage as she tries to engineer a compromise with U.K. lawmakers who last week took control of the parliamentary agenda to debate alternatives to her Brexit deal, which has already been rejected by Parliament three times. The House of Commons is scheduled to vote Monday on a variety of Brexit options, with two ideas - staying in the EU customs union and holding a second referendum on Brexit - emerging as the most likely alternatives. Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters attend a rally in Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London, Friday, March 29, 2019. The protest march which started on March 16 in Sunderland, north east England, finishes on Friday March 29 in Parliament Square, London, on what was the original date for Brexit to happen before the recent extension. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) While Justice Secretary David Gauke said Sunday the government would have to "very carefully consider" the wishes of Parliament, he also said May's EU divorce deal is still the best alternative. Gauke said the prime minister was "reflecting" on the possibility of bringing it back to Parliament for a fourth vote. If the government can't bridge the gap by April 12, Britain will crash out of the EU without a plan for future relations, damaging its economy, undermining the country's unity and diminishing its stature in the world. "I think it would be very, very bad news indeed," Gauke told the BBC. "I don't think the British people would thank us if we left without a deal." May's political weakness stretches back to when she took office in July 2016, less than a month after Britain voted 52 percent to 48 percent in favor of leaving the EU. Despite the close result on such a momentous decision, May did little to build consensus about what Britain's departure from the world's largest trading bloc should look like. Instead, she set out her own red lines: Britain must end the free movement of people coming in, end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain and leave the European customs union so Britain could negotiate trade deals with other countries. Then, seeking to bolster the small majority left to her by her predecessor, David Cameron, May called a disastrous early election in which she lost 13 seats. That left May as the leader of a minority Conservative government and forced her into an alliance with Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. Though weakened, May kept Brexit strategy in the hands of the Conservative Party and more specifically her own advisers. But Brexit cuts across traditional political lines. Both May's Conservatives and the opposition Labour party are split between those who want to sever links to the EU and those who want to remain close to the bloc. Even so, May has been reluctant to reach out to Labour for fear of deepening the split in her own party. "She feels trapped politically," said Thomas Raines, head of the Europe program at the Chatham House think tank. "Each step she takes toward the Labour Party will lose her support on her right flank." Complicating the equation is the staunch opposition of May's erstwhile allies in the DUP, which refuses to back her Brexit withdrawal deal because it treats Northern Ireland differently than the rest of the U.K., and the Scottish National Party, which wants to remain in the EU. "Everyone is still convinced they can have their first choice outcome," Raines said. "They cannot see their way to a compromise." Even if May is able to secure a withdrawal deal, more negotiations lie ahead because Britain and the EU still need to work out exactly what their future relationship will look like. In an effort to win support for her deal, May said she wouldn't lead those talks. That has triggered a Conservative party beauty contest among possible successors, with newspapers offering odds on those vying for the top job. Former Prime Minister John Major warned, though, that even changing leaders would do little to break the deadlock in Parliament. "Of course, a new leader may, depending upon who it is, have less baggage than a prime minister who's had to fight for everything from the moment she went into Downing Street," he told the BBC. "But it doesn't change the numbers. It doesn't change the arithmetic. It doesn't change the instincts and convictions of people both in the Remain and in the Leave camp." That leaves the prospect of calling a general election in hopes of securing a stable majority government in Britain. Labour is eager to go to the voters and such a move might persuade the EU to extend the Brexit talks for a second time. But most Conservatives are opposed, fearing they would be punished for three years of deadlock. Alistair Burt, who resigned as foreign office minister after voting against May's Brexit deal, told Sky News he didn't think a new election would be helpful. "We need to stick to this task that we have in relation to the European Union," he said. "Settle that and then move forward, offer the public the wide range of choices that political parties do ... let's get on with doing this job in the first place." ___ Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit The fiercest battle for campaign cash is playing out between the presidential candidates who might not be on your radar. Ahead of Sunday's fundraising deadline for the first quarter, the underdogs of the Democratic primary were in a mad dash to coax as little as $2 from grassroots donors. It's all part of their bid to clear a new threshold from the Democratic National Committee to earn one of 20 highly coveted spots in presidential debates that begin in June. "I'll be blunt," former Obama Cabinet member Julian Castro told prospective donors in one social media ad that was running as late as Thursday. "The Democratic Party's new debate rules mean I might not make it onto the debate stage." New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand sent multiple fundraising emails pleading her case, telling recipients in one that they could chip in $5 "to become a founding member" and "help get Kirsten on the debate stage." Washington Gov. Jay Inslee urges donors in a Facebook ad to "chip in ... at any amount to make sure" his call to combat climate change "is on the stage in June." John Delaney, a little-known former Maryland congressman, is going a step further. He promised to donate $2 to charity for every new donor who donated on his website as Sunday's fundraising deadline approached. FILE- In this Jan. 16, 2019, file photo Julian Castro, former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, speaks to the media at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. The fiercest battle for campaign cash is playing out between the presidential candidates who might not be on your radar. Ahead of Sunday, March 31 fundraising deadline for the first quarter, the underdogs of the Democratic primary were in a mad dash to coax as little as $2 from grassroots donors. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm, File) At issue are the rules that DNC Chairman Tom Perez announced in February for the first two debates in June and July: The debates will take place over two back-to-back midweek evenings with 10 slots each night. Candidates have two paths to the stage: They can either achieve 1 percent support in three reputable national or early nominating state polls or they can collect contributions from at least 65,000 donors, with a minimum of 200 in at least 20 states. The amount raised doesn't matter. It's all about how many voters are contributing. It's not immediately clear how many candidates are short of the fundraising threshold and how many might be using the rules as a way to expand their fundraising base. That won't be known until mid-April, when campaign finance disclosures are next due with the Federal Elections Commission. Perez says he's not concerned either way, arguing that he wanted to make the debate qualifications fairer by not relying only on polling. He also wanted to force candidates to "engage with the grassroots," those people who have provided Democrats with energy and votes since President Donald Trump's election in 2016. "It's important to empower the grassroots," Perez said recently on C-SPAN, explaining that the DNC worked with ActBlue, the online fundraising juggernaut for Democrats, to come up with the threshold. He characterized the requirements as "not a layup for any candidate but also not a full-court shot." It actually might be a layup for a few candidates. California Sen. Kamala Harris raised more than $4 million in her first day. Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign says he has more than 760,000 donors, another eye-popping mark after hauling in more than $10 million in the first week after his official campaign launch. Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke's campaign said he raised more than $6.2 million in his first day, more than surpassing the individual donor requirements. He said on Monday that he raised more than $1 million from nearly 32,000 contributors over the weekend. But Perez says his point stands, with rules that help candidates by relieving them of polling pressure while still requiring them to show progress among voters. Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said the rules forced him to tailor his fundraising efforts to the grassroots. He said on Monday that he raised more than $7 million during the first quarter. "All of us, I think, are going to be responding to the incentives that the DNC creates," Buttigieg said in an interview, "and whether it's intentional or whether it's just a happy side effect, it just amplified the kind of on-the-ground quality that hopefully will be a spirit that stays in this cycle throughout." Delaney was less enthusiastic as he sought support in Epping, New Hampshire. "I think it's a weird standard because it's a money standard and I don't think the Democratic Party should qualify candidates based on money," he told The Associated Press. That's in partial contrast to what Delaney said in December, when he praised Perez for pursuing "a debate structure that is fair and on-the-level" after the chairman first confirmed publicly that grassroots donors might figure into debate qualifications. Despite any frustration, Delaney is among those benefiting from another side effect of the rules, with some donors spreading their money around to ensure the field doesn't winnow before the debates. That goes for donors big and small. Major donor Susie Buell is committed to Harris but held a fundraiser for Buttigieg anyway, telling NBC News that "Mayor Pete has a voice that must be heard." That was the same impetus that spurred Joe Denoncour to give Delaney's campaign $20 before he left a recent campaign event. Looking ahead to the debates, he said, "I think everybody should get on there that wants to do it." --- Barrow reported from Atlanta. Woodall reported from Manchester, New Hampshire. Burnett reported from Columbia, South Carolina. --- Follow the reporters on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP, https://twitter.com/HunterMw, and https://twitter.com/sara_burnett FILE - In this March 24, 2019 file photo, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., speaks at the kickoff of her presidential campaign,near the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York. The fiercest battle for campaign cash is playing out between the presidential candidates who might not be on your radar. Ahead of Sunday, March 31 fundraising deadline for the first quarter, the underdogs of the Democratic primary were in a mad dash to coax as little as $2 from grassroots donors.(AP Photo/Julius Constantine Motal, File) KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - The Latest on Ukraine's presidential election (all times local): 11:10 p.m. Ukraine's central elections commission says nearly 64 percent of the country's registered voters took part in the presidential election. Only fragmentary results from the election had been reported three hours after the polls closed. Full preliminary results are expected to be announced on Monday morning. Exit polls indicated that Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a television comedian without previous political experience, would lead with about 30 percent of the vote, well short of the absolute majority to win in the first round. Most exit polls showed incumbent Petro Poroshenko in second place, meaning he would face Zelenskiy in a second round on April 21. No voting was held in the parts of eastern Ukraine under the control of Russia-backed separatist rebels or in Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. Election officials start counting ballots at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) ___ 9:25 p.m. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says his apparent poor performance in the country's presidential election is sobering. Most exit polls show Poroshenko trailing in second place behind comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy with support of 20 percent or less. That would be enough to put him into a runoff with Zelenskiy on April 21. Poroshenko has said at a news conference after the polls closed that "I don't feel any kind of euphoria. I critically and soberly understand the signal that society gave today to the acting authorities." ___ 9:15 p.m. Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the comedian whom exit polls show leading Ukraine's presidential election, says he has made a major step toward victory. Exit polls indicated Zelenskiy would get about 30 percent of the vote, far short of the absolute majority needed to win the first round. Most exit polls said incumbent Petro Poroshenko received the second-biggest support, which would put him and Zelenskiy in a runoff on April 21. Zelenskiy told journalists after the polls closed that "this is only the first step toward a great victory." He denied that his campaign would coordinate with the forces of any of the other 37 candidates on the first-round ballot. He said that "we are young people. We don't want to see all of the past in our future." ___ 8:55 p.m. Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko is disputing several exit polls that showed her failing to get enough support in Sunday's election to qualify for a runoff. Several exit polls showed comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy and incumbent Petro Poroshenko as the top two vote-getters. The polls indicated Zelenskiy would get about 30 percent of the votes, ahead of Poroshenko but far away from the 50 percent needed to win in the first round. However, Tymoshenko's campaign staff said its own exit polling showed her in second place. At a news conference after the polls closed, Tymoshenko called on her supporters to head to polling stations to ensure an honest count. ___ 8:10 p.m. An exit poll shows comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the lead in Ukraine's presidential election but his support is well short of the majority needed to win in the first round. The exit poll released Sunday after voting stations closed indicated that Zelenskiy received about 30.4 percent of the nationwide vote, followed by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko with 17.8 percent and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko with 14.2 percent support. The poll conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology and the Razumkov Center public opinion organization was based on nearly 18,000 responses to questioning at some 400 polling places as of 6 p.m., two hours before the polls closed. The poll claims a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points. A runoff between the top two candidates in the race will take place on April 21. ___ 6:40 p.m. Ukrainian police say they have received more than 1,600 complaints about electoral violations in the presidential election. A statement Sunday by Ukraine's Interior Ministry on Facebook said the complaints had been received by 6 p.m., two hours before polling stations were to close. It said the reported violations included unauthorized campaigning at polling stations, attempts to bribe voters and removal of ballots. Opinion polls have shown Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who stars in a TV sitcom about a teacher who becomes president after a video of him denouncing corruption goes viral, leading a field of 39 candidates in the presidential race. The polls also had Zelenskiy outpacing incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the other top candidates, by a broad margin ___ 3:15 p.m. Ukrainian citizens living in Poland are lining up to vote in their country's presidential election. It is the first Ukrainian election since the arrival in recent years of large numbers of Ukrainian workers and students seeking higher wages and better opportunities in the neighboring European Union country. People lined up at the embassy in Warsaw and at three other consular points across Poland on Sunday and cast their ballots, choosing from a field of 39 candidates. Igor Isajew, editor of a news portal for Ukrainians in Poland, PROstir.pl, said that many other Ukrainians in Poland remain unable to vote because they live too far from the polling stations. While there are no opinion polls tapping into the views of Ukrainians in Poland, Isajew sees signs that a higher percentage of Ukrainians in Poland than in Ukraine favor incumbent Petro Poroshenko due to his pro-European credentials, despite corruption allegations. ___ 7 a.m. Voters in Ukraine are casting ballots in a presidential election after a campaign that produced a comedian with no political experience as the front-runner and allegations of voter bribery. Opinion polls have shown Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who stars in a TV sitcom about a teacher who becomes president after a video of him denouncing corruption goes viral, leading a field of 39 candidates. The polls also had Zelenskiy outpacing incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the other top candidates, by a broad margin. Voter Tatiana Zinchenko, 30, cast her ballot for the comedian. She says "Zelenskiy has shown us on the screen what a real president should be like." If no candidate secures an absolute majority of Sunday's vote, a runoff between the two top finishers would be held April 21. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko speaks at his headquarters after the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. The exit poll released Sunday after voting stations closed indicated that Zelenskiy received about 30.4 percent of the nationwide vote, followed by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko with 17.8 percent and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko with 14.2 percent support. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) An Ukrainian government soldier casts his ballot in a tent using as a polling station during the president elections in Kurakhove, near a contact line not far from Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka) Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a candidate for the presidential election, center, leaves a polling station after casting during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Ukrainian comedian and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy, holds his ballot before voting at a polling station, during the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March. 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) An elderly woman examines her ballot voting at home during the presidential election in Mariinka, near a contact line not far from Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gestures as he arrives at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Voters in Ukraine are casting ballots in a presidential election Sunday after a campaign that produced a comedian with no political experience as the front-runner and allegations of voter bribery. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a candidate for the presidential election, center, holds her ballot for casting at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Baryshevsky Victor, Bishop of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, holds his ballot at a polling station, during the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March. 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) Baryshevsky Victor, Bishop of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, holds his ballot at a polling station, during the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March. 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) Baryshevsky Victor, Bishop of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, casts his ballot at a polling station, during the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March. 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gestures while speaking to the media, with his wife Maryna, right, at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Voters in Ukraine are casting ballots in a presidential election Sunday after a campaign that produced a comedian with no political experience as the front-runner and allegations of voter bribery. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) An elderly woman casts her ballot at home during the presidential election in Mariinka, near a contact line not far from Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka) A Ukrainian government soldier exits a cabin in a tent using as a polling station during the presidential election in Mariinka, near a contact line not far from Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka) A woman holds her ballot before casting at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) MIAMI (AP) - Reflecting on her assault 12 years ago, 41-year-old Wanda Gomez said she did not know if she was going to make it out alive. She had been stabbed multiple times by an angry ex-boyfriend, she said. Her attacker, who was also a co-worker, had been kicked out of her home after he was accused of sexually assaulting Gomez's school-age daughter. With her assailant at large, authorities advised Gomez, a mother of seven who made $13 an hour as a demolition worker, to leave her home and quit her job out of concerns for her safety. "You don't have many choices," said Gomez, who was placed in a shelter and later transitional housing roughly 30 miles (about 50 kilometers) away from her home in Miami due to her lack of financial resources. "It's between your life or your job." Gomez is one of the many women across the U.S. who are forced to quit jobs due to domestic violence. Survivors of domestic violence qualify for unemployment benefits in 41 states. But in Florida - which averages more than 117,000 reported cases of domestic violence per year - there is no such compensation. That could change soon under a bill being considered by the Florida Legislature that would provide a financial safety net to victims in need. The bill, which has support in the House and Senate, would add victims of domestic violence to those eligible to receive benefits under the current unemployment law. Victims would receive compensation for a period up to 12 weeks. In this Thursday, March 28, 2019 photo, Wanda Gomez, a survivor of domestic violence, poses in her home, in Miami, Fla. According to Gomez, 12 years have passed since she was nearly stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend. Following her assault, she was advised by authorities to quit her job and leave her home. She lost her ability to make a living and provide a safe living environment for her family. Gomez said she could have benefited from a bill currently making its way through Florida Legislature. If passed, the law would grant victims of domestic violence the right to receive unemployment compensation. According to data, 41 states across the U.S. provide unemployment benefits to victims of domestic assault. (AP Photo/Ellis Rua) Victims would need to prove that they voluntarily left their job as a direct result of domestic violence. It would also require victims to demonstrate that a reasonable effort was made to maintain their employment, such as requesting to be transferred to another location. The legislation, proposed by Democratic lawmakers Rep. Dotie Joseph of Miami and Sen. Audrey Gibson of Jacksonville, would have a limited impact on private business owners. Funds to pay for the measure would pool from taxes employers pay per employee. "It cost practically nothing to fix a problem that will have a huge impact on those that need it," Joseph said to a House Committee. "It is my sincere prayer that no one has to use this law, but if, God forbid, they do, we have a little help for them." The bill also calls for measures to make workplaces safer. More than half of female victims are harassed by partners while at work, according to the Women's Legal Defense and Education Fund. In 2010, an armed man killed his wife and three female co-workers, wounding three others at a Miami-area restaurant. "You really don't want the violent partner showing up in the workplace," said Joseph. Marcia Olivo, executive director of Miami Workers Center, an organization that works closely with survivors of domestic violence and helped lawmakers shape the bill, said victims often stay in abusive relationships for financial reasons. Compensation is the difference between "life and death" for survivors, she added. Miami-area victims in particular are increasingly finding themselves hostage in abusive relationships due to low wages and rising rents, said Jasmen Rodgers, who works at the center. Tethered by her inability to work, Gomez said her abusive relationship caused her to lose everything. Physicians diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, and her children were placed in foster care by the state. "I'd wake up screaming," said Gomez. "I saw him everywhere." It took her three years to regain stability and put her family back together. She now works as a parking lot attendant in Miami and advocates for social causes as a Spanish-language community radio host. Gomez, who is in favor of the bill, said victims are merely in need of a bit of assistance during a time of crisis. "Unemployment is not going to be for life," she said. "It's for a short term that you can (use) to get (your life) back together and find another job." In this Thursday, March 28, 2019 photo, Wanda Gomez, a survivor of domestic violence, poses in her home, in Miami, Fla. According to Gomez, 12 years have passed since she was nearly stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend. Following her assault, she was advised by authorities to quit her job and leave her home. She lost her ability to make a living and provide a safe living environment for her family. Gomez said she could have benefited from a bill currently making its way through Florida Legislature. If passed, the law would grant victims of domestic violence the right to receive unemployment compensation. According to data, 41 states across the U.S. provide unemployment benefits to victims of domestic assault. (AP Photo/Ellis Rua) In this Thursday, March 28, 2019 photo, Wanda Gomez, a survivor of domestic violence, shows her tattoo that reads "No More Domestic Violence," while standing in her in Miami, Fla., home. According to Gomez, 12 years have passed since she was nearly stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend. Following her assault, she was advised by authorities to quit her job and leave her home. She lost her ability to make a living and provide a safe living environment for her family. Gomez said she could have benefited from a bill currently making its way through Florida Legislature. If passed, the law would grant victims of domestic violence the right to receive unemployment compensation. According to data, 41 states across the U.S. provide unemployment benefits to victims of domestic assault. (AP Photo/Ellis Rua) In this Tuesday, March 26, 2019 photo, Marcia Olivo, executive director of Miami Workers Center, an organization that works closely with survivors of domestic violence, works at the nonprofit's headquarters, in Miami, Fla. The organization helped shape the language of a bill currently in the Florida Legislature, that if passed, would grant victims of domestic violence the right to receive unemployment compensation. According to data, 41 states across the U.S. provide unemployment benefits to victims of domestic violence. (AP Photo/Ellis Rua) In the course of a single week, there has been all of this: "I have been truthful and consistent on every level since day one," actor Jussie Smollett told the world after prosecutors dropped 16 felony counts that accused him of making a false police report about being the target of a racist, anti-gay attack. "I am highly confident," high-profile lawyer Michael Avenatti said after being accused of trying to extort money from Nike, "that I will be fully exonerated and justice will be done." "Complete and total EXONERATION," Donald Trump tweeted after the attorney general's summary of the Mueller report's "principal conclusions" was released. And on Thursday night, before a huge crowd: "The greatest hoax in the history of our country." Such certainty across the board. Such vigorous, declarative statements - crystallized, workshopped, simplified into sound bites containing a single message: It didn't happen. I didn't do anything wrong. Case closed. End of story. Incontrovertible. Don't question it. Ever since the first stirrings of national inevitability in the 17th century, ever since the colonists declared independence by citing truths they held to be "self-evident," being definitive has been the American way. But in an age of utter uncertainty such as this, the expression of certainty - robust, sure-of-yourself, no-other-possibility certainty - may be the most powerful weapon of all. FILE - In this March 26, 2019, file photo, Actor Jussie Smollett leaves the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Chicago after prosecutors dropped all charges against him. Smollett was indicted on 16 felony counts related to making a false report that he was attacked by two men who shouted racial and homophobic slurs. (Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP, File) "You see this absolute language: 'Always.' 'Never.' It's a drive to oversimplify because we fear losing people, we fear the confused mind saying no," says Shannon Berg, who runs a crisis communications firm in Portland, Oregon. "We have a lot of binary thinking and really overly simplistic storylines that we try to drive to because, for whatever reason, that's how we're wired," she says. "We're not comfortable in the space where things aren't so cut and dried." The problem, though, is that certainty is a rare beast. With Smollett, for example, prosecutors made clear that dropping the charges didn't mean they'd exonerated him. In Avenatti's case, prosecutors expressed confidence - maybe even certainty - that they had the goods to secure a conviction. And the president? Attorney General William Barr's four-page letter on the still-unreleased Mueller report took pains to say that just because it didn't conclude guilt didn't mean it had concluded complete innocence. Yet the practice of protagonists claiming definitive outcomes is as American as Hollywood endings, the expression of a culture that hasn't had much use for nuance - a word that was deployed against John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign to support accusations that he was wishy-washy. It wasn't so long ago that Americans lived in a world where they couldn't amplify themselves globally with devices in their pocket, and the notion of "definitive" was a lot easier to control. So when an avuncular, sure-of-himself middle-aged white man signed off his nightly newscast by saying, "That's the way it is," anyone who thought that actually WASN'T the way it was didn't have an immediate and loud way of saying otherwise. The world seemed less fragmented, even though it probably wasn't. Now, though, humans carry around the ability to talk to the wider world, and Twitter-style fragments abound. Opinions, informed and otherwise, buzz about like gnats. A certainty-based central narrative - the kind that was often calming, but also shut out and silenced Americans by the tens of millions - seems lacking. That can encourage critical thought. It can also sow confusion. One key reason Donald Trump's voters say they've supported him is that they consider him authentic - someone who says what he means. Few would accuse him of being overly nuanced; that's not his appeal. And in the age of Trump, that has emerged as a defining tenet of the public sphere: Say what you need to say, plant your feet and insist. This has a lengthy lineage. American society has long been conditioned - literally, and sometimes by the muscle of policy - to demand sharp, specific, binary outcomes. The production code that governed Hollywood movies from the mid-1930s to the 1960s required, for example, that moral order be maintained and "the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin." Style guides for romance-novel writers offered similar strictures - and usually demanded happy endings. But beyond stipulating what KIND of endings things should have, such social engineering also encouraged Americans to expect clarity in life as we do on screen. This was evident in 2007, when the mob show "The Sopranos" offered up a finale that underscored Americans' dislike for ambiguous conclusions. The screen went abruptly black to finish off the show, and no one knew whether its protagonist, mob boss Tony Soprano, was alive or dead. It could have been interpreted in any number of ways. The outcry over the ambiguity was huge; where, people complained, was the definitive ending we were waiting for? Trouble is, life doesn't generally work that way. "The problem with absolute certainty is that it ends up tripping you up," says Evan Cornog, a political historian and author of "The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush." "There is this fondness for absolutes in this country," he says. "The upside is you project this aura of certainty. The problem is that reality often moves past it and proves it to be wrong." And so, behind the stage of certainty, ambiguity waits in the wings for its inevitable curtain call. It's behind the question of why, in the face of what was generally believed to be strong evidence, prosecutors inexplicably let the Smollett case go and moved on, sealing it from prying eyes. It's in the revelations that will emerge if and when Michael Avenatti faces trial. And it's in the tantalizing subtlety that Barr shared from Robert Mueller himself in a nearly 400-page report that few Americans have seen and that feeds the uncertainty: "While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." Reality is messy. The best TV these days has started to recognize that: "Mad Men," ''Fargo," Donald Glover's "Atlanta," this month's "Russian Doll" on Netflix. Where once we had "Perry Mason," we now have "True Detective." Each has its own way of showing that stories aren't always wrapped up in tidy bows, and that even things that seem absolutely definitive usually aren't. In this context, certainty seems something of a holy grail. But you wouldn't know it by listening to those in the spotlight during the final week of March in 2019. "Facts are stubborn things," John Adams famously said. But that was the 18th century. Today, in America's era of hyperamplified either-ors, Stephen Colbert may be more appropriate to cite: "Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty." ___ Ted Anthony, director of digital innovation for The Associated Press, writes about American culture. Follow him on Twitter at @anthonyted. FILE - In this March 28, 2019, file photo, President Donald Trump talks with reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File) WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on former Vice President Joe Biden (all times local): 9:45 a.m. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway is criticizing former Vice President Joe Biden after a former Nevada state legislator alleged he inappropriately kissed her on the back of her head in 2014. Conway described the woman, Lucy Flores, as "quite bold" to "go against the highest levels of her political party" with the allegations and said Biden now has a "big problem." Biden, a Democrat, is considering running for president in 2020. Conway tells "Fox News Sunday" that quote, "He calls it affection and handshakes. His party calls it completely inappropriate." Conway suggested that Biden should consider apologizing to Flores. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway is interviewed on television outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Monday, March 25, 2019. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) Flores, who was Nevada's Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2014, wrote in New York Magazine that she felt uncomfortable with her interactions with Biden. ___ 9:30 a.m. Former Vice President Joe Biden says he doesn't believe he ever acted inappropriately toward women but will "listen respectfully" to suggestions he did. Biden, who is deciding whether to join the 2020 presidential race, faces allegations from a Nevada political candidate that he kissed her on the back of the head in 2014 and made her uncomfortable. In a new statement released Sunday, Biden says: "In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once - never - did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention." The allegation was made by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor. BEIRA, Mozambique (AP) - As Mozambique battles to control a fast-spreading cholera outbreak in the cyclone-hit central city of Beira, international assistance is arriving. The number of cholera cases jumped to 271 over the weekend although no deaths from the disease had been reported. More than 500 people have died in Mozambique from Cyclone Idai , which slammed into Beira more than two weeks ago, according to government officials. Another 259 people died in Zimbabwe and 56 in Malawi, bring the three-nation total to more than 815. Authorities warn the tolls are preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. The Chinese government has sent doctors to fight the cholera outbreak in Beira and on Sunday Chinese aid workers sprayed anti-cholera disinfectant in parts of the port city of 500,000. The World Health Organization has said some 900,000 cholera vaccine doses are expected to arrive on Monday, with a vaccination campaign to start later this week. "You know we came from China and our government cares very much about the situation in Beira here in Mozambique. And China has a good relationship with Africa, so the China government sent medical doctors to come and give some treatment," said Wang Shenguin, spokesman for the Chinese doctors. Chinese doctors spray chemicals to prevent the spread of cholera at a camp for displaced survivors of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) The U.S. military joined the international humanitarian aid efforts to Mozambique by airlifting food and relief supplies from South Africa. The first round-the-clock flights to deliver supplies from the U.N. World Food Program started Saturday and continued Sunday from King Shaka International Airport in Durban, South Africa, said Robert Mearkle, U.S. embassy spokesman. He said the commodities airlifted from Durban were from the World Food Program's internal stock. "Separately from these shipments, the United States has provided nearly $3.4 million in additional funding for the World Food Program to deliver approximately 2,500 metric tons of rice, peas, and vegetable oil to affected people in Sofala, Zambezia, and Manica provinces," said Mearkle. "This lifesaving emergency food assistance will support approximately 160,000 people for one month." The U.S. government has provided nearly $7.3m in humanitarian assistance to help people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi who have been affected by Cyclone Idai, including more than $6.5 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development, said Mearkle. The cholera outbreak in Beira started on Wednesday with five cases of the acute diarrheal disease confirmed by national health director Ussein Isse. The number of cases jumped to 271 over the weekend. Beira's crowded, poor neighborhoods are at particular risk. Children and other patients curled up on bare beds at a treatment center in Beira, some with anxious parents by their side. They had intravenous drips to help replace fluids. Doctors Without Borders has said it is seeing some 200 likely cholera cases per day in the city, where relief workers are hurrying to restore the damaged water system and bring in additional medical assistance. Cholera is spread by contaminated food and water and can kill within hours if not treated. The disease is a major concern for the hundreds of thousands of cyclone survivors in the southern African nation now living in squalid conditions in camps, schools or damaged homes. Some drink from contaminated wells or filthy, stagnant water. As health responders stress the need for better disease surveillance, the United Nations' deputy humanitarian coordinator in Mozambique, Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, has said all cases of diarrhea are being treated as though they are cholera. Cholera is endemic to the region, and "it breaks out fast and it travels extremely fast," he told reporters. Doctors Without Borders has said other suspected cholera cases have been reported outside Beira in the badly hit areas of Buzi, Tica and Nhamathanda but the chance of spread in rural areas is smaller because people are more dispersed. Mozambican officials have said Cyclone Idai destroyed more than 50 health centers in the region, complicating response efforts. The United Nations has said some 1.8 million people need urgent help across the sodden, largely rural region. ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa A baby plays with water in a bucket at a camp for displaced survivors of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A woman fetches water from an unprotected source in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A World Food Programme(WFP) plane takes off from Beira International Airport after dropping off supplies for survivors of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A mother bathes her baby in a bucket at a camp for displaced survivors of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A young girl gives a banana to a tamed baboon on the outskirts of Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A woman fetches water from an unprotected source in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Women and men pick up bricks from a collapsed house to build another structure in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A woman picks up bricks from a collapsed house to build another structure in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies.(AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A woman fetches water from an unprotected source in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A young girl diagnosed with cholera is checked by a doctor at a treatment centre in Beira, Mozambique, Saturday, March 30, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said, a figure that nearly doubled from the previous day. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - The Latest on the killing of a South Carolina college student (all times local): 4:35 p.m. The man charged with kidnapping and killing a college student who police say mistakenly got into his car did not appear at a jail hearing. Nathaniel David Rowland will remain in jail at least until his bond hearing at an undetermined date. It is unknown if he has a lawyer. Police say the 24-year-old Rowland killed 21-year-old University of South Carolina student Samantha Josephson on Friday after she got into his car thinking it was her Uber ride. The State newspaper quotes Marci Josephson as saying Sunday that her daughter's killer has "taken away a piece of our heart, soul and life." This undated photo provided by the Columbia Police Department shows Nathaniel David Rowland. Police in South Carolina say they've arrested a suspect in connection with the death of a college student. Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook said at a news conference that 24-year-old Rowland was detained early Saturday, March 30, 2019, and that blood was found in his car. (Columbia Police Department via AP) Marci Josephson said her daughter was bubbly, loving and full of life and planned to go to law school after graduating in May. ___ 11:30 a.m. Authorities say a South Carolina college student kidnapped and killed after mistakenly getting into what she thought was a ride share car had wounds all over her body. Arrest warrants released Sunday morning said 21-year-old Samantha Josephson had numerous wounds to her head, neck, face, upper body, leg, and foot. The documents didn't say what was used to attack the University of South Carolina student. Authorities have charged 24-year-old Nathaniel David Rowland with murder and kidnapping. The arrest warrants say a large amount of what DNA testing showed to be Josephson's blood was found inside Rowland's vehicle and trunk after police say he was arrested early Saturday just blocks away from where Josephson was kidnapped the night before. The warrants say Rowland turned on the child locks in his vehicle so the back doors could only be opened from the outside and also had turned on the window locks. ___ 10:45 a.m. Authorities say the man who kidnapped and killed a South Carolina college student who mistakenly thought she was getting in her ride share car was arrested in the same area the next night. Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook says 24-year-old Nathaniel David Rowland will be charged with kidnapping and murder in the death of 21-year-old Samantha Josephson. Holbrook says quick DNA testing determined Josephson's blood was in Rowland's car after his arrest Saturday near the same bar district in Columbia where Josephson was kidnapped the night before. The chief says her cellphone was also found in the vehicle. Holbrook says Rowland activated the child locks so the back doors could only be opened from the outside. Rowland is being held without bond. It wasn't known if he had a lawyer. Vaccin contre la poliomyelite Archives The National Director of Customs, Fongod Edwin Nuvaga has warned collaborators to prevent the importation of fake vaccines against meningitis, into Cameroon. He directed the call in a fax message to workers at the borders and other entry points of the country to prevent importers of medications and pharmaceutical products to smuggle these fake vaccines into the country, which could be dangerous to Cameroonians. He further directs that all importers should show they are duly registered and have authorisations to circulate drugs. Meningitis is an inflammation of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. The swelling from meningitis typically triggers symptoms such as headache, fever and a stiff neck. Most cases of meningitis are caused by a viral infection, but bacterial, parasitic and fungal infections are other causes. Some cases of meningitis improve without treatment in a few weeks. Others can be life-threatening and require emergency antibiotic treatment. Some persons have gone deaf or physically impaired due to meningitis. Given the importance of this vaccine, in 2011, government launched a vaccination campaign. People paid 2500frs to get vaccinated, while others paid 1000frs. Today, some hospitals administer these vaccines for 3000frs. Due to this, many prefer buying from the black market. Same thing with other medicines sold in the black market these days. Although the Cameroon custom department has embarked on an offensive against these fake drugs, importers continue to succeed in reaching the markets. In 2017,a group if African lawyers, pushed for tougher legislation, against counterfeit or fake medicine. However, Cameroonians are also blaming greedy custom officials at the border, who easily get bribed by defaulters and such products freely get into the markets, to the disadvantage of the population. BEIRUT (AP) - A Turkish soldier was killed in a mortar attack on Sunday near the northern Syrian town of Afrin, the Turkish ministry of defense said, blaming the attack on "terrorists" and responding with a barrage of shelling. The ministry said another soldier was wounded in the attack, and that Turkish forces had struck back against "terrorist targets." The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said Turkey shelled at least three villages north of the town of Afrin, mainly causing material damage. Turkey and allied Syrian fighters took control of Afrin last year, expelling local Kurdish fighters that Ankara considers terrorists. The Turkish takeover set off a series of attacks against Turkey's presence in the originally Kurdish-dominated areas. The Observatory said at least 140 Turkish shells hit the villages. The area north of Afrin is controlled by the Syrian government, but Kurdish militia fighters have maintained some presence there. The Kurdish-run Hawar news agency also reported the shelling but gave no details on casualties. CHATSWORTH, N.J. (AP) - Authorities say fire whipped by high winds has spread over thousands of acres of state land in New Jersey's Pine Barrens, a forested area of coastal plain that stretches more than 1 million acres. State environmental protection department officials say the blaze was reported Saturday afternoon in Penn State Forest in Woodland Township. Department spokesman Larry Hajna (HAY-nah) said Sunday afternoon the blaze had grown to 10,000 acres (40 sq. kilometers) with about 75 percent containment. Officials said plumes of smoke were visible from as far as Freehold, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) away. Hajna says a portion of Route 72, the main road across the Pinelands, has been closed. No homes or businesses are endangered and no injuries or mandatory evacuations have been reported. The cause of the blaze is under investigation. Spectators watch as the Spring Hill fire and backfire burns in Woodland Township, N.J., Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Authorities say fire whipped by high winds has spread over thousands of acres of state forest land in the Pinelands of New Jersey. (Ed Murray/NJ Advance Media via AP) The Spring Hill fire and backfire burns in Woodland Township, N.J., Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Authorities say fire whipped by high winds has spread over thousands of acres of state forest land in the Pinelands of New Jersey. (Ed Murray/NJ Advance Media via AP) ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - New York's Democrat-controlled Legislature worked into the night Sunday to wrap up work on a new state budget that includes new tolls on motorists driving into the busiest parts of Manhattan and a statewide ban on plastic bags. The Senate and Assembly began voting on budget bills Sunday and hoped to finish their work on the $175.5 billion spending plan early Monday. In addition to new tolls and the bag ban, the budget calls for closing up to three yet-to-be-determined state prisons, eliminating cash bail for misdemeanor and non-violent felony arrests, a permanent, annual 2 percent cap on local property taxes, and another $1 billion for public education. "This budget is probably the strongest progressive statement that we've made," Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters Sunday as lawmakers worked through hours of debate and voting on the budget. "If you have big problems, it calls for big solutions." In an agreement reached earlier last week but not officially announced until Sunday, most single-use plastic bags provided by supermarkets and other stores will be banned statewide starting March 1, 2020. Individual counties will have the option of charging 5 cents for paper bags, with 2 cents going to local governments and 3 cents to the state's Environmental Protection Fund. New York would be just the third state with a statewide ban. California's ban has been in place since 2016. All of Hawaii's counties ban plastic bags but it's not a state-mandated ban. Members of the New York state Senate debate budget bills during session in Senate Chamber at the state Capitol Sunday, March, 31, 2019, in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink) "The convenience of plastic bags is simply not worth the environmental impact," said Carl Heastie, D-Yonkers. "By reducing our state's usage, we will see less litter in our communities and less plastic pollution in our waterways." Major issues that didn't make it into the spending plan include legalization of recreational marijuana. Cuomo and legislative leaders have said the issue was too complex to rush into the budget. Instead, it could be handled in separate legislation worked out over the last three months of the legislative session, scheduled to end June 19. The Manhattan tolls plan known as congestion pricing will be the first of its kind in the nation. State leaders said a review board will determine the toll amount, exemptions and credits for drivers headed into the borough's central business district. The billions the tolls are expected to raise will go toward fixing New York City's ailing mass transit system, though a portion of the revenue will go to the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North An earlier estimate had put the toll amount for personal vehicles at nearly $12. Cuomo said without the tolls, either the subways could continue to deteriorate or fares for subways and city buses would have had to go up 30 percent. "That was the choice," he said of the toll. "You need a viable mass transit system." The state budget also will include two other dedicated revenue sources for the subways: a "mansion tax" on Manhattan homes that sell for $25 million or higher, and an internet sales tax levied on retailers who sell merchandise online. The funding streams for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority include a reorganization plan and other reforms Cuomo has demanded for the agency that runs the city's buses, subways and commuter trains. In addition to eliminating cash bail for some charges, other criminal justice reforms include requiring prosecutors and defense lawyers to share all case information well in advance of trials, and speeding up the time it takes for a case to go to trial. The budget agreement also establishes a state commission that will come up with a system for public financing of legislative and statewide offices, with up to $100 million in taxpayer funds authorized annually for such a system. Cuomo and legislative leaders also agreed to legislation that would allow three hours of paid time off for New Yorkers to vote on Election Day and expand voting hours upstate in primary elections to begin at 6 a.m. instead of noon to match general election hours. Senate Minority Leader John Flanagan, R-Smithtown, listens as Senate members debate budget bills in the Senate Chamber at the state Capitol Sunday, March, 31, 2019, in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink) Senate Deputy Minority Leader Joseph Griffo, R-Utica, left, speaks with Senate Minority Leader John Flanagan, R-Smithtown, as Senate members debate budget bills in the Senate Chamber at the state Capitol Sunday, March, 31, 2019, in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink) Sen. Todd Kaminsky, D-Rockville Centre, speaks as Senate members debate budget bills in the Senate Chamber at the state Capitol Sunday, March, 31, 2019, in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink) View of desk top as Senate members debate budget bills in the Senate Chamber at the state Capitol Sunday, March, 31, 2019, in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink) KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) - A rainstorm swept through villages in a farming region of southern Nepal on Sunday, and the government said the 25 reported deaths and hundreds of injuries were likely to increase. Nepal's Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli said on Twitter he had received a report of 25 people killed and 400 injured. He said security forces were alerted. Rescue helicopters with night vision capabilities were waiting for the weather to clear to help bring the injured from the villages to medical facilities. Government administrator Rajesh Poudel said the number of deaths would likely increase as the storm had hit many villages in the Bara district, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) south of the capital, Kathmandu. He said police and army rescuers were fanned around the district trying to reach the villages, but rescue efforts were difficult at night. The injured were being brought to a hospital by cars and ambulances, but roads in many villages had been blocked by fallen trees and electricity poles. An Injured of rain storm from Bara district is being brought to a government hospital, in Birgunj, 136 kilometers (85 miles) from Kathmandu, Nepal, March 31, 2019. Officials say many people were killed and hundreds were injured by a rainstorm that swept southern Nepal on Sunday. (AP Photo/Jiyalal Sah) Poudel said most of the deaths and injuries were because of flying objects, falling huts and trees. Most people in the district are farmers. PARIS (AP) - French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed three new government members, including the minister who will be in charge of handling Brexit-related issues. A lawmaker with Macron's party, Amelie de Montchalin, becomes junior minister for European affairs, a statement from the French presidency said Sunday. An economist who studied at Harvard Kennedy School, she has worked at the European Commission, the EU's executive body, as a political analyst. Sibeth Ndiaye, previously Macron's communication adviser, has been appointed spokeswoman of the government and Cedric O is the new junior minister for Digital Affairs. Former European Affairs Minister Nathalie Loiseau left the government to lead Macron's party in the May 23-26 EU parliament elections. Two other French government ministers quit this week because they want to run in next year's mayoral race in Paris. CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday announced a 30-day plan to ration electricity following nationwide power cuts that have inflicted misery on millions of people and ignited protests, including one near the presidential palace in Caracas. The rationing plan will help deal with the outages that have also cut off water supply and communications for days at a time, Maduro said in a speech on national television in which he also warned against any unrest in reaction to the blackouts. Hours before Maduro's appeal for calm, protests broke out in neighborhoods in the capital and other cities following a call by opposition leader Juan Guaido to demonstrate against the government's failure to provide basic services. Many took to balconies and building windows to bang pots in protest and shout curses at Maduro. They also burned trash and blocked roads. While police did not intervene in most cases, alleged government supporters known as "colectivos" appeared in some areas on motorbikes and threatened protesters, who quickly dispersed. The "colectivos" are sometimes armed and video posted on social media showed masked men as well as men firing shots in the streets. In his speech, Maduro said "colectivos" and other pro-government groups should keep order as Venezuela grapples with the blackouts, which he has blamed on U.S.-led sabotage without offering clear evidence. "We're confronting monsters who want to destroy Venezuela," said Maduro, who said the electricity rationing would balance generation and transmission with consumption, with the aim of ensuring water supply. Her face painted in the colors of the national flag, a supporter of opposition leader Juan Guaido, Venezuela's self-proclaimed interim president, waits for his arrival in Los Teques, Miranda State, Venezuela, Saturday, March 30, 2019. Guaido addressed the crowd while Maduro loyalists gathered for what was billed as an "anti-imperialist" rally in the capital. Such dueling demonstrations have become a pattern in past weeks as Venezuela's opposing factions vie for power in a country enduring economic turmoil and a humanitarian crisis. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) Guaido says years of government neglect, mismanagement and corruption have left the electrical grid in shambles. "There is no sabotage," the leader of the opposition-controlled National Assembly wrote on Twitter. "They brought the electrical system to a collapse because they are corrupt and now they can't resolve it because they are incapable." Some of the protests on Sunday occurred near the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, in a direct challenge to Maduro. "No one can put up with this. We spend almost all day without electricity," said Karina Camacho, a 56-year-old housewife who was about to buy a chicken when electronic payment machines stopped working. "There's been no water since (last) Monday, you can't call by phone, we can't pay with cards or even eat." The ongoing blackouts now mark another point of tension in a country paralyzed by political and economic turmoil, compounding a humanitarian crisis and deepening a prolonged standoff between two political parties vying for power. Netblocks, a group monitoring internet censorship, said network data showed just 15 percent of Venezuela was online after the latest power cuts struck Sunday morning, while water supply, phone service and internet continued to be shaky and unreliable. The United States and dozens of other countries support Guaido's claim that Maduro's re-election last year was illegitimate. The U.S. has imposed oil sanctions and other economic penalties on Venezuela in an attempt to force him out of power, but he has yet to show signs of backing down. The latest outage comes just weeks after Venezuela experienced nationwide blackouts on March 7 which shut down schools, offices and factories and paralyzed nearly every part of the oil-rich country of 31 million. ___ Associated Press writer Jorge Rueda contributed to this story. Venezuela's self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido greets supporters at a rally in Los Teques, Miranda State, Venezuela, Saturday, March 30, 2019. Guaido took his campaign for change to one of the country's most populous states on Saturday, while supporters of the man he is trying to oust, President Nicolas Maduro, held a rival demonstration in the capital after another nationwide blackout. (AP Photo/Boris Vergara) A supporter of Venezuela's self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido, with a message on his torso that reads in Spanish: "Venezuela with Guaido," attends an opposition rally a rally in Carrizal, Miranda State, Venezuela, Saturday, March 30, 2019. Guaido addressed the crowd while Maduro loyalists gathered for what was billed as an "anti-imperialist" rally in the capital. Such dueling demonstrations have become a pattern in past weeks as Venezuela's opposing factions vie for power in a country enduring economic turmoil and a humanitarian crisis. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) - Police say one migrant from Bangladesh has been killed and six Pakistani migrants seriously injured when their driver told them to jump from the speeding vehicle, apparently because he had spotted a police patrol. North Macedonian police say the vehicle, which was carrying the Bangladeshi and 14 Pakistanis - was traveling early Sunday on the country's main highway running north from the border with Greece to the Serbian border. The dead 27-year-old Bangladeshi has been identified only by his initials as S.I. The six injured from Pakistan were transported to nearby hospitals. Police say they are searching for the driver. They gave no details as to how many people actually jumped from the vehicle. FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - The Latest on a small plane crash in central Germany (all times local): 9:40 p.m. Russian airline operator S7 Group says that co-owner Natalia Fileva, one of Russia's richest women, has died in the crash of a small plane in Germany. The airline's press service said in an email Sunday that Fileva, 55, was aboard a single-engine, six-seat Epic-LT aircraft that crashed in a field on approach to the small airport at the town of Egelsbach in southwestern Germany about 3:30 p.m. German police said there appeared to be three people aboard the plane, including the pilot of the flight, which originated in France. They said that positive identification of the occupants would require further investigation. German aviation authorities were probing the cause of the crash. A damaged police car is seen next to a road in Langen near Frankfurt, Germany, Sunday, March 31, 2019. The police car with two police officers was on the way to a nearby plane crash as it collided with another car, background, carrying two young people who died in the crash. The police officers were seriously injured. (AP Photo/Michael Probst) Business publication Forbes.ru estimated Fileva's fortune at $600 million. ___ 8:15 p.m. German police say a pilot and two passengers are believed to have died in the crash of a small airplane near Frankfurt and two more people died in a collision with a police vehicle responding to the scene. Police said the six-seater airplane took off in France and was on its way to the central German town of Egelsbach when it crashed and burned in a field Sunday afternoon near Erzhausen, 10 kilometers (6 miles) south of Frankfurt. Police said they believed three people were aboard but were still working on positive identification of the victims as well as confirming the number of occupants. The dpa news agency, citing police, reported that three people in a police vehicle were seriously injured in the traffic crash while the two people in the other car died. A damaged police car is seen next to a road in Langen near Frankfurt, Germany, Sunday, March 31, 2019. The police car with two police officers was on the way to a nearby plane crash as it collided with another car carrying two young people who died in the crash. The police officers were seriously injured. (AP Photo/Michael Probst) ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) - Algeria's powerful army chief retained his post in a newly-named government despite his call to have ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika declared unfit for office. Algerian national television announced Sunday night that Bouteflika and Prime Minister Noureddine Bedoui named a new government after weeks of mass protests and political tensions in this gas-rich North African country. The new government notably keeps Ahmed Gaid Salah as army chief of staff and vice defense minister. Gaid Salah shocked the nation with his call last week for the constitutional council to set in motion a process to end Bouteflika's 20-year presidency. Critics accused Gaid Salah of trying to orchestrate a coup, and the army chief suggested Saturday that unnamed figures were plotting against him as a result of his stand against Bouteflika's presidency. Millions of Algerians have been holding weekly protests demanding that Bouteflika leave office along with the distrusted political elite. Algerians have barely seen their president, now 82, since a 2013 stroke. Also Sunday, a top Algerian businessman was arrested at an Algerian border post as he was apparently trying to go to Tunisia, Algerian media reported. In this picture taken on June 27, 2012, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, left, and his Army chief of staff, Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah, review an honor guard before attending a military parade, in Cherchell near Algiers, Algeria. Algeria's powerful army chief, Ahmed Gaid Salah, insisted Wednesday that the military won't get mixed up in politics, a day after he said a constitutional process should be set in motion to declare ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika unfit for office. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul) Journalists at tycoon Ali Haddad's private television channel Dzair News said he was arrested overnight in Oum Tboul, close to the Tunisian border. Haddad, long a backer of Bouteflika, resigned this week as head of Algeria's Business Forum, apparently trying to distance himself from the unpopular leader whose government has been accused of corruption. Bouteflika withdrew from running for a new term but canceled Algeria's April 18 presidential election. Pressure has mounted for him to step down before his current term expires later this month. WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on former Vice President Joe Biden (all times local): 4:20 p.m. Former Vice President Joe Biden is defending his interactions with women, saying he doesn't believe he's ever acted inappropriately. But a Nevada politician's assertion that Biden's kiss on the back of her head in 2014 made her feel uncomfortable has prompted some Democrats to question whether the 76-year-old is too out of step with his own party to run a successful 2020 presidential campaign. In a statement on Sunday, Biden said it was never his intention to make women feel discomfort. The woman, Lucy Flores, wrote about the encounter for New York Magazine. Flores tells The Associated Press that she had been mulling coming forward for years. She says the tipping point for her was Biden's meeting in March with 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams. FILE - In this Feb. 19, 2019, file photo, former Vice President Joe Biden reacts as he talks with University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann at the university's Irvine Auditorium in Philadelphia. Biden on Sunday, March 31, defended his interactions with women, saying he doesn't believe he's ever acted inappropriately. But a Nevada politician's assertion that Biden's kiss on the back of her head made her feel uncomfortable prompted some Democrats to question whether the 76-year-old is too out of step with his own party to run a successful 2020 presidential campaign. (Tim Tai/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP, File) ___ 9:45 a.m. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway is criticizing former Vice President Joe Biden after a former Nevada state legislator alleged he inappropriately kissed her on the back of her head in 2014. Conway described the woman, Lucy Flores, as "quite bold" to "go against the highest levels of her political party" with the allegations and said Biden now has a "big problem." Biden, a Democrat, is considering running for president in 2020. Conway tells "Fox News Sunday" that quote, "He calls it affection and handshakes. His party calls it completely inappropriate." Conway suggested that Biden should consider apologizing to Flores. Flores, who was Nevada's Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2014, wrote in New York Magazine that she felt uncomfortable with her interactions with Biden. ___ 9:30 a.m. Former Vice President Joe Biden says he doesn't believe he ever acted inappropriately toward women but will "listen respectfully" to suggestions he did. Biden, who is deciding whether to join the 2020 presidential race, faces allegations from a Nevada political candidate that he kissed her on the back of the head in 2014 and made her uncomfortable. In a new statement released Sunday, Biden says: "In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once - never - did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention." The allegation was made by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor. FILE - In this March 12, 2019, file photo, former Vice President Joe Biden speaks to the International Association of Firefighters at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington. Biden says he does not recall kissing a Nevada political candidate on the back of her head in 2014. The allegation was made in a New York Magazine article written by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor. Flores says Biden's behavior "made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused."(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File) Ewane Clifford Ngambe, Deputy treasurer general number II for South West Region Atia Tilarius The representative of the South West Regional Paymaster General, Ewane Clifford Ngambe, deputy treasurer general number II for South West Region has raised an alarm decrying low deposit of funds in treasury by municipal treasurers. He revealed this on Tuesday March 26, 2019 during the first bi-annual general assembly of the association of South West municipal treasurers which took place at Limbe I council hall down beach. According to Ewane Clifford, the hierarchy of financial jurisdiction in the Region is not pleased with the outcome of municipal treasurers financial records, as the rate of deposits of financial statement is low, representing 60.6% for the month of February 2019, representing 20 municipal treasury stations out of 33. The situation is currently greatly affecting the performance of South West financial jurisdiction in the national classification, however there are some municipal treasurers who are making effort every month while others hardly follow sort, he said. Ewane also regretted that, the rate of deposit in January stood very low at 24.2% representing just 8 out of the 33 councils and equally only 18 out of 33 municipal treasurers have so far deposited their 2017 management account at the audit bench of the Supreme Court in Yaounde. Through this association therefore, we expect you people to exchange ideas and experience and even come to directly assist each other ensure that, operations are all handled by all, with the regular production statement and effective deposit Ewane stated. He however urged the municipal treasurers to put up a platform for debate and mastery of various laws of decentralisation, the account framework of councils and various ministerial instructions as well as those from the technical hierarchy on the handling of local accounting operations. While urging them to be apolitical in their actions and activities within their association and not to resort to activities of syndicates, but concentrate on issues that concern their profession so as to ameliorate their performance as accountants. Ewane Clifford is optimistic that, with the creation of this framework, there will be more collaboration and synergy action for a better understanding of procedure, text and proper handling of accounting operations within the municipal treasury stations and subsequently production and depositing of summary statement will be encouraging. On his part, the President of the Association of South West Region Municipal Treasurers, SWAMUT, Sona Simon Makia said, the creation of the association is an opportunity to the municipal treasurers of the South West Region in particular and financial jurisdiction as a whole to continue to have a framework on which efforts and ideas are exchanged for a better handling of accounting operations. We have our own challenges but as we serve the people, we should make the people know we are working for them, if we work selflessly Sona Simon told his peers. ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) - Pope Francis defended his decision to reject French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin's resignation after he was convicted of covering up for a predator priest, saying Sunday the appeals process must run its course before a final decision is made. Francis also explained why he rejected proposals by U.S. bishops to respond to the sex abuse scandal there, saying they neglected the spiritual dimension required for a true reform. The pope referred to both cases during an in-flight news conference en route home Sunday from Morocco. Francis' papacy has been thrown into turmoil by the eruption of the scandal on multiple continents and his own handling of cases at the Vatican. Currently, two of his cardinals - Barbarin and Australian Cardinal George Pell - have criminal abuse-related convictions hanging over them, though both are appealing. Asked Sunday about Barbarin, Francis said the archbishop of Lyon was entitled to the presumption of innocence as long as the case remained open. "He has appealed, so the case is open. After the second tribunal decides, we'll see what happens," he said. Pope Francis, flanked by interim director of Holy See Press Office, Alessandro Gisotti, speaks to reporters on board the flight back to Rome from a two-day trip to Morocco, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Francis sought Sunday to encourage greater fraternity between Christians and Muslims in Morocco, telling his flock that showing the country's Muslim majority they are part of the same human family will help stamp out extremism. (Alberto Pizzoli/Pool Photo via AP) Francis said that presumption of innocence was necessary to guard against a "superficial media condemnation." Barbarin offered his resignation to Francis last month after a court in Lyon gave him a six-month suspended sentence for failing to report the Rev. Bernard Preynat to civil authorities when he learned of his abuse. Preynat, who is scheduled to be tried on sexual violence charges next year, confessed to abusing Boy Scouts in the 1970s and 1980s. His victims accuse Barbarin and other church authorities of covering up for him for years. After Francis declined to accept the resignation, Barbarin decided to take a leave and turned over the day-to-day management of the archdiocese to his deputy. In the news conference, Francis also defended his tendency to blame the devil for the abuse scandal, saying the crisis is of such magnitude and scale of filth that it cannot be understood without referencing the "mystery of evil." "It's not washing your hands (of the problem) to say the devil did it," Francis said. "We have to do battle with the devil. Just as we have to battle human things." Francis explained that it was precisely the spiritual dimension of the scandal that he asked U.S. bishops to reflect on when he sent them on spiritual retreats at the beginning of the year. The U.S. church hierarchy has suffered a credibility crisis over its repeated failures to protect children from predator priests, as evidenced by the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the scandal over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, found guilty by the Vatican of sexually abusing minors and adults. At their November general meeting, the U.S. bishops had planned to vote on proposals to hold themselves accountable for sexual misconduct or negligence in handling abuse cases. But the Vatican blocked them from taking up the measures, which included a third-party confidential reporting system and a code of conduct. "The proposals were too much about organization, about methodology," Francis said Sunday. "But they had neglected this second, spiritual dimension." The head of the U.S. bishops' conference, Houston Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, stunned the bishops when he opened the assembly Nov. 12 by announcing that "at the insistence of the Holy See" the bishops wouldn't be voting on the measures after all. He said the Vatican wanted them to delay a vote until after Francis' February abuse summit. The Associated Press later reported that the Vatican had demanded the delay because the U.S. conference had waited until four days before the meeting began to share the legally problematic proposals with the Holy See. A letter from the head of the Vatican's bishops' office said the proposals required further consultation before they could be approved. The U.S. bishops are expected to take up the revised proposals at their June meeting. CHICAGO (AP) - The Rev. Jesse Jackson and other clergy are planning a rally in support of Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, who's faced criticism since her office dropped charges against actor Jussie Smollett . Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition says the civil rights leader will join fellow clergy, elected officials, attorneys and community activists for a Monday morning rally at the Chicago Temple supporting Foxx. Jackson says in a statement that the criticism of Foxx is "unreasonable, unjustified and politically motivated." Foxx has faced criticism since prosecutors dismissed all 16 felony counts against Smollett, who is black and gay. The "Empire" actor was accused of faking a racist, anti-gay attack on himself in January. Authorities say that in return for the charges being dropped, Smollett agreed to forfeit the $10,000 he put up to get out of jail and completed community service. The Chicago Tribune reports that the community service included volunteering at Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. The Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago plans a protest outside Foxx's office Monday over the dismissal of the Smollett charges. SAO PAULO (AP) - Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in several major Brazilian cities Sunday to protest the 55th anniversary of the coup that instituted the country's 1964-1985 military regime. The demonstrations took place in 10 states, a day after an appeals court judge overturned another judge*s decision barring the commemorations sought by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has sparked controversy with comments seen as racist, homophobic and misogynist, and has praised the authoritarian regime. In Brasilia, the nation's capital, protesters marched chanting "dictatorship never again." Brazil's armed forces overthrew President Joao Goulart on March 31, 1964. "Bolsonaro expresses his love for the dictatorship because he thinks that violence will resolve the country's problems," said Marcos Souza, a 37-year-old bank worker in a Rio protest. The celebrations called for by Bolsonaro were roundly condemned by human rights activists and social groups that quickly organized Sunday's protests. A woman holds a sign that reads in Portuguese "Never commemorate, remember to not repeat. Dictatorship never more," during a protest against the military coup of 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waxes nostalgic for the 1964-1985 dictatorship, asked Brazil's Defense Ministry to organize "due commemorations" on March 31, the day historians say marks the coup that began the dictatorship. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) A 2014 report by the country's truth commission concluded that at least 434 people were killed or disappeared during the military regime Bolsonaro repeatedly praises. During Bolsonaro's 28 years in Congress, he repeatedly expressed support and admiration for the military regime. During last year's election, that position angered and shocked many Brazilians while seducing others who think of the dictatorship as a time of low crime and general order. Bolsonaro has said the dictatorship should have gone farther in killing communists who threatened Brazil. A video sent by Brazil's Presidency to journalists via WhatsApp on Sunday defended events on March 31, 1964. "It was a time of fear and threats. The communists were detaining and killing their own compatriots; there was a lot of fear," a man said in the video looking at the camera. "Called on by the press and by the people in the streets, Brazil agreed that it had a national army and appealed to it. Thanks to this, the darkness passed and there was light." "The army saved us; there is no way to deny this and history can't be changed," the man said. Asked by The Associated Press, the Presidency's press office declined to say who had produced the video. "Brazil has become the laughing stock of the world," said 67-year-old Carmelena Nassar in Rio. "I am here to defend the future of my children and grandchildren. We cannot return to that period of tortures and murders we already experienced Demonstrators hold photos of persons who were killed during Brazil's dictatorship during a protest in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Over the objections of human rights groups, but with the support of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, some military bases are commemorating the March 31, 1964, coup that lasted two decades in Brazil and made for thousands of victims. (AP Photo/Andre Penner) A person places a candle in an altar for victims of Brazil's dictatorship in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in several major Brazilian cities Sunday to protest the 55th anniversary of the coup that instituted the country's 1964-1985 military regime. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano) A woman holds a sign with a picture of the former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, that reads in Portuguese "Without Lula is coup" during a protest against the military coup of 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waxes nostalgic for the 1964-1985 dictatorship, asked Brazil's Defense Ministry to organize "due commemorations" on March 31, the day historians say marks the coup that began the dictatorship. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) A man holds a sign that reads in Portuguese "Bolsonaro and all the putschists out. Freedom to Lula," during a protest against the military coup of 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waxes nostalgic for the 1964-1985 dictatorship, asked Brazil's Defense Ministry to organize "due commemorations" on March 31, the day historians say marks the coup that began the dictatorship. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) A man hold an image of the former President Dilma Rousseff, who was tortured during the dictatorship as he takes part in a protest against the military coup of 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waxes nostalgic for the 1964-1985 dictatorship, asked Brazil's Defense Ministry to organize "due commemorations" on March 31, the day historians say marks the coup that began the dictatorship. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) A woman holds a street sign honoring slain councilwoman Marielle Franco during a protest against the military coup of 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waxes nostalgic for the 1964-1985 dictatorship, asked Brazil's Defense Ministry to organize "due commemorations" on March 31, the day historians say marks the coup that began the dictatorship. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) Children hold a sign that reads in Portuguese "Fascists will not pass" during a protest against the military coup of 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waxes nostalgic for the 1964-1985 dictatorship, asked Brazil's Defense Ministry to organize "due commemorations" on March 31, the day historians say marks the coup that began the dictatorship. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer wants Boeing to be removed from a Federal Aviation Administration rulemaking committee as investigations deepen into both the company and regulator's role in two deadline airline crashes. Senate Democratic Leader Schumer said Sunday that Boeing should be suspended from the Aviation Rulemaking Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations on airline industry regulations. He also wants the membership and activities of the committee to be made public and suggested further reforms to the committee. Congress is looking closely at the relationship between Boeing and the FAA after two recent deadly crashes. Both crashes involved a Boeing jet green-lighted by the U.S. regulator, which relied heavily on safety assessments made by Boeing employees. The FAA said it had not received Schumer's request and would provide a response when it does. A representative for Boeing was not immediately available. MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexican immigration officials plan to issue humanitarian visas on a "limited basis" starting Monday to some of the roughly 2,500 Central American and Caribbean migrants gathered in the southern state of Chiapas. The National Migration Institute said Sunday it will give priority to women, children and those over the age of 65 "whose situation merits" such visas. The authority said it would also provide bus transportation back to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras for citizens of those countries, and air transport home to migrants from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. The statement came as President Donald Trump threatens to close U.S. border crossings with Mexico unless the country prevents thousands of Central American migrants from reaching the U.S. border, where they either cross stealthily or request asylum. U.S. officials say their country's immigration system is overwhelmed. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said last week her agency apprehended more than 75,000 migrants at the U.S. southern border in February, a 12-year high. U.S. law does not require asylum seekers to present themselves at an official U.S. crossing, though, and many request asylum after having already entered the U.S. With a backlog of more than 700,000 immigration cases, asylum seekers can wait years for their cases to progress, and are often released in the meantime to live in the U.S. A migrants mother an child, part of the caravan hoping to reach the U.S. border, move on a road in Tapachula, Chiapas State, Mexico, Thursday, March 28, 2019. A caravan of about 2,500 Central Americans and Cubans is currently making its way through Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. (AP Photo/Isabel Mateos) Mexico appears to be both tiring of the migrant caravans and eager not to anger the United States. It has stopped granting migrants humanitarian visas at the border, and towns along the well-traveled route through southern Mexico sometimes no longer allow caravans to spend the night. Fewer private citizens are offering food and rides to the weary travelers. A U.S.-Mexico border shutdown would be a major blow for commerce. The U.S. and Mexico trade about $1.7 billion in goods daily, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said closing the border would be "an unmitigated economic debacle" that would threaten 5 million American jobs. Starting in the second half of May, Mexico's immigration institute said Sunday the country will issue humanitarian visas in the capitals of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras_as well as in San Pedro Sula, Honduras_"for cases that merit this condition." Also, from those cities, Mexico will continue to issue temporary work visas for Central Americans wishing to live and work in southern Mexico. The goal of the visa restrictions, the institute said, is to achieve a more orderly, regulated and safe international movement of people. The largest of last year's migrant caravans through Mexico contained about 7,000 people at its peak. Migrants have been coming together in caravans to avoid falling prey to kidnappers, thieves and human trafficking networks as they traverse Mexico. Central American migrants, part of the caravan hoping to reach the U.S. border, move on a road in Tapachula, Chiapas State, Mexico, Thursday, March 28, 2019. A caravan of about 2,500 Central Americans and Cubans is currently making its way through Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. (AP Photo/Isabel Mateos) Central American migrants, part of the caravan hoping to reach the U.S. border, move on a road in Tapachula, Chiapas State, Mexico, Thursday, March 28, 2019. A caravan of about 2,500 Central Americans and Cubans is currently making its way through Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. (AP Photo/Isabel Mateos) TOKYO (AP) - The era of Japan's next emperor, which begins May 1, will be named "Reiwa," connoting pursuit of harmony, the government said Monday after selecting the phrase from ancient Japanese poetry instead of Chinese classics as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promotes national pride. The current "Heisei," or "achieving peace," era will end with Emperor Akihito's abdication on April 30. His son, Naruhito, is to ascend the throne the following day. While a growing number of Japanese prefer the Western calendar over the Japanese system in a highly digitalized and globalized society, era names are still widely used in government and business documents and on calendars. Many people use them to identify generations and historical periods. The choice had been kept strictly secret ahead of Monday's announcement. Abe said the two characters were taken from a poem about plum blossoms in the "Manyoshu," a 7th century poetry collection, and mean that "culture is born and nurtured as the people's hearts are beautifully drawn together." He said "Manyoshu" is Japan's oldest collection of poetry written by both royals and ordinary people, and it was appropriate to choose the name from a book symbolizing Japan's rich culture and tradition. Abe said the government selected the name "with hopes of making Japan a nation where every person can achieve dreams, like the plum flowers that bloom beautifully after a severe winter to signal the start of spring." People watch a TV news report as the name of new era "Reiwa" is unveiled, in Urayasu, near Tokyok Monday, April 1, 2019. The name of the era of Japan's soon-to-be-emperor Naruhito will be "Reiwa," the government announced Monday. (Kyodo News via AP) The first character of the era name, "rei," also means "good" or "beautiful," while the second, "wa" could mean "peace," ''harmony" or "mild" as in the introduction to a Manyoshu section with poems about plum flowers. "It is now the good month in early spring, the air is fresh and wind is soft. The plums blossoms are like the white powder of a beauty before a mirror, the fragrance like that which follows the sachet of a noble lady," it says, describing a scene at a party where people open their hearts. The break from 1,400 years of drawing era names from Chinese classics was expected from Abe's conservative government, which is often hawkish toward China. Abe and his strongest supporters have campaigned to bolster national pride, which they say was lost because of war guilt taught during the U.S. occupation after Japan's World War II defeat. Abe also has been pushing to restore an authoritative image of the emperor. "We hope (the era name) will be widely accepted by the people and deeply rooted as part of their daily lives," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said in announcing the name, written with two Chinese characters in black ink calligraphy on a white background. The announcement gives the government, businesses and people only a month to adjust to a change that affects many parts of Japanese society, even though the system is not compulsory and the emperor has no political power under Japan's postwar constitution. Under a 1979 law, a panel of experts on classical Chinese and Japanese literature was appointed in mid-March to nominate names that met strict criteria, including being easy to read and write but not common. The nominations were presented first to nine outside experts, including Nobel Prize-winning stem-cell scientist Shinya Yamanaka and award-winning novelist Mariko Hayashi, to present their views and narrow the selection before final approval by the Cabinet. Although some names nominated in the past have come from Japanese classics, none was ever chosen. "I think the first adoption of an era name drawn from Japanese classics under the Abe government, which has the strong backing of conservatives, seems to be quite significant," said Eiichi Miyashiro, an era name expert and senior editorial staff member at the Asahi newspaper. Taking the name from a Japanese book stresses the country's identity, and Manyoshu is a great choice because it is an anthology that documents the people's own voices, Robert Campbell, head of the National Institute of Japanese Literature in Tokyo, said in an interview with public broadcaster NHK. Discussing and guessing the new era name in advance was not considered a taboo this time because Akihito is abdicating, a highly unusual step. Era name changes are also a time for many Japanese to reflect on the outgoing and incoming periods. "Many Japanese people don't think of an emperor when they mention an era name. Changes in eras are a rare occasion when people realize the link between the era name and the emperor," Miyashiro said. The new name seemed well-received. Office worker Yoshiko Sugita, 50, said she liked the name's second character, "wa," which means peace or harmony. "I hope that harmony and peace will also continue in this new era," she said. Akihito's Heisei era was the first without war in Japan's modern history, but is also remembered as a period of lost years caused by economic deflation and natural disasters. Heisei was the first era name decided by the government under the postwar constitution and the emperor had no say over the choice. Still, the government, with its highly secretive and sensitive handling of the process, underscored that "the emperor has power in an invisible, subtle way," said Hirohito Suzuki, a Toyo University sociologist. Era name changes create a host of business opportunities. Anything dubbed "last of Heisei" attracts Akihito fans, while others wait to submit marriage certificates or file other official registrations until the new era starts. Analysts say the era change, which will extend Japan's "Golden Week" holiday period to 10 days with the addition of May 1, could buoy tourism and other recreational spending. ___ AP journalist Haruka Nuga contributed to this report. ___ Follow Mari Yamaguchi at https://www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi A woman holds a copy of extra edition of Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reporting the name of new era "Reiwa" is unveiled in Tokyo, Monday, April 1, 2019. Japan's government has unveiled an era name, "Reiwa," or "pursuing harmony," for soon-to-be Emperor Naruhito, who will succeed the Chrysanthemum throne on May 1. His father, Emperor Akihito, is abdicating, with his "Heisei" era coming to an end the day before. A selection of the name was a top secret and the decision comes after highly guarded closed meetings and intense media speculation. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara) Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga unveils the name of new era "Reiwa" at the prime minister's office in Tokyo, Monday, April 1, 2019. Japan says next emperor Naruhito's era name is Reiwa, effective May 1 when he takes the throne from his father.(AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko) Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks after the official announcement of new era's name "Reiwa" at the Prime Minister's office in Tokyo, Monday, April 1, 2019. Japan says next emperor Naruhito's era name is Reiwa, effective May 1 when he takes the throne from his father.(AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko) A shop worker arranges Japanese traditional dolls depicting Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, left, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, right, holding the new era name "Reiwa" at Kyugetsu, a Japanese doll company, in Tokyo, Monday, April 1, 2019. Japan's government has unveiled an era name, "Reiwa," or "pursuing harmony," for soon-to-be Emperor Naruhito, who will succeed the Chrysanthemum throne on May 1. His father, Emperor Akihito, is abdicating, with his "Heisei" era coming to an end the day before. A selection of the name was a top secret and the decision comes after highly guarded closed meetings and intense media speculation.(Satoru Yonemaru/Kyodo News via AP) A clerk writes the name of new era "Reiwa" on a board in Tokyo, Monday, April 1, 2019. Japan says next emperor Naruhito's era name is Reiwa, effective May 1 when he takes the throne from his father.(AP Photo/Koji Sasahara) Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga unveils the name of new era "Reiwa" at the prime minister's office in Tokyo, Monday, April 1, 2019. Japan says next emperor Naruhito's era name is Reiwa, effective May 1 when he takes the throne from his father.(AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko) EL PASO, Texas (AP) - U.S. immigration officials say they will close a holding area under a bridge connecting El Paso, Texas, with Juarez, Mexico, that is just a short distance from where a senior official declared an "operational crisis" at the border last week. In a statement Sunday, Customs and Border Protection says that migrants being held under the Paso Del Norte International Bridge will be relocated to a place with more space and shelter. The holding area is a few hundred yards from where Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan Wednesday announced that 750 border inspectors will be reassigned to cope with an influx of families from Central American seeking asylum. The area held hundreds of migrants in a pen lined with concertina wire under the shade of a bridge. Shreds of Mylar blankets and a Border Patrol vehicle are seen under the Paso del Norte Port of Entry bridge in El Paso, Texas, on Sunday, March 31, 2019. Migrants, including young children and babies, seeking asylum were being kept in a U.S. Border Patrol temporary holding area under the bridge. Some migrants were held there for as many as four days and were forced to sleep outside on gravel, provided only thin Mylar blankets for warmth. (Ryan Michalesko/The Dallas Morning News via AP) Border Patrol agents guard a gate at the entrance to what was a temporary holding facility under the Paso del Norte Port of Entry bridge in El Paso, Texas, on Sunday, March 31, 2019. Migrants, including young children and babies, seeking asylum were being kept in a U.S. Border Patrol temporary holding area under the bridge. Some migrants were held there for as many as four days and were forced to sleep outside on gravel, provided only thin Mylar blankets for warmth. (Ryan Michalesko/The Dallas Morning News via AP) Shreds of Mylar blankets and a Border Patrol vehicle are seen under the Paso del Norte Port of Entry bridge in El Paso, Texas, on Sunday, March 31, 2019. Migrants, including young children and babies, seeking asylum were being kept in a U.S. Border Patrol temporary holding area under the bridge. Some migrants were held there for as many as four days and were forced to sleep outside on gravel, provided only thin Mylar blankets for warmth. (Ryan Michalesko/The Dallas Morning News via AP) CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - Australia's prime minister said on Monday he won't put officials in danger by retrieving three orphaned Australian children of a convicted terrorist who have reportedly been found in a Syrian refugee camp. Prime Minister Scott Morrison's response to the plight of former Islamic State group fighter Khaled Sharrouf's children is the same as his government's reaction to other Australians who have joined the fight with extremist groups in Syria and want to come home. "I'm not going to put one Australian life at risk to try and extract people from these dangerous situations," Morrison told reporters. But security experts say that Australians can and should be safely brought home from Syrian refugee camps since the defeat of Islamic State forces. Only three of Sharrouf's five children survived the conflict, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. They are 17-year-old Zaynab, Hoda, 16, and Humzeh, 8. The siblings fled the siege of Baghouz village in mid-March. Zaynab is pregnant and has her two children with her, Ayesha, 3, and Fatima, 2. Their grandmother, Karen Nettleton, said she is particularly concerned for Zaynab, who is about to give birth in the squalid al-Hawl camp. "Zaynab is seven-and-a half months pregnant; she's feeling very fatigued," Nettleton told ABC. The siblings' father Khaled Sharrouf in 2017 was the first dual national to be stripped of Australian citizenship for actions contrary to his allegiance to Australia. The Sydney-born man slipped out of Australia in 2013 on his brother's passport because his own had been canceled because of his conviction for his part in a thwarted terrorist attack plot in Australia. He was left with Lebanese citizenship. Sharrouf horrified the world in 2014 when he posted on social media a photograph of his young son clutching the severed head of a Syrian soldier. Then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry described that image as "one of the most disturbing, stomach-turning, grotesque photographs ever displayed." Sharrouf's wife Tara Nettleton, with her five children, joined her husband in Syria in 2014. She died of medical complications in 2015. Sharrouf and his two eldest sons Abdullah, 12, and Zarqawi, 11, were killed in an air strike near Raqqa, the Islamic State-group's stronghold in Syria, in August 2017, the ABC reported. Save the Children Australia's Mat Tinkler said Australia should follow the lead of France, which recently repatriated five orphaned children from Syria. "We seek to ensure Australian children trapped in Syria are not punished for the crimes of their parents," Tinkler said. "It is entirely within the Australian government's power to bring these children home and we urge them to do so immediately," he added. SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korea's military began searching for Korean War remains at the heavily armed inter-Korean border on Monday after North Korea ignored its calls to carry out a previously planned joint search. South Korean soldiers will remove mines and proceed with excavation work at an area south of the military demarcation line that bisects the rivals, said Choi Hyunsoo, spokeswoman for Seoul's Defense Ministry. The joint recovery of war remains was one of many peace agreements reached between the Koreas last year as they took steps to improve bilateral relations amid larger nuclear negotiations between North Korea and the United States. But North Korea has shown less enthusiasm about upholding inter-Korean agreements following the collapse of February's high-stakes summit between leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump over mismatched demands on sanctions relief and disarmament. The breakdown has been a major setback for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who held three summits with Kim last year and lobbied hard to revive nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang following a provocative run in North Korean nuclear and missile tests that led to fears of war on the peninsula. Moon, who will travel to Washington later this month for a summit with Trump, called for Pyongyang to respond to efforts to keep the atmosphere of dialogue alive and diplomatically resolve the nuclear standoff. FILE - In this Oct. 2, 2018, file photo, South Korean army soldiers search for landmines inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas in Cheorwon, South Korea. South Korea's military on Monday, April 1, 2019, is separately searching for Korean War remains at the heavily armed inter-Korean border after North Korea ignored its calls to carry out a previously planned joint search. (Song Kyung-Seok/Pool Photo via AP. File) "We surely will not return to the past and cannot return to the past," Moon said in a meeting with senior aides on Monday. The Koreas had agreed to jointly search for war remains from April 1 to Oct. 31, which was part of a military agreement reached on the sidelines of Moon's third summit with Kim in Pyongyang last September. The North in recent weeks has been unresponsive to South Korean calls for military talks to discuss details about carrying out the search. "Our side will prepare to immediately switch to a joint search if North Korea later responds," Choi said. Under the September military agreement aimed at reducing conventional threats, the Koreas also established buffer zones on land and at sea and no-fly zones above their border. They also removed some front-line guard posts and conducted a joint survey of a 70-kilometer (43-mile) -long waterway near their western border under plans to allow civilian vessels from both countries to pass freely. But Seoul's Defense Ministry said last week that the civilian use of the river estuary will be "postponed" because of the lack of discussions with the North. The Koreas have also fallen behind on their plans to disarm a jointly controlled area at the border village of Panmunjom and let tourists freely cross concrete slabs forming the demarcation line there. North Korea recently withdrew its entire staff at a frontline liaison office with South Korea before sending some of them back to the office. Some analysts say North Korea is trying to pressure South Korea into backing its position with the U.S. more strongly. Following the breakdown of the Trump-Kim meeting, North Korean state media have urged the South to distance itself from Washington and resume joint economic projects that have been held back by sanctions. Experts say the breakdown of the Trump-Kim talks raised further doubts about Moon's claim that Kim is genuinely interested in dealing away his nuclear weapons and about Moon's role as mediator, which has become less crucial with Washington and Pyongyang directly communicating. WASHINGTON (AP) - Aides to Joe Biden struck a more aggressive tone on Monday as the former vice president faced scrutiny over his past behavior toward women. In a statement, Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted "right wing trolls" from "the dark recesses of the internet" for conflating images of Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends in his official capacity during swearing-in ceremonies with uninvited touching. The move came on a day in which a second woman said Biden had acted inappropriately, touching her face with both hands and rubbing noses with her in 2009. The allegation by Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Hines of Connecticut, followed a magazine essay by former Nevada politician Lucy Flores, who wrote that Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014. The developments underscored the challenge facing Biden should he decide to seek the White House. Following historic wins in the 2018 midterms, Democratic politics is dominated by energy from women. The allegations could leave the 76-year-old Biden, long known for his affectionate mannerisms, appearing out of touch with the party as the Democratic presidential primary begins. Lappos told The Associated Press that she and other Himes aides were helping out at a fundraiser in a private home in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2009 when Biden entered the kitchen to thank the group for pitching in. "After he finished speaking, he stopped to talk to us about how important a congressional staff is, which I thought was awesome," Lappos said. Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Biden Courage Awards Tuesday, March 26, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) She said she was stunned as Biden moved toward her. "He wrapped both his hands around my face and pulled me in," said Lappos, who is now 43. "I thought, 'Oh, God, he's going to kiss me.' Instead, he rubbed noses with me." Biden said nothing, she said, then moved off. She said the experience left her feeling "weird and uncomfortable" and was "absolutely disrespectful of my personal boundaries." The Hartford Courant first reported Lappos' assertion. Russo didn't directly respond to Lappos, instead referring to a Sunday statement in which Biden said he doesn't believe he has acted inappropriately during his long public life. The former vice president said in that statement: "We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will." Biden hasn't made a final decision on whether to run for the White House. But aides who weren't authorized to discuss internal conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity said there were no signs that his team was slowing its preparations for a campaign. Asked by the AP about the accusations against Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "I don't think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all." She declined to elaborate. Biden's potential Democratic rivals haven't rushed to back him up. Over the weekend, presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand came closest to calling out the former vice president. Warren said Biden "needs to give an answer" about what occurred. Gillibrand said, "If Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic he'll have to engage on further." Ultraviolet, a women's advocacy group, tweeted: "Joe Biden cannot paint himself as a champion of women and then refuse to listen and learn from a woman who says his actions demeaned her. Good intentions don't matter if the actions are inappropriate. Do better, Joe. And thank you @LucyFlores for coming forward." ___ Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. AP Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace contributed to this report. Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Biden Courage Awards Tuesday, March 26, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) FILE - In this March 12, 2019, file photo, former Vice President Joe Biden speaks to the International Association of Firefighters at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington. Biden says he does not recall kissing a Nevada political candidate on the back of her head in 2014. The allegation was made in a New York Magazine article written by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor. Flores says Biden's behavior "made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused."(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File) Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Biden Courage Awards Tuesday, March 26, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) Dr Denis Nsame Nforniwe Archives The Director of the Limbe Regional Hospital, Dr Denis Nsame Nforniwe has revealed that the Limbe Regional Hospital under his leadership does not hold hostage patients who are unable to pay their medical bills. Dr Nsame was reacting to cameroon-info, following the recent authorization of the Minister of Public Health, Manaouda Malachie, ordering the administration of all public hospitals in Cameroon to let go patients who cant pay their hospital expenses. The unfortunate situation had become the order of the day in some hospitals across the country, which has gone on to draw the sympathy of Minister Manaouda, who in a recent communique called on all public hospital directors to see to its strict implementation. According to the director of Limbe Regional Hospital, Dr Denis Nsame Nforniwe, though the hospital, out of human sympathy does not hold patients hostage until they pay their bills, as is the case in other hospitals, yet, they are at the losing end. This he explained is due to the fact that the hospital is incurring huge losses to that respect, amounting, for example, to FCFA 12million last year. Dr Nsame told cameroon-info that their priority at the Limbe Regional Hospital is to concentrate and attend to all patients, especially emergency cases, before talking money. Some are paupers, and the social welfare service attends to them, but others who are not paupers are dishonest and after leaving the hospital to go in search of finances to settle their medical bills, never return. The hospital is incurring huge losses, for example last year unpaid medical bills amounted to at least FCFA 12 million. The director also explained that Health Insurance is a necessity, but says unfortunately, a great majority of the population is not health insured. He maintained the initiative of the Minister of Health to free all indebted patients is a good one, as it addresses the plight of the less privilege in society, and he said the reason why there are no patients being held hostage in the Limbe Regional Hospital is because they consider the hospital a welfare service to the public. However, he appealed to the consciences of all, especially those viable, to always settle their medical bills. Dr Nsame equally appreciated the effort of institutions such as the BEFA of the Catholic Church, which is a fund set aside to cater for hospital bills of its stakeholders, and said its quite encouraging and called on others to emulate. In Cameroon, a great majority of patients pay their bills directly when admitted in hospitals, while a few pay through various insurance schemes. The insurance schemes are basically in two forms; customers pay first and are reimbursed by the insurance company later or they fill an insurance form through which the insurance company takes care of their bills. However, most insurance companies limit their health coverage, not covering cases such as organ transplants, due to the high cost. It should be noted however that some hospitals complain of the non-payment of hospital bills by some insurance companies. WASHINGTON (AP) - When Kamala Harris made her much-heralded arrival in Washington as California's first black U.S. senator, she made a curious early decision. Within months of her swearing-in, she sponsored a bill urging states to eliminate cash bail, denouncing the system as a scourge on the poor and communities of color. That position would become a key part of her criminal justice reform platform. But her choice surprised some bail reform advocates back in California. In her seven years as a district attorney, and then six as attorney general, Harris was absent on the issue, they say. In fact, less than a year earlier, her office defended the cash bail system in a pair of federal court cases, shifting course only weeks before she entered the Senate. "For her entire career she used some of the highest money bail amounts in the country to keep people in jail cells and saddle poor families with financial debt," said Alec Karakatsanis, an attorney who has brought several legal challenges to California's bail system, "and as soon as she had no influence on that issue practically, she announces she has a different view on it." Now a presidential candidate , Harris is casting herself as a progressive who consistently leveraged her power in the justice system to further civil rights causes and advocate for the disadvantaged. She has pledged a wholesale overhaul of the country's fractured criminal justice system, arguing for marijuana legalization, bail reform and a moratorium on the death penalty. But when she had a chance to take a bold stand on these issues as a top law enforcement officer, Harris often opted for a careful approach or defended the status quo. Observers of her career note some of her key positions, like her opposition to cash bail, came at politically opportune moments, after public views had shifted on race, inequality and bias in the justice system. U.S. Senator Kamala D. Harris, D-California, addresses supporters while holding a campaign rally at Morehouse College on Sunday, March 24, 2019, in Atlanta. The Democratic candidate for president is at least the fifth presidential candidate to visit Georgia in the 2020 cycle. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP) "I never had a sense she was forward thinking or reforming," said John Raphling, a bail reform advocate and senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who faced off against Harris's state Justice Department as a criminal defense attorney. "Bail reform is a trendy issue, and a lot of politicians are jumping on it and saying this is unfair. I don't have any evidence that Harris was seeing that unfairness back when she was attorney general - but to her credit, we evolve, we learn, we see things." Harris' supporters say as a prosecutor she was tasked with upholding the law and, as attorney general, defending the state, not making policy. She had limited ability to effect change within the rigid structure of the courts, they argue. "Everyone who has experienced the criminal justice system knows it's broken," said Lateefah Simon, a civil rights activist who worked for Harris in San Francisco. "She would say, 'we're confined by the rules of the law, and in the areas where we have discretion, we are going to work to try to move justice.'" "I deeply know her convictions about what could be possible and what we needed to do, but also what the boundaries and limitations were," she said. Simon said Harris worked to hire more people of color as prosecutors. In her first year as San Francisco district attorney, she launched a re-entry program designed to keep low-level drug offenders from returning to prison. That same year she refused to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer, infuriating the Bay Area political establishment and creating friction with the law enforcement community. But in many cases throughout her career Harris embraced the traditional role of prosecutor. Her office defended wrongful convictions, fighting to keep behind bars those who judges determined should go free. She refused to take a position on a pair of sentencing reform ballot measures, arguing she must remain neutral because her office was responsible for preparing ballot text. She defended the death penalty in court, setting aside her personal opposition to capital punishment. In response to critics who've pushed her to use her power in the courts to usher in change, she told The New York Times in 2016, "I have a client, I don't get to choose my client." Harris says she would call for a federal moratorium on the death penalty if elected president. Harris' law enforcement approach has at times put her out of step with California's activist community. When she pushed a controversial policy that criminalized truancy, threatening to jail parents of children who missed too much school, even Harris' staff "winced at the plan," she wrote in her first book released just in time for her campaign for attorney general in 2010. The program has since become a source of tension with criminal justice advocates, who see it as sign of Harris' outdated approach to dealing with problems that stem from poverty. In a recent NPR interview, Harris said her truancy initiative was not designed to punish vulnerable families, but "put a spotlight" on the problem and direct resources to needy families. Her campaign hails the effort as a success, and supporters have lauded Harris for prioritizing a child's education. "As a result of our initiative, which never resulted in any parent going to jail - never - because that was never the goal," Harris said. But Harris's legacy remains on the state's books: She authored a state-wide truancy law modeled after her San Francisco program. It has resulted in hundreds of parents in often less affluent and less politically liberal California counties being prosecuted. Harris' approach at the time was considered smart politics for a politician seeking to run statewide. Throughout her career, Harris worked to win over powerful police unions. She refused to support a bill requiring her office to investigate shootings involving law enforcement officers. In 2015, she declined to back statewide standards for body cameras, arguing that individual departments should decide how to use the technology. "If you offend all the police chiefs and sheriffs of California, you're probably not going to get re-elected as the attorney general of California, and if you're not elected, how do you engage in any of the reforms you want to do?" said Jim Bueermann, a former California police chief who worked on Harris' transition to the attorney general's office. As Harris transitioned from law enforcement to legislating, the politics of criminal justice issues were changing fast. The deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police in 2014 and 2015 prompted outcry and spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. Democrats began rethinking their tough-on-crime strategies, focusing more on inequality and abuse in the system. Prosecutors and police came under increasing scrutiny for their roles. Harris' views appear to have been changing, too. In 2014, she was opposed to legalizing recreational marijuana, and when she ran against a Republican challenger for re-election as attorney general she took the more conservative view: He wanted to legalize. Harris laughed at the idea in a local television interview. But Harris's public tone changed as speculation grew about her running for president in 2020. Last year, Harris endorsed Democratic Sen. Cory Booker's bill for federal legalization of marijuana. She argued on Twitter that "making marijuana legal at the federal level is the smart thing to do and it's the right thing to do." She released a video declaring that "marijuana laws are not applied and enforced in the same way for all people." Last month, she went as far as acknowledging to a pair of morning radio hosts that she's used recreational marijuana: "I have, and I did inhale; that was a long time ago." For Ron Gold, the Republican who ran against her in 2014 and who supported recreational legalization when she did not, Harris' stance on marijuana is indicative of her tendency to take a position "that's popular, but not necessarily held strongly by the candidate, it's a position that curries favor with a segment of the population," he said. Some see a similar pattern when it comes to the call for bail reform. Shortly after announcing her presidential bid in January, Harris declared on Twitter: "It's long past time to address bail reform across the country." "This is a serious injustice," she wrote. Three years earlier, Harris's office was defending cash bail in a federal case. "Neither the bail law nor the bail schedule discriminate on the basis of wealth, poverty, or economic status of any kind," she wrote. In response to the notion that money bail schemes unfairly punish low-income defendants, Harris wrote, "the state is not constitutionally required to remove obstacles not of its own creation." Harris appears to have shifted her stance 10 months later. In December of 2016, Harris filed a motion in a case challenging the application of California's money bail laws saying the system is deserving "of intense scrutiny." She pledged not to defend any bail scheme that fails to take into account a defendant's ability to pay. Three weeks later she was sworn in to the Senate. Still, she asked the judge to toss the case, arguing that the laws were constitutional even if the way some counties implemented those laws was not. "The bail system at issue here does not categorically deny bail to any group of individuals," she wrote. The move perplexed bail reform advocates who say she could have used her position of power to do more as the top law enforcement official in the state, overseeing thousands of prosecutors who each day requested cash bail for those they charged with crimes. "I'm glad she's come to the right position now, but it's too late for tens of thousands of Californians, real human beings who have been detained in jail every day in California throughout the whole state, that the attorney general could have stopped," said Phil Telfeyan, one of the plaintiff's attorneys in the bail cases. Harris' campaign declined to answer questions about when and why Harris' views on marijuana and bail reform shifted. Campaign spokesman Ian Sams noted the political arena, not the courtroom, is the appropriate place to address policy problems. "As senator," he said, "she has aggressively confronted the policy question by proposing a bipartisan federal law to end cash bail." Simon, the civil rights advocate who worked with Harris, said she often say Harris spoke, privately, in frustration about cash bail and other elements of the criminal justice system while she was a prosecutor. But still, Harris had to work within its confines, Simon said. "Prosecutors and lawmakers are different," she said, "as a lawmaker, you actually get to make laws. As a prosecutor, you must follow them." Advocates say they're cautiously optimistic about Harris' legislative efforts, and are glad to see the issue in the political spotlight. But they note her bill, which she co-wrote with Republican Sen. Rand Paul, endorsed the use of controversial risk-assessment tools to determine who should be released from jail and who should remain behind bars. Raphling said Harris' office has been receptive to feedback. Still, he said she never indicated a progressive stance on the issue before and her commitment remains to be seen. "I give her credit for wanting to tackle bail reform, and people are listening," Raphling said. "The question is, and this is an open question, what kind of reform is she going to push?" --- The article has been corrected to fix the title of Cory Booker, to Sen. Cory Booker. FILE - In this March 9, 2019, file photo, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., speaks during an event in St. George, S.C. Harris is casting herself as a progressive who consistently leveraged her power in the justice system to further civil rights causes and advocate for the disadvantaged. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard, File) In this Friday, March 8, 2019, photo, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California, speaks at a town hall gathering in Hemingway, S.C. On Thursday, March 28, 2019, Harris announced a slate of backers for her presidential campaign in this early-voting state, including three state lawmakers. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard) FILE - In this March 1, 2019, file photo, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., speaks at the Black Enterprise Women of Power Summit in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher, File) ISTANBUL (AP) - Turkey's opposition looked poised to win control of the country's two biggest cities Monday as it dealt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's conservative party one of its most serious electoral setbacks in years. The opposition won Ankara, a ruling party stronghold for decades, and was leading a tight race for mayor in Istanbul, according to unofficial figures Monday. The leader who has dominated Turkish politics for 16 years declared victory despite the opposition gains. Sunday's local elections were widely seen as a gauge of support for Erdogan as the nation of 81 million faces a daunting economic recession. They were also a first test for Erdogan - who has been accused of increasingly authoritarian tendencies - since he got widely expanded presidential powers last year. If confirmed, the swings in Ankara and Istanbul could be excruciating for the politician who campaigned hard to retain hold of them. The opposition also retained its hold over Izmir, Turkey's third-largest city. Although Erdogan was not running for office Sunday, he became the face of the campaign, rallying tirelessly for months across Turkey, using hostile rhetoric against opposition parties and portraying the vote as a matter of national survival. The decline in urban support for his conservative, religious-based party came despite the fact that Erdogan wields tight control over the media, which hardly covered the opposition candidates' campaigns. Backdropped by the Suleymaniye mosque, people sit by the Golden Horn in Istanbul, Monday, April 1, 2019, a day after the local elections. Turkey's opposition dealt Erdogan a symbolic blow by gaining ground in key cities in the country's local elections. The opposition won the capital, Ankara, a ruling party stronghold for decades, and was leading a tight race for mayor in Istanbul, according to unofficial figures Monday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) Behlul Ozkan, an associate professor at Marmara University, said Erdogan's loss of ground in Ankara and Istanbul indicated that his socially conservative and construction-driven policies no longer resonated in Turkey's cities. "Political Islam's quarter-century old hegemony in Turkey's two largest cities is over," he said. "The basic problem is that Erdogan is not able to get votes from middle-income earners, who believe that the economy, education and urban administration are not run well." More than 57 million voters were eligible to choose leaders for 30 major cities, 51 provincial capitals and 922 districts in Turkey, as well as thousands of local positions. The election was marred by sporadic violence, with five dead and scores injured across Turkey. Erdogan's party and its nationalist allies garnered some 52% of the vote overall but the opposition made momentous inroads. A strategic decision by a pro-Kurdish party to sit out critical races in major cities contributed to the opposition's gains. The opposition also increased its support along the Mediterranean, taking the city of Adana from the nationalists and the resort destination of Antalya from the ruling party. Erdogan acknowledged setbacks in a speech to his supporters, saying his party would work to understand what had gone wrong and fix the problem. Unofficial results reported by the state-run Anadolu news agency after all votes were counted showed a razor-thin win for the opposition in the race for mayor of Istanbul, Turkey's largest city and commercial hub. The opposition vote was at 48.8% support to the ruling party's 48.5% support. Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition candidate in an alliance led by the secular Republican People's Party, or CHP, declared that he won Istanbul but his rival, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim of the ruling party, said it was still too early to call. Yildirim accepted that his rival was leading but said his party would file an objection, suggesting a recount of the 319,500 votes declared void in Istanbul. Both Ankara and Istanbul have been held by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, the AKP, and its Islamic-oriented predecessor for 25 years. Erdogan's own ascent to power began as Istanbul mayor in 1994. Unofficial results showed Mansur Yavas, the candidate of the CHP-led alliance, winning the top post in Ankara with 50.9% support. The AKP still holds a majority of Ankara's 25 districts. The government had accused Yavas of forgery and tax evasion, which he called slanderous. The AKP's candidate for Ankara mayor, Mehmet Ozhaseki, won 47.1% support and his party said it would challenge the results. Sunday's election was a significant victory for the opposition, which displayed good strategies and promising candidates, said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the Ankara director of the German Marshall Fund. "This will certainly lead to an emerging new political landscape in Turkey," he said. He argued, however, that a pause in elections until 2023 would benefit Erdogan. "This gives the governing party and President Erdogan a window of opportunity to undertake economic reforms, political reforms if they wish, fix Turkey's relations with foreign countries," he said. Andrew Dawson, head of the Council of Europe's election observation mission, said Monday his monitors were "not fully convinced that Turkey currently has the free and fair electoral environment which is necessary for genuinely democratic elections." In predominantly Kurdish provinces, the Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, won back some seats from government-appointed trustees, including the symbolic capital of Diyarbakir, but lost several former strongholds to the ruling party. The government has replaced 95 elected officials since 2016 for alleged links to outlawed Kurdish militants. Dawson urged the Turkish government to respect the election results. Political parties have three days to submit objections and official results are expected in the coming days. __ Fraser reported from Ankara. Mehmet Guzel contributed from Istanbul. Turkey's President and ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is silhouetted as he addresses his supporters after the results of the local elections were announced in Ankara, Turkey, early Monday, April 1, 2019. Erdogan's ruling party has declared victory in the race for mayor of Istanbul, even though the result in Turkey's most populous city and commercial hub is too close to call. State broadcaster TRT says former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim received 48.71 percent of the votes in Sunday's municipal elections while the opposition's candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, got 48.65 percent. (AP Photo/Ali Unal) Supporters of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) hold a banner with his picture a day outside the party's headquarters after the local elections in Istanbul, Monday, April 1, 2019. Turkey's opposition dealt Erdogan a symbolic blow by gaining ground in key cities in the country's local elections. The opposition won the capital, Ankara, a ruling party stronghold for decades, and was leading a tight race for mayor in Istanbul, according to unofficial figures Monday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) Ekrem Imamoglu, the candidate from an alliance led by the secular Republican People's Party, (CHP) gestures as he declares victory during a news conference in Istanbul, Monday April 1, 2019.Unofficial results by state-run Anadolu news agency said he had won 48.8 percent of the vote Sunday and his opponent, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim of the ruling party, had captured 48.5 percent. One percent of the votes were still to be counted. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) Supporters of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) wave party flags outside the party's headquarters a day after the local elections in Istanbul, Monday, April 1, 2019. Turkey's opposition dealt Erdogan a symbolic blow by gaining ground in key cities in the country's local elections. The opposition won the capital, Ankara, a ruling party stronghold for decades, and was leading a tight race for mayor in Istanbul, according to unofficial figures Monday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) Andrew Dawson, heading the Council of Europe's election observation mission, speaks to the media in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, April 1, 2019, a day after local elections in Turkey. Dawson said Monday that they were "not fully convinced that Turkey currently has the free and fair electoral environment which is necessary for genuinely democratic elections in line with European values and principles." (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) BEIJING (AP) - Chinese Premier Li Keqiang urged New Zealand to provide a "fair, transparent, convenient" investment environment in a meeting Monday with the country's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, that comes amid a dispute over use of Chinese telecoms equipment. Relations between the two countries have been strained since New Zealand in November stopped mobile phone company Spark from using Huawei gear in its planned 5G upgrade because of security concerns. In opening remarks at their meeting Monday in Beijing, Li did not mention Huawei directly but said China wanted improved relations that would serve the best interests of businesses on both sides. "China ... is willing to, on the basis of mutual respect and equal treatment, elevate mutual political trust with New Zealand, expand practical cooperation and increase personal exchanges," Li told Ardern at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of the legislature in central Beijing, following a formal welcoming ceremony. "And we hope that ... when each side's businesses invest in each other's businesses, they can enjoy a fair, transparent, convenient environment," Li said. Ardern did not address investment issues in her opening remarks, but thanked Li for expressing China's condolences over the deadly shootings at mosques in the city of Christchurch. Her visit was cut back to one day following the March 15 shootings that killed 50 people. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, right, walks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Money, April 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) Ardern said she still wanted to "visit Beijing at this time to underline the importance that we place on our relationship with China. It is one of our most important and far reaching relationships, a point I've made in my public speeches over the past year." Following the meeting, the two leaders oversaw the signing of agreements on avoiding double taxation, agriculture, financial dialogue and science and research. Ardern met later in the day with Chinese president and head of the ruling Communist Party Xi Jinping, who also expressed his condolences and said both countries must "adhere to mutual trust, the principle of mutual benefit and continue to develop the spirit of striving to be first." "We will continue to enrich the meaning of China-New Zealand comprehensive strategic partnerships, push forward the relationship between the two countries even further, and better serve the people of China and New Zealand," Xi said. The cordial tone comes after months of tensions between the sides, during which official visits and exchanges were delayed or postponed. The determination by New Zealand's spy agency that Huawei's equipment posed a "significant network security risk" sparked deep indignation in China, where the company is considered a national champion. New Zealand has been caught in the fray as the U.S. cautions allies against partnering with Huawei over national security concerns. The country is part of the "Five Eyes" security alliance along with the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia. The agency's move brought condemnations in China's state media and indications of economic retaliation. China is a key customer for its dairy and other agricultural products. New Zealand's government says two-way trade between the sides more than tripled in the 10 years since a free trade agreement between the sides came into force in 2008. China is New Zealand's biggest trading partner, with $19 billion in commerce between them last year, as well as a key source of tourists and foreign students. Ardern said last month that no final decision has been made on whether Huawei equipment can be used in the country's slated 5G network. Human Rights Watch had called on Ardern to raise concerns about reported Chinese government abuses of Muslims during her visit, although it wasn't clear if she planned to do so. The group said Ardern "spoke forcefully in defense of Muslims' rights" after the Christchurch attacks and should do so again in Beijing. ___ This story has been corrected to show that the China-New Zealand free trade agreement started in 2008. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, right, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang review an honor guard during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Monday, April 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, left, is shown the way by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on stage during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Monday, April 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern talks during the meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, not seen, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Monday, April 1,2019. (Kenzaburo Fukuhara/Pool Photo via AP) Chinese President Xi Jinping talks during the meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, not seen, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Monday, April 1, 2019. (Kenzaburo Fukuhara/Pool Photo via AP) Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shake hands before their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Monday, April 1, 2019. (Kenzaburo Fukuhara/Pool Photo via AP) GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Over the weekend, Gaza's Hamas rulers marked a year of bloody, weekly protests that have failed to break the Israeli blockade. Rocket attacks brought a wave of Israeli airstrikes and unprecedented protests broke out against the Islamic militants' increasingly unpopular rule. And yet Hamas' control over Gaza is tighter than ever. The militants' rule has been strengthened by an unlikely overlap of interests with Israel's right-wing government. Neither wants to see an independent state established in all the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, as the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Hamas' refusal to give up power - the asking price of its West Bank-based Palestinian rival for reconciliation - aligns with Israel's long-standing policy of maintaining a separation between the West Bank and Gaza. So even though Israel and Hamas have fought three wars and dozens of skirmishes, and even though Hamas remains committed to Israel's eventual destruction, the two are once again meeting with Egyptian mediators and working to keep things quiet. Under an emerging arrangement, Hamas would halt rocket fire and keep border protests peaceful in exchange for Israel easing its border blockade and allowing $30 million a month in Qatari aid into the territory. On Sunday, Israel reopened Gaza crossings to limited traffic. Egypt has brokered short-lived deals in the past, and it is not clear if the current arrangements will last beyond Israel's April 9 election. In a close race, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under fire for what his challengers say is a Gaza policy that exposes Israel to Hamas blackmail. FILE - In this Monday, March 25, 2019 file photo, an explosion caused by Israeli airstrikes is seen in Gaza City. Hamas controls Gaza more tightly than ever, despite unprecedented domestic unrest and its failure to significantly weaken Israel's chokehold of the territory after a year of weekly anti-blockade rallies along their shared frontier. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File) For Gaza residents, open-ended Hamas rule is a bleak prospect. Gaza's 2 million people have endured rising poverty and unemployment, undrinkable ground water and frequent electricity outages since Israel and Egypt closed Gaza's borders after Hamas seized power in 2007. In recent weeks, hundreds dared to protest Hamas policies, such as new tax hikes, chanting "We want to live." Many were jailed and beaten. Protester Amer Balousha, a 27-year-old unemployed law school graduate, said he and others were mistreated in Hamas detention but will not be deterred. "If the situation does not improve, the protests will continue," he said. ___ HAMAS OVER ABBAS Hamas has demonstrated that it prefers an understanding with Netanyahu over reconciling with its Palestinian rival, President Mahmoud Abbas. A deal with Israel would help keep Hamas in power. By contrast, Abbas - who presides over autonomous enclaves in the Israeli-occupied West Bank - wants Hamas to hand control of Gaza to him, a demand the group has repeatedly rejected. Hamas and Netanyahu both oppose Abbas' goal of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands Israel captured in 1967. Hamas seeks to establish an Islamic state in the area encompassing Israel and the war-won lands, while a majority in Netanyahu's Cabinet and Likud Party reject a two-state solution along the 1967 lines. Last month, Netanyahu was quoted as saying that those who oppose Palestinian statehood should back his policy of allowing Qatari aid into Gaza and maintaining the separation between the rival Palestinian governments. "There is a great confluence of interests" between Israel and Hamas, said Tareq Baconi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. "Netanyahu prefers to deal with Hamas because clear dynamics have been established and Hamas will not seek a final resolution (of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) from Israel." ___ MANAGING THE CONFLICT Israel and Hamas have fought three wars, most recently in 2014. In between, there have been repeated cross-border skirmishes and periods of calm brokered by Egypt, which has close security ties with Israel and controls part of the Gaza border. Israel's stated reason for the blockade is to contain Hamas and prevent it from rearming, while rights groups denounce the restrictions as collective punishment. Last summer, amid weekly mass protests along the frontier in which scores of Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire and thousands wounded, Egypt started new cease-fire talks. Hamas hoped they would lead to an easing of the blockade. Early on, Israel consented to Qatari cash shipments and Hamas pledged to halt rocket fire, but then the talks stalled. In March, with Israel's election campaign heating up, Hamas sensed an opportunity to apply pressure on Netanyahu to resume negotiations, twice firing rockets into central Israel. It worked. Two Hamas officials, speaking Sunday on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the renewed truce talks, relished in the group's apparent leverage. But they also expressed concern any new deal could quickly unravel. ___ A NEW GAZA POLICY? Netanyahu's main challenger, former army chief Benny Gantz, has said he would handle Gaza differently. His party's platform pledges a "powerful response to any provocation and violence," while improving the lives of Gaza civilians and driving a wedge between them and Hamas. But the plan is short on specifics. Gantz and two other ex-military chiefs in his team held top command roles in the last three wars with Hamas, exacting a heavy price for rocket fire but coming up against the limits of military action. A consensus has emerged in Israel that Hamas cannot be brought down by force, short of a bloody reoccupation of Gaza. Yet any easing of the blockade, meant to bring relief to Gaza's residents, would also prolong Hamas rule. ___ ODD MAN OUT Abbas has given up on reconciliation with Hamas after years of failed efforts. He has stepped up financial pressure on Gaza, including cutting in half salaries for tens of thousands of ex-civil servants who were replaced by Hamas in 2007 but remained on the Abbas government payroll. Such cutbacks worsened Gaza's economic deterioration. But instead of stoking a popular uprising against Hamas, anger turned toward Abbas. Abbas is also suspicious of multi-million-dollar Gaza development projects proposed by the U.N. and Qatar, with U.S. and Israeli backing. He fears it's a plot to turn the territory into a Palestinian mini-state and undercut Palestinian political claims to the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Baconi, the analyst, said that Abbas' policies are counterproductive, even if his concerns are understandable. "Putting more sanctions on Gaza or trying to break the Hamas government will further entrench the division," he said. ___ Laub reported from Ramallah, West Bank. Associated Press writer Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah contributed reporting. FILE - In this Wednesday, March 27, 2019 file photo, a Palestinian boy searches for their family's belongings amid the rubble of a destroyed building near a Hamas security building that was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. Hamas controls Gaza more tightly than ever, despite unprecedented domestic unrest and its failure to significantly weaken Israel's chokehold of the territory after a year of weekly anti-blockade rallies along their shared frontier. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File) KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine's president was holding off a long-time rival in a bid to claim the other spot in a runoff set for later this month, while a comic actor with no political experience was leading strongly in the election, according to results released Monday. With nearly 97% of the polling stations counted, Volodymyr Zelenskiy had 30% support in Sunday's vote, while President Petro Poroshenko was a distant second with just under 16% of the vote. Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko trailed behind in third with 13% support. The strong showing for the 41-year-old Zelenskiy reflects the public longing for a fresh leader who has no links to Ukraine's corruption-ridden political elite and can offer a new approach to settling the grinding five-year conflict with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine that has left 13,000 dead since 2014. "This is only the first step toward a great victory," Zelenskiy said. The top two candidates advance to a runoff on April 21. Final results are expected on Tuesday. Election officials start counting ballots at a polling station during the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Ukrainians choose from among 39 candidates for a president they hope can guide the country of more than 42 million out of troubles including endemic corruption, a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east and a struggling economy. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Zelenskiy dismissed suggestions that he could pool forces with Tymoshenko to get her voters in the second round in exchange for forming a coalition later. "We aren't making any deals with anyone," he said. "We are young people. We don't want to see all the past in our future." Like the character he plays in a TV comedy show, a schoolteacher-turned-president angry over corruption, Zelenskiy made fighting corruption a focus of his candidacy. He proposed a lifetime ban on holding public office for anyone convicted of graft. He also called for direct negotiations with Russia on ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The election was marred by allegations of widespread vote buying. Police said they had received more than 2,100 complaints of violations on voting day alone in addition to hundreds of earlier voting fraud claims, including bribery attempts and removing ballots from polling stations. Zelenskiy's headquarters alleged multiple voting and other cheating on the part of Poroshenko's campaign, but election officials said the vote took place without significant violations. Election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe hailed Sunday's election as competitive and free, even though it criticized procedural violations and said there were indications that state resources were misused in the vote. Poroshenko looked visibly relieved about surpassing Tymoshenko. "It's a tough lesson for me and my team," he said. "It's a reason for serious work to correct mistakes made over the past years." But Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta Center Kiev-based independent think-tank, predicted that Zelenskiy will easily win the runoff. "He doesn't even need to do anything, the current government already has done it, setting most voters against itself," Fesenko said. "Poroshenko needs to prepare for a defeat and try to seek security guarantees for himself and his team." Poroshenko, 53, a confectionery tycoon before he was elected five years ago, saw his approval ratings sink amid Ukraine's economic woes and a sharp plunge in living standards. Poroshenko campaigned on promises to defeat the Russian-funded separatists in the east and to wrest back control of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014. The OSCE said about 5 million people have been taking off Ukraine's voter registry as the government was unable to organize the presidential vote in Crimea or in the separatist-held east. In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, refrained from commenting on Zelenskiy's strong performance, but indicated that the Kremlin would like to see a change of government. "We would like to see not a party of war at the helm in Ukraine, but a party that aims at a gradual settlement in eastern Ukraine," he told reporters. A military embezzlement scheme that allegedly involved top Poroshenko associates as well as a factory controlled by the president dogged Poroshenko before this election. After the vote, Poroshenko lashed out at Zelenskiy, describing him as a "puppet" of self-exiled billionaire businessman Igor Kolomoyskyi, a charge that Zelenskiy denies. Zelenskiy shot back, saying mockingly that it's impossible to say whether a corrupt official allegedly involved in the military embezzlement scheme was Poroshenko's puppet, or the other way round. Voters on Monday were ready for the presidential runoff. "Poroshenko is taking the country forward," said Serhiy Poltorachenko, a bank employee. "He made mistakes, but promised to correct them." Petro Demidchenko, a 38-year-old office worker, was supporting the actor. "We don't know what to expect from Zelenskiy, but over the past five years we have found out what to expect from Poroshenko - corruption, soaring prices, continuing war and poverty," he said. ___ Mstyslav Chernov in Kiev, Ukraine, Vladimir Isachenkov and Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed to this report. In this Sunday, March. 31, 2019 photo, Ukrainian comedian and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaks to the media outside a polling station, during the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine. Zelenskiy is used to being in the spot light, imbuing him with an easygoing manner and snappy talk on the presidential campaign trail. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) FILE In this file photo taken on Friday, March 29, 2019, Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy hosts a comedy show at a concert hall in Brovary, Ukraine. Zelenskiy has no political experience but seems to have won Sunday's presidential vote, putting him in a strong position for the runoff election in three weeks' time. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File) Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, reacts as he responds to a journalist question during a press conference, after the presidential elections in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March. 31, 2019. Exit polls indicated Zelenskiy would get about 30 percent of the vote, far short of the absolute majority needed to win the first round. Most exit polls said incumbent Petro Poroshenko received the second-biggest support, which would put him and Zelenskiy in a runoff on April 21. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gestures while speaking at his headquarters after the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, March 31, 2019. The exit poll released Sunday after voting stations closed indicated that Zelenskiy received about 30.4 percent of the nationwide vote, followed by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko with 17.8 percent and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko with 14.2 percent support. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) The Stepova coal mine just before dawn in Pershotravensk, Dnipropetrovsk region, eastern Ukraine, Monday, April 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka) Doris Barnett, the head of the delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE PA), attends a news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Monday, April 1, 2019. Early results in Ukraine's presidential election show comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy maintaining a strong lead against the incumbent president in the first round of voting, setting the stage for a runoff vote in three weeks. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Iikka Kanerva, OSCE Special Co-ordinator, attends a news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Monday, April 1, 2019. Early results in Ukraine's presidential election show comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy maintaining a strong lead against the incumbent president in the first round of voting, setting the stage for a runoff vote in three weeks. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) FILE In this file photo taken on Friday, March 29, 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukrainian actor and candidate in the upcoming presidential election, hosts a comedy show at a concert hall in Brovary, Ukraine. Zelenskiy has no political experience, but his easygoing manner and snappy talk on the campaign trail strongly resembled his character in "Servant of the People", a schoolteacher catapulted into the presidential seat. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File) FILE In this file photo taken on Sunday, March 31, 2019, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gestures while speaking at his headquarters after the presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine. Over recent years Ukraine has suffered from an economic meltdown and alleged endemic corruption, which will be great challenges for whom ever wins the upcoming runoff presidential election in three weeks' time. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File) KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The Taliban stormed checkpoints in northern and western Afghanistan, killing at least eight members of the country's security forces and in one attack, setting off an hours-long gunbattle, provincial officials said as a U.S. envoy arrived in Kabul on Monday to push for peace talks. According to Zabihullah Amani, spokesman for the provincial governor in northern Sari Pul province, five security forces were killed in an attack there in Sozma Qala district that started late on Sunday night. The fighting lasted until Monday morning and also left two troops wounded. The insurgents captured six soldiers before fleeing the scene and their fate remains unknown, Amani said. The checkpoints were later retaken and the area was brought under control once reinforcements arrived. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but Amani blamed the Taliban who are active in the province and have stepped up their attacks on Afghan security forces. Separately, the Taliban on Monday overran an army checkpoint in western Badghis province, killing three soldiers, said Jamshid Shahabi, spokesman for provincial governor. Four other soldiers were wounded and two were missing after Taliban attack in the district of Bal Murgahb. Qari Yusouf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, claimed responsibility for the attack in Badghis. Meanwhile, U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad tweeted that he arrived in Kabul and met with Afghan government officials on Monday. "We discussed the urgency of making progress on intra-Afghan dialogue," he said. Khalilzad has held several rounds of talks with the Taliban, most recently last month in Qatar where both sides said progress has been made. But despite the talks, the Taliban stage near-daily attacks on Afghan forces, inflicting staggering casualties, and now hold sway over half of the country. Also, the insurgents refuse to talk directly with the government in Kabul, considering it a U.S. puppet. TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Taiwan said Monday its planes warned off Chinese military aircraft that crossed the center line in the Taiwan Strait, and called China's move a provocation that seeks to alter the status quo in the waterway dividing the island from mainland China. Taiwan's defense ministry said a pair of Chinese J-11 jet fighters crossed the line at around 11 a.m. Sunday and entered the island's southwestern airspace. It said Taiwan scrambled jets to warn off the Chinese planes, which came within about 185 kilometers (115 miles) of Taiwan. "Yesterday, Chinese military aircraft provoked us by violating the tacit agreement by crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait. They backed to the west side of the median line after warnings by our Air Force," Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said in remarks at a military awards ceremony. Foreign Ministry Joseph Wu told reporters at the legislature that the line crossing was an intentional act, calling it a provocative and dangerous. He said Taiwan had informed "regional partners" about the incident. About 160 kilometers (100 miles) wide at its narrowest, the Taiwan Strait opens at its southern end into the South China Sea, where Taiwan and China share overlapping territorial claims. Since the sides split amid civil war in 1949, China has claimed Taiwan as its own territory to be absorbed by force if necessary. Tsai, who Beijing despises for her pro-independence views, has sought to bolster Taiwan's air power with the purchase of latest-model F-16V fighters from the U.S., Taiwan's chief source of defensive weapons. In this photo released by the Taiwan Presidential Office, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen speaks during a military award ceremony at the Presidential office in Taipei, Taiwan on Monday, April 1, 2019. Taiwan said Monday its planes warned off Chinese military aircraft that crossed the center line in the Taiwan Strait, and called China's move a provocation that seeks to alter the status quo in the waterway dividing the island from mainland China. (Taiwan Presidential Office via AP) In this photo released by the Taiwan Presidential Office, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, right, hands out military awards to Navy commander the Admiral of Taiwan Navy Liu Chih-pin in white and military strategy advisor to the president Wu Wan-Jiao in blue during a ceremony in the Presidential office in Taipei, Taiwan on Monday, April 1, 2019. Taiwan said Monday its planes warned off Chinese military aircraft that crossed the center line in the Taiwan Strait, and called China's move a provocation that seeks to alter the status quo in the waterway dividing the island from mainland China. (Taiwan Presidential Office via AP) SHAH ALAM, Malaysia (AP) - Two Southeast Asian women were the only suspects charged with murder after an outcast from North Korea's ruling family was poisoned with VX nerve agent at a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, airport two years ago. The trial ended abruptly Monday after a Vietnamese woman, Doan Thi Huong, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and is expected to be freed next month. It comes just three weeks after prosecutors dropped the murder charge against Siti Aisyah of Indonesia. A chronology of key events in the case: ___ Feb. 13, 2017: A North Korean man, waiting to board a flight to Macau at a low-cost airport terminal in Malaysia, complained to airport officials that someone grabbed him from behind him and smeared his face with some liquid. He was sent to the airport clinic and pronounced dead on the way to a hospital. Feb. 14, 2017: International media broke the news that Kim Jong Nam was murdered in Malaysia. Police later said the victim was a North Korean man known as Kim Chol based on his passport. Feb. 15, 2017: Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam was detained at the same airport terminal where Kim was killed. Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong, right, leaves Shah Alam High Court in Shah Alam, Malaysia, Monday, April 1, 2019. The Vietnamese woman who is the only suspect in custody for the killing of the North Korean leader's brother Kim Jong Nam pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in a Malaysian court on Monday and her lawyer said she could be freed as early as next month. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian) Feb. 16, 2017: Indonesia's Siti Aisyah was detained. Malaysia's then-Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi confirmed that Kim Chol was Kim Jong Nam. Feb. 18, 2017: Police arrested North Korean Ri Jong-chol, 47, who is believed to be a chemical expert. Feb. 19, 2017: Police announced they were looking for seven North Korean suspects in connection with the murder. Police later said four of them were believed to have left the country and later sought Interpol's help to detain them. Feb. 24, 2017: Officials said Kim was killed by the toxic VX nerve agent, listed by the U.N. as a weapon of mass destruction. Feb. 26, 2017: Officials said they found no hazardous material nor any trace of VX after a sweep of the airport terminal where Kim was killed, and declared it safe. Feb. 27, 2017: South Korean lawmakers said the country's National Intelligence Service had told them that four of the North Koreans identified as suspects by Malaysian authorities were spies from North Korea's Ministry of State Security. The lawmakers also said they were told that two other suspects were affiliated with North Korea's Foreign Ministry and that leader Kim Jong Un directed a "state-organized terror" to kill his half brother. The lawmakers didn't say how South Korea's spy agency got the information. March 1, 2017: Aisyah and Huong were charged in a Magistrate's Court with Kim Jong Nam's murder and faced the death sentence if convicted. March 2, 2017: Ri Tong Il, a former North Korean deputy ambassador to the United Nations who was leading a high-level delegation to Malaysia to seek Kim's body, said a heart attack likely killed the victim, not VX nerve agent as the autopsy showed. March 3, 2017: North Korean Ri Jong-chol was released due to a lack of evidence and deported. March 4, 2017: The Malaysian government expelled North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol, days after scrapping a visa-free entry for North Koreans. Kang Chol, who had denounced Malaysia's investigations into Kim's death and accused Kuala Lumpur of colluding with outside forces to defame Pyongyang, was given 48 hours to leave the country. March 7, 2017: North Korea banned Malaysian citizens in its country from leaving as tension escalated over Kim's killing. Malaysia responded with a similar ban. March 30, 2017: Nine Malaysians held in Pyongyang returned home after the two countries struck a deal to end a diplomatic row. Malaysia released Kim's body to Pyongyang and also allowed North Koreans to leave, including a North Korean Embassy official and an Air Koryo employee wanted by police for questioning over Kim's death. Oct. 2, 2017: The joint trial of Aisyah and Huong began in the High Court. They pleaded not guilty. Their lawyers said they were pawns in a political assassination orchestrated by four North Korean suspects who fled Malaysia on the day of Kim's killing. The four men were accused in the charge sheet of conspiring with the women to kill Kim. Aug. 18, 2018: A High Court judge ordered the two women to enter their defense after ruling there was enough evidence to infer that they had engaged in a "well-planned conspiracy" with the four missing North Korean suspects to kill Kim. Nov. 7, 2018: The judge set Jan. 7 for the trial to resume after Aisyah's lawyers complained that some witnesses were unreachable. Jan. 7, 2019: The trial was postponed to March. Aisyah's lawyers sought time to appeal to higher courts to obtain statements given by witnesses to police that they said are crucial for her case. March 11, 2019: Prosecutors unexpectedly dropped the murder against Aisyah, without giving any reason. Aisyah was given a discharge not amounting to an acquittal by the court. She was flown back to Jakarta in a private jet on the same day. Indonesian officials said her release was due to Jakarta's continual high-level lobbying. A distraught Huong, who was supposed to start her defense, said she was in a shock. Her lawyers sought a postponement of the trial and asked prosecutors to also withdraw the murder charge against Huong. March 12, 2019: Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh phoned his Malaysian counterpart, Saifuddin Abdullah, requesting the court to be fair and also free Huong. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Aisyah's release was based on the rule of law, amid allegations the government had interfered in the trial. March 13, 2019: Law Minister Liew Vui Keong said Malaysia's attorney general has sole discretion in withdrawing the charge against Aisyah and that the government cannot interfere with the attorney general's power. March 14, 2019: Prosecutors told the court that the attorney general ordered the murder case to proceed against Huong. They didn't explain why the attorney general refused to acquit her. Huong's lawyers accused the attorney general of being unfair and discriminating against her. The judge postponed hearing to April 1 after Huong told the judge she was unwell and stressed. April 1, 2019: Prosecutors said the attorney general offered a reduced charge of "voluntarily causing injury with a dangerous weapon" to Huong following renewed pleas from the Vietnamese government and her lawyers. Huong pleaded guilty and the judge sentenced her to three years and four months in jail. Her lawyers said she will be freed early next month after a one-third remission for good behavior. Huong said she was "very happy" and that the sentence was fair. BEIJING (AP) - A look at recent developments in the South China Sea, where China is pitted against smaller neighbors in multiple disputes over islands, coral reefs and lagoons in waters crucial for global commerce and rich in fish and potential oil and gas reserves: ___ EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a weekly look at developments in the South China Sea, the location of several territorial conflicts in the region. ___ TAIWAN PROTESTS CHINESE MILITARY AIRCRAFT CROSSING TAIWAN STRAIT CENTER LINE Taiwan says its planes warned off Chinese military aircraft that crossed the center line in the Taiwan Strait, calling China's move a provocation that seeks to alter the status quo in the waterway dividing the island from mainland China. FILE - In this April 27, 2016, file photo, the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD-1), center, sits pier side along with support ships at Naval Station Norfolk in Norfolk, Va. The U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship USS Wasp arrived in Subic Bay, the Philippines, Saturday, March 30, 2019, with its complement of Marines and F-35 Lightning II fighter jets in preparation for joint exercises with the Philippines.(AP Photo/Steve Helber, File) Taiwan's defense ministry said a pair of Chinese J-11 jet fighters crossed the line around 11 a.m. Sunday and entered the island's southwestern airspace. It said Taiwan scrambled jets to warn off the Chinese planes, which came within about 185 kilometers (115 miles) of Taiwan. "Yesterday, Chinese military aircraft provoked us by violating the tacit agreement by crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait. They backed to the west side of the median line after warnings by our Air Force," Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen told reporters. Foreign Ministry Joseph Wu said the line crossing was intentional, calling it a provocative and dangerous. He said Taiwan had informed "regional partners" about the incident. About 160 kilometers (100 miles) wide at its narrowest, the Taiwan Strait opens at its southern end into the South China Sea, where Taiwan and China have overlapping territorial claims. Since the sides split amid civil war in 1949, China has claimed Taiwan as its own territory to be absorbed by force if necessary. ___ USS WASP, MARINES ARRIVE IN PHILIPPINES FOR JOINT EXERCISES The U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship USS Wasp arrived in Subic Bay, the Philippines, Saturday with its complement of Marines and F-35 Lightning II fighter jets in preparation for joint exercises with the Philippines. The drills known as Exercise Balikatan, meaning "shoulder-to-shoulder" in Tagalog, also feature participation from Australian forces. "Balikatan is a great opportunity for the Navy, Marine Corps team and our allies from the Republic of the Philippines to learn from one another, and further improve our ability operate together," Capt. Colby Howard, Wasp's commanding officer, was quoted as saying in a news release from the 7th Fleet. This year's drills will include amphibious operations, live-fire training, urban operations, aviation operations, and counterterrorism response, the news release said. All events will take place on the islands Luzon and Palawan. "Participating in Balikatan demonstrates their ability to quickly forward deploy in support of an ally should a crisis or natural disaster occur," the release said. The Philippines and the U.S. are treaty allies, although the political relationship has frayed as the government of President Rodrigo Duterte courts support from China as a counter to long-standing American influence. Last month, the Philippine defense secretary said his country's defense treaty with the U.S. needs to be re-examined, bringing expressions of concern from Washington. ___ CHINA PLANS FLEET REVIEW TO MARK ANNIVERSARY OF PEOPLE'S LIBERATION ARMY NAVY China plans to hold a multinational fleet review this month in the northern port of Qingdao to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army navy. China has been building new, more sophisticated naval ships and submarines at a world-beating pace, challenging U.S. forces and regional rivals such as Japan and India. That's given China a growing ability to conduct operations from ports, and while Beijing says its navy is purely for defense, it's seen as helping cement control over the South China Sea, in coordination with the powerful coastguard and a maritime militia of ostensibly civilian vessels. Defense ministry spokesman Wu Qian told reporters Thursday that more than 60 countries will send representatives to the celebrations and that some would also send ships to take part. He gave no details, and said further information would be released later. In a fleet review last year in the South China Sea, President Xi Jinping said, "The mission of building a mighty people's navy has never been more urgent than it is today," in an address delivered from the helicopter deck of one of China's most advanced destroyers. FILE - In this Nov. 8, 2009, file photo, a woman walks near a Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force's J-11 fighter jet displayed for the Air Force's 60th anniversary at an airport in Beijing, China. Taiwan says its planes warned off Chinese military aircraft that crossed the center line in the Taiwan Strait, calling China's move a provocation that seeks to alter the status quo in the waterway dividing the island from mainland China.(AP Photo, File) ISLAMABAD (AP) - Pakistan scrapped terrorism trials before special military courts after the tribunals' mandate expired on Monday, ending a measure that had been in place for over four years to help authorities curb militant attacks, a government minister said. The country resumed military trials for terror suspects in 2015 and lifted a moratorium on the death penalty after a Taliban attack in December 2014 on a school in Peshawar killed more than 150 people, mostly young students. Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said the courts were re-introduced under special circumstances and "performed well." "We were near to eliminating terrorism," he added. Chaudhry said Prime Minister Imran Khan's government could not bring the matter of extending the courts before parliament, where opposition parties challenge his every move. The measure had to be backed by two thirds of lawmakers in the 342-seat chamber to pass. Terrorism cases will now be handled by regular courts, notorious for their bureaucracy and slow justice. FILE - In this Jan. 21, 2016 file photo, a Pakistani mother holds pictures of her son and mourns his death in attack on an Army Public School in 2014 in Peshawar that left over 150 people dead, mostly children, during a protest in Charsadda, Pakistan. In response to this school attack, the Pakistan government resumed military trials and re-introduced the death penalty for terror suspects under a mandate that has been in place for over four-years, but that mandate expires Monday April 1, 2019, according to Pakistan Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry. (AP Photo/Zia Mohammad, FILE) Khan came to power after elections last summer, promising to clean house and do away with rampant corruption. He has repeatedly demanded that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and former President Asif Zardari return "looted money." Sharif is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for corruption and Zardari is facing an investigation for money laundering. Zardari's aide Farhatullah Babar said the opposition Peoples Party would not support extending the military courts. "The government should strengthen the regular court system instead," Babar said. Analyst Zahid Hussain said that while the closure of the special military courts might not have a direct impact on Pakistan's fight against terror, it's unclear how the remaining cases of those held on terrorism charges would be handled. "The regular courts lack the capability to handle terrorism cases," Hussain said. "We either have to strengthen the legal system or they need to find a way to extend the military courts." Rights groups have criticized the military courts and have campaigned against the death penalty in Pakistan, which was largely used to execute common criminals. According to Pakistani officials, the special military tribunals over the past four years decided 478 cases and sentenced 284 people to death. Of those, 56 convicted militants have already been executed. Also, 192 other suspects were sentenced to various prison terms. BERLIN (AP) - German authorities on Monday recovered the bodies of three people, including one of Russia's richest women, who were killed in a small plane crash near Frankfurt a day earlier. Russian airline S7 Group said co-owner Natalia Fileva was aboard the single-engine, six-seat Epic LT aircraft that crashed and burned Sunday afternoon in a field as it approached the small airport at the German town of Egelsbach near Frankfurt. The business publication Forbes.ru has estimated Fileva's fortune at $600 million. Russian news reports said Fileva, who co-owned S7 with her husband, was traveling with her father. German police have said there were two Russian citizens on board but haven't provided any positive identification of the victims yet. The plane took off from the Mediterranean city of Cannes, a popular holiday destination for rich Russians on the glitzy French Riviera. The cause of the crash remained unclear on Monday. Knut Happel, a spokesman for prosecutors in Darmstadt, said investigators hope for evidence from witnesses and the burnt-out wreckage itself but, given the state of the plane, it will probably take "some time" to establish. The propellor and other debris of a small plane lies in an asparagus field in the village Erzhausen near Frankfurt, Germany, Monday, April 1, 2019. Russian airline S7 Group said co-owner Natalia Fileva was aboard the single-engine, six-seat Epic LT aircraft that crashed and burned on Sunday, March 31, 2019, in a field as it approached the small airport at Egelsbach near Frankfurt. (AP Photo/Michael Probst) The Moscow-based Interstate Aviation Committee, which investigates crashes involving planes from Russia and other ex-Soviet nations, said in a statement that it sent a group of experts to help the German investigation. With a base at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, S7 is part of the Oneworld alliance and flies to 150 destinations in 35 countries, using 56 Airbus planes and 23 aircraft from Boeing. Fileva's husband, Vladislav Filev, is chair of the company's board of directors, according to the company's third-quarter 2018 financial statement. Epic Aircraft, a Bend, Oregon-based company that developed the Epic LT, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. In this photo taken on Tuesday, July 3, 2018, S7 Group co-owner Natalia Fileva attends a meeting in Novosibirsk, Russia. One of Russia's richest women, S7 Group co-owner Natalia Fileva, has died in a small plane crash in Germany, the Russian airline operator said Sunday. (Valery Titievsky/Kommersant Photo via AP) RUSSIA OUT Investigators stand around the debris of a small plane at an asparagus field in the village Erzhausen near Frankfurt, Germany, Monday, April 1, 2019. Russian airline S7 Group said co-owner Natalia Fileva was aboard the single-engine, six-seat Epic LT aircraft that crashed and burned on Sunday, March 31, 2019, in a field as it approached the small airport at Egelsbach near Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/dpa via AP) JERUSALEM (AP) - An Israeli watchdog group said Monday that it found a network of social media bots disseminating messages in support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of next week's elections. Noam Rotem and Yuval Adam, two researchers operating the Big Bots Project, said in a report that they uncovered hundreds of fake accounts spreading messages in support of Netanyahu's Likud party and smearing his opponents. Likud denied the allegations. Adam said his project discovered a network that included a number of real people, along with hundreds of Twitter accounts that appeared to be fake or duplicate. "One person might be operating tens or hundreds of accounts at the same time," he told The Associated Press. "All these accounts are pushing their political agenda, not only that but also inciting hate speech, attacking very specific people who are opposed to their political agenda." He said this appeared to be a violation of Twitter's terms of use. He said the findings had been forwarded to Twitter in hopes of deactivating the fake accounts. Twitter declined comment. Adam said the Big Bots Project was financed through a crowdfunding program. The project also includes researchers from Ben Gurion University's Cyber Research Center and Tel Aviv University. File - In this Thursday, March 28, 2019 file photo, a woman walks by an election campaign billboard showing Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud party leader, in Tel Aviv, Israel. An Israeli watchdog said Monday that it's found a network of social media bots disseminating messages in support of Netanyahu ahead of next week's elections. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty, File) Israelis head to the polls in eight days in a close race between Netanyahu and his main rival, former army chief of staff Benny Gantz. Netanyahu is seeking a fifth term in office under the shadow of corruption charges. The campaign has focused largely on personal attacks between the two front-runners, with Gantz taking aim at Netanyahu's alleged ethical lapses, and Netanyahu painting Gantz as a weak "leftist." The prime minister's Likud Party has also tried to portray Gantz as being mentally unstable. Rotem and Adam said they found no direct link between the network and Netanyahu or Likud. But Netanyahu's son Yair, who has run into trouble in the past for controversial social media activity, has frequently liked posts by the network's accounts. They said it was unclear who was operating the network. The report said the network had relayed tens of thousands of tweets and garnered over 2.5 million engagements. Many of the accounts in the network were largely inactive before elections were announced in December. Since then, these users have tweeted frequently and exclusively about the Likud party and against its opponents, Adam said. The report found a huge spike in activity during the first few months of the year compared to the same period in 2018; for example, March 2019 had 13.2 times more average activity than in the same month last year. One of the most active Twitter accounts mentioned in the report became private shortly after the 34-page document was published, Adam said. At a press conference convened to address the issue, Netanyahu dismissed the report sarcastically as an April Fool's Day prank. He called it a "false libel" by the media based on a "fake investigation." "Almost all of the examples, perhaps all of them, turned out to be real people. They have a name, they have a face, they have families, and the worst thing: they have opinions of their own. Independent people," Netanyahu said. "Not one of them is fake." One Twitter user named in the report, Ziv Knobler, said in an interview with Israel's Army Radio that "there is nothing organized. We are a group of people who believe in the way of Benjamin Netanyahu." "We expressed personal opinions, not on behalf of an organization," Knobler said. "We have absolutely no connection to the Likud party." After the Big Bots Project's report headlined Monday's edition of Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Gantz's Blue and White party wrote on Twitter that "Netanyahu is trying to steal the elections" and called for a police investigation to determine the network's funding. Last month, news broke that Gantz's personal telephone was infiltrated by Iranian hackers. While Gantz contends no sensitive information was compromised, Netanyahu leveraged the breach to argue that Gantz was unprepared to lead the country. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Saudi Aramco's net profits reached $111 billion last year, according to an assessment published Monday by Moody's Investors Services that offered a rare glimpse into the state-owned oil firm's finances before it issues its first bonds in international markets. That places Aramco ahead of some of the world's most profitable firms. By contrast, Apple booked a net profit of about $60 billion in its last full year, Royal Dutch Shell had net income of $23 billion and Exxon Mobil $21 billion. Moody's said the oil giant's revenue hit $355.9 billion last year and that it produced 10.3 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2018. The figures provide the first look in recent memory at Aramco's revenue and earnings. The company, which began as a U.S. venture with a concession for oil rights in Saudi Arabia, was fully acquired by the Saudi government in 1980. "I would say that this tells us that Aramco is worth at least one trillion dollars," said Ellen Wald, president of Transversal Consulting and the author of "Saudi Inc," a book about Aramco's corporate history. In another assessment issued Monday, Fitch Ratings said Aramco posted profits of $224 billion before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. FILE - In this Feb. 26, 1997 file photo, Khaled al-Otaiby, an official of the Saudi oil company Aramco, watches progress at a rig at the al-Howta oil field near Howta, Saudi Arabia. According to an assessment published Monday, April 1, 2019, by Moody's Investors Services, the net profits of Saudi Aramco reached $111 billion last year. That places Aramco ahead of some of the world's most profitable firms. In their first-ever grade assessment for Aramco, Fitch Ratings issued the firm an A+ rating, while Moody's gave it it's A1 rating ahead of its upcoming bonds sale. (AP Photo/John Moore, File) Moody's said Aramco paid $58.2 billion in dividends in 2018 and $50.4 billion in 2017. It remains unclear exactly how these dividends are distributed within the Saudi monarchy and its ruling family. Fitch said Aramco accounted for around 70% of the Saudi government's budget revenue between 2015-2017, but it wasn't immediately clear if that figure included the dividends mentioned by Moody's. In anticipation of a partial listing of Aramco on an international exchange, the Saudi government in 2017 reduced Aramco's tax rate from 85% to 50%. Such moves are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to create new income streams and lessen the government's dependence on oil for revenue. In their first-ever grade assessment for Aramco, Fitch issued the firm an A+ rating, while Moody's gave the company it's A1 rating. The ratings are considered investment-grade level and indicate low credit risk, but the agencies held off on issuing their top grades to Aramco due to strong links between the Saudi state and the company. Specifically, Fitch noted "the influence the state has on the company through regulating the level of production, taxation and dividends." Wald said that five years ago, under the late King Abdullah, the government's links to Aramco would not have been a significant concern because the company had "essentially complete independence." That's now changed under King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who have taken a much more active role in controlling various power centers in the kingdom, including Aramco, Wald said. "There's no telling... what kind of demands this king and his son might make on the company in the future that might have impact on its core profitability," she added. The ratings agencies issued their reports on the same day that Aramco said it will start to meet with investors about selling its bonds which, if issued, would be priced in dollars and traded on the London Stock Exchange. The bonds are expected to help pay for Aramco's $69 billion acquisition of majority shares in Saudi petrochemical firm SABIC from the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund. Fitch said its conservative forecasts show Saudi Aramco's net debt rising to around $35 billion by 2021, after incorporating the SABIC transaction. The $69 billion deal with SABIC pumps capital into the Public Investment Fund, which is overseen by the crown prince. Prince Mohammed has transformed the fund in order to back major development projects throughout the kingdom amid delays to an initial public offering of Aramco, which he'd touted as a way to raise capital for the PIF's projects. The deal was struck after the crown prince's early efforts at attracting Western investors for his social and economic transformation plans suffered a setback following the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents inside the country's consulate in Istanbul last year. ___ Associated Press business editor Carlo Piovano contributed to this report from London. TOKYO (AP) - Japan's government has unveiled an era name, "Reiwa," or "pursuing harmony," for soon-to-be Emperor Naruhito, who will succeed the Chrysanthemum throne on May 1. His father, Emperor Akihito, is abdicating, with his "Heisei" era coming to an end the day before. A selection of the name was a top secret and the decision comes after highly guarded closed meetings and intense media speculation. On Monday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ultra-conservative government chose the name for the first time from an ancient Japanese document, breaking with the tradition of taking them from Chinese classic literature, a step seen as reflecting Abe's attempt to bolster national pride. Some questions and answers regarding the process of picking an era name: ___ WHAT IS THE ERA NAME? The era name, or "gengo," is a 1,400-year-old Japanese tradition tied to emperors' reigns to showcase their power. The names change when a new emperor takes the throne. It becomes an emperor's official posthumous name - Akihito's father, Hirohito, is now named after his era, "Showa." Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, left, speaks after he unveils the name of new era "Reiwa" at the prime minister's office in Tokyo, Monday, April 1, 2019. Japan says next emperor Naruhito's era name is Reiwa, effective May 1 when he takes the throne from his father.(AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko) Originally a Chinese tradition, the era name is made of two Chinese characters taken from classic Chinese literature. Japan adopted the system in 645 and has since had 247 eras, including Akihito's 1989-2019 "Heisei," which means "achieving peace." Showa is the longest era, at 64 years. Akihito's Heisei is the first decided by the government under the postwar constitution, in which the emperor is stripped of political power and had no say over the choice. Still, the government, with its highly secretive and sensitive handling of the process, is underscoring that "the emperor has power in an invisible, subtle way," said Hirohito Suzuki, a Toyo University sociologist. ___ HOW WIDELY IS THE ERA NAME USED? The era name is only for domestic use. Although its use is not compulsory, Japanese government offices and businesses still widely use the system in official documents, coins, calendars and for other paperwork. Middle-age to elderly people often use "gengo" to identify their generations, while younger people prefer the Western calendar over the era name as conversions are cumbersome in a highly globalized and digitalized society. Popularity of era names has dropped to less than half over the past four decades since the late 1970s. Though impractical, the era name is considered Japan's traditional culture and is expected to continue despite persistent calls by some to abolish it. ___ WHO DECIDES THE ERA NAME AND HOW? The procedures to change the era name is based on a 1979 law, with the government picking a team of experts on classical literature in Chinese to find and nominate several names each for top officials to review. It is a complicated process that must meet certain criteria - easy to read and write but not commonly or previously used. Japanese media have been scrambling to get scoops out. The names of the scholars and their nominations have been and will be classified for decades. On Monday, Abe's government chose the name drawn from Japan's oldest poetry book, "Manyoshu" from the 7th century, breaking with Japan's 1,400-year-old tradition - a step seen reflecting Abe's attempt to bolster national pride that he says was weakened by war-guilt campaigns during U.S. occupation after Japan's World War II defeat. ___ WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE ERA NAME CHANGES? A change of an era name causes a major hassle for government offices and businesses, which have to revise computer systems and software. It also leads to printing new train tickets, stamps, coins, receipts and calendars. The new era name was announced a month ahead of the start of Naruhito's reign to allow for time to adjust. Because of a festive mood surrounding the upcoming era change, the event is also creating businesses for both the outgoing and the incoming eras. The abdication and succession events that come in the middle of the annual "golden week" expand the holidays to 10 days, bolstering tourism and other consumer spending. ___ Follow Mari Yamaguchi at https://www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi People reach out for copies of newspaper extra edition reporting the name of new era "Reiwa" in Osaka, Monday, April 1, 2019. The name of the era of Japan's soon-to-be-emperor Naruhito will be "Reiwa," the government announced Monday. (Juntaro Yokoyama/Kyodo News via AP) BEIRA, Mozambique (AP) - Mozambican and international health workers raced Monday to contain a cholera outbreak in the cyclone-hit city of Beira and surrounding areas, where the number of cases has jumped to more than 1,000. One person has died of cholera, while 97 patients remain in treatment centers, with the others released, Mozambique's health director Ussein Isse announced. The new figures are an indication that cholera is spreading but is being brought under control, health workers say. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said there is also a high risk of the spread of infectious diseases including those caused by insects like mosquitoes, with 276 malaria cases also reported in cyclone-affected areas,. The overall cyclone death toll in Mozambique has risen to 518. With 259 deaths in Zimbabwe and 56 in Malawi, the three-nation death toll from Cyclone Idai now stands at more than 830. Authorities warn the tolls are preliminary as receding flood waters will expose more bodies. Dujarric said more than 140,000 people in Mozambique are sheltering in 161 sites, including schools and community centers. He said 11 emergency treatment centers for cholera victims have been established in Beira and other locations and nine are operational. A woman fetches water from an unprotected source in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Mozambican workers have restored clean tap water to parts of Beira, a city of 500,000, although large areas of the urban center still don't have access to sanitary water, David Wightwick, the World Health Organization's team leader in Beira, told The Associated Press while visiting a water treatment center. "A vaccination campaign against cholera, with 900,000 doses of the vaccine, will start Wednesday," Wightwick said. "That should blunt the edge of this outbreak." More than two weeks after the cyclone hit Beira and swept across central Mozambique, about 98,000 people are in camps for displaced and "living under canvas," he said. "Cholera is our most immediate challenge," said Wightwick, who added that getting adequate nutrition to the population and battling other diseases like malaria are also priorities. In addition to Mozambican medics, health workers from Portugal, Denmark, Italy and China are helping respond to the crisis. Sanitary water points and latrines are being constructed throughout Beira by the International Federation of the Red Cross, which has also established a field clinic in Macurungo, is constructing a field hospital in Nhamatanda and distributing relief supplies to 800 in Buzi, said the group's spokeswoman, Jana Sweeny. Cases of cholera, an acute diarrheal disease, have risen dramatically since the first five cases were confirmed last week. Cholera is spread by contaminated water and food. It can kill within hours but is relatively easy to treat. The U.S. military joined the international humanitarian aid efforts to Mozambique by airlifting food and relief supplies from South Africa. Round-the-clock flights are delivering supplies from the U.N. World Food Program from King Shaka International Airport in Durban, South Africa, U.S. Embassy spokesman Robert Mearkle said. He said the commodities airlifted from Durban were from the World Food Program's internal stock including rice, dried peas and vegetable oil. "This lifesaving emergency food assistance will support approximately 160,000 people for one month," Mearkle said. As health responders stress the need for better disease surveillance, the United Nations' deputy humanitarian coordinator in Mozambique, Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, has said all cases of diarrhea are being treated as though they are cholera. Cholera is endemic to the region, and "it breaks out fast and it travels extremely fast," he told reporters. Doctors Without Borders has said other suspected cholera cases have been reported outside Beira in the badly hit areas of Buzi, Tica and Nhamathanda but the chance of spread in rural areas is smaller because people are more dispersed. Mozambican officials have said Cyclone Idai destroyed more than 50 health centers in the region, complicating response efforts. The United Nations has said some 1.8 million people need urgent help across central Mozambique's sodden, largely rural region. The U.N. Economic and Social Council has scheduled a special meeting in New York on Tuesday on the "Response to Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe." ___ Andrew Meldrum contributed to this story from Johannesburg, and Edith M. Lederer, contributed from the United Nations. ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa A mother bathes her baby in a bucket at a camp for displaced survivors of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Members of the US army help load supplies at Beira International airport, Mozambique, Monday, April 1, 2019, joining the humanitarian aid efforts following a cyclone that hit the country on March 14. The death toll from the cyclone has inched up to 501 according to a Lusa report, with cholera cases from cyclone survivors jumping to 271. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Members of the US army help load supplies at Beira International airport, Mozambique, Monday, April 1, 2019, joining the humanitarian aid efforts following a cyclone that hit the country on March 14. The death toll from the cyclone has inched up to 501 according to a Lusa report, with cholera cases from cyclone survivors jumping to 271.(AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Women and men pick up bricks from a collapsed house to build another structure in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Chinese doctors spray chemicals to prevent the spread of cholera at a camp for displaced survivors of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Cholera cases among cyclone survivors in Mozambique have jumped to 271, authorities said. So far no cholera deaths have been confirmed, the report said. Another Lusa report said the death toll in central Mozambique from the cyclone that hit on March 14 had inched up to 501. Authorities have warned the toll is highly preliminary as flood waters recede and reveal more bodies. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Women and children are outside a displacement camp in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Mozambican authorities say the number of cholera cases among cyclone survivors has risen to 271. The cases have been discovered in the port city of Beira, raising the stakes in an already desperate fight to help hundreds of thousands of people sheltering in increasingly squalid conditions.(AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) A young boy is seen outside a displacement camp for survivors of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, Sunday, March, 31, 2019. Mozambican authorities say the number of cholera cases among cyclone survivors has risen to 271.The cases have been discovered in the port city of Beira, raising the stakes in an already desperate fight to help hundreds of thousands of people sheltering in increasingly squalid conditions.(AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Members of the US army help load supplies at Beira International airport, Mozambique, Monday, April 1, 2019, joining the humanitarian aid efforts following a cyclone that hit the country on March 14. The death toll from the cyclone has inched up to 501 according to a Lusa report, with cholera cases from cyclone survivors jumping to 271. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) Members of the US army help load supplies at Beira International airport, Mozambique, Monday, April 1, 2019, joining the humanitarian aid efforts following a cyclone that hit the country on March 14. The death toll from the cyclone has inched up to 501 according to a Lusa report, with cholera cases from cyclone survivors jumping to 271. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) CAIRO (AP) - Sudan's state-run news agency says police used tear gas to disperse anti-government protests in the capital, Khartoum, and other cities across the country. SUNA quoted police spokesman Hashem Ali as saying that security forces on Sunday arrested a "number of protesters" and filed charges against them under emergency laws declared by President Omar al-Bashir in February. Ali says police received reports of injuries both among policemen and protesters. He didn't elaborate. Sudan has been gripped by nationwide protests since mid-December. Opposition parties and professional unions have called on al-Bashir to step down after three decades in power. Price hikes and food shortages triggered the current wave of unrest. Al-Bashir's government has met the protests with a heavy-handed crackdown and banned unauthorized public gatherings. BEIJING (AP) - A fire high in the mountains of western China's Sichuan province has killed 30 firefighters and others, the government said Monday. The deaths occurred after a change of wind Sunday as the firefighters were battling the blaze in a rugged area at an altitude of 3,800 meters (12,500 feet), according to the Ministry of Emergency Management and the military. Among the dead were 27 firefighters and three local residents recruited to help fight the blaze, the ministry said. Nearly 700 people were battling the fire in Sichuan's Muli county that erupted on Saturday, but contact was lost Sunday with the 30. Two helicopters carrying medical staff and military personnel were dispatched to help in the search. China has been battling forest fires in recent weeks in various parts of the vast country, including on the outskirts of Beijing, fed by dry weather and high winds across many northern areas. The death toll among the firefighters appeared to be the worst since 2015, when an explosion at a chemical warehouse in the port city of Tianjin killed 173 people, most of them firefighters and other first responders. That blast was blamed on illegal construction and unsafe storage of volatile materials. Scores of workers have also died in recent industrial accidents, including 85 in a pair of explosions last month. In this aerial photo released by Xinhua News Agency, smoke can be seen from a forest fire in Yalongjiang township of Muli County, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southwestern China's Sichuan Province on Monday, April 1, 2019. The fire high in the mountains of western China's Sichuan province has killed over two dozen firefighters and others, the government said Monday. (Lin Jiping/Xinhua via AP) LONDON (AP) - The Latest on Britain's exit from the European Union (all times local): 10:50 p.m. The European Parliament's top Brexit official says the U.K. has a "last chance" to break the deadlock on leaving the European Union. Guy Verhofstadt tweeted the comments soon after Britain's Parliament again rejected alternative options to Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal. Parliament has carved out time on Wednesday for another series of indicative votes on Brexit options. Verhofstadt said: "The House of Commons again votes against all options. A hard #Brexit becomes nearly inevitable. On Wednesday, the U.K. has a last chance to break the deadlock or face the abyss." Britain is legally due to leave the EU on April 12, after the bloc agreed to extend the March 29 deadline. A supporter of Brexit holds a sign saying 'Just hoot, we voted leave' while others continue with their daily activities outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, ahead of the latest round of debates in the House of Commons concerning Brexit issues, Monday April 1, 2019. (Rebecca Brown/PA via AP) ___ 10:20 p.m. U.K. Conservative Party legislator Nick Boles says he is quitting the party after one of his Brexit proposals was voted down. Boles made the dramatic statement in Parliament moments after the results of the votes were announced, saying he couldn't remain in the party. Boles' proposal called for Britain to remain in the European Union's single market for goods and services. It was narrowly defeated by 282-261. Boles said that "I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise." He said he regretted that he could no longer be part of the party. The Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Theresa May is deeply split between those who favor a hard Brexit with few ties to the EU and those seeking a softer divorce deal. ___ 10:15 p.m. British government says it will continue to pursue support for Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay says that May's deal is the only way forward in light of Parliament's inability to find a clear majority for an alternative arrangement. May's deal has already been rejected three times. Barclay says the default position calls for Britain to leave the European Union in 11 days. He says if Parliament agrees to May's withdrawal agreement this week it "may be possible" to leave the EU without participating in European elections in late May. He says the Cabinet will meet Tuesday to discuss options. ___ 10:10 p.m. British lawmakers have failed to find a majority for any proposal in votes on alternatives to the government's rejected Brexit deal. Lawmakers rejected four options in votes in the House of Commons. The votes were an attempt to forge an alternative to the government's rejected European Union divorce deal. The options included remaining in a customs union with the EU - which failed by just three votes - and holding a new referendum on Britain's membership in the bloc. The government is still trying to build support for Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal, which has been rejected three times by Parliament. Britain is due to leave the EU on April 12 without an agreement unless it passes a divorce deal or secures an extension from the bloc. ___ 8 p.m. British lawmakers have started voting on four alternatives to the government's thrice-rejected Brexit deal. Rather than the usual procedure of voting with their feet by walking through "aye" and "no" lobbies, members of Parliament are each receiving a paper ballot listing all four options. Legislators have half an hour to vote before ballots are collected and counted. Results are due around 2100 GMT (5 p.m. EDT). The options include remaining in a customs union with the EU and holding a new referendum on Britain's membership in the bloc. ___ 5:20 p.m. British lawmakers are considering four alternatives to Prime Minister Theresa May's rejected Brexit deal, in hopes of finding a plan that can command majority support. The options up for votes Monday night in Parliament include two proposals that aim to retain close economic ties between Britain and the European Union. One would keep the U.K. in a customs union for goods with the EU after Brexit, while another calls for Britain to stay in the bloc's single market for both goods and services. Another option wants any Brexit deal to be submitted to a public referendum, and the fourth says Britain should cancel its departure from the EU if it comes within two days of crashing out of the bloc without an agreement. House of Commons Speaker John Bercow chose the options from eight ideas submitted. ___ 2:55 p.m. A leading credit ratings agency has reiterated the array of economic difficulties it foresees Britain encountering if the country crashes out of the European Union without an exit deal. Standard & Poor's said in an update Monday that a disorderly Brexit would "adversely affect income levels and growth prospects, as well as government finances." S&P also is warning that Britain's withdrawal could "significantly limit" access to key European markets. The ratings agency says if that happens, it would expect "downward pressure" on house prices, a significant increase in the country's debt and a further drop in the value of the pound. S&P has said such a scenario could lead it to downgrade Britain's AA long-term credit rating. U.K. lawmakers are voting later Monday on alternatives to the European Union withdrawal deal proposed by Prime Minister Theresa May. Parliament has voted down May's deal three times. The EU gave Britain until April 12 to come up with a new plan or to leave the bloc without a deal. It's unclear if May would accept any option that might win approval in the House of Commons. ___ 1:25 p.m. The chief executive of industrial manufacturer Siemens U.K. is imploring British lawmakers to unite around a compromise Brexit deal, saying the country's political chaos is making the U.K. a "laughing stock." Parliament is set to vote Monday on several alternatives to the European Union withdrawal deal proposed by Prime Minister Theresa May. Siemens U.K. CEO Juergen Maier urged lawmakers in an open letter to choose an option that keeps Britain in a customs union with the EU. He said that choice would allow frictionless trade to continue between the U.K. and the EU, something many firms have come to rely on. Maier also wrote that Britain's political paralysis is "making it hard to win support for finely balanced investment decisions that in the end have an impact on U.K. jobs, innovation and the competitiveness of our activities here." May's spokesman, James Slack, says the prime minister understands that "business wants certainty." He said lawmakers should support May's Brexit deal, which the House of Commons has rejected three times. ___ 1 p.m. The head of the European Union's executive is stressing that Britain will have to take part in May's European Parliament elections if it remains an EU member beyond April 12. Britain either has to leave the EU on April 12 or come up with an alternative plan, which - unless it decides to revoke Brexit - is likely to involve delaying its withdrawal from the bloc well beyond the May 23-26 European Parliament vote. Some British politicians have suggested the U.K. could stay for longer without participating in the EU elections. But European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters in Saarbruecken, Germany that "if the British haven't left by April 12 and there is an extension, then Britain must take part in the European election." He added "that is (in) the treaty. Whether I want that is another question." ___ 12:35 p.m. European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker says it's time for the British Parliament to spell out what it wants on Brexit - and says the mythical sphinx is easier to decipher than U.K. lawmakers. After rejecting British Prime Minister Theresa May's divorce deal three times, U.K. lawmakers are holding a series of votes on Brexit alternatives Monday in an attempt to find the elusive idea that can command a majority. Juncker said in a speech Monday to the Saarland state legislature in Saarbruecken, Germany: "We now know what the British Parliament doesn't want, but we haven't heard what it wants. A sphinx is an open book in direct comparison with the British Parliament." He added: "We must get the sphinx to talk now. Enough of the long silence." __ 11:40 a.m. Discount airline easyJet has warned that the U.K.'s pending withdrawal from the European Union is likely to hurt earnings in the second half of its financial year as travelers hold back on booking tickets amid the impasse over future relations. EasyJet says its first half loss of 275 million pounds ($360 million) was within expectations, but the outlook for the six months through September is "more cautious" because of "softness in ticket yields in the U.K. and across Europe." Shares fell 8.3 percent in early London trading after the profit warning. Shares in other airlines and travel companies also fell, with British Airways owner IAG down 2 percent and travel group TUI down 2.5 percent. George Salmon, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, says that with Brexit "potentially impacting travel regulations and currency markets, customers are understandably waiting for more certainty before booking trips away." ___ 10:30 a.m. Further evidence has emerged that British manufacturers are building up their cushions against the possibility the country crashes out of the European Union without a deal. Financial information firm IHS Markit found that Brexit stockpiling is giving a boost to production - at least temporarily. According to the firm, its purchasing managers index for the sector rose to a 13-month high in March to 55.1, up three points from the previous month. Anything above 50 indicates an expansion in output. Stockpiling has become increasingly prevalent over the past few months as Britain's exit looms - originally scheduled for March 29 but since delayed at least to April 12. Given the uncertainty, firms have stored up on raw materials and on those products they need from elsewhere in the EU. ___ 8:45 a.m. Prime Minister Theresa May's chief disciplinarian says the government should have told people they would have to accept a softer form of exiting the European Union after May lost her majority in the 2017 general election. Chief Whip Julian Smith, whose job is to ensure Conservative Party lawmakers vote for the government, makes the comments in a BBC documentary to be broadcast Monday. Smith says May called the election to strengthen her hand in delivering Brexit, but was weakened when she lost her majority. He says the government "should have just been clearer the consequences of that, the parliamentary arithmetic, would mean that this would be inevitably a kind of softer type of Brexit." The comments come after Parliament rejected May's EU withdrawal deal for a third time on Friday. ___ Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit A street cleaner sweeps the road outside the Prime Minister's official residence 10 Downing Street, Monday April 1, 2019, ahead of various scheduled meetings later Monday, concerning Brexit issues and knife crime. (Jonathan Brady/PA via AP) Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to lawmakers in the House of Commons, London, Friday March 29, 2019. U.K. lawmakers on Friday rejected the government's Brexit divorce deal with the European Union for a third time. (Mark Duffy/House of Commons via AP) Britain's Chief Whip Julian Smith leaves 10 Downing Street, London, Thursday, March 28, 2019. The British government says it plans to hold a new Brexit debate in Parliament Friday, but hasn't confirmed whether it will call a third vote on its twice-rejected European Union divorce deal. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham) Britain's Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay in Downing Street, ahead of the latest round of debates in the House of Commons concerning Brexit issues, Monday April 1, 2019. Britain's Parliament gets another chance Monday to debate and vote on the Brexit divorce from the European Union, with the knowledge that if no agreement is reached by April 12, Britain will crash out of the EU without a plan for future relations. (Jonathan Brady/PA via AP) Britain's Attorney General Geoffrey Cox arrives at Downing Street ahead of the latest round of debates in the House of Commons concerning Brexit issues, Monday April 1, 2019. Britain's Parliament gets its chance Monday to debate and vote on the Brexit divorce from the European Union, with the knowledge that if no agreement is reached by April 12, Britain will crash out of the EU without a plan for future relations. (Jonathan Brady/PA via AP) FILE - In this file photo dated Thursday, March 21, 2019, Britain's' Chief Whip Julian Smith leaves 10 Downing Street, in London. In a BBC TV documentary to be broadcast Monday April 1, 2019, Smith says, Prime Minister Theresa May lost her majority in the 2017 general election, which weakened the government and predicated a softer type of Brexit from Europe. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, FILE) FILE - In this file photo dated Thursday, March 28, 2019, Britain's Chief Whip Julian Smith arrives at 10 Downing Street, London. Smith made comments in a BBC TV documentary to be broadcast Monday April 1, 2019, saying Prime Minister Theresa May lost her majority in the 2017 general election, which weakened the government and predicated a softer type of Brexit from Europe. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, FILE) Anti Brexit demonstrators protest on the Irish border on the Old Dublin Road, Carrickcarnon, Ireland, Saturday, March 30, 2019. Border communities protested against Brexit by holding various rallies around Ireland. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison) Protesters stage an anti brexit rally on the Old Dublin Road, in Carrickcarnon, Ireland, Saturday, March 30, 2019. Border communities protested against Brexit by holding various rallies around Ireland.(AP Photo/Peter Morrison Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters attend a rally in Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London, Friday, March 29, 2019. The protest march which started on March 16 in Sunderland, north east England, finishes on Friday March 29 in Parliament Square, London, on what was the original date for Brexit to happen before the recent extension. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Pro-Brexit protesters stand near police after their rally in Westminster, London, Friday, March 29, 2019. Pro-Brexit demonstrators were gathering in central London on the day that Britain was originally scheduled to leave the European Union. British lawmakers will vote Friday on what Prime Minister Theresa May's government described as the "last chance to vote for Brexit." (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) A Brexit supporter holds an England flag at Parliament Square in Westminster, London, Friday, March 29, 2019. Pro-Brexit demonstrators were gathering in central London on the day that Britain was originally scheduled to leave the European Union. British lawmakers will vote Friday on what Prime Minister Theresa May's government described as the "last chance to vote for Brexit." (AP Photo/ Frank Augstein) Protesters stage an anti brexit rally on the Old Dublin Road, Carrickcarnon, Ireland, Saturday, March 30, 2019. Border communities protested against Brexit by holding various rallies around Ireland. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison) Commuters walk past the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Monday, April 1, 2019. Britain's Parliament gets another chance Monday to offer a way forward on Britain's stalled divorce from the European Union, holding a series of votes on Brexit alternatives in an attempt to find the elusive idea that can command a majority. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco) MANILA, Philippines (AP) - The Philippines has protested the presence of more than 200 Chinese vessels that were sighted from January to March near a Philippine-occupied island in the disputed South China Sea, officials said Monday. Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said the Department of Foreign Affairs lodged the protest after the military monitored about 275 Chinese vessels near Thitu island, which is called Pag-asa by Filipinos, in the Spratlys, the most hotly contested region in the busy waterway. A regional military spokesman, Capt. Jason Ramon, said the number of spotted Chinese boats was 217, about the same number in the last quarter. It was not immediately clear why Ramon and Panelo gave different numbers. The Chinese vessels have been sighted more than 600 times near Thitu so far this year, military officials said. Asked if the Chinese flotilla's presence was a cause for worry, Panelo said, "Anything that concerns the security of the Philippines will always be a concern." Panelo did not say when the Philippines protested, but a Filipino diplomat told The Associated Press that the foreign affairs department in Manila sent a diplomatic note to the Chinese Embassy on Friday to express concern over the "swarming of Chinese boats" near Thitu. The diplomat asked not to be named because of a lack of authority to discuss the issue publicly. FILE - In this April 21, 2017 file photo, engineers from NAMRIA, the central mapping agency of the Philippine Government, survey the area around the Philippine-claimed Thitu Island with a sandbar sitting on the horizon off the disputed South China Sea in the western Philippines. An official says the Philippines has protested the presence of about 275 Chinese vessels that were sighted from January to March near a Philippine-occupied island in the disputed South China Sea. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File) China and the Philippines, along with Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei, have been disputing ownership of the strategic waters for decades. Tensions flared in recent years, when China transformed seven disputed reefs into islands, three of which had military-grade runways, sparking protests and concerns from Western and Asian countries. The artificial islands were later reportedly installed with a missile defense system. While China also claims ownership of Thitu, where Filipino forces and a fishing community can be found, it apparently started to deploy Chinese navy and coast guard ships and fishing boats in sizable numbers in the area in 2017 after Filipinos tried to erect shelters on one of three sandbars that naturally emerged in recent years between Thitu and a Chinese-occupied man-made island called Subi. China protested the Philippine attempt to occupy the sandbar, prompting President Rodrigo Duterte to order a halt to the planned construction, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said at the time. Since then, the Chinese vessels have never left the vicinity of the barren sandbars, collectively called Sandy Cay, near Thitu. The nearest sandbar in Sandy Cay is about 2.5 nautical miles (4.6 kilometers) from Thitu island. Duterte has taken a nonconfrontational approach to the territorial disputes between China and his country as he sought Chinese trade, investment and infrastructure funding. He has refused to immediately take up with China a ruling by a U.N.-linked tribunal that invalidated Beijing's sprawling claims in the South China Sea, sparking criticism from nationalists and left-wing groups, which wanted him to demand immediate Chinese compliance with the landmark decision. Last month, two former Philippine officials filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing Chinese President Xi Jinping of crimes against humanity over his government's assertive actions in the South China Sea, which they say have deprived thousands of fishermen of their livelihood and destroyed the environment. Duterte said he doubted the complaint would prosper and stressed his administration had no role in it. Zhao dismissed the complaint as a baseless political attack that will go nowhere. "We think it is a kind of political action viciously targeting the Chinese leadership," Zhao told reporters Monday. "It's a fabrication and also a misuse of the mandate of the ICC." NEW YORK (AP) - A technical glitch at an outside aviation company led to delays at major U.S. airlines. The issue was resolved quickly, but it led to travel disruptions Monday. Delays that began appearing first in Chicago, New York, Miami and Boston spread to Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C. The Federal Aviation Administration said several airlines had problems with a program called Aerodata, which is used to plan weight and balance for flights. The FAA said the issue was resolved. By midday, 3,400 U.S. flights had been delayed, according to tracking service FlightAware, but it was unclear how many were related to the technical issue. The FAA advised travelers to contact airlines directly for flight information and updates. Airlines said travelers should check online for the latest updates on flights. American Airlines said the technical issue affected a few of its regional carriers that operate American Eagle flights. FILE- In this Jan. 25, 2019, file photo a Southwest Airlines jet moves on the runway as a person eats at a terminal restaurant at LaGuardia Airport in New York. A technical outage is impacting major airlines and causing flight delays that may lead to a ripple effect throughout the day. The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday, April 1 that several airlines were dealing with computer issues. Dan Landson of Southwest Airlines said there was an outage with a vendor that services multiple carriers with data used in flight planning. There are delays already at airports in Chicago, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami and Detroit. The airline anticipates scattered delays. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File) Southwest Airlines lifted an internal ground stop at on Monday morning after about 40 minutes. Nearly 1,000 Southwest flights had been delayed by midday, according to FlightAware. Some United Airlines regional carriers were hampered by the issue, which resulted in delays for select United Express flights, the company said. About 150 flights were impacted, according to United. "Some flights that were affected have departed, and we're working to get all affected flights back on schedule," United said. Delta said that the outage prevented some of its Delta Connection flights from leaving on time. The airline did not anticipate flight cancellations. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) Malacanang on Tuesday said the government is still verifying reports of the presence of a Chinese dredging vessel along the shores of Lobo, Batangas. In a media briefing, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said he is contact with authorities in the area. "They're verifying it, 'yun ang sagot sa akin (that's what they told me). We will verify," Panelo said when asked about the supposed dredging ship stationed in the area. Local report circulated that a ship with a nine-man crew of Chinese nationals has been allegedly holding dredging operations along Barangay Lagadlarin in Lobo. The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) on Tuesday however said the MV Emerald Vessel was registered with African country Sierra Leone. PCG said the vessel is "intended" to conduct dredging and desilting operations of Lobo River and nearby estuaries. It added the ship had both Indonesian and Chinese nationals aboard. The spokesman noted that as far as he's concerned, there is no agreement between the country and China that would allow the latter's nationals to conduct dredging operations. "None that I know of. Wala akong alam," Panelo said. The PCG said authorities are continuously monitoring safety and environment concerns in the area. Military officials on Monday also confirmed reports that hundreds of Chinese vessels have been spotted going in and out of Philippine-occupied Pag-asa island, one of the biggest islands in the disputed Spratlys in the South China Sea. Panelo said a diplomatic protest to be filed by the government over the issue is "on its way." Tuesday, April 2, 2019 at 7:44AM Lance Montgomery and Bryan Baeumler, HeyBrian App By Sonya Davidson Consider it the Uber of home repairs and services. The HeyBryan app recently launched in Toronto after a successful launch in Vancouver. Backed by HGTV Canada's TV host Bryan Baeumler this new app connnects pre-qualified, insured home service providers to home owners all in the convenience on our mobile devices. The HeyBryan app (iOS and Android) is a safe and secure way to connect with skilled workers from electricians to plumbers and beyond. We had the opportunity to sit down with Baeumler to find out more. This is being touted at the Uber of home Renos? BB: They were the first with the technology but I think the idea of punching something into your phone and getting a task done and having someone on the other end thats interested and available is great. I guess you can also consider it more like the Tinder of home repairs. I definitley don't know much about Tinder other than from my friends, explain? BB: Yeah, I dont either but I hear it from others. Its really like a dating app but the difference is at the end of the relationship, as brief as it may be, not only does money change hand but also a rating is posted so the next suitor can check it out. Right now rating is just one sided but were thinking about adding the opportunity to have it two ways. Its important as well. As a home owner you want to deal with a good business and as a business owner you want to know what its like to deal with a homeowner sometimes. There have been trust issues between homeowners and tradespeople for so long. This is a great crowd-sourced way to find opinions on the experts. So, can anyone join in as a service business? It sounds great for people who are looking for extra work or retired. BB: Yes, if they pass the vetting process. They must have the skill in a particular task and experience. What is the vetting process? BB: Essentially its the same way that anyone would do their due diligence on a company. The hard thing for home owners is the time you spend on researching. But even still, you can do all the due diligence and it may not be enough. This will quickly identify whos great on paper and whos actually good in class and on the street. How many experts do you have signed up? BB: Theres over 1000 already signed up. The demand is high and even when we recently launched there were people already interested in services before our official launch. So, how does it work for the consumer? BB: You would go on the app and post what job youre asking for. The app will connect you directly with the people who would be interested in providing that service. Rather than you phoning a large contractor needing say, a hole in your drywall repaired, youre inputting a specific job request. Then the experts in that exact field know what your needs are as well. It's a way to really narrow down the search to exactly what youre looking for and vice versa for the expert. So, as a consumer I can say what my budget range is? BB: Exactly. You can also see the experts and their hourly rates before deciding on who you want to work with. Its not a random match. You can also set your own rates. But does it just match up to the nearest expert, or the one that is the fastest that can get to me? Im thinking about how Uber works. BB: Thats where it differs from Uber and its more like the dating app. You get the final decision on who you want to work with. What kind of tips do you have for consumers when they are looking for an expert especially new home owners? This is that conundrum. We get a lot of feedback even through our own website from people that are frustrated and say I cant find someone" to do this specific task. Someone may want a few drywall pops patched up but theyre calling up larger companies that drywall condominiums. Its not the right call. So, the advice is to go on the app and post your job. The people that are specifically interested in that size of job in your area and within your budget are going to connect. The other thing to be aware of is everyone is so hip to marketing so even the smallest owner/operator who has one part time staff who helps with his website and Instagram feed he may appear like a major corporation. This app really comes down to someone to accepting a job that they are actually good at. I admit to being caught up in flashy websites and then realizing it's sometimes smoke and mirrors. Good point. So, how quickly can a job be done? BB: As quickly as the two sides can agree. Certainly you can request emergency. Instead of having to spend a lot of time searching for the right people, your post allows experts to see exactly what you need and help zone in a lot faster. What about the reviews - how will the app monitor those? BB:It has to be an honest review about an actual experience. When I was a young owner, your name, business and reputation is all you have. Thats on you. If you get a bad review, its up to you to do better. Its a motivator really. Imagine if all the previous dates gave you a review on the dating site? And what about the name of the app? BB: For years weve been thinking about the perfect way to do this and when Lance Montgomery (President CEO and Founder, HeyBryan Inc.) approached me early on with the technology it made sense. As for the name, I thought about how it doesnt matter where I go, and even walking down the street, people are always yelling Hey Bryan! Where do I find this..." or "Hey, Bryan, can you recommend that..." and thats where it all came together. Its very seamless and organic. The intent and the technology and the opportunity just came together very easily. The app is going to provide a great service for so many people. I think the fact that it will hold the experts accountable visibly in public is important. Ive heard of stories where someone who had a good reputation actually made a real mess . Youre only as good as your last job. If youre held accountable it will keep the heat in the fire. BRUSSELS (AP) - The United States and its allies are stepping up cooperation in response to Russian aggression, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday while playing down differences among members as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary. Foreign ministers from NATO countries are meeting in Washington this week for the occasion, determined to show a united front in the midst of a long military stalemate in Afghanistan and tensions with Russia returned to Cold War era levels. But as NATO deploys thousands of troops and equipment to deter Russia and seeks solutions to fast-evolving new threats such as cyberattacks and hybrid warfare, its biggest challenge arguably lies within. Damaging infighting over defense spending and authoritarian tendencies exhibited by some allies undermine NATO's values, according to experts. "The strength of NATO is that despite these differences, we have always been able to unite around our core tasks. That is, to protect and defend each other," NATO chief Stoltenberg said in Brussels before the trip. Stoltenberg has talks with U.S. President Donald Trump planned for Tuesday. He is scheduled to address Congress on Wednesday. A big source of the internal strain is Trump's recurrent demand that countries devote an amount equal to at least 2 percent of GDP to defense spending - though that metric takes no account of how well the money is spent - as well as the U.S. president's reluctance to criticize strongmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks during a media conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Monday, April 1, 2019. NATO foreign ministers mark in Washington on Thursday the 70th anniversary of the world's biggest security alliance amid heightened tensions with Russia and years of military stalemate in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) "NATO's single greatest challenge is the absence of strong, principled American presidential leadership for the first time in its history," two former U.S. envoys to NATO, Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute, wrote in a report for the alliance anniversary. Trump, they said, is seen by allies as NATO's "most urgent, and often most difficult, problem." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified last week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. He was asked if he was familiar with the report by Burns and Lute. Pompeo said he hadn't read the report but he had known Lute since he was a young military office and had "great respect for him." But on the subject of Trump and NATO, Lute was "just simply wrong," Pompeo said. If the conclusion he drew that President Trump is the biggest impediment to NATO, he's just simply wrong," he added. "We have worked diligently to make NATO stronger. I am convinced that we have done so." Trump made a memorable impression on leaders from Canada and European nations during his first NATO summit in May 2017. During a speech outside NATO's new Brussels headquarters, he publicly humiliated them. Trump also cast doubt on whether they could count on Washington to fulfill NATO's collective defense clause. The speech was delivered by a memorial made from a twisted piece of the World Trade Center towers felled by al-Qaida's airliner attacks on Sept. 11, 2011. Since the founding Washington Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, NATO has only once activated the clause stating that an attack on one member is an attack on them all, after the 9/11 attacks. Trump also delayed a summit last year with fresh demands on burden sharing. That time, at least, his dressing down about the U.S. spending more on defense than the other NATO members combined happened behind closed doors. Trump's routine tirades have fueled suspicion his aim mostly is to drum up business for the U.S. defense industry. But the attitude of Trump - who walked away from the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate change agreement his allies in Europe value while making tariff threats against them - also is similar to authoritarian or populist streaks showing up in NATO members Turkey, Hungary, Italy and Poland. "The political and trans-Atlantic unity that underpins NATO has been weakened. Only bad guys benefit from trans-Atlantic division and a U.S. retreat from its global leadership role," Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Stoltenberg's predecessor as NATO's top civilian official, said in an email exchange with The Associated Press. "We see the consequences of U.S. retreat, with autocrats and dictators filling the vacuum," he added, Burns and Lute say this retreat from democracy, individual freedoms and the rule of law is "a potentially cancerous threat." Still, NATO has survived formidable challenges over the decades, including the Cuban missile crisis and the missile race in Europe. It's also remained intact after internal divisions over the Suez Canal, the Iraq war, and France's departure from the alliance's command structure. Officials say they are confident NATO will endure now, too. The White House said last month in a statement about Stoltenberg's talks with Trump on Tuesday that the two would "discuss the unprecedented success of NATO, including the recent increased commitments on burden-sharing among European allies and ways to address the current, evolving challenges facing the alliance." Trump is not scheduled to appear at the upcoming talks of NATO foreign ministers, but he is expected to attend a leaders' summit in London in mid-December. "I hope we will not see a repeat of President Trump's antics in Brussels last year. It's time for the world's democracies to show their unity," Rasmussen said. ___ Deb Riechmann contributed from Washington. FILE - In this July 11, 2018 file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump checks the time as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stands beside him, at the Art and History Museum at the Park Cinquantenaire in Brussels. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is playing down differences among member countries as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary in Washington on April 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, File) FILE - In this July 11, 2018 file photo, President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sit, during their bilateral meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is playing down differences among member countries as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary in Washington on April 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File) FILE - In this Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012 file photo, U.S. soldiers, part of the NATO- led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) walk west of Kabul, Afghanistan. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is playing down differences among member countries as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary in Washington on April 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Hoshang Hashimi, File) FILE - In this May 7, 2018 file photo, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, center, walks in the Agora Hall as he arrives for his first day of work at the new NATO headquarters in Brussels. Stoltenberg is playing down differences among member countries as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary in Washington on April 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, File) FILE - In this Wednesday, July 11, 2018 file photo U.S. President Donald Trump attends a meeting of the North Atlantic Council during a summit of heads of state and government at NATO headquarters in Brussels. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is playing down differences among member countries as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary in Washington on April 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, File) FILE - In this July 12, 2018 file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump arrives for a press conference during a summit of heads of state and government at NATO headquarters in Brussels. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is playing down differences among member countries as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary in Washington on April 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, File) Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, right, and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov shake hands after a news conference in the Mediterranean coastal city of Antalya, Turkey, Friday, March 29, 2019. Turkey's foreign minister said Friday his country is committed to a deal to purchase advanced Russian surface-to-air missile defense system, despite warnings from Washington that the deal could put the NATO member country's participation in the U.S. F-35 fighter aircraft program at risk. (Turkish Foreign Ministry via AP, Pool) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks during a media conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Monday, April 1, 2019. NATO foreign ministers mark in Washington on Thursday the 70th anniversary of the world's biggest security alliance amid heightened tensions with Russia and years of military stalemate in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg (BOO'-tuh-juhj) says he's raised more than $7 million this year. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor tweeted Monday his team's initial report shows he and his supporters "are out-performing expectations at every turn." Buttigieg promised over the weekend there'd be a "celebration" with his announcement Monday, two months since he launched his exploratory committee. Buttigieg says the first quarter fundraising total comes from a preliminary analysis and he'll have a more complete analysis later. He says until then: "a big thank you to all our supporters." Buttigieg is known as Mayor Pete. He says he'll release a video showing how he's "spending the investments" supporters have made. Former Texas congressman and Democratic 2020 candidate Beto O'Rourke says he raised slightly more than $1 million over the weekend, achieving his $1 million weekend fundraising goal. In this March 23, 2019, photo, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg arrives to speak about his presidential run during the Democratic monthly breakfast at the Circle of Friends Community Center in Greenville, S.C. Buttigieg was the longest of long shots when he announced a presidential exploratory committee in January. But now the underdog bid is gaining momentum, and Buttigieg can feel it. (AP Photo/Richard Shiro) In this March 23, 2019, photo, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks to a crowd about his presidential run during the Democratic monthly breakfast at the Circle of Friends Community Center in Greenville, S.C. Buttigieg was the longest of long shots when he announced a presidential exploratory committee in January. But now the underdog bid is gaining momentum, and Buttigieg can feel it. (AP Photo/Richard Shiro) South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks to a crowd about his Presidential run during the Democratic monthly breakfast held at the Circle of Friends Community Center in Greenville, S.C. Saturday, March 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Shiro) Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks during his presidential campaign rally kickoff in Austin, Texas, in front of the pink-granite state Capitol, Saturday, March 30, 2019. (AP Photo/Clarice Silber) Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks during his presidential campaign kickoff rally in Houston, Saturday, March 30, 2019. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - The United States Navy and 33 other countries recently carried out weeks of maritime training in the Gulf of Guinea, to improve safety against pirates and to improve the monitoring of the West Africa coastline. The Obangame Express training exercise, in its ninth year, this year included 2,500 personnel, 95 ships and 12 aircraft, with the participation of countries in West Africa, Europe and North America. "In West Africa the Gulf of Guinea is crucial to economic development because economic prosperity is tied to the maritime domain," said Adm. James G. Foggo III, commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa and commander, Allied Joint Force Command Naples. "This requires that the maritime countries of this region have strong, professional military and law enforcement institutions that can provide the setting for maritime trade to flourish." Currently the Gulf of Guinea "is vulnerable to illegal activities within territorial waters, all of which degrades the ability for regional and global trade to occur freely and benefit the region," said Foggo. Not all countries have large ships, he said, so vessels are shared in the Gulf of Guinea. Admiral Ibok-Ete Ekwe Ibas, Nigeria's Chief of Naval Staff, said that countries in the region are challenged to be aware of what needs to be done to protect their coastlines and sea areas. In this photo taken on Wednesday March 20 2019. Nigeria Naval Special Forces patrol during a joint navy exercise, in the Gulf of Guinea. The United States Navy and 33 other countries recently carried out weeks of maritime training in the Gulf of Guinea, to improve safety against pirates and to improve the monitoring of the West Africa coastline. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba) There are "issues of the various navies not having adequate platform and not having adequate infrastructure to support even the operational fleet in terms of capacity to even deploy ... We also have problems with language," he said, noting that English, French, Portuguese and Spanish are all used in the region. In the last six years, Nigeria has been able to buy more ships to improve its abilities at sea, he said, adding that more than 75 percent of attempted "mischief" at sea has been foiled in recent times, referring to piracy and the hijacking of vessels. Training, logisitics and government support will remain crucial, he said, in maintaining the security of the gulf. __ Petesch reported from Chicago. In this photo taken on Wednesday March 20 2019, Nigeria Naval Special Forces board a vessel, during a navy exercise, in the Gulf of Guinea. The United States Navy and 33 other countries recently carried out weeks of maritime training in the Gulf of Guinea, to improve safety against pirates and to improve the monitoring of the West Africa coastline. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba) In this photo taken Thursday March 21, 2019. Adm. James G. Foggo III, commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa and commander, Allied Joint Force Command Naples, speaks with U.S. Navy officers onboard Coast Guard ship 'Thetis' in Lagos. The United States Navy and 33 other countries recently carried out weeks of maritime training in the Gulf of Guinea, to improve safety against pirates and to improve the monitoring of the West Africa coastline. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba) In this photo taken on Wednesday March 20 2019, Nigeria Naval Special Forces patrol during a joint navy exercise, in the Gulf of Guinea. The United States Navy and 33 other countries recently carried out weeks of maritime training in the Gulf of Guinea, to improve safety against pirates and to improve the monitoring of the West Africa coastline. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba) In this photo taken Friday March 22, 2019. Admiral Ibok-Ete Ekwe Ibas, right,Nigeria Chief of Naval Staff, shakes hands with Adm. James G. Foggo III, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa and commander, Allied Joint Force Command Naples, during the closing ceremony of exercise Obangame in Lagos, Nigeria. The United States Navy and 33 other countries recently carried out weeks of maritime training in the Gulf of Guinea, to improve safety against pirates and to improve the monitoring of the West Africa coastline. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba) LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Sen. Tim Kaine endured being denied the vice presidency despite running on a ticket that won the national popular vote. But the Virginia Democrat on Monday downplayed the prospects for doing away with the Electoral College, which sealed Republican Donald Trump's election to the White House. Kaine said abolishing the Electoral College would require a change to the U.S. Constitution - with the "really onerous requirement" of being ratified by an overwhelming majority of states. "It's not going to happen because smaller states really like the Electoral College," Kaine told an audience at the University of Louisville. The idea has gained traction among Democrats since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election. She netted nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, yet lost the Electoral College and therefore the White House to him. Kaine was Clinton's running mate. Some candidates in the crowded race for next year's Democratic presidential nomination have already jumped aboard the push to scrap the Electoral College, tapping into Democratic anger over the election process. Trump became the second Republican in five elections to win the presidency through the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The Electoral College, a group that comes together every four years to technically elect the president, is enshrined in the Constitution. Senator Tim Kaine, right, makes a point while giving a speech at the University of Louisville Monday, April 1, 2019, in Louisville KY. On left is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (Pat McDonogh/Courier Journal via AP) "You might do it differently if you were starting from scratch," Kaine told the campus audience. "But it's not going to get the support of this overwhelming majority of states. So I tend to focus on the things that I think I can really make a difference on. And I think that's not that productive a use of a whole lot of energy." Meanwhile, several Democrat-controlled states are pushing for a national popular vote. But rather than pass a constitutional amendment, those legislatures are joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a group of states that pledge to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The compact would only go into effect when it includes states representing 270 electoral votes, the majority needed to win the White House. Kaine, a former mayor and governor, delved briefly into the sting of losing the 2016 election. "I had never lost a race. I can't say that anymore. I can say I've never lost a popular vote on any ballot that I've been on," he said, drawing applause from the audience. "And I've never lost the Virginia vote." Kaine recalled that his first visitor after he returned to the Senate following the 2016 loss was Republican John McCain, who lost to Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. "He said, 'Tim, I'm the only person here who knows exactly how you feel,'" Kaine recalled. "'You and me are the only two that have been on a national ticket and lost. ... And I'm just here to tell you, that the answer to what you're feeling is just go right back to work.' And I said, 'You found me here, didn't you?'" On another issue, Kaine said he's confident that special counsel Robert Mueller's full report on the Russia investigation will eventually reach the public "because you can't keep a secret in Washington." Attorney General William Barr released a four-page summary that detailed Mueller's "principal conclusions" and says a redacted version will be sent to Congress. Asked about impeachment talk among some Democrats against Trump and how Congress should respond, Kaine replied, "You should not jump to a conclusion about something so momentous and weighty before all the facts are out on the table." Kaine spoke as part of the McConnell Center Distinguished Speaker Series at UofL. He was introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican and a UofL graduate. TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) - A federal judge has ordered a government agency to take a closer look at pipeline company Enbridge's plans for dealing with potential oil spills in the waterway connecting Lakes Huron and Michigan. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith instructed the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to provide more information about its reasons for approving the Canadian company's spill response strategies for areas including its Line 5, which carries oil and natural gas liquids between Superior, Wisconsin, and Sarnia, Ontario. Goldsmith's ruling Friday was in response to a lawsuit by the National Wildlife Federation. The group contended the plans omitted key details about personnel, equipment and methods that would be used to contain and clean up oil that could be released from a rupture of a 4-mile-long (6.4-kilometer long) underwater segment of the pipeline that extends through the Straits of Mackinac. PHMSA responded that Enbridge had satisfied the requirements by contracting with oil spill removal organizations that the U.S. Coast Guard recognized as having necessary resources. Goldsmith acknowledged Enbridge had an extensively detailed "master service agreement" with the contractors. But the Detroit-based judge said PHMSA still "did not articulate a satisfactory explanation for its decision to approve the response plans." The wildlife federation also said the pipeline agency was legally required to prepare an environmental analysis and consider potential effects on endangered species but had failed to do so. Goldsmith ordered PHMSA to do both. FILE - In this July 19, 2002 file photo, the Mackinac Bridge that spans the Straits of Mackinac is shown from Mackinaw City, Mich. A federal judge has ordered The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to take a closer look at pipeline company Enbridge's plans for dealing with a potential oil spill in the waterway connecting Lakes Huron and Michigan. In a ruling Friday, March 29, 2019, U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith instructed the agency to provide more information about its reasons for approving the plans. (Dale G Young/Detroit News via AP, File) (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File) "This ruling confirms what we've known for years - Enbridge is not prepared for an oil spill, and the federal government is not doing enough to protect the Great Lakes," Beth Wallace of the wildlife federation said Monday. The pipeline agency was reviewing the decision and had no immediate comment, spokesman Bobby Fraser said. "We have thoroughly reviewed the response plan in place for the straits on the off-chance that anything were to happen, although we've never had an incident in the straits in 65 years," Enbridge spokesman Ryan Duffy said. PHMSA endorsed Enbridge's spill contingency plans for the pipeline network that includes Line 5 in 2015 and 2017. The latter plan covers the underwater section, which is divided into two pipes 20 inches (50.8 centimeters) in diameter. University studies have projected that a worst-case release of oil in the swirling straits could foul hundreds of miles of shoreline. Enbridge has said repeatedly the submerged pipes are in good condition and could last indefinitely. But the company, based in Calgary, Alberta, reached an agreement last year with former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to decommission that section of Line 5 in favor of a new pipe that would be routed through a tunnel drilled in bedrock beneath the straits. However, Michigan's recently elected attorney general, Dana Nessel, ruled last week that a law enacted in December to carry out the agreement violates the state constitution. Snyder's successor, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, then ordered state agencies not to issue permits or take other steps toward implementing the deal. Enbridge says it plans to discuss its next steps with Whitmer administration officials. ___ Follow John Flesher on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/johnflesher EL PASO, Texas (AP) - President Donald Trump's threat to shut down the southern border raised fears Monday of dire economic consequences in the U.S. and an upheaval of daily life in a stretch of the country that relies on the international flow of not just goods and services but also students, families and workers. Politicians, business leaders and economists warned that such a move would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping. "Let's hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools' joke," said economist Dan Griswold at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. He said Trump's threat would be the "height of folly," noting that an average of 15,000 trucks and $1.6 billion in goods cross the border every day. "If trade were interrupted, U.S. producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and U.S. exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market," he said. Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point. Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict "severe economic harm." Vehicles from Mexico and the U.S. approach a border crossing in El Paso, Texas, Monday, April 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Cedar Attanasio) In California's Imperial Valley, across from Mexicali, Mexico, farmers rely on workers who come across every day from Mexico to harvest fields of lettuce, carrots, onions and other winter vegetables. Shopping mall parking lots in the region are filled with cars with Mexican plates. More than 60 percent of all Mexican winter produce consumed in the U.S. crosses into the country at Nogales, Arizona. The winter produce season is especially heavy right now, with the import of Mexican-grown watermelons, grapes and squash, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas. He said 11,000 to 12,000 commercial trucks cross the border at Nogales daily, laden with about 50 million pounds of produce such as eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, cucumbers and berries. He said a closing of the border would lead to immediate layoffs and result in shortages and price increases at grocery stores and restaurants. "If this happens - and I certainly hope it doesn't - I'd hate to go into a grocery store four or five days later and see what it looks like," Jungmeyer said. Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, said a closure would be catastrophic. "Closing the border would cause an immediate depression in border state communities and, depending on the duration, a recession in the rest of the country," he said. "Our business would end," said Marta Salas, an employee at an El Paso shop near the border that sells plastic flowers that are used on the Mexican side by families holding quinceaneras, the traditional coming-of-age celebrations. Salas said her whole family, including relatives who attend the University of Texas at El Paso, would be affected if the border were closed. "There are Americans who live there. I have nephews who come to UTEP, to grade school, to high school every day," Salas said. Meanwhile, the Trump administration said Monday as many as 2,000 U.S. inspectors who screen cargo and vehicles at ports of entry along the Mexican border may be reassigned to help handle the surge of migrants. Currently, about 750 inspectors are being reassigned. That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border. The effects were evident Monday: Sergio Amaya, a 24-year-old American citizen who lives in Juarez, Mexico, and attends UTEP, said it normally takes him two minutes to cross the bridge. It took an hour this time. "The Border Patrol agent said it's going to get worse," Amaya said. Instead of ensuring the flow of goods across the border, the inspectors are being put to work processing migrants, taking their applications for asylum and transporting them to holding centers. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the reassignments are necessary to help manage the huge influx that is overloading the system. "The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it," Nielsen said. In addition to reassigning inspectors, Nielsen has asked for volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress requesting resources and broader authority to deport families faster. The administration is also ramping up efforts to return asylum seekers to Mexico. Apprehensions all along the southern border have soared in recent months, with border agents on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry there in March, more than half of them families with children. ___ Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington, Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Nomaan Merchant in Houston and Anita Snow in Phoenix contributed to this story. Cars and trucks line up to enter Mexico from the U.S. at a border crossing in El Paso, Texas, Friday, March 29, 2019. Threatening drastic action against Mexico, President Donald Trump declared on Friday he is likely to shut down America's southern border next week unless Mexican authorities immediately halt all illegal immigration. Such a severe move could hit the economies of both countries, but the president emphasized, "I am not kidding around." (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) El Paso resident Adriann Romero holds 9-month-old Andres in her lap as they drive across a border crossing to El Paso, Texas, Monday, April 1, 2019. Romero spent over two hours on the bridge trying to get home after visiting her mother in Juarez over the weekend. (AP Photo/Cedar Attanasio) Central American migrants wait for food in El Paso, Texas, Wednesday, March 27, 2019, in a pen erected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to process a surge of migrant families and unaccompanied minors. Earlier, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, center, announced the the Trump administration will temporarily reassign several hundred border inspectors, during a news conference at the border in El Paso. (AP Photo/Cedar Attanasio) HOUSTON (AP) - The U.S. Coast Guard says it's unclear when the Houston Ship Channel will fully reopen as crews continue cleaning up chemicals that seeped into one of America's busiest shipping lanes following a fire at a petrochemical storage facility. Coast Guard Capt. Rich Howes said Monday that cleanup crews are making headway and that more than 2.5 million gallons of an oily water mixture has been removed. Part of the ship channel was closed after a fire erupted March 17 at the Intercontinental Terminals Company facility in Deer Park. The fire burned for days and triggered air quality warnings. The closed portion was reopened but only during daylight hours. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says elevated benzene levels were detected over the weekend, but that residents are not in danger. In a Wednesday, March 20, 2019 photo, maritime traffic moves through the Houston Ship Chanel past the site of now-extinguished petrochemical tank fire at Intercontinental Terminals Company in Deer Park, Texas. Air quality and water pollution from the fire's runoff, seen on the right, into the ship channel are some of the concerns in the aftermath of the blaze. (Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via AP) WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on former Vice President Joe Biden (all times local): 7 p.m. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says women's assertions that Joe Biden touched them inappropriately years ago are not a reason for the former vice president to abandon the idea of running for president. The California Democrat says in brief comments to The Associated Press, "I don't think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all." She declined to discuss why she felt that way. Pelosi has been a champion of the #MeToo movement opposing sexual harassment. Pelosi spoke on a day when a second woman publicly described what she considered inappropriate behavior by Biden. FILE - In this March 12, 2019, file photo, former Vice President Joe Biden speaks to the International Association of Firefighters at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington. Biden says he does not recall kissing a Nevada political candidate on the back of her head in 2014. The allegation was made in a New York Magazine article written by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor. Flores says Biden's behavior "made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused."(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File) The former vice president and long-time senator is considering a run for the Democratic presidential nomination. He has said he doesn't think he's acted inappropriately, but says men should pay attention when women discuss their experiences. __ 6:10 p.m. Aides to Joe Biden are striking a more aggressive tone as the former vice president faces scrutiny over his past behavior toward women. Biden spokesman Bill Russo is blasting "right wing trolls" from "the dark recesses of the internet" for conflating images of Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends with uninvited touching. The move comes on a day in which a second woman has said Biden once touched her inappropriately. The allegation by Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Hines of Connecticut, followed an essay by former Nevada politician Lucy Flores, who said Biden kissed her on the back of the head. __ 1:50 p.m. Joe Biden is pushing back against comparisons of the former vice president's embrace of women during official ceremonies and an allegation he touched a Nevada Democratic candidate without invitation. Aides say specifically that an image of Biden with his hands on the shoulders of Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, during his 2015 swearing-in was misleadingly used to bolster the claim by 2014 Nevada lieutenant governor nominee Lucy Flores. Stephanie Ashcroft wrote in a Medium piece Sunday that "it is high time that I reclaim" the story, which she writes included Biden comforting her when she was nervous. Biden says he does not recall Flores' allegation in a Friday New York Magazine piece that he approached her from behind, touched her shoulders and kissed her head. ___ 12:15 a.m. Former Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday defended his interactions with women, saying he doesn't believe he's ever acted inappropriately. But a Nevada politician's assertion that Biden's kiss on the back of her head made her feel uncomfortable prompted some Democrats to question whether the 76-year-old is too out of step with his own party to run a successful 2020 presidential campaign. The episode, recounted by Democrat Lucy Flores, highlighted an aspect of Biden's persona that has been publicly known for years: the affectionate whispers, hugs and shoulder squeezes he has long doled out to women, often on camera and at high-profile public events. In a moment of national reckoning over sexual harassment and the treatment of women by powerful men. BALTIMORE (AP) - The Latest on revelations about Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh's lucrative deals to sell her self-published children's books (all times local): 5:35 p.m. At least one Baltimore City Council member is calling for Mayor Catherine Pugh to resign as a scandal intensifies over allegations of "self-dealing" arrangements to sell her children's book series. Councilman Zeke Cohen says Pugh has "lost the moral mandate to govern and the public's trust." Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot has also urged her to resign. Cohen, Franchot and Pugh are Democrats. Cohen notes that Pugh accepted over $100,000 from Kaiser Permanente for her "Healthy Holly" children's books while the company was seeking a contract to provide health benefits to city employees. Cohen says that instead of recusing herself from a Board of Estimates vote when the contract came up "she voted in favor of it." FILE - In this June 8, 2018 file photo, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh addresses a gathering during the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Boston. Baltimore's mayor says a lucrative arrangement to sell her self-published children's books to a health care system was a "regrettable mistake." In a Thursday, March 28, 2019 press conference, Mayor Catherine Pugh provided four pages of paperwork that she says details production of thousands of her "Healthy Holly" illustrated books and deliveries to Baltimore's school system. Since 2011, Pugh received $500,000 selling her illustrated books to the University of Maryland Medical System. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File) Pugh announced Monday she is taking an indefinite leave of absence due to deteriorating health. Her spokespeople say she was recently diagnosed with pneumonia. ___ 4:45 p.m. Baltimore's mayor is taking an indefinite leave of absence as a political scandal about "self-dealing" book sales intensifies. In a Monday statement, Pugh's office says she has been "advised by her physicians that she needs to take time to recover and focus on her health." It says she feels as though she is unable to fulfill her obligations as mayor due to deteriorating health. Her announcement comes shortly after Maryland's governor called on the state prosecutor to investigate allegations against Pugh and Maryland's comptroller called on her to resign. The City Council president will take over Pugh's day-to-day responsibilities. ___ 3:55 p.m. Maryland's governor has called on the state prosecutor to investigate allegations of self-dealing involving Baltimore's mayor. In a letter to the state prosecutor released Monday, Gov. Larry Hogan says allegations facing Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh are "deeply disturbing." Hogan says he's particularly concerned about a $500,000 sale to a university-based health care system "because it has significant continuing ties with the State and receives very substantial public funding." The Republican governor's request came shortly after Maryland's comptroller called on Pugh to resign. Also Monday, Kaiser Permanente disclosed that it paid $114,000, between 2015 and 2018, for roughly 20,000 copies of Pugh's self-published "Healthy Holly" illustrated paperbacks for children. ___ 2:35 p.m. Maryland's chief accountant is calling for Baltimore's mayor to step down, calling the latest revelations about lucrative deals to sell her self-published children's books "brazen, cartoonish corruption." In a Monday tweet, Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot wrote: "The Mayor has to resign - now." His comments came on the same day that Kaiser Permanente disclosed that it paid Mayor Catherine Pugh's limited liability company about $114,000 for roughly 20,000 copies of her "Healthy Holly" children's books. Those purchases came during a period when the health provider sought a city contract. Pugh became mayor in 2016. The next year, Baltimore's spending board, which is controlled by the mayor, awarded a $48 million contract to the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic. Calls to Pugh's attorney were not immediately returned Monday. CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - The Latest on Venezuela's Crisis (all times local): 5 p.m. Venezuela's chief justice is asking pro-government lawmakers to strip opposition leader Juan Guaido of immunity from prosecution. The request by Supreme Court Justice Maikel Moreno on Monday takes a further step toward prosecuting Guaido for alleged crimes. Guaido is seeking to oust President Nicolas Maduro with support from the United States among some 50 countries who declared Maduro's presidency as illegitimate. Moreno is a political ally of the Maduro. Moreno asked the pro-Maduro National Constituent Assembly to waive immunity Guaido holds as a member of Venezuela's National Assembly. Juan Guaido, Venezuelan opposition leader and self-proclaimed interim president, attends a meeting at a university in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, April 1, 2019. He's backed by more than 50 nations, which consider Nicolas Maduro's presidency illegitimate following what they call sham elections last year. "We must unite now more than ever," said Guaido, speaking at the university. "We must mount the biggest demonstration so far to reject what's happening." (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) Officials loyal to Maduro have already said that Guaido is under investigation for inciting violence against the government and receiving illicit funds. __ 4 p.m. Venezuelans struggled on Monday to understand an announcement by President Nicolas Maduro that the nation's electricity is being rationed to combat daily blackouts. Office worker Raquel Mayorca said she didn't know if her lights were off because of another power failure - or whether it was part of the government's plans. "We are worse off now more than ever," she said, adding that the power was out on one side of the street, but working on the other. "We do not know if the light went out due to a blackout, or whether they took it away because of the rationing." A day earlier, Maduro said that he was instituting a 30-day plan that would balance generation and transmission with consumption. He also called on Venezuelans to stay calm, but provided no further details. Meanwhile, opposition leader Juan Guaido continued his calls for Maduro to step down and appeared to use the blackouts as political capital, saying years of neglect by the socialist government had left the grid in shambles. "We must unite now more than ever," said Guaido at a Caracas university on Monday. "We must mount the biggest demonstration so far to reject what's happening." As the lack of electricity became the latest sticking point in an ongoing political standoff, however, many Venezuelans simply found themselves wondering what the newly announced rationing plan would entail. BALTIMORE (AP) - Baltimore's embattled mayor announced Monday that she is taking an indefinite leave of absence, just as a political scandal intensifies over what critics call a "self-dealing" book-sales arrangement that threatens her political career. Mayor Catherine Pugh's office says she feels unable to fulfill her obligations as mayor due to deteriorating health brought on by a recent bout of pneumonia. "She's been advised by her physicians that she needs to take time to recover," her office's statement said, adding that the City Council president will take over the Democratic mayor's day-to-day responsibilities. The first-term mayor's abrupt decision to go on leave indefinitely came the same day that Maryland's Republican governor asked the state prosecutor to investigate corruption accusations against the leader of Maryland's biggest city and the state's comptroller, a Democrat, urged Pugh to resign immediately. In a letter to the state prosecutor released Monday, Gov. Larry Hogan said allegations facing Pugh and her questionable no-contract arrangements to sell her "Healthy Holly" children's books are "deeply disturbing." Hogan said he was particularly concerned about $500,000 in sales over seven years to a university-based health care system "because it has significant continuing ties with the State and receives very substantial public funding." Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot did not mince words: "The Mayor has to resign - now. The people of Baltimore are facing too many serious challenges, as it is, to also deal with such brazen, cartoonish corruption from their chief executive." Some emboldened members of Baltimore's City Council also want Pugh to resign. Councilman Zeke Cohen asserted Monday that she's "lost the moral mandate to govern and the public's trust." Another councilman, Ryan Dorsey, described Pugh as "an embarrassment to the city." FILE - In this Dec. 6, 2016 file photo, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh delivers an address during her inauguration ceremony inside the War Memorial Building in Baltimore. Maryland's chief accountant is calling for Pugh to step down, calling the latest revelations about lucrative deals to sell her self-published children's books "brazen, cartoonish corruption." In a Monday, April 1, 2019 tweet, Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot wrote: "The Mayor has to resign - now." His comments came on the same day that Kaiser Permanente disclosed that it paid Pugh's limited liability company about $114,000 for roughly 20,000 copies of her "Healthy Holly" children's books. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File) The various officials' calls came shortly after Kaiser Permanente disclosed that it paid $114,000, between 2015 and 2018, for roughly 20,000 copies of Pugh's self-published "Healthy Holly" illustrated paperbacks for children. And it came about two weeks after news broke that since 2011, Pugh has received $500,000 selling her illustrated books to the University of Maryland Medical System, a $4 billion hospital network that's one of the largest private employers in the state. Pugh became Baltimore's mayor in 2016. The next year, Baltimore's spending board, which is controlled by the mayor, awarded a $48 million contract to the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States Inc. Kaiser previously held that contract. When asked who Kaiser bought the books from, company spokesman Scott Lusk said: "We purchased the books from Healthy Holly, LLC." That is Pugh's company, which she has said was meant to encourage healthy lifestyles. Cohen noted that Pugh accepted money from Kaiser for her "Healthy Holly" children's books at the same time the company was seeking a contract to provide health benefits to city employees. Instead of recusing herself from a Board of Estimates vote "she voted in favor of it," he said. Additionally, The Baltimore Sun reported that CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, another city health provider, effectively bought Pugh's roughly 20-page illustrated books for $14,500 in 2011 and 2014. In a subsequent email, a CareFirst spokesman said it made contributions to Associated Black Charities, or ABC, a nonprofit that manages the city's Children and Youth Fund, to fund its purchase and distribution of books. Associated Black Charities said in a statement that between 2011 and 2016, five organizations donated $87,180 to pay for the books, of which ABC kept $9,552 to use as "general support." The firm Pugh identified as her books' printer said it has produced only 60,000 copies and doesn't have any more orders from Pugh. She's only acknowledged sales of her book to UMMS and said they were meant to be distributed to city schools and day cares. The attorney representing the mayor, Steve Silverman, said the mayor looked "forward to cooperating with the state prosecutor and providing as much information as possible to put this matter to rest." Since the arrangement with UMMS came to light last month, Pugh has stepped down from the volunteer board and returned her most recent payment of $100,000 for the books. At a news conference last week, Pugh described the book deal with the university-based health care system as a "regrettable mistake" and suggested the school system needed to clear up confusion about where tens of thousands of books were. But the school system has failed to unearth copies of the books outside of nearly 9,000 copies found stacked in a warehouse. One of Maryland's largest private employers, the UMMS paid Pugh $500,000 for 100,000 copies of books. There was no contract behind the deal and the hospital network described some of the purchases as "grants" in federal filings. Pugh - who once sat on a state Senate committee that funded the major health network before becoming mayor- served on the system's board since 2001. One-third of UMMS board members received compensation through the medical system's arrangements with their businesses. Legislation is pending in Maryland's capital focusing on board governance. On Monday, John Ashworth, interim leader of the University of Maryland Medical System, said he believed nothing criminal took place by UMMS. But NYGREN has been chosen as an independent auditor, he said, to review financial relationships involving the UMMS and board members, among other things. They are due to start work this week. SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) - El Salvador's former first lady Ana Ligia de Saca has reached a deal to plead guilty to corruption charges related to her role in the laundering of $25 million in public money. Her husband, former President Tony Saca, is already serving a 10-year sentence for the diversion of $300 million in public funds to his companies and other people tied to him. Ligia's deal would give her an abbreviated legal process and community service instead of three years in prison. The deal was discussed during a court hearing Monday. Saca governed El Salvador from 2004 to 2009. Ligia was charged with 14 others for their roles in allegedly laundering $25 million in public money. MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico's top security official says he twice crossed illegally into the United States in his youth to work. La Jornada newspaper reported Monday that Public Safety Secretary Alfonso Durazo told a business gathering in the northern state of Sonora that out of economic necessity he went to the U.S. to wash cars and dishes. Durazo retweeted the newspaper's account Monday. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. President Donald Trump has threatened to close the border with Mexico this week unless Mexico stops the flow of immigrants to the U.S. border. On Sunday, Mexico announced it would begin granting humanitarian visas again on a limited basis to some of the 2,500 Central American and Caribbean migrants currently in the southern state of Chiapas. ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) - Johns Hopkins University will be allowed to create its own armed police force, under a measure that received final approval by the Maryland General Assembly on Monday night. The Maryland Senate voted 42-2 to pass the bill. That sends the measure to Gov. Larry Hogan, and a spokesman for the Republican governor said he will likely sign the bill. "The governor looks forward to reviewing the final legislation, but he appreciates the support the Johns Hopkins police force initiative has received from both sides of the aisle, and strongly believes it will help make Baltimore City a safer place," said Michael Ricci, Hogan's spokesman. The measure has sparked debate between those who want to increase campus safety as Baltimore struggles with violent crime and those who fear police profiling. The legislation would allow the private institution to have its own police force at its academic campuses and main medical campus in Baltimore. In addition to support in both chambers of the General Assembly, which is controlled by Democrats, supporters have included billionaire alumnus Michael Bloomberg and Democratic U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings. Opponents have included a group called Students Against Private Police, which has led multiple protests, and faculty members, as well as people who live near the university. Sen. Mary Washington, a Democrat who is one of two Baltimore senators who voted against the bill, said Monday night that she thought the measure created a foundation for campus policies and new police forces, but she said she still had concerns that an accountability board should be broadened. "And I do fundamentally believe that policing should be a publicly controlled entity and that privatization is not the way to go," Washington said. Efforts to create a police force for the university in Baltimore began after a spate of robberies in late 2017. Researchers at the school examined trends at Baltimore universities equipped with armed police and found Hopkins had a disproportionate number of aggravated assaults, according to Ronald Daniels, the university's president. While state law allows public institutions to have police departments, a private institution like Hopkins needed the legislation. The university said in a statement that the institution's work is just beginning, with many steps to come in the process of building a Johns Hopkins Police Department. "We also understand that differences of opinion remain on this topic, and we are firmly committed to working with our students, staff, faculty and neighbors to consider varying viewpoints and ensure public accountability, public transparency and public input within a JHPD," the university said. ___ This version corrects spelling of university president's name to Daniels. WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg said Monday that he's raised more than $7 million this year. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor tweeted his team's initial report early Monday, saying he and his supporters "are out-performing expectations at every turn." Later Monday, he posted a video saying 158,550 donors had contributed to his campaign. He said 64% of the total raised came through contributions of less than $200. "This is a great look for our first quarter," said Buttigieg, who launched his presidential exploratory committee two months ago. California Sen. Kamala Harris said her presidential campaign has raised $12 million this year, from more than 218,000 individual contributions. Her campaign also touted its small-dollar fundraising operation, noting that 98% of contributions were under $100, and saying nearly all of her donors can donate again. Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke said he raised slightly more than $1 million over the weekend, achieving a fundraising goal. In this March 23, 2019, photo, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg arrives to speak about his presidential run during the Democratic monthly breakfast at the Circle of Friends Community Center in Greenville, S.C. Buttigieg was the longest of long shots when he announced a presidential exploratory committee in January. But now the underdog bid is gaining momentum, and Buttigieg can feel it. (AP Photo/Richard Shiro) In this March 23, 2019, photo, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks to a crowd about his presidential run during the Democratic monthly breakfast at the Circle of Friends Community Center in Greenville, S.C. Buttigieg was the longest of long shots when he announced a presidential exploratory committee in January. But now the underdog bid is gaining momentum, and Buttigieg can feel it. (AP Photo/Richard Shiro) South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks to a crowd about his Presidential run during the Democratic monthly breakfast held at the Circle of Friends Community Center in Greenville, S.C. Saturday, March 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Shiro) Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks during his presidential campaign rally kickoff in Austin, Texas, in front of the pink-granite state Capitol, Saturday, March 30, 2019. (AP Photo/Clarice Silber) Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks during his presidential campaign kickoff rally in Houston, Saturday, March 30, 2019. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) KUAL LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - The murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half brother at an airport in Malaysia was brazen, intricately orchestrated and, thanks to scores of security cameras, witnessed by millions around the world. The real masterminds behind the killing, however, may never be brought to justice. The murder charge was dropped against an Indonesian woman, who was freed last month. Her co-defendant, a Vietnamese woman who is the only suspect in custody, pleaded guilty - not to murder, but to the lesser charge of using a deadly weapon to cause injury - and will be freed as early as next month. Her guilty plea and sentencing on Monday concluded more than two years of legal proceedings. But it cleared up none of the mystery. Here's a look back at the crime, the missing masterminds and the ending. ___ FILE - In this June 4, 2010, file photo, Kim Jong Nam, the eldest son of then North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, waves after his first-ever interview with South Korean media in Macau. The murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half-brother at an airport in Malaysia was brazen, intricately orchestrated and, thanks to scores of security cameras, witnessed by millions around the world. The real masterminds behind the killing, however, may never be brought to justice. (Shin In-seop/JoongAng Ilbo via AP, File) THE CRIME On Feb. 13, 2017, when Kim Jong Nam appeared at a check-in counter at a Kuala Lumpur airport terminal, he was jumped by two women who smeared something on his face. He soon began to feel ill, found his way to a medical station and was taken by ambulance to a hospital. He was dead within a matter of hours. The women - Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam - were arrested soon afterward. Huong was seen on security video wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "LOL" across the chest. The video, and video of the chubby, blue jean-clad victim staggering around before his death, went viral. From the start, this was obviously no ordinary crime. Aisyah and Huong were accused of using VX nerve agent, a poison developed for military use, and the victim was the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and half brother of current leader Kim Jong Un. For a time, Kim Jong Nam had been seen, at least by outside experts, as a potential heir to the country's leadership. But he was caught, and humiliated, trying to enter Japan in 1998 to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He ended up in de facto exile, spending most of his time in Macau, a Chinese territory famous for its casinos. By the time of his death, he wasn't part of the North Korean political scene. But his freedom to reside in Macau indicated he had some Chinese support. It's possible he was seen by some as a viable replacement if Kim Jong Un were ever to be removed from power. Soon after Kin Jong Nam's murder, his son, Kim Han Sol, appeared in a YouTube video in which he claimed he, his mother and sister were under the protective care of a group calling itself "Cheollima Civil Defense." The same group is believed to be behind an attack on the North Korean Embassy in Madrid last month in which 10 people allegedly shackled and gagged embassy staff before escaping with computers, hard drives and documents. ___ THE MISSING MASTERMINDS Malaysian officials have never officially accused North Korea of involvement in Kim's death. North Korea has denied any involvement. But prosecutors made it clear throughout the trial they suspected a North Korean connection. Four North Korean suspects were seen on airport security video discarding their belongings and changing their clothing after the attack. The North Korean Embassy has also been implicated, with an embassy official helping obtain flights out of Malaysia for the four men, and using the name of one of its citizens to buy a car that took the suspects to the airport. At Malaysia's request, Interpol issued a "red notice" for the four North Koreans wanted in connection with the killing. Investigators said the North Korean suspects met the women at the airport and were believed to have provided them with the VX nerve agent used in the murder. The North Koreans are suspected of scouting and training the women, who say they thought they were taking part in a candid camera-style prank show for television. Malaysian police believe the North Korean suspects flew out of the country the day of the killing and returned to Pyongyang. Investigations into Kim's death led to a diplomatic spat between Malaysia and North Korea. Malaysia scrapped visa-free entry for North Koreans and expelled North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol after he rejected Malaysia's investigation and insisted the victim was an ordinary citizen who died of a heart attack. Kang Chol also accused Kuala Lumpur of colluding with outside forces to defame North Korea. North Korea then banned Malaysians in its country from leaving, entrapping three diplomats and six of their family members. The nine Malaysians were only allowed to fly back after Malaysia released Kim's body to North Korea and allowed the North Koreans to leave, including an embassy official and a North Korean Air Koryo employee wanted by police for questioning over Kim's death. Following last year's summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Malaysia's government has said it may re-establish ties with North Korea and reopen its embassy in Pyongyang. ___ THE ENDING With the North Korean suspects missing, the two women were left to face the charges. After some high-level lobbying by Indonesia's government, the Malaysian attorney general decided to drop the murder case against Aisyah on March 11. Aisyah, 26, cried and hugged her Vietnamese co-defendant before leaving the courtroom. She was driven away in an Indonesian Embassy car and then flown back to Jakarta, where she thanked the president and other officials for their help. "I feel happy, very happy that I cannot express in words," she told reporters at Jakarta's airport. "After this I just want to gather with my family." Huong, 30, also sought to be released after Aisyah was freed, but prosecutors rejected her request. Both had faced a murder charge that carried the death penalty if they were convicted. Prosecutors on Monday said they were offering Huong a reduced charge, and High Court judge Azmi Ariffin sentenced her to three years and four months from the day she was arrested, telling her she was "very, very lucky" and wishing her "all the best." Vietnamese officials in the courtroom cheered when the decision was announced. Her lawyer, Hisyam Teh Poh Teik, said she is expected to be freed by the first week of May, after a one-third reduction in her sentence for good behavior. He said four North Korean suspects still at large were the "real assassins." As she was being escorted out of the court building, Huong shouted to reporters: "It's very good. I love you." She told reporters earlier that she wants to "sing and act" when she returns to Vietnam. ___ Talmadge, the AP's Pyongyang bureau chief, contributed to this report from Tokyo. FILE - This file image provided by Star TV of closed circuit television footage from Feb. 13, 2017, shows Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong, left, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang. The murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half-brother at an airport in Malaysia was brazen, intricately orchestrated and, thanks to scores of security cameras, witnessed by millions around the world. The real masterminds behind the killing, however, may never be brought to justice. (Star TV via AP, File) FILE - In this Interpol website file photo released on March 16, 2017 shows Interpol's red notice for North Korea's Jong Gil O. National police chief Khalid Abu Bakar told reporters that four North Korean suspects who left Malaysia on the same day as the killing of Kim Jong Nam have been put on Interpol's red notice list, which is a request to locate and hold a person pending extradition. The murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half-brother at an airport in Malaysia was brazen, intricately orchestrated and, thanks to scores of security cameras, witnessed by millions around the world. The real masterminds behind the killing, however, may never be brought to justice. (Interpol via AP, File) FILE - In this March 11, 2019, file photo, Indonesian Siti Aisyah, center, smiles as she leaves Shah Alam High Court in Shah Alam, Malaysia. The murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half-brother at an airport in Malaysia was brazen, intricately orchestrated and, thanks to scores of security cameras, witnessed by millions around the world. The real masterminds behind the killing, however, may never be brought to justice. (AP Photo/Yam G-Jun, File) SYDNEY (AP) - The family of an Australian man who was detained for a year and is now unable to leave Egypt has called on the Australian government to help get him out of the country. Brisbane resident Hazem Hamouda was arrested in Cairo in January 2018 after arriving there with his family for a holiday. Egyptian police accused him of having links to Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned in Egypt, and of spreading falsities online - allegations his family denies. While Hamouda was freed from jail in February this year, Egyptian authorities stopped him boarding a Brisbane-bound flight in Cairo last month, despite Australian consular officials having escorted him to the airport. Hamouda's 30-year-old daughter Lamisse Hamouda called on Australian leaders to petition Egypt for her father's release. "We fear he could be rearrested at any point," she said Tuesday. "We're a bit on tenterhooks at the moment. We just don't want any trouble whatsoever at the airport." Hamouda's family and his lawyer, Jen Robinson, have asked for the Australian government to provide the maximum level of support possible to help ensure his exit in the near future. "It would be really great to see a public statement from either Marise Payne or Scott Morrison in support of dad and his safe return home to Australia," Lamisse Hamouda said. Little information about the allegations against Hamouda was provided to his family members. They've been left to speculate the accusations may be linked to Facebook posts Hamouda made during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. Lamisse Hamouda said her father's arrival in Cairo coincided with the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution - Jan. 25 - and that increased security on the day was likely to have brought him to attention of authorities. SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) - Back in Nicaragua, she owned her own home and made enough as an elementary substitute teacher and lawyers' assistant to eke out a stable, if not luxurious, life. Now she spends her days on the streets in and around Costa Rica's capital begging for spare change and clutching a can decorated with Nicaragua's blue-and-white flag, an unmistakable reminder to pedestrians of the political turbulence that has claimed hundreds of lives in her native country. "I never did this before," said the 53-year-old woman, who asked to be identified only by her nickname, "the teacher," for fear of retaliation against loved ones back home. "We were modest," she said, "but life (there) is cheaper." The fate of the estimated 50,000 Nicaraguans who've fled violence and persecution for exile in Costa Rica over the last year is a central point in fledgling peace talks between Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's government and the opposition, which is demanding guarantees for their safe return. But while negotiators in Managua haggle over that and other thorny issues with little progress, many exiles are struggling. Some formerly middle-class citizens are having trouble putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads, while others from the working class are reduced to living in near-indigence. The most vulnerable among them have become "the forgotten among the forgotten," said Esteban Beltran of Amnesty International Spain, who recently visited Costa Rica to document their plight. In this March 29, 2019 photo, Nicaraguan exile, who wishes to only be identified by her nickname "La Profe", Spanish for "the teacher", begs for spare change in Alajuela, Costa Rica. She fled during the so-called Operation Cleanup launched by Daniel Ortega last July, which the United Nations has termed a "witch hunt" aimed at suppressing dissent. She holds a sign with a message that reads in Spanish: "I am Nicaraguan and I need 5 or 10 colones to be able to buy food and pay for a roof to sleep under. Hands that give are never empty. May God bless Costa Rica and Nicaragua." (AP Photo/Carlos Gonzalez) Like many others, the teacher fled during the so-called Operation Cleanup launched by Ortega last July, which the United Nations has termed a "witch hunt" aimed at suppressing dissent. In her hometown of Diriamba, paramilitary forces aligned with Ortega's government left a trail of dead and wounded, she said. Her offense was feeding and supporting student protesters. One day as she brought them breakfast, gunshots rang out. "I don't know how I'm alive," she said. "They were grabbing everybody." The only thing to do was run. Like many exiles she ended up in La Carpio, a shantytown on the outskirts of the Costa Rican capital, San Jose, where the number of Nicaraguans has swelled since the protests began last April, though nobody's sure by how much. It's a neighborhood of cement and sheet-metal homes where sleeping quarters and a latrine often occupy a single space. Water is scarce, trash piles up in the streets and sewage flows in open channels. Even before the latest influx of Nicaraguan refugees, half of the estimated 18,000 people in the neighborhood lived in inadequate homes and 70 percent of households subsisted on less than $330 per month, according to a government study last year. The $3 that the teacher is able to beg on a bad day isn't nearly enough and like others she relies heavily on aid from churches and help from neighbors who are in equally precarious situations. Still lacking a work permit after eight months, she's sleeping on the floor of a rented, 300-square-foot (30-square-meter) house along with her two adult children, two grandchildren and six others from another family. On a recent day the only things in the pantry were a packet of pasta, a Nicaraguan flag and a Bible. While asylum-seekers are guaranteed the right to work, the sheer number of Nicaraguans has overwhelmed Costa Rica's system for processing such requests. Authorities are able to handle only about 600 asylum applications per week, and securing work permits involves yet another bureaucratic hurdle. So far only 8,000 have secured work permits compared with the nearly 29,000 who have received credentials as asylum-seekers. More than 20,000 are awaiting appointments. Last week Amnesty urged the Costa Rican government to put an aid plan in place for Nicaraguan refugees with help from the international community, including identifying the most vulnerable and fast-tracking access to basic services they have a right to and may not be aware of. Costa Rica's government said the plan is ready and simply awaiting presidential sign-off. Ortega's government did not respond to a request for comment. Ortega officials have had little to say about exiles, though in a recent speech the president compared all opposition supporters to Cain, the biblical figure who killed his brother Abel out of envy. Peace talks between Ortega's government and the opposition Civic Alliance began Feb. 27, but progress has come in fits and starts. The government has freed more than 160 jailed government opponents to house arrest, but hundreds more remain behind bars under a slow release plan that's supposed to take place over 90 days. On Friday the government and the opposition reached two accords, one of which supposedly restored the right to demonstrate freely - only for police to forcefully break up a protest the following day during which an apparent government sympathizer shot at demonstrators who sought refuge in a mall. Recently the government also emphatically rejected calls for early elections scheduled for 2021, another central opposition demand. So there's plenty of skepticism among exiles that Ortega officials will abide by another deal struck Friday: that Nicaraguans who fled can return "with full guarantees of personal and family security." "In Nicaragua we say about Ortega, 'You may sign, but you'll never follow through,'" said Cesar Gutierrez, 63. Gutierrez is a regular at gatherings where he and fellow exiles plan demonstrations, coordinate with government opponents back in Nicaragua, share news of home gleaned from the internet and gossip about the latest from the talks. He said he'll believe Ortega is acting in good faith only when all prisoners are released and freedoms of speech and assembly are restored - two other core Civic Alliance demands, along with the annulment of trials, convictions and arrest warrants for government opponents. "The disarming of the paramilitaries" is a must, Gutierrez added, "because otherwise they are going to bully us. Then it will be the moment to think about how we return." Gutierrez, a former fighter in the revolution that first brought Ortega to power in 1979, later soured on the president, joined the protests and fled after receiving threats against his life and home. He, too, is living in La Carpio, taken in by a family friend who is letting him sleep in the living room of her modest home where seven others also live. He scrapes by selling homemade cheese to fellow exiles after leaving his family back home and his businesses, a bakery and some billiard halls. At least 168 Nicaraguan exiles are wanted due to their political activities, opposition leaders say. Among them is Sadie Rivas, who slipped across the border in August after being accused of a laundry list of crimes more associated with a narco-kingpin than a 19-year-old college student: torture, terrorism, money laundering, drug trafficking, weapons possession, destruction of public property, disturbing the peace. Such accusations are typical in cases against protesters, and both they and international observers call them groundless. Rivas' father and brother remain in hiding in Nicaragua, moving from safe house to safe house. Her mother joined her in San Jose after being targeted for arrest for sheltering and feeding her daughter - "covering for terrorists," as the government charges. An artist who made artisanal soaps and jewelry back home, Rivas and her mother now clean houses and wait tables. Like Gutierrez they're fortunate enough not to be living in slum conditions, but it's not the life they're used to. Rivas plans to return but thinks opposition negotiators at the talks need to be more aggressive. "They have to be more demanding," she said. "We exiles are an important element." ___ Verza reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writers Carlos Gonzalez and Javier Cordoba in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Gabriela Selser in Managua, Nicaragua, contributed to this report. This March 29, 2019 photo shows a bird's eye view of La Carpio, a shantytown on the outskirts of San Jose, Costa Rica. The number of Nicaraguan exiles living in La Carpio has swelled since the Nicaraguan protests that began last April. It's a neighborhood of cement and sheet-metal homes where sleeping quarters and a latrine often occupy a single space. (AP Photo/Carlos Gonzalez) In this March 23, 2019 photo, Francia Leon cooks rice in her home in the La Carpio shantytown, on the outskirts of San Jose, Costa Rica. Many Nicaraguan exiles, formerly working-class citizens reduced to living in near-indigence, struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. (AP Photo/Carlos Gonzalez) In this March 23, 2019 photo, Nicaraguan exile Carlos Andres Monterrey poses for a photo in his home in San Jose, Costa Rica. Monterrey says he still can't forget the 20 hours he spent under fire by Nicaraguan government paramilitaries. (AP Photo/Carlos Gonzalez) MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Attorneys and the judge on Tuesday excused six potential jurors from the murder trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman who called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home. Mohamed Noor, 33, is charged in the July 2017 death of 40-year-old Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a life coach who was engaged to be married. Attorneys and the judge said they had examined the questionnaires filled out by roughly half of the potential 75 jurors, and they agreed to excuse six of them based on their written answers. One of the excused jurors wrote that he or she has negative feelings toward Somalis and believed Noor was a fast-track police hire. Noor is Somali-American. Another potential juror said he had already decided that Noor is innocent. Earlier, Hennepin County District Judge Kathryn Quaintance heard arguments on whether jurors at Noor's trial should see a "fly through" exhibit of the shooting scene. The prosecution wants to introduce a 3D scan of the Minneapolis neighborhood where Damond was shot. Authorities say Noor fired his gun once across his partner through the open driver's side window, striking and killing Damond. FILE - In this May 8, 2018, file photo, Mohamed Noor arrives at the Hennepin County Government Center for a hearing in Minneapolis. Jury selection is scheduled to begin, Monday, April 1, 2019, in the trial of the former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home. Noor is charged with murder in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond - a case that drew international attention and led to changes at the city's police department. He has pleaded not guilty. (AP Photo/Jim Mone, File) The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension used the scanner to document the scene. In court, the prosecution played a video showing where Noor's squad car was in relation to Damond's body in the alley where she died. The BCA also inserted lines showing potential bullet trajectories. But Noor's attorneys contend the video is inadmissible because it "inaccurately and prejudicially depicts what a person would actually see." Prosecutor Patrick Lofton told the judge that the videos will help jurors "understand what the scene is like." But defense attorney Thomas Plunkett argued that the evidence was novel in Minnesota and that the position of Damond's body had changed over the seven hours that the BCA took the images. Meanwhile, a coalition of media groups filed a motion Tuesday challenging Quaintance's plan to keep the media and public from seeing video evidence introduced at trial, including footage from officers' body cameras after the shooting. The outlets argued that the move is unconstitutional and won't accomplish Quaintance's stated goal of protecting Damond's privacy. "As this Court is aware, this is a murder trial involving allegations that a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed an unarmed woman while on duty," attorney Leita Walker wrote for the media coalition. "It goes without saying that there is significant public interest in this case, both in Minnesota and around the world. That high degree of interest counsels in favor of greater access to the trial, not less." Jury selection began Monday and resumes Wednesday. FILE - In this Dec. 21, 2017 file photo, John Ruszczyk makes a statement in Sydney, demanding a more rigorous probe into the fatal shooting of his daughter, Justine Ruszczyk Damond, by Minneapolis police. Jury selection is scheduled to begin, Monday, April 1, 2019, in the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot the unarmed Australian woman after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home. Mohamed Noor is charged with murder in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond - a case that drew international attention and led to changes at the city's police department. He has pleaded not guilty. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft, File) FILE - In this Aug. 11, 2017, file photo, Johanna Morrow plays the didgeridoo during a memorial service for Justine Ruszczyk Damond at Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. Jury selection is scheduled to begin, Monday, April 1, 2019, in the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot the unarmed Australian woman after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home. Mohamed Noor is charged with murder in the July 2017 death of Damond - a case that drew international attention and led to changes at the city's police department. He has pleaded not guilty. (Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP, File) This courtroom sketch depicts jury selection Monday, April 1, 2019, in Minneapolis in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, second from right, who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home. Noor is charged in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond in a case that drew international attention, cost the police chief her job and forced major revisions to the Police Department's policy on body cameras. (Cedric Hohnstadt via AP) Former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, left, and his attorneys Peter Wold, center, and Thomas Plunkett, right, made their way out of court at the Hennepin County Government Center, Monday, April 1, 2019 in Minneapolis, Minn. (Elizabeth Flores/Star Tribune via AP) Former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor leaves the Hennepin County Government Center after the first day of trial in Minneapolis on Monday, April 1, 2019. Noor is charged in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, who was killed after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home. (Evan Frost/Minnesota Public Radio via AP) SYDNEY (AP) - The Australian lawmaker who had an egg cracked on his head by a teenage boy for his comments about last month's New Zealand mosque shootings faced a stinging attack on Tuesday in the first sitting of Australia's Parliament since the attacks. Independent Sen. Fraser Anning was the target of widespread condemnation after the Christchurch shootings, in which 50 people died, when he blamed the massacre on immigration policies that he said allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand. Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant has been charged with murder in the shootings. After his comments, Anning faced more criticism for physically striking the teenager who cracked an egg on his head at a Melbourne public appearance - 17-year-old Will Connolly, who became known around the world as "Egg Boy." Anning will face an official censure motion in Parliament on Wednesday for the comments, which caused more than a million people to sign an online petition calling for his removal from the national legislature. But when Parliament resumed in Canberra on Tuesday following a monthlong break, one senior fellow lawmaker took the opportunity to lash out at Anning. Australian senator Fraser Anning arrives in the chamber at the start of the senate session Tuesday, April 2, 2019, at Parliament House in Canberra. Anning, whose comments about the New Zealand mosque shootings led to him having an egg cracked on his head by a teenage boy has faced a stinging attack in the first sitting of Australia's Parliament since last month's attacks. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk) Echoing Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's comment that Anning should be charged for striking Connolly, acting government Senate leader Simon Birmingham attacked Anning for his lack of humanity after the shootings. "The lack of compassion you have shown demonstrates, frankly, a basic lack of basic humanity," Birmingham told Anning, adding that his conduct "betrays the rights you have to freedom of speech." Birmingham said Anning acted in a way that would potentially fuel more acts of terrorism and violence. "You have failed the test of character I would expect of anybody who is elected to this place," he said. Birmingham's outburst came after Anning arrived at Parliament saying he had "no remorse" over his comments. Anning then used the Senate's question time to bring up the egging incident. He quizzed the government about its response to the episode, asking whether it believed politically motivated violence was acceptable in some circumstances. Birmingham accused Anning of drawing a comparison between his comments about the Christchurch massacre and the egging incident, and said it was an "appalling comparison." Wednesday's censure motion against Anning has support from both sides of Parliament. After New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern previously called Anning's comments on the shootings "a disgrace," her deputy Winston Peters on Tuesday called Anning a "jingoistic moron." "I would call him a four-flushing, jingoistic moron, but you already know that in Australia," Peters said in a television interview with Australia's Sky News. Immediately after Anning's response to the massacre last month, Morrison said the comments were "appalling and they're ugly and they have no place in Australia." Anning came under blistering criticism over tweets within hours of the massacre, 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 later statement. Australian senator Fraser Anning, center, bows his head in the chamber at the start of the senate session Tuesday, April 2, 2019, at Parliament House in Canberra. Anning, whose comments about the New Zealand mosque shootings led to him having an egg cracked on his head by a teenage boy has faced a stinging attack in the first sitting of Australia's Parliament since last month's attacks. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk) ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party on Tuesday appealed the results of local elections in Istanbul where preliminary results give the opposition a razor-thin victory, sounding confident that a recount will alter the outcome of the vote. Nationwide, Erdogan's conservative and Islamic-based party won a majority of votes in Sunday's elections, but lost its decades-old stronghold of Ankara to the opposition and is trailing in the tight race for Istanbul. The results, which are pending the appeals process, were one of Erdogan's most serious electoral setbacks in years. Bayram Senocak, the top official in Istanbul for the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, told reporters he had filed appeals to challenge results in all of the city's 39 districts. The party was seeking a recount to fix alleged irregularities as well as a reassessment of invalid votes. Some 319,578 votes in Istanbul that were declared void "can affect the result of the election," Senocak said. The party is also contesting results in 25 districts in Ankara, said Hakan Han Ozcan who heads the AKP in the capital. Ali Ihsan Yavuz, an AKP deputy chairman, called the elections "one of the most stained in our democratic history" - a claim the opposition Republican People's Party, or CHP, quickly rejected. Ekrem Imamoglu, seen at the center from the back, the main Turkish opposition's candidate for Istanbul is surrrounded by cheering supporters as he visits the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular republic's founder, in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party is appealing the results of the local elections in Istanbul, where the opposition has a razor-thin lead.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) "We won Ankara and Istanbul despite the fact that the conditions were not equal," said senior CHP official Muharrem Erkek, in an apparent reference to the fact that the government-dominated media had hardly covered the opposition. The ruling party is also frequently accused of using state resources to campaign. Erkek also accused the AKP of trying to win back the election "it lost in the ballot box" by trying to get the invalidated votes counted. "You should know how to accept defeat with maturity," he said. The CHP said it had objected to results in 22 Istanbul districts where it claims its votes were miscounted. The party said its votes in Istanbul would increase by nearly 5,000 after a recount. The district electoral boards have two days in which to consider the appeals. Meanwhile, the opposition's mayoral candidate for Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, traveled to Ankara, to pay respects at the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular republic founder, where large crowds gathered to meet him, chanting "mayor Ekrem." Imamoglu garnered 48.8% of the votes, according to the results that have yet to be confirmed. His rival, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, took 48.5%. Yildirim had declared victory on Sunday before acknowledging on Monday that Imamoglu was leading by some 25,000 votes. Ankara and Istanbul have been held by the AKP and its Islamic-oriented predecessor for 25 years. Erdogan's own ascent to power began as Istanbul mayor in 1994. Mansur Yavas, the candidate of the opposition alliance, won 50.9% support in Ankara. The AKP's candidate Mehmet Ozhaseki, a former environment and urbanization minister, won 47.1% support. Ekrem Imamoglu, the candidate from an alliance led by the secular Republican People's Party, (CHP) gestures as he declares victory during a news conference in Istanbul, Monday April 1, 2019. Unofficial results by state-run Anadolu news agency said he had won 48.8 percent of the vote Sunday and his opponent, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim of the ruling party, had captured 48.5 percent. One percent of the votes were still to be counted. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) Ekrem Imamoglu, the main Turkish opposition's candidate for Istanbul, embraces children after he visited the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular republic's founder, where large crowds gathered to greet him, chanting " Mayor Ekrem " in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party is appealing the results of the local elections in Istanbul, where the opposition has a razor-thin lead.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) Ekrem Imamoglu, the main Turkish opposition's candidate for Istanbul, center, is surrrounded by cheering supporters as he visits the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular republic's founder, where large crowds gathered to greet him, chanting " Mayor Ekrem " in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party is appealing the results of the local elections in Istanbul, where the opposition has a razor-thin lead.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) Thousands supporters try to see Ekrem Imamoglu, the main Turkish opposition's candidate for Istanbul, as he visits the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular republic's founder, in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party is appealing the results of the local elections in Istanbul, where the opposition has a razor-thin lead.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) Ekrem Imamoglu, the main Turkish opposition's candidate for Istanbul is surrounded by cheering supporters as he visits the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular republic's founder, in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party is appealing the results of the local elections in Istanbul, where the opposition has a razor-thin lead.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) Thousands supporters try to see Ekrem Imamoglu, the main Turkish opposition's candidate for Istanbul, as he visits the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular republic's founder, in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party is appealing the results of the local elections in Istanbul, where the opposition has a razor-thin lead.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) A man has been arrested after a teenager was chased and stabbed to death outside a block of flats. Abdirashid Mohamoud, 17, was discovered with stab injuries outside apartments on Union Lane, Isleworth, west London, at around 10.35pm on March 22, and was pronounced dead at the scene a short time later. A 22-year-old man was arrested in the early hours of Saturday on suspicion of murder and has been bailed, Scotland Yard said. Abdirashid is from the Brentford area. A post-mortem examination established that he died from stab injuries. Detective Chief Inspector Richard Leonard said: Our inquiries have established that the victim was in Syon Park close to the flats with a group of other people. Police activity outside a block of flats on Union Lane, Isleworth (Aine Fox/PA) A vehicle pulled up and a group of males got out. They chased the victim and attacked him in Union Lane. I need to speak to anyone who was in the park or the surrounding area at around 10.30pm on Friday night or who has information that could assist this investigation. They should get in touch immediately. At this early stage, officers retain an open mind as to the motive. The victims of a stabbing spree in north London were out walking alone when they were randomly attacked from behind, police say. Scotland Yard said a second man has been arrested following the four potentially linked stabbings in the Edmonton area. A man in his 40s was arrested at a residential address in Edmonton on suspicion of GBH and taken into custody at a north London police station, while the first man arrested on suspicion of GBH also remains in custody. Police believe a single male suspect was acting alone and that mental health issues may be a factor. The Met said it remains a live investigation and said they are pursuing all lines of inquiry, as they advised members of the public to remain vigilant. A 45-year-old woman, who was stabbed in the back, and a 23-year-old man are in a critical condition in hospital. Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Smillie, from North Area Command, said: We are doing everything we can to apprehend the suspect behind these cowardly and senseless attacks. We are treating the four stabbing related incidents as potentially linked. The four victims are from different backgrounds and appear to have been selected at random due to them being alone and vulnerable. There is nothing to suggest this incident is terror related. A police officer and police dog on Aberdeen Road in north London (Dominic Lipinski/PA) We are working on the hypothesis that the single male suspect is acting alone and mental health issues may be a factor. All of the people he has targeted have been walking alone and he has approached from behind without warning. The motive from the stabbing appears to be solely to inflict harm. Early accounts suggest none of the victims were robbed or engaged in conversation before they were attacked. The single male suspect who is described as a black man, approximately 6ft 3ins tall, of skinny build and wearing dark clothing, possibly a hooded top. The first stabbing took place at 7.02pm on Saturday at Aberdeen Road where the 45-year-old victim suffered a stab wound to her back after being attacked by the man. She was taken to an east London hospital where she remains in a critical condition. The second incident took place four hours later at around 12.15am with reports of a male suffering stab injuries in Park Avenue. The 52-year-old man was taken to an east London hospital for treatment of stab injuries. His condition is not life threatening. The third incident was at 3.55am with reports of a man stabbed at Seven Sisters Tube station. The 23-year-old man suffered stab injuries and remains in hospital in a critical but stable condition. Police said there is a lot of activity under way to catch the suspect (Dominic Lipinski/PA) Initial inquiries have established that the man may have been attacked in Silver Street, Edmonton. The last incident took place at 9.43am in Brettenham Road where officers found a 29-year-old man with a stab injury to the back. He was taken to hospital for an assessment of his injury, and while his injuries are not life-threatening they are potentially life-changing. We are doing everything we can to identify & apprehend the suspect behind these cowardly & senseless attacks. A large additional police response is now working throughout the #Edmonton area to help keep the public safe. Our advice is carry on but remain vigilant. A/DCI Smillie pic.twitter.com/uLnVnpc3MV Enfield MPS (@MPSEnfield) March 31, 2019 Police tape was up and officers were calling at houses along Aberdeen Road on Sunday afternoon accompanied by a police dog. Officers in forensic suits could be seen along the stretch of road within the police cordon. Dervish Husseyin, 60, was at his friends house on Aberdeen Road when the stabbing took place. I seen the woman lying down, face down, he said, adding: She said they had beaten her up. Mr Husseyin said the woman had blood on her back but did not seem to realise she had been stabbed. She said she only went out for a walk on her own, he said. Police and sniffer dogs in Craig Park in north London (Dominic Lipinski/PA) Natasha Cameron, 45, lives on Aberdeen Road and was walking home from work at a nearby casino after 10pm. She said she saw officers on her road who told her there had been a stabbing but she was unaware of the later attacks. I was oh my God this is the road I live on, she said. Ms Cameron added: Im scared now because I always walk here from work home. Now Im definitely taking the bus. The husband of jailed British charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has delivered flowers to the Iranian Embassy in London to mark the third Mothers Day since she was imprisoned. She was arrested with her infant daughter Gabriella on April 3 2016 at Tehrans Imam Khomeini Airport as she prepared to board a plane back to the UK after visiting relatives. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 40, is serving a five-year sentence in Tehrans notorious Evin Prison after she was convicted of membership of an illegal group. The trial by a Revolutionary Court in Tehran was widely condemned as unfair and she strenuously denies the charges against her. Richard Ratcliffe delivered flowers to the Iranian Embassy in London (Dominic Lipinski/PA) Speaking outside the embassy, Richard Ratcliffe told the Press Association: Weve come to deliver her a Mothers Day card, because obviously we cant do that in person, and to deliver 155 bunches of flowers, one for each week she has been held. Flowers, partly because its a Mothers Day tradition, also because thats what people are given when theyve been released from prison [in Iran]. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt granted Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe diplomatic protection earlier this month, and her husband said they are grateful. Its clear that Jeremy Hunt has taken a personal commitment to Natalies case and hes made some clear statements, he said. Before he granted her diplomatic protection he went to Tehran. Hes done a lot to make it clear that he cares and this is a priority. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, holds her daughter Gabriella during happier times (The Free Nazanin campaign/PA) Hes not done everything that weve wanted, but hes also been clear that hes not going to. As a family were appreciative of all hes done. Speaking about his four-year-old daughter, who is currently living in Iran, Mr Ratcliffe said: I spoke to Gabriella yesterday and theres a prison visit today. Were going to draw a card together for Granny, my mum. For her, it was Iranian New Year last week, so that was the big occasion that she wanted her mummy back for. That not happening, amongst a number of times that it hasnt happened, has meant that she hopes for things but I dont think she takes her parents promises entirely seriously these days. When asked about the stress the process has caused him and his wife, he said: Sometimes you speak to her and she seems fine, and sometimes shes really bleak and dark and threatening all sorts of things but yesterday she was fine. Often she decides that she needs to take matters into her own hands, she had that hunger strike to get medical treatment which hasnt been provided. She does threaten every so often that Ill do it again and itll be an escalation from last time. I do live a bit in fear of what will happen. If you dont sort it, there will be consequences. Hopefully thats an empty threat and it doesnt happen but sometimes shes in a dark place. A young girl looks at flowers alongside a giant Mothers Day card left on the steps of the Iranian Embassy (Dominic Lipinski/PA) [The whole experience] has brought us closer together because weve had to survive it. Im hugely proud of the fact that shes kept going, shes kept her dignity. Among those laying flowers outside the embassy were his parents John and Barbara Ratcliffe. Mrs Ratcliffe, 68, said: Were feeling sad, but cross. Why should this have happened to them? Whats our family done to anybody? That poor little girl. Shes now got a different mummy and shell have another different mummy when she comes out. The support from everybody is helping us through, it is really terrific. We just spoke to one lady who said: I can see my (her) child any day. Naz cant see her mum.' When asked what they wanted to see happen soon, Mrs Ratcliffe said: Apart from the obvious, in the short term we want to see that Naz gets a bit of comfort, to get on and do whatever shes able to do craft-wise. She added: We last heard from Naz about four weeks ago, and she sounded alright but wed been told by Richard and by her brother that she wasnt alright. She just put on a good show for us, which was lovely. When asked if they felt Mr Hunt was taking the case more seriously than his predecessor, Boris Johnson, Mrs Ratcliffe said: Im sure now its taken much more seriously. Certainly by him [Jeremy Hunt] and we always felt (former foreign office minister) Alistair Burt really cared. Hes helped us emotionally a lot, and Nazs family. But whether he can actually get her out, I dont know. Please God that she can get out. A Foreign Office spokesman said: It is deeply disappointing that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe will be spending yet another Mothers Day without her daughter Gabriella. We constantly review which further steps are available to secure Nazanins release, and will continue to be guided by what we consider is in the best interests of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and of all dual national consular cases in Iran. Mr Hunt later tweeted: No one should forget this devoted mother separated from her daughter for more half the childs life. She is innocent and a human being please Iranian govt DO THE RIGHT THING and let her go home to her family. MPs are expected to take part in the second stage of the Brexit indicative vote process on Monday. None of the eight alternatives to Prime Minister Theresa Mays deal were approved last week after Parliament seized control of the Commons agenda. Many of the ideas have returned for a second attempt, with Speaker John Bercow the person responsible for selecting which ones can be put to a vote. Tory MPs will be given a free vote on the options, but Cabinet ministers will be told to abstain. Motion A: Unilateral right of exit from the backstop. Tory backbenchers, led by John Baron, want the UK to leave the EU on May 22 2019 with the Withdrawal Agreement amended to allow the UK unilaterally to exit the controversial Northern Ireland backstop. Anti-Brexit protesters with an illuminated sign reading `Let Us Vote (Victoria Jones/PA) Motion B: No deal in the absence of a Withdrawal Agreement. John Baron MP: "...whilst most of us in this place want a good deal, many of us have taken the view that the deal on offer from the Prime Minister is not a good deal, and therefore the legal default position is that we leave on no-deal/WTO terms." pic.twitter.com/EeLCmIM6ZB BrexitCentral (@BrexitCentral) March 27, 2019 Another proposal from Mr Baron, which calls for a no-deal Brexit on April 12 if no Withdrawal Agreement can be agreed by the Commons. Motion C: Customs union. Tory former chancellor Ken Clarkes customs union plan requires any Brexit deal to include, as a minimum, a commitment to negotiate a permanent and comprehensive UK-wide customs union with the EU. This was defeated by the smallest margin in the first round, falling just six votes short. Labour will support the plan again. Motion D: Common market 2.0. Common Market 2.0: - Respects result of the referendum by leaving the EU for EFTA - no more 'ever closer union' - Leaves ECJ (EFTA court respects national sovereignty) - Introduces safeguards on EU migration - Protects jobs by maintaining full Single Market participation pic.twitter.com/sOSI58LDIQ Stephen Kinnock (@SKinnock) January 22, 2019 Tabled by Conservatives Nick Boles, Robert Halfon and Dame Caroline Spelman and Labours Stephen Kinnock, Lucy Powell plus the SNPs Stewart Hosie. The motion proposes UK membership of the European Free Trade Association and European Economic Area. It allows continued participation in the single market and a comprehensive customs arrangement with the EU after Brexit including a UK say on future EU trade deals would remain in place until the agreement of a wider trade deal which guarantees frictionless movement of goods and an open border in Ireland. Labour and the SNP will support the amendment. Motion E: Confirmatory public vote. We're in Bolton, and virtually no one here thinks Brexit is going well. Thank you @DavidCrausby and @YasminQureshiMP for supporting a confirmatory referendum on the final deal last week - whatever agreement is reached, this needs to go back to the people.#100x100 pic.twitter.com/9wV4wisWGU Our Future, Our Choice (@OFOCBrexit) March 30, 2019 It has been drawn up by Labour MPs Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson. This motion would require a public vote to confirm any Brexit deal passed by Parliament before its ratification. This option, tabled last time by Labour former minister Dame Margaret Beckett, polled the highest number of votes although was defeated by 295 votes to 268. Labour is expected to back the plan. Motion F: Public vote to prevent no deal. Moved by Labours Graham Jones and Tory former minister Dominic Grieve, this proposal would require a referendum, if necessary, to prevent the UK leaving the EU without a deal. Labour is expected to support this amendment. Motion G: Parliamentary supremacy. If we can't agree a deal we want: 1. We ask for an extension 2. If the EU says no there's no time for a referendum so 3. Parliament chooses between either (1) No Deal or (2) Revoking, with a commitment to a public inquiry into what we want and a possible further notification pic.twitter.com/8xD9WnHyTT Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) March 29, 2019 SNP MP Joanna Cherry joins with Mr Grieve and MPs from other parties with this plan to seek an extension to the Brexit process, and if this is not possible then Parliament will choose between either no-deal or revoking Article 50. An inquiry would follow to assess the future relationship likely to be acceptable to Brussels and have majority support in the UK. Motion H: Efta and EEA. A motion tabled by Conservative MP George Eustice who quit as agriculture minister to fight for Brexit proposes rejoining the European Free Trade Association (Efta) at the earliest opportunity, agree a short extension to the UKs membership of the EU to conclude accession to Efta and negotiate with the EU additional protocols relating to the Northern Ireland border and agri-food trade. Motion I: Labours plan. Jeremy Corbyns amendment calls for the Government to negotiate changes to the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration to secure a permanent customs union with the EU; close alignment with the single market; dynamic alignment on rights and protections; commitments on participation in EU agencies and funding programmes; and agreement on the detail of future security arrangements. An environmental activist has been elected as the first female president of Slovakia. Relative newcomer Zuzana Caputova took 58% of the vote with almost 95% of returns counted in Saturdays runoff election, topping European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic, who took 42%. Mr Sefcovic conceded defeat and congratulated his rival. Ms Caputova attending a TV debate (Petr David Josek/AP) Im extremely happy about the result, Ms Caputova said. Its an extremely strong mandate for me. Ms Caputova, 45, has little experience in politics and attracted voters who are angered by corruption and mainstream politics. She only recently became vice chairman of the Progressive Slovakia, a party so new it has not had a chance to run in parliamentary elections. Ms Caputova in front of the Presidential Palace in Bratislava (Petr David Josek/AP) Ms Caputova resigned from her party post after winning the first round of the presidential vote two weeks ago. She becomes Slovakias fifth president since the country gained independence following the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993. The president of the nation of 5.4 million people has the power to pick the prime minister, appoint Constitutional Court judges and veto laws. But parliament can override the veto with a simple majority. The government, led by the prime minister, possesses most executive powers. A lawyer by profession, Ms Caputova is a rising star of Slovak politics. She became known for leading a successful fight against a toxic waste dump in her hometown of Pezinok, for which she received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2016. A divorced mother-of-two, she is in favour of gay rights and opposes a ban on abortion in this conservative Roman Catholic country. She was also part of a campaign in 2017 that led to the annulment of pardons granted by former authoritarian prime minister Vladimir Meciar. Mr Sefcovic, 52, is a career diplomat who was supported by the leftist Smer-Social Democracy party led by former populist prime minister Robert Fico, a major force in Slovak politics that was tarnished by corruption scandals. He campaigned on a traditional family values ticket. Popular incumbent Andrej Kiska, who did not stand for a second term, backed Ms Caputova in the vote. The two had supported the massive anti-government street protests last year triggered by the killings of an investigative reporter and his fiancee that led to the fall of Ficos coalition government. Investigators have linked Jan Kuciaks death to his work probing possible widespread government corruption. Ficos party has already suffered losses in local elections in November the first votes since the largest demonstrations in the country since the anti-Communist Velvet Revolution of 1989. Africa hosts the largest number of British Armed Forces personnel outside the United Kingdom. Over recent years, Kenya has become a common destination for UK troops taking part in the gruelling Exercise Askari Storm. The exercise is run by the British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK), a permanent training support unit based mainly in Nanyuki, 124 miles north of the capital Nairobi. BATUK consists of around 100 permanent staff and is reinforced by a short tour cohort of another 280 personnel. Under an agreement with the Kenyan Government, up to six infantry battalions per year carry out the exercises. Soldiers from 2 Rifles take part in Exercise Askari Storm in Kenya. (Robbie Hodgson/Crown Forces/PA) There are also Royal Engineer exercises, which carry out civil engineering projects, and medical deployments, which provide primary health care assistance to the civilian community. The soldiers train alongside members of the Kenyan Defence Forces. Exercise Askari Storm aims to challenge soldiers in a hot arid environment, living in basic camps in the bush, a far cry from the comforts of life in the UK, and allows battalions to prove themselves battle ready. Major Neil Watson, Officer Commanding B Company and Sergeant Major Daniel Long on Exercise Askari Storm in Kenya. (Robbie Hodgson/Crown Forces/PA) Battalion 2 Rifles will complete its six-week exercise in April as part of readiness training before deploying to Kabul in Afghanistan in 2020. Before 2 Rifles, the 1 LANCS battlegroup of The Duke Of Lancasters Regiment were the most recent to complete the training exercise, arriving after the Parachute Regiments 2 Para who completed the exercise at the end of last year. Celebrities, politicians, advocacy groups and social media users around the world have been raising awareness around transgender issues on Sunday for the annual Trans Day of Visibility Among the thousands of messages on the hashtag #TransDayofVisibility, LGBT equality charity Stonewall shared a blog post by Carolyn Mercer, a former secondary school headteacher turned LGBT activist. She wrote about the daily attacks on trans identities and encouraged people everywhere to read about trans peoples experiences, challenge transphobia when you hear it and show support to your trans friends and families. Happy #TransDayOfVisibility! To all our trans friends and family: you are valuable, valid and important, whether you choose to be seen or not, on this day and every day https://t.co/NwJV68g77s #TDOV #WithTheT pic.twitter.com/fqM1dp06Gg Stonewall (@stonewalluk) March 31, 2019 Stonewall estimates one per cent of the UK population, or roughly 600,000 people, identify as trans or non-binary, meaning their gender identity or expression does not match the one they were assigned at birth. Thousands of people shared their experiences and words of support across social media. Christina Grimwade, a trans mother from Essex, shared a picture of herself and her son, adding: Here I am being visible on #TDOV . Being a mum to my kids on #MothersDay. People shelter from the rain at a Trans Pride March in Dublins city centre. Hopefully Im the positive role model I didnt have for at least one trans person that sees me today. Here I am being visible on #TDOV. Being a mum to my kids on #MothersDay. Hopefully I'm the positive role model I didnt have for at least one trans person that sees me today.#TransDayOfVisibility #Mothersday2019 pic.twitter.com/BlFh7GExYI Christina Grimwade (@XtinaGrimwade) March 31, 2019 And Ryan, who said he has been trans for seven years, also shared pictures. He said: This year marks 7 years Ive been out as trans; Im so proud of who I am, how far Ive come and the community Im part of. We still have so much further to go, our very existence is a debate, so its time to be loud and be proud on #TransDayOfVisibility. In the US, writer and speaker Jamie Bruesehoff shared a picture of her daughter Rebekah, writing: While Rebekah sometimes does do public advocacy that makes her very visible, she also shows up every day at home, at church, at school, at dance, at practice, and in her community just being herself. Just by being herself, she reminds folks that transgender kids are here and they are kids just like any other with passions, interests, struggles, successes, failures, and all of the rest. Public figures also gave their support. Apple chief executive Tim Cook tweeted: The trans community at Apple makes us stronger and more vibrant. On this #TransDayOfVisibility, were grateful to all who live their truths and bring their authentic selves to work. The trans community at Apple makes us stronger and more vibrant. On this #TransDayOfVisibility, were grateful to all who live their truths and bring their authentic selves to work. Tim Cook (@tim_cook) March 31, 2019 And Labour MP Dawn Butler wrote: Today is #TransDayofVisibility and I am proud to join other parliamentarians in this cross-party statement of support for the trans community. To all of our trans constituents, friends, colleagues and family, we stand in solidarity with you. Today is #TransDayofVisibility and I am proud to join other parliamentarians in this cross-party statement of support for the trans community. To all of our trans constituents, friends, colleagues and family, we stand in solidarity with you. #TDOV #MPwiththeT #PeerwiththeT pic.twitter.com/IX6AibwbOR Dawn Butler MP (@DawnButlerBrent) March 31, 2019 Lib Dem MP Layla Moran, peer Brian Paddick, and Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas also shared the cross-party statement on Twitter, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan shared a message of support on his @MayorofLondon account. The official account for UN Women tweeted a reminder of the first article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adding: On #TransVisibilityDay, join us in advocating for every persons right to live as their true self! #TDOV #TransVisibility On #TransVisibilityDay, join us in advocating for every person's right to live as their true self! #TDOV #TransVisibility pic.twitter.com/19fFpDxeIQ UN Women (@UN_Women) March 31, 2019 Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. An investigation is under way after a teenage girl was attacked in Co Antrim on Saturday night. The girl was walking near Mossley West Train Station in Newtownabbey when she was set upon by an unknown man, police said. She ran away, but suffered a cut lip and cuts to her knees. A PSNI spokesman said: The male is described as being aged in his late 20s, approximately 5ft 10ins tall, of medium build with ginger stubble and bushy eyebrows. He was wearing a grey track top and grey bottoms. Detective Inspector Kelly is appealing for anyone who witnessed the incident or anyone who witnessed a male matching the description of the attacker in the area of Mossley West Train Station last night to contact detectives in Public Protection Branch in Strandtown police station. An investigation is under way after a teenage girl was attacked in Co Antrim on Saturday night (Niall Carson/PA) Alternatively, information can be provided to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 which is anonymous and gives people the power to speak up and stop crime. Kenya may be a long way from Barnsley but two local men have distinguished themselves as they lead a company of an infantry battalion in the African nation. The Co Antrim-based 2 Rifles, known by their motto Swift and Bold, were created in 2007 following the amalgamation of several older regiments, and recruit soldiers from across the United Kingdom. But among the wide variety of accents in the ranks, there is a strong Barnsley sound in B Company, where two of the leading men are from the South Yorkshire town. Major Neil Watson is Officer Commanding of B Company and works closely with fellow Barnsley man Sergeant Major Daniel Long. Soldiers from B Company, 2 Rifles on Exercise Askari Storm in Kenya. (Robbie Hodgson/Crown Forces/PA) Talking to the Press Association while leading B Company on the intensive Exercise Askari Storm in central Kenya, the men said they have had to contend with gruelling heat, scorpions in the practice trenches, and herds of elephants close to camping grounds. Its not exactly something youd see in Barnsley, they laughed. The pair are both based at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn, Co Antrim, and are set to lead B company on tour to Kabul in Afghanistan next year. They have drunk at the same bar back in Barnsley, but never met until joining the former Light Infantry regiment, which became part of The Rifles in 2007. Its only a small town, added Sergeant Major Long. Major Watson said that, with The Rifles having such a large recruiting ground, it is unusual to end up working closely with someone from your own town. A soldier from B Company, 2 Rifles takes part in Exercise Askari Storm in Kenya. (Robbie Hodgson/Crown Forces/PA) While Major Watson is a commissioned officer, Sergeant Major Long joined as a Rifleman. We both served together in the old second battalion of the Light Infantry, which was 3 Rifles when I was a 2nd Lieutenant, and he was a Lance Corporal, Major Watson said. Its been great to be able to come back together later on. The Rifles has got a big recruiting area, we recruit from south of the Tyne all the way down through Yorkshire, the Midlands, Birmingham, pretty much nationwide now. Its quite unusual that you would have a company commander and a company sergeant major from the same place, but I think it proves the strength and depth in the Rifles that it doesnt matter where you start off, if you have got the capacity to be able to do your job well, then there is absolutely no limit to what you can achieve, be that joining as a Rifleman or joining as an Officer. A comedian with no political experience has won the most votes in Ukraines presidential election, according to an exit poll. Volodymyr Zelenskiy beat incumbent president Petro Poroshenko into second place, closely followed by former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, but fell well short of the absolute majority needed to win outright in the first round. The election has been overshadowed by allegations of widespread vote buying. Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy holds his ballot before voting at a polling station (Emilio Morenatti/AP) Police said they had received more than 1,600 complaints of violations on voting day alone, in addition to hundreds of earlier voting fraud claims, including bribery attempts and removing ballots from polling places. Mr Zelenskiy, who stars in a TV sitcom about a teacher who becomes president after a video of him denouncing corruption goes viral, led the field of 39 candidates with 30.4% of the vote, according to an exit poll by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology and the Razumkov public opinion organisation. Mr Poroshenko tallied with 17.8% support and Ms Tymoshenko took 14.2%, it said. The poll claimed a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko speaks to the media at a polling station (Efrem Lukatsky/AP) The top two candidates will face a presidential runoff on April 21. Final results in Sundays first round are expected to be announced on Monday. Zelenskiy has shown us on the screen what a real president should be like, said voter Tatiana Zinchenko, 30, who cast her ballot for the comedian. He showed what the state leader should aspire for fight corruption by deeds, not words, help the poor, control the oligarchs. Campaign issues in the country of 42 million included Ukraines endemic corruption, its struggling economy and a seemingly intractable conflict with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine that has killed 13,000 people since 2014. Former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko leaves a polling station (Sergei Grits/AP) Concern about the elections legitimacy has spiked in recent days after Ukraines interior minister said his department was showered with hundreds of claims that supporters of Mr Poroshenko and Ms Tymoshenko had offered money in exchange for votes. Like the popular character he plays, Mr Zelenskiy, 41, made corruption a focus of his candidacy. He also called for direct negotiations with Russia on ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine. A new life, a normal life is starting, Mr Zelenskiy said after casting his ballot in Kiev. A life without corruption, without bribes. His lack of political experience helped his popularity with voters amid broad disillusionment with the countrys political elite. (We have) no trust in old politicians. They were at the helm and the situation in the country has only gotten worse corruption runs amok and the war is continuing, businessman Valery Ostrozhsky, 66, another Zelenskiy voter said. Mr Poroshenko, 53, a confectionery tycoon when he was elected five years ago, pushed successfully for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to be recognised as self-standing rather than a branch of the Russian church. But he saw approval of his governing sink amid Ukraines economic woes and a sharp plunge in living standards. Mr Poroshenko campaigned on promises to defeat the rebels in the east and to wrest back control of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 in a move that has drawn sanctions against Russia from the US and the European Union. Ukraines former prime minister, Ms Tymoshenko, shaped her message around the economic distress of millions in the country. Ukraine has sunk into poverty and corruption during the last five years, but every Ukrainian can put an end to it now, she said after voting on Sunday. Francesco Molinaris 10-match unbeaten run came to a disappointing end as he lost out to Kevin Kisner in the semi-finals of the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play. Molinari fought back from two down with three holes to play with birdies on the 16th and 17th, only to three-putt the 18th hole at Austin Country Club. After 15 holes: 2 down After 17 holes: All-Square@F_Molinari never gives up! pic.twitter.com/YuTe6BYYjA DP World Tour (@DPWorldTour) March 31, 2019 It was the first time the Open champion had played the 18th in competition this week after enjoying five comfortable wins to reach the last four. Molinari was thrashed 7&5 by Justin Thomas in his final group game 12 months ago, but became the first European player to compile a perfect 5-0 record in the Ryder Cup and had beaten Satoshi Kodaira, Thorbjorn Olesen, Webb Simpson, Paul Casey and Kevin Na to reach the semi-finals. Confirmed. Kuchar will face Kisner in the final @DellMatchPlay. pic.twitter.com/BWe4WIhasJ DP World Tour (@DPWorldTour) March 31, 2019 Kisner will contest the final for the second year in succession he was thrashed 7&6 by Bubba Watson 12 months ago and faces fellow American Matt Kuchar, who ended the brilliant run of Denmarks Lucas Bjerreregaard with a hard-fought win. There was never more than one hole between the pair and Bjerregaard, who got the better of Tiger Woods in the quarter-finals, got back on level terms four times after Kuchar edged in front. Francesco Molinari lost to Kevin Kisner in the semi-finals in Austin (John Walton/PA) Bjerregaard also crucially matched Kuchars birdie on the 17th to keep the match alive but was unable to repeat the feat on the last and Kuchar safely two-putted for par. Molinari made an uncharacteristic error when he chipped into the water on the par-five 12th and also bogeyed the 14th before his brace of birdies kept the match alive. I bogeyed 12, 14 and 18 from decent spots so its not something really youre allowed to do. I just didnt quite play my best, Molinari said. We played quite well on the front nine and then just dropped too many easy shots on the back nine unfortunately. I bogeyed 12, 14 and 18 from decent spots so its not something really youre allowed to do. But its still a positive week. Bjerregaard also tried to take the positives away from his week in Austin, adding: I can see from my Instagram and so forth that a few people have gotten to know my name from yesterday. So its been a great week, no matter what happens. But, yeah, it stings a bit now, Ive come this far, and Id love to have a chance in the final. Neither of us played really well on the front nine and I didnt do much, made a lot of pars and he made a few birdies and a few bogeys. I had a few chances on the back nine, just didnt putt well enough. Just didnt put pressure on him when I needed to, which I succeeded with yesterday. Police say concern is growing for a missing dementia sufferer who was last seen walking near a disused mine on a Scottish island. Officers are trying to trace Alistair Lovie, who has been reported missing from the Inverarish area of the Isle of Raasay. The 73-year-old was last seen walking at a disused mine area north of the village at about 11am on Sunday. Team out searching with @RaasaySFRS @MCA_media locals etc for Alistair Lovie (73 yrs) missing from home on @IsleofRaasay Alistair suffers from dementia so keen to get him home soon @RaasayStores @RaasayHouse @TheSilverG @RaasayWhisky Last seen in Inverarish area at 1100 hrs today Lochaber & Skye Police (@LochabSkyePol) March 31, 2019 Police Sergeant David Canning said: We are growing increasingly concerned for Alistair as he suffers from dementia and is likely to have lost his way whilst out walking. Alistair is reasonably physically fit but he may be in a confused state. I would urge anyone who was walking in the Rasaay area today or who lives in the area and has seen Alistair today to contact Portree Police on 101. He is described as 5ft 10ins, medium build with brown hair and blue eyes. When last seen he was wearing a black jacket, jeans, a black cap, a blue shirt and a red jumper. Meanwhile, officers are also keen to trace a man who has been reported missing from Dalkeith, Midlothian. Ross Taylor was last seen at around 12pm on Sunday (Police Scotland) Ross Taylor was last seen at his home in the Mayfield area around 12pm on Sunday and police say there are concerns for his welfare. The 30-year-old is described as white, 5ft 9ins tall, of skinny build, with short light-brown hair and was last seen wearing grey jeans, a black jumper and white Converse trainers. Sergeant Alan King, from Dalkeith Police Station, said: As part of our enquiries, were asking anyone who may have seen Ross since this time, or who has possible information on his whereabouts, to contact us. If Ross sees this appeal wed urge him to get in touch with either us or his family, who are very worried about him, as soon as possible and let us know he is ok. A street in Glasgow has been sealed off amid reports of a disturbance. Emergency services were called to Albion Street on Sunday. Police Scotland remains at the scene of Albion Street for the ongoing incident. The route has been closed between Ingram Street and Bell Street. Glasgow City Council has put a diversion in place via the High Street. Firefighters remain at the scene of a serious blaze at a church building, almost 20 hours after the incident began. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) was called to the well-developed fire at Great George Street, in the west end of Glasgow, just after 3am on Sunday. Six fire engines were sent to the scene and crews have been working over a number of hours to extinguish the flames at the three-storey building. An SFRS spokeswoman confirmed that a crew was still at the scene at 10.45pm almost 20 hours after they were alerted to the fire. There were no reports of any casualties. It is understood the building was being converted into flats. Six fire engines were sent to the scene (Niall Carson/PA) Police Scotland said a joint investigation involving the fire service and police is being carried out to establish the cause of the blaze. A spokeswoman said: Inquiries are continuing. Adventurer James Ketchell has taken off as he attempts to be the first person to fly around the world solo in a gyrocopter. The 37-year-old will fly over 22,800 nautical miles across 13 different countries including France, Lithuania, Russia, Canada and Greenland, before arriving back in England in around six months. The gyrocopter travels at just 70 knots, with a range of just 700 nautical miles. During his trip he will stop at schools in every country he visits in order to give motivational talks and raise money for two charities, Kindled Spirit which supports victims of trafficking, and Over The Wall which supports children and young people facing serious health challenges. Adventurer James Ketchell takes off for the first leg of his bid to fly round the world (Steve Parsons/PA) On Sunday, crowds gathered at Popham Airfield in Hampshire to wave him off before he leaves to fly across the Channel from Goodwood, Sussex, on Monday. Mr Ketchell, from Basingstoke, Hampshire, told the Press Association: I had no idea three or four hundred people were just going to turn up to wave this lunatic off, its all a bit surreal really. Its doable but Im just taking it day by day. Itll probably take me about six months, thats the plan. Hopefully I can achieve my objective of speaking at a school in every country, trying to inspire some young kids to believe in themselves and do things thats the mission. I enjoy working with kids and for some reason they listen to me. Maybe its because Ive done a few cool things. Maybe they wont listen to me in 10 years when Ive lost my hair or gone grey. I dont have a family of my own. Im not sure if thats in my destiny. Ive got a little nephew so, I can try and be a cool uncle. Maybe if the time is right and I meet the right person but right now Im focusing on my thing really. All of his adventure can be tracked in real-time online through his website as he sets out to inspire one million young people on his journey. Asked what had motivated him to be so involved with inspiring children, Mr Ketchell said: When I was a young teenager I just really struggled. I had no motivation, I left school without one qualification. James Ketchell starts his bid to become the first person to fly solo round the world in an open cockpit gyrocopter (Steve Parsons/PA) I didnt really have any ambition or drive, I was lazy. When I left school I got fired from jobs, left, right, and centre I spent a lot of time just lying around in bed. I never really believed in myself or wanted to anything. I was probably a bit depressed really, but didnt know or understand how the brain works. I had a very nasty motorcycle accident and that was really the catalyst for rowing across the Atlantic Id always wanted to but never had the guts to do it. I was very insecure when I was younger and always worry about what other people would think of me. But when I had that accident and the doctor said: well mate, you may never walk again, I thought that I needed something to aim for and I did it. People who had never rowed the Atlantic before, all of a sudden were experts, telling me why I shouldnt be doing it, why I should focus on my job instead of silly dreams. Human beings have a terrible habit of telling other people what they think they should do, and if I had listened to those people, I wouldnt be where I am today. Teachers, nurses and police officers could be held accountable for failing to spot warning signs of violent crime among young people, under Government plans announced on Monday. Home Secretary Sajid Javid floated the idea of a so-called public health duty in an effort to ensure every part of the system works together to support young people. The Government said it is intended to help spot the warning signs that a young person could be in danger, such as presenting in A&E with a suspicious injury, to worrying behaviour at school or issues at home. (PA Graphics) A consultation will assess the extent to which those on the front line will be held to account for failing to prevent a young person getting involved in violence, a Home Office spokesman said. It comes a day after Mr Javid granted police new powers to increase stop and search activity following a spate of bloodshed across London and the rest of England since the start of 2019. Mr Javid said: Violent crime is like a disease rotting our society and its essential that all public bodies work together to treat the root causes. Sajid Javid granted police new powers to increase stop and search activity (Dominic Lipinski/PA) The public health, multi-agency approach has a proven track record and Im confident that making it a legal duty will help stop this senseless violence and create long-term change. Im committed to ending this scourge and will use all the tools at my disposal to do so. More than 100 experts will meet this week to explore the scope and impact of new ideas while kick-starting a further programme of action. They include Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, Patrick Green from the Ben Kinsella Trust, and Baroness Newlove, the Victims Commissioner for England and Wales, whose husband Garry was beaten to death by a gang vandalising his car in 2007. Theresa May, who will host a serious youth violence summit in Downing Street on Monday, will also meet privately with the families of a number of victims of knife crime to listen to their first-hand experiences of this issue. The Prime Minister said: To bring about lasting change and protect young people from the tragic violence we have seen on our streets, we need to work across society to intervene early and stop them from being drawn into crime. Strong law enforcement plays an important role, and the police will continue to have our support on the front line, but we all need to look at what we can do in our communities, and in every part of the system, to safeguard young people. That is why our plans to introduce a whole community or public health approach are designed to identify more young people at risk. Writing in the Daily Mail on Monday, Mrs May and Mr Javid added: Of course, nothing we say or do this week will bring back the children who were so cruelly taken from them. But we can promise that we will do whatever it takes to confront and defeat the scourge of youth violence. And that we will do everything in our power to stop more families suffering as they have suffered. The consultation, mooted by Mr Javid in the Commons four weeks ago, will open on Monday until May 28 to the public and professionals across the UK. (PA Graphics) It follows days of violence across the country, including a slew of serious stabbings in Edmonton, north London, from Saturday night into Sunday morning, as well as the death of a 40-year-old motorist at the wheel of his vehicle in Clapham, south-west London, and a 29-year-old fatally stabbed on Thursday afternoon in Toxteth, Liverpool. Mrs May came under fire last month after she suggested that police cuts were not to blame for a spate of fatal stabbings on teenagers. Senior figures in policing were at odds with the Prime Minister as they called for a reverse to slashes in staffing levels. On Monday, Mike Cunningham, chief executive of the College of Policing, welcomed recent announcements on extra measures and funding, but warned against the assumption that with more resources, policing alone can solve this problem. If partners across health, education and local government play their part, we can make a real difference and help prevent more tragic deaths, he told Sky News. However, Royal College of Nursing acting chief executive and general secretary Dame Donna Kinnair said the move could put greater pressure on frontline staff. She said: With almost 40,000 nursing vacancies in England alone, nurses are already concerned about providing safe and effective care with such widespread staff shortages. Nursing staff already have a key role in safeguarding patients, whether thats working in the community, in schools or in hospitals and its unclear how putting a further obligation on our members, already working incredibly hard to do all they can for patients, will prevent violent crime. Javed Khan, boss of childrens charity Barnardos, said the Downing Street summit must look at long-term solutions and commit public funding to tackle violence. He said: We need a concerted effort to tackle the profound poverty of hope amongst vulnerable children and young people who see little or no chance of a positive future. The number of social media accounts shut down at the request of prison authorities has almost quadrupled in three years after hundreds of inmates used smuggled phones to post from behind bars. Jail security officials took action in relation to material on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. More than 1,700 accounts were removed from 2015 to 2018, statistics obtained by the Press Association show. It is thought the bulk of cases were triggered by prisoners using illicit mobiles to upload content themselves. Removals are also sought when video or images captured in jail, or messages sent from behind bars, are posted by people on the outside. (PA Graphics) The Prison Officers Association warned the shocking revelations risk undermining confidence in the criminal justice system, while the Prison Service said it works closely with social media companies to close accounts used by prisoners. Figures on social media accounts removed after being identified by HM Prison and Probation Service were released by the Ministry of Justice following a freedom of information request. The number of removals increased in each of the four years for which data was provided, with 153 in 2015, followed by 462 in 2016, 527 in 2017 and 594 last year. In total, 1,736 accounts were taken offline, with 1,121 or nearly two-thirds removed in 2017 and 2018. The FOI response said the figures include, but are not limited to, accounts on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The MoJ declined to provide a detailed breakdown of the cases by jail or social media platform as it could prejudice the prevention or detection of crime and maintenance of security and order in prisons. Glyn Travis, of the Prison Officers Association, said: The POA are not surprised by the shocking statistics which highlight the growing problems of prisoners using technology in prisons. The use of social media sites on illegal phones by prisoners can only undermine public confidence in the criminal justice system. These sites continue to be accessed and prisoners are taunting victims, intimidating witnesses and organising criminal activity from the safety of a prison cell. Alex Mayes, of charity Victim Support, said victims may feel unsafe knowing that the perpetrator could potentially contact them or their family and friends. He added: Victims should feel most safe when the perpetrator is serving their sentence and this news could leave them feeling that justice has not been fully served. A string of cases have highlighted the potential for images and footage captured behind bars to appear online. In 2016 pictures said to have been taken at a prison emerged showing takeaway meals and steaks. Last year Justice Secretary David Gauke spoke of his shock at videos posted on social media of prisoners under the influence of drugs. Authorities have identified the illegal use of mobiles as one of the most significant threats faced by jails. In the 12 months to March last year, there were 10,643 incidents where mobile phones were found in prisons in England and Wales, a 15% increase compared with the previous year. Criminal gangs have deployed a range of tactics to exploit the lucrative contraband market behind bars. Last month three dead rats stuffed with mobiles and drugs were found at HMP Guys Marsh. A Prison Service spokesman said: We do not tolerate the use of mobile phones in our jails and we work closely with social media companies to close accounts being used by prisoners. We are investing millions in body scanners, phone-blocking technology and other measures to prevent phones being smuggled into and used in prison. Any prisoner found with a mobile phone faces extra time behind bars. YouTube said it has a dedicated process for police and the prison service to flag videos directly to its teams for review, and takes action on videos and channels when it finds threats or violations of its community guidelines. Tackling climate change and embracing digital technology are key to boosting Scotlands productivity and economy, the new chief executive of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI) has said. Sara Thiam will move into the role from her current post as Scotland director of the Institution of Civil Engineers. A member of the Scottish Governments newly-formed Infrastructure Commission, Ms Thiam said focusing on people having the correct skills will also be key to ensuring Scotlands economic future. She said: In common with other countries around the world Scotland faces unprecedented environmental, demographic, mobility, educational and technological challenges. Ensuring our people have the right skills and knowledge, embracing digital technology and tackling climate change hold the key to driving a much-needed surge in productivity and sustainable economic prosperity. With change comes opportunity and Im passionate about Scotlands ability to innovate. Sara Thiam has been appointed the new chief executive of the Scottish Council of Development and Industry (SCDI/PA) She said continued uncertainty around Brexit affecting investment in Scotland and business confidence underlines the need for industry organisations such as the SCDI. Having been appointed to the chief executive role, Ms Thiam will take up her post in June. Former Marks & Spencer boss Lord Stuart Rose has dismissed calls for a second Brexit referendum as nonsense and warned it would inflict years of pain on UK businesses. The retail stalwart who helped spearhead ex-prime minister David Camerons disastrous campaign to remain in the European Union said he was fundamentally against the UK holding a second referendum. He said MPs should back Prime Minister Theresa Mays deal and break the stranglehold that uncertainty has on the economy. Speaking after appearing at this weeks Retail Week Live conference, he told the Press Association any plans for a second referendum were nonsense. It will cause all sorts of problems, he said. It comes after MPs rejected Mrs Mays deal for a third time on Friday and earlier failed to back any of the eight alternatives tabled in the Commons, including a second referendum. Sir Stuart Rose has come out strongly against a second Brexit vote (Ocado/PA) People are trying to plan their businesses, planning whether to order this and that if you push that can down the road for another year or two, that could mean theres a period of uncertainty in UK plc for as long as five years, said Lord Rose. That means 2025 before you see the benefits of investments made today. Thats not going to help drive the economy, he cautioned. Lord Rose admits he got beaten up in his role heading up the Remain campaign, which saw him involved in several memorable blunders. As well as controversially complaining that Brexit would push up wages, he also forgot the name of his own pro-EU campaign in an interview. Despite his remain stance, he said he respects the result of the referendum vote and backs Mrs May and her efforts to see her deal through to avoid a catastrophic hard Brexit. (The deal) is not perfect, but it was never going to be, he said. Someone has to say, for Gods sake, lets get on with it. In the 59th minute of the hour, people are beginning to realise that and the alternative, which is to have a hard Brexit, is catastrophic, he said. The retail heavyweight who is now chairman of firms including online grocer Ocado and clothing chains Fat Face and Oasis said all sectors are suffering from Brexit uncertainty. The businesses Im involved in are all finding it quite tough going, he said. It doesnt matter which market people are just thinking do I spend my money now or wait? Toilet charges have been scrapped at all of Britains busiest railway stations. On Monday, London Liverpool Street, London Kings Cross and Edinburgh Waverley became the last of 20 Network Rail stations to make their toilets free to use. The public sector body previously charged up to 50p per person to use the facilities. Network Rail chief executive Andrew Haines said: Passengers have told us that toilets are an important issue for them and taking this step is just one of a number of small measures we are taking to put our passengers first, by helping to make their journeys a bit more hassle-free. Anthony Smith, chief executive of independent watchdog Transport Focus, said: Scrapping toilet charges is a welcome step for passengers. Toilets are a priority for improvement at stations according to our research and will signal the end of fumbling around in your pocket for change to spend a penny. Other improvements being made at Network Rail stations include the introduction of water fountains, better and more seating, and reducing clutter on concourses. The Scottish Government is being urged to speed up the pace in delivering its GP contract in a bid to overcome deep-seated problems. Dr Andrew Buist of BMA Scotland said the contract, introduced in April 2018, was never going to solve the various challenges facing the profession in its first 12 months. The new contract, backed with 100 million of Scottish Government funding in its first year, aimed to reduce the workload of family doctors and improve recruitment and retention rates. With the deal having been in place for a year, Dr Buist, the chair of the BMAs Scottish GP committee, said there now needed to be an increased pace of change. And while the contract will see a minimum earnings guarantee come into place this month, ensuring no full-time GP earns less than 70,000 a year, Dr Buist stressed being a doctor was about far more than money. He said: Essentially we need to deliver this contract to make working as a GP attractive again and ensure that recruitment and retention problems will be alleviated. BMA Scotland wants the pace of change in delivering the GP contract to be increased (Anthony Devlin/PA) The GP contract was signed in January 2018, after a poll of doctors found 71.5% were in favour of it. Its intention was to refocus the role of family doctors as expert medical generalists. Ministers also pledged that the contract would see more nurses, physiotherapists and pharmacists working in general practices in a bid to free up more time for doctors to spend with patients. Dr Buist said: As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Scottish GP contract it is worth reflecting on the huge challenges that faced us when we signed the contract. Of course, these deep-seated problems such as there simply not being enough GPs were never going to be solved in a single year. Over the last 12 months, I have seen a mixed picture across Scotland and varied progress. There is much work to be done, so we need to see an increased pace of change. This needs the Scottish Government to continue to play its part to the full and deliver on our shared commitments and to ensure health boards do the same. He continued: We still have two years to deliver on this phase of the contract. I want to see the numbers of GPs start to rise again, with reduced vacancies, young doctors choosing to become GP partners in Scotland and older GPs who were thinking about retirement to decide they might keep going for a few more years. We have two more years of implementation, we all need to make the most of them. A Scottish Government spokesman said: We have a record number of GPs working in Scotland and are working to further increase the current numbers by at least 800 in the next 10 years. We are investing a further 7.5 million in Scotland in 2018/19 in GP recruitment and retention. By the end of this parliament we will have invested an additional 500 million per year in Primary Care 250 million of which will be in direct support of general practice. A year after being thrashed in the final, Kevin Kisner enjoyed a far happier experience at Austin Country Club by beating Matt Kuchar to win the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play title. Kisner, who ended the 10-match winning run of Open champion Francesco Molinari in the semi-finals, beat Kuchar 3&2 to win his third PGA Tour title and the biggest of his career. The 35-year-old was never behind in an error-strewn final but saved the best until last with a birdie on the par-five 16th to seal victory after Kuchar had left his eagle attempt from 20 feet agonisingly short. Kisner, who lost 7&6 to Bubba Watson 12 months ago, told Sky Sports: Im relieved. Its a long week, I played great and did the things I needed to do to win and thats what you have to do in match play. Im glad to come back after my performance last year and do a little better. I said to Roger (Maltbie, TV commentator) in the fifth fairway that were doing a lot better I was five down last year right here. I didnt think Matt played his best, I dont think either one of us did but its a long week and we were both grinding our butts off. I was just lucky enough to hole a few more putts. Kevin Kisner won the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play title (AP Photo/Eric Gay) Molinari had earlier fought back from two down with three holes to play against Kisner with birdies on the 16th and 17th, only to lose the match by three-putting the 18th. After 15 holes: 2 down After 17 holes: All-Square@F_Molinari never gives up! pic.twitter.com/YuTe6BYYjA The European Tour (@EuropeanTour) March 31, 2019 It was the first time the Open champion had played the 18th in competition this week after enjoying five comfortable wins to reach the last four. Molinari was thrashed 7&5 by Justin Thomas in his final group game 12 months ago, but became the first European player to compile a perfect 5-0 record in the Ryder Cup and had beaten Satoshi Kodaira, Thorbjorn Olesen, Webb Simpson, Paul Casey and Kevin Na to reach the semi-finals. In the other semi-final, Kuchar ended the brilliant run of Denmarks Lucas Bjerregaard with a hard-fought win. There was never more than one hole between the pair and Bjerregaard, who got the better of Tiger Woods in the quarter-finals, got back on level terms four times after Kuchar edged in front. Clutch from Bjerregaard. They're heading to 18. pic.twitter.com/BqaNljzjFF DP World Tour (@DPWorldTour) March 31, 2019 Bjerregaard also crucially matched Kuchars birdie on the 17th to keep the match alive but was unable to repeat the feat on the last and Kuchar safely two-putted for par. Molinari made an uncharacteristic error when he chipped into the water on the par-five 12th and also bogeyed the 14th before his brace of birdies kept the match alive. I just didnt quite play my best, Molinari said. We played quite well on the front nine and then just dropped too many easy shots on the back nine, unfortunately. I bogeyed 12, 14 and 18 from decent spots so its not something really youre allowed to do. But its still a positive week. Bjerregaard also tried to take the positives away from his week in Austin, adding: I can see from my Instagram and so forth that a few people have gotten to know my name from yesterday. So its been a great week, no matter what happens. But, yeah, it stings a bit now, Ive come this far, and Id love to have a chance in the final. Neither of us played really well on the front nine and I didnt do much, made a lot of pars and he made a few birdies and a few bogeys. I had a few chances on the back nine, just didnt putt well enough. Just didnt put pressure on him when I needed to, which I succeeded with yesterday. In the third/fourth place play-off, Molinari defeated Bjerregaard 4&2. MPs are set to take back control of the Brexit agenda in a fresh attempt to find an alternative to Theresa Mays deal that Parliament can support. The Commons will stage a second round of indicative votes on Monday on a series of rival proposals tabled by backbenchers to see if any can command a majority. The move comes as Mrs May struggles to contain the rising tensions with her Cabinet as the clock counts down to the latest EU deadline on April 12. Despite seeing her deal again defeated on Friday, the Prime Minister is determined to bring it back to the Commons for a fourth time possibly as early as Tuesday in a final roll of the dice to get it over the line. Mrs May spent the weekend trying to build support among MPs who could be won over, with aides saying she was 100% focused on getting the result she needed. (PA Graphics) Some in Parliament believe that if MPs begin to coalesce around a softer Brexit in Mondays votes, it may finally convince Brexiteer hold-outs that the PMs deal now represents the hardest break with the EU available. The pro-EU Justice Secretary David Gauke warned Mrs May not to ignore the will of Parliament if it does swing behind a softer deal such as the customs union plan proposed by Tory veteran Ken Clarke, which came closest to gaining a majority in the first round of indicative votes. (PA Graphics) And in an interview with the BBC, Tory chief whip Julian Smith said that the Parliamentary arithmetic means a softer type of Brexit is inevitable. The Prime Minister has, however, set her face firmly against a customs union, warning it runs counter to the Conservatives election manifesto and would inhibit Britains ability to strike trade deals around the world. If she were to give way, she would provoke a furious reaction from Brexiteers, with International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling among the ministers reportedly ready to resign. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: Its not clear to me that going softer is the way to command support. She added: If you look at the parliamentary arithmetic now, its not clear that something like a customs union actually commands support. Ms Truss said: I think that we are well prepared for no deal. I dont have any fear of no deal. Mr Gauke, meanwhile, said at the weekend that he would quit if Mrs May took Britain out of the EU without a deal, with other senior pro-EU ministers likely to follow suit. His warning followed a letter to the Prime Minister signed by 170 Tory MPs demanding Britain leave by May 22 at the latest without or without a deal. Justice Secretary David Gauke has warned Theresa May not to ignore the will of Parliament (Dominic Lipinski/PA) In a sign of her waning authority, it was written by Brexit Minister Chris Heaton-Harris, according to The Times. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn sought to keep up the pressure, hinting that Labour could table a fresh vote of no confidence in the Government in a bid to force a general election. Were ready for a general election, whenever it comes, he told the Daily Mirror. A general election would give us the chance to remove this incompetent and failed Tory Government. Amid the continuing Cabinet turmoil, eight motions have been tabled in the latest indicative votes, with Speaker John Bercow set to announce which he has selected for debate. Jeremy Corbyn says Labour is ready to fight a general election (Jason Roberts/PA) As well as Mr Clarkes customs union plan, there are again motions calling for a softer Norway-style arrangement, dubbed Common Market 2.0, and a confirmatory referendum on any deal that is agreed. With horsetrading between the various groups continuing over the weekend, some supporters of Common Market 2.0 were hoping to win over the DUP, arguing their plan would avoid the need for the Northern Ireland backstop. They were encouraged after the deputy leader of the pro-Brexit party, Nigel Dodds, said he would rather remain in the EU than back Mrs Mays deal. The DUPs Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson also insisted the party would continue to vote against Mrs Mays EU withdrawal deal. Mr Bercow is also expected to say whether MPs will adopt a preferential voting system this time around to help whittle down the options. Meanwhile, with potential successors to Mrs May beginning to jostle for her position following her announcement that she will quit once she has finally delivered on Brexit, Mr Grayling suggested the next leader should be a senior figure who campaigned for Brexit. (PA Graphics) He indicated that the younger generation of contenders which includes Dominic Raab, Ms Truss and Matt Hancock should wait until after the next general election due to take place in 2022. Brexit, knife crime and diabetes make headlines on Monday. Theresa May has been warned that backing a soft Brexit involving a customs union with the EU will split the Conservative Party, The Times reports. Tomorrow's front page : "Soft Brexit will shatter Tory party, May warned" #tomorrowspaperstoday Read more here : https://t.co/HQJ5YN7s2v pic.twitter.com/6lSEFAwcAs The Times Pictures (@TimesPictures) March 31, 2019 Justice Secretary David Gauke said the Prime Minister will have to accept the possibility of a customs union if Parliament votes in favour of the measure this week, The Guardian reports. Guardian front page, Monday 1 April 2019: Ministers try to force Mays hand as cabinet rift widens pic.twitter.com/JzLR8sMDpe The Guardian (@guardian) March 31, 2019 There has also been a breakdown in trust between her senior advisers and Cabinet ministers, according to the Financial Times. Just published: front page of the Financial Times, UK edition, Monday 1 April https://t.co/NVpS558KqH pic.twitter.com/yCnDjj66B5 Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) March 31, 2019 Speculation is mounting that Mrs May will call a snap election if a fourth attempt to pass her Brexit deal fails, The Independent reports. The i says Mrs May has been left with nowhere to turn and potential leadership contenders are starting to manoeuvre. What the papers say - April 1 (PA) I: Tories at breaking point on Brexit #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/xt1k2bUIJk Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) March 31, 2019 Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has intervened amid speculation over who might succeed Mrs May as Prime Minister, telling the Daily Telegraph they should be a senior Tory Eurosceptic. Monday's Daily Telegraph front page: Tories need 'experience' at helm #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/xlvhJOZI4r The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 31, 2019 Jeremy Corbyn has told the Daily Mirror Labour are ready for a general election whenever it comes. The Daily Mail leads with knife crime as the PM and Home Secretary Sajid Javid unveil new plans to tackle the problem. The Metro leads with four seemingly linked random stabbings in north London over the weekend. The Daily Express leads with new figures that suggest one person is diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes every three minutes in England and Wales. EXPRESS: New diabetes patient every 3 minutes #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/QAOAqvbWTF Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) March 31, 2019 And The Sun leads with a celebrity romance. Labour has accused ministers of failing vulnerable youngsters following a sharp rise in the number of primary school children being taught in pupil referral units (PRUs). According to an analysis of Department for Education (DfE) figures by the party, the number of five to 10-year-olds in PRUs where children excluded from mainstream education are taught has more than doubled in just seven years. They rose from 715 in 2011 to 1,572 in 2018, the party said, while the numbers placed in local authority alternative provision were up from 2,475 to 3,714 over the same period. The analysis also found that last year there were 42 under-fives in PRUs of whom 28 were aged two or younger. Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said the figures should be a cause for serious concern. It is deeply concerning to see such a vast increase in the number of very young children being taught in pupil referral units, she said. (Ian West/PA) For too long, the Tories have sat by idly as some of the most vulnerable young people in our country are falling between the gaps and even out of education altogether. The release coincides with the launch of a fresh series of Government initiatives to tackle youth violence at a Downing Street summit hosted by Theresa May. Last month, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and eight Police and Crime Commissioners wrote to the Prime Minister to warn that the broken system of support for troubled and excluded youngsters lay behind the recent rise in knife crime. They said excluded children were sucked into criminality and were at much greater risk of becoming either perpetrators or victims of serious youth violence. A DfE spokesman said: No matter the obstacles they may face or the backgrounds theyre from, we want our young people to receive an education that fosters ambition and a confidence in their abilities. Pupil referral units exist to work with young people with more complex problems. The classes are often smaller, with more specialist teaching, and can offer the support and mentoring that vulnerable children need. Early results in Ukraines presidential election show a comedian with no political experience maintaining his strong lead against the incumbent president in the first round, setting the stage for a run-off in three weeks. With just over half of the votes counted on Monday, Volodymyr Zelenskiy had 30.2% of the vote. Incumbent president Petro Poroshenko was a distant second with about 16.6%. Ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko trailed behind with 13%. I critically and soberly understand the signal that society gave today to the acting authorities, he said. Its a tough lesson for me and my team. Its a reason for serious work to correct mistakes made over the past years. Poroshenko, 53, a confectionery tycoon before he was elected five years ago, saw approval of his governing sink amid Ukraines economic woes and a sharp plunge in living standards. Poroshenko campaigned on promises to defeat the rebels in the east and to wrest back control of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 in a move that has drawn sanctions against Russia from the US and the European Union. A military embezzlement scheme that allegedly involved top Poroshenko associates as well as a factory controlled by the president dogged Poroshenko before the election. After the vote Poroshenko hit back at Zelenskiy, describing him as a pawn of self-exiled billionaire businessman Igor Kolomoyskyi, charges that Zelenskiy denies. Fate pitted me against Kolomoyskyis puppet in the run-off, he said. We wont leave a single chance for Kolomoyskyi. Zelenskiy quickly shot back, saying mockingly that it was impossible to say whether a corrupt official involved in the military embezzlement scheme was Poroshenkos puppet, or the other way round. BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen has revealed he is suffering from bowel cancer but is staying positive. The Middle East editor said he has had surgery to remove a cancerous tumour and is undergoing chemotherapy. Bowen said he was diagnosed with the disease in October after suffering funny pains in his leg and back. The experienced journalist, 59, told BBC Breakfast: Im a positive kind of guy. .@BowenBBC "could have had his cancer potentially prevented" Deborah from @bowelcanceruk explains the difference in #bowelcancer screening across the UK pic.twitter.com/xpNoYwolja BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) April 1, 2019 The chemo is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be in terms of side-effects. I think Ive just been quite lucky to tolerate it. Youve got to keep positive about things in life. Its all part of the journey. Jeremy Bowen said he was diagnosed in October (Ian West/PA) Bowen has urged others to seek testing for cancer in order to catch the disease early, revealing he did not suspect what was revealed with his own diagnosis. He said: I was diagnosed with it last October. I had some funny pains in my leg and my back, when I was in Iraq. When I came back I had to go to hospital for a couple of days, but they didnt mention cancer. They said it was to do with some scar tissue I had from some previous surgery. Thank you so much to Jeremy Bowen @BowenBBC for speaking to @BBCBreakfast for the first time about his bowel cancer diagnosis and helping to raise awareness as we start Bowel Cancer Awareness Month #thisisbowelcancer pic.twitter.com/lfQMfPLNQF Bowel Cancer UK (@bowelcanceruk) April 1, 2019 I went to my GP and I had no symptoms, none of the classic bowel cancer symptoms. I got a test and it came back positive. From that they found that I had a tumour. I had surgery to take it away. And now Im having chemotherapy. The key thing is, get tested. Ive been saying to all my friends, get tested. He added that despite bowel cancer testing being concerned with bodily functions, people should not die of embarrassment. Victims of crime should be allowed to give a personal statement and make requests to be heard at prisoners parole hearings, Scottish lawyers have said. A victim personal statement would be considered by parole boards in Scotland under proposals put forward by the Faculty of Advocates. Responding to a consultation by the Scottish Government about making changes to the system of releasing prisoners before the end of their sentences, the representative group for Scotlands lawyers has suggested giving victims the chance to submit evidence to the parole board. The Faculty of Advocates has recommended a limited role for victims or their families, proposing they could be able to write a personal statement as part of a dossier for consideration about whether a criminal should be released from custody. The group suggested victims or families who have requested to be notified about changes to the perpetrators situation should be given the opportunity prior to each parole hearing to submit a written victim personal statement to the Parole Board for their consideration. It added: This could include an option to ask the parole board to consider adding certain conditions to the prisoners licence if they are released, such as imposing an exclusion zone or prohibiting contact with certain individuals directly affected by the original offence. In its submission to the consultation, the faculty argued victims should not be able to attend parole hearings, warning it could provoke conflict. It wrote: As a matter of principle it is perhaps difficult to see what would be gained by wider attendance at hearings. The purpose of such hearings is the assessment and management of risk. It is difficult to see how this task would be improved by the greater involvement of others. The presence in the same room of the perpetrator of an offence and the victim or victims has the potential to produce conflict, and that is in the interests of no-one. The faculty also noted greater openness might not be welcomed by all victims and added there were disagreements about how much detail of parole decisions should be made public. It said: At the moment if victims do not wish to hear about their original case it is relatively easy for them to avoid doing so. With a few exceptions, cases attract media attention for the time that they are in court and then fade from the public eye. Publicising parole decisions might well result in renewed attention for the original offences. For victims who wish to try to put the offence behind them, this may not be desirable. Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf (Jane Barlow/PA) Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said: We welcome the Faculty of Advocates response to our public consultation on transforming Scotlands parole system and will consider all of the responses received as we determine the next steps. Victims needs must be at the centre of the criminal justice system and the proposals in the consultation were informed by the experiences of victims and families in Scotlands criminal justice process. By making improvements such as giving victims the opportunity to make representations to the parole board and ensuring openness and transparency, I believe we can strengthen public confidence in an already fair and robust system. Royal Marines who faced a deteriorating situation in the wake of a powerful category five hurricane, which pummelled British overseas territories in the Caribbean, have been recognised with a prestigious award. Barrelling through the region and unleashing life-threatening winds, Hurricane Irma tore a destructive trail and sparked a major UK aid operation in September 2017. The British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos and Anguilla bore the brunt of the damage, with buildings reduced to their foundations, lush green hillsides turned into brown stubble and a state of emergency declared. Marines during a 40 Commando Royal Marines parade, to celebrate their humanitarian efforts and reaction to Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean (Ben Birchall/PA) Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel Paul Maynard said 40 Commando left Britain and were greeted by a fast deteriorating situation on arrival including civil disorder and more than 100 prisoners on the loose. The first to arrive, at the peak of relief efforts more than 2,000 UK troops were in the Caribbean, with personnel from 40 Commando Royal Marines deploying with almost no notice in response to the humanitarian disaster. On Monday, on the sun-drenched parade square of their Norton Manor camp in Taunton, Somerset, 40 Commando were awarded the Firmin Sword of Peace the only unit across the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and Army to receive it four times. Describing what 40 Commando discovered in the British Virgin Islands, Lt Col Maynard said he had never felt the burden of risk before that he was carrying on Operation Ruman, despite having undertaken tours of Afghanistan. The band of Her Majestys Royal Marines perform (Ben Birchall/PA) When Alpha Company first drove down from the airport there were riots at petrol stations, there were people with blood on their face panic and shock everywhere all the shops were being looted, he said. Everyone was just very, very scared those first few days we had nothing really. We had to do the best we could. Due to the pace of their deployment, their weapons and radios were left behind in the UK and they arrived with only three days of supplies. They were forced to break into the police armoury to access firearms, and even used radios from stricken yachts. At one point, the personnel of 40 Commando were also forced to go down to half rations until they could access more. During their weaponless period, Lt Col Maynard said they were going out and arresting looters that were armed with machetes and cars packed with side arms. There was a real threat, he said. We had to adapt and improvise. Royal Marines officer Lieutenant Henry Hives carries the Sword of Peace (Ben Birchall/PA) Lt Col Maynard said the conditions on the ground were unlike anything he had ever seen, adding that it looked post apocalyptic. The most powerful storm in decades was followed less than two weeks later by category five Hurricane Maria, which proceeded to decimate the islands Dominica and Puerto Rico. At the presentation event, attended by dignitaries, including the vice chief of the defence staff General Sir Gordon Messenger, the Sword of Peace was presented to Lieutenant Henry Hives on behalf of the unit. The sought after Firmin Sword of Peace is given for activities above and beyond the units normal role, either within the United Kingdom, or overseas. If no suitable recipient the sword will not be awarded. For me the most important thing is that the unit has been given recognition for what it did on that operation, Lt Col Maynard said. I am delighted they have been recognised in this way. To be the first unit in defence to have four such accolades I think is testament to the ethos, culture and the qualities of the Royal Marines that are clearly being repeated through the generations. Royal Marines officer Lieutenant Henry Hives (right) carries the Sword of Peace during a 40 Commando Royal Marines parade (Ben Birchall/PA) The other three swords given to 40 Commando were for Operation Claret in 1966 for their role in the secret war against Indonesia, for Operation Banner in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1972 and a peacekeeping mission in Cyprus in 1984. Gen Messenger, as a former 40 Commando commanding officer, said it is a very proud moment, and added: Although, notably I didnt get a sword of peace when I was here, so I am just showing my failings. When you are called upon at very short notice and thrown into a situation that you simply dont understand, and then being able to adapt in order to have the right effect, he added. And be able to prioritise what needed to happen first, and establish relationships with people that have been shocked and disrupted by the events that happened, that is not easy. But it was delivered with aplomb by 40 Commando and I am very proud of them. He dismissed reports that the response was too slow, stating they were absolutely there out the starting pistol. Police officers, teachers and nurses have criticised Government proposals that could make them accountable for failing to spot warning signs of violent crime among young people. The Prime Minister warned we cannot simply arrest ourselves out of the countrys knife crime crisis as she opened a summit in Downing Street on Monday. More than 100 experts are meeting this week after Home Secretary Sajid Javid floated the idea of a so-called public health duty intended to help spot the warning signs that a young person could be in danger, such as presenting in A&E with a suspicious injury, to worrying behaviour at school or issues at home. A consultation in England and Wales will assess the extent to which those on the front line will be held to account for failing to prevent a young person getting involved in violence, a Home Office spokesman said. If passed, new legislation would create a legal duty for agencies, but each would determine for themselves how they would address and comply with it, according to consultation papers. The proposals are similar to the successful approach taken in Scotland, where knife crime has been treated as a public health issue for more than a decade, with a significant reduction in stabbings in Glasgow. Opening the serious youth violence summit on Monday, Theresa May said: Of course we will always make sure that the resources and tools are there to be able to apprehend and deal with those who are carrying and using knives and that the police have what they need to do. But we cannot simply arrest ourselves out of this problem. This is a wider problem, it is more deep-seated and we have to have a more coordinated effort. The Prime Minister met with the families of knife crime victims as well as experts including Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, Patrick Green from the Ben Kinsella Trust, and Baroness Newlove, the Victims Commissioner for England and Wales, whose husband Garry was beaten to death by a gang vandalising his car in 2007. (PA Graphics) Speaking after attending the summit, John Apter, the national chair of the Police Federation for England and Wales, said he was cynically optimistic, but added that the Government should take responsibility for policies that have left public services stripped to the bone and police firefighting when it comes to dealing with crime. Mr Apter, who represents rank-and-file officers, said: Whilst I fully accept we have to look forward, I think the Government and the Prime Minister in particular has to shoulder some of the responsibility for the Governments failed policies. What shes done to policing is unforgivable and shes now seeing the impact of that. He also described proposals which could make police, along with teachers and nurses, accountable for failing to spot warning signs that youngsters are becoming involved in knife crime as a bit of an insult. We already have that level of accountability and we already highlight if we fear that somebody is going down that path, he said. My plea is that this cannot be just a talking shop or a photo opportunity. Its got to be something meaningful and credible because the country deserves something to come out of this. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Prime Minister Theresa May and Youth Justice Board co-chair Roy Sefa-Attakora during a serious youth violence summit in Downing Street (Adrian Dennis/PA) Others have also suggested the proposals could put greater pressure on frontline staff. Royal College of Nursing acting chief executive and general secretary Dame Donna Kinnair said: With almost 40,000 nursing vacancies in England alone, nurses are already concerned about providing safe and effective care with such widespread staff shortages. Nursing staff already have a key role in safeguarding patients, whether thats working in the community, in schools or in hospitals and its unclear how putting a further obligation on our members, already working incredibly hard to do all they can for patients, will prevent violent crime. Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: Neither the blame for or the solution to violent crime can be laid at the door of schools or frontline hospital staff. Schools already have strong safeguarding practices in place and staff will be alerted to any issues of concern. The problem is what happens after issues of concern have been identified. Schools have lost pastoral support, special needs teachers and school counsellors. It comes a day after Mr Javid, who is also attending the summit, granted police new powers to increase stop and search activity following a spate of bloodshed across London and the rest of England since the start of 2019. (PA Graphics) Violent crime is like a disease rotting our society and its essential that all public bodies work together to treat the root causes, he said. The public health, multi-agency approach has a proven track record and Im confident that making it a legal duty will help stop this senseless violence and create long-term change. It follows days of violence across the country, including a slew of serious stabbings in Edmonton, north London, from Saturday night into Sunday morning, as well as the death of a 40-year-old motorist at the wheel of his vehicle in Clapham, south-west London, and a 29-year-old fatally stabbed on Thursday afternoon in Toxteth, Liverpool. There were 285 homicides where the method of killing was by a knife or sharp instrument in the year to March 2018 the highest number since records started in 1946. Mrs May came under fire last month after she suggested that police cuts were not to blame for a spate of fatal stabbings on teenagers. Senior figures in policing were at odds with the Prime Minister as they called for a reverse to slashes in staffing levels. In our latest blog, @MHewittNPCC reflects on what his priorities are in his new role as NPCC Chair, including how extra money should be used in the short term to combat the rise in violence that is claiming young lives https://t.co/qUOzsRdLyS pic.twitter.com/YgG4hkeWvX National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) (@PoliceChiefs) April 1, 2019 One of those attending the summit, Martin Hewitt the new chair of the National Police Chiefs Council, wrote in a blog post: This year there will be 970 million more for policing than the previous year that is positive but its not enough to meet all the challenges that the service faces. So an important part of my role will be working with policing and crime commissioners and the Home Office to make an evidence-based case for increased investment in the forthcoming government spending review as well as developing ambitious plans to maximise every penny we have. The consultation, mooted by Mr Javid in the Commons four weeks ago, will open on Monday until May 28 to the public and professionals across the UK. A 20,000 reward is being offered in the search for the killers of a 16-year-old boy who was gunned down near a leisure centre a year ago. Amaan Shakoor was shot at close range by two hooded attackers in Walthamstow, east London, on April 2 2018, and died in hospital the following day with his family at his bedside. A year on no one has been charged with his murder, although two men aged 18 and 19 were arrested and released under investigation. On Monday his family, who visit his grave nearly every day, said in a statement: Our lives have been totally changed forever by those individuals who had no regard for life and the devastating impact it would have on Amaans entire family. We have been handed a life sentence due to the senseless murder of our beloved child. Amaan was still a child, he came from a good family and was raised with endless amounts of love and affection. He had a stable family and good home. He was an innocent victim of a despicable and brutal crime. Amaan Shakoor (Metropolitan Police/PA) Officers will return to the scene of the shooting in Markhouse Road, near Kelmscott Leisure Centre, on Tuesday. Detective Inspector Darren Jones, from the Metropolitan Police murder squad, said: We believe Amaan was the victim of a targeted attack, with the chief suspects being two teenage males. Amaan was on the brink of an exciting time of his life and was a member of a close-knit, loving family. It is our understanding that Amaan was on the periphery of activity linked to gangs, and we believe his death may be linked to this. It is important to talk about this element of the investigation, as we believe the key to solving his murder is held by those he may have had links with through gang activity, whether this was directly or indirectly. Nothing excuses or justifies the taking of a life, and Amaans death is a tragedy. At only 16 years old, he was callously shot in the head at close range and these individuals must be caught and removed from our streets. The force is offering a 20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of Amaans killers. Anyone with information can call police on 020 8345 1570, or 101 quoting reference 6727/02APR2018, or to remain anonymous contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555111 or visit crimestoppers-uk.org MPs will choose from four Brexit options in the second round of the indicative vote process. None of the eight alternatives to Prime Minister Theresa Mays plan considered last week won a majority. But four of the ideas considered then will be considered again by MPs after Speaker John Bercow made his selection of motions to be put to the vote. The Speaker has selected the following #Brexit options for #IndicativeVotes this evening: (C) Kenneth Clarke - Customs Union (D) @NickBoles - Common Market 2.0 (E) @peterkyle - Confirmatory public vote (G) @joannaccherry - Parliamentary Supremacy pic.twitter.com/qMAMF0DRLt UK House of Commons (@HouseofCommons) April 1, 2019 Tory MPs will be given a free vote on the options, but Cabinet ministers will be told to abstain. Labour MPs have been told to back motions calling for the so-called Common Market 2.0, a customs union and a second referendum. Here are the motions selected by Mr Bercow: Former chancellor Ken Clarke is leading calls for a customs union with the EU after Brexit (PA) Motion C: Customs union Tory former chancellor Ken Clarkes customs union plan requires any Brexit deal to include, as a minimum, a commitment to negotiate a permanent and comprehensive UK-wide customs union with the EU. This was defeated by the smallest margin in the first round, falling just six votes short. Labour will support the plan again. Motion D: Common market 2.0 Common Market 2.0: - Respects result of the referendum by leaving the EU for EFTA - no more 'ever closer union' - Leaves ECJ (EFTA court respects national sovereignty) - Introduces safeguards on EU migration - Protects jobs by maintaining full Single Market participation pic.twitter.com/sOSI58LDIQ Stephen Kinnock (@SKinnock) January 22, 2019 Tabled by Conservatives Nick Boles, Robert Halfon and Dame Caroline Spelman and Labours Stephen Kinnock, Lucy Powell plus the SNPs Stewart Hosie. The motion proposes UK membership of the European Free Trade Association and European Economic Area. It allows continued participation in the single market and a comprehensive customs arrangement with the EU after Brexit including a UK say on future EU trade deals would remain in place until the agreement of a wider trade deal which guarantees frictionless movement of goods and an open border in Ireland. Labour and the SNP will support the amendment. Motion E: Confirmatory public vote We're in Bolton, and virtually no one here thinks Brexit is going well. Thank you @DavidCrausby and @YasminQureshiMP for supporting a confirmatory referendum on the final deal last week - whatever agreement is reached, this needs to go back to the people.#100x100 pic.twitter.com/9wV4wisWGU Our Future, Our Choice (@OFOCBrexit) March 30, 2019 It has been drawn up by Labour MPs Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson. This motion would require a public vote to confirm any Brexit deal passed by Parliament before its ratification. This option, tabled last time by Labour former minister Dame Margaret Beckett, polled the highest number of votes although was defeated by 295 votes to 268. Labour is expected to back the plan. Motion G: Parliamentary supremacy If we can't agree a deal we want: 1. We ask for an extension 2. If the EU says no there's no time for a referendum so 3. Parliament chooses between either (1) No Deal or (2) Revoking, with a commitment to a public inquiry into what we want and a possible further notification pic.twitter.com/8xD9WnHyTT Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) March 29, 2019 SNP MP Joanna Cherry joins with Dominic Grieve and MPs from other parties with this plan to seek an extension to the Brexit process, and if this is not possible then Parliament will choose between either no-deal or revoking Article 50. An inquiry would follow to assess the future relationship likely to be acceptable to Brussels and have majority support in the UK. Police are searching a caravan park where a missing Co Down shop assistant was last seen alive in 2005. Lisa Dorrian disappeared after a party at the site in Ballyhalbert, Co Down, and detectives have said they believe the 25-year-old was murdered. Detective Superintendent Jason Murphy, who is leading the investigation, said: The determination of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to bring those who killed Lisa Dorrian to justice is as strong today as it has ever been. Detective Superintendent Jason Murphy (David Young/PA) I can confirm that a large-scale search operation is taking place today in the caravan park in Ballyhalbert where Lisa was last seen alive, as well as the disused airfield behind. We will also be searching a number of other areas over the coming days. Police have pursued thousands of lines of inquiry in relation to the murder. Turkeys opposition looked poised to win control of the countrys two biggest cities as it dealt President Recep Tayyip Erdogans conservative party one of its most serious electoral setbacks in years. The opposition won Ankara, a ruling party stronghold for decades, and was leading a tight race for mayor in Istanbul, according to unofficial figures on Monday. The leader who has dominated Turkish politics for 16 years declared victory despite the opposition gains. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan leaves after giving a statement (Lefteris Pitarakis/AP) Sundays local elections were widely seen as a gauge of support for Mr Erdogan as the nation of 81 million faces a daunting economic recession. They were also a first test for Mr Erdogan, who has been accused of increasingly authoritarian tendencies, since he got widely expanded presidential powers last year. If confirmed, the swings in Ankara and Istanbul could be excruciating for the politician who campaigned hard to retain hold of them. The opposition also retained its hold over Izmir, Turkeys third-largest city. Although Mr Erdogan was not running for office, he became the face of the campaign, rallying tirelessly for months across Turkey, using hostile rhetoric against opposition parties, portraying the vote as a matter of national survival. The decline in urban support for his conservative, religious-based party came despite the fact that Mr Erdogan wields tight control over the media, which hardly covered the opposition candidates campaigns. People sitting by the Bosporus in Istanbul, read newspapers with news regarding the local elections (Emrah Gurel/AP) Behlul Ozkan, an associate professor at Marmara University, said Mr Erdogans loss of ground in Ankara and Istanbul indicated that his socially conservative and construction-driven policies no longer resonated in Turkeys cities. Political Islams quarter-century old hegemony in Turkeys two largest cities is over, he said. The basic problem is that Erdogan is not able to get votes from middle-income earners, who believe that the economy, education and urban administration are not run well. More than 57 million voters were eligible to choose leaders for 30 major cities, 51 provincial capitals and 922 districts in Turkey, as well as thousands of local positions. People walk past posters showing Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Binali Yildirim, the mayoral candidate for Istanbul (Emrah Gurel/AP) The election was marred by sporadic violence, with five dead and scores injured across Turkey. Mr Erdogans party and its nationalist allies garnered some 52% of the vote overall but the opposition made momentous inroads. A strategic decision by a pro-Kurdish party to sit out critical races in major cities contributed to the oppositions gains. The opposition also increased its support along the Mediterranean, taking the city of Adana from the nationalists and the resort destination of Antalya from the ruling party. A woman takes a selfie as Peoples Democratic Party, HDP, supporters celebrate after the announcement of preliminary results (Stringer/AP) Mr Erdogan acknowledged setbacks in a speech to his supporters, saying his party would work to understand what had gone wrong and fix the problem. Even with 99% of the votes counted, it was still a tight race on Monday to be mayor of Istanbul, Turkeys largest city and commercial hub. Unofficial results reported by the state-run Anadolu news agency showed the opposition at 48.8% support to the ruling partys 48.5% support. Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition candidate in an alliance led by the secular Republican Peoples Party, or CHP, declared that he won Istanbul but his rival, former prime minister Binali Yildirim of the ruling party, said it was still too early to call. Mr Yildirim accepted that his rival was leading but said his party would file an objection, suggesting a recount of the 319,500 votes declared void in Istanbul. Both Ankara and Istanbul have been held by Mr Erdogans Justice and Development Party, the AKP, and its Islamic-oriented predecessor for 25 years. Ekrem Imamoglu, the candidate from an alliance led by the secular Republican Peoples Party, (CHP) gestures as he declares victory during a news conference in Istanbul (Emrah Gurel/AP) Mr Erdogans own ascent to power began as Istanbul mayor in 1994. Unofficial results showed Mansur Yavas, the candidate of the CHP-led alliance, winning the top post in Ankara with 50.9% support. The AKP still holds a majority of Ankaras 25 districts. The government had accused Mr Yavas of forgery and tax evasion, which he called slanderous. The AKPs candidate for Ankara mayor, Mehmet Ozhaseki, won 47.1% support and his party said it would challenge the results. Sundays election was a significant victory for the opposition, which displayed good strategies and promising candidates, said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the Ankara director of the German Marshall Fund. This will certainly lead to an emerging new political landscape in Turkey, he said. He argued, however, that a pause in elections until 2023 would benefit Mr Erdogan. This gives the governing party and President Erdogan a window of opportunity to undertake economic reforms, political reforms if they wish, fix Turkeys relations with foreign countries, he said. Supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Emrah Gurel/AP) Andrew Dawson, head of the Council of Europes election observation mission, said his monitors were not fully convinced that Turkey currently has the free and fair electoral environment which is necessary for genuinely democratic elections. In predominantly Kurdish provinces, the Peoples Democratic Party, or HDP, won back some seats from government-appointed trustees, including the symbolic capital of Diyarbakir, but lost several former strongholds to the ruling party. The government has replaced 95 elected officials since 2016 for alleged links to outlawed Kurdish militants. Mr Dawson urged the Turkish government to respect the election results. Political parties have three days to submit objections and official results are expected in the coming days. Senator Tim Kaine would have been vice-president had the 2016 US presidential election been decided by popular vote but he does not see any prospect of the Electoral College being abolished. The Democrat, who was Hillary Clintons running mate in her ill-fated duel with Donald Trump, told students at the University of Louisville he saw no prospect of a move towards the popular vote. Mr Kaine, from Virginia, said getting rid of the Electoral College was not going to happen because it would require a constitutional change. President Donald Trump won the race to the Oval Office despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton (Susan Walsh/AP) He said the proposal could not overcome the really onerous requirement of being ratified by an overwhelming majority of states. He said smaller states really like the Electoral College. The idea has gained traction among Democrats, since Mrs Clinton netted nearly three million more votes in 2016 than Mr Trump. However, the former first lady lost the Electoral College and therefore the White House to her opponent whose victories in key Rust Belt states, taking all the electoral votes for those states, gave him the keys to the Oval Office. Climate change protesters in their underwear have attempted to disrupt the Commons debate on Brexit. More than 10 people in the public gallery with messages written on their bodies stood up, including some pressed against the glass which separates the gallery from the chamber. The protest took place as MPs considered the second stage of the Brexit alternatives. The campaigners in @HouseofCommons gallery have managed to get naked, glue their hands to the glass but most interestingly as well some retain their security lanyards if not many clothes #neverboringinWestminster Mims Davies MP #KICKSTART #JOBS #PROGRESSION (@mimsdavies) April 1, 2019 Speaker John Bercow maintained that the debate would proceed despite the protest. The group of men and women with slogans stood up as the Labour MP Peter Kyle was making a speech. Several doorkeepers attempted to remove the protesters, but they remained in position for several minutes. (Stefan Rousseau/PA) My god, naked protesters in the chamber! No! there will not be a clothes shortage with No-Deal! Andrea Jenkyns MP (@andreajenkyns) April 1, 2019 The dozen or so semi-naked protesters stood in a line with their backsides pressed against the security glass of the public gallery. Most were only wearing knickers or underpants. On their bodies were written the words Climate justice act now and eco collapse. Extinction Rebellion, which describes itself as a non-violent direct action and civil disobedience group, claimed responsibility for the protest. They wrote on Twitter: Extinction Rebellion activists strip off in House of Commons public gallery to call attention to the elephant in the room climate and ecological crisis. Irelands foreign affairs minister has said there is no plan in place to protect the integrity of the EU single market in a no-deal Brexit scenario. But Simon Coveney said it was not too late to create a plan that would protect the single market and the peace process on the island of Ireland in the absence of a backstop. Mr Coveney made the comments as efforts intensify to find a way through the Brexit impasse with the April 12 deadline looming. While Westminster continues to debate #Brexit in search of way forward - All businesses linked to UK in Ireland should be preparing for the potential impact of No-Deal. Dont ignore this possibility - Theres a lot of help, funding & advice available, access it and be informed! https://t.co/wIS5XOU4En Simon Coveney (@simoncoveney) April 1, 2019 Sinn Fein leaders Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle ONeill met EU negotiator Michel Barnier and the EU parliaments Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt for discussions in Brussels on Tuesday. Ms McDonald said any hardening of the border on the island of Ireland was unacceptable in any form. Irish premier Leo Varadkar will travel to Paris on Tuesday for a bilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet Mr Varadkar in Dublin on Thursday. Speaking to RTE News in Cork, Mr Coveney said: In the absence of a British Government co-operating in the way that they have committed to, to actually prevent checks on the island of Ireland, well then we need to try to come up with another plan. Asked whether it was too late with the April 12 date looming, he said: No, its not, because we need to continue to focus on the solution here, which is a solution that was agreed by the British Government and the EU institutions, which was to solve this problem on the basis of regulatory alignment. If the British Government refuse to follow through on that commitment that they have made well then, of course, weve to speak to the EU Commission about how we respond to that and that was always going to be left to the last number of weeks. Speaking after her meeting with EU leaders in the Belgian capital, Ms McDonald said the Sinn Fein leadership reiterated the necessity to continue to protect Irish interests and prevent a hard border in the event of a no-deal scenario. Ms McDonald said: Irrespective of who occupies number 10 Downing Street, the British system needs to understand that theres no getting away from the question of Ireland. The Irish question needs a resolution. She said the British Government had obligations under the Good Friday Agreement. Michelle ONeill and Mary Lou McDonald (Stefan Rousseau/PA) In the event of a crash, we have a big, big problem at the Irish border, she said. Weve set out clearly to Mr Barnier and others that any hardening of that border would represent a step backwards for Ireland. We regard any hardening of the border on the island of Ireland to be unacceptable, however it is done. The reality is the peace that we enjoy, and the quality of life that people particularly living in border communities enjoy, is based on the premise of free-flowing movement. She said any interference to that will cause significant difficulties. A global baby shower in honour of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex has raised more than 22,000 for three charities, including enough money to support 83 girls in education in Africa for a year. Fans of Meghan and Harry have been donating to the animal rescue charity Mayhew, the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed), and WellChild ahead of the birth of the royal baby. Fans of Meghan and Harry have been donating to good causes (Chris Jackson/PA) Anke Adams, of Camfed, which helps girls who live in the poorest rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa go to school, said its donations thanks to the #GlobalSussexBabyShower have exceeded 15,000 in just a few days. Its enough money to support 83 girls in secondary school for a year, she said. Its been incredible. Were only a small team but weve been on social media thanking everybody, she said. Wow! The incredible generosity of the #GlobalSussexBabyShower movement! This is enough to support **83 girls** in Africa to continue their high school #education for another year This impact is from just 4 days, imagine how many young women we can empower by 12th May?! pic.twitter.com/3LJpe1FULB CAMFED - Campaign for Female Education (@Camfed) April 1, 2019 Weve had 15,136 from 660 donations. Some of our partner communities have been hit badly by Cyclone Idai with schools swept away and headteachers killed. Theres a lot of support needed. More than 2,400 has been received by WellChild, of which Harry is patron. The charitys chief executive Colin Dyer said: We have been surprised and delighted by the donations from supporters of #GlobalSussexBabyShower. Its great that an online outpouring of goodwill can lead to practical help for children with serious illness and their families. Thanks to #GlobalSussexbabyshower supporters for all your kind donations to WellChild today, which will be a huge help to all the seriously ill young people and their families who we support!#GlobalSussesBabyShower WellChild (@WellChild) March 31, 2019 Mayhew, an animal welfare charity working to improve the lives of dogs, cats and people in communities in London and internationally, had received more than 4,500 in donations. The charity, of which Meghan is patron, said it had been incredibly touched by the response. We're incredibly touched by the generosity of everyone who joined the #GlobalSussexBabyShower this weekend! THANK YOU to everyone who donated and showed their support, you are amazing! pic.twitter.com/vLxZJ6wscp Mayhew (@themayhew) April 1, 2019 The viral campaign was started by Twitter user @freepeeper to honour Baby Sussex and Harry and Meghans compassion. Were kicking off a GLOBAL fundraiser on Sunday, 31st of March in honor of #BabySussex and the compassion and altruism of The #DukeandDuchessofSussex. Weve selected 3 charities to benefit in this effort. Tweet your donations and include hash #GlobalSussexBabyShower RETWEET! pic.twitter.com/4BEscqdwRR THRIVE ON PURPOSE (@freepeeper) March 29, 2019 The Sussexes first child is due this month and will be seventh in line to the throne. New York Police Department is investigating sexual assault allegations against magician David Blaine. Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea told reporters Blaine is under investigation but declined to discuss any details, including whether police had sought to interview him. Mr Shea was responding to a report by the Daily Beast website that the NYPD had taken statements from two women accusing Blaine of sexual assault. Citing unnamed sources, the report said one of the alleged victims claims she was attacked by Blaine in his Manhattan apartment in 1998. The Daily Beast had previously reported that a former model alleged Blaine raped her in London in 2004, an allegation he denied. David Blaine over the Thames (PA) Scotland Yard detectives later declined to take further action after investigating her claim, the website said. Blaine, 45, is known for stunts like being buried underground for seven days without food or water in New York in 1999. He also stayed in a plexiglass case suspended 30ft above the Thames River in London for more than 40 days in 2003. According to his website, he is to begin a tour of the UK and Ireland in June. The NYPD said it takes sexual assault and rape cases extremely seriously, and urges anyone who has been a victim to file a report so we can perform a comprehensive investigation, and offer support and services to survivors. An MP quit the Conservative Party in the House of Commons chamber after his Brexit alternative was defeated for a second time. Former minister Nick Boles said he could no longer sit for this party, prompting one colleague to say: Oh Nick, dont go, come on. He was applauded by other MPs for his announcement, which came moments after his Common Market 2.0 proposal was among four Brexit alternatives to Theresa Mays deal rejected again by MPs. Mr Boles acknowledged he had failed but blamed this chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I am resigning the Conservative whip with immediate effect. The Conservative Party has shown itself to be incapable of compromise so I will sit as an Independent Progressive Conservative. Nick Boles (@NickBoles) April 1, 2019 His plan sought UK membership of the European Free Trade Association and European Economic Area and received cross party support, but lost by 282 votes to 261 majority 21. Conservative former chancellor Ken Clarkes proposal for any Brexit deal to include a commitment to negotiate a permanent and comprehensive UK-wide customs union with the EU was defeated by 276 votes to 273, majority three the smallest margin. Nick Boles speaking during the indicative votes debate in the House of Commons (UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor) Labour MP Peter Kyles call for a second referendum to confirm any Brexit deal received the most votes but was defeated by 292 votes to 280, majority 12. SNP MP Joanna Cherrys motion calling for an extension to the Brexit process, and if this is not possible then Parliament will choose between either no-deal or revoking Article 50, was defeated by 292 votes to 191, majority 101. Mr Boles rose to his feet to raise a point of order in the Commons after Speaker John Bercow had read out the results. He said: I have given everything to an attempt to find a compromise that can take this country out of the European Union while maintaining our economic strength and our political cohesion. I accept I have failed. I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I regret therefore to announce I can no longer sit for this party. He later wrote on Twitter: I am resigning the Conservative whip with immediate effect. The Conservative Party has shown itself to be incapable of compromise so I will sit as an Independent Progressive Conservative. A pioneering blood test that can detect up to 90% of cases of endometriosis has been developed by UK scientists. The simple test looks for tiny DNA fragments in the blood and could spare women needing to undergo keyhole surgery to diagnose the condition. Endometriosis can be extremely painful and is thought to affect 1.5 million women in the UK. According to the charity Endometriosis UK, it takes an average of 7.5 years to get a diagnosis from the first onset of symptoms. Experts now hope to speed up this process through a new blood test, with laboratory results available within a few days. Developed by MDNA Life Sciences and experts at the University of Oxford, the test will be available privately within nine months at a cost of about 250. The Mitomic Endometriosis Test looks for biomarkers of endometriosis in the blood (MDNA Life Sciences/PA) It is hoped women will be able to access it on the NHS in the not too distant future. The Mitomic Endometriosis Test, which was developed at MDNAs Newcastle lab, looks for biomarkers of endometriosis in the blood through the close examination of mutations in mitochondrial DNA. A study published in the journal Biomarkers in Medicine found that these newly-identified biomarkers can accurately detect endometriosis in blood samples in up to nine out of 10 cases, even in the early stages of the condition. MDNA Life Sciences is now putting together a test kit to enable clinical laboratories in the UK and worldwide to carry out the test. The company has already developed a blood test for prostate cancer and is looking to release tests for ovarian cancer and pancreatic cancer next year. Other tests, for lung, liver, and stomach cancers could follow in 2021. Dr Christian Becker, from the Nuffield Department of Womens and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford, said: Endometriosis not only causes enormous suffering to the affected women, but also brings a tremendous medical and economic burden to bear on society. There is a long lag phase between the onset and diagnosis of the disease, mainly due to its non-specific symptoms and because it can only be diagnosed invasively by laparoscopy. A specific, non-invasive test to aid diagnosis of endometriosis is certainly an unmet clinical need. Dr Andrew Harbottle, MDNA Life Sciences chief science officer, said: Mutations in mitochondrial DNA act as ideal biomarkers, providing us with a unique and detailed diary of damage to the DNA and accurately detecting many difficult-to-diagnose diseases and conditions, such as endometriosis. Harry Smart, MDNA Life Sciences chairman said: We are the only company to use mitochondrial DNA to detect diseases and have developed a library of 16,000 biomarkers to date. Our groundbreaking test for endometriosis will fundamentally change the way this debilitating disease is detected and diagnosed. We look forward to helping UK women get treatment sooner, reducing their pain and distress and providing cost savings to health services. Endometriosis occurs when tissue similar to the lining of the womb starts to grow in other parts of the body, such as the ovaries and fallopian tubes. It is the second most common gynaecological condition after fibroids and can affect fertility. Until now, the only definitive way to diagnose endometriosis has been via laparoscopy a type of keyhole surgery where a camera is inserted into the pelvis to look at internal organs. An anti-abortion group that lost its legal challenge against a Scottish Government move to allow women to take abortion pills at home is to return to court. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) believes the decision by ministers to enable women to self-administer the drug misoprostol is unlawful and a threat to their health. Judge Lady Wise rejected the groups arguments following a hearing at the Court of Session last May. The SPUC is appealing against the decision and will return to the Edinburgh court on Tuesday. Chief executive of SPUC Scotland John Deighan said: Clearly, the original decision was disappointing but it has always been our intention to fight this case all the way. After thorough consideration of the judgment and in tandem with legal advice we are now ready for the appeal. The appeal will be heard at the Court of Session in Edinburgh (Jane Barlow/PA) We owe it to our supporters who continue to make donations to cover our legal costs. The SPUC will argue that taking an abortion-causing drug at home is not consistent with the Abortion Act of 1967. By Guy Faulconbridge and William James LONDON, April 2 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May will chair a five-hour cabinet meeting on Tuesday in an attempt to plot a course out of the Brexit maelstrom as she comes under pressure to either leave the European Union without a deal or call an election. Nearly three years since the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU in a shock 2016 referendum, British politics is in crisis and it is unclear how, when or if it will ever leave the club it first joined in 1973. May's deal has been defeated three times by the lower house of the British parliament which failed on Monday to find a majority of its own for any alternative to her deal. May is expected to try to put her deal to a fourth vote this week. The deadlock has already delayed Brexit for two weeks beyond the planned exit date of March 29 and May is due to chair hours of cabinet meetings in Downing Street in a bid to find a way out of the maze. "Over the last days a no-deal scenario has become more likely, but we can still hope to avoid it," EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said at an event in Brussels. Education Secretary Damian Hinds said he hoped May's withdrawal agreement would finally be approved this week by parliament, saying it remained the best outcome. If May cannot get her deal ratified by parliament then she has a choice between leaving without a deal, calling an election or asking the EU for a long delay to negotiate a Brexit deal with a much closer relationship with the bloc. "If we move quickly this week and we get this deal over the line it is still possible that we may be able to avoid having to have those European Parliament elections (in May)," Hinds said. Asked whether there would be a much longer extension if May's deal failed once again, he said: "That is absolutely a risk and a big looming risk at the moment." The Sun newspaper said Brexit-supporting ministers will demand May give a final ultimatum to fix the Irish backstop, the most controversial part of her deal, or see the United Kingdom leave without a deal at 2200 GMT on April 12. The option which came closest to getting a majority in parliament on Monday was a proposal to keep Britain in a customs union with the EU, which was defeated by three votes. A proposal to hold a confirmatory referendum on any deal got the most votes, but was defeated by 292-280. The EU's Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said the only way to avoid a no-deal Brexit was if the British parliament found a majority for an option. He said the EU would accept a customs union and a Norway-style relationship. Sterling fell almost 1 percent to $1.3036 on Monday. The third defeat of May's withdrawal agreement on Friday - the date Britain was originally scheduled to leave the EU - has left one of the weakest British leaders in a generation facing a spiralling crisis. Her government and her Conservative Party, which has been trying to contain a schism over Europe for 30 years, are now riven between those who are demanding that May engineer a decisive break with the bloc and those demanding that she rule out such an outcome. (Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Michael Holden) By Lisa Baertlein and Matthias Inverardi LOS ANGELES/DUSSELDORF, April 2 (Reuters) - The volume of U.S. ocean cargo imports arranged by Deutsche Post's DHL Group, United Parcel Service Inc, FedEx Corp and other freight forwarders fell sharply in February, sending a warning on global trade, a key barometer for the world economy. Though just a sliver of the global delivery and logistics business, freight forwarding - the arranging of end-to-end transport of goods for importers and exporters - is seen as a proxy for international trade. Towards the end of last year their clients binged on imports such as apparel, auto parts, chemicals and furniture to avoid U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods. In February, those customers pulled back. U.S. ocean imports fell 4.5 percent, the first drop in two years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence's trade data firm Panjiva. Freight forwarders' overall February decline was in near lockstep, down 4.4 percent, according to Panjiva data, published first by Reuters. Customers - grappling with stockpiled goods and delays on a new round of planned tariff increases - eased off buying, exacerbating a normal slowdown due to Chinese New Year factory closures. Switzerland's Kuehne und Nagel, which is the largest ocean cargo freight forwarder, saw its U.S. import volume fall 9.3 percent in February. Volume for DHL, the second largest, was down 8.6 percent. UPS volume dropped 16.3 percent and FedEx, which twice in three months has warned about cooling global trade, saw its volume fall 14.6 percent. The companies mentioned declined to comment on Panjiva's data. Overall U.S. imports from China fell 9.9 percent in February, driving most of the monthly decline for freight forwarders. Some experts said the retreat was the inevitable outcome of a bitter trade war between the world's biggest economic powerhouses. "I'm not seeing these declines as anything alarming yet," said Stifel analyst David Ross, who is awaiting March results, due later this month. But Panjiva research analyst Chris Rogers said data suggests that a widespread and accelerating trade slowdown is under way, with Europe, South Korea and Japan contributing. The 4.6 percent fall in European imports in February, including car parts and furniture, could point to a "softer consumer spending picture than many expect," Rogers said. DHL's Global Trade Barometer, which tracks three-quarters of all ocean and air freight, last week forecast that growth would continue to lose momentum. Among other things, U.S. imports of consumer fashion goods and industrial raw materials are expected to contract slightly for the next three months, DHL said in a statement. "The outlook for the rest of 2019 doesn't look great," said supply chain consultant John Haber, who thinks tariff-related stockpiling masked softening U.S. demand. (Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles and Matthias Inverardi in Dusseldorf Editing by Phil Berlowitz) There was never a real intent. Far from respecting religious sentiments, the Kartarpur corridor was a political tool being used for projection and one-upmanship. India should have assessed reality on the ground. The enthusiasm shown by Pakistan over religious connect should have been seen as a red herring for India as should be the other proposal by Islamabad now, to open up a corridor for Hindu pilgrims to visit the Sharada Peeth temple situated in Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir (PoK). Why do I say that? To begin with, India has drawn a new red line for Pakistan, engaging the Khalistanis. Disturbing Liason: Sikh extremist Gopal Singh Chawla with LeT chief Hafiz Saeed. (Photo: Twitter/ @Geeta_Mohan) In 2014, the Modi administration had sent out out a strong message to Islamabad by drawing a line with the Hurriyat, calling off talks because of Pakistans continuous engagement with separatist elements. Pakistan has now found a new card to act as a disruptor Khalistan. Therefore, will Pakistan pay heed to Indias call and remove elements such as Gopal Singh Chawla from the Kartarpur Sahib Committee, who is not only a known Khalistani but also apparently a close aide of terrorist Hafiz Saeed? Did Pakistan not know that? They not only knew it but also have used Gopal Singh Chawla and his anti-India propaganda to their advantage. The Gurudwaras in Pakistan are infested with such elements. Instead of keeping these elements at bay, Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan has appointed some of them as members of the Committee. It is not just to rile India, but also to ensure that the messaging in international fora is that while Islamabad is taking forward-moving steps, India is holding back. Having these elements as part of a religious initiative would be unacceptable to New Delhi but can Imran Khans government remove these assets of the ISI? If not, then Kartarpur is practically a stalled process for now. Kartarpur Sahib: The ploy for a fresh bout of one-upmanship against India. (Photo: India Today) It is not just the fact that the corridor would be yet another tool in Rawalpindis anti-India kit; there are many other nuances that have to be looked into, such as the difference in opinion on permits to visit Kartarpur Sahib. India insists that it should be a permit-free corridor whereas Pakistan wants passports and permits. After much persuasion, Pakistan agreed to Indians of all faiths being allowed to visit the holy place as the Indian Constitution does not allow for distinction or restriction on the basis of religion. How are Indian citizens expected to travel to Sharada Peeth temple? Taking Pakistani visas would be unacceptable. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) But any decision on these areas could impact the other proposal put forth to open up another corridor for Hindu pilgrims to visit the Sharada Peeth situated in Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir (PoK). While the focus would be for Kashmiri Pandits to be able to travel across the border, how will Indian citizens travel to the temple? Will Pakistan insist on visas? If so, then it would be unacceptable since it is occupied territory by Pakistan. These are technicalities which would have far-reaching political and foreign policy impacts on India. So, while the no go areas have been defined by India, it has to tread carefully to ensure it does not fall into any of Pakistans ploys. Also read: Step towards Sharda Peeth: Pakistan's proposal for a corridor to the famed temple breaks the ice in Kashmir rhetoric The following companies are subsidiares of Dover: Accelerated Production Systems, Acme Elevator, Advansor A/S, Advansor Dover International (Poland) sp. z o.o, Advansor Germany GmbH, Alfred Fueling Systems Holdco Ltd., Alfred Fueling Systems Inc., Alfred Fueling Systems Intermediate Holdco Ltd., All-Flo Pump Company, Anman LLC, Anthony Equity Holdings Inc., Anthony Holdings Inc., Anthony Inc., Anthony International, Anthony International Foreign Sales Corp., Anthony International Holding Company, Anthony Mexico Holdings LLC, Anthony North Holdco Inc., Anthony Specialty Glass LLC, Anthony TemperBent GP LLC, Auto Glanz Solutions LLC, Automatik Grundstucksverwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG, Automatik Plastics Machinery (Taiwan) Ltd., BSC Filters Limited, Background2 Limited, Belanger, Belanger Inc., Belvac Middle East FZE, Belvac Production Machinery Inc., Blackmer, BlitzRotary GmbH, Butler Engineering and Marketing S.P.A., CDS Visual, CEP Liquidation LLC, CP Formation LLC, CPC Europe Inc., CPI Products Inc., Caldera, Canada Organization & Development LLC, Chief Automotive Technologies (Shanghai) Trading Company Ltd., Chippewa Square Captive Insurance Company, Colder Products Company, Colder Products Company GmbH, Colder Products Company LTD, Cook Compression BV, Cook Compression LLC, Cook Compression Limited, Cook-MFS Inc., DD1 Inc., DDI Properties Inc., DE-STA-CO Benelux B.V., DE-STA-CO FRANCE, DE-STA-CO Shanghai Co. Ltd., DESTACO UK Limited, DFH Corporation, DFS Netherlands B.V., DSR BZ Holdings LLC, Datamax International Corp, De Sta Co (Asia) Company Limited, De-Sta-Co Cylinders Inc., DeStaCo Europe GmbH, Delaware Capital Formation Inc., Delaware Capital Holdings Inc., Dover (China) Investment Co. Ltd., Dover (Schweiz) Holding GmbH, Dover (Shanghai) Industrial Co. Ltd., Dover (Shenzhen) Industrial Equipment Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Dover (Suzhou) Industrial Equipment Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Dover Asia Trading Private Ltd., Dover Australia Holdings Pty Limited, Dover Business Services EMEA Limited, Dover Business Services LLC, Dover Business Services Philippines Corporation, Dover CLP Formation Limited Partnership, Dover CR spol s r.o., Dover Canada Holdings ULC, Dover Canada Operations ULC, Dover Corporation Regional Headquarters, Dover DEI Services Inc., Dover Denmark Holdings ApS, Dover EMEA FZCO, Dover Energy UK Ltd, Dover Engineered Products Segment Inc., Dover Europe Inc., Dover Europe Sarl, Dover Fluids UK Ltd, Dover France Holdings, Dover France Participations, Dover France Technologies, Dover Fueling Solutions Segment Inc., Dover Fueling Solutions UK Limited, Dover Germany GmbH, Dover Global Holdings LLC, Dover Holdings de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Dover Imaging & Identification Segment Inc., Dover India Pvt. Ltd., Dover Intercompany Services UK Limited, Dover International B.V., Dover International Operations Inc., Dover International Ventures Inc., Dover International Ventures Tunisia S.a.r.l., Dover International ithalat ihracat ve Pazarlama Limited Sirketi, Dover Italy Holdings S.r.l., Dover Luxembourg Finance Sarl, Dover Luxembourg Participations Sarl, Dover Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Dover Luxembourg Services Sarl, Dover Operations South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Dover Overseas Ventures Inc., Dover Pumps & Process Solutions Segment Inc., Dover Refrigeration & Food Equipment Segment Inc., Dover Refrigeration & Food Equipment UK Ltd, Dover Resources International de Mexico S. de R.L. C.V., Dover Solutions Colombia SAS, Dover Southeast Asia (Thailand) Ltd., Dover Spain Holdings S.L., Dover UK Pensions Limited, Dover WSCR Holding LLC, Dover WSCR LLC, Dover do Brasil Ltda., Dow-Key Microwave Corporation, Dresser Wayne Data Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Dresser Wayne Fuel Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., EOA Systems Inc., Ebs-Ray Holdings Pty Ltd, Ebs-Ray Industries Pty. Ltd., Ebs-Ray Pumps Pty. Ltd., Em-tec, Espy, Ettlinger, Ettlinger Kunststoffmaschinen GmbH, Fairbanks Environmental Limited, Fibrelite Composites Limited, Fibresec Holdings Limited, Fibresec Limited, Finder, GAL LLC, GIIER LLC, Gala Industries, Gala Kunststoff-und Kautschukmaschinen GmbH, Guangdong Tokheim LIYUAN Oil Industry Technology Limited Company, Highland Park Insurance Company, Hill PHOENIX Inc., Hill PHOENIX WIC LLC, Hill Phoenix Costa Rica Sociedad De Responsabilidad Limitada, Hill Phoenix El Salvador Limitada de Capital Variable, Hill Phoenix Guatemala Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix Honduras Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Hiltap Fittings Ltd., Hydro Systems Company, Hydro Systems Europe Ltd., Hydronova Australia-NZ Pty Ltd, Industrial Motion Control LLC, Innovative Control Systems, Innovative Control Systems Inc., Inpro/Seal LLC, JK Group, JK Group S.P.A., JK Group USA Inc., K S Boca Inc., K&L Microwave DR Inc., K&L Microwave Inc., KPS (Beijing) Petroleum Equipment Trading Co Ltd., KPS Fueling Solutions Sdn. Bhd., KPS Hong Kong Holding Limited, KPS UK Limited, KS Formation Inc., KS Liquidation Inc., KSLP Liquidation L.P., Kiian Digital (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Knappco LLC, Knowles Electronics, LIQAL, Liquip, Liquip International Pty Limited, MAAG, MARKEM FZ SA, MARKEM-IMAJE Corporation, MIP Holdings Inc., MS Printing Solutions, MS Printing Solutions S.R.L., Maag Automatik GmbH, Maag Automatik Plastics Machinery (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Maag Gala Inc., Maag Italy S.R.L., Maag Pump Systems, Maag Pump Systems (US) Inc., Maag Pump Systems AG, Maag Reduction Inc., Maag Service (Malaysia) Sdn. Bdn., Maag Systems (Thailand) Limited, Marathon Equipment Company (Delaware), Markem Imaje Center of Competencies Spain S.L.U., Markem-Imaje, Markem-Imaje (China) Co. Limited, Markem-Imaje - Unipessoal Lda, Markem-Imaje A/S, Markem-Imaje AB, Markem-Imaje AG, Markem-Imaje AS, Markem-Imaje B.V., Markem-Imaje CSAT GmbH, Markem-Imaje Co. Ltd., Markem-Imaje GmbH, Markem-Imaje Holding, Markem-Imaje Identificacao de Produtos Ltda., Markem-Imaje Inc., Markem-Imaje India Private Limited, Markem-Imaje Industries, Markem-Imaje Industries Limited, Markem-Imaje KK, Markem-Imaje LLC, Markem-Imaje Limited, Markem-Imaje Limited, Markem-Imaje Ltd., Markem-Imaje N.V., Markem-Imaje Oy, Markem-Imaje Philippines Corporation, Markem-Imaje Pty Ltd, Markem-Imaje S.A., Markem-Imaje S.A. de C.V., Markem-Imaje S.r.l., Markem-Imaje SAS, Markem-Imaje Sdn Bhd, Markem-Imaje Singapore Pte. Ltd., Markem-Imaje Spain S.A.U, Markpoint Holding AB, Midland Manufacturing LLC, Mouvex, Northern Lights (Nevada) Inc., Northern Lights Funding LP, Northern Lights Investments LLC, Nova Controls Inc., OK International, OK International (UK) Ltd., OK International Holdings Inc., OK International Inc., OPW Engineered Systems Inc., OPW Fluid Transfer Group Europe B.V., OPW Fluid Transfer Solutions (Jiang Su) Co. Ltd., OPW Fluids Group Inc., OPW France, OPW Fuel Management Systems Inc., OPW Fueling Components (SuZhou) Co. Ltd., OPW Fueling Components LLC, OPW Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OPW Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., OPW Slovakia s.r.o., OPW Sweden AB, Officine Meccaniche Sirio S.R.L., PDQ Manufacturing, PDQ Manufacturing Inc., PISCES by OPW Inc., PSD Codax Holdings Limited, PSD Codax Limited, PSG (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, PSG (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., PSG California LLC, PSG Germany GmbH, Petro Vend Sp. z o.o., Pike Machine Products Inc., Pole/Zero Acquisition Inc., Precision Brasil Equipamentos E Servicos Para Postos De Combustiveis Ltda., Precision Service - Servicos De Manutencao E Instalacao De Postos De Abastecimento De Combustivel Ltda., Production Control Services, Pump Management Services Co. LLC, RAV Equipos Espana S.L., RAV France, Ravaglioli Deutschland GmbH, Ravaglioli S.P.A., Reduction Engineering GmbH, Revod Corporation, Revod Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Revod SAS, Revod Singapore Holdings Pte. Ltd, Revod Sweden AB, Robohand Inc., Rosario, Rosario Handel B.V., Rotary Lift Consolidated (Haimen) Co. Ltd, SE Liquidation LLC, SWEP Germany GmbH, SWEP Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., SWEP North America Inc., SWEP Slovakia s.r.o., SWEP Technology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Seabiscuit Motorsports Inc., Simmons Sirvey Corporation, So. Cal. Soft-Pak, So. Cal. Soft-Pak Incorporated, Solaris Laser, Solaris Laser S.A., Somero Enterprises, Sound Solutions, Space S.R.L., Spirit, Start Italiana Petrol Cihazlari Sanayi Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Start Italiana S.R.L., Swep Energy Oy, Swep International A.B., Swep Japan K.K., Sys-Tech Solutions, Sys-Tech Solutions Inc., Systech GB Limited, Systech Shanghai Consulting Company Limited, TQC Quantium Quality S.A. de C.V., TTSI III Inc., TWG Canada Consolidated Inc., TXHI LLC, Tartan Textile Services Inc., The Heil Co., Tokheim Belgium, Tokheim China Company Limited, Tokheim GmbH, Tokheim Group, Tokheim Hengshan Technologies (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Tokheim Holding B.V., Tokheim India Private Limited, Tokheim Sofitam Applications, Trans - Logistic Group S.R.L., Triton Systems, Tulsa Winch Inc., UPCO Inc., US Synthetic, Unattended Payment Solutions LLC, Unified Brands, Unified Brands Inc., Val TemperBent Glass L.P., Vectron Frequency Devices (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Vehicle Service Group LLC, Vehicle Service Group UK Limited, Vos Food Store Equipment Ltd., WSCR Corp., Warn Automotive LLC, Warn Industries, Waukesha Bearings, Waukesha Bearings Corporation, Waukesha Bearings Limited, Waukesha Bearings Russia LLC, Wayne Fuel Management UK Ltd., Wayne Fueling Systems, Wayne Fueling Systems (Rus) Limited Liability Company, Wayne Fueling Systems Australia Pty Ltd, Wayne Fueling Systems Canada ULC, Wayne Fueling Systems Deutschland GmbH, Wayne Fueling Systems Italia S.R.L., Wayne Fueling Systems LLC, Wayne Fueling Systems Ltd., Wayne Fueling Systems Sweden AB, Wayne Fueling Systems UK Holdco Ltd., Wayne Industria e Comercio Ltda., WellMark, XanTec Steuerungs- und EDV-Technik GmbH, and em-tec GmbH. 5 hours ago How Much Higher Can Broadcom Go? Double-Digit Gains In Store For Broadcom With shares of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) up sharply in the wake of the Q4 earnings and Q1 guidance investors and traders alike are surely wondering how much higher can the stock go? Based on our assessment of the report, the market fundamentals, and the chart we think this stock could go a lot higher. Read Article BlackBerry Limited provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments worldwide. The company leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety, and data privacy; and endpoint security management, encryption, and embedded systems. It offers BlackBerry Spark software platform that includes a suite of security software products and services comprising BlackBerry UEM, BlackBerry Dynamics, and BlackBerry Workspaces solutions; and BlackBerry Spark SDK to promote the evolution of a platform ecosystem by enabling enterprise and independent software vendor developers to integrate the security features of BlackBerry Spark into their own mobile and web applications. The company also provides BlackBerry Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, including BlackBerry QNX, BlackBerry Certicom, BlackBerry Radar, BlackBerry Jarvis, BlackBerry AtHoc, BlackBerry Alert, SecuSUITE, and other IoT applications. As of February 28, 2021, it owned approximately 38,000 worldwide patents and applications. The company has a partnership with the University of Windsor to develop and deliver a cybersecurity curriculum for the university's graduate master's program in applied computing; and an agreement with Amazon Web Services, Inc. to develop and market BlackBerry's IVY, an intelligent vehicle data platform. The company was formerly known as Research In Motion Limited and changed its name to BlackBerry Limited in July 2013. BlackBerry Limited was incorporated in 1984 and is headquartered in Waterloo, Canada. Read More Deutsche Telekom AG, together with its subsidiaries, provides integrated telecommunication services. The company operates through five segments: Germany, United States, Europe, Systems Solutions, and Group Development. It offers fixed-network services, including voice and data communication services based on fixed-network and broadband technology; and sells terminal equipment and other hardware products, as well as services to resellers. The company also provides mobile voice and data services to consumers and business customers; sells mobile devices and other hardware products; and sells mobile services to resellers and to companies that purchases and markets network services to third parties, such as mobile virtual network operators. In addition, it offers internet services; internet-based TV products and services; and information and communication technology systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions with an infrastructure of data centers and networks under the T-Systems brand, as well as call center services. The company has 242 million mobile customers and 22 million broadband customers, as well as 27 million fixed-network lines. Deutsche Telekom AG has a collaboration with VMware, Inc. on cloud-based open and intelligent virtual RAN platform to bring agility to radio access networks for existing LTE and future 5G networks; and partnership with Microsoft to deliver high-performance cloud computing experiences. The company was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Bonn, Germany. Read More iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF's stock was trading at $80.84 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, HYG stock has increased by 7.2% and is now trading at $86.63. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. iShares MSCI EAFE ETF's stock was trading at $56.05 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EFA shares have increased by 37.4% and is now trading at $76.99. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. North American Construction Group Ltd. provides mining and heavy construction services to the resource development and industrial construction sectors in Canada and the United States The company's Heavy Construction & Mining division offers constructability reviews, budgetary cost estimates, design-build construction, project management, contract mining, pre-stripping/pit pioneering, overburden removal and stockpile, muskeg removal and stockpile, site preparation, air strip construction, site dewatering/perimeter ditching, tailings and process pipelines, haulage and access road construction, tailings dam construction and densification, mechanically stabilized earth walls, dyke construction, and reclamation services. Its Equipment Maintenance Services division provides fuel and lube servicing, portable steaming, equipment inspections, parts and component supply, major overhauls and equipment refurbishment, onsite haul truck brake testing, onsite maintenance support, under carriage rebuild, machining, hose manufacturing, and technical support services, as well as welding, fabrication/repairs, weld certification, and inspection services. As of December 31, 2020, the company had a heavy equipment fleet of 626 units. The company was formerly known as North American Energy Partners Inc. and changed its name to North American Construction Group Ltd. in April 2018. The company was founded in 1953 and is headquartered in Acheson, Canada. Read More Premier Technical Services Group Plc maintains, inspects, tests, repairs, and installs permanent facade access equipment, fall arrest and lightning protection systems, electrical services, testing services, and level cleaning and fire solutions in the United Kingdom. It operates through four segments: Access and Safety, Electrical Services, Building Access Specialists, and Fire Solutions. The company offers safety testing products, such as mansafe systems, rail systems, mobile man anchors, ladders and walkways, anchor devices, collective protection systems, rope access and abseil points, and Christmas decoration fixings, as well as testing and maintenance services for safety equipment in wind turbines. It also provides horizontal safety systems, walkways, ladders and step units, fall proof covers, inclined and vertical systems, demarcation systems, eyebolts, building maintenance units, roof trolleys, cradles and Bosun's chairs, MEWPs, travelling ladders and gantries, lifting equipment, self-hoisting platforms, davits, roof trolleys, rope access systems, gantries and ladders, monorails, and bespoke building maintenance units, as well as personal protective equipment, such as harnesses, lanyards, and travelling devices. In addition, the company offers lightning and surge protection, portable appliance testing, and fixed wire testing services; dry risers, fire alarms and extinguishers, and sprinkler systems; and steeplejack, installations, reparation, and cleaning solutions for buildings. Premier Technical Services Group PLC was incorporated in 2006 and is headquartered in Castleford, the United Kingdom. Read More Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 1) President Rodrigo Duterte directed Cabinet members to review all government contracts including the China loans, and remove all onerous provisions, his spokesperson said on Tuesday. Presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo said that during the Cabinet meeting on Monday, Duterte said government contracts can be canceled and certain provisions in the deals can also be removed if it is proven to be burdensome to the country. "The Chief Executive instructed all agencies to check and review all contracts entered into and remove onerous provisions that might be detrimental to the lives of the Filipinos," he said in a statement. Panelo said Duterte specifically directed Solicitor General Jose Calida and the Department of Justice to conduct the reviews. The legal units of all government agencies were also given the same instruction. "The most important thing that was discussed last night, the President issued a directive that henceforth, he directed SolGen and Department of Justice to study all contracts entered into by the government to find out whether there are provisions that are onerous and against the interest of the Filipino people. And to do something about it, either to rescind or to cancel those contracts or to sue people who are behind those contracts which are unconstitutional," Panelo told CNN Philippines. When asked if this includes the loan agreements the Philippines has entered with China, Panelo replied, "Certainly." Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio has issued warnings against the controversial loan deals with China. He said the Philippines' patriomonial assets are being used as collateral in the China-funded Kaliwa Dam Project and the Chico River Irrigation Pump Project. He said these deals are just "the beginning" of possibly more onerous agreements with China. "The first two loans Chico and Kaliwa are just the beginning because this is a total of 12 to 24 billion dollars with several projects. So we have to be careful. We must remove these provisions that are disadvantageous to us," he said on March 28. He said that in case of default by the Philippines in repayment of the loan, China can seize, to satisfy any arbitral award in favor of China, patrimonial assets and assets dedicated to commercial use. Panelo also said the President has ordered a review of the concessionaire agreement with water providers Maynilad and Manila Water following the water crisis in March. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said they will focus on the "concession agreements and loan contracts with reportedly disadvantageous provisions." Antofagasta plc, through its subsidiaries, primarily engages in the exploration, evaluation, development, and mining of copper properties in Chile and internationally. It operates through Los Pelambres, Centinela, Antucoya, ZaldAvar, Exploration and Evaluation, and Transport segments. The company explores for copper concentrates containing by-products, such as molybdenum, gold, and silver; and copper cathodes. It holds a 60% interest in the Los Pelambres mine; a 70% interest in the Centinela mine; a 50% interest in the ZaldAvar mine; and a 70% interest in the Antucoya mine located in Chile. The company also provides rail and road cargo, and other ancillary services. In addition, it offers rail and truck services to the mining industry in the Antofagasta Region. The company was incorporated in 1888 and is based in London, the United Kingdom. Antofagasta plc is a subsidiary of Metalinvest Establishment. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of POSCO: 2015 POSCO New technology II Fund, BLUE O&M Co. Ltd., Brazil Sao Paulo Steel Processing Center, Busan E&E Co. Ltd., DAESAN (CAMBODIA) Co. Ltd., DAEWOO INTERNATIONAL GUANGZHOU CORP., Daewoo Amara Company Limited, Daewoo Global Development. Pte. Ltd, Daewoo International, Daewoo Power and Infra (PTY) Limited, Daewoo Precious Resources Co. Ltd., Future Creation Fund Postech Early Stage account, GOLDEN LACE POSCO INTERNATIONAL CO. LTD., GRAIN TERMINAL HOLDING PTE. LTD., Growth Ladder POSCO K-Growth Global Fund, HONG KONG POSCO E&C (CHINA) INVESTMENT Co. Ltd., HOTEL LAONZENA, HUME COAL PTY LTD, Hunchun Posco Hyundai Logistics, JB CLARK HILLS(*1), Korea Fuel Cell, LA-SRDC, Mapo Hibroad Parking Co. Ltd., MegaAsset Co. Ltd., Myanmar POSCO C&C Company Limited., Myanmar POSCO Engineering & Construction Company Limited., Myanmar POSCO Steel Co. Ltd, Mykolaiv Milling Works PJSC., PGSF L.P., PNR, POS-CD PTY LTD, POS-GC PTY LTD, POS-LT Pty Ltd, POS-Minerals Corporation, POS-NP PTY LTD, POS-ORE PTY LTD, POSCAN Elkview, POSCO (Thailand) Company Limited, POSCO A&C, POSCO AFRICA (PROPRIETARY) LIMITED, POSCO AMERICA ALABAMA PROCESSING CENTER CO. LTD., POSCO AMERICA COMERCIALIZADORA S DE RL DE CV, POSCO ASSAN TST STEEL INDUSTRY, POSCO AUSTRALIA GP PTY LIMITED, POSCO AUSTRALIA PTY LTD, POSCO America Corporation, POSCO Argentina S.A.U., POSCO Asia Co. Ltd., POSCO CHEMICAL CO. LTD., POSCO COATED STEEL (THAILAND) CO. LTD., POSCO Canada Ltd., POSCO Center Beijing, POSCO ChengDu Processing Center, POSCO China Dalian Plate Processing Center Co. Ltd., POSCO Coated & Color Steel Co. Ltd., POSCO DAEWOO E&P CANADA CORPORATION, POSCO DAEWOO WAIGAOQIAO SHANGHAI CO. LTD, POSCO E&C (THAILAND) CO. Ltd., POSCO E&C CHINA Co. Ltd., POSCO E&C HOLDINGS CO. Ltd., POSCO E&C Mongolia, POSCO E&C SMART S DE RL DE CV, POSCO E&C Vietnam Co. Ltd., POSCO ENERGY CO. LTD., POSCO ENGINEERING & CONSTRUCTION DO BRAZIL LTDA., POSCO ENGINEERING & CONSTRUCTION. CO. LTD., POSCO ENGINEERING (THAILAND) CO. LTD., POSCO ENGINEERING AND CONSTRUCTION AUSTRALIA (POSCO E&C AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD, POSCO ES MATERIALS CO. LTD., POSCO Engineering and Construction India Private Limited, POSCO Europe Steel Distribution Center, POSCO Family Strategy Fund, POSCO GEM 1th Fund, POSCO Gulf SFC LLC, POSCO Humans, POSCO ICT, POSCO ICT BRASIL, POSCO ICT VIETNAM, POSCO ICT-China Co. Ltd, POSCO INDIA PROCESSING CENTER PRIVATE LIMITED, POSCO INTERNATIONAL (CHINA) CO. LTD, POSCO INTERNATIONAL AMERICA CORP., POSCO INTERNATIONAL AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY. LTD., POSCO INTERNATIONAL Corporation, POSCO INTERNATIONAL Deutschland GMBH, POSCO INTERNATIONAL INDIA PVT. LTD, POSCO INTERNATIONAL ITALIA S.R.L., POSCO INTERNATIONAL JAPAN CORP., POSCO INTERNATIONAL MALAYSIA SDN BHD, POSCO INTERNATIONAL MEXICO S.A DE C.V., POSCO INTERNATIONAL MYANMAR CORPORATION LIMITED, POSCO INTERNATIONAL POWER (PNGLAE) LTD., POSCO INTERNATIONAL POWER(PNGPOM) LTD., POSCO INTERNATIONAL SHANGHAI CO. LTD., POSCO INTERNATIONAL SINGAPORE PTE. LTD., POSCO INTERNATIONAL TEXTILE LLC., POSCO INTERNATIONAL UKRAINE LLC., POSCO INTERNATIONAL VIETNAM COMPANY LIMITED, POSCO India Steel Distribution Center Private Ltd., POSCO JAPAN Co. Ltd., POSCO Japan PC CO. LTD, POSCO M-TECH, POSCO MAURITIUS LIMITED, POSCO MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., POSCO MPPC S.A. de C.V., POSCO Maharashtra Steel Private Limited, POSCO NCR Coal Ltd., POSCO O&M CO. Ltd. (formerly POSMATE), POSCO Philippine Manila Processing Center Inc., POSCO Processing&Service, POSCO RU Limited Liability Company, POSCO Research & Technology, POSCO Research Institute, POSCO SINGAPORE LNG TRADING PTE. LTD., POSCO SS VINA JOINT STOCK COMPANY (Formerly POSCO SS VISA CO. Ltd.), POSCO SUZHOU PROCESSING CENTER CO. LTD., POSCO TMC INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED, POSCO TNPC Otomotiv Celik San. Ve Tic. A.S, POSCO Thainox Public Company Limited, POSCO VST CO. LTD., POSCO Venture Capital Co. Ltd., POSCO Vietnam Processing Center. Co. Ltd, POSCO WA PTY LTD, POSCO WOMANS FUND, POSCO(Chongqing) Automotive Processing Center Co. Ltd., POSCO(Dalian) IT Center Development Co. Ltd., POSCO(Guangdong) Automotive Steel Co. Ltd., POSCO(Guangdong) Coated Steel Co. Ltd., POSCO(Liaoning) Automotive Processing Center Co. Ltd., POSCO(Suzhou) Automotive Processing Center Co. Ltd., POSCO(Wuhu) Automotive Processing Center Co. Ltd., POSCO(Yantai Automotive Processing Center Co. Ltd., POSCO-CFPC Co. Ltd., POSCO-CTPC Co. Ltd., POSCO-China Holding Corp., POSCO-China Qingdao Processing Center Co. Ltd., POSCO-India Private Limited, POSCO-India Pune Processing Center. Pvt. Ltd., POSCO-Indonesia Jakarta Processing Center, POSCO-Italy Processing Center, POSCO-MKPC SDN BHD, POSCO-Malaysia SDN. BHD., POSCO-Mexico Villagran Wire-rod Processing Center, POSCO-Poland Wroclaw Processing Center Sp. z o. o., POSCO-South Asia Company Limited, POSCO-TISCO (JILIN) PROCESSING CENTER Co. Ltd., POSCO-Terminal Co. Ltd., POSCO-VIETNAM Co. Ltd., POSMATE-CHINA CO. LTD, PSC Energy Global Co. Ltd., PT KRAKATAU BLUE WATER, PT. Bio Inti Agrindo, PT. KRAKATAU POSCO, PT. KRAKATAU POSCO ENERGY, PT. POSCO E&C INDONESIA, PT.Krakatau Posco Chemtech Calcination, PT.Krakatau Posco Social Enterprise, PT.MRI, PT.POSCO ICT INDONESIA, PT.POSCO INDONESIA INTI, Pohang Scrap Recycling Distribution Center Co. Ltd., Pos-Sea Pte Ltd, Posco Group University, Posco e&c Songdo International Building, Qingdao Pohang Stainless Steel Co. Ltd., SANPU TRADING Co. Ltd., SPH Co LTD., SUZHOU POSCO-CORE TECHNOLOGY CO. LTD., Songdo Development PMC (Project Management Company) LLC., Suncheon Eco Trans Co. LTD, TANCHEON E&E (formerly POSCO E&E), Ventanas Philippines Construction Inc, Yuzhnaya Stevedoring Company Limited LLC., ZHEJIANG POSCO-HUAYOU ESM CO. LTD, Zhangjiagang BLZ Pohang International Trading, Zhangjiagang Pohang Refractories Co. Ltd., Zhangjiagang Pohang Stainless Steel Co. Ltd., Zhangjigang Pohang Port Co. Ltd., and eNtoB Corporation. Bonmarche Holdings plc, together with its subsidiaries, operates as a multi-channel retailer of womenswear and accessories in the United Kingdom. It sells its products through a network of 325 stores located in the United Kingdom, as well as through Website, mail order catalogues, Ideal World TV shopping channel, and telephone. The company was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in Wakefield, the United Kingdom. Read More There is not enough analysis data for Capstone Companies. 4.4 Community Rank Outperform Votes Capstone Companies has received 91 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Capstone Companies has received 48 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Capstone Companies has received 65.47% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Capstone Companies and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe CAPC will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe CAPC will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next iShares MSCI Germany ETF's stock was trading at $23.17 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, EWG stock has increased by 40.4% and is now trading at $32.54. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. There is not enough analysis data for Eaton Vance California Municipal Bond Fund. 4.4 Community Rank Outperform Votes Eaton Vance California Municipal Bond Fund has received 78 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Eaton Vance California Municipal Bond Fund has received 41 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Eaton Vance California Municipal Bond Fund has received 65.55% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Eaton Vance California Municipal Bond Fund and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe EVM will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe EVM will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next The following companies are subsidiares of Emerson Electric: A.P.M. Automation Solutions Ltd., AE Valves, AGI Mexicana S.A. de C.V., ALCO CONTROLS spol. s.r.o., APM Automation Solutions, ASC Investments Inc., ASCO (Japan) Company Limited, ASCO L.P., ASCO Numatics (India) Private Limited, ASCO Numatics Holding Inc., ASCO SAS, ASCO Valve (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ASCO/JOUCOMATIC s.r.o., ATX SAS, Advanced Protection Technologies, Aegir Norge Holding AS, Alliance Compressors LLC, American Governor, Aperture, Apple JV Holding Corp., Appleton Electric LLC, Appleton Electric S.A. de C.V., Appleton Group, Appleton Group Canada Ltd., Appleton Grp LLC, Appleton Holding Corp., Appleton Holding Sarl, Artesyn Embedded Technologies, Artesyn Hungary Elektronikai Kft., Artesyn Technologies, Asco AB, Asco Controls AG, Asco Controls B.V., Asco Joucomatic Ltd., Asco Joucomatic ZA B.V., Asco Magnesszelep Kft., Asco Numatics GmbH, Asco Numatics S.A., Asco Numatics Sirai S.R.L., Asco Numatics Sp. z o.o., Ascomatica S.A. de C.V., Ascomation (NZ) Ltd., Ascomation Pty. Ltd., Ascotech S.A. de C.V., Ascoval Industria e Commercio Ltda, Automatic Switch Company, Aventics, Aventics, Aventics AB, Aventics AG, Aventics AS, Aventics ApS, Aventics B.V., Aventics Corporation, Aventics Holding S.A.S., Aventics Holding S.a.r.l., Aventics Hungary Kft, Aventics Inc., Aventics India Private Limited, Aventics Limited, Aventics Ltd., Aventics Oy, Aventics Pneumatics Equipment (Changzhou) Co. Ltd., Aventics Pneumatics Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Aventics S.A.S., Aventics S.R.L., Aventics Services Germany GmbH, Aventics Singapore Pte. Ltd., Aventics Sp. z.o.o., Aventics Spain S.L., Aventics spol. s.r.o., Avtron LoadBank, Bannerscientific Limited, Beckman Industrial B.V., Beijing Rosemount Far East Instrument Co. Ltd., Bettis Canada Ltd., Bettis Holdings Limited, Bettis UK Limited, Biffi Italia S.r.l., Bioproduction Group, Branson Korea Co. Ltd., Branson Ultrasonic S.A., Branson Ultrasonics (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Branson Ultrasonics B.V., Branson Ultrasonics Corporation, Branson Ultrasonics a.s., Branson Ultrasonidos S.A.E., Branson Ultrasons SAS, Branson Ultrasuoni S.R.L., Branson de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Bray Lectroheat Limited, Bristol Babcock Limited, Bristol Inc., Buehler Europe Limited, Buehler UK Limited, CR Compressors LLC, CSA Consulting Engineers Ltd., California Emerson LLC, Cascade Technologies, Cascade Technologies Holdings Limited, Cascade Technologies Limited, Chemat GmbH Armaturen fur Industrie - und Nuklearanlage, Chloride Koexa S.A., Componentes Avanzados de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Computational Systems, Computational Systems Incorporated, Conception et Representation de Technologies de Controle C.R.T. Controle SAS, Control Products Inc., Controles de Temperatura S.A. de C.V., Cooligy Inc., Cooper-Atkins, Cooper-Atkins Corporation, Cooper-Atkins Pte. Ltd., Copeland Access + Inc., Copeland Compresores Hermeticos S.A. de C.V., Copeland Corporation, Copeland Corporation LLC, Copeland Limited, Copeland Redevelopment Corporation, Copeland Scroll Compresores de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Copeland de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Copesub Inc., Crosby Valve LLC, Damcos A/S, Damcos Holding A/S, Daniel Automation Company, Daniel Europe Limited, Daniel Industrial Inc., Daniel Industries, Daniel Industries Canada Inc., Daniel Industries Inc., Daniel Industries Limited, Daniel International Limited, Daniel Measurement Solutions Private Limited, Daniel Measurement and Control Inc., Daniel Measurement and Control S. de R.L. de C.V., Danmasa S.A. de C.V., Dar Ibtikar Al Iraq for General Services and General Trade LLC, Decision Management International, Dieterich Standard Inc., Digital Appliance Controls (UK) Limited, Dixell North America Inc., Dixell S.R.L., Do+Able Products, E. Business Development E.B.D.Com Ltd., E.G.P. Corporation, EECO Inc., EGS Comercializadora Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., EGS Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., EGS Private Ltd., EMERSON CLIMATE TECHNOLOGIES s.r.o., EMR (Asia) Limited, EMR (Mauritius) Ltd., EMR Emerson Holdings (Switzerland) GmbH, EMR Europe Holdings Inc., EMR Foundation Inc., EMR Holdings (France) SAS, EMR Holdings Inc., EMR Worldwide B.V., EMR Worldwide Inc., EMRSN HLDG B.V., EMRSN Process Management Morocco Sarl, ENPDOR2012A Limited, ENPESNA Inc., EPM Tulsa Holdings Corp., EPMCO Holdings Inc., ETC International Holdings Ltd., Easy Heat Europe SAS, Easy Heat Inc., El-O-Matic B.V., El-O-Matic Valve Actuators (F.E.) Pte. Ltd., Electrische Apparatenfabriek Capax B.V., Emerald Advanced Technology Limited, Emerson (Philippines) Corporation, Emerson (Taiwan) Limited, Emerson (Thailand) Limited, Emerson Arabia Inc., Emerson Argentina S.A., Emerson Asia Pacific Private Limited, Emerson Automation Solutions Actuation Technologies Holdings Inc., Emerson Automation Solutions Actuation Technologies Limited, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control (Sichuan) Co. Ltd., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control (Taiwan) Ltd., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control (Thailand) Ltd., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Africa (Pty) Ltd, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Australia Pty Limited, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Czech Republic s.r.o., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Denmark A/S, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control France SARL, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Germany GmbH, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Hong Kong Limited, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Hungary Kft, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Italia S.r.l., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control LLC, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Middle East FZE, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Netherlands B.V., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Polska Sp. Z.o.o., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Sales Australia Pty Limited, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Sales Holding LLC, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control Singapore Pte. Ltd., Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control UK II Ltd, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control UK Ltd, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control US LP, Emerson Automation Solutions Final Control de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Emerson Automation Solutions GmbH, Emerson Automation Solutions Intelligent Platforms (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Emerson Automation Solutions Intelligent Platforms Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Emerson Automation Solutions Intelligent Platforms Private Limited, Emerson Automation Solutions Intelligent Platforms do Brasil Ltda, Emerson Automation Solutions Ireland Limited, Emerson Automation Solutions Isolation Valves Inc., Emerson Automation Solutions SSC UK Limited, Emerson Automation Solutions UK Limited, Emerson Beijing Instrument Co. Ltd., Emerson Climate Services LLC, Emerson Climate Technologies (India) Private Limited, Emerson Climate Technologies (Shenyang) Refrigeration Co. Ltd., Emerson Climate Technologies (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Emerson Climate Technologies (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Emerson Climate Technologies (Suzhou) Trading Co. Ltd., Emerson Climate Technologies - Solutions (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Emerson Climate Technologies - Transportation Solutions ApS, Emerson Climate Technologies Arabia Limited Co., Emerson Climate Technologies Australia Pty. Ltd., Emerson Climate Technologies FZE, Emerson Climate Technologies GmbH, Emerson Climate Technologies Inc., Emerson Climate Technologies Limited, Emerson Climate Technologies Mexico S.A. de C.V., Emerson Climate Technologies Refrigeration S.A., Emerson Climate Technologies Retail Solutions Europe S.R.L., Emerson Climate Technologies Retail Solutions Inc., Emerson Climate Technologies Retail Solutions UK Limited, Emerson Climate Technologies S.A., Emerson Climate Technologies S.R.L., Emerson Climate Technologies Sarl, Emerson Commercial & Residential Tools LLC, Emerson Commerical & Residential Asia Limited, Emerson Comres de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Emerson DHC B.V., Emerson Dietzenbach GmbH, Emerson Dominicana Srl, Emerson Egypt LLC, Emerson Electric (Asia) Limited, Emerson Electric (China) Holdings Co. Ltd., Emerson Electric (M) Sdn Bhd, Emerson Electric (Mauritius) Ltd., Emerson Electric (South Asia) Pte. Ltd., Emerson Electric (Thailand) Limited, Emerson Electric (Tongling) Co. Ltd., Emerson Electric (U.S.) Holding Corporation, Emerson Electric (U.S.) Holding Corporation (Chile) Limitada, Emerson Electric (Zhuhai) Co. Ltd., Emerson Electric CR Limitada, Emerson Electric Canada Limited, Emerson Electric Company (India) Private Limited, Emerson Electric Company Lanka (Private) Limited, Emerson Electric Holdings (Switzerland) GmbH, Emerson Electric II C.A., Emerson Electric International Inc., Emerson Electric Ireland Limited, Emerson Electric Korea Ltd., Emerson Electric Nederland B.V., Emerson Electric Overseas Finance Corp., Emerson Electric Poland Sp. z o.o., Emerson Electric U.K. Limited, Emerson Electric de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Emerson Electric do Brasil Ltda, Emerson Energy Systems (UK) Limited, Emerson FZE, Emerson Final Control US Holding LLC, Emerson Finance LLC, Emerson Fusite Electric (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Emerson Gabon SARL, Emerson Hazardous Electrical Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Emerson Holding Company Limited, Emerson Holding Sweden AB, Emerson InSinkErator Appliance (Nanjing) Co. Ltd., Emerson Industrial Automation USA Inc., Emerson International Holding Company Limited, Emerson Japan Ltd., Emerson Junkang Enterprise (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Emerson Korea Limited, Emerson LLC, Emerson LLP, Emerson Machinery Equipment (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Emerson Mexico Finance S.A. de C.V. SOFOM ENR, Emerson Middle East Inc., Emerson Network Power DHC B.V., Emerson Paradigm Holding LLC, Emerson Process Management (India) Private Limited, Emerson Process Management (South Africa) (Proprietary) Ltd., Emerson Process Management (Tianjin) Valves Co. Ltd., Emerson Process Management (Vietnam) Co. Ltd., Emerson Process Management A/S (Denmark), Emerson Process Management AB, Emerson Process Management AG, Emerson Process Management AS, Emerson Process Management Angola Lda, Emerson Process Management Arabia Limited, Emerson Process Management Australia Pty Limited, Emerson Process Management B.V., Emerson Process Management Chennai Private Limited, Emerson Process Management Co. Ltd., Emerson Process Management Distribution Limited, Emerson Process Management Europe GmbH, Emerson Process Management Flow B.V., Emerson Process Management Flow Technologies Co. Ltd., Emerson Process Management GmbH & Co. OHG, Emerson Process Management Holding AG, Emerson Process Management Holding LLC, Emerson Process Management Kft., Emerson Process Management LLLP, Emerson Process Management Lda, Emerson Process Management Limited, Emerson Process Management Ltda, Emerson Process Management Magyarorszag Kft., Emerson Process Management Manufacturing (M) Sdn Bhd, Emerson Process Management Marine Solutions Korea Co. Ltd., Emerson Process Management Marine Solutions Singapore Pte. Ltd., Emerson Process Management Marine Systems (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Emerson Process Management NV, Emerson Process Management New Zealand Limited, Emerson Process Management Nigeria Limited, Emerson Process Management Oy, Emerson Process Management Power & Water Solutions (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Emerson Process Management Power & Water Solutions Inc., Emerson Process Management Power & Water Solutions India Private Limited, Emerson Process Management Qatar W.L.L., Emerson Process Management Regulator Technologies Inc., Emerson Process Management Regulator Technologies Tulsa LLC, Emerson Process Management Romania S.R.L., Emerson Process Management S.A., Emerson Process Management S.A. de C.V., Emerson Process Management S.L., Emerson Process Management S.R.L., Emerson Process Management SAS, Emerson Process Management Shared Services Limited, Emerson Process Management Sp. z o.o., Emerson Process Management Ticaret Limited Sirket, Emerson Process Management UAB, Emerson Process Management Valve Automation (M) Sdn Bhd, Emerson Process Management Valve Automation (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Emerson Process Management Valve Automation Inc., Emerson Process Management Verwaltung GmbH, Emerson Process Management d.o.o., Emerson Process Management de Colombia SAS, Emerson Process Management del Peru S.A.C., Emerson Process Management s.r.o., Emerson Professional Tools (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Emerson Puerto Rico Inc., Emerson Retail Services Europe GmbH, Emerson S.R.L., Emerson Sales UK Limited, Emerson Saudi Arabia LLC, Emerson Scroll Machining (Thailand) Limited, Emerson Sice S.R.L., Emerson Sweden AB, Emerson TOV, Emerson Technologies GmbH & Co. OHG, Emerson Technologies Verwaltungs GmbH, Emerson Tool Company de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Emerson Tool and Appliance Company S. de R.L. de C.V., Emerson Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Emerson UK Trustees Limited, Emerson USD Finance Company Limited, Emerson Valves & Controls Japan Co. Ltd., Emerson Ventures Inc., Emerson Vulcan Holding LLC, Emerson Xi'an Engineering Center, Emersub 1 LLC, Emersub 10 LLC, Emersub 11 LLC, Emersub 12 LLC, Emersub 14 LLC, Emersub 15 LLC, Emersub 16 LLC, Emersub 3 LLC, Emersub 4 LLC, Emersub 5 LLC, Emersub 7 LLC, Emersub 8 LLC, Emersub 9 LLC, Emersub CII Inc., Emersub CV Inc., Emersub Italia S.R.L., Emersub LXXXIV Inc., Emersub LXXXVI Inc., Emersub Mexico Inc., Emersub Treasury Ireland Unlimited Company, Emersub XLVI Inc., Emersub XXXVI Inc., Emirates Techno Casting FZE, Emirates Techno Casting Holding Limited, Emirates Techno Casting LLC, Enardo, Endura-Greenlee Tools, Energy Solutions International (India) Private Limited, Energy Solutions International GP LLC, Energy Solutions International Ltd., Energy Solutions International SAS, Energy Solutions International Sub LLC, F-R Tecnologias de Flujo S.A. de C.V., FC QSF LLC, FMC Technologies, Fiberconn Assemblies Morocco Sarl, Fincor Holding LLC, Fire & Safety Group.Com Ltd., Fisher Controles de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Fisher Controls International LLC, Fisher Jeon Gas Equipment (Chengdu) Co. Ltd., Fisher Regulators (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Fisher Sanmar Limited, Fisher-Rosemount Systems Inc., Flow Control Holding GmbH & Co. KG, Flow Control Holding Verwaltungs GmbH, Flow Control US Holding Corporation, Francel SAS, Fromex S.A. de C.V., Fusite B.V., Fusite Corporation, Fusite Land Company, GSEG LLC, General Equipment and Manufacturing Company Inc., Generale de Robinetterie Industrielle et de Sytemes de Surete, GeoFields, GeoFields Inc., Greenex Ltd., Greenfield (UK) Limited, Greenlee, Greenlee Communications, Greenlee Tools Inc., Gulf Valve FZE, Gustav Klauke GmbH, H.T.E. Engineering Limited, HD Electric Company, HTE Engineering Services Limited, Hindle Cockburns Limited, Hiross India Private Limited, Hiter Industria e Comercia de Controles Termo-Hidraulicos Ltda., Humboldt Hermetic Motor Corp., Hytork International Ltd., I Solutions Inc., ICC Intelligent Platforms GmbH, ISE-MagTech, Industrial Controls Canada ULC, Industrial Group Metran JSC, Instrument & Valve Services Company, Intelligent Platforms LLC, Intellution, International Gas Distribution SA, Intrinsic Safety Equipment of Texas Inc., JCF Fluid Flow India Private Limited, JSC Metran-Export, Joucomatic S.A., K Controls Limited, Keystone Germany Holdings Corp., Keystone Valve (Korea) LLC, Keystone Valve (U.K.) Limited, Klauke, Klauke (Jiangsu) Electrical Connection Technology Co Ltd., Klauke France SARL, Klauke Handelsgesellschaft mbH, Klauke Iberia S.L., Klauke Polska Sp. z.o.o., Klauke Slovakia s.r.o., Klauke UK Ltd., Knurr, Liebert, Liebert Swindon Limited, Locus Solutions LLC, Locus Traxx Worldwide, Locus Traxx Worldwide Europe BVBA, MDC Technology Limited, MDC Technology Trustees Limited, METCO Services Limited, MYNAH Technologies, Management Resources Group Inc., Mecafrance (Deutschland) GmbH, Metallurgical Services Laboratories Limited, Metaserv Limited, Metco Services Venezuela C.A., Micro Motion Inc., Mobrey Group Limited, Motores Hermeticos del Sur S.A. de C.V., NetworkPower Ecuador S.A., Nippon Fisher Co. Ltd., Novel Environmental Technologies Ltd., Novel Extinguishing Agent Technology Ltd., Numatics Incorporated, Nutsteel DHC B.V., Nutsteel Industria Metalurgica Ltda, O.M.T. Officina Meccanica Tartarini S.r.l., Open Systems International, P I Components Corp., PT Emerson Solutions Indonesia, PT. Emerson Indonesia, PT. Paradigm Geophysical Indonesia, Pactrol Controls Limited, PakSense, PakSense Inc., Paradigm, Paradigm (UK) Holding Limited, Paradigm B.V., Paradigm France S.A., Paradigm Geophysical (India) Private Limited, Paradigm Geophysical (KL) Sdn. Bhd., Paradigm Geophysical (Nigeria) Limited, Paradigm Geophysical (U.K.) Limited, Paradigm Geophysical B.V., Paradigm Geophysical Corp., Paradigm Geophysical Italy SRL, Paradigm Geophysical LLC, Paradigm Geophysical Limited, Paradigm Geophysical Pty Ltd, Paradigm Geophysical S.A., Paradigm Geophysical Sdn. Bhd., Paradigm Geophysical Spain S.L., Paradigm Geophysical de Venezuela C.A., Paradigm Geophysical do Brasil Ltda., Paradigm Geoservices Canada Ltd., Paradigm Geotechnology (Egypt) S.A.E., Paradigm Kazakhstan LLP, Paradigm Middle East FZ-LLC, Paradigm Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Parex Industries Limited, Pentair Valves & Controls, Pentair Valves and Controls India Private Limited, Permasense, Permasense Asia Pacific Sdn Bhd, Permasense Limited, ProSys, ProTeam Inc., Progea, RAC Technologies (Israel) Ltd., RIDGID Inc., RPP Europe GmbH, RPP LLC, Rey-Lam S. de R.L. de C.V., Ridge Tool (Australia) Pty. Ltd., Ridge Tool Company, Ridge Tool Europe NV, Ridge Tool GmbH, Ridge Tool GmbH & Co. OHG, Ridge Tool Manufacturing Company, Ridge Tool Pattern Company, Ridgid France SAS, Ridgid Italia S.R.L., Ridgid Online Inc., Ridgid Scandinavia A/S, Ridgid Werkzeuge AG, Rosemount China Inc., Rosemount Inc., Rosemount Measurement Limited, Rosemount Nuclear Instruments Inc., Rosemount Specialty Products LLC, Rosemount Tank Gauging India Pvt. Ltd., Rosemount Tank Gauging Middle East SPC, Rosemount Tank Gauging North America Inc., Rosemount Tank Radar AB, Rosemount Tank Radar Properties AB, Roxar, Roxar AS, Roxar Flow Measurement AS, Roxar Flow Measurement Sdn Bhd, Roxar Limited, Roxar Maximum Reservoir Performance W.L.L., Roxar Saudi Co., Roxar Services AS, Roxar Services OOO, Roxar Software Solutions AS, Roxar Technologies AS, Roxar Vietnam Company Ltd., Roxar de Venezuela C.A., Rutherfurd Acquisitions Limited, S.F.T. Group Ltd., SABO-Armaturen Service GmbH, Safety Systems UK Pte. Ltd., Sakhi-Raimondi Valve (India) Limited, Scroll Compressors LLC, Scroll Mexico LLC, Sempell GmbH, Shanghai Virgo Valves Technology Consulting Co. Ltd., Sherman + Reilly, Soluciones 0925 C.A., Spectra-Tek Holdings Limited, Spectra-Tek International Limited, Spectra-Tek UK Limited, Spectrex, Spectrex Inc., Spectronix Ltd., Spensall Engineering Limited, Steel Support Systems Limited, Stratos Lightwave, System Plast International B.V., System Plast Ltda, System Plast USA de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., TDM-avtomatizatsiya, TV&C GP Holding LLC, Taiwan Valve Co. Ltd., TechnipFMC, Termocontroles de Juarez S.A. de C.V., Tescom Corporation, Tescom Europe GmbH & Co. KG, Tescom Europe Management GmbH, The Automation Group Inc., The J.R. Clarkson Company LLC, Therm-O-Disc Europe B.V., Therm-O-Disc Incorporated, Thunderline Z Inc., TopWorx UK Limited, Tranmet Holdings B.V., Tranmet Holdings Limited, Verdant Environmental Technologies, Vilter Manufacturing LLC, Virgo Valves & Controls (ME) FZE, Virgo Valves and Controls Sdn Bhd, Von Arx AG, Vulsub 1 Limited, Vulsub Brasil Holding, Vulsub Brasil Ltda., Vulsub Chile SpA, Vulsub Gulf Holding Limited, Vulsub Holding III (Denmark) ApS, Vulsub Holding Ltd, Vulsub Holdings A LLC, Vulsub Holdings B LLC, Vulsub Holdings C LLC, Vulsub Holdings D LLC, Vulsub Italia S.r.l., Vulsub Middle East Holdings LLC, Vulsub Peru S.A.C., Vulsub Property Holding LLC, Vulsub Property Limited, Vulsub S.A., Vulsub South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Vulsub VZ C.A., Westinghouse Electric Pvt. Limited, Westlock Controls Limited, Westlock Equipamentos de Controle Ltda., Woodstock Land Company LLC, epro GmbH, iSolera Inc., iSolutions Private Limited, and intelliSAW. American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved. 326 E 8th St #105, Sioux Falls, SD 57103 | U.S. Based Support Team at contact@marketbeat.com | (844) 978-6257 MarketBeat does not provide personalized financial advice and does not issue recommendations or offers to buy stock or sell any security. Our Accessibility Statement | Terms of Service | Do Not Sell My Information 2021 Market data provided is at least 10-minutes delayed and hosted by Barchart Solutions. Information is provided 'as-is' and solely for informational purposes, not for trading purposes or advice, and is delayed. To see all exchange delays and terms of use please see disclaimer. Fundamental company data provided by Zacks Investment Research. Goldman Sachs TreasuryAccess 0-1 Year ETF's stock was trading at $100.72 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, GBIL shares have decreased by 0.7% and is now trading at $100.06. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. SunTrust Banks, Inc. operates as the holding company for SunTrust Bank that provides various financial services for consumers, businesses, corporations, institutions, and not-for-profit entities in the United States. It operates in two segments, Consumer and Wholesale. The Consumer segment provides deposits and payments; home equity and personal credit lines; auto, student, and other lending products; credit cards; discount/online and full-service brokerage products; professional investment advisory products and services; and trust services, as well as family office solutions. This segment also offers residential mortgage products in the secondary market. The Wholesale segment provides capital markets solutions, including advisory, capital raising, and financial risk management; asset-based financing solutions, such as securitizations, asset-based lending, equipment financing, and structured real estate arrangements; cash management services and auto dealer financing solutions; investment banking solutions; and credit and deposit, fee-based product offering, multi-family agency lending, advisory, commercial mortgage brokerage, and tailored financing and equity investment solutions. This segment also offers treasury and payment solutions, such as operating various electronic and paper payment types, which comprise card, wire transfer, automated clearing house, check, and cash; and provides services clients to manage their accounts online. The company offers its products and services through a network of traditional and in-store branches, automated teller machines, Internet, mobile, and telephone banking channels. As of December 31, 2018, it operated 1,218 full-service banking offices located in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. SunTrust Banks, Inc. was founded in 1891 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Read More Invesco High Income Trust II is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Invesco Ltd. The fund is co-managed by Invesco Advisers, Inc, INVESCO Asset Management (Japan) Limited, INVESCO Asset Management Deutschland GmbH, INVESCO Asset Management Limited, Invesco Hong Kong Limited, INVESCO Senior Secured Management, Inc., and Invesco Canada Ltd. It invests in the fixed income markets. The fund seeks to invest in securities rated between BB and C by Standard and Poor's. It seeks to maintain an average duration of around three to four years for its portfolio. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the Barclays U.S. Corporate High Yield 2% Issuer Cap Inde. It was formerly known as Invesco Van Kampen High Income Trust II. Invesco High Income Trust II was formed on April 28, 1989 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More There is not enough analysis data for John Hancock Preferred Income Fund III. 5.0 Community Rank Outperform Votes John Hancock Preferred Income Fund III has received 281 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes John Hancock Preferred Income Fund III has received 61 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment John Hancock Preferred Income Fund III has received 82.16% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about John Hancock Preferred Income Fund III and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe HPS will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe HPS will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next Photo: Pacificpokeylw A popular Vancouver business has popped up in Kelowna right beside the water. Pacific Poke has a total of 10 locations, most of them in Vancouver, and now one in Kelowna on 219 Bernard Avenue. General Manager Raj Khare said they have been very busy since their soft opening on Saturday. The restaurant offers poke bowls, which are raw fish salad. We can't wait to share our Chef-Inspired Bowls in Kelowna, they said on Instagram. On Sunday, people flocked to the restaurant and many were seen enjoying their poke in black bowls along the waterfront. For more details head to their website. There is not enough analysis data for Northstar Realty Europe. 4.5 Community Rank Outperform Votes Northstar Realty Europe has received 195 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Northstar Realty Europe has received 89 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Northstar Realty Europe has received 68.66% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Northstar Realty Europe and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe NRE will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe NRE will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next Photo: John Woodward UPDATE: 7:15 p.m. A man has been arrested following a fire at Langara College. Just before noon, first responders received reports of a suspicious fire on campus. After speaking with witnesses, officers determined that a suspect had allegedly entered the college with incendiary devices, Vancouver Police confirm. It appears the suspect may have lit one or more fires before fleeing. The school was evacuated, and there were no reported injuries. The VPDs Emergency Response Section searched the campus for additional hazards and found a number of suspicious devices. Their search is expected to continue into the night. A suspect was quickly identified and was arrested in Surrey by Metro Vancouver Transit Police just after 4 p.m. He is now in custody. UPDATE: 2:40 p.m. A fire at Langara College forced the cancellation of classes on Monday. "Students, staff, and faculty should vacate the campus for the rest of the day," the school tweeted. "Classes and exams are cancelled." Vancouver Fire Rescue is investigating the incident and has asked the public to avoid the area for now. ORIGINAL: 1:30 p.m. Students and staff evacuated Vancouver's Langara College on Monday after an incident brought police and firefighters to the campus. The school cancelled classes for the day at its technology building after an unknown incident about 11:40 a.m. However, the entire campus was evacuated a short time later, CTV News reports. The college said only it is "continuing to investigate the incident on campus," and did not say what prompted the evacuation. All classes and exams have been cancelled for the day. with files from CTV Vancouver Photo: Contributed Daniel Joseph The new president of the Kelowna-Lake Country Peoples Party of Canada riding association denies allegations of racist and homophobic views levelled against the party by his predecessor. Daniel Joseph quit the party and his position last week, claiming people in positions of authority had "utterly hateful ... racist, homophobic and xenophobic views." "I no longer feel like there is a place for me in this party," he said in a Facebook video posted Friday. His successor, Peter Neville, says he has neither seen nor heard any evidence of such behaviour at either the local or national level. "I was present when Daniel Joseph was elected president of our association. I voted for him myself. I guess we didn't notice the colour of his skin. How very careless of us!" Neville said in an email to Castanet. He reiterated that opinion in a phone call, saying there is no truth to the allegations and ".... it was kind of obvious that he's black ... It seems to me that gives the lie to the idea that we are racist, sexist or homophobic. "Frankly, I think it's nonsense." Neville says he actually took over as president two weeks ago, prior to Jospeh's public resignation. He said Joseph wanted to manage the electoral district association in a different direction and had become secretive about his motives and wouldn't return calls. "I believe there was something more behind this," he said. The party continues to work towards this fall's federal election and will hold a nomination meeting later this spring, Neville added. Re: Humboldt convicted driver sentenced to eight years then deportation. Jaskirat Singh Sidhu should be deported immediately. It costs $312 per day to house an inmate in a Canadian prison. That's $113,880 times eight years, or $ 911,040. In Connecticut, a convict has to pay to become a prisoner, to cut costs. Sort of like paying for daycare or a nursing home. What about Omar Khadr, the one who was convicted of killing a U.S. solder by throwing a grenade at him. He was awarded $10 million in a settlement and was released. There are many Canadians and Americans who have joined terrorists groups. Do we reward them, too? I can see why Pierre Trudeau abolished the death penalty in Canada. It was to save his son, Justin! Politics in Latin poly means many, and tics means blood-sucking creatures thus many blood-sucking creatures! We need a new political party headed by 12 common sense people who care about Canadians first. My last OAS pension increase afforded me two bananas. Gary West, Penticton Photo: The Canadian Press Liberal backbenchers and cabinet ministers alike condemned former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould on Monday for surreptitiously recording a phone conversation with the country's top public servant, Michael Wernick. For many of them, the recording was the last straw in the SNC-Lavalin saga that has engulfed the Trudeau government and proof that the former minister can't be trusted as a member of the Liberal caucus. "Jody Wilson-Raybould? Should be gone. Gone. Should've been gone long ago", said Prince Edward Island MP Wayne Easter, calling her secret recording "about as low as you can go." The same sentiment was applied by most Liberal MPs to Jane Philpott, who quit cabinet in solidarity with Wilson-Raybould early last month, saying she no longer had confidence in the government's handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair. "The moment you stop trusting the government, I mean obviously you shouldn't be in the government or you shouldn't be in the caucus that supports the government," said Montreal MP Alexandra Mendes. Easter, a longtime MP who once served as solicitor general, suggested Philpott might have been "used" by Wilson-Raybould and several others said they'd like to know whether she condoned the secret taping. Wilson-Raybould submitted the 17-minute audio recording to the House of Commons justice committee last week to bolster her contention that she was improperly pressured last fall to intervene to stop the criminal prosecution of Montreal engineering giant SNC-Lavalin. The recording confirms her earlier oral testimony about the content of a Dec. 19 phone conversation with Wernick, clerk of the Privy Council although whether anything he said amounted to "veiled threats," as she has alleged, is a matter of opinion. In a written submission to the committee, Wilson-Raybould said she took the admittedly "extraordinary and otherwise inappropriate step" of recording the conversation because she was home alone in Vancouver without a staffer to take notes and wanted to "ensure that I had an exact record of what was discussed as I had reason to believe that it was likely to be an inappropriate conversation." Tourism Minister Melanie Joly said if Wilson-Raybould simply wanted a record of what was said, she should have told Wernick she was taping the call for that purpose. As it was, several Liberal MPs suggested the recording smacked of "entrapment." "In my listening to it, I felt she had to be reading from a script at times to try and draw out, to make the clerk and the prime minister and cabinet colleagues and us that sit in caucus with her look bad," said Easter. "Of course I'm angry." Mendes called the secret recording "unethical" and "treasonous, really." "Even if she had taped that conversation for the purpose of bringing it to the prime minister's attention, the thing is she never did." Montreal MP Marc Miller called the secret recording "distressing" and "somewhat repugnant." He noted that courts are typically skeptical about such "one-sided" recordings because "there's an ability of the person recording to prime the evidence, consciously or unconsciously." Toronto MP Adam Vaughan said the revelation "impacts the frankness by which we have conversations with people." A former journalist, Vaughan said: "I know that when you use a microphone and you know it's being recorded and the other person doesn't, it puts the other person at a significant disadvantage. It also puts the person recording it at inappropriate advantage. I think for those reasons there are rules for lawyers, there are rules for journalists, there are rules in place for how recorded conversations are used as evidence." Transport Minister Marc Garneau said it was "very inappropriate" to record the conversation without telling Wernick. "It is not an honourable thing to do." Both Wilson-Raybould and Philpott have said they intend to remain in the Liberal caucus and run as Liberal candidates in this fall's election. "Why would I resign?" Wilson-Raybould told Global News as she left Parliament Hill on Monday. "I'm just doing the best job I can." Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has thus far been unwilling to kick the former ministers out, maintaining that the Liberal party is a big tent that can accommodate diverse views. And until the secret recording was released Friday, Liberal ministers and backbenchers dutifully used Trudeau's script. They now appear determined to take the matter into their own hands at their weekly caucus meeting Wednesday. Some are pushing for an emergency meeting earlier to boot the pair of former ministers out of caucus as soon as possible. While the secret tape has galvanized the Liberal caucus against Wilson-Raybould and Philpott, it has fortified opposition parties in their call for a thorough investigation of the entire SNC-Lavalin affair. The recording proves Trudeau "not only had knowledge about the pressure being applied on the former attorney general but he and his office were, in fact orchestrating it," Conservative House leader Candice Bergen told the Commons, accusing Trudeau of providing "false and deceitful information" to Canadians about the affair. Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, launched a one-man filibuster of the government's budget until the Liberals agree to further investigation of the SNC-Lavalin affair. "I have the ability to speak an unlimited period of time (on the budget) and I will be using that ability to demand the government end the coverup (and) agree to a parliamentary investigation into the SNC-Lavalin scandal," he told a news conference before heading into the Commons to begin an hours-long speech. Ellison Elementary have won themselves a $5000 grant through the Association for Learning Environments. Students put together and submitted a video explaining why they needed the grant money. ''We want to use the grant money to build an outdoor learning space for our students. We beat 30 other submissions, and won first place,'' said Sue Ito grade 1/2 teacher. ''We had one of our parents, Clayton Andres, re-record the song Down to the Honkytonk, by Jake Owens, with lyrics myself and my colleague, Kristy Fletcher, rewrote. We videoed the students to make a music video,'' she added The lyrics read: ''Theres a school down a backroad that wants to try a cool new mode. That helps the kids get motivated, and not teach lessons that are outdated. And the teachers really have a yearn To show their students a new way to learn. Hands on and really down it, Outdoor learning will be a big hit.'' Association for Learning Environments and The British Columbia Chapter annually recognizes one member for outstanding planning achievements, either over a long period or during the past year. The Ellison Elementary team is hoping to go to the 2019 Spring Chapter Conference in Parksville to be presented and receive the cheque. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) Damage and losses from the impact of El Nino ballooned by nearly 1 billion from 4.35 billion in just two days as reports come in from the field, the Agriculture department said Tuesday. According to the Agriculture department's disaster risk reduction management operations center, El Nino has resulted in 5.05 billion in damage to 276,568 metric tons of corn and rice. The Agriculture department, however, said that the spike in data is based on consolidated reports from various regions from Friday until Monday. The Cordillera, Ilocos, Cagayan Valley, Central Luzon, Calabarzon, Mimaropa, Bicol, Western Visayas, Eastern Visayas, Zamboanga Peninsula, Northern Mindanao, Davao, SOCSKSARGEN and Bangsamoro regions are affected by El Nino, it added. Cagayan Valley has suffered the most, with officials recording 702.04 million in damage to rice and 701.88 million to corn. Officials said 164,672 farmers in 177,743 hectares of agricultural areas are affected by the extended dry spell. They added that a total of 97.875 million has been given to 3,835 farmers as financial assistance, while the Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation has paid 43.083 million in insurance to 3,534 farmers in the Ilocos, Central Luzon, Calabarzon, Western Visayas and Northern Mindanao regions. Photo: CTV News Fire broke out Monday on a Canadian Forces submarine being retrofitted at CFB Esquimalt in Greater Victoria. Firefighters quickly doused the fire on board HMCS Corner Brook, which started in an engineering area on the sub. It's not yet known what started the fire or how much damage was done. Canadian Forces firefighters and local fire crews responded to the fire about 12:40 p.m., CTV News reports. The repair facility was evacuated, and no one was injured in the incident, Maritime Forces Pacific confirmed. Work on the sub is expected to be complete by early 2020. with files from CTV Vancouver Island Photo: The Canadian Press Pope Francis attends an audience with participants of a course on the Internal Forum promoted by the Apostolic Penitentiary Court, in the Pope Paul VI hall, at the Vatican. Pope Francis said Tuesday that women have "legitimate claims" to seek more justice and equality in the Catholic Church, but stopped short of endorsing more sweeping calls from his own bishops to recognize the "urgency of an inevitable change" to give them leadership roles. Francis issued a document inspired by an October 2018 meeting of the world's bishops on better ministering to today's young Catholics. The meeting was marked by demands for greater women's rights, and the bishops' final document called the need for women to have positions of responsibility and decision-making in the church "a duty of justice." In his lengthy document, "Christ is alive," Francis endorses no such conclusion. He says only that a church that listens to young people must be attentive to women's "legitimate claims" for equality and justice, and must better train men and women who have leadership potential. "A living church can look back on history and acknowledge a fair share of male authoritarianism, domination, various forms of enslavement, abuse and sexist violence," Francis writes. "With this outlook, she can support the call to respect women's rights, and offer convinced support for greater reciprocity between males and females, while not agreeing with everything some feminist groups propose." Asked at a news conference Tuesday about the lack of reference to both women in leadership positions and the need to welcome homosexuals better, synod organizer Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri noted that Francis acknowledged in his text that he couldn't rewrite everything from the final synod document and referred readers back to it. Francis writes that he was inspired by all the reflections at the synod but that he wanted to use his text to "summarize those proposals I considered most significant." The document, known as an apostolic exhortation, covers a wide range of issues confronting young people today, noting that many feel alienated from the Catholic Church because of its sexual and financial scandals, and are themselves suffering from untold forms of exploitation, conflict and despair. Church doctrine reserves the priesthood for men, given Christ's apostles were male. Women have often complained they have a second-class status in the church. History's first Latin American pope has vowed to change that, but he has done little concrete and counts no women among his own advisers. Just last week, the founder of the Vatican's women's magazine resigned with members of the editorial board, citing what she said was a climate of distrust and delegitimization in the Vatican. The editor of the newspaper that distributes the magazine denied an effort to undermine them. Photo: RCMP Prince George RCMP took a large quantity of cannabis, cash, and guns off the streets of their city. Two people have been arrested, a man and a woman, after police executed a search warrant under the Cannabis Act at a Prince George residence last week. The property search turned up more than 55 kilograms of dried cannabis, a significant amount of other forms of cannabis products, several firearms, ammunition and more than $550,000 in cash. RCMP gauge the total value of the cash and cannabis is estimated to be approximately $1,000,000. This is a substantial seizure resulting from the investigation of persons previously not known to police says Insp. Shaun Wright, Operations Officer for the Prince George RCMP. Our officers will continue to target those persons that do not abide by Canadian law, including the Cannabis Act. The Federal Prosecution Service of Canada is considering whether charges, in this case, will be laid. The suspects were released without formal charges and the investigation is ongoing. Gets Turbo badging at rear confirming the 1.0-litre turbocharged petrol engine Hyundai Venue features headlamps integrated into the bumper just like the Hyundai Kona. Higher variants of the SUV will get 16-inch alloy wheels shod with 205/60 section tyre. Turbo badging on the Venue powered by the 1.0-litre, 3-cylinder turbocharged petrol engine which is likely to be teamed with a 7-speed DCT. Features a touchscreen infotainment system which is seemingly bigger than the Creta; expected to b an 8-inch unit India unveil on 17 April with launch expected in May 2019. While we await the Hyundai Venues official unveil on 17th April, we have got hold of the first images of the SUV sans camouflage. Pictured in a dealer stockyard is the SUVs SX variant on offer with a 1.0-litre turbo-petrol engine. Theres another Venue -- in red colour -- that has been spied, but were not sure which variant that is. While the official teaser videos released recently hinted towards a split-headlamp setup, the spy images confirm headlamps and LED DRLs as one unit, on the bumper. The top lamp, in the conventional headlamp position appears to be turn indicator. The Venue will feature Hyundais signature cascading grille with oodles of chrome. At the bottom of the front bumper are fog lamps enclosed in silver design elements and similarly coloured faux skid plate. The Hyundai Venues top variant will feature 16-inch dual tone 5-nut alloy wheels shod in 205/60 tyres. It remains to be seen if its lower variants will get 15-inch steel wheels or 16-inch units only. The Venues tail section appears to be boxy and features squarish tail lamps similar to the Carlino concept. The Venue will be the first Hyundai SUV in India to get its name in the center of the boot lid. Overseas, Hyundais Palisade SUV also gets its name badge in the middle of the bootlid. The turbo badge at the rear of the Venue confirms the 1.0-litre, 3-cylinder turbocharged petrol engine. This engine is expected to produce a max power somewhere in between 100PS to 120PS while the torque figure around 172Nm. It is likely to be teamed up with an automatic transmission, expected to be a 7-speed DCT unit. The spy images reveal the interior of the Venue for the first time. It features an all-black interior with a floating touchscreen infotainment system which could be an 8-inch unit. Theres piano black finish at the bottom of the infotainment unit along with silver accents around the AC vents and on the bottom of the steering wheel. The central tunnel layout is completed by an automatic climate control followed by fast charging, USB and 12V ports. The chunky steering wheel has a design similar to the 2019 Hyundai Elantra facelift and comes equipped with controls of bluetooth, telephony and cruise control. The images disclose that the instrument cluster will be a digital-analogue unit. The steering column has function for the adjustment which may be limited to rake only, as the Creta also misses out on reach adjustment. Expect adjustable headrests for both the passenger rows as its visible in the images. This particular version of the Venue gets sporty-looking striped seat base along with leather wrap around the gear stick and steering wheel. The gear knob is of an automatic transmission, possibly a 7-speed unit which gets shift lock function as well. This transmission is likely to be paired with the 1.0-litre turbo-petrol engine. The Hyundai Venue will get a four-button key fob similar to the sixth-gen Sonata with function for the lock/unlock and boot lid release. The fourth button on the Sonatas key fob could engage the lights and horns together as a distress alarm. Hyundai had revealed that the Venue will receive a panic button on the base of the internal rear view mirror (IRVM) along with Hyundai BlueLink telematics system, SOS and RSA. The Hyundai Venue will also get a eSIM and mobile controlled ignition, climate control, door lock and lights. Apart from that it will also get cloud-based voice command and other internet-derived features. Hyundais upcoming compact SUV will make its world debut on 17 April with the launch expected in May 2019. Interested? Prices are expected to start from Rs 8 lakh and will put the Venue in competition against the Mahindra XUV300, Ford EcoSport, Tata Nexon and Maruti Suzuki Vitara Brezza. Disclaimer: This article has not been edited by Deccan Chronicle and is taken from a syndicated feed. Photos: CarDekho. Company plans to launch the products in India over the next few years in line with JLR's global commitment. New Delhi: Tata Motors owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) on Tuesday said it plans to launch multiple electrified models, including hybrid and battery operated vehicles in India, starting this year. Towards the end of 2019, JLR India will introduce its first hybrid vehicle from the Land Rover portfolio, the company said in a statement. In the second half of 2020, the company plans to launch its first battery electric vehicle, the Jaguar I-PACE, it added. The company plans to launch the products in India over the next few years in line with JLR's global commitment to introduce electrified options on its entire product portfolio by 2020, it said. "JLR's focus is to commit itself to a more sustainable future and our engineers have developed just the right products to lead us on this path," JLR India President and Managing Director Rohit Suri said. The introduction of electrified vehicles in JLR's India portfolio is in line with the government's thrust towards electric vehicles, he added. The company is encouraged by the introduction of FAME-II by the government and its focus on expansion of the charging infrastructure in the country, Suri said. "This is bound to help with faster adoption of all kinds of electric vehicles in due course," he added. Rajan Anandan, also an investor in multiple startups, is slated to join venture fund Sequoia Capital. (Photo: Twitter @RajanAnandan) New Delhi: Google's India and South East Asia President Rajan Anandan has put in his papers after an eight-year stint at the American tech giant. Anandan, also an investor in multiple startups, is slated to join venture fund Sequoia Capital. He will work with Google till the end of this month. Vikas Agnihotri will take on the interim responsibility. He is currently serving as Google's Country Director for Sales. "We are grateful to Rajan for his huge contribution to Google over the past eight years. His entrepreneurial zeal and leadership has helped grow the overall internet ecosystem in India and Southeast Asia," Google President Asia Pacific Scott Beaumont said in an emailed statement. Anandan had joined Google from Microsoft India in 2010. Previously, he was also been associated with Dell India and McKinsey & Company. In a tweet, Anandan said: "8 amazing years. 850million internet users across India and SEA. Many billions of revenue and fastest growing region in the world. Incredible team that thinks big and executes superbly. Thank you @GoogleIndia #GoogleSEA. Loved every minute." Some of companies in which Anandan has invested include WebEngage, Instamojo, Capillary Technologies, TravelKhana, and EasyGov. Sequoia Capital Managing Director Shailendra J Singh, in a Linkedin post, said Anandan will join the leadership team at the firm, in addition to the six current managing directors. Anandan will focus on developing 'Surge' programme for startups by acting as an investment advisor and mentor to the founders. Surge aims to engineer rapid early progress for startups, by enabling disproportionate access to capital, talent, network and decades of company-building knowledge. "Rajan's deep understanding of technology, significant operating expertise and track record of growing tech businesses across the region will help Surge founders scale and build the transformational businesses of tomorrow," Singh said. This year Royal Enfield will focus on the upcoming transition to the BS-VI emission norms. New Delhi: Eicher Motors on Monday announced Rs 700 crore capital expenditure plan for Royal Enfield in the current financial year. The capex will be used for the construction work of the Technology Centre, Phase-2 of the Vallam Vadagal plant in Tamil Nadu and towards the development of new platforms and products. Also, for 2019-20, Royal Enfield plans a production of 9,50,000 motorcycles, Eicher Motors said in a statement. "This year Royal Enfield will focus on the upcoming transition to the BS-VI emission norms along with strengthening our product development capabilities and working towards new global platforms," Eicher Motors MD & CEO Siddhartha Lal said. The second phase of our Vallam Vadagal plant near Chennai, Tamil Nadu is progressing well and is expected to commence commercial production in the second half of this financial year. The construction of the Technology Centre in Chennai is also nearing its completion, he added. "With a wide distribution network in India, growing international presence and building state-of-the-art capabilities in product development, Royal Enfield is well on its way to grow the middleweight motorcycle segment globally in the coming years," Lal said. In FY 2018-19, Royal Enfield announced formation of its wholly-owned subsidiary in Thailand. To further strengthen its presence in the ASEAN region, it recently announced its upcoming assembly operations in Thailand, its first outside of India. The initial response to Royal Enfield in the ASEAN region, which is one of the largest two-wheeler markets, has been very encouraging, Eicher Motors said in the statement. With the upcoming assembly operations expected to come onstream in H1 FY2019-20 and plans to further expand dealer presence in the region, Royal Enfield is well poised to fill the gap in the mid-sized segment in the region, it added. Mumbai: The Supreme Court on Tuesday declared as unconstitutional the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBI) February 12, 2018 circular on defaulting companies. The circular had forced lenders to act effectively on soured loans, pushing promoters of defaulting businesses to either opt for resolution, or file for insolvency. The major beneficiaries of the Supreme Courts action are likely to be the stressed power and sugar companies. However, experts said that the SC judgement undermines the RBIs action and would slow down the resolution process, though it is near-term positive for corporate-heavy public sector banks and private banks. The total estimated debt impacted by the RBI circular was Rs 3.8 lakh crore across 70 large borrowers, of which Rs 2 lakh crore across 34 borrowers was in the power sector. Further, 92 per cent of this debt was classified as non-performing by banks as on March 31, 2018. GMR Energy Ltd, RattanIndia Power Ltd, Association of Power Producers (APP), Independent Power Producers Association of India, Sugar Manufacturing Association from Tamil Nadu and a shipbuilding association from Gujarat moved different courts against the circular. They had challenged the RBI's directive as unconstitutional on the ground that it wrongly classified them as wilful defaulters. Their argument was that they were stressed because of external reasons beyond their control. Several defaulters argued that customer payment was overdue in some cases because of slow processing by government departments. On many occasions, they had asked the RBI to roll back or dilute some of the most stringent clauses. The RBI refused, insisting that the new rules will improve the credit culture, as it would force banks to deal with non-performing assets more proactively, leading to a reduction in NPA addition in future. The judgment was pronounced by an apex court bench led by Justice Rohinton Nariman, on a batch of petitions transferred to it from various High Courts. The Supreme Court held that in the light of section 35AA of the Banking Regulation Act, the RBI could not have issued a generic circular mandating reference under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). The court also held that reference under IBC has to be on case-specific basis and with authorisation of the central government. The Supreme Court in its judgement said, The impugned circular will have to be declared as ultra vires as a whole, and be declared to be of no effect in law. Consequently, all actions taken under the said circular, including actions by which the Insolvency Code has been triggered must fall along with the said circular. As a result, all cases in which debtors have been proceeded against by financial creditors under Section 7 of the Insolvency Codeare declared to be non-est. According to Anil Gupta, Sector Head (Financial Sector Ratings) at ICRA, Banks have made provisions of over 25-40 per cent on these accounts and hence quashing of the RBI circular should not impact the reported asset quality or profitability numbers, however the resolution process, which was expected to be expedited, may get delayed. Despite quashing of the circular, banks will continue to have an option to refer such defaulting borrower under IBC, in case the resolution plans fail. State Bank of India Chairman Rajnish Kumar told a news channel that the SCs decision will not change the credit culture. Our (SBIs) approach to the resolution of stressed assets, which is a proactive approach, recognises early the asset and takes corrective action there will be no change in that and the discipline which has come in the market around payment, I dont think that is going to be diluted in any manner, he said. One, banks have already put a resolution framework under bank-led resolution approach where that system has already started functioning. Second is, the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the IBC in their previous judgements, he added. The February 12 circular had directed lenders to refer loan accounts over Rs 2,000 crore under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) if they were not resolved within 180 days of default. Banks had to treat a company as a defaulter even if it missed the repayment schedule by a day. This would not impact the NPA recognition rule. The impact of this circular was to identify stressed assets in the banking system immediately rather than wait for an account to turn NPA over 90 days past default. As soon as there was a default in the borrowers account with any bank, all banks (singly or jointly) had to initiate steps to cure the default. Mumbai: In a major relief to the makers of 'PM Narendra Modi' biopic, the Bombay High Court on Monday disposed of the public interest litigation (PIL) filed to stay the film's release. The petitioner lawyer Tausif Sheikh told ANI: "We had filed a PIL against 'PM Narendra Modi.' In our PIL we have made 10 respondents, first is Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Censor Board of India, Election Commission of India and all the producers and actor of the film." "Accordingly, everyone appeared before the court and the Censor Board of India said that they have not certified the film yet. So the question of releasing it on April 5 doesn't arise," he said. "They stated that they have only certified the trailer so that it has been released. The EC stated that they have issued a notice, show-cause notice, for violating the Model Code of Conduct," Sheikh added. Sheikh said: "The producers appeared before the court and the court has disposed of the matter. EC was authorised by the court to take the decision. Observing that the EC has already initiated proceedings, the petition came to be disposed of." Vivek Oberoi, who essays the role of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the biopic, visited Siddhivinayak Temple ahead of the film's release. "Our film 'PM Narendra Modi' is about to release. So we have come here to take the blessings of Lord Ganesha. This is a place where all the wishes come true. So we are hoping for the same." Commenting on the recent judgment, he said, "The court's judgment is also a blessing of Lord Ganesha." The film's producer Sandip Ssingh also expressed his happiness and said, "I am really grateful that the law has done to justice to our film and hopefully the film will release very soon." The court noted that the Election Commission (EC) has already issued a notice to the makers of the film 'PM Narendra Modi' over allegations of breach of the Model Code of Conduct in view of the Lok Sabha elections. The Court disposed of a PIL filed by Satish Gaikwad, a resident of Pune, who said the film if it is permitted to be released for public viewing, would violate the Model Code of Conduct imposed by the EC. The plea also questioned the timing of the film's release and claimed that if released, it was likely to earn Prime Minister Modi electoral mileage. The petitioner also demanded that the trailer of the film should either be removed or deleted from all social media sites. "We have conveyed the urgency in front of the Chief Justice that the film would be released on April 5. EC's standing counsel is of the view that we have not got the notice up till now," the petitioner had said. The EC, however, told the court that it had already sought replies from the makers. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) told the court, through its lawyer Advait Sethna, that it had already granted requisite certificates for the trailer on March 20. He also stated that the film is scheduled to be examined for certification this Wednesday and would be cleared for release if it meets all the necessary criteria. The National Students' Union of India, the Congress party's student wing unit of Goa, on March 15 had urged the Election Commission to ban the release of the biopic, alleging that the movie was a "propaganda by the BJP to influence" voters during the Lok Sabha elections. The biopic came under the scanner of the ECI after Congress and Left parties complained to the electoral body saying that it violates the Model Code of Conduct. The film depicts the journey of Modi from his humble beginnings to his years as a chief minister and finally his landmark election as the Prime Minister. Mumbai: Jacqueline Fernandez, who will soon start working on Salman Khan-starrer "Kick 2", says doing sequels is not easy as they come with huge responsibilities and expectations to live up to. Jacqueline, who made her debut back in 2009 with "Aladin", rose to fame with 2014 film "Kick" in which she played Salman's love interest. "'Kick 2' is being scripted. Moving into any sequel is not easy. I have done 'Race', 'Housefull' and have been part of 'Judwaa 2'. It is difficult to do and there is pressure. "Sajid Nadiadwala wants to make 'Kick 2' more bigger and better. He is working hard on the writing," Jacqueline told PTI. The actor's next release is "Drive" with Sushant Singh Rajput. The film produced by Karan Johar will arrive in theatres in June this year. There are rumours that Jacqueline will be seen in the sequel of "Chashme Baddoor" and is also likely to star alongside Akshay Kumar in Rohit Shetty's next, "Sooryavanshi". The 33-year-old actor, however, refrain from commenting about the two project. Comedian Vivekh takes the new avatar of a serious cop in his upcoming crime thriller Vellai Pookkal, set entirely in the US. Vivekh says he was apprehensive if he would pull it off when the US based engineer Vivek Ilangovan from Microsoft, who directs the film, contacted him and narrated the one-liner. But he convinced me saying that audiences would lap up when unusual things come from unexpected people. I play a retired DIG (Intelligence) Rudhran who goes to the US to meet his son, with whom he has had a difference of opinion. A series of murders take place and with his police instincts not allowing him to be a mere spectator, how he solves the case forms the rest of the riveting thriller. Charle, Pooja Devariya, Dev, and Hollywood actress Paige Henderson are the other lead artistes. Trident Arts releases the film worldwide on April 19. The police have recovered a suicide note which stated that one of them (it was not specified) had recently found to be suffering from advanced stage of cancer and did not want to go through depression or any more suffering. (Representional Image) Bengaluru: In a macabre incident, a 60-year-old man allegedly killed his wife with a dumbbell, threw his pet dog from the terrace of their apartment and later committed suicide by jumping off the terrace in Sadashivanagar police station limits on Tuesday morning. The deceased have been identified Atul Upadhaya and his wife Mamatha Upadhyaya (50). Atul was running a travel agency in Ulsoor, the police said. The police have recovered a suicide note which stated that one of them (it was not specified) had recently found to be suffering from advanced stage of cancer and did not want to go through depression or any more suffering. The couple was residing on the fourth floor of an apartment near Gayathri Vihar with the son of Atul's brother, who was pursuing LLB at a city college. According to neighbours, Atul and Mamatha had a quarrel on Tuesday morning before the incident. The Sadashiva Nagar police said the incident took place at around 10.30 am. "After Atul's nephew left for college around 9:30 am, the couple got into a quarrel for about 45 minutes. The quarrel then ended with the killing of Mamatha. Atul had hit her on the head with a dumbbell. Later he took their Labrador dog to the terrace on the sixth floor and threw it to the ground and later committed suicide by jumping from there. The police rushed to the spot and shifted the bodies to hospital for postmortem. Though the police have found the death note in which the Atul had mentioned of cancer, they are investigating to as to who was suffering from it. It is learnt that Atul was suffering from depression for the past few months. Sadashivanagar police have registered a case and begun the investigation. In the previous hearing, the Supreme Court had said that BSP chief should reimburse the public money spent on statues. (Photo: File) New Delhi: Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Tuesday filed an affidavit before the Supreme Court justifying expenses in installation of her statues and elephants statues in Uttar Pradesh. She stated that it was the will of the people. BSP supremo in her affidavit said, Whether the money should have been spent on education or hospitals "is a debatable question and can't be decided by a court." The top court is hearing the petition against the statues of herself and elephants (BSP's symbol), at parks in Lucknow and Noida, with taxpayers' money. The statues of bronze, cement and marble had critics accusing her of self-obsession and megalomania. In the previous hearing, the Supreme Court had said that BSP chief should reimburse the public money spent on statues. A bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi said, We are of tentative view that you (Mayawati) should pay the public money from your pocket. The petition accusing her of glorifying herself, BSP chief said with statues, the state legislature had shown respect to Dalit woman leader and how can she defy the will of the legislature. "Proper budgetary allocation was made for the statues when I was the Chief Minister of UP," Mayawati added. Referring to statues of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Shivaji and other leaders, she asked, "Why question only Dalit leaders' statues and not the ones erected by the Congress and the BJP using public money?" She clarified that elephant statues were "mere architectural design" and not representative of her party's symbol. Photo: Colin Dacre The City of Penticton will consider resurrecting its defunct sustainability committee, under the banner of a "climate action committee," following a presentation from a local nonprofit. First Things First Okanagan was before council Tuesday, the same day a federal report dropped warning Canada is warming at a pace twice that of the rest of the world. The group aims to spur action on climate change through events like an event slated for next weekend at Olivers Burrowing Owl winery showcasing solar power and electric cars. Chair Jim Beattie praised the city for its climate change initiatives, but said residents would like to get involved with helping find local solutions to the globes biggest challenge. You have good things on the books that the constituents would want to work with you on, he said. We would gladly support you in every effort you make to that end. Councillors were enthusiastic about the idea. As we read everyday, yeah, this is becoming a big problem wed better look into it and face it and deal with it, Coun. Jake Kimberley. Council unanimously voted to direct staff to look into launching a climate-action committee. Patna: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar kick-started 2019 election campaign with their political rallies at Bihars Jamui and Gaya on Tuesday. While addressing public meetings in both the Lok Sabha constituencies Prime Minister slammed the Congress and other Mahagathbandhan allies for misleading the nation in the name of development and governance. Whenever Congress and its allies come to power, governance and development goes into reverse gear. Terrorism, corruption, the credibility of country and morale of our armed forces decline whenever they come to power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while addressing the masses on Tuesday. This was Mr Modis first political rally in Bihar after election schedule was announced. A number of NDA leaders including deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi and LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan were present during the event in Jamui and Gaya. Union minister and LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswans son Chirag Paswan is in fray from Jamui constituency and Vijay Manjhi of JD(U) is contesting from Gaya seat against former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi. Hitting out the Congress and its allies during the rally, PM said that the Opposition parties have ganged up against the government because it is working to maintain the credibility of the country. The Prime Minister also used the occasion to criticize the grand old party for coining the term Hindu terror. When today the whole world is standing with our country few Mahamilawti leaders are speaking Pakistans language. But dont worry your chowkidar is alert and need your blessings to finish all pending works and serve the nation. Adding further he said, Before 2014 innocent people were being killed by terrorists. There used to be bomb blast everywhere in the country but after May 2014 situation changed and all these terrorists went into hiding, Prime Minister said. He also hailed Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy Sushil Kumar Modi for working for the development of Bihar. I congratulate Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his government for changing the face of Bihar, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said. Keep yourself updated on Lok Sabha Elections 2019 with our round-the-clock coverage -- breaking news, updates, analyses et all. Happy reading. New Delhi: With just two days left for filing of nominations to the Lok Sabha polls, the Supreme Court Tuesday refused to grant urgent hearing to Congress leader Hardik Patels plea challenging the Gujarat high court order rejecting stay on his conviction in the 2015 Vispur rioting case. When the matter was mentioned for urgent listing before a bench of Justices Arun Mishra, M.M. Shantanagoudar and Navin Sinha, Justice Mishra told the counsel appearing for Patel that there was no urgency in hearing the matter as the Gujarat high court order was passed in August last year. The order was passed in August 2018. What is the urgency now? the bench said while refusing to agree with the submissions for early listing of the appeal against the high court verdict. In view of the courts refusal to hear before April 4, the chances of Patel contesting the polls has become bleak. Patidar leader Harik Patel, who joined the Congress party, was preparing to contest from Jamnagar constituency and the last date for filing of nominations is April 4. He sought suspension of his conviction in a case relating to rioting so that he can contest the upcoming elections. Patel has approached the Supreme Court after the Gujarat high court rejected his plea in the matter. Patel was convicted in a case of rioting and arson by a lower Court in Mehasana and was sentenced to two years impr-isonment. The case dates back to the Patidar prote-sts in 2015 for reservation. He approached the Gu-jarat high court seeking suspension of his conviction so that he can contest elections. This plea was, however, rejected by the high court. PTI Patel has challenged the high courts decision on the ground th-at an Appellate Court oug-ht to consider the consequences if the conviction is not suspended. PTI In this case, rejection of his plea would cause him an irreparable loss. He submitted that in a case for suspension of conviction, the Court is required to look into the broad features and the evidence available on record. Hardik Patel said that his conviction was based on hearsay evidence but the High Court rejected the plea. Stating that the balance of convenience is in his favour, Patel has sought an interim stay on conviction order passed by the Additional Sessions Judge, Mehasana. Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh governments decision to withdraw security cover at the state RSS headquarters here on Tuesday stirred a row with Opposition BJP taking strong exception to the move. Interestingly, the issue has brought to fore differences between Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath and veteran Congress leader Digvijay Singh. Hours after security was withdrawn at the state RSS headquarters here, Mr Singh, known as diehard critic of the Sangh, early on Tuesday morning made an appeal to the chief minister to review the matter. It is improper to withdraw security at RSS office. I request chief minister Kamal Nath ji to order reinstatement of security there urgently, Mr Singh posted his appeal in Twitter at 8.18 am. The tweet by Mr Singh has landed the chief minister in embarrassment, prompting him to order restoration of security at RSS office. The temporary security set up established at the RSS office here was dismantled late on Monday night following an order to this effect by the state government. The decision to rob RSS office of security had drawn criticism from BJP which saw it a design to attack the Sangh office during Lok Sabha elections, scheduled to be held in Madhya Pradesh in four phases in April 29- May 19. The security has been withdrawn with a plan to engineer attack on RSS during the elections, senior BJP leader and Leader of Opposition (LOP) in MP assembly Gopal Bhargav Tweeted. Interestingly, BJP media chief here Lokendra Parasar took a swipe at Mr Singh for being unduly sympathetic to RSS by pleading to restore security at RSS office. Why are you worried about security of RSS? Nationalist forces very well know your attitude towards them. You are the person who linked Hindus to terrorism by coining saffron terror. You are now showing concern for RSS owing to nearing elections. New Delhi: Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati has justified in the Supreme Court the installation of her statues across many cities in the state, saying it represented the will of the people. Ms Mayawati has filed her affidavit in response to an observation made by a bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi that she should be asked to pay up for using public money spent on installation of her own statues and of elephants, the BSPs party symbol In her affidavit Ms Mayawati said that when she was the CM, the state legislature sought to pay tribute to her for her tireless work for the welfare of Dalits by getting her statues installed. The will of the people was expressed by the state legislature with a proposal to install the statues of the answering respondent at the memorials to show respect to the contemporary woman Dalit leader who has decided to sacrifice her life for the cause of the underprivileged communities, said the affidavit. She said that the apex court itself had ruled that the expenditure approved by the state legislature may be unwise but it could not be adjudicated by the courts and should only be debated in the legislature. She urged the court not to adjudicate on the issue of statues. She said construction of elephant statues in memorials had nothing to do with her party symbol and it is a mere coincidence. It is incorrect and misleading to correlate the statues of elephants installed at the memorials with the symbol of the BSP. The elephants standing in the welcome posture are inalienable part of the Indian culture and no parallel can be drawn betw-een the elephants and the party symbol. She pointed out that elephant statues adorn the Rashtrapathi Bhavan, temples and are regarded as a welcome symbol in mythology. She said, Certainly, I could not go contrary to the wishes of the state legislators in installing my statues near the statue of Shri Kanshi Ram, for whom the nation has raised the demand for conferring Bharat Ratna posthumously. Describing the PIL questioning the installation of statues, she said it was a politically motivated petition and said that the petition was a result of disgruntlement against the respect being shown to a Dalit woman leader. She pointed out that there was a budgetary allocation made and an Appropriation Act passed to take out the money for construction of the memorials and the statues. According to Mayawatis affidavit, these memorials served as source of inspiration for the people. Mayawati also cited similar exercise carried out by Congress, BJP and other political parties in erecting statues of their leaders at the expense of public money. She referred to statues of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat, statues of Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy in the undivided Andhra Pradesh, apart from clearance of proposals to install statues of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, Atal Bihari Vajpayees statue at Lok Bhavan in Lucknow. On February 8, a Bench headed by the Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi made a tentative observation that Mayawati may have to pay for the statues. The Bench was hearing a PIL filed by advocates Ravi Kant and Sukumaran in 2009 questioning the then decision of Ms. Mayawati to erect statues for her and also the construction of elephant statues in the memorials. The petitioners argued that the policy of putting up of Statues is being done in the grab of making statues of great leaders and Dalit leaders but on close examination of the built up parks it can bee seen that it is being made only for the glorification of the Chief Minister, Mayawati. In a democratic system such policy in which crores of public funds are being utilized need a discussion and unanimity of all political parties but the same have been ignored. The government is hand in gloves with the Chief Minister to glorify her by acquiring huge space of Public Land and building parks and then putting the Chief Minister and her mentor at the Central point. This amounts to grab of public land. Hyderabad: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath referring to the Indian Army as Modis Sena has upset officials in the army with veterans asking political parties to spare the forces in the election battle. One has even said using the Army for political gains is shameful. The Army can only be referred to in the Indian Constitution, they have emphasised adding that forces are independent and apolitical. Strongly objecting to Mr Adityanaths speech, former Navy Chief and Admiral Laxminarayan Ramdas wrote to the Election Commission saying that the Indian Army did not belong to any individual and cited possible violation of the election code of conduct. Lieutenant General Mohan Bandari (retired) said , When I joined the service 50 years ago, we were told then and even now that the Army is an apolitical institution, reason being very clear whoever is their master (Army chief), is their boss. The Indian Army imbibed its customs and traditions from the British and we follow it till date. The Army is not concerned with the government or the party ruling it. This apart, there are committees that work on the nations security and whatever decision is taken, the Army obeys it. Using the Army for political gains is shameful. Not too long ago, political parties used the face of Wing Commandar Abhinandan Varthaman in their political rallies. The EC then issued notices advising that the army be kept out of this. The Armed forces are loyal to the Constitution of India and the President. The Prime Minister has no formal role, it is the President who is their supreme commander. It is he who commissions the officers. Misusing the Army for political benefits will damage the countrys independent institutions. It is highly condemnable, added military analyst Mr Mandeep singh Bajwa. Bhawanipatna: Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Odisha and fired on all cylinders targeting the ruling Biju Janata Dal and the Congress. The PM, without taking names, criticized the BJD and Congress. The two parties have used the poor and farmers in the state as vote bank and later betrayed them after coming to power. Large numbers of people are migrating to other states in search of work, he stated. Mr Modi further cornered the BJD government over chit fund and mining scams. He alleged that the Odisha Government, during its 19 years of rule, had only given patronage to fraudsters, chit fund and mining Mafias. The states natural resources which could have been utilised to enrich the lives of poor people here have been given to chit fund and mining mafias. Thousands of people have been looted by chit fund firms who got direct patronage of the local government, he added. Speaking in the same vein, Mr Modi questioned the people, Do you need a chit fund mafia or a Chowkidar? Do you need a mining mafia or a Chowkidar? The PM also condemned the BJD Government over the latters non-cooperation in Centrally-sponsored schemes like PM-KISAN scheme and Ayushman Bharat. While around 12 crores of farmers are getting direct benefits under the PM-KISAN scheme, the BJD Government is standing as a wall between the farmers and the scheme, he said. Assuring that BJP would bring improvement in the lives of poor people in Odisha if voted to power, Mr Modi appealed the people to cast their votes in favour of the saffron party in Bhubaneswar and in New Delhi to form a double engine government. Besides, the PM also highlighted various achievements during his last five years of rule and said, 24 lakh houses in Odisha have access to electricity, 8 lakh people have pucca houses, 40 lakh poor households have got gas connections, 1.40 crore bank accounts have been opened and 50 lakh toilets constructed in the last five years. Keep yourself updated on Lok Sabha Elections 2019 with our round-the-clock coverage -- breaking news, updates, analyses et all. Happy reading. Based on statements from the rescued victims, raids were conducted at the Polo Lodge located under the Punjagutta police station limits and five women were rescued from its hotel rooms. (Representational Image) Hyderabad: Seven women, including five from Uzbekistan, who were forced into flesh trade in Hyderabad were rescued, and five persons were taken into custody by the SR Nagar police late on Monday night. Punjagutta ACP M. Thirupathanna said, Following up on a tip, the SR Nagar police station teams rushed to Aditya Park Hotel in Ameerpet where two women were confined in a room and prostitution was being undertaken. These women were rescued and the manager of the hotel was taken into custody. Based on statements from the rescued victims, raids were conducted at the Polo Lodge located under the Punjagutta police station limits and five women were rescued from its hotel rooms. Four persons, who were engaged by the pimps as customers, were also detained and taken to the police station for further questioning, he said. Prima facie, it is found that the women five hailing from Uzbekistan, one from Madhya Pradesh and one from West Bengal were lured and forced into flesh trade by the accused persons, who have been identified as Rahul and Surya. The duo is currently absconding, but weve got some clues, like their mobile phone numbers, based on which they will be traced and arrested, said the ACP. He added that the victims are being sent to a rescue home for rehabilitation and care. Responding to a query, ACP Thirupathanna said, Notices will be served to the managers of the hotels in connection with the case. Further action will be initiated after aprehending organisers of the brothel. Kozhikode: Kozhikode native E. Suresh Kumar, 59, has been running from pillar to post for the last 30 years to get justice from the Indian Railways. After working as a casual labourer as a Mappila Khalasi for 962 days at Hassan under the then Southern Railway Mysore division (now South-Western Railway) for two terms (1978-1980 and 1980-1981), he was eligible to be absorbed as a regular employee. But the railway rejected his claim despite a favourable ruling from the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), State Humans Rights Commission (SHRC) and the Supreme Court. He had also approached the local MP and the prime minister, but nothing has happened. The Supreme Court ordered in 1987 that retrenched casual labourers were entitled to be re-engaged provided they complied with certain criteria, including service period and number of days worked. "I am eligible to be absorbed with effect from 1990. Even those who are junior to me were appointed by the railways. But they have withheld a decision in my case even after 30 years," alleged Suresh Kumar. "The then general manager in a letter in 1994 had confirmed that my name was in the supplementary live register and that I would be considered for employment when my turn came," he says. He approached the CAT in 1995 which ordered the railway to include his name in the labour live register. If any person junior to him was already re-engaged, Suresh Kumar was entitled for re-engagement within three months from the date of the order. After exchanging a series of letters, the railway rejected his claim in 2015 saying that he had crossed the age limit of 40 in 2000. "The CAT order came when I was 37 but they didn't absorb me as per the order. After not implementing the order for years, they are now saying that I have crossed the age limit," laments Kumar. Though the Chennai headquarters of the railway recommended to take up Kumar's case with the Hubli general manager, there has been no action. Kumar, who hails from Cheruvannur near Feroke, is surviving on temporary jobs like security guard. The Congress party on Monday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of doing 'cheap politics by spreading hatred and dividing the country along religious lines.' (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: The Congress party on Monday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of doing cheap politics by spreading hatred and dividing the country along religious lines. At a press conference here, Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said: Sensing defeat in the Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Modi has gone to an extent of insulting Indias culture." "He is playing cheap politics by sowing seeds of hatred. Do people of different religions not live in southern India? Surjewala made the comments after Prime Minister Modi said that the Congress labelled peace-loving Hindu community as terrorists. Prime Minister Modi had said the party has been forced to run away from a majority seat to a minority constituency, in a veiled reference to Congress president Rahul Gandhi contesting from Keralas Wayanad constituency in addition to Uttar Pradeshs Amethi seat. When Sushil Kumar Shinde was a minister, he had spoken about Hindu terrorism from this land of Maharashtra. However, a few days ago the courts decision came which exposed the Congress conspiracy in front of the country. Congress has insulted Hindus, said Modi at an election rally in Maharashtras Wardha on Monday. Referring to Rahuls decision to contest Lok Sabha poll from Wayanad as well, Surjewala said that Rahul wanted to unite the country, but the Prime Minister wanted to divide the nation based on religion, culture, and languages. In Wardha, Prime Minister Modi reacted to Rahul Gandhi contesting in Wayanad by insulting the legacy of the people of the place who fought bravely against the British. This is condemnable. Wayanad is the 'Karmabhoomi' of freedom fighter Pazhassi Raja of Kottayam kingdom, who led a guerilla war against the British and sacrificed his life. Is Narendra Modi aware of that, he asked. Does Narendra Modi also know that Wayanad has a Hindu population of nearly 50 per cent and other backward communities and religions are living harmoniously together? Does Narendra Modi know this, he asked. The Congress spokesperson claimed that Prime Minister Modi had no sense of history and geography and did not understand the composite culture of India. Asserting that the comments made amounted to a corrupt practice, Surjewala said: By dividing people along religious lines, Narendra Modi violated Section 123 of Representation of Peoples Act that defines corrupt practices. The Election Commission should take the cognizance and take action against Modi. Slamming the BJP government for the current situation in Jammu and Kashmir, Surjewala said, When the UPA government was in power, militancy was almost finished in Jammu and Kashmir. BJP-PDP alliance turned Jammu and Kashmir into a bleeding violent region. PM Modi is responsible for this. Keep yourself updated on Lok Sabha Elections 2019 with our round-the-clock coverage -- breaking news, updates, analyses et all. Happy reading. Priyanka Gandhi tweeted, 'I urge everyone to read our manifesto. Make this election about real issues.' (Photo: File) New Delhi: Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra Tuesday described her party's manifesto as "fantastic" and appealed to the people to make the Lok Sabha election about real issues. Her remarks came after the Congress released its manifesto, making a slew of promises, including giving Rs 72,000 each to five crore poor families under the 'Nyay' scheme, filling up 22 lakh government vacancies, bringing a separate budget for farmers and fixing a single moderate Goods and Services Tax rate. "I think it is a fantastic manifesto. Everybody should read it, especially first-time voters and young people because this election must be about real issues that matter to people," she told reporters. Later, Priyanka Gandhi tweeted: "I urge everyone, especially young people and 1st-time voters- Please read our manifesto. Make this election about real issues." The poll panel is likely to write to President Ram Nath Kovind to bring the matter to his notice. (Photo: File | ANI) New Delhi: The Election Commission of India (ECI) has found Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh's alleged remark calling for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's win as violation of Model Code of Conduct (MCC), poll body sources said on Tuesday. The poll panel is likely to write to President Ram Nath Kovind to bring the matter to his notice. However, the ECI will take a final call at a meeting to be held on Tuesday, the sources added. On March 25, Singh allegedly said that as a party worker he "genuinely" wanted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to win the ensuing Lok Sabha elections, which are going to be held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. As a worker of BJP, I genuinely want the party to win. We want that once again Narendra Modi should become the Prime Minister. It is important for the nation and society that Narendra Modi should become the Prime Minister again, he had told reporters in Aligarh. Singh, who served two terms as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (1991-1992 and 1997-1999) was appointed the Governor of Rajasthan in 2014. A Governor is considered to be a neutral post and the person occupying the office is not supposed to side with any political party. Keep yourself updated on Lok Sabha Elections 2019 with our round-the-clock coverage -- breaking news, updates, analyses et all. Happy reading. Bengaluru: Former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah claimed here on Monday that the surgical strike against the terror camp in Pakistan was carried out to cover up the Union government's failure to prevent the terrorist attack on the CRPF convoy in Pulwama. Participating in a meet-the-press programme organised by the Press Club of Bangalore and Bangalore Reporters' Guild, he said the people saw through such tactics and it would be foolish of the BJP to believe it would win an election on this issue. There were a series of failures on the part of the intelligence and IB, which resulted in the attack on the CRPF convoy at Pulwama. (If alerted) The CRPF convoy could have been sent by air instead of road. It was to cover up these (intelligence) failures, that the surgical attacks were carried out on Pakistan, he argued, adding, This is not the first time that India has conducted such surgical strikes. In the past too 10 or 12 surgical strikes were carried out when neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor the BJP were ruling the country. Where was Mr Modi when Bangladesh was liberated? It was Mrs Indira Gandhi who ruled the country at the time. When elected, it is the responsibility of the government and the Prime Minister to protect the country and its people. Whenever there is threat through external aggression, the country has to fight back. Contending that this Lok Sabha poll was not a contest between Mr Narendra Modi and Congress president, Rahul Gandhi, but between democracy and dictatorship, he argued that the struggle was to protect the Constitution and Constitutional bodies. The situation has changed drastically since 2014 when Mr Modi weaved a beautiful dream for India and the people believed him. But all he did was weaken the Constitutional bodies. First it was the RBI, then CBI and later the CVC. Now, even the judiciary has come to the streets. This has never happened in the history of the country, he added, wondering why Mr Modi never mentioned his achievements, development or problems of the people in his election speeches. All he does is to criticise the opposition, calling it a Mahaghatbhandan, and talk of security of the nation and nationality. When seeking re-election, the Prime Minister is expected to talk about what he has done. In 2014, he promised to create two crore jobs every year ,but where are they? What happened to the promise of Rs 15 lakh being deposited in every citizen's account after bringing back all the black money parked outside the country? He had also promised to double the income of farmers. These should be the poll issues, he observed. To a question on differences among party workers, Mr Siddaramaiah maintained that once the coalition partners began campaigning together everything would fall into place. Eshwarappa, 70, who is a member of the Kuruba backward caste, is also known for making controversial and sexist statements in the past as well. (Photo: ANI) Koppal: Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, BJP leader and former deputy chief minister of Karnataka KS Eshwarappa caught himself in a controversy for slamming the oppositions and the Muslims for not trusting in them. While addressing members of Kuruba and minority communities on Tuesday in Koppal, KS Eshwarappa said, Congress uses you only as a vote bank, doesn't give you a ticket. We won't give Muslims tickets because you don't believe in us. Believe us and we'll give you tickets and other things. Karnataka will go to the polls for 14 seats on April 18, and the other 14 on April 23. Eshwarappa, 70, who is a member of the Kuruba backward caste, is also known for making controversial and sexist statements in the past as well. In January this year, Eshwarappa claimed that the former chief minister Siddaramaiah had gone 'pagal' (crazy) after losing his chief ministerial position and therefore, resorted to attacking BS Yeddyurappa. Eshwarappa told ANI, "Congress has no plans for development in Karnataka. Gradually 20 to 25 MLAs will leave Congress. Siddaramaiah lost the CM post. Since then, he has become like a 'pagal'. That is why he is targeting BS Yeddyurappa." Earlier, in last year, he alleged that Muslims who have killed 22 RSS and BJP activists are with the Congress and those who are good Muslims are with the BJP. Around the same time, Eshwarappa had also landed in another controversy when he had asked if the then chief minister Siddaramaiah and home minister KJ George will have "feelings" for survivors of sexual assault only if their daughters were "raped". Keep yourself updated on Lok Sabha Elections 2019 with our round-the-clock coverage -- breaking news, updates, analyses et all. Happy reading. Bidar: Stepping up his offensive against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, veteran Congress leader, Mallikarjun Kharge on Tuesday made a fervent appeal to the people to reject the BJP this Lok Sabha poll to stop Mr Modi from becoming another Hitler and imposing authoritative rule on the country. Participating in a rally to mark the filing of nomination papers by Congress candidate for Bidar, Eshwar Khandre, Mr Kharge said Mr Modi had already shown enough streaks of authoritarianism. Hitler also got elected through a democratic process, but later turned dictator. This could be repeated in India as Mr Modi is a pawn in the hands of the RSS and other organisations, which want to turn the social structure of the country upside down. Some ministers in the Modi cabinet and RSS chief, Bhagawath have already spoken of changing the Constitution, which guarantees equality and social justice to all citizens of the country, if voted to power, he added. The Congress leader warned Mr Modi against provoking Congress leaders by repeatedly questioning the contribution of the party to the country since Independence. Wherever he goes, Mr Modi asks what is the contribution of the Congress to the country since Independence? Mr Modi does not speak much in Parliament he spoke for only 25 hours and 25 minutes on the floor but outside he speaks a lot. Modi tum bar bar math chedo, hum is desh ke liye bahut karchuke hai (Modi don't provoke us over and over again, we have done a lot for this country). It is you who is trying to destroy whatever good that has been done by us by instigating fights between communities, lynching of Dalits and Muslims, shooting at the effigy of Mahatma Gandhi and so on. Such people want to lecture us on the importance of democracy. Mr Modi should be kept away from power at any cost. Otherwise, the country's hard earned freedom and the Constitution will be in danger, Mr Kharge warned. The Congress leader also questioned Mr Modi's contribution to the Hyderabad Karnataka region. Has Mr Modi sanctioned any railway project, set up an airport in Bidar or brought amendment to confer special status on the region? When the answer is no, what right does he have to seek votes for the Bharatiya Janata Party? he demanded. Keep yourself updated on Lok Sabha Elections 2019 with our round-the-clock coverage -- breaking news, updates, analyses et all. Happy reading. Days before it was made official that Congress president Rahul Gandhi would fight from Wayanad in Kerala as well as from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh and there was a strong buzz that he would choose a second constituency, a worker in the Varanasi area office of the BJP, Amarnath Awasthe, declared triumphantly: We have won Amethi. The message, whether it was intended to be so or not, was that Mr Gandhi was not too confident about his victory in Amethi. The BJP leaders and workers can rightfully claim that they succeeded in pushing Mr Gandhi out of his comfort zone. He cannot take Amethi, his familys pocket borough for decades, for granted any longer. According to Congress insiders, there was a strong suspicion that the BJP would indulge in foul play to defeat Mr Gandhi in Amethi because the party was in power in Lucknow as well as in New Delhi. There was little doubt that the BJP was hell-bent on defeating Rahul Gandhi. For five years after her defeat in 2014, the BJPs losing candidate in Amethi, Smriti Irani, visited the constituency regularly and got many things done for the people, no doubt by virtue of her position as a prominent minister at the Centre. The streak of viciousness to electorally humiliate Mr Gandhi is unmistakable, though it cannot be faulted. That is how politics is played. Neither the BJP nor Ms Irani have any special attachment to or concern for Amethi or its people. But the election remains to be fought, and there is a possibility that Ms Irani might lose yet again, though the mind games that the BJP is playing there seem to give her an advantage. It makes perfect sense for the Congress strategists to throw a ring of protection around their president, Mr Gandhi, and find a safe seat for him. Any other reason that the party leaders would want to offer would be mere rationalisation. And it makes political sense as well. Indira Gandhi fought the byelection from Chikmagalur in 1978 after she tasted defeat from Rae Bareli in the historic 1977 post-Emergency Lok Sabha election. In the 1980 Lok Sabha election, she fought from Medak as well as Rae Bareli. In the wake of the office of profit controversy, Mrs Sonia Gandhi had fought from Bellary in Karnataka as well as from Amethi in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections. There is no need for Mr Gandhi or the Congress to feel apologetic for choosing Wayanad. The fight between the BJP and Congress over Mr Gandhi is a simple one. The BJP believes that if Mr Gandhi is defeated in Amethi, then the defeat of the Congress would be complete. It is the antiquated military strategy that once the commander of the enemy side is defeated, then the enemy army would collapse. The BJPs thinking is rooted in antiquated norms, and it is out of sync with democratic politics. Even if it is assumed that Mr Gandhi loses in Amethi as did Indira Gandhi in Rae Bareli in 1977, then the party can find ways of bringing back the leader. The BJPs intention of electorally decapitating the Congress by defeating Mr Gandhi in Amethi is puerile thinking at best. The question however remains: Would it have been honest on the part of Mr Gandhi and the Congress to fight the good fight in Amethi despite the potential foul play that the BJP could have indulged there, and only then look for another constituency? It is not for outsiders, including political observers, to say what Mr Gandhi and the Congress should do nor not do, or what the BJP and Ms Irani should in fact do in Amethi. It is a judgment call to be taken by the two parties themselves. But Mr Gandhis Wayanad move has left the two Communist parties and the ardent anti-BJP folk red in the face. They appear to be outraged that Mr Gandhi, instead of fighting against the BJP, is now pitting himself against the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala. The burst of anger against Mr Gandhi in the anti-BJP circles is understandable, because the anti-BJP folk assume that it is the duty of all non-BJP parties to defeat the BJP and save the secular fabric of Indian democracy. It is a laudable ideal, but there is a contradiction in the position. The anti-BJP group of parties will have to decide whether they need the Congress in the first place. If they feel that the Congress has lost its political footprint in large parts of the country, then the non-Congress anti-BJP parties should leave out the Congress altogether. But if they believe that the Congress has a crucial role to play because it could win more seats than all the rest of the anti-BJP parties put together, then they cannot ask the Congress to play second fiddle. If the Communist parties feel that defeating the BJP with its toxic communal and nationalist agenda is of the highest national priority, and if it feels that the Congress has a role to play, then the LDF candidate should be withdrawn from Wayanad. It would send a clear signal to the BJP that its bid to demolish the Congress would not succeed. The anti-BJP parties have as much obligation to provide a safe constituency to Mr Gandhi as the Congress itself. It would be much better for the Congress to explain its stand with regard to the decision to choose a second constituency for Mr Gandhi. It should have openly declared that it does not expect the BJP to fight a fair election in Amethi, and that it suspects that the BJP would misuse its position of being the party in power in the state as well as the Centre to lure and to intimidate the people of Amethi from voting in favour of Mr Gandhi. It would be a fair apprehension but then the Congress must voice its suspicion and its fears in a bold and honest manner. Keep yourself updated on Lok Sabha Elections 2019 with our round-the-clock coverage -- breaking news, updates, analyses et all. Happy reading. Elections are obviously difficult times for candidates and their parties, but we increasingly find that the Election Commission too finds itself under severe test. Gone are the days of T.N. Seshan and J.M. Lyngdoh, whose upright conduct as head of the poll body struck fear in government leaders of the highest tier as well as the most famous politicians. In this respect, the present CEC, shall we say, still has some way to go in reaching the standards set by those two of his predecessors. It was widely felt that Sunil Arora should have called out the government on the point of violation of the model code of conduct when the Prime Minister announced the launch of India's A-Sat missile. Since then the CEC would appear to have been under greater scrutiny. With UP chief Minister Yogi Adityanath recently describing the Indian Army as Modiji ki sena (Mr Modis army) while campaigning, the Opposition parties have reacted furiously. A former Army Chief, Gen. V.P. Malik (Retd), and a former Navy Chief, Adm. L. Ramdas, too have urged that the armed forces be kept above politics. One only hopes the CEC will act on this with despatch. It seems such an open and shut case. To his credit, Mr Arora thought the words of Kalyan Singh, Rajasthan's governor, as unacceptable. The governor had included himself among karyakarta (volunteers) of the BJP and said it was the job of BJP workers to bring back Mr Modi as Prime Minister. Of course, the CEC only took the karyakarta part of the statement into account, deeming it unworthy of the high office of governor. Accordingly, he has forwarded the matter to President Ram Nath Kovind, the appointing authority for governors, to take a call. He could have censured the governor himself or expressed his displeasure. About a quarter century ago, the then governor of Himachal Pradesh quit his post when the CEC voiced his displeasure at the governor's campaigning during an election in Madhya Pradesh. This precedent might have been tested in Mr Kalyan Singh's case if the CEC had expressed his displeasure. But the CEC has lobbed the ball into the President's court. It will be interesting to see what the Rashtrapati does. In a statement on Monday, the PM sharply criticised Congress president Rahul Gandhi for choosing to fight from Wayanad as his second seat since in this Kerala seat Muslims and Christians make up nearly half the electorate. The Congress Party has objected, as have others. It is for the CEC to determine if this issue falls within the parameters of the model code of conduct. By its sheer magnitude, the general election in India is a massive spectacle. That brings the Election Commission under greater scrutiny. While campaigning against Jawaharlal Nehru in 2014, Narendra Modi used to demand that the Manmohan Singh government should release the Henderson Brooks Report on the 1962 war. The report is just not about the failures on the battlefield, but also about how politicians and bureaucrats run the ministry of defence. Mr Modi has had five long years as Prime Minister. But the HBR is still not public. With good reason too. As nothing has changed in the MoD in the five Modi years. His too is a record of shame. The MoD continues as before. A tangled web of inability to understand security issues, prevarication, bureaucratic intrigue, political indecision, all-pervasive corruption. The consequences of all these are still seen. MiG-21s are still at the front line of our air defence. Advanced fighters lacking vital munitions. Ageing submarines and an ill-equipped army. These are well known and recorded. Aiming at policy without the means is now a deep-rooted tradition. If A.K. Antony was a master of indecision, we now have a political and intellectual lightweight in charge at the interface of technology, war and peace. Policies are thus made to satiate the galleries and narrow political gains. A complicit media then compounds problems by not publishing the whole truth and asking pertinent questions. I must confess that I have read Part I of the Henderson Brooks Report (HBR) many years ago. I also read a copy of an executive summary of the HBR, which is made available to certain senior military officers. Dont ask how and dont wonder why! Some of us get to see things that we are not meant to see. There is nothing in either of them that most of us who comment on security issues didnt know. The HBR is a severe indictment of how our government goes about handling critical issues involving national security. It was meant for the government to derive lessons to enable it to improve its security-related decision-making processes. As the HBR was seen more as an indictment of a particular government, it was turned into a badly-kept national secret. The HBR was actually as much an indictment of how the Indian military, and in particular the Indian Army, conducted itself in 1962. Since the military at some levels does get to study the main points made in HBR, it is possible that at least the military has derived some lessons from it. But the military, despite accounting for almost a fifth of the national budget, is only an attached department of the government, and not a part of it. Which means its status is no different from a state-owned Road Transport Corporation in the government. Even Indian Railways is a part of the government, and we all know that all governments love civil aviation because of all the attendant implications of controlling the national carrier, airports, and regulating who flies in and out with how many seats. So the institution that accounts for a fifth of the national budget, and about 1.8 per cent of GDP, has no say in the government, which means that it has no role to play in policy and decision-making. It will only do as it is told, and make do with what it is given. We now still end up making policy goals without the military means. Thus, if a submarine has to put to sea with its batteries at the fag end of their life cycle, it just has to do so. If our artillery is deployed with only half its normal ammunition, so be it. If our Air Force has to fly with its hard points empty, so be it. That this is so is also well known. In 1962, we did not know it. The HBR pointed out all this, among other shortcomings. Since nothing had actually changed since Jawaharlal Nehru was hustled into dubious battle with China by an unthinking and constantly baying Opposition and media, and an explosive mix of ignorance and naivete, none of the non-Congress governments which have enjoyed power from time to time in New Delhi have really bothered about making public the contents of the relevant HBR. I had spoken to several Prime Ministers V.P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar and Atal Behari Vajpayee to make the report public, but they knew better. One just said that when you point one finger outwards, you point three at yourself. And that about sums up the situation even now. On June 18, 1940, at Britains bleakest moment as it braced for a German invasion, Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons. In his speech, he reiterated Britains resolve to meet the German threat come what may. In the course of this speech, he said: We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. It is said that as the Commons thundered, applauding his stirring rhetoric, Churchill muttered in a whispered aside to a colleague: And well fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because thats bloody well all weve got! A country fights with what its got. Its the responsibility of the government to be aware of the risks a country is constantly subjected to. Commanders are apt to exaggerate threats and prepare for all contingencies and the worst-case scenarios. Thats their nature. But policymakers must temper military expectations with reason and probability. To be overprepared also invites risks. Theres a fine balance between showing readiness and being threatening. That cut must be made by policymakers elected to do just that job. But they still dont know their job. But our problem is that those who are most competent and qualified to influence and make military policy are not a part of the government. And those tasked with this responsibility in the government still dont know very much. So if there is another debacle on the lines of 1962, we may not need a new HBR. We may as well dust the old one and read it. Or be ready to sing Aaye mere watan ke logon! The training schedulein two phaseswould be worked out by the IAFs Institute of Aerospace Medicine (IAM) in Bengaluru. Bengaluru: In the first baby step of the giant leap of Indiansvoyage into space, prospective crew members who will be picked for Gaganyaan, the countrys first human space flight programme, will commence training later this month as soon as Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Indian Air Force (IAF) sign an agreement. It (agreement) could happen next week, and then the course of selection and training will begin. In about a year-and-a-half or two years, six crew members will be selected from about 100 astronaut candidates. Those six members, of whom three will make it to the first flight while the remaining three will be on standby, will be the toppers in a three-phase selection and training programme, Dr K Sivan, Chairman, ISRO, told Deccan Chronicle. Of course, we want a woman to be part of the first crew, he added, but it depends on the procedures of selection and training. He said those who make the final cut would join the space agency as a member of staff in order to get familiar with the first mission to space, the experiments to be carried out during the seven-day outing in space, and get hands-on experience of technologies involved in Gaganyaan. The training schedulein two phaseswould be worked out by the IAFs Institute of Aerospace Medicine (IAM) in Bengaluru while the last phase would be conducted in collaboration with Russian or French space agencies. Three of our people (ISRO) have visited aerospace medicine facilities in France but we have not signed any agreement with CNES (the French space agency) as other countries like Russia have also offered to help us during the last phase of training, he added. Dr Sivan said a number of reviews, including one at the national level by renowned experts, the IAF, academia, and DRDO labs, have been completed on the crew module and the launch vehicle. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Airbnb, last month bought HotelTonight, an app for finding hotel rooms at a discount, with an eye on a variety of travelers ahead of the US companys hotly anticipated initial public offering. (Photo: Pixabay) Home-renting company Airbnb will invest between USD 100 and USD 200 million in SoftBank Group-backed Indian hotel start-up OYO, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters, as it dives deeper into the hotel-booking business. Airbnb said earlier on Monday it has invested in OYOs latest funding round and it will look at ways to make the Indian start-ups accommodation available on its platform. It did not disclose details of the deal. The investment will give US-based Airbnb access to a variety of franchised or leased hotels, helping it lure travelers who have shied away from the risks and quirks of renting a strangers home. Airbnb, last month bought HotelTonight, an app for finding hotel rooms at a discount, with an eye on a variety of travelers ahead of the US companys hotly anticipated initial public offering. Emerging markets like India and China are some of Airbnbs fastest-growing, with our growth increasingly powered by tourism to and from these markets, said Greg Greeley, president of homes, Airbnb. OYO, which raised USD 1 billion last year from investors including SoftBank and ride-hailing firm Grab, operates in India, China, Britain, Dubai, Indonesia and Malaysia. It expects revenue to more than treble every year over the next five years, as it expands locally and in international markets, a senior company executive told Reuters earlier this year. Airbnbs strong global footprints and access to local communities will open up new opportunities for OYO Hotels & Homes... said Maninder Gulati, global chief strategy officer at OYO Hotels & Home. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. China postponed a major tourism campaign in New Zealand days before its launch in February. (Photo: AP) President Xi Jinping called upon New Zealand on Monday not to discriminate against Chinese companies during a meeting with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose country has rejected a bid by Chinese telecom giant Huawei to build a 5G mobile network. Ardern, on a one-day visit to China, said before meeting Xi that she hoped to have a dialogue with Beijing about New Zealands intelligence agencys decision to reject the bid. Ties with China have been tense under Arderns government which has openly raised concerns about Beijings growing influence in the South Pacific. China postponed a major tourism campaign in New Zealand days before its launch in February. Meeting in Beijings Great Hall of the People, Xi told Ardern that China has always regarded New Zealand as a sincere friend and partner. Both countries must deepen mutual trust and understanding, seek common ground while putting aside differences, and respect each others major concerns, Xi said, according to a statement from Chinas Foreign Ministry. China is willing to continue to support strong companies to invest in New Zealand, and New Zealand should provide a fair, just, non-discriminatory operating environment for Chinese companies, it paraphrased Xi as saying. There was no direct mention of any specific firm in the statement. Ardern told Xi that she valued China ties. This bilateral relationship is one of our most important and far-reaching, a point that Ive made in successive public speeches over the past year, she told reporters. I look forward to discussions around the opportunity for us to further our partnership and indeed our critically important relationship. I welcome this opportunity to meet together and continue those discussions. In 2008, New Zealand became the first Western country to sign a free trade agreement with China and China is New Zealands largest goods export partner. Ardern earlier met with Premier Li Keqiang. I reiterated to Premier Li that New Zealand welcomes all high-quality foreign investment that will bring productive economic growth to our country, she said in a statement. We discussed the FTA upgrade, and agreed to hold the next round of negotiations soon and to make joint efforts towards reaching an agreement as soon as possible. Talking to reporters before meeting Li, Ardern said she would set out the process New Zealand followed in the Huawei decision, and point out that there had been no political or diplomatic influence in the matter. She said media reports suggesting Huawei was banned in New Zealand were not true. The interview with reporters was streamed on New Zealands 1NEWS. Ardern has acknowledged there were complexities in the relationship with China but has dismissed concerns of a rift with New Zealands largest trading partner. The trip has been trimmed down to a one-day visit following an attack on two mosques in Christchurch on March 15 that killed 50 people. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. The law would require social media sites like Facebook to carry warnings on posts the government deems false and remove comments against public interest. Singapore submitted wide-ranging fake news legislation in parliament on Monday, stoking fears from internet firms and human rights groups that it may give the government too much power and hinder freedom of speech. The law would require social media sites like Facebook to carry warnings on posts the government deems false and remove comments against public interest. The move came two days after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said governments should play a more active role in regulating the online platform. But Simon Milner, who works on Facebooks public policy in Asia, said after the law was tabled, the firm was concerned with aspects of the law that grant broad powers to the Singapore executive branch to compel us to remove content they deem to be false and proactively push a government notification to users. As the most far-reaching legislation of its kind to date, this level of overreach poses significant risks to freedom of expression and speech, and could have severe ramifications both in Singapore and around the world, said Jeff Paine, managing director of the Asia Internet Coalition, an industry association of internet and technology companies in the region. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Singapores Law Minister K. Shanmugam said the new legislation would not hinder free speech. This legislation deals with false statements of facts. It doesnt deal with opinions, it doesnt deal with viewpoints. You can have whatever viewpoints however reasonable or unreasonable, he said. Tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google all have their Asia headquarters in the city-state, a low-tax finance hub seen as an island of stability in the middle of the fast-growing but often-turbulent Southeast Asia region. Singapore, which has been run by the same political party since independence from Britain more than 50 years ago, says it is vulnerable to fake news because of its position as a global financial hub, its mixed ethnic and religious population and widespread internet access. It is ranked 151 among 180 countries rated in the World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders, a non-government group that promotes freedom of information, below the likes of Russia and Myanmar. The new bill proposes that the government get online platforms to publish warnings or corrections alongside posts carrying false information, without removing them. This would be the primary response to counter falsehoods online, the Law Ministry said. That way, in a sense, people can read whatever they want and make up their minds. That is our preference, Law Minister K. Shanmugam told reporters on Monday. Under the proposals, which must be approved by parliament, criminal sanctions including hefty fines and jail terms will be imposed if the falsehoods are spread by malicious actors who undermine society, the ministry said, without elaborating. It added that it would cut off an online sites ability to profit, without shutting it down, if the site had published three falsehoods that were against the public interest over the previous six months. It did not say how it would block a sites profit streams. The bill came amid talk of a possible general election this year. Law Minister Shanmugam declined to comment when asked if the new legislation was related to a vote. This draft law will be a disaster for human rights, particularly freedom of expression and media freedom, said Phil Robertson, deputy director, Asia division, at Human Rights Watch. The definitions in the law are broad and poorly defined, leaving maximum regulatory discretion to the government officers skewed to view as misleading or false the sorts of news that challenge Singapores preferred political narratives. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Gmail will now allow you to write an email and schedule it to be sent later. Fifteen years ago, Google introduced its web-based email service, Gmail. The free service offered more storage than competing services back in 2004. As the search giant marks the 15th anniversary of its very popular product, there are a handful of new features which are also making their way into Gmail. Starting this week, Gmail will show you a new Smart Compose feature to help you craft instant emails on-the-go using predictive behaviour via machine learning. The feature will be first made available on Android devices, followed by iOS. It will also support four new languages including Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Another addition is probably the biggest game changer. Gmail will now allow you to write an email and schedule it to be sent later. As explained in the official blog, once you finish typing your email, a new drop-down menu on the Send button will let you schedule the date and time when you would like to send the email. You can also take quick actions on an email, such as respond to a comment thread in Google Docs, schedule a meeting, or fill a questionnaire, and more right from the message itself. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Kunlun said last August it was preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) of Grindr. (Photo: AFP) Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd said on Monday that it was in talks with US government authorities about whether it should continue to own popular gay dating app Grindr LLC. Reuters reported last week that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a US government panel that scrutinizes deals for national security risks, had asked Kunlun to sell Grindr, spurred on by data privacy concerns. We are in talks with CFIUS at the moment. We have not reached any agreement with CFIUS as of the day of the announcement. We will disclose any future development, Kunlun said in a brief filing with the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission. The development represents a rare high-profile example of CFIUS seeking to undo an acquisition that has already been completed. Kunlun took over Grindr through two separate deals between 2016 and 2018 without submitting the acquisition for CFIUS review, making it vulnerable to such an intervention, Reuters reported last week. CFIUS has not disclosed its specific concerns. However, the United States has been increasingly scrutinizing app developers over the safety of personal data, especially if some of it involves US military or intelligence personnel. Grindr collects personal information submitted by users, including location, messages, and in some cases even someones HIV status, according to its privacy policy. Kunlun said last August it was preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) of Grindr. As a result of CFIUS intervention, Kunlun has shifted its focus to an auction process to sell Grindr outright, given that the IPO would have kept Grindr under Kunluns control for longer, Reuters reported. Kunluns control of Grindr has fueled concerns among privacy advocates in the United States. US Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to Grindr last year demanding answers about how the app would protect users privacy under its Chinese owner. Kunlun is one of Chinas largest mobile gaming companies. It was part of a buyout consortium that acquired Norwegian internet browser business Opera Ltd for USD 600 million in 2016. Founded in 2008 by Tsinghua University graduate Zhou Yahui, Kunlun also owns Qudian Inc, a Chinese consumer credit provider, and Xianlai Huyu, a Chinese mobile gaming company. Zhou has said that the overseas market is the root of Kunluns business, accounting for 70 percent of Kunluns revenue. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. In total the company had printed 306,057 problematic maps, which will all be destroyed. Beijing: Customs officials in China have ordered the destruction of three lakh more maps for not mentioning Arunachal Pradesh and Taiwan as part of its territory and decided to file a lawsuit against four persons for trying to export them to the Netherlands, according to a media report. Last month, officials in China have destroyed 30,000 world maps printed in the country for incorrectly showing the borders with India and depicting Taiwan as a separate country. China claims the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. China routinely objects to Indian leaders visiting Arunachal Pradesh to highlight its stand. India says the State of Arunachal Pradesh is its integral and inalienable part and Indian leaders visit Arunachal Pradesh from time to time, as they visit other parts of the country. The two countries have so far held 21 rounds of talks to resolve the border dispute covering 3,488-km-long Line of Actual Control. China also claims the estranged island of Taiwan as its part.The Global Times reported on Tuesday that customs officers in South Chinas Guangdong Province will destroy more than three lakh world maps with boundary mistakes and file a lawsuit against four suspects for intending to export the maps to the Netherlands. The customs bureau at the port of Wenjindu in Chinas Guangdong Province recovered 264,983 incorrect world maps in English for export to the Netherlands on January 17, an employee surnamed Wang from the customs press office told the Global Times. The maps were printed by a company in Dong-guan in Chinas Guan-gdong province.In total the company had printed 306,057 problematic maps, which will all be destroyed. Those maps jeopardised Chinas territorial integrity and will be destroyed soon, Wang said. The post, on a page run by the Catholic SMS from Heaven evangelical group, stirred controversy and has gone viral. Warsaw: Catholic priests in Poland burned books they say are sacrilegious this weekend, including tomes from British author J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series of fantasy novels. We obey the Word, priests said in a Facebook post showing photographs of the public book burning and quoting Biblical passages from the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. One passage exhorting believers to destroy the enemies of God includes the command to burn their idols in the fire. The post, on a page run by the Catholic SMS from Heaven evangelical group, stirred controversy and has gone viral. Photographs show three priests carrying a basket of books and other items, including an African-styled face mask through a church to an outside fire pit. Priests are seen saying prayers over the fire pit where other items, including a 'Hello Kitty' umbrella and a Hindu religious figurine, are also burning. Contacted by AFP on Monday, the Polish Episcopate and local bishop acknowledged the incident but declined to comment. The local parish did not answer calls. The book burning took place after the 10:00 am mass on Sunday, at 11:00 am, an unnamed parishioner at the church in the northern Polish city of Gdansk told the TVN24 commercial news channel. And these offerings, which were brought (to the church) during the week, were taken in front of the church and there was a bonfire. Justice Minallah said the matter requires transparent inquiry and it is the government's job to conduct probes not the judiciary's. (Photo:AP) Islamabad: The Islamabad High Court on Tuesday formed an independent five-member commission to probe the alleged abduction, forced conversion and marriage of two teenage Hindu girls in Sindh province that led to massive protests by the minority community in the country. A high court bench led by Chief Justice of IHC Athar Minallah heard the petition filed by the two sisters -- Reena, Raveena -- and their alleged spouses, Safdar Ali and Barkat Ali, to seek protection. In their plea, the girls claimed that they belong to a Hindu family of Ghotki, Sindh but converted willfully as they were impressed by Islamic teaching. The counsel for the girls' parents, however, asserted that the case pertained to forced conversion. Their father on Monday also filed a petition in the IHC for a medical board to determine the exact ages of the two sisters as well as to test the girls for Stockholm Syndrome, a state of mind when a victim develops trust or affection for kidnappers. Justice Minallah said the matter requires transparent inquiry and it is the government's job to conduct probes not the judiciary's. The chief justice said the court had to ensure that there was no forced conversion. The bench formed a five-member commission to probe the matter. The commission includes Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Chairperson Mehdi Hasan, National Commission on the Status of Women Chairperson Khawar Mumtaz, veteran human rights activist I A Rehman and renowned Islamic scholar Mufti Taqi Usmani. The federal government has been tasked to organise meeting of the commission. The incident came to light when a video surfaced online showing the teenagers' father and brother claiming the girls were abducted and forcefully converted. It was followed by another video snippet in which the two girls claimed that they had converted to Islam. Amid the uproar, Prime Minister Imran Khan directed Sindh and Punjab to investigate the matter and recover the girls if the forceful conversion allegation was correct. Chief Justice Minallah also ordered that a medical board be constituted to determine the age of the girls. The court ordered the medical board to submit its report at the next hearing on April 11. Earlier, a medical report by Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences stated that the girls were not minors at the time of their marriages. The report was dismissed by the family of the girls as well as opposition lawmaker from Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, Darshan Punshi, who belongs to the Hindu community. Both the family and the lawmaker demanded an independent medical board to determine the age. The girls and their husbands had filed a petition for protection against threats to their lives. Already, the IHC on March 26 ordered state protection for the couples. The petition also stated that the two girls left their home on March 20 and two days later they willingly converted and entered into marriages. During the hearing, the chief justice noted the increasing number of forced conversion cases from Ghotki. He was irked at the governments' failure to find a solution. Why are such incidents repeatedly being reported from one district of the Sindh province? He said the perception that minorities' rights were not protected has to be changed. When speaking about the rights of minorities, Justice Minallah referenced the recent terror incident in New Zealand's Christchurch that killed 50 Muslims and the Jessica Arden-led government's response. The judge asked Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf lawmaker Ramesh Kumar Vankwani why the matter was not raised in the parliament. To which, Vankwani said he will bring the House's attention to it. Until the inquiry is completed, the high court has ordered for the girls to remain in state custody. They are currently being housed at the Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Crisis Centre in Islamabad. The high court summoned reports sought by the premier and adjourned the hearing till April 11. The Hindu community in Pakistan has carried out massive demonstrations calling for strict action to be taken against those responsible for forced conversion and marriages of Hindu girls, while reminding Prime Minister Khan of his promises to the minorities of the country. Last year, Khan during his election campaign had said his party's agenda was to uplift the various religious groups across Pakistan and said they would take effective measures to prevent forced marriages of Hindu girls. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj last month sought details from the Indian envoy in Pakistan into the alleged abduction of the two Hindu teenaged girls and their forcible conversion to Islam. Hindus form the biggest minority community in Pakistan. According to official estimates, 75 lakh Hindus live in Pakistan. Majority of Pakistan's Hindu population is settled in Sindh province. According to media reports, approximately 25 forced marriages take place every month only in Umerkot district in Sindh province. The letter said posting Khashoggis pictures online 'conveyed a very disrespectful message' towards the visiting crown prince. (Photo: File) Islamabad: Pakistans interior ministry ordered investigations into six journalists who had posted pictures online of murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Monday. RSF said it was appalled to learn of the investigations, adding that it condemns this latest case of intimidation, especially given the Pakistani polices past behaviour towards dissident journalists. The investigations had been ordered in a letter dated March 13 from the cybercrime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency, part of the interior ministry, the group said in a statement. AFP has been unable to independently verify the letter, which has been widely circulated on social media, and Pakistani officials have not responded to requests for comment. According to RSF, the FIA letter named the journalists as part of what it called a targeted social media campaign against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman during his visit to Pakistan in February. The campaign consisted of repeatedly posting photos of Jamal Khashoggi....throughout the crown princes visit, the watchdog said. The visit came five months after the crown prince came under intense pressure following the murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi had been a fierce critic of the prince, and his killing ignited a diplomatic crisis. Pakistan, long allied with Saudi Arabia, was seeking much-needed investment during the visit. The letter said posting Khashoggis pictures online conveyed a very disrespectful message towards the visiting crown prince. Daniel Bastard, the head of RSFs Asia-Pacific desk, said: This kind of harassment of journalists, whose only crime is posting content online that displeases the authorities, is symptomatic of the treatment that the Pakistani political establishment reserves for dissidents. The six journalists targeted by these investigations by the FIA are known for being outspoken on social networks, which are now the only place where they can express themselves freely, he added. Pakistan routinely ranks among the worlds most dangerous countries for media workers. Coverage critical of the countrys powerful military is considered a red flag, with reporters at times detained, beaten and even killed for running afoul of the security establishment. During his visit to Islamabad, the Saudi crown prince ending up signing investment deals worth up to USD 20 billion. Income Tax officials on Monday seized Rs 11.53 crore from a cement godown allegedly belonging to a local DMK leader in Vellore in northern Tamil Nadu and sleuths are probing whether the money was meant for distribution among voters in the constituency. The godown allegedly belongs to local DMK functionary Poonjolai Srinivasan, who is a close aide of party treasurer Durai Murugan, whose son Kadhir Anand is contesting the Lok Sabha elections from Vellore. Though I-T officials were tight-lipped on details of the investigation, they confirmed that raids are continuing in premises owned by DMK block secretary Perumal and Murugans secretary Askar Ali were also being raided. Officials said raids at an engineering college owned by Anand are still continuing. Meanwhile, Anand knocked at the doors of the Madras High Court seeking a stay on such raids since it prevents them from concentrating on elections. Wads of cash neatly packed and ward numbers written on it were recovered from the godown, the sources said. They suspect the cash was meant for distribution among voters since they had even recovered documents like voters list. Murugans residence was raided by the I-T officials early on Saturday morning in connection with elections. Cash for votes is a reality in Tamil Nadu where political parties spend huge amount of cash to tilt votes in their favour. In the past, elections to three constituencies Aravakurichi and Thanjavur, and by-elections to Dr R K Nagar Assembly constituency were rescinded due to allegations of rampant use of money power. As the fresh recovery of currency-linked the DMK, its president M K Stalin viewed it as an act of political vendetta. It is meant to threaten us. We will not fear such raids. These raids are meant to intimidate us, and I would like to say DMK men will never be threatened by such actions, Stalin said. The sources said they suspect that the money recovered was moved from a private engineering college owned by Murugan to the godown after the raids last week. Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Satyabrata Sahoo said they were yet to receive any official report from the I-T department, following which a decision on necessary action will be taken. The BJP on Tuesday slammed the Congress's poll manifesto as "dangerous and unimplementable", alleging that was aimed at "balkanisation" of India and was drafted by Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's friends in 'tukde-tukde gang'. Hitting out at the manifesto which which was released by the Gandhi scion, senior BJP leader and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said, "When out of ignorance, he makes implementable and dangerous promises, I am sure the country will not be in a mood to oblige." Addressing a press conference at the BJP headquarters here, he claimed it was divisive and aimed at "balkanisation of India," and added that the Congress does not deserve "even a single vote" for its promises, including doing away with sedition law. Even former prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Manmohan Singh did not dare change the law, he claimed. Jaitley in a blog said, "The manifesto compromises national security and has sham and bluff promises with little detailed understanding of the subjects involved. It is an irresponsible document which has never to be implemented since the Congress looks a certain loser." On the proposed amendments in the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, he said it compromised national security. The Congress earlier wanted martyr status for jawans, now they want cases against them, the Union minister said. "Those who laid their lives for the nation, the Congress wants them to be prosecuted at the behest of relatives of terrorists," he alleged. Jaitley alleged that though the party had set up a drafting committee, it appears that some important points related to Jammu and Kashmir were drafted by Rahul Gandhi's friends in 'tukde tukde' gang. He was referring to the Congress president's visit to Jawaharlal Nehru University in solidarity with protesting students against the arrest of the student union leader Kanahiya Kumar. On farm loan waiver, the minister said even tokenism had not been done on the issue in the five states where the Congress was in power and said, "It is an attempt to further their tradition of bluff and betrayal." On Nyay, the minimum income scheme, Jaitley said,"It is a bluff scheme. You only make such promises when you know you would never get a chance to implement them." He pointed out that in the manifesto, Nyay had become a joint scheme of the central and the state governments, diluting the initial announcement. Election Vigilance Squad and police on Tuesday seized Rs 17.92 lakh being transported without documents in separate incidents in Chitradurga and Bagalkot districts. The squad stopped a four-wheeler heading from Chitradurga at a checkpost at Challakere. While checking, they recovered a bag hid among flower pots which had Rs 8.38 lakh inside. Dilip Builders, Hyderabad, manager Amarnath, who was inside the vehicle, claimed that he had withdrawn cash from a bank in Chitradurga to disburse among labourers working for National Highway project as wages. As he failed to produce documents, the sleuths seized the bag and handed it over to the election officers. At Honnakatti checkpost in Bagalkote, the rural police recovered Rs 9.54 lakh from a four wheeler. The police stopped the vehicle coming from Sangam cross and checked it. Those inside the vehicle claimed that the cash was collected from members of women self-help groups to be deposited with a bank. However, they did not have documents. The police handed over the cash to tahsildar and asked them to produce documents for the cash and collect it from tahsildar. NORRISTOWN After a dog named Charlie helped sniff out his crime, an Ardmore lawyer admitted that he possessed child pornography and potentially faces time behind bars. Lawrence Brean, 70, of the 200 block of Cobblestone Drive, pleaded guilty in Montgomery County Court to felony charges of possessing child pornography in connection with incidents that occurred between September and November 2017. Judge Steven T. ONeill deferred sentencing so that court officials can complete a background investigation report about Brean, who will undergo drug, alcohol and psychosexual evaluations. The judge permitted Brean to remain free on bail pending a sentencing hearing later this year. Brean faces a possible maximum sentence of 7-to-14-years in prison on the charges. However, state sentencing guidelines could allow for a lesser sentence. Regardless of the sentence he receives, Brean faces a 15-year requirement to report his address to state police in order to comply with Pennsylvanias Sexual Offender Registration and Notification Act. Charlie, a K9 from the Delaware County District Attorneys Office trained to detect electronics, assisted in a Nov. 2, 2017, search of Breans residence and uncovered two flash drives that contained 25 images of child pornography depicting girls ranging in age from 11 to 15 engaged in sexual acts or poses. K9 Charlie is trained in electronics detection. K9 Charlie searched Lawrence Breans first-floor office and indicated in the closet, Montgomery County Detective Kathleen Kelly wrote in a criminal complaint, adding investigators found a computer bag that contained the two flash drives. Charlie, a Labrador Retriever introduced to the public by Delaware County District Attorney Kat Copeland in the fall of 2017, was instrumental in bringing about Breans arrest, Montgomery County prosecutors said previously. Investigators also reported finding a laptop computer inside Breans residence that contained additional child pornographic images. The investigation of Brean began in October 2017 when Montgomery County detectives received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that six images of child pornography had been downloaded to a computer tied to an IP address at Breans residence, according to court papers. Brean was at home when detectives came knocking at his door with a search warrant and Charlie on Nov. 2. Brean cooperated and gave detectives a statement. Brean told detectives he frequented chat rooms, including those for swingers lifestyles, and would chat with others about children and sex, Kelly alleged in the criminal complaint. Mr. Brean admitted to receiving images of child pornography and saving the images to his computer hard drive or a thumb drive, Kelly alleged. The flash drives and electronics equipment seized from Breans home were submitted to the FBI Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory for analysis, court papers indicate. Breans previous bail conditions included that he have no unsupervised contact with children and he must restrict his Internet usage to business. Editors note: The following is a transcript of the episode. It's been edited for clarity. Boyd Matheson: History is made of individual biographies. It is the work of the biographer to capture the principles that make that history possible. Sheri Dew is the Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer of Deseret Management Corporation. She's a best-selling author and the biographer for three presidents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Today, Sheri Dew discusses her latest biography, "Insights From a Prophet's Life: Russell M. Nelson," on this episode of "Therefore, What?" "Therefore, What?" is a weekly podcast that breaks down the news while breaking down barriers, challenges you and the status quo, explores timely topics and timeless principles, and leaves you confident to face what's next. I'm Boyd Matheson, opinion editor for the Deseret News, and this is "Therefore, What?" Sheri, welcome to "Therefore, What?" We're focused today on biographies of world religious leaders. We were down in Uruguay late last year with Sergio Rubin, who is the biographer of Pope Francis. And you have been the biographer for three presidents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and you had a chance to meet Sergio Rubin down in Uruguay. What an amazing man. And I want to start just with the interesting connection there, because here it was just five months later, and you had Pope Francis and President Russell M. Nelson actually meeting together in the Vatican. First, tell me a little bit, just kind of the interaction there with Sergio Rubin and then let's set dive into what it means to be the biographer of a world religious leader. Sheri Dew: I was absolutely fascinated to watch Mr. Rubin interview President Russell M. Nelson. He was smart, respectful, but asked probing questions. I think he really wanted to know how this world religious leader felt about things, how things operate in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I thought he was a total pro, and I loved watching him operate, as it were, and just seeing how he went about trying to find out the true distinctions, it seemed to me, between his background in the Catholic Church and then President Nelson's background. BM: I thought it was interesting that one of the things that Sergio Rubin commented on after he had interviewed President Nelson was that he felt that both President Nelson and Pope Francis had this very unique gift of wanting to be close to the people. SD: Yes, close to the people. And when we were watching, we were there together and we were watching it and we had seen President Nelson do that. I mean, two nights before we'd seen him in an audience where afterwards he came down to greet some of the dignitaries who had come to hear him speak and then before he could make his way out of the hall, how many children it's like they rushed the stage right? And practically knocked him over. It was kind of cute to watch security trying to figure out what do I do with all these children that are now attacking the president of the church? What do you do, right? But we had just observed this and again, after several days on an international trip we had seen that that is absolutely true. And we could tell from what we've observed from Pope Francis as well as what his biographer was saying that that's absolutely part and parcel of who Pope Francis appears to be. He wants to be by the people. And so they did seem to connect in a beautiful way talking about that very essence of why that's so important in a leader in a religion. BM: It was very interesting after the meeting between the two in the Vatican in Rome, as we stood outside there and had a chance to listen to what happened, President (M. Russell) Ballard said that they were friends at the first word and ended with a brotherly embrace. Again, as a biographer, what do you think it was that made that connection so special, where it wasn't like it was a head of state. Heads of state typically get 15 or 20 minutes with the pope. This was a meeting of well over 30, 35 minutes. Why do you think there was that unique connection? SD: Well, you and I didn't get to be in the room when that meeting took place. But we did get to hear immediately as President Nelson and President Ballard came out afterwards, and one of the things that struck me was the tremendous respect that President Nelson and President Ballard clearly evidenced for Pope Francis. And I wondered if part of what we were experiencing or hearing about them experiencing was this shared reality of the fact that they had parishioners all over the world for whom they care deeply, principles that they espouse and teach constantly, and if they just sort of related again we didn't get to see it, we're trying to understand what really took place. But that's what it felt like to me, is maybe they've had some absolute common ground because they really do care about the people and they care about the Lord. BM: So I want to dive into this whole process of biography. It's been said that a good biography is neither a voyeuristically-hovering exercise nor a mind-numbing kind of sequential list of events, and that it can't be preachy or pushy, that it can't create a feeling of less than in the reader you know, I'm a loser because this person is so amazing that you're doing the biography on. The great biographies create this insight within the story that really takes care of itself. You've done biographies on world religious leaders, as you've been involved in this very unique work, "Insights in a Prophet's Life" about President Russell M. Nelson. How did you approach it? Because you did this a little different. SD: This one was different than some other things that I've done. And by the way, let's just go on the record as saying, I know some fine biographers, and I'm not one of them. I know people who are far more talented than I. I do understand the process. And part of the process of a biography, going back to an earlier question, is to just say how do you really understand what the essence of a person is that you depict? And how do you, as the biographer, get out of the way and let their story tell themselves. Now with President Nelson, we had an interesting dilemma because an official biography was written of him 15 or so years ago. So when he became president of the church, there had already been this very important documentation of his life. But there was a pretty big gap at the end of his life where some very important things had taken place. And now he's president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and people are wanting to read about him in a different way than they would have 15 years earlier. And as we looked at that, frankly, we and I'm now involving Deseret Book as the publisher, weren't quite sure what to do. And finally the idea occurred, he's had so many amazing experiences in his life, and they're insightful. Every time you hear him tell a story, whether it's as a world famous heart surgeon, or in some of the work he's done as an ecclesiastical leader in the church, you hear him tell a story and you think, wow, it's just filled with insight. And that's where the idea came to say, well, maybe instead of a traditional biography that's chronological in nature and starts at the beginning and goes through to the end. Maybe we tell the stories that document his life and let the insights pop out to you, the reader. BM: Yeah. And I want to drill down a little bit because I know during this process, that you agonized over, as you were telling those stories you had originally talked about calling out some of those insights at the end of the chapter. You put a lot of work into that. And then in the end you took them out. SD: I took them out. Because when I went back and I looked at these amazing accounts, these episodes in his life, and here's the little insight at the bottom and honestly, it just sounded like a really bad Sunday School lesson. I thought, oh, this is just awful. And then I thought, somebody else's insight that they derive from this episode is going to be different. Let them get their own insight, have their own inspirational experience by reading about his life and pull out of it what they will. Don't get in the way. Again, don't get in the way of letting his story tell itself. Just present the story and then get out of the way, because that's where the power is. It's not in some amazing skilled writing. You don't actually want to draw attention to the writing. You just want the story to tell itself. BM: And actually I thought that was maybe the greatest tribute to President Nelson in the writing, was that you did get out of the way and you created space for the reader to receive their own revelation about the insight or the principle, which is so indicative of President Nelson. SD: What I said in the introduction was that if something was included, it means that I found some insight in it. That's as much of myself as I wanted to insert, because the biographer does have to be the one that selects. If I think back, for example, to writing a biography of President Ezra Taft Benson. He was a secretary of agriculture in Dwight D. Eisenhower's cabinet for eight years. There are rooms full of stuff about him. Not to mention his decades of service as an ecclesiastical leader, we would say a prophet, seer and revelator, in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There's roomfuls of stuff. So the biographer has this very difficult challenge of saying, of everything that exists about him that documents his life, what are you actually going to tell? What is actually important to make sure that the reader gets a sense of who this person is and what he cares about and what he's devoted his life to? And can we, and I think you see this in the life of a religious leader, I think you see the hand of God touching their lives and helping shape them and mold them and get them ready for the time when they are going to lead a large organization of members all over the world. BM: So let's drill down a little bit on that leadership component. Again, you've been the biographer for three world religious leaders, and they each have their own talents, their own skills. We live in an age where leadership is really lacking, whether that's in business or in politics or government. What are some of the leadership lessons you've learned in looking at the lives of these prophets, seers and revelators? SD: One of the things that strikes me about this, and I'm not sure this is what you're looking for, but one of the things that has struck me is people will say to me all the time, especially in the past, they've said, well, you wrote the biography of Ezra Taft Benson and of Gordon B. Hinckley. How are they different? That is such an uninspired question. Of course they're different. They have different parents, they were raised in different places, they have different talents, they went to different schools. Yeah, they're way different. What's way more interesting to me is how they're alike. They're alike in that they are filled with faith. And you see the Lord, I think, putting them in situations where they had the opportunity to either turn on their faith or build it. And they always choose to build it. They always choose to choose faith and in the process to build their faith as they work through whatever problems come their way. You see them helping others do that and you see leadership, their styles are different. Ezra Taft Benson, Gordon B. Hinckley, Russell M. Nelson, those are three very distinctive and unique men, but they all care about others more than themselves. They're looking for the greater good. So they're making decisions based on what will be good for you and for me, not for them. Also, in this case, as religious leaders, I think it about all the time, there's nothing in this for them. They're not getting rich, they're not getting famous, they're not getting anything. They're trying to say how can we discern the Lord's will? How can we help map out a path for the members of the church that would help them live happier, more productive, more meaningful lives? It's always focused outward. So that's one of the huge leadership lessons is they're focused out, not in. BM: So tell me a little bit from President Nelson's standpoint. When he went to school it was, you know, you don't touch the human heart, right? You'll be disbarred, banned, discredited. And then this unique thing of these researchers, all these people who were trying to figure it out, where again in the world today it's look out for No. 1, win at any cost, win over people rather than with. What did you learn in looking at that portion of his life in preparation? SD: I'll tell you, it was actually a story associated with this that I think led me to think about the idea of insights, because when he told me the story, I just thought it was profound. So here he goes from being told in the University of Utah medical school, you cannot touch the human heart. And then he's now gone to do his residency and his internship at the University of Minnesota and suddenly finds himself on the team building the first heart-lung machine in the world. How do you go from being told don't touch the heart to saying, hey, let's build a heart-lung machine? And he said something interesting. He said, Oh, I've just always been curious. Well, that curiosity led him to be truly one of the pioneering heart surgeons in the world. And he goes forward, he does the first open heart surgery in Utah. And he's a part of this little teeny group of surgeons that are trying to figure it out. Imagine they're opening up hearts and they don't know what to do. They're trying to figure out how you save lives. And they did save lives and they lost lives in those early days. They had both experiences. He tells the story, though, and this is when the insight thing I thought, Wow, he said that they would go in those early days to these medical conferences, and this little group of surgeons would huddle and share everything they were learning. What was working, what wasn't, what had they discovered about cleanliness, about making sure that operating room was perfect, about procedural issues. What had they discovered? And I remember saying to him, So you shared everything you were learning, you weren't worried about getting the first patent or getting written up in medical textbooks saying that you pioneered such a process? You just openly shared those things? And he said, Oh, yes, he said. Our competition wasn't with each other. Our competition was with death, disease and ignorance. And you want to talk about leadership and caring about the greater good. Here you have these men, and women too, but I think in that day and age, it honestly was mostly men, and they're looking out to say, How can we save more lives? I had a profound experience for me. This is in 2015, I believe, when the University of Utah Medical Center celebrated then President Nelson, he was president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the church, and it was the 60th anniversary of the first open heart surgery in Utah. And they were honoring him. So I was invited to attend this event at the U. Heart surgeons, cardiac surgeons from around the country had flown in to honor this early pioneer. And he gets up and he talks about, in doctor language, by the way, he talks about everything they were discovering and how it happened and all this sort of thing. And I mean, this audience was glued. There were several hundred cardiac surgeons there. The person who conducted was, as I remember, head of cardiothoracic surgery at the Mayo Clinic, and he had flown in to honor Dr. Nelson. And he stood up and said, You know, today, open heart surgery is just not that big a deal. We know what's going to happen. We know how to do it. And he said, but that was not the case with a young Dr. Nelson. They were having to figure out everything that we now take so for granted. Well, one of the interesting things was at the end, that group of very distinguished doctors, they didn't rush the stage necessarily, but they all headed up because they all wanted their picture taken with him. And one of the great pictures is this huge group of surgeons just crowding around, wanting to have an association with someone who had paved the way for them. But I go back and say there must have been an amazing unselfishness in those early days. Our competition isn't with each other. When do you ever see that today? BM: That's right. Excellence never has to call attention to itself. We could use a lot of that in the world today. Let's talk about another leadership component, again, insights, I think, from President Nelson and from others. So much of what we see today is so scrubbed, you know, everything is poll-tested and consultant-certified. And, you know, you've had 27 focus groups and 800 meetings. But President Nelson has a little different approach in terms of leadership. He doesn't seem to look at it as either it's him coming in and just declaring it. Tell me a little bit more about his leadership style as a world religious leader. SD: I have had those who sit in meetings with him and in counsel with him frequently say that he is one of the brightest men they've ever met, but also one of the most collaborative and most gracious. He wants to hear what everybody in the room has to say. And I've experienced that myself actually, sometimes being called upon to make presentations of different kinds to him and to his counselors who comprise the First Presidency. I saw it, in fact, just the other day where after making the presentation, one by one, President Nelson is directing around the room, there were probably seven or eight other individuals in the room, and he wanted to know what every single one of them had to say. And before he spoke, he wanted to hear everybody else. And that led him to ask for the questions about the proposal in front of them and I just witnessed myself the collaborative nature of saying, Look, if you're in this room, I think you have something to add. I want to know what you think. And then it's a matter of gathering the information, but we would say in our culture a lot that good information proceeds inspiration. Then you can almost see the process of the First Presidency really trying to discern, based upon what they had just heard, discern not just what they thought was the best idea, but what would God have them do. And that's probably the pattern that I have seen the most. And from all these leaders with whom I've associated closely, they gather information, they want to know, and they're bright and they're savvy, and they do know. They travel the world and have for decades, this is a very bright, experienced, accomplished, informed group of individuals. But when all is said and done, they're not trying to figure out what's our best idea. They're trying to do their homework and then take their best thinking to the Lord and saying, Please guide us and help us know what the Lord would have us do. BM: Yeah, I think if there's one thing that people who have been watching just over the last year plus, in the time that President Nelson has been president. I believe it was Elder (Jeffrey R.) Holland who said, you know, this rush of revelation that's kind of hurting all of our hearts and causing us all to try to you know, gasp and keep up with the prophet. Some people have looked at that and never really seen or felt so part of the process or had a prophet be so open in terms of revelation and how that comes to him and how that happens. We know that Sister (Wendy) Nelson has shared some very tender and very personal insight. Just this last weekend, CNN picked up on that and ran an article in their online piece, their religion writer, that both praised that but also criticized that, or at least questioned, in terms of, you know, is he just trying to shore up a man-made decision by declaring it as revelation? Some people say that doesn't leave anyone any room to think for themselves if you declare it revelation. Give us your insight on that. How do you see his use of revelation, and what is he really challenging the members around the world to do? SD: You know, I think that what he's doing is completely consistent. Again, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regard the president of the church as their prophet in the same sense that those who lived in ancient days and Old Testament days would have regarded Moses as a prophet and Elijah as a prophet. So that is how we see him. And the interesting thing about this is he has been quite open in indicating the conversation, gathering the information with those that we regard as prophets, seers and revelators is the phrase that we would use. So he's been very open about that. But it's following the pattern that we see in the Old and New Testament. It's not any different than that, where you do see men who we believe are called of God declaring the will of God. That's what a prophet does. And it's interesting because, by the way, I thought that CNN article was pretty interesting. And I thought that writer got a lot right. And some of his interpretation was probably different. But I think it's always difficult to parachute into a new culture, a new religious culture, and they're never going to say it exactly like we would say it and we wouldn't expect them to, right? I'm sure that for some people in the world today that the whole notion of somebody declaring the mind and will of God just seems maybe crazy, or at least like a whole new idea. But again, if you happen to be a believer in God, if you believe in the Bible and the New Testament, and have drawn some truths from there, then this doesn't seem terribly inconsistent. And the interesting thing is for those who might be saying, Yeah, but when he says it's revelation, where does that leave me? Do I have to like, take it or leave it? You go back to, I think it's the book of Numbers. You'll have to check me on this. But you've got Moses who is saying, Would that all the people were prophets. We want all the people to receive revelation. Every president of the church that I can think of is constantly inviting, pleading with the members of the church to basically go seek their own confirming revelation. So yes, the responsibility of the prophet is to declare the mind and will of the Lord and to lead his people, but they don't expect any of us to just not go to the Lord ourselves and get our own confirmation that what we've just heard is, in fact, true. And to me, that's the wonderful combination. I don't want the prophet to get up and say, You know, we had a really smart discussion, we had a really great focus group, and we came up with some really great ideas and let's test this. That's not to me what a prophet would do. I love it when he declares that he and the other leaders in the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve are of one mind and one heart about a certain direction. But then it's my job to go ask the Lord if that's right, and to get my own confirming revelation. We believe in revelation. That's something we believe in. BM: Yeah. And I don't know that there's ever been a president of the church who has challenged the membership worldwide to do more. I want to read just a couple of things from his very first Sunday after being sustained as the prophet in the church's general conference last April, and I'm going to read just a couple of lines from his address, and then I just want you to respond to those on what you think that means for us. He said, I urge you to stretch beyond your current spiritual ability to receive personal revelation. In coming days it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting and constant influence of the Holy Ghost. My beloved brothers and sisters, I plead with you to increase your spiritual capacity to receive revelation. SD: Don't you love that? Here's what I love about that. The man I believe is a prophet is telling me I believe you can do it, Sheri. And Boyd, I believe you can do it, but I need you to work at it. So he's telling me it's possible, he thinks I can do it, and that I can increase my spiritual capacity. And I love that phrase. Because in a world of very noisy opinions, you can find an opinion to support any point of view, any hour of the day, on any continent, in any language. And he's saying, you can learn, you can increase your spiritual capacity so you can learn spiritually to be sharp enough, and to be receptive enough that you can go straight to heaven and ask for help. And so what that also tells me is God will talk to me. I love that. BM: I think there are many people around the world, there a lot of very exhausted people on the planet, for the very reasons you just laid out. You can get an opinion on anything at any moment. And I think there's a lot of people who are just really weary. Some people, I think, after reading the CNN article, thought, OK, yeah, maybe it does sound different. Do I really want someone to tell me what God wants? But I also think there are people out there who may just have that notion, who may be really exhausted and think well, wow, if there is such a man on the planet, who's up in the middle of the night getting the will of God and writing it down on a yellow pad, maybe that means that God still is interested in the world. And if God's interested in the world, he might just be interested in me. Is that part of the message? SD: I think it's a huge part of the message. And I think there's also another element to it and that is, he's not only interested in me, he's interested in what's happening in my life and in everybody else's life because God loves his children and he knows his children. All the noise today can create such a feeling of being unsettled and even fearful that to me, the clarion call of a prophet gives such confidence to a regular person like me to say, OK, I have a spiritual leader that I can follow with confidence, but he's also telling me that you develop your own spiritual muscles so you can go to heaven yourself. You can appeal to your Heavenly Father yourself and get answers for yourself. And that double-barreled spiritual protection is, to me, just the greatest antidote to fear and to a lack of peace. BM: A couple of things, just as we come down the homestretch here. You know I'm the master of the false finish so don't think you're done. You talked about this arc of looking at the lives of these men, ordinary men, who become world religious leaders, who take on this mantle. One of the elements in the book is this instant where President Nelson is taking some notes at a meeting and he has this impression that he needs to learn Chinese. What did you see in that arc of his life, in terms of he really worked at getting better at receiving revelation and promptings and insight. What are some of the things you saw in that arc? SD: So one of the interesting things here, there are a number of examples from his life, many examples from his life, some of them in the operating room with somebody's chest cut open, where he literally didn't know what he was going to do as he walked in. But he'd been pleading and praying for help to know what to do and actually had phrases and words come into his mind and images come into his mind about where to put sutures and how to actually fix something. So that's one kind of thing. This example that you're referencing here is actually a perfect example of the fact that he as a very skilled, very smart, world famous in his craft man, was at a meeting where the prophet said we ought to learn to speak Mandarin. And so he goes home and says to his wife, do you want to learn to speak Mandarin with me? I didn't hear President Spencer W. Kimball, who the prophet was at the time, I didn't hear him say, Well, everybody but Russell M. Nelson should learn Mandarin, he said, he thinks we should learn Mandarin and he started learning Mandarin. And it wasn't but a few months that he found himself in a professional meeting in Boston, where he ended up sitting next to a prominent surgeon, a medical colleague from China, and he was amazed that he knew a few words by then in Mandarin and so forth. It ended up with invitations to go to mainland China to teach open heart surgery. He helped lots of surgeons there learn how to do some of the procedures he had been pioneering. And it all started because he was, I would say, receptive enough and humble enough. He's at the top of the food chain in the medical world. But humble enough to take counsel from a prophet and say, Well I guess I should learn Mandarin. And it ended up extending his career around the world. In fact, the very last open heart surgery he did in his life was in mainland China after he became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Saved the life of a very famous opera star. BM: Well, the program is "Therefore, What?" And that is always the question we have to get to in the end. First, I just want to say the book is so inviting, because you can literally flop it open to any page and begin and have a single sitting insight into a prophet's life. And I think that's exciting for young people as well as us older folks. So as you look at that, and as you look at the life of President Russell M. Nelson, what's the "Therefore, What?" What principle from his life would we all do well to implement in our own? SD: There are a lot. It's hard to know which one to settle on. But I would suggest this one, maybe, in this context. And that is a very bright, talented, kind, gracious man. And if he had just used his own faculties and his own talent and his native ability, he would have been, quote-unquote, very successful and left quite a mark on the world. But early on in his life, he turned his life over to God, and basically allowed him to make more out of it than he would have ever made on his own. And I think there is a remarkable lesson in seeing the humility and the dedication and the sheer faith of someone willing to say, I'm willing to do whatever God wants me to do. And because of that, his impact the world over has been immeasurable. We'll never know how many we know he saved nearly 7,000 lives in the operating room. We know that. You can't go anywhere with him that somebody doesn't come and say, You operated on my dad, you saved the life of so and so. But he has saved a lot of other lives because he's been willing to be submissive to God. BM: Sheri Dew, thanks so much for being with us today. The biography, "Insights from a Prophet's Life" from Russell M. Nelson, a world religious leader, an extraordinary soul with insights and principles for all of us to follow. Thanks for sharing that with us today. Remember after the story is told, after the principle is presented, after the discussion and debate have been had, the question for all of us is "Therefore, What?" Don't miss an episode, subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcast or wherever you're listening today. Be sure to rate this episode and leave us a review. Follow us on Deseretnews.com/Tw, and subscribe to our newsletter. This is Boyd Matheson, opinion editor for the Deseret News. Thanks for engaging with us on "Therefore, What?" Find and subscribe to this and other podcasts from the Deseret News at DeseretNews.com/Podcasts_. Or find us on_ iTunes_,_ Google Play or wherever you listen to podcasts. SALT LAKE CITY Utah Department of Agriculture and Food Commissioner LuAnn Adams, the agencys first female commissioner, is stepping down April 16 after more than five years in the position. During her time with the department, she led the agencys efforts to regulate and promote farming and animal production, land conservation, food safety, lab testing and economic development. Gov. Gary Herbert made the announcement in a statement Monday. Deputy Commissioner Scott Ericson will serve as interim commissioner until a new commissioner is appointed and approved by the Legislature. Herbert tapped Adams in 2013 while she was serving her first term as Box Elder County commissioner. Prior to that she had spent 16 years serving in positions as the countys clerk, recorder and surveyor. It has been a wonderful life-changing opportunity to serve in Gov. Herberts Cabinet, Adams said in a statement. This experience has been the highlight of my career, and I have been honored to work among amazing leaders. SALT LAKE CITY Public shaming in politics can be a "tribal dog whistle" that attracts like-minded people and pumps up the self-esteem of the person doing the shaming, says the organizer of an upcoming "ethics slam" on the topic. But shaming also can be an effective tool of justice, and feeling shame can cause people to behave better. There's no easy answer to the question, "Is shaming ethical?" And that makes the topic perfect for an ethics slam, said Rachel Robison-Greene, co-organizer of the April 3 event in Logan and a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Utah State University. "We want the community to have conversations about tricky issues; to practice in a public setting having civil, rational discussions about these issues because it really can be done. It doesnt have to devolve into what it becomes on the internet, Robison-Greene said. The upcoming ethics slam will give armchair philosophers equal footing with real philosophers in discussing the increase in public shaming and its ramifications, said Robison-Greene, who teaches philosophy at USU. Ethics slams are modeled after poetry slams, in which poets read their work informally in public. This will be the fifth slam organized by Robison-Greene and her husband, Richard Greene, director of the Richard Richards Institute for Ethics at Weber State University. Previous topics have included gun control, take-a-knee protests and the effects of technology on morality. At first, they tried to model the events after scholastic ethics bowls, in which participants have a set time in which to make an argument and to respond to others. But Greene said they quickly realized that wouldn't work. In the current format, moderators pose a question and then pass a wireless microphone around the room to anyone who raises a hand. There is no time limit, although people are encouraged to be brief and to thoughtfully respond to what the person speaking ahead of them said, rather than delivering a prepared speech. There is no need to register; anyone can show up and participate, and the forum benefits from diversity of participants, Greene said. Although the slams always involve controversial questions, participants in previous events have been unfailingly courteous, even during one about #MeToo held during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, he added. "I think people surprise themselves. They sit there and listen to people they vehemently disagree with and hear other points of view. I dont know that anyone changes their mind, but every everyone sort of feels better about the process," Greene said. "And people who were undecided do make up their mind." Robison-Greene said she selected public shaming as a topic because its complex. People may say readily that certain types of shaming are bad, such as body shaming or shaming ones children on the internet, but they may approve of shaming white supremacists or people who have committed a crime. It's only March but we already have a strong candidate for dad of the year at the @cavs game pic.twitter.com/tFnT1qa50D Dom (@DumbMoreReady) March 25, 2017 In fact, while public shaming is widely interpreted as something people do on the internet, it has a long history in jurisprudence. Public whipping and stocks were commonplace in colonial times, as were public hangings. Writing in Prison Legal News, David Reutter said one colonial judge sentenced a man convicted of stealing a pair of pants to being enclosed in stocks with the pants around his neck. "Public shaming sentences began to fade around the time of the American Revolution, though some shaming punishments, such as the pillory and branding for horse thieves, continued into the 1800s," Reutter wrote. Shaming today can be comical, such as people shaming their pets for bad behavior, or calculated, such as President Donald Trump's penchant for belittling political opponents by mocking their physical appearance. And some judges are still incorporating shame into punishment. In Reutter's article, he cited cases in which judges have required people to wear signs in public that said, among other things, "I stole from a 9-year-old on her birthday!" and "Only an idiot would drive on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus." Shame is a way we have of holding one another accountable. Rachel Robison-Greene, a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Utah State University Shame does play an important role. Its important that we feel shame as an emotion so we modify our behavior going forward, Robison-Greene said. Shame is a way we have of holding one another accountable, she said. But whether shaming is the best tool for political discourse or for making yourself feel superior to others deserves debate, she said. Robison-Greene said they were initially expecting about 25 to 30 people to attend the slams, but the events are attracting 75 to 100 people, from college students to senior citizens. The goal here is community engagement; the goal is not to have philosophers talking to one another. Philosophers are great, but they bring a limited viewpoint when it comes to these important social issues. Its important to have people of diverse backgrounds whove had different experiences, she said. The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 6 p.m. April 3 at The Crepery restaurant, 25 W. Center Street in Logan. PARK CITY Park City High School was evacuated when nearly 20 people became sick after a student released pepper spray in or near the school, fire officials said. Police were called to the school about 2 p.m. on reports of a natural gas leak, Park City fire information officer Tricia Hazelrigg said. Law enforcement officials arrived and confirmed the substance wasn't natural gas but an "unknown substance," she said. The student later called the school and admitted to releasing pepper spray, Park City Police Capt. Phil Kirk said. He did not immediately know how the pepper spray had gotten into the school's air system. As of about 4:30 p.m., police hadn't interviewed the student or taken him or her into custody. Additional details about the student were not immediately available. Nineteen people including students and faculty members who had been in the school were treated on scene for respiratory distress. Some who were affected experienced burning in their lungs and abdominal cramping, Hazelrigg said. Authorities found that some had elevated levels of carbon monoxide in their blood, according to Hazelrigg, but it was not immediately known whether that was related to the pepper spray in the building. One person was taken to a hospital, Hazelrigg said. Hazmat crews were investigating Monday afternoon, she said. Initial gas monitor results had showed no signs of explosives or carbon monoxide. School was out when the incident occurred, Hazelrigg said. Park City School District spokeswoman Melinda Colton said it was expected the school would remain closed through Monday night and reopen Tuesday morning for classes. Kirk had originally reported the school had reopened within a few hours of the incident. SOUTH SALT LAKE A Utah group is pushing to make sure everyone in the Beehive State is counted as the U.S. census moves largely online for the first time. "Really what we want to do is make sure everyone knows they matter," said Evan Curtis with the Governor's Office of Management and Budget. Youngsters, immigrants and college students have long proved difficult to tally in the survey that helps decide how much federal money goes to Utah schools and roads, and how voting districts are drawn. Now Utah's Complete Count Committee seeks to ensure those who don't have internet or don't trust the new online system still will take part in the 2020 count that takes place a year from Monday. The committee includes state experts in demographics and planning, plus faith and community leaders from across the state. Utah lawmakers declined to fund the effort in the 2019 general legislative session, so the push will rely largely on a statewide network of volunteers. "That's something we do especially well in Utah. We're really good at reaching out to our neighbors and making sure that people are OK. That's the type of effort we're really going to need, is everyone making sure that they're talking to their friends, neighbors and of course any community groups that they belong to," Curtis told reporters at the Columbus Library in South Salt Lake. The preparation comes as the U.S. Supreme Court reviews a possible question about whether a person is an American citizen. President Donald Trump on Monday said the report would be "meaningless" without it, but Hispanic lawmakers and advocates have said such an inquiry will turn immigrants away from filling out the form altogether. A ruling is expected before a June printing deadline for the forms. Curtis declined to say how the potential question could affect the survey participation in Utah but emphasized that there are safeguards to protect the information a person discloses. Even though the 2020 survey will be offered online, each household will have the option to respond by phone or mail. At a Monday news conference in Washington, census officers emphasized that their systems are secure and the data will remain confidential. The federal government relied on the once-a-decade questionnaire in parceling out about $5.7 billion in Utah in 2016, noted Mallory Bateman with the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. But the data is also important to the state, cities, real estate developers and others planning for Utah's rapidly growing population. "If we don't have a good census count, that will kind of mess up our planning for the next 10 years," Bateman said. "We don't have another opportunity to do a count this big and global." For certain hard-to-reach groups, the complete-count group is also planning a social media blitz with the message "You matter. Be counted." As a senior citizen who doesn't care for the internet and lives in a gated community, 71-year-old Henry Jones is among those the committee wants to be sure to reach. But Jones already has a plan. If he receives a postcard directing him to fill out a census form next year, he will either complete a written questionnaire or seek out help with the online version from the Columbus Senior Center, where he plays pickleball twice a week. Jones, a retired truck driver who delivered food for Granite School District, is trying to get the word out to others who exercise and socialize at the senior center. He said he prods them to keep an eye out for a card in the mail. "If you don't do it, nobody will know about it," he said. PROVO A Provo man faces 43 felonies for allegedly enticing teenage girls from several states, including Utah, into sending explicit pictures. Alan Jesse Hiatt, 31, was charged in 4th District Court in late March with 34 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, three counts of enticing a minor, and obstructing justice, second-degree felonies; plus three counts of enticing a minor and two counts of dealing in harmful materials to a minor, third-degree felonies. Charging documents outline a disturbing case that involves at least five girls between the ages of 12 and 15 dating back to November 2017. Investigators were still attempting to identify some of the victims, but believe they live in Ogden, Oklahoma City, West Virginia and Iowa, according to a police affidavit filed in 4th District Court. Hiatt "had been receiving nude photos from several underaged girls through Facebook," according to charging documents. Provo police were alerted to the case by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "They found messages between Mr. Hiatts account and multiple girls who told him they were minors. During these online conversations, Mr. Hiatt discussed explicit sexual acts solicited and received nude photos from them, and sent them photos of himself," the charges state. "Mr. Hiatt consistently referred to himself as 'Daddy,' telling her that her age did not matter 'as long as youre still mine,'" he told one 14-year-old girl, according to the charges. Police say Hiatt was very violent in some of his messages, telling one 12-year-old girl that he would kidnap her, and asking another girl, "'You want to be raped and hurt?' and encouraged her to kill herself," according to charging documents. In one conversation, Hiatt allegedly told a girl that he just got his license to be a private security guard. According to the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing website, Hiatt received his license to be an unarmed private security guard in November. His next court hearing is scheduled for April 11. MURRAY For Carter Oliphant, an 11-year-old sixth grader at Woodstock Elementary School, the thought of millions of children suffering child abuse is heartbreaking. "I had no idea about the amount and it just breaks my heart to know that that many children are being hurt like that," he said. According to the Administration for Children and Families' child maltreatment report, child protective service agencies nationwide received an estimated 4.1 million referrals involving approximately 7.5 million children for 2017's federal fiscal year. Carter, along with all students in the school, received training Monday about child abuse taught by Prevent Child Abuse Utah. The nonprofit has been in 243 schools statewide to teach its child abuse curriculum this year. Thanks to a $35,000 donation from Discover Financial Services, the 63 elementary schools in Granite School District will receive the nonprofit's training on child abuse either before the end of the current school year or in the fall. "I really truly feel I am a protector of students and anything that we can do that empowers them to know what is safe is something that I support," said Brenda Byrnes, principal at Woodstock Elementary. The district is the third-largest in the state with more than 67,000 students, the majority being elementary students, according to the district's website. "We think that it's important to be involved in the community," said Steve Peck, vice president of consumer banking at Discover's Utah Customer Care Center. "This is one of the best things we can do." Peck, who is an alumnus of schools in Granite School District, said the company thinks the information and training is important. "We value volunteerism it's part of the 'V' in the Discover name. We also value doing the right thing, so if you think about those two things, this fits very well with Discover's values and we're very happy to be involved." The curriculum is evidence-informed and different for different age groups, according to Gwen Knight, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Utah. "Some key messages that we're teaching kids through this curriculum is if they are abused it is not their fault and to keep telling until someone believes you," she said. "So if they haven't been abused we're empowering them to prevent the abuse. If something has happened to them we're empowering them to come forward and have a voice and get the help that they need and deserve." The length and topic of presentations depend on the age groups. For kindergarten, the presentation is 30 minutes for one day, whereas students in second through sixth grade have two-day presentations that are about an hour long. Parents receive notice prior to the presentations and have the choice to opt their children out or sit in on the lesson. "So in kindergarten we use stories and examples: 'Your body belongs to you, nobody is allowed to touch your body without your permission, you have a right to say no,'" she explained. She noted that often a child is abused by someone they know and children don't know it's wrong. "And then as they get older we start to tell them exactly 'OK, abuse is to hurt or harm a child on purpose,'" she said. "Whenever we define sexual abuse it is that no one has a right to touch you on the private parts of your body for no appropriate reason or ask you to touch them. And the private parts are the parts covered by the swimming suit." Knight said it's crucial to educate children on abuse and cited data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention study about adverse childhood experiences, which found that children who've been abused have higher risks for mental health problems, suicide and drug abuse. "From kindergarten to second grade we don't even use the word abuse," said Cortney Bramlette, lead prevention specialist with the nonprofit. In the earlier grades, children are taught to "listen to their 'uh-oh feeling,' say no, and go tell," Bramlette said. Starting in third grade, the word abuse is introduced and the different types are identified: physical, emotional, sexual and neglect. In fourth grade is when the conversation goes more in-depth and kids are taught to recognize, resist and report abuse. "What's so interesting to me is how interested the kids actually are in this subject," Bramlette remarked. "The information we give them, it's not scary, and they're already in a learning environment and so they're open to what we're talking about. And they really are so interested in what abuse is." That interest was true for 11-year-old Emily Jarman, a fifth grader at the school. "I knew that one form of child abuse was hurting the kid but I didn't know that if you were saying mean things to the kid you were also abusing them, I didn't know that if you weren't caring for them right, that was also abuse," she said. Emily's mother, Annie Jarman, said she was glad the students received the training. "There's a lot going in our world today and the kids need to be prepared, they need to have the tools," said Jarman, who works as a secretary at Woodstock. "There's been too many kids that have been hurt that have lived with shame and pain in their lives and it's really important to give them an oppurtunity to speak up for themselves and to be able to say this isn't OK and know that they're OK even if something bad happens to them that people love them and they can be helped." Jarman also said it's important to have these conversations at home to reinforce what children are taught during the presentations. The organization also offers free training online for parents or adults who work with children. "That's what I tell my daughter is we don't keep secrets if something happens to you, you have to come and tell me and it's OK," Jarman said. One second grade class at the school seemed to learn that lesson from the presentation after Bramlette discussed an educational video with them. She asked the class if they have to keep a "bad secret" when someone makes them promise to. The group answered with a resounding "No." She went on to discuss the difference between good secrets and bad secrets, using a secret birthday present as an example of a good secret. "To open up that conversation is really important," Bramlette said. "And we're able to bring that topic up and then the kids go home with information that they're able to talk to their parents about." LAYTON One of the men charged as part of an investigation into a fatal shooting inside a Layton trailer home last year, now faces new charges of killing his cat. Devon Allan Miller, 22, of Layton, was charged Monday in 2nd District Court with torture of a companion animal, a third-degree felony, two counts of drug possession, a class A misdemeanor, and two counts of assault, a class B misdemeanor. The incident happened on Sept. 23, 2017, when police were called to Miller's residence on a report that he was "acting violently and had killed his cat," according to charging documents. Officers found two other people trying to restrain Miller. Miller then bit both of those people, the charges state. Miller was taken to a hospital where investigators learned he had allegedly "consumed an unknown amount of LSD." When he "eventually became coherent enough for an interview," Miller admitted to punching, strangling and slamming his cat against a wall, according to charging documents. Court documents do not say if Miller was charged in 2017 or why charges are being filed now. More recently, Miller was charged with felony drug- and weapons-related crimes and obstructing justice. On Sept. 27, Anthony Child, 26, was shot in a trailer at the Lakeview Estates, 2600 N. Hill Field Road in Layton. But rather than go to a local hospital, he made his friends drive him to a hospital in Preston, Idaho, allegedly to hide the marijuana and psychedelic mushroom growing operation in the trailer, according to police. Child died shortly after arriving at the hospital. Police say he had been shot twice in the back after a gunman fired 13 rounds from a rifle. Several people have been charged in connection with the shooting, including Angel Christopher Abreu, 22, of Ogden, who is charged with aggravated murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated burglary and obstructing justice. Brandon Martin Hinojosa, 16, was charged as an adult with murder, aggravated burglary, aggravated kidnapping and obstructing justice. When police searched the trailer, they found a psychedelic mushroom growing operation in Miller's bedroom, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, and a .22-caliber rifle, according to charging documents. He is also accused of helping to clean up blood and shell casings from the shooting before police arrived. On March 19, a warrant was issued for Miller's arrest for failing to show up for a scheduled court hearing in that case. SALT LAKE CITY To Leonard Bagalwa, Utah's replacement of the voter-approved Proposition 3 to expand Medicaid is like a bad April Fools' joke. Before the Legislature passed a more limited plan to replace Proposition 3, Bagalwa said he was looking forward to April 1, believing he would finally have affordable health care under Medicaid. But Monday came, and Bagalwa said he's among many other Utahns who continue to fall in the health care coverage gap, now forced to purchase private insurance from the federal marketplace. The cost, even with a federal subsidy? About $250 a month, he said. "That is too much when we are trying to take care of our children and make our lives better," Bagalwa said. Bagalwa's wife, who recently had a baby, now stays home with their four children, meaning their income is even lower, but still above the federal poverty level, he said. As an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bagalwa said he was "excited" to vote and campaign for Proposition 3, but now he's left "disappointed." "To see my voice have no meaning to the Legislature reminds me of my native home country where democracy is not respected," he said. Bagalwa said he's enthralled in the complicated world of health care coverage every day as a navigator for Health Access Project. "I do this every day, enrolling people," he said. "And we shouldn't be fooled by our politicians." Bagalwa was among a group of health care advocates who Monday the day Utah's limited Medicaid expansion opened for enrollment to between 70,000 to 90,000 Utahns who earn up to 100 percent of the federal poverty level gathered at Liberty Park to outline the shortfalls of Utah's expansion. 'Broken bridge' Stacy Stanford, policy analyst with the Utah Health Policy Project, called Utah's so-called "bridge plan" a "broken bridge" with "missing planks" that still leave Utahns falling through the gaps. Those missing planks are work reporting requirements, enrollment caps, per-capita caps and open enrollment "lockouts" for people like Balgalwa who earn just over the federal poverty line, Stanford said. Proposition 3 would have covered people earning up to 138 percent of the about $12,000 federal poverty level. "This is really affecting people, the people who are falling through these gaps have very real issues right now, and they can't wait for a fallback plan that might come 18 months from now," Stanford said She referred to a provision of SB96 that expands Medicaid fully in the event the federal government doesn't approve Utah's other waivers. Stanford said there will be Utahns "calling our office today because they see the headlines and they think they get coverage," but instead they'll "find out that they should have signed up for the Affordable Care Act market last year." "Now they have to wait until next January because they're falling through that plank," Stanford said. Under a federal waiver approved Friday, Utah is paying for 30 percent of the cost of the plan. The state's other waiver request to move to a 90-10 split is pending. "We'll be spending more of Utah's hard-earned taxpayer dollars, yet covering fewer people," said Jessie Mandel, senior health policy analyst for Voices for Utah Children. "That should give us all pause." Utah's federal approval came after a judge struck down Medicaid work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas, leading critics to ponder whether Utah's program could be legally challenged. Proponents of the plan say Utah's program is different from those states because it requires applicants to show a work "effort" and includes exceptions. But Nate Crippes, an attorney with the Disability Law Center, said Utah's requirements add extra red tape that acts as an unnecessary "barrier" to an already complex system. 'A day to celebrate' Also on Monday, Utah Decides, the group behind Proposition 3, announced in a news release the launch of a campaign to "unseat the politicians who turned their backs on democracy" and sponsored the bill replacing Proposition 3. The campaign targets Sen. Allen Christensen and Rep. Jim Dunnigan. "The decision made by politicians to choose profits for insurance companies over the wishes of Utah voters and the health care needs of families cannot and will not be forgotten, Utah Decides organizer Dawn Le said. There is no point in having a democracy if the votes of its citizens are ignored." In response, Dunnigan, R-Taylorsville, said critics of SB96 are "missing" an important point. "This should be a day to celebrate," he said, noting up to 90,000 Utahns now have coverage when they previously didn't. Dunnigan also said Proposition 3 included a "guaranteed pay raise" for drug companies and hospitals. "I don't think many of the voters who supported Proposition 3 understood that of the $100 million tax increase to pay for the expansion, $30 million of that goes to pay drug companies and hospitals," he said. To claims that now 50,000 Utahns still fail in the coverage gap, Dunnigan said that's "not factual." He said people can still apply for subsidized health coverage on the federal market place. "I would say there are no gaps," he said. "I think Utahns are well-served with the plan that we're on." Asked about Bagalwa's situation, Dunnigan questioned whether Bagalwa was on the most affordable planned he was eligible for. Dunnigan, an owner of an insurance agency, then searched the federal marketplace for subsidized plans offered to families of six at just above the federal poverty level, and he found other plans at lower costs. But Courtney Bullard with the Utah Health Policy Project, said Bagalwa's situation is complex and his income has fluctuated because his wife worked before she recently had another baby. As a health care navigator, Bagalwa is "very fluent" in the health care system and chose the best option for his family, she said. Regardless, Bullard said the point is the cost of health care is too much for families not covered by Utah's limited expansion. Christensen, R-Ogden, did not immediately return a request for comment Monday. Open for enrollment Kolbi Young, spokeswoman for the Utah Division of Medicaid and Health Care Financing at the Department of Health, said as of Monday about 19,000 Utahns were enrolled in Utah's expanded program. Most of those were automatically converted from the state's Primary Care Network, Young said. About 1,400 of them were early applicants that have already been approved by the Utah Department of Workforce Services. "We're closely watching that number, and it's continually growing," she said. Utahns can apply for coverage at medicaid.utah.gov or call 866-435-7414 for more information. SALT LAKE CITY Three-term former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt laid a lot of groundwork during his time in office that's been paying huge economic dividends for the state for the past 20-plus years. But he noted in a talk Monday that the generational baton is now in the hands of new leaders, and in order to maintain the state's economic vitality, now driven in large part by the technology sector, new and decisive actions are required. While investments made in the '90s under Leavitt's administration that included upgrading infrastructure via the $4 billion Centennial Highway projects, bolstering higher education outcomes with the Utah Engineering Initiative, and aggressively recruiting out-of-area tech investment in the state, those efforts, Leavitt said, are ready for a reboot. "The next leaders of this state will have to take bold risks, will have to step up and invest, will have to innovate in ways that were unnecessary for us, but this generational relay requires it," Leavitt said. "The running room we created in this state is essentially gone. Leaders will be required to update the (economic) foundations for the next 18 years." Leavitt, speaking at the Utah Technology Innovation Summit in downtown Salt Lake City on Monday, has had a storied career that's included success in the private sector before a chain of public service positions that led him from the Utah Governor's Mansion to the nation's capital. Leavitt served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush before assuming another Cabinet-level job just over a year later, also for Bush, as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. While at the helm of state government, Leavitt helped lead Utah's charge into the digital age with efforts to get residents wired following the advent of the internet, launching the nation's second-ever state government website and vowing to spend more time in Silicon Valley "than California's governor" in a running strategy to bring new innovation investment into the Beehive State. One of those Bay Area pursuits involved a face-off between Utah and Arizona in a bid to secure a new facility for the, at the time, wildly popular eBay online auction platform. Leavitt said he'd done his homework on the service, including engaging in his own online sales to "figure out how the whole thing worked." Turns out, that may have been a clincher on Leavitt's quest to bring the new, 400-employee office to Utah. Awaiting a final decision on where the new facility would be located, Leavitt pulled his trump card during phone call with eBay's then-CEO Meg Whitman. "Meg, Ive got a suggestion for you on how you decide," Leavitt recounted telling her. "Why dont you find out if the governor of Arizona has an eBay account and if he does why dont you compare our customer ratings and go with the highest one. "It may be coincidental, but we got the deal the next day." Leavitt's tech bona fides are numerous and include bringing semiconductor giant Micron Technology Inc. to the state in 1995, co-founding, along with former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, one of the country's first online-only schools, Western Governor's University, and in 1997 was the first U.S. Cabinet-level official to launch a blog. Leavitt said the seeds of the idea behind his engineering initiative one that more than doubled the output of engineering and computer science graduates from Utah universities and amassing some 40,000 Utah graduates in those categories since the program's launch in 2000 were sown by a conversation with tech legend John Warnock. Leavitt said Warnock, a computer graphics innovator who earned his doctorate at the University of Utah before going on to participate in the first incarnation of the internet as well as co-founding software giant Adobe, highlighted what Utah was lacking, at the time, through the eyes of the relatively new, and burgeoning, U.S. high-tech industry. And, according to Leavitt, it was a dose of harsh reality. "Look, you want tech jobs in Utah youve go to have more engineers," Leavitt recalled of the conversation with Warnock. "Utah isnt investing a fraction of what it needs to. Tech companies like Adobe can't come to Utah unless you fix that." Years later, Leavitt noted, the circle was completed when Adobe did come to Utah, swallowing web analytics startup Omniture in a $1.8 billion deal in 2009. Last year, the company doubled down on its committment to Utah, breaking ground on its second facility in Lehi with plans in place to double its workforce in the state. While Leavitt presented the keynote address of the innovation summit, attendees also attended breakout presentation sessions that covered topics including international tech investment opportunities, energy sector innovation, early stage funding in the state and tech-based rural economic development. The 32nd annual Governor's Medals for Science and Technology were also presented by Gov. Gary Herbert's deputy chief of staff, Mike Mower, at the event. Those awards went to Bryant Middle School math teacher Diane Crim for K-12 education; University of Utah chairman of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Dr. Randall Olson for academic/research; Intermountain Precision Genomics for industry; and Merit Medical founder and CEO Fred Lampropoulos received the lifetime achievement award. SALT LAKE CITY Mental health advocates including nine people and one support dog gathered Monday to share their experiences interacting with police officers and encourage the use of best practices taught in Crisis Intervention Team training. "I was a victim of sexual assault. My son got involved. The police did not come as peace officers. Things got out of hand. I actually thought the police were going to shoot my son. They didnt ask questions, they just started getting violent with him," said Rachel Howard. Howard lives with post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury. She said collaborating with police, professionals and those with mental illness can save lives. The group encouraged using the best practice, which they said is the Memphis model and taught to police officers by CIT Utah in a weeklong course. Ron Bruno is a Utah police officer and CIT Utah program director, he is also the second vice president of CIT International. He said the training will bring officers who understand mental illness to situations where they are needed. "A person that is emotionally escalated is going to be less predictable, so be prepared for all situations, but slow things down and try to lower the emotional level of that situation," Bruno said. Ginger Phillips, who organized the group Advocates Gone Rogue and its news conference Monday, said she decided to speak out now because of a spike in officer-involved shootings and lack of funding for police body cameras. She noted that Salt Lake City Police Department and the Unified Police Department use a separate method when they do training, saying she sees issues with a lack of collaboration, law enforcement officers teaching other officers and the training is completed before officers are certified rather than later in their career. Salt Lake police detective Michael Ruff said the department trains all its new officers in crisis intervention with a weeklong course in the police academy. He said most of the course is taught by social workers and mental health specialists. "We believe in the training and it's been something that has been implemented throughout our officers," Ruff said. He said the training gives tools for officers to help people, whether they are working with mentally ill citizens or not. Bruno who has 20 years of law enforcement experience and now works as a reserve patrol officer with Unified police and is a vice president of CIT International's board of directors said the CIT International program continues to do research and spread best practices. He said the program trains experienced officers to deal with mental health at an expert level. It discourages training every officer or new officers. "Were looking to develop officers to that level where they have a real clear understanding of mental health issues, they have a real clear understanding of the terminology utilized in the mental health field (and) they have the experience to know their resources," Bruno said. He said officer training is only a part of the purpose of crisis intervention training, which is "building an effective and responsive crisis response system." Bruno said the goal is to build partnerships and cut how often law enforcement is needed. The advocates also shared positive experiences, showing the difference in response when officers are trained. Adam Montgomery said he returned from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at age 19 after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He was involved in treatment and trying to improve his symptoms. "A few weeks after I started medication treatment my parents came to me and they said they were going to sell my dog. That was a trigger. So I flipped over everything in the house as a protest, a symbolic protest," Montgomery said. He said the next thing he heard was a knock it was four police officers. He was surprised at their response. They asked how he was feeling and spoke calmly with him. "I support any practice that allows these officers to respond in that way. I appreciate those officers helping me in that pivotal time in my recovery," Montgomery said. Nearly all laws send some kind of message: about our priorities as a community, about what we value or about what we feel is unimportant. In a time when other states are considering or enacting extreme bills that remove traditional limits on the taking of unborn life, silence, too, sends a message. That silent message is one the state could not afford to send. Within the past week, Gov. Gary Herbert has signed two important pieces of legislation intended to strengthen the culture of respect for life in Utah. The first was HB166, the Down Syndrome Nondiscrimination Abortion Act, sponsored by Rep. Karianne Lisonbee. This law provides that 1) the state make available resources for medical professionals to share with parents given a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis, and 2) if the federal courts allow a ban on abortions targeted at eliminating individuals with Down syndrome, such a ban would go into effect in Utah. The second was HB136, Abortion Amendments, sponsored by Rep. Cheryl Acton. This law prohibits abortions performed after 18 weeks, when an unborn child is approaching viability and abortion procedures are particularly violent. The bill allows for exceptions in cases where a mother has been victimized by rape or incest, where the life of the mother is threatened by a continued pregnancy, and where the child already has a fatal condition and will not survive birth. Predictably, these modest steps were met with threats of litigation based on the U.S. Supreme Courts ruling that states may not create an undue burden on a womans choice to abort an unborn child. The Down syndrome bill is not open to challenge, since the abortion provision does not go into effect until the federal courts have clearly ruled on the constitutionality of the idea. The informational effects of that bill, however, will begin helping parents faced with a prenatal diagnosis. The law is a teacher, and the laws in Utah now express the states conviction that when medical professionals counsel a parent whose child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome, they should encourage understanding rather than abortion. So the challenge would be to the 18-week bill. Proponents of abortion on demand argue that the Supreme Courts rulings create an absolutist position that any regulation on abortion is illegal. That is likely an overreading of the relevant precedent. In fact, the Supreme Court has approved abortion restrictions when they advance important government interests. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for a majority of the court: The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman. The court has recognized legitimate state interests in 1) promoting respect for life in the medical profession, 2) preventing anything even nearing infanticide, 3) ensuring so grave a choice (as abortion) is well informed. At any rate, the court should be given the opportunity to revisit its now decades-old decisions made before recent medical developments. In the Legislature, bills related to life issues are often denigrated as mere message bills making a statement without real effects. That is not a fair characterization of these bills, which will produce tangible benefits for unborn children and their parents. But as noted at the outset, in some ways they are message bills as well. This session, the Legislature and now the governor have allowed the state to send a powerful message about the value Utah (and an increasing segment of the population) places on every human life. Silence might have been easier but ultimately wrong, when the alternative would have been to acquiesce in the view that some lives are not worth protecting. After 675 days and at the taxpayer expense of $40 million, the Mueller investigation hopefully appears to be over. No evidence of Russian collusion or obstruction of justice apparent. What are we paying our elected leaders for? During the past two years or more, the Democrats have done absolutely nothing to earn their salaries but trash our duly elected president. I thought we paid them to protect us, the American people, and make our lives better? The Republicans (my own party) are no better. Twelve Republican senators (including the two from Utah) failed to support the president in his bid to protect us. I havent heard one Republican mention reducing the cost of health care by limiting tort lawyers, medical malpractice suits or promoting across state lines health insurance. What about the rising cost of prescription drugs? And the reduction in Medicare help for Medicare recipients, like my wife and I? We pay far more for life-stabilizing medicine than we pay for food. In the words of Ebenezer Scrooge, "We would be better off dying and reducing the surplus population. Alan Carabine Kaysville SYDNEY The Australian lawmaker who had an egg cracked on his head by a teenage boy for his comments about last month's New Zealand mosque shootings faced a stinging attack on Tuesday in the first sitting of Australia's Parliament since the attacks. Independent Sen. Fraser Anning was the target of widespread condemnation after the Christchurch shootings, in which 50 people died, when he blamed the massacre on immigration policies that he said allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand. Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant has been charged with murder in the shootings. After his comments, Anning faced more criticism for physically striking the teenager who cracked an egg on his head at a Melbourne public appearance 17-year-old Will Connolly, who became known around the world as "Egg Boy." Anning will face an official censure motion in Parliament on Wednesday for the comments, which caused more than a million people to sign an online petition calling for his removal from the national legislature. But when Parliament resumed in Canberra on Tuesday following a monthlong break, one senior fellow lawmaker took the opportunity to lash out at Anning. Echoing Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's comment that Anning should be charged for striking Connolly, acting government Senate leader Simon Birmingham attacked Anning for his lack of humanity after the shootings. "The lack of compassion you have shown demonstrates, frankly, a basic lack of basic humanity," Birmingham told Anning, adding that his conduct "betrays the rights you have to freedom of speech." Birmingham said Anning acted in a way that would potentially fuel more acts of terrorism and violence. "You have failed the test of character I would expect of anybody who is elected to this place," he said. Birmingham's outburst came after Anning arrived at Parliament saying he had "no remorse" over his comments. Anning then used the Senate's question time to bring up the egging incident. He quizzed the government about its response to the episode, asking whether it believed politically motivated violence was acceptable in some circumstances. Birmingham accused Anning of drawing a comparison between his comments about the Christchurch massacre and the egging incident, and said it was an "appalling comparison." Wednesday's censure motion against Anning has support from both sides of Parliament. After New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern previously called Anning's comments on the shootings "a disgrace," her deputy Winston Peters on Tuesday called Anning a "jingoistic moron." "I would call him a four-flushing, jingoistic moron, but you already know that in Australia," Peters said in a television interview with Australia's Sky News. Immediately after Anning's response to the massacre last month, Morrison said the comments were "appalling and they're ugly and they have no place in Australia." Anning came under blistering criticism over tweets within hours of the massacre, 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 later statement. SALT LAKE CITY The Republican mayor of El Paso, Texas, said in an interview Monday that the root of the immigration crisis in the United States is in the nations capitol. The symptom and the root cause is out of Washington, D.C., Dee Margo (R-Texas) said on Rising, a video news outlet run by The Hill. Margo singled out 2008 legislation that he says made it easier for migrants to seek asylum at the southern border, which in turn has overwhelmed immigration enforcement resources. There was a bill passed at the end of 2008 called the Trafficking Victims Reauthorization Act of 2008, and it was designed when there were unaccompanied minors coming from Central America through Mexico to the United States, he said. "There was a fear on our part, it's very altruistic on our part in the United States which it should be, that they would be picked up by Mexican cartels, and used as drug mules or in human trafficking," he said. "So we made it easier for those Central American nations to claim asylum, primarily for the children that were coming through, or the young people." "It was also I think amended in 2014, but that gives them basically unfettered ability to come into the United States, and claim asylum," he added. "If you notice we're not having the problem with Mexico. There aren't Mexican immigrants coming north. It's only from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras." There are other explanations for the decline in Mexican migration to the United States, a trend that has been steadily falling for the last decade, Heide Castaneda, associate professor at the University of South Florida, told the Deseret News in December. Economics played a major role in that decline, she said, as the American economy tanked in 2008 and the Mexican economy improved, reducing the incentive for people to leave in the first place. In fact, a 2015 Pew study concluded that in a historic shift, more Mexicans returned to their home country between 2009-2014 than entered the United States. During the same period, increased political and economic instability in Central American countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador caused an increase in the number of unauthorized immigrants seeking entry in the United States, increasing by 275,000 between 2007-2016, according to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center. (Read more: Number of U.S. undocumented immigrants falls to lowest number in a decade, study finds) President Donald Trump clashed with Margo on immigration earlier this year, days after Trump said used El Paso, Texas, as an example for why walls were effective in reducing crime. "(El Paso) used to have extremely high rates of violent crime, one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our nations most dangerous cities," Trump said. "Now, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of our safest cities," he said. (Read more: President Trump says 'walls work.' Here's why he's heading to El Paso to prove it.) After the speech, Margo pushed back, tweeting that El Paso was never one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. Weve had a fence for 10 years and it has impacted illegal immigration and curbed criminal activity, Margo stated. It is NOT the sole deterrent. Law enforcement in our community continues to keep us safe. El Paso was NEVER one of the MOST dangerous cities in the US. Weve had a fence for 10 years and it has impacted illegal immigration and curbed criminal activity. It is NOT the sole deterrent. Law enforcement in our community continues to keep us safe #SOTU Mayor Dee Margo (@mayor_margo) February 6, 2019 Margos latest remarks come on the heels of an action-packed week on immigration policy in the Trump White House. Last week, the president threatened to shut down the U.S. border with Mexico, saying that Mexico and other Central American countries were not doing enough to stem the tide of migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico. (Read more: Why president Donald Trump says Mexico is 'all talk and no action' when it comes to stopping illegal immigration) More recently, he also directed the State Department to stop sending aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Trump said last week that the Northern Triangle countries "set up" migrant caravans, according to CNN. "We were paying them tremendous amounts of money. And we're not paying them anymore. Because they haven't done a thing for us. They set up these caravans," he reportedly said. SALT LAKE CITY Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser threw some serious shade at Bryce Harper on Monday. According to the Bleacher Report, the mayor posted and then deleted a photoshopped photo of Harper that compared him to Benedict Arnold, who famously betrayed the colonies during the Revolutionary War. ABC 7s Chip Brierre captured the photo and shared it on social media: This picture WAS on Mayor Bowser's Twitter page less than 30 minutes ago, but not anymore... Tomorrow is going to be nuts. #OnePursuit #HarperReturns @ABC7Sports pic.twitter.com/rO5sEO1D9l Chip Brierre (@Chip_Brierre) April 1, 2019 Why the tweet?: Harper played for the Washington Nationals for seven seasons, winning the National League MVP, Rookie of the Year and Silver Slugger awards during that time. This past summer, Harper left the team and signed a 13-year, $330 million deal with the Philadelphia Phillies, a divisional rival for the Nationals. Harper told The Washington Post about his mindset heading back to Washington for a game on Tuesday. "It's definitely going to be weird," Harper said, according to the Washington Post. "I can't imagine flying into the airport, into Dulles, and taking that 45-minute drive to stay in a hotel instead of my place." OGDEN A Weber County mother who prosecutors say served alcohol and performed lap dances for teenagers at her house during a birthday party is facing a dozen criminal charges. Rhianna Renae Nivens, 40, of Harrisville, was charged Tuesday in 2nd District Court with four counts of dealing in harmful materials to a minor, a third-degree felony; four counts of lewdness, a class B misdemeanor; and four counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a class B misdemeanor. On Feb. 9, a birthday party was held at Nivens' home in Harrisvillle, according to charging documents. Twelve teens between 14 to 17 years old attended. "During this party, the minors drank alcohol and smoked marijuana and (Nivens) knew about this occurring in her home and even drank some alcohol with them," the charges state. Nivens then went upstairs to change into "a risque outfit which they described as red and black lingerie," charging documents state. "The minors stated that after (Nivens) came back downstairs in the lingerie she began to 'dance sexually' for approximately 10 minutes during which she gave several minors lap dances," according to charging documents. At least one teen recorded some of the alleged lap dancing on a cellphone. Harrisville police were contacted the next day. SALT LAKE CITY Mayor Jackie Biskupski detailed record-setting wildfire seasons, unprecedented drought and heat, as well as persistent algal blooms and notorious air pollution that compromises public health in presenting to U.S. House members the climate change impacts that are very real threats to Salt Lake City residents. Biskupski, testifying Tuesday before a congressional subcommittee, was among a handful of local and state leaders from across the U.S. who described the effects of a changing climate and then cited local examples of what strategies are in place to minimize carbon emissions. "The ski industry, a $1.3 billion contributor to Utah's economy, is also threatened and will decline due to a shorter ski season," she said, noting winters shortened by as much as five weeks. Wasatch streams, she added, can expect to have as much as 4 percent less volume of water with each degree of warming temperatures. But Biskupski noted positive steps the city has taken over the years to make a difference in mitigating harmful carbon emissions. Salt Lake City was the first city in the country with a public safety building designed to be net-zero energy, meaning it produces as much energy as it consumes, and the city also has two first-of-its-kind fire department stations that are net-zero energy. Biskupski, who spoke before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change, also detailed a unique effort beginning this year in Utah with the passage of HB411. Sponsored by Rep. Steve Handy, R-Layton, and signed into law by Gov. Gary Herbert, the unique legislation establishes the framework for communities to wholly embrace 100 percent net renewable energy within a certain time frame by working with Rocky Mountain Power. Residents will have opt-in and opt-out provisions in a public hearing process that will unfold over several months. But she and several others who testified said cities and states can't make strides in the clean energy fight without the leadership of the federal government, and urged action on several fronts. In particular, she urged renewed funding for energy efficiency and conservation block grant programs under the U.S. Department of Energy, pass-through funding from the department to state governments for energy efficiency improvements and taking legislative action to reverse the rollback on fuel efficiency standards in cars. In earlier testimony, Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat who is running for U.S. president, said claims that a green economy kills jobs are just wrong, pointing to his state's thriving economy and the fast-growing job sectors in the solar and wind industries. There were some testy moments in the committee, however, via multiple exchanges between Inslee and several GOP members who took issue with Inslee's position on retiring all fossil fuels by 2045. "I hope my colleagues can learn honestly from Washington state's mistakes instead of repeating them on a national level," said Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Montana, pointing to job losses in the coal sector. In Inslee's state, the last coal-fired power plant is being retired. SALT LAKE CITY The View co-host Abby Huntsman asked if were reaching a point in society where cant hug each other anymore. "Are we going to get to a place where we can't shake hands?" she asked. "(Where) we can't hug each other?" Context: Huntsmans comments follow accusations that former Vice President Joe Biden inappropriately touched a Nevada state lawmaker, former Nevada Democratic Assemblywoman Lucy Flores, at a 2014 event, according to The Hill. Huntsman also questioned Flores motive bringing up the incident five years later with Biden likely close to launching a 2020 presidential bid. "I do wonder if she could have sent him a letter," Huntsman said. "Send him a personal note to say, 'Hey, this happened a few years ago. Now I feel confident in telling you about it. I don't want to make this public.' I always wonder when these things come out, what is the motive for this person? Is it simply to let people know that I was uncomfortable, which you could have done in private? Or is it because you want someone else to win?" Whoopi Goldberg, a fellow View co-host, defended Huntsmans comments as well. For me, these things are not Democratic or Republican, Goldberg said. I want women to get to the place where they can say, Hey, you just made me uncomfortable. This idea that you have to tiptoe away from this, you do not have to carry it. If someone makes you uncomfortable, tell them. "You have to stop mischaracterizing stuff. Dont sit and wait and say Im uncomfortable on national television," she added. "Because it makes us suspect of your thoughts." Context: Flores wrote an op-ed for The Cut last week that said Biden made her feel uncomfortable when he sniffed her hair and kissed the back of her head. Biden denied the allegation that he acted inappropriately, Vox reported. A second allegation of inappropriate touching surfaced on Monday after a Connecticut woman said Biden touched her inappropriately at a fundraiser in 2009, according to the Hartford Courant. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) Looks like a TV talent search winner is not off the hook yet over his traffic violation case. Migo Adecer of "Startstruck" faced authorities last week for injuring two Metropolitan Manila Development Authority employees while driving drunk in Makati City, as officials found that the driver's license and license official receipt presented by the actor were fake. The Land Transportation Office (LTO) reported Tuesday that the real driver's license owner is Lerwin Estanislao based on its database. In a separate report, the Makati police said Adecer's real driver's license was surrendered to authorities for violations before the hit-and-run incident. A traffic enforcer confiscated Adecer's original license for reckless driving in Rockwell Makati. Police arrested Adecer on March 26 for reckless imprudence resulting in physical injuries and damage to properties and disobedience to a person in authority. His victims did not press charges. Adecer later issued a public apology for his actions. The LTO said it will continue its investigation on the case after it obtained other pertinent documents such as the Ordinance Violation Receipt and a copy of the incident report from the police. "After obtaining documents from PNP. LTO will conduct its own investigation and act accordingly," LTO Spokesperson Weng Ocfemia told CNN Philippines in a text message. MOUNTAIN GREEN, Morgan County Officials say initial test results Tuesday show water is safe in the Morgan County town of Mountain Green after someone recently broke into a water tank. Cottonwood Water Mutual Co. distributed notices Monday warning customers that sometime since Feb. 6, "someone broke and removed the lock securing one of our lower storage tank access lids." The company noticed the security breach on Monday and contacted the state Division of Drinking Water, according to the notice. Cottonwood Water Mutual Co. cautioned people in the town that until testing results are confirmed on Wednesday, they should boil their drinking water for one minute before using it. The boil advisory is expected to be lifted Wednesday after another 24 hours of testing, said Doug Dingman, a water board member in Mountain Green. According to the notice, bottled water is also available at the water office, 4000 W. Old Highway Road in Mountain Green. SALT LAKE CITY A Utah man accused of loaning the gun to the man who killed University of Utah student Lauren McCluskey appeared in federal court Tuesday. Nathan Daniel Vogel, 21, pleaded not guilty in the brief hearing to making a false statement during the acquisition of a firearm and conspiracy. U.S. Magistrate Judge Dustin Pead scheduled a three-day trial to start June 10. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents arrested Vogel while he was working in San Diego last month. A federal judge there released him from custody with certain conditions. Pead reiterated those conditions Tuesday, including prohibitions on possessing guns, contacting his co-defendant and witnesses, and traveling outside Utah without permission from his pretrial officer. Vogel told the judge his job as a roofer frequently takes him out of the state. Vogel and Sarah Emily Lady, 24, allegedly made a "straw" purchase of a Beretta PX4 Storm .40-caliber handgun from a federally licensed gun store last September, according to a federal indictment. Vogel loaned the gun to Melvin Rowland who used it to shoot McCluskey in a parking lot outside her dorm last October, federal prosecutors say. McCluskey had dated Rowland before learning he was a sex offender and more than a decade older than her. Rowland fatally shot himself as police pursued him off campus. Prosecutors say Vogel asked Lady to buy the gun for him because he didn't want to wait for the background check. They allege she lied to the seller that the gun was for her. Both are charged with making a false statement during the acquisition of a firearm and conspiracy. They face up to 15 years in prison if convicted. Lady pleaded not guilty at a hearing last month. She was placed on supervised release with several restrictions, including prohibiting her from having contact with Vogel and prohibiting her from possessing guns or weapons. He trial was set for May 20, but prosecutors agreed to move to the same date as Vogel's trial. SPANISH FORK A Springville man faces criminal charges after police say he tried to steal copper wire from Union Pacific Railroad at Spanish Fork Canyon but got stuck in the mud with the loot. Travis Jon Klett, 32, was charged Tuesday in 4th District Court with theft, a third-degree felony, and criminal mischief and trespassing, both class B misdemeanors. According to an affidavit filed in support of Klett's arrest, Utah County Sheriff's Office deputies responded to a call of a theft in progress near U.S. 6. on March 27. A Union Pacific worker reported seeing a man and woman in a large red truck stuck in the mud alongside railroad tracks, the affidavit states. The worker had approached the truck and saw "numerous stacks of copper all around his truck," as well as a roll of copper wire on the back of the man's truck that belongs to Union Pacific. That same worker happened to have caught Klett last fall in the same area with the same truck, police said. According to the affidavit, police found Klett in a gated, padlocked area that belongs to the railroad. The padlock had been cut, the worker told authorities. "The flatbed truck was badly stuck in mud and the suspect, who is the owner of the truck, was trying to get it out. He denied cutting the wire down, and said he was only in the area as part of a nonprofit organization cleaning up the area. He did, however, tell deputies he intended to sell the copper wire for cash," the Utah County Sheriff's Office said in a news release. Klett told the sheriff's deputies that he had found the spool of wire sitting by the highway, court documents state. A deputy also found an orange vest like those worn by railroad employees inside Klett's truck, according to the affidavit. Railroad employees told the sheriff's deputies that the wire had been strung along poles adjacent to the tracks. The wire's estimated value was $500, the release states. Klett has a criminal history in Utah, the sheriff's office said, including past convictions for theft, burglary and drug offenses. SALT LAKE CITY Utah's two senators joined a bipartisan group of Western colleagues Tuesday in introducing drought contingency plans for the Colorado River to ward off possible shortages that may come in the aftermath of the river's driest 100 years. Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Mitt Romney are among 14 senators to co-sponsor legislation to ensure the wide-reaching plan forged between the seven Colorado River Basin states and Indian tribes could be implemented without delay. The river has seen a 19 percent decline in its flows since 2000. Lawmakers called the plan a grassroots, state-driven solution to ensure drinking water for 40 million people, irrigation for 5.5 million acres of farmland, and more than 4,000 megawatts of carbon-free hydropower for communities across the West. The Colorado River is managed under a complicated set of compacts, statues, court decisions, and other agreements; given these constraints, negotiating a compromise among all the stakeholders is quite the accomplishment," Lee said. The plan is designed to protect Lake Mead and Lake Powell from reaching certain critical water elevations that would trigger severe water supply reductions and hydropower impacts, including the risk of reaching crises levels. Utah has experienced severe drought the past 19 years, with Lake Powell currently at dangerously low levels, Romney said. The Colorado River is critical to the survival, livelihood and recreation of Utahns, and we must do everything we can to sustain it," he said. "By implementing drought contingency plans for the Colorado River Basin, this bill is an important step toward managing Utahs waters and the communities that depend on them. The Colorado River Basin drains more than 246,000 square miles across seven states and Mexico. Utah, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming depend on the river for drinking water, farming irrigation and hydropower. In addition to Lee and Romney, Sens. Martha McSally, R-Ariz.; Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.; Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Cory Gardner, R-Colo.; Michael Bennet, D-Colo.; Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.; Tom Udall, D-N.M.; and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., are co-sponsors of the bill. Film: No Fathers In Kashmir Actors: Shivam Raina, Zara Webb, Soni Razdan, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Ashvin Kumar, Natasha Mago Director: Ashvin Kumar My Verdict - Superb Cinema, Majid And Noors Circumstances, Will Stir Your Soul With Questions That Dont Have Any Answers Rated: 4 out of 5 Stars Films based on the militancy in Kashmir have been made time and again and almost all of those movies have stirred the soul. People who do not belong to that part of the country do not understand the gravity of the situation in there. Ashvin Kumar has brought this facet out in a manner no one ever did. His protagonists are a teenaged boy and girl. The girl is called Noor, she has flown down to Kashmir with her mother from the U.K. Needless to say she doesnt have the slightest idea of the tensions that prevail in there. So much so that she doesnt even know the difference between militants and terrorists. (I am sure many in our country wouldnt know the difference in the meaning either). When Noor meets Majid, she eventually gets to know about the sinister happenings in the valley. She is absolutely oblivious to the grave repercussions her innocent pranks might have and neither does Majid pay attention to that. Majid on the contrary is a product of that milieu. He has seen it all, in fact he is the son of a father who had been picked up by the army. He knows it well; his father was a militant which is why he is aware that militants take up arms because they want freedom! Having said that, one thing that cant be overlooked is his age. He is all of a teenager. It is evident he wont be taking life as seriously as a grown perhaps would. Thats why in a bid to impress a girl his age, he clicks a photo in the garb of a militant and posts it on Facebook, paying no heed to the aftermaths of the action! The girl is unaware of the whereabouts of her father and in the course of time, she discovers that like Majids father, her father too was picked up by the army. From here begins her teenage quest to locate her father and at least fathom whether is dead or is still alive. And she takes Majid along with her. However, as fate would have it, they are stranded in the dense forested mountains, lost. They spend the night lighting a bon fire and that is when they perhaps have the first kiss of their lives, only to be caught by the army the next day. Noor somehow manages to escape but is so frightened that she leaves Majid with the army only to be tortured brutally. The film puts up a lot many questions on the psychological level. Who is right? Who is wrong? Are the locals right when they take up arms and become militants for freedom, for an Azaad Kashmir? Or is the army right when they try to curb these militants and torture them to death and bury them somewhere in the valley, while their widows are forever in the dark about the grim reality? Is it wrong when these young boys who have seen their families suffer in the hands of the army, pelt stones at them as a mark of protest? Is it right when these army men heave their weight on these people? This is an invisible war that is being fought in this country since the independence. When will it all end? The performances by the lead cast Shivam Raina who played Majid and Zara Webb who played Noor were excellent. Shivam especially stole the show. He was so good and believable. There was something about his glances and his body language for the matter. Zara too was very good with her expressions and the psychological turmoil she goes through as a teenager whose head is filled with so many unanswered questions. A girl who kind of betrays her friend out of sheer fear (through which she understands, at times human beings dont know what they do, why they do and that, it is not right to point fingers at anyone because no one knows for sure what might have had happened to him or her to take a particular action the way they did Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Soni Razdan are great actors and they fit their respective roles like hands in gloves, even they dont have much screen time because most of the screenplay is centred around the teenagers I spoke of earlier. Anshuman Jha as Major Pandey extracted hatred from me for his performance. That shows he is a terrific performer. One scene needs must be mentioned - he crushes Noors mobile phone by stamping on it multiple times, the sheer intensity with which he does it, the straight yet spiteful expression on his countenance coupled with the sound effect along with the appearance of the montage of the memories that phone accumulated over the years , made me feel angry! Very angry! The editing of the film was also very hard-hittingly done. So much so, that I could feel, some of the shots were written with the edit in mind. The cinematography is beautiful. This film showcased that part of Kashmir which wasnt explored earlier, especially the mist covered woods, It looked very overbearing and scary especially when we picture two teenagers in the midst of the humongous mountains densely packed with trees and no civilisation to be seen as far as the sight goes The jerky camera movements though when Arshid (Ashvin Kumar) talks is a bit too much! Ashvin is the director of the film and he has done a swell job. He is a prolific filmmaker; his work has earlier been nominated for the Oscars as well and this film too is sheer greatness! The two Pixel devices are succeeded by the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL. Highlights: Google quietly discontinues the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. Links to Pixel 2 product pages now lead you to Pixel 3. It appears Google has quietly taken the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL off the shelf. As reported by Android Police first, the two Pixel 2 devices are no longer seen on the Google Store. Clicking on a link to the Pixel 2 product page on Google or anywhere else now takes you to the Pixel 3s product page. The Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL were launched in November last year to replace the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL respectively. According to Android Polices recent report on the matter, Google had temporarily stopped sales of the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL earlier this year around Valentines Day, hinting it was clearing off the last remaining units. The companys decision to remove the two devices from the Google Store altogether suggests that it has finally exhausted the last of its stocks and doesnt plan to restock. The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL were launched in India in October 2017 at a starting price of Rs 61,000 and Rs 73,000 respectively. While the Pixel 2 offered a 5-inch AMOLED display and a 2,700mAh battery, the Pixel 2 XL offered a larger 6-inch P-OLED display and a 3,520mAh battery. Both phones entered the market running Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box. The Pixel 3 family succeeded the Pixel 2 family roughly a year later with Android 9 Pie running right out of the box. The Pixel 3 devices sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset and replace the Pixel 2 devices Snapdragon 835 chipset. The Pixel 3 has 5.5-inch P-OLED display and a 2,915mAh battery, while the Pixel 3 XL has a 6.3-inch P-OLED display and a 3,430mAh battery. The Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL currently sell for Rs 59,999 and Rs 64,999 respectively on Flipkart. Related Read: Google Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL pre-orders start on Flipkart with bundled offers and discounts Google Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL specifications, price, India launch and everything else you need to know Sony Mobiles is reportedly stopping the use of the Xperia branding for its upcoming smartphone lineup and the Xperia 1 might be the companys last Xperia phone. Highlights: Sony Mobiles might stop using the Xperia 1 branding from its upcoming lineup. The company is reportedly gearing up to announce a new series. The report comes soon after the announcement of Sony's Mobile division merging with the companys other operations. Things have not been going too well for Sony Mobiles with the reported high losses and the recent announcement of the division being merged with the companys audio, TV and camera operations. Now, it seems like the company could even drop the Xperia branding from its upcoming smartphone lineup. Sony Xperia recently tweeted that it will be moving its announcements to the @SonyMobileNews twitter handle. The announcement has sparked speculation that the companys upcoming lineup could drop the Xperia nametag. This rumour is further fanned by a Weibo tipster, which MySmartPrice reports, has reiterated the same. As per the report, the company will soon be releasing the Camera API 2 for the Sony Xperia 1. Additionally, the device could be the companys last Xperia offering as the Xperia 2 smartphone will reportedly lose the Xperia branding and could be launched under a different name. There have been some rumours of the upcoming smartphone, which is rumoured to be launched at IFA 2019 in Berlin. The previous reports suggest that the device could come equipped with a 6.2-inch display that has the same Cinema-wide 21:9 aspect ratio with 1234x2880 pixels resolution as its predecessor. The smartphone is tipped to be powered by the Snapdragon 855 processor and come equipped with 6GB RAM, coupled with 128GB of internal storage. Additionally, the handset is touted to come equipped with a 3000mAh battery that supports Xperia Adaptive Charging. There could be a triple rear camera setup on the device, dissimilar from the one we have seen on the Xperia 1, and the phone might ditch the 3.5mm audio jack. Rumours about the Xperia 1 being the companys last Xperia branded device might not be too far-fetched since they follow a major reshuffle at the company. After Sonys announcement of merging its mobile, TV, audio and camera division into Sony Electronics Products and Solutions, we recently came across a report that the device manufacturer intends to cut back half its workforce in its smartphone division, by 2020. Related Reads: Sony smartphone to cutback half its workforce by 2020: Report NASA has condemned Indias demonstration of an Anti Satellite weapon. The Space agency says that the debris produced by the destruction of the Indian satellite poses danger to the International Space Station. Highlights: NASA Head denounces India's ASAT launch Says International Space Station at risk of collision Space debris from India's ASAT mission has reached above the apogee of the ISS Last week, India, for the first time, demonstrated its ability to destroy low orbit satellites using an anti-satellite weapon. Deemed Mission Shakti, India flexed its defence muscles becoming the fourth nation in the world to demonstrate ASAT capabilities. However, the move has since attracted a lot of criticism from space scientists and other industry stakeholders because of the space debris produced when the defunct satellite was destroyed. In a fresh round of reprovals, NASA head Jim Bridenstine has denounced Indias ASAT mission and has revealed that the destruction of the satellite resulted in 400 pieces of space debris, risking the safety of the International Space Station (ISS) and the astronauts that reside within it. Addressing NASA employees days after Indias ASAT launch, Bridenstine said, What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track we're talking about 10 centimeters (six inches) or bigger about 60 pieces have been tracked. Even though the Indian satellite was destroyed at a low altitude of 300 Km, below the ISS altitude of 408 Km, Bridenstine said that around 24 pieces of debris created by the ASAT system are flying above the apogee of the ISS. The NASA head called the event a terrible, terrible thing because of the debris flowing above the ISS. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight," he noted. Bridenstine even went to the length of calling the exercise unacceptable. Previously, a Chinese ASAT test created 3,000 pieces of space debris at 852 Km from the surface. Now, because of Indias demonstration, the risk of space debris collision with the ISS has gone up by 44 percent over 10 days. This risk is expected to lower once the space debris burns up on its entry into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, US Strategic Commands Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC) is actively tracking the debris produced by Indias satellite destruction. On March 29, US Air Force Space Command Commander Lt Gen David D Thompson told lawmakers in the US that the debris posed no threat to the ISS. However, over time the debris seems to have gone up higher, creating the current risk exposed by the NASA chief. Indian lawmakers and the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) are yet to respond to NASAs comments. Subscriber content preview The news suggests that airlines could be forced to park their Max jets longer than they expected. By DAVID KOENIG AP Airlines Writer U.S. aviation regulators say Boeing needs more time to finish changes in a flight-control system suspected of playing a role in two deadly crashes. The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it anticipates Boeing's final software improvements for 737 Max airliners in the coming weeks. . . . Subscriber content preview By KYRIE LONG Fairbanks Daily News-Miner FAIRBANKS, Alaska A clock from the beginning of the Nenana Ice Classic has come home to Alaska while the tripod still stands on the river for this year's round of betting. The reason we're donating the clock is because our family feels it's a part of Alaska history and that it needs to be up here, not with us, Jim Hlavacek said. . . . Subscriber content preview By CEDAR ATTANASIO Associated Press EL PASO, Texas President Donald Trump's threat to shut down the southern border raised fears Monday of dire economic consequences in the U.S. and an upheaval of daily life in a corner of the country that relies on the international flow of not just goods and services but also students, families and workers. Politicians, business leaders and economists warned that such a move would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping. . . . Subscriber content preview BOISE, Idaho (AP) The Senate on Monday approved legislation to legalize hemp, although it appears to be in trouble in the House. The Senate voted 32-3 to approve the bill that would legalize the growing and selling of hemp products containing 0.3% or less of THC, the cannabis compound that gives marijuana its high. . . . Subscriber content preview ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) The Anchorage Assembly is working to determine if it needs to spend about $1.9 billion to rebuild the city's deteriorating port. Assembly member Christopher Constant said at a March 21 Assembly committee meeting that the group needs to look closely at whether there are ways to save on cost, the Alaska Journal of Commerce reported on Wednesday. . . . Essar Steel's debt resolution stuck again as SBI moves SC against StanChart claim In a move that could delay debt-laden Essar Steels debt resolution process, the State Bank of India (SBI) is moving the Supreme Court against the National Company Law Appellate Tribunals direction to give more cash to Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), which has made a claim of Rs3,487 crore against the company. NCLAT has directed a fresh meeting of the committee of creditors (CoC) on Essar Steel funds distribution. StanChart told the NCLAT last week that as per the decision of the committee of creditors, StanChart, an unsecured financial creditor, will receive only 1.7 per cent, or Rs60 crore against its claim of Rs3,487 crore. StanChart said it should get higher a payout for its dues from Essar Steel. The next hearing on the matter at NCLAT has been adjourned to 9 April. Unsecured lender Standard Chartered Bank, which had made the highest claim of Rs3,400 crore, has been excluded from the offer. As per the plan submitted by ArcelorMittal, the bank will receive only 1.7 per cent, or Rs60 crore, of its dues. In the proposal cleared by the committee of creditors (CoC) last week, operational creditors agreed to set aside Rs1,000 crore more from the Rs42,000 crore debt resolution plan of ArcelorMittal. The SBI move comes days before the NCLAT is to hear the outcome of the CoC meeting on 9 April During the NCLAT hearing, the State Bank of India had said that Standard Chartered Bank is not a secured creditor and it should not be allowed to make any additional claim from ArcelorMittals Rs42,000 crore offer. In July 2 last year, Standard Chartered Bank had asked the resolution professional of Essar Steel that its claim of Rs3,487 crore, pertaining to its unsecured loan to Essar Steel Offshore Limited (ESOL), should be reclassified as secured loan on the basis of share pledge made by the promoters. It said the corporate guarantee for the loan was provided by Essar Steel for the ESOL loan. The RP agreed to SCBs claim to be converted into a secured one based on security of pledge of shares. But, on 31 August last year, Essar Steels lenders led by SBI, ICICI Bank, IDBI Bank, Edelweiss ARC, Canara Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, Bank of India and Punjab National Bank objected the re-classification of Standard Chartered Bank loan from unsecured to a secured one. The lenders expressed their objection on SCB being a financial creditor on grounds of execution of guarantee without obtaining no objection certificate (NOC) from them, based on which, the lenders said, the SCB's claim is invalid, unsustainable in law, ultra vires and far beyond Essar Steel's powers and authority. In a reply letter dated 10 September 2018 sent on behalf of the RP, it was mentioned that the RP will suitably record the objections (as set out in the said letter dated 31 August) in the list of creditors of ESIL. Interestingly, last week 70 per cent of the lenders agreed to set aside Rs1,000 crore more for the operational creditors of Essar Steel as against Rs200 crore earmarked earlier, as per ArcelorMittals debt resolution plan. This plan, however, excluded Standard Chartered Bank. Essar Steels operational creditors have made a claim of Rs4,700 crore against the company. The NCLTs Ahmedabad bench had earlier ordered that lenders must share 15 per cent of ArcelorMittals upfront cash with operational creditors while the rest can be distributed to the lenders. Chile waives visa rules for Indians holding valid US visa In a major boost to furthering bilateral ties, Chile today announced that it will allow visa-free entry to Indian nationals holding a valid US visa. India and Chile also signed three memoranda of understanding (MoUs) in the fields of mining, culture and disability during the President Ran Nath Kovinds visit to the country. President Kovind along with his Chilean counterpart Sebastian Pinera witnessed the signing and exchange of three MoUs in the fields of mining, culture and disability, following delegation-level talks. The President welcomed Chiles decision on visa-free entry for Indians as a step that would promote both cultural and business ties. Later, addressing the India-Chile Business Roundtable in Santiago, the President said that for India and for Indian business, Chile is not just a market; it is a very important and long-term partner country. Chile is Indias window to Latin America and to the Pacific Alliance. The President said that the two countries shall work together to expand their trade basket and open new pathways for economic engagement. We can cooperate in areas such as marine research and other scientific exploration, he said, adding that India is also keen to strengthen its collaboration with Chile in the space sector. The President reached Santiago, Chile in the evening of 30 March 2019 on the final leg of his visit to three nations Croatia, Bolivia and Chile. On 31 March 2019, the President visited the Pablo Neruda Museum in Santiago. He gifted a special pen to the Museum made by the family whom Gandhiji encouraged to develop the first indigenous fountain pen in India. On the same evening, the President addressed a gathering of Indian community and friends of India at a reception hosted by Anita Nayar, Ambassador of India to Chile. Yesterday (1 April), the President commenced his engagements by paying respects at the Monumento Al Libertador General Bernardo O Higgins. Thereafter, he visited the La Moneda Presidential Palace where he was received by Sebastian Pinera, the President of Chile and accorded a ceremonial welcome. Subsequently, the President led the delegation-level talks between the two sides. Speaking on the occasion, he said that although trade relations between India and Chile are doing well, the two countries can do much more. Chile is the fifth largest trading partner of India in the Latin American region. At present, copper constitutes more than 85 per cent of Indias imports from Chile. He said the two countries must diversify their trade basket to further strengthen trade. The President also thanked Chile for its strong condemnation of the recent Pulwama Terror. The two countries agreed to work together to strengthen global response to defeat and destroy terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and hold those responsible, accountable for their brutality against humanity. India also offered training slots to Chilean armed forces in the premier defence institutions, including for courses in mountain warfare and peacekeeping. The two countries also agreed to explore opportunities for other cooperation in the defence field, including joint manufacture of defence equipment under the `Make in India programme. The President said that in financial year 2017-18, India drew about $62 billion in FDI and was recognised as among the worlds most attractive investment destinations. Given this, Chiles modest investment in India is an anomaly. Since the beginning of the century, Chilean companies have invested just about US$ 150 million in India. This needs to be rectified. He said that Chiles two sovereign wealth funds have a reputation for sound investment decisions. They could consider opportunities in Indian infrastructure sector. Together we can design investment products that serve Chiles Economic and Social Stabilisation Fund as well as its Pension Reserve Fund and feed into the Indian growth story. This would lead to a win-win situation. Later speaking at a luncheon banquet hosted by President Pinera, the President said that India-Chile bilateral agenda is expansive. From energy to security, and from Yoga to outer space, we have much work to do together. In the final engagement in Chile, the President addressed the students and faculty of the University of Chile on the topic Gandhi for the Young. Speaking on the occasion, the President said that Mahatma Gandhi belonged to all cultures and he drew from all religions. While deeply rooted in Hinduism, Gandhiji was also influenced by Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism and Islam as also by thinkers such as Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau. He thus came to represent the confluence of all that was best in the East and the West. The President said that Mahatma Gandhi carried his concept of universal love to include living in harmony with nature. He advocated both sustainability and ecological sensitivity at a time when the industrial revolution and increasing mechanization were the mantra guiding the world. He promoted concepts which are now enshrined in the sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations. The President said that Gandhi was a unique persona who inspired both the East and the West, who forged new pathways for human endeavour, while at the same time maintaining the strength and sanctity of tradition and spiritual roots. To all those who are adrift today in a sea of doubt and scepticism, his life, thought and philosophy would inspire them to regain inner strength and confidence. Mahatma Gandhi was more than just a man, he was an ideology, an institution that still resonates more than a hundred years after it was developed. In the evening (April 1, 2019), the President left for Cape Town on his way back to India. He will take the opportunity provided by the transit halt to address the Indian Community in Cape Town. RBI sets trigger for disclosure of bad loans divergence lower The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has lowered the base for disclosure of bad loan divergences lower at 10 per cent from the existing 15 per cent of the companys profit before provision and contingencies. This means that the bank should make a disclosure of any additional provisioning that exceeds 10 per cent of its annual profit in the `Notes to Accounts to the financial statements - divergence in the asset classification and provisioning Banks were earlier required to disclose divergences if such provisioning exceeded 15 per cent of net profit after tax. While the new norms require banks to disclose divergences from prudential norms on income recognition, asset classification and provisioning that exceed certain thresholds, RBI did not change any rules that permit lenders to reveal divergences if the additional gross non-performing asset (NPA) exceeded 15 per cent of the reported incremental gross NPAs. RBI noted that some banks, on account of low or negative net profit after tax, are required to disclose divergences even where the additional provisioning assessed by RBI is small, which is contrary to the regulatory intent that only material divergences should be disclosed. Therefore, it has been decided that henceforth, banks should disclose divergences, if the additional provisioning for NPAs assessed by RBI exceeds 10 per cent of the reported profit before provisions and contingencies for the reference period, and the additional gross NPAs identified by RBI exceed 15 per cent of the published incremental gross NPAs for the reference period. BEL under scanner over Rs7,900-cr IACCS project: report Defence public sector undertaking Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) is under the scanner for allegedly compromising national security by awarding a highly sensitive air command and control contract of the Indian Air Force to an ill-equipped and newly formed private design firm in 2011. An internal enquiry report on the award of the Rs7,900-crore project for implementation of the Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS) at 10 locations across the country has exposed massive irregularities in the way the contracts were awarded, say reports. BEL is the executing agency for the highly-sensitive IACCS project - an automated command and control system for air defence operations that integrates all ground-based and airborne sensors. Reports citing BEL's internal investigation report said a BEL official, who was instrumental in the hiring of a private vendor to put together the Preliminary Project Report (PPR) of the coded system, joined the same private company after retirement. Also, the report said crucial project documents were buried to avoid scrutiny by the investigation team which was looking into the irregularities. BELs internal inquiry report, prepared in October 2018, flagged discrepancies at various stages of the execution of the project. The report questioned the move to hire RD Konsultants to prepare the PPR in 2011 and then bringing the same company on board as the design consultant in 2013, violating the norms during UPA regime. The inquiry report also red-flagged other serious issues, including monumental lapses in ordering the execution of the contracts at all 10 sites across the country and deviations in the implementation at certain project sites where BEL had to bear additional expenditure. According to the inquiry report, BEL first hired RD Konsultants in September 2011 to prepare the PPR for IACCS. The firm, a 50-50 partnership between Ruby Kant and Suresh Kumar Anand, was barely one and a half years old when it was hired. Despite these, BEL top brass approved the proposal to award the contract to the company on 6 September 2011. An accompanying note on the award also made it clear that "as per corporate vigilance guidelines, RD Konsultants' should not have been considered for similar requirements in the future. The inquiry report also flagged the way RD Konsultants was hired to prepare the PPR. The note added that for the IACCS project, BEL would have to look for new consultants for "future requirements of consultancy". "...No norms of Request for Proposal or tendering were followed, but it was selected just based on a recommendation by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) with no written correspondence from the DRDO," it said. But BEL officers went a step ahead to allegedly favor RD Konsultants in the second stage of the project while hiring a consultant to prepare a Detailed Project Report (DPR), the inquiry report suggested. RK Handa, who was the general manager of the BEL's Network Centric System (NCS-Strategic Business Unit) at the time, was part of the committee that selected the vendors and hired RD Konsultants in 2011, the report noted. "In fact the file raised in October 2012 should have been in continuation to the file initiated on 28 July, 2011. Why it was not done needs a detailed investigation with respect to malafide intentions to violate the Central Vigilance Commission's guidelines for hiring of consultants," it added. "Even in the selection of M/s RD Konsultants for the second time, there were a lot of deviations from the norms laid down." BEL signed the second contract with the firm in September 2013 to prepare the DPR of all 10 IACCS sites. The inquiry report noted that RD Konsultants was paid Rs13.5 lakh for consultancy charges to prepare the PPR but Rs15.94 crore for the DPR, alleging that someone was pulling the strings to favour the company, and that the financial criterion was changed twice during the course of selection of vendors. It was also verified by the chartered accountants that RD Konsultants' had been established in April 2010, but to show a turnover in the last three years as required, they showed a turnover in 2009-10. This clearly shows that false information was provided. Also, a company that came into existence on April 2010 showed that its employees had an experience of five years in 2013, again a false information. The chartered accountant certificate enclosed with the inquiry report does not mention a telephone number. The letterhead of the CA firm merely shows an address of Shakarpur in New Delhi, the report adds. Coal India production rises 7% to 607 million tonne in FY19 Coal India Ltd has reported a 7 per cent increase in production in 2018-19 to 606.9 million tonne, compared to the 567.4 million tonnes of coal produced in the previous financial year. CILs production during the financial year, however, is a shade below the 610 million tonne target se in the MoU signed with the coal ministry. Coal India is reported to have projected an aspirational target of 652 million tonne for the year. In a filing with stock exchanges, CIL the largest coal miner, said coal offtake from its mines rose 4.8 per cent to 608.1 million tonne during the year compared with the offtake of 580.3 million tonne in the previous fiscal. CILs coal production peaked in March 2019, with an output of 79.19 million tonnes, the highest monthly production since inception. Coal supply to power sector rose 7 per cent to 488 million tonnes year-on-year. The pithead coal stock stood at 54 million tonnes while cumulative stock at power plants stood at 30.41 million tonne. The South Eastern Coalfields Ltd (SECL), however, crossed coal production 2018-19 target of 150 million tonnes, for the first time in a financial year. SECL crossed the 150 million tonnes with a production figure of 153 million tonnes on 20 March, reports citing company sources said. SECL is also reported to have touched the highest ever single day production of 7.44 lakh tonnes in the month. During FY 2017-18, the SECL had produced 144.7 million tonnes of coal. A man came face-to-face with an intruder in his Stranorlar home at 1.30am on Monday night. The frightening incident took place at Berryfield, Stranorlar. The man heard a noise downstairs in his house and when he went to investigate - he found a male in the kitchen area. No words were spoken. The intruder left through the patio door. It is understood that nothing was taken. The male is described as 5ft 8 and of heavy build. He was wearing a dark tracksuit with the hood up. Gardai were at this house when they became aware that the alarm had been activated at the flower shop in Stranorlar. When gardai arrived at the scene, they found the flower-shop door damaged and ascertained that entry had been gained. A number of poor boxes had been stolen from the shop and the 'float' from the till had also been taken. The incident took place at around 1.40am. CCTV footage shows a man that would be similar in description to the person who had intruded on the Berryfield home. Gardai are appealing to the public for information. Burglary and an attempted burglary Gardai at Letterkenny are anxious to speak to anyone who may be able to assist them with a burglary and an attempted burglary that occurred in Ballybofey on March 27 between the hours of 1am to 3am. The incidents took place at Blackrock drive in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The two homes are in close proximity to each other. Garda Grainne Doherty told the 'Nine til Noon show,' that a lock was broken on a patio door on one of the houses. "There was an attempted break-in at one house on Blackrock drive. There was damage to the lock on the back patio door. No entry was gained to the house. and nothing was taken from that house. "A short time later, within the same period, 1am to 3am, on Wednesday morning. A burglary did occur just a few doors down and entry was gained through the back door, the lock was damaged on a back patio door," she said. A handbag, a money-box and a sum of money were taken from the house. Items of great sentimental value were also taken. Taxi drivers are asked to check their dash-cam for suspicious activity, in that particular area, at that time. Anyone with any information to this incident can call gardai at their local gardai or call the garda confidential line at 1800 666 111. Lifford A number of incidents has taken place in Lifford on March 28 and 29. Peking house in Lifford was 'ransacked' and a substantial sum of money taken. The incident took place between 10.30pm on March 28 and 10.30am on March 29. Entry was gained through a rear window. On March 29 between 1am and 2am the front door of a restaurant on Bridge Street was smashed. It is uncertain whether person(s) were trying to gain entry. However, Grainne Doherty told Highland Radio that two men were captured on nearby CCTV and gardai are appealing to anyone who may have witnessed the two men walking down Lifford main street to contact them. And, also on March 29 between midnight to 4am, the window of a beauty salon was smashed on bridge street. No entry was gained. Anyone who may have witnessed the incident are asked to contact Letterkenny gardai at 074 91 67100. Letterkenny Two front windows were smashed on the property of a home on Bennion Avenue, Letterkenny on March 26 at 11.40pm. Two youths were seen leaving the scene and a motive has not been established. Gardai at Letterkenny Garda Station are seeking information in relation to the incident. On March 30, entry was gained via the back door of a home on Oran Hill in Letterkenny. A substantial sum of money was taken. The Green Party launched their local and European election campaign with a concert in the Spirit Store on Thursday night. Guests were treated to some of the best local music on the night with Larry, Elephant and Kelso all putting in stellar performances. They were joined on the stage by Conor Bailey and Donal McKenny, the two students from Ardee Community School who organised the recent Louth School Strike 4 Climate. The event was also an opportunity to meet with the European and Local Election Candidates for the area. MEP candidate for the Midlands North West region Saoirse McHugh spoke about how important it was now more than ever to send a Green voice to the European Parliment saying: "Decisions are made in the European Parliment that affect every country in the EU, it's important to have Green Representation to protect people and the Environment." Also in attendance was Green Party Leader Eamon Ryan, who highlighted the important work done by sitting Green Party Councillors Mark Dearey and Marianne Butler. He also welcomed the party's two new local election candidates: Sean Connolly in Ardee and Eoin Daly who hopes to retain Cllr. Dearey's seat in Dundalk/Carlingford May's elections. "Tonight has been brilliant," said Daly afterwards, "it's great to see our family, friends and supporters get together and relax. We really couldn't run without their help and understanding." This year's Local Election will be held on the 24th of May, with the Green Party putting forward more candidates nationwide than ever before. Local Election Candidate for Dundalk-Carlingford Erin McGreehan has warned of the "extreme danger" of not wearing hi-vis vests when out walking and running on roads "especially at dusk, dawn and night". McGreehan said: "The Road Safety Authority of Ireland (RSA) analysis revealed there were 313 pedestrians killed on Irish roads between 2008 and 2015 and pedestrian deaths are not decreasing. It is a very worrying trend." "Last week whilst driving on one evening I met five individuals out walking at dusk on country roads. They were all dressed in dark clothing and incredibly difficult to see. With the longer and milder evenings, people are rightly getting out and about. However, it is reckless in my opinion to go out without a hi-visibility jacket or some sort of reflective clothing." Ms McGreehan added: "According to the RSA more than two-thirds of fatal pedestrian collisions happen at night. Although you can hear a car coming and see its lights, the driver may not see you and definitely not hear you." McGreehan went on to outline the following guidelines from the RSA: Always wear a pair of reflective armbands, high-visibility belt or other reflective or fluorescent clothing which will help you to be seen from a distance Carry a torch on country roads McGreehan continued: "Most children have received free hi-vis vests from the RSA under the Hi-Visibility Schools campaign. There is no point having them if they are not used." Pictured [from left to right] are Michael Mulvey, PhD, DkIT President; Dr Sheila Flanagan, VP of Academic Affairs & Registrar, DkIT; Cllr. Maria Doyle; Stephane Crouzat, French Ambassador to Ireland Joan Martin, Chief Executive, Louth County Council and Cllr. Marianne Butler at the Good France-Ireland event in DkIT The French Ambassador to Ireland, Stephane Crouzat, DkIT President, Michael Mulvey PhD and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Registrar at DkIT, Dr Sheila Flanagan hosted a very successful culinary event in the DkIT Hospitality Studies Training Kitchen recently to mark Gout de France or Good France-Ireland month. Gout de France, initiated by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development and chef Alain Ducasse, is a series of culinary events celebrating French gastronomy, involving 2,000 chefs and 2,000 menus in 150 counties across five continents including Ireland during the month of March. It was inspired by Auguste Escoffier who launched the Diners dEpicure (Epicurean Dinners) initiative in 1912. The event was expertly organised by the Department of Hospitality Studies at DkIT. Food was prepared by students on the BA in Culinary Arts programme and service was provided by BA in Hospitality Management students. Event attendees included representatives from local government, business and the wider cultural and hospitality sectors. Students prepared a five-course, French-inspired menu developed from local Irish produce. The menu comprised a Champagne aperitif with canapes. The starter included: marinated mackerel with textures of cauliflower, raisin puree, cucumber & apple dressing followed by an artichoke veloute with a chive & hazelnut dressing. The main course consisted of loin of lamb, braised shoulder with Ballymakenny heritage potatoes, mushroom puree, tender-stem broccoli, minted pea & broad beans with lamb sauce. The dessert included a citrus bavarois on a madeline base with rhubarb compote and peppermint meringue. Speaking during the event, French Ambassador Crouzat said: I am delighted that Dundalk Institute of Technology has participated for the first time in Gout de France this year with an exquisite meal prepared and served by superbly talented students. DkIT President, Michael Mulvey, PhD added, We were delighted to welcome Ambassador Crouzat and his team to our campus. Good France / Gout de France is an exceptional opportunity to showcase the vitality of agrifood links which exist between our two countries and I am delighted that some of our local food producers could be here today to join the celebration. "I would like to thank our Hospitality Studies students and staff for their hard work in preparing and serving the food today. As always food was outstanding and the service was impeccable. For further information about DkITs Culinary Arts and Hospitality programmes, please visit: www.dkit.ie/cao-hub/hospitality-and-culinary-arts.html For more information on the GoutdeFrance/GoodFrance initiative, please visit: www.france.fr/en/campaign/gout-france-good-france Green Party election candidate for Dundalk-Carlingford, Eoin Daly has hit out at Ireland's "broken rental market". Daly's comments came in response to an article which appeared in TheJournal.ie yesterday which revealed that one in ten renters in Ireland were spending over 60% of their incomes on housing costs. Daly took to Facebook to say: "Our rental market is broken. There really is no other way to describe it. "Nationally 1 in 5 renters are paying 40% of their incomes in rent and for 1 in 10 it's 60%; the average rent in County Louth had broken the 1,000 barrier; all while there are 10,000 people, including over 3,500 children, living without a home. "And all the while local authorities let houses like these two in Oldbridge fall into such disrepair they become unlivable and magnets for anti-social behaviour. "There is simply not enough money being put into building social and affordable housing; We need to be building thousands of homes, not allowing what we have lie empty." The figures highlighted by the Journal's report were taken from The National Social Monitor Report from Social Justice Ireland which also revealed that one in five renters are spending 40% of their income, and one in 20 are spending 75% of their income on rent. Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content. Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist. If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider subscribing to our ePaper and/or free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. A new food ordering app called YQueue is set to launch on the Gold Coast in May. The recent start up has seen a successful first launch in Singapore and now the founder George Lim looks to recreate that success in Australia. YQueue has been designed with the local food and beverage merchants in mind, as well as the consumer, which is what is setting it apart from other big names in the food ordering game, according to Hannah Churcher, Nishi Ratnayake (Account Executives) and Jay Nathwani, National Sales Manager. They spoke to us about the upcoming May launch, the platforms Unique Selling Points (USPs) and YQueues future expansion. Tell us about the launch in Singapore how successful has YQueue been there so far? The platform was officially launched in Singapore in the third quarter of 2017. YQueue currently has over 100 signed merchants across Singapore and we already have over 35 signed on the Gold Coast in Australia, despite not officially launching till May. The popular bubble tea establishment Each A Cup had 942 orders, 356 unique customers and saved 30 hours per month on the YQueue platform. Additionally, the entire Singaporean Subway franchise has successfully adopted the YQueue platform which has been especially fruitful on their University campuses. Why have you chosen to expand into Australia and why now? Singapore and Australia were chosen as the founder of YQueue, George Lim, has successful businesses and relationships in both countries. It made sense for us to start in these locations before rolling out to other international cities. Our developers are located in Brisbane and hence rolling out a platform here makes sense in terms of testing, adoption and local support which we understand is a priority for Australian business owners. Australian businesses in the food and beverage industry, suffer from high labour and overhead costs, often finding it hard to survive. Our platform, if fully embraced, can and will help the owners. We understand that business is changing rapidly and keeping up with the latest advancements and automating various processes and functions will develop a competitive advantage. How is YQueue different to companies such as Uber Eats and MenuLog? Our unique selling proposition is to provide an all-in-one solution that provides the equivalent benefits and functionalities to both end-users and businesses who partner with us. We have seen a pattern of small businesses simply being provided with a channel and promised a percentage increase in sales revenue. Were different because provide a solution which gives businesses the capacity to reduce their operational costs, streamline their systems and operations, and ultimately provide them with the opportunity to provide their respective clientele with the best possible experience. Our hyper-localised approach in dealing with businesses face-to-face paired with our ongoing support not only technically but also in marketing and sales consultancy sets us apart from competitors. Each business will have temporary YQueue support staff, to assist in set-up and implementation of the YQueue platform before and during the launch promotional period. The app features in-built CRM which provides businesses with a direct marketing channel to strategise and communicate with theirr clientele. We also have apayment management system that has both local and international providers including DBS, Alipay, Google Pay, Amex and WeChat Pay; this ensures we can continue a relationship with the international tourism market which is a huge part of Australian revenue. How are you spreading the word about the May launch? Our marketing strategy is multi-faceted and contains no predominant channel or tactic. We are using business partnerships with other start ups such as YesThanks Australia, influencer marketing, social media paid and organic promotion and different events to increase brand awareness. What are YQueues plans for the next five years? The plan for the next five years is to constantly grow the capacities of the YQueue application. Certain technical developments we can foresee include our delivery functionality, where partnered businesses can utilise internal staff as their delivery drivers. Our application roadmap also includes booking table reservations and further down the line there will be lots of exciting add-on features in the third quarter of 2019 and 2020. Singapore and Australia were picked as the initial launchpads for the platform and we are in talks about having the USA and London as our next targets. Australians have long been considered a traditional group and for good reason. Neighbours recently entered its 35th TV season and the Tim Tam is still the nations favourite biscuit. But in the retail sector this love affair with tradition is no more, replaced by a thirst for new and innovative experiences. Recent 451 Research, commissioned by Adyen, titled the APAC Unified Commerce Market Guide, has uncovered deeper insights into the modern Australian shopper and the fundamental demands they carry when engaging with retailers. These unique shopping demands are best categorised by three distinct groupings.Termed the Three Cs; Convenience, Context and Control,they now form the three critical pillars to best increase Australian consumers in-store shopping. Convenience: It is no secret Australian consumers are driven by a need for speed. The modern shopping experience is one that should be fast and easy. As retailers look at reducing the speed of transaction however, the key barrier continues to be the dreaded queue. The APAC Unified Commerce Market Guiderevealed 73 percent of Australian respondents decided against purchasing an item simply because the queue was too long. In fact, long lines in-store were responsible for a staggering $12.52bn AUD in total losses last year. Queue-busting systems like mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) or self-checkout kiosks are an easy solution to this problem. Nearly half (45 percent) of those surveyed said a self-checkout experience would directly improve their in-store payment experience. Having these platforms in place allows customers to instantly check-out anywhere on the shop floor and meets the demand for speed and convenience head on. Context: Retailers are starting to take note of the importance of a seamless customer experience and the need to unify this experience across the different channels available. By combining your payment provider for both e-commerce and in-store, a retailer can transform otherwise disparate departments into a functional whole. The reality is that the consumer, store relationship is no longer simply transactional. Customers connect with a business along a more complex journey, traversing both digital and physical experiences that bring many twists and turns along the way. For example, a customer journey may begin on social media and move to a web page to further browse for products, ending with an in-store visit to try and buy. These are what we characterise as micro-moments, and they are increasingly impossible to plan for. The new challenge is to reach shoppers wherever they are and make sure each new step of the journey blends together seamlessly. Take for example that 53 percent of Australian respondents said that the ability to check online if an item is available in-store would increase their loyalty to that retailer. Australian shoppers crave tailored experience, one that keeps personalisation front of mind and is not handcuffed by the fact a product is online or in-store. Effective personalisation uses the power of data to offer shoppers one-click checkouts online and recognise their spending journey across sales channels to tailor future offerings. Another answer is an investment into new and emerging technologies, incorporating in-store interfaces like voice-activated speakers or chat bots to act as store assistants. Half (50%) of Australian respondents stated they would increase shopping frequency online if they could receive product recommendations and make purchases with a chatbot. The future of customer experience will increasingly rely on things like automation and machine learning to help personalise interactions with customers. Conversational technologies make for a store associate, contact centre, support staff, marketer and data analyst in one package and can drive effective collaboration between ecommerce and in-store operations. Control: Finally, control is the third crucial component. Consumers want to interact and engage on their own terms and this makes product availability and transparency critical as shoppers expect a sense of ownership throughout the retail experience. 53 percent of Australian shoppers said they would shop at a specific location if they could purchase out-of-stock items and have them delivered to their house. We want full control of our purchase decisions, and not being told no is a big part of this. This also means giving shoppers control of their payment method. A stores capacity to accept preferred payment methods seems insignificant, but an inability to do so can be the ultimate conversion killer. It is an increasingly important area where retailers have room to grow. One in five Australians have encountered retailers who could not offer their preferred payment method and it is a number that will continue to grow as technology advances. It is important to remember an opportunity lost is an opportunity cost.While alternative payment methods like digital wallets may not dominate everyday choices for Australian shoppers (digital wallets constitute just 12%), the ability to accommodate them remains a top priority for retailers. Consumer demand for convenience, context, and control will only increase which means retailers must continue to evaluate how they serve their customers across the shopping journey. No longer can retailers rely on price alone to build shoppers loyalty. To truly win over Australian shoppers, while avoiding lost sales and drive greater revenue, retailers need to focus on delivering experiences that blend these elements. Michel van Aalten is Country Manager of Adyen ANZ. The accounting app Xero share their Small Business Insights with us to shed light on what small businesses should be aware of, which is now made especially relevant with the federal budget announcement later today. The anonymous and aggregated data is collected monthly from hundreds of thousands of Xeros Australian subscribers through the Xero platform. The data relies on Xero subscribers that meet the criteria for each metric Getting Paid, Cash Flow, Hiring, Overseas Trading and Cloud Adoption. Xeros Small Business Insights provide us with many useful findings relevant to small businesses right now, with the main ones listed below: Tax cuts: When small businesses receive a tax cut, about half of the money goes toward hiring employees, raising wages or boosting investment in the business the other half is retained as cash in the business. When small businesses receive a tax cut, about half of the money goes toward hiring employees, raising wages or boosting investment in the business the other half is retained as cash in the business. Cash flow: On average, 46% of small businesses were cash flow negative in 2018, meaning they had more money going out the door than coming in. Our customers tell us poor cash flow is the number one reason businesses go under. On average, 46% of small businesses were cash flow negative in 2018, meaning they had more money going out the door than coming in. Our customers tell us poor cash flow is the number one reason businesses go under. Late payments: Small businesses were paid almost a week late in 2018: It took an average of 36 days to be paid on a 30-day invoice. When payments arrive late, cash flow inevitably suffers.The sectors that endure the latest payments include transport and warehousing (10 days late as of the most recent months data); rental hiring and real estate (6 days late). Small businesses here often lack the resources to pursue late payments from much bigger customers in the sector. Small businesses were paid almost a week late in 2018: It took an average of 36 days to be paid on a 30-day invoice. When payments arrive late, cash flow inevitably suffers.The sectors that endure the latest payments include transport and warehousing (10 days late as of the most recent months data); rental hiring and real estate (6 days late). Small businesses here often lack the resources to pursue late payments from much bigger customers in the sector. Digital: Businesses on Xero using at least one app saw annual employment growth averaging 4.7%, or nearly double that of firms using no apps.The more apps used, the greater the revenue growth seen; turnover and app usage tend to rise together. Businesses on Xero using at least one app saw annual employment growth averaging 4.7%, or nearly double that of firms using no apps.The more apps used, the greater the revenue growth seen; turnover and app usage tend to rise together. Lending: Australias small businesses say they would borrow as much as $80 billion over the next 12 months, if they could get the funding. Instead, many are struggling to access capital, in large part due to the complexity of the loan process. Small businesses said they would use the money to hire an average of six extra staff in the next year (from mid-2018 survey). Trent Innes, Australian MD of the global small business platform, has said that simplifying the application process while creating incentives for banks to lend to small businesses without having to secure the loan against their home is critical. Our research showsthat access to capital is the greatest pain point for one in five small business owners, hampering their aspirations for long-term growth. Trent Innes goes on to highlight why these analytics are so important, what information small businesses should be taking on board and some particularly relevant takeaways with consideration of the federal budget announcement later today. Why are these analytics so important to small businesses? Xero Small Business Insights offers a near real-time snapshot of the small business sectors health, and paints a picture of business conditions that is more accurate than most private surveys. It tells us how small businesses performed last year, in recent months, what decisions they were making and what challenges they faced. Kate Carnell, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, told a Sydney audience in October that she thought our data helped spur the government to take action on payment times. These numbers are important because, as Mrs. Carnell said, data gives us the grunt to get policy changed. We agree, and were proud to help drive a transformation for small business in Australia. What do you think small businesses should be most aware of right now? Our customers tell us that cash flow is the number one reason businesses go under. Xeros data shows that, on average, almost half of small businesses in Australia were cash flow negative last year meaning they had more money going out the door than coming in. This is likely driven by many different factors, including late payments and poor access to capital. For example, we know that in 2018 small businesses across the country were paid almost a week late on average on 30-day invoices. This suggests that an improvement in payment times would make a bigger, long-term difference for the sector than business tax cuts. Permanently fixing payment times would be a huge win for small business. The biggest federal budget win for small businesses right now would be for the government to fix payment times once and for all. An improvement in payment times would make a bigger impact for the sector than business tax cuts. 3) Based on the recent results, what should small businesses be doing to ensure success? Its clear from the data that digital connectivity is far from a nice to have and has become a must-have for small business survival. For example, our data suggests that the more Xero-integrated apps our small business customers use, the greater their revenue growth tends to be; turnover and app usage tend to rise together. On top of that, our small business customers in mature NBN regions grew employment by one-third more than peers in non-NBN regions. And they grew revenue by almost two-thirds more than peers in non-NBN regions. The Australian Government is helping drive the digitisation of small businesses, and our numbers show how critical it is that small businesses get help in making this digital transition. Whether this is through their accountants and bookkeepers, platforms such as Xero, or other advisors, going digital will not only help small businesses meet their compliance requirements but will help boost their growth. Sam Allert, Reckon Group CEO, shares his thoughts on the impacts of the expected federal budget announcement this evening. General Outlook Our survey uncovered that 65 per cent of small business owners do not believe this years Federal Budget will deliver positive change for their business, suggesting that they have been disappointed by budget announcements in the past. As a result, many are expecting a change of federal government this year, indicating that many feel Aprils budget announcements could be short lived. Small businesses will be eager to understand what concessions the Coalition can offer if it remains in power. This means they will need to go the extra mile and introduce more substantial benefits to small businesses in order to meet their expectations. Wages & Income Tax Income tax reductions are to be expected from the government, with a surplus from booming iron ore prices offering it more revenue to play with. These will be appreciated by small businesses, who are fearful that a sluggish economy is hurting consumer confidence. Just over half (56 per cent) of business owners say the seven-year personal income tax relief plan announced at last years budget benefitted them, suggesting more cuts would be welcomed. As we approach the election, many small businesses say Labors plan to enforce a living wage could harm their revenue. By making changes to income tax rather than adding legislation on wages, the Coalition will have the upper hand with small business owners on this subject. Instant Tax Asset Write-Off Research from Reckon shows that 91 per cent of small business owners want to see the $20,000 instant asset tax write-off extended. While an extension to June 2020 is expected, a permanent fix would provide more certainty to small businesses. Labor has already pledged to introduce a permanent $20,000 instant asset write-off if it gets into power, offering a more stable prospect for businesses. While Scott Morrison is expected to raise the threshold to $25,000 in the budget, a longer extension will still be in demand. Ultimately, any further tax relief for small businesses is always welcomed, as it means more resources for business owners to re-invest back into their venture. Interestingly, only half (53 per cent) of respondents have utilised the tax offset since it was put in place, indicating a need to educate small businesses on what they can actually write off. Of those who have benefited, 68 per cent say theyve seen an improvement in cash flow as a result. Corporate Tax Cuts 78 per cent of small business owners say they have seen no benefits since the corporate tax rate was reduced from 30 to 27.5 per cent last year, indicating that larger reductions are desired. In fact, almost half (45 per cent) say a decrease in corporate tax rate is critical to their business success. Policies with a more personal immediate impact are therefore more likely to resonate. Housing Affordability Securing small business finance has been a challenge for some time, and this shows no sign of abating. In Reckons research, 44 per cent of small business owners say they have already been affected by falling house prices and tighter lending conditions imposed by banks. This comes as no surprise, given many small business owners secure loans on their homes. The Coalitions plans to offer additional funding to financial regulators should be welcomed, but small businesses will need reassurance that credit sources do not dry up as more stringent checks are introduced. Labor has pledged to limit negative gearing on housing to help first time buyers, but this could also cause house prices to drop. The Treasury concludes that the impact of Labors policy would be limited, but the Coalition could use this to entice home owners at the election. Small Business Training & Upskilling Australia is experiencing a skills gap across many professions, with shortages spanning from carpenters to electricians. This is reflected in Reckons pre-budget survey of Australian small businesses, which found that 83 per cent of business owners want the government to provide more subsidies for skills and training. In last years budget, additional resources were assigned to the Skilling Australians Fund to help create more apprenticeships. However, this has not been successful for the most part, with Victoria and Queensland rejecting the proposal completely. Labor has already announced plans to increase funding in TAFE and vocational education, and small business owners will be looking for similar assurances from the Coalition. Rising Energy Prices In our survey of Australian small businesses, 69 per cent say they have been affected by increasing energy prices, showing a high demand for policies that encourage electricity cost reductions. The Coalition has confirmed it will underwrite several energy generation projects to bring down prices, which could include gas and coal. While this will please some small business owners, it will alienate those that are more environmentally conscious. The Coalitions Energy Efficiency Grants that were announced at the beginning of the year which offer small businesses up to $25,000 to install more efficient and environmentally friendly equipment were clearly devised to show decisive climate action. However, our research shows that only 19 per cent of Australian small businesses will take up the governments offer, while almost half (47 per cent) do not even know what it is. The lukewarm response to the Energy Efficiency Grants shows this initiative is unlikely to offset voter concerns regarding emissions. Confirmation of more investment into fossil fuels in the budget could divide the small business vote. With the federal budget announcement later today and an election on the horizon, a national survey reveals clear expectations of what the government should prioritise for the small to medium business sector. SME Growth Index research released yesterday shows the priorities of SMEs in regards to what the new Federal Parliament should focus on and company tax cuts was the top response. SME Growth Index research is conducted independently by banking analysts East & Partners, on behalf of national working capital funder Scottish Pacific. The owners, CEOs or senior financial staff of 1257 SMEs across all states and key industries, with annual revenues of $A1-20 million. Scottish Pacific CEO Peter Langham said company tax cuts topped the wish list for what SMEs want to see from the budget; it has been nominated by 27% of business owners as the initiative that should have top priority. The Federal Governments moves last month to further expand the instant asset write-off should please respondents, as almost 24% said this should be their focus. One in five SMEs want the newly elected government to prioritise cutting red tape by reducing their administrative and regulatory burden. Mr Langham said SMEs were far more concerned about government action on things they see affecting their business on a day-to-day basis, rather than big picture projects such as the NBN or small business funding initiatives. Over the past six years, the SME Growth Index has repeatedly highlighted that company tax cuts and a reduced regulatory burden are the most pressing reforms SMEs are crying out for. Nothing has changed this round, Mr Langham said. The Index has recorded a three year high in SMEs expecting to grow in the first half of 2019, despite the uncertainty surrounding the property market, Royal Commission aftermath and pre-election period. Simplifying the complex tax system and cutting red tape, and on a state basis getting rid of payroll tax, would have the biggest daily impact for Australias small to medium business sector. These are the everyday impact items that will energise SMEs, encourage business investment and drive growth and innovation, he said. Mr Langham said Federal Government efforts to simplify BAS must be starting to hit the mark in this latest research, only one in 10 SMEs named further BAS simplification as their top priority, down from one in four when this question was last asked 18 months ago. Only 7% thought reducing SME energy costs should be the main focus for the new parliament. Despite significant publicity around the announcement of a $2 billion SME lending fund, not even 3% of respondents felt that implementing this fund should be the top priority, Mr Langham said. The research also found that very few SMEs thought the first order of business for any new Federal Government should be extending legislation to ease late payment times, working on SME infrastructure such as the NBN or funding national cybersecurity education for small businesses. Most SMEs werent seeking the extension of legislation designed to ease late payment times and to mandate participation in the Australian Supplier Payment Code, despite much public debate about ever-lengthening supplier payment times. Just over 2% of business owners named it as their preferred top post-election priority. Dedicated SME infrastructure such as fast tracking the NBN (less than 2%) and cybersecurity (1%) are seen by business owners as lower on the agenda for a new government relative to tax cuts and cutting red tape. This is despite a recent Chubb and YouGov survey, Too Small to Fail? Australia SME Cyber Preparedness Report, that found 71% of SMEs have experienced a cyber-attack or error in the past 12 months and 45% of SME owners are not confident that their employees who have access to sensitive data are fully aware of their data privacy responsibilities. EBRD and donors help Araz supermarket remain number one in retailing Azerbaijan is one of the birthplaces of the global oil industry. At the beginning of the last century its wells accounted for half the worlds supply. But hydrocarbons will not last forever, and a transition to a lower carbon, resource efficient and diversified economy is critical to ensuring a modern and sustainable private sector in the country. With new concepts, new brands and new outlets, retail has become one of the most dynamic areas of the Azeri economy in the past 10 years. Weve revolutionised the supermarket retail business in Azerbaijan, said Holger Wagner, CEO of Araz Supermarket, the biggest supermarket chain in the country. Until quite recently, people had to visit several small markets to get what they needed. It was inefficient. Now customers can find quality products at a competitive price under just one roof. The story of Araz supermarket goes back to 2011 when it opened its first outlet next to Bakus Azadlig metro station. Within a short period, it was the leading retail chain in Azerbaijan, thanks to its affordable prices, locally sourced products and high levels of service. But, as Mr Wagner explained, times change quickly and, despite ongoing success, the company needed to change with them. To secure its position as number one in the country and to gain an international perspective, the company turned to the EBRD for its advice for small businesses programme. Happy employees, happy customers Through the EBRDs Early Transition Countries Fund ( Canada , Finland , Germany, Ireland, Japan , Korea , Luxembourg , the Netherlands, Norway , Spain, Sweden , Switzerland, Taipei China and the United Kingdom ), the Bank provided Araz with the knowledge and expertise it needed to capitalise even further on the growth of the booming local retail market. For Araz, the EBRD-led project focused on designing a more effective marketing strategy to distinguish itself from the competition. The project also helped them prepare a business plan, building teamwork, improving quality and design of products and services. The results speak for themselves: today it operates over 120 stores throughout the country and has introduced a Spar franchise as well as a hard discount Oba with 700 stores in operation, establishing itself as the indisputable number one in the country. I come here every morning to do my daily shopping, said Leyla Mammadli, a regular costumer. Vegetables are always fresh, prices are very reasonable and, most importantly, Im always welcomed with a smile! But quality products and low prices are only half of the story. The company is also an exemplary employer in a region where effective Human Resources practices are still slowly adapting to the needs of market economy. The scholarship scheme for employees children to pursue studies is one of the innovative HR policies that Araz supermarket has introduced. We understand that companies are reliant on the people who run them: from sales staff to senior management. Our key priority is to create a stable, comfortable, family environment for the employees of the company, Mr Wagner said.The success of Araz translates into market-driven diversification of the economy and a boost to Azerbaijans private sector, both in line with the EBRDs priorities in the country . Yes, our political opponents are worse. But we have to be better than THIS. In May of 2015, Sarah Studley was hired by the Michigan Senate Democrats into the position of Counsel and Senior Policy Adviser. For the first year, she loved the job and found it professionally fulfilling. A year later, however, that changed. After Andy Leavitt left as the Senate Dems Chief of Staff, John Mulcrone was hired to take his place. Eight months after that, Studley filed a Michigan Senate Discriminatory Harassment Complaint against Mulcrone, alleging that he had created a toxic environment for women in the central staff of the Senate Dems and had essentially demoted her, a result, she believed, of gender discrimination. The complaint form filed by Studley was shared with me by a source who said he was familiar with the process. You can view it HERE In her complaint, Studley explains how Mulcrone had a reputation for having difficulty working with women, particularly strong women. Studley says she was directly warned about Mulcrones difficulty with women from his former boss, ten months before Mulcrone took over as Chief of Staff. Once he was her boss, it soon became obvious to Studley that this reputation was well-earned and, based on conversations I have had with others who were in a position to observe, it is a reputation that is widely known. Mulcrone wasnt the only source of problems for the women of the Senate Democrats central staff. Several women from the Communications Department repeatedly shared their concerns (and in one case filed actual complaints) about the management of that department. Despite the many criticisms multiple women registered against the management of the Senate Dems comms shop, nothing was done and Mulcrone was dismissive of their feedback. Because of this, at least three women quit and took their talents elsewhere. The Communications Director at the time, David Schupbach, was also running a side business, Point 5 Foundry, a web development company that once hosted isigned.org which ran an attack ad against Republican Senator Margaret OBrien saying she wants Kalamazoo to be another Charlottesville, drawing wide criticism even from his own Party. MIRS news service reported that OBrien had raised three African American children as part of her blended family and was deeply offended by the attack. Michael Zukas, who is a partner in Point 5 Foundry and was Schupbachs direct report on central staff for a time, is described in Studleys complaint as someone with a history of making sexist remarks and treating women on the central staff poorly. His name came up repeatedly in this regard in my conversations with others, as well. Despite being alerted to Zukas offensive, sexist behavior, Mulcrone once again did little and told his staff that they should just let interpersonal problems go, even after a formal complaint was filed. Even then, Zukas was only reprimanded for making racially insensitive comments, not for his well-known and offensive sexism. He was subsequently promoted and given a raise. In Sarah Studleys case, John Mulcrone seemed to harbor particular animus. She describes in detail how she was slowly given an effective demotion, a rather surprising turn of events given that she had been promised a promotion and raise by Mulcrones predecessor, Andy Leavitt, and Senate Democratic Leader, Jim Ananich. Studley was systematically excluded from communications, policy development, and message development. Although she never got the promotion she had been promised, Studleys status as Democratic Counsel for Senate and Executive branch function was stripped from her without consultation or acknowledgment. Instead, Mulcrone claimed the title of Counsel for himself, in addition to being Chief of Staff. According to Studleys complaint, Mulcrone: Dismissed her opinions on staffing matters, including the problems in the Communications Department Cut her out of the hiring process for new staff Stopped consulting with her about high level activities for the Democratic Caucus or the Democratic Leader Removed her from her role in developing a Democratic response to the Flint Water Crisis (legislation, communications, etc.) Systematically reduced her role in the development of policy and communications strategy, in some cases deliberately withholding information about discussions or meetings Dismantled a work flow system she had implemented with no discussion or warning Its important to remember that as all of this was happening to her, Studley retained the title Counsel and Senior Policy Adviser. These arent the complaints of someone whose job has evolved in a natural way. They are the complaints of a Senior Policy Adviser who has been stripped of her former role as a top adviser to the Senate Democrats without notice or consultation. After Studley filed her complaint with the Senate Business Office, an outside attorney conducted an investigation described to me as an exercise in box checking. At least two of the witnesses listed on the complaint werent contacted until a day or two before the weeks-long investigation was closed. One of these interviews was conducted while the investigator was driving. Finally, after coming to the realization that nothing was going to change, Sarah Studley quit her position with the Senate Democrats in mid-2017. John Mulcrone, however, is still Chief of Staff and Dave Schupbach is still employed by the Senate Dems, as well. I have been reluctant to write this piece, I will confess. I dont like slagging on Democrats. We take enough abuse from our political opponents and we all know how women and womens issues are commonly treated by Republicans. The phrase War on Women didnt come about by accident. But, being not quite as bad when it comes to gender discrimination isnt enough for Democrats, not ever, but especially not now. At a time when women are making inroads on taking their rightful and important place next to men in the political sphere and when women are waking up to their political power, in general, the thought that the offices of our Democratic staff are toxic to women and causing them to leave in large numbers should serve as a wake-up call that things need to change. When I reached out to Sarah for a comment, she expressed a similar thought. Although I am unable to comment on the substance of the complaint, she said, I do find the turnover among the women on the Senate Democrats central staff noteworthy. Democrats havent had a majority in the Michigan state senate in nearly three four decades and for much of that time Republicans have had a super-majority. Yes, gerrymandering has played a significant role in this. But if we are losing talented female staff due to unacceptable and sexist treatment by male managers who have difficulty working with women, we dont stand a chance of ever getting our majority back. At this moment in time, women are the most powerful force in politics. In 2018, more than half of the candidates who won their Congressional and state legislative primaries in Michigan were women. Women showed up on election day in massive numbers and women are, quite frankly, leading the resistance. The idea that, in this environment, our Senate leadership and management is driving away skilled and passionate women while having a different set of expectations for men should outrage ALL of us. Its time for a reckoning on this and I sincerely hope that this reckoning happens sooner than later. If it doesnt, we can plan on another 35 years of Republican control of the Michigan Senate. Because the people currently crafting the messages the public sees dont seem to have the values or the perspective that they need to win with a demographic that represents over half of the electorate. I received no response to an email I sent to Senate Democratic leadership with questions about this situation. UPDATE: In what can only be described as an unfortunate decision, the Senate Dems today sent out this fundraising email highlighting another way women are treated unfairly. (Im told women in the Michigan senate central staff are paid less than their male counterparts, as well.) The timing on the email was exquisitely poor, coming three and half hours after I posted this piece. As one person I talked to about this put it, This is what happens when you lack women in decision-making positions. A wildfire that broke out in Florida's Panhandle Saturday that should have been easy to contain was quicker to spread and harder to fight because of debris left over from Hurricane Michael. The fire burned around 678 acres over the weekend and forced 20 homes to be evacuated in Bay County, AccuWeather reported. The fire burning near Allanton, Florida was 50 percent contained at only 15 acres Saturday evening when wind caused it to spread to 100 acres within an hour. Winds also pushed it south Sunday, and the Florida Fire Service described it as "stubborn." "Under normal conditions it would have been a few hours and a few acres," Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried said during an update on the fire reported by The News Service of Florida. "But because of the fact of all the timber on the ground and because the weather conditions, it escalated to be the 600-plus (acres) because of all the fuel on the ground and the inability to get there." The most recent update from the Chipola division of the Florida Fire Service Monday said that the fire was 75 percent contained at 668 acres. It was also started by a debris burn that got out of control. Officials are worried that the weekend's fire could be the start to a particularly dangerous fire season for the state. Hurricane Michael downed 72 million tons of trees between the Gulf Coast and the Georgia border, and most of them have yet to be cleared. "Even a normal fire season in the Panhandle could be catastrophic because of all the fuel," Florida Forest Service Director Jim Karels said Monday, according to the Tampa Bay Times. However, this year's fire season, which peaks in April and May, also comes during a particularly dry year for the state. "[S]tatewide we have been drier than normal over the past two months," state climatologist and Florida State University Climate Research Center head David Zierden said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. This could make life even more difficult for Panhandle residents still recovering from Hurricane Michael, which slammed the area in October of 2018. "Our house was destroyed in Hurricane Michael, and now this," Amy Carter, who was preparing to evacuate due to the fire, told the Panama City News Herald, as the Tampa Bay Times reported. Hurricane Michael, a category 4 hurricane, was the strongest to ever hit the Panhandle. It intensified rapidly due to warmer than average water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, a sequence of events consistent with predictions about how climate change will influence hurricanes. Fried used the occasion to call for state and federal aid to help with Michael recovery. "Other parts of our country have seen (federal) disaster packages within weeks after a disaster," Fried said, according to The News Service of Florida. "And now almost six months later we are still waiting. This is absolutely unacceptable." Fried has requested $39 million from the state to remove debris, plant new trees and buy new firefighting equipment, but the Florida House and Senate are still negotiating a final budget. A pregnant sperm whale washed up dead on a beach in Sardinia last week with 22 kilograms (approximately 48.5 pounds) of plastic in its stomach. This is the second whale in two weeks to be found dead with plastic in its belly: a male Cuvier's beaked whale was found in the Philippines after ingesting 88 pounds of plastic bags. "It is the first time we have been confronted with an animal with such a huge quantity of garbage," University of Padova biologist Cinzia Centelegghe told the Turin daily La Stampa of the dead sperm whale, as the Associated Press reported. That garbage included "garbage bags ... fishing nets, lines, tubes, the bag of a washing machine liquid still identifiable, with brand and barcode ... and other objects no longer identifiable," SeaMe President Luca Bittau told CNN. The whale was 26 feet long and pregnant. Bittau said that she had probably aborted her fetus before she washed up on a beach in the tourist town of Porto Cervo. "The fetus was in an advanced state of composition," Bittau said. Bittau told CNN that the cause of the whale's death is still to be determined by veterinarians in Padua in the north of Italy. However, experts said that she had been unable to digest calamari because of the plastic that had filled two-thirds of her stomach, according to the Associated Press. Italian Environment Minister Sergio Costa posted a picture of the dead whale on Facebook, along with calls for action on plastic pollution. Teachers spend their days taking care of other peoples children. But what happens when they have babies of their own? Unlike other developed nations, the United States does not mandate paid parental leave. And the K-12 education sector is no exception, despite being dominated by women in their childbearing years. Just a handful of states, including Washington state and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia, provide paid parental leave for teachers. And some individual school districts offer it, too. But for the most part, teachers have to cobble together sick days to have some paid time off with their newborns, and then supplement that with unpaid leave. In a profession that has increasingly been under fire for low wages, its another source of frustration for educators, many of whom say they have to return to the classroom before they feel ready. Its not just the fact that you have a baby, its the fact that youre healing physically and possibly dealing with things emotionally and mentally as well, said Marianna Ruggerio, a high school physics teacher in Rockford, Ill., who is expecting her second child in early April. I think theres a lack of recognition of how intense and difficult that can be. Yet there are signs that paid family leave policies for teachers have increasingly been on the radars of policymakers, who see this as a recruitment and retention tool. There are ongoing efforts in Arizona and California to implement paid parental leave policies for teachers. Last year, Delaware Gov. John Carney signed into law a bill that gives state workers, including educators, 12 weeks of paid parental leave. And New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last year that teachers will be eligible for six weeks of paid parental leave. Even some of the labor actions this year have taken up the cause: Teachers from the Chicago International Charter Schools network went on strike earlier this year and won benefits that included one week of paid parental leave. While these efforts have been largely driven by state and local teachers unions, the National Education Association has drafted sample contract language for paid family leave policies that its affiliates can use during bargaining. (That action stemmed from a resolution NEA delegates introduced and voted for during their 2017 convention.) These policy pushes reflect an ongoing broader national conversation. As of now, most teachers and other employees can take unpaid, job-protected leave for 12 weeks under the Family Medical Leave Act. But paid parental leave is widely popular among Americans , and private-sector companies have been increasingly offering these policies. President Donald Trump has said he wants to start a federal paid parental leave policy , though his recent budget proposal offered few details. This year, lawmakers in Congress have introduced multiple proposals that would enact some form of paid parental leave. For example, a Democrat-backed bill would grant 12 weeks of paid family leave to all workers, while a Republican-sponsored measure would allow workers to fund parental leave with their Social Security benefits. A Pay Cut to Have a Child Meanwhile, educators say that relying on sick days to make up parental leave is stressful. Doing so makes it difficult to take time off before the baby is born, including for doctors appointments required with pregnancy. Then when youre actually sick, you dont want to take off because of all of the time away already planned, said Ruggerio, who will take eight weeks off, with just five of those weeks paid through banked sick days. Each additional sick day is one less paid day during maternity leave. On average, public school teachers receive about 12 days of sick and personal leave per year. They do receive vacation time throughout the year when schools are closed, but thats often not helpful when childbearing can be so unpredictable. For early-career teachers who dont have many sick days bankedor who dont yet qualify for the FMLA, often because they havent been working at their job for a yeartaking time off for the birth or adoption of a child can be even more difficult. Ruggerio said when she had her first child, it was only her second year working in the school district, so she had few sick days saved. In order to make ends meet during a largely unpaid maternity leave, she did online tutoring sessions to prepare students for the ACT college-admissions test. The day she brought her newborn son home from the hospital, she did a two-hour call with a student. When Maggie Perkins, a 6th grade teacher in Smyrna, Ga., had her first daughter last year, she was new to the district and didnt qualify for FMLA. She had to purchase her own short-term disability policy instead. Then, her summer paychecks were prorated because she hadnt worked the full school year. It ended up being a 30 percent pay cut to have a child, she said. In March, Perkins gave birth to her second daughter. While she qualified for FMLA this time, she had no sick days saved up and couldnt afford to lose that many paychecks. She took just 16 school days off. Im frustrated because I know Im going to have to leave a newborn. ... Its too soon to be separated, Perkins said, her voice thick with emotion. I dont want to not teach anymore, but I also want to be a mother and have my family as well. Theres the sense that youre supposed to be heroic about it, she added. When do teachers get to be humans? Benefits of Paid Family Leave Research has shown that access to paid family leave can lead to improved health outcomes for children, lower rates of postpartum depression, and more and longer breastfeeding. (Teachers in particular struggle finding the dedicated space and time to pump breast milk at work.) And Maya Rossin-Slater, an assistant professor in the department of health research and policy at Stanford University, said her research on paid parental leave policies in California shows there is no detrimental effect on womens career trajectories. Instead, the policies lead to small or neutral effects on womens retention in the workforce. Its important to remember that its not a panacea, she said. Theres evidence suggesting that paid family leave improves infant health, it improves maternal health and well-being, it reduces stressall of these things that are extremely important, and I think on their own suggest the case for paid leave. Even so, advocates for paid family leave policies for teachers say that they could still be a recruitment and retention tool. About 77 percent of teachers are female, and many of them are in their prime childbearing years. (The average age of teachers is 42.) Among the teachers who leave the profession voluntarily, nearly a quarter say its because of personal life reasons, which include pregnancy and child care, according to the most recent federal data. If [young people] are thinking, I want to start a family, and I want to work with kids, we really want teaching to be the top choice, said Kathy Hoffman, Arizonas state superintendent of public instruction, in an interview. And its about reducing barriers to keeping teachers. ... We want to make sure something like having a child is not a huge obstacle to remaining in the classroom. Hoffman, a former teacher, was elected to office last fall on a platform that included statewide paid parental leave. She said she had heard so many stories from her colleagues about the challenges of having a baby while workingranging from planning childbirth for the summer months to going into significant debt after taking unpaid leave. Especially for our educators, where its a family-centric, kids-centric career, where we have so many teachers and educators who are parents, we should be doing everything we can to support mothers and their young children, she said. Fighting for Paid Time Off Hoffman is advocating for 12 weeks of paid leave for the birth or adoption of a child, and plans to prioritize this effort next legislative session. She said she will build a coalition around the issue with administrators, health-care professionals, insurance providers, and hopefully someone from the governors office. Meanwhile, in California, lawmakers are planning to push for paid parental leave for teachers once again. The state already gives many workers up to six weeks of partial pay to care for a new child or sick relative, but public school teachers are ineligible for the benefit. In 2017, a bill that would have required school districts, charter schools, and community colleges to pay for at least six weeks of leave for pregnancy, childbirth, or miscarriage passed both chambers of the state legislature . But it was vetoed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, who said teacher leave policies should be decided through the collective-bargaining process at the local level. Now, state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the bills author, has introduced the measure again this year, in hopes that newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom will be more receptive to it. Newsom has already proposed extending paid parental leave in the state to six months , although a spokesman for the governor said leave policies would have to be negotiated between districts and their employees. School districts are not just willfully doing this, Gonzalez said. Sometimes you have to ensure it gets done through state law. Still, the last time this bill was up for consideration, districts said they couldnt afford the costs associated with offering paid leave. Gonzalez countered that the policy could be a cost-saver for districts in the long run if it helps with retention, since its expensive for districts to replace teachers year after year. In New York, change happened through a groundswell of teacher activism , said John Troutman McCrann, a math teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in the city who is the leader of his schools union chapter. A teacher had started a Change.org petition to fight for paid parental leave that gathered nearly 85,000 signatures . That inspired the United Federation of Teachers president to convene a task force of educators (including McCrann), lawyers, and negotiators who ultimately struck an agreement with the city. It was just crazy to me, that in a sector of the economy that is supposed to be about caring for children, we would not have any means for someone who wanted to spend time bonding with her new little one, McCrann said. One of the biggest critiques of the No Child Left Behind Act was that it forced states to impose penalties on schools based solely on test scores and high school graduation rates. Measures such as state takeover or replacing a schools entire staff were simplistic or misguided, practitioners and policymakers arguedand, worse, created incentives to game the system. Meanwhile, states dumped reams of sometimes-outdated test-score and graduation-rate data on their hard-to-navigate websites, making it almost impossible for teachers and principals to figure out what needed to be fixed and preventing parents from using the data as tools to push for change. Enter the Every Student Succeeds Act. The revised federal law requires states to use measures beyond just test scores and graduation rates to rate schools. And it requires states to publish on their annual report cards a range of data points about schools never before seen by the general public, including school spending amounts, teacher-pay averages, and academic and discipline disparities between student groups. This has provided both an opportunity and a challenge for state education departments. While states new accountability systems are much more comprehensive today, theres still widespread disagreement about what data should be used to determine what makes for a high-quality school. And, for a variety of technical and logistical reasons, states have had a difficult time collecting and reporting accurate information about their schools in a way thats digestible to the general public. Because state officials still cant agree on how to comply with new federal data requirements on measures beyond test scores, some state departments such as in Florida, Indiana, and Utah are still operating separate federal and state accountability systems, something federal lawmakers explicitly set out to avoid in their ESSA rewrite. Other states such as Michigan and New Mexico, after political turnover, are attempting this year to scrap their accountability systems and replace them with new ones. Work in Progress Its yet to be determined how parents and policymakers will use states redesigned report cards and data offerings to improve schools. A recently released report by the Data Quality Campaign, a group that advocates for data transparency, shows the vast majority of states still have not complied with several of ESSAs requirements, including disaggregating testing data by gender, reporting discipline data, and showing how many ineffective teachers are employed at schools. It is better, Paige Kowalski, the executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, said about states new report cards. States are listening, but to go in and ask people to do things like theyve never done before is a lot. Its not an excuse, but it does explain that even in states that have tried to tackle this, theyre not going to get all the way there because this is hard work. Kowalski said states have made a significant amount of progress since the early days of No Child Left Behind when they were first asked to collect and report to the general public data about their schools. Almost every state now has built a longitudinal-data system that allows it to determine how students perform over time. And theres more discussion in states about school performance. But theres plenty of ground to make up. By the time No Child Left Behind was retired in 2015, more than a third of state departments had buried their report cards in hard-to-find corners of their websites. Ten states hadnt for years updated test scores and graduation rates. And only four actually met NCLBs reporting requirements, even though the law was passed in 2001, according to a DQC analysis. ESSA requires states to visualize in an easily accessible and user-friendly way more data points than were required under NCLB, including statistics on teacher and principal quality, school discipline rates, preschool, and Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate offeringsall broken out by more than 10 student subgroups. Data Compliance States have released redesigned school report cards that for the first time detail how districts are performing according to new metrics under the Every Student Succeeds Act. The Data Quality Campaign, an advocacy group, reviewed all 50 state report cards to determine how closely they are following the law and how digestible they are to the general public. Here are some of their findings: 15 States translate information on report cards into a language other than English, even though a significant portion of Americas parents dont speak English. 42 States do not include disaggregated achievement data for at least one federally required subgroup. In addition, more than 21 states dont disaggregate achievement data by gender. 12 States do not include student-growth data. Of these, 10 states are holding schools accountable for student growth but not including growth data in their school report cards. 26 States do not include discipline data such as suspensions and expulsions. 46 States do not include information about teacher effectiveness, a new federal requirement. Source: Data Quality Campaign It also requires states to add another element to their accountability systems. State officials spent more than a year deciding which new elements to place in their revamped accountability systems and how to collect new required data elements. Late last year, in the heat of the 2018 midterm elections, states began rolling out with great fanfare their new report cards on sleek, redesigned websites intended for easy use. Rhode Islands education department, after adopting Massachusetts test, used the unveiling of its report card to spark a statewide discussion about why the states school system lagged so far behind Massachusetts. But there were plenty of hitches along the way. Missouri delayed by more than six months the rollout of its new report card to give its education department time to properly assess the meaning of the fourth standardized test given in five years. Tennessee deemed its entire grade-letter assessment of schools null after more than 1,400 tests in 39 districts were invalidated because of a testing glitch. (The state is shopping for a new test now.) And South Carolina had to delay the release of its accountability system after realizing that AdvancED, a consulting and accreditation agency, botched the results of thousands of school climate surveys. We havent issued a rating in quite some time, said Ryan Brown, a spokesman for South Carolinas education department. We want to show to the public what the expectations are at the state and federal level so its important that people buy into it. We have some who are accepting it and some who are still skeptical. School Spending Data The most difficult new data element to comply with, states have said, is having to report school-by-school spending amounts. Figuring out how much districts spend on each school requires combing through hundreds of items districts buy and determining which are overhead costs, such as transportation, and which are classroom costs, such as teacher salaries. Many district administrators fear that the display of school spending amounts will pit school board members and parent groups against each other and make the annual spring budgeting process especially contentious. But many finance experts and civil rights advocates hope breaking out school spending amounts can highlight disparities among schools. At least 12 states so far have published school spending amounts, according to Edunomics, a school finance think tank thats working with state education department officials as they try to comply with the measure. One of the next goals is to get the data to be used, said Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab and an associate professor of research at Georgetown University. Right now, states have to check the box. With disagreements in states over the composition of their existing accountability systems and with the political turnover after the 2018 midterm elections, several states, including South Carolina and Wyoming are expected to ask the U.S. Department of Education for permission to make changes to their report cards this year. After Democrats swept governorships in Michigan and New Mexico, both could potentially make sweeping changes to their accountability systems. Texas will use some districts self-assessments as part of their final letter grade after superintendents complained about the states use of letter grades. One district, in Alief, Texas, uses more than 28 indicators to grade its schools, indicative of a larger movement across the country of district officials, skeptical of state politicians, collecting their own data and evaluating their own schools. Kowalski from DQC said that the first year of new state data collection and reporting is inevitably going to be contentious and messy. Whats important, she said, is that state departments think of report cards as living documents and spend the next few months gathering feedback from the public. The data use drives data quality, Kowalski said. Thats the one truth in data. When you get data out to get reviewed and looked at, thats when people start paying attention. The Every Student Succeeds Act is hundreds of pages longand that leaves a lot of room for questions as states and school districts work to turn federal mandates, guidelines, and goals into practice. As part of a continuing feature, Education Weeks Politics K-12 blogger Alyson Klein has been answering questions from educators, policymakers, and others, with the help of experts in the field. Here are some highlights. Whats the toughest part of the Every Student Succeeds Act for districts to get a handle on? It varies, experts and advocates say. Theres a recognition that the promise of decreased paperwork, individualized accountability [for districts] isnt a reality, said Noelle Ellerson Ng, the associate executive director for policy and advocacy at AASA, the School Superintendents Association. Thats compared to their experience under the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act. State plans look a lot like NCLB 2.0. ... The full benefit of the law isnt being felt, she said. Districts also anticipate challenges with the test-participation portion of ESSA. The law says that schools that test fewer than 95 percent of their students must face some sort of consequence. But it also allows states to pass laws affirming parents right to opt their children out of testing, as Oregon does, for example. And superintendents want to make sure they live up to ESSAs push for more equitable funding between high-poverty schools and other campuses. But its a challenge to figure out how to ensure dollars are fairly and reliably distributed at the per-pupil level, Ellerson Ng said. Some districts are also confused by a lack of clarity surrounding Title IV of ESSA, the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, which districts can choose to use on arts, foreign language, college readiness, safety, and more, said David DeSchryver, a senior vice president and director of research at Whiteboard Advisors. Also, DeSchryver is beginning to hear questions about a requirement in ESSA that schools and districts use evidence-based interventions with their lowest-performing schools. That might be trickier than it sounds on paper. Jeff Simering, the director of legislative services for the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban districts, expects districts may have more questions as states finalize changes to accountability plans, requirements for English-learners, and reporting requirements. How many states are including school climate in their ESSA accountability systems? Not as many as you might think. ESSA told states they had to pick an indicator of school quality or student success to measure alongside test scores. Most states picked chronic absenteeism and/or college and career readiness. At least four say they are incorporating school climate specifically into school ratings, including Illinois (which is measuring climate through surveys), Maryland (which is also using surveys), Montana (where school climate is part of a broader measure of program quality that also includes reducing behavior issues and increasing engagement), and New Mexico (which is gauging school climate through Opportunity to Learn surveys). Two othersCalifornia and Ohioare looking at school discipline data. And Rhode Island and Tennessee are specifically looking at suspensions. Must teachers still be highly-qualified under ESSA? Short answer: No. Longer answer: ESSA got rid of the No Child Left Behind mandate that teachers must be highly qualified, which typically meant they needed to have a bachelors degree in the subject they were teaching and state certification. Instead, states must come up with their own definition of an effective teacher. The federal government is explicitly prohibited from telling states what that can be. ESSA also bars the U.S. Department of Education from interfering with state and district teacher evaluations. Since ESSA passed, six statesAlaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahomahave decided to stop using teacher evaluations that included student outcomes, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. Other states have kept performance reviews, but made some modifications. Florida, for instance, kept the student-growth measures, but lets districts decide how they are calculated. How many states have included science testing in their ESSA plans, and what states will count science in their accountability system? Every state will have to test students in science. The law, like NCLB, requires states to test students at least three times in science, once in grades 3-5, once in grades 6-9, and once in grades 10-12. Those science tests dont have to be used for accountability purposes as they do for math and reading. But at least 19 states are choosing to make them part of their school rating systems anyway. At least 14 states are using science as an indicator of school quality or student success, among them Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Vermont. And at least five are using science tests as a way to gauge schools academically, including Illinois, Kentucky, New York, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Do districts need state permission to take advantage of new ESSA flexibility to substitute a nationally recognized, college-entrance exam (like the SAT or ACT) instead of the state test for high school accountability purposes? Yes. Guidance, from the Education Department makes that crystal clear: A state has discretion as to whether it will offer its [local education agencies] this flexibility. And at least one district that has sought its states permission to use the SAT instead of the state testLong Beach, Calif.was told no. In fact, states generally have been reluctant to offer districts this flexibility. Thats partly because its not easy for states to oversee two different testing systems, Julie Woods, a senior policy analyst at the Education Commission of the States, said back in January. States have to figure out how to pay for the college-entrance exams, design a process for districts to apply for the flexibility, and find a way to compare student scores on the state test with scores on the SAT, ACT, or another test. Thats potentially a lot more work than states are currently doing, Woods said. States have to decide what the payoff is for them. Whats more, the prospect of allowing districts to pick among multiple testsand potentially change them from year to yeardrives assessment experts batty, said Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, which works with states on testing, because it becomes difficult to compare one districts results with anothers. So far, just two statesNorth Dakota and Oklahomaare working to move forward with this option. How does ESSA handle mental health in schools? There arent any explicit requirements that states include mental health in their ESSA plans. But states can include them in the portions of their plans that deal with supports for low-performing schools, educator professional development, and Title IV of ESSA, the flexible block grant that districts can use for school safety, school counselors, and more. For instance, Kentucky will look at whether low-performing schools have access to mental-health professionals. Most states havent used ESSA as an opportunity to take mental health off in a new direction, said Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, the director of policy and advocacy at the National Association of School Psychologists. Overall, she said, specific details about mental and behavioral health [are] significantly lacking from the plans. But she isnt so sure that would be the case if they had been written more recently. These plans were written pre-Parkland, she said, referring to the murders at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Would these plans look different after renewed focus on mental health and safety? Maybe states would have tried to hold themselves more accountable for it if they were written now. Whats new for children in foster care under ESSA? ESSA makes some key changes for this important population, which includes hundreds of thousands of students. First off, it asks school districts to break out achievement data and graduation rates for children in foster care as well as homeless and military-connected children, just like they do for other subgroups such as racial minorities, those from low-income families, and students in special education. Also, the law calls for students in foster care to be able to stay in their school of origin (a term the law does not define) even if its no longer their neighborhood school. The state must work with districts and local child-welfare agencies to provide transportation. That was supposed to be in place one year after the passage of ESSA. But state agencies may not be doing such a great job of complying with those requirements, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Social Change, which covers child welfare. Of the 44 states responding to the survey, 33 said they were working with local school districts to comply with the law. Its less clear that other states have implemented ESSAs requirements. And responses from certain statesAlaska, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, and New Yorksuggest that school districts have tried to comply with the law, but the state agencies could not definitively confirm that they had. Its been more than three years since President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law, and roughly half a year since the last approval of a state accountability plan by Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Despite that procedural progress, the myriad of state plans and the painstaking nature of their rollout make it difficult for those in the education policy world to paint a comprehensive picture of how states and district leaders areor are notholding schools accountable for how well they serve students. Although many have emphasized the newfound flexibility states and school districts would enjoy under ESSA, advocates and observers of different stripes havent set aside their concerns about how the law is playing out. For example, some continue to sound the alarm over what they say is the danger that one school might receive a higher overall rating, even as that strong score masks its failure to do well by subsets of students like those who are economically disadvantaged or have disabilities. Others are worried by what they say are fuzzy and uninformative state accountability systems that sometimes dont provide ratings at all. And the center of gravity for school improvement strategies has shifted dramatically in favor of individual schools and districtsmaking it harder for national observers to paint a cohesive picture across state boundaries. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, people became accustomed to focusing, happily or not, on proficiency rates and what that law termed adequate yearly progress to judge how schools were performing, said Paige Kowalski, the vice president of policy and advocacy at the Data Quality Campaign, which works on how education data can be used to serve students. But under ESSA, theres simply a much bigger range of factors that states are using to judge schools, factors that are still largely unfamiliar to the public at large, such as chronic absenteeism. ESSA is legally authorized only through the middle of 2020, but theres virtually no expectation that Capitol Hill will revisit the law any time soon. Accountability is still very much in its infancy, and data is still very much in its infancy, Kowalski said. We need to let some of these measures bake and marinate and simmer a little bit, so we can better understand how we know if kids are learning. At the same time, she said, as attention has drifted away from how states and schools are handling ESSA, much of the education community is kind of dropping the ball. That inattention could hurt efforts to figure out whats worked and what hasnt whenever Washington lawmakers start looking at how to revamp ESSA, she noted. Tough to Pin Down Just finding out what states are doing on major accountability issues, many months after DeVos approved the last outstanding state plan, isnt easy even for experts. When Elizabeth Ross, the director of K-12 state policy at the consulting firm HCM Strategists, was working on a report published in November on school improvement work under ESSA and checked what state education department websites said about their school improvement practices, some of the sites hadnt been updated since before ESSA passed. HCMs report, one of the more recent surveys covering ESSA implementation, found that at the time, just 17 states had enough public information about the topic for the groups report to consider. With some states, we got the sense that they were still hiding the data, Ross said. Among positive trends, Ross and her team identified Louisianas efforts to create a statewide school improvement strategy focused on curriculum and teachers; Colorados streamlined application to help districts get services and funding for improvement work; and Tennessees soup-to-nuts approach in helping districts conduct a needs assessment, create priorities, and set goals. Were trusting that things are going well. But we know that a lot of things are happening behind the scenes, Ross said. From his position as the chairman of the Wisconsin Senates education committee, Sen. Luther Olsen, a Republican, said he virtually never hears from educators about ESSA. Thats not necessarily a bad thing in Olsens book: His overriding concern is how, or whether, Wisconsin is going to meet its ESSA goal of cutting in half the achievement gap between groups of students such as white students and their black and Latino peers over five years. I dont really want to get into telling schools how to run their business, Olsen said. We just want to hold them accountable for the outcomes. At the same time, hes worried that if his state and others eventually cant prove that theyre meeting the expectations theyve laid out under ESSA, the temptation from the feds is going to be [to say]: Well, we gave you a chance. Now we have to put the hammer to you again. Lynn Jennings, the senior director of national and state partnerships at the Education Trust, which advocates for civil rights in education, said early returns for accountability under ESSA when it comes to actual outcomes arent necessarily encouraging. According to a preliminary analysis Jennings conducted of the first year of North Carolinas school grades under ESSA, 24 percent of schools receiving an A also had at least one group of students receiving an F. Further down the list, the vast majority of North Carolina schools receiving a B grade86 percenthad at least one subgroup getting a D or F rating, according to Jennings early study of the numbers. She said those kinds of statistics reinforce her concerns that much of the public might get a misleading impression of school performance. How do we make sure that those students, those children, are not forgotten? Jennings said. There are groups, coalitions, that have made equity a focus. ... There are definitely some states where groups have come together and said: We definitely want to work together on these issues. The lack of clarity on accountability can extend beyond measures such as school ratings into the realm of financial transparency. As of last month, for example, just five states had complied with the laws requirements to publish detailed spending figures on a school-by-school basis, including such information as the amount of various funding sources, according to a Data Quality Campaign analysis. California Battle California has become one of the more heated battlegrounds for what kind of information is shared with the public and whats done with it. The state has adopted a color-coded dashboard system, which assigns ratings to different factors of a schools performance but not an overall score. In February, the state released for the first time a list of hundreds of public schools identified as needing improvement under ESSAs categories. The states system represents the progression of an ongoing debate between fans of a hands-off approach to school improvement and those who believe the Golden States strategy will simply let districts off the hook. For years, the state has often disdained what officials have said is top-down and narrow accountability directed at least in part by officials in Washington. Its important to remember that the environment for key decisions about accountability can vary dramatically from state to state, said Dale Chu, an independent education consultant whos previously worked at the Florida and Indiana education departments. Whatever their priorities, states need to articulate clear principles and actively engage with their districts, even if it means districts dont always like what the state lays out: Tension is good in these circumstances. At the same time, Chu said he was skeptical of what he called the just trust us model for accountability. There are still a lot of questions, he said. If youre a California parent and you want to compare how your school is doing to other schools, theres no way to do it. Yet the publics attitudes toward these accountability systems isnt easy to predict and may not fit neatly with some advocates concerns. In a poll of Californians conducted by the University of Southern Californias Rossier School of Education and the research group Policy Analysis for California Education, 65 percent of voters who saw the states dashboard had a positive impression, while just 19 percent had a negative impression. Among parents, the gap was even larger: 81 percent reported a positive impression, while 11 percent said they had a negative impression. Its also fair to question how engaged the public is on the topic: The same poll found that just 17 percent of voters and 38 percent of parents had visited the dashboard at least once or twice. Jennings of Education Trust said the issue of getting people who havent gotten involved with ESSA to work on such issues as school grades is still one of her biggest priorities. Now were getting more of the data, its becoming real. Implementation is becoming real, Jennings said. The rubber is really meeting the road now. Can a new assessment for students help schools create a more literate citizenry? By trying to align tests more closely with curriculum and standardswhile developing an assessment format that covers both English/language arts and social studiesLouisiana officials are working to develop a system they say is used successfully in other countries. And they say theres no reason it cant work here. Louisiana, along with New Hampshire, is one of two states so far to win federal approval to try out new tests that differ from the traditional end-of-year summative exams that became the norm after the No Child Left Behind Acts passage nearly two decades ago and continue into the Every Student Succeeds Act era. Through ESSAs Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority, up to seven states can establish, operate, and evaluate a new testing system that they plan to eventually take statewide. Crucially, these pilot exams must gauge students progress to the same standards as the state tests already in use, and they must be aligned with state standards. So far, the federal pilot program hasnt attracted much interest: In the second round of the application period with the U.S. Department of Education near the end of last year, only Georgia and North Carolina applied, although Hawaii, Kansas, and South Carolina previously expressed interest. The lack of interest is likely because theres no additional federal money for the pilot, as well as technical challenges for states to overcome. The Louisiana pilot relies on the states model curriculum, which roughly 80 percent of districts in Louisiana use. But more broadly, said Jessica Baghian, an assistant superintendent in the Louisiana education department, the pilot is a step toward the states goal of aligning high-quality standards, curriculum, and tests, while also attempting to ensure that a wider group of students is exposed to important background and topical knowledge in the classroom. We think its ultimately an equity play, Baghian said. Hot and Warm Reads In 2015, New Hampshire won federal approval to conduct a pilot of competency-based exams in a few districtscompetency-based learning allows students to demonstrate proficiency in a topic without a prerequisite amount of seat time. The state used the assessment pilot application to continue this programwith some changeswhich is called the Performance Assessment of Competency Education. By contrast, Louisiana is trying out its own approach for the first time this school year. The pilot is being conducted with the participation of 2,400 students in the 7th grade, with the goal of making it operational for 7,400 students in grades 6-8 in the 2019-20 school year in districts that are using the states model curriculum and choose to participate. (This year, the pilot is under way in four districts, including one charter school district.) Essentially, the assessment Louisiana is piloting will consist of three sections, with each building upon the previous one. The first will include texts students have already had exposure to in class, called hot reads by the state, in order to grasp their understanding of material at the core of the states model curriculum. The state calls this material anchor texts. The second will ask students to deal with warm reads, which consist of reading material related to the hot reads. On this portion of the pilot exam, students will be asked to demonstrate their knowledge of things like setting and the authors strategy. Finally, the third section will require students to write an essay based on both the hot reads and warm reads. Literate Citizenry The description of the pilot proposal, titled, Literate Citizenry in Public Schools: A New Vision for Assessment in Louisiana, says that a focus on discrete reading skills dominates English classrooms. But students with relatively large amounts of background knowledge, the state pointed out, tend to read at higher levels. Adults comprehend and evaluate news articles, workplace documents, novels, web pages, and social-media posts not just because they know what individual words mean but because they know something about the topic each text contains, the state wrote in its proposal. Baghian said traditional standardized tests often assume a certain level of background knowledgesuch as whether students know about or have seen Leonardos Mona Lisa, for examplebut in a way that often prioritizes relatively privileged life experiences rather than what students have actually dealt with in class. She said the approach Louisiana is taking in the pilot is more focused on students classroom instruction and experiences, relies on teachers to build the items, and has generated positive feedback from students so far. The test felt like it was a culmination of what theyd done in class, more so than the tests theyre used to taking, Baghian said. The next round of the pilot will take place in May, after an initial round at the start of this year. Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment who has worked with Louisiana on the pilot, said, The lack of connection between actual curriculum and assessments is a unique feature of educational systems in the United States. (The center works on testing and accountability with states and districts.) Programs such as the International Baccalaureate, Marion said, rely on the same model Louisianas pilot ultimately does. Its always that trade-off of flexibility and standardization, Marion said. How do we make things comparable but flexible? Others involved in studying, creating, and evaluating new forms of assessment say that efforts in Louisiana and New Hampshire could eventually affect what happens in federal policy down the road. The conversations started by the pilot, even among the vast majority of states that havent indicated an interest in the pilot itself so far, could lead to dramatic changes across the country in testing, said Lillian Pace, the vice president of policy and advocacy at KnowledgeWorks, a nonprofit that works on personalized learning and trends in teaching. Can we get different models to emerge so that we can evaluate them and figure out what assessment could look like when we get to the next reauthorization of [federal education law]? Baghian made it clear that in the states view, the new test is not some sort of magic elixir for challenges in Louisiana public schools: The test is not going to solve achievement gaps. And Cynthia Posey, the legislative director for the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, said her union is still waiting to see whether the new assessment will disrupt instruction in social studies as well as English/language arts. Shes worried that despite what the state says, the model curriculums emphasis on what she called cold reads (dealing with texts students havent previously encountered) could cause problems with the assessment pilot. A spokeswoman for the state education department said that view is based on a misunderstanding of the model curriculum. Posey also said she still doesnt know how the test will be used in teacher evaluations. (Test scores in certain grades and subjects currently factor into state teacher ratings.) Theres just a whole bunch of unanswered questions about it, Posey said. Louisianas approach to the challenge of orienting tests toward students deep knowledge of a topic rather than rote skills is creative and holds potential, said Sandy Kress, who worked on the legislation that became the No Child Left Behind law as an adviser to President George W. Bush. But Kress cited three key issues that have hobbled previous attempts at new assessments. First, can we see the innards of the test they propose? And second, can we determine whether it is aligned in a solid way with the standards of the state? he said. The third aspect would be maybe the most complicated: Can it be used by the state in terms of measuring different levels of proficiency? The Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed with bipartisan fanfare in 2015, has been the law of the land for more than three years. But for states and school districts, some of the most important workincluding putting out more transparent school report cards and figuring out how to fix low-performing schoolsis just beginning. The changes brought by ESSA are subtle and not easy to see, said Carissa Moffat Miller, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. Implementation isnt one of those things thats headline-grabbing, she said. Its really hard work to put things in place. Its really hard to explain to people whats different here. So what are the big questions facing ESSA as it rolls out in school districts around the country? Heres a check-in on the nations main K-12 education law: Where does implementation of ESSA stand? ESSA has been in full swing for some time at the U.S. Department of Education and state education agencies. But many schools havent seen a huge impact from it yet. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has approved every states plan to implement the law. The majority of states have flagged their lowest-performing schools and high schools where less than two-thirds of students graduate for what the law calls comprehensive school improvement, using data from the 2017-18 school year. In many states, districts are submitting plans to fix those schools. Those plans must be approved by the state. Were going from identifying low-performing schools to trying to do something about it, said Phillip Lovell, the vice president for policy development and government relations at the Alliance for Excellent Education, a research and advocacy organization in Washington. But the action is still largely on paper, its still sort of planning phase in many respects. From a childs perspective, implementation has barely begun. Later this year, states will begin identifying schools for what the law calls additional targeted support and improvement. These are schools that might look fineeven really goodoverall, but where at least one subgroup of students, such as English-language learners, students in special education, racial minorities, or poor children, is performing as poorly as the students in the bottom 5 percent of Title I schools, which have large percentages of low-income students. States also have to annually issue updated report cards, which will include new school-by-school spending data that will help show whether schools that are spending similar amounts of money are getting similar academic results. Meanwhile, governors and state chiefs who came to power after the 2018 election are itching to make changes to their plans. Case in point: New Mexicos new Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, wants to rework key parts of the ESSA plan put in place by her predecessor, GOP Gov. Susana Martinez. Those include teacher evaluation, school ratings, school improvement, testing, and more. Indiana, Michigan, and other states are also mulling tweaks to their ESSA plans. ESSA was supposed to bring about bold new thinking at the state level. So did it? When ESSA passed at the end of 2015, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., one of the bills main architects, predicted that it would unleash a flood of innovation in states and districts across the country. More than three years later, Chad Aldeman, a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a consulting organization, said hes not seeing it. In terms of actual accountability or consequences for schools, I think were seeing the absence of a flood of innovation, said Aldeman, who led a 50-state review of ESSA plans. Im seeing a desert. The CCSSOs Miller, though, said states are embracing new strategies and initiatives driven by the law. Its just not always eye-popping work. She cited Ohios focus on continuous improvement for all its schools, not just the lowest performers. And she noted that Illinois has put in place IL-Empower, which helps districts and schools find improvement partners. But few states and districts have taken the department up on some of the new flexibilities ESSA offers. Only two so farLouisiana and New Hampshirehave been approved for the laws Innovative Assessment pilot, which allows states to try out new forms of testing in a handful of districts before taking them statewide. Two othersGeorgia and North Carolinahave applied for the program. Up to seven states can participate in the pilot, at least initially. And just half a dozen districts want to participate in the laws weighted student funding pilot, even though up to 50 districts could take advantage of it. That pilot allows districts to combine federal, state, and local dollars into a single funding stream tied to individual students. English-language learners, children in poverty, students in special educationin short, students who cost more to educatecarry with them more money than other students. In theory, adopting a weighted student-funding formula could make it easier and more attractive for districts to operate school choice programs, since money would be tied to individual students and could therefore follow them to charter or virtual public schools. But most of the districts that applied to participate in the pilot arent planning to use the flexibility that way. Thats not to say there have been no changes at all. One of the biggest: States are now measuring factors that get at school quality and student success alongside test scores. More than thirty-five states and the District of Columbia, for example, are looking at chronic absenteeism or attendance as one of those school quality indicators, according to the nonprofit Attendance Works. And more than 40 states are looking at college-and-career readiness. Districts also got new funding flexibility under the law through a new program, the Student Success and Academic Enrichment Grants, better known as Title IV. The program was funded at $1.1 billion in the 2018-19 school year. Districts can use the money for the arts, health, safety, foreign language, college-and-career-ready coursework, and more. Districts could also choose to shift the funding to Title II, the part of the law that deals with teacher training, or Title I, which deals with disadvantaged students. Not many districts went with the transfer option, according to a survey conducted last year by the National Association of Federal Education Program Administrators and Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting organization. For the most part, districts chose to spend money on social-emotional learning, STEMscience, technology, engineering, and mathcourses, and professional development, according to the survey. Also high on the list: school safety. Notably, however, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating funding for the Title IV program in its latest budget. What approach has the U.S. Department of Education taken to ESSA implementation? The department hasnt issued much guidance for states on the new law, preferring instead to develop materials to help parents better understand ESSA, including a guide specifically for families, released last fall. Instead of Dear Colleague letters, I much prefer Dear Parent letters, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told the National School Boards Association earlier this year, according to prepared remarks. I encourage you to lead within your state. Embrace the freedom ESSA allows and the freedom for which many of you fought. But DeVos has also been critical of states approaches to implementation. Last year, she berated states in a speech to CCSSO. Let me be clear: Just because a plan complies with the law doesnt mean it does whats best for students, she said. Whatever the reasons, I see too many plans that only meet the bare minimum required by the law. Sure, they may pass muster around conference tables in Washington, but the bare minimum wont pass muster around kitchen tables. Beyond voicing those concerns, she has done little to change the course of the laws implementation, however. Some worry the departments hands-off approach could hinder its ability to make sure states are serving historically overlooked groups of students. States want to do the right thing, said Scott Sargrad, who served in the department during the Obama administration and is now the vice president for K-12 education policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. They want to follow the law. Ive heard from some folks that they are not getting the clarity they need of what is and isnt allowable and what some best practices might be that they should consider. ESSA was supposed to provide states and districts with flexibility while looking out for vulnerable groups of students. Does it? That depends on who you ask. Civil rights organizationsand Democrats in Congressare deeply concerned that the Education Department has approved state plans that violate the law, in part because schools in those states can still get high ratings on state accountability systems, even if vulnerable subgroups of students arent performing well. In fact, in 2017, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrats in Congress on K-12 policy, sent a letter to DeVos saying she had failed to adequately address several shortcomings in ESSA plans. And in February, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights sent a letter to state chiefs telling them that their ESSA plans allow schools to overlook vulnerable children and will undermine ESSAs purpose to provide all children significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps. Whats more, education experts find it problematic that a handful of statesincluding Colorado, Florida, Michigan, and Utahhave one accountability system to meet the federal requirements and a separate system for the state. Those competing systems send mixed messages about what schools should actually be expected to focus on, said Anne Hyslop, the assistant director of policy development and government relations at the Alliance for Excellent Education and a former Obama education staffer. But Miller of the CCSSO said that equity has underpinned states planning and implementation of the law. The key on this law was reporting out subgroup performance. And that has continued to be a focus area for states, she said. ESSA promised flexibility for states and districts. Did it deliver? That also depends on who you ask. States feel that its been broad enough and wide enough for them to be able to customize it to their state and their stakeholders, Miller said. But some district leaders say they dont notice that much of a difference between ESSA and its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act. The concept of freeing schools and districts from so many federal guidelines is a good one, but often the concept and reality do not match, said Tess Smith, the superintendent in Mississippis Lamar County school district. We still have to follow all of our state mandates as well, which I believe has led to more student assessments for us. Andrew Hill, the superintendent of the Wadsworth City school district near Cleveland, agreed."I cant think of anything huge that says, Wow, [ESSA] had this immediate impact, Hill said. Hill wants to see the leeway given to states trickle down to districts. With the federal government taking a step backwards like they did, Im hoping that states [use] that as an example and allow for more local control. But Jillian Balow, Wyomings superintendent of public instruction, said that while the new law provides a lot of leeway, there are limitations, and those are intentional. There are still a lot of guardrails with ESSA, and we want that to be the case, she said. We didnt want to start with a blank slate when we had a lot of really good things in place that school districts and states have been working on for a long time. Its been up to states, she said, to explain that to districts. You cant just say, You have flexibility now, without providing guidance in where that flexibility lies. And thats been part of the lift for states. Will Congress ever revisit ESSA? Believe it or not, ESSA technically expires in about 1 yearsthe law only authorizes appropriations through the end of federal fiscal year 2020, which wraps up in September of that year. But dont expect lawmakers to dive into ESSA 2.0 anytime soon. So far, theres no groundswell to change the law, Bellwethers Aldeman said. ESSA still feels too new for lots of people. We havent learned about what would need to change with the law in the next reauthorization, he said. And Congress has other things on its plate, including tackling a revamp of special education and higher education laws. Even on education, its way down the list of priorities. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) Authorities seized three kilos of cocaine stored in children's books at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) last week, the National Bureau of Investigation said. In a statement Monday, the NBI said it arrested three suspects in Pasay and Pasig City who sought to transport 3.297 kilos of cocaine abroad. The drugs were found hidden in five children's books in the suspect's luggage. The NBI said Ma. Clara Q. Bedico was intercepted by authorities on March 28 after she was offloaded from her flight. A tipster earlier told authorities she was to take a flight to Thailand and Brazil to transport the drugs. Bedico was meeting with an accomplice, Alvin Avila, in a restaurant at the NAIA Terminal 3 when drug enforcement officers conducted a consented search on their belongings. "Noticing that the books were unusually heavy, (Special Action Unit) operatives ripped them open and discovered that the inner portions of its hardbound covers were filled with white powdery substance suspected to be cocaine," the NBI statement detailed. The investigation also revealed that the two suspects were set to meet with another accomplice in Pasig City, identified as Antonette Mendiola. Mendiola was arrested on March 29. All three suspects were presented for inquest proceedings at the Justice Department for possession and transportation of dangerous drugs, the NBI added. Officials said the operation was linked to the Western African Drug Syndicate (WADS), a group that allegedly recruits Filipino women to be couriers through a "work abroad scheme" promoted online. "These interested Filipino women are being enticed to transport to other countries jewelries which in fact are dangerous drugs," the NBI explained. Error, group does not exist! Check your syntax! (ID: 17) . Electricity customers and the public in South Africa experienced Stage 2 (2000 MW) manual rotating load shedding in late 2018 and Stage 4 (4000 MW) in February and March 2019. However, while Nero fiddles the prospect of further load shedding is set to continue in the months ahead. But there seems little sign that the bureaucrats at the South African Department of Energy (DoE), the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa), and the countrys national electricity utility, Eskom, have quite grasped the depth of the problem, or what is required to bring new generation capacity on stream quickly. Eskom Generation week-on-week energy availability factor (EAF) for 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 to week 12. Click on above graph for higher resolution. (Data source: Eskom; Graph: EE Publishers) Having failed in the old Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela, South Africa still seems committed to a central command and control approach, particularly when it comes to electricity policy, planning, regulation and implementation. Unfortunately, this is proving to be way too slow and cumbersome for the needs of the modern economy. If there is one thing that the failed e-tolls project should have taught us is that, in the 4th Industrial Revolution, centrally imposed solutions that are not seen by customers to have their interests and needs at heart, will not work. Increasingly, customers have options and choices, including the option to ignore imposed solutions they perceive to be unworkable and dysfunctional. Small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) in South Africa Another example beyond that of e-tolls is now raising its ugly head. This comes in the form of the unworkable DoE, Nersa and Eskom policies, regulations, procedures and implementation of distributed small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) in South Africa. SSEG comprises grid-tied and off-grid solar photo-voltaic (solar PV) and other relatively small power generation systems (typically up to about 10 MW) installed by customers behind the meter on their premises. This is done for own use, or to reduce grid electricity consumption costs, or even to supply electricity into the grid for use by others. SSEG is generally applied in domestic, commercial, industrial and agricultural environments in homes, buildings, warehouses, parking lots, factories, mines and farms. In times of rising electricity prices and utility supply constraints, SSEG provides benefits to the customer by reducing grid electricity usage costs and increasing security of supply, as well benefits to a constrained utility that is unable to meet electricity demand from its own centralised generation capacity and grid. In metros such as Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, Cape Town and others, the grid electrical energy and demand charges of existing electricity tariffs are already exceptionally high for commercial and industrial customers. For such customers, who use electricity mainly during the daylight working hours, the business case for solar PV SSEG is already a no-brainer, based on grid electricity cost savings alone. Furthermore, SSEG has been identified as the quickest option to bring literally thousands of megawatts of new generation capacity to the grid within six months to one year, at no cost to the fiscus, Eskom or municipal electricity distributors, in order to relieve Eskom of the burden, which it is clearly failing to meet. In light of these opportunities, the response by the DoE, Nersa and Eskom has been truly dismal. Policy, regulatory and implementation chaos On 10 November 2017, a Licensing Exemption and Registration Notice for SSEG up to 1 MW was published by the Minister of Energy in the form of Schedule 2 in the Electricity Regulation Act (ERA), to replace the previous Schedule 2 in the Act. This new Schedule 2 exempted SSEG installations up to 1 MW from the burdensome requirement of having to be licenced by Nersa, but instead requires grid-tied and off-grid SSEG installations up to 1 MW to be registered with Nersa following a new registration process still to be put in place. In addition, the new Schedule 2 requires all grid-tied and off-grid SSEG installations above 1 MW, whether for own use or not, to have an allocation within the national Integrated Resource Plan for Electricity (IRP). If no allocation is provided in the IRP, then permission from the Minister of Energy to deviate from the IRP is required on a case-by-case basis. In addition, a full generation licence from the regulator, Nersa, is required for all SSEG installations above 1 MW, following the same process as that required for a large Eskom power station of say 3600 MW. But the madness continues. The notice of 11 November 2017 contained several inconsistencies, misunderstandings and errors. Therefore on 8 June 2018, the Minister of Energy published draft SSEG regulations (rules) and a notice of intention to amend the above Schedule 2 in the ERA, for public comment by 8 July 2018. But despite the public comment process having taken place, to this day the flawed Schedule 2 of 10 November 2017 has never been amended, and the SSEG regulations (rules) have never been published or gazetted. Then in November 2018, the DoE provided Nersa with a new draft Licensing Exemption and Registration Notice and Schedule 2 for SSEG installations up to 1 MW for concurrence by Nersa following a public process, before promulgation and gazetting. To date this has not been done. Instead, on 15 December 2018 Nersa issued a notice and commenced a public comment process over the festive season (closing 15 January 2019) in respect of a proposed R200 registration fee for SSEG installations. Following from this, a R200 registration fee was decided upon by Nersa, but the R200 registration fee has never been gazetted, and the affected SSEG sector has never been advised. Then in February 2019, the DoE provided Nersa with yet a further revised draft Licensing Exemption and Registration Notice and Schedule 2 for SSEG installations up to 1 MW for concurrence by Nersa following a public process, before promulgation and gazetting. Again, to date this has still not been done. However Nersa has advised EE Publishers that this second revised Notice and Schedule 2 is expected to go to the Nersa electricity sub-committee (ESC) and Nersa board for review in April 2019, after which there will likely be a 30-day public comment process, followed (hopefully) by concurrence by Nersa. The Notice and Schedule 2, once concurred by Nersa, will then revert back to the DoE for review by the Minister of Energy, before final gazetting. No timeline has yet been provided. Then in mid-March 2019, without advising the affected industry in any way, Nersa surreptitiously published the Registration Procedure for SSEG installations up to 1 MW dated 20 August 2018 on its website. The registration procedure is however based on the flawed Schedule 2 of 10 November 2017 in the ERA, which the Minister of Energy announced on 8 June 2018 would be amended. The regulations (rules) for SSEG installations that were published by the minister of energy on 8 June 2018 for public comment have still not been gazetted, and no timeline has been provided for this. Where things stand now In the meantime, on 27 March 2019 Nersa formally advised EE Publishers that, to date, Nersa has not accepted a single application for registration of an SSEG installation up to 100 kW. Instead Nersa has been advising prospective applicants to await the amended Schedule 2 of the ERA, as the requirements for registration may change. Nersa has also advised EE Publishers that, to date, only 18 applications for registration of SSEG installations from 100 kW to 1 MW have been received, while one has been rejected, and the remaining 17 are still being processed. The applications would then need to be approved by the Nersa ESC and board before registration can take place. Thus, to date, not a single SSEG installation up to 1 MW has been registered by Nersa since the Licensing Exemption and Registration Notice for SSEG up to 1 MW was published by the Minister of Energy on 11 November 2017. As indicated earlier, SSEG installations above 1 MW require authorisation by the Minister of Energy for deviation from the IRP, as there is no allocation in the current IRP2010-2030 for SSEG above 1 MW. For about a year now, DoE officials have been advising prospective applicants for SSEG installations above 1 MW to await the new IRP, which may include an allocation for SSEG installations above 1 MW. The latest draft IRP2019 has only recently been received by Nedlac, and is currently undergoing a Nedlac consultation process between government, business, labour and communities. Only thereafter can the draft IRP2019 proceed to the cabinet for policy intervention, before final approval and gazetting. Nedlac has advised EE Publishers that its process typically takes between three and six months. Power to some customers Incumbent monopoly electricity utilities and electricity distributors perceive that the widespread adoption of SSEG undermines their revenue and business case. As well-heeled domestic, commercial, industrial and agricultural customers install SSEG to protect their interests, they argue that poorer customers will face rising prices as utilities increase their tariffs to cover their declining sales volumes in terms of the current regulatory pricing dispensation. Some customers see the chaotic policy, legal, regulatory and implementation framework for SSEG in South Africa as perhaps just another symptom of incompetence by and mismanagement between the various sate entities. Others suggest that factions within the DoE, Nersa and Eskom are deliberately trying to delay and frustrate the adoption of SSEG as a part their political agendas to protect vested interests in the status quo. It should be noted that, in theory, an SSEG installation up to 1 MW cannot be legally connected to the distribution grid or operated unless it has been registered with Nersa. Similarly, in theory, SSEG installations above 1 MW cannot be legally connected to the distribution grid or operated without written permission to deviate from the IRP from the Minister of Energy, and a generation license from Nersa. The reality, of course, is that in face of cumbersome and dysfunctional SSEG policies, regulations and procedures, the legal requirements of the central planners and regulator are simply ignored as customers do their own thing, knowing that the regulations are essentially unenforceable. However one thing is certain: SSEG provides the quickest option at least cost to government and Eskom for new generation capacity in South Africa. By lifting the policy and regulatory hurdles, and through active encouragement and incentivisation, SSEG could deliver several thousand megawatts of new generation capacity within six months to one year that would avoid Stage 4 load shedding of the productive economy during daylight working hours. Related Articles Australian senator was criticized over Islamophobic comments Queensland lawmaker Fraser Anning says he feels no remorse. The Australian senator whose controversial remarks blaming Muslim immigration for the New Zealand terror attacks in March was severely criticized by his fellow lawmakers on Tuesday. "BASIC LACK OF HUMANITY" Fraser Anning, an independent senator representing Queensland said he felt "no remorse" for his comments. Acting Australian government Senate leader Simon Birmingham slammed Anning for his "basic lack of humanity." Press Trust of India (PTI) quoted reported. "His conduct betrays the rights you have to freedom of speech," said Birmingham. At least 50 Muslims were massacred, with as many injured, in an alleged white supremacist terror attack by an Australian-born man during congregational Friday prayers in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15. Amid global outcry against the massacre, Anning had tweeted: "Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?" The Australian senator was blasted for his racist remarks, receiving an egg to his head from teenage boy Will Connolly while speaking to reporters shortly after the attack. Showing no guilt, he issued a statement saying: "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." Birmingham said Anning had acted in a way that "would potentially fuel more acts of terrorism and violence." "You have failed the test of character I would expect of anybody who is elected to this place," he told Anning. Accused white supremacist Brenton Tarrant has been charged with murder for the shootings. A public online petition garnering more than one million signatures has set Anning to face official censure in Parliament on Wednesday, according to the daily Sydney Morning Herald. The petition called for his removal from the national legislature. Israeli forces detain 11 Palestinians in W. Bank The Israeli army frequently carries out wide-ranging arrest campaigns across the occupied West Bank on the pretext of searching for wanted Palestinians. The Israeli army rounded up 11 Palestinians in overnight raids carried out across the occupied West Bank, according to a military statement issued on Monday. MANY PALESTINIANS ARE IN DETAINS The individuals were detained for suspected involvement in popular terrorist activities, the army said without elaborating on the nature of said activities. Detained individuals have since been referred to the relevant authorities for further investigation, according to the statement. According to estimates, roughly 5,800 Palestinians are currently languishing in Israeli detention facilities, including women, children and a handful of lawmakers. In a related development, a group of Jewish settlers on Monday vandalized several Palestinian vehicles in Jerusalems Beit Hanina neighborhood, where they also spray-painted racist slogans on the walls of Palestinian homes, according to witnesses. Attacks by Israeli settlers usually target Muslim and Christian holy sites in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and Arab villages located inside Israel. The Beit Hanina neighborhood is located near the Jewish-only Pisgat Ze'ev settlement, which was built in the early 1980s on expropriated Palestinian land. According to Palestinian figures, more than 650,000 Israeli settlers currently live on 196 settlements (built with the Israeli governments approval) and more than 200 settlers outposts (built without its approval) across the occupied West Bank. Israeli soldiers killed Palestinian near Ramallah Palestinian shot multiple times by Israeli forces while driving his car in Qalandia refugee camp in occupied territory. A Palestinian young man was martyred and two others injured by Israeli forces near occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, the Palestinian Health Ministry said on Tuesday. ONE DEAD TWO INJURED Mohammad Edwan, 23, was shot multiple times by Israeli forces while driving his car in the Qalandia refugee camp southern Ramallah, the ministry said in a statement. The Palestinian victim was shot more than ten times by the forces who left him to bleed to death, it added. According to the ministry, two other Palestinians were injured after clashes erupted in the refugee camp. Dozens of Israeli forces stormed Qalandia checkpoint and other neighborhoods in Ramallah at dawn, triggering clashes with dozens of Palestinians. Jamal Khashoggi's children paid by Saudi government The children of Jamal Khashoggi were given million-dollar houses and large monthly payments as blood money by the Saudi government, according to the Washington Post. Saudi Arabia is compensating the children of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi for his murder, The Washington Post reported Monday. "AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE A WRONG RIGHT" Each of the children were given houses in Jeddah worth as much as $4 million apiece as part of a preliminary settlement and they are also receiving monthly payments, the Post reported. The Post said the five-figure payments that Khashoggi's two sons and daughters were getting "are part of an effort...aimed in part at ensuring that they continue to show restraint in their public statements about the killing of their father." "The delivery of homes and monthly payments of $10,000 or more to each sibling were approved late last year by King Salman as part of what one former official described as an acknowledgment that 'a big injustice has been done' and an attempt 'to make a wrong right'," it said. "BLOOD MONEY" The children may also receive payments -- up to tens of millions of dollars apiece -- as part of "blood money" negotiations with the Saudi government, said the newspaper, adding that the Khashoggi siblings have refrained from "any harsh criticism" of the Saudi kingdom. According to the Post, a Saudi official described the payments as consistent with the countrys practice of providing financial support to victims of violent crime or natural disasters. The official denied the suggestion that the Khashoggi family would be obligated to remain silent. "Such support is part of our custom and culture," the newspaper quoted the official as saying. "It is not attached to anything else." Turkey has sought the extradition of the Saudi citizens involved in the killing as well as a fuller accounting of the killing from Riyadh. The Saudi public prosecutor indicted 11 unnamed individuals in November last year, and secret court hearings began in January. Jeremy Corbyn meets PKK supporters The leader of the British Labour Party is in solidarity with PKK supporters who protest the imprisonment of PKK ringleader. British lawmakers rejected the governments Brexit deal for a third time, leaving the UK facing the stark prospect of a chaotic departure from the EU in just two weeks. And yet, the countrys opposition party leader is out to provoke PKK supporters instead of trying to solve the chaos in Parliament. 'SYMPATHY' SPEECH The leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, met with PKK provocateurs in Wales who wants support for PKK terror organization leader Abdullah Ocalan. Corbyn also expressed sympathy with the hunger strikers which protesting the imprisonment of PKK ringleader Abdullah Ocalan. Turkey sends aid to Colombia State aid agency distributes construction equipment to help repair building damage, resume work. Turkeys state aid agency distributed aid last week in western Colombia after floods left more than 7,000 homeless. MATERIALS TO HELP IN REPAIRS The Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) provided local farmers and shopkeepers equipment and materials to help in repairs of damaged buildings in Istmina, Choco, the agency said in a written statement on Sunday. TIKA also sent school supplies to 140 students in Andres Bello Primary School in the same region. Governor Jhoany Palacios had called for aid after flooding in the San Juan River devastated local people who were already living in extreme poverty, now having lost their livelihoods. TIKA sent locals construction tools such as shovels, chainsaws, drilling equipment and field measurement devices to help them resume work and repair damages from the deluge. Luis Ignacio Munoz, a member of the Colombian National Center for Disaster Management, coordinated the assistance. "Our mission is to help international organizations to reach the assistance to the victims as soon as possible. We know that TIKA's activities cover not only the Choco region but also many parts of Colombia and we congratulate them for their efforts," he said. UK Parliament rejects four alternative Brexit proposals British MPs failed once again to find any way out of the Brexit chaos after a series of alternatives were rejected in the Parliament. British MPs rejected four alternative Brexit proposals Monday, failing to form a majority behind any of them. THE VOTES NOT CLEAR Lawmakers indicative votes on the alternatives to Prime Minister Theresa Mays three-times-rejected deal or to a no-deal Brexit produced no clear way forward again. One of the alternatives, which suggested that the UK leave the European Union but remain in the customs union, was narrowly defeated by three votes as 273 MPs voted for and 276 against it. Speaking after the results were announced, Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said no solution has won a majority, but parliament can avoid a no-deal Brexit by approving Mays deal in a fourth vote this week. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn underlined that one of the options was narrowly defeated and could be voted on again. Nick Boles the Conservative MP behind the Common Market 2.0 proposal, under which the UK would leave the EU but remain in the European common market said he regretted to announce his amendment had failed. Boles said he will refuse to sit in the House of Commons as a Conservative member, announcing his resignation from the party. The eight alternatives voted on last week were all rejected, but four of those receiving the most votes were brought back to parliament Monday, with only 11 days remaining before the EUs extended deadline is reached. EXPECTED TO CHAIR A CABINET MEETING The EU recently granted a Brexit extension, saying the deadline is April 12 if the House of Commons did not approve Mays deal by the end of last week. Mays deal was rejected last Friday for the third time. Earlier in Mondays debate on the alternatives, Conservative MP Richard Drax said he voted for Mays deal last week but regretted doing so, calling on the prime minister to immediately resign. May is expected to chair a cabinet meeting Tuesday. She said last week she would resign as premier if parliament passed her deal. The EU announced last week that it would hold an emergency Brexit summit on April 10. UK voters decided to leave the bloc after a more than 40-year-long membership following a referendum in 2016. Winning candidates to receive mayoral status Winning candidates to obtain mayoral status unless any objection to poll results, Turkish election authority says. Head of Turkey's election authority announced on Tuesday that mayoral status will be handed to winning candidates if there is no contest to the results of the poll. "ELECTION CERTIFICATE WILL BE GIVEN" Speaking to reporters in the capital Ankara, Sadi Guven, head of Supreme Electoral Council (YSK), said: The certificate of election will be given in places where there is no objection [to election results]. Guven also said that preliminary results of local polls were shared with political parties, and the process for applying to the YSK to contest the poll results continues through Wednesday. LOCAL ELECTION Millions of Turkish voters cast their votes nationwide Sunday in elections to choose Turkeys mayors, city council members, mukhtars (neighborhood officials) and members of elder councils for the next five years. Turkey's AK Party is leading in 15 metropolitan municipalities (larger cities), with 24 cities claimed by AK Party candidates, according to unofficial results. The CHPs Ekrem Imamoglu, with 48.79 percent of the votes, has a narrow lead over Yldrm, with 48.51 percent for Istanbul mayorship. Mansur Yavas, the CHPs mayoral candidate in Ankara, is leading with 50.91 percent of votes, according to unofficial results, with the AK Partys Mehmet Ozhaseki trailing at 47.1 percent. World's population to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 According to the UN report released on Monday, the world's population is projected to reach around 9.7 billion in 2050 and rise further to about 11 billion by the end of the century. The UN report is titled "Review and Appraisal of the Program of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and its contribution to the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development." POPULATION CONTINUES TO GROW The report was submitted by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the 52nd substantive session of the UN Commission on Population and Development, which was held on Monday. "The world's population, estimated at 7.7 billion in 2019, continues to grow, albeit at a decreasing rate. It is projected to continue growing, reaching around 9.7 billion in 2050 and rising further to roughly 11 billion by the end of the century," said the UN report. The NIA must adhere to its avowed role of matching the international investigation standards. The recent acquittal of the accused in the Samjhauta Express blast of 2007 near Panipat in Haryana that had killed 68 passengers, 44 of whom were Pakistani nationals, has led to reactions that are diametrically opposite. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has hailed the verdict as historic. Pakistan, on the other hand, has denounced it as a travesty of justice. However, what is notable and is a cause for concern is the effect on the credibility of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) that conducted the probe. This was reflected in the observations made by the NIA court. The judge of the special NIA court said that there were gaping holes in the evidence presented by the prosecution and that a dastardly act of violence is going unpunished due to the lack of admissible evidence. He put on record his deep pain and anguish while concluding the verdict. Among the four accused who were acquitted is Naba Kumar Sarkar alias Swami Aseemanand who was acquitted in 2018 by a special NIA court in the Ajmer blast case of October 2007 and also by the Hyderabad court in the Mecca Masjid blast of May 2007 and that killed nine persons. Both these cases were probed by the NIA and herein, too, the acquittal came due to the prosecution failing to prove any allegation against the accused. In the latter case, the Hyderabad police had at first arrested Muslims who were later released, but not before they were allegedly tortured in custody. The 2006 Malegaon bomb blast case in Maharashtra followed a similar trajectory, though the investigative body was not the NIA. A first-of-its-kind national study has found that a form of brain imaging that detects Alzheimer's-related "plaques" significantly influenced clinical management of patients with mild cognitive impairment and dementia. The study revealed that providing clinicians with the results of positron emission tomography (PET) scans that identify amyloid plaques in the brain changed medical management -- including the use of medications and counseling -- in nearly two-thirds of cases, more than double what researchers predicted in advance of the study. The technique, known as "amyloid PET imaging," also altered the diagnosis of the cause of cognitive impairment in more than one in three study participants. The multicenter study of more than 11,000 Medicare beneficiaries, published April 2, 2019 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was managed by the American College of Radiology and led by scientists at the Alzheimer's Association, UC San Francisco, Brown University School of Public Health, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Public Health, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, UC Davis School of Medicine, and the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. "We are impressed by the magnitude of these results, which make it clear that amyloid PET imaging can have a major impact on how we diagnose and care for patients with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of cognitive decline," said study lead author and principal investigator Gil Rabinovici, MD, Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. "These results present highly credible, large-scale evidence that amyloid PET imaging can be a powerful tool to improve the accuracy of Alzheimer's diagnosis and lead to better medical management, especially in difficult-to-diagnose cases," added Maria C. Carrillo, PhD, Alzheimer's Association chief science officer and a co-author of the study. "It is important that amyloid PET imaging be more broadly accessible to those who need it." Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the accumulation of both amyloid protein plaques and tau protein "tangles" in the brain, the presence of which are required for a definitive diagnosis. Until recently, amyloid plaques could only be detected by postmortem analysis of autopsied brain tissue. With the advent of amyloid PET -- which involves injecting patients with "tracer" molecules that stick to amyloid plaques and can be used to visualize their location in the brain -- it became possible to detect plaques with a brain scan and therefore more accurately diagnose people living with the disease. Though there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease, early diagnoses enable physicians to prescribe appropriate symptom-management therapies, counsel families on important safety and care-planning issues and direct people to clinical trials for promising new drugs. It also allows people with the disease and their families to plan for the future, including legal and financial issues, and accessing resources and support programs. PET imaging results that reveal no signs of amyloid buildup in the brain rule out Alzheimer's disease as the cause of memory loss, which can prompt an evaluation for alternative and sometimes reversible causes, such as medication side effects, sleep or mood disorders and other medical conditions. However, despite FDA approval of amyloid PET tracers, use of amyloid PET imaging to assist with the accurate diagnosis of the cause of someone's dementia is currently not covered by Medicare or health insurance plans, making it unavailable to most people. Launched in 2016, the four-year Imaging Dementia - Evidence for Amyloid Scanning (IDEAS) study was developed by a team of scientists convened by the Alzheimer's Association to determine whether learning the results amyloid PET imaging would change medical management and health outcomes of people with memory loss and cognitive decline. IDEAS recruited nearly 1,000 dementia specialists at 595 sites in the U.S. and enrolled more than 16,000 Medicare beneficiaries with mild cognitive impairment or dementia of uncertain cause. Under their Coverage with Evidence Development policy, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reimbursed amyloid PET scans conducted at 343 facilities and interpreted by more than 700 imaging specialists as part of this clinical study. "This was a uniquely real-world study that looked at the impact of amyloid PET imaging in community clinics and other non-academic settings, and demonstrates for the first time how much impact this technology has in real-world dementia care," Rabinovici said. The newly published results from the first phase of the IDEAS study focused on how amyloid PET scans altered physician diagnosis and treatment plans for the 11,409 participants who completed the study. As the study's primary endpoint, the scientists collected data on how physicians altered participants' medication prescriptions and counseling about safety and future planning. As a secondary endpoint, the researchers evaluated whether PET imaging results caused physicians to alter participants' diagnoses. Finally, several exploratory endpoints included physician decisions about referrals to Alzheimer's clinical trials. The newly published data reveal that physicians changed their clinical management of more than 60 percent of patients in the study, more than double the number the authors had predicted in advance. In participants who joined the study with mild cognitive impairment and whose brain scans revealed the presence of significant amyloid deposits, clinicians were twice as likely to prescribe Alzheimer's drugs following PET imaging (~40 percent prior to imaging vs. ~82 percent following imaging). In those with dementia and significant amyloid buildup on PET scans, prescriptions of these drugs rose from ~63 percent to ~91 percent after the study. Doctors discontinued the use of these drugs in some patients whose scans revealed little amyloid deposition. In addition, for approximately one quarter of study participants, physicians changed non-Alzheimer's drug prescriptions and counseling recommendations based on PET imaging results. PET scans that revealed no significant amyloid buildup led physicians to rule out Alzheimer's disease for approximately one in three patients who had previously been given an Alzheimer's diagnosis. On the other hand, PET scans that showed significant amyloid plaque buildup led to a new diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in nearly half of patients who had not previously been diagnosed with the disease. The researchers also discovered that one-third of participants who had previously been referred to Alzheimer's clinical trials showed no sign of amyloid buildup based on PET imaging, which generally rules out Alzheimer's disease as the cause of their cognitive symptoms. Based on the imaging results, physicians were able to ensure that nearly all patients referred to Alzheimer's trials were amyloid-positive (93 percent), which is critical to these trials' success. "Accurate diagnoses are critical to ensure patients are receiving the most appropriate treatments. In particular, Alzheimer's medications can worsen cognitive decline in people with other brain diseases," said Rabinovici. "But perhaps more fundamentally, people who come into the clinic with concerns about memory problems want answers. An early, definitive diagnosis may allow individuals to be part of planning for the next phase of their lives and to make decisions that otherwise would eventually need to be made by others." The IDEAS team is currently analyzing data on the study's second phase, which will examine how amyloid PET scans affect health outcomes following the scan. The researchers are using CMS claims data to document hospitalization rates and Emergency Department visits for IDEAS participants, and comparing them to participants with similar neurologic problems but who did not undergo amyloid PET. They plan to publish their findings in 2020. In addition, the researchers are developing a second study (known as New IDEAS) to include more people with both typical and atypical clinical presentations of Alzheimer's and recruit a study group that better reflects the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the national population. ### IDEAS Study Leadership: Rabinovici and Carrillo are co-chairs of the IDEAS Study along with Constantine Gatsonis, PhD, of Brown University School of Public Health; Bruce Hillner, MD, of Virginia Commonwealth University; Barry Siegel, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; and Rachel Whitmer, PhD, of UC Davis School of Medicine and the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, in Oakland, Calif. See the study online for a full list of authors and affiliations. Funding: The trial was funded by the Alzheimer's Association; the American College of Radiology; Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly and Company); General Electric Healthcare; and Life Molecular Imaging (formerly Piramal Imaging). PET scans in the study were reimbursed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The IDEAS Study was developed in response to CMS's 2013 National Coverage Decision on amyloid PET imaging in dementia and neurodegenerative disease (CAG-00431N) to not cover these scans for Medicare enrollees. CMS reimbursed amyloid PET scans for participants in the IDEAS study under its "coverage with evidence development" program. The purpose of the coverage with evidence development program is to gather additional evidence to inform a future coverage decision. Disclosures: Rabinovici has served on scientific advisory boards for Genentech, Eisai, Merck and Roche. He receives research support from Avid Radiopharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly and Company; and serves as associate editor for JAMA Neurology. Siegel is an advisory board member for GE Healthcare and Blue Earth Diagnostics. He has received consultation fees from Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, BTG Management Services, Capella Imaging, Curium Pharma, and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals; and has received clinical trial support from Blue Earth Diagnostics and Progenics Pharmaceuticals. Siegel's spouse is a speaker for Siemens Healthineers. All other authors report no relevant disclosures. About UCSF: UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises three top-ranked hospitals - UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland - as well as Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics, UCSF Benioff Children's Physicians and the UCSF Faculty Practice. UCSF Health has affiliations with hospitals and health organizations throughout the Bay Area. Please visit http://www.ucsf.edu/news. Follow UCSF: ucsf.edu | Facebook.com/ucsf | Twitter.com/ucsf | YouTube.com/ucsf About the Alzheimer's Association: The Alzheimer's Association is the leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer's care, support and research. Our mission is to eliminate Alzheimer's disease through the advancement of research; to provide and enhance care and support for all affected; and to reduce the risk of dementia through the promotion of brain health. Our vision is a world without Alzheimer's. Visit http://www.alz.org/facts or call 800.272.3900. Follow the Alzheimer's Association: alz.org | Facebook.com/actionalz | Twitter.com/alzassociation | Instagram.com/alzassociation ORLANDO, Fla., April 2, 2019 -- Hundreds of everyday items, from furniture to cell phones to floor wax, contain organophosphate ester (OPE) flame retardants and plasticizers. Some of these semi-volatile compounds make their way into the air, onto surfaces and even inside our bodies, with uncertain health effects. Today, researchers report that hands play a central role in transferring OPEs and other flame retardants and plasticizers throughout the indoor environment. The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. ACS, the world's largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features nearly 13,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. Increasingly, manufacturers have relied on OPEs to replace brominated flame retardants, some of which were banned or heavily restricted because of health concerns. However, a few recent epidemiological studies have linked the replacements themselves to adverse health effects. "The toxicity of OPEs is not well understood," says Miriam Diamond, Ph.D., the project's principal investigator. "Studies are emerging that associate some OPEs with developmental effects in kids, fertility problems and possibly some types of cancer." Previous studies have found relatively high concentrations of OPEs in indoor air and dust. However, the sources of these compounds were not always clear. "We wondered if electronic devices, especially those that heat up during use, such as computers or printers, might be important sources of flame retardants and plasticizers," says Diamond, who is at the University of Toronto. To find out, the researchers collected about 400 samples from the homes of 51 Canadian women enrolled in the Ontario Environment Health Study. These included urine samples and hand wipes from the women, surface wipes of their electronic devices, and air and dust samples. The team used mass spectrometry to determine the concentrations of 23 different OPEs in the wipes and eight OPE metabolites in urine. To the researchers' surprise, all indoor surfaces had similar chemical profiles, and larger electronic devices that heat up had no higher OPE levels than handheld devices. "We went into this study expecting to find that surface wipes of different electronic devices would have elevated levels of one or a few flame retardants and plasticizers that were added to their casings during the manufacturing process," Diamond says. "Instead, we found that most of the OPEs, and other flame retardants and plasticizers, were in most of the surface wipes, floor dust and on participants' hands, as well as on the electronic devices. In other words, we found most of the chemicals everywhere." Another unexpected result was that the level of OPEs on the surface wipes of cell phones predicted about 25 percent of the variability in urine levels of OPE metabolites -- suggesting that cell phones might be major sources of internalized OPEs, or perhaps they accumulate the compounds from other sources. When people use their cell phones (which most people touch hundreds or even thousands of times per day), they ingest the compounds or absorb them through their skin. More recently, the researchers conducted a network analysis to find correlations among the chemical profiles they identified from all of the samples. They found that regardless of which group of chemicals they examined, hands were at the center of the network. "We believe that hands are central to moving chemicals around the indoor environment," Diamond says. "This makes intuitive sense -- your hands touch everything. It's also consistent with how infectious organisms can be spread by hands that touch multiple surfaces." Is there anything a person can do to minimize their exposure to flame retardants and plasticizers? "Yes, wash your hands!" Diamond says. "Also, wash your cell phone and other handheld electronic devices." She adds that parents should be careful about giving cell phones to small children, who often put their hands in their mouths and also gnaw on and lick objects rather than using them in the intended manner. "We didn't collect any data on kids' exposures," she says, "but it's obvious that our results could hold insights into pathways of exposure for them." ### A press conference on this topic will be held Tuesday, April 2, at 3 p.m. Eastern time in the Orange County Convention Center. Reporters may check-in at the press center, Room W231B, or watch live on YouTube http://bit.ly/ACSLive_Orlando2019 ("ACSLive_Orlando2019" is case-sensitive). To ask questions online, sign in with a Google account. The researchers acknowledge support and funding from Health Canada, Canada's Chemicals Management Plan, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Cancer Society. The American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. To automatically receive press releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org. Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Follow us: Twitter | Facebook Title "Everything is everywhere": A network analysis of SVOCs indoors with implications for human exposure Abstract Due to "chemical intensification", modern indoor environments are typified by numerous natural and synthetic chemicals within consumer products, furnishings and building materials. Knowing that nearly all North Americans tested through biomonitoring are exposed to flame retardants and plasticizers, we asked which electronic devices could be sources of these chemicals and what are the likely exposure pathways. To probe these questions, we sampled and analyzed surface wipes of handheld and non-handheld electronic devices, residents' hands (palms and backs sampled twice), indoor air and dust in a study of 51 homes. First, the results showed that analytes with >50% detection frequency were 42 in total (11 organophosphate esters (OPEs), 15 polybrominated diphenyl ether congeners (PBDEs), 10 non-PBDE halogenated flame retardants (HFRs), and 6 phthalate esters). Second, we found that these chemicals, which were presumably added to specific products and materials, were distributed among all indoor surfaces sampled leading to all surfaces having similar chemical profiles or "everything is everywhere." This was contrary to expectations of finding characteristic profiles on specific device surfaces that would have indicated emission sources. Third, chemical profiles of hand palms and backs were most frequently (number of chemicals) and highly correlated with those of other surfaces sampled, especially handheld devices, rather than air or dust. A network analysis of chemical profiles showed the centrality of hands to all surfaces. From this we postulate that hands are agents of chemical transfer indoors, serving to homogenize the chemical signature of indoor surfaces. Fourth, we found differences in networks according to chemical group. For example, OPE profiles showed stronger correlations between hands and handheld devices, especially cell phones, where OPE concentrations were significantly higher on handheld than non-handheld devices. In contrast, chemical profiles in air were more central to the network for phthalates, which is consistent with the higher vapor pressure of this chemical group. Dust was more central for HFRs and PBDEs, again consistent with their generally lower vapor pressures. Finally, the finding of the centrality of hands to networks of chemical profiles has implications for exposure since chemical profiles on hands are related to absorbed dose of these chemicals. ORLANDO, Fla., April 2, 2019 -- When an act of terrorism or a vehicle or industrial accident ignites fuel, the resulting fire or explosion can be devastating. Today, scientists will describe how lengthy but microscopic chains of polymers could be added to fuel to significantly reduce the damage from these terrifying incidents without impacting performance. The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. ACS, the world's largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features nearly 13,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. The project was motivated by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. On that day, passenger planes loaded with fuel were crashed into the Twin Towers at New York City's World Trade Center. The impact set off a chain of events that ultimately brought down the buildings, Julia Kornfield, Ph.D., says. When the planes struck the buildings, their fuel turned into mist. Ignition of the mist blew out hundreds of windows (providing more air to feed the fire), ruptured concrete membranes between floors and stripped insulation off steel beams, she says. If fuel misting hadn't occurred, the initial destruction wouldn't have been as severe, and the buildings might have been able to withstand the lesser damage, says Kornfield, who studies polymers and flow behavior at the California Institute of Technology. After the attack, one of her colleagues suggested that adding small amounts of polymers to fuel could limit misting during a high-speed impact and reduce the risk of subsequent fire or explosion. Prompted by the suggestion, Kornfield and her team began a quest for suitable polymers that could dissipate the impact energy that would ordinarily break fuel drops into a mist. Other researchers pursuing this goal have developed "ultralong" polymers that can diminish the outcome of an impact, resulting in cooler, shorter fires. However, ultralong polymers aren't very practical because they interfere with engine operation, Kornfield notes. They also irreversibly break down into smaller molecules when they run through pipelines or pumps, losing efficacy. As an alternative, her team created polymers that can reversibly link up end-to-end via carboxylic acid and amine groups to form "megasupramolecules," which are as long as ultralong polymers but don't break apart in pipelines or pumps. The researchers, who created videos about the work, cofounded the startup company Fluid Efficiency to further develop the polymers and provide samples for evaluation to petrochemical companies, lubricants producers and pipeline operators. Results have been encouraging. Misting was significantly reduced in fuel treated with the polymers, and after the fuel was ignited, the flame self-extinguished. A recent test suggests that megasupra-molecules added at a refinery or fuel depot would remain active after passing through more than 600 miles of pipeline and hundreds of pumps, Kornfield says, noting ultralong polymers would have lost most of their potency after 50 miles. "This is an important step toward providing an additive that could improve transportation safety for all users receiving fuel through a pipeline network without concern that protection was lost in transit," she explains. Kornfield's molecules have other advantages. They enhance lubrication and flow through pipelines and hoses during fuel distribution. Because the polymer molecules' hydrocarbon backbone resembles that of fuel, they remain soluble even at low temperatures. In addition, the molecules break up into smaller ones when they pass into engines and burn with the fuel, so they don't interfere with engine performance. As an unexpected bonus, the additive reduces soot formation by diesel fuel engines by 12 percent, according to preliminary testing at the University of California, Riverside. At present, the polymers would add a penny or two to the cost of a gallon of fuel, which she says is a bit costly. They would like to collaborate with partners who can reduce the price and test the molecules' performance with a variety of fuels. The U.S. Army plans to study the utility of the additives in scenarios involving various impacts and projectiles such as improvised explosive devices. A press conference on this topic will be held Tuesday, April 2, at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time in the Orange County Convention Center. Reporters may check-in at the press center, Room W231B, or watch live on YouTube http://bit.ly/ACSLive_Orlando2019 ("ACSLive_Orlando2019" is case-sensitive). To ask questions online, sign in with a Google account. ### Kornfield acknowledges funding from the U.S. Army, NASA, the California Institute of Technology and the National Science Foundation. The American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. To automatically receive press releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org. Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Follow us: Twitter | Facebook Title Mitigating post-impact energy release from liquid fuels Abstract Impacts that target fuel depots, fuel tanker trucks or rail cars, or the fuel tanks of vehicles, in addition to impacts that use a fully fueled vehicle as a weapon, inflict greater damage by rapidly releasing much of the energy content of the fuel. Here, high-performance polymers are used to inhibit misting of fuel following impact to mitigate fuel explosion/conflagration. The approach is complementary to strategies that modify materials of construction of vehicles or buildings. Polymers added to fuel can mitigate impact-induced damage even when it is not possible to retrofit existing equipment or structures. Mist control polymers are complementary to approaches that provide fire retardant when impact is detected. Mist control polymers dissolved in fuel function through their innate response to rapid elongational deformation and do not require sensors or control devices to activate their response. The present polymers overcome prior obstacles to mist control fuel additives: 1) they do not degrade during transport of fuel through pumps and pipelines; 2) they remain soluble at low temperatures (down to the freezing point of kerosene); 3) they are compatible with necessary fuel processing (filtering and dewatering); and 4) they burn in unmodified engines without measurably affecting power output or fuel efficiency. This combination of attributes was guided by theoretical predictions of the molecular structure and concentration range in which end-to-end association of polymers could produce a significant population of supramolecules having molecular weight greater than 5 Mg/mol, referred to as "megasupramolecules." This talk will summarize the theoretical basis for the molecular design, the synthetic route to the polymers and characterization of their molecular structure, their rheological properties in shear flow, and their performance in various fuel tests, including qualitative observations regarding post impact misting, ignition and flame propagation. (Disclosure: The speaker is a co-founder of Fluid Efficiency.) ORLANDO, Fla., April 2, 2019 -- Just as controlled-release medications slowly dole out their cargo after they experience a pH change in the body, implanted "artificial muscles" could someday flex and relax in response to light illuminating the skin. In pilot studies, scientists have developed a new material that expands and contracts, lifting a weight merely by shining a light on it. The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. ACS, the world's largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features nearly 13,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. A brand-new video on the research is available at http://bit.ly/HLS_Artificial_Muscle. "We have developed a new polymer that has a novel mechanism for actuating materials -- making materials shrink, expand or hold a 'memory' of a particular shape -- all with a simple stimulus," says Jonathan Barnes, Ph.D. Stimuli-responsive materials have been applied in many different industries to date. For example, some of them change color and are used as windshield coatings to instantly shade drivers in blinding sun. Other materials can be formed into vessels that respond to changes in nutrient concentrations and feed agricultural crops as needed. Still other applications are in the biomedical area. Barnes and his team at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) are running their new polymer through its paces to determine what it is particularly suited for. But the main goal has been to see whether the material can do work, a trait that could facilitate development of an artificial muscle. During graduate school, Barnes studied a group of molecules, known as viologens, that change color with the addition and subtraction of electrons. Barnes suspected that if these molecules were linked together, they would fold like an accordion because areas that accept a single electron recognize one another. He also wondered if the action of the folding molecules could make a 3D network move, and if he could make the process reversible. To address these issues, Barnes' team at WUSTL synthesized polymer chains with viologens in their backbones. When a blue LED light was shone on the molecules, they folded into pleats with the help of well-known photoredox catalysts that can transfer electrons to the viologens. The researchers next incorporated the polymers into a flexible, water-soluble 3D hydrogel. When the team shone light on the gel, the accordion effect that occurred within the molecule tugged the gel in on itself, causing the material to shrivel to one-tenth its original size. When the light was turned off, the material expanded. As the polymer-embedded hydrogel changed form, it also changed color. "The beauty of our system is that we can take a little bit of our polymer, called a polyviologen, and put it in any type of 3D network, turning it into a stimuli-responsive material," Barnes says. Less than one percent of the weight of the hydrogel needs to contain polyviologen to get a response. So the polymer doesn't impose a significant effect on the other properties of the material in which it is contained. To find out if the material could do work, the group attached the gel to a strip of electrical tape with a piece of wire at the end. They suspended a small weight from the wire and hung the hydrogel in front of a blue light. The gel lifted the weight -- which was about 30 times the mass of the embedded polyviologen -- and after five hours, it rose several centimeters. The group has now made other tweaks, including making the gels stronger and more elastic, and making them move faster. And the researchers have developed polymers that respond to multiple stimuli at once. They also have constructed gels that respond to light at different wavelengths. Materials that respond to red or near-infrared light, which can penetrate human tissue, could be used in biomedical applications, such as drug-delivery devices or, eventually, as artificial muscles. Barnes says that his group has only begun to test the limits of these new materials. Currently, the team is studying the self-healing properties of polyviologen-embedded hydrogels, and they are exploring the possibility of 3D printing the polymers into different types of materials. A press conference on this topic will be held Tuesday, April 2, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time in the Orange County Convention Center. Reporters may check-in at the press center, Room W231B, or watch live on YouTube http://bit.ly/ACSLive_Orlando2019 ("ACSLive_Orlando2019" is case sensitive). To ask questions online, sign in with a Google account. The researchers acknowledge support and funding from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering and Washington University in St. Louis. The American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. To automatically receive press releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org. Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Follow us: Twitter | Facebook Title Sequence-defined redox-responsive polymers as artificial molecular muscles Abstract Nature relies on sequence-defined polymers to carry out a wide range of functions, such as the precise folding of a protein to establish a catalytic active site, or the matching of base pairs in two strands of DNA during replication or transcription for example. Recently, synthetic polymer chemists have devoted a lot of time and resources to coming up with new methods to control the sequence of monomers in synthetic polymers for the purpose of preparing digitally encoded polymers or bioactive macrocycles, to name a few examples. My research group is interested in stimuli-responsive materials that can actuate - i.e., change their size, shape, and mechanical properties reversibly in response to an external stimulus - and more specifically, whether sequence-defined polymers can impact this actuation process. In my talk I will describe the iterative step-growth-like syntheses of oligo- and polyviologens consisting of 4,4?-bipyridinium subunits (a.k.a., viologens) spaced on either side by different polar and non-polar groups that are known to affect the bulk physical properties of a polymer - e.g., crystallinity, T g , etc. - and how these sequence-defined redox-responsive polymers perform in a series of hydrogel actuators. In each case, I will highlight the ability of each material to function as an artificial molecular muscle. ### ORLANDO, Fla., April 2, 2019 -- From computer hard discs and smart phones to earbuds and electric motors, magnets are at the forefront of today's technology. Magnets containing rare-earth elements are among the most powerful available, allowing many everyday objects to be ever smaller. But rare-earth elements can be difficult to obtain, given either their scarcity or the challenging geopolitical climates of some of the nations where they are mined. Now, scientists have identified magnets based on more readily obtainable rare earths, as well as some promising magnets that don't contain these materials at all. The researchers will present their findings today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. ACS, the world's largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features nearly 13,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. "We have developed new ways to better predict which materials make good magnets," says Thomas Lograsso, Ph.D., who led the team. "Experimentally, we can 'rehabilitate' near-magnet systems, called paramagnets. We start with alloys or compounds that have all the right properties to be ferromagnetic at room temperature. Many times, these materials have high proportions of iron or cobalt." Paramagnets are materials that are weakly attracted to a magnetic field and are not permanently magnetized. But by adding alloys, paramagnets have been transformed into ferromagnets, or regular permanent magnets, like the metal surface of a refrigerator. Lograsso's team at the Critical Materials Institute at Ames Laboratory has identified two promising candidates thus far using this "rehabilitative" approach, and both are forms of cerium cobalt: CeCo 3 and CeCo 5 . Although cerium is called a rare-earth element, it is very abundant and easy to obtain. Previous work on CeCo 3 showed that it exhibited classic paramagnetic behavior. Calculations predicted that by adding magnesium, paramagnetic CeCo 3 could be transformed into a ferromagnet. These predictions have been experimentally validated, Lograsso says, and this property has been observed in measurements of single crystals of the compound. CeCo 5 is a strong ferromagnet. The researchers combined theoretical calculations with high-throughput experiments to zero in on the exact amount of copper and iron to add that would optimize the compound's ferromagnetism. With these additives, the team anticipates that CeCo 5 could someday be used in place of the strongest rare-earth magnets that contain neodymium (Nd) and dysprosium (Dy), thus easing demand for those critical elements. Lograsso and colleagues continue to investigate other similar metals that can be added to CeCo 5 to further improve its suitability as a viable substitute for Nd and Dy magnets. "Replacing rare-earth magnets, which are in high demand, would be ideal, both economically and environmentally," Lograsso says. "Although our modified cerium-cobalt compounds are not as powerful as rare-earth magnets, they could still be highly valuable for certain commercial applications. So, our goal is to match the right magnet material to a specific application -- a so-called 'Goldilocks' non-rare-earth magnet." To that end, the group continues to use their strategy to optimize the key characteristics of poor magnets or non-magnets to transform them into alternatives that are completely free of rare-earth elements. For example, they are now using cobalt to optimize the performance of iron germanium, Fe 3 Ge. The resulting compound's high magnetization is comparable with the best Nd-based magnets. This strategy is not just limited to Fe 3 Ge and is being applied to other promising rare-earth-free compounds to selectively improve magnet properties. A press conference on this topic will be held Tuesday, April 2, at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the Orange County Convention Center. Reporters may check-in at the press center, Room W231B, or watch live on YouTube http://bit.ly/ACSLive_Orlando2019 ("ACSLive_Orlando2019" is case sensitive). To ask questions online, sign in with a Google account. ### The researchers acknowledge support and funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. The American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. To automatically receive press releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org. Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Follow us: Twitter | Facebook Title Accelerated Development of Substitutes for Rare Earth Permanent Magnets Abstract The Critical Materials Institute has developed a multi-pronged approach to finding substitutes for permanent magnets including materials discovery, application of advanced manufacturing methods and substitution at the system level to improve overall motor performance. An integrated computational experimental methodology for materials discovery allows for rapid screening of both intrinsic magnetization properties as well as quickly identifying those systems that can develop extrinsic coercivity required for a hard magnet. This effort has rapidly identified both high performance magnets with reduced rare earth content and rare earth-free magnets that exceed the performance of existing non-rare earth magnets. Alternatively, application of advanced manufacturing methods such as additive manufacturing, magnets can be fabricated into unique configurations that can concentrate flux not possible with conventionally processed magnets. When coupled with advanced motor design, overall motor performance can be improved with reduced magnet sizes and with significant less manufacturing scrap losses. ORLANDO, Fla., April 2, 2019 -- Traditional surgery to reshape a nose or ear entails cutting and suturing, sometimes followed by long recovery times and scars. But now, researchers have developed a "molecular surgery" process that uses tiny needles, electric current and 3D-printed molds to quickly reshape living tissue with no incisions, scarring or recovery time. The technique even shows promise as a way to fix immobile joints or as a noninvasive alternative to laser eye surgery. The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. ACS, the world's largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features nearly 13,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. "We envision this new technique as a low-cost office procedure done under local anesthesia," says Michael Hill, Ph.D., one of the project's principal investigators, who will discuss the work at the meeting. "The whole process would take about five minutes." Hill, who is at Occidental College, became involved in this project when Brian Wong, M.D., Ph.D., who is at the University of California, Irvine, asked for help in developing a noninvasive technique to reshape cartilage. Such a method would be useful for cosmetic surgery procedures, such as making a nose more attractive. But the method also could help fix problems, such as a deviated septum, or conditions for which no good treatments exist, such as joint contractures caused by stroke or cerebral palsy. Having suffered through painful deviated septum surgery himself, Hill understands what patients go through, and was excited to join a project to develop a better strategy. Wong was already an expert in one alternative technique that uses an infrared laser to heat cartilage, making it flexible enough to reshape. "The problem is, that technique is expensive, and it's hard to heat the cartilage enough so that it's malleable without killing the tissue," Hill says. To find a more practical approach, Wong's team began experimenting with passing current through cartilage to heat it up. The method indeed allowed them to reshape tissue, but, curiously, not by warming it. Wong turned to Hill to determine just how the new method was working and to refine it to prevent tissue damage. Cartilage is made up of tiny rigid fibers of collagen loosely woven together by biopolymers. Its structure resembles spaghetti that's been randomly dumped on a counter, with the individual strands tied together with thread. "If you picked it up, the strands wouldn't fall apart, but it would be floppy," Hill says. Cartilage also contains negatively charged proteins and positively charged sodium ions. Cartilage with a greater density of these charged particles is stiffer than cartilage with a lower charge density. Hill's group discovered that passing current through cartilage electrolyzes water in the tissue, converting the water into oxygen and hydrogen ions, or protons. The positive charge of the protons cancels out the negative charge on the proteins, reducing charge density and making the cartilage more malleable. "Once the tissue is floppy," he says, "you can mold it to whatever shape you want." The team tested the method on a rabbit whose ears normally stand upright. They used a mold to hold one ear bent over in the desired new shape. If they had then removed the mold without applying a current, the rabbit's ear would have sprung back into its original upright position, just like a human ear would. But by inserting microneedle electrodes into the ear at the bend and pulsing current through them with the mold in place, they briefly softened the cartilage at the bend site without damage. Turning off the current then allowed the cartilage to harden in its new shape, after which the mold was removed. To achieve this outcome with traditional methods, a surgeon would have to cut through the skin and cartilage and then stick the pieces back together. That can lead to formation of scar tissue at the joint. That scar tissue must sometimes be removed in subsequent operations, Hill says. By avoiding this mechanical damage to the cartilage, the molecular surgery technique causes no scarring and no pain. The researchers are exploring licensing options for the cartilage technique with medical device companies. They're also investigating applications in other types of collagen tissue, such as tendons and corneas. In an eye, cornea shape affects vision, with too much curvature causing nearsightedness, for example. Many hurdles must be overcome before this method could be used to correct a person's vision, but preliminary animal experiments have had promising results. The researchers used a 3D printer to make a contact lens. After painting electrodes on it, they put the contact lens on the eye. Applying current allowed them to temporarily soften the cornea and change its curvature. ### A press conference on this topic will be held Tuesday, April 2, at 2:30 p.m. Eastern time in the Orange County Convention Center. Reporters may check-in at the press center, Room W231B, or watch live on YouTube http://bit.ly/ACSLive_Orlando2019 ("ACSLive_Orlando2019" is case-sensitive). To ask questions online, sign in with a Google account. Hill acknowledges support and funding from UCI Applied Innovation, the John Stauffer Charitable Trust and National Institutes of Health. The American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. To automatically receive press releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org. Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Follow us: Twitter | Facebook Title Electrochemical reshaping of living tissues: Non-invasive surgical modalities for reshaping cartilage and cornea Abstract Collagenous tissues form underlying structural features of the head and neck, and serve critical functional roles in the upper airway, musculoskeletal systems, and vision. Congenital defects, trauma, and disease can damage these tissues, necessitating surgical intervention to reshape (or replace) damaged (or missing) structures. Conventional surgical approaches (mechanically cutting, carving, and suturing tissues) have remained essentially unchanged since the advent of aseptic surgery and are characterized by long recovery times, significant tissue morbidity, and high cost. We are working on a "molecular surgery" alternative that affects controlled shape change in living tissues using an electrochemical modality: "potential-controlled electromechanical reshaping" (pEMR), combines mechanical deformation with the application of electrochemical potentials. In a typical embodiment, collagenous tissue is held in mechanical deformation by a jig, micro-needle electrodes are inserted into the tissue, and a constant potential is applied to the specimen for several minutes. When the electrodes and jig are removed, the tissue assumes a new shape that approximates the geometry of the mold. Our work suggests that the mode of action depends on electrochemically generated pH gradients that transiently neutralize the fixed-negative-charge matrix that provides collagenous tissues their structural rigidity; once malleable, the tissue can be remodeled without the need for cutting. We present data in animal models that indicate permanent shape change in cartilage following this technique, and show preliminary work designed to evaluate this procedure as a non-invasive alternative to refractive vision correction by remodeling the cornea. NEW YORK, NY, April 2, 2019 - As part of its Diagnostics Accelerator research program, the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) announced today a new initiative that aims to fast-track the development of digital tools for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The Diagnostics Accelerator program was created in July 2018 with initial funding commitments totaling nearly $35 million from partners including ADDF Co-Founder Leonard Lauder, Bill Gates, the Dolby family, and the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, among others, to develop novel biomarkers for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. Since its inception, the Diagnostics Accelerator program has welcomed additional funders such as The Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration. The latest to join this coalition of philanthropists include Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, bringing the current program funding to nearly $50 million. "The Diagnostics Accelerator brings together philanthropic capital with a venture investment mindset to advance bold new ideas for easier and more accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias," Lauder said. "Initially, our goal was to raise $35 million to be spent over the next three years. We have exceeded our goal." In a Gates Notes post published today, Gates reiterated the progress advancing the science of biomarkers for early detection and diagnostics, noting, "It's hard to overstate how important finding a reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use diagnostic is for stopping Alzheimer's." Gates highlighted how the use of advanced technology and digital tools, such as blood tests and mobile phone apps, can help empower doctors, patients and caregivers, and ultimately lead to better outcomes. The Diagnostics Accelerator was created to address the lack of biomarkers that easily and more specifically screen and diagnose patients, stage disease progression, monitor response to treatment, and improve the rigor and efficiency of clinical trials. All are critical to the development of effective drugs for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's. "The interest from the philanthropic as well as the scientific community has been tremendous," said Howard Fillit, M.D., Founding Executive Director and Chief Science Officer of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation. "The ADDF is excited to expand its research support for the development of digital biomarkers that will augment traditional lab tests and imaging tools with creative and cost-effective approaches to collect, track and analyze patient data." Digital tools may allow the remote capture of changes in a patient's physical and mental status at various stages of Alzheimer's disease. Information gathered can span from cognitive assessments to motor ability to sleep disruptions. "This real-world evidence has the potential to add significant value to clinical trials, increasing patient engagement, enhancing monitoring, and greatly improving treatment outcomes," Dr. Fillit said. Funding provided through the Diagnostics Accelerator Digital Biomarker Initiative is open to scientists and clinicians worldwide working in: Academic medical centers, universities, or other nonprofits. Industry partnerships are encouraged. Biotechnology companies. Funding is provided through mission-related investments. Existing companies and new start-ups are both eligible. Rigorous scientific and where applicable business due diligence will be conducted by the ADDF on each proposal. For more information and/or to apply for funding visit Digital Biomarker RFP. ### About the Diagnostics Accelerator The Diagnostics Accelerator is a partnership of funders dedicated to accelerating the development of affordable and accessible biomarkers to diagnose Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, and to advance the development of more targeted treatments. Through translational research awards and access to consulting support from industry experts, this program will challenge the research community to develop novel fluid and digital biomarkers. About the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation Founded in 1998 by Leonard A. and Ronald S. Lauder, the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation is dedicated to rapidly accelerating the discovery of drugs to prevent, treat and cure Alzheimer's disease. The ADDF is the only public charity solely focused on funding the development of drugs for Alzheimer's, employing a venture philanthropy model to support research in academia and the biotech industry. Through the generosity of its donors, the ADDF has awarded over $115 million to fund more than 590 Alzheimer's drug discovery programs and clinical trials in 18 countries. To learn more, please visit: http://www.alzdiscovery.org/ Media contacts: Amy Losak losak@optonline.net Geralyn LaNeve glaneve@alzdiscovery.org 212-901-7997 The number of informal caregivers who look after older adults with cancer is on the rise. Caregivers could be relatives, partners, or even friends who provide assistance to people in order to help them function. Most older people with cancer live at home and are dependent on informal caregivers for support with their cancer treatment, symptom management, and daily activities. Caregiving itself can also take a toll on a caregiver's own physical and emotional well-being, which makes it important to ensure the proper supports are in place. Until now, no large study has evaluated whether or not caring for older adults with advanced cancer is linked to caregivers' emotional health or to their quality of life. Recently, researchers studied a group of adults aged 70 or older who had advanced cancer (as well as other challenges). This study used information from older patients with advanced cancer and their caregivers from local oncology practices enrolled in the "Improving Communication in Older Cancer Patients and Their Caregivers" study conducted through the University of Rochester National Cancer Institute Community Oncology Research Program Research Base between October 2014 and April 2017. Results from the study were published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The researchers learned that the health problems of older patients with cancer were linked to a poorer quality of life for their caregivers, including poorer emotional health. This fact is confirmed by many other studies, which show that caregivers may even experience more emotional health challenges (such as anxiety, depression, and distress) than the people they care for, the researchers added. What's more, poorer patient health (measured by a geriatric assessment) was also associated with higher levels of caregiver distress. The average caregiver in the study was 66 years old, though 49 percent of the caregivers were aged 70 or older. The majority of caregivers were female and white (non-Hispanic), and 67 percent were the patient's spouse or partner who lived with them. Close to 40 percent of the caregivers had serious chronic illnesses of their own. Nearly half (43.5 percent) said they experienced moderate to high distress, 19 percent reported having symptoms of depression, and 24 percent were anxious. Interestingly, older caregiver experienced less anxiety and depression and better mental health, said the researchers. However, they were in poorer physical health. Being female was associated with experiencing less distress. An income of more than $50,000 a year also was linked to having better physical and mental health. The researchers concluded that caregivers for older patients with advanced cancer are a vulnerable group. Thankfully, there are strategies caregivers can incorporate into their routines to help keep their own health and well-being top-of-mind. Talk with a healthcare provider about your own stress related to caregiving. If you prefer, you can ask to talk privately, without the person you care for present. Your healthcare provider may suggest ways to address the burdens you may experience with caregiving. There are strategies that have been found to help with specific tasks and challenges, decrease caregiver stress, and improve quality of life. You can learn more--and take a free and private assessment of caregiver health--at HealthinAging.org. ### This summary is from "Quality of Life of Caregivers of Older Patients with Advanced Cancer." It appears online ahead of print in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study authors are Lee A. Kehoe, MS, LMHC; Huiwen Xu, MHA; Paul Duberstein, PhD; Kah Poh Loh, MBBCh, BA; Eva Culakova, PhD; Beverly Canin; Arti Hurria, MD4; William Dale, MD, PhD; Megan Wells, MPH; Nikesha Gilmore, PhD; Amber S. Kleckner, PhD; Jennifer Lund, PhD; Charles Kamen, PhD; Marie Flannery, PhD; Mike Hoerger, PhD, MSCR; Judith O. Hopkins, MD; Jane Jijun Liu, MD; Jodi Geer; Ron Epstein, MD; and Supriya G. Mohile, MD, MS. About the Health in Aging Foundation This research summary was developed as a public education tool by the Health in Aging Foundation. The Foundation is a national non-profit established in 1999 by the American Geriatrics Society to bring the knowledge and expertise of geriatrics healthcare professionals to the public. We are committed to ensuring that people are empowered to advocate for high-quality care by providing them with trustworthy information and reliable resources. Last year, we reached nearly 1 million people with our resources through HealthinAging.org. We also help nurture current and future geriatrics leaders by supporting opportunities to attend educational events and increase exposure to principles of excellence on caring for older adults. For more information or to support the Foundation's work, visit http://www.HealthinAgingFoundation.org. About the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society Included in more than 9,000 library collections around the world, the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) highlights emerging insights on principles of aging, approaches to older patients, geriatric syndromes, geriatric psychiatry, and geriatric diseases and disorders. First published in 1953, JAGS is now one of the oldest and most impactful publications on gerontology and geriatrics, according to ISI Journal Citation Reports. Visit wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/JGS for more details. About the American Geriatrics Society Founded in 1942, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) is a nationwide, not-for-profit society of geriatrics healthcare professionals that has--for 75 years--worked to improve the health, independence, and quality of life of older people. Its nearly 6,000 members include geriatricians, geriatric nurses, social workers, family practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, and internists. The Society provides leadership to healthcare professionals, policymakers, and the public by implementing and advocating for programs in patient care, research, professional and public education, and public policy. For more information, visit AmericanGeriatrics.org. The dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic is influencing sea-ice transport across the Arctic Ocean. As experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research report in a new study, today only 20 percent of the sea ice that forms in the shallow Russian marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean actually reaches the Central Arctic, where it joins the Transpolar Drift; the remaining 80 percent of the young ice melts before it has a chance to leave its 'nursery'. Before 2000, that number was only 50 percent. According to the researchers, this development not only takes us one step closer to an ice-free summer in the Arctic; as the sea ice dwindles, the Arctic Ocean stands to lose an important means of transporting nutrients, algae and sediments. The new study will be released as a freely accessible Open Access article in the online journal Scientific Reports on 2 April 2019. The shallow Russian shelf or marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean are broadly considered to be the 'nursery' of Arctic sea ice: in winter, the Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea constantly produce new sea ice. This is due to extremely low air temperatures down to minus 40 degrees Celsius, and a strong offshore wind that drives the young ice out to the open sea. In the course of the winter, the sea ice is eventually caught up in the Transpolar Drift, one of the two main currents in the Arctic Ocean. In two to three years' time, it transports the ice floes from the Siberian part of the Arctic Ocean, across the Central Arctic, and into the Fram Strait, where it finally melts. Two decades ago, roughly half the ice from Russia's shelf seas made this transarctic journey. Today only 20 percent does; the other 80 percent of the young ice melts before it can become a year old and reach the Central Arctic. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) came to this troubling conclusion after monitoring and analysing the sea ice's movements with the aid of satellite data from 1998 to 2017. "Our study shows extreme changes in the Arctic: the melting of sea ice in the Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea is now so rapid and widespread that we're seeing a lasting reduction in the amount of new ice for the Transpolar Drift. Now, most of the ice that still reaches the Fram Strait isn't formed in the marginal seas, but comes from the Central Arctic. What we're witnessing is a major transport current faltering, which is bringing the world one major step closer to a sea-ice-free summer in the Arctic," says first author Dr Thomas Krumpen, a sea-ice physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute. This trend has been confirmed by the outcomes of sea-ice thickness measurements taken in the Fram Strait, which the AWI sea-ice physicists gather on a regular basis. "The ice now leaving the Arctic through the Fram Strait is, on average, 30 percent thinner than it was 15 years ago. The reasons: on the one hand, rising winter temperatures in the Arctic and a melting season that now begins much earlier; on the other, this ice is no longer formed in the shelf seas, but much farther north. As a result, it has far less time to drift through the Arctic and grow into thicker pack ice," Thomas Krumpen explains. Those ice floes that the Transpolar Drift still carries to the Fram Strait are for the most part formed in the open sea, i.e., in regions of the Arctic Oceans far from the coasts. Consequently, compared to ice from the shelf seas, they contain significantly fewer particles like algae, sediments and nutrients - because waves, wind and tides stir up far more particles from the seafloor in shallow coastal zones than on the high seas. In addition, rivers like the Lena and the Yenisei carry major quantities of minerals and sediments to coastal areas; when the water freezes, they become trapped in the ice. Whereas in the past, sea ice from the shelf seas transported this mineral load to the Fram Strait, today the melting floes release it on their way to the Central Arctic; what reaches the Fram Strait is less material, and with a different composition. This finding is a result e.g. of analysis of samples obtained by means of sediment traps that AWI biologists have been conducting in the Fram Strait for about two decades. "Instead of Siberian minerals, we're now finding more remains of dead algae and microorganisms in our sediment traps," says co-author Eva-Maria Nothig. In the long term, this altered sea-ice-based particle transport is likely to produce lasting changes in the biogeochemical cycles and ecological processes of the central Arctic Ocean. The evolution of sea ice and the ecological processes in the Arctic Ocean are also key research questions that will be addressed during the MOSAiC expedition, which will begin this September. The German research icebreaker Polarstern will journey to the Arctic and drift with the Transpolar Drift through the Arctic Ocean for an entire year, intentionally trapped in the ice. 600 people from 17 countries will take part in the expedition, which will be regularly resupplied by aircraft and other icebreakers; moreover, many times that number of experts will use the resulting data to take climate and ecosystem research to a new level. MOSAiC, the greatest Arctic research expedition in history, will be spearheaded by the Alfred Wegener Institute. ### Original Publication: Thomas Krumpen, H. Jakob Belter, Antje Boetius, Ellen Damm, Christian Haas, Stefan Hendricks, Marcel Nicolaus, Eva-Maria Nothig, Stephan Paul, Ilka Peeken, Robert Ricker, Rudiger Stein: Arctic warming interrupts the Transpolar Drift and affects longrange transport of sea ice and ice-rafted matter, Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-41456-y When broadband comes to town, flexible work is boosted and work-life balance improves for educated women, who can choose to have more than one child, according to a study by Bocconi scholars Access to broadband Internet has a positive effect on fertility, overall life satisfaction and time spent with children. Since this effect is largely driven by higher-educated women, though, it risks to create another digital divide, according to a study by Francesco Billari and Luca Stella (Bocconi University), with Osea Giuntella (University of Pittsburgh), just published in Population Studies. In the context of DisCont, a research project funded by the European Research Council, the scholars link data on broadband deployment in Germany to a dataset that contains retrospective life course information, including fertility histories. After gaining access to high-speed Internet, the share of higher-educated women aged 25-45 that give birth to a child in one year passes from 7.2% to 8.7%, mostly thanks to a higher likelihood of having a second or higher-order child. Broadband Internet also positively affects their overall life satisfaction and time spent with children during weekdays. On the contrary, lesser-educated women, at 6.3%, don't record significant changes. We find that the channel through which high-speed Internet increases fertility is a better work-family balance, due to the spread of teleworking, smart working and part-time working among educated women, says Francesco Billari, a Full Professor of Demography at Bocconi University, Milan, and the DisCont Principal Investigator. High-speed Internet increases the likelihood of working from home by almost thirty per cent and facilitates part-time vs. full time, with little effects on female employment or labor force participation. Summing up, prof. Billari concludes, broadband Internet access allows higher-educated women to better reconcile work and motherhood, which in turn may promote fertility. This may be particularly important in countries such as Germany, or the best part of Southern and Central-Eastern Europe, where total fertility is below replacement . The downside of these findings is that broadband Internet introduces a fertility digital divide, which excludes lesser-educated individuals, who tend to be employed in less flexible occupations. If smart working and flexible hours are an avenue to be trodden, then, child care policies such as those recently introduced in Germany, Luca Stella says, have also proved to be effective and are to be pursued. ### Francesco Billari, Osea Giuntella, Luca Stella, Does Broadband Internet Affect Fertility?, in Population Studies, 28 Mar 2019, doi: 10.1080/00324728.2019.1584327. BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York, have developed skin-inspired electronics to conform to the skin, allowing for long-term, high-performance, real-time wound monitoring in users. "We eventually hope that these sensors and engineering accomplishments can help advance healthcare applications and provide a better quantitative understanding in disease progression, wound care, general health, fitness monitoring and more," said Matthew Brown, a PhD student at Binghamton University. Biosensors are analytical devices that combine a biological component with a physiochemical detector to observe and analyze a chemical substance and its reaction in the body. Conventional biosensor technology, while a great advancement in the medical field, still has limitations to overcome and improvements to be made to enhance their functionality. Researchers at Binghamton University's Intimately Bio-Integrated Biosensors lab have developed a skin-inspired, open-mesh electromechanical sensor that is capable of monitoring lactate and oxygen on the skin. "We are focused on developing next-generation platforms that can integrate with biological tissue (e.g. skin, neural and cardiac tissue)," said Brown. Under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Ahyeon Koh, Brown, master's students Brandon Ashely and Youjoong Park, and undergraduate student Sally Kuan designed a sensor that is structured similarly to that of the skin's micro architecture. This wearable sensor is equipped with gold sensor cables capable of exhibiting similar mechanics to that of skin elasticity. The researchers hope to create a new mode of sensor that will meld seamlessly with the wearer's body to maximize body analysis to help understand chemical and physiological information. "This topic was interesting to us because we were very interested in real-time, on-site evaluation of wound healing progress in a near future," said Brown. "Both lactate and oxygen are critical biomarkers to access wound-healing progression." They hope that future research will utilize this skin-inspired sensor design to incorporate more biomarkers and create even more multifunctional sensors to help with wound healing. They hope to see these sensors being developed incorporated into internal organs to gain an increased understanding about the diseases that affect these organs and the human body. "The bio-mimicry structured sensor platform allows free mass transfer between biological tissue and bio-interfaced electronics," said Koh. "Therefore, this intimately bio-integrated sensing system is capable of determining critical biochemical events while being invisible to the biological system or not evoking an inflammatory response." ### The paper, "Skin-inspired, Open Mesh Electrochemical Sensors for Lactate and Oxygen Monitoring," was published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics. SAN FRANCISCO (April 2, 2018) - One critically endangered species of smooth-shelled abalone is making a comeback in certain parts of its range along the California coast. To better understand the extent of black abalone recovery, a collaborative team led by scientists at the California Academy of Sciences, San Diego State University, University of Oregon, and Channel Islands National Park is turning to archeological sites on the Channel Islands. Their findings, published today in Ecology and Evolution, suggest that while the recent ecological rebound is encouraging, there's still work to do before the black abalone should be considered fully recovered. "Our goal is to provide a deep historical lens for understanding black abalone across 10,000 years of human fishing," says Dr. Todd Braje, Academy Curator of Anthropology. "Documenting abalone populations across millennia helps resource managers put shorter-term decadal changes in context. We hope these data will serve as a new benchmark for setting management goals." Black abalone play a critical role in the kelp ecosystem along the California coast. The marine snails are an important food source for key predators like the endangered sea otter. Historically, coastal Native Americans relied on abalone for over 10,000 years--the shellfish later became one of California's first commercial fisheries. "Management goals are often set using modern data from fisheries already on the verge of collapse," says lead author Hannah Haas, a former Master's student at San Diego State University. "If we want to restore kelp ecosystems, we first have to understand what a healthy system actually looks like, and archeological data can help paint that picture." To better understand the characteristics of a flourishing abalone population in a historically healthy ecosystem, the study team turned to the archeological record left behind along the rocky shorelines of the Channel Islands. San Miguel Island, the westernmost island in the archipelago, hosts archeological sites spanning the last 10,000 years where the Chumash and their ancestors once deposited abalone shells by the thousands into trash piles known as shell middens. The team recovered nearly 2,000 whole abalone shells from 26 shell middens and measured shell size. They then compared deep historical shell size to modern measurements of live abalone collected by Channel Island National Park biologists during recent ecological monitoring. Shell size indicates the ratio of juveniles to adults and the population structure through time, which can help scientists compare and contrast overall population health between deep historical and modern eras. While there has been an encouraging rebound of black abalone in recent decades, current populations still pale in comparison to historical levels. Several thousand years ago, the distribution of juvenile to adult-sized abalone was more akin to what ecologists recognize as a healthy population. This was probably maintained by a delicate balance between competitors, predators, and prey that may have actually increased the productivity of black abalone over the long term. "We hope that our long-term analyses over the 10,000-year history of black abalone fishing in Southern California may help resource managers determine whether current abalone populations are healthy," says Haas. Millions of smooth-shelled abalone once clung to California's rocky coastline until a steep decline in the 1990s, driven by overfishing, warming waters, and a devastating infection known as withering foot syndrome. California closed commercial and recreational black abalone fisheries in 1993 and listed the species as endangered in 2009. "A variety of perspectives and data are key to understanding how to manage toward ecological balance rather than an era defined by commercial fishing, sea otter extirpation, and ecosystem dysfunction," says Braje. "We're trying to put together a diverse group of scholars--archeologists, biologists, and resource managers--to combine data insights and all work toward the same goal of abalone recovery and restoring healthy California kelp forest ecosystems." ### About Research at the California Academy of Sciences The Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability at the California Academy of Sciences is at the forefront of efforts to understand two of the most important topics of our time: the nature and sustainability of life on Earth. Based in San Francisco, the Institute is home to more than 100 world-class scientists, state-of-the-art facilities, and nearly 46 million scientific specimens from around the world. The Institute also leverages the expertise and efforts of more than 100 international Associates and 450 distinguished Fellows. Through expeditions around the globe, investigations in the lab, and analyses of vast biological datasets, the Institutes scientists work to understand the evolution and interconnectedness of organisms and ecosystems, the threats they face around the world, and the most effective strategies for sustaining them into the future. Through innovative partnerships and public engagement initiatives, they also guide critical sustainability and conservation decisions worldwide, inspire and mentor the next generation of scientists, and foster responsible stewardship of our planet. Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- Dr. Bruce Stillman, President and CEO of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), has been awarded the 2019 Canada Gairdner International Award in honor of his pivotal contributions to basic research. The Canada Gairdner International Award recognizes researchers who have made seminal discoveries or contributions to biomedical science. Dr. Stillman is being honored for "pioneering research on the eukaryotic DNA replication cycles including initiation, regulation, and responses to DNA damage." The award is shared with Stillman's collaborator Dr. John Diffley, Associate Director of the Francis Crick Institute and Dr. Stillman's former postdoctoral fellow. Stillman's discovery of the Origin Recognition Complex (ORC) and his research on the process and regulation of chromosome replication have changed how scientists understand chromosomes. The Gairdner Foundation's announcement states that "by describing the exact sequence of events involved in DNA replication, Stillman and Diffley have provided key insights into how our genome is duplicated and how this process is coordinated with many other essential cellular events, which have implications for understanding genome instability and tumor heterogeneity in cancer." "The entire faculty of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory joins me in congratulating Bruce on receiving this well-deserved and prestigious award honoring his groundbreaking research accomplishments in the field of DNA replication," said CSHL Director of Research Dr. David Spector. "CSHL has benefited greatly from Bruce's dedication to both basic research and his profound role as President and CEO, guiding the institution on a positive trajectory." As an expert in DNA replication, Stillman has been elected to the Royal Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of Science. Stillman and Dr. Thomas Kelly of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center were awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Prize by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation in 2004. Stillman has received the Basic Science award from the Society of Surgical Oncology, the Herbert Tabor Research Award, and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize. He was also recently elected as an American Association for Cancer Research Fellow. The Gairdner Awards are given by the Gairdner Foundation. 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the awards, and the new class of honorees will be presented with their awards at the annual Canada Gairdner Awards Gala in Toronto on October 24, 2019. ### About Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has shaped contemporary biomedical research and education with programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology. Home to eight Nobel Prize winners, the private, not-for-profit Laboratory employs 1,100 people including 600 scientists, students and technicians. The Meetings & Courses Program annually hosts more than 12,000 scientists. The Laboratory's education arm also includes an academic publishing house, a graduate school and the DNA Learning Center with programs for middle and high school students and teachers. For more information, visit http://www.cshl.edu Scientists at the Sensitive Instrument Facility of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory achieved real-time atom rearrangement monitoring using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy during the synthesis of intermetallic nanoparticles (iNPs). In collaboration with Wenyu Huang, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State University and a scientist at Ames Laboratory, they examined nanoparticles made of a platinum-tin alloy. These unique iNPs have applications in energy-efficient fuel conversion and biofuel production, and are one focus of Huang's research group. "In the formation of these materials, there was a lot of information missing in the middle that is useful to us for optimal catalytic properties tuning" said Huang. By tracking the movement of metal atoms of platinum and tin during formation of iNPs using advanced microscopy at high temperature, intermediate phases were discovered with their own unique set of catalytic properties. "Conventional material synthesis focuses on the beginning and the end of a reaction, without much understanding of the pathway. Atomic-level observation of the alloying process led to the discovery of the reaction route," said Lin Zhou, a scientist in Ames Laboratory's Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering. "Once we knew intermediate states in between, we could control the reaction to 'stop' at that point. That opens up a new way to predict and control our discovery of new materials." The research is further discussed in the paper, "Toward Phase and Catalysis Control: Tracking the Formation of Intermetallic Nanoparticles at Atomic Scale," authored by Tao Ma, Shuai Wang, Minda Chen, Raghu Maligal-Ganesh, Lin-Lin Wang, Duane D. Johnson, Matthew J. Kramer, Wenyu Huang, and Lin Zhou; and published in Chem. ### This work was supported in part by Laboratory Directed Research and Development funds through Ames Laboratory, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Ames Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory operated by Iowa State University. Ames Laboratory creates innovative materials, technologies and energy solutions. We use our expertise, unique capabilities and interdisciplinary collaborations to solve global problems. 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. New studies suggest combining data around parasite genetics and human movement can improve malaria transmission mapping, and help with efforts to eliminate the disease in Southern Africa, Bangladesh and other areas Scientists have identified a way to provide more detailed information on malaria transmission both locally and across borders, according to two new papers published today in eLife. The studies, from collaborators in the US, UK, Thailand, Bangladesh, Namibia and Norway, suggest that combining data on parasite genetics and human movement can provide greater insight on how malaria spreads among populations. This approach, applied to data from Southern Africa and Bangladesh, could allow malaria control programs to strengthen their local and regional efforts for eliminating the disease. A global decline of malaria in recent decades has led to a push for complete elimination of malaria parasites in 21 countries by 2020. But malaria transmission differs among countries and policy-makers must focus on reducing transmission in locations where the disease remains, while protecting areas where it has been controlled from imported infections that threaten to reintroduce parasites. This is a particular concern for countries that share an international border with those that have high-transmission rates. "Countries and regional blocs are working to identify where parasite importations are common and to pinpoint the sources of imported cases to develop more effective and targeted malaria interventions," explains Sofonias Tessema, a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, San Francisco, US, and co-first author of the Southern Africa study. "But routinely collected data, such as malaria case counts obtained from health facilities, may not provide much information on importations. Malaria cases are often classified as either having been infected locally or imported based on the patient's self-report of recent travel. With only travel history data, it can be difficult to assess accurately whether malaria parasites were acquired locally or during travel." To address this, the team used parasite genetic data to estimate the contribution of importation and compared it with human-mobility data to identify relevant sources of malaria parasites in Southern Africa. "We found that parasites from cases near to each other were much more likely to be closely related genetically, providing evidence that the majority of malaria cases were from local transmission," says co-first author Amy Wesolowski, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, US. Using genetic data from malaria parasites, the team also identified more detailed evidence of parasite connectivity over hundreds of kilometers than the other data sources, within Namibia and across the Angolan and Zambian borders. While these data are not yet routinely collected, they suggest the need to strengthen local interventions and regional coordination to successfully eliminate malaria from a critical region of Southern Africa. Meanwhile, for the second study, researchers measured the spatial spread of malaria parasites in southeast Bangladesh. To do this, they analysed epidemiological surveillance data, travel surveys, parasite genetic data and anonymised, aggregated mobile data from their collaboration partners at Telenor Research and Grameenphone, both part of Telenor Group, Norway. "Our combined method gave us detailed insight into the direction and intensity of parasite flow between locations," explains co-first author Hsiao-Han Chang, Research Associate at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, US. Contrary to current beliefs, the team found that frequent mixing occurs in low-transmission areas in the southwest of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region, and elimination will require interventions in addition to reducing imported infections from forested regions. "Unlike risk maps generated from clinical case counts alone, our method also distinguished areas of frequent importation as well as high transmission," adds Richard Maude, Head of Epidemiology at Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), and a co-senior author of this study. Altogether, the findings suggest that the ability to gather useful information from genetic data, using new methods, provides a strong case for the coordinated collection of regional data on parasite genomics in areas where importation of malaria is a potential concern, and where efforts are being focused to eliminate the disease. ### References The papers 'Using parasite genetic and human mobility data to infer local and cross-border malaria connectivity in Southern Africa' and 'Mapping imported malaria in Bangladesh using parasite genetic and human mobility data' can be freely accessed online at https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43510 and https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43481, respectively. Contents, including text, figures and data, are free to reuse under a CC BY 4.0 license. Collaborators This work was the result of collaborations between researchers at: University of California, San Francisco, US; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, US; Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, US; MORU, Thailand; Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK; University of Southampton, UK; University of Namibia; and various organisations in Bangladesh, including the Bangladesh National Malaria Control Program. Media contact Emily Packer, Senior Press Officer eLife e.packer@elifesciences.org 01223 855373 About eLife eLife is a non-profit organisation inspired by research funders and led by scientists. Our mission is to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science. We publish important research in all areas of the life and biomedical sciences, including Epidemiology and Global Health, which is selected and evaluated by working scientists and made freely available online without delay. eLife also invests in innovation through open-source tool development to accelerate research communication and discovery. Our work is guided by the communities we serve. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, the Wellcome Trust and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Learn more at https://elifesciences.org/about. To read the latest Epidemiology and Global Health research published in eLife, visit https://elifesciences.org/subjects/epidemiology-global-health. Lugano, Switzerland, 2 April 2019 - The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) announced today that Prof. Jonas Bergh from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm will receive the newly established 2019 ESMO Breast Cancer Award in connection with the inaugural ESMO Breast Cancer Congress (2-4 May, Berlin, Germany). (1,2) The ESMO Breast Cancer Award acknowledges distinguished experts who have devoted a major part of their career and made a special contribution to the discovery and development of education, research and clinical practice in the field of breast cancer. Profs. Sibylle Loibl and Giuseppe Curigliano, Co-Chairs of the ESMO Breast Cancer Congress, said: "Professor Jonas Bergh has conducted clinical trials with new drugs and individually tailored dosing of chemotherapy. The Swedish Group demonstrated in the first randomised study that five years of tamoxifen treatment is better that the previously recommended two years. He has been involved in showing the additional value of other drugs, in particular chemotherapy, in breast cancer treatment." Bergh is Cancer Theme Prefect and Director of Strategic Research Programme in Cancer at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is also member of the Nobel Assembly and holds the Mimi Althainz' Professorship in Oncology. Bergh is also Senior Consultant in Oncology at the Karolinska University Hospital, Acting Chair of the Scientific Council in Oncology/Haematology for the European Medicines Agency (EMA), (3) Visiting Professor of Breast Cancer Research at Oxford University, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London, UK. Bergh's research is mainly focused on breast cancer biology, including alteration of characteristics during progression and tailored breast cancer treatments. He is Co-Chair of the Early Breast Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group (EBCTCG), whose publications have had a global impact on primary breast cancer treatment, and was Chair of the Swedish Breast Cancer Group (SweBCG) between 1995 and 2016. "Prof Bergh's work has contributed to important progress in many aspects of cancer epidemiology, prevention, and treatment in breast cancer," said Curigliano. "Under his leadership, the EBCTCG has analysed immense amounts of clinical trial data. Their findings have provided crucial information to those of us who treat breast cancer patients." Bergh said he was "deeply honoured" to receive this award from ESMO, adding: "On behalf of many collaborators, I'm pleased that ESMO is acknowledging our research, which aims to understand breast cancer biology and appreciate the complexity of this disease - for example clonal development during tumour progression - which increases the complexity of management." He acknowledged the patients who have participated in his research, the research team at the Karolinska Institutet, the breast team at the Karolinska University Hospital, and former research collaborators at Uppsala University and Akademiska Sjukhuset. "I also would like to express my sincere thanks to SweBCG and the collaborators within the EBCTCG and the associated team in Oxford, in addition to a long list of other international collaborators, including the St.Gallen International Breast Cancer Conference and the International Consensus Conference for Advanced Breast Cancer (ABC) teams," he concluded. ### Notes to Editors Please make sure to use the official name of the meeting in your reports: ESMO Breast Cancer Congress 2019 Official Congress Hashtag: #ESMOBreast19 References 1 ESMO Breast Cancer Congress: https://www.esmo.org/Conferences/ESMO-Breast-Cancer-2019 2 The ESMO Breast Cancer Award session will be held on Thursday, 2 May, 13:45 to 14:15 (CEST) in the Maritim Hall. Jonas Bergh will give a keynote lecture entitled "A long and winding road: Aiming to understand how best to treat an increasingly complex disease" 3 European Medicines Agency (EMA): https://www.ema.europa.eu/en 4 Early Breast Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group: https://www.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/research/ebctcg 5 Swedish Breast Cancer Group: http://www.swebcg.se/ About the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) ESMO is the leading professional organisation for medical oncology. With more than 20,000 members representing oncology professionals from over 150 countries worldwide, ESMO is the society of reference for oncology education and information. ESMO is committed to offer the best care to people with cancer, through fostering integrated cancer care, supporting oncologists in their professional development, and advocating for sustainable cancer care worldwide.Visit http://www.esmo.org In two new species of rare giant stick insects, males turn livid blue or multicolored at sexual maturity -- but why? Biodiversity hotspot Madagascar is one of the world's biggest islands, and home to some of its biggest insects. Now German scientists have discovered two new species of giant stick insect, living only in the dry forests of Madagascar's northernmost tip. One giant female measures a whopping 24cm - but it is the smaller males that are most striking. At sexual maturity these daredevils abandon their stick-like camouflage for dazzling blue or many-colored shining armor. Writing in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers describe their rare and exciting findings, and wonder at the reproductive success of the least stick-like stick insects on the planet. When two become four "Nearly all of the 3000+ known species of stick insects try to be inconspicuous and just look like twigs," says senior author Dr. Sven Bradler of the University of Gottingen, Germany. "There are a very few, very large exceptions - and we have just discovered a couple more of them." The authors re-examined specimens they'd previously identified as odd-looking examples of two existing giant stick insect species, whose adult males remarkably are bright blue or multicolored. "These were similar in size - 15 to 24cm - but generally less spiny and a bit differently colored than typical examples of their kind," explains Bradler. "Now genetic tests confirm that the quirky individuals are in fact two new species, distinct from the original two but part of the same group." explains Bradler. Bradler's reclassification places members of this group of species as close evolutionary relatives to other Madagascan stick insects, rather than cousins from overseas as previously thought. This is a potentially major finding, as it challenges the prevailing view that sticks insects colonized Madagascar multiple times. He who dares, wins The discovery also prompted the researchers to wonder: what reproductive advantage do these males gain from their bright colors, that is worth exposing themselves to predators? The first author Dr. Frank Glaw of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich, and colleagues bred the new giant stick insect species in captivity to observe their behavior. "Males of one species started mating attempts only when they achieved their bright blue color." This might suggest that the males use their bright coloring to attract a mate. However, it is hard to believe the males could find a mate before being eaten - unless their bright coloring acts as a deterrent to predators. "Males searching for a mate have to move about more, so pretending to be a stick becomes tricky. Better perhaps to plump for the opposite: a brightly colored warning." Bright colors - suggestive of toxicity - keep safe vivid members of other typically camouflaged species, like lividly colored Madagascan frogs. "In support of this, all stick insects have neck glands that repellant substances, and these are typically well-developed in brightly colored species. Alternatively, like the Madagascan frogs some giant stick insects may have developed the ability to accumulate toxins from their food." But testing these hypotheses will be tough, admits Glaw. Bradler adds "More than one factor may have played a role in the evolution of this remarkably conspicuous coloration. So even with more data on mate selection, habits, predators, natural food plants, toxins produced by defense glands and possible accumulation of toxins among giant stick insects, finding evidence for these ideas may prove difficult." Colorful stick insects have a bright future Whatever its function, the splendid coloring of the male giant stick insects could make them a strong flagship species to promote the unique biodiversity of Madagascar, and the need for its protection. "Already the once-uncertain future of these two new species seems secured, with their forest habitat in northern Madagascar a hotspot for conservation priorities," says Glaw. "It is vital to maintain awareness and motivation to keep logging at bay. This precious area also harbors the highest density of critically endangered reptiles in Madagascar and is home of one of the most threatened primate species in the world, the lemur Lepilemur septentrionalis." ### Please link to the original research article in your reporting: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2019.00105/full Frontiers is an award-winning Open Science platform and leading Open Access scholarly publisher. Our mission is to make research results openly available to the world, thereby accelerating scientific and technological innovation, societal progress and economic growth. We empower scientists with innovative Open Science solutions that radically improve how science is published, evaluated and disseminated to researchers, innovators and the public. Access to research results and data is open, free and customized through Internet Technology, thereby enabling rapid solutions to the critical challenges we face as humanity. For more information, visit http://www.frontiersin.org and follow @FrontiersIn on Twitter. Description of genes involved in sugarcane root cell separation could lead to the development of varieties with softened cell walls similar to those of papaya, boosting the production of second-generation etanol. During the period in which the papaya (Carica papaya) is ripening, its cell walls separate, making the tissue softer and more digestible because the cell contents become accessible and the sucrose in the fruit is more easily extracted. Sugarcane roots have recently been found to undergo a similar process. Their cell walls are modified during development to form gas-filled intercellular spaces in a type of tissue known as aerenchyma. "Aerenchyma is very common in crops grown in flooded fields, such as rice, since it supports them or enables them to float in water while also allowing the submerged parts of the plant to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon gas," said Marcos Buckeridge, a professor in the University of Sao Paulo's Bioscience Institute (IB-USP) in Brazil. In recent years, Buckeridge and collaborators have focused on studying the genes involved in sugarcane root cell separation with the aim of developing transgenic varieties of sugarcane in which the process occurs in other parts of the plant, such as the stem, where biomass and sucrose accumulate. The cell walls in these varieties would be as soft as in a papaya - hence the nickname "papaya sugarcane" - and could more easily be degraded to produce second-generation bioethanol (obtained from biomass) on a large scale. Researchers affiliated with Brazil's National Institute of Science and Technology of Bioethanol (INCT Bioethanol, one of several such research centers supported by Sao Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP in Sao Paulo State in partnership with the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), have now taken an important step in this direction. Partnering with colleagues from other universities and research institutions in Brazil and abroad, they described the first gene sequences involved in sugarcane root cell separation and elucidated their functions in this process. The results of the study were published, in the Journal of Experimental Botany. "If we succeed in promoting cell wall separation in the sugarcane stem, it will be possible not only to reduce the amount of enzyme cocktails used for enzymatic hydrolysis [degradation of the carbohydrates in sugarcane trash and bagasse and their conversion into fermentable sugar] to obtain second-generation ethanol but also to increase sucrose extraction," Buckeridge, principal investigator for INCT Bioethanol, told. The researchers sequenced two genes considered essential to the initial stages of aerenchyma development in sugarcane roots. The first was scRAV1, which encodes the RAV transcription factor that controls plant leaf aging. The second was scEPG1, which encodes endopolygalacturonase (EPG), an enzyme that degrades the pectin that keeps cells together, thereby contributing to cell separation and the softening of fruit tissue via aerenchyma formation. Owing to the complexity of the sugarcane genome, which has several copies of each chromosome and numerous variants of each gene, the two genes were sequenced from 17 artificial bacterial chromosome clones containing genomic regions homologous to those of the R570 sugarcane variety. The gene sequences were compared with those of the corresponding regions of Sorghum bicolor (the sorghum genome closely resembles the sugarcane genome). A similar sequence from each of the two genes was expressed in tobacco leaves for transactivation assays to see which other genes they activated. "Tobacco is easy to transform genetically and serves as a model to demonstrate how mechanisms like this actually work," Buckeridge said. Analysis of the genomic regions and the transactivation assays showed that scRAV1 controls early pectin degradation during sugarcane root aerenchyma formation and that the protein produced by scRAV1 binds to the scEPG1 promoter, blocking transcription of this gene. "Our findings pave the way for using biotechnology for the genetic manipulation of sugarcane to boost the production of second-generation ethanol," Buckeridge said. First step The researchers developed a sugarcane variety with enhanced expression of scRAV1. They also discovered a microRNA (a molecule that regulates gene expression) capable of specifically inhibiting scRAV1 and stimulating the expression of scEPG1throughout the plant. "In this genetically transformed variety, we're starting to see what seems to be a softening of the sugarcane cell wall, similar to the effect we want. The stems of some of the plants, for example, are unable to stay erect. This could be the first step toward the development of papaya sugarcane," Buckeridge said. ### A video showing a CT scan of sugarcane root aerenchyma formation can be observed at http://www.botany.one/2017/11/creative-destruction-death-leads-function. About Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) The Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at http://www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at http://www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe. Anzac day commemorations in Gallipoli and Northern France are only weeks away and continue to hold a special place in the psyche of Australians, with thousands expected to travel abroad again this year. But Australians would be shocked to learn how the government and Department of Veterans' Affairs have reshaped history at these memorial sites, to present a glorified and self-centred version of the First World War which serves political and commercial agendas, according to a new book. "There is a clear gap between the way official government institutions commemorate Anzac, and the way everyday Australians do when they travel to the Western Front and visit these graves, which are deeply meaningful and personal." Why? To create an identity for a young nation, score cheap political points, secure commercial agreements and divert attention from burning social issues back home, argues Dr Romain Fathi, a lecturer in Australian History at Flinders University and chercheur associe at the Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po, in Paris, France. In Our Corner of the Somme. Australia at Villers-Bretonneux, Dr Fathi outlines how the glorification of Anzac on the former Western Front is showcased by the $10 million Australian Remembrance Trail and the $100 million Sir John Monash Centre in the village of Villers-Bretonneux; the most expensive war museum built in France in decades. "The centre tells the Australian version of the war, tinged with nationalism, and showcases a very self-centred and biased narrative of the conflict. But let's be honest, the French don't mind that $100 million was spent by Australian taxpayers to generate more tourism in the region," says Dr Fathi. "Villers-Bretonneux has become a stage for Australia to project an image of itself in search of validation. But if you analyse this objectively the French only send senior representatives for commemorations when they're negotiating a $50 billion sale of French submarines to Australia." With tensions escalating between the Morrison government and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the wake of comments made after the Christchurch massacre, many Australians will consider travelling to the Western Front instead of Gallipoli this year. In this book, Dr Fathi outlines how Australia has remembered its Anzacs in France and documents the Department of Veterans' Affairs interactions with French institutions over decades. "Beyond these small villages where the Australian government has invested heavily, most French people are unaware that Australians fought in the First World War". That's not helped by the Australian government's refusal to acknowledge the sacrifice of other nations. For example, the Monash Centre makes no effort to remember the French Army's Moroccan Division, which rescued the Anzacs in late April 1918. "Instead of desperately pushing other nations to remember our sacrifice, perhaps Australians should go about it differently. This was a joint operation, so why make it solely Australian? We can't expect others to remember us if we don't remember them." The glorification of Anzac reached new heights during John Howard's tenure as Prime Minister - but both sides of politics are guilty of employing these tactics, says Dr Fathi. "Australia is the country that has spent the most money commemorating the Centenary of the First World War, more than any other nations put together, in order to put Anzac at the centre of the national narrative while sidelining other aspects of Australian history." "Sometimes commemorations are large and political but they can be personal and moving for individuals who travel to France, because they hold a significant place in each family's personal story." ### A team from Heidelberg University Hospital and the German Cancer Research Centre has developed a new method for the automated image analysis of brain tumors. In their recent publication, the authors show that machine learning methods carefully trained on standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are more reliable and precise than established radiological methods in the treatment of brain tumors. Thus, they make a valuable contribution to the individualized treatment of tumors. In addition, the validated method is an important first step towards the automated high-throughput analysis of medical image data of brain tumors. Gliomas are the most common and most malignant brain tumors in adults. In Germany, approximately 4,500 people are diagnosed with a glioma every year. The tumors often cannot be completely removed by surgery. Chemotherapy or radiotherapy are only effective to a limited extent because the tumors are highly resistant. New and precisely validated treatment approaches are therefore urgently needed. One of the essential criteria for the precise assessment of the efficacy of a new therapy for brain tumors is the growth dynamic, which is determined by MRI. However, the manual measurement of tumor expansion in two planes in the contrast-enhanced MRI scans is prone to errors and leads to slightly different results. "This can have a negative effect on the assessment of therapy response and hence the reproducibility and precision of scientific statements based on imaging," explains Martin Bendszus, Medical Director of the Department of Neuroradiology at the University Hospital in Heidelberg. In their current study, doctors and scientists from the University Hospital of Heidelberg and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) describe the huge potential of machine learning methods in radiological diagnostics. The team has developed neuronal networks in order to assess and clinically validate the therapeutic response of brain tumors on the basis of MRI in a standardized and fully automated way. A team led by Philipp Kickingereder from the Department of Neuroradiology at Heidelberg University Hospital, researchers from the Division of Medical Image Processing (head: Klaus Maier-Hein) at the German Cancer Research Center and colleagues from the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) and the Neurological Department of the University Hospital Heidelberg (Medical Director: Wolfgang Wick) worked together on this project. Using a reference database with MRI scans of almost 500 brain tumor patients at Heidelberg University Hospital, the algorithms were able to automatically recognize and localize brain tumors using artificial neural networks. In addition, the algorithms were trained to volumetrically measure the individual areas (contrast medium-absorbing tumor portion, peritumoral edema) and to precisely assess the response to therapy. The results were validated in cooperation with the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC). "The evaluation of more than 2,000 MRI scans of 534 glioblastoma patients from all over Europe shows that our computer-based approach allows a more reliable assessment of therapy response than the conventional method of manual measurement. We were able to improve the reliability of the assessment by 36 percent. This can be crucial for the image-based assessment of therapy efficacy in clinical trials. The prediction of overall survival was also more precise with our new method," explains Kickingereder. The goal of the Heidelberg physicians and scientists is to use the promising technology for the standardized and fully automated assessment of the therapy response of brain tumors as quickly as possible in clinical studies and, in future, also in clinical routine. In addition, the researchers designed and evaluated a software infrastructure that enables the complete integration of the new technique into existing radiological infrastructure. "In this way, we are creating the prerequisites for broad application and fully automated processing and analysis of MRI scans of brain tumors within a few minutes," explains Klaus Maier-Hein. The new technology is currently being re-evaluated at the NCT Heidelberg as part of a clinical study to improve the treatment of glioblastoma patients. "For precision therapies, a standardized and reliable assessment of the effectiveness of the new treatment approaches is of outstanding importance. The technology we have developed may be able to make a decisive contribution here," explains Wolfgang Wick. "With this study, we were able to demonstrate the great potential of artificial neural networks in radiological diagnostics," summarizes Philipp Kickingereder. "In the future, we want to advance the technology for automated high-throughput analysis of medical image data and transfer it not only to brain tumors but also to other diseases such as brain metastases or multiple sclerosis," adds Klaus Maier Hein. ### Kickingereder P, Isensee F, Tursunova I, Petersen J, Neuberger U, Bonekamp D, Brugnara G, Schell M, Kessler T, Foltyn M, Harting I, Sahm F, Prager M, Nowosielski M, Wick A, Nolden M, Radbruch A, Debus J, Schlemmer HP, Heiland S, Platten M, von Deimling A, van den Bent MJ, Gorlia T, Wick W, Bendszus M, Maier-Hein KH. Automated quantitative tumor response assessment of MRI in neuro-oncology with artificial neural networks: a multicenter, retrospective study. Lancet Oncology 2019, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045(19)30098-1 The German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) with its more than 3,000 employees is the largest biomedical research institute in Germany. At DKFZ, more than 1,000 scientists investigate how cancer develops, identify cancer risk factors and endeavor to find new strategies to prevent people from getting cancer. They develop novel approaches to make tumor diagnosis more precise and treatment of cancer patients more successful. The staff of the Cancer Information Service (KID) offers information about the widespread disease of cancer for patients, their families, and the general public. Jointly with Heidelberg University Hospital, DKFZ has established the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg, where promising approaches from cancer research are translated into the clinic. In the German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research (DKTK), one of six German Centers for Health Research, DKFZ maintains translational centers at seven university partnering sites. Combining excellent university hospitals with high-profile research at a Helmholtz Center is an important contribution to improving the chances of cancer patients. DKFZ is a member of the Helmholtz Association of National Research Centers, with ninety percent of its funding coming from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the remaining ten percent from the State of Baden-Wurttemberg. Joint press release of the German Cancer Research Center and the University Hospital Heidelberg Michael Snyder, PhD, of Stanford University is the recipient of the 2019 Genetics Society of America (GSA) George W. Beadle Award for developing and disseminating widely-used technology for the simultaneous analysis of thousands of genes, RNA molecules, and proteins. Beginning with studies of baker's yeast and later expanding to humans, Snyder's sharing of tools and resources set a high standard of service to the community and helped lay the foundation of systems biology. He also pioneered the application of omics technologies and big data to personalized medicine. The Beadle Award recognizes significant, sustained service to the genetics community that goes beyond an exemplary individual research career. "Mike's enormous contributions include ingenious new methods and technological advances that are now central to the field," says John Carlson, a professor at Yale University and one of the scientists who nominated Snyder for the award. "He has shown great leadership as an innovator, a disseminator of new technology and knowledge, and a community builder." Snyder's interest in the application of chemistry to biological systems emerged during his undergraduate training at the University of Rochester and continued at the California Institute of Technology under his PhD advisor Norman Davidson. Following a postdoctoral fellowship with Ronald Davis at Stanford University, Snyder moved to Yale University in 1986 and was the Chair of its Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from 1998 to 2004. In 2009, he was appointed Chair of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University and became the Stanford B. Ascherman Professor of Genetics in 2011. Early in his career, Snyder used yeast as a model organism to launch a new system-level approach to analyzing the functions of the thousands of genes that make up the yeast genome. He achieved this by expanding a method known as transposon tagging. Transposons are repetitive DNA sequences that can jump from one genomic location to another. Other researchers had used this unique ability to identify and map unknown genes, typically one at a time, by testing which DNA sequences were disrupted by the transposon's jump. Snyder's group deployed this tool on a system-wide scale by creating libraries of transposon-tagged yeast genes. To multiply the impact of these libraries, Snyder made them freely available to the genetics community before publication, along with the reagent lists and analysis tools needed for their use. These resources allowed other researchers to track, for example, which gene was expressed at which point during the yeast life cycle and where in the cell the protein coded by that gene was active. The 1994 publication of Snyder's first large-scale functional analysis of the yeast genome spawned the fields of systems biology and functional genomics. With Patrick Brown, Snyder developed the ChIP-chip technology for identifying all DNA sites to which transcription factors can bind. These sites help initiate a gene's transcription and regulate gene expression. ChIP-chip later evolved into the widely-used ChIP-seq technology. In 2000, when researchers were completing the first sequence of the human genome, Snyder turned his attention to human cells and their large and continuously changing set of RNA molecules. They include not only messenger RNA, the familiar coding molecule for proteins, but also RNA types that researchers knew much less about. In 2004, Snyder's group was the first to discover widespread non-coding RNAs in human cells, using the tiling array approach they had developed. These functional RNAs are transcribed from DNA but not translated into proteins. Paired-end sequencing, another technology devised by Snyder's group, revealed widespread structural variation in the human genome. His team also showed that the bulk of these DNA rearrangements of varying length were not due to homologous recombination, as many researchers had expected. Snyder's RNA analyses and methods were an integral part of the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements) project, a massive multi-center consortium charged with defining all functional elements in the human genome. Snyder's group contributed more data sets to the ENCODE project than any other laboratory. His team co-invented RNA-seq technology for mapping coding and non-coding RNAs to DNA sequences. It is now a ubiquitous tool in genome and transcriptome analysis. Snyder's laboratory also built the first proteome array for the large-scale characterization of protein function. Snyder's move to Stanford in 2009 set the stage for studying human health at an entirely new level by combining insights from genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. The latter is the large-scale study of small molecules (metabolites) that result from chemical reactions in tissues and fluids. Using himself as the initial test subject, Snyder pushed the boundaries of the field by applying big-data science to personalized medicine. In 2012, his group published a longitudinal proof-of-principle study in which integrative omics analyses were performed on Snyder's samples to track his health status over time. After the researchers discovered his high risk for type 2 diabetes through genome sequencing, they began to monitor his blood glucose levels and observed a spike in glucose levels after a viral infection. This resulted in a diabetes diagnosis about one year into the study. With lifestyle changes, Snyder was able to reduce his glucose levels back to normal for several years. The 2012 study showed that integrative personal omics profiles (iPOPs) can predict diseases before the onset of clinical symptoms. The term "precision health" describes the early detection of subtle health changes in order to prevent diseases or to initiate treatment before they advance. Snyder's group recently illustrated the power of precision health in a much larger cohort of subjects in whom the omics profiles identified many clinically actionable health outcomes, such as early lymphoma, pre-cancerous lesions, and early stages of heart disease. Snyder has continued to make data and resources from these pioneering studies freely available. Snyder's team has also incorporated wearable devices into the omics profiles. These devices measure personal health information, such as heart rate, skin temperature, and sleep duration, as well as airborne biological and chemical exposures ("exposome"). Snyder believes that physicians and patients will make health decisions in the future not based on population averages, but on each person's unique and longitudinal data from omics profiles and wearable devices. At Yale and Stanford University, Snyder has opened the doors of his lab to many high school and undergraduate students. He has mentored more than 70 graduate students and about 180 postdoctoral trainees. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. "Mike has an outstanding record of service to the genetics community," says Joseph Ecker, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and one of the scientists who nominated Snyder for the Beadle Award. "His achievements have had a major impact on our understanding of genetic processes from yeast to humans." Snyder joined the GSA as a graduate student and served on its Board of Directors from 2006 to 2009. He has attended almost all of its Yeast Genetics Meetings since 1983 and organized two of them. The George W. Beadle Award will be presented at The Allied Genetics Conference, which will be held April 22-26, 2020, in the Metro Washington, DC region. The award was named in honor of George W. Beadle (1903-1989), who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward Tatum for discovering that genes act by regulating specific chemical reactions. Beadle served as GSA president (1946) and made numerous contributions to the genetics community during his long and distinguished career. ### DETROIT - Allowing for more quality measures in the federal government's Quality Star Rating program would create a fairer and more equitable model for assessing the level of quality at U.S. acute-care hospitals, according to a Henry Ford Health System study. Researchers found that recognizing four fundamental quality factors in the safety of care category and assigning more equal weights to the eight measures in that category would modify the rating system's current scoring methodology and produce more accurate and informative results. "Since the star ratings introduction in 2016, the ratings have been met with skepticism because of the methodology," says David Nerenz, Ph.D., director emeritus of Henry Ford's Center for Policy and Health Services Research and the study's lead author. "In our study, we believe we've identified a simple and straightforward solution in the safety of care domain that would make these ratings more meaningful and unbiased." The study is published online in the American Journal of Medical Quality. Created by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the rating system assigns a score of one to five stars - five being the highest - based on a set of 57 individual quality measures across seven categories: mortality, readmission, safety of care, patient experience, effectiveness of care, timeliness of care and efficient use of medical imaging. The first four categories each account for 22 percent of a hospital's total score, while the last three each count for four percent. A complex weighting scheme is used to assign an importance to each measure in each category, and the scheme for the safety of care category makes only one of the eight measures really count. For their study, Dr. Nerenz and his team of researchers sought to evaluate the current methodology and how an alternative approach might affect the ratings scoring. Researchers performed principal components analyses on a subset of 674 hospitals in the December 2017 national data set that reported on eight safety measures used at the time. Then they assigned equal weight to each of the measures instead of the model employed by CMS and considered the number of cases at a hospital and how it impacted the accuracy of each measure. The effect of applying this alternative methodology was illustrated in a single hospital, whose safety category score was markedly different (+1.65) compared to CMS' current methodology (-2.35). That was enough difference to move the score from below average to above average. Assigning equal weight to each measure had a "pronounced effect," researchers wrote. "A stated aim of the Hospital Star Ratings program is to effectively summarize available hospital performance measures on Hospital Compare into a single, summary rating," says Brian Waterman, Ph.D., MPH, vice president of Analytic Business Solutions for the Missouri Hospital Association and a study co-author. "Our study results indicate that the current form of the methodology employed by CMS likely leaves important information about safety of care effectively out of the mix." Researchers say the designers of the ratings system were well intentioned in creating a system that would be both "simple and patient-friendly" for consumers. However, the methodology is so highly complex that it has led to confusion and "very significant consequences for the ratings of individual hospitals." Further refining the methodology, they say, would better summarize the quality measures and "offer greater upside for consumers and providers." ### MEDIA CONTACT: David Olejarz / David.Olejarz@hfhs.org / 313.874.4094 Two Harvard Medical School researchers have been named recipients of the prestigious Canada Gairdner Awards for transformational work in the fields of biomedicine and global health. Vikram Patel, The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, will receive the 2019 John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award. Patel is being recognized for research that has transformed understanding and attitudes toward the importance of mental health in a global context, for his contributions to international mental health policy and for efforts to improve access to mental health services in areas of the world where mental health resources are acutely lacking. Timothy Springer, the Latham Family Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, will receive the 2019 Canada Gairdner International Award, which recognizes pivotal contributions in the field of biomedicine. Springer is being honored for his discovery of the first immune system adhesion molecules, for elucidating their roles in the body's ability to recognize foreign antigens and mount an attack against them, and for the subsequent translation of these findings into therapies for autoimmune diseases. Patel and Springer are among seven laureates who will each receive a $100,000 cash honorarium. The recipients will be formally honored Oct. 24 at the annual Canada Gairdner Awards gala in Toronto. "These honors could not have gone to more deserving recipients," said George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School. "Vikram Patel's and Tim Springer's creativity and passion are inspirational." "Vikram's research has not only reshaped our understanding of mental health globally but also has tangibly improved access to critical services for people living in areas that lack mental health resources," Daley added. "He has challenged some of the most pernicious myths about mental health and his efforts have been foundational in making mental health a global health priority." "Tim's insights into cell biology, immunology and biological chemistry have transformed our understanding of the structure, function and interactions of many families of proteins and yielded critical insights about immunity, cancer, blood vessel homeostasis and more," Daley said. "His work has energized the field of protein science and illuminated new ways of thinking about next-generation protein therapies." Patel has been instrumental in establishing the field of global mental health. He has dedicated his research to raising the global profile of mental health through epidemiological research that has demonstrated the burden of mental disorders in low- and middle-income countries as well as their impact on poverty, child growth and development, and the risk for HIV infection, among other conditions. Patel's work has demonstrated that mental health problems are universal forms of human suffering that fuel a vicious cycle of deprivation and poor mental health. The central theme of Patel's work has been democratizing access to mental health care and making mental health care a right for everyone everywhere. Patel championed the concept of mental health care delivery by non-specialists and lay health workers as a way to expand access to mental health services in underserved areas. His book Where There Is No Psychiatrist: A mental health care manual has become the definitive text for community health workers in developing countries. Patel's intervention research became the foundation for the design, delivery and evaluation of psychosocial interventions provided by lay and community health workers. Such interventions include the primary care treatment of depression, anxiety and alcohol use disorders, the community-based care of people with schizophrenia and autism, and the prevention and treatment of adolescent mental health problems through school-based interventions. Much of Patel's work has been done in partnership with Sangath, an Indian nongovernmental organization that he co-founded in 1996. Sangath, one of India's leading community-based research organizations, received a 2008 MacArthur Foundation International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions and a 2016 World Health Organization Public Health Champion of India prize. Patel co-founded the Centre for Global Mental Health and the Mental Health Innovation Network at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Movement for Global Mental Health, the largest global network of individuals and organizations advocating for promoting services and human rights for people living with mental health problems. In 2018, Patel co-founded the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard Initiative which is developing a suite of innovative, interdisciplinary initiatives aimed at implementing and generating knowledge to transform mental health globally. Springer's research on the structure, function and interactions of biomedically important proteins spans the fields of mammalian biology and human physiology and has influenced disciplines ranging from immunology and hematology to infectious diseases and therapeutic development. His discoveries have yielded critical sights into how proteins on the surface of cells interact with other proteins and transmit signals outside the cell. Using antibodies as research tools, Springer elucidated the structure and role of several types of adhesion molecules on the surface of immune cells, a discovery that has clarified the role of these proteins in biological processes ranging from blood vessel homeostasis to inflammation and immunity. Springer was the first to demonstrate the presence of such adhesion molecules on the surface of two types of immune cells, lymphocytes and leukocytes, which play a critical role in the body's response to infection and cancer. Springer extended his research into proteins called integrins to define the biophysics that underlie their role in wound healing, infection control and tumor development. These discoveries, and Springer's entrepreneurship, have reshaped the fields of immunology and cell biology, catalyzing the development of treatments for a range of autoimmune conditions, including psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, as well as cancer. Springer's work has generated novel insights about the role of protein interactions in blood vessels and platelet function and illuminated the understanding of protein malfunctions that give rise to bleeding disorders. Specifically, Springer's research has elucidated the effects of hydrodynamic forces in the bloodstream on a molecule known as von Willebrand factor, which regulates blood clotting and blood vessel homeostasis. Springer's team is also working to define the conformational structures of proteins used by the malaria parasite to infect human cells and reproduce and how the immune system recognizes these proteins to mount a defense. The findings could pave the way to the design of new vaccines for an infection that claims hundreds of thousands of lives globally each year. Springer's team is also working to unravel the structure of TGF-beta proteins, which are critical for muscle and bone development, immunity and cancer progression. Most recently, Springer channeled his interest in translational work and therapeutics development by co-founding the nonprofit Institute for Protein Innovation, which aims to advance protein science, develop an open-source antibody library for the study of disease and propel the development of protein-based therapies. Springer's discoveries have inspired the formation of three biotech companies. "Over the years, we have been awed by Tim's textbook work, from early discoveries of hematopoietic cell adhesion receptors and their role in lymphocyte functions to their atomic structures and large conformational changes that activate them," said Frederick Alt, director of the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. "Equally important, Tim used his basic insights to develop new classes of therapeutics that have benefited large numbers of patients." The Canada Gairdner Awards, bestowed by the Gairdner Foundation, celebrate the world's best biomedical and global health researchers through seven annual awards. The awards recognize international excellence in fundamental research and global health work that have impact on human health. "On the 60th anniversary of the Canada Gairdner Awards, the Gairdner Foundation continues to uphold the tradition of honoring the best and brightest researchers from around the world," said D. Lorne Tyrrell, chair of the board of the directors of the Gairdner Foundation. "Whether it is the field of global mental health, stem cell biology or fundamental cell biology and DNA replication, the work of each of this year's laureates is both critical and extraordinary." To date, the Gairdner Foundation has bestowed 387 awards on scientists from 35 countries. Of those, 89 have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes. Past Canada Gairdner award recipients from HMS include Stephen Elledge, the Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital; Harold Dvorak, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Pathology, Emeritus at HMS and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital; William Kaelin, the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Marc Kirschner, the John Franklin Enders University Professor of Systems Biology at HMS. Richard Losick, the Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology at Harvard University, is also a recipient of the award. ### The GeoFarmer app allows community workers and smallholders to easily collect and share information on climate-related agricultural interventions. Development agencies can use the tool to gather effective feedback and to respond to emergent climate needs When a drought-bringing El Nino hits, farmers are the first to take the brunt of the climate stress. Quickly obtaining information on the fallout is essential for development agencies, government and farmers organizations to respond efficiently. But poor connectivity and slow flows of information are an obstacle. An app tested with thousands of farmers in Colombia and Africa showed that farmers can quickly produce and share vital information when climate problems arise. The GeoFarmer app was deployed and tested in Colombia, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda, and was developed by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in collaboration with the University of Salzburg. GeoFarmer allowed farmers to collect and share geospatial data on weather, farm conditions including soil and crop types, and monitor the adoption of techniques to make farms more productive and resilient to climate change. Even where internet connectivity was limited, farmers produced and shared tens of thousands of data points over short periods. The findings were published this February in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. "An app like this gives farmers a voice and helps close the communication gap between people working in the development sector, researchers working on development technologies, and farmers," said Andrew Jarvis, a co-author and director of CIAT's Decision and Policy Analysis research area. "We're better at understanding farmers' needs and we're more responsive to emerging opportunities and unanticipated challenges." Agriculture is one of the globe's least technologically developed sectors, and this is especially true for most of the world's half-billion smallholder farmers. Improving their precarious situation is often the target of global development agencies, but interventions sometimes fall short of desired outcomes due to the top-down nature of some recommendations. Research has shown that farmers are more likely to make decisions based on input from peers, and Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as GeoFarmer show great potential to increase communication between smallholders. "We're making farmers not only the end-beneficiary, but rather an actor in the whole development process," Jarvis said. "They're able to receive information more effectively, they are empowered by having more information, and the development project is more relevant because their preferences are being fed back much better." Climate-smart, affordable tech GeoFarmer was tested and deployed alongside development projects, including climate-smart villages that are part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). In Jirapa-Lawra, a village in Northern Ghana's Guinea Savannah woodlands, the app was used to gather 60,000 data records from five blocks of surveys in a two-week period. The data was mostly collected in offline mode and uploaded into a cloud storage system when local data-collection facilitators were within range of the community's mobile network. Farmers in Lushoto, in the Usambara Mountains in Northeastern Tanzania, used GeoFarmer as part of a citizen scientist project to test and manage climate-smart agricultural practices. One practice included the adoption of manure composting to increase productivity, reduce costs and diminish reliance on chemical fertilizers. GeoFarmer was used to monitor awareness, knowledge and use of the practice. (See figure.) In Cauca, a department of southwestern Colombia, 1,240 farmers were surveyed using GeoFarmer's interactive voice response (IVR) calling system to gather perceptions of climate risks and other risks facing agricultural activities. The IVR system, which delivered five-question surveys that were completed in 2-3 minutes, had a lower response rate than typical face-to-face surveys but collected useful data at a far greater rate and volume at a much lower cost than traditional surveying techniques. Maps and clouds The GeoFarmer app transmitted data to a cloud-based storage system and was made accessible through a web-based interface. The app allowed farmers to share photos and comments related to the agricultural projects. The information was georeferenced so content could be properly contextualized with the app's map viewer. Future iterations of GeoFarmer aim to expand beyond sharing comments and photos to include discussion, voting and rating mechanisms to help farmers determine best practice solutions to new challenges. Developers will also continue to expand the app's ease-of-use to facilitate greater technology adoption across the digital literacy divide present in some smallholder communities. "For the next phase, we aim to integrate GeoFarmer with other mobile apps to solve the problem of missing interoperability of data collected by different actors from research, academia, non-profit, governmental institutions, and the private sector," said Anton Eitzinger, lead author and climate change scientist at CIAT. "The problem of missing interoperability of data between different ICT systems hinders the flow of data, information, and insights that would have the potential to alleviate some of the impacts from climate risks for farmers. Integrating the different ICT systems in a country would help to establish innovative monitoring systems and produce smart metrics for the supply side, and to innovate around the development of unique services for the farmer." ### Funders and collaborators This work was implemented as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) - led by CIAT - and carried out with support from CGIAR Fund Donors and through bilateral funding agreements. For details, please visit https://ccafs.cgiar.org/donors. This work was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID); and the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). This study was conducted with collaborators from the University of Munich (Germany), University of Salzburg (Austria), Unversidad de San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador), and Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (Switzerland). An international team of researchers has put a theory speculated by the late Stephen Hawking to its most rigorous test to date, and their results have ruled out the possibility that primordial black holes smaller than a tenth of a millimeter make up most of dark matter. Details of their study have been published in this week's Nature Astronomy. Scientists know that 85 per cent of the matter in the Universe is made up of dark matter. Its gravitational force prevents stars in our Milky Way from flying apart. However, attempts to detect such dark matter particles using underground experiments, or accelerator experiments including the world's largest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, have failed so far. This has led scientists to consider Hawking's 1974 theory of the existence of primordial black holes, born shortly after the Big Bang, and his speculation that they could make up a large fraction of the elusive dark matter scientists are trying to discover today. An international team of researchers, led by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe Principal Investigator Masahiro Takada, PhD candidate student Hiroko Niikura, Professor Naoki Yasuda, and including researchers from Japan, India and the US, have used the gravitational lensing effect to look for primordial black holes between Earth and the Andromeda galaxy. Gravitational lensing, an effect first suggested by Albert Einstein, manifests itself as the bending of light rays coming from a distant object such as a star due to the gravitational effect of an intervening massive object such as a primordial black hole. In extreme cases, such light bending causes the background star to appear much brighter than it originally is. However, gravitational lensing effects are very rare events because it requires a star in the Andromeda galaxy, a primordial black hole acting as the gravitational lens, and an observer on Earth to be exactly in line with one another. So to maximize the chances of capturing an event, the researchers used the Hyper Suprime-Cam digital camera on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, which can capture the whole image of the Andromeda galaxy in one shot. Taking into account how fast primordial black holes are expected to move in interstellar space, the team took multiple images to be able to catch the flicker of a star as it brightens for a period of a few minutes to hours due to gravitational lensing. From 190 consecutive images of the Andromeda galaxy taken over seven hours during one clear night, the team scoured the data for potential gravitational lensing events. If dark matter consists of primordial black holes of a given mass, in this case masses lighter than the moon, the researchers expected to find about 1000 events. But after careful analyses, they could only identify one case. The team's results showed primordial black holes can contribute no more than 0.1 per cent of all dark matter mass. Therefore, it is unlikely the theory is true. The researchers are now planning to further develop their analysis of the Andromeda galaxy. One new theory they will investigate is to find whether binary black holes discovered by gravitational wave detector LIGO are in fact primordial black holes. ### Why would boys and girls choose different reproductive strategies? For golden lion tamarins in the Brazilian rain forest, the answer may offer clues to help save this neotropical primate. For conservationists, gaining an understanding of the ecology and behaviors of an animal population is vital for creating an optimal preservation strategy. But there are still many unexplored motives affecting the ways of life of a particular animal. One major question researchers ask regards the dispersal patterns and social drivers of 'natal emigration': leaving a birthplace or group. Population dispersal is a crucial behavioral trait in animal societies, helping maintain the viability of each species. To investigate, a research team from Japan and Brazil analyzed the dispersal patterns of the endangered golden lion tamarin, or GLT. Their study appears in the American Journal of Primatology. First author Valeria Romano of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute explains that GLTs live in small family groups, each averaging seven individuals. There is a reproductive pair at the center, and older offspring help care for younger siblings. However, this system leaves subordinate members with only limited options for reproduction: waiting for a breeding opportunity within the group, or 'emigrating' out to search for potential mates. Emigration can increase reproductive opportunities, but also entails risks, such as facing predators and starvation. The team analyzed data on the social habits of 68 groups -- collected over seven years by an international conservation program -- which revealed that, while both male and female GLTs emigrate out to maximize their dispersal success, their tactics differ. Successful males immigrate into other groups, whereas females form entirely new ones. Males and females were also found to leave their natal groups because of attraction to external breeding opportunities. Additionally, weak social integration with other group members was found to add to male emigration. The researchers hope that further investigation of the underlying mechanisms of natal emigration will assist in the design of management strategies for the conservation of other threatened species. ### The paper "Unraveling the dispersal patterns and the social drivers of natal emigration of a cooperative breeding mammal, the golden lion tamarin" appeared on 27 February 2019 in the American Journal of Primatology, with doi: 10.1002/ajp.22959 About Kyoto University Kyoto University is one of Japan and Asia's premier research institutions, founded in 1897 and responsible for producing numerous Nobel laureates and winners of other prestigious international prizes. A broad curriculum across the arts and sciences at both undergraduate and graduate levels is complemented by numerous research centers, as well as facilities and offices around Japan and the world. For more information please see: http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en Lehigh University has been awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a coordinated on-campus community development program to infuse the humanities across the academic culture through research, curriculum development and student experiences. "We are proud to be the recipient of a grant through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the positioning of the humanities at the center of disciplinary convergence at Lehigh," said John D. Simon, Lehigh's President and co-PI on the grant. "Bridging disciplines in new ways to provide distinctive educational opportunities has long been an institutional hallmark at Lehigh. This effort coincides with major new initiatives, including the establishment of a new College of Health, that will significantly grow numbers of faculty and students over the next decade. We are excited to embrace this timely opportunity for sustainable infusion of the humanities across Lehigh's academic culture with Mellon Foundation support." "The best innovations in higher education are those that transform institutional culture to help prepare students for leadership in addressing the increasingly complex issues facing society," said Patrick V. Farrell, Lehigh's Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs and co-PI. "We are grateful for this support from the Mellon Foundation to continue the original vision of Asa Packer, Lehigh's founder, for Lehigh graduates to deploy and advance technologies with the critical reflection and appreciation of human experience necessary to act with wisdom and humility." The program components focus on three areas: strengthening an integrated academic culture through research; curriculum development to deepen academic integration; and, building integrated perspectives into student experiences. Central to the effort to elevate the university's commitment to the humanities will be offering humanities-based research development grants as a way to extend, amplify and sustain humanities scholarship. "Humanities scholarship is an essential part of a research portfolio that reflects public concerns and shapes the environment in which we cultivate the next generation of leaders," said Alan J. Snyder, Vice President and Associate Provost for Research & Graduate Studies at Lehigh. "It's also a vital influence on how scholars in other fields see their work in societal, and human, context. One goal with the Mellon program is to facilitate further exchange and influence across disciplines while remaining centered in the humanities." The proposed work will build on Lehigh's public-facing research and community partnership success such as the recent Mellon Digital Humanities Initiative and Lehigh's hosting of the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium. The Mellon Foundation support will increase the opportunities for members of the community to see their concerns and intellectual assets reflected in Lehigh's research. Curriculum development plans include efforts to broaden the first-year classroom experience with integrated first-year seminars designed to introduce students across a wide range of fields to the humanities as an integral part of their education. In addition, 'Course moments' seminars will provide an avenue for science, business, and engineering faculty who want to enhance their existing coursework to include scheduled participation of humanities faculty. Finally, new courses workshops will be offered to faculty from different disciplines and colleges to create upper-level courses that thoroughly integrate humanities with other disciplinary perspectives. These courses will intentionally target STEM and business students who, looking for career relevance, often discount the value of humanities distributions when choosing their courses. "These first-year seminars, 'course moments' seminars and new courses will help students understand how humanities perspectives can inform their approaches in a wide range of fields. The humanities promote the ability to evaluate issues from multiple perspectives, a skill that's necessary for effective communication and meaningful collaboration," said Suzanne Edwards (https://english.cas2.lehigh.edu/content/suzanne-edwards), Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Humanities Center at Lehigh. "The Mellon grant gives us the opportunity to foreground the humanities as a hub for interdisciplinary education. Through this initiative, for example, an English professor who works in medical humanities might challenge students in a biology course to consider how social and cultural factors shape scientific inquiry." All curriculum development programming will be implemented under the auspices of Lehigh's Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL), which is an on-campus hub for faculty professional and curricular development, including teaching tools, course development opportunities, classroom and instructional support and consultation services. The program will recruit a postdoctoral fellow whose experience and scholarly interests amplify in-house expertise. The fellow will combine their own scholarship in the humanities with co-teaching in the integrated first-year seminar pilots, working in partnership with CITL on faculty development seminars and workshops and one-on-one with seminar participants, as well as coordination of proposed programming details and assessment. "The CITL is looking forward to partnering with Lehigh faculty to create new courses that will help our students draw on humanities and STEM disciplines to jointly tackle some of the most fundamental and pressing questions of the current age," said Greg Reihman, Lehigh's Associate Vice Provost and Director of the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. "Mellon recognizes the importance of the arts and the humanities in our students' education, and this grant shows the foundation's trust in Lehigh's faculty and the CITL to partner together to create exciting multi-disciplinary research and teaching opportunities for our students and faculty." Finally, to infuse integrated perspectives into the student experience, Lehigh will build on its distinctive 5x10 ("five by ten") program, a co-curricular format that can be utilized to immediately integrate humanities-centered perspectives university-wide. Currently, all first-year students attend five 75-minute 5x10 sessions in their first ten weeks on campus, choosing from among dozens of interactive programs that introduce Lehigh's many venues for intellectual engagement outside the classroom, from international internships to social action to undergraduate research to healthy work-life balance and beyond. Through Lehigh's proposed program, the 5x10s will expand throughout the year, engaging more students - and faculty - to attend and present on humanities-centered themes emerging from program-supported research and curricular development. Implementation is scheduled to begin immediately with the hiring of a postdoctoral fellow to begin collaborating on curriculum development with the CITL. The central elements of the initiative will be in place at the start of the 2019-2020 academic year. ### The difficulty in spotting minute amounts of disease circulating in the bloodstream has proven a stumbling block in the detection and treatment of cancers that advance stealthily with few symptoms. With a novel electrochemical biosensing device that identifies the tiniest signals these biomarkers emit, a pair of NJIT inventors are hoping to bridge this gap. Their work in disease detection is an illustration of the power of electrical sensing - and the growing role of engineers - in medical research. "Ideally, there would be a simple, inexpensive test - performed at a regular patient visit in the absence of specific symptoms - to screen for some of the more silent, deadly cancers," says Bharath Babu Nunna, a recent Ph.D. graduate who worked with Eon Soo Lee, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, to develop a nanotechnology-enhanced biochip to detect cancers, malaria and viral diseases such as pneumonia early in their progression with a pin prick blood test. Their device includes a microfluidic channel through which a tiny amount of drawn blood flows past a sensing platform coated with biological agents that bind with targeted biomarkers of disease in body fluids such as blood, tears and urine - thereby triggering an electrical nanocircuit that signals their presence. In research recently published in Nano Covergence, Nunna and his co-authors demonstrated the use of gold nanoparticles to enhance the sensor signal response of their device in cancer detection, among other findings. One of the device's core innovations is the ability to separate blood plasma from whole blood in its microfluidic channels. Blood plasma carries the disease biomarkers and it is therefore necessary to separate it to enhance the "signal to noise ratio" in order to achieve a highly accurate test. The standalone device analyzes a blood sample within two minutes with no need for external equipment. "Our approach detects targeted disease biomolecules at the femto scale concentration, which is smaller than nano and even pico scale, and is akin to searching for a planet in a galaxy cluster. Current sensing technology is limited to concentrations a thousand times larger. Using a nanoscale platform allows us to identify these lower levels of disease," Nunna says, adding, "And by separating the plasma from the blood, we are able to concentrate the disease biomarkers." In another recent paper in BioNanoScience, Nunna, Lee and their co-authors detailed their findings on variations in sensitivity based on microfluidic flow. Nunna is now a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, where he is expanding his expertise in microfluidic platforms, using them in organ-on-the-chip research conducted with Su Ryon Shin, a principal investigator and instructor in the medical school's Department of Medicine who develops 3D-bioprinted organoids - artificial organs composed of cultured cells within structured hydrogels - for medical experimentation. "I'm primarily responsible for developing the microfluidic devices that will automate the process of bioprinting 3D organs that will be incorporated on a chip for a number of purposes. I'm tasked, for example, with developing an automated platform for long-term drug efficacy and toxicity analysis to track liver cancer and cardiac biomarkers. I'll be integrating the microfluidic biosensor with the liver cancer- and heart-on-a-chip model for continuous monitoring," he says. By measuring the biomarker concentrations secreted from drug-injected 3D-bioprinted organs, we can study drug effects on several organs without harming a live patient. Creating artificial organs allows us to experiment freely." Down the road, he adds, the work at Harvard could potentially be applied in regenerative medicine. "The goal is to develop fully functional 3D-bioprinted organoids and clinically relevant 3D tissues to address the issue of donor shortages in transplantation." Nunna says his research at Harvard Medical School will expand his knowledge of programmable microfluidics and precise electrochemical sensing techniques, which will in turn help him advance his biochip technology. The goal is a simple, standard assay for cancer diagnosis that avoids conventional, complex diagnostic steps. Lee and Nunna have been working with oncologists at Weill Cornell Medicine and Hackensack Medical Center to identify clinical applications. As currently designed, the device would provide both qualitative and quantitative results of cancer antigens in blood samples, providing information on the presence and the severity of the cancer. Their next step, he says, will be to expand the platform to detect multiple diseases using a single blood sample obtained with a pin prick. "Although healthcare technology is considered to be a fast-evolving technology, there are still many unmet needs that need to be addressed. Diagnosing potentially deadly diseases at the early stages is the key to saving lives and improving patient treatment outcomes," he says, adding, "There is a huge need for healthcare technology, including a universal diagnostic platform that can provide instant results at the physician's office and other point-of-care settings." Nunna is the co-founder and chief research scientist for Abonics, Inc., a startup formed by Lee to commercialize their device. He is named as a co-inventor with Lee on three published biochip patents and six additional patents that are now under review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Their technology has won financial backing from the National Science Foundation I-Corps program and the New Jersey Health Foundation (NJHF), a not-for-profit corporation that supports top biomedical research and health-related education programs in New Jersey. "As we know, early detection can improve treatment outcomes for patients significantly," explained George F. Heinrich, M.D., vice chair and CEO of NJHF, in announcing the award. "Currently, doctors rely on diagnostic devices requiring a minimum of four hours of sample preparation through centralized diagnostic centers rather than their local offices." In 2017, Nunna received the "Best Design in Healthcare Innovations and Point-of-Care Innovations Award" at the Healthcare Innovation and Point-of-Care Technologies conference from the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, held at the National Institute of Health headquarters in Bethesda, MD. That same year, the technology received the national innovation award at the TechConnect World Innovation Conference and Expo, an annual gathering of technology transfer offices, companies, and investment firms who meet to identify promising technologies from across the globe. ### Astronomers used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to make the first direct image of a dusty, doughnut-shaped feature surrounding the supermassive black hole at the core of one of the most powerful radio galaxies in the Universe -- a feature first postulated by theorists nearly four decades ago as an essential part of such objects. The scientists studied Cygnus A, a galaxy some 760 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy harbors a black hole 2.5 billion times more massive then the Sun at its core. As the black hole's powerful gravitational pull draws in surrounding material, it also propels superfast jets of material traveling outward at nearly the speed of light, producing spectacular "lobes" of bright radio emission. Black hole-powered "central engines" producing bright emission at various wavelengths, and jets extending far beyond the galaxy are common to many galaxies, but show different properties when observed. Those differences led to a variety of names, such as quasars, blazars, or Seyfert galaxies. To explain the differences, theorists constructed a "unified model" with a common set of features that would show different properties depending on the angle from which they are viewed. The unified model includes the central black hole, a rotating disk of infalling material surrounding the black hole, and the jets speeding outward from the poles of the disk. In addition, to explain why the same type of object looks different when viewed from different angles, a thick, dusty, doughnut-shaped "torus" is included, surrounding the inner parts. The torus obscures some features when viewed from the side, leading to apparent differences to the observer, even for intrinsically similar objects. Astronomers generically call this common set of features an active galactic nucleus (AGN). "The torus is an essential part of the AGN phenomenon, and evidence exists for such structures in nearby AGN of lower luminosity, but we've never before directly seen one in such a brightly-emitting radio galaxy," said Chris Carilli, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "The torus helps explain why objects known by different names actually are the same thing, just observed from a different perspective," he added. In the 1950s, astronomers discovered objects that strongly emitted radio waves, but appeared point-like, similar to distant stars, when later observed with visible-light telescopes. In 1963, Maarten Schmidt of Caltech discovered that one of these objects was extremely distant, and more such discoveries quickly followed. To explain how these objects, dubbed quasars, could be so bright, theorists suggested that they must be tapping the tremendous gravitational energy of supermassive black holes. The combination of black hole, the rotating disk, called an accretion disk, and the jets was termed the "central engine" responsible for the objects' prolific outpourings of energy. The same type of central engine also appeared to explain the output of other types of objects, including radio galaxies, blazars, and Seyfert Galaxies. However, each showed a different set of properties. Theorists worked to develop a "unification scheme" to explain how the same thing could appear differently. In 1977, obscuration by dust was suggested as one element of that scheme. In a 1982 paper, Robert Antonucci, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, presented a drawing of an opaque torus -- a doughnut-shaped object -- surrounding the central engine. From that point on, an obscuring torus has been a common feature of astronomers' unified view of all types of active galactic nuclei. "Cygnus A is the closest example of a powerful radio-emitting galaxy -- 10 times closer than any other with comparably bright radio emission. That proximity allowed us to find the torus in a high-resolution VLA image of the galaxy's core," said Rick Perley, also of NRAO. "Doing more work of this type on weaker and more distant objects will almost certainly need the order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity and resolution that the proposed Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) would bring," he added. The VLA observations directly revealed the gas in Cygnus A's torus, which has a radius of nearly 900 light-years. Longstanding models for the torus suggest that the dust is in clouds embedded in the somewhat-clumpy gas. "It's really great to finally see direct evidence of something that we've long presumed should be there," Carilli said. "To more accurately determine the shape and composition of this torus, we need to do further observing. For example, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) can observe at the wavelengths that will directly reveal the dust," he added. Carilli and Perley, with their colleagues Vivek Dhawan, also of NRAO, and Daniel Perley of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, discovered the torus when following up their surprising discovery in 2016 of a new, bright object near the center of Cygnus A. That new object, they said, is most likely a second supermassive black hole that only recently encountered new material it could devour, causing it to produce bright emission the same way the central black hole does. The existence of the second black hole, they said, suggests that Cygnus A merged with another galaxy in the astronomically recent past. Cygnus A, so named because it is the most powerful radio-emitting object in the constellation Cygnus, was discovered in 1946 by English physicist and radio astronomer J.S. Hey. It was matched to a visible-light, giant galaxy by Walter Baade and Rudolf Minkowski in 1951. It became an early target for the VLA soon after its completion in the early 1980s. Detailed VLA images of Cygnus A published in 1984 produced major advances in astronomers' understanding of such galaxies. ### The scientists are reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. Routine scaling and polishing of teeth should be stopped as the NHS dental budget would be better spent elsewhere, experts warn. A study, led by Newcastle University, UK, shows that the NHS dental budget is not being spent in the most efficient way and must be better allocated to avoid oral health inequality and meet patients' needs. Presenting their findings today at a policy briefing in London, the team says public money used for NHS dentistry in England is based on historical demands rather than evolving with the needs of patients. Their study reveals that funds should be much more focused on prevention of decay and gum disease and more accessible services. Changes in investment The findings include opening new NHS high street practices, greater provision of dentistry in care homes, allowing direct booking of dental appointments from the NHS helpline, and having more oral health measures built into contracts for local authority services. The trade-off, say the team, would be a reduction in the amount of orthodontics the NHS provides - by not treating those with moderate need and not providing adult orthodontics - and stopping routine scaling and polishing of teeth. Dr Chris Vernazza, Clinical Senior Lecturer at the School of Dental Sciences, Newcastle University, led the RAINDROP project, which has been funded by the National Institute for Health Research. He said: "Public money used for NHS dentistry is not being spent in the most effective way to ensure that patients are given the best care possible. "Our RAINDROP project shows much of the dental budget is spent on high street dentistry but significant amounts are also spent on specialist oral surgery and orthodontic services, with very little spend on oral disease prevention. "We estimate the current NHS dentistry budget includes only a tiny provision for prevention of oral disease, less than 5%, and this is not enough. "We have recommended a specific set of services we would like to see new investment in and a set of services that should have funding reduced to allow this investment." Better system The RAINDROP project was set up to identify a better system for making decisions around changing how the NHS dental budget is spent, trying to satisfy multiple criteria, including determining public views in a way that represented the whole of society. A panel of patient representatives, dental network chairs, dental lead commissioners, dental public health consultants and an academic assessed the current funding model and services, exploring more effective models of care. Currently, NHS dental budgets are set regionally, but the funding arrangements often maintain historic allocations, partly due to lack of resources to review current allocations. Each panel member scored a variety of dental services - such as examinations, oral surgery, out of hours, restorative and orthodontics - to identify the changes needed to dental health budgets. The team have presented their findings to the Office of the Chief Dental Officer and others at NHS England, who will now consider the resource allocation recommendations. Dr Vernazza said: "Major changes, such as those we have recommended, are often difficult to implement at a national level. "It may be that any changes need to be made as part of ongoing and emerging processes, such as dental contract reform which is currently scheduled for roll out next year. "In addition, at regional level, opportunities may present which would allow implementation of parts of our recommendations. "The focus is on improvements for the whole population, so individual patients may see different levels of benefit. The sooner changes are made, the sooner the potential benefits can be realised." The RAINDROP team are now embarking on a series of engagements with key stakeholders to explain and explore the project and its findings. ### Notes to Editors 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. Rice University chemists who discovered that chemicals used in Billups-Birch reductions of carbon nanotubes react with the white PTFE stir bars, turning them black. They recommend using glass stir bars, like the one in the middle, for such reductions. The stirrers that mix cream into your coffee probably don't make much difference to the drink. But in a chemistry lab, it turns out using the wrong stirrer can skew the science. Rice University scientists have determined that stir bars made of PTFE, more commonly known as Teflon, can introduce errors into a standard lab reaction used to manipulate the properties of carbon or boron-nitride nanotubes. Stir bars are pellet-like rods of ferromagnetic metal covered in PTFE that sit in the bottom of a beaker and are turned by a rotating magnetic field. They allow a solution to be mixed in a closed flask without manual stirring. The Rice lab of Angel Marti published a paper in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Omega outlining what happens when PTFE stir bars are used to functionalize nanotubes through Billups-Birch reduction, a long-used reaction developed in part by Rice Professor Emeritus of Chemistry Edward Billups that frees electrons to bind with other atoms. Reduction is often used to make nanotubes more amenable to functionalization, the process of customizing them for applications by adding molecules like proteins. That can be as simple as dispersing nanotubes in a chemical bath laden with the molecules you want to add. Billups-Birch is one such method, a one-step process used to functionalize nanotubes with a variety of molecules, according to the researchers. When they used it to modify nanotubes of boron-nitride, the researchers were surprised to see their tubes turn gray, while the PTFE stir bars turned black. Standard thermogravimetric analysis, usually adequate to see evidence of functionalization, didn't see anything wrong - but the researchers did. "Aside from that, we couldn't get consistent results," Marti said. "Sometimes we would get very high functionalization - or apparent functionalization - and sometimes we wouldn't. That was really strange." They found the lithium in the ammonia-based solvent used in the Billups-Birch reaction was reacting with the white PTFE from the bars, turning them black. "Because carbon nanotubes are black, it would be easy to believe that nanotubes were depositing on the bars throughout the reaction," Marti said. "But that's not what happens. We found that in Billups-Birch conditions, the PTFE reacts. "Teflon doesn't generally react with anything," he said. "That's why it's used in stir bars, and in cookware. That's why it's also easy to overlook what we saw happening in the lab." Marti said search of the literature turned up nothing about avoiding PTFE in Billups-Birch. "That was odd, too," he said. "Maybe everybody else knows - but just in case we decided to explore the problem. That's why we decided to write a paper." The researchers suspect the unexpected reaction with Teflon is creating radicals that reduce the efficiency of the reaction and that can attack the boron-nitride or carbon nanotubes. In the meantime, their quick solution to the problem is perhaps the simplest. "Now we use glass-coated stir bars," Marti said. "Glass is completely inert. That gives us reproducibility and good functionalization." WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Adranos Inc., a Purdue University-affiliated company developing a high-performance, solid propellant for long-range missile and space launch systems, has won the Army's inaugural xTechSearch competition, besting more than 350 companies in the months long competition. The award decision was made by senior Army leaders based on what technology they believed could have the biggest impact on the Army's modernization needs. Adranos previously was awarded $125,000 for being selected a finalist in the competition, which it used to perform a live flight demonstration of its novel rocket propellant called ALITEC. A video of the flight demonstration is available here. Adranos founders Brandon Terry, who received his doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue, and Chris Stoker, an Indiana University JD/MBA alumnus, will use the $200,000 award funding to enable company growth and continued ALITEC development. The technology is a high-performance solid rocket propellant that has more thrust and is less corrosive than traditional solid propellants. "Brandon and I have always believed in our technology, but to have senior Army leaders recognize ALITEC's potential impact is a great honor for us. We are highly motivated to take the funding from this competition and advance our rocket fuel to the next level," Stoker said. "In this year when Purdue is celebrating its 150th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of Purdue alumnus Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, we're excited to be working on another potentially giant leap when it comes to aeronautics." Adranos's flight demonstrations confirmed that ALITEC could substantially increase the range of ballistic missiles over traditional solid propellants. The technology aligned with the Army's Long Range Precision Fire modernization priority, which is focused on restoring the U.S. Army's dominance in range, munitions, and target acquisition. ALITEC is processed in the same way traditional propellants, meaning that it can be used in any of the current or future missile platforms employed by the Department of Defense. "We mix it the same way. We cast it the same way. We cure it the same way. The only difference is we're replacing one metal powder with another metal powder in the processing," Terry said. The propellant could be used by the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA and other Department of Defense agencies, as well as U.S.-allied nations. The Expeditionary Technology Search, shortened to xTechSearch, called on companies to demonstrate technologies that can help the Army meet its modernization challenges. The goal is to seek nontraditional innovators who can work with the Army, including through cooperative research opportunities with Army scientists, as it modernizes the force. From robotics and night-vision to radar, machine guns and duct tape, innovation has driven the very nature of how the Army fights, said Jeffrey White, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology. "Innovation reforms, both large and small, have improved the lives of our soldiers," White said. "And continued innovation is absolutely critical for force modernization." Adranos, which is named after the Greek god of fire, has previously received nearly $1 million of funding for ALITEC development. Stoker said $600,000 in funding came from Archibald Cox Jr., chairman of Sextant Group Inc., a private investment firm. Cox is the former chairman of Barclays of America and former CEO of Morgan Stanley International and various other companies. He is now on the Adranos Board of Directors. The remaining funds came from other state and federal programs. The company received startup assistance from the Purdue Foundry, an entrepreneurial accelerator in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship. "We've worked with nearly 250 startups, and Chris and Brandon are 'rocket' stars with their expertise in the technology and in the development of their entrepreneurial skills," said Greg Deason, senior vice president of entrepreneurship and place making. "Even more importantly, their innovation will serve the U.S. Army in advancing defense technologies. Very proud of these guys." Adranos' work aligns with Purdue's Giant Leaps celebration, celebrating the university's global advancements in space exploration as part of Purdue's 150th anniversary. This is one of the four themes of the yearlong celebration's Ideas Festival, designed to showcase Purdue as an intellectual center solving real-world issues. Adranos emerged as a startup from what is now called the Purdue Energetics Research Center. Technology used by Adranos is licensed through the Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization, which patented the technology. Adranos is continuing to raise funds to advance the technology. ### About Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization The Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization operates one of the most comprehensive technology transfer programs among leading research universities in the U.S. Services provided by this office support the economic development initiatives of Purdue University and benefit the university's academic activities. The office is managed by the Purdue Research Foundation, which received the 2016 Innovation and Economic Prosperity Universities Award for Innovation from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. For more information about funding and investment opportunities in startups based on a Purdue innovation, contact the Purdue Foundry at foundry@prf.org. For more information on licensing a Purdue innovation, contact the Office of Technology Commercialization at otcip@prf.org. Scientists at the University of Navarra link the alteration of three molecules with the prevalence, incidence, and recurrence of this cardiac ailment present in 33.5 million people in the world Pamplona (Spain), April 2nd, 2019. Scientists at the University of Navarra (Spain), in collaboration with clinicians from the University Hospital of Donostia, have identified two biomarkers associated with the risk of suffering atrial fibrillation, a cardiac ailment that affects more than 33.5 million people in the world. In the European Union, it is present in 8.8 million people over 55 years of age and, specifically in Spain, it affects more than 4% of the population over 40 years of age. The World Health Organization considers this disease as an epidemic due to its high morbidity and mortality, and a public health problem due to its high prevalence. Atrial fibrillation is the most common alteration of the heart rhythm (arrhythmia). It happens when the heart pumps blood in an accelerated and irregular way, thus increasing the risk of suffering a heart attack, heart failure, stroke, or other complications related to this organ. Some common causes are heart disease or hormonal changes. It can be treated with medications and procedures, such as cardiac ablation, to correct irregular heart rhythms. Researchers at Cima, Clinica Universidad de Navarra and the Faculty of Sciences, have discovered that, by analyzing a blood sample, it is possible to predict the appearance of this cardiac ailment. "The alteration of three molecules related to collagen metabolism (CITP, MMP-1, and PICP) determine the risk of suffering atrial fibrillation and the response to its treatment," explains Dr. Javier Diez, director of the Cardiovascular Disease Program at Cima, Head of Research of the Department of Cardiology and co-director of the Department of Nephrology at the Clinica Universidad de Navarra. Advances toward precision medicine The study was performed in 392 patients, 150 of them treated with cardiac ablation. "We have found that patients with low blood levels of the CITP/MMP-1 ratio and elevated levels of PICP have a high risk of developing atrial fibrillation and that it recurred after cardiac ablation. The confirmation of these findings can lay the foundations to precisely adjust the most optimal treatment and follow-up for each patient according to these two biomarkers," adds Dr. Diez, also from CIBERCV. ### This research, led by Dr. Diez and Dr. Ignacio Garcia-Bolao, director of the Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery Department at Clinica Universidad de Navarra, has been published in the prestigious Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The same number of this manuscript contains an editorial that highlights the scientific advance that this study implies toward precision medicine. Caption: From the left: Gabriel Ballesteros, Susana Ravassa, Ignacio Garcia-Bolao, Begona Lopez, Javier Diez, Arantxa Gonzalez, Pablo Ramos, Jean Bragard and Ujue Moreno. Bibliographic reference Combination of Circulating Type I Collagen-Related Biomarkers Is Associated With Atrial Fibrillation DOI:10.1016/j.jacc.2018.12.074 About Clinica Universidad de Navarra Clinica Universidad de Navarra, with more than 2.800 full-time commitment professionals in both of its locations Pamplona and Madrid, is a research hospital and a model in personalized medicine in our country. Our hospital is renowned for its research and teaching labor, for its prestigious professionals and its career in the diagnosis and treatment of complex pathologies. Furthermore, it is a high-resolution hospital due to its diagnosis speed, that it is possible thanks to a multidisciplinary work and the acquisition of the latest technology. With all that, Clinica Universidad de Navarra is capable of providing 46 clinical and surgical specialties. For the fifth consecutive year, our center has been the hospital with the best reputation in Spain (according to MRS ranking). About Cima Universidad de Navarra Cima is the research center of the Clinica Universidad de Navarra. The scientific objective of its more than 370 professionals is to face current clinical problems and propose the most effective treatment for each patient. To transfer the results of basic research to clinical application, Cima has a Translation and Transfer unit that seeks to establish collaborations with biotechnological and pharmaceutical companies to facilitate the arrival of scientific discoveries to the patient. Cima is a leading biomedical institution in the field of immunotherapy, gene therapy, and liver diseases. More information: https://cima.unav.edu/en/ Researchers discovered the virus, which does not infect humans, in Kenya, 3,400 miles west of where it first appeared FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A recently discovered species of ebolavirus may be more widespread than previously thought and could be hosted by a particular bat species, according to findings published by a University of Arkansas biologist. The ebolavirus species, named Bombali, is one of two currently not known to infect humans. Kristian Forbes, assistant professor of biology, along with colleagues from the University of Helsinki, Maasai Mara University and the University of Nairobi, found Bombali in the organs and tissues of an Angolan free-tailed bat (Mops condylurus) captured in the Taita Hills of southeast Kenya, on the east coast of Africa. Bombali was originally identified in this species of bats last year in Sierra Leone, 3,400 miles to the west. This is the first time any ebolavirus has been found in wildlife in Kenya or other countries along the east coast of Africa. "This particular virus is known from the west coast of Africa, and now we are placing it on the opposite side," said Forbes. "It could conceivably be everywhere in between as well, which is a whole lot of countries." Forbes emphasized that Bombali is not the species of ebolavirus responsible for the deadly Ebola outbreaks in west Africa. There are six known species of ebolavirus, four of which are capable of infecting humans. Bombali is not one of them. To further assess the risk to humans, the researchers analyzed biological samples from people in the Taita Hills region who reported being sick with a fever and who had contact with bats in recent years. They found no evidence of Bombali infections. "This is a high risk group, so a good place to start looking for potential spillover to people," Forbes said. Samples were sent from Kenya to the University of Helsinki in Finland for analysis. Samples from the positive bat were then sent to a high-security lab in Sweden for further testing. The findings were published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. Ebolaviruses are rarely identified in wildlife, Forbes said. Establishing the geographical range and wildlife species infected by Bombali could help researchers understand the dynamics of this and other ebolavirus species in nature. "These are high risk viruses," he said. "The close relatives of Bombali virus do tend to spillover into human populations from time to time, so we must be vigilant and try to understand all we can about them." ### CONTACTS: Kristian Forbes, assistant professor, Biological Sciences J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences 479-575-3797, kmforbes@uark.edu Bob Whitby, science writer University Relations 479-575-4737, whitby@uark.edu Surgery is associated with increased survival for patients with HER2-positive stage 4 breast cancer A student at the University of California, Riverside, presented research results at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, or AACR, in Atlanta showing that surgery is associated with higher survival rates for patients with HER2-positive stage 4 breast cancer compared with those who did not undergo surgery. The protein HER2, or human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, can play a role in the development of breast cancer. "Between 20% and 30% of all newly diagnosed stage 4 breast cancer cases are HER2-positive," said Ross Mudgway, the study's lead author and a third-year student in the UCR School of Medicine. "This form of breast cancer once had poor outcomes, but in recent years, advances in targeted therapy have led to improved survival." Mudgway explained at the meeting that in recent years, most patients with HER2-positive breast cancer have been treated with systemic therapy, which could include chemotherapy, targeted therapy, or endocrine therapy. "Surgery is sometimes offered to these patients, but previous research on whether surgery improves survival has yielded mixed results," he said. According to Mudgway and senior author Dr. Sharon Lum, a professor in the Department of Surgery-Division of Surgical Oncology and medical director of the Breast Health Center at Loma Linda University Health, HER2 status has been reported in large registry data sets since 2010, but the impact of surgery on this type of breast cancer has not been well documented across hospital systems. The researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study of 3,231 women with HER2-positive stage 4 breast cancer, using records from the National Cancer Database from 2010-12. They found that 89.4% of the women had received chemotherapy or targeted therapies, 37.7% had received endocrine therapy, and 31.8% had received radiation. Overall, 1,130 women, or 35%, received surgery. The researchers found surgery was associated with a 44% increased chance of survival, assuming the majority also had systemic treatment. "This suggests that, in addition to standard HER2-targeted medications and other adjuvant therapy, if a woman has stage 4 HER2-positive breast cancer, surgery to remove the primary breast tumor should be considered," Lum said. The study also examined factors associated with receipt of surgery and found that women with Medicare or private insurance were more likely to have surgery and less likely to die of their disease than those with Medicaid or no insurance. White women were also more likely than non- Hispanic black women to have surgery and less likely to die of their cancer. "These results suggest disparities in health care due to race and socioeconomic factors, and these must be addressed," Mudgway said. According to Mudgway and Lum, numerous factors may contribute to a physician's decision about whether to recommend surgery, including other chronic diseases in the patient, response to other forms of treatment, and overall life expectancy. "Our findings should be considered in the context of all other factors," Mudgway said. "For patients, the decision to undergo breast surgery, especially a mastectomy, can often be life- changing as it affects both physical and emotional health. The patient's own feelings about whether or not she wishes to have surgery should be considered." Mudgway was invited to discuss the research project at a press conference held at the AACR meeting. The conference received more than 5300 abstract submissions. Mudgway's abstract was one of only 17 selected for the press program. ### The study was self-funded by the Department of Surgery at Loma Linda University. Eileen Loftus at the AACR contributed significantly to this article. The contentious 'Berkeley vs. Big soda' campaign may have been enough to drive down soda sales in the city Sticker shock may not have been the only force driving the decline in soda consumption in Berkeley after residents voted to enact the nation's first soda tax in November 2014. The election, and the vigorous campaigning around the tax that led up to the vote, also may have played a major role in changing habits, shows a new study by economists at the University of California, Berkeley. The study authors analyzed food and drink purchases at UC Berkeley-owned dining facilities and in drug stores in the city of Berkeley before and after residents voted in favor of levying a penny-per-ounce tax on all sugar-sweetened beverages. Their analysis revealed that soda sales dropped an average of 10 to 20 percent in the three months immediately following the vote -- before the tax and any associated price hikes went into effect. The results indicate that the contentious "Berkeley vs. Big Soda" campaign, and the ultimate vote in favor of the tax, were enough to lower soda sales in the city. "In this case, an election really worked to change consumption before a price change," said Sofia Villas-Boas, professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Berkeley and senior author of the paper, which appears online in the journal Economic Inquiry. "A big takeaway from our study is that if you replicate a soda tax or some other similar measure in a different city, you might not witness the same consumption results if you didn't have a campaign and election leading up to the actual tax implementation," said Scott Kaplan, a graduate student of agriculture and resource economics at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper. Berkeley vs. Big Soda On July 1, 2014, the Berkeley City Council approved Measure D -- which would wage the penny-per-ounce tax on the distributors of sugar-sweetened beverages -- for the November ballot. More than $3 million was spent on the resulting campaigns for and against the tax, with ads appearing on billboards, in subway stations, at bus stops, on television and in local newspapers. Seventy-six percent of voters came out in favor of the tax, and it went into effect in March 2015. For those hoping the tax would lower the consumption of sugary drinks, Measure D appears to be a resounding success. In previously published surveys, residents of diverse and low-income neighborhoods in Berkeley reported drinking up to 21 percent fewer servings of sugary drinks in 2015 and 50 percent fewer servings in 2017 than they did before the tax went into effect. Retail scanner data also showed a 10 percent drop in the sales of sugar-sweetened beverages in the city in the year after the tax was implemented. These earlier studies, however, do not provide insight into what drove these changes: Was it the changing price of soda, the influence of the campaign and overwhelming "yes" vote, or both? In the new paper, the authors analyzed monthly soda prices and soda sales at Berkeley-owned dining facilities from January 2014 to December 2016. Though the tax was levied on all sugar-sweetened beverages, they decided to focus only on the sale of soda, since that was the main target of the Measure D campaign. The results showed that soda purchases dropped between 18 and 36 percent during the study time period. The majority of this decline -- around 10 to 20 percent -- occurred in the three months after the election, November 2014 through February 2015, even though soda prices at UC Berkeley did not go up until August 2016. "We wanted to know what happened to consumption behavior before the prices changed, and our data shows that that the dip [in sales] happened in the three months after the election and just continued to stay low, even after they passed the tax through in August 2016," Kaplan said. "I would say that's pretty convincing evidence that it is the impact of education, information and social norms that are causing consumption to go down." Because the clientele of UC Berkeley-owned dining facilities may not be representative of the city as a whole, the team also used retail scanner data to examine soda sales in the city of Berkeley and compared the data to other cities with UC campuses, such as Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz. The economists found a similar 10 percent drop in soda sales in the city of Berkeley in the months immediately following the election compared to the other cities with a UC campus, indicating that the change was unique to Berkeley. However, it is unclear when, or if, off-campus drugstore retailers decided to raise prices on certain beverages in response to the election outcome before the tax was actually put into place. "Prices matter, but information matters, as well, in the soda debate," Villas-Boas said. "The survey results could be confounding the media and the price effects, and what we bring to the story is we can tell you that the biggest chunk of the change in consumption is probably due to media and information." ### Co-authors of the paper include Rebecca L.C. Taylor of the University of Sydney and Kevin Jung of UC Berkeley. In "Conspicuous Plumage Does Not Increase Predation Risk: A Continent-Wide Test Using Model Songbirds," published in the American Naturalist, Kristal E. Cain examines the factors that drive the predation levels of Australia's fairy wrens. After measuring attack rates on both conspicuously and dull colored 3D fairy wren models in various habitats, Cain found that bright or "conspicuous" plumage is not associated with an increase in predation. "These findings do not support the long-standing hypothesis that conspicuous plumage, in isolation, is costly due to increased attraction from predators," Cain writes. "Our results indicate that conspicuousness interacts with other factors in driving the evolution of plumage coloration." The forces shaping plumage color of female birds -- who are sometimes brightly colored like their male counterparts and other times much more dull -- is a long-debated topic of evolutionary biology that remains unresolved. Fairy wrens, who vary greatly in both female coloration and the habitats in which they live, are an excellent group for investigating the evolutionary forces shaping female plumage, Cain writes. Cain and her co-authors produced 60 3D fairy wren models at the University of Melbourne School of Engineering. The models had three types: conspicuously-colored male purple-backed fairy wren, dull-colored female purple-backed fairy wren, and conspicuously-colored female lovely fairy wren. Field experiments took place at eight different fairy wren habitats across Australia that ranged from open savannah to dense forest. Mimicking actual fairy wrens' foraging habits, models were placed approximately 5 meters apart on bare ground or in short vegetation, attached to metal stakes with magnets. Cameras were used at some locations to determine that the models were knocked off their perches by attack or by accident, and in the case of attacks, to identify the predator. Cain found that, contrary to their predictions, there was not a significant difference between attack rates on the conspicuous models and the dull models. Attack rates did vary, however, depending on habitat and latitude: predator pressure was stronger at sites that were open savannahs, as well as at sites that were further from the equator. These increases in predation in open habitats occurred more dramatically for female models, both dull and conspicuous, than for the conspicuous male models. Females also saw a greater decrease in predation pressure in habitats that fell on the opposite end of the spectrum: dense forest habitats or habitats closer to the equator. "Our data suggest that adult birds living in open Australian habitats experience higher predation pressure than those in closed habitats, though it is unclear whether this pattern is due to differences in detectability, predator density, or both," Cain writes. The lack of differences between attack rates between conspicuous and dull models imply that coloration alone doesn't predict how often a bird will be attacked. This doesn't mean, however, that conspicuousness is not an important factor, Cain writes. For instance, it is possible that a combination of predator behavior, sex differences in behavior, and conspicuousness against particular backgrounds may all play a role in the evolution of plumage colors. As for the female models experiencing a wider range of predation across sites, Cain writes that this finding joins a substantial body of empirical evidence suggesting that predators may avoid male birds, or that they preferentially attack females or cryptic bird species. There are many theories as for why this may be the case, including some studies that have found that birds that are conspicuously colored, male, or both, are more vigilant against predators. Further research is needed to determine the mechanisms that are at play with fairy-wrens, Cain writes. "These conflicting patterns suggest that this relationship may be less straightforward than is often assumed and that explicit tests of the relationship between color and predation risk are required. " ### Until recently, five ebolavirus species were known, with three of these - Bundibugyo, Sudan and Zaire ebolaviruses - associated with large human outbreaks. The latter is responsible for the devastating 2013-16 outbreak in West Africa and the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the reservoirs of ebolaviruses have remained enigmatic, though fruit bats have been implicated and demonstrated as the reservoir for related Marburg virus. Last year a sixth ebolavirus species, Bombali virus, was found in saliva and faeces from bats in Sierra Leone. Professor Olli Vapalahti, University of Helsinki, Finland, and Professor Omu Anzala, University of Nairobi, Kenya, are leading a research project focused on developing enhanced preparedness for emerging infectious disease threats, and the researchers have identified Bombali ebolavirus in an Angolan free-tailed bat (species: Mops condylurus) captured in the Taita Hills, southeast Kenya. No ebolaviruses have been previously reported from wildlife in Kenya or other countries along the east coast of Africa. The researchers recovered high amounts of Bombali ebolavirus in bat tissues, including its full genome, confirming that productive infection does occur in this species. The bat was also shown to have antibodies towards the virus. There is no current evidence that Bombali virus infects people, Professor Vapalahti underlines: "Evidence against apparent human infection was obtained by screening febrile patients reporting to clinics in the Taita Hills who have had contact with bats: no signs of Bombali virus infection or past exposure were uncovered." "However, vigilance and ongoing monitoring are important to understand this viral infection and the risks it may pose to people, and further research is ongoing", notes principal investigator, disease ecologist Dr. Kristian Forbes, University of Arkansas, USA. THE FINDING INCREASES UNDERSTANDING ABOUT EBOLAVIRUS DIVERSITY AND GEOGRAPHY Given the vast distance between the identification sites in Sierra Leone and Kenya (ca. 5500 km) and that the bat species involved is not believed to travel large distances, Bombali virus is likely to be transmitted across its range in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Although recently found, it is obvious that Bombali virus, along with other ebolaviruses, has been around since ancient times. The bat biologist expert of the team, Dr. Paul Webala from Maasai Mara University, emphasizes that despite being occasional virus carriers, bats are essential components of global ecosystems serving critical functions such as insect pest control, seed dispersal and plant pollination, and their conservation is vitally important. "In fact, previous eviction and culling attempts in response to possible disease outbreaks have backfired and may actually expose humans to potential risks of transmission", Dr. Webala states. Dr. Tarja Sironen, University of Helsinki, concludes: "This finding increases our understanding about ebolavirus diversity and geography, and highlights the role that insectivorous bat species may play, in addition to fruit bats, for ebolavirus maintenance in nature." The bat samples were collected at the University of Helsinki Taita Research Station and processed in Biosafety Level-3 laboratories of the Veterinary Faculty at the University of Helsinki. Positive samples were transferred to a Biosafety Level-4 laboratory at the Public Health agency of Sweden for further investigation. The study will be published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA. ### Editorial argues that term promotes the belief that patient harm is not preventable LEXINGTON, Ky. (Apr. 3, 2019) -- When you type the phrase "victim of medical error" into your search engine, you expect to see scores of stories and images featuring patients and families whose lives have been devastated by a healthcare provider's unintentional, preventable action. Astonishingly, what fills the screen instead are images of anguished men and women in white coats or scrubs. That bewildering result is the apparent effect of a 2000 editorial penned by Johns Hopkins' Dr. Albert Wu, who proposed the term "second victim" in an attempt to bring attention to the need for emotional support for doctors who are involved in a medical error. The term has been perpetuated by authors and educators and has even been extended to include healthcare organizations, which are now deemed "third victims." It's time to abandon the term "second victim," said the University of Kentucky's Melissa Clarkson in an editorial for The BMJ, one of the world's oldest general medical journals. Clarkson, who co-authored the editorial with three mothers whose children who died after medical errors, said that the term "subtly promotes the belief that patient harm is random, caused by bad luck, and simply not preventable." "This mindset is incompatible with the safety of patients and the accountability that patients and families expect from healthcare providers," they argued. Clarkson et al stress that patient communities and their advocates do not question the need to support providers who have been involved in an incident of patient harm, but they ask the healthcare community to pause and reflect on the "second victim" moniker. "Opinion is growing that [the term] is inappropriate, including among patients and healthcare professionals....even Wu has recently acknowledged concerns about its use," they wrote. And while the "second victim" label may help providers and institutions to cope with an incident of medical harm, "it is a threat to enacting the deep cultural changes needed to achieve a patient-centered environment focused on patient safety," they added. "Providers and institutions must break down this barrier, engaging with patients, families, and advocacy organizations to understand more broadly how everyone -- patients, families, and providers -- is affected by medical harm." ### Clarkson is on the faculty of the University of Kentucky's Institute for Biomedical Informatics. She became an advocate for safety and transparency in the medical system when her father died after a series of medical errors seven years ago. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a unique 3D-printed transparent skull implant for mice that provides an opportunity to watch activity of the entire brain surface in real time. The device allows fundamental brain research that could provide new insight for human brain conditions such as concussions, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The research is published in Nature Communications. Researchers also plan to commercialize the device, which they call See-Shell. "What we are trying to do is to see if we can visualize and interact with large parts of the mouse brain surface, called the cortex, over long periods of time. This will give us new information about how the human brain works," said Suhasa Kodandaramaiah, Ph.D., a co-author of the study and University of Minnesota Benjamin Mayhugh Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Science and Engineering. "This technology allows us to see most of the cortex in action with unprecedented control and precision while stimulating certain parts of the brain." In the past, most scientists have looked at small regions of the brain and tried to understand it in detail. However, researchers are now finding that what happens in one part of the brain likely affects other parts of the brain at the same time. One of their first studies using the See-Shell device examines how mild concussions in one part of the brain affect other parts of the brain as it reorganizes structurally and functionally. Kodandaramaiah said that mouse brains are very similar in many respects to human brains, and this device opens the door for similar research on mice looking at degenerative brain diseases that affect humans such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. The technology allows the researchers to see global changes for the first time at an unprecedented time resolution. In a video produced using the device, changes in brightness of the mouse's brain correspond to waxing and waning of neural activity. Subtle flashes are periods when the whole brain suddenly becomes active. The researchers are still trying to understand the reason for such global coordinated activity and what it means for behavior. "These are studies we couldn't do in humans, but they are extremely important in our understanding of how the brain works so we can improve treatments for people who experience brain injuries or diseases," said Timothy J. Ebner, M.D., Ph.D., a co-author of the study and a University of Minnesota Professor and Head of the Department of Neuroscience in the Medical School. To make the See-Shell, researchers digitally scanned the surface of the mouse skull and then used the digital scans to create an artificial transparent skull that has the same contours as the original skull. During a precise surgery, the top of the mouse skull is replaced with the 3D-printed transparent skull device. The device allows researchers to record brain activity simultaneously while imaging the entire brain in real time. Another advantage to using this device is that the mouse's body did not reject the implant, which means that the researchers were able to study the same mouse brain over several months. Studies in mice over several months allow researchers to study brain aging in a way that would take decades to study in humans. "This new device allows us to look at the brain activity at the smallest level zooming in on specific neurons while getting a big picture view of a large part of the brain surface over time," Kodandaramaiah said. "Developing the device and showing that it works is just the beginning of what we will be able to do to advance brain research." ### In addition to Kodandaramaiah and Ebner, the research team was led by fourth-year mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Leila Ghanbari. The research team included several post-doctoral associates, graduate students and undergraduate students including Russell E. Carter (neuroscience), Matthew L. Rynes (biomedical engineering), Judith Dominguez (mechanical engineering), Gang Chen (neuroscience), Anant Naik (biomedical engineering), Jia Hu (biomedical engineering), Lenora Haltom (mechanical engineering), Nahom Mossazghi (neuroscience), Madelyn M. Gray (neuroscience) and Sarah L. West (neuroscience). The team also included partners at the University of Wisconsin including researcher Kevin W. Eliceiri and graduate student Md Abdul Kader Sagar. The research was funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with additional support from Minnesota's Discovery, Research, and InnoVation Economy (MnDRIVE) funding from the State of Minnesota. Several undergraduate students involved in the research were supported by the University of Minnesota Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). The imaging research was made possible by the cutting-edge imaging infrastructure at the University Imaging Center. To read the full research paper, entitled "Cortex-wide neural interfacing via transparent polymer skulls," visit the Nature Communications website. Since the late 1990s, undocumented Mexican and Central American farm workers on Vermont's dairy farms have been instrumental in helping bring milk, cheese, yogurt and other food products to market. While the laborers play a vital role in feeding others, many face significant barriers in accessing food themselves, says a new book. According to Life on the Other Border, Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont (University of California Press, April 2019), 18 percent of Vermont's undocumented migrant farm workers are food insecure, defined as lacking reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food, compared to between 13 and 14 percent for Vermonters as a whole. The book is the first to measure food insecurity in this population. While that number is troubling, it's likely much too low, given the unique circumstances of Vermont's migrant farm workers, says the book's author, Teresa M. Mares, an anthropology professor at the University of Vermont. The standard method for determining food insecurity, which Mares used to arrive at the 18 percent figure, administering a USDA survey to 100 migrant farm workers in the state, is income based. While Vermont's migrant laborers often do face economic difficulties, the bigger challenge that most experience is accessing places to purchase food. "Because of the large presence of Border Patrol agents, especially in Franklin County, migrants are often afraid to leave the farm to go to the supermarket," Mares said. Based on in-depth interviews she conducted with 30 migrant farm workers and 10 service providers, Mares says it's likely that 50 percent or more of farmworker homes experience challenges accessing food, particularly at grocery stores and other food outlets. "One of the interviews that really sticks with me was shared by a farmworker woman from Chiapas, Mexico," Mares said. "She said the problem isn't that we don't have money, it's that we can't leave. She was referring to leaving the farm. Food insecurity has significant mental health effects, as well as physical ones, Mares said. "Food insecurity is about getting enough food and the right kind of food, but it's also about the emotional and mental health impacts of being isolated and constantly under stress and anxiety - being worried about food. That is a further troubling aspect of the migrant farm worker experience in Vermont." Trump Effect Mares' research was completed in the fall of the 2016, but after Donald Trump was elected President in November, she decided to conduct more interviews to see what impact the election might have had. While a policy line could be drawn between the Obama and Trump administrations - under Obama, deportations increased significantly over previous administrations - the public discourse was vastly different. "The public acceptability of anti-immigrant sentiment really changed - the openness about expressing hatred toward immigrants," she said. "That led to increased fear, increased anxiety and growing uncertainty about their own families and livelihoods among migrant farm workers." A migrant worker from Middlebury whom she interviewed after the election, for instance, told Mares she began "facing questions about where she was from and whether she had 'papers' from people who proudly shared they had voted for Trump," Mares said. "She had never before experienced that level of hatred from her own community." Progress in farm-worker organizing While the book paints an unsettling picture of migrant farm workers in Vermont, it also applauds the progress that has been made in recent years by labor organizing groups like Migrant Justice. "Despite all these problems and the vulnerability migrant farmworkers are experiencing, it's been a really important time for farmworker organizing," she said. Migrant Justice's Milk with Dignity campaign, for instance, not only institutes a code of conduct that guarantees workers are treated humanely and have fair housing, it also addresses economic justice in the supply chain by asking companies like Ben and Jerry's to pay a premium to the farms where they source their milk. "An important element is that they are seeking structural changes, whether it's in policy or corporate purchasing," Mares said. "Migrant farm workers face structural challenges that call for structural solutions." Other states, same issues While the book focuses on Vermont, its insights and conclusions are applicable to wide swath of the country's northern border. "You see the same experiences Vermont is having in many other states," Mares said. "Wisconsin, New York State and Washington State have similar issues. Wherever you have large dairy operations, you have undocumented labor. If the farms are near the Canadian border, they're experiencing many of the problems Vermont is seeing, including - and especially - around the issue of food insecurity." ### For five decades, the U.S. government's mission to intercept or seize cocaine and other drugs entering the United States originating from South America and going through Central America on the way to Mexico has been largely ineffective, and the volume of drugs coming into the United States continues to rise. According to a University of Wyoming researcher, that's because the focus of law enforcement agencies to identify transportation routes for drugs and seize them caused a ripple effect of drug trade organizations and cartels looking for new points of entry in a game of "cat and mouse." This, in turn, created an unintended spread and fragmentation of existing trafficking routes, leaving in its wake widespread collateral damage, including corruption, violence, deforestation, displacement of communities and laundering of drug profits through other types of businesses, including cattle ranching. Zoe Pearson, an assistant professor in UW's School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies, was part of a research group that created a computer model called NarcoLogic. The computer model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool to assess different cocaine interception scenarios and predict how drug smugglers react to attempts by authorities to intercept their narcotics. Development of the model relied on multiple theories, empirical studies, media reports and several of the authors' own years of field research in the region, she says. "Interdiction (intercepting), in and of itself, is always going to be problematic. We need a new approach to drug policy," Pearson says. "We obviously care about the health consequences of drug abuse. We would hope to see new policies address the ill effects of drugs on some people's health, and policies that wouldn't cause collateral damage across the hemisphere." Pearson was a co-author of a paper, titled "Modeling Cocaine Traffickers and Counterdrug Interdiction Forces as a Complex Adaptive System," that was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The journal is one of the world's most prestigious multidisciplinary scientific serials, with coverage spanning the biological, physical and social sciences. Nicholas Magliocca, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Alabama, was the paper's lead author. Other contributors to the paper were from Ohio State University, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, Texas State University, Oregon State University and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The model produced realistic predictions of where and when drug traffickers move in and around Central America in response to law enforcement intervention. The model demonstrated that narcotics trafficking is as widespread and difficult to eradicate as it is because of the interception and seizure of drugs. Additionally, the model showed increased seizure of drugs will continue to spread traffickers into new areas. The drug transit zone in the Western Hemisphere grew from 2 million square miles to 7 million square miles between 1996 and 2017, according to the paper. This has made it more difficult for law enforcement to track and disrupt drug trafficking networks, the paper says. When major drug kingpins, such as Pablo Escobar and Joaquin Guzman Loera, a.k.a. "El Chapo," are killed or arrested, and taken out of play, this seems like progress -- at least on the surface. But, in reality, Pearson says such action creates the "cockroach effect," in which other drug traffickers rise up to fill the leadership void. For eight years, Pearson has been part of a team of researchers looking at the environmental, social and political effects of drug trafficking policy in Central America. For nine years, she has been conducting research on drug control policies in Latin America more broadly. Her role in the new paper included "contributing information we needed to create the model. It included some fieldwork I conducted in Honduras that would impact the model, and I added detail based on drug literature," Pearson says. As an Ohio State University graduate student working on her Ph.D. on drug policy in Bolivia, Pearson traveled to Honduras in 2011 with her faculty adviser, geography Professor Kendra McSweeney. Pearson recalls taking a two-day trip by canoe down a river in a remote area known as the Mosquitia region. There, the two came across an area that had been deforested to make way for an airstrip and learned that people had been displaced due to violence and drug traffickers running them off from where they lived. "We saw so much deforestation, and one entire town was completely emptied out," Pearson recalls. "Someone we met wanted to exchange dollars for Honduran bills. He had crisp U.S. $20 bills in the middle of nowhere." Pearson says money from drug profits is often laundered through cattle ranches and oil palm plantations -- both of which flourish on deforested land. "We were very careful not to ask direct questions about drug trafficking," Pearson says of her time in Honduras. Additionally, the research team used data compiled by the Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB), which documents, over many years, cocaine movement through the Western Hemisphere. "Outside of the government, we think we're the first team to use this CCDB data," says Pearson, who has been at UW for three years. The work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Magliocca and McSweeney, another co-author of the paper, received additional funding from an NSF Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research Project. The researchers' hope is that Congress and government agencies will review their paper and use it in creating future drug policy. "We hope our research is being read by people with the potential to make policy change," Pearson says. ### MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - West Virginia University, in partnership with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, announced Tuesday the creation of one of the state's most powerful computer clusters to help power research and innovation statewide. The announcement came as the University kicked off its inaugural Research Week celebration. The Thorny Flat High Performance Computer Cluster, named after the state's second highest peak, joins the Spruce Knob cluster as resources. With 1,000 times more computing power than a desktop computer, the Thorny Flat cluster could benefit a variety research: forest hydrology; genetic studies; forensic chemistry of firearms; modeling of solar-to-chemical energy harvesting; and design and discovery of new materials. Thorny Flat is the latest step in an ongoing regional partnership with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, which has contributed greatly to the Morgantown-Pittsburgh corridor's status as a hub for technological and scientific progress. The system will be housed in PSC's machine room, and the center will provide routine maintenance and support for scientists using it The cluster was created by WVU's Research Computing team in Information Technology Services with a nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. Thorny Flat's creation also underscores WVU's commitment to ground-breaking research, which is being highlighted this week in the institution's inaugural Research Week. In his latest State of the University address, WVU President Gordon Gee challenged the community to innovate so West Virginia can remain vibrant and competitive. "In a state that no longer manufactures products the way it used to, West Virginia University's faculty, staff and students have no choice but to manufacture transformation," he said. "We must pioneer progress." Blake Mertz, assistant professor of chemistry in WVU's Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, was the principal investigator behind the NSF grant. Mertz's lab uses molecular dynamics simulations to model systems of interest in both biomedical and alternative energy research. In particular, Mertz is studying a peptide (a small protein) that could be used for targeted drug deliveries in cancer patients. Thorny Flat acts as a sort of computational microscope for observing key interactions between the peptide and the cell membrane surface. Mertz said these simulations can speed discoveries about the peptide, saving not only time and money in the lab, but also lives in the clinic. Also from Eberly, WVU physicist Zachariah Etienne will use Thorny Flat for simulations that model the physical processes involved when neutron stars collide. "Neutron stars are not simply large balls of neutrons, and we cannot create neutron star matter in laboratories," Etienne said. The only way to understand how such matter behaves is to compare observations with computer simulations. This kind of research "has the potential to revolutionize our current scientific understanding," Etienne said. "Historically, such revolutions have led to incredible new technologies that help us diagnose and cure disease, and generally make our modern lives far safer and more comfortable than our predecessors." Thorny Flat, which will become available Tuesday (April 9), can accommodate a wide range of users, offering free access to researchers with on-demand computational projects and first-time HPC users. Researchers with more intensive, long-term computational needs also can purchase separate, dedicated time and resources. Thorny Flat is theoretically capable of processing data at 428 TeraFLOPS, or about 1,000 times faster than a typical desktop computer. FLOPS, or "floating point operations per second", is a measure of computer performance. There are 108 total nodes available, containing 4,208 cores. For comparison, a high-end personal computer processor may have as many as 28 cores. Seven nodes have access to 21 specialized Graphics Processing Units that can benefit research into fields such as artificial intelligence. ### For more information about Thorny Flat, including specifications and queue information, visit the ITS Research Computing site. For help determining its suitability for a particular project, contact helpdesk@hpc.wvu.edu. UPDATE: Highlighting the centrality of Brexit-related developments on GBP markets, the Pound Sterling shrugged off Tuesday's weak Construction PMI, reversing early session losses to see out Tuesday up against both the Euro and US Dollar. The move higher came following Prime Minister May's statement which said she will seek a further Brexit delay from EU leaders while offering cross-party talks in a bid to "agree a plan - that we would both stick to - to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal." While domestic data is a secondary driver while Brexit remains unresolved, Wednesday's session will see the latest Services PMI which, following a better-than-anticipated Manufacturing PMI and sluggish Construction figure, is likely to come higher than usual scrutiny. Following Monday's above-forecast Purchasing Managers' Index release for the UK's manufacturing sector, Tuesday's IHS Markit release of the latest construction sector PMI came under a brighter than usual spotlight. However, record-high levels of stockpiling ahead of Brexit, which inflated the manufacturing index to Monday's above-forecast 55.1 print, didn't spill over to the construction sector with drops in commercial and civil engineering work weighing on the construction index which printed marginally higher at 49.7. Activity in the UK's construction sector in March (49.7), with falls in commercial and civil engineering work. Brexit and economic concerns weighed on client decisions. More: https://t.co/zxGmoWEsR7 pic.twitter.com/t0qypptiRb IHS Markit PMI (@IHSMarkitPMI) 2 April 2019 According to the IHS Markit release, overall output within the sector recorded a marginal decline while commercial work remained the weakest performing sub-sector. The notable exception to the otherwise lacklustre release came in the form of rising residential building work, which picked up at it's fastest pace in three months. Overall, it appeared the recent soft patch for UK construction persisted into March with slight increases in business and employment suggesting subdued underlying demand and client's holding off on decision-making. IHS Markit economist, Joe Hayes, cited Brexit uncertainty as a factor weighing on the sector in supplementary commentary to the release. Hayes wrote "Brexit-related uncertainty continued to generate indecisiveness, ultimately hitting order book volumes... The outlook was subsequently underwhelming by historical standards, with the unsettled political and economic environment keeping business confidence below its long-run average." He added that UK construction businesses had, like manufacturers, ramped up their purchases of raw materials and other input goods in a bid to get ahead of any Brexit-related disruptions. Duncan Brock, Group Director at the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) also attributed the protracted soft patch to Brexit-related uncertainty impinging on client-side demand in the sector. Brock wrote "The situation in the UK construction sector was broadly unchanged from February, with PMI data posting a second consecutive month in contraction. The fault of this continuing inertia was placed squarely at the feet of Brexit." Looking ahead, Brock anticipates little change as we progress into Q2, "It is unlikely that next month will bring about any positive news given the challenges of a weaker UK economy, volatile pound and intense competition for new orders, as Brexit continues to cast a long shadow over the sectors future." Head of infrastructure, building and construction at KPMG, Jonathon White, expects sluggish levels of activity to continue in the coming months with the construction sector remaining fragile. White wrote "There continues to be a stall on investment plans across the construction sector, especially in commercial work, and until the Brexit conundrum is resolved we dont expect order books to pick up." The inescapable theme of Brexit continues to be the key to unlocking improvements in sectors which have of late felt the pinch as the UK barrels towards an unknown withdrawal from the European Union, with uncertainty thereon in expected to keep a cap on business activity and the GBP. Commenting on the Sterling over the coming, Brexit-heavy, days, senior analyst at Caxton FX, Michael Brown expects the British to remain range-bound with risks tilted to the downside. Brown wrote "Sterling is likely to remain within its current range, possibly with pressure to the downside, until decisive action is taken to break the impasse, something which becomes more likely as we edge closer to the 12th April deadline," adding "This could come in the form of a general election, approval of a deal or legislation to prevent a no-deal exit." In the wake of Monday's failed indicative votes and with just 10 days left until the April 12th Brexit deadline for UK lawmakers to present a viable Brexit solution to EU leaders lest risk the UK crashing out of the European Union, market expectations of a no-deal scenario were on the rise. The British Pound has been at the mercy of Brexit-related developments and is expected to continue to be so as yet another crucial week of Brexit-related political wrangling dominates headlines as UK lawmakers attempt to secure a non-disorderly withdrawal from the European Union. UK Lawmakers Set for Fresh Round of Indicative Votes Following Monday's fruitless House of Commons ballots, MPs are expected to put the alternative Brexit proposals to another round of indicative votes on Wednesday as UK politicians scramble to secure a UK withdrawal which avoids a no-deal, disorderly, Brexit. Given the results of the latest series of votes, the proposals expected to have the greatest chance of passing are those on the 'softer' side with a proposal for a permanent post-Brexit customs union between the UK and EU missing out by just 3 votes and a motion calling for a 'confirmatory' public vote also being rejected by a narrow margin. Whether or not Wednesday's votes will yield different results could come down to whether those who abstained during Monday's votes decide to join the fray. Commenting on the customs union proposition, developed markets economist, James Smith wrote " The customs union option lost by only three votes, and with a relatively high number of lawmakers still opting to abstain (including the Scottish National Party and some Lib Dems), this could feasibly be turned around." Brexit Options Could Be Combined to Increase Chances of Passing Perhaps convoluting the already murky waters further at this late stage, Tuesday's Brexit news-flow included speculation over combining two, or more, of the most popular options from Monday's votes in a bid to secure a substantial majority backing. For example, one report suggested the EU withdrawal agreement could be renegotiated to include a permanent customs union - a condition the EU is likely to be agreeable to - and then put to the public in a second referendum, with this option including both the most popular of those rejected on Monday. On such an option, ING's Smith wrote "This kind of proposal might succeed in gaining the votes of 11 Independent Group and 10 extra Lib Dem lawmakers, who have a strong preference for a Peoples Vote and could be prepared to compromise to get it," adding however that "this approach also risks losing others. 37 Conservative MPs voted in favour of a customs union, but many of these may drop out if a second referendum were thrown into the mix." Any Chance of Meaningful Vote 4.0? Now thrice-rejected, Prime Minister Theresa May's EU withdrawal agreement could make a reappearance this week in light of the lack of consensus on alternative options, as demonstrated on Monday. With the Democratic Unionist and Labour Parties still squarely averse the deal, expectations of a win following three substantial defeats are limited. However, should MPs rally around an alternative Brexit solution on Wednesday there have been suggestions that the Prime Minister could table her deal against the winning proposal in a last ditch effort to force Brexiteers to back May's deal over the alternative, and presumably softer, option. Will May Respect the Will of the House of Commons? Caught between a rock and a hard place, PM May has been under increasing pressure from both within her own party to remove the UK from the EU at whatever cost and from across the House to retain close 'post-Brexit' ties with the EU leading some to expect a choice between her party or parliament in the coming sessions. Given Wednesday's votes are only indicative, May could well choose to disregard any Commons majority to save face with her own party while acceding to pursue a Commons-backed 'softer' option could see the already divided Tory Party in turmoil. On such an outcome, Smith wrote "there is a possibility that the prime minister decides that a general election would be preferable, compared to pushing ahead with parliament's chosen option," adding "if she does accept parliaments wishes, then the Eurosceptic lawmakers within her party could decide enough is enough and vote against the government if there were another no-confidence vote. Given the possibility of a softer option emerging and PM May's tough decision thereon, Danske Bank chief analyst, Arne Rasmussen, sees an avenue to a snap election emerging in such a scenario. Rasmussen wrote "If some of the softer versions of Brexit (customs union or Common Market 2.0) make it at a later stage, PM Theresa May will find herself in a difficult position party or country? given the opposition to the customs union within her own party. We cannot rule out a general election if the Conservative Party implodes." With the European Council set to convene on April 10th, the timeframe for the UK government to reach a verdict on how to proceed is theoretically limited to the forthcoming week. Meanwhile across the channel, patience with the UK government continues to wear thin with reports that EU leaders are firming their stance with regards to no-deal Brexit amid growing perceptions that this could be less costly than extending Brexit without evidence to suggest a deal in the offing. As a sign of their preparedness, the EU announced last week that no-deal Brexit preparations had been completed with a series of no-deal contingency measures in place to be activated should a deal not be reached. Nevertheless, EU Commissioner, Valdis Dombrovskis, warned on Monday of the economic repercussions of no-deal. Speaking to the economic committee of the European Parliament, Dombrovskis said "We will not be able to mitigate all possible negative economic effects... There is going to be disruption. There may be effects on liquidity." Pound Sterling Forecasts Contingent on Brexit Outcome Unsurprisingly, the fate of the Pound Sterling remains squarely contingent on how the UK and EU split ways, or not as the case may turn out to be. Near-term, the GBP is expected to remain range-bound with a risk of elevated volatility in response to Brexit-related news-flow, until clarity emerges as to how the UK government intends to proceed and the EU response thereto. ING global head of strategy, Chris Turner wrote, "GBP price action to remain chiefly driven by evolving headline Brexit news," while Lloyds strategist, Gajan Mahadevan, wrote "GBP is likely to remain vulnerable to headlines through the coming sessions." In the short-term, Danske's Rasmussen expects that " EUR/GBP will stay in the 0.85-0.87 range until we get more clarification, which we should get soon given Brexit day is 12 April." Further out, the GBP forecast is contingent on how the UK's withdrawal from the EU proceeds with the Euro-to-Pound tipped to hit parity should the UK and EU fail to reach a deal. Rasmussen added, "If the UK leaves without a deal, we should see EUR/GBP move towards parity. If Mays deal is passed, we expect to see EUR/GBP move down to around 0.83. A long extension would be slightly GBP-positive and could cause EUR/GBP to finally break below the 0.85 mark and trade in the 0.84-0.86 range." Nordea analysts, Andreas Larsen and Morten Lund, note that current market pricing reflect a strong perception that a Brexit deal will be reached. Above: Key Market Take-Aways for GBP Brexit Pricing The analysts wrote "A long prolongation of the Brexit deadline is now most likely on the cards. The GBP is though priced, as if a relatively benign exit is almost carved in stone, why a long prolongation could easily end up as GBP disappointment." Should MV4 fail, Nordea analysts anticipate a lengthy Brexit extension of 9+ months and while earlier assessments had posited such a delay could be positive for the GBP and UK economy, Nordea analysts predict "that the GBP could weaken over the following 3-6 months in case of such a prolongation." On no-deal, the analysts wrote "A no deal will put +0.95 range in play in EUR/GBP, in case of any deal the GBP will only be modestly stronger," while a 'Norway-plus' model or permanent customs union "would take EUR/GBP fair value to the 0.81-0.83 range, while May's deal will take EUR/GBP fair value to around 0.83-0.84 (almost at current spot-levels)." Above: Brexit Based GBP Forecasts GBP/USD FORECAST UPDATE #2: The Pound to US Dollar (GBP/USD) exchange rate was placed on the offensive on Wednesday, climbing to $1.3164 as US-China trade optimism dented demand for the safe-haven US Dollar. This helped to offset the release of the UKs latest services PMI as it revealed a shock contraction in growth last month and prompted fears the UK economy may have stalled in the first quarter of 2019. However these gains may prove short lived if the ISM non-manufacturing PMI indicates that the US service sector fared better in March. GBP/USD FORECAST UPDATE #1: The Pound reversed losses seen earlier in Tuesday's session with the Pound to Dollar exchange rate extending its advance into Wednesday's session after the latest round of Brexit developments fed through to market pricing. The latest Sterling rally came after Prime Minister May said she will seek a longer Brexit delay from EU leaders in order to find a non no-deal route for the UK's withdrawal from the EU while also committing to meet with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to discuss possible Brexit options. While Brexit is expected to remain critical for GBP crosses in forthcoming sessions, Wednesday's session will also see the latest UK and US service sector PMIs released alongside US non-manufacturing PMI and the latest ADP employment figures (ahead of Friday's government labour stats) with investors keen to see whether the US labour market has maintained its red-hot streak. GBP/USD OUTLOOK: The Pound to US Dollar exchange rate is down today and is currently trading around $1.3036 on the inter-bank market. The US Dollar (USD) gained on the Pound (GBP) today despite a raft of disappointing US data, which showed that the US nondefense capital goods orders excluding aircraft for February fell by -0.1%. These were followed by the publication of the US durable goods orders figures for February which fell to -1.6%. Durable goods excluding defense, meanwhile, also came in at a worse-than-expected -1.9%. Greenback traders will be awaiting tonights publication of the US total vehicle sales for March. In US political news meanwhile, President Donald Trump is causing wide political divisions over the controversial Mexican border wall, with threats that he could close the southern border entirely. Donald Trump tweeted yesterday: Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border! I'm not playing games. This is causing USD traders to remain cautious, as any eruption of political tensions between the White House and the House of Representatives could market weaken confidence in the US Dollar. GBP/USD Exchange Rate Slips as Doubts Set in Over Brexit Extension The Pound has struggled today following last nights indicative votes which were, for the second time, rejected by MPs, leaving no open alternatives to Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal. Sterling has remained weakened as the UK is once again jammed in a Brexit limbo. However, hopes are rising that the Government could request for an extension of Article 50, which would limit the possibility of a no-deal between the UK and the EU. The Labour MP Yvette Cooper, along with Conservative Sir Oliver Letwin, are pushing for an amendment which would effectively rule out a no-deal Brexit situation. Jo Maugham, of the QC and a part of the team who took the case of extending Article 50 to the European Court of Justice, remained critical however, saying: The Cooper/Letwin Bill looks like a dangerous distraction. First, the timescale is too long. Second, it is too vague. Third, it doesnt specify what happens if the EU proposes a different date. Fourth, it doesnt specify what happens if the EU imposes conditions for an extension. French President Emmanuel Macron has also issued the UK a warning, saying that an extension to Brexit should not be taken for granted, adding, The EU will not be hostage to a political crisis in the UK. GBP/USD Forecast: Pound Could Rise on an Extension to Article 50 Sterling traders will be looking ahead to the UKs Markit Services PMI figures for March tomorrow, and with any signs of improvement this could provide a little uplift for the GBP/USD exchange rate amid Brexit developments. US investors, however, will be awaiting tomorrows raft of US data, with the most significant being the publication of the US ISM Non-Manufacturing PMI figures for March, which are expected to come in at around 58.0. The GBP/USD exchange rate will remain sensitive to Brexit developments today, and with any signs that the UK could be granted an extension to Article 50 from the EU, this would potentially see the Pound soar. Tuesday, April 2, 2019 Time for the nitty-gritty of Pinterest profiles! In this post, youll learn all the details of how to create a business profile and what a scheduler is and why you should be using one. This is the post youve been waiting for: The IKEA of Pinterest profile building! Pinterest offers personal or business accounts. As an author, you will want to upgrade to a free business profile in order to utilize the tools Pinterest has set up for business owners. Well discuss those in a separate post as this article is intended to walk you through the setup of your profile. If youve never used Pinterest then youll be able to start an account and build it to suit your needs as an author. If you already have an established account then you can easily switch it to a business account and change things up a bit based on the ideas I will outline. Your profile will be as unique as you are and the more information you share the broader your potential reach. Always remember: as an author You are the brand. This doesnt mean you have to bare your soul on social media but definitely let your hair down. Board Talk Once your business account is established you can lay down what I consider the foundational boards. These are boards that I consistently use for clients to begin to build their presence. To make it a bit easier to understand Ill use Jane Doe to stand in for places where I would use the authors name. I will also break it down by board category and explain briefly why these are important. The following boards relate to you as an author and your work. Here is where you will pin all of the content you create about your work. I suggest creating boards for each of the books you have written or are considering writing and naming it the book title. If its a working title you can always rename a board later if needed. By doing this you are creating a small amount of momentum simply by having your name and book titles out there. If someone likes the content of your board and chooses to follow it then automatically your name/titles are being spread around the search engine. Remember the dandelions from the previous post? This is how you generate the wind that blows them across the internet. Jane Doe Books and Blog Book Title 1 Book Title 2 (you get the idea here, yes?) Within the boards, you create for your books make sure to pin content that links back to your author page, images of your book, and pins from Pinterest or online that convey the idea of what your book is about. If its a book about ghosts then pin a lot of ghostly material. Did you write about the origin of unicorns? Mythology, movies, and unicorn images are all great starting places. Remember anything that can help people to better understand, at a glance, what your book is about should be pinned to these boards. This is also a great place to save links to websites you are actually using for research and ideas. Each blog post you write should also have its own pin linking directly back to the post. File these under your Books and Blog board, to begin with, and over time repin them to other boards that are relevant. It is NOT overkilling to have your books and blog pinned to multiple boards on your profile. How to do this in a way that maximizes the Pinterest algorithm I will detail later. The next section is basic boards that appeal to a broad, general audience. Its good to have them as you never know who will follow a pin back to your profile. Also, these are all popular searches on Pinterest and writing blogs on these topics, then pinning them to those boards can help people find you when they click back to your site. Even if you have a book that has nothing to do with any of these topics it is good to cast a wide net with your blog and perhaps that way gain new readers who would otherwise not see you. Humor Parenting/Grandparenting/Pet Parenting Food Travel Writing tips Blogging Tips Podcast tips (if youre into that) Books and Book Club Movies Health Any Hobby type interests (separate boards for each) I would suggest also creating boards that appeal to the niche elements of your audience. If you write about unicorns have a board for your unicorn book AND have a board just about unicorns- with pins about your book as well. Do you see the pattern here? Were going for a very wide net but hoping for it to also sink deep in an effort to catch as many peoples interest as possible. Even the most niche book can cast a wide net by capitalizing on your interests and life experiences. Your author blog is a great resource for this. If youre wondering if something would make a good board ask yourself: Can I write a blog post, or perhaps a series of posts, about this topic? If yes then definitely create that board! Redecorating and using Pinterest to find ideas? Create a board for that and then blog about the experience! Remember: All the content you create and curate is intended to build your online presence and share a bit about you, the author, with your audience and encourage them to read your blog, buy your book, and interact with you by sharing your Pinterest content to their profiles. After youve determined what boards to create each one needs a brief description added. This is also a good place to add hashtags specific to the category. For example, your author books and blog board could say something like this for the description: I started writing when I was nine years old and have never stopped! I write fantasy novels about unicorns and ghosts. Sometimes I think Im still that kid with a better vocabulary! #author #fiction #books #read Note the use of keywords in the description and the use of hashtags for adding additional keywords that pertain directly to the content this board will contain. Put a Pin in it So now youve got a bunch of boards that look like empty windows. Its time to fill them up with pins. The majority of these will come from Pinterest. The 80/20 rule of most social media applies to Pinterest as well: 80% of other peoples content and 20% yours. You can browse the search engine and start pinning interesting content that relates to your board topics to get the ball rolling. This is important! You want your boards to be filled with content that is relevant to the subject of the board. This allows the search engine spiders to easily categorize your boards and start picking through them for the content a user is searching for. This means the content you create and file to those boards will then begin to be associated with those ideas. This is one reason it is important to have a good foundation of pins on each board (15-20) which are not your personal pins but have everything to do with the subject of the board. You can also go back to your site and start pinning from there if you already have the Pin button/widget installed AND you have images connected to each blog post that can be used to create a pin. Remember from my previous article: Pinterest is a visual search engine. Your blog posts need images. If you dont have images embedded in each post then now is the time to do that. Find images you like which make sense with the subject of your article and have your web person attach it to your post. This makes it so you and other people can easily save it to Pinterest. The content you pin from your website (blog posts, book covers, quotes, etc) will be the other 20% that gets added to your boards. Pinning original content is a power move. The Pinterest algorithm loves getting fresh content added and profiles that regularly add new pins (as opposed to repinning from within the platform) gain traction with the algorithm. There is such a thing as too much though. Pinterest wants a good balance of fresh content as well as repins so everyone gets a fair chance at being seen on user feeds. If your profile is always adding but never sharing then it could be flagged as a bot or spam account and temporarily disabled until you can prove youre an honest, upstanding human citizen. Scheduling for freedom Consistency is key with Pinterest. As a business account, you want the algorithm to key onto you and share your content. If youre pinning 5-10 pins every day, with an overall mix of 80% repins and 20% fresh content then youre in the Goldilocks zone for the platform. Youll see your broad reach grow pretty rapidly. But if pinning every day seems daunting and time consuming then a schedule is the way to go. A scheduler is a program that allows you to schedule pins (and often other social media posts) in advance. Not all schedulers are created equal and only a few are currently approved partners of Pinterest. While the list of approved Pinterest partners changes (and can be found with a simple search on their website) I know that as of this writing Tailwind, Buffer, and Hootsuite are three schedulers that can be used without fear of your account being suspended. All three are reasonably priced, offer a suite of options for scheduling your posts, and have their own analytics to explore. At this time the only one I have personally used is Tailwind and I find it user-friendly and flexible. Any scheduler you choose to use should be one that allows you to pin in batches based on search terms, then shuffle those pins into a queue that will pin to a variety of your boards at different times during the day. Into your queue, you also want to mix your own content. A looping feature is a great way to set your personally created content to circulate through your boards so your pins are being seen consistently. This is a delicate balance to maintain though. You dont want to pin content to a board that it doesnt fit on- dont pin your unicorn blog to a board about decorating bathrooms. It will get lost and thats a wasted opportunity. Likewise, when looping your pins, take care to not have the same pin repin onto the board more than once every few months. A good scheduler will alert you when you are doing something that can trigger the spam filter on the Pinterest algorithm. When in doubt, take yourself over to Youtube and get some training on the schedule youre using as well as how often to circulate your content. A word to the wise: ALWAYS check the date of any blog, article, or tutorial you are using for help. If its more than two years old and hasnt been updated then the information will no longer be current enough to be useful. Using a scheduler has a learning curve but is a wise use of your time. Whichever one you chose, spend some time watching their videos and doing the tutorials. Also, make use of their help desk. Youre paying good money for them to help you promote your brand so get your moneys worth! Be a Groupie Another useful way to find pins for your profile as well as share your content is group boards. Pinterest has group boards that are created by users to share and spread similar pins. When you join a group you will be able to share pins of your content to the board and also pin other members content to yours. A good group board has many members that are active within that community and follow a 1:1 pin ratio, meaning that for every one pin you add to the group you pin one onto your profile. This allows everyones work to be spread through the community and to the followers of each person in the group. Some groups are very specific and have tight rules to follow while others have broad types of content that can be added with loose rules. If you dont find a group that fits your needs you can also create one and invite people to join. A good resource for finding a group board to join is Pingroupie.com. Once youve implemented the strategies described in this post your profile and pins will join the Pinterest community. In the early days and weeks, you may see slow growth and interaction. Fear not, this is natural. Pinterest is about the long game. Stay consistent with your posting schedule and keep creating content (reblogs) on your author site that can be shared to Pinterest and other social media outlets. After two weeks or so of consistency check out your analytics and see what kind of numbers youre getting. Find it a little confusing? Learn about interpreting Pinterests analytics and how to make it work for you in part 3- Pinterest: Finding Your Edge Heather Daleccio has sat on the open loading deck of a C-130 as it flew over the white cliffs of Dover, been trained to evade and survive in enemy territory, and eaten the brain of a cow in France. These experiences have proven useful for raising three kids. She reads, writes, and researches. Her most recent adventure is working on social media marketing. Latest posts by Judith Briles see all) Was this helpful? Get more FREE tips and insight: Latest posts by Judith Briles see all) Will Computers Revolt?: Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence Charles J. Simon. Future AI, $19.95 trade paper (250p) ISBN 978-1-7326872-1-9 Simon makes a welcome contribution to the literature on artificial intelligence that benefits from his technical expertise, acquired writing software for neurological test equipment. This background, and Simon's penchant for philosophical inquiry, allows this relatively short book to be remarkably thorough in considering various implications of AI. At the beginning, Simon asks readers to consider a thought experimentif all one's neurons were replaced with identical but artificial neurons, would one be the same person? Simon goes on to consider the hypothetical science of intelligent thinking machines from multiple angles and possible outcomes. Chief among his numerous conclusions is his certainty that "intelligent thinking machines are not only possible but inevitable." At the midway point, he takes a lengthy but useful digression into basic neuroscience and evolutionary biology, in order to show how little separates the human brain from a computer. Simon ends by predicting four possible scenarios for a world with intelligent thinking machines; these range from an apocalyptic societal meltdown to the negotiation of robot rights. The appealing blend of philosophy and hard science from a thoughtful writer with a knack for bringing the esoteric down to earth will be a treat for readers with questions about AI's possibilities and potential. (BookLife) A sale is imminent for a San Antonio medical office building mired in bankruptcy despite some fireworks at an auction last week. Camco Land Ltd., an Austin partnership, successfully bid $14.2 million for the building at 9618 Huebner, edging out Denver-based Broe Real Estate Group by $100,000. The sale is expected to close later this week. Before approving the sale Wenesday, though, Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Ronald King denied Cherish Medical Office Building LLC the opportunity to bid amid allegations it has connections with Michael Horrell who is involved with the buildings current ownership. Ray Battaglia, a bankruptcy lawyer for Palomar LLC, which has a stake in the buildings bankrupt ownership group, Tresha-MOB LLC, raised the objection regarding Cherish. In an interview Monday, Battaglia said it was his understanding that Randy Soule, Cherishs owner, has had a long association with Horrell and that it should have been disclosed to the court before the auction. Battaglia expressed concern that Cherishs participation in the bidding would drive up the sale price. Horrell stands to share in the proceeds of a sale after debts are paid. If the winning bidder fails to close, then the runner-up can complete the purchase. Horrell also personally filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation last month in Chicago. Nobody could satisfy the court that Cherish didnt include an involvement on behalf of Mike Horrell, so (the judge) didnt allow (it) to bid, Battaglia said. He added that he disclosed to the judge that Palomar was participating with Camco in the bidding. Cherishs lawyer told the judge that it was prepared to offer more than Camcos high bid, but King wasnt persuaded. On Friday, Voltaire Asset Managers II, which owns the building with Palomar, asked the judge to reconsider his ruling on Cherishs bid. King denied the request late Friday. Jason Rudd, Votaires lawyer, didnt respond to a request for comment. Austin attorney David Trotter, a Camco official, said he did not want to comment until the sale closes. Theres an awful short fuse going on right now that were all bending over backwards to try to complete, Trotter said. Call me back on Thursday. He is principal of HTH Capital Ltd., which manages and develops medical office buildings. Palomar sued Voltaire, its owners Horrell and Goriana Alexander, and other parties last summer in Bexar County district court over troubles at 9618 Huebner. The case was removed to bankruptcy court after Tresha filed for Chapter 11 in October. Tresha was one of the biggest bankruptcies in San Antonio last year, reporting $11.7 million in liabilities and $17.9 million in assets. Related: 10 biggest bankruptcies in San Antonio in 2018 In an amended complaint, Palomar accuses Voltaire of mismanaging the building, failing to pay its lender and property taxes, and causing Tresha to be brought into three lawsuits. Palomar also alleges Horrell and Alexander paid themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of paying creditors. Palomar, whose principals include Dr. Ramiro Sonny Cavazos II, seeks more than $1 milion in damages. Voltaire, Horrell, Aleander responded with their own lawsuit, accusing Palomar of causing Tresha to default on a construction loan and another loan for tenant improvements. They also seek more than $1 million in damages. King recently ordered that some of the claims unrelated to the bankruptcy should be litigated in state district court. Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD In the room filling installation Thunder & Lightning, created by the Balloon Collective, white balloons filled the ceiling in drifts resembling low-lying clouds. When visitors tugged on pulleys, the peaceful array would turn threatening, with some balloons darkening ominously and the sound of thunder crackling. Down the hall was Spirits, a piece by dadageek, a school for expressive technology, in which visitors could have their facial features projected onto oversized origami-style animal heads hung high overhead. Its a real-life Snapchat filter, said Nicole Jensen, who co-founded Hopscotch, an immersive blend of art and technology, with partner Hunter Inman. For the past six weeks, Hopscotch: Light & Sound has filled an outwardly nondescript Austin warehouse with 13 room-filling installations dreamed up almost entirely by artists based in the area. Now Playing: The immersive art experience Hopscotch is set to open in San Antonio in fall 2019. Video: San Antonio Express-News Its a test run for a San Antonio-based Hopscotch slated to debut later this year near Travis Park. The San Antonio edition, which Jensen and Inman are hoping to open in October or November, will not be a transplanted version of the Austin installation. For one thing, the San Antonio Hopscotch is envisioned as a permanent installation, whereas Austins was a pop-up. For another, the installations will be new. The lions share of the space will be devoted to works by artists based in the San Antonio area. We really want to be invested in the local scene, wherever it is, Jensen said. Theyre our market first. We hope the tourists will come, but we want to keep the locals happy. The pieces will change over time, Jensen said: Not probably as often as a traditional gallery. Frankly, after the build-out, youre like, Holy crap, this needs to stay for a while. But we think that based on demand, maybe every eight months (the pieces will change). And there might be one or two pieces that people just love, and those will stay. A call for artists proposals will go out soon. Details of what visitors can expect will be announced this summer. On ExpressNews.com: Isaac Julien show a preview of Ruby City The idea behind Hopscotch is to create a platform for artists to realize large-scale projects they might not otherwise have a chance to bring to life, as well as to create an entry point for people who might find the idea of contemporary art intimidating. We realized that theres nowhere for these artists to show their work unless its a grant-funded city project or a Luminaria or a festival, but then its (just for a) weekend. So theres only a certain amount of people that get to experience it, Jensen said. And I think that there are a lot of barriers to the art world from a consumer standpoint. You dont know where to go, you dont know if youre smart enough or youre cool enough. I feel that way sometimes. Youre like, Am I allowed to go this party? Probably not. So I think that we want to break all that down and make it fun and interactive. The name is intended to reflect that vibe. We kept going back to the words joy and wonder when we were building, Jensen said. Thats why we decided on the name Hopscotch, because theres a nostalgic kind of joy to life that seems to be missing these days. We were like, Lets go back to when we could just enjoy ourselves through art, hopefully. Thats kind of theme behind it. The San Antonio space will be situated in the Travis Park Plaza building at 711 Navarro, and it will be substantially bigger, Jensen said. The Austin pop-up filled 10,000 square feet. In San Antonio, it will be a two-story attraction, with 7,000 square feet on the main level and 10,000 square feet downstairs. It will include a bar and a patio, as well as an event space that shes hoping non-profits will use of for fundraisers. A portion of the proceeds will benefit non-profits. The Austin pop-up benefited the HOPE Campaign, an Austin organization that brings various artists together to support causes. Jensen and Inman arranged for a busload of San Antonio influencers to visit the space on Saturday, the second-to-last day it was open. The group included Kathy Armstrong, executive director of Luminaria, the annual arts festival. On ExpressNews.com: Iconic photos in SAMA exhibit Im super glad that an exhibit of this caliber and variety of art exists and that it exists in a for-profit space, Armstrong said. Because that is something the arts struggle with gaining an audience that supports them. This model theyve made is smart. Its entertaining, its artistic and its valuable. Armstrong was particularly struck by the marriage of art and tech in Spirits and in Neon Scream, which was based on the street art of Ami Plasse, who works as Angry Cloud. Plasses signature pieces are vivid depictions of cloud-like balls of rage. In Hopscotch, one of Plasses clouds was depicted in neon, a tangle of neon-lit lines suspended over a sign reading SCREAM. A microphone stood a few feet away, and visitors were encouraged to scream into it. The sound would cause the tangle of wires that made up the cloud blaze and flash. Sometimes, the yellow eyes would spin. His drawings were transferred into light and sound, Armstrong said. That piece was a breakthrough piece in somebodys development he translated his aesthetic into the experiential arts. If all goes according to plan, the Travis Park location will be the Hopscotch flagship as Jensen and Inman expand into other cities. Deborah Martin is an arts writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN On Sunday afternoon, the cast of Twelve Angry Men gathered at Classic Theatre for their one-and-only rehearsal. They sat at a long table in the center of the set for The Little Foxes, the companys upcoming production, with their scripts open in front of them. Thats pretty much what audiences will see. The all-female cast will present two readings of Reginald Roses 1957 play about a jury deliberating over a murder case. The Classic presentation is one of dozens being staged across the country and in British Columbia this weekend as part of a project dubbed 12,000 Voices. Most readings titled Twelve Angry Men Performed by Twelve Impassioned Women will include information about voter registration. The Classic readings will be followed by a talk-back. One of main ideas of the play, which follows jury deliberations on a murder trial, is that a single voice can make a big difference. The 12,000 Voices series is the brainchild of Lauren Class Schneider, a University of Texas at Austin alum now based in New York, who wanted to come up with a project that would spark discussion about gender equity and also would deal with democracy in some way. On ExpressNews.com: Classic announces 19-20 season The concept of gathering people together for something live and in person in addition to community engagement being simultaneous all came together as one entity, this idea of this play, Twelve Angry Men, written 19 years before women could serve on juries in 50 states, Schneider said. The play highlights an element of our democracy. We sit on juries. And it is an honor and a privilege to be able to that in our democracy. Voter registration is another part of how our democracy works. Combining the two, and we have a terrific time together as a community in the theater. Classics reading is being spearheaded by Christi Eanes, a teacher and actress who is directing. I was literally one morning in my kitchen sipping coffee before school, scrolling through Facebook, and Playbill had shared it and I saw it and I immediately thought, We need to do this, Eanes said. Something that is a huge push for us at Classic is diversity, women in theater, and instantly, I thought this would be an amazing opportunity to put together a diverse group of women from our community and just absolutely decided this is truly something for Classic. She reached out to Kelly Hilliard Roush, Classics executive and artistic director, and got the OK to go ahead. The play has been reworked a couple of times to reflect changes to the justice system. Eanes looked at both scripts titled Twelve Angry Women and Twelve Angry Jurors and decided to stick with the original. When I read Twelve Angry Women, it kind of cracked me up how sexist it is, she said, noting that a male character who is a bowler in the original script becomes a crocheter. I decided we need to go with the original and keep true to that. On ExpressNews.com: SAs revue guru looks back on his work The cast includes some of the citys strongest actresses as well as a few people with little experience. Eanes invited her 13-year-old daughter Katie to play the guard in the show. I feel like this is an event I want our young women to be involved in, too, she said. It really is a very broad spectrum of folks. Catherine Babbitt, a respected actress who makes her living as the chief of major crimes for the district attorneys office, plays the juror who insists that the evidence be weighed and the case be thoroughly hashed out. I love Classics work, and it was an opportunity to perform with 12 incredibly talented women, Babbitt said. And its for a great cause, voter registration. Rosa M. Cabezas-Gil, who also is a lawyer and actress, plays a juror who is an immigrant. She was drawn to the project because of the message about womens roles and the forces that sometimes limit womens engagement. This is the 21st century and women are still not being heard, Cabezas-Gil said. The initial plan was to present a single reading on Sunday, but reservations went so quickly that a second reading was added that evening. That, too, is full, though a waiting list is being maintained. The Classic reading is is one of three across the state. The others are at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and Spring Woods High School in Houston. The Lone Star sites are pretty representative of whats planned across the country. Readings will be held at community and professional theaters, at high schools and colleges and in churches and living rooms. Twelve Angry Men Performed by 12 Impassioned Women takes place at 3 and 7 p.m. Sunday at Classic Theatre, 1924 Fredericksburg Road. Both readings are sold out, but there is a waiting list in case reservations are canceled. Call 210-589-8450 to check on availability. dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN Deborah Martin is an arts writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN The store has already partnered with online beauty retailer Birchbox, which has shops inside Walgreens beauty departments. Its also partnered with grocery chain Kroger Co. to offer food pickup at some Walgreens stores, and it has partnered with LabCorp to collect samples in stores for lab testing. Its also working with Sprint to offer wireless services and advice on mobile services and products. AUSTIN A proposal to ban any government funding for abortion providers and their affiliates won narrow approval in the Texas Senate on Monday, advancing one of several anti-abortion proposals Republican lawmakers hope to turn into law this year. The Senate approved the bill 20-11 Monday, prohibiting any state or local governmental entity from doing business including donations, land sales, leases and other transactions with an abortion provider or one of its affiliates. The proposal is one of 30 priority bills for Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Texans who oppose abortion should not be forced to subsidize the industry with their tax dollars, said Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, who sponsored the bill. Proponents argue the measure would cut off the flow of taxpayer money to the abortion industry and promote the pro-life values of a majority of Texans. Womens health care providers contend the bill is the latest in a string of attempts to limit access to abortion and that the consequences include less access to womens health services, including preventative care and STD screenings. For Subscribers: Senate bill would block state, local funding for abortion providers Representatives for cities including Houston and San Antonio said they have no direct contracts with Planned Parenthood, a leading abortion and reproductive healthcare provider. However, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast is one of the leading safety net providers in Harris County, according Bill Kelly, the government relations director for the city of Houston. If we were to have which is not out of the realm of possibilities a Zika outbreak or something that could typically affect women of reproductive age, the prohibition against coordinating with a safety net provider in a public health emergency just seems completely against what people would expect their government to do, Kelly said. Abortion providers have long been a target of Texas Republicans. In recent years, the Republican majority in the state Legislature has passed bills requiring abortion providers arrange for the burial or internment of aborted fetal tissue and have banned a common second-trimester abortion procedure two laws now on hold as they are being challenged in the courts. The Legislature also imposed stringent regulations on abortion clinics in 2013, which were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark decision three years later. Lawmakers are considering dozens of other anti-abortion bills this year, including a proposal to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected which occurs as early as six weeks in a pregnancy and another that opens abortion providers up to civil lawsuits if they fail to care for a baby that survives a botched abortion. Senate approval of SB22 comes as the state awaits a rehearing by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on whether it can halt Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. A three-judge panel decided in favor of cutting off funding in January. The bill next moves to the Republican-led Texas House which last Legislative session amended the budget to ban the the state from directly doing business with abortion providers. That chamber has 83 Republicans and 67 Democrats. She waded across the Rio Grande holding her 2-year-old above her head as the cold water rose up to her chest Friday night. Sopping wet and clutching her daughter on U.S. land, Nidia Dominguez told a Border Patrol official she was seeking asylum. It was so scary, she said. Three days later, the Honduran mother and daughter were wearing donated clothes along with dozens of other migrants inside the City of San Antonios new, pop-up resource center, a former Quiznos across from the Greyhound bus station. The city is aiding Catholic Charities and the Interfaith Welcome Coalition in what it calls surge support. It opened the center Saturday after the nonprofits became overwhelmed by the influx of migrants arriving at the bus station. We have things for kids to do and eat and wear, said Colleen Bridger, the interim assistant city manager, above the chatter of children and the ripping sound of multiple bags of chips opening up. Its a safe place to wait until their bus is here. Thousands of recently released migrants are coming through San Antonio, headed to cities across the country with notices to appear in court for their first asylum hearing. Its like the border has moved to us, said Sister Denise LaRock, who has managed the migrants at the station for the Interfaith coalition for years. READ ALSO: Charities scramble to help dozens of migrant families dropped in San Antonio The federal government says it is overwhelmed with the increasing number of Central American families, often with small children, coming across the border and presenting themselves to officials, asking for asylum. Earlier this month it began releasing migrants, both those who were in detention facilities and newly arriving immigrants. More than 76,000 migrant family members crossed the border in February, through ports of entry and between them. Customs and Border Protection officials said Marchs number was expected to reach 100,000 - nearly double what it was in March last year. Bridger said she wouldnt characterize the situation as a crisis. Weve got this, were dealing with this very creatively, she said. Its going to take a lot more than this to throw us into crisis mode. Laredos bus station has had a similar, if not larger, influx since the beginning of February. The police chief regularly gets texts from CBP officials about migrants on their way to the city and alerts their Catholic Charities and other local shelters. The problem weve had is there was no system in place for this amount of people, said LaRock. Im very impressed with the city to have put in this system. What was once a haphazard operation is now gaining some stability, with the city involved and a few days to sort out the kinks behind them. Until now, the federal government wasnt giving the city or the nonprofits regular notice of their arrival. Now, the citys immigration liaison, Tino Gallegos, gets texts from federal officials notifying him - most of the time of a load of migrants on their way. City officials and the nonprofit stakeholders are having group calls twice a day now. The Fire Departments medical van comes by twice a day to screen the immigrants. Many of the sick have what Bridger calls stress-induced illnesses - colds, fevers, sore throats. OnExpressNews.com: Migrant surge expected to reach 100,000 this month Two children were taken to the hospital and released, a city official said. Shelter has alternated the past few days, from the Travis Park United Methodist Church, San Antonio Mennonite church, Madison Square Presbyterian, and in some instances Catholic Charities has footed the bill for hotel rooms. On Monday night, the migrants were expected to sleep at Travis Park. If this becomes the new normal, well need to have that conversation with our partners and figure out how do we adjust, Bridger said. But right now were taking this a couple days at a time. Nobodys sure how long this surge will last. We have no idea. LaRock said. Thats the big question. Poster-sized papers were taped to the windows of the resource center, the phone number for immigration court on one, displaying the bus departure times to various cities on others. Sitting on red mats along the walls of the center, which is just across the street from the bus station, Dominguezs daughter was playing with colorful toys that she stuffed into a donated kids purse that said Be Happy. Mama, mama! Zoe squealed as she dangled a yellow car in front of Dominguez and ran it along her shoulder and down her chest. Its the first time shes ever held a toy, Dominguez said. They were too poor in Guatemala to own one. Francisca Belazquez Ordonez, 33, brought her two sons from Guatemala to join her husband in Houston, who moved there five years ago from their home. For an eight day stretch on their journey, they only ate one meal a day. At one point, they didnt eat for two days. She said they all lost weight. OnExpressNews.com: Migrants inundating San Antonio bus station As the family ate chips at a resource center table, she and her sons looked to the future with excitement - 9-year-old Eric cant wait to study, 11-year-old Jorge said he cant wait to learn English. And then theres the thought of finally seeing their dad again. Eric said the first thing hes going to do when he sees his father is hug him. And Jorge, his face half-hidden behind his bag of chips mumbled softly: I want to tell him I love him. Their bus to Houston was expected to depart just after midnight. Silvia Foster-Frau covers immigration news in the San Antonio, Bexar County and South Texas area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | sfosterfrau@express-news.net | Twitter: @SilviaElenaFF The years-long contract dispute between San Antonio and its firefighters union reached a new crossroads Tuesday, with stalled discussions over health care benefits casting doubt over future negotiations. At issue was the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Associations long-standing request for a self-controlled and city-funded health care trust, perhaps the groups top priority in the contract. The city has long been skeptical of and opposed to the idea, arguing the union hasnt enumerated how it would spend the money and taxpayers would remain on the hook if the trust ran into fiscal trouble. On Tuesday, the city was more definitive. Our conclusion is that theres no reason for a trust, and there are solid reasons from our standpoint for not doing a trust, said Jeff Londa, San Antonios chief negotiator. He said such a fund would have to be so attractive in terms of savings to taxpayers that the city would be forced to consider it further, with costs almost half of what the union has proposed. On ExpressNews.com: Health care trust at the core of city-union disagreement The union asked for a break afterward to discuss that declaration. You are, in our eyes, not considering the value that would come to the city with a health care trust, union attorney Ricky Poole said later. With the two sides entrenched in their positions, the rest of the meeting included intense back-and-forth bickering, as union representatives accused the city of undermining its firefighters and the city said the union, which has endorsed Councilman Greg Brockhouses mayoral campaign, was playing political games ahead of the May 4 election. Tuesday marked the 10th time that the two sides have met to discuss a new contract since firefighters agreed to come back to the table in January. They confronted a deep divide in their initial proposals and have proven mostly unable to make progress on the most substantive portions of the contract, including health care benefits and wages. It was also the last scheduled meeting before they reach a 60-day impasse April 7 under state law. The two sides left Tuesday without resolving how negotiations will proceed before the deadline. The union said it wants to continue discussing the trust, and it proposed extending the statutory impasse by 15 days and establishing new dates to meet. The balls in the citys court, Poole said. On ExpressNews.com: Slight progress in fire negotiations The city, if it were to agree to an extension, said it would need assurance the union would provide more details. Otherwise, the city has proposed moving to mediation or postponing the discussions altogether until the city has more clarity about what action the Legislature will take on property tax cuts, which would affect city finances. Looming over the uncertainty is Proposition C, a referendum voters approved in November that gives the union sole ability to declare an impasse at any time and move to arbitration. Poole said it was unlikely the union would agree to mediation, which he said proved fruitless in 2017. He said Prop C remains an option. Under the current health benefits system, the city puts aside a pool of money and hires an insurance company to manage claims. The city says it currently pays about $19,650-per-firefighter every year for the benefits. The number is $16,100 for police and $8,000 for civilians. It has said it wants to bring firefighters more in line with police. Firefighters and their families currently get coverage without having to pay monthly premiums. They have long sought to carve out a fund from that pool so that they could control benefits and contributions themselves. They have asked the city for a lump-sum payment of about $50 million to help start the fund and account for the pay freeze they have experienced since the last contract expired in 2014. Theyve further asked for 17.5 percent increases in compensation over the next five years, along with annual payments of $19,000-per-employee to continue funding the health care trust. The cost is roughly $157 million more than what the city already pays. Londa said the current cost is unsustainable, let alone hundreds of millions of dollars in increases. The union has never since the idea was broached during court-ordered mediation in 2017 put forward proposals for what benefits or premiums would look like under the trust, according to Londa. Anything short of that, he said, doesnt amount to a serious proposal. The union has come into these negotiations with a view that weve got unsustainable health care costs, (saying) give us all that money and well decide how to spend it, Londa said. Thats not the citys view of things. The city had instead advanced a one-year proposal with a 2-percent bonus for firefighters and a health care package similar to the one police agreed to in 2016. Poole replied that it would be up to the funds trustees, not the city, to decide premiums and benefits under the plan. He said the unions offer would give the city financial certainty in providing a flat cost going forward. He said the city has consistently moved the goal posts for what it said it would consider in regards to the trust. On Friday, after a union consultant clarified some portions of the groups proposal, Londa said the citys contributions would have to come down from the unions $19,000 proposal to something closer to the costs for the police plan. He said Tuesday the reduction would have to be even more substantial, approaching something similar to Fort Worth, where the city contributes about $11,000 per employee to an independent trust that has run into some trouble. Poole said the citys message to the 1,750 fire department employees is either that the city is trying to get us to arbitration, trying to have the union move to arbitration ... or is simply taking a position that the city will never consider a trust. Londa also accused the union, which hosted Tuesdays session, of deliberately making the citys meeting room cold and ordering Chick-fil-A for lunch to perturb city staff. City Council made a heavily scrutinized decision two weeks ago to remove the restaurant from an airport plan. Finish your political speech and lets go, an exasperated Londa told Poole at one point. Everything from ordering Chick-fil-A for lunch today, keeping the room cold, it was a political event and youre conducting a political speech now. Get it over with. Poole flatly denied those claims. On ExpressNews.com: Chick-fil-A rejection draws attorney generals attention The firefighters collective-bargaining agreement expired in September 2014, but most of its provisions remain in place under an evergreen clause. The two sides relationship deteriorated since then, with the union refusing to negotiate and the city launching an ultimately-futile lawsuit to try to force it back to the table. In November, the battle spread to politics. The union pushed a set of charter amendments targeting City Hall that was opposed by the mayor and most council members. Voters approved two of those measures. One gave the union the authority to declare an impasse, and the other set pay and tenure caps on the city manager. That will likely continue through May. Outside the union hall Tuesday, new signs dotted the lawn touting Brockhouse for mayor. Dylan McGuinness covers San Antonio city government and politics. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | dylan.mcguinness@express-news.net | Twitter: @DylMcGuinness Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) The Philippine National Police (PNP) relieved the Negros Oriental police chief and three other police officers in the province pending a probe on police operations that killed 14 people last week. The PNP said it sacked P/Col. Raul Tacaca, Negros Oriental provincial director; P/Capt. Michael Rubia, Santa Catalina town police chief; P/Lt. Kevin Mamaradlo, Manjuyod town police chief; and P/Lt. Col. Patricio Degay effective Tuesday. This should give way to an impartial investigation by the PNP Internal Affairs Service (IAS), it added. On Monday, P/Gen. Oscar Albayalde, PNP chief, said the IAS is conducting an investigation on several police operations in Negros Oriental that claimed the lives of farmers, residents and members of left-wing organizations on Saturday. Albayalde earlier denied that the operation was a "massacre" and maintained that the operations were legitimate. A: Homeowners and insurance agents always want to assign blame for things that happen, so were not surprised that you feel that if it is your sons neighbors tree, then any damage caused by the tree should fall to the owner. But unless your neighbor was doing something to his tree to cause it to come down, we doubt you can blame the neighbor. Frequently, rain, wind, snow, ice and other weather events cause trees to fall. Sometimes their age or insect damage is a primary or secondary cause. There are now two competing requests to designate the Alamo as a Historical Texas Cemetery and both could change how the site is remembered. The Texas General Land Office wants to have the Alamo church listed as a historic Texas cemetery, citing the names of three people buried there nearly a century before the famed 1836 battle. Another proposal from Native American groups seeks a much larger area be designated a cemetery. Neither is likely to halt a planned $450 million, public-private makeover of Alamo Plaza. But the outcome, depending on which concept is approved, could shape how much emphasis is placed on the history of the mission before the famous siege. Alamo officials had earlier contested a notice for an unknown cemetery filed by one of the tribal groups, the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, citing the Texas Health and Safety Code. Now, the Land Office and Tap Pilam have dueling proposals with the Texas Historical Commission for a historical cemetery designation. In a proposal filed last week, the Land Office cited the names of a Canary Islander and two Native Americans listed in Catholic Church burial records as having been interred in the heavily visited limestone church, which functioned as a roofless cannon station and refuge for women and children in the 1836 siege and battle. The 52-page application leaves to speculation where others, including Spanish friars, soldiers and indigenous people of the Mission San Antonio de Valero, may have been buried outside the church, on what is now the city-owned plaza. While records list names and dates of certain individuals buried at the former mission, they do not necessarily indicate location, the Land Office application states. Tradition indicates the area in front of the current church may be the mission campo santo (cemetery) associated with the final location of the Mission de Valero Church, although no work has been undertaken, or planned to be undertaken, to confirm the presence of burials. On ExpressNews.com: More digs sought to reveal Alamo secrets Land Commissioner George P. Bush said the designation would help restore reverence and dignity for the Alamo and the 1836 battlefield. We have long known of human remains that lie buried inside of the church, Bush said in a news release. The designation of the Alamo church as a historic cemetery is yet another step forward in ensuring our defenders are respectfully honored. But Ramon Vasquez, a leader in Native American groups that have clashed with the Land Office, and one of 26 members of the Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee, said his group released a 70-page report documenting burials well outside the church. It shows that unbaptized Native Americans were buried beyond the walls of the mission, said Vasquez, executive director of the American Indians at Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, a nonprofit created by Tap Pilam. Its not up to us to delineate the boundaries of cemeteries. All were pointing out is that the cemetery is still there, he said. Tap Pilam and the San Antonio Missions Cemetery Association asked the historical commission about six months ago to designate the Alamo site a historic cemetery. Although renderings of the Alamo plan have shown interpretation of burial grounds on the north end of the plaza, the tribal groups have said they want a larger, more precise acknowledgment. Tap Pilam also filed a notice of existence of abandoned or unknown cemetery last Oct. 15 with the Bexar County Clerks Office, citing archaeological reports, church burial records and newspaper articles. But the Alamo Trust, which manages the Alamo, filed a Jan. 14 objection, arguing the notice was not filed within 10 days of discovery of a cemetery, as required in the Health and Safety Code, and did not include sufficient evidence. Then, in a letter dated Jan. 18, Alamo CEO Douglass W. McDonald told the historical commission it was the trusts position that a historic cemetery, as defined by state law, does not exist on Alamo property. He asked that the designation sought by Tap Pilam be denied in all respects. Land Office spokeswoman Karina Erickson said McDonalds letter was misinterpreted by Tap Pilam and the historical commission, which sent a letter in February asking the trust to consider the archival, ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence of burial sites at the Alamo. Dougs letter is taken out of context, Erickson said in an email. In addition, the group that filed this application has no legal affiliation with or authority over the Alamo. The Land Office has long recognized that there are known burials inside of the church, she added. The Native American groups initially proposed that a large area around the Alamo, including nearly all of the plaza, the entire state-owned Alamo grounds, the Emily Morgan Hotel property and Hipolito F. Garcia Federal Building, be designated a cemetery. Much of that area also was included in the Tap Pilams notice of an unknown cemetery in October. According to archaeological reports, 1,000 or more people could be buried in the plaza. But experts have said it may be impossible to determine boundaries of one or more historic cemeteries, even with todays ground-penetrating radar and other technology, since people of the mission era were likely interred in shrouds, without coffins. City Archaeologist Kay Hindes, appointed by Mayor Ron Nirenberg to help define cemetery boundaries in the plaza, is set to retire at the end of May. The Alamo Trust, meanwhile, has hired Kristi Nichols, formerly at Raba-Kistner, in a new Alamo archaeologist position, and has formed an archaeological advisory committee. Tap Pilam now seeks designation of a smaller area, bounded by Houston Street on the north, that excludes the federal building, Emily Morgan and the western half of the plaza. Vasquez emphasized that he doesnt want to stop the Alamo project, which includes construction of a 135,000-square-foot museum, relocation of the Cenotaph, closure of streets to traffic and renovation of the plaza. We want to protect the cemetery in the interests of our people, he said. On ExpressNews.com: Missions tour to tell Native American story The historical commission will discuss and possibly vote at its April 15-16 meeting in Austin on the Land Offices cemetery application. The tribal groups proposal is set for the commissions quarterly meeting July 25-26 in Paris, northeast of Dallas. A historic Texas cemetery designation helps protect historic cemeteries by recording cemetery boundaries in county deed records, alerting current and future adjacent landowners, THC spokesman Chris Florance said. The designation imposes no restrictions on private owners use of land adjacent to the cemetery, or the daily operations of the cemetery. Vasquez, whose family has worked for decades to preserve the memory of Native Americans buried at the Alamo and other San Antonio missions, said the groups were blindsided by the Land Offices application last week. He feels the two proposals should be considered at the same time. The Land Offices application to designate the church a cemetery references mission burial records that documented three people, identified by name, laid to rest in the structure in 1749. The remains of one of the three may have been uncovered in a 1995 archaeological excavation at the churchs south transept. The document also noted that the U.S. Army, while converting the church to a warehouse in 1849, reported finding two or three skeletons that evidently had been hastily covered with rubbish after the 1836 battle, for with them were found fur caps and buckskins. Scott Huddleston covers Bexar County government and the Alamo for the San Antonio Express-News. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | shuddleston@express-news.net | Twitter: @shuddlestonSA With a 6.2-liter supercharged aluminum engine, a late-model Z06 Corvette can generate 650 horsepower and hit 60 mph in under three seconds. But the maroon 2016 model that belongs to Charlie Thrash, a San Antonio millionaire at the middle of an acrimonious guardianship battle, isnt burning much rubber these days. Instead, its stashed somewhere in Junction, 115 miles to the northwest. Its in a garage owned by Phil Ross, the lawyer for Laura Martinez, who was briefly Thrashs wife. The guardian of Thrashs estate, Tonya Barina, and her lawyer, Karen Andersen, who are charged with securing his assets, say they have been stumped in attempts to recover the Corvette, which is worth $113,000 new. No one seems to have the keys, the garage in Junction is allegedly inaccessible to a wrecker and Ross has been less than cooperative, according to Andersen. RELATED: Lawyer seeks to remove judge in Thrash case There seems to be an obstacle at every turn. And I guess were reluctant to spend $1,500 (on a wrecker) to go out there and find that we cant bring it out, she said. Our position is going to be that Mr. Ross was a party to taking the vehicle out there, so he can bring it back on his own dime. Ross said any attempt to burden him with getting the car back is a waste of time. Not only do I not have responsibility, I dont have the ability to bring it back, he said. Im not authorized to drive the car, and I dont have a key for the car. Thrash, 81, was the longtime owner of CT Thrash Differential & Axle Services on West Avenue, a specialty repair shop that closed this year. The flashy Corvette was just one of the gems in his collection, which also included a 1966 Ford Shelby Mustang, various Fords from the 1930s and classic motorcycles. After a complaint was made to Adult Protective Services about Martinezs treatment of Thrash, an investigation ensued. He eventually was found to be mentally incapacitated and in 2017 was placed under the care of guardians by Bexar County Probate Court. His estate is worth at least $3 million, and Martinez, who says she began dating him in 2012, says she is the sole heir. RELATED: Judge nullifies mentally incompetent San Antonio man's adult adoptions, scolds lawyer for misleading him In recent months, the legal battle between Martinez, 54, who is accused of exploiting and manipulating him, and the court-appointed guardians has intensified. Last month, Martinez was briefly married to Thrash until Probate Judge Oscar Kazen annulled the union on the grounds that Thrash, being incapacitated, could not make such a serious life-changing decision. On March 6, Thrash was removed from the home in Shavano Park he shared with Martinez, after Mary Werner, his personal guardian, became fearful for his safety. He is now staying with a relative. On March 13, after complaints from Andersen, Kazen granted a temporary restraining order that was directed at Ross and members of the Martinez family. Among Andersens complaints was that Martinez had ignored her requests to deliver all motor vehicles, all associated keys, all titles and the locations of all vehicles titled in (Thrashs) name. In asking for court intervention, Andersen cited threats and aggression from Martinez family members. Ross and the Martinez family were ordered to refrain from having possession of any of Thrashs property, committing fraud against Thrash, interfering with his two guardians, coming within 500 feet of Thrash and various other acts. Ross, 69, who has been remonstrated by two judges recently for his conduct in the case, is attempting to have Kazen removed from the case. A hearing on his motion to recuse Kazen will be heard today. RELATED: San Antonio millionaire marriage annulled after abuse, exploitation and 'abduction' claims Ross claims that it was Thrashs decision to take his prize roadster to Junction and that he merely provided a secure garage. I was out there about a month ago, and Laura and Charlie showed up in the Corvette. He asked me if he could park it there. He wanted it there to drive Laura around the Hill Country, Ross said. Ive never had a key to the car, and I didnt drive it out there, added Ross, who said he is willing to meet the guardians in Junction. Ill let them in the building, and they can drive the car out, he added. Barina, who has spoken to Thrash about his Corvette, said he wants it back in San Antonio. Charlie told me that Laura has two keys. She has told me otherwise, Barina said. Andersen said she intends to ask Kazen to resolve the Corvette impasse. Were certainly going to bring it up in court. I dont know what the courts position will be, she said. The state of Texas is set to end a program to purge voters it claimed were noncitizens in order to settle lawsuits brought by civil rights groups over the botched plan. A deal was about 99 percent done Monday, after Secretary of State David Whitley met in San Antonio with members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other plaintiffs, said Luis Vera, LULACs national legal counsel. As part of the tentative agreement discussed Monday, the state would scrap the data it used for the first voter purge program and begin a new one that, to the best of its ability, assures that all United States citizens not be affected with the undue burden of having to prove their citizenship, according to LULAC. Its not going to be perfect, but its nowhere near the disaster of the first one, Vera said. It allows us to have some input in the process. The parties were to return to the table Tuesday to hammer out additional terms before taking the final deal to a judge for review. Sam Taylor, communications director for the secretary of state, said that while there is no official settlement yet, progress was made Monday. We are encouraged by the positive and constructive progress we have made with the plaintiffs, and we remain committed to our goal of maintaining accurate voter rolls while eliminating the impact of any list maintenance activity on eligible Texas voters, Taylor said. The civil rights groups brought three lawsuits filed in San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Galveston alleging the voter purge program illegally targeted immigrant voters and resulted in voter intimidation. The suits were consolidated into the lead case, which was filed by LULAC and the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center in San Antonio. Related: State launches purge of noncitizen voters, LULAC files suit Whitleys office announced the initial program Jan. 25. The state used drivers license data from the Texas Department of Public Safety and after comparing it with voter rolls, wrongly concluded that 98,000 noncitizens were registered to vote and that about 58,000 had voted in previous elections. Some local elections administrators after receiving an advisory and the list from Whitleys office immediately sent out notices telling voters on the list that they would be removed from the rolls if they didnt provide proof of citizenship within 30 days. Other administrators investigated the information the state provided and found discrepancies in the data. On ExpressNews.com: Official leading Texas effort to scrub noncitizens from voter rolls says he learned early on that numbers were overstated The program led to the suits and, at LULACs request, three days of court hearings in San Antonio. At one of those hearings, a top official in Whitleys office admitted that the state used flawed information to roll out the initiative and overstated the numbers by tens of thousands of people. LULAC and the other plaintiffs groups seek to have input on the new plan to determine voter eligibility and said the state has agreed to share the methodology and data used. The process will enable the state to remove voters who shouldnt be on the rolls while being the least disruptive to those who are U.S. citizens, according to LULAC. The tentative deal comes more than a month after U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of San Antonio listened to three days of testimony before issuing a preliminary injunction temporarily halting the program, finding that state officials created a mess that intimidated naturalized citizens. On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio judge blocks voter purge, saying the state created a mess The evidence has shown there is no widespread voter fraud, Biery wrote in his Feb. 26 order. He said the number of noncitizen voters was so small that they were like infinitesimal needles in the haystack of 15 million Texas voters. The judge wrote that although the states effort to remove noncitizens from the rolls began in good faith, the process was flawed. As a result, he said, perfectly legal Americans were burdened with what the court finds to be ham-handed and threatening correspondence from the state which did not politely ask for information but rather exemplifies the power of government to strike fear and anxiety and to intimidate the least powerful among us. The court noted that only naturalized citizens were asked to prove their eligibility. No native-born Americans were subjected to such treatment, the judge wrote. The order instructed state officials to inform all 254 Texas counties not to remove any person from the current voter registration list until authorized by this court, and even then, only with conclusive evidence that theyre ineligible. Guillermo Contreras covers federal courts in San Antonio and international legal issues. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | gcontreras@express-news.net | Twitter: @gmaninfedland An investigation by the House Oversight and Reform Committee into efforts in Texas to purge thousands of suspected non-citizens from voter rolls is part of an aggressive effort by Democrats across the country to protect voting rights, says the congressman who is leading the inquiry. We want to get to the bottom of what happened in Texas, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, said in an interview. The powerful committee, under Democratic control for the first time since 2011, gave acting Secretary of State David Whitley until April 11 to produce a host of documents related to his assertion in January that nearly 100,000 registered voters in Texas may not be citizens. Related: Congressional Democrats launch investigation into Texas botched voter purge County election officials charged with vetting the list said tens of thousands of people had been wrongly identified. In February, a federal judge ordered the effort halted, saying that it had resulted in intimidation of Texas citizens. Raskin stopped short of threatening a subpoena if the many documents requested - including emails with Gov. Greg Abbott and Trump administration officials - arent turned over. We have the authority to order these documents to be produced and we have subpoena power if we need to use it. Were very serious about this, he said. Abbott and Whitley have characterized the purge as part of their plan for ensuring the integrity of the states voter rolls. It is unclear how the House inquiry will be affected by a possible settlement of the federal lawsuits filed by the League of United Latin Citizens and a half-dozen other civil rights groups. A tentative agreement calls for Whitleys office to tell county voter registrars and local election administrators to take no further action on the data they were sent in January regarding suspected non-citizen voters. As part of the settlement, the state will scrap the data it used for the first program and begin a new one that, to the best of its ability, assures that all United States citizens not be affected with the undue burden of having to prove their citizenship, according to LULAC. The state will also work with LULAC and the other plaintiffs groups on the plan by sharing the methodology and data used. The process will enable the state to remove voters who shouldnt be on the rolls, while being the least disruptive to those who are U.S. citizens, LULAC said. Democrats push for same-day voter registration law Raskin described a broad effort by newly empowered Democrats to tackle what he described as a pattern across the country of recent attempts to limit voting rights. That effort includes his partys first bill of the new Congress, called the For the People Act. The legislation, House Resolution 1, imposes new rules for canceling voters registrations and makes it easier to vote by allowing registration on the day of federal elections, requiring at least 15 days of early voting. Nineteen states have enacted same-day registration laws, with three more poised to join them, according to a national report issued in March by Nonprofit VOTE and the U.S. Elections Project. Texas, which requires voters to register a month in advance of elections, ranked 41st in the nation in turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, that same report concluded. It was an improvement. In 2014, Texas ranked last. The 600-page House Resolution 1 also requires more campaign finance disclosure and takes aim at gerrymandered congressional districts by requiring independent redistricting panels in every state. The legislation is given little chance of passing the GOP-controlled Senate; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ken., recently referred to it as a Democratic power grab. Nonetheless, Democrats intend to continue their efforts through committees. The oversight panel has begun by looking at states like Texas where perceived problems may reflect what is happening nationally. The committee last week also began an inquiry into relocation of a Latino-heavy polling place in Dodge City, Kan., to outside city limits, making it more difficult to vote. Raskin referred to a number of states that have conducted purges under the guise of keeping out unqualified people from the franchise. The right to vote is obviously still very vulnerable and precarious in a lot of states, said Raskin, a constitutional law professor before entering Congress. He added: Political parties will tangle and squabble and fight for position and advantage. That goes without saying. But we have to have a basic commitment to protecting everybodys right to vote in elections. That really should not be subject to normal political push and pull. Staff writer Guillermo Contreras contributed reporting from San Antonio. More than 4,000 people have signed a petition calling on NASA to reschedule the first, all-female spacewalk after it was canceled earlier this week because there weren't enough available suits that fit. "People around the world were ready to witness history. Unfortunately, NASA wasn't ready to make it," stated the online petition, which was posted Tuesday evening by Care2's advocacy and engagement team. On Monday, NASA decided to cancel the spacewalk, which would have been conducted by American astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch, after McClain said she would feel more comfortable in a smaller suit. HISTORY NOT MADE: NASA canceled its first all-female spacewalk. Why? It didn't have anything that fit The spacewalk was scheduled for Friday morning to replace old batteries on the International Space Station's solar arrays with more powerful, lithium-ion ones. MISSION MOON: How 50 years of space exploration defined Houston Initially, McClain thought she would be able to wear a large-sized hard upper torso -- the spacesuit's shirt. Turns out, she was more comfortable in a medium and only one medium-sized torso could be made ready by Friday. So, Koch will wear the medium this week, walking instead with NASA astronaut Nick Hague. McClain will wear the medium again on April 8, when she walks with Canada's David Saint-Jacques. The announcement brought a major backlash on social media, eliciting shock, disappointment and, in some cases, anger from the scientific community. In response, McClain tweeted Wednesday that NASA's decision to bump her from the walk "was based on my recommendation." "Leaders must make tough calls, and I am fortunate to work with a team who trusts my judgement," she wrote. "We must never accept a risk that can instead be mitigated. Safety of the crew and execution of the mission come first." She continued to tweet about the change throughout the day, telling followers to "Tune in - history is made every day up here!" There currently are two medium, two large and two extra large spacesuits on the station. However, the other medium is a spare and could not be configured quickly enough for the Friday walk. "To stay on schedule with @Space_Station upgrades, it's safer & faster to change spacewalker assignments than reconfigure spacesuits," NASA tweeted in response Tuesday. But the petition writers called it "disappointing," adding that NASA should have enough suits to fit women on the space station. "Canceling a spacewalk because there weren't enough suits to fit male astronauts is almost unheard of, probably because there are ample suits ready to go that fit the men of the ISS," the petition stated. "Women astronauts deserve to have the same courtesy." NASA officials said in a statement Thursday that spacewalks are scheduled when important operations and maintenance need to be done on the station. Though there currently aren't any spacewalks scheduled after April 8, the statement added, there are "multiple women assigned to upcoming missions to the space station, and we would not hesitate to assign two women to perform a spacewalk." "We believe an all-female spacewalk is inevitable," the statement continued. The all-female spacewalk would have drawn accolades for an agency that has been slow to make historic strides with women and minorities. For example, the first female Mission Control chief flight director was only picked last year and the United States was 20 years behind the Soviet Union in putting a woman into space. The U.S. also was behind in allowing women to conduct spacewalks. The first woman to do so was the Soviet Union's Svetlana Savitskaya in 1984. Only 13 women have conducted spacewalks since; Koch will be the 14th. Crewmembers aboard the space station have conducted 214 spacewalks since 1998, when construction of the orbiting laboratory first began. Alex Stuckey writes about NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey. 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. At an expo, a Planned Parenthood representative convinces Abby that the organization is all about reducing the number of abortions (which, among other things, it is). And thats why she joins. But from the moment she volunteers, shes drawn into a sympathetic dialogue with the protesters outside. A few of them are bellicose, carrying photographs of mangled fetuses, but the members of the Coalition for Life are kinder and gentler. They dont believe in strong-arm tactics; they believe in persuasion through love. Cheryl, who ultimately anoints Abby to be director of the clinic, is portrayed as a corporate witch the Cruella de Vil of abortion who greets any questioning of her methods as heresy. Its she who reveals what the movie presents as the dirty secret of Planned Parenthood: that the organization makes the most money off abortion, and therefore according to Unplanned its hidden agenda is to maximize the number of abortion procedures it performs. The organization is portrayed as an abortion factory. Our students have achieved prolific measurable successes over the past four years under the leadership of the San Antonio Independent School District board. Measurements of success are reflected not only in an increase in graduation rates but in more graduates attending four-year colleges, from 40 percent in 2015 to more than 54 percent in 2018 and more than doubling the percentage of students at Tier 1 institutions. Additionally, we take pride because we are on track toward becoming a B-rated district under Texas Education Agency standards by 2020. We were recently rated C and, according to the state, had SAISD been graded three years ago we would have gotten an F, meaning that 35,000 of the districts 50,000 students were in the bottom 5 percent of the schools in the entire state. However, the positive momentum and successes on behalf of our students have been mired with misinformation and false claims about SAISDs transformational efforts. The most recent focus has been on 19 of our schools that requested and prepared applications to redesign their existing schools through new school models tailored to best meet the needs of the students they serve. The reimagining of the campus provides greater flexibility and empowers the school leadership to create an environment that meets the challenging demands of their specific student population. These campuses continue to operate with the full support and oversight of the district, and in the case of 18 of the schools, they will have the additional valued assistance of nonprofits whose mission is aligned with the campus. All SAISD schools were invited to present a proposal during this annual solicitation of campus strategies. Prior to board presentation for approval, these campuses were required to go through a detailed and lengthy engagement process to meet the approval requirements for teachers and parents. After an almost eight-month process that exceeded the expectations of public engagement, the SAISD board of trustees, at its March 25 meeting, unanimously approved the opportunity to empower these schools with strongly endorsed plans put forth by their principals and teachers. Prior to approval, principals of these schools held multiple meetings with teachers and parents to discuss the in-district charter proposals and provided ballots for an official vote. The proposals passed with overwhelming support. Of those parents voting, the yes votes ranged from 85 percent to 100 percent, with the great majority in the high 90s. We as a board dispel the rumors and intentionally misleading claims that our schools are up for sale or being privatized. Even though change is occurring, the core mission remains the same. NO tuition will ever be charged for our schools. NO child will be turned away from the neighborhood schools and ALL employees at the schools remain SAISD employees. The nonprofit partners were selected by the schools to accelerate the great work they are already doing, build even stronger programs and provide deeper learning experiences for every child. These are NOT private management companies or charter operators. Campuses have brought in experts in areas ranging from early childhood learning to the International Baccalaureate program. By approving the recommendations, the board authorized the nonprofit partners, school leadership teams and staff the responsibility to manage the schools day-to-day operations in collaboration with the district. This is a shift in allowing greater autonomy and more decision-making at the campus level by those who know our students best. These plans and partnerships exist for one purpose: to provide greater opportunity, access and collaboration for our students in a system that requires innovation, creativity and commitment for one purpose the academic success of our student. Thats what this is all about students are, and always will be, at the heart of every decision we make. Patti Radle is the San Antonio Independent School District board president. Art Valdez is the board vice president. Debra Guerrero is the board secretary. The sudden movement toward ending the war in Afghanistan isnt entirely due to President Donald Trumps determination to withdraw all U.S. troops from that country. American negotiations with the Taliban are driven as well by a painful admission buried in the Pentagons most recent report on the war. Quietly, it acknowledged that after 18 years of struggle, the investment of $942 billion , the loss of 2,400 American dead and 20,00 wounded, and the sacrifice of millions of military families, the war is at an impasse. Its a belated recognition that scattered bands of insurgent fighters with primitive and makeshift weapons, with no sophisticated communications or logistics network and no air force, has fought the most powerful military force in the world not just to a standstill but to strategic failure. The Americans we sent to war fought honorably and well. Defeat if a failure to attain official U.S. goals can be called that lies directly with the senior generals and civilian politicians accountable for the management of the war. Not that any have stepped forward to acknowledge their responsibility. The Pentagons official strategy now is to try to hold on while diplomats struggle for a face-saving exit. (In official Pentagon language, The principle goal of the South Asia Strategy is to conclude the war in Afghanistan on terms favorable to Afghanistan and the United States.) Reports from the diplomatic front indicate that means trusting the Taliban not to allow terrorists to operate from Afghanistan after the 14,000 U.S. troops currently deployed there are sent home and the Taliban are in charge. It will take a while to absorb what happened to the lofty American goals once envisioned for Afghanistan, and no doubt there will be plenty of finger-pointing (the revolving door of top commanders comes to mind: There have been 15 American generals in charge of the war in the past 17 years). But heres a significant piece of the failure: Our military commanders, contractors and politicians never did figure out a way to achieve what they described as the ultimate U.S. exit plan: building a strong, professional and noncorrupt Afghan security force capable of securing the country without outside help. To take just one recent illustration, American taxpayers today are supporting the gift of 159 Blackhawk UH-60 helicopters to the Afghans, at a cost of $5.75 billion to $7 billion. Sixteen choppers have already been delivered but there arent enough Afghan pilots to fly the helicopters, and the Defense Department has neglected to train Afghans to maintain the aircraft. As a result, contractors will be hired to keep the choppers running, at a cost of $2.8 billion for starters. And the aircraft will only fly from limited secure locations, because contractors arent allowed to work in dangerous places (i.e., where the Afghan helicopters will be needed to transport troops, ammo and the wounded). We know this not because the Pentagon has reported it theres no mention of the problem in its latest report. It comes from an office that Congress set up in 2008 to monitor U.S. spending in Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. SIGAR operates in Washington and Afghanistan with teams of sharp-eyed investigators, and reports directly to Congress and the public. It also turns out that Afghan generals are misusing the helicopters they do have, carting around civilian VIPs and ordering up other noncombat jaunts. Astonishingly, the U.S. command resorted last year to imposing fines of $100,000 per flight hour on Afghan generals in a last-ditch effort to stop the practice. It didnt stop, so the fines recently were raised to $150,000 for every hour the choppers were sent off on nonessential missions. Its been a gargantuan task to create capable Afghan security forces, one that the U.S. command cavalierly assured us was within our capabilities. It proved not so. In his memoir in 2010, President George W. Bush acknowledged, The task turned out to be even more daunting than I anticipated. Certainly the Afghans themselves bear some responsibility. But for all their faults, concludes Anthony Cordesman , senior strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the lack of consistent, effective United States efforts is probably as much to blame. Wherever the blame lies, the American failure to stand up the Afghan security forces will inevitably cast a dark shadow over Afghanistans future as it struggles to emerge as a free and democratic state. Gov. Greg Abbott never promised Texans meaningful criminal justice reform, but he certainly gave it lip service. This was during a press conference last summer outside Waco. Abbott was flanked by the widow of state Trooper Damon Allen, who was killed in 2017 during a traffic stop. Abbotts attitude then was all about being tough on crime. The man accused of killing Allen had been out on a $15,000 bond, and Abbott said he wanted to keep dangerous people off the streets. Among other things, Abbott called for better sharing of criminal history when judges make bail decisions, and he wanted a system that accounted for a defendants risk with the help of an assessment tool. Allens death is a tragedy and horror. So, lets focus on that risk part of the equation. In fact, many people in the system are accused of nonviolent crimes and pose little risk to the public. If Texas officials are serious about judging a defendants risk, they cant solely focus on preventing the pretrial release of someone who is potentially dangerous. Just as important is avoiding the pretrial detention of someone who is not dangerous. These are two sides of the same criminal justice coin. And this is where Abbotts lip service to meaningful criminal justice reform comes into focus. He knows this. We know he knows this because as he said this summer: Our goal for people who are not dangerous to the community is to not house nondangerous criminals behind bars, but put them on a pathway toward productivity and contributing back to society. But actions speak louder than words, and Abbott never endorsed bipartisan legislation from Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, and state Rep. Andrew Murr, R-Junction. They named their legislation the Damon Allen Act in honor of the fallen state trooper, and its been widely viewed as smart, bipartisan reform. It includes having the states Office of Court Assessment create a risk-assessment tool for defendants. It would require a bail review hearing within 48 hours in cases when bail is denied, and in cases when bail is warranted, the presumption is to make it as least restrictive as possible. It tilts the system toward personal recognizance bonds for defendants who do not pose a risk to the public, meaning no one should be locked up simply for being poor. But Abbott has thrown his weight behind a second Damon Allen Act, which suddenly appeared in March. The legislation was filed by Rep. Kyle Kacal, R-College Station, who attended that summer press conference in Waco. This legislation also requires a risk-assessment tool, but it lacks details about how the tool would be used. Its also depressingly vague about keeping people from unnecessarily languishing in jail pretrial. There are no guidelines or specifics. This tool, as well as policies for pretrial release, would be created in the governors office. Abbott is shifting policy control to his office. Kacals bill would also limit bail decisions in felony and some misdemeanor cases to district or associate judges potentially meaning long delays for bail hearings for people arrested in rural areas. The lack of specifics are troubling and point to a broader concern: Kacals bill fails to address the fundamental issues in Texas criminal justice system and is potentially a tool to lock up more people. Why? It ignores reforms instituted in Harris County after officials there were sued over bail practices. It ignores similar litigation over bail practices in Galveston and Dallas counties. It ignores the words of Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, who has bravely called for criminal justice reform. It is time its actually past time to ensure that defendants who pose no risk to the public are not jailed, and that those who do are, Hecht said earlier this year. Polling has shown the majority of Texans are with Hecht. They want people accused of nonviolent crimes to be with their families and stay employed. They want jail populations to be reduced, and they want risk to be properly assessed. Time is running out on lawmakers to get this right and its entirely unclear if they will. And this failure underscores the importance for local officials to take action. Bexar Countys misdemeanor court judges have refused to embrace bail reform for those accused of nonviolent offenses even as they recognize people are routinely locked up pretrial on nonviolent charges simply for being poor. Nobody should be held pretrial solely for lack of money, and if state officials cant address this, then county officials must. Its past time to follow Harris Countys recent lead. Good thing President Donald Trumps trade wars are so easy to win. Otherwise, Chinese President Xi Jinping might be signing billions in deals with France, Italy, Germany and Monaco. Reagin McAllister Apologize? No Re: Apologies to Trump, Your Turn, Thursday: The letter writer suggested Democrats and the media apologize to Donald Trump for suggesting he was involved with Russians. Well, apologies should first come from Trump for the following: more than 8,000 lies or misstatements made to the American people; disrespecting Gold Star families; disparaging the late Sen. and American hero John McCain; talking about grabbing women by their private parts; his language and rhetoric used at rallies encouraging violence; his vengeful attitude toward members of the media whose job is to ask tough questions and report the truth; his condescending attitude toward Americans in Puerto Rico; his declaration that white nationalists are fine people; his sadistic treatment of the most vulnerable human beings, such as immigrant mothers, children, families and disabled; and now his proposed budget, which will take billions from Medicare and Medicaid. Shall I go on? But, perhaps the most important reason Trump should apologize to the American people is because of his efforts to completely destroy traditional American values such as truth, compassion, honesty, integrity, decency, civility, patriotism and a fear of God. Apologize to Trump? I dont think so. Gerald Avila Drivers had a choice Re: Texas drives the poor into spiraling debt, Editorial, Thursday: I fail to see how Texas is at fault for spiraling debt. Texas isnt behind the wheel! Lets take some personal responsibility and realize there is an easy solution dont speed. A choice made solely by the driver, having nothing to do with whether you are rich or poor. Karnie Wessling For nearly two decades, theyve greeted drivers heading southbound on U.S. 281 into downtown San Antonio: four billboard-esque signs suspended over a self-storage facility. Locals and elected officials have long viewed the signs as a blight on the front door to downtown from the North Side. In 2002, San Antonio officials accused the property owner of flouting the citys ban on billboards under a "scenic corridor" designation. But the signs were allowed to remain. The sight is jarring for both residents and travelers driving in from San Antonio International Airport who pass through the wooded areas of Olmos Park, by the University of the Incarnate Word and Trinity University and over St. Marys Street, said Jimmy McCloskey, executive vice president of development at Embrey Partners, a local developer. Then, you turn the corner and its just this eyesore, McCloskey said. Ive always thought itd be a place for a cool project. Michael Fisher Now, the signs could come down under a joint proposal by Embrey Partners and Area Real Estate, another local developer, to renovate the self-storage facility into a mixed-use development that includes apartments, offices and retail. On ExpressNews.com: Blighted downtown San Antonio building to become 47-room hotel Embrey Partners want to demolish several buildings with self-storage units that sit on the 5.1-acre lot at 815 E. Ashby Place just two blocks north of the Pearl and half a mile from the St. Marys Strip to make way for a five-story apartment building with about 300 units. Some of those units will be set aside for households making less than the area median income about $67,000 so the project can qualify for city housing incentives, McCloskey said. Area Real Estate plans to revamp the mustard-colored Borden Creamery warehouse building which currently houses SmartStop Self Storage and sits on the San Antonio River into 50,000 square feet of office, retail and commercial space. For what it is, its in fine shape, said David Adelman, who heads Area Real Estate. For a modern mixed-used building, its not in good shape. It would need a complete and total renovation plus restoration, which is what our desire is. The proposed development also includes the elimination of a ditch that runs along 281 and the propertys north side. Instead, Embrey has proposed a low-impact trail with natural drainage components that would connect the Tobin Hill neighborhood to the San Antonio River and a bridge that would span the river and connect to the Brackenridge Park Trail on the rivers east side. No one runs down there because you dont think you should because its industrial, McCloskey said. It just doesnt feel welcoming. The developers havent tallied an initial estimate for how much the project will cost, McCloskey said. Embrey is under contract to buy the land from Strategic Storage Growth Trust, a California-based real estate investment trust that owns the property, McCloskey said. The project still has city regulatory hurdles to clear. The city Historic Design and Review Commission will take up the developers proposal at its Wednesday meeting. The proposed development will go before the Zoning Commission later this month. On ExpressNews.com: Proposed eight-story apartment building near La Villita in downtown San Antonio gets initial city approval Strategic Storage Growth Trust bought the property from Midland-based Star Storage in December 2015, Bexar County property records show. A sales price was not disclosed but the Bexar Appraisal District assessed the property at $3.7 million that year. This year, the property was valued at nearly $11.5 million. The Borden site had been dormant except for when refrigeration units were leased before Star Storage bought the property in 1999. A representative for Strategic Storage Growth Trust declined to comment. Joshua Fechter is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering real estate, economic development and tourism. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreports by Brad Camara | Mon, Apr 1st 5:59pm EDT Langston Galloway is expected to play Monday against the Indiana Pacers. (Johnny Kane on Twitter ) Fantasy Impact: Galloway, who was questionable with an illness, will attempt to give it a go for Mondays game against the Pacers. With Blake Griffin already ruled out, look for Galloway to see an increase in usage and minutes. Through the American Sheep Industry Association, the Sheep Heritage Foundation Memorial Scholarship in the amount of $3,000 is being made available for sheep-related graduate studies. The scholarship is for the advancement of the American sheep industry through financial support of a graduate-level (M.S. or Ph.D.) student who is attending a school in the United States. Requirements for applying include: Be a graduate student involved in sheep and/or wool research in such areas as animal science, agriculture economics or veterinary medicine with proof of graduate school acceptance. Complete an application. Present two letters of reference. Click Here to download the application or obtain a copy by contacting ASI, Attn: Memorial Scholarship, 9785 Maroon Circle, Suite 360, Englewood, CO 80112-2692, by calling 303-771-3500 ext. 107, or by emailing angela@sheepusa.org. Applications must be received in the office by May 31 and the 2019 scholarship recipient will be announced in June or July. HARRISBURG, Pa. Pennsylvania state Sen. Elder Vogel Jr., a fourth generation farmer and chairman of the Senate Agriculture & Rural Affairs Committee, introduced legislation that is intended to encourage existing farmers and landowners to work with beginning farmers to help them get started. Senate Bill 478 would create a personal income tax credit for landowners who lease or sell their land, buildings and equipment to beginning farmers. Aging farmers For every four farmers in Pennsylvania over 65, there is only one farmer under the age of 35, and of the 7.7 million acres of farmland across Pennsylvania, 11 percent of that land is expected to transfer in the next five years. My legislation provides an incentive for landowners to lease or sell their land, buildings and equipment to beginning farmers, said Vogel, who operates a family farm in Beaver County that was established in the late 1800s. Tax credit Landowners would receive a one-time personal income tax credit for the sale of property or a multi-year tax credit for the lease of property. Under the bill, a landowner would receive a one-time tax credit totaling 5% of the sales price, with a maximum credit of $32,000, or a 10% credit on the gross rental price with a maximum credit of $7,000 per year. The landowner, who rents property to a qualified beginning farmer, would be eligible for the tax credit for a maximum of three years. The legislation requires all leases be enforced through written agreements and that the sale of property be for fair market value in order to qualify for the tax credit. Vogels bill is modeled after a program in Minnesota. In the first year of its program, Minnesota offered $2.3 million in tax credits to nearly 450 landowners, he said. The number one concern faced by new farmers is finding affordable farmland and I believe the state can be proactive in helping them overcome that hurdle, the Republican senator said. We work to entice companies to do business in Pennsylvania, said Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-34, who joined Vogel at a news conference introducing the bill. This bill does the same thing for agriculture and young farmers. The bill is supported by the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau and the National Young Farmer Coalition. Over and over we hear from young farmers who are hindered from establishing their own businesses due to the lack of affordable land to buy or rent, said Pennsylvania Farm Bureau President Rick Ebert, who operates a dairy farm in Westmoreland County. We are hopeful that the legislation will reduce some of those roadblocks. Vogel said there are specific criteria defining who can qualify as a beginning farmer, including the exclusion of individuals who have engaged in farming for 10 years or longer. The bill, which was assigned to the senate Finance Committee March 26, currently has 13 bipartisan co-sponsors, in addition to Vogel. The best thing about it is that these are not 4,000-passenger ships that destroy the experience for people who live there, said Lorenz, vice president of Travel Michigan, the states tourism arm. You look at places like Venice or Barcelona, and theyre actively fighting to keep out the huge cruise ships. In our case, youre talking a couple hundred people per ship. They get to see this is a pretty stunningly beautiful area, and it opens the door for them to come back later on. Facebook has deleted a post by a group of vegan campaigners which publicised personal details of game farms around the UK. The social media giant has taken a zero-tolerance approach to online bullying and harassment of legitimate businesses. It comes as the Countryside Alliance rallied around the general public to put pressure on Facebook to take decisive action on vegan campaigners who publicise personal farm addresses online. Within a matter of hours, a Facebook post, which reportedly showed a map listing game farm addresses, was deleted. Tim Bonner, Countryside Alliance Chief Executive, said: The uptake from our supporters was superb, Facebook would never have reacted so quickly if it were not for all those that reported the post. For that we are extremely grateful. Mr Bonner said rural businesses and livelihoods 'have enough challenges' without having to contend with 'intimidation and attacks'. Our work on this issue does not end here as game farmers are still living in fear. We will continue to work with the police to tackle harassment and incitement, he added. The police have reacted quickly to investigate those game farms that have been attacked as a result of this map, and we will ensure that they continue to treat the threats being made online seriously. The move by Facebook follows the release of a viral video which shows the moment nearly 5,000 pheasants escaped a game farm after activists freed them. The incident happened on a game farm in Chilmark, Wiltshire on Monday 18 March, with the group Members of Animal Liberation Front claiming responsibility for it. A similar incident occurred at a game estate in Bodmin, Cornwall on the same day, which saw around 1,000 birds escape. The group also claims responsibility for this. Two separate incidents involving livestock within days of each other has highlighted the safety precautions farmers should take when tending to animals. Perthshire farmer Murray Alexander was airlifted to hospital with serious injuries on Sunday (31 March) after he was injured by a cow. Mr Alexander, who is also the managing director of construction company Algo, was hurt while tending animals at his farm near Murthly. A company spokesperson said: The managing director of Algo, Murray Alexander, was involved in an accident with an animal on the farm on Sunday night. He was airlifted to Ninewells where he was treated for serious, but not life threatening, injuries. Meanwhile, emergency services were called to a farm in Bletchingly, Surrey, last week, after a farmer was injured by a cow she had been helping to give birth to a calf. The woman, who has not been named, was airlifted to hospital after suffering serious injuries during the incident. According to Metro, one nearby resident said: Apparently the cow was not happy that she went into the pen after the birth of her calf and it knocked her over before trampling on her. Statistics show that around 6 people are killed every year due to livestock related injuries, with cattle being the primary culprit. To reduce the risk of injury when handling cattle, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) urge farmers to have: Proper handling facilities, which you keep in good working order; A race and a crush suitable for the animals you handle; Trained and competent workers; and A rigorous culling policy for temperamental animals Farmers can view more information on proper livestock handling techniques from HSE's online guidance. Farmers in Northern Ireland have called for a scheme which protects the viability of farms in severely disadvantaged areas to be re-instated. The Areas of Natural Constraint (ANC) scheme is seen as crucial in protecting the viability of farm businesses making a living off some of the most challenging landscapes in the country. This year is the first where farmers will receive no ANC payment, following on from a number of years where payments were reduced. Profitability remains a key issue on hill farms following a costly spring across Northern Ireland, but businesses in severely disadvantaged areas are feeling the pinch more acutely. The Ulster Farmers Union (UFU) says replacing the ANC scheme is a priority. Hill farming chairman, John Kennedy said: Cold weather and wet conditions have restricted grass growth and stock turnout, which has added costs. Sheep feed, such as meal, has risen over 15 per cent now costing up to 280 a tonne, and straw costing up to 180 a tonne, a 30 per cent increase on last year. Annual costs are increasing and this is why ANC payments are important for cash flow, he said. In addition to losing the ANC payment, many severely disadvantaged farm businesses have also lost income as a result of changes to the countryside management scheme (CMS). However, the Environmental Farming Scheme, which replaced the CMS, has been criticised for being to bureaucratic and financially unattractive. The UFU said the ANC payment must be reinstated or an alternative must be found to help farms remain profitable. Mr Kennedy added: It is an unfortunate reality that the market often does not deliver healthy margins for primary producers. The loss of the ANC payment has hit farms financially hard and has many questioning their viability. A potential knock-on effect is livestock numbers may reduce and we risk losing livestock grazing as an environmental management tool. Meanwhile, it has been over two years since Northern Ireland has had a functioning Executive and a government minister responsible for agricultural issues. The importance of livestock auction markets have been highlighted as new figures show they contributed 3.42 billion to the rural economy. Marts across England and Wales are also supporting over 3,000 jobs and offer farmers the advantage of equality when selling in a public auction, a new report highlights. It details the value of livestock markets to rural communities. For example, without auctions, cattle and sheep populations in England and Wales would be smaller. The report, commissioned by the Livestock Auctioneers Association (LAA), investigates the benefits to buyers, vendors and the livestock industry in general, as well as animal welfare within livestock auction markets. Key findings of the report shows how both buyers and sellers benefit from fair prices, accurately reflecting current demand, and how marts are at the centre of an agricultural network, providing both a social and business hub. Billion pound turnover The 110 livestock auctions markets in England and Wales directly employ some 2,599 people, generating a turnover of 1.76 billion. By using Office of National Statistics (ONS) calculations, this direct expenditure injected into the economy is boosted by a further 1.66 billion of indirect and induced expenditure, totalling 3.42 billion to the economy. Following the same ONS calculations, livestock markets contribute total employment to the equivalent of 3095 full-time jobs. However, these figures dont consider the total contribution of ancillary businesses, such as farm supply stores, located on-site or nearby. Economic analyst, Sean Rickard, who is behind the report, said: The estimated expenditure and employment set out in the report is a significant underestimate of the total contributions of auction markets, because the values do not include the expenditure and employment generated by businesses located within their sites, or in close proximity. Agricultural hubs Livestock auction markets are also increasingly found at the centre of a network of rural businesses that also non-farming activities including retail outlets, conference facilities and venues for social gatherings. At the heart of these hubs, livestock auction markets carry a social responsibility. Farming has become an increasingly isolated and lonely occupation, and the social networking the auction market provides should not be underestimated, the report says. Mr Rickard said: Auctions not only provide an opportunity to socialise, but it is now common for auction markets to provide facilities where farmers can meet with trained social and/or health workers to share their concerns and if appropriate directly address issues raised by stress and illness. Achieving a fair price Central to achieving these wider benefits is the success of the livestock market system in realising added value for both buyer and vendor. The report highlights how livestock farms are small businesses and as such have little market power when compared to large scale, corporate food companies. Farmers can lose out when entering into private negotiations with powerful buyers, and risk a transaction that under-values their animals. In contrast, selling livestock in an open-cry auction market will guarantee a fair price due to their transparency. 'Get behind markets' Chris Dodds, executive secretary of the LAA, said that the farming community 'must get behind and support' livestock auction markets. The report clearly identifies that without livestock auction markets, farmers would be in a far worse position due to lack of competition, and livestock numbers across England and Wales would inevitably fall. Knock-on effects to the wider rural economy would be devastating, he added. The report follows a new 'Use your mart' campaign launched in March 2019 urging farmers to 'take back control' and demand transparency in pricing by selling through livestock marts. The call comes as major buyers, often those supplying UK supermarket chains, increasingly demand direct contracts with farmers. 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. Smollett faced a 16-count felony indictment for allegedly staging a racist and homophobic attack on himself in downtown Chicago in order to further his career. But a surprise hearing last week, prosecutors stunned Chicago police brass by abruptly dropping the charges with little explanation. The actor and his legal team did a victory lap, claiming he was wrongfully accused all along and saying the city of Chicago owed him an apology. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category 'I'm Shivering Still' Rakshita while speaking to the press said that launching her baby brother's film was an emotional moment for her. Thanking her fans, family and people from the industry, the actress shed tears as she remembered her initial days in the industry. She said, as a newbie, she was nervous when she first performed on stage during the launch of her debut film Appu. Rakshita Speaks For Rana She further added, "My fans have supported me for 18 years. Similarly, I request you all to shower my brother Rana with the same love. He's always aspired to become an actor and he's extremely hard working. I would like to first thank Prem for all of this." She Rejected Several Scripts For Brother Apparently, Rakshita was very particular about Rana's first film. She rejected 7-8 scripts and finally agreed to go ahead with Ekalavya. However, Rana has previously worked as an assistant director with Prem. He was also a part of The Villain. An Engineer Turned Actor Rana is an engineer by profession. Rakshita said that a few years back, they planned on sending him to the US for an MBA. But, he was adamant about going to acting school and fought for it as the family didn't want him to enter the industry. Considering Prem's reputation for introducing new actors, we look forward to watching Rana in Ekalavya. Sandalwood actor Upendra is not contesting in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections, but he has announced candidates from his party Uttama Prajaakeeya Paksha. Due to this, the release of his and Rachita Ram's film I Love You has been postponed yet again. The voting in Karnataka will take place on April 18 and 23 respectively. Uppi wasn't willing to break the model of code by releasing the film during elections. Therefore, he's asked the director R Chandru to push the release further. While talking to Times Of India, Chandru said, "We had decided on the release dates and were sticking to it even after the election dates were announced. But things have changed after Uppi sir announced his party candidates." It is his advise that we may fall foul of the model code of conduct if we release the film before or during the election. It is only a matter of waiting for one or two more weeks. Anyway it will still be an April release in both Kannada and Telugu," he further added. Yash Hopes To Make KGF Chapter 2 A World-Class Film! Says 'It Would Be Of No Use' If THIS Happens The film which was initially scheduled to release in December 2018, has been delayed for several reasons. It was first delayed as the makers planned on dubbing it in Telugu. The Telugu version is now ready for release, but the elections clashed with the release dates for both languages. Raghava Lawrence, one of the most popular stars in Tamil cinema, is currently gearing up for the release of the eagerly-awaited Kanchana 3 which is one of the biggest releases of April. The film's official trailer was released a few days ago and it became the talk of the town in no time due to its intense presentation and stunning visual appeal. The film, the third instalment in the Kanchana series, is touted to be an action-comedy and has the potential to be a winner. Now, it seems that the plot of the film has been revealed. According to a fan, Kanchana 3 revolves around Jallikattu and features Raghava Lawrence in the role of a farmer who is left distraught when his bull is killed. The fan further states the film will highlight the conflict between a farmer and a corporate bigwig. "It's my point of view The story is based on jallikattu Lawrence is a farmer , he and his bull was killed for some reason , U can see lots of bull running toward home and Lawrence delivering a dialogue "ennaku onnuna vittutu poiduvan enn pasangalku....." Farmer take care of his bull as his son and even villain look corporate one. So maybe this is the story," (sic) added the fan If this is indeed the case, then Kanchana 3 might have strong emotional undercurrents which might help it click with fans. So, are you looking forward to Kanchana 3? Comments, please! Kanchana 3 First Single Is Out: Nanbanukku Koila Kattu Is A Catchy Number! CALGARY, Alberta, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Pembina Pipeline Corporation ("Pembina" or the "Company") (TSX: PPL; NYSE: PBA) announced today that it has agreed to issue $800 million of senior unsecured medium-term notes (the "Offering"). The Offering will be conducted in two tranches consisting of $400 million in senior unsecured medium-term notes, series 12 (the "Series 12 Notes") having a fixed coupon of 3.62% per annum, paid semi-annually, and maturing on April 3, 2029, and $400 million in senior unsecured medium-term notes, series 13 (the "Series 13 Notes") having a fixed coupon of 4.54% per annum, paid semi-annually, and maturing on April 3, 2049. Closing of the Offering is expected to occur on April 3, 2019 and the net proceeds will be used to repay short-term indebtedness of the Company under its credit facilities, as well as to fund Pembina's capital program and for general corporate purposes. The Series 12 Notes and Series 13 Notes are being offered through a syndicate of dealers under Pembina's short-form base shelf prospectus dated July 27, 2017 as supplemented by related pricing supplements dated April 1, 2019. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the notes in any jurisdiction. The notes being offered have not been approved or disapproved by any regulatory authority. The notes have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or any state securities law, and may not be offered or sold within the United States. About Pembina Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Corporation is a leading transportation and midstream service provider that has been serving North America's energy industry for over 60 years. Pembina owns an integrated system of pipelines that transport various hydrocarbon liquids and natural gas products produced primarily in western Canada. The Company also owns gas gathering and processing facilities and an oil and natural gas liquids infrastructure and logistics business. Pembina's integrated assets and commercial operations along the majority of the hydrocarbon value chain allow it to offer a full spectrum of midstream and marketing services to the energy sector. Pembina is committed to identifying additional opportunities to connect hydrocarbon production to new demand locations through the development of infrastructure that would extend Pembina's service offering even further along the hydrocarbon value chain. These new developments will contribute to ensuring that hydrocarbons produced in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin and the other basins where Pembina operates can reach the highest value markets throughout the world. Purpose of Pembina: To be the leader in delivering integrated infrastructure solutions connecting global markets; Customers choose us first for reliable and value-added services; choose us first for reliable and value-added services; Investors receive sustainable industry-leading total returns; receive sustainable industry-leading total returns; Employees say we are the 'employer of choice' and value our safe, respectful, collaborative and fair work culture; and say we are the 'employer of choice' and value our safe, respectful, collaborative and fair work culture; and Communities welcome us and recognize the net positive impact of our social and environmental commitment. Pembina's strategy is to: Preserve Value by providing safe, environmentally conscious, cost-effective and reliable services; by providing safe, environmentally conscious, cost-effective and reliable services; Diversify by providing integrated solutions which enhance profitability and customer service; by providing integrated solutions which enhance profitability and customer service; Implement Growth by pursuing projects or assets that are expected to generate cash flow per share accretion and capture long-life, economic hydrocarbon reserves; and by pursuing projects or assets that are expected to generate cash flow per share accretion and capture long-life, economic hydrocarbon reserves; and Secure Global Markets by understanding what the world needs, where they need it, and delivering it. Pembina is structured into three Divisions: Pipelines Division, Facilities Division and Marketing & New Ventures Division. Pembina's common shares trade on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges under PPL and PBA, respectively. For more information, visit www.pembina.com. Forward-Looking Information and Statements This news release contains certain forward-looking statements and information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of applicable securities legislation that are based on Pembina's current expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "intend", "will", "shall", and similar expressions suggesting future events or future performance. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the offering, including the anticipated closing date and the expected use of the net proceeds of the offering. These forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions that Pembina has made in respect thereof as at the date of this news release, including: prevailing commodity prices, margins and exchange rates, that Pembina's businesses will continue to achieve sustainable financial results and that future results of operations will be consistent with past performance and management expectations in relation thereto, the availability and sources of capital, operating costs, ongoing utilization and future expansions, the ability to reach required commercial agreements, and the ability to obtain required regulatory approvals. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to: non-performance of agreements in accordance with their terms; the impact of competitive entities and pricing; reliance on key industry partners, alliances and agreements; the strength and operations of the oil and natural gas production industry and related commodity prices; the continuation or completion of third-party projects; regulatory environment and inability to obtain required regulatory approvals; tax laws and treatment; fluctuations in operating results; the ability of Pembina to raise sufficient capital to complete future projects and satisfy future commitments; construction delays; labour and material shortages; and certain other risks detailed from time to time in Pembina's public disclosure documents including, among other things, those detailed under the heading "Risk Factors" in Pembina's management's discussion and analysis and annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2018, which can be found at www.sedar.com and with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov and available on Pembina's website at www.pembina.com. In addition, the closing of the offering may not be completed, or may be delayed, if the conditions to the closing of the offering are not satisfied on the anticipated timeline or at all. Accordingly, there is a risk that the offering will not be completed within the anticipated time, on the terms currently proposed, or at all. The intended use of the net proceeds of the offering by Pembina may change if the board of directors of Pembina determines that it would be in the best interests of Pembina to deploy the proceeds for some other purpose and there can be no guarantee as to how or when such proceeds may be used. Accordingly, readers are cautioned that events or circumstances could cause results to differ materially from those predicted, forecasted or projected. Such forward-looking statements are expressly qualified by the above statements. Pembina does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information contained herein, except as required by applicable laws. For further information: Investor Relations, Scott Arnold, (403) 231-3156, 1-855-880-7404, e-mail: investor-relations@pembina.com, www.pembina.com Next-Generation Cinema Technology CJ 4DPLEX Transforming the Theatrical Landscape in Belarus Through Strong Expansion LAS VEGAS and MINSK, Belarus, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Belarus' Silver Screen and CJ 4DPLEX, the world's leading cinema technology company, has just signed a new deal at CinemaCon to open a total of 6 4DX and ScreenX theatres in Belarus. The announcement comes amid Silver Screen's commitment to immersive movie-going experience through innovation. Silver Screen is the number one cinema chain in Belarus. It brings the highest level of technology, comfort, design and service. It changes the common perception of the cinema and makes it more fashionable, technological and simply exciting. 4DX enhances the on-screen visuals of action-packed blockbusters, transcending the traditional cinema experience through special effects, including motion-synchronized seats, wind, fog, rain, lightning, snow, bubble, vibration, and scents. The result is one of the most innovative cinema formats in the industry, drawing fans into the action on the big screen. ScreenX is the world's first multi-projection theatre technology designed to enhance the movie-going experience. ScreenX allows the audience to go beyond the frame of the traditional movie screen, utilizing a proprietary system to expand select scenes of feature films and pre-show advertising to the left and right walls. "We are very pleased today to be signing a new deal to see 4DX and ScreenX expand significantly across the CIS region," said JongRyul Kim, CEO of CJ 4DPLEX. "This is an exciting new market and we are immensely thankful for the partnership with Silver Screen in working with us to introduce our core technologies to film-loving audiences across Belarus." "We were deeply impressed by the cinema trends in South Korea during our visit. 4DX is leading the cinema market there and shapes up its future. We're sure that cooperation with 4DX will create a powerful boost in the interest to Silver Screen. We strongly believe in this partnership and know that it is only the beginning," said Aleksei Malichuk, CEO. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/844990/CJ_4DPLEX.jpg NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of First Choice Healthcare Solutions, Inc. ("First Choice" or the "Company") (OTCMKTS: FCHS). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888-476-6529, ext. 9980. The investigation concerns whether First Choice and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices. [Click here to join a class action] On November 14, 2018, the United States Department of Justice ("DOJ") filed a criminal indictment, and on November 15, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") filed a civil action, against First Choice's then-Chief Executive Officer, President, and Board Chairman Christian Romandetti, Sr. and certain alleged co-conspirators, charging them with securities fraud in connection with the orchestration of a multi-million dollar pump-and-dump scheme. The DOJ indictment and SEC complaint allege that Romandetti and his co-conspirators, through various manipulative practices, defrauded investors in First Choice securities "by artificially controlling the price and volume of traded shares in [First Choice] through, inter alia: (a) artificially generating price movements and trading volume in the shares; and (b) material misrepresentations and omissions in their communications with victim investors about the stock of [First Choice] . . . ." Following news of the foregoing enforcement actions, First Choice's stock price fell $0.66 per share, or 65.35%, to close at $0.35 per share on November 15, 2018. The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com. CONTACT: Robert S. Willoughby Pomerantz LLP rswilloughby@pomlaw.com STOCKHOLM, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Azelio signs a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Pakistani company JD Aviation for reliable and sustainable electricity supply in Pakistan. The MOU is a first step in introducing the technology to the market in Pakistan. A market characterized by an unreliable electricity grid and good solar conditions, where long-term energy storage with cost-effective electricity production will make a big difference. Pakistan has an average of 75 power outages per month (World Bank, 2018) and is dependent on backup systems to ensure a functioning infrastructure with continuous electricity supply. JD Aviation is focused on implementing solar power solutions and energy storage in Pakistan to increase the share of renewables to the energy mix. A MOU has been signed with Azelio for the possibility of replacing parts of the expensive backup systems that cause large emissions with a sustainable and cost-effective distributed electricity baseload. The signed MOU is a start in the preparation of introducing Azelio's technology in Pakistan and build up resources for the entire customer journey, from sales to deliveries and aftermarket. "Azelio's technology enables a country like Pakistan to utilize its good solar conditions even when the sun does not shine. We are very pleased to have signed this MOU with JD Aviation, taking a first step towards a market introduction in Pakistan. We know that our technology can make a big difference in the region and we look forward to demonstrate it," says Jonas Eklind, CEO of Azelio. "Azelio's solution has shown great promise in terms of scalability and reliability for generating electricity, compared to other solar and storage technologies. For Pakistan, the technology will help to avoid costly battery systems and eliminate diesel generators. We look forward to our continued collaboration with Azelio," says Jalal Uddin Sadiq, CEO of JD Aviation. For further information, please contact Jonas Eklind - CEO Email: jonas.eklind@azelio.com Tel: +46-709-40-35-80 This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/azelio/r/azelio-signs-mou-for-reliable-and-sustainable-electricity-supply-in-pakistan,c2778394 The following files are available for download: UiPath, the leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company, is today announcing it has become a member of the American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union (AmCham EU). While being aligned to AmCham EU's priority areas (education, inclusion, sustainable development, research and innovation among others), the move has been prompted by the strategic importance of the EU market to the global operations of UiPath. In fact, more than a third of the company's employees are working for its 18 Europe-based offices. Working with other members of AmCham EU on topics such as Digital Economy, Future of Work, Education and Skills, and Gender Initiatives, UiPath will deepen its local and regional efforts to create jobs, increase automation skills, and empower people of all ages for the fully-automated workplace. As part of its mission to democratise RPA, UiPath has recently launched UiPath Academic Alliance, a global programme that will serve more than one million students and one thousand schools in the next three years. University students, educators, and also elementary and middle-school students will have access to automation solutions and teaching resources, as the company aims to make sure the young generation is competitive and will thrive in the workplace of the future. "Automation is a global phenomenon that will create ripples of change both on our jobs, and society at large. We take it at heart to be the leaders of the digital revolution, but also to be responsible for preparing the future workforce alongside local and regional governments. We are excited to join the ranks of AmCham EU who acts as a facilitator for an improved interaction between the business class and European institutions," said Tom Clancy, Senior Vice President of Global Learning at UiPath. AmCham EU speaks for American companies committed to Europe on trade, investment and competitiveness issues. It aims to ensure a growth-orientated business and investment climate in Europe. Aggregate US investment in Europe totalled more than 2 trillion in 2018, directly supports more than 4.8 million jobs in Europe, and generates billions of euros annually in income, trade and research and development. About UiPath UiPath is leading the "Automation First" era championing one robot for every person, delivering free and open training and collaboration and enabling robots to learn new skills through AI and machine learning. Led by a commitment to bring digital era skills to more than a million people, the company's enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform has already automated millions of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for business and government organizations all over the world, improving productivity, customer experience and employee job satisfaction. Recently named by Comparably as the 6th happiest place to work and recognized for having the 11th best company culture among large businesses, UiPath has become one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in history. The company is backed by over $400 million in funding from Accel, CapitalG, Credo Ventures, Earlybird's Digital East Fund, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Madrona, Meritech, Seedcamp and Sequoia. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005091/en/ Contacts: Anna Ghica UiPath anna.ghica@uipath.com +40 722 296 531 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - CannaOne Technologies (CSE: CNNA) (FSE: 3CT) ("CannaOne" or the "Company") wishes to announce that it has entered into a formal agreement with Real Health Science ("Real Health"), to create, facilitate and operate an online CBD product purchase and delivery marketplace in the United States. The agreement was signed on March 18, 2019, with a contract term of 48 months and an option to renew for an additional 60 months at the conclusion of the initial period. The expected target date for the marketplace to be live and ready to conduct business is August 2019. CannaOne CEO Solomon Riby-Williams stated, "Real Health has incredibly strong working relationships in place with high-quality suppliers and purveyors of CBD solutions in the US. The existing Real Health infrastructure and market positioning in the CBD market, combined with our unique and proprietary cannabis targeted technology solution offers our joint initiative a sound and superior foundation and a reasonable basis to perceive the potential it holds to be an economically lucrative long-term opportunity for our Company." "Recent third-party reports have offered evidence that that the overall CBD market in the United States could likely eclipse $16 Billion annually by the year 2025. We feel the timing of the launch of our marketplace with Real Health could not be any better and with the recent passing of the Farm Bill provides us a legitimate foothold to potentially expand our business throughout the 50 states in the union" added Riby-Williams. The USA CBD Market: February 25, 2019 Nearly 7 percent of Americans are already using cannabidiol (CBD), placing the potential market opportunity for the much-hyped cannabis compound at $16 billion by 2025, according to a new analysis by Cowen & Co. Cowen's January 2019 consumer survey of approximately 2,500 adults found 6.9 percent of respondents use CBD as a supplement. "This initial response piqued our interest considerably, as it was much higher than we would have suspected," and compared to 4.2 percent who reported use of Juul Labs Inc.'s e-cigarette devices and 19.6 percent who consider themselves current tobacco users, analyst Vivien Azer said in a note. Based on this surprising level of consumer awareness, Cowen "conservatively" sees CBD use growing to 10 percent of U.S. adults or 25 million consumers by 2025, implying a $16 billion market opportunity, Azer said. The Cowen survey found that CBD use is highest among consumers aged 18 to 34. Tinctures (liquid extracts) accounted for the biggest chunk of the market at 44 percent, followed by topicals at 26 percent, capsules at 22 percent and beverages at 19 percent. About Real Health Science Real Health is a California based company with a focus towards delivering the highest quality CBD products to its customer base covering the USA mass market in the most timely and professional services manner possible. In order to accomplish this, Real Health has established working relationships with superior providers in each vertical within the industry; U.S.A. cannabis genetics businesses, U.S.A. cannabis terpene extractors and suppliers, efficient and cost-effective hemp CBD extraction and purification labs in the USA, cGMP manufacturers of finished products, highest rated cannabis testing and certification labs & supremely effective drop shipping and logistics providers. About CannaOne Technologies CannaOne has developed Bloomkit, the first product in the Bloom Product Suite; a turnkey enterprise software solution that can be utilized by any B-to-C cannabis company. Inherent functionalities ensure its users the highest levels of on-going customer satisfaction while the adaptability of Bloomkit, gives clients the ability to operate and satisfy regulatory environments of any governing body around the World, truly affording CannaOne the opportunity to serve an overall base of global clientele with a software suite that sits at the forefront of the industry. The Bloom Product Suite is representative of complete data driven and design focused software solutions that contain diverse system architectures and provide intelligent, machine learning that will give clients detailed industry business insights and ultimately lead to the creation and management of predictive content and product recommendation engines. For further information, please contact: Solomon Riby-Williams Chief Executive Officer solomon@bloomkit.co 604 - 559 - 8893 NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATIONS SERVICES PROVIDERS HAVE REVIEWED OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: Certain information contained herein may constitute "forward-looking information" under Canadian securities legislation. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as, "will be", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "will" occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the Company's estimates and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of CannaOne to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, including capital expenditures and other costs. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. CannaOne will not update any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information that are incorporated by reference herein, except as required by applicable securities laws. NOT FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES OR THROUGH U.S.A. NEWSWIRES To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43832 The $91 billion figure Trump has repeatedly claimed actually reflects an estimate of how much funding the island could receive over time and is more than twice as much as federal agencies have obligated or approved thus far, according to the Post. As many pointed out on Twitter, it was the same amount of damage originally attributed to Hurricane Maria, but again, is not what has actually been promised in relief. VANCOUVER, BC and SAN CARLOS, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / (OTCQB: FOGCF; CSE: FOG; FRA: MUU3) FogChain Corp.("FogChain" or the "Company") is excited to announce a major new release update with Trident's rapid application development suite, RadJav. Trident is a unified cross-platform application development, testing and monitoring services solution. RadJav, an integral part of the Trident platform, is the rapid application development suite which enables developers to quickly and cost-effectively create new applications using a single code-base while being natively deployed across desktops, tablets, mobile devices and the web. RadJav is fully integrated with all major operating systems such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. Trident's RadJav just released its latest version (version 0.30.0) and now moves from the Alpha phase into the Beta phase. Highlights of this latest release include: Create native applications using a single codebase across all mainstream desktop, tablet and mobile operating systems Fully integrated with FogChain's Trident platform for development, testing and monitoring Cryptographic library included for the development of secure apps Visual Studio code is integrated and will be fully bundled for easy setup and deployment of applications Bundled batch file scripts to easily and quickly create iOS and Android apps Easily create databases using RocksDB, an embeddable key-value store for fast storage Full documentation, templates, and examples provided in our GitHub repository FogChain's CEO, James Cerna, commented, "RadJav's latest release significantly contributes to the efficiency and effectiveness we achieve in the developing applications for our clients. This elevates our Trident platform to an entirely new level as an end-to-end development, testing and monitoring solution for enterprises and development firms, and enables us to deliver one of the most compelling and cost-effective technologies in the marketplace. We're very grateful to our talented development team for its efforts to achieve this major milestone and for its vision to create such an incredible piece of software." Nathanael Coonrod, VP of Engineering for FogChain and the inventor of RadJav, stated, "We've been looking forward to this day for a long time and are very excited about releasing our full Beta version of RadJav. With the recent integrations of Android, Visual Studio Code and Chrome Developer Tools, we believe that developers and enterprises alike can achieve significantly greater yield out of their development efforts with added simplicity, lower cost and less time to market." The new release is available on FogChain's website (https://www.fogchaininc.com/download.html), as well as through our main software and documentation repository at GitHub (https://github.com/FogChainInc/RadJav/releases). About FogChain Corp. FogChain (OTCQB: FOGCF; CSE: FOG) is a fully integrated, end-to-end software development life cycle (SDLC) and quality assurance solutions provider. Combined with a decentralized Fog (edge network) and high-performance application development platform, FogChain's suite of services and technology provides application development at scale with greater speed, greater efficiency and at a lower cost. With the recent explosive demand for more edge computing and security within the Micro-Service, IoT, mobile data and driverless vehicle space, FogChain's Build-Once-Deploy-Everywhere software architecture provides developers with a suite of tools and resources that bridges devices and operating systems, and the ability to build and launch exciting new applications in a unified environment. Learn more at www.FogChainInc.com Contact: Elizabeth Cowell | Partner Newgate Communications elisabeth.cowell@newgatecomms.com D +44 (0)20 3757 6880 M +44 (0)7900 248 213 Sky Light City Tower 50 Basinghall Street London EC2V 5DE Newgatecomms.com Investor Relations info@fogchaininc.com (415) 745-8650 FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. In this news release, forward-looking statements relate, among other things, to: the terms and conditions of the Transaction; use of funds; and the business and operations of the Company. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; and the delay or failure to receive board, shareholder or regulatory approvals. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law. Source: FogChain Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540749/FogChains-RadJav-Rapid-Application-Development-Platform-Pushes-Out-Major-New-Release-and-Enters-Beta Companies are partners in a new initiative to drive open industrial IoT development and help grow a community to build future Industry 4.0 solutions - Technology framework and open community to share smart factory solutions across the automotive and manufacturing sectors to significantly accelerate future industrial IoT developments. - Utilizing industrial use cases and sample code, community members and partners will have the capability to develop their own services and solutions. - Built on the Microsoft Azure industrial IoT cloud platform, the Open Manufacturing Platform is intended to provide a reference architecture with open source components based on open industrial standards and an open data model. - By the end of 2019, the goal is to have an initial set of four to six partners in place and a minimum of 15 use cases rolled out into select production environments. - Manufacturers and suppliers, including companies from outside the automotive industry, will be encouraged to join the community. HANNOVER, Germany, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, at Hannover Messe, Microsoft Corp. and the BMW Group announced a new community initiative to enable faster, more cost-effective innovation in the manufacturing sector. In manufacturing today, production and profitability can be hindered by complex, proprietary systems that create data silos and slow productivity. The Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) is designed to break down these barriers through the creation of an open technology framework and cross-industry community. The initiative is expected to support the development of smart factory solutions that will be shared by OMP participants across the automotive and broader manufacturing sectors. The goal is to significantly accelerate future industrial IoT developments, shorten time to value and drive production efficiencies while addressing common industrial challenges. Built on the Microsoft Azure industrial IoT cloud platform, the OMP is intended to provide community members with a reference architecture with open source components based on open industrial standards and an open data model. In addition to facilitating collaboration, this platform approach is designed to unlock and standardize data models that enable analytics and machine learning scenarios - data that has traditionally been managed in proprietary systems. Utilizing industrial use cases and sample code, community members and other partners will have the capability to develop their own services and solutions while maintaining control over their data. "Microsoft is joining forces with the BMW Group to transform digital production efficiency across the industry," said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Microsoft Cloud + AI Group. "Our commitment to building an open community will create new opportunities for collaboration across the entire manufacturing value chain." With currently over 3,000 machines, robots and autonomous transport systems connected with the BMW Group IoT platform, which is built on Microsoft Azure's cloud, IoT and AI capabilities, the BMW Group plans to contribute relevant initial use cases to the OMP community. One example is the company's use of their IoT platform for the second generation of its autonomous transport systems in the BMW Group plant in Regensburg, Germany, one of 30 BMW Group production and assembly sites worldwide. This use case has enabled the BMW Group to greatly simplify its logistics processes via central coordination of the transport system, creating greater logistics efficiency. In the future, this and other use cases-such as digital feedback loops, digital supply chain management and predictive maintenance-will be made available and, in fact, developed further within the OMP community. "Mastering the complex task of producing individualized premium products requires innovative IT and software solutions," said Oliver Zipse, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, Production. "The interconnection of production sites and systems as well as the secure integration of partners and suppliers are particularly important. We have been relying on the cloud since 2016 and are consistently developing new approaches. With the Open Manufacturing Platform as the next step, we want to make our solutions available to other companies and jointly leverage potential in order to secure our strong position in the market in the long term." The OMP is the next evolution in the BMW Group's and Microsoft's long-standing technology partnership and mutual commitment to innovation and creating industry-wide opportunities for collective success. Through the OMP, community members will have greater opportunities to unlock the potential of their data, allowing them to build and integrate industrial solutions more quickly and securely and, in turn, benefit from contributing to and learning from other organizations. The OMP will be designed to address common industrial challenges such as machine connectivity and on-premises systems integration. This will facilitate the reuse of software solutions among OEMs, suppliers and other partners, significantly reducing implementation costs. For example, an ROS-based robotics standard for autonomous transport systems for production and logistics will be contributed to the OMP for everyone to use. The OMP will be compatible with the existing Industry 4.0 reference architecture, leveraging the industrial interoperability standard OPC UA. "This is very good news for the manufacturing industry," said Stefan Hoppe, president and CEO of the OPC Foundation. "The use of open international industry standards such as OPC UA in the OMP community enables manufacturers, machine builders and suppliers to integrate their existing equipment and systems efficiently and securely. For a long time, companies have promoted proprietary, closed ecosystems - the OMP commitment to open development will shape tomorrow's manufacturing." The underlying platform will continue to evolve over time, along with manufacturing requirements, to incorporate new innovations including areas of analytics, artificial intelligence and digital feedback loops. The broader OMP community is being formed now, with recruitment of additional partners underway. The OMP Advisory Board is expected to be in operation with an initial set of four to six partners in place and a minimum of 15 use cases rolled out into select production environments by the end of 2019. The two initial partners, Microsoft and the BMW Group, encourage other manufacturers and suppliers, including companies from outside the automotive industry, to join the community. About the BMW Group With its four brands BMW, MINI, Rolls-Royce and BMW Motorrad, the BMW Group is the world's leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles and also provides premium financial and mobility services. The BMW Group production network comprises 30 production and assembly facilities in 14 countries; the company has a global sales network in more than 140 countries. In 2018, the BMW Group sold over 2,490,000 passenger vehicles and more than 165,000 motorcycles worldwide. The profit before tax in the financial year 2018 was 9.815 billion on revenues amounting to 97.480 billion. As of 31 December 2018, the BMW Group had a workforce of 134,682 employees. The success of the BMW Group has always been based on long-term thinking and responsible action. The company has therefore established ecological and social sustainability throughout the value chain, comprehensive product responsibility and a clear commitment to conserving resources as an integral part of its strategy. www.bmwgroup.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BMWGroup Twitter: http://twitter.com/BMWGroup YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/BMWGroupView Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bmwgroup LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bmw About Microsoft Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/24227/microsoft_corp_logo226_9217jpg.jpg This Report provides a consolidated overview of the payments to governments made by Royal Dutch Shell plc and its subsidiary undertakings (hereinafter refer to as "Shell") for the year 2018 as required under the UK's Report on Payments to Governments Regulations 2014 (as amended in December 2015). These UK Regulations enact domestic rules in line with Directive 2013/34/EU (the EU Accounting Directive (2013)) and apply to large UK incorporated companies like Shell that are involved in the exploration, prospection, discovery, development and extraction of minerals, oil, natural gas deposits or other materials. This Report is also filed with the National Storage Mechanism ( http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/nsm ) intended to satisfy the requirements of the Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules of the Financial Conduct Authority in the United Kingdom This Report is available for download from www.shell.com/payments Basis for Preparation - Report on Payments to Governments for the year 2018 Legislation This Report is prepared in accordance with The Reports on Payments to Governments Regulations 2014 as enacted in the UK in December 2014 and as amended in December 2015. Reporting entities This Report includes payments to governments made by Royal Dutch Shell plc and its subsidiary undertakings (Shell). Payments made by entities over which Shell has joint control are excluded from this Report. Activities Payments made by Shell to governments arising from activities involving the exploration, prospection, discovery, development and extraction of minerals, oil and natural gas deposits or other materials (extractive activities) are disclosed in this Report. It excludes payments related to refining, natural gas liquefaction or gas-to-liquids activities. For a fully integrated project, which does not have an interim contractual cut off point where a value can be attached or ascribed separately to the extractive activities and to other processing activities, payments to governments will not be artificially split but disclosed in full. Government Government includes any national, regional or local authority of a country, and includes a department, agency or entity that is a subsidiary of a government, which includes a national oil company. Project Payments are reported at project level except that payments that are not attributable to a specific project are reported at entity level. Project is defined as operational activities which are governed by a single contract, licence, lease, concession or similar legal agreement, and form the basis for payment liabilities with a government. If such agreements are substantially interconnected, those agreements are to be treated as a single project. "Substantially interconnected" means forming a set of operationally and geographically integrated contracts, licences, leases or concessions or related agreements with substantially similar terms that are signed with a government giving rise to payment liabilities. Such agreements can be governed by a single contract, joint venture, production sharing agreement, or other overarching legal agreement. Indicators of integration include, but are not limited to, geographic proximity, the use of shared infrastructure and common operational management. Payment The information is reported under the following payment types. Production entitlements These are the host government's share of production in the reporting period derived from projects operated by Shell. This includes the government's share as a sovereign entity or through its participation as an equity or interest holder in projects within its sovereign jurisdiction (home country). Production entitlements arising from activities or interests outside of its home country are excluded. In certain contractual arrangement, typically a production sharing contract, a government through its participation interest may contribute funding of capital and operating expenditure to projects, from which it derives production entitlement to cover such funding (cost recovery). Such cost recovery production entitlement is included. In situations where a government settles Shell's income tax obligation on behalf of Shell by utilising its share of production entitlements (typically under a tax-paid concession), such amount will be deducted from the reported production entitlement. Taxes These are taxes paid by Shell on its income, profits or production (which include resource severance tax, and petroleum resource rent tax), including those settled by a government on behalf of Shell under a tax-paid concession. Payments are reported net of refunds. Consumption taxes, personal income taxes, sales taxes, property and environmental taxes are excluded. Royalties These are payments for the rights to extract oil and gas resources, typically at set percentage of revenue less any deductions that may be taken. Dividends These are dividend payments other than dividends paid to a government as an ordinary shareholder of an entity unless paid in lieu of production entitlements or royalties. For the year ended December 31, 2018, there were no reportable dividend payments to a government. Bonuses These are payments for Bonuses. These are usually paid upon signing an agreement or a contract, or when a commercial discovery is declared, or production has commenced or reached a milestone. License fees, rental fees, entry fees and other considerations for licenses and/or concessions These are fees and other sums paid as consideration for acquiring a licence for gaining access to an area where extractive activities are performed. Administrative government fees that are not specifically related to the extractive sector, or to access to extractive resources, are excluded. Also excluded are payments made in return for services provided by a government. Infrastructure improvements These are payments which relate to the construction of infrastructure (road, bridge or rail) not substantially dedicated for the use of extractive activities. Payments which are of a social investment in nature, for example building of a school or hospital, are excluded. OTHER Operatorship When Shell makes a payment directly to a government arising from a project, regardless of whether Shell is the operator, the full amount paid is disclosed even where Shell as the operator is proportionally reimbursed by its non-operating venture partners through a partner billing process (cash-call). When a national oil company is the operator of a project to whom Shell makes a reportable payment, which is distinguishable in the cash-call, it is included in this Report. Cash and in-kind payments Payments are reported on cash basis. In-kind payments are converted to an equivalent cash value based on the most appropriate and relevant valuation method for each payment, which can be at cost or market value or such value as stated in the contract. In-kind payments are reported in both volumes and the equivalent cash value. Materiality Level For each payment type, total payments below 86,000 to a government are excluded from this Report. Exchange Rate Payments made in currencies other than US Dollars are translated for this Report based on the foreign exchange rate at the relevant quarterly average rate. Report on Payments to Governments[1] Government Reports (in USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total Countries EUROPE Albania - - - 1,500,000 - - 1,500,000 Bulgaria - - - - 163,914 - 163,914 Denmark - 539,750,148 - - - - 539,750,148 Germany - -10,132,980 - - - - -10,132,980 Ireland - - - - 769,208 - 769,208 Italy - 14,975,703 55,076,302 - - - 70,052,005 Norway 3,165,774,735 1,040,993,863 - - 4,195,378 - 4,210,963,976 United Kingdom - -147,028,177 - - 6,174,498 - -140,853,679 ASIA Brunei Darussalam - 137,685 - - 1,443,157 - 1,580,842 China 1,256,628 - - - - - 1,256,628 India 267,211,397 22,902,094 38,529,764 - - - 328,643,256 Iraq 2,214,541,672 11,900,234 - - - - 2,226,441,906 Kazakhstan - 223,985,224 - - - - 223,985,224 Malaysia 3,525,878,067 393,359,945 815,886,371 - 15,000,127 - 4,750,124,510 Oman - 3,214,036,496 - - - - 3,214,036,496 Philippines 556,499,261 121,491,599 - - - - 677,990,860 Qatar 662,736,297 745,840,777 - - 19,623,657 - 1,428,200,731 Thailand - 180,305,494 78,273,392 - - - 258,578,885 OCEANIA Australia - 110,809,798 151,674,812 - 13,907,835 647,950 277,040,395 New Zealand - 49,778,934 43,762,900 - - - 93,541,833 AFRICA Egypt - 127,475,156 - - - - 127,475,156 Gabon - - - - 121,307 - 121,307 Mauritania - - - 75,000,000 - - 75,000,000 Nigeria 3,776,418,858 1,286,152,191 358,161,091 - 976,593,706 - 6,397,325,844 Tanzania - - - - 727,600 - 727,600 Tunisia - 96,161,987 17,906,473 - - - 114,068,460 NORTH AMERICA Canada - 7,049,831 91,355,941 - 11,677,763 - 110,083,535 Mexico - - - 343,524,306 20,565,718 - 364,090,025 United States - 117,473,285 826,330,922 - 42,994,471 - 986,798,677 SOUTH AMERICA Argentina - - 15,293,712 3,057,004 762,487 - 19,113,203 Bolivia - - - - 1,590,502 - 1,590,502 Brazil 19,546,098 - 814,340,789 479,885,380 1,580,218,015 - 2,893,990,283 Colombia - - - - 229,091 - 229,091 Trinidad and Tobago 84,542,265 21,603,165 3,773,443 - 8,876,393 - 118,795,265 Total 14,274,405,278 8,169,022,452 3,310,365,912 902,966,690 2,705,634,826 647,950 29,363,043,107 Albania GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS AGJENCIA KOMETARE E BURIMEVE - - - 1,500,000 - - 1,500,000 Total - - - 1,500,000 - - 1,500,000 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS EXPLORATION PHASE ONSHORE BLOCK 2&3 ALBANIA - - - 1,500,000 - - 1,500,000 Total - - - 1,500,000 - - 1,500,000 Bulgaria GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS MINISTRY OF ENERGY OF THE REPUBLIC OF BULGARIA - - - - 163,914 - 163,914 Total - - - - 163,914 - 163,914 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS SILISTAR - - - - 163,914 - 163,914 Total - - - - 163,914 - 163,914 Denmark GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS TAX AUTHORITIES - 523,790,322 - - - - 523,790,322 DANISH ENERGY AGENCY - 15,959,826 - - - - 15,959,826 Total - 539,750,148 - - - - 539,750,148 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SHELL OLIE - OG GASUDVINDING DANMARK B.V. - 539,750,148 - - - - 539,750,148 Total - 539,750,148 - - - - 539,750,148 GERMANY GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS TAX AUTHORITIES HAMBURG - -10,132,980 - - - - -10,132,980 Total - -10,132,980 - - - - -10,132,980 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT DEUTSCHE SHELL HOLDING GmbH - -10,132,980 - - - - -10,132,980 Total - -10,132,980 - - - - -10,132,980 IRELAND GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS COMMISSION FOR ENERGY REGULATION - - - - 618,473 - 618,473 DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATIONS - - - - 150,735 - 150,735 Total - - - - 769,208 - 769,208 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS CORRIB PROJECT - - - - 769,208 - 769,208 Total - - - - 769,208 - 769,208 Italy GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS BASILICATA REGION (VDA) - - 33,777,845 - - - 33,777,845 CALVELLO MUNICIPALITY - - 883,492 - - - 883,492 GRUMENTO NOVA MUNICIPALITY - - 504,852 - - - 504,852 MARSICO NUOVO MUNICIPALITY - - 378,639 - - - 378,639 VIGGIANO MUNICIPALITY - - 3,502,413 - - - 3,502,413 TESSORERIA PROVINICIALE DELLO STATO - 14,975,703 15,776,635 - - - 30,752,338 MARSICOVETERE MUNICIPALITY - - 126,213 - - - 126,213 MONTEMURRO MUNICIPALITY - - 126,213 - - - 126,213 Total - 14,975,703 55,076,302 - - - 70,052,005 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS ITALY UPSTREAM ASSET - - 55,076,302 - - - 55,076,302 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SHELL ITALIA E&P SpA - 14,975,703 - - - - 14,975,703 Total - 14,975,703 55,076,302 - - - 70,052,005 Norway GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS DIREKTORATET FOR SAMFUNNSSIKKERHET - - - - 387,231 - 387,231 OLJEDIREKTORATET - - - - 3,808,148 - 3,808,148 PETORO AS 1,964,580,025[A] - - - - - 1,964,580,025 SKATTE OG AVGIFTSREGNSKAP - 1,038,305,637 - - - - 1,038,305,637 SKATTEOPPKREVEREN I SOLA - 2,688,227 - - - - 2,688,227 EQUINOR ASA 1,201,194,710[B] - - - - - 1,201,194,710 Total 3,165,774,735 1,040,993,863 - - 4,195,378 - 4,210,963,976 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS NORWAY EXPLORATION PROJECTS - - - - 1,541,681 - 1,541,681 ORMEN LANGE AND DRAUGEN 3,165,774,735[C] - - - 2,234,675 - 3,168,009,410 GAUPE - - - - 280,341 - 280,341 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT A/S NORSKE SHELL - 1,040,993,863 - - 138,681 - 1,041,132,545 Total 3,165,774,735 1,040,993,863 - - 4,195,378 - 4,210,963,976 [A] Includes payment in kind of $1,964,580,025 for 39,866 KBOE valued at market price. [B] Includes payment in kind of $1,201,194,710 for 25,410 KBOE valued at market price. [C] Includes payment in kind of $3,165,774,735 for 65,276 KBOE valued at market price. United Kingdom GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS OIL AND GAS AUTHORITY - - - - 6,174,498 - 6,174,498 HM REVENUE AND CUSTOMS - -147,028,177 - - - - -147,028,177 Total - -147,028,177 - - 6,174,498 - -140,853,679 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS BRENT AND OTHER NORTHERN NORTH SEA PROJECTS - -92,850,595 - - 394,937 - -92,455,658 ONEGAS WEST - - - - 1,219,478 - 1,219,478 UK EXPLORATIONS PROJECTS - - - - 491,891 - 491,891 UK OFFSHORE NON OPERATED - - - - 281,034 - 281,034 UK OFFSHORE OPERATED - - - - 563,938 - 563,938 WEST OF SHETLAND NON OPERATED - - - - 197,836 - 197,836 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT BG GLOBAL ENERGY LIMITED - 14,385,733 - - - - 14,385,733 BG INTERNATIONAL LIMITED - 49,616,600 - - - - 49,616,600 SHELL U.K. LIMITED - -118,179,915 - - 3,025,384 - -115,154,531 Total - -147,028,177 - - 6,174,498 - -140,853,679 Brunei Darussalam GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS GOVERNMENT OF BRUNEI DARUSSALAM - 137,685 - - 1,443,157 - 1,580,842 Total - 137,685 - - 1,443,157 - 1,580,842 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS BRUNEI OFFSHORE BLOCKS - - - - 1,443,157 - 1,443,157 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SHELL DEEPWATER BORNEO LIMITED - 137,685 - - - - 137,685 Total - 137,685 - - 1,443,157 - 1,580,842 China GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS CHINA NATIONAL PETROLEUM CORPORATION 1,256,628[A] - - - - - 1,256,628 Total 1,256,628 - - - - - 1,256,628 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS CHANGBEI 1,256,628[B] - - - - - 1,256,628 Total 1,256,628 - - - - - 1,256,628 [A] Includes payment in kind of $1,256,628 for 41 KBOE valued at government selling price. [B] Includes payment in kind of $1,256,628 for 41 KBOE valued at government selling price. INDIA GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS CENTRAL BOARD OF EXCISE AND CUSTOMS - - 6,896,448 - - - 6,896,448 INCOME TAX DEPARTMENT - 22,902,094 - - - - 22,902,094 OIL AND NATURAL GAS CORPORATION LTD. 257,121,118[A] - - - - - 257,121,118 PAY AND ACCOUNTS OFFICER, MINISTRY OF PETROLEUM AND NATURAL GAS 10,090,279 - 31,633,316 - - - 41,723,595 Total 267,211,397 22,902,094 38,529,764 - - - 328,643,256 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS PANNA MUKTA 267,211,397[B] - 38,529,764 - - - 305,741,162 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT BG EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION INDIA LIMITED - 22,902,094 - - - - 22,902,094 Total 267,211,397 22,902,094 38,529,764 - - - 328,643,256 [A] Includes payment in kind of $257,121,118 for 5,423 KBOE valued at market price. [B] Includes payment in kind of $257,121,118 for 5,423 KBOE valued at market price. Iraq GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS BASRA OIL COMPANY 2,214,541,672[A] - - - - - 2,214,541,672 GENERAL COMMISSION FOR TAXES - LARGE TAX PAYERS DEPARTMENT BAGHDAD - 11,900,234 - - - - 11,900,234 Total 2,214,541,672 11,900,234 - - - - 2,226,441,906 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS MAJNOON 2,214,541,672[B] 11,900,234 - - - - 2,226,441,906 Total 2,214,541,672 11,900,234 - - - - 2,226,441,906 [A] Includes payment in kind of $2,214,541,672 for 34,127 KBOE valued at market price. [B] Includes payment in kind of $2,214,541,672 for 34,127 KBOE valued at market price. Kazakhstan GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS WEST KAZAKHSTAN TAX COMMITTEE - 223,985,224 - - - - 223,985,224 Total - 223,985,224 - - - - 223,985,224 Show PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS KARACHAGANAK - 223,985,224 - - - - 223,985,224 Total - 223,985,224 - - - - 223,985,224 Malaysia GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS KETUA PENGARAH HASIL DALAM NEGERI - 388,439,384 - - - - 388,439,384 PETROLIAM NASIONAL BERHAD 1,960,280,714[A] - 50,663,874 - 15,000,127 - 2,025,944,716 PETRONAS CARIGALI SDN BHD (KL) 1,565,597,353[B] 4,920,561 - - - - 1,570,517,914 MALAYSIA FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENT - - 765,222,496[C] - - - 765,222,496 Total 3,525,878,067 393,359,945 815,886,371 - 15,000,127 - 4,750,124,510 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS SABAH GAS - NOT OPERATED - 6,753,311 1,251,854 - - - 8,005,165 SABAH INBOARD AND DEEPWATER OIL 1,775,615,976[D] 282,224,069 490,767,073[E] - - - 2,548,607,117 SARAWAK OIL AND GAS 1,750,262,092[F] 96,854,627 323,867,444[G] - 15,000,127 - 2,185,984,290 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SABAH SHELL PETROLEUM COMPANY LIMITED - 1,027,841 - - - - 1,027,841 SARAWAK SHELL BERHAD - 1,417,620 - - - - 1,417,620 SHELL ENERGY ASIA LIMITED - 1,099,277 - - - - 1,099,277 SHELL OIL & GAS (MALAYSIA) LLC - 515,966 - - - - 515,966 SHELL SABAH SELATAN SDN. BHD. - 3,467,234 - - - - 3,467,234 Total 3,525,878,067 393,359,945 815,886,371 - 15,000,127 - 4,750,124,510 [A] Includes payment in kind of $738,807,066 for 43,624 KBOE valued at fixed price and $1,221,473,648 for 16,509 KBOE valued at market price. [B] Includes payment in kind of $558,127,655 for 33,673 KBOE valued at fixed price and $1,007,469,698 for 13,379 KBOE valued at market price. [C] Includes payment in kind of $216,851,316 for 13,089 KBOE valued at fixed price and $548,371,180 for 7,284 KBOE valued at market price. [D] Includes payment in kind of $1,775,615,976 for 23,253 KBOE valued at market price. [E] Includes payment in kind of $478,052,374 for 6,258 KBOE valued at market price. [F] Includes payment in kind of $1,296,934,721 for 77,297 KBOE valued at fixed price and $453,327,371 for 6,635 KBOE valued at market price. [G] Includes payment in kind of $216,851,316 for 13,089 KBOE valued at fixed price and $70,318,806 for 1,026KBOE valued at market price. Oman GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS OMAN - MINISTRY OF FINANCE - 3,214,036,496[A] - - - - 3,214,036,496 Total - 3,214,036,496 - - - - 3,214,036,496 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS BLOCK 6 CONCESSION - 3,206,523,313 - - - - 3,206,523,313 MUKHAIZNA PSC - 7,513,183[B] - - - - 7,513,183 Total - 3,214,036,496 - - - - 3,214,036,496 [A] Includes payment in kind of $7,513,183 for 129 KBOE valued at government selling price. [B] Includes payment in kind of $7,513,183 for 129 KBOE valued at government selling price. Philippines GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS BUREAU OF INTERNAL REVENUE - 121,491,599 - - - - 121,491,599 DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY 466,024,339 - - - - - 466,024,339 PNOC EXPLORATION CORPORATION 90,474,922 - - - - - 90,474,922 Total 556,499,261 121,491,599 - - - - 677,990,860 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS SC 38 MALAMPAYA GAS 556,499,261 121,491,599 - - - - 677,990,860 Total 556,499,261 121,491,599 - - - - 677,990,860 Qatar GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS QATAR PETROLEUM 662,736,297 745,840,777 - - - - 1,408,577,074 RAS LAFFAN INDUSTRIAL CITY - - - - 19,623,657 - 19,623,657 Total 662,736,297 745,840,777 - - 19,623,657 - 1,428,200,731 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS PEARL GTL 662,736,297 745,840,777 - - 19,623,657 - 1,428,200,731 Total 662,736,297 745,840,777 - - 19,623,657 - 1,428,200,731 THAILAND GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS DEPARTMENT OF MINERAL FUELS - - 52,855,905 - - - 52,855,905 REVENUE DEPARTMENT - 180,305,494 - - - - 180,305,494 MINISTRY OF ENERGY - - 25,417,487 - - - 25,417,487 Total - 180,305,494 78,273,392 - - - 258,578,885 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS BONGKOT - 180,305,494 78,273,392 - - - 258,578,885 Total - 180,305,494 78,273,392 - - - 258,578,885 AUSTRALIA GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS AUSTRALIAN TAXATION OFFICE - 110,809,798 - - - - 110,809,798 BANANA SHIRE COUNCIL - - - - 128,492 - 128,492 DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRY - - 143,371,913 - - - 143,371,913 OFFICE OF STATE REVENUE - - 8,302,899 - - - 8,302,899 WESTERN DOWNS REGIONAL COUNCIL - - - - 11,398,922 647,950 12,046,872 DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND MINES - - - - 1,624,554 - 1,624,554 DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENT AND SCIENCE - - - - 755,867 - 755,867 Total - 110,809,798 151,674,812 - 13,907,835 647,950 277,040,395 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS NORTH WEST SHELF - - 143,371,913 - - - 143,371,913 QGC PROJECT - - 8,302,899 - 13,907,835 647,950 22,858,683 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SHELL AUSTRALIA PTY LTD - 1,485,918 - - - - 1,485,918 SHELL ENERGY HOLDINGS AUSTRALIA LIMITED - 109,323,881 - - - - 109,323,881 Total - 110,809,798 151,674,812 - 13,907,835 647,950 277,040,395 New Zealand GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS INLAND REVENUE DEPARTMENT - 49,778,934 - - - - 49,778,934 MINISTRY OF BUSINESS, INNOVATION AND EMPLOYMENT - - 43,762,900 - - - 43,762,900 Total - 49,778,934 43,762,900 - - - 93,541,833 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS MAUI - - 4,410,917 - - - 4,410,917 POHOKURA - - 39,351,983 - - - 39,351,983 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SHELL NEW ZEALAND (2011) LIMITED - 49,250,876 - - - - 49,250,876 ENERGY FINANCE NZ LIMITED - 528,057 - - - - 528,057 Total - 49,778,934 43,762,900 - - - 93,541,833 Egypt GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS EGYPTIAN GENERAL PETROLEUM CORPORATION - 127,475,156 - - - - 127,475,156 Total - 127,475,156 - - - - 127,475,156 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS BADR EL-DIN (BED) - 63,545,505 - - - - 63,545,505 NORTH EAST ABU GHARADIG (NEAG) - 22,711,331 - - - - 22,711,331 OBAIYED - 38,032,990 - - - - 38,032,990 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SHELL EGYPT N.V. - 3,185,331 - - - - 3,185,331 Total - 127,475,156 - - - - 127,475,156 Gabon GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS TRESOR PUBLIC DU GABON - - - - 121,307 - 121,307 Total - - - - 121,307 - 121,307 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS GABON EXPLORATION - - - - 121,307 - 121,307 Total - - - - 121,307 - 121,307 Mauritania GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS MINISTRY OF PETROLEUM ENERGY AND MINES - - - 75,000,000 - - 75,000,000 Total - - - 75,000,000 - - 75,000,000 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SHELL EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION MAURITANIA (C19) B.V. - - - 30,000,000 - - 30,000,000 SHELL EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION MAURITANIA (C10) B.V. - - - 45,000,000 - - 45,000,000 Total - - - 75,000,000 - - 75,000,000 Nigeria GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS NIGER DELTA DEVELOPMENT COMMISSION - - - - 81,531,381 - 81,531,381 NIGERIAN NATIONAL PETROLEUM CORPORATION 3,776,418,858[A] - - - - - 3,776,418,858 DEPARTMENT OF PETROLEUM RESOURCES - - 358,161,091[B] - 895,062,325 - 1,253,223,416 FEDERAL INLAND REVENUE SERVICE - 1,286,152,191[C] - - - - 1,286,152,191 Total 3,776,418,858 1,286,152,191 358,161,091 - 976,593,706 - 6,397,325,844 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS PSC 1993 (OPL209) - 294,789,470[D] - - - - 294,789,470 PSC 1993 (OPL212/OML118, OPL219/OML135) 759,199,810[E] 416,091,020[F] 41,742,440[G] - - - 1,217,033,270 SPDC EAST 1,809,700,722[H] - - - - - 1,809,700,722 SPDC SHALLOW WATER 368,559,074[I] - - -- - -- 368,559,074 SPDC WEST 838,959,252[J] - - - - - 838,959,252 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT THE SHELL PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENT COMPANY OF NIGERIA LIMITED - 575,271,701 316,418,651 - 976,593,706 - 1,868,284,057 Total 3,776,418,858 1,286,152,191 358,161,091 - 976,593,706 - 6,397,325,844 [A] Includes payment in kind of $3,776,418,858 for 104,014 KBOE valued at market price. [B] Includes payment in kind of $41,742,440 for 581 KBOE valued at market price. [C] Includes payment in kind of $710,880,490 for 9,966 KBOE valued at market price. [D] Includes payment in kind of $294,789,470 for 4,104KBOE valued at market price. [E] Includes payment in kind of $759,199,810 for 10,419 KBOE valued at market price. [F] Includes payment in kind of $416,091,020 for 5,862 KBOE valued at market price. [G] Includes payment in kind of $41,742,440 for 581 KBOE valued at market price. [H] Includes payment in kind of $1,809,700,722 for 76,662 KBOE valued at market price. [I] Includes payment in kind of $368,559,074 for 5,260 KBOE valued at market price. [J] Includes payment in kind of $838,959,252 for 11,673 KBOE valued at market price. Tunisia GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS ENTERPRISE TUNISIENNE D'ACTIVITES PETROLIERES - - 6,330,394[A] - - - 6,330,394 MONSIEUR LE RECEVEUR DES FINANCES DU LAC - 96,161,987 11,576,079 - - - 107,738,066 Total - 96,161,987 17,906,473 - - - 114,068,460 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS HASDRUBAL CONCESSION - 63,296,646 8,127,338[B] - - - 71,423,984 MISKAR CONCESSION - 32,865,341 9,779,135[C] - - - 42,644,476 Total - 96,161,987 17,906,473 - - - 114,068,460 [A] Includes payment in kind of $6,330,394 for 121 KBOE valued at market price. [B] Includes payment in kind of $4,178,231 for 86 KBOE valued at market price. [C] Includes payment in kind of $2,152,163 for 35 KBOE valued at market price. Tanzania GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS TANZANIA PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENT - - - - 727,600 - 727,600 Total - - - - 727,600 - 727,600 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS BLOCK 1 & 4 - - - - 727,600 - 727,600 Total - - - - 727,600 - 727,600 Canada GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS GOVERNMENT OF ALBERTA - - 32,775,688 - - - 32,775,688 MUNICIPAL DISTRICT OF GREENVIEW - - - - 711,632 - 711,632 PROVINCIAL TREASURER OF ALBERTA - 2,398,416 - - 8,789,716 - 11,188,132 RECEIVER GENERAL FOR CANADA - 4,651,415 56,781,633 - 191,606 - 61,624,654 CANADA-NOVA SCOTIA OFFSHORE PETROLEUM BOARD - - - - 143,083 - 143,083 MINISTRY OF EMPLOYMENT AND INVESTMENT - - - - 693,918 - 693,918 MINISTER OF FINANCE (BC) - - 149,048 - 629,218 - 778,267 ALBERTA PETROLEUM MARKETING COMMISSION - - 1,649,572[A] - - - 1,649,572 MCLEOD LAKE INDIAN BAND - - - - 384,766 - 384,766 ALEXIS NAKOTA SIOUX NATION - - - - 133,823 - 133,823 Total - 7,049,831 91,355,941 - 11,677,763 - 110,083,535 [A] Includes payment in kind of $539,343 for 8 KBOE valued at government selling price. Canada PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS ATHABASCA OIL SANDS - 701,360 8,739,918 - 548,585 - 9,989,863 FOOTHILLS - - 3,218,587 - 626,349 - 3,844,936 GREATER DEEP BASIN - - 24,353,827[B] - 7,567,001 - 31,920,828 GROUNDBIRCH - - 149,048 - 2,351,358 - 2,500,407 INSITU - - 1,618,066 - - - 1,618,066 SABLE DEEPWATER - - 53,276,495 - - - 53,276,495 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT Shell Canada Energy - - - - 584,469 - 584,469 BLACKROCK VENTURES INC. - 1,131,690 - - - - 1,131,690 6581528 CANADA LTD. - 5,216,781 - - - - 5,216,781 Total - 7,049,831 91,355,941 - 11,677,763 - 110,083,535 [B] Includes payment in kind of $539,343 for 8 KBOE valued at government selling price. Mexico GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS FONDO MEXICANO DEL PETROLEO PARA LA ESTABILIZACION Y EL DESARROLLO - - - 343,524,306 8,905,511 - 352,429,817 SERVICIO DE ADMINISTRACION TRIBUTARIA - - - - 11,660,207 - 11,660,207 Total - - - 343,524,306 20,565,718 - 364,090,025 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SHELL EXPLORACION Y EXTRACCION DE MEXICO, S.A. DE C.V. - - - 343,524,306 20,565,718 - 364,090,025 Total - - - 343,524,306 20,565,718 - 364,090,025 United States GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA - - 119,957 - 7,986,673 - 8,106,630 INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE - 50,852,489 - - - - 50,852,489 OFFICE OF NATURAL RESOURCES REVENUE - - 711,099,701 - 31,549,865 - 742,649,566 STATE OF LOUISIANA - 1,332,480 - - - - 1,332,480 STATE OF TEXAS - 66,178,374 115,111,264 - - - 181,289,638 THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SYSTEM - - - - 3,214,525 - 3,214,525 DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF OIL AND GAS - - - - 243,408 - 243,408 STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA - -890,058 - - - - -890,058 Total - 117,473,285 826,330,922 - 42,994,471 - 986,798,677 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS ALASKA EXPLORATION - - - - 243,408 - 243,408 APPALACHIA - - 119,957 - 7,986,673 - 8,106,630 GOM (CENTRAL) - - 554,123,625 - - - 554,123,625 GOM (WEST) - - 156,976,076 - - - 156,976,076 GOM EXPLORATION - - - - 31,549,865 - 31,549,865 PERMIAN - 66,178,374 115,111,264 - 3,214,525 - 184,504,162 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT SWEPI LP - 1,332,480 - - - - 1,332,480 SHELL OIL COMPANY - -17,037,569 - - - - -17,037,569 SHELL PETROLEUM INC. - 67,000,000 - - - - 67,000,000 Total - 117,473,285 826,330,922 - 42,994,471 - 986,798,677 Argentina GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS GAS Y PETROLEO DEL NEUQUEN S.A. - - - - 283,801 - 283,801 PROVINCIA DE SALTA - - 4,971,503 - - - 4,971,503 PROVINCIA DEL NEUQUEN - - 10,322,210 3,057,004 478,686 - 13,857,899 Total - - 15,293,712 3,057,004 762,487 - 19,113,203 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS ACAMBUCO - - 4,971,503 - - - 4,971,503 ARGENTINA UNCONVENTIONAL PROJECTS - - 10,322,210 3,057,004 762,487 - 14,141,701 Total - - 15,293,712 3,057,004 762,487 - 19,113,203 Bolivia GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS NATIONAL OIL COMPANY OF BOLIVIA - - - - 1,590,502 - 1,590,502 Total - - - - 1,590,502 - 1,590,502 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS HUACARETA - - - - 1,022,292 - 1,022,292 LA VERTIENTE - - - - 568,210 - 568,210 Total - - - - 1,590,502 - 1,590,502 Brazil GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS MINISTERIO DA FAZENDA - - 814,340,789 - 1,580,218,015 - 2,394,558,804 PRE-SAL PETROLEO SA 19,546,098[A] - - - - - 19,546,098 AGENCIA NACIONAL DO PETROLEO GAS NATURAL E BIOCOMBUSTIVEIS - - - 479,885,380 - - 479,885,380 Total 19,546,098 - 814,340,789 479,885,380 1,580,218,015 - 2,893,990,283 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS BASIN EXPLORATION PROJECTS - - - 479,885,380 - - 479,885,380 BC-10 - - 40,052,595 - - - 40,052,595 BIJUPIRA & SALEMA - - 1,463,502 - - - 1,463,502 BM-S-9, BM-S-9A, BM-S-11, BM-S-11A and Entorno de Sapinhoa - - 753,503,605 - 1,577,571,662 - 2,331,075,268 LIBRA PSC 19,546,098[B] - 19,321,088 - - - 38,867,186 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT BRAZIL ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT - - - - 2,646,352 - 2,646,352 Total 19,546,098 - 814,340,789 479,885,380 1,580,218,015 - 2,893,990,283 [A] Includes payments in kind of $19,546,098 for 287 KBOE valued at Market price. [B] Includes payments in kind of $19,546,098 for 287 KBOE valued at Market price. Colombia GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS AGENCIA NACIONAL DE HIDROCARBUROS - - - - 229,091 - 229,091 Total - - - - 229,091 - 229,091 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS COLOMBIA CUMBIA PROJECT - - - - 229,091 - 229,091 Total - - - - 229,091 - 229,091 Trinidad and Tobago GOVERNMENT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total GOVERNMENTS MINISTRY OF ENERGY AND ENERGY AFFAIRS 84,542,265 21,603,165 3,773,443 - 8,876,393 - 118,795,265 Total 84,542,265 21,603,165 3,773,443 - 8,876,393 - 118,795,265 PROJECT REPORTS (IN USD) Production Entitlement Taxes Royalties Bonuses Fees Infrastructure Improvements Total PROJECTS BLOCK 5C, 5D AND 6D - - - - 2,446,446 - 2,446,446 BLOCK 6B 2,311,131 - - - 1,697,479 - 4,008,610 CENTRAL BLOCK - - 3,773,443 - 618,782 - 4,392,225 NORTH COAST MARINE AREA 1 (NCMA1) 82,231,134 21,603,165 - - 1,802,183 - 105,636,482 ENTITY LEVEL PAYMENT BG INTERNATIONAL LIMITED - TRINIDAD & TOBAGO BRANCH - - - - 2,311,502 - 2,311,502 Total 84,542,265 21,603,165 3,773,443 - 8,876,393 - 118,795,265 CAUTIONARY NOTE The companies in which Royal Dutch Shell plc directly and indirectly owns investments are separate legal entities. In this Report "Shell", "Shell group" and "Royal Dutch Shell" are sometimes used for convenience where references are made to Royal Dutch Shell plc and its subsidiaries in general. Likewise, the words "we", "us" and "our" are also used to refer to subsidiaries in general or to those who work for them. These expressions are also used where no useful purpose is served by identifying the particular company or companies. "Subsidiaries ", "Shell subsidiaries", and "Shell companies" as used in this Report refer to companies over which Royal Dutch Shell plc either directly or indirectly has control. Entities and unincorporated arrangements over which Shell has joint control are generally referred to as "joint ventures" and "joint operations" respectively. Entities over which Shell has significant influence but neither control nor joint control are referred to as "associates". The term "Shell interest" is used for convenience to indicate the direct and/or indirect ownership interest held by Shell in a venture, partnership or company, after exclusion of all third-party interest. 1 This Report is not corrected for rounding. 2 April 2019 Acacia Mining plc LSE:ACA ("Acacia" or the "Company") Annual Report Publication Acacia informs the market that the Company's Annual Report and Accounts for 2018 are available to view and download on Acacia's website: http://www.acaciamining.com. The 2019 Annual General Meeting ("AGM") Notice, the Annual Report and Accounts for 2018 and all other accompanying materials will be dispatched to shareholders on 25 April 2019 ahead of Acacia's planned AGM on Thursday 23 May 2019. We will provide a further update to shareholders when AGM materials are available. ENQUIRIES For further information, please visit our website: www.acaciamining.com or contact: Acacia Mining plc Sally Marshak, Head of Investor Relations and Communications +44 (0) 20 7129 7150 Camarco Gordon Poole / Nick Hennis +44 (0) 20 3757 4980 About ACACIA Acacia Mining plc (LSE:ACA) is the UK holding company of the Acacia Group, Tanzania's largest gold miner and one of the largest producers of gold in Africa. The Acacia Group has three mines, all located in north-west Tanzania: Bulyanhulu, which is owned and operated by Bulyanhulu Gold Mine Limited, Buzwagi, which is owned and operated by Pangea Minerals Limited and North Mara, which is owned and operated by North Mara Gold Mine Limited. The Acacia Group also has a portfolio of exploration projects in Kenya, Burkina Faso and Mali. Acacia Mining plc is a UK public company headquartered in London. It is listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange with a secondary listing on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange. Barrick Gold Corporation is the majority shareholder of Acacia Mining plc. Disclaimer and forward-looking statements This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an invitation or offer to underwrite, subscribe for or otherwise acquire or dispose of any securities of Acacia in any jurisdiction. This announcement includes "forward-looking statements" that express or imply expectations of future events or results as opposed to historical facts. These statements include, financial projections and estimates and their underlying assumptions, statements regarding plans, objectives and expectations with respect to future production, operations, costs, projects, and statements regarding future performance. Forward-looking statements are generally identified by the words "plans," "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates" and other similar expressions. All forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of Acacia, which could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, the forward-looking statements contained herein. Factors that could cause or contribute to differences between the actual results, performance and achievements of Acacia include, but are not limited to, changes or developments in political, economic or business conditions or national or local legislation or regulation in countries in which Acacia conducts - or may in the future conduct - business, industry trends, competition, fluctuations in the spot and forward price of gold or certain other commodity prices (such as copper and diesel), currency fluctuations (including the US dollar, South African rand, Kenyan shilling and Tanzanian shilling exchange rates), Acacia's ability to successfully integrate acquisitions, Acacia's ability to recover its reserves or develop new reserves, including its ability to convert its resources into reserves and its mineral potential into resources or reserves, and to process its mineral reserves successfully and in a timely manner, Acacia's ability to complete land acquisitions required to support its mining activities, operational or technical difficulties which may occur in the context of mining activities, delays and technical challenges associated with the completion of projects, risk of trespass, theft and vandalism, changes in Acacia's business strategy and ongoing implementation of operational reviews, as well as risks and hazards associated with the business of mineral exploration, development, mining and production and risks and factors affecting the gold mining industry in general. Although Acacia's management believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, Acacia cannot give assurances that such statements will prove to be correct. Accordingly, investors should not place reliance on forward-looking statements contained in this announcement. Any forward-looking statements in this announcement only reflect information available at the time of preparation. Save as required under the Market Abuse Regulation or otherwise as may be required under applicable law, Acacia explicitly disclaims any obligation or undertaking publicly to update or revise any forward-looking statements in this announcement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Nothing in this announcement should be construed as a profit forecast or estimate and no statement made should be interpreted to mean that Acacia's profits or earnings per share for any future period will necessarily match or exceed its historical published profits or earnings per ZephyrTel also joins AWS Partner Network, ramps up cloud development ZephyrTel, a division of ESW Capital dedicated to serving global telecommunications operators, is pleased to announce that it has today signed a telecom-focused Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This agreement comes less than a year after ZephyrTel's formation and is testament to the company's growth strategy and focus on cloud leadership in the Telco market. The strategic collaboration agreement will initially be focused on a joint go-to market approach based on ZephyrTel's industry leading Customer Experience Management platform, ResponseTek for Telco, which was the first ZephyrTel solution to be migrated to AWS. Work is already underway to migrate other ZephyrTel solutions to AWS, including Mobilogy, OASIS Cloud Contact Centre, Volt Delta 360 Directory Assistance, PeerApp and Vasona, as well as NewNet Messaging and the Invigorate Rating and Charging platform which ZephyrTel acquired in December 2018. ZephyrTel's Dev Factory is also working with AWS in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) space and development is underway on the first suite of predictive analytics applications built on AWS. Mike Shinya, CEO of ZephyrTel, said, "We are dedicated to partnering with our 330 global Telco Operator customers on their journey to becoming Digital Telcos. We expect our cloud offerings to deliver Total Cost of Ownership savings to our customers of up to 90% and we are thrilled to work with AWS's dedicated Telecom business to extend our joint offerings." "Telecommunication service providers are accelerating their migration to AWS in order to deliver lower total cost of IT for their organizations as well as increase automation of their services and business processes in order to drive agility and innovation for their customers," said Jean-Philippe Poirault, Vice President and Global Head of Telecom, Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL. "We are excited to support ZephyrTel in delivering cloud-deployable telecom solutions on AWS to enable and accelerate the digital transformation journey of our shared customers." AWS Partner Network The agreement will also see ZephyrTel join the AWS Partner Network (APN) with immediate effect. The APN is a global partner program that helps APN Partners build successful AWS-based businesses or solutions by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. About ZephyrTel Launched in early 2018, ZephyrTel has rapidly scaled up to reach $70M revenues in a short space of time. ZephyrTel has installations in over 50 countries around the world and its customers include more than 330 of the global leading Telecom Operators. The company has access to over 4000 of the world's top talented engineers and other skilled professionals, available through affiliated company Crossover for Work's platform. ZephyrTel is currently serving the telecommunications industry worldwide with software products for retail, infrastructure, mobile, cloud, and customer experience and is continuously extending its telco product range. More information is available at www.zephyrtel.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005511/en/ Contacts: ZephyrTel For further information please email: Mike Shinya, CEO mike.shinya@zephyrtel.com Ali Perkins, Chief Marketing Officer ali.perkins@zephyrtel.com For media enquiries please email: Paula Elliott, Managing Director, C8 Consulting paula@c8consulting.co.uk SELBYVILLE , Delaware, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The submarine combat systems market is set to hike from USD 4.5 billion in 2018 to around USD 9.5 billion by 2025, according to a 2019 Global Market Insights, Inc. report. The governments across the globe are focusing to enhance and enlarge maritime warfare capabilities in their naval fleet. The rising political disputes among countries, development of advanced submarine system, and growing requirement to modernize the weapon systems will drive the submarine combat system market. Additionally, growing usage of fast attack submarines coupled with advantages offered by this system such as stealth capabilities and faster operations will support the market growth. Request for a sample of this research report @ https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/3054 Technological advancements of combat system include usage of artificial intelligence (AI) and computed automation that enhances remote supervision and monitoring of submarines. The countries including Russia are developing advanced super-cavitating torpedoes. These torpedoes are propelled by rocket engines and attain high speeds of 200 knots an hour. These technical developments will further support penetration of submarine combat systems market over the study timeframe. The industry participants are investing in R&D to introduce new technologically advanced software solutions including integrated ship control management and monitoring system (ISCMMS). Multiple countries are upgrading these systems to enhance the performance of submarines. The SSK submarine segment will showcase significant growth in submarine combat system market owing to submarine modernization plan of several countries. SSK are compact, agile, and less noisy as compared to their counterparts. Additionally, industry players are securing contracts from governments to equip their submarines with latest weapons. Browse key industry insights spread across 200 pages with 359 market data tables & 9 figures & charts from the report, "Submarine Combat System Market Size, By Submarine (SSK, SSN, SSBN, SSGN), By Weapon (Torpedoes, Ballistics Missiles, Cruise Missiles, Mines) Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Greece, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Iran, Turkey, Algeria), Application Potential, Price Trend, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2019 - 2025" in detail along with the table of contents: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/submarine-combat-system-market Torpedoes weapon segment will showcase significant growth rate in submarine combat systems market. This can be credited to higher procurement and commissioning of high-tech, longer range and lethal submarines that can launch heavyweight torpedoes. The development of new torpedoes allow navy to destroy targets at ranges up to 5 miles and at speed greater than 28 knots. In addition, the new torpedoes are integrated with digital guidance, and digital fusing system and propulsion improvements. European submarine combat system market share will hold dominance over the study timeframe. The dominance can be attributed to the purchase of new submarines and modernization of naval fleet by several countries. Latin American submarine combat systems market will witness momentous gains over the study timeframe owing to upgradation of combat systems on existing submarine fleet as part of extensive defense programs. The industry participants in the market includes Atlas Elektronik, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Thales Group, Raytheon, and BAE Systems. The other notable players in the industry includes Saab, and Naval Group. Contract with the several navy forces is the key strategy adopted by industry participants to enhance their market share. Make an Inquiry for purchasing this report @ https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/3054 Browse Related Reports: Interceptor Missiles Market Size By Surface (Surface To Air, Water To Air), By Range (Upto 125 Kms, Between 125 To 200 Kms, Above 200 Kms), By Technology (THAAD, PAC-3, SM-3, HQ-19, HQ-9, Iron Dome, FD-2000, Patriot-GEM-T, Aegis Ashore, Aster), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Germany, Romania, UK, France, Russia, Italy, Poland, Netherlands, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kuwait, Turkey, UAE, Qatar), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017 - 2024 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/interceptor-missiles-market Butylated Hydroxytoluene Market Size By Application (Food, Animal feed [Poultry, Swine, Fish Feed, Cattle], Lubricating & Specialty Oils, Rubber, Personal Care & Cosmetics, Industrial Fats, Oils, & Fatty Acids, Printing Inks & Coatings, Food Packaging), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Application Potential, Price Trend, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2019 - 2025 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/aerospace-cold-forgings-market About Global Market Insights Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology. Contact Us: Arun Hegde Corporate Sales, USA Global Market Insights, Inc. Phone: +1-302-846-7766 Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688 Email: sales@gminsights.com Web: https://www.gminsights.com Blog: http://industry-source.org/category/automotive/ Allied Wallet, a globally leading provider of mainstream online payment processing, is now compatible with several new, alternative payment options to support users in Peru Latin America's 5th fastest growing e-commerce market. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005307/en/ Allied Wallet adds new online payment options in Peru. (Photo: Business Wire) In 2011, the Peruvian government drafted an ambitious plan to expand broadband connectivity. Peru is now the country with the highest internet user growth in the region. 96% of Peruvians online have made an online purchase, and e-commerce business in the region has grown 198% in the last two years. Allied Wallet recognized that users in the region required certain payment options that cater to their unique needs. Only 12% of Peruvians have a credit card and 29% have a bank account. Needless to say, more cash-based options were necessary to expand e-commerce. Allied Wallet is now compatible with Safetypay, Pago Efectivo, Sencillito, MercadoPago, and Astropay Card. "Peru has one of the fastest growing e-commerce environments and we want to help support that. We want to help introduce more business owners to the online environment and enable Peruvians to access more goods and products," said CEO Andy Khawaja, "these cash based payment methods will allow for more connectivity amongst Peruvian buyers and sellers." Cash based payment methods typically allow the customer to generate a print document of their purchase upon checkout. The customer can take this to a local branch and make their cash payment for their goods or service. Pago Efectivo has over 40,000 payment locations in Peru. MercadoPago processed over 25.4 million transactions in 2015. The e-commerce market in Peru is expected to grow 8.2% each year, and Allied Wallet hopes to help Peru surpass these expectations with the compatibility of these new alternative payment options and more. About Allied Wallet: Allied Wallet continues to revolutionize the e-commerce industry by introducing new and innovative payment processing solutions for online merchants, enabling them to send and receive global payments. With PCI compliant merchant services for nearly any business size, Allied Wallet provides a state-of-the-art payment gateway to optimize online transactions. Please visit www.alliedwallet.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005307/en/ Contacts: A.J. Almeda E-mail: aalmeda@alliedwallet.com +1-888-255-1137 SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The global catalyst market size is expected to reach USD 34.06 billion by 2025, ascending at a CAGR of 4.5%, according to a report by Grand View Research, Inc. Rising demand for petrochemicals from various end-use industries is expected to be a prime factor driving the market growth. Inclusion of high-grade polymers in manufacturing commodities for domestic as well as export oriented industry is anticipated to surge the product demand in future. Key suggestions from the report: Environmental was the largest application segment in the catalyst market and accounted for 29.6% of the overall volume share in 2016 In terms of raw materials chemical compounds segment is expected to attain the highest market share over the forecast period The petroleum refining application segment is expected to register a CAGR of 3.4% over the forecast period This application includes the use of catalyst in cracking of feedstock components that increase the yield of high-quality products MEA is expected to be the second fastest-growing regional market during the forecast years Key industry participants include BASF SE; Akzo Nobel N.V.; Clariant International Ltd.; Zeolyst International, Inc.; and Chevron Corporation Key competitive strategies adopted by these companies include capacity expansion, geographical expansion, technology licensing, and mergers & acquisitions For instance, recently, BASF started a new chemical catalysts manufacturing plant in Caojing, China to cater to growing demand in Asia Pacific Read 300 page research report with TOC on "Catalyst Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Raw Material (Metal, Chemical Compounds), By Product (Heterogeneous, Homogeneous), By Application (Polymers & Petrochemicals, Environmental), And Segment Forecasts, 2019 - 2025" at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/catalyst-market Moreover, demand for clean and green fuels has shifted the trend of energy generation from conventional to clean resources. Cobalt, iron, and nickel catalysts are the key components used for clean energy generation processes, such as the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Rapidly expanding polymer and chemical manufacturing sectors is also anticipated to play an important role in the growth of the catalysts market. In addition, supportive regulations regarding the production and usage of catalysts are expected to augment market growth over the next eight years. Emission regulations are the biggest drivers for a wide range of application sectors and the usage of catalysts for environmental and chemical applications are anticipated to have the highest market growth. Heterogeneous product segment led the market on account of wide product usage in the polymer industry. It is also used in the form of vanadium oxide for the production of sulfuric acid, which is growing on account of increasing demand of this acid in oil refining, wastewater processing, and chemical synthesis. This is also expected to fuel the demand for heterogeneous catalyst in the near future. Grand View Research has segmented the global catalyst market on the basis of raw material, product, application, and region: Catalyst Raw Material Outlook (Volume, Kilotons; Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Zeolite Metal Base Metals Precious metals Chemical Compounds Peroxide Acid Amines & Others Others Catalyst Product Outlook (Volume, Kilotons; Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Heterogeneous Homogeneous Catalyst Application Outlook (Volume, Kilotons; Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Petroleum Refining FCC Alkylation Hydrotreating Hydrocracking Catalytic Reforming Others Chemical Synthesis Polyolefins Adsorbents Chemical catalysts Others Polymer & Petrochemicals Ziegler-Natta Reaction Initiator Urethane Chromium Single-site Others Environmental Light Duty Vehicles Heavy Duty Vehicles Motorcycles Others Catalyst Regional Outlook (Volume, Kilotons; Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) North America U.S. Canada Mexico Europe U.K. Germany France Italy Netherlands Spain Russia Asia Pacific China India Japan South Korea Indonesia Malaysia Australia Latin America Brazil Middle East & Africa & South Africa Saudi Arabia Find more research reports on Catalysts & Enzymes Industry, by Grand View Research: Platinum Market - Skeletal dysplasia market encompasses a broad number of genetic and rare disorders that affect mainly the cartilage and bone. Skeletal dysplasia market encompasses a broad number of genetic and rare disorders that affect mainly the cartilage and bone. Alcohol Enzymes Market - Increasing population coupled with rising income levels has fueled demand for consumer products such as foods & beverages and cleaning agents which in turn is expected to boost the demand for alcohol enzymes. Increasing population coupled with rising income levels has fueled demand for consumer products such as foods & beverages and cleaning agents which in turn is expected to boost the demand for alcohol enzymes. Fluorspar Market - Growth of automotive sector is expected to drive global fluorspar market growth over the forecast period. Fluorspar is used in production of hydrofluoric acid which is a key component for manufacturing aluminum. Heavy usage of aluminum in automotive industry is projected to remain a key driver for global fluorspar market growth. Gain access to Grand View Compass, our BI enabled intuitive market research database of 10,000+ reports About Grand View Research Grand View Research, U.S.-based market research and consulting company, provides syndicated as well as customized research reports and consulting services. Registered in California and headquartered in San Francisco, the company comprises over 425 analysts and consultants, adding more than 1200 market research reports to its vast database each year. These reports offer in-depth analysis on 46 industries across 25 major countries worldwide. With the help of an interactive market intelligence platform, Grand View Research helps Fortune 500 companies and renowned academic institutes understand the global and regional business environment and gauge the opportunities that lie ahead. Contact: Sherry James Corporate Sales Specialist, USA Grand View Research, Inc. Phone: +1-415-349-0058 Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519 Email: sales@grandviewresearch.com Web: https://www.grandviewresearch.com Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --Global Rice Transplanter Market is estimated to grow at a substantial CAGR of 9.4% by 2022 as the scope, product types, and its applications are increasing across the globe. A rice transplanter, as the name suggests, transplants rice seedlings onto paddy field. Primarily there are two categories of rice transplanter i.e., walking type and riding type. The factors that propel the growth of the Rice Transplanter Market include increasing consciousness among farmers about smart farming, decrease in labor expenses, requirement of less manpower, and reduction in the transplanting time. On the other hand, there are factors that may hamper the growth of the market including higher maintenance cost and high cost of the machine. Rice Transplanter Market may be explored by type and geography. Rice Transplanter Market may be explored by Type as Walking Rice Transplanter, and Riding Rice Transplanter. The "Riding Rice Transplanter" segment led the Rice Transplanter Market in 2017 and is anticipated to maintain its dominance by 2022. Rice Transplanter Market is categorized based on geography into North America, Latin America, Japan, Middle East and Africa, Western Europe, Asia Pacific, and Eastern Europe. Asia-Pacific accounted for the major share of the Rice Transplanter Market Size in 2017 and will continue to lead in the forecast period. The factors that propel the growth of the market include substantial demand for rice transplanter machines. Farmers in India select manually-operated machinery, although China and ASEAN countries witness a higher demand for riding type of rice transplanter machines. Download PDF to know more details about "Rice Transplanter Market" Report 2022. The key players contributing to the robust growth of the Rice Transplanter Market comprise CLAAS KGaA GmbH, Greaves Cotton Limited, ISEKI & CO., Ltd., Amisy Machinery, Kubota Corporation, YANMAR CO., LTD., Redlands, agroman.in., and TNAU. The leading companies are taking up partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures in order to boost the inorganic growth of the industry. The global market for rice transplanter will grow at a CAGR of 9.4% by 2022, according to a new report published by Gen Consulting Company. The report segments the market and forecasts its size, by volume and value, on the basis of product (walk behind type, riding type, etc.), and by geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, MEA and South America). The report covers forecast and analysis for the rice transplanter market on a global and regional level. The study provides historic data of 2012-2016 along with a forecast from 2017 to 2022 based on both output/volume and revenue. The study then describes the drivers and restraints for the rice transplanter market along with the impact they have on the demand over the forecast period. Additionally, the report includes the study of opportunities available in the rice transplanter market on a global level. The report has been prepared based on the synthesis, analysis, and interpretation of information about the global rice transplanter market collected from specialized sources. The competitive landscape section of the report provides a clear insight into the market share analysis of key industry players. Company overview, financial overview, product portfolio, new project launched, recent development analysis are the parameters included in the profile. Relevantly, the report and company profiles specify the key drivers that are impacting the demand in global rice transplanter market. Access 113 page research report with TOC on "Rice Transplanter Market" available with Radiant Insights, Inc. @ https://www.radiantinsights.com/research/global-rice-transplanter-market-outlook-2017-2022 Key Products Walk Behind Type Riding Type Key Regions North America Europe Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa and South America Key Vendors Asia Tech ISEKI Jiangsu World Kubota Mitsubishi TYM Yamabiko Yanmar request free sample to get a complete list of companies Browse reports of similar category available with Radiant Insights, Inc.: Greenhouse Soil Market Bifenthrin Market Bio Pesticides Market Compound Feed Ingredient Market About Radiant Insights, Inc.: At Radiant Insights, we work with the aim to reach the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Our representatives strive to understand diverse client requirements and cater to the same with the most innovative and functional solutions. Contact: Michelle Thoras. Corporate Sales Specialist Radiant Insights, Inc. Phone: +1-415-349-0054 Toll Free: 1-888-928-9744 Email: sales@radiantinsights.com Web: https://www.radiantinsights.com/ DUBLIN, Ireland and FUNCHAL, Madeira, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Telecomunicacoes da Madeira, Unipessoal, Lda., EMACOM, and the EllaLink Group announced today that their partnership on the EllaLink system has extended further in order to meet the growing capacity demands of the islands of Madeira. EMACOM currently own a dedicated fiber pair on the EllaLink system which is designed to carry over 24Tbps of traffic. New plans under discussion propose to increase the number of direct fiber pairs between Funchal and mainland Portugal in order to provide EMACOM with additional capacity in excess of 70Tbps. Currently under construction, EllaLink will provide the islands of Madeira with fiber diversity, increased data capacity and direct connectivity to Lisbon via a new state-of-the-art coherent submarine system. EMACOM's provisions on EllaLink are guaranteed to meet the long-term demand of this key autonomous region of the republic of Portugal. Rui Faria Rebelo, CEO of EMACOM, explained, "We are pleased to deepen our relationship with EllaLink in order to strengthen our regional infrastructure, to encourage telecoms growth and to support the current plans to improve the infrastructure connecting mainland Portugal with the Autonomous regions of Madeira and Acores. Expansion of our network provides our customers with choice, reliability and economic value, as well as delivering the large data capacity that Portugal will need in order to meet its connectivity demands for the next 25 years." "It gives me great pleasure to offer EMACOM an increased share in the EllaLink cable system. Additional fiber pairs at a very competitive price will position Madeira as an ideal regional hub, offering direct connections to Portugal and onwards to Spain, Cabo Verde and Brazil. We look forward to working together for many years to come," added Philippe Dumont, CEO of the EllaLink Group. Being built by Alcatel Submarine Networks, EllaLink is a leading edge 4 fiber pair submarine cable system scheduled for operation in 2020. Designed to satisfy the growing demand for traffic between Europe and Latin America, the low latency EllaLink route avoids the congestion of the North Atlantic by offering the first ever direct fiber pair between the two continents. About EMACOM The company EMACOM - Telecomunicacoes da Madeira, Unipessoal, Lda., incorporated in August 1998, is wholly owned by the Empresa de Electricidade da Madeira, SA. EMACOM's main objective is to provide fiber optic services as a neutral operator in the Autonomous Region of Madeira - Portugal, and to promote with international connectivity, the development of IT business opportunities in this region. For more information visit http://www.eem.pt About EllaLink EllaLink is an advanced subsea cable system offering secure high capacity connectivity on a unique low latency transatlantic route serving the growing needs of the Latin American and European markets. The EllaLink network directly connects Brazil and Europe, linking the major hubs of Sao Paulo and Fortaleza with Lisbon, Madrid and Marseille. The EllaLink System is being built with state-of-the-art coherent technology initially offering 72Tbps of capacity over four fiber pairs. The landing sites in Fortaleza Press contacts Brittany Anderson, 25, of Chatham, who has helped out with the dance team for years and met Brantley when she was 13, said Brantley was looking forward to going to her prom at the end of May. She was going to go with her brother. KUWAIT CITY, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- EdgeVerve Systems, a subsidiary of Infosys (NYSE: INFY), has been selected by Al Ahli Bank of Kuwait to automate the bank's operational processes using the AssistEdge RPA platform. Ahli United Bank is one of the pioneering banks in Kuwait to innovate its banking operations using RPA. Leveraging AssistEdge's RPA platform, the bank will be able to improve SLAs (service level agreements), accelerate turnaround time, reduce human dependency and errors by increasing efficiency and efficacy of processes across different business functions. AssistEdge helps businesses become truly digital through process automation. Highly scalable and secure, AssistEdge is a holistic process automation platform offering products across process discovery, intelligent automation and orchestration, catering to multiple industry sectors. It provides integrated software robots to automate high-touch repetitive processes and assisted automation for processes which need manual intervention. Commenting on the solution, Ms. Jehad Al Humaidhi, Deputy CEO Banking Support Group, Ahli United Bank, Kuwait, said, "We are thrilled to implement Robotics. We have been continuously focused on enhancing the overall customer experience and digitalization remains at the core of our strategy. We have always endeavored to introduce new innovations, bringing efficiencies to customer's financial value chain through futuristic technologies like Robotics, Biometric Identification, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. With introduction of Robotics, banking operations will be streamlined and we will derive major cost efficiencies. This initiative is another milestone in our continuous endeavor towards digitizing the financial value chain." Atul Soneja, SVP & Global Head - Edge Products and Infosys Nia, said, "We are excited to partner with Ahli United Bank Kuwait, to work on their strategic initiatives around robotics, AI and automation. AssistEdge has been helping customers drive significant cost, efficiency and quality benefits by taking them through a journey from process discovery to automation and management of digital workforce. We are proud to be the automation product partner of choice for the bank." About EdgeVerve Systems Ltd. EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys, develops innovative software products and offers them on premise or as cloud-hosted business platforms. Our products help businesses develop deeper connections with stakeholders, power continuous innovation and accelerate growth in the digital world. We power our clients' growth in rapidly evolving areas like banking, interactive commerce, distributive trade, customer service and enterprise buying and help them navigate their digital journey with our AI enabled Automation and Business Solutions. At EdgeVerve, we are making constant strides towards transforming enterprises by providing AI enabled Business Applications, leveraging the Infosys Nia Platform with capabilities across the Automation continuum. Today EdgeVerve products are used by global corporations across financial services, insurance, retail and CPG, life sciences, manufacturing and telecom. Finacle, our industry-leading digital banking solution suite is the choice of financial institutions across 100 countries to service more than a billion consumers and 1.3 billion accounts. To know more, visit www.edgeverve.com About Infosys Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem. Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next. Safe Harbor Certain statements mentioned in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law. Media contacts: For further information, please contact: PR_Global@infosys.com CHICAGO / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / Gold Eagle Co, maker of 303 Products, today announced O'Reilly Auto Parts, a leading retailer in the automotive aftermarket industry, as the national retailer of the new 303 Touchless Sealant, a time-saving wax alternative with water-activated hydrophobic technology that lasts up to two times longer than traditional wax and doesn't require wiping or buffing. Available at more than 5,200 O'Reilly Auto Parts locations across the United States for $16.99, 303 Touchless Sealant (16 oz.) takes mere minutes to apply, compared to the lengthy process of traditional vehicle waxing, and offers immediate results, as water beads on the paint to indicate the vehicle's paint is protected. 'As we head into spring, we are thrilled to have full distribution at O'Reilly Auto Parts for our newest automotive product, 303 Touchless Sealant,' said Matthew Banach, senior director of marketing at Gold Eagle Co. 'The quick and easy-to-use spray and rinse product is ideal for both the do-it-yourself weekend warriors and professional detailers, making 303 Touchless Sealant a natural fit at O'Reilly Auto Parts, as consumers prepare for appearance care season.' With SiO2 Technology, 303 Touchless Sealant provides superior water-beading protection and a deep, long-lasting, glossy shine. It also prevents UV damage and will help to protect against light scratches. Providing up to six months of protection, 303 Touchless Sealant works on all exterior surfaces, including clear coat, gel coat, fiberglass, plastics, windshields, wheels, tires and trim. For additional information on the new 303Touchless Sealant, click here. About Gold Eagle Company Founded in 1932, Gold Eagle Co. is a family owned and operated company that is an industry pioneer in the production and distribution of performance chemicals and surface treatments. Gold Eagle Co. is driven to produce innovative products that protect and preserve the things we love and its award-winning line up of products, includes STA-BIL, 303 Products, TriNova, & HEET Gas-Line Antifreeze. Gold Eagle Co. is committed to providing the ultimate customer service and has received the American Honda Service Award for 2018, marking the company's 12th consecutive year for this award. For more information, please visit www.goldeagle.com. About O'Reilly Automotive, Inc. O'Reilly Automotive, Inc. was founded in 1957 by the O'Reilly family and is one of the largest specialty retailers of automotive aftermarket parts, tools, supplies, equipment and accessories in the United States, serving both the do-it-yourself and professional service provider markets. Visit the Company's website at www.OReillyAuto.com for additional information about O'Reilly, including access to online shopping and current promotions, store locations, hours and services, employment opportunities and other programs. As of Dec. 21, 2018, the Company operated 5,219 stores in 47 states. Media Contact: Amy Fisher The Motion Agency, Inc. 312.565.0044 ext. 1151 afisher@agencyinmotion.com SOURCE: Gold Eagle Co View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540752/Time-Saving-Vehicle-Wax-Alternative-303R-Touchless-Sealant-Now-Available-In-Store-at-OReilly-Auto-Parts 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. Results of Phase Ib Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer ("NMIBC") Clinical Study Demonstrate a 66% Complete Response ("CR") at the Therapeutic Dose (0.70 mg/cm2) 360 Days Post Treatment TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / Theralase Technologies Inc. ("Theralase" or the "Company") (TSXV: TLT) (OTCQB: TLTFF), a clinical stage pharmaceutical company dedicated to the research and development of light activated Photo Dynamic Compounds ("PDCs") and their associated drug formulations intended to safely and effectively destroy various cancers is pleased to report that patient six, enrolled and treated in the recently completed Phase Ib NMIBC Clinical Study ("Study"), has demonstrated a CR with no tumour recurrence, progression or presence of NMIBC disease at the 360 day clinical and cystoscopy assessment. The Study's purpose was to evaluate TLD-1433, Theralase's lead PDC, for the primary endpoint of safety and tolerability, a secondary endpoint of pharmacokinetics (movement and exit of drug within tissue) and exploratory endpoint of efficacy, primarily at 90 days and secondarily at 180 days post treatment. The Study was successfully completed with patient five and six demonstrating achievement of the primary, secondary and exploratory endpoints at 90 and 180 days, when treated with the Therapeutic Dose. The Company is pleased to report that patient five and six have continued to demonstrate no tumour recurrence, progression or presence of NMIBC disease at 360 days post treatment during their scheduled clinical and cystoscopy assessment. This latest data validates the strong efficacy signal that the Company has received after only a single Anti-Cancer Treatment ("ACT") in the completed Study, representing a 66% CR in the Therapeutic Dose group. Three patients (patients four, five and six) were enrolled and treated at the Therapeutic Dose (0.70 mg/cm2), with patient 4 successfully achieving the primary and secondary endpoints at 90 days post treatment; however, the patient was diagnosed with pre-existing and non-Study related metastatic disease and was excluded from further study evaluation. Theralase's ACT involved the intravesical instillation of a water-based solution of Theralase's lead anti-cancer PDC, TLD-1433, via a catheter inserted through the urethra into the patient's bladder, allowing the PDC to be preferentially absorbed by NMIBC tumours. The bladder was then drained of the solution, flushed with sterile water to remove non-absorbed solution and refilled with sterile water via a cystoscope. A fibre optic assembly, comprising a Laser Emitter used to emit laser light and a proprietary Laser Detector used to detect laser light, were used to activate TLD-1433 resident in the NMIBC tumours. Shawn Shirazi, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer - Drug Division, Theralase stated, "We have received additional evidence that even a single Theralase ACT was able to lead to a CR at 360 days post treatment for patients treated at the Therapeutic Dose and who presented with Bacillus Calmete Guerin ("BCG")-Unresponsive NMIBC. This provides significant support for the enormous opportunity that awaits Theralase in the treatment of NMIBC." Dr. Shirazi added, "For NMIBC, a CR is defined by the FDA as the definitive endpoint for single-arm intravesical studies of patients who present with BCG-Unresponsive Carcinoma In-Situ ("CIS") disease, with or without resected papillary tumours, at 90 days and to demonstrate duration of CR at 360 days. In the proposed Phase II NMIBC clinical study, the Company is providing two treatment procedures (Day 0 and Day 180) to help achieve these FDA endpoints. The latest data received on patient six is extremely encouraging, in that it demonstrates after only one Theralase ACT, CR at 90 and 360 days post-treatment is achievable. If the efficacy results obtained to date are able to be replicated in a larger patient population, via a well-designed Phase II NMIBC clinical study, with a demonstrated CR at 90 days and duration of CR at 360 days post-treatment, then the Theralase ACT has the potential to be the next gold standard in the treatment of NMIBC. Theralase is highly encouraged by this recent data demonstrating that BCG-Unresponsive NMIBC patients, who refused or were ineligible to undergo a radical cystectomy (bladder removal surgery) have remained cancer free at 360 days post Theralase ACT, achieving cancer-free status beyond their previous clinical experience living with this devastating disease. Theralase ACT may provide sustainable and comprehensive benefit to people diagnosed with NMIBC and the Company looks forward to providing updates on the Phase II NMIBC Clinical Study ("Study II") when it commences. Theralase ACT is multi-faceted, allowing the technology to be adapted to the treatment of additional cancer indications, if successfully validated in independent clinical studies. Pending successful commencement of Study II, the Company plans to investigate the commencement of an additional Phase Ib clinical study for a new cancer indication." About Theralase Technologies Inc. Theralase is a clinical stage pharmaceutical company dedicated to the research and development of light activated Photo Dynamic Compounds and their associated drug formulations intended to safely and effectively destroy various cancers. Additional information is available at www.theralase.com and www.sedar.com This news release contains "forward-looking statements" which reflect the current expectations of management of the Company's future growth, results of operations, performance and business prospects and opportunities. Such statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the Company's proposed development plans with respect to Photo Dynamic Compounds and their drug formulations. Wherever possible, words such as "may", "would", "could", "should", "will", "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "potential for" and similar expressions have been used to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements reflect management's current beliefs with respect to future events and are based on information currently available to management. Forward-looking statements involve significant risks, uncertainties and assumptions including with respect to the ability of the Company to: successfully fund and complete a Phase II NMIBC clinical study, secure the requisite regulatory approvals to commence a Phase II NMIBC clinical study and implement its development plans. Many factors could cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements; including, without limitation, those listed in the filings made by the Company with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities (which may be viewed at www.sedar.com). Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize or should assumptions underlying the forward looking statements prove incorrect, actual results, performance or achievements may vary materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained in this news release. These factors should be considered carefully and prospective investors should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements. Although the forward-looking statements contained in the press release are based upon what management currently believes to be reasonable assumptions, the Company cannot assure prospective investors that actual results, performance or achievements will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to revise forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise except as required by law. All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchanges) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. For More Information: 1.866.THE.LASE (843-5273) x304 416.699.LASE (5273) x304 Amelia Tudo, Investor Relations Coordinator atudo@theralase.com www.theralase.com SOURCE: Theralase Technologies Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540707/Patient-Six-Cancer-Free-Twelve-Months-After-Single-Anti-Cancer-Treatment Fifth Hole Being Drilled at Crunchy Hill Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - Aurania Resources Ltd. (TSXV: ARU) (OTCQB: AUIAF) (FSE: 20Q) ("Aurania" or the "Company") reports the Tsenken target in the Lost Cities - Cutucu Project ("Project") in southeastern Ecuador has been enlarged by 6 kilometres ("km"); high-grade copper and silver has now been found over a 9km long trend. Recent grab samples from boulders in streams contain up to 7% copper with 70 grams per tonne ("g/t") silver. Follow-up exploration of these streams has led to the discovery of copper and silver in outcrop. Aurania's President, Dr. Richard Spencer, commented, "Results from recent sampling have tripled the size of the Tsenken target to an impressive length of 9km. The copper-silver mineralization lies in sedimentary rocks above and to the side of a conspicuous geophysical feature that we believe is a buried porphyry cluster. Our current exploration model is that copper and silver from the porphyry cluster spread into the enclosing, permeable sedimentary rocks where it was trapped, creating a more or less flat-lying layer of copper-silver - bearing rock. This sheet-like target should be relatively simple to drill. The potentially larger target presented by the covered porphyry would require much deeper drilling and would be investigated in a later phase of exploration." "In addition, scout drilling at Crunchy Hill is progressing well with four holes completed and the fifth is currently underway. Samples from the first three holes have been dispatched to the laboratory. Core recovery has been excellent. No assays have been returned at this time. We intend to release results once we have completed drilling a cluster of holes. This will enable us to understand the context of any mineralization." Copper-Silver Mineralization at Tsenken Copper and silver found in the area north of the magnetic feature at Tsenken (Figure 1) is contained in relatively flat-lying layers of sandstone and shale. Mineralization is mainly concentrated in layers that contain carbon in fossilized plant fragments within the sedimentary rock. The copper minerals observed include malachite, chrysocolla, tenorite, chalcocite, cuprite and minor bornite and chalcopyrite. Grades from boulders in streams range from 0.8% copper with 1.3g/t silver to 9.3% copper with 185g/t silver (Figure 1). The grade of outcrop samples ranges from 0.15% copper and 1.1g/t silver to 38.6% copper and 263g/t silver. The latter sample with extreme grade probably represents an isolated pocket of mineralization akin to a gold nugget, that is atypical and should not be extrapolated - it is extremely unlikely that this extreme grade extends over any significant distance. The magnetic feature evident at Tsenken in the data from the geophysical survey that the Company flew over the Project in late 2017, is about 5km long by 3km wide (Figure 1). This is far larger than a typical porphyry. One explanation for its size, raised in the Company's January 10, 2019 press release, is that the Tsenken feature represents a cluster of porphyry bodies. Mineralization models will likely evolve with further exploration of the Project. Figure 1 To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2477/43820_bce0b63c140528d6_001full.jpg Sample Analysis & Quality Assurance / Quality Control ("QAQC") Some of the samples were prepared for analysis at ALS Global's ("ALS") lab in Quito, Ecuador and others at MS Analytical in Cuenca, Ecuador. The rock samples were jaw-crushed to 10 mesh (crushed material passes through a mesh with apertures of 2 millimetres ("mm"), from which a one-kilogram sub-sample was taken. The sub-sample was crushed to a grain size of 0.075mm and a 200 gram ("g") split was set aside for analysis. Aurania personnel inserted a certified standard pulp sample, alternating with a field blank, at intervals of approximately 20 samples in all sample batches. ALS's preparation lab in Quito sent the prepared samples to its analytical facility in Lima, Peru for analysis. Samples prepared by MS Analytical were sent to its assay facility in Vancouver for analysis. Approximately 0.25g of rock pulp underwent four-acid digestion and analysis for 48 elements by ICP-MS. For the over-limit samples, those that had a grade of greater than 1% copper and 100g/t silver, 0.4 grams of pulp underwent digestion in four acids and the resulting liquid was diluted and analyzed by ICP-MS. The ultra high-grade copper sample (sample Y003600) was re-assayed by MS Analytical, and the value reported in Figure 1 is the average of the two assays. The re-assay values for copper were 38.68% in the original and 38.63% in the re-assay, and for silver, the values were 263g/t and 262g/t respectively. ALS and MS Analytical reported that the analyses had passed their internal QAQC tests. In addition, Aurania's analysis of results from its QAQC samples showed the they passed its internal QAQC standards. Qualified Person The technical information contained in this news release has been verified and approved by Jean-Paul Pallier, MSc. Mr. Pallier is a designated EurGeol by the European Federation of Geologists and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects of the Canadian Securities Administrators. About Aurania Aurania is a junior mineral exploration company engaged in the identification, evaluation, acquisition and exploration of mineral property interests, with a focus on precious metals and copper. Its flagship asset, The Lost Cities - Cutucu Project, is located in the Jurassic Metallogenic Belt in the eastern foothills of the Andes mountain range of southeastern Ecuador. Information on Aurania and technical reports are available at www.aurania.com and www.sedar.com, as well as on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/auranialtd/, Twitter at https://twitter.com/auranialtd, and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/aurania-resources-ltd-. For further information, please contact: Carolyn Muir Manager - Investor Services Aurania Resources Ltd. (416) 367-3200 carolyn.muir@aurania.com Dr. Richard Spencer President Aurania Resources Ltd. (416) 367-3200 richard.spencer@aurania.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements This news release may contain forward-looking information that involves substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties, most of which are beyond the control of Aurania. Forward-looking statements include estimates and statements that describe Aurania's future plans, objectives or goals, including words to the effect that Aurania or its management expects a stated condition or result to occur. Forward-looking statements may be identified by such terms as "believes", "anticipates", "expects", "estimates", "may", "could", "would", "will", or "plan". Since forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Although these statements are based on information currently available to Aurania, Aurania provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Risks, uncertainties and other factors involved with forward-looking information could cause actual events, results, performance, prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Forward looking information in this news release includes, but is not limited to, Aurania's objectives, goals or future plans, statements, exploration results, potential mineralization, the corporation's portfolio, treasury, management team and enhanced capital markets profile, the estimation of mineral resources, exploration and mine development plans, timing of the commencement of operations and estimates of market conditions. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking information include, but are not limited to, failure to identify mineral resources, failure to convert estimated mineral resources to reserves, the inability to complete a feasibility study which recommends a production decision, the preliminary nature of metallurgical test results, delays in obtaining or failures to obtain required governmental, regulatory, environmental or other project approvals, political risks, inability to fulfill the duty to accommodate indigenous peoples, uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future, changes in equity markets, inflation, changes in exchange rates, fluctuations in commodity prices, delays in the development of projects, capital and operating costs varying significantly from estimates and the other risks involved in the mineral exploration and development industry, and those risks set out in Aurania's public documents filed on SEDAR. Although Aurania believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking information in this news release are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information, which only applies as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. Aurania disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by law. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43820 SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The global real-time payments market size is estimated to reach at USD 39.02billion by 2025 registering a CAGR of 29.3%, according to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc. Real-time payments are digital/electronic payments that allow the immediate transfer of funds in real time through a secured payment gateway. Growing e-commerce sector and adoption of smartphones coupled with the rising need for fast and convenient payment solutions in large and Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs), are anticipated to fuel the RTP market expansion. Key suggestions from the report: The Asia Pacific regional market accounted for the largest share in the past and is anticipated to witness the highest CAGR over the forecast period This growth can be attributed to the increasing number of new instant payment providers and government initiatives to promote digital payments Retail and consumer goods industry held the largest market share in the past and is expected to register the maximum CAGR during the forecast years This growth is mainly due to high demand for instant payment solutions from of large- and small-sized e-retailers and merchants Prominent companies in the market are Finastra; MasterCard, Inc.; Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (FIS Inc.); Fiserv, Inc.; ACI Worldwide, Inc.; and Visa, Inc. These companies focus more on M&A to enhance product and services portfolios and expand regional presence Read 101 page research report with TOC on "Real-Time Payments Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By End-use Industry, By Nature of Payment (P2B, B2B, P2P), By Enterprise Size (Large, SME), By Component, By Deployment, And Segment Forecasts, 2019 - 2025" at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/real-time-payments-market The real time payments infrastructure can significantly enhance the payments' stakeholders experience of disbursements and refunds - a frequent issue for merchants and consumers alike as card refunds generally take at least a few days to process and clear. Real-time payments solutions are being widely adopted across various industries, such as retail and e-commerce, BFSI, and IT & telecom, owing to their benefits in terms of speed, security, and transparency. Rising demand for advanced analytics for payment-related data from merchants and corporate users is also driving the market. Moreover, availability of advanced online payment systems, such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Samsung Pay, and rising adoption of such solutions by large e-commerce retailers are expected to lead the market growth over the forecast period. Additionally, favorable government initiatives about digital payments across emerging economies, such as India, and China, are estimated to create significant opportunities for market entrants. The Asia Pacific market is anticipated to witness a significant expansion over the forecast period due to increasing e-commerce sales and adoption of smartphones. Key companies in the market focus on M&A to enhance their product portfolios, expand geographical presence, and consumer base to deliver RTP solutions across various industries. For instance, in June 2016, MasterCard Inc. acquired VocaLink Holdings Ltd. (92.4% stakes) for a deal worth USD 920 million, which allowed MasterCard to strengthen its role in the U.K. payments ecosystem. However, growing cybersecurity concerns and lack of network interoperability among multiple payment-related schemes, such as Automated Clearing House (ACH) and Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), could hamper the market growth. Grand View Research has segmented the global real-time payments market on the basis of nature of payment, component, deployment, enterprise size, end-use industry, and region: RTP Nature of Payment Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025) P2B B2B P2P Others RTP Component Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025) Solutions Payment Gateway Payment Processing Security & Fraud Management Services Advisory Services Integration & Implementation Services Managed Services RTP Deployment Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025) On-Premises Cloud-Based RTP Enterprise Size Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025) Large Enterprises Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) RTP End-use Industry Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025) Retail & E-Commerce BFSI IT & Telecom Travel & Tourism Healthcare Government Energy & Utilities Others RTP Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025) North America U.S. Canada Mexico Europe U.K. Sweden Denmark Switzerland Asia Pacific China India Japan Singapore South America Brazil Argentina MEA ( Middle East & Africa ) Find more research reports on Next Generation Technologies Industry, by Grand View Research: Global E-Book Market - Global e-book market is expected to witness growth owing to increasing reach and convenience offered and is gradually expected to replace traditional reading methods. The printed book market is expected to lose market share, due to digitization of books and its accessibility over the internet. Global e-book market is expected to witness growth owing to increasing reach and convenience offered and is gradually expected to replace traditional reading methods. The printed book market is expected to lose market share, due to digitization of books and its accessibility over the internet. Hydrographic Equipment Market - Hydrographic survey is a process used to measure and describe the physical features of the navigable earth's surface such as oceans, lakes and rivers. The equipments used in such surveys are known as hydrographic equipments. Hydrographic technology earlier consisted of hardware setup to connect with the satellites for receiving information. Hydrographic survey is a process used to measure and describe the physical features of the navigable earth's surface such as oceans, lakes and rivers. The equipments used in such surveys are known as hydrographic equipments. Hydrographic technology earlier consisted of hardware setup to connect with the satellites for receiving information. Managed Services Market - Outsourcing day-to-day management functions from a third party are known as managed services. Technological proliferation and advancement of cloud based technology has mainly led to the development of managed services (MS). Gain access to Grand View Compass, our BI enabled intuitive market research database of 10,000+ reports About Grand View Research Grand View Research, U.S.-based market research and consulting company, provides syndicated as well as customized research reports and consulting services. Registered in California and headquartered in San Francisco, the company comprises over 425 analysts and consultants, adding more than 1200 market research reports to its vast database each year. These reports offer in-depth analysis on 46 industries across 25 major countries worldwide. With the help of an interactive market intelligence platform, Grand View Research helps Fortune 500 companies and renowned academic institutes understand the global and regional business environment and gauge the opportunities that lie ahead. Contact: Sherry James Corporate Sales Specialist, USA Grand View Research, Inc. Phone: +1-415-349-0058 Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519 Email: sales@grandviewresearch.com Web: https://www.grandviewresearch.com Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / First Mining Gold Corp. ("First Mining" or the "Company") (TSX: FF) (OTCQX: FFMGF) (FRANKFURT: FMG) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mal Karwowska as the Company's Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations, effective April 1, 2019. Ms. Karwowska has over 10 years of experience in the mining sector, predominantly in corporate finance and principal investing. Most recently, she was an Investment Manager at Pacific Road Capital Management, a mining-focused private equity investment firm with approximately $800 million under management. Mal's prior roles include Business Development Director at Oxygen Capital Corp., where she worked closely with the management team on the sale of True Gold Mining Inc. to Endeavour Mining Corporation in the spring of 2016, and Senior Investment Research Analyst at Boston-based Liberty Metals & Mining Holdings, LLC, a subsidiary of Liberty Mutual Insurance. Ms. Karwowska began her career in the mining sector at National Bank Financial where she spent over five years as a member of the investment banking team, specializing in metals and mining. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Finance and Accounting from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. "We are delighted to have Mal join the First Mining team" said Dan Wilton, Chief Executive Officer. "She brings an exceptional background and perspective as both a corporate financier and as an investor to the Corporate Development and Investor Relations role at the Company, and we look forward to her contributions." Filing of Technical Report for Updated Goldlund Resource Estimate and the Company's Year-End Filings Further to the Company's news release dated March 27, 2019, the Company is pleased to announce that it has filed on SEDAR (under First Mining's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com ) an independent technical report titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimation Update, Goldlund Gold Project, Sioux Lookout, ON" in respect of the updated mineral resource estimate for the Company's Goldlund gold project. The report was prepared by Todd McCracken, P.Geo, Manager - Mining of WSP Canada Inc. in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"). First Mining has also filed on SEDAR its audited financial statements, management's discussion and analysis and annual information form for the financial year ended December 31, 2018. In addition, concurrently with the annual Canadian filings set out above, the Company has filed its annual report on Form 40-F with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). The Form 40-F incorporates by reference the above annual Canadian filings of First Mining, and is available on the SEC's website, EDGAR, at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml . All the above noted filings are also available on First Mining's website at www.firstmininggold.com , and printed copies of the filings are available free of charge to First Mining shareholders upon written request. About First Mining Gold Corp. First Mining Gold Corp. is an emerging development company with a diversified portfolio of gold projects in North America. Having assembled a large resource base of 7.3 million ounces of gold in the Measured and Indicated categories and 3.6 million ounces of gold in the Inferred category in mining friendly jurisdictions of eastern Canada, First Mining is now focused on advancing its assets towards production. The Company currently holds a portfolio of 24 mineral assets in Canada, Mexico and the United States. ON BEHALF OF FIRST MINING GOLD CORP. Daniel W. Wilton Chief Executive Officer and Director For further information, please contact: Mal Karwowska | Vice President, Corporate Development & Investor Relations Direct: 604.639.8824 | Toll Free: 1.844.306.8827 | Email: info@firstmininggold.com www.firstmininggold.com Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "plans", "projects", "intends", "estimates", "envisages", "potential", "possible", "strategy", "goals", "objectives", or variations thereof or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative of any of these terms and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements in this news release relate to future events or future performance and reflect current estimates, predictions, expectations or beliefs regarding future events and include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to: (i) the Company's focus on advancing its assets towards production;and (ii) realizing the value of the Company's gold projects for the Company's shareholders. All forward-looking statements are based on First Mining's or its consultants' current beliefs as well as various assumptions made by them and information currently available to them. 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. Forward-looking statements reflect the beliefs, opinions and projections on the date the statements are made and are based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the respective parties, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors, both known and unknown, could cause actual 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 and the parties have made assumptions and estimates based on or related to many of these factors. Such factors include, without limitation; fluctuations in the spot and forward price of gold, silver, base metals or certain other commodities; fluctuations in the currency markets (such as the Canadian dollar versus the U.S. dollar); changes in national and local government, legislation, taxation, controls, regulations and political or economic developments; risks and hazards associated with the business of mineral exploration, development and mining (including environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected formations, pressures, cave-ins and flooding); the presence of laws and regulations that may impose restrictions on mining; employee relations; relationships with and claims by local communities, indigenous populations and other stakeholders; availability and increasing costs associated with mining inputs and labour; the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development; title to properties.; and the additional risks described in the Company's Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2018 filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com, and in the Company's Annual Report on Form 40-F filed with the SEC on EDGAR. First Mining cautions that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. When relying on our forward-looking statements to make decisions with respect to First Mining, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. First Mining does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time by the Company or on our behalf, except as required by law. Cautionary Note to United States Investors This news release has been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the securities laws in effect in Canada, which differ from the requirements of U.S. securities laws. Unless otherwise indicated, all resource and reserve estimates included in this news release have been prepared in accordance with NI 43-101 and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum 2014 Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves. NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators which establishes standards for all public disclosure an issuer makes of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects. Canadian standards, including NI 43-101, differ significantly from the requirements of the SEC, and mineral resource and reserve information contained herein may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. In particular, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the term "resource" does not equate to the term "reserves". Under U.S. standards, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. The SEC's disclosure standards normally do not permit the inclusion of information concerning "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" or "inferred mineral resources" or other descriptions of the amount of mineralization in mineral deposits that do not constitute "reserves" by U.S. standards in documents filed with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted into reserves. U.S. investors should also understand that "inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimated "inferred mineral resources" may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies except in rare cases. Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" exists or is economically or legally mineable. Disclosure of "contained ounces" in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves" by SEC standards as in-place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures. The requirements of NI 43-101 for identification of "reserves" are also not the same as those of the SEC, and reserves reported by the Company in compliance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves" under SEC standards. Accordingly, information concerning mineral deposits set forth herein may not be comparable with information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards. SOURCE: First Mining Gold Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540761/First-Mining-Announces-Appointment-of-Vice-President-Corporate-Development-and-Investor-Relations HYDERABAD, India, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --In the USD 250 billion market Intelligence and consulting industry, syndicate reports have been produced traditionally using manual work done by Analysts. Market data is typically sourced from sources such as annual reports, paid databases, investor presentations and so on, which is further validated through primary interviews from executives across functions such as Operations, marketing, business development and strategy in different companies. This process leads to extended timeline in producing data and thus limits the amount of reports a publisher can provide as well as create a data availability gap, especially for clients need data immediately. Manual process of gathering and analyzing data also leads to higher price points for the published reports. Considering these pain points for clients, a team of subject matter experts with a cumulative experience of more than 40 years and data scientists worked for the past 3 years at BYOR to provide a solution to resolve the same. As a fruit of our efforts, the team is proud to announce our flagship product "BYOR - World's First AI and ML based Market research platform". According to Mr. Chaitanya, Project Head for BYOR, the platform can deliver reports at 2x speed to clients at 70% lower cost on average and also with an improved 5x data accuracy rate compared to traditional report production models. You can reach out to sales@byor.ai for any enquiries on reports and visit www.byor.ai to build your own report today. BYOR or Build Your Own Report is an online platform which provides highly customized reports to clients on their markets of choice, using an online report-builder tool. Clients get tons of options to select the exact market scope - product types, technology, applications, end-use verticals, competitors of interest and so on. According to Mr. Sanjay, CEO and Co-Founder "We also provide market data for 1 Million+ datasets across 100+ countries, which remains unparalleled among any global market research publishers. All of our datasets are prepared based on data aggregated from millions of public and private sources using proprietary ML and AI algorithms for enhanced levels of accuracy and turnaround times." Some of the Key Features provided uniquely with BYOR to prospective clients: Instant selection from 1 Million+ titles Endless customization by choosing only segments of interest Datasets available for all markets across 100+ countries Data Delivery Options: Excel and/or PPT In-depth Competitor Analysis. Fastest turnaround time - 4 to 48 hours Delivery Unbelievably low price points - Starting from just $500 Highest levels of data accuracy 100% Refund Policy if not satisfied with data quality Accuracy built into the DNA of the Platform Each data point in a market is cross-checked with a specific market model and internal databases vetted by our industry experts. BYOR also ensures that the error margins and standard deviations from multiple sources are compared efficiently to give the best-fit data in a report. The algorithms built for the platform constantly search for new information from public records such as Annual reports, SEC Filings, Investor presentations, company articles, 5000+ news feeds and more, as well as private databases such as Factiva, Hoovers, One Source and our own internal database developed in the past 5 years. The BYOR platform architecture has been developed from ground-up to ensure the highest accuracy levels by processing more than a billion data points on a daily basis. Fastest Delivery Times Among Peers BYOR report and data delivery times are best compared to traditional publishers with 2x to 5x comparative performance. Traditional publishers can typically take 2 to 4 weeks' time to deliver the same amount of data as per our research done with clients. Delivery timeline for any report varies between 4 to 48 hours in the chosen format of the client depending upon amount of data requested, number of scope segmentations and priority level of the order. Once an order is received, the BYOR platform automatically dispatches a fresh data pull request on the report to the Central Data Engine (CDE) with the selected parameters. All new data extracted will be cleaned, compared to earlier PASS versions and then further validated by our analysts to ensure the final version sent to client is devoid of any technical, grammatical errors and data accuracy is not compromised at any level. Lowest Price Points to Enable Multiple Datasets Access Any product or service is charged based on the time, efforts spent on it along with other fixed costs. Due to usage of ML and AI, we could notice a significant reduction of our costs by automating 80% of the report production process and hence BYOR gladly passes on the cost savings to the clients. Quality Data Promise While ML and AI are technologies being used to provide accurate data at a faster turnaround with a low price point - the foundational focus of BYOR remains "Quality Data". The entire team at BYOR takes this core vision very seriously and have multiple checks before data is delivered to clients. Multiple iterations are done for each data model for a market to train the algorithm and also reduce the error rates or error margins, in order to promise a best-in class report to clients. This is the reason why BYOR confidently offers a 100% refund - no questions asked, which is an unheard of gesture and policy in the market intelligence industry. About BYOR: BYOR is an online platform which provides custom reports to clients on their markets of choice, based on data from millions of public and private sources using proprietary ML and AI algorithms for enhanced levels of accuracy and turnaround times. For more details write to sales@byor.ai Contact: Mr. Chaitanya Project Head, Client Relations Manager sales@byor.ai www.byor.ai +1-302-261-5343 Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/845255/BYOR_Logo.jpg The Extraordinary General Meeting of Solidium Oy was held in Helsinki on 2 April 2019. The Extraordinary General Meeting resolved that Solidium will transfer shares in Kemira, Nokia and Sampo (A-shares) worth EUR 80 million in total as capital repayment to the State of Finland. The State of Finland will transfer the shares further to Oppiva Invest Oy, which acts under the Finnish National Agency for Education in order to execute projects within vocational education and training. Consequently, Solidium's holding in Kemira will decrease from 14.9 per cent to 14.0 per cent, in Nokia from 3.66 per cent to 3.54 per cent and in Sampo from 10.09 per cent to 9.95 per cent The strategy? I think at the end of the day, its really going to come down to Preckwinkle closing the gap, and her organization has to be strong in two areas: One is the north part of the city where Lori Lightfoot did very well in the first-round election. I dont know that theyll switch from Lightfoot but this is a high voter turnout area, and with undecided voters, she (Preckwinkle) wants to try and get them to her camp. Theyre both going to have to excite and turn out the West Side wards that Willie Wilson won, he said. Global Investment Bank Streamlines IT Operations and Shortens Application Development Time To Impact, Supporting Thousands of Users Alfresco Software, a commercial, open source software company, today announced that RBC Capital Markets, part of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), selected Alfresco's Digital Business Platform to provide process and content services across the company. Additionally, RBC Capital Markets uses the Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF) to rapidly develop solutions using reusable pre- or custom-built components. RBC Capital Markets is a top-ten global investment bank with in-depth expertise in capital markets, banking, and finance. RBC Capital Markets has some 14,700 clients in 112 countries and more than $8 billion in revenues. According to James 'Jim' Williams, Managing Director, Head of Operations and Shared Services Technology at RBC Capital Markets, "Many of our existing applications and platforms are difficult to maintain and modernize. The Alfresco Digital Business Platform helps us modernize content and document rich applications because it understands the details behind a document, not just the fact that it exists." Williams noted: "A critical need was support for legally-mandated post-trade activities, including the process-intensive workflows required to comply with tax regulations." Further, with more than 100 custom applications, RBC Capital Markets needed to streamline legacy systems and migrate outdated business process management (BPM) software that lacked rich document management capabilities. RBC Capital Markets required a platform that integrated both process and content capabilities, as well as one that provided support for accelerated application development leveraging DevOps to support continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and cloud deployment. Designed to meet the demands of RBC Capital Markets' growing business, Alfresco now serves as the basis for 14 critical applications supporting the needs of 3,500 business users, or 50 percent of the workforce. Alfresco-powered solutions are now supporting numerous business-critical functions for RBC Capital Markets, including: Tax Operations, Regulatory Compliance, Regulatory Request Management, Job Attestation Monitoring, Equity Trade Confirmations, Payment Allocations, Risk Limit Management, and Resource Onboarding. Another benefit of the Alfresco Platform at RBC Capital Markets has been the ability to keep pace with a rapidly growing business. "We can now meet our business requirements with a much faster turnaround," noted Ruchi Saraswat, Director, Global Head of Tax Operations. By using the Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF) to accelerate solution development, IT can build applications rapidly and iteratively using reusable pre or custom-built components. "It's like using building blocks, where we build all the modules and put them together," Saraswat explains. "Reusable components really help our team enormously." She also credits Alfresco's Customer Success team with helping RBC Capital Markets get up to speed quickly. "We can easily take on new challenges because we know we've got Alfresco backing us up." With Alfresco process automation, content management and development tools, RBC Capital Markets has increased operational efficiency, tightened internal controls, and strengthened regulatory compliance. Common user experiences across the company have increased adoption and streamlined work, while the flexible and future-proof Alfresco platform enables RBC Capital Markets to adapt to dynamic markets by building new solutions as needed and deploying quickly using the latest DevOps tools, including Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Maven, Jenkins, and Git. Alfresco CEO Bernadette Nixon observed: "The RBC Capital Markets implementation is a perfect example of how organizations can leverage process, content and rapid application development for business advantage. The stable, scalable and supportable applications built on Alfresco have generated significant interest across various business units within RBC, and the firm is evaluating several future applications to be built on the now-standardized Alfresco platform. We are thrilled with the success that RBC has achieved with Alfresco, and we applaud their approach to innovation and modernization." About Alfresco Alfresco Software, Inc. ("Alfresco") is a commercial, open source software company focused on the enterprise. The company provides a better, more effortless way for people to work, making sure they have the information they need, exactly when they need it most. The Alfresco Digital Business Platform accelerates the design and delivery of 'cloud-first' solutions for the enterprise that are process and content intensive. It is a single, integrated platform built from the ground up by Alfresco and used to digitize processes, manage content and securely govern information. Alfresco helps more than 1,300 industry-leading organizations, including Cisco, Pitney Bowes, Capital One, US Department of Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NASA, be more responsive and competitive. Founded in 2005, Alfresco has its U.S. headquarters in San Mateo, California, and European headquarters in Maidenhead, UK. For more information on Alfresco, please visit http://www.alfresco.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005396/en/ Contacts: Sara Black 213.618.1501 Sara@bospar.com Ottawa, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. (TSXV: CMI), the world's leading provider of commercial grade auto-acquire mobile satellite antennas, announced today its first successful integration with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite tracking capabilities. The test was completed with the C-COM iNetVu FLY-981 Ku-band antenna and with Kepler Communications' first in orbit LEO satellites, KIPP and CASE. Kepler is a pioneering nano-satellite telecommunications company based in Toronto. During the store & forward tests, C-COM's FLY-981 antenna successfully acquired signal to Kepler's nanosats and achieved data transfer speeds of more than 100Mbps down and 30Mbps up. iNetVu Flyaway Antenna System FLY-981 To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5445/43635_0657c38ab44c8af9_005full.jpg Shortly thereafter, the same data was downloaded to Kepler's teleport in Inuvik, Canada. This uniquely successful test completes a significant development project between the two companies. C-COM's engineering team developed the necessary tracking algorithms to work with the already globally renowned iNetVu 7000 series controllers, and Kepler provided access to their powerful LEO satellite constellation and assisted with daily testing. The iNetVu FLY-981 is C-COM's 98cm, fully automatic and motorized Ku-band flyaway product. This antenna system is a highly portable terminal of choice for various industries such as Oil & Gas Exploration, Emergency Response, Military Communications, Cellular Backhaul, Satellite News Gathering, and many other vertical markets. "For C-COM, this test with Kepler Communications LEO nano-satellites opens up new developing markets for our extensive worldwide reseller base," said Leslie Klein, President and CEO of C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. "The store and forward data delivery services offered by Kepler's LEO constellation using our iNetVu mobile antenna system's Low Earth Orbit option, will provide customers with a unique, cost-effective large data transfer capability," Klein continued. "For Kepler, the addition of the C-COM FLY-981 as an approved satellite antenna solution expands the potential user base beyond maritime applications, to land-based mobile/transportable applications such as natural resource exploration and extraction, remote research bases, disaster management, defense, and many other vertical markets requiring high-capacity connectivity where portability and reliability are key considerations," said Mina Mitry, CEO of Kepler Communications. C-COM offers classic and next generation Driveaway, Flyaway, Fixed Motorized, and Manpack systems (iNetVu) for any vertical market where communications are challenged due to disruption or deficiency. C-COM has more than 20 different Comm-on-the-Pause antenna models, integrated with all major modem manufacturers, approved with most major satellite operators, and is working closely with more than 500 active dealers in over 100 countries. More than 8,000 iNetVu systems have been sold since the brand's inception. Working with a renowned research team at the University of Waterloo, the Company is also developing an electronically steerable, Comm-on-the-Move Ka-band flat panel antenna system based on phased array technology with the potential to revolutionize satellite's addressable mobile markets for land, airborne and maritime. ABOUT C-COM SATELLITE SYSTEMS Inc. C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. is a pioneer and world leader in the design, development, and manufacture of mobile satellite-based antenna systems for the delivery of Broadband Internet to any location via Satellite. C-COM has developed a proprietary, one-button, auto-acquisition controller technology for rapid antenna pointing to a geostationary satellite with just the press of a button, enabling high-speed Internet connectivity where terrestrial markets are overloaded or simply don't exist. The company has sold approximately 8,000 systems to customers in over 100 countries providing service to a wide range of vertical markets such as Oil & Gas Exploration, Military Communications, Disaster Management, SNG, Emergency Communications, Cellular Backhaul, Telemedicine, Mobile Banking, and others. The Company's iNetVu brand is synonymous with high quality, reliability and cost-effectiveness. In partnership with a renowned research team at the University of Waterloo's Centre for Intelligent Antenna and Radio Systems (CIARS), C-COM has been developing a next generation Ka-band flat panel antenna based on advanced phased array technology for enabling high-throughput mobility applications over satellite: land, airborne and maritime. More information is available at: www.c-comsat.com iNetVu is a registered trademark of C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. ABOUT KEPLER COMMUNICATIONS: Kepler Communications is a satellite telecommunications provider based in Canada, backed by Costanoa Ventures, IA Ventures, and other leading investors. Kepler aims to build an in-space telecommunications network through an incremental deployment of products and technologies. For more information visit: www.kepler.space and @KeplerComms, or contact Kepler at info@kepler.space. Forward Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Statements about new technologies, the possible benefits of such technologies to end users and to C-COM and the potential for expanded sales and the potential impacts of new technology under development all contain forward-looking information. Several factors could cause actual events, performance or results to differ materially from the events, performance and results discussed in the forward-looking statements. New technologies under development may not perform as expected, anticipated benefits of the new technology may not be realized, and new products and services may not be released or, if released may not gain market acceptance. Any of those events and others could influence future performance and C-COM's ability to achieve the results mentioned above. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and C-COM does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. # # # 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. INVESTOR RELATIONS C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. Tel: (613) 745-4110 ext. 4950 Fax: (613) 745-7144 lklein@c-comsat.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43635 Salt Lake City, Utah--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - 6th Wave Innovations Corp., Salt Lake City, Utah (USA) and CyPlus GmbH, Hanau-Wolfgang (Germany) have signed a sales and marketing representative agreement for IXOS nanotech gold extraction resin for the mining industry. CyPlus is dedicated to bringing sustainable innovations beyond cyanides to the mining industry and has identified IXOS as a premiere product after a global search for technologies meeting strict performance criteria. The Company will represent 6th Wave in Europe, Mexico, Turkey and Egypt. "6th Wave's technology has tremendous potential," said Dr. Jurgen Steiger, CyPlus Head of Product Line Solution Provider. "We are very glad to support 6th Wave by introducing this game-changing product to our global gold mining customers." Sherman McGill, President of 6th Wave, noted that, "It is a great honor to enter into a representative agreement with CyPlus whose international renown and exposure will greatly enhance product acceptance." CyPlus is a regional leader in cyanides with strong technology services and is gearing towards positioning as innovative solution provider. 6th Wave estimates that its molecularly imprinted polymer IXOS resin can increase gold mining profits by approximately $100 per ounce in process savings and extra gold recovered in direct comparison and as a replacement for activated carbon, the most widely used extraction medium today. Each patented IXOS bead is imprinted at the molecular level to attract gold and ignore the other elements leached off in mining operations. IXOS also requires fewer chemicals, reduces waste, has no toxic emissions, and uses less power - making it a "greener" technology. The resin is supplied ready-to-use, with a range of particle sizes available to accommodate heap leach and resin-in-leach/pulp circuits. IXOS has consistently and thoroughly outperformed activated carbon and conventional ion-exchange resins in laboratory and field trials conducted over the past three years including testing by CyPlus. The trials were done in conjunction with some of the world's largest gold mining companies under a wide variety of conditions. Sherman McGill: "Working directly with gold miners has allowed us to field-test the IXOS beads in harsh conditions that are impossible to synthesize. We have clearly demonstrated that the beads are predictable and consistent and display all of the positive attributes we have seen in the lab. We are confident that IXOS will substantially increase our customers' profitability." 6th Wave has a pilot plant in operation at a major US gold producer and has pending projects with other mines and Canadian R&D entities. About 6th Wave Innovations Corp. 6th Wave Innovations Corp. is an extraction/detection/sequestration company using advanced technology to manufacture products that meet the highly specialized needs of its clients. 6th Wave will continue to develop products that positively impact shareholder value in the mining industry. It is currently developing other products for metal extraction and environmental remediation. Disclaimer This news release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based upon the current beliefs and expectations of 6th Wave's management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. If underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or risks or uncertainties materialize, actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. About CyPlus Value explorers: Sustainable innovations beyond cyanides. CyPlus is a regional leader in cyanides (NaCN and KCN) with strong technology services and is gearing towards positioning as innovative solution provider Our mission: We stand for safe and responsible handling of cyanides across their lifecycle from production, transport & handling to application and disposal. The Evonik subsidiary offerings encompass services for the entire cyanide life-cycle new solution offerings with focus on productivity increase of mines with the potential to disruptively innovate the gold leaching process. With approx. 100 employees worldwide, production sites in Europe and Mexico (CyPlus Idesa Joint Venture) as well as sales offices on all continents, we can ensure highest product quality, proximity to our customers and an optimum supply chain set up. About Evonik Evonik is one of the world leaders in specialty chemicals. The focus on more specialty businesses, customer-oriented innovative prowess and a trustful and performance-oriented corporate culture form the heart of Evonik's corporate strategy. They are the lever for profitable growth and a sustained increase in the value of the company. Evonik benefits specifically from its customer proximity and leading market positions. Evonik is active in over 100 countries around the world with more than 36,000 employees. In fiscal 2018, the enterprise generated sales of 15 billion and an operating profit (adjusted EBITDA) of 2.6 billion. Disclaimer In so far as forecasts or expectations are expressed in this press release or where our statements concern the future, these forecasts, expectations or statements may involve known or unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results or developments may vary, depending on changes in the operating environment. Neither Evonik Industries AG nor its group companies assume an obligation to update the forecasts, expectations or statements contained in this release. 6th Wave/CyPlus GmbH CyPlus GmbH Rodenbacher Chaussee 4 63457 Hanau Germany Phone +49-6181-59-2172 www.cyplus.com Contact: Sabine Hinkelbein Phone +49 6181 59-2172 sabine.hinkelbein@cyplus.com 6th Wave Innovations Corp. 615 Arapeen Drive, Suite 303 Salt Lake City, UT 84108 United States Phone +1-901-674-0282 www.6WIC.com Contact: Sherman McGill Phone +1-901-674-0282 smcgill@6wic.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43808 Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - ZEN Graphene Solutions Ltd. (TSXV: ZEN) ("ZEN" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that Dr. Francis Dube will take over the role of Chief Executive Officer. The Company also announces the resignation of Mr. Donald Bubar as Co-Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors. Mr. Bubar will continue to support the Company as a member of ZEN's Advisory Board. Mr. Greg Fenton, Director, comments: "We are pleased to have Dr. Francis Dube take on the role of CEO. Francis has been instrumental in the creation and implementation of the new vision for the Company with the focus on the development of graphene enhanced applications and as a large scale industry supplier of graphene. He has the full support of the Board of Directors and management team to continue leading the company as Chief Executive Officer. We look forward to his continued leadership as we move the company forward." The Board of Directors would like to thank Mr. Bubar for his leadership during the Company's transition period and look forward to his continued contributions as a member of the Advisory Board. We wish him continued success in his role as President and CEO at Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. ZEN is also pleased to announce that it has retained Integral Wealth Securities Limited ("Integral") to provide Market-Making services in accordance with TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") policies. Integral will trade securities of ZEN on the TSXV for the purposes of maintaining an orderly market of the Company's securities. In consideration of the services provided by Integral, the Company will pay Integral a monthly cash fee. Integral will not receive shares or options as compensation. However, Integral and its clients may have or may acquire a direct interest in the securities of the Company. ZEN and Integral are unrelated and unaffiliated entities; Integral is a member of the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada ("IIROC") and can access all Canadian Stock Exchange and Alternative Trading Systems. About ZEN Graphene Solutions Ltd. ZEN Graphene Solutions Ltd. is an emerging graphene technology company with a focus on development of the unique Albany Graphite Project. This precursor graphene material provides the company with a competitive advantage in the potential graphene market as independent labs in Japan, UK, Israel, USA and Canada have demonstrated that ZEN's Albany Graphite/Naturally PureTM easily converts (exfoliates) to graphene, using a variety of simple mechanical and chemical methods. About Integral Wealth Securities Limited. Established in 2003, Integral Wealth Securities Limited is a private, independent, IIROC-licensed investment dealer headquartered in Toronto. The firm operates from seven offices, including Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa. The firm's capital markets group, Integral Capital Markets, has established capabilities in market making, energy banking and private capital solutions. Integral's private client group is comprised of experienced advisors who provide sophisticated wealth management solutions to affluent individuals and families. For further information: Francis Dube, Chief Executive Officer Tel: +1 (289) 821-2820 Email: drfdube@zengraphene.com To find out more on ZEN Graphene Solutions Ltd., please visit our website at www.ZENGraphene.com . A copy of this news release and all material documents in respect of the Company may be obtained on ZEN's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.ca. Forward Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements. This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements", which often, but not always, can be identified by the use of words such as "potential", "believes", "anticipates", "expects", "estimates", "may", "could", "would", "will", or "plan". These statements are based on information currently available to ZEN and ZEN provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them 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. Although ZEN believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking information in this news release are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information, which only applies as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. ZEN disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by law. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The Company's full disclosure can be found at https://www.zengraphene.com/disclaimer/ To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43826 PALM BEACH, Florida, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- A recent research article questions just how big the Canadian legal market cannabis market will be, but like most others it really means just how large it could be! The report stated: "On October 17, 2018, Canada became the first G7 nation to fully legalize recreational cannabis. As a massive, formerly black market transforms into an above-board one, companies from around the globe in a range of disparate industries-agriculture, yes, but also tobacco, beer, software, and even fashion and design-aim to cash in. But no one knows exactly how large this market will be. Both immediately and in the coming years, attitudes about marijuana in Canada inevitably will change. Meanwhile, the unknowns are impacting everything from share prices to government policies. As jurisdictions in the U.S. and around the world ponder changing their own cannabis laws, they're watching to see how the numbers shake down in Canada. According to Stastics Canada, 4.9 million Canadians used cannabis in 2017, spending $5.7 billion Canadian dollars on pot, 90% of that on the illegal market. For context, Canada has a population of 37.1 million, which is about one-tenth of that of the U.S. It's actually close in size, population wise, to California, which has 39.7 million residents. Active companies in the industry making moves to ready that include: IONIC Brands Corp., (CSE: IONC), SLANG Worldwide Inc. (CSE: SLNG) (OTC: SLGWF), Aurora Cannabis Inc. (NYSE: ACB) (TSX: ACB.TO), Canopy Growth Corporation (NYSE: CGC) (TSX: WEED: TO), Newstrike Brands Ltd. (OTC: NWKRF) (TSX-V: HIP.V). In the wake of full legalization, estimates of the market's potential vary. The Canadian bank CIBC predicts the market will grow to $6.8 billion CAD by 2020. Provincial governments, it speculates, will take in $3 billion CAD in earned profits and taxes." The article revealed that: "Most researchers round up by a third when estimating true cannabis use, and even this method may be overly conservative. IONIC Brands Corp., (CSE: IONC) BREAKING NEWS: IONIC Brands announces the commencement of trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) under the trading symbol IONC. IONIC BRANDS is led by a team of successful entrepreneurs, that are dedicated to building a multi-state, consumer focused portfolio of luxury cannabis brands. IONIC BRANDS's flagship asset is their #1 vaporizer pen brand in Washington State under the branded name "Ionic". The Company's initial focus was to dominate the most competitive state in the US and focus on building a premium brand within the cannabis concentrate products segment of the market, currently the fastest growing segment of the legal marijuana industry. The Ionic vaporizer pen is currently the top producer of concentrates in Washington State and has experienced year over year growth. IONIC BRANDS is taking their team, proprietary techniques and blueprint for dominating marketplace, as evidenced in Washington State and is aggressively expanding via entrances into new markets (Oregon and California) and accretive acquisitions as outlined below. IONIC BRANDS's strategy is to be the leader of the highest-value segments of the supply chain in the west coast markets and expand eastwards via acquisitions. Highlights of IONIC BRANDS - Premium luxury portfolio of cannabis concentrate products: Established in 2015, IONIC BRANDS is an industry leader building a multi-state consumer-focused Brand portfolio consisting of award-winning premium and luxury brands in the concentrates space, the fastest growing segment of the legal marijuana industry. IONIC BRANDS has proven the ability to expand and operate multiple brands in multiple markets across the western United States, including California, Washington and Oregon. Scaling Nationally and Integrated Operations: In 2018, IONIC BRANDS expanded their vaporizer pen business into Oregon and California. Continuing to deliver on our pillars of Quality, Responsibility and Respectability. The IONIC BRANDS strategy is to own the highest-value segments of the supply chain in the west coast markets and expand eastwards via acquisitions: Further discussed below, the Company most recently adding the desirable Nevada market with a binding letter of intent ("LOI") to acquire of Vegas Valley Growers ("VVG"). In Washington State, the Company will acquire a 140-acre cannabis farm located in Eastern Washington to cultivate input material for extraction. In 2019, the Company will deploy an aggressive national expansion strategy into new geographic markets and new product segments Disruptive entry into the cannabis-edibles and cannabis-infused beverage market via strategic acquisitions: Further discussed below, the Company entered into a binding LOI to acquire Zoots, a premium cannabis edibles company, and also acquired two of the very first cannabis-infused coffee patents granted by United States Patent and Trademark office from Canna Cafe. Together with Zoots and the coffee patents, Company will use its premium production touches and synergistically utilizing the IONIC brand name to disrupt the highly sought after cannabis-infused beverage market, valued at over $4 billion in Canada and the United States by 2022, according to a report by marijuan market research company The Arcview Group . Cowen and Company recently released a report in which it pinpoints Starbucks as the likely first major chain that will market products featuring cannabinoids (CBD). IONIC BRANDS plans on adding domain expertise and engaging various consultants to explore how to best monetize owning these critical patents.Read this entire announcement for IONC at:https://www.financialnewsmedia.com/news-ionc/ Additional industry related developments from around the markets: SLANG Worldwide Inc. (CSE: SLNG) (OTCPK: SLGWF) recently announced that co-founders Peter Miller and Billy Levy have been honored as High Times 100 Most Influential People in Cannabis for 2019 for their leadership in the cannabis industry. High Times 100 is recognized as the highest honor for a cannabis executive or entrepreneur. In 2012, SLANG Worldwide co-founders Peter Miller (CEO) and Billy Levy (President) co-founded Mettrum Health Corp, a leading Canadian licensed producer that was acquired by Canopy Growth in 2016. An experienced entrepreneur with a decade of leadership in cannabis and a track record in agriculture, operations, tech, and clean energy, Peter is also the Chairman of the Canadian licensed producer Agripharm. Billy's visionary leadership in consumer tech and marketing has resulted in a number of start-ups including Virgin Gaming (acquired by Cineplex Media 2015) and Virgin Mega (acquired by NIKE June 2016 ) with Sir Richard Branson . Aurora Cannabis Inc. (NYSE: ACB) (TSX: ACB.TO) recently that the Company and its wholly-owned subsidiary CanniMed Therapeutics, have added product information numbers (PINs) to 78 medical cannabis products to better facilitate and track insurance coverage for their Canadian patients. The products that received PINs include dried flower, capsules, soft gels, topicals and oils. PINs help employers and insurance companies classify and incorporate health care products into benefit coverage plans. Patients submitting claims to their third-party insurer can now identify specific products and thereby speed up the adjudication and medical coverage process. MedReleaf, another wholly-owned subsidiary of Aurora, introduced PINs to 57 medical cannabis products in 2018. Canopy Growth Corporation (NYSE: CGC) (TSX: WEED: TO) recently welcomed Houseplant, a new brand of Canadian cannabis, to the Canopy Growth family today. Founded by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg , Houseplant represents years of product expertise and an unmatched attention to detail within each strain that has been carefully selected and grown. Commitment to cannabis quality begins with selecting the best genetics and doesn't stop until the customer opens the jar. Canopy Growth has witnessed how carefully Houseplant has chosen each component of their offering to deliver the highest quality product to Canadians. Newstrike Brands Ltd. (OTCPK: NWKRF) (TSX-V: HIP.V) recently announced that it is making a US$5 million investment in Green Tank Technologies ("Green Tank"), one of North America's premiere manufacturers of cannabis vape hardware and technology. The investment by Newstrike strengthens the existing partnership between Newstrike's wholly-owned subsidiary, Up Cannabis, and Green Tank, as both companies prepare for the legalization of cannabis oil vaping. "In anticipation of revised cannabis regulations coming into force in late 2019, we are gearing up for the commercial launch of our full line of cannabis vape products. DISCLAIMER: FN Media Group LLC (FNM), which owns and operates FinancialNewsMedia.com and MarketNewsUpdates.com, is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. FNM and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. FNM's market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. The material in this release is intended to be strictly informational and is NEVER to be construed or interpreted as research material. 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Media Contact email: editor@financialnewsmedia.com +1(561)325-8757 BestCrypt Volume Encryption Now for Both Windows and Mac Jetico, long-trusted pioneer in data protection, has announced the release of its Mac drive encryption software. Expanding on many years of Windows support, BestCrypt Volume Encryption is now the world's only independent software for Mac disk encryption of all native volumes, that is separate from operating systems and built without backdoors. "BestCrypt users gain an added layer of security by segmenting data encryption from the hardware and operating system provider," explains Jetico CEO, Michael Waksman. "At Jetico, we are proud to serve Mac users looking for an independent alternative to Apple's own FileVault to encrypt hard drives." BestCrypt offers an ideal encryption solution for offices with mixed OS environments and for individuals using both Windows and macOS. When considering how to encrypt an external hard drive, Mac and Windows must both be supported to securely and reliably access private data. Whichever operating system is used, BestCrypt will seamlessly care for customer data protection. Mr. Waksman adds, "many users switch between Windows and Mac computers. For our customers, this is a long-awaited relief to continue using BestCrypt the preferred independent encryption software without backdoors." FEATURES BENEFITS IN BESTCRYPT VOLUME ENCRYPTION FOR MAC Superior whole disk encryption for macOS Encrypt Mac hard drive, as well as your removable storage (USB) Support for most common types of native Mac volumes (APFS, Core Storage), including on Fusion Drives Protect access to data with pre-boot authentication Save time by encrypting multiple volumes simultaneously Rescue functions to decrypt volumes in case of emergency Strong encryption algorithms (AES, Serpent, Twofish) with largest possible key size most secure XTS encryption mode Transparent and easy operation BestCrypt Volume Encryption does not interrupt your natural workflow Continue using your computer during initial encryption process or pause to resume later Intuitive GUI for any level user Fast encryption process Compatible with BestCrypt Volume Encryption for Windows Create encrypted USB drives to use on Macs Windows PCs Share encrypted files across both Windows Mac Cross-platform compatibility ensures full protection during entire data transfer cycle; seamless file sharing with Windows is not possible using FileVault At the time of this release, if a Mac has a T2 security chip installed, encryption will not operate because Apple policy prevents third-party boot modules from loading. Mac computers produced before mid-2018 will run encryption operations normally. For over 20 years, Jetico proudly serves customers with BestCrypt data encryption software, a reliable alternative to native OS encryption. BestCrypt delivers compliance with regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR, as well as privacy for personal data at home. On both fixed and removable storage, data on lost computer hardware is safe with BestCrypt. About Jetico Jetico provides pure and simple data protection software for National Security, Compliance and Personal Privacy. Trusted for over 10 years by the U.S. Department of Defense, Jetico's BCWipe can wipe selected files beyond forensic recovery such as in response to classified data spills, while BCWipe Total WipeOut can erase hard drive data entirely such as for disposal or decommission. To protect stored data, Jetico's BestCrypt delivers compliant data encryption software for whole disks, virtual drives and selected files or folders. Jetico Enterprise Editions include central management for client software control. Jetico products are trusted by government and military agencies, all of the top 10 U.S. defense contractors, many national laboratories, as well as various other enterprises and a wide global base of home and small business users in over 100 countries. Founded in 1995, Jetico is privately held and headquartered in the Otaniemi Science Park in Helsinki, Finland. For more information, please visit jetico.com. Apple, Mac, macOS and FileVault are registered trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005604/en/ Contacts: Michael Waksman Jetico Inc. Oy marketing@jetico.com Phone (U.S.): +1 202 742 2901 Phone (Europe): +358 9 2517 3030 BRUSSELS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Mars Petcare announced today that Paulo de Castro will join their global management team as the leader of the finance function. De Castro brings over 25 years of experience in finance, M&A, and business leadership. His background in consumer goods and services are a great fit for Mars Petcare, a business that provides for health care, nutrition and services for half of the world's pets. De Castro will join Mars Petcare in June from GrandVision, a $4B leader in optical retail with business in more than 40 countries, where he has been CFO since 2012. Prior to GrandVision, de Castro spent ten years with Unilever in a number of finance positions including personal assistant to Unilever Chairman, CFO for Canada, and CFO of the Unilever Supply Chain Company. "We are very excited to welcome Paulo to Mars Petcare," said Poul Weihrauch, Global President, Mars Petcare. "He brings a wealth of exceptional knowledge and experience, and along with his lifelong love of animals, I am confident he will help us advance our purpose of creating: A Better World for Pets." "I'm delighted to be joining Mars, a world-class company and a leader in animal health and nutrition, and I'm looking forward to helping Mars Petcare grow the business around the world," said de Castro. "Paulo will play a leading role in the continued successful value creation strategy for Mars Petcare and I am excited to have Paolo contribute to the Mars, Incorporated financial strategy. We are pleased to be building our capabilities both from within and by adding new team members like Paulo," said Claus Aagaard, Chief Financial Officer of Mars, Incorporated. About Mars Petcare Part of Mars, Incorporated, a family-owned business with more than a century of history making diverse products and offering services for people and the pets people love, the 85,000 Associates in Mars Petcare are dedicated to one purpose: A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS. With 75 years of experience, our portfolio of almost 50 brands serves the health and nutrition needs of the world's pets - including brands PEDIGREE, WHISKAS, ROYAL CANIN, NUTRO, GREENIES, SHEBA, CESAR, IAMS and EUKANUBA as well as The WALTHAM Centre for Pet Nutrition which has advanced research in the nutrition and health of pets for over 50 years. Mars Petcare is also a leading veterinary health provider through a network of over 2,000 pet hospitals including BANFIELD, BLUEPEARL, PET PARTNERS, VCA, Linnaeus and AniCura. We're also active in innovation and technology for pets, with WISDOM PANEL genetic health screening and DNA testing for dogs, the WHISTLE GPS dog tracker, and LEAP VENTURE STUDIO accelerator and COMPANION FUND programs that drive innovation and disruption in the pet care industry. As a family business and guided by our principles, we are privileged with the flexibility to fight for what we believe in - and we choose to fight for: A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS. VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / Alchemist Mining Inc. (CSE: AMS) (the 'Company') is pleased to announce a non-brokered private placement (the 'Private Placement') of up to 48,000,000 units (the 'Units') at a price of $0.25 per Unit, for gross proceeds of up to $12,000,000. Each Unit will be comprised of four (4) common shares (each, a 'Share') and four (4) transferable common share purchase warrants (each, a 'Warrant'). Each Warrant will be exercisable for one additional Share at a price of $0.15 for a period of two years from the date of closing. The Private Placement is not subject to a minimum aggregate amount of subscriptions. As announced by the Company on March 20, 2019, the Company intends to complete a consolidation (the 'Consolidation') of its issued and outstanding common shares on a ratio (the 'Consolidation Ratio') of one (1) new post-consolidation share for every four (4) old pre-consolidation shares. Shares and Warrants subscribed for under the Private Placement prior to completion of the Consolidation will be consolidated in accordance with the Consolidation Ratio on completion of the Consolidation. The Company plans to allocate the net proceeds from the Private placement to general working capital, including towards completion of the Company's recently-announced agreements with Green Rush Consulting, Agua Technologies, Lady Chatterley's Health and Rubikon Blockchain Corp., and to the build out, deployment and operation of those assets. Assuming the entire $12,000,000 is raised, the Company intends to allocate approximately $6,000,000 towards development activities and the remaining $6,000,000 towards operational costs. A portion of the Private Placement may be completed in accordance with the exemption set out in BC Instrument 45-536 - Exemption from prospectus requirement for certain distributions through an investment dealer (the 'Investment Dealer Exemption'). The Company may pay finder's fees on a portion of the Private Placement in accordance with applicable securities laws and the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange (the 'Exchange'). In accordance with the requirements of the Investment Dealer Exemption, the Company confirms there is no material fact or material change related to the Company which has not been generally disclosed. The Private Placement is subject to the approval of the Exchange. The securities described herein have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the '1933 Act'), or under any state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold, directly or indirectly, or delivered within the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. persons (as defined in Regulation S under the 1933 Act) absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy such securities in the United States. Alchemist CEO, Paul Mann, stated: 'We have been working diligently over the last few months to establish our team of experts and roll out the first comprehensive, laterally integrated, technology platform for the cannabis sector in both the United States and Canada. We will continue to innovate, and our short term plan will see us adding more components to our supply chain with the sole aim of ensuring that administrative bodies, business partners and consumers are all confident that the products and companies on our platform are legally licensed, compliant in all areas and accountable for the quality of the products that they produce and sell.' On Behalf of the Board, Paul Mann, CEO Alchemist Mining Inc. ________________ For further information on this release, please contact: Sukh Sandhu Investor Relations Investors@alchemistinc.ca 604-601-2093 ______________ About Alchemist Inc. Upon effecting the Company's fundamental change, as announced on September 25, 2018, Alchemist's goal is to be a global provider of technology solutions to the cannabis sector. It will be primarily focused on investing and building a sustainable portfolio of business entities, by actively identifying opportunities in the developing global cannabis market, through a combination of acquisitions, incubations and investments, with a goal to create shareholder value. Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words 'anticipate', 'continue', 'estimate', 'expect', 'may', 'will', 'project', 'intends', 'should', 'believe' and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this press release include statements regarding: the proposed Private Placement; the intention to complete the Consolidation; the planned use of proceeds from the Private Placement; the potential payment of finders fees in connection with the Private Placement; the Company's plan to continue to innovate and add more components to its supply chain and ensure that administrative bodies, business partners and consumers are all confident that the products and companies on the Company's platform are legally licensed, compliant in all areas and accountable for the quality of the products that they produce and sell. 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, including: that the Private Placement will not complete; that the Consolidation will not complete; that proceeds from the Private Placement will not be used as planned; that the Company will not be able to execute its proposed business plan in the time required or at all due to regulatory, financial or other issues; that the Company's competitors may develop competing technologies; changes in regulatory requirements; and other factors beyond the Company's control. Additional risk factors are included in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis, available under the Company's profile on www.sedar.com . The forward-looking statements are made as at the date hereof and the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, where because of new information, future events or results, or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. SOURCE: Alchemist Mining Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540760/Alchemist-Announces-Non-Brokered-Private-Placement-of-Up-To-48000000-Units-at-a-Price-025-Per-Unit-for-Gross-Proceeds-of-Up-To-12-Million-Canadian-Dollars VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / NV Gold Corporation (TSXV: NVX; OTC PINK: NVGLF) ('NV Gold' or the 'Company') announces the staking and approximate doubling of its land position around its 100% controlled Frazier Dome Gold Project, located in the Tonopah Mining District, Nevada, and highlights its upcoming 2019 exploration program. Frazier Dome Gold Project Review and Fall 2018 Exploration Program Highlights: Gold occurs in silicified breccias adjacent to a Middle Miocene felsic dome, where Company surface samples grade up to 6.1 g/t Au over 3 m, and historical surface samples grade up to 14.7 g/t Au. High-grade gold also occurs in north-northwest-trending quartz veins, with Company surface samples grading up to 11.2 g/t Au, and a historical drill hole grading 7.5 g/t Au over 3 m. 2018 drilling (8 holes) yielded notable runs of detectable gold across altered and mineralized zones in FD-1: ~105 meters, FD-2: ~150 meters, and FD-5: ~135 meters. Re-surveying of hole FD-01 identified strong deviation of the drill hole, causing it to miss the priority target structure of the interpreted feeder zone beneath the identified rhyolite dome. 2018 drilling only tested 4 of 9 target areas, and only tested depths of 500 ft from the surface. Five of the eight widely-spaced holes delivered gold intersections greater than 0.10 g/t, and up to 1.035 g/t, pointing to what the Company believes could be a robust gold system at depth. 'Modelling of the Frazier Dome identified many geologic similarities with the shallow parts of low-sulfidation epithermal deposits, especially resources related to other rhyolite domes in the vicinity, such as the Eastside, Hasbrouk, and Three Hills gold deposits,' commented Dr. Marcus Johnston, Vice President Exploration. 'The 8 reverse-circulation holes NVX drilled in 2018 all encountered significant runs of alteration and gold and silver mineralization. The lengths and widths of the mapped fracture/vein sets, combined with the long-runs of alteration and mineralization in drilling, and the shallow nature of the exposed system all point toward a potentially bonanza-grade deeper deposit(s), and the possibility of bulk-tonnage ore to be found on the property.' Highlights of 2019 Frazier Dome Exploration Plan: Consolidate key property position in and around project. Completed in March 2019 by adding 71 claims (approx. 1466.9 acres) to the existing 72 claims (approx. 1,487.6 acres. Property position now totals approx. 2,954.5 acres (approx. 1,195.6 Hectares) - see attached map below. Focused mapping, sampling program and structural analysis in combination with geophysical program studies to define three-dimensional framework to enhance the quality of already known targets, and to identify new targets buried elsewhere on the property. Reverse Circulation drilling program planned for the summer of 2019: 80 percent of the property is covered by post-mineral volcanic rocks and alluvium, and five of the original nine targets permitted remain untested. Follow-up deeper holes are also being planned for the targets already tested. Given the exposed widths and lengths identified in 2018, and with the estimated depths and calculated volumes, the Company believes it is possible for a robust gold deposit to occur deeper on the claim block. About Tonopah Mining District The Frazier Dome Project, staked by the Company, is located 13 km north of the Tonopah Mining District, Nye County, Nevada. The Project contains a low- to intermediate-sulfidation, volcanic-hosted epithermal gold system with high-grade mineralization. The Tonopah Mining District contains multiple styles of volcanic-hosted epithermal gold mineralization similar to that at Frazier Dome, including: High-grade, intermediate-sulfidation Ag-rich veins which historically produced 174 million ounces (Moz) Ag and 1.9 Moz gold; and Younger, low-sulfidation, gold-rich mineralization related to intrusive rhyolite domes, which has been the focus of modern exploration (e.g., Hasbrouck and Eastside deposits). Dr. Michael Gustin of Mine Development Associates, an independent Qualified Person under NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical information disclosed in this release. Mine Development Associates is a division of RESPEC. About NV Gold Corporation NV Gold is a junior exploration company based in Vancouver, British Columbia that is focused on delivering value through mineral discoveries. Leveraging its highly experienced in-house technical knowledge, NV Gold's geological team intends to utilize its geological databases, which contains a vast treasury of field knowledge spanning decades of research and exploration, combined with a portfolio of mineral properties in Nevada, to prioritize key projects for focused exploration programs. On behalf of the Board of Directors, John E. Watson Chairman For further information, visit the Company's website at www.nvgoldcorp.com or contact: Peter A. Ball, President & COO Phone: 1-888-363-9883 Email: peter@nvgoldcorp.com 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. Forward Looking Statements This news release includes certain forward-looking statements or information. All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding the proposed uses of such funds and other future plans and objectives of the Company, including exploration plans, are forward-looking statements that involve various 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. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's plans or expectations include regulatory issues, market prices, availability of capital and financing, general economic, market or business conditions, timeliness of government or regulatory approvals and other risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. SOURCE: NV Gold Corporation View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540758/NV-Gold-Doubles-Land-Position-at-Frazier-Dome-Gold-Project-and-Highlights-2019-Exploration-Program DZ BANK AG Frankfurt am Main - Pre Stabilisation RNS Number: residue number system Frankfurt am Main, 2. April 2019 Not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or any jurisdiction in which such distribution would be unlawful. Pre-Stabilisation Notice European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) DZ BANK AG (contact: Ralph Ockert; telephone: +49 69 7447 7051) hereby announces, as Stabilisation Coordinator, that the Stabilising Managers named below may stabilise the offer of the following securities in accordance with Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1052 under the Market Abuse Regulation (EU Regulation 596/2014). The security to be stabilised: Issuer: EFSF Guarantor (if any): several Eurozone member states Aggregate nominal amount: EUR benchmark Description: fixed rate, due 10th April 2035 ( ISIN EU000A1G0ED2) Offer price: Tbc Other offer terms: Payment 10. April 2019, denoms 1k/1k, soft bullet Stabilisation: DZ BANK AG Stabilisation Coordinator: Stabilising Managers: DZ BANK AG Barclays plc BNP Paribas Stabilisation period expected to start on: 10th of April 2019 Stabilisation period expected to end on: no later than 30 days after the proposed issue date of the securities Existence, maximum size and conditions of use of over-allotment facility. The Stabilising Managers may over-allot the securities to the extent permitted in accordance with applicable law. Stabilisation trading venue: Luxembourg Stock Exchange (Regulated Market) In connection with the offer of the above securities, the Stabilisation Manager(s) may over-allot the securities or effect transactions with a view to supporting the market price of the securities at a level higher than that which might otherwise prevail. However, there is no assurance that the Stabilisation Manager(s) will take any stabilisation action and any stabilisation action, if begun, may be ended at any time. Any stabilisation action or over-allotment shall be conducted in accordance with all applicable laws and rules. This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an invitation or offer to underwrite, subscribe for or otherwise acquire or dispose of any securities of the Issuer in any jurisdiction. In addition, if and to the extent that this announcement is communicated in, or the offer of the securities to which it relates is made in, any EEA Member State that has implemented Directive 2003/71/EC, as amended (together with any applicable implementing measures in any Member State, the "Prospectus Directive") before the publication of a prospectus in relation to the securities which has been approved by the competent authority in that Member State in accordance with the Prospectus Directive (or which has been approved by a competent authority in another Member State and notified to the competent authority in that Member State in accordance with the Prospectus Directive), this announcement and the offer are only addressed to and directed at persons in that Member State who are qualified investors within the meaning of the Prospectus Directive (or who are other persons to whom the offer may lawfully be addressed) and must not be acted on or relied on by other persons in that Member State. Jurors found Stanley Liggins, 57, guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Jennifer Ann Lewis, according to the Quad-City Times . The Rock Island, Illinois, girl's body was found the night of Sept. 17, 1990, in a field near a Davenport elementary school. She had been sexually abused and strangled, and her body was then doused with gasoline and set aflame. Regulatory News: Alcon, the global leader in eye care and a division of Novartis, announced today that Timothy C. Stonesifer ("Tim") will join the company as its new Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO), in conjunction with the company's April 9 spinoff from Novartis. He will report directly to David Endicott, Alcon's Chief Executive Officer, and become a member of the Executive Committee of Alcon. David Murray, Alcon's current CFO, has decided for family reasons to return to Europe and remain with Novartis, where he has served in various finance leadership roles since 2001. He will work closely with Tim through the spinoff to ensure an orderly transition. "Tim joins us at an exciting time as we become an independent organization and the world's leading eye care device company," said David Endicott, Alcon's Chief Executive Officer. "He is an outstanding addition to our leadership team, bringing extraordinary financial acumen and deep experience in capital markets transactions, having served as CFO for numerous companies. Tim is also respected in the financial community and known for his ability to develop top-performing finance organizations that deliver results." Tim is a seasoned executive who joins Alcon with over 29 years of global financial and operational experience. He was most recently with Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE), where he served as Executive Vice President and CFO. During his tenure, Tim executed two spin merge transactions valued at over $20B, completed 11 acquisitions to accelerate the company strategy and developed and implemented a financial architecture that delivered significant value to shareholders. Prior to his time at HPE, Tim spent 3 years in Shanghai, China, as the CFO of General Motors International Operations and also spent 18 years at General Electric in a variety of finance roles. "I am excited to join the exceptional team at Alcon," said Tim. "For more than 70 years, Alcon has been synonymous with eye care. We share a passion for serving customers and a vision for delivering innovative products that will continue to shape the industry while driving profitable growth." "On behalf of the management team and the entire company, I would like to thank David Murray for his significant contributions to Alcon over the past 4 years," said David Endicott. "David has been transparent about wanting to minimize his commute between Geneva and Fort Worth and we certainly respect his decision. He has worked tirelessly to drive transformation across the company, developing a strong foundation for our financial and business processes and systems that will allow us to operate from a position of strength as a public standalone company. We wish David all the best in his future with Novartis." 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. Alcon has filed a registration statement on Form 20-F with the SEC relating to the anticipated spin-off of the Alcon eye care business from Novartis AG. For more information, please refer to the Alcon Inc. Form 20-F registration statement, which is available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Alcon is on Facebook. Like us at www.facebook.com/AlconEyeCare. 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. Novartis is on Twitter. Sign up to follow @Novartis at http://twitter.com/novartis. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005362/en/ Contacts: Alcon Media Investor Relations Wes Warnock Alcon Global Communications +1 817 615 2501 wes.warnock@alcon.com Karen King Alcon Investor Relations +1 817 551 8847 karen.king@alcon.com The nomination committee's reasoned proposals to the annual general meeting 2019 The Nomination Committee composed of Daniel Nyvang Mariussen (chairman), appointed by Bumble Ventures and Better Partners, Martin Jonasson, appointed by Andra AP Fonden, Michael Knutsson, appointed by Knutsson Holdings, and Jens Bager, chairman of the board of directors, Better Collective, presents the following proposals: that Andreas Nielsen, Partner at Bruun & Hjejle, is appointed chairman of the general meeting, that the board of directors shall be comprised of five (5) board members, unchanged from last year, that the following members of the board of directors shall be re-elected, Jens Bager (also to be reelected as chairman of the board of directors), Klaus Holse, Leif Nrgaard, Sren Jrgensen and Petra von Rohr. that the board remuneration is proposed to be increased from last year. The committee has taken into consideration the fact that the remuneration has been unchanged since Better Collective was a privately held company and that previously, part of the board remuneration was incentive pay (warrants), a practice that is not continued post-IPO. The remuneration of the chairman of the board of directors is proposed to be increased by 150,000 DKK to a total of 450,000 DKK, and the remuneration to the other members of the board of directors to be increased by 50,000 DKK to a total of 150,000 DKK each, that the remuneration to the audit committee and the remuneration committee, respectively, is proposed to be increased from last year. The remuneration of the chairman of a committee is proposed to be increased by 25,000 DKK to a total of 75,000 DKK, and the remuneration to the other members of a committee is proposed to be increased by 12,500 DKK to a total of 37,500 DKK, that, in accordance with the audit committee's recommendation, remuneration to Ernst & Young Godkendt Revisionspartnerselskab shall be paid in accordance with an approved account, that, in accordance with the audit committee's recommendation, elect Ernst & Young Godkendt Revisionspartnerselskab is re-eleted as auditor until the close of the next annual general meeting The work of the Nomination Committee and reasoned opinion regarding the nomination committee's proposal for the board of directors According to the instruction and rules of procedure for the nomination committee adopted at the extraordinary shareholders' meeting held on May 18, 2018, the nomination committee shall consist of four members representing the three largest shareholders as per the end of Agust, together with the chairman of the board of directors. The nomination committee has been formed in accordance with the instructions and the composition of the nomination committee was announced on October 3, 2018. The nomination committee has had four meetings. The nomination committee has been presented with the board of of director's self-assessment, with the board's view on future challenges to the board and the company, and met with the CEO for an update on Better Collective's business model and future prospects. The nomination committee has further interviewed all members of the board of directors. The nomination committee motivates its proposal for the board of directors as follows: The nomination committee has aspired to present at the annual general meeting a proposal which includes persons with appropriate experience and competence in fields that are crucial to the company. Diversity as regards to age, gender, education, professional background and other factors have been taken into account. The company has applied a diversity policy, in compliance with section 99 b of the Danish Financial Statements Act as well as rule 4.1 of the Swedish Corporate Governance Code (the "Code"), when compiling its proposal for the board of directors. The nomination committee has also assessed the size of the board and any possible need for renewal. The nominaton committee has finally also considered the requirements regardning indpendency in the Code. The nomination committee has concluded that the proposed board of directors meets all stated objectives besides gender equality, as the proposed composition of the board of directors consists of one woman and four men. The gender diversity is thus 20 % / 80 %, which, in the nomination committee's opinion, is not consistent with the requirement of an equal gender balance. The nomination committee's ambition is that the gender balance shall increase further over time to meet the company's targets. The nomination committee proposes a re-election of Jens Bager (also to be reelected as chairman of the board of directors), Klaus Holse, Leif Nrgaard, Sren Jrgensen and Petra von Rohr. The nomination committee believes that the proposed board of directors has the qualifications, experience and breadth appropriate to Better Collective's operations, phase of development and other relevant circumstances. In the nomination committee's opinion, all proposed board members are to be considered as independent in relation to the company, its management and major shareholders. Information on the board members proposed for re-election can be found at the company website (www.bettercollective.com) and in the annual report. The nomination committee proposes no changes to the principles for appointment of the nomination committee. For further information, please contact: Daniel Nyvang Mariussen, Chairman of the Nomination Committee, daniel@bumbleventures.comor Christina Bastius Thomsen, Investor Relations Manager, investor@bettercollective.com, +45 2363 8844 The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact persons set out above, on April 2, 2019 at 3.00 pm CET. About Better Collective Better Collective'svision is to empower iGamers through transparency and technology - this is what has made them the world's leading developer of digital platforms for betting tips, bookmaker information and iGaming communities. Better Collective's portfolio includes more than 2,000+ websites and products. This includes bettingexpert.com, the trusted home of tips from expert tipsters and in depth betting theory, and SmartBets, the odds comparison platform made personal. Attachment TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / PJX Resources Inc. ("PJX") is pleased to announce that the first hole to test the large Magnetotelluric (MT) geophysical target at depth has intersected localized tourmaline alteration for the first time on the Vine Property. This style of alteration can be found in proximity to the Sullivan deposit that is located approximately 35 km north of the Vine Property near Cranbrook, British Columbia, Canada. Drilling to test the shallow target intersected a narrow massive sulphide vein that management believes could represent re-mobilized mineralization from a massive sulphide body at depth. Laboratory analysis of the massive sulphide part of the vein, excluding wall rock, grades 3.73% lead, 1.97% zinc, 23.37 g/t silver with anomalous gold (0.05 g/t) and copper (.08%). Highlights Magnetotelluric (MT) geophysics has identified a shallow and larger deep conductive MT targets that could be identifying multiple massive sulphide bodies. Drilling the shallow MT target intersected a narrow massive sulphide vein. The vein is conductive and is considered to be proof of concept that MT is identifying massive sulphide mineralization and not another source of conductivity, such as graphite. Massive sulphide vein has milled-rolled texture (see photo http://pjxresources.com/vine-massive-sulphide-core.pdf). Milled texture suggests tectonic remobilization and deformation, possibly similar to "Durchbewegung" texture of some sulphide sections found at the Sullivan deposit. (Durchbewegung texture is typically created by movement of massive sulphides during deformation with milling and rotational movement of more competent rocks or minerals incorporated into the sulphide.) Massive Sulphide Vein contains zinc, lead, silver with anomalous gold and copper. Vein could be remobilized sulphide from a deposit at depth. First hole to test larger MT target at depth has intersected geology with localized tourmaline alteration for the first time. Tourmaline is an alteration found in and proximal to the Sullivan Deposit. Large MT target has potential to host multiple massive sulphide bodies. Target has an 800 metre (m) strike length and can be traced down dip for over 2,000 metres. Down hole geophysics is planned to help identify the conductive source or sources of the MT targets (possible massive sulphide) to direct the next phase of drilling. "Tourmaline and tourmalinite occur locally within metamorphosed phyllite and un-metamorphosed blocks of sediments in the folded attenuation zone above the regional Moyie fault," states Dave Pighin. "Tourmaline and tourmalinite can be found around and within the Sullivan deposit. Seeing this style of alteration supports that the drilling may be getting closer to a massive sulphide body. The hole is at 1488 m depth and still in phyllite. Down hole geophysics is planned to assess if the hole should be deepened or if the source of the large MT target, which could represent massive sulphide mineralization, is adjacent to the large blocks of unmetamorphosed rock within the folded attenuation zone." "Having both tourmaline alteration at depth and zinc, lead, silver with anomalous gold and copper mineralization in the massive sulphide vein is very encouraging," states John Keating. "If the massive sulphide portion of the vein represents remobilized mineralization from a massive sulphide deposit at depth then this supports that the larger target at depth would not be just iron sulphide but could also contain lead, zinc, silver, copper, and gold. In addition, drilling from 2015 to 2017 intersected disseminated and bands of sphalerite (zinc) mineralization locally in the metamorphosed phyllite up-dip from the large MT target at depth." Results of down hole geophysics will be compiled with the new understanding of the geology to prepare for the next phase of drilling that is planned to commence in May. The road-accessible Vine Property is located approximately 140 km east of the Trail Metallurgical Complex and about 35 kilometres south of the historical Sullivan Mine, which operated for over 90 years before being closed in 2001. The property is at an elevation with terrain amenable to drill at any time of the year. It is crossed by two power lines as well as a rail line and is only a 20-minute drive south along Highway 3 from Cranbrook, British Columbia. The foregoing geological disclosure has been reviewed and approved by Dave Pighin P.Geo. and John Keating P.Geo. (qualified persons for the purpose of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects). Mr. Pighin is the consulting geologist for PJX on the Vine Property. Mr. Keating is the President, Chief Executive Officer and a Director of PJX. About PJX Resources Inc. PJX is a mineral exploration company focused on building shareholder value and community opportunity through the exploration and development of mineral resources with a focus on gold and base metals. PJX's properties are located in the historical mining area of Cranbrook and Kimberley, British Columbia. Please refer to our web site http://www.pjxresources.com for additional information. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Linda Brennan, Chief Financial Officer (416) 799-9205 info@pjxresources.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Information This News Release contains forward-looking statements. Forward looking statements are statements which relate to future events. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to exploration results, the success of exploration activities, mine development prospects, completion of economic assessments, and future gold production. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may", "appears to", "should", "expects", "plans", "anticipates", believes", "estimates", "predicts", "potential", or "continue" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. These statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking-statements. Although PJX has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. SOURCE: PJX Resources Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540740/Drilling-Continues-to-Support-Potential-for-Massive-Sulphide-Body-on-PJX-Resources-Vine-Property Velocity Global, the leading provider of global business expansion solutions, is hosting its first-ever Velocity Global Day of Service to celebrate its five-year anniversary. The day will be dedicated to giving back to the 10 communities in which the company has offices: Toronto, Yangon, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Singapore, London, Bogota, Dubai, Bangalore, and its headquarters in Denver, Colorado. The volunteer efforts will take place on Thursday, April 4, 2019, and align with Velocity Global's three service cornerstones: local community, leadership and mentorship, and global good. More than 30 employees around the globe will be supporting organizations in their respective communities, including NL Cares in Amsterdam and Willing Hearts in Singapore. Additionally, more than 80 employees in Denver will have the opportunity to support one of three local organizations they are passionate about, including Food Bank of the Rockies, A Precious Child, and Project C.U.R.E. Following the day's activities, Velocity Global plans to host a large celebration to commemorate the company's noteworthy milestone. "Our company is not only defined by our clients, team, and culture, but also our promise to continue to give back to organizations that Velocity Global employees care about," said Ben Wright, CEO of Velocity Global. "We value our local roots, connections to the community, and making a difference in the places we call home." Wright founded Velocity Global in April 2014 on five key values that employees live by each and every day: Professionalism, Velocity, Integrity, Empowerment, and Service. The Velocity Global Day of Service will give employees an opportunity to embrace all of these values, while giving back and making a difference in their communities. In addition to its Global Day of Service, Velocity Global is regularly active with other organizations that hold significant importance to its team and serve as the core of the company's financial donations and volunteer opportunities. The company recently extended a transformative multi-year financial commitment to First Descents, a Denver-based not-for-profit, to support the development of a new program specifically designed for young adults battling multiple sclerosis. Velocity Global also supports The Cristina M. Weir Foundation, an organization established to honor the life of Velocity Global employee, Cristina Weir, who passed away in 2017. About Velocity Global: Velocity Global is the leading provider of global employment solutions that has reinvented the way companies expand overseas. With unrivaled expertise in over 185 countries, Velocity Global delivers end-to-end services and best-in-class support to help companies confidently navigate the entire lifecycle of international business. To ensure a compliant, efficient, and flexible international expansion, Velocity Global provides a comprehensive suite of global services that includes International PEO, Entity Setup and Support, Global Talent Acquisition, Immigration, and Consulting. Visit VelocityGlobal.com to learn more or follow us on Twitter @Velocity_Global. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005316/en/ Contacts: Dani Row PR Manager DaniRow@VelocityGlobal.com +1 913-961-5578 NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / Skeena Resources Limited (TSX.V: SKE, OTCQX: SKREF) ("Skeena" or the "Company") is pleased to announce a non-brokered private placement offering (the "Offering") of up to 3,896,103 common shares at a price of $0.385 for aggregate gross proceeds of approximately C$1,500,000. The net proceeds of the Offering will be used to fund advancement of the Company's Eskay Creek project and for working capital purposes. The closing of the Offering is anticipated to occur on or before April 15, 2019 (the "Closing Date") and is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, including the acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange.The securities issued under the Offering will be subject to a statutory hold period in Canada expiring four months and one day from the Closing Date. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. About Skeena Skeena Resources Limited is a junior Canadian mining exploration company focused on developing prospective precious and base metal properties in the Golden Triangle of northwest British Columbia, Canada. The Company's primary activities are the exploration and development of the past-producing Snip and Eskay Creek mines, both optioned from Barrick. In addition, the Company has completed a Preliminary Economic Assessment on the GJ copper-gold porphyry project. On behalf of the Board of Directors of Skeena Resources Limited, Walter Coles Jr. President & CEO Cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements Certain statements made and information contained herein may constitute "forward looking information" and "forward looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation. These statements and information are based on facts currently available to the Company and there is no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Forward-looking statements and information may be identified by such terms as "anticipates", "believes", "targets", "estimates", "plans", "expects", "may", "will", "could" or "would". Forward-looking statements and information contained herein are based on certain factors and assumptions regarding, among other things, the estimation of mineral resources and reserves, the realization of resource and reserve estimates, metal prices, taxation, the estimation, timing and amount of future exploration and development, capital and operating costs, the availability of financing, the receipt of regulatory approvals, environmental risks, title disputes and other matters. While the Company considers its assumptions to be reasonable as of the date hereof, forward-looking statements and information are not guarantees of future performance and readers should not place undue importance on such statements as actual events and results may differ materially from those described herein. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements or information except as may be required by applicable securities laws. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Not for distribution to U.S. Newswire Services or for dissemination in the United States of America. Any failure to comply with this restriction may constitute a violation of U.S. Securities laws. CONTACT: Walt Coles Jr., President & CEO or Kelly Earle, Vice President Communications Email: kearle@skeenaresources.com Tel: (604) 684-8725 SOURCE: Skeena Resources Limited View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540750/Skeena-Announces-C1500000-Private-Placement Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - Sixty North Gold Mining Ltd. (CSE: SXTY) (FSE: 2F4) (OTCQB: SXNTF) (the "Company" or "Sixty North Gold") is pleased to announce that Geotech Ltd. has completed a 135 km helicopter-borne VTEMTM Plus, time domain electromagnetic and horizontal magnetic gradiometer survey across the Mon Property. This system was selected to trace the outcropping Ag, Au, Pb, Zn enriched VMS-style mineralization recently discovered on the property (see news release November 6, 2018). The final report is expected to take 4 to 6 weeks to complete, however the initial results are promising. Massive, semi-massive and disseminated galena, sphalerite, and tetrahedrite was identified within mixed mafic volcanic, felsic tuff and chert, in the 2018 rock sampling program. A 2,500 m long contact of mixed mafic and felsic tuffs hosts numerous structurally and stratigraphically controlled massive and disseminate sulphides and weakly gossanous schist zones discovered in late fall, 2018, and referred to as the Nelson Lake Deposit. Seven isolated weakly to strongly conductive anomalies ranging from single line (<200m long) to 720m long zones have been identified from preliminary plots of the Geotech data. Six conductors have associated magnetic responses. Four coincident magnetic anomalies are part of longer more formational trends. All conductors appear to be parallel to the steeply dipping stratigraphy. These conductors occur within Chan Formation rocks of the Yellowknife Supergroup, five at the top of a thick tholeiitic mafic volcanic sequence within narrower felsic volcanic tuff horizons described by Jackson, V., 1998 as "Mixed pelitic and felsic, intermediate and mafic rocks with overall intermediate composition, and felsic volcanic and related rocks". Modelling of the anomalies will continue as the data are refined, but initial indications are that individual conductors along the horizon hosting outcropping VMS-style mineralization is generally less than 10 m wide. Other conductors occur on the property and are being assessed over the next few weeks. There is a camp on the property and permits to drill have been received. John Campbell, Chairman of the Board of Directors reports "The Geotech VTEMTM Plus survey has provided a number of excellent targets that we plan to drill test as soon as possible. Permits to drill have been received. Our proximity to a hydroelectric power plant and all-weather roads (25 km and 35 km away respectively) improves the development potential of this type of target. We have further processing to complete, but the survey has also identified a terrain-bounding type of break that passes 300 m west of the past-producing Mon Gold Mine, which provides for a much larger target area increasing the potential for the size of the Mon A-Zone to be expanded." Dr. D.R. Webb, Ph.D., P.Geol., P.Eng. is the Qualified Person for this release within the meaning of NI 43-101 and has reviewed the technical content of this release and has approved its content. About the Company The Company is engaged in acquisition, exploration and development of mineral properties. Its principal target is the exploration for gold on the Mon Gold Property, 40 km north of Yellowknife, NWT. The Mon Gold Property consists of 11 contiguous mining leases and 3 mineral claims, comprising an aggregate 1,536.92 acres, located in the South MacKenzie Mining District, NWT. For more information, please refer to the Company's Prospectus dated January 19, 2018 available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com), under the Company's profile. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS "John Campbell" ____________________________________ John Campbell, Chairman, CFO and Director For further information, please contact: John Campbell, 604-961-0175 Email: jcampbell.capital@gmail.com Website: www.sixtynorthgold.com Statements about the Company's future expectations and all other statements in this press release other than historical facts are "forward looking statements". Such forward-looking statements are based on numerous assumptions, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, including risks inherent in mineral exploration and development, which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any projected future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Further details about the risks applicable to the Company are contained in the Company's Prospectus dated January 19, 2018 available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com), under the Company's profile. THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE HAS NOT APPROVED NOR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENT OF THIS PRESS RELEASE. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43811 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - MLI Marble Lending Inc. (CSE: MRBL) ("Marble" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the formation of its Advisory board and the addition of Mr. Blake Elyea and Mr. Rahul Petkar to its newly formed Advisory Board. "We are honored to welcome both Blake and Rahul to our newly formed Advisory Board. Their experience and knowledge in both consumer insolvency and credit rebuilding, along with financial services and technology (fintech), will provide guidance to Marbles' management team and Board of Directors as the Company pursues its aggressive, nationwide growth strategy," says Mike Marrandino, Marble's CEO. "As we provide Canadians with a fresh start in rebuilding their credit, the experience from our Advisory Board will fortify our growth strategy and assist the 125,000* plus Canadians that file for consumer insolvency on an annual basis (*Source: Office of Superintendent of Bankruptcies). The professional backgrounds of our inaugural Marble Advisory Board members include: Blake Elyea - A Chartered Professional Accountant (CGA), Chartered Insolvency and Restructuring Professional (CIRP) and Licensed Insolvency Trustee (LIT), Blake has over twenty-five years of professional experience providing business owners, individuals, shareholders, board of directors, financial institutions and stakeholders with financial advisory, restructuring, insolvency, audit, accounting and tax advice. Blake's professional experience includes thirteen years at two National Accounting and Advisory Firms; and 4 years as a Partner, Shareholder and Managing Director of a mid-sized Financial Advisory and Restructuring Firm. Blake has broad industry knowledge across many sectors including high tech and automotive finance, pulp and paper, packaging, transportation, forestry, biotechnology, manufacturing, agriculture, non-profit organizations, construction and real estate. Blake currently provides independent Financial Advisory and Restructuring Services to companies throughout Western Canada. Rahul Petkar - The President and CEO of Mississauga based Ishkan Inc. is a business leader with over thirty years of experience in the financial services and technology sectors spanning Asia, The Middle East and North America. Rahul is currently the CEO of Intellect Design Arena Chile Ltda, a leading fintech company that provides innovative payment and banking solutions in Latin America. Rahul founded Polaris Canada, a banking technology company that services all of the major Canadian banks and was responsible for scaling the company to over 250 employees. Rahul was also Director of International Development at TD Waterhouse where he was actively involved in the global expansion of TD's brokerage business to Japan, UK, Luxembourg and Hong Kong. Additionally, Rahul worked at Citibank and Merrill Lynch in the business and operating divisions. Rahul has been a speaker and a panelist on topics pertaining to financial services, global sourcing and technology on various occasions including at the Toronto Financial Services Alliance and at the Schulich Business School. In 2013, Rahul was appointed by the Mayor of Mississauga to the Mississauga International Partnership Program and to the Mississauga Economic Advisory Board where he currently serves as Chairman. He is a Member of the Institute of Corporate Directors in Toronto and a Charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), the largest global not- for-profit association supporting entrepreneurs. Rahul has a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) from VNIT (Nagpur) and has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore). ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, Mike Marrandino, President & CEO About MLI Marble Lending Inc. MLI Marble Lending Inc., dba Marble Financial (CSE: MRBL) provides Canadians with a second chance to rebuild their credit and fast track their way back to mainstream lending with socially responsible lending and fintech solutions. Since 2016, the Company's flagship product has funded in excess of $10 million in loans and helped over 1,100 Canadians rebuild their credit scores. Marble's proven consumer credit rebuilding strategy accelerates the timeline for its consumers by 50% relative to the current traditional methods available through Consumer Proposals. For further information, please visit the Company's website at www.marblefinancial.ca. Mike Marrandino, CEO, Director Email: ir@marblefinancial.ca NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATIONS SERVICES PROVIDER HAVE REVIEWED OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43828 Andersen Global today announced a collaboration agreement with Albieri e Associados, a tax and accounting firm based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Andersen Global now has six locations in Brazil through its member and collaborating firms. Albieri e Associados is a premier business consulting firm in Sao Paulo. Its team of professionals brings decades of experience in accounting consulting, business tax and finance, operational consulting, technology and paralegal assistance. The firm's clients cross a wide variety of sectors, including retail, automotive, food and beverage, and the service industry. The firm has 130 professionals in two offices in Sao Paulo. "We operate throughout the entire accounting, tax and financial chain in a seamless way that is personalized for each of our clients," said Luiz Albieri, Founder and Principal Partner of Albieri e Associados. "Our client-centered approach to everything we do is something I honed at Arthur Andersen many years ago, and now, I'm beyond thrilled it's come full circle and we are collaborating with Andersen Global." Along with collaborating firm Lotti Araujo, which has offices in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Albieri e Associados will work alongside member firm Andersen Tax, which has offices in Sao Paulo and Campinas. "I've watched Luiz and his team do really excellent business for quite a while. They operate with the highest professional and personal standards, but they also bring highly-specialized business consulting to our Latin American team," said Leonardo Mesquita, Regional Managing Director for Latin America. "This is an integrated solution for Brazil, with a huge potential to bring expanded service opportunities to the corporate market." "Albieri e Associados' approach and unique service offerings complement our tax services in Brazil and the region very well," said Mark Vorsatz, Andersen Tax LLC CEO and Andersen Global Chairman. "Our platform continues to expand exponentially, and Brazil is a key component of our Latin American business strategy. But we aren't going to sacrifice quality for the sake of growth, and with Albieri e Associados, we get to add incredible quality, business acumen, and expand our best-in-class offerings for the region." Andersen Global is an international association of legally separate, independent member firms comprised of tax and legal professionals around the world. Established in 2013 by U.S. member firm Andersen Tax LLC, Andersen Global now has more than 4,000 professionals worldwide and a presence in over 136 locations through its member firms and collaborating firms. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005003/en/ Contacts: Megan Tsuei Andersen Tax 415-764-2700 GOLDEN, CO / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / Vitro Diagnostics, Inc. (OTC PINK: VODG), dba Vitro Biopharma announced receipt of a Certificate of Compliance with CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment) without deficiencies. This allows Vitro Biopharma to perform clinical laboratory testing, reporting and billing in full compliance with the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA) according to section 353 of the Public Health Service Act (42 C.F.R. 263a) and (42 C.F.R 493). We will use our CLIA Certification to expand services related to stem cell therapies to include diagnostics as well as therapy including our patent-pending AlloRx Stem Cell product. The testing includes biomarkers to assess stem cell status and the effects of stem cell therapies as well. Assessment of stem cell status is an emerging aspect of medical diagnostics since stem cell deficiencies may underly diseases, such as MS & Alzheimer's disease. Also, efficiency of stem cell therapies is quantified by diagnostic tests such as measurement of anti-inflammatory effects, differentiation of stem cells and reduction of autoimmunity. By using highly sensitive, specific and accurate tests, efficiency of therapies may be determined at higher levels of statistical significance. The efficiency of stem cell therapies is often measured from patient assessments of function and pain that are subject to considerable variation. Quantitative biomarker testing provides less variability and complements other efficacy tests to enhance measurement of stem cell clinical outcomes. Also, recent research has shown that measurement of specific biomarkers improves diagnosis and identification of poor outcomes in TBI. Keith Burge, Director of Sales and Marketing of Vitro Biopharma said, 'Attainment of CLIA certification is continuance of Vitro Biopharma's commitment to establishing manufacturing, operating and quality standards as a world class provider of stem cell therapies and related services. ISO 9001 certification and cGMP compliance were instrumental in the Company gaining approval for our Stem Cell Clinical Trial for Musculoskeletal conditions by the Bahamas Ministry of Health. Our ongoing IRB approved clinical trial in the Cayman Islands with our clinical partner, DVCStem recently provided treatment to Lou Ferrigno, the 'Incredible Hulk', a testament to the quality and effectiveness of Vitro Biopharma's AlloRx Stem Cell product. Tiana States, MS and COO of Vitro Biopharma said, 'Our CLIA Certification is an important milestone as we build our regulatory accreditation as a commercial biologics manufacturing operation. This complements our cGMP compliant and ISO 9001 Certification by providing certification to our clinical laboratory testing services as well.' Forward-Looking Statements Statements herein regarding financial performance have not yet been reported to the SEC nor reviewed by the Company's auditors. Certain statements contained herein and subsequent statements made by and on behalf of the Company, whether oral or written may contain 'forward-looking statements'. Such forward looking statements are identified by words such as 'intends,' 'anticipates,' 'believes,' 'expects' and 'hopes' and include, without limitation, statements regarding the Company's plan of business operations, product research and development activities, potential contractual arrangements, receipt of working capital, anticipated revenues and related expenditures. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, among others, acceptability of the Company's products in the market place, general economic conditions, receipt of additional working capital, the overall state of the biotechnology industry and other factors set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Most of these factors are outside the control of the Company. Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Except as otherwise required by applicable securities statutes or regulations, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. CONTACT: Dr. James Musick Chief Executive Officer Vitro Biopharma (303) 999-2130 Ext. 3 E-mail: jim@vitrobiopharma.com SOURCE: Vitro Diagnostics, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540745/Vitro-Biopharma-Obtains-CLIA-Certification-Complimenting-its-Ongoing-Stem-Cell-Clinical-Trials SHANGHAI, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Human Horizons officially announced its strategy for smart vehicles today. Under its "3-Smart" strategy covering "smart vehicles, smart transportation and smart cities", Human Horizons will build new-era vehicle species on three dimensions: "H-Vehicle Technologies, U-V2X Collaboration and A-Connectivity & Sharing." Human Horizons' founder and Chairman Ding Lei revealed that the company will announce its automotive products this summer and will also provide a preview of its first production ready model. At today's event, the company unveiled information about its industry-leading team, world-class partners, and manufacturing factories. Vehicle development is well on track and the first model will realise mass production by the end of 2020. As a cutting-edge technology company focused on innovation, Human Horizons has been working on the original development of smart vehicles since its inception. The "3-Smart" strategy is not just about individual vehicles. It is aimed at future transportation under different scenarios involving three dimensions: H, U, and A. With this strategy, Human Horizons will build a family of smart vehicles like no other: H -- Vehicle Technologies: Bringing together cutting-edge technologies to build state-of-the-art vehicle systems to keep abreast of the times, including developing specific physical architectures, data-oriented smart EE architectures, and future-oriented powertrain technologies. In addition the unique development of active and passive vehicle safety systems providing the vehicle with a "sixth sense." U -- V2X Collaboration: Connecting the vehicle-road data channel through V2X technologies providing the complete realisation of autonomous driving technologies to enable passengers to enjoy the pleasure of travel to the fullest. It includes high-bandwidth and short-distance communication, data analytics, road monitoring and sensing, as well as intelligent autonomous driving technology. To create a mobile private space for the future, an immersive cabin system, and an ultimate time-tunnel experience with simulated space and time greatly enhancing the travel experience. A -- Connectivity & Sharing: Building diverse mobility carriers for cities that run on the combination of the smart city's Internet, IoT, and energy network nodes. Based on 5G, IOV and other technologies, Human Horizons will build diverse mobility carriers to suit different transportation scenarios. Human Horizons' international team consists of over 700 members representing seven countries with backgrounds in various industries such as Internet, AI, vehicle engineering, and parts manufacturing. They are former executives of leading international companies, IoV and autonomous driving experts, top vehicle development engineers and leading international vehicle designers. More than half hold a Ph.D. or Master's Degree. The Human Horizons International Science & Technology Advisory Committee which is chaired by the Academic C.C. Chan who is regarded as the "Father of EVs in Asia", brings together top scientists from around the world to form a powerful think-tank for Human Horizons to bring its "3-Smart" strategy to life." In addition to the existing R&D center, operation center and design center, the Human Horizons Jinqiao Intelligent Manufacturing Center will be inaugurated in May 2019. Human Horizons is partnering with distinguished suppliers such as Bosch, Continental, Aptiv, Aisin Seiki, Yanfeng Group, CATL, Dow, Dassault, and Siemens. Early-stage product development has been completed and will soon enter the "two-winter & two-summer" prototype vehicle testing stage. The first clay model has already completed phase one of wind tunnel testing. Human Horizons has two plans to build a smart factory: building a new one or renovating an existing facility. Either will be operated by Human Horizons' management team and factory workers, and will manufacture products using Human Horizons' technologies. In the 18 months since it was founded, Human Horizons has already achieved remarkable results under its "3-Smart" strategy including autonomous driving featuring V2X technologies, a pilot smart road project on an urban road and the in-wheel electric motor demonstrator. This summer, Human Horizons will provide a preview of its first production ready model, which is expected to cause quite a stir. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/845266/Human_Horizons_1.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/845265/Human_Horizons_2.jpg Neubauer sn't conceding or saying whether she will seek a recount, which would face a tough challenge in overturning such a large margin and which would come at her expense. She immediately appealed to supporters for money in case she pursues the recount. Counties have until April 12 to report final vote totals, and Neubauer has three days after that to request a recount. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - Appia Energy Corp. (CSE: API) (OTCQB: APAAF) (FSE: A0I.F) (FSE: A0I.MU) (FSE: A0I.BE) (the "Company" or "Appia") is pleased to provide the analytical results from an initial heavy mineral sand study (the "Study") completed on the Alces Lake Property (the "Property") in northern Saskatchewan. The Study location is 2.3 km north of the world-class high-grade rare earth oxide ("REO") Alces Lake outcrops. Mr. James Sykes, Vice-President, Exploration, and Development for Appia comments: "We are excited to learn that the heavy mineral layers along Alces Lake are indeed enriched with rare earth element-bearing minerals and that our grades (average 0.386 wt% Total REO) and concentrations are comparable with major heavy mineral sand producers around the World. The scandium concentrations (average 0.011 wt% Sc 2 O 3 ) were a pleasant surprise as these could possibly represent a unique and easy source to bring scandium to the market. The Alces Lake property continues to grow with potential and excitement at every turn. We are eager to continue this Study to add to the significant resource potential of this property in conjunction with our planned upcoming summer diamond drilling program on the world-class high-grade REO outcrops." For the Study, a total of 6 samples were collected from black heavy mineral sand surface layers along a 500 m shoreline of Alces Lake and analyzed for their rare earth element ("REE") concentrations and mineral concentrations (relative to 100% of the total minerals per sample) (Figures 1 and 2, Tables 1 and 2). Each sample was processed by means of magnetic separation followed by grain size sorting to create 4 distinct sub-sample combinations; ferromagnetic and non-magnetic with grain size <0.25 (0.01 mm to 0.25 mm) or grain size >0.25 (0.25 mm to 1.0 mm). Three REE-bearing minerals were identified in the non-magnetic sub-samples; monazite (average 0.80% concentration), xenotime (average 0.24% concentration), and zircon (average 3.14% concentration). The Study clearly shows that first-pass magnetic separation concentrates both monazite and zircon into the non-magnetic sub-sample, whereas xenotime remains equally concentrated regardless of magnetic separation or grain size distribution. The non-magnetic sub-samples are approximately 10 times more concentrated with respect to Total REO (average 0.386 wt% Total REO) than the ferromagnetic samples (average 0.041 wt% Total REO). The ratio of the individual REOs to Total REO in all four sub-samples are roughly the same. The Study also revealed the presence of scandium (0.011 wt% Sc 2 O 3 ) concentrated within the non-magnetic samples, and the sand samples are significantly enriched with heavy REEs ("HREEs") with respect to the high-grade monazite outcrops (i.e. 14.4% HREEs in the sands vs. 3.1% HREEs in the outcrops). Scandium is believed to be sourced from zircon, whereas the HREEs are believed to be sourced from xenotime, a well-known HREE host mineral. The remaining light REEs are interpreted to be sourced from monazite. Appia plans to continue diamond drill exploration on the Alces Lake property in June with a 3,000 m program designed to delineate the currently known REE zones, as well as testing other high-priority target areas. The planned drilling program will be carried out concurrent with a detailed ground gravity survey exploring for subsurface REE zones. The Company will continue surface stripping and sampling of other high-priority outcrops, as well as continuing the heavy mineral sand Study of Alces Lake. The Alces Lake Property encompasses some of the highest-grade total and critical REE mineralization in the world**, hosted within seven surface and near-surface showings that remain open at depth. Critical rare earth elements are defined here as those that are in short-supply and high-demand for use in permanent magnets and modern electronic applications (i.e: Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr) and Dysprosium (Dy)). The Alces Lake project area is 14,334 hectares (35,420 acres) in size and is 100% owned by Appia. All sample analytical and modal mineralogy results were provided by Saskatchewan Research Council's ("SRC") Geoanalytical Laboratory, an ISO/IEC 17025:2005 (CAN-P-4E) certified laboratory in Saskatoon, SK, for multi-element and REE analysis. Modal mineralogy results were obtained from QEMSCAN back-scattered electron images and semi-quantitative point chemical analyses. All analytical results reported herein have passed rigorous internal QAQC review and compilation. The technical content in this news release was reviewed and approved by Dr. Irvine R. Annesley, P.Geo, Advisor to the Board of Directors of Appia, and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. **Note: The Alces Lake REE grades were compared with global REE deposit grades. The global REE deposit information was derived from publicly available information as of January 31, 2018, from individual company websites, SEDAR technical report filings, and the Technology Metals Research Advanced Rare Earth Projects Index (http://www.techmetalsresearch.com/metrics-indices/tmr-advanced-rare-earth-projects-index/). About Appia Appia is a Canadian publicly-traded company in the uranium and rare earth element sectors. The Company is currently focusing on delineating high-grade critical rare earth elements ("REE") and uranium on the Alces Lake property, as well as prospecting for high-grade uranium in the prolific Athabasca Basin on its Loranger, North Wollaston, and Eastside properties. The Company holds the surface rights to exploration for 64,045 hectares (158,259 acres) in Saskatchewan. The Company also has a 100% interest in 13,008 hectares (32,143 acres), including rare earth element and uranium deposits over five mineralized zones in the Elliot Lake Camp, Ontario, which historically produced over 300 million pounds of U 3 O 8 and is the only Canadian camp that has had significant rare earth element (yttrium) production. Appia's Management and Board have over 250 years of combined industry experience, and the Technical team is directed by James Sykes, who has had direct and indirect involvement with over 450 million lbs. U 3 O 8 being discovered in five deposits within the Athabasca Basin. Appia has 64.0 million common shares outstanding, 84.4 million shares fully diluted. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: This News Release contains forward-looking statements which are typically preceded by, followed by or including the words "believes", "expects", "anticipates", "estimates", "intends", "plans" or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance as they involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. We do not intend and do not assume any obligation to update these forward-looking statements and shareholders are cautioned not to put undue reliance on such statements. Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange 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. For further information, please contact: Tom Drivas, President, CEO and Director: (tel) 416-546-2707, (fax) 416-218-9772 or (email) appia@appiaenergy.ca James Sykes, Vice-President, Exploration and Development, (tel) 306-221-8717, (fax) 416-218-9772 or (email) jsykes@uraniumgeologist.com Frank van de Water, Chief Financial Officer and Director, (tel) 416-546-2707, (fax) 416-218-9772 or (email) fvandewater@rogers.com Figure 1: Heavy mineral sand sample location map. Sample locations cover 500 m of shoreline. Background main image is satellite imagery. The inset shows Alces Lake property (pink polygon), lakes (blue polygons), Alces Lake high-grade REO outcrops (yellow star) and black square is zoomed in the area of the main figure. To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5416/43833_de283e3c7445390f_002full.jpg Figure 2: Sample location 100074. Note red/purple color in black heavy mineral sands (within red dashed polygon). This location also exhibited elevated radioactivity. The observed red/purple color and elevated radioactivity attest to high concentrations of monazite confirmed in the Study To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5416/43833_resized2.jpg Table 1 and Table 2 Cannot view this image of Table 1 and Table 2? Visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5416/43833_enhancedtable.jpg To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43833 8K TVs are set to achieve modest success over the next few years, according to the latest research from Strategy Analytics' Connected Home Devices service. The report will be published to coincide with this month's NAB Show in Las Vegas, where 8K, which offers four times the resolution of today's 4K standards, will be one of the dominant themes. Strategy Analytics' consumer technology adoption models predict that 56 million homes worldwide will own an 8K TV by the end of 2025. The US will be the most successful market, with 8% of households owning an 8K TV by this time. 8K TVs have only been introduced in recent months, and the research finds that global sales in 2019 will reach 0.5 million units. Compared to the US, where super-large displays have long been accepted, 8K TV will struggle in most other regions. The report concludes that 8K TV will be good for TV vendors, but less meaningful for the content industry. Other key findings from the report include: Annual sales of 8K TVs will reach 31 million units worldwide by 2025, worth $35Bn in retail revenues China will see the highest volumes for 8K TV through 2025 as domestic vendors are quick to adopt 8K resolutions for their large screen ranges Sales of 8K TVs will be concentrated in the 60-inch and above screen size categories. All 8K TVs today are above 60-inch in size and by 2025 the 60-inch and above category will still account for more than 70% of 8K TV demand. "8K TV is likely to attract a lot of attention this year," says David Watkins, Director at Strategy Analytics. "TV manufacturers and video technology vendors are all keen to promote the idea that 8K is a logical and inevitable upgrade to today's 4K. This makes sense, up to a point, and 8K will achieve a foothold in the market where demand for the largest screen sizes is strong." Michael Goodman, Director, TV Media Strategies, added: "The availability of true 8K content is going to remain extremely restricted for some years. Many content providers and distributors are still migrating to 4K from basic HD and will see little justification in investing in 8K when so few viewers will see any benefit for many years. Instead, they should focus on other important image enhancement technologies such as HDR (high dynamic range) and HFR (high frame rate)." Strategy Analytics is offering analyst meetings at this year's NAB Show in Las Vegas, NV, April 8-11. Contact mgoodman@strategyanalytics.com to take advantage of this opportunity. About Strategy Analytics Strategy Analytics, Inc. provides the competitive edge with advisory services, consulting and actionable market intelligence for emerging technology, mobile and wireless, digital consumer and automotive electronics companies. With offices in North America, Europe and Asia, Strategy Analytics delivers insights for enterprise success. www.StrategyAnalytics.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005700/en/ Contacts: David Watkins +33 153 409 952 dwatkins@strategyanalytics.com Michael Goodman +1 617 614 0769 mgoodman@strategyanalytics.com TORONTO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- First Quantum Minerals Ltd. ("First Quantum" or "the Company") (TSX: FM) will publish its first quarter 2019 financial and operating results on Monday April 29, 2019 after the close of the Toronto Stock Exchange. The Company's President, Clive Newall, will host a conference call and webcast to discuss the results on Tuesday April 30, 2019. Conference call and webcast details are as follows: Date: April 30, 2019 Time: 9:00 am (EDT); 2:00 pm (BST); 6:00 am (PDT) Webcast: www.first-quantum.com Dial in: North America (toll free): (877) 291-4570 North America and international: (647) 788-4919 United Kingdom: (toll free) 0-800-051-7107 Replay: Available from noon (EDT) on April 30, 2019 until 11:59 pm (EDT) on May 21, 2019 North America (toll free): (800) 585-8367 North America and international: (416) 621-4642 Passcode: 4757109 ANNUAL MEETING OF SHAREHOLDERS The annual meeting of shareholders will take place on May 9, 2019, at 10:00 a.m. EDT at the Gallery of the TMX Broadcast Centre 130 King St. W. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. For those unable to attend the meeting in person, an audio webcast of the meeting, including slide presentation, will be accessible through the Company's website. ANNUAL DISCLOSURE DOCUMENTS The Company also today advised that its 2018 Annual Report and the 2019 Notice & Access Document, Combined Notice and Management Information Circular, Proxy Form, Financial Statements Request Form and Voting Instruction Form are now available online at https://www.first-quantum.com/Investors-Centre/--2019-Annual-Meeting-of-Shareholders-Materials/default.aspx. On Behalf of the Board of Directors of First Quantum Minerals Ltd. G. Clive Newall President For further information visit our website at www.first-quantum.com North American contact: Lisa Doddridge, Director, Investor Relations, Tel: +1-416-361-6400, Toll-free: +1-888-688-6577, E-Mail: lisa.doddridge@fqml.com; United Kingdom contact: Clive Newall, President, Tel: +44-7802-721663, Fax: +44-140-327-3494, E-Mail: clive.newall@fqml.com Product series aims to inspire youthful creativity, with UAE launch confirmed as the first international market for Reno outside of China DUBAI, UAE, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Following a string of recent investments in the Middle East, OPPO-a leading global smartphone brand-has confirmed that its new product series, Reno, will come to the UAE as the first international market to range the series outside of China. The official UAE unveil for Reno is announced for April 16th. As the epitome of OPPO's creative vision, Reno will serve as the catalyst for OPPO's smartphone development, and will also be the first product launched after the company announced a refocusing of its portfolio to deliver a premium experience to young consumers. The selection of UAE as the first international market for the Reno series highlights the strategic importance OPPO is placing on the Middle East as part of its global expansion strategy. This spring, OPPO began operations in Saudi Arabia for the first time and opened its second regional hub for the Middle East within the UAE. The company also announced its entry into new EMEA markets with consecutive launches in the United Kingdom, Turkey and Poland. OPPO's new Reno product series boasts a brand-new product concept, design philosophy, and communication model. It's tailor-made for youthful pioneers who are dream chasers and those who express themselves to create new trends. Reno will empower users with its stylish appearance and innovative design. Using Reno, youthful pioneers who view life from a unique perspective can fuel their artistic inspiration, and create style of their own. No-one defines this new series, but rather everyone will have their own unique Reno experience. Ahead of launch, OPPO has partnered with artists around the world to share Reno's potential. A series of colorful artworks have now been released and provide a sneak peek into Reno's key features. OPPO entered the global smartphone market in 2011 and has since become one of the world's most popular smartphone brands-particularly among young people-with over 250 million consumers around the world using OPPO smartphones. Reno will officially debut in the UAE on April 16th in Dubai. More information on the launch will be shared over the coming days. Please find herewith the OPPO Reno video. About OPPO OPPO is a leading global smartphone brand, dedicated to providing products infused with art and innovative technology. Based on the brand elements of young, trend-setting and beauty, OPPO brings consumers delighted experience of digital life. For the last 10 years, OPPO has been focusing on manufacturing camera phones, while innovating mobile photography technology breakthroughs. OPPO started the era of Selfie beautification, and was the first brand to launch smartphones with 5MP and 16MP front cameras. OPPO was also the first brand to introduce the motorized rotating camera, the Ultra HD feature and the 5x Dual Camera Zoom technology. OPPO's Selfie Expert F series launched in 2016 drove a Selfie trend in the smartphone industry. In 2017, OPPO was ranked as the number 4 smartphone brand globally, according to IDC. Today OPPO's business covers 40 countries and regions, and has 6 research centers worldwide, providing excellent smartphone photography experience to more and more young people around the world. About OPPO MEA In 2015, OPPO entered the Egyptian market. In 2016, OPPO set up its Middle East & Africa Sales Center in Cairo. The markets OPPO has entered in the Middle East and Africa include: Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kenya and Nigeria. OPPO set up its factory in Algeria in 2017, which made OPPO the first Chinese brand setting up factory in North Africa. Now, the factory goes into production. Based on the insights of local consumers in each country, OPPO MEA has started the progress of localization. And the localization includes all the perspectives towards each market - product localization, to further meet the core needs of users; marketing localization, to better communicate with local young customers; and team localization, to know our local consumers further and provide better service to the consumers. Within the last year, OPPO has started to adjust its product line in the Middle East region specifically. This has included the launch of its flagship OPPO Find X smartphone and the introduction of the OPPO R Series. OPPO will continue to evolve its local product line to offer more premium series to young consumers in the region. (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/845339/OPPO_Reno_Artwork.jpg) (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/845340/OPPO_Reno_Artwork.jpg) Kaspersky Lab is opening a Transparency Center in Madrid, which along with a transparency center opened in 2018 in Zurich, will serve as a trusted facility for the company's partners and government stakeholders to come and check source code of the company's products. In addition, the company is publishing the results of an independent legal analysis of the company's obligations to adhere to Russian legislation related to data processing. The center will open for its first visitors in June. Its development is part of the company's Global Transparency Initiative a set of measures being brought to life in order to fulfill growing demand from partners and government stakeholders for more information on how Kaspersky Lab's products and technologies work. Along with being a place to undertake "standard" source code review, the Spanish facility will also serve as a briefing center, where visitors can learn more about the company's portfolio, engineering and data processing practices. This information will be delivered in an easily accessible way. The company has developed a review system, which offers multiple review options, from a general non-technical overview of the company's engineering practices and data protection standards, through to a deep and comprehensive review of the critical parts of the company's source code. More information about the available options can be found on the Transparency Centers website. In addition to the opening of the new Transparency Center, the company is publishing the results of a voluntary third-party legal assessment aimed at providing an independent evaluation of the obligations the company adheres to in line with Russian legislation. The assessment was conducted by a prominent Russian and international law expert, Dr. Kaj Hober, Professor of International Investment and Trade Law at Uppsala University in Sweden. The analysis covers three Russian laws related to data processing and storage*, which were widely reported as the ones with which Kaspersky Lab is obliged to comply. The results following the analysis are freely available online and provide an unbiased and fair legal assessment to the company's customers and partners looking for reliable information about Kaspersky Lab. Based on Dr. Kaj Hober's review, the company does not fall under obligations of those legal acts primarily due to the nature of its activities. "We see that businesses are most concerned about sensitive questions relating to data management processes how data is stored and processed, and what the company does to keep users' data safe," said Anton Shingarev, vice president for public affairs at Kaspersky Lab. "To meet those needs, we decided to open an additional Transparency Center where European clients, governments and regulators can receive answers to all their questions. This motivation was also behind our initiative to conduct a legal assessment. "We understand that in the current geopolitical climate, when different countries create very different laws related to data processing, some of our partners and clients need as much information as possible in order to make the best possible choice of cybersecurity products and services. We are happy to provide them with such information because this is what the Global Transparency Initiative was originally created for. We are also happy to continue to extend the scope of the initiative and increase the number of measures supporting it," Shingarev added. Kaspersky Lab's Global Transparency Initiative was announced in October 2017 and continues to make progress. In particular, the company: Started relocating customer data storage and processing infrastructure from Russia to Switzerland. Since November 13, 2018, threat-related data coming from European users is being processed in two data centers in Zurich. The relocation of file processing is expected to be complete by the end of 2019. Has been working with one of the Big Four professional services firms on an audit of the company's engineering practices around the development and release of its anti-virus bases. This has the goal of independently confirming Kaspersky Lab's adherence with the highest industry security practices. A final SOC 2 (The Service and Organization Controls) report for this assessment under the SSAE 18 standard (Statement of Standards for Attestation Engagements) is planned for Q2 2019. Has been developing the Bug Bounty program. Since the announcement of the program's extension, the company resolved more than 50 bugs reported by security researchers and awarded more than $17,000 in bounty rewards. The company recently extended the scope of products available for review, giving security researchers the possibility to research Kaspersky Password Manager and Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Linux, among others. Kaspersky Lab believes that today's ultra-connected global landscape requires increased transparency and continues to implement concrete measures that further demonstrate our enduring commitment to assuring the integrity and trustworthiness of the company's solutions in the service of our customers. Learn more about Kaspersky Lab transparency principles and the Global Transparency Initiative here: www.kaspersky.com/about/transparency Federal Law No 40-FZ of 3 April 1995 On the Federal Security Service, as amended; Federal Law No 149-FZ of 27 July 2006 On Information, Information Technologies and Protection of Information, as amended; Federal Law No 144-FZ of 12 August 1995 On Operational-Investigative Activity, as amended. About Kaspersky Lab Kaspersky Lab is a global cybersecurity company, which has been operating in the market for 21 years. Kaspersky Lab's deep threat intelligence and security expertise is constantly transforming into next generation security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. The company's comprehensive security portfolio includes leading endpoint protection and a number of specialized security solutions and services to fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats. Over 400 million users are protected by Kaspersky Lab technologies and we help 270,000 corporate clients protect what matters most to them. Learn more at www.kaspersky.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005727/en/ Contacts: Gayle Landry (781) 503-1874 Gayle.Landry@kaspersky.com The "The Operator Business Services: Turkey Forecast 2018-2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. This report provides an outlook on the telecoms and ICT services market in Turkey for businesses of all sizes. It contains forecasts for fixed and mobile voice and data network services, as well as other business services such as security, co-location and hosting and public and private cloud services. The report contains: forecasts for operator services to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and large enterprises including fixed and mobile voice and data services, IoT connectivity services and ICT business services such as security and co-location and hosting quantification of revenue, the number of connections or users and ARPU for each service and each enterprise segment (micro, small, medium and large) an estimate of the total market addressable by operators for ICT business services and the likely share achievable by them for each service demographic data on the number of employees, enterprises and sites within each segment (note that we include entities in the governmental and public sectors) Key Topics Covered Chapter Nos. 5. Executive summary 6. Executive summary: increases in revenue from mobile and fixed data connectivity services will drive operator business revenue growth in Turkey 7. Forecast results 8. Operator business revenue in Turkey will increase during the forecast period, and mobile data will be the most significant contributor to this growth 9. Businesses of all sizes will deliver revenue growth, and micro enterprises will remain the largest source of operators' business revenue in Turkey 10. Growth in handset data revenue will lead to an increase in mobile services revenue in Turkey during the forecast period 11. Operator revenue from fixed services in Turkey will grow during the forecast period, driven by an increase in the number of data connections 12. The number of business fixed data connections in Turkey will increase between 2018 and 2023, along with demand for higher-bandwidth services 13. The addressable market for other business services for operators will continue to grow as businesses migrate further towards cloud-based business solutions 14. The key other business services markets addressed by operators in Turkey are co-location and hosting, security and private cloud 15. The broader enterprise IT and managed services market reaches beyond those services addressed by operators and is currently worth around TRY45 billion For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/b2763d/operator_business?w=4 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005743/en/ Contacts: ResearchAndMarkets.com Laura Wood, Senior Press Manager press@researchandmarkets.com For E.S.T. Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 Related Topics: Business Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - North American Nickel Inc. (TSXV: NAN) (OTCQB: WSCRF) (CUSIP: 65704T 108) (the "Company") is pleased to provide a detailed summary including remaining results from the 2018 exploration program designed to test the relationship between high grade nickel and tenors of magmatic sulphide mineralization and the distribution of high magnesium oxide (MgO) melanorite rocks on its 100% owned Maniitsoq nickel-copper-cobalt-PGM project in southwest Greenland. In 2018 NAN adapted a more aggressive drill targeting strategy which placed an emphasis on evaluating the roots of large intrusions at Maniitsoq that contained thick intervals of noritic rock with unusually high MgO concentrations. This new approach was driven by the technical data that indicated that the majority of the highest-grade mineralization comprising heavily disseminated, net-textured, breccia and massive sulphides are hosted within high MgO melanorite rocks. The connected nature of the sulphides in these styles of mineralization provides an exceptionally good target for deep-penetrating surface electromagnetic surveys. Using this knowledge NAN was able to target drill holes to test both anomalies derived from deep-penetrating surface electromagnetic surveys and the larger volumes of prospective melanorite adjacent to the known mineral zones. The assays of core samples derived from each hole helped to map the distribution of high MgO rocks which provides a geochemical vector towards the prospective keel of the intrusion. The boreholes have provided the platforms and geometry to test for conductivity within the melanorite keel of the intrusion using downhole electromagnetic (EM) survey methods. Given the scale of a conductive target that would achieve an economic hurdle, the EM method can effectively test up to 200m away from the borehole. Surface mapping, geochemistry, drilling, and geophysical technologies indicate that the prospective mineralized melanorite keel of the largest Greenland Norite Belt intrusion, Fossilik, is located at the southwestern end of the intrusion (see press release dated January 28, 2019). The 2018 program of work did not identify significant additional mineralization of the type encountered at P-058 and P-004 which are viewed as tectonically detached enclaves derived from the deeper keel of the intrusion. A similar approach was extended to the Imiak Hill Complex where exploration focused on the identification of the source of steeply-plunging detached zones of semi-massive, vein, and breccia style sulphide mineralization. At P-008, this approach was rewarded with the discovery of high Ni tenor, disseminated through semi-massive sulphide mineralization associated with melanorite (see press release dated November 19, 2018). NAN CEO, Keith Morrison, commented: "NAN had a very productive drilling campaign during the 2018 season at Maniitsoq, completing 14,287.6m in 33 holes. The resulting large number of assays delayed receipt of results and hence the time required to get this information to the markets. The advancement in our drilling strategy to test prospective melanorite is expected to reduce the amount of drilling time and cost to fully evaluate the camp scale Maniitsoq property. The 2018 drilling confirmed the presence of melanorite at several of the priority Maniitsoq intrusions but did not demonstrate an economic mineralized system. NAN remains committed to Maniitsoq and we will apply our cumulative experience to continuing to explore there and along the west coast of Greenland. Details of the 2019 program are being developed and will be press released when completed." Drill collar information and a summary of assays are provided in Tables 1 and 2 respectively and may be viewed using the link provided: Drill Collar Information & Selected 2018 Assay Results The 2018 program was accomplished over a 15 week period and 33 holes were completed. These numbers include six holes drilled on the Qeqertaasaq Carbonatite Complex designed to test potential nickel targets and evaluate the strategic metal potential in this area. Exploration activity focused on the use of geological, geochemical and geophysical data to target the melanoritic keel zones of prioritized intrusions at P-030-031-032, and in the footprint of the Imiak Hill Complex (IHC; Figure 1). The program included deep-penetrating, surface electromagnetic methods designed to optimize the detection of large conductive massive sulphide bodies at depth, coupled with borehole electromagnetic surveys (BHEM), structural geology, surface physical property, geochemical sampling, and 3D modeling. IMIAK HILL COMPLEX The Imiak Hill Complex is located approximately 8km north of Fossilik and comprises the Mikissoq, Imiak Hill and Spotty Hill sulphide zones. A number of additional mineralized norite intrusions containing melanorite occur within the footprint of the IHC, particularly to the west. Four IHC Footprint intrusions collectively named G-017; G-025; G-026, and G-036 were evaluated in 2018. Seven drill holes (MQ-18-160, 165, 166, 170, 176, 178, 179) totalling 3,499.8m were completed to evaluate the most promising areas within the intrusions based on available geophysical gravity anomalies and 2017 IP anomalies. Geochemical data also vectored boreholes into areas within the melanorite keels and the contacts of these heavily deformed intrusions. G-017 was drilled by holes MQ-18-170 and 178 to evaluate the depth potential of an area of melanorite outcrop that is associated with a gravity high. The two holes totaling 1,230.8m intersected one interval of melanorite at depth with no significant nickel or copper mineralization contained within broader intervals of weak to unmineralized norite and leuconorite. G-025 is located on the western margin of the Imiak Hill Complex. The intrusion consists of discontinuous outcrops of a melanorite body that has complex contacts with the surrounding gneiss. Hole MQ-18-176 was designed to undercut previous historic surface grab samples with values of up to 0.79% nickel and 0.42% copper (see press release dated December 18, 2017). The hole was drilled to a depth of 516m and intersected a thick interval of melanorite with anomalous Ni and Cu contents extending from casing depth down to 424m. The best interval returned values of 0.54% nickel and 0.19% copper between 115.15m to 121.0m. G-026 is located west of the Imiak Hill mineral zone and was tested with holes MQ-18-165, 166 and 179 totaling 1,174m. Hole MQ-18-165 was abandoned shortly after casing and restarted as 166, this hole targeted the interpreted base of the intrusion and exhibited a high degree of deviation. Hole MQ-18-166 failed to encounter any melanorite or nickel enrichment but MgO concentrations in the noritic rocks indicate a possible inversion of stratigraphy. Hole MQ-18-179 evaluated a discrete chargeability high coupled with a resistivity low in the SW portion of the intrusion. Noritic rocks with relatively low MgO concentrations were encountered throughout the hole. Two intervals of mineralization were encountered which assayed 0.43% Ni and 0.13% Cu over 7.0m from 382m to 389m, and 0.56% Ni and 0.17% Cu between 399.45m to 402m. G-036 is interpreted to be a possible faulted and displaced continuation of the mafic intrusive host to the Imiak Hill mineral zone. The intrusion, which may represent the keel of the system, is marked by a gravity high. Borehole MQ-18-160 tested G-036 to a depth of 579m and intersected a thick sequence of melanorite with a distinct 30m zone of nickel and copper enrichment between 80m and 110m.This high MgO noritic unit returned a best interval of 0.37% Ni and 0.19% Cu over 1.65m at 93.35m. Variations in MgO concentration through the hole suggest a possible inversion of lithostratigraphy. Spotty Hill P-055 Hole MQ-18-157 was designed to target a discrete gravity anomaly associated with an interpreted and projected melanorite keel roughly 300m down-plunge of known mineralization. Previous drill hole intercept values of 1.35% Ni and 0.26% Cu over 7.8m from hole MQ17-143 (see press release dated October 19, 2017). The 778m long hole (MQ-18-157) intercepted the high MgO melanoritic keel but returned sub-economic values of 0.27% Ni and 0.07% Cu over 4.63m from 527.8m to 532.43m. BHEM follow up on the hole failed to generate any discrete anomalies in the near vicinity. There remains an unexplained gravity feature at depth, suggesting a possible stacking of melanoritic strata at depths exceeding 600m. P-030/P-031/P-032 The P-030-032 target area is located in the southern portion of the Greenland Norite Belt and comprises a large, approximately two kilometre long, northeast-striking norite intrusion with surface gossans returning values up to 2.26% Ni, 0.67% Cu and 0.33g/t PGM's (see press release dated December 16, 2016). Hole MQ-18-181 was drilled steeply westward into the P-032 area targeting an area of high MgO norites associated with a surface gossan that assayed up to 1.08% Ni and 0.47% Cu. The hole intercepted multiple thick sequences of weakly mineralized melanorite down to 597m. Mineralization was intersected between 194.10m and 196.80m with assays of 0.86% Ni and 0.19% Cu. The appearance of a systematic increase in MgO concentrations with depth suggests the primary keel of the intrusion extends below the depth of drilling. MQ-18-188 was designed to evaluate the large P-031 noritic intrusion that occurs northeast of the P-032 sulphide zone. Grab samples at P-031 have previously returned values up to 0.49% Ni, 0.22% Cu and a combined PGM content of 0.7g/t. Unfortunately, the P-031 hole was shut down early in melanorite at a depth of 672m due to the termination of the 2018 exploration program. Analysis of drill hole chemostratigraphy indicates the intrusion becomes more primitive with depth and suggests the base or keel of the intrusion occurs at depths below current drilling. A third hole in the intrusion, MQ-18-186 was completed to a depth of 417m with the goal of establishing whether mineralized melanorite extends below the near-surface P-030 mineral zone. The hole failed to intercept norite because the contact on the P-030 norite was shallower than expected. A follow-up BHEM survey failed to produce any anomalies. PINGO Three holes totalling 1,017m were sited to evaluate the melanoritic Pingo dyke located approximately 23km northwest of the Imiak Hill Complex. The melanoritic intrusion has a linear surface expression over an interpreted strike of over 7km, and varies in width from 35 to 165m. Historic surface grab samples collected along the intrusion returned values of 0.78% Ni and 0.26% Cu; 0.74% Ni and 0.34% Cu; and 0.78% Ni and 0.23% Cu. Hole MQ-18-183 indicates that the gossanous melanorite exposed at surface extends to depth. The changes in MgO concentration through the melanorite define a differentiation trend with a base or keel to the south suggesting the possibility the Pingo intrusion is a sill. BHEM did not identify strongly conductive plates in association with the intrusion. Hole MQ-18-187 encountered noritic rocks underneath the surface outcrop of mineralized melanorite. The weakly conductive BHEM plates modelled from this hole point back towards the surface gossan and are coincident with the center of an intrusive body that varies from norite to melanorite over a vertical distance of ~300m. 3D modeling indicates the mineralized segment of the dyke has been tested for a conductive target satisfying an economic threshold above ~400m depth. The VTEM airborne geophysical response does not provide a focus for further evaluation of the strike-extent of the dyke. OTHER NORITIC INTRUSIONS P-005: MQ-18-164 was drilled to a depth of 122m to evaluate a previously identified VTEM anomaly modelled with a 252 Siemen conductance plate. The hole intersected weak but high nickel tenor stringer sulphide mineralization and returned a best value of 0.27% Ni and 0.22% Cu with 1.51% S over 1m. Follow up BHEM indicates an off-hole anomaly below the drill hole, suggesting the bulk of the mineralization potentially lies at depth. P-012: MQ-18-159 targeted a near surface 400 Siemen conductance surface pulse EM anomaly and a historic 1483 Siemen off-hole anomaly, modelled from DDH MQ-15-093. The 329m borehole intersected stringer/vein sulphide mineralization hosted within mafic gneiss from 24.20 to 30.85m. The best assay returned 0.22% Ni, 0.14% Cu over 0.60m. There was no explanation for the deeper anomaly; a BHEM survey indicated that the plunge extent of mineralization is less than originally modelled. P-293: Two holes, MQ-18-180 and 182 with a combined meterage of 338m were designed to evaluate a set of known VTEM anomalies located roughly 2km north east of the Mikissoq sulphide zone. Both holes intersected norite with associated barren sulphide mineralization. QEQERTAASAQ CARBONATITE COMPLEX & IKERTOQ A mineral licence over a highly prospective block of ground in the Greenland Norite Belt containing the Qeqertassaq Carbonatite Complex (QCC) was awarded to the Company in 2018 (see press release dated July 9, 2018). Compilation and re-interpretation of historic data for the property helped to focus exploration on the potential for nickel and rare and strategic metals. Two holes were drilled to follow up on potential nickel sulphide targets. DDH MQ-18-168 and 169 totaled 553m and targeted EM anomalies detected during the 2018 surface EM program. MQ-18-168 encountered thin veins of barren pyrite and pyrrhotite. DDH MQ-18-169 intersected a 30m thick interval of conductive magnetite. Four short drill holes totaling 752m targeted the concentric radiometric high developed at the periphery of the carbonatite intrusion where historic grab samples from the fenite zone contained elevated tantalum and niobium concentrations. Sporadic elevated results were received. DDH MQ-18-171, the easternmost hole, returned the highest Nb values of 3218 ppm over 0.9m and 3376 ppm over 0.3m. The highest Ta values occur in the northern part of the QCC with hole MQ-18-172 returning values of 166 ppm Ta over 0.5m and 163 ppm Ta over 0.15m (see table of intercepts using the link above). Host rocks for the mineralized intercepts include a mixture of weakly fenitized gneiss and mafic intrusive material. Mineralization tested to date is interpreted to occur along narrow irregularly-shaped veins and segregations in association with fenitized basement rocks In March 2018, the Company was granted a license for exclusive exploration rights to an area located near Kangerlussuaq in west Greenland known as Ikertoq. During 2018, the Company completed sampling and mapping of the area. Historic grab samples with elevated Ni concentration and Ni tenor corresponded to 1-15cm wide pegmatoidal feldspathic veinlets cross-cutting dunite and peridotite at the center of the intrusion. No ultramafic-hosted disseminated magmatic sulphide was identified. FOCUS FOR FUTURE EXPLORATION NAN is committed to understanding and developing the Ni-Cu-Co-precious metal potential of prospective rocks of the norite belt and other prospective geological environments in Greenland. The company will continue to investigate the nickel potential of near-surface targets on its Maniitsoq Property, and carry out systematic geoscience driven evaluations to maximize the potential value of the project. In 2019 NAN will aim to identify, map and sample priority gossans at Maniitsoq with the ambition to acquire additional geoscience data needed to advance the opportunities to drill-ready targets. Quality Control The drilling was completed by Forage M3 Drilling Services Inc. (Canada) utilizing two Discovery EF-50F diamond drills and one Boyles JKS 300 diamond drill rig. Drill core samples (47.6 mm NQ and 42.1mm BTW) are cut in half by a diamond saw on site. Half of the core is retained for reference purposes. Samples are generally 1.0 to 1.5 metre intervals or less at the discretion of the site geologists. Sample preparation is completed at the GeoLAB Greenland ApS preparation lab in Nuuk, Greenland. Sample pulps are sent by air to the MS Analytical laboratory in Langley, BC, Canada. Blank samples and commercially prepared and certified Ni sulphide and/or Carbonatite REE analytical control standards with a range of grades are inserted in every batch of 20 drill core samples or a minimum of one per sample batch. Blank samples and/or commercially prepared and certified Ni sulphide and/or Carbonatite REE analytical control standards are also inserted into every batch of surface samples. Analyses for Ni, Cu and Co are completed using a sodium peroxide fusion preparation and ICP-ES finish (PER-700). Analyses for Pt, Pd, and Au are by fire assay (30 grams nominal sample weight) with an ICP-AES finish (FAS-113). Analysis for Carbonate Major Oxides are by Lithium Metaborate fusion with an ICP-AES finish (WRA-310). Analysis for Li, Nb, and Ta along with Rare Earth Elements (REEs) and Refractory elements are completed using a sodium peroxide fusion with ICP-ES/MS finish (PER-700R). Technical Information; Qualified Person The Company is not aware of any legal, political, environmental or other risks that could materially affect the potential development of the project other than those set out in its annual information form filed on www.sedar.com. Please see below under the heading "Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements" for further details regarding risks facing the Company. All technical information in this release has been reviewed and approved by Peter C. Lightfoot, Ph.D., P.Geo. (Consulting Chief Geologist), who is the Qualified Person for the Company. About North American Nickel North American Nickel is a mineral exploration company with 100% owned properties in Maniitsoq, Greenland and Sudbury, Ontario. The Maniitsoq property in Greenland is a Camp scale permitted exploration project comprising 3,048 square km covering numerous high-grade nickel-copper + cobalt sulphide occurrences associated with norite and other mafic-ultramafic intrusions of the Greenland Norite Belt (GNB). The >75km-long belt is situated along, and near, the southwest coast of Greenland accessible from the existing Seqi deep water port with an all year-round shipping season and hydroelectric power potential from a quantified watershed. The Post Creek/Halcyon property in Sudbury is strategically located adjacent to the past producing Podolsky copper-nickel-platinum group metal deposit of KGHM International Ltd. The property lies along the extension of the Whistle Offset dyke structure. Such geological structures host major Ni-Cu-PGM deposits and producing mines within the Sudbury Camp. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements This press release contains certain "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" under applicable securities laws concerning the business, operations and financial performance and condition of the Company. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the success of exploration activities; impact of mineralogy, estimation of mineral resources at mineral projects of the Company; the future economics of minerals including nickel and copper; synergies and financial impact facilities; the benefits of the development potential of the properties of the Company and currency exchange rate fluctuations. Except for statements of historical fact relating to the Company, certain information contained herein constitutes forward-looking statements. Forward-looking 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. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are based on a number of assumptions and subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Many of these 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. Factors that could cause actual results to vary materially from results anticipated by such forward-looking statements include variations in metal grades, changes in market conditions, variations in recovery rates, risks relating to international operations, fluctuating metal prices and currency exchange rates, and other risks of the mining industry, including but not limited to the failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated. The Company cautions that the foregoing list of important factors is not exhaustive. Investors and others who base themselves on forward-looking statements should carefully consider the above factors as well as the uncertainties they represent and the risk they entail. The Company believes that the expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and such forward-looking statements included in this press release should not be unduly relied upon. These statements speak only as of the date of this press release. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable securities laws. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be anticipated, estimated or intended. Statements concerning mineral reserve and resource estimates may also be deemed to constitute forward-looking statements to the extent they involve estimates of the mineralization that will be encountered if the property is developed. Statements about the Company's future expectations and all other statements in this press release other than historical facts are "forward looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and as that term defined in the Private Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The Company intends that such forward-looking statements be subject to the safe harbours created thereby. Since these statements involve risks and uncertainties and are subject to change at any time, the Company's actual results may differ materially from the expected results. For further information on the project, please see National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101) technical report prepared by SRK Consulting (Canada) Inc. (SRK) dated effective March 17th, 2017, titled "Updated Independent Technical Report for the Maniitsoq Nickel-Copper-Cobalt-PGM Project, Greenland", available under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com or at www.northamericannickel.com. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Mark Fedikow President North American Nickel Inc. For more information contact: North American Nickel Inc. Jaclyn Ruptash Corporate Communications (604) 770-4334 Toll free: 1-866-816-0118 Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Figure 1: Location of 2018 Drilling To view an enhanced version Figure 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2081/43836_3ac97938f49e3a12_002full.jpg To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43836 BUDAPEST, Hungary, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- 17-19 April, Startup Safari festival will be held in Budapest for the 4th time. Visitors will have the opportunity to meet companies, experts and discover professions from various fields, mainly from the ICT sector, the creative industry, the startup culture and from those business services and social affairs that are clustered around these fields. This year's three-days-long Startup Safari Budapest is expected to host more than 300 programmes in over 100 locations with over 5000 participants. The festival offers a real "safari" experience, as participating companies introduce their offices and organize programmes in various topics at their own headquarters, showing a more authentic and detailed picture of themselves than what visitors would see at a job fair or any other employer branding event. Startup Safari offers series of job opportunities for people facing career choices as well as the chance to obtain valuable connections and acquaintances in a short period of time that otherwise would take years. Expedition in Budapest's Startup World Thematic routes help visitors navigate the festival's many programmes, therefore each participant can choose the companies and the workshops according to their own individual interests. Some of the main topics this year include the future of education, lifestyle, design, the relationship between technology and gastronomy, artificial intelligence, industry 4.0, digital marketing, product development or the effects of UI/UX and automatization. Last year, noted companies, such as Prezi, Google, Publishdrive or LogMeIn were represented at the Safari, and in addition to company headquarters, other popular Budapest locales such as the A38 Ship were involved in the programmes. Key Players Exchange Knowledge Joanna Bakas, managing partner of LHBS Consulting will arrive from Berlin to Budapest to talk about the conditions of agile business operation. Alex Felman, CEO of the Danish Felman Family Office will expound the important differences between idea men and implementers, which can fundamentally determine the success of a startup. Artificial intelligence will be the topic of the lecture of Daniel Dippold, the leader of Kairos, an English company consisting of 6000 startup entrepreneurs. He has a thorough view of the topics and fields of innovation most concerning for upcoming enterprises. About Startup Safari Startup Safari was initiated back in 2012 with the aim of introducing the world of startups in a real working environment with the proactive involvement of the audience. The first ever Safari was organized in Berlin and since then many cities in Germany has also organized their own Safari. Globally 25 cities joined in, including Rome, Riga or Sao Paulo - however the event grew out to be the largest in Budapest. The festival is frequently visited by startup founders, CEOs, freelancers, investors and representatives of scientific fields and the atmosphere of the Safari provides the occasion to have a casual talk over a coffee after an interesting lecture. For more information visit www.budapest.startupsafari.com or follow www.facebook.com/startupsafaribudapest Photo gallery: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1U7mHGHZwEqEPEPDtzGQfSQMghLTYJGSl CHICAGO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- According to new market research report "Geomarketing Market by Software (Location and Predictive Analytics, Reporting, and Geofencing), Services, Technology (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Beacons, NFC, and GPS), Location (Indoor, and Outdoor), Deployment Mode, Vertical, and Region - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the Geomarketing Market size is expected to grow from USD 7.3 billion in 2018 to USD 23.7 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.4% during the forecast period. Increasing demand for location-based intelligence to enhance business outcome and use of location analytics and big data to collect comprehensive and differentiated information about potential markets and customers are the major driving factors of the Geomarketing Market. Browse in-depth TOC on "Geomarketing Market" 56 - Tables 52 - Figures 168 - Pages Speak to our Expert Analyst: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/speaktoanalystNew.asp?id=196816785 The software segment to hold the higher market share The software segment is expected to gain traction in the Geomarketing Market during the forecast period. Geomarketing software is usually deployed as a stand-alone solution as per application requirements. It mainly consists of 4 subcomponents, namely, content management, location and predictive analytics, geofencing, and reporting and data visualization. This solution helps businesses generate their revenues by implementing it across industry verticals, such as retail, healthcare, logistics, and transportation. Additionally, it can be integrated with the existing centralized system. Among services, deployment and integration segment is gaining traction Deployment and integration services help in reducing the time required for deploying and integrating virtual classroom solutions. These services ensure safety and security of integration of mobile devices with the geomarketing ecosystem. Service providers safeguard and confirm the integration and installation of the geomarketing solutions for quality assurance. Ask for PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=196816785 North America to hold the highest market share during the forecast period North America is one of the major contributors to the Geomarketing Market, due to technological developments. The US and Canada are the top contributing countries to the Geomarketing Market in this region. These countries have established economies, which empower them to invest in Research and Development (R&D) activities strongly. Moreover, the rapid development of the startup culture and high adoption of technologies in education are expected to fuel the growth of the Geomarketing Market in North America. Moreover, the companies in this region are focusing more on analytics strategies because nowadays customers are accessing multiple touch points. For instance, smartphone buyers first perform secondary research about devices over the internet. After researching, they go through product specifications and review other users' feedback. The major vendors covered in the Geomarketing Market, include Google (US), Microsoft (US), IBM (US), Cisco (US), Oracle (US), Adobe(US),Salesforce(US), ESRI(US), Software Ag (Germany), Ericsson(Sweden), Qualcomm(US), XTREMEPUSH(Ireland), Plot Projects(Netherlands), Rover(Canada), Mobile Bridge(Netherlands), Hyper(US), Reveal Mobile(US), Galigeo(Europe), Navigine(US), Clevertap(US), Urban Airship(US), Bluedot Innovation(US), Merkle(US), Foursquare(US), and LocationGuru (India). Browse Adjacent Markets: Digitalization and Internet of Things (IoT) Market Research Reports & Consulting About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledge Store" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Shelly Singh MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: sales@marketsandmarkets.com Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/geomarketing-market.asp Visit Our Website: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) The Presidential Spokesperson is inclined to believe the military that Chinese militia are present in disputed waters, and not Chinese fishermen. In a briefing with the Malacanang news media Tuesday, Salvador Panelo said, "The military command says from their point of view, it's militia men. Eh sino ba paniniwalaan ko, siyempre yung military." [Translation: The military command says from their point of view, it's militia men. So who do I beleive? The military, of course.] Panelo met with Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jianhua Monday, and Zhao said it was fishermen seen in Pag-asa island. Zhao also told Panelo they would investigate the issue. In a separate interview with CNN Philippines New Day, Panelo said a diplomatic protest over China's presence near Pag-asa island is "on the way" and has "most likely" already been filed. Panelo said he was given this information by Foreign Affiars Secretary Teodoro "Teddy Boy" Locsin Jr. CNN Philippines has reached out to Locsin for an answer on the issue, but has not yet received a response. When asked what was included in the protest, Panelo said, "I assume the diplomatic protest would be saying that 'Why are you... this is supposed to be our territory, why are you there? Why are you staying there for some time?'" But on whether the Philippines would demand specific measures from China, Panelo said the issue would have to be discussed in bilateral meetings. He went on to say a meeting was scheduled for Thursday where the issue would "most likely" be raised. Panelo added raising the issue before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is also an option. "There are cases where certain issue that happens in a particular country that affects humanity, are raised in the General Assembly. Tapos, General Assembly makes a unified action. Siguro, baka yun [That could be it]," he said. On Monday, Armed Forces of the Philippines Spokesperson Edgar Arevalo confirmed the presence of Chinese vessels in Pag-asa Island. "Indeed there (is) presence of Chinese vessels in the area... "The information that we got is the more likely intention is to establish their presence in the area," he told CNN Philippines. Arevalo, however, could not give a definite number on how many vessels were in the are as he said it varied from day to day. In Tuesday's interview with CNN Philippines' New Day, Panelo said Chinese fishermen were not supposed to be fishing in the area as it belonged to the Philippines. When asked if Filipinos should be worried, Panelo said, "Well yes, if it raises apprehension in our fishermen." He also said no reports have been received about Filipino fishermen being harassed by Chinese. This is a developing story. CNN Philippines senior correspondent Ina Andolong contributed to this story. Mrs. Bush, who was 92 when she died last April , gave Susan Page, author of "The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty," access to volumes of her diaries, which she began keeping in 1948. The former first lady recounts in a January 1990 entry about reading a news article on Trump speaking at a Los Angeles charity awards dinner for Merv Griffin. Former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, attended the gala, and Trump needled the former president over pricey speeches he had given in Japan. LONDON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Sean McCready, Director of Education and Skills at leading apprenticeship provider ICS Learn, has warned that companies may be "set to lose millions" from their apprenticeship levy fund on April 6th. As the two-year anniversary of the launch of the controversial scheme approaches, McCready believes that levy-paying employers may lose out, as the UK Government will begin reclaiming unused funds at a rate of 120 million per month. Apprenticeship funds are valid for just 24 months after being paid into the ringfenced account, meaning the first batch of funds are set to expire next month if unused. Digital apprenticeship training provider ICS Learn is urging employers to turn their levy into a strategic advantage before it's too late. "Starting in April 2019, companies may lose millions from their apprenticeship levy," warns Sean McCready. "Apprenticeships can be hugely beneficial to employers, with each apprentice delivering an average of 10,300 in productivity gains per year according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Offering training to existing staff through an apprenticeship can also improve morale and retention, as it shows that employers are invested in their further development." The controversial apprenticeship levy has seen limited uptake by businesses, with 3 billion in levy funding remaining unused. "Many employers believe that apprentices have to attend college for a day each week, and this inconvenience prevents them from offering apprenticeship training," explains McCready. "However, this is not the case - much of the required 20% off-the-job training can be completed online, making it much easier to fit into a busy working schedule." McCready cites that other common misconceptions include believing only new, young or inexperienced members of staff can be apprentices. Current employees of any age or experience level can enrol on an apprenticeship, with some programmes being equivalent to a degree or Master's degree. The diversification of apprenticeships has also enhanced the range of subjects offered, moving away from traditional trades training and into the professions. Apprenticeships are now available for human resources, finance, project management and many other key business roles. Digital-first apprenticeship training ICS Learn is the UK's most trusted online learning provider. Their flexible digital apprenticeship training allows apprentices to learn from their office and shape training around their everyday tasks, with minimum disruption to their work or organisation. Contact: Stephen.Blythe@icslearn.co.uk +44-(0)800-056-3983 Regulatory News: Tikehau Capital (Paris:TKO), the alternative asset management and investment group, has appointed Frederic Giovansili as Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Tikehau Investment Management, the company's primary asset management platform, with effect from 1 April 2019. Reporting to Thomas Friedberger, Co-Chief Investment Officer of Tikehau Capital and Chief Executive Officer of Tikehau Investment Management, and Henri Marcoux, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Tikehau Capital and Chief Executive Officer of Tikehau Investment Management, Frederic Giovansili will be responsible for Tikehau Investment Management's sales, marketing and business development. Mr. Giovansili's appointment comes as Tikehau Capital sets two core targets to achieve by 2022: reaching over 35 billion in assets under management, and reporting over 100 million of net operating profit from the asset management activities, over five times the amount recorded in 2018 for this business. Mr Giovansili, 46, graduated from CentraleSupelec and has a Masters degree in Economics. Since 2017, he has been head of Northern and Western European sales across global markets and Client Financing Solutions at Nomura. In this role, he headed up an international sales team based in five offices covering 10 countries, working across both investment banking and global markets. Previously, he was based in London and then Paris for Citi where he was head of global markets for France, Belgium and Luxembourg for 11 years. Appointed managing director at Citi in 2007, he led a team working across the full range of products (equities, FX and fixed income) for financial institutions and large corporates. Before joining Citi, he held several roles at Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan in London. Henri Marcoux, Deputy CEO of Tikehau Capital and CEO of Tikehau Investment Management, commented: "We are delighted to have Frederic Giovansili on board. With over 20 years' experience in global markets in both London and Paris working in various structuring, sales and management roles across a range of products, his arrival is part of our clear and ambitious asset management growth strategy." About Tikehau Capital Tikehau Capital is an asset management and investment group which manages approximately 22bn of assets, with shareholders' equity of 2.3bn (as at 31 December 2018). The group invests in various asset classes (private debt, real estate, private equity and liquid strategies), including through its asset management subsidiaries, on behalf of institutional and private investors. Controlled by its managers, alongside leading institutional partners, Tikehau Capital employs 430 staff (as at 31 December 2018) across its Paris, London, Brussels, Madrid, Milan, New York, Seoul and Singapore offices. Tikehau Capital is listed on Euronext Paris, compartment A (ISIN: FR0013230612; Ticker: TKO.FP) www.tikehaucapital.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005842/en/ Contacts: Press contacts Tikehau Capital: Julien Sanson +44 20 3821 1001 Finsbury: Arnaud Salla Charles O'Brien +44 207 251 3801 press@tikehaucapital.com Shareholder and Investor Contact: Louis Igonet +33 01 40 06 11 11 shareholders@tikehaucapital.com Calling All Food, Beverage, Tourism & Hospitality Professionals PORTLAND, Oregon, USA, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Taking place in just two weeks, on April 17-18, is the third edition of FoodTreX Global | Online Food Travel Summit, the world's largest online food and beverage tourism conference for trade professionals. The Summit brings together experts who will answer the hard questions facing our industry. They discuss issues and information that just cannot be found easily online. Topics covered at FoodTreX Global 2019 include: The role of social responsibility in food and beverage tourism Using the food-lover's customer journey to increase guest satisfaction Meeting the expectations of food-loving travelers Competing with globalization while remaining an authentic culinary attraction Food sport and destinations What matters most in food tourism today Sustainable food tourism strategies for destinations What food-focused destinations are overlooking with social media Different ways food-centric rural areas can compete with metropolises Leveraging immigrant influence in marketing culinary cultures This year for the first time, content will be divided over two days. Day 1 is more business and entrepreneur-focused, while Day 2 is more destination marketing and government-focused. Delegates are invited to attend one or both days. REGISTRATION NOW OPEN Interested trade professionals can learn more at www.foodtrex.org. A limited number of complimentary passes are available for qualified media professionals. MORE ABOUT FOODTREX EVENTS The World Food Travel Association is at the forefront of delivering quality, thought-provoking and topical events, seminars and conferences for professionals in the food and beverage tourism industry. In 2018, the Association's events were restructured under a common event brand named FoodTreX (" Food Tr avel Ex cellence"). The FoodTreX event portfolio includes FoodTreX London | Food Travel Innovation Summit (next: November 3, 2019), FoodTreX Global | Online Food Travel Summit (next: April 17-18, 2019), as well as Regional Food Travel Summits (next: Kathmandu, NepalMay 24, 2019 and Thessaloniki, GreeceOctober 7, 2019; a regional summit was already held in Pamplona, Spain earlier this year). MORE ABOUT THE WORLD FOOD TRAVEL ASSOCIATION (WFTA) The World Food Travel Association (WFTA) was founded in 2003 as a non-profit and non-governmental organization (NGO) and today is recognized as the world's leading authority on food and beverage tourism. Each year the Association serves nearly 100,000+ professionals in over 100 countries. The WFTA's knowledge, tools and training help trade professionals and organizations to leverage their area's food and beverage products and experiences to help create a strong sense of place, which increases visitor arrivals; destination brand equity; and export demand for their area's food and beverage products. Learn more at www.worldfoodtravel.org. MORE ABOUT FOOD TOURISM Learn more about what food tourism is, which business sectors it includes and the benefits of being involved at www.WhatIsFoodTourism.org. PRESS CONTACT: ERIK WOLF help@WorldFoodTravel.org, (+44) 7827-582-554 (GMT) Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/654605/World_Food_Travel_Association_Logo.jpg Regulatory News: In conformity with market best practices, Air Liquide (Paris:AI) announces today that its Pre-Quarterly Sales Communication document for Q1 2019 is available on the company's corporate website under the "Investors" section: https://www.airliquide.com/investors/first-quarter-2019-revenue This quarterly document aims to assist in the financial modeling of the Group's performance. The first quarter 2019 sales will be published on April 26, 2019 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. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005928/en/ Contacts: Investor Relations Aude Rodriguez +33 (0)1 40 62 57 08 Muriel Legeron +33 (0)1 40 62 50 18 Corporate Communications Media Relations: +33 (0)1 40 62 58 49 Airliquide-media@airliquide.com Article L. 238-8-II of the French commercial Code and article 223-16 of the AMF (French Financial Markets Authority) general regulation Regulatory News: Corporate name of the issuer: Veolia Environnement (Paris:VIE) 21, rue La Boetie 75008 PARIS FRANCE (ISIN code: FR0000124141-VIE) Information closing date Total number of shares forming the share capital Total number of voting rights March 31, 2019 565,593,341 Total number of theoretical voting rights (1): 598,688,936 Total number of voting rights that may be exercised (2): 586,173,547 Inclusion in the Veolia Environnement Articles of Association of a clause requiring a reporting obligation of the declaration of crossing a shareholding threshold, complementary to the one relating to the thresholds provided by the French law and the regulations in force (article 8). (1) Number of theoretical voting rights after taking into account the number of shares with double voting rights as of March 31, 2019 (33,095,595 shares) and the number of treasury shares held as of March 31, 2019 (12,515,389 shares). (2) Number of voting rights that may be exercised number of theoretical voting rights (or total number of voting rights attached to shares) shares without voting rights (number of treasury shares held as of March 31, 2019). Veolia Environnement Siege social/head office: 21, rue La Boetie 75008 PARIS France Adresse postale/Correspondence address: 30, rue Madeleine Vionnet 93300 AUBERVILLIERS France tel. +33 (0)1 85 57 70 00 Fax: +33 (0)1 71 75 10 45 www.veolia.com A Public Limited Company (Societe Anonyme) with a share capital of 2,827,966,705 403 210 032 RCS PARIS View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005955/en/ Contacts: Veolia Environnement JOGMEC/Thunderstruck Mobilize on Korokayiu Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) -Thunderstruck Resources Ltd. (TSXV: AWE) (OTCQB: THURF) (The "Company") is pleased to announce that the first focused geophysical surveys ever conducted on its exploration projects in Fiji have confirmed high-priority drill targets beneath extensive surface geochemical anomalies. The coincident chargeability high and resistivity anomalies, together with the widespread surface mineralization, in this geological setting and with extensive hydrothermal alteration, are characteristic of large gold-copper mineralizing systems and related epithermal veins. Thunderstruck completed a total of 11 line-km of pole-dipole IP/Resistivity ground geophysical surveys, comprising 7 line-km over five lines at Rama Creek copper-gold porphyry target (including a one-km line transecting the associated Senikura Gold Zone), and 4 line-km over four lines at the Liwa Creek gold prospect during December 2018 and February 2019. All nine lines returned significant IP/Resistivity anomalies coincident with known soil, rock, and trench geochemical targets. The results highlight the significant depth potential of gold and copper-gold mineralization zones identified by the Company. "These results show that our Rama copper-gold porphyry target geophysical anomaly extends to a depth of at least 500 meters, far deeper than Anglo's discovery hole in 1975, which ended in mineralization at 244 meters," stated Bryce Bradley, Thunderstruck President and CEO. "A drilling program will determine the ultimate size of this exciting target." "The results from our Liwa gold prospect also indicate that geophysical anomalies associated with wide-spread surface mineralization extend to a depth of at least 300 meters below each of our four gold targets, where prior sampling and trenching showed locally high grade gold mineralization at surface," she noted. "With this confirmation of depth potential, we are now ready to determine specific drill targets for each of our identified gold prospects. It's important to note that, in all cases, the anomalies are open to depth beyond the limits of the geophysical surveys." JOGMEC/Thunderstruck Exploration Preparations Underway JOGMEC (Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation) has notified the Company that it has satisfactorily completed due diligence on the Korokayiu Zinc-Copper Project (previously Wainaleka) (See the Company's news release dated February 28, 2019). The team has commenced re-opening of access roads and camp building in preparation for the 2019 CAD$900,000 Korokayiu Joint Venture work program comprising property-wide ground gravity geophysical surveys, detailed geologic mapping, and surface rock geochemical sampling, followed by a 1,600 m diamond drill program. Technical Discussion Of Geophysical Survey Results Rama Creek At Rama Creek a series of four survey lines, each 1.5 km in length, targeted what the Company interprets as the core of the copper-gold mineralized porphyry system. The results of the survey define an approximately 800 m diameter, bowl-shaped greater-than-40 mV/V chargeability high and resistivity low (conductive) anomaly cored by resistive highly-altered tonalite intrusive rocks at surface. The chargeability anomaly extends from surface to a vertical depth of approximately 500 m below surface; the limit of the geophysical inversion (Figure 1). The chargeability and resistivity low anomalies are coincident at surface with semi-circular, greater-than-800 parts-per-million copper and greater-than-200 parts-per-billion gold ridge-and-spur soil geochemical anomalies (see the Company's news release dated October 22, 2018). In addition, an historic Australian Anglo American Ltd (Anglo) diamond drill hole "DDH1" within the surface anomaly returned a 244-metre interval, between depths of 6 m and 250 m, averaging 0.22% Cu and ending in mineralization (including a 72 m interval between 6 m and 78 m averaging 0.23 g/t gold). The results of the Rama Creek Porphyry IP/Resistivity survey are significant in that inversion results demonstrate the chargeability and resistivity anomalies extend to a depth of a least 500 m. This represents at least 150 m below the limit of historic drilling by Anglo Pacific, which ended in mineralization and is coincident with Thunderstruck's recent soil geochemical surveys. A single 1 km survey line transecting the Senikura Gold Zone defined a 60-meter-wide, less-than-200-Ohm, resistivity low (conductive) anomaly extending to a vertical depth of 150 m coincident with the 2018 surface trenched zone that returned assays of 0.96 grams-per-tonne gold (g/t Au) over 11.1 m, within a broader anomalous gold zone averaging 0.55 g/t Au over 37.6 m (see the Company's news release dated March 1, 2018) (Figure 2). Figure 1: Rama Creek IP/Resistivity Survey Results (Isometric View Looking North) To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2901/43839_2eb2ccf1d4e5a94b_001full.jpg Liwa Creek The four Liwa Creek IP/Resistivity lines targeted the following gold prospects via two east-west and two north-south oriented survey lines (see the Company's news releases dated February 13, 2018 and October 30, 2018): Jensen's (55 g/t Au in outcrop), Liwa Ridge (trenched 1.2 g/t Au over 26.5 m, within a broader zone of 0.61 g/t Au over 71.3 m), Lower Vatuvatulevu (untested 2.5 g/t Au in soil anomaly), and Gun (anomalous gold and silver in rock float) High grade gold bearing plus base metal quartz veins at Jensen's are coincident with an approximately 100 m wide greater than 600 Ohm steeply north dipping resistive, and narrower 60 m wide weak sub-vertical chargeability anomaly extending to a depth a 250 m; the limit of the geophysical inversion (Figure 2). At the Liwa Ridge, broad gold in soil and rock trench values are coincident with weak near surface chargeability of hematite-silica-pyrite altered volcanic rocks. Significantly, a strong greater-than-600-Ohm restive anomaly occurs beneath the trenched area at a depth of 100 m extending to a depth of 300 m; the limit of the geophysical inversion. Similar near-surface chargeability and a broad greater-than-600-Ohm underlies the untested Lower Vatuvatulevu gold in soil anomaly at a vertical depth of 120 m. Anomalous gold and silver values in rock float discovered at the Gun Showing area are coincident with a moderate 10 mV/V chargeability anomaly at 100 m depth, and flanking greater-than-600-Ohm resistivity values. The presence of strong resistive and coincident weak-moderate chargeability anomalies are interpreted to indicate the presence of silicified lithologies and potentially mineralized targets at depth. Importantly, all of the known Liwa Creek Gold Prospect showings produce clearly defined IP/Resistivity anomalies coincident with gold mineralized zones on surface as defined by a combination of ridge-and-spur soil, rock grab and trench geochemical samples. Figure 2: Senikura and Liwa Creek IP/Resistivity Results To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2901/43839_2eb2ccf1d4e5a94b_002full.jpg About Fiji Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji, has a long mining history. It is on the prolific Pacific Ring of Fire, a trend that has produced numerous large deposits, including Porgera, Lihir and Grasberg. The island of Viti Levu hosts Namosi, held by a joint venture between Newcrest and Mitsubishi. Newcrest published Proven and Probable Reserves for Namosi of 1.3 billion tonnes at 0.37% Cu and 0.12 g/t Au (5.2M ounces Au and 4.9M tonnes Cu). Namosi is now undergoing environmental assessment as part of the permitting process. Lion One Metals is now developing its Tuvatu Project, with Indicated Resources of 1.1 million tonnes at 8.17 g/t Au (294,000 ounces Au), and Inferred Resources of 1.3 million tonnes at 10.6 g/t Au (445,000 ounces Au). The Vatukoula Gold Mine has been operating for 80 years, producing in excess of 7 million ounces. About Thunderstruck Resources Thunderstruck Resources is a Canadian mineral exploration company that has assembled extensive and highly prospective properties in Fiji on which recent and previous exploration has confirmed zinc, copper and precious metals mineralization. The Liwa Creek gold prospect and Rama Creek copper/gold porphyry are two of the Company's four distinct projects. The Company provides investors with exposure to a diverse portfolio of exploration stage projects with potential for zinc, copper, gold and silver in a politically safe and stable jurisdiction. Thunderstruck trades on the Toronto Venture Exchange (TSX-V) under the symbol "AWE" and United States OTCQB under the symbol "THURF." Qualified Person Statement Kristopher J. Raffle, P.Geo. (BC) Principal and Consultant of APEX Geoscience Ltd. of Edmonton, AB, is a qualified person for the project as defined by National Instrument NI 43-101. Mr. Raffle has reviewed and approved the portion of the technical content of this news release as it relates to the Rama and Liwa Creek Prospects. The 2018/2019 IP/Resistivity ground geophysical surveys utilized a pole-dipole array with a 100 m (Rama) and 50 m (Liwa) "a" spacing at "n" separation of 1 to 12. Readings were taken in the time domain using a 2 second on /2 second off alternating square wave. Chargeability values are for the 690-1050 msec interval after shutoff. For additional information, please contact: Rob Christl, Investor Relations Email: rob@thunderstruck.ca P: 778 840-7180 or, visit our website: http://www.thunderstruck.ca Neither the TSX Venture Exchange Inc. nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release contains certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". Although Thunderstruck believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward looking statements. Forward looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of Thunderstruck's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by law, Thunderstruck undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43839 SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / On March 26th, the 'Selective goods to the globe' O'MALL Brand Strategy Summit Korea Station was grandly opened at the Hilton Hotel in Seoul. The summit attracted JAYJUN, Aekyung, AHC and many other well-known Korean brands and their executives to attend, and the summit was full of surprises. Strategically works in Korea for more quality goods One of the first overseas warehouses and branches of O'MALL lie in Korea. Brain Kim, general manager of Onion Korea Branch, said that after several years of development, Korea Branch has gotten a return. Firstly, warehouse in Seoul has been built as a high standard warehouse logistics system equipped with 20 thousand square meters. Secondly, members of professional purchase team have increased from 3 to 50 . What's more, Korea Branch has reached a co-operation with more than 300 Korean preeminent brands to ensure that all products are local and directly delivered to consumers. More importantly, trade volume of Korea Branch keeps a rapid growth. In 2017, trade amount between Onion and Korea has exceeded 50 million US dollars and is awarded ' The US $20 million Export Tower Award' by South Korean President Mr.Moon Jae-in. In 2019, it is estimated to reach 100 million US Dollars. O'MALL - A perfect platform for overseas purchasing transformation As we all known, the implementation of the E-Commerce Law has brought tremendous impact to the global overseas purchaser, and the same for the South Korean. For the transformation of South Korean procurement services, Deng Lijie, general business manager of O-cloud, indicated a better way for the overseas purchasing after analyzing the operation mode of O'MALL at the summit. Deng said that O'MALL is the first one in China to redefine social retailing and create a new retailing mode - M2S (Made to Social). This kind of mode built on the system of O'MALL. With the individual as the carrier, every user can become a promoter of the product to omit the redundant circulation. Therefore, consumers can buy products with the better price which is closed to the cost. By the end of 2018, O'MALL has attracted 500,000 social online retailing sellers, and is expected to grow to 800,000 in 2019. O'MALL - Selective goods to the globe With the vision of 'Connect customers with the world', O'MALL has developed rapidly in recent years not only due to its unique operating method and philosophy, but also due to its global supply chain system as well as the professional commodity team. During the summit, Karen Zhen, vice general manager of the O'MALL Commodity Center, said O'MALL has always committed to selecting qualified goods from all over the world for the customers, with more than 5000 brands and 350,000 goods gathered since established. Furthermore, strategic cooperation has been achieved with numerous international brands, such as Nestle, Mead Johnson, Wyeth, as well as some national brands like Cheong Kwan Jang, Mediheal, including AHC, JAYJUN, Amore and Aekyung, which are popular with Chinese consumers.. Self-purchasing & operating as well as self-built oversea warehouses, supply chains and logistic systems are what O'MALL sticks to, said Karen. Besides, ten cooperation warehouses have been set up in Japan, Korea, Europe, America, Asia and so on by far, with a 25,000 square meters of constant-temperature central issuing warehouse in Hong Kong and 29 comprehensive channels for import & export customs clearance worldwide, which indeed fulfill 'Selective goods to the globe'. Contact: Theranos Wei 861314370@qq.com SOURCE: O'MALL View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540825/CONNECT-CUSTOMERS-WITH-THE-WORLD-OMALL-Brand-Strategy-Summit-Was-Successfully-Held-in-Korea-Station Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 2, 2019) - Revelo Resources Corp. (TSXV: RVL) ("Revelo" or the "Company") reports that Hochschild Mining PLC's Chilean subsidiary ("Hochschild") has terminated the Option Agreement to earn a 100% interest in Revelo's gold-silver project at Loro, located in northern Chile. The Option Agreement allowed Hochschild to earn a 100% interest in the Loro Project over a maximum of five years in exchange for a series of cash payments, in-ground investments and a royalty on future production. Hochschild will pay a break fee to Revelo of US$50,000 together with the annual Chilean mineral property maintenance payments at Loro for 2019. Tim Beale commented; "Whilst we are disappointed to see Hochschild exit this exploration program, Revelo remains encouraged by the results to date, and we have already been approached by other companies interested in the project. We are hopeful to see exploration activities continue in the near future." ABOUT LORO Loro is located along the highly productive Paleocene (or Central) Mineral Belt in northern Chile that contains several important gold, silver and copper mines and projects. The project is located along trend and just 25 km due south of the Yamana Gold owned and operated, multi-million-ounce gold-silver district of El Penon. The project also lies just a few kilometers east of Revelo's important Las Pampas project, also prospective for low-sulphidation, epithermal precious metals veins. The 4,800-hectare Loro project area is located at relatively low altitudes (1,800m to 2,000m), has subdued topography, and is easily accessed, being located within a short driving distance from the Pan-American Highway along a dirt road, some two hours' drive from Antofagasta and 2.5 hours from Taltal. Recent work completed included geological mapping, surface geochemistry, ground magnetics and a total of 2,972 metres drilled in 10 holes on one small portion of the property. Results showed the presence of a mineralised epithermal vein system in the Chucao and Tricao-Caleu vein systems, with highly anomalous silver and gold values. Several, multi-kilometer geochemical and geophysical anomalies remain to be tested by drilling (see news releases dated August 15, 2018; May 2, 2018; March 14, 2018; December 14, 2017; October 5, 2017). For further details of the Loro Project please refer to the Loro Project page on Revelo's website (http://www.reveloresources.com/projects/loro). Dr. Demetrius Pohl, Ph.D., Certified Professional Geoscientist (CPG), an independent consultant, is the Company's Qualified Person for the purposes of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosures for Mineral Projects of the Canadian Securities Administrators, and has approved the written disclosure of the technical information contained in this news release. ABOUT REVELO Revelo has interests in an outstanding portfolio of projects prospective for copper, gold and silver located along proven mineral belts in one of the world's top mining jurisdictions - Chile. The Company has a combination of wholly-owned projects (available for option, JV or sale), option agreements, royalty interests (non-producing to date), and equity interests in mining and exploration companies. Revelo's total exposure to mineral tenements in northern Chile, either wholly-owned or through royalty interests, is around 200,000 hectares. Revelo is a Canadian company and is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV: RVL). For more information, please visit Revelo's website at www.reveloresources.com. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "Michael Winn" Michael Winn, Chairman INVESTOR CONTACT Timothy J Beale | President & CEO T: +1 604 687-5544 | info@reveloresources.com | www.reveloresources.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENT This news release contains certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical fact, that address events or developments that Revelo expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "indicate" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although Revelo believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43817 Changes in the Board of Directors of MCH Group Ltd. It is to be proposed to the General Meeting of 2 May 2019 that Markus Breitenmoser and Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard be elected as members of the Board of Directors and successors to Marco Gadola and Jean-Philippe Rochat. The Canton of Basel-Stadt is delegating Dr. Dagmar Maria Kamber Borens to the Board of Directors as per 2 May 2019 to succeed Werner Helfenstein. Board of Directors' members Marco Gadola, Jean-Philippe Rochat and Werner Helfenstein will be resigning from the Board of MCH Group Ltd. at the General Meeting of 2 May 2019. Marco Gadola has been a member of the Board since 2016 and is chairman of the Audit Committee. Jean-Philippe Rochat was an observer as of 2013 and, since 2017, has been a member of the Board of Directors and of the Governance, Nomination and Compensation Committee (GNCC). Werner Helfenstein has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2006 - as a delegate of the Canton of Basel-Stadt since 2013 - and is resigning from the Board on age grounds. MCH Group Ltd. extends its sincere thanks to Marco Gadola, Jean-Philippe Rochat and Werner Helfenstein for their strong commitment to the company's highest body. The Board of Directors is proposing to the General Meeting of 2 May 2019 that Markus Breitenmoser and Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard be elected as successors to Marco Gadola and Jean-Philippe Rochat. Markus Breitenmoser has been recommended for nomination by shareholders linked to AMG Analysen & Anlagen AG, which, among other things, represents the biggest private shareholder of MCH Group Ltd. For more than 30 years, he has been a Board of Directors' member, manager and consultant in different sectors of industry worldwide, including in the financial industry, and especially in the field of corporate restructuring and repositioning. He holds an MBA degree from the University of St. Gallen. Among other things, he is the founder and a partner and Board member of the consultancy Breitenmoser & Partner GmbH in Rapperswil-Jona and the innovation research company Alpora AG in Zug and also chairman of the Board of Central American forestry company, Novelteak AG. Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard has more than 30 years' international professional experience in managerial posts in different companies in the luxury and consumer goods industry as well as in the specialist retail trade - most recently as CEO of Oettinger Davidoff AG in Basel. Since 4 September 2018, he has been interim CEO of MCH Group Ltd. and will be continuing in this function until Bernd Stadlwieser, the new CEO, arrives on 12 June 2019. He is thus bringing valuable knowledge from the operational management of MCH Group Ltd. with him to the Board of Directors. The government of the Canton of Basel-Stadt has taken the decision to delegate Dr. Dagmar Maria Kamber Borens to the Board of Directors of MCH Group Ltd. as successor to Werner Helfenstein. As a doctor of law and financial specialist, she was Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Swiss Universal Bank and Credit Suisse (Schweiz) AG until October 2018, where she was responsible inter alia for the segments of strategy, digitisation, IT, operations and bank products as well as marketing and sponsoring. Prior to that, Dr. Dagmar Maria Kamber Borens worked for almost 18 years in different managerial posts for UBS AG in Zurich, London and Singapore and, from 2012 to 2016, was Group CFO for the Asia-Pacific region in Singapore. In addition, the Board of Directors proposes to the General Meeting that Dr. Ulrich Vischer be re-elected as a member and chairman of the Board of Directors and that Dr. Karin Lenzlinger Diedenhofen and Andreas Widmer be re-elected as members of the Board of Directors. It is proposed that Dr. Ulrich Vischer, Dr. Balz Hosly and Thomas Weber be re-elected as members of the Governance, Nomination and Compensation Committee (GNCC) and that Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard be elected as a new member of the GNCC. Media contact MCH Group Ltd. Corporate Communications Christian Jecker +41 58 206 22 52 christian.jecker@mch-group.com www.mch-group.com Links Items on the agenda for the General Meeting of 2 May 2019 (https://www.mch-group.com/en-US/mch-group/investor-relations.aspx) 2018 Reports online (also available to download) (https://www.mch-group.com/en-US/news/reports.aspx) Media releases (https://www.mch-group.com/en-US/news/medienmitteilungen.aspx) Attachment Headquartered in Luxembourg, with a branch in London, BOS Wealth Management Europe S.A. is poised to better serve Europe's growing ultra-high net worth population Bank of Singapore, the private banking arm of Southeast Asia's second largest financial services group OCBC Bank, officially launched its wealth management subsidiary, BOS Wealth Management Europe S.A. ("BOSWM") that further positions Bank of Singapore to capture opportunities in Europe. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005846/en/ Bank of Singapore launched its European wealth management subsidiary BOS Wealth Management in Luxembourg and London to deepen its presence in the region which has the highest number of ultra-high net worth individuals globally. (L-R) BOS Wealth Management Chief Executive Officer Mr Anthony Simcic, Director General of Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier Mr Claude Marx, OCBC Group CEO Mr Samuel Tsien, Bank of Singapore CEO Mr Bahren Shaari, OCBC Bank Chief Operating Officer and Bank of Singapore Chairman Mr Ching Wei Hong, and Bank of Singapore Global Market Head for Singapore, Malaysia and International Mr Olivier Denis (Photo: BOSWM) This ushers in a new growth phase to its presence in Europe which has the largest population of ultra-high net worth individuals in 2018 worldwide 35% of the global population with an expected increase of 24% over the next five years1 Heading the Luxembourg-headquartered subsidiary is Chief Executive Officer Mr Anthony Adriano Simcic. Ms Liz Bottomley is the General Manager of the UK branch of BOSWM, based in London, reporting to Mr Simcic. BOSWM presently has 30 employees across its Luxembourg and London offices and plans to continue hiring strategically. On 1 April 2019, BOSWM held the official opening of the business in Luxembourg, officiated by the Finance Minister of Luxembourg Mr Pierre Gramegna. Singapore's High Commissioner to the UK Ms Foo Chi Hsia graced the opening of BOSWM's UK branch in London on 2 April 2019. Mr Samuel Tsien, the Group Executive Officer of Bank of Singapore's parent company, OCBC Bank, Ching Wei Hong, Chief Operating Officer of OCBC Bank and Chairman of Bank of Singapore, and Bahren Shaari, Chief Executive Officer of Bank of Singapore, as well as 400 guests were present at both events. Commenting on the official launch of BOSWM, Bank of Singapore Chief Executive Officer, Mr Bahren Shaari, said, "This is an important milestone for Bank of Singapore. Europe has always been an integral part of our business. The setting up of BOS Wealth Management Europe in two leading financial hubs further deepens our commitment to serving the ultra-high and high net worth individuals in this region." Luxembourg's Minister of Finance, Mr. Pierre Gramegna, said, "The launch of BOS Wealth Management Europe is an important occasion. It is the first Singapore financial institution to establish a presence in Luxembourg. The fact that Bank of Singapore has chosen to set up its European hub in the Grand Duchy confirms Luxembourg's role as one of Europe's leading wealth and asset management centres." Prior to the set-up of BOSWM, Bank of Singapore had been serving its European clients from its Singapore headquarters and through its parent company OCBC Bank's London office. Details of Key Appointment Holders Mr Anthony Simcic Chief Executive Officer (CEO), BOS Wealth Management Europe S.A. Mr Simcic was appointed Chief Executive Officer on 12 March 2018. A French-Italian, he has 20 years of banking and asset management experience. As CEO, he is responsible for the overall strategy, governance, commercial development and implementation of BOSWM's activities in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom. Prior to joining BOSWM, Mr Simcic was the Managing Director of HSBC Private Bank in Luxembourg. Reporting directly to Bank of Singapore's Global Market Head for Singapore, Malaysia and International Mr Olivier Denis, Mr Simcic holds a Master's Degree in European Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science as well as a Bachelor's Degree (Hon) in Economics from the University of Warwick. Ms Liz Bottomley General Manager, BOS Wealth Management Europe S.A. UK branch Ms Bottomley was appointed General Manager of BOS Wealth Management Europe S.A. UK Branch on 2January 2019, having joined the London branch of OCBC Bank in November 2018. An industry veteran, Ms Bottomley has been advising private clients for over 25 years in Europe and Asia. As the General Manager of the UK branch, she is responsible for growing the business for BOSWM in the UK. Ms Liz reports to the Chief Executive Officer of BOS Wealth Management Europe S.A. Mr Anthony Simcic. Ms Bottomley was previously the Head of Private Banking at Arbuthnot Latham, a boutique private bank in London and a Client Partner with Coutts's International Private Banking Division. About Bank of Singapore Bank of Singapore is the dedicated private banking subsidiary of OCBC Bank. It has a strong Aa1 credit rating from Moody's and offers a unique value proposition as a safe Singapore-registered private bank. It operates on an open-architecture product platform and has strong research capabilities, especially in emerging market research, to help its clients make the right decisions for fixed income, equities and money market investments as well as portfolio management, trust and insurance services. Over the years, it has built Managed Investments capabilities and premium trust and advisory services, supported by one of the largest research teams in Asia. Beyond private banking services, clients of Bank of Singapore have access to personal and business banking services, as well as investment opportunities offered by OCBC Bank or its subsidiaries. It is able to leverage OCBC Bank's commercial banking capabilities to extend its clients a broad array of consumer and corporate banking, corporate finance and treasury services across the OCBC Bank's regional and international network. Bank of Singapore serves high net worth individuals and wealthy families in its key markets of Southeast Asia, Greater China, Philippines, India Sub-Continent and other International markets. Headquartered in Singapore, Bank of Singapore has branches in Hong Kong and Dubai International Financial Centre, with representative offices in Manila and Dubai. In Europe, the bank serves clients through BOS Wealth Management Europe Societe Anonyme (S.A.) in Luxembourg and London. Its strong performance has won it numerous industry recognitions. Bank of Singapore was named the Best Private Bank for Middle East and North Africa by Asian Private Banker in 2018 and Best Private Bank for Non-resident Indians in 2017 by Asian Private Banker. For more information, please visit www.bankofsingapore.com. For all updates on Bank of Singapore, follow @bankofSG on twitter and "follow" linkedin.com/bankofsingapore on LinkedIn. About OCBC Bank OCBC Bank is the longest established Singapore bank, formed in 1932 from the merger of three local banks, the oldest of which was founded in 1912. It is now the second largest financial services group in Southeast Asia by assets and one of the world's most highly-rated banks, with an Aa1 rating from Moody's. Recognised for its financial strength and stability, OCBC Bank is consistently ranked among the World's Top 50 Safest Banks by Global Finance and has been named Best Managed Bank in Singapore by The Asian Banker. OCBC Bank and its subsidiaries offer a broad array of commercial banking, specialist financial and wealth management services, ranging from consumer, corporate, investment, private and transaction banking to treasury, insurance, asset management and stockbroking services. OCBC Bank's key markets are Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Greater China. It has more than 570 branches and representative offices in 19 countries and regions. These include over 300 branches and offices in Indonesia under subsidiary Bank OCBC NISP, and more than 100 branches and offices in Hong Kong, China and Macao under OCBC Wing Hang. OCBC Bank's private banking services are provided by its wholly-owned subsidiary Bank of Singapore, which operates on a unique open-architecture product platform to source for the best-in-class products to meet its clients' goals. OCBC Bank's insurance subsidiary, Great Eastern Holdings, is the oldest and most established life insurance group in Singapore and Malaysia. Its asset management subsidiary, Lion Global Investors, is one of the largest private sector asset management companies in Southeast Asia. For more information, please visit www.ocbc.com. 1 According to Knight Frank's 2019 Wealth Report View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005846/en/ Contacts: For media queries: Ann Chiu Assistant Vice President Group Brand and Communications OCBC Bank Tel: (65) 6530 6146 HP (65) 9692 6240 Email: annchiu@ocbc.com Ow Yong Weng Leong Vice President Group Brand and Communications OCBC Bank Tel: (65) 6530 4849 HP: (65) 9791 3734 Email: wengleong@ocbc.com He believed that it wasnt good enough to be a lawyer. You had to do other things in life, like have a good family, have friends, get on boards of directors and be a charitable person because as a lawyer youre privileged to have a lot of education and so it was your responsibility to do other things, she said. Former Sage CEO Guy Berruyer joins Softomotive as Chairman of the board Softomotive has established itself as a leader in Robotic Process Automation, with a focus on easy-to-use technology Mr Berruyer brings experience as a FTSE-100 CEO, as well as experience as a Chairman, Director, Non Exec Director and advisor to major companies Softomotive has doubled its headcount over the last 12 months and aims to double again in the coming year Softomotive, a leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), has announced the appointment of Guy Berruyer as Chairman of the board. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005746/en/ Guy Berruyer, photo credit Getty Images Founded in 2005, Softomotive has been a pioneer in the RPA marketplace and now has more than 8,000 customers worldwide. Last September, it announced its Series A financing round of $25 million, to help build on its strong and growing position. Mr Berruyer is the former Chief Executive of Sage Group, the accounting software firm, and successfully led the company to a subscription software model. He brings his experience not only as a former FTSE-100 CEO but also as Chairman of software company Linaro, Director at Berger Levrault and Non Executive Director at Meggitt PLC. He is also a senior advisor at Warburg Pincus LLC and former council member at the University of Southampton. "The RPA market is really a new frontier of innovation and growth opportunity. It's a very exciting industry," said Mr Berruyer. He added that he was impressed by co-founders Marios Stavropoulos, Softomotive's CEO, and Argyris Kaninis, COO. Mr Berruyer said: "Softomotive is transforming extremely fast and part of my role as Chairman is to act as a mentor, so I'm looking forward to sharing my experience." Mr Stavropoulos said: "The traditional approach to RPA is not the whole story and we add to the mix by providing a bottom-up approach which we call a People1st approach to RPA. This is a totally different way to deploy RPA by putting the power in the hands of the end user." Mr Kaninis added: "Softomotive has doubled its headcount over the last 12 months and we are looking to double it again in the coming year as we continue to invest in our products. Our global HQ remains in London but we have deepened our presence in the US with our New York HQ, at One World Trade Center, while continuing to develop our presence in Greece and India. We are also looking closely at opening offices in Continental Europe and APAC. Mr Stavropoulos said: "We are very much looking forward to working with Guy. This is an exciting time for us and he brings a lot of experience that we will be able to benefit from." About Softomotive Softomotive is one of the leading worldwide providers of Robotic Process Automation solutions, trusted by more than 8,000 companies worldwide. Both attended and unattended RPA are delivered through powerful, robust RPA technology from desktop installation to server based software which is quick to deploy, easy to use and provides best value for money. WinAutomation is the world's best Robotic desktop automation (RDA) tool and provides a powerful, robust and easy to use Windows based platform for building software robots. ProcessRobot is a leading enterprise RPA platform, including enterprise grade security and controls, with links to best-of-breed AI technologies. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005746/en/ Contacts: Media inquiries Bob Weare Chief Marketing Officer press@softomotive.com Smart building materials company ClearVue Technologieshas sold their panels to a South African property development group, GrowthPoint Properties.It's the company's first commercial arms length sale to a third party.It is a key milestone for Clearvue as it pursues growth in the South African market.GrowthPoint plan to integrate the purchased panels into a project they are completing for prominent South African mining company Exxaro1 , in Centurion, Pretoria, South Africa.The project was completed in conjunction with green building electrical engineering consultants Conscius Consultants.Shares in ClearVue Technologiesclosed 1.9 per cent lower at 26 cents yesterday COAI rued that revenue continues to remain under pressure for the telecom industry saddled with high debt New Delhi: Industry body COAI on Tuesday said the new government post elections should set out a clear roadmap to ease the burden of levies on the telecom sector, and issues including a cut in licence fee and spectrum charges should be taken up at the earliest, preferably in 6-9 months' timeframe. COAI rued that revenue continues to remain under pressure for the industry saddled with high debt, and for most players, the earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization or EBITDA generated "is not enough to meet the interest expenses". "The definition of adjusted gross revenue (AGR) should be reviewed to include revenue from licensed activities only ... Telecom Department should adopt the recommendations given by the regulator on the issue of determination of AGR," Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) Director General Rajan S Mathews told reporters in New Delhi. COAI said that income from interest, dividend, capital gains from sale of fixed assets, gains from forex fluctuation, income from rent, insurance claims, and distributors margin should not be included in the revenue of the telecom operators for the purpose of computation of licence fee and spectrum usage charges. Also, revenue from the sale of handsets and other subscriber terminals like routers should also be not included in the AGR, it said. "Once you address the AGR definition issue, it has cascading benefits.. that is the first thing they (the new Government) should look at. Second, the issue of double taxation...you have got payment for spectrum upfront why are you continuing to tax the industry for the spectrum usage charge and licence...TRAI already recommended that SUC should come down to 1 percent and licence fee should come down too," he said. He added that if these outstanding issues are dealt with in the first 6-9 months by the new government post elections, it would yield "sizable benefits" for the industry. "It would also send a clear signal to both industry and investors that the government is serious about getting the sector back on its feet," Mathews said. Some of the major demands of the industry include reforms in AGR finalization, allowing deductions of lease line/bandwidth charges and the charges paid by one telecom operator to another as `pass-through charges', alignment of the bank guarantees with the licence fee and SUC payouts of telecom operators, and refund of accumulated unutilised input tax credit, among others. Under the Unified License Agreement, the licence fee currently is 8 percent of the AGR. Further, in case the operator obtains spectrum, they also pay spectrum related charges, including payment for allotment and use of such radio waves. Over the past few years, India's telecom market had become cut-throat where nearly a dozen players jostled for market share, pummelling the call rates to among the lowest in the world. Competition has only intensified since 2016, when Reliance Jio Infocomm, owned by India's richest man Mukesh Ambani, stormed into the market and offered free calls and dirt cheap data. This triggered massive consolidation in the industry the most prominent being that of Vodafone and Idea. (Disclosure - Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd) The amalgamation of Dena and Vijaya with BoB is the second merger during the past five years Mumbai: Bank of Baroda on Monday said the amalgamation of Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank from Monday is unlikely to bring in much changes in the financials of the combined entity, including non-performing assets. The three-way merger, the first in the country, makes BoB the third-largest lender after State Bank of India and HDFC Bank, and the second-largest among state-run banks, with a combined business of Rs 15 lakh crore, of which deposits are Rs 8.75 lakh crore and advances are at Rs 6.25 lakh crore. "Looking at capital adequacy ratio for December 2018 quarter, the numbers don't change magically as the pluses of one (Vijaya) are offsetting the minuses of the other (Dena). So net numbers of the combined entity is close to where BoB has been in terms of core capital," managing director and chief executive PS Jayakumar told PTI in an interaction. He said as of the December quarter, CET1 of BoB was 8.65 percent and on a consolidated level it would be 8.67 percent. Of this, on a standalone basis, BoB's tier 1 capital stood at 9.86 percent and at the combined level it would also be 9.86 percent. As far as net NPA is concerned, for BoB it was 4.26 percent in the December quarter. Given the fact that Dena has much higher NPAs, the new NPA numbers for the combined entity is marginally higher at 4.80 percent, he said. "Yes, net NPA has increased but it is not a blow-up by any means, and at 4.8 percent this is something that we can address over the next two quarters," Jayakumar said. He said in absolute terms, net NPA of BoB stood at around Rs 19,000 crore and this would move to Rs 30,000 crore on a combined basis and he hopes to see improvement in the combined numbers from the first quarter of FY20. "We are at the end phase of NPA-related challenges. In general, everybody is expecting the recovery cycle to begin from now on. I'd think that positive movement should start from the March quarter itself," he said. Ahead of the merger, government had infused Rs 5,042 crore capital into the bank, and he said he will not require any immediate capital. From now on, all customers of Dena Bank, which is under prompt corrective action of the RBI, will have renewed access to credit facilities immediately, he said, adding credit growth of BoB and Vijay have been at 15-18 percent and it will continue to grow at the same pace. Jayakumar said plans are also afoot to build on the strengths of individual banks and their gain from their synergies and scale up operations by deepening relationships with a wider customer base. By the end of this month, BoB will bring in interoperability of the key banking services at all the 9,500 branches of the combined entities which would now be known as BoB also the 13,400 ATMs. He said IT integration is expected to be completed over the next 12-18 months when accounts of all three banks will be migrated to single core-banking system. BoB is now on the version 10 of Finnacle, while Dena and Vijaya are on a different versions of Finnacle. Ruling out a massive branch mergers, Jayakumar said in rural areas the overlaps are very thin, but in around 1,000 urban centres, the bank will be looking at relocating branches to areas. Similarly, he also ruled out retrenchment as he does not see redundancy in extra-staff as there are many sectors where BoB is not present and would now focus on those areas. The combined entity will have a workforce of over 85,000. "Our total number of employees is not going to shrink. We will, in fact, be in an expansionary mode as we need different kind of talents such as a larger outbound sales force, more competencies in analytics and artificial intelligence," he said, adding so there is not plan on the table to bring in a voluntary retirement scheme. Amalgamation of Dena and Vijaya with BoB is the second merger during the past five years. The State Bank had merged five of its associate banksthat of Patiala, Bikaner & Jaipur, Mysore, Travancore and Hyderabad as also the Bhartiya Mahilain April 2017, making SBI the 48th largest lender in the world with a balance sheet of $500 billion. The BoB counter closed 3.2 percent up at Rs 132.85 on the BSE while the benchmark Sensex rallied 0.51 percent to close at a near-life time high of 38,871.87. By Tatiana Bautzer and Carolina Mandl SAO PAULO (Reuters) - At least three investors left separate groups interested in acquiring a gas network pipeline that will be sold by Brazil's state-controlled oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, three sources with knowledge of the matter said. By Tatiana Bautzer and Carolina Mandl SAO PAULO (Reuters) - At least three investors left separate groups interested in acquiring a gas network pipeline that will be sold by Brazil's state-controlled oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, three sources with knowledge of the matter said. Those departures will likely leave a third group, led by France's Engie with Canadian pension fund Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, stronger. The final bids for TAG, as the unit is known, are due on Tuesday. After the previously reported departure of Australia's Macquarie from one of the groups, which included Brazilian investment firm Itausa Investimentos SA and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, the other two investors that were supporting the bid, sovereign wealth fund Adia- Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and investment manager Wren House Infrastructure, also pulled out. A second group, led by Mubadala Investment Company and EIG Global Energy Partners, had been in talks with the world's largest investment firm, BlackRock Inc, but the company gave up. Wrenhouse, Adia, EIG, Mubadala and Itausa did not immediately comment on the matter. BlackRock declined to comment. The weakening of the Itausa and Mubadala groups raises the chance of Engie, which was the winner of the first bid round, winning the deal. The sale of TAG is expected to be the largest divestment in Petrobras' asset sale programme. The oil company expects to fetch around $8 billion (6.1 billion). (Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer; Editing by Susan Thomas) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. GST collections in March indicate that the revenue growth has been picking up despite various rate rationalisation measures New Delhi: Goods and Services Tax (GST) collections in March came in at a record Rs 1.06 lakh crore, but not enough to meet the Union government's target for the fiscal year ended 31 March, official data showed. The Centre, which had upwardly revised fiscal deficit target to accommodate the cash-dole-out plan to farmers, was banking on its share of estimated GST collections of Rs 5.03 lakh crore out of about Rs 11.47 lakh crore in total mop-up for 2018-19. But, the final numbers showed gross central GST coming in at Rs 4.25 lakh crore, about Rs 78,000 crore short of what the Centre was targeting. GST, which was rolled out from 1 July 2017, subsumed 17 central and state levies and collections thereof are divided into three broad headscentral GST (which accrues to the Union Government), state GST (which goes to states) and integrated GST (that is divided equally between the centre and the state). Official sources said estimated Rs 5.03 lakh crore share of the Centre in the GST proceeds was after distributing states' share out of I-GST. The actual collection of Rs 4.25 lakh crore is after settling IGST. GST revenues were critical for the Central government to meet its revised fiscal deficit target of 3.4 percent for 2018-19 and a shortfall in indirect taxes, if not compensated from higher revenues from other sources, would lead to the target not being met. While GST collections have been gradually increasing since August, they came in at a record high of Rs 1.06 lakh crore in March, up from Rs 97,247 crore in the previous month, as compliance improved amid an increased number of returns filed, an official statement said. March witnessed the highest-ever monthly return filing since GST rollout on 1 July, 2017. The collections indicate that the revenue growth has been picking up despite various rate rationalisation measures. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in a tweet said the record collections in March "indicates the expansion in both manufacturing and consumption". The record collection in March, 2019 of the GST touching 1,06,577 crore indicates the expansion in both manufacturing and consumption. Chowkidar Arun Jaitley (@arunjaitley) April 1, 2019 Collections in direct taxesmade up of income tax and corporate taxmay as well fall short of the targeted Rs 12 lakh crore as only Rs 10.21 lakh crore was collected till 23 March. In a statement, the finance ministry said the monthly average of GST revenue during 2018-19 is Rs 98,114 crore, 9.2 percent higher than the previous fiscal. "These figures indicate that the revenue growth has been picking up in recent months, despite various rate rationalisation measures," it said. The gross collections during 2018-19 fiscal totalled a little over Rs 11.77 lakh crore. PwC India Partner and Leader Indirect Tax Pratik Jain said given the year-end's push, the collection for April 2019 (for the month of March 19) is also likely to exceed Rs 1 lakh crore, as was the case in April 2018. "However, it is worth noting that projected growth in GST collections for 2019-20 is around 20 percent over 2018-19. Achieving this steep target would call for substantial increase in tax base by plugging the existing leakages, as room for increase in tax rate seems limited," Jain said. For 2019-20, the government proposes to collect Rs 6.10 lakh crore from Central GST, Rs 1.01 lakh crore as compensation cess. The Integrated GST balance has been pegged at Rs 50,000 crore. Abhishek Jain of EY India said major reasons for the growth in collections could be "reconciliations by businesses of outward and inward supplies, intelligent data analytics; related tax leakage detections and consequent GST payment by businesses". Devendra Kumar Pant, Chief Economist, India Ratings and Research (a Fitch Group company) said that the government has for FY20 budgeted for 21.1 percent increase in central GST and 24.8 percent growth in combined GST (central GST, integrated GST and GST compensation cess). Higher collections is a good sign with elections around, and the puzzle of this math can only be solved if one discovers whether the increase in collections has been due to the year-end sales increase, illegitimate transactions being trapped by the government or tweak in rates, Suresh Nandlal Rohira, Partner, Grant Thornton India said. Total gross GST revenue collected in March 2019 stood at Rs 1,06,577 crore of which central GST was Rs 20,353 crore, state GST was Rs 27,520 crore, integrated GST was Rs 50,418 crore and cess was Rs 8,286 crore. The collection in March, has been highest since the introduction of GST and the fourth instance of the mop-up breaching the Rs one lakh crore mark in 2018-19, which ended on 31 March. The collection also reflects a 15.6 percent growth over March 2018 collection of Rs 92,167 crore. The GST collection stood at Rs 1.03 lakh crore in April, Rs 94,016 crore in May, Rs 95,610 crore in June, Rs 96,483 crore in July, Rs 93,960 crore in August, Rs 94,442 crore in September, Rs 1,00,710 crore in October, Rs 97,637 crore in November, Rs 94,725 crore in December 2018, Rs 1.02 lakh crore in January 2019, Rs 97,247 crore in February 2019 and Rs 1.06 lakh crore in March 2019. Earlier, Panagariya had said the implementation of the NYAY scheme not only poses a 'fiscal challenge' to India's economy but also has a 'serious incentive problem' Pointing out the practical problems of implementing the Nyuntam Aay Yojna (NYAY), former Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog Arvind Panagariya said that no one has given details of the scheme about how Rs 3.6 lakh crore will be arranged to execute it, a media report said. According to ANI, Panagariya said, "If you are giving Rs 72,000 per annum to 5 crore families then there will be an expense of Rs 3.6 lakh crore, this is 13 percent of the total Budget of the Central government." He said that no one has given details of NYAY scheme that how Rs 3.6 lakh crore would be arranged to implement it. "It's more than our defence budget. Fiscal situation is always tight, it's almost impossible to take out 13 percent of the Budget," said Panagariya. On 26 March, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said that its minimum income guarantee scheme assures up to Rs 72,000 a year or Rs 6,000 a month income to 20 percent of India's poorest families if the party is voted back to power in the Lok Sabha elections. Last month, Panagariya had said the implementation of the NYAY scheme not only poses a "fiscal challenge" to India's economy but also has a "serious incentive problem". Panagariya, who served as the first vice chairman of NITI Aayog for two years from 2015 to 2017, told PTI that NYAY is difficult to implement and unlikely to achieve its intended objective. "It raises three major questions the incentive compatibility issue, the fairness issue and fiscal challenge," Panagariya, an eminent Indian-American economist, said. But Gandhi said the NYAY scheme has the twin objectives of giving money to the 20 percent poorest families and remonetising the economy damaged by the demonetisation in 2016. Its aim is two-fold. First is to guarantee a minimum income to the bottom 20 percent families. The second is to remonetise the economy that has been demonetised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Gandhi told PTI. Senior Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram said 'enough' economists and experts had been consulted and they broadly agreed that India has the capacity to implement the scheme. Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan has said the implementation of the scheme is possible, Chidambaram said. "Our calculation shows that it will not cross 2 percent of the GDP, it will be 1.8 percent of the GDP at any given point of time," he said. Commenting on the scheme, Panagariya said the transfer is meant to be Rs 6,000 per month per family to 50 million families and at the same time, it also guarantees an income of Rs 12,000 per month to these families. "What happens if one family has an income of only Rs 4,000 and another Rs 8,000 per month? Will the former then receive Rs 8,000 and the latter Rs 4,000 per month? If so, why should anyone with income below 12,000 do any work at all since their incomes will be Rs 12,000 regardless of what they earn?" he asked. Interpreted this way, "there is a serious incentive problem with the scheme", Panagariya asserted. "If the scheme is meant to transfer flat Rs 6,000 per month to identified families regardless of the family's earned income, you cannot deliver Rs 12,000 per month to families earning less than Rs 6,000," he asserted. The programme, as announced by the Congress, guarantees Rs 12,000 per month in income to the poor, which is Rs 144,000 per year, he said, explaining the fairness issue. Add to it all other in-kind transfers: subsidised food, NREGA wages, free house, free toilet, free education and Rs 500,000 free health insurance coverage. The gross sum will be close to Rs 200,000 per year, Panagariya observed. "Now think of someone not covered by the scheme and earning Rs 3,00,000 per year. This family will have to pay Rs 2,500 in taxes (currently covered by a tax credit but in principle taxable). How fair is this to those working? "Moreover, taxpayers are all in urban areas and dole recipients all in rural areas. Will this not open a serious rural-urban schism? No one questions helping the destitute on the margin but when help is given to give all comforts of life free, those paying for those comforts will become intensely unhappy," he said. Then there is the question of fiscal challenge, he said. If Rs 12,000 per month per household is to be guaranteed to bottom 20 percent of the population, even the average Rs 6,000 per family will be insufficient, he argued. "But let us set that problem aside. Can we scrape Rs 3.6 lakh crore per year (calculated at Rs 6,000 per family for 50 million households)? There is no chance. "It is 13 percent of the proposed total Central government expenditure in Budget 2019-20," Panagariya said. Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development where he works on issues of governance, public finance and service delivery in developing countries, said how to identify the target beneficiaries and how to absorb the fiscal impact are two major problems. The amount is substantial, more than the current government has proposed (Rs 6,000 per year), and to a general definition of the poorest of the poor (and not just farmers), he said. "However, it is about half of what a similar scheme in Kenya through a US-based charity GiveDirectly provides over 20,000 adults purely on a universal basic income criteria," Mukherjee said, adding the results of the scheme are still awaited, so there is no firm global evidence on whether Universal Basic Income works or not at the scale which the programme in India would operate on. According to Mukherjee, to address the problem of fiscal impact, there has to be "cutbacks" in other subsidies, principally food, fuel, electricity and fertiliser. "Some transfers to the poorest of the poor, such as MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) and social pensions, would probably have to be absorbed into NYAY," Mukherjee told PTI. Schemes such as Public Distribution System (PDS) and MGNREGA are constitutionally mandated and it would be hard to remove them altogether, he said. The Centre, which has struggled to contain the fiscal deficit, will have to foot the entire bill so the fiscal concern is justified, Mukherjee said. With PTI inputs Japan and the United States are likely to hold their first round of trade talks in Washington on 15-16 April Tokyo: Japan and the United States are likely to hold their first round of trade talks in Washington on 15-16 April, a Japanese government source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Tuesday. Japanese Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi told reporters earlier on Tuesday he would travel to the United States as early as this month to start negotiations with his counterpart U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. U.S. President Donald Trump has made clear he is unhappy with Japans $69 billion trade surplus with the United States - nearly two-thirds of it from auto exports - and wants a two-way agreement to address it. Trade frictions between Tokyo and Washington have been present since Trump took office in 2017 with a pledge to renegotiate trade deals he considers unfair to U.S. companies and workers. The Trump administration is also engaged in ongoing trade talks with both the European Union and China as part of the Republican presidents America First agenda. Japanese government officials are increasingly worried that Trump will demand a reduction in the number of Japanese auto imports to lower the trade deficit. They are also concerned that Trump could impose steep import tariffs on autos and auto parts, which would deal a big blow to the export-reliant economy. Abe may meet President Donald Trump in the United States in late April for talks on North Korea and Japan-U.S. trade. Trump is expected to make a decision sometime in May about whether to unleash steep tariffs on imported cars and auto parts after he commissioned a report from the U.S. Commerce Department to determine the effects of imports on national security. By Mike Stone WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp was awarded a $2.4 billion Pentagon contract on Monday for THAAD interceptor missiles, some of which are slated to be delivered to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Reuters had reported Lockheed was nearing the deal earlier on Monday By Mike Stone WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp was awarded a $2.4 billion Pentagon contract on Monday for THAAD interceptor missiles, some of which are slated to be delivered to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Reuters had reported Lockheed was nearing the deal earlier on Monday. In November, Saudi and U.S. officials signed letters of offer and acceptance formalising terms for Saudi Arabia's purchase of 44 Terminal High Altitude Area Defence launchers, missiles and related equipment. The Pentagon said the Saudi government would pay $1.5 billion of the $2.4 billion. The November deal was inked amid concerns about the role of the kingdom's leadership in the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi critic who lived in the United States and was a columnist for the Washington Post. Representatives for Lockheed Martin declined to comment. Lockheed Martin, the biggest U.S. arms maker, builds and integrates the THAAD system, which is designed to shoot down short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Raytheon, another U.S. firm, builds its advanced radar. As a part of the scope of work outlined by the Pentagon, obsolete systems currently in place will be updated to prepare the current Saudi missile defence infrastructure for the new THAAD technology. (Reporting by Mike Stone; writing by Nick Zieminski; editing by Bill Berkrot, Leslie Adler and Sonya Hepinstall) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Nirav Modi's attempt to acquire the citizenship of Vanuatu in late 2017 also went against him as the judge said it seemed like he was trying to move away from India at an important time. London: Fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi, undergoing extradition proceedings in the UK, intends to appeal for bail in the UK High Court after a second bail application was rejected by a lower court in London last week in the $1-billion Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud and money laundering case. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which represents the Indian authorities through the extradition process in the UK courts, said the 48-year-old intends to appeal against Judge Emma Arbuthnot's decision to turn down his bail plea at the end of a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court on last Friday on the grounds that there was a substantial risk he would fail to surrender. Mr Modi intends to appeal his bail decision, but he has not yet submitted the appeal, a CPS spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday. The diamond merchant, who has been behind bars at HMP Wandsworth in south-west London ever since his first bail application was rejected on 20 March, can apply for a High Court bail appeal at any time until his next remand hearing on 26 April. However, his legal team must give the CPS 48 hours' notice and the bail hearing must be listed within 48 hours of the appeal being lodged in the higher court. We are not making any comment at this time, Modi's solicitor Anand Doobay said, in reference to plans for a bail appeal application. It remains to be seen how Modi's legal team is able to further bolster the bail application after Chief Magistrate Arbuthnot ruled that 1 million pounds offered as security for bail as well as the offer to meet stringent electronic tag restrictions on their client's movements, "akin to house arrest", were not sufficient to convince her that he did not pose a flight risk. This is a case of substantial fraud, with loss to a bank in India of between $1-2 billion. I am not persuaded that the conditional bail sought will meet the concerns of the government of India in this case, the judge noted. The court was told that Modi's son, who had been at a school in London, had now left for higher studies in the US, which led the judge to conclude that Modi not only had a lack of community ties in the UK but also large resources at his disposal to try and flee the country. Modi's attempt to acquire the citizenship of Vanuatu in late 2017 also went against him as the judge said it seemed like he was trying to move away from India at an important time. Clare Montgomery, Modi's barrister, had made a series of offers to try and convince the judge to grant bail, even bringing up his pet dog. He did have a son at Charterhouse (school in London) who has now gone to a university in the States and as a sign of ageing parents, led Mr Modi to get a dog instead. None of these actions are emblematic of someone setting out to flee the country, Montgomery had claimed. It is nonsense to say that he is a flight risk. He does not have a safe haven open to him and he has not travelled or applied for citizenship elsewhere...he only qualifies for leave to remain in this country, she said. CPS barrister Toby Cadman told the judge that there was a substantial risk that the prime accused in the PNB fraud case, "of an amount between $1 and 2 billion, would flee and attempt to interfere with witnesses and evidence. Judge Arbuthnot accepted the Indian government's arguments, noting the very unusual evidence she had seen at this early stage in the case of interference with witnesses and destruction of evidence in the form of mobile phones and a server. The court was told that Modi was the "principal beneficiary" of the fraudulent issuance of letters of undertaking (LoUs) as part of a conspiracy to defraud PNB and then laundering the proceeds of crime. Because a lot of what citizens have seen perplexes them: The decision of Foxxs office to pursue charges against Smollett and secure an indictment but then let him off the hook in an unannounced court session. The decision to offer no objection to the sealing of public records. The decision to suggest that this is a routine pretrial diversion of the case. The decision to let a defendant facing 16 felony charges walk without taking responsibility for his actions. These decisions are extraordinary and troubling. At minimum, they suggest velvet-glove treatment for a celebrity defendant. Given that Foxx will accept an outside review, a robust investigation could begin to rebuild citizens trust. Rajan Anandan will focus on developing Surge into the worlds top scale-up program for startups by acting as an investment advisor and mentor at Sequoia Capital India Alphabet Incs Google South East Asia and India Vice-President Rajan Anandan will leave the firm at the end of April, Google Asia Pacific President Scott Beaumont said on Tuesday, a Reuters report said. Anandan, also an investor in multiple startups, is slated to join venture fund Sequoia Capital. He will work with Google till the end of this month, PTI reported. Anandan had joined Google from Microsoft India in 2010. Previously, he was also been associated with Dell India and McKinsey & Company. 8 amazing years. 850million internet users across India and SEA. Many billions of revenue and fastest growing region in the world. Incredible team that thinks big and executes superbly. Thank you @GoogleIndia #GoogleSEA. Loved every minute. Rajan Anandan (@RajanAnandan) April 2, 2019 Some of the companies in which Anandan has invested include WebEngage, Instamojo, Capillary Technologies, TravelKhana, and EasyGov. Vikas Agnihotri, country director, sales, will replace Anandan in the interim for Google India, Beaumont added. Sequoia Capital Managing Director Shailendra J Singh, in a Linkedin post, said Anandan will join the leadership team at the firm. In addition to the six current Managing Directors there, he will focus on developing Surge into the worlds top scale-up program for startups by acting as an investment advisor and mentor to the programs founders. Surge aims to engineer rapid early progress for startups, by enabling disproportionate access to capital, talent, network and decades of company-building knowledge. "Rajan's deep understanding of technology, significant operating expertise and track record of growing tech businesses across the region will help Surge founders scale and build the transformational businesses of tomorrow," Singh said. The Supreme Court order quashing a Reserve Bank of India circular on resolving bad debt will provide relief to power companies and lenders as well as flexibility to restructure debts but will slowdown bankruptcy proceedings, experts said on Tuesday New Delhi: The Supreme Court order quashing a Reserve Bank of India circular on resolving bad debt will provide relief to power companies and lenders as well as flexibility to restructure debts but will slowdown bankruptcy proceedings, experts said on Tuesday. The Supreme Court on Tuesday quashed RBI's 12 February circular, which prescribed rules for recognising one-day defaults by large corporates and initiating insolvency action as a remedy. Vishrov Mukerjee, Partner, J Sagar Associates said after the Supreme Court judgment, the RBI may have to issue revised guidelines/circulars for the restructuring of stressed assets. "There is also a question mark over existing processes which may have been completed/nearing completion," he said. "However, with the threat of IBC proceedings mitigated, it will give some breathing space to power companies and lenders as well as flexibility to restructure debts in a manner which ensures continuity and value maximization for lenders as well as power companies." Cyril Shroff, Managing Partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, termed the ruling as a major development that shows how "proactive" the judiciary has been. "Whilst it's too early to say but if banks voluntarily still invoke IBC - the practical impact will be minimal," he said. ICRA senior vice president Sabyasachi Majumdar said the Supreme Court decision is likely to result in a further slowdown in the already tardy pace of resolution of stressed assets in the power sector. "This apart, the resolution process is in any case subjected to regulatory risks as exemplified in the case of the Prayagraj Power asset, where the regulator has given a recent directive for a discount in PPA tariff while allowing the shareholding change approval for the same," he said. The RBI had on 12 February, 2018, issued a circular on the resolution of stressed assets revised framework -- commonly known as 12 February circular. According to the circular, lenders had to classify a loan account as stressed if there was even a day of default. The bankers had to mandatorily refer all accounts with over Rs 2,000 crore loans to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) or the bankruptcy court if they failed to resolve the problem within 180 days of default. Lenders were supposed to file an insolvency application under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016 within 15 days of the completion of the 180-day deadline. The circular also withdrew the loan resolution mechanisms the RBI had implemented, such as Corporate Debt Restructuring and Strategic Debt Restructuring. Power sector was the worst hit by the circular and so were companies in steel, textile, sugar and shipping sector. GMR Energy Ltd, RattanIndia Power Ltd, Association of Power Producers (APP), Independent Power Producers Association of India, Sugar Manufacturing Association from Tamil Nadu and a shipbuilding association from Gujarat moved different courts against the circular. The power sector argued that outstanding loans of Rs 5.65 lakh crore (as on March 2018) were a result of factors beyond their control such as unavailability of fuel and cancellation of coal blocks. The Supreme Court on Tuesday held that the circular was 'ultra vires' -- meaning it went beyond the scope of what the RBI can do when coming up with rules and regulations. Mukerjee said the Supreme Court verdict along with recent government decisions implementing the recommendations of the High-Level Empowered Committee will provide much-needed respite and impetus to regulatory reform in the power sector. The Delhi government order was selectively applied to private schools which were on government land and as per a 'land clause' in the lease agreement, they needed to seek prior approval of the DoE before hiking fees New Delhi: The AAP government on Tuesday challenged in the Delhi High Court its single judge order allowing private unaided schools in the national capital to go ahead with an interim hike in fees to implement the recommendations of the Seventh Central Pay Commission on salaries of teachers and other employees. The petition came up for hearing before a bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A J Bhambhani which recused from hearing it and directed that it be listed for hearing before another bench on Wednesday. The single judge on 15 March had permitted the interim fee hike by quashing a Delhi government circular of 13 April 2018, which had prohibited private unaided schools functioning on government land from hiking tuition amounts without approval of the Directorate of Education (DoE). The government order was selectively applied to private schools which were on government land and as per a 'land clause' in the lease agreement, they needed to seek prior approval of the DoE before hiking fees. The court, while setting aside the circular, had said the statements of fees submitted by private schools would be subject to scrutiny by the DoE "with a view to ensuring that the schools were not indulging in commercialisation of education by resorting to profiteering, or charging of capitation fee". "The decision for allowing an interim fee hike, as contained in the order dated 17 October, 2017, being that of the DoE, there was no justification for jettisoning the said order, in respect of schools governed by the 'land clause', as was done by the impugned order dated 13 April, 2018. The impugned order, dated 13 April, 2018, therefore, cannot sustain...and is, accordingly, quashed and set aside. "...the 'interim fee hike' would operate immediately, in favour of all private unaided schools, without the requirement of any prior approval," the court had said in its 173-page judgement allowing the plea of Action Committee Unaided Recognised Private Schools which had challenged the circular. The court had also made it clear that "if any school is, in fact, found to be indulging in commercialisation of education, the DoE would be well within its rights in proceeding, against such institution, in accordance with law, and keeping in mind the provisions of the Delhi Schools Education Act and Rules". The Action Committee, in its plea filed through advocate Kamal Gupta, had contended that the Delhi Schools Education Act equalised all schools, in the matter of pay and allowances to be granted to teachers and employees and therefore, there was no justification to selectively withdraw the 17 October, 2017 order which permitted an interim hike of fees to implement the 7th CPC recommendations. The controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which gives sweeping powers to security forces, was partially removed from three of nine districts of Arunachal Pradesh after 32 years New Delhi: After 32 years, the controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which gives sweeping powers to security forces, was partially removed from three of nine districts of Arunachal Pradesh but would remain in force in the areas bordering Myanmar, officials said here. The state, which was formed on 20 February, 1987, had inherited the controversial AFSPA enacted by Parliament in 1958 and applied to the entire State of Assam and the Union Territory of Manipur. After Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland came into being, the Act was appropriately adapted to apply to these states as well. The Justice BP Jeevan Reddy committee had recommended scrapping of the AFSPA from the state. Under the Act, the security forces can arrest anyone or carry out searches in any premises. The Ministry of Home Affairs said in a notification that the four police station areas in Arunachal Pradesh, which were declared "disturbed areas" under the AFSPA, are no longer under the purview of the special law from Sunday. The police station areas from where the AFSPA has been withdrawn are Balemu and Bhalukpong police stations in West Kameng district, Seijosa police station in East Kameng district and Balijan police station in Papumpare district. However, according to the notification, the AFSPA will continue to be enforced in Tirap, Changlang and Longding districts and areas under the jurisdiction of Namsai and Mahadevpur police stations in Namsai district, Roing in Lower Dibang Valley district and Sunpura in Lohit district for six more months till 30 September. A Home Ministry official said the "disturbed area" tag was withdrawn from the four police station areas due to the improvement of law and order situation there and it will continue in other areas in view of continuing activities of banned insurgent groups of the Northeast. The notification said the Union Home Ministry took the decision exercising its powers conferred under section 3 of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958. A review of the law and order situation in Arunachal Pradesh's six districts was undertaken before the 31 March deadline for the validity of the "disturbed area" designation under the AFSPA. In March last year, the AFSPA was removed completely from Meghalaya following improvement in security situation. The AFSPA is imposed in areas where armed forces are required to operate in aid to civil authorities. For the AFSPA to become valid, an area, however, needs to be declared disturbed either by the Central or the state government under the section 3 of the 1958 Act. Some parts of Arunachal Pradesh has the presence of banned militant outfits such as NSCN, ULFA and NDFB, another official said. The Jammu and Kashmir police said they have arrested the 'fidayeen' allegedly belonging to terror outfit Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, accused of attacking the CRPF convey at Banihal town of Ramban on 30 March. The accused has been identified as Owais Ameen, a resident of Shopian, who was arrested within 36 hours of the incident, the police said. Jammu: The Jammu and Kashmir police said they have arrested the "fidayeen" allegedly belonging to terror outfit Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, accused of attacking the CRPF convoy at Banihal town of Ramban on 30 March. The accused has been identified as Owais Ameen, a resident of Shopian, who was arrested within 36 hours of the incident, the police said. "Cordon and search went on after the incident. Clues from the site of the incident were obtained and police followed those clues. After the incident, he was hiding here and there but eventually came on Highway and took a tipper in his bid to escape towards Kashmir. But he was arrested at the check-post," said Dilbag Singh, DGP, Jammu and Kashmir Police. "The accused Owais Ameen has been arrested within 36 hours of the incident. During interrogation, he confessed to his crime. He is a resident of Shopian. This appeared to be a fidayeen and as per our investigation till now he belongs to Hizb-ul-Mujahideen," he added. Speaking about the incident, he said: "On 30 March at about 10.15 am, a Santro car loaded with explosives hit a CRPF bus in Banihal while the convoy was moving from Srinagar to Jammu, as a result, the bus suffered minor damage and the CRPF personnel travelling in the said bus had a narrow escape." Police said massive amounts of explosive materials were found at the blast site split around the car that includes 50 gelatin sticks, urea, ammonium nitrate, 2 LPG cylinders, 1 Improvised Explosive Device (IED), unexploded IED inside Tiffin, etc. The DGP said the "trigger mechanism" was not perfect and the blast was minor. "The trigger mechanism was not perfect as a result secondary blast in the cylinder and IED didnt get initiated. The only primary blast of less intensity took place and the accused escaped after triggering the primary blast only," he said. The accused confessed to his crime after his arrest saying that he was instructed over the phone to do so. "I was asked on the phone to explode the convoy. My task was to drive the car and press the switch. I pressed the button while I was in the car. I was alone when I did it," said Ameen. An internal inquiry report of Bharat Electronics (BEL) has exposed massive irregularities in the way the contracts were awarded for an IAF project and how it was implemented at 10 locations across the country. New Delhi: Defence public sector undertaking Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) is under the scanner for allegedly compromising national security by awarding a highly sensitive air command and control contract of the Indian Air Force to an ill-equipped and newly formed private design firm in 2011. The project was worth Rs 7,900 crore. An internal inquiry report of BEL has exposed massive irregularities in the way the contracts were awarded and how the Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS) was implemented at 10 locations across the country. IACCS is an automated command and control system for air defence operations that integrates all ground-based and airborne sensors. BEL is the executing agency for the highly-sensitive project. BEL's internal investigation report exclusively reviewed by Firstpost also highlighted a conflict of interest of a BEL officer, who was instrumental in the hiring of a private vendor to put together the Preliminary Project Report (PPR) of the coded system, in joining the same private company after retirement. The report also suggested that the investigative team looking into the irregularities was not provided with crucial project documents allegedly to bury the scam. The defence PSU's internal inquiry report was prepared in October 2018. It flagged discrepancies at various stages of the execution of the project. To begin with, the report questioned the move to hire M/s RD Konsultants to prepare the PPR in 2011 and then bringing the same company on board as the design consultant in 2013, violating the norms in place during UPA regime. The inquiry report also red-flagged other serious issues, including monumental lapses in ordering the execution of the contracts at all 10 sites across the country and deviations in the implementation at certain project sites where BEL had to bear additional expenditure. After Firstpost mailed a detailed questionnaire to MV Gowtama, chairman and managing director (CMD) of BEL, Ranjit Karamchandani from the CMD's office denied the findings of the firm's own inquiry report. "BEL follows a transparent process in selection of its vendors/partners," he said. "Prima facie, BEL does not see any irregularity, as alleged." Questionnaires sent to RD Konsultants seeking its comment on findings of the inquiry report went unanswered. Deep-rooted nexus exposed According to the inquiry report, BEL first hired RD Konsultants in September 2011 to prepare the PPR for IACCS. The report pointed out that the firm was barely one and a half years old when it was hired, having come into existence on 1 April, 2010, on 50-50 partnership between Ruby Kant and Suresh Kumar Anand. The BEL top brass approved the proposal to award the contract to the company on 6 September, 2011, with a note that made it amply clear that "as per corporate vigilance guidelines, if 'M/s RD Konsultants' is hired as a consultant for preparing the PPR, then it cannot be considered for similar requirements in the future". The note added that for the IACCS project, BEL would have to look for new consultants for "future requirements of consultancy". The inquiry report also flagged the way RD Konsultants was hired to prepare the PPR. "...No norms of Request for Proposal or tendering were followed, but it was selected just based on a recommendation by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) with no written correspondence from the DRDO," it said. But BEL officers went a step ahead to allegedly favor RD Konsultants in the second stage of the project while hiring a consultant to prepare a Detailed Project Report (DPR), the inquiry report suggested. As per the rules in place in October 2012, BEL formed a committee to select consultants to prepare the DPR along with a detailed design for 10 sites of IACCS nodes. That RD Konsultants should not have been allowed was clearly mentioned in the file initiated by BEL's Network Centric System (NCS-Strategic Business Unit) on 28 July, 2011, and cleared by the top brass on 6 September, 2011. But that did not happen. RK Handa, who was the general manager of the NCS at the time, was part of the committee that selected the vendors and hired RD Konsultants in 2011, the report noted. "In fact the file raised in October 2012 should have been in continuation to the file initiated on 28 July, 2011. Why it was not done needs a detailed investigation with respect to malafide intentions to violate the Central Vigilance Commission's guidelines for hiring of consultants," it added. "Even in the selection of M/s RD Konsultants for the second time, there were a lot of deviations from the norms laid down." The inquiry report further highlighted that had a financial criterion been put in place, RD Konsultants would not have qualified for the job. The defence PSU signed the second contract with the firm in September 2013 to prepare the DPR of all 10 IACCS sites. The inquiry report noted that RD Konsultants was paid Rs 13.5 lakh for consultancy charges to prepare the PPR but Rs 15.94 crore for the DPR, alleging that someone was pulling the strings to favour the company, and that the financial criterion was changed twice during the course of selection of vendors. "M/s RD Konsultants' had been established in April 2010, but to show a turnover in the last three years as required, they showed a turnover in 2009-10, also verified by a chartered accountant. This clearly shows that false information was provided. Also, a company that came into existence on April 2010 showed that its employees had an experience of five years in 2013. This again is false information. It is interesting to note that another company, M/s Systems Dynamics, was rejected by the committee on the criterion that it had shown a turnover for only two years (2010-11 and 2011-12)," the inquiry report said. The chartered accountant certificate enclosed with the inquiry report does not mention a telephone number. The letterhead of the CA firm merely shows an address of Shakarpur in New Delhi. Raising concerns over the track record of RD Konsultants, the inquiry report recommended further investigation to find out whether it has actually completed the big ticket projects as it claimed to BEL. Raising suspicion, the report said RD Konsultants had mentioned that by March 2013, they had completed 30 projects worth Rs 1,266 crore, with consultancy charges of Rs 36 crore, whereas they had 45 works worth Rs 1,743 crore underway, with consultancy charges of Rs 52.29 crore. "How was a company, which came into existence in April 2010, awarded 75 projects within three years (when as per DRDO rules, any company without requisite experience and turnover cannot be awarded contracts). What was the timeline in which these projects were completed? These need detailed investigations to find the ground reality. As per the BEL Works Contract Manual, it is mandatory that all vendors who qualify submit proof of the works they claimed to have done. RD Konsultants took the plea that they could not share details of the works since they were for the DRDO and confidential in nature, though another vendor, 'M/s Systems Dynamics', submitted documents related to the DRDO as well as the integrated headquarters of the army to confirm the work they did. There is no secrecy in the order copy or listing of the works carried out for the DRDO. Non-submission of the details (by RD Konsultants) itself casts doubts on the validity of the claims made," the inquiry report said in its scathing observation. BEL's inquiry report further alleged that RD Konsultants had claimed to have provided design consultancy to a few well-known brands that specialise in equipment used for structures similar to IACCS, such as Temet Oy Finland and Pro-Hub Germany. It added that RD Konsultants was also into civil construction "with direct/indirect control on a lot of companies like SR Ashok & Associates, CS Construction etc." "Being the designer agency, which got the order for all 10 sites, they have a huge influence on the selection of vendors for various sub-systems of the project. A detailed investigation is needed to find out where orders have been placed with companies where RD Konsultants has direct/indirect influence. (There was a case wherein SR Ashok & Associates had applied for civil execution of underground structures and CS Construction was hired by L&T for execution of work at sites). Also, Temet Oy Finland and Pro-Hub Germany have been given orders for sub-systems to be installed inside the IACCS structures," the report observed. Moreover, the file to hire consultants for IACCS structures was initiated with the mandate that one agency will not get the order for all 10 sites. Even the newspaper advertisement and qualification document clearly mentioned that a consultancy firm could be given a contract for five sites. However, the inquiry report alleged that the entire process was manipulated. Further alleging serious charges of conflict of interest, the report said BEL officer PK Bhola, who was instrumental in having RD Konsultants cleared to prepare the PPR for the IACCS project in 2011 joined the same company after retiring from the defence PSU. The report said he might have passed on crucial information to benefit the company. "How come the order for all sites was finally awarded to only one vendor, which violated the tender document? The quote given by RD Konsultants was nearly the same as that estimated by BEL, which leads to doubts whether the methodology of estimates was known to RD Konsultants. Mr PK Bhola (DGM of NCS-Marketing), who was the main resource in BEL for raising all the files and interfacing with the customer for the project, joined RD Konsultants after his retirement from BEL, and hence, all information was being transmitted to RD Konsultants through Mr Bhola," the report alleged. Firstpost reviewed two BEL notes regarding the inquiry report's observations on Bhola. The first note from July 2011 signed by Bhola, when he was the deputy general manager of marketing at the NCS, is on hiring RD Konsultants to prepare the PPR for the IACCS project. The second note, dated 8 August, 2016, which is basically minutes of a pre-bid meeting for two tenders related to the IACCS project. In this, Bhola is mentioned as a representative of RD Konsultants. Irregularities in ground execution RD Konsultants is the design consultancy firm for all 10 IACCS sites, but the contract to execute the project was given to different companies. The details quoted by the inquiry report from the files related to the project suggests that after clearance, certain changes were made in the quantities, which escalated the cost of the project by Rs 106 crore to the government exchequer. The report said such changes were concurred to by the BEL director of finance vide note no 37, where it is mentioned that "this is a deviation from the works' contract manual". The report further observed that L&T was awarded the execution work at three sites, but its cost per site was more than that of the other sites being constructed by other companies. The inquiry also found that L&T had subcontracted work at two IACCS sites to a private vendor, which is allegedly linked to RD Konsultants. "L&T has further subcontracted part of the work at two sites to 'M/s CS Constructions', which is again a company related to RD Konsultants. The director of the company, Mr Rahul Bhuchar, has been coming to BEL and meeting the assistant general manager (infrastructure) as a representative of RD Konsultants. The sub-contracting of work by L&T to a party related to RD Konsultants is in violation to the terms of the contract. A civil engineering expert needs to go into the details of the costing for each site and the various considerations that led to the difference in the cost of various sites. As per the file on the selection of a consultant, DRDO representatives had brought out that all sites will be same, with only cosmetic differences in design. If that was so, then how come the difference in the costing between the lowest and the highest is more than two times?" the report said, flagging the loopholes in financial deviations, seeking further investigation into the entire matter. It also said that under "para 3.2.3 of the design and engineering contract, RD Konsultants and his affiliates as well as sub-consultants have been debarred from providing any goods, works or services". "RD Konsultants failed to make a voluntary and complete disclosure in this regard, thus violating the contract," it concluded. BEL shelled out more due to deviations in project BEL's internal investigation report said that at three IACCS sites, deviations in execution on the ground forced BEL to shell out more money. The report observed that at all three locations, the conditions of the sites during excavation were found to be in mismatch with those taken by RD Konsultants while designing and preparation of the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for excavation. The report also revealed that a few IACCS sites under construction had collapsed. An inspection team visited one of the sites on 22 and 23 March 2018 to investigate the mishap. Although CCTV cameras were installed, the BEL fact-finding team was told by its own manager deployed at the site that the footage was not available. Interestingly, an engineer from MECON Limited, the government-owned company that blew the whistle on irregularities at a project site, was transferred. MECON Limited functions under the Ministry of Steel and is working as a project management consultant at five IACCS sites. Firstpost is withholding the name of the whistleblower and the location of the IACCS project in the interest of national security. The inquiry report mentioned these in detail. "There was a complaint received from 'AAAAA' (site engineer) posted by M/s MECON at the 'BBBBB' site alleging that though he had brought out that quality procedures were not being followed at the site, senior executives at BEL, in collusion with the vendor, have not responded to his calls/reports. He alleged that pressure was put on him to ignore the facts since it was more important to meet the timelines. He also alleged that he was transferred along with the local BEL site engineer because they had highlighted that procedures were bypassed. The complaints need to be pursued to find out the facts," the inquiry report asserted. Firstpost reviewed the engineer's complaint dated 28 March, 2018, which was sent to two senior BEL officials. In the letter, he claimed higher officials of BEL impose a lot of unethical verbal instructions on juniors, which is damaging for a PSU of national importance. "I was posted as the site in-charge of MECON Limited and tried my best to act as a whistleblower, being a part of a project of national importance. I had issued innumerable emails and letters regarding quality issues of the project. But the engineer in charge and other higher officials from BEL desisted me verbally to not follow quality procedures strictly on the pretext of progress of the project. They actually always blindly favored the contractor anywhere and everywhere," the MECON Limited engineer wrote in his complaint. "However, when we did not allow any relaxation in this regard and made deduction in bills wherever quality procedures were not followed, higher officials of BEL were not satisfied with the site in-charges (both officials of BEL and MECON Limited) for not favoring the contractor and for following the rule book strictly. For this reason, the BEL general manager and assistant general manager transferred their own site in-charge and pressurised MECON Limited to transfer its senior manager (name withheld) in September 2017 on the pretext that they did not perform satisfactorily, whereas actually it was just the opposite. This was to instill a sense of fear so that other engineers fall in line." The inquiry report said walls at the site of another project collapsed twice due to the soil conditions being different from what were assessed by the design consultant when the SOP for excavation was formulated. BEL had to get the soil analysed independently by the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru at its own expense. "The total cost of the execution increased because of the side wall collapse and also the change in the foundation, which, once again, resulted in extra cash flow of crores of rupees. All this needs detailed investigation by some civil engineering expert," report further added. The report also highlighted glaring irregularities in the hiring of civil engineer Manish Goyal to look after the IACCS projects' infrastructure as a manager. It claimed Goyal was hired despite falling short of the required 10 to 12 years' experience and without having any exposure to highly specialised work like the IACCS project. The report expressed shock over this, saying it was quite surprising how and why the human resources division of BEL did not fully check or verify the documents Goyal's submitted while establishing his experience as per BEL's requirements and rules. The report said Goyal earlier worked with L&T. As the manager of NCS-infrastructure, Goyal was later given charge of the three IACCS sites that the infrastructure giant is working on and authorises L&T bills. It is pertinent to mention that before the internal inquiry report was submitted in October 2018, a three-member BEL team had submitted an investigation-cum-site inspection report in May 2018 regarding certain allegations related to the execution of the IACCS projects. The panel, which included BEL officers AK Raheja, Sayanarayana and MM Roy, had submitted the report to BEL's vigilance department, concluding that there were serious irregularities in the implementation of the ambitious national security project. Also, BEL's panel report clearly said that the RD Konsultants' capabilities were not checked before it was awarded the contract in 2011 and 2013. "There are evidences of work being subcontracted to CS Constructions Private Limited by L&T, the execution contractor, both on the material and labour front. The registered addresses of CS Constructions Private Limited and RD Konsultants are one and the same. The company profile of YS Anand Consultants Private Limited shows Suresh Kumar Anand (partner of RD Konsultants) and Sarita Anand (director of CS Constructions Private Limited) as its directors. This evidences the fact of RD Konsultants' involvement with the affiliates related to persons otherwise interested in project," the panel's report noted. "The soil test report as submitted by the design consultant does not match the strata found in excavation," it added. "Evidence exists of Manish Goyal (manager, NCS-infra), a key person in the infrastructure project, being a former L&T person. The documents submitted by Manish Goyal lack transparency. A part of the work experience of Manish Goyal conflicts with the tenure of pursuing M Tech, and to that extent, his work experience falls short of the minimum eligibility criteria. After the soil collapse at YYYY site (location withheld), no independent inquiry was conducted by the management for any corrective measure. The design of the soil extraction was changed without analysing the reasons for the soil collapse. Although a CAR (Comprehensive All Risk) policy exists in the joint name of BEL and L&T, no insurance claim was lodged. Pinpoint focus by BEL IACCS-Infra is somewhere lacking, and work is being left at the mercy of site engineers and the agencies hired." The panel's report further suggested that BEL officials had tried to cover up the collapse. It indicated that the non-availability of CCTV camera footage at the important sites was yet another attempt to allegedly conceal the wrongdoing. In the district of Chitrakoot, in Bundelkhands UP, where in the cow shelter located in Chureh Kesruwa village, more than 100 cows have died in the last few months. When does an all-too-familiar recurring problem become a burning issue? In Bundelkhand, one of the most under-developed regions in India, characterised by arid land, prone to droughts and famines that start off every year this time, the problem of stray cattle has been an ancient one. Locally termed anna janwar, there is a ritual around it too the anna janwar pratha, which basically involves letting go of cattle past their prime. Indeed, it is such a Bundeli problem that local government representatives speak of it in semi-nostalgic tones think 70-something MLAs wistfully recalling his childhood marked by long summer days spent practising the anna pratha. But it was not until 2017 and the BJP sweep of Uttar Pradesh followed by the instating of a religious head at the helm of affairs did the problem become a mudda. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, in a bid to protect gau mata central to the hardline Hindutva-espousing values he has propagated in his capacities as mahant of the Gorakhpur math, and the founder of the Hindu Yuva Vahini has put into effect a two-fold approach to ensure this on the ground. Large budgets have been directed towards the rakh-rakhav (well-being) of cows, while law and order guidelines have been set into place for the protection of the holy cow. The former has meant budgets sanctions while the latter has been a series of announcements, both formal and informal, clarifying the official stand on what HYV members like to call gau raksha. Anybody found killing or causing harm to cows will be put behind bars, Adityanath had declared in November 2017. And in the new fiscal year, he set aside 647 crores on cow welfare. Add to this the Gau Kalyan cess levied on public sector institutions to build and subsidise local cow shelters and impossible-to-abide-by deadlines All stray cattle in the state will be housed by 10 January, 2019 was one such. In Bundelkhand alone, the budget for cow shelters was 90 lakhs. Given that the 2016 animal census estimates the number of cattle in Bundelkhand at 2.3 million close to 88 percent of that number being stray the Math was not a heartening one. It is one that we see illuminated in the district of Chitrakoot, in Bundelkhands UP, where in the cow shelter located in Chureh Kesruwa village, more than 100 cows have died in the last few months. What do you mean, how, asks Kuli, the caretaker at the shelter, of KL reporter Sahodra, They were starving. According to Kuli, the cow shelter has had no access to fodder to feed the cows they house close to 300. Until about 40 days ago, sarson ka bhoosa was coming for them to eat. But in the last month, there has been none. Coupled with the scarcity of water, already a problem at the onset of Bundelkhands summers, the deaths have long been coming. We will also die if we dont eat or drink for days, right?, is how local Ramkali puts it. The death of the cows was a sensationalist piece of news that travelled far and wide amidst local networks. Sahodra found out why when she went to investigate. 10 have died within a matter of 72 hours, she reports, That is when the official post-mortem inquiry was ordered and conducted. The cow shelter was built as a result of the local drive, we are told, the local gram sabha, the pradhan and the sachiv were instrumental. But the budgets have been wanting. Thats why there are no boundary walls, Kuli informs us, just this one lame gate, baans ka phatak. Chureh Kesruwa is only one such example. In Chitrakoot, we have found both facilities and budgets wanting across the 70 government-registered cow shelters. When farmers raged through the wintry nights, keeping vigil over their fields and protecting precious rabi crop, they spoke of the same mudda, of there not being enough shelters to house the stray cattle. Official reactions have been apathetic, at best. RK Patel, a popular party-hopping politician in Chitrakoot, currently the BJP MLA from Mau-Manikpur constituency and in the running for a ticket again this Lok Sabha elections, puts the onus back on the farmers, Farmers have to become more aware, is how he had put it at a press conference in 2018, adding almost poetically, The problem is farmers, and the solution too is farmers. While the official vet Dr Ramesh Kumar ascribes the deaths to illness and the sudden rise in temperatures, Sangam Lal Gupta, assistant District Magistrate, Manikpur, Chitrakoot, reacts casually, We dispatched a team as soon as we heard of about seven or eight cows suddenly dying. Initial enquiries have revealed that they hadnt been fed for days. But we are waiting for the official postmortem report. Meanwhile, in Chureh Kesruwa, locals, perhaps inspired by the reigning government, are trying their own hand at word-play. Says Ram Pyari, Chowkidar chara nahi denge toh chowkidaari karke kya hoga? (If the countrys watchmen dont provide fodder, then whats the point of being a chowkidar?). Khabar Lahariya is a women-only network of rural reporters from Bundelkhand. Congress raising the illegal immigrant issue will only help refreshing memory of gory days for Assam, a condition likely to go against the interests of the Grand Old Party in the region. Secondly, it is also likely to remind the voters of the failures of the Congress party in arresting the influx from Bangladesh. With less than two weeks to go for Lok Sabha Election, the Congress party seems to be trying hard to corner the BJP in the issue of Citizenship Amendment Bill in North East. But public perception on the issue of illegal immigration from Bangladesh is so precariously placed against the Congress in the region that the issue might do more harm to the party's election prospects in the region. Significantly, in the northeastern region, the Congress has long been seen as the party which reaped political benefits, thanks to the votes of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh at the cost of the economy, culture and political identity of the region. In the late seventies, Assam saw one of the bloodiest movements in contemporary history demanding detection and deportation of illegal migrants which led to the fall of the Congress government led by the then chief minister Hiteswar Saikia in 1985. The six-year-long anti-migrant agitation which is known as the Assam Movement also witnessed massive brutality by security forces on the protesting student activists. According to the records of the Assam government, 855 youths from both, Hindu and Muslim communities in the state, were killed in police atrocities in a span of six years. Atrocities against the activists only fortified the perception that the ruling Congress government was siding with the illegal immigrants. During 1996 Assembly election, the issue of illegal immigrants was pivotal focus for all parties. Saikia lost that year, for the second time, to Asom Gana Parishad. Five years later in 2001, when Tarun Gogoi, another Congress chief minister, was voted to power in the state, he tactfully ensured that the issue of illegal immigration never became a poll issue for the next fifteen years. In the 2001 Assembly election and every election that took place after that till 2016, Gogoi ensured that only issues related to law and order and economic condition of the citizens prevailed as poll issues in Assam. In the 2016 assembly election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Asom Gana Parishad alliance made illegal immigration a raging election issue. The BJP-AGP combine won a historically and Congress lost. Encroachment of tribal lands and vaishnavite satras (ashrams) in Assam by suspected migrants and the Congress government's perceived failure to reign them in is one of the main issues ahead of elections this year. The Citizenship Amendment Bill tabled in the last Winter Session of Parliament by the present BJP government, just five months before the Lok Sabha polls, ensured that the issue does not lose any traction in Assam. The bill which was duly passed in the Lok Sabha but was not placed in the Rajya Sabha due to protests from Opposition parties aims at granting Indian citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains, Christians and Buddhists from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Since the bill has faced severe protests across the northeastern region, the Congress has raised the poll pitch saying that the party will scrap it if it comes to power. Recently, the Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee and earlier Congress chief Rahul Gandhi announced the same. But the Congress raising the illegal immigrant issue will only help refreshing memory of gory days for Assam, a condition likely to go against the interests of the Grand Old Party in the region. Secondly, it is also likely to remind the voters of the failures of the Congress party in arresting the influx from Bangladesh. Significantly, after the Assam movement, the Government of India and the activists agreed upon detecting illegal immigrants in an agreement famously known as the Assam Accord. It took three decades and aitigation for the Congress-led governments in power to initiate the process of updating the National Register of Citizenship in 2015. The perception was had the process of NRC initiated just after it was agreed upon, situation would have been different. The apathy over the issue of illegal immigrants does not end here. In 1983, when the Assam Movement was touching its peak, the Centre had passed a legislation named Illegal Immigrants Detection Tribunal Act making detection of illegal immigrants legally difficult. It took another protracted legal battle by current chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal for the courts to strike down this legislation. It is unlikely that the people would now move away from the BJP and suddenly turn to a party against which they have seen themselves struggling for the last 40 years on the same issue of illegal immigrants. Certainly, there is fear among the people that the BJP would pass the bill if it comes to power in 2019. The fear is aggravated by the repeated announcements by BJP leaders that it would re-introduce the bill once the majority in the Rajya Sabha is attained. Even in this case, the Congress is unlikely to be seen as an option by the people to resort to, given their past experiences. It is, therefore, no wonder that the BJP and the AGP leaders are now harping on a compromise formula to pass the bill without hurting the interests of the region. All eyes would now be peeled for the BJP manifesto, which will probably be released early next week The Congress just released its manifesto for the 2019 general elections. Dealing with Jammu and Kashmir obviously forms an important part of it, more so because of two factors. The first is that for the first time a serious attempt was made at seeking professional advice on national security from experts: Lt General DS Hooda (retd) who oversaw the 2016 surgical strike recently handed over a copy of the partys draft national security strategy to Congress chief Rahul Gandhi. Obviously, Hooda knows the reality of the situation on the ground in Jammu and Kashmir and his views are respected. The Jammu and Kashmir bit in the manifesto should automatically be extracted from there. Second, Jammu and Kashmir is no better off than when the Congress left it. The Congress must have done some soul-searching on the inability of its leadership to move the situation beyond the military stabilisation achieved from 2011 to 2013; perhaps the best situation which presented itself militarily in the 30 years of proxy war with Pakistan. These are the main issues on which the Congress has chosen to focus: 1) Review of the deployment of armed forces, moving more troops to the border to stop infiltration completely, reduce the presence of the Indian Army and Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) in the Valley, and entrust more responsibility to the Jammu and Kashmir Police to maintain law and order. 2)Review Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Suitable changes will be made in the text of the laws to balance the requirements of security and the protection of human rights. 3) Talks without pre-conditions while eschewing muscular militarism and legalistic formulations; primarily looking for an innovative federal solution. 4) Appointment of three interlocutors to facilitate talks with civil society even as no tampering with Article 370 finds mention. 5)Schemes such as UDAAN, HIMAYAT and UMMEED to impart training in skills and create economic opportunities for the youth of Jammu and Kashmir, initiated by the former UPA government, to be reinstated. 6) Action against discrimination and harassment of students, traders and others belonging to Jammu and Kashmir in the rest of India while ensuring their safety and their right to study or do business. These points comprehensively cover the negative situation in Jammu and Kashmir, but there isnt a word on the all-important issue of governance or of promotion of amity between Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, where people of the first two sub regions do not even wish to talk with each other. Commencing with the military aspect of redeployment, no doubt the terminal aim of any pragmatic Indian leader should be to get the army back to the Line of Control (LoC). That does not even look at the current problem where there is large-scale local terrorist recruitment and its the armys Rashtriya Rifles (RR), which in conjunction with the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and Jammu and Kashmir Police provides the glue towards the domination and stabilisation of the security environment. In Kashmir, the sanctity of the LoC, counter-infiltration, gathering of intelligence, domination of the counter terror grid and the conduct of operations in the hinterland is one continuum. Disturb this and the whole edifice will get shaken up; most undesirable when fresh threats of suicide bombers have emerged in the hinterland. It was an erroneous decision in 2012 to remove troops from Kashmir and redeploy them in Ladakh, denuding parts of south Kashmir, which eventually became the bone of contention. The Congress should know enough about AFSPA and with what urgency it was drafted and passed on 4 July, 1990. Since then, the situation has undergone drastic changes in terms of nature of threats and operations. Tremendous experience has been gained from the thousands of contingencies faced. The Congress manifesto under discussion on television came across as a drastic step to remove AFSPA. Later, the party spokespersons clarified that a review of AFSPA would be considered in consultation with the army, although its emphasis of review appeared to be in relation only to human rights. The use of the sentence review to balance the requirements of security and the protection of human rights appears to make a case for both. If the party has understood the predicament of servicemen under prosecution for doing their duties and the challenge of registering FIRs against soldiers while FIRs against stone-pelters are quashed, then one can only compliment it; not otherwise. The issue of talks with stakeholders is an easy point to state, but is rarely implemented in the wake of the dynamics of violence. Firstly, the party should have mentioned that it would seek a fresh and representative leadership among civil society with whom engagement could be undertaken. Talks with whom? is the inevitable question that would be asked. With the Hurriyat Conference insignificant and the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front under embargo, the identification of new leadership is essential to take away the influence of United Jihad Council. Talks without pre-conditions could be welcome as long as the elements being engaged owe allegiance to the Indian Constitution and there is no demand for the inclusion of Pakistan anywhere within purview. The proposed appointment of three interlocutors is old wine. The last time they did some splendid work by engaging an array of stakeholders across the divide of Pir Panjal. However, for almost three years the report of the interlocutors remained in secrecy with the UPA government without being tabled in Parliament and with no discussion on it with the security forces or other major players. The interlocution phase created a ray of hope among the people and added to positivity. However, the Congress never took advantage of that fact to remain in touch with the people. In terms of civil society, there is no mention of the missing section: the Kashmiri Pandits. Surely, a manifesto of a major national party cannot forget the plight of a community which has remained virtually exiled from home. Even a mention of efforts to return it to its rightful place would have been good. The stance on Article 370 is well known. However, the necessity of initiating a dialogue with the people is a must. I strongly believe that eventually both articles 370 and 35A will get abrogated, but doing it the conducive way by urging, discussion and final acceptance is better than simply accepting it blindly. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi alluded to such an approach in his comments on Article 370 in Jammu during a pre-election rally in 2014. UDAAN, HIMAYAT and UMMEED are indeed good schemes for development of skills to have better scope for employment, but their execution cannot be as tardy as it was under the last Congress-National Conference combine. Strict monitoring of funds is a necessity to avoid corruption which has huge scope in such schemes. Of course, support to Kashmiri traders and student community pursuing business and studies in other states is always welcome. Obviously, the Congress has chosen to focus on the internal aspects of Jammu and Kashmir. However, what must be considered is that Pakistan is and will continue to be in the near future an important player. In a way, avoiding mention of Pakistan in a manifesto of the internal aspects of Jammu and Kashmir may be smart thinking lest it hijacks the entire security related issues of the manifesto. One expected a vision statement on Jammu and Kashmir that could capture the essence of the problem and how in a concept the same could be addressed towards resolution, internally. All eyes would now be peeled for the BJP manifesto, which will probably be released early next week. It will be interesting to compare the attitude of two mainstream parties to Jammu and Kashmir. And then, it is a matter of waiting for the electorate to render their verdict. At the launch of the Congress manifesto, one thing that stood out was the confidence with which Rahul Gandhi took charge After tasting electoral victory in three Hindi heartland states Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan at the end of 2018 by focussing on pressing farm issues and waiving farmers loans, the Congress seems to have found the theme it needs for the Lok Sabha elections. With the release of its national manifesto today in New Delhi, the Congress sent a strong message to the electorate: That its focus continues to be distressed farmers, waiving farm loans, solving the problem of unemployment for the youth and rural poor. While the BJP has set its narrative around nationalism, national security and Hindutva, the Congress has reverted to its time-tested pro-poor narrative. Im absolutely certain... The issues of this election are farmers, unemployment, youth, corruption and our NYAY scheme, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said after the release of the document titled Congress will deliver (Hum Nibhaayenge in Hindi) at AICC headquarters amidst a charged up environment. Laying emphasis on the key areas of the manifesto, Rahul said as a first step towards Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) or Minimum Income Support Programme (MISP), his government if it came to power would directly transfer Rs 72,000 per annum in the accounts of 20 percent of the poorest families of the country. This will jump start the countrys economy that has got blocked due to demonetisation and poor implementation of GST, Rahul said. NYAY is a scheme that the Congress announced as its poll promise and proposes to bring economic justice to the poorest citizens. Next will be employment under which 22 lakh vacancies in government jobs will be opened up. Employment will be given to 10 lakh rural youth in gram panchayats. However, the most important announcement made by Congress president was to have a separate farmers budget, similar to previous rail budgets. Above all, I would call it a historical step: no criminal offence will be filed against farmers who fail to pay back their loans. Instead, itll be under civil offence, added Rahul, emphasising the crisis in the farm sector. These were broadly the issues that brought victory to the party in Assembly polls, most notably in Chhattisgarh, where the Congress swept by winning 68 seats in the 90-seat Assembly in December 2018 and ended the 15-year BJP rule in the state. Taking a cue from Chhattisgarh In the Chhattisgarh Assembly polls, the Congress manifesto was a well-surveyed, all-inclusive document which represented every section of society. According to party sources, Rahul hailed the Chhattisgarh manifesto as a unique experiment and asked his research and analytics team to study and replicate it for the 2019 general elections. A team of the research and analytics department of AICC not only accompanied the manifesto man TS Singh Deo, whos now a minister in Chhattisgarh government, and his team on all field trips, but also worked with them intensely even after the Assembly election, a party source added. Prior to the drafting of the manifesto, the party leaders went to the masses and understood their hopes and aspirations, before coming out with a list of the doable promises. The objective was to ensure no section of the society was left uncared for. It also ensured that the chances of the party defaulting on its promises were fewer. Thats why in response to a query after the release, Rahul remarked, The had said MNREGA and loan-waiver were not doable, but we proved it wrong. After our victory, what we had promised during Assembly elections, we fulfilled them: like loan waivers in three states. Chhattisgarh-based political commentator Parivesh Mishra told Firstpost, Congress included all the major issues raised by the Chhattisgarh Congress during the Assembly election last year, which brought victory not only in the state, but alsdo in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. This manifesto is an extension of that document. He added, Chhattisgarh was the pilot project. Later, Madhya Pradesh was asked to follow the manifesto. A slightly modified version of it has been replicated in Odisha for the upcoming Assembly election. The venue of the manifesto launch, 24 Akbar Road, was visibly upbeat and vibrant today, saw the presence of top Congress leaders: Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Motilal Vohra, P Chidambaram, AK Anthony, Digvijaya Singh, to name just a few. At the launch of the Congress manifesto this afternoon, one thing that stood out was the confidence with which Rahul took charge. In stark contrast to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the 2019 elections have Rahul not only as the president of the party, but also as a man totally in charge. His body language did not betray even a moment of indecisiveness. He was articulate in his answers, assertive and spoke fluently, which also pointed to a clarity in his thought process. In response to a variety of questions, Rahul answered without a fumble, a pause, or a break. He answered all questions confidently and in depth, hinting that he knew the subject well and was not repeating rehearsed lines. More than once, he got up from his seat and walked about the dais, like an assured leader capable of inspiring confidence. If there ever was a need for Rahul to nail the fact that he has matured into a leader that this democracy can repose faith in, then he did today by challenging the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to engage in a debate with him over the state of the nation. Rahul seems to have walked a long distance in the past five years. Let me say this: Preckwinkles efforts to distinguish herself as a progressive reformer arent completely off the mark. Context is crucial. As Cook County Board president, she has tried to be a more conscientious steward of tax dollars and of public worker pensions than her predecessors. She has advocated for sensible reform at Cook County Jail and been a voice for poverty-stricken, low-level offenders when other elected officials engaged in petty politics at their expense. She has directed the countys health care and social services resources toward the most vulnerable. As assistant civic engineer has been sent to police custody till 5 April by a Magistrate Court in Mumbai in connection with the foot over bridge collapse at CSMT An assistant civic engineer has been sent to police custody till 5 April by a magistrate court in Mumbai in connection with the foot overbridge collapse near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) station, according to ANI. Assistant engineer with Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) SF Kakulte, who works with the civic bodys bridges department, was arrested on Monday by the Azad Maidan police after being interrogated. Kakulte was booked under Indian Penal Code section 304A (causing death by negligence), PTI reported. Executive engineer AR Patil, who was earlier suspended by civic chief Ajoy Mehta was also arrested and will be produced before a court on Wednesday. "The accused Anil Patil was arrested by Azad Maidan police this (Tuesday) evening. He worked with the bridges department of the civic body between September 2014 and December 2018," DCP, Zone I, Abhishek Trimukhe told PTI. The DCP said both the engineers were aware that such incidents (like bridge collapse) might happen, but acted negligently. "During our investigation it came to light that they had knowledge of their job and due to their negligence the incident took place," the DCP said. Earlier, structural auditor Neeraj Kumar Desai, who had allegedly given clearance for the use of the bridge, was booked under Section 304-II of the Indian Penal Code (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and arrested on 18 March. The 40-year-old Himalaya foot over bridge, which connects the Times of India building with the iconic CSMT station collapsed on 14 March, resulting in the death of six people and injuring 31 others. According to PTI, a preliminary report into the collapse submitted by the BMC had said the structural audit of the foot overbridge was not carried out correctly. It suggested major lapses when the structural audit of the FOB was carried out on 13 August, 2018. The Bombay High Court on Tuesday called the incident an eye-opener and directed the BMC to formulate a new policy for the audit, repair and upkeep of rail and foot overbridges and to consider handing over the audit of some these structures with high footfalls to agencies like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). The high court also asked the civic body to strengthen criteria of awarding tenders to contractors. The court was hearing a plea that sought, among other things, that the BMC cancel all structural audit contracts given to the firm DD Desai, which had audited the foot overbridge that collapsed. Today's top stories: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address rallies in Odisha and Bihar; Congress will release its election manifesto; Rajasthan Royals and Royal Challengers Bangalore will both look to secure their first IPL win of the season; and more. Modi to speak in Odisha, Bihar; Congress to release manifesto Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address an election rally at Bhawanipatna, the district headquarter of Kalahandi district in western Odisha. From there, he will travel to Ballopur village in Bihar's Jamui district for a rally and then to Gaya's Gandhi Maidan, where he and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar will address another rally. BJP national president Amit Shah will also hold public meetings on Tuesday, at Thoothukudi, Sivaganga and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Later in the evening, he and the BJP's Bengaluru South candidate Tejaswi Surya will hold a joint road show in Bengaluru. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yodi Adityanath will interact with nearly 10,000 youngsters in Gorakhpur as part of the party's Yuva Sammelan. Meanwhile, the Lucknow chief electoral officer has asked for a factual report from the District Election Office at Ghaziabad, on Aditynath allegedly referring to the Indian Army as "Modi ji ki sena". Furthermore, the Congress is expected to release its election manifesto on Tuesday. The minimum income scheme NYAY, along with special status for Andhra Pradesh and several states in the North East, are likely to be among the party's promises. Debate over Kashmir's special status heats up National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on Monday said his party will strive hard to "restore the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir", and that could include having a sadar-e-riyasat (president) and wazir-e-azam (prime minister). Modi condemned Abdullah's remark and demanded to know from the Congress an ally of the National Conference and other parties of the "grand Opposition alliance" whether they supported the former chief minister on the autonomy issue. Addressing a rally at Bandipore in North Kashmir, Abdullah said his party will not allow any attacks on Jammu and Kashmir's special status and will work to get back what was "infringed upon". Responding to Modi's attack on him, an unfazed Abdullah tweeted that he did not need other parties to support his stand and said his party has always stood for the restoration of the original terms of accession. "So there is nothing new in this. You guys must be really desperate when the prime minister makes this an election issue," he wrote. British Parliament rejects fourth Brexit plan British lawmakers on Monday voted against the fourth of the possible alternative plans for the country's withdrawal agreement with the European Union (EU), after rejecting deals that had been tabled thrice in the Parliament. By the time voting concluded in the British Parliament on Monday, lawmakers had rejected all the proposed alternatives, which included plans to hold a second referendum, retaining much closer economic ties after leaving the EU, or stopping Brexit to prevent a no-deal departure, Al Jazeera reported. The second referendum proposal had garnered the most votes in favour (280) but was beaten by 292 votes against. The next option that proposed having UK stay in a permanent customs union with the EU was rejected by 276 to 273 votes. The UK will crash out of the EU on 12 April, unless the British Parliament passes May's deal, or the government is able to secure a long extension to Brexit. SC may hear petition on electoral bonds sales rising by 62 percent Reports say the Supreme Court is likely to hear a petition on the sale of electoral bonds skyrocketing by 62 percent compared to last year, ahead of the Lok Sabha election, with the State Bank of India alone selling bonds of over Rs 1,700 crore. In an RTI response to Pune-based Vihar Durve, the SBI said that in 2018, it had sold bonds worth Rs 1056.73 crore in the months of March, April, May, July, October and November. This year, in January and March alone, the bank has sold electoral bonds worth Rs 1716.05 crore, the response said. 5-year-old, BSF jawan, woman killed in Pakistani shelling A five-year-old girl, a Border Security Force inspector and a woman were killed, and more than 15 people injured on Monday as Pakistani troops persisted with heavy shelling in areas along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district. The Indian Army said it gave Pakistan a "befitting reply", though there are no reports yet of casualties across the border. Ceasefire violations have witnessed a spurt after Indias airstrike on the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) training camp in Balakot in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on 26 February, in a "pre-emptive" action following the militant groups suicide bombing in Pulwama on 14 February, in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel were killed. SFIO arrests former IL&FS vice chairman Hari Shankaran The Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) on Monday arrested former vice-chairman of crisis-hit IL&FS for fraudulent conduct and causing wrongful loss to the company and its creditors, official sources said. Sankaran was arrested in Mumbai in connection with the ongoing investigations into the affairs of IL&FS and its group entities. This is the first arrest made by the probe agency in the IL&FS case. The agency has been granted custody of Sankaran till 4 April. Sources said Sankaran was arrested on the grounds of abusing his powers at IL&FS Financial Services Ltd through fraudulent conduct and in granting loans to entities that were not credit-worthy, or were declared as non-performing accounts. Such actions caused wrongful loss to the company and its creditors, they added. GST misses FY19 collection target Goods and Services Tax (GST) collections in March came in at a record Rs 1.06 lakh crore, but not enough to meet the Centre's target for the fiscal year that ended 31 March, official data showed. The government, which had upwardly revised the fiscal deficit target to accommodate the cash-dole-out plan to farmers, was banking on its share of estimated GST collections of Rs 5.03 lakh crore out of about Rs 11.47 lakh crore in total mop-up for 2018-19. But the final numbers showed gross central GST coming in at Rs 4.25 lakh crore, about Rs 78,000 crore short of what the Centre was targeting. GST, which was rolled out on 1 July, 2017, subsumed 17 central and state levies, and collections thereof are divided into three broad heads central GST (which accrues to the Union government), state GST (which goes to states) and integrated GST (which is divided equally between the Centre and the state). Official sources said an estimated Rs 5.03 lakh crore share of the Centre in the GST proceeds was after distributing states' share out of IGST. The actual collection of Rs 4.25 lakh crore is after settling IGST. Dedicated 'News' tab on Facebook soon? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that he may add a dedicated tab for "high-quality news" to Facebook, possibly by the end of 2019. Reports suggest that this section will be free for users, but Facebook will likely pay publishers whose work is featured. This development comes amid the rampant spread of provocative fake news during the election season. Social media platforms have been trying to crack down on agencies behind the spread of such fake news and to curb their dissemination. IPL 2019: Rajasthan Royals, Royal Challengers Bangalore eye first win of season Ajinkya Rahane-led Rajasthan Royals will take on Virat Kohli's Royal Challnegers Bangalore on Tuesday, with both teams looking for their first win of the new season at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur. Both RCB and RR have played three matches and suffered defeats in all of them. Pressure is on Indian skipper Virat Kohli, who has been facing criticism for his captaincy. A few senior players like AB de Villiers have also been failing to make any impact. Indian Test team vice-captain Ajinkya Rahane has been on the wrong side of couple of close contests, so he would hope that his players will finally break the points duck and secure the win. In talks with Priyanka Chopra for a project, says Avengers: Endgame co-director Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo on Monday revealed that he is in talks with Priyanka Chopra for a project. The 47-year-old filmmaker, who is known for giving Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) a grounded tone along with his brother Anthony Russo, finds Priyanka "fantastic" and says he would love to work with her. "Priyanka is transitioning into global status now. She is fantastic... (I would) love to work with her... I am potentially talking to Priyanka for something. I am not going to say what it is," Russo said in a group interview. A five-year-old girl and a BSF sub-inspector were killed on Monday as Pakistan Army resorted to mortar shelling and firing of small arms on villages and army posts while 14 others were injured in the cross-border firing Five-year-old Sobia Shafeeq was playing in the courtyard of her house in the Bandi Chechin area of Shahpur sector of Poonch district when a shell fired from Pakistan side landed in the neighbourhood on Monday. Sobia had just walked into the courtyard when the explosion took place, killing her instantly. "The firing started at 7.30 am, but stopped after 15 minutes. Then it resumed at 11.30 am and went on non-stop for at least three hours. The five-year-old girl was killed on the spot," said Muntazar Kanjwal, a resident of Shahpur, over the phone from Poonch hospital. Paramedics said that there was chaos at the hospital after the injured people were brought for treatment. According to reports, 14 people were injured in the cross-border shelling on Monday. "Five BSF jawans were among the 14 injured in the shelling," said Ramesh Kumar Agarwal, SS Poonch, adding, The firing continued for some time, he added. The killing of the five-year-old is a grave reminder of the horrors being faced by residents living along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, even though the talk of war seems to have subsided in television studios for now. Ceasefire violations have witnessed a spurt after Indias air strike on the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) training camp in Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on 26 February in a "pre-emptive" action following the militant groups suicide bombing in Pulwama on 14 February in which 49 CRPF personnel were killed. On Sunday and Monday, after some days of relative calm, troops from India and Pakistan pounded each others locations along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir. It is a scene which often repeats itself these days, forcing residents into cave-like bunkers, while many others migrate to plains. A BSF sub-inspector, who was also injured in the shelling from across the border, succumbed to injuries while the condition of four other is said to be stable. They were posted near a shrine of Sian Mira Ziarat in Shahur area, which was also partially damaged. An army man guarding a forward post in Mankote was also injured. According to officials, nine civilians were also injured in the cross-border shelling. Residents described a chaotic scene followed the early morning firing as shells began landing on the stretch of villages in Shahpur and other adjoining areas. A police official said that the Pakistani Army opened fire and attacked several Indian Army posts in Kerni and Krishan Ghati sectors Monday afternoon. The officer said that cross-border shelling later also erupted at Mankote, Gulpur and Degwar sectors of Poonch district. Last year, according to official data, more than double the number of ceasefire violations were reported along the Line of Control as compared to the previous year. The Indian Army recorded 1,599 cases of ceasefire violations along the Line of Control and lost 20 personnel in 2018, the government said in the Lok Sabha recently. With Pakistani soldiers targeting security forces, at least 2,140 ceasefire violations were reported in 2018, up from 971 in 2017 and 449 in 2016, according to official data. The loss of life along the LoC was highest in a decade with 30 civilian casualties and 29 casualties among security personnel. "Life is tougher and riskier than what it was four years ago, Rasheed Magray, the brother of an injured civilian said from the hospital in Poonch. It has become only worse after the Pulwama attack. There has never been a week which has been peaceful since then. "We are not dying. That doesnt mean we are leading a peaceful life either. We are living in constant fear of death. I am afraid, someday a bomb will land on my house and kill me and my family," he added. The Arya Samaj's activities complemented those of the Brahmo Samaj. Their founder Dayanand Saraswati had devised a purification ceremony through which Muslims and Christians could be reconverted to Hinduism. Editor's note: This is the second reported piece in an 18-part series on the contemporary history of Hindutva in coastal Karnataka. The series features interviews, videos, archival material and oral histories gathered over a period of four months. Read other articles of the series here *** The story of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in South Kanara is incomplete without a flashback. Frank F Colon's A Caste in a Changing World, a book which explores the lives of Saraswat Brahmans in South Kanara, serves as an excellent source of one such story. The author alludes to it in this section: "The period (late eighteenth and early nineteenth century) was marked among the Saraswats by a reaffirmation of ancestral dharma, but it was also a time of confrontation with new knowledge and values. Foreign missionaries offered increasingly valuable English education to those anxious to advance in government service, but at the price of exposure to another religion. The threat of religious conversion put Saraswat families on the defensive, and ultimately pushed them into Kanara's first organized political mobilization-a campaign for the establishment of a government school at Mangalore." What does this have to do with the RSS? Or Hindu nationalism? Colon's reference to "confrontation" is illustrated in the 19th century story to which he refers; it speaks of the "great moral conflict that lay before the pioneers of the 'Hindu Nationalism' project in South Kanara the Saraswat Brahmins". We'll split this flashback into two phases. Phase 1: Flop It is wrong to solely credit Maharashtrian Brahmins for the emergence of RSS in Coastal Karnataka this was a natural tendency, given how the dominant creation story of the RSS is linked to the organisation's roots in Nagpur. It is, however, equally true that Brahmins local to coastal Karnataka had a significant role in the emergence of Hindu nationalism. This community, comprising Chitrapur Saaswat Brahmins (Bhanaps) and Gaud Saraswat Brahmins is one of the few meat-eating Brahmin groupings in the country and the region's largest priestly sect. They first attempted to mobilise as a political Hindu bloc in 1870, 70 years before the RSS set up its first shakha in Mangaluru, and this had nothing to do with Hindu nationalist ideology. It was a reaction to the conversion of their ilk to Christianity. The Charter Act of 1813 passed by the British parliament granted Christian missionaries permission to enter India to teach English and preach Christianity. Within two decades, the German Basel Mission set up its first base at Mission Street near the old port in Mangaluru. Up until then, Christianity in the city meant Catholicism. The Konkani-speaking Catholic migrants had, by then, created a clearly defined space for themselves, with the help of the British. Colon writes: District's Christian population manifested little interest in proselytising. Indeed, in many ways, it appeared to be but another caste in the complex layering of the district's society. The German and Swiss evangelicals represented a different approach. This approach was one that threatened the status quo in a way the Catholic Church before it never conceived. The motto of the Basel Mission was: "Let the image or the shadow of caste never seen in the Christian church.." Not only did they offer education to all, but they also promised economic development. In 1836, they set up a Kannada-medium school that admitted students across castes and religions. The German missionaries followed this up with the establishment of the first English school of South Kanara on Market Road in 1838. The interlocking clay tiles that are today found in different parts of the world (they're called 'Mangalore tiles') were invented at the Basel Mission Tile Works at Morgansgate in 1857. This was the first such factory and in a few decades, there were close to 25 operating from South Kanara. The lowered castes perceived in their messaging and activities the inherent potential for liberation from Brahmin control in Madras Presidency. The missionaries' efforts bore fruit in the conversions of several low-caste agriculturalists and a few members of the ritually still lower Billava caste of toddy-tappers. The literal meaning of the word 'Billava' is archer. The revered Tuluva warriors Koti and Chennaya, belong to the Billava community. Billavas are numerically the largest Tulu speaking group in South Kanara. They were the first lowered caste group to take to education in South Kanara, in spite of protests against their entry. Less than two decades after the first generation of Billavas were educated in the Basel Mission School, they started entering the service of the East India Company as bureaucrats. They started to share office spaces with Brahmins who considered them untouchables. In 1851, the Brahmins, who were the largest group in government service, petitioned the district judge in Mangaluru against the employment of Billavas as trainees in the East India Company. The petition stated, "In the course of time Billavas would become the heads of the offices and Brahmins would be compelled to obey their orders, the orders of people that they could scarcely look at without being polluted." This resentment towards their education-enabled success turned the Billavas more militant and they gravitated towards Christianity. The period between 1869 and 1875 saw many lowered castes, the largest of them being the Billavas converting en masse into the Basel Mission's order. This exodus came to be known later as the Basel Mission's 'Tulu movement'. While the conversion of these communities attracted little attention from the dominant Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, it was the only conversion of their own men which pushed them to come together. In 1862, a riot almost broke out when Ganesh Rao, the son of a tehsildar, a powerful Gaud Saraswat Brahmins bureaucrat converted to the Protestant faith. The Saraswat Brahmins complained to the colonial administration that the Germans were interfering with their faith in the name of western education. This is when they came together to lobby for an English medium school. They sought English education as it was crucial to accessing government service but not at the cost of their men being converted or polluted. It was during this time that Ullal Raghunathaya, a Gaud Saraswat Brahmins modernist, sent a telegram to Keshub Chandra Sen, a prominent member of the Brahmo Samaj based in Calcutta. Brahmo Samaj is a Hindu reformist organisation founded in 1828 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a Hindu reformer, in Calcutta. Raghunathaya's telegram to Sen sought the establishment of Brahmo Samaj in Mangalore. Raghunathaya was an alumnus of the Basel Mission School and was among the first few generations of Brahmins from whom Christian converts emerged. He was himself swayed by the influence of Christianity when he accidentally discovered the writings of Ram Mohan Roy at the Mission Library in Balmatta. From the accounts of the time, Raghunathaya was a man genuinely interested in reforming caste relations among Hindus. He partnered with his Billava classmate N Arasappa to extend an invitation to the Brahmo Samaj. At the instance of Raghunathaya, Arasappa organised a large delegation of Billavas to welcome the three Brahmo Samajists who arrived in the city in 1870. But the reformists' plan crumbled soon after their guests arrived. The Billavas became instantly suspicious because of the "western clothes" worn by the Brahmo Samajists, and the fact that they spoke English. The Bengali Hindu evangelists were confused for Christian missionaries, who were already facing stiff opposition and their message was lost in translation. Of those who turned up, only 19 remained to become the first members of the Brahmo Samaj which was started at Arasappa's house. This small group too disintegrated after the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins who had followed Raghunathaya into the Samaj refused to accept the leadership of the 'untouchable' Arasappa. They formed a parallel organisation called the Prarthana Samaj for their Brahmin brethren. They also rallied the community to excommunicate Raghunathaya for staying back in the organisation started by his Billava friend. When Arasappa died in 1876, his unit of the Brahmo Samaj fizzled out. Soon after, the breakaway Brahmins renamed Prarthana Samaj as the Brahmo Samaj of Mangalore. Raghunathaya tamely joined the new organisation in exchange for his reacceptance as a Brahmin. After this, the Brahmo Samaj of Mangalore made its primary objective to oppose missionaries, particularly the German Protestants. This period also saw the mobilisation of Brahmin women by the Samaj against 'religious enemies'. In an article in a local journal called The West Coast Express, the Brahmo Samaj warned people from sending their children to Mission Schools. They accused these schools of turning youth away from their roots. The British government eventually did set up the first government English medium school in the city, co-financed by Saraswat Brahmins who after this, took to funding educational institutions across the region. To this day, this tradition continues with Hindu ideologues continuing to start their own schools where they combine modern education with Vedic ethos. The history of the Samaj in Mangaluru goes against the grain of any of its foundational tenets, as established by Ram Mohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore. The SBs wanted to protect their caste supremacy in the face of western modernity and Christian liberation theology; these were transforming centuries-old social relations. This is the moral conflict which ultimately stalled them from truly practising the Brahmo Doctrine which laid out what it took to defeat this modernist wave: Hindu reform, the abolition of untouchability and equity between castes. Phase II: Lesson learnt The next organisation to take root in the coast was the Arya Samaj. As opposed to the Brahmo Samaj which was largely just Saraswat Brahmins, Arya Samaj was a broader coalition of Brahmin castes such as Kotas, Havyaks and Shivalli Madhwas. It was formed under the leadership of Mangaluru-based advocate KR Karanth the brother of noted writer Shivaram Karanth along with Dr K Shyama Rao, K Rama Rao and M Ananthakrishna Rao in 1918. The Arya Samaj's activities complemented those of the Brahmo Samaj. Their founder Dayanand Saraswati had devised a purification ceremony through which Muslims and Christians could be reconverted to Hinduism. Dayanand Saraswati had also argued that Aryas formed 'Bharat' and were spiritually, socially and culturally superior. He preached to his followers that rather than reform, a revival was in order to restore 'Bharat' to its erstwhile glory. The Arya Samajists blamed recent events like foreign invasions, by British or Muslim forces, and colonialism, for the degradation of 'Bharat'. Most important, the Arya Samaj avoided making the same mistake that led to the initial chaos in the Brahmo Samaj. They formed a social alliance with the Moghaveera fishing community. They had on their side Mohanappa Thingalaya, a formidable Moghaveera leader who had formed Gnanodhay Samaj, which was focussed on the uplift of fisherfolk through spirituality, education and nationalism. He rallied the community against alcoholism and superstitions, as per Samajist principles. The links between GSBs and Moghaveeras within the larger Hindu nationalist formation proved to be crucial in the decades to come. Even as the Arya Samaj attempted to deepen its roots in Coastal Karnataka, a new set of political events were unfolding in the rest of British ruled India. The ruling class Hindus and Muslims were growing increasingly hostile towards each other in their scramble for the scraps of political power that the colonial administration tossed at the 'natives' through the Minto-Morley reforms of 1909. The years leading to these reforms were marked by riots breaking out over cow slaughter in the Punjab, the Arya Samaj's stronghold. These conflicts not only led to the eventual Hindu-Muslim partition but also had a profound impact on the Hindu organisations active in Coastal Karnataka. The period saw the emergence of a new outfit, the All India Hindu Mahasabha and helped shape the anti-Muslim narrative that is today a defining feature of the Hindutva movement in the region. Absconding Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Nisar Tantray was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Delhi after being deported from UAE Absconding Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Nisar Tantray, the mastermind behind the attack on a CRPF camp in Jammu and Kashmirs Lethpora in December 2017, was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Delhi after being deported from UAE, government sources told CNN-News18. Tantyray will be remanded to government custody. According to ANI, Tantray was arrested on 31 March. Nisar, a resident of Tral, fled to the UAE on a work visa after the attack. According to a Zee News report, he fled on 1 February this year after his associate was arrested by the NIA. Nisar is the younger brother of Noor Mohammed Tantray, a Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) commander who was killed in December 2017 during an encounter with security forces in Pulwama. The attack on a CRPF camp in Lethpora on the intervening night of 30 and 31 December, 2017 claimed the lives of five security personnel. Faiyaz Ahmed, who coordinated this attack, was arrested in February this year by the NIA. Since the first parliamentary election in 1952, where 1,874 candidates filed their nominations for 489 seats, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of candidates that fight it out in the polls. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, a whopping 8,251 candidates contested for the 543 seats in the Lower House of Parliament. Since the first parliamentary election in 1952, where 1,874 candidates filed their nominations for 489 seats, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of candidates that fight it out in the polls. The figure rose steadily to 2,784 candidates in 1971 and 13,952 in 1996 during the 11th general election to 543 parliamentary constituencies. For the upcoming Lok Sabha election, the deadline to file nominations is 4 April, with the papers scheduled to be scrutinised the very next day. The Election Commission of India has set 8 April as the last day to withdraw one's candidature. Here is a guide on filing nominations for the general election in India: Who can file a nomination? Anyone who is 25 years of age or older is eligible to contest an election to a Lok Sabha seat. The candidate must be a registered elector of a constituency and a citizen of India. However, if s/he is a registered voter in a particular state, s/he can contest from any seat in any state. The candidate cannot be nominated if they have been convicted for some offence and are in prison, or if s/he is out on bail, pending disposal of his/her appeal. As per the guidelines of the Election Commission, such a person is disqualified from contesting elections. How much is the security deposit? At the time of filing a nomination, every candidate has to make a security deposit of Rs 25,000 for the Lok Sabha election. Candidates belonging to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes get a concession they have to pay only half the amount, Rs 12,500, as the deposit. The security deposit must be made while filing the first set of nominations or before that. It can be made in cash to the Returning Officer or Assistant Returning Officer, or deposited at the RBI/Treasury. No deposit can be made with a cheque or bank draft. Requirements for valid nominations Lok Sabha hopefuls need to fill up Form 2A and present it to the Returning Officer, or the specified Assistant Returning Officer only. Candidates can file nominations only at the place mentioned in the public notice released by the Returning Officer and only between 11 am and 3 pm during the period specified by the Election Commission, barring public holidays. Only the candidate or any of the proposers can file the nomination; the papers cannot be sent through post or someone else. It must also be signed by the candidate and the prescribed number of proposers. In case the candidate is an elector of a different constituency, s/he must submit a certified extract of entries in the relevant electoral roll. Proposers For candidates of a recognised national or state party, one proposer is enough. But for Independent candidates or those of an unrecognised political party, s/he will require 10 proposers at the time of filing nominations. The proposers must also be electors from the concerned constituency, but a proposer can also be a candidate from the same constituency. In the case of proposers who are illiterate, their thumb impressions must be attested by the Returning Officer, or an officer authorised by the EC. How do SC/ST candidates file nomination? For reserved constituencies, candidates must submit a declaration specifying the caste/tribe they belong to. Such a caste/tribe must be included in the list of SCs/STs in the state where the nomination is being filed. It would be better if the candidate also produce a certificate of a reasonably recent date to prove their SC/ST status. Affidavits to be filed Candidates have to file their affidavit in Form 26. The affidavit has to be sworn before a notary public, or oath commissioner, or magistrate of the first class. It must be typed clearly or written legibly, and no columns must be left blank. In case the affidavit is not filed with the nomination paper, it can be filed till 3 pm on the last day of nomination. Number of nomination papers for one candidate While a candidate can contest from two constituencies at the most, there can only be a maximum of four sets of nomination papers for a candidate, albeit with only one deposit. If more than four nominations are filed, the Election Commission will ignore the papers submitted from the fifth set onwards. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taunted Mahatma Gandhi by skipping Sevagram Ashram from his itinerary, a trustee of the ashram, the Mahatma's home for a decade, said on Monday. Wardha: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taunted Mahatma Gandhi by skipping Sevagram Ashram from his itinerary, a trustee of the ashram, the Mahatma's home for a decade, said on Monday. Modi, who visited this district headquarters town in Vidarbha on Monday, limited his engagements to addressing an election rally. "Maybe, in the last five years, he (Modi) has started thinking that he has become bigger than Gandhi and there is no need for Gandhi," Avinash Kakde, trustee of the Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan, which runs the ashram, said. Gandhi and Modi are poles apart in their thoughts and actions, Kakde said. In the Modi regime, falsehood reigns supreme in the country and his not visiting Sevagram is akin to taunting Gandhi's advocacy of truth, he added. "Tum se bada mein ho gaya hoon, tum satya ki baat karte they, mein jhoot ki baat karta hoon, dekho desh mein kaun bada hai (I (Modi) am bigger than you. You (Gandhi) used to talk of truth, I speak of falsehood. See who is bigger in the country)," Kakde said. Gandhi believed in truth, while Modi believes in lying and using falsehoods to usurp power, he said. While Gandhi was a votary of non-violence, Modi believes in violence, he said. "In their thoughts and practices, (Gandhi and Modi) are North and South poles," Kakde said. While Gandhiji believed in equality for all humans, Modi thinks only about big industrialists, he added. Modi not visiting the ashram is good in a way, Kakde said. He recalled that in 2014, Modi had visited the ashram as a prime ministerial candidate, seeking to benefit from the "aura and blessings" of Gandhi. Gandhi believed in taking responsibility for incidents like riots but Modi has refused to accept responsibility for the the 2002 Godhra riots, he said. Modi came to Wardha to show that he is a Gandhian, after getting a clean chit from the Supreme Court in the Godhra riots case, Kakde said. The last five years (of Modi rule) have made it clear that he is not the same person, Kakde said. In 1936, Mahatma Gandhi established his residence in a village called Segaon on the outskirts of Wardha, which he renamed as Sevagram, which means 'village of service'. Risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44 percent over 10 days: NASA Chief. The satellite destroyed in an anti-satellite missile test by India's Defense Research and Development Organization at an altitude of ~300 kilometres on 27 March was well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit. However, 24 of the pieces "are going above the apogee of the International Space Station," said Bridenstine. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station," he continued, adding: "That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight." "It's unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is." The US military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk for the ISS and for satellites. They are currently tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters. That includes about 10,000 pieces of space debris, of which nearly 3,000 were created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007 at 530 miles from the surface. As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44 percent over 10 days, Bridenstine said. But the risk will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere. As per one newspaper, Narendra Modi used the word Hindu eight times and the phrase Hindu terror five times. Prime Minister Narendra Modis speech at Wardha, the setting for Mohandas Gandhis experiment with nai talim (new education) and still home to an ashram, should attract the attention of the Election Commission (EC). The point of entry into what can conceivably be called deeply divisive speech was the proposition that Hindus are known for peace and brotherhood. Nowhere in history will you find theyre involved in such subversive activities [read terrorism]. Even the British never mentioned them as terrorists. But former minister Sushil Kumar Shinde made a statement during the United Progressive Alliance regime that Hindu terrorists were behind the Samjhauta blast. In all, one newspaper counted, Modi used the word Hindu eight times and the phrase Hindu terror five times. It did not record how long the speech lasted, however. This premise was then made the basis of an attack on Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his party. The burden of Modis song was that having alienated Hindus by using the term Hindu terrorism, Rahul fled to contest from Wayanad, where Hindus comprise only 49 percent of the population. The fundamental premise underlying Modis speech is communal, divisive, and incendiary, and could be construed as having promoted enmity between communities. We shall get to that in detail in a while. But first a lesson in history would be in order for the BJPs leadership. First, it is completely untrue that the colonial rulers never designated Hindus as terrorists. To be sure, they did not do so on the grounds that some people involved in terrorist attacks happened to be Hindus, but an entire stream of the nationalist movement actually came to be known as revolutionary terrorism. This tag was worn by many nationalists with pride, but the colonial rulers who called Khudiram, Benoy, Badal, Dinesh and many others terrorists used the word pejoratively, of course. Revolutionary terrorists were prosecuted under the most stringent of laws and many were executed. Then again, it is important to stress to the BJP that a man who was Hindu Nathuram Godse murdered Mahatma Gandhi in an attack that can be called nothing but terrorism. The fact that Godse assassinated Gandhi does not, however, reflect on all Hindus, or even a majority of them, just as the activities of Wahhabi Islam-inspired terrorist organisations do not reflect on Muslims. The term Hindu terror is as meaningless as the term Islamist terror. Lets get closer to our times for a bit. Over the past four-odd years any number of Hindus, both individuals acting spontaneously or organised under criminal umbrellas, have lynched people, usually, but not always Muslims, on the suspicion of slaughtering cows or even transporting cows on eminently legitimate business. In this they have been encouraged, and often incited, by the BJP as a whole or individual members thereof. What name do we give to beef vigilantism? Is it not a form of terror-mongering? Two other points must be cleared up. First, Shinde. As Union home minister, he issued a statement in 2013 accusing the BJP and RSS of fanning Hindu terrorism. The use of the phrase in the context of the Samjhauta blast, and the attacks on Mecca Masjid and in Malegaon, was undoubtedly wrong-headed. But in the course of the interview in which he used the phrase, he clarified categorically that what he was talking about was saffron terrorism: Reports have come during investigation that BJP and RSS conduct camps to spread terrorism, he said. That statement, in the absence of proof and with investigations ongoing, was also objectionable, but is not the same as accusing Hindus in general of being involved in terrorism. As a matter of fact, BJP ministers make statements compromising investigations all the time. A recent example is Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanaths statements on the murder of a police officer in Bulandshahr. Second, the point, for the purposes of this argument, is not the guilt or innocence of Aseemanand and others, acquitted by a special court on 20 March. Neither would reflect in any way on Hindus. But it is significant that just over a week later, on 28 March, in the just-released judgment, the judge was recorded as having said that he was pained and anguished that the dastardly act had gone unpunished. "There are gaping holes in the prosecution evidence and an act of terrorism has remained unresolved," the judge wrote. The Congress tried to tarnish crores of people of the country by using the term Hindu terror, Modi declaimed, before accusing it also of tarnishing the countrys 5,000-year-old culture. The Congress needs to be taught a befitting lesson for insulting the Hindu community he added. He then made the accusation that Rahul was escaping to Wayanad "where the minorities are in a majority as he knew that people wouldnt spare him for insulting the Hindu community". The assumptions in this statement should be examined by the EC. First, there is no evidence that Rahul ever insulted the Hindu community, if such a thing exists. Second, Modi stereotypes all minorities as Congress voters, which they are not. Minorities can, and should, take exception to this characterisation, which pits them in an adversarial role against the majority community. If this does not amount to promoting enmity, nothing conceivably does. The producers of the Narendra Modi biopic, which is slated for release on 5 April, have already replied to the EC notice on the oppositions' complaint against the film. Before taking a call on whether to allow the release of a biopic on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Election Commission is awaiting the BJP's reply to an opposition parties' plea to prevent its screening amid the ongoing poll process. The producers of the film, which is slated for release on 5 April, have already replied to the EC notice on the oppositions' complaint against the film. "Once the response from the BJP general secretary is received, the Election Commission will take a decision," said a senior poll panel official Monday night. Since the complaint to the Election Commission mentioned BJP in it, its copy was sent to the party for its reply. The official also referred to at least two Supreme Court rulings about movies. In one of the rulings, the Supreme Court had directed the West Bengal government to ensure that satirical film Bhobishyoter Bhoot, which was critical of the state chief minister, is screened without obstruction. The model code of conduct, however, was not in force at that time, he added. "We also have to see the latest Delhi High Court ruling which said the biopic screening should be decided by the EC," he said, adding the model code is silent on films and it was a grey area. He said the EC has to keep the court verdicts in mind. In their complaint, the opposition parties has alleged that the film violates the model code and would act like an advertisement for the BJP. Me too. Having covered Biden off and on since his first short-lived presidential run in 1987, I have witnessed close-up the relentless Biden charm that leaves people praising Joe being Joe or good ol Uncle Joe, the retail politician who would shake every hand in the nation, if you cut him loose long enough. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday hit out at former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah for demanding to revive the post of Wazir-e-Azam and Sadar-e-Riyasat in Kashmir, saying that New India would never allow this to happen. New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday hit out at former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah for demanding to revive the post of Wazir-e-Azam and Sadar-e-Riyasat in Kashmir, saying that New India would never allow this to happen. In his blog, Jaitley wrote: The National Conference presidents statement today that we will demand the revival of the post of Wazir-e-Azam and Sadar-e-Riyasat is only intended to create a separatists psyche. Little do these demandeurs realise how much they are hurting the country as also their own people. The new India will never allow any government to commit such blunders. In a veiled attack on the PDP and the National Conference, Jaitley said: The two mainstream parties in Kashmir are increasingly losing their identity. The separatists and the terrorists want a part of the State to segregate from India. India will never accept this. It has already given a loud and clear message both to the separatists/ terrorists and Pakistan that Azadi is not a distant possibility. It is an impossibility. The statement of the two parties that the Constitutional link between the State and the country is based on the solemn assurance of Article 35A. If there is no Article 35A, it will break the link. Some have even gone further and argued that two Constitutional provisions constitute the revocable link, which has to be maintained. The Union Minister termed the argument as completely unacceptable. The argument is completely unacceptable. Article 35A was not there in 1947 when the Instrument of Accession was signed in the month of October. In 1950, when the Constitution came into force, it was not there. It was only surreptitiously inserted in 1954. How can it be the essential Constitutional link? The challenge is being heard by the Supreme Court, he said. Why intimidate the Court, which is hearing the matter. History is never reversed by Court judgments. The argument of revocability is as absurd as a suggestion that if the Indian Independence Act was revoked by the British Parliament, we will lose our Independence, added Jaitely. Abdullah earlier in the day had said that he would like to bring back the posts of President and Prime Minister for the state of Jammu and Kashmir. On Saturday, PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti had warned the Centre if Article 370 is scrapped, the relationship with the state will cease to exist. If you break that bridge (Article 370)... Then you will have to renegotiate the relationship between India and Jammu and Kashmir. There will be new conditions... A Muslim majority state, would it even want to stay with you? If you scrap Article 370, your relations with Jammu and Kashmir will be over, Mufti had said. Just last month, Pakistan had reiterated that only JF-17s, and no F-16, were used against India in the 27 February dogfight over Kashmir, which makes the latest mention of the use of F-fighter jets significant. For the first time since the air engagement between India and Pakistan on 27 February over Rajouri in Jammu and Kashmir, Islamabad has indicated that it may have used F-16 fighter jets against Indian aircraft. Major General Asif Ghafoor, the spokesperson for Pakistan's military, issued a statement on Monday on "repeated Indian claims" of shooting down a Pakistani F-16 and the use of the fighter jet in the dogfight. India has maintained that Indian Air Force (IAF) Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman had shot down a Pakistani F-16 before his MiG-21 Bison was hit. On 10 March, the Ministry of External Affairs had said there are eyewitness accounts as well as electronic evidence to prove their claim. Also, on 28 February, a day after the air battler, IAF displayed parts of an AMRAAM (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile) as evidence to "conclusively" prove that Pakistan had deployed F-16s during the aerial raid targeting Indian military installations in Kashmir. It said Pakistan does not have any other fighter jets capable of firing an AMRAAM missile. Last month, Ghafoor had maintained that only JF-17s were used against India in the 27 February dogfight, which makes his latest mention of the use of F-16s significant. "Pakistan retains the right to use anything and everything in its legitimate self defence," Ghafoor said, claiming that Pakistan had used JF-17 jets for the strikes it carried out across the Line of Control, and that the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) shot down two Indian jets that had crossed the LoC. "Whether it was F-16 or JF-17 that shot down two Indian aircraft is immaterial," he remarked. "Even if F-16s were used, as at that point in time, the complete PAF (sic) was airborne, including F16s, the fact remains that Pakistan shot down two Indian jets in self-defence." India has objected to Pakistan's use of F-16s since the dogfight, citing the purchasing agreement between Washington and Islamabad. As part of the agreement, the US had barred Pakistan from using F-16s against any third country and allowed it to operate the fighter jets only in self-defence and anti-terror missions. Let's note the "self-defence" provision here, which Ghafoor made sure to mention in his vague statement neither admitting nor denying the use of F-16s. The US has a strong end-user monitoring agreement, and as a matter of practice, takes all allegations of misuse of defence articles seriously. In fact, Washington sought more information from Islamabad on the alleged misuse of the American-made F-16 fighter jets in violation of the end-user agreement, after India displayed remnants of the AMRAAM missile allegedly fired a PAF F-16. Ghafoor's statement is another case of Pakistan flip-flopping on its stand, near-exposing the lies it has spun since the dogfight over Kashmir. Early in March, contradictory claims by the government and military with regard to terrorism on its soil had exposed the country's lack of seriousness in tackling the problem. Ghafoor had claimed that the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist group does not exist in Pakistan, completely contradicting Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi's admission on 1 March that JeM chief Masood Azhar was, indeed, in Pakistan, but was "unwell to the extent that he can't leave his house". Pakistan is now trying to save face besides save itself from US action by trying to hide the fact that it had, indeed, used an F-16 in the air operation against India, and that the fighter jet was not merely in the air with most of PAF's other aircraft, as Ghafoor claimed. In fact, India shared proof with the US that Pakistan had deployed equipment Washington had supplied largely using funds under the war on terror initiative against India in its cross-border raid. India has maintained that Pakistan had fired AMRAAM at least four times to target an Indian air patrol, which had gone to counter an intrusion over Rajouri in Jammu and Kashmir's Nowshera sector. One of them hit Wing Commander Abhinandan's MiG-21 Bison, after which ejected from the jet across the LoC. How is Pakistan going to counter the proof that India has in its arsenal? Ghafoor's vague "maybe we did, maybe we didn't" statement is surely not making a case. His remarks are a poor attempt to hide the truth and indicate that Pakistan is trying to take cover behind a flimsy "self-defence" argument, which does not hold given how India had targeted a terrorist training camp in Balakot, whereas Pakistan had chosen to target several military establishments. A clear case of an anti-terror operation versus a hostile, provocative attack. At this point, it would serve Pakistan better to drop the weak case it's trying to make. Its vagaries are only working against it. Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after the 14 February attack by Pakistan-based JeM in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama, which killed 42 soldiers of the Central Reserve Police Force. The India-Pakistan dogfight over Rajouri on 27 February followed IAF's airstrikes on a (JeM) terror camp in Balakot in Pakistan Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Postal voting is a type of voting in elections whereby Electronically Transmitted Postal Ballot Papers (ETPB) are distributed to electors and returned by post, in contrast to electors voting in person at a polling station via an electronic voting system aided by Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). In India, service voters are entitled to the same. Postal voting is a type of voting in elections whereby Electronically Transmitted Postal Ballot Papers (ETPB) are distributed to electors and returned by post, in contrast to electors voting in person at a polling station via an electronic voting system aided by Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). However, postal voting refers only to the means by which the ballots are submitted, not to the method by which the votes are counted. These are counted first but along other votes at the time of counting during the elections. While India has a system in place for postal ballots, it is restricted to certain categories of people. Who all can vote through postal ballots? According to the Election Commission (EC) of India, the facility is available to a service voter that is a voter having a service qualification. According to the provisions of subsection (8) of Section 20 of Representation of People Act, 1950, service qualification means (a) Being a member of the armed forces of the Union; or (b) Being a member of a force to which provisions of the Army Act, 1950 (46 of 1950), have been made applicable whether with or without modification ; (c) Being a member of an Armed Police Force of a State, and serving outside that state; or (d) Being a person who is employed under the Government of India, in a post outside India. However, while an ordinary elector is registered in the electoral roll of the constituency in which his place of ordinary residence is located, a person having service qualification can get enrolled as service voter at his native place even though he actually may be residing at a different place (of posting). He has, however, an option to get himself enrolled as a general elector at the place of his posting where he factually, at the point of time, is residing ordinarily with his family for a sufficient span of time, the EC website states. Procedure to get oneself enrolled as a service voter Following are the application forms in which various categories of service voters are to make application for enrollment as a service voter: Members of Armed Forces Form 2 Members of Armed Police Force of a State, serving outside that State Form 2A Persons employed under Government of India on post outside India Form 3 However, if a service personnel has opted to get himself enrolled as a general elector at the place of his posting, where he is actually residing, he will have to apply in Form 6 like other general electors. To this effect, when a person applies for registration as a service voter in Form 2/2A, he has to submit a declaration in a prescribed format to the effect that he did not get enrolled as an ordinary general elector in any constituency. The wives of the above-mentioned voters are also allowed to vote through postal ballots. The service voter has to make a statement to the effect in the relevant Form 2/2A/3 that his wife ordinarily resides with him. The wife will be enrolled as a service voter on the basis of the declaration made by her husband in the application form itself submitted by him and no separate declaration / application is required to be made by the wife. However, the son/daughter/relative/servant etc. residing ordinarily with a service voter cannot be enrolled as a service voter. Nor can be the husbands of female service voters. The exception of classified voters Service voters belonging to Armed Forces or forces to which provisions of Army Act, 1950 are applicable, have the option of either voting through postal ballot or through a proxy voter duly appointed by him. A service voter who opts for voting through a proxy is called Classified Service Voter (CSV). A service voter may appoint (by applying to Returning Officer in Form 13 F of Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961 Form available at the website of Election Commission) any person as his / her proxy to give the vote on his/her behalf and in his/her name at the polling station. The proxy shall have to be an ordinary resident of that constituency. He/she need not be a registered voter but he/she must not be disqualified to be registered as a voter. A proxy voter can be appointed in the following two ways: If a service voter is at the place of his posting, he has to put his signature in Form 13F before the Commanding Officer of the Unit and then to send the Form to his proxy for affixing his/her signature before a Notary/First Class Magistrate. Thereafter, the proxy can submit the Form to the Returning Officer concerned. If a service voter is at his native place, both he and his proxy can sign Form 13F before a Notary/First Class Magistrate and then send to the Returning Officer concerned. The provision for voting through a proxy is valid till the person making the appointment is a service voter. Once appointed, the proxy will continue until his appointment is revoked by the service voter. The facility of a proxy voter can be revoked and the proxy can be changed at any time or for any number of times by the Classified Service Voter. Thus a Classified Service Voter can revoke and opt back for postal ballot route or even substitute the proxy by intimating the Returning Officer in Form 13G of Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961. Revocation will become effective from the date it is received by the Returning Officer. Application for appointment of a proxy should be received by the Returning Officer before the last date of filing of nomination papers. An application for appointment of a proxy received after the last date of filing nomination papers cannot be considered for the election in progress, though it will be valid for subsequent elections unless revoked/changed. A Classified Service Voter cannot be issued postal ballot, instead his/her appointed proxy shall physically come and vote at the polling station which covers the classified voters home address. How does a proxy voter vote? The proxy can record the vote on behalf of the service voter at the polling station to which service voter is assigned, in the same manner as any other elector assigned to that polling station. The proxy will be entitled to vote on behalf of the service voter, in addition to the vote that he/she may cast in his/her own name if he/she is a registered elector in the constituency, at the polling station to which he/she has been normally assigned. Issuing voter ID cards to service voters A service voter is not issued Elector Photo Identity Card (EPIC) as it is a document of identity which an elector has to show at the polling station at the time of casting his vote. As service voters are issued postal ballots or votes through his proxy, they are not required to visit the polling stations personally and therefore the identity card is not issued to them. How do service voters apply for postal ballots? Is a service voter required to apply for issue of a postal ballot paper? The service voter need not apply for the postal ballot, the Returning Officer will himself/herself send a postal ballot paper to him/her through his record office (directly or through the Ministry of External Affairs in the case of a service voter serving outside India). Other cases While prisoners are not allowed to vote, people under preventive detention can cast their votes through postal ballots as well. As of now, there is no provision for voters who have migrated inside the country to cast their votes through postal ballots. If you want to vote in the place you currently stay, you will have to fill up a new voter registration form and ask for your name to be deleted from the old list. While Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) are allowed to register as voters from the constituency of their 'ordinary residence' (the address for which you have proof like passport, ration card and so on), they will have to vote in person from a polling booth. They are also not allowed to vote through postal ballots. In August, the Lok Sabha passed a bill that proposes to amend the Representation of the People Act, 1951, to enable overseas electors to appoint proxies to cast their votes in elections to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies which is currently pending in the Rajya Sabha. The postal ballot voting process: Voting and return of ETBP on receipt of the ETPB and the accompanying papers, the service voter shall- (a) mark his vote on the ballot paper by putting a cross (X) or tick (v') against the name of the candidate of his choice as per the instructions in Form 13D. He shall then place the marked ballot paper inside the smaller envelope, close the envelope by gum and paste the label for Form 13B on this envelope. Also, the serial number of the ballot paper shall be noted on the Form 13B at the space provided for the purpose on that envelope, if not already printed thereon. (b) Fill up the declaration in Form 13A, sign the same and get it attested by the officer designated for attestation. (c) Place (i) the closed (gummed) smaller envelope (Form l3B) and (ii) the declaration in Form 13A, inside the larger envelope and close the same using gum. (d) Paste the label for Form 13C on the larger envelope and put signature in the place marked for the signature of the sender. (e) Dispatch the envelope (Form 13C) back to the RO through the available postal means. (f) No postage stamp need be affixed on the envelope (Form 13C) if posted within India. (g) CEO should inform GM Post Office to accept the envelope for speed post delivery to addressee and charges would be paid by the CEO Office. President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday discussed wide ranging issues of mutual interest with his Chilean counterpart Sebastian Pinera as the two sides signed three memorandums of understanding in the fields of mining, culture and disability. Santiago: President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday discussed wide ranging issues of mutual interest with his Chilean counterpart Sebastian Pinera as the two sides signed three memorandums of understanding in the fields of mining, culture and disability. Kovind, who arrived here on Sunday after visiting Bolivia and Croatia, is on the last leg of his three-nation visit. "President Pinera and I had a wide ranging discussion on all issues of mutual interest. We exchanged views and assessments of our respective neighbourhoods and regions," he said. Thanking Pinera for his strong condemnation of the Pulwama terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, the President said the two countries have agreed to work together to strengthen global response to defeat and destroy terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and hold those responsible, accountable for their brutality against humanity. India offered training slots to Chilean armed forces in the premier defence institutions including for courses in mountain warfare and peacekeeping. The two countries also agreed to explore opportunities for other cooperation in the defence sector. "The two countries should also seize the opportunity to jointly manufacture defence equipment," Kovind said. Noting that the bilateral relations between India and Chile are on an "upward curve", Kovind said, "Today we have signed three MoUs in the fields of mining, culture and disability. These would further enhance our engagement in economic, social and cultural fields." Chile is the sixth largest trading partner of India in the Latin American region. The bilateral trade between the two nations registered an impressive increase of 50 percent in 2017-18, to reach $ 2.8 billion. Kovind said he is hopeful that the India-Chile Preferential Trade Agreement with increased tariff lines would further contribute towards enhancement of bilateral trade. The President invited Chilean companies to invest in Indian mining, infrastructure, defence and food processing sectors under 'Make in India', 'Smart Cities' and 'Digital India' programmes. "Given our commitment to environment and sustainability, India is particularly keen to strengthen lithium partnership with Chile...Indian companies are also eager to strengthen their presence in Chile especially in IT, pharma, automobiles and mining sectors," Kovind said. He also said that India look forward to work with Chile to promote solar energy worldwide and enhance global action to combat climate change as both the countries are partners in the International Solar Alliance. India and Chile sign three MoUs ! During State Visit of President of India to #Chile three MoUs on culture, mining and disability were signed between two countries.@rashtrapatibhvn @sebastianpinera pic.twitter.com/NFiE6UmzMY Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) April 1, 2019 The President also welcomed Chile's decision to allow visa-free entry to Indian nationals holding a valid US visa, saying the step would promote both cultural and business ties between the two countries. Earlier, Kovind reviewed the Guard of Honour along with Pinera at the Presidential Palace La Moneda. "Chile officially welcomes President of India! #PresidentKovind walks the Red Carpet and reviews Guard of Honour along with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera at the Presidential Palace " La Moneda" in Santiago," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Ravish Kumar tweeted. In the morning, the President laid a wreath at Monument of General Bernardo O' Higgins, who struggled for Chile's independence from Spain. "Before starting his official engagement with his counterpart #Presidentkovind laid a wreath at Monument of General Bernardo O' Higgins, who struggled for Chile's independence from Spain," Kumar said in a tweet. The Enforcement Directorate told a Delhi court that jailed Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah generated funds from Pakistan and other countries to carry out unrest in the Valley New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate Tuesday told a Delhi court that jailed Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah generated funds from Pakistan and other countries to carry out unrest in the Valley. The agency made the submission before Additional Sessions Judge Satish Kumar Arora while opposing Shah's bail application in a decade-old money laundering case for alleged terror financing, in which the accused is currently lodged in Tihar central jail here. ED's special public prosecutor NK Matta told the court that Shah was "involved in generation of huge proceeds of crime from various countries, including Pakistan, to carry out unrest in Kashmir and amassed huge wealth in the form of immovable and movable assets." Advocate Samvedna Verma, appearing for ED, told the court that if granted the relief, Shah may use his influence in threatening the witnesses and may not be available for facing the trial. "Accused Shabir Shah is involved in channelizing the illegal money sources from foreign countries, i.e., Pakistan, avoiding banking channel to fund the terror organisations in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of the country and if released on bail, he may use his influence in pressurizing/ threatening the witnesses and may not be available for facing trial," the agency said. It also alleged that Shah was in regular touch with Hafiz Sayeed, Chief of Pakistan-based banned terror outfit, Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD). There are serious allegations against Shah and further investigation in the case was going on and the properties were being identified, the ED said, adding that it was trying to establish the money trail. Advocate MS Khan had moved the bail application on behalf of Shah on the ground of parity after the Delhi High Court recently granted bail to co-accused and alleged hawala dealer Mohammad Aslam Wani in the case. The case was registered in 2007 for the alleged offence committed in 2005 and the accused was arrested on 25 July, 2017. The court had in August 2017 denied bail to Shah after ED submitted that it was probing whether he had received money from "enemy countries" like Pakistan to promote terrorism in India. Shah was arrested in connection with the August 2005 case in which the Special Cell of Delhi Police had arrested Wani, claiming that Rs 63 lakh was recovered from him, out of which Rs 52 lakh was allegedly to be delivered to Shah. The agency had earlier issued summonses to Shah in the case, the prosecution had said, adding that Wani had claimed that he had given Rs 2.25 crore to Shah. Investigating agencies such as the National Investigation Agency (NIA) have cracked down on Hurriyat leaders, arresting Syed Ali Shah Geelani's son-in-law - Altaf Ahmed Shah, also known as Altaf Fantoosh - and several other Kashmiri separatists. Adityanath said during the tenure of UPA from 2004-2014, several terror attacks were termed 'Hindu terror'. 'Thousands of soldiers were injured in stone-pelting in Kashmir in this period,' he claimed. Gorakhpur: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath Tuesday dismissed the Congress manifesto as a "bundle of lies" and also targeted the Opposition over its handling of national security. Referring to the Pulwama terror attack and the retaliatory air strike by India in Balakot, at a meeting of BJP's youth workers in Gorakhpur, he said the statements by the Opposition parties are helping Pakistan, which is highlighting them at the international level. On the Congress manifesto released earlier on Tuesday, he said, "It is a bundle of lies and the party has expressed its failure over 55 years in its 55-page manifesto." "Opposition is making negative statements on Pulwama and Balakot and Pakistan is drawing advantage from such remarks by presenting them at the international level in its favour, the chief minister said. He also hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for adopting a "zero tolerance" policy towards terrorism. Adityanath said during the tenure of United Progressive Alliance (UPA) from 2004-2014, several terror attacks were termed "Hindu terror". "Thousands of soldiers were injured in stone-pelting in Kashmir in this period," he claimed. "Pakistan used to attack many times and even beheaded our soldier," Adityanath said. He said the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party - the two Opposition parties which have forged an alliance in Uttar Pradesh - supported the Congress then and looted the country. On Monday evening, he addressed a teachers' conference here, accusing the opposition party workers of being linked to hooliganism. He claimed when women see people carrying SP and BSP flags, they ask why are they flags of 'goondas'." This story is part of our DocuWalk series. Read more here. Text by Neerja Deodhar | Photographs by Zahra Amiruddin Days begin very early at the far end of Mumbais Sassoon Docks. Here, the air is a strange mix of hot and cool, and wherever you look, you will see ice long slabs of ice, crushed crystals of ice, small blocks of ice melting in the morning sun. Far from the madding crowd of the fish market, where catch is traded every minute, is a quieter ice industry, which ensures the fish that reaches Mumbais homes and restaurants remains fresh. Documentary filmmaker Niyantha Shekar found that this mini-industry, which runs for close to 17 hours every day, is fuelled by the work of men from Uttar Pradeshs Unnao district, who turn slabs of ice into a form that can be used to store fish. Their labour has a repetitive, almost rhythmic nature, and this is translated into the visuals of Niyanthas short film, Baraf, which documents what a day in their life is like. *** Around 50 years ago, a couple of young men came to Mumbai from this North Indian town to find work, eventually taking up these jobs at the Dock. Word about the availability of jobs spread back at home, and soon enough, men from other families came to Mumbai too. Unnaos teenage boys continue to arrive at the Docks to earn a livelihood. For many, this is the first time they have got a glimpse of the sea. Mumbai mein samundar nahi dekha, toh kya dekha? (If you havent seen Mumbais sea, what have you truly seen in the city?), one of the older workers says to me. Interestingly, Niyantha provides the context about the lives of these workers right at the end of the film. Baraf doesnt have any dialogues either, populated instead by visuals of the workers and the variety of sounds one hears in the ice industry. We wanted to build a mood that would be immersive... We also saw Baraf as a community story and wanted the short film to convey the larger sense of their work and what a day in their lives looks like, which is why we didn't focus on any one worker's individual story through a dialogue-driven approach. The ice is brought to the Docks from faraway Vashi and Ambarnath in large trucks; each truck can hold slabs that collectively weigh up to 15 tonnes. Each slab is slid out of the truck and carried by hand using tongs called kainchi and dropped into a crusher, which lets out a stream of cold, white crystals that resemble fresh snow. Sometimes, the slabs are broken into smaller blocks using a large pick. These mounds of crushed ice are shovelled into barrows called tonne-gaadis, named so because of their capacity (they can accommodate seven blocks of crushed ice). We see these barrows filled with ice that glistened in the sunlight being wheeled to the edge of the dock. Waiting on the other side are boats heading out to the sea; these boats and the fishermen in them will be away for weeks. A fabric contraption resembling an assembly line connects these boats to the barrows. In it flow steady streams of ice from the barrow into the boats, creating the most wonderful sloosh-ing sound and letting out white vapour. I wanted it to be driven by the sounds and visuals of the process. The idea was to recreate the rhythm the work that happens here is repetitive and relentless, says Niyantha. The ice makes for a very visually compelling subject. In Baraf, the whiteness of the ice is striking, allowing it to become one of the protagonists of the film. We considered using a monochromatic colour scheme, but the colours in the surroundings stood out In a sense, we didnt have a strong enough reason to use black-and-white, Niyantha explains. *** We are witness to a particularly warm moment: Some of the men from Unnao recognise Niyantha. He shows them the film on his phone, and they are visibly delighted. As we sit down to talk to some of the workers while they take a break, I realise just how cold their workplace was. Rows and rows of slabs pale blue in colour were stacked against each other in the trucks. Standing inside a truck feels like being in a small air-conditioned room. In fact, the cold is palpable even if one stands a few feet away. When we halt near a crusher which is belting out smoke and ice in equal parts, some shrapnel of ice falls on our faces and clothes. Its a surprise the workers hands dont go numb every day. This is work cut out for young people with immense strength, but men aged anywhere between 18 and 40 are engaged in it. Some of them have been working at the Docks for many decades. Many parts of the process are executed with bare hands, which means extended exposure to very cold ice. Hard labour of this kind is bound to be accompanied by occupational hazards: Back pain and blisters are everyday health problems. They drink in the morning and evening to ease the pain, Niyantha says. *** The workers share a camaraderie which goes beyond the fact that they hail from the same district and do the same job. They sit together and finish each others sentences when we speak to them. But there are no romanticised stories about them sharing meals though; their cruel work hours dont allow for it. In fact, there is no assigned lunch time, and if you skip a meal, you have to wait for the next break to eat. Breaks are few and far in between that is, every time there is no boat waiting at the dock. Lucknow is the best city in the country, declares a proud Mukesh Verma, Mumbai pasand hai, par majboori hai Mumbai mein peit bharta hai (I like Mumbai, but I dont have a choice when it comes to living here, because this is where I can earn a living). Mukesh is hinting at the larger issue of a lack of jobs in Unnao and areas surrounding it; why else would men of an employable age move so far away from their homes? Most people here have tagged along with someone else from Unnao who found a job here. Close to a 1,000 residents of Unnao have worked here, and many of them have held jobs at the Docks for a decade, Mukesh informs. He traces the first migration to the Docks to 1975. The ice industry gives these men seasonal employment; no work happens during two months of the monsoon season, which is when they go back home. For the rest of the year, they live at the Docks. This might prompt one to think that the workers get used to the conditions of their jobs and workplace, but this is far from true. Mukesh remarks that his hands have become stronger, but that the smells of the Docks are a constant irritant. I wouldnt recommend this life to others, he says. The workers earn anywhere between Rs 15,000 Rs 20,000 per month. Hindi isnt the only language spoken in this mini-industry; the managers of these trucks and workers are Maharashtrians from Mumbai and other cities in the state. And the hierarchical divide between managers and workers is quite stark. The other community that speaks Marathi here is the koli community the fishermen and women. *** Niyantha and the cinematographer of Baraf, Anirudh Ganapathy, initially intended to only write a photo-essay on the ice workers; the idea for a short documentary, which would be shot over three days, came only later. But this photo-essay defined the visual language we adopted while making the film. We used very wide angles, partly because we were waiting for the action to happen, and partly because we didnt want to get in the way, Niyantha explains. He cites Bert Haanstras Glass and Sergei Loznitsas Factory as two documentaries which influenced him; these films show, rather than tell through dialogue. Their work is so cyclical and similar that we could shoot different parts on different days, and it would still look like a 24-hour cycle, he adds. But Baraf also includes visuals of the lulls in between and after work of the labourers resting, playing cards. It picks up on small details like how the workers begin kicking the slabs into the crushers instead of using tongs as they grow wearier. Such a story can easily be exoticised, Niyantha acknowledges. It was hugely important for us to not romanticise or exoticise the work of these men at the Docks, and we thought about this hard before we started filming The camera observes the activity from a slight distance and everything is shot at regular speed (as opposed to slow-motion which can sometimes create a larger-than-life feeling and a mood that is not natural). Our goal was to create a film that was representative of what we saw over the course of our research that this is labour that plays an almost invisible yet significant role in sustaining the city's largest fish market. Baraf was selected by National Geographic for its Short Film Showcase. Watch the film here: Also read on Firstpost Inside 'Bombay 70': Finding 'asli hip-hop' in Naezy's neighbourhood Inside 'Aunty Sudha Aunty Radha': Two women ponder life and death in UP's Lahra village Inside 'Under the Open Sky': Mumbra's girls find freedom, reclaim public space through football Delhi's Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia Tuesday said the Congress has betrayed the people of the national capital by backtracking from its earlier promise of giving full statehood to Delhi New Delhi: Delhi's Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia Tuesday said the Congress has betrayed the people of the national capital by backtracking from its earlier promise of giving full statehood to Delhi, while it assured the same to Puducherry. "Today, the Congress has crossed all limits. While it has promised full statehood to Puducherry, there is no such mention about Delhi. What enmity do these (the BJP and the Congress) parties have with the people of Delhi," Sisodia said at a poll rally. He said the Congress had assured in its 2009 and 2014 manifestos to grant full statehood to Delhi, but it has now backtracked on its promise. At press conference, AAP's Delhi convenor Gopal Rai said the Congress has met a "step-motherly" treatment to Delhi. "Congress has given step-motherly treatment to the people of Delhi in its manifesto by not supporting full statehood," Rai said. Referring to the Congress manifesto released ahead of the 2015 Delhi elections, Rai said, "When the party had earlier promised full statehood to Delhi, why are they not doing so now. In their present manifesto, they are promising full statehood to Puducherry but not Delhi. Why this step motherly behaviour." The Congress manifesto released Tuesday said, "Congress promises to amend the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Act, 1991 to make it clear that the Lieutenant Governor shall act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers except in matters concerning the three reserved subjects." Rai urged the Congress to review its manifesto and do justice to the people of Delhi by including the promise of full statehood to the national capital. Shah, as party president, is relentless. He maintains a punishing schedule and puts the entire organisational structure of the worlds largest political party through an equally strenuous exercise. In his latest piece for The Washington Post, Milan Vaishnav, senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment talks of Prime Minister Narendra Modis enduring popularity as the chief reason why the BJP is likely to retain power despite weak economic fundamentals, rural distress and slowdown in job growth. Vaishnav surmises that many Indian voters are looking for an excuse to vote for Modi because they see the incumbent as an incorruptible, decisive leader who needs another five years to undo 65 years of corruption and administrative rot. The writer has a point, but the prime ministers popularity, though an undeniable factor, might not be the sole determinant in a devilishly complex general elections where the BJP appears to be on front foot and even the bookies agree. BJP chief Amit Shah, Modis trusted lieutenant, plays an equally important role in driving the saffron party's juggernaut. And he does so through the most underrated of human virtues, diligence and hard work. Shah, as party president, is relentless. He maintains a punishing schedule and puts the entire organisational structure of the worlds largest political party through an equally strenuous exercise. His reputation for being a hard (even harsh) task master is well-earned, and he acknowledged the fact during his Mondays freewheeling conversation with Network18 group editor Rahul Joshi. The most important bit of the exchange did not generate headlines, but that should not take away from its significance. In reply to the interviewers question on whether he takes a break from his arduous campaign schedule and his role as the partys key strategist, Shah said he doesnt feel the need to and added that attending programmes such as the media interaction at Agenda India 2019 are diversion enough to keep him going. What kind of schedule and relentless pursuit of goals are we talking about? Shortly after the BJP suffered defeats in three Hindi heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in fact almost as soon as the result was declared in December last year Shah charted out an arduous roadmap for 2019 Lok Sabha elections and gave stiff targets for BJP office-bearers and cadres to meet. Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan didnt get even two days of relaxation after being ousted from power: Shah immediately asked him to play a pivotal role in general elections. As The Hindu detailed in a report, Chouhan was asked to be the star speaker at a rally in Patna after the national executive meet of the BJPs OBC Morcha is completed. Shah called a meeting of central office-bearers as well as organisational general secretaries of state units where he stressed that Congress win was not BJPs defeat, asked workers to have single-minded focus on 2019 polls and laid out an extensive programme for starting preparations. It came up during Shahs conversation with Network18 group editor that the BJP president has completed an exhaustive and complete tour of India from Kashmir to Kanyamumari and Kamrup to Gujarat and is attending at least three rallies or road shows every day in the lead up to the elections. For instance, Shah was in Odisha on Monday where he took on the Naveen Patnaik government. The BJP hopes to do well in Odisha, which will witness simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly polls, and Shah appeared confident that BJP will reap handsome rewards from the eastern state and will even install a government, ending Patnaiks 17-year rule. On Tuesday, Shah headed to Bengaluru on a flash visit where murmurs of unrest are brewing over BJPs decision to field 28-year-old Tejasvi Surya from Bangalore South and overlooking Tejaswini, wife of the late Union minister Ananth Kumar, ostensibly against the wishes of local MLAs and the partys state unit. Economic Times reported that Suryas election campaign has not really taken off because state BJP leaders are apparently upset by the way the central leadership announced Suryas name without taking them into confidence. For Shah, this is just another day in office, but the way he focuses on both the micro and macro aspects of his role as the minder of a humongous party apparatus and manages to keep his ear to the ground despite being the second most powerful man in Indian politics after the prime minister speaks of his administrative abilities. Under him, the BJP has expanded its national footprint in uncharted territories without relinquishing hold over its traditional bastions. This administrative ability that saw BJPs membership explode from 20 million to 110 million and counting (as per 2017 figures) and his effort of putting in the hard yards, covering thousands of miles in campaigning across the country, help Shah acquire perspectives and recognise trends before his peers or even analysts. He puts this acumen to good use while drawing up party strategy. For instance, during the interview, Shah emphasised that the BJP will improve its tally in Uttar Pradesh from the 73 seats it won during the Lok Sabha elections in 2014. Uttar Pradesh is electorally the most significant state, and sends 80 MPs to Parliament. On the face of it, Shahs words resembled an empty boast. No one expects the BJP to repeat its 2014 feat in Uttar Pradesh, leave alone improving the figure. It isnt just about anti-incumbency: The arithmetic too is loaded against the BJP this time with arch-rivals SP and BSP joining hands to offer a combined resistance. Simple math suggests that BJPs tally will halve, if not lessen even more. Shah, however, emphasised that the old arithmetic of vote bank politics is over because no political party may now claim exclusive rights over a vote bank. The electorate, according to Shah, has moved ahead to take control of their votes, and mandate is now inextricably tied to issues. Shah posits that parties having lost their banks, are in no position to strike deals over their strengths. This is where the campaign turns presidential and instead of caste-based politics of yore, voters will consider whether to back a leader strong enough to lead India, or repose faith in an alliance that has no leader to speak of. There could be debates over Shahs reasoning and until the results are out this debate wont be settled. It is worth pondering over, however, whether the explosion of social media and its deep-seated reach over almost every strata of Indian polity have made voters, even in the rural hinterlands, more aware of the issues, and whether that may upset traditional calculations. Shah clearly thinks it will, and though part of his statement can be put down to election rhetoric, one shouldnt overlook the possibility that his theory may work. If the BJP manages to hold its own in Uttar Pradesh, hard work and diligence may look sexier than sloganeering and strategising. In a press statement, Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal said, 'by alleging that Rahul Gandhi is contesting Wayanad seat on account of there being residents of a particular religion living there, is a disgrace to the high office of prime minister is holding.' New Delhi: Congress on Monday demanded an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his "condemnable and divisive" statement that hurt the sentiments of people in Wayanad in Kerala. In a press statement, Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal said, "by alleging that Rahul Gandhi is contesting Wayanad seat on account of there being residents of a particular religion living there, is a disgrace to the high office of prime minister is holding." This comes in the wake of Modi's statement at a rally in Maharashtra where he said that the Congress party was forced to run away from a majority seat to a minority constituency, in a veiled reference to Congress party's recent announcement that Rahul Gandhi contesting from Kerala's Wayanad constituency in addition to UP's Amethi seat. "Without understanding the cultural legacy and demography of Wayanad, the prime minister was making a communal and divisive statement," said Venugopal who added that demographically Wayanad reflects the composite culture of India. "It is an ideal ground of combination of various communities and religions that thrive and live together," he said. Calling Wayanad the "Lion of Kerala", Venugopal mentioned the role of the "pride of whole Keralities" Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja, a Hindu king who fought against the British in the 18th century. He said that the prime minister's remarks disrespected not just the people of Wayanad, but also insulted the freedom movement. "By hiding all these cultural legacy and multiculturalism, the prime minister was not only disrespecting the people of Wayanad but also insulted the freedom movement, he said. Further, Venugopal added that the prime minister has insulted entire Southern India and has insulted the composite culture of India. Questions from the audience are a shopworn attempt to symbolize the open and democratic nature of the debate. But since follow-ups are seldom allowed, such questions tend to become prompts for the candidates either to summon up bromides from the issues tab on their websites, revert to their stump speeches or answer whatever related question they wish theyd been asked. The manifesto also talks about more public sector bank mergers which will depend a lot on how the Bank of Baroda-Dena-Vijaya Bank alliance works out as there will be several lessons to be learnt. Does anyone take elections manifestos seriously? This is pertinent because it is usually understood that parties like to promise all the goodies when going to the voter. But once elected, the language changes to reality where harsher aspects are highlighted and people are asked to make sacrifices for the larger good. While the poor always find themselves at the centre of manifestos, the rich are often blamed and the middle class is given the skip. This is an admission that there are more not-so-rich people in the country! Does the Congress manifesto have anything new to offer? The answer is probably no, because most of the announcements made are high on the agenda of all parties but articulated in a different style. When one looks at all the good things promised, the first question which comes to mind is whether or not we have the money to pay for it. Here, it is assuring to know that the manifesto has indicated that the party would be on the fiscal path of 3 percent deficit by 2021. This is credible and to make it feasible, all the other promises have to work around this number. The cash transfer of Rs 72,000 per family per annum is now going to be attained over a period of time i.e., two years and more importantly, will be shared with the states. Hence the full cost of Rs 3.5 lakh crore will be over a period of time and shared with states. This means there is no case of merging existing schemes to accommodate this expenditure. It will require to be seen whether (like the PMs Ayushman scheme) states have to sign up for the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) scheme or whether it would be automatic. More likely, states will have to independently sign on. The manifesto speaks of creating 10 lakh jobs. Now this number has to be a derived figure based on how the economy progresses and pushes up the demand for labour. It cannot be in the government per se and hence is quite a hypothetical numbers. This is a mistake which all parties make when they talk of such numbers because if the economy does not perform in five years, they will be in a tight spot when they reach out to the electorate next time. The bureaucracy is already high with accompanying commitments like pensions which are increasing. In such a situation, both the Central and state governments are going slow on recruitment. Therefore, jobs have to be created in the private space. Continuing on this track, the party has promised to allow people to set up enterprises without any permission for the first three years. This is easier said than done as there are several state and local laws that have to be adhered to and are outside the purview of the Centre. In a federal structure, there are limits on what the Centre can take on. Hence, while the idea is good as it makes doing business easier, in practice, the compliance with local laws can still be cumbersome. This is where states need to be more open and liberal and the state rankings initiated by the present government are pertinent. The party has also spoken about increasing the number of days under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) to 150 days. But, if one looks at the scheme so far, notwithstanding the higher allocation, the number of days actually used by the targeted population has been just about 50 days per household on an average basis. This being the case extending it to 150 may not make a material difference as there is limited access to such jobs for various reasons. Similarly, the promise on spending more on education is commendable but the output quality is important as often education outlays have been more on quantitative achievement than quality. As a result, there has been a tendency for schools to be set up without teachers or furniture. Even the more successful Swachh Bharat scheme has run into problems after toilets were constructed but not used due to absence of water supply, lights, doors being stolen, security issues, etc. Therefore, this has to be looked at closely and the programmes must be well-crafted with end-to-end solutions. The governments in the past have taken steps to have more AIIMSs and IITs but the result has not been always positive as there are instances in the former where the students, who become doctors, have never seen patients. Therefore, most of the content, though admirable, could have been taken from the past and for success requires careful follow-up action. The manifesto also talks about more public sector bank (PSB) mergers which will depend a lot on how the Bank of Baroda-Dena-Vijaya Bank alliance works out as there will be several lessons to be learnt. The decision to do away with electoral bonds is surprising as this is definitely a cleaner way of approaching the issue of funding of any party. Unless there is a more transparent system that is used as a substitute, there is the lurking fear of black money returning the system. While the party has been cryptic of the GST, the fact remains that the tax is still evolving and the present government has been very open to addressing all concerns right from the procedures to the rates. This has been also at the cost of revenue collections. It would be interesting to see what kind of an alternative is brought in its place. Ideally, the system needs to be fine-tuned regularly to ensure that we arrive at the right structure. This was a conscious decision taken by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government for this complex structure in a complex economy. Rather than wait to create the perfect model, it started off modestly and has gone through a transformation continuously so as to move towards a more acceptable structure. If there is one thing that stands out as unique, it is the idea of an agriculture budget. This makes sense as there are lots of provisions in the budget which relate to the farm sector. Ideally, a rural budget would make more sense as it can address all the issues of the community. This is surely a thought worth munching on. (The writer is chief economist, CARE Ratings) Delhi was a Union Territory till 1991 and then made into a hybrid after that, considering the special nature of it being the seat of the Union government. The special administrative treatment of the seat of the Union or the federal government is not something new and is also found in other jurisdictions. The recent spat between two eminent leaders from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Delhi BJP about the issue of the statehood goes to show the lamentable condition of politics in the country. It all started when BJP's Delhi unit president Manoj Tiwari stated last week that the Supreme Court made it clear that Delhi cannot be granted full statehood. AAP Delhi convener Gopal Rai retorted by saying that Tiwari was spreading falsehoods about the matter. AAP Delhi convenor @AapKaGopalRai 's letter to Delhi BJP Cheif Manoj Tiwari on Delhi Full Statehood . pic.twitter.com/7wWWZEO4hX Vikas Yogi (@vikaskyogi) April 1, 2019 Keeping the politics aside, what lies at the heart of the matter is the judicial determination of the fact whether Delhi can be granted statehood or not. The first conventional debate on this issue is whether Delhi should be a state or a Union Territory. It was a Union Territory till 1991 and then made into a hybrid after that, considering the special nature of it being the seat of the Union government. The special administrative treatment of the seat of the Union or the federal government is not something new and is also found in other jurisdictions. In the US, the District of Columbia government which has control over Washington, for instance, is also a branch of the federal government. This is when the US Constitution is much more federal than the Indian Constitution and accords a lot more powers to the states vis-a-vis the federal government. This translates into Washington DC being the sole Union Territory (in the language of Indian Constitution) on mainland USA. Therefore, Delhi not being a Union Territory in its entirety is a fairly-obvious administrative measure which was done away in 1991. It is worth noting that the Supreme Court has already dismissed a plea seeking full statehood for Delhi. The legal question revolves around Article 239AA of the Constitution enacted as per 69th Amendment Act of 1991 which empowers the Delhi Legislative Assembly to legislate on all subjects in the 'State List' of Schedule VII. The only exceptions to those are public order, police and land. It is this exception that is the source of tension between the Centre and Delhi as the politics around controlling public order and the police forms a significant part of the politics in the country. Further, Article 239AA (3) states that despite the apparent powers granted to the Legislative Assembly, the Parliament still reserves the power to make laws on any matter and in case of a conflict, the law made by the Parliament will prevail. This directly grants supremacy to the Centre, and the state is rendered powerless. Moreover, Article 239AA (4) thereafter makes the state subservient to the Centre. This clause provides that in case of a tussle between the lieutenant-governor and the chief minister, the former shall refer the matter to the president and the word of the president on the particular matter will be final. As the president acts according to the aid and advise of the Union Cabinet, it is the indirectly the word of the Centre which will be followed. What is even more problematic is that during the pendency of the decision from the president, it shall be competent for the lieutenant-governor, in any case where the matter in his opinion is so urgent that it is necessary for him to take immediate action, to take such action. However, the Supreme Court has also made it clear that despite the provision, the lieutenant-governor is an administrative head in the limited sense, and is not a governor. He is bound by the aid and advise of National Capital Territory (NCT) government in areas other than those exempted. Thus, the court interpreted the words aid and advise as provided in Article 239 AA (4) to mean that the lieutenant-governor of NCT of Delhi is bound by the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers (only for matters enumerated) and this position holds true so long as the lieutenant-governor does not exercise his power under the proviso to Clause (4) of Article 239AA. Moreover, the power-sharing between the Central and state governments needs to be read as per the spirit of the Constitution. The Indian Constitution has very deep centralising tendencies, much more than most federal constitutions and substantially more than the US. A relevant provision on this position is Article 3, which gives unbridled power to the Union government to make a new state or do away with an existing state. The Union government also has the power to turn an existing state into a Union Territory and vice-versa. Similarly, creating a hybrid model, like that of Delhi, is entirely permissible within the scheme of the Constitution, if the Union government so wishes to. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has argued that this is undemocratic and unconstitutional. He is wrong on both the counts. The model is constitutional for the above-mentioned reasons and also democratic, simply because the Union government is also a democratically-elected government. As per his logic, all Union Territories are administered by non-democratic authorities. However, this debate provides a ground for expanding the discourse to question the statehood of Delhi. A simple argument against the statehood of Delhi is, if Delhi should be a state, then why not Mumbai or Bangalore or Chennai, etc? As is seen in India and elsewhere, it is only a medium of unnecessary politics right under the nose of the Union government and Delhi is much better off as a Union Territory in totality. Several of the villages in Jharkhand's Villagers Arki, Murhu, and Khunti blocks which supported the Pathalgadi movement are likely to witness low voter turnout during the Lok Sabha polls for 14 seats in the state Editor's Note: A network of 60 reporters set off across India to test the idea of development as it is experienced on the ground. Their brief: Use your mobile phone to record the impact of 120 key policy decisions on everyday life; what works, what doesn't and why; what can be done better and what should be done differently. Their findings straight and raw from the ground will be combined in this series, Elections on the Go, over a course of 100 days. Read more articles from the series here *** Khunti: A green 15-feet stone plaque (pathal in the local tongue) mentioning various articles of the Constitution of India stands tall in Bhandra village in Jharkhands Khunti district. Its the only physical remanent of the events of 2017 when this tribal settlement among many others in Chhattisgarh and Odisha, some in Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal proclaimed autonomy from the Indian state. While the movement has petered out some say, gone underground in a whirlpool of conspiracies, kidnappings, arrests and a horrific incident of rape, it seems people of Bhandra village are still in no mood to participate in the democratic process of electing the next government at Centre. As news trickled out about this audacious decision of gram sabhas declare themselves the highest authority within its borders, as marked by these pathals, the country was confronted with dramatic visuals of tribesmen, and boys, standing side by side and brandishing primitive weapons like spears and bows, defending their way of life from the outside world. Its safe to say these men will not be found standing in a line outside the polling booth, come 11 April when the first phase of polling begins. Jharkhand will go for polls in four phases on 29 April, 6 May, 12 May and 19 May for 14 constituencies. And that the pathal is still standing at all is proof of that. Installed by the gram panchayat in 2017, its purpose is to cite various articles of the Indian Constitution, namely 13(3), 19(5), 19(6) and others, and to prohibit outsiders from entering the village, doing any kind of business or job, and claiming that none of the laws of the Parliament or legislature can be implemented in the area, which comes under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution. Sources add that the state administration is refraining from removing the plaque, fearing an outburst from the villagers, which wouldnt be the first. Pulling the strings from behind the scenes Started as a movement by tribals to protect their land in 2017, the Pathalgadi movement gradually snowballed into something else, leading to numerous clashes between the villagers, police personnel, and the state administration. Arrests of various Pathalgadi leaders by late 2018 led to the movement dying down, officially; but sources claim it is still operational under wraps. And one of the top leaders of the movement, Yusuf Purty, the main accused, remains absconding. However, a few locals, in hushed voices, deal the ultimate blow the movement may influence a low voter turnout in the upcoming Lok Sabha election. Among the places where low turnout is expected are Kurunga, Kochang, Mochia, Chalkar, Barudih, Longa, Naranga and a few more villages south of Arki block, Udburu, Ardih, and Jikilata villages in Murhu block, and a few villages in the Khunti block. The gram pradhan of a village in Khunti says, While we have tried to convince many villagers to not be a part of this new Pathalgadi, we are getting information that meetings are being held in the middle of the night to keep the movement alive. In the December 2018 bypolls, some polling booths in these areas saw abysmal turnout. The same can be expected in these elections as well." Attempts to obtain booth-specific turnout for the Kolebira bypolls were in vain and the administration refused to comment. Seconding the gram pradhan, a social activist of Kurunga village says, No votes were cast in 20 booths in my village as well as in seven booths in neighbouring Sake during the (December) bypolls and it is likely that the upcoming (Lok Sabha) election will be boycotted too. This activist, however, is against the new movement and doesnt stay in his village fearing his safety. "I go there in the afternoons if needed, and leave soon after. People are not happy that I support the administration; hence, I am not safe there," he adds. Its the administrations extreme action against the villagers in the name of crushing the movement that has left them simmering with anger and fear. And thats likely to affect polling as well. A Khunti-based social activist says that during the administrations anti-Pathalgadi drives, many innocent people were accused of sedition and thrown behind bars. "People are terrified of the police after they framed some villagers. In such a situation, why would they want to vote? And even if they do, they will definitely not vote for the present government, he adds. From student to a breadwinner Sonu Munda (name changed), a teenager whose father is behind bars for allegedly being a Pathalgadi supporter, has been forced to take up work amid his studies. Before my father went to jail, I was focused on my studies, but now, the responsibility of earning for the family is also on my shoulders. I have to take care of my grandmother, mother, aunt, and sister, he says. Arranging money to pay the lawyer and for frequent visits to jail to meet his father has been worsening the familys financial situation. I have been to Ranchi court twice and Khunti court seven to eight times. Every visit costs around Rs 2,500. Farming is the only source of income. We do get some support from the gram sabha, but there is no outside help, says Sonu. He adds that whether or not the village will vote in the upcoming elections is still undecided. The issue has not been discussed in the gram sabha, he informs. In 2018, Chitramu, one of the villages in Khunti district which were part of the Pathalgadi movement, pulled out by removing the plaque, and has been enjoying government benefits since. However, Sonu questions the motive behind it. "If there were schemes already, why werent they given before the movement could start?" he asks Putting up protection, one plaque at a time The gram pradhan of another village in Khunti, who is against the movement, explains that Pathalgadi was a Century-old tradition of the Munda tribes and involved installing stone plaques to honour the dead or define the limits of a village. He says: "There were four types of plaques one to honour the dead and mentioning the generations and work of the person, another, to be installed under the trees, bears names of those who died an unnatural death, a third is put up in the names of couples belonging to the same gotra who married, leading to their banishment from the village, and a fourth one for identifying a villages limits." So, I dont understand this new type of listing Articles from the Constitution. It was never there until recently, he adds. A social activist adds that the new type of Pathalgadi came into being because the villagers wanted to protect their lands. The government was preparing to grab their land without their consent and a new Pathalgadi movement was the way to stop it. The Constitution clearly states that the land in the areas under the Fifth Schedule should be taken only with the gram sabhas permission; so, when the villagers saw that wasnt being complied with, they decided to start the movement, he says. However, the activist says that the movement was misrepresented. It was the fear of losing their land that led the villagers to do this. But the administration started arresting innocent villagers and lodging cases of sedition against them and activists who were supporting the movement, he adds. The Jharkhand Police, however, has a different version to tell. They say that while the villagers movement was about prohibiting entry to outsiders and administration officials, they stopped sending their children to school, and even began planning to start their own currency and banks. The movement was later hijacked by opium smugglers. "Opium farming is done in many villages of Khunti, and opium dealers found this movement as an opportunity to stop the polices entry to the farming areas, to continue their illegal work freely, a police source reveals. What really happened from 2017 to 2018? The new Pathalgadi movement started in early 2017 when stone plaques announcing gram sabhas as the sovereign authority was installed in Kochang and a few other neighbouring villages of Arki block. This proclamation of self-governance soon spread to other villages in Arki, Murhu, and Khunti blocks. On 24 August, 2017, Kanki villagers detained a team of policemen that broke the barricade at the villages entry point. Though there was no plaque there, this was one of the early Pathalgadi movement incidents. On 19 June, 2018, five female social workers enacting a play at a school in Kochang village were abducted and gang-raped. The police alleged the involvement of two Pathalgadi supporters in the crime. Then, on 26 June, the police raided Udburu village to arrest Purty. Though he wasnt arrested, his property was attached. The raid angered villagers and supporters, who gathered in Ghaghra village and protested. The police lathi-charged the protesters following which some Pathalgadi supporters abducted three armed guards of the sitting MP of Khunti, Kariya Munda and a policeman, from his house in Anigara village. The incident proved pivotal, leading to a massive crackdown by the administration against Pathalgadi supporters. Officers say that, since then, around 36 leaders have been arrested and 250 people booked under various charges. In July 2018, Chitramu village of Khunti became the first of the dozens to pull down the Pathalgadi plaque, following which a development fair was organised there, bringing many state benefits to the villagers. Mangal Singh Pahan, a ward member of the village, says, We joined the movement after listening to its leaders, but soon, we realised that not taking benefit of government schemes and not sending children to school wasnt sensible. Hence, we removed the plaque. This election, all of us are ready to vote." But rumour has it Many, however, say the movement is still alive, even if in secret. A former mukhiya of Murhi Panchayat says, Kanki village, where policemen were kept prisoners in 2017, is still affected. While no one says anything openly, secret meetings are held. The gram panchayat does not want to take part in any development schemes and villagers are fined Rs 500 if they fail to turn up for gram sabha meetings." "We are trying our best to convince all villagers to cast their vote in the upcoming elections, he adds. A Padma Bhushan awardee, Kariya admits the movement might have some impact on the upcoming election, but won't lead to a boycott. The impact wont be huge. Some supporters of the movement might try to disrupt voting in interior areas, however, I dont think people will boycott the election altogether, he says. Despite attempts, government officials refused to comment on the issue and say giving any kind of importance to it will only encourage the supporters to cause problems. Additional Chief Electoral Officer at Jharkhand Election Commission, Vinay Kumar Choubey said, Before the elections, vulnerability mapping of hamlets is done where vulnerable populations and intimidators are identified. A vulnerability can be of any type, including cases like this. Then we go for confidence-building measures in those locations. The idea is to assure the population that we will ensure all safety measures so they can come out and vote. The district election officer would take due care to ensure that people come out and vote. Disclaimer: Names of some of the people interviewed for this story has been withheld or changed to protect their identity The manifesto launch was heavily attended by Congress brass, including former UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, P Chidambaram, Rajeev Gowda, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Sam Pitroda, Sheila Dikshit, Meira Kumar, and others. Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, with UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, general secretary Priyanka Gandhi, and other senior leaders released party's 2019 Lok Sabha election manifesto, a document titled India's New Tryst With Destiny. Prioritising employment, poverty, farmers' woes, women and an inclusive society above all else, the manifesto countered the Bharatiya Janata Party's five years' of policies and measures at every step and called for a "new narrative" to come forth this general election. The title a play on the first few words of Jawaharlal Nehru's first speech post Independence is likely a tongue-in-cheek disavowal of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) insistence on Nehru's culpability in India's everyday failings. The manifesto reveal began with an audio-visual presentation, kicked off by Congress communication in-charge Randeep Singh Surjewala. In the video, several noted personalities, like rural journalist P Sainath, environmentalist Sunita Narain, Lieutenant General Deependra Singh Hooda and murdered journalist Gauri Lankesh's sister Kavitha, spoke of the necessity of a newer order. Party president Rahul Gandhi then announced the highlights of the manifesto. Some of the key points of Congress manifesto for the Lok Sabha election 2019 were: 1) Rahul announced that the first point of address in the Congress's manifesto would be the much-discussed NYAY scheme. "Let us try to find the truth, I told the manifesto committee. As it is we have a prime minister who lies to us everyday. Narendra Modi's promise of Rs 15 lakh in every account has not happened. How much money can the Indian government give to the accounts of the poor, I asked them? They told me Rs 72,000...This will secure two things. For the first time, the poor will get a direct transfer of cash. Secondly, the economy that had been jammed by the Narendra Modi government with measures like demonetisation, would be recharged," the Congress president said. 2) The second theme in the manifesto is jobs. "I have come to know that 22 lakh government jobs are lying vacant. These, I promise, will be filled by March, 2020. Ten lakh youth will be given jobs in village panchayats. For entrepreneurs, we will have a three-year window where new businesses will not require any permission. We will bring jobs to India, so we will open the banks for new businesses," Rahul said. He added that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, "which the PM had called bogus" will increase the promise of work under the scheme from 100 to 150 days. 3) Rahul significantly announced a separate budget for Indian farmers, "to let them know for certain how much money they are getting, exactly how much of their loans are being forgiven". He also added that crorepatis take bank loans and default often. "Anil Ambanis and Mehul Choksis steal from banks and run away. Farmers are honest, when they take bank loans and fail to repay them, they are thrown in jail. We will not regard farmers' loan defaults as criminal offences any more, but will see them as a civil offence now," he said. 4) Six percent of the Gross Domestic Product will go to education, universities, colleges, IITs and IIMs, according to the Congress manifesto. "We will try to make the best institutions accessible to all," Rahul said. 5) Healthcare was the last highlight of Rahul's address. "The point of the current health scheme brought by this government has been to take money from people and put it into pockets of private insurance players. We will give the poor high-quality medical attention," he announced. Rahul also delineated an additional concern, that of national security. Referring to the recent border incursions, Rahul said that the casualties have risen in the last five years. "Congress will bring the country together. National and internal security, we will make sure both are restored," he said. Significantly, the manifesto has promised a revision of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 in order to strike a balance between the powers of security forces and the rights of citizens. The party has also promised to repeal the sedition law and the Citizenship Amendment Bill introduced by the BJP, stating that it has become "redundant". The manifesto launch was heavily attended by Congress brass, including P Chidambaram, Rajeev Gowda, Sam Pitroda, Sheila Dikshit, Meira Kumar, and others. Rajeev Gowda, convenor of the manifesto committee, said the party was given a "very simple mission statement" by Rahul to go out and listen to the voices of the people of India. "We constituted 20 different sub-committees across a range of topics and reached out to people. Our outreach covered 24 states, three Union Territories and saw a total of 121 public consultations, including one overseas sitting at Dubai to look at non-residential Indians' concerns," Gowda said. Chidambaram, who is chairman of the manifesto committee, said each paragraph in the manifesto "was written" by a common man and reflected the concerns of ordinary men and women. "The idea is to set the narrative for 2019, something the Congress president has already done. The BJP our Opposition is trying to take the narrative back to that of polarisation, divisiveness and hyper-nationalism. We have to bring the narrative back to the real issues faced by the people," he said. Four crore jobs were lost, the former finance minister went on to say. He also highlighted farmers' plight and the security of women, announcing that these three make up the theme of the manifesto, which focuses primarily on wealth and welfare. Speaking before the launch, Manmohan Singh said the manifesto points to ways in which "prosperity and productivity" go hand in hand. In the post-launch interaction with media, Rahul took to walking around on the dais, fielding questions, most of which pertained to whether he was the Congress's prime ministerial candidate to which the party president said: "The people will say." When asked about Opposition's reaction to his decision to contest from Wayanad, Rahul said, "BJP can't hide behind hollow narratives." Rahul also blamed reporters for not asking tough questions to Modi. "You all drill me with questions but are afraid of taking on Modi ji. He has never ever addressed a press conference so far, why don't you ask him why is he so afraid of talking to the media," Rahul asked. He also said he was ready for an open debate with Narendra Modi on national security. Who is campaigning where? Click here for Lok Sabha Election TRACKER The Election Commission plans to write to President Ram Nath Kovind, bringing to his notice remarks made by Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh where the latter has vouched for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's re-election. The Election Commission plans to write to President Ram Nath Kovind, bringing to his notice remarks made by Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh about Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week, reports say. The panel, reported The Indian Express, has found that Singh's statement that Modi should be "re-elected" was in violation of the Model Code of Conduct. Speaking to reporters in Aligarh on 25 March, the Rajasthan governor had called himself a "Bharatiya Janata Party worker". "As a worker of the BJP, I genuinely want the party to win. We want Narendra Modi to once again become the Prime Minister of India. It is important for the nation and society that Narendra Modi become Prime Minister again," Singh had said. The Election Commission had sought a factual report from the UP Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) on the issue, on 30 March. Singh, who has previously served as Uttar Pradesh chief minister was appointed Rajasthan governor in 2014. A governor's post is considered a neutral one and the person in office traditionally does not side with any particular political party. Earlier in February, Singh had stated that the time has come to scrap Article 370, which grants special autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir, and that only Narendra Modi could do this. "Article 370 encourages separatists. This, in turn, poses a threat to the country's unity and integrity. Jammu and Kashmir will largely benefit from scrapping Article 370," he had said. "Nobody other than Narendra Modi is capable enough of doing this," he had added. With inputs from agencies Lok Sabha Election 2019 LIVE Updates: The battle of Bengal is all set to heat up with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trinamool Congress president Mamata Banerjee kickstarting their campaign on Wednesday in the state that sends third largest number of Lok Sabha members to Parliament. Auto refresh feeds The Congress is likely to release its manifesto for the Lok Sabha election on Tuesday. The manifesto document will be released by Congress president Rahul Gandhi and all top party leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, will be present at the party's Akbar Road headquarters. The Congress document is the result of extensive nationwide consultations and it will be a very "powerful" document aimed at redressing key challenges facing the nation, Rahul said. He has also said the manifesto will lay major thrust on jobs creation, addressing agrarian distress and strengthening the education and health sectors besides charting a roadmap to boost economic growth. Congress president Rahul Gandhi has said that the manifesto will reflect the "people's voice" and not just "one man's view", while reportedly making a reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Congress, which is likely to release its manifesto for the Lok Sabha election on Tuesday, had initiated a consultation process for the document which spanned across the country and many of its top leaders had interacted with a host of people from different sections to seek their views on their aspirations from the party, PTI reported. "It will also serve the additional purpose of remonetisation or note wapsi of the Indian economy, which was badly hit by Prime Minister Narendra Modis destructive demonetisation," the release said. According to reports, it is a scheme to "provide economic justice to the poorest citizens". The basic element of the scheme, according to a press release by the party, is that every year, Rs 72,000 will be transferred to the poorest 20 percent families in India. This translates to Rs 6,000 per month for 5 crore families/ The much-debated Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) or Minimum Income Support Programme (MISP), which was announced by Congress president Rahul Gandhi in March, is expected to be the key aspect of the Congress' manifesto. "No one has given details of scheme regarding how Rs 3.6 lakh crore will be arranged for the scheme's implementation. It's more than our defence budget. Fiscal situation is always tight, it's almost impossible to take out 13 percent of the budget. Ahead of the Congress' release of its manifesto for the Lok Sabha election, Panagariya said, "If you are giving Rs 72,000 per annum to 5 crore families then there will be an expense of Rs 3.6 lakh crore this is 13 percent of the total budget of central government. The party has been ambiguous over this issue over the past week, even as Arvind Kejriwal on Monday stated that Rahul had "refused" the alliance with AAP. Congress president Rahul Gandhi is planning to chair a high-level meeting with party leaders PC Chacko and Sheila Dikshit over the possible alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for the Lok Sabha election in Delhi. An announcement of the final decision is likely, reports said. Ramdev said, "Those who want a separate constitution should leave India, adding that people who want "another nation" should be labelled as "desh drohis". Baba Ramdev also hit out at National Conference leader Omar Abdullah over his statement that the party would seek the restoration of the terms of accession of Jammu and Kashmir, including the provision for 'Sadr-e-Riyasat' (president) and prime minister posts. Union minister Ashwini Choubey has been granted bail by a Bihar court in connection with his alleged misbehaviour towards Bihar sub-district magistrate KK Upadhyay in Buxar. The official had stopped Choubey's convoy for violating the Model Code of Conduct on 30 March. KS Eshwarappa, a BJP leader from Karnataka, while addressing members of the Kuruba community along with other minorities in Koppal said, "Congress uses you only as a vote bank, they don't give you tickets. We won't give Muslims tickets because you don't believe in us. Believe us and we'll give you tickets and other things." BJP leader says won't give Muslims tickets because they "don't believe in us" The Supreme Court has declined to hear newly-joined Congress leader Hardik Patel's plea seeking a stay on his conviction. Since the last date of filing nomination for the Lok Sabha election is on Thursday, the apex court's decision might mean Patel may not be able to contest the election. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address an election rally at Bhawanipatna, the district headquarter of Kalahandi district in western Odisha. From there, he will travel to Ballopur village in Bihar's Jamui district for a rally and then to Gaya's Gandhi Maidan, where he and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar will address another rally. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yodi Adityanath will interact with nearly 10,000 youngsters in Gorakhpur as part of the party's Yuva Sammelan. BJP national president Amit Shah will hold public meetings on Tuesday, at Thoothukudi, Sivaganga and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Later in the evening, he and the BJP's Bengaluru South candidate Tejaswi Surya will hold a joint road show in Bengaluru. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday held election rallies in Maharashtra's Wardha, Telangana's Secunderabad, and Andhra Pradesh's Rajamundry. "My campaigns across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been overwhelming. NDAs solid track record and development agenda has connected with people," the prime minister tweeted. Bhalchandra Mungekar, member of Congress party's manifesto committee on Tuesday said, "When we will come to power, on the first day we will initiate an inquiry into Rafale deal and we have included this in the manifesto." Even as speculation is rife about the Congress' manifesto and what it will contain for the crucial Lok Sabha election, party president Rahul Gandhi on Monday tweeted, "Real smart cities are built by good leaders. To improve quality of life in our cities we will move to directly elected Mayors with 5-year terms and elected councils. Administration will be run by multidisciplinary teams of specialists & experts accountable to the Mayor and council." Rahul Gandhi says city admins to be run by "multidisciplinary teams" if Congress comes to power Congress president Rahul Gandhi's tweets since 25 March could be an indication of the party's anticipated manifesto, reports speculated on Tuesday. "Congress is likely to announce 'Mega Doles' this elections season," The Economic Times reported . The prime minister, however, in the end said that all this was not just because of him but because of the power in people's vote. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is addressing a rally in Kalahandi in Odisha, asked the crowd whether they were benefiting from the central government schemes. Modi recalled each social welfare scheme implemented under his government and asked people to tell him who made it possible. The crowds responded with the chants of 'Modi, Modi." Congress leader Sam Pitroda was spotted at the Congress headquarters in New Delhi ahead of the party's presser announcing its manifesto. He was recently in the midst of a controversy for allegedly trivializing the Pulwama attack, and asking questions. During the launch event of Congress manifesto, party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said that a promise made by the Congress was as good as an oath. The party revealed its manifesto. P Chidambaram said that the COngress manifesto tries to encapsulate aspirations of farmers, youths, minorities, women security. You will find there is enough in the manifesto which addresses the concerns of Dalits, youths, minority, the state of healthcare and education and that concerns the internal and national security. Congress released its manifesto claiming that the theme of the election document was marrying welfare to wealth. He said that apart from wealth creation and economic boost, the manifesto will focus on three main issues: unemployment, women's security, and agrarian crisis. Chidambaram said that the manifesto will be a guiding document for governnance. Congress president Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, and Manmohan Singh unveil poll document at the AICC headquarter. The theme of the document is "marrying wealth to welfare". "I don't want a single thing in the manifesto that is a lie because we hear the PM speak a lie every day," said Gandhi. Rahul Gandhi said that he had instructed Congress manifesto committee to not put any lies in the manifesto unlike what the BJP does. "When we started the process for drafting the Congress manifesto one year ago, my first instruction to them was that don't make it behind closed doors and secondly, don't put anything that is a lie in it." When asked about his decision to contest from a smaller seat Wayanad, Rahul Gandhi said that the narrative has been set and it is about the real issues like unemployment, GST and healthcare. "The prime minister is trying to hide behind hollow narratives, but he can't do that anymore." "PM had spoken about MGNREGA. He mocked and said it is a bogus and useless scheme. Today everyone knows how much it helped the country. So now we want to guarantee jobs for 150 days, instead of 100 days, under the scheme," Rahul Gandhi said. "He has never ever addressed a press conference so far, why don't you ask him why is he so afraid of talking to media," Gandhi said. Speaking to reporters, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said, "You all drill me with questions but are afraid of taking on Modi ji. Why don't you ask him some questions?" "Will India be a free and democratic country and will the Indian people be free from fear, free to live and work and pray and eat and love and marry according to their wishes, free from poverty and free to pursue their ambitions? Or will India be governed by a pernicious ideology that will trample upon peoples rights, institutions, conventions and the healthy differences that are the essence of a multi-cultural country?" the party's manifesto stated. The Congress manifesto promised a re-look at the the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 in order to strike a balance between the powers of security forces and the human rights of citizens and to remove immunity for enforced disappearance, sexual violence and torture. The party also promised to repeal the sedition law stating that it has become redundant. The Congress, meanwhile, has come with its own slogan: Gareebi pe waar, 72,000 Elections more often than not become a war of words, with political leaders harping on catchy wordplay which makes their campaign narratives rememberable for the voters. This year we heard prime minister Narendra Modi latchin on to the 'chowkidar' narrative to put focus on his incorruptible image. "Ek taraf mazboot chowkidar, dusri taraf daagdaro ki bharmaar," the prime minister coud be heard saying at his rallies. In Congress manifesto, party president Rahul Gandhi has promised to allocate 6 percent of the GDP to to the education sector and an accessible healthcare setup. Rahul Gandhi repeated his dare to prime minister Narendra Modi for a debate on issues of national importance. "Who is he scared of, I challenge him to come and have a debate with me on any issue," Rahul said. Sam Pitroda, Indian Overseas Congress Chief on party's election manifest said, "Don't underestimate our ability to deliver, we'll deliver. We promised we'll deliver. We've delivered in past and we'll deliver in future. Who created telecom jobs?How did we get from 2 mn telephones to 1.2 bn?" In an interview to Sena MP Sanjay Raut in party mouthpiece 'Saamana', Thackeray said he agreed to the alliance after BJP president Amit Shah came to him twice to sort out the issues. "...You ask me why did we agree to an alliance again. The whole world is a witness. BJP president Amit Shah came to me not once, but twice. And when the alliance was charted out, we put forth the problems of people. Even the chief minister was present when all this happened," Thackeray said. Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray on Tuesday said his party and the BJP are bound by Hindutva and the two decided to enter into a pre-poll alliance after overcoming differences that soured their ties in the past. But the announcement to review the act gave BJP the ammo against party it had been looking for. Here's what the party's I-T cell head said. The Congress party promised in its manifesto to re-look at the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act, opening a floodgate of criticism from BJP and its supporters. The act gives security forces immunity from prosecution in war zone and gives them substantial power to conduct operations in such areas. "The Bofors scam during the Congress regime and the Rafale scam during the BJP regime shows that both these parties do not have any interest in strengthening our security forces," Mayawati said while addressing a rally in Bhubaneswar. Congress had Bofors and now BJP has Rafale, says Mayawati in Odisha Rally With the BJP wasting no time in latching on to Congress' promise to review AFSPA, the grand old party has found itself on the defensive moments after the release of its manifesto. Party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said that the Congress will only move forward with it after due consultation with the security forces. In this backdrop, the new position seems to be a bid to pacify the agitated section and prevent any split in the party just before the elections. In what appears to be a compromise formula, Tejashwini Ananth Kumar has been appointed the vice-president of state unit after the party denied her ticket from Late Ananth Kumar's traditional constituency Bengaluru South. Instead of Tejashwini, the BJP picked Ananth Kumar's political prodigy Tejaswi Surya, causing some heartburn to the former's supporters. Omar Monday said his party will strive hard for restoring the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir that could include having a separate 'Sadar-e-Riyasat' (President) and 'Wazir-e-Azam' (Prime Minister). Gambhir slammed these comments advising Omar to take a nap and some strong coffee. Omar hit back with some sage wise in turn. He asked Gambhir to stick to his area of expertise and not lecture him on matters he does not understand. Earlier, PTI had quoted Ramdas as saying, "The armed forces do not belong to any one individual, they serve the country. Till the polls get over, the Chief Election Commissioner is the boss. I am going to approach the Election Commission in this regard." Ex-navy chief Admiral L Ramdas has written a letter to the Election Commission on Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath referring to the Indian Army as 'Modi ki sena' during a public rally in Ghaziabad on 30 March, ANI reported. "There is a feeling in South India, a very strong feeling in South India, that they are not being carried (along) by the current government. South India feels hostility from Mr Narendra Modi, they feel that they are not being included in the decisions of the country," Rahul said. Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday claimed people in South India "feel hostility" from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said he decided to contest from Wayanad in Kerala to send out the message that he stands with them. Addressing a rally in Tuticorin, BJP chief Amit Shah said, "In their recent manifesto, the Congress has proposed to tone down AFSPA in J&K. Do they want to demoralize the forces and their personnel?" Union minister Arun Jaitley said, "When out of ignorance he makes unimplementable and dangerous promises, I'm sure the country will not be in a mood to oblige him for implementing the kind of promises in this manifesto. Some of the ideas are positively dangerous. Even though there was a drafting committee, It appears that some of the important points have been drafted by the Congress president's friends in the tukde tukde gang when it deals with Jammu and Kashmir." He further added, "They are saying the law of sedition will be removed, the party which wants this does not have the right to get even a single vote." He also claimed that the Congress wanted to scrap sedition law in its bid to save the separatists. Claiming that the Congress manifesto has ideas which will divide India, Arun Jaitley said, "They are moving forward on the agenda of the Nehru-Gandhi family's historic blunder on Jammu and Kashmir." On Congress' promise to review AFSPA, Arun Jaitley said, The dilution of AFPSA was opposed by Congress and now the current leadership is now advocating for it. It will empower terrorists and their supporters." "I kept reading on this NYAY scheme very carefully. In 80s, Rajiv ji and Indira ji did fiscal blunder. They need to find Manmohan Singh to save the country from debt trap," he further said, On Congress' NYAY scheme which said that the growth in economy will help Centre fund it, Arun Jaitley said, "This is such a plan that I will buy a chicken, it will give the egg, which will create thousands of chickens, then I will become a millionaire." " What is here in these 54 pages is what we heard from the people of India. We believe this is the narrative which the people want to hear and which the people want to be addressed by the future government. We are confident that the Congress will have the capacity to implement this manifesto over the next 5 years. We think our economy will be stronger, and poverty will be considerably reduced," former finance minister P Chidambaram said at a press conference. "I seem to have read the manifesto more than Congress president," he further said, taking a dig at Rahul. At the BJP press conference on Congress manifesto, Arun Jaitley said, "Rahul Gandhi said that we will fill 28 lakh jobs. The next sentence of Congress manifesto says 20 lakh jobs are of them are in the state government. He must at least read what he is saying." Arun Jaitley's jibe at Rahul; 'I seem to have read the manifesto more than Congress president' Hitting out at Arun Jaitley over his remarks on the Congress manifesto, P Chidambaram said, "I can say that it (promises in manifesto) is unimplementable by a BJP government. Why do you think it can't be done by a future government? Congress sets ambitious goals, but these are achievable with wise and competent government. Speaking at the Congress press conference, senior leader Jairam Ramesh said, "We have promised that farm loan waiver is the first step. But we want to move from karz maafi (loan waiver) to karz-mukti (loan-free)." According to reports, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will accompany Congress president Rahul Gandhi to Wayanad in Kerala for filing of his nomination from the parliamentary constituency. Rahul will file his nomination from Wayanad on 4 April. Addressing a rally in Sivaganga, BJP chief Amit Shah said, "In their manifesto, the Congress has announced that all should get bail and no one should be put behind bars. Probably, it's meant for Karti Chidambaram." Political circles are agog that a war of words are on the cards with Mamata Banerjee deciding to hold her public rally on the same day the Prime Minister will commence his campaign in the state. While Modi will address a rally at Siliguri, Banerjee will hold her first public meeting for the general elections in the state at Dinhata, both in north Bengal. The battle of Bengal is all set to heat up with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trinamool Congress president Mamata Banerjee kickstarting their campaign on Wednesday in the state that sends third largest number of Lok Sabha members to Parliament. BJP party president Amit Shah declared at his public address in Sivaganga that the NDA alliance under the leadership of Narendra Modi will win over 30 seats in Tamil Nadu. Election Commission of India writes to secretary of Ministry of Civil Aviation and Railway Board's chairman over 'noncompliance of lawful instructions and lackadaisical approach towards enforcing the model code of conduct'. On 27 March, the poll panel had written to Ministry of Railways and Ministry of Civil Aviation, asking them why have the pictures of Narendra Modi had not been removed from rail tickets and Air India boarding passes even after Model Code of Conduct had come into effect. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath Tuesday dismissed the Congress manifesto as a bundle of lies and also targeted the Opposition over its handling of national security. "It is a bundle of lies and the party has expressed its failure over 55 years in its 55-page manifesto," he said. He further said, "The demand for statehood had been raised for years together as the present constitutional status of Union Territory had been standing in the way of getting sufficient grants from the Centre and most of the time the plea had fallen on deaf ears." Addressing reporters at the party office in Puducherry, Narayanasamy said, "The specific announcement in the manifesto that the Congress would procure statehood for Puducherry now a Union Territory shows that the party and its leader have concern for the welfare of the people here." Puducherry chief minister V Narayanasamy expressed gratitude to Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for promising in the party's manifesto that it would procure full statehood for the Union Territory, if elected to power after the Lok Sabha polls. "I wish they would have mentioned this issue (in the manifesto) earlier when I was the Chief Minister. At that time, when I demanded AFSPA's removal, some Congress friends had conspired against it. I do not want to name them. But, I got support only from (former Union minister P) Chidambaram," he said. Welcoming as better late than never the Congress poll promise of amending the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on Tuesday said earlier some friends in the grand old party had conspired against scrapping the controversial law when he had demanded so during his tenure as the chief minister. Speaking at the Congress press conference, senior leader Jairam Ramesh said, "We have promised that farm loan waiver is the first step. But we want to move from karz maafi (loan waiver) to karz-mukti (loan-free)." According to reports, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will accompany Congress president Rahul Gandhi to Wayanad in Kerala for filing of his nomination from the parliamentary constituency. Rahul will file his nomination from Wayanad on 4 April. Addressing a rally in Sivaganga, BJP chief Amit Shah said, "In their manifesto, the Congress has announced that all should get bail and no one should be put behind bars. Probably, it's meant for Karti Chidambaram." Political circles are agog that a war of words are on the cards with Mamata Banerjee deciding to hold her public rally on the same day the Prime Minister will commence his campaign in the state. While Modi will address a rally at Siliguri, Banerjee will hold her first public meeting for the general elections in the state at Dinhata, both in north Bengal. The battle of Bengal is all set to heat up with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trinamool Congress president Mamata Banerjee kickstarting their campaign on Wednesday in the state that sends third largest number of Lok Sabha members to Parliament. BJP party president Amit Shah declared at his public address in Sivaganga that the NDA alliance under the leadership of Narendra Modi will win over 30 seats in Tamil Nadu. Election Commission of India writes to secretary of Ministry of Civil Aviation and Railway Board's chairman over 'noncompliance of lawful instructions and lackadaisical approach towards enforcing the model code of conduct'. On 27 March, the poll panel had written to Ministry of Railways and Ministry of Civil Aviation, asking them why have the pictures of Narendra Modi had not been removed from rail tickets and Air India boarding passes even after Model Code of Conduct had come into effect. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath Tuesday dismissed the Congress manifesto as a bundle of lies and also targeted the Opposition over its handling of national security. "It is a bundle of lies and the party has expressed its failure over 55 years in its 55-page manifesto," he said. He further said, "The demand for statehood had been raised for years together as the present constitutional status of Union Territory had been standing in the way of getting sufficient grants from the Centre and most of the time the plea had fallen on deaf ears." Addressing reporters at the party office in Puducherry, Narayanasamy said, "The specific announcement in the manifesto that the Congress would procure statehood for Puducherry now a Union Territory shows that the party and its leader have concern for the welfare of the people here." Puducherry chief minister V Narayanasamy expressed gratitude to Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for promising in the party's manifesto that it would procure full statehood for the Union Territory, if elected to power after the Lok Sabha polls. "I wish they would have mentioned this issue (in the manifesto) earlier when I was the Chief Minister. At that time, when I demanded AFSPA's removal, some Congress friends had conspired against it. I do not want to name them. But, I got support only from (former Union minister P) Chidambaram," he said. Welcoming as better late than never the Congress poll promise of amending the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on Tuesday said earlier some friends in the grand old party had conspired against scrapping the controversial law when he had demanded so during his tenure as the chief minister. Lok Sabha Election 2019 Latest Updates: The battle of Bengal is all set to heat up with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trinamool Congress president Mamata Banerjee kickstarting their campaign on Wednesday in the state that sends third largest number of Lok Sabha members to Parliament. While Modi will address a rally at Siliguri, Banerjee will hold her first public meeting for the general elections in the state at Dinhata, both in north Bengal. AICC general-secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to accompany Congress president Rahul Gandhi to Wayanad in Kerala for filing of his nomination from the parliamentary constituency. Rahul Gandhi will file his nomination from Wayanad on 4 April. Hitting out at Arun Jaitley over his remarks on the Congress manifesto, P Chidambaram said, "I can say that it (promises in manifesto) is unimplementable by a BJP government. But why do you think it can't be done by a future government? Congress sets ambitious goals, but these are achievable with wise and competent government." Addressing a press conference, Union minister Arun Jaitley lashed out at the Congress for promising to review AFSPA in its manifesto. The dilution of AFPSA was opposed by Congress and now the current leadership is now advocating for it. It will empower terrorists and their supporters," Jaitley said. The Election Commission writes to President Ram Nath Kovind to bring it to his notice that Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh's remark that Narendra Modi should be re-elected as the Prime Minister is violative of the Model Code of Conduct The Congress manifesto promised a re-look at the the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 in order to strike a balance between the powers of security forces and the human rights of citizens and to remove immunity for enforced disappearance, sexual violence and torture. The party also promised to repeal the sedition law stating that it has become redundant. Congress party's manifesto website has crashed moments after its release. The party said that the issue was caused due to "heavy traffic" and the website would be back up shortly. Rahul Gandhi said that the narrative has been set and it is about the real issues like unemployment, GST and healthcare. "The prime minister is trying to hide behind hollow narratives, but he can't do that anymore." Rahul Gandhi said that he had instructed Congress manifesto committee to not put any lies in the manifesto unlike what the BJP does. "When we started the process for drafting the Congress manifesto one year ago, my first instruction to them was that don't make it behind closed doors and secondly, don't put anything that is a lie in it." Congress president Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh unveil poll document at the AICC headquarter. P Chidambaram said that the COngress manifesto tries to encapsulate aspirations of farmers, youths, minorities, women security. In a video preview of their manifesto, Congress party has mentioned social security for poor, a detailed and effective plan for reducing unemployment. The party has also promised to probe the Rafale jets Amid speculation and anticipation regarding the Congress' manifesto for the crucial Lok Sabha election, Congress president Rahul Gandhi's tweets are an indicator of content in party's manifesto, The Economic Times reported. Rahul tweets since 25 March could be an indication of the party's anticipated manifesto, reports speculated on Tuesday. "Congress is likely to announce 'Mega Doles' this elections season," the report said. The Congress on Tuesday said that the Rafale inquiry is part of the party's manifesto for the Lok Sabha election. Bhalchandra Mungekar, member of Congress party's manifesto committee on Tuesday said, "When we will come to power, on the first day we will initiate an inquiry into Rafale deal and we have included this in the manifesto." The Supreme Court has declined to hear newly-joined Congress leader Hardik Patel's plea seeking a stay on his conviction. Since the last date of filing nomination for the Lok Sabha election is on Thursday, the apex court's decision might mean Patel may not be able to contest the election. Congress president Rahul Gandhi is planning to chair a high-level meeting with party leaders PC Chacko and Sheila Dikshit over the possible alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for the Lok Sabha election in Delhi. An announcement of the final decision is likely, reports said. The party has been ambiguous over this issue over the past week, even as Arvind Kejriwal on Monday stated that Rahul had "refused" the alliance with AAP. The much-debated Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) or Minimum Income Support Programme (MISP), which was announced by Congress president Rahul Gandhi in March. According to reports, it is a scheme to "provide economic justice to the poorest citizens". The basic element of the scheme, according to a press release by the party, is that every year, Rs 72,000 will be transferred to the poorest 20 percent families in India. This translates to Rs 6,000 per month for 5 crore families/ "It will also serve the additional purpose of remonetisation or note wapsi of the Indian economy, which was badly hit by Prime Minister Narendra Modis destructive demonetisation," the release said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address an election rally at Bhawanipatna, the district headquarter of Kalahandi district in western Odisha. From there, he will travel to Ballopur village in Bihar's Jamui district for a rally and then to Gaya's Gandhi Maidan, where he and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar will address another rally. BJP national president Amit Shah will also hold public meetings on Tuesday, at Thoothukudi, Sivaganga and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Later in the evening, he and the BJP's Bengaluru South candidate Tejaswi Surya will hold a joint road show in Bengaluru. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yodi Adityanath will interact with nearly 10,000 youngsters in Gorakhpur as part of the party's Yuva Sammelan. Meanwhile, the Congress is likely to release its manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls on Tuesday. The manifesto document will be released by Congress president Rahul Gandhi and all top party leaders, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, will be present at the party's Akbar Road headquarters. Rahul has said that the manifesto will reflect the people's voice and not just one man's view, while making a clear reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has also said the manifesto will lay major thrust on jobs creation, addressing agrarian distress and strengthening the education and health sectors besides charting a roadmap to boost economic growth. The Congress document is the result of extensive nationwide consultations and it will be a very "powerful" document aimed at redressing key challenges facing the nation, Rahul said. Congress had initiated a consultation process across the country and many of its top leaders had interacted with a host of people from different sections to seek their views on their aspirations from the party. The party's manifesto committee was headed by former finance minister P Chidambaram. The Congress on Monday also accused Modi of dividing the country on the basis of religion and culture and demanded his apology even as it asked the Election Commission (EC) to take "decisive action" against him for violating the law. The Opposition party also accused Modi of insulting democracy by trying to segment Indians in terms of castes and communities. Congress's chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala charged the prime minister with indulging in "cheap politics by sowing the seeds of hatred" among people and alleged that Modi had now gone to the extent of insulting India's composite culture and the sacrifice of the people of south India during the freedom struggle. Earlier in the day, slamming the Congress over the "Hindu terror" metaphor, Modi charged the Opposition party with insulting the "peace-loving" followers of the religion by linking them to terrorism. The Hindus had woken up and the country had decided to "punish" the Congress, the prime minister said at a public rally in Maharashtra's Wardha, adding that the opposition party was scared to field its leaders from constituencies where the majority community dominated in terms of the voter-base, without naming Rahul. Congress president Rahul Gandhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh and several top leaders are expected to be present at the party's Akbar Road headquarters in Delhi, during the release of the election manifesto. The Congress likely will release its election manifesto for the 2019 Lok Sabha election today (Tuesday). Party president Rahul Gandhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh and several top leaders are expected to be present at the party's Akbar Road headquarters in Delhi, during the release, reports have said. Rahul had told PTI that the manifesto will "reflect people's voice and not just one man's view", taking a clear jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He also said the manifesto will lay major thrust on employment creation, addressing agrarian distress, strengthening the education and health sectors, besides charting a roadmap to boost economic growth. "The Congress document is the result of extensive nationwide consultations and it will be a very powerful document aimed at redressing key challenges facing the nation," he had said. People from various parts of the country had been consulted by top Congress leaders in charge of formulating the manifesto. The committee is headed by former finance minister P Chidambaram. NYAY scheme Congress's ambitious minimum income guarantee scheme, or NYAY scheme, is most likely to be one of the key points in the party's manifesto. The Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) or Minimum Income Support Programme (MISP) is a scheme which, as Rahul said, will provide Rs 72,000 a year (Rs 6,000 a month) to the poorest 20 percent of India's population. The party has packaged the income scheme as a "remonetisation or note wapsi" plan for the Indian economy. It is intended to counter the after-effects of the BJP-government's demonetisation move, the party has claimed. Congress has held successive press conferences to address critics' and Oppositions' doubts on the scheme. Congress claims economists, including, former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, Abhijit Banerjee and Thomas Piketty have helped in formulating the tenets of the scheme, which is expected to cost the government approximately Rs 3.6 lakh crore a year. Who is campaigning where? Click here for Lok Sabha Election TRACKER Urban government structures "Real smart cities are built by good leaders," Rahul tweeted on 1 April, a day before the election manifesto is set to be released. In his tweet, Rahul wrote that if elected, the Congress government will move to install a system where mayors will be directly elected, with five year terms and elected councils. Their administration, said the Congress chief, will be run by multidisciplinary teams of specialists and experts who will be accountable to the mayor and council. Special category status for Andhra Pradesh, North East states On 31 March, Rahul Gandhi promised "special category" status to Andhra Pradesh and the same is likely to be codified in the manifesto, sealing support from a state where the Congress had lost popular support over its bifurcation into Telangana. "Giving special status to Andhra is not only a commitment made by Congress and Manmohan Singh ji, it is a commitment made by the country to Andhra Pradesh. It is our commitment that we will give special status to Andhra Pradesh the moment we come to power in Delhi," said Rahul, while addressing his first public rally in Vijayawada. Rahul had also promised special category status for states in the North East, especially Arunachal, while speaking at Itanagar on 19 March. With inputs from agencies Spread over 491 square kilometres and landlocked between Gujarat in the north and Maharashtra in the south, Dadra and Nagar Haveli was liberated from the Portuguese in 1954. Dadra and Nagar Haveli has a lone Lok Sabha constituency and the Bhartiya Janata Partys (BJP) Patel Natubhai Gomanbhai is the sitting MP from here. Spread over 491 square kilometres and landlocked between Gujarat in the north and Maharashtra in the south, Dadra and Nagar Haveli was liberated from the Portuguese in 1954. While the culture in the Union Territory is influenced by the Portuguese, the Census data of 2011 states that more than half of the population belongs to Scheduled Tribes, which is why the seat is reserved for ST. The major tribes inhabiting the area are Varlies, Kokana, Dhodia and Dublas. While the BJP has held the seat twice consecutively, it faces threat from Congress leader Delkar Mohanbhai Sanjibhai. The tribal leader has been elected MP six times. He was also one of the founders of the Bharatiya Navshakti Party but has since joined both the BJP and Congress. While in the 1991 and 1996 elections, he won the MP seats on a Congress ticket, he quit Congress to join BJP in 1998. A year later, he contested General Elections as an independent candidate. In 2009, he joined the Congress again. While there were rumours of him joining the BJP again ahead of the 2014 polls, the tribal leader is likely to stick to Congress. Vocal about the problems of the tribals working in factories of Silvassa, Delkar poses a great challenge to incumbent Patel. Dadra and Nagar Haveli Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 1 Total electors: 1,96,577 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 90,386 Male electors: 1,06,191 Reserved: Yes. For Scheduled Tribes. Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Dadra and Nagar Haveli Results in last four elections: In 1999, independent candidate Delkar Mohanbhai Sanjibhai won the election. Delkar was re-elected again in 2004 from Bharatiya Navshakti Party, which he set up. Patel Nanubhai Gomanbhai from the BJP was elected MP from the Union Territory in the 2009 elections. Gomanbhai was re-elected as a BJP candidate in 2014 as well. Demographics: As per the Census of 2011, Dadra and Nagar Haveli has a population of 3,43,709, which is the third lowest among States/UTs of India. More than half (51.95 percent) of the population belongs to Scheduled Tribes and 46.72 percent live in urban areas. Business and economy of Dadra and Nagar Haveli are mainly based on agriculture and the manufacturing industries. Since a large section of the Union Territory is covered with forests, forestry is also an important occupational source for the people. Spread over a mere 111 square kilometres, this is the second smallest Union Territory after Lakshadweep. The Daman and Diu Union Territory has a lone Lok Sabha constituency and Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) Lalubhai Patel is the sitting MP from here. Patel has been elected for two consecutive terms and is going for a third attempt this election. Spread over a mere 111 square kilometres, this is the second smallest Union Territory after Lakshadweep. The Union Territory has only two districtsDaman and Diuof which Daman is larger. It is adjacent to the southern tip of Gujarat. After having been under the Portuguese rule for more than four centuries, the Union Territory was under Portuguese rule as recently as 1961. It then became a part of the Goa, Daman and Diu Union Territory. However, when Goa attained statehood, the Union Territory of Daman and Diu came into existence. Daman and Diu have traditionally seen bipolar elections since the beginning between BJP and Congress. While BJP has fielded incumbent Lalubhai Patel, the Congress has decided to give candidate Ketan Patel as a second chance. In the 2014 elections, Lalubhai had defeated Ketan by a mere 9,222 votes. Daman and Diu Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 1 Total electors: 1,11,808 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 54,812 Male electors: 56,996 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Daman and Diu Results in last four elections: In 1999 and 2004, Dahyabhai Vallabhbhai Patel from Congress won the seat. He was succeeded by Lalubhai Patel from the BJP in 2009. Lalubhai was again elected in 2014 after he won with a margin of over 9,000 votes. Demographics: As per the census of 2011, Daman district covers 64.86 percent of the total area of the Union Territory of Daman and Diu. Daman has a population of 191,173 and Diu has a population of 52,074. There are around 600 small-scale industries in the Union Territory and the economy is primarily dependent on fishing, tourism and distillery. Chicagoans head to the polls on election day for city elections that include a historic mayoral runoff to choose the the city's first African American woman as mayor between Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle. (Chicago Tribune) The LDF, the UDF as well as the BJP are likely to evoke voter sentiments by bringing up political murders during campaigning. With 20 parliamentary constituencies and 140 Assembly constituencies, the southern state of Kerala is gearing up for an important election year. The 2019 General Elections will see a three-way clash between the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party. While the CPI-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) have footing in the states Lok Sabha constituencies, the BJP is planning to make inroads in at least two seats. Riding high on the Sabarimala protests, BJP plans to field Kerala BJP chief Kummanam Rajasekharan against two-time Congress MP Shashi Tharoor from the Thiruvananthapuram. During the Sabarimala agitations, after the Supreme Court verdict allowing women into the temple, party workers were at the forefront preventing women from entering the temple. The saffron party is also hopeful of consolidating the Hindu votes in its favour. It is also hopeful of winning Thrissur seat by winning over the Nair community. Kerala faced one of the worst floods in its history in August last year when over 300 people lost their lives. According to the 2011 Census, the state has a population of 33,387,677, of which 52.3 percent live in rural areas. Although the state has a Hindu majority, it has a sizeable minorities population. Around 26.56 percent of the population are Muslims and 18.38 percent are Christians, according to the 2011 Census data. The state has for decades been a battleground for the left and the right parties. The battle has left a trail of political murders over time. The LDF, the UDF as well as the BJP are likely to evoke voter sentiments by bringing up the murders during campaigning. Another campaigning point this election is the visibility of women. Although the number of women electors is more than that of men, there are only two women MPs in the state. 1. Alappuzha Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 15 Total electors: 1,261,564 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,56,816 Male electors: 6,04,748 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Aroor, Cherthala, Alappuzha, Ambalappuzha, Haripad, Kayamkulam, Karunagapally Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: Congress partys VM Sudheeran won the constituency in 1999 when it was called Allepey. In 2004, KS Manoj from CPI(M) was elected MP from the constituency. State Congress general secretary KC Venugopal won the election in 2009 and 2014, now called Alappuzha. Demographics: According to the Census 2011, Alappuzha has a population of 21,21,943. It was one of the worst-hit victims of the heavy rains and floods in August last year. Earlier, the district was recognised as a flood district. It has voted for the Congress for two consecutive elections but party veteran KC Venugopal will not be contesting this year. 2. Alathur Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 9 Total electors: 1,213,387 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,23,508 Male electors: 5,89,879 Reserved: Yes. For Scheduled Castes Delimited: Yes. The erstwhile Ottapalam constituency was dissolved in 2008. Its constituencies Chelakkara, Kunnamkulam and Wadakkancherry were added to the newly formed Alanthur constituency. Assembly Constituencies: Tarur (SC), Chittur, Nenmara, Alathur, Chelakkara (SC), Kunnamkulam, Wadakkancherry Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: Since the formation of this constituency, the CPM has held sway. PK Biju has been the elected MP since 2009. Demographics: Spread over the Thrissur and Palakkad districts, the constituency has been a CPM bastion from its Ottapalam days. Former President of India and Congress member KR Narayanan had been a three-time MP from Ottapalam. The LDF has decided to field sitting MP PK Biju from Alanthur. 3. Attingal Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 19 Total electors: 13.19 lakh (2019 estimates) Female electors: 7.05 lakh Male electors: 6.14 lakh Reserved: No Delimited: Yes. This constituency came into existence in 2008 Assembly Constituencies: Varkala, Attingal, Chirayinkeezhu, Nedumangad, Vamanapuram, Aruvikkara, Kattakkada Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: A Sampath of the CPM has been the sitting MP since 2009. Demographics: This has been a Left stronghold even before it came into existence in 2008. Prior to the delimitation exercise, this constituency was called Chirayinkil. Attingal has a significant working-class population. The population in Attingal includes estate workers in the hilly regions and coir workers and fishermen in the coastal regions. 4. Chalakudy Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 11 Total electors: 9,90,607 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 5,00,695 Male electors: 4,89,912 Reserved: No Delimited: Yes, formed in 2008. The Mukundapuram constituency was dissolved as part of the delimitations of constituencies order, 2008. It became an assembly segment in the newly formed Chalakudy constituency. Assembly Constituencies: Kaipamangalam, Chalakuddy, Kodungallur, Perumbavoor, ANgamaly, Aluva, Kunnathunad Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: KP Dhanapalam of Congress won the first Lok Sabha election for the constituency in 2009. Thereafter, independent candidate Innocent won the election in 2014. Demographics: Of the seven segments in this constituency, three falls under the Thrissur district and four under the Ernakulam district. While Thrissur has a population of 32 lakh, Ernakulam has a population of 33 lakh, according to the 2011 Census. LDF has decided to field film actor Innocent for a second term. 5. Ernakulam Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 12 Total electors: 1,155,081 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 5,90,165 Male electors: 5,64,916 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Kalamaserry, Paravur, Vypen, Kochi, Thrippunithura, Ernakulam, Thrikkakara Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: In 1999, Congress candidate George Eden was elected MP. In 2004, independent candidate Sebastian Paul was successful. After that, Congress held sway over this constituency. Both in 2009 and 2014 Congress candidate KV Thomas was elected MP. Demographics: The Latin Catholic community is influential in this constituency. They form at least half of the population here. Their influence can be gauged by the fact that the UDF and LDF, the two biggest formations in Kerala politics have always selected candidates belonging to this community. 6. Idukki Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 13 Total electors: 1,157,302 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 5,79,446 Male electors: 5,77,856 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Muvattupuzha, Kothamangalam, Devikulam (SC), Udumbanchola, Thodupuzha, Idukki, Peermade Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: Leader of the Kerala Congress (KEC) in 1999, F Francis George was elected MP from this constituency in 1999 and 2004 elections. Then Congress party member PT Thomas won the election in 2009. In 2014, independent candidate Joice George won a 46.60 majority and won the election. Demographics: Idukki is part of what is called the "Christian heartland" of Kerala. It is noted that this constituency has only elected Christian candidates since 1971 elections. The constituency is also known for its significant plantation workers, many of whom are of Tamil origin. 7. Kannur Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 2 Total electors: 1,161,364 ( 2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,19,694 Male electors: 5,41,670 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Taliparamba, Irikkur, Azhikode, Kannur, Dharmadam, Mattannur, Peravoor Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: In 1999, AP ABdullahkutty of the CPM won the election. He was re-elected in 2004. In 2009, Congress tasted success when candidate K Sudhakaran won the election. But CPM made a comeback in 2014 with the win of PK Sreemathi Teacher. Demographics: Kannur has been garnering media attention for the political violence between the RSS and the CPM. Kannur is one among the many constituencies where the BJP is looking to make inroads in the aftermath of the Sabarimala verdict. 8. Kasaragod Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 1 Total electors: 1,239,562 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,47,772 Male electors: 5,91,790 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Kasaragod, Kanhagad (SC), Payyanur, Manjeswar, Trikkaripur, Udma, Kalliasseri Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: The CPM holds fort in this constituency since the 1999 Lok Sabha elections. While T Govindan was the MP in 1999, P Karunakaran has been a three-time sitting MP since 2004. Demographics: Kasaragod, which lies on the border with Karnataka, has a sizeable Muslim population as well as a significant linguistic minority who belong to the Tulu speaking community. Kasaragod is often considered a part of Tulu Nadu, which also includes Karnataka's Mangalore and Udipi. 9. Kollam Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 18 Total electors: 1,214,771 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,42,404 Male electors: 5,72,367 Reserved: No Delimited: Yes. In 2008 Quilon constituency became Kollam. While Kunnathoor and Karunagapalli segments were removed, Punalur and Chadayamangalam segments were added to the newly formed one. Assembly Constituencies: Kollam, Punalur, Chavara, Chadayamangalam, Eravipuram, Kundara, Chathannoor Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: P Rajendran of the CPM was elected MP from the Quilon constituency in both 1999 and 2004. Congress partys N Peethambarakurup won the election in 2009. NK Premachandran from the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) defeated CPM heavyweight MA Baby to win the seat in 2014. Demographics: It is a considered a swing constituency which can go either to the LDF or the UDF. It has a sizeable population of plantation workers as well as a strong fishing community. Cashew industry is a significant player in this constituency. 10. Kozhikode Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 5 Total electors: 1,177,644 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,09,585 Male electors: 5,68,059 Reserved: No Delimited: Yes. The name of this constituency changed from Calicut to Kozhikode Assembly Constituencies: Balusseri, Elathur, Kozhikode North, Kozhikode South, Beypore, Kunnamangalam, Koduvally Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: While in 1999, Congress candidate M Muralidharan won the election, in 2004 it was MP Veerendra Kumar from the Janata Dal (Secular) who was elected MP. Since 2009, Congress leader MK Raghavan has been the sitting MP here. In 2009, Raghavan beat CPM candidate PA Mohammed Riyas by a mere 838 votes. Demographics: Kozhikode is largely an urban constituency, where development issues play an important role. In the wake of the Sabarimala protests, the BJP is expected to grab a significant chunk of Hindu voters, as per reports. 11. Malappuram Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 6 Total electors: 1,196,938 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,00,010 Male electors: 5,96,928 Reserved: No Delimited: Yes. In 2008, the erstwhile Manjeri constituency was dissolved and merged into the newly formed Malappuram constituency. Assembly Constituencies: Kondotty, Manjeri, Perinthalmanna, Mankada, Malappuram, Vengara, Vallikkunnu Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: In both 2009 and 2014, E Ahamed from the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) won the election. Demographics: Once the headquarters of the British and European troops, this district also falls in the Malabar region. The district has a Muslim majority. Almost 70 percent of the 4,110,956 people living here are Muslims. The IUML, which is the second largest part of the UDF, has managed to consolidate its place by wooing the majority population. 12. Mavelikkara Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 16 Total electors: 1,242,939 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,57,379 Male electors: 5,85,560 Reserved: Yes. For Scheduled Castes Delimited: Yes. In 2008, Kunnathur from the erstwhile Quilon constituency was merged with Mavelikkara. Assembly Constituencies: Changanassery, Kuttanad, Mavelikkara, Chengannur, Kunnathur, Kottarakkara, Pathanapuram Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: Ramesh Chennithara from Congress was elected as MP from here. In 2004, CPM won the seat. Candidate CS Sujatha was the MP. Congress made a comeback when Kodikkunnil Suresh won the election in 2009. He won the seat again in 2014. Demographics: Spread across the Kottayam, Alappuzha and Kollam district, this constituency has been a Congress bastion for two terms. The UDF plans to field sitting MP, BJP is trying to make an entry into the constituency. 13. Palakkad Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 8 Total electors: 1,205,601 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,20,457 Male electors: 5,85,144 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Pattambi, Shornur, Ottapalam, Kongad, Mannarkad, Malampuzha, Palakkad Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: The CPM has held this constituency since 1999. While NN Krishnadas was two-time MP since 1999, MB Rajesh won the seat in 2009 and 2014 elections. Both belong to CPM. Demographics: According to the 2011 Census, around 2,810,892 people live in the Palakkad district. While around 66 percent of them are Hindus, around 28.9 percent are Muslims. The constituency has been a CPM bastion since 1999. However, BJP, which rules in the Palakkad municipality, is looking to make an entry into the constituency. Party president Amit Shah recently flagged off campaigning from Palakkad. 14. Pathanamthitta Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 17 Total electors: 1,317,265 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,90,557 Male electors: 6,26,708 Reserved: No Delimited: Yes. In 2008, the Adoor constituency reserved for Scheduled Castes was dissolved to form a new constituency. Adoor is now an Assembly segment of newly formed Pathanamthitta constituency. Assembly Constituencies: Kanjirappally, Poonjar, Thiruvalla, Ranni, Aranmula, Konni, Adoor(SC) Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: In the 2004 elections, Congress candidate Anto Antony Punnathaniyil was elected MP from this constituency. He won a second time in the 2014 elections. Demographics: Pathanamthitta district has a population of 1,195,537, according to the Census 2011. Situated in the Travancore part of Kerala, this district has the highest literacy rate in the state (96.26 percent). Of the total population, 56.93 percent are Hindus and 38.12 percent are Christians. The constituency is witnessing anti-incumbency wave against Anto Antony Punnathaniyil and regional party workers, too, are against Antonys candidature. The grand old party is mulling pitching veteran leader PJ Kurien. 15. Ponnai Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 7 Total electors: 1,178,325 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,06,384 Male electors: 5,71,941 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Tirurangadi, Tanur, Tirur, Kottakkal, Thavanur, Ponnani, Thrithala Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: GM Bannatwala won the election in 1999. He was succeeded by E Ahamed. ET Muhammed Basheer has been the sitting MP since 2009. All three candidates belong to IUML. Demographics: Of the seven assembly constituencies, six fall in the Malappuram district. Only Thrithala comes under the Palakkad district. The constituency is a Muslim majority area and has been loyal to IUML. Sitting MP ET Muhammed Basheer will run for a third time in the 2019 elections. The Left Front has fielded sitting Nilambur MLA PV Anwar. The CPM politician took a beating last year after he was accused of illegal construction in a water park. 16. Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 20 Total electors: 1,267,340 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,56,714 Male electors: 6,10,626 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Kazhakkoottam, Vattiyoorkavu (SC), Thiruvananthapuram, Nemom, Parassala, Kovalam, Neyyattinkara Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: VS Sivakumar from trhe Congress won the seat in 1999. He was succeeded by PK Vasudevan Nair who was from the CPI. Thereafter, Congress took over the constituency with Shashi Tharoors win in both 2009 and 2014 elections. Demographics: Thiruvananthapuram has a population of 33,07,284, according to Census 2011. The capital city also has a sizeable population of Nairs, a point that BJP plans to use in its favour by pitching party veteran Kummanam Rajasekharan. He, too, is a Nair by caste and was serving as the Mizoram governor. The Communist party is likely to choose former minister C Divakaran. 17. Thrissur Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 10 Total electors: 1,273,724 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,68,326 Male electors: 6,05398 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Guruvayoor, Manalur, Ollur, Thrissur, Nattika (SC), Irinjalakkuda, Puthukkad Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: In the 1999 election, Congress candidate AC Jose was elected MP. In 2004 the constituency was taken over by CPI when CK Chandrappan won a majority. He was succeeded by PC Chacko from the Congress in 2009. In 2014, CPI made a comeback when CN Jayadevan won a majority. Demographics: Thrissur has a population of 31,10,327, with 58.4 percent Hindus and 24.27 percent Christians. Bharath Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS) leader Thushar Vellappally has announced that he will contest the election from this constituency. The BDJS is backed by the BJP, which aims to appease the Ezhava and Thiya community. The BDJS was created with the aim to help develop these communities. 18. Vadakara Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 3 Total electors: 1,175,415 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,20,321 Male electors: 5,55,694 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Thalassery, Kuthuparamba, Vadakara, Kuttiadi, Nadapuram, Quilandy, Perambra Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: AK Premajam from the CPM won the 1999 election and P Satheedevi, also from CPM, won the 2004 electionn. In 2009, Congress took over the seat. Party candidate Mullappally Ramachandran won from the constituency in 2009 and 2014. Demographics: This constituency is spread over Kannur and Kozhikode districts. Over the past decades, voters have swayed between CPM and Congress. In the last two elections, Congress-led UDF held a majority in this constituency. 19. Kottayam Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 14 Total electors: 1,158,819 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 587,001 Male electors: 5,71,808 Reserved: No Delimited: No Assembly Constituencies: Piravom, Pala, Kaduthurthy, Vaikom, Ettumanoor, Kottayam, Puthupally Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: In the 1999 and 2004 elections, Suresh Kurup from CPM was elected MP. In 2009, Kerala Congress (M) took over the seat. Jose K Mani, son of party president KM Mani, won the election in both 2009 and 2014. He was, however, nominated to the Rajya Sabha and the seat is currently vacant. Demographics: Kottayam has a population of 19,79,384, of which 49.81 percent are Hindus and 43.48 percent are Christians. This constituency is the only seat won by Kerala Congress (M) in the state. The party is a part of the UDF and has decided to give the ticket to Thomas Chazhikkadan for the upcoming election. 20. Wayanad Lok Sabha Constituency Constituency number: 4 Total electors: 1,247,029 (2014 estimates) Female electors: 6,33,995 Male electors: 6,13,034 Reserved: No Delimited: Yes. The constituency was formed in 2008. Assembly Constituencies: Mananthavady(ST), Sulthanbathery(ST), Kalpetta, Thiruvambady, Eranad, Nilambur, Wandoor Results in last four Lok Sabha elections: In the 2009 elections, MI Shanavas from the Congress party won the election. Shanavas repeated his feat again in 2014 elections. After Shanavas death in 2018, the seat is vacant. Demographics: Considered less developed than its other counterparts in Kerala, the Wayanad constituency is tribal dominated and rural in landscape. Wayanad constituency is dominated by Muslims, with various estimates of their population ranging between 40 to 60 percent. The dominance of minority voters became a point of heated discussion after Congress president Rahul Gandhi was named the candidate for Wayanad. Further, taking a jibe at the chief minister Naveen Patnaik-led government, Modi said the development in Odisha could have been accelerated had there been a BJP government. Upping the ante against the Congress and the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD), Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused the Opposition during an election rally in Odisha's Kalanhandi district Tuesday of deceiving the poor and treating them as "vote-bank". Addressing an election rally at Bhawanipatna in Odisha's Kalahandi, Modi highlighted the "positive changes" brought by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. "I want to ask the eight lakh poor families in Odisha who got houses. Who gave them this? Twenty-four lakh people in Odisha got free electricity connection. Who removed this darkness? Odisha's 40 lakh women got free LPG connection. Who gave them this? One crore and 40 lakh people in Odisha got bank accounts opened. Who did this? No Modi did not do this. Your one vote did all this," the prime minister said. PM Narendra Modi in Kalahandi, Odisha: 24 lakh houses in Odisha have got free electricity connection. After 70 yrs of independence, 3000 villages of Odisha got electricity for the first time. All of these things werent done by Modi, Indias voters are the ones who made it happen pic.twitter.com/23IpOnTDdz ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 Modi also claimed that his government has successfully installed sanitation facilities for the poor and facilitated banking schemes. "All these works have been done by your vote, not by Modi, I am just a sevak. Your vote has brought a new progress in India," Modi said. Further, taking a jibe at the Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik-led government, Modi said the development in Odisha could have been accelerated had there been a BJP government. "Parties like Congress and BJD conspired to keep the poor of the country poor, they deceived the poor. They treated them as vote-banks; and because of this dont know how many Dana Manjhis don't even get ambulance," the prime minister said. Modi urged voters in Odisha to "repeat history" which was created by Uttar Pradesh in 2017 and Tripura in 2018. "I have worked for you despite no cooperation of state government, this watchman has taken advantage of Centre's schemes to help Odiyas. I urge Odiyas to vote for BJP, repeat history created by Uttar Pradesh in 2017 and Tripura in 2018," Modi said. Narendra Modi lambasted the opposition parties for seeking proof of military operations against terror camps and remarked they appear spokespersons for Pakistan Jamui: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday lambasted the opposition parties for seeking proof of military operations against terror camps and remarked they appear spokespersons for Pakistan more than political parties representing India. Addressing his maiden rally in Bihar after announcement of Lok Sabha polls, Modi said the electorate must decide whether they want the madadgars (helpers) of Pakistan to be in power, those who are out to destroy the morale of armed forces by seeking proofs. He also hit out at National Conference leader Omar Abdullah for advocating restoration of the post of Prime Minister in Jammu and Kashmir, saying can any country have more than one Prime Minister. "I would like the Congress and the RJD, which are part of the same mahamilavat gang, to come clean on the issue," he said. The PM has been mocking mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) of opposition parties as mahamilavat (highly adulterated). "They appear more like spokespersons for Pakistan than political parties representing India," the PM said launching a scathing attack at the rivals for their comments post-Pulwama terror attack. The Prime Minister alleged that whenever the Congress has come to power in the country, whether on its own or heading an alliance, governance has gone into reverse gear. Growth rate has dropped while there has been a surge in terrorist activities, violence and accumulation of black money. In a veiled attack on parties like Lalu Prasad's RJD, Modi said those who always swore by the name of JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) are now sitting in the lap of the Congress. In an apparent rebuttal of the RJD's repeated allegation that his government was planning to do away with reservations to forward the RSS agenda, he said let alone Modi, nobody can abolish quotas. "We have provided 10 per cent reservations for the economically weaker sections among the general category, but we have done so without diluting reservations for SCs, STs and OBCs," he pointed out. "With elections approaching, they have begun to scare you with the false propaganda that Modi is out here to do away with reservations. The fact is, we granted constitutional status to the OBC commission despite hurdles created from their side," the Prime Minister alleged. "It is a matter of pride for all of us that after getting the constitutional status, the first person to be heading the body Bhagwan Das Sahni hails from this state," Modi said. "They have suddenly discovered the virtues of Ambedkar on whom they had only heaped insults during his lifetime. The father of the Constitution got Bharat Ratna, in recognition of his invaluable contribution to the making of modern India, by our government. Five places associated with Ambedkar, including London, are being developed as panch teerth (five places of pilgrimage) by my government," Modi added. Modi's maiden election rally in the state was held in the Lok Sabha segment represented by Chirag Paswan, son of Union minister Ramvilas Paswan and the heir apparent of BJP's alliance partner Lok Janshakti Party. "You know what depths Bihar had sunken into under the RJD's rule. The team of Nitish Kumar and Sushil Kumar Modi had made great efforts to pull Bihar out of the deep rut. A lot more still needs to be done and for that we need your blessings," he said. In keeping with his rousing style of oratory, Modi ended his brief address by making the crowds chant along with him 'main bhi Chowkidar, gali gali mein chowkidar' an obvious riposte to Congress president Rahul Gandhi's oft-repeated slogan 'chowkidar chor hai'. Delhi goes to polls on 12 May, and the lack of clarity on the AAP-Congress alliance is a testament to the ideological bifurcations within the political narratives adopted by both parties. On Sunday, Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal and Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee had attended a poll rally in Visakhapatnam to back their Andhra Pradesh counterpart N Chandrababu Naidu. With the trio sharing the dais, the rally showcased Opposition unity ahead of the Lok Sabha election. However, the possibility of the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) joining hands in Delhi to stop the BJP from coming to power has been hanging by a thread, even though both the ruling party and the party whose three-term government AAP ousted are both in the Opposition in national politics. One argument that makes the alliance necessary for AAP is that voters might keep the broader "Rahul Gandhi versus Narendra Modi" narrative in mind and make AAP's hyper-local outreach irrelevant. Addressing three public meetings in Delhi on Monday evening, Kejriwal appealed to Delhi-ites to vote for AAP with the aim to make the city a full state and not get caught up in deciding who the next prime minister will be. The Muslim vote bank is another argument. Nearly 12 percent of Delhi's population is Muslim. The community mostly comprises Congress supporters, but AAP got 77 percent of the Muslim votes in the 2015 Delhi Assembly election. At that point, the Congress had weakened in the National Capital, and many had tactically voted for AAP to reject the BJP. This might not be the case today because Muslim voters may want to improve Congress' presence nationally and return to its old loyalties. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, AAP secured 56 percent of Muslim votes, while Congress got 39 percent and BJP, 2 percent. So essentially, a party that came to power winning 67 of the 70 seats in the Vidhan Sabha election has been seeking an alliance with the grand old party that had failed to secure a single seat in the same election. Such is the irony of Delhi politics. On Tuesday, while releasing the Congress manifesto in New Delhi, party president Rahul Gandhi responded to a question on the possible alliance with AAP, saying there was "no confusion on the issue". The Congress is very clear on the matter, has constructed alliances and is open to more alliances, he said. While he did not decline the possibility of an alliance with AAP, he shifted the focus away from this particular alliance towards alliances in general. The Congress has been indecisive about allying with AAP because of the split within its Delhi camp. While party leaders PC Chacko and Ajay Maken are for the alliance and are talking about the two parties trying to reach a consensus, former Chief Minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit is opposed to the idea and is seen contesting AAP's views on statehood for Delhi, its primary poll plank. Less than 24 hours before Rahul's press conference, AAP Delhi convenor Gopal Rai had responded to a question about reports of the Congress supposedly offering a 4-3 seat-sharing arrangement in Delhi. "Which formula?" he said. "The one that is running on TV? TV channels are reporting that the Congress has offered a 3-3-1 or 4-3 formula in Delhi, three seats in Haryana and zero seats in Punjab. If they proposed zero seats, how is that an offer?" The only two seats that AAP is likely to offer the Congress are Chandni Chowk and West Delhi. The former is traditionally a Congress domain except in 1977 when Sikandar Bakht won on a Janata Party ticket, when BJP's Tara Chand Khandelwal in won in 1991, and Vijay Goel won by slim margins in 1998 and 1999. After AAP announced that party leader Balbir Singh Jakhar was its candidate from West Delhi, Rai had said that AAP had waited for a long time, hoping the Congress would respect the mood of the nation to rid the country of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo. Moreover, Kejriwal is neither likely to risk losing his trader votes by giving up on Brajesh Goyal's New Delhi seat, nor is he likely to disappoint Gugan Singh Ranga's North West Delhi seat because he helped him ace the Bawana bypoll. Multiple seat-sharing calculations are doing the rounds and are being understood as the main cause for the delay in the alliance. Also, the ideological friction between the two parties is evident to Delhi voters, which means that the longer they take to come to a decision, the more desperate the alliance will seem. On Monday, senior AAP leader Sanjay Singh said the Congress is more interested in ending regional parties contesting against the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party combine in Uttar Pradesh, against the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and Left parties in Kerala instead of defeating the BJP. Such repeated war of words on public fora drastically bring down the gravity of the alliance. Delhi goes to polls on 12 May, and the lack of clarity on the alliance is a testament to the ideological bifurcations within the political narratives adopted by both parties. The district magistrate of Ghaziabad has been asked to furnish a report on the matter of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath referring to the Indian Army as Modi ji ki sena. New Delhi: The Election Commission Monday took cognizance of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yodi Adityanath referring to the Indian Army as 'Modi ji ki sena'. The district magistrate of Ghaziabad has been asked to furnish a report in this regard, a functionary said. #WATCH UP CM Yogi Adityanath in Ghaziabad: Congress ke log aatankvadiyon ko biryani khilate the aur Modi ji ki sena aatankvadiyon ko goli aur gola deti hai...Congress ke log Masood Azhar jaise aatankvadiyon ke sath 'ji' laga kar aatankvad ko protsahit karte hain, yahi antar hai pic.twitter.com/ScHCNYxgX7 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) March 31, 2019 The report will be submitted to the office of chief electoral officer of Uttar Pradesh which has sought the details after taking cognizance of media reports in this regard. "Congress ke log aatankwadiyon ko biryani khilate they aur Modi ji ki sena aatankwadiyon ko goli aur gola deti hai. (Congress would feed biryani to terrorists, while Modi's army gives them bullets and bombs)," Adityanath said at an election rally in Ghaziabad on Sunday. "This is the difference. The Congress people use 'ji' to refer to Masood Azhar to encourage terrorism," Adityanath further said. said at an election rally in Ghaziabad on Sunday. The chief minister was campaigning for sitting MP and Union minister VK Singh. The Election Commission had on 19 March asked political parties to "desist" from indulging in any propaganda involving actions taken by defence forces during their Lok Sabha poll campaigns. The fresh advisory came days after the poll panel asked parties and their candidates against using pictures of defence force personnel in their campaign material. "...parties or candidates are advised that their campaigners/candidates should desist, as part of their election campaigning, from indulging in any political propaganda involving activities of defence forces," it said. The poll body said the new advisory was in continuation to its earlier one on use of pictures of defence personnel in campaigning. Kanishk Karan and Ben Nimmo On 1 April, Facebook took down over 700 assets that were posting partisan content on Indian politics ahead of the countrys national elections, ruling that they had engaged in coordinated inauthentic behaviour. A number of large pages on Facebook and Instagram supported the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); several dozen smaller Facebook pages were linked to the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress (INC). Social media are already a major battleground in Indias pre-election fervour. The BJP has long been accused of running deceptive social-media accounts and disinformation campaigns from inside its so-called IT cells. The INC is reported to have followed suit, although the latter operation is allegedly suffering from internal disputes. In a blog post, Facebook explained three separate and unrelated actions, which included: We removed 687 Facebook Pages and accounts the majority of which had already been detected and disabled by our automated systems that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior in India and were linked to individuals associated with an IT Cell of the Indian National Congress (INC). We removed 15 Facebook Pages, Groups and accounts that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior in India and were linked to individuals associated with an Indian IT firm, Silver Touch. We removed 321 Facebook Pages and accounts in India that have broken our rules against spam. Unlike the first three actions, this last activity does not represent a single or coordinated operation instead, these are multiple sets of Pages and accounts that behaved similarly and violated our policies. The pro-BJP assets carried vitriolic posts against opposition leaders and managed to garner high engagement, while the INC-linked assets pushed satirical posts but garnered moderate engagement. The fact that partisans on both sides resorted to such tactics is a troubling feature. It suggests that such inauthentic behaviour may increasingly be considered a necessary part of political campaigning, with the expectation that the other side will also be conducting such activity. That, in turn, suggests that the platforms, and voters, will continue to face more challenges from more directions, as they try to distinguish between genuine and inauthentic content. Simultaneously, Facebook took down a set of Indian pages that posted spam and a set of pages linked to Pakistan that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB). The DFRLab analyzed the Indian and Pakistan pages engaged in CIB, but not the spam pages. The India Eye The takedown included two pro-BJP pages called The India Eye, which Facebook removed from its own platform and Instagram. These were significant assets: by the time of the takedown, the Facebook page had over 2 million followers. According to The Wire, The India Eye was connected to an Indian IT company called Silver Touch Technologies Ltd, which also created Prime Minister Narendra Modis official app. The page was strongly nationalist, a vocal supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and a critic of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. Last year, AltNews, an open-source fact-checking outlet, reported that a related website called theindiaeye.com was hosted on Silver Touch servers. Silver Touch managers denied having anything to do with the website or the Facebook page, but Facebooks statement attributed the page to individuals associated with Silver Touch. The page was created in 2016. It went through several name changes in the first two weeks of its existence, suggesting that the operation was experimenting with branding. Even after several regional media outlets reported that the page was spreading false information related to Indian politics, the engagements on posts kept increasing, with a significant uptick from June 2018 onward. On occasion, the page held events, including quiz nights aimed at celebrating the BJPs hold on power. These events started with little success, but gained more engagement over time, up into the low thousands. Overall, the notoriety of this page, as well as its high follower count, suggest that it was a significant asset. It engaged its users with partisan and polarizing content, posing as an independent outlet while serving the interests of the governing party. Its removal a few weeks prior to the election eliminates an important player from the pre-election landscape, but it highlights the willingness of the BJPs supporters to engage in large-scale inauthentic behaviour to push their message across. The India Eye Facebook page had a counterpart on Instagram. After Indian media began writing about the Facebook page, the page redirected its activity toward Instagram, opting for more visual content with fewer words, and even fewer sources. One of the most engaged posts presented a polarizing narrative of one of Prime Minister Narendras recent speeches on corruption. The post suggested that, during the speech, Indian media outlets focused their cameras on the INC, as if confirming the allegations of corruption plaguing the party. The post provided no corroborating evidence for the claim, and used a collage graphic of three distinct images rather than video footage. The page used popular hashtags, such as #like4like and #follow4follow on Instagram, to push its messages across political filter hashtags and to attract a wider following. This is a common tactic of hyper-partisan and spam accounts. Despite this, compared with the Facebook page, the Instagram page had far fewer followers, perhaps in part because it did not live up to its promise to follow users who followed it. The page followed only 12 accounts, including government offices and senior BJP politicians. tech2 News Staff In an attempt to mend its tarnished reputation as far as dissemination of news is considered, Facebook has said that the company could start employing editors to select high-quality news to show to users. Facebook could potentially have a direct relationship with publishers in order to make sure that their content is available, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg, while speaking with Mathias Doepfner, CEO of Germanys top news publishing house, Axel Springer. The discussion was part of his personal challenge for 2019 where Zuckerberg said he will host regular public discussions about the future of technology in society. In an hour-long video posted on Facebook, Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is considering to pay news publishers for sending curated content on this news section so as to reward, high-quality, trustworthy content. This product has said to be in development for some time and it should be ready to use by the end of this year. This news feature will have a separate section of Facebook and is said to run parallel alongside its long-established news feed feature. "Were coming to this from a very different perspective than I think some of the other players in the space who view news as a way that they want to maximize their revenue. Thats not necessarily the way that were thinking about this. said Zuckerberg. In his estimate, Zuckerberg says that 10-20 percent of Facebook's two billion users would be interested in this news feature as many people would like to know what's happening with their friends rather than read quality journalism. Up until now, Facebook has not paid publishers for news material, saying that they should be grateful for the additional traffic being sent their way via the social media giant's network. Now the company wants to have "a direct relationship with publishers to make sure that their content is available if its really high-quality content. The company could still entice publishers with ad revenue bolstered by minimum guarantees, says a report by Recode. In the wake of Facebook being accused of not checking 'fake news' on its platform, it would be a welcome change if the company provides its audience with verifiable news that gives readers with a clearer picture and not muddles information. With input from Reuters. Despite minor shortcomings, it beats the Pixel 3 as an overall package. Samsung has launched a mini version of its flagship Galaxy S series after many, many years. The last time a mini version of the Galaxy came to India was four years ago in 2014 and it was a watered-down variant of the Galaxy S5. But the Galaxy S10e is no watered-down mini variant of the S10. You get the same performance, RAM and storage that are as good as the bigger Galaxy S10, but in a smaller, hand-friendly package. Its less of a mini and more of compact that Sony is used to delivering with their flagship Xperia series. The S10e looks classier than the Pixel 3 (which features last years Qualcomm 845 chipset) and it also shoots better video. The only thing the Pixel 3 does better than the Galaxy s10e is photos and it shoots some really good looking Portraits, that no Android smartphone is able to match with its machine learning bits. But the S10e comes close and does offer a much better video which easily makes this the better buy, or as I would put it, the best S10 to buy this year. Classy, minimal and hand-friendly design The Samsung Galaxy S10e is hands-down the best-looking compact Android smartphone I have seen till date. The glass and metal construction in the Prism White colour looks gorgeous and feels premium. Its not fancy or loud, but just too damn classy. Obviously, its size is the highlight, which for once, allows for one-handed usage of an Android smartphone. The Pixel 3 comes close, but it is taller which still makes it a two-handed device. This baby Galaxy also comes with an IP 68 rating, features dual speakers, a 3,100 mAh battery and a 3.5 mm headphone jack, all in that tiny package! The only other smartphone that comes close to this one-handed Android experience is Google's Pixel 3. But the bezels on the Pixel 3 make it look far more outdated than the Galaxys sleek and modern look. A proper bezel-less display experience The Galaxy S10es AMOLED 5.8-inch display is a flat one and does not curve around the edges like on the S10 or the S10+ models. The flat display also makes it more comfortable to read the text (does not wrap around the edges), watch movies and is less distracting overall as compared to the S10 and the S10+. Honestly, I dont know why Samsung even makes those curved edge displays anymore, because they dont even curve half-way around the edges as the Galaxy Note Edge did. And the Note Edge used the curved edge for displaying notifications. The Dynamic AMOLED Infinity - O display also packs in the same HDR10+ certification as the Galaxy S10 and S10+. Dynamic AMOLED basically delivers richer colours and very high contrast ratios getting you the darkest blacks (a theoretical contrast ratio 2,000,000:1) possible on a mobile device. And this comes of use when watching HDR content on video streaming services like Netflix. It does not get in your way like an iPhone Xs gigantic notch and unlike the S10+s dual camera cutout, its quite small so you wont notice it at all. Like the S10 and the S10+, the S10e is quite possibly the best AMOLED display you can get on an Android smartphone and easily beats the one on the Pixel 3. Everything within your thumbs reach One UI is great and has already been optimised to run on big (6.4-inch) displays, so it feels absolutely delightful to use on a much smaller display of the S10e. Everything is within your thumbs reach and the UI somehow feels faster and more fluid than the Galaxy S10+ (possibly because of the FHD+ display). Its got a dark mode that can be scheduled to turn on and off or can be set to follow sunrise and sunset. Everything else is pretty much the same as it was on the Galaxy S10+, which is pretty much the same you can get on most of Samsungs premium flagships (Galaxy S9 S10+) with a software update. Against the Google Pixel 3, Id actually pick One UI because its far more customisable. But not for timely software updates. Top-notch performance When it comes to performance, my biggest gripe with the Galaxy S10+ was its in-display ultrasonic fingerprint reader, which didnt work as expected. On the S10e, the capacitive fingerprint reader (which doubles up as the power button) is a much-welcomed change and it works flawlessly. With the Exynos 9820 SoC and an FHD+ resolution display, there are fewer pixels to push, which brings a noticeable boost in gaming performance as compared to the bigger S10+. There is no lag and no stuttering and whole UI feels quite fluid. Audio quality is pretty loud and quite clear, but it still doesnt match up to the new iPhones in terms of bass delivery. The S10e still has one of the best speakers you can get on an Android smartphone. Oh, and did I mention that there is a headphone jack on the S10e? Something a few Android devices and no iOS device has on offer in the premium smartphone range. Courage! Decent photos, but great video Camera quality is pretty good but somehow cannot match the Google Pixel 3 when it comes to the finer details in photos the Pixel 3 has set a benchmark on that front, which few smartphones can match. The S10e still showcases a better dynamic range than the Pixel 3 even though its photos look abnormally brighter as less contrasted. In low light theres noise and the details also take a hit. But these photos are far better than what you will get on any smartphone in this price range. The ultra-wide angle lens despite not featuring autofocus is useful, but you have to keep your subjects away from the edges as theres noticeable lens barrel distortion. You can check out the camera samples from the Samsung Galaxy S10e in the carousel below or simply click here to check out the album on Flickr. Samsung has a software fix to kill the flex, but they look a bit abnormal considering that just the edges are straightened out and not the whole image. Selfies on the S10e come out quite detailed and most would be satisfied by them, provided they have never used a Pixel 3. Video quality is class-leading and the best you can get from an Android smartphone in this price range. In low light or dim light, it all depends on the resolution and frame rate you choose. I would recommend sticking to FHD 30 fps as the output features less noise in low light and also lets you shoot HDR10+ video, which looks quite good on the smartphones display. You will have to export these into regular HDR10 video to view them on other platforms or devices. Super Slow Motion at 960 fps is fantastic provided the lighting conditions are right and so is the Super Steady mode which offers the best in class stabilisation and something that no other smartphone currently offers. Best battery on a small premium flagship Google only sent us a Pixel 3 XL unit for review so I really cannot comment on which of these two hand-sized premium flagships is better. But Samsung S10e does deliver around 6 hours of screen on time, which is pretty darn good for a small smartphone with a 3,100 mAh battery. And this is using the optimised mode which does not throttle the processor and the displays brightness, and with Androids Adaptive battery setting switched on. On a heavy work day with plenty of calls, the S10e almost gets through with 15 percent juice left. On weekends, where I rarely pick up calls but focus more on apps, games and a couple of photos, the phone easily gets me through a day with about 20 percent left to spare. The in-box 10 W adaptive charger works well for this smaller battery but still is not the fastest one around. If you are coming from a large-screen smartphone, you will be a bit disappointed, but the phone is still quite usable and you have to give it a week before the adaptive battery will start to figure out your usage patterns. Indeed, theres only so much you can squeeze into a smartphone this tiny. Verdict and price in India The Samsung Galaxy S10e falls short on the camera just like its eldest sibling, the Galaxy S10+. But its pretty darn good at being a compact flagship that allows for one-handed use. If you are in the market for a premium Android smartphone, you literally have two options to choose from, the Galaxy S10e and the Pixel 3. While the Pixel 3 brings a stock Android experience and almost DSLR-like photography, the Galaxy S10e makes up for everything else. From allowing you to select navigation keys or gestures you want (Pixel does not allow that) to the way you want them placed (nope not this either) to a system-wide dark mode (nope) that is again customisable and even letting you choose your own font (not here yet)! And then theres that Super Steady video that will amaze anyone. And its all available in a lovable, one-handed, bezel-less design that even includes a headphone jack with more RAM and more storage (6GB + 128 GB) than the competiton. Why would I buy anything else at Rs 55,900? 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. tech2 News Staff Researchers at ETH Zurich have demonstrated a new, cheaper and faster way of building genomes than ever before. The team created the first fully computer-generated DNA sequence "Caulobacter ethensis-2.0" which doesn't correspond to a living, existing organism.... yet. But, the genome sequence was constructed into a physical DNA molecule and placed inside an existing organism with a similar genetic sequence. The synthetic C. ethensis-2.0 is based on the genome of a well-researched, harmless species of freshwater bacteria known as Caulobacter crescentus. In nature, the bacterium thrives in spring water, rivers and lakes worldwide but isn't pathogenic, i.e., it doesn't infect plants or animals. It is often picked up as a model organism by scientists studying life processes in bacteria. The genome of C. crescentus has roughly 4,000 genes, only 680 of which are crucial to its survival, an earlier study has shown. Bacteria with this minimal genome seemed to be viable and functional when artificially recreated in a laboratory. A pair of ETH researchers have now taken this minimal genome of C. crescentus to another level chemically synthesising it from scratch as a single, continuous ring-shaped chromosome. Prior to this study, bringing an artificial genome 'alive' was seen as a tour de force. Their interests were two-fold: to make it much easier to make synthetic genomes, and to address the fundamental question of whether synthetic biology can create "living", functional organisms akin to natural biology. But one of the two researchers that led the project said that it was also intended as a test of our understanding of genetics. "Our method is a litmus test to see whether we biologists have correctly understood genetics, and it allows us to highlight possible gaps in our knowledge," Beat Christen, one of the lead researchers from ETH Zurich, said in a press release. Only 580 of the 680 artificial genes engineered in the synthetic genome functioned normally, and researchers intend to troubleshoot before giving it another go. "With the knowledge, we have gained, it will be possible for us to improve our algorithm and develop a fully functional genome version 3.0," Christen added. Artificial microorganisms have many potential applications, including in biotechnology to produce complex pharmaceutically-active molecules and vitamins and the production of DNA vaccines. It can also be universally applied in any microorganisms, and not just Caulobacter. The technology could bring down the cost of creating and sequencing DNA sequences and the likelihood of mutations, simply because the probability of errors becomes lower with shorter sequences. As promising as the results of the study appear, it opens up ethical and moral questions akin to gene editing technology CRISPR. Are we ready to create synthetic life forms? Well, the ETH Zurich researchers "stand ready to contribute to that discussion" whenever the rest of us are. tech2 News Staff NASA's new TESS exoplanet-hunting mission is getting a lot of help from the astronomers studying distant stars. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida in 2018. The main objective of the mission is to hunt for potential exoplanets and worlds in other solar systems than our own. TESS has four powerful cameras onboard that are making month-long observations of regions in the sky. The telescope has divided the visible universe into 26 vertical strips of the sky starting with the southern hemisphere and then moving over to the northern. In two years, researchers expect TESS will have scanned 85 percent of the sky for potential exoplanets. Asteroseismologists astronomers who study seismic waves, or "starquakes", in stars look at changes in brightness of distant stars, which can often give critical information about newly-discovered planets orbiting it. By looking at how the host star oscillates (specifically, its light intensity), astronomers have discovered and characterised the first planet identified by TESS TOI 197.01, which is short for "TESS Object of Interest." In a new study in the Astronomical Journal, researchers describe the planet as a "hot Saturn" since it has a size roughly that of Saturn's and is also very close to its host star. It completes an orbit of its star in just 14 days and is, therefore, scorching hot. "This is the first bucketful of water from the firehose of data were getting from TESS," Steve Kawaler, co-author of the study from the Iowa State University, told Futurity. Astronomers looked through images from TESS looking for transits tiny dips in the light intensity from a star when an orbiting planet passes in front of it. NASAs Kepler Mission the predecessor to TESS hunted for planets the same way TESS does now, except that it scanned only a narrow sliver of the vast Milky Way galaxy and only focused on distant stars. In another recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers from the TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium (TASC) has compiled a target list of almost 25,000 Sun-like stars (many of which are similar to our own Sun, albeit, a little older) to explore further using data from TESS. Astronomers from TASC use "asteroseismic modelling" to estimate how big, heavy or old a host star is. This data can also be combined with other observations and measurements to reveal properties about the planets orbiting it. Researchers estimate, based on its oscillations, that host star TOI-197 is about 5 billion years old and a little heavier and larger than our Sun. They also find that planet TOI-197.01 is a gas giant nine times the size of Earth approximately the size of Saturn. "TOI-197 provides a first glimpse at the strong potential of TESS to characterise exoplanets using asteroseismology," the astronomers write in their paper. TESS may also allow astronomers to look at very faint stars white dwarfs that represent the future of our Sun and solar system. At the time, pundits speculated that the record number of candidates may have discouraged people from making an initial choice before the runoff narrowed their options. Yet, similarly dismal turnout seen Tuesday may indicate that some voters who participated in the primary chose to sit this round out, Allen said during a conference call with reporters before polls closed at 7 p.m. The Conversation If there is one thing Twitter has taught us, its that the world loves a question that sounds stupid, but actually has a profound and interesting answer. For instance, what would happen if the world suddenly turned into blueberries, as answered by physics recently. Or what colour is that dress? In a similar way, perception scientists have recently been fighting it out on Twitter to answer the seemingly trivial question of: which is the best sense, and why?. The debate has opened up some surprisingly deep questions like what actually makes a sense more or less valuable? And, are some senses fundamentally more important in making us human? The question was also put to a poll. While most people would probably assume the obvious winner is vision, somatosensation which we normally refer to as touch but technically incorporates all sensations from our body took the day. But does this vote hold up when you take a closer look at the scientific evidence? Losing your body We need somatosensation to move successfully seemingly more so than vision. While a big claim, it is arguably backed up by the rare handful of cases where this sense is lost. "Deafferented" patients are individuals who have lost most (or all) touch sensation, as well as the ability to sense the position (proprioception) and movement (kinesthesia) of their limbs. This may occur because the body attacks its own somatosensory nerves in post-infection autoimmune reaction, though in most cases the cause is unclear. While there is no direct dysfunction in the patients motor systems, most sufferers cannot complete even the most basic of movements. Thats because the brain must feel the bodys starting position to create the right motor plan, and needs sensory feedback to know if the plan was executed successfully. Despite these barriers, one patient, dubbed "IW", shocked medical experts by regaining the ability to walk. He achieved this feat by meticulously planning what muscles to contract, in what order before moving then staring at his limbs to track his success. This strategy is highly cognitively demanding, and not at all the norm, with most patients bound to wheelchairs. Many foodies might think that taste gets their vote for top sense. However, those who have tried eating after dental anaesthetic can attest to the risks and difficulties of eating without somatosensation a challenge described by the deafferented patient "GL" in the scientific literature. Another subcomponent of somasensation is the vestibular system, which is critical in keeping us upright. If you have ever been motion sick, you have a tiny insight into what happens when this critical system goes awry. In short, your eyes tell the brain you are moving, but your vestibular system says you are still causing a conflict that can lead to vertigo, nausea and loss of balance. Pain and temperature perception also get lumped in with somatosensation, failing to fit into any other category. Being born without sensitivity to pain is rare (around 45 documented cases) and highly dangerous. Some experts speculate the incidence may actually be largely underestimated, as sufferers dont survive long enough to be documented. This is because pain tells you something is directly impinging on your body in a bad way, and you better react fast. Patients must self-check multiple times daily, to prevent infection from cuts they havent noticed. Touch forms a core part of our humanity. It is the first sense to develop in a fetus in utero, and some suggest the integration of sensations related to the body may form the basis of our fundamental self-consciousness. The touch of another can also reduce anxiety, influence our behaviour, shape brain development and reduce brain responses to pain in babies. We even have a dedicated set of nerves that preferentially process "social" and "emotional" touch. Vision versus touch On the other hand, looking from a neuroscience perspective, it is easy to see (no pun intended) why vision almost won the poll. The brain seems to have a vision focus. The primary brain area for processing visual stimuli, the visual cortex, takes up the largest area of any individual sense. Partly because of this vast processing resource, vision is the most acute sense we have for various kinds of discrimination. The high reliability of vision means that if there is a conflict between what two senses say, vision will typically warp our final perception to be in line with the visual information. In the famous rubber hand illusion, stroking a realistic dummy hand in front of a person (and hiding their own hand) can make the person feel as if it is their own hand that is being stroked with vision hijacking their sense of touch. Similar things happen when you conflict hearing with vision. Vision also allows reading, writing and art. You can see the faces of your loved ones, or danger coming from far away. But maybe we only think vision is so crucial because it is at the very forefront of our daily experience. As Kevin Wright, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Oregon Health and Science University, who posted the best sense poll, states people may simply perceive the loss of vision as being more life affecting because we are more aware of our vision as opposed to our somatosensory function. And the rest So are the other senses really less important? Our sense of smell is incredibly ancient and complex. If order indicates anything, smell is a form of chemoreception which is thought to have been the first sense to evolve in our early multicellular ancestors. Smell is the only sense that bypasses our brains sensory relay system going straight to the cortex for processing. Smell works together with taste to stop you eating spoiled or poisonous foods. Smell is also strongly linked to autobiographical memory, therefore forming a core part of the processes that maintain our identity. And hearing is better than both touch and vision for detecting danger coming up behind you. And it is certainly better than vision in the dark. And no hearing, no music. Enough said. At the end of the day, somatosensation gets my vote because it keeps me upright, moving and alive more so than the others. Looking to the future, however, I am excited to see how sensory substitution technology might upend our assessments of what sense is more or less important. As science reveals, for instance, that with the right device you can learn to see with touch or sound. Harriet Dempsey-Jones, Postdoctoral Researcher in Cognitive Neurosciences, UCL This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Beijing's latest self-congratulatory document, Democratic Reform in Tibet 60 Years On, is an attempt to arrest not just the revival of global interest on Tibet issue but also dismiss Dalai Lama's latest assertions that the next Buddha reincarnation may be found in India Beijing has just brought out a more than usual self-congratulatory document. The State Council Information Office issued the "Democratic Reform in Tibet 60 Years On" highlighting its role in helping Tibetans become 'master of their own affairs'. China does these exercises from time to time. An earlier iteration was in 2009 and was based on the same broad assumptions that Tibet was in a state of extreme misery and poverty before the Communist Party of China came and rescued it. Horrifying accounts of the extreme misery of the Tibetan people is now followed by a more subtle presentation of history. The exploitation of the Tibetans, according to this text, was not just by the kings and nobles of the time, but also by the Dalai Lamas administration. In addition to all their privations, these entitled landholders and nobles are said to have exercised mind control over the Tibetans through religion, promising them Elysium in the next life in return for strict obedience. All of this, of course, in stark contrast to the benefits of today due to the munificence of Beijing. Analysing this document from a purely academic viewpoint, a case can certainly be made that Tibet did have a form of serfdom in its early years, and much like the rest of Asia at the time had overlords and entitled classes, together with extreme poverty. As scholars note, more than half of the lay bureaucracy was indeed recruited from manorial households, and the monks from a particular sect, leaving the large majority without any effective foothold in the government or in regulating their own lives. Eminent scholars like Melvyn Goldstein, however, argue that serfdom did not automatically equal torture and exploitation. It is also pointed out that Chinas historical accounts are somewhat selective. These and other such publications forget to note the social reform carried out by, for instance, the 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas, and that much of the injustice described with such graphic detail, maybe being replicated by a new regime in a different uniform in new ways. In short, the text makes little effort to hide its political message. Each and every paragraph whether it be on highways, health, or education a contrasting exercise, with the present system portrayed as being so hugely better than before as to make any Tibet ambitions for independence or autonomy absolutely nonsensical. And heres the icing on the cake. Citing a special survey of the National Bureau of Statistics, the white paper claims that "more than 97 percent of Tibet people are satisfied with their situation, and 97.3 percent are confident of achieving moderate prosperity. Thats reminiscent of stories from the Brothers Grim. There are, however, two significant differences from earlier publications. First, there is no mention of Beijings readiness to engage with the Dalai Lama anymore. Second, it affably praises the Living Buddha reincarnation as a succession system unique to Tibetan Buddhism, and in the same breath lists a series of rules and regulations including the Measures on the Management of the Reincarnation of Living Buddhas of Tibetan Buddhism instituted in 2007. Apparently, no one sees the humour in this. The timing of the publication was primarily motivated by the fact that the day marks the 60th anniversary of the present Dalai Lamas flight to India and the tectonic shift this entailed in the status of Tibet at the time. There is also the issue that His Holiness, the present Dalai Lama, has changed his stance considerably in recent days. From saying that there perhaps may not be another Dalai Lama, he now suggests that the next reincarnation may be found in India. Not just that, he went on to say that in this case, the Chinese installed one would have little or no relevance. Thats clearly annoyed Beijing no end. Thus the above treatise and homilies. There are those who say that the world has lost interest in the Tibet issue. As Chinese power grows, that interest is likely to revive. In the US for instance, Section 4 of the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act of 2018, enacted on 19 December, 2018, requires the Department of State to provide an annual report to Congress, regarding the level of access China grants to US diplomats and officials, journalists, and tourists to Tibetan areas in China. This years report notes even more surveillance than before, a development that is hardly surprising given the US-China relations. In another case, the Human Rights Committee of the German Parliament, in a rare statement, called upon the Chinese government to stop repression in Tibet, citing the over 150 self-immolations and declaring deep respect for the peaceful Tibetan culture. In London, a wreath-laying ceremony marked the 60th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, while rallies and speeches were held in Australia. So, no, the Tibet issue is not going to go away in a hurry, despite Beijings throwing a tantrum every time the subject is raised. Beijing is already on the spotlight for its reported internment and torture of Xinjiang separatists alongside its sheer hypocrisy in refusing to designate Masood Azhar as a terrorist. That stance was called out by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently, even while Delhi remains reticent on the subject. Meanwhile, matters are more complicated by the fact that the status of a new Dalai Lama in India is likely to be considerably different from that of the present head who has not just a worldwide presence but is also truly respected for his intelligence, learning and impish charm. Indias positioning on the Tibet issue will also be heavily influenced by not just the huge increase in Chinese power, but how to balance against it. This, in turn, will mean that the office of the Dalai Lama may be far more politically sensitive in the future, as against the rather lukewarm support that has been evident in the past. Indeed, many have wondered why New Delhi bothered to host more than 100,000 Tibet refugees and bear the consequences, and yet not give China measure for measure on truly strategic issues like its virtual hand-holding of Pakistans nuclear and missile capability. Neither has India ever used the Tibet card to sort out the border issue. All of that, however, could change with a government that is intent on emphasising Indias status as a growing power and quietly making common cause not yet an alliance with countries like the US, Japan and Australia. Matters are only likely to get more complicated as China weighs in even more on the side of Pakistan following the IAF air strikes in Balakot. So far, the Modi government has chosen to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt in terms of whether it wants good relations with India or not. Also, remember that private Chinese investment in India is rising, as also bilateral trade. If there is no reciprocity, that could change, whichever government comes to power. The Islamabad High Court on Tuesday formed a five-member commission to probe the alleged abduction, forced conversion and marriage of two teenage Hindu girls in Sindh province that led to massive protests by the minority community in the country. Islamabad: The Islamabad High Court on Tuesday formed a five-member commission to probe the alleged abduction, forced conversion and marriage of two teenage Hindu girls in Sindh province that led to massive protests by the minority community in the country. A high court bench led by Chief Justice of IHC Athar Minallah heard the petition filed by the two sisters Reena, Raveena and their alleged spouses, Safdar Ali and Barkat Ali, to seek protection, the Express Tribune reported. In their plea, the girls claimed that they belong to a Hindu family of Ghotki, Sindh but converted willfully as they were impressed by Islamic teaching. The counsel for the girls' parents, however, asserted that the case pertained to forced conversion. Justice Minallah sought recommendations to resolve the matter. The matter requires transparent inquiry it is the government's job to conduct probes not the judiciary's, he observed. The chief justice said the court had to ensure that there was no forced conversion. The bench formed a five-member commission to probe the matter. The commission includes Federal Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari, Mufti Taqi Usmani, Dr Mehdi, Advocate IA Rahman and chairperson of National Commission on the Status of Women Khawar Mumtaz. The federal government has been tasked to organise meeting of the commission. The incident came to light when a video surfaced online showing the teenagers' father and brother claiming the girls were abducted and forcefully converted. It was followed by another video snippet in which the two girls claimed that they had converted to Islam. Amid the uproar, Prime Minister Imran Khan directed Sindh and Punjab to investigate the matter and recover the girls if the forceful conversion allegation was correct. During the hearing, the chief justice noted the increasing number of forced conversion cases from Ghotki. He was irked at the governments' failure to find a solution. Why are such incidents repeatedly being reported from one district of the Sindh province? He said the perception that minorities' rights were not protected has to be changed. When speaking about the rights of minorities, Justice Minallah referenced the recent terror incident in New Zealand's Christchurch that killed 50 Muslims and the Jessica Arden-led government's response. The judge asked Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf lawmaker Ramesh Kumar Vankwani why the matter was not raised in the parliament. To which, Vankwani said he will bring the House's attention to it. Until the inquiry is completed, the high court has ordered for the girls to remain in state custody. They are currently being housed at the Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Crisis Centre in Islamabad. The high court summoned reports sought by the premier and adjourned the hearing till 11 April. The Hindu community in Pakistan has carried out massive demonstrations calling for strict action to be taken against those responsible for forced conversion and marriages of Hindu girls, while reminding Prime Minister Khan of his promises to the minorities of the country. Last year, Khan during his election campaign had said his party's agenda was to uplift the various religious groups across Pakistan and said they would take effective measures to prevent forced marriages of Hindu girls. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj last month sought details from the Indian envoy in Pakistan into the alleged abduction of the two Hindu teenaged girls and their forcible conversion to Islam. Hindus form the biggest minority community in Pakistan. According to official estimates, 75 lakh Hindus live in Pakistan. Majority of Pakistan's Hindu population is settled in Sindh province. According to media reports, approximately 25 forced marriages take place every month only in Umerkot district in Sindh province. Pakistan could be blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) due to 'lobbying by India', Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said Lahore: Pakistan could be blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) due to "lobbying by India", Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said as he estimated that the country could suffer USD 10 billion loss annually if it remains in the watchdog's grey list. In June last year, the Paris-based FATF had placed Pakistan on the 'grey list' of countries whose domestic laws are considered weak to tackle the challenges of money laundering and terrorism financing. The FATF is working to curb terrorism financing and money laundering and has asked Pakistan to reassess the operation of banned terrorist outfits in the country. Pakistan is under intense international pressure to rein in terror groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) after the Pulwama terror attack. "The Foreign Office is calculating the annual loss if Pakistan is pushed in the black-list by the FATF as India is lobbying for this," Foreign Minister Qureshi told reporters at the Governor's House here on Monday evening. He said the government has calculated that Pakistan will face USD 10 billion loss annually if it remains in the 'grey list'. A group of experts from the FATF recently visited Pakistan to review whether Islamabad has made enough progress on global standards against financial crimes to warrant its exclusion from the watchdog's 'grey list'. During its three-day visit to Islamabad in the last week of March, a delegation of the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on money laundering, a regional affiliate of the FATF, expressed serious reservations over insufficient physical actions on ground against banned groups to block flow of funds and activities. The visiting team members reportedly raised questions over specific and on-ground actions against each of the eight organisations proscribed under international requirements. It wanted break-up of suspected transaction report against each banned outfit and specific actions taken against each entity. The team members said that activities of banned organisations and non-profit organisations are still unchecked at the provincial, district and grass roots level where they can still raise funds and hold meetings and rallies. The FATF noted that Pakistan had revised its terror financing risk assessment but did not demonstrate a proper understanding of the terror financing risks posed by the Islamic State group, Al-Qaeda, Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), Falah-i-Insaniat (FIF), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Haqqani Network and persons affiliated with the Taliban. Prime Minister Imran Khan's government recently banned Mumbai terror attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed-led JuD and its charity wing FIF. It declared JeM and five other groups "high risk". It also arrested over 100 members of the banned outfits including the son and brother of JeM chief Azhar Masood. The government also has taken over the control of the properties of the banned outfits including the JeM, the JuD and the FIF what it says in accordance with the FAFT requirements and the National Action Plan. Ahead of the team's visit, Pakistan wrote to FATF President Marshall Billingslea to appoint any other member as co-chair of the Asia-Pacific's Joint Group, in place of India, to ensure that the FATF review process is fair, unbiased and objective. The Joint Group is a sub-body of the International Cooperation Review Group (ICRG) of the APG. Pakistan is a member of the APG and its case is being presented before the FATF by the APG. India's Financial Intelligence Unit's (FIU) director general is the co-chair of the Joint Group. After obtaining Pakistan's response, the Mutual Evaluation Report will be presented in the Annual General Meeting of the APG that is likely to take place in August. The APG meeting would either accept the report or suggest changes to it. In case of the worst outcome, Pakistan may have to implement yet another Action Plan from October onwards. The FATF's Action Plan implementation deadline is September this year. The review on the implementation of the FATF Action Plan held in February did not go well, which has increased pressure on Pakistan. The next FATF review would take place in June in Washington and before that Pakistan will have to show compliance on 16 points that have been agreed for May in addition to three issues that were left out in the last review. To a question on the suspension of dialogue on the Kartarpur corridor by India, Qureshi said, "Pakistan went to India for a meeting on Kartarpur despite the escalation on borders but India was hesitating for a second meeting scheduled for 2 April. I ask India to bring its apprehensions on the table for review by Pakistan but avoid cancelling meetings." "Pakistan had responded to the wishes of the Sikh community from across the world and India had reluctantly accepted the joint venture," he added. India Friday summoned Pakistan's deputy high commissioner in New Delhi and conveyed concerns over the presence of a leading Khalistani separatist in a committee appointed by Pakistan on the Kartarpur corridor project. Indian officials said said they will wait for a response from Pakistan on the issue and they're not going ahead with a previously agreed meeting on the Kartarpur corridor on 2 April in Wagah on the Pakistani side. Last November, India and Pakistan agreed to set up the border crossing linking Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev, to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. The Pakistan Army said on Tuesday that it lost three soldiers due to 'unprovoked' Indian firing across the Line of Control. Islamabad: The Pakistan Army said on Tuesday that it lost three soldiers due to "unprovoked" Indian firing across the Line of Control. Military spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor said in a statement that Indian troops resorted to "unprovoked" firing in Rakhchakri area of Rawalakot Sector along the LOC. Three soldiers were killed, he said. Ghafoor said that the Pakistan Army responded effectively. Meanwhile, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir "Prime Minister" Raja Farooq Haider on Monday said his government has prepared a plan for evacuation of civilian population from the highly vulnerable areas along the Line of Control (LoC) in case of emergency, according to a report in Dawn. Tensions between India and Pakistan flared up after the Pulwama terror attack claimed by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed. Amid mounting outrage, the Indian Air Force carried out a counter-terror operation, hitting what it said was a JeM training camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistan on 16 February. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured an Indian pilot, who was handed over to India later. Pakistan's interior ministry ordered investigations into six journalists who had posted pictures online of murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Monday. RSF said it was 'appalled' to learn of the investigations, adding that it 'condemns this latest case of intimidation, especially given the Pakistani police's past behaviour towards dissident journalists'. Islamabad: Pakistan's interior ministry ordered investigations into six journalists who had posted pictures online of murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Monday. RSF said it was "appalled" to learn of the investigations, adding that it "condemns this latest case of intimidation, especially given the Pakistani police's past behaviour towards dissident journalists". The investigations had been ordered in a letter dated 13 March from the cybercrime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency, part of the interior ministry, the group said in a statement. AFP has been unable to independently verify the letter, which has been widely circulated on social media, and Pakistani officials have not responded to requests for comment. According to RSF, the FIA letter named the journalists as part of what it called "a targeted social media campaign" against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman during his visit to Pakistan in February. The campaign consisted of "repeatedly posting photos of Jamal Khashoggi.... throughout the crown prince's visit", the watchdog said. The visit came five months after the crown prince came under intense pressure following the murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi had been a fierce critic of the prince, and his killing ignited a diplomatic crisis. Pakistan, long allied with Saudi Arabia, was seeking much-needed investment during the visit. The letter said posting Khashoggi's pictures online "conveyed a very disrespectful message" towards the visiting crown prince. Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF's Asia-Pacific desk, said: "This kind of harassment of journalists, whose only crime is posting content online that displeases the authorities, is symptomatic of the treatment that the Pakistani political establishment reserves for dissidents." "The six journalists targeted by these investigations by the FIA are known for being outspoken on social networks, which are now the only place where they can express themselves freely," he added. Pakistan routinely ranks among the world's most dangerous countries for media workers. Coverage critical of the country's powerful military is considered a red flag, with reporters at times detained, beaten and even killed for running afoul of the security establishment. During his visit to Islamabad, the Saudi crown prince ending up signing investment deals worth up to USD 20 billion. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said on Monday that cutting aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras would make the situation there worse, not better, a sign that President Donald Trump will face bipartisan objections in Congress as he pursues the plan. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said on Monday that cutting aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras would make the situation there worse, not better, a sign that President Donald Trump will face bipartisan objections in Congress as he pursues the plan. "If we cut all this funding, and a lot of it, quite honestly, is seriously law enforcement that we're doing down there ... I think it's going to make things tragically worse, not better," Representative Michael McCaul said in a presentation at the Wilson Centre think tank in Washington. The State Department said on Saturday it was carrying out Trump's directive to end aid programs to the three Central American nations, known as the Northern Triangle, after Trump blasted them for sending migrants to the United States. However, congressional aides noted that, since the U.S. constitution says Congress, not the president, sets spending policy, Trump cannot overrule spending bills passed by Congress, which he signed into law, without lawmakers' approval. To obtain that approval, the administration would have to send Congress a formal notification explaining its plans for reusing the aid money and seeking lawmakers' approval. McCaul said those who might want to cut off aid may not understand the issue, arguing that U.S. money goes to addressing the problems that prompt migrants to leave their countries. "I don't think they thought it through," he said. (Reporting by Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and James Dalgleish) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Salah, the eldest of Jamal Khashoggi's children, plans to continue living in the kingdom, while the others, who live in the United States, are expected to sell the homes Washington: The children of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received multimillion-dollar homes and are being paid thousands of dollars per month by the kingdom's authorities, The Washington Post reported on Monday. Khashoggi a contributor to the Post and a critic of the Saudi government was killed and dismembered in October, 2018 at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul by a team of 15 agents sent from Riyadh. His body has not been recovered. The payments to his four children two sons and two daughters "are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to reach a long-term arrangement with Khashoggi family members, aimed in part at ensuring that they continue to show restraint in their public statements," the Post said. The houses given to the Khashoggi children are located in the port city of Jeddah and are worth up to $4 million, the newspaper reported. Salah, the eldest of the children, plans to continue living in the kingdom, while the others, who live in the United States, are expected to sell the homes, the paper said. In addition to the properties, the children are receiving $10,000 or more per month and may also receive larger payments that could amount to tens of millions of dollars each, according to the report. Saudi Arabia's powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has been accused of orchestrating Khashoggi's killing, but the kingdom has claimed that the prince was not involved. Saudi Arabia initially said it had no knowledge of Khashoggi's fate but later blamed rogue agents for his death. Its public prosecutor has charged 11 people over his murder. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is slated to meet on Tuesday at the White House with family members of six executives from Citgo Petroleum jailed in Venezuela since 2017, a White House official said on Monday. 'The vice president will reiterate the administrations deep concern for the welfare and safety of all wrongfully detained American citizens,' the White House official said, adding that Pence will call on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to 'release all political prisoners immediately and unconditionally.' (Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Lisa Shumaker) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is slated to meet on Tuesday at the White House with family members of six executives from Citgo Petroleum jailed in Venezuela since 2017, a White House official said on Monday. "The vice president will reiterate the administrations deep concern for the welfare and safety of all wrongfully detained American citizens," the White House official said, adding that Pence will call on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to "release all political prisoners immediately and unconditionally." (Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Lisa Shumaker) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. I think about the children, and the city they will grow up in and what it will mean for young boys and girls to see leaders who look like them in the mayors office. You know what they say, You cannot be what you cannot see, Preckwinkle said during a rally before hundreds of African-American voters at the Harold Washington Cultural Center last month. I hope this election tells them that no dream is too big or challenge too great. And this is truly a historic moment. Not long ago, the idea that two African-American women would be vying for this spot would have been considered impossible. Scientists measure extent of recovery for critically endangered black abalone SAN FRANCISCO (April 2, 2018) - One critically endangered species of smooth-shelled abalone is making a comeback in certain parts of its range along the California coast. To better understand the extent of black abalone recovery, a collaborative team led by scientists at the California Academy of Sciences, San Diego State University, University of Oregon, and Channel Islands National Park is turning to archeological sites on the Channel Islands. Their findings, published today in Ecology and Evolution, suggest that while the recent ecological rebound is encouraging, there's still work to do before the black abalone should be considered fully recovered. "Our goal is to provide a deep historical lens for understanding black abalone across 10,000 years of human fishing," says Dr. Todd Braje, Academy Curator of Anthropology. "Documenting abalone populations across millennia helps resource managers put shorter-term decadal changes in context. We hope these data will serve as a new benchmark for setting management goals." Black abalone play a critical role in the kelp ecosystem along the California coast. The marine snails are an important food source for key predators like the endangered sea otter. Historically, coastal Native Americans relied on abalone for over 10,000 years--the shellfish later became one of California's first commercial fisheries. "Management goals are often set using modern data from fisheries already on the verge of collapse," says lead author Hannah Haas, a former Master's student at San Diego State University. "If we want to restore kelp ecosystems, we first have to understand what a healthy system actually looks like, and archeological data can help paint that picture." To better understand the characteristics of a flourishing abalone population in a historically healthy ecosystem, the study team turned to the archeological record left behind along the rocky shorelines of the Channel Islands. San Miguel Island, the westernmost island in the archipelago, hosts archeological sites spanning the last 10,000 years where the Chumash and their ancestors once deposited abalone shells by the thousands into trash piles known as shell middens. The team recovered nearly 2,000 whole abalone shells from 26 shell middens and measured shell size. They then compared deep historical shell size to modern measurements of live abalone collected by Channel Island National Park biologists during recent ecological monitoring. Shell size indicates the ratio of juveniles to adults and the population structure through time, which can help scientists compare and contrast overall population health between deep historical and modern eras. While there has been an encouraging rebound of black abalone in recent decades, current populations still pale in comparison to historical levels. Several thousand years ago, the distribution of juvenile to adult-sized abalone was more akin to what ecologists recognize as a healthy population. This was probably maintained by a delicate balance between competitors, predators, and prey that may have actually increased the productivity of black abalone over the long term. "We hope that our long-term analyses over the 10,000-year history of black abalone fishing in Southern California may help resource managers determine whether current abalone populations are healthy," says Haas. Millions of smooth-shelled abalone once clung to California's rocky coastline until a steep decline in the 1990s, driven by overfishing, warming waters, and a devastating infection known as withering foot syndrome. California closed commercial and recreational black abalone fisheries in 1993 and listed the species as endangered in 2009. "A variety of perspectives and data are key to understanding how to manage toward ecological balance rather than an era defined by commercial fishing, sea otter extirpation, and ecosystem dysfunction," says Braje. "We're trying to put together a diverse group of scholars--archeologists, biologists, and resource managers--to combine data insights and all work toward the same goal of abalone recovery and restoring healthy California kelp forest ecosystems." ### About Research at the California Academy of Sciences The Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability at the California Academy of Sciences is at the forefront of efforts to understand two of the most important topics of our time: the nature and sustainability of life on Earth. Based in San Francisco, the Institute is home to more than 100 world-class scientists, state-of-the-art facilities, and nearly 46 million scientific specimens from around the world. The Institute also leverages the expertise and efforts of more than 100 international Associates and 450 distinguished Fellows. Through expeditions around the globe, investigations in the lab, and analyses of vast biological datasets, the Institute's scientists work to understand the evolution and interconnectedness of organisms and ecosystems, the threats they face around the world, and the most effective strategies for sustaining them into the future. Through innovative partnerships and public engagement initiatives, they also guide critical sustainability and conservation decisions worldwide, inspire and mentor the next generation of scientists, and foster responsible stewardship of our planet. This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) The Ejercito-Estrada family has planned to maintain its hold on power in San Juan by assuring that its members are elected to top local positions. This was revealed by San Juan mayoralty candidate Francis Zamora, who is running against Janella Estrada, in an interview on CNN Philippines' Politics As Usual. Three members of the Ejercito-Estrada family have held the city's mayoralty post for at least two consecutive terms. Incumbent Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada was San Juan mayor for 16 years beginning in 1968, while re-electionist Senator JV Ejercito held the position for three consecutive terms from 2001 to 2010. In 2010, he was replaced by Guia Gomez, the Manila mayor's partner. Younger members of the family, including Janella, had also served in the city in lower positions. Zamora said the alleged plan was laid out during a meeting called by the former president in June 2015 at former Senator Jinggoy Estrada's former detention facility in Camp Crame. Jinggoy was detained from 2013 to 2017 for his alleged involvement in the multi-billion peso pork barrel scam. He is out on bail. Gomez and JV also attended the supposed meeting, Zamora added. "There were councilors, there were barangay captains, and a lot of people from San Juan. And during that meeting, they already planned that in 2016, they would make sure that they would maintain full control of the city," Zamora, who was then the city's vice mayor, said. "President Estrada had told everyone na hindi dapat mawala sa pamilya Estrada ang lungsod ng San Juan," he added. Zamora added that the family had "preempted" his possible win in this year's mayoralty race in San Juan. "So they wanted to ensure the continuity of the Estrada control in our city. So what happened was in 2015, they had hatched this plan to ensure that I would not become mayor even in 2019 because even if I had ran for vice mayor again in 2016, I would just be one step away from the mayoralty with my father then still having two more terms," he said. "It became clear then that they would not let go of San Juan," he added. However, JanellaJinggoy's oldest daughter and Gomez's step-granddaughterdenied Zamora's claims. "Wala naman po siyang (Joseph Estrada) sinabing ganon. Actually, 'yun po 'yung pinapalabas ng aming mga katunggali pero wala pong ganong nangyari. Mayor Guia went to Camp Crame to visit my dad para po humingi ng suporta sa kanyang pagtakbo bilang mayor ng San Juan," she said during the program. Janella admitted there was really a meeting as what Zamora said, but she denied that Joseph Estrada was among the attendees. "My lolo was not there... I remember only Mayor Guia and my dad and me, I was there, and 'yung mga I think barangay captains were there," she said. Guests can expect a playlist of 2000s hits and plenty of songs from Fyres would-be headliners like Major Lazer and Ja Rule, plus a bevy of custom-art photo walls that are IG-ready. Additional artwork and T-shirts will be available for purchase. The pop-up will also feature several events throughout its duration, such as weenie and smores roasts, a treasure hunt and a show by a Blink-182 cover band. After Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Punjab and Mumbai, Airtel has deployed 900 Mhz (LTE 900) spectrum band in Karnataka to significantly enhance the network experience for smartphone customers. In addition to high speed data capacity and wider availability, 900 Mhz spectrum will offer improved 4G availability inside buildings homes, offices and malls. In Karnataka, Airtel already uses 2300 Mhz (TD LTE) and 1800 Mhz (FD LTE) in addition to 900 Mhz (LTE 900) spectrum. Airtel has already deployed advanced network technologies and tools such as pre-5G Massive MIMO, 4G Advanced and Carrier Aggregation to step up high speed network capacity and coverage. Airtel recently announced that it will expand its network in the state by rolling out 13000 new sites and 4500 Km of optic fiber during FY 19 under its network transformation program Project Leap. C. Surendran, CEO Karnataka, Bharti Airtel said: Our endeavor is to deliver best-in-class network experience to our customers. The deployment of LTE 900 will further boost Airtel 4G coverage, particularly inside homes and buildings. Airtel smartphone customers will enjoy a seamless high speed data and HD quality calling experience on our upgraded network. We will continue to invest aggressively in deployment of latest network technologies to delight our customers. Electric and gas utility Consolidated Edison ( ED 1.04% ) has a monopoly on one of the greatest markets in the world: New York City and its surrounding suburbs. The population of this vibrant northeastern city is projected to reach 9 million by 2040, up from around 8.6 million in 2017. That may not sound like a huge change, but the Northeast as a whole has seen a steady decline, as people leave for warmer southern climates. But this good news for Con Ed is also a big problem, because the utility doesn't have enough natural gas to satisfy current demand for the fuel, let alone the increase in demand that will come with an expanding population. Below, we'll talk about a small test it's doing that could have big results in helping it deal with the issue. How big of a problem are we talking about? Historically, coal was the primary source of electricity in the United States and an oil furnace was the most common way to heat a home. However, a mixture of low natural gas prices and the cheaper construction costs of natural gas power plants has led to natural gas catching up to and overtaking coal over the past decade. Low prices and the convenience of no longer having to call for oil deliveries have also led customers to switch from oil to gas for heat. There's an environmental angle to this shift as well, since natural gas is cleaner burning than coal or oil, but the financial component is probably the more important factor. Cheaper and cleaner is a great combination. However, the infrastructure needed to supply the Northeast region with natural gas has lagged behind demand. Essentially, Con Ed can't get enough natural gas to satisfy demand. To be truthful, it's not a big issue on a day-to-day basis. The problem shows up on peak demand days, when heating needs spike due to extreme weather. To put some numbers on that, during the 2004-2005 heating season Con Ed had to buy roughly 5% of its gas from third parties. That number jumped to 17% in the 2017-2018 heating season and is projected to rise to 22% by 2023. Looking at that another way, by 2024 Con Ed estimates that its natural gas capacity will only cover 78% of its peak demand use. The key thing here is that natural gas is a commodity, and when demand spikes, so do prices. In other words, when Con Ed most needs natural gas is exactly the point when natural gas is most expensive. The issue is so troubling that the company has openly asked for suggestions to help deal with the problem. And, in early 2019, it announced that it was going to stop converting customers to natural gas heat (meaning more customers will continue to rely on dirtier oil heating systems). This is a growth issue, since every customer it turns away is a customer it doesn't get to add to its system. The small test that could yield big results One way that Con Ed is trying to deal with the issue is by borrowing a playbook from the electricity market: demand response. When demand peaks, certain customers agree to reduce their use of electricity (or in this case, natural gas). To motivate customers to do this, the utility compensates the customers for the reduction in use. It's more complex than just turning off the lights (or the furnace), since in some cases it can involve shifting use to lower demand periods. Use also has to be carefully tracked to ensure compliance. However, the basics are easy to grasp and you can see how it would help Con Ed with the natural gas demand issue if customers agreed to pull back at times of peak demand. Having received approval from regulators, Con Ed is planning to spend roughly $5 million on a pilot program. A little under $600 million is earmarked for meters, with another $1.6 million to cover administrative costs. The rest, roughly $2.9 million, is for incentive payments. A $5 million investment, to be honest, is chump change for a company like Con Ed, which plans to spend an average of $4 billion on capital projects in each of the next three years. But if the demand response test works out, it could have a huge impact on Con Ed and its customers. This relatively small test alone, if it achieves the projected reductions, could meet roughly 1% of the natural gas shortfall by 2023. That sounds like a tiny figure, but Con Ed sold $2.4 billion worth of natural gas in 2018. If it can reduce demand during peak periods, the savings could be quite large for its customers and indirectly for Con Ed. Con Ed largely passes on fuel costs to its customers on the electric and natural gas sides of its business. It gets paid for the delivery of these things across its system. So, on some level, Con Ed doesn't need to care about the cost of fuel. Unfortunately, customers see the bill and blame Con Ed, not fully understanding the structure of their relationship with the utility. But the bigger problem is longer-term in nature. If Con Ed doesn't start to do something like this now, it may not be able to get natural gas when it needs it most -- price may not be the only limiting factor. If it can't get gas, the company would have to resort to rationing it at the worst possible times. That's a disaster scenario for Con Ed and its customers. It's basically a problem that Con Ed can't allow to happen, since one of the things that regulators monitor is its ability to provide uninterrupted service. So, if Con Ed can't find ways to solve the peak demand issue, it will likely need to take matters into its own hands and pay to build new pipeline capacity to carry natural gas into the New York region. That capacity, however, will sit idle on most days, since peak demand is intermittent and generally only occurs during the winter months. That's a hugely expensive proposition. To give some idea of the cost, the Williams Companies-backed and recently opened Atlantic Sunrise pipeline (which brings gas from Pennsylvania to the Mid-Atlantic region) came with a price tag of roughly $3 billion...to build just 200 miles of pipes. That's roughly $15 million per mile. Then consider that pipeline capacity generally has to be paid for regardless of whether or not it's being used (known as a take-or-pay contract) to ensure that it's there when you need it. Con Ed would clearly rather not pay for something it only uses once in a while. No wonder the utility is looking for alternatives. Keep watching this issue This small test isn't likely to make or break Con Ed as an investment. However, the long-term implications are material. Con Ed faces a very real problem with regard to natural gas access. And since it is already turning customers away, the impact is starting to hit today. If this demand response test works, it could save Con Ed a lot of money down the line -- particularly if it can be expanded. How much is hard to tell, but savings for things like not having to support unused pipeline capacity or build new pipelines could add up to a huge number. Moreover, customer satisfaction from such a move could help build positive regulatory relationships for the company. If you own Con Ed, keep a close eye on its efforts to offset peak demand use, including things like this seemingly tiny demand response test. It could be bigger than it looks. Bank stocks have been hit hard lately, as investors worry whether a temporary inversion of the yield curve means a recession is on the way. It's natural to fret about banks when economic times turn ugly, as the last recession showed. Still, I think it's a bit too early to worry, since the yield curve is an imperfect indicator (click here for more on what it is and what it means). Moreover, thanks to new regulations, all the big banks are much better positioned to weather any potential downturn than they were before the 2008 financial crisis. The largest U.S. banks must now hold more capital, and underwriting at large banks has generally grown more conservative. In addition, the big banks have ubiquitous branch and ATM distribution systems, as well as the means to invest in leading digital tools. That should help keep their deposit costs lower than those of smaller banks, which often have to offer higher rates on savings accounts or CDs. For those of you who think this sounds like a potential buying opportunity, let's look at two leading large U.S. banks: Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Citigroup (NYSE:C). Which company is a better home for your investment dollars? What each bank does As large banks, Bank of America and Citigroup have similar suites of products, spanning consumer, investment, and corporate banking; wealth management; and sales and trading. However, each emphasizes different parts of the portfolio. Bank of America tends to gravitate toward residential mortgages and home equity loans, whereas Citi puts much more emphasis on credit cards. Citi is also more internationally focused than Bank of America, as BofA's name indicates. Citi generates a majority 54% of revenues outside of North America, with a strong presence in Asia and Latin America. That's in contrast to Bank of America, which generates the vast majority of its revenue in the U.S. BofA's international revenue made up only 12% of its revenue in 2018. Growth, efficiency, and leverage Let's go to the numbers and evaluate these two banks in a variety of key metrics including revenue growth, returns, and a measure of risk called the Tier 1 Capital ratio that shows us how well a bank can absorb unexpected losses. Here's how each bank stacks up in these departments: Full-Year 2018 Revenue Growth Return on Tangible Equity Return on Assets Net Income Margin Tier 1 Capital Efficiency Ratio Bank of America 4% 15.5% 1.21% 29.3% 11.6% 58.5% Citigroup 1% 10.9% 0.93% 24.7% 11.9% 57.4% It should be noted that Citi sold off its Latin American asset management business last year. Without that divestiture, its growth would have been closer to 3%, not 1%, as shown. That puts most of its metrics relatively close to those of Bank of America. Still, Bank of America appears to be the more profitable and efficient bank. The company has not only slightly superior growth, but also superior returns on assets and returns on equity, as well as higher profit margins. However, Citi has slightly higher capital ratios, which means it retains slightly more equity and is thus less risky by that measure. It also has a slightly lower efficiency ratio, which shows us noninterest expenses as a percentage of revenue (as you may have guessed, lower is better here). However, these metrics are only slightly better than Bank of America's, and Bank of America has been steadily cutting excess costs and overhead through employee attrition and branch closures every year under CEO Brian Moynihan. Valuation It appears the market is aware of these differences, with Citi garnering a cheaper valuation. (Here's a quick primer on what we're looking at in the last two columns: Tangible equity, also known as tangible book value, is the bank's common equity i.e. GAAP book value minus preferred stock, goodwill from acquisitions, and intangible assets.) P/E Ratio (last 12 months) P/E Ratio (next 12 months) Price-to-Book Ratio Price to Tangible Book Value Bank of America 10.57 9.55 1.09 1.53 Citigroup 9.31 8.32 0.82 0.97 Citigroup's stock is definitely cheaper than Bank of America's, and in somewhat proportional amounts to its lower growth and returns on equity, making the choice harder. Bank on both? Deciding between Citigroup and Bank of America means thinking about the type of bank you want to own. For bargain-hunting investors comfortable with the riskier business of credit card lending and international exposure, Citigroup is clearly the better value. However, Bank of America is the higher-quality bank with more well-rounded economic exposure, and it operates in the U.S., which is currently the better-performing economy. Given that all bank stocks are out of favor right now, it might not hurt to own both if you feel like playing the sector; however, in the longer term, I'd lean toward the higher-quality Bank of America and its U.S.-focused lending, despite Citigroup's cheaper price. PARIS -- It has been six months since Washington Post columnist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered with a bone saw inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump demonstrating that he's slaphappy when it comes to imposing or tightening sanctions on countries such as Venezuela and Iran, he has yet to take any measures against Saudi Arabia for the Khashoggi murder, which the CIA believes was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman . The Washington Post reports that some of the individuals involved in Khashoggi's murder may have been trained in America. "The CIA has cautioned other government agencies that some of this special-operations training might have been conducted by Tier 1 Group, an Arkansas-based company, under a State Department license," writes Post columnist David Ignatius. According to the Tier 1 Group's website, the company "is proud to provide world-class multidiscipline, multi-echelon training to the U.S. Military and State Department, Law Enforcement, the Private Security Detail Sector, OGA Specialty Operator Teams as well as International Allied Forces." The term "OGA," or "Other Government Agency" in military and paramilitary parlance, generally refers to the CIA or CIA contractors, which can also mean foreign entities, but it's the "International Allied Forces" bit here that's of particular interest. The State Department should be compelled to disclose whether Tier 1 did, in fact, train any of the individuals involved in the Khashoggi murder. This is, after all, an American company operating under an American government license. The ties between the Tier 1 Group and the Trump administration are striking. Tier 1 is owned by Cerberus Capital Management, according to a 2017 story in The New Yorker about Cerberus co-founder and CEO Stephen A. Feinberg. Cerberus bought portions of Jared Kushner 's distressed real estate debt when the market collapsed in 2008, shortly after Kushner had paid $1.8 billion for an office tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in 2016. Kushner and then-White House strategist Steve Bannon asked Feinberg and Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater (now known as Academi ) to come up with proposals to replace U.S. troops in Afghanistan with military contractors, according to a New York Times story from July 2017. (Feinberg had expressed interest in purchasing Blackwater in 2008, but the deal never came to fruition.) In May 2018, Trump appointed Feinberg to lead the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, a body described as "[providing] advice to the president concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, counterintelligence, and other intelligence activities." Would that include advising Trump on matters related to Saudi Arabia, despite Feinberg running the company that owns Tier 1 Group? It's debatable whether America's best interests are being served by having a fund manager with financial interests in a company that provides private training to "International Allied Forces" supply Trump with advice on foreign intelligence. This calls into question the overall credibility of Trump's Middle East policies, which Kushner seemed all too keen to take off former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's plate. It was reported last year that Kushner communicated directly with the Saudi crown prince via the encrypted messenger service WhatsApp. It calls into question the Trump administration's interest in selling American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia -- an interest now being probed by Congress in the wake of whistleblower reports. It calls into question Trump's hard line against Saudi Arabia's archenemy, Iran, which has been the target of sanctions that run contrary to the position of the international community and American allies. It calls into question Trump's decision to visit Saudi Arabia on his first trip overseas, instead of a customary close ally such as Canada or the United Kingdom. It calls into question Trump's inaction when the Saudi crown prince locked a bunch of wealthy Saudis inside a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, where they were imprisoned and shaken down for cash. And it calls into question Trump's nonchalance towards the killing and dismemberment of a member of the American press inside a Saudi consulate. Finally, it calls into question, yet again, America's role in providing training and knowhow to foreigners despite the obvious potential for blowback. This administration owes the American public some answers. ( Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at www.rachelmarsden.com.) (c) 2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Discover the Superfruits of the Amazon at Juice It Up! this April Acai Month Leading Smoothie, Superfruit Bowl & Raw Juice Chain Giving Away Nearly 3,000 Acai Bowls! April 02, 2019 // Franchising.com // IRVINE, California - April Acai Month is back at Juice It Up!, one of the nations leading handcrafted smoothie, raw juice, and superfruit bowl chains! Teaming up with Sambazon for the fourth annual April Acai Month, Juice it Up! has launched its Superfruits of the Amazon celebration where guests have the chance to win nearly 3,000 free Acai Bowls! Fans are encouraged to head to their nearest location to enter Juice It Up!s Instagram photo contest for a chance to win one free acai bowl every single day during the month of May. One winner from each of Juice It Up!s 84 locations will win this prize! A nutritionally dense superfruit regarded for its remarkable levels of antioxidants and healthy omega fats, acai continues to grow in popularity as consumers invest in their health. Juice It Up! has a variety of menu items featuring the superfruit, but the brands five Acai Bowl creations are the top sellers: Ultimate Acai Bowl features a delicious blend of organic Sambazon acai, guarana, banana and apple juice blend, topped with organic hemp plus granola, sliced bananas and a drizzle of honey. features a delicious blend of organic Sambazon acai, guarana, banana and apple juice blend, topped with organic hemp plus granola, sliced bananas and a drizzle of honey. Acai Berry Bowl features organic Sambazon acai, guarana, strawberry juice blend, strawberries and blueberries, topped with organic hemp plus granola, sliced bananas, strawberries and a drizzle of honey. features organic Sambazon acai, guarana, strawberry juice blend, strawberries and blueberries, topped with organic hemp plus granola, sliced bananas, strawberries and a drizzle of honey. Super Fusion Bowl features a perfectly blended combination of both organic Sambazon acai and pitaya, cranberry and apple juice blend, blueberries and pineapple, topped with organic hemp plus granola, sliced bananas, strawberries, blueberries and a drizzle of honey. features a perfectly blended combination of both organic Sambazon acai and pitaya, cranberry and apple juice blend, blueberries and pineapple, topped with organic hemp plus granola, sliced bananas, strawberries, blueberries and a drizzle of honey. Protein Acai Bowl features a creamy blend of organic Sambazon acai, peanut butter, soy milk, non-fat yogurt, bananas and protein powder, topped with organic hemp plus granola, sliced bananas, crunchy peanuts and a drizzle of honey. features a creamy blend of organic Sambazon acai, peanut butter, soy milk, non-fat yogurt, bananas and protein powder, topped with organic hemp plus granola, sliced bananas, crunchy peanuts and a drizzle of honey. Cold Brew Acai Bowl features a delicious blend of organic Sambazon acai, non-fat yogurt, cold brew coffee, soy milk, banana, cinnamon and guarana. Our fourth annual April Acai Month is even more special this year because its paired with our Superfruits of the Amazon celebration, where were highlighting the nutrient-rich superfruits currently offered and coming soon to the Juice It Up! menu! said Chris Braun, Juice It Up! CEO. Acai is such a powerhouse natural ingredient that really does deserve its own month of recognition. Each year, our guests get more and more creative with their beautiful acai bowl posts on Instagram and, with nearly 3,000 free bowls up for grabs, were excited to see what they come up with next! To enter, fans should head to their local Juice It Up! through April 27 and complete the following steps: Follow @JuiceItUp on Instagram Post a photo of your Acai Bowl (with Juice It Up! logo displayed) using the hashtags #superfruits and #jiustore(number); store number can be found on guest receipt (example: #jiustore1) Tag @JuiceItUp and @Sambazon in photo Note: Make sure your Instagram profile is public the entire month of April By following these rules, youre entered to win a free regular size Acai Bowl every single day in May! Instagram entries must be posted on a public account by April 27, 2019 to qualify. The participant with the most creative post from each of Juice It Up!s 84 locations will be chosen as the winner and notified on April 30, 2019. For official contest rules, visit https://www.juiceitup.com/acai-bowl-promo-2019. Braun continued, when dreaming up new menu items, were equally focused on flavor and functionality, and its so easy to find a beautiful balance when working with an ingredient like acai that is as delicious as it is nutritious. To view the full menu and to find your nearest location, go to www.juiceitup.com. About Juice It Up! Juice It Up! is a leading handcrafted smoothie, raw juice, and superfruit bowl franchise. Founded in 1995, the Irvine, California-based lifestyle brand is focused on providing its guests with a variety of great-tasting, better-for-you food and drink choices designed with personal wellness in mind. With over 100 locations open or under development across California, Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas, the privately-owned company is showcasing a new restaurant design, a heavier focus on healthy smoothies and bowls, the growing demand for raw and cold pressed juice options, and a menu refresh that reflects the brands active personality and motto to Live Life Juiced! An established lifestyle brand with unparalleled experience in the raw juice bar industry, Juice It Up! has been included in Fast Casuals 2017 Top 100 Movers & Shakers List, Franchise Times 2017 Top 200+ Franchise Chains, named a 2018 Best for Vets Franchise by Military Times, ranked Top 3 Smoothies/Juices franchises in Entrepreneur Magazines 2018 Annual Franchise 500 List, and named one of Entrepreneur Magazines 2017 Best Food Franchises and Top Franchises for Veterans. According to the Nations Restaurant News Annual Top 200 Report, the $32.1 billion U.S. beverage-snack industry is recognized as one of 2018s top five bestselling restaurant segments. Juice It Up! Social Media Pages Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/juiceitup/ Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/juiceitup/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/juiceituphq/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/juiceitup/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/juiceitupcorp/ Media Contact: Chelsea McKinney For Juice It Up! Powerhouse Communications (949) 261-2216 chelsea@powerhousecomm.com SOURCE Juice It Up! ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Grand Opening Of The First Just Cuts Franchised Salon In London Overnight A Huge Success April 02, 2019 // Franchising.com // On Thursday 28th March 2019, iconic Australian hairdressing brand Just Cuts celebrated its expansion into the United Kingdom, with the Grand Opening of its first franchised salon in Southside Wandsworth shopping centre in South London. Local London mum, Magda Deaconescu, cut the ribbon across the entrance of her stylish Just Cuts salon to a cheering crowd of Clients and media, fulfilling her lifelong dream of owning a salon. It is the second Just Cuts to open in the UK. This forward-thinking 38-year-old previously worked in the corporate sector. After spending a few years away from the rat race, raising her two beautiful daughters, she decided to take up the challenge of business ownership but was a little nervous about being completely on her own. Ask any mum, work-life balance is really important but now my girls are a bit older, Ive realised the time had come to chase one of my dreams. Just Cuts is the southern hemispheres largest hairdressing brand, so when I found out they wanted to expand across the UK, I sent a message to them. I instantly fell in love with their family-friendly philosophy and had a gut feeling that joining forces with them was the right move for me. Magdas team of Stylists are bringing the Just Cuts premium service at not-so-premium prices, that is so well known in Australia and New Zealand where there are 200+ Just Cuts salons, to the people of Wandsworth. On the day, Stylists gave the first 30 Clients free Style Cuts, with everyone else being able to benefit from a 6-week special on the cut - down from 19 to 15. You cant book an appointment at our salon, however our app allows you to check in and join the queue so you can continue shopping until its your turn to get in the chair. Using our app also builds up loyalty points to spend on any service or JUSTICE Professional product - you get one point for every 1 you spend. Just Cuts Founder, Denis McFadden, made the trip to London to support Magda and the team and is thrilled to be bringing the brand to the capital. He once had his own salon in London in the late 1970s before returning home to Australia to begin the Just Cuts story. I consider London to be the world centre for hair fashion, so coming over here is a proud moment for the whole Just Cuts team. In the past, weve had many British backpackers travel to Australia and New Zealand seeking work in our salons. When the time comes for them to depart, they ask: When will Just Cuts be coming to the UK?. Wandsworth is the continuation of our UK story and were grateful to be part of making Magdas dreams come true. Showcasing a brand new Just Cuts Coastal look with a modern, open plan layout, Just Cuts Wandsworth opens as a JUSTICE Professional exclusive salon, offering Clients a range of professional and affordable hair care, styling and scalp care products to help maintain and complement their Style Cuts cuts in between visits to the salon. JUSTICE Professional has been sun kissing Australian hair since 1997 and are delighted to be offering the range to the United Kingdom Clients. More about Just Cuts Just Cuts is a hairdressing salon that bridges the gap between the old style barber shop and the high end hair salon. Our fixed price, no appointment system is a convenient and practical solution for our Clients, offering them convenient, quality Style Cuts cuts from fully qualified Stylists at an affordable price. Just Cuts was the brainchild of Denis McFadden, who, back in 1982 turned a simple idea into a business concept that would change the hairdressing industry forever. Always one to make the most of every situation, McFadden decided to run a promotion at his humble Sydney salon to boost business and offered all clients a no appointment, $6 Style Cut. The response was outstanding and the idea of Just Cuts was born. The following year, the inaugural Just Cuts salon opened its door to the public. And in 1990, the first Just Cuts franchise opened in the suburb of Engadine, in the south of Sydney. Our brand has continued to expand ever since, with 200 locations in Australia and New Zealand now open. Thats an average of one new salon every six weeks! And in 2013, we answered the calls of our Clients and Stylists and launched JUSTICE Professional - a range of salon quality, paraben free haircare and styling products available exclusively in all our salons at a competitive, affordable price. The JUSTICE Professional line has something for everyone, including everyday shampoos and conditioners, anti-dandruff and dry scalp treatments, toning products, nourishing leave-in treatments and a range of hair styling waxes and sprays. We now offer our Clients 20 salon quality products to choose from. Media Contact: Kelly Gaunt Just Cuts Marketing +61(2) 9527 5444 kelly@justcuts.com SOURCE Just Cuts ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus The Original Hot Dog Factory Announces Franchise Opportunities for Aspiring Entrepreneurs, Restauranteurs, Investors and Franchisees in the US. Atlanta-Based Food Chain, The Original Hot Dog Factory, Is Now Offering Franchising Opportunities Nationwide; Targeting Those with a Passion for Providing Excellent Service in the Food and Beverage Industry April 02, 2019 // Franchising.com // Atlanta, Georgia - The Original Hot Dog Factory is proud to announce that they are currently offering franchise opportunities to qualified candidates in the United States, effective today. Qualified applicants who are awarded the opportunity to own and operate a franchise will be provided with an exceptional business model, extensive training, and consistent, ongoing support from senior management. The Original Hot Dog Factory first opened in 2010 but has been rebranded and revamped in 2015. The company has become a household name in Atlanta, Georgia, as being one of the citys top casual dining destinations. The Original Hot Dog Factorys menu consists of a wide range of selections including: specialty hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, salads, french fries, onion rings, milkshakes, and related foods and beverages. Currently, we are looking for franchisees that are looking to open restaurants, create jobs, boost their citys economy, and do some remarkable things in their community, says Director of Franchising, Tarji Carter. We are looking to do this on a national level. Aside from being an Atlanta staple, The Original Hot Dog Factory has received national exposure as it has been featured on BRAVOs Real Housewives of Atlanta numerous times. At the Original Hot Dog Factory, we offer a wide variety of mouthwatering hot dogs that will make you ask for more, says CEO, Dennis McKinley. All hot dogs are served steamed, grilled, or fried with globally inspired toppings. Hot Dogs Include: All American classic beef hot dog topped with ketchup, mustard, relish and onions classic beef hot dog topped with ketchup, mustard, relish and onions Corn Dog beef hot dog battered and fried and topped with mustard and ketchup beef hot dog battered and fried and topped with mustard and ketchup Detroit Coney beef hot dog topped with FACTORY chili, shredded cheese and chopped onions beef hot dog topped with FACTORY chili, shredded cheese and chopped onions BLT bacon wrapped beef hot dog topped with lettuce, tomato and mayo bacon wrapped beef hot dog topped with lettuce, tomato and mayo LA Dog bacon wrapped beef hot dog topped with chili cheese fries and grilled onions bacon wrapped beef hot dog topped with chili cheese fries and grilled onions Jamaican Jerk Chicken Dog Jamaican jerk seasoned chicken hot dog topped with grilled pineapples, chopped onions and sweet island sauce Jamaican jerk seasoned chicken hot dog topped with grilled pineapples, chopped onions and sweet island sauce San Francisco Veggie Dog veggie soy dog topped with onions, tomatoes, lettuce and brown mustard veggie soy dog topped with onions, tomatoes, lettuce and brown mustard Italian Dog deep fried Italian sausage topped with grilled bell peppers and onions deep fried Italian sausage topped with grilled bell peppers and onions Taco Dog beef hot dog topped with FACTORY chili, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, guacamole, jalapenos and tortilla chips beef hot dog topped with FACTORY chili, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, guacamole, jalapenos and tortilla chips Street Polish Dog polish sausage on a poppy seed bun, topped with grilled onions, mustard and sport peppers polish sausage on a poppy seed bun, topped with grilled onions, mustard and sport peppers Chicago Dog beef hot dog topped with tomatoes, pickle spear, sport peppers, sweet relish, onions, mustard and celery salt on a poppy seed bun beef hot dog topped with tomatoes, pickle spear, sport peppers, sweet relish, onions, mustard and celery salt on a poppy seed bun New Yorker beef hot dog topped with sauerkraut and spicy brown mustard beef hot dog topped with sauerkraut and spicy brown mustard The Texas Rodeo bacon wrapped beef hot dog topped with onion rings and FACTORY chili bacon wrapped beef hot dog topped with onion rings and FACTORY chili Fire Dog beef hot dog topped with Arizona heat hot sauce, jalapeno peppers, and sport peppers beef hot dog topped with Arizona heat hot sauce, jalapeno peppers, and sport peppers Boston Dog steamed beef hot dog topped with FACTORY baked beans, bacon bits and chopped onions steamed beef hot dog topped with FACTORY baked beans, bacon bits and chopped onions Atlanta XL Footlong XL footlong beef hot dog topped any way you like XL footlong beef hot dog topped any way you like Bratwurst Dog deep fried bratwurst topped with kraut and grilled onions deep fried bratwurst topped with kraut and grilled onions Memphis Dog bacon wrapped hot dog, topped with shredded cheese, BBQ sauce and green onions bacon wrapped hot dog, topped with shredded cheese, BBQ sauce and green onions Taste Of Seattle Dog beef hot dog topped with cream cheese and grilled onions beef hot dog topped with cream cheese and grilled onions California Baby Dog grilled beef dog topped with lettuce, tomatoes, grilled onions, avocado and try me sauce grilled beef dog topped with lettuce, tomatoes, grilled onions, avocado and try me sauce Marthas Vineyard Jumbo Hot Dog jumbo beef hotdog topped any way you like jumbo beef hotdog topped any way you like Surf & Turf Dog grilled hot dog topped with super lump crab meat, lettuce, tomatoes and try me sauce grilled hot dog topped with super lump crab meat, lettuce, tomatoes and try me sauce Vegas Red Hot Dog Red hot sausage split and charbroiled Other Items Include: Factory Wings Tossed Wings Plain, HDF Hot, BBQ, Sweet Chili, Lemon Pepper, Garlic Parmesan, Sweet Island Plain, HDF Hot, BBQ, Sweet Chili, Lemon Pepper, Garlic Parmesan, Sweet Island Factory Grilled Chicken Sandwich grilled chicken breast topped with lettuce, tomatoes, red onion sauce and mayo Bacon grilled chicken breast topped with lettuce, tomatoes, red onion sauce and mayo Bacon Factory Loaded Fries Large chili cheese fries with shredded bacon, diced hot dogs, jalapeno, green onions and try me sauce Large chili cheese fries with shredded bacon, diced hot dogs, jalapeno, green onions and try me sauce Factory Burger 1/2 pound of 100% angus beef with lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and pickles 1/2 pound of 100% angus beef with lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and pickles Corn Dog Nuggets 12 deep fried corn dog nuggets The following states currently regulate the offer and sale of franchises: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. Once brought on board, franchisees will obtain access to the brand, tested and proven processes and support, purchasing power and distribution chains, cooperative marketing, new product research, development and roll-out, experienced training staff, and continuing training and education. The Original Hot Dog Factory already has an established market presence and substantial market penetration in Atlanta. From this highly successful platform, the company is looking to expand the brand in select key areas domestically. Franchise Points include: Low Cost of Entry (Requiring under 200k to start, HDF has the most competitive rates on the market), Low Operating Cost (HDF leads the industry in QSR concepts, with extremely low food cost and simple execution), Strong Retail Relationships (HDF offers extensive, ongoing training, turnkey development planning, and creative marketing support), Flexible Footprints (From storefronts to c-stores to hot dog carts to food trucks, HDF is a progressive and adaptable franchise), and High Profit Potential (Low food cost and operational budgets, mixed with innovative business strategies makes profit margin potential limitless! Americas new favorite hotdog franchise). Media Contact: Lamont Johnson Lamont@ArtDepartmentPr.com 305.219.2242 SOURCE The Original Hot Dog Factory ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Founded on Sept. 9, 1916, the Kiwanis Club of Aurora was the first club in the Illinois-Eastern Iowa District and the 21st club chartered in the world, club officials said. The club currently has 99 members. It is also the sponsor of Kiwanis clubs in Oswego and Yorkville. As a Bible-based, Christ-centered ministry, we are also required by scripture to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God, they said in the statement, citing specific Bible passages. For more than nine decades (Wayside Cross) has been committed to empowering the afflicted and the powerless in collaboration with scores of local churches and hundreds of godly mentors. Recognizing that God is the source of our competence, we are called to help people like Thomas. A Pratt manager, who learned of the situation Sunday morning, retrieved some of the discarded items that were still, thankfully, in the trash container. But John Jaros, executive director of the Aurora Historical Society, had been chronicling the memorial site and knew what had been put back was only a small fraction of what people had left since the crosses went up the day after the Feb. 15 shooting. And he was determined to find more of the items that had been left so as much as possible could be saved for posterity. Phil Spencer has just dropped one of his Twitter-based teasers for whats to come about Xbox, as hell be embarking on a journey very soon. As he shared on the social network, indeed, hell be in Japan and Korea to meet several publishers and developers. These meetings will be functional to the preparation of the Xbox E3 2019 media briefing, where therell be the usual series of foreign games. On top of that, Spencer will also be briefing those partners about the future plans the gaming division at Microsoft has in store for the next couple hours. Looking forward to the week in Korea and Japan visiting studios and publishers, he told his followers on Twitter. Always inspired by the great games these studios are delivering. Talking about E3 and getting input on future plans is always fun. So, its interesting that these talks wont stop at the E3 2019, which is in June, but will also cover future plans. Xbox has in store a next-gen console family, which should span across two different platforms, and the streaming platform Project xCloud, so definitely Spencer will have a lot to talk with his partners over in Asia. The shunt was placed in Jayne when she was 3 months old, Crouthamel said. The shunt can last a lifetime and some people never need another surgery after the shunt is implanted. Others have had more than 100 surgeries by age 21. Buying guide April 2019: Best High End smartphones to buy in India Features oi-Harish Kumar Planning to buy a new premium flagship smartphone, and confused about your decision? To reduce your burden of buying your next smartphone, we have cured a list of devices, which offers top of the line specifications, premium design, and the flagship branding. The Samsung Galaxy S10 series of smartphones some of the best flagship Android smartphones available in the country, which goes head to head with Apple's iPhone XS series of smartphones. Smartphones like OnePlus 6T, Honor View20 does offer flagship grade design and spec-sheet an unbeatable price tag. Whereas, devices like the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, Samsung Galaxy Note9, and the Samsung Galaxy S9+ offers the best value for money. Phones like the Asus ROG are known for their gaming capability. Here are all the flagship smartphones, which you can currently buy in India, which offers top of the line specifications with premium looking design. One can choose a device depending on the requirement and the amount they are willing to spend on their next device. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Asus ZenFone 6 shows up on Geekbench with 6GB RAM and Snapdragon 855 SoC News oi-Sandeep Sarkar It has logged a score of 3,527 points in the single-core tests. Whereas, the device has achieved a total of 11,190 points in the multi-core test. Asus, the Taiwanese tech giant is gearing up to bring its next premium offering the ZenFone 6 smartphone for the consumers. The upcoming premium smartphone by the company is expected to be officially unveiled in the market next month, i.e, May. It is being speculated that Asus might announce the device on May 16 and ahead of its official launch date, the smartphone has been spotted over the web once again. The Asus ZenFone 6 smartphone has made an appearance on the popular benchmarking platform Geekbench. The device has been listed on the benchmarking platform along with some specs and scores of multi-core and single-core tests. The Asus ZenFone 6 has been spotted with a model number ASUS I01WD. This is the same model number with which the device had been previously spotted on the Wi-Fi Alliance website. In terms of the single-core and multi-core tests, the Asus ZenFone 6 has logged a score of 3,527 points in the single-core tests. Whereas, the device has achieved a total of 11,190 points in the multi-core test. The ZenFone 6 Geekbench listing suggests that the smartphone will run on a premium octa-core Snapdragon 855 processor. The processor will be combined with 6GB of RAM. In the software department, the smartphone is said to come with Android 9 Pie OS onboard which has been suggested by previous leaks as well. Asus ZenFone 6 has already cleared its certification from Wi-Fi Alliance which is a mobile certification body of the US. With the device clearing Wi-Fi Alliance certification and making an appearance on Geekbench, we can expect that the company is working with full force on its latest premium smartphone. We also have come across some leaks which suggested that Asus might use a punch-hole display panel on the ZenFone 6 and there will be ultra-slim bezels all around. We are waiting for some more leaks on the device's hardware along with pricing and will keep you updated with all the latest information on same. via Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications LG V50 ThinQ to go on sale from the 16th of April for Rs 73,000 News oi-Vivek LG V50 ThinQ is LG's first 5G smartphone LG announced the LG V50 ThinQ at MWC 2019, along with the LG G8 ThinQ. Now, the company has officially announced that the LG V50 ThinQ will be available from the 19th of April, starting from South Korea. LG V50 ThinQ price and availability The LG V50 ThinQ will be available in South Korea from the 16th of April 2019. The standard variant retails for 1,199,000 won or $1055 or Rs 73,100. The dual screen accessory comes with a price tag of 2,19,000 won or $195 or Rs 13,350. As of now, there is no information on the launch of the LG V50 ThinQ in India. LG V50 ThinQ specifications The LG V50 ThinQ has a 6.4-inch 2K OLED display with 2.5D curved tempered glass. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC powers the smartphone with 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage along with a microSD card slot for additional storage space. The LG V50 ThinQ is also one of the first smartphones in the world to launch with the Snapdragon X50 5G modem, with support for true 5G networking capability. Coming to the camera, the smartphone has a 12 MP primary sensor with an f/1.5 aperture, a 16 MP super wide angle lens with an f/1.9 aperture, and a 12 MP telephoto lens to offer portrait mode and 2x optical zooming capability. On the front, the device has a dual camera setup with an 8 MP primary camera and a 5 MP secondary camera with an f/2.2 aperture. Like most of the LG flagship smartphones, the LG V50 ThiQ is IP68 certified for water, and dust resistance with MIL-STD 810G certified for added durability. The LG V50 ThinQ is one of the few flagship smartphones of 2019, to retain the 3.5mm headphone jack with a USB type-C port for charging and data syncing. The device has a massive 4000 mAh battery with support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0. Source Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications To see how Christmas has changed over the last century, Stacker explored how popular traditions, like food and decorations, emerged and evolved from 1920 to 2020 in the U.S. and around the world. Stacker also found when some of the most popular Christmas songs, movies, and books entered the canon of the holiday season and gifts that topped many Christmas lists over the years. Read on to discover how Christmas has evolved over the past century. Visit thestacker.com for similar lists and stories. Nokia X71 with punch hole display officially launched for Rs 26,700 News oi-Vivek Nokia X71 has a 48 MP primary camera Nokia has officially launched it's first triple camera smartphone with a punch-hole display design, the Nokia X71. Here is everything you need to know about the latest smartphone from HMD Global with a massive 48 MP primary camera. Price and availability The Nokia X71 will be available in Taiwan via Nokia official website for 11,990 Taiwan Dollars or Rs 26,900. As of now, there is no information on the availability of the Nokia X71 in India. Specifications The phone has a premium looking design, similar to the Nokia 7.1 Plus with an all-glass unibody design and a metal mid-frame. The Nokia X71 offers the highest screen to body ratio in the Nokia smartphone series from HMD Global. The smartphone comes with the modern punch hole display with a 6.39-inch screen, offering an aspect ratio of 19.3:9. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 AIE SoC powers the smartphone with 6 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage. At the back, the smartphone houses a rear-facing fingerprint sensor. With respect to connectivity, the smartphone has dual nano-SIM card slots with support for 4G LTE and VoLTE on both the slots. The smartphone does support dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz) with Bluetooth 5.0. The main highlight of the Nokia X71 is the triple camera setup. The device has a massive 48 MP Zeiss certified primary camera with an 8 MP super wide angle lens and a 5 MP depth camera. There is a 16 MP front-facing selfie camera on the front with an f/2.0 aperture. The smartphone does support 4K video recording @ 30fps and the selfie camera will support 1080p video recording @30fps. The Nokia X71 is fueled by a 3500 mAh Li-ion battery with support for 18W fast charging via USB type C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Lastly, the device runs on stock Android 9 Pie OS with no third-party apps or customizations. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Realme U1 prices slashed once again in India, now starts at Rs 9,999 News oi-Sandeep Sarkar The Realme U1 with 3GB RAM is now available for Rs 9,999 and the 4GB RAM variant is now retailing for Rs 11,999. Realme is one of the other brands besides Xiaomi and Honor which is popular amongst the masses for the budget smartphones. The company debuted in the Indian market with the launch of the Realme 1 smartphone and recently launched its third iteration, the Realme 3. The company has also some other popular affordable smartphones which it has launched in the Indian market such as Realme U1, Realme C1, etc. Realme U1, a selfie-centric smartphone by the Chinese brand has also been a success in the Indian market. The smartphone was launched with an original price tag of Rs 11,999 for the 3GB variant in the Indian market and had recently received a price cut. Now, the device has received yet another price slash here in the country. The information about the price cut on the Realme U1 has been shared by the company on its official Twitter handle. The smartphone has received Rs 1,000 off price deduction on both of the variants. The Realme U1 with 3GB RAM is now available for Rs 9,999 and the 4GB RAM variant is now retailing for Rs 11,999. Both the variants will be available for purchase via Amazon.in and Realme's online store. Let the excitement begin! Now be the Pro and grab #IndiasSelfiePro #realmeU1 at exciting new prices. 3+32GB Rs. 9,999 4+64GB Rs. 11,999 Buy here: https://t.co/ePJQ3535pc Retweet to spread the news. pic.twitter.com/peVcu5nyZU realme (@realmemobiles) April 1, 2019 Coming to the specifications, the Realme U1's key highlight is its 25MP selfie camera. This makes it one of those smartphones which offer such a powerful setup for selfies at this price range. The rear camera, on the other hand, comes with a dual lens setup with one 13MP lens and one 2MP sensor. The smartphone flaunts a 6.3-inch FHD+ display panel with a screen resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels. There is a dewdrop notch on top that houses the selfie camera. The smartphone runs on MediaTek P70 chipset and is backed by a 3,500mAH battery under the hood. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Airtel boost 4G network in Karnataka, introduces 900 Mhz spectrum band News oi-Priyanka Dua Airtel has deployed advanced network technologies and tools such as pre-5G Massive MIMO, 4G Advanced, and Carrier Aggregation to step up high-speed network capacity and coverage. India's second largest telecom service provider Bharti Airtel has further upgraded its 4G network in Karnataka with the deployment of LTE 900 technology which will enhance the network experience for its smartphone customers. With the rollout of 4G in the superior 900 Mhz spectrum band, Karnataka's fastest mobile network will get additional high-speed data capacity to serve its customers. C. Surendran, CEO - Karnataka, Bharti Airtel said, "Our endeavor is to deliver best-in-class network experience to our customers. The deployment of LTE 900 will further boost Airtel 4G coverage, particularly inside homes and buildings. Airtel smartphone customers will enjoy seamless high-speed data and HD quality calling experience on our upgraded network. We will continue to invest aggressively in a deployment of the latest network technologies to delight our customers." In addition, Airtel has deployed advanced network technologies and tools such as pre-5G Massive MIMO, 4G Advanced, and Carrier Aggregation to step up high-speed network capacity and coverage. For those who are aware, Airtel has also announced new ISD call charges for Bangladesh and Nepal. The new ISD call charges, which are currently available to Airtel prepaid mobile users, are the most affordable in the industry and eliminate the need for buying additional ISD packs to make calls to Bangladesh and Nepal. Airtel mobile customers can now enjoy the most competitive ISD tariffs with their regular recharge packs and bundles. Calls to Bangladesh will now be charged at only Rs 2.99/minute (versus Rs. 12/minute earlier) representing a reduction of 75 percent. Calls to Nepal will now be charged at Rs 7.99/minute (versus Rs 13 earlier) representing a reduction of appx. 40 percent. These new ISD rates will provide a major fillip to the growing socio-economic cooperation in the region, benefiting migrant population and businesses alike. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Whistleblower: Trump Aides Gave Security Clearances Deemed Unwarranted By Ken Bredemeier April 01, 2019 A whistleblower from inside the White House has told congressional investigators that senior Trump administration officials granted national security clearances to at least 25 people that government reviewers had rejected for an array of concerns. The whistleblower, Tricia Newbold, said the officials, cleared for security credentials after career employees recommended they be denied, include two current unnamed senior White House officials, government contractors, and other staff aides working for the office of President Donald Trump. Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process under both Republican and Democratic presidents, last month told investigators for the House Oversight and Reform Committee that while Trump had the right as president to overrule career employees' denials of the security badges, the officials' clearances "were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security." The committee chairman, Congressman Elijah Cummings, told the panel's members that Newbold told investigators that those eventually cleared by senior Trump administration officials "had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct." Newbold told investigators she had been suspended for 14 days without pay earlier this year after protesting internally about the way in which the security clearance denials had been overturned and now was worried about returning to work after she decided to go public with her concerns. "I'm terrified of going back," she told investigators. "I know that this will not be perceived in favor of my intentions, which is to bring back the integrity of the office." But Newbold said she decided to become a whistleblower because "I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security." Cummings's memo on Newbold's statements to investigators did not identify any of the officials who have been granted security clearances against the recommendations of the security reviewers. But the panel said it is reviewing the clearances given to Trump's daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, both of whom are White House advisers, and national security adviser John Bolton. News accounts earlier this year said Trump had personally intervened last year to overrule then-White House chief of staff John Kelly to grant a clearance to Kushner, a move Kelly found so unsettling that he recorded Trump's direction to him in a memo. Cummings, in a letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, said he "has given the White House every possible opportunity to cooperate with the investigation, but you have declined. Your actions are now preventing the committee from obtaining the information it needs to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities." Cummings said his panel would vote Tuesday to subpoena Newbold's former boss, Carl Kline, who now works at the Defense Department, along with five other current and former White House officials involved with the security reviews to testify about their role in the clearances. The White House had no immediate comment on the security clearance issues. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address April 1, 2019 News Release Press Operations Release No. NR-075-19 Readout of Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan's Meeting with Philippine Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana Acting Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Charles E. Summers Jr. provided the following readout: Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan met with Philippine Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana today at the Pentagon to reaffirm the enduring alliance between the United States and the Philippines and to discuss bilateral issues in the relationship. The two leaders discussed a broad range of defense issues and mutual steps to strengthen the alliance. They agreed on the need to increase interoperability between our respective militaries, through exercises, training, and U.S. support for the Armed Forces of the Philippines' modernization plans. Secretary Shanahan and Secretary Lorenzana affirmed their common commitment to fighting terrorism in Southeast Asia. Secretary Shanahan thanked Secretary Lorenzana for his continued support to the alliance, and for his role in advancing our shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific. https://dod.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1802470/ NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address April 1, 2019 News Release Press Operations Release No. NR-075-19 Readout of Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan Meeting With Defense Minister Jeong Keyong-doo of the Republic of Korea Readout of the meeting between U.S. Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan and ROK Minister of National Defense Jeong Keyong-doo Minister of National Defense Jeong Keyong-doo and Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan held a U.S.-ROK defense ministerial meeting on April 1, 2019, and discussed U.S.-ROK efforts to support denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula after the second U.S.-DPRK Summit, as well as other key alliance issues. The secretary and minister affirmed that the U.S.-ROK Alliance is "ironclad" and ready to face an evolving security environment. They pledged to closely cooperate in order to further develop and reinforce the alliance through the synchronized efforts of the U.S.-ROK military authorities. The two sides reaffirmed the commitment to maintain an unwavering combined readiness posture while continuing to support the ongoing diplomatic efforts to achieve complete denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula. Secretary Shanahan and Minister Jeong both expressed their satisfaction with the close communication between the U.S.-ROK military and defense authorities. They also pledged to enhance coordination and cooperation in various areas, including information sharing pertaining to North Korean issues, such as North Korean nuclear and missile activities. Gen. Abrams, commander, Combined Forces Command (CFC), provided the minister and the secretary an evaluation of the 'Dongmaeng' exercise executed in March, and assessed that the revised exercise and training strengthened their combined defense and readiness posture and contributed to the groundwork for the transition of wartime operational control (OPCON) for the CFC. The two sides also agreed to work toward initial operational capability certification of a ROK-led combined defense posture in 2019, and committed to stay in close consultation. Minister Jeong updated Secretary Shanahan on the ROK's efforts towards achieving the Conditions-Based OPCON Transition. Secretary Shanahan reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to continue providing the U.S. military's bridging and enduring capabilities to defend the ROK even after the transition of wartime OPCON. The two sides committed to closely cooperate to expedite the fulfilment of conditions needed for OPCON transition including the ROK military's acquisition of critical military capabilities. The minister informed the secretary of the ROK's new Defense Reform 2.0, devised as a result of the changing security environment. Secretary Shanahan voiced his hopes that Defense Reform 2.0 would enhance alliance capabilities and contribute to the transition of wartime OPCON transition and the ROK-led Future Combined Forces Command. The secretary and the minister assessed that implementation of the Comprehensive Military Agreement has contributed to the easing of military tension and confidence building on the Korean Peninsula. They reaffirmed that they will continue to closely coordinate to support CMA implementation. https://dod.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1802481/ NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Press conference by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg ahead of the meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers in Washington, D.C. on 3 and 4 April 2019 NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 01 Apr. 2019 (As delivered) Good afternoon. Later this week, NATO Foreign Ministers will meet in Washington D.C. to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Alliance. Tomorrow I will meet with President Trump at the White House. On Wednesday, all the Foreign Ministers are invited to a joint session of the United States Congress. Where I will deliver a speech on behalf of the 29 Allies. On Wednesday evening, we will gather in the Mellon Auditorium. Where the original twelve members signed the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. This will be an opportunity to celebrate seven decades of peace and prosperity for our nations. And it will be an opportunity to look to the future together. On Thursday, we will begin by addressing NATO's relations with Russia. Russia continues to violate the INF Treaty by developing and deploying SSC-8 missiles. These missiles are hard to detect, lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and make us all less safe. Russia continues to defy our calls to return to compliance with the INF Treaty. And time is running out. So we will discuss NATO's next steps. The Alliance remains strongly committed to arms control. But we must also continue to maintain credible and effective deterrence and defence. NATO is also concerned by Russia's pattern of aggressive behaviour. Including its ongoing actions against Ukraine, and the seizure of Ukrainian sailors and ships near the Sea of Azov. NATO has already stepped up its presence in the Black Sea. And we continue to work closely with our partners in the region. Just last week, I saw for myself this cooperation at the 2019 NATO-Georgia exercise. And today, ships from one of NATO's naval groups are in Ukraine and Georgia. These ships will take part in exercise Sea Shield in the Black Sea. I expect Ministers this week will agree new measures to improve our situational awareness in the region. And to step up NATO's support for both Georgia and Ukraine. In areas such as training of maritime forces and coast guards, port visits and exercises, and sharing of information. Ministers will also discuss NATO's role in the fight against terrorism. And US efforts to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan. Ambassador Khalilzad held consultations with Allies here at NATO just last week, for the fourth time. And our commander of the NATO Resolute Support Mission, and NATO's Senior Civilian Representative in Khabul, are closely coordinating with Ambassador Khalilzad. We are in Afghanistan together and we will take any decisions on our future presence together. We also stand together in the fight against ISIS, and we have made major progress. Millions have been freed from oppression. And this terrorist group no longer holds any territory. But we are not complacent. We are now doing more training in Iraq to help ensure that ISIS can never return. Hundreds of trainers from Allies and partners countries are in the country, providing support to the Ministry of Defence, the Office of the National Security Adviser and to military schools. Training local forces is one of our best tools in the fight against terrorism. And we are committed to doing more, including with other close partners in the region, Jordan and Tunisia and other partners. We will close the meeting in Washington, the Foreign Ministers meeting with a session to discuss burden sharing. After years of cutting billions from defence budgets, now we are adding billions. And we have seen four consecutive years of rising investment in defence. Since 2016, European Allies and Canada have added $41 billion dollars to their defence budgets. By the end of next year, this will rise to $100 billion. Allies are also investing more in major capabilities, like missile defence, drones and new fighter aircraft. And NATO has just agreed a new substantial investment in military infrastructure. We will invest more than $260 million in a project to support US forces in central Poland. This will fund storage and maintenance of pre-positioned military equipment which will speed up reinforcement for Europe. This project is part of a bigger picture: Around $2.3 billion in NATO funding for military mobility projects over the last four years. So Allies are really stepping up. Spending more, and better, on defence. But we still have to do more and we must keep up the momentum. For seventy years, the bond between Europe and North America has made NATO the strongest alliance in history. In an unpredictable world, we work together every day to prevent conflict and preserve peace for nearly one billion people. And with that, I am ready to take your questions. OANA LUNGESCU [NATO spokesperson]: Okay, we'll start with Jane's, third row, yeah? QUESTION [Brooks Tigner, Jane's Defence Weekly]: I was interested about the Black Sea measures, you know, to boost security in the area, you mentioned several things including port visits. Given that the Azov Sea is supposed to be a free and open sea, wouldn't it make sense for NATO to send some ships in for a port visit to Mariupol? And if it doesn't, would you not agree that, or would you agree that this, de facto hands control, perhaps permanently over to Russia, thank you, of that sea, thanks. JENS STOLTENBERG [NATO Secretary General]: For NATO the important thing is that the law, the international law and the law of Sea is fully respected. And that's also the reason why we reacted so strongly when Russia seized Ukrainian ships some months ago. And that's also the reason why we continue to call on, on Russia to release the ships and the sailors. And, as I said, we have increased our presence in the Black Sea, with more naval presence, with NATO's maritime groups taking part in exercises and also with different port visits, just now both to Ukraine and to Georgia. But I will not comment exactly on which ports we are going to visit when and how, we are in the Black Sea, we operate there, and we strongly urge all countries in the region and especially Russia, of course, to respect the international law. OANA LUNGESCU: Okay, Deutsche Welle, NPR, lady in red, over there. Yeah. QUESTION [Teri Schultz, Deutsche Welle and NPR]: In a report written by two former US ambassadors to NATO, Doug Lute and Nick Burns, they concluded after interviewing dozens of people on both sides of the Atlantic that the biggest challenge, or threat, to NATO is the absence of strong presidential leadership from the United States. And this was taking into account all of the things that you say, you know, the additional spending on the ground, the additional troops. So even with experts who know those things, they still say that this is the . . . the biggest problem NATO is facing. So, I mean, is even the perception of this a weakness for the Alliance at 70? Thanks. JENS STOLTENBERG: NATO is an Alliance of 29 democracies, and in democracies there are different views, different experts, different opinions about many things. So part of being open societies is that we also have open discussions about strength and . . . and challenges we face. And then you may find, or, you not only may find, but you will always find experts which have different assessments on where we are and where we stand and what's the main challenges. What I am absolutely convinced about is that what we see now is a strong commitment by the United States to NATO, and I say that partly because that is what has been stated by the President. He has stated again and again, for instance, in the State of the Union speech, that he is committed to NATO, he said so when he met NATO leaders here at the Brussels summit. But also we see a very strong bipartisan support from the US Congress to NATO. And not only that, but we see also an increased presence of US troops in Europe. And I can hardly think about any stronger expression of US commitment to the security of Europe than the US sending more troops to Europe, with a new armoured brigade in Europe and, for instance, with the US Marines in Norway they've not, never been there before. So . . . so it's just not possible to say that, that the United States is not committed to NATO, because the United States is increasing their military contributions to NATO in . . . with more troops, with more exercises. I mentioned the examples now where we are actually, with NATO funding, investing in new facilities, new infrastructure for US military presence in Poland. One of the biggest investments we have done for many years and over four years 2.3 billion NATO-funded investments in infrastructure, very much of that is relevant for US presence in Europe. So, and then the fact that I will speak to the US Congress too on Wednesday, I , I regard that as a very strong bipartisan expression for that commitment and for the support for NATO. So, I know these former ambassadors well. I . . . sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree, but the fact is that we see that North America and Europe are doing more together than they've done for many, many years. OANA LUNGESCU: Okay, Washington Post. QUESTION [Michael Birnbaum, The Washington Post]: If Germany is spending 1.5 percent of its GDP on defence in 2024, as it's currently planning to do, is that enough for it to meet its NATO defence capability targets? Thank you. JENS STOLTENBERG: So, I expect Germany to make good on the pledge Germany made together with all other NATO Allies. And that's partly about spending but also about capabilities. So I expect them to, of course, both meet the spending targets, the spending commitments and they have conveyed to, also they have submitted to NATO a national plan where they outline how Germany will increase defence spending in real terms by 80 percent over a decade. Then, in addition, we have agreed capability targets and . . . and we just expect that when Germany, as other Allies, when they agree to capability targets, that, of course, they provide the necessary funding to deliver those capability targets. So I will continue to . . . to follow up and to focus on this in all my meetings with . . . NATO leaders in Berlin, in . . . in Rome, in . . . in Paris, in all other NATO Allied countries, to make sure that when we speak about burden sharing, a fair Alliance, that's about spending, but it is also about contributions to NATO missions and operation, and also, of course, capability targets. And let me just add that Germany is delivering more contributions to NATO missions and operations. They have agreed, they have . . . they continue to be one of our largest force contributors to our mission in Afghanistan, they lead one of the battlegroups in the Baltics and they are now responsible for the High Readiness Force of NATO, which was certified during the NATO exercise in Norway, the Trident Juncture. So . . . so Germany is contributing to the Alliance in many different ways. OANA LUNGESCU: Okay, Georgian TV, lady here. QUESTION [Rustavi 2, Georgian TV]: Regarding to the Black Sea security, NATO official last week said that on the upcoming ministerial, ministers will agree new steps to co-operate with Georgia on Black Sea security. Can you tell us more details and which kind of new steps it +will be? Thank you. JENS STOLTENBERG: So, first of all I . . . the ministers have to meet before they can agree. But I can say what I expect them to agree. And I expect that they will agree on measures related to training, meaning exercises like the exercises we see now. We have one exercise which is hosted by Romania and then we had recently this exercise which I took part in, NATO and Georgia exercise just a week ago. But especially training of maritime forces and NATO provides help to the Georgian Coast Guard, we are looking into how we can step up that, do more of that. That was also something I discussed when I visited Tbilisi a few days ago. So that's training maritime forces and training and helping to strengthen coast guards. The other is port visits, meaning . . . and also, then, participation in different exercises. And, for instance in . . . last year, in 2018, NATO ships spent 120 days in the Black Sea, and that is a significant increase from the 80 days we spent in the Black Sea in 2017. So that's actually a 50 percent increase in the number of days where you have NATO ships in the Black Sea. That shows a presence. That improves our situational awareness and we often, when we are in the Black Sea, we do something together with our partners. Georgia, Ukraine and, of course, we have three littoral states Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria and, of course, whatever they also do is also relevant for the Black Sea, and they are also strengthening their . . . their maritime capabilities. And then, sharing information, because to have the best possible situational awareness, to be able to see what is going on, is key for the three NATO littoral states, but also, of course, for our two close partners, Georgia and Ukraine. So, yeah. OANA LUNGESCU: Okay, we'll go to the gentleman in the second row. QUESTION: [Barzan Hassan, Kurdistan 24]: Can you give us last update information about the NATO mission to Iraq and Kurdistan region? And let's just take a listen, this President Trump, he said something and then I will have a question please? PRESIDENT TRUMP [Audio recording]: We lost . . . tens of thousands of Kurds died fighting ISIS. They died for us and with us and for themselves. They died for themselves. But they are great people and we have not forget . . . we, we don't forget, I don't forget, what happens some day later, but I can tell you that I don't forget. QUESTION: [Barzan Hassan, Kurdistan 24]: So what's your reaction please? Thank you. JENS STOLTENBERG: But did you ask about the NATO mission in Iraq? QUESTION: [Barzan Hassan, Kurdistan 24]: [Inaudible, off-mic] JENS STOLTENBERG I understand, I understand. Well, NATO is part of the global coalition to defeat ISIS and all NATO Allies participate. And . . . and NATO has provided support in different ways to the global coalition. And the global coalition has made remarkable progress, meaning that not many years ago, or actually, not many months ago, ISIS was controlling a territory, almost equal the size of the United Kingdom and millions of people were under the control of ISIS. ISIS does not control any territory anymore. And that is, of course, very much because of the efforts of the Global Coalition, and that's a huge achievement, or a significant achievement. But that doesn't mean that the fight against terrorism and . . . and that we can be . . . is over or that, that we can be complacent. We know that they still tried to mobilise support for their twisted ideology. ISIS exists many places in the world. We see them also in Afghanistan. So we need to continue to fight ISIS and terrorism in different places of the world. And we have to make sure that ISIS doesn't return in the way it was in Iraq and . . . and Syria, where they controlled territory. That's the main reason why, or that's the reason why we now are training more Iraqi forces, because we strongly believe that the best way of stabilising Iraq, the best way of preventing Iraq from once again being threatened by ISIS, is to train, build local capacity, and that's what we do in Iraq. QUESTION: [Barzan Hassan, Kurdistan 24]: [Inaudible, off-mic] JENS STOLTENBERG: Yeah, but then, so that's, that's . . . that's the training mission in Iraq, and NATO support for the global coalition. As you know, NATO as an Alliance is not present on the ground in northern Syria. Some NATO Allies are, but we also know that there are some different views among NATO Allies on how to deal with the challenges we see in northern Syria. What I welcome is that NATO Allies are talking together, that they address the common challenges we see in northern Syria, but it's not for me to go into the different issues, because that will only make that dialogue more difficult. OANA LUNGESCU: Interfax-Ukraine, lady with a red scarf. QUESTION [Iryna Somer, Interfax-Ukraine Agency]: On 16th March, President Poroshenko wrote to you a letter, a congratulations letter, it's your birthday. In third paragraph, he mentioned that in London during a summit he will raise issue of MAP for Ukraine. Did you actually see this letter, and how do you consider it, like official request or just friendly letter from a friend, 'happy birthday.'? And can we have your comment on the yesterday first round of the presidential election in Ukraine where comedian got 30 percent of votes? Thank you. JENS STOLTENBERG: First of all, I am grateful for the happy birthday wishes from President Poroshenko. And as long as I am younger than the NATO Alliance I feel young. So . . . so, and it will remain like that for a long time. Then . . . then when it comes to Ukraine and NATO membership, we recognise the ambitions, the aspiration of Ukraine to become a NATO member. We work with Ukraine to help Ukraine move forward towards its transatlantic integration. We . . . and that's the reason why we have all the different frameworks, programmes to provide help and support, to help Ukraine focus on the most important thing, and that is reform: to modernise to meet the NATO standards, we help Ukraine, we modernise their defense and security institutions, we have trust funds, we have training, we have different kinds of activities where we are helping Ukraine. And NATO Allies also provide different kinds of bilateral support. We strongly believe that this has to be the main focus: reform and to continue to modernise and to strengthen their defence and security institutions, including fighting . . . fighting corruption. So this will be our focus. When it comes to the meeting in December, that's a short meeting, it's not a full-fledged summit. It will be leaders meeting, an important meeting, but not a full-fledged summit with all the different sessions. We . . . we will meet in London to mark the 70th anniversary of the Alliance, we meet in London because London was the place we had NATO's headquarters at the beginning. QUESTION [Iryna Somer, Interfax-Ukraine Agency]: [inaudible, off-mic] JENS STOLTENBERG: The elections? Well, the elections are ongoing and therefore I think it will not be appropriate if I started to comment on the outcome of those elections. There will be a second round. But the . . . NATO . . . NATO and our partners they have elections almost all the time and that's . . . that's part of being a democracy. And I think it's important that those elections are conducted in a way which is fair and free and . . . and then I think we should wait to comment on the outcome until we see an outcome of the final round. OANA LUNGESCU: Okay, Le Soir? QUESTION [Philippe Regnier, Le Soir]: Regarding this new military infrastructure in Poland, do you see this as a sort of . . . of game-changer, compared to the rotating battalion which is already there? And if so, is it sort of escalation with Russia? And if I may, on INF Treaty do you expect some decisions during the Washington meeting regarding what has to be done in case of the non-return of Russia to compliance to the treaty? Thank you. JENS STOLTENBERG: The investment in the infrastructure project in central Poland is part of a broader effort to strengthen military mobility. This is one of the biggest airports, military air . . . airfields in Poland. And we will then invest in different facilities to enable maintenance and storage of equipment. And by prepositioning equipment, we can then . . . we will increase the readiness and . . . of our forces, because then we need to move in people and . . . also heavy equipment. So this is part of an ongoing process where NATO has been focused on military mobility, improved infrastructure, means of transportation, but also on preposition . . . prepositioning of heavy equipment and, for instance, improving airfields, harbours and other critical infrastructure for moving forces across Europe. So this is part of that, but it's a major significant investment. And it also shows how NATO is working with the US, because this is a bilateral US presence, but underpinned by a NATO investment in infrastructure. Good for NATO, good for all of us. Then, on the INF, well, I expect the ministers to be very clear on their message to Russia, that Russia has to come back into compliance with the INF Treaty, because this is a cornerstone for European security, cornerstone for the whole arms control architecture. And now this cornerstone is in jeopardy, because Russia is violating the treaty, deploying new missiles. So therefore the withdrawal process which was announced early February, there is a six-month period before that is completed, and there is still time for Russia to come into compliance. So I expect ministers to be very clear on the need for Russia to come back into compliance, but at the same time I expect ministers to be equally clear on the need for NATO to prepare for a world without the treaty and with more Russian missiles in Europe. We will be coordinated. We will be measured. But we . . . and we don't have any intention of deploying new ground launch nuclear weapons in Europe. But, of course, NATO has to always be able to deliver credible deterrence and defence, also in a world without the INF Treaty. OANA LUNGESCU: Okay, Kabul Times, lady in the middle. QUESTION [Lailuma Sadid, Kabul Times]: You mentioned that Mr Khalilzad updating you regarding the peace talk in Afghanistan. And you also said that NATO and US went in Afghanistan together, and they will make a plan for the future. Is that mean that if US decide to draw their troops in Afghanistan, NATO do the same? And also you mentioned that Daesh is very active in Afghanistan. Is that true because the situation is really worse than ever? And what's the next plan, NATO decide to make fight against terrorism especially with Daesh and Al-Qaida or any other insurgents group in Afghanistan? Thank you. JENS STOLTENBERG: Well, the next step depends very much on the progress in the peace process. And since these are ongoing negotiations, no one can tell you when and exactly what the outcome will be. And therefore we have not made any decisions, because that will very much depend on the outcome of the peace process if, and what kind of agreement, that will be reached and when. What we have clearly stated is that we are committed to our mission in Afghanistan. So NATO Allies provide the troops to the . . . to the mission. We have actually increased the number of NATO trainers in Afghanistan, because we know that the best way to reach a peaceful negotiated solution is to send a message to the Taliban that they will not win on the battlefield. So that's the reason why we are training and supporting the Afghan forces. And as long as we are committed to that, we are also providing the necessary strength around the negotiating table, and then hopefully that can help us to reach a peaceful negotiated solution, which will allow us then, later on, to reduce our presence in Afghanistan. Again, how much, exactly when it will just be wrong if I started to speculate, because it's just too early. But as you know, the negotiations, they address the importance of Afghanistan not again becoming a safe haven for international terrorists. How to make sure that, how to ensure that that's the case. It addresses, of course, the issue of presence of international troops, NATO presence. And it also addresses another important issue and that is Afghan reconciliation. Of course, there can be no lasting peace in Afghanistan without Afghan reconciliation, and the Afghan government has to be part of that. That's obvious. So . . . so we are working closely with United States. The message from all NATO's Allies, including United States is that we went in together and we will make decisions on our future presence together. But that . . . those decisions will, of course, depend on what happens around the negotiating table. And therefore we also send the message that we are committed to the security of Afghanistan, providing both training, practical support to the Afghan security forces, but also continued financial support. We made a pledge to continue our financial support until 2024. So . . . so, yeah, we are committed. But at the same time, of course, we don't want to stay in Afghanistan longer than necessary. We would like to create the conditions for us to be able to draw down our presence. But that depends on the negotiations. OANA LUNGESCU: Associated Press. QUESTION [Lorne Cook, Associated Press]: You've just had your mandate extended again and part of the reason, I understand, is your ability to keep together some . . . some rather difficult, tricky, tricky meetings that you've had to manage. I just wonder, as you look ahead for your next three years, at NATO's 70 years, how much of a challenge is this internal cohesion at NATO? How hard is it to keep together countries which have very assertive leaders, whether it be the United States, Turkey, Poland or somewhere else? Or is it perhaps that NATO's bigger challenges are coming from the outside, rather than the inside? JENS STOLTENBERG: We have to be frank and recognise that there are disagreements between NATO Allies. There is no way anyone can deny that, because just by reading newspapers or watching the television you see that NATO Allies disagree on many issues. We see serious disagreements on issues like trade, energy, climate change, the Iran nuclear deal and . . . and also on other issues. But this is not the first time we see differences between NATO Allies. That has been part of our history for decades. Because we are 29 different nations, from both sides of the Atlantic, with different history, different geography, different political parties. And, therefore, actually, differences between NATO Allies, it's absolutely nothing new. We had differences back in the . . . in 1956 on the Suez crisis. We had differences when France decided in 1966 to leave the military cooperation in NATO. Or we had differences between NATO Allies in 2003, when . . . in 2003 when . . . on the Iraq War some Allies strongly supported that, other Allies equal . . . opposed it strongly. The strength of NATO is that despite these differences we have always been able to unite around our core task, and that is to protect and defend each other. Because we . . . we see that we are so much, that we are strong and safe together. As long as we stand together we are . . . we are so much stronger and so much safer. And especially in a world where we see new challenges, we see the balance of power shifting, we see the importance of new technologies like artificial intelligence and many other technologies. And we see that the fight against terrorism is a generational fight, and we see that we have to deal with a more assertive Russia, then it's even more important now we stand together. So yes, I'm not denying that there are differences. But my message is that, what we see is that NATO is able to overcome those differences. Because the best thing would be if we're able to solve the differences, on trade and energy or whatever it is. But as long as these issues remain unsolved, that there are disagreements, then my main focus is to make sure that we, at least, are able to deliver on defence and security and that we are able to deliver on the core task of NATO to protect and defend each other. And that's exactly what we're doing, because despite all these differences, North America and Europe are doing more together now than they have done for decades, with more US presence in Europe, European Allies are stepping up, investing more, contributing to different missions and operation, fighting terrorism, modernising our Alliance. So I'm not saying that I'm not aware of the differences, but I'm only saying that I think what we see is that NATO once again is able to deal with differences without weakening the core responsibility, the core task of our Alliance. And then I guess that one other . . . I have been prime minister for 10 years in Norway, I have been prime minister in a coalition government and I would say that that was a good experience to have when I went on to NATO. OANA LUNGESCU: Okay, ZDF. QUESTION [Stefan Leifert, ZDF German TV]: A question regarding your meeting with the US President tomorrow. How far do you expect burden sharing and especially the German defence expenditure to be a subject of discussion tomorrow? JENS STOLTENBERG: First, I think it's always important when we . . . when I speak about a meeting which has not taken place, to say that I am not able to tell you what the President will tell me tomorrow. I'm not able to tell you that today. But I expect that, of course burden sharing . . . burden sharing will be an important issue. And I expect that the message from the . . . from President Trump will be that the United States is committed to NATO, that . . . that NATO is important for our shared security. But, at the same time, that we need fairer sharing of the burden, we need fair burden sharing. And this has been a very consistent message from President Trump, yeah, since he took office and even before that. And my message will be that I agree. That NATO is a strong Alliance, but for NATO to remain a strong Alliance we need to be a fair Alliance. And therefore I have been so focused on the importance of making sure that NATO Allies are investing more. Partly, of course, because we need those capabilities, but also because to invest in defence is also a way to invest in our unity, invest in the strength of the transatlantic bond. And . . . and I expect the President to convey that message. But I will also then highlight that actually European Allies are stepping up, including Germany, and that if we just look at the accumulated increase it's 41 billion dollars since 2016. At the end of next year that number will be 100 billion dollars. That's significant. That makes a difference. And it shows that Allies are stepping up. OANA LUNGESCU: Thank you very much. This concludes this press conference and hope to see at least some of you in Washington D.C. Thank you. JENS STOLTENBERG: Thank you. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Canadian Armed Forces sharpen cold weather skills above the Arctic Circle, alongside NATO Allies and partners NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 17 Mar. 2019 - 01 Apr. 2019 Last updated: 01 Apr. 2019 12:22 Canada's Operation NANOOK-NUNALIVUT 2019 is wrapping up in northern Canada. Between 17 March and 1 April, around 500 personnel have been testing Arctic survival skills and logistics, including long-range patrols, ice diving, and creating landing strips on the sea ice. In Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, Canadian and international ice divers have been practicing their skills, which are crucial for repairing underwater infrastructure, and assisting ships that sink or run aground. Divers from NATO Allies France and Norway took part, as did divers from NATO's close partners Finland and Sweden. Brigadier-General Patrick Carpentier, Commander of Canada's Joint Task Force (North) welcomed the international cooperation, saying: "if we can work together and draw on each other's strengths, it's a huge win. We have to work with others to secure our homeland, so the importance of alliances is critical." Operation NANOOK-NUNALIVUT 2019 also focused on scientific research, including on cold weather injuries, satellite usage for search and rescue, and improving cold weather shelter systems. In Resolute and Crystal City, Nunavut, researchers with the Joint Arctic Experiment have been working on a range of projects, including on energy efficiency and Arctic protective gear, with support from NATO's Science for Peace and Security programme. The 1st Canadian Rangers Patrol Group provided support throughout the operation. Based in their home communities in Canada's northern territories, the vast majority of Canadian Rangers are indigenous to the north. They provide expertise in navigation, survival, and predator control including against polar bears. Allies regularly work to improve their ability to operate in cold weather. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address NATO ships visit Odesa NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Apr 1, 2019 ODESA, Ukraine (April 1, 2019) Two ships from Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2) arrived in Odesa, Ukraine today for a routine port visit. Canadian frigate HMCS Toronto and Spanish frigate ESPS Santa Maria arrived in Odesa after patrolling in the Black Sea with fellow SNMG2 ships for the last several days. While in Odesa, the ship captains will meet with local military and elected officials, work with Ukrainian Navy personnel and welcome local Ukrainian civilians aboard during scheduled open ship periods. Following the visit to Odesa, HMCS Toronto plans to conduct a Passing Exercise with Ukrainian Navy ships in the Black Sea to enhance interoperability among Allied and Partner nation ships. Three Allied nations border the Black Sea, and NATO regularly conducts exercises and operations in the Black Sea in order to maintain a credible and capable defensive readiness. This is the second patrol of a Standing NATO Group in the Black Sea in 2019, Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group Two (SNMCMG2) spent approximately 20 days patrolling in the Black Sea in February visiting Varna, Bulgaria and participating in mine hunting exercise Poseidon. Since Russia's illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea in 2014, NATO has increased its presence in the Black Sea. Patrols by NATO Maritime Groups increased in 2018 to three patrols for each group for a total of 120 days of NATO Group presence over the year, compared to two patrols for each group and a total of 80 days in 2017. Concurrent with the port visit to Odesa, Royal Netherlands Navy frigate HNLMS Evertsen along with group members Bulgarian frigate BGS Drazki, Romanian frigate ROS Regele Ferdinand and Turkish frigate TCG Yildirim are conducting a port visit to Poti, Georgia. Georgia is another NATO Partner on the Black Sea. SNMG2 is one of four standing NATO groups which are multinational, integrated maritime forces made up of vessels from allied countries. These vessels are under continuous NATO command to perform a wide range of tasks ranging from deterrent presence and situational awareness to exercises and the conduct of operational missions. They demonstrate Alliance resolve and foster solidarity, as well as enhance the Alliance's relations with Partner nations through visits and exchanges. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address NATO participates in UN Peacekeeping Ministerial meeting in New York NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 29 Mar. 2019 Last updated: 01 Apr. 2019 20:25 On 29 March 2019, NATO took part in the annual United Nations Peacekeeping Ministerial Conference at the UN Headquarters in New York. The Alliance was represented by Ms. Clare Hutchinson, NATO Secretary General's Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security. Ms. Hutchinson underscored NATO's long-standing support for the UN's Action for Peacekeeping initiative. She also illustrated current and new strands of NATO-UN cooperation, including on training to counter improvised explosive devices and protect civilians and children in armed conflict, and on military medicine. Defence and Foreign Affairs Ministers as well as high level officials from over 130 countries and international organizations attended this year's UN Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial Conference. They reaffirmed their commitment to UN peacekeeping operations and shared views on how to further strengthen them in all of their main aspects. They also pledged to fill key capability gaps and to further integrate gender perspectives in UN peace-keeping missions, including through the deployment of more women peacekeepers. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Pacific Partnership 2019 Begins in Malaysia Navy News Service Story Number: NNS190401-25 Release Date: 4/1/2019 2:08:00 PM From Pacific Partnership 2019 Public Affairs KUCHING, Malaysia (NNS) -- Senior mission leadership, host nation and partner nation personnel attended the opening ceremony of the third Pacific Partnership mission stop in Kuching, March 30. "Pacific Partnership 2019 will continuously strengthen ties and enhance our friendship," said Lt. Gen. Datuk Suhaimi bin Haji Mohd Zuki, Malaysian Armed Forces joint force commander. "It will have an overwhelming and significant influence in our future relations amongst the participating countries." While continuing to strengthen existing bonds, partner nations work together toward a common goal of creating a safer environment. "The impact of disaster emergencies transcends borders and requires comprehensive preparation and coordination among nations for an effective disaster response," said Capt. Randy Van Rossum, mission commander for Pacific Partnership 2019. "I am confident that the planning and hard work we've invested thus far will show in our successful collaborative efforts for a long-lasting impact here in Kuching." U.S., partner nation military members, and non-governmental organization volunteers are scheduled to take part in a variety of events including first aid training, preventive medicine training, various healthcare symposiums, engineering projects, disaster response seminars, and a variety of community outreach engagements with the goal of improving the overall humanitarian and disaster preparedness in Malaysia. "Malaysia and the United States have a comprehensive partnership, which is building every day on the things that we can do together to make the region safer and to enable our people in a more effective regional crisis response," said U.S. Embassy Malaysia Deputy Chief of Mission Dean Thompson. Pacific Partnership began in response to one of the world's most catastrophic natural disasters, the December 2004 tsunami, that devastated parts of South and Southeast Asia. The mission has evolved over the years from emphasis on direct care to an operation focused on enhancing partnerships through host nation subject matter expert and civil-military exchanges. Working at the invitation of each host nation, Pacific Partnership is joined by partner nations that include Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and the United Kingdom to strengthen disaster response preparedness around the Indo-Pacific region. Malaysia is one of several host nations for Pacific Partnership 2019. Mission teams have also made stops in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Philippines and will continue with stops in the Federated States of Micronesia, Timor-Leste, Vietnam and Thailand. Experts in the fields of engineering, medicine and disaster response will partner with each host nation to conduct civic-action projects, community health exchanges, medical symposiums, and disaster response training activities. Pacific Partnership, now in its 14th iteration, is the largest annual multinational humanitarian assistance and disaster relief preparedness mission conducted in the Indo-Pacific. Each year, the mission team works collectively with host and partner nations to enhance regional interoperability and disaster response capabilities, increase stability and security in the region, and foster new and enduring friendships across the Indo-Pacific. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Algeria protests: president to quit before end of mandate' Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 09:40PM Apparently running out of concessions to angry protesters, Algeria's president says he is to resign before his mandate runs out towards the end of this month. The official Algeria Press Service carried the statement issued by Abdelaziz Bouteflika's office on Monday. Bouteflika would resign "before April 28, 2019" after "important decisions" are taken, the statement read. He would take "steps to ensure state institutions continue to function during the transition period," it added. Protests erupted countrywide in February after the 82-year-old announced a decision to contest a fifth term in upcoming presidential elections. Protesters say they disapprove of the country's old political system, which is dominated by veterans of the 1954-1962 independence war against France, who include the president himself. Opponents have also cited suspicion that the president was being kept in office to protect the grip of the military and business elite. As the protests grew, Bouteflika said he would drop his re-election bid and usher in reforms aimed at handing over the country's affairs to the "new generation." He even named a new government made up mainly of technocrats under recently appointed premier Noureddine Bedoui. The protesters, however, would not leave the streets, and key allies began deserting his side. Most recently, coalition ally the National Rally for Democracy (RND) called for Bouteflika's resignation "with the aim of smoothing the period of transition." A day earlier, Armed Forces Chief Of Staff, General Ahmed Gaid Salah had said the head of state should either resign or be declared medically unfit to rule by the Parliament. Bouteflika has rarely been seen in public after suffering a stroke in 2013. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Tensions reemerge in Kashmir, '2 Indians killed' Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 05:10PM Tensions have resumed between India and Pakistan in the disputed Kashmiri region, where cross-border fire has reportedly killed two Indians, including a young girl. Media reports said a five-year-old girl died on Monday after a mortar bomb landed near her house in Poonch, a district on the Indian side of the frontier in Kashmir. A spokesman for India's Border Security Force said one trooper with the force was killed and three others were wounded in the shelling as well. Indian army spokesman Lt. Colonel Devender Anand said Indian forces returned fire along the de facto border. Pakistan did not immediately comment. The latest clashes in Poonch which often sees heavy shelling between the two arch rivals came just hours after four armed men were killed in a firefight with government forces in Pulwama, a district closer to the main city of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir. Police said one of their officers was injured, along with three soldiers, in the shootout with militants. Such violence between armed groups resisting Indian rule and government troops is not uncommon in the restive mountainous region. But fighting has been particularly bloody this year, with at least 162 people killed between January and March In February, at least 40 paramilitary troops were killed in a bombing in the region. New Delhi, which blamed Pakistan for supporting the militants behind the blast, launched retaliatory aerial raids inside Pakistani territory for the first time in decades. Tensions escalated as Pakistani and Indian jets fought over the skies in Kashmir. The situation only partially calmed down when an Indian pilot who had been captured in the fighting was returned by Pakistan in a gesture of goodwill. Sporadic fighting continued, but, most recently, tensions had largely subsided. Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their partition and independence from Britain in 1947. The disputed region is claimed in full by both sides, which have fought three wars over it. India regularly accuses Pakistan of arming and training militants and allowing them across the restive frontier in an attempt to launch attacks. Pakistan strongly denies the allegation. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Yemeni forces target Saudi bases in Jizan, Asir with 7 missiles, causing casualties Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 06:25AM The Yemeni army and fighters from allied Popular Committees have launched several missiles at Saudi military positions in the kingdom's southern regions in retaliation for Riyadh's deadly military campaign against their country. The Yemeni forces fired five Zelzal-1 (Earthquake-1) missiles at Saudi military positions near Alab border crossing in the kingdom's southwestern region of Asir on Sunday, Yemen's al-Masirah news website reported. A military source said that the attack left an unspecified number of Saudi troops dead and injured, the report added. Saudi authorities usually keep the number of their war casualties a secret. The Yemeni forces fired two more missiles at military positions east of al-Nar Mountain in Jizan. Just days earlier, they foiled a massive Saudi offensive in the city of Sa'ada, killing at least 90 mercenaries and injuring over 100 others. Riyadh, under the order of its de-facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, leads a coalition of Arab nations -- including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- that began indiscriminately pounding targets across Yemen in March 2015, with the aim of crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement and bringing former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi's government back to power. According to a new report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, the Saudi-led war has so far claimed the lives of about 56,000 Yemenis. The Saudi-led war has also taken a heavy toll on the country's infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories. The UN has warned that a record 22.2 million Yemenis are in dire need of food, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger. According to the world body, Yemen is suffering from the most severe famine in more than 100 years. A number of Western countries, the US and Britain in particular, are also accused of being complicit in the ongoing aggression as they supply Riyadh with advanced weapons and military equipment as well as logistical and intelligence assistance. Houthis and their allies, however, remain steadfast in their resolve to fight off the enemy with a powerful arsenal of domestically-developed missiles that have struck as far as the Saudi capital. UAE building military base in Yemen's Socotra According to Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, a video circulating on social media shows Emirati forces constructing a private port inside a military base they have been building near Socotra Island's main port, which is run by Hadi loyalists. Socotra, located near Somalia in the Gulf of Aden, is protected by the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO as a world heritage site, meaning that even the Yemeni government is not allowed to interfere in the natural habitats and places of natural beauty in the area. In May, UAE forces landed in Socotra along with tanks, armored transports and heavy equipment in a move that sparked the anger of the island's residents. Socotra, located near Somalia in the Gulf of Aden, is protected by the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO as a world heritage site, meaning that even the Yemeni government is not allowed to interfere in the natural habitats and places of natural beauty in the area. In May, UAE forces landed in Socotra along with tanks, armored transports and heavy equipment in a move that sparked the anger of the island's residents. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address How the Public Can Visit the Disputed, Undeveloped South China Sea By Ralph Jennings April 01, 2019 A beaching ramp due for completion this year and warily watched by China will give curious reporters something new to see when the Philippine military next escorts them to Thitu Island. Media pay attention to the 37-hectare (90 acres) islet west of the main Philippine archipelago because it's the front line in a sovereignty dispute over the wider, largely off-limits South China Sea. China also claims Thitu, and it's developing three other islets not far off. Thitu, home to about 100 people plus an airstrip, is one South China Sea islet that allows some form of public access. Governments that control the sea's islets seldom permit anyone but their own personnel to visit, but some believe wider access can their bolster sovereignty claims by showing actual use, a criterion cited in international legal disputes. Among officials in China, which is starting to allow cruises, "they see tourism as a means of exercise of administrative control," said Yun Sun, East Asia Program senior associate with the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, D.C. "By governing or managing the tourism in that area, it will be a piece of evidence to support sovereignty." Most of the sea's roughly 500 islets lack infrastructure. Coast guards and navy personnel stop entry to others. But a Malaysian-held island allows diving. Taiwan organizes periodic public viewing on two of its islets, China is opening the Paracel chain to cruise ships and Vietnam runs tours for its own citizens to the Spratly chain, which includes Thitu. What's open Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam dispute sovereignty over all or parts of the 3.5-million-square-kilometer sea. The waterway running from Hong Kong to the island of Borneo is valued for fisheries, shipping lanes and undersea fossil fuel reserves. Reporters can visit Taiwan-held Itu Aba on sporadically organized trips, the most recent of which took place in 2016. Marine ecosystem researchers join occasional trips, by invitation, to Taiwanese-controlled Pratas Islands. Taiwan's science minister led a 64-person delegation including researchers, some non-Taiwanese, to the Pratas in August. Passengers on the Chinese cruise ship are probably all Chinese nationals, said Jonathan Spangler, director of the South China Sea Think Tank in Taipei. It's hard for foreigners to book, said Collin Koh, a maritime security research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. "So far, China is still restricted because of the sensitivity of the area. Vietnam is comparable to China in terms of the level of access," Koh said. "Unless you are a Chinese citizen I think it is very difficult to access those areas." One island totally open Layang Layang, a Malaysian naval base, stands out as the sea's only islet open to the general public, regardless of nationality and without joining a media tour or research delegation. Visitors board charter flights from Borneo for the 300-kilometer trips and stay at the island's 85-room diving resort for expeditions in the nearby open sea. Malaysia began opening Layang Layang in the 1980s's before other countries had the knowledge or impetus to protest, Koh said. "In terms of a place that you could actually go for a vacation I think the only one that's really open to like the global public is Layang Layang," Spangler said. Waters in the sea also remain open to the public, allowing civilian vessels to transit usually without incident. About one-third of the world's marine shipping traffic pass through the South China Sea today. More access? China, with the region's strongest armed forces, has taken a territorial lead in the six-way sovereignty dispute over the past decade by reclaiming land to enlarge islands for military installations. Other countries resent the expansion, leading to standoffs, negotiations and warnings to Beijing from the United States. A sudden opening of a new feature to the public would disrupt an uneasy calm today among the maritime claimants, Spangler said. But he said China might eventually open its Paracel cruises further to foreigners. Malaysia or the Philippines could extend today's level of public access to "make it seem like less of a sensitive thing," he added. The Permanent Court of International Justice considers a continual display of authority over a land feature as an effective administrative use of the South China Sea. The Philippines would worry about safety before opening further, Koh said. Some 90 Chinese ships ranging from 30 to 70 meters in length alarmed Manila when they approached Thitu Island in December and January to check the beaching ramp, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative under the U.S. research group Center for Strategic & International Studies. China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which includes four maritime claimants, are negotiating now a code of conduct aimed at preventing mishaps in the sea. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Maduro Announces 30-Day Electricity Ration Plan By VOA News April 01, 2019 Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in an address Sunday on state television, announced a 30-day plan to ration electricity. The rationing plan, Maduro said, will also help the government deal with the country's water and communications infrastructure. On Sunday, residents fed up with the recurring electrical blackouts protested by banging on pots, burning garbage in the streets and shouting curses against President Maduro. Maduro said schools would remain closed and the length of the workday will be cut to conserve power during the 30-day period. "No one can put up with this," a Caracas housewife complained Sunday as she tried to buy a chicken but discovered the bank machines didn't work. "There's been no water since last Monday, you can't call by phone, we can't pay with cards or even eat." Another homemaker said she can't refrigerate food and said when her appliances break, it's impossible to buy a replacement. Maduro has blamed the blackouts on U.S. sabotage. Opposition leader Juan Guaido says government neglect and mismanagement are responsible. "They brought the electrical system to a collapse because they are corrupt and now they can't resolve it because they are incapable," he said. Guaido used his constitutional authority as head of the National Assembly to declare the Maduro presidency illegitimate, saying he was re-elected in December in a fraudulent vote. The United States and about 50 other countries recognize Guaido as president. Washington has imposed numerous sanctions against the government, but Maduro is refusing to step down. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Japan announces "Reiwa" as new era name to begin under next Emperor People's Daily Online (Xinhua) 13:22, April 01, 2019 TOKYO, April 1 (Xinhua) -- The Japanese government announced Monday that "Reiwa" will be the name of Japan's new era to start on May 1, when Crown Prince Naruhito ascends the Chrysanthemum throne succeeding his father Emperor Akihito. The new era name, interpreted as meaning "decree" (or order) and "peace" is derived from Man'yoshu, the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry. The announcement was greeted by a highly expectant nation, including thousands gathering on the streets in front of large screens. Era names, or "gengo" as they are known in Japanese, are used in Japan for the length of an emperor's reign. The new era name is usually announced after the accession of the new monarch, but the government decided to announce the new name in advance of the accession of the new Emperor. In this way companies and the general public have time to prepare for the change and disruption is kept to a minimum. Era names in Japan are still used for official documents such as drivers' licenses, as well as for some calendars, newspapers and other documents such as health insurance cards. They are typically composed of two Chinese characters, or kanji in Japanese, and selected to impart a positive meaning that represent the values and ideals of the people of Japan. The era names should be distinct from previous ones and be easy to read and write. Earlier on Monday, Yoshihide Suga, the government's top spokesperson, convened a nine-member panel of representatives at the prime minister's office to present them with a list of proposals for the new era name. The representatives were from the worlds of academia, media and business. Thereafter, the opinions on the new era name were sought by both leaders and deputy leaders of both chambers of Japan's bicameral parliament. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet was subsequently charged with approving an ordinance on the new era name to replace Heisei. The Japanese premiere has said that the government wanted to select a name that conveys the heralding of a "new era full of hope." "Heisei," the name of the current era, means "achieving peace" and began on Jan. 8, 1989, the day after Emperor Hirohito died. Previous era names in modern history have been Meiji (1868-1912), Taisho (1912-1926) and Showa (1926-1989), followed by the current Heisei era. Emperor Akihito will step down on April 30, marking the first Japanese monarch to abdicate the throne in about 200 years. The 85-year-old emperor, Japan's 125th according to the traditional order of succession, expressed his desire to step down in a rare video message broadcast in 2016. During the video message he expressed his concern that owing to his age he might not be able to fulfill his official duties. A year later, parliament passed a one-off bill enabling Emperor Akihito to step down. The government ordinance will be promulgated as early as Monday afternoon following its signing by Emperor Akihito. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Japan unveils name of new imperial era ahead of emperor's abdication Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 07:03AM Japan has announced the name of a new imperial era, set to begin on May 1, when Crown Prince Naruhito will take over the throne from his father following his historic abdication. Following weeks-long speculation and top-secret discussions, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said in televised news conference on Monday that the new era under Naruhito will be called "Reiwa," meaning "order/command and peace/ harmony." "Reiwa" will replace the current "Heisei" era, which started in 1989 with the ascension of now 85-year-old Emperor Akihito to the throne and will end on April 30, when he hands the throne to his eldest son. In Japan, a new era beings once an emperor dies and his reign known as "gengo" -- ends. Things are, however, different this time, with Emperor Akihito set to become the first Japanese monarch to abdicate in favor of his heir in almost two centuries. The outgoing emperor first indicated his intention to abdicate in 2016, citing health concerns. Although the use of the Gregorian calendar has become widespread in the world's third-largest economy, Japan is the only country still using Chinese-style imperial calendars. So far, there have been four eras in its modern history: Meiji (1868-1912), Taisho (1912-1926), Showa (1926-1989) and current Heisei. The era name is not just a way of counting years, but it ushers in a new chapter in Japan's politics, history and culture. "It's a way of dividing history," said Jun Iijima, a 31-year-old lawyer. "If you were just counting years, the Western system might be sufficient. But gengo gives a certain meaning to a historical period." This time, however, the characters of "Reiwa" were taken from the Manyoshu, an ancient collection of Japanese poetry, in a break with the tradition of selections from ancient Chinese texts. The era name appears in places such as coins, calendars, official paperwork and newspapers. The announcement came a month earlier so that offices and government agencies can update computer software and make other preparations to prevent glitches. Many, including companies that manufacture private ink seals, which are commonly used in Japan to sign official documents, are expected to benefit from the change. Financial traders hope the new era name will bolster the shaky market. "Reiwa" echoes Abe's 'national pride' agenda Elaborating on the significance of the name's selection, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a presser that "it is a collection which expresses our nation's rich culture, which we should take pride in, along with our nation's beautiful nature." "Reiwa" implies "culture is born and nourished when people's hearts are drawn beautifully together," he added. "We believe this national character should be passed along to the next era." Koichi Nakano, a professor of political science at Sophia University, said Abe's interpretation is reflective of his conservative agenda, which seeks to promote national pride. It "echoes his calls for Japan to be proud of its roots and its tradition," the professor added. "He wants Japan to be proud of their country and this was seen as an opportunity to boost that." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Leaked reports: Saudi political detainees subjected to severe abuse Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 10:25AM Leaked medical reports prepared for Saudi Arabia's King Salman have for the first time provided evidence of the torture political detainees in the kingdom have been subjected to as part of the regime's violent crackdown on dissidents and possible rivals to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's rule. The Guardian reported on Sunday that the medical reports showed the political prisoners are suffering from malnutrition, cuts, bruises and burns, in the first documented evidence from within the heart of the royal court that runs contrary to Riyadh's repeated denials of such torture reports. The reports are said to have been prepared for King Salman along with recommendations from some advisers to the monarch that are said to include a pardon for all political prisoners as well as the release of detainees with health problems. They are part of a substantial internal review ordered by the king, who approved the commissioning of examinations of up to 60 prisoners, many of them women, a source said. The examinations reportedly took place in January. In recent months, the Saudi regime has come under intense pressure by rights groups for mistreating political prisoners amid reports that several female activists faced torture and sexual harassment in its prisons. The torture reports came under the spotlight following the gruesome assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018. The CIA has concluded that bin Salman personally ordered the murder. As the kingdom is reeling from the aftermath of the murder of Khashoggi, King Salman is said to have ordered a review of the decision to arrest nearly 200 men and women in a crackdown ordered by the controversial crown prince. The medical examinations took place despite objections from Mohammed's aides, a source with knowledge of the review said. This comes amid speculation of a growing rift between Prince Mohammed and the king. The Guardian recently reported that the prince had been stripped of some of his powers and had not attended a series of recent high-profile ministerial and diplomatic meetings in the kingdom. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) - The Social Security System (SSS) is appealing to members not to see the recent hike in contributions as a burden, but rather as a means to increase funds for future use. Speaking to CNN Philippines Tuesday, SSS Acting Media Affairs Head May Rose Francisco said, "The increase in contributions would be very important for the fund. It's one way of ensuring that the fund would be more stable and that we would be able to be prepared for the future benefits for our members." She added higher contributions would mean better benefits for SSS members. Funds primarily come from contributions, she said, with employers being partners. "We reach out to them and make sure they pay...the contributions of their employees." Francisco said, "We've always said that SSS is a form of savings for our members, and we just hope that they don't find it as a burden, because all of these will be coming back to them in the form of their benefits." The increase on contributions was announced in March, and took effect on April 1. That means that for an employee earning 10,000, 400 will be slashed from his or her pay check an increase of 36.70 from the current 363.30. The employer, meanwhile, will now pay 800 instead of 736.70, an increase of 63.30 for its share. The SSS said this 1 percentage point hike is just "reasonable," stressing that it will enable members to save more for retirement. The minimum and maximum monthly salary credits will also be adjusted to 2,000 and 20,000 respectively. SSS: When funds are stable, we will consider P1000 pension When asked if the increase in pension will happen now that members are being asked to pay higher contributions, Francisco said, "The increase in contribution rate is based on the new law that has been passed. As for the additional 1,000, that's one thing that the SSS is working on." Francisco said she did not have a time frame for the pension increase, but they would give notice on when the fund would be stable enough to support the increase in benefits for pensioners. On a chilly February afternoon, about 15 students headed outside just beyond a courtyard used as an outdoor classroom. They huddled over picnic tables to learn the art of tying knots. The first one was easy but it got a lot harder, said Dajon Jones, 18, a senior from Markham. If youve got to lower a rope into a hole to get someone out, you should make it so they can get the rope around their waist. HRH the Crown Prince launches first Hawk jet training aircraft assembled and some of its parts manufactured locally by Saudis Saudi Press Agency Monday 1440/7/25 - 2019/04/01 Dhahran, April 01, 2019, SPA -- His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, the Crown Prince, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, on Sunday launched the first Hawk jet training aircraft, which was assembled and some of its parts were manufactured locally by citizens. The event took place at King Abdulaziz Air Base in the Eastern Sector. Upon arrival, His Royal Highness the Crown Prince briefed on the stages of assembling and manufacturing the main parts of the Hawk by Saudi youth, the tests on the plane after the assembly, the test of acceptance of the aircraft after flight, as well as an explanation of the initiatives of the Saudi-British program of the transfer and localization of technology as more than 70% of Saudi youth are working on assembly of 22 Hawk aircraft after more than two years of training at the hands of international expertise. His Royal Highness the Crown Prince witnessed the launch ceremony, which included a video presentation on the stages of assembling the aircraft. Then HRH the Crown Prince launched and unveiled the plane. His Royal Highness the Crown Prince also signed at the front of the plane. Pictures of HRH the Crown Prince and crew were taken. Then the Crown Prince went to the plane's launch platform, where the captain of the plane received from His Royal Highness the Crown Prince via the radio permission to take off. His Royal Highness the Crown Prince said, "In the name of Allah, and on the blessing of Allah, fly above the most precious land." The Saudi-British Defense Cooperation Program, in collaboration with BAE Systems (BAE Systems), oversaw the training of Saudi youth with the participation of more than 25 national companies. His Royal Highness the Crown Prince was accompanied during the event by a number of princes and officials. --SPA 01:03 LOCAL TIME 22:03 GMT 0030 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Taiwan thanks Japan for support after Chinese jet incursion ROC Central News Agency 2019/04/01 22:48:06 Taipei, April 1 (CNA) Taiwan on Monday extended its appreciation to Japan for its concern over the situation in the Taiwan Strait, after two Chinese Air Force planes crossed the median line of the waterway separating Taiwan and China over the weekend. In a statement, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Andrew Lee () said the government will always be committed to maintaining the cross-strait status quo as well as peace and stability across the region. The ministry's response came after Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga expressed hope that cross-strait issues can be resolved peacefully through direct dialogue between Taiwan and China. "The government of Japan believes that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is extremely important to the region and the world," Suga said. Taiwan's Foreign Ministry on Monday condemned China's "intentional, reckless and provocative action" and said it has called on Taiwan's regional partners to be aware of China's behavior and its efforts to destabilize peace and stability in the region. The government will continue to strengthen its self-defense capabilities and work with like-minded partners such as the United States and Japan to jointly defend democracy and freedom and maintain peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region, the ministry said. (By Ku Chuan and Ko Lin) Enditem/ls NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Tsai warns China against altering status quo ROC Central News Agency 2019/04/01 17:26:04 Taipei, April 1 (CNA) In view of China's increased saber-rattling in relations with Taiwan, President Tsai Ing-wen () Monday issued a stern protest against Beijing, warning it against altering the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. "China's move is not only a unilateral change in the cross-strait status quo, it is also a provocation to peace in the region," Tsai said while giving a speech at a ceremony in which military cadres were promoted. Amid the fast-changing international climate and multiple challenges facing national security, the military will assume a much more important role in maintaining regional peace, safeguarding sovereignty and upholding the people's well-being as well as the values of democracy and freedom, she stressed. "The military is firmly determined to defend the country's democracy, sovereignty and security," she reiterated, vowing that "we will never give even an inch of territory." Tsai's remarks came after Taiwan's Air Force scrambled five fighter jets Sunday to intercept two Chinese J-11 fighter planes that crossed the median line of the strait at about 11 a.m. It is understood that the Chinese military aircraft were 185 kilometers away from Taiwan proper when they finally heeded warnings and turned around. Later Monday, Tsai underlined on her Facebook page that she has ordered the Air Force to immediately expel any intentionally intruding Chinese aircraft. "As an important member in the region, Taiwan will not provoke or make trouble and will do its utmost to maintain security and stability in the Taiwan Strait," she stressed. According to a source at the Presidential Office, Tsai also convened a meeting with National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General David Lee () and Minister of National Defense Yen De-fa () Monday, where she was briefed on the military response to the incident. Tsai was quoted as demanding during the meeting that "the Taiwan military must always respond immediately to incursions by Chinese military jet fighters across the median line of the strait." Also Monday, Mainland Affairs Affairs (MAC) Minister Chen Ming-tong () said during a radio interview that the government has implemented a comprehensive strategy to deal with China. Upon learning of the intrusion by Chinese military jets into Taiwan's air space Sunday, the president immediately called a meeting with her national security team and activated contingency measures to deal with the situation, Chen said, noting that this forms part of the government's strategy. Since Chinese President Xi Jinping () reiterated in January the "one country, two systems" model for unification with Taiwan and said Beijing would use force if necessary, China has stepped up its intimidation of Taiwan, he noted. On Sunday, the MAC also issued a statement strongly condemning China's intimidation. It also blasted Beijing for its two pronged hard-soft strategy to push for Taiwan's unification with China through its "one country, two systems" formula, which it characterized as posing a huge threat to Taiwan's safety and regional peace. (By Flor Wang and Wen Kui-hsiang) Enditem/AW NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address U.S. calls on China to stop coercion after PLA jets cross median line ROC Central News Agency 2019/04/01 17:16:04 Taipei, April 1 (CNA) The United States on Monday called on China to stop its coercion against Taiwan and resume official cross-strait dialogue after two Chinese Air Force planes crossed the Taiwan Strait median line Sunday, a rare move that violated a long-held tacit agreement between the two sides. According to Taiwan's defense ministry, two J-11 fighter planes from the People's Liberation Army of China crossed the median line and entered Taiwan's southwestern airspace at 11 a.m. Sunday. The aircraft finally returned to China's side of the median line after receiving multiple radio warnings. Government officials said the intrusion triggered a 12-minute standoff between Taiwanese and Chinese warplanes when the latter flew 43 nautical miles into Taiwan's airspace, despite repeated warnings. Asked to comment on the incident, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) told reporters Monday that Beijing's efforts to unilaterally alter the status quo "are harmful and do not contribute to regional stability." "Rather, they undermine the framework that has enabled peace, stability, and development for decades," AIT spokesperson Amanda Mansour said, while reiterating Washington's position that Beijing should stop its coercive efforts and resume dialogue with Taipei. "Consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States considers any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, of grave concern to the United States," she continued. The spokesperson added that to the U.S. "Taiwan is a reliable partner, a democratic role model, and a force for good in the world. The United States urges China to abstain from coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan." AIT represents U.S. interests in Taiwan in the absence of official diplomatic ties. (By Joseph Yeh) Enditem/AW NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Taiwan condemns China after air force planes cross median line ROC Central News Agency 2019/04/01 13:24:03 Taipei, April 1 (CNA) Foreign Minister Joseph Wu () on Monday condemned China's "intentional, reckless and provocative action" a day earlier by sending two fighter planes across the Taiwan Strait median line at noon Sunday, a rare move that violated a long-held tacit agreement between the two sides. Wu said Taiwan informed its regional partners of the incursion the same day, which he said triggered a 12-minute standoff between Taiwanese and Chinese warplanes when the latter flew as far as 43 nautical miles on the east side, or Taiwan side, of the median line, despite repeated warnings. "We warned these regional partners of China's apparent intentional and dangerous move, calling for them to jointly pay closer attention to Beijing's behavior," he told lawmakers. The minister declined to disclose which regional partners had been informed. Although none of those partners have so far commented officially on the incident, many indicated disapproval of Beijing's behavior, Wu said. According to Wu, this is the first time in recent years a PLA fighter jet has crossed the Taiwan Strait median line. Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker Wang Ting-yu () said previous intrusions only lasted briefly and mainly occurred due to poor weather conditions. On such occasions Chinese jets often returned to their side of the strait immediately after been warned by their Taiwanese counterparts. Sunday's incident, did not fall into that category, Wang said. According to Taiwan's defense ministry, two J-11 fighter planes from the People's Liberation Army of China crossed the median line and entered Taiwan's southwestern airspace at 11 a.m. Sunday. They finally retreated to the west side of the median line after being issued with multiple radio warnings, he added. (By Joseph Yeh) Enditem/AW NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US playing Taiwan card risky Global Times By Zhang Hui and Liu Xuanzun Source:Global Times Published: 2019/4/1 19:23:43 Two PLA jets allegedly cross Taiwan Straits 'middle line' The alleged flight crossing the "middle line" of the Taiwan Straits by two People's Liberation Army (PLA) fighter jets could be a strong response to "Taiwan independence" forces and the US, who increasingly plays the card of the island to provoke the mainland, analysts said. If the US and the island of Taiwan upgrade their provocative actions, the mainland's fly-through could become routine and the "middle line" could become history, said a mainland military expert who asked not to be named. The island of Taiwan scrambled aircraft to drive away two J-11 fighter jets from the mainland which allegedly crossed the "middle line" of the Taiwan Straits on Sunday, with Taiwan calling the mainland's possible move "provocative" actions which "seriously impact regional safety and stability," according to Taiwan's Military News Agency. Although there was no immediate response from the mainland authority, many Chinese mainland netizens said on social media and forums that they hope the J-11s did cross the middle line. "Middle line? What middle line? We are all in Chinese territory, we come and go as we want," read typical comments. The anonymous military expert told the Global Times that the "middle line" is only a psychological line which separates the Taiwan Straits, and neither side usually crosses the line. But there is no such line and both sides are Chinese territory, plus the Chinese mainland has never recognized the line. The possible fly-through by J-11 fighter jets sent a strong signal that no one can touch the bottom line of China on the Taiwan question, not "Taiwan independence" forces, not the US, which is attempting to strengthen its ties with Taiwan, experts said. "As a matter of fact, Taiwan is not worth targeting anymore. All of our military strength [shown] is used to tell the US to stop where it should stop. The island of Taiwan causes trouble because the US supports it. When the US calms down, it will calm down," an anonymous mainland expert on the Taiwan question told the Global Times. This year, the US has sent warships through the Taiwan Straits three times, with the latest being the US Navy destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur and the US Coast Guard cutter USCGC Bertholf on March 24. The Trump administration also reportedly gave its tacit approval to Taiwan's request to buy more than 60 US-made F-16 fighter jets (A formal request would still need US congressional approval), and the US has not sold advanced fighter jets to Taiwan since 1992, Bloomberg reported. The US and Taiwan's frequent interactions will not stop there, as experts predict that the US will conduct more activities, such as sending high-level officials to Taiwan to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act this month. Sixteen bipartisan US senators sent a letter last month to US President Donald Trump, asking him to send a cabinet-level official to Taiwan to attend an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act, media reported. This came after the passage of two US bills - the Taiwan Travel Act and Asia Reassurance Initiative Act of 2018 - last year, which the US is using to suppress China. Bargaining chips "The US has been playing the Taiwan card in a more radical way lately, and such risky actions may result in a heavy blow to overall China-US relations," Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University's Institute of International Relations in Beijing, told the Global Times. The Taiwan question is the core question that would impact on China-US relations, and any problems on it will slow down the settlement of other issues between China and the US, including ongoing trade negotiations, experts warned. The Taiwan question, together with human rights, Huawei and the trade issue are important cards the Trump administration plays to pressure China, and those cards may be related to each other, Li noted. "The US may also use Taiwan as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations with China, but such tricks won't work." After eight rounds of trade talks, the focus of the talks has been narrowed to very specific questions, and China will not drop its bottom line on its sovereignty. Further actions by the mainland could possibly see mainland warplanes flying across the island of Taiwan, the anonymous expert on Taiwan question said. "We have not done that for now because the hope of a peaceful solution to the Taiwan question still exists," and if the mainland decides to do so, the island and the US will have absolutely no way to stop it. The report also coincided with the 18th anniversary of the Hainan Island incident on April 1, 2001, when PLA Navy pilot Wang Wei's J-8II fighter jet collided with a US EP-3 signals intelligence aircraft above China's exclusive economic zone southeast of Hainan Island. Remembering Wang's death, netizens noted the mainland's significant military development over the years and the PLA's determination to safeguard the country. "Today we won't have another tragedy like Wang's J-8II since the motherland is becoming much more powerful, and the hero can rest in peace," a netizen said on Sina Weibo. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address No US F-35 equipment shipment to Turkey over Russia's S-400: Report Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 The United States has stopped shipment of equipment for F-35 equipment to Turkey over the country's defensive cooperation with Russia, a report says. Reuters cited two unnamed sources in a report Monday, suggesting that the Turkish officials had been notified about the matter by their American counterparts "in recent days." "The next shipment of training equipment, and all subsequent shipments of F-35 related material, have been canceled," read the report citing sources speaking on condition of anonymity. Turkey has said the S-400 Triumph air defense system will be delivered by Russia despite the US pressure on the NATO member. "The contract with Russia on S-400s remains in force and these defensive systems will be delivered to Turkey. Now talks on this issue are underway," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said, according to Russian media. According to multiple reports, the production has been estimated to be completed in May for subsequent delivery to Turkey in July. "We are not going to sell S-400s to third countries. We do not need this as we are acquiring them for our own needs," Cavusoglu reportedly said. Turkish foreign minister is scheduled to take part in a summit for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the US this week. The row over the F-35 and the S-400 is the latest in a series of diplomatic disputes between Ankara and Washington. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Turkey's opposition CHP claims victory in Istanbul elections Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 12:18AM Turkey's opposition Republican People's party (CHP) has claimed clear-cut victory in mayoral elections in the city of Istanbul despite a statement by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggesting his ruling AK Party had the upper hand in the votes. CHP candidate Ekrem Imamoglu said on Sunday that it was "very clear" his party had won the mayoral election in Turkey's largest city of Istanbul. "I know we won in Istanbul, it is very clear," Imamoglu told reporters in Istanbul while accusing the rival candidate of "manipulation" by declaring victory in the votes. The statement came after AKP candidate and former prime minister Binali Yildirim declared victory in Sunday's mayoral elections in Istanbul. It also came just before Erdogan said that his AK party remained "the number one party" in Turkey despite admitting that it may have lost in Istanbul. Erdogan said in a speech to supporters in the capital Ankara, where the AK Party had suffered a similar defeat, that his party was still the dominant political force in districts of Istanbul despite reports showing it may have given away the mayorship of the city. "In Istanbul, the majority of the districts are either ours or head-to-head. What does this mean? Even if our people gave away the mayorship, they gave the districts to the AK Party," said the Turkish leader. Erdogan, who was apparently dissatisfied with the election results, said that the AK Party would appeal results wherever needed while adding that there was a need for making the system of governance in Turkey more dynamic. However, Erdogan's communications director said his remarks on Istanbul votes were not contradicting Yildirim's declaration of victory in the city. "Our president did not have any remarks on Istanbul that contradicted Mr Binali Yildirim's statement," Fahrettin Altun said in a post on Twitter. Erdogan has dominated Turkish politics since coming to power 16 years ago. He had been optimistic the AKP would win the local elections, saying during intensive campaigns before the votes that it was a "matter of survival" for Turkey. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UK frontline army units face serious understaffing crisis: Report Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 04:07PM Fresh data released by The UK ministry of defense shows that the British army faces a real staffing crisis in its frontline units. The Guardian newspaper said in a report on Monday that the number of personnel in the frontline units of the British army had decreased by up to a third compared to what was required in recruitment targets. The data, published in response to a parliamentary question, showed that the deficit in infantry groups on the frontline was much larger than previously reported by the government. It said that there were only 460 personnel in the Scots Guards, 1st Battalion in October last year although the unit had anticipated 697 workforce in its target strength. The 2nd Battalion of The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment also reported a 31 percent shortage with only 330 people enlisted. Other regiments and units had also failed to meet their recruitment targets as much as 30 percent, said the report. The new revelations comes amid numerous reports suggesting the youth in Britain are less inclined to join the army given its records of launching bloody invasions over the past decades. That comes despite extensive government programs to enlist the socially odd groups of the youth, including internet addicts and video gamers. Experts say the significant shortfall of personnel in the British army could pose serious risks to the integrity of the armed forces and their combat readiness in future. "A battalion that is missing 10% of its strength can probably compensate for the shortfall. Having lost 30%, you are not going to be able to generate the combat power to stand up to two enemy battalions, even in the defense," said Jack Watling, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Comedian tops 1st round of Ukraine's pres. race, set to face Poroshenko in run-off: Early results Iran Press TV Mon Apr 1, 2019 10:02AM Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a comedian with no political experience, has taken a strong lead in the first round of Ukraine's presidential race after securing almost twice the vote share of his main contender, incumbent Petro Poroshenko, early results show. The election commission website said Zelensky, 41, had won 30.2 percent of the vote, while Poroshenko, 53, garnered 16.7, with over half of all ballots counted. Ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko was knocked out with 13.08 percent of the vote, according to the partial results. The two rivals will now have to face off in a run-off round slated for April 21 as Zelenskiy failed to achieve an outright victory in Sunday's election. Zelenskiy's political experience remains restrained to a fictional president he has been playing in a popular TV series. During his campaign, he capitalized on public discontent with corruption and the country's stalling economy under Poroshenko. Poroshenko has also been under scrutiny for what many view as his inability to resolve a bloody conflict, which has been gripping the country's eastern Russian-speaking regions since 2014. "I would like to say 'thank you' to all the Ukrainians who did not vote just for fun," Zelenskiy told cheering supporters on Sunday. "It is only the beginning, we will not relax." Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Agnese Ortolani said Zelenskiy "embodies the perceived need for 'new faces' in politics and could sway the young, pro-reform electorate to his side." Poroshenko, for his part, called the result a "harsh lesson" for him to learn, especially from the younger voters of the country, whom he urged to give the incumbent another chance in next month's run-off. "You see changes in the country, but want them to be quicker, deeper and of higher quality. I have understood the motives behind your protest," he said. Poroshenko also portrayed his comic rival as unfit for the post. Russian President Vladamir Putin "dreams of a soft, pliant, tender, giggling, inexperienced, weak, ideologically amorphous and politically undecided president of Ukraine," said Poroshenko. "Are we really going to give him that opportunity?" Kiev and its Western allies accuse Russia of having a hand in eastern Ukraine's conflict, which pits government troops against pro-Russia forces active there. Moscow denies the allegations. Both Zelenskiy and Poroshenko have pro-western tendency, opposing reconciliation with their eastern neighbors. Poroshenko's campaign is focused on the promise that one day Ukraine will join the EU and NATO, an aspiration that was enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution during his first term. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address The woman, who was 69 at the time of the incident, testified how one of the men approached her as she got out of a car and put a gun to her head and told her he had been to prison and was not afraid to return. He and another man were accused of ordering her to get into the trunk of a different car but she pleaded with them and they wound up putting her in the back seat of the car. BOCA RATON, Fla., April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ADT (NYSE: ADT), a leading provider of monitored security and interactive home and business automation solutions in the United States and Canada, today announced the appointment of Elliot Cohen in the newly created role of Senior Vice President of Business Development, effective immediately. Cohen brings more than 20 years of experience in technology, real estate and venture capital. In 2011, he founded Citymaps, a leading global B2C and B2B mapping application, which was acquired by TripAdvisor in 2016. Subsequent to the sale of Citymaps, he joined TripAdvisor as vice president, consumer product and general manager of Citymaps. In addition, Cohen is an active Board Advisor and angel investor to a number of technology firms. Cohen is a graduate of Cornell University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Urban Planning and received his MBA in Real Estate and Finance from Columbia Business School. We are excited to welcome Elliot to the ADT team as we continue to drive innovation and further develop strategic alliances to deliver peace of mind and protection to our customers, said Jim DeVries, ADT Chief Executive Officer. Elliots track record of shepherding new and innovative customer-facing services, digital initiatives and partnerships position him well to support ADTs continued growth and transformation. As an executive leader at our company, he will help advance new revenue sources and segments within, and outside, of our traditional security footprint. We look forward to continuing to build on our successful performance to position ADT for emerging opportunities and value-enhancing growth. I am honored to be joining ADT at this exciting moment in the Companys development, said Cohen. ADTs position as a leader in the security space, coupled with the impressive leadership team Jim has assembled, make this a tremendous opportunity. I look forward to working with the ADT team to bring the best security and protection to our customers. Over the past year, ADT has maintained a robust pace of product and service innovation, including the expanded relationship with Amazon, the national launch in March 2019 of ADT Command and Control, the Companys next generation home security automation system. In 2018, ADT introduced ADT Go, an easy-to-use mobile app to connect and protect families, and announced a partnership with West Corporation to enhance emergency response. About ADT ADT is a leading provider of monitored security and interactive home and business automation solutions in the United States and Canada. Making security more accessible than ever before, and backed by 24/7 customer support, ADT is committed to providing superior customer service with a focus on speed and quality of responsiveness, helping customers feel safer and empowered. ADT is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida and employs approximately 19,000 people throughout North America. For more information, visit www.ADT.com. Media Relations Monica Talan mtalan@adt.com Asia-Pacific (APAC) LED Lighting Market by Product Type (Luminaires, Lamps), by Installation Type (New Installation, Retrofit [A-Lamps, Reflectors, T-Lamps), by Application (Indoor [Commercial [Offices, Retail, Hospitality and Tourism, Hospitals, Government, BFSI, Education, Transportation], Residential, Industrial [Automotive, Food and Beverage, Electronics and Semiconductors, Energy and Utilities, Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals, Oil and Gas], Outdoor [Road Network, Transportation, Parks, Parking Spaces, Stadiums/Sports Complex]), by Geography (China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia) Market Size, Share, Development, Growth and Demand Forecast, 20142024 NEW YORK, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to the market research report published by P&S Intelligence, Asia-Pacific LED lighting market is expected to reach $58.0 billion by 2024, registering a CAGR of 13.0%, during the forecast period, the growth in the market can be attributed to the growing number of smart cities, high energy efficiency, and rising government initiatives, globally. Request to get the sample pages of the report: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/apac-led-lighting-market/report-sample On the basis of installation type, Asia-Pacific LED lighting market is classified into new installations and retrofit. Among these, retrofit installation is projected to be fastest growing category in the region due to increasing replacement of incandescent and sodium vapor lamps with LEDs in the countries such as India, China, Japan, Australia, and South Korea. Based on indoor LED lighting application, Asia-Pacific LED lighting market is segmented into residential, commercial and industrial. Among these, commercial category is expected to hold largest share in 2018. The commercial category includes offices, retail, hospitality and tourism, hospitals, government, BFSI, education, transportation, and others. The commercial category is predominantly driven on account of increasing government initiatives toward the adoption of LED lighting in commercial spaces, predominately in China, Japan, India, and Australia. On the basis of outdoor LED lighting, the Asia-Pacific LED lighting market is categorized into road network, parks, parking spaces, stadiums/sports complex, transportation, and others; wherein others include agriculture, architectural, and religious institutions. Among these, road network sub-category is expected to hold largest share in the market in 2024. This can be attributed to increasing replacement of older technology lights used in street lights with LED lights. Countries such as India, China, South Korea, and Australia are increasingly installing LED lights on roads to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Browse report overview with 139 tables and 89 figures spread through 205 pages and detailed TOC on "Asia-Pacific (APAC) LED Lighting Market" at: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/apac-led-lighting-market Based on industrial LED lighting, Asia-Pacific LED lighting market is categorized into chemicals and pharmaceuticals, automotive, energy and utilities, oil and gas, food and beverage, electronics and semiconductors and others; wherein others include telecom, mining, and textile. Among these, energy and utilities expected to be fastest growing sub-category during the forecast period. This can be attributed to increasing construction of power plants and energy utilities substations in the region. Rising number of smart cities is supporting the growth of Asia-Pacific LED lighting market. Presently, several smart city development projects are on the line in countries such as China, India, and South Korea. China introduced national smart city development project in 2012 to build smart cities with modern technology. Further, Chinese government aimed to nurture 100 new smart cities to lead their urban planning and development by 2020. To showcase their achievements in smart cities, the country held its fourth China Smart City International Expo in Shenzhen from 21 August 2018 to 23 August 2018. Make enquiry before buying the report: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/send-enquiry?enquiry-url=apac-led-lighting-market The major players in the Asia-Pacific LED lighting market in the region are mainly involved in product launches, and partnerships. The companies involved in product launches and partnerships are Cree Inc., Osram Licht AG, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, Zumtobel Group AG, and Koito Manufacturing Co. Ltd. It would strengthen the product offerings of the company and support in acquiring large number of customers. Other activities in the market include mergers and acquisitions, and client wins. Major companies in the Asia-Pacific LED lighting market include Koito Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Stanley Electric Co. Ltd., Osram Licht AG, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Cree Inc., Signify N.V., LG Electronics Inc., Panasonic Corporation, Zumtobel Group AG, and Seoul Semiconductor Co. Ltd. More Related Reports by P&S Intelligence LED Lighting Market As per the findings of research, based on product type, luminaire is expected to be the major product type and it is also expected to grow at a faster rate, as compared to the lamp market, during the forecast period. The growth of luminaire market can be attributed to the increasing infrastructural activities across the globe. Based on installation type, the global LED lighting market is classified into new installation and retrofit, where new installation is expected to contribute higher revenue to the market. However, retrofit installation is expected to register faster growth during 2017-2023. Increased replacement of conventional lamps with energy-efficient light sources, such as LED lamps, is the key factor contributing to the advancement of the market for retrofit installation. https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/led-lighting-market Emergency Lighting Market North America is the largest market for emergency lighting, contributing over 30% to the global emergency lighting market in 2018. This is attributed to rise in construction of commercial and residential buildings in the U.S., increasing focus of the U.S. government on energy efficient lighting in buildings, and strict safety norms toward the installation of emergency lights in commercial buildings in the country. https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/emergency-lighting-market About P&S Intelligence P&S Intelligence is a provider of market research and consulting services catering to the market information needs of burgeoning industries across the world. Providing the plinth of market intelligence, P&S as an enterprising research and consulting company, believes in providing thorough landscape analyses on the ever-changing market scenario, to empower companies to make informed decisions and base their business strategies with astuteness. Contact: P&S Intelligence Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada) International: +1-347-960-6455 Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.com Web: https://www.psmarketresearch.com Estonian English The Management Board of AS Tallinna Sadam (hereinafter: Tallinna Sadam) presented to the Supervisory Board the audited Annual Report 2018, which the Supervisory Board approved. There are no differences in the audited financial results, compared to the 12-month unaudited financial results disclosed on 27 February 2019. The consolidated Group Annual Report 2018 of Tallinna Sadam is enclosed to this announcement and is also available on the companys investor webpage at: https://investor.ts.ee/en/annual-reports/ . The annual revenue of 2018 amounted to EUR 130.6 million, increasing by EUR 9.3 million, i.e. 7.7% year on year. The adjusted EBITDA was EUR 74.4 million i.e. 11.8% higher compared to 2017. The net profit amounted to EUR 24.4 million, an annual decrease of EUR 2.0 million due to EUR 14.2 million higher dividend income tax expense in 2018 in connection with the payment of a record high dividend. The Group's retained earnings as of 31.12.2018 were EUR 42.1 million. The increase in the Groups revenue was mainly influenced by the work of multifunctional icebreaker Botnica as an escort and ice management vessel in the northern part of Canada from June to November; and the growth of liquid cargo volumes and revenues. Also, the revenue from the trips of the additional ferry on the Saaremaa route in summer contributed significantly to the annual results. Based on the aforesaid and the dividend policy approved by the General Meeting of Shareholders to pay a dividend of at least EUR 30 mln in 2019 and 2020 and at least 70% of the profits from 2021 and forward, the Management Board, with the approval of the Supervisory Board, will propose to the General Meeting of Shareholders to pay a dividend of EUR 0.134 per share in 2019, totaling EUR 35.242 mln. Material dates related to the payment of dividends will be disclosed in the notice of the general meeting the latest on 23 April 2019. The Annual General Meeting of Shareholders will be held on 14 May 2019. Tallinna Sadam is one of the largest cargo- and passenger port complexes in the Baltic Sea region, which in 2018 serviced 10.6 million passengers and 20.6 million tons of cargo. In addition to passenger and freight services, Tallinna Sadam group also operates in shipping business via its subsidiaries OU TS Laevad provides ferry services between the Estonian mainland and the largest islands, and OU TS Shipping charters its multifunctional vessel m/v Botnica for icebreaking and construction services in Estonia and offshore projects abroad. Tallinna Sadam group is also a shareholder in an associate AS Green Marine, which provides waste management services. Marko Raid CFO, Member of the Management Board Additional information: Marju Zirel Head of Investor Relations AS Tallinna Sadam m.zirel@ts.ee Attachment Washington, DC, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global Fund for Children announces the winners of its inaugural Juliette Gimon Courage Awards today at the 2019 Global Philanthropy Forum in Redwood City, CA, recognizing innovative grassroots organizations Asociacion Generando (ASOGEN) and Mavi Kalem for their work to advance childrens rights in the face of political and social adversity. Mavi Kalem has spent nearly two decades mobilizing community volunteers to empower impoverished women and children in Istanbul, including rapidly adapting to meet the needs of Turkeys growing Syrian refugee population. This award recognizes Mavi Kalems continuous and persevering work for children, especially for empowerment of girls in disadvantaged communities, said Filiz Ayla, Chairwoman of the Board and General Director of Mavi Kalem. Global Fund for Children motivated and reinforced us to develop innovative education programs for children. With this award, we become more determined to pursue our courageous efforts to care about the rights and needs of children. In the Guatemalan states of Chimaltenango, Sacatepequez, and Solola, ASOGEN is the only community-based organization to offer survivors of gender-based violence the legal aid, medical services, and psychological support they urgently need. This award dignifies the work that ASOGEN carries out with Guatemalan women, especially young and adolescent girls, said Danessa Luna, Executive Director of ASOGEN. Global Fund for Children gives the annual Courage Awards through the Juliette Gimon Fund for Courageous Leadership a more than $1 million endowment made possible by William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and other donors in honor of Juliette Gimon. A former Board Chair of Global Fund for Children, Juliette passed away on February 24, 2018. Her wisdom, insights, and profound concern for children helped shape Global Fund for Children, changing hundreds of thousands of young lives across the globe. "We're thrilled to recognize ASOGEN and Mavi Kalem for the strength, courage, and passion they demonstrate in their work to defend and empower young people in incredibly challenging circumstances," said John Hecklinger, President and CEO of the Global Fund for Children. "These values honor Juliette Gimon's legacy and her work to inspire positive change for children around the world." Mavi Kalem and ASOGEN were selected for their courageous work from among 12 award finalists who have endured bomb threats, stood up to the Taliban, and defied deeply engrained practices like female genital mutilation and child marriage. The winners have channeled adversity into their causes, boldly pursuing justice for children worldwide. About Global Fund for Children: Global Fund for Children partners to build a world where all children and youth enjoy equal resources and opportunities in society and live free from violence, discrimination, and exploitation. To that end, GFC invests in innovative local organizations, helping them deepen their impact and build their capacity for social change. Together, GFC and its partners advance the rights of children and youth facing poverty and injustice and equip them with the tools and skills to reach their full potential. Since 1997, Global Fund for Children has invested $43 million in nearly 700 organizations, reaching more than 10 million children and youth worldwide. For more information, visit www.globalfundforchildren.org. Attachments April 2, 2019 Advancing Care Coordination & Telehealth Deployment at Scale (ACT@Scale) Handbook now available to implement and grow population health management to improve patient care and reduce costs in an aging society Analysis from three-year telehealth deployment in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Spain delivers best practice standards for deployment of digital care coordination at scale Amsterdam, The Netherlands and San Sebastian, Spain - Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA), a global leader in health technology today announced the results of the Advancing Care Coordination & Telehealth Deployment at Scale (ACT@Scale) Program during the 19th annual International Conference on Integrated Care in San Sebastian, Spain. ACT@Scale is the first of its kind initiative to explore the organizational and structural processes needed to successfully implement care coordination and telehealth services on a large scale. Published results of the three-year program across six European regions are now available, along with recommendations for best practices in connected care. The World Health Organization (WHO) has established the target goal of a 25% relative reduction in risk of premature mortality from cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, or chronic respiratory diseases by 2025 in Europe [1]. Connected care is viewed by many governments as essential to enable more efficient, patient-centric and continuous care for the aging EU population. However, while many local connected care pilot programs are successful, they fail to scale to their full potential. ACT@Scale builds on the expertise and successful experiences of the ACT program, leveraging tested collaborative methods and tools to implement improvements, and is fully aligned with the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Aging objectives to deploy integrated care for chronically ill patients. The EU-sponsored project comprises 16 partners from eight EU countries, including 14 programs in six regions coordinated by Philips. The ACT@Scale program delivers a clear methodology for service quality improvement with EU-wide evidence-based recommendations for coordinated care and telehealth deployment, and further demonstrates our commitment to help care providers and societies implement and scale innovative delivery models to support tens of thousands of elderly or people living with chronic conditions in different local settings, said Carla Kriwet , Chief Business Leader, Connected Care, Philips. We look forward to sharing the outcomes of this study that can be successfully replicated across the European Union. The synergy of Philips Connected Care business and Research helps us to scale high impact projects together with our customers. Digital health best practices for large-scale deployment The ACT@Scale handbook contains recommendations to achieve change at scale, and spotlights examples of success. It identifies best-in-class processes, structures and ways of working across the six participating European regions. Insights and recommendations can be used to build large scale deployment across Europe and beyond. We cannot underestimate the efforts made by healthcare organizations in bringing about change in practice in healthcare. Connected care is disruptive to many aspects of current health care practice and overcoming resistance to change and persuading healthcare professionals, patients and their families as well as managers and those who finance care is not an easy task, said Prof. Stan Newman, Vice-President (International), City, University of London. The ACT@Scale handbook contains a host of important recommendations to achieve change at scale and provides an impressive insight into some of the best successes in Europe in care coordination and telehealth to date that we can continue to leverage for future deployments. Among the findings, four key areas were identified as most essential to scale-up and drive adoption of innovation across connected care and telehealth: Citizen Empowerment; Stakeholder and Change Management; Service Selection; and Sustainability & Business Models. Examples of success across key areas showcased in the findings include the My Diabetes My Way online self-management platform for patients in Scotland, which has reached a high level of patient activation with 22,000 diabetes patients across the nation who can access their medical records online to manage their diabetes more effectively. The Basque Country regional stratification approach has also demonstrated success with its multi-morbid integration program , enabling patients with complex health and social care needs at high risk of hospital or care home admission, to lead fulfilled lives and improved clinical outcomes. The program has succeeded to scale up to 16,000 patients across the region by implementing technology solutions to provide access to personalized care plans based on clinical guidelines, and leveraging data from the EHR (Electronic Health Record). For more information on ACT@Scale, visit http://www.act-at-scale.eu and download the full ACT@Scale handbook for more detail on best practice analysis, examples and results here . [1] http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/disease-prevention For further information, please contact: Kathy OReilly Philips Group Press Office Mobile: +1 978 659 2638 E-mail: kathy.oreilly@philips.com Twitter: @kathyoreilly Catia Sofia Fernandes Communications, Philips Iberia Mobile: +1 34 672 631 808 E-mail: catia.fernandes@philips.com About Royal Philips Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) is a leading health technology company focused on improving people's health and enabling better outcomes across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care. Philips leverages advanced technology and deep clinical and consumer insights to deliver integrated solutions. Headquartered in the Netherlands, the company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Philips generated 2018 sales of EUR 18.1 billion and employs approximately 77,000 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries. News about Philips can be found at www.philips.com/newscenter . About ACT@Scale: The ACT@Scale consortium members include Royal Philips (project coordinator); Academisch Ziekenhuis - Groningen Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen (UMCG); Asociacion Centro De Excelencia Internacional En Investigacion Sobre Cronicidad (KROKIKGUNE); Agencia De Qualitat I Avaluacio Sanitaries De Catalunya (AQuAS); Aristotelio Panepistimio Thessalonikis - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH); City, University London (CITY); Consorci Institut Dinvestigacions Biomediques August Pi I Sunyer Hospital Clinic de Barcelona (IDIBAPS); Gesundes Kinzigtal GmbH(GK); Optimedis AG (OPTIMEDIS); Osakidetza-Servicio Vasco De Salud (OSAKIDETZA) ; Regional Agency for Public Health and Social Well-being Northern Ireland (NIRE); Region of Southern Denmark - Odense University Hospital (RSD); University of Dundee (DUNDEE); University of Hull (HULL); Universitatsklinikum Wurzburg; Klinikum Der Bayerischen Julius-Maximilians-Universitat (WUERZBURG). About ACT@Scale Handbook: The work leading to these results arises from the ACT@Scale (Advancing Care Coordination and Telehealth deployment at Scale) Program, which has received funding from the European Union, in the framework of the Health Program under grant agreement 709770. Co-funded by the Health Program of the European Union The content of this report/note represents the views of the author only and is his/her sole responsibility; it cannot be considered to reflect the views of the European Commission and/or the Consumers, Health, Agriculture and Food Executive Agency or any other body of the European Union. The European Commission and the Agency do not accept any responsibility for use that may be made of the information it contains. Attachments Date:02/04/19 Not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or any jurisdiction in which such distribution would be unlawful. Elis S.A Pre-stabilisation Period Announcement BNP Paribas, contact: Rupert Lewis, telephone: 0207 595 8222 hereby gives notice, as Stabilisation Coordinator, that the Stabilisation Manager(s) named below may stabilise the offer of the following securities in accordance with Commission Delegated Regulation EU/1052/2016 relating to conditions for buy-back programmes and stabilisation measures under the Market Abuse Regulation (EU/596/2014). The securities: Issuer: ELIS S.A. Guarantor (if any): M.A.J. Aggregate nominal amount: EUR 500M Description: FXD 5YR Offer price: TBC Other offer terms: n/a Stabilisation: Stabilisation Manager(s): Global Coordinators: BNP Paribas / HSBC (B&D)/ ING Active Bookrunners: Credit Agricole CIB / Deutsche Bank / Societe Generale Stabilisation period expected to start on: 02/04/19 Stabilisation period expected to end no later than: 11/05/19 Existence, maximum size and conditions of use of overallotment facility: The Stabilisation Manager(s) may overallot the securities to the extent permitted in accordance with applicable law. Stabilisation trading venue: OTC In connection with the offer of the above securities, the Stabilisation Manager(s) may overallot the securities or effect transactions with a view to supporting the market price of the securities during the stabilisation period at a level higher than that which might otherwise prevail. However, stabilisation may not necessarily occur and any stabilisation action, if begun, may cease at any time9. Any stabilisation action or overallotment shall be conducted in accordance with all applicable laws and rules. This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an invitation or offer to underwrite, subscribe for or otherwise acquire or dispose of any securities of the Issuer in any jurisdiction. This announcement and the offer of the securities to which it relates are only addressed to and directed at persons outside the United Kingdom and persons in the United Kingdom who have professional experience in matters related to investments or who are high net worth persons within Article 12(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 and must not be acted on or relied on by other persons in the United Kingdom. In addition, if and to the extent that this announcement is communicated in, or the offer of the securities to which it relates is made in, any EEA Member State that has implemented Directive 2003/71/EC, as amended (together with any applicable implementing measures in any Member State, the "Prospectus Directive") before the publication of a prospectus in relation to the securities which has been approved by the competent authority in that Member State in accordance with the Prospectus Directive (or which has been approved by a competent authority in another Member State and notified to the competent authority in that Member State in accordance with the Prospectus Directive), this announcement and the offer are only addressed to and directed at persons in that Member State who are qualified investors within the meaning of the Prospectus Directive (or who are other persons to whom the offer may lawfully be addressed) and must not be acted on or relied on by other persons in that Member State This announcement is not an offer of securities for sale into the United States. The securities have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933 and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration. There will be no public offer of securities in the United States. PROVIDENCE, R.I., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Upserve , the industry's leading full-service Restaurant Management Platform, announced that it has appointed Kendra Tucker as Chief Revenue Officer. "Im thrilled to have someone with Kendras level and range of go-to-market expertise joining our executive team as CRO, said Upserve CEO Sheryl Hoskins. She is a growth leader and innovator, and will continue to elevate the level of service and success Upserve provides our customers. Tucker specializes in transforming companies by turning leading best practices into optimized processes in sales and customer experience. For over a decade, she has grown and scaled teams, products, and subscription business models across industries and global markets. Tucker was previously Director of Go-to-Market at Vista Consulting Group, part of Vista Equity Partners, which owns a managing stake in Upserve. In this role, Tucker has worked closely with the Upserve team over the last year. There is a massive growth opportunity at Upserve, said Tucker, who will oversee customer success and retention, sales, and implementation. Im excited to deliver proactive service through our customer experience teams to make Upserve an even more valuable partner in growing successful hospitality businesses. At Vista, Tucker worked closely with portfolio companies like Upserve to implement more effective and sustainable growth strategies and specialized in pushing customer teams to over 90% net-retention through superior support and contracts that incentivized a long-term partnership. Tucker is no stranger to the restaurant industry. The Bahamas native spent her first four years in the working world at McDonalds, and her husband recently opened a restaurant movie house outside of Baltimore, giving her a front row seat to the challenges of running a restaurant. After graduating with a degree in International Studies from the University of Chicago, Tucker spent her early career studying the success of Fortune 500 leaders at Gallup and CEB (recently acquired by Gartner), working in research before moving into product marketing and sales. In her twelve years at CEB, she transitioned into sales leadership, scaling teams and closing deals with companies like BMW and Chanel. Tucker also served as SVP of Audience and Platforms at Axios, a political news organization. At Upserve, Tucker is bringing scalable growth to an already fast-paced and thriving organization. Im fascinated by the restaurant industry, and Im encouraged by what we can do for our customers by implementing what Ive learned from the amazing portfolio companies at Vista, said Tucker. Im dedicated to delivering an incredible customer experience from the moment they sign with us and providing world-class support as their business grows. About Upserve Upserve is the magic ingredient that helps restaurateurs become wildly successful, providing everything you need to run a restaurant in a single hub. Upserve offers the market-leading cloud restaurant POS, actionable insights, transparent processing, automated inventory and ordering, mobile restaurant management, and seamless integration with leading third-party restaurant apps via the Upserve Marketplace. Over 9,000 restaurants use Upserve to manage relationships with more than 57 million active diners, process over $9.9 billion in annual sales, and serve over 36 million meals per month. Upserve is headquartered in Providence with additional offices in Denver and Tel Aviv. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/23aaa640-549f-4814-84d2-35243d7a1939 Amber van Moessner 1 (855) 66G ETUP press@upserve.com VANCOUVER, B.C., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Eldorado Gold Corporation, (Eldorado or the Company) is pleased to announce that as of April 1, 2019, mining, crushing and placing of ore on the Kisladag heap leach pad has resumed. This follows the Companys announcement on January 30, 2019 that it would resume full operations at Kisladag. Further testwork is underway to determine the effects of a 250 day leach cycles on deeper material, the results of which are expected to be available in late 2019 or early 2020. Eldorados President and Chief Executive Officer, George Burns, stated: My thanks to Matt Badylak, Kisladag General Manager, and the team at site, as resumption of operations has started on schedule. We are now prepared to deliver on our 2019 Kisladag guidance of 145,000-165,000 ounces at a cash cost of $570-620 per ounce, increasing in 2020 to 240,000-260,000 ounces. About Eldorado Gold Eldorado is a gold and base metals producer with mining, development and exploration operations in Turkey, Canada, Greece, Romania, Serbia, and Brazil. The Company has a highly skilled and dedicated workforce, safe and responsible operations, a portfolio of high-quality assets, and long-term partnerships with local communities. Eldorado's common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: ELD) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: EGO). Contacts Investor Relations Peter Lekich, Manager Investor Relations +1 604 687 4018 or 1 888 353 8166 peter.lekich@eldoradogold.com Media Louise Burgess, Director Communications & Government Relations +1 604 687 4018 or 1 888 353 8166 louiseb@eldoradogold.com Cautionary Note about Forward-looking Statements and Information Certain of the statements made and information provided in this press release are forward-looking statements or information within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. Often, these forward-looking statements and forward-looking information can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", continue, projected, "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or the negatives thereof or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements or information contained in this release include, but are not limited to, statements or information with respect to: resumption of crushing and stacking at Kisladag, our guidance and outlook, including expected production at Kisladag; plans and goals, including our proposed testing plan at Kisladag and operating plans and priorities and related timelines. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information by their nature are based on assumptions and involve known and unknown risks, market uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. We have made certain assumptions about the forward-looking statements and information, including assumptions about the geopolitical, economic, permitting and legal climate that we operate in; the future price of gold and other commodities; the global concentrate market; exchange rates; anticipated costs and expenses; production, mineral reserves and resources and metallurgical recoveries, the impact of acquisitions, dispositions, suspensions or delays on our business and the ability to achieve our goals. In particular, except where otherwise stated, we have assumed a continuation of existing business operations on substantially the same basis as exists at the time of this release. Even though our management believes that the assumptions made and the expectations represented by such statements or information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that the forward-looking statement or information will prove to be accurate. Many assumptions may be difficult to predict and are beyond our control. Furthermore, should one or more of the risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements or information. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, among others, the following: recoveries of gold and other metals; geopolitical and economic climate (global and local), risks related to mineral tenure and permits; gold and other commodity price volatility; risks regarding potential and pending litigation and arbitration proceedings relating to the Companys, business, properties and operations; expected impact on reserves and the carrying value; the updating of the reserve and resource models and life of mine plans; mining operational and development risk; financing risks, foreign country operational risks; risks of sovereign investment; regulatory risks and liabilities including, environmental regulatory restrictions and liability; discrepancies between actual and estimated production, mineral reserves and resources and metallurgical testing and recoveries; additional funding requirements; currency fluctuations; community and non-governmental organization actions; speculative nature of gold exploration; dilution; share price volatility; competition; loss of key employees; and defective title to mineral claims or properties, as well as those risk factors discussed in the sections titled Forward-Looking Statements and "Risk factors in our business" in the Company's most recent Annual Information Form & Form 40-F. The reader is directed to carefully review the detailed risk discussion in our most recent Annual Information Form filed on SEDAR under our Company name, which discussion is incorporated by reference in this release, for a fuller understanding of the risks and uncertainties that affect the Companys business and operations. Forward-looking statements and information is designed to help you understand managements current views of our near and longer term prospects, and it may not be appropriate for other purposes. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements or information contained herein. Except as required by law, we do not expect to update forward-looking statements and information continually as conditions change. Except as otherwise noted, scientific and technical information contained in this press release was reviewed and approved by Paul Skayman, FAusIMM, Chief Operating Officer for Eldorado Gold Corporation, and a "qualified person" under NI 43-101. BELLEVUE, Wash., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trilogy International Partners Inc. (the Company) (TSX: TRL) today announced that it has declared a dividend of C$0.02 per common share of the Company (each, a Common Share) The dividend will be paid on May 6, 2019, to holders of the Companys Common Shares as of a record date of April 16, 2019. The dividend declared on the Common Shares is an eligible dividend for the purpose of the Income Tax Act (Canada). The Company also announced today that its subsidiary, Trilogy International Partners LLC, has declared an equitably equivalent dividend of its Class C Units (Trilogy LLC Class C Units) to holders of Trilogy LLC Class C Units as of a record date of April 16, 2019. The Company also wishes to remind its Canadian shareholders that is has implemented a dividend reinvestment plan (the Plan). Holders of Common Shares who are residents of Canada may elect to participate in the plan in connection with the dividend to be paid on May 6, 2019 to shareholders of record as of April 16, 2019. Pursuant to the Plan, eligible Canadian holders of a minimum of one Common Share of the Company may elect to automatically reinvest their cash dividends payable in respect of the Common Shares to acquire additional Common Shares, which will be issued from treasury on the applicable dividend payment date. The price at which such Common Shares are issued from treasury will be 95% of the volume weighted average closing price of the Companys Common Shares over the five business days immediately preceding such dividend payment date. For more information about the Plan, or to request or download a copy of the detailed Plan, please contact the Plan Agent, TSX Trust Company (TSX Trust), by phone at 1-866-600-5869, by e-mail to tmxeinvestorservices@tmx.com, or visit TSX Trusts website at www.tsxtrust.com/resources/investor-centre/forms. A copy of the Plan will also be available on our website at www.trilogy-international.com (go to Investor Relations and Dividends). The Plan is subject to certain limitations and restrictions and interested parties are encouraged to review the full text of the Plan before making any decisions regarding their participation in the Plan. Eligible Canadian registered shareholders must complete and deliver enrollment forms to TSX Trust at least five (5) business days before the record date. Canadian beneficial shareholders who hold their Common Shares through a nominee and who wish to participate in the Plan should contact their nominee to enquire about enrollment. Holders of Trilogy LLC Class C Units will receive their dividend in the form of additional Trilogy LLC Class C Units. The value per additional Trilogy LLC Class C Unit received will be equal to the value of each additional Common Share received by holders of Common Shares under the Plan, being 95% of the volume weighted average closing price of the Companys Common Shares over the five business days immediately preceding the payment date. About Trilogy International Partners Inc. Trilogy International Partners Inc. (TSX: TRL) is the parent company of Trilogy International Partners LLC, a wireless and fixed broadband telecommunications operator formed by wireless industry veterans John Stanton, Theresa Gillespie and Brad Horwitz. Its founders have an exceptional track record of successfully buying, building, launching and operating communication businesses in 15 international markets and the United States. The Company currently provides wireless communications services through its operating subsidiaries in New Zealand and Bolivia. Its head office is located at 155 108th Avenue NE, Suite 400, Bellevue, Washington, 98004 USA. For more information, visit www.trilogy-international.com . Cautionary Statements Certain information contained in this news release may be forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws in Canada and forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 of the United States of America. Forward-looking information and forward-looking statements are often, but not always identified by the use of words such as "expect", "anticipate", "believe", "foresee", "could", "estimate", "goal", "intend", "plan", "seek", "will", "may" and "should" and similar expressions or words suggesting future outcomes. This news release includes forward-looking information and statements pertaining to, among other things, expectations regarding the payment of dividends, the ability to reinvest dividends for additional common shares of the Company and other aspects of the intended operation of the Plan. Numerous risks and uncertainties could cause the actual events and results to differ materially from the estimates, beliefs and assumptions expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons (as such term is defined in Regulation S 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. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Trilogy International Partners Inc. Ann Saxton Vice President, Investor Relations & Corporate Development (425) 458-5900 ann.saxton@trilogy-international.com www.trilogy-international.com DUBLIN, Ireland and FUNCHAL, Madeira, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Telecomunicacoes da Madeira, Unipessoal, Lda., EMACOM, and the EllaLink Group announced today that their partnership on the EllaLink system has extended further in order to meet the growing capacity demands of the islands of Madeira. EMACOM currently own a dedicated fiber pair on the EllaLink system which is designed to carry over 24Tbps of traffic. New plans under discussion propose to increase the number of direct fiber pairs between Funchal and mainland Portugal in order to provide EMACOM with additional capacity in excess of 70Tbps. Currently under construction, EllaLink will provide the islands of Madeira with fiber diversity, increased data capacity and direct connectivity to Lisbon via a new state-of-the-art coherent submarine system. EMACOMs provisions on EllaLink are guaranteed to meet the long-term demand of this key autonomous region of the republic of Portugal. Rui Faria Rebelo, CEO of EMACOM, explained, We are pleased to deepen our relationship with EllaLink in order to strengthen our regional infrastructure, to encourage telecoms growth and to support the current plans to improve the infrastructure connecting mainland Portugal with the Autonomous regions of Madeira and Acores. Expansion of our network provides our customers with choice, reliability and economic value, as well as delivering the large data capacity that Portugal will need in order to meet its connectivity demands for the next 25 years. It gives me great pleasure to offer EMACOM an increased share in the EllaLink cable system. Additional fiber pairs at a very competitive price will position Madeira as an ideal regional hub, offering direct connections to Portugal and onwards to Spain, Cabo Verde and Brazil. We look forward to working together for many years to come, added Philippe Dumont, CEO of the EllaLink Group. Being built by Alcatel Submarine Networks, EllaLink is a leading edge 4 fiber pair submarine cable system scheduled for operation in 2020. Designed to satisfy the growing demand for traffic between Europe and Latin America, the low latency EllaLink route avoids the congestion of the North Atlantic by offering the first ever direct fiber pair between the two continents. About EMACOM The company EMACOM Telecomunicacoes da Madeira, Unipessoal, Lda., incorporated in August 1998, is wholly owned by the Empresa de Electricidade da Madeira, SA. EMACOMs main objective is to provide fiber optic services as a neutral operator in the Autonomous Region of Madeira Portugal, and to promote with international connectivity, the development of IT business opportunities in this region. For more information visit http://www.eem.pt About EllaLink EllaLink is an advanced subsea cable system offering secure high capacity connectivity on a unique low latency transatlantic route serving the growing needs of the Latin American and European markets. The EllaLink network directly connects Brazil and Europe, linking the major hubs of Sao Paulo and Fortaleza with Lisbon, Madrid and Marseille. The EllaLink System is being built with state-of-the-art coherent technology initially offering 72Tbps of capacity over four fiber pairs. The landing sites in Fortaleza (Brazil) and Sines (Portugal) have been secured and EllaLink is scheduled to be Ready for Service in 2020. EllaLink is a privately funded and independent company committed to providing products and services on a Carrier Neutral and Open Access basis. To learn more visit ella.link Press contacts In his letter, Gardiner said village officials were first presented with conceptual plans for the facility last September. But it wasnt until mid-January of this year, after the developer filed its zoning application with Glenwood and its permit application with the IEPA, that the village first received detailed reports on the impact of this project, the mayor wrote. PITTSBURGH, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DATAMARK , a team of public safety geographic information services (GIS) experts and the go-to authority on GIS solutions and services for public safety, today welcomes Sandy Dyre , a veteran in the public safety sector with a wealth of experience in 9-1-1 and Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) program development and services. Dyre will support customers on a local and national level in her new role as a DATAMARK Senior Public Safety Subject-Matter Expert (SME). In addition to leading a team of public safety experts to educate, advocate and problem solve with clients in the central United States region, she will be an advocate for 9-1-1 enhancement through participation in standard committees and focus groups. Dyres team will consult with clients and leverage DATAMARKs suite of public safety GIS products and services to evaluate GIS data needs, support current E9-1-1 systems and aid in the transition to NG9-1-1. Sandys extensive experience and strong commitment will help our public safety community successfully implement NG9-1-1, said Martin Miner, CTO, Michael Baker International. As a results-driven team player working on behalf of the DATAMARK client community, she is a perfect addition to our DATAMARK family. Throughout her numerous positions spanning two decades, Dyre has worked to develop partnerships to advance 9-1-1 services throughout the state of Arizona on behalf of local and statewide entities. Prior to joining DATAMARK, as Project Manager for the State of Arizona 9-1-1 Program Office, Dyre was responsible for 9-1-1 architectural initiatives addressing system and network design and implementation, project management duties for NG9-1-1, GIS and the Master Street Address Guide (MSAG) 9-1-1 addressing databases and law enforcement, and fire and emergency medical Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) operations and training. Previous positions include 9-1-1 administrator/MSAG coordinator and public safety communications dispatcher/supervisor at the Pinal County Sheriffs Office and public safety dispatcher for the Mesa Police Department. Dyres management and leadership credentials are reflected in her professional certifications. She is a certified Emergency Number Professional (ENP) from the National Emergency Number Association, has met the requirements for a Fundamentals of Government Leadership Certificate from the University of Arizona, and a Certified Public Manager at Arizona State University, and received a Public Administration Certificate of Completion from Rio Salado College. About DATAMARK DATAMARK , the GIS business of Michael Baker International, is the go-to authority on GIS solutions and services for public safety. Its data-forward, purpose-built NG9-1-1 solutions provide the highest levels of public safety GIS data completeness and accuracy. DATAMARKs VEP SaaS solution ensures easy and consistently dependable access to mission-critical information in life-critical situations, simplifying the transition to NG9-1-1 for addressing authorities, and GIS and PSAP stakeholders. Because it works with existing public safety systems, the solution requires no additional investment in hardware or software. The company empowers its team and stakeholder partners to foster trusted relationships and cultivate data integrity for informed decision making, all leading to safer communities. Visit www.datamarkgis.com and follow on Twitter and LinkedIn . About Michael Baker International Michael Baker International is a leading provider of engineering and consulting services, including design, planning, architectural, environmental, construction and program management. The company provides its comprehensive range of services and solutions to support U.S. federal, state, and municipal governments, foreign allied governments, and a wide range of commercial clients. Michael Bakers more than 3,000 employees across nearly 100 locations are committed to a culture of innovation, collaboration and technological advancement to help solve challenges for clients and communities throughout the country. Visit www.mbakerintl.com . Media Contact: Michelle Allard McMahon +1 781-718-3248 datamark@rainierco.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/42059ab8-91dc-4943-8602-62a6c8400e85 Not for distribution to United States newswire services or for dissemination in the United States VANCOUVER, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aton Resources Inc. (AAN: TSX-V) (Aton or the Company") is pleased to confirm the extension of its exploration licence at the Companys 100% owned Abu Marawat Concession (Abu Marawat or the Concession), located in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, until March 2020. The Company also announces the relinquishment of 20% of the land area of the Concession. Figure 1: Revised area of the Abu Marawat Concession http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f91b95d6-8576-409a-847e-e80c691898d5 "We have now agreed a further land relinquishment at Abu Marawat with the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources (MOP) and the Egyptian Mineral Resources Authority (EMRA). At the same time, we have also been formally granted an extension on the exploration licence until March 2020, further extended from the previously advised January 2020 date," said Mark Campbell, President and CEO. "This is very positive news for Aton, as not only were we able to reduce our area by 20% to nearly 600 km2, allowing us to retain all of our exploration targets as well as other prospective areas within our licence, but it also gives us an even longer extension period for us to continue our work and to await the reforms to Egyptian exploration and mining that are coming. This is an important development for Aton." Abu Marawat Concession extension and 20% relinquishment The MoP and EMRA have now confirmed the extension of the Companys Abu Marawat Concession exploration licence until March 5, 2020. The Company has also agreed to relinquish 20% of the area of the Concession, reducing its total area to 596.3 km2, now consisting of 2 non-contiguous blocks (see Figure 1). The relinquishment will allow the Company to focus its ongoing regional exploration activities at Abu Marawat on the main existing prospects and target areas, including new areas of interest identified in the northeastern area of the Concession, as well as progressing the advanced Rodruin project, which remains the Companys top priority. Extension to Private Placement The Company also announces, further to its news releases of February 15 and March 1, 2019, that it intends to extend its non-brokered private placement financing of up to 100,000,000 units (the Units) at $0.05 per Unit for total proceeds of up to $5,000,000 (the Offering). Each Unit will consist of one common share in the capital of the Corporation (a Common Share) and one half of one common share purchase warrant (each whole warrant a Warrant). Each Warrant will be transferable and will entitle the holder to acquire one Common Share for three years from the closing date at a price of $0.10. The closing of the Offering is expected to occur on or about April 15, 2019, and is subject to approval by the TSX Venture Exchange (the TSXV). The net proceeds from the Offering will be used to fund continued exploration and development activities at Atons Abu Marawat concession, located in Egypt. All currency amounts are in Canadian dollars. Additional Terms: All securities issued pursuant to the Offering will be subject to a four-month hold period from the date of issuance under applicable Canadian securities laws. The Corporation may pay certain finders fees on certain of the gross proceeds raised from the sales of Shares pursuant to the Offering, yet to be determined and subject to the approval of the TSXV. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to sell any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the U.S. Securities Act) or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. About Aton Resources Inc. Aton Resources Inc. (AAN: TSX-V) is focused on its 100% owned Abu Marawat Concession (Abu Marawat), located in Egypts Arabian-Nubian Shield, approximately 200km north of Centamins Sukari gold mine. Aton has identified a 40km long gold mineralised trend at Abu Marawat, anchored by the Hamama deposit in the west and the Abu Marawat deposit in the east, containing numerous gold exploration targets, including three historic British mines. Aton has identified several distinct geological trends within Abu Marawat, which display potential for the development of RIRG and orogenic gold mineralisation, VMS precious and base metal mineralisation, and epithermal-IOCG precious and base metal mineralisation. Abu Marawat is over 596km2 in size and is located in an area of excellent infrastructure; a four-lane highway, a 220kV power line, and a water pipeline are in close proximity. Qualified person The technical information contained in this News Release was prepared by Javier Orduna BSc (hons), MSc, MCSM, DIC, MAIG, SEG(M), FGS, Exploration Manager of Aton Resources Inc. Mr. Orduna is a qualified person (QP) under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. For further information regarding Aton Resources Inc., please visit us at www.atonresources.com or contact: MARK CAMPBELL President and Chief Executive Officer Tel: +202-27356548 Email: mcampbell@atonresources.com Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Some of the statements contained in this release are forward-looking statements. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions; by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results in each case could differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Posted 2018 Year-End Financials Show Double-Digit Increases in Revenue and Profits, Reduction in Operating Expenses, While Projecting an Additional 80% Revenue Growth in 2019 SANTA MONICA, CA, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE Oliveda International, Inc. (OTC Pink: OLVI), a leading international natural cosmetics and wearable beauty and health technology innovator, today commented on its 2018 financial results made public yesterday, including a 27% revenue increase from operations and a 35% increase in gross profit all while achieving a reduction of operating expenses. Further, the company is projecting 80% additional revenue growth in 2019 with new products, growth in current markets, and expansion into new territories. The financial results were included in the companys 2018 annual report posted yesterday to the OTC Markets Group website at https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/OLVI/disclosure . Posting of the financial reports within the required period continues OLVIs commitment to maintain timely disclosure for stockholders and investors. Income for the year-ended 2018 increased to $3,479,278, up from $2,733,180 for the year-ended 2017. Gross profit rose to $2,518,583, as compared to $1,865,145 for the corresponding 2017 period. The profit increase is attributable to both increased revenues and a reduction of over $200,000 in operating expenses. While 2018 operations growth was strong in virtually all categories, our expectations for 2019 are even greater, said Chairman and CEO Thomas Lommel. We have exciting new products preparing to launch, both in the natural cosmetics and wearable beauty and health technology sectors, and the company is currently laying the groundwork for expansion into new markets, including North America and Asia. Our stockholders should expect to hear more about these activities in the coming weeks and months. Concurrently, Oliveda International is moving forward in its efforts to advance in the U.S. public markets with an audit of its completed 2017 and 2018 financial statements. The audit will help the company meet the requirements to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as to potentially upgrade on the OTC Markets Group platform. The company has retained Pinnacle Accountancy Group, a dba of Heaton & Company, PLLC, to perform a two-year audit. OLVIs legal representatives are expected to begin preparing the informational filings required to become an SEC-reporting company during the second quarter of 2019. Oliveda International, Inc. Founded in 2003 by German real estate investor Thomas Lommel, Oliveda International, Inc. is a leading international natural cosmetic company in the premium segment. The company has also developed a globally-unique wearable beauty and health technology. In addition to online sales and a global branch network of 650 retail stores, the companys wholly owned Oliveda Deutschland GmbH subsidiary operates flagship stores, Olive Tree Pharmacy, in Berlin and Dusseldorf with plans to open new locations in Los Angeles, Taipei and Seoul. Overall, the company believes that it will be able to operate a total of 60 of its own flagship stores worldwide and increase the retail store network worldwide to 1,200 over the next five years. Through subsidiary operations, Oliveda International is the largest investor in eco-certified mountain olive trees as well as the largest conservationist in Arroyomolinos de Leo, Spain. Further information on Oliveda International can be found at http://www.oliveda.com and http://www.olivetreepeople.com . Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain statements, estimates or projections that constitute "forward-looking statements" pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. federal securities laws. Generally, the words "believe," "expect," "intend," "estimate," "anticipate," "project," "will" and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, which generally are not historical in nature. Forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which may be found in the Companys filings with OTC Markets Group Inc., that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's historical experience and present expectations or projections. Investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. The Company expressly disclaims any obligation or intention to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements unless otherwise required by law. English French Event will highlight enhanced customer support presence in Europe, now including a Challenger 300 Mobile Response Team aircraft and Paris line station M&O Conference Europe part of extensive customer event lineup planned for 2019 Helpful how-to sessions will also shine the spotlight on Bombardiers flagship Global 7500 aircraft, the worlds largest and longest-range business jet MONTREAL, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bombardier Business Aircraft is pleased to be hosting its aircraft customers and operators at this years Maintenance and Operations (M&O) Conference Europe in Lisbon, Portugal, on April 2-4. This informative event provides an opportunity for customers and operators from around the world to learn about Bombardiers latest in-service activities, world-class products and program development updates. With the recent introduction of a dedicated Challenger 300 Mobile Response Team (MRT) aircraft based in Frankfurt, Germany, and a new line maintenance station in Paris, Bombardier continues to enhance its customer service footprint in Europe. We are committed to ensuring our customers receive an exceptional experience, so we are not only expanding our worldwide support network and adding value throughout their aircrafts lifecycle, but also highlighting our industry-leading products such as our flagship Global 7500 aircraft, said Jean-Christophe Gallagher, Vice President and General Manager of Customer Experience, Bombardier Business Aircraft. This years event features several new sessions, giving guests a unique opportunity to learn more about Bombardiers products and services, including updates on the Global 7500 aircraft and our award-winning service centres. Attendees will also benefit from the platform-specific technical and operational discussions to gain and share insight with Bombardier and the operator community. Bombardier has a strong footprint in Europe and continues to grow its customer service and support presence worldwide. In addition to the Paris line maintenance station and dedicated Challenger 300 MRT aircraft, Bombardier has added two more MRT trucks in Paris, and five more MRT trucks in the U.S. With major service centre expansions in both Miami Opa-Locka and Singapore, such initiatives underscore Bombardiers ongoing commitment to providing the most comprehensive onsite, mobile and aircraft-on-ground resolution services in the industry. Bombardiers industry-defining Global 7500 aircraft will be a prominent part of this years event, with general sessions highlighting the most luxurious and impressive business aircraft ever built. Since its entry-into-service in Dec. 2018, the Global 7500 jet has emphatically proven itself to be the highest-performing aircraft in the history of business aviation. Its recent record-setting non-stop flight of 8,152 nautical miles connecting Singapore to Tucson, Az., is the longest-range business aircraft flight and showcases the real-world capabilities of this aircraft. The M&O Conference Europe is just one of several customer-focused events Bombardier has planned for 2019. A full roster of events is in the works, including exhibitions, six customer advisories and Safety Standdown 2019 in Fort Worth, Tx. Offered free of charge and open to all aviation professionals regardless of the aircraft they operate, Safety Standdown is a three-day program aimed at promoting knowledge-based pilot safety training, along with personal discipline and responsibility as essential elements of aviation safety and professionalism. This years Safety Standdown seminar will be held on Nov. 12-14 at the OMNI Fort Worth hotel in Fort Worth, Tx. These important events give our customers and operators an invaluable forum to share key information about our products and services so we can deliver exceptional products and unparalleled service to our customers, added Gallagher. Its just one more way we can continue to provide the best customer experience possible. About Bombardier With over 68,000 employees across four business segments, Bombardier is a global leader in the transportation industry, creating innovative and game-changing planes and trains. Our products and services provide world-class transportation experiences that set new standards in passenger comfort, energy efficiency, reliability and safety. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Bombardier has production and engineering sites in 28 countries across the segments of Transportation, Business Aircraft, Commercial Aircraft and Aerostructures and Engineering Services. Bombardier shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (BBD). In the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018, Bombardier posted revenues of $16.2 billion US. The company is recognized on the 2019 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World Index. News and information are available at bombardier.com or follow us on Twitter @Bombardier . Notes to Editors Visit the Bombardier Business Aircraft website for more information on our industry-leading products and services. Follow @Bombardierjets on Twitter to receive the latest news and updates from Bombardier Business Aircraft. To receive our press releases, please visit the RSS Feed section. Bombardier, Challenger 300 and Global 7500 are trademarks of Bombardier Inc. or its subsidiaries. LOWELL, Mass., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Thursday, April 11, 2019, Mass Innovation Nights , Massachusetts leading monthly new product showcase, will showcase ten new products at UMass Lowells Innovation Hub in Lowell, MA. A part of National Robotics Week, the event will feature a variety of local startups across several industries including IoT, AI, and robotics. The event is sponsored by the City of Lowell and the UMass Lowell iHub , both of whom have previously hosted and sponsored Mass Innovation Nights events. MIN 121 is free and open to the public. This event is also the ten-year anniversary of the first Mass Innovation Nights event. Mass Innovation Nights' return to Lowell is an indicator of our thriving startup community, said Tom ODonnell, senior director of Innovation Initiatives at UMass Lowell. UMass Lowell is proud to foster this growth through our programs and resources at the Innovation Hub. Were thrilled to partner with the City of Lowell to welcome back Mass Innovation Nights and join them in supporting local companies. Over the last ten years, Innovation Nights has produced monthly events that have showcased more than 1200 new products, said Bobbie Carlton, the founder of Innovation Nights and Innovation Women . Our events are designed to connect startups with the local community to the benefit of all. The City of Lowell is enthusiastic to sponsor Mass Innovation Nights for a fourth consecutive year, said Andrew Shapiro, the City of Lowells Director of Economic Development. Between having affordable and diverse housing options, value-driven available commercial spaces, an easy commute, and a well-supported ecosystem of innovative startups, Lowell is a gem when it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship. Mass Innovation Nights events feature business experts, networking, tabletop demos and presentations from local startups. Participating startups this month include: Two MIN alumni will be featured in our alumni corner: Various business experts, including ODonnell and Andrew Shapiro, the City of Lowells Director of Economic Development, will be on hand to share their knowledge. Guests are encouraged to use #MIN121 and Twitter handle @MassInno to share photos and social media commentary. About UMass Lowell Innovation Hub The UMass Lowell Innovation Hub in Lowell provides startup programming, co-working space and access to the UMass Lowell's faculty and research resources, as well as collaboration with mentors and sponsors. The facility offers private offices, dedicated desks, a prototyping and fabrication lab, meeting and event spaces, community programs and more. This space addresses the needs of startups by offering them work and laboratory space with access to office resources in the short term, rather than long-term, expensive business leases, all while creating a vibrant, supportive community in this thriving city north of Boston. www.uml.edu/ihub About the City of Lowell The fourth largest city in Massachusetts, Lowell is ideally located at the intersections of routes 3 and 495 in the Merrimack Valley, and approximately 30 miles north of Boston with easy access to North Station via the MBTA Commuter Rail. Lowell offers a unique blend of urban amenities and suburban convenience with the backdrop of unmatched natural beauty. The Citys Economic Development Office supports businesses of all sizes in a variety of ways, including guidance through permitting, location assistance, and access to financial resources and technical assistance. Learn more by following the Economic Development Office on Facebook and Twitter , or visit its website . About Mass Innovation Nights Mass Innovation Nights offers an opportunity for people interested in innovative new products to connect live and online. Over the past ten years, it has helped launch more than 1,200 new products, which have collectively received more than $3 billion in funding. Follow MIN on Instagram and Twitter or visit the website . ATLANTA, GA, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The UPS Foundation is coordinating with United Nations partners to speed food and supplies to impacted communities in Mozambique and Malawi Efforts continue in collaboration with relief organizations to provide safe shelter, food and relief supplies to victims of the recent tornados and floods in the U.S. Midwest UPS (NYSE: UPS) today announced relief efforts are underway to bring critical supplies and food to victims of the recent cyclone that slammed into East Africa and the tornadoes and floods that devastated parts of the U.S. Midwest. Collaborations between The UPS Foundation and leading humanitarian relief organizations are bringing urgent relief by land, sea and air. The number of people impacted by Cyclone Idai has climbed to more than 3 million people, with 500 people reported dead, a number thats been projected to increase. As flood waters slowly recede, UPS and The UPS Foundation continue to engage in close collaborations with the UN Logistics Cluster and relief organizations including The World Food Programme, UNICEF, UNHCR, CARE and MedShare. The situation is heartwrenching, and the need for help is urgent said Eduardo Martinez, president of The UPS Foundation and UPS chief diversity and inclusion officer. The collaboration with our United Nations and disaster relief network partners is allowing us to address immediate needs for food and shelter, and to bring supplies that will be critical during the recovery period. The multi-modal relief strategy includes: Coordination with United Nations partners on four flights landing on the east coast of Africa to bring food and supplies. Two flight rotations into Beira, Mozambique on behalf of UNICEF to bring ready-to-eat meals that will provide essential nutrition to more than 7,000 people. Collaboration with The World Food Programme on the airlift of two amphibious transport vehicles called SHERPs from the Ukraine to Beira, Mozambique, to deliver food and supplies to isolated communities where roads are impassible or no longer exist. Coordination with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to transport more than 190,000 lbs. of core relief items, including tarps, buckets, solar lamps, sleeping mats, mosquito nets, food preparation equipment and blankets, to Lilongua, Malawi. Transport of 168,000 water purification sachets to Malawi, in addition to the activation of $25,000 of the advanced relief funding provided to CARE by The UPS Foundation. The funds will be used to purchase tarps and blankets which are being transported to Beira via ocean transport. In collaboration with MedShare, UPS is preparing to transport an ocean container of medical supplies that will help more than 12,000 people in Malawi. In collaboration with the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN), UPS has also transported 15 pallets of cholera and typhoid treatment kits which will help prevent the outbreak of water-borne illnesses in Mozambique, an increasing threat as waters recede. Recent flooding in the U.S. is now threatening the safety of more than a million private water wells. The National Ground Water Association estimates that people living more than 300 counties across 10 states are at risk of groundwater contamination from flood waters. The states include Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wisconsin. The UPS Foundation continues to collaborate with relief partners across the U.S.: The UPS Foundation delivered a $500,000 grant last week to support the American Red Cross Annual Disaster Giving Program, enabling the Red Cross to immediately open shelters in impacted communities across America to support the hundreds of people sleeping in Midwest shelters each night. UPS is collaborating with The Salvation Army to transport two truckloads of flood kits to Nebraska being coordinated by Coyote Logistics, a UPS company. In collaboration with Feed the Children, on behalf of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD), UPS has transported four truckloads of water and two truckloads of food supplies and hygiene items to Grand Island, Nebraska where the majority of the town is still underwater. UPS continues to provide in-kind transportation of technical equipment for the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC) as they expand to new areas to provide power and connectivity to assist multiple relief organizations responding to the disaster. UPS is working with Toolbank USA to prepare the Toolbank Disaster Services Trailer for deployment to Nebraska to support volunteers cleaning homes and removing debris in neighborhoods where water has receded. The relief efforts and collaborations in the U.S. and Africa are just the latest in UPSs history of supporting communities in times of need. In 2018, UPS and The UPS Foundation responded to 29 major world disasters and invested $16 million in funding, in-kind, and technical support for community safety initiatives that included disaster preparedness and urgent response, recovery and public health system strengthening. Relief spanned 71 countries across continents around the globe. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Miracle Method Surface Refinishing, the largest kitchen and bathroom refinishing company in North America, has expanded into the Baton Rouge area. Seasoned surface refinishing veteran Eric Davis and his wife Debbie are now ready to help customers throughout Louisiana. We were looking for a company to help me get my little refinishing business off the ground. What we found in Miracle Method was a whole new method of support to help us go from side-business to an exciting full-time venture. We are very excited to offer Miracle Method Surface Refinishing in Louisiana, an area that really needs a quality alternative to a timely and expensive renovation, Eric said. The newly married husband and wife team, along with several technicians, have passed extensive training at the Miracle Method Corporate Headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Eric and his team are attentive and pay special attention to the little things that matter to our customers, Miracle Method President Chuck Pistor said. Were excited to expand into East Baton Rouge and know that homeowners need the cost-effective option of surface refinishing now, more than ever. With 40 years of experience, Miracle Method is the fastest growing kitchen and bathroom surface refinishing company in the industry. The company has shown a 73 percent sales increase over the last six years, and specializes in ceramic tile, bathtubs and surrounds, showers, countertops, vanities, and sinks. About Miracle Method Surface Refinishing Miracle Method Surface Refinishing is the nations largest bathroom and kitchen surface refinishing franchise, with more than 150 locations throughout the U.S.. Founded in 1979, Miracle Method specializes in bathtub, ceramic tile, and countertop refinishing and strives to constantly improve their areas of expertise. The award-winning franchisor was listed on Entrepreneur Magazines Franchise 500 list in 2019 and is also an actively participating member of Vet Fran. Miracle Methods franchise owners all live in the markets they serve and pride themselves on being independent, local small business owners building outstanding reputations in their communities. For more information about Miracle Method or to inquire about franchise ownership, visit www.miraclemethod.com or call 877-434-5096. ### Attachment Washington, DC, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A new, first-of-its-kind handbook released today draws on the insights and expertise of 50 city leaders to offer guidance on how technology and innovation can be deployed to benefit entire communities. The Centre for Public Impact, together with the Boston Consulting Group and the Center for Urban Innovation at The Aspen Institute, partnered to make this unique resource available to city officials. Seven out of every 10 Americans live in a city, and while trust for the federal government continues to drop, residents still look to local authorities to make a difference in their daily lives. While it is within the reach of city governments to help millions of people thrive, the handbook demonstrates that technology-driven solutions today often fail to address long term challenges and overlook pressing needs for vulnerable communities. In talking with city problem-solvers, weve discovered a growing movement of leaders using innovative solutions to build the broad reservoir of support they need to maintain life and opportunity for all city residents, said Dan Vogel, Director of the Centre for Public Impact North America. When cities innovate with intention, they do so in a way that emphasizes legitimacy, equity, and agility. While the challenges facing American cities are more complex than ever - tightening budgets, deteriorating infrastructure, and widening inequality - the handbook shares practical examples of where cities have been able to overcome these challenges in ways that align innovation both within city government and across sectors, empower the entire city ecosystem to tackle public sector problems, and grow innovation through the creation of a citywide culture that encourages continuous experimentation with measurement grounded in resident experiences. Cities are epicenters of innovation, opportunity, and delight. Especially in an age of smart cities, city leaders will need to continue innovating with an intentional focus on equity to ensure that all city residents are able to reap the benefits of new tools and technologies, said Jennifer Bradley, Executive Director of the Aspen Institutes Center for Urban Innovation. City leaders interviewed for the handbook include Matt Klein, Executive Director of NYC Mayors Office for Economic Opportunity, Nigel Jacob, Co-Founder of the Boston Mayors Office of New Urban Mechanics, Grace Simrall, Chief of Civic Innovation & Technology for Louisville, KY, among others. A few stories of how cities are innovating with intention: Austin, TX has become more populous and prosperous over the last decade. But as the cost of living has soared, homelessness has increased. As part of its efforts to address the challenge, the City created the Homelessness Advisory Committee of Austin (HACA), which brings together 13 residents who are or have been homeless, to set the direction for the Citys approach to the problem. We needed to find a way to build the lived experience into the system. And it really is as simple as pulling people together and building relationships. said Lincoln Neiger, a service designer in the Austin City government. has become more populous and prosperous over the last decade. But as the cost of living has soared, homelessness has increased. As part of its efforts to address the challenge, the City created the Homelessness Advisory Committee of Austin (HACA), which brings together 13 residents who are or have been homeless, to set the direction for the Citys approach to the problem. We needed to find a way to build the lived experience into the system. And it really is as simple as pulling people together and building relationships. said Lincoln Neiger, a service designer in the Austin City government. Detroit, MI launched the Mobility Innovation Initiative to improve the citys public transportation. The initiative, spearheaded by the Boston Consulting Group, brought together a group of 10 public, private, and social sector entities to devise approaches to key mobility issues in the city. The coalition then worked together to define the problem within each of the key mobility issues, to ensure all were aligned on what the initiative needed to solve for. You need to make sure youre not just driving technology to problems that don't exist. We need to make sure we are tackling the most important problems that residents have, explained Mark de La Vergne, Chief of Mobility for the city of Detroit. launched the Mobility Innovation Initiative to improve the citys public transportation. The initiative, spearheaded by the Boston Consulting Group, brought together a group of 10 public, private, and social sector entities to devise approaches to key mobility issues in the city. The coalition then worked together to define the problem within each of the key mobility issues, to ensure all were aligned on what the initiative needed to solve for. You need to make sure youre not just driving technology to problems that don't exist. We need to make sure we are tackling the most important problems that residents have, explained Mark de La Vergne, Chief of Mobility for the city of Detroit. To ensure that the citys bike-share system was available to all communities, the city of Philadelphias Strategic Initiatives team worked with residents to crowdsource a decision about where to locate docking stations. They quickly found that the credit card payment system was a barrier for many residents in low-income neighborhoods being able to use the bikes, so the team revamped the payment system so that it doesnt require a credit card. In Philly, the conversation is centered around the neighborhoods that need the services most. We make sure marginalized communities are at the forefront of innovation, not an afterthought, said Andrew Buss, Deputy CIO for Innovation Management. The handbook, The Future of U.S. Cities: How cities are innovating with intention to achieve impact, was authored by the Centre for Public Impact, in partnership with the Center for Urban Innovation at The Aspen Institute and the Boston Consulting Group. It is available to read here: https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/futureofcities. NOTES TO EDITORS: The handbook will be presented at an event in Washington, D.C, on Tuesday, April 9, featuring city leaders and experts from across the country. For more information and to register, email Elena.Bell@aspeninstitute.org. About the Centre for Public Impact The Centre for Public Impact is a not-for-profit foundation, founded by the Boston Consulting Group, committed to helping governments around the world achieve better outcomes for people through research and tailored support, using the Public Impact Fundamentals to diagnose and enhance the impact of ideas. For more information, visit https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/. About the Center for Urban Innovation at The Aspen Institute The Aspen Institute Center for Urban Innovation (CUI) is a network hub that catalyzes and supports a broader movement to define values-led approaches to the development, piloting, regulation, and evaluation of urban technologies. We connect city leaders, non-profit organizations, and emerging businesses who share the belief that people deserve more than smart cities. We deserve cities that promote human flourishing and digital infrastructure that enhances the experiences and opportunities that city life affords for all residents, particularly those in underserved neighborhoods. Thats the standard that we seek to develop and promote. For more information, visit www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/center-urban-innovation/. About the Boston Consulting Group Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is a global management consulting firm and the world's leading advisor on business strategy. We partner with clients from the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors in all regions to identify their highest-value opportunities, address their most critical challenges, and transform their enterprises. Our customized approach combines deep insight into the dynamics of companies and markets with close collaboration at all levels of the client organization. This ensures that our clients achieve sustainable competitive advantage, build more capable organizations, and secure lasting results. Founded in 1963, BCG is a private company with offices in more than 90 cities in 50 countries. ### Quest will provide Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Based Machine Vision Technology to fully automate the parking experience Concept adds flexibility and convenience to the parking experience; similar to on-demand car service model North America smart parking market is expected to reach $4.11 Billion by 2025* Recurring revenue model expected to generate higher margins and return. SALT LAKE CITY, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Quest Solution, Inc. (OTCQB: QUES), (Quest or the Company) a provider of Supply Chain and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Machine Vision solutions, today announced the U.S. launch of its AI-based Machine Vision Automatic Vehicle Recognition solution for the full automation of ticketless smart parking services. The Quest technology, coupled with a parking service platform, enables drivers of registered vehicles to find and pay for parking before a trip or while travelling. Any driver or car registered on a parking service network that accesses a lot or garage powered by Quests Artificial Intelligence Vehicle Recognition System (VRS) technology solution will automatically be recognized as an authorized user of the parking service and the driver wont need to open an app, show an ID or physically pay for a ticket. The Quest technology creates a convenient, fast and effortless way for drivers to access and pay for parking. Quest is already implementing this solution in Israel and the Company expects to begin piloting this technology on the West Coast of the United States during spring 2019 and intends to continue the rollout to thousands of parking locations over the next year. Registered users across the U.S. and Canada will have access to the transactional parking network through web-powered parking reservations that offer drive-up, effortless parking. Quest, thorough its fully owned subsidiary HTS, is a leader in providing proprietary patented Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Based Vehicle Recognition Systems including LPR (License Plate Recognition) and recently announced Color, Make and Model capabilities. In addition to Parking Automation, HTS provides its unique solutions for use in Safe Districts for anti-terrorism and law enforcement, Safe and Smart City projects, School Safety, Secured Facilities, Logistics Centers, Seaports and others which operate using installed cameras and computers to capture and decipher license plate data as well as vehicle color and make. Shai Lustgarten, CEO of Quest, stated, Quest is a proven provider of innovative AI Technology for the automation of parking, homeland security and law enforcement applications and were excited to have this opportunity to introduce further innovation to the multi-billion dollar Smart Parking market. We believe our solution, when combined with parking service platforms, has the potential to impact the parking industry similar to the way Uber transformed transportation alternatives and Open Table innovated the restaurant business. Smart parking will revolutionize the way drivers can find and access available parking and Quests VRS capabilities will make it faster and easier for registered users to park and pay by eliminating the need to stop to make a payment upon arrival or exit from a parking facility. Quests Machine Vision solutions are currently being used at several U.S. airports including JFK, La Guardia, Newark, Miami, Dulles, DFW and many others. Were excited to be pioneering the introduction of technology that enables the smart parking revolution. (*)Grand View Research Inc. (November 2017) https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/north-america-smart-parking-market-analysis About Quest Solution, Inc. Quest Solution is a Specialty Systems Integrator focused on Field and Supply Chain Mobility as well as a provider of Artificial Intelligence (AI) monitoring and surveillance solutions. Additionally the Company is a manufacturer and distributor of consumables (labels, tags, and ribbons), RFID and IoT solutions, and barcoding printers. Founded in 1994, Quest is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah with sales offices located across the United States as well as Israel. Rated in the Top 1% of global solution providers, Quest specializes in the design, deployment and management of enterprise mobility solutions including Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC), Mobile Cloud Analytics, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), and proprietary Mobility software. Our mobility products and services offering is designed to identify, track, trace, share and connect data to enterprise systems such as CRM or ERP solutions. Our customers are leading Fortune 500 companies from several sectors including manufacturing, retail, distribution, food / beverage, transportation and logistics, health care and chemicals/gas/oil. Information about Forward-Looking Statements Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Statements in this press release relating to our competitive position in this growing market and our ability to optimize our opportunities for growth and other statements that are not descriptions of historical facts may be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. This release contains forward-looking statements that include information relating to future events including expectations regarding billing of products, our ability to add new customer relationships and strengthen our existing partnerships. The words may, would, will, expect, estimate, can, believe, potential and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or results, and will not necessarily be accurate indications of the times at, or by, which that performance or those results will be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time they are made and/or managements good faith belief as of that time with respect to future events, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause these differences include, but are not limited to: fluctuations in demand for Quest Solution, Inc.s products, the introduction of new products, the Companys ability to maintain customer and strategic business relationships, the impact of competitive products and pricing, growth in targeted markets, the adequacy of the Companys liquidity and financial strength to support its growth and other information that may be detailed from time-to-time in Quest Solution Inc.s filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Examples of such forward looking statements in this release include, among others, statements regarding Quests position in this growing market and our ability to optimize our opportunities for growth. For a more detailed description of the risk factors and uncertainties affecting Quest Solution, Inc. please refer to the Companys recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings, which are available at http://www.sec.gov. Quest Solution, Inc. undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless otherwise required by law. Investor Contact: John Nesbett/Jen Belodeau IMS Investor Relations (203) 972-9200 jnesbett@institutionalms.com MEDFORD, Ore., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For 24 years and counting, Minuteman Press franchise owner Dave Greenhalgh has served the Medford business community with pride. He says, Minuteman Press in Medford, Oregon is family owned and operated and has been in business since 1995. We provide a full array of printing, copy, design, mailing, signs and banners, and promotional services to large and small businesses throughout the Rogue Valley and beyond. We are fortunate to have a skilled service-oriented staff that works well together to provide the highest quality products and excellent service to every customer on every job. Recently, Dave and his team have expanded their business to increase production and benefit his Minuteman Press clients. He explains, We completed a major renovation that doubled our production area from 3600 sq. ft. to 7200 sq. ft. The entire remodel was designed to improve our workflow and to provide even better working conditions for our staff. We also remodeled our lobby. These renovations and streamlined workflow have made a big difference in our production capacity, which helps us do everything we need to do to serve our clients well. From Medical Sales to Minuteman Press: I was tired of traveling There are many different paths to entrepreneurship and yet there are some common threads as well. Like many others, Dave had a solid career but was simply looking for a change. He explains, My background was in medical sales. Prior to starting Minuteman Press in 1995, I was the national sales manager for the vascular division of an international diagnostic ultrasound company where I worked for 12 years. Dave continues, Starting my own business was a long-time consideration before it became a reality in 1995. I was tired of traveling and wanted to put my energy into a business that would eventually work for me. A franchise provided the support to start a new business that I was looking for and I went to a franchise trade fair in San Francisco. I actually went to visit another company, but lost interest in that company after visiting with the people from Minuteman Press, which in my opinion was by far the best opportunity for me. They scheduled visits to several Minuteman Press shops in the Bay area where I had the opportunity to talk to the owners directly about their experiences and that sold me on this franchise and my own store. The ongoing support that Dave has received for nearly 25 years is something that he appreciates about being a long-time member of the Minuteman Press franchise family. He states, Minuteman Press support, starting with my Regional Vice President Chris Jutt, has been exceptional. Their World Expo is a must attend for us. It provides valuable training seminars on current business opportunities, vendors showing new product lines, and most importantly for me is talking business with other owners. The home offices support in evaluating equipment is an excellent resource before making a purchase. Talking with another franchise owner who has the equipment in his shop that we are considering is also invaluable. Rewards of Owning a Business and Being Active in the Community Dave is very clear about what it takes to reap the rewards of being a business owner, saying, There are risks and rewards that are specific to running ones own business and it is not for everyone to be sure. An owner that waits for customers to come to them will find few rewards before his business fails. My greatest reward is a completely satisfied customer that pays his or her bill on time. Secondly, I feel rewarded by a staff that has the same priority for service, quality, and on time delivery. Nothing is more gratifying than delivering a high-quality job on time to a customer that appreciates good service. The ultimate reward that comes as a result of putting in the work is a profit at the end of every month. Putting in the work means building authentic relationships with customers and community members . Dave adds, We work with large and small companies from a large variety of industries. Medical, manufacturing, real estate, and service companies make up a large percentage of our business. When I started Minuteman Press, I joined the Chamber of Commerce, a professional leads club, and a Rotary organization. I remained active in these and other organizations for many years. We currently provide financial support to a number of local non-profit organizations and participate in numerous community events throughout the year. All of that hard work has paid off for Minuteman Press in Medford. Dave says, We have grown our business by continually improving our service, adding new services and participating in all of the digital marketing programs that are offered by Minuteman Press. Acquisitions and equipment upgrades are also ways Dave has reinforced his customer base and enhanced products and services. Long-term, Dave notes, Our five-year plan includes large format equipment and to increase our sales by 15% each year. Advice to Others With so many years of experience to draw from, Dave Greenhalgh is a great resource for aspiring business owners and franchisees. He has the following words of advice for entrepreneurs looking to grow: My advice is talk to other business owners, seek the advice of your regional manager, and dont be timid in changing things that arent working. Concentrate on meeting your customers needs and make excellent service the number one priority. Dave Greenhalghs Minuteman Press franchise is located at 722 Rossanley Drive, Medford, Oregon 97501. For more information, call Dave and his team at 541-776-7966 or visit their website: https://www.medford.minutemanpress.com About Minuteman Press International Minuteman Press International is the number one rated business marketing and printing franchise that offers world class training and unparalleled ongoing local support. Started in 1973 by Roy Titus and his son Bob, Minuteman Press began franchising in 1975 and has grown to nearly 1,000 business service franchise locations worldwide including the U.S., Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Minuteman Press is ranked #1 in category by Entrepreneur 27 times and 16 years in a row, including 2019. Independent franchisee satisfaction firm Franchise Business Review has also named Minuteman Press International to its 2019 Top Franchises, 2018 Top Franchise Leaders, Top Franchises for Women, and Top Franchises for Veterans lists thanks to positive reviews from our owners . At Minuteman Press, We Are The Modern Printing Industry providing high quality products and services that meet the needs of today's business professionals and go way beyond ink on paper. Today, our centers offer innovative branding solutions and produce custom designs, promotional products, branded apparel, direct mail marketing, large format printing (banners and posters), signs and graphics, and much more. Prior experience is not necessary to own and operate a successful Minuteman Press franchise. To learn more about #1 rated Minuteman Press franchise opportunities and speak with one of our experienced franchise representatives at no obligation, call 1-800-645-3006. Continue your franchise research, watch exclusive owner videos and access Minuteman Press franchise reviews at https://minutemanpressfranchise.com Attachment Bucci: Passion for all things food. You cant be a great chef if you are not passionate about everything. You need to respect the food you work with and treat it correctly. Even a carrot deserves the same respect that an expensive cut of meat deserves. Passion can get you through the long days and countless hours of work that is sometimes required in this industry. English French BROSSARD, Quebec, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DIAGNOS Inc. (DIAGNOS or the Corporation) (TSX Venture: ADK), (OTCQB: DGNOF), a leader in early detection of critical health issues through the use of its FLAIRE platform based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), announces today the opening of the first eye screening diabetic clinic with a world leading global health research institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Eyes For All (EFA) is working with a group that is operating multiple clinics and hospitals in the country. They have multiple diabetes clinics and, with the help of EFA, want to screen patients for diabetic retinopathy (DR) when patients come to evaluate their blood sugar. The plan is to screen up to 80 patients per day at the initial clinic. In the coming months, they expect to expand the coverage in other diabetic clinics. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) estimates that by 2030, Bangladesh would emerge as one of the countries with the largest number of people with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes in Bangladesh is growing at an alarming rate. Nearly half of the population with diabetes, 51.2%, dont know that they have diabetes and dont receive any treatment. A greater number of the diabetes population comes from educated and affluent families with 40.7% coming from the richest quintile. EFA is a health technology consultancy company with relationships in Bangladesh across Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), healthcare research institutes and the public sector hospital network. We are delighted to be able to partner with Diagnos in the effort to conduct DR screening across Bangladesh. The mismatch between existing healthcare infrastructure and demand in the country means that Diagnoss proprietary technology will make a tremendous difference to the lives of many people in the country, said Mr. Zahed Chowdhury, cofounder of Eyes For All. We are welcoming our partner first customer and we are looking forward to continuing our work with EFA to fight to prevent vision loss in Bangladesh and Asia. This new customer is a strong example of the incremental value of an indirect model to execute our growth plan in the country with large culture differential, said Yves-Stephane Couture, Diagnos vice-president of sales. About DIAGNOS DIAGNOS is a publicly-traded Canadian corporation with a mission of early detection of critical health issues through the use of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool CARA (Computer Assisted Retina Analysis). CARA is a tele-ophthalmology platform that integrates with existing equipment (hardware and software) and processes at the point of care. CARAs Artificial Intelligence image enhancement algorithms make standard retinal images sharper, clearer and easier to read. CARA is accessible securely over the internet, and is compatible with all recognized image formats and brands of fundus cameras, and is EMR compatible. CARA is a cost-effective tool for screening large numbers of patients in real-time. CARA complies with local regulations, is FDA cleared for commercialization in the United States of America, is Health Canada licensed for commercialization in Canada and is CE marking compliant in Europe. Additional information is available at www.diagnos.com and www.sedar.com For further information, please contact: Mr. Andre Larente, President DIAGNOS Inc. Tel: 450-678-8882 ext. 224 alarente@diagnos.ca This news release contains forward-looking information. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in these statements. DIAGNOS disclaims any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. 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. CHICAGO, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fast Radius, a leading manufacturing technology company, announced today that they raised $48M in a Series B funding round led by UPS, with strong insider participation from Drive Capital. Fast Radius will use the funds to continue to scale up its global manufacturing footprint as well as its software development, application engineering, and sales teams. Fast Radius is headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Atlanta, GA and Singapore, as well as a production hub on-site at the UPS Worldport facility in Louisville, KY. Additive manufacturing is increasingly becoming the logical direction for future supply chain strategies, blurring the lines between physical and virtual warehousing for products in many industries, said Scott Price, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at UPS. Fast Radius technology platform and additive manufacturing design processes are bringing the virtual warehouse vision to life for their customers, complementing UPS global time-definite logistics expertise. Fast Radius technology platform and manufacturing footprint help customers bring new products and supply chain models to market that are uniquely enabled by additive manufacturing (3D printing). The Fast Radius software platform, also known as the Fast Radius Operating System (FROS), supports customers across the product lifecycle. The platform helps customers identify potential applications, conduct engineering and economic evaluations, accelerate new product development, and ultimately manufacture industrial-grade parts in Fast Radius factories at scale with the latest additive technologies. Fast Radius represents the future of manufacturing, supply chains and the fourth industrial revolution, said Nick Solaro, Partner, Drive Capital. Fast Radius full stack software and production capabilities are defining the cloud manufacturing market. Late last year, the World Economic Forum ( WEF ) recognized Fast Radius as one of the nine companies best implementing technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolutionthe only company so honored that is based in North America. Fast Radiuss mission is to make new things possible to advance the human condition, said Fast Radius Chief Executive Officer Lou Rassey. The new tools of digital design and additive manufacturing power that mission. Our focus is to help companies imagine new products and bring them into the world. This additional funding will allow us to further expand our partnerships with leading global companies across aerospace, consumer, industrial, medical, and automotive verticals, added Pat McCusker, Fast Radius Chief Operating Officer. The Fast Radius team is headquartered in Chicago and includes senior leaders from McKinsey & Company, Amazon, PayPal, GE, Blue Origin, and other leading global firms. This additional funding will help Fast Radius expand its world-class team across software, manufacturing technology, and customer engagement. Also participating in the Fast Radius Series B financing were previous investors Jump Capital, Skydeck, and Hyde Park Venture Partners. About Fast Radius Fast Radius is the leading provider of additive manufacturing solutions, including application discovery, product design and testing, production-grade manufacturing and global fulfillment. From entirely new products uniquely enabled by additive manufacturing to global supply chain solutions leveraging a virtual warehouse, Fast Radius brings the future of manufacturing and the supply chain to its customers. In September 2018, Fast Radius was named as one of the nine companies best implementing technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by the World Economic Forum ( WEF ). Fast Radius is headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Atlanta, GA and Singapore, as well as a production hub on-site at the UPS Worldport facility in Louisville, KY. Visit www.fastradius.com for additional information. Contact Info: NASHVILLE, TN, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- LIG Assets, Inc. (LIGA) (also known as the "Leader in Green Assets" or "LIGA") announces it has released to shareholders its financial report for Fiscal Year ending on December 31st, 2018. This report may be found on the OTCMarkets.com at: https://backend.otcmarkets.com/otcapi/company/financial-report/214954/content The 2018 Annual Report posts Total Revenues of $4,239,748.00 and posting a small net profit for the year. The Company anticipates the current trend of increased revenues and net profits to continue in 2019 and beyond as the Companys current revenue generating operations have invested heavily in various projects in 2018 that are now coming to fruition and this doesnt take into account the real estate development projects and other value based opportunities that LIGA is developing. LIGA President Marvin Baker stated, Weve taken a very different approach to building LIG Assets into a company that will last for years by financing our various projects with traditional financing vehicles. All of us have been very diligent in making LIGA work for the long term and all indication is that well be able to keep up the current pace of growth with only the current revenue generating operations. Baker continued Once we can get the other opportunities with real estate and Robert Plarrs technologies to market, LIGAs upside in incalculable. LIGAs CFO Doug Vaughn states, Our management has been working extremely hard on multiple fronts. I am pleased to report that we have made great progress cleaning up various compliance items. In April 2018, all of our operating areas were converted to a common accounting platform and all accounting was brought in house. Our reviews made some changes to the 2017 results and by June 30, 2018, the financial review of all past results was complete, and now we have control of all accounting moving forward which will make the audit process much easier. Vaughn continues, While real estate projects such as ours almost always take longer than expected, the company is in a much better position than last year. We are working on other new projects in addition to Brentwood and Panama City Beach. Our current market capitalization only reflects the media business, which is capable of growing very nicely. The funding of the Brentwood project or the construction of the Panama City model home (which is funded) should substantially increase the value. In 2017, LIGA transitioned from non-revenue status to generating revenues. In 2018, LIGA started developing and investing into various projects that are now starting to materialize and have just started to generate revenue in 2019. LIGA Chairman Aric Simons stated, Even though 2018 was the new Management teams second year operating the company, we managed a small net profit in 2018 a rarity in the OTC Market. 2019 will be the year that LIGA begins to achieve its goals and we will continue to be transparent and honest with their shareholders as we work toward having a very profitable year for all divisions and subsidiaries of the company. The company expects more major announcements over the next few months. LIGA plans to release an overview of the financial and operational updates to shareholders over the next weeks via the Companys Shareholder Newsletter. Interested parties can subscribe for free to LIGAs Shareholder Newsletter on the Companys website www.LIGAHomes.com or www.LeaderInGreenAssets.com, and for instant updates and alerts follow us on Twitter.com/LIGASSETS For more information about LIGA Homes visit - www.LIGAHomes.com or contact the Company directly at 833-LIGAHOMES General inquiries: ContactUs@LIGAHomes.com About LIGA Homes: LIGA Homes unique residential and commercial developments utilize specially designed and manufactured recycled "element resistant" steel framing, in addition to toxic free magnesium oxide building materials and panels that are 100% mold, fungus, termite and rot resistant and fire resistant against temperatures up to 3500 degrees Fahrenheit as well as famed environmentalist Robert Plarr's exclusive "maximum rated" R-60 insulation -- combining to create disaster resistant materials and structures that can withstand up to a 7.5 magnitude earthquake and sustained gale force winds up to 175 MPH while negating damage caused by rain and flood exposure. With the addition of Plarr's green and renewable systems and products, LIGA Homes is now capable of providing affordable, fully sustainable and disaster resistant living environments LIGA Homes is at the forefront of this new and improved direction for the green, sustainable and construction sectors. About LIG Assets, Inc.: LIG Assets, Inc. in association with Robert Plarr is the emerging "Leader in Green Assets" -- focused on exclusive green, renewable energy and sustainable and disaster resistant homes, living systems, technologies and components to be utilized in the residential and commercial real estate acquisition and development projects currently under way and now individual product sales, as well as rapid expansion into other sectors via acquisitions, mergers and joint venture partnerships. LIG Assets, Inc. trades on the pink sheets under the ticker symbol "LIGA." Forward-Looking Statements: This press release may contain forward-looking statements. The words "believe," "expect," "should," "intend," "estimate," "projects," variations of such words and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean that a statement is not a forward-looking statement. These forward-looking statements are based upon the Company's current expectations and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Among the important factors that could cause actual results to differ significantly from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements are risks that are detailed in the Company's filings on file at www.OTCMarkets.com. Contact: Shareholder/Investor inquiries can be directed to: Marvin Baker President LIG Assets, Inc. CEO BGTV Direct Worldwide Media Solutions Email: Marvin@BGTVDirect.com www.LeaderInGreenAssets.com www.BGTVDirect.com West Lafayette, Indiana, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Adranos Inc., a Purdue University -affiliated company developing a high-performance, solid propellant for long-range missile and space launch systems, has won the Armys inaugural xTechSearch competition, besting more than 350 companies in the months long competition. The award decision was made by senior Army leaders based on what technology they believed could have the biggest impact on the Armys modernization needs. Adranos previously was awarded $125,000 for being selected a finalist in the competition, which it used to perform a live flight demonstration of its novel rocket propellant called ALITEC. A video of the flight demonstration is available here . Adranos founders Brandon Terry, who received his doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue, and Chris Stoker, an Indiana University JD/MBA alumnus, will use the $200,000 award funding to enable company growth and continued ALITEC development. The technology is a high-performance solid rocket propellant that has more thrust and is less corrosive than traditional solid propellants. Brandon and I have always believed in our technology, but to have senior Army leaders recognize ALITECs potential impact is a great honor for us. We are highly motivated to take the funding from this competition and advance our rocket fuel to the next level, Stoker said. In this year when Purdue is celebrating its 150th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of Purdue alumnus Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, were excited to be working on another potentially giant leap when it comes to aeronautics. Adranoss flight demonstrations confirmed that ALITEC could substantially increase the range of ballistic missiles over traditional solid propellants. The technology aligned with the Armys Long Range Precision Fire modernization priority, which is focused on ENHANCING the U.S. Armys STRENGTH in range, munitions, and target acquisition. ALITEC is processed in the same way traditional propellants, meaning that it can be used in any of the current or future missile platforms employed by the Department of Defense. We mix it the same way. We cast it the same way. We cure it the same way. The only difference is were replacing one metal powder with another metal powder in the processing, Terry said. The propellant could be used by the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA and other Department of Defense agencies, as well as U.S.-allied nations. The Expeditionary Technology Search, shortened to xTechSearch, called on companies to demonstrate technologies that can help the Army meet its modernization challenges. The goal is to seek nontraditional innovators who can work with the Army, including through cooperative research opportunities with Army scientists, as it modernizes the force. From robotics and night-vision to radar, machine guns and duct tape, innovation has driven the very nature of how the Army fights, said Jeffrey White, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology. Innovation reforms, both large and small, have improved the lives of our soldiers, White said. And continued innovation is absolutely critical for force modernization. Adranos, which is named after the Greek god of fire, has previously received nearly $1 million of funding for ALITEC development. Stoker said $600,000 in funding came from Archibald Cox Jr., chairman of Sextant Group Inc., a private investment firm. Cox is the former chairman of Barclays of America and former CEO of Morgan Stanley International and various other companies. He is now on the Adranos Board of Directors. The remaining funds came from other state and federal programs. The company received startup assistance from the Purdue Foundry, an entrepreneurial accelerator in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship. Weve worked with nearly 250 startups, and Chris and Brandon are rocket stars with their expertise in the technology and in the development of their entrepreneurial skills, said Greg Deason, senior vice president of entrepreneurship and place making. Even more importantly, their innovation will serve the U.S. Army in advancing defense technologies. Very proud of these guys. Adranos work aligns with Purdue's Giant Leaps celebration, celebrating the universitys global advancements in space exploration as part of Purdues 150th anniversary. This is one of the four themes of the yearlong celebrations Ideas Festival , designed to showcase Purdue as an intellectual center solving real-world issues. Adranos emerged as a startup from what is now called the Purdue Energetics Research Center. Technology used by Adranos is licensed through the Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization , which patented the technology. Adranos is continuing to raise funds to advance the technology. TORONTO, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Schulich School of Business at York University today officially launched a new Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence degree program. The new program, which begins in September 2019, is a 12-month career-focused degree that combines a broad range of advanced AI applications with business skills. The Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence (MMAI) is specifically designed to prepare graduates who can manage the design and implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions and technologies for businesses and other organizations. The program was designed in consultation with industry practitioners and The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in order to gain a clear understanding of emerging trends in AI, as well as the skills and knowledge needed for graduates aspiring to successful careers in AI-related fields. Schulich is seeking strong candidates with an undergraduate degree in disciplines such as Engineering, Math, Computer Science, Business, Biology, Statistics, Physics, Economics, Psychology or Neuroscience and with experience or a strong interest in coding. The School is currently accepting applications for the new program. Prospective Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence students are also invited to attend the Programs launch event at the Schulich School of Business on Monday, May 13, 2019 from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm. The event will feature a panel discussion with AI experts and business leaders, and will provide an opportunity to network with faculty and other prospective students, as well as with Schulich alumni. The Schulich Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence degree program will produce well-rounded managers who have the potential to become leaders in AI-management, said Murat Kristal, Program Director and Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems at Schulich. Artificial Intelligence will transform the private and public sectors in the coming decade. With businesses expected to be the main driver of AI adoption, the need for individuals that combine management skills and knowledge of advanced AI applications will continue to grow exponentially. Schulich is one of the leading schools globally in the emerging fields of Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, said Dezso J. Horvath, Dean of the Schulich School. Our deep faculty expertise in this area, together with our newly established Centre of Excellence in Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, will provide a hub for industry outreach, experiential learning and cutting-edge research. Over the course of three consecutive terms of full-time study, the Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence program will focus on strategic thinking, managerial decision-making, AI technologies, design techniques and ethics in AI. The program includes an integrative, hands-on consulting project for real-world clients that will take place over the 2nd and 3rd terms. During the consulting project, students will make extensive use of the Deloitte Cognitive Analytics and Visualization Lab, located in the newly opened Rob and Cheryl McEwen Graduate Study & Research Building, and will also spend time at client sites, interacting with various stakeholders such as line managers, technicians, customers and suppliers. For more information about the Schulich Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence program, please visit: http://schulich.yorku.ca/programs/mmai/ . About Schulich Known as Canadas Global Business School, the Schulich School of Business in Toronto is ranked #1 in Canada among the worlds leading business schools by a number of global MBA surveys, including Forbes, CNN Expansion, Corporate Knights, America Economia and eFinancialCareers. The Kellogg-Schulich EMBA program is ranked #8 in the world by The Economist, #6 in the world by QS MBA, and #1 in Canada by the Financial Times of London. Global, innovative and diverse, Schulich offers business programs year-round at its state-of-the-art complex at York University; at its Miles S. Nadal Management Centre located in the heart of the Torontos financial district; and at its new campus in Hyderabad, India. Schulich also operates a number of satellite centres in Beijing and Shanghai, China; Mumbai, India; Seoul, South Korea; Mexico City, Mexico; and Sao Paulo, Brazil. Schulich offers undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate business degrees that lead to rewarding careers in the private, public and nonprofit sectors, and has more than 30,000 alumni working in over 90 countries. The School pioneered Canadas first International MBA (IMBA) and International BBA (iBBA) degrees, as well as North Americas first ever cross-border Executive MBA degree, the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA. The School launched one of the worlds first Master of Business Analytics and Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure degrees and has one of the largest portfolios of one-year, specialized Masters programs of any business school in North America. Schulichs Executive Education Centre provides executive development programs annually to more than 10,000 executives in Canada and abroad. For more information, please contact: Johannesburg, South Africa and Mountain View, CA, USA, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DeARX Services (DeARX) and WSO2 today announced that they have entered into an agreement in which DeARX is now a WSO2 Value-Added Reseller (VAR) for Southern Africa. The move builds on the strong, multi-year partnership between WSO2, the leading open source integration company, and DeARX an application integration specialist and WSO2 Certified Integration Partner. As a VAR, DeARX will expand its collaboration with WSO2 in delivering open source technology solutions that support customers in the implementation of application and system integration projects while efficiently aligning their architectural needs and business goals. Additionally, the company will implement campaigns to increase awareness of the WSO2 Integration Agile Platform across Southern Africa. DeARX leverages the skills and experience of a team passionate about modern integration technology combined with a commercial and financial focus to ensure real business value. Having many years experience within corporate IT, the team has crafted an offering based on WSO2s Integration Agile Platform which accelerates time to value, reduces cost, and facilitates a highly agile and modern digital offering. The VAR agreement follows the recent recognition of WSO2 by Forrester Research, Inc. as a Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: API Management Solutions, Q4 2018 report1 published on October 29, 2018. In its evaluation of WSO2 API Manager, the report1 states, As the only fully open source solution in our Forrester Wave analysis, WSO2 provides good breadth across all evaluation criteria. Particular strengths include formal life-cycle management and non-REST APIs, both of which facilitate mature and disciplined enterprise API strategies. Our philosophy has always been to bring business value to our customers, and in WSO2 we have found a technology vendor that offers a balance of industry-leading software, openness, and a customer-first culture, unlike the familiar revenue-first vendors, said Nick Parry, executive director at DeARX. Weve been delivering projects using WSO2 technology for more than five years, so building on our certified partner status to become a WSO2 VAR is a natural evolution and something we are both ready for and excited about. At WSO2, we put a priority on teaming with companies who share our values, have the skills and experience to deliver solutions using our technology, and are committed to jointly growing our footprint by leveraging their regional focus and expertise. DeARX has demonstrated all of these qualities, said Shevan Goonetilleke, COO of WSO2. Now through our VAR partnership with DeARX, we are well-positioned to support our growing number of customers on the African continent in meeting their digital transformation goals. About WSO2 WSO2 is the worlds #1 open source integration vendor, helping digital-driven organizations become integration agile. Customers choose us for our broad integrated platform, approach to open source, and agile transformation methodology. The companys hybrid platform for developing, reusing, running and managing integrations prevents lock-in through open source software that runs on-premises or in the cloud. Today, hundreds of leading brands and thousands of global projects execute 6 trillion transactions annually using WSO2 integration technologies. Visit https://wso2.com to learn more. About DeARX DeARX Services is a South African IT Services business that specializes in application integration. Our team is made up of specialists who are experts in their field. We started using WSO2 in our solutions in 2014 which was a great choice! We have enjoyed many successful projects with customers across multiple industries and have loved the continuous development of the WSO2 platform between then and now. WSO2s technology innovation ensures a great alliance between our customers, WSO2 and ourselves. 1Forrester Research, Inc. The Forrester WaveTM: API Management Solutions, Q4 2018, by Randy Heffner with Christopher Mines, Allison Vizgaitis, and Diane Lynch, October 29, 2018. Trademarks and registered trademarks are the properties of their respective owners. Newest member brings success in transformative innovation and strong investment contacts to global broadband and IoT services provider Fort Lauderdale, FL, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- FMC GlobalSat Holdings Inc., a satellite communications and wireless services provider for geographically remote commercial operations, announced that David Montanaro, a noted technology executive and angel investor with extensive board experience in both private and public companies, has agreed to join the companys board of directors. In this capacity, he will contribute to the companys strategic vision, go-to-market plans, investment community outreach, as well as other corporate activities. Recognized as an innovative strategist with a proven track record in bringing disruptive innovations and companies to market, Mr. Montanaro has deep expertise in several cutting-edge technologies that are directly related to FMC GlobalSat. Among these include IoT, cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, mobile communications and data networking. In addition to his strong technology background, Mr. Montanaro has an exemplary track record in business development, sales, and management. He has spent more than 35 years in executive management, which include serving as chairman and chief executive officer of NEC eLuminant Technologies, a market-leading optical networking company. We are pleased that David has agreed to join our board and help FMC GlobalSat continue its growth trajectory by delivering IoT services that are relevant to business needs, said Emmanuel Cotrel, FMC GlobalSats chief executive officer. We anticipate that Davids longstanding success in technology marketscoupled with his business expertise that ranges from multinational giants to startupswill benefit our companys goal to increase our customer base and further disrupt the satellite and wireless industries. FMC GlobalSats 4G/LTSAT (Long Term Satellite) service offers hybrid connectivity leveraging the best features of wireless networks (4G) and current high-throughput satellite (HTS) channels to deliver seamless access in geographically remote areas and applications in-transit. Offering a usage-based subscription model which automatically switches traffic to the network with the best throughput at any given time, the service eliminates many communication failures and black-outs while reducing the need for human resource investment or effort. In addition, the solution employs the Kymeta flat panel software steered antenna which automatically tracks satellite connections and utilizes current satellite GEO Ku transmission bands, as well as those which will be coming online with the new wave of high bandwidth capacity low earth orbit (LEO) constellations. FMC GlobalSat is in a position to capture significant market share by delivering a sensible and affordable IoT offering that satisfies the unique needs of customers that operate in geographically remote locations, said Montanaro. Im looking forward to working closely with Emmanuel, his team, and the other board members to accelerate FMC GlobalSats growth and continue redefining the IoT landscape. Mr. Montanaro is a founding member of Seed Capital Fund of Central New York, executive advisor, mentor and business judge for the Genius New York Drone/UAS program, and chief executive officer and founder of Strategic Advisory Associates of Syracuse, New York. He resides in the Syracuse area. To learn more about FMC GlobalSat and its 4G/LTSAT services, please visit www.FMCGlobalSat.com. About FMC GlobalSat FMC GlobalSat is a global provider of best-in-class satellite and wireless solutions to geographically remote businesses that require reliable, secure, and cost-effective connectivity. Partnering with major wireless carriers and satellite communications providers, FMC GlobalSat delivers a hybrid connectivity solution that incorporates 4G wireless solutions across CDMA, GSM, and LTE networks in more than 190 countries, and high-throughput satellite (HTS) communications. The companys network incorporates Tier 1 carriers, and satellite infrastructure that includes 53 satellites, eight teleports, 20,000 miles of fiber optic cable, and a 24/7 enterprise-grade global technical support organization. For more information about FMC GlobalSat, please visit www.FMCGlobalSat.com FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Forward-Looking Statements in this press release, which are not historical facts, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Our actual results, performance, or achievements may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the use of words such as may, could, expect, intend, plan, seek, anticipate, believe, estimate, predict, potential, continue, likely, will, would, and variations of these terms and similar expressions, or the negative of these terms or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by us and our management, are inherently uncertain. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in any forward-looking statements made by us herein are often discussed in filings we make with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, available at: www.sec.gov. We caution you not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which are made as of the date of this press release. We undertake no obligation to update publicly any of these forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, new information, orfuture events, changes in assumptions, or changes in other factors affecting forward-looking statements, except to the extent required by applicable laws. If we update one or more forward-looking statements, no inference should be drawn that we will make additional updates with respect to those or other forward-looking statements. Contact: John Stafford Parallel Communications jstafford@parallelpr.com +1 515 708-1296 Detroit, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Its been 24 years since the National Society of Black Engineers last brought its Annual Convention to Detroit. This years iteration, NSBEs 45th Annual Convention (#NSBE45), held in the Motor City, was a record-breaker, with an all-time high attendance of more than 14,000 and a highest-ever number of exhibitors, nearly 350, at the events Career Fair. At the press conference for the event, held at the convention venue, Cobo Center, Detroit city officials and NSBE officers and staff discussed the Societys important place in the nations present and future. NSBE National Chair Niasia T. Williams spent five years in the Flint and Detroit, Michigan, areas as a preteen and teenager. Shes now a graduate student in STEM education at the University of Iowa and a mechanical systems engineer at Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Company, as well as NSBEs highest-ranking officer. But she says she never saw a black female engineer until her undergraduate years at Rutgers University. One of the things thats important, and one of the things that I hope well be able to utilize at this conference, is to make sure that students and people within this community actually see themselves as engineers, technologists or STEM-literate folks, Williams said. We know that the next economy is going to be technology-based, STEM-based, and if we are not prepared within our community to engage in that, we will lose our opportunity. Alexis Wiley, chief of staff for the City of Detroit, began by speaking about her undergraduate background. I was very, very active in my college chapter of [the National Association of Black Journalists], and we had an equally as active a chapter of NSBE, Wiley said. I know how critical this organization is in terms of giving our people a path forward in a career like engineering, where many people who look like me and look like you are not as well represented. NSBE established a bold new goal to nearly triple the number of Black Engineers the nations colleges and universities produce, from 3,500 to 10,000 annually, by 2025, said Karl W. Reid, Ed.D., NSBEs executive director. How are we doing? Were doing great. Twenty-eight percent more African Americans are earning degrees in engineering than we were when we started the strategy in 2015. So thats a thousand additional Black Engineers being deployed in academia and in industry than in 2015. But we have a long way to go. Why is this all important? Dr. Reid continued. NSBE is really about Unlocking Potential, Cultivating Confidence and Changing Lives. Thats really what were all aboutbecause diversity matters. Nikolai P. Vitti, Ed.D., general superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, praised NSBEs partnership with the district through the Societys Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (SEEK) program, and he told the gathering about the districts plans to remake the citys schools. Weve set out with an aggressive agenda to improve education in Detroit, with a focus on STEM," Dr. Vitti said, and with plans such as hands-on teaching of science in and labs for pre-K through 12th graders; alignment of math curricula to grade-level expectations; placement of robotics clubs in every elementary and middle school; increasing the number and diversity of excellent math and science teachers; free college education for high-achieving high school students; and the establishment of a new engineering school in the heart of Detroit, in partnership with the University of Michigan, a high school focused not only on engineering but social justice, he said. We want to develop the next generation of engineers but engineers that also will give back to the community. Anthony B. Murphy, national chair of NSBE Professionals, likewise emphasized the importance of having engineers positively impact the community. My job is to maintain contact with thousands of engineers who are into their careersand try to convince them to come back, to give back, to stay connected to this great mission, to continue to mentor not just the collegiate students but also to go back into the (elementary, middle and high schools) and teach individuals what engineers actually do, Murphy said. As NSBE Professionals, it is our job to make sure that were mentoring the next generation of engineers, the next generation of leadersthat were coming back with the intent of saying You can do it. Stick with it. You can achieve what we have achieved. Alana Tremble-Winfrey, chair of NSBEs 2019 Convention Planning Committee, welcomed media to the event, and Larry Alexander, president and CEO of the Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau, welcomed the convention attendees to Detroit. NSBE National Secretary Julius Page served as moderator of the event. Attachment Three of the top five early voting locations were in the Southland, with Orland Township Hall in Orland Park topping the list with nearly 3,900 ballots, according to the Cook County clerks office. Olympia Fields Senior Living in Olympia Fields was fourth-busiest with nearly 2,200 votes cast and village hall in Park Forest fifth-busiest with more than 2,100 ballots cast, according to the clerk. SSANGYONG Motor Company says the early signs are overwhelmingly positive after its return to the Australian market late last year, with the South Korean brand on track to sell more than 3000 new vehicles from a fast-growing 50-strong dealer network in 2019. Speaking to journalists last week at Pocheon Raceway north of Seoul, SsangYong Motor Co export division managing director Sanjeev Saksena said the Australian operation a $450 million investment and the companys first wholly owned subsidiary outside its home market is performing very well. It is almost like a textbook kind of actions that they are taking, he said. Just look at what has been done for the customers to see what they have seen. A very good marketing action has already taken place, and I understand that the TVCs and digital campaigns, they were really appreciated. We also have systems to get all the enquiries, etc, and measure and push. So, all of that is being done ideally. The (dealer) network is also really motivated because theyre seeing that the marketing support is there, so theyre all trying to put the best foot forward. SsangYong Motors Australia currently has 34 dealerships but plans to expand its network to around 50 by the end of this year as dealer interest continues to grow, according to communications and product planning manager Andrew Ellis. Well definitely hit 45, which is our target, but we might even get to 50, he said. We did a lap of the map last month. We drove around every state and caught up with every dealer in the capital cities, and we caught up with a couple of prospective dealers in all those states. Every dealer we saw has now signed and is going through the process of the paperwork. Mr Saksena added that dealer interest has been strengthened via overseas trips, including one last month to the Geneva motor show to see the fifth-generation Korando mid-size SUV make its international debut a crucial model that GoAuto drove in South Korea last week. (The Australian dealer network) was there looking at the competition, they were looking at how everybody is launching their new products, he said. Theyre all together thinking how SsangYong has to be successful there and what actions should be taken by SsangYong Australia, what actions should be taken by the dealerships. So, everybody is aligned. Mr Saksena said the appreciation of SsangYong Motors Australias performance also extends to its customers, many of whom were caught in the changeover from independent distributor Ateco Automotive which handled the brand between 2012 and 2016 and the new factory operation, which officially relaunched in December last year. We have also done all the research with all the existing customers, and the existing customers are also very happy with the performance, he said. As soon as SsangYong Australia started doing their campaigns, a lot of customers of SsangYong, they started connecting with SsangYong Australia (if) they had problems. We had a surge of spare parts orders and we see huge shipments taking place, and then suddenly we see now the number of orders, etc, are all reduced. To connect with dealers is ideal, to connect with the existing customers is strong. We (have) this positive word of mouth going for us. Mr Saksena said he hopes there is a big momentum of business happening from SsangYong Motors Australia in terms of sales. He did not specify targets, however the head of the Australian operations, Tim Smith, told GoAuto in December that he was targeting 10,000 sales a year and a top-15 position for the brand by the end of 2022. As far as numbers are concerned, theyre going up month by month, Mr Saksena said. Growth: how much should that be? I would say that in case Ateco was doing some level, then at least we should cross it this year. If we are able to do better than where Ateco left at the end of business and the direction is positive, then we are satisfied. That is being practical, rather than saying, I would like this number. Although, definitely, we are working on numbers. Unless you cite numbers and chase it, it doesnt happen in any business. Mr Ellis said SsangYong Motors Australia remains on track to sell more than 3000 vehicles in 2019, with the Korando expected to account for at least 1000 of those. So far, were happy, he said. Weve hit all of our wholesale targets. Rexton has really surprised us. Rexton Ultimate, we cant get enough of it, which is great. Musso has been everything we thought it would be, so were confident Musso short-wheelbase and long-wheelbase will be good. We are very bullish about Korando, because its the biggest segment in Australia, but the good thing is we now have a couple of cars around it to help that fight. We think our line-up, and with the new Tivoli, it makes for a pretty exciting line-up. Asked if the performance of the Australia outfit will determine if SsangYong Motor pursues fully owned subsidiaries in other markets, Mr Saksena said that is absolutely the case. It almost like (an audition) for us, because there are so many markets where because of certain reasons, the distributor is not able to (make) the kind of marketing investments that are required, he said. At a distributor level, hes looking at certain margins, and with a factory-owned subsidiary or distribution, you are not looking at margins, you are just looking at maybe breaking even. So, youve got some leeway, and that leeway you try to invest in marketing. If this works for us, we will start replicating it in markets where the distributor is finding it difficult. We have very strong relationships with distributors, and if they would like to continue, then we would not like to (lose) them, but if some distributor is trying to exit, then well take over. We will perfect this business model that we are trying to create in Australia. We have a very experienced team of people leading the business there. Mr Saksena said Australia was an ideal guinea pig given it is the 12th-largest market in the world for SUV and pick-up sales due to its relatively healthy economy. Here it was a situation where we (found it is) only marketing which is requiring investment, he said. Ateco clearly said that we cannot. Whenever they were confronted with low (sales), theyd reduce the prices and we started becoming cheap. And we always felt it was a new product line that was required for Australia and we had that ready, because when Ateco threw in the towel, then Tivoli and XLV were ready and we knew that and Korando was coming in with five-star ANCAP. And Musso and Rexton, they really have really strong base in Australia, because if you research on the web, people are talking very good about those two products. And we do not have the problems with DSI automatic transmission. When we went to Aisin, we felt that everything is great. And we did the customer clinics, so independent opinion from the customers (was sought), then KPMG also, we engaged them to guide us to what should be done. So, on their recommendation and finally ours, because we wanted to see if the network was there and if it is enthused about the new product portfolio, then we hit the ground running. If you talk to the dealers, they would have a pretty high opinion about SsangYongs products and how SsangYong is supporting them. So, we felt that everything was right, so why not enter ourselves rather than just give up on the market? How can you give up on a market like this? The Road to Recovery podcast series TORONTO, April 2, 2019 - Pelangio Exploration Inc. (PX:TSX-V; OTC PINK:PGXPF) ("Pelangio" or the "Company") is pleased to announceit has initiated further target development work on its Dalton Property and signed an access agreement with Goldcorp Canada Ltd. in order to facilitate a drill program on its Dome West Property. Both the Dalton Property and the Dome West Property are located proximal to the largest gold producers in the Timmins Camp. The Dalton Property is 1.5 kilometres ("km") south west of the historic Hollinger Gold Mine, currently being operated by Goldcorp Canada Ltd., and the Dome West Property is located 800 meters ("m") west of the Dome Mine super pit (See Map 2 below). Highlights Completed a detailed airborne magnetic survey over the Dalton Property Completed an access agreement with Goldcorp Canada Ltd. for Dome West Initiating a diamond drill program at Dome West scheduled to begin in mid-April "We are excited to begin exploration on our Dome West and Dalton gold properties. The results of the airborne magnetic survey at Dalton will be used to develop targets, whereas the diamond drill program at Dome West will be used to confirm the existence of a highly prospective porphyritic sill that is interpreted to extend across the Dome West property. These are appropriate first steps for us in the advancement of our strategic properties",commented Ingrid Hibbard, President and CEO of Pelangio. Dalton Property Consistent with Pelangio's strategy to explore within established mining camps proximal to known mines, the Dalton Property represents a unique opportunity to cost effectively explore a property that has had minimal exploration conducted since the early days of the Timmins camp. In late March of 2019, Pelangio initiated a detailed airborne magnetic survey over the Dalton Property. This survey will be combined with other target development work on the property planned for the summer field season. It is anticipated that geochemical surveying and further prospecting work will be completed during the summer months in order to develop drill targets for a fall 2019 diamond drill program. During the winter months a review of limited historical geophysical data was completed. From this work it was ascertained that previous operators did not test all of the targets developed. These untested targets will be prioritized for future drilling in conjunction with any newly developed targets outlined by Pelangio. Dome West Property As stated previously Pelangio has completed an access agreement with Goldcorp Canada Ltd. This agreement will allow Pelangio access to surface rights surrounding the Dome Mine in order to conduct a limited first phase drill program on the Dome West property. Pelangio would like to thank Goldcorp Canada Ltd for their co-operation and assistance with the access permit process. The Dome West property, formerly controlled by Central Porcupine Mines Ltd., is a strategic land holding that is adjacent to both the former Paymaster Mine property and Goldcorp's Dome Mine (Source: Ont. Dept of Mines Map 449B, Ferguson, 1969). The Dome West property is located approximately 800 m west of the Dome Mine and approximately 500 m northwest of the former Paymaster mine shaft. (See Map 2 below: Location of the Dome West property in reference to the Dome Mine and other strategically located mine properties, shown below). The focus of the Pelangio's initial drill program is to confirm the presence of a highly prospective porphyritic sill unit that has been designated as target P1. The porphyritic sill unit is interpreted to extend across a substantial portion of the Dome West property at the 1000-foot elevation from the former Paymaster Mine property (Source: Ont. Dept of Mines Map 449B, Ferguson, 1969 and OGS Assessment File T-125). Given the extremely challenging topography for ground access to the P1 target area, it was determined that the best cost-effective and environmentally sound solution was to utilize helicopter support for the diamond drill program on the P1 target. It is anticipated that the first phase drill program will in commence on or about April 15. Contingent on the success of this first phase program the company intends to plan, permit and conduct a winter drill program in 2019/2020 from Edwards Lake which would provide an optimum platform to properly evaluate the P1 target (See Map 1 below). Map 1:Location of targets P1 and V1 with reference to the Dome West Property Image: https://www.accesswire.com/users/newswire/images/540726/04022019PEL1.jpg A second target area of interest designated target V1 is present in the central portion of the property where government geologists have documented a historical shaft and a small adit associated with quartz veins in outcrop (reference: Ontario Dept of Mines Map 2075).There is no record of sampling in this area. The V1 target will be re-evaluated and sampled in conjunction with a proposed soil sampling program planned for the field season of 2019. Map 2:Location of the Dome West property in reference to the Dome Mine and other strategically located mine properties Image: https://www.accesswire.com/users/newswire/images/540726/04022019PEL2.jpg Qualified Person Mr. Kevin Filo, P.Geo. (Ontario), is a qualified person within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Filo has verified and approved the data disclosed in this release. About Pelangio Pelangio acquires and explores large land packages in world-class gold belts in Canada and Ghana, West Africa. In Canada, the company is focusing on the Dome West property located 800 metres from the Dome Mine in Timmins, the 25 km2 Birch Lake Property located in the Red Lake Mining District and the Dalton Property located 1.5 km from the Hollinger mine in Timmins. In Ghana, the Company is focusing on two 100%- owned camp-sized properties: the 100 km2 Manfo Property, the site of seven recent near-surface gold discoveries, and the 284 km2 Obuasi Property, located 4 km on strike and adjacent to AngloGold Ashanti's prolific high-grade Obuasi Mine. Ghana is an English-speaking, common law jurisdiction that is consistently ranked amongst the most favourable mining jurisdictions in Africa. For additional information, please visit our website at www.pelangio.com, or contact: Ingrid Hibbard, President and CEO Tel: 905-336-3828 / Toll-free: 1-877-746-1632 / Email: info@pelangio.com Forward Looking Statements Certain statements herein may contain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements or information appear in a number of places and can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate" or "believes" or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements and information include statements regarding the Company's newly initiated exploration programs on the Dome West and Dalton properties, the Company's strategy of acquiring large land packages in areas of sizable gold mineralization, the Company's plans to follow-up on previous work, and the Company's overall exploration plans. With respect to forward-looking statements and information contained herein, we have made numerous assumptions, including assumptions about the state of the equity markets. Such forward-looking statements and information are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statement or information. Such risks include the changes in equity markets, share price volatility, volatility of global and local economic climate, gold price volatility, increases in costs, exchange rate fluctuations, speculative nature of gold exploration including the risk that favourable results may not be obtained, and other risks involved in the gold exploration industry. See the Company's annual and quarterly financial statements and management's discussion and analysis for additional information on risks and uncertainties relating to the forward-looking statement and information. There can be no assurance that a forward-looking statement or information referenced herein will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements or information. Also, many of the factors are beyond the control of the Company. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward- looking statements or information. We undertake no obligation to reissue or update any forward-looking statements or information except as required by law. All forward-looking statements and information herein are qualified by this cautionary statement. 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. SOURCE: Pelangio Exploration Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540726/Pelangio-Exploration-Commences-Airborne-Survey-on-Dalton-Property-and-Completes-Access-Agreement-on-Dome-West-Property Halifax, April 2, 2019 - Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (TSXV: UCU) (OTCQX: UURAF) ("Ucore" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Company has entered into a secured loan agreement (the "Loan") with Orca Holdings, LLC ("Orca") in the amount of CAD $3.6 million (USD $2.7 million). The proceeds from the Loan will be used for general working capital purposes, and to dismiss any short term amounts owing to Orca over the next six months (the "Short Term Obligations" or "STO's"). The STO's include payments on the sale leaseback, and subsequent repurchase of the Company's Rare Earth Pilot Plant (the under the finance agreement originally announced on July 31, 2017 (the "Lease Agreement"). The Loan will terminate on March 31, 2021. Payments which would have otherwise come due under the Lease Agreement between April 1, 2019 and June 30, 2019 will be added to the Principal amount of the Loan. The Loan will bear interest at a rate of 12.5% annually for the first 9 months commencing July 1, 2019 and then at a rate of 15% annually for the 12 months commencing April 1, 2020. The Loan is secured by a first charge on the Company's assets. "Ucore would like to thank Orca for its continued support as the Company continues to advance its ongoing projects," said Jim McKenzie, President & CEO of Ucore. "This non-dilutive financing further demonstrates the Company's strength and the value of Ucore's assets." The transaction is considered a related party transaction within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). The transaction is exempt from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 as neither the fair market value of the subject matter of the transaction, nor the considered paid, exceed 25% of the Company's market capitalization. No new insiders and no control persons were created in connection with the closing of the transaction. About Ucore Ucore Rare Metals is a development-phase company focused on rare metals resources, extraction and beneficiation technologies with near term potential for production, growth and scalability. The Company has a 100% ownership stake in the Bokan-Dotson Ridge Rare Earth Project. On March 31, 2014, Ucore announced the unanimous support of the Alaska State Legislature for Senate Bill 99 (2014), which authorized the AIDEA to issue up to USD $145 Million in bonds for the infrastructure and construction costs of the Bokan-Dotson Ridge Rare Earth Project. Ucore's vision and plan is to transition as a leading nanotechnology company that provides mineral separation products and services to the mining and mineral extraction industry. This vision includes the development of a Strategic Metals Complex (initially announced on Nov. 15, 2016) in Ketchikan, Alaska and the development of the Company's rare earth minerals property located at Bokan Mountain in Alaska (technical report filed on SEDAR on March 14, 2013). For further information, please contact Mr. Jim McKenzie, President & CEO of Ucore Rare Metals Inc. at: +1 (902) 482-5214 or visit . Cautionary Notes This press release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address future business acquisition activities (including related required financings), timelines, litigation outcomes, events or developments that the Company expects, are forward looking statements. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance or results and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Ucore has assumed that it will in the near future be able to obtain interim financing and sufficient additional financing to acquire IBC in compliance with the terms contemplated in the existing agreements with IBC and its shareholders holding a majority of its shares. Ucore has also assumed that there will be no material adverse findings in its upcoming expected comprehensive due diligence review of IBC. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include: Ucore not being able to raise sufficient funds to acquire IBC (including the non-acquisition payments owed under the previous and existing agreements); adverse capital market conditions; unexpected due diligence findings; unexpected or adverse outcomes in the currently outstanding litigation matters between Ucore and IBC; resistance to or noncompliance by IBC or its key shareholders with the existing agreements; the emergence of alternative superior metallurgy and mineral separation technologies; the inability of IBC to retain its key staff members and clients; the inability of IBC to protect its intellectual property; unexpected transaction costs or other deal completion setbacks; the availability and procurement of any required interim financing that may be required; and general economic, market or business conditions. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined by the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43809 For 60 years, Eugene and Mary Schmittgens have been a vital part of the village, both working with distinction for St. Irenaeus Catholic Church in Park Forest as teachers of religious principles in its program for developmentally disabled adults and as part of Park Forests artistic community and its health services. Eugene served as treasurer, served on the board of directors and trained docents for for the Tall Grass Arts Association. For many years, Mary was a school nurse and Director of Health Services for School District 163. VANCOUVER, April 2, 2019 - NV Gold Corporation (TSXV: NVX; OTC PINK: NVGLF) (''NV Gold'' or the ''Company'') announces the staking and approximate doubling of its land position around its 100% controlled Frazier Dome Gold Project, located in the Tonopah Mining District, Nevada, and highlights its upcoming 2019 exploration program. Frazier Dome Gold Project Review and Fall 2018 Exploration Program Highlights: Gold occurs in silicified breccias adjacent to a Middle Miocene felsic dome, where Company surface samples grade up to 6.1 g/t Au over 3 m, and historical surface samples grade up to 14.7 g/t Au. High-grade gold also occurs in north-northwest-trending quartz veins, with Company surface samples grading up to 11.2 g/t Au, and a historical drill hole grading 7.5 g/t Au over 3 m. 2018 drilling (8 holes) yielded notable runs of detectable gold across altered and mineralized zones in FD-1: ~105 meters, FD-2: ~150 meters, and FD-5: ~135 meters. Re-surveying of hole FD-01 identified strong deviation of the drill hole, causing it to miss the priority target structure of the interpreted feeder zone beneath the identified rhyolite dome. 2018 drilling only tested 4 of 9 target areas, and only tested depths of 500 ft from the surface. Five of the eight widely-spaced holes delivered gold intersections greater than 0.10 g/t, and up to 1.035 g/t, pointing to what the Company believes could be a robust gold system at depth. ''Modelling of the Frazier Dome identified many geologic similarities with the shallow parts of low-sulfidation epithermal deposits, especially resources related to other rhyolite domes in the vicinity, such as the Eastside, Hasbrouk, and Three Hills gold deposits,'' commented Dr. Marcus Johnston, Vice President Exploration. ''The 8 reverse-circulation holes NVX drilled in 2018 all encountered significant runs of alteration and gold and silver mineralization. The lengths and widths of the mapped fracture/vein sets, combined with the long-runs of alteration and mineralization in drilling, and the shallow nature of the exposed system all point toward a potentially bonanza-grade deeper deposit(s), and the possibility of bulk-tonnage ore to be found on the property.'' Highlights of 2019 Frazier Dome Exploration Plan: Consolidate key property position in and around project. Completed in March 2019 by adding 71 claims (approx. 1466.9 acres) to the existing 72 claims (approx. 1,487.6 acres. Property position now totals approx. 2,954.5 acres (approx. 1,195.6 Hectares) - see attached map below. Focused mapping, sampling program and structural analysis in combination with geophysical program studies to define three-dimensional framework to enhance the quality of already known targets, and to identify new targets buried elsewhere on the property. Reverse Circulation drilling program planned for the summer of 2019: 80 percent of the property is covered by post-mineral volcanic rocks and alluvium, and five of the original nine targets permitted remain untested. Follow-up deeper holes are also being planned for the targets already tested. Given the exposed widths and lengths identified in 2018, and with the estimated depths and calculated volumes, the Company believes it is possible for a robust gold deposit to occur deeper on the claim block. About Tonopah Mining District The Frazier Dome Project, staked by the Company, is located 13 km north of the Tonopah Mining District, Nye County, Nevada. The Project contains a low- to intermediate-sulfidation, volcanic-hosted epithermal gold system with high-grade mineralization. The Tonopah Mining District contains multiple styles of volcanic-hosted epithermal gold mineralization similar to that at Frazier Dome, including: High-grade, intermediate-sulfidation Ag-rich veins which historically produced 174 million ounces (Moz) Ag and 1.9 Moz gold; and Younger, low-sulfidation, gold-rich mineralization related to intrusive rhyolite domes, which has been the focus of modern exploration (e.g., Hasbrouck and Eastside deposits). Dr. Michael Gustin of Mine Development Associates, an independent Qualified Person under NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical information disclosed in this release. Mine Development Associates is a division of RESPEC. About NV Gold Corporation NV Gold is a junior exploration company based in Vancouver, British Columbia that is focused on delivering value through mineral discoveries. Leveraging its highly experienced in-house technical knowledge, NV Gold's geological team intends to utilize its geological databases, which contains a vast treasury of field knowledge spanning decades of research and exploration, combined with a portfolio of mineral properties in Nevada, to prioritize key projects for focused exploration programs. On behalf of the Board of Directors, John E. Watson Chairman For further information, visit the Company's website at www.nvgoldcorp.com or contact: Peter A. Ball, President & COO Phone: 1-888-363-9883 Email: peter@nvgoldcorp.com 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. Forward Looking Statements This news release includes certain forward-looking statements or information. All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding the proposed uses of such funds and other future plans and objectives of the Company, including exploration plans, are forward-looking statements that involve various 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. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's plans or expectations include regulatory issues, market prices, availability of capital and financing, general economic, market or business conditions, timeliness of government or regulatory approvals and other risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. SOURCE: NV Gold Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/540758/NV-Gold-Doubles-Land-Position-at-Frazier-Dome-Gold-Project-and-Highlights-2019-Exploration-Program TORONTO, April 02, 2019 - Fura Gems Inc. (Fura or the Company) (TSXV: FURA, OTC: FUGMF and FRA: BJ43) announces the extension of the drop dead date for the closing of the Merger of Ruby Assets Agreement dated July 14, 2018, as amended (the MRAA). In accordance with the MRAA, on March 29, 2019, the Company gave New Energy Minerals Ltd. (formerly known as Mustang Resources Ltd.) written notice to extend the drop dead date of the MRAA from March 31, 2019 to April 30, 2019. The MRAA contemplates the purchase and sale by Fura of interests in three ruby licenses/concessions in Mozambique as follows: (i) 75% of the issued shares of Montepuez Minerals Pty Ltd., which owns a 70% interest in mining licence 5030L and an 80% interest in mining concession 8921C; and (ii) a right to earn a 65% interest in mining concession 8955C under a joint venture agreement (collectively, the New Energy Assets). Please see the Companys press release dated November 29, 2018 for further details regarding the terms of this proposed acquisition. The transaction remains subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. Fura also announces the resignation of Jaime Lalinde from the Companys board of directors, effective immediately. The board and management of Fura express their gratitude to Mr. Lalinde for his efforts and extensive contributions and wish him well in his future endeavours. For more information about Fura Gems Inc., please contact: Fura Gems Inc. Dev Shetty President & Chief Executive Officer Tel: +971 (0) 4 240 8760 dev.shetty@furagems.com Brad Scharfe Director Investor Relations Tel: +1+(778)386-1313 brad.scharfe@furagems.com Public Relations Tavistock (UK) Jos Simson / Barney Hayward Tel: +44-207-920-3150 fura@tavistock.co.uk About Fura Gems Inc. Fura Gems Inc. is a gemstone mining and marketing company which is engaged in the mining, exploration and acquisition of gemstone licences. Furas headquarters are located in Toronto, Canada and its administrative headquarters are located in the Almas Tower, Dubai. Fura is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker symbol FURA. Fura is engaged in the exploration of resource properties in Colombia and owns a 76% interest in the Coscuez Emerald Mine in Boyaca, Colombia. Fura is also involved in the exploration and mining of rubies in Mozambique through its 80% effective interest in four ruby licences (4392, 3868, 3869 and 6811). Regulatory Statements This press release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the Companys ability to complete the acquisition of the New Energy Assets, the mineralization and prospectivity of the New Energy Assets, changes to the Companys board of directors, the Companys exploration activities and mining activities and the Companys performance. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as plans, expects or does not expect, is expected, budget, scheduled, estimates, forecasts, intends, anticipates or does not anticipate, or believes, or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, geopolitical and social uncertainties; the actual results of exploration activities; regulatory risks; risks inherent in foreign operations, legacy environmental risks, title risks and other risks of the mining industry. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. NEITHER 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. Metropolis Healthcare IPO Opens On 3 April; Find Details Here Business oi-Olga Robert The first initial public offering (IPO) of the financial year 2019-20 is here. Metropolis Healthcare will issue its IPO on 3 April. The equity shares of the diagnostics company is proposed to be listed on BSE as well as NSE. Details The offer for sale is being made by promoter Dr. Sushil Kanubhai Shah and investor CA Lotus Investments. Collectively they are offering 1,36,85,095 equity shares at a price band of Rs 877-880 per share. Up to 3 lakh shares will be reserved for subscription by eligible employees. The minimum lot size for bidding is 17 equity shares and in multiples of 17 thereafter. The issue is expected to fetch Rs 1,204.3 crore at upper end of the offer. It is an offer for sale, which means the proceeds would go to the selling shareholders and not Metropolis Healthcare. JM Financial, Credit Suisse Securities (India), Goldman Sachs (India) Securities, HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra Capital Company will be the book running lead managers to the public issue. The issue closes on 5 April. Company profile Metropolis Healthcare offers clinical laboratory tests which are used for early detection and diagnostic screening of disease. It also provides analytical and support services for research projects of clinical organizations. It has a presence in 19 states and has offered approximately 3,487 clinical laboratory tests and 530 profiles as of 31 December 2018. The company also has operations in Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Mauritius, and Sri Lanka. Revenue from operations grew from Rs 475.47 crore to Rs 643.57 crore between FY 2016 and FY 2018, and profit for the years grew from Rs 81.95 crore to Rs 109.75 crore, respectively. UK Parliament Rejects All Brexit Deal Options Once Again Business oi-Olga Robert With just 11 days left, the British Parliament failed to gain a majority in the second round of "indicative" votes conducted on Monday to decided on an alternative plan for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (popularly known as Brexit). Last week, the lawmakers held a session of "indicative" voting at the House of Commons giving the Members of Parliament 8 possible Brexit options that ranged from a "softer Brexit" to a "no-deal Brexit". As no plan won a majority, a second round was conducted this week with just four options on the ballot, most of which had come close to being finalists in the previous session. With the deadline of 12 April approaching, fewer options were expected to help gain a clearer stand but the UK Parliament failed another time to win a majority stance. The four options included: negotiation of "a permanent and comprehensive UK-wide customs union with the EU" as part of any Brexit deal joining the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) while remaining in the European Economic Area (EEA) a public vote to seek approval of any Brexit deal passed by Parliament before it could be implemented a series of steps preventing the UK from leaving the EU without a deal which includes a final vote on whether to not have a Brexit at all The first option came close to being passed on Monday, defeated only by three votes. It is one of the "soft Brexit" alternatives that will help the UK keep closes ties with the EU despite the exit. The UK had joined the EU back in 1973. EU is a political and economic union of 28 primarily European countries that allow free movement of citizens, goods and services among the member nations. It created a single trade market with standardized laws. On 23 June 2016, a public vote was conducted on whether or not UK should exit the EU. The decision to leave won the majority with nearly 52 percent votes in favour. An exit deal known as the "Withdrawal Agreement" (on how the UK leaves) was to be decided by 29 March 2019. On failure to agree on a deal, the EU agree to postpone the deadline to 12 April. The Brexit is expected to hit the British economy as movement of trade, capital and business will face major disruptions. For investment related articles, business news and mutual fund advise Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 12:35 [IST] 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. Amstar was looking to the village to have a pour license where you could consume alcohol on the premises. That was a different question for the board. (Board members were) not willing to do that putting bars in a gas station, she said. In a forcefully worded ruling, a federal judge in San Diego on Friday struck down a state law banning gun magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, handing gun rights advocates a sweeping victory.U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez ruled that the California law violated the Second Amendment rights of gun owners and issued an injunction barring state officials from enforcing it, invoking the nation's Colonial past as well as recent cases from around the country in which gun owners ran out of bullets while confronting intruders in their homes.He concluded that the state law effectively made criminals out of ordinary citizens and was an overreaction to high-profile gun crimes."Bad political ideas cannot be stopped by criminalizing bad political speech," he wrote. "Crime waves cannot be broken with warrantless searches and unreasonable seizures. Neither can the government response to a few mad men with guns and ammunition be a law that turns millions of responsible, law-abiding people trying to protect themselves into criminals. Yet, this is the effect of California's large-capacity magazine law."The ruling may not have come as a surprise because Benitez, an appointee of President George W. Bush, in 2017 had granted a preliminary injunction stopping enforcement of the law _ a decision upheld last July by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.Chuck Michel, president of the California Rifle & Pistol Association, which filed the suit along with several gun owners, said the ruling reaffirmed gun-owning rights."This comprehensive and detailed ruling recognizes that these magazines have great value as self-defense tools, and confirms that the government bears a very high burden to justify a law that infringes on the right to keep and bear arms," Michel said in a statement.The state attorney general's office said in a statement that it was reviewing the ruling."We are committed to defending California's common sense gun laws," the statement said. "We are reviewing the decision and will evaluate next steps."The lawsuit was filed in 2017 on behalf of gun owners who either wanted the magazines for self-defense or already owned them and didn't want to be forced to give them up.In his 86-page opinion, Benitez concluded that larger-capacity magazines are "lawful arms" under the Constitution and said the state did not have a strong enough reason to infringe on the constitutional rights of gun owners. He said the magazines are used for self-defense and are legal in 41 states and under federal law.State law for years had banned selling or buying large-capacity magazines, though people who owned them were allowed to keep them. In 2016, the state passed a law that banned possession of the magazines, which led to the lawsuit. In addition to determining the law violated the Second Amendment, Benitez also said forcing residents to give up lawfully acquired magazines violated the Constitution's ban on taking property without just compensation.In the opening pages of the ruling, Benitez recounted three instances of home invasions. In two examples, women fired at the intruders but ran out of bullets. In a third case, a woman fired multiple rounds with a gun in one hand while she held a phone in the other to call police.Benitez ended his ruling by harking back to the nation's founding."This decision is a freedom calculus decided long ago by Colonists who cherished individual freedom more than the subservient security of a British ruler," he wrote. "The freedom they fought for was not free of cost then, and it is not free now."The issue may not be fully resolved because judges in other states have issued different rulings, potentially setting up a scenario in which the U.S. Supreme Court would have to ultimately decide. (TNS) A major new study of computer science skills concludes that American college students are outperforming their counterparts in three major economic and political powers: China, India, and Russia.Our results suggest that the U.S. is doing a great job, at least in terms of computer science education, compared to these three other major countries, concluded Prashant Loyalka of Stanford Universitys Graduate School of Education, who led the international research project.This first-ever comparison can inform employers seeking to hire qualified computing professionals in a globally competitive labor market, according to the research , published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The average undergraduate senior studying computer science in America ranked higher than about 80 percent of final-year students tested in China, India and Russia, the team found. The difference in scores among students in those three countries was small and not statistically significant.The trend also held for students from top-ranking institutions in each country, with students in the U.S. outperforming about 80 percent of elite students from the other three countries. The study identified elite schools in the U.S. as those with average ACT/SAT scores of 1,250 out of 1,600 or higher, which produce about 20 percent of computer science graduates.The top Chinese, Indian and Russian students scored comparably with U.S. students from regular institutions, according to the research.The test, which aligned with national and international guidelines on what should be taught, scored students on their understanding of programming, algorithms, software engineering and other computer science principles. It did not assume knowledge of any particular type of software or programming language but instead used a pseudocode meant to be universally understood.With the global proliferation of information and communication technologies, theres been a surge in demand for computing professionals and a corresponding increase in undergraduate computer science programs.Undergraduate computer science enrollments in research universities in the United States and Canada tripled between 2006 and 2016. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2024 almost three-quarters of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) job growth will be in computer-related occupations.Until this research, theres been little analysis of the competency of the worlds students. International comparison of universities has been based on popular news rankings and general public perception, which rely on limited information, according to Loyalka.Despite rapid increases in the quantity of CS graduates, little is known about their quality, he said in a prepared statement.Thats why he and his team wanted to collect and analyze data on what students learn in colleges and universities in different countries.They selected nationally representative samples of seniors from undergraduate computer science programs in the four nations, giving them a two-hour standardized computer science test developed by the nonprofit Educational Testing Service. In total, 678 students in China, 364 students in India and 551 students in Russia were tested. In the United States, the researchers used assessment data on 6,847 seniors.Contrary to conventional wisdom, the higher proficiency in American institutions is not due to international student enrollment. Of all sampled U.S. test-takers, almost 90 percent reported that their best language is only English, a sign that they were domestic students.There is this sense in the public that the high quality of STEM programs in the United States is driven by its international students, Loyalka said. Our data show thats not the case.In the future, the team seeks to study what might be driving the differences in student performance among countries. Is it faculty behavior? The type of instruction? Student interactions? Thats what they hope to learn.One of our major goals is to see what types of college experiences could contribute to better student performance, said Loyalka. Nearly 20 years ago, I had the humbling privilege to be assigned as the donations manager for the state of New York following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.I deployed from California to the New York State Emergency Operations Center in Albany via the interstate Emergency Management Assistance Compact. It was a cold, dreary first day in upstate New York. I entered Highway Patrol Headquarters, proceeded past the blast doors, and down into the Cold War fallout shelter in the basement. There was a buzz of subdued, chaotic efficiency. The New York State Emergency Operations Center was in full activation.The State Emergency Management Offices (SEMO) deputy director covered the initial ramp-up to the second disaster, a flood of well-intentioned but not always useful in-kind donations. Within the first few days of the disaster, well-meaning people and organizations sent truckloads of what donations managers call stuff. Stuff was piling up all over the streets of New York City and around ground zero. There were literally piles of stuff clogging the streets, impeding access to the disaster site, and getting in the way of first responders ability to respond.The SEMO deputy director made some preliminary arrangements, but needed to attend to matters more urgent. He briefed me on the current situation. Afterward I met the team, a handful of individuals with a big task to accomplish. It would be up to us to organize the transfer and storage of all in-kind donations.Our first priority was to clear the stuff off the streets. The second was to organize the stuff, inventory the stuff, and try to put everything to good use. We started with one facility in Poughkeepsie, an abandoned state-owned building that was previously a psychiatric hospital. It may not have been ideal, but it was a start. We coordinated with the New York National Guard to clear the streets and transport the stuff to our facility. Over the next two weeks, we added three more warehouse locations to the operation.Bayonne Marine Terminal in Bayonne, N.J., a warehouse by the Bayonne docks, was organized and managed by the Salvation Army. This was the go-to place for buckets. Responders carefully sifted through rubble at ground zero using these buckets. Bayonne Marine Terminal is also where I found letters and mementos addressed to first responders. We found a school near the incident site where we could properly distribute these items.King Kullen Warehouse, in Long Island, N.Y., was a warehouse donated by a local business. Americas Second Harvest and the New Jersey State Military Reserve managed this location.At over 500,000 square feet, the Stratford Army Engine Plant in Stratford, Conn., was the largest warehouse. A Seventh Day Adventists team with a local youth volunteer organization and a local Teamsters Union crew managed it.Once fully integrated into our operation, I visited each location. During that magical mystery tour, I experienced my first quiet moment during an 80-minute ferry ride from Long Island to Connecticut. There, on a railing overlooking the open water and reflecting on the past two weeks, I was totally overcome by the enormous generosity of the American people.Warehouses were filling up with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donations from the American people. Buckets, water, clothing, picks, shovels, teddy bears, etc. We literally had everything. Dog booties started arriving in large quantities after people saw search dogs injured from walking through the rubble. In a televised interview, a firefighter from California mentioned it was colder than he thought it would be and he had not packed any thermal underwear. Can you guess what showed up next? Thats right. Pallets of long underwear started flowing into the warehouses.This was an organizationally diverse operation. The facilities werent always constructed for warehouse operations, but we made the most of what we had to work with. Many different groups contributed time and labor to support first responders and the community.My greatest revelation came during a discussion with a woman in South Carolina. She had a truckload of donations she wanted to send. My job was to make sure we didnt get any more stuff flowing in. I called her, intending to give my best dont send stuff, send money speech. She answered the phone and I identified who I was. Not missing a beat, she said, Well, we have a truckload of donations wed like to send, but dont know where to send it.Thank you very much, maam, but we dont need any more stuff. In fact, we have more stuff than we can use. Please keep that generous donation in your community and perhaps put it to good use.Oh sir, you do not understand. The churches in our town collected everything and loaded the truck. Then we took the truck to our town square, where we all prayed and our local clergy blessed it. So now we need to know where to send it.Silence. I dont know if a second or a minute passed. All I could say was, Maam, please send that truck to the King Kullen warehouse in New Jersey.Donations management is more than avoiding bad press. More than just ensuring resources are utilized efficiently. More than just providing for the victims and their families. People have a need to give. The Donations Management Unit has a duty to fulfill that need as well. The immense generosity I observed makes me proud to be an American. As an emergency management professional nearing retirement, this experience continues to be a moment I will never forget. (TNS) Californias hospitals are scrambling to retrofit their buildings before The Big One hits, an effort that will cost tens of billions dollars and could jeopardize health-care access, according to a newly released study.The states 418 hospitals have a deadline from the state, too. Theyre racing to meet seismic safety standards set by a California law that was inspired by the deadly 1994 Northridge earthquake, which damaged 11 hospitals and forced evacuations at eight of them.By 2020, hospitals must reduce the risk of collapse. By 2030, they must be able to remain in operation after a major earthquake.That could cost hospitals between $34 billion and $143 billion, according to a new report from Rand Corp.The report, funded by the California Hospital Association, examined whether the states hospitals will be able to comply with the law, particularly the 2030 deadline.About a third of the hospitals in the state are in financial distress, and that number could rise to more than 50 percent as hospitals seek seismic compliance, the study found.Public health-care district hospitals, hospitals that serve large numbers of Medi-Cal patients, rural hospitals and privately owned hospitals are especially vulnerable.The trend toward greater reliance on outpatient services and facilities, when combined with the implications of retrofitting existing buildings or replacing those buildings, could result in a net reduction in hospital capacity in California by 2030, the study concluded.The report questioned whether the state could help hospitals meet the safety standards without putting health-care providers at risk of financial distress. That could mean providing public subsidies to share the costs of compliance or reduce financing costs, providing additional flexibility in the timing of compliance deadlines, rethinking what it means for hospitals to remain operational post-event, and streamlining the administrative processes associated with seismic compliance projects.The full study can be viewed here 2019 The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.)Visit The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.) at www.sanluisobispo.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. (TNS) Officials at the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University are asking state legislators to invest about $5.7 million in a network that connects the North Dakota schools with other research universities across the country.The Northern Tier Network is an ultra high-speed regional network that supports research and education across Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.The Northern Tier Network had been funded for at least a decade through the North Dakota University System budget until 2017, when the schools used reserve funds to support it, UND President Mark Kennedy said. However, those reserve funds are now depleted."If we don't get this funded ... we are basically going backwards in terms of research dollars," he said, adding the campuses would have to find the money elsewhere to continue in the network. "It would be the equivalent of getting a budget cut on research."The schools have placed a $5.7 million request in the higher education budget to allow the schools to continue to access the Northern Tier Network and Internet2, which the network is connected to. The funding would be for the entire biennium and would be split between the two schools, and would include five new positions to connect users throughout the state with the "best access to high performance computing."Internet2 connects almost all research universities in the country as well as most national laboratories, said Marc Wallman, vice president of the information technology division at NDSU. Internet2 dates back to the 1980s as a research project that was just connecting a limited number of universities, he said.Both UND and NDSU have been members since 1996. The schools pay a fee to access Internet2; however, this also allows K12 schools and other universities in the state to access it.The money also would help fund infrastructure upgrades that would allow the universities to "catch up with peers," Kennedy said."It is vital for North Dakota to stay on the cutting edge with our peers; we need this investment," he said.Kennedy said investment in the network is necessary to support research and collaboration of North Dakota research universities among regional and national peers, including the University of Minnesota and University of South Dakota, as well as national laboratories and cloud providers.Additionally, as the two Internet2 members, NDSU and UND are committed to pay the fee that allows all North Dakota University System and K12 schools access to the collaboration infrastructure, he said.Madhavi Marasinghe, chief information officer at UND, said in order to do solid research, the universities need to have a solid network that allows them to work with high levels of data in a quick and timely matter.Being able to share data is a big part of doing research, she said, and some research grants are denied because the school doesn't have enough bandwidth for research to do their work."This is very impactful for our institutions, not just at UND and NDSU but for our state as well," Marasinghe said.Marasinghe said there are researchers across UND campus such as the biology department, aerospace, the medical school, the Energy and Environmental Research Center that are using huge amounts to do their research. That data needs to be transferred from one point to another at high speeds, otherwise people simply spend time trying to transfer data, which is time they should be spending analyzing it, she said."They do need to have the bandwidth to compete with other institutions, as well as to collaborate (with other schools)," Marasinghe said.The primary users of Internet2 and the Northern Tier Network at NDSU are chemistry, engineering and pharmacy, Wallman said. The school is expecting agriculture to use the network more in the future as precision agriculture continues to develop."It's a must and we have to figure out a way to fund it," he said. "It would be a problem for us. There would be research programs that would be hurt. There would be opportunities that wouldn't be available."Not having the funds would also make it difficult to recruit faculty because NDSU and UND would be one of the few research universities in the country that didn't have this technological infrastructure. Code for America (CfA) will soon help reduce or clear more than 54,000 cannabis convictions in Los Angeles and San Joaquin counties, officials announced Monday.CfA, which is a national nonprofit and nonpartisan group that uses tech to help government better serve constituents, is partnering with the district attorneys' offices in the California counties. And this is big news in Los Angeles County,given that its more than 10 million residents make it the single most populous county in the nation.This all comes following a similar effort last year in San Francisco County that helped reduce or clear more than 8,000 cannabis convictions.Jennifer Pahlka, CfAs founder and executive director, described the work as setting a new bar for record clearance in the state and across the nation at a press conference that was live-streamed via Facebook Monday. Officials also noted that this work began in July 2018. Early indications are that there are 50,000 eligible convictions in Los Angeles County with another 4,000 in San Joaquin. Its all an extension of a project called Clear My Record This work comes after California voters approved Proposition 64 in 2016, which essentially legalizes recreational marijuana in the state. Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey and San Joaquin County District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar both spoke at the press conference, pointing out that following the passage of that measure, they expected a high volume of petitions to have records cleared. Those petitions, however, didnt come, presumably because the burden of understanding and filing them was too great on eligible individuals.We expected a tsunami of petitions, but frankly very few people took the legal action required to clear their records of cannabis convictions, Salazar said at the press conference.In a press release announcing the new collaboration, officials described the process to petition as time-consuming, expensive and confusing. The work that CfA is doing as part of this partnership, however, clears or reduces eligible convictions without individuals having to take any action.This also stands to save local governments time and, by extension, money. California state lawmakers have tasked prosecutors throughout the state with reviewing and addressing convictions eligible for dismissal or reduction. At the press conference, the DAs talked about the amount of time it took for their staff to do this versus the roughly 12 seconds in which Clear My Record gets it done. This has the potential to save government millions of dollars in time and resources.Overall, participants stressed that this continuing work has an obvious potential to be extended to all 58 counties in California and eventually to the rest of the country as states continue to legalize marijuana. The end result is that those who are eligible will have their records cleared, removing any related barriers to opportunities around education, employment and housing.We hope its a spark that ignites change across the country, Pahlka said. Employee vs. Independent Contractor Drivers and Barbers Competing Legislation SACRAMENTO, Calif. It started with installing some red and green LED lights. Then came the disco balls, neon eyeglasses and a gold Bluetooth karaoke microphone.Daniel Flannery had transformed the car he drives for Uber and Lyft into a party on wheels.You put everything together, and it encourages people to loosen up, he said. Sometimes, I have people call me up and say, We dont want to go anywhere we just want to drive around and sing.Flannery, who drives to supplement his retirement income, said he loves the freedom that comes with it setting his own schedule and adding his own flair to what he dubs his Swag Rides.Much of that freedom comes from being classified as an independent contractor. But a 2018 California Supreme Court decision could change the nature of working in the gig economy while providing a model for other states.The Dynamex decision, as its commonly called, established a new test for how businesses in California must classify workers. Depending on how the state legislature acts, employment experts say the decision likely will require a range of businesses from ride-hailing companies to trucking firms to barber shops to reclassify independent contractors as employees or to restructure their business models.Critics argue the decision threatens to disrupt industries that have traditionally relied on independent contractors. Some contractors, like Flannery, say they are worried that being reclassified as an employee would limit the professional freedom they currently enjoy in their work schedule, habits and rates.But labor advocates argue the decision can help ensure that the growing number of gig workers receive benefits, such as health insurance coverage, and workplace protections, such as a guaranteed minimum wage, overtime and workers compensation.The California labor department estimates that the practice of wrongly classifying workers as contractors instead of employees costs the state about $7 billion a year in potential payroll tax revenues.While some businesses have started reclassifying workers under the new court test, others are awaiting the outcome of an ongoing battle in the California legislature. Lawmakers might codify the test in state law, override the decision or create carveouts for specific industries.We want to clear up any confusion about the new test, said Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who introduced a bill in December to preserve the courts decision in the state labor code. Instead of going piece by piece through the court system, we want to codify it in law.The new test established three criteria for employers to use to identify a worker as an independent contractor: The worker must be free from the employers control and direction in carrying out duties; must perform a job outside the employers usual line of work; and must regularly do the same type of work as will be done for the employer.The court reached its decision in a lawsuit filed by drivers for Dynamex, a delivery and logistics company that ships goods to consumers. In 2004, the company reclassified its employees as independent contractors. Drivers now had to use their own vehicles and cover work-related expenses, such as liability insurance, fuel and vehicle repairs.The drivers pushed back, taking legal action to preserve their status as employees. The courts decision determined Dynamexs drivers should be classified as employees. The decision set a precedent that would ostensibly apply to all employers in California.The Dynamex test is modeled on nearly identical tests established in other states. Massachusetts changed its labor laws in 2004 to apply the same test criteria, which has sparked legal challenges by independent contractors aiming to be reclassified and by businesses that want to continue to classify workers as independent contractors.In February 2018, for example, a Massachusetts appeals court ruled against GateHouse Media, finding the company must classify its newspaper delivery drivers as employees.New Jerseys labor laws apply the same test, but state elected officials disagree over its application and enforcement.In 2013, then-Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a bill that would have automatically classified truck drivers as employees and imposed harsh penalties against trucking companies that misclassified drivers. The Republican argued it would make New Jersey unfriendly to the trucking industry.The requirement that a worker perform a job outside the employers usual line of work is the most crucial part of the test, said Lukas Clary, a Sacramento-based labor and employment attorney at Weintraub Tobin Chediak Coleman Grodin Law Corp.Almost all pre-Dynamex independent contractors were hired to perform work that is within the scope of the companys business, Clary toldClary said some industries, such as the trucking industry, see the new test as an existential threat.This decision will potentially put me out of business and thousands of people like me, said John Pitta, the owner-operator of a trucking business in Salinas.Pitta drives a dump truck, a niche that makes his services in demand. He contracts with larger trucking companies as an independent contractor. He said he fears the Dynamex decision will dissuade large trucking companies from hiring him because they wont want to classify him as an employee.In July, the Western States Trucking Association, which represents large trucking outfits and independent truckers in 11 states, filed suit against the state of California in federal court, claiming the Dynamex decision is pre-empted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 . That law prohibits states from enacting laws related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier.Trucking companies will either have to dramatically increase their prices to account for all of the additional costs associated with hiring employees, or they will have to dramatically reduce the quantity and quality of services they provide, according to the association.Clary said many California businesses have started to reclassify their workers as employees, while others are attempting to adjust their business model.Misclassification can be extremely costly, Clary said. If enough workers are misclassified, the claims can be brought as class or representative actions, and the damages could be multiplied across the workforce.About 1 in 10 Californians in the previous year had participated in the gig economy, such as driving for companies like Uber and Lyft, a 2018 survey found. Conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute , a nonpartisan polling group, the survey found that nearly half the Californians who participated in the gig economy were low-income.The decision should extend employee benefits, such as guaranteed minimum wage, health-care coverage and overtime pay, to gig economy workers, argues Shannon Liss-Riordan, a class action attorney and partner at Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C. in Boston.Liss-Riordan said she has filed lawsuits on behalf of workers against all major gig economy employers, including Uber, Lyft, Postmates and DoorDash.Liss-Riordan is currently representing a worker in a lawsuit against Grubhub in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California. The case seeks a declaration from the court that the worker is an employee under the new Dynamex test.But Loni Mahanta, vice president of public policy development at Lyft, said in a statement that the companys drivers are independent contractors who decide when, where and for how long they wish to drive, and that they tell us that this flexibility is incredibly important to them.Flannery, the Uber and Lyft driver, said the flexibility goes beyond the lights and karaoke microphone in his car he also has a medical condition that can prevent him from working, so he said he needs to have control over his schedule.Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub did not respond to requests for comment.To comply with the Dynamex test, Sacramento barbershop and cocktail lounge Bottle & Barlow last summer reclassified its barber staff as employees, instead of independent contractors. The shops seven barbers quit.It was strictly a business decision for me, one of the barbers, Adrian Olivares, 27, said in an interview. We would be making minimum wage plus commission, [but] you cant live off that. We all have bills to pay, and a lot of us have kids.Olivares, who is married with a young daughter, estimates that switching to minimum wage plus commission would have cut his pay by 60 percent.Within three weeks of quitting, Olivares and three co-workers leased a storefront, gutted the space and refurbished it with fresh paint and new barber chairs. The shop opened under the name Midtown Barbershop, but Olivares and his associates operate as individual businesses, and they pay rent to control their respective chairs.But Midtown Barbershop, at least on paper, is not a barber shop its a real estate company. That allows the barbers to rent the chairs and classify themselves as independent contractors. But it also means the barbers have to secure a business license, on top of their state barber license.Assemblywoman Gonzalez in an interview said she intends to include a carveout in her bill for hair stylists and barbers to remain independent contractors but not for truckers, saying that historically they have been employees.Jennifer Barrera, executive vice president of the California Chamber of Commerce, which has criticized the Dynamex decision, said she anticipates a vigorous debate in the legislature over who should be exempt from the test under the proposed legislation.Some [carveouts] well agree on, and others we wont, Barrera said in an interview.Meanwhile, Republican Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez has introduced a bill that would implement a multifactor test for classifying workers, overriding the Dynamex test and making it easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors.Without clear legislative action, the Dynamex case could unravel gig and tech economies and threaten the traditional business models of Realtors, teachers, beauticians, truck drivers, construction trades and countless other professions, Melendez said in a statement.Last year, nine gig economy companies, including Uber and Lyft, signed a letter addressed to then-Gov. Jerry Browns secretary of labor and cabinet secretary, warning that the Dynamex ruling could decimate businesses and stifl[e] innovation.Another company to sign the letter, the delivery service Postmates, doesnt want to reclassify its workers as employees, according to its vice president of global public policy and strategic communications, Vikrum Aiyer. But, Aiyer added, Postmates and other tech companies have an obligation to work with labor unions and policymakers to explore creative ways to achieve the best practices and protections for workers.Lyft also is working with drivers and lawmakers to find a potential middle ground, Mahanta said in a statement. We are engaging with drivers, labor and policymakers to actively explore options to allow drivers to maintain this flexibility while also addressing the lack of benefits for independent contractors. Easter egg hunts will be among the holiday activities held over the next few weekends in the Elgin area. (Rob Dicker / Chicago Tribune) The votes made at the citys three early voting sites make up about 28 percent of the 8,502 ballots that had been cast early in Kane County as of Monday, according to county data collected as of Monday. Another 800 Elgin voters cast their ballots by mail or through other options. Duke Energy is proposing a $76-million initiative to spur EV adoption across the state of North Carolinathe largest investment in electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure yet in the Southeast US. In a filing with the North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC), Duke Energy outlined its program that will provide incentives to customers. It will also lead to a statewide network of fast-charging stations to meet growing demand. The three-year program requires NCUC approval. Duke Energys proposal will help fund the adoption of electric school buses, electric public transportation, and will lead to almost 2,500 new charging stations in the state. Currently, North Carolina has more than 10,000 plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles. It has approximately 600 public charging stations. This program would more than double that amount. The proposed initiative before the NCUC has several components: Residential EV Charging: This program will provide a $1,000 rebate for qualifying Level II charging stations for up to 800 residential customers. Level II charging allows customers to charge their EVs up to six times faster than a standard wall outlet. Public Charging: Duke Energy will install and operate more than 800 public charging stations across North Carolina, including DC Fast Charging, Public Level II and multifamily locations, which will expand the states network of EV charging stations. Fleet EV Charging: The program will provide a $2,500 rebate for 900 qualifying charging stations for commercial and industrial customers who operate fleets that are transitioning to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. Municipalities and universities also qualify for these rebates. EV School Bus Charging Station: Duke Energy will provide financial support to eligible customers to procure up to 85 electric school buses. Duke Energy will install the associated charging infrastructure. EV Transit Bus Charging Station: Duke Energy will install and operate more than 100 electric transit bus charging stations for eligible transit agencies electing to procure electric buses. Electric transit buses eliminate diesel emissions and reduce fuel and maintenance costs for transit agencies. The program follows a similar $10.4-million program being considered by the Public Service Commission of South Carolina. "In 'Roar,' she's showing what people already know about her that she's determined but now it's 'I'm determined for you' not 'I'm determined to have you be who I want you to be,' " Colon said. Cotabato City (CNN Philippines, January 21) A "confidential survey" was held in the proposed Bangsamoro areas in months leading to the historic Bangsamoro Organic Law plebiscite in Mindanao. Presidential Peace Adviser Carlito Galvez told CNN Philippines on January 20 that a survey was held in December 2018 and January 2019. He called the survey results as "extensive" and "convincing." He said one of the findings of the survey showed Cotabato City will have an "overwhelming" yes vote of at least 70 percent. "There is a very confidential survey na nabasa ko. Talagang extensive. Ginawa nila last December 9 to 12 and then yung isa ngayong January 9 to 12. Ang nakita nila is those who are for yes, ang kanilang reason is there will be peace. Second is there will be reconciliation. There will be unity and there is progress... Majority sa kanila is talagang convinced the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) can really deliver the goods and the governance," he said. However, Cotabato City Mayor Cynthia Guiani-Sayadi has openly opposed the city's inclusion in the new Bangsamoro region. The is not included in the current Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Galvez refused to give further details on who commissioned the survey and which agency conducted it. CNN Philippines is also trying to independently verify its authenticity. President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday personally made a last pitch for the ratification of the BOL, pleading to Cotabato City residents to vote in favor of the measure which would abolish the ARMM and establish the new Bangsamoro ARMM (BARMM). Cotabato City is seen as a possible hotly contested area during the plebiscite. Cotabato City has the highest economic potential among the proposed Bangsamoro areas. Its location is also strategic. The plebiscite, where Cotabato City, Isabela City, Basilan, and ARMM is voting in on Monday, is seen as a historic event since it is the first time that the MILF, a former revolutionary force, would submit itself to a democratic electoral process. A second plebiscite for Lanao del Norte excluding Iligan City, North Cotabato, and the 28 areas which petitioned for inclusion into the new Bangsamoro region is scheduled for February 6. CNN Philippine Senior Correspondent David Santos contributed to this report. Back in September 2018, Lenovo filed a patent at WIPO (World Intellectual Property Office) imagining a foldable smartphone with a vertical fold. It resembles Motorola's Razr smartphone to some extent because it has a secondary screen. It has a big hinge on the back letting you choose the flex point so you can fold it halfway or almost fully. This way part of the screen remains visible and usable. The idea is reminiscent of Sharp's design that we saw last week. Lenovo's foldable phone renders based on the patent By the looks of it, the bezels are big enough to accommodate the front-facing camera and the earpiece along with the usual sensors and the back has only one camera pictured. Of course, this is just a preliminary design and could change upon release if the project sees broad daylight at all. Via Nokia X71 Released 2019, April 17 180g, 8mm thickness Android 9.0, Android One 64GB/128GB storage, microSDXC 0.4% 2,081,066 hits 280 Become a fan 6.39" 1080x2316 pixels 48 MP 2160p 6 GB RAM Snapdragon 660 3500 mAh Li-Po Disclaimer. We can not guarantee that the information on this page is 100% correct. Read more As promised, HMD Global unveiled the Nokia X71 alongside the flagship Nokia 9 PureView today in Taiwan. This is the first Nokia branded device with a punch hole display as well as the first X-series phone to launch outside China. The new midranger is built around a 6.39" FHD+ display with an impressive quoted 93% screen to body ratio and a punch hole for the 16MP selfie shooter. Under the hood is the Snapdragon 660 paired with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, expandable by up to 256GB via microSD card. Around the back lies the Zeiss branded triple camera setup with 48MP (main), 8MP (wide), and 5MP (depth) units. Next to the cameras is the flash while below that youll find a traditional fingerprint sensor. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Nokia X71 is part of the Android One program and runs on Android 9.0 Pie. Its 3,500 mAh cell can be topped up via the 18W fast charger included in the box. The phone is priced at TWD 11,900 ($385/345) with sales starting on April 30. According to previous rumors, the device will make its way as the Nokia 8.1 Plus globally. Source (in Chinese) Every month the Chinese website for benchmarks AnTuTu releases a list of the Top 10 best performing devices in its database. The March list is now out and we have a new leader - the Xiaomi Mi 9 Explorer, taking the crown from last month's champion - Xiaomi Mi 9. Looking at the list, 9 out of 10 smartphones have a chipset built on a process smaller than 10 nm, with only the nubia Red Magic Mars running the Snapdragon 845 from last year. While Xiaomis latest devices grab the top two spots, vivos new gaming smartphone comes in third. It is worth mentioning the Monster edition comes with 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage, while the regular vivo iQOO, sitting in sixth, has up to 8 gigs. The Samsung Galaxy S10 and Samsung Galaxy S10+ sit between the iQOOs, but we dont know if they are running the Snapdragon 855, or someone tested a unit with a Exynos 9820 chipset. On a side note AnTuTu revealed the number of benchmarked Galaxy S10 phones is significantly higher than last years Galaxy S9, meaning sales of the 2019 flagship have been going great. The Chinese website also reminded that we are still waiting for more flagships to join the fun, including the Huawei P30 Pro, Oppo Reno and Meizu 16s. Source (in Chinese) GULFPORT, Miss. -- Dale Ricardo Easterling, 43, of Moss Point will serve the next 10 years in prison for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. Easterling pleaded guilty before Judge Louis Guirola on Tuesday. On July 13, 2018, a Louisiana State Trooper stopped a car driven by Easterling traveling east bound on I-10. The trooper observed nervous behavior by Easterling and proceeded to pull him over and searched his vehicle. The trooper searched the car and found a hidden compartment with seven kilograms of cocaine. Easterling admitted that he was taking the cocaine back to Moss Point for further distribution and that it wasnt his first time trafficking cocaine to Jackson County. An operation conducted by the FBI, DEA and Metropolitan Enforcement Team (MET) Agents executed a search warrant at Easterlings residence on Dantzler Avenue in Moss Point revealed Easterling recovered approximately one kilo of cocaine, six pounds of marijuana, four pounds of marijuana brownies, 98 Oxycodone dosage units, a .45 caliber Glock pistol and $10,000 in cash. Easterling was also ordered to pay a $5,000 fine. Haiti - Shipwreck : End of the search, 14 survivors 15 dead 4 missing United States Coast Guard (USCG) have suspended its search assistance efforts to the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force Marine Branchfollowing the sinking Sunday of a small sailboat overloaded with Haitian migrants off the uninhabited island of West Caicos, in shark-infested waters https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27338-haiti-flash-sinking-in-a-sea-infested-with-sharks-at-least-14-haitians-dead.html The latest operation report shows 14 survivors, 15 dead, 4 missing out of an estimated 33 migrants, according to survivors' testimonies. A shadow that the authorities of the island are not yet able to confirm with certainty. The joint efforts of the Haitian Red Cross and the Turks and Caicos Islands helped rescue 14 survivors who were all evaluated and taken care by the rescue staff before being handed over to the archipelago's immigration agents. In Haiti, the Directorate of Civil Protection (DPC) is working jointly with the relevant institutions and the representation of Haiti in the Turks and Caicos Islands to try to clarify the number of victims and passengers embarked on this small sailboat. The authorities of the two islands are closely following the evolution of the situation to keep the Haitian population informed of possible new developments. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27338-haiti-flash-sinking-in-a-sea-infested-with-sharks-at-least-14-haitians-dead.html https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-24746-icihaiti-turks-and-caicos-islands-102-haitian-boat-people-intercepted-off-providenciales.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-24539-haiti-social-29-haitian-boat-people-intercepted-by-the-population-of-providenciales.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-24451-haiti-social-new-waves-of-haitian-migrants-on-the-turks-and-caicos-islands.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22423-haiti-flash-two-other-survivors-of-the-sinking-found.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-20851-haiti-social-the-body-of-15-shipwrecked-repatriated-to-haiti.html https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-17006-icihaiti-social-54-haitians-intercepted-off-the-coast-of-providenciales.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-13089-haiti-social-risk-his-life-at-sea-migrants-testify-video.html SL/ HaitiLibre NorthShore University HealthSystem and Erie Family Health have a shared and long-term commitment to increase access to medical care for the underserved, and were proud to extend this vital community partnership, said Sean OGrady, chief clinical operations officer at NorthShore, in an email. Were happy to provide support for the expanded clinic and for the graduate medical education that will help staff the clinic. Its a collaboration that has and will continue to provide great benefit to the community. The man, who is 28 years old and is not a resident of Franklin Park, had three handguns with him when he was taken into custody, according to Witz, as well as two more firearms in a vehicle. Helmsley Charitable Trust awards $14.2 million to rural hospitals for advanced X-ray technology Press release SIOUX FALLS, S.D. Medical centers in Big Sandy and Chester are among facilities receiving funds for X-ray equipment. In its ongoing efforts to improve the quality of rural health care, The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust today announced new grants totaling more than $14.2 million to 50 hospitals in the rural Upper Midwest to purchase advanced X-ray technology, some of which will replace devices that are more than a half-century old. Our goal has always been to improve access to exceptional medical treatment for those who live in rural America, sai... Hill County Community Foundation is hosting its second annual gala fundraiser, Spring for the Arts, Saturday, April 27, to raise funds for projects in the county. Thanks to the generosity of this community, last years event was very successful and raised proceeds for our annual fall grant cycle, said Pam Veis the HCCF chair. Due to the success of last years event, our annual grantable amount grew from $1,500 in 2017 to $7,200 in 2018 all of which was distributed back into Hill County communities last fall. These grants funded innovative projects submitted by Hill County... Press release HELENA The Montana Invasive Species Council will hold its next meeting April 10-11 2019 at Cargill located at 4401 Innovation St. in Great Falls. The business meeting on April 10 will include presentations about gastropods snails and slugs and Diorhabda, a leaf beetle which has been used as a biological control agent for saltcedar. Other agenda items include project and committee updates. April 11, USDA APHIS trainers will guide attendees through a table-top incident command system response exercise. That afternoon attendees will travel to Belt to view infest... Editors note: This corrects the amount of the proposed opiod flat tax which was changed in Tempels letter due to an editing error. One of the things discussed this week in Energy Committee was net neutrality on internet providers. Basically, the bill states that internet providers may not block lawful content, applications or services, on any device. Providers may not throttle, impair, or degrade lawful internet traffic or engage in paid prioritization. Based on testimony in committee, this has not been an issue in Montana at present. So it may be something that will have to be looked... Havre Daily News staff Montana Highway Patrol reported today that Trooper Wade Palmer, hospitalized after receiving multiple gunshot wounds March 15, has regained consciousness and his condition upgraded from critical to stable condition. "We are immensely grateful for Trooper Palmer's progress," Col. Tom Butler, chief of the Montana Highway Patrol, said in a release issued this afternoon. "We remain hopeful as we see Wade continue to heal and make positive strides, however, we are fully aware that he has a long journey ahead of him. "We will be with him and his family every step of the w... Flat Rock interior designers recognized Ann Ferguson's design for a Florida vacation home overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. The project includes a custom table design was inspired by a banyan tree outside the home. Two Flat Rock-based interior designers were honored recently by the American Society of Interior Designers at the annual Excellence in Design Awards hosted by the Carolinas Chapter of ASID. Related Stories Ann Ferguson won First Place in the Vacation Home Category over 3,500 square feet. The winning entry is a Florida vacation home overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. The project includes a custom table design inspired by a banyan tree outside the home and a custom TV cabinet in the master suite. Each of those designs garnered Second Place Awards in the Furniture or Special Cabinetry category of the competition. Dawn Driskill, of The Design Gallery in Flat Rock Square, was recognized in two specialty categories. Her Bathroom Specialty entry and her Kitchen Specialty entry each won Second Place Awards. Dawn also received an Honorable Mention in the Single Space category for her Living/Dining Room entry. The Carolinas Chapter of ASID represents 890 members in both North and South Carolina. County clerk of court appointed to district judgeship Kim Gasperson-Justice speaks to the Kiwanis Club in January 2019. Gov. Roy Cooper on Monday appointed Clerk of Superior Court Kim Gasperson-Justice to a District Court judgeship serving Henderson Polk and Transylvania counties, the third of three judgeships to be filled in District 29B since last October. Gasperson-Justice, a Republican, will fill the vacant seat previously held by the Honorable Peter Knight, now a Superior Court Judge in District 29B. Knight was appointed to replace Resident Superior Court Judge Mark Powell, who retired last Oct. 1. Gasperson-Justice has served as Clerk of Superior Court in Henderson County since 2006 and before that had nearly 17 years of experience in private practice. She is also a retired major in the U.S. Army Reserves Judge Advocate General Corps. A graduate of West Henderson High School, Gasperson-Justice received a Bachelor of Arts from Mars Hill College and her Juris Doctor from Campbell University School of Law. Knight, who is now resident Superior Court judge for District 29B, will appoint the next Henderson County Clerk of Superior Court. The new Clerk of Superior Court will have to run for election next year and again in 2022, the regular cycle of Henderson County constitutional officers. Last October, Cooper appointed C.W. Mack McKeller, a Democrat, to the District Court judgeship that became vacant after he appointed Chief District Court Judge Athena Fox Brooks as a special Superior Court judge. McKeller served in the U. S. Navy for 13 years as a lieutenant commander and commanding officer. He is also the founding member of McKeller Law Firm, P.C., representing clients in civil and criminal matters at the trial and appellate level. McKeller received his Juris Doctor from Campbell University School of Law, and his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wake Forest University. Cooper also appointed Ellen Shelley of Marion as District Court Judge in Judicial District 29A, serving McDowell and Rutherford counties. Shelley fills the vacancy created when Judge Laura Powell resigned to take a position as the District 29A public defender. He appointed Bob R. Cherry of Newport as District Court judge in Judicial District 3B, serving Craven, Carteret and Pamlico counties. "These experienced attorneys bring valuable knowledge of the law and their communities to the bench, and Im thankful for their willingness to serve North Carolina, Cooper said in a news release. A MERMAID statue could soon return to the riverside in Henley. The 6ft 6in bronze sculpture, which stood on a plinth on Red Lion Lawn, has been in storage since it was vandalised and thrown into the river in November 2017. Now the ama is set to be put back after the owners decided to gift it to the town. An anonymous resident has already agreed to pay the 780 cost of hiring a diver and flatbed crane to fish it out of the water.. The council only needs to raise up to 1,200 to reinstall it and members will discuss this at the next full council meeting on April 30. Town clerk Janet Wheeler said she hoped another donor would offer this sum. Speaking at a meeting of the councils town and community committee, she said: Weve managed to get the owner to agree to donate the mermaid to Henley so we no longer have to buy her, which is fantastic news. Weve also found an incredibly generous resident whos going to pay the salvage bill from those mindless idiots who threw her in. There are some costs involved in putting her back securely in her rightful place and Im in the process of trying to find another generous benefactor to fund the reinstallation. A lot of people were really unsure about the idea but I know a lot of people have taken her into their hearts so I may ask the town council if it would consider paying on the basis that shes loved across the town. This is the final stage and I would like the full council to at least have a proper discussion about it. Lorraine Hillier, who chairs the committee, told the Henley Standard: Im pleased that it has been gifted to Henley and it would be marvellous to find someone to pay for the installation as it would be quite an expense for the council. However, we will have a look and see if weve got any pots of money. I think people have come to view the statue as a permanent fixture because it provides a nice focal point for that part of the riverside. Wed need to quickly check it over but it has been well looked after in storage and should be in a good condition to reinstall when were able. The 370lb statue, which was designed by French artist Amaryllis Bataille, was loaned to the council in 2013 by a German company named Koh i Noor. It was offered in 2012, prompting conflicting opinion as to whether the town should accept it. It was supposed to be sold for at least 15,000 euros (12,800) after five years, with a share of the proceeds going to charity, and replaced with another piece but the owners said they wanted the council to buy it after it was vandalised. They first wanted 8,800 minus the salvage costs then reduced their request to 5,000 euros, about 4,455, which the council agreed to try to crowdfund online. The statue was retrieved by experts from Cook Piling, of Hurley, which sets up the royal regatta course every year. Staff from Hobbs of Henley fished out awnings and umbrellas thrown in on the same night but couldnt pull up the statue as it was too heavy. Ama is the name given to the Japanese and Korean women divers, or ladies of the sea, who collect pearls. Henley was one of 20 locations around the world chosen to have a statue as a place of beauty near water. What do you think? Write to: Letters, Henley Standard, Caxton House, 1 Station Road, Henley or email letters @henleystandard.co.uk You dont see ledger books like this anymore, now everything is pretty much done online. You see payouts for 80 cents and $1.90 for sales, she said. These books are every bit as wonderful because they dont keep fiscal scrapbooks anymore because it is done online. It is a great way to show the history and so it is a pretty cool setup. Ann Grant is a volunteer for the Irene Overman Kreer Used Book Store in the Glenview Public Library. She has volunteered in the bookstore for two years. Grant grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and received a bachelors degree in elementary education from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. After graduation, Grant said she saw an advertisement in the newspaper about a position as a flight attendant for American Airlines. Grant thought she would work there for a few years and then become a teacher, but she worked as a flight attendant for 47 years. Grant and her husband have lived in Glenview for 30 years, and they have two sons. Heavy showers are expected to hit the capital this week It may be officially springtime, but April's first few days will see "treacherous" hail and snow batter many parts of the country, including Dublin. Met Eireann yesterday issued a snow and ice warning. With temperatures plummeting to lows of -1C, the national forecaster advised people to brace themselves for a return of frost and snow from today. A status yellow snow and ice warning has been issued for Connacht, Co Cavan, Co Monaghan, Co Donegal, Co Longford and Co Louth. While the capital is not included in this weather warning, heavy showers, hail and thunder are still expected throughout the afternoon. There is also a risk of sleet and snow on higher ground. Met Eireann said the dramatic dip in temperatures was due to a polar air mass moving over Ireland from the north. This will heavily influence Irish weather for the coming days. Threat According to forecaster Pat Clarke, the severe hail showers may lead to "treacherous" conditions for motorists and pedestrians. "While snow is forecast in northern parts of the country, the hail may pose as a bigger threat because once it hits the roads it will turn to ice. "There's a chance the snow will fall on lower ground in these parts, but it will mainly occur on mountains and hills. "We'll be reviewing the situation and will determine whether to extend the status yellow warning." The rest of the week will see limited spells of sunshine, but widespread and occasionally heavy showers. It will turn particularly cold tomorrow and overnight temperatures could sink to as low as -1C in some areas with a heavy frost forecast. The warmest daytime temperatures will only reach 7C or 8C. But the good news is that from April 10, Ireland is likely to enjoy a week of good sunshine, limited only by spells of cloud cover. Pat Kenny and wife Cathy have objected to the development The building firm seeking to construct an apartment block and housing plan on land adjacent to broadcaster Pat Kenny's home has offered to reduce the scale of the development. Last November, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Council refused planning permission to Bartra Capital Property for three apartment blocks and seven houses on land beside the Kenny home in Dalkey. The application consists of 19 apartments in three blocks ranging up to four storeys, along with five three-bedroom homes and two semi-detached homes on the 1.4-acre site. Bartra appealed the decision to An Bord Pleanala and in its bid to secure the green light is proposing revised plans. It is proposing the omission of one of the homes and the location of one of the apartment blocks being further away from one of the residential properties on adjoining land. Impact Bartra is also proposing the recessing of the upper floors of one block, aimed at reducing the visual impact. In a submission to the appeals board, the council has stated the changes are significant, material and have not been publicly advertised. As a result, the council said the proposed changes should not be considered in the context of the appeal but should instead be subject to a new application and "a fresh assessment". In response, consultants for Bartra, McGill Planning, disagree that the changes require a fresh planning application. The consultants say "the suggested alterations could not be considered significant or material to require further public advertisement in such cases". The appeals board has written to the local authority asking it to reply to the points raised by McGill Planning. Richard Barrett's Bartra is anxious to see a return on the reported 3.1m his firm paid for the Maple Tree House site adjacent to the Kenny home and an additional 0.51 acre site. The comprehensive Kenny objection lodged with the council ran to 16 pages. It states that if permitted, the development "would detrimentally impact on The Anchorage" and other residential properties in the area. "It would also set a precedent that could ultimately seriously damage the character of the area," it added. Planning permission should be refused as "this development is ill-thought and appears based on the quest for density alone with scant other consideration" it goes on. "We have no desire to object to every development proposal, but we seek only to have appropriate development in terms of scale and function," the Kennys said. A decision is due next month. Meanwhile, the green light has been given for a 35m development which includes a new 117-bedroom hotel on Dublin's Dawson Street. This follows Dublin City Council granting the go-ahead to the plan which also includes the redevelopment of the Royal Irish Automobile Club's (RIAC) private members' club. The project is being led by Tetrarch Capital, which counts the Marker Hotel and Citywest Hotel in its portfolio. Library Tetrarch firm Miro Hotel 2 Limited purchased the Dawson Hotel on Dawson Street and Anne's Lane. The RIAC is located next door and the plan reconfigures the RIAC and creates the 117-bedroom hotel. Established in 1901, the RIAC is a private members' club and the club currently provides two restaurants, a bar and a members' reading room, along with a substantial library. Recommending that planning permission be granted, the council's planner's report stated "the proposal is welcomed and given the location of the site and the surrounding context, the proposed scheme is deemed to be acceptable". The work is expected to take two years. Sharon Rowe was in dire financial straits, the court heard A grandmother caught stealing 1,800 worth of perfume products before last Christmas was under huge financial pressure at the time, a court has heard. Sharon Rowe (44) had been working as a cleaner but had to give it up due to chronic back pain and she had not been getting any social welfare payments. Judge John Lindsay said he would give the defendant one chance and ordered Rowe to enter into a peace bond for 12 months. Rowe, of Leo Fitzgerald House, Dublin 2, admitted charges of theft and possession of articles for use in a theft. The theft took place at Debenhams in the Frascati Shopping Centre, Blackrock, last December 6. Dun Laoghaire District Court heard that Rowe was stopped by security staff as she tried to leave the store without paying for 18 bottles of perfume. The total value of the bottles of perfume amounted to 1,835, the court was told. Foil The defendant was also found in possession of foil strips, which had been used to cover the security tags so the alarms would not go off. The property was recovered in a saleable condition, a garda sergeant said. The court heard Rowe had no previous convictions. Defence lawyer Miranda Egan-Langley previously said that Rowe's husband died tragically just before Christmas in 1996, and she had suffered post-traumatic health disorder since his death. The court heard that Rowe had two children and a grandchild. She had been working two jobs as a cleaner but had to give them up as she suffered from chronic back pain, Ms Egan-Langley said. As a result, the defendant had no money, was in dire financial straits and was not in receipt of social welfare. The shoplifting incident took place just before Christmas last year. Ms Langley said that Rowe took the opportunity and made a "very bad decision" to take the goods. She wished to apologise to the court for her behaviour, the lawyer added. Three young Dublin men filmed themselves laughing and showing their bloodied fists after a "violent rampage" of assaults on bystanders in the city centre, a court has heard. Gardai arrested Harry Walsh (18), Gordon Robinson (20) and Darragh Smith (20) after viewing CCTV of seven incidents of violent disorder and assaults on eight members of the public. Judge Melanie Greally imposed a five-year sentence on Robinson and a four-year jail term on Smith, with the final 12 months of each sentence suspended. She adjourned Walsh's sentence until July. Video footage taken from Robinson's phone, which was played in court, showed the three men laughing together after their final assault. Garda Brian O'Reilly pointed out visible damage to Robinson's and Walsh's hands in the clip, which was addressed to a fourth youth, who had been in their company at the start of the offending. This man is currently before the courts for his role. Walsh, of Woodfield, Knocklyon; Robinson, of Allenton Avenue, Tallaght, and Smith, of Brehons Chair, Kellystown Road, Rathfarnham, all pleaded guilty to violent disorder and assault causing harm at Camden Street, Harcourt Street and Montague Street between 3am and 4am on November 3, 2017. Walsh also pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to criminal damage of a 1,000 Samsung phone belonging to one of the assault victims. He has five previous convictions, including assault causing harm and driving offences, while Robinson and Smith have none. Unconscious Gda O'Reilly told Ronan Kennedy BL, prosecuting, one man suffered a broken eye socket and cheekbone, another man's jaw was broken and a third victim had teeth knocked out. He said another injured party was left face down unconscious on the ground and a different man suffered cracked ribs. The judge noted the three assailants had raised 11,000 between them as compensation for their victims. She described it as an hour-long "violent rampage" and due to its extreme nature she had to impose custodial sentences. She noted Smith did not engage in the more serious violence, but added it was "clear all three were operating as a unit". She said Robinson was instigator in many of the offences. Samaritans volunteers in Ireland have answered almost three million calls for help over the last five years, new figures show. Major reasons for contact include mental health problems, isolation and loneliness. A freephone helpline has operated for five years. "Samaritans has been supporting people in Ireland since 1961, but the introduction of freephone made a huge impact," said Samaritans Ireland regional director Cindy O'Shea. "It is amazing that in that time volunteers have answered almost three million telephone calls, as well as given support to thousands more by text, email and face to face in branches, in communities, at festivals and in prisons." Six major telecom providers - BT Ireland, Eir, Sky Ireland, Three Ireland, Virgin Media Ireland and Vodafone Ireland - have extended their partnership and agreed to support the helpline until 2024. "We are thrilled that our largest telecommunications companies have shown their faith and confidence in us to continue delivering this service to their customers and others who need us in their darkest hours," added Ms O'Shea. Over the last five years 2.9 million calls were answered. A total of 110,000 individual callers made contact. The busiest time was generally 6pm to midnight. More than 500,000 calls were answered by Samaritans volunteers last year, with almost 46,000 text replies and 5,300 emails sent. emotional Some 4,000 people were given emotional support in a branch or at a festival. Communications, Climate Action and Environment Minister Richard Bruton said: "I am delighted that all major telecom providers have agreed to continue to support the Samaritans and the vital work that they do. "This agreement will mean there will be no cost barrier to anyone who may need to call the Samaritans." Hopes that a majority of British politicians would embrace a soft Brexit were dashed last night as parliament again rejected all pathways to leaving the EU. The deadlock in Westminster remains with just 10 days until the next Brexit deadline, fuelling fears that the UK will crash out of the union. Prime Minister Theresa May will discuss the crisis with her divided Cabinet today and is believed to want to a fourth vote on her own deal. Extension While the UK Parliament continues its internal battle, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar will be pleading with EU capitals look favourably on a long Brexit extension rather than force a no-deal scenario. His conversations with leaders begin in Paris today where French President Emmanuel Macron is reported to be extremely sceptical about allowing the UK take part in European elections next month. In a statement last night, Mr Varadkar said Brexit is at a "critical juncture". Four options were presented to MPs in the House of Commons yesterday but all were rejected. The House was heavily split on the idea of entering a customs union or common market arrangement with the EU. Both approaches would be welcomed in Dublin. The custom union, which was defeated by just three votes, would not solve the Irish border question but it would guarantee smooth and tariff-free trade in goods across the border. In order to maintain the status quo, the UK and Ireland would still have to negotiate a way of ensuring food and animal standards are aligned between Northern Ireland and the EU. Some 280 MPs voted in favour of a second referendum but 292 voted against one. The Paris meeting between Mr Varadkar and Mr Macron is likely to be closely monitored in London. The French government are increasingly frustrated with events in the UK and wary of granting a lengthy Brexit extension. Mr Macron is also likely to seek assurances that Ireland will protect the EU's single market in the event of a disorderly Brexit. The Taoiseach has repeatedly acknowledged that this country has a responsibility to the remaining EU27 - but he has insisted this cannot be through border controls on the island of Ireland. He is expected to spend the coming days urging EU leaders to show patience must while the UK tries to find a way forward, making the point a delay is better than no-deal. Solidarity Last night Mr Varadkar said he will thank the French for their "ongoing solidarity" with the Irish cause and commitment to the backstop. "I am keen to discuss the possible scenarios arising from this week, particularly how the European Council should respond to a request for another extension, should there be one, and ongoing efforts to secure ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement," he said. "As I have indicated, it is now up to the UK to show how it plans to proceed and avoid a No Deal scenario. "We are preparing for all outcomes, and have prepared intensively for a No Deal," he said. Keith Duffy is out of hospital after 72 hours of illness which left his Boyzone bandmates to continue on without him in Thailand. The 44-year-old was hospitalised before the weekend as the band were due to perform in Bangkok. The Dubliner said on Instagram that he had suffered a bowel infection and a viral infection, and thanked hospital staff at the World Medical Centre hospital in Thailand for their help. Infection "Seventy-two hours of a fever of 38/40 degrees with diarrhoea and vomiting caused by contaminated food from bad hygiene in preparation. "The worst bad health experience of my life," Duffy said. "A secondary bowel infection and viral infection. "These ladies are my saviour, they are saints - thank you, ladies, I love you. "You've given me a whole new perspective of selflessness I will never forget. God bless you all and thank you again." Boyzone took to the stage as a trio at the Thunder Dome, Pak Kret on Friday as part of their 25th anniversary tour in south-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand. His bandmates thanked fans for their support and confirmed Keith would be flying to Adelaide for their next show tonight. "After three long days in hospital in Bangkok, Keith is back on his feet and will be flying to Adelaide to join the Boyz for their show there. "Big love and thanks to all the wonderful staff that have looked after him and for all the messages of support that you guys have sent out to him." Ronan Keating (42) had said Duffy went on a "downward spiral" before being taken to hospital. "He took ill before the show, he just went on a downward spiral," he said. "He came to the gig, he had a massive, really high temperature, the doctors arrived at the gig and they said it wasn't possible for him to go on in the state he was in," he said. A statement from the band on Thursday said Duffy had been taken to hospital "on the advice of the local medical team". Hilarious Asked about the Bangkok gig without Duffy, Keating said it was "hilarious". "We had considered certain things, but not others. "I had to take some of Keith's vocals and I didn't know the words," he said. In January, the band said farewell to Irish fans as they played their last-ever gig in the 3Arena, having announced they would split for good after this tour. Keating thanked fans for their support over the years and paid tribute to former band member Stephen Gately, who passed away in 2009. "The four of us, the five of us, want to thank you," he said. Tragic Lynn Browne died just one day after celebrating her 40th birthday An assistant school principal who tragically died after falling down stairs had been celebrating her 40th birthday the night before. Mother-of-one Lynn Browne, from Co Louth, died on Mother's Day after the fall in which she is believed to have hit her head off a table. Ms Browne was an art teacher at Ballymakenny College in Drogheda, Co Louth. Principal Alan Mynes said the school and the community are "deeply saddened" following the tragedy, which is understood to have happened at her parents' home in Glenmore Drive. Beloved Ms Browne was rushed to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, but lost her battle for life late on Sunday night. Her school and the local community have been in mourning since the accident and paid tribute to Ms Browne. "We learned this morning of the death of our beloved colleague and teacher, Lynn Browne," Mr Mynes said. "This is a terrible tragedy for the family, our school and our community. We are deeply saddened by this event. "Our sympathy and thoughts are with her family and friends." The principal said Ms Browne was a founding member of the relatively new school and her husband Ken works as the caretaker. The couple had been together since they were 17 and have a young son, with the whole family understood to be in shock following the accident. Ms Browne has a twin sister and two older sisters. Funeral details detailed how she will be sadly missed by her "heartbroken" family. "We have been in contact with her family and they have requested that we all understand their need for privacy at this difficult time," Mr Mynes said. "Offers of support have been pouring in and are greatly appreciated. "Our school has implemented our critical incident management plan. "Psychologists from the National Educational Psychological Service and counsellors from neighbouring schools have been with us supporting and advising teachers in their efforts to assist our school community at this time." Local councillor Oliver Tully, who is on the school's board of management, said Ms Browne would be "sadly missed by everybody in the school". "She really did contribute quite a lot to the school," he said. Bubbly Mr Tully said he knows the family well, having worked with Ms Browne's twin sister, Carol. The councillor described Ms Browne as a "personable" and "bubbly" woman who always had the interest of the children at heart. The funeral for Ms Browne will take place on Thursday, with the family requesting that mourners wear something colourful to the teacher's funeral "as a tribute to Lynn's personality and love of life". Ms Browne will be reposing at her parents' home tonight and tomorrow. "Beloved wife to Ken and loving and devoted mam to Baxter," her funeral notice said. The notice added that she is mourned by her family, extended family and a "very large circle of good friends and work colleagues". Breakfast with the Bunny, from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., April 20, Burr Ridge Park District Community Center, 15W400 Harvester Drive. Pre-registration required, in person or by phone with a credit card. Fee is $12 for residents, $15 for nonresidents and includes Easter egg hunt at 10:30 a.m. sharp, photo with the Easter bunny, doughnuts and beverages. All children must be accompanied by an adult. That 2.25-mile stretch of roadway home to some 28,000 vehicles per day, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation had been down to one lane in each direction from late August into December as work continued on two projects totaling more than $15 million to rebuild bridge decks over Greenleaf Avenue, Route 41 and two sets of railroad tracks. This officer paid the ultimate sacrifice early this morning and saved my daughters life, wrote Carrie Kay. She was traveling home from Washington D.C. with a family she babysits for. From what we were told Trooper Ellis was directly ahead of them two lanes over and moved his (squad) car into their lane to block a wrong way driver on interstate I-94 in Illinois from hitting the car she was in. A: Ive been in the exhibition field for a little over three decades. There are a lot of institutional challenges in exhibition. Its complex, but marketing budgets are flat. People are being challenged to do more with less. When you look at whats happening with things like Airbnb, from renting apartments or ancillary space and building a business out of that, that seemed like crazy thinking. Shortly after that, Uber comes into the mix. In short, theres not a business on the consumer side that hasnt evolved into sharing the marketplace. Path of deadly 5-state tornado may go down as longest ever in US We probably would have continued rolling these (utility taxes) back, as well, if it was not for the biggest uncertainty we have, which is the State of Illinois keeping our money, Moras said. They collect tax money on our behalf and then chose not to give us what has always traditionally been our share. The average person living in our community and other communities is tired of seeing taxes go up, he said. When you look back, you see all anybody is talking about is a small increase. When you add it up over the years, it gets high. Its wrong. Its not good policy for the village, county or state. Czerwinski added the village would determine after 180 days if the experiment should become permanent through enforcement effort. He said residents would have an opportunity to comment on the new traffic structure either through the villages website or by calling village hall. Actor Deepika Padukone is currently engrossed in her upcoming film, Chhapaak in which she plays an acid-attack survivor named Malti. The actors first look from the film has been widely praised by her fans and film fraternity. The actor has now shared a new picture of the films script and captioned it, The only kinda homework Ive ever enjoyed! #chhapaak. The picture shows a pencil, eraser, ruler and a highlighter along with the script, which has director Meghna Gulzars name on it. The films tagline a journey of trauma and triumph is also written under the films title. Chhapaak stars Vikrant Massey as the male lead. The film is based on the life of acid-attack survivor Laxmi Agarwal. Talking about Deepikas look in the film, Laxmi told IANS, I was happy to see Deepikas first look from the film. The response and the messages I got on social media was overwhelming. In fact, it was my daughters birthday, and more than messages for her, I got congratulatory messages about the film. I was feeling good that a celebrity has come in that look. A lot of make-up artistes changed a natural face to acid distorted face after that (on social media). And I felt, see, they are finding beauty in an acid-burnt face. Also read: 4 times when he hilariously roasted wife Kajol on Instagram She also spoke about the film and what it is set out to achieve. People are intrigued by Bollywood. A long time ago, a film named Tezaab came out. It spoke about beauty. Today, beauty through films is shown in a different manner and the youth will see and learn, she said. Chhapaak is also Deepikas debut production venture and is scheduled to release on January 10, 2020. (With IANS inputs) Follow @htshowbiz for more Bollywood actor Kalki Koechlin is likely to join the cast of Netflixs popular series Sacred Games for the second season. The show will return this year with a new trail of betrayal, crime, passion and a thrilling chase through Mumbais underbelly. The highly-anticipated season will see a mix of old favourites and fresh new characters to drive the storyline to its intrepid twists and turns, Netflix had said earlier. Also read: Ranbir Kapoor opens up on dad Rishi: He speaks to me about his insecurities that when he gets back, will he get work in movies Now there is a buzz that Kalki, whose film Candyflip was released on Netflix earlier this year, will be part of the second season of Sacred Games. The second season picks up from Sartaj Singh (actor Saif Ali Khan) pursuing his relentless battle of saving the city and Ganesh Gaitonde (actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui) facing bigger challenges to retain his position as the legendary kingpin of Mumbai. The intriguing Guruji (actor Pankaj Tripathi), introduced in season one as Gaitondes third father, plays a pivotal role in unfolding a chain of events that shape the next season. Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap will continue directing Ganesh Gaitondes track, while director Neeraj Ghaywan will take over Sartaj Singhs plot. Vikramaditya Motwane and Varun Grover will continue their roles of being the showrunner and the lead writer respectively. The first season also starred Radhika Apte and Kubbra Sait. Also read: Irrfan Khan removes mask in front of paparazzi as he is spotted again in Mumbai. See pics Last December, Mirzapur actress Harshita Gaur had confirmed that she had bagged a pivotal role in Sacred Games season two. Actor Jatin Sarna, who made a big impact with a small role as Nawazuddins volatile hitman Bunty in Sacred Games, will also be back in Season 2 of the Netflix series, although his character was killed in the first season. The second season goes into a flashback. My character Bunty is on a wheelchair. So I need to harness and control my natural energy level to play a subdued physically limited character, Jatin said. (This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.) Follow @htshowbiz for more The Delhi Police on Monday evening seized around rupees 70 lakh cash from six different persons in northwest Delhis Keshavpuram. The police said the cash was seized by a 13-member police team that was conducting a check of vehicles at the Prem Nagar underpass in Keshavpuram. Police said all the six persons, who were either in scooters or cars, failed to give any explanation about the source of money. Police are probing if the cash is related to election poll expenses. DCP (northwest) Vijayanta Goyal Arya said police have informed the Income Tax department and poll panel. The project will affect the villages cast iron water distribution main and a section of the sanitary sewer on the north side of Dundee Road, as well as the water main on the west side of Lee Road, which must all be relocated to avoid any conflicts during the project, according to information about the project on the villages website. It isnt often that one hears Pakistans other neighbours levelling similar accusations about cross-border terrorism at the same time as India, but that is what happened over the past few weeks as both Iran and Afghanistan accused Pakistan of harbouring terrorist groups on its soil. A day before a Jaish-e-Mohammed suicide bomber killed 40 Indian troops at Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir on February 14, the Pakistan-based Jaish-al-Adl claimed a suicide attack that killed 27 members of Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Subsequently, Afghanistans defence minister accused Jaish-e-Mohammed of working with the Taliban to target one of the countrys largest military bases in March, an attack that killed 26 troops. The accusations show that India is no longer alone in being targeted in a brazen manner by heavily armed terror groups based on Pakistani soil. They also come at a time when the US has consistently increased pressure on Pakistan to crack down on terrorists sheltering in its territory and the Financial Action Task Force has taken Islamabad to task for failing to cut off terror financing. When Pakistans political leadership talk about their countrys hard-earned gains against terror groups through military operations over the past few years, they often fail to note that these gains have been made against organisations within the country that were challenging the States writ, and not against groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba that have been used by the military as proxies to target nations such as India and Afghanistan. This is why Afghan politicians such as former spy chief Amrullah Saleh describe the entire terrorist infrastructure operating from Pakistan as a virulent arm of the Inter-Services Intelligence. The time is now right for India to explore ways to work more closely with Pakistans neighbours to ensure that terror groups can no longer find safe haven on Pakistani soil to carry out attacks that have the potential to destabilise the entire region. PUCET 2019: Patna University has started its application process for new academic session 2019-20 on April 2.The last date to apply is May 15. The university will conduct a PU Common Entrance Test (PUCET) for various undergraduate and post graduate programmes in different colleges of PU. Candidates seeking admission in PU will have to fill online application form its official website. The PUCET will begin in the month of May while the academic session generally commences from July. Since 2016, PU is conducting PUCET for admission in different courses. Patna Womens College (PWC) will be responsible for conducting the entrance test for BA, Magadh Mahila College for B Com and Patna Science College for B Sc. While the PWC will be conducting entrance test for B Ed, the department of education, PU, will be responsible body for conducting the M Ed test. Similarly, Patna Law College will conduct LLB and department of law, PU, will conduct LLM entrance tests. College of Art and Craft will conduct test for bachelors of fine arts. The PU has also added online payment facility for students. Candidates will be able to make payment through a unified payment gateway Sab Paisa in collaboration with Allahabad Bank. As soon as e-payment is done, applicant will get an electronic receipt that will have a unique confirmation number. The unique confirmation code will be required to get the online admit card. The application fee for undergraduate programmes is 300 while for postgraduate programmes it is of 500. PUCET 2019: HOW TO APPLY Visit the official website of Patna University at patnauniversity.ac.in On the top right corner click on Apply Online tab A PUCET 2019 login page will appear Register yourself Do enter your mobile number and email ID correctly for updates. Fill in the required academic, personal details. Upload a scanned passport size photograph (of size 20 to 50 kb) and a scanned signature (of size 10 to 20 kb). Make online payment of application fee either by credit card, debit card, net banking, wallet or UPI. How to resize your photo Click here to apply online The appearing candidates may apply for admission in such courses where admission is based on Entrance Test but they must submit the copy of the mark sheet of the previous result before the finalisation of selection list for admission failing which their candidature will not be considered for admission. Mark sheet is mandatory in such courses where admission is based on the marks obtained by the candidates in the previous examinations. Check PUCET 2019 admission notice The print copy of the duly filled in form complete in all respect along with the self-attested copies of the academic records and other relevant documents will be accepted in the respective Department / College / Institutes concerned separately by the speed post. The address of each of the respective institution is mentioned in respective column of the admission details. Academic records refer to Marksheet / CLC / TC etc. and documents refer to certificate of caste / Physically handicapped or different quota of the appropriate authority. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON A resident of Sector 5 and three of her family members were allegedly conned of 83,843 by a man who introduced himself as the sales advisor of an online travel company for a round-trip between Delhi and Malaysia. The complaint in this regard was lodged in the second week of January. The cyber cell of Gurugram police completed investigations and filed a case on Monday. Police said the complainant had remitted the money in three transactions to the accused person via online transfer for flight tickets and hotel bookings. The family later found out that their flight bookings were cancelled and that the hotel bookings were never made by the online travel company, police said. She was supposed to travel to Malaysia in the first week of January and had contacted the sales advisor of an online travel company. We were given a confirmed Malaysian airline ticket. On calling Malaysian Airlines, we were informed that our tickets had been cancelled by the agent (this was done) without our consent or knowledge. We were also given a confirmed hotel booking for a resort in Langkawi from January 5 to 7. On sending a mail to them, we were informed that no such booking was done, she said in the complaint, adding that another confirmed booking at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur could not be verified. Police said the complainant tried to call the accused sales advisor but he had switched off his phone number, adding that the victim had incurred a loss of 83,843. A police official privy to the investigation, requesting anonymity, said they were yet to verify if the accused person was a fake agent or if the website itself was fake. The police said they are trying to trace the location of the accused. A case was registered against the accused under sections 66 D of The Information Technology Act, 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) of Indian Penal Code at the Cyber Crime police station. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder of variable severity which causes disruption in communication and social interaction. The disorder is also characterized through repetitive behaviour and thoughts. On 2nd April every year we observe the World Autism Awareness Day to spread information about Autism Spectrum Disorder and help the global ASD population lead a healthy social life. The UN Department Of Global Communication and Department Of Economic and Social Affairs is the main organization responsible for shaping this day. A number of other organisations working for the people with ASD are also associated with WAAD. According to the World Health Organisation one out of every 160 children is living with autism. However, there is a lack of awareness about this disorder on a whole. People living with ASD are prone to problems relating to communication and social interaction. These issues can be tackled successfully if ASD is detected at a young age and thereof managed-well. Through WAAD, United Nations aims to raise awareness about ASD. It aims to help people detect the signs of autism in children at an early age and to fight the discrimination faced by people on the spectrum. Significance of World Autism Awareness Day UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres sums up the significance of WAAD saying, On World Autism Awareness Day, we speak out against discrimination, celebrate the diversity of our global community and strengthen our commitment to the full inclusion and participation of people with autism. Supporting them to achieve their full potential is a vital part of our efforts to uphold the core promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: to leave no one behind. Theme Of World Autism Awareness Day 2019 Assistive Technologies. Active Participation is the theme for WAAD 2019. The theme is derived keeping in mind that technology plays an integral role in the development of people with any form of disability including autism. Not only is technology important for development, it also ensures that people with disabilities enjoy their basic human rights and helps them tackle any issues they face as a member of the society. However, this theme also highlights the fact that assistive technologies are expensive and inaccessible to a large population living with autism. There is also a lack of guidance about the usage of assistive technologies and their efficiency throughout the globe. As a theme of WAAD 2019, the United Nations at its headquarters in New York will discuss the engagement of assistive technologies for people living with autism as a tool to remove any barriers which may hamper their complete participation in the social, political and economic aspects of the society. It will also focus on the use of technology to promote equality, equity and inclusion. Topics to be addressed through discussions with self-advocates and experts at UN today include: The Internet and digital communities: Leveling the playing field Independent living: Smart home technology and more Education and employment: Communication and executive functioning Telemedicine: Opening the doors to healthcare The right to be heard: Political participation and advocacy History of World Autism Awareness Day The United Nations General Assembly announced 2nd April as World Autism Awareness Day in 2008. Since then the UN, with a number of other organisations have worked to spread information about Autism Spectrum Disorder which affects a major portion of population across the globe. This day aims at making healthcare and technology more accessible to people living with autism. However, the main aim of celebrating World Autism Awareness Day is to make sure that no one, including people living with autism, are left behind. Follow more stories on Facebook and Twitter Marvel has shared a brand new special look at its upcoming and highly anticipated film, Avengers: Endgame. The new one-minute long clip features all the remaining Avengers as they foray into outer space to take the fight to Thanos and avenge the death of their fallen friends. The trailer begins with Bruce Banner saying, If we do this, we will be going in short-handed. Yeah, coz he killed all our friends, War Machine tells him. We then see Rocket and Nebula bond with each other and Tony finally gets a hug from Pepper Potts. The most anticipated reunion is, however, between Tony and Captain America. The two shake hands on their restored friendship and set out to work together. Captain America, Thor, Captain Marvel, Rocket, War Machine and Black Widow fly off to some distant planet where we finally meet the mad Titan. Thanos can be heard saying, You could not live with your failures. And where did that bring you? Back to me. Watch the Avengers Endgame footage here: Also read: Priyanka Chopra, Nick Jonas rep refutes rumours of divorce, couple may sue magazine for slanderous article Marvel Studios Avengers: Endgame, starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson, is slated to release in India on April 26 in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. The film is a continuation of Avengers: Infinity War, which left Marvel fans in shock with the failure of the superheroes against the supervillain Thanos. The films co-director Joe Russo is currently in India for the films promotions. He said wrapping up 10 years of storytelling was not at all an easy task. It was very difficult. Theres a lot of focus on a lot of characters,and (has) incredible amount of stories... (It is) 11 years of narrative culminating in one movie, said Joe, one half of the Russo brothers. This movie focuses on the six original Avengers and closes the book and the stories being told about them in the last decade. We spent a lot of time with the writers to see that we deliver a powerful, emotionally impactful ending a and hopefully it will be delivered. Avengers: Endgame was not easy movie... It was very difficult and exhausting, he added. Joe was happy to begin the press tour of Avengers: Endgame with India. We insisted for India to be the first stop of our press tour because of the incredible response to ...Infinity War. We had been wanting to come here for a long time. We have heard so much about India, Joe said at the launch of Marvel anthem, which has been created by Oscar-winning composer AR Rahman, in Mumbai on Monday. Follow @htshowbiz for more The BJP on Tuesday appointed union minister Ananth Kumars widow Tejaswini as the state unit vice-president in an apparent placatory move after denying her the ticket to contest from Bangalore South Lok Sabha constituency, which her husband had represented. Tejaswini was sulking after the BJP announced political greenhorn Tejasvi Surya as the Bangalore South candidate, leaving her supporters angry and agitated. I am delighted to announce that @Tej_AnanthKumar has been appointed as state vice president of @BJP4Karnataka. Wishing her all the very best, Karnataka BJP Chief Yeddyurappa tweeted. BJP announced the ticket to 28-year-old Surya, withjust hours left for the deadline for filing of nominations forthe first phase of polls in Karnataka. Maintaining an unbroken record, Ananth Kumar had won the Bangalore South seat six times. The decision had led to disappointment among late Ananth Kumars supporters and some state leaders, as it waswidely expected that the BJP would field Tejaswini given heractive participation in scripting her husbands victories. Tejaswini was also confident about fighting the poll on BJP ticket and had started a door-to-door campaign, as the Karnataka BJP had proposed only her name. The discontent among BJP leaders against Suryas candidacy was visible, with senior legislators from the constituency including former Deputy Chief Minister R Ashoka and V Sommana not attending his nomination filing. Tejaswini, though had insisted that she remained loyal to party and accepted their decision to ensure that Narendra Modi became Prime Minister again, was not involving herself in any campaign related activities. Active in public life through not-for-profit organisation Adamya Chetana, Tejaswini had worked as a scientist at the Aeronautical Development Agency between 1993 -1997 and also on the Light Combat Aircraft (LCATejas) project. During her student days, she was very active in Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), and has also served as its State Joint Secretary and National executive member. Read more| OMG, OMG: Tejasvi Surya tweets after BJP picks 28-year-old for Bengaluru South seat Pakistan could be blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) due to lobbying by India, foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said at a press conference in Lahore on Monday. Qureshi said he estimated that the country could suffer $10 billion loss annually if it remains on the watchdogs grey list. The Foreign Office is calculating the annual loss if Pakistan is pushed in the black-list by the FATF as India is lobbying for this, foreign minister Qureshi told reporters at the Governors House in Lahore. In June last year, the Paris-based FATF had placed Pakistan on the grey list of countries whose domestic laws are considered weak to tackle the challenges of money laundering and terrorism financing. The FATF has asked Pakistan to reassess the operation of banned terrorist outfits in the country. Ahead of the teams visit, Pakistan wrote to FATF president Marshall Billingslea to appoint other member as co-chair of the Asia-Pacifics Joint Group, in place of India, to ensure that the FATF review process is fair, unbiased and objective. A group of experts from the FATF recently visited Pakistan to review whether Islamabad has made enough progress on global standards against financial crimes to warrant its exclusion from the watchdogs grey list. During its three-day visit to Islamabad in the last week of March, a delegation of the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on money laundering, a regional affiliate of the FATF, expressed serious reservations over insufficient physical actions on ground against banned groups to block flow of funds and activities. The FATF noted that Pakistan had revised its terror financing risk assessment but did not demonstrate a proper understanding of the risks posed by the Islamic State group, Al-Qaeda, Jamaat-ud-Dawah , Falah-i-Insania , Lashkar-e-Taiba, JeM, Haqqani Network and persons affiliated with the Taliban. To a question on the suspension of dialogue on the Kartarpur corridor for Sikh pilgrims from India to visit his country, Qureshi said: Pakistan went to India for a meeting on Kartarpur despite the escalation [of tensions] on borders, but India hesitated for a second meeting scheduled for April 2. I ask India to bring its apprehensions on the table for review by Pakistan but avoid cancelling meetings. India on Friday summoned Pakistans deputy high commissioner in New Delhi and conveyed concerns over the presence of a leading Khalistani separatist in a committee appointed by Pakistan on the Kartarpur corridor project. Indian officials said they will wait for a response from Pakistan on the issue. (With agency inputs) India on Tuesday called on Pakistan to release and repatriate 400 Indian prisoners, including some who were still in jail despite having completed their sentences nearly four to five years ago, people familiar with developments said. New Delhi also sought consular access to five civilian prisoners, including former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, whom its officials have been unable to meet despite repeated requests, the people said. Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court after being arrested on charges of spying and subversive activities in 2016. The demand for the release of 385 fishermen and 15 other prisoners and consular access to five prisoners was made through a note verbale an unsigned diplomatic correspondence sent to the Pakistan high commission in New Delhi, the people said. They added India had expressed deep concern over its long-pending request for the release and repatriation of prisoners and fishermen with their boats, especially those who had completed their sentences and whose nationality had been confirmed. India sought the immediate release of 10 civilian prisoners who had completed their sentences, including two who had served their terms by 2014 and 2015. It also called for urgent steps to repatriate 385 fishermen whose nationality had been confirmed and who were still in jail despite serving their sentences. Another five prisoners had been confirmed as Indian nationals and India sought their early release and repatriation. Noting that India has been providing timely consular access to Pakistani prisoners, the note verbale said access to Indian fishermen and prisoners was inordinately delayed. It again sought consular access to five civilian prisoners, including Jadhav, whose cases were pending with Pakistan. Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged heavy fire on Tuesday along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmirs Rajouri district. Defence spokesman Lt Col Devender Anand said that at about 11.30 am on Tuesday, the Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked shelling with mortars and firing with small arms along the LoC in Nowshera sector of Rajouri district. The Indian Army is retaliating befittingly. Exchange of fire is going on, he added. The trans-LoC trade via Chakan-da-Bagh in Poonch was suspended on Tuesday after intense shelling by Pakistani troops on Monday left three dead including a five-year-old child and a Border Security Force (BSF) officer and 20 others injured in the frontier district. Three Pakistani soldiers were also killed in Indian fire in Poonch sector on Monday. A five-year old girl named Sobia Shareef, a 35-year-old woman Shaista Bi and an Inspector of the BSF T Alex Lalminlun were killed and 20 others were injured in indiscriminate shelling and firing by the Pakistan Army in Poonch on Monday. As a precautionary measure, civil administration in Poonch district have closed all educational institutions within a five kilometre radius of the LoC in Poonch. Custodian of the Chakan-da-Bagh trade facilitation centre, Fareed Kohil said, following intense shelling by Pakistani army on Monday the trade was suspended due to security reasons in wake of the casualties. Even on Tuesday there was small arms fire between the two sides, he added. Trade between of Jammu and Kashmir and PoK takes place via Chakan-Da-Bagh crossing point in Poonch and Salamabad in Baramulla. The places are also used by divided families to visit each other across the LoC. The Pakistani Armys publicity wing, Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), in its website acknowledged that three of its soldiers were killed in Indian firing in Poonch sector on Monday. Tensions have been running high between India and Pakistan in the wake of a suicide attack by a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Adil Mir on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama on February 14, which killed 40 troopers. A day after Bharatiya Janata Party Bengal unit leaders slammed the states chief electoral officer Aariz Aftab for his proximity to the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), state Congress leader and four-time-MP Adhir Chowdhury lashed out at Aftab claiming that he was working at the behest of the TMC. Chowdhury said that the Congress would move the Election Commission (EC) against him. Aftab isnt working impartially. He is following the precedent of the former state election commissioner, who was instrumental in helping the TMC to grab votes during the panchayat elections in Bengal last year, said Chowdhury, who is seeking re-election from the Baharampur constituency. Incidentally, last year state election commissioner A K Singh was in the eye of a storm, as the opposition parties alleged that he was acting in a partisan manner in the run-up to the panchayat elections. In the polls, more than one third of the seats were won by the TMC without any contest. Aftab is following the directions of the TMC leaders. He does not bother to respond to the complaints that we have been lodging. I have telephoned him and sent text messages on a number of days. But he did not receive the calls. Once or twice, he called me back only to say that he was very busy, added Chowdhury, who was a former president of the Bengal Congress unit. On Monday, convener of the BJPs election management committee in Bengal, Mukul Roy, refused to speak to Vivek Dube, special central police observer for West Bengal (for the Lok Sabha elections) in Aftabs presence. We have told the special police observer (Dube) that we will not discuss anything in the presence of the CEO. If we do, the information will go to the ruling party and the state government within two minutes, Roy told reporters on Monday. The BJP leaders spoke to Dube only after the CEO stepped out of the room. On Tuesday, Congress leader Adhir Chowdhury also alleged that some officers were trying to remain in the good books of the chief minister by aiding the plan of the ruling party to loot votes. The CEO, however, was not available for comment. On Monday, additional CEO Sanjay Basu said that they were only doing their job. No comments. Someone has passed a comment, it is his matter, Basu had said on Monday. I will say this, said Thomas Moore, community relations supervisor with the Northbrook police. If you ever get anyone who calls you and wants you to pay them with gift cards, iTunes gift cards, or Google gift cards, do not do it. Thats a scam. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday hit out at the Congress party accusing it of proposing Balkanisation of India in its manifesto for the Lok Sabha election. Jaitley said the Congresss manifesto has imprints of what he termed tukde tukde gang. Some of the ideas are positively dangerous in the Congress manifesto. They are for an agenda for the Balkanisation of India, Jaitley said at a press conference in New Delhi. The remarks came hours after the Congress released its manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls. The manifesto was prepared by a committee chaired by former Finance Minister P Chidambaram. The 2019 Congress Manifesto is a charter to weaken India. After reading Congress Manifesto my worst fears have come true. The repeal of Section 124A of the IPC, diluting AFSPA and bail is the rule jail is the exception for terrorists and hardcore criminals will compromise national security. WATCH: Some ideas in Cong manifesto positively dangerous: Arun Jaitley Defending the promise on repealing the sedition law, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala urged the journalists to start speaking and ask questions. Jaitley further said, Even though there was a drafting committee, but it appears that some of the important points have been drafted by the Congress presidents friend in Tukde Tukde gang when it deals with Jammu and Kashmir. The senior BJP leader said the Congresss promise of removing Indian Penal Code Section 124A is fraught with danger. It was not even done by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi or even Dr Manmohan Singh government, he said. The Congress manifesto says IPC Section 124A will be scrapped. This means sedition will no longer be a crime. A party that makes such a promise does not deserve a single vote, said Jaitley. Also read: 15 top promises in Congress manifesto for Lok Sabha polls Coming down heavily on the Congresss Nyuntam Aay Yojana or NYAY, which promises cash tranfer of Rs 72,000 annually to the 20 percent of the poorest families, Jaitley said it a big Congress bluff. Nyay, in the Manifesto, has now become a joint scheme of Central & the State govts. thereby diluting the initial announcement that Nyay will be over & above existing schemes. It is visible through Manifesto that Nyay is an all time big Congress bluff, said Jaitley. Countering Jaitley, Surjewala said that the BJP is hell-bent on demolishing NYAY as it belives in anyay (injustice). He then asked the press why were no questions asked when PM Modi promised Rs 15 lakh in every bank account and giving 2 crore jobs every year. To Congresss promise of simplifying the GST with single moderate rate of tax, Jaitley said,This effectively means that luxury items, Aam Aadmi commodities, and food items, all should be taxed at the same rate. Rahul Gandhi got this wisdom from Singapore which has no poverty. So, the Manifesto does not care about the poor. Keeping up his narrative, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday hit out at the opposition leaders, accusing them of working as spokesmen of Pakistan, at an election rally of in the Maoist-affectedJamui, from where NDA ally LJPs Chirag Paswan is seeking re-election. In his maiden visit to the district , Modi said Maha-milawati netas (referring to grand alliance) were talking like Pakistan. They appear (to me) more like the spokesmen of Pakistan. They believe more in bad son (Kaput)of Pakistan than the good son (saput) of India. Will not you punish the supporters of Pakistan in the elections? he said. Taking a swipe at the opposition for allegedly questioning the veracity of the surgical strikes, the PM said they did not have faith in their own Army. Some people consider the Army a their rivals. They feel Modi is being benefited from their acts. This is why, they are creating trouble for the Army, he said, addressing the well-attended gathering in Khaira block of the district. Calling upon the people to vote the NDA to the cause of a strong nation, Modi said the entire governance jumped into the reverse gear whenever Congress and its allies came to the power. While Chirag Paswan is contesting to retain Jamui seat, Chandan Kumar of LJP is seeking election from the adjoining Nawada seat for the first time. Modi said incidents of terrorism and crime, prices of commodities, corruption and crime went up during the regime of Congress and its allies. Credibility of the nation, morale of armed forces and respect for honesty declined. We have a cleat-cut policy on terrorism and Naxalism. Those supporting such activities would not be handled politely, said Modi. Accusing the Congress of disrespecting Baba Saheb Ambed kar, Modi said the Congress forgot to honour him even though it bestowed Bharat Ratna to those in its family. Now the party is conspiring to erase Ambedkar from the public memory. But the BJP offered Baba Saheb the highest civilian award posthumously, he said. Claiming that the BJP-led government accorded constitutional status to the OBC commission despite the oppositions bid to stall it, Modi said the government offered 10 per cent quota to the upper castes without disturbing others existing share of reservation and without evoking any protest. In an apparent dig at RJD chief Lalu Prasad, Modi said those who shouted slogans in favour of the JP during the Emergency were not sitting in the Congresss lap. Craving for power is more important for such people than self-respect, he said. I require your blessings again for carrying on with overall progress of the country, Modi said, even as he also lauded chief minister Nitish Kumar-led team for ushering in change in the state. The Delhi high court on Tuesday asked the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) to file a response to a plea challenging the appointment of Manoj Yadava as Haryanas director general of police (DGP). Justice Suresh Kait also asked the Haryana government to file a reply and listed the matter for next hearing on April 11. The plea was filed by IPS officer Prabhat Ranjan Deo through his counsel Ashwarya Sinha. The advocate said that despite being the senior-most and fully eligible, Deo was overlooked and superseded and not even considered by the UPSC in the process of empanelment for the post of DGP. Even his clients representation to the UPSC chairman was neither considered nor replied to, the counsel added. In his plea, Deo told the court that the decision by UPSC is contradictory as it completely overlooks and supersedes his eligibility and seniority. He said that the February 18 order regarding the appointment is in complete contravention of the settled principles of law and contrary to the guidelines issued by the Central government regarding appointment of the DGP. Deo said he is a distinguished service record and has been awarded the police medal for meritorious service in 2006 and Presidents police medal for distinguished service in 2013. Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati on Tuesday defended the construction of memorials and installation of her statues along with that of her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)s election symbol elephant in parks when she ruled the state saying they represented the peoples will. In an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court, Mayawati said there was nothing new about the statues and that public money was spent on them in accordance with the law. Memorial parks featuring life-sized marble and sandstone statues of elephants, Dalit icons and herself were built during the tenure of four-time chief minister Mayawati, whose last term in office ended in 2012. Funds for construction of the said memorials and installation of statues have been sanctioned through budgetary allocation after approval of the budget by the State Legislature and the passing of relevant Appropriation Act by the State Legislature in accordance with the Constitution of India and rules, Mayawati said in the affidavit. She questioned why the use of public funds by other parties for similar causes had not prompted questions and cited the example of a statue of Vallabhbhai Patel that PM Modi inaugurated last year in Gujarat. The statue is nearly twice the height of New Yorks Statue of Liberty. She also referred statues of leaders like former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in Lucknow. The Supreme Court had on February 8 said that it was of the tentative view that Mayawati should deposit the public money utilised for building the statues to the exchequer. It was hearing a petition against the use of public money for building statues and publicising any political party. Lawyer Ravi Kant had filed the petition in 2009 alleging that crores of rupees were used from the state budget for 2008-09 to glorify Mayawati. He has demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the alleged misuse of public money. In her affidavit, Mayawati maintained the expenditure incurred for construction of memorials and installation of the statutes forms part of the Appropriation Act passed by the assembly after discussion and voting. She said the memorials and her statues and that of other leaders were intended to promote values and ideals of various saints, gurus, social reformers and leaders among the public. She denied it was done for self-promotion or glorification. Mayawati sought the dismissal of Kants petition calling it politically motivated. Mayawati added she has dedicated her entire life for the upliftment of the downtrodden society. She said for achieving the same, she also took a decision to remain unmarried. She maintained that construction of memorials and installation of statues in India was not a new phenomenon. Mayawati pointed out that during the Congress rule, the Centre and state agencies installed statues of various Congress leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, P V Narasimha Rao across the country with public funds. The memorials, sthals and parks have been constructed by the state government in the memory of social reformers and their statues have been installed to pay tributes to them. The memorials have been developed for the public to draw inspiration from the lives of great personalities of social reformers and leaders who devoted their lives for the upliftment of Dalit, poor, oppressed and downtrodden sections of the society, she submitted. Elephants standing in welcome posture is part of Indian culture and the Election Commission has already decided on the issue, she said. She was referring to the commissions January 2012 order that the statues of Mayawati and elephants be covered during the assembly election. Nisar Ahmed Tantray, the Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist accused of being a key conspirator in the 2017 attack on the Pulwama Lethpora CRPF camp, has been deported by the United Arab Emirates, an official of the National Investigation Agency said. Nisar Tantray had been detained by the UAE authorities at New Delhis request and deported to national capital Delhi on 31 March. He had escaped to the UAE just a few weeks earlier. Five CRPF personnel were killed after JeM militants attacked the camp in Pulwama districts Lethpora in December 2017. The NIA had previously arrested an operative of the terror group in February for providing logistical support in the attack. Tantrays deportation is seen as another example of deepening security cooperation with West Asia countries over the last few years, particularly Saudi Arabia and UAE. The NIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Nisar Ahmed Tantray was flown in on a special aircraft from Dubai on Sunday and arrested by the NIA at the Delhi airport. Nisar had been on the run after the December 2017 attack when three heavily-armed hurled grenades and entered the 185th battalion camp of the CRPF in Lethpora at around 2am. The NIA official said that a warrant for Nisars arrest was issued for having acted as one of the conspirators in the Lethpora attack. An official of the home ministry said that Nisar fled to the UAE on February 1. Intelligence agencies recently zeroed in on his location following which the Indian government pursued the matter with UAE authorities for his deportation amid a crackdown on JeM in India, the home ministry official said, requesting not to be named. Nisar Tantray is brother of Noor Mohammed Tantray, the most brutal of Jaish commanders. He was just a little over 3 feet tall but was a deadly terror planner. Noor Mohammed Tantray was also reported to have played a key role to draw the young into the group. Noor Mohammed, who was famously reported to have been referred to as a merchant of death by a Delhi court, had been killed a few days before the 2017 CRPF camp attack. His killing is treated as a major success for the security establishment in light of his attempts to revive the Pakistan-based outfit. According to reports, Mudasir Ahmed Khan, alias Mohd Bhai, the 23-year-old electrician who arranged the vehicle and explosives used in the suicide bombing that killed 40 CRPF jawans in Pulwama this February had also been recruited by Noor Mohammed. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON National Conference vice-president Omar Abdullah Tuesday defended his statement that his party would strive hard for restoring the terms of accession of Jammu and Kashmir, including the provisions for having a sadr-e-riyasat (president) and wazir-e-azam in the state and asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to go through history how Jammu and Kashmir became part of India. At a rally in north Kashmirs Pattan town, the former J&K chief minister said the demand about Prime Minister and sadr-e-riyasat was nothing new. He said that a host of BJP leaders have been attacking the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. First, Finance minister Arun Jaitley wrote on Facebook that 35A should be removed, then BJP president, Amit Shah in a television interview said that it is BJPs old promise to scrap Article 35A. And whatever was left, PM Naredra Modi in his speech at Andhra Pradesh made my speech in Bandipore famous throughout the country and world. Article 35A of the Indian Constitution empowers the Jammu and Kashmir states legislature to define permanent resident of the state and provide special rights and privileges to those permanent residents which are excluded for non-permanent residents Also read: PM Modi slams Omar Abdullah over separate PM for J-K remark Asking Prime Minister to go through history of the country, Omar said. Modi sahib, you should read the history of this country and what were the circumstances under which J&K became a part of India. The demand for PM and sadr-e-riyasat for J&K is not new. It is in our constitution on which Prime Minister had taken oath, the same constitution has given us a separate map, flag and a separate constitution. Later speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the rally, Omar Abdullah said that J&K had its own Prime minister and sadr-e-riyasat till 1965. Whatever I spoke about is part of the constitution. Omar Abdullah said that he had not said anything wrong. I have only repeated truth. Even on behalf of the National Conference, I havent said anything different, when I was minister in the NDA under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then also our stand was same on this issue. That time also we were talking about autonomy and demanding pre-1953 position. If that time I was right, how come this is wrong this time? Our stand has never changed as we are seeking restoration of internal autonomy of this state and pre-1953 position. We want to restore conditions of accession of J&K with India. Omars pitch for wazir-e-azam had angered Prime Minister Narendra Modi who dismissed the demand, tweeting that as long as he was alive, no one can divide India. The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined urgent hearing to Patidar leader Hardik Patels plea against his conviction so that he can contest Lok Sabha polls. Hardik Patel, who had recently joined the Congress, had filed a plea in the top court challenging the Gujarat High Court sorder rejecting stay on his conviction in the 2015 Vispur rioting case. The matter was mentioned for urgent listing before a bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra. The bench also comprising Justices M M Shantanagoudar and Navin Sinha told the counsel appearing for Patel that there was no urgency in hearing the matter as the high court order was passed in August last year. The order was passed in August 2018. What is the urgency now? the bench said while refusing to accord urgent hearing on the petition, news agency PTI reported. Hardik Patel moved the top court after his plea for stay was rejected by Gujarat High Court last week. The Patidar leader, who joined the Congress in March, was awarded a two-year prison sentence by a Visnagar court in July 2018 for leading a mob that ransacked local MLA Rishikesh Patels office in July 2015. The Representation of the People Act bars anyone who has been sentenced to two or more years of imprisonment from contesting elections. The 25-year-old, who is said to be keen on contesting from Gujarats Jamnagar, is running against time as April 4 is the last date for filing of nominations for the polls in Gujarat, to be held in the second phase of elections. My only crime is that I have raised voice against the BJP. I will campaign for the Congress and we will form the government, Hardik wrote Twitter after the HC verdict. Advocate Dharmesh Devani, who was representing the state government, said the high court accepted the fact that Patel had been a lawbreaker and so cannot contest an election. The fact that there were 14 FIRs against him, his speeches throughout have remained inflammatory and he is a regular offender has been accepted by the court, which has refused to stay Patels sentence, Devani said on why the HC rejected his plea to stay the conviction. No political party wants to empower the Election Commission (EC) as it will cause them problems, the Supreme Court observed on Monday . A bench of justices N V Ramana and M M Shantagoudar made the observation as the apex court asked the poll watchdog to furnish data about the cases initiated in connection with cash seizures during the 2014 national elections. It was hearing a Karnataka government plea challenging the state high courts decision to quash a criminal case regarding a cash seizure from Bellary Lok Sabha constituency in 2014. The bench sought to examine the larger issue and to know what happens to such cases once the elections are over. The court was informed the cases hardly get prosecuted since the officers, who are part of the special teams constituted to crack down on the misuse of cash for elections, get back to their routine work once the elections are over. The ECs lawyer, Amit Sharma, told the bench that once the cases are initiated, then it is the states duty to pursue them. Sharma added he would have the data on the cases initiated but not those on the state of prosecution when the court asked him what was being done about the seizures. Justice Ramana responded saying that no political party is keen to empower the EC. He went on to also caution the poll watchdog against the misuse of its powers when the Model Code of Conduct is enforced with the announcement of polls. The judge verbally remarked: During these 3-4 months, the Election Commission is the government. Other governments are nothing [during this period]. Even the Prime Minister is required to have the clearance of the EC for public meetings. Fortunately, [the EC] they are not saying courts should not pass orders. Meanwhile, the apex court asked 21 opposition parties to file within a week their reply on the ECs affidavit on their plea seeking counting of at least 50% of VVPAT slips in Lok Sabha and state polls. The head of American space agency Nasa on Tuesday described Indias destruction of one of its own satellites a terrible, terrible thing that had created 400 pieces of orbital debris and led to new dangers for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) chief Jim Bridenstine was addressing staff five days after India shot down a low-orbiting satellite in a test to prove it was among the worlds advanced space powers, AFP reported. Not all of the pieces were big enough to track, Bridenstine said. What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track were talking about 10 centimetres [six inches] or bigger about 60 pieces have been tracked, the agency quoted him as saying. Watch | Anti-Satellite missile capability explained: What it means for India The Indian satellite was destroyed at a low altitude of 300 kilometres, well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit. But 24 pieces are going above the apogee of the ISS, said Bridenstine. The ISS apogee is at 408km. That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station, Bridenstine said. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight. The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) declined to comment, saying the mission was executed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). The DRDO chief and a spokesperson did not comment. An official of the agency, while asking not to be named, said the debris will disappear in 45 days. The test was calibrated keeping in mind the debris issue. The world should know that debris from two Chinese tests is still floating whereas those created by the Indian test will disappear, he added. An Indian expert said that India conducted the anti-satellite test responsibly but agreed it could have raised risks for the ISS. I would say India conducted the test responsibly. At 300km, the altitude is lower than that of the ISS and most of the other satellites and the debris will come back to the atmosphere of the earth eventually. That said, there is a possibility that some debris might enter the apogee of the space station; the risk of collision increases as it does with any object sent to space , said Rajeswari Rajagopalan, head of nuclear and space initiative, Observer Research Foundation (ORF). The anti-satellite missile strike was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on live television on March 27, an address that was condemned by the Opposition parties. Congress leader P Chidambaram said the test was unnecessary and India already had the capability. The US military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk for the ISS and for satellites. They are currently tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10 centimetres. That includes about 10,000 pieces of space debris, of which nearly 3,000 were created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007 at 530 miles from the surface. As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44% over 10 days, Bridenstine said. But the risk will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere. According to Dr M Annadurai, former director of Isro satellite centre in Bengaluru, the problem of space debris is a wider issue. Space debris is composed of satellites, parts of launch vehicles, etc. The only difference with the debris from the anti-satellite mission is that a satellite would be a larger piece weighing a few tonnes, the debris from the destroyed satellite would be smaller, he said. With 830 satellites, US leads the world in the number of satellites, followed by China with 280 satellites. India has 54 satellites. Late on Monday, Pakistan released a statement criticising Indias A-SAT test and saying the reports about the debris posing a risk to ISS were worrying. (With AFP inputs) The United States on Tuesday stated it will utilize all available resources to ensure Jaish-e-Mohammad founder Masood Azhar, was held accountable countering Chinese charges that it has circumvented UN security councils sanctions committee to blacklist the Pakistan-based terrorist leader. While we strongly prefer that UNSC designations take place through the committee process, the United States and its allies and partners, including those on the UN Security Council, will utilize all available avenues to ensure that the founder and leader of the UN-designated terrorist organization JeM is held accountable by the international community, a US state department spokesperson said in a statement to Hindustan Times. The spokesperson also confirmed that we circulated a draft UNSC resolution with U.K. and French support. The state department was responding to China criticizing the United States, France and the United Kingdom for moving a draft resolution at the UNSC as not a constructive move and that it set a bad example. Also read: Positive progress in Masood Azhar case, says China, faults US for UN move Beijing has said the process should have stayed in the 1267 sanctions committee where progress had been made and that the United States was aware of it and yet it insists on pushing the UNSC draft resolution. The United States, France and the United Kingdom moved a draft resolution at the UNSC last week after what they saw was Chinas failure to agree to the designation by removing the technical hold it had put three weeks ago on a proposal the three powers had moved before the sanction committee following the Pulwama attack on a CRPF convoy that killed 40 troopers. Also Read | US says it will use all available resources to blacklist Masood Azhar They were understood to have agreed among themselves to give discussions with China some more days, but not weeks and month. They were prepared, at the same time, to escalate the issue to the full Security Council for an open debate and vote, to force China to either agree or end up defending a known terrorist. China had blocked or put a hold on four proposals to list Azhar a global terrorist so far. The draft resolution set off informal discussions, which could lead to that open debate, but not if the designation was cleared in the interim. As the SUV carrying TV anchor-turned Congress candidate Supriya Srinet drove to her village in Mahrajganj on Monday noon, slogans of Maharajganj ki beti Zindabad rent the air, setting the stage for the poll to be held in the last phase, on May 19. Srinet, daughter of former MP Harshvardhan Singh, has been fielded on a Congress ticket from the Maharajganj seat, where she will be facing a fight from another women leader Tanushree Tripathi, daughter of former MLA and strongman Amar Mani Tripathi, who is currently serving a life term in connection with the murder of poetess Madhumita Shukla. The political debut by two women candidates, both belonging to influential political families in east UP has made the Maharajganj seat contest interesting, while the sitting BJP MP Pankaj Chowdhary is confident of winning the seat a sixth time. Earlier, he won the seat in 1991, 1996, 1998, 2004 and 2014. In 2009, Pankaj faced defeat at the hand of Harshwardhan Singh, who had won his first election from the seat on a Janta Dal ticket way back in 1989. His daughter, Srinet, a TV anchor, is tasked with wresting the seat back from the BJP. On Sunday, before moving to Mahrajganj by road, Srinet took a brief halt on way to Gorakhpur, where she spoke to reporters. Srinet cited the prevailing condition in the country as the reason for joining politics after working for long in the media. When asked about Rahul Gandhis decision to contest from Amethi as well as Waynad in Kerala this time, she was quick to attack PM Modi for contesting elections from two seats in 2014. I am very glad to have been fielded from Maharajganj which has been my fathers karmbhoomi, not for five or 10 years but for 41 years. Also, I have been given a big responsibility by Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi and I am pretty confident that I will stand by the expectation of my party. I will try and follow in the footprints of my father, she said, and refused to comment on Tanushree Tripathi and her father Amarmani Tripathi, saying that more than her, the locals know about them and she didnt want to indulge in any controversy by making any comment. However, Srinet slammed BJP MP Pankaj Chwodhary saying, He has been an MP for five terms but no development has taken place in any of his tenures, not even in 2017, when he his party was in power at the Centre as well as in the State. The Railway line for Mahrajganj, proposal of which was passed during my fathers tenure, has not come up till today. Mahrajganj would have seen some development, had Pankaj Chowdhary taken forward the work done by my father. When contacted, Tanushree Tripathi, representing Shivpal Yadavs Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party, also possesses a Masters degree from London, dismissed Srinet, saying she was just a parachute candidate, little known in her own village. She bet that Srinet would lose her deposit. She is an anchor in an English channel which, is not watched in Maharajganj. Nobody in her own village, including next-door neighbours, know her. I dont know which political legacy of her father she speaks about, as Harshwardhan ji represented the seat for one time in 2009 and after that he lost by 50,000 votes. Also, there is a revolt among Congress workers, who know that she will get not more than 10,000 votes. Secondly, being a sitting MP and BJP leader, he will certainly put up a fight but its me who will win. Chowdhary is facing the ire of locals for not doing work in 25-year tenure. In Mahrajganj, which shares a border with Nepal and is part of the Buddha circuit, we dont have a single hotel for tourists to stay. Besides, the farmers are suffering because all five sugar mills are lying closed, said Tanushree, who shot into light during the 2017 assembly election when she extensively campaigned for her brother Amanmani Tripathi, who fought from jail and won by over 34,000 votes as an independent candidate at a time when BJP clean-swept UP with 73 out of 80 seats. Tanushree is all set to enter wedlock on April 20. Over 18.5 lakh voters will exercise their franchise to elect their representative. The Congress manifesto released by party president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday has promised to pull out the plan to set up the countrys first specialised counter-terrorism agency conceived by the previous UPA government after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. The project, however, had to be put on hold after chief ministers of various states blocked the initiative. As the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi had opposed the federal terror agency at the command of the Centre. Back then, Modi and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee were on the same page voicing their concerns about federal structure and infringement upon the rights of the states. The Congress manifesto promises that a National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) will be set up within 3 months, if the party is voted to power in the Lok Sabha election. The manifesto says the Congress-led government will keep a vigilant eye on the security situation and take every measure that is required to maintain law and order and to provide a sense of security for every citizen and for every visitor to India. The Congress has criticised the counter-terror policies of the Narendra Modi government. The party has targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi citing major terror attacks such as in Pathankot, Uri and recently at Pulwama, where 40 CRPF jawans were killed in a suicide bombing. The Congress manifesto says, The key to internal security is intelligence, analysis and quick response. Congress had put in place the Multi-Agency Centre and the NSG regional hubs. Congress had also proposed to establish the National Counter-Terrorism Centre and NATGRID. The BJP government dismantled the preparatory work and wasted 5 years. NCTC was put in the cold storage and NATGRID is yet to be made operational. Congress promises that NCTC will be set up within 3 months and NATGRID will be made operational by December 2019, the Congress manifesto for the Lok Sabha election reads further. In 2012, then UPA government had to put off its plan to setting up NCTC, as chief ministers of non-Congress ruled states, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal fiercely opposed the move. Even some of the states ruled by the Congress and its alliance partners such as Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh also made it clear that they were not comfortable with the NCTC. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday termed the Congress poll manifesto as a bundle of lies. It is a bundle of lies and the party has expressed its failure over 55 years in its 55-page manifesto, Yogi said at the Yuva Sankalp rally a gathering of youths at Nepal Lodge on second day of his two day visit to Gorakhpur on Tuesday morning. He also alleged that the Congress could not eliminate poverty from the country during over five decades of its rule in the country. He, however, said the richness of a family had increased manifold for sure. He said first it was Pt Nehru who gave the slogan to eliminate poverty. Later Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, both former PMs, also gave the same slogan and now the fourth generation of the Congress was repeating it. Attacking Congress president Rahul Gandhi for the minimum income guarantee scheme NYAY, he said it was nothing but a copy (an oblique reference to the BJPs Kisan NIdhi Yojna under which farmers will be given annual financial help of Rs 6000). Moreover while asking the youth to support the BJP in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, Yogi asked them to remain wary of the SP-BSP-RLD, terming it Mahamilavati (highly adulterated). Opposition is making negative statements on Pulwama and airstrikes and Pakistan is drawing advantage from such remarks by presenting them at the international level in its favour, Yogi said. Later addressing voters convention in Varanasi, the chief minister said the Congress defamed the entire Hindu community by coining the term Hindu terror. Hindu Samaj is the worlds most tolerant community. It is known for its tolerance and generosity across the world. But it is the Congress which declared Hindu Samaj a terrorist and defamed it across the world for its vested political interests, Yogi said. He appealed to the youth to give a befitting reply to such people who coined the term for what he called political gains. Mudra scheme alone gave employment to 15 crore youths, Yogi said, adding that the Congress president was trying to mislead people. Strong determination and will power is required to teach a lesson to enemies, he said. He said PM Narendra Modi had adopted a policy of zero tolerance towards terrorism. Earlier, naxal activities were spread in 270 districts which has been reduced in the Modi government, the chief minister said. Yogi also claimed that stone- pelting incidents in Jammu and Kashmir had come to an end. He said the Modi government had brought a positive change in the North Eastern states. Without naming anyone, he said it was due to the Centres Namami Gange scheme that the Ganga had become clean and a Congress general secretary was doing achman (sipping water as a ritual during puja) in Ganga. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on the Congress minimum guarantee scheme for the poorest of families, saying the opposition party chants about the poor only during elections. Congress president Rahul Gandhi recently announced the NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojana) scheme that guarantees 72,000 per annum for the poor. The Congress has promised to provide cash support to the poorest 20% households of the country if it is voted to power in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The opposition party promised to target five crore families or 25 crore individuals as beneficiaries of NYAY, which Rahul Gandhi has called a revolutionary scheme that will change the face of India. Also read: An idea that will change India: Rahul Gandhi hard sells NYAY at Andhra Pradesh rally They keep chanting the word poor during elections, but they snatch the rights of the poor. This is the truth of the claws of Congress, this is their policy and their principles, said Modi. The Prime Minister was speaking at the Vijay Sankalp Samavesh of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bhawanipatna, the district headquarters of Odishas Kalahandi. WATCH: Modi alleges conspiracy against poor as Rahul promises Nyay Referring to former prime minister Rajiv Gandhis statement on welfare money being embezzled, Modi said the identity of the Congress is associated with Kalahandi. It was here in Kalahandi that Rajiv Gandhi had said that if he sends Re 1 from Delhi, only 15 paise reaches the poor tribals. After decades when the Congress formed the government in Delhi, they accepted only 16 paise out of Re 1 reaches the poor. So in nearly 25 years, Congress gave only 1 paise relief to Odisha. Do you trust these people? he asked. Modi said if the Centre now sends 100 paise to the poor, then the entire money reaches them. We have managed to do in five years what the Congress could not do in decades. Can you believe how much money was going to the pockets of middlemen and being turned into black money? There was no redressal of grievance of the poor. But the BJP government has stopped the leakage of money for the poor, he said. Modi also slammed the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) government accusing it of perpetuating the corruption of Congress. The BJD took forward the corrupt practices of Congress. In the last two decades, mining mafia chit fund scammers and corrupt officials were encouraged in Odisha, he said. Targeting the BJD over not implementing the PM-Kisan programme, Modi said while the central government deposits 75,000 crore directly into the bank account every year to about 12 crore farmers across the country, it could not be implemented in Odisha as the state government stood as a barrier between the farmers and the Centre. Modi alleged that both the Congress and BJD conspired to treat the poor as a vote bank, but cheated them. Due to this deception, people like Dana Majhi could not get an ambulance. Many people in Odisha had to leave their homes and go to other states to do jobs. Due to this deception, Odisha could not develop as much as it was supposed to be. Congress and BJD have conspired to keep the people poor, he alleged. Modi was referring to the poor Odisha tribal who was forced to walk back home with the body of his dead wife on his shoulder as the authorities at the district headquarters hospital at Bhawanipatna did not provide a mortuary van or an ambulance. Continuing his attack on chief minister Naveen Patnaiks 19 years rule, Modi said 19 years are not inadequate. In 19 years, a person becomes eligible to vote. In 19 years, a student becomes an engineer, a doctor or graduate. You relied on the BJD for the last 19 years, but now the time has come to change it, the Prime Minister said. BJD leaders have taken your votes for granted. They think whatever they do, they would get your vote. Now is the time for them to face the reality, he said, reiterating that Odisha is about to script a new history in 2019. Voting in Odisha will be held in four of the seven-phased Lok Sabha election 2019 from April 11 to April 29. Kalahandi will go to polls in the first round. The result will be declared on May 23. Shatrughan Sinha, who has announced he will soon join the Congress party, launched another attack on the Prime Minister as he addressed Narendra Modi as Honble outgoing Sirji. This time, Shatrughan Sinha in his usual style criticised the speeches of Prime Minister Modi and said they lack lack content and depth and have become highly repetitive and irritating. Shatrughan Sinha has announced that he will be quitting the Bharatiya Janata Party and will be joining the Congress on April 6. His decision was finalised after a meeting with Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi last week. Honble outgoing Sirji. Why are you wasting so much money on different channels and on the paid and choreographed crowd who chant your name at any given time - during, before & after your speeches on the signal of the conductors, the actor-turned-politician tweeted on Tuesday. Your rhetorics/speeches lack content and depth these days and have gone to the extent of becoming highly repetitive and irritating. Sirji, I still remain your well wisher despite your EVM misuse and in-spite of all your arrogance. My humble suggestion for you at this eleventh hour would be to become straight and go straight Sinha wrote. The two-time sitting BJP Member of Parliament from Patna Lok Sabha seat has been a vocal critic of the Narendra Modi government for the past couple of years. He has been sidelined in the BJP, which replaced him with Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad as the Lok Sabha candidate from Patna Sahib constituency. Painfully....on the way out of BJP....But hopefully in the best direction under the dynamic leadership of my dear friend Lalu Yadav and the desirable, most talked about leader from the Nehru Gandhi family... the true family of nation builders, he tweeted after a meeting with Congress president Rahul Gandhi on March 28. With less than two weeks before the Lok Sabha elections kick off, the big political question in Gujarat revolves around whether the 2019 election will resemble the 2014 one - when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won all 26 Lok Sabha seats from the state - or 2017 assembly polls - when the BJP struggled and the Congress made a strong comeback. It is this question that frames all conversations. The BJP hopes it can replicate the first. The Congress hopes that it can build on its performance in the subsequent election. But the sense from the ground is that the 2019 elections may not be either. The euphoria and excitement for the BJP, visible in 2014, is missing. But so is the public hostility that was visible in 2017. It is in this landscape that both parties are entering the battle. And this battle revolves around a common set of issues - the impact of Prime Minister Narendra Modi; the candidature of BJP president Amit Shah from Gandhinagar; the meaning of the 2017 verdict where the BJP scraped through; and the Patidar and farm factors. The 2014 hawa [wave] is not presentthe question is whether the Congress has the organisational capacity to leverage this resentment against the BJP, said Hari Desai, a political analyst and commentator. The BJP game plan The BJP has a simple plank - return a Gujarati prime minister to power in Delhi. It was faith in Modi, but more importantly, pride in someone from their own state, who had been chief minister for 12 years, that got the BJP the clean sweep last time around. And this card will be played again. BJP spokesperson Bharat Pandya said, Of course, Narendra Modi and the fact that he is from Gujarat will be a factor. It is also a fact that for 10 years between 2004 to 2014, a lot of Gujarats development was stalled because of an unfriendly Centre. Over the past four years, having Modi ji in Delhi has helped Gujarat, be it through Narmada or the big projects that have come here. But Modi was a factor in 2017 too. Yet the BJPs tally fell to below 100 in a house of 182, and a robust Opposition was constructed with the Congress securing its highest seat tally in two decades. Going by the 2017 pattern in assembly polls, the BJP would win 17 of the 26 seats in the Lok Sabha polls - which means it will lose nine seats. A BJP strategist points out that among these nine seats, the party would face a challenge in constituencies such as Junagadh (where it trailed by over 100,000 votes), Anand (where it trailed by close to 60,000 votes), Surendranagar and Amreli (where it was behind by over 40,000 votes). But in five other seats - Porbandar, Banaskantha, Sabarkantha, Mehsana, and Patan - the party was behind by less than 40,000 votes. In a Lok Sabha election, with Modi as the face, we can make up these margins. Pandya claims the challenges that were visible in 2017 have been overcome. The broad analysis holds two factors as responsible for the setback to BJP in rural pockets - the Patidar agitation and the farmer anger, especially over groundnut and cotton prices, and water. But leaders claim that Hardik Patel, the face of the Patidar protests for reservation in jobs and education, has got discredited in the community, and the governments positive steps - be it setting up bodies for economically weaker sections at the state level or the recent announcement of 10% reservation - will take care of Patel concerns. This could be partly true. Rajnikant Patel is a small farmer and also runs a tea shop in Mehsanas agricultural mandi. A supporter of the Patidar agitation, Patel has turned sceptical of its young mascot, Hardik Patel. He should not have gone to the Congress. The Congress has been in power for 60 years and done little. If he had created another party, I could still have supported him. With Gujarat becoming the first state to follow up on the constitutional amendment which allowed for 10% reservation to economically weaker sections, is Patel happy? Let us wait and see whether this gets implemented. It is too early. Patel also has mixed views on the Narendra Modi governments performance at the Centre. He supports the Goods and Services Tax (GST) - but believes that the rates were too high. He is ambivalent about demonetisation. When asked who he would like to support in the Lok Sabha elections, Patel is firm. Modi. I supported him in 2014 and will do so in 2019. He will win again. BJPs seats may come down. But Modi will once again be PM. His views are echoed by a younger Patel in the Khervad village. This is a departure of sorts because it was the younger men of the community who were the most vocal supporters of Hardik. Nikunj Patel did shift from BJP to the Congress in 2017 on Hardiks prodding, but now feels that the 25-year-old has lost his way. Modi is taking difficult decisions which will give us long term returns. We should support him. The BJP believes that if it is able to retain its urban strongholds, upper caste base, regain a substantial segment of Patidars, keep Other Backward Classes (OBC) groups, and win over farmers through increases in minimum support prices, it would be able to reconstruct its formidable social coalition. And it is banking on the Modi wave to do so. The general sense in party circles is they should be able to comfortably win over 20 seats. And finally, the BJPs move to field Amit Shah from Gandhinagar has energised its cadre and is being seen as a major step to reverse the losses of the 2017 assembly election. Since then, five MLAs have left the Congress to join the ruling party. In particular, the defection of veteran Kunvarji Bavalia (an OBC leader ) and Aasha Patel (a Patidar leader) may hit the opposition party hard given the support of these two communities was crucial for the Congresss improved show. In 2014, when Modiji contested from Vadodara, for us he was contesting from all the 26 seats. Similarly, this time Amitbhai is our candidate for all the seats, said Yogesh Patel, a grassroots worker form Saurashtras Amreli district. A national leader contesting from Gujarat changes everything for the cadre. His candidature from Gandhinagar will help us boost their morale across the state, said Pandya. The Congresss hopes If this is the BJPs game plan, the Congress is not sitting idle either. The Congress partys campaign has relied on its national leadership. It held the Congress Working Committee meeting last month in Gujarat after 60 years and kicked off the Gujarat leg of its campaign from Gandhinagar with the entire top brass, including party president Rahul Gandhi, United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi, former PM Manmohan Singh and newly inducted general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, in attendance. But the partys hopes of winning over Patidar loyalists through Hardik have already suffered a blow. The firebrand young leaders planned electoral debut is now a race against time after the Gujarat high court dismissed his plea seeking a stay on the sentence in a rioting case. Paresh Dhanani is the partys young leader of Opposition in the state assembly. Sitting on the fifth floor of a corporate building in Ahmedabad, Dhanani claims that Modis Gujarati card will not work in 2019. In 2014, two things happened. Under a conspiracy, there was anger generated against the Congress, false allegations were made, our leaders had to face character assassination. Second, Modi told Gujarat that he was their son, their sevak [servant]. And Gujaratis, out of a sense of belonging, sent a fellow Gujarati to Delhi. But the mood now, Dhanani argued, has changed. Till 2014, Modi could claim that the Centre was not with him. But in the last four years, the BJP has had a full majority in both the centre and Gujarat. They have no excuses. The anger against the Congress has ended. And instead, there is a sense of betrayal, dhoka, among those who voted for Modi that he has hurt them the most. In his view, the emotional engagement people of Gujarat had with Modi then has dissipated. Dhanani reads the 2017 assembly datas implications for the Lok Sabha differently. He claims that there are actually 16 out of 26 seats where the Congress has a chance - besides the ones where it had more votes than the BJP, Dhanani includes seats where Congress lost by less than 50,000 votes. The Congress is also banking on the fact that both the Patidar and the farmer anger persists against the BJP. Indeed, the mixed mood among Patidars is visible in Mehsana. In Khervad village, Patel farmers are not as generous as some others were in their neighbourhood. Ramesh Patel owns 10 bighas of land while Bharat Patel owns three bighas. They were both Modi voters in 2014, but turned to the Congress in 2017. Both have become critical of Hardik Patel and claim he used the movement only for personal benefits. But this has not translated into support for the BJP either. Their disenchantment comes from agrarian issues. Demonetisation harmed our incomes. GST made goods more expensive for us. We got hurt both ways. Diesel prices increased. Fertiliser prices increased. Modi just talks,said Bharat Patel. When asked if they would be willing to vote against a Gujarati PM, Ramesh Patels response is an emphatic yes. We have to defeat the Gujarati PM this time. Only the election results will tell which of the two parties is correct. But it is clear that the battle in Gujarat will revolve around the persona of Narendra Modi, the economy, Patidar discontent, and the condition of farmers. Appears some that points drafted by Congress presidents friend in Tukde Tukde gang when it deals with J-K: Arun Jaitley Even though there was a drafting committee, but it appears that some of the important points have been drafted by the Congress president's friend in Tukde Tukde gang when it deals with J&K: Shri @arunjaitley #BharatBoleModiModi BJP (@BJP4India) April 2, 2019 Cong does not deserve even single vote for promises like doing away with sedition law: Arun Jaitley Congress does not deserve even single vote for promises like doing away with sedition law, says Arun Jaitley Positively dangerous, Arun Jaitley on Congress Manifesto Positively dangerous, Arun Jaitley on Congress Manifesto. Congress making dangerous promises, says finance mMinister Arun Jaitley on the party manifesto Congress manifesto is about balkanisation of India: Arun Jaitley Congress manifesto is about balkanisation of India... The manifesto has agenda that will break the country, says Arun Jaitley Will get minimum 30 seats in Tamil Nadu: Amit Shah We have formed a strong alliance in Tamil Nadu and will get a minimum of 30 seats in the sate. DMK and Congress have fielded corrupt politicians like Kanimozhi, Karti Chidambaram and A Raja, said Amit Shah while addressing a public meeting in Tamil Nadu. Two union ministers from Tamil Nadu in our reign: Amit Shah Last time we had not marked a big victory in Tamil Nadu. Only BJPs Pon Radhakrishnan had won. However, we made two people, Pon Radhakrishnan and Nirmala Sitharaman, from Tamil Nadu as union ministers, said Amit Shah in Tamil Nadu. BJP will not give Kashmir to others: Amit Shah We are making tough against terrorism. During the BJP government, the IAF destructed terrorist camps in Pakistan. But,Congress government did not take any steps to contain terrorism. We should punish terrorists who killed our soldiers. However, the Congress is not ready for that. The Congress party says it will review the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Disturbed Areas Act. Congress is not concerned about the nations security. We BJP will not give Kashmir to others. It is our terrain, said Amit Shah while addressing a rally in Tamil Nadu. GST, demonetisation have affected small businesses: Mayawati The way PM Modis government implemented GST and demonetization, in haste, that affected small businesses; that also led to increase in unemployment, said BSP chief Mayawati while addressing a public meeting in Odisha. Mayawati kickstarts poll campaign Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati is in Odisha has kickstarted her election campaign. Congress promises simplifies GST, modern programmes for Armed Forces Congress will radically simplify the GST regime with a single moderate rate of tax, zero rating of exports, and exemption for essential goods and services. We also promise panchayats and municipalities a share of GST revenues, Congress said in manifesto. Congress will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government, and increase it to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces. We will expedite all modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces in a transparent manner. We will improve social security, education and health facilities for our Paramilitary Forces and families, the manifesto adds. Congress promises separate kisan budget, universal healthcare For farmers, Congress promises to put them on the path from Karz Maafi, to Karz Mukti. This will be done through remunerative prices, lower input costs, and assured access to institutional credit. We will present a separate Kisan Budget every year. We will also establish a permanent National Commission on Agricultural Development and Planning, Congress said in its manifesto. Congress promises to enact the Right to Healthcare Act and guarantee every citizen free, diagnostics, out-patient care, free medicines and hospitalisation, through a network of public hospitals and enlisted private hospitals. We will double expenditure on healthcare to 3 per cent of GDP by 2023-24, it adds. Congress promises to introduce NYAY, bring job revolution To ensure a life of dignity to all Indians, Congress will introduce the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) under which Rs. 72,000/year will be transferred to the poorest 20 per cent households in India. It will be transferred to the woman in the household, as far as possible, read the Congress manifesto. To the youth of India, Congress pledges to make jobs our no.1 priority, both in the public and private sector. We will ensure 34 lakh jobs in the public sector by; a. Filling all 4 lakh central government vacancies before March 2020. b. Persuading the state governments to fill their 20 lakh vacancies. c. Creating an estimated 10 lakh new Seva Mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local body. We will also provide a fillip to private sector jobs by; a. Rewarding businesses for job creation and employing more women, b. Requiring businesses with over 100 employees to implement an apprenticeship programme, the manifesto adds. Congress key pledges in manifesto 1. Minimum Income Guarantee To Eliminate Poverty Or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) 2. Jobs Revolution 3. Farmers And Farm Labour 4. Universal Healthcare 5. GST 2.0 6. Armed Forces and Paramilitary Forces 7. Quality Education For Every Child 8. Gender Justice 9. Adivasis 10. Right to Homestead 11. End to Hate Crimes 12. Celebrating Freedom 13. Protecting Our Institutions 14. Cities and Urban Governance 15. Environment and Climate Change Chowkidar can hide but not run says Rahul Gandhi Chowkidar can hide but not run. I don t understand why the PM doesnt address you, why doesnt he answer your questions like this, why is he scared of you,says Rahul Gandhi. South India feels hostility from the PM: Rahul Gandhi South India feels hostility from the PM, they feel they are not being included in the decision making in the country. This is why I am contesting from Wayanad, said Rahul Gandhi. NYAY and employment among 5 big ideas in Congress manifesto Five big ideas in manifesto, the first being NYAY. PM Narendra Modi said Rs 15 lakh will be put. I asked manifesto committee to give me the truth. How much can we really put into bank accounts of poor people. They gave me a number. Rs 72,000. Garibi pe vaar, Rs 72,000. In five years, 3.6 lakh. This will put money into pockets of poor. 2nd PM modi jammed economy with notes ban. This will jumpstart economy by putting money in hands, said Rahul Gandhi. Congress promises 150 days of MNREGA, separate kisan budget Congress promises 150 days of MNREGA in its manifesto. We have also decided to bring a separate farmers budget and 6% of the GDP will be contributed to education, and will also make non-payment of loans by farmers civil offence instead of criminal one said Rahul Gandhi. Didnt want a single thing in this manifesto that is a lie: Rahul Gandhi This manifesto is a massive step for Congress. When we started process a year back, I spoke to Chidambaram and Rajeev Gowda, I said dont want a single thing in this manifesto that is a lie. We are hearing large number of lies being spoken by PM, said Rahul Gandhi. Cong manifesto panel has delivered voice of people: Rahul Gandhi We took a year's time to cover all the objectives in the manifesto. We took opinions from the people and their wishes have been scripted in the manifesto, said Rahul Gandhi at Congress manifesto launch. Congress releases party manifesto Rahul Gandhi releases Congress manifesto, says it reflects wishes of the people. Manifesto spells out vision of rapidly expanding economy: Manmohan Singh Manifesto spells out vision of rapidly expanding economy: Manmohan Singh Idea is to set narrative for 2019, says Chidambaram at Congress manifesto release Idea is to set the narrative for 2019. Congress president has already set the narrative. The BJP is our opposition. That party is trying to seize narrative to what they tried five years back, i.e. the narrative of polarization, divisiveness and hypernationalism. Have to bring the narrative to the real issues, which are unemployment, farmers distress, women security said Chidambaram ahead of Congress manifesto release. Our manifesto will script bright future for country: Congress Our manifesto will script bright future for country, said Congress ahead of the release of partys 2019 manifesto. Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh at Congress manifesto launch UPA chairperson Sonia and former prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh joined Congress president Rahul Gandhi at the launch of Congress manifesto ahead of Lok Sabha elections 2019. You trusted the BJD for 19 years, but its now time for transformation: PM You trusted the BJD for 19 years, but its now time for transformation and to bring BJP again at the Centre so as to facilitate double-engine growth, said PM Modi in Odisha. We identified 8 cr fake people who were availing subsidies: PM We identified 8 crore fake people who were availing subsidies and looting public money, said PM Narendra Modi in Odisha. Congress to shortly release party manifesto The Congress president Rahul Gandhi will shortly release the party manifesto for Lok Sabha elections 2019. Congress, BJD conspired to keep the poor as poor: PM Modi Parties like Congress and BJD conspired to keep the poor of the country poor, they deceived the poor. They treated them as vote-bank; and because of this dont know how many Dana Manjhis dont even get ambulance, said PM Modi in Odisha. Introduced a tribal ministry for the first time: PM Modi Tribal people have been in the country for a long time but none of the previous governments had a special ministry for them. For the first time, the Centre introduced a tribal ministry to work towards the welfare of the many tribes in the country, said PM Modi in Odisha. If BJP was in power in Odisha, development would have been faster: PM Had BJP been in power in Odisha, development in state would have been on a much faster pace, because the state government here doesnt move. I have worked for you despite not getting from the state, said PM Modi. Credit for transformation in country goes to the people: PM Modi I worked diligently to bring transformation in the country. It was possible because people supported me. The credit for the transformation in the country goes to the people of the country, said PM Modi in Odisha. Didnt take a single leave in last 5 years: PM Modi Ever since you elected me in Delhi, I didnt take a single a leave in the last five years. I put in as much efforts that are possible by a human body, said PM Modi in Odisha. PM Modi addresses poll rally in Odishas Kalahandi Prime Minister Narendra Modi today began addressing a poll rally in Odishas Kalahandi. PM Modi set to address poll rally in Odishas Kalahandi PM Narendra Modi is set to address a public meeting in Odishas Kalahandi. BJP, Congress locked in tight battle in Arunachal assembly seat A neck-and-neck electoral battle in on the cards in the assembly constituency of Pakke-Kesang, the newly created district in Arunachal Pradesh, where both contesting candidates of the ruling BJP and the Congress claim to enjoy equal popularity. BJP candidate B R Waghe and Congress nominee Atum Welly will vie for the seat, which was earlier a part of the East Kameng district. The Pakke-Kesang assembly constituency was in the news post the 2014 assembly polls, as former deputy chief minister Kameng Dolo, who won as a Congress nominee, had to give up the seat, following a Gauhati High Court order that declared his election null and void. Congress fields Mohan Joshi against BJPs Girish Bapat in Pune Putting an end to suspense, the Congress has announced Mohan Joshi as its candidate from Pune Lok Sabha constituency in Maharashtra. The announcement was made late Monday night by the Congress in an official release, a day after its city unit started poll campaigning in the constituency though it had then not declared its candidate. Joshis main rival in Pune constituency is five-time BJP MLA and state cabinet minister Girish Bapat. Joshi, popularly known as dada in political circles, is considered a loyalist of the Congress since 1972. Mayawati to kickstart poll campaigning from Odisha Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati is scheduled to visit Odisha on Tuesday to kick off her election campaign. Mayawati will address a public rally at Baramunda Ground in Bhubaneswar, a statement from the party read. The BSP is going solo in Odisha. After Odisha, Mayawati will address poll rallies in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra. She will be back to Lucknow on April 5. Should be limit to lies: Tejashwi Yadavs tweet before PMs Bihar rallies Prime Minister Modi will address two back-to-back rallies in Gaya and Jamui, which have witnessed several violent Maoist incidents in the recent past, on Tuesday. Bihar chief minister and Janata Dal(United) chief Nitish Kumar will also campaign for the Lok Sabha election from Gaya with the Prime Minister. Modi ji is coming to Gaya once again. Prime Minister @narendramodi, listen to the speech that you gave the last time when you were in Gaya carefully. I am sure you will be embarrassed. Does one exaggerate so much? There should be some limit to the lies, Prime Minister, Tejashwi Yadav tweeted in Hindi on Tuesday. Dear PM @narendramodi Ji, Just reminding what you had promised to Bihar & Biharis on 10-03-2014 in Purnea. You promised to give Bihar- * Special Status * Special Package *Special Attention Before visiting Bihar & to befool Biharis again first see the MIRROR & answer thyself, he wrote. Congress to release poll manifesto The Congress party is likely to launch its crowdsourced manifesto for the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections on Tuesday. Congress president Rahul Gandhi has been outlining the partys agenda at election rallies and many of these are expected to be part of the manifesto including the much-hyped minimum income scheme. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Sunday address a gathering of first-time voters . He will seek their support for a second term, a ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said. Young voters are crucial as always, and the prime ministers interaction is [aimed] to mobilise support from this set of the electorate, said the BJP leader. The event is likely to be held outside Delhi in the state capital of a major state. First-time voters elsewhere will be able to join the interaction at different locations through video conferencing. Approximately 900 million people are eligible to vote in 2019 compared to 814.5 million five years earlier. This marks an increase of over 84 million voters. Over 15 million of them or 1.66% of the total electorate are in the 18-19 age group, compared to 23.1 million (2.8 % of the total voters) ahead of the 2014 Parliamentary elections. Modi has called the 15 million as millennium voters who were born in 2000 and asked the BJP to reach out to them, according to people aware of the developments. The BJP launched a Pehla Vote Modi Ko (first vote to Modi) campaign to woo the first-time voters . It has organised many outreach programme over the last three months to reach out to them. The size of millennium voters may look small, but they can be the deciding factor on many seats. If you take the 84 million new voters, their impact on the final outcome will be even greater, the BJP leader said. The ruling party considers these voters crucial in 250-odd LS seats, especially in those seats where its victory margin was relatively thin . Experts credit overwhelming support among young voters for the BJPs return to power in 2014 when it won 282 seats . The vote share of the BJP among young voters was 34.4 per cent, more than three percentage points higher than its average vote share of 31.1 per cent, said Centre for the Study of Developing Societies director Sanjay Kumar in a paper . Some doubt the BJP would get the same response from young voters in 2019 elections. I have my doubts about the success of any BJP programme in drawing young voters like it did in 2014, said Centre for Reforms, Development and Justice president Sidharth Mishra. Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Monday that his party wants direct elections for mayors to improve the quality of urban living. Gandhis announcement comes a day before the party will release its manifesto on Tuesday for the staggered national polls that begin on April 11. Real smart cities are built by good leaders. To improve quality of life in our cities we will move to directly elected Mayors with 5 yr terms & elected councils. Administration will be run by multidisciplinary teams of specialists & experts accountable to the Mayor & council, he tweeted. Currently, mayors are elected indirectly, that is to say, from among the corporators and councillors. The state-appointed Municipal Commissioner has administrative and executive powers. A strong mayor model puts executive power in the hands of the mayor -- currently followed in many cities such as New York, Tokyo and Barcelona -- rather than the commissioner or chief executive. Although the Constitution (seventy-fourth) Amendment Act of 1992 conferred constitutional recognition on Urban Local Bodies, it did not specify a model of governance for cities or the manner in which the chief of ULBs would be elected. Its an excellent idea because that is the spirit in which the 74th amendment act was promulgated. The amendment empowers the local municipality to bring out master plans for towns and at present, the mayor is just a puppet in the hands of the commissioner, or the state and central government who controls the finances...hence putting that power in the hands of an elected representative is a true expression of democracy, said KT Ravindran, professor and head of urban design at the School of Planning and Architecture of New Delhi. If you look at our 2004, 2009 and 2014 manifestos, its a policy initiative covering all core sectors. Unlike BJP saying they will make 100 smart cities... our focus is on the policy, said a Congress leader . He said the manifesto proposes radical judicial reforms and electoral reforms. There is a dedicated section for minority upliftment. The manifesto also proposes a free and fair election in the state of Jammu& Kashmir along with internal security in the state. Senior Congress leaders, involved in the manifesto process, indicated that the poll paper will have quite a few broad policy directions covering many core social, economic and administrative sectors. The plan would be to indicate the reforms that the Congress intends to usher in, if it comes to power. If you look at our manifestos of 2004, 2009 and 2014 its a broad policy initiative covering all core sectors. Unlike BJP saying they will make 100 smart cities, we dont make specific claims in such a way. Our focus is on the policy, said a senior leader. He added that apart from unemployment and the framework of the NYAY scheme, there will also be a section on the protection of environment and water bodies and curbing air pollution. We will also focus on coastal security guidelines, another Congress leader said. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won all 26 seats in Gujarat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. No party has achieved this kind of success in the history of Gujarat. Can the BJP repeat this performance in 2019? The BJPs 2014 vote share came down by 10 percentage points to 49% in the 2017 assembly elections. Normally a 49% vote share should lead to a huge seat share for a political party. However, this was not the case for the BJP in the 2017 Gujarat elections. Despite increasing its vote share by 2 percentage points between 2012 and 2017, the BJP suffered a 9 percentage point decline in its seat share in the 2017 elections. Understanding this otherwise counter-intuitive trend holds the key to any analysis of the verdict Gujarat might throw in the 2019 elections. The biggest reason why the BJP could not prevent a decline in its 2017 seat tally despite adding to its 2012 vote share is that its performance was regionally skewed. Simply speaking, this means while the BJP did well in a few assembly constituencies (ACs) in urban pockets, it actually lost ground in a large number of ACs in rural areas of the state. In terms of vote share, the BJP had a lead of 30 percentage points or more over the Congress in 18 ACs in the 2017 elections. The number of such ACs for the Congress was zero. In another 22 ACs, the BJP had a lead of 20-30 percentage points over the Congress, while there were only six such seats where the Congress had similar leads over the BJP. In contrast, the Congress won 71 ACs with a lead of less than 20 percentage points, while the BJP won just 60 such seat. See chart A lot of what happens in Gujarat will depend on how the Congress and BJP perform in seats that saw close contests in 2017. If the Congress manages to make even small gains in some close seats it lost to the BJP, it could expect to win a significant number of seats. An AC-wise extrapolation of the 2017 results to Lok Sabha seats gives seven and 19 seats to the Congress and the BJP in the state. Things could be drastically different if BJP were to regain even some of its lost ground in the closely contested regions. Panelists Trudy Doyle and Nancy Leavy were involved in the 1st Tuesday Group, which Doyle described as "young mothers with college educations and young kids" who strove to "make Oak Park the kind of place we knew it could be" through education. Leavy described it as "an incubator for ideas." Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders such as Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti, Kalyan Singh and Vinay Katiyar, who led the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, are absent from the electoral race this time. While some of them have been denied tickets by the party, others have decided not to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, or are serving in constitutional positions. The forthcoming Lok Sabha will be bereft of the Ram temple movement heroes, probably for the first time in the last three decades, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Sharad Sharma said. VHP is one of the outfits that spearheaded the Ayodhya movement. But it is the BJPs internal matter..., he said. Once called an iron man by the party, former deputy PM Advani will not contest the election this time. A former party president, Advani led a Rath Yatra in September-October 1990 to demand the construction of a grand temple at the site of the Babri mosque that was razed on December 6, 1992. Former HRD minister Joshi, who was closely associated with the Ram temple movement, has also been dropped this time. Joshi led the BJP as its president between 1991 and 1993, the period when the country was on the boil because of the temple agitation that culminated into the demolition of the Babri mosque. Union minister Uma Bharti, who was indicted by the Liberhan Commission for her alleged presence during the demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya, offered not to contest the election. Barjrang Dal founder-president Vinay Katiyar, also a BJP leader, has been denied ticket. Katiyar has always been very vocal about Ram temple construction in Ayodhya and played a key role in kar seva in the 1990s. Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh, who was a Lok Sabha member from 2009 to 2014, will not contest the election this time as he is currently serving as the Rajasthan governor. The BJP played down the issue. This is partys prerogative to choose candidates. But a more important issue is that all party leaders and other Ram Bhakts are working in tandem to make Narendra Modi the PM prime minister once again, Uttar Pradesh BJP spokesperson Chandramohan said. Congress leader Ajay Kumar claimed the BJP is not serious about the Ram temple issue. The BJP has forgotten the temple issue; so has its leaders associated with the temple agitation. Echoing similar sentiments, Samajwadi Party (SP) leader and spokesman, Sunil Kumar, said, The BJP has an uncanny tendency of forgetting anything for political expediency. They have forgotten all their promises... Prof SK Sharma, who teaches political science at Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut said, The shape of politics and the leaders have all changed with the change of time . The temple agitation belonged the 1990s while today, development is the main issue. Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav has attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of his Lok Sabha election rallies in Bihars Gaya and Jamui, pulling him on the promises he made to the state during the last general polls. Prime Minister Modi will address two back-to-back rallies in Gaya and Jamui, which have witnessed several violent Maoist incidents in the recent past, on Tuesday. Bihar chief minister and Janata Dal(United) chief Nitish Kumar will also campaign for the Lok Sabha election from Gaya with the Prime Minister. Modi ji is coming to Gaya once again. Prime Minister @narendramodi, listen to the speech that you gave the last time when you were in Gaya carefully. I am sure you will be embarrassed. Does one exaggerate so much? There should be some limit to the lies, Prime Minister, Tejashwi Yadav tweeted in Hindi on Tuesday. Sir, Remember what you had promised to Bihar and people of Bihar in 2014 & 2015. Also dont forget its your own NDA govt in Bihar for last 15 years in leadership of U-Turn Chacha (The DNA CM). Putting some videos of Gaya for your kind reference. Hope you dont have memory loss https://t.co/4M8jeZbx99 Tejashwi Yadav (@yadavtejashwi) April 2, 2019 Dear PM @narendramodi Ji, Just reminding what you had promised to Bihar & Biharis on 10-03-2014 in Purnea. You promised to give Bihar- * Special Status * Special Package *Special Attention Before visiting Bihar & to befool Biharis again first see the MIRROR & answer thyself, he wrote. Dear PM @narendramodi Ji, Just reminding what you had promised to Bihar & Biharis on 10-03-2014 in Purnea. You promised to give Bihar- * Special Status * Special Package * Special Attention Before visiting Bihar & to befool Biharis again first see the MIRROR & answer thyself pic.twitter.com/pNj0lAAHS1 Tejashwi Yadav (@yadavtejashwi) April 2, 2019 Bihars opposition alliance has announced a seat-sharing deal for the Lok Sabha elections and the RJD, the senior partner, will contest 19 of the states 40 Lok Sabha seats. The Congress party will fight in nine under the arrangement. Former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi will contest from Gaya. The BJP has not fielded any candidate from either Gaya or Jamui constituencies, which will vote on April 11. The BJPs ally JD(U) has fielded Vijay Kumar Manjhi from Gaya and the Lok Janshakti Partys (LJPs) Chirag Paswan will contest from Jamui. Polling in the eastern state will be held in all the seven phases of the Lok Sabha elections scheduled to begin from April 11 and end on May 19. The results will be declared on May 23. Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray has said his partys alliance with the BJP would stay strong if they are honest with each other after the parties recently joined hands again following an acrimonious relationship for the last five years. Uddhav Thackeray, in his first major interview after the alliance was forged, spoke on various issues including the reasons to ally with the BJP, the state of the opposition in the country, the Ram Temple issue, spreading Senas base, and why the Sena-BJP alliance is an answer to the woes of the people in Maharashtra. In his interview to Sena mouthpiece Saamana, the Sena chief said he does not regret taking on the Bharatiya Janata Party while being in power with the national party. We will not betray you, you shouldnt betray us, he said was the mantra for the alliance between the two parties. As a part of the deal, of Maharashtras 48 Lok Sabha seats the Shiv Sena will contest 23 and the BJP 25 in the April-May general elections. According to Thackeray, the decision to ally with the BJP once again was on the basis of Hindutva and done after the national party fulfilled the conditions the Sena had taken up for the people. All the issues the Shiv Sena took up were for the people. They were acknowledged, accepted, and they are being acted upon and rectified. So why should we be in a conflict? he asked. Also read: Agreed to alliance as BJPs way of treating allies has changed, says Uddhav Thackeray The Sena chief said that the party was lax in the 25 years of the alliance with the BJP and did not spread its base across the state. Referring to his statement that the Sena rotted in the 25 years of alliance with the BJP he said, Understand what I mean by we rotted for 25 years. After the alliance we were lax. Shiv Sena chief (Bal Thackeray) had then toured the entire state. But after the alliance we got lax. Now, this laxity wont be seen. Thackeray, however, did not clarify on the power sharing agreement between the Sena and BJP for the assembly elections. When the alliance was announced on February 18, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had said that both parties would have an equal share of power and responsibilities in Maharashtra. I think what the chief minister said during the alliance announcement is enough on the matter that the responsibility and power will be equally shared. You can make sense of that statement, he said when asked about the next chief minister of Maharashtra. In stark contrast to Prime Minister Narendra Modis Congress-mukt Bharat (Congress-free India) slogan during the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Thackeray said he does not have such petty imaginations. When asked if the problems of the country would be solved if it becomes free of Congress-rule, Thackeray said, I never said anything about Congress-mukt country. I never said that finish the Congress because the opposition should remain Finish off or Congress-mukt, I do not have such petty imagination. That said, the condition of the Congress today is bad, it does not have tall leaders it earlier had like [PV] Narasimha Rao. The Sena chief also took on Congress president Rahul Gandhi and said there is no opposition party that can take on the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance or NDA at the Centre. He said that like in 2014, the opposition still cannot bring about a change of power at the Centre. The Congress doesnt have the leadership. What is Rahul Gandhi doing exactly is a question before the people Sometimes he says something good and at times he makes a mess, he said. Thackeray also said his visit to Ayodhya has reignited the Ram temple issue that was in lying in the cold storage. He said he would like the Supreme Court to set a deadline for the mediation process it has ordered. If its (Ram temple issue) resolution doesnt happen at desired speed, I will again go to Ayodhya... After the Shiv Sena went to Ayodhya the issue that was lying in cold storage started moving again, he said. The court had to take some steps, along with the government. The court has appointed mediators now so the issue has moved ahead. I have only one request that the court should define a deadline to resolve it, he said. Uddhav Thackeray also said Balasaheb Thackerays teachings have been that defeat is better than false promises when asked about jumlas. During elections, if one says I do not promise anything to the voter, then he wont give his valuable vote. But while promising the voters, things that cannot be fulfilled should not be promised. One knows their capacity to fulfill promises. It should be taken into account before promising the voters. On Sunday, the Congress announced Rahul Gandhis candidature from Wayanad in Kerala. Today, a political partys newspaper in Kerala carried an editorial, which says Rahul Gandhis prospects in Amethi do not look good; a hype is being created about a Rahul Wave; Priyanka Gandhis entry does not seem to be having any impact; Wayanad has been chosen with an eye on minority votes etc. Intuition would suggest that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would say such things. However, the newspaper in question is Deshabhimani, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)s mouthpiece in Kerala. To be sure, there is nothing new in the CPI (M) and the Congress trading such polemics in Kerala. In fact, they do worse, and indulge in lethal political violence, in which party workers from both sides even lose their lives. However, the Congresss decision to field Gandhi in Kerala is a clear snub to the all-India leadership of the CPI (M), especially its general secretary Sitaram Yechury. Heres why. After Yechury took over as general secretary of the CPI (M) in 2015, there has been a clear pro-Congress tilt in the stance of the CPI (M). The biggest proof of this was an alliance of the CPI (M)-led Left Front and the Congress in the 2016 assembly elections in West Bengal. Ironically, this was in complete violation of the political line adopted at the 21st party congress of the CPI (M), which elected Yechury as general secretary. The political resolution adopted at the party congress was categorical. While the main direction of the struggle is against the BJP, the party will continue to oppose the CongressThe party will have no understanding or electoral alliance with the Congress, it said. This author predicted before the West Bengal results that the alliance would be counter-productive for the CPI (M) while it could benefit the Congress . The CPI (M) lost its status as the principal opposition party in the West Bengal assembly to the Congress in 2016. The line of not having any truck with the Congress was reiterated once again in the 22nd party congress in 2018. However, this did not prevent the CPI (M) from having prolonged seat-sharing negotiations with the Congress in West Bengal for 2019 elections. The disagreement was essentially on seat-sharing rather than ideological reasons. In Bengal, we said that there will be no mutual contest in the sitting seats. The Congress was unfortunately rigid... we have been sincere in our no-contest offer, it is the Congress which reneged, Yechury said in an interview to Press Trust of India. Also Watch: Rahul Gandhi to contest from Wayanad LS seat apart from Amethi No amount of ideological gymnastics can explain the CPI (M)s hypocritical stance vis-a-vis the Congress today. It wants to ally with the Congress in West Bengal, but calls it all sorts of names in Kerala. And this is a party that demands unanimity on even international affairs within its ranks. To be fair, the Kerala unit of the CPI (M) is at least being consistent in its posturing. Even in 2004, when the Opposition was trying everything to defeat the then BJP-led government, the CPI (M)-led Left Democratic Front won an unprecedented 18 out of the 20 seats in Kerala, with the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) being its main adversary. Despite the LDF and UDF being arch-rivals, the Left extended outside support to a Congress-led government without any controversy within its ranks. What has changed today then? Why is the CPI (M) leadership accusing the Congress of targeting the left by trying to field Rahul Gandhi from Kerala? The LDF and the UDF continue to be arch-rivals in the southern state. The actual problem is outside Kerala. The CPI (M) is facing extinction in its erstwhile stronghold of West Bengal, which gave an average of 31 out of 42 seats in the state to the CPI (M)-led Left Front between 1980 and 2004. This tally came down to just two in 2014. The LDFs tally in Kerala, unlike West Bengal, has been quite volatile. It was the assured parliamentary strength from West Bengal, which gave the all-India leadership of the CPI (M) (people like Harkishan Singh Surjeet) the wherewithal to convince regional players to forge both pre-poll and post-poll anti-BJP coalitions. The Congress had good reason for not riding roughshod over the Left when it was assured to have at least 35 seats in the Lok Sabha. The CPI (M) leadership can no longer play the pre-2009 role in dictating the strategy of Congress or other anti-BJP parties. Instead of showing double standards vis-a-vis the Congress, the CPI (M) leadership should introspect whether there is any Lok Sabha seat in the country where the rank and file of the Left will share the same kind of enthusiasm which the Congress workers in Wayanad are displaying over Rahul Gandhis candidature. The short point is the leadership of the CPI (M) does not evoke confidence within its rank and file. This is a big reason for the predicament facing the left in Indian politics today. After pitching a hard-line Hindutva stance before the Lok Sabha elections, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray will now reach out to Catholics and other religious minorities in Vasai-Virar region, which falls in the Palghar Lok Sabha constituency. Thackeray, who will be on a two-day tour of Palghar starting Tuesday, will visit the Vasai Gurdwara and meet Archbishop Felix Machado, the Archbishop of Vasai. For the Sena, which got the Palghar parliamentary seat from the quota of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a part of the alliance deal, the seat has now become a matter of prestige. According to Sena leaders, the party is building on from its experience during the 2018 by-election there. Vasai-Virar and the tribal pockets of Palghar district have a considerable Catholic population who are not traditional voters of the BJP. Thackeray in the past 10 months has raked the Ram Temple issue vociferously and even called for immediate construction of a grand temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya. Uddhavji will interact will all sections during his tour, not just the Catholics or Sikhs. We have tasted success in the 2018 by-poll. All the 23 seats that we are contesting are important to us, said Anil Desai, party secretary. According to Sena leaders, Thackeray will go to around 30 spots between Vasai and Talasari in Palghar district. The tour assumes significance as Sena is working hard to wrest control over the seat that is geographically, economically and socially diverse. He is slated to start his tour from Nalla Sopara, Vasai and Virar, which are known to be strongholds of Hitendra Thakurs Bahujan Vikas Aghadi (BVA). In the 2018 by-poll, the Sena was pitted against the BJP, BVA and Congress. Its candidate came a close second to BJPs Rajendra Gavit. According to the results, both the Sena and BJP took a hit in votes in Vasai and Nalla Sopara Assembly constituencies. Thakurs party holds sway in the two Assembly constituencies and an extensive visit in the constituency is aimed at building from our performance, said a party functionary. Father Richard Dabre, secretary to Archbishop Machado, confirmed that Thackeray will meet the leader on Tuesday. He said, Uddhav Thackeray will meet Archbishop Machado at 11 am. It is a cordial visit because the elections are announced. Leaders from all political parties visit the Archbishop to seek his blessings when they are in Vasai, Father Dabre said. An umbrella organisation of major civil societies and student associations in Mizoram have decided to boycott the April 11 election to the lone Mizoram Lok Sabha seat and organise a state-wide indefinite bandh from April 8, sources in it said Monday. The NGO Coordination Committee said that a decision was taken earlier to boycott the Parliamentary polls if special polling booths are established at Mizoram-Tripura border Kanhmun village. The NGOCC opposed the establishment of special polling stations at Kanhmun by the election department and the state government officials, a statement issued by the committee and signed by NGOCC Secretary Lalhmachhuana said. The EC is setting up 15 exclusive polling booths in the village for Bru refugees from Mizoram who are housed in six camps in neighbouring Tripura. The step had been taken in the November 2018 Mizoram assembly polls too. Appeals would again be made to the authorities to ensure that Bru voters housed in the relief camps in North Tripura district should exercise franchise in their respective villages where they were enrolled as voters and indefinite bandh be organised from April eight to pressurise the authorities, the statement said. The NGOCC appealed to all the commercial and private vehicle owners requisitioned for transportation of central armed police force (CAPC) and state police personnel as also for use by polling officials not to allow their vehicles for the election purposes. The Bru community in the Tripura relief camps have refused to return to Mizoram for years despite several repatriation efforts. In 2014 the NGOCC had boycotted the Lok Sabha polls on the same issue and the EC had then succumbed to the demands of the civil societies saying that the Bru voters would cast their votes only inside Mizoram and not in their relief camps. The agitation was then called off. The 15 polling stations are being set up at Kanhmun village so that 11,941 Bru voters in the six relief camps can exercise their franchise, EC sources said. Bru leaders have sought to casting their votes in the relief camps. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Its breakfast time when 4-5 middle-aged people gather at a tea stall near Gokul Baba temple in Magarwara village of Unnao. After ordering tea and kachori at the eatery, the villagers engage in a political discussion after one of them reads a report on the minimum income guarantee scheme promised by Congress president Rahul Gandhi if the party is voted to power. Ye bhi to satta me rahe, kya de diya? (They were in power to, what did they give to the people), says septuagenarian Dahsrath Yadav, a resident of neighbouring Maswasi village. The discussion also touches issues like nationalism and air strike across the Line of Control (LoC) in Pakistan after a terror attack on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama (J&K) which claimed the lives of at least 41 personnel. However, local issues regarding basic amenities and development dominate the discussion. Sanjay Kumar of Magarwara who works in a private factory in Kanpur says: We have to elect a government to run the country. Obviously national issues will rule the roost but what about other issues like development and basic facilities? We cant ignore them too. Om Prasad, the owner of the eatery, also chips in: I was working at a tannery in Kanpur but I was fired after the government shut down slaughterhouses. Whatever money I had, I invested in this tea stall. Rozgaar dene aaye the, chheen kar chale gye (They had come on the promise of job creation but ended up snatching our jobs). But will they vote for the party in power? Abhi bahut samay hai. Sab kuchh dekhna hai. Samasya bhi dekhenge lekin leader dekhna bhi zaruri hai. (We have lot of time. All aspects have to be seen. Problems will be deliberated on and we will also consider who the leader is), says another villager. Claiming that the issue of national security is important but it is not the only issue, a local resident Prakash Pasi says the government acted tough against Pakistan but it is a separate issue. We want solution to other problems too, he says. In Bichhiya village of Unnao, Prabhu Dayal is frying samosas at his shop while waiting for customers. Our village has many farmers and they face numerous issues. The government claims to have helped us but our fate has yet not changed, he adds. His brother Ram Prasad rues that 2,000 were deposited in his account under the Kisan Samman Yojana but were auto-debited from his account the same day. Was this some kind of joke he asks. A customer at the stall Lalji Kumar says, Ab to Priyanka Gandhi bhi maidan me hai. Congress ko fayda to hoga. (Now, Priyanka Gandhi is also active. Congress will gain). Another resident Rati complains she was also not paid 2,000 under Kisan Samman Yojana. However, villagers say that the amount was reversed by the government from the bank account of some farmers after it was found that they were not eligible for the benefit. Sipping tea at a stall, Bansi Lal of Ghurkhet village asserts: The Modi government has done many things to regain national pride. This is the first time when the Indian army entered Pakistan. However, his friend Ram Khilawan confronts him saying: What about jobs and poverty? In Akohari village of Rae Bareli, a group of senior citizens are also discussing politics. Those who have been benefitted with government schemes have soft corner towards Modi but those deprived of it are against the government, a villager says. As another villager suggests that Mahagathbandhan (SP-BSP-RLD) alliance is also an option, former gram panchayat pradhan Ram Aasre says, These are smaller parties and will support either Modi (BJP) or Rahul (Congress). Better we directly vote one of these two. In Lohra Mau village, which has around 40% Dalit population, people are not much vocal. One of the villages says, Though Dalit people may not like to go with SP but since BSP is in alliance, their candidate may get some votes. In Sataon village, people wish that Priyanka should contest from Rae Bareli. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister and senior BJP leader Shivraj Singh Chouhan,60, said here on Tuesday that he was not willing to contest general elections. In an interview, Chouhan, who was the CM for 13 years and is now an MLA in the assembly as the BJP lost the state elections to the Congress in November 2018, said, It is my view that I should not contest the (Lok Sabha) election. It has been just four months since I contested the state assembly elections. Now theres an election again. What is the necessity for me to contest it? Chouhans name is doing the rounds in political circles as the possible BJP candidate from Bhopal to take on Congress nominee for the seat, ex-AICC general secretary, Digvijaya Singh (72). According to BJP sources who did not wish to be named, Chouhan is under pressure from the party leadership to contest the Lok Sabha election from Bhopal, given that the Congress has fielded a political heavyweight like Singh in order to snatch the seat from the BJP after four decades. Chouhan, sources said, wanted either himself or his wife, Sadhna Singh, to contest from a safer seat like Vidisha and that Bhopal was not his choice. Digvijaya Singh who, self-admittedly, also wanted to contest from a safer seat like Rajgarh, his home turf was declared the Congresss Bhopal candidate after chief minister Kamal Nath said that Singh should contest from a tough seat. I cant say that I will not contest the election at all, Chouhan said. For, this will amount to defiance (of the party). How can I take a decision like that on my own? But, whatever may the party decide, the fact is that my contesting the election is not proper. There are other workers, he said, pointing to many leaders in the BJP who were capable of defeating Digvijaya Singh. When asked whether he didnt want to contest from Vidisha either, which he had, after all, represented in the Lok Sabha five times in a row, he said, When I dont want to contest elections, it means I dont want to contest election from any seat. If I have to contest the election, then how can Bhopal be (a) bad (seat)? Chouhan said that Digvijaya Singh was not an issue in MP politics but as far as the election is concerned, even an ordinary BJP worker would be able to defeat him. We are not creating any hype but he (Digvijaya Singh) knows what he has done. People have not forgotten his work and him as yet. Thats why I dont want to discuss him, said Chouhan. On the delay in the BJP declaring its candidates for high-profile seats like Bhopal, Vidisha and Indore, Chouhan said there was still time for the elections (in Madhya Pradesh) and that the names would be announced at the right time. State Congress spokesperson, Pankaj Chaturvedi, said, The BJP leadership is treating Shivraj Singh Chouhan as a leader who has lost his value for the party. Thats why he was not made the leader of the Opposition in the state assembly. He was not given permission by his party to take out an Abhar yatra (a tour to thank people) either and he is being kept away from Madhya Pradesh politics. Delhi Chief Minister and AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal on Monday promised to make the city clean and attractive like other capitals of the world, provided his party won all seven seats in the coming elections. While Kejriwal pitched for full statehood of Delhi, the partys primary poll plank, he went on to tell a public gathering in Delhi Cantonment area on how the three municipal corporations of Delhi (MCDs) in the national capital were ruled by the BJP and accused them of being ignorant and leaving Delhi unclean. Today in Delhi, one can see filth and garbage everywhere. Many of you must have travelled abroad. Take as examples the capitals of other countries. For instance, Paris, London, Washington, Tokyo and those of other developed nations. Such beautiful cities they are. Cant we make Delhi beautiful? Yes we can, he said. If we [the AAP-led government] can improve Delhis hospitals and schools and connect the whole city with CCTV cameras among other achievements, we can make Delhi free of filth and garbage too. But friends, the MCDs do not come under the Delhi government. If Delhi becomes a full state, we will make the city so clean that you will be proud of Delhi. The Delhi CM also reiterated better policing, jobs, education, healthcare and infrastructure. A leopard was rescued at the end of a three-hour long operation after the animal entered a residential area in Andheri (East) on Monday morning. The leopard was identified as a two-year-old male and was safely tranquillised. This is the second incident of leopard rescue in Marol and the sixth in a residential zone in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) since 2017. At around 9am, a leopard entered the compound of Woodland Crest Apartment in Vijaynagar, Marol. A vehicle cleaner spotted the big cat and thought it was a dog. On realising the animal was a leopard, he informed the police. A crowd had gathered and the scared leopard hid under a white vehicle for some time, said S Shukla, a resident of the area. A few people also had sticks in their hands in case the animal turned aggressive. Locals in the area suspect the animal may have wandered into the residential area from Aarey Milk Colony. A recent leopard census revealed the presence of six adult leopards and three cubs at Aarey Milk Colony which borders the SGNP. A team of 50 personnel from the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), Mumbai Police, the fire department and non-government organisations (NGOs) worked together to capture the leopard. The police cordoned off the building, but said crowd management was a challenge. More awareness is needed for the public to allow the safe passage of animals out of the building. They have only lost their way. Attempts to forcefully take photographs or enter secured areas can be dangerous, said Anil Pophale, senior police inspector, Powai. Forest officials reached the spot by 11.30am. Jitendra Ramgaokar, deputy conservator of forest, Thane, said, Our SGNP team led by Dr Shailesh Pethe broke into the society office from the first floor, and descended towards the ground floor while separate teams monitored exits as Mumbai Police managed the crowd outside. Range forest officer Santosh Kank said, The animal took cover under the stairs on the ground floor. We formed two teams one that would focus on safe tranquillization, the other to track the animals movement from the exits. From this moment on, he did not move. We used four 22-foot-long nets to cover all exits. Senior veterinarian Dr. Pethe said the operation was carried out professionally. The animal was calm when we spotted him. Within 15 minutes the animal was sedated. Since the leopard was in a fairly open condition, he could have attacked the rescue team several times, he said. At 2.45pm, the sedated leopard was taken from Marol to the rescue centre at SGNP. Dr.Pethe said the animal has been identified as a healthy, two-year-old male. A body check-up and blood sampling has been done. Once the leopard is found fit, the decision about his release will be taken, said Dr. Pethe. Park Ridge Fire Chief Jeff Sorensen said a neighbor noticed flames inside a room of the house and called 911. Firefighters were at the fire station at Cumberland and Devon avenues located about one mile away and not responding to other calls, so they were able to get to the house quickly, Sorensen said. Game of Thrones star Isaac Hempstead-Wright has revealed that he received lots of hate messages after a key character died in the shows sixth season. In an interview with Esquire, the 19-year-old actor, who plays Bran Stark on the hit HBO show, said many people thought his character was responsible for the death of Hodor, the affable giant caretaker of the young Stark. People really started to have a go at me around season six, when Bran became the Three-Eye Raven. I remember getting a torrent of abuse after Hodor died, like it was my fault, Hempstead-Wright said. The actor said he would get messages on social media where people would say adverse things about his appearance, particularly his nose. Also read: Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo confirms Marvel is talking to Priyanka Chopra about future project Suddenly people decided to attack my appearance. They were like: What happened to your nose? I was like: I dont know!. Whenever youre really self-loathing you can delve into this cesspit of Instagram messages that people send you. I got one from this guy going: Hi, Im a plastic surgeon. Id be really interested in doing some rhinoplasty on you. I was like: f***ing hell, he added. Hempstead-Wright is all set to reprise his role for the final time in Game of Thrones eighth season, which will premiere on April 14. The series will air in India on Star World. Follow @htshowbiz for more The H-1B visa programme for high-skilled foreigners, which has been subjected to prohibitive scrutiny by the Trump administration, has earned the US $4.9 billion in employer-paid fees since 1999, which paid for more than 90,000 college scholarships and training, according to a new study. These collections are from the $1,500 processing fee that the government charges employers for every new H-1B or a renewal, the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank, says in the report, and adds that the total rises to $7 billion, by adding $500 in anti-fraud fees. The US grants 65,000 cap-subjected H-1B work visas to foreign workers hired abroad every year and 20,000 to foreigners in US institutions of higher education. More than 70% of these visas have gone to Indians, hired by US companies such as Google and Facebook, and Indian firms such as TCS and Infosys. The application process for 2020, which comes with changes, started on Monday and will typically end in a few days given the demand. More than 190,000 applications were received by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that runs the programme, in 2018 (for 2019), and 199,000 in 2017. Few people realize that fees for each new H-1B visa holder fund scholarships and job training for Americans, said Stuart Anderson, a former immigration services official and executive director of the think tank that released its report on Monday. The report argued that the role of employer-paid H-1B fees has received scant or no attention in the policy debate around immigration so far. People on all sides of the immigration debate agree that it is beneficial to train and educate more Americans in STEM fields, yet policymakers rarely note that every company-sponsored H-1B petition provides money for training and STEM education, it said. This side of the H-1B visas has indeed received no attention. The focus has been on American workers displaced by outsourcing. And the Trump administration has initiated a series of measures to check abuse and fraud of the programme in line with its Buy American, Hire American policies. Since 1999, H-1B fees paid by employers have been used to educate and train Americans in technology-related fields. And based on data obtained from the National Science Foundation, the US department of labour and the USCIS, the report said approximately 87,890 college students enrolled in mathematics, engineering and computer science courses were granted scholarships ranging from one to four years and of up $10,000 a year. Money from the collections also funded training of more than 1.5 million school students and teachers in STEM-related fields, and an estimated $2.5 billion of the total collections was used by the department of labor to train US workers. The H-1B fees have benefited American students and encouraged through teaching and financial support many individuals to enter science and engineering fields, said the report. Pakistans interior ministry ordered investigations into six journalists who had posted pictures online of murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Monday. RSF said it was appalled to learn of the investigations, adding that it condemns this latest case of intimidation, especially given the Pakistani polices past behaviour towards dissident journalists. The investigations had been ordered in a letter dated March 13 from the cybercrime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency, part of the interior ministry, the group said in a statement. AFP has been unable to independently verify the letter, which has been widely circulated on social media, and Pakistani officials have not responded to requests for comment. According to RSF, the FIA letter named the journalists as part of what it called a targeted social media campaign against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman during his visit to Pakistan in February. The campaign consisted of repeatedly posting photos of Jamal Khashoggi.... throughout the crown princes visit, the watchdog said. The visit came five months after the crown prince came under intense pressure following the murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi had been a fierce critic of the prince, and his killing ignited a diplomatic crisis. Pakistan, long allied with Saudi Arabia, was seeking much-needed investment during the visit. The letter said posting Khashoggis pictures online conveyed a very disrespectful message towards the visiting crown prince. Daniel Bastard, the head of RSFs Asia-Pacific desk, said: This kind of harassment of journalists, whose only crime is posting content online that displeases the authorities, is symptomatic of the treatment that the Pakistani political establishment reserves for dissidents. The six journalists targeted by these investigations by the FIA are known for being outspoken on social networks, which are now the only place where they can express themselves freely, he added. Pakistan routinely ranks among the worlds most dangerous countries for media workers. Coverage critical of the countrys powerful military is considered a red flag, with reporters at times detained, beaten and even killed for running afoul of the security establishment. During his visit to Islamabad, the Saudi crown prince ending up signing investment deals worth up to USD 20 billion. Facing crunch time, Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday offered to move her stated position on Brexit widely seen as intransigent, to seek another extension to Article 50 and hold talks with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to resolve the logjam. Making a statement in Downing Street after a seven-hour cabinet meeting, the politically hobbled May by seeking Labours support appeared to have lost hope of winning over rebels within the her party as well as the Democratic Unionist Party that is propping up her minority government. So today I am taking action to break the logjam: I am offering to sit down with the Leader of the Opposition and to try to agree a plan - that we would both stick to - to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal, she said, offering a compromise. Labour has already made its position known it would agree to support the withdrawal package on the condition that it is put before a confirmatory referendum in which the British public would be asked to accept or reject it. Also read: UK deadlock makes no-deal Brexit more likely, says EUs Michel Barnier Arriving at the conclusion that London needs another extension of Article 50, May said it would be as short as possible and would end when the withdrawal package is passed in the House of Commons. However, it is up to Brussels to agree to another extension or not. There is much impatience in Brussels and other European capitals over the lack of decision in London. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, tweeted after Mays statement: Even if, after today, we dont know what the end result will be, let us be patient. May hopes to resolve the issue soon so that the UK does not need to participate in the May 23 elections to the European Parliament. EU leaders have stated that any further extension beyond the current deadline of April 12 would need participation in the elections. But May is keen to avoid doing so. This is a difficult time for everyone. Passions are running high on all sides of the argument. But we can and must find the compromises that will deliver what the British people voted for. This is a decisive moment in the story of these islands. And it requires national unity to deliver the national interest, May said. Her statement prompted renewed criticism in Westminster, with many seeing it as an attempt at kicking the Brexit can down the road. Liberal Democrats leader Vince Cable said her statement could be a case of piling more logs onto the logjam, insisting that Brexit in which ever shape or form would be hugely damaging for the country. He said: Theresa May now finally seems to be accepting that she cannot get support for her deal, though her identifying Jeremy Corbyn as a source of support for Brexit is less surprising. The way forward, to break the impasse, is for the prime minister to compromise and support a Peoples Vote, with the option to stay in the European Union. Former chairperson of Chinas troubled Xinjiang region, Nur Bekri, has been arrested on corruption charges, national prosecutors announced Tuesday, making him one of the most high-profile Uyghurs to be arrested under President Xi Jinpings ongoing anti-graft campaigns. Bekri was the chairperson of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) for seven years between 2007 and 2014, a period that saw several ethnic riots in the remote region. Bekri was the head of the National Energy Administration last September when he was sacked from the post and expelled from the Communist Party of China (CPC) over serious violations of Party discipline that included taking bribes. Nur Bekri, former head of the National Energy Administration, has been arrested for taking bribes, the Supreme Peoples Procuratorate (SPP) announced Tuesday in a brief statement. The National Supervisory Commission has completed an investigation of his case and handed it over to the procuratorial organ for review and prosecution, the SPP said. Nur Bekri was also former deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, the statement added. Bekri was earlier accused of using his position to make money, and, according to state media trading favour for sex. Investigations were launched against him last year following the allegations of corruption. The investigation found that Nur Bekri took advantage of his positions to help others in promotions, operation of enterprises, and exploitation of mineral resources. He was also found to have taken bribes himself or through relatives. Other offenses included living an extravagant lifestyle and trading favour for sex, the state-controlled China Daily newspaper had said in a report. The report added that Bekri has severely violated the Party discipline and is suspected of taking bribes and that he showed no signs of restraint even after the 18th CPC National Congress, which was when Xi took over the reins of the CPC and soon after, launched his anti-corruption campaign. The case is serious in nature and has a bad influence, and he should be harshly punished, the China Daily report said, quoting a government statement. In a separate statement on Tuesday, the SSP announced that three other senior officials have been prosecuted for corruption: the former deputy head of the food and drug administration, Wu Zhen, former vice-chairperson of Beijing, Li Shixiang, and former vice-chairman of Henan province, Jin Suidong, had all abused their positions for their own benefit. The announcements come days after former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei was expelled from the CPC and official positions. The public security ministry announced that it would completely and thoroughly eliminate the poisonous influence of Meng Hongwei. According to the official news agency, Xinhua, at least 51 officials at or above the provincial/ministerial level were among a total of 621,000 people punished by CCDI and the National Supervisory Commission last year. More than 1.5 million officials have been brought down since the campaign took off in 2013. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON But go ye now unto my place which [was] in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people. Jeremiah 7:12 B efore it lent its name to the April 6-7, 1862, battle, Shiloh Church was the center of a community. Erected in 1851, the humble church sat at a small crossroads in heavily wooded tableland three miles west of the bend in the Tennessee River where waters that have run all the way from the Appalachians cease their westward track across the top of Alabama and plunge due north, back into Tennessee and all the way to the Ohio River. Growing up around Shiloh Church, Elsie Duncan remembered her community as an idyll in the woods. The forest was beautiful, she said, with every kind of oak, maple and birch, [with] fruit trees and berry bushes and a spring-fed pond with water lilies blooming white. As the 9-year-old daughter of Shilohs circuit-riding minister, Elsie knew the woods well. On the morning of the battle, she remembered that the sun was shining, birds were singing, and the air was soft and sweet. I sat down under a holly-hock bush which was full of pink blossoms and watched the bees gathering honey. Disembarking at Pittsburg Landing, many of Ulysses S. Grants soldiers saw not an idyll but a muddy, squalid waste, which, in fairness, Shiloh also was. Pittsburg Landingexcited nothing but disgust and ridicule, said one Federal. A small, dilapidated storehouse was the only building there. The surrounding area was an uninteresting tract of country, cut up by rough ravines and ridges, [where] here and there an irregular field and rude cabin indicated a puny effort at agriculture. The Federals were equally unimpressed with Shiloh Churcha rude structure in whichthe voices of the poor white trash of Tennessee mingle in praise to God. It is not such a church as you see in your own village, one New Englander explained: It has no tall steeple or tapering spire, no deep-toned bell, no organ, no singing-seats or gallery, no pews or carpeted aisles. It is built of logschinked with clay years ago, but the rains have washed it out. You can thrust your hand between the cracks [making it] the best-ventilated church you ever saw. Such estimations drip with class bias. They also drip with judgment. The Federals knew that Shiloh Church was proslavery, pro-Confederate. It was formed after the great schism in the Methodist Church in 1844, when, ironically, the local proslavery congregants fled a church called Union to form their own church west of the river. To many of the invading Federals, Shiloh Church was a perversiona little log building in the woods, said one, where the people of the vicinage were wont to meet on the Sabbath and listen to sermons about the beauties of African Slavery. Reading their Bibles, such Yankees had decided that God demanded a rough equalityno man should be a master; no man should be a slave. Reading the same Bible, the Duncans and their neighbors had concluded that God had fitted an entire race for slaverywhites had been chosen, blacks had not. The Soul of Shiloh: In Will Gallaghers photograph, morning light falls on empty pews in Shiloh church. The scene is ambivalent. Is this a place of peace or a place of desolation? Are the congregants dead, their church abandoned? Or maybe this church is about to flood with life? Perhaps the preacher will enter and pronounce a new sermon full of decency, humility, and truth. (Photo Copyright Will Gallagher) I have often wondered whether, in naming their church Shiloh, the parishioners knew what they were letting themselves in for biblically. Certainly they knew their Bible better than I. Then again, they didnt have Google. Shiloh is typically translated as Place of Peacewhich is, lets face it, the kind of irony Civil War historians and the public find irresistible. But before Shiloh was a town in Elsie Duncans west Tennessee, it was a city in ancient Samaria. As the Book of Jeremiah tells us, the ark of the covenant resided there for untold years before the locals, somewhat typically, ran afoul of the Almighty. And so did God smite Shiloh in a biblical bloodletting intended to serve as an example to the Israelites of how lucky they were to be merely enduring the Babylonian captivity: Therefore thus saith the Lord God; Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched. Shiloh is probably correctly translated as Place of Peace, but it could also be translated as Place of Desolation. I n his memoir, Grant said that Shiloh has been perhaps less understood, or, to state the case more accurately, more persistently misunderstood, than any other engagement between National and Confederate troops during the entire rebellion. Grant had a vested interest in saying so: most observers at the time believed that he had made grave mistakes there. To his everlasting credit and occasional shame, Grant was doggedly offense-minded, and by his own admission, prior to Shiloh, he had never quite considered the possibility that he might be attacked. Contrary to all my experiencewe were on the defensive, he said of the opening action on April 6, without intrenchments [sic] or defensive advantages of any sort. This might seem to implicate him as a commander, but he said he had decided that his men were so green they needed drill more than trenches. Probably they needed both. Certainly I agree with a Confederate officers assessment that Grants position simply invited attack. Leading the Confederates, Grants antagonist, Albert Sidney Johnston, had a bad first day toonot least because he was mortally wounded. Most historians regard Johnston as more or less complicit in his own undoing, for having sent off his surgeon and for generally leading from the front. The truth, however, is that Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman had close calls at Shiloh also. It was that kind of fight. As one soldier remembered, the bullets seemed to come from too many points of the compass. A man who was hit on the shin by a glancing ball[was] hurtawfully, the soldier continued, and he screamed out. His captain said, Go to the rear. As the line broke and began to drift through the brush, this soldier came limping back and said, Cap, give me a gun. This blamed fight aint got any rear. The sense of chaos at Shiloh was undoubtedly amplified by the terrain. I had always supposed, from pictures I had seen, that armies were drawn upon each side of a big field, noted one Federal. I didnt understand how we could fight in those woods. Many of them did not fight very well. Grant admitted that most of his men were entirely rawhardly able to load their muskets according to the manual. In two cases, as I now remember, he later said, colonels led their regiments from the field on first hearing the whistle of the enemys bullets. At Shiloh, many officers were so green, they didnt even know what their generals looked like. Colonel H.T. Reid was approached by a stranger who said gruffly, After the men have had their coffee and received their ammunitionmove [them] to the top of the bluff and stop all stragglers and await further orders. Reid stared at the man blankly for a moment before the stranger satisfied his curiosity: I am General Grant. Another officer requested ammunition from a stranger with stars on his shoulders who sat on his horse as a king might a throne. I [do not] believe you want ammunition, sir, the latter said furiously. I looked at him in astonishment, doubting his sanity, the officer noted, but made no further reply than to ask his name. It makes no difference, sir, came the reply, but I am General Buell. Dealt A Bad Hand: Captain Adolph Metzner of the 32nd Indiana fought at Shiloh, and painted this graphic watercolor of two Confederates decapitated by a shell while they were playing cards. Such gory scenes forever remained with Shiloh veterans. (Library of Congress) Such mix-ups are amusing. They could also be deadly. After his heroic holdout at the Hornets Nest, Union Brig. Gen. Benjamin Prentiss tried repeatedly to surrender, but every time he successfully did so new Rebels would emerge from the woods and fire on his men even after being ordered to stand down. As one survivor remembered, The firing did not cease until General Prentice [sic] told the rebel officers that if they did not stop, he would order his men to take their guns and sell their lives as dearly as possible. Where their greenness most showed was immediately after the battle, when they got their first look at the carnage. They were mangled in every conceivable form, said one soldier. They were torn all to pieces, said another, leaving nothing but their heads or their boots. They were mingled together in inextricable confusion, said a third, headless, trunkless, and disemboweled. There is a problem in Civil War history that I will dub the problem of gore. Those of us who have written a lot of Civil War history inevitably face a conundrum: When it comes to the material realities of the battlefield, how much is enough? Do I really tell my audience that, at the end of day one, Shilohs spring dogwoods, in full bloom, are festooned with arms, legs, and entrails? Is that gratuitous? Or is it necessary? They were mingled together in inextricable confusionheadless, trunkless, and disemboweled. There are few bills I would not pay for my country to have ended slavery even a year sooner. There were generations of black children who never went to school, a vast industry of commodified human beings, endemic rape, and leveraged sex, all of which is humiliating and painful to look upon as an American. Surely ending all of thissurely emancipationredeemed this conflict. And yet there are images of Shiloh I cant get out of my head: the wounded Federal who lay strewn across a log, legs on one side, body on the other, conscious but immobile as fire crept across the leaf litter to ignite the log, burning his legs from his body but leaving his smoking feet on one side and his still-breathing torso on the other. Or the Confederate, bayoneted through the temple, eye distended, lying in a state of madness, pulling on his eye stalk: He seems unconscious, and yet he has not lost sensation. He evidently received a bayonet thrust in his temple which caused the eye on that side to bulge out of its socket, and he has pulled at it till the optic nerve is out at full length. How it pops when the eyeball slips out of his hand. He has pulled at it till the optic nerve is real dirty; and from the delicate structure of the eye and its connection with the brain, we know he must suffer fearfully. Am I really supposed to elide this? Am I supposed to edit this out because I am told that it is gratuitous, sophomoric, gauche, or unpleasant? Perhaps I am. But who exactly decided that reading about war should be pleasant? When Oliver Wendell Holmes said of the Civil War generation, In our youth our hearts were touched with fire, I think what he really meant was that In our youth our retinas were burned with images that would never let us go. O n his second day at Shiloh, Mississippian Augustus Mecklin was awakened at midnight by orders to fall in. The rain was coming in torrents and the darkness was so intense he could barely see the officer leading him into position. Every so often, however, vivid peals oflightning would ignite the landscape, searing Mecklins mind with one appalling image after another: first a dead man, his clothes ghastly, bloody face turned up to the pattering raindrops, then his friend slipping upon a corpse that lay dismembered in the road, then a Golgotha of dead, heaped & piled upon each other. How, Mecklin wondered, had men so quickly taken a beautiful Sabboth morn and rendered it an infernal hell-scape where monster death held high carnival? Civil War Americans were very articulate when writing about horror. Walt Whitman embodies that conclusion. Traveling to Fredericksburg to nurse his wounded brother, he discovered that his brother was fine. But Whitman was never the same: These thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, &c. open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanitytried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, the living souls, the bodys tragedies, bursting the petty bounds of art. Eden Ravaged: Limbs blasted off trees fall down on Union cannoneers blasting away at Confederates on April 6. Behind the lines, raw troops struggle through a tangle of wagons to join the violence. (Corbis/Getty Images) With all due reverence for Whitmans style, I think what he is saying is that the real war will never get into the books until we figure out how to grapple deeply with the violence. I entirely grant that the men and women of the Civil War era had an extraordinary tolerance for other peoples pain. Some of them could make fun of a dying man, wave at people with a dismembered arm, or boil a dead mans bones to make jewelry. But it is cavalier to think that the national bloodletting didnt affect them deeply or that behind their occasionally feeble metaphorscorpses stacked like cordwood and hails of gunfirethere wasnt an ocean of feeling being poured out in a puddle of blood. As if the souls fullness didnt sometimes overflow into the emptiest metaphors, Flaubert once explained, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes to make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity. Of all the battles fought in the Civil War, I have always thought that tragicomic Shiloh had the best chance of moving the stars to pity. Rightly and wrongly, the Civil War stands as an American Iliad; each of its battles has been translated into a mythic character and asked to play a specific part in a national morality play. Gettysburg stands as the great test of democracy, the darkest hour in a national struggle to determine whether any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. Shiloh may be equally fabled and fabulous, but the moral is different. Shiloh represents the death of national innocence. On an idyllic spring Sunday in America, war took an Edenic field of dogwoods and peach blossoms and painted it with gore. W ars may be fought outside, but they are made insidein the halls of Congress and the White House, in parlors, kitchens, and churches. Elsie Duncans father may have been a preacher, but he was also the communitys drillmaster. He would prepare our young men to go into the army to fight other men that they did not even know, nor have anything against, Elsie Duncan later marveled. I used to sit and watch them go marching by and I wondered how many of them would be killed. Duncans final time inside Shiloh Church was when she performed in a concert. She enacted a skit in which the South was the goose that laid the golden egg, but Lincoln squeezed it too hard and it ran away. The girls waved Confederate flags and sang Dixie. The men threw their hats up yelling, hurrah for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy. How that old Shiloh Church did ring. Memories of War: In this circa 1890 image, Union General Benjamin Prentiss stands third from right with fellow veterans near where he was captured at Shilohs Hornets Nest on April 6, 1862. (Library of Congress) Shiloh Church was everywhere in the battle. At different times, it served variously as headquarters for both armies, a hospital, a prison, and a morgue. Albert Sidney Johnstons body was carried to the church for a time. At the church, P.G.T. Beauregard, Johnstons successor, decided not to follow up on the gains of April 6, giving Grant a chance to rally and recapture the church the next day. And while the church was not killed on the field, it was certainly a casualty. In the days and weeks after it gave its name to the battle it was torn down for firewood, bridges, and especially souvenirs. No one who visits Pittsburg Landing has a thought of returning without first making a pilgrimage to Shiloh Church, noted one newspaper, and few have returned without bearing home with them a piece of the church as a trophy. Shiloh Church is now in ruins. Shiloh represents the death of national innocence Shiloh Church got what it deserved, I suppose. But I am glad it has been reconstructed as part of the effort to restore and preserve the battlefield. I like to think that people will sit there, contemplating hubris and confronting the fact that we are a sometimes hardheaded, hard-hearted, misguided people. We are tenderhearted, too, and capable of redemption. When I came to, wrote one wounded soldier at Shiloh, I found my gun gone and the fellows around me saying it was no use taking [me] off the field. [I had] gone up at the spout.I had not the courage to open my eyes. My first movement was to feel if I still lived.Every action of my life seemed written before me. When I opened my eyes the battle was still going on, and many had bit the dust like myself. I put my hand to my head where I remember having been struck, for I felt no pain, and my hand, when I looked at it, told a fearful story, and [I] felt the warm blood running down my back in a perfect stream.While drooping in this way, my head leaning against the tree, I noticed a little violet looking up to me from under the trampled grass, and a thought of past scenes of a different nature passed through my mind as I plucked it and put it in my sketchbook next to my bosom.The little flower I carefully kept and pressed in my journal was the only trophy I took from the fire of battle. Stephen Berry is Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia. His books include All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (2003) and House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War (2007). This article is adapted from Civil War Places: Seeing the Conflict Through the Eyes of its Leading Historians, edited by Gary W. Gallagher and J. Matthew Gallman, 2019 by Gary W. Gallagher and J. Matthew Gallman. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press. www.uncpress.org Life of wealth, privilege didnt keep one angel from giving all for the wounded It is no secret that health care during the Civil War was rudimentary at best. Most of the 750,000 or so deaths suffered during the conflict occurred because of illness, disease, or infection. And at a time when amputation was common in the treatment of wounded men, hospitals were not known for their solicitous or effective treatment of the stricken. Therefore, when an unassuming young Virginia woman opened her own private hospital for the care of Confederate soldiers, people had every reason to presume that it wouldnt differ at all from the others. They were wrong. From the moment of her birth in 1833 at Poplar Grove, her familys Mathews County estate in Virginias Tidewater region, Sally Louisa Tomkins lived a life of privilege. By the outbreak of the war, her father had died, and Sally was living in Richmond with her mother. Reportedly, from early childhood she showed both an inclination and an aptitude for nursing, and in the immediate aftermath of the First Battle of Manassas in late July 1861, she determined to dedicate her inheritanceand her lifeto the care of Confederate wounded. Tompkins immediately acquired and converted the Richmond home of Circuit Court Judge John Robertson, at the corner of 3rd and Main streets. She immediately bought medical supplies and outfitted what she named the Robertson Hospital in top-drawer fashion. Tompkins staffed the hospital with womenall fellow members of the St. James Episcopal Churchwho called themselves, appropriately, the Ladies of Robertson Hospital. Within a short time, word of Tompkins compassionate demeanor and highly effective treatment methodswhich were grounded in strict adherence to a regimen of cleanlinessspread throughout the Rebel ranks. According to one source, Wounded soldiers coming to Richmond begged to be admitted to her hospital. Unfortunately, many of the disabled soldiers were in fact malingerers, bent on using long stays in the Souths hospitals as a means of avoiding camp chores and combat. To counter this practice, the Confederate government passed a measure placing all hospitals under the administration of the military. As a result, private hospitals were forced to close their doors. According to various historians, Tompkins appealed directly to President Jefferson Davis, andbased on her hospitals outstanding reputationhe commissioned her a captain of cavalry in the Confederate Army, thereby enabling her not only to remain in operation, but to draw her medical supplies from military stores. Although she refused to accept the officers pay that accompanied her new commission, Tompkins held the distinction of being the only woman knowingly commissioned as a woman (and not a woman soldier posing as a man) ever to hold officer rank in the Confederate Army. The hospital maintained an extraordinary survival and recovery rate, inspiring numerous commanders to send her their most critical cases. Still, things did not always go smoothly. The South was consistently short of everything from food, blankets, and clothing to medical supplies. But Tompkins always made do, generally spending her own money to make the necessary purchases. She also demonstrated considerable grit in confronting threats to her institution. In June 1864, a Confederate military inspector of hospitals named Carrington took it as his mission to close down the Robertson Hospital, claiming that it was filled beyond capacity. In response, Tompkins wrote to the authorities that his assertion of overcrowding was written under a misapprehension of the facts, adding, I think the register of this Hospital will show as great success in its management of the sick and wounded as any other. Since the 1st of last June, we have had 337 patients and but 8 deaths. Many of them sent to us werethe wors[t] cases. Needless to say, the hospital remained open. The soldiers adored Tompkins, dubbing her the Angel of the Confederacy, the Little Lady with the Milk-White Hands, and most commonly, Captain Sally. One source records that she saw that every discharged patient received clean clothes, rations and a Bible. Love-struck patients often asked for her hand in marriage, but she always refused, commenting, Poor fellows, they are not yet well of their fevers. At wars end, Tompkins kept her doors open, releasing her last patient on June 13, 1865two months after Robert E. Lees surrender at Appomattox. Although most of the Confederacys records in Richmond were burned, one statistic remains indisputable: During its 45 months in operation, the Robertson Hospital treated 1,333 soldiers and lost only 73, reflecting a survival rate of 94.5 percent. This is a remarkable record, especially considering the time and conditions. After the war, Captain Sally remained active in the affairs of the Episcopal Church and enjoyed a certain celebrity as a frequent guest at reunions and other functions. Between June 30 and July 2, 1896, the Grand Confederate Reunion took place in Richmond. As part of the observances, a reunion of Tompkins former patients was held at the hospital. Several old soldiers attended and were once again treated to the solicitousness of their former nurse. According to the historical records at the Library of Virginia, to mark the occasion, Sally Tompkins rented a house and provided food and drink for former patients of Robertson Hospital and their families. Tompkins entered old age virtually penniless, however. She had spent most of her inheritance in the maintenance of her hospital and on several other philanthropies, andaccording to one sourcefinancial reverses took the rest. She was invited to enter the Richmond Home for Confederate Women, where she resided as both matriarch and honored lifetime guest. Captain Sally never married, despite the many proposals from her grateful and adoring patients. She lived well into her 82nd year, dying on July 25, 1916. The next days Richmond Times-Dispatch noted, Captain Sally Louisa Tompkins, 83 years old [sic], died yesterday of chronic nephritis at 8:45 oclock in the morning.The funeral, with full military honors, will take place in Mathews County. Four United Daughters of the Confederacy chapters have been named in Sally Tompkins honor, and there is a memorial to her in the Mathews Court House Square. At St. James Episcopal Church in Richmond, to which she dedicated so much of her time and resources, a stained-glass window features a full-size portrait of her holding a Bible and dressed in black, standing before an angel with arms extended protectivelya fitting tribute to the Angel of the Confederacy. Ron Soodalter writes from Cold Spring, N.Y. Young Civil War drummers werent there just for show. They played a vital role for both armies. Drumbeats governed Civil War soldiers. Over the din of the battlefield, drum calls were used to transmit commandsthe long roll, for instance, was the signal to fall in under arms. In camp, drummers summoned the regiment to meals, to muster, drill, and sick call. When on the march, drummers kept up a lively cadence to boost mens morale. Regular soldiers had to be at least 21, or 18 if they had parental consent to enlist. Noncombatant musicians could enlist at 12. One of the enduring stories of the Civil War is how many boys under 12, swept up in the excitement and yearning for adventure, lied about their age to enlist. Its unknown how many boys under 12 served in the Civil War, because records reflect fraudulent birth dates. Early in the war, underage boys often tagged along as unpaid pets of local regiments. Many turned out to be immature and caused disciplinary problems. The smallest found it exhausting to carry and beat a drum 12 to 14 inches deep and 16 inches in diameter, cut down from the standard of 18 inches deep before the war. Drummers struggled to learn several dozen cadences and variations that went by such colorful names as flams, paradiddles, ruffles, drags, rolls, and ratamacues. A particular worry for the parents of these boy soldiers was sickness. Underdeveloped immune systems meant thousands of them fell ill and died from endemic camp diseases such as diarrhea and measles. When the shooting started, noncombatant musicians were supposed to go to the rear to act as stretcher bearers and surgeons assistants, often detailed to hold men down during amputations. Pint-sized volunteers made good newspaper copy. A few drummer boys gained fame fabricating or exaggerating their exploits. Robert Henry Hendershot, for example, enlisted under a false name and gained notoriety when newspapers printed his claims to have participated in the Battle of Fredericksburg and to have captured a Confederate soldier when he was 12. John Clem (or Klem) enlisted in the 22nd Michigan and at age 12 was present at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863. His unsubstantiated story of shooting a Confederate colonel who ordered him to surrender, you Yankee (expletive unclear) and his angelic features made him a celebrity. He retired from the Army as a major general in 1915. Not all underage heroics were exaggerated. Willie Johnston of the 3rd Vermont was awarded the Medal of Honor at the age of 13. He was the only musician to maintain possession of his instrument during the Union retreat after the Battle of Malvern Hill in 1862. Leaving Home: Throughout the conflict, the heartbreaking sight of a youthful drummer boy heading off to war would be all too familiar for families both North and South. This engraving first appeared in the December 19, 1863, issue of Harpers Weekly and then in the book The Boys in Blue, published in 1867. (Old Paper Studios/Alamy Stock Photo) Sharp Look: This well-preserved, 8-button, single-breasted frock coat was reportedly worn by the drummer of Co. H, 23rd Regiment, Gaston (N.C.) Light Guard. (American Civil War Museum) Keeping the Beat: Drummers and other musicians were allowed to enlist at 12, but many lied about their age. Charles E. Mosby of the 6th Virginia and later the 19th Virginia Heavy Artillery, was 13 when this photo was taken in May 1861. (Virginia Museum of History And Culture) Johan Christian Julius Langbein of the 9th New York, Hawkins Zouaves, received a Medal of Honor for voluntarily providing medical aid to a wounded officer under heavy fire. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas) Taylor, a former slave, became the drummer of the 78th U.S. Colored Troops. (Library of Congress) An unidentified drummer boy, dressed in his winter overcoat. (Library of Congress) A magnificent eagle adorns the drum of the boy on the right, posing with a younger relative, possibly his brother. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas) Unidentified drummer, 91st Pennsylvania. (Photo Don Troiani/Bridgeman Images) This 37th New Jersey drummer wears a non-regulation jacket with shoulder tabs and horizontal breast piping. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas) Marcus F. Jones of the 1st Michigan Engineers, wearing a cap a little too large for his head. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas) Uncle Sam Wants You: In this rare half-plate tintype, a diminutive drummer boy (center) and two soldiers in uniform (at right) lead a contingent of 14 boys in civilian clothes. The boys were probably lining up to muster into service. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas) Enter the Victors: Weary-looking drummers lead the 3rd Minnesota Infantry into Little Rock, Ark., on September 11, 1863. The 3rd was the first Federal unit to enter Arkansas capital city after it was abandoned by the Confederates. (Minnesota Historical Society) Allied bombing raids didnt just devastate the cities of Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. They damaged the heavens, too, new research shows. Shock waves from the wars big bombs reached 150 miles above the Earths surface, causing temporary damage to the ionosphere, the upper atmosphere. The findings appeared September in Annales Geophysicae, the journal of the European Geosciences Union. Study coauthor Chris Scott of Britains University of Reading said he was absolutely astonished at the far-reaching impact of the Allied bombing campaigns. Each raid released the energy of at least 300 lightning strikes. The researchers studied contemporaneous daily measurements of the ionosphere taken at the Radio Research Station near Slough, England. They decided to focus on the effects to the upper atmosphere during 152 major Allied bombing raids from 1943 to 1945. They did not analyze German raids on London from September 1940 to May 1941 because the Blitz was so continuous it is difficult to separate its effects from seasonal factors. And German bombs typically were less powerful. While four-engine Allied bombers carried massive bombs such as the 12,000-pound Tall Boy and the 22,000-pound Grand Slam, the two-engine Luftwaffe bombers typically carried just 4,400 pounds of bombs. The bomb blasts heated the upper atmosphere, weakening it by reducing the number of electrons. The damage from each raid typically lasted about 24 hours; the impact of the diminished ionosphere at the time isnt clear, but the research helps explain why Allied airmen reported that their bombers were damaged by shock waves even when they flew above the recommended heights. What we get with these readings is a bit of detective work, which allows us a glimpse of not just what was happening on the ground but the effects of the bombing at the edge of space, said Patrick Major, University of Reading historian and the studys coauthor. Researchers are keenly interested in the constantly changing ionosphere, which affects radio communications, radar, and GPS systems. The Annales Geophysicae study provides evidence of the ways that human activity can disturb the upper atmosphere. Some restaurants will be offering specials during the week, the mayor said, but there is not an official website. Dolcetti Patisserie and Cafe, 133 S. Vine Ave., is hosting a pie-making class on Sunday from 3 to 5 p.m., and cost for the class is $85 per seat, according to the events Facebook post. New uses Through a sensitive but comprehensive development, we can deliver a significant increase in much-needed housing for Westminster and more affordable homes as well as consider new uses like senior living, said Paul OGrady, location director at Grosvenor Britain & Ireland. >See more of London's historic homes The woman said she suddenly heard a loud pop like a balloon, according to police. She then realized that a large amount of blood was coming out of her, police said. The single shot went through the womans upper right chest before going through the windshield, according to police. Fortunately there is an organization like NICK out there to help them in their time of need, he said. And who better to help them are public servants. We are supposed to help people in their time of need; well this is just another one of those situations. Christine Russell, the East Chicago Democratic city chairwoman, said the administration building already has three precincts voting there and it has historically had higher voter turnout. Many voters in the old 25th precinct are within six blocks of the administration building, Russell said, but if the polling location remains the same, people in the old 26th precinct could have to go up to a mile to vote. Pipeline 2 April 2019 Melia Hotels International has announced its second hotel in Albania, the Melia Durres, during an event attended by the country's Prime Minister, Edi Rama. The event also included the presentation of the Concord Group, owner of the group's hotels in Albania, as a strategic partner and investor in the country. Thanks to new measures in Albania to stimulate tourism and the significant opportunity offered by the Concord Group, Melia has taken the opportunity to get involved in the development of the hotel industry in the country and continue to extend its influence in the Mediterranean with the opening of the future Melia Durres and Melia Tirana hotels. Melia Hotels International brings to the partnership its international leadership in resort hotels, its experience and impeccable record in pioneering destinations, and the recognition of its brand in the Mediterranean region, an area in which the Company is a dominant player. The Melia Durres will be located in the second most important city in the country and aims to position itself as a benchmark hotel in this emerging destination known as "the new pearl of the Mediterranean" thanks to its location, beaches and natural diversity. This extraordinary five-star resort on the beach in Gjiri I Lalzit, will offer 400 rooms and extensive complementary facilities. Among others, the Melia Durres will provide great dining options in eight restaurants, several swimming pools, an exclusive YHI Spa, fitness centre, beach club, convention centre and parking. Appointment 2 April 2019 Four Seasons Resort Costa Rica at Peninsula Papagayo has appointed Heriberto "Beto" Pena as Health and Wellness Ambassador of the newly re-imagined spa and wellness centre at the luxury resort located on the 1,400-acre (565 hectare) Peninsula Papagayo on the north Pacific coast of Costa Rica. As Health and Wellness Ambassador, Pena will guide the Resort's fitness programming and wellness initiatives including Breathing and Sound Healing Work Shop, Yoga and longevity lifestyle retreats, High Intensities indoor and outdoor training, and develop a line of local Ayurveda-inspired spa products with Costa Rican organic and wild-crafted resources. Pena's career as the dedicated yoga instructor at Four Seasons Resort Costa Rica spans nearly 10 years during which time he travelled to India and Thailand to study Eastern medicine and philosophy. In India, Pena trained to become an Ayurveda Health Consultant at Anjali Ayurvedic & Panchakarma Institute. With more than 15 years as a yoga practitioner, Pena finds joy in helping people seek healthier lifestyles. Discovering his passion for health and wellness early on, Pena appreciated the rich natural resources of his home city of Quepos, Costa Rica. After discovering Peninsula Papagayo during a visit to study the Chorotega culture of native Guanacastans, Pena made it his new home. In his spare time, Pena enjoys spending time at the beach, reading and making delicious and creative vegetarian meals. Appointment 2 April 2019 Saxon Hotel, Villas and Spa is excited to announce the appointment of Anton Gillis as an Executive Director, effective April 1, 2019. The Saxon Hotel, Villas and Spa is a leading luxury hotel in South Africa and Johannesburg.\ Cape Town-born Anton brings with him a wealth of experience in both the hospitality and the private healthcare sector. His passion for hospitality started at a very young age; being born into a family of hoteliers, his passion was ignited through having the luxury of being able to visit some of the world's finest hotels. From a young age his father, well known international hotelier Arthur Gillis, encouraged him to spend time during his school holidays working in a variety of hotels. Prior to attending and graduating from hotel school, Anton spent many wonderful years working his way through various hotel departments. He attributes some of his greatest learnings from this experience. Anton has since been acknowledged as a Platinum Lifetime Achiever within the South African Hotel Industry by the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. He has also had the fortune of furthering his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. One of the biggest lessons that he lives, eats and breathes is the need to always anticipate, meet and exceed the expectations of guests. After completing his hotel school internship at the Cape Grace Hotel where he took employment as a Guest Relations Manager, Anton sought new frontiers and joined the team at the Grove Hotel, London, often referred to as London's Finest Country Estate. In 2006, he returned home to Cape Town and took up the position as Deputy General Manager of The Protea Hotel Fire & Ice!, from conceptualization to opening to operating. In 2010, Anton moved up to Johannesburg to be the General Manager of the Protea Hotel Fire&Ice! Melrose Arch. In 2011, Anton was awarded the prestigious title of General Manager of the year by Protea Hotels. With a view of wanting to understand and further explore the correlation between hospitality and private healthcare, Anton joined the Netcare Hospital Group in 2012 as a Hospital General Manager. Within two years he was promoted to lead the team at their flagship hospital, the Netcare Milpark Hospital. Anton's diverse management experience and proven track record of managing complex business models has allowed him to gain key insight into both hospitality and the private healthcare sector. He also prides himself on his relentless pursuit for service excellence whilst executing a profitable standards strategy. Anton's non-negotiable stance towards Respect for Human Dignity has allowed him to build a unique team of resources and international network to call upon. He looks forward to bringing his extensive experience to bear at the Saxon Hotel, Villas and Spa. Appointment 2 April 2019 sbe , a leading international hospitality group that develops, manages and operates award-winning global hospitality brands, announced today the appointment of industry veteran Stephanie J Rubin as Senior Vice President of Corporate Finance. She will be based out of the sbe New York global headquarters and will oversee sbe's accounting, treasury, and financial planning & analysis functions. Rubin will play a pivotal role in the ongoing integration process with Accor. Attracting this talented team member onboard reinforces sbe's position as one of the most relevant players in the hospitality market today. Rubin, CPA, joins sbe from Re:Sources, a Publicis Groupe company where she was the Chief Accounting Officer for the last five years in her 17-year term. She has held various roles in media and digital transformation, as well as contributed at the establishment of shared services centers in offshore countries. Rubin's 20 years of experience encompasses roles with TBWA Worldwide, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, and Publicis Groupe, and her talent will further the financial growth of sbe. Appointment 2 April 2019 Wave Hospitality, LLC is pleased to announce the recent appointment of Julian Payne to the position of General Manager of the soon-to-open Wave Resort at Pier Village. Payne brings more than 30 years of hospitality experience at various top-tier properties with him, including Pier Village's own Bungalow Hotel where he currently serves as the General Manager. In this larger role, Julian will oversee the day-to-day operations, guest and employee satisfaction, human resources, and overall financial performance for both Bungalow Hotel and the new modern beachfront property, Wave Resort. Born into a family of hoteliers, Payne was groomed for a life in hospitality from the start. After working in several luxury boutique hotels throughout Europe, Julian held managing roles at The Ritz London, as well as Mandarin Oriental properties in both London and Hong Kong. Payne has a thorough understanding of hotel operations through a variety of roles, a strong background in planning and management, and significant hospitality experience within the New Jersey market. Wave Resort will open its doors under his skilled guidance and strategic vision, while Bungalow Hotel will continue to thrive as a boutique property. Supplier News 2 April 2019 US PATENT GRANTED TO AUSTRALIAN INVENTOR OF DYNAMIC VARIABLE PRICING World first technology pioneered in Australia has been awarded a United States patent for the creation of real-time dynamic pricing and allocation technology for e-commerce. The US Patent granted to Allotz.com Limited, covers the technology the company began developing in 2006. The technology has since been used in a variety of industries, including, travel, retail and transport. President and founder Martin McConnachie said the patent for this unique cloud-based application uses real time data, based on supply and demand, including time to expiry, to maximise a vendor's distribution, turnover and profit. Mr. McConnachie said the company is very excited to add the US patent to its international portfolio of related patents. Mr. McConnachie said the US patent has left Allotz willing to negotiate licensing permissions with any company that varies their rate and electronically allocates inventory. "Over the last few years artificial intelligence and algorithms have enabled online retail companies, for example, to electronically vary rate and allocation, however the granting of the patent recognises our original and unique innovation. " The Allotz technology is available under licencing or a royalty agreement to companies in potential breach of the patent -and also as a plugin for any transactional application. "These companies include ride share operators, hotel owners, airlines, online shopping sites, freight companies and fuel suppliers to name just a few. "The official recognition of our technology has Allotz.com Limited in a strong position to seek: partnerships, licensing, joint ventures, mergers and major investment to fund significant growth. "We are ready to collaborate with the various industry groups who may have inadvertently been using our patented technology to maximise their profitability," Mr. McConnachie said. Allotz.com Limited has been using and validating the technology through its subsidiary Allotz Autopilot in the hotel industry. "When the system detects changes in buying behaviour, the price or allocation is adjusted in real time to reflect actual demand. There is no guesswork," Mr. McConnachie said. "While the price might be peaking in time of high demand, the savvy consumer can take advantage of much lower prices during low demand periods or when there's an oversupply." "The awarding US patent is a massive win for Australian innovation on the world stage - and a great tribute to our team's tremendous resolve, professionalism and patience." For more information contact Allotz.com General Manager Chris Curtis 0437 733571 Supplier News 2 April 2019 SiteMinder, the global hotel industry's leading guest acquisition platform, has partnered with Desbravador Software, the three-time winner of the Revista Hoteis Best Hotel Management Software Award, to automate how hotels distribute their rooms online. The partnership, which comes one day ahead of WTM Latin America in Sao Paulo, will see Desbravador's award-winning hotel management system connect into SiteMinder's platform to create a more seamless flow of guest information that hoteliers can use to enhance the experiences of their guests. The partnership will also give Desbravador's 2,000 hotel customers the ability to market their properties through SiteMinder's network of 400 distribution channels, including the 12 that contributed over ninety percent of the total revenue made by SiteMinder's Latin American hotel customers last year. They include Despegar.com, BestDay.com and PriceTravel. "SiteMinder is a proven partner in enabling hoteliers to achieve their full potential. We are proud to work alongside a brand that is trusted by accommodation providers across the Latin American region, to harness the information they have at their disposal and make more meaningful decisions for their guests," says Marcelo Pompeo, Diretor da Desbravador. "Consumers today have more choice than ever before. Thanks to the endless options available to them, today's consumers can choose where they stay, how they book their stay and how they will experience that stay. Through the automation offered by SiteMinder's partnership with Desbravador, more hotels now have the opportunity to look at their data and understand their guests at every stage of their online journey. We are delighted to provide this capability in collaboration with Desbravador, a name known and respected by Latin America's hoteliers," says Mike Kantor, Senior Director of Global Partnerships at SiteMinder. Desbravador's hotel management software caters for hotels, hostels and lodges of every size. The company celebrated its 30th year of operation in 2018, one year after expanding outside of Latin America for the first time, into Portugal. According to Euromonitor International, Brazil attracted almost 7 million inbound travellers in 2018. Arrivals are forecast to reach nine million by 2023 as travel exhibitions such as WTM Latin America, Equipotel and ABAV continue to make the Latin American region increasingly relevant and attractive on the global stage. About SiteMinder In an age of rising choice and accessibility for curious travellers, SiteMinder is the name synonymous with the belief that technology can empower any hotel to win in a consumer-led world and unleash their potential. SiteMinder is the global hotel industry's leading guest acquisition platform, ranked among technology pioneers for its smart and simple solutions that put hotels everywhere their guests are, at every stage of their journey. It's this central role that has earned SiteMinder the trust of more than 30,000 hotels, across 160 countries, to generate in excess of 80 million reservations worth over US$35 billion in revenue for hotels each year. For more information, visit www.siteminder.com. About Desbravador Software Desbravador Software's key to success is that they develop their products focusing on what is best for the user, from mobile application customisations and responsive access to software in the cloud. They are currently based in seven countries across the Latin American region. At the heart of Desbravador is the constant search for evolution - values that are passed on to each new member of the team so better service can be provided to partners and customers. Desbravador, which hails from the West of Santa Catarina, won, for the third consecutive time, the award for best hotel management software, as conducted by Revista Hoteis. For more information, visit www.desbravador.com.br. Press Release 2 April 2019 TOKYO - Hilton Grand Vacations Inc. (NYSE:HGV) and Japan Airlines (JAL) today announced a comprehensive plan to develop new programs and services that capitalize on HGV's vacation ownership and JAL's Hawaii flight experience. These premium brands will work together to grow travel between Japan and Hawaii, as well as broaden options for enhanced vacation experiences in Hawaii. Advertisements The expanded relationship between HGV - a leading vacation ownership company with a strong global presence and resorts in both Hawaii and Japan - and JAL - an international airline - is expected to provide an elevated experience for travelers. This collaboration is in response to the increasing needs of Japanese travelers seeking memorable vacation experiences in Hawaii. According to the Hawaii Tourism Authority, more than 1.5 million Japanese visitors traveled to the Hawaiian Islands in 2018, making Hawaii one of the leading vacation destinations among Japanese travelers. Specifically, HGV-related travelers from Japan represented 8 percent and 16 percent of arrivals in Oahu and the Big Island of Hawaii, respectively. "We are excited to strengthen our partnership with Japan Airlines," says Jeff Bernier, senior vice president, sales and marketing - Asia. "Through our collaborative efforts, we can further grow the Japan to Hawaii market and offer our owners and our guests enhanced vacation experiences, which can create lasting memories." Highlights of the collaboration include: Joint program development (anticipated to launch in April 2019) to provide current and prospective HGV members vacation products that come with a JAL flight and provide JAL customers with programs to experience HGV's vacation lifestyle through its property portfolio. Development of a "Flight Ownership Program" to offer a variety of status services for HGV members. This would be the first program of its kind to launch in Japan. This relationship also builds upon JAL's new concept, "Style Yourself - JAL Hawaii," which leverages insights obtained during the company's 65 years of experience serving customers between Japan and Hawaii. This concept helps travelers customize their own enhanced vacations in Hawaii, while focusing on nature, health and lifestyle. HGV has nine vacation-ownership properties in Hawaii, with two newly announced development projects underway. The company delivers vacation experiences to more than 305,000 members globally and more than 61,000 members in Asia. HGV is considered an industry innovator and operates a portfolio of high-quality, shared-ownership properties in highly desired vacation and urban destinations. Important Notice Statements in this press release that are not historical facts may be forward-looking statements. Words such as "will," "anticipates," "believes," "expects" "plans" and "intends" indicate a forward-looking statement, although not all forward-looking statements include these words. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different. Ive never had one of these, said Patrice Ventnor of Merrillville, as she relaxed and extended her arms for the special treat. This kind of thing can do wonders for us women especially as a way to reduce stress. Im having the chair massage too when Im done here. Press Release 2 April 2019 As one of ASEAN's leading business destinations for smart city solutions, Messe Frankfurt in collaboration with Digital Economy Promotion Agency (DEPA) will host the inaugural Smart City Solutions Week in Thailand from 28 31 October 2019. Messe Frankfurt's brand shows for the smart city industry Secutech Thailand, Thailand Lighting Fair and Thailand Building Fair will showcase innovative smart city solutions, while the focus on digital infrastructure will be at the DEPA-organised Digital Thailand Big Bang show. The four shows will embrace this new theme to serve as a one-stop shop for the latest smart city technology and solutions. Advertisements A press conference was held today in Bangkok to announce the debut Smart City Solutions Week. Committed to showcasing the best in security, building automation, lighting and digital infrastructure solutions, the line-up of fairs, which kick-off on 28 October, look set to cement Thailand's position as one of the leading hubs for smart city solutions in the ASEAN region. Mr. Hubert Duh, Chairman and Managing Director, Messe Frankfurt New Era Business Media Ltd, said: "Messe Frankfurt is proud to support the ASEAN smart city development. We are confident that local organisers DEPA, Worldex and Exhibiz understand key local market needs and concerns, while Messe Frankfurt shall use its deep-rooted experience in nurturing and growing trade fairs while also leveraging our international network to foster new business opportunities. The synergy created amongst the four fairs will not only enhance the visitor experience but also help to build even more momentum for ASEAN's smart city sector. Dr. Nuttapon Nimmanphatcharin, President/CEO, Digital Economy Promotion Agency, remarked: "We are looking forward to a fruitful collaboration with all our partners to mark this noteworthy new milestone of the Smart City Solutions Week in Thailand. The adoption of the smart city concept is an undeniable trend for ASEAN cities and we hope that industry players will take advantage of these integrated solutions and build a networking platform across the smart city ecosystem. The 2018 editions of Secutech Thailand, Thailand Lighting Fair and Thailand Building Fair collectively gathered 300 exhibitors from 18 countries and regions and welcomed over 10,000 visitors. With a new show date and position alongside Digital Thailand Big Bang, it is forecast that the Smart City Solutions Week 2019 will enhance visitor numbers and the overall fair experience for the smart city industry. Connected fairs showcase industry-specific expertise Secutech Thailand has experienced steady year-on-year growth since its first edition in 2011. The fair is now widely recognised as a must-attend trade fair for security industry professionals from across the ASEAN region, partly thanks to its heavy influence in the smart city sector. Under the new theme of 'Security + AI - Empowers Sustainable City Development', the fair will deliver the latest AI and IoT security innovations for the smart city. To accommodate different sourcing requirements and highlight the most important security markets, the 2019 edition will be designated into five zones - the Smart Police Zone, the Safe Factory Zone, the Smart Transportation Zone, the Smart Campus Zone and the Smart Solutions Zone for Waste and Environment Management. These zones will feature all of the very latest surveillance systems, biometric identification systems, smart sensors, alarms, access control systems and crowd management systems. Thailand Lighting Fair and Thailand Building Fair will concentrate its focus via a new show theme: City + IoT - A sustainable and livable future. The use of IoT-enabled street lighting supports the development of smart city applications as these smart grids can be used for future public services to enhance the quality of city life. Likewise, buildings that leverage IoT technologies are developing into vital elements of the complex smart city network. Ranging from sensors collecting data to developers building thousands of smart city apps, the IoT movement will facilitate large volumes of high quality data to be in the hands of city leaders and decision makers, leading to better quality living environments. Under this theme, both Thailand Lighting Fair and Thailand Building Fair will present the full spectrum of the smart city concept including digital applications (smart lighting solutions, smart parking and smart buildings), smart technology (intelligent sensors, dimming and control and smart lighting platforms) and smart governance (facility management and smart community features). In addition, to create a sustainable and livable future, the fairs will have an additional focus on energy efficiency and power generation to address ongoing efforts to diversify our energy mix and showcase an array of technology and solutions. Digital Thailand Big Bang, established in 2017, is a platform that receives government backing to promote digital technologies. The fair is organised by the Digital Economy Promotion Agency to showcase the ways in which big data can be used to transform society and improve urban living standards. In its mission to move towards Thailand 4.0, some of the solutions that can be found at the fair include city management systems, cloud computing, fintech products and digital infrastructure such as submarine cables and satellites. Located at the Bangkok International Trade & Exhibition Centre, Secutech Thailand and Digital Thailand Big Bang will be held from October 28 31, while Thailand Lighting Fair and Thailand Building Fair will be held from October 28 30. Press Release 2 April 2019 BANGKO - Dusit Thani PCL, one of Thailand's foremost hotel and property development companies with 70 years of expertise, and Central Pattana PCL (CPN), Thailand's largest and most diversified property developer with 40 years of expertise, have officially revealed the creation of their historic collaboration to create a new city landmark, and transform a major Silom-Rama4 intersection into the prime core of the CBD (Super Core CBD), linking 4 key areas of Bangkok with a one-of-a-kind, mixed-use project called 'Dusit Central Park'. Developed under the concept of 'Here for Bangkok', the project creates a new way to live the metropolis life, and brings Bangkok to another level as one of the world's best cities. The project is expected to be completed in 2024. Worth a total of 36.7 billion baht and covering 440,000 sq.m of prime real estate on the corner of Silom and Rama IV roads, the ambitious project is set to feature luxury residences, a state-of-the-art office tower, a high-end shopping complex with a large rooftop park, and a distinctive reimagining of Dusit Thani Bangkok hotel, Dusit's iconic flagship property, which served as a symbol of gracious Thai hospitality for 50 years. Under the concept of 'Here for Bangkok', the project reflects four key pillars: 1) Here for Heritage & Innovation, where cultural legacy is put into practice, 2) Here for Unrivalled Connectivity, highlighting Dusit Central Park as the one-of-a-kind mixed-use project in Bangkok that connects all important infrastructure, 3) Here for a Lush Quality of Life, where people will get close to nature at Lumpini Park, aka the Lungs of Bangkok, as well as city vibrancy all day all night, and 4) Here for Meaningful Experiences, where new experiences of modern living reconnects with local communities and green space through a unique project where old meets new. To make Dusit Central Park a true real-estate masterpiece, Thailand's leading architectural firm, known globally for its passion in incorporating Thainess into its works, is assigned to oversee all design elements, with a world-renowned architectural consultant to help with the creation. "We aim to deliver a one-of-a-kind mixed-use project that blends heritage and innovation, connects all important infrastructure and transportation, embraces a green concept reflecting our prime position opposite Lumpini Park, and delivers enduring value for all our stakeholders," said Ms. Suphajee Suthumpun, Group Chief Executive, Dusit Thani. "By blending the best of Thai design and hospitality with international standards of service, we will create a new city landmark that reflects our past, embraces our present, and anticipates the future. By doing so, we will continue the legacy of Dusit Thani Bangkok, following the same principles Thanpuying Chanut Piyaoui had when she founded the hotel - to be bold and do great things, to create things that never existed before, and to always have a positive impact. "We look forward to working with CPN to doing just that under our promise, Here for Bangkok, while revolutionising the way people shop, dine, work, live and stay in this area. Regarding our most distinctive value, our project will enhance convenience for commuters by linking directly with the Bangkok BTS (Skytrain) systems and MRT (Mass Rapid Transit underground), at Silom and Sala Daeng stations, respectively." Ms. Wallaya Chirathivat, Deputy CEO of Central Pattana (CPN), said, "Under the concept of Here for Bangkok, this project is not just a mixed-use space but a new creation that will transform this area into the prime core of the CBD (Super Core CBD). Ultimately, Dusit Central Park will connect four Bangkok neighbourhoods in four directions - namely Ratchaprasong (north), Charoenkrung (south), Sukhumvit (east), and Yaowarat (west) - thereby creating a new junction where old meets new, and financial meets commercial. This seamless connection responds to both business and lifestyle needs. Dusit Central Park will be perfectly positioned to help bring Bangkok to a whole new level and set the standard for mixed-use projects in the city, as it locates next to Bangkok's major park, Lumpini Park, just like the iconic properties found adjacent to parks in New York and London." Dusit Central Park is expected to open in three phases. The First Phase will be the Dusit Thani Bangkok hotel. Designed to preserve the rich architectural and artistic heritage of the original hotel, the new 39-storey, 250-key Dusit Thani Bangkok will feature a modern-yet-familiar design that incorporates significant elements from the original hotel. A grand ballroom overlooking Lumpini Park will be a highlight, as will a multi-level rooftop bar and lounge. Alongside Dusit's unique brand of gracious hospitality, the property will offer the latest in high tech and high touch service. The Second Phase will be the Central Park Offices, whose 90,000 sq.m are set to be recognized as a Professional Hub that will provide the ultimate in technology for city workers where connectivity is the priority, suitable for innovative start-ups and large companies, and Central Park Shopping Complex. Designed to connect all elements, the luxury shopping complex is set to give retail experiences of the future that will create world-class 'New Urbanized Lifestyle' that has never seen before. The shopping mall will feature iconic international and local brands, with over 80,000 sq.m to meet the needs of various lifestyles. Also topped with Rooftop Park, the shopping complex will provide an expansive outdoor leafy retreat for people to unwind. These two elements will be completed in 2023. The Final Phase of the project will be the residences. Set over 69 storeys, this 389-key tower will be divided into two distinctive sections - Dusit Residences and Dusit Parkside - each managed by Dusit International in line with its unique brand of Thai-inspired gracious hospitality. Dusit Residences will comprise 159 luxurious, spacious units on the uppermost floors of the building, offering panoramic views of Lumpini Park. It is designed to provide a luxury standard of living for Bangkok-based executives or travelling executives who regularly visit Thailand, as well as middle- to large-sized families seeking maximum comfort and convenience. Dusit Parkside, meanwhile, will comprise 230 contemporary-styled units, also offering views of Lumpini Park, and is aimed at small-sized families as well as city workers seeking a stylish home in the heart of the capital. Units for both Dusit Parkside and Dusit Residences will be available for long-term rent or leasehold. Booking will open soon. Further information about Dusit Central Park is available at www.dusitcentralpark.com,www.facebook.com/dusitcentralpark and Instagram @dusitcentralpark. Further details about Dusit Residences and Dusit Parkside, please visit www.dusitresidences.com or call +66-2-233-5889. Hashtags: #DusitCentralPark #DCP #HereforBangkok Dusit Central Park is a project created by Vimarn Suriya Company Ltd, a joint venture between Dusit Thani PLC and Central Pattana PLC, comprising a hotel, residence, shopping complex and office tower. Supplier News 2 April 2019 Orlando, Fla. - Hapi, the transformative new data streaming, integration and enrichment platform designed to solve the hotel industry's rapidly expanding data management challenges, has appointed John Figliolini as Vice President of Business Development for Data Travel, LLC, the developer of the Hapi platform. A proven sales and strategic account management professional specializing in technology solutions for over 13 years, Figliolini has spent the past six years focused on the global hospitality technology sector. Prior to joining Data Travel, Figliolini served as Vice President of Service Optimization, Americas for Amadeus, where he spent over five years in various sales and leadership roles. In his new position with Hapi, he will be responsible for the strategic development of partner and hotel client relationships, as well as the go-to-market strategy for critical Hapi partner integrations intended to maximize market share for the company. "John's deep knowledge of hospitality technology and passion for customer advocacy make him the perfect person to help tech partners and hotel companies adopt Hapi and thereby accelerate innovation," said Luis Segredo, president and CEO or Data Travel. Based in Rhode Island, Figliolini earned his MBA from the University of New Hampshire. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, where he was the recipient of the Hobart Deans Presidents Award for Leadership. "I am deeply honored to be joining Hapi's highly experienced and successful team of hotel data professionals," said Figliolini. "Their collective knowledge and expertise make them a formidable force, and I look forward to being a part of solving the industry's pressing data and integration challenges." To learn more about the HAPI data streaming and integration platform, please visit hapicloud.io. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has announced plans to open a new Hotel Indigo in the Spanish capital. The Hotel Indigo Madrid - Princesa will be one of seven IHG boutique hotels opening in key cities across Southern Europe in the next three to five years. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has announced plans to open a new Hotel Indigo in the Spanish capital. The Hotel Indigo Madrid - Princesa will be one of seven IHG boutique hotels opening in key cities across Southern Europe in the next three to five years. The announcement was made during the 19th WTTC (World Travel & Tourism Council) Global Summit in Seville, Spain, which brings together influential figures from around the world to address the challenges and opportunities facing the Travel & Tourism industry. The Hotel Indigo Madrid Princesa is set to open its doors in Autumn 2019 in the Moncloa-Arguelles area, a key location in the Spanish capital within walking distance of the city's main business and leisure districts. Developed in partnership with Hotel Collection International, a Luxembourg-based third party operating company which currently operates four IHG properties, the hotel will feature 100 design-led rooms inspired by local culture and history, a destination restaurant, fitness centre and access to a stunning rooftop with sweeping views of the city. The move builds on Hotel Indigo's strong growth as one of the largest boutique brands in this fast-growing segment. Having recently celebrated opening in 100 vibrant neighbourhoods around the world, Hotel Indigo made 33 new hotel signings in 2018 and is now set to double its portfolio over the next three to five years. Current open properties in Southern Europe include Madrid (Gran Via), Barcelona, Rome and Paris, with pipeline developments opening in Venice, Milan and Belgrade in 2019, Verona in 2020, and Gibraltar in 2021. Eric Viale, Managing Director Southern Europe, IHG, commented: "The strong growth of openings and pipeline of our Hotel Indigo and Kimpton brands reflect the opportunity across the boutique hotel sector, which is among the fastest growing in the industry. With appetite for unique, design-led hotels continuing to increase across Southern European markets, we are perfectly placed to take advantage of that growth and look forward to welcoming guests from around the world to these popular and historic locations." Sebastian Lodder, CEO, Hotel Collection International, commented: "We look forward to partnering once again with IHG on this exciting project and tapping into its world-class systems and expertise. Madrid's rich arts and culture scene make it a great fit for Hotel Indigo, and we're delighted be able to bring this world-class lifestyle brand to the popular business and leisure district of Moncloa-Arguelles." Together with IHG's leading luxury boutique brand, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, IHG's boutique portfolio makes up almost 170 hotels globally, with nearly 120 more hotels in the development pipeline. Having doubled its number of signings in 2018, the Kimpton brand has secured a presence in 14 countries and is set to expand across Southern Europe with stunning properties opening in Barcelona at the end of 2019 and Paris in Summer 2020. There are currently 186 IHG hotels (over 3,000 rooms) open across Southern Europe 27 of which are in Spain and 31 hotels in the pipeline* *Figures as of 31 December, 2018 Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource 100 Queens Gate Hotel - London was formerly the home of Victorian aristocrat William Henry Alexander, and has been transformed into a hotel that embraces the buildings heritage, retaining much of its original 1870s architecture. 100 Queens Gate Hotel London, Curio Collection by Hilton opens its doors to guests. The 228-room hotel is the latest addition to Curio Collection by Hilton, a growing portfolio of one-of-a-kind hotels and resorts in premier destinations and one of Hiltons (NYSE: HLT) 17 brands. Following a two-year transformation, we are excited to open 100 Queens Gate Hotel - London, the newest Curio Collection by Hilton hotel. The hotel is a fantastic addition to the Curio Collection by Hilton portfolio, further strengthening our partnership with Hilton, says Mary Doogan, Cluster General Manager, 100 Queens Gate Hotel - London. The hotel features 11 suites, tailored and named after famous historic residents of Kensington including Alfred Hitchcock, Dame Agatha Christie and Captain Robert Scott. Each guest room is finished in a contemporary design to offer the ultimate in relaxation. For travellers looking for the optimum in refinement, the hotel also features the exclusive Queens Gate Suite, which boasts a private direct street entrance and up to four private bedrooms. 100 Queens Gate Hotel - London was formerly the home of Victorian aristocrat William Henry Alexander, and has been transformed into a hotel that embraces the buildings heritage, retaining much of its original 1870s architecture. William Alexander, a lawyer by profession, became well known not only for his wealth, but also his eclectic collection of oriental jewels and curios, collected on his exotic travels to the Far East. The hotels interior and unique design reflects the rich history of the Victorian terrace building, capturing the adventurous spirit of William Alexander and his Victorian contemporaries. The design elements of the hotel have been specially designed to spark curiosity and inspire guests to explore the delights of both Kensington and the great city beyond. Our neighbourhood of Kensington & Knightsbridge embodies the spirit of London, a city that combines an unrivalled and deep history with a fierce determination to define the contemporary, says Doogan. With the opening of 100 Queens Gate Hotel - London, we believe we have captured this spirit and brought it to life with our own unique story. The hotel is thoughtfully designed, in keeping with the buildings Victorian history from the cabinets of curiosities and decor, to Botanica, the Victorian-inspired orangery. In addition, 100 Queens Gate Hotel - London features three new food and beverage venues, introducing the following stylish new destinations to the area, alongside state-of-the-art facilities for guests. W/A Kensington W/A Kensington is the hotels elegant all-day brasserie and bar and the ideal place to dine and relax. The menu offers a contemporary take on British-French fusion cuisine the perfect setting to enjoy a lazy weekend brunch. Botanica The brasserie leads on to the beautiful Botanica, which draws inspiration from an authentic Victorian orangery, housed in a beautiful botanical glasshouse with and abundance of luxurious greenery and planting. The elegant atrium is flooded with natural light and curated by Whittard Teas of Chelsea the ideal place for indulgent afternoon teas and cocktails. ESQ The hotels ESQ bar has been designed as a discreet drinking den, inspired by the parlour bar of former resident William Alexander and his exotic travels. Here guests can explore crafted cocktails and innovatively infused spirits, in a relaxing and intimate home away from home setting, complete with eclectic curios and artifacts evoking the grand expeditions of a bygone era. Two neighbouring private dining rooms can also be booked for an exclusive gastronomical experience or intimate meetings. Gymnasium The gym draws inspiration from Victorian gymnasiums which were a trend in wealthier establishments at the time. The decor features dark paneling with wooden flooring, alongside modern gym equipment. Designed in collaboration with UK-based architects Morrison Design and interior design companies DesignLSM and Newman Gauge, 100 Queens Gate Hotel - London is ideally located in close proximity to many of Londons most recognised visitor attractions including Kensington Palace and Hyde Park, the Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Harrods. The hotel is located a short five-minute walk from South Kensington tube station. Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource The Melia Durres will be located in the second most important city in the country and aims to position itself as a benchmark hotel in this emerging destination known as 'the new pearl of the Mediterranean' thanks to its location, beaches and natural diversity. Melia Hotels International has announced its second hotel in Albania, the Melia Durres, during an event attended by the country's Prime Minister, Edi Rama. The event also included the presentation of the Concord Group, owner of the group's hotels in Albania, as a strategic partner and investor in the country. Thanks to new measures in Albania to stimulate tourism and the significant opportunity offered by the Concord Group, Melia has taken the opportunity to get involved in the development of the hotel industry in the country and continue to extend its influence in the Mediterranean with the opening of the future Melia Durres and Melia Tirana hotels. Melia Hotels International brings to the partnership its international leadership in resort hotels, its experience and impeccable record in pioneering destinations, and the recognition of its brand in the Mediterranean region, an area in which the Company is a dominant player. The Melia Durres will be located in the second most important city in the country and aims to position itself as a benchmark hotel in this emerging destination known as 'the new pearl of the Mediterranean' thanks to its location, beaches and natural diversity. This extraordinary five-star resort on the beach in Gjiri I Lalzit, will offer 400 rooms and extensive complementary facilities. Among others, the Melia Durres will provide great dining options in eight restaurants, several swimming pools, an exclusive YHI Spa, fitness centre, beach club, convention centre and parking. During the presentation, Maria Zarraluqui, Global Vice President of Expansion at Melia Hotels International, stated that "standing here in the place where the future Melia Durres will be located, we can understand even better the huge potential of this destination. Thanks to its natural advantages and the commitment to quality tourism shown by the government and key local investors such as the Concord Group, it is becoming one of the favourite destinations in the Mediterranean. We are very proud to be part of this future and to be able to contribute our experience." Melia Hotels International recently announced the signature of an agreement to add the Melia Tirana Hotel (2021), and continues to strengthen its international positioning in the Mediterranean, extending its presence in the Adriatic where it already operates hotels in Croatia and Montenegro. Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource Ariana Grande dropped off another catchy track yesterday called "Monopoly" featuring the likes of Victoria Monet. The self-love anthem caught the attention of many fans since Ariana sings that she likes both "women and men." Of course, the tune has sent Twitter into a frenzy with lots of fans sharing a few words on the reveal. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images "Ariana Grande is officially bi this is the best day of my life," one user wrote, while another added: "miss ariana grande saying i like women and men as a line in a song.....a fucking mood !!! but im not gonna jump to conclusions n assume shes bi until she addresses it. if she is tho.....................im gonna be dropping my uwus [sic] all over the place." Ariana is seemingly very aware of how happy her fans are since she has revealed her true self, but when it comes to labeling her sexuality, she doesn't feel like she has to. "I havent before and still dont feel the need to now which is okay," Ariana replied in response to a fan. https://twitter.com/_/status/1112866753518825473 "My music being embraced and celebrated by the LGBTQ community is all I ever truly cared about when I thought about my career goals early on," Ariana previously wrote in a letter to the LGBTQ community. "Theres no award I could win or accolade I could receive that would fulfill me more than seeing a 6-foot queen with a 4-foot ponytail walk into my meet n greet and say hey girl or meeting a young queer person at Starbucks and them letting me know that my music has helped them become who they are. Literally nothing." For years Rob the Original has been featured on a number of platforms that have praised him for his artistry. The barber, real name Rob Ferrel, has made a name for himself by creating uncanny portraits, most notably of celebrities, using a pair of clippers. His nearly 800K followers on Instagram are regularly updated with his clients who are looking for a cut that will stand out from the crowd, and in the wake of Nipsey Hussle's death, one fan wanted to go above and beyond to honor the slain rapper. The 3D cut is remarkable, to say the least, and Ferrel captioned one of his images by writing, "In loving memory #ripnipseyhussle." In a previous interview with CosmoProf, Ferrel spoke about how he adapted his artistic skills into barbering. "Ive been an artist ever since I can remember. Growing up, I did all kinds of art, like graffiti, tattooing for a little bit and a lot of painting." "I had been cutting my own hair since I was 16," Ferrel continued. "It started as a necessity cause I didnt have an allowance growing up, and in high school, we were rocking those tight fades. (Laughs.) I didnt like going to school with my hair really long, so I started cutting it myself, and I just happened to be a natural." Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Police Department has stated that they are currently searching for 29-year-old Eric Holder, naming him the suspect in Nipsey Hussle's murder. Drake's currently overseas for the "Assassination Vacation" tour along with Baka Not Nice and Tory Lanez. Drake tours are in high demand and in international markets, the rapper typically has to book multiple shows in one city to appease his fanbase. Tonight, the rapper kicked off his seven-night residency at London's O2 arena, which the Canadian sensation managed to have switched to the "O3," as he mentioned in "God's Plan." During his first night in London, the rapper made sure to pay his respects to the late Nipsey Hussle. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bvt2ZbCAhtM "Somebody that provided for his people, somebody that always treated you with respect when they saw you. Somebody that commanded respect when you walk in the room. So I really want to do this show for Nip tonight," he said with a shot in his hand while projecting a picture of Nipsey Hussle. "London, as long as youll have me back Ill stand in the middle of this building and give you everything Ive fucking got. Cheers to my brother, rest easy my g. London, I love you." https://twitter.com/_/status/1112860279321362432 Drake paid homage to Nipsey Hussle last on Instagram with a heartbreaking tribute. "I was so happy watching from distance fam nobody ever talks down on your name you were a real one to your people and to the rest of us," he wrote. "Im only doing this here cause I want the world to know I saw you as a man of respect and a don. Rest easy my g." His first night at London's O2 arena also included the premiere of the trailer for Drake's long-awaited Top Boy revamp. https://twitter.com/_/status/1112812255941443584 Just a couple weeks after Philadelphia nabbed its biggest cocaine bust in the history of the city, an apartment in Harlem has now been busted with over $10 million worth of heroin and fentanyl. NY Daily News reports that over 77 pounds of heroin and fentanyl, as well as bricks of drugs labeled Pablo Escobar" were confiscated by police just yesterday on Lenox Ave. at W. 141st St. Depending on the potency of the opioids, they are worth anywhere from $10 million to $20 million. $200,000 in cash, a money counter and a kilogram press were also found in the apartment. The amount of fentanyl and heroin seized is a chilling reminder of the daunting threat lethal opioids pose to vulnerable substance users and those tempted to try readily available drugs," Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan said. Police made the bust after an investigation that required surveillance on Ariel Hernandez and Luisuidyn Garcia Mena. Police watched as both parties met in a black 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe and then followed Ariel who led cops to the apartment. When Ariel left the apartment again he was wearing a backpack that contained three kilos of heroin and fentanyl. Ariel, 35, faces charges of criminal possession of a controlled substance while Luisuidyn, 41, is charged with conspiracy and false personation for allegedly giving authorities a fake name. Both have pleaded not guilty. Since most of the money had allegedly been already transferred to Pfister and Sopko by that time, it meant that Sopko would be on the hook for one annuity payment and all other payments received after May 2012. As 2018 was coming to a close, it was announced that Kevin Hart would be the next comedian to host the Oscars. However, when controversial tweets of his from 2009-2011 surfaced, Hart's credibility was questioned as he was labeled homophobic. The "scandal" caused Hart to step down as the Academy Awards host, and throughout these few months of 2019, Hart has issued numerous apologies for his use of words and phrases including "homo," "f*g," and "that's gay." In an interview with USA Today, Hart revisits the controversy and denies that he has any issues with the LGBTQIA community. He also recognizes that not apologizing straight away may have been a mistake. "So I had several conversations with good friends of mine that are part of the LGBTQ community, and listened and heard the point of view that was very important, which was, 'Hey, Kevin, we just want to know that you don't feel the way you felt then. We wanted to hear you say that,'" Hart said. Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images "Which is what a good friend of mine, Lee Daniels, told me," Hart continued. "And I said, 'You know what, Lee, I can understand that.' I thought that me putting my change on display and never going back to that was the best way to do that. And if the verbal [apology] would have been better, then I can understand that. But at the time, I didn't grasp that concept of just wanting to hear that again. Hopefully, the people of the LGBTQ community know that I in no way, shape or form embrace any ill will toward anybody in general. Its not who I am." The actor also goes on to speak about his past infidelities and using the event as jokes in his act. Not every wife would be okay with her husband getting laughs from his cheating ways, but Hart says he sat down with his woman, Eniko Parrish, to talk things out first. "Me and my wife were on the same page, because this is something we addressed in our household first," he said. "Before it gets to the stage, my home has to be handled; we have to be in the space where we're OK and our conversations are ultimately what led to the material that was birthed from it." The term bananas does not often apply to an orchestral performance, but for Carmina Burana it fits. Carl Orffs cockeyed 1935-36 cantata has a checkered past, to say the least. Its popularity during the Third Reich has understandably given pause to programmers in later decades. A 2009 article in The Guardian noted the piece is often presented only with a clothes-peg clamped ostentatiously over the managerial nose. Yet its raw, elemental appeal is undeniable last weekend, the Houston Symphony made Carmina Burana burn. The opening and best-known section, O Fortuna, is classical music at its most sinister and dramatic. Meant to evoke the spinning wheel of fate it also closes the piece the massive chorus in the key of D minor dims to a conspiratorial whisper before making a volcanic return. Orff makes it all too easy to imagine fell deeds afoot, adding a whiff of the occult just to remove any lingering confusion with sacred music. Besides being used in any number of commercials, Hollywood producers have long recognized its power. O Fortuna has been tapped to accompany King Arthurs knights thundering into battle in Excalibur; Jim Morrison and his Wiccan lovers candlelit coupling in Oliver Stones The Doors; and the slow-motion downhill plunge of Johnny Knoxvilles crew, riding an oversized shopping cart, in Jackass: The Movie. All that makes perfect sense in light of the pieces actual origins. The text of Carmina consists of brief poems discovered in Austria around the year 1230 and compiled into a book; the edition Orff used was published in 1847. Supposedly written by a band of wayward students known as goliards Orff chose two dozen out of hundreds these poems celebrate the joys of drinking, nature, and (last but hardly least) sexuality. This was long enough ago that no one is actually sure, but these goliards may or may not have been on the verge of renouncing their worldly desires in order to join a monastic order. If thats the case, it would explain a lot full of florid imagery and characters from Greek mythology, these poems have the approximate mindset of soldiers on leave. For once, the Jones Hall stage looked as deep as it is wide, accommodating the Houston Symphony Chorus and a walk-on by the Fort Bend Boys Choir besides the unusually large orchestra. Also on hand were three vocal soloists: soprano Laura Claycomb; baritone Reginald Smith Jr.; and tenor Matthew Grills, the latter giving a memorable turn as a swan slowly being roasted over a fire. Tasked with keeping everyone on the same page was guest conductor Yaniv Dinur, impressively demonstrating the skill set that won him the 2019 Sir Georg Solti Prize. All told, their Carmina was lusty and priapic, exalting in the approach of spring (the overarching theme of the hour-long piece) with a riot of choral and orchestral sounds: cymbal crashes, stampeding tympani, rustling tenors, booming low brass, merry flutes, and so forth. We complain about sensory overload today; imagine how audiences back then must have felt. Perhaps only Stravinsky or Mahler could have loosed such unruly musical forces into the world, but they didnt. Whatever capricious spirits were helming fortunes wheel by the 1930s left that dubious distinction to Orff. In retrospect, the first half of the evening felt like an inoculation against the excess to come. The program opened with a welcome turn of the spotlight toward principal cellist Brinton Averill Smith, who in turn featured on a somewhat forgotten curio from the late Romantic era, Eugen dAlberts Cello Concerto in C Major. Completed in 1899, the 24-minute piece which folds a typical concertos three distinct movements into a single unit rather than separating them has faded somewhat over the years, but Smith showed how easily it can be revived as an example of hazy textures and sterling technique. The French-born dAlbert was a top pupil of Franz Liszt and loved Germans, becoming renowned for his interpretations of Bach and Brahms, among others. His cello concerto sounds designed to wring the maximum possible amount of sensuality out of the instrument, allowing soloists to show off their upper-register talents without making a terribly big deal about it. The accompaniment was equally lush, often structured as a playful dialogue between Smith and the woodwinds. Dripping with vibrato and plentiful double stops (or bowing two strings at once), many passages were long on languid atmosphere, if perhaps light on moments that truly sung until the passionate final bars. DAlberts somewhat overcast melodies may have gradually lowered the concertos profile over time, but it was certainly no reflection on Smith, who was enthusiastically called back for a pre-intermission encore. He chose Gabriel Faures Apres un Reve, a brooding bauble whose title translates as after a dream. Arranged so that Smiths only accompanists were his fellow cellists, these three elastic minutes pensive, melancholy, exquisite achieved a much different plane of decadence than Carl Orff probably ever dreamed of. Chris Gray is a Houston-based writer. Superintendent Steve Disney said he has filed an appeal to the Indiana Department of Education to recalculate how much money the state should give his school system in 2020 and 2021. On Jan. 9, Galloway, Juarez Rogers, and three people Rogers had brought from Illinois, first tried to rob Hawkins at a house in the 4400 block of Madison Street in Gary, court records state. When that failed, Galloway and his group followed Hawkins to Park West Apartments, where Ortiz was shot. Its been a real blessing to have this group where they can take animals and theyll provide them with appropriate food and care until we can find their owner or else find them another place to live, Counard said. Texas Catholic leaders have joined Southern Baptists in their support of a bill that would allow churches to share former employees sexual abuse and misconduct allegations without being sued. The bill, filed last month in the Texas Legislature by Southern Baptist minister and McKinney Rep. Scott Sanford, comes as Catholics and Southern Baptists the nations two largest faith groups wrestle with sexual abuse crises. Sanford said the legislation would help prevent sexual predators from moving into unsuspecting churches, an issue that was detailed in Abuse of Faith, a recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News that found at least 700 victims of sexual abuse or misconduct by Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers since 1998. In some of those cases, the newspapers found, churches did not alert other congregations about allegations against former employees out of fear of lawsuits. The Texas bill would give immunity to those who make such disclosures in good faith. Though the two faiths are voicing similar support for the bill, there are important distinctions in their structures. Southern Baptists profess that each of the denominations 47,000 cooperating churches are self-governing and autonomous, and church leaders thus normally dont interfere in the business of other congregations. Nor does the SBC track ordinations, most of which are done at the local level. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, is far more hierarchical, and it extensively tracks where clergy have worked and sexual abuse allegations made against them. Those records have proved integral to investigations such as the one conducted by the Pennsylvania attorney general last year. On Monday, hours after the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston announced it was investigating allegations that a local priest had fathered a child with a parishioner overseas, a Catholic official testified that the bill would assist in eradicating the evil of sexual abuse. The bishops believe that transparency in this painful matter of sexual abuse can assist healing for survivors and transformation for our society, said Jennifer Allman of the Austin-based Texas Catholic Conference of the Roman Catholic Bishops of Texas. The bill, she said, is consistent with Pope Francis proclamation that there is absolutely no place in ministry for those who would sexually abuse another person. Protect the vulnerable An official with Texas largest Southern Baptist group voiced similar support, but said that churches need to protect the vulnerable whether we are shielded or not. We know of churches and institutions that have written policies never to disclose the reason for a termination to anyone seeking a job reference, said Ben Wright, a Cedar Park-based pastor and an official with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The sole purpose of these policies is to minimize exposure to civil liability. But we are not ordinary businesses. We believe that it rests on us a moral obligation that demands more. Sanford said his bill shines a light on the sexual abuse that thrives in secrecy. That sentiment has been welcomed by victims of sexual abuse and advocate groups such as the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a national organization started in response to Catholic abuses in the 1990s. But those groups also say that more should be done to protect victims, some of whom have been targeted with defamation suits by those they accuse of abuse. The bill should help to drive more reporting of abuses, Michael Norris, of Houstons SNAP chapter, said Tuesday. But, he added, there should be some verbiage in there about protecting the victim. Theyre not thinking about protecting the victim. Easier to prosecute SNAP continues to push for more sweeping changes to the states statute of limitations for civil lawsuits. Texas and other states have reformed such laws for criminal cases, but changes to civil rules have sometimes been quashed by lobbyists for groups that include the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts of America and insurance companies, according to Marci Hamilton, an expert on child sexual abuse laws. In Texas, the window for reporting criminal sexual abuses of children was broadened more than a decade ago. Its precisely why Tarrant County prosecutors were able to indict Anne Marie Millers alleged abuser last summer. Wright, the Texas Southern Baptist official, cited a story similar to Millers when testifying in support of HB 4345 on Monday. Miller was a teenager in Fort Worth when she says she was groomed for sex by a local seminary student. In 2007, she contacted the Southern Baptist Conventions International Missions Board after learning her alleged abuser was working there, prompting an internal investigation that concluded that the man, Mark Aderholt, more likely than not had abused Miller. Aderholt soon after resigned, though mission board officials declined to alert his future employers in other states about the claims in part because of fears of civil litigation, they later said. He was extradited last summer from South Carolina to Texas, where his criminal case is ongoing. Miller on Tuesday called the bill a very good step in the right direction, but said SBC entities such as the IMB need to be held accountable for past failures. robert.downen@chron.com Twitter.com: @RobDownenChron WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castros Senate candidacy could set up a clash between two veteran Texas politicians with San Antonio roots who have known only success in their careers. Latino leaders in Texas are pressing Castro to run, eyeing the potential of unseating John Cornyn and the likelihood that a competitive Senate race could boost Democrats as well as Hispanic candidates up and down the 2020 ballot. Several candidates already are considering running to step into Castros San Antonio seat, among them former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, multiple sources said. Van de Putte, the Democrats 2014 lieutenant governor candidate, is among those encouraging Castro to run for the Senate. In an interview, she said she believes that Castro would mount a strong challenge to Cornyn and compete with him in fundraising. If I, as a candidate for lieutenant governor, could raise $8.2 million, I dont think Joaquin is going to have any problem raising the funds he needs. He will have a superb small-dollar program for donors, she said. For subscribers: Van de Putte seriously considering a run for Castros congressional seat Castro says he is seriously considering running for Senate but has given no timetable for making up his mind. Castro would be the first big-name Democrat to enter the race. Others mentioned as possible contestants include Mary Jennings MJ Hegar, of Austin, an Afghanistan War veteran who said in an interview that she, too, is considering running. She also noted that she is conferring with Castro. Former state Sen. Wendy Davis said this month that she might run but added that she encourages a Castro candidacy. Castro, 44, a four-term House member, is the twin brother of Julian Castro, a former San Antonio mayor and Obama administration housing secretary who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president. For subscribers: Twins Julian and Joaquin Castro step onto national political stage together, as always Before entering Congress, Joaquin Castro served five terms in the Texas House. He hasnt achieved the stature of Cornyn, who rose to No. 2 in the Senate GOP ranks before reaching a term limit for that leadership post. But Castro has been at the center of action recently in Washington. He chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which operates at the cutting edge of border policy. As an Intelligence Committee member, Castro has become a cable television regular on matters of security and foreign affairs. And he wrote the resolution that passed the House and Senate rebuking President Donald Trump for his national emergency declaration to fund the border wall. Trump vetoed the measure. Cornyns support of the presidents authority in the recent high-decibel Washington debate suggests that a Castro-Cornyn contest would trigger an intense airing of border issues. For subscribers: Texas Sens. Cruz, Cornyn back Trump in vote on border emergency declaration Houston-born Cornyn, 67, is a former Texas attorney general and Texas Supreme Court justice. He spent part of his high school years in San Antonio, graduated from Trinity University and received his law degree from St. Marys University. Cornyn has $5.8 million on hand for his re-election - some 40 times Castros political bank balance - bolstered by contributions from the oil and gas industry. Democrats bank on massive turnout in 2020 A Castro candidacy against Cornyn likely would be viewed as an uphill climb in part due to Democrats quarter-century drought in statewide contests. Democrats last won a statewide Texas office in 1994, the year Bob Bullock succeeded in his campaign for lieutenant governor. But Castro supporters predict a massive turnout in 2020, spurred by an energized Democratic electorate. Anti-Trump sentiment among Democrats helped Beto ORourke come within 2.6 percentage points of unseating Ted Cruz last year. A Castro candidacy could benefit from the quest by his twin brother, Julian, like ORourke a contestant in the Democratic presidential field. The prospect of Latino twins running for high office will propel turnout among Latinos, which surged last year across the state, analysts say. Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox A closely contested Senate race would inject even more buzz into the 2020 elections, with two Texas Democrats competing on the national political stage and Democrats vying for relevance after being shut out of statewide office for so long. Cornyn has scarcely been challenged in the past, posting double-digit wins in every general election since he claimed the Texas attorney generals post in 1998. He stayed close to electoral politics in Washington, twice leading the National Republican Senatorial Committee political group, including the run-up to the 2014 elections when Republicans won back the Senate control that they retain today. Cornyn has prepared to defend his seat. Intent on forestalling a primary challenge, he obtained an endorsement in December from Cruz, who withheld primary backing for Cornyn in 2014. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also endorsed Cornyn in December, and in February, Trump tweeted: John has my complete and total endorsement. Already on board Cornyns re-election drive is campaign manager John Jackson, who engineered Gov. Greg Abbott re-election victory last year, and former Texas GOP chairman Steve Munisteri, who left a White House job in January to become senior adviser for Cornyns effort. I think a lot of people woke up the day after the election and said, Hey, weve got to be prepared, Jackson said, referring to Democrats 2018 successes. $50M needed to challenge Cornyn, strategist says The Cornyn campaign has signaled a plan of attack, already linking Castros voting record to that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a favorite GOP villain. The campaign also would be expected to highlight Castros votes against legislation including Hurricane Harvey relief money and provisions tightening federal record-keeping for gun purchases. Last year, after the Sutherland Springs church shooting, Cornyn engineered legislation to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check system. The legislation won final approval in 2018 as part of an omnibus spending bill, with Castro opposing it - along with 90 Republican House members, several from Texas. Matt Angle, who directs the Lone Star Project, a Democratic aligned-PAC, said he believes that any serious challenge to Cornyn will require a $50 million entry fee. But Angle remarked that Castro will have Cornyn sweating bullets, and contends that Cornyn is vulnerable because of his alliance with Trump. Texas senators over the years have been willing to stand up to a president of their own party. Cornyn just waits to get scratched behind his ears by Trump, Angle said. Brendan Steinhauser, who ran Cornyns 2014 re-election campaign, said Cornyn would be well-prepared to fend off Castro, partly by making special appeals to Latino voters. Though ORourke gave Cruz a scare in November, he doubts Castro would fare as well with Texas voters. He added: I dont think he is anywhere close to Beto ORourke. ORourkes candidacy was unique. Rice University political science professor Mark P. Jones said Cornyn likely benefited from ORourkes decision to run for president rather than the Senate. He noted, too, that Cornyn is not Ted Cruz. There are not too many people who intensely dislike John Cornyn. Nonetheless, Cornyn could be vulnerable if 2020 turns into a big Democratic year, Jones said. I dont think John Cornyn relishes running with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, he said. Donald Trump is the best thing that has happened to the Texas Democratic Party in recent memory. WASHINGTON - In the first major policy offering of his presidential quest, Julian Castro today presented a set of immigration proposals that would end criminal penalties for border crossings and eliminate for-profit detention and prison facilities. Castro, a former San Antonio mayor and U.S. housing secretary, spelled out a plan in the online platform Medium that goes beyond proposals forwarded by his rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. The next president must start by reversing the cruel policies of the Trump administration, including the Muslim ban, wasteful spending on a pointless wall and cuts to the refugee program - and ending the vile rhetoric that has scapegoated and vilified immigrants, Castro writes. Castro offered his plan amid a humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border and threats of border closure by President Donald Trump. In many ways, Castros People First immigration plan represents the mirror opposite of policies pursued by the Trump administration. For subscribers: Migrants inundating San Antonio bus station Republican National Committee spokesman Steve Guest called Castros proposal to remove criminal penalties an extreme view and recalled Beto ORourkes remarks when he was running for Senate last fall. ORourke, now a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination along with Castro, was referring to asylum-seekers arriving at the border, when he said: We should not criminalize that. Guest asserted that decriminalizing illegal immigration would mean open season for human traffickers, drug smugglers, and violent gangs like MS-13. He added in an email: So does the rest of the 2020 Democratic field agree with Beto and Castro? In addition to stopping construction on the border wall, Castro proposes overhauling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by splitting the agency in half and assigning enforcement functions to the Justice Department and other federal agencies. Castro also proposes changes that have stalled over the years in Congress, among them a pathway to citizenship for some 11 million undocumented immigrants and protection of so-called Dreamers - young immigrants brought to the United States as children without legal permission. In perhaps the most controversial section of his plan, Castro wants repeal of the immigration law section that enables criminal rather than civil violations for people apprehended when entering the country illegally. In his Medium post, Castro writes that the criminal provision dates to the 1920s when his grandmother arrived at Eagle Pass from Mexico. The U.S. government started enforcing the law in earnest during the administration of George W. Bush, he adds. For subscribers: Twins Julian and Joaquin Castro step onto national political stage together, as always This shift to criminalize immigration is at the core of many of this administrations most egregious immigration policies - from family separation to indiscriminate ICE raids to targeting asylum seekers, Castro writes. In tackling root causes of the border crisis, Castro departs full-scale from the Trump administration, which announced plans this week to end aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the Northern Triangle countries from which tens of thousands of people are fleeing to the southern border. Castros so-called Marshall Plan for Central America would increase funding to those countries for economic development and anti-violence programs, including support for public health and nutrition initiatives. Making investments in our southern neighbors boosts U.S. economic growth, strengthens global relationships and helps ensure that all people can find the safety and stability they seek in their home countries, Castro writes. Democrats in the Texas House and Senate who are pushing for an assortment of gun control measures have found Republican allies for bills that would enact criminal penalties for gun owners who fail to safely store their weapons at home, and that would launch a state awareness campaign around gun safety. Bringing attention to safely storing firearms can save lives and just might have saved the life of my dad, said Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, a co-sponsor of the awareness campaign bill, at a press conference at the Capitol on Tuesday. In 1990, Goodwin said, a burglar shot and killed her father with a gun he found in the home. Had that gun been in a gun safe, he might still be here today, she said. Several bills also would increase criminal penalties for failing to store firearms out of the reach of children, as required by state law. Others would eliminate taxes on firearm safety equipment and related materials. Lawmakers said they are hopeful that after mass shootings at a high school in Santa Fe and at a church in Sutherland Springs, they have more bipartisan support than ever before, especially on the gun storage measures. Improving gun storage laws was one of Republican Gov. Greg Abbotts main recommendations out of roundtable discussions he convened last spring after the shootings. For subscribers: Abbott proposes 40-page recommendation to beef up school safety Republican Rep. Rick Miller, R-Sugar Land, joined with Democrats as a co-sponsor of the awareness campaign bill in the House. And Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, is sponsoring one of the bills increasing penalties for leaving firearms accessible to children. Im very optimistic about the support that Im seeing among my colleagues for getting past the political knee-jerk reactions to this and looking at what really makes sense, Donna Howard, D-Austin, said. So Im very hopeful that were going to see some movement this session. Howard said nearly 200,000 children in Texas live in homes with unlocked, loaded guns, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. In just the last two weeks, she said, three Texas children have been accidentally shot by another child in the family. Two of the three shootings occurred in the Houston area. One of the children died. In mid-March, KPRC-TV reported that two 16-year-old cousins were playing with a gun when one of them accidentally shot and killed the other in Klein, Texas. Later that week, KHOU reported that a 16-year-old boy was showing his 14-year-old cousin a gun and accidentally shot and injured her in Katy, Texas. And last week, NBC DFW reported that a 3-year old accidentally shot and injured his 5-year-old brother in Dallas. In our state and our country, we believe in the right to bear arms, Howard said. However, that right comes with the great responsibility of ensuring that others who may cause harm, either intentionally or unintentionally, to themselves or others, do not have access to those guns. For subscribers: Reynolds files legislation to 'close the notorious gun show loophole' Democrats also plugged bills Tuesday that would close the gun show loophole by requiring sellers to background check potential buyers who dont already have a handgun license. Others would allow higher education institutions to opt out of the 2015 campus carry law that allows licensed gun owners to carry concealed handguns in most buildings at public universities. Editor's note: A previous version of this story misstated the number of children killed in accidental shootings in March. Another hellish plume of black smoke. Another captive community ordered to shelter in place. Another chemical plant with a long history of regulatory violations. Only this time, the fire was deadly. People across the Houston region can be forgiven for feeling a bit of deja vu Tuesday afternoon as live local news coverage depicted fiery scenes at a chemical plant in Crosby owned by KMCO LLC. Law enforcement said one person had been killed and two were LifeFlighted to the hospital. Details were scant. Worries, questions and frustrations were not. At a press conference, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said it was disturbing and problematic that the incident comes on the heels of the Deer Park fire at the Intercontinental Terminals Co. It was only two weeks ago that a multi-tank fire raged out of control at the ITC plant, which had a history of environmental violations that garnered little more than wrist slaps from state regulators at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Fortunately, there were no deaths or injuries, though we may never know the public health toll of an incident that reportedly spewed 9 million pounds of pollution on the first day. Thats more illegal air pollution than reported for the entire Houston region in 2017. Then on Tuesday, it happened again. Like the Deer Park plant, the Crosby facility, owned by KMCO, had a history of environmental and workplace safety issues, the Chronicles Matt Dempsey reported. Among them: The facility is currently not compliant with the federal Clean Water Act. In fact, Dempsey found, it was in violation for seven of the past 12 quarters. It violated the Clean Air Act three times in the past 12 quarters. Environmental Protection Agency data show the facility on Feb. 22, 2018, violated the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which regulates how facilities handle hazardous and non-hazardous solid waste. The plant has dozens of Occupational Safety and Heath Administration violations since 2010, Dempsey reported. And Harris County sued the plant in 2008 for spills and fumes that gave neighbors headaches, which ended with a permanent injunction requiring KMCO to pay $100,000 in civil penalties. Sunday, this editorial board demanded that state officials hold polluters accountable and not just after a disaster. We didnt expect to be repeating ourselves so soon. But this is what happens in a state where environmental regulators are toothless tigers. Where the TCEQ trusts polluters to police themselves in part out of necessity, since lawmakers dont adequately fund the agency. Where violators avoid sanctions and routinely endanger Texans health without our knowledge. Where Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton talk tough, maybe even file a lawsuit after an incident makes headlines, but look the other way when the smoke clears. At this rate, the smoke will never really clear. There will be another fire. And another. Another round of parents fearing for their childrens safety. Another community fearing the effects of chemicals and pollutants they cant pronounce. Another black eye to Houstons already bad reputation as a place where one shouldnt breathe too deeply, a place where profits outweigh concern for public health. As weve pointed out, Texas facilities in 2017 reported releasing more than 63 million pounds of unauthorized air pollution including chemicals linked to cancer, heart attacks and respiratory problems, according to a report by Environment Texas. But, in the past seven years, TCEQ issued fines in less than 3 percent of such events. These repeated, disastrous fires and explosions can no longer be called isolated incidents, Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, told the editorial board Tuesday. The Texas petrochemical industry has a serious, chronic problem, and Texas workers and citizens are paying the price. How many people have to die, get hurt, get cancer or suffer respiratory failure before the state takes this seriously and overhauls our broken system of oversight? Texans, these are questions for Abbott and our other state leaders. Its up to us to demand the answers. Almost every day, I used to go Swamplotting. Id jump in my car or get on my bike to look at Houston to look for Houston, really. I was never sure where Id end up. Id drive to Friendswood or pedal into the Third Ward and pull over to take photos with an iPhone whenever I spied Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission notices taped in the corners of windows or one of those awkward Notice of Variance Request signs posted at a property the planning commission was going to consider whether to reduce a building setback or approve a replat for townhouses, or whatever. This was in 2012, 2013. So, usually, it was townhouses. At that time, I was running Swamplot, the popular real estate and architecture site. It was my first real job in Houston. I worked with a small crew of freelancers who drew illustrations and compiled the Daily Demolition Reports maybe the sites essence. After Swamplotting most evenings and weekends, snapping photos until my camera roll was full, Id spend hours zooming around in Google Maps, scrolling through Houston Architecture Information Forum threads or searching addresses in the Harris County Appraisal District database. My job was to see what was what and where was where. Address by address, and intersection by intersection, I was trying to learn the 10,000 square miles of what I had been trained to call the built environment of the greater Houston region. It was an interesting time. Every day, it seemed, I would write posts featuring renderings of mid-rise apartment buildings in Montrose, 15-story towers in the Energy Corridor, 50-story towers downtown remember the one Chevron was going to build? It was when the idea of Sunday Streets was forming, when Uptown unveiled the bus rapid transit line on Post Oak Boulevard, when the citys Safe Passing ordinance was passed, when the fate of the Astrodome still hung in the balance. But its always an interesting time for Houston, isnt it? And thats why its such a shame that Swamplot is done. This March, after 12 years, more than 17,000 posts and 133,000 comments from readers, the sites founder posted that it would no longer be publishing every day. The simplest way of explaining it, he told me, is that the people involved were ready to move on to the next thing. The founder is Larry Albert, who has his own architecture practice and teaches at Rice University. For years, he ran Swamplot he wrote 10,000 posts himself under the pseudonym Gus Allen, a play on Augustus of the Allen brothers, the citys first real estate hucksters. The citys inside jokes were always part of it, but Swamplot was interested in the details, too what Albert called the weirdnesses, the stories about bed bugs and townhome farms and pollution leaks and mansion demolitions that, when you pile them up, give you Houston. In time, Swamplot would attract 150,000 readers a month, most of whom came to the site as much for these weirdnesses as for the tone of it all. The adjective you hear most about Swamplot is snarky, but that wasnt it. (A lot of the snark came from readers, anyway.) Early on, Albert trained me to avoid a harrumph. Really, the site wanted to show what was happening to our built environment the sidewalks, the strip malls, the Superfund sites without taking much of a position, one way or the other. Thats what compelled people to keep reading, Albert said. It allowed people to trust in it and appreciate it without thinking that they were being talked down to or that we had some agenda. Albert always told me that Swamplot was a way for Houston to understand itself. Ever since the Allen brothers called the city salubrious, well-watered and beautifully elevated in 1836, weve been trying to square what we actually see with what speculators and their spokespeople say. Swamplots business was publishing our attempts, with our photos and questions all aimed at giving the rest of us a say, too. Thats what Houston needs. Even though the site is no longer publishing Albert said he will be announcing in the weeks to come what will happen with its domain and archives we need to keep Swamplotting. Maybe the sites legacy can be an action more than an archive, a verb more than a noun. The strip malls arent going to tell on themselves. On March 29, President Donald Trump moved to cut $450 million in aid to the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras because he believes the three governments are not doing enough to prevent their citizens from migrating to the United States. This policy shift is counterproductive to the presidents goal of reducing unlawful migration from Central America to the U.S., since its only effect will be to worsen the already dismal security and economic conditions in the three countries. These worsened conditions will in turn push even more Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans to embark on the arduous and dangerous journey to the United States. It parallels the counterproductive and punitive decision that President Trump made last year, choosing not to extend permission for Hondurans and Salvadorans with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to remain in the U.S. That affects the approximately 195,000 Salvadoran and 57,000 Honduran TPS holders who have maintained a clean legal record in the U.S. for two decades, generally have children who are U.S. citizens and who send millions of dollars in remittances every month to bolster the Salvadoran and Honduran economies. Only an ongoing federal court challenge stands between them and deportation in January 2020. Northern Triangle residents are migrating in large numbers to the U.S. for two principal reasons personal safety and economic welfare. All three countries, but especially El Salvador and Honduras, are infested with violent criminal gangs, such as MS-13 and Barrio 18, which control large swaths of territory where the presence of the police is weak to nonexistent. These gangs regularly force children and adults to serve or join. Refusal can mean assault or death for them and their families. All three countries also remain mired in endemic poverty. So its no wonder that the desire for a better life spurs many Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans to migrate. President Trump moved to cut the aid because he felt the Northern Triangle governments were not doing enough to stem migration. But these three countries have weak national governments that, without reforms and substantially more resources, cannot do much more than they already are doing. If the governments cannot enforce the rule of law in their capital cities, where gangs rule the roost, it is unreasonable to expect them to be able to adequately control their borders or the behavior of their citizens, who have every constitutional right to travel to neighboring countries. And, until January and June, El Salvador and Guatemala will respectively continue to be led by unpopular, lame-duck presidents who are even more constrained and ineffectual than the average Northern Triangle president. Most of the U.S. assistance in the Northern Triangle has been focused on improving public security and the rule of law and promoting economic development. In recent years, it has led to important successes providing alternatives to gangs for at-risk youth in a select number of Honduran communities, introducing new techniques to boost Guatemalan agricultural production, and connecting thousands of Salvadoran households to the countrys electrical grid for the first time. As a result, the only real effect of the proposed aid cutoff will be worsened public safety and economic welfare and more migration. While this will undermine the Trump administrations stated goal of reducing migration, it is at least consistent with the similarly mean-spirited and counterproductive policy of moving to deport TPS holders whose forced removal will only deepen poverty in El Salvador and Honduras, encourage more northward migration and cause severe emotional and economic hardship for the hundreds of thousands of their children and grandchildren who are U.S. citizens. The current Trump policies are diametrically opposite what effective policies to reduce migration from the Northern Triangle would look like. A more effective agenda would involve a significant increase in U.S. aid to bolster public safety and reduce poverty. And because the efficacy of current aid is undermined by corruption, cronyism and mismanagement, expanded aid should be used a carrot to promote greater government transparency, accountability and capacity. Productive policy would also provide permanent residence status to TPS holders, so they can continue to be part of the solution to the Northern Triangle crisis as productive members of U.S. society, rather than become part of the problem as jobless deportees in El Salvador and Honduras. Republicans should urge President Trump to modify his Northern Triangle policy. Democrats should make a greater effort to negotiate with the president to support other policies he desires in exchange for a reversal of policies that are only counterproductive. Jones is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policys Political Science Fellow at Rice University. 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. 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Page Content Montreal and Riyadh, 2 April 2019 Welcoming the fact that civil aviation continues to deliver important direct and indirect benefits to Middle eastern States in terms of local and regional economic growth, ICAO Council President Dr. Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu, while delivering opening remarks to the Global Ministerial Aviation Summit being held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, appreciated how regional tourism figures were up 10% since last year, and that the very significant Central Southwest Asia to Middle East passenger route group was expected to grow at a compound growth rate of 6.5% annually from 2015 to 2045, according to the latest ICAO long-term traffic forecasts. He also expressed the collective gratitude of the senior officials present to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for hosting the timely Middle east aviation event under His patronage, and highlighted how aviation in Saudi Arabia now supports over 500,000 direct and indirect jobs, while contributing $34 billion or almost 4.6% in national GDP. All of these indicators strengthen our appreciation of the extensive policy guidance which has been developed through ICAO in support of air transport liberalization and harmonization here in the Middle East, covering such critical connectivity priorities as traffic rights, airport and air navigation charges, consumer protection, competition, and air transport taxation, Dr. Aliu noted. Focusing on a key topic at the Summit, Dr. Aliu stressed that it was important to recognize that the Regions increasing reliance on the safety, speed, and economic benefits of air transport also increases its exposure to aviation security risks and the increasingly concerning area of cyber-attacks. With respect to cyber threats more specifically, I wish to emphasize that a sweeping transformation is now underway as aviation evolves more rapidly from traditional analogue to digital communications. The ICAO President commented that transitions always carry with them a number of risks, opportunities and challenges for aviation and its national regulators, noting that by continuing to drive globally-harmonized solutions for all concerned ICAO could play an important role, notably through the new digital trust framework which the 13th Air Navigation Conference asked ICAO to begin exploring. It is important to ensure that all aviation stakeholders can take advantage of cost-effective communication links in the future which are fully secured, and establishing secure identities for all senders and receivers of aviation data is critical to this outcome, Dr. Aliu emphasized. Accordingly, ICAO recently signed an MOU with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN, to help explore if and how ICAO can eventually serve as a single-source digital identity trust-broker for global aviation. The preliminary analysis indicates that this approach could generate significant security and cost- benefits for operators, manufacturers, suppliers, basically anyone wishing to exchange information in our network, he explained. President Aliu drew attention to the recent and important Riyadh Declaration adopted at The Kingdom of Saudi Arabias2016 World Ministerial Conference on Civil Aviation, underscoring how it has been key to the accelerated development of the MID Region Security and Facilitation Plan. Dr. Aliu added that ICAOs Global Aviation Security Plan (GASeP), which was approved by the ICAO Council in 2017, has been very influential to these improvements in terms of Regional threats and global solutions. He concluded by enjoining his high-level audience to take note of ICAOs 2019 Global Aviation Security Symposium (AVSEC2019) and AVSEC Industry Engagement Day being held this September, immediately followed by the UN agencys aviation technology Innovation fair and Exhibition which will be part of its 2019 World Aviation Forum. All of these events take place just before ICAOs 40th Triennial Assembly this 24 September, when thousands of high-level government and industry officials will be present at its Montreal Headquarters. Accompanied by several Representatives on the ICAO Council, the Director of ICAOs Air Transport Bureau, Mr. Boubacar Djibo and by the ICAO Regional Director for the Middle East Office in Cairo, Mr. Mohamed Rahma, the President held a series of bilateral meetings with senior government officials, including with the Honourable Minister of Transport of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, His Excellency, Dr. Nabeel M Al-Amudi. Resources for Editors About ICAO A specialized agency of the United Nations, ICAO was created in 1944 to promote the safe and orderly development of international civil aviation throughout the world. It sets standards and regulations necessary for aviation safety, security, efficiency, capacity and environmental protection, amongst many other priorities. The Organization serves as the forum for cooperation in all fields of civil aviation among its 192 Member States. ICAO Future Aviation 75th Anniversary website ICAO and Aviation Development ICAO and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Contacts Anthony Philbin Chief, Communications aphilbin@icao.int +1 514-954-8220 +1 438-402-8886 (mobile) Twitter: @ICAO William Raillant-Clark Communications Officer wraillantclark@icao.int +1 514-954-6705 +1 514-409-0705 (mobile) Twitter: @wraillantclark LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/raillantclark/ Vietnam, China review 15-year implementation of Gulf of Tonkin Fisheries Agreement April 01,2019 | Source: Nhan Dan The Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs jointly organised a symposium in Vietnams Quang Ninh province on March 31, aiming to evaluate 15 years of implementing the Vietnam-China Agreement on Fishery Cooperation in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Agreement on the Delimitation of the Tonkin Gulf and the Vietnam-China Fisheries Cooperation Agreement was signed in 2000 and came into effect in 2004. It is a legal basis for Vietnam and China to clearly define the boundary in the gulf and create a clear international legal framework, which is convenient for each country to protect, manage, use and exploit natural resources, as well as facilitating economic development in coastal areas and continental shelf, contributing to strengthening and developing neighbouring relations and traditional friendship between the Party, Government and peoples of Vietnam and China. Speaking at the seminar, Vice Chairman of Quang Ninh provincial People's Committee Dang Huy Hau affirmed that the Vietnamese northern province attaches great importance to the implementation of the agreement and has directed its related departments and localities to propagate the contents of the agreement to local officials and fishermen, while regularly coordinating and providing information in the management and protection of national sovereignty over the sea and islands, inspecting and supervising fisheries activities and promptly handling violations. Also, in the process of implementing the agreement, Quang Ninh has integrated it with the implementation of the provincial resolutions, plans and directives on the development of the fisheries sector, with particular attention to exploitation and protection of aquatic resources. Evaluating the cooperation results after 15 years, the leaders of both ministries jointly affirmed that both the Tonkin Gulf Agreement and the Fisheries Cooperation Agreement have contributed to stabilising security and order in the gulf, building a peaceful, stable and cooperative environment for the two countries. MARD Deputy Minister Phung Duc Tien affirmed that Vietnam's ministries and localities have closely coordinated in training for about 55,000 fishermen and the management control force, and at the same time, developed plans to implement the agreement effectively. The two countries have well organised production and security at sea. Most of the licensed fishing boats comply with regulations and fishermen operate in compliance with the inspection and supervision of the Coast Guard, Vietnam Fisheries Resources Surveillance, and Border Guard forces, Deputy Minister Tien stated. Vice Minister of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development Wu Qinghai said that with the efforts of both countries related ministries and agencies, the spirit of cooperation and friendship between the two sides, with trust and mutual understanding, has maintained stable fishery production in the waters under the agreement, with three key elements maintained, which are the production of fisheries, fishermen's relations and fisheries management methods. After 15 years of fisheries cooperation between the two countries, the two sides have achieved outstanding results, contributing to the economic development of localities along the gulf and stabilising the social order in the fishing areas, the Chinese official stated. Through the workshop together with the analysis, assessment and evaluation of experts and the experience from diplomatic negotiators, representatives of the agricultural sector from the two countries will provide appropriate solutions to help fishermen have successful fishing trips, continuing to promote the sustainable development of fisheries in the Gulf of Tonkin and strengthening trust in the common relations between the two countries. Nhan Dan Online Theme(s): Fisheries Development and Aquaculture. Sierra Leone bans industrial fishing for a month April 01,2019 | Source: AFP Sierra Leone has banned industrial fishing in its territorial waters for a month from Monday in a move to try to shore up stocks that was applauded by environmental activists. The government also decreed an April 1-30 halt to exports by major fishing companies "to protect our fish stock from depletion", said a statement from the fisheries ministry. "All industrial fishing companies should stock their fish in cold rooms ... during the period of closure," Minister of Fisheries Emma Kowa Jalloh told AFP. The West African states of Mauritania, Senega, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone lost about $2.3 billion (more than 2.1 billion euros) a year from 2010 to 2016 due to illegal and undeclared fishing, according to the Greenpeace environmental group. Sierra Leone National Fishermen Consortium chairman Alpha Sheku Kamara accused China and Korea of destroying stocks. "We are happy that the government has declared fishing period closure after series of complaints," he told AFP at the bustling Tombo fishing community outside the capital Freetown. 2019 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. Theme(s): Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods. Chinese envoy reminds Filipino fishers of West Philippine Sea limits by Darryl John Esguerra Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jinhua on Monday said Filipino fishermen can continue fishing in the West Philippine Sea, but he reminded them of certain limits in the disputed areas. Zhao made the remark amid reports that Chinese coast guards drove away Filipino fishers from the Panatag Shoal, a traditional Filipino fishing ground within the countrys 370-kilometer exclusive economic zone. I think we are concerned about the livelihood of fishermen from both sides. And if they think they can fish in the areas where they catch fish, they can go, Zhao told reporters in Malacanang before he met with Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo. The Chinese envoy, however, claimed that there are some concerns from each side (on) how far they can go, and to what extent they can go near the islands and reefs that China controls. So there are certain kinds of limits that I think both sides are observing, Zhao said. For example, Chinese fishing vessels getting too close to the Chung-yeh island (Pag-Asa Island), there might be some concerns on your side, but if fishermen getting too close to the islands that we have people, there might be concerns. But in general, fishing can go on as usual, he added. The two countries, which have been locked in a territorial dispute for years now, previously agreed to let fishermen freely navigate the South China Sea, except for marine protected areas. The supposed harassment of Filipino fishers, however, has been reported a number of times. The Philippines filed a case challenging Chinas expansive claims in the South China Sea before the United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2013. The arbitral tribunal favored the Philippines three years later, but China refused to recognize the ruling. The Philippines, under President Rodrigo Duterte, has opted to set aside the landmark decision and instead engage China in bilateral talks. 1997-2019 INQUIRER.net Theme(s): Others. Israel loosens restrictions on fishermen in besieged Gaza March 30,2019 | Source: Saudi Gazette Israel loosened restrictions on fishermen off the blockaded Gaza Strip on Monday by allowing them to travel up to 15 nautical miles into the Mediterranean in one area, the largest distance in years. The decision comes after Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules Gaza, said it had been engaged in Egyptian-brokered talks with Israel on easing parts of the blockade in return for calm. Israel has not commented on the negotiations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is widely seen as wanting to avoid a severe escalation in the Gaza Strip ahead of April 9 Israeli elections. "The fishing zone in the Gaza Strip has been expanded to a maximum of 15 nautical miles (28 km)," said COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry unit that oversees such regulations. It did not say in which areas the zone would extend to 15 nautical miles. The Gaza fishermen's union said the zone was set at six nautical miles in the north the area next to Israel as well as 12 off central Gaza and 15 in the south near the Egyptian border. The distance is the largest allowed in years by Israel, which has fought three wars with Palestinian militants in the enclave and has blockaded it for more than a decade. Miriam Marmur, spokeswoman for Gisha, an NGO that monitors restrictions on Gaza, however noted that it remains short of the 20 nautical miles agreed to under the Oslo accords of the 1990s. Gisha also said enforcement of the zone has in the past led Israeli soldiers to fire toward fishermen and to seize vessels for those accused of violating it. "The enforcement of such a complicated demarcation of various permitted distances is likely to endanger the lives of fishermen and threaten their equipment," it said. The distance has fluctuated in recent years from between three nautical miles up to 12 in certain areas. In late February, Israel extended part of the zone to 12 nautical miles while other areas remained at six. On Sunday, Israel reopened its goods and people crossings with the Gaza Strip after having kept them closed for nearly a week following a rare long-distance rocket strike from the Palestinian enclave. Restrictions had also been placed on the fishing zone. The rocket fire wounded seven Israelis and led to Israeli retaliatory strikes across the Gaza Strip, another serious flare-up between the two sides. The reopening of the crossings came after tens of thousands of Palestinians protested along the Gaza border with Israel on Saturday, marking the one-year anniversary since demonstrations and clashes erupted there. Four Palestinians were killed on Saturday during protests and clashes, but unrest was limited and fears of mass bloodshed were averted after Egyptian-led negotiations. Gisha, citing UN figures, says the number of fishermen in Gaza has dropped from nearly 10,000 in 2000 to 3,700 now registered. Of those, about 2,000 are engaged in fishing on a daily basis, it says. 2016 WWW.SAUDIGAZETTE.COM.SA Theme(s): Communities and Organisations. Mexico fishermens leader: repression and persecution continue March 30,2019 | Source: Mexico News Daily The navys aggression towards fishermen in San Felipe, Baja California, this week represents a continuation of the policy of repression and persecution initiated by the former federal government against the fishing sector, according to a fishermens leader. Sunshine Rodriguez made the accusation following a clash Thursday in which a suspected illegal totoaba fisherman was shot by marines accidentally, according to a statement from the navy. Local media reported that two other people were wounded in the confrontation. It was a confrontation between fishermen and the navy derived from four years of harassment by the government of [Enrique] Pena Nieto, which planted a bomb that has detonated in the government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Rodriguez said. Fishermen in San Felipe, a town on the upper Gulf of California around 200 kilometers south of Mexicali, are accused of contributing to the near extinction of the vaquita marina porpoise by continuing to use gillnets to catch totoaba, whose swim bladder is a delicacy in China. The vaquita population has plummeted to just 10, scientists estimate, largely due to deaths caused by entanglement in the nets. In recent years, the navy and Federal Police have carried out operations aimed at stamping out the illegal use of gillnets, while environmental organizations such as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society carry out patrols to detect and remove the nets from the upper Gulf of California, the only place in the world vaquitas live. 2019 Mexico News Daily Theme(s): Communities and Organisations. On Monday morning, the parking lot of the restaurant at 200 Skokie Boulevard was empty, with a sign posted on the locked entrance door announcing: We have ceased operations at this location, but we hope you will visit one our other nearby Bakers Square Restaurants. Chinese museums need to tap deeper into the cultural and creative products market, the Guangming Daily reported. These products need to better feature the cultural characteristics of their respective museums and not be limited to common items such as refrigerator magnets, notebooks and cup holders, the newspaper said. Ouyang Hui, the curator of the Natural History Museum of Chongqing municipality, was quoted as saying that museums should dig deeper into their collections to come up with their own cultural characteristics. "They can also cooperate with businesses and exploit each other's advantages," he said. The report cited the Suzhou Museum in Jiangsu Province as a positive example of developing unique cultural and creative products such as cookies and seeds. "In addition to developing products on our own, we have cooperated with enterprises to design products and expand sales channels," said Jiang Han, who is in charge of developing such products at the Suzhou Museum. China issued a document in 2016 to encourage museums to develop cultural and creative products to promote the country's traditional culture. Data from the Chinese Tourism Academy showed in the past three years, the number of visitors to museums surged by 100 million each year. Spanish writer Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio passed away on Monday at the age of 91, his publishers confirmed to Xinhua. Sanchez Ferlosio, who was born in Rome on Dec. 4, 1927, is known for his novels and essays as well as his work studying the Spanish language. He based his work on the use of realistic narrative, which reflected everyday life. His formative years were spent as the son of a foreign correspondent living in Rome, where he learned Italian neo-realism, and was influenced by the style when he returned to live in Spain in the post Spanish Civil War era. Much of his writing reflected the difficult times in the 1940s and 50s on themes such as war, poverty, austerity and morality. Perhaps his most famous work is the novel 'El Jarama' which was published in 1955 and won him the prestigious 'Premio Nadal' of that same year. The book tells the story of a group of youngsters from Madrid, who spend a day in the country and highlights the contrast between urban and rural Spain. 'El Jarama' is considered to be one of the most important Spanish novels of the 20th century, thanks in part to the quality of the dialogue between its main characters. Sanchez Ferlosio's career was further recognized in 2004 when he won the Cervantes Prize (Premio Cervantes), the most important award for Spanish literature. Several journalists were attacked outside in court in West Jakarta by a gang leader on March 27, 2019. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its affiliate the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) condemn the assault on journalists and urge the authorities to prosecute the perpetrator. Gang leader, Hercules Rosario Marshal was in court in West Jakarta. When Hercules arrived at court, he stepped out of the car where he was met by waiting media. Hercules immediately started verbally and physically assaulting the media before he was taken to a holding room. As photographers tried to take his photo he was chased and the rest of the media fled the scene. FS, an online journalist who did not want to disclose his name due to safety concerns was recording the video at the moment of incident happened. He tried to escape, but was trapped between parked cars. FS was punched in the face by Hercules, but he covered his face with his hand which caused swelling and bruising. FS noted that he did not see any police officers on guard at the location. Hercules later published an online video and issued an apology. He said he was too emotional because of the verdict. AJI said assaults on the media is a violation of the press laws which guarantee legal protection for journalists as they do their jobs. We urge the police to prosecute Hercules as the perpetrator and bring him to court and sentence a punishment as heavy as possible as a deterrent effect to stop the attacks of journalists in the future, AJI added. In Indonesia,journalists are a target to attacks and physical harassment. All the cases of violence and abuse against journalist reported in Jakarta remain unsolved. The IFJ said: The local authorities in West Jakarta failed to ensure the protection and safety of journalists. We again remind all parties in Indonesia that protection of journalists whilst they are on duty is stated under the Press Law. Aside of that, we stand with AJI to urge the authorities to take action and bring perpetrators to justice. In the past, people rarely mentioned culture and tourism at the same time, even if they did travel to a certain place because of its unique culture. However, when the Ministry of Culture changed its name in March 2018 to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China, it marked a new era of the two concepts developing hand in hand. The ongoing exhibition A Journey in Love - which opens with a panda statue slowly circling around a green-walled room - explores the experiences of travelers connecting with different cultures in the form of installations, pictures and short animated films. Andy Warhol is featured among these travelers, through pictures and portraits of him as well as photos he took during his visit to China in the 1980s. Black-and-white photos, capturing a Beijing of a bygone era, were reflected poetically in a large glittering mirror with a more modern design. After lawyer and civil rights activist Zuzana Caputova was elected as Slovakia's first female president on 30 March 2019, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) joined the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) and other freedom of expression organisations to send her a letter, drawing attention to the press and media freedom situation in the country. Dear President-elect Caputova, Congratulations for winning the presidential election in Slovakia on 30 March 2019. Your victory marks a strong demand of the Slovak people for change, for true democracy under the rule of law one year after Jan Kuciak and his partner were murdered in your country. Jan Kuciak often reported about corruption in Slovakia, including cases that involve the government. We believe corruption is one of the greatest enemies of press freedom, around the world and within the EU. We therefore support your fight against it. We are confident, now that business owner Marian Kocner was charged with murder and the deputy general prosecutor resigned over his contact with him, that there will be no impunity in the Jan Kuciak murder case. This is an important sign for all other journalists, especially investigative reporters. We welcome the initiative by the European Parliament, with the resolution adopted last week, to deplore shortcomings in the rule of law in EU member states, especially in Slovakia and Malta. This is an important reaction in these times of rising threats against journalists throughout Europe. We are still concerned and ask for your support about two recent developments: Robert Fico, former Prime Minister and chairman of the ruling Smer party, just recently renewed his attacksagainst the media and journalists by insulting and denigrating them. These allegations contribute to a toxic atmosphere for journalists amongst the public, which can easily cross international borders. Likewise, the attempts to amend the Press Law 2008 by introducing a right of reply are a serious threat to press and media freedom. The proposal to oblige media to publish politicians replies to critical coverage is unnecessary, unacceptable and not in line with best European standards. It bears a high risk of massive political interference, which would lead to increased self-censorship in the media in Slovakia. We call on the parliament not to pass the amendment. The European media freedom community and also the Slovak Press Publishers Association and more than 400 journalists who signed a petition, oppose it. We politely remind you that your predecessor President Andrej Kiska stated at the European Press Freedom conference in Bratislava on 5 March 2019 that if such a law were passed during his presidency, he would refuse to sign it. We, the undersigned organisations, call on you to use your veto power against the proposed amendments to the Press Law, to uphold the European Charter on Freedom of the Press and do everything in your power to improve the safety of journalists in Slovakia. We are happy to support you with our research and our international networks. Yours sincerely, European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) Article 19 Articolo 21 (Italy) Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT) Ossigeno per lInformazione (Italy) South East Europe Media Organisation The office of the Director of Press and Public Relations at State House has abandoned plans to allow Security Intelligence Agency (SIS) agents to vet journalists. The decision came after strong complaints and the threat of a boycott from the IFJ and its national affiliate, the Gambian Press Union (GPU), who jointly condemned the plan as an attempt to silence and intimidate the media and lobbied the authorities to drop the scheme. Under the plan, every journalist who wanted to apply for accreditation to cover the presidency needed to go through a selection process under the supervision of the State Intelligence Services (SIS) "as part of press accreditation procedures". Both the IFJ and GPU called for journalists to boycott the new selection process arguing that journalists must be allowed to work freely and without any form of surveillance. In a meeting with GPU executive members at the State House on April 1st, Amie Bojang Sissoho, the Gambian Director of Press and Public Relations, announced that the plan was being dropped after consultation with stakeholders. She also confirmed to the GPU that the screening process, which was scheduled to start on Monday morning, was developed with goodwill and its only objective was to get to know the people covering the presidency because it is a sensitive office. Journalists who applied for accreditation will now be accredited without going through any form of SIS screening. Reacting to the new development, the GPU President, Sheriff Bojang Jr. said: Its in the interest of both parties that the plan to screen journalists in this manner is abandoned. Forcing journalists to appear before a panel of NIA/SIS agents would have been a very bad idea. IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: We welcome the governments decision to reverse its plan to screen journalists by its intelligence agency and congratulate the GPU for its work on defending media freedom in The Gambia. We call on authorities to consult the GPU before adopting any law that could affect the free exercise of journalism in the country. Imperial Valley News Center FDA warns homeopathic firms for putting patients at risk Washington, DC - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today posted warning letters to four companies who produce homeopathic drug products for significant violations of current good manufacturing practice (CGMP) regulations, including a letter to King Bio Inc. of Asheville, N.C. The FDA previously warned the public about the agencys serious concerns with the quality of drug products produced by King Bio. In late 2017, the FDA proposed a comprehensive, risk-based enforcement approach to drug products labeled as homeopathic and marketed without the required FDA approval. While the agency continues to examine this approach, the homeopathic industry has continued to grow, and we need to continue to address, consistent with our current enforcement policies, situations where products labeled as homeopathic are being marketed for serious diseases and/or conditions where the products havent been shown to offer clinical benefits. Were committed to continue taking appropriate actions when we believe patients are being put at risk by products that contain potentially harmful ingredients or have significant quality issues. One company that continues to concern us because of the low quality of their operation and the threat their products pose to consumers is King Bio. Despite previous actions weve taken, our concerns remain. The warning letter were sending is a formal notice to King Bio outlining a number of ongoing, serious violations with their manufacturing operations that must be corrected, said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D. Today weve also posted warnings letters to three other homeopathic drug manufacturers for additional concerns weve observed from the use of toxic substances like snake venom that has the potential to cause harm and does not have demonstrated benefit, to other firms whose products weve found to be contaminated. These actions build on similar steps weve taken over the past year, as we continue to see products labeled as homeopathic that are being marketed without approval for a wide array of diseases and conditions, from chronic pain to cancer. In addition to our concerns with contamination, some products labeled as homeopathic may not deliver any benefit and may have the potential to cause harm. Thats why weve proposed a new regulatory approach to prioritize additional enforcement and regulatory actions against certain products labeled as homeopathic. Were focused on products that have the greatest potential to cause risk to patients, including products for vulnerable populations like children. The actions weve taken recently, and over the course of the past year are further warning to all companies that these types of products must be manufactured and labeled appropriately. Were working to finalize our draft guidance in the coming months to help ensure that products that reach consumers are not harmful to their health. Products labeled as homeopathic have not been approved by the FDA for any use and may not meet modern standards for safety, effectiveness and quality. Products labeled as homeopathic can be made from a wide range of substances, including ingredients derived from plants, healthy or diseased animal or human sources, minerals and chemicals. These products are often marketed as natural, safe and effective alternatives to approved prescription and nonprescription products and are widely available in the marketplace. These unapproved drugs may cause significant and even irreparable harm if they are poorly manufactured, which can lead to contamination, or may contain active ingredients that arent adequately tested or disclosed to patients, such as belladonna, which the agency has previously warnedagainst. The warning letter to King Bio Inc. provides details of flaws in manufacturing operations and quality assurance systems found during a July 2018 FDA inspection of the facility. Beyond the violations found during the inspection, the FDA collected and tested samples of finished homeopathic drug products; results revealed inordinately high microbiological contamination. Additionally, evidence collected during the FDAs inspection indicated recurring microbial contamination associated with the water system used to manufacture drugs. The microbiological contamination of the water system led, in part, to a voluntary recall of more than 900 homeopathic drug products manufactured by King Bio. Following the July 2018 inspection, the FDA alerted consumers and pet owners not to use drug products, including homeopathic drug products, made by King Bio and labeled as Dr. Kings, as these products may pose a safety risk to people (especially infants, children, pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems), as well as pets due to the high levels of microbial contamination identified at the manufacturing site. The company recalled all drug products made with water marketed for humans and animals. King Bio manufactures a range of products including those for children, adults and pets. Since August 2018, more than 900 potentially contaminated products manufactured by King Bio have been recalled, including those labeled as Aquaflora, Canada, Dr. Kings Natural Medicine(s), Natural Pet, Peoples Best and SafeCare. Additionally, other products manufactured by King Bio and distributed by other companies under different brand names were also recalled due to contamination. These include products sold under the brand names Sprayology, Silver Star Brand, HelloLife, Beaumont Bio Med and BioLyte Laboratories. Today, the FDA also posted warning letters to additional companies for products labeled as homeopathic due to various quality and misbranding violations. Red Mountain Incorporated, Oakland Park, Fla. warning letter for lacking quality oversight while manufacturing homeopathic drug products containing ingredients with potentially toxic effects for consumers, including snake venom. Tec Laboratories Incorporated, Albany, Ore. warning letter for releasing products marketed for use with children, without conducting testing to ensure they were free from objectionable levels of microbial contamination. The company also did not adequately investigate test results that found high microorganism levels in its water system B. Jain Pharmaceuticals Pvt. Ltd., Rajasthan, India warning letter after FDA investigators observed insects in the facility and in ingredients used to make its products. The FDA has taken similar actions this year, including a warning letter to Nutra Pharma Corp., Boca Raton, Fla.; as announced earlier this month, the FDA issued a warning letter regarding the company illegally marketing unapproved products labeled as homeopathic with claims about their ability to treat addiction and chronic pain; the agency also alerted consumers to this health fraud scam. In February, the FDA issued a warning letter to Pure Source LLC, Doral, Fla. for distributing drugs made with contaminated raw materials. In December 2017, the FDA proposed a risk-based enforcement approach that prioritizes enforcement and regulatory actions involving drug products labeled as homeopathic and marketed without the required FDA approval that have the greatest potential to cause risk to patients. Given the concerns about the proliferation of potentially ineffective and harmful products labeled as homeopathic, the FDA stated when it issued the draft guidance that it would consider taking additional enforcement and/or regulatory actions, consistent with its current compliance policies, in the interest of protecting the public. We expect to finalize this guidance soon. The FDA encourages healthcare professionals and consumers to report adverse events or quality problems experienced with the use of any of these products to the FDAs MedWatch Adverse Event Reporting program. Complete and submit the report online at www.fda.gov/medwatch/report.htm; or Download and complete the form, then submit it via fax at 1-800-FDA-0178. For reporting adverse drug events in animals, please see How to Report Animal Drug Side Effects and Product Problems. Imperial Valley News Center United States and Jamaica Become Partners Under the Hague Abduction Convention Washington, DC - Today, the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction entered into force between the United States and Jamaica. The United States now has 79 partners under the Convention. The Convention provides a civil law mechanism for parents seeking the return of children who have been wrongfully removed from or retained outside their country of habitual residence in violation of custodial rights. Parents seeking access to children residing in treaty partner countries may also invoke the Convention. The Convention is important because it establishes an internationally recognized legal framework to resolve international parental child abduction cases. The Convention does not address who should have custody of the child; rather it addresses where issues of child custody should be decided. The Department of States Office of Childrens Issues serves as the Central Authority for the United States under the Convention, welcomes our partnership with Jamaica, and looks forward to working together on this critical issue. For more information please visit travel.state.gov and click on international parental child abduction. Imperial Valley News Center Presidential Message for Winning on Reducing Food Waste Month Washington, DC - The success of our Nations agricultural sector has fed the world and enabled generations of Americans to prosper. Unfortunately, more than one-third of food in the United States is lost or wasted, a problem that undermines environmental stewardship and the ability of Americans to lead healthier lives. When food goes uneaten, it adversely affects food security and the environment. Growing, processing, and transporting food consumes critical resources. When food is lost or wasted, so are those resources. We have made great strides in recent years to reduce food loss and waste, but food remains the single largest type of waste thrown away by communities across America. That is why my Administration launched the Winning on Reducing Food Waste Initiativea collaborative effort by the Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, and Food and Drug Administration. This Initiative aligns efforts across our Federal Government to educate consumers, engage key stakeholders, and develop and evaluate solutions to reduce food loss and waste. Help from private entities and individuals is the key ingredient to successfully reducing food loss and waste. Public-private partnerships, like the United States Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions, have already brought together businesses and organizations to help improve the efficiency and management of food systems and to pursue more effective measurement and networks that can reduce food loss and waste. The work of these partnerships is helping drive our successes in ensuring that food that is grown becomes food that is eaten. During Winning on Reducing Food Waste Month, I encourage all Americans to do their part in helping to reduce food loss and waste. Together, we will promote American prosperity and turn what might otherwise be millions of tons of wasted food into nutritional fuel for Americas communities and economy. Helping Close the Pay Gap in California Sacramento, California - Today, one day before National Equal Pay Day, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, California Labor Secretary Julie A. Su, the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls and TIMES UP announced #EqualPayCA, a campaign to help close the pay gap in California. Together, they are promoting brand new resources (found here: https://women.ca.gov/californiapayequity/) from the Commissions Pay Equity Task Force to educate employees, employers and labor unions on how to close the pay gap, and launching an awareness campaign to educate the public on the causes of the pay gap and how to close it. #EqualPayCA was launched in coordination with TIMES UP PAY UP, an awareness campaign from TIMES UP aimed at closing the pay gap nationwide. The Office of the First Partner and CCSWG are also announcing 13 inaugural corporate commitments to their CA Equal Pay Pledge. These businesses have committed to conduct an annual company-wide gender pay analysis, review hiring and promotion processes and procedures to reduce unconscious bias and structural barriers and promote best practices that will close the pay gap to ensure fundamental equity for all workers. The inaugural signatories include: Airbnb Apple AT&T Communications Inc. Autodesk Branch Metrics Gusto Ike Robotics Medallia Inc. Salesforce Shutterfly Inc. Square SunRun Zynga California has the strongest equal pay laws in the nation - but there is still more work to do, said First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Thats why I applaud these California companies for their commitment to pay equity, and why I am excited to partner with the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls and TIMES UP to continue to work toward closing the pay gap. Together, we can uplift California women to ensure a more equitable future for all. We are excited to have sponsored the work of the Pay Equity Task force and recognize the importance of these resources in establishing a real cultural change in the state of California that ensures women are treated equitably in the workplace, said CCSWG Chair Dr. Alisha Wilkins. We are thrilled to join First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom and TIMES UP to promote this important effort and close the wage gap in California "Across industries, women in the workforce earn less money than men do, and women of color often lose out the most. While California has some of the strongest laws on the books to ensure equal pay, passing a law is only the first step, said Rebecca Goldman, interim CEO of TIMES UP. Thats why we are proud to partner with First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom and the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls on #EqualPayCA as the first step in our TIMES UP PAY UP awareness campaign. The time for equal pay for all women is now. Todays announcement also drew the support of business and community leaders: Getting strong laws on the books is only the first step; to fulfill the promise of pay equity, we need employees to be aware of their rights, employers to have the tools to do the right thing, and enforcement agencies committed to effectively investigating violations, said California Labor Secretary Julie A. Su. The tools and resources we have created help on all of those fronts. "AT&T is committed to pay equality regardless of gender or ethnicity for people who hold the same jobs, have the same experience and performance levels, and work in the same geographic area, said Rhonda Johnson, state president of AT&T California. Equal pay for equal work is part of our strong commitment to a diverse and inclusive workforce, and we appreciate the opportunity to join First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom in this ground-breaking initiative. Equal pay is not just about the equitable treatment of women or an individual companys fair treatment of women - it is about human belonging. Equal pay for equal work is foundational for anyone to feel like they can truly belong at their workplace, said Beth Axelrod, Vice President of Global Employee Experience at Airbnb. And for Airbnb, whose mission is belonging, equal pay is foundational when it comes to advancing belonging - and that means equal pay for equal work for all. We are proud to join California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls and the California Pay Equity Task Force in the Pay Equity Pledge. "Equal pay is about fair compensation for work performance and improving the quality of life for employees and their families," said Jeanna Steele, Sunrun General Counsel and Member of the California Pay Equity Task Force. "Sunrun is proud to take the California Equal Pay Pledge and strongly encourages all businesses across the state and beyond to join this movement." I am very pleased that the Pay Equity Task Force has completed this clear and comprehensive guide designed to assure effective implementation of Californias equal pay law that I authored in 2015, a measure that has become the model for 41 other states, said Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson. Guaranteeing equal pay for substantially similar work is critically important if we are to achieve economic opportunity for working women in todays world. This important report should become the template for all employers in achieving that goal. By coiling woolen cords around nails piercing through a wooden board, people can reproduce "Bull," Pablo Picasso's distinctive abstract masterpiece. Although a shortcut to facsimile classical arts is nothing special, an exhibition focusing on bringing art to everyday lives both through online and offline means, has narrowed the gap between high art and regular consumers. From March 29 to 31, Tmall.com, one of China's most popular e-commerce platforms owned by the Alibaba Group from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, opened its first avant-garde art exhibition at the Enjoy Art Museum in Beijing's 798 Art Zone. It hoped that the brick-and-mortar gallery could draw more people and help them enjoy the artworks. "The operations enable customers to appreciate the artistic items in the galleries and also purchase them online," said Chen Yue, the executive in charge of Tmall's home decoration sector. According to a report on online art consumption jointly released by the China Business Network (CBN) Data and Tmall.com on the first day of the exhibition, nearly 60 percent consumers said they were willing to buy art online. This is due to the numerous options online, which help consumers make comparisons. The report also found that mainstream consumers of online art are mainly those born in the 1980s and 1990s. Within this cohort, the people born in the 1980s generally favor traditional water paintings while consumers born in the 1990s prefer impressionism and modernism. Launched several years ago, Tmall Art provides an easy platform for artists, especially novices, to get their creations seen by potential customers. Tmall, with its already burgeoning online businesses, has recently made forays into the offline space in the hope of better integrating its online and offline channels and enhancing interaction between artists and customers. "This is a very distinctive exhibition in the history of the 798 Art Zone as all the artistic items here are also commodities," said Liang Shubin, CEO of Wallwa, an artistic home decor platform affiliated to Tmall.com. According to Liang, all the creations displayed at the exhibition are original but sell at reasonable prices. Focusing on home decor rather than collections, customers can also get their items once they scan the two dimensional codes and buy them online. Liang said the exhibition also catered to consumers' increasing need to participate in art creations. This is why the organizers displayed the string wire handcraft for visitors to experience and create art using their own imagination. This artwork featured a big board pinned to the wall and embedded with nails. People could thread different colored cords to create different designs. This, according to Liang, is a salute to the Memphis genre. In addition, there were also copies of the cover pages of Life magazine, one of the United States' most influential weekly magazines which stopped publication in 2007. While commenting on the purpose of the exhibition, Liang sad, "We hope that people can understand that e-commerce platforms are not only for selling clothes, shoes, suitcases or bags, but can also explore and broaden one's vision and be used for an even greater influence." Secretary of State remarks at U.S. Army War College Carlisle, Pennsylvania - Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo remarks at U.S. Army War College: SECRETARY POMPEO: Good morning, everyone. AUDIENCE: Good morning. SECRETARY POMPEO: Thank you, Jaymie, too for the kind introduction. Thanks to my I was going to say old, but Ill say long-time friend General Kem, because it would date me if I said he was old. Its good. By the way, as the Secretary of State, you know its all about leverage, and as we were talking about our time, we were both in the same cadet company, Company C-3 back in the day, and we were deciding who had leverage on whom and we both decided we would disengage, at least for this morning. (Laughter.) Thanks too to Ambassador Koran, whos at State Department and serving here at the Army War College. I know you came from Africa. This is a very different place, much I dont know if its calmer, but its more beautiful in every respect. I have a tradition. My wife loves animals. We have dogs. We tend to name them after generals. Our current golden retriever is Sherman. I know some of you are from Georgia, so I thought I would not talk about him this morning. (Laughter.) But the dog before that was Patton, and I do want to talk about General Patton just a bit. He was almost mythical, for sure, as a commander in World War II. Some of his training occurred right here at the Army War College. And he joined the great Kansan Dwight Eisenhower and General Colin Powell on a list of famous people who have come before you all, so I think about this when I walk the halls of State Department: Madison, Jefferson, Pompeo. No pressure on you all either. (Laughter.) The world has changed. The geopolitical circumstances have certainly changed. New weapons, new technology, the methods of warfare are different. But what has fundamentally has not changed and will not change is the massive need for leadership, both military and civilian, both here at home and abroad. Leaders defining qualities havent changed much either. You all possess those qualities. You would not have been invited to be here without that. And as a former Army officer myself, I must say I think thats great, congratulations, you all earned it, but I did not come here today to pat you on the back. The truth is you all will be tested again, and I am confident it will be soon. We dont know how, we dont know where, we dont know precisely the challenge you will face, but I can assure you it will come before you. Many of you will leave the life you spent in a particular branch or particular service to a larger role. And your mission will require you to expand your capabilities. And indeed, I want to talk about today how your life and mine, the role of those of us at the State Department with those in other branches of government, intersect. Im a Cabinet Secretary today, not a tank officer, but I can assure you I still need protection. Its not armor anymore, but you will need the ability to lead in a way that is unique to you but not unique all across the United States Government. I must say I tell my team this and you would all know it because I do it publicly as well I talk about how important it is what we do at the State Department. We can keep men and women serving in uniform all across the world safe, we can cause them to have to work a little less hard and take a little less risk with the flip side being that we cant be successful at that without you having an enormous level of preparedness, of readiness, and leadership. We need the credible threat of the capacity for America to project its military power in order for our diplomatic efforts to have the opportunity to succeed in the hardest places all around the world. You all know too that it is key to governance and stability in so many places around the world that our organizations the State Department, Department of Defense work together. I dont want to talk about that. I want to talk about how Ive seen it manifest. I saw it when I was a member of Congress, I saw it when I was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and I certainly see it today. Weve seen it for two decades, frankly, in Iraq and Afghanistan Foreign Service officers, military personnel cooperating rather than competing for influence. Lots of places. The fight against ISIS where, thanks to some enormously good work by some incredibly capable military leaders, the ISIS has been ISIS caliphate has been taken down. And at the same time, I have officers on the ground today in Syria playing a role, a crucial role, distributing foreign aid, working to rebuild, working to develop a diplomatic resolution that will create a more stable Syria. And two, we are engaged in the fight, as I know you are, countering the ideology which drove that caliphate. Those are external joint efforts, things we work on in the field facing with our partners and allies around the world. I want to talk about internal cooperation that we do as well. We do it, you see, in exchange programs I know we have officers here today. This is a vital piece of the State-Defense connection. And then I want to close with this and then I know Im going to get a chance to take questions from you and I look forward to that. This chain goes back a long time, and we have a duty, indeed an intense obligation, to continue to build that chain. It goes back to at least 1903, when President Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, witnessed the laying of a cornerstone here at the War College. He was addressing men and women like you, and he called for America to promote peace around the globe, saying, quote, Not in the spirit of the weakling and craven, but with the assured self-confidence of the just man armed. Now, a little more than a century on, American diplomats are acting out Teddy Roosevelts call for peace, but the just men armed are the leverage that we need. When you leave here to take on your larger role, your responsibilities, the stakes are enormously high, and Ill talk about that in response to your questions. In fact, remember we as diplomats are your partners. Trust us. Well earn that, and we in turn will trust you as well. Our objectives are absolutely the same: projecting strength and effective peace. And I hope, too, youll take the message from Teddy Roosevelt as well as from General Patton the general, not the dog, of course. We should all be proud of achieving these joint objectives together. Thanks for having me today, and Ill look forward to your questions. USDA Announces Investments in Water and Wastewater Infrastructure in 23 States that will Benefit 171,000 Rural Residents Washington, DC - Acting Assistant to the Secretary for Rural Development Joel Baxley announced that USDA is investing $116 million to help rebuild and improve rural water infrastructure for 171,000 rural Americans in 23 states. Helping to bring modern water and wastewater infrastructure to rural communities will increase economic opportunities and improve the quality of life for rural residents, Baxley said. The investments USDA is announcing today are foundational to health, safety and economic development in rural communities across America. USDA is working with local partners to provide financing for 49 water and environmental infrastructure projects. The funding is being provided through the Water and Waste Disposal Loan and Grant program. It can be used for drinking water, stormwater drainage and waste disposal systems for rural communities with 10,000 or fewer residents. Eligible communities and water districts can apply online on the interactive RD Apply tool or through one of USDA Rural Developments state or field offices. Below are some examples of the investments USDA is making: In Arkansas, Lake City will use a $2.3 million loan to modernize its wastewater treatment and collection system, which serves more than 2,000 residents. This project will improve the systems capacity and reliability. Rensselaer, Ind., is receiving a $3.4 million loan and a $1.7 million grant to connect three unserved areas of the city to the sewer system and to replace the main lift station. The homes that will be connected are currently served by individual septic systems. This project will benefit nearly 6,000 residents. The city of Franklin, Idaho, is receiving a $900,000 loan and a $522,000 grant to increase the supply of water available to the Franklin Water System. The citys water storage and spring boxes will be rehabilitated, and approximately two miles of pipe that connect the springs to the water system will be replaced. This project will also add two backup wells. It will provide more than 600 of the citys residents and businesses with reliable water quantity and quality. USDA is making investments in rural communities in: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington. In April 2017, President Donald J. Trump established the Interagency Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity to identify legislative, regulatory and policy changes that could promote agriculture and prosperity in rural communities. In January 2018, Secretary Perdue presented the Task Forces findings to President Trump. These findings included 31 recommendations to align the federal government with state, local and tribal governments to take advantage of opportunities that exist in rural America. Increasing investments in rural infrastructure is a key recommendation of the task force. CNO Hosts Admiral Sim, Seung-Seob, Chief of Naval Operations, Republic of Korea Navy Washington, DC - Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. John Richardson met with Adm. Sim, Seung-Seob, Chief of Naval Operations, Republic of Korea (ROK), March 29. During a day of engagements that included an arrival honors ceremony and discussions between the ROK delegation and senior U.S. Navy leadership, the two Heads of Navy focused on expanding and strengthening maritime security throughout the Indo-Pacific region. "Admiral Sims visit to the United States comes at a critical time for our two nations," said Richardson at the welcoming ceremony. The strategic environment is becoming more complex and our two nations have many common interests. That is why visits like these are so important -- so we can better understand each others perspectives, learn from each other, and most importantly, coordinate ways we can work together to enhance the security, order, and prosperity of our two nations. Richardson and Sim agreed that enhanced cooperation and information sharing between the navies is more consequential than ever to ensuring peace on the Korean Peninsula and in the broader Indo-Pacific theater. The ROK-U.S. alliance is an integral element in maintaining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, especially during our current changing security environment, and we will have to further strengthen military exchanges and cooperation between the ROK Navy and the U.S. Navy, said Sim. The U.S. and ROK navies routinely conduct bilateral maritime engagements and operate together to promote security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region. Prior to his visit to Washington, D.C., Sim visited Hawaii and met with U.S. Navy officials of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. Pacific Fleet. Sim assumed the duties as ROK Chief of Naval Operations in July 2018. At the core of Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO)'s mission is an unrelenting commitment to helping entrepreneurs learn and grow in every stage of business. Adopting an attitude of gratitude in recognizing employee wins is a critical component of success. We asked Tom Turner, CEO of BitSight, about the importance of uncovering and recognizing invisible wins. Here's what he shared: Building a strong company culture is fundamental to success. When employees are happy, engaged and enjoy coming to work every day, they work harder and care more about your company. A key element in creating that environment is celebrating your employees' successes. I've always believed that building a company is a team sport, and just like in any game, you should celebrate the wins. It's easy to cheer for what you see, like leading a new product development initiative or converting a new customer. What is equally important, however, are the things you don't see: the team member who fixed a laptop glitch moments before a pivotal demo, or the one who went the extra mile to onboard a new employee. In every company, people are working hard behind the scenes, creating a collection of little victories that shape a company and drive it forward; and they should enjoy equal credit for their wins as those who visibly score. These small, "invisible wins" drive big results. What is an invisible win? Recently, our company moved its headquarters from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. The move entailed an incredible amount of work, much of which was never seen by employees. In celebrating the move, the most obvious (and admittedly highly warranted) person to thank was our facilities coordinator, who developed the layout, thoughtfully designed the space and purchased state-of-the-art furniture. This is a visible win. But what could be overlooked was the work done by our VP of Finance, who coordinated the early-build stages of the office, ensured permitting was correct, accepted furniture deliveries and corralled the crew into action. This is an invisible win. Our company made sure we celebrated both. Neither of the two possesses the skills of the other or owned the same responsibilities throughout the process, but without both of them, we would not have the beautiful new office we sit in today. Four ways to identify and recognize invisible wins It's often not easy to identify invisible wins and the team members behind them. Doing so involves a combination of listening, engagement and setting up processes specifically designed to find and celebrate the range of wins in your company. Here are four strategies to help you uncover more invisible wins: Ask questions. Finding invisible wins involves asking the right questions and listening for anecdotes. Ask managers how their teams are performing and who is impressing them lately?challenge them to consider the small, day-to-day victories that would otherwise go unnoticed. Be engaged. You won't see the small wins unless you're present and paying attention. I've learned from our chairman to walk around the office and drop in to different meetings, which enables me to gain a sense of the various teams and what they're working on, both big and small. Encourage recognition. Create processes that allow everyone in the company to acknowledge wins of all types. When we get a new customer, for example, we ask the sales team to write a win report to recognize those who contributed. We also encourage people to write anonymous note cards recognizing others who have recently helped them. Acknowledge publicly. Wins big and small deserve to be recognized beyond one-on-one meetings and within individual teams?whether that's in a company-wide email or at your regular all-hands meeting. During each of our company meetings, we choose someone to read employee acknowledgment note cards and the names of the people who received them. These note cards have become a point of pride for employees, who often showcase them on their desks--transforming the invisible into the visible. As you work to improve the ways you appreciate and motivate employees, you will no doubt continually learn new things about the people you employ and the recognition that drives them. Of course, compensation and benefits are significant and always will be. But recognizing wins--both the obvious and the more subtle--should become an essential part of any company culture. How should business owners be thinking about equal pay in 2019, and what actions should we be taking? I recently attended a conference of CEOs where we spent multiple sessions talking about the best practices for closing the gap. Both female and male leaders shared their strategies and learnings of how to set up equitable hiring practices and how to drive to parity after a team had been built. While the tech industry certainly still has a way to go overall, we should look to the best organizations and practices as a guide for how we can more quickly close the gap. First, let's take a look at a snapshot of some current data about the gender pay gap. Here is a sample of nice popular corporate and tech roles based in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, and how the pay disparity still manifests today. The salary data represents the median salary for these roles, and the data comes directly from tens of thousands of user-contributed salaries on Comparably.com. In addition, it's vital to understand the sentiment of women and how they feel about their compensation opportunities relative to men. Here Comparably published a comprehensive study about how women think about equal pay in 2019. Some critical findings include: Less than half of women feel they are paid fairly. Many people feel underpaid, especially women. Just 44 percent of women say they feel they are paid fairly. Fifty-one percent of men say the same. Women are less likely to negotiate their salary. When asked if they negotiated their current salary, 44 percent of women and 53 percent of men said yes. The confidence gap is real. When asked whether they'd feel comfortable asking their boss for a raise, 54 percent of women said yes compared to 60 percent of men. In light of this, what actions should business owners be taking to close the gap? Here are a set of best practices that are becoming commonplace at tech companies. 1. Publish salary ranges up front. Be upfront about your compensation in your recruiting process and job posts. Candidates are seeking more transparency about organizations and their compensation structure. By showcasing your salary ranges for job titles up front, it helps eliminate the inequality of salaries in the hiring process. 2. Pay parity for the same job titles. Define a set salary structure for a job title; all candidates get paid the same amount for that title/role. This takes the ambiguity out of widely disparate compensation ranges for the same job. As a business grows in employee count, and more varied job titles, it becomes more feasible to tie a specific compensation structure to a job title. 3. No negotiation policies in offer letters. This both eliminates the ability for more skilled negotiators to earn more than their peers, and necessitates that employers put forward their most compelling offer up front to a candidate. Pay disparity often starts at the salary negotiation level, which has historically negatively affected women. 4. Stop asking about salary histories. A candidate's compensation should not be pegged to their previous role, but rather to the value they will add to your business. In 2018 Starbucks announced it reached 100 percent pay equality for women, men, and underrepresented monitories, ending a 10-year process to correct pay difference among its employees. It attributed its success in large part to its new hiring practice of not asking for previous pay history. 5. Invest in pay parity. Be willing to invest company resources to examine and correct pay disparity. Salesforce, Intel, and Apple, for example, have all signed the Equal Pay Pledge. The initiative required companies to review their hiring practices, create policies to ensure equal pay, and conduct an annual analysis on the gender wage gap. Salesforce notably announced a $3 million initiative to close its gender pay gap after analyzing its payroll. Intel released a diversity and inclusion report that showed that the company has reached 100 percent gender and racial pay equity in the U.S. Apple announced that it had finally closed its gender pay gap and that all male and female employees in the U.S. are being compensated equally. The year was 2014. Competition was heating up between Uber and Lyft, two companies with similar visions: Use the rapidly emerging gig economy to transform the transportation industry. Uber, which had a three-year head start, was bigger, had more money, and was operating in more cities than Lyft. It was at this point that Travis Kalanick, Uber's CEO at the time, tried to eliminate his closest competition--by offering to buy Lyft. But Lyft's co-founders, Logan Green and John Zimmer, turned down the offer. It was a huge risk, one that looked like it would doom Lyft only months later. In early 2015, Lyft had only about four months' worth of cash left. (In stark contrast, Uber had just raised over $2.5 billion.) One of Lyft's largest investors, a serial entrepreneur and investor with decades of experience, advised the two co-founders to shut down the company. "The odds were stacked against us," Zimmer said in a recent interview with Inc. "Most people were already counting us out." Fast-forward to today. As of Friday, Lyft has officially beaten Uber in the race to go public, raising $2.34 billion in the process. Lyft, which now operates in 300 markets, says that its number of quarterly active riders has tripled in the past two years. And while Uber continues to hold a larger U.S. market share, Lyft has gained major ground: Lyft says it now holds 39 percent of the U.S. rideshare market, up from 22 percent just two years ago. So, how did Lyft do it? Looking back at the company's actions over the past few years, we could sum up Lyft's great comeback in a single word: Focus. "What that investor told us was the best and most important advice Logan and I ever received, because it forced us to double down on our conviction, to double down on our values, and to double down on our belief in the team," said Zimmer. With their backs up against the wall, Lyft's co-founders focused on what made their company different from its competitor. For example, Lyft built a reputation as the kinder, gentler of the two brands, partially through efforts to prioritize drivers. Lyft has also built a strong focus on its corporate strategy, which differs greatly from Uber's as well. For example, consider that Uber has spent millions of dollars building a global brand (Uber currently operates in more than 60 countries), building its own autonomous driving technology, and diversifying in markets such as food delivery and freight transport. Lyft, on the other hand, is adamant that it is focused on passenger transport. It has invested in autonomous driving, but more cautiously. And while Green and Zimmer see potential for expanding in other countries down the road, they remain focused on North America for now. (Lyft recently expanded into Toronto, its first city outside of the U.S.) "We're really happy with the focus that we've had," said Green in a recent interview. "We're going at the right pace. We're going deep in transportation, deep in the markets we're in, that allows us to gain the share that we've gained." So, what about the future? Lyft is currently working on integrating public transportation information directly into the app. The goal? In a world where the transportation model is shifting dramatically, the company wants its app to become the first place consumers go to figure out how they're going to get from point A to point B. "We don't care if it's a ride on our platform, or if it's the bus, or the train," says Zimmer. "In fact, we'd love to connect you to whatever the best option is." When it comes to car ownership, Zimmer says he wants Lyft to enable a better consumer experience, at a better price point. Imagine using Lyft to service, clean, fuel, and even insure your automobile. "That's the magic of service," says Zimmer. It's that type of focus, that customer-first mentality, that has helped Lyft not just survive, but thrive. Green and Zimmer have refused to say how much Kalanick offered to buy Lyft for all those years ago. But when asked if they were happy they didn't take the deal, Zimmer answered for both of them. It's no secret that aircraft manufacturer Boeing has been on the hot seat ever since the crashes of two of its 737 MAX aircraft. That seat just got a little hotter yesterday when Boeing announced that fixes to its software would be delayed. First, Lion Air Flight 610 -- a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft -- crashed on October 29, 2018 shortly after takeoff from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta. All 189 passengers and crew died in the disaster. Then, on March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 -- another Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft -- crashed soon after takeoff from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in Ethiopia. All 157 passengers and crew died in this latest disaster involving Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. After initially resisting calls to ground the Boeing 737 MAX, on March 13, 2019 the FAA did just that. And, a day later, Boeing suspended deliveries of the aircraft while it focused on determining the cause of the crashes and coming up with a fix. Unfortunately, that fix -- which was expected to be developed quickly -- was just delayed for at least several weeks, and perhaps even longer. According to news reports, Boeing had planned to submit its fix to the FAA for review last week, but that schedule turned out to be too optimistic. According to an FAA statement, The FAA expects to receive Boeing's final package of its software enhancement over the coming weeks for FAA approval. Time is needed for additional work by Boeing as the result of an ongoing review of the 737 MAX Flight Control System to ensure that Boeing has identified and appropriately addressed all pertinent issues. Of course, there's no guarantee that the fix will actually arrive on its new schedule, or that it will work to the FAA's satisfaction. It may now be late spring or even summer before the fixes are fully tested and approved, and the FAA allows the troubled aircraft to fly once more. Boeing's software update for its troubled 737 Max jetliners has been delayed after the company deemed further work was needed on the fix before it was submitted to the FAA https://t.co/VP7D4naAcq -- The New York Times (@nytimes) April 2, 2019 In the meantime, the three U.S. airlines with grounded 737 MAX aircraft -- Southwest, American, and United -- continue to lose millions of dollars as they juggle their schedules to make up for the out-of-service aircraft. American Airlines has canceled dozens of flights a day since its 737 MAX aircraft were grounded by the FAA. Says American Airlines spokesperson, Ross Feinstein, We are aware that the resumption of service for our 737 Max aircraft may be further delayed, and our team will work with all customers impacted by any flight cancellations. When David Strang joined the Supper Club, a London-based networking group comprising some 450 founders, he relished the idea of being able to air his frustrations and fears, as well as trade ideas and best practices, with fellow entrepreneurs. These days, all anyone can talk about is Brexit. "All we can do is sit tight and wait for the chaos to ensue," says Strang, the founder of Wicked Vision, a London-based maker of boomerangs and other toys. Should the U.K. leave the European Union without a plan for streamlining import and export tariffs and customs duties with its neighbors--that is, a "no-deal Brexit"--he fears the outcome could be "disastrous" for his business. Currently, he says, European buyers account for about 20 percent of his company's total sales, which he declined to disclose. Strang is just one of many U.K. entrepreneurs grappling with how to operate--much less grow--in a time of extreme uncertainty. According to the latest survey from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, a membership organization for accountants and finance professionals, business confidence for the first quarter of 2019 hit negative 16.4 percent--the lowest level in almost a decade. It isn't helpful that policymakers can't seem to agree on a withdrawal plan. The latest deal gives the U.K. until April 12 to agree on an exit plan negotiated between lawmakers and their counterparts in Brussels. The nation had been hurtling toward a deadline of March 29 without a deal for how to exit the E.U.'s single market, which allows the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labor among member countries. Despite the momentary reprieve, entrepreneurs are busy making contingency plans--hoping to avoid erasing many of the gains they've made in the past few years. From ramping up sales to non-E.U. countries and inking new vendor relationships outside the trading bloc to relocating entirely, here's a look at how U.K. businesses are coming to terms with Brexit, deal or no deal. Moving Out to Move Up PVL U.K. is a Sussex-based designer and manufacturer of high-visibility, reflective safety markings for police vans, ambulances, and other emergency fleets. It serves 55 percent of the U.K. Emergency Service public-sector market, and provides all markings to the Metropolitan Police, the law enforcement agency for Greater London. PVL also has a healthy export business to Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Poland, and Sweden, which amounts to 20 to 25 percent of the company's sales, or about 3 million ($3.9 million) this year. CEO Nick Broom expects export sales to ratchet up to as much as 35 percent next year, as the company recently won a job equipping the entire Belgian ambulance fleet in 2020. What's more, PVL imports almost all of its raw materials from the E.U. With so much on the line, Broom isn't taking any chances. "Any increase on our raw materials will hit our margins if we cannot pass these increases on," Broom says. To prevent such a shock, the company is stocking materials at higher levels, and it is setting up an outpost in Belgium. Under a joint venture agreement, the company is training six employees of its Belgian business partner to handle operations for the time being, and Broom is in the process of moving equipment to the facility. He estimates that the training, materials, and management time he is putting toward the satellite plant, which he expects to be functional by the end of the month, will cost 150,000, or $198,000. Similarly, Straight Teeth Direct, a direct-to-consumer orthodontics startup founded by Lucie Marchelot Shukla and Aalok Shukla, recently moved to diversify business ties. While the company based manufacturing in London, to be close to trusted suppliers, it set up its headquarters in Ireland in late 2016--an important move for establishing Straight Teeth Direct as a global company, especially in the aftermath of that summer's Leave vote. "We made sure we didn't build everything in the U.K.," Marchelot Shukla says. "Brexit or no Brexit, it's always better to be in multiple jurisdictions." And to forestall any potential cross-border legal disputes, Straight Teeth Direct secured a costly global insurance policy that provides international coverage for both the dentists who work on the company's platform and for the invisible aligners it supplies. It took more than seven months to set up the complex policy, the price of which the co-founders declined to disclose. In 2017, the company also opened an office in Lisbon, a city that's fast becoming an attractive location for startups. "We're very happy with the choices we made," says Marchelot Shukla. She adds that while establishing international outposts initially stemmed from the co-founders' ambition to build an international company, the move has helped navigate shifting laws under Brexit. "It has accelerated the whole process." Reinforcing the Ranks When moving isn't an option, figuring out how to stay--and how to keep European employees--is a real conundrum for many businesses. Depending on the terms of a Brexit deal, there may be stiffer regulations regarding the flow of labor across borders. To limit a labor crunch, companies like Perlego, a London-based online e-textbook library, are asking employees hailing from the E.U. to file for either "settled" or "pre-settled" status through a process called the E.U. Settlement Scheme. This process describes the protocol for which E.U. nationals and their families living in the U.K. may stay in the country permanently after June 30, 2021. Those from certain E.U. countries, including France and Ireland, can apply for this status now, while citizens of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, or Switzerland must wait until March 30 to apply. Perlego, which brands itself as the "Spotify of textbooks," has 14 employees eligible for this special status. However, founder and CEO Gauthier Van Malderen is grim about his hiring prospects in a post-Brexit environment. He's been able to hire educated developers, who want to come to London because it has one of the best startup ecosystems; he questions whether this will be true after the U.K. breaks away from the E.U. Immigration to the U.K. dropped 6 percent from 2017 to 2018, according to the latest data from the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics. Looking West for Growth For businesses anticipating tariffs and currency fluctuations, the need to diversify their customer base is critical. Flavours Holidays is a Scotland-based tour operator that helps area travelers book activity vacations to Italian destinations like Tuscany and the Amalfi coast. Although the company's revenue grew 25 percent between 2017 and 2018 to 2 million ($2.6 million), founder Lorne Blyth worries people will put off non-essential traveling in an uncertain economic climate. Plus, as the pound loses value, which has been the case since the referendum, she's effectively paying more for services purchased in euros. To limit the sting, Blyth is seeking opportunities outside the E.U. She attended the New York Times Travel Show in January to get insight into the U.S. market, for instance. "We are very actively marketing in the U.S.," Blyth says. "We are preparing a U.S. brochure for 2020 and working on specific tours for U.S. operators." She's predicting the U.S. expansion will boost revenue to 2.6 million ($3.4 million) in 2019. Strang, of Wicked Vision, is also hoping the U.S. will serve as a growth market for his company--and despite his misgivings, he sees the business potential in a "no-deal" Brexit. "If there's no deal, the pound would weaken considerably, which can be a positive for us," says Strang, because prices will look increasingly attractive to overseas buyers. "I hate saying it. But if you have a commodity in the U.K., there's a huge upside to the devaluing." Discovery Channel is set to broadcast a live episode that will see hosts open an ancient sarcophagus live from Egypt for the first time on television. The station will air two-hour special Expedition Unknown: Egypt Live on Sunday from a less-visited part of the country where, according to Here & Now, new exciting finds are coming to light. When asked what he thinks hell find upon opening the stone coffin, host Josh Gates said: [The] kind of the beauty of this is, I dont know and I think thats the fun of it. He continued: We know that there are a lot of mummies that are down there. Gates added that the burial site theyll be broadcasting from is the final resting place of some of Egypts higher-class citizens and expects to find physical remains. Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies Show all 9 1 /9 Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies An archaeologist points at newly-discovered mummies, part of a collection found in burial chambers dating to the Ptolemaic era (305-30 BC) at the necropolis of Tuna el-Gebel in Egypt's southern Minya province. AFP/Getty Images Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies Mummies lie in a recently-discovered burial chamber in the desert province of Minya, south of Cairo, Egypt, 2 February, 2019. AP Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies An archaeologist brushes a newly-discovered mummy laid inside a sarcophagus. AFP/Getty Images Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies A mummy at Tuna el-Gebel archaeological site in Minya, 270km south of Cairo, Egypt, 2 February, 2019. EPA Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies Mummies lie in a recently-discovered burial chamber in the desert province of Minya, south of Cairo, Egypt, 2 February, 2019. AP Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies Newly-discovered mummies wrapped in linen. AFP/Getty Images Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies The partially-uncovered skull of a newly-discovered mummy wrapped in linen. AFP/Getty Images Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies Newly-discovered mummies wrapped in linen found in burial chambers dating to the Ptolemaic era (305-30 BC) at the necropolis of Tuna el-Gebel in Egypt's southern Minya province. AFP/Getty Images Ancient desert tomb reveals 50 Egyptian mummies Fragments of coloured carttonage on display at Tuna el-Gebel archaeological site in Minya, south of Cairo, Egypt, on 2 February, 2019. EPA The channel will be filming the episode at a site overseen by head of Egypts Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri. Scientists have unearthed a scandal at the heart of global plans to tackle climate change through tree planting. Forest restoration has long been hailed as a vital tool to combat global warming, as trees are able to suck climate-warming CO2 from the atmosphere and keep it stored. This vital mechanism has been undermined by deforestation, but nations are now aiming to reverse this process by replanting an area the size of India with trees by 2030. However, in a new commentary published in Nature, a team of British researchers has revealed that most of the commitments made by nations including Brazil and China are not what they seem. Rather than pledging to replace deforested regions with swathes of natural forests, almost half of the area covered by these commitments are destined to become commercial tree plantations. "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change Show all 38 1 /38 "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 Reuters "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Magdeburg, Germany on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh on March 15 Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cape Town, South Africa on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in New York on March 15 AFP/Getty Images "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Madrid on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Quezon City, Philippines on March 15 Getty Images "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Vienna on March 15 AFP/Getty Images "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Dublin on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Canterbury, Kent on march 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh on March 15 Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Erfurt, Germany on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Zagreb, Croatia on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Lisbon on March 15 Reuters "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Edinburgh on March 15 Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Florence, Italy on March 15 Sign reads: there is no future without a planet, let's not sell it for money EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Vienna on March 15 Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Brighton on March 15 Reuters "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cambridge on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change Students protest in Bangalore, India on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cape Town, South Africa on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change Students protest in Bangalore, India on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change A student protests in Lucerne, Switzerland on 15 March EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 AFP/Getty Images "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Milan, Italy on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 AFP/Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Lund, Sweden on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change A poster with Greta Thunberg, who began the current children's movement at the protest in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cape Town, South Africa on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Canterbury, Kent on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Canterbury, Kent on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh Getty These areas, planted to be harvested for wood and other commodities, provide carbon-cutting benefits 40 times smaller than those provided by the expanses of forest they replaced. There is a scandal here, said Professor Simon Lewis from University College London, who led the study. To most people forest restoration means bringing back natural forests, but policy makers are calling vast monocultures forest restoration. And worse, the advertised climate benefits are absent. To meet the 1.5C warming goal laid out by experts to avoid climate disaster, the equivalent of all the CO2 pumped out by the UK, US, China and Germany since the Industrial Revolution must be removed from the atmosphere. Trees planting is therefore critical, and to this end the Bonn Challenge was launched in 2011 as a global effort to restore 350 million hectares of deforested land by 2030. Over 40 nations across the tropics, including the major economies of India, Brazil, China and Nigeria, have so far committed to restoring 292 million hectares. However, the calculations performed by Professor Lewis and his colleagues concluded that this commitment will only help meet climate goals if it comprises natural forest. The reason plantations are so poor at storing carbon is that they are harvested every decade or so, meaning all the carbon stored in the trees goes back into the atmosphere, as the plantation waste and the wood products mostly paper and chipboards decompose, explained Dr Charlotte Wheeler from the University of Edinburgh. The scientists recommended that forest restoration measures must not be allowed to include plantations, and called for more natural forests to be planted while also protecting existing regions from the Amazon to Borneo. Millions of hectares of forest gets destroyed every year because companies and governments want to sell us palm oil to fuel our cars, soya to feed factory-farmed chickens, throwaway packaging and cheap beef to feed our addiction to meat, said Greenpeace UKs senior forest campaigner Richard George. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Worse, this study has revealed a cynical accountancy trick allowing governments to pass off short-lived single-crop plantations as permanent natural forest restoration despite the fact that they absorb and store far less carbon. This isnt just cooking the books, its cooking the climate. An annual ceremony and dozens of events paying homage to Huangdi, or the Yellow Emperor regarded as a common ancestor for all Chinese are set to be held in Northwest China's Shaanxi province before and after Qingming Festival on April 5, according to the province's work committee for public memorial services of the Yellow Emperor. The grand ceremony will kick off April 5 at the Mausoleum of Huangdi in Shaanxi's Huangling county, on the occasion of the festival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day, where worshiping ancestors is a long-standing Chinese tradition. Over 300 compatriots from Taiwan will attend the activity, spokesman for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office An Fengshan said on Wednesday. A total of 15 serial events themed on the Yellow Emperor and ancient Chinese culture will also be held in the province prior to and after the memorial ceremony. They include family history searches for overseas Chinese, folk art performances, photo, calligraphy and painting exhibitions, lectures, academic seminars, concerts and tree-planting activities. Sharks can no longer be culled on the Great Barrier Reef after a landmark court ruling overturned an Australian government culling scheme. Campaigners had fought to end the practice of killing sharks, which is meant to reduce the risk of attacks in the region. Nearly 200 defensive fishing lines are used in Queensland to kill them, and while many sharks drown after being caught on these lines, others are found alive and shot. However, the tribunal found overwhelming evidence that killing the predatory fish does not reduce the risk of unprovoked shark interactions. Its judgement stated: It is plain from the evidence given in these proceedings that Queenslands lethal shark control programme is out of step with national and international developments. Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Show all 15 1 /15 Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Campaigners in Australia have today released photographs showing sharks in snared in hooks placed as part of the Queensland governments Shark Control Program HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Operating in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, the program is intended to reduce the threat of attacks in Queenslands waters by capturing sharks with nets and drumlines, permanent fishing hooks buoyed off coast HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program A diagram showing the drumlines used by the Queensland government to catch sharks Queensland Government Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program The Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) and Humane Society International (HIS) are calling for the immediate removal of the drumlines HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Though Queensland has seen a decline in fatal attacks since the program launched in 1962, campaigners argue that control measures are not proportional to the threat posed by sharks and lament the programs devastating effect on certain shark populations HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program For example, nearly 9000 tiger sharks have been caught since the program was launched HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Their numbers have dropped by up to three quarters says Dr Leonardo Guida, senior shark campaigner at Australian Marine Conservation Society HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Citing the findings of the recent official Australian Shark Report Card, Dr Guida continues numbers will keep dropping unless we make major improvements to the way they are managed HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program The government should not be sanctioning the culling of a species in such perilous decline HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program The release of this footage comes weeks before the implementation of a law that would make its capture illegal HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program The Queensland Governments Fisheries Amendment Bill 2018 outlaws being within 20 metres of shark control equipment on the grounds of public safety, but campaigners view it as a way to hide the impact of the Shark Control Program HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Nicola Beynon, head of campaigns at HIS says not only does the Queensland Government insist on slaughtering sharks, but it has recently passed legislation making it illegal to document the horror. The public has a right to see true cost of its Shark Control Program HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program A diagram showing the nets used by the Queensland government to catch sharks Queensland Government Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Tiger sharks are a particular concern for campaigners HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Sharks in Great Barrier Reef threatened by government program Tiger sharks are a particular concern for campaigners HSI/AMCS/N McLachlan Lawrence Chlebeck, marine campaigner at Humane Society International, said: Since the 1960s, sharks have been shot dead in the Great Barrier Reef. Today this has ended. This is a massive victory for sharks and marine wildlife. The ruling concluded that sharks can no longer be killed by gunshot except on welfare grounds. It also stated that hooks must be checked more frequently, and any tiger, bull or great white shark found on them must be tagged before being released alive offshore. Recommended Photographs of sharks impaled on giant hooks spark calls for ban Finally, the tribunal ordered the rollout of non-lethal fishing lines and other methods that will allow the fish to be removed without harming them. The judgement makes it crystal clear that non-lethal technology is the way forward for shark control in the Great Barrier Reef, said Mr Chlebeck. As a result of this judgement, finding that killing sharks has no impact on bather safety, HSI calls on the Queensland government to update its shark management program along the whole Queensland coast. Since 2016, more than 500 sharks have died as a result of prevention measures in the region. The court found tiger sharks had undergone a serious decline. Authorities told local news sources they were reviewing the decision made by the court. Bitcoin's sudden and unexpected price rise may have accidentally been spurred on by an April Fool's joke, analysts have speculated. An article published on 1 April by online cryptocurrency publication Finance Magnates claimed the US Securities and Exchange Commission had made the monumental decision to approve a bitcoin-based exchange traded fund (ETF). Such a decision by the SEC would be seen by bitcoin investors as hugely positive for the cryptocurrency the world's first ETF backed by gold caused a 300 per cent rise in value for the commodity however the US regulator has consistently failed to make a ruling on the ETF. Unsurprisingly, Finance Magnates eventually updated its article to reveal that it was an April Fool's joke. But by the time that happened, the surge had already begun. The bitcoin price shot up by 20 per cent in less than an hour to $5,080 early on 2 April, leading to speculation that the spike may have been caused by rogue bitcoin trading bots. Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Satoshi Nakamoto creates the first bitcoin block in 2009 On 3 January, 2009, the genesis block of bitcoin appeared. It came less than a year after the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto detailed the cryptocurrency in a paper titled 'Bitcoin: A peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin is used as a currency for the first time On 22 May, 2010, the first ever real-world bitcoin transaction took place. Lazlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins the equivalent of $90 million at today's prices Lazlo Hanyecz Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Silk Road opens for business Bitcoin soon gained notoriety for its use on the dark web. The Silk Road marketplace, established in 2011, was the first of hundreds of sites to offer illegal drugs and services in exchange for bitcoin Screenshot Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The first bitcoin ATM appears On 29 October, 2013, the first ever bitcoin ATM was installed in a coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada. The machine allowed people to exchange bitcoins for cash Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The fall of MtGox The world's biggest bitcoin exchange, MtGox, filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 after losing almost 750,000 of its customers bitcoins. At the time, this was around 7 per cent of all bitcoins and the market inevitably crashed Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Would the real Satoshi Nakamoto please stand up In 2015, Australian police raided the home of Craig Wright after the entrepreneur claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto. He later rescinded the claim Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's big split On 1 August, 2017, an unresolvable dispute within the bitcoin community saw the network split. The fork of bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology spawned a new cryptocurrency: Bitcoin cash Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's price sky rockets Towards the end of 2017, the price of bitcoin surged to almost $20,000. This represented a 1,300 per cent increase from its price at the start of the year Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures What goes up... Bitcoin price crashes spectacularly, losing half of its value in a matter of days Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin plunges The cryptocurrency eventually bottoms out below $4,000 in 2019 before slowly rebuilding momentum to outperform more traditional assets Getty Images So how could this happen? Some traders set up bots to monitor relevant news outlets and social media channels like Twitter for keywords and activity that might indicate a market shift may be about to occur. If relevant keywords appear in this case 'bitcoin', 'ETF' and 'approved' then these bots may autonomously make trades in anticipation of bitcoin's price moving in a positive direction. The only problem is that the developers of these bot may not have allowed for the possibility that the news is the result of a prank. "It's about getting there first. In this instance a trading bot cannot tell an April Fool's from a real thing," George McDonaugh, chief executive and co-founder of blockchain investment firm KR1, told The Independent. "So if you have a system in place to recognise the words 'ETF' and 'approved' to immediately trigger large scale buys, then theoretically this could lead to a big move." The price of bitcoin is notoriously volatile, making predicting its future value difficult (Getty Images/iStockphoto) The timing of the initial price surge means it is "far-fetched" to attribute it to the article's publication, according to Mr McDonaugh, though this does not rule out the possibility that the April Fool's joke helped fuel the bitcoin price surge. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile and it is difficult to pinpoint price movements to one specific factor, meaning there is a myriad of possible reasons why bitcoin surged in price. Some analysts speculated the rally could also be the result of bitcoin breaking above $4,200, which was seen as a key testing point for the market as it was previously bitcoin's highest price of 2019. Other cryptocurrency experts suggested the jump could have come in anticipation of bitcoin's next 'halvening' an event that sees the rewards for mining the virtual currency cut in half. Previous halvenings have been preceded by price gains. The price of bitcoin has suddenly shot up by hundreds of dollars, bucking months of market stability. Bitcoin rose from $4,150 (3,182) to $4,849 in less than an hour on Tuesday morning, as it reached its highest value of 2019. It comes after a period of remarkable stability for the cryptocurrency, which has seen is hover around the $4,000 mark since the beginning of the year. Despite the most recent gains, bitcoin is still trading a long way from its peak of close to $20,000 that it hit at the end of 2017. The mysterious movement helped boost other major cryptocurrencies, with ethereum, ripple and litecoin all experiencing gains of around 10 per cent. Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Satoshi Nakamoto creates the first bitcoin block in 2009 On 3 January, 2009, the genesis block of bitcoin appeared. It came less than a year after the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto detailed the cryptocurrency in a paper titled 'Bitcoin: A peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin is used as a currency for the first time On 22 May, 2010, the first ever real-world bitcoin transaction took place. Lazlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins the equivalent of $90 million at today's prices Lazlo Hanyecz Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Silk Road opens for business Bitcoin soon gained notoriety for its use on the dark web. The Silk Road marketplace, established in 2011, was the first of hundreds of sites to offer illegal drugs and services in exchange for bitcoin Screenshot Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The first bitcoin ATM appears On 29 October, 2013, the first ever bitcoin ATM was installed in a coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada. The machine allowed people to exchange bitcoins for cash Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The fall of MtGox The world's biggest bitcoin exchange, MtGox, filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 after losing almost 750,000 of its customers bitcoins. At the time, this was around 7 per cent of all bitcoins and the market inevitably crashed Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Would the real Satoshi Nakamoto please stand up In 2015, Australian police raided the home of Craig Wright after the entrepreneur claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto. He later rescinded the claim Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's big split On 1 August, 2017, an unresolvable dispute within the bitcoin community saw the network split. The fork of bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology spawned a new cryptocurrency: Bitcoin cash Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's price sky rockets Towards the end of 2017, the price of bitcoin surged to almost $20,000. This represented a 1,300 per cent increase from its price at the start of the year Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures What goes up... Bitcoin price crashes spectacularly, losing half of its value in a matter of days Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin plunges The cryptocurrency eventually bottoms out below $4,000 in 2019 before slowly rebuilding momentum to outperform more traditional assets Getty Images Cryptocurrency markets are notoriously volatile and it is difficult to pinpoint price swings to a specific incident. Some market analysts suggest such a jump could help kick start more gains for bitcoin in the year leading up to its next halvening an event taking place every four years where the rewards for mining the digital currency are reduced by 50 per cent. Although there are no clear cut reasons for the sudden movement, it is reasonable to suggest that bitcoin has hit its bottom as we are almost 400 days away from the next halvening, Danny Scott, chief executive of Isle of Man cryptocurrency exchange CoinCorner, told The Independent. This is price behaviour we have seen before previous halvenings and is something we believe to be an emerging pattern for bitcoin. Breaking above the $4,200 price is also seen as significant by some cryptocurrency experts, who believe it could precede a positive price trend for bitcoin. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Earlier this week, bitcoin analyst Simon Peters, who works for the online trading platform eToro, said that investors were eagerly awaiting to see if it broke above this price point. Bitcoin has failed to break this ceiling so far in 2019, and therefore this price movement would be significant, he said. However, investors should hold their horses, as only once weve seen a break and, importantly, the price stays above $4,200, can people perhaps start to turn bullish for the long-term. Scientists are to hold mysterious meetings across the world to announce a "groundbreaking" new black hole discovery. Press conferences around the globe are being organised, seemingly to announce a photograph that could break new ground in our understanding in space. Humanity might be about to see a black hole for the first ever time. The announcement relates to the Event Horizon Telescope, the European Southern Observatory announced, which is said to have found its "first result". That telescope has been capturing data for more than a decade in an attempt to take a photo of the edge of a black hole, the first time one would ever have been seen by human eyes. Scientists have been attempting to take images of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that lurks in the middle of our galaxy. Black holes are by their very nature impossible to see, since they swallow up all light and so make it impossible for any to reach us on Earth. While we can understand them because of the way they affect the space that surrounds them, they cannot actually be directly seen. Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures Show all 7 1 /7 Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures The MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars EPA Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures Nasa finds flowing water on Mars - in pictures But the telescope hopes to snap an image of the event horizon, or the point at their edge where light cannot escape. That has proved incredibly difficult, because of the dust and disruption that lurks on the far reaches of a black hole. Now astronomers are teasing the "groundbreaking" and incredibly important new breakthrough in that project, suggesting the work might be complete. Recommended Black hole discovered hiding behind gas cloud near centre of galaxy The main press conference will take place on 10 April, in Brussels, at 3pm local central European time. Other press events will be held in Chile, Shanghai, Japan, Taipei, and the USA, each in their local languages. The event will be streamed online by the ESO as well as the European Research Council, as well as on social media. It will be available on YouTube. The European Southern Observatory said that, "due to the importance of this result", it was encouraging satellite events around the world where people can get together to watch along. They are current planned in Madrid, Rome, Gothenburg, Nijmegen and Pretoria, it said. The price of Ethereum has experienced a major surge, as the world's second most valuable cryptocurrency mirrored Bitcoin's market movements on Tuesday. Ethereum's digital token ether rose by 10 per cent to above $150, taking it to its highest value since February. The gains were not as significant as bitcoin, which rose by around 20 per cent in less than an hour, but analysts say it could signal an end to the recent bear market. "The bitcoin price crossed the $5,000 mark, touching the highest level since November 2018 in the early hours of Tuesday, London time," said Nigel Green, chief executive of financial advisory firm deVere Group. "All other major cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, XRP and Litecoin have experienced gains of around 10 per cent. This dramatic jump is likely to attract many investors who have been sitting on the sidelines. In addition, it can be expected to reignite institutional interest." Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Satoshi Nakamoto creates the first bitcoin block in 2009 On 3 January, 2009, the genesis block of bitcoin appeared. It came less than a year after the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto detailed the cryptocurrency in a paper titled 'Bitcoin: A peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin is used as a currency for the first time On 22 May, 2010, the first ever real-world bitcoin transaction took place. Lazlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins the equivalent of $90 million at today's prices Lazlo Hanyecz Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Silk Road opens for business Bitcoin soon gained notoriety for its use on the dark web. The Silk Road marketplace, established in 2011, was the first of hundreds of sites to offer illegal drugs and services in exchange for bitcoin Screenshot Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The first bitcoin ATM appears On 29 October, 2013, the first ever bitcoin ATM was installed in a coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada. The machine allowed people to exchange bitcoins for cash Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The fall of MtGox The world's biggest bitcoin exchange, MtGox, filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 after losing almost 750,000 of its customers bitcoins. At the time, this was around 7 per cent of all bitcoins and the market inevitably crashed Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Would the real Satoshi Nakamoto please stand up In 2015, Australian police raided the home of Craig Wright after the entrepreneur claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto. He later rescinded the claim Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's big split On 1 August, 2017, an unresolvable dispute within the bitcoin community saw the network split. The fork of bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology spawned a new cryptocurrency: Bitcoin cash Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's price sky rockets Towards the end of 2017, the price of bitcoin surged to almost $20,000. This represented a 1,300 per cent increase from its price at the start of the year Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures What goes up... Bitcoin price crashes spectacularly, losing half of its value in a matter of days Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin plunges The cryptocurrency eventually bottoms out below $4,000 in 2019 before slowly rebuilding momentum to outperform more traditional assets Getty Images Since launching in 2015, six years after bitcoin, Ethereum has seen remarkable growth due to its functionality, which extends beyond just being an alternative payment system. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum relies on the same underlying blockchain technology that means it is decentralised and does not rely on traditional financial institutions like banks to function. But beyond being a virtual currency, Ethereum was designed as a software platform that enables applications such as smart contracts which are self-executing, secure contracts to be built and run without the need of a third party. This means it aims to not just decentralise banks but decentralise the entire internet. Its utility has led some industry experts to speculate that Ethereum could one day surpass bitcoin as the world's leading cryptocurrency. "Ethereum has the possibility to overtake the market capitalisation, and thus the value, of bitcoin," Hubert Olszewski, director of business development at Blockchain Board of Derivatives, told The Independent last April. "This is because from the get-go it was a more versatile tool." Ethereum's recent gains may give investors hope that it can fulfil such expectation, though it still remains a long way off bitcoin and a long way down from its $1,400 peak from January 2018. Nasa says that India's decision to test a weapon by destroying a satellite has put astronauts on board the International Space Station in danger. Last week, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced that the country had successfully destroyed a satellite in space. He said it made India a "space power", and the technology is only available to a few countries in the world. But Nasa says the debris strewn across space by the explosion could endanger the people currently living above the Earth. The risk of collision to the ISS was increased by 44% over a period of 10 days, the American space agency's administrator Jim Bridenstine warned staff on Monday, after identifying 400 different pieces of orbital debris from the event. "It's unacceptable and Nasa needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is," Mr Bridenstine said. Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Show all 30 1 /30 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 more commonly known as WR 124 and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago Nasa's most stunning pictures of space The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead sharing pictures of black holes Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station Nasa/Scott Kelly Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Pluto image Four images from New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way NASA & ESA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called draa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region "Intentionally creating orbital debris fields is not compatible with human space flight." Nasa is now tracking around 60 pieces that are 10 centimetres or bigger, with 24 that have gone above the apogee of the ISS, which Mr Bridenstine described as a "terrible, terrible thing". "We need to be clear with everybody in the world, we're the only agency in the federal government that has human lives at stake here," he explained. "And it is not acceptable for us to allow people to create orbital debris fields that put at risk our people." India's ministry of external affairs insists that the risk from Mission Shakti is low, saying: "The test was done in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris. "Whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back onto the earth within weeks." Mr Bridenstine admitted this was true, adding: "It's low enough in Earth orbit that over time this will all dissipate." India is the fourth country to have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons (Asat), after the US, Russia and China. Additional reporting by agencies The news that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were expecting a second child was met with jubilation by fans of the royal family. The couple released a statement in mid-February announcing that their first child, Archie, was going to be a big brother, accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of the pair. The news was particularly poignant, as Meghan had previously revealed in a moving essay for the New York Times that she had suffered a miscarriage in summer 2020. I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second, she wrote. During their sensational interview with Ophrah Winfrey in March, the couple confirmed that their second child would be a girl and was due in the summer but gave no fixed date or further details. But what citizenship will their second child have? Heres everything you need to know. Will Meghan and Harrys second child be an American citizen or a British citizen? Prince Harry and Meghan in March 2019 (Shutterstock) Although the couple announced in 2018 that Meghan intended to become a British citizen, its unclear what the current status of this is now that the pair have stepped back from royal duties and moved to California, not least because the process of applying for citizenship can take several years to complete. Meghan will give birth to her daughter in the US and still retains her American citizenship (she voted in the 2020 presidential election), meaning that her child will automatically qualify for American citizenship. As Prince Harry remains a British citizen, and British citizenship can be passed down one generation under British law (depending on certain conditions he meets), a child of his would automatically qualify for British citizenship. Their second child, therefore, is likely to possess dual British and American citizenship. What about Archie? Harry and Meghan with baby Archie (Shutterstock) As Meghan and Harrys first child Archie was born in the UK, he automatically became a British citizen. And as Meghan is an American citizen, he also qualified for American citizenship. Archie, therefore has dual British and American citizenship. When is Meghan and Harrys daughter due? No specific details are known about Meghans due date for their second child, although she is estimated to arrive over the summer period. Coffee chain Boston Tea Party expected to lose a quarter of its takeaway drink sales when it banned disposable cups and so it proved. But owner Sam Roberts took the hit anyway, saying he felt it was the right thing to do for the planet. You often hear business leaders talking about their mission and waxing lyrical about making the world a better place. But how often are they willing to put their corporate money and bonuses where their mouths are like Roberts and his business have? The company agrees with environmentalists that the waste created by disposable coffee cups is causing Britain a huge problem, because it is. Tonnes of them are dumped into landfill every year. Many people are under the impression they are recyclable. Trouble is, the plastic lining that prevents leakage and keeps drinks warm means they are not. Larger chains typically offer people a discount for using a reusable cup, but thats like trying to apply sticking plaster to a bullet wound. Boston Tea Party used to do it, but just 2.8 per cent of its customers took up the offer. Other chains have reported higher figures, but the take up as a percentage is still very small, and so the mountain of waste grows ever higher. Roberts has called upon other, larger, chains to follow his lead and they should do. But with keeping short term shareholders sweet the priority, its more likely that theyll carry on making a fuss about the half measures theyve adopted while spending big bucks on PR and lobbying firms to fight any attempts to change the situation. Boston Tea Party, whose branches are to be found in the South West and the Midlands, deserves your support. But it also deserves, and needs, the support of the government. Its there that the solution to this particular problem lies. Business news: In pictures Show all 13 1 /13 Business news: In pictures Business news: In pictures Flybe collapses Airline Flybe has collapsed. All future flights on the Exeter-based airline have been cancelled leaving more than 2,300 staff facing an uncertain future, and wrecking the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers. The chief executive, Mark Anderson, said: Europes largest independent regional airline has been unable to overcome significant funding challenges to its business. AFP via Getty Business news: In pictures Future product placement will be 'tailored to individual viewers' Marketing executives say that product placement in films and televison shows on streaming services such as Netflix may be tailored to individuals in future. For instance, if data shows that a viewer is a fan of pepsi, a billboard in the background of a shot would host an advert for pepsi, while for a viewer known to have different tastes it could be for Coca-Cola Paramount Business news: In pictures Corbyn wishes Amazon a happy birthday In a card sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the company's 25th birthday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn writes: "You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on. Please pay your fair share" Business news: In pictures No deal, no tariffs The government has announced that it would slash almost all tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Notable exceptions include cars and meat, which will see tariffs in place to protect British farmers Getty Business news: In pictures Fingerprint payment NatWest is trialling a new bank card that will allow people to touch their hand to the card when paying rather than typing in a PIN number. The card will work by recognising the user's fingerprint NatWest/PA Wire Business news: In pictures Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis Business news: In pictures Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid 3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA Business news: In pictures RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA Business news: In pictures Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty Business news: In pictures Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rues contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. Business news: In pictures Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped 4m off of Flybes revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airlines estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year. It has thus far resisted a latte levy on disposable cups, despite evidence suggesting that the imposition of an extra charge would work rather better than the offer a discount currently does. The proceeds from it could also go towards cleaning up the mess this industry makes on the principle that the polluter pays. It has worked with other industries. The plastic bag tax has resulted in a dramatic reduction in their use, and cut the waste produced by supermarkets. Its long past time for something similar to be adopted for this form of disposable packaging too. And if a levy doesn't work, then stronger measures should be applied. Boston Tea Party shouldnt have to go it alone, and nor should it be forced into the position of paying a penalty for being clean through losing business to messier rivals. Ford has warned it will reconsider its UK investments if MPs cannot agree a Brexit deal that guarantees a smooth departure from the EU. The US car manufacturers Europe Chairman Steven Armstrong warned of the potentially disastrous effects of a no-deal Brexit on Ford and the wider industry. Such a scenario would mean Ford will have to consider seriously the long-term future of our investments in the country, Mr Armstrong told The Associated Press. We've been very consistent since the referendum that a hard Brexit, a no-deal Brexit, would be a disaster for the automotive industry in the UK and within that of course I count Ford Motor Company, Mr Armstrong told the news agency So anything that puts tariffs or friction at the borders in place would be a significant inhibitor to our business. We've been very clear in saying that could cost us up to a billion dollars a year. Car manufacturers cutting UK jobs Show all 5 1 /5 Car manufacturers cutting UK jobs Car manufacturers cutting UK jobs Jaguar Land Rover Britain's largest automotive manufacturer announced in January that it plans to cut 4500 jobs from its 40,000 workforce Getty Car manufacturers cutting UK jobs Nissan The Japanese car company announced early in February that it would no longer be making the new X-trail model at its Sunderland factory Getty Car manufacturers cutting UK jobs Honda Honda has announced that it is planning to close its Swindon plant with the loss of 3,500 jobs PA Car manufacturers cutting UK jobs Michelin Michelin announced in November that it will close its Dundee tyre factory which employs over 800 people by 2020 PA Car manufacturers cutting UK jobs Schaeffler Shchaeffler's Llanelli plant is to close by the end of 2019. The company provides automotive and and industrial parts worldwide and the Llanelli plant employs over 200 people. Juergen Ziegler, chief executive for Europe, said that while Brexit was not the only factor, it has "brought forward" the decision to relocate Google The latest stark warning from Britains car industry came after MPs again failed to agree on a way forward for the Brexit process, voting down a series of alternatives to the prime ministers deal. Mr Armstrong said Ford ahd spent tens of millions of dollars preparing for a no-deal Brexit. The best case for me would be that that money is actually wasted because we actually reach a deal, Armstrong said. So I would encourage all parties concerned to figure out how to get us to a deal that guarantees frictionless trade because otherwise we will have to consider seriously the long-term future of our investments in the country. The company has already laid out plans to cut thousands of jobs across Europe, including the UK, as it tries to boost profitability in a region where it has underperformed for years. The bulk of the redundancies are expected to affect Germany Brexit is not the reason for that, but it clearly is another factor that if we were to get a hard Brexit we would have to think seriously about what further steps we'd have to take, Mr Armstrong said. Last week the industry trade body said car production in the UK fell by 15.3 per cent in the year to February, the ninth consecutive month of falls. Manufacturers built 123,203 cars in the UK over 12 months, down from 145,518 a year ago, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said. Declining demand in the UK and in key European and Asian export markets has hit carmakers hard, while continued uncertainty around Brexit is hurting investment in the sector. Mike Hawes, SMMT chief executive, said the figures should provide additional impetus for MPs to avert a hard Brexit. The ninth month of decline for UK car production should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks this industry, already challenged by international trade hostilities, declining markets and technological disruption, could survive a no deal Brexit without serious damage, he said. A managed no deal is a fantasy. Concerns about young people falling off the grid have been growing in the education sector, and now, to allay fears, the government will make families who home school register their child with the council. The proposal for a mandatory register to ensure authorities can supervise young people out of school comes after the number of children being home schooled doubled in the space of four years. Education secretary Damian Hinds has warned that some children are being taught in illegal schools, where they are vulnerable to dangerous influences, under the banner of home education. You are here: Business China and France have signed a Memorandum of Understanding on bilateral cooperation in financial innovation recently, the country's top securities watchdog said Monday. Both parties will share information and strengthen cooperation in the development trend of financial technologies and relevant policies for regulation, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said in a statement on its website. The two countries' securities regulators also achieved consensus on enhancing green finance cooperation and exploring ways to advance connecting the two countries' capital markets, according to the statement. A procedure which helps obese people to lose weight by reducing blood flow to the stomach could become a cheaper and less risky alternative to other surgeries, a clinical trial suggests. Researchers leading tests of the recently developed technique, known as bariatric embolisation, showed that over a year severely obese patients shed around 10 per cent of their body weight. They also reported having a reduced appetite, feeling full more quickly, and showed promising early signs that their cholesterol was going down. This is a great step forward for this procedure establishing early feasibility, safety and early efficacy, said Dr Clifford Weiss, lead author of the study from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The pioneering procedure works by using a tubular catheter to access the blood vessels and place microscopic beads which block off some of the arteries leading to the stomach. Science news in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures Pluto has 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there." Getty Science news in pictures Over 400 species discovered this year by Natural History Museum The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year PA Science news in pictures Jackdaws can identify 'dangerous' humans Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average. Getty Science news in pictures Turtle embryos influence sex by shaking The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal Ye et al/Current Biology Science news in pictures Elephant poaching rates drop in Africa African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017. Reuters Science news in pictures Ancient four-legged whale discovered in Peru Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago A. Gennari Science news in pictures Animal with transient anus discovered A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste Steven G Johnson Science news in pictures Giant bee spotted Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands Clay Bolt Science news in pictures New mammal species found inside crocodile Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science news in pictures Fabric that changes according to temperature created Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold Faye Levine, University of Maryland Science news in pictures Baby mice tears could be used in pest control A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males Getty Science news in pictures Final warning to limit "climate catastrophe" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase Getty Science news in pictures Nobel prize for evolution chemists The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies Getty/AFP Science news in pictures Nobel prize for laser physicists The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers Reuters/AP Science news in pictures Discovery of a new species of dinosaur The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn" Viktor Radermacher / SWNS Science news in pictures Birth of a planet Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. ESO/A. Muller et al Science news in pictures New human organ discovered that was previously missed by scientists Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins Getty Science news in pictures Previously unknown society lived in Amazon rainforest before Europeans arrived, say archaeologists Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs Jose Iriarte Science news in pictures One in 10 people have traces of cocaine or heroin on fingerprints, study finds More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly. Getty Science news in pictures Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary This reduces the blood flow enough to prevent the stomach releasing hunger-triggering hormones, but not enough to cause damage. Obesity is a growing public health crisis in developed countries like the US and UK. Britain is already the fattest nation in western Europe and this is driving rates of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancers. Two pictures show how blood flow to stomach is reduced after bariatric embolisation (Radiological Society of North America) This places a significant burden on health systems, and while weight-loss surgeries are shown to be effective in reducing obesity, financial constraints mean the NHS has been reduced to rationing these as well. Embolisation is already used to shut off blood flow to a weak or damaged blood vessel aneurysm repair and a way to starve cancerous tumours of oxygen. While it is still in early stages in weight loss, bariatric embolisation instead of gastric bypass, where the small intestine is attached to a pouch at the top of the stomach, or gastric bands which pinch the stomach to make a person feel full quicker, with less risk of infection and complications. The 20 patients in the trial, which is published in the journal Radiology on Tuesday, lost 8.2 per cent of their excess weight in the first three months and had lost 11.5 per cent of their weight by the end of the trial. Recommended Gastric bands are as useful as a plaster on a severed artery Crucially the participants all reported that their quality of life had improved as well. Larger trials with more patients will be needed to rule out the possibility that the weight loss is just a temporary placebo effect, but it looks at present like a future option to help combat obesity. It is fulfilling to all of us to see something that started as an idea develop through about a decade of research and then go all the way to an initial clinical trial, Dr Weiss said. The reality is that obesity itself is an individualised disease that requires individualised treatments. A British man fuelled the violence and devastation which has engulfed Syria by travelling to fight against Isis, a court has heard. Aidan James, from Formby, Merseyside, had no previous military experience or weapons knowledge when he allegedly set out to join the bloody war in August 2017. The 27-year-old, who linked up with Kurdish fighters, prepared himself in an "amateurish way" and had just two months training in Iraq before crossing the border into Syria, the Old Bailey heard. He denies engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts and two charges of attending a place used for terrorist training. Mark Heywood QC, prosecuting, said the ongoing civil war in Syria had been fuelled by the involvement of foreign combatants on all sides who had no prior link to the land or its people. He said: [Mr James] went as an individual to Syria to fight with guns and explosives." Timeline of the Isis caliphate Show all 19 1 /19 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Timeline of the Isis caliphate ISIS began as a group by the merging of extremist organisations ISI and al-Nusra in 2013. Following clashes, Syrian rebels captured the ISIS headquarters in Aleppo in January 2014 (pictured) AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared the creation of a caliphate in Mosul on 27 June 2014 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis conquered the Kurdish towns of Sinjar and Zumar in August 2014, forcing thousands of civilians to flee their homes. Pictured are a group of Yazidi Kurds who have fled Rex Timeline of the Isis caliphate On September 2 2014 Isis released a video depicting the beheading of US journalist Steven Sotloff. On September 13 they released another video showing the execution of British aid worker David Haines Timeline of the Isis caliphate The US launched its first airstrikes against Isis in Syria on 23 September 2014. Here Lt Gen William C Mayville Jnr speaks about the bombing campaign in the wake of the first strikes Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis militants sit atop a hill planted with their flag in the Syrian town of Kobani on 6 October 2014. They had been advancing on Kobani since mid-September and by now was in control of the citys entrance and exit points AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Residents of the border village of Alizar keep guard day and night as they wait in fear of mortar fire from Isis who have occupied the nearby city of Kobani Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Smoke rises following a US airstrike on Kobani, 28 October 2014 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate YPG fighters raise a flag as they reclaim Kobani on 26 January 2015 VOA Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis seized the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra on 20 May 2015. This image show the city from above days after its capture by Isis Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces are stationed on a hill above the town of Sinjar as smoke rises following US airstrikes on 12 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces enter Sinjar after seizing it from Isis control on 13 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi government forces make the victory sign as they retake the city of Fallujah from ISIS on 26 June 2016 Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi forces battle with Isis for the city of Mosul on 30 June 2017 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of the Iraqi federal police raise flags in Mosul on 8 July 2017. On the following day, Iraqi prime minister Haider Al Abadi declares victory over Isis in Mosul Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Female fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim Square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Trucks full of women and children arrive from the last Isis-held areas in Deir ez-Zor, Syria in January 2019 They were among the last civilians to be living in the ISIS caliphate, by this time reduced to just two small villages in Syrias Deir ez-Zor Richard Hall/The Independent Timeline of the Isis caliphate Zikia Ibrahim, 28, with her two-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter, after fleeing the Isis caliphate, on Saturday 26 January 2019 Richard Hall/The Independent And he added: The prosecution case against this defendant is that, as a citizen and resident of this country who did not know and had never been to Iraq or Syria before and who had no prior military knowledge or experience whatever and no official sanction at all, he went there for four months to fight. He picked one particular cause and he joined in. "At the time, and since, he claimed that his aim was to combat Islamic State. In reality, it was not just that, there was much more to it. He had picked his cause and it was the cause of just one of the many groups of people that inhabit that part of the world and would like it to be their own, the Kurdish people. Mr Heywood added that, while in the Middle East, James associated himself with the PKK or Kurdistan Workers' Party a militant group which British citizens are banned from joining because of its use of arms and violence to advocate for a Kurdish state. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events He was arrested on his return to the UK at Liverpool Airport on 14 February. The trial continues. A pensioner told a black woman when Brexit comes you will be gone in a racist tirade at a London betting shop, a court heard. John Keogh, 74, allegedly called Anneka Davis a f***ing n***** at a Coral bookmakers in Peckham, southeast London, on 23 August 2018. He is alleged to have told her: When Brexit comes you will be gone. Mr Keogh denied one count of racially aggravated public disorder and a second public order offence at Camberwell Green Magistrates Court on Tuesday. Prosecuting, Chidi Ikwuakolam said Mr Keogh, of Bermondsey, southeast London, was dealing with a member of staff when he made the alleged comments. Brexit racism and the fightback Show all 9 1 /9 Brexit racism and the fightback Brexit racism and the fightback Demonstrators protest against an increase in post-ref racism at London's March for Europe in July 2016 PA Brexit racism and the fightback These cards were found near a school in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the day after the EU referendum Twitter/@howgilb Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback Romford, Essex, June 25 @diamondgeezer Brexit racism and the fightback A worker at this Romanian food shop was asleep upstairs at the time of this arson attack in Norwich on July 8, but escaped unharmed. Hundreds later participated in a love bombing rally outside the shop to express their opposition to racism and their support of the shop owners. JustGiving/Helen Linehan Brexit racism and the fightback This neo-Nazi sticker was spotted in Glasgow on June 26 Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback But after news emerged of neo-Nazi stickers appearing in Glasgow, some in the city struck back with slogans of their own. Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback More signs began to appear in some parts of the UK, created by people who wanted to show their opposition to post-referendum racism Courtesy of Bernadette Russell The defendant, who is hard of hearing, was allowed to sit in the body of the court behind his solicitor Ricky Yau during the five-minute hearing. He appeared wearing a dark grey coat, white trousers, brown shoes and glasses and spoke to confirm his name, address, date of birth and nationality as Irish. District Judge Sue Green bailed Mr Keogh ahead of a trial at Croydon Magistrates Court on 23 May. She is living in a tent in a Syrian refugee camp, blocked from returning to the UK but even Isis bride Shamima Begum says she is getting bored of Brexit. The 19-year-old has revealed that Britains departure from the EU dominates television coverage at the al-Hol desert camp, where she is living. It goes on and on without end, she told The Times. Its so boring now that I ask the sisters to flick on to the cartoon channel just to get away from it. In the same interview the first since her third baby died last month Ms Begum said she had accepted she may never return to the UK but said that she only ran away to join Isis after being brainwashed online. She said she left London for Syria in 2015 because she believed everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion. Timeline of the Isis caliphate Show all 19 1 /19 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Timeline of the Isis caliphate ISIS began as a group by the merging of extremist organisations ISI and al-Nusra in 2013. Following clashes, Syrian rebels captured the ISIS headquarters in Aleppo in January 2014 (pictured) AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared the creation of a caliphate in Mosul on 27 June 2014 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis conquered the Kurdish towns of Sinjar and Zumar in August 2014, forcing thousands of civilians to flee their homes. Pictured are a group of Yazidi Kurds who have fled Rex Timeline of the Isis caliphate On September 2 2014 Isis released a video depicting the beheading of US journalist Steven Sotloff. On September 13 they released another video showing the execution of British aid worker David Haines Timeline of the Isis caliphate The US launched its first airstrikes against Isis in Syria on 23 September 2014. Here Lt Gen William C Mayville Jnr speaks about the bombing campaign in the wake of the first strikes Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis militants sit atop a hill planted with their flag in the Syrian town of Kobani on 6 October 2014. They had been advancing on Kobani since mid-September and by now was in control of the citys entrance and exit points AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Residents of the border village of Alizar keep guard day and night as they wait in fear of mortar fire from Isis who have occupied the nearby city of Kobani Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Smoke rises following a US airstrike on Kobani, 28 October 2014 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate YPG fighters raise a flag as they reclaim Kobani on 26 January 2015 VOA Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis seized the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra on 20 May 2015. This image show the city from above days after its capture by Isis Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces are stationed on a hill above the town of Sinjar as smoke rises following US airstrikes on 12 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces enter Sinjar after seizing it from Isis control on 13 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi government forces make the victory sign as they retake the city of Fallujah from ISIS on 26 June 2016 Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi forces battle with Isis for the city of Mosul on 30 June 2017 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of the Iraqi federal police raise flags in Mosul on 8 July 2017. On the following day, Iraqi prime minister Haider Al Abadi declares victory over Isis in Mosul Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Female fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim Square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Trucks full of women and children arrive from the last Isis-held areas in Deir ez-Zor, Syria in January 2019 They were among the last civilians to be living in the ISIS caliphate, by this time reduced to just two small villages in Syrias Deir ez-Zor Richard Hall/The Independent Timeline of the Isis caliphate Zikia Ibrahim, 28, with her two-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter, after fleeing the Isis caliphate, on Saturday 26 January 2019 Richard Hall/The Independent She married Dutch fighter Yago Riedijk after arriving in the caliphate, and the pair had two previous children, who also both died. They finally fled Isis territory as its last bastion in Baghuz crumbled earlier this year. Ms Begum, who has Bangladeshi heritage, has since been stripped of her British citizenship by home secretary Sajid Javid. Her family plans to appeal the decision and is to apply for a judicial review. Shamima Begum, the British schoolgirl who ran away to join Isis, has said she has accepted she will probably never return to the UK but insisted she was brainwashed by the terrorist group. Speaking for the first time since the death of her third baby in March, the 19-year-old said she "really regretted everything" and asked for a second chance. Ms Begum claims she left London for Syria in 2015 because she believed everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion". She became an Isis bride shortly after arriving in the caliphate, marrying Dutch fighter Yago Riedijk. The pair whose first two children both died only fled Isis territory as its last bastion in Baghuz crumbled earlier this year. The teenager, who has Bangladeshi heritage, has since been stripped of her British citizenship by home secretary Sajid Javid. Timeline of the Isis caliphate Show all 19 1 /19 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Timeline of the Isis caliphate ISIS began as a group by the merging of extremist organisations ISI and al-Nusra in 2013. Following clashes, Syrian rebels captured the ISIS headquarters in Aleppo in January 2014 (pictured) AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared the creation of a caliphate in Mosul on 27 June 2014 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis conquered the Kurdish towns of Sinjar and Zumar in August 2014, forcing thousands of civilians to flee their homes. Pictured are a group of Yazidi Kurds who have fled Rex Timeline of the Isis caliphate On September 2 2014 Isis released a video depicting the beheading of US journalist Steven Sotloff. On September 13 they released another video showing the execution of British aid worker David Haines Timeline of the Isis caliphate The US launched its first airstrikes against Isis in Syria on 23 September 2014. Here Lt Gen William C Mayville Jnr speaks about the bombing campaign in the wake of the first strikes Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis militants sit atop a hill planted with their flag in the Syrian town of Kobani on 6 October 2014. They had been advancing on Kobani since mid-September and by now was in control of the citys entrance and exit points AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Residents of the border village of Alizar keep guard day and night as they wait in fear of mortar fire from Isis who have occupied the nearby city of Kobani Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Smoke rises following a US airstrike on Kobani, 28 October 2014 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate YPG fighters raise a flag as they reclaim Kobani on 26 January 2015 VOA Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis seized the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra on 20 May 2015. This image show the city from above days after its capture by Isis Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces are stationed on a hill above the town of Sinjar as smoke rises following US airstrikes on 12 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces enter Sinjar after seizing it from Isis control on 13 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi government forces make the victory sign as they retake the city of Fallujah from ISIS on 26 June 2016 Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi forces battle with Isis for the city of Mosul on 30 June 2017 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of the Iraqi federal police raise flags in Mosul on 8 July 2017. On the following day, Iraqi prime minister Haider Al Abadi declares victory over Isis in Mosul Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Female fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim Square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Trucks full of women and children arrive from the last Isis-held areas in Deir ez-Zor, Syria in January 2019 They were among the last civilians to be living in the ISIS caliphate, by this time reduced to just two small villages in Syrias Deir ez-Zor Richard Hall/The Independent Timeline of the Isis caliphate Zikia Ibrahim, 28, with her two-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter, after fleeing the Isis caliphate, on Saturday 26 January 2019 Richard Hall/The Independent She told the Times: I have sat down and thought about how long I would have to stay here. And I have kind of accepted that I will have to stay here, I will have to make this like a second home. Since I left Baghouz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again. I was brainwashed." The new comments follow interviews in February when Ms Begum was first tracked down to the al-Hawl refugee camp in Syria in which she showed little remorse for joining the extremists. At one point, she appeared to suggest the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack which left 23 men, women and children dead were justified. But she now says she was speaking under fear of revenge from extremists embedded in the camp. "Anything I said against Dawlah (Isis), they would immediately attack me, so I was afraid of that," she said. Meanwhile, here in the UK, Ms Begum's family have initiated legal proceedings to review the decision to strip her of British citizenship. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Sajid Javid's move was only permissible under international law if it does not leave her stateless. He says she has automatic Bangladeshi citizenship because of her heritage. The Home Office has been accused of failing to learn from the mistakes of Windrush after planning to launch a long-awaited scheme to compensate those affected by the scandal behind closed doors. Scores of Windrush victims were left off the invitation list for the event on Wednesday night, as prominent immigration lawyers and press were also barred. News of the event caused an angry backlash after which the department said home secretary Sajid Javid would make a statement about compensation in the Commons on Wednesday. Jacqueline McKenzie, an immigration lawyer who has worked with many Windrush victims, said she was asked by the Home Office to nominate people who had been affected by the scandal to be invited but that only three of the six she suggested had been asked. One of those who did not get an invitation, Willow Sims, who came to the UK aged four but found herself in debt and facing deportation after losing her right to work last year, accused Mr Javid of being a coward. Willow Sims (left) said she felt let down by Sajid Javid (Willow Sims) I was hoping this would help bring me some closure. At the moment, Im trying to put all this behind me, she said. I was hoping that this would be one of the things that would make me say Ive stood there, Ive seen the people, theyve heard my case, that part is done now. But I feel like Sajid Javid has so many problems on his plate, so hes trying to stay in his ivory tower, dictate to people whats going on, and then not be held accountable for it. Hes a coward too afraid to come out and listen to the problems. I feel let down. Ms McKenzie, who was also not invited, said: This is a shocking way to treat people who in the main have been patient and respectful of the Home Office despite the appalling suffering they have endured, and despite the fact that it has taken over a year for the redress scheme to be launched. I think what all of this demonstrates to me is that even a year after the scandal, the Home Office is failing to learn from its mistakes or just simply does not care about a group of very vulnerable people who they deem expendable. Patrick Vernon, Windrush campaigner and ex-Labour councillor, who did receive an invitation to the event, said it was worrying it appeared to be so secretive. Everyone knows about the scandal, internationally. Everyone is waiting for the details of the compensation scheme, particularly those who have been affected, he said. And if were taking about government transparency, then why is this a secret? Why are they hiding this? What are they embarrassed about? We have to pay out the compensation. That goes without saying. Some people might object to that, but most people across the country will agree that these people deserve compensation for the loss theyve suffered. Jamie Beagent, a human rights lawyer at Leigh Day currently investigating potential legal action against the government on behalf of over 30 victims of the Windrush scandal, said he was surprised to have learned about the event on Twitter. We are contacting all those Windrush victims who we are in contact with, those who we have spoken to have also not heard anything from the government or its agencies in relation to this scheme. This private meeting is as much a surprise to them as it is to us, he added. The government does not seem to have learnt anything from the poor handling of this scandal. Mr Javid pledged in July last year to introduce a compensation scheme to reimburse members of the Windrush generation for the losses they have suffered. But when pressed months later, the Home Office has repeatedly said it is unable to confirm when it will be in operation. The Sun reported last week, citing a Whitehall insider, that the government was allocating about 100m to the scheme as part of a bigger package of money, after Mr Javid had reportedly warned the scheme was unaffordable without the extra money. Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Show all 15 1 /15 Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' arriving at Tilbury Docks from Jamaica, with 482 Jamaicans on board, emigrating to Britain. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaican immigrants being welcomed by RAF officials from the Colonial Office after the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' landed them at Tilbury. PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner who arrived in Britain in 1948 on the first Windrush ship to dock in Tilbury, Essex, speaking at his home in Leeds PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner in Leeds shortly after he arrived in Britain in 1948 on the first Windrush ship to dock in Tilbury, Essex PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Gardner was 22 years old when he boarded the ship in Kingston, Jamaica, with his brother Gladstone before they and hundreds of Caribbean migrants called on to rebuild post-war Britain disembarked the ship in Tilbury Docks PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner (right), during his RAF service in 1947 PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The son of Ruth Williams, a Windrush-generation immigrant, wants to the leave the country after threats of deportation. According to his mother, Mr Haynes applied for British citizenship in 2016 but was rejected, despite Ms Williams having lived in the UK almost permanently since arriving from St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1959. Ruth Williams, 75, said she felt "betrayed" by Britain after the Home Office twice turned down applications for her 35-year-old son, Mozi Haynes, to remain in the country. Ms Williams is understood to have cancer and said she relies heavily on her son for support. PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The British liner 'Empire Windrush' at port in 1954. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Ruth Williams, 75, with her British passport. "I feel betrayed and a second class citizen in my own country," she said. "This makes me so sad and the Home Office must show some compassion. "I am unwell and almost 75, I live on my own and I need my son to stay here. I need my family around me and I cant face being alone. He has applied to the Home Office and been refused twice." PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK From the top, hopeful Jamaican boxers Charles Smith, Ten Ansel, Essi Reid, John Hazel, Boy Solas and manager Mortimer Martin arrive at Tilbury on the Empire Windrush in the hope of finding work in Britain. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaicans reading a newspaper whilst on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' bound for Tilbury docks in Essex. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK After half a century in Britain, Anthony Bryan decided it was time to go abroad. But the decision set off a nightmare that saw him lose his job, detained twice and almost deported to Jamaica. AFP/Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaica-born Anthony Bryan poses outside his home in Edmonton, north London. Now 60 and a grandfather, Bryan thought the issue could be resolved swiftly, as he legally moved to Britain with his family as part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants after World War II. In 1948, the ship Windrush brought the first group of migrants from the West Indies to help rebuild post-war Britain, and many others followed from around the Commonwealth. A 1971 law gave them indefinite leave to remain, but many never formalised their status, often because they were children who came over on their parents' passports and then never applied for their own. AFP/Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Three Jamaican immigrants (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush', smartly dressed in zoot suits and trilby hats. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Newly arrived Jamaican immigrants on board the 'Empire Windrush' at Tilbury in 1948. Getty It comes after MPs warned last month that victims of the Windrush scandal were still homeless and being betrayed by the Home Office almost a year on, and accused ministers of a shameful failure to provide the help promised to those affected. Many remained homeless or having to rely on family members, while a promised compensation scheme has yet to start and an urgent hardship fund took eight months to set up, the report said. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) also accused the home secretary of failing to investigate cases from Commonwealth countries outside the Caribbean while his officials admitted they may still be using incorrect data. A Home Office spokesperson said: Righting the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation remains one of the home secretary's top priorities and he is committed to ensuring it never happens again. That is why we have kept Parliament fully updated at every step of the way and have published regular information about the work of the Windrush Taskforce. Our compensation scheme - which will play a vital role in righting the wrongs - has been subject to a full public consultation with independent oversight and designed in conjunction with those affected. Tomorrow we will be publishing full details of the scheme in Parliament. Emmanuel Macron has said he is open to granting a long Brexit delay if the UK wants to use the time to hold a general election or a second referendum, or work out new red lines. Speaking ahead of a meeting with Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar in Paris, the French president said the approval of another extension would be far from evident and is certainly not for granted if the UK requested one. Should the United Kingdom be unable, three years after the referendum, to propose a solution backed by a majority, they de facto will have chosen by themselves to leave without a deal, Mr Macron told reporters. We cannot avoid failure for them. Should this plan be new elections, a referendum or different selection to the future relationship such as a customs union, its not for me to say but we are open to it. His comments confirm a report by The Independent at the weekend revealing that the three scenarios were being considered by EU leaders as reasonable justifications for an extension to Article 50. Recommended Brexit can be delayed if UK calls referendum or general election Michel Barnier, the EUs chief negotiator, this morning laid out similar conditions to an audience in Brussels. Speaking in Brussels the morning after MPs yet again rejected a slate of compromise Brexit options, the EU chief negotiator had said a no-deal becomes day after day more likely. He said: The UK may ask for another extension. Such an extension would carry significant risks for the EU. Therefore a strong justification would be needed. Mr Barnier confirmed that the EU would accommodate any move by MPs to try and soften Brexit, stating that deals like the Norway option or a customs union had always been on the table. The Commons narrowly rejected a customs union by just three votes on Monday evening, and Norway-style single market membership by 21 votes. A plan for a Final Say referendum was rejected by a 12-vote margin. We cannot avoid failure for them. Should this plan be new elections, a referendum or different selection to the future relationship such as a customs union, its not for me to say but we are open to it Emmanuel Macron, French president The Irish prime minister travelled to Paris on Tuesday in a bid to discuss the possibility of an extension with Mr Macron. Ireland is keen to avoid no deal because it would be hardest-hit by the return of a hard border and disruption to trade through the UK. Mr Varadkar told reporters: I think we need to be open to any proposals that she [Theresa May] may bring forward to us. Well need to consider how we may respond to any UK request for the extension. We want to avoid a rolling extension so any extension must have a clear purpose and a clear plan. EU leaders are due to meet in Brussels next week to decide a way forward for the UK, which will crash out of the EU on 12 April if it does not secure an extension, pass a deal or cancel Brexit. Because any extension to the negotiating period has to be agreed unanimously by EU leaders, every last one must be convinced with Emmanuel Macron often portrayed as the most sceptical. Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Show all 30 1 /30 Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters attend a rally in Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The protest march which started on March 16 in Sunderland, north east England, finished on what was the original date for Brexit to happen before the recent extension Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter sips a can of Stella in protests outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Dedicated anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray and likewise pro-Brexit campaigner Joseph Afrane go head to head near the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit marching band in Parliament Square Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Remain supporters wave EU flags from a bus in Parliament Square PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter shouts slogans outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside of the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside of the Houses of Parliament REUTERS Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit flag is waved in Parliament Square AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The March to Leave nears the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit protester holds a sign outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters carry the coffin of democracy AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters march outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters take part in the March to Leave protest in London PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter holds a sign outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A man holds satirical paintings of politicians Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit An pro-Brexit float on the March to Leave march in London Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Far-right activist Tommy Robinson addresses protesters outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Tommy Robinson supporter arrives at the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A jogger gestures rudely at a Brexit supporter outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament PA Theresa May has yet to ask for another extension and previously suggested she would not be open to one, but the prime minister is expected to come under parliamentary pressure from MPs this week to seek another one. Though the Paris talks are focused on Brexit, both leaders said they would also discuss other issues. Its very much the case that the UK at the moment is consumed by Brexit, but Ireland, France and the European Union shouldnt be consumed by Brexit, Mr Varadkar said. Mr Macron added: We have a future to build together within the European Union, a new relationship to build within the United Kingdom. They will remain a friend, a key ally but we will cannot spend the coming months to sort out yet again the terms of our divorce and to deal with the past. Jeremy Corbyn has said he is "very happy" to meet with Theresa May after she offered to hold cross-party talks in an effort to break the Brexit logjam at Westminster. The Labour leader's remarks came after the prime minister used a Downing Street statement to the nation to announce that she will seek a short extension to the Article 50 negotiating period. Ms May also offered to hold talks with Mr Corbyn in order to thrash out a future relationship with the EU that can command a majority in the House of Commons. "Today I am taking action to break the logjam," she said. "I am offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and try to agree a plan - that we would both stick to - to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal." Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Show all 30 1 /30 Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters attend a rally in Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The protest march which started on March 16 in Sunderland, north east England, finished on what was the original date for Brexit to happen before the recent extension Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter sips a can of Stella in protests outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Dedicated anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray and likewise pro-Brexit campaigner Joseph Afrane go head to head near the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit marching band in Parliament Square Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Remain supporters wave EU flags from a bus in Parliament Square PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter shouts slogans outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside of the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside of the Houses of Parliament REUTERS Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit flag is waved in Parliament Square AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The March to Leave nears the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit protester holds a sign outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters carry the coffin of democracy AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters march outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters take part in the March to Leave protest in London PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter holds a sign outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A man holds satirical paintings of politicians Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit An pro-Brexit float on the March to Leave march in London Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Far-right activist Tommy Robinson addresses protesters outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Tommy Robinson supporter arrives at the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A jogger gestures rudely at a Brexit supporter outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament PA In response, Mr Corbyn said he will meet with the prime minister, adding: "We recognise that she has made a move, I recognise my responsibility to represent the people that supported Labour in the last election and the people who didn't support Labour but nevertheless want certainty and security for their own future and that's the basis on which we will meet her and we will have those discussions." Mr Corbyn added: "However people voted in the referendum in 2016, whether they voted remain or they voted leave, they didn't vote for lower living standards, they didn't vote to lose their jobs. "And actually there's far more that unites people on both sides about the kind of society we can be than divides them." He said the question of whether the UK takes part in the EU elections was not the most important question, rather that the most important issue was "to make sure we don't crash out of the EU next week with no deal, and what I believe would be a degree of chaos that would follow as a result". He also warned that Labour would "hold in reserve" the option of tabling a confidence motion in the government if it "proves it is incapable of commanding a majority in the House of Commons". Responding to Ms May's statement, however, the former foreign secretary and Tory Brexiteer Boris Johnson said it was "very disappointing" the cabinet had decided to "entrust the final handling of Brexit" to Mr Corbyn and the Labour Party. "It now seem all too likely that British trade policy and key law making powers will be handed over to Brussels - with no say for the UK." MPs will make a fresh attempt to compel Theresa May to delay Brexit further by passing legislation in a single day, a cross-party alliance has announced. A bill designed to clear the Commons on Wednesday would prevent a drift into no deal by accident in just 10 days time, its supporters say. The move will delay a further round of indicative votes, following the failure to reach a consensus on Monday night, which raised the threat of a crash-out Brexit. The bill has been drawn up by senior Conservative Oliver Letwin and Labours Yvette Cooper, to force Ms May to seek a longer extension to Article 50 past the new departure day of 12 April. Crucially, it would force the UK to take part in next months European parliament elections which the prime minister is desperate to avoid and which would enrage Brexiteer Tories. Ms Cooper MP said: We are now in a really dangerous situation with a serious and growing risk of no deal in 10 days time. Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Show all 24 1 /24 Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Put It To The People march: Best of The Independents pictures Angela Christofilou/The Independent Parliament has tried to jam into two days a process of finding consensus that I wish the prime minister had started two years ago. But right now nothing has been agreed. And Mr Letwin said: This is a last-ditch attempt to prevent our country being exposed to the risks inherent in a no-deal exit. We realise this is difficult. But it is definitely worth trying. The plan is to commandeer the Commons agenda, with MPs first passing a motion on Wednesday and then attempting to pass the legislation by 10pm. It would then move on to the House of Lords on Friday or next Monday, when the UK will be just days from leaving the EU with no agreement on Friday next week. Originally Mr Letwin and Ms Cooper said the legislation would be debated on Thursday, possibly preventing the prime minister staging a further meaningful vote on that day, but have now brought that forward to Wednesday. The two MPs said they were not trying to stamp on further attempts for the Commons to agree an alternative Brexit plan but argued that vetoing a no deal must take priority. That would have catastrophic consequences for manufacturing industry, food prices, medicine supplies, policing and national security, a view apparently confirmed by Britains top civil servant. As last time, when the prime minister secured a delay beyond the original Brexit day of 29 March, the government would propose the length of the extension being sought. MPs would debate and vote on it. Ms Cooper added: She needs to put forward a proposal, including saying how long an extension she thinks we need to sort things out. If the government wont act urgently, then parliament has a responsibility to try to ensure that happens, even though we are right up against the deadline. The move risks cutting the chances of the EU granting an extension because it delays the next chance for MPs to coalesce around a rival Brexit plan to justify it. Anna Soubry, Independent Group MP, had revealed plans for a composite motion, combining a softer Brexit with a Final Say referendum, to break the deadlock. Theresa May has said she will seek a short extension to the Article 50 period to try and find a compromise with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that can break the Brexit deadlock. The prime minister was not clear in her statement how long the extension will be, but did say her target was to see the UK leave the European Union by 22 May. But the offer to compromise with Mr Corbyn indicates the prime minister has abandoned hope of passing her deal on the back of Tory and DUP votes. Recommended Macron says he is open to long Brexit delay for referendum or election It also suggests that she could be willing to shift her red lines, particularly in relation to a customs union which is likely to be the key facet of any Labour wish-list. Key ministers in Ms Mays cabinet, including Andrea Leadsom and Liam Fox, have indicated they could quit if Britain is unable to execute trade deals after Brexit though no resignations have yet materialised. After confirming that she would seek a delay to Brexit past the current 12 April departure date that is as short as possible, she said that the debate on the UKs departure cannot drag on much longer. She went on: Today I am taking action to break the logjam. I am offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and to try to agree a plan that we would both stick to to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal. Any plan would have to agree the current withdrawal agreement it has already been negotiated with the 27 other members, and the EU has repeatedly said that it cannot and will not be reopened. Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Show all 30 1 /30 Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters attend a rally in Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The protest march which started on March 16 in Sunderland, north east England, finished on what was the original date for Brexit to happen before the recent extension Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter sips a can of Stella in protests outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Dedicated anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray and likewise pro-Brexit campaigner Joseph Afrane go head to head near the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit marching band in Parliament Square Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Remain supporters wave EU flags from a bus in Parliament Square PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter shouts slogans outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside of the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside of the Houses of Parliament REUTERS Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit flag is waved in Parliament Square AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The March to Leave nears the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit protester holds a sign outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters carry the coffin of democracy AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters march outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters take part in the March to Leave protest in London PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter holds a sign outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A man holds satirical paintings of politicians Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit An pro-Brexit float on the March to Leave march in London Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Far-right activist Tommy Robinson addresses protesters outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Tommy Robinson supporter arrives at the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A jogger gestures rudely at a Brexit supporter outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament PA What we need to focus on is our Future Relationship with the EU. The prime minister said the ideal outcome of the process would be to agree an approach on the future that delivers on the result of the referendum, that both she and Mr Corbyn agree on and which the European Council would find feasible at a summit next week. This debate, this division, cannot drag on much longer It is putting Members of Parliament and everyone else under immense pressure and it is doing damage to our politics Theresa May She explained that if a single approach could not be agreed the government would instead agree a number of options for the future relationship that could be to the House of Commons to determine which course to pursue. On Monday the Commons voted on four different Brexit outcomes with MPs unable to find a majority for anything, though a customs union came within three votes of passing. Ms May added: Crucially, the government stands ready to abide by the decision of the House. But to make this process work, the Opposition would need to agree to this too. The government would then bring forward the Withdrawal Agreement Bill. We would want to agree a timetable for this bill to ensure it is passed before 22 May so that the United Kingdom need not take part in European parliamentary elections. Could the Brexit chaos result in another general election? Ms May has failed three times to win support from the Commons for her Brexit deal as it stands, with a large number of mainly Tory Brexiteer MPs refusing to back it because they believe it does not represent a clean enough break from the EU. But if Ms May does eventually end up backing any kind of deal that leaves the UK in a customs union, it could well mean not just cabinet resignations but a major split of her party all the way down to the grass roots. Industries are stepping up efforts in blockchain technology to serve the real economy, even though the global cryptocurrency market could be facing tough times. As of November, China led the world in new blockchain projects, with 263 in progress. The figure accounted for about 25 percent of such projects globally, according to data service provider Blockdata in Beijing. Blockchain refers to the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies, but its real value goes far beyond that. In the digital ledger system, transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly, ensuring that data is secure and not tampered with, while allowing it to be shared among a distributed network of computers without the involvement of middlemen. The technology is used widely across a range of industries in China, like financial services, public services, healthcare, supply chains, smart manufacturing and logistics. "The main strength of blockchain is in decentralized data management," said Zhang Feixue, chief editor at Blockdata. "It can serve the real economy in terms of circulation and distribution. In the field of industrial economy, blockchain allows various assets to flow in the digital world, so it is a real gateway to digitalization for industries." Paul Sin, leader of the Asia Pacific Blockchain Lab at global advisory company Deloitte, said, "Whenever there is a need to synchronize data, especially sensitive information, across companies, industries and geographical boundaries, blockchain can offer a great solution due to its cryptographical protection of data." For instance, trade finance will allow banks to detect fraud, improve productivity and eventually enable small and medium-sized enterprises to obtain financing that was once unavailable to them. "This is a solid example of blockchain supporting financial inclusion and macroeconomic growth," Sin said. In Deloitte's 2018 global blockchain survey, nearly 50 percent of respondents in China said the technology was already being used in their organization, compared with only 14 percent in the United States. Li Qilei, chief technology officer at Qulian Technology, a blockchain platform developer in China, said the financial industry is now the biggest user of the technology in areas such as asset securitization for banks and brokers. Take Qulian, for example. On an accounts receivable platform it developed with China Zheshang Bank, the scale of financing has reached hundreds of billions of yuan since its launch in August 2017. Qulian, in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, launched Hyperchain, which focuses on enterprise-level network solutions for companies, government agencies and industry alliances. In June, the company said it had raised a series B round of financing of 1.5 billion yuan ($222 million) - the largest amount in the domestic blockchain industry at the time. In addition to linking with financial services, Li said blockchain can be applied in other areas such as green energy and smart government. Qulian is also working with some housing bureaus to build a trusted property chain, with the aim of preventing fake housing information appearing online. Qulian is just one of 615 blockchain companies in China, with 82 percent of them founded between 2016 and last year, according to a report in December by Beijing think tank EO Intelligence. Half of the companies are working on the adoption of blockchain technology in the financial industry. Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent - collectively known as BAT in the industry - have launched their own blockchain initiatives. Alibaba has been using blockchain in areas such as public welfare, food and healthcare since 2016. With 90 blockchain-related patents, it ranked No 1 in the Top 100 Blockchain Enterprise Patent Rankings, followed by international technology giant IBM's 89 patents, according to Beijing intellectual property information media outlet IPRdaily, which compiled the list last year. Tencent ranked eighth with 40 patents, while Baidu was 40th with fewer than 20. In August, the tax bureau in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, and Tencent announced that China's first blockchain electronic invoice had been issued. Du Xiaoman Financial, formerly known as Baidu Finance, released its blockchain white paper to outline its capability in developing applications in eight areas - consumer finance, management of financial clients and community building, asset digitalization, public welfare, identity systems, digital content copyright, interconnection between different products, and tracking. China's innovations are also expanding overseas, one example being Ant Financial, Alibaba's financial services affiliate, which operates mobile payment tool Alipay. International blockchain companies are also looking to China for opportunities. Digital Asset in New York is one example. The distributed ledger technology provider is working with Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing to develop a blockchain-powered program to help international investors to trade Chinese mainland shares via Hong Kong's Stock Connect system. Chris Church, chief business development officer for Digital Asset, said, "One of the reasons that HKEX is so important to us is because it is a gateway to the mainland's stock market." He added that he feels excited about how people want to advance the technology in the region. Kang Li, assistant director at the Blockchain Research Center of China at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, said a blockchain product has yet to be put into practice on a large scale in China. "The industry is still in a blossoming phase where more and more companies can come up with all kinds of chains, but they don't have an explicit idea of application service or supporting content," Kang said. Although many see the potential in blockchain applications, the attitude being adopted is still relatively prudent due to a lack of direct return. In addition, regulations, user acceptance and conflicts with other industries are all issues facing the blockchain industry. Data from research and advisory company Gartner show that in 2017, 82 percent of reported cases of blockchain use were in financial services, while the figure fell to 46 percent last year. The data appeared in the PwC Global Blockchain Survey 2018. In December, Pan Gongsheng, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, the central bank, said initial coin and security token offerings are essentially illegal in China "no matter how fancy the technical terms are". He said internet finance and related tools should be under even stricter supervision. Close Theresa May says UK will seek 'short extension' as she reaches out to Corbyn for new deal Theresa May has reached out to Jeremy Corbyn to find a way through the Brexit deadlock as she vowed to delay the UKs exit to secure a deal. In a statement from Downing Street, Ms May said: This is a decisive moment in the story of these islands and it will require national unity to deliver the national interest. Mr Corbyn, the Labour leader, said he was very happy to meet the prime minister to discuss a way forward. It comes after Ms May gathered her cabinet for seven-hour crisis talks after MPs once again failed to unite around any Brexit option during a late-night session of indicative votes. Recap our coverage of the day's developments Despite Ms Mays departure plan having been rejected by MPs three times in the House of Commons, it is believed she may try to put it to the house for a fourth time. The meetings come amid growing speculation the prime minister could call a snap general election if a fourth attempt to pass her deal fails. Britain's most senior civil servant has privately warned cabinet ministers of the dire consequences of a no-deal Brexit. Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, told ministers that leaving the EU without an agreement will result in food prices rising by ten per cent, the police being unable to protect people and the economy suffering the worst recession in a decade. Direct rule would have to be restored in Northern Ireland for the first time since 2007 and the government would come under pressure to bail out companies that had gone bust, he warned. In an explosive 14-page briefing sent to every cabinet minister and obtained by the Daily Mail, Sir Mark said leaving without an agreement would make Britain "less safe" and see pressure on law enforcement authorities "enormously increase". The stark warning comes just ten days before Britain is due to leave the EU with no deal after Theresa May's exit plan was rejected three times and MPs voted down various alternatives. Recommended MPs fail to agree on alternative Brexit plan Parliament is strongly opposed to a no-deal exit, meaning the government is likely to instead seek a further delay to Brexit. However, the EU has demanded a concrete plan from the UK for how the extension will be used before it agrees to a lengthy postponement. On Monday, MPs rejected all four possible proposals for a way forward: two versions of a softer Brexit, a fresh referendum and revoking Article 50. The cabinet will meet for four hours on Monday in a bid to thrash out a way forward, but ministers are deeply divided between those wanting Ms May to agree to a softer Brexit and those who want to leave without a deal. Cabinet ministers had reportedly sought Sir Mark's advice on the risks of no deal in order to ensure they were meeting their duty to govern in the national interest. In his response, the cabinet secretary, who also acts as Ms May's national security adviser, said: "We believe there would be significant disruption in the short term. Food prices would increase by up to 10 per cent, with steeper rises in fresh product prices." Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Show all 30 1 /30 Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters attend a rally in Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The protest march which started on March 16 in Sunderland, north east England, finished on what was the original date for Brexit to happen before the recent extension Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter sips a can of Stella in protests outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Dedicated anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray and likewise pro-Brexit campaigner Joseph Afrane go head to head near the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit marching band in Parliament Square Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Remain supporters wave EU flags from a bus in Parliament Square PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter shouts slogans outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside of the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside of the Houses of Parliament REUTERS Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit flag is waved in Parliament Square AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The March to Leave nears the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit protester holds a sign outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters carry the coffin of democracy AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters march outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters take part in the March to Leave protest in London PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter holds a sign outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A man holds satirical paintings of politicians Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit An pro-Brexit float on the March to Leave march in London Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Far-right activist Tommy Robinson addresses protesters outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Tommy Robinson supporter arrives at the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A jogger gestures rudely at a Brexit supporter outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament PA He said the consequences of no deal would be "more severe" in Northern Ireland than elsewhere, adding: "The current powers granted to the Northern Irish secretary would not be adequate for the pace, breadth or controversy of the decisions needed to be taken through a no-deal exit. Therefore we would have to introduce direct rule." And raising the prospect of law and order breaking down, Sir Mark said none of government's "mitigation measures would give the UK the same security capabilities as our current ones...the UK would be less safe as a result." He continued: "Our national security would be disrupted....The stability of the union would be dislocated." The cabinet secretary said the economy would suffer the worst recession since 2008, with the subsequent fall in the value of the pound likely to be "more harmful" than in 2008 because it would affect only the UK and not other countries. Parliament is gripped by deadlock on Brexit. Having rejected Theresa May's deal three times, on Monday MPs also voted down all four alternative options placed in front of them. After parliament rejected proposals to negotiate a customs union with the EU, stay in the single market, hold a fresh referendum or revoke Article 50 entirely, it is not at all clear what ministers will do next. With Britain currently on course to leave the EU without a deal at the end of next week, they have only days to decide. What happens next? Theresa May's cabinet will meet for five hours on Tuesday in a bid to thrash out a way forward, but with ministers bitterly divided between those who want the prime minister to pursue a softer Brexit and those who want her to opt for no deal, it is far from clear that they will reach any kind of agreement. On Wednesday, backbench MPs will once again seize control of the Commons agenda and will likely hold more votes on alternatives to the prime minister's plan. The proposal for a customs union with the EU was defeated by just three votes in Monday's "indicative votes", while a motion calling for another referendum was rejected by just 12. It is possible that one - or both - could receive a majority in the next round, piling pressure on Ms May to agree to implement them. Recommended Brexit can be delayed if UK calls referendum or general election The UK has until 10 April to pass the current withdrawal deal or put forward a new plan. That is when the European Council will meet to consider any request from the UK for a further delay to Brexit. Unless this is approved, Britain will leave the bloc without a deal on 12 April. Will there be yet another vote on Theresa May's deal? Downing Street is highly likely to try to hold a fourth vote on Ms May's Brexit deal. With a lengthy delay to Brexit now looking likely, they will make clear to Eurosceptic rebels that they now have only two options: vote for the prime minister's plan, or face a long extension that could result in the UK not leaving the EU at all. Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary, hinted at this on Monday after MPs rejected all four options proposed in the latest round of "indicative votes". He told the Commons: "If the House were to agree a deal this week it may still be possible to avoid holding European parliamentary elections." However, the government will need to find a way around the ruling by John Bercow, the Commons speaker, that there cannot be another vote on the deal unless it has changed "substantially". This is because parliamentary rules forbid repeat votes on matters that have already been decided by MPs. Even if the government is able to hold another vote, it appears unlikely that the deal will pass, given it was rejected by 58 votes last week. Could Britain now leave the EU without a deal? That is what the country is currently heading for, but it is still unlikely to happen. There is a significant majority in parliament against a no-deal outcome, meaning any attempt by the government to move in this direction would almost certainly be blocked. Ms May is also believed to be unwilling to take Britain out of the EU without a deal. Instead, a long delay to Brexit appears to be the most likely outcome. This would need to be approved by the EU, however, and Brussels has said it will only agree if the UK puts forward a clear plan for how the extension will be used to ensure a withdrawal agreement is passed. The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day Show all 12 1 /12 The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day March 29 2019 - The original date for Britain's departure from the EU, what do the newspapers have to say about it? The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day Daily Express The Daily Express focuses on the fact that today was the original day for Britain's departure from the EU The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day Daily Mail The Daily Mail warns MPs that they have "one last chance" to back the Prime Minister's Brexit deal The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day The Independent The Independent Daily Edition reports that the Prime Minister is gambling as she holds a vote today on the withdrawal agreement The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day The Sun The Sun reports that the Prime Minister last night sought to convince DUP leader Arlene Foster to back her deal The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day The Guardian The Guardian reports that some ministers want the Prime Minister to step down now, while Michael Gove becomes the favourite at the bookies to replace her The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day The i The i reports that Boris Johnson is preparing his leadership bid for when the Prime Minister resigns The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day The Times The Times reports that Brexit may be delayed for a further year The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph reports that the Prime Minister is making a "desperate final plea" to pass her Brexit deal through the house of commons The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day Financial Times The Financial Times reports on the Brexit Betrayal march that will reach London today after setting off from Sunderland with the intention of reaching London on Brexit day The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror reports on the Prime Minister's difficulty passing her deal through the commons The front pages on what would have been Brexit Day Daily Star The Daily Star calls on its readers to shut up about Brexit This could be through a general election, a fresh referendum or proposals for a Brexit deal more likely than Ms May's plan to gain parliament's support. Any extension that is granted will almost certainly require the UK to hold European Parliament elections on 22 May. Could there be a general election? The current parliament has proved repeatedly unable to decide on important matters relating to Brexit. That has prompted speculation that Theresa May's only option if her deal is rejected again could be to call a general election. This would become significantly more likely if parliament tried to force her to accept a fresh referendum or a softer Brexit involving a customs union with the EU, given the prime minister has consistently ruled these out. But the Conservatives' fear of losing power may lead them to thrash out a compromise rather than run the risk of allowing Jeremy Corbyn into No10. There is also the matter of whether Ms May would be allowed to lead the Tories into an election, given the widespread opposition she has faced from her own MPs. The prime minister has already said she will not lead her party into the 2022 election and promised to step down if her Brexit deal is passed. A general election is the last resort - but as other options are ruled out, it becomes ever more likely as the only way to break the current impasse. MPs have failed again to agree on an alternative Brexit plan, increasing the risk of the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal next week. In a second series of indicative votes, two options were only narrowly rejected: to keep the UK in the EU customs union or in both the single market and a customs arrangement. The Commons also turned down putting any agreed deal to a Final Say referendum and rejected revoking Article 50 if the UK is close to the no-deal Brexit cliff-edge. The results were followed by Nick Boles, the Conservative MP behind the Common market 2.0 plan for the single market and customs arrangement, dramatically quitting the Tory whip on the Commons floor. Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary, said the cabinet would discuss the impasse tomorrow but pointed out the UK was due to leave the EU in just 11 days time, with no deal in sight. However, Final Say supporters were cheered that their option won more votes than a week ago, securing 280 and losing by just 12 the narrowest defeat. Peter Kyle, one of the Labour sponsors of the motion, urged colleagues to see how minorities can be brought together to still achieve a Commons consensus. Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Show all 30 1 /30 Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters attend a rally in Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The protest march which started on March 16 in Sunderland, north east England, finished on what was the original date for Brexit to happen before the recent extension Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter sips a can of Stella in protests outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Dedicated anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray and likewise pro-Brexit campaigner Joseph Afrane go head to head near the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit marching band in Parliament Square Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Remain supporters wave EU flags from a bus in Parliament Square PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter shouts slogans outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside of the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside of the Houses of Parliament REUTERS Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit flag is waved in Parliament Square AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The March to Leave nears the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit protester holds a sign outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters carry the coffin of democracy AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters march outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters take part in the March to Leave protest in London PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter holds a sign outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A man holds satirical paintings of politicians Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit An pro-Brexit float on the March to Leave march in London Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Far-right activist Tommy Robinson addresses protesters outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Tommy Robinson supporter arrives at the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A jogger gestures rudely at a Brexit supporter outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament PA Some potential supporters of the customs union and single market options refused to back them because their movers refused to agree these paths should then be put to a public vote There was applause for Mr Boles when he made his shock resignation, telling MPs: I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I regret, therefore, to announce that I can no longer sit for this party. MPs voted on the four options, whittled down from the eight potential alternatives to the prime ministers thrice-defeated plan, none of which secured a majority a week ago. The four options were: * A permanent and comprehensive customs union, put forward by Ken Clarke, the former Conservative chancellor with Labour support defeated by 276-273 votes. * Common market 2.0, a cross-party bid to keep the UK in the single market and a customs arrangement, with support from both Labour and the Scottish Nationalists defeated by 282-261. * A confirmatory public vote, requiring a Final Say referendum on any Brexit deal before its ratification defeated by 292-280. * Parliamentary supremacy, put forward by the SNPs Joanna Cherry and calling for Article 50 to be revoked if a crash-out Brexit looms and a no-deal has been rejected defeated by 292-191. Conservative MPs were given a free vote on all the options, although cabinet ministers had again been told to abstain. In a letter to Labour MPs, Jeremy Corbyn acknowledged vastly different and passionately held views, but had urged support for common market 2.0 to break the deadlock. He stressed that Labour was still pushing its plan for alignment with the single market and would keep all options on the table, including campaigning for a public vote. Ex-Conservative MP Nick Boles has launched a scathing attack on Theresa May's "cowardly" and "selfish" cabinet, as he described the prime minister's top team as the worst in recorded history. Less than 24 hours after dramatically quitting the party during a series of votes in the Commons, Mr Boles said Ms May had "misunderstood and mismanaged" the Brexit process. Speaking to the BBC, the Grantham and Stamford MP said: "There are some fine people in the cabinet, genuinely, people who would have been in a cabinet in any age, but this is the worst cabinet collectively not only in my lifetime but I think probably in recorded history." He added that Ms May's successor as prime minister "should not be anyone who is or has been in the cabinet" since 2017. "None of them in my view has earned the right to lead the country after Brexit - they are all compromised by their collective failure to lead, to unite, to get behind one plan, to sell that plan, to communicate," Mr Boles continued. Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Show all 30 1 /30 Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters attend a rally in Parliament Square after the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The protest march which started on March 16 in Sunderland, north east England, finished on what was the original date for Brexit to happen before the recent extension Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter sips a can of Stella in protests outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Dedicated anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray and likewise pro-Brexit campaigner Joseph Afrane go head to head near the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit marching band in Parliament Square Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Remain supporters wave EU flags from a bus in Parliament Square PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter shouts slogans outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter protests outside of the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside of the Houses of Parliament REUTERS Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A pro-Brexit flag is waved in Parliament Square AP Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit The March to Leave nears the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit protester holds a sign outside parliament EPA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters carry the coffin of democracy AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters march outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters take part in the March to Leave protest in London PA Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Brexit supporters protest outside parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter holds a sign outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A man holds satirical paintings of politicians Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit An pro-Brexit float on the March to Leave march in London Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit Far-right activist Tommy Robinson addresses protesters outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Tommy Robinson supporter arrives at the Houses of Parliament Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A jogger gestures rudely at a Brexit supporter outside of the Houses of Parliament AFP/Getty Opposing protesters flock to parliament on would be date of Brexit A Brexit supporter outside the Houses of Parliament PA "They have all put themselves first, they have all been cowardly when they should have been brave, they have been selfish when they should have been cooperative. None of them should be prime minister after Brexit." Explaining is decision to resign from the party, he said: "I found myself there, looking around the House of Commons, seeing that the party that was least willing to compromise... was my own. I guess that was when it snapped." The highly-critical remarks came after Mr Boles' Norway-style Brexit proposal was rejected during a second round of indicative votes on Monday evening in the Commons. "This House has continuously rejected leaving without a deal, just as it has rejected not leaving at all," he told MPs. "Therefore the only option is to find a way through which allows the UK to leave with a deal. The government continues to believe that the best course to take is to do so as soon as possible." Algerias long-serving president Abdelaziz Bouteflika submitted his resignation late Tuesday, ending two decades of rule following weeks of mass protests that prompted key allies to turn against him. The ailing 82-year-old leader stood down shortly after the army chief of staff demanded immediate action to remove him from office, the official Algerian Press Service reported. There is no more room to waste time, APS quoted Lieutenant General Ahmed Gaed Salah, once a key pillar of Mr Boutelflikas rule, as saying. The resignation grants a key demand to hundreds of thousands of Algerians marching in the streets for weeks demanding political reform and transparency. Many Algerians wildly celebrated the departure of the man who guided the country from a brutal 1990s civil war to a period of relative stability that was rife with corruption and stagnancy. But Mr Bouteflikas departure also throws the country into a fresh state of uncertainty. Under Algerias charter, a constitutional council now sets the course for a transition period and fresh elections. Algerias constitution denotes the head of the upper house of parliament, Mr Bouteflikas ally Abdelkader Bensalah, as interim leader for a maximum of 90 days as elections are organised. Algerias powerful military has repeatedly intervened in politics over the decades, including the crushing of the countrys nascent democratic changes in the early 1990s. Analysts say the armed forces are sure to attempt to manipulate the process. Meanwhile protesters are determined to continue to march, in what appears to be a generational rebellion against the elderly cadres who helped liberate the country from French rule in 1962 but continue to remain in power. Nationwide mass protests scheduled for Friday will continue, activists said. In downtown Algiers, protesters brandished placards reading: See you Friday, said one witness. They know Bouteflika is the tip of the iceberg. The demand from day one was, Get out, all of you. Scholar Mohamed Affan explains how Algerian military faces an uprising That sets up a potentially perilous confrontation between protesters demanding transparency and reform and military officials and their private and public sector allies eager to maintain their grip on power. Mr Bouteflika has not publicly spoken and has been wheelchair-bound since a stroke in 2013. Many Algerians suspect hes been serving as a front for shadowy powers that include business leaders and military and intelligence officials. On Monday, Mr Bouteflika, who was in power for 20 years, said in a statement attributed to him he would quit before the end of his term on 28 April. But opposition parties rejected this as insufficient, while hundreds of students marched through the capital Algiers to demand the replacement of a political system widely seen as incapable of significant reform. Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Show all 14 1 /14 Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Protests against President Bouteflika in Algiers on March 15 Reuters Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Protesters march in Algiers to demand the resignation of President Bouteflika on March 15 Reuters Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Protesters carrying the national flag protest against President Boueflika on the Republique Plaza on March 17 AP Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Algerians march during a protest in Algiers on March 15 AP Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Students protest in Algiers on March 19 Reuters Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Protesters hang national flags atop a building in Algiers on March 15 Reuters Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Algerian doctors protest against President Bouteflika on March 19 in Algiers EPA Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Algerians demand the resignation of President Bouteflika in a protest on March 15 in Algiers AFP/Getty Algerians protest against President Bouteflika A woman holds a placard with the photo of President Bouteflika during a protest on March 15 in Algiers AP Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Algerians demand the resignation of President Bouteflika in a protest on March 15 in Algiers AFP/Getty Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Algerian doctors march against President Bouteflika on March 19 in Algiers EPA Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Algerians take part in a demonstration against President Bouteflika on March 19 in Algiers AFP/Getty Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Algerian doctors protest against President Bouteflika on March 19 in Algiers AFP/Getty Algerians protest against President Bouteflika Employees of the Algerian Ministry of Vocational Education and Training protest against President Bouteflika in Algiers on March 18 EPA The announcement that he would step down by the end of his fourth term in office failed to quell protesters, who said it did not go far enough in bringing dramatic change to Algerias opaque power networks. Mr Bouteflikas office had said on Monday that the president would take important steps to ensure the continuity of the countrys institutions, fuelling fears that his entourage was seeking to cement its hold on power. But Lt Gen Gaid Salah later presided over a meeting with senior army officials to discuss implementing a procedure in the constitution for removing a sitting president. Our decision is clear and irrevocable. We will support the people until their demands are fully and completely satisfied, he said in statement. Mr Bouteflika had originally planned to seek a fifth term but has faced intensifying protests since mid-February.. If not for these protests he would have been re-elected on the 18th [April], said the activist and journalist, savouring the nights victory. In addition to Mr Bouteflika, the countrys prime minister and the chief of the countrys main business lobby have resigned, and the protesters sense more victories on the horizon, she said. Its unanimous, she said. People are going to the streets again. Nigerians are ordering pizzas from London and transporting them over 3000 miles using British Airways, the countrys Minister of Agriculture has claimed. According to Audu Ogbeh, the African nations new international takeaway trend has become annoying and officials are desperate to bring an end to it. Speaking at a Senate committee hearing in Abuja, the 71-year-old politician said: They buy in London, they bring it on British Airways in the morning to pick up at the airport. It is a very annoying situation and we have to move a lot faster in cutting down some of these things. Although Mr Ogbeh did not specify which Nigerians were making the orders, his comments raised a few eyebrows and prompted a mixed reaction on social media. The worst ever inflight meals Show all 8 1 /8 The worst ever inflight meals The worst ever inflight meals Cockroach curry A cockroach was found in an Air India breakfast meal. Twitter/Manoj Khandekar The worst ever inflight meals Apples and pears Avianca's idea of a vegetarian meal was an apple and a pear on board one flight. Twitter/Steve Hogarty The worst ever inflight meals Chicken sandwich Emirates served this disappointing Cajun chicken and cheese sandwich on a flight to Dubai Paul Carlin The worst ever inflight meals Gluten-free banana Martin Pavelka was handed this banana, complete with "gluten-free" label, as his inflight meal on an ANA service from Tokyo to Sydney. Martin Pavelka/Evening Standard The worst ever inflight meals Mushroom sandwich Oman Air's finest: presenting something approximating a mushroom sandwich on a flight to Heathrow. Nick Boulos The worst ever inflight meals Raw vegetables Aegean Airways served up some raw pepper and carrot sticks as its veggie option on one flight. musterknabe The worst ever inflight meals More cockroaches An Air India passenger wasn't impressed when she found this in the business class lounge. Twitter/Harinder Baweja The worst ever inflight meals Leftovers Not everyone turns their nose up at plane food - this Urumqi flight attendant was suspended after a video of her eating leftovers went viral. Viral Press One person tweeted: Dear @British_Airways, how come you didn't tell us you run a pizza delivery service to Nigeria? Is there an app for this? Another said: Whats the crime there? Doesnt the same BA flight return to London with fresh vegetables from Anambra? If people like UK pizzas whats wrong with that? The ministers remarks were in response to the Nigerian government plans to cut down on imports in a bid to stop citizens importing anything from rice to tomato paste because they think "it shows status, class, that they only eat imported things." He claimed the habit was damaging the countrys economy. Nigeria is a nation of importers. toothpick every year costs us 18 million dollars; tomato paste costs us 400 million dollars, meanwhile, a basket of tomatoes is less than N2000 (4). The farmers are losing money because the processors do not have enough funds to set up factories. The Independent has contacted British Airways for comment. A woman has been arrested in Oklahoma after being caught drunk at the wheel of her car with a cocktail in the cup-holder and a front tyre missing. The damaged vehicle could be heard from a block away, according to police. It was apparently the noise of the metal wheel grinding along the road that first alerted police to a potential incident. According to officers from Tulsa Police Department, they were able to hear 28-year-old Amy Ann Dillons approach from the cacophony, which grew in volume until she drove the damaged vehicle past them. They pulled her over and asked her how much shed had to drink. She admitted shed had two tequila shots, though officers said she told them this while she could barely stand upright. The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 10. Poland Results from an OECD report The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 9. Germany The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 8. Luxembourg Rex Features The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 7. France The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 6. Hungary Rex Features The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 5. Russia AFP/Getty Images The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 4. Czech Republic The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 3. Estonia Rex Features The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 2. Austria Getty Images The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 1. Lithuania AFP/Getty Images They also found a full margarita in her cars cup-holder. The police breathalysed her and took a reading for blood alcohol concentration of 0.21 per cent. A BAC reading of 0.08 per cent or higher is illegal in the US. She did not do well on her SFST (standardised field sobriety test), the arresting officer wrote on Facebook. Police said they believe she had wrecked her car on something prior to the arrest and assume she was driving on [the metal rim] for some time, because somebody had called the police in relation to the vehicle 15 minutes before the arrest but theyd been unable to locate it. Police believe the 28-year-old had already 'wrecked her car on something' before they arrested her and found her drunk and in possession of a tequila-based cocktail (Tulsa Police Department) Police believe the 28-year-old had already wrecked her car on something before they arrested her and found her drunk and in possession of a tequila-based cocktail (Tulsa Police Department). She was taken to David L Moss Criminal Justice Centre in Tulsa, where she smiled for her mugshot. She faces charges for DUI (driving under the influence), operating a motorised vehicle with defective tyres, transport of an open container, and driving without a license in her possession. She also could be facing hit and run charges if it [is] discovered what she hit, police said. According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an estimated 10,874 people were killed in drunk driving crashes in 2017. A drama student has been charged with attempted murder and assault after allegedly stabbing his classmates while re-enacting a violent movie scene. University of Hartford student Jake Wascher was working on a group project with two other students in a dorm room on Sunday afternoon when he took the class assignment too far, Hartford Police said. At around 1:30 pm, officers responded to a call of a two people stabbed. When they arrived, they found two young men with stab wounds. Authorities said the 19-year-old victim from South Windsor suffered puncture wounds to his chest and back while a 21-year-old victim suffered a puncture wound to his chest and four to his back. One was listed in critical, but stable condition and the other was listed in stable condition, the force added. Wascher was arrested two hours later in a wooded area south of the university after the institution was placed on lockdown. He is said to have told officers he was curious what it would be like to stab someone. Police said the 21-year-old was a commuter student from San Diego and currently pursuing a BFA in acting at The Hartt School. According to The Hartford Courant, the trio were re-enacting a scene from Ashton Kutchers 2004 sci-fi thriller, The Butterfly Effect. A spokesperson for the University of Hartford said was deeply saddened by the frightening and unsettling and would be offering counselling services to members of the campus community. Wascher is being held on a $1 million (767,282) bail. Martin Shkreli has reportedly been thrown in solitary confinement after continuing to run his pharmaceutical company from prison via a contraband smartphone. The disgraced businessman, once branded the most hated man in America for vastly increasing the price of a lifesaving drug, was sentenced last year to seven years in jail over an unrelated securities fraud conviction. According to Forbes, officers at the prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey, put Shkreli in solitary after he reportedly continued to run Phoenixus AG, of which he owns a 40 per cent stake, from his cell. Shkreli allegedly dealt with the upper management of the firm, even firing chief executive Kevin Mulleady before reinstating him under a suspension. He also managed to keep his social media accounts and personal blog updated. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, inmates are not allowed to have cell phones, and can be fined and jailed for a year for the offence. 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 bureau, which has been contacted by The Independent for comment, would not confirm Shkrelis status, but told the magazine he was under investigation. When there are allegations of misconduct, they are thoroughly investigated, and appropriate action is taken if allegations are sustained, a spokesperson said. Despite forfeiting $7.4m (5.6m) in assets and paying a fine of $750,000 (574,000) as part of his sentence, Shkreli reportedly has a net worth of $27m (20m), and believes his business will be valued at $3.7bn (2.8bn) by the time he is released. China's manufacturing activity grew for the first time in four months in March with quicker rises in output and overall new work, according to a private report released on Monday, which also showed the fastest growth in eight months. The Caixin China General Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index, which measures the manufacturing sector and is weighted toward private companies, came in at 50.8 in March, rebounding 0.9 percentage points from the previous month, Caixin magazine and research firm Markit said. A reading above 50 signals growth while one below 50 means contraction. The Caixin PMI is a private survey focusing on smaller businesses and offers a first glimpse into the operating environment. It is closely watched as an alternative to the official PMI. The official PMI for March released on Sunday was 50.5, compared with 49.2 in February. Although consistent with only a marginal pace of improvement, the Caixin index was the highest since July. "Overall, with a more relaxed financing environment, government efforts to bail out the private sector and positive progress in Sino-US trade talks, the situation across the manufacturing sector recovered in March, and the employment situation improved greatly," said Zhong Zhengsheng, director of macroeconomic analysis at CEBM Group. Manufacturing production rose for the second month in a row in March. Although modest, the rate of increase was the quickest seen since last August, which was supported by a stronger rise in total new work. The activity index includes such measures beyond actual production as new orders. The sub-index for new orders climbed to its highest level in four months, and the gauge for new export orders returned to expansionary territory, showing that both domestic and external demand rebounded moderately, the report said. Staffing levels at goods producers increased in March the first expansion since October 2013. Some firms said they were hiring additional workers to support more production and new business. Hiring also coincided with sustained signs of stretched capacity at manufacturers, as outstanding workloads continued to rise moderately. "Data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed unemployment in urban areas for February was the highest since early 2017, causing concerns about the job market. The situation improved significantly in March, indicating easing pressure on employment," Zhong said. Gauges for input costs and output charges edged into positive territory, with the latter posting a higher reading than the former, reflecting lower pressure from raw material costs, Caixin said. Optimism toward the year-ahead outlook for production improved to a 10-month high in March, with a number of firms linking positive forecasts to expectations of further improvements to overall market conditions, the report said. The official general PMI released on Sunday, which tracks both the manufacturing and services sectors, jumped 1.6 points to 54, indicating that the overall expansion of production and operation activities of Chinese enterprises accelerated in March, said Zhao Qinghe, senior statistician at the National Statistics Bureau. The official manufacturing PMI rose for the first time over the past four months, up 1.3 points to 50.5 in March, while the non-manufacturing PMI advanced by 0.5 points to 54.8. Four dead bodies have been found in what authorities classify as a multiple homicide inside a building belonging to a North Dakota property management business. On Monday, the bodies of three men and one woman were discovered inside RJR Maintenance and Management in Mandan, a city just over five miles away from Bismarck. The victims were not immediately identified and Mandan Police Department did not say how the individuals died. Its quite a large crime scene, so its not something thats going to be easy for us to get in and do quickly, Police Chief Jason Ziegler told the Associated Press, referring to the speed of the investigation. Mr Ziegler said the police have not yet identified a suspect, nor a possible motive. Manhattan murder mystery: Who really killed Linda Stein? Show all 2 1 /2 Manhattan murder mystery: Who really killed Linda Stein? Manhattan murder mystery: Who really killed Linda Stein? 8417.bin Manhattan murder mystery: Who really killed Linda Stein? 8418.bin The crime scene is contained to where its at, and there is no evidence based upon what we see that the public at large is in any danger from what happened there, Mr Ziegler added. It looks like an isolated incident. The police chief said officers did not know of any recent incidents or calls at or from the business that could be connected to the homicide. Recommended Body of murdered journalist Rafael Murua Manriquez found in Mexico The building has a lot of surveillance cameras. The authorities are asking for other businesses in the area to hand over surveillance footage relevant to the killings. The businesss website features 22 employees in their Meet Our Team page. At least one person has been killed and two others badly injured after a Texas chemical plant explosion and fire that has led to calls for residents and students to shelter in place, according to local media. The explosion occurred in the northeast Houston suburb of Crosby, and one employee told Houston area television station KPRC that employees were being evacuated at the time of the incident as a result of a leak of some sort. Harris County Fire Marshal's Office said that the fire was burning at the KMCO chemical plant. Around 20 employees were being evacuated at the time of the explosion, and some were forced to climb underneath a gate to get away from the blaze that ensued. Immediately after the explosion, the fire began spewing a thick back plume of smoke into the air. Soon after the blaze began, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez announced on social media that they were closing down roadways nearby. The explosion comes just two weeks after a separate fire at a petrochemical storage plant in Deer Park, a community 20mi (32km) away from Crosby. 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 According to its web site, KMCO is a chemical company that offers coolant and brake fluid products and chemicals for the oilfield industry. The Crosby and Sheldon school districts have asked students and staff to shelter in place at all their campuses. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The Associated Press contributed to this report. It would most likely resemble the aftermath of a major natural disaster: food shortages, skyrocketing prices, people out of work and a plummeting stock market. While President Donald Trump sees shutting the border with Mexico as punishment for its failure to stop the flow of immigrants coming to the country illegally, economists warn that it would effectively paralyse the US economy given the huge volume of blue jeans, cars, flat-screen TVs, avocados and other goods that cross the border every day. Trump does not see it that way. In a series of tweets in recent days, the president has blasted Mexicos immigration policies and erroneously claimed that shutting the southern border would save the United States money, given that the US buys more goods from Mexico than it sells to it. Next step is to close the Border! the president tweeted on Sunday. This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico! 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 If Mexico doesnt immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week, the president wrote on Friday. While Trump has repeatedly frightened business leaders by threatening to terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which facilitates trade around the continent by cutting tariffs and streamlining regulations, shutting the southern border entirely would be far more destructive. Nearly $1.7 billion (1.3 billion) of goods and services flow across the border daily, as well as nearly half a million legal workers, students, shoppers and tourists, the US Chamber of Commerce said Monday. Most of us in the trade business thought terminating NAFTA would be quite a body blow, but what Trump is talking about now, shutting the southern border, would be catastrophic, said Gary Hufbauer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Its just absurd. If Trump were to shut down the border, here is who would pay the biggest price: US Manufacturing US industries including agriculture and cars rely on Mexico for trade, either by selling goods and services into Mexico or by using Mexican materials in their products. So one of the biggest victims of a border shutdown would be US manufacturing, a sector the president has promised to help. The United States imported $349.6 billion (268 billion) of goods from Mexico in 2018, and it sent $265 billion (203 billion) back across the border, according to statistics from the Union Nations International Trade Centre, making Mexico the United States largest trading partner after China and Canada. Car manufacturers, who have spread their supply chains across North America, would be among those most affected. Shutting the border would lead to sudden disruptions in the supply chains for parts, causing car production lines in South Carolina, Michigan, Indiana and Alabama to shudder. The change would begin to affect US car production in less than one week, said Ann Wilson, senior vice president for government affairs at the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, which represents car parts makers. Other industries would be hard-hit as well. Many manufacturers of flat-screen TVs, computer hardware and medical devices are set up south of the border, while the apparel industry sources raw materials like cotton, buttons, zippers and threads from the United States and sews them into finished products in Mexico. Closings would also affect sectors outside manufacturing, including energy the United States supplies much of Mexicos natural gas through pipelines that run across the border as well as the transportation sector, where hundreds of thousands of US jobs are tied to moving goods to and from Mexico through ports and by truck or train. Overall, some of the worlds biggest multinational companies would be affected including Ford, Toyota, Boeing and Caterpillar but so would countless small and medium-sized businesses that depend on trade to make and sell their products. The Farm Belt and US Grocery Store Shelves The signing of NAFTA prompted a huge reorganisation in agriculture on both sides of the border. New Mexico's governor literally runs through walls in response to Trump's border wall Now, consumers in the United States depend on Mexican farmers for fresh fruit and vegetables like avocados, tomatoes, strawberries, grapes and mangoes, as well as packaged foods and beer. Mexico relies heavily on US soybeans, corn, dairy products, chickens, beef and other goods. The development of refrigerated trucks and railroad cars means much of the industry depends on just in time deliveries. If the border were shut down, consumers would most likely see an immediate spike in food prices, and supplies of fresh food could dwindle from grocery store shelves in a matter of days. US farmers would lose a major market, causing a drop in prices for their crops and a potential buildup of their goods in factories, slaughterhouses and grain bins. Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, said that Mexico supplies more than 60 per cent of all US produce in the winter and early spring, and that a shutdown could result in immediate and uncontrollable spikes in prices for items like bell peppers, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, eggplant and yes, the beloved avocado. The rise in the popularity of the avocado would not have been possible without trade with Mexico, which supplies 80 percent of the avocados eaten in the United States. If prices go up for fresh produce, people are going to have to choose between eating healthy or putting other food on their plates, Jungmeyer said. Business Confidence Trump often credits his policies with economic growth, renewed business confidence and a rising stock market. But shuttering the border to legitimate commerce and travel could quickly undermine US growth and productivity, the US Chamber of Commerce said in a statement Monday. Closing the US-Mexico border would inflict severe economic harm on American families, workers, farmers and manufacturers across the United States, said Neil Bradley, the chambers executive vice president and chief policy officer. It is hard to imagine that such a measure would not prompt a drop in the stock market, which has seized up as the president threatened to withdraw from NAFTA or put more extensive tariffs on China. That would dent the retirement savings of many Americans, as well as affect the ability of companies to raise money in the capital markets. Once the president breaks the glass once, that casts a lot of uncertainty on the future, said Scott Lincicome, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. It would cast a cloud of uncertainty around a commercial relationship that for decades has been almost an afterthought. US-Mexico Relations and Border Communities Americans often take for granted the fact that Mexico is an ally, ready to work with the United States on a range of issues, including water use and drug trafficking. But before NAFTA went into force in 1994, that future was by no means assured, said Phil Levy of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events If business ties and relations with Mexico are strained, border communities in the United States would most likely suffer, from both decreased economic activity and potentially higher costs from crime and migration. In McAllen, Texas, for example, Mexican shoppers make up nearly one-third of the roughly $3.2 billion (2.45 billion) worth of retail sales the city records annually, signalling a grim prospect for city coffers if Trump follows through on his threat to shut down the border. Were impacted at a very personal level in that the people in McAllen, some of them, work in Mexico, McAllens city manager, Roel Rodriguez, said, adding that 30 percent is a huge number. La Plaza Mall, a Simon Malls property, is constantly full of shoppers on weekends, and the parking lots are often dotted with license plates from various Mexican states. The city and the Chamber of Commerce spend tens of thousands of dollars advertising McAllen in Mexico each year. The more global concern would be how it would impact the whole country, because the goods and services that come through the ports of entry, they dont just stay at the border, Rodriguez said. The produce, the equipment, the auto (car) parts. So theres a real danger for cities on the border, but it has a greater impact than just the cities on the border. Salvador Contreras, who runs the Centre for Border Economic Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, said there was a big risk for large companies with plants in the Mexican border town of Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, including Caterpillar, LG and Panasonic. If youre a multinational corporation who has, say, an operation in Reynosa, and your ability to operate is being impacted, you might question your desire to maintain that plant there, Contreras said. Migration Northern Mexican cities that depend on trade with the United States would be devastated by any extended border closing, leading to mass unemployment that could prompt more attempts to cross the United States border. Under US law, asylum-seekers can request protections once they reach US soil meaning border closings could actually encourage more desperate flights across the border. If anything, it would promote more poverty in Mexico, which would then turn into more pressure on immigration in the US, Hufbauer said. The New York Times Tricia Newbold, the Trump administrations latest whistleblower, did something unexpected only hours after a House committee released her deposition that the White House had overruled career staff members who denied security clearances: she went back to work. As you can imagine, Ms Newbold, 39, an employee of the White House Personnel Security Office, wrote in an email during her commute Monday, I am extremely nervous for how people at work will treat me. But according to people close to her, she was not afraid to tell them about the things she had seen. Ms Newbolds decision to accuse her own office of rampant mismanagement of the security clearances of at least 25 employees came after months of what she characterised as personal discrimination and professional retaliation from Carl Kline, the offices former director, after she spent about a year trying to raise issues internally. In a White House where aggressive leak investigations are conducted in service of President Donald Trump, who has aides sign nondisclosure agreements, Ms Newbolds account represents the rarest of developments: a damning on-the-record account from a current employee inside his ranks. Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty She wasnt looking for trouble, Ms Newbolds lawyer, Edward Passman, said Monday. And she wasnt looking to go public. But her back was to the wall, and she did what she had to do. Described as both no nonsense and intense by people who have interacted with her during the clearance process, Ms Newbold has served under four presidential administrations, beginning with the Clinton White House in 2000. Eventually, she worked her way up to adjudications manager, a job that required her to help make determinations about the security clearances of administration employees. Her office is filled with holdovers from other administrations, and it is meant to be nonpartisan. Yet in the Trump administration, the office was filled with people who had little experience in vetting employees in the interest of national security, Ms Newbold said in a nine-hour deposition with the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week. There was no resolution, Ms Newbold told the committee, according to a lengthy summary letter the panels Democratic chairman published of her interview, which contained verbatim quotes. And I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office. Ms Newbold told the committee that at least two senior administration officials had been granted security clearances which gave them access to classified information despite possible disqualifying issues. She also told the committee that she had compiled a list of at least 25 individuals, including contractors and senior advisers, who had a wide range of disqualifying information, including drug use, financial problems and criminal conduct. In February, The New York Times reported that the president overruled several senior officials in order to reinstate the security clearance of Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, despite issues raised during his clearance process. John Kelly, the presidents former chief of staff, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been ordered to give Mr Kushner the top-secret clearance. In her interviews with the House committee, Ms Newbold said that Mr Kelly and former Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin had been attentive to the national security issues she had tried to raise. Mr Hagin resigned in June and Kelly in December. Trump has the legal authority to grant a clearance, but in most cases, the White Houses personnel security office makes a determination about whether to grant one after the FBI has conducted a background check. Trump rally chants 'AOC sucks' as her push for 'Green New Deal' gains traction Democrats on the committee are also demanding information from the White House about Ivanka Trump, the presidents eldest daughter and adviser, who was granted a security clearance shortly after Mr Kushner got his. In an interview with ABC News in February, Ivanka Trump insisted her father had no hand in either her clearance or her husbands. Ms Newbold, who has a rare form of dwarfism, also accused Kline, the former director of personnel security, of retaliating against her when she repeatedly pointed out to him that actions he was taking, including overriding recommendations to issue clearances to two senior officials, were violating protocol. She said that Kline oversaw a workplace where files including extensive and sensitive background check documents were not secured properly, and stopped the performing of credit checks for potential employees. Ms Newbold told the House committee that she had never seen our office so ill-staffed and with such lack of experience. In fall of last year, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accusing Mr Kline of moving office files to a shelf several feet above her, deliberately out of her reach, beginning in December 2017. That month, she hired Mr Passman, her lawyer. As little as I am, Im willing to fight and stand up for what I know is right, and theyve always respected that about me, Ms Newbold told the House committee last week. Its humiliating to not be able to independently work and do the job that you need. In January, she was suspended for two weeks without pay after NBC News reported that Mr Kline had approved a security clearance for Mr Kushner despite staff objections. The offices new director, Crede Bailey, said at the time that Ms Newbold had refused to support new procedures your supervisor implemented. Within the past two weeks, Mr Passman said she was also removed from her supervisory role at work. On Monday, the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether she could expect to continue in her job. In the evening, Ms Newbolds lawyer said she had gone back to work without incident. Also on Monday, Elijah Cummings, the committees chairman, called for a subpoena for Kline, who now works at the Defence Department, to learn more about his work when he was the director of the office and about his interactions with Ms Newbold. In a letter to Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, Cummings said that the Trump administration had refused to provide information about the problematic practices of the White House Security Office over the past two years. Independent Minds Q&A session on the Middle East, Trump, Syria and Isis Republicans on the committee quickly sought to minimise what Ms Newbold actually knew about the senior officials whose clearances were overturned. In a memo released Monday, they said Cummings used only cherry-picked excerpts from her deposition, and said she had acknowledged that the president has the authority to grant access to national security information to anyone he chooses. The Republican members also pointed out that she had positive things to say about Bailey, her current supervisor. Mr Passman said Baileys two-week suspension of Newbold was unwarranted, but added that hes not personally attacking her like Kline did. It did not surprise Mr Passman or other people close to Ms Newbold that she returned to work her choice to continue kind of speaks for itself about the kind of person she is, her older sister, Melissa Rahming, said Monday. Shes not afraid for what shes said, Rahming said, adding that her sister had held her integrity this entire time. Daniel Jacobson, a former associate counsel in the Obama White House, called Ms Newbold a serious security professional and a total straight shooter in a tweet Monday. The New York Times A memorial dedicated to slaves and African-American workers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was vandalised on Sunday, the university said, as the institution is still reeling from tensions over a Confederate monument that was toppled by protesters last year. The memorial, called the Unsung Founders Memorial, was vandalised by two people, including one person with ties to a group called Heirs to the Confederacy, the university said. The Unsung Founders Memorial was installed in 2005 to honour those men and women of colour enslaved and free who helped build the Carolina we all know and love, according to the university. It features a stone tabletop six feet in diameter that is held up by 300 bronze figurines. At about 1:30am on Sunday, the memorial was defaced with urine and racist language written in permanent marker, university police said. Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee Show all 16 1 /16 Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee Anti-Trump protesters gather outside of the rally Getty Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee A supporter of the president waiting for the rally Getty Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee Anti-Trump protesters wield picket signs Getty Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee A Trump supporter outside of the Mckenzie Arena in Chattanooga prior to the President's appearance Getty Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee Anti-Trump protesters gather outside of the rally with signs Getty Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee A t-shirt for sale at the rally Lucy Gray Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee A crowd gathers in waiting for the rally Lucy Gray Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee A Trump memorabilia stand outside of the rally EPA Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee Trump supporters cheer as the President arrives to the rally AP Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee President Trump stands with Lee Greenwood as he sings 'God Bless the USA' to commence the rally Reuters Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee A supporter listens as President Trump speaks EPA Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee President Trump addresses supporters AP Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee President Trump thanks Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn after her speech EPA Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee Supporters of the president wield signs during the rally Getty Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee Trump supporters cheer during the rally AFP/Getty Inside a Make America Great Again rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee President Trump exits the stage AP These events challenge not only our most fundamental community values, but also the safety of our campus, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, the campus interim chancellor, said in a statement Sunday. The vandalism comes more than six months after the toppling of a 105-year-old Confederate statue called Silent Sam, which prompted heated protests and drew national attention to the university. Many asserted that the statue was an emblem of white supremacy. Students had protested the statue for decades, but it was toppled amid a greater reckoning nationwide over what to do with Confederate symbols and tributes. Confederate monuments have been removed across the country, from Los Angeles to Brooklyn. Heirs to the Confederacy had previously organised events in support of the statue. Lance Spivey, chairman of the group, said Monday that he was looking into the universitys allegations about the vandalism of the Unsung Founders Memorial. He said at least two members of the group, whom he did not name, were on the campus Saturday night, but he did not have any information to suggest that they defaced the memorial. If they did vandalise it, he said they did so in a renegade capacity. He said he believed that the two members were cooperating with the police, and that if the allegations against them were proved true, the group would also take whatever punitive measures it deems necessary. The Silent Sam statue, which was located near the Unsung Founders Memorial, depicted a Confederate soldier grasping a rifle. The soldier is considered silent because he has no ammunition for his weapon. Harry L. Smith Jr., chairman of the universitys board of governors, which is elected by the state legislature, had previously called the toppling of Silent Sam an act of vandalism. After the statue was toppled, what remained was a tall base with a relief that depicted a woman beseeching a university student to join the Confederate Army. In January, the board voted to expedite the resignation of the schools previous chancellor, Carol L. Folt, after she authorised the removal of the base of the statute. She had previously said she would stay on through the end of the academic year. A spokeswoman for the university said Monday that the board was expected to decide what to do with the statue and its base in May. Until then, they are being stored at a secure, undisclosed location on campus, she said. The Unsung Founders Memorial, created by artist Do-Ho Suh, was dedicated in November 2005. What we do today will not rectify what our ancestors did in the past, the universitys then-chancellor, James Moeser, said at a ceremony that year. But this memorial, I believe, attests to our commitment to shed light on the darker corners of our history. Yes, the universitys first leaders were slaveholders. It is also true that the contributions of African-American servants and slaves were crucial to its success. The university said it was not aware of any previous times the memorial had been vandalised. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The university police said Monday that an art installation on campus was also vandalised with racial slurs. The individual with ties to the Confederate group was identified on surveillance footage, the university said. The police declined to name the individuals they were seeking, but a spokesman said they had warrants out for their arrests. The police also declined to be more specific about what was written on the memorial or provide more information about the Heirs to the Confederacy group and the connection to the vandalism. They said an investigation was continuing. The Unsung Founders Memorial has been cleaned by the university, which has placed barricades around the memorial to deter future incidents, the police said. The New York Times Close Joe Biden jokes about inappropriate touching With a burgeoning field of Democratic presidential hopefuls vying for their partys nomination to take on Donald Trump in 2020, a tight grouping of candidates has emerged with a just a few earning the distinction as front-runners in the polls. As those democrats cross the country from Iowa to New Hampshire and South Carolina hoping to earn voter support, Mr Trump faces his own reckoning in the form of approval ratings for the job he is doing as president. So far in the just over two years he has been in office, Mr Trump has seen approval ratings in the low 40s a troubling sign for a man who hopes to once again win one of the most powerful offices in the world. Take a look below for the latest poll coverage from The Independent. We will be updating with the latest individual polls of import, as well as frequent updates on the aggregates of polls and what they mean for the 2020 election prospects. Please allow a moment for live blog to load. Looking towards the 2020 presidential election, democratic candidates vying to take on Donald Trump have apparently learned a valuable lesson from November 2016 when he shocked the world by winning the election by winning the electoral college but fell millions of votes short in the popular vote. Top democratic presidential candidates have come out against that electoral system which has delivered the presidency to two men in recent memory even though they failed to gain support from a majority of voters. If it sounds funny that a candidate could earn less votes than their competitor but still win, read on. Heres what you need to know about the electoral college, the calls for its elimination, and why it exists in the first place. What is the electoral college and how does it work? When voters cast their ballots on election day in America, theyre technically not voting directly for the candidates themselves. Instead, under the electoral college, they are essentially casting a ballot for their preferred candidates electors. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Show all 23 1 /23 Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Joe Biden The former vice president - poised to be a frontrunner - has announced his run. He recently faced scrutiny for inappropriate touching of women, but was thought to deal with the criticism well AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Bernie Sanders The 2016 runner-up has announced that he will be running again in 2020 Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Hillary Clinton The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State says she is still considering whether she will run again. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Pete Buttigieg The Indiana mayor and war veteran will be running for president. If elected, he would be the first openly LGBT+ president in American history. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kamala Harris The former California attorney general will be running for president in 2020. Introduced to the national stage during Jeff Sessions testimony, she has endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major tax-credit for the middle class. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts Senator has formally launched her bid for president in 2020. A progressive Democrat, she is a major supporter of regulating Wall Street. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Beto ORourke The former Texas congressman told Oprah Winfrey that he has been thinking about running for presidency, but stopped short of formally announcing his bid to run in 2020. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Wayne Messam Mayor of the city of Miramar in the Miami metropolitan area, Wayne Messam has announced his bid. He intends to run on a progressive platform against the "broken" federal government. He favours gun regulations and was a signatory to a letter from some 400 mayors condemning President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Vice News Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kirsten Gillibrand The New York Senator formally announced her presidential bid in January, saying that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Cory Booker The New Jersey Senator has announced that he will be running for the presidency in 2020. If he secures the nomination he said finding a female vice president would be a priority. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Delaney The Maryland congressman was the first to launch his bid for presidency, making the announcement in 2017. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Julian Castro The former San Antonio mayor announced his candidacy in January and said that his running has a special meaning for the Latino community in the US. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Tulsi Gabbard The Hawaii congresswoman announced her candidacy in January, but is likely to face tough questions on her past comments on LGBT+ rights and her stance on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Andrew Yang The entrepreneur has announced his presidential candidacy, and has pledged that he would introduce a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Marianne Williamson The author and spiritual advisor has announced her intention to run for president. She had previously run for congress as an independent in 2014 but was unsuccessful. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Kerry The former secretary of state has said he is still thinking about whether to run. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Michael Bloomberg The entrepreneur and former New York mayor with a net worth of around $50bn has said he will decide by the end of February whether to seek the presidency. AFP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Howard Schultz Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not yet ruled out running for president in 2020, despite criticism that his bid could help re-elect Mr Trump by dividing the Democrat vote. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Holder The former attorney general has said he will decide in the next month or so whether to run as a 2020 presidential candidate. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Swalwell The California congressman said he is ready to do this and will decide before April whether to run. MSNBC Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Terry McAuliffe The former Virginia governor, who worked to elect Democratic governors during 2018 midterms, said there was a 50 per cent chance he would run. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Sherrod Brown The Ohio senator is still undecided about whether to run for president in 2020. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Mitch Landrieu The former New Orleans mayor said he doesnt think he will run for president, but never say never. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin These electors are often party loyalists, or the individuals close to the campaigns. In all but two states, the winner of the popular vote receives all of that states electoral college votes no matter the margin of victory. All told, there are 538 electors in the electoral college: one for each member of the House of Representatives, one per senator, and three allocated to the District of Columbia through the 23rd Amendment. So, after voters cast their ballots (and after governors of the states certify the tallies and electoral lists), the electors then meet in December in their respective states. At that point, they then officially vote for president and vice president. Members of the House and Senate then meet in January to take an official tally of those votes. Why does the US do it this way? The electoral college is a compromise solution dating back to the origins of the country, when considerable concern existed that urban centres would dominate elections to the detriment of less populated areas. Because the number of electors a state has is tied to number of representatives, more populous states have an edge because they wield more by virtue of having greater representation in the House. But, in order to offset that, the founders of the country determined that two electors would be allocated per senator which each state has two of regardless of size so less populous states are inherently given an extra boost. The procedure is detailed in the 12th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Donald Trump is fact-checked over claim he won the biggest electoral college victory since Reagan Who benefits? In the two most recent elections in which candidates lost the popular vote but won the election anyway, the candidates were Republicans. George Bush won in 2000, while Donald Trump won in 2016. Generally speaking, republican support is found in rural areas of the country, while democrats find their support in urban centres. If you look at a map of nearly any election, the vast majority of the country will be painted red for republicans no matter the vote and that is because republicans dominate in very sparsely populated areas of the US in the centre of the country. Meanwhile, urban centres are concentrated on coasts and in relatively few states. Electoral College voting: How the United States decides its president What are the 2020 democratic candidates saying? A pretty sizeable number of democrats have come forward with a forceful call to eliminate the system in favour of the popular vote, or have signalled a willingness to changing the system. Those who have supported eliminating it are: Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Michael Bennet. Meanwhile, two candidates still in the race have said the system should not be eliminated: Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang. It is not clear where Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer stand on the issue. How can it change? Changing the system would require a constitutional amendment, which would is a drawn out process that requires an overwhelming amount of support across the country. In some states, though, governors have taken action and are pushing for laws that would award all of their electors to whoever won the popular vote, no matter what the result was in their state. This article was amended on 26 April 2021. It previously stated there were two electors per senator, when there is one, and said the number of electors for the District of Columbia related to the 22nd Amendment, when it should have been the 23rd. No matter the final tally, the City of Chicago is set to make history by electing an African American woman as its mayor for the first time in its nearly 200 years of existence. Voters are heading to the polls on Tuesday to choose between Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot, the former head of a police oversight board and a lawyer. Both women are African American, and managed to rise to the top of a 14-candidate field during the citys first-round election in February. Ms Lightfoot led with 17.5 per cent of the vote, while Ms Preckwinkle received 16 per cent. The two women jostled into their standings after the current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, delivered a surprise announcement last year that he would retire from public life. Mr Emanuel is a prolific fundraiser who once served as chief of staff for former President Barack Obama. 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 election of one of the two women comes at a watershed moment for diversity in American electoral politics, with the the 2018 midterms bringing an historic number of women into US Congress. Meanwhile, the burgeoning 2020 Democratic presidential field includes several candidates of colour, including the senator Kamala Harris, a black woman who is seen as one of several front-runners in the race. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events On the mayoral level, there are 1,412 female mayors of cities in the US with a population of 30,000 or higher. That represents 21 per cent of all mayors in those cities, according to the US Conference of Mayors. While that number is nowhere close to parity when considering the relative population sizes of men and women, it is an uptick compared to the number of women in those positions just three years earlier. In 2016, there were 1,391 female mayors of cities that size, representing 19 per cent of the total. Dozens of people in Donald Trumps administration initially rejected for US security clearance due to serious disqualifying issues had the decision overturned by senior administration officials, a whistle-blower has claimed. The individuals include the Presidents daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, according to Reuters. Tricia Newbold, who has worked in the White House for 18 years and who oversaw the issuance of clearances for some senior White House aides, said she had a list of at least 25 people who were rejected due to concerns over issues including drug use, foreign influence and criminal conduct. Ms Newbold, who testified to the Democratic-led House Oversight and Reform Committee in a day-long private interview last month, did not name the individuals, but said two current senior White House officials, as well as contractors and individuals had their rejections overturned and work in various parts of the Executive Office of the President. Reuters said "two sources familiar with the information" had named the senior officials as Ms Trump and Mr Kushner. Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty The allegations were detailed in a letter and memo released on Monday by Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the committee. The memo said: According to Ms Newbold, these individuals had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use and criminal conduct. "I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security," she said. Mr Cummings committee said it is investigating how Ms Trump, her husband Mr Kushner, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and National Security Advisor John Bolton received their security clearances. The investigation has gathered momentum since The New York Times reported Mr Trump ordered then-chief of staff John Kelly to grant Mr Kushner an interim clearance, despite the objections of national security officials. On Monday, Mr Cummings said this week he will authorise his first subpoena in the investigation. The subpoena will be for the deposition of Carl Kline, who served as the White House personnel security director and supervised Ms Newbold. He has since left the White House for the Defense Department. The Committee respects the Presidents authority to grant security clearances, Mr Cummings said in a statement. However, the White House must respect Congress co-equal and independent authority to investigate who has been given access to our nations secrets, how they obtained that access, the extent to which national security has been compromised, and whether Congress should amend current laws to improve national security and enhance transparency over these decisions. Mr Cummings said Ms Newbold had come forward at great personal risk to warn Congressand the nationabout the grave security risks she has been witnessing first-hand over the past two years. Speaking about the reaction in the White House, Ms Newbold told the committee: Im terrified of going back. I know that this will not be perceived in favour of my intentions, which is to bring back the integrity of the office. Democrat politicians have consistently claimed the president was abusing security clearance rules. The most senior Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Representative Jim Jordan, called the allegations a "partisan attack on the White House". Chairman Cummings investigation is not about restoring integrity to the security clearance process, he said in a statement. It is an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants. The White House and representatives for Ms Trump and Mr Kushner are yet to make any comment regarding the allegations. An aide to Joe Biden has blamed right-wing trolls from the dark recesses of the internet for conflating images of the former vice president embracing people during swearing-in ceremonies, with uninvited touching. Mr Biden is facing scrutiny over his past behaviour towards women after up to four people came forward within three days to accuse him of unwanted physical contact. A woman from Connecticut said Mr Biden touched her inappropriately and rubbed noses with her at a political fundraiser in 2009. It wasnt sexual, but he did grab me by the head, Amy Lappos, 43, told the Hartford Courant on Monday. He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Show all 23 1 /23 Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Joe Biden The former vice president - poised to be a frontrunner - has announced his run. He recently faced scrutiny for inappropriate touching of women, but was thought to deal with the criticism well AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Bernie Sanders The 2016 runner-up has announced that he will be running again in 2020 Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Hillary Clinton The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State says she is still considering whether she will run again. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Pete Buttigieg The Indiana mayor and war veteran will be running for president. If elected, he would be the first openly LGBT+ president in American history. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kamala Harris The former California attorney general will be running for president in 2020. Introduced to the national stage during Jeff Sessions testimony, she has endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major tax-credit for the middle class. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts Senator has formally launched her bid for president in 2020. A progressive Democrat, she is a major supporter of regulating Wall Street. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Beto ORourke The former Texas congressman told Oprah Winfrey that he has been thinking about running for presidency, but stopped short of formally announcing his bid to run in 2020. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Wayne Messam Mayor of the city of Miramar in the Miami metropolitan area, Wayne Messam has announced his bid. He intends to run on a progressive platform against the "broken" federal government. He favours gun regulations and was a signatory to a letter from some 400 mayors condemning President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Vice News Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kirsten Gillibrand The New York Senator formally announced her presidential bid in January, saying that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Cory Booker The New Jersey Senator has announced that he will be running for the presidency in 2020. If he secures the nomination he said finding a female vice president would be a priority. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Delaney The Maryland congressman was the first to launch his bid for presidency, making the announcement in 2017. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Julian Castro The former San Antonio mayor announced his candidacy in January and said that his running has a special meaning for the Latino community in the US. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Tulsi Gabbard The Hawaii congresswoman announced her candidacy in January, but is likely to face tough questions on her past comments on LGBT+ rights and her stance on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Andrew Yang The entrepreneur has announced his presidential candidacy, and has pledged that he would introduce a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Marianne Williamson The author and spiritual advisor has announced her intention to run for president. She had previously run for congress as an independent in 2014 but was unsuccessful. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Kerry The former secretary of state has said he is still thinking about whether to run. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Michael Bloomberg The entrepreneur and former New York mayor with a net worth of around $50bn has said he will decide by the end of February whether to seek the presidency. AFP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Howard Schultz Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not yet ruled out running for president in 2020, despite criticism that his bid could help re-elect Mr Trump by dividing the Democrat vote. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Holder The former attorney general has said he will decide in the next month or so whether to run as a 2020 presidential candidate. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Swalwell The California congressman said he is ready to do this and will decide before April whether to run. MSNBC Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Terry McAuliffe The former Virginia governor, who worked to elect Democratic governors during 2018 midterms, said there was a 50 per cent chance he would run. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Sherrod Brown The Ohio senator is still undecided about whether to run for president in 2020. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Mitch Landrieu The former New Orleans mayor said he doesnt think he will run for president, but never say never. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin Ms Lappos posted the allegation in a Connecticut Women in Politics Facebook group on Sunday in response to an account in The Cut by former Nevada state legislator Lucy Flores, who last week accused Mr Biden of kissing her on the back of the head at an event in 2014. The allegations could threaten Mr Bidens rumoured bid to become president in 2020. He was serving as vice president under Barack Obama at the time of both alleged instances. Mr Bidens spokesman Bill Russo did not respond directly to Ms Lappos, and instead referred to a statement released on Sunday in which Mr Biden said: I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once - never - did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention. He added: We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. Joe Biden accidentally says he's running for president in 2020 Mr Biden, who has long been known for his warm and intimate campaign style, has come under fresh scrutiny in the #MeToo era for his propensity for hugging and physical touch as awareness about sexual assault and harassment has grown. Ms Lappos, who formerly worked as an aide to the Democratic representative for Connecticut, Jim Hines, said she felt uncomfortable when Mr Biden approached her at the fundraiser. She said she was in the kitchen with three or four other volunteers when Mr Biden moved towards her. I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody, Ms Lappos told the Courant. Theres absolutely a line of decency. Theres a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. Its not cultural. Its not affection. Its sexism or misogyny. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Mr Biden is yet to make a final decision on whether to run for the White House. The third International Youth Forum on Creativity and Heritage along the Silk Road opened in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province on Sunday. The forum, scheduled to be held from Sunday to April 6 in Changsha and Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, will focus on the theme of youth creativity and innovation in the age of media arts. It aims to promote the exchange and cooperation among the media arts cities and young creative talents from countries along the Belt and Road. The forum is a joint initiative between UNESCO and the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO. A total of 124 youth delegates from 85 countries along the Belt and Road are attending the forum. The forum will build a platform to help youth delegates strengthen cultural exchanges, inherit the spirit of the Silk Road, tell stories about the Silk Road, promote cooperation and make efforts to promote traditional friendship among countries along the Belt and Road. The forum was first held in Changsha and the city of Quanzhou in east China's Fujian Province in April 2017. The second forum was held in Changsha and Nanjing in May 2018. A second woman has accused Joe Biden of unwanted touching, as another rushed to defend the US former vice president against a misleading photograph. Amy Lappos claimed that Mr Biden put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth," she told The Hartford Courant newspaper. Ms Lappos said she met Mr Biden when she was working as a volunteer for Democrat Jim Hines. In a separate Facebook post, she called the exchange at a 2009 fundraiser, an incredibly uncomfortable situation. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Show all 23 1 /23 Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Joe Biden The former vice president - poised to be a frontrunner - has announced his run. He recently faced scrutiny for inappropriate touching of women, but was thought to deal with the criticism well AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Bernie Sanders The 2016 runner-up has announced that he will be running again in 2020 Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Hillary Clinton The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State says she is still considering whether she will run again. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Pete Buttigieg The Indiana mayor and war veteran will be running for president. If elected, he would be the first openly LGBT+ president in American history. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kamala Harris The former California attorney general will be running for president in 2020. Introduced to the national stage during Jeff Sessions testimony, she has endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major tax-credit for the middle class. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts Senator has formally launched her bid for president in 2020. A progressive Democrat, she is a major supporter of regulating Wall Street. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Beto ORourke The former Texas congressman told Oprah Winfrey that he has been thinking about running for presidency, but stopped short of formally announcing his bid to run in 2020. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Wayne Messam Mayor of the city of Miramar in the Miami metropolitan area, Wayne Messam has announced his bid. He intends to run on a progressive platform against the "broken" federal government. He favours gun regulations and was a signatory to a letter from some 400 mayors condemning President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Vice News Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kirsten Gillibrand The New York Senator formally announced her presidential bid in January, saying that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Cory Booker The New Jersey Senator has announced that he will be running for the presidency in 2020. If he secures the nomination he said finding a female vice president would be a priority. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Delaney The Maryland congressman was the first to launch his bid for presidency, making the announcement in 2017. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Julian Castro The former San Antonio mayor announced his candidacy in January and said that his running has a special meaning for the Latino community in the US. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Tulsi Gabbard The Hawaii congresswoman announced her candidacy in January, but is likely to face tough questions on her past comments on LGBT+ rights and her stance on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Andrew Yang The entrepreneur has announced his presidential candidacy, and has pledged that he would introduce a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Marianne Williamson The author and spiritual advisor has announced her intention to run for president. She had previously run for congress as an independent in 2014 but was unsuccessful. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Kerry The former secretary of state has said he is still thinking about whether to run. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Michael Bloomberg The entrepreneur and former New York mayor with a net worth of around $50bn has said he will decide by the end of February whether to seek the presidency. AFP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Howard Schultz Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not yet ruled out running for president in 2020, despite criticism that his bid could help re-elect Mr Trump by dividing the Democrat vote. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Holder The former attorney general has said he will decide in the next month or so whether to run as a 2020 presidential candidate. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Swalwell The California congressman said he is ready to do this and will decide before April whether to run. MSNBC Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Terry McAuliffe The former Virginia governor, who worked to elect Democratic governors during 2018 midterms, said there was a 50 per cent chance he would run. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Sherrod Brown The Ohio senator is still undecided about whether to run for president in 2020. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Mitch Landrieu The former New Orleans mayor said he doesnt think he will run for president, but never say never. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin Her claims came days after Lucy Flores, a former Democratic politician in Nevada, claimed in The Cut that Mr Biden kissed the back of her head during a campaign stop. She wrote that the interaction between her and the former vice president was a violation of my personal space, but that it did not rise to the level of sexual misconduct or a form of assault. As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me? Ms Flores said. I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. While some have criticised Mr Biden for being too physical with female colleagues, supporters and others, others have said pictures showing him with his hands around women are misleading. Stephanie Carter, who is the wife of former Defence Secretary Ashton B Carter, wrote an article for the Medium website defending the 76-year-old after photo of an exchange between the pair went viral after Ms Flores allegations surfaced. Let me state upfront that I dont know [Flores], but I absolutely support her right to speak her truth and she should be, like all women, believed, she wrote. But her story is not mine. She added: "The Joe Biden in my picture is a close friend helping someone get through a big day, for which I will always be grateful. So, as the sole owner of my story, it is high time that I reclaim it from strangers, Twitter, the pundits and the late-night hosts. Meanwhile, Ms Carter said she was uncharacteristically nervous the day the photo was take on her and Mr Biden, as she had fallen on ice outside of the Pentagon before the event took place. Mr Biden noticed her worrying, she wrote, and quickly gave me a hug. She added the vice president kept his hands on my shoulders as a means of offering his support. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Mr Biden denied he had acted inappropriately towards Ms Flores in a statement, but said he would listen respectfully to women sharing their stories. He did not respond to Ms Lappos claims but did offer general sympathy for women who have expressed discomfort with his interactions. In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once never did I believe I acted inappropriately," he said. "If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention. I may not recall these moments the same way, and I may be surprised at what I hear. But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will." In addition to threatening to shutdown the southern border, Donald Trump is looking into bringing a border or immigration tsar on board to work on immigration policy across several federal agencies, according to sources familiar with the proposal. The top candidates on President Trumps short list for immigration tsar include Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, both of whom are far-right conservative views on immigration policy. Mr Kobach previously ran for an unsuccessful bid for Kansas governor with the promise to drive undocumented immigrants out of the US. He currently works for WeBuildthewall Inc, a nonprofit corporation raising money to construct the presidents infamous border wall. Mr Cuccinelli has been known for championing hard-line immigration views including denying citizenship to US-born children of undocumented immigrants, allowing in-state tuition at public universities only for citizens or legal residents, and allowing employees to file lawsuits against their employer if they knowingly hire an undocumented immigrant who took a job from a law abiding competitor. Mr Cuccinelli was seen visiting the White House on Monday. Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Federal workers and contractors rally against the partial federal government shutdown Getty Images Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures The US Capitol on the first morning of a partial government shutdown in Washington EPA Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Federal workers and contractors rally against the partial federal government shutdown Getty Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures President Trump speaks with children who called the North American Aerospace Defense Command Santa tracker in the State Dining Room of the White House. He earlier in the day, tweeted that he was 'all alone in the White House' waiting for Democrats to make a deal on border security EPA Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Furloughed federal workers pick up free food at a pop-up store of Kraft Heinz Getty Images Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Hundreds of federal workers and contractors rally against the partial federal government shutdown Getty Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Reuters Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures From left, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Dick Durbin and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi walk to speak to reporters after meeting with President Donald Trump about border security in the Situation Room of the White House. Trump declared he could keep parts of the government shut down for "months or even years" as he and Democratic leaders failed in a second closed-door meeting to resolve his demand for billions of dollars for a border wall with Mexico Evan Vucci AP Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Federal workers and contractors rally against the partial federal government shutdown Getty Images Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures A sign alerts visitors to the closure of the National Archives on the fifth day of a partial government shutdown EPA Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Hundreds of federal workers and contractors rally against the partial federal government shutdown Getty Images Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Visitors read signs announcing the closure of the White House Visitor Center EPA Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures President Donald Trump speaks during a round-table discussion on border security and safe communities with State, local, and community leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House Getty Images Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures A sign alerts visitors to the closure of the White House Visitor Center on the first day of a partial government shutdown EPA Trump shuts down US government over Mexico border wall in pictures Furloughed federal workers show their IDs for entering a pop-up store of Kraft Heinz Getty Images The likely appointmen comes on the heels of the presidents threatening call to close the US-Mexican border this week if Mexico does not completely halt undocumented immigration into the country. White House aides, who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity, said the immigration tsar position is still in the planning stages and is hoping whoever it may be serve as the face of the Trump administration on immigration. They also hope appointing an immigration tsar would appease the presidents supporters, proving to them he is committed and taking action in what he believes is a broken immigration system. Recommended Trump vetoes Senate measure blocking border wall It is uncertain whether the tsar position would be fall within Homeland Security, which is the federal agency overseeing for immigration policy and enforcement, or the White House, which would not require a Senate confirmation. Special Counsel Robert Mueller may have concluded his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, but the grand jury behind a slate of indictments is seemingly still alive and well as a mystery foreign company battles a subpoena stemming from the federal investigation. A US District Court judge in Washington allowed the unnamed company to remain private on Monday as it fights against a document request made in the subpoena. That followed the Supreme Courts refusal to hear a bid last month by the unidentified company to contest the grand jury subpoena, though the justices stopped short of forcing the firm to comply with the demands. A federal judge previously imposed a daily fine of $50,000 (38,080) against the company, which had asked the justices to hear its appeal after it was held in contempt for refusing to fulfil the demands in the subpoena. Chief Judge Beryl Howell wrote in court filings the company is linked to foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election and potential collusion in those efforts by American citizens. 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 The case has remained a high-profile mystery, with the Supreme Court and lower courts declining to identify the company, the country that owns it or the specific purpose of the subpoena. The company, which has a US office, has said it was a witness, not a suspect, in the special counsels investigation. Court papers detailing its legal arguments were made public but all information about specific facts of the dispute were redacted. The subpoena was issued last July. The Supreme Court in January refused to put the lower court ruling on hold. According to court filings, the daily fine imposed by US District Court Judge Beryl Howell started accruing on 15 January. Such fines accrue until the grand jury is no longer sitting. Recommended Jared Kushner seen leaving secret Senate Intelligence Committee The legal question was whether the company is protected under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a law that allows foreign countries to avoid lawsuits in US courts. The law does not cover commercial activities. The company argued that this law protects it not just in civil cases but also in criminal cases. The company also argued that foreign governments are immune from contempt findings in US courts. The confirmation of the grand jurys continuing activity came during a bid by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to win the release of records involving the unidentified company. The Justice Department is planning to release a public version of Mr Muellers report in the coming weeks after Attorney General William Barr an appointee of Donald Trump removes any secret grand jury material and information about ongoing criminal matters that were referred to other prosecutors, including the US Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Ongoing criminal cases brought by the special counsels office including the scheduled November trial of Mr Trumps longtime political adviser Roger Stone also are being handed off to prosecutors in the US Attorneys Office for Washington. Additional reporting by Reuters Nancy Pelosi has called on Joe Biden to join the straight arm club after multiple women expressed discomfort over their physical interactions with the former vice president. The Democratic House speaker was answering questions about whether accusations from Lucy Flores and Amy Lappos about seemingly inappropriate contact with Mr Biden disqualified him from running in the 2020 presidential elections, as he has been considering in recent months. Neither women claimed their exchanges with Mr Biden reached the level of assault or sexual misconduct. Ms Pelosi said she did not believe the controversy disqualified Mr Biden from potentially joining the race, though she encouraged him to acknowledge that peoples space is important to them. Im a member of the straight-arm club, she said, fully extending her arm as if to shake a hand from a small distance. I just pretend you have a cold, and I have a cold. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Show all 23 1 /23 Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Joe Biden The former vice president - poised to be a frontrunner - has announced his run. He recently faced scrutiny for inappropriate touching of women, but was thought to deal with the criticism well AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Bernie Sanders The 2016 runner-up has announced that he will be running again in 2020 Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Hillary Clinton The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State says she is still considering whether she will run again. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Pete Buttigieg The Indiana mayor and war veteran will be running for president. If elected, he would be the first openly LGBT+ president in American history. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kamala Harris The former California attorney general will be running for president in 2020. Introduced to the national stage during Jeff Sessions testimony, she has endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major tax-credit for the middle class. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts Senator has formally launched her bid for president in 2020. A progressive Democrat, she is a major supporter of regulating Wall Street. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Beto ORourke The former Texas congressman told Oprah Winfrey that he has been thinking about running for presidency, but stopped short of formally announcing his bid to run in 2020. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Wayne Messam Mayor of the city of Miramar in the Miami metropolitan area, Wayne Messam has announced his bid. He intends to run on a progressive platform against the "broken" federal government. He favours gun regulations and was a signatory to a letter from some 400 mayors condemning President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Vice News Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kirsten Gillibrand The New York Senator formally announced her presidential bid in January, saying that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Cory Booker The New Jersey Senator has announced that he will be running for the presidency in 2020. If he secures the nomination he said finding a female vice president would be a priority. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Delaney The Maryland congressman was the first to launch his bid for presidency, making the announcement in 2017. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Julian Castro The former San Antonio mayor announced his candidacy in January and said that his running has a special meaning for the Latino community in the US. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Tulsi Gabbard The Hawaii congresswoman announced her candidacy in January, but is likely to face tough questions on her past comments on LGBT+ rights and her stance on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Andrew Yang The entrepreneur has announced his presidential candidacy, and has pledged that he would introduce a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Marianne Williamson The author and spiritual advisor has announced her intention to run for president. She had previously run for congress as an independent in 2014 but was unsuccessful. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Kerry The former secretary of state has said he is still thinking about whether to run. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Michael Bloomberg The entrepreneur and former New York mayor with a net worth of around $50bn has said he will decide by the end of February whether to seek the presidency. AFP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Howard Schultz Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not yet ruled out running for president in 2020, despite criticism that his bid could help re-elect Mr Trump by dividing the Democrat vote. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Holder The former attorney general has said he will decide in the next month or so whether to run as a 2020 presidential candidate. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Swalwell The California congressman said he is ready to do this and will decide before April whether to run. MSNBC Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Terry McAuliffe The former Virginia governor, who worked to elect Democratic governors during 2018 midterms, said there was a 50 per cent chance he would run. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Sherrod Brown The Ohio senator is still undecided about whether to run for president in 2020. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Mitch Landrieu The former New Orleans mayor said he doesnt think he will run for president, but never say never. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin Mr Biden has to understand that in the world were in now, peoples space is important to them, and whats important is how they receive it, and not necessarily how you intended it, Ms Pelosi said on Tuesday during an interview with Politico that was live-streamed. The House speaker added that her grandchildren love Joe Biden, who she said she knows well and described as a very affectionate person. Recommended Second woman accuses Joe Biden of unwanted touching Both Ms Flores and Ms Lappos have accused Mr Biden of inappropriately touching them in public in seemingly awkward exchanges with the former vice president, who has been occasionally referred to as Creepy Uncle Joe by critics who believe he has been too hands-on with women along the campaign trail. I think its important for the vice president and others to understand, it isnt what you intended, its how it was received, Ms Pelosi said on Tuesday. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events She added, Its how it is received, so to say, Im sorry that you were offended is not an apology. Im sorry I invaded your space, but not Im sorry you were offended. South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has been busy on the campaign trail, meeting voters and driving a fundraising effort that shocked the 2020 democratic field this week when he announced his campaign had raised $7m. But, the Indiana mayor has still found some time for his current slate of official duties, and recently officiated an emergency wedding for a couple right before they had a C-section. Mr Buttigieg said that a couple in his town Mary and Gabe ran into him as he was arriving at his office, and asked him to marry them before they headed off to the hospital. So, using ribbons as wedding rings and city staff as witnesses, the couple was married at 8.15am, and were still able to make it to their 9am C-section appointment. It's moments like this that I'll miss when my term as mayor comes to an end, Mr Buttigieg later wrote in a Facebook post, alongside photos of Jade Katherine Jones, who he celebrated as his citys newest resident. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Show all 23 1 /23 Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Joe Biden The former vice president - poised to be a frontrunner - has announced his run. He recently faced scrutiny for inappropriate touching of women, but was thought to deal with the criticism well AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Bernie Sanders The 2016 runner-up has announced that he will be running again in 2020 Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Hillary Clinton The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State says she is still considering whether she will run again. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Pete Buttigieg The Indiana mayor and war veteran will be running for president. If elected, he would be the first openly LGBT+ president in American history. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kamala Harris The former California attorney general will be running for president in 2020. Introduced to the national stage during Jeff Sessions testimony, she has endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major tax-credit for the middle class. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts Senator has formally launched her bid for president in 2020. A progressive Democrat, she is a major supporter of regulating Wall Street. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Beto ORourke The former Texas congressman told Oprah Winfrey that he has been thinking about running for presidency, but stopped short of formally announcing his bid to run in 2020. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Wayne Messam Mayor of the city of Miramar in the Miami metropolitan area, Wayne Messam has announced his bid. He intends to run on a progressive platform against the "broken" federal government. He favours gun regulations and was a signatory to a letter from some 400 mayors condemning President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Vice News Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kirsten Gillibrand The New York Senator formally announced her presidential bid in January, saying that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Cory Booker The New Jersey Senator has announced that he will be running for the presidency in 2020. If he secures the nomination he said finding a female vice president would be a priority. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Delaney The Maryland congressman was the first to launch his bid for presidency, making the announcement in 2017. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Julian Castro The former San Antonio mayor announced his candidacy in January and said that his running has a special meaning for the Latino community in the US. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Tulsi Gabbard The Hawaii congresswoman announced her candidacy in January, but is likely to face tough questions on her past comments on LGBT+ rights and her stance on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Andrew Yang The entrepreneur has announced his presidential candidacy, and has pledged that he would introduce a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Marianne Williamson The author and spiritual advisor has announced her intention to run for president. She had previously run for congress as an independent in 2014 but was unsuccessful. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Kerry The former secretary of state has said he is still thinking about whether to run. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Michael Bloomberg The entrepreneur and former New York mayor with a net worth of around $50bn has said he will decide by the end of February whether to seek the presidency. AFP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Howard Schultz Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not yet ruled out running for president in 2020, despite criticism that his bid could help re-elect Mr Trump by dividing the Democrat vote. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Holder The former attorney general has said he will decide in the next month or so whether to run as a 2020 presidential candidate. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Swalwell The California congressman said he is ready to do this and will decide before April whether to run. MSNBC Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Terry McAuliffe The former Virginia governor, who worked to elect Democratic governors during 2018 midterms, said there was a 50 per cent chance he would run. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Sherrod Brown The Ohio senator is still undecided about whether to run for president in 2020. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Mitch Landrieu The former New Orleans mayor said he doesnt think he will run for president, but never say never. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin Congratulations to the newlyweds and new parents, and welcome, Jade, to this unlikely and lovely world! he wrote. Mr Buttigieg is the youngest candidate in the democratic field, and has been receiving quite a lot of attention in the crowded field of presidential hopefuls. Just this week, his campaign announced that he had raised a staggering $7m during the first three months of the year a remarkable figure for a candidate who was virtually unknown before joining the race. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Mr Buttigieg still faces a steep uphill battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination, and has not yet topped even 3 per cent in aggregates of national polls. There is still, however, plenty of time for him to gain ground on his better known opposition, with the first votes in the primary season not being cast until next year. There will also be several debates between now and then for Mr Buttigieg to make his mark. Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff mocked Donald Trump for breaking the cardinal rule of childish nicknames after the president gave him a string of monikers rather than holding on to just one. This is nothing new, Mr Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN. Weve seen these childish nicknames for a year and a half, but he is violating the cardinal rule of childish nicknames, which is youve got to pick one and stick with it. In the past few weeks, the president called Schiff several names including little shifty Schiff and little pencil neck Adam Schiff. Another nickname, Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff, is featured on shirts sold on the The Trump 2020 re-election campaigns website. Mr Trump, along with Republicans, have recently been piling on Mr Schiff after he announced that Democrats will continue their probe of the president following special counsel Robert Muellers completed investigation into Russias election interference and alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Last month, Mr Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr, who announced that the special counsels team did not find anyone on the Trump campaign guilty of conspiring with Russia. 'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range Show all 6 1 /6 'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range 'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range The mug 'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range The tee 'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range The tee 'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range The can cooler 'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range The tee 'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range The can cooler Mr Barr said the special counsel could not exonerate the president on obstruction of justice and that two Justice Department officials decided against bringing a charge against Mr Trump. Despite this, Mr Schiff stands by his belief that evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow undoubtedly exists and could be found by the House Intelligence committee. Undoubtedly, there is collusion, the California Democrat said. We will continue to investigate the counterintelligence issues. That is, is the president or people around him compromised in any way by a hostile foreign power? Adding, it doesnt appear that was any part of Muellers report. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Mr Schiff also rejected calls for resignation by the president and Republicans. Donald Trump has complained Puerto Rico hurricane victims who are US citizens are taking money from our farmers in an angry late night Twitter tirade. The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any place in history, Mr Trump tweeted on Monday evening. The people of Puerto Rico are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government cant do anything right, the place is a mess nothing works. The US president failed to provide any evidence Puerto Rico, which is a US territory, has received the most hurricane relief aid in history, or that its politicians have used the funds corruptly. Democrats on Monday voted against a Republican disaster aid bill, complaining the $600m (460m) in food stamps offered to the US territory, which is still recovering from 2017s Hurricane Maria, failed to go far enough. Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Show all 20 1 /20 Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Crew chief Kenney shelters under the blade of an HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit preparing to take off during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Isla Grande, Puerto Rico, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico An HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit takes off behind Crew Chief Alexander Blake and his fellow soldiers during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Morovis, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Crew member Bynum stands in tropical rain as a HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit prepares to take off during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Isla Grande, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter pilot Chris Greenway receives a hug from a woman thanking him for water as he works with the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Verde de Comerio, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico A man carries a case of water away from an HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter after soldiers working with 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit dropped off relief supplies during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Jayuya, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Crew chief Alexander Blake from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit loads water into a helicopter during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Isla Grande, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Residents wait for soldiers in UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade to deliver food and water during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in San Lorenzo Reuters Bringing aid to Puerto Rico An HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit lands in a field to avoid lightning during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Manati, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Residents hold their hands aloft to signal that they need water as UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade fly past during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, near Ciales, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Tropical rain splashes on a runway as HH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit wait for weather to clear during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Isla Grande, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Pilot Eldwin Bocanegra Torres speaks with residents isolated by landslides in the mountains after unloading water and food from a helicopter during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, near Utuado, October 10, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Residents stand in front of wind-damaged trees as they wait for soldiers in UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade to deliver food and water during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in San Lorenzo, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico The contents of a home are seen from the air during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria near Utuado, October 10, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Thomas looks out of the window of an HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit, loaded with relief supplies, during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria in Isla Grande, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico A message written on the rooftop is seen from the air during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria near Humacao, October 10, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico A HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit lands in a field during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria in San Sebastian, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Sergeant First Class Eladio Tirado, who is from Puerto Rico, looks for a landing spot for a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade, during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria near Ciales, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Boys carry water away from an HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter after soldiers working with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit dropped off relief supplies during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Jayuya, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Sergeant First Class Eladio Tirado from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade, who is from Puerto Rico, speaks with residents as he helps during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in San Lorenzo, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Residents peek through a fence at helicopters from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit that had parked in a locked field during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Lares, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson The bill included money for a number of states recovering from disasters, including midwestern ones hit by flooding. FEMA & the Military worked emergency miracles, but politicians like the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health, Mr Trump continued. 91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful! In fact, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) was widely criticised for its failure to adequately prepare for Hurricane Maria, and while Democrats do want additional funding for the island, they do not want it at the expense of US farmers struggling with unprecedented flooding. Donald Trump says he isn't going to 'shoot undocumented immigrants but shooting immigrants would be very effective' It comes days after it was reported Mr Trump has repeatedly complained about additional relief money going to Puerto Pico. A senior administration official told The Washington Post: He doesnt want another single dollar going to the island. Close Fox News graphic claims that Trump is cutting funding to '3 Mexican countries' Donald Trump could still face impeachment proceedings as the House Judiciary Committee prepares to demand attorney general William Barr release the full Mueller report into the president's ties to Russia, as the latter looked set to miss the 2 April deadline for its publication. Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, will ask his team to vote on a resolution to issue subpoenas on Wednesday, as reports emerge the Trump administration defied official advice in giving high-level security clearances to the presidents daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. President Trump has meanwhile raged on Twitter against the amount of aid given to Puerto Rico since it was hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017, attacking the islands incompetent and corrupt politicians and declaring, the place is a mess nothing works. He is also pushing forward once again with an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is more commonly known as Obamacare. Mr Barr has said that he plans on delivering the Mueller report to Congress by mid-April, but has signalled that the document could be heavily redacted in spite of his promise to be transparent with the report. And, anticipating that Mr Barr would not deliver the report on Tuesday, activists groups are preparing protests for later in the week to try and set focus on the attorney general's handling of the report. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, testimony got fiery in Congress over Mr Kushner's security clearance, with representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comparing giving the Trump family security clearances to transmitting America's nuclear codes via Instagram direct messages. Please allow a moment for our liveblog to load A spokesperson for the White House referred to Puerto Rico as that country during a live television interview twice while providing false facts about the administrations response to Hurricane Maria. Hogan Gidley joined MSNBCs Hallie Jackson on Tuesday and slammed Puerto Ricos systematic mismanagement of the goods and services we sent them after the hurricane spurred a natural disaster across the island, with nearly 3,000 people having died in its aftermath. Echoing Donald Trumps claims from earlier this week, Mr Gidley also falsely claimed the island received more money than any state or territory in history, to which Ms Jackson corrected him by pointing out the fact that Louisiana received more recovery funding after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They have now come to $91bn [69bn] with all weve done in that country, Mr Gidley said on Tuesday. The White House spokesperson continued attacking Puerto Ricos leadership, saying the governor was casting blame on others for not having a good grid and not having a good system in that country. Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Show all 20 1 /20 Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Crew chief Kenney shelters under the blade of an HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit preparing to take off during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Isla Grande, Puerto Rico, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico An HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit takes off behind Crew Chief Alexander Blake and his fellow soldiers during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Morovis, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Crew member Bynum stands in tropical rain as a HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit prepares to take off during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Isla Grande, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter pilot Chris Greenway receives a hug from a woman thanking him for water as he works with the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Verde de Comerio, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico A man carries a case of water away from an HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter after soldiers working with 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit dropped off relief supplies during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Jayuya, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Crew chief Alexander Blake from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit loads water into a helicopter during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Isla Grande, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Residents wait for soldiers in UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade to deliver food and water during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in San Lorenzo Reuters Bringing aid to Puerto Rico An HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit lands in a field to avoid lightning during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Manati, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Residents hold their hands aloft to signal that they need water as UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade fly past during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, near Ciales, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Tropical rain splashes on a runway as HH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit wait for weather to clear during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Isla Grande, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Pilot Eldwin Bocanegra Torres speaks with residents isolated by landslides in the mountains after unloading water and food from a helicopter during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, near Utuado, October 10, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Residents stand in front of wind-damaged trees as they wait for soldiers in UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade to deliver food and water during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in San Lorenzo, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico The contents of a home are seen from the air during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria near Utuado, October 10, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Thomas looks out of the window of an HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit, loaded with relief supplies, during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria in Isla Grande, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico A message written on the rooftop is seen from the air during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria near Humacao, October 10, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico A HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit lands in a field during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria in San Sebastian, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Sergeant First Class Eladio Tirado, who is from Puerto Rico, looks for a landing spot for a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade, during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria near Ciales, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Boys carry water away from an HH-60 Blackhawk helicopter after soldiers working with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit dropped off relief supplies during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Jayuya, October 5, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Sergeant First Class Eladio Tirado from the First Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade, who is from Puerto Rico, speaks with residents as he helps during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in San Lorenzo, October 7, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson Bringing aid to Puerto Rico Residents peek through a fence at helicopters from 101st Airborne Division's "Dustoff" unit that had parked in a locked field during recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria, in Lares, October 6, 2017 Reuters/Lucas Jackson He also dodged questions from Ms Jackson as to whether or not the president considered Puerto Ricans just as American as citizens living in states like Texas and Louisiana. Youre rolling your eyes and I dont know why youre rolling your eyes, the host said to him. Recommended Puerto Rico mayor blames Trump for soaring Hurricane Maria death toll The president launched a series of attacks against Puerto Rico on Twitter earlier on Tuesday morning, writing, all their politicians do is complain [and] ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA, he continued. The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump. So many wonderful people, but with such bad Island leadership and with so much money wasted. Mr Trump added, "Cannot continue to hurt our Farmers and States with these massive payments, and so little appreciation!" Ms Jackson pressed Mr Gidley for clarity on Mr Trumps false claims about his administrations response to the disaster, fact-checking him in real-time on the morning news show. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events These are things that not trust, she said, referring to the White Houses claims about Puerto Rico disaster relief funding. Just from a factual basis, she added. Mr Gidley later clarified that calling Puerto Rico another country was a "slip of the tongue". A nursery school teacher has been arrested in eastern China after 23 children were reportedly fed poisoned porridge. The teacher, identified only by the surname Wang, is believed to have added sodium nitrite into her pupils' food, Jiaozuo city police said. The children were reportedly taken to hospital. Most were discharged, but one had serious symptoms, according to state news agency Xinhua. Overexposure to sodium nitrite can be toxic and possibly fatal. Police said they were still looking for a motive. Nursery school age in China is usually between three and six years old. Schoolchildren in China have been the target of often fatal attacks by people bearing grudges or considered mentally ill. 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 In 2002, 42 people, mostly schoolchildren, died after eating snacks laced with rat poison in the eastern city of Nanjing. The killer, who apparently was jealous of his rivals thriving business, was swiftly sentenced to death and executed. Associated Press contributed to this report A new relay satellite launched late Sunday night will allow video calls to be made between China's future space station and the ground and provide data transmission and control services for various spacecraft. The Tianlian II-01 satellite was sent into orbit at an altitude of 36,000 km by a Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Sunday. The satellite, developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, will provide data transmission services for satellites operating on medium- and low-Earth orbit and monitoring and control support for the launch of spacecraft. A relay satellite, regarded as the "satellite of satellites," is like a control station moved from the ground to space, experts explained. "The Tianlian II-01 ushered in the construction of a new generation of the relay satellite system for China," said Zhang Peng, commander in chief of the research team of the satellite from CAST. From 2008 to 2016, China launched four relay satellites to form the Tianlian I system, making China the second country in the world to establish a relay satellite system which is able to cover the whole world. The system can provide global real-time information transmission. Last year, China sent a relay satellite, named Queqiao, meaning Magpie Bridge, into a halo orbit around the second Lagrangian (L2) point of the earth-moon system, nearly 500,000 km from Earth. Queqiao plays a key role in ensuring the success of the Chang'e-4 probe to make the first-ever soft landing and exploration on the far side of the moon. As the first satellite of China's second-generation relay satellite system, Tianlian II-01 is compatible with the Tianlian I system, but its transmission speed and volume and coverage area have been greatly improved, according to Zhang. For instance, the transmission speed of the Tianlian II-01 doubles that of its predecessors and its design life has been extended. The construction of the Tianlian II relay satellite system will improve China's space-based communication infrastructure, said Zhang. The Tianlian II relay satellite system will also help service countries along the Belt and Road, Zhang added. Indias main opposition Congress party has promised to create wealth and guarantee welfare in an election manifesto it hopes will inspire voters to unseat Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Trailing in the polls and fighting to keep focus on its key election issues, the party of such famous leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru has also struggled to present its current president, Rahul Gandhi, as a credible candidate to replace Mr Modi. In a bid to turn its fortunes around, Congress has made some big promises to voters: its manifesto offers a minimum basic wage for the countrys poorest people; to double spending on healthcare; and to support farmers with a string of policies designed to ease their money woes. India was in a deep crisis after five years of a Modi administration that has trample[d] upon peoples rights, Mr Gandhi said, as he vowed to protect personal freedoms and the multicultural fabric of society. There were progressive policies too to go along with the rhetoric. Congress would reserve a third of all government jobs and seats in parliament for women, he said, and scrap the use of colonial-era sedition laws that critics say have been used to impinge on free speech. Best photos from India's Republic Day parade Show all 20 1 /20 Best photos from India's Republic Day parade Best photos from India's Republic Day parade "Daredevils" motorcycle riders from Indian Army's Corps of Signals regiment take part in the Republic Day parade in New Delhi Reuters Best photos from India's Republic Day parade Indian school children perform during the Republic Day parade in New Delhi AFP/Getty Best photos from India's Republic Day parade India celebrated its 70th Republic Day AFP/Getty Best photos from India's Republic Day parade A tableau of the Indian of Delhi is displayed at the Rajpath EPA Best photos from India's Republic Day parade Indian Paramilitary soldiers march past Rajpath, the ceremonial boulevard AP Best photos from India's Republic Day parade AP Best photos from India's Republic Day parade AFP/Getty Best photos from India's Republic Day parade Reuters Best photos from India's Republic Day parade AFP/Getty Best photos from India's Republic Day parade Reuters Best photos from India's Republic Day parade EPA Best photos from India's Republic Day parade AFP/Getty Best photos from India's Republic Day parade "Daredevils" motorcycle riders from Indian Army's Corps of Signals regiment take part in the Republic Day parade in New Delhi Reuters Best photos from India's Republic Day parade EPA Best photos from India's Republic Day parade AFP Best photos from India's Republic Day parade Reuters Best photos from India's Republic Day parade AFP/Getty Best photos from India's Republic Day parade Reuters Best photos from India's Republic Day parade AFP/Getty Best photos from India's Republic Day parade AP But with less than 10 days until voting begins in the mammoth, six-week long general election, there is a danger that the party is playing it too safe to make a dent in the BJPs formidable lead, said analyst Jai Mrug from leading independent pollster VMR. While the minimum income scheme does look very appealing, it is unlikely to have a real wow factor with the masses, Mr Mrug told The Independent. He said people simply wont believe in promises of such a big payout a minimum wage of Rs 72,000 (800) to the poorest 20 per cent of households in the country. It wont be a game-changer because of the lack of credibility in Indian politics, he said. The BJP was seen as likely to lose its majority in polling just a couple of months ago, but an interim budget full of handouts and a nationalist reaction to clashes with Pakistan in February have seen Mr Modis party surge ahead. The latest poll for VMR gave the BJP a healthy cushion of 283 seats out of 543 in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. Styling himself as Indias chowkidar (watchman), vowing a jaw-breaking response to alleged Pakistan-fomented terror and announcing the launch of a new anti-satellite missile, Mr Modi has done everything in his power to make national security the main election talking point. And it is working, said Mr Mrug. Our latest polling shows national security is now up there as one of the key issues, just behind jobs and unemployment, he said. Sure enough, the BJP reserved its fiercest criticism for Congresss pledge to review the Special Powers Act in disputed Kashmir, to balance the requirements of security and the protection of human rights amid accusations of widespread excesses by the Indian security forces. Finance minister Arun Jaitley, who also heads the BJPs election publicity committee, said: Some of the ideas in the Congress manifesto are positively dangerous and they will result in the Balkanisation of India. Ajay Mehra, a former political scientist at Delhi University, said Congresss moderate manifesto looked good on paper, but came too little too late for the party to counter the BJPs right-wing pro-Hindu and critics say anti-minority agenda. The manifesto might strike a progressive tone, he said, but Congress has veered to the right since Mr Modi beat them to the 2014 election in a shock landslide. Congress has not been able to mount an effective criticism of the (cow vigilante) lynching promoted by the BJP. It has not taken a very strong stand for the protection of minorities. It has also not taken a clear stand on Ayodhya and Ram Mandir (the plan to build a temple to the Hindu Lord Ram). The manifesto now is all goody-goody, but by its silence and by some of its statements, in the past five years the party has certainly moved rightwards, he said. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Mr Mehra said that the only realistic prospect of unseating Mr Modi would be if the BJP falls short of a majority and a host of opposition parties, including Congress, can strike a deal for a broad-church alliance. Would-be coalition partners would probably ask Mr Gandhi not be put forward to lead the country, he said, making the likelihood of him becoming prime minister very weak. Rahul Gandhi has been speaking confidently and avoiding making any controversial statements, but even if the BJP declines and Congress can make up some of the deficit, the other parties have made it very clear that they will not support [Mr Gandhi] as prime minister, he said. With so little time to go until polls open and the country is fully in election mode, the choice for voters is clearly being framed as either for or against another five years of Mr Modi. The vision for a future without the BJP at the helm might be more progressive, but it is also a lot less clear. A KFC franchise has been ordered to pay a young worker 46,000 after he fell into a deep fryer and suffered third-degree burns. The 20-year-old had to have a skin graft after he slipped into the hot fryer while carrying out his usual morning cleaning duties in November 2016, according to SafeWork NSW, the workplace health and safety regulator for New South Wales, Australia. He was using a ladder to clean a ventilation and air conditioning system directly above the deep fryers at a branch of the fast food chain in Coffs Harbour. The fryers were switched on and heating up oil as he worked above which was the usual method used, according to the watchdog. But on the day of the incident there was reportedly an electrical blackout and, as the worker tried to climb down from the ladder, his leg slipped into the hot cooking oil and he suffered third-degree burns. 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 man is said to have had mobility issues since the incident and had to have a skin graft. QSR Pty Ltd, the franchisee of the KFC restaurant, was ordered to pay the worker $60,000 (46,000) at the District Court of New South Wales on 22 March. The court found the franchisees had failed to adequately implement safe work procedures for the staff member, including training, according to the Work Health and Safety Act of 2011, News.com.au reported. It ruled the cookers should have been closed and switched off during the cleaning, with the lids locked. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events QSR pleaded guilty to failing to provide training for its workers, and therefore exposing them to risk. The judgment noted the company demonstrated remorse and contrition and had taken steps to fix the problems that caused the injury. Tony Williams, executive director for SafeWork operations, said the incident was an example of the vulnerability of young and inexperienced people in the workplace and how vital it is that employers equip young workers with the right training and resources, supported by adequate levels of supervision and monitoring. He said: The incident occurred at a workplace with a number of young and vulnerable workers who have limited work experience and may not understand the risks of what they are doing or know how to protect themselves from injury. By law, managers or supervisors of young workers have a legal obligation to protect young workers from incidents such as this which are entirely preventable. Five elderly people have died after eating a foie gras salad at a care home in France. Four women aged between 76 and 95 and a man aged 76 died on Sunday night within hours of consuming the meal at the home near Toulouse. In addition, 19 patients fell ill with vomiting and other signs of food poisoning. The meals they were served have been held for analysis. The granddaughter of one of the women who died told local newspaper La Depeche du Midi: "I still have the menu in my bag and I know that last night they ate Perigord salad. So what does it mean, maybe it was the foie gras? 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 Toulouses public prosecutors office said a post-mortem would be carried out to determine cause of death. The home, La Cheneraie in Lherm, has 82 residents in total and last passed a hygiene inspection in February. The Korian group, which runs the home, said meals are cooked on site. However, the son of one of the dead women told the paper a doctor at the home had told him the meals had been delivered. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The public prosecutors office said: The seriousness of this event calls for complex investigative measures of which the results cant be reached too quickly. An Italian government minister has been criticised for suggesting that authorities should check quickly to see if women who report sexual attacks are being "hysterical". Critics argued that Guilia Bongiorno's use of the word was outdated. The minister of public administration and member of the far right League Party, tweeted: #RedCode is a regulation that says when a woman reports an attack, she must be listened to within three days by the public prosecutor or the judicial police. In this way, it can be seen straight away whether they are dealing with a hysterical woman or with a woman whose life is in danger, and in that case be able to save her. Marcelle Pirrone, a family lawyer who has been focusing on women in Italy's criminal justice system for 30 years, hit out at the remarks. It is such an incredible thing for her to say," she told The Independent. "It has been criticised by people who work with women in violent situations. It is throwing women into the mouths of police and judges. 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 She is a lawyer and she credits herself for protecting women against violence. Unfortunately, her comments have not had many consequences. We keep on discussing prejudice against woman and then a minister says something like that. Others hit out Ms Bongiornos since-deleted tweet on the social media site. Donatella Di Cesare, an Italian philosopher, said: What can I say? The myth of the hysterical woman has returned." Another added: That a minister, a woman moreover, uses such language disgusts me. If a person, man or woman, falsely reports a crime, it is calumny, not hysteria. Hysterical is a term so obsolete and misleading that it is not excusable. Welcome to the medieval ages! Hysteria was a common medical diagnosis for women from the end of the 1800's until the first decades of the 1900's, but the American Psychiatric Association dropped the term in 1952. The word comes from the Latin word "hystericus" which means "of the womb". Originally, it was believed that hysteria and hysterical symptoms were caused by a defect in the womb and therefore, only women could become hysterical - something which has since been discredited as a sexist myth. Ms Bongiorno, a lawyer by trade, later deleted the tweet and sought to clarify her remarks. The tweet has been deleted for the simple fact that on top of the oversimplification imposed by the middle it wasnt an expression that fits in with how I think, she said. I was quoting those who criticise the codice rosso with the term hysterical. Because every time that I mention that women who report attacks and abuse must be heard within a short time by the public prosecutor, someone objects to their credibility using that term. Campaigners have repeatedly raised alarm bells about Italys lurch to the far right under the League Party, which is a partner in Italys coalition government. They have warned warning that womens rights are under attack in a country that already has one of the highest rates of femicide - the gender-motivated killing of women - in Europe. Tens of thousands of campaigners took the streets of Verona over the weekend to show their opposition to an anti-LGBT+ and anti-abortion conference with the self-avowed goal of establishing the natural family order. The US-founded World Congress of Families (WCF), which has faced criticism for its Russian ties, staged the three-day conference in the ordinarily quiet northern Italian city to discuss the beauty of marriage and growth and demographic decline. The 13th international conference of the WCF which critics have branded medieval was funded by the local authority and is backed by the League Party. Recep Tayyip Erdogans political party, stung after losing political control of Istanbul for the first time in a quarter of a century, has demanded a full recount of a Sundays close municipal elections on Tuesday, alleging irregularities and miscounting in a process the government has overseen and tightly controlled for years. Erdogans Justice and Development Party (AKP) also sought a recount of some districts of Ankara, the capital, which it also lost but by a more substantial margin. The move suggested the AKP would not give up Istanbul without a fight. Erdogan is a native of the citys working-class waterfront Kasimpasa district, and has remarked repeatedly that Istanbul is the key to controlling Turkey. The sprawling city of 15 million is a source of massive real-estate deals and development projects that have been the lifeblood of Erdogans national political machine. But the party also wants to show a political base disappointed by the Sundays election losses that it is doing everything it can to retain power, even if it ultimately relents. At the end of the day its the election watchdog that will announce the official results, says Serkan Demirtas, Ankara bureau chief for Hurriyet Daily News, an English-language newspaper. In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria Show all 9 1 /9 In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria Turkish tanks driving to the Syrian-Turkish border town of Jarabulus yesterday AFP/Getty In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria Turkish-backed gather on the outskirts of Jarabulus, Syria, ahead of an offensive on 24 August 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria Turkish army tanks make their way towards the Syrian border town of Jarabulus, Syria August 24, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria Turkish soldiers return from Syria to Turkey with tanks after a military operation at the Syrian border as part of their offensive against the Islamic State (IS) militant group in Syria, Karkamis district of Gaziantep, Turkey, 25 August 2016 EPA In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria Turkish army tanks and Turkey-backed Syrian opposition forces move toward the Syrian border as pictured from Karkamis, Turkey, AP In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria Turkish tanks on their way to the Turkish-Syria border during an operation against Isis on 24 August 2016 EPA In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria Syrian opposition fighters being transported during preparations to enter Jarabulus in Karkamis, Turkey, on 24 August 2016. EPA In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria An air strike hitting Isis-controlled territory near Jarabulus, near the Turkish border, on 24 August 2016. EPA In pictures: Turkey launches operation in Syria A Turkish army tank and an armoured vehicle stationed near the border with Syria. Turkish media reports say Turkish artillery has launched new strikes at Isis targets across the border AP They are trying to find ways to appeal over a number of irregularities they are claiming. But they will have to accept the results at some point. The elections were free and there were no big rumours or speculation about fraud. Mild-mannered Istanbul mayoral candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, of the secular-nationalist, centre-left Peoples Republican Party (CHP), surprised Turkeys political world by defeating his well-financed AKP rival by 25,000 out of more than 8 million votes cast. CHP made other surprising inroads, though the AKP received the most votes and remain the countrys foremost political organisation. On Tuesday, Erdogan struck a conciliatory tone: There is no loser in these elections. The winner is every one of our people who cast their votes, whether they voted for us or not, he wrote on his Twitter account, referring to victories in 15 metropolitan areas, a tally that excludes Istanbul. We will continue to establish bridges of love with our people while being aware of the message given at the ballots. Still, AKP supporters have ratcheted up rhetoric alleging cheating and vote fraud in the Istanbul election. Authorities have begun posting billboards across Istanbul featuring Erdogan and AKP mayoral contender Binali Yildirim, a former prime minister and speaker of parliament, thanking Istanbul for its support. They will have to accept the results at some point. The elections were free and there were no big rumours or speculation about fraud Serkan Demirtas, Ankara bureau chief, Hurriyet Daily News AKP officials, including Yildirim, allege that the number of invalidated votes exceed the oppositions margin of victory. In a constant stream of press appearances, AKP officials allege irregularities, mistakes, discrepancies and wrong entries. We have detected rigging and irregularities that violate the legislation and a fair election environment from the start of the voting process, Senocak said. AKP spokesman Omer Celik vowed to respect the results regardless of the outcome, as it is our peoples choice. Many opposition members suspect the Supreme Election Council (YSK) that will weigh the merits of any fraud and allegations, and oversee any recount is packed with AKP loyalists. In the past, it has rejected requests for recounts and ignored allegations of impropriety submitted by opposition parties. Critics of the government accused the AKP of dishonestly wresting control of the Ankara municipality from front-runner Mansur Yavas in 2014 elections. Attempting a similar move against Imamoglu in the more high-profile Istanbul race could prompt protests and violence that could further damage Turkeys relations with the west. Imamoglu said he trusted the YSK, but was disappointed with the behaviour of the AKP. This chaos makes me sad, he told reporters on Tuesday before heading to Ankara to confer with CHP leaders. If I lost this election, I would congratulate my rival. We are confident because we are right. Political ideology will not rule over logic. Though vote tallies have not been officially sanctioned, both Imamoglu and Ankara mayor-elect Yavas, also of the CHP, have changed their Twitter biographies to identify themselves as mayor. Elsewhere in the country the opposition nationalist Iyi party contested the results of the election in Usak, a town in western Turkey that the AKP won with just a few hundred votes. Showman and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky has cemented his dominant position after the first round of Ukraines presidential elections. With more than 95 per cent of precincts reporting, Mr Zelenskys 30.25 per cent share was almost twice that of runner-up Petro Poroshenko, who polled just 15.94 per cent. Given the margin of victory, the incumbent president now faces a battle for his political life and legacy. It is expected Mr Poroshenko will draw on every ounce of the cunning that helped him squeeze Yulia Tymoshenko into third place (13.39 per cent). Ms Tymoshenkos exit was the drama of the weekend, with the former prime minister refusing to accept defeat and the likely end of her own presidential ambitions. Speaking after the release of the exit polls, she promised to dispute the count once a final result was clear. But on Monday, as the hours ticked on and the ballots mounted, hopes of her making a credible claim to second position faded. While final results may be days away, it is now inconceivable that she will be able to close the gap. The Independent understands Ms Tymoshenko will make an announcement on Tuesday in which she may avoid officially endorsing either election campaign. Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Show all 26 1 /26 Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Volodymyr Zelenskiy, centre right, and his wife Olena Zelenska, greet supporters after exit polling gave the comedian a commanding lead AP Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Outgoing Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko raises his hand with his wife Maryna at his party headquarters in Kiev AFP/Getty Images Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy reacts following the announcement of the first exit poll REUTERS Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Comedian and leading Ukrainian presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy plays ping pong with a journalist at his election night gathering in Kiev, Ukraine. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will face off in a second-round election on April 21 Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Election officials count ballots at a polling station in Kiev during the first round of Ukraine's presidential election, AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures People walk in front of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev during Ukraine's presidential election AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian servicemen sit in a truck to head to a polling station, near the front line with pro-Russian separatists, near Butivka, Donetsk region AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian citizens living in Kyrgyzstan vote in Ukraine's presidential election at a polling station in the Ukrainian embassy in Bishke AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian citizens living in Kyrgyzstan vote in Ukraine's presidential election at a polling station in the Ukrainian embassy in Bishkek AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian citizens living in Kyrgyzstan vote in Ukraine's presidential election at a polling station in the Ukrainian embassy in Bishkek AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian citizens living in Kyrgyzstan vote in Ukraine's presidential election at a polling station in the Ukrainian embassy in Bishkek AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures A young girl casts the ballot of a man at a polling station in Kiev on the first round of Ukraine's presidential election, on. Exit polls are expected when voting stations close at 8 pm local time (1700 GMT). First preliminary results are expected several hours after. Barring a shock result in which one candidate crosses the 50 percent threshold in the first round, a run-off will be held on April 2 AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian comic actor, showman and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky waves in front of voting booths at a polling station during Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Former Ukrainian Prime Minister and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko speaks with the media after casting her ballot at a polling station during Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Former Ukrainian Prime Minister and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko speaks with the media after casting her ballot at a polling station during Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Former Ukrainian Prime Minister and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko speaks with the media after casting her ballot at a polling station during Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian comic actor, showman and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky casts his ballot at a polling station during Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian comic actor, showman and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky gestures in front of voting booths at a polling station during Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev AFP/Getty Images Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian comic actor, showman and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky walks with his ballot at a polling station during Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev AFP/Getty Images Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures A view of the building of the Ukrainian Central Election Commission in Kiev during Ukraine's presidential election. AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (L) casts his ballot at a polling station in Kiev on the first round of Ukraine's presidential election, The 53-year-old president has positioned himself during the political campaign as the only person able to stand up to the Kremlin and has promised to return Crimea to Ukraine if he is re-elected. AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures A voter emerges from the voting booth after filling out her ballot for Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev, Ukraine. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will face off in a second-round election on April 21. Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian president Petro O. Poroshenko (C), running for re-election, receives his ballot in Ukraine's presidential election on in Kiev, Ukraine. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will face off in a second-round election on April 21 Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures A woman holds her ballot as she leaves a voting booth at a polling station in Kiev on the first round of Ukraine's presidential election. - Exit polls are expected when voting stations close at 8 pm local time (1700 GMT). First preliminary results are expected several hours after. Barring a shock result in which one candidate crosses the 50 percent threshold in the first round, a run-off will be held on April 21 AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures A young girl casts the ballot of a man at a polling station in Kiev on the first round of Ukraine's presidential election. Exit polls are expected when voting stations close at 8 pm local time (1700 GMT). First preliminary results are expected several hours after. Barring a shock result in which one candidate crosses the 50 percent threshold in the first round, a run-off will be held on April 21 AFP/Getty Ukraine Elections 2019 in pictures Ukrainian servicemen queue to cast their ballots at a polling station near the front line line with pro-Russian separatists near Avdiivka, Donetsk region, during the first round of Ukraine's presidential election AFP/Getty It is as yet unclear what form, if any, her legal challenge will take. Privately, her supporters admit that focus will now switch to parliamentary elections in September, a vote that may prove as crucial in determining the future balance of power in Ukraine. International observers painted a largely positive picture of the elections as broadly competitive, free and peaceful. Ilkka Kanerva, leader of the OSCE observer mission, said the competitive election had laid the groundwork for a vibrant second round. But others drew attention to reports of vote buying and the use of government resources to influence the election. Ms Tymoshenkos supporters said Mr Poroshenkos use of election tricks proved to be the deciding factor in the elections. The former prime minister protested one-off payments to pro-Poroshenko agitators and the appearance of a candidate on the ballot paper with almost the same name as her own. In the event, the 110,000 votes given to Yuri Tymoshenko were likely almost all given in error, and constituted 0.6 per cent of the vote. There may not have been significant violations on the day, but the abuse of technical candidates and budget resources easily accounts for the 2.5 per cent projected gap, claimed Kateryna Odarchenko, a political consultant who worked on Ms Tymoshenkos team. People were literally handed $50 to agitate for Mr Poroshenko. Given the poverty in our country, that was a very weighty argument indeed. Ms Odarchenko said she expected Mr Poroshenkos campaign to roll out the tactics on an even larger scale in an attempt to bridge the gap with Mr Zelensky. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The initial outlines of the presidents attack strategy were already clear soon after polling closed. Mr Zelensky was funny, he said, but a novice who would crumble when faced with Vladimir Putin. Its up to you who will be the countrys commander-in-chief and who will represent Ukraine in international meetings and, yes, in talks with Russia, he said. Mr Poroshenko also said the second round would be a showdown with the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, whose television channel runs Mr Zelenskys show: Fate has paired me and Im not shy of saying this with Kolomoiskys puppet. I wont give them a single chance. He said that he would immediately begin campaigning for a second-round victory. Under Ukrainian law, campaigning is in fact banned for 10 days. The British government does not know how many civilians have been killed in its bombing campaign against Isis, the armed forces minister has admitted. Mark Lancaster comments came after the Ministry of Defence was heavily criticised for official casualty estimates that claimed only one civilian had died alongside more than 4,000 Isis militants in RAF airstrikes across Syria and Iraq. He told the Defence Committee it was not our position that there has only been a single civilian casualty as a result of our military action. He added: What we are saying is that we only have evidence of what we believe to have been a single civilian casualty, he added. That is a rather different position. Mr Lancaster said there were challenges verifying the true figure because of the lack of British boots on the ground in targeted Isis strongholds. Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Show all 14 1 /14 Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Trucks full of women and children arrive from the last Isis-held areas in Deir ez-Zor, Syria Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Zikia Ibrahim, 28, with her two-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter, after fleeing the Isis caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Men who fled the last Isis-held area of Syria line up to be questioned by American and Kurdish intelligence officials Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate A young girl pulls her belongings after arriving Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate An SDF fighter hands out bread to women and children after they arrive Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Sita Ghazzar, 70, after fleeing from the last Isis-held territory in Syria Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate A family from Russia who recently fled the last Isis-held area of Syria Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent It is difficult to prove exactly what has happened as a result of a strike, but that doesnt mean that we are remotely complacent in our approach, he added. We think that is absolutely vital [to avoid civilian casualties] because potentially there is a connection between the causing of civilian casualties and potential further radicalisation. There is a direct link there if we were to be reckless with the use of military force it would be entirely counter-productive. Mr Lancaster said British forces use pre-targeting intelligence, then monitor peoples movements at the location of strikes and assess the result afterwards. The RAF has carried out at least 1,700 of 34,000 airstrikes launched by the US-led coalition against Isis, across Syria and Iraq since August 2014 around 5 per cent. US Central Command (Centcom) had confirmed the deaths of 1,257 civilians by the end of February, but monitoring group Airwars puts the toll at between 7,500 and 12,300 civilians. The Coalition will continue to work with partner forces to deny Daesh [Isis] any physical space and influence in the region as well as deny Daesh the resources they need to resurge, a Centcom spokesperson said last week. We continue to employ thorough and deliberate targeting and strike processes to minimise the impact of our operations on civilian populations and infrastructure. Baghouz: Syrian Democratic Fighters begin final push to recapture the last sliver of territory controlled by ISIS Isis has used images of dead men, women and children in propaganda calling on supporters to launch global terror attacks, seeking to present airstrikes on its territories as a war on Muslims. Following a speech by late spokesman Abu Muhammed al-Adnani in 2014, many claims of responsibility issued by the terrorist group for atrocities have said they were in response to the call to target citizens of Crusader countries that participate in the coalition against the Islamic State. A former London postman who joined Isis told The Independent that the US-led coalition's bombing campaign was giving Isis "more recruits, more men and children who will be willing to give their lives because they've lost their families". Ben Wallace, the security minister, said that although military action was certainly a factor in the radicalisation of some Isis-inspired terrorists who have plotted attacks in the UK, other issues like wider foreign policy and Islamophobia were also exploited. We havent seen an increase in the last 24 months of people being radicalised in our communities as a result of the military campaign, he told MPs. We see the increase in threat, where it comes, from the remaining Isis and al-Qaeda voices using the internet to recruit, but not really as a result of British actions overseas. Mr Wallace added that the government was fighting extremist narratives by demonstrating that what it does is proportionate and necessary, and follows the rule of law. The committee was told that military action seeing Isis lose all of its major strongholds in Iraq and Syria had resulted in an 80 per cent reduction in propaganda output. Chris Felton, head of the Joint International Counter Terrorism Unit (JICTU), said Isiss ability to directly contact vulnerable people in the UK had been dramatically reduced. The narrative of success of the caliphate has been reduced, which is also a factor in the attractiveness of Isis as an organisation, he added. But the government recognises that ultimately a military solution isnt going to defeat the terror threat posed by Isis, Mr Lancaster told the committee, warning that displaced jihadis may regroup elsewhere as their ideology continues online. We can certainly go to a certain point where we do contain Isis and the geographical defeat is a definite step in the right direction, the minister said. But are we going to delude ourselves that we have removed all of the threat to the UK because now nobody is a foreign fighter still in Syria? Of course we havent. The Isis caliphate is no more. Four years after its fighters captured large swathes of Iraq and Syria and declared its intention to spread jihad around the world, the terror group no longer holds any territory. But as one extremist Islamic state falls, another one endures. Over the past few years, a group that was formerly part of al-Qaeda has cemented its power in northern Syria and now rules over some 3 million people. After forcing out rival rebel groups in Idlib earlier this year, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has moved to impose its control over all institutions in the province. A university with more than 6,000 students has become the latest battleground in its quest for dominance. They came when we were in the middle of exams and said they would be taking over, says Ahmed, a student at Free Aleppo University, which was shut down last week by the HTS-controlled administration in Idlib. We have demonstrated against the decision many times. They arrested many professors at our university to put us under pressure to leave, says Ahmed, who would give only his first name because he fears retribution for speaking out. Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive Show all 13 1 /13 Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive A Syrian protester waves a flag of the opposition as during a protest against the regime and its ally Russia, in the rebel-held town of Maaret al-Numan in the north of Idlib province AFP/Getty Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive Syrian rebel fighters from the recently-formed "National Liberation Front" stand guard over a trench as rebels prepare defensive positions in anticipation for an upcoming government forces offensive AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive Syrian rebel fighters pile-up sandbags AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive A Syrian rebel fighter looks through an embrasure in a make-shift bunker AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive Syrian rebel fighters walk through a trench AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive A Syrian protester waves a flag of the opposition AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive A Syrian rebel fighter stands guard over a trench AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive AFP/Getty Images Fears for 3m people in rebel-held Idlib ahead of regime offensive AFP/Getty Images When the group first shuttered the university, its lecturers gave classes outside the buildings gates in protest. But the HTS-run salvation government officially closed it down last week. I wasnt surprised. The problem is the mentality. Both HTS and Isis worked with Assad to destroy our revolution, he adds. The takeover of the university is just the latest power grab in the groups slow and steady march to dominance. Like Isis, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham wants to create an Islamic state of its own. Where Isis aimed to expand quickly and attract the maximum possible attention, HTS has played a long game. It has been pragmatic, and worked with other groups when it needed to. But it has also been opportunistic and crushed its rivals. It has put aside global ambitions to focus on succeeding locally. In doing so, it has pursued a far more durable force than Isis. The end of the Isis Caliphate: Timeline of their rise and fall Hayat Tahrir al-Sham shares the same end state goal as Isis, which is to build a state based on a rigid interpretation of Salafist Sunni Islam. But it has a smarter way to do it, according to Nicholas Heras, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security think tank. Its strategy has been to allow other rebel groups to exist, but like a powerful mafia enterprise, to maintain the ability to use overwhelming and concentrated force on any opponents as they appear. HTS also has positioned itself to control the major border points into and out of Idlib, and to control the roadways that serve as the major arteries of the province, he adds. In doing so, it has become the powerbroker in Idlib and the de facto sovereign power there. The closure of Free Aleppo University was just another demonstration of that power. The result is that thousands of students have been forced to stop their education and left many facing the prospect of being displaced again. Some of the professors and academic figures were arrested. Some students were arrested. Its so dangerous for the education, for the students. Many professors are thinking of leaving Syria now, says one lecturer at the university. Thousands of students were so close to achieving what they lost seven or eight years ago have been stopped from completing their studies. Their dreams have collapsed, he adds. But their problem is part of a larger issue that shows few signs of being resolved. As early as 2017, former US envoy for Syria Brett McGurk called the territory controlled by the group the largest al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11. Since then, the groups grip on the province has only got stronger. Russian airstrikes killed at least 13 civilians, including six children, last month in Idlib province (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images) Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a direct descendant of al-Qaedas Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra. That group was formally established by al-Qaedas central command and the leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq in January 2012, after the latter sent fighters to join the battle to overthrow Assad and set up an emirate. Nusra set itself apart in the early days of the Syrian civil war as one of the strongest and most disciplined groups among the dozens of rebel factions. Its strength on the battlefield won it supporters among the Syrian people, despite espousing an ideology that was more extreme than most Syrians were used to. HTS is becoming so woven into Idlib that the only way that its power can end is if it is ripped out of Idlib, which will lead to many dead and displaced Nicholas Heras, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security think tank In 2013, the group split in two. Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi tried to merge his group with Nusra, under his command. Nusras leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, rejected the merger and announced his loyalty to al-Qaeda. Nusra initially focused on immersing itself within the Syrian opposition to ensure its survival. But after a time, it crowded out more moderate groups and came to dominate it. The US intervened against Nusra before it tackled Isis, carrying out airstrikes against the groups leadership as early as September 2014. Russias entry into Syria in 2015 saw it take control of the skies over Idlib, and together with the Syrian government has surrounded the province. Recommended Syria civil war enters ninth year with new wave of violence on horizon In January 2017, a coalition of Islamist Sunni anti-government armed groups was formed and named Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. It was led by the group previously known as Jabhat al-Nusra, which has since claimed to have cut ties from Al Qaeda. International pressure has prevented an all-out assault on Idlib by Russian and Syrian government forces. But that peace is fragile. Clashes between the two sides have been increasing in recent months. Hundreds have died in Syrian government and Russian attacks on de-escalation zones in Idlib over the past few months, and some 40,000 civilians have fled their homes to escape the fighting. Many in Idlib now fear a government offensive is imminent. A long-threatened plan to recapture the province was put on hold last year following an agreement between Russia and Turkey, which has military forces on the ground there and backs a number of rebel groups in the area. Turkey, which has deployed military forces on the ground in Idlib to deter an all-out government offensive, had hoped the deal would allow time to reach an agreement between Damascus and the remaining rebel holdouts. But since then the extremist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has increased its control of the province, dimming those hopes. In January this year, Human Rights Watch said it had documented scores of arbitrary arrests by the group across its area of control, including 11 cases in which people were detained apparently because of their peaceful work documenting abuses or protesting the groups rule. Hayat Tahrir al-Shams crackdown on perceived opposition to their rule mirrors some of the same oppressive tactics used by the Syrian government, says Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. There is no legitimate excuse for rounding up opponents and arbitrarily detaining and torturing them. The group is also accused of being behind the assassinations of several well known activists, including Raed Fares and Hamoud Jneid, who ran a local radio station where they spoke out against the militants. A sign made by anti-Assad demonstrator Raed Fares (Read Fares) Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, says the threat of an attack by government forces has been used by HTS to justify its crackdown. The key here is how HTS appears to be responding to increased external threats rather than pulling back and seeking to appease, HTSs strategy has been to double down in a form of aggressive deterrence. Sadly, civilians have too often been the victim of these power gambles, as the group overreaches or simply chooses to crack down to demonstrate its authority once again, he says. For HTS, everything is about maintaining a complex balance balancing relations with the local population; with rival opposition groups; with al-Qaeda loyalists; with Turkey; and with Russia. HTS cannot afford to burn all its bridges with the local civilian population, but likewise, it cannot afford to demonstrate weakness or vulnerability to any party, including civilians. It must simultaneously appear as both defender and governor, while also deterring enemies beyond its borders from attacking. In seeking its goal of creating an Islamic state of its own, HTS has come to represent to many living under its control something similar to the regime it hopes to replace. And while it is unlikely to succeed in creating its own caliphate, Idlibs three million residents remain caught between Russian bombing and Hayat Tahrir al-Shams prisons. That may be precisely how the group planned it. HTS is becoming so woven into Idlib that the only way that its power can end is if it is ripped out of Idlib, which will lead to many dead and displaced, says Heras. A British woman who joined Isis in Syria and recruited teenage girls has pleaded to return to the UK for a normal life. Tooba Gondals appeal was a stark contrast to a previous Twitter post where she attacked lies that muhajireen regret hijrah [joining Isis] and desperately want to return to the west. She had used social media to urge sisters to join her in the terrorist groups strongholds, while celebrating terror attacks and condemning the kuffar [disbelievers]. Tweeting under the name Umm Muthanna al-Britannia, she shared a photo of herself brandishing an AK-47 with the caption living the life. A 2015 tweet claimed she had obtained a suicide vest and continued: I came here to die. I will not leave till I get what I came here for: shahadah [martyrdom]. Timeline of the Isis caliphate Show all 19 1 /19 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Timeline of the Isis caliphate ISIS began as a group by the merging of extremist organisations ISI and al-Nusra in 2013. Following clashes, Syrian rebels captured the ISIS headquarters in Aleppo in January 2014 (pictured) AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared the creation of a caliphate in Mosul on 27 June 2014 Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis conquered the Kurdish towns of Sinjar and Zumar in August 2014, forcing thousands of civilians to flee their homes. Pictured are a group of Yazidi Kurds who have fled Rex Timeline of the Isis caliphate On September 2 2014 Isis released a video depicting the beheading of US journalist Steven Sotloff. On September 13 they released another video showing the execution of British aid worker David Haines Timeline of the Isis caliphate The US launched its first airstrikes against Isis in Syria on 23 September 2014. Here Lt Gen William C Mayville Jnr speaks about the bombing campaign in the wake of the first strikes Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis militants sit atop a hill planted with their flag in the Syrian town of Kobani on 6 October 2014. They had been advancing on Kobani since mid-September and by now was in control of the citys entrance and exit points AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Residents of the border village of Alizar keep guard day and night as they wait in fear of mortar fire from Isis who have occupied the nearby city of Kobani Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Smoke rises following a US airstrike on Kobani, 28 October 2014 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate YPG fighters raise a flag as they reclaim Kobani on 26 January 2015 VOA Timeline of the Isis caliphate Isis seized the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra on 20 May 2015. This image show the city from above days after its capture by Isis Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces are stationed on a hill above the town of Sinjar as smoke rises following US airstrikes on 12 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Kurdish forces enter Sinjar after seizing it from Isis control on 13 November 2015 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi government forces make the victory sign as they retake the city of Fallujah from ISIS on 26 June 2016 Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Iraqi forces battle with Isis for the city of Mosul on 30 June 2017 AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of the Iraqi federal police raise flags in Mosul on 8 July 2017. On the following day, Iraqi prime minister Haider Al Abadi declares victory over Isis in Mosul Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Members of Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Female fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces celebrate in Al-Naim Square after taking back the city of Raqqa from Isis. US-backed Syrian forces declare victory over Isis in Raqqa on 20 October 2017 after a four-month long campaign AFP/Getty Timeline of the Isis caliphate Trucks full of women and children arrive from the last Isis-held areas in Deir ez-Zor, Syria in January 2019 They were among the last civilians to be living in the ISIS caliphate, by this time reduced to just two small villages in Syrias Deir ez-Zor Richard Hall/The Independent Timeline of the Isis caliphate Zikia Ibrahim, 28, with her two-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter, after fleeing the Isis caliphate, on Saturday 26 January 2019 Richard Hall/The Independent Everyone around me is getting shahadah, she later wrote. When will it be my turn? But Gondal has claimed she is not a threat since being caught by Kurdish-led forces as she tried to flee Isiss last territory towards the Turkish border. Now 25, she is being held in Ayn Issa camp with her children and said she feared for their health, following the death of several children including Shamima Begums baby. In an interview with the Rojava Information Centre, she claimed it was a relief to leave Isis territory, where there had been food shortages and constant bombing, sniping and bullets. The women and the children became the victims, Gondal said. It was a complete mess and even trying to leave was almost ... it was a mission to try to find any way to escape or any reliable smugglers who could help you. The former Goldsmiths University student said she was born in France and is of Pakistani heritage, but grew up in London from the age of three. Gondal said she has permanent British residency but a French passport, which she concealed by sewing it into her childrens nappies. I feel British, but Britain refuses to take us, she added. Jeremy Hunt says British officials didn't rescue Shamima Begum's baby because it was too dangerous Gondal said she had heard news that the Home Office had revoked fellow Isis bride Shamima Begums British citizenship. I know the British public, they are scared, they dont want to deal with us, but they must deal with us, she added. We cant stay in this camp for the rest of our lives, they must deal with us. We are not threat to their society, we just want a normal life again. If I did not harm to anyone, if I committed no harm in Syria for four years, what kind of threat can I be to Britain? Nikita Malik, director of the Centre on Radicalisation and Terrorism at the Henry Jackson Society, said Gondal and other female Isis recruiters were vital to Isiss state-building project. They were essential in reaching out to women and also in propaganda that was the way that Isis was able to recruit women, she told The Independent. We had women in communication with other women about the importance of the sisterhood and the need to join Isis state-building operations. They were also able to provide answers to questions about life in the caliphate and help with logistics. Gondal claimed said her husband had been killed and she was injured by shrapnel during battles, where she moved from village to village before paying smugglers to escape Baghuz. But before leaving the UK for Syria in 2015, she tweeted: Kuffar media spreading lies that muhajireen regret hijrah and desperately want to return. Gondals now-deleted Twitter accounts showed the depth of her radicalisation, with her sharing Isis propaganda, celebrating executions and terror attacks, and claiming that showing womens faces was a violation of Islam. SDF fighters fire a cannon on the frontline of battles in Baghuz (AFP/Getty) The Islamic State and the Kufr [disbeliever] State. Which state are you on? she asked her followers. After reaching Syria, Gondal shared photos of herself holding an AK-47, owning a car, eating and socialising with other women. Sisters come to the land of freedom! We have everything here for you, she urged, saying girls could privately message her for advice on how to evade western security services to reach Syria. After the November 2015 Paris attacks, Gondal wrote: Wish I could have seen the hostages being slaughtered last night with my own eyes. Would have been beautiful. An undercover newspaper investigation caught her grooming a British teenage girl to join Isis on social media, with a detailed plan to travel to Isis via Switzerland and Istanbul. A friend told the Mail on Sunday Gondal had been a rebel at school, smoking and having secret boyfriends, but started becoming increasingly religious in 2014. She started posting verses of the Quran on Twitter, and talking about religion. I just dont know what brought it on, the friend said. The Home Office said it could not comment on individual cases, but has vowed to investigate anyone returning from Iraq or Syria and prosecute them where possible. A spokesperson said: "The UK has advised against all travel to Syria and parts of Iraq for many years. We have powers to prevent individuals from returning to the UK. Anyone that does return should expect to be investigated to determine if they have committed crimes or pose a threat to our national security. The government has stripped more than 150 people of their British citizenship for the public good in recent years and made no move to help others leave camps in Syria. A group of American hackers who once worked for US intelligence agencies helped the United Arab Emirates spy on a BBC journalist along with a host of other prominent media figures, it has been reported. The American operatives worked for Project Raven, a secret Emirati program that spied on dissidents, militants and political opponents of the UAE monarchy, a Reuters investigation found. They attempted to break into the iPhones of at least 10 journalists and media executives, the report states including a Middle East-based BBC reporter and the chairman of Al Jazeera news station. The apparent aim was a fishing exercise to find confidential information that could be used in the UAEs ongoing dispute with their Gulf rival Qatar and to stifle dissent. But the revelation has potential global reach in that it highlights how highly-trained former US intelligence officials have increasingly become guns-for-hire in the cyber wars of other nations with little oversight from Washington. 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 At least nine spies working on Project Raven had previously been employees of the US military or National Security Agency. The hackers started targeting journalists in 2017 in an apparent attempt to find evidence that the Qatar royal family was funding what the UAEs authoritarian monarchy perceived as media coverage likely to ferment dissent towards their rule. The UAE is run as a hereditary autocracy and political dissent is not tolerated. Among those attacked were Giselle Khoury, the Beirut-based host of BBC Arabics The Scene, a current affairs show specialising in interviews with Middle Eastern leaders. Another was Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani, the chairman of Al Jazeera. When informed of the hack, Ms Khoury said: They need to spend their time on making better their country, their economy. Not on having Giselle Khoury as a hacking target. Mr bin Thamer Al Thani declined to comment. Reuters say the attacks utilized a cyber weapon called Karma a piece of software which allowed Raven operatives to remotely hack into iPhones by inputting a targets phone number or associated email address. Unlike many exploits, Karma did not require a target to click on a link sent to an iPhone, it is said. The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its embassy in Washington did not respond to Reuters requests for comment. The US Department of Defense and the NSA also declined to comment. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events But Dana Shell Smith, America's former US ambassador to Qatar, told the news agency she found it alarming that American intelligence veterans were able to work, as effective mercenaries, for another government. Folks with these skill sets should not be able to knowingly or unknowingly undermine US interests or contradict US values, she said. Hu Kaihong: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to today's SCIO briefing. Today, the "Statement on Adding Fentanyl-related Substances to the Supplementary List of Controlled Non-medical Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances" was jointly issued by China's Ministry of Public Security, National Health Commission, and National Medical Products Administration. This statement means that the Chinese government has officially begun to include all fentanyl-related substances into the control list. To offer more information on the announcement, we are delighted to welcome three officials to update you on the fentanyl-related substances control and answer your questions. They are Mr. Liu Yuejin, deputy director of China's National Narcotics Control Commission and counter-terrorism commissioner of the Ministry of Public Security; Mr. Wang Hesheng, deputy director of the National Health Commission; and Mr. Chen Shifei, deputy head of the National Medical Products Administration. Liu Yuejin: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning! Now, on behalf of the National Narcotics Control Commission, I read out the "Statement on Adding Fentanyl-related Substances to the 'Supplementary List of Controlled Non-medical Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances' issued by the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China, National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China and National Medical Products Administration." In accordance with the provisions of "Regulations for Controlling on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances" and "Methods for Controlling Non-medicinal Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances," the Ministry of Public Security, National Health Commission and National Medical Products Administration have decided to add fentanyl-related substances into the "Supplementary List of Controlled Non-medicinal Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances." "Fentanyl" refers to a substance that has one or more of the following chemical structures: 1. Uses other acyl groups to substitute for propionyl; 2. Using any substituted and unsubstituted mono-aromatic groups to substitute for phenyl directly connected with nitrogen atoms; 3. Piperidine ring having substituent groups such as alkyl, alkenyl, alkoxy, ester, ether, hydroxy, halogen, haloalkyl, amino and nitro; 4. Using any other groups (except hydrogen) to substitute for phenethyl. If the substances listed above are found to have any legitimate pharmaceutical, industrial, scientific research or other legal use, they shall be adjusted in accordance with the second paragraph of Article 3 of the "Methods for Controlling Non-medicinal Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances." The fentanyl-related substances that have been included into the "List of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances" and the "Supplementary List of Controlled Non-medicinal Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances" will be supervised and controlled in accordance with the original regulations. This announcement will take effect on1 May, 2019. Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China, National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China and National Medical Products Administration. Just now, I have read out the announcement that China will include all fentanyl-related substances into the list of controlled drugs, which marks an important and innovative measure taken by the Chinese government in the building of China's anti-drug legal system. Drugs are a public hazard to all mankind. This issue must be tackled because it concerns the future of mankind. China has knowledge of their harm as we have suffered from serious drug epidemics before. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China 70 years ago, the Party and the government have always attached great importance to anti-drug enforcement. We have consistently pursued and strictly carried out anti-drug policies and adopted the guidelines of comprehensive governance; prevention first; and the four prohibitions of drug abuse, trafficking, cultivation and production. In particular, since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary Xi Jinping has laid out important instructions on drug control many times, stressing that political and institutional advantages should be given full play to improve the drug control governance system, and responsibilities be shouldered and the masses should be mobilized. Governance with Chinese characteristics should be followed to combat drugs and win the anti-drug war in the new era. China National Narcotic Control Committee and all local authorities and relevant departments resolutely implements the decisions of the central government and also take the initiative to tackle the difficulties. Hence, steady progress has been made in controlling drugs. At present, the world is undergoing profound and complex changes concerning drugs and the situation is not optimistic. In particular, new drugs represented by fentanyl-related substances have emerged at an unprecedented rate and have been abused on a large scale in some countries, claiming large numbers of lives and causing serious social problems. Facing this international challenge, the Chinese government has added all fentanyl-related substances into the control list. It is not only an important move to prevent the risks caused by the new drugs, but also a measure to protect people's physical and mental health. It is an important manifestation of China's participation in the global control of illicit drugs and the maintenance of international security and stability. Adding all fentanyl-related substances into the control list is one of the innovative measures that China is taking to tackle the drug problem, bringing opportunities for us to deepen reform and development in our drug control efforts. The Ministry of Public Security, National Health Commission, National Medical Products Administration and other related departments have closely coordinated on a series of relevant studies, risk assessments, expert evaluations, and suggestions. As a result, they have managed to complete the legal procedures to schedule such substances within four months. In particular, the legal definition of fentanyl-related substances has been scientifically determined, which guarantees an extensive and expandable scope of control while ensuring minimum impact on medical industry, scientific research and other legitimate uses. After issuing and implementing the announcement to list and regulate the entire class of fentanyl substances, the Chinese government will draft and issue a series of documents as soon as possible. This will also include guidance on applicable laws for handling criminal cases related to fentanyl substances as well as protocols for the filing and prosecution of similar cases. The authorities will push for the construction of laboratories that can examine related drugs, develop universal on-site rapid screening equipment, safety protection equipment, formulate public safety industry standards for the inspection and identification of fentanyl substances, and push for the construction of a monitoring system for fentanyl substances based on suspicious substances and spectrum analysis. It will also reinforce the monitoring, on-site inspection, examination, identification and risk assessment of fentanyl substances. In addition, it will provide efficient technical support for daily supervision and law enforcement, and ensure that the regulation of fentanyl substances falls within law enforcement and judicial practices. Cooperation creates synergy, and co-governance leads to a win-win result. The Chinese government is willing to share its drug control experiences with the world and tackle the drug problem together. The government also wishes to offer Chinese wisdom to address global drug control issues and contribute to the process of building a community with a shared future for humanity as well as promoting peace and development in the world. Next, my colleagues and I will answer your questions. Hu Kaihong: Thank you, Mr. Liu. Let's start the questions. Please identify the news organization you represent before asking questions. Jet2 is the best-rated airline in Europe according to TripAdvisors Travellers Choice Awards. The budget airline was also ranked number nine in the world, making it the only UK carrier to secure a place in the top 10. It was also awarded the best economy class in Europe, and named Europes best low-cost carrier. The only other British airline to get a shout out was Virgin Atlantic, which won the title of Best Major Airline in Europe. Singapore Airlines was named number one airline in the world, following its win in last years Skytrax awards. World's safest airlines 2019 Show all 19 1 /19 World's safest airlines 2019 World's safest airlines 2019 Eva Air Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Austrian Airlines Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 KLM Getty World's safest airlines 2019 Qatar Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Lufthansa Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Hawaiian Airlines Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Alaska Airlines Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 SAS Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Finnair Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Emirates Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Cathay Pacific Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 British Airways Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Singapore Airlines Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 All Nippon Airways Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Air New Zealand Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Swiss Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 American Airlines Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 United Getty Images World's safest airlines 2019 Virgin Atlantic and Australia Getty Images Asian carriers dominated the top 10, with Eva Air, Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways coming third, fifth and 10th respectively. The Travellers Choice awards are now in their third year, recognising passengers favourite airlines overall, plus the top carriers in four distinct service classes: First Class, Business Class, Premium Economy and Economy. Recommended Ryanair voted worst airline for sixth year running Other categories include Best Low-Cost Airline, Best Major Airline, Best Mid-Size Airline, Best Regional Airline and Best Regional Business Class. Award winners were determined using an algorithm that took into account the quantity and quality of airline reviews and ratings submitted by travellers worldwide over a 12-month period on TripAdvisor Flights. The awards are living proof that our investment in customer service is working, because they are based on the experiences of paying customers, said Steve Heapy, CEO of Jet2.com and Jet2holidays. Our family friendly formula, low fares, brand new aircraft and generous 22kg baggage allowance are a big hit with customers, and all of these great benefits are complemented by our fantastic Jet2.com team who work tirelessly every day to look after each and every customer. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events 10 best-rated airlines The airport that was once the third-busiest in Britain after Heathrow and Manchester is continuing its renaissance. Southend airport has become the latest base for Ryanair. Its first flight, to Alicante, departed shortly before 7am, followed immediately by another to Kosice in Slovakia and a third to Dublin. Europes biggest budget airline has deployed three aircraft in Southend, in south-east Essex. It will operate more than 50 flights a week to 13 destinations in eight countries. Besides serving familiar locations such as Bilbao, Corfu, Dublin, Milan Bergamo and Venice, Ryanair will also fly to Cluj in Romania. It is also competing head-to-head with its arch-rival, easyJet, on sunshine routes to the main holiday airports: Alicante, Faro, Malaga and Palma. The world's healthiest and happiest airports Show all 8 1 /8 The world's healthiest and happiest airports The world's healthiest and happiest airports Therapy dogs at Vancouver International Airport Vancouver International Airport employs therapy dogs to assist with anxious and stressed passengers Vancouver International Airport The world's healthiest and happiest airports The rooftop swimming pool at Changi Airport, Singapore This airport also includes its own cinema Changi Airport, Singapore The world's healthiest and happiest airports Green space at Vancouver International Airport Vancouver International Airport scored top marks for outdoor and green space Vancouver International Airport The world's healthiest and happiest airports The outdoor terrace at San Francisco International Airport San Francisco International Airport is the seventh busiest airport in the US San Francisco International Airport The world's healthiest and happiest airports Fancy a dip? A pool at Dubai International Airport, the world's busiest airport and number three in the ranking Dubai International Airport The world's healthiest and happiest airports Frankfurt Airport With an open-air roof terrace, dedicated silent chairs, a quiet room and peaceful leisure facilities, Frankfurt International Airport came top in the ranking Frankfurt Airport The world's healthiest and happiest airports Work out The transit lounge gym facilities at Changi Airport's Terminal 2 Changi Airport, Singapore The world's healthiest and happiest airports The spa at Vancouver International Airport Vancouver International Airport came seventh in the ranking Vancouver International Airport The move is being viewed with interest from the much bigger airport across the county, Stansted, which is Ryanairs main base. Both Essex airports are served by train from London Liverpool Street station. Stansted has four trains an hour, with the fastest taking 45 minutes; while Southend has three departures hourly, with a journey of 52 minutes. But the latter has a much smaller terminal and only a short walk between train and plane. The Stobart Group, which owns Southend airport as well as Stobart Air and 30 per cent of Flybe, is capitalising on congestion at other London airports while waiting for a third runway at Heathrow. But its new link between Southend and Newquay is in competition with Flybe's service from Heathrow, which is more frequent and is subsidised, with passengers avoiding 13 Air Passenger Duty each way. Ryanair has announced a 9 per cent increase in passenger numbers for March compared with a year earlier. Its load factor remains at 96 per cent, meaning only seven or eight empty seats on the average flight. Next month Southend will gain another airline. From 28 May the Scottish carrier, Loganair will connect south-east Essex with Aberdeen, Glasgow and Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. It is a measure of how far we have travelled that the sudden, silent pressing of 22 naked buttocks against the window of the public gallery of the House of Commons felt like a moment of serenity. The first reactions to this scene, unfolding in slow motion above the Commons chamber, were almost quizzical. Ed Miliband appeared to do no more than raise an eyebrow, to acknowledge the increasingly unignorable reality that, here in the heart of the mother of parliaments, at this defining hour of history, were 11 naked men and women, each with their backsides mashed on to the glass, a flat panorama of squashed humanity, marked with unreadable protest slogans and vanishing undercrackers. It was the silence that did it, the eerie calm. No noise penetrates that glass, so even the wildest of commotions unfold like those climactic movie scenes in which heroes perish in slow motion beneath the sound of soft strings. It almost felt like it was happening underwater, their sheer pink flesh appearing suddenly from nowhere, like a family of giant turtles before a startled scuba diver, gliding serenely towards the shimmering sunlight. At the moment it began, a Labour MP called Peter Kyle had been muttering something about the customs union. Or was it the single market? It might have been the backstop. Who even cares any more? Nothing of any interest whatsoever has been uttered in that chamber for at least two years. There is nothing left unsaid, no angle unworked, no debating point that has not been sanded away to nothing by Brexits dreary tides. There was a gentle commotion, eventually. Members did their best to carry on as normal. Mike Gapes interrupted to make a point of order. Something to do with the 2016 referendum being advisory, I think. If it wasnt that, it can only have been another one of the approximately nine salient points about Brexit that have been repeated, ad infinitum, for three long dismal years. Recommended Nude protesters storm Commons public gallery as MPs debate Brexit They were a work of art, up there, the Flat Arse society. This was humanity, turning its soft, inscrutable face towards its torturer, begging to be noticed, begging to be saved. Quite literally, in fact. The protest had nothing at all to do with Brexit. The people were from Extinction Rebellion, a climate change direct action group. The world is burning, and powerful people are too consumed with their petty squabbles to do anything about it. And here they were, too consumed by their petty squabbles to do anything about it. Even the police could scarcely be bothered to puncture the slow spell of the moment. By the House of Commons clock, it was eight minutes before even the first arse was peeled away. A policeman appeared to be going at one with a small spray. In a later statement, we learned that a number of the eleven had come with superglue, and had actually adhered themselves aggressively to the glass, their liberation requiring the application of a special solvent that the authorities, miraculously, had to hand. Occasionally, in free societies and through institutions of this nature, the people must be forced to be free, once wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though it is questionable whether this is quite what he had in mind. Hours after the protesters had been sent on their polite, denuded way, an MP called Ed Vaizey was going through the dreadful motions of the legitimacy of no-deal Brexit as conferred by the people through the 2016 referendum, and more police arrived in the public gallery again. They were, I have been told, gathering evidence recording, for posterity, the vaporous shapes of the buttock marks against the window. There was Mr Vaizey, laying the full weight of his own personal gravity down upon this moment of great crisis, and there, clear in his vision, were bored police officers taking snaps of damp arse prints before they narrowed to nothing. At half past 10, history, if it can be bothered, will record that the House of Commons voted, yet again, to reject every single version of Brexit that was put before it. No to the customs union, no to Common Market 2.0 (whatever that is), no to a second referendum, no to revoking Article 50, no the past, no the present, no to the future. When the results were read out, Nick Boles, he of Common Market 2.0, rose to his feet. With his voice cracking, he left his party. High drama, but too late. All that had been worth saying had been said hours before, in total silence, when 11 ordinary men and women turned to show their backsides to the whole sorry spectacle. In August 2013 Jacob Rees-Mogg spoke at a dinner event thrown by the far-right Traditional Britain Group. The group is run by Gregory Lauder-Frost, a well known figure in British far-right politics. Lauder-Frost argues that anyone living in the UK not of what he calls European stock should be offered assisted voluntary repatriation to their natural homeland. Despite being warned of the nature of the event by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, Rees-Mogg attended the Traditional Britain Group dinner as their guest of honour. He later insisted he was shocked when the politics of his hosts were apparent, admitting: I feel very silly. This was clearly a mistake ... I wouldnt want to be caught out in this way again. This was not Rees-Moggs only encounter with the far right. In 2017 he met with president Trumps ex-chief of staff Steve Bannon at the Mayfair hotel in London to discuss how conservative movements in the UK and US could keep power. Jacob Rees-Moggs after-dinner speech to group calling on Doreen Lawrence to go home Show all 2 1 /2 Jacob Rees-Moggs after-dinner speech to group calling on Doreen Lawrence to go home Jacob Rees-Moggs after-dinner speech to group calling on Doreen Lawrence to go home 12-rees-mogg-Getty.jpg Getty Jacob Rees-Moggs after-dinner speech to group calling on Doreen Lawrence to go home 12-doreen-EPA.jpg EPA Bannon is the darling of far right politicians across Europe. He has been feted by Hungarys antisemitic prime minister Viktor Orban and Italys rabidly anti-immigrant deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini. In March 2018 Bannon told a rally of Frances racist Front National (now Rassemblement National, the National Rally) that they should wear the label of racist and xenophobe as a badge of honour. The latest chapter in Rees-Moggs engagement with the far right is his retweeting the anti-EU arguments of Alice Weidel, the leader of the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). The AfD has been linked to having racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic and xenophobic politics and is linked to Indentitarian movements in Germany. Yet Rees-Mogg defends circulating their ideas on social media on the grounds that he thinks its important people know that this is a strand of German thinking. Six years on from being the guest of honour at a far-right banquet Rees-Mogg is no longer arguing he was caught out endorsing the far right, he now argues it expresses something interesting which is worth watching. Rees-Mogg is one of a growing band of politicians who want to rehabilitate harmful politics and restore it to the spectrum of acceptable politics. I believe he must be condemned, challenged and fought by all who have made the vow never again! Sasha Simic London N16 Jacob Rees-Moggs body language I learned many years ago the joys of mining body language for insights into a subjects inner world. What a story leaps out of the picture of Jacob Rees-Mogg in Will Gores piece yesterday! Folded arms, looks of distaste, expressions of boredom, a private conversation behind him... surely he doesnt need enemies with friends and colleagues like that. Adrian Murray-Leslie Barlborough, Derbyshire There could be a way out Surely the common-sense solution is a Final Say referendum, using single transferable votes, and including Remain, no-deal Brexit and two or more soft Brexit options. The will of the people would then be seen to be done, no traitors, no treachery, simply democracy in action that everyone can get behind. Felicity Pollard Isle of Mull Dear Theresa May I would like to thank you for the hard work you have done and the tireless effort you continue to make to do the best thing for the country. You must be weary of people letting you down. Please know that there are millions like me who admire you and, whatever the outcome, wish you well. Jean Bergin Norwich Theresa, please dont ask for another extension If Theresa May writes to EU leaders pleading for a further extension, she will place us in an extraordinary position. Having been promised by our politicians that they would deliver Brexit as mandated, we shall instead be left reliant upon Emmanuel Macron to do us this service. Where we should have boldly taken our leave of the EU we would find ourselves only hoping that we have provoked leaders sufficiently that they throw us out. She would be indicating that, for her, no deal was never on the table, and so in practice, neither was Brexit. John Riseley Harrogate, North Yorkshire The real reason behind Brexit As speculation whirls around which of the increasingly numerous and flimsy options MPs might finally and randomly opt for, one seems to be gaining traction among the blindly optimistic that of Norway-style ie Efta membership. The issue of the free movement that goes 100 per cent hand in hand with this option is almost glossed over by those twittering about it. Why not? Reality is, after all, simply optional these days. What the optimists seem to forget and which they might have been reminded of if they had observed the similarities to a Trump crowd reflected in those around Westminster on non-exit day is that for many hardliners, Brexit was always mainly about xenophobia. Amanda Baker Edinburgh Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Communism is coming As a lifelong Labour supporter I regret to say that if Jeremy Corbyn is still at the head of the Labour Party with his communist friends, I will not be putting my cross in the Labour square. I, for one, do not want to see a communist government in this country. We must remember what happened in China with protesting students; they were driven at by tanks and attacked by the military. Some younger readers wont remember the communist government in Hungary which called in Russian troops to quell an uprising. There were dead bodies in the streets; buildings and homes destroyed. Corbyn, be honest and put yourself forward as the head of the Communist Party and see how many votes you get. M Kelly Oxford After 15 years of researching UK arms export policy, its rare that I am surprised by the UK governments capacity for sophistry and self-aggrandisement. Yet Jeremy Hunts recent claim that the consequences of the UK stopping selling arms to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen would be morally bankrupt left me temporarily speechless. According to the foreign secretary, its crucial that the UK maintain arms sales to one of the parties involved in the conflict as a result of Britains history and our values; if we did not, we would simply leave the parties to fight it out, while denouncing them impotently from the sidelines. This ongoing British preoccupation with our own esteem and anxiety around potency is a reminder of the "perils of mixing masculinity and missiles". This week's Channel 4 Dispatches programme provided a sobering insight (in spite of its all-male line up of talk heads) into how UK support for Saudi Arabia makes the war in Yemen possible and has directlycreated the worlds worst current humanitarian disaster. Making public the central role of expat BAE Systems technicians in facilitating Saudi bombing missions, and the unwillingness or inability of the UK Ministry of Defence to restrain Saudi targeting practices, the programme may help chip away at some of the governments self-serving rationales for its ongoing relationships in that region. The children wounded in Yemen's war Show all 15 1 /15 The children wounded in Yemen's war The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Ali Ashwal / Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Save the Children The children wounded in Yemen's war Save the Children Two clear issues have now emerged. The first is that targeting the civilian population appears to be a core component of the Saudi-led coalitions strategy in Yemen, rather than an accidental side-effect, though the Saudi state denies this. As the Yemen Safe Passage Group, which includes former ambassadors, diplomats and military officers with experience of working in Yemen, told Jeremy Hunt late last year, economic blockades and the military targeting of civilians are illegal under international law and yet central to Saudi strategy. These experts are clear that the UK should suspend arms exports until a sustainable peace has been assured. Second, much noise has been made about growing levels of UK humanitarian aid and our involvement in the push towards a peace process in an attempt to deflect criticism of UK arms export policy. Yet this effort to tally the balance sheet doesnt work: no amount of humanitarian aid can compensate for a strategy that relies on harming the civilian population physically, economically and psychologically. Despite its strenuous claims not to be party to the war, the nature of its interactions mean that the UK necessarily is materially, diplomatically and symbolically involved. When a former defence attache to Riyadh goes on Radio 4 to declare the UK complicit in the war, and urging a halt to arms sales - unilaterally if necessary - the government should know its in trouble. Instead, it appears to be doubling down on its dubious bet. Next week a campaign group is taking the government to court, challenging the legality of its arms export policy. Campaign Against Arms Trade initiated a judicial review two years ago, arguing that weapons sales to Saudi Arabia break the UKs own legal commitment not to export weapons where theres a clear risk they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Back then, the High Court found in favour of the government based on a flexible interpretation of risk in a process marked by a reliance on secret information and significant deference by the Court to the executive. Nonetheless, the Court of Appeal agreed with CAAT that there were grounds for them to challenge this finding, and the case returns to court next week. With two more years of evidence of civilian targets, significant moves by some other EU member states to restrict their exports to Saudi Arabia, and Congressional opposition growing in the US, this could prove a pivotal moment in the search for accountability in the war in Yemen and for UK arms export policy. Anna Stavrianakis is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex A garda spokeswoman said investigations into the incident were ongoing (Nick Potts/PA) An investigation is under way after shots were fired outside a school in Dublin. The incident happened at about 3.40pm on Tuesday afternoon in the Corduff area. Gardai said a lone gunman appeared to target a man in his twenties who was waiting outside Riversdale Community School on Blanchardstown Road North. A garda spokesman said nobody was injured in the attack and the gunman ran off in the direction of Corduff Grove. A number of people were arrested at the scene, but they were released following searches. Superintendent William Carolan, of Blanchardstown garda station, condemned the attack which he described as reckless. He said it had taken place in broad daylight at a time when school was just about to finish and students would have been exiting to be collected by parents. He appealed to anyone with any information to contact them. Gardai carried out a number of searches in the vicinity on Tuesday evening, with the assistance of the emergency response unit and armed support units. No further arrests were made. Local TD Jack Chambers said: There has been a recent escalation in violent crime in the West Dublin area as of late, but the fact that someone could consciously attempt to cause grave harm by firing gun shots outside a school in broad daylight marks a very alarming precedent. This latest incident will have proven traumatic for parents and students who were in the immediate vicinity. There is no doubt that innocent people felt frightened. Another shocking incident of pure violence in West Dublin. We need law and order with the urgent deployment of national units for the safety of local residents to support local Gardai. https://t.co/bBXBVUixmQ Jack Chambers TD (@jackfchambers) April 2, 2019 The Fianna Fail politician said local gardai were doing their best to increase their visibility, but he said additional resources were needed. For such an incident to occur in a residential area within yards of a school in the middle of a weekday afternoon is not normal and should not be treated as a normal part of everyday life, he added. Labour TD for Dublin West Joan Burton called on the Government to respond urgently to the shooting by increasing the resources for community policing, and clamping down on the spate of recent incidents locally. That someone could act with such impunity where children are being taught is deeply troubling, she said. Ms Burton added: We need more community policing urgently This type of shooting cannot be allowed become the norm. Theresa May: British PM is not giving up on her withdrawal deal. Picture: AFP Hopes that a majority of British politicians would embrace a soft Brexit were dashed last night as Parliament again rejected all pathways to leaving the EU. The deadlock in Westminster remains with just 10 days until the next Brexit deadline, fuelling fears that the UK will crash out of the union. Prime Minister Theresa May will discuss the crisis with her divided Cabinet today and is believed to want a fourth vote on her deal. There will consideration given the possibility of calling a general election to break the deadlock or whether to seek a long Brexit delay. Reacting to the latest developments, the European Parliament's Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt said a hard Brexit was "nearly inevitable". "On Wednesday, the UK has a last chance to break the deadlock or face the abyss." While the UK Parliament continues its internal battle, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar will be pleading with EU capitals to look favourably on a long Brexit extension rather than force a no-deal scenario. His conversations with leaders begin in Paris today where French President Emmanuel Macron is reported to be sceptical about allowing the UK to take part in European elections next month. Last night, Mr Varadkar said Brexit is at a "critical juncture". Read More Four options were presented to MPs in the House of Commons yesterday but all were rejected late last night. The House was heavily split on the idea of entering a customs union or common market arrangement with the EU. Both approaches would be welcomed in Dublin. The custom union, which was defeated by just three votes, would not solve the Irish Border question but it would guarantee smooth and tariff-free trade in goods across the Border. In order to maintain the status quo, the UK and Ireland would still have to negotiate a way of ensuring food and animal standards are aligned between Northern Ireland and the EU. Some 280 MPs voted in favour of a second referendum but 292 voted against. The Paris meeting between Mr Varadkar and Mr Macron is likely to be closely monitored in London. The French government is increasingly frustrated with events in the UK and wary of granting a lengthy Brexit extension. Mr Macron is also likely to seek assurances that Ireland will protect the EU's single market in the event of a disorderly Brexit. The Taoiseach has repeatedly acknowledged that this country has a responsibility to the remaining EU27 - but he has insisted this cannot be through border controls on the island of Ireland. He is expected to spend the coming days urging EU leaders to show patience while the UK tries to find a way forward, making the point a delay is better than no deal. Last night, Mr Varadkar said: "I am keen to discuss the possible scenarios arising from this week, particularly how the European Council should respond to a request for another extension and ongoing efforts to secure ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement. As I have indicated, it is now up to the UK to show how it plans to proceed." The part shift towards a softer Brexit was driven by the British Labour Party, which urged its MPs to back alternatives to Mrs May's deal. The DUP voted against all of the four alternative Brexit options last night. Holding her Cabinet and her party together is now proving to be an almost impossible task for Mrs May. She is under immense pressure from both party wings to decide whether to put her own deal forward for a fourth vote, or switch to a plan B. But she has been warned that ministerial resignations will be "unavoidable" if she picks either no deal or a customs union. Headwinds: EasyJet has often downplayed the likely risks from Brexit Shares in Ryanair fell 5pc in early trading after EasyJet warned that the uncertainty over Brexit is resulting weaker demand and increasing softness in ticket yields. EasyJet's caution in a first-half trading update spooked investors who have already seen Ryanair issue a profit warning back in January. Shares in EasyJet slumped as much as 10pc. Wizz Air also declined, shedding almost 2pc in early trading. Shares in Aer Lingus owner IAG also fell as much as 2pc. "For the second half we are seeing softness in both the UK and Europe, which we believe comes from macroeconomic uncertainty and many unanswered questions surrounding Brexit which are together driving weaker customer demand," said EasyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren. "We are operationally prepared for Brexit," he added. "Now that the EU parliament has passed its air connectivity legislation and together with the UK's confirmation that it will reciprocate, means that whatever happens, we'll be flying as usual." Mr Lundgren confirmed that EasyJet has also made progress on its EU ownership position, with more than 49.9pc of the carrier now owned by EU nationals or entities, excluding those from the UK. Under EU rules, more than 50pc of shares in an airline granted an operating licence by a member state must be held by EU nationals. EasyJet's sub-50pc EU ownership level is below that which would be required if there's a no-deal Brexit and no subsequent adjustment period for compliance with EU ownership requirements. Mr Lundgren said that EasyJet had performed in line with expectations during the first half of its financial year and should post a headline pre-tax loss of about 275m (321m). Total first-half revenue at the airline is expected to have grown by 7.3pc to 2.34bn (2.73bn), with seat capacity having grown by about 14.5pc. Revenue per seat on a constant currency basis is likely to have fallen by about 7.4pc in the period. Total headline costs are expected to have risen by about 18.8pc due to increased capacity and higher fuel unit costs. Brussels is demanding Britain promises to pay the EU billions of pounds even if the UK crashes out of the bloc in a no-deal Brexit in 11 days' time. The EU wants about 5.3bn (6.1bn) from Britain, UK officials said. The figure takes into account deductions from the British rebate and funding already paid back to Britain. The money would guarantee that the EU continues to pay out committed funding to British recipients, such as farmers and university researchers, until the end of 2019. "We hope to have it wrapped up this week," a senior EU source said yesterday, according to RTE. A British government promise to pay up is unlikely to be forthcoming this week. But there is recognition at UK government level that a price will have to be paid whether there is a deal or no deal to meet outstanding commitments. Last year, Philip Hammond, the UK chancellor, said withholding payment to the EU after no deal would damage Britain's prospects of striking free trade deals with other countries. "If we were to do so, we would effectively rule ourselves out as being regarded as reliable partners in future international deals of any kind, including trade deals." ( Daily Telegraph, London) You are here: China Nur Bekri, former head of the National Energy Administration, has been arrested for taking bribes, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) announced Tuesday. The National Supervisory Commission has completed an investigation of his case and handed it over to the procuratorial organ for review and prosecution, the SPP said. Nur Bekri was also former deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission. New advice has been issued today to people working in the construction industry, and those with UK driving licences, as the Government prepares for a No Deal Brexit. New advice has been issued today to people working in the construction industry, and those with UK driving licences, as the Government prepares for a No Deal Brexit. The latest advice issued this afternoon from Government for those working in construction and the building trade is urging them to review their supply chain to assess the degree to which they rely on materials coming from the UK and vice versa. If the businesses buy or sell materials to the UK, they are being advised they will need to prepare for a new customs arrangement, which will likely impact on their business. They are also being urged to check and ensure that certifications, licenses or authorisations that apply to their products now will be valid post a No Deal Brexit. Businesses are being warned that if they rely on UK notified bodies for certificates that demonstrate compliance with EU standards, they may no longer apply post a No Deal Brexit. In this instance, Irish businesses will need to arrange to either transfer existing certificates to a EU27 Notified Body or obtain new ones. They are also being warned to assess their businesses in relation to cashflow amid potential currency fluctuations post Brexit. Separately, in another statement from the Government, motorists who hold a UK drivers' licence and reside in Ireland are being urged to apply for an Irish drivers licence before April 12th. Immediately post a No Deal Brexit, UK drivers licences will no longer be valid in Ireland, and will mean the driver will have to sit their driving test again if they don't apply for an Irish licence before April 12th, the day the UK could leave the EU with no deal. Drivers are urged to contact the National Driver Licence Service for more details. UK licence holders who are visiting Ireland for up to 12 months will still have their licences recognised post Brexit. Further information is available on www.gov.ie/brexit. Simon Coveney TD, Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade speaking at the opening of Cork Airports new Airport Control Centre (ACC) and purpose-built office suite The Hub. Pic: Brian Lougheed Ireland will fight the risk of being dragged out of the EU single market after Brexit, Tanaiste Simon Coveney said today. Under pressure from opposition TDs, and as the Taoiseach met French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, Mr Coveney said he believed the risk of a no-deal crash-out Brexit is increasing. The Foreign Affairs Minister said the Government continues to make its plans to manage a no-deal end to Brexit in 10 days time on April 12. He said Ireland will act to defend the integrity of the EU single market, and he also said the UK was committed to giving special status to the North after Brexit to stave off a hard border. He said Ireland had stepped up no-deal preparations and the Cabinet will meet again at 8.30 this evening when the Taoiseach returns from his meeting in Paris. Mr Coveney added that in the case of a no-deal Ireland will have a dual obligation to manage the border issues and also protect the integrity of the EU single market. The Tanaiste also warned that Ireland will not tolerate a situation where mainland EU states impose controls on Irish exports. "Ireland is not going to allow a situation where the UK leaving the EU without a deal, drags Ireland out of the single market with it. That is not a runner," Mr Coveney stressed. Under questioning from Fianna Fail deputy leader, Dara Calleary, Mr Coveney said the Government would not tolerate a situation where border controls would be moved to mainland Europe to protect the single market. Mr Calleary said the series of deadlocked votes in the Westminster parliament, and comments by EU chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, strongly signalled that no-deal scenario was increasingly likely. The Mayo Fianna Fail TD said he still hoped no-deal can be avoided but he said the Government should be more open with the public about the risks and implications. "Nobody wants a hard Brexit but the indecision of the parliament in Westminster may land us in one whether by accident or design," Mr Calleary said. Theresa May is holding a marathon Cabinet session to try and break the Brexit deadlock, as EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said a no-deal withdrawal was becoming more likely by the day. The British Prime Minister is gathering her top team for crisis talks in Downing Street after MPs again failed to find a majority for a series of alternatives to her Brexit deal. A call for a customs union with the EU was rejected by just three votes, while a demand for a second referendum was defeated by 12 and a Norway-style deal put forward by Nick Boles by 21. Mr Barnier said the UK now had two options, quit the EU without a deal, or seek an extension to Article 50. Expand Close European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier holds a news conference after a General Affairs Council on Article 50 in Brussels, Belgium March 19, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier holds a news conference after a General Affairs Council on Article 50 in Brussels, Belgium March 19, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman Speaking in Brussels, Mr Barnier said: "If the UK Parliament does not vote in favour of the Withdrawal Agreement in the coming days only two options would remain. "Leaving without an agreement or requesting a longer extension of the Article 50 period." He added: "No deal was never our desired or intended scenario. "But the EU is now prepared." He said no deal "becomes day after day more likely". Mr Barnier said: "The UK may ask for another extension. Such an extension would carry significant risks for the EU. "Therefore a strong justification would be needed. "We have always said that we can accept a customs union, or relationship along the style of the Norway model. "In fact, however, the Political Declaration today can accommodate all of these options already. "It leaves the door open for a variety of outcomes. "But if the UK so wishes we are ready to rework the Political Declaration." Mr Barnier later told the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs that no-deal would disrupt EU/UK security co-operation. Expand Close Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay arrives in Downing Street, London, for a cabinet meeting. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay arrives in Downing Street, London, for a cabinet meeting. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire "We need to be aware of the implications of a no-deal for our security partnership," he told MEPs. "There will be a break in the level of talks, less mutual commitment, risks to intelligence pooling. There might be inconsistencies in applying sanctions regimes because of a low level of co-operation. "The UK would no longer be taking part in EU operations or in the European Defence Agency's capacity-building programmes." Mr Barnier said: "No-deal for some time poses the threat of there being no organised framework... Come what may, we must fend off the risk of strategic divergence." The comments came after a dramatic day in the Commons which saw Mr Boles declare that he would no longer sit as a Conservative MP as he blamed the party for refusing to compromise on a means of leaving the European Union. Cabinet is meeting on Tuesday for five hours to thrash out a way forward. The first three hours will be without civil servants, fuelling speculation the senior Tories could use the time to consider a snap election, the timing of the Prime Minister's exit from office or to air the bitter grievances between the Leave and Remain wings of the ministerial team. The failure of any option to gain a majority in the Commons left the UK no clearer about its direction with the prospect of a no-deal Brexit on April 12. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told MPs that if they wanted to secure a further delay from the European Union, the Government must be able to put forward a "credible proposition" as to what it would do. But he held out the prospect of leaving with a deal next month - as long as MPs back one. He said: "If the House were to agree a deal this week, it may still be possible to avoid holding European Parliamentary elections." Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock pleaded with MPs to back the Prime Minister's deal "and deliver Brexit". But European Parliament Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt said the votes meant "a hard Brexit becomes nearly inevitable". He suggested that Wednesday, when MPs may have a third attempt at reaching a majority, was the "last chance to break the deadlock or face the abyss". Labour chairman of the Commons Brexit Committee Hilary Benn said that if the PM did not announce she was seeking an Article 50 extension, MPs could try to force her to on Wednesday. Referring to an extension request, he told the BBC: "If she does not do so then there is an option available to the House of Commons to seek to legislate to require the Prime Minister to do that." After a debate disrupted by semi-naked climate change protesters in the public gallery, "indicative votes" were again held in an attempt to establish what outcome might have majority support among MPs following a similar process last week. MPs have control of proceedings in the Commons for a third time on Wednesday, but Speaker John Bercow said it was not yet clear what debates and votes will be staged. The EU parliaments Agriculture Committee has voted in favour of 100pc convergence of payments under CAP Post 2020 reforms. Fine Gael MEP and Vice President of the European Parliament Mairead McGuinness stated this morning that the result of the final vote on Pillar One of CAP reform was 27 members in favour, 17 against. MEPs had a straight choice between 100pc or 75pc convergence in payments to the national average. They voted that all per ha direct payments within their territories reach at least 75pc of their average direct subsidies by 2024 and 100pc by 2027. The push for 100pc convergence was backed by the Greens and left-leaning GUE/NGL coalition, of which Luke 'Ming' Flanagan is a member. Proposals from Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan proposed to limit convergence to 75pc of the national average - a position supported by the European People's Party to which Fine Gael is aligned. Both the IFA and ICMSA had warned that further convergence - Ireland moved to 60pc of the national average during the current CAP - would seriously undermine the viability of farmers in low-margin enterprises such as drystock and tillage. Other suggested changes, voted in favour of today by MEPs, included that Member states should be obliged to cap annual direct payments to farmers at the level of 100.000 but they may allow farmers to deduct 50% of agriculture-related salaries, including taxes and social contribution, from the total amount before the reduction. Further, at least 5pc of national direct payments envelope should be allocated for complementary redistributive income support to small and medium-sized farmers (maximum 65pc top-up per ha). States using more than 10pc of their direct payments budget for this support scheme, may decide not to apply the capping mechanism at all, says the adopted text. EU states should use at least 2pc of their direct payments budgets to support young farmers, the MEPs also voted. The per-ha top-up should be granted for the first seven years after the application. Further support could be granted from the rural development funding and member states could support young farmers investments, including land purchase, as a priority, MEPs say. Convergence On convergence, Mr Flanagan, who is an MEP for the Midlands NorthWest, maintained that it was not "rational or equitable to have farm support payments based on historic criteria two decades old". "In terms of defending the CAP budget going forward, it is not credible or defensible to the public that in 2027 we will be paying farmers based on their activities in 2002," he said. The Roscommon-based MEP also took aim at claims that the most productive farmers received the highest payments. "Data [from the Department of Agriculture] shows that despite payments ranging from 100/ha to 1,000/ha, there is only marginal difference in stocking rates. When looked at through the lens of output per euro received, it is clear that those on lower payments are in fact the most productive," he argued. However, Fine Gael MEP, Mairead McGuinness, cautioned that "those who paint convergence as simply taking from the rich to give to the poor ignore the complex reality at farm level". While accepting that many farmers on low-value entitlements will benefit from such a move, she said farmers who have only a small number of entitlements above the average level, but whose total payment is small, will lose under full convergence. "I am also concerned about the unintended consequence of convergence where full-time farm families with above-average entitlement value will lose money, while land owners with significant off-farm income will gain at their expense," Ms McGuinness said. In a recent letter to the Agriculture Minister Michael Creed, Ms McGuinness called for an impact assessment to be carried out on full convergence on family farm income and output and a detailed analysis of the changes in family farm structures. The minimum CAP payment has increased to 160/ha during the current CAP regime. Full convergence to the national average would be worth an additional 70-75/ha for farmers with low-value entitlements, while 75pc convergence would be worth an extra 40/ha. The IFA claimed the 60pc convergence applied in the current CAP programme had a "huge negative impact on those with relatively modest farms" and "disproportionately impacted" on the livestock, sheep and grain farmers who had built up the payments to compensate them for low commodity prices. While the IFA said it supported the concept of 75pc convergence, it insisted that it must be funded through "upwards only convergence". In a letter to the Agriculture Minister Michael Creed, Ms McGuinness called for an impact assessment to be carried out on full convergence on family farm income and output and a detailed analysis of the changes in family farm structures. The minimum CAP payment has increased to 160/ha during the current CAP regime. Full convergence to the national average would be worth an additional 70-75/ha for farmers with low-value entitlements, while 75pc convergence would be worth an extra 40/ha. The IFA claimed the 60pc convergence applied in the current CAP programme had a "huge negative impact on those with relatively modest farms" and "disproportionately impacted" on the livestock, sheep and grain farmers who had built up the payments to compensate them for low commodity prices. While the IFA said it supported the concept of 75pc convergence, it insisted that it must be funded through "upwards only convergence". ICOS has raised concerns over the planned Production Curbing System proposed by Agriculture MEP's in the reform of the Common Agriculture Policy. It says the supply management tool, which would apply to all economic sectors, including dairy, would impose a levy on farmers who increase their production, in order to finance an aid scheme for farmers who reduce their production, in times of market imbalance. ICOS has raised its strong opposition to this proposal among MEPs, which would be hugely damaging to Irish dairy farmers and co-operatives and would serve to undermine the significant on-farm and processing investments made by the industry in recent years, Alison Graham, ICOS European Affairs Executive. She was reacting to the outcome of the votes in the European Parliaments Agriculture Committee on proposals to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2020, which took place last night and this morning. Graham said that at every opportunity this Parliament has pushed for a return to supply management of the dairy sector through the use of such a tool, ignoring the market realities of the global supply-demand balance. There are more effective market management tools already on hand to prevent and address a market disturbance, which does not risk undermining the investment and sustainability of the European dairy sector. "We hope that the next Parliament can undo this damaging trend and focus on policy stability so that farmers and the agri-food industry can focus instead on meeting new and evolving environmental objectives," she said. Supply Management has support from some quarters in Europe. The European Milk Board has said that the European milk market is under considerable pressure from volumes, with milk supply manifestly exceeding demand. It claims that while the EU Commission has been trying to stabilise the market with export refunds and by storing vast quantities of butter and milk powder, these measures have already cost hundreds of millions of Euros and have not prevented the slump in the milk price. Its position is that it is not enough to be active on the sales level and that the production volume has to be reduced. LacPatrick was formed from the merger of Town of Monaghan Dairy in the Republic and Ballyrashane Dairy in the North. It processes more than 600 million litres of milk from more than 1,000 farmers, roughly half on each side of the Border Lakeland Dairies and LacPatrick Co-operative have formally completed the merger of the two societies. The new society formed by the merger is to be called Lakeland Dairies Co-operative Society Limited and will be known as Lakeland Dairies. Lakeland Dairies is now the second largest dairy processor on the island of Ireland with a cross-border milk pool of 1.8bn litres, produced by 3,200 farms from a catchment area covering 16 counties. The co-operative will have a combined annual turnover in excess of 1bn. A Transitional Board has been established (including Lakeland and LacPatrick Board members) to cover the initial 12-month period post-merger. At the first Board meeting of the new Society, Alo Duffy was appointed chairman of the co-operative together with two vice-chairs, Colin Kelso and Alan McCay. Michael Hanley, the current CEO of Lakeland Dairies, will continue to serve as the Group CEO in the new society. Mr Hanley stated that after completing a lengthy merger process, it must now focus its efforts on driving the business forward and delivering the strongest possible milk price for the farmer. Significant work will have to take place to make the new organisation as efficient as possible and to return the strongest possible milk price back to dairy farmers in line with market conditions. We will leave no stone unturned to ensure that we establish the most effective platform from which to conduct our business in the future. Lakeland Dairies is farmer owned and farmer controlled and we exist for the benefit of our milk producers. We are now bringing all of our capabilities together into a single and unified organisation whereby we will create new efficiencies and economies of scale as we continue to serve our valued customers throughout the world. Alo Duffy stated the merger was a historic and progressive development A renewed call for dog owners to keep their pets under control was made last week after another dog was shot after it was found worrying sheep in a field on the Cooley peninsula. Local farmer and IFA Rural Development chairman, Matthew McGreehan told The Argus that the dog was spotted in the field at Grange with pregnant ewes, some of which were actually giving birth. 'It was attacking the ewes and luckily enough Eoin White, chairperson of the Louth IFA sheepfarmers, was passing and raised the alarm,' says Matthew. 'A neighbour who had a gun then shot the dog before it could do any more damage.' He said that the sheep, which had been checked by the farmer who owned them a short time earlier, were very badly traumatised and some of them were physically injured. 'There were about 60 sheep in the field at the time of the attack. Some of them had lambs with them and others were actually in labour.' The dog warden was notified and the owner was traced as the dog was micro chipped and had accepted responsibility. 'It was an Alsatian/German Sheppard and we are seeing more of these restricted breeds,' said Matthew. 'The dog was on its own which shows that dogs will attack sheep on their own and don't have to be with other dogs, contrary to what people may think.' He said when farmers shoot dogs which are attacking their sheep they do so humanely. 'Sheep which are killed by dogs get an awful death - they are pulled asunder. There have even been cases of pet lambs being killed which is very upsetting for children.' He also called for tighter laws in regarding the micro-chipping of dog and for the setting up of an all-island data base and more for resources for the dog warden service so that it can give an after hours service. The contents of grain silos which burst from flood damage are shown in Fremont County Iowa, U.S., March 29, 2019. Photo taken March 29, 2019. REUTERS/Tom Polansek The Black Hawk military helicopter flew over Iowa, giving a senior US agriculture official and US senator an eyeful of the flood damage below, where yellow corn from ruptured metal silos spilled out into the muddy water. But it has no program to cover the catastrophic and largely uninsured stored-crop losses from the widespread flooding, triggered by the bomb cyclone that hit the region in mid-March. Congress would have to pass legislation to address the harvests lost in the storm, according to Northey and a USDA statement to Reuters. Its not traditionally been covered, he said. But weve not usually had as many losses. Indigo Ag, an agriculture technology company, identified 832 on-farm storage bins within flooded Midwest areas. They hold an estimated 5 million to 10 million bushels of corn and soybeans - worth between $17.3 million to $34.6 million - that could have been damaged in the floods, the company told Reuters. Across the United States, farmers held soybean stocks of 2.716 billion bushels as of March 1, the largest on record for the time period, the USDA said on Friday. Corn stocks were the third-largest on record. Some Congress members have expressed interest in pursuing legislation to provide aid for damaged crops in storage, Northey said. But passing legislation could require a lengthy political process in the face of an urgent disaster, U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley told farmers at a meeting in Malvern, Iowa. If we have to pass a bill to do it, I hate to tell you how long that takes, said the senator from Iowa, who joined Northey on the helicopter tour. With farm incomes declining for years before the flood, many farmers had planned to sell their grain in storage for money to live, pay their taxes or finance operations, including planting this spring. THROWING AWAY CROPS From the helicopter, piloted by National Guard members, officials surveyed miles of flooded fields in Iowa, littered with lawn chairs, fuel tanks, furniture, tires and other flood debris. Farmers will have to destroy any grains that were contaminated by floodwater, which could also prevent some growers from planting oversaturated fields. Near Crescent, Iowa, farmer Don Rief said the flood damaged more than 60,000 bushels of his grain, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He tried to move the crops before the flood, but dirt roads were too soft from the storm to support trucks. We were just hurrying like hell, Rief said. Hopefully USDA will come in and minimize some of the damage. The USDA does not have a program that covers flood-damaged grain because farmers have typically received more advance notice of rising waters, allowing them to move crops and limit losses, said Tom Vilsack, who ran the agency under former President Barack Obama. In this case, floods inundated fields quickly after multiple levees failed when rain and melting snow filled the Missouri River and other waterways. The frozen ground was unable to soak up the water. Near Percival, Iowa, railroad tracks leading up to a grain facility were flooded and broken. A Deere & Co (DE.N) dealership, Wendys restaurant, Motel 6 and gas station nearby were also underwater, along with homes, cars and farm equipment. Some farmers moved machinery such as tractors on to highways to keep it out of the path of the floods. The equipment was still parked there during the flyover on Friday. DISASTER RELIEF GAP About 416,000 acres of cropland across six counties in Iowa were flooded, said Amanda De Jong, state executive director for the USDA Iowa Farm Service Agency. Of that, about 309,000 acres will be eligible for the federal program that helps farmers and ranchers remove debris left by natural disasters on farmlands, De Jong said last week. She estimated the program would need about $34m to clean up the fields. Iowas agriculture secretary Mike Naig said the US government also should help compensate farmers for some of the grain that was damaged. This is clearly a gap that we think needs to be addressed, said Naig, who accompanied Grassley and Northey in the chopper. Time is short for a solution, said Carol Vinton, supervisor of Mills County, Iowa, one of the states two most heavily damaged counties. Vinton said she was getting calls from farmers whose grain was damaged and are worried about making good on previously signed contracts to deliver those crops to elevators. The USDA wants to do everything it can to help farmers hurt by the disaster, Northey said. They spent all last year raising that crop, putting it in the bin and they maybe already have it marketed, he said. And now theyre going to have to spend time just to get rid of it - just to clean the place up. THE State-owned AIB has pushed ahead with a 1bn sale of bad loans that controversially includes around 200 family home mortgages as well as thousands of buy-to-lets. The bank concluded the sale of so-called non-performing exposures to US fund Cerberus for around 80 cents in the euro. The portfolio consists of loans linked to 2,200 customers and 5,000 assets. The collateral is mainly buy-to-let and investment properties but includes some farm land. In around 10pc of cases the mortgage on borrowers' family homes is included because it "is cross-secured to wider commercial connected debt", AIB said. The sale excluded restructured deals where the borrower has kept up with their new payments The average debt among the borrowers is 500,000. The loans were bought by Everyday Finance, an affiliate of Cerberus Capital Management, one of the most prolific investors in Irish distressed debt since the crash. The sale is the first time AIB has included customers' soured home loans in a portfolio sale but follows a precedent set by Permanent TSB. Around 95pc of the loans have been non-performing for over two years, and 80pc of the debt has not been serviced in five years, AIB said. Largely State-owned AIB pressed ahead with the sale despite proposed legislation going through the Dail that will restrict such sales. The Sinn Fein-backed 'No Consent, No Sale' Bill is intended to give borrowers a veto over their mortgage being sold. However, AIB, like all Irish lenders with big stocks of bad boom-era loans, is under pressure from European regulators to clean up its balance sheet fast. The bank said it is on track to cut the share of its total lending made up of bad loans to 5pc by the end of 2019. You are competing with your jealous colleague for a promotion. It is likely that you will succeed as more colleagues support you. Your opponent understands that a stable, harmonious, and calm work environment is favorable to you and unfavorable for him. To defeat you, your colleague uses all kinds of dirty tricks to create chaos, turmoil and trouble for you. This kind of workplace politics is almost identical to Venezuelan politics. Juan Guaido, the self-declared president, has been trying his best to destabilize the oil-rich South American country by organizing street protests against the government, attempting to bring in the so-called "humanitarian aid" from the United States, and inviting external forces to intervene in any way. Since Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, Venezuela has been highly debated by international media. On the political front, Chavez carried out the so-called Bolivarian Revolution. This political process is named after Simon Bolivar, an early 19th-century Venezuelan and Latin American revolutionary leader. On the economic front, Chavez strengthened government regulations and implemented nationalization policies. On the social development front, he spent a tremendous amount of money on improving the well-being of the poor people. On the international stage, he strongly opposed the U.S. hegemony by standing alongside Cuba and other left-wing nations in Latin America. The reactions to these policies were mixed. The vulnerable people were happy as their living conditions improved, while the business sector opposed the government's programs that discouraged private investment. Moreover, U.S.-Venezuela relations became all the more antagonistic. This could explain why the U.S. was behind the scene of an unsuccessful military coup against Chavez in April 2002. After Chavez died in March 2013, Nicolas Maduro became the Venezuelan President. However, the new leader came to power at a bad time. The dramatic fall of the oil prices, from a peak of US$115 per barrel in June 2014 to under US$35 at the end of February 2016, worsened the economic situation thereafter. Economic development can only take place in a harmonious society with stable political conditions. However, Venezuela was suffering from political confrontations between the government and the U.S.-supported opposition. Since Guaido declared he is the "legitimate" leader of Venezuela, the multiple crises in the political, economic, social and diplomatic fields of the country have become all the more unmanageable. U.S. President Trump, Vice President Pence, and other senior officials have said that in order to deal with the situation in Venezuela "all options are on the table," meaning that the U.S. might use military means to overthrow President Maduro. Apart from verbal criticisms, the U.S. has tightened its economic sanctions against Venezuela, leading to more hardships for the Venezuelan government. Repeated blackouts in recent days have weakened President Maduro's hold on office. Maduro accuses the U.S. and the opposition of plotting these sabotages. No matter whether this accusation is supported by proofs or not, Guaido and his supporters are glad to see that similar incidents will take place from time to time because chaos and turmoil can weaken the legitimacy of President Maduro. Which incident will be the last straw that broke the camel's back is anyone's guess. China has been criticized for its economic ties with Venezuela. Such criticism is groundless. As sovereign nations, China can develop economic relations with any country in the world, and the same is true for Venezuela. Moreover, both the Chinese investment in Venezuela and the oil-loan swap between the two sides are beneficial to the economic and social development of the South American nation. As a matter of fact, China's economic relations with Venezuela developed years before Chavez came to power. This kind of cooperation is based on mutual benefits and a win-win principle. What do the Venezuelan people need? Do they need Chinese investment and loans or American economic sanctions? The answer is crystal clear! China's policy towards Venezuela is clear and straight-forward: The future is in the hands of the people, and international laws, as well as the Venezuelan constitution, must be respected. Guaido must understand that confrontations between the opposition and the government will harm both sides and the people. Political dialogues and compromise is the only way out of this terrible situation now. It is reported that President Maduro has agreed to talk to Guaido and President Trump for a solution to the dangerous situation in Venezuela. However, the benign offer has fallen on deaf ears. The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/jiangshixue.htm Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn. If you would like to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinion@china.org.cn THE Central Bank paid online bookings site hotels.com more than 540,000 (all figures include Vat) in fees for its travelling staff last year. The 540,499 payment to the Expedia firm is part of a 1.5m spend by the Central Bank on travel and hotels last year for its staff. The vast bulk of the meetings relate to the work of the Eurosystem/European Central Bank and EU Supervisory Committees. The largest payment by the Central Bank was the 715,143 paid to corporate travel consultants FCM Travel Solutions. The 1.5m spend also includes 194,131 to Aer Lingus, 50,307 to hotel platform roomex.com and 24,799 to Ryanair. A spokesman for the Central Bank said yesterday that in line with Government circulars the bank used the services of a travel agent - FCM Travel Solutions - during 2018. The spokesman said: "The bank used FCM's systems for arranging flights and hotel accommodation, in addition to FCM's travel booking services to arrange travel on a limited, as needs arise, basis. "The amounts paid to FCM include the costs of flights and hotels paid directly by FCM on the bank's behalf in addition to the related FCM service fee." He added: "In line with our travel policy, Central Bank staff overnight accommodation is offered in line with public sector policies and spend limits. "In order to secure the most competitive rates, the bank uses a range of sources to secure the most suitable and competitively priced accommodation - one of which is Hotels.com. "Where practicable, the bank's policy is to book 'reasonably priced' business class hotel accommodation." He said the bank's work necessitates attendance at international meetings. The Central Bank also paid Sodexo Ireland 3.54m for providing catering services for the bank's 2,000 staff at North Wall Quay, Spencer Dock and Sandyford in Dublin. Kildare County Council has put on hold plans by Intel for a new $4bn (3.53bn) manufacturing fabrication facility at its Leixlip plant. This follows the planning authority seeking further information from the chip giant on its ambitious plan. The primary issue in the request concerns Eirgrid's plan for a new 220KV sub-station to connect the Maynooth Woodland transmission line to the Intel campus, pictured, either overground or underground, across the Rye Water. Eirgrid requires planning permission from An Bord Pleanala to construct the connection and the council pointed out that a planning application has yet to be lodged for the project. The impacts from that are to form part of a revised Natura Impact Statement to be lodged to examine the combined impacts of the Intel plan and the Eirgrid scheme. The council has also requested Intel to respond to issues raised by third parties making submissions. The small number of those to make submissions include farmer Thomas Reid. It is the latest Intel Leixlip application the farmer has objected to since 2012, with six previous Intel applications brought before An Bord Pleanala by Mr Reid. Ireland issued its first 'green bond' last year along with Belgium and Lithuania and the market is set to grow further when the Netherlands sells its first issue in May. Governments are selling more green bonds so as to tackle climate change and to provide finance for sustainable growth and investment. Although the market for sovereign sales remains small, it is growing rapidly, according to Canadian credit rating agency DBRS. The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) raised 3bn from last year's sale and demand came in at almost four times that level as the agency tapped new sources of demand. Investors based in France, for example, accounted for 19pc of demand compared with an average of 8pc over the past 10 NTMA sovereign debt sales. Half the investment in that bond came from investors or pools of capital that were new to NTMA issuance, The NTMA indicated that it would sell into last year's issue and possibly seek to raise another 1bn by doing so early in 2019. "The result of our inaugural syndication of a Sovereign Green Bond last year means that this type of instrument will likely be a key element of our strategy," a spokesman said. With the issue from the Netherlands, there will be six European states as sellers of green bonds. Although the surge of interest in Europe last year, which saw Ireland, Belgium and Lithuania sell environmental bonds in 2018, lifted sovereign issuance volumes by 52pc to a total of $16.3bn (14.5bn), the asset class accounts for just 1pc of European government bond issuance. France's first sovereign green bond for 7bn in 2017 remains the largest issue and DBRS said it expects the Netherlands to come in at 4bn-6bn. "The rising trend in sovereign green bond issuance shows the commitment of several European governments to contribute to the implementation of the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted in 2015," DBRS said. Even though the State looks set to miss its 2020 carbon reduction target, there is 23bn of planned spending on green projects through to 2027. European financial institutions were the leading green bond issuers last year and the euro was the top currency. There has been a push from legislation in the EU too, around a green bond classification plan, the incorporation of sustainability in requirements for banks and insurance companies, as well as for greater transparency in corporate reporting around the issue. DBRS said it expected Europe to continue to lead the way as a result. State-backed life sciences investment fund Malin has assets of 404m at 31 December 2018. The group said several of its assets have important milestones this year, which have the potential to create significant value for shareholders. Malins corporate cash balance was 43m at the end of the year, while its debt balance with the European Investment Bank was 55m, according to its annual results. Darragh Lyons, chief business and financial officer, said: "We are pleased by the operational and clinical progress made by our priority assets during 2018, with several advancing towards important clinical and regulatory milestones over the next year. We will continue to work closely with these companies to support them as they progress towards these catalysts, which have the potential to create significant value for our shareholders. We remain committed to returning capital to shareholders following a significant asset realisation." In November last year the group said it would not hire a new CEO after former CEO Adrian Howd departed the company in October, and will instead look for a chief investment officer. The State is an investor in Malin via the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund. The State's own insurance arm has failed in an attempt to have a legal case heard in secret about information it holds on almost 30,000 claims. Irish Public Bodies Mutual Insurance (IPB) is one of the largest insurers in the State. It insures local authorities, the HSE and other public bodies, and is also owned by these bodies. Other insurers do not generally get this insurance business. IPB has been denied an application to have a High Court case about disclosure of documents held in secret. IPB wants to block an independent insurance campaigner getting access to information on whether is it offering good value to the State bodies that insure with it. IPB handles personal injuries claims for county councils. Between 2012 to the first half of 2017, local authorities received over 29,000 compensation claims. Most were for slips and trips on footpaths and damage caused by potholes. At least 387m was spent on behalf of local authorities settling claims from 2012 to June 2017, according to data collated by RTE Investigates. Insurance expert Dorothea Dowling used Freedom of Information legislation to try and get access to a value-for-money report on IPB written by consultants PwC. The report was commissioned by the Local Government Managers Association (LGMA), the State body that provides services to councils. Ms Dowling is questioning why insurance cover for the local authorities and other public bodies that use IPB is not going out to public tender to secure the most competitive premium, in keeping with public procurement requirements. She was given some documents, but refused others. She appealed to the information commissioner, and there was a finding in her favour. But the LGMA, which commissioned the PwC report on IPB, would not give her access to a number of the documents. This was despite the findings of the Office of the Information Commissioner. IPB Insurance took a High Court case to stop the information commissioner forcing LGMA to release all the PwC documents. Ms Dowling was joined as a notice party and defended herself. Last Friday Mr Justice Charles Meenan found in favour of the information commissioner and Ms Dowling, by rejecting the IPB application to have the case heard "otherwise than in public". A full hearing is yet to come before the High Court on the attempt to block Ms Dowling having full access to the PwC documents. Ms Dowling was the founding chairperson of the State's Personal Injuries Assessment Board, until 2014. She headed up the Motor Insurance Advisory Board, a statutory investigation into the cost of insurance which reported in April 2002 and led to a 40pc reduction in insurance costs. She is completing a PhD on insurance companies and their accounting practices. Ms Dowling said she was delighted at the court decision. "This is all about blocking the release of information on the spending of public money," she said. It is understood insurer IPB and the LGMA are concerned that the PwC report contains commercially sensitive information. They argue they are entitled to be the exclusive insurer of local authorities, State education bodies and the HSE as they are owned by them, and IPB pays these bodies dividends. Mass sale: Some 282 apartments in the Citywest development are being sold in one block First-time buyers will be deprived of the chance to buy almost 300 apartments at one of the countrys biggest new developments. The 282 properties, which are still under construction at the Citywest Quarter development just outside Dublin, have been put up for sale in one block by builder Cairn Homes. Selling homes to big funds which then rent them out en masse has become increasingly common in this country as the housing crisis continues to spiral. The narrative around such funds involvement in Irish property has largely focused on vultures, which have bought non-performing loans at a low price in the hope of making a quick profit. However, another type of investment fund has also emerged, focusing on long-term investments in Irish property by buying homes and renting them out for years. Critics of the practice say it deprives aspiring home-buyers of a chance to buy a home, in the way that cuckoos elbow fledgling birds from their nest. The proposed Cairn sale is the latest in a series of similar transactions. Last week, the countrys biggest landlord, a property investment company called Ires Reit, snapped up 118 family homes in the Dublin suburbs in a single deal from builder Glenveagh. The UN recently criticised the practice of selling homes to investors en masse. In a scathing assessment of the housing market, UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing Leilani Farha wrote to the Government, accusing it of facilitating the financialisation of housing through preferential tax laws and through weak tenant protections, among other measures. Ireland was one of five countries singled out by the UN. "Almost overnight, multinational private equity and asset management firms like Blackstone have become the biggest landlords in the world, purchasing thousands and thousands of units," the UN said. "They have changed the global housing landscape. Pouring unprecedented amounts of capital into housing, they have converted homes into financial instruments and investments." Read More The UN said properties often deemed "undervalued" - which generally means affordable to those living there - are being purchased en masse, renovated and then offered at a higher rental rate, pricing tenants out of their own homes and communities. "Landlords have become faceless corporations wreaking havoc with tenants' right to security and contributing to the global housing crisis," the UN said. At Citywest, Cairn is looking to find an institutional buyer, and has put a guide price of 90m on the deal, equating to just under 320,000 each on average. Apart from the 282 apartments, the Citywest Quarter will also contain around 170 separate units, which will be offered for sale to individuals. In the past decade thousands of homes have been bought by the new class of institutional landlords - including now familiar names like Ires Reit and Kennedy Wilson. In fact the transformation of the private rental sector appears to be only beginning. Property expert CBRE said last month that as much as 5bn is now targeting so-called build-to-rent (BTR) opportunities in Ireland's residential market. This sees the funds build properties with the idea of renting them out, potentially buying sites ahead of other developers who might give people the chance to buy. Kennedy Wilson's director of Irish operations Peter Collins has said his company wants to have 5,000 units let out here within four years. The company currently has just over 2,000 units built or subject to planning here. Meanwhile, another fund, Hines, is looking to build 1,269 BTR apartments in Cherrywood, Dublin. As for Ires Reit, it had almost 2,700 units let out as of the end of last year. Separately, State-owned AIB has pushed ahead with a 1bn sale of bad loans that controversially includes around 200 family home mortgages as well as thousands of buy-to-lets. The bank concluded the sale of so-called non-performing exposures to US fund Cerberus for around 80c in the euro. AIB, like all Irish lenders with big stocks of bad boom-era loans, is under pressure from European regulators to clean up its balance sheet fast. The portfolio consists of loans linked to 2,200 customers and 5,000 assets. The collateral is mainly buy-to-let and investment properties but includes some farm land. In around 10pc of cases the mortgage on borrowers' family homes is included because it "is cross-secured to wider commercial connected debt", AIB said. Lawyers for ousted Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn on Tuesday asked a Tokyo court that he stand trial for alleged financial wrongdoing separately from his former employer, saying he would not get a fair hearing otherwise. The request marks the first major legal manoeuvre by Ghosn's new legal team, which took over his case in February and is headed by a high-profile defence lawyer, Junichiro Hironaka, widely know as "the razor" for his courtroom prowess. Ghosn was arrested in Tokyo in November after Nissan told prosecutors its own internal investigation uncovered evidence of wrongdoing. The Japanese automaker subsequently ousted Ghosn as chairman. Along with Ghosn and Greg Kelly, a close Ghosn associate who served as a director on Nissan's board, prosecutors have also indicted the company itself for making false disclosures in annual securities reports, for which it has expressed regret. "No matter how you look at it, having Ghosn sit alongside Nissan at the trial would be peculiar, it would go against his right to a fair trial," Hironaka told a briefing. Ghosn faces criminal charges in Japan over failing to report around $82m (73m) in salary from Nissan, and for temporarily transferring personal financial losses onto Nissan's books during the global financial crisis. Both Ghosn and Kelly have denied the wrongdoing. Hironaka told the briefing that his team wanted Ghosn's case separated from that of Kelly's because Kelly is a potential key witness for the Ghosn defence. Meghan and Harry have set up their own official - and joint - Instagram account. The couple, who are expecting a baby this month, said @SussexRoyal would be used to share the work that drives them, and important announcements. The move comes as they are splitting their household from the William and Kate, whose Instagram account is @KensingtonRoyal. Meghan and Harry's new household will be based at Buckingham Palace, while William - a future King - and Kate will remain at Kensington Palace. In a message on their first post, Harry and Meghan thanked people for their support, saying: "Welcome to our official Instagram; we look forward to sharing the work that drives us, the causes we support, important announcements, and the opportunity to shine a light on key issues. "We thank you for your support, and welcome you to @sussexroyal."- Harry & Meghan." It was accompanied by an image bearing a white version of couple's royal cypher - the entwined initials H and M below a coronet - on a navy background. Kensington Palace's Twitter feed introduced the new account, saying: "Welcome to Instagram, SussexRoyal!" Harry and Meghan's first post also included a gallery of photos of them on engagements around the world, including on trips to Australia and Fiji. The new @SussexRoyal Instagram account notched up nearly 300,000 followers within an hour of launching - including Meghan's best friend Jessica Mulroney and celebrities David Beckham and Gwyneth Paltrow. Expand Close Harry and Meghan have a new Instagram account / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Harry and Meghan have a new Instagram account Video of the Day Princess Eugenie posted a picture of Harry and Meghan on her own account with the message "Welcome cousins. @sussexroyal". Former actress Meghan revealed only last month that she does not read newspapers or engage with Twitter to avoid getting "muddled" by the "noise", whether positive or negative. The duchess's admission came when she joined a panel of feminists and national figures to mark International Women's Day. She told the audience: "It's our responsibility to make a choice on what we click on, we make a choice of what we read, we make a choice of what we engage in, that's our personal decision to not be there for negativity, to be more positive and action-based. "And for me that's a tricky one because I'm not part of any of that." Ex-Suits star Meghan used to have her own personal Twitter and Instagram accounts, as well as a lifestyle website thetig.com, but closed them down ahead of her wedding to Harry. The Sussexes' new Instagram account has been introduced less than a month after the royal family published new guidelines for members of the public interacting with them on social media. It warned that trolls who post offensive or abusive messages on official royal channels will be blocked, and may even be reported to the police. This followed news that Kensington Palace staff were spending hours each week moderating online abuse aimed at Kate and pregnant Meghan. Some of the worst, hate-filled personal abuse is said to be between rival fans of the duchesses. The royal family's website said the guidelines were introduced to try to maintain a safe environment on channels run by the three households, and it called for users to show "courtesy, kindness and respect". Harry warned against the perils of social media at the WE Day UK event in March. He told schoolchildren and students at the SSE Arena in Wembley, London: "If we look at the world we're living in, I know it can feel challenging sometimes, but your role is to shine the light. "Every day you are inundated with an over-exposure of advertising and mainstream media, social media and endless comparisons, distorting the truth, and trying to manipulate the power of positive thinking. "But you don't let them sway you." At the moment, Harry and Meghan do not have a separate Twitter account, but their names have been removed from the @KensingtonRoyal Twitter account bio, which now reads: "The official account of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Royal Foundation, based at Kensington Palace." @Sussexroyal on Twitter is not associated with the royal family, and is used by a Kevin Keiley, who currently has 26 followers and whose bio reads simply "Sussex". This is now likely to receive scores of notifications thanks to Harry and Meghan's new identical Instagram handle. Dakota Johnson was apparently not the only Fifty Shades of Gray star to use a body double. Jamie Dornan reportedly had Peter James Gray stand in for him in some of his body shots in the hit erotic romance. The Canadian model and actor has not listed his involvement in the film on his IMDB profile but The Sun reports that he kept it secret so as not to impact his own acting career. His spokesman told The Sun, "he's now pursuing a serious acting career so I'd prefer to keep the emphasis on that." Expand Close Peter J Gray and Blake Lively in 'Age of Adeline' / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Peter J Gray and Blake Lively in 'Age of Adeline' The aptly-named Gray was most recently seen starring opposite Blake Lively in period romance Age of Adeline. He also appeared in slasher film Girl House. Flash The world's population is projected to reach around 9.7 billion in 2050 and rise further to about 11 billion by the end of the century, according to a UN report released Monday. "The world's population, estimated at 7.7 billion in 2019, continues to grow, albeit at a decreasing rate. It is projected to continue growing, reaching around 9.7 billion in 2050 and rising further to roughly 11 billion by the end of the century," said the UN report. The UN report is titled "Review and Appraisal of the Program of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and its contribution to the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development." The report was submitted by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the 52nd substantive session of the UN Commission on Population and Development, which was held on Monday. "The continued increase in global population and an expected rise in prosperity will place additional pressure on natural resources and ecosystems," the report said. "The world's population is becoming larger, older, more mobile and more spatially concentrated than ever before," according to the report. This year marks the 25th anniversary of a landmark achievement in global cooperation -- the adoption of the Program of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo of Egypt in 1994. The finale is coming. Game Of Thrones actor Aidan Gillen has said he is hoping that the show's ending will "surprise" fans of the fantasy series. Season eight will be aired on HBO on April 14 and Gillen, who played Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish, said he thinks a happy ending would be "strange" but hopes characters such as Arya and Bran Stark, who have been dealt the worst cards, will get one. "Happy ending," he said when asked what kind he'd like to see. Expand Close Aidan Gillen as Littlefinger in Game of Thrones / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Aidan Gillen as Littlefinger in Game of Thrones "I mean a happy ending would be really strange, wouldn't it? Maybe that's what it is. "I've always been fond of Sansa Stark despite, you know, the way things went. "I honestly don't know. At the start, when we started shooting it, it seemed like Tyrion, Arya Stark, Bran Stark you know, people who had the worst things done to them [would win] but I just think even that is too predictable. "Hopefully, it'll be something surprising, that's all I know." Speaking to Bang Showbiz, the Drumcondra man added he thinks there is little chance that anyone will emerge as a winner. "There's all this stuff about who's going to win. I think that changed a few seasons ago, you know, the whole idea of it being a game, the winning - that there can be a winner, or a loser just seemed to go out the window," he said. Video of the Day "It shifted and became about something else, so other than that I hope it's something really surprising and, you know, shocking." He said season one showed there is always a twist in the plot, and he reckons something similar could be in store for the final episode. "Maybe you'd hope it's going to be something like these strokes that the creators pull that make the show such a big deal in the first place that they can do it again," Gillen said. "They did it with Sean Bean's character in season one. That's where people really kind of sat forward and thought this is something we haven't really had to deal with before." Gillen met a grisly end in the show when he came up against the Stark sisters Arya and Sansa, played by Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner. Sophie Turner revealed over the weekend in an interview that she was paid less than her co-star Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow in the fantasy drama series. However, she didn't think it was unfair because the actor had to film 70 nights straight during the shoot for the ninth season. "Kit got more money than me but he had a bigger storyline," said the 23-year-old. "And for the last series, he had something crazy like 70 night shoots and I didn't have that many." Upset: Annie Murphy said she was saddened to learn of the allegations that have been levelled against Bishop Casey The former lover of Bishop Eamonn Casey, who bore a son to the cleric, said she is "shocked and saddened" at accusations of child sexual abuse against him. Annie Murphy unleashed a scandal within the Catholic Church in 1992, when she named the then-Bishop of Galway as the father of her son, Peter. Ms Murphy, now in her late 60s, told the Irish Independent she had been informed of the latest scandal to hit the late bishop. It is understood Peter, now in his 40s, had first read about the latest allegations and informed his mother. "I'm shocked and saddened," said Ms Murphy, who lives in California. "They [the abuse survivors] have to be heard. "I don't think I can say anything else, as I think it would be unfair [to the survivors]," she added. Four separate people have alleged Bishop Casey abused them as children. A woman who accepted a redress settlement has passed away. Another woman reportedly received a six-figure sum and signed a non-disclosure agreement. Two other women, who live in London, have also reportedly contacted the Church regarding allegations of abuse during the 1960s when Bishop Casey was based there. Ms Murphy yesterday recalled sparking a scandal, striking into the heart of the Catholic Church, when she stayed true to her promise of ensuring Bishop Casey recognised he had fathered a child to her. The family are upset by the latest scandal but Ms Murphy made it clear this issue was about giving the survivors a voice. In 2017, she told the Irish Independent: "It was contentious. He (Casey) had to acknowledge Peter and it ended up a dreadful fight. "It was unfortunate. But I did say to him you must acknowledge your son. "When I left him it was many years ago and I was about 25. "And I told him, 'If you don't acknowledge him, I will fight. That is the only reason I will go at you. I won't stop'. "I knew what I would do. I know myself I am not petty," she said. She had told Bishop Casey then that "I'm not going to fight with you but if somebody... it's human nature... if you have a child and they're going to go at them and I said 'No, you can't do that'. I have to do it. I have to do this". Ms Murphy had no idea of any of the latest allegations about Bishop Casey until they were published, and she was left shocked. Eamonn Casey died in March 2017, at 89 years of age. A former Christian Brother teacher has been jailed for two years for sexual assaults on two children in the 1980s. A judge ruled against the State's application to stop the media naming John Gibson (72). The first victim was abused during the summer of 1983 when Gibson recruited her to do some work in the school. After the day's work was done he insisted she wash before going home and molested her. Two years later, Gibson asked the second victim, a boy, to grease the goalposts on playing fields. He again insisted the boy clean up after the work and molested the boy in the shower block. Gibson, of Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, had denied three charges of indecent assault. He was found guilty of all counts by a jury following a trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court in February. During the trial, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) sought an order from Judge Elma Sheahan to prevent the media from naming Gibson or even reporting any of the detail of the case, on the basis there may be upcoming trials. Lawyers on behalf of the publishers of the Irish Independent, the 'Irish Times', and the 'Irish Daily Mirror' newspapers subsequently made an application to have the reporting restrictions lifted and to allow normal reporting. The DPP did not make any submissions against the application and the court heard there are no other charges against Gibson before any court. Judge Sheahan ruled then that there were no compelling arguments to restrict reporting. Sentencing him yesterday, Judge Sheahan said his behaviour had "profound and long-lasting consequences" on the victims. She said he abused his position of authority and carried out the attacks in a pre-meditated way. She said he did not acknowledge his wrongdoing or the verdict, and had shown no remorse. She noted the defence submissions that Gibson was in ill health. She imposed one-year sentences for each assault, to run consecutively. A young man arrested as a child for running an alleged explosives and firearm collection errand for one of the people convicted of the murder of Gareth Hutch wants the High Court to dismiss his prosecution over delay. He was arrested when just 16 for the offences and as a result of the delay in charging him, he will lose his anonymity he enjoyed as a child, he says. He also faces a mandatory minimum five year sentence if convicted of the offences as an adult. A child could be sent to a detention school or even dealt with by community order, it is claimed. He was arrested in February 2016 on the M7 motorway at Mountrath, Portlaoise, travelling as a passenger in a car which was allegedly found to have a glock firearm, two explosive devices and an unlicensed air pistol. The court heard that as a result of evidence gathered by gardai in the month after his arrest, it is claimed the boy had attended the "errand" meeting with Jonathan Keogh (33), who last November was one of three people jailed for life for murdering Gareth Hutch outside a north city Dublin flat complex on May 24, 2016. Gareth was a nephew of Gerry "the Monk" Hutch whose criminal gang is involved in a bloody feud with that of drug dealer Christy Kinahan. It is claimed shortly before his arrest the boy was brought to a north Dublin service station cafe to meet Keogh who told him to go to Limerick, pick up a grenade, and bring it back to Dublin. It is claimed Keogh offered to knock 10,000 off a debt owed by the boy if he did the job. Gardai stopped the car and found the explosives and firearm, it is alleged. The boy and the driver were charged in September 2018. Last November, his lawyers brought a High Court challenge against the Garda Commission and DPP seeking to prohibit his trial on grounds of delay in bringing the prosecution. The defendants opposed the application. In arguments before Mr Justice Seamus Noonan on Tuesday, Vincent Heneghan SC, for the young man, said in March 2016, a month after his client was arrested, the gardai had all the necessary evidence to charge him. It included CCTV evidence of him meeting Keogh in the service station. Instead, they waited until Keogh, who fled abroad just after the Hutch murdered, was extradited back from the UK, counsel said. Mr Heneghan said Keogh was a "red herring" in relation to dealing expeditiously with the case against his client. There was no good reason for the delay in charging and having him dealt with before he reached 18, when he would have to be dealt with as a adult. Paul Anthony McDermott SC, for the defendants, said there was never any possibility of his case being dealt with in the one and a quarter years between when he was arrested and when he turned 18 on June 10, 2017 . Even if he had been charged before that, he would still be 18 by the time his case came to trial and, if convicted, at his sentencing hearing. The gardai were entitled to properly investigate all lines of inquiry in relation to these offences, including waiting for Keogh to give his version of the service station meeting when he was brought back from abroad. Had the gardai submitted a partial file to the DPP, it was likely it would have been returned because all lines of inquiry had not been followed. There was no blameworthy delay in this case and it was not one of those exceptional cases in which the court should exercise its discretion to prohibit the trial, counsel said. Mr Justice Noonan reserved his decision. Interview: Garda Fiona Conneely and Garda Sharon Maloney after giving evidence in the trial of Patrick Quirke. Photo: Collins Courts Mary Lowry (left) was a bit flustered because shed been given information and we gave her different information. Picture: Mark Condren Mary Lowry was "unhappy and upset" rather than angry at being told that she could not sit in on the Garda interviews of her three young children, the Tipperary murder trial has heard. However, once correct procedure was explained to her, she acquiesced and allowed the interviews to take place without her, the two gardai who went to her house told the trial. Garda Fiona Conneely, who is trained in taking statements from children, said she was asked along with colleague Garda Sharon Moloney to attend Ms Lowry's rented house in Dundrum, Co Tipperary, in mid-July 2013. The children were aged 15, 11 and nine at the time. 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. When they arrived at the house, they explained the procedure to Ms Lowry, who had previously been informed that she would be allowed to be present during the interview. However, they explained that this was not best practice that a parent would be present and she was unhappy about that. After they explained correct procedure, however, she gave her written consent, Gda Conneely said. Under cross-examination by Lorcan Staines SC, for the defence, she explained that they interview children by first trying to speak to them about sport and general conversation to try to build a rapport. The gardai had a conversation with the two younger Lowry children and nothing of value emerged, so they did not proceed to interview level. They did take a statement from Tommy, the older of the three children, she said. Mr Staines asked Gda Conneely about Ms Lowry's reaction to being told that she could not be in the room - and of the use of the garda's description of her as being "angry", in a report she had subsequently filed. Gda Conneely said that she would not describe her as being angry, adding: "I know I did say she was angry. "In hindsight it was the wrong word to use. "Upset would cover it," she said. Asked why she had used the word "angry" if it was not right, she again said it was the wrong word to use. "She was flustered, she was red in the face. She didn't express anger," said Gda Conneely, adding that she would describe anger as "shouting and roaring", and that was not Ms Lowry's reaction. Mr Staines put it to her that she had now changed from saying in "an important report" that a person was angry and a number of years later, had come to court saying "angry wasn't fair". "Angry wasn't a fair description of Mary Lowry," Gda Conneely said. She said that had been the word she had used that day and "to be fair, 'upset' would have been a better word to use". Mr Staines asked when she knew she was coming to court to give evidence, and she replied "last Thursday". He asked her if media reporting of the evidence had "consciously or subconsciously" fed into her view that angry was the wrong word, but she said it had not. Asked when she had decided it was unfair, she replied, "When I recalled my day" at Ms Lowry's house. Mr Staines put it to the garda that she had not put Ms Lowry's reaction in her statement and that Ms Lowry was in the witness box for four days in January, and it was not traversed because nobody was aware of it. Gda Moloney told the court the purpose of speaking to the Lowry children was to find out if they were aware of anything relevant to the murder investigation. Asked how Ms Lowry had received them, she said she had welcomed them into the house. "There was a bit of an issue because she had been misinformed that she would be present when we were speaking to the boys but we said we'd prefer to speak to them on their own," she said, adding that she had become "a little bit upset". "She was put out - a little bit flustered because she'd been given information and when we turned up we gave her different information," Gda Moloney said. Asked if she was privy to the report Gda Conneely had filed, Gda Moloney said she was. She had "not put too much weight" on her use of the word "angry", she said, adding: "But in hindsight, it was a little bit of a strong word." Ms Lowry had never raised her voice, she added. Put to her that a list of questions had been furnished to her before interviewing Tommy Lowry, Gda Moloney said she took it as "a guide". Meanwhile, Detective Garda Fiona McGuire told the court she had analysed finger marks found on a black diary and the driving licence found in Mr Ryan's van. She found five marks on the diary and two palm marks on the licence. Four of the prints on the diary belonged to the deceased's daughter Michelle Ryan, but she was not able to identify the other. It did not match the suspect, nor did it match records in the national database. Detective Garda Ernie Fraser said that in 2012, as part of the missing persons investigation, he took fingerprints from a bottle of aftershave from the van and also from a panel from the rear driver-side door. He searched them against the national fingerprint database and the result was negative. They also did not match those of Mr Quirke, he said. The trial continues. Children of Sean Quinn (left-right) Sean Jr, Aoife and Brenda at the Four Courts. Photo: Collins Courts A dispute between the five adult children of former billionaire Sean Quinn and the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) has been settled after they consented to having judgements totalling 440m entered against them. The High Court was told this morning by Bernard Dunleavy SC, counsel for the Quinn children, that the children's proceedings against the former Anglo Irish Bank could be struck out. He said the court did not have to make an order on costs. However, the court also heard from IBRCs counsel Paul Gallagher SC that judgments in the sum of 88,157,351 could be entered against each of the children in favour of the bank. He said there would be a stay on the execution of these judgments on terms agreed by the parties. The agreement was reached on Monday night following over a week of talks between both sides. Mr Dunleavy said the outcome of the talks was that all of the proceedings have been resolved. In their action, the children had claimed loan guarantees and share pledges given in connection with 2.34bn in loans from Anglo to Quinn Group companies in 2007 and 2008 were invalid. IBRC had a counterclaim seeking to recover 82m from each of the children. In a separate case, the IBRC alleged the children were involved in a conspiracy to strip 455m in assets from their international property group. This action will now not go ahead. Under the terms of the agreement, the Quinn children have committed to giving full disclosure in relation to the Quinn assets allegedly put beyond the reach of the IBRC. Mr Justice Garrett Simons congratulated both sides on reaching an agreement. He said this was a very sensible outcome. None of the Quinn children, Sean Jr, Colette, Ciara, Aoife or Brenda, were in court this morning. While IBRC is not seeking a costs order against the Quinns, it is seeking costs from two third parties in the case, former Quinn group executives who had been due to give evidence had the trial continued. The court will deal with this matter at a later date. Todays agreement comes just days after the Quinns suffered a significant setback in the case when Mr Justice Simons ruled they could not amend their statement of claim to include an allegation they were under the undue influence of their father when they signed loan guarantees and share pledges. The judge also refused to allow them to file supplementary witness statements. The loans the children signed off on were predominantly used to cover losses made by their father following his disastrous speculation on Anglo shares using complicated financial instruments known as contracts for difference. The stock market bets would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Quinn Group and Mr Quinns bankruptcy. The children were the shareholders in the group and their signatures were required for the loans to go through. They claimed loan guarantees and share pledges they gave in connection with the borrowings were invalid on a number of grounds, including the alleged undue influence of their father and "unconscionable bargain" - that the guarantees they were asked to sign were unfair and contrary to common sense or good conscience. They had also alleged negligence and breach of duty by Anglo, especially to advise them of the risks they faced. Had they known the risks, they would not have signed the guarantees, they claimed. The children also alleged that "signature switching" took place. This was an allegation that having signed an earlier draft of a share charge, the signature page was then wrongfully appended to a later revised draft by persons in Quinn Group. This allegation was only being made in relation to some of the transactions they claimed were invalid. The case was first initiated in 2011 and had been due to run for six months. But after opening statements lasting five days, the parties decided to enter talks. In a statement, the IBRC said: An agreement has been reached following discussions over the last number of days. Pursuant to the agreement, the Quinn family has agreed to the dismissal of all of their claims against IBRC, as well as their separate claims against the Central Bank and various other parties. The statement said the Quinn family had provided IBRC with full disclosure and would likewise relinquish any entitlement to any assets which IBRC has a claim to. It said the Quinns acknowledged IBRC had valid and enforceable claims on such assets. The statement said final orders, including orders for judgments against the Quinn children, would be obtained in the separate proceedings taken by IBRC against the Quinn family. This was a reference to the conspiracy proceedings. The final orders in that case are expected to be sought tomorrow. The statement continued: IBRC views this settlement as being in the best interests of creditors, in circumstances where it has received full disclosure from the Quinn family and where the very lengthy litigation that has been in being since 2011 will be brought to a conclusion. In a statement, the Quinn family said: "The Quinn family are happy to be able to move on and put the litigation with Anglo (now IBRC) behind them. We would like to thank our family members, friends and legal teams for their support. The Quinn family will not be making any further comment." Nimbyism, the 'not in my backyard' response to change, has been a feature of the process of handing over Catholic primary schools to other patron bodies from the start. There is general agreement that the primary school system needs to be rebalanced better to reflect the changes in modern Ireland. Even Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin has been a staunch proponent of the idea, believing that the current situation, where about nine out of 10 primary schools remain under the control of the Catholic Church, is no longer appropriate. Apart from a big decline in adherence to the Catholic faith and an influx of families of new religions and none to Ireland, there are practical considerations for the Church, such as a lack of priests who traditionally played a key role in the management of the schools. But a decade of heated debate, including a major report, about reducing the control of the Church in primary education in particular, has barely dented its position. The Church is no longer opening primary schools, but its schools have 90.3pc (505,053) of primary pupils on their books, a small dip from 90.7pc two years ago. Over the same period, enrolments in multi-denominational schools rose to 5.7pc (32,060) from 5.4pc, much of the expansion in areas of population growth, where, perhaps, there was no school before. There are more than 3,000 primary schools, almost 2,800 of which are Catholic. Since former education minister Ruairi Quinn launched an initiative to divest some of those to other patron bodies, about 10 have changed hands, and some because it was convenient for another reason. The divestment process got mired in legal issues about ownership of school properties and it largely hinged on amalgamations or closures, which, in themselves, can be costly and contentious. What also became very obvious was that, wherever it was suggested, the reaction was that it may be a grand idea, but not in our school. It ran into the ground. Mr Quinn's successor, Richard Bruton, relaunched it as the Reconfiguration for Diversity process, to look at "live" transfers and with a financial sweetener that would involve the leasing of property from bishops. As an initial step, education and training boards (ETBs) were tasked with conducting surveys of pre-school parents in 16 areas to gauge the mood for greater choice. Where a demand was identified, local bishops are being asked to tease it out with school communities. Portmarnock-Malahide-Kinsealy is one of those areas and early indications are that some schools, at least, are in no mood for change. Catholic schools are driving opposition to a proposed switch in patronage by warning parents that events such as Christmas, St Patricks Day and Shrove Tuesday will no longer be celebrated. A move to handover one of eight Catholic primary schools in the Portmarnock-Malahide-Kinsealy area of north Dublin has met a hostile reaction in at least two of the schools. The approach to the eight schools is part of the wider Department of Education initiative to reduce the dominance of the Catholic Church in primary education and provide greater diversity in school choice to reflect societal changes. Any transfer would be either to the non-denominational Educate Together, the multi-denominational Community National School model or the all-Irish An Foras Patrunachta, which allows parents to decide the school ethos. It is understood that staff in the two schools, Scoil an Duinninigh and St Marnocks NS, do not favour change and the schools have made their opposition clear in letters to, and at meetings with parents. Among the claims made by one or both of the schools are that the annual Christmas fair, carol services and nativity plays would no longer be held and St Patricks Day, St Brigids Day and Easter, including Shrove Tuesday, would no longer be marked. Scoil an Duinninigh, a gaelscoil, also told parents that common Irish-medium greetings that refer to God, such as dia dhuit, would no longer be allowed. It advised playing, singing or dancing to music with any religious reference, including the St Patricks Day anthem, would not be permitted. The school said it hoped to make the patronage change in time for September 2019, but the Department of Education told the Irish Independent there was no such requirement. The letter to parents from St Marnocks NS covers some similar ground and also raised a number of other issues, including teachers rights and who would control parental fundraising under a new model of patronage. Both schools also said any change of patronage would have a major effect on management and culture and, in at least one school, parents were told a large number of teachers would consider leaving. Portmarnock-Malahide-Kinsealy is one of a number of areas where parents of preschool children were surveyed as part of the diversity process. While the results have not been published, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Dublin said there were indications of a movement for change. They said four parishes were asked to consult school staff and parents of existing pupils, and the consultations were being facilitated by diocesan staff. St Marnocks NS and Scoil an Duinninigh have hosted meetings attended by parents, principals and chairpersons of boards of management where the process of divestment was explained and discussed. Meetings have taken place in some of the remaining six schools, while others are planned for this week and next for the remaining six schools. Parents will be asked to vote on whether or not they want their school to divest and the archdiocese spokesperson said feedback will be given to the Department of Education. A department spokesperson said the Government has a commitment to reach 400 multi-/non-denominational schools by 2030. Gardai search across the road from Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys Gardai have condemned the lone gunman who targeted a man in his 20s waiting outside a secondary school in Dublin. A secondary school in west Dublin went into lockdown this afternoon after a gunman discharged shots from a handgun outside the school gates. Expand Close Gardai search across the road from Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Gardai search across the road from Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys Gardai are investigating the shooting outside Riversdale Community College secondary school in Blanchardstown Road North, Blanchardstown at 3.40pm. Gardai said that several shots were fired just as school was about to finish. Pupils were kept in the school as a precaution and the students' parents were informed of the incident. The announcement came on the school intercom to inform students and teachers to remain inside their classrooms and for nobody to leave just as the school bell went. Its understood that some teachers stood against the doors of their classrooms to prevent anyone from getting in or out as a precaution. Expand Close Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys The intended target was not injured in the incident. The gunman then fled to the nearby Corduff Grove estate. Gardai carried out a number of searches this evening in the Corduff area, with the assistance of the Emergency Response Unit and Armed Support Units. A number of persons were arrested near Corduff Grove, and released following searches. Expand Close Gardai search Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Gardai search Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys Superintendent Carolan, Blanchardstown Garda Station condemned the "reckless attack" "(The incident) took place in broad day light at a time when school was just about to finish and students would have been exiting to be collected by parents," he said in a statement. Expand Close Gardai search Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Gardai search Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown following the shooting. Pic Steve Humphreys Superintendent Carolan is appealing to any person in the vicinity of the Community College between 3p.m. and 3.40p.m. to contact Gardai at Blanchardstown Garda Station. In particular Gardai are looking for any person driving along Blanchardstown Road North or Corduff Grove who may have dashcam footage to make contact. Gardai are also appealing for any person who observed any unusual activity in the vicinity of the Community College in recent days to make contact at Blanchardstown Garda Station at 01-6669700 or the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station. A representative for the Dublin and Dun Laoghaire Education and Training Board (DDLETB), which is the patron of Riversdale Community College said that all pupils and staff are "safe and well" following the incident. "We are aware that an incident involving gunfire has taken place outside of the school this afternoon at approximately 3.40 pm. "The gardai attended the area immediately in large numbers. All pupils and staff are safe and well," a spokesperson said in a statement. "When the nature of the incident became apparent, the school requested all pupils to stay within the school for a period of time to ensure their safety and well-being. The school also contacted parents and in due course all pupils were able to leave as normal. "The school will reopen tomorrow fully as normal. "DDLETB Psychological Support Service will be linking with the school to support students and staff in the event that this should be necessary. "DDLETB expressed its strong appreciation to the entire school community and commended the Principal of the school, all staff, pupils and parents for the excellent and calm manner in which they reacted to this regrettable incident. "Given that a Garda investigation is currently operational and ongoing we will not be commenting any further at this time." Gardai are investigating if the shooting is linked to a bitter feud in the Corduff area which has seen numerous violent incidents in the past number of months. It is understood that the intended target who is aged in his 20s was shot at a number of times outside Riversdale Community College when he arrived at the school to collect his younger brother. He was not injured in the attack and it is understood that he ran into the school grounds after being targeted. Expand Close Gardai block off roads at Corduff Grove close to the Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown. Pic Steve Humphreys 2nd April 2019 / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Gardai block off roads at Corduff Grove close to the Riversdale Community College in Blanchardstown. Pic Steve Humphreys 2nd April 2019 Speaking in Paris, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he is shocked and concerned to hear about the shooting at a school in his constituency. He expects to be briefed on the situation by Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan later this evening. Jack Chambers, a Fianna Fail TD who represents Dublin West, said local gardai need the support of national units due to the recent escalation in violent activity in the area. A similar response saw armed gardai and specialist units deployed to the inner city a number of years ago when gangland tensions there spiked. There has been a shocking escalation of violence in west Dublin recently, he said. Now we have had a shooting in broad daylight outside of a school which has serious ramifications for the safety of the broader community, he said, adding it was also traumatic for parents and children to witness such an incident near the school. People in the area are living in fear and in some areas are afraid to let their children out according to Mr Chambers, who sits on the Oireachtas Justice Committee. Local gardai are doing their level best to respond and to increase their visibility but there is a need for a proportionate response in the form of national resources to be deployed as back up the deputy told Independent.ie. Former Tanaiste Joan Burton said she has already raised concerns about recent developments in the area. "I have spoken about childrens parents and staff of local schools being really worried about recent episodes of lawlessness in the area," she said. "A small number of people are putting the good name of a lovely community at risk." "We need more community policing urgently. Fine Gael is failing people and communities on policing and justice," she added. Finally, Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said the incident was "contemptible". "I utterly condemn all incidents of violence but the particular recklessness involved in this incident where shots were fired outside a school is shocking and particularly contemptible," he said. A spokeswoman for the minister said that "while the circumstances surrounding this incident are yet to be determined, the Minister is aware that there have been a series of violent incidents in recent weeks relating to an ongoing feud in this area". They added; "As the incident today has proven, there is cause for concern for the safety of the local residents. An Garda Siochana have been engaging in a number of actions to combat this activity involving members of specialist Garda units, including local Detective Units and the Garda Dog Unit. Victims of the CervicalCheck scandal have asked for a face-to-face meeting with the judge overseeing their ex-gratia compensation scheme warning they are feeling "tremendously vulnerable". The letter has been sent to Judge Aindrias O Caoimh by campaigners Vicky Phelan, Stephen Teap and Lorraine Walsh on behalf of the 221+ Patient Support Group. The judge has been appointed to chair an expert panel that will formulate the ex-gratia scheme to compensate women who developed cervical cancer, and families of the bereaved, for not telling them that audits were carried out showing they received wrong test results. In a strongly worded letter, seen by the Irish Independent, they said the "failure to provide smear test audit results in a timely manner" and the "very poor" implementation of the HSE's open disclosure process has, "for a lot of our members, eroded trust in our consultants, our health system, and our Government". They stressed that "these are the very people we must continue to rely upon for our medical care". "In many cases we rely on them to support life-and-death decisions. This concern for trust has left us feeling tremendously vulnerable. "Unfortunately, the poor communication persists and notwithstanding the public and political attention to our circumstances, the women and families have often been the last to know about developments that directly affect them during the past year." They have asked to meet Judge O Caoimh to share the experiences of women before the panel sets out the criteria to be assessed. It is unclear what the level of compensation will be, although it has been speculated it would amount to around 25,000 each. The ex-gratia scheme is separate to a tribunal which is to be set up adjudicate on issues of alleged negligence as an alternative to going to court. Meanwhile, Health Minister Simon Harris has said the delay in the return of cervical screening results, while undesirable, is not necessarily dangerous and poses a very low risk to women. He was responding amid ongoing concern at the delays of up to 33 weeks in returning test results to women who have undergone screening with CervicalCheck. He told Fianna Fail TD Michael Moynihan "the natural history of cervical cancer would indicate that the disease would normally develop over a period of 10 to 15 years". A HSE spokeswoman said there are no plans to temporarily halt cervical screening to clear the backlog. The programme will continue as normal inviting women for their scheduled screening tests. Flash Ukraine's presidential election will head to a run-off, according to the country's electoral commission on Monday. Early official results showed that none of 39 candidates gained enough support to secure a victory in the first round, according to the head of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) Tetiana Slipachuk. The preliminary official results of the election unveiled on Monday by the CEC suggested that Ukrainian actor Volodymyr Zelensky and incumbent President Petro Poroshenko advanced to the run-off round. With 81.97 percent of all ballots counted, Zelensky garnered 30.40 percent of the votes, while Poroshenko gained 16.01 percent. According to Ukrainian law, if no one gets more than half of the vote in the first round, the two candidates with the most ballots move to a run-off on April 21. The day before Leaving Cert results were released 2,266 callers rang the Samaritans, a fact that must ensure "pressure" is taken off students, Minister Richard Bruton said. The charity, which launched its new phone deal to continue providing free calls for the next five years, has detailed how on August 16, 2017, it had one of its busiest days. Mr Bruton, who is Communications Minister and former education minister, said: "There's a review of the Leaving Cert being undertaken by the Curriculum and Assessment Board. "We can look back on the Junior Cycle which has introduced more broad-based assessment and less emphasis on the final exam, so hopefully that's something that will be possible in the Leaving Certificate as well." Mr Bruton said many people had "great faith" in the fairness of the exam, meaning "we can't risk losing" that element. But he added it should "take the pressure off students and allow them to perform to their best without that sort of pressure". The charity is understood to take a high number of calls on cyberbullying - another issue Mr Bruton vowed to combat. "I have committed we will prepare legislation for an online safety commissioner and one of the areas we will specifically be targeting is cyberbullying," he said. "There's been some very tragic cases of cyberbullying and we believe the time for self-regulation by companies has now passed. "We need a proper regulatory system and we are working to frame that legislation over the coming months." Samaritans Ireland volunteers answered almost three million calls in the past five years on the freephone service. The charity announced a new deal with BT Ireland, eir, Sky Ireland, Three Ireland, Virgin Media Ireland and Vodafone Ireland to continue assisting until 2024. Teresa Bell, deputy regional director for the Samaritans Ireland, told the Irish Independent the deal was a "wonderful endorsement" of the service and it would allow callers to continue accessing the phone line for free. Ms Bell, who still volunteers on the phone line, added: "The Leaving Cert is a very difficult time for young people and parents. "But it's great that young people thinking about their future call Samaritans, along with parents, to discuss these concerns. "People are worried about results, going to college, financial constraints, leaving home for college and it's really important that they get the chance to talk about their concerns and worries. "We are happy to be there to be a listening ear." If you are affected by any of these issues call Samaritans Ireland on freephone 116 123. Christina Donnelly holding a picture of her son Brendan, who died in a crash caused by a drunk driver Finian McGrath: Calls for him to step down as a cabinet minister. Picture: Frank McGrath Grieving relatives of road victims have branded remarks made by Finian McGrath about the Garda enforcement of a drink-driving crackdown an "insult" and a "slap in the face". There were demands for the Cabinet minister's resignation and an apology to the families of victims in the wake of his extraordinary comments. Mr McGrath last night said he apologised unreservedly to the families and the Garda for the remarks. He sustained severe criticism since he claimed in a 'Sunday Independent' interview that gardai have become politicised and have been "over the top" in the implementation of tougher drink-driving laws. He also claimed that gardai are blaming Transport Minister Shane Ross for the laws when they stop motorists at checkpoints. Mr McGrath withdrew his comments on Sunday evening and said they were "wrong" in the midst of a furious response from Government colleagues and gardai. However, people who have lost loved ones also criticised Mr McGrath. Christina Donnelly, who lost her son Brendan (24) in a 2009 crash caused by a drunk driver, said she was "incensed". She said Mr McGrath's suggestion that the implementation of the drink-driving law was over the top was "an absolute insult" to bereaved families. She said he was "not fit to hold office". Ms Donnelly added: "I'm speaking as a mum who lost a beautiful son and on behalf of bereaved families." She appealed to the Disabilities Minister to make an apology to "all families who have lost loved ones to drink-drivers and who have to visit the side of the road with flowers". Expand Close Christina Donnelly holding a picture of her son Brendan, who died in a crash caused by a drunk driver / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Christina Donnelly holding a picture of her son Brendan, who died in a crash caused by a drunk driver Read More Aisling Reid, from the Parc Road Safety group, lost her cousin Karl Robertson (28) in a hit-and-run incident. She also called on Mr McGrath to resign. She said it was "ridiculous" to suggest that gardai had an ulterior motive in enforcing the law and that retracting the remarks doesn't change the fact Mr McGrath made them. Ms Reid said the comments were a "slap in the face" and Mr McGrath should step down as a minister. Donna Price, the chairperson of the Irish Road Victims Association, said her organisation was "absolutely shocked" by Mr McGrath's remarks. Ms Price, whose son Darren (18) was killed in a 2006 collision, said the comments were "unacceptable" coming from a Government minister. She said people have nothing to fear from Garda checkpoints if they're not breaking the law. Expand Close Donna Price (left) of PARC Road Safety Group and Caitriona Quinn hold a pictures of their children Darren and Cait. (Julien Behal/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Donna Price (left) of PARC Road Safety Group and Caitriona Quinn hold a pictures of their children Darren and Cait. (Julien Behal/PA) Ms Price is a board member of the Road Safety Authority but said she wasn't speaking on that organisation's behalf. She said Mr McGrath should apologise but noted that he supported the drink-driving crackdown during the legislative process and did not call for his resignation. Despite Fine Gael's anger at Mr McGrath's intervention, ministers sought to draw a line under the controversy yesterday. Richard Bruton said: "Like any of us, he can make mistakes and he's been man enough to admit that this was a mistake." Read More Tanaiste Simon Coveney said he believes Mr McGrath's withdrawal of the remarks brought an end to the matter. Mr McGrath last night apologised unreservedly. He said he was aware his comments "caused hurt". He said this was never his intention and that "families and victims suffering the aftermath of drink-driving have always been my priority". He said he voted for, and fully supports, the drink-driving law brought in by Mr Ross which automatically disqualifies motorists found to have consumed alcohol. Mr McGrath added: "I will continue to support all road safety initiatives and measures." A BILL tabled to cap the level of insurance payouts for personal injury claims has passed second stage in the Seanad. It received widespread support and will now go to committee stage. The aim of the bill is to ensure the cost of insurance cover is reduced for motorists, businesses and farmers. Called the Civil Liability (Capping of General Damages) Bill 2019, it is being promoted by Fine Gaels Senator Tony Lawlor. Speaking during a debate on the bill last week Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan described the insurance industry as highly profitable and said there was scope to cut premiums. He said jobs were at risk from soaring premiums and the inability of some companies to get cover. The level of awards in personal injury cases was too high and needs to be addressed, the minister said. Addressing the Seanad on a bill that aims to cap injury awards, Mr Flanagan said the latest data for the industry showed insurers making healthy profits. The annual profits of ten major insurance companies amounted to between 6.1m and 201m at the end of 2017 with the total assets of insurance corporations reported by the Central Bank to be 305bn at the end of last year. Businesses, particularly those in the leisure and child activity sectors, are closing due to soaring premiums, with many unable to get cover. Their insurers blame high and inconsistent injury awards in the courts. Senator Lawlors bill has the support of business groups Ibec, Isme, the Licensed Vintners Association, famers lobby group the IFA and Insurance Ireland. The Lawlor bill comes months after the Government-appointed Personal Injuries Commission found that award levels for minor injuries in this country are almost five times higher than in the UK. The commission, headed up by former High Court President Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, has advocated that a judicial council made up of judges should recalibrate awards levels. But the legislation to put a judicial council in place has been delayed. Insurers have consistently argued that the cost of insurance is directly related to high levels of awards made in the courts. There are suggestions that the Lawlor compensation-capping bill will have to be referred to Attorney General Seamus Woulfe as the legal lobby has suggested it may be unconstitutional. Business lobby group Isme dismissed claims that the legislature could not dictate to judges on award levels. Chief executive Neil McDonnell said the principle that awards for general damages can be capped has been conclusively established in Irish case law and in statute. The legislature routinely decides the sentencing tariffs to be applied in matters of criminal and road traffic law. The principle is no different here, Mr McDonnell said in a letter to the Government. However, lawyers are expected to question the constitutionality of the bill, if it is passed by the Oireachtas, and argue that injury awards constitute property rights. A LUCKY man is 1 million richer thanks to a Lotto ticket his father gave him. Odhran Doherty (23) is Ireland's newest millionaire after a Lotto Plus 1 ticket his dad Liam bought him ended up being a winner. The pair are very close and work together on the family farm at The Glebe, Letterkenny. The family never thought their numbers would come up but Odhran was left speechless on Saturday evening when he checked the draw result on the ticket and realised he had netted the life-changing fortune. Dad Liam revealed how he had bought three lottery tickets in the shop, one each for himself and wife Margaret and one for Odhran. Odhran was going to a party in the local Dry Arch bar at Bonagee that evening and called into the adjoining shop to check his ticket. Speaking exclusively to Donegal Daily dad Liam revealed: "He rang me and said the ticket had said he was a winner. He checked with the guy in the shop but they said it was too big for them to tell him how much he had won. "He told me I had better come out. I thought it was an early April's Fool joke or something. When I got out to him he came out of the party with his hands above his head and said he was a millionaire. "I took the ticket off him for safe-keeping and we realised later there was only one winner of the 1 million." Mum Margaret says the family have been on a high since learning they won the jackpot. Expand Close (L-R) Margaret Doherty, Odhran Doherty, his girlfriend Jessica Orr and Liam Doherty celebrating the win / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (L-R) Margaret Doherty, Odhran Doherty, his girlfriend Jessica Orr and Liam Doherty celebrating the win "He simply couldn't believe it at first but it soon sunk in and he was just so delighted. I have a pain in my neck from all the hugs he has given me. "He's a lovely big young fella and this will set him up now for life. We're just so delighted for him," said Margaret. Read More Odhran is the youngest of three siblings. Eldest brother Shane is a pharmacist and has his own pharmacy in Manchester, while sister Lana is a solicitor with a practice in Gorey, Co Wexford. Having put the ticket in a safe place, Odhran decided he would call in on Bartley's shop in Raphoe where dad Liam had bought the lotto ticket. Odhran spoke with owner James Bartley and asked him if he knew who the owner of the winning lotto ticket was. Mr Bartley replied he had heard some rumours but didn't know who exactly had won the 1 million. Margaret added: "That's when Odhran stuck out his hand and told James Bartley that he was speaking with the winner. It sounds so funny but that would be Odhran alright." A former pupil of Woodlands National School and St Eunans College in Letterkenny, Odhran is big into farm machinery and a new vehicle could well be on the cards with his new-found wealth. Mum Margaret added: "We won't let it go to his head. We'll sit down as a family and we have two solicitors in the family so he won't be short on advice." The small border town of Raphoe in Co. Donegal has claimed its third big National Lottery win of the year, with a local shop selling last nights Lotto Plus 1 winning ticket worth a massive 1 million. Barclays Newsagents in the Diamond, Raphoe, is certainly on a winning streak. This is their second big win in recent weeks. They also sold a EuroMillions Plus winning ticket landing local man Charlie Meehan 500,000 in February. And in an incredible run of luck, the Centra store in Raphoe sold the winning Match 5 Plus Bonus winning ticket from the Lotto Draw on February 28 nabbing that ticket holder a cool 98,068. Odhran's 1 million winning numbers were 8, 11, 16, 18, 20, 46 and bonus number 40. Teenager Shauntelle Tynan told her siblings that the public raised more than 700k for her cancer-treatment IRISH people are among the most generous people out there with more people donating money to fundraising campaigns per capita than any other country in the world. That is according to fundraising site GoFundMe, who have seen more than 30 million donated to campaigns in Ireland since 2016. Expand Close Rob Solomon, Chairman and CEO of GoFundMe / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Rob Solomon, Chairman and CEO of GoFundMe Campaigns in Ireland grew by more than 50pc last year compared to 2017, the company revealed. According to CEO Rob Soloman, Irish people tend to "show kindness and express support for those in need". "GoFundMe has become the take action button of the internet - and nowhere is that more evident than in Ireland," he said. "GoFundMe is a really simple and social way of enabling ordinary people to engage and support the causes they care about - a person puts a campaign out, a friend shares that campaign and soon tens, hundreds or even thousands of people are sharing and donating. "With more than 1 in 10 people donating in Ireland, it really is the most generous country in the world." One of the biggest campaigns in Ireland is the treatment fund for 20-year-old Shauntelle (Shan) Tynan, with over 750,000 raised over the last two years. Shan, who was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, Histiocytosis X, in 2015, announced last August that she is cancer free. A campaign to support Sean Cox, who was stabbed outside Anfield before the Champions League match against Roma, raised over 1 million in five months. More than 6 billion ($7 billion) has been raised across the world on GoFundMe since their launch in 2010. Irish people show strong positive support for autistic people in schools, employment and society generally- but admit their level of knowledge of the condition is inadequate, according to new research being published today. The research results were published this morning by the autism advocacy group AsIAm at an event to mark World Autism Day. The survey was carried out nationwide last month among a representative sample of 1000 adults. Irish people strongly support the education of autistic people in mainstream schools, reflecting the societal trend towards maximum integration. 61pc of people believe mainstream schools should be responsible for the education of autistic people, with this figure rising to 71pc among those aged 18-25. This shows a welcome tendency towards inclusion, according to Adam Harris, CEO of AsIAm. While some autistic children currently benefit from special schools, there is a growing trend towards educating autistic children in mainstream schools, sometimes in special classes within those schools. "However there is still a significant minority of people who do not believe mainstream schools are responsible for supporting autistic students. This requires further work in light of Irelands ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. While only 40pc believe they have a quite good or very good understanding of autism, many attitudes towards autistic people are quite positive. The survey shows a greater awareness and acceptance of autistic people among younger people. Younger people are more likely to believe they have a good understanding, and they are also more likely to be aware of having an autistic person among their friends. 25pc of all people say there is an autistic person among their friends, but this rises to 33pc within the 18-25 age group. Half of working adults feel that autistic people could work in a job like theirs, with this proportion being higher among those over 35. There is significant variance of perception between people working in different sectors, with around three in five of those working in professional services, the public sector and wholesale feeling that an autistic person could work in their job, with just two in five of those in finance and manufacturing believing this. Just 5pc of people say they do not think autistic people could get married and establish families, with 72pc believing they could and 23pc giving no opinion. Finally there is a majority view that media representation of autism is inauthentic, with 37pc believing it to be quite or very inauthentic, and 25pc believing it is quite or very authentic. According to Adam Harris: The critical finding of this survey is the gap between public support for inclusion and reality. Despite positive public sentiment, over 85pc of autistic people are under or unemployed, autistic people are up to 9 times more likely to die by suicide. Social isolation, particularly among autistic adults, remains a norm. The peoples attitudes are ahead of the Governments efforts to include autistic people. For over 5 years Government have allowed successive Autism Bills and proposed strategies to languish on the floor of the Oireachtas whilst at the same time assuring the community of its support, he added. Police have issued a fresh appeal into the circumstances surrounding the death of 17-year-old Tara Wright. Ms Wright was found dead in a car outside Belfast City Hospital on March 24. Her death is believed to be connected to a single-vehicle crash on the Ballygowan Road in Castlereagh in the early hours of that morning. PSNI Inspector Nigel Henry said police have revisited the scene of the crash as part of their investigation and are focusing on the events leading up to Tara Wright's death. We believe that the silver Mercedes car Tara was travelling in was in the area of Gourleys Bar near the roundabout in Ballygowan around 1.25am on Sunday 24th March 2019," he said. "We would like to hear from anyone who noticed this car between 11pm on Saturday 23rd March and 1.30am on Sunday 24th March. I would also like to thank all of those who have come forward with information already and ask again for anyone who witnessed a grey coloured MG car between Ballygowan Road the Belfast City Hospital during the early hours of Sunday, 24th March to contact us. If you have dash cam footage which you believe is relevant to this investigation, you can contact us on 101, quoting reference number 227 of 24/03/19. Four men aged 20, 21, 28 and 30 were arrested in the wake of the incident. French President Emmanuel Macron and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar make a joint statement at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer French President Emmanuel Macron has said his country "will never abandon Ireland" as the EU grapples with the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. With just 10 remaining for the UK to find a consensus, Mr Macron said it appears we are heading for de facto no-deal scenario. "If the United Kingdom is not capable, almost three years after the referendum, of coming forward with a solution that is supported by a majority, it will have effectively chosen a no-deal exit on its own," Mr Macron said. He said the EU will listen to any request for another Brexit extension but it must have a good reason. Expand Close French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer Speaking alongside Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the Elysee Palace in Paris, he cited a general election, a second referendum or a move towards a customs union as potential reasons for a delay. "It's up to London to say it, and to say it now," he said. The two leaders are discussing the consequences of a no-deal next week. Mr Macron said Ireland and France will be the two most impacted countries. Expand Close French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer "We will never abandon Ireland or the Irish people, no matter what," he said. The French government is known to be wary of delaying Brexit and subsequently facilitating the UKs participation in next months European election. Part of Mr Varadkars mission in Paris is to convince Mr Macron to be as generous as possible to embattled British Prime Minister Theresa May. Before their meeting Mr Varadkar publicly acknowledge that it is difficult for other EU countries to contemplate Brexit remaining on the agenda for another year or longer. He said the UK is consumed by Brexit but France, Ireland and the EU shouldnt be. Mr Varadkar urged UK politicians to give Mrs May a mandate for a new approach. There is still time for the prime minister to come to the European Council with proposals, proposals that are credible and have a clear pathway to success," he said, adding: "We need to be open to any proposals that she may bring forward to us. However, he also accepted that as things stand the UK will crash out of Europe and all countries need to be prepared for that situation. Mr Varadkar said the Irish government would protect the EU single market which he credited with provide jobs and prosperity for many decades. There is still no clear method for how the Government plans to protect the single market while also avoiding a hard border. THE government has decided to extend Rent Pressure Zones (RPZs) until the end of 2021. The zones in place in Dublin, Cork, Galway and towns like Naas and Drogheda, were due to expire at the end of the year. Under the rules, annual rent increases can't rise more than 4pc in RPZ areas. The decision to extend the scheme was announced by Tanaiste Simon Coveney in the Dail today in response to a question from Green Party TD Catherine Martin. She said people were living with uncertainty given that the RPZs were due to expire this year. Mr Coveney said the government today decided to extend the scheme until the end of 2021 and to change how the qualification criteria for how rent pressure zones are calculated. He said: "The qualification criteria of having to be above the national average needs to change for outside of Dublin." The changes came as Cabinet considered amendments to the Residential Tenancies Bill. Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy is to outline further changes that were agreed in the coming days. Read more here: Flash Vice President Wang Qishan met with Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar in Beijing on Monday, saying China hopes for the continuous development of the two countries' comprehensive strategic partnership. Wang said the two countries should work together in implementing the consensus reached by the two heads of state, maintaining the momentum of high-level exchanges, jointly pushing the Belt and Road Initiative, deepening cooperation in various sectors and enhancing cultural and people-to-people exchange. Mongolia is one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China founded in 1949. Wang said friendship and cooperation had remained the mainstream of bilateral ties over the past 70 years. Mutually-beneficial cooperation in recent years has yielded fruitful outcomes, bringing benefits to both peoples, Wang added. China's rapid development and the Belt and Road Initiative bring important opportunities to Mongolia, Tsogtbaatar said, adding that his country is willing to improve the bilateral ties to higher levels. April will bring "treacherous hail" and snow for parts of the country, with Met Eireann issuing its latest weather warning. With temperatures plummeting to lows of -1C, the forecaster has advised people to brace themselves for a return of frost and snow from today. A Status Yellow snow-ice warning has been issued for Connacht, Cavan, Monaghan, Donegal, Longford and Louth until noon. However, if conditions do not improve by this afternoon the warning will be extended. Met Eireann said the dramatic dip in temperatures was due to a polar air mass moving over Ireland from the north. This will heavily influence our weather for the coming days. Forecaster Pat Clarke said: "While snow is forecast in northern parts of the country, the hail may pose as a bigger threat because once it hits the roads it will turn to ice. There's a chance the snow will fall on lower grounds in these parts, but it will mainly occur on mountains and hills." Mark Zuckerberg says he may appear before the Irish Oireachtas in front of a cross-parliamentary committee to answer detailed questions about fake news and the Facebooks effect on society. The social media boss told TDs in a formal meeting today that he is open to the engagement, scheduled for November. The Facebook chief executive also told TDs that his company will not drop its appeal to the UK information commissioners 500,000 (584,000) fine over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, telling the politicians that it wasnt their fault. And Mr Zuckerberg defended reclassifying 1.5bn Facebook users as non-EU data subjects on the eve of the GDPR data privacy law, saying that it was done for practical reasons. His remarks come after having an op-ed jointly published in the Sunday Independent and Washington Post, setting out ideas for how harmful content, political misinformation and privacy might be dealt with. In the piece, he said that Facebook may now have too much power of online speech. He called on national legislators and regulators to pass more specific laws on what defines harmful content and illicit political content. He also argued that apps should be required to transfer data to rival apps by law. Last week, Facebook announced that it would require a new paid for by sticker on ads placed on Facebook for the upcoming European Parliamentary elections. The company is introducing the transparency move having repeatedly come under fire over disinformation that is seeded on the platform. In Dublin today, Mr Zuckerberg was meeting parliamentary TDs Eamon Ryan, James Lawless and Hildegarde Naughton in Dublin as part of an outreach exercise with an international Grand Committee, made up of politicians from the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and Argentina. The Facebook boss also toured the companys facilities in Dublin, which currently employs over 4,000 people and is set to add another 1,000 this year. Mr Zuckerberg also met with journalists but restricted his answers to pre-prepared remarks. However, he again warned about Apples competing vision for the internet, making a thinly-veiled reference to the iPhone company when referring to data stored in countries like China. GDPR is as important for what it doesn't do, which is require companies to localise data and store systems data in a given country, he said, referring to Apples compromise with Chinese authorities, where it stores data in servers located in that country. Facebook and Google are not allowed to operate in China. We can take this for granted in a country like Ireland or in the US where there's a strong rule of law and respect for human rights. But in a lot of the places around the world, those aren't a given. What we see is that there are some competing visions for how the internet goes and what the future of that will be. We see a lot of pressure in a number of countries localising data in a way that that could put people's data more accessible to governments and in harm's way. So I think that it's almost inevitable at this point, that every country is going to want some kind of comprehensive privacy legislation. And having us, as quickly as possible, move towards having as many countries as possible adopt something like the GDPR framework, as opposed to the alternative visions for the internet, is going to be really important for securing the data privacy future that we want and for peoples safety. Repro Free: 01/04/2019 To demonstrate solidarity in support of Organ Donation, representatives of CAOGA in the Defence Forces Army, Naval Service and Air Corps - stepped out at McKee Barracks along with the family of a deceased member of the Defence Forces. CAOGA organised the event in partnership with the Irish Kidney Association to mark the beginning of Organ Donor Awareness Week (30 March-6 April). Yvonne Cassidy honoured her late husband Sergeant Pat Cassidys wishes when he passed away at the age of 47, five years ago, by donating his organs and saving three lives. Pictured representing CAOGA and the Army was Comdt. Ciara Murray, Captain Andrew Fry from the Air Corps and Lieutenant Colm Fox from the Naval Service with the deceased donor Pat Cassidys wife Yvonne, her son Cian and daughter Jessica. Yvonne Cassidy honoured her late husband Sergeant Pat Cassidys wishes when he passed away at the age of 47, five years ago, by donating his organs and saving three lives. Pictured are the couple on their wedding day in McKee Barracks. Members of the Defence Forces are showing their support for Organ Donor Awareness Week, while also remembering a young Army sergeant who helped save three lives after his organs were donated. The family of Sergeant Pat Cassidy - originally from Athlone - joined with Defence Force members earlier today in a special ceremony to highlight the importance of organ donation at McKee Barracks in Dublin. Expand Close Repro Free: 01/04/2019 To demonstrate solidarity in support of Organ Donation, representatives of CAOGA in the Defence Forces Army, Naval Service and Air Corps - stepped out at McKee Barracks along with the family of a deceased member of the Defence Forces. Yvonne Cassidy honoured her late husband Sergeant Pat Cassidys wishes when he passed away at the age of 47, five years ago, by donating his organs and saving three lives. Pictured is the deceased donor Pat Cassidys wife Yvonne. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Repro Free: 01/04/2019 To demonstrate solidarity in support of Organ Donation, representatives of CAOGA in the Defence Forces Army, Naval Service and Air Corps - stepped out at McKee Barracks along with the family of a deceased member of the Defence Forces. Yvonne Cassidy honoured her late husband Sergeant Pat Cassidys wishes when he passed away at the age of 47, five years ago, by donating his organs and saving three lives. Pictured is the deceased donor Pat Cassidys wife Yvonne. Sgt Cassidy was just 47 when he died following a heart attack - he was the holder of an organ donor card. His wife Yvonne and their children honoured his wishes, and his lungs, kidneys and liver helped save the lives of three people. Its a very special day for myself and my family to be asked to help highlight Organ Donor Awareness Week alongside members of the Defence Forces and CAOGA," Yvonne said. "Pat would have been proud. We both came from military families and I grew up in the army married quarters here at McKee Barracks as my father was a Company Sergeant, while Pat, was the son of an army Corporal at Custume Barracks in Athlone. "We got married here and this place holds so many special memories. My son Cian and my daughter Jessica looked forward to coming back here today. My other daughter Rachel regretted not being able to attend. It is lovely to meet Comdt. Ciara Murray today, who served with Pat when they worked together at the Chief of Staffs office at Infirmary Road. Expand Close To demonstrate solidarity in support of Organ Donation, representatives of CAOGA in the Defence Forces Army, Naval Service and Air Corps - stepped out at McKee Barracks along with the family of a deceased member of the Defence Forces. CAOGA organised the event in partnership with the Irish Kidney Association to mark the beginning of Organ Donor Awareness Week (30 March-6 April). Yvonne Cassidy honoured her late husband Sergeant Pat Cassidys wishes when he passed away at the age of 47, five years ago, by donating his organs and saving three lives. Mark Murphy, Chief Executive of the Irish Kidney Association is pictured with the deceased donor Pat Cassidys wife Yvonne and representing CAOGA, from the Army was Comdt. Ciara Murray, Captain Andrew Fry from the Air Corps and Lieutenant Colm Fox from the Naval Service. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp To demonstrate solidarity in support of Organ Donation, representatives of CAOGA in the Defence Forces Army, Naval Service and Air Corps - stepped out at McKee Barracks along with the family of a deceased member of the Defence Forces. CAOGA organised the event in partnership with the Irish Kidney Association to mark the beginning of Organ Donor Awareness Week (30 March-6 April). Yvonne Cassidy honoured her late husband Sergeant Pat Cassidys wishes when he passed away at the age of 47, five years ago, by donating his organs and saving three lives. Mark Murphy, Chief Executive of the Irish Kidney Association is pictured with the deceased donor Pat Cassidys wife Yvonne and representing CAOGA, from the Army was Comdt. Ciara Murray, Captain Andrew Fry from the Air Corps and Lieutenant Colm Fox from the Naval Service. Pat was seemingly very fit and healthy before he passed away at just 47 years of age. "He ran 8km a day, didnt smoke and drank in moderation although he did have high blood pressure. Following his heart attack, he had stents inserted but he took a bad turn which is thought to have been caused by an aneurysm, which left him on life support for three days before we said goodbye to him. "We hadnt slept for days and the decision to donate his organs was a hard one to make but was made easier knowing that we were honouring his wishes. "He had been a blood donor all his life and we had had the conversation about his wishes to be an organ donor. My children and myself are proud of Pat. At our darkest moments we take solace in knowing that he helped others through organ donation," Yvonne said. Expand Close To demonstrate solidarity in support of Organ Donation, representatives of CAOGA in the Defence Forces Army, Naval Service and Air Corps - stepped out at McKee Barracks along with the family of a deceased member of the Defence Forces. CAOGA organised the event in partnership with the Irish Kidney Association to mark the beginning of Organ Donor Awareness Week (30 March-6 April). Yvonne Cassidy honoured her late husband Sergeant Pat Cassidys wishes when he passed away at the age of 47, five years ago, by donating his organs and saving three lives. Pictured representing CAOGA and the Army was Comdt. Ciara Murray, Captain Andrew Fry from the Air Corps and Lieutenant Colm Fox from the Naval Service with the deceased donor Pat Cassidys wife Yvonne (left). / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp To demonstrate solidarity in support of Organ Donation, representatives of CAOGA in the Defence Forces Army, Naval Service and Air Corps - stepped out at McKee Barracks along with the family of a deceased member of the Defence Forces. CAOGA organised the event in partnership with the Irish Kidney Association to mark the beginning of Organ Donor Awareness Week (30 March-6 April). Yvonne Cassidy honoured her late husband Sergeant Pat Cassidys wishes when he passed away at the age of 47, five years ago, by donating his organs and saving three lives. Pictured representing CAOGA and the Army was Comdt. Ciara Murray, Captain Andrew Fry from the Air Corps and Lieutenant Colm Fox from the Naval Service with the deceased donor Pat Cassidys wife Yvonne (left). Comdt. Ciara Murray said, We are delighted to be here today in recognition of a former colleague and a gentleman Pat Cassidy and all the other deceased organ donors who have saved lives through transplantation and to be able to support the Irish Kidney Association in highlighting Organ Donor Awareness Week. "Special thanks to my fellow Defence Forces colleagues Captain Andrew Fry from the Air Corps and Lieutenant Colm Fox from the Naval Service. The Air Corps transports organ donor patients as one of its many roles. We are here to demonstrate the collective solidarity amongst Defence Forces' personnel in support of organ donation. Chief Executive of the Irish Kidney Association Mark Murphy thanked the Defence Forces and the Cassidy family in involving members highlight the vital importance of organ donation. "It is thanks to the selflessness of deceased organ donors that there are 4,000 people in Ireland who are enjoying extended life. "We hope this initiative will motivate the public to discuss organ donation and let their family know their wishes as well as keeping the reminders present with signed organ donor cards and ticking the box for organ donation on their driving licence." The focus of Organ Donor Awareness Week which takes place from 30 March until 6 April is to remind individuals to talk to their families about their organ donation wishes and keep the reminders of their decision available by carrying the Organ Donor Card, permitting Code 115 to be included on their drivers licence and having the digital organ donor card APP on their smartphone. On a rainy Tuesday night, a group of men are giving up the comforts of home and live Champions' League football on the telly to unburden themselves of their emotions. Every week, the men from around Dublin city venture into a room just off Parnell Street, and sit in a ring, which is supposed to indicate that there is nobody in charge. This is a "soft hierarchy". When I am welcomed into this circle at Hill Street Men's Group, the participants include a postman, a school caretaker, a community worker and a counsellor. Most of the men here are separated or divorced. The postman Liam McDermott tells me he was encouraged to come along by his ex-wife. "She thought it would help me. At first when I came here I thought to myself, 'What am I doing here?' But I find you can talk about things that you wouldn't talk about at work or in the pub." The response from colleagues at work when he says he is in a men's group can be quite curious. He says: "One of them asked whether we were all gay." The popular image of a men's group is of bearded neo-neanderthals running around a campfire thumping their chests and hollering as they try to re-discover their inner warrior. But there is none of this macho carry-on in the resource centre on Hill Street in a room decorated with family photos, where chaps chat amiably over tea and biscuits. The manly ritual is kept to a minimum. At the start of a session that lasts for an hour and a quarter, the group reads out its mission statement to "support men... who are living with feelings of loneliness and isolation by sharing and growing together". Another stereotype about men's groups is that they are a forum for endless moaning about the wrongs of women - and the perceived injustices inflicted in marital break-ups. Family and relationships problems are certainly aired in the group, but there seem to be few expressions of bitter recrimination when I am there. Most of the separated fathers say they have good relationships with their former partners. Christy Fleming, coordinator of a project helping people with Alzheimer's disease says: "It's a place to come along and share and be listened to, which you wouldn't be able do in other situations. "Sometimes there is healing in someone just listening to you - and giving you the space to say what you want to say. That can be enough and it's not about fixing anybody." Although the talk among the assembled men may be informal, and light-hearted at times, the session has a set structure. After the mission statement is read, the time is divided up equally between the participants. Each man talks for his allocated period of time about what is pre-occupying them, and afterwards he can ask for feedback, or choose to have no feedback at all. One of the men in the group is worried about a prostate operation and having sleepless nights about it. He says that just talking about it to the group takes away the fear and isolation. Another member of the group tells me how he had a problem with one of his sons, and does not know what to do about it. He talked about it at a previous session, and said the feedback from the rest of the group helped him to find a solution. Many of the participants joined the group, which was originally known as Men Alone in No man's Land, after their marriages broke up. As one put it to me, "Men can find themselves being thrown out of their home and they are left with a lot of isolation and loneliness. When I was in that situation I joined a men's group." There is common agreement in the group that women are much better at sharing their emotions, and supporting each other in times of difficulty. Terry McMullen, a member of the group who works as a counsellor, says: "When you grow up as a man you are not conditioned to show how you are feeling. It's more about being macho. That's our culture, heritage and where we come from. "The cycle needs to be broken by men being educated to say what they feel." Liam, the postman, agrees and suggests that when he was growing up, if a boy showed any feelings he would be told: "You little gobshite, you'll be okay." Terry says: "I find that when men are emotionally involved with something, they can find it hard to think their way through it. They can get confused. "They need something outside of themselves in order to see their way through it. That is why talking in the group helps." Terry believes that it is not just the conditioning of men that is the problem. He says women can also expect men to behave in a certain way and not express their emotions too much. "Women want the perfect man, but when they find him, they say they don't want him that way and that he needs to go back to being himself." Only two of the men who meet up on a Tuesday knew each other before the group formed, and they do not see each other outside these Tuesday sessions. Paul, the school caretaker, says: "We don't meet outside the group but if I was in a spot of bother I could ring one of the lads and go through the problem with them. You have someone to lean on when you are feeling down. "I live on my own and coming to the group gets me out of the house, and it is not just about talking about the bad stuff. I could be here talking about having a great day in the park with the grandkids." Dr Harry Barry, the GP and author who specialises in mental health, says meeting up in a men's group can be hugely constructive. "It's a healthy way of approaching men's problems - it's the whole idea that men can say something in a group, feel safe and not feel judged. "You will often find that when men are in trouble they tend to go in on themselves while women pick up the phone and talk to each other. "In the past there was an ethos that if something happened to men it was up to them to absorb their emotion and get on with it, while it was okay for women to show distress or difficulty. "Men almost have to be educated in what their actual emotions are." Dr Barry says the idea of men sharing their inner feelings in a group follows some of the basic principles of psychotherapy. "We get something out of our emotional mind in words and suddenly it is not as big a problem as we thought. "When our emotional mind keeps our problems locked in it enlarges them, and makes them much worse than they actually are." Dr Barry says that by meeting up and sharing their inner thoughts, men are able to rationalise their emotions. As Paul, the school caretaker, told me as we sat in a circle: "A problem shared is a problem halved. As we look across the water to the greatest calamity in modern political history, a range of emotions spring to mind - bewilderment, scorn and downright contempt being the most prominent. Theresa May now looks as broken as a bride who has been shunned at her own wedding reception and the sight of her various ministers and former allies taking turns to stick the boot into their supposed 'leader' is both unedifying and a rather horrifying indication that parliamentary democracy rests on a knife edge in the UK. But as much as we look at the dangerously farcical events unfolding with that combination of scorn, bewilderment and downright contempt, we should be careful not to be too smug about our own situation, which now sees Disabilities Minister Finian McGrath the latest member of Cabinet to go rogue. McGrath's comments on drink-driving were, under any rational metric, complete nonsense. In his now-infamous interview with the 'Sunday Independent', the embattled minister made some rather strange and extremely serious assertions. During the interview, he claimed that the Government had to "bite the bullet" on Shane Ross's new drink-driving laws but then upended the table with his claim that members of An Garda Siochana are so unhappy with the new laws that they have started to excessively breathalyse drivers as some weird form of political protest. Warming to his theme, he further expounded that: "I'm getting complaints around the country that they are breathalysing people at 2pm in the day. To me, the breathalysing time should be at pub closing time between 12 o'clock and two in the morning. That's where the focus should be, so I don't know what agenda is going on here." Those remarks alone would have been sufficiently odd to raise more than one eyebrow. But warming to his tinfoil-helmet routine, he then added that: "I think they [gardai] have an issue and that I feel uncomfortable about. The law is there to implement - you're a civil servant, get on with it. Some of them don't like the law, yes. I suspect that's part of the angle and they are saying, 'well, blame the Government', and I don't like that." He then further stuck the boot in by going so far as to claim that: "I would like Drew Harris now, as part of the reforms we have to de-politicise anything like that in a police force. A police force - like teachers, nurses - guards should always be non-political. That would not be tolerated in any other profession." Even in the strange and terrible state of the current political landscape, it was a remarkable thing to say. After all, here is a man who sits at the Cabinet table and decided that even though we're in the midst of the biggest national crisis any of us have ever witnessed, now was the perfect time to accuse the cops of being, essentially, a mutinous political force that gets to cherry-pick which laws it enforces and which ones it doesn't. Nobody ever won any prizes for defending the police in this country and there is no doubt that shenanigans of previous commissioners have left a sour taste in the mouth of many observers - of all political stripes. But apart from blithely insulting the very people who have to - sometimes literally - pick up the pieces after a car crash, he was also demonstrably incorrect in his fatuous claim. After all, 10pc of drink-driving crashes occur between the hours of 7am and 11am. But leaving aside the mere factual inaccuracy, the remarks seem to indicate a man who is simply not up to his job. Not surprisingly, the condemnation of his remarks was vociferous. Numerous road safety campaigners were quick to point out the sheer ignorance of the comments, and his colleagues, such as Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan, seemed genuinely aghast. Numerous fellow junior ministers were quick to condemn him and, not for the first time in his career, as soon as McGrath realised he had made a massive mistake he immediately rolled back. The ink was barely dry on the newspaper before he issued a statement "withdrawing" his remarks and he then added, for good measure, that: "I am also happy to state that I have full confidence in An Garda Siochana and that I was wrong to suggest there was any element of politicising within the force over the new drink-driving regulations." With the best will in the world, that's simply not good enough. After all, if you are going to make the rather dangerous suggestion that gardai are a law unto themselves, who unilaterally decide which rules they enforce depending on their mood, then it stretches credulity to state that you "have full confidence" in the force. Simply put, either he has confidence in them or he doesn't. If he does have confidence in them, why make such an incendiary claim in the first place? Frankly, his ferocious backtracking matters not a jot when compared to the conspiracy-theory grenade he rolled down the corridor. In much the same way that some UK politicians have been accused of politicising the stop-and-search proposals in London which are designed to cut down on their knife crime epidemic, there were two things that stood out with his comments - a seemingly irresistible desire to make a cheap, populist political point and an apparent indifference to the families and victims of drunk drivers. To be charitable, one could perhaps say that the minister is from a time when drink driving wasn't taken all that seriously in this country. But those days, thankfully, are long gone and the culture has changed for the better, and most people now understand that driving is a responsibility not a right and that driving over the limit is not just illegal but morally reprehensible. It's not the first time McGrath has walked into his own punch. Whether it was his hopelessly misguided defence of totalitarian Cuba, his initial opposition to the HPV vaccine, or paying the water charges, he seems almost incapable of not putting his foot in it - before invariably making the kind of swift U-turn that would leave most mere mortals perilously dizzy. In normal times, this furore would surely be enough to force Leo Varadkar to listen to the calls for his resignation and hand him his ministerial P45. But as we know, these are far from normal times and he's hardly the only minister woefully out of his depth, so he might manage to hang on. Again. In one of the lesser spotted comments in that interview, he laughed that he would "do a deal with the Devil himself" if it secured his place in the next cabinet. Perhaps mindful of the PR liability which McGrath has now become, the Devil has yet to give his response... It looks rather like Finian McGrath is going to "get off with a caution". He has reversed out of a few very ill-thought-out comments about An Garda Siochana's operation of road checks for drink driving and wisely went into media purdah for a time thereafter. In other circumstances there would be a strong case for him having to quit. In essence he was accusing the nation's police of trying to undermine a minister in the Government - that is pretty hefty and perilous stuff. Up until Sunday, the likeable Independent TD and super-junior minister responsible for disability issues, appeared to have settled down as a diligent member of the Government team. After a few calamitous and quixotic forays into the media on various issues after his appointment in May 2016, he appeared to be the one from the Independent Alliance most accepting that Government is different, slower, harder and more complex than being an Opposition TD who can be perennially "agin the Government and all the related authorities". Then he did a 'Sunday Independent' interview and spoke out without thinking of the huge implications of what he was saying. He said gardai had become politicised and were carrying out unnecessary breathalyser tests, especially in the mornings, because they opposed new drink-driving laws. Mr McGrath alleged gardai were keen to "stick things" to his Independent Alliance colleague, the unloved Transport Minister Shane Ross, who had pushed through laws toughening penalties for drivers caught at the lower-range of drink transgressions. He similarly cited the tougher rules on unqualified drivers having to be accompanied at all times by a fully licensed driver. That 'Sunday Independent' interview is well worth reading in full. It shows a huge honesty by Finian McGrath about issues like housing, and a determination to back his embattled Cabinet colleagues, Eoghan Murphy in housing and Simon Harris in health. But Mr McGrath's comments about the nation's police force - and his exhortation to the Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris, to intervene - were a bridge far too far. You have to reach back to the 1973-77 ill-starred Fine Gael-Labour coalition to find anything comparable. Back then, allegations began to build of "a heavy gang" of gardai breaking the law by coercing, intimidating and assaulting IRA and other paramilitary suspects under detention. Fine Gael informally claimed the allegations came from pro-Fianna Fail gardai - claims which were never put on the formal record. Comparisons are also made with the late defence minister Paddy Donegan who, in 1976, dubbed President Cearbhall O Dalaigh "a thundering disgrace" for doing his duty in referring tough anti-terrorist legislation to the Supreme Court to test how it accorded with human rights guarantees in the Constitution. Back then Mr Donegan stayed in office and the President resigned. It reminds us that everything relates to the political situation of the day. Predictably, Fianna Fail's justice spokesperson, Jim O'Callaghan, has said Finian McGrath's comments were "very foolish" and "over the top". Mr O'Callaghan then said he should apologise to An Garda Siochana. Fianna Fail is not betting the farm on this row. And enter Fine Gael grandee Richard Bruton to stress he had full confidence in Mr McGrath and "anyone can make a mistake". Wagons circled, and time to move on. Messrs Bruton and McGrath are constituency colleagues. Anyone for a transfer, guard? It all goes back to when Transport Minister Shane Ross and Tanaiste Simon Coveney were caught on tape discussing the prospect of Border checks in the event of no deal. During their conversation, the Tanaiste confirmed a form of checks will be introduced in a no deal, "but we can't get into where they'll be at this stage". "But once you start talking about checks anywhere near the Border, people will start delving into that and all of a sudden we'll be the Government that reintroduced a physical Border on the island of Ireland," he said. More than two months later very little has changed. Leo Varadkar has forever argued that the only way to prevent a hard Border is the backstop. But he also puts forward the idea that 'difficult discussion' can ensure frictionless trade continues in a no-deal Brexit scenario. We were told those talks would not take place until after the meteor hits - but last week the Taoiseach admitted there have been some talks at official level. Extraordinarily though, he told the Dail there is "nothing to share" and "no papers or documents". The Irish Independent understands the discussions are a bit more advanced than Mr Varadkar would like us to think. Technology is being looked at as one option to limit the disruption, but major questions remain about how to maintain livestock standards on both sides of the Border. And today Mr Varadkar travels to the Elysee Palace in France where tough talking will be done. Irish Government sources are ultra keen to portray the trip to Paris and Angela Merkel's jaunt to Dublin on Thursday as positive events. The solidarity shown by the EU countries throughout the Brexit process has been phenomenal. But the French are fed up with the British intransigence and worried what impact a long extension might have on their own political system. Macron was elected on the back of a pro-European message but his star has fallen far in the interim. And he knows there are plenty of right-wing groups in France that would love to hang their election campaigns on Brexit. Despite mixed messages over Merkel's position on Ireland, it does appear she's on our side and likely to back a long delay to Brexit. But she will be taking no chances either. The single market must be protected. Everybody, including Mr Varadkar, says so. What they won't tell us is how. And that's a risky position for the Irish Government to maintain. It will not be thanked if the public here learn about 'alternative arrangements' or 'Border security by any other name' from outside this island. The truth is that the Government is hoping against hope that the crisis in London can resolve itself. The sheer stupidity and crassness of Finian McGraths assertions that gardai have become politicised and are carrying out unnecessary roadside breathalyser checks (Coalition crisis over ministers disparaging attack on gardai, Irish Independent, April 1) can only be seen for what it is, populist rhetoric to appease those who think its okay to drink and drive. Mr McGrath should remember, before he opens his gob, that he is part of the Government that brought forward legislation to improve road safety and bring down road deaths. For him to suggest that ordinary Garda members on front-line patrol are over the top and that it was part of an agenda required an immediate apology. It shows how out of touch he and others in the political arena are who think that drink driving is okay, even the morning after. He sounds more like the Healy-Raes with their imbecilic outbursts. Mr McGrath should be reminded that the number of road deaths is below the 200s from 2010, with an average of 140 per year, from the highs of the 600s in the 1970s and 1980s. To have a Government minister allege that gardai on the front line have some insidious underlying reason for roadside breath tests is bordering on the fantastical. Maybe Finian McGrath and his cohort of sympathisers would like to meet with the families of people who have died as a result of drunk drivers and suggest to them that Garda enforcement is wrong? Christy Galligan Letterkenny, Co Donegal We must build our way out of this devastating housing crisis I would like to bring your attention to the latest homeless figures which Housing, Planning and Local Government Minister Eoghan Murphy referred to this week as disappointing, making it the understatement of the week. This Government has been nothing short of useless in trying to get to grips with the housing crisis. It is time to stop vulture funds buying up large swathes of properties in Ireland in general, and in Dublin in particular. Its very easy to put in some sort of legislation to put a stop to something that no one is happy about. Then start negotiating with vulture funds who own property here to buy it back from them. I live in the Dublin North Bay. Not far from where I live four sites owned by Dublin City Council were earmarked for development more than three years ago. Hand on heart I can assure you there is not a digger to be seen at any of these sites even though this is an area with a huge amount of households on the social housing lists. Private developers will not solve the housing crisis. More than 50pc of households on the social housing lists are single persons requiring one-bedroom accommodation. I think I can risk a bet here that this is exactly the type of property private developers are not building. This means that one-bedroom properties must be built by local authorities, so just start building them. Evelyn Harte Dublin Over-the-top solution would be bordering on the ridiculous It seems to me that our Taoiseach and his Cabinet will soon have a very difficult proposition to make to the Irish people regarding the Border. The EU will insist that the frontier on the Irish side be manned by a mobile force made up of mainland European police and customs officers. They in turn will be protected against smuggling, racketeering and serious crime by a battalion of soldiers from Pesco, the European army. The perfect problem reaction syndrome, where the solution will be a lot worse than the original problem. John Finegan Bailieborough, Co Cavan Hardline Brexiteers simply want everything on a plate So many columnists and letter writers express exasperation that the UK knows what it does not want but has no idea what it does want. This is patently misreading the situation. The UK has made it abundantly clear from the outset what it wants and Brexiteers, in particular, have been saying clearly that the UK wants its cake and to eat it too. They want out of the EU and all its appendages but want full access to the trading environment with no freedom of movement/no tariffs/no financial input and no legal oversight. That the EU bureaucrats cant seem to understand this is a complete mystery to Mr Rees-Mogg, Mr Johnson et al. Simples. Gerry Barrett Dublin 17 Fiona Shaw has described Brexit as a nightmare that should never have befallen the UK (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP) Fiona Shaw has described Brexit as a nightmare that should never have befallen the UK. The countrys future relationship with the European Union is as uncertain as ever after MPs again rejected a series of alternatives to Theresa Mays deal. The deadlock has led to speculation the Prime Minister could call a snap election, while some politicians are calling for a second referendum and a no-deal exit remains a possibility. Expand Close Fiona Shaw has said she does not see a happy ending for Brexit (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Fiona Shaw has said she does not see a happy ending for Brexit (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP) Irish actress Shaw, who is known for playing Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, said she could see no positive outcome from Brexit. She told the Press Association: Brexit is just a nightmare that should never have befallen that country but its very sad and I really cant see any good coming of it at all. Asked if she felt sorry for Mrs May, Killing Eve star Shaw said: Im sorry for the country, Im sorry for the poverty in the country that shouldve been addressed before now, Im sorry that the wrong people are being blamed for that and Im very sorry that in any way that we should offend our neighbours. The Cabinet will meet on Tuesday as Mrs May seeks to navigate a way through Brexit. Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh attend the premiere of BBC America and AMC's 'Killing Eve' at ArcLight Hollywood on April 01, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images) Jodie Comer, left, and Sandra Oh have won critical praise for their leading roles in Killing Eve (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP) (L-R) British actress Jodie Comer, Canadian actress Sandra Oh and Irish actress Fiona Shaw arrive for BBC America and AMC's "Killing Eve" season 2 premiere at the Arclight on April 1, 2019 in Hollywood. (Photo by Chris Delmas / AFP) Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh attend the premiere of BBC America and AMC's 'Killing Eve' at ArcLight Hollywood on April 01, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images) Canadian actress Sandra Oh (L) and British actress Jodie Comer (R) arrive for BBC America and AMC's "Killing Eve" season 2 premiere at the Arclight on April 1, 2019 in Hollywood. (Photo by Chris Delmas / AFP) There are few programmes which can confirm we are in fact in the golden age of television moreso than Killing Eve. To mark the arrival of an impending season two to our screens over the coming weeks, show stars Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer arrived in contrasting ensembles at last night's premiere in Hollywood. Oh, whose rise to household name-dom has been coming for 15 years, won a Golden Globe for her role in the show's first season, opted for a plunging white suit, her signature style. Comer, on the other hand, nabbed a BAFTA nomination for her role as a Russian assassin obsessed with the eponymous Eve, chose a strapless black midi dress with a V-shaped back embellished with colourful sequins by Victoria Beckham, accessorising with a pair of half moon earrings. Irish actress Fiona Shaw, from Cork, also stars as MI6 boss said the sophomore season will bring "even more thrills" that its debut. "You wouldnt have thought you could have many more but there are." Expand Close Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh attend the premiere of BBC America and AMC's 'Killing Eve' at ArcLight Hollywood on April 01, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh attend the premiere of BBC America and AMC's 'Killing Eve' at ArcLight Hollywood on April 01, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images) The female-led cast have been vocal in their appreciation and support for one another, especially as the show continues to grow in popularity and boost each actresses profile even more. "I did have a moment last year at the Critics Choice Awards. I was with Phoebe, Sandra and Fiona and I was like, 'This is so f**king cool'. To be on set not just with women, but these women in particular - being encouraged by them, learning from them and laughing with them - its just special," Comer told Elle. Meghan Markle (L) in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle for her wedding to Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, watched by (middle row L-R) Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Britain's Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Britain's Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, Page boy James, Viscount Severn, Britain's Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Britain's Lady Louise Windsor, Britain's Princess Anne, Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Timothy Laurence, (front row L-R) Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Britain's Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Duchess of Britain's Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York Prince Andrew, Duke of York and Princess Eugenie of York during day three of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and his daughters Britain's Princess Eugenie of York (L) and Britain's Princess Beatrice of York arrive for the wedding ceremony of Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and US actress Meghan Markle at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, in Windsor, on May 19, 2018. (Photo by Chris Jackson / POOL / AFP) Royal wedding part two is on the way tomorrow and with it, comes a reminder of an old scandal. While the guestlist will feature all senior royals, including Kate Middleton and Prince William and newlyweds Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and a who's who of showbiz including Robbie Williams, Karlie Kloss and George Clooney - one person's planned absence is glaring. Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, is not only skipping the ceremony in favouring of attending a school event in Scotland, a "previous commitment" but she will also be reportedly hosting a party at her home in East Ayrshire. A number of new reports have claimed that tensions between Camilla and Eugenie's father Prince Andrew are the real reason she's avoiding the ceremony, because she "hasn't forgotten" how "deeply unhelpful" he was in facilitating her acceptance into the royal family after Princess Diana's death. "Camilla has always felt Andrew could have done more. The Queen listens to Andrew and he could have helped his brother at a time when he had few allies within the family," a source told the Daily Mail. Expand Close (L-R) Prince Andrew, Duke of York and Prince Charles and Prince of Wales arrive for the second day of Royal Ascot 2006, at Ascot Racecourse on June 21, 2006 in Ascot, England. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (L-R) Prince Andrew, Duke of York and Prince Charles and Prince of Wales arrive for the second day of Royal Ascot 2006, at Ascot Racecourse on June 21, 2006 in Ascot, England. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images) "In fact, I would go so far as to say he was deeply unhelpful when support would have meant a huge amount to her and the Prince. Looking back to when there was little public sympathy for Charles and Camilla, if not open hostility, it was a case of Andrew playing politics. Camilla hasnt forgotten." And Camilla is making the most of her time away from the festivities at Windsor Castle, hosting a shooting party at her Scottish estate, which she organised after learning of Eugenie's wedding date. "The truth is that Camilla has a house party for a few friends. They are arriving on Friday and will be there over the weekend," an insider told the Telegraph. "The date of the wedding was known eight months ago so its strange Camilla organised her house party this weekend...Its hard to see her turning down the invitation as anything other than a snub but she insists she has other engagements that she was invited to first." Expand Close Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and his daughters Britain's Princess Eugenie of York (L) and Britain's Princess Beatrice of York arrive for the wedding ceremony of Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and US actress Meghan Markle at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, in Windsor, on May 19, 2018. (Photo by Chris Jackson / POOL / AFP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and his daughters Britain's Princess Eugenie of York (L) and Britain's Princess Beatrice of York arrive for the wedding ceremony of Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and US actress Meghan Markle at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, in Windsor, on May 19, 2018. (Photo by Chris Jackson / POOL / AFP) Reports of behind the scenes bickering is a throwback to the explosive royal scandals of yesteryear rather than the sanitised version of news we get from the younger generation today. In fact, Eugenie's wedding is proving to be a reminder of a time period that most of the British royals would want erased history - largely, an adjustment of the spotlight on Sarah Ferguson, who is said to be a "bag of nerves" at meeting former father-in-law Prince Philip for the first time in years. After divorcing Andrew in 1996, with whom she has a famously strong friendship, Philip has gone to great lengths to avoid her. Video of the Day "She is worried about the reception she will get from Prince Philip and now there will be a bit of a frosty atmosphere with Prince Charles," the source added. Tensions have grown between Charles and Andrew over the years as the next in line to the throne is actioning his vision for the future of the royals, including trimming costs for extended family - including Eugenie and her sister Beatrice, who both work full-time and no longer have state funded security. Eugenie and her husband-to-be live in an apartment in Kensington Palace, where they pay the market rate rent, while her cousins live on the grounds at no charge. Expand Close Meghan Markle (L) in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle for her wedding to Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, watched by (middle row L-R) Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Britain's Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Britain's Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, Page boy James, Viscount Severn, Britain's Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Britain's Lady Louise Windsor, Britain's Princess Anne, Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Timothy Laurence, (front row L-R) Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Britain's Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Duchess of Britain's Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Meghan Markle (L) in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle for her wedding to Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, watched by (middle row L-R) Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Britain's Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Britain's Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, Page boy James, Viscount Severn, Britain's Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Britain's Lady Louise Windsor, Britain's Princess Anne, Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Timothy Laurence, (front row L-R) Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Britain's Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Duchess of Britain's Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York Tomorrow's wedding has been a controversial one, particularly the couple's decision to have such a lavish ceremony and their reported insistence on having the ceremony televised. 850 guests are expected to watch the wedding at St George's Chapel, while 400 will enjoy the VIP after-party at Royal Lodge. Commuters make their way home this evening during a sudden shower of hailstones in the Grand Canal Dock area of Dublin. Picture Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin Forecasters have issued a snow-ice warning for five counties which will begin tonight. The warning comes just hours after a separate snow-ice warning ended at noon today. The status yellow warning covers Wicklow, Donegal, Leitrim, Mayo and Sligo and is in place from 10pm on Tuesday until 11am on Wednesday morning. The latest weather warning warns people to expect wintry showers "leading to possible snow accumulations and icy conditions". Status Yellow Snow - Ice warning issued for Wicklow, Donegal, Leitrim, Mayo and Sligo. Valid from 22:00 hours Tue, 02-Apr-2019 until 11:00 hours Wed, 03-Apr-2019 pic.twitter.com/F3B4oCDHIV Met Eireann (@MetEireann) April 2, 2019 With temperatures plummeting to lows of -1C, the forecaster has advised people to brace themselves for a return of frost and snow. Met Eireann said the dramatic dip in temperatures was due to a polar air mass moving over Ireland from the north. Heavy showers in all parts of the country this evening. Some showers will be wintry with hail and thunder in places.https://t.co/YJqxvBBwTs Below is the hail shower that passed through Dublin just after 4pm. pic.twitter.com/dZZagxaiQr Met Eireann (@MetEireann) April 2, 2019 It will heavily influence our weather for the coming days. The rest of the country is to expect cold and blustery weather for the remainder of today. There is also an ongoing risk of hail and thunder. Temperatures will vary between 5 and 8C, but may feel colder in the wind. Mozambican and international health workers raced yesterday to contain the outbreak of cholera in the cyclone-hit city of Beira, where the number of cases of the disease has jumped to 517 and the first death has been recorded. "There are seven emergency cholera treatment centres operational in Beira and two more being set up. Two additional centres are being set up in Nhamatanda," said David Wightwick, the World Health Organisation's team leader in Beira. Mozambican workers have restored clean tap water to parts of Beira, a city of 500,000, although large areas of the city still do not have access to sanitary water, he told The Associated Press while visiting a water treatment centre. "A vaccination campaign against cholera, with 900,000 doses of the vaccine, will start Wednesday," said Mr Wightwick. "That should blunt the edge of this outbreak." More than two weeks after Cyclone Idai hit Beira and swept across central Mozambique, about 98,000 people are in camps for displaced and "living under canvas", he said. "Cholera is our most immediate challenge," said Mr Wightwick, who added that getting adequate nutrition to the population and battling other diseases like malaria are also priorities. In addition to Mozambican medics, health workers from Portugal, Denmark, Italy and China are helping respond to the crisis. Cases of cholera, an acute diarrheal disease, have risen dramatically since the first five cases were confirmed last week. Cholera is spread by contaminated water and food. It can kill within hours but is relatively easy to treat. Algerian demonstrators have demonstrated for weeks against Abdelaziz Bouteflika and his regime (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul) Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has stepped down after 20 years in office and weeks of massive nationwide protests aimed at pushing him out of power. The announcement followed a call from the powerful army chief for the ailing president, 82, to immediately take up his proposal to bow out while respecting the constitution. The official APS news agency said that Bouteflika had notified the Constitutional Council of his decision to end his mandate. There was no immediate word on who would take over. Expand Close Abdelaziz Bouteflika, pictured in 2008, has stepped down from power (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Abdelaziz Bouteflika, pictured in 2008, has stepped down from power (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel) Under the constitution, the president of the upper house, the Council of Nations, steps in as interim leader for a maximum of 90 days so that elections can be organised. Army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah had earlier in the day convened a meeting of the top military hierarchy, making clear that the call for Bouteflika to step down had the backing of the military. The Defence Ministry communique referred to Bouteflikas entourage as a gang and said it had made fraud, embezzlement and duplicity its vocation. He has rarely been seen in public since a 2013 stroke. His resignation caps six weeks of peaceful protest marches calling for him to make an exit. It was preceded by calls for him to submit to Article 102 of the Constitution that would declare him unfit for office. The Defence Ministry statement Tuesday appeared to be a final warning. Bouteflika came to the presidency after its darkest period, the 1990s Islamic insurgency. After taking power in 1999, he managed to bring back stability to a country devastated by killings and distrust. As president, age and illness took its toll, and corruption scandals dogged him and associates. Bouteflika is accused of failing to create an economy that could offer enough jobs, despite the nations vast oil and gas wealth. In a country where secrecy surrounds the leadership, it has never been clear whether Bouteflika was fully in charge or whether the powerful army was pulling the strings. More than 400 people gathered on cliffs near Brighton to send an SOS signal across the English Channel in protest against Brexit. The protesters used mirrors and other reflective objects to send the signal in the direction of continental Europe. The stunt was a large scale, pro-EU, human artwork, according to a statement issued by the organiser, Bristol-based artist Dunkan McKellar. The group successfully created a symbolic SOS call to the rest of Europe, to show the strength of the British pro-EU community in the face of Brexit chaos, the statement added. The protest took place on Saturday on the cliffs at Saltdean on the south coast. The crowd spread out to form a long line along the coast, facing out across the sea. Last year Mr McKellar worked on another artwork which saw people line a 1km stretch of the border between Mexico and the US. Participants wore a mirrored mask which reflected the suns rays. The masks caught the sun and together they created a dazzling ray of hope crossing the border wall, the statement added. Celebrity publicist Max Clifford's conviction for sex offences has been upheld by leading judges more than a year after his death. The case of the 74-year-old, who died while serving an eight-year prison sentence for indecent assault, was scrutinised by the UK's Court of Appeal last month. The court was told the PR guru denied "until his death" that he had sexually assaulted young women. But, in a ruling on Tuesday, Lady Justice Rafferty described the case against Clifford as "strong". Expand Close Undated handout photo issued by the Metropolitan Police of a custody photograph of Max Clifford / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Undated handout photo issued by the Metropolitan Police of a custody photograph of Max Clifford Dismissing an appeal against his conviction, she said: "Nothing we heard came anywhere near imperilling the safety of his conviction." Before suffering heart failure in December 2017, Clifford won the right for his fight to overturn his conviction to be heard at the Court of Appeal. His daughter Louise continued the challenge on her late father's behalf. Clifford, from Hersham in Surrey, was jailed in May 2014 after being convicted of a string of indecent assaults carried out between 1977 and 1984. He branded his accusers "fantasists" and denied the charges, but was convicted at London's Southwark Crown Court. He was sentenced to a total of eight years on eight counts of indecent assault relating to four victims. Sentencing Clifford after his trial, Judge Anthony Leonard said his personality and position in the public eye were the reasons his crimes were not revealed earlier. The former celebrity agent vowed to clear his name, claiming he was wrongly convicted. An application by Crown lawyers for their 6,408 costs of the appeal, made against Louise Clifford, will be dealt with at a later date. Kim Harrison, of law firm Slater and Gordon, who represented five victims in civil cases against Clifford, said: "Hopefully, this loss will put an end to efforts to clear Clifford's name and finally give his victims the chance to put these terrible events behind them. "These proceedings had yet again forced them to confront the abuse he subjected them to and caused them significant distress. "Clifford always insisted his accusers were 'fantasists' in a cynical attempt to bully and deter them from pursuing justice. "The truth is Clifford was a predatory sex abuser - that much has been shown time and time again." Julian Dunkerton is to become chief executive of Superdry after winning a long-running battle to return to the fashion chains board in a victory that has triggered a mass exodus of current management. Following a bitter months-long campaign, Mr Dunkerton emerged victorious following a shareholder vote that saw him scrape over the line with 51.15% of investor backing on Tuesday. His return sparked a flurry of resignations, with Superdry chairman Peter Bamford and chief executive Euan Sutherland resigning with immediate effect. The directors had previously said they would resign or not seek re-election if Mr Dunkerton returned to the company. In their stead, Mr Dunkerton has been appointed interim chief executive, while Boohoo man Peter Williams has been appointed as Superdrys chairman. Finance chief Ed Barker and remuneration committee char Penny Hughes also quit the fashion chain. Mr Williams and Mr Dunkerton said: We are very pleased to be joining the board of this great British company. We look forward to rebuilding the Superdry brand and the business. Mr Dunkerton has been a vocal critic of Superdrys management for several months, ripping into Mr Sutherland and claiming he has presided over a catastrophic decline. During his war to reclaim a board seat, he was acting with co-founder James Holder and together the pair own 29% of Superdry. Mr Dunkerton vowed on Tuesday to set Superdry back on the path to growth and success. He said: We have a wonderful opportunity to take this brand and this business to the next, exciting phase of its growth and development. I cant wait to get started and to work with the directors, the talented staff and our partners to deliver the future of Superdry. The hard work starts now. In the build-up to Tuesdays vote, investor advisory firms PIRC and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) both recommended shareholders vote against the shake-up. But big City investors including Investec Asset Management, Schroders and Spanish bank BBVA are thought to have voted in favour of Mr Dunkerton. Dennis Millard, Minnow Powell, Sarah Wood and John Smith have given three-months notice under their contracts and will stand down as Superdry directors with effect from July 1. Mick Jagger will reportedly undergo heart valve replacement surgery after cancelling the Rolling Stones' latest tour. The 75-year-old is set to have a damaged valve replaced during the operation in a New York City hospital this week, according to online US news website Drudge Report. Jagger was forced to postpone the nine-week 'No Filter' tour across the US and Canada after doctors told him he was not in a sufficiently healthy condition to go on stage. The band's world tour officially started in Germany in September 2017 with a concert in Hamburg. The Stones have since toured Europe and the UK and in November announced shows in the US and Canada. Jagger, a father of eight who is worth an estimated 314m, was spotted yesterday for the first time since his poor health was revealed. He was on a family beach outing in Miami. The rock veteran was pictured with his model daughter Georgia May (27) and two-year-old son Deveraux. Venezuelas chief justice has asked for opposition leader Juan Guaido to be stripped of immunity, taking a step towards prosecuting him for alleged crimes as he seeks to oust President Nicolas Maduro. Supreme Court Justice Maikel Moreno said Mr Guaido should be prosecuted for violating a ban on leaving the country when he went on a tour of Latin American nations that back a change in Venezuelas government. The opposition leader is also accused of inciting violence linked to street protests and receiving illicit funds from abroad. It is unclear when the pro-Maduro National Constituent Assembly will consider whether to remove Mr Guaidos immunity from prosecution as head of the National Assembly. Mr Guaido dismissed the Maduro-stacked high court and Constituent Assembly as illegitimate and continued his calls for Mr Maduro to step down. We must unite now more than ever, said Mr Guaido at a Caracas university earlier on Monday. We must mount the biggest demonstration so far to reject whats happening. Expand Close Juan Guaido talks during a rally in Caracas, Venezuela (Natacha Pisarenko/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Juan Guaido talks during a rally in Caracas, Venezuela (Natacha Pisarenko/AP) Venezuelan security forces have detained Mr Guaidos chief of staff, but had yet to move directly against the opposition leader, whose claim to be interim president is backed by dozens of countries that say Mr Maduros re-election last year was rigged. Since a massive power failure struck March 7, the nation has experienced near-daily blackouts and a breakdown in critical services such as running water and public transportation. Classes have been suspended for nearly a week. At the same time, frustrated residents are increasingly unable to find water, make phone calls or access the internet. Millions of Venezuelans struggle to understand an announcement by Mr Maduro a day earlier that the nations electricity is being rationed to combat daily blackouts. Mr Maduro said late on Sunday that he was instituting a 30-day plan that would balance generation and transmission with consumption. He also called on Venezuelans to stay calm, but provided few details. Expand Close A woman collects water from a spout in a tunnel, in Caracas (Ariana Cubillos/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A woman collects water from a spout in a tunnel, in Caracas (Ariana Cubillos/AP) Mr Maduro appeared on state TV Monday to announce that an engineer with 25 years of experience, Igor Gaviria, will serve as the next electricity minister, heading the state-run Corpoelec. He is replacing a military general, Luis Motta Dominguez. Ive lost him to a period of rest, Mr Maduro said, adding that students will return to classrooms on Wednesday. Expressing her confusion, office worker Raquel Mayorca said she did not know if her lights were off because of another power failure or whether it was part of the governments plan. We are worse off now more than ever, she said, adding that the power was out on one side of the street, but working on the other. We do not know if the light went out due to a blackout, or whether they took it away because of the rationing. Mr Maduro blames the blackouts on US-directed sabotage, an allegation that M Guaido routinely dismisses as the desperate talk of a government that has presided over the collapse of infrastructure in a country which was once among the wealthiest in Latin America. Expand Close Supporters of Juan Guaido attend a rally in Caracas (Natacha Pisarenko/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Supporters of Juan Guaido attend a rally in Caracas (Natacha Pisarenko/AP) As the lack of electricity became the latest sticking point in an ongoing political standoff, many Venezuelans simply found themselves wondering what the newly announced rationing plan would entail. With few details, it was difficult to assess how effective the plan would be in restoring a consistent supply of power in the long term. Some electricity experts have also said there are no quick fixes to Venezuelas fragile power grid, presenting the prospect that electricity could be shaky and unreliable for the foreseeable future. On Sunday, a mass of protesters took to the streets only to be threatened by contingents of alleged government supporters known as colectivos who appeared on motorbikes and quickly dispersed them. Videos posted on social media showed armed men opening fire to drive residents inside. Many Venezuelans had resigned themselves to a bleak reality. I havent had water at home for 15 days, said Maria Rojas, a 57-year-old homemaker looking for a source to fill her jugs. You try to find water in the street that is more or less safe to drink. Send to Email Address Your Name Your Email Address Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Email check failed, please try again Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. With the start of summers, vacations are on mind of all our favorite TV celebs. Be it Hina Khan enjoying a beach vacation in Maldives with her family, Benafsha-Priyank vacaying in Goa, Karishma Tanna having fun in New York or Ravi-Sargun returning from a lavish Rajasthan trip, everyone is enjoying their summers with full swing. Recently we spotted adorable telly town couple Aamir Ali and Sanjeeda Sheikh partying around in Pattaya, Bangkok. Well, they're not there alone, but celebrating best friend Remo D'souza's birthday. Famous choreographer, reality show judge and filmmaker Remo D'souza partied hard with Aamir Sanjeeda in the party-city Bangkok and their pictures are totally lit. Here check out some pictures from the party night: Featured Video We wish Remo a very happy and healthy birthday! Videos Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos. A federal judge has sided with six tribes in a dispute over gaming revenues in New Mexico. The state demanded upwards of $60 million from the tribes, claiming they owned the money for so-called "free play" at their casinos. But Judge Kirtan Khalsa said that wasn't the case, in a March 30 decision first reported by The Santa Fe New Mexican. Its a common sense observation that it makes no sense to claim revenue sharing based on something that is not, in fact, revenue, attorney Richard W. Hughes told the paper. Good morning Albuquerque pic.twitter.com/jaYmfiCgdi Sandia Casino (@sandia_casino) January 21, 2019 The Pueblo of Isleta , the Pueblo of Sandia and the Pueblo of Tesuque filed the lawsuit in June 2017 . The Pueblo of Santa Ana , the Pueblo of Santa Clara and the Pueblo of San Felipe later intervened. According to the judge's decision, the state demanded $10,360,149 in "Free play" revenues from Isleta, $26,491,350 from Sandia and $3,252,873 from Tesuque. Exact dollar amounts weren't cited for other tribal plaintiffs but Hughes said Santa Clara and Santa Ana were told to pay more than $20 million, bringing the total amount sought by the state to more than $60 million. New Mexico is unusual in that it is the only state where every tribe is operating a casino under a Class III gaming compact that was neither approved nor rejected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs . Tribes are required to share more of their revenues but they aren't getting something meaningful in return, the agency said in reviewing the agreement. As a result, the compacts are considered to be legal and in effect but only to the extent that their provisions are consistent with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act Of the disputed revenues, Judge Khalsa wrote that the "Pueblos did not agree to them, the additional revenue sharing payments defendants seek do not satisfy the requirements of [IGRA], i.e., they are not payments made pursuant to a bargained-for and agreed-upon compact provision for which meaningful concessions were offered in return. "Lacking any authorization under [IGRA], defendants claims for such payments from the Pueblos constitute an impermissible attempt to impose a tax, fee, charge, or other assessment," the ruling continued. "The court further finds that defendants claims for additional revenue sharing violate the 'per se rule' prohibiting states from taxing federally recognized Indian tribes without express Congressional authorization," Khalsa concluded. Turtle Talk has posted documents from the case, Pueblo of Isleta v. Grisham Read More on the Story Join the Conversation Lawmakers, business leaders wary of Trump threat to close Mexico border Cronkite News WASHINGTON President Donald Trump repeated threats Monday to deal with a surge of migrants by closing the U.S.- Mexico border, a move that has been called a potential economic catastrophe for Arizona. The threat came late last week, as Customs and Border Protection said it had 12,000 immigrants in custody double what it considers crisis level and was on track to apprehend 100,000 for the month of March, the most for that month in a decade. CBP has started releasing immigrants into the community once they are processed for court hearings, sparking an outcry from immigration advocates and opponents alike. Trump blamed the surge on Mexico and the three Central American countries that many migrants are fleeing. He threatened to close the border and to cut off foreign aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala unless they took steps to stem the migrants. If they dont stop them, were closing the border, Trump told reporters Saturday. Well keep it closed for a long time, Im not playing games. Cronkite News Video by Micah Bledsoe: Trump threatens to shut down border That threat raised alarms from critics who said shutting the border would mean cutting off trade with the countrys third-largest trading partner, trade that was worth $16.7 billion to Arizona last year. A closure of the U.S.-Mexico border would be an economic catastrophe, said Glenn Hamer, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, in a statement The statement said Mexico is the first- or second-biggest trading partner with 27 states, and that trade between the two countries averages $2 billion per day. Even the presidents supporters conceded that closing the border would have an impact, but they said the situation at the border calls for drastic action. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, in an interview Monday on Fox Business , said closing the border would cause economic distress throughout Arizona and the rest of the country. But he said Trump has few options, with Congress unwilling to fund a border wall and unable to pass immigration reform. For that reason, Biggs said he could support a temporary closure to inspire Mexico to do what it needs to. ....through their country and our Southern Border. Mexico has for many years made a fortune off of the U.S., far greater than Border Costs. If Mexico doesnt immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States throug our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2019 Trump said he would act this week, but its unclear if or when a shutdown might come. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed Monday that the president is working to set the conditions of the funding cuts to the three Central American countries. Also Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was redeploying 750 CBP officers to the border in emergency surge operations backing up Border Patrol agents. Sen. Martha McSally, R-Arizona, who convened a roundtable Monday to discuss CBPs release of immigrants, said afterward that it is important to keep the legitimate trade and travel and cross-border commerce happening at the ports of entry. But she added that something must be done at the border, and echoed Trumps call for Mexico to do its part. Its important for our economy, but Mexico needs to step up and address this issue, and the countries in Central America need to do their part as well, she said. Critics said a shutdown will not stop immigrants, but it will hit the economies of both countries. Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada called shutting down ports of entry the weirdest, most crazy thing Ive ever heard. He said the worst-case scenario of a complete border closure would have an immediate impact. The people, the tourism, the relationship, international commerce, everything is going to be impacted only because the current administration doesnt care, Estrada said. Trucks and cars are not the only vehicles that carry goods across the border. A Customs and Border Protection agent inspects a train crossing at Nogales in this file photo. Trade between Arizona and Mexico totaled $16.7 billion in fiscal 2018. Photo by Josh Denmark / U.S. Customs and Border Portection Hamer said the impact would be felt not just in Arizona but across the country. U.S. exporters products would be cut off from a critical market, his statement said. Prices here would spike almost immediately as domestic supplies dwindled due to imports being blocked from crossing the border. But Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, echoed other supporters who said Trump has been painted into a corner and needs to send a message to Mexico. It can certainly help regain control of the border, which is to everyones benefit, Mehlman said. It is certainly in the interest of the American people to have a border that is under some kind of reasonable control. He laid the blame at Congress feet. If they are not going to give the president other options for dealing with this, then they have only themselves to blame, Mehlman said. David Bier, immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute, said the potential closing would have a huge effect on the economies along the U.S.- Mexico border. But he also said it would have political consequences for Trump. It would have devastating political consequences if he shut it down immediately overnight, which is the threat the president keeps reiterating, Bier said Monday. Despite the presidents threats, Bier said he does not believe the border will be closed in the next few days. Hes reiterated it, hes put a deadline on it, but I dont think that the president is going to shut off all trade and travel with the third-largest trading partner of the United States, he said. This would impact probably at least 5 million jobs in the United States that are dependent on the trade. But Estrada is beginning to think anythings possible. I thought that would have been the most ludicrous and ridiculous thing possible, he said of the shutdown threat. And yet, now that I hear the president talk about that, I say, My God, it could be a possibility.' Cronkite News reporters Micah Bledsoe and Austen Bundy contributed to this report. This story originally appeared on Cronkite News and is published via a Creative Commons license . Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University Join the Conversation 'That makes us unique in Indian Country' Big Fire Law and Policy Group is 100% Native owned Harold Big Fire was a fighter, a boxer. But when a car accident stole his left arm, the Winnebago father had to find another way to support his family. So he became a heavy equipment operator. I mean, who drives heavy equipment with one arm? He did, said Lance Morgan, president and CEO of Ho-Chunk Inc. , the Winnebago Tribes economic development corporation. Recently, Morgan began searching for names for a new law firm he planned to launch, and he said he couldnt think of a better one than his grandfathers. He pretty much was the toughest guy I knew in my life, and I like the idea of honoring his name and his image and especially on something that hopefully creates some permanence in Indian Country. He pretty much was the toughest guy I knew in my life," Lance Morgan says of his grandfather, Harold Big Fire, the namesake of the new Big Fire Law and Policy Group. Courtesy photo On Monday, Morgan and seven other attorneys launched the Big Fire Law and Policy Group , a new law firm borne out of Morgans former legal partnership Fredericks, Peebles and Morgan which Morgan and several of Big Fires attorneys recently left. Big Fires six partners are Morgan, Leonika Charging, Sheila Corbine, Nicole Ducheneaux, Burton Warrington and Danelle Smith. Two other attorneys, Joseph V. Messineo and Michael Novotny, join the firm as senior associate and associate, respectively. With four of its six partners being women, Big Fire is one of the first law firms in the country owned by a majority of Native women. That makes us unique in Indian Country, Morgan said. Founding partners of Big Fire Law and Policy Group, from left: Lance Morgan, Leonika Charging, Sheila Corbine. Courtesy photos Founding partners of Big Fire Law and Policy Group, from left: Nicole Ducheneaux, Danelle Smith and Burton Warrington. Courtesy photos Charging, a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation , said shes hopeful Big Fire will serve as a shield for Indian Country, representing tribes, tribal organizations, Alaska Native corporations and tribal gaming enterprises, among others. She said she decided to become a lawyer after seeing the impact of the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program on her tribe in North Dakota. The federal flood control project flooded much of the productive land on the Fort Berthold Reservation, as well as the homes and lands of hundreds of tribal families. Charging said she understood then that her people, and all Native people, needed competent attorneys to protect their interests from public and private encroachment. She said a Native-owned law firm brings expertise to Native law issues that non-Native-owned law firms cant by being able to understand the challenges facing tribes. And Charging said shes particularly gratified to be able to work for a law firm that appreciates the value of diversity within its ranks. She said many law firms simply arent concerned with understanding why so few women serve as partners or supervisors within their organizations. Were beyond that, she said of Big Fire. Were built on a foundation of diversity. Were built on a foundation of gender equity, pay equity and providing opportunity for attorneys of color. Morgan said Big Fire plans to add three more attorneys, making it one of the larger law firms in the country practicing Indian law. And unlike many of those large law firms, which dont usually focus on Native law, Big Fires primary mission will be to serve its Native clients. He said an explosion of economic development in Indian Country has provided greater opportunity and need for Native attorneys to protect tribal interests. He said his goal is to create the largest Native-owned law firm in the country within the next five to 10 years. We want to create the 800-pound gorilla in our world, and we want it to be Native-controlled, Morgan said. He said the firms attorneys bring with them valuable life experiences, having served as tribal judges, tribal economic development executives and elected tribal leaders. Among them is Warrington, a citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation , who served for five years as the CEO of his tribes economic development corporation. Warrington said his experiences inform his approach to Native legal issues and inspire him to continue seeking to protect tribal interests. Because of our ancestors, were here now, and its on our shoulders to keep this fight up in a little different way, he said. For us, its being attorneys and contributing to the preservation and advancement of our tribal rights. Join the Conversation Warning of "devastating effects for Indian Country," tribes are their advocates are rebuking the Trump administration for failing to defend the health care promised to their citizens under the treaty and trust responsibility. In a filing on Monday, 483 tribes -- representing more than 80 percent of all Indian nations -- urged a federal appeals court to preserve the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (IHCIA). The law, which was made permanent by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), is at risk of being eliminated as part of a legal case in which the Trump team has dramatically reversed course. The shift from Washington also puts the Indian Country specific provisions of the ACA, popularly known as Obamacare, on the chopping block. As a result, tribes are calling on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to take into account the "health and welfare" of millions of American Indians and Alaska Native before making any rulings in the case. "Striking down the IHCIA and other Indian health provisions on the ground that a wholly unrelated private insurance coverage mandate is constitutionally invalid would disregard those responsibilities and subvert federal Indian health care policy, without any indication that Congress had anticipated let alone intended such a result," the 483 tribes wrote in the brief. Markwayne Mullin: Promise kept to protect Indian health care law https://t.co/ryVhW8yhjA pic.twitter.com/WOFC4r0rQk indianz.com (@indianz) March 13, 2017 A letter sent to the Department of Justice by a key advocate on Monday was even more strongly worded. In it, attorney Geoffrey Strommer , who successfully defended the IHCIA from a prior attack on the ACA, blasted the Trump administration for abandoning Indian Country without so much as a consideration of the impacts on the first Americans. "Whether intentional or not, the department's recent action amount to a gross and irresponsible violation of the federal trust responsibility to tribal nations and to American Indian and Alaska Native people, and it requires immediate corrective action," Strommer told top officials at Justice. The missive comes barely a week after those same officials told the 5th Circuit of their position in a case that has sparked a nationwide political and legal firestorm. In a one-page filing consisting of just two sentences , the department said it was not going to defend the ACA and would instead support the Republican attorneys general who went to cour to strike down the law. But with no further explanation provided by the federal government's legal team -- an in-depth brief won't be filed until a later date -- Indian Country had to rush to court to defend its interests. The brief filed on Monday includes tribes and tribal organizations from every region of the nation, from Alaska to Maine to Florida to California, and it seeks to ensure that key programs at the Indian Health Service , as well as other initiatives at the federal level, won't be harmed by the attack on Obamacare. "The IHCIA is one of many distinct and specialized federal laws designed by Congress to address the unique needs of tribal communities," the filing states. "These laws were enacted to carry out treaty obligations assumed by the United States in exchange for vast cessions of land and resources by tribal nations, and to implement the federal trust responsibility to American Indians and Alaska Natives that evolved from those and other historical dealings." Judge OConnor also struck down recently the Indian Child Welfare Act, a 40 year old statute that has twice been reviewed by SCOTUS on four separate constitutional grounds. The Fifth Citcuit stayed the decision pending appeal. https://t.co/oyrEVFujHB Keith Michael Harper (@AmbHarper) December 15, 2018 But the judge who struck down the entire ACA in a ruling last December did not conduct an analysis of the IHCIA and its history , nor of the federal government's obligations to tribes and their citizens, the brief argues. Likewise, there was no discussion of the other Indian Country specific provisions of the law either, such as ones that infuse the underfunded IHS with additional revenues from Medicare, Medicaid and other sources. "At a minimum, the department should clarify in any further filings with the courts that the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and other Indian-specific ACA provisions are unrelated to the individual mandate, intended to implement the federal trust responsibility to American Indians and Alaska Natives, and must be preserved," Strommer wrote in his letter. "The department should also clearly state this position in arguments before the court." Oral arguments have not yet been scheduled but the Trump administration's refusal to defend the ACA hasn't only sparked concern from Indian Country. Since the March 25 development, a slew of health care providers, insurance companies, women's groups and other advocates have sought to make their views known in the case, known as Texas v. United States . Members of Congress are also worried. This administrations attacks on the ACA and people with pre-existing conditions could result in millions of people being kicked off of their coverage and going without the vital care they need, said Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kansas), a citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation who is one of the first two Native women in Congress The case was spearheaded by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton , a Republican. He filed the lawsuit in the same federal court as his controversial challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), the law that protects Indian children from being removed from their families and their communities. Thanks to the maneuvering, both lawsuits got assigned to the same judge because Reed O'Connor , who was appointed to the bench by Republican former president George W. Bush, is the only active judge in the Fort Worth Division of the Northern District of Texas No tribes are based in the district so O'Connor has had little experience in Indian law and policy disputes. That didn't stop him from striking down the entirety of ICWA as unconstitutional in a ruling two months before his decision in the ACA case. "They kind of shopped around for a while to find a court that would side with them," Chairman Tehassi Hill of the Oneida Nation told Indianz.Com after the 5th Circuit heard arguments in the ICWA case, known as Brackeen v. Bernhardt and as Texas v. Bernhardt. Unlike the ACA case, the Trump administration is defending its obligations in the ICWA case. Regardless of the outcome, tribes and their advocates expect an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court . The same is anticipated in the ACA matter. Join the Conversation Related Stories While the storyline of shows and films are getting more and more progressive, there are certain issues that still persists in the film industry. Talking about the same, Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner revealed that co-actor Kit Harington makes more money than her on the hit HBO show but it does not bother her. The actor, a vocal supporter of the Times Up campaign and gender equality, said that Harington received a bigger pay cheque than her because he has a bigger role in the epic fantasy series, which also involved more night shoots. She said demanding equal pay on the show was a little tricky. Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO Kit got more money than me, but he had a bigger storyline. And for the last series, he had something crazy like 70 night shoots, and I didnt have that many. I was like, You know what You keep that money, Turner told Bazaar UK magazine. The actor, who plays Sansa Stark in the series, said now all her contracts come with an inclusion rider, which ensures a 50:50 male/female workforce on the sets. Now, you see women in the camera departments, producing, directing. Its exciting, she added. Youtube Turner said nowadays people are engaging in conversations about pay more readily. (Executives are) more willing to listen to people saying, I want the same amount of money. So things are getting done, but it will take a while, I think she said. The excitement for the show is at an all-time high as the show is all set to return with its eighth and final season on April 14. Turner will also be seen reprising her role of mutant Jean Grey/Dark Phoenix in X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Jacqueline Fernandez is excited as she is going to start working on Salman Khan-starrer Kick 2. In a recent interaction with media, she said that doing sequels is not easy as they come with huge responsibilities and expectations to live up to. Jacqueline, who made her debut back in 2009 with "Aladin", rose to fame with 2014 film "Kick" in which she played Salman's love interest. Kick 2' is being scripted. Moving into any sequel is not easy. I have done 'Race', 'Housefull' and have been part of 'Judwaa 2'. It is difficult to do and there is pressure. bccl "Sajid Nadiadwala wants to make 'Kick 2' more bigger and better. He is working hard on the writing," Jacqueline told PTI. The actor's next release is "Drive" with Sushant Singh Rajput. The film produced by Karan Johar will arrive in theatres in June this year. There are rumours that Jacqueline will be seen in the sequel of Chashme Baddoor and is also likely to star alongside Akshay Kumar in Rohit Shetty's next, Sooryavanshi. The 33-year-old actor, however, refrains from commenting about the two projects. A suspected suicide bomber, who was arrested for trying to target CRPF convoy in the similar way another one was attacked in Pulwama on February 14 in which more than 40 soldiers were martyred on Monday. He tried to attack a CRPF convoy on the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway two days ago. Now, he told police that he was asked over the phone to explode the paramilitary vehicle. "I was asked on phone to explode the convoy. My task was to drive the car and press the switch. I pressed the button while I was in the car. I was alone when I did it," he was quoted as saying by ANI. The car was laden by gas cylinders. The resident of Wail village in Shopian district, Owais Amin Rather was arrested by the joint search team of police and the army while he was trying to flee, Sajad Sarwar, the sub-divisional police officer (SDPO) of Banihal said. In the attack, the CRPF vehicle did suffer damage after a Santro car caught fire after an explosion at Tethar village shortly after the CRPF convoy crossed the Jawahar Tunnel on Saturday. The convoy was going to Jammu. Pulwama attack was carried out by JeM terrorist on February 14/REUTERS The driver of the car had managed to flee and was later booked under various section Ranbir Penal Code (RPC). A letter was also recovered from the spot of the attack through which the driver was identified as Hizbul Mujahideen operative Owais Amin and his intention of carrying out a Pulwama-style terror attack also had a mention in the letter. (With ANI inputs) Nizamabad constituency in Telangana which had made news headlines last week for the jumbo candidate list for the upcoming polls will in fact vote using Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). Earlier, there were reports that the Election Commission was planning to hold the elections in Nizamabad, where TRS MP K Kavitha, daughter of state Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, is seeking re-election, using paper ballots as the EVMs cannot accommodate 185 names. BCCL A 'normal EVM' can accommodate only 16 names and according to the EC, a maximum of 4 ballot units can be deployed in on a booth, which makes it a maximum of 64 names including NOTA. Only one control unit is allotted to a booth which can take a record of 4 EVMs. BCCL Faced with this unprecedented challenge, the Election Commission, instead of taking a step, back in time has decided to go ahead with electronic voting in Nizamabad too. As part of this, the EC has placed an urgent order for 26,820 ballot units, 2,240 control units and 2,600 VVPATs of third-generation (M3) EVMs. Unlike the conventional EVMs, the M3 EVMs can be connected to 24 ballot units and accommodate up to 384 candidates. The order has been placed with Electronics Corporation of India Limited, the supplier of the EVMs. BCCL The election which is to be held on April 11 ran into the hitherto unforeseen crisis after hundreds of turmeric farmers threw their names into the fray as independent candidates. Initially, there were a total of 503 candidates who had filed their nominations, out of which 60 withdrew and others were disqualified leaving 178 farmers still in contention. The farmers decided to contest the polls to press for their demands including a Minimum Support Price of Rs. 15,000 per quintal for turmeric besides setting up of turmeric board. BCCL While what happened in Nizamabad is unprecedented, a repeat of it could play out in Varanasi, from where PM Modi will seek re-election. 111 farmers from Tamil Nadu have announced that they will contest as independent candidates from the seat. Ex-BSF jawan Tej Bahadur Yadav, who was sacked for complaining against the poor quality of food served to the armed forces personnel too have announced his candidate from Varanasi. Most of us are privileged enough to be able to see through our eyes but there are others who are either partially or completely blind. In order to make it easier for the blind people to see, Braille was invented to aid them by Louis Braille in 1824. Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired. However, this system has considerable shortcomings in the 21st century like difficulty in language learning, unavailability and the high cost of braille books, in-availability of all books in braille. In order to make things easier for blind people, 23-year-old Roopam Sharma realised the need of the hour and invented a piece of technology that is predicted to revolutionise reading methods for the visually impaired community. His product, Manovue, is a digital glove that can scan text in the wearer's surroundings, making the world more disability-friendly and accessible. Roopam Sharma In an exclusive conversation with Indiatimes, Roopam Sharma gave a detailed insight into his invention ranging from its idea to turning into an affordable reality. How it all began? Getting blindfolded for 30 minutes in 2015 and the subsequent visit to a blind school in Delhi paved the way for Roopam to realise how difficult was it for the blind people to live their life without any proper assistance. Braille was invented but less that 1% of the community is braille literate in India. "Sadly, it's been more than four thousand years after the advent of reading and writing but sadly less than one percent of the text is available in braille. Due to this, the community has very limited educational and job options. My team and I saw an urgent need to do change this scenario in-order to secure a better future", he said. Roopam Sharma What is Manovue? Manovue is the world's first intelligent wearable visual assistant. The word Manovue is derived from a combination of two words: Mano, Spanish word for Hand and Vue, French word for Vision. The user wears Manovue on its hand and simply points its finger towards any printed text and the device reads out aloud what's written over there. Manovue is an inexpensive technology that replaces the 200-year-old braille language and brings employability, employment and empowerment to the visually impaired community. Roopam Sharma Who all can benefit from Manovue? Manovue's technology can also benefit people who are illiterate or have dyslexia, second language learners, tourists in need of translation, young children learning their first language or even people recovering from brain trauma. Manovue can also provide distraction free reading and learning experience to the patients of Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Roopam Sharma The cost of the device and when can we expect to reach its target audience? At present, the lowest end model is priced at $28 (Rs. 1,935 approx). "We're currently working on reducing the cost of this technology so as to make it affordable in the least income settings and help it reach the masses. We will mass produce the device once the cost is attained," Roopam said. He added that the product should reach the consumers by 2020, if not sooner. Courtesy his invention, Roopam has bagged a coveted place on Foreign Policy's list of 100 Global Thinkers for living by the principles of social impact and technological invention. A Finnish startup is trying to build an AI for inter-business networking. To do that, they first need a bunch of human manpower to separate the information they can use to train the AI from thousands of newspaper articles. So they went to a prison. Reuters Vainu's whole deal is setting up an AI that could help companies connect with contractors. First, they need to train the AI on news articles that discuss business acquisitions or similar topics, so it can learn to pick out details from them itself. So the app was attempting to contract people on Mechanical Turk, a service that lets you pay strangers to perform menial tasks. Unfortunately for the company, only one person on the service could read Finnish, on of their requirements. "We saw that and said, 'okay, this is not going to be enough,'" Vainu co-founder Tuomas Rasila told The Verge. However, he eventually had a brainwave, when he realised his office shared the same building as the Finnish Criminal Sanctions Agency (CSA). He figured "hey, why don't we just use prison labour?" So for three months now, Vainu and the CSA have been partnered, with convicts in Finnish prisons working to help build this collection of data for the app's AI. It's of course provided them with more manpower to complete the task faster, not to mention that they're gaining really cheap labour. Supposedly the CSA is dividing up some of the cash it receives among the prisoners doing the work, roughly the same amount they would have received on Mechanical Turk according to Vainu. That's reportedly about a few dollars an hour, which means the prisoners are likely earning less, if any. Not to mention, Vainu's attempt at a positive spin on this exploitation is that the prisoners are building job skills they can use once released. But honestly, how many jobs out there would be more likely to hire you because you can identify a business news story from regular ones? At the end of the day, it's another example of wrongs carried out in the name of artificial intelligence and progress. These guys are hyping that they're reforming prisoners and paying them for honest work. But the truth is they're not so far from a sweat shop in a developing country, exploiting cheap labourers that have no better alternative and no bargaining power. Yesterday, Facebook put out a blog saying it had removed 702 pages and accounts from its platform that violated its policies on "coordinated inauthentic behavior". What that means is that the social media company blocked pages spreading propaganda for Indian political parties. Reuters Of the takedowns, 687 were linked to the Congress party IT cell, and 15 were tied to a local IT firm Silver Touch. However, while it looks like the Congress party is the only one playing dirty here, there's more than you can see at first glance For one thing, Silver Touch wasn't furthering its own gains, it was solely posting messages in favour of the BJP. The IT firm has also been in the past involved with the development of the official NaMo app, as well as a few other government projects. And indeed, it seems their 15 takedowns might be the most damaging. All told, the 687 pages and accounts linked to the INC that were banned had about 2.06 lakh followers. The smaller list seeming to be linked to the BJP however had about 26 lakh followers. The Digital Forensic Research Lab, which partnered with Facebook for the page review, didn't have great things to say about either party, according to Reuters. They said accounts linked to Congress tended to post satire about the ruling government, while pro-BJP pages "carried vitriolic posts against opposition leaders". "The fact that partisans on both sides resorted to such tactics is a troubling feature," the DRF said. Importantly though, as Facebook's head of cybersecurity police Nathaniel Gleicher said, none of these pages or accounts were taken down because of their content. Facebook hasn't specified, so there may well have been some nasty stuff posted on these pages. However, the social network's action was triggered by how these actors were operating. That means if they were using fake accounts, misleading people, or pretending to not be backing their agenda behind the posts, they were on the chopping block. Their reasoning for this is clear. Facebook doesn't want to be caught in another Cambridge Analytica. That scandal singlehandedly almost took down the whole network, showing how the social network betrayed its user's privacy and forcing CEO Mark Zuckerberg to say sorry to the world. Impact on Indian election? But how does this affect our elections coming up? Well, probably not one bit. You see it's up to the Election Commission to police violations, but a full day after Facebook's announcement there's been no talk of censure against the parties involved. And the lakhs of followers that previously subscribed to these pages aren't going to read the news and see this as a takedown of misleading pages. They're instead going to look at it as an attack on their political party of choice, they're going to interpret it as Facebook being biased one way or the other. Reuters And all of this is happening just days before voting begins on April 11. At this point, cleaning house serves no real purpose. If Facebook was truly committed to not having its platform used to manipulate a voting populace, they would have conducted this survey months, or at least weeks ago. Removing the propaganda echo chamber 10 days before we head to the polls is merely lip service from a giant that's realised it can be given detention, and doesn't want to piss off the teacher. It's not like this is a surprise either. We've known for years that this would be an election year because that's how the system is set up. And we've known for at least a year how Russia allegedly abused Facebook's data and systems to spread Trump propaganda and influence the 2016 US elections. Yet, by all accounts, the Election Commission is struggling to control the fake news spreading pre-elections because it wasn't prepared. And that's just Facebook. We have no idea what the situation is on WhatsApp because that's a platform impossible to monitor in this fashion. As of last month, companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp and others submitted to the EC's voluntary code of conduct, promising to take down any deliberately misleading information within three hours. Aside from that however, there's no active measure in place. Reuters "The mechanism they have set up is that if they see any fake news, they will request the Internet and Mobile Association of India to contact Facebook or YouTube and ask them to take it down," Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, told the Washington Post. "The Association then requests the platforms to do this. This is ludicrously slow." Ultimately, as a reader, it's in your best interest to be exposed to as many trusted news sources as possible, as many avenues of information as possible, and not be spurred into action at the polls based on propaganda from some deep-rooted online echo chamber. A Lithuanian man has pleaded guilty to swindling Google and Facebook out of a total of $122 million between 2013 and 2015. He didn't hack their servers, or steal their corporate bank account details. Apparently, he instead just asked them for the money like he was owed it. nyccriminallawyer.com Evaldas Rimasauskas hatched a really simple plan. Instead of some long drawn-out Ocean's Eleven montage, he simply sent the companies invoices for items they hadn't ordered. These were accompanied by a bevy of forged paperwork, including contracts and official corporate communications to make it look authentic. He even registered a fake hardware company called Quanta Computer Inc in Latvia, which shares the name of a real company in Taiwan. Bewilderingly, both companies paid up. Apparently, his fake out was so believable that neither company checked to see if his invoices were legitimate. They simply paid Rimasauskas the money, which he them transferred to bank accounts set up in Cyprus, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Latvia. It was only much later that Google discovered the ruse, which is why Rimasauskas is now facing charges in the US for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. He has agreed to forfeit $50 million of what he stole, and could also face up to 30 years imprisonment when he is sentenced on July 29. It's anything but easy being a celebrity and one of the biggest challenges that stars face is staying away from the prying eyes of media and fans. Literally, every breath and every step is documented and sometimes it can get overwhelming, so much so that they lash out, in their own way. But no one, not even Indian celebrities, can match the way this K Pop star escaped a bunch of obsessed fangirls. According to reports, the Korean star named Woo Jin recently made his return to South Korea after a Thailand edition of SBS variety show, Laws of the Jungle. Just when he saw fans crowding him at the airport, he ran away at lightning speed to a 'safer' area. The video soon went viral and many fans expressed their concern over the need for space especially for people constantly in the public eye. Woo Jin began his career as a fashion model at the 2007 Seoul Fashion Week and for jeans brand Evisu in 2008. He made his acting debut in the queer coming-of-age film Just Friends? in 2009. It was an odd sight for some passengers onboard airline flydubai from Tajikistan, when two men clad in Middle-Eastern attire nonchalantly walked down the aisle holding falcons. A tweet accompanied with the video says the birds of prey were emotional support falcons." Twitter user @DonnieDoesWorld, whose bio says he is a foreign correspondent for Barstool Sports, posted the video in utter amazement saying, "Folks two dudes just boarded my plane with emotional support falcons." Folks two dudes just boarded my plane with emotional support falcons pic.twitter.com/lHABg8A7La The Tajikistahn Dahn (@DonnieDoesWorld) 29 March 2019 He added that people were changing seats to get away from the predatory birds but he "volunteered to sit closer to them. They make me feel secure. Post Flight Thoughts: Would ride with an entire plane full of falcons if given the chance. I saw a 6 yr old kid try to touch a falcon but didnt see the falcons trying to touch any 6 yr old kids. Very well behaved. https://t.co/a7rucZGSXI The Tajikistahn Dahn (@DonnieDoesWorld) 30 March 2019 Getting falcons as emotional support, for the uninitiated, is a very normal practice in middle eastern flights. In fact, some airlines like Etihad Airlines, have specific policies in place for Falcons. Falcons are allowed to travel with the owners in the cabin. It's nothing new...we see it all the time here in the Gulf. Don't be an ignoramus. Be curious. Learn about diff cultures. Annie (@aj_talk2me) 30 March 2019 If you fly on Royal Jordanian Airways you'll have the best chance of this happening. They allow 2 falcons per person (till the max of I think 10 per plane is reached). Other middle eastern airlines allow them too but fewer. In the UAE falcons are issued their own passports. :) Liz Williams (@Liz_Alfreda) 30 March 2019 'Falcons are allowed to travel with the owners in the cabin. It's nothing new...we see it all the time here in the Gulf', one person tweeted. 'Don't be an ignoramus. Be curious. Learn about diff cultures'. Here's how people reacted to the video: #1 My falcon is cold and indifferent. I get almost NO emotional support from him. Its always Oh, I see a mouse. And whats with the staring?! He just... stares. The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) 30 March 2019 #2 So basically, the birds boarded the plane with their emotional support humans. t. (@grace_eludes_me) 30 March 2019 #3 As long as they are well behaved...? What animals are not considered emotional support? K3 (@TretonicMW) 30 March 2019 #4 Man, why doesn't anything cool like this happen to me on a plane. Awesome. (((clevecarole))) (@Clevecarole) 30 March 2019 #5 We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form British Pakistani actor Art Malik, seen at the Mirzya Love Gala screening during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Embankment Garden Cinema Oct. 6, 2016 in London, England, will play Indian American actress Hannah Simones father in a comedy pilot starring, co-written and executive produced by Simone for ABC. (Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images for BFI; David Livingston/Getty Images) A memorial page has been set up on Facebook to pay homage to Indian American psychiatrist Achutha Reddy (top, 2nd from right, in photo with family), who was fatally stabbed in his Wichita, Kansas clinic. (Facebook memorial page photo) The United States has challenged European Union proposals to label titanium dioxide and cobalt as carcinogens on free-trade grounds. A communication issued by the US delegation to the World Trade Organization (WTO) dated March 21 raised concerns that the new labeling could represent a non-tariff barrier to trade. The delegation... Wacker rebrands amino acids Fermopure is Wackers fresh brand name for all of the amino acids that the group produces, saying that it offers a brand that stands for innovative, safe and versatile cystine and cysteine products. At the new site in Leon, Spain, L-cystine the starting material for L-cysteine is manufactured by fermentation. Production in Leon has been certified to both FSSC 22000 and ISO 9001 and thus, the company says, satisfies the highest of quality requirements. Due to the entirely plant-based and inorganic raw materials, Wackers cystine and cysteine are purely vegan. They are claimed to be ideal for use in food and pharmaceutical products. With Fermopure, Wacker offers a brand that stands for innovative, safe and versatile cystine and cysteine products, said Dr. Stefan Neumann, head of the Bioprocessing business line at Wacker. Since September 2018, cystine production has been up and running at the modernized and technologically upgraded site in Leon, where more than 40 people work. Wacker says it is the first company in the world to manufacture cystine by fermentation thanks to a patented biotech process. This has the advantage, according to the company, that the raw materials are entirely plant-based and inorganic, so that any potential contamination due to animal or human pathogens can be eliminated completely. Our production process yields products that are vegan, kosher and halal. This makes them ideal for numerous applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries, said Neumann. Wacker received the 2008 Environmental Award from the Federation of German Industries (BDI) for this process. This fermentative production requires the aid of microorganisms and glucose from plant starch. These microorganisms are by nature able to synthesize cysteine. In the fermentation tank, they produce amino acid in a continuous stream of glucose and inorganic trace elements. The microorganisms release cysteine directly into the surrounding culture medium in the fermenter, where spontaneous oxidation takes place two molecules come together to form the dimer cystine. This product can subsequently be reduced again to the monomeric cysteine by electrolysis. The latter, says Wacker, is one of the 20 natural amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Thanks to their properties and high level of purity, Wacker says its Fermopure products have a broad application range in the food and pharmaceutical industries: they can be used in the manufacture of flavourings, as additives in baked good and as an essential component of baby and toddler food. Cystine and cysteine, notes the company, are popular ingredients in nutritional supplements for strengthening the skin, hair and nails. The pharmaceutical sector uses cysteine in expectorants or to produce insulin, for example. In Leon, we are well-equipped to satisfy our customers growing demand for cysteine in the long term and to advance other bioengineered products, said Neumann. 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. According to the Insurance Council of Australia, the wild weather event caused damages to the tune of $1.19 billion, with AAMI and other Suncorp brands receiving more than 26,000 motor claims. Michael Miller, AAMI head of claims, said the insurer is on track to complete 80% of scheduled cars repairs by the end of July. The pace of our response has been faster than any other similar hailstorm, Miller said. In response to the NSW hailstorms, the insurer set up six motor vehicle assessment and repair centres to quickly assess and triage all hail-affected vehicles to make the repair process as seamless and efficient as possible. The insurer also hosted six community forums in Berowra, one of the worst hit communities. We continually look to improve how we respond to natural catastrophes and some new initiatives have meant weve been able to make good progress in supporting our customers through these storms, Miller said. Sydney was again hit by hail only a few weeks ago, so these extra claims are now coming in. To date, weve already booked in 94% of these customers cars to be assessed and then repaired. Miller said more than 96% of home assessments have been completed, with 80% of repairs expected to be commenced or finalised by the end of April. Almost half of home repairs are already finalised or underway, and weve injected more than $41 million into the economy through payments to customers, builders, and suppliers, Miller said. The damage caused is significant and the repairs will take some time, but well be with our customers every step of the way. In his new role, Baich will lead the firms cybersecurity risk management program and will work with AIGs executive leadership team on the companys information security strategy. Baichs other responsibilities include defining information security requirements, implementing industry-leading technology solutions and providing oversight on information security risks associated with the roll-out of new technology platforms and systems, a release explained. Baich will report to AIG chief information officer John Repko. He joins from Wells Fargo & Company, where he had served in the same role from 2012. Prior to Wells Fargo, Baich was a principal at Deloitte & Touche LLP, managing the global cyber threat and vulnerability management practice. His other previous roles included serving as a naval information warfare officer for the National Security Agency, senior director for professional services at Network Associates (now McAfee), and following 9/11 special assistant to the deputy director for the National Infrastructure Protection Centre at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. AIG has also nominated three director candidates for election on to the board of directors. The nominees are former XL Group executive vice-president and chief financial officer Peter R. Porrino; ex-BlackRock senior managing director and global head of beta strategies Amy L. Schioldager; and Therese M. Vaughan, who was previously the CEO of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The nominations come as two current directors Theresa M. Stone and Ronald A. Rittenmeyer announced that they will not run for re-election. Stone revealed her intention to retire, as she will have reached the companys general retirement age, and Rittenmeyer had stated that he would not run for reelection due to his other professional commitments. Exclusive Features Outdated systems and processes are holding insurers back from offering a first-rate motor claims experience in line with consumers' expectations, say Steve Chapman and Daniel Lukich of loss assessor AAMC. They tell IB what can be done to improve the process Ameriprise Financial chairman and CEO Jim Cracchiolo commented: This transaction is consistent with our strategy to grow our less capital-intensive businesses and is expected to reduce our risk profile and increase capital flexibility. Cracchiolo added that hes proud of the exceptional value and award-winning service Ameriprise has given AAH policyholders over the past few decades and that hes confident AmFam will continue that service. Both companies have said theyre committed to executive a smooth transition for partners, policyholders, employees and other stakeholders. Current AAH customers will keep their policies with no change in coverage or service. Given American Familys financial strength and reputation for quality products and customer care, we are pleased to reach this agreement and feel confident that we will be leaving the business in good stead, Cracchiolo said. The AAH business will be sold to a subsidiary of Madison, Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance Mutual Holding Company for $1.05 billion. After a payment to an affinity partner, the net proceeds for Ameriprise will be approximately $950 million, subject to some post-closing financial adjustments. The total transaction remains subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals and is expected to close in the second half of 2019. The first thing insurance companies need to do in order to avoid penalties and unintentional infractions is carry out an internal risk assessment, according to Jeffrey Taft, partner in Mayer Browns Financial Services Regulatory & Enforcement group. They need to look at their cybersecurity policy and tailor a program based upon their unique risk profile. Read next: Leading industry trade group has problems with insurer cybersecurity law Insurers also need to assess the cybersecurity of their third-party service providers, which are a large part of any financial services organization, Taft told Insurance Business. They need to do their due diligence on those third-party service providers, and they need to ensure their contractual provisions are adequate in terms of cybersecurity. That provision under the NAICs Insurance Data Security Model Law, similar to the New York cybersecurity legislation, has a long phase-in period to give insurance companies some time to modify their existing vendor contracts and include additional protections if necessary. A lot of the provisions required within the NAICs Insurance Data Security Model Law are things that a lot of insurance companies may already have. For example, a lot of companies will have an incident response plan in place that includes reporting procedures. What they might not have done is fully implement and test those policies. Implementation and testing are two key elements of any successful cybersecurity program. Insurance brokers operating in states that have adopted the NAICs Insurance Data Security Model Law must follow the same obligations and provisions as the insurance carriers. However, their risk profiles may differ depending on the size of their operations and their overall business appetite, Taft pointed out. The NAIC model is somewhat scalable in that its based upon a companys individual risk assessment, so even if smaller brokerage firms lack the same cybersecurity resources as larger carriers, they can still tailor their procedures for compliance. Read more: Are US insurers ready for a national GDPR-style privacy law? A number of states have introduced, or are in the process of introducing, their own cybersecurity legislation. In February 2018, the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) cybersecurity regulation (23 NYCRR 500) came into effect for all financial institutions in the state. The New York law has similar requirements to the NAICs Insurance Data Security Model Law, but it imposes some additional obligations and has some more stringent obligations. Generally, those complying with the New York law are fairly comfortable that theyre also in compliance with the NAIC provisions, according to Taft. California is also proceeding with its own cybersecurity law, bill SB-327, which is due to come into effect on January 01, 2020. The Californian law, in contrast to the NAICs regulation, is much more focused on privacy rather than cybersecurity. Privacy also seems to be the primary focus at a federal legislative level, Taft noted. A lot of the discussion and the legislation thats being proposed at a federal level right now is focused on privacy. Weve seen it in the context of the Californian privacy act and also in Europe with the GDPR. There hasnt, however, been much progress from a federal level on legislation regarding cybersecurity. That might explain why there has been a lot more developments into cybersecurity at state level, he commented. There are lots of critical industries in the US that arent yet subject to a federal privacy law, so I think that will continue to be the federal focus moving forward. Obviously, there has been some attempt at a federal level to increase cybersecurity programs and increase information sharing between critical infrastructure, but that has been more through executive orders and other things of that nature. There hasnt been a lot of legislation around that per say. The federal government has taken note of the NAICs Insurance Data Security Model Law. The federal trade commission recently proposed a customer information safeguarding rule that draws very heavily upon the NAICs model rules and the NYDFS cybersecurity legislation. If more and more states start to adopt the NAIC model, it could essentially become a de facto standard at a federal level, according to Taft. Hub International Northeast Limited, a subsidiary of the global insurance brokerage, risk advisory and employee benefits firm, Hub International Limited, has re-hired James Hutchinson as executive vice president of Commercial Lines. In this role, Hutchinson will report directly to Paul Collins, Hub Northeast president and CEO, and serve as part of the regions executive management team. Hutchinson will be responsible for the management of internal efforts within the commercial lines division of Hub Northeast, including the oversight of marketing efforts and working closely with Hubs client service departments. He will be working in partnership with Ken Schreiber, who will continue to serve as Hub Northeasts president of commercial lines. Hutchinson previously held a variety of marketing roles at Hub Northeast from 1996 to 2014, including chief marketing officer and senior vice president. Most recently, he served as senior vice president of Field Operations for The Navigators Group Inc., where he handled customer marketing and distribution and regional marketing and business development initiatives. He started his career in the insurance business as a personal and commercial lines producer at Hobbs Group, which ultimately gave him the platform to start his own insurance agency, which he subsequently sold and then joined Hub Northeast called Kaye Insurance Associates at the time. Hub Northeast is a full service insurance brokerage firm with approximately 800 employees working in 18 regional offices located throughout New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Source: Hub International Northeast Topics Commercial Lines Business Insurance Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Jessica Altman has approved a loss-cost filing, including a 12.95% reduction in loss-costs a component in determining workers comp insurance rates paid by businesses. This reduction is expected to lead to lower premiums for many Pennsylvania businesses, according to a press release issued by the Pennsylvania Insurance Department. This loss-cost filing was recommended by the Pennsylvania Compensation Rating Bureau, an independent bureau that makes filings to the Insurance Department on behalf of companies that write workers comp insurance in Pennsylvania. The Insurance Department approved two mid-year loss cost filings in December 2018 following a legislative response to a state Supreme Court ruling concerning how disability claims are handled in workers comp cases, and a second filing correcting a loss-cost filing effective earlier in the year. This most recent approval is for an annual filing and distinct from the mid-year loss-cost filings. This significant cut continues several years of reductions, further helping business owners create good-paying jobs in Pennsylvania, Altman said in the release. Under Governor [Tom] Wolfs leadership, my department is working to maintain a vibrant and competitive workers compensation insurance market, helping to keep costs down. More than 325 companies offer workers compensation insurance coverage in Pennsylvania. Altman noted the premium savings for an individual employer will vary based on the employers risk classification, claims experience and other factors. Not all employers will see a decrease. Benefit levels have also been maintained for injured workers in Pennsylvania. Labor & Industry Secretary Jerry Oleksiak said in the release that certified workplace safety committees overseen by his department are key for both cost and safety. Making Pennsylvanias workplaces safer requires a commitment from employers and employees alike, and workplace safety committees are a valuable tool in that effort, Oleksiak said in the release. Its a win-win, as companies with a certified committee also receive a 5% discount on their workers comp insurance premiums. More than 12,232 state-certified workplace safety committees have been established since March 1994, protecting more than 1,553,981 workers. Additionally, employers with certified workplace safety committees have saved close to $733.2 million in workers compensation premiums. These savings in insurance costs are due solely to the 5% premium discount provided to businesses that have these committees, according to the release. Source: Pennsylvania Insurance Department Topics Workers' Compensation Profit Loss Pennsylvania Theresa May is expected to confront her most senior ministers with the potentially explosive option of delaying Brexit by months, as the U.K. struggles to find a plan for leaving the European Union. The British prime minister will hold five hours of crisis talks with her cabinet Tuesday, with the pro- and anti-Brexit factions in her top team set to clash over the best way forward. According to an official, ministers are likely to be asked to weigh postponing the date for leaving the bloc until potentially year-end or beyond, to allow more time to resolve the deadlock in Parliament. With Britain due to exit the EU on April 12, politicians are no closer to agreeing to a divorce deal. On Monday night, members of Parliament rejected all the options that were put forward to replace Mays unpopular plan, which itself has been voted down three times in the House of Commons. The pound weakened. If she cant get her Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament before a summit of EU leaders April 10, May will face a perilous set of options. She could seek a long delay to Brexit, which would anger euro-skeptics, and use the extra time for a general election or even a new referendum to let voters decide. A lengthy postponement would force the U.K. to take part in European Parliament elections next month something that would enrage the already-frustrated Brexit campaigners in the cabinet and could prompt some to resign. Members of Parliament will have another chance Wednesday to take over the Brexit agenda and have a say on what happens next. A proposal to stay in the EUs trading regime known as the customs union was rejected by just three votes Monday. It could still prevail in another ballot Wednesday, though Conservative opposition to the proposal is strong. Opposition Labour lawmaker Hilary Benn said Tuesday that Parliament could legislate to force May to seek an extension. Speculation has been mounting that May will call a general election as the only way out of the impasse. Her decision to call an unusually long cabinet meeting Tuesday further fueled expectations that Britain might be heading for its second election in as many years. Even so, Education Secretary Damian Hinds said the government would have one more go at getting Mays unpopular deal approved later this week. If we move quickly this week and get this deal over the line we may be able to avoid European elections, Hinds told BBC radio on Tuesday. We want it to get through. Time is very short. In Brussels on Tuesday, the EUs chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier warned again that if the U.K. still wants to leave the bloc in an orderly manner, the current Brexit deal is the only way. Being prepared for no deal doesnt mean there will be no disruption, he said. Refuses to Compromise In a dramatic sign of the escalating tensions within Mays party, Nick Boles, one of the authors of a motion that was rejected, resigned as a Conservative in the Commons chamber. I have given everything to an attempt to find a compromise that can take this country out of the European Union while maintaining our economic strength and our political cohesion, Boles told the Commons. I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. While Parliament came close to a majority to stay in the customs union, the breakdown of votes shows an overwhelming majority of Conservatives reject keeping closer ties with the bloc. That makes it politically dangerous for May to pursue a softer stance. Just 37 Tories voted for the customs union plan, compared with 236 against, and 33 Tories backed the plan to stay in the single market, with 228 against. Support for a second referendum also came close in Parliament overall, but just 15 Tories voted for it. With assistance from Kitty Donaldson and Nikos Chrysoloras. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Topics Europe Uk Price Forbes, a London-based broker, has appointed Emma Hewett as leader of its Sharing Economy practice. Price Forbes said its Sharing Economy practice was one of the first established broking teams to specialize in designing insurance programs for emerging and fast-growing companies using technology to disrupt traditional marketplaces, such as self-driving cars, augmented reality platforms, on-demand delivery drivers and peer-to-peer sharing platforms. Joining from Jardine Lloyd Thompson, Hewett has a strong background in working with clients across the sharing economy, with a particular interest in insuring autonomous vehicles, said Price Forbes in a statement. Before she worked at JLT, Hewett was North American casualty broker for Marsh. Her insurance career began as an assistant to the underwriting team of CV Starrs London Casualty division when it was established in 2009. Price Forbes was one of the first brokers in the London market to realize the potential of the sharing economy, and I am excited about leading the team in this dedicated practice, said Hewett. Given the growth in the sharing economy industry and carriers desire to innovate, we are starting to see a real appetite in this space, she added. As an independent broker, Price Forbes culture is well aligned with the start-up sector. They want to know that we will care as much about their business as they do and that we are committed to growing with them; they do not just want to be seen as a number on the balance sheet, Hewett went on to say. Price Forbes Sharing Economy practice was originally set up and led by Jack Keyes, who has now moved into an underwriting role with a Lloyds syndicate where he will specialize in the sharing economy arena. Price Forbes & Partners Ltd. is an independent specialty insurance broker with offices in Bermuda, Brussels, Chile, Dubai, London, South Africa and Malaysia. In 2017, it became part of the Ardonagh Group, an independent broking and underwriting group, based in St Helier, Jersey, one of the Channel Islands. Source: Price Forbes Topics Agencies Leadership London Sharing Economy Denmarks financial watchdog is warning that smaller banks need to be on high alert for signs of money laundering as larger lenders tighten their surveillance systems. Jesper Berg, director general of the Financial Supervisory Authority in Copenhagen, said Denmark is concentrating on building the lines of defense and having them stronger, in an interview with Bloomberg Televisions Tom Keene and Anna Edwards. Denmarks biggest bank, Danske Bank A/S, is at the center of what may be Europes worst ever money laundering case. Danske said last year that a large chunk of $230 billion in transactions done via an Estonian unit was suspicious. The bank has lost almost half its market value since the revelations surfaced, and the scandal has driven sweeping changes in Denmark, including far greater powers for the FSA. What happened in the Danske Bank case was deplorable by any standards, Berg said. We are now dealing with it. The steps we have taken now and the Danish government is taking with a broad coalition in parliament will take us far down the road, including building the strongest framework in Europe, he said. Completely eliminating money laundering is impossible but regulators and banks can make it difficult, Berg said. He declined to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for the surge of suspicious money thats flowed into Europe. It is more than the leadership of Russia, Berg said. The environment also plays a large role, and it is clear, a Scandinavian culture of having trust and confidence clashes with the way business is being done in Russia, and we have lessons to learn. Related: Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Topics Europe Russia Ameriprise Financial is selling its Ameriprise Auto & Home (AAH) division to a subsidiary of Madison, Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance Mutual Holding Co. (American Family Insurance), the companies announced. Ameriprise will receive gross proceeds of $1.05 billion in cash in the deal. After a payment to an affinity partner, the net proceeds are approximately $950 million, subject to certain post-closing financial adjustments. Current AAH customers will retain their policies with no change in coverage or service. Ameriprise Auto & Home is based in De Pere, Wisconsin, and has 1,800 employees. AAH sells auto, homeowners, renters, umbrella and some specialty insurance lines in 43 states and District of Columbia through partners. For 2018, AAH reported $789 million in surplus, $1.8 billion in assets and $1.1 billion of annual direct premium written. Approximately 70 percent of the companys premium is from auto insurance sales. American Family reported that a significant majority of AAHs policies are sold through a partnership with Costco, which offers Ameriprise Auto & Home policies to its members through its website. American Family and Costco have entered into a letter of intent to continue that partnership. AAH also sells its products through referrals from Ameriprise Financial advisors, a relationship that also will continue after the acquisition. American Family said the two Wisconsin companies share similar cultures, values and customer focus. The transaction also broadens American Familys business on a geographic basis. AAHs largest premium state is California. For 2017, AAH reported direct premium written of $377 million in the state. Of that, more than 80 percent is auto premium. American Family currently does relatively little business in California, the company said. A multi-line mutual insurance group, American Family Insurance serves customers in 19 states through exclusive agents, and nationally through subsidiaries that sell products through the internet, call centers, affinity partners and independent agents. The group reported 2018 results of $9 billion in equity, $27.5 billion in assets and $9.6 billion of direct premium written. The group employs 12,000 people through its various companies, with American Family-brand products sold through 2,500 independent contractor exclusive agents. Ameriprise Financial said it had conducted strategic review of the AAH business and determined it is the right time to sell. The sale also is consistent with Ameriprises strategic focus on its core growth areas: advice and wealth management; and asset management. In its media release, Ameriprise Financial said there will be no contingent liability associated with this transaction for Ameriprise Financial, except for certain post-closing financial adjustments and customary indemnification obligations in a transaction of this type. The transaction is subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals and is expected to close in the second half of 2019. Insurer rating firm A.M. Best said its financial and credit ratings for American Family Insurance Group remain unchanged following the announcement. A.M. Best added that it believes that the addition of Ameriprise P&C Companies, with significant premium writings in California and Texas, may contribute further to the growing geographic and distribution diversification of the American Family enterprise. Credit Suisse Securities acted as financial advisor and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom acted as legal advisor to Ameriprise in the transaction. America Family was advised on legal matters by Foley & Lardner and on financial matters by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Source: Ameriprise Financial Services Inc., American Family Insurance Mutual Holding Co. Topics Mergers California Auto Wisconsin If you get struck by lightning or bitten by a pig, a physician can record that information with a code shorter than your phone number. But if you cant afford your bills, doctors and health plans have no consistent way to document that. Now the biggest U.S. insurance company and the countrys most influential association of doctors want to create new ways to better capture information about patients social conditions. Its part of a shift in the health-care industry to address aspects of peoples lives that influence their well-being beyond medical care, so-called social determinants of health. Having a standardized diagnosis allows for everyone in the system to understand that theres an unmet social need, said Sheila Shapiro, a senior vice president at UnitedHealthcare. The company, a unit of Minnetonka, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group Inc., announced the plan Tuesday with the American Medical Association. Medical care accounts for only about 20 percent of what determines a persons health. The rest comprises behavior, social and economic factors, and environment. While the U.S. spends much more than peer countries on health care, it spends far less on a thinner social safety net. Just as medical diagnoses trigger prescriptions or referrals to labs and specialists, the proposed codes are meant to help clinicians refer patients to assistance for food, housing, transportation or other needs. Since 2017, UnitedHealthcares Medicare Advantage plans have made more than 700,000 referrals to outside social-service programs. The insurers Medicare plans cover about 4.9 million people. Among the more than 20 new codes under consideration are: unable to pay for prescriptions, unable to afford child care, worried about losing housing, unable to count on family and friends, and feeling unsafe in current environment. Having standard designations for such conditions would let doctors, hospitals and health plans share the information through medical records and insurance claims forms. Everyone can start reading from the same sheet of music, said Tom Gianulli, chief medical information officer at the AMAs Integrated Health Model Initiative. While the codes wouldnt immediately lead to reimbursement changes, capturing data about patients social needs may be a step toward paying for interventions that address them. Collecting data is a big part of this right now, and trying to figure out whats effective, and advocate for funding around that, said Steve Nelson, chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare. Slowly Changing Payments are still largely tied to the number of procedures clinicians perform, rather than the overall health of patients. Thats slowly changing, and the effort to treat social needs is part of the transformation. For example, a diabetic who cant get to the pharmacy to pick up medication may wind up in an emergency room with uncontrolled blood sugar. Traditionally, insurance would pay for the emergency room visit but not for the cab ride to the pharmacy that might have prevented it. The taxpayers and employers who finance Americas $3.5 trillion medical system ultimately pay the cost of that hospital visit. The health-care industry and policy makers are struggling to figure out how to get people those cab rides, as well as other interventions that could make people healthier and reduce overall spending. The industry has already taken steps in that direction. In 2016, the new codes were adopted to indicate whether a patient is homeless, poor or lacking adequate food, for example. The latest proposal would build on that effort. A federal committee will decide whether to adopt the proposal later this year. New codes are a useful first step, but there are limits to what the health-care system can do, said Melinda Abrams, a vice president at the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation focused on health research. Society also needs to properly finance the social-service system because inadequate funding contributes to high health-care costs, Abrams said. The health-care sector has had a blind eye to it. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Topics Carriers Medical Professional Liability Note: This is the first of a three-part series resulting from a conversation with Texas Insurance Commissioner Kent Sullivan. Becoming the chief insurance regulator of a large and populous state with the second largest insurance market in the country was never in Kent Sullivans game plan. But when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott asked Sullivan to step up to the plate and take over as commissioner of the Texas Department of Insurance, he willingly did so. His predecessor, David Mattax had passed away while in office in April 2017 and Sullivan took over in September 2017 just after Hurricane Harvey struck the state to devastating effect in late August of that year. Harveys aftermath obviously presented definite challenges for the new commissioner. Dealing with the exigent circumstances surrounding recovery from the hurricane took some time, Sullivan said. After that, with a little bit of time to breathe and survey the situation, one of the things I found was that we really had a need to modernize the agency, to evaluate our practices in light of best practices and to upgrade. That was what we decided to do. Its been a priority. The initiatives the department is working on are pretty significant and will change the way we do business, Sullivan said. However, he thinks the effort to modernize the agencys processes will allow it to both do a better job of protecting consumers and make it easier to work with from an industry standpoint. Automating Policy Review Review of policy forms submitted by insurance carriers is one of the agencys major responsibilities and a process that Sullivan saw was in serious need of reform. To that extent, TDI already has begun working on a project that will enable the agency to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to automate policy form reviews, with the aim of creating a more accurate, efficient and timely process. In reviewing policies, there is a commitment to try and do it on a particular time table, no surprise there. What I found was that our policy review was largely one that was a number of years old. While its not entirely manual, I think by modern, cutting edge, standards someone might describe it as a disproportionately manual system. It simply wasnt the sort of system that we wanted either for speed, for efficiency of resource allocation, or for regulatory consistency purposes, Sullivan said. The AI system being developed is intended to monitor for regulatory consistency both vertically and horizontally, he said. Vertical in the sense that youre able to immediately determine the extent to which youve already reviewed and approved, or for that matter, disapproved, certain policy provisions that have been reviewed in the state of Texas, historically. It also allows you to compare that to what other states have done. Thats the horizontal approach, so that you can see what else is out there, which can be particularly useful if, for some reason, youre visiting an issue for the first time, which comes up sometimes. You can at least see whether other states have addressed a particular issue that is raised by a policy provision. There are instances, as well, when a filing that has been previously addressed by regulators is re-submitted with the carrier arguing in favor of some new interpretation. Again, its useful to see what other states have done. You can measure the extent to which youre in the mainstream or perhaps not, he said. Texas is working on its own AI system in partnership with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Other states also are partnering with the NAIC on similar, but different projects. While the approaches to the problem are varied, all are aimed at streamlining and creating efficiencies in the policy form review process. Some states are working with outside vendors. Connecticut Insurance Commissioner Katherine L. Wade, for example, announced in late December 2018 that her department is working on a pilot with RiskGenius, a Kansas-based tech company. The purpose of that project is to test a web-based platform that applies machine learning to determine if it improves the regulatory reviews of insurance company filings and ultimately moves approved products more quickly to the market for greater consumer choice, according to the Connecticut Insurance Department. In a sense, the states are playing catch up with the industry, which already is using sophisticated AI tools in a variety of ways, Sullivan said. Ultimately, as various processes that are being tested are finely tuned, regulators will have multiple alternative AI form review options from which to choose. As for the Texas project, he said TDI anticipates a proof of concept here just in the next couple of months. Then we hope to be able to implement it within a reasonable time frame and its something that probably will be ultimately available across the country. In addition to the benefits of efficiency and accuracy, Sullivan sees a consumer protection aspect to using artificial intelligence in the policy form review process. You make better regulatory decisions when you have access to the maximum amount of information. Thats what were really trying to do with the AI project, is to ensure that youre delivering consistent decisions about issues raised by policy forms and also have access to what other states are doing, he said. Topics Texas Legislation InsurTech Data Driven Its been nearly 20 years since a tornado lumbered through downtown Fort Worth and experts say the deadly storm left behind more than just destruction. The March 28, 2000, twister, which caused an estimated $400 million in damage, triggered a valuable opportunity for business redevelopment and more housing, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports. Insurance Council of Texas records show the tornado that killed two people in Fort Worth was the 21st costliest storm in state history. I think by the next morning we pretty much understood the scale of the damage that had occurred, said former Fort Worth Mayor Kenneth Barr. Initially 20 to 25 blocks of downtown were closed as concerns about falling glass from downtown skyscrapers continued. Phillip Poole, a Fort Worth architect and urban planner, said the storm provided an opportunity to redevelop along the West Seventh corridor. I think it gave us an opportunity we probably wouldnt have had, said Poole, who heads TownSite, a real estate development firm that has done projects on the west side and Near Southside of Fort Worth. Tarrant Appraisal District records show that from 2000 to 2018, the value of the storm-damaged areas of downtown and the Cultural District increased 359 percent from $1.63 billion to $7.48 billion. Nobody wants to experience a tornado but the destruction of that tornado forced people to think differently about redevelopment, said Fernando Cost, assistant city manager. Though it wasnt hit by the tornado, plans to tear down the old Ripley-Arnold public housing project and build a new Radio Shack corporate campus now Tarrant County Colleges Trinity River campus also helped persuade investors that downtown was ripe for residential housing, Barr said. John Roberts, a Fort Worth architect, said while development wouldve likely occurred regardless of the twister, the progress is still impressive. I think it probably would have happened without the tornado but maybe not as rapidly as it did, he said. There are parts of it I like and parts that I dont but thats always the case. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Windstorm A Florida pharmacist was sentenced last month to 120 months in prison followed by three years supervised release for his role in a massive compounding pharmacy fraud scheme, which impacted private insurance companies, Medicare and TRICARE, according to a statement from the Department of Justice. Ademola O. Adebayo, 55, of Odessa, Florida, was convicted on Jan. 11 after a four-day trial of one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud, three counts of health care fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. He was sentenced March 19 before U.S. District Judge Federico A. Moreno of the Southern District of Florida, who presided over the trial. Adebayo was also ordered to pay $3.2 million in restitution and $1.4 million in forfeiture. Eight other individuals have previously been sentenced in connection with the scheme. Various real properties, cars and a 50-foot boat have been forfeited as part of the sentencings. According to evidence presented at trial, from 2012 to 2015, Adebayo and his co-conspirators engaged in a scheme to defraud private insurance companies, Medicare and TRICARE out of $121 million by submitting false and fraudulent claims for compounded drugs, primarily pain and scar creams, and other prescription medications that were not medically necessary, never provided, or both. The evidence established that in his role as the pharmacist at A to Z Pharmacy, a now-defunct pharmacy located in New Port Richey, Fla., Adebayo conspired to submit or cause the submission of claims that often amounted to several thousands of dollars for a single tube of pain or scar cream. According to the DOJ, in 2014, when insurance companies discovered the fraud at A to Z Pharmacy and terminated their contracts with the pharmacy, Adebayo agreed to become the straw owner of Havana Pharmacy & Discount in Miami, which Adebayo and his co-conspirators used to continue the fraud, the evidence showed. The evidence further established that Adebayo personally benefited from the fraud and received $1.5 million through the fraud, which he used to purchase luxury vehicles, including a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Bentley, a Porsche and two Cadillacs, as well as a house in Land O Lakes, Fla. All of these items were seized by the government. Eight other defendants have pleaded guilty in this case. Nicholas Borgesano, 46, of New Port Richey, is serving 15 years for his role as the owner of A to Z Pharmacy in the fraud that involved Havana Pharmacy, Medplus/New Life Pharmacy and Metropolitan Pharmacy, all of Miami; and Jaimy Pharmacy and Prestige Pharmacy, both of Hialeah, Fla. In addition to Borgesano, the following defendants have previously been sentenced for their roles in the scheme: Scott P. Piccininni, 50, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., sentenced to serve 51 months in prison; Bradley Sirkin, 56, of Boca Raton, Fla., sentenced to serve 46 months in prison; Peter B. Williams, 58, of New Port Richey, sentenced to serve 26 months in prison, to be served consecutively to a 60-month sentence of imprisonment he is serving as a result of his guilty plea to a separate indictment returned in the Southern District of Florida; Wayne M. Kreisberg, 41, of Parkland, Fla., placed on probation for a term of five years, to be served consecutively to a sentence of probation he is serving as a result of his guilty plea to a separate indictment returned in the Middle District of Florida; Joseph Degregorio, 71, of New Port Richey, sentenced to serve one year and one day in prison; Matthew N. Sterner, 48, of New Port Richey, sentenced to serve 36 months in prison; and Edwin Patrick Young, 49, of New Port Richey, sentenced to serve 66 months in prison. This case was investigated by the FBI with support from HHS-OIG and DCIS and was brought as part of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, under the supervision of the Criminal Divisions Fraud Section and the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Florida. The case was prosecuted by Trial Attorneys Timothy P. Loper and Aleza Remis of the Fraud Section. The Justice Department Criminal Divisions Fraud Section leads the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, which is part of a joint initiative between the Department of Justice and HHS to focus their efforts to prevent and deter fraud and enforce current anti-fraud laws around the country. Since its inception in March 2007, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, which maintains 14 strike forces operating in 23 districts, has charged nearly 4,000 defendants who have collectively billed the Medicare program for more than $14 billion. In addition, the HHS Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with the HHS-OIG, are taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers. Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Departments Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Ariana Fajardo Orshan of the Southern District of Florida, Special Agent in Charge George Piro of the FBIs Miami Field Office, Special Agent in Charge Shimon Richmond of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector Generals (HHS-OIG) Miami Regional Office and Special Agent in Charge John F. Khin of the U.S. Defense Criminal Investigative Services (DCIS) Southeast Field Office made the announcement. Source: Florida Department of Justice Topics Florida USA Fraud Abuse Molestation A forklift operator was killed when he was struck by a car during a business delivery. KCAL reports that the unidentified man in his 60s was making a delivery of live poultry in the Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles when his forklift was struck by a blue Hyundai shortly after 1 a.m. Sunday. Officials say the deceased man from the Fresno area was in his 60s, but identification was withheld while police notified the mans family. Authorities say the Hyundai driver was cooperating with police at the scene in the northern San Fernando Valley region, but there were no details about how the accident occurred. Authorities say officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration reported to the scene to investigate what they called a workplace accident. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics California Commercial Lines Business Insurance So thats nearly Tuesday 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 Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg has assured senior politicians he will work with governments to establish new policies in a bid to regulate social media. Brexit: Ireland will not be abandoned if there is a no-deal Brexit, insists Emmanuel Macron. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn has said he is very happy to meet Theresa May after she offered to sit down with him to agree a plan which allows the UK to leave the EU with a deal. Keep up to date with all the latest Brexit news here Dublin shooting: Two men narrowly escaped injury this afternoon after a gunman fired shots outside a secondary school in Blanchardstown. Fatal attraction: A woman has been jailed after she tried to pass her boyfriend heroin via a kiss while he was under escort on his way to prison. Smear test: The Government and Health Minister Simon Harris came under severe attack in the Dail over fresh delays in cervical tests for women who had to be retested. Hurling: Lessons learned, but Deise may have to draw a different conclusion, writes Waterford legend Tony Browne TO ENGAGE Column: UKs bird-brain politics that could leave us all in a very dark place, writes Fergus Finlay Opinion: Finian McGraths politics are no laughing matter, writes Michael Clifford TO ENTERTAIN Celebs: Heres what happened when JoJo Siwa babysat North West Royals: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have launched their own official Instagram account - separate to Kensington Palace. MOST READ STORY CUH: A 'black escalation level' had to be declared at Cork University Hospital (CUH) as there was such a severe backlog of patients in the emergency department. Aviation has an often overlooked importance for the Irish economy. Conventional economic analysis can miss this point because it usually stems from data in large economies. Countries like Germany, the US and China have enormous land borders that dilute the critical role of aviation. On top of that these big countries have very large domestic economies that can exist independent of international trade. In Ireland, we have a number of stand-out features which explain why aviation needs to be treated differently at a policy level. First, we live on a relatively small island which has a high dependence on international trade for our economic well-being. Although sea ferries do operate to and from Ireland their activities are eclipsed by aviation. Second, alongside the air services operating in Ireland we have developed a world class sub-set of the financial services industry which is the largest aircraft leasing cluster in the world. Taken together, these two factors explain why aviation is a key component of the nations infrastructure while it also supports a lot of high earning jobs directly and indirectly. For this reason alone policymakers have to be on their toes leading change and innovation that ensures this key industry continues to thrive as it augments the economic future of the country. There is encouraging evidence that politicians and civil servants are alive to the challenges and opportunities that reside in aviation. The current plans being rolled out to build an all new runway in Dublin Airport, alongside improved terminal and ramp facilities, is a case in point. While this might not garner the banner headlines attached to a giant IT company setting up a headquarters in Ireland it has even greater long-term value. By creating the bandwidth to accommodate a much greater volume of aircraft and their passengers and freight a larger Dublin Airport helps grow the economy and, thereby, add jobs for the future. The leasing community continues to expand, too. Despite highly charged competition from other centres Ireland continues to command investment by existing lessors adding to their fleets and new platforms being established. Moreover, evolving tax regulations are encouraging many companies to adopt Ireland as a legitimate low tax rate centre that is respected in particular by key European, US and Asian authorities. From such a strong base the opportunity to do much more is crystal clear. Alongside the continued development of airports and leasing entities the scope to step change another element of the aviation industry maintenance and repair stands out. Although Ireland has a number of so-called MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) facilities it can strategically target a whole lot more. This segment is job-rich but needs a strong relationship with third level training and access to competitively-priced large hangars in order to thrive. I observe a number of significant air fields in Ireland that are remarkably quiet compared to Dublin. While we can forever argue why that is so, a clear opportunity exists - if politicians, local councils and state agencies combine to rapidly develop a major MRO network in Knock, Shannon and Cork in particular. This requires imaginative thinking and some forward-looking policies towards rates on facilities inside airport perimeters but it promises to unlock a lot of economic activity and jobs if handled right. Having done so well to create a successful aviation industry in Ireland, for good economic reasons, it seems a shame to be ignoring a business that has particular potential for airports outside Dublin. - Joe Gill is director of corporate broking with Goodbody Stockbrokers. His views are personal. Ambulance workers will hold a fifth day of industrial action at stations across the country today. Members of the Psychiatric Nurses Association will go on strike from 7am until 5pm. A woman began verbally abusing ambulance staff while being brought for treatment and when concerned staff pulled in she left the vehicle barefoot and was found later following a Garda search. Alana ODriscoll, with an address at East End House, Cool Mountain, Dunmanway in Co Cork faced two public order charges arising out of the incident at 1.30am on April 4 last year. Sgt Paul Kelly told Clonakilty District Court that on that night gardai received a call from ambulance control that a patient travelling between Skibbereen and Clonakilty had become abusive. Sgt Kelly said that due to her behaviour the ambulance pulled in, at which point Ms ODriscoll, 21, walked barefoot from the vehicle, having already tried to open the door when the ambulance was still moving. Following an extensive Garda search she was found 50 minutes later in a different part of the town. Still highly intoxicated, she had no idea where she was, declined Garda assistance, became argumentative and was arrested. Her solicitor, Flor Murphy, said Ms ODriscoll had been out in Skibbereen earlier that night and had fallen, hurting her hand. The court heard she had 13 previous convictions, including two for criminal damage and two for assaulting police officers. Judge James McNulty heard that the cruelty charges had resulted in a two year suspended prison sentence. Flor Murphy said his client had had a troubled upbringing and was not in a good place at the time of this incident. He also said Ms ODriscoll had been on quite a lot of medication and that she should not have mixed that medication with alcohol. She got paranoid that night, Mr Murphy said. They [ambulance staff] were trying to help her, she felt scared and paranoid. She deeply regrets that night and apologises to ambulance crew and Gardai. This was way out of order. The judge said Ms ODriscoll was probably deserving of support more than punishment and is already in the care of the Probation Service. He said the incident caused alarm to ambulance staff and was a waste of the time of public servants. He convicted her on her plea to one public order charge, with the other withdrawn by the state, but deferred penalty until November 22 next. Fears have been raised that wastewater treatment works planned for a pier in East Cork could undermine the structure and cause untold damage to the local fishing industry. County councillors are to ask Irish Water officials to attend a meeting in an effort to urge them not to locate the treatment plant under the pier at Ballycotton because of concerns it may lead to subsidence. Cllr Michael Hegarty said a sinkhole appeared at the pier 15 years ago and led to major disruption. "The location of the pumping station is underneath the toilet block and they (Irish Water) will have to excavate 15 feet underneath it for the treatment plant," Cllr Hegarty told a meeting of the East Cork Municipal District Council. He said he has questioned Irish Water officials over this. Cllr Hegarty said he was told that while Irish Water has carried out a marine survey in the immediate area their engineers haven't looked at what was underneath the pier: "What if something happens when the work is going on? This is a working pier. There are trucks taking fish off it daily and oil tankers coming onto the pier to supply fuel to the boats." Cllr Hegarty added that a nearby "brownfield site" has been identified as a suitable location for the treatment plant by locals and this should be used instead: "To me Irish Water aren't listening and are prepared to drive on regardless. There is a solution to this if common sense would prevail." Cllr Hegarty got unanimous support from his colleagues to allow a delegation representing Ballycotton Development Company and Ballycotton Fishermen's Association to outline their concerns at next month's municipal district council meeting. Cllr Michael Hegarty said that everybody in Ballycotton welcomes that at long last Irish Water is going to do something about raw sewage draining into the harbour, but the genuine concerns have to be addressed. Cllr Michael Ahern said he attended an Irish Water briefing on the project in Ballycotton a few weeks ago at which locals had expressed their concerns. "Irish Water is not listening to those who know about the pier," Cllr Ahern said. Cllrs Susan McCarthy, Danielle Twomey and Mary Linehan-Foley also raised their concerns. Municipal district council chairman, Cllr Noel Collins, said he will write to Irish Water requesting they send officials to next month's council meeting and extend an invitation to attend to the Ballycotton groups. An agricultural contractor bled to death after he was shot in the left arm while working late in the to evening in October of last year in Macroom, Co Cork, his inquest has heard. South Cork Coroner's Court heard that father-of-one, Derry Coakley, passed away from haemorrhage and shock due to a gunshot wound when he was shot at Raleigh North, Macroom on October 23 last year. Coroner Frank O'Connell heard evidence from Assistant State Dr Margaret Bolster who carried out a postmortem on Mr Coakley. She said that Derry Coakley died from a gunshot wound to the arm. The inquest heard that gardai went to the scene at 11.30pm on October 23 after they received a call saying that a man had been shot. Det Garda Alan OSullivan told the inquest that when they arrived there they found two men onsite. Det Garda OSullivan said he recognised one of the men as Richie Creedon. Mr Creedon was bent over Derry Coakley who was bleeding heavily having incurred a gunshot wound to the arm. He was alive but he was moaning and rolling on the ground when we arrived but he deteriorated very rapidly he took his last breath just before the ambulance personnel arrived at the scene. They worked on him for a while trying to resuscitate him but they were unable to do so and it was after midnight that a local doctor pronounced that Mr Coakley had died." Supt Joe Moore applied to have the inquest adjourned because a man is currently before the courts in relation to the murder of Mr Coakley. No date has been fixed for the trial but it is unlikely to be heard before 2020. The case was adjourned for mention until early 2020. At Mr Coakley's funeral last year mourners heard that his name was "synonymous with hard work". Monsignor James O'Donnell told mourners that Derry was a very obliging man. He said that Derry's reply to being asked to do anything was always a "just leave it with me". "His importance in our community was well-summed up during the week by one of his many friends who said that whenever there was a job to be done, whenever there was a problem, Derry was the go-to person." Macroom Tidy Towns and Macroom Ploughing Association provided a guard of honour at the funeral. A morning-after headache may be the side effect of a pint of plain and a whiskey chaser but at least its short-lived the long-term hangover is the thousands of tonnes of carbon emitted during production. Latest figures from the European Commission show that St James Gate Brewery, the home of the black stuff, emitted 51,514 tonnes of greenhouse gas last year while Midleton Distilleries was responsible for 41,520 tonnes. Theyre just two examples of how some of our favourite pleasure pursuits including travel, socialising and enjoying dairy products are adding to the climate crisis. The figures track the performance of some 14,000 major airlines, manufacturers, power plants and other heavy energy users across Europe. While Ryanair emerged from the list newly elevated to the top 10 carbon producers in the EU with a record output of more than 9.8 million tonnes last year, Ireland has scores more companies who are also substantial contributors to the problem. After Ryanair, ESB has the largest emissions, chiefly from its Moneypoint power station although with 1.9m tonnes emitted last year, that is a dramatic reduction on the 2017 figure of 3.4m which was down from 4.4m in 2016. Moneypoint was out of action for a time last year which explains some of the reduction. ESBs other plants at Poolbeg and North Wall in Dublin, Lough Ree and West Offaly in the midlands and Aghada in County Cork between them produced 2.6m tonnes. Norwegian Air, which is also registered in Ireland, emitted 1.5m tonnes which was up from the previous year while Aer Lingus was responsible for 848,646 tonnes. Aughinish Alumina, the Limerick-based aluminium producer, had the largest emissions of the single base manufacturing industries in the list, with an output of 1.2m tonnes which has changed little in recent years. Irish Cement, between its two plants in Limerick and Drogheda, had emissions totalling 1.6m tonnes. Other cement producers were also high on the list including Scotchtown Cement with 806,637 tonnes emitted and Lagan Cement with 424,139 tonnes. Power station operators, SSE, Viridian and Synergen all had emissions in excess of 500,000 tonnes. The pharmaceutical and dairy sectors also had high levels of emissions. Glanbias plants in Ballyragget and Virginia had emissions totalling 104,843 tonnes while Kerry Ingredients plants in Listowel and Charleville between them produced 123,000 tonnes. Around a dozen other dairy producers had emissions ranging from just over 10,000 tonnes to more than 70,000 tonnes. Several pharmaceutical companies also feature. Pfizers four Irish plants between them had emissions totalling 62,599 tonnes. The figures were released as Ireland and the rest of the world face the crucial task of halving carbon emissions within 12 years and eliminating them completely by 2050 if extreme climate chaos is to be avoided. Despite creeping into the top 10, Ryanair is still far below the worst offender which is the Belchatow coal-fired power plant in Poland which produced 38m tonnes of carbon last year. It is followed by six other coal-fired power plants in Germany and one in Bulgaria which produced between 10m and 32m tonnes each. Ryanair, which has seen its emissions rise in recent years, has pointed out that the increase is in line with its growing business. In a statement, the company said: Ryanair is Europes greenest and cleanest airline. Passengers travelling on Ryanair have the lowest CO2 emissions per km travelled than any other airline. Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has tasked an assistant commissioner to coordinate investigations into reports that DNA samples of suspected criminals have gone missing. The Garda chief had last week asked regional assistant commissioner to check with their divisional chief superintendents to examine whether or not there is a problem and the scale of it. Subsequent to that meeting, Assistant Commissioner John O'Driscoll, head of Special Crime Operations, has been given a formal role in coordinating the examination. Senior sources said that, while the facts of the matter are not yet clear, any failure to submit DNA samples for forensic testing could have serious implications in aiding investigations and even prosecutions. At the moment it's hard to know the scale or extent of this, one source told the Irish Examiner. It could be a problem, it could even be a serious problem, but then again it may not be as big as people might think. The issue, reported in the Irish Daily Mail yesterday, claimed that up to 2,000 DNA samples taken from criminals are missing and not added to the National DNA database, operated by Forensic Science Ireland. The newspaper reported that the Technical Bureau had identified the issue. One source told the Irish Examiner that a lot is unclear: It is not clear if DNA kits were given out to gardai and the garda failed to utilise them at all or if they were used and samples taken, but the samples were not returned or returned incorrectly. Last week, the commissioner directed regional assistant commissioners to request their divisional commanders to examine the issue. All the chief superintendents have been told to look into the issue and report back to the ACs who will report back to Garda HQ, said a source. Subsequently, the commissioner appointed AC O'Driscoll to lead the overall examination. The garda boss could be questioned on this issue at the next public meeting with the Policing Authority on April 18. It is understood that DNA kits are distributed from central Garda stores based on requests from local divisions. Garda HQ said: "An Assistant Commissioner has been appointed to examine any potential issues. Any issues arising will be brought to the attention of the independent statutory DNA Database System Oversight Committee and the Policing Authority." Ministers have been warned that a no-deal Brexit is now becoming very likely as they signed off on further plans to protect Ireland from a UK crash-out. The Government is ramping up preparations significantly as it faces pressure from other EU countries to provide a plan for the border with Northern Ireland in a no-deal scenario. Tanaiste Simon Coveney brought two Brexit memos to Cabinet, which convened at 8.30pm after the Taoiseach returned from a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris yesterday. It is understood that much of the discussion with the French leader centred around the border and how the single market would be protected if Britain leaves the EU without an agreement. High-level talks between Ireland, the UK, and the EU have already kicked off around the difficult issue of balancing the need to protect the Good Friday Agreement, while at the same reassuring other EU countries that Ireland is protecting the integrity of the single market. Mr Coveney yesterday said the Government will now be intensifying discussions with the European Commission on this. He told the Dail: Ireland is not going to allow a situation where the UK leaving the European Union without a deal drags Ireland out of the single market with it. We cannot allow that situation. By that, I mean that a response of checks in EU ports on all Irish products is not a runner. It would cause significant damage to our economy and we will not allow it. Mr Coveney was pressured by Fianna Fails deputy leader Dara Calleary to reveal what plans are being developed to ensure no hard border returns, while maintaining our EU obligations. The Tanaiste said the Government is well prepared in many ways, adding that there were now regular discussions at EU level. The Taoiseach has referred to the conversations that have begun on that issue. There was a meeting last Friday and those discussions will continue into this week, he said. We must find a way to protect the single markets integrity, but also avoid physical border infrastructure on the border. That is something on which we do not have an agreed plan but this week, and presumably into next week if necessary, we are working on this in the context of a no-deal Brexit. Meanwhile, the Cabinet has decided to extend the application of rent pressure zones until the end of 2021. Ministers agreed to extend the current scheme aimed at keeping rent increases under control, but are changing the qualification criteria for areas outside Dublin. Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy is due to publish the full details this week, but the decision to extend the zones is a clear indication of the pressure the lack of housing is having on the system. A rent pressure zone is an area where annual rent increases have been at 7% or more in four of the last six quarters and where the rent levels are already above the national average. In these areas, rent increases are capped at 4% per annum. Green Party TD Catherine Martin said the news will come as a significant relief to those who otherwise would have been facing significant rent increases. She said the indication that the criteria for an area to qualify for the RPZ will be changed will be welcome for rural areas of Ireland. An archaelogist who plans to create a craft last used by our forebearers more than a millennium ago is getting a dig out for his dugout boat from people from all corners of the world. Niall Gregory, who did his doctorate on dugout boats, has gathered a meitheal of willing volunteers from the local direct provision centre in Kenmare to help him hew the craft from a 250-year-old oak tree on the grounds of Bonane Heritage Park. Work has already begun on the craft and should be complete by mid-summer when they hope to take the boat out on the tranquil waters of Kenmare Bay. Its going to take up to 30 working days to complete and were working on it every weekend, he said. As were seeking to replicate everything as accurately as possible, the tools are replicas of those found on Irish archaeological excavation sites. The volunteers working alongside Mr Gregory include helpers from Albania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, and Poland as well as some locals. The craft they are building is based on a dugout boat which was retrieved from the Shannon estuary some years ago and was initially on display in Muckross House before being moved to the North Kerry Museum near Ballyduff. Based upon evidence of Irish dugout boats and my expertise, I envisage the boat dating to possibly 600 to 700AD, he said, pointing out the caveat that it was impossible to date it accurately without submitting the craft to carbon dating or other scientific methods. The craft should be complete by mid-summer when Niall Gregory and his volunteers hope to take the boat out on the waters of Kenmare Bay. According to Mr Gregory, there is a global community of dug out boat builders and his plan is to stage a regatta for this ancient craft in Kenmare in the next few years. Kerry County Council has been very supportive of Bonane Heritage Park where the boatbuilding is taking place. The project is being supported by South Kerry Partnership. Bonane Heritage Park is a treasure trove for those interested in archaeology with sites from different periods located there. People can call in to talk to the people working on the project on Saturdays or Sundays. Ireland is near the top of the table of 47 European nations for the number of life sentence inmates in prison. It is third, with Northern Ireland at the top, followed by Greece, a major report by the Council of Europe shows. The Republic also has higher rates of escapes from penal institutions - all from Oberstown Children Detention Centre. In addition, Ireland has higher rates than average of inmates serving sentences for rapes and other sexual offences. The council's Annual Penal Statistics 2018 show that: 11.8% of all prisoners in Ireland are serving a life sentence, third behind Northern Ireland (15.4%) and Greece (13.9%) and ahead of England & Wales (9.7%) The Republic's rate is nine times the average (2.8%) of the 47 countries The Council of Europe includes the 28 EU states and a host of neighbouring countries, from Iceland in the west to Ukraine in the east. Using figures from 2017, the report shows there were 358 life sentence inmates, or 'lifers', in Irish prisons. Life sentences are mandatory in Ireland in cases of murder and prison sources indicate that the number of life sentences has increased in recent years as a result of garda successes against gang feuds. Another factor that might explain the high rate in Ireland is the option in other countries for courts to hand down minimum tariffs for different categories of homicides - something not available in Ireland. The report shows that the average across the 47 countries for prisoners serving sentences of 20 years or more was 3.2% - which is significantly higher than Ireland, where it is only 0.2%. In addition, the average for sentences of between 10 and 20 years is 12.4% across Europe, where in Ireland it is 7.9%. Prisoners serving life sentences are legally entitled to apply for parole after serving seven years in Ireland. Figures published by the Parole Board in its 2017 annual report show that the average sentence served by 21 life sentence prisoners granted parole was 18 years. The Council of Europe said the percentage of prisoners sentenced for homicide and attempted homicides was similar in Ireland to the European average (14.1% v 13.6%). The figures also show that more prisoners are serving sentences in Ireland for rapes (6.7% v 4.6%) and other sexual offences (6% v 3.9%). And there are significantly greater numbers serving time for assault and battery in Ireland (13.7% v 7.6%) and more for terrorism (0.5% v 0.1%). The report shows that Ireland has a prison population rate of 79.5 per 100,000 people, compared to an average of 123.7, with England & Wales in top position at 142.4. Ireland's prison population rate has remained effectively unchanged compared to 2008 figures. But it has dropped dramatically from a high of 95.7 in 2010, after which it fell steadily, to 78.1 in 2016, increasing slightly in 2017. The report shows that Ireland's prison density, which is inmates per capacity, stood at 88.9 per 100 places, just above the average of 87.6. There are 1.3 prisoners per cell in Ireland, compared to an average of 2.5. It said there were 21 escapes from penal institutions in Ireland, translating to a rate of 54.6 per 10,000 inmates, compared to an average of 42.6. The figure was higher for escapes from closed institutions 52.4 compared to an average of 16.4. The report said these 11 escapes were not from Irish closed prisons but from Oberstown Children Detention Centre. The other 10 escapes were from open prisons. Elsewhere the report said the staff ratio in Ireland was higher than the average and that the cost of housing an inmate (188 per day) was higher than the average (128). Ireland will not be abandoned in a no-deal Brexit - which is now looking increasingly likely - the French president says. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar travelled to Paris todayto speak with Emmanuel Macron as the spotlight turns to how this country would deal with a crash-out Brexit. Mr Macron said: "We will never abandon Ireland or the Irish people no matter what happens because this solidarity is the very purpose of the European project. Our priority shall be the good functioning of the EU and the single market. The EU cannot sustainably be the hostage to the solution to a political crisis in the UK. Mr Varadkar, who is also due to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dublin tomorrow, said that "as things stand" Britain will leave the European Union on April 12 without a deal. "However there is still time for the prime minister to come to the European Council with proposals, proposals that are credible and have a clear pathway to success. I think we need to be open to any proposals that she may bring forward to us," he said. Mr Varadkar added that a no-deal scenario would put Ireland in a "difficult situation" as "we have to reconcile the Good Friday Agreement and obligations to protect the single market". After the meeting, the Taoiseach said the issue of protecting the Single Market in a no-deal situation was discussed between the two leaders but he emphasised that there is no better alternative than the backstop. Mr Varadkar thanked the French leader for his "solidarity" in "this difficult time" but called on all European countries to consider any options the Theresa May put forward to extend Brexit. "It's very much the case at the moment that the UK is consumed by Brexit and Ireland, France the Europe should not be consumed by Brexit, we have a very positive forward-looking agenda for the European Union we want to deliver." Latest: France and Ireland would be the EU nations most directly affected by a no-deal Brexit, the French president has said. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar travelled to Paris to meet with Emmanuel Macron, where he thanked France for its ongoing solidarity with Ireland in the difficult Brexit period. Im fully aware of the tremendous difficulties such a situation would bring about for Ireland, said the French president. Good to return to the Elysee Palace today to meet @EmmanuelMacron for discussions on #Brexit and the #futureofeurope pic.twitter.com/nUAqfdA05c Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) April 2, 2019 We will never abandon Ireland or the Irish people, no matter what happens, because this solidarity is the very purpose of the European project. Mr Macron said that credible justifications for an Article 50 extension for the UK could include an election, second referendum or alternative proposals for the future relationship, such as a customs union. The EU would be open to such proposals, but it was for London to put them forward, he said. A long extension involving the participation of the UK in European elections and European institutions is far from evident and certainly not (to be taken) for granted. Our priority shall be the good functioning of the EU and the single market. The EU cannot sustainably be the hostage to the solution to a political crisis in the UK. He added: We cannot spend the coming months sorting out yet again the terms of our divorce and dealing with the past. Emmanuel Macron with Leo Varadkar at the Elysee Palace in Paris (Christophe Ena/AP) The UK is being consumed by Brexit, but Ireland and France and the European Union shouldnt be consumed by Brexit, we have a positive agenda for the EU which we want to deliver, he said. At the last European Council meeting, we gave the UK some time and space to come up with a way forward, as it stands they will leave the EU on April 12 without a deal. However, there is still time for the Prime Minister to come to the council with proposals proposals that are credible and have a clear pathway to success and we need to be open to any proposals she might bring forward to us. Id like to talk about what we can do to assist the Prime Minister to secure the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement including the backstop, Mr Varadkar told the media in Paris. Recognising that the Withdrawal Agreement cannot be opened but if the UK changes its red lines, we could make changes to the declaration on the future relationship. Also, well need to consider how we may respond to any request for a long extension, and we want to avoid a rolling extension, so any extension must have a clear purpose and plan. Well need to talk about what we will do in the event of a no deal, which will be particularly difficult for Ireland, and from our point of view, well want to pursue our twin objectives, to protect the Good Friday Agreement on which peace in Northern Ireland is based, and protect the integrity of the single market and customs union, (on) which Irelands economic model has been based for decades. Speaking ahead of the talks, Mr Macron said the remaining 27 EU nations will continue to show unity and solidarity with Ireland.- Press Association Earlier (4:08pm): The French President Emmanuel Macron has insisted that the EU would not abandon Ireland, no matter what happens with Brexit. Speaking as the Taoiseach arrived at the Elysee Palace, President Macron insisted that the EU "will not be held hostage" to the political crisis in the UK. He stressed that it is up to the UK to come up with alternative proposals and "to say it now". The Taoiseach says there is still time for the British Prime Minister to come to the European Council with credible proposals to avoid a no-deal Brexit. Speaking in Paris before a meeting with the French President, Leo Varadkar said the EU needs to be open to any proposals that Theresa May brings forward before the April 12 deadline. He added that if the UK changes its red lines changes could be made to the declaration on the future relationship. The Taoiseach admitted any extension to the leave date must have a proper objective. "We'll need to consider how we may respond to any request for a long extension taking into account that will involve the UK participating in European elections and we want to avoid a rolling extension," said Mr Varadkar. "Any extension must have a clear purpose and a clear plan and of course we will need to talk about what we will do in the event of no-deal which would be particularly difficult for Ireland." Digital Desk Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has again rejected calls for the party's Northern MPs to take their seats in Westminster, insisting this would just add to the Brexit chaos there. One motion - aligning with the EU's custom's union to resolve the Brexit deadlock - failed by just three votes in Westminster on Monday. Now there is pressure on Sinn Fein to add its voice there. Ms McDonald said that, as a matter of policy, Sinn Fein would not swear an allegiance to a British Queen, as is required by sitting Westminster MPs. Furthermore, she noted that the seven Sinn Fein MPs elected in the North were there on an abstentionism mandate. This was a century old policy, said Ms McDonald, for the party that believed in a united Ireland. Irish interests in this Brexit debacle are not best advanced at Westminster. The purpose of the Westminster parliament is to advance British interests. Irish interests should instead be protected in Dublin, she said, also adding: "Don't imagine for a second that seven Sinn Fein MPs could enter Westminster and make sense of the utter chaos and circus that we have witnessed over the last number of months. I would suggest that were Sinn Fein MPs to enter Westminster, it would only heighten the political temperature. Far from producing light or a conclusive position, I would suggest it would have the practical effect of making things more confused and more chaotic. Health Minister Simon Harris triggered debate on the MPs taking their seats, tweeting that it was hard to see how Sinn Fein would not change the Brexit impasse. Fianna Fail also argues that Sinn Fein should be in Westminster representing all the people of the North. Penal reformers have welcomed the massive drop in people being jailed for non-payment of court fines but are concerned at the rise in prison numbers caused by more committals for non-fine offences. The conflicting trends have emerged in statistics provided by the Irish Prison Service to the Irish Examiner following queries. The figures show that committals for non-payment of court fines fell from almost 9,883 in 2015 to just 455 in 2018 a cut of 95%. This followed the implementation of legal changes, including a key provision at the start of 2016, which put in place a set of non-custodial options for judges for offenders who fail to pay a court fine. This has meant the total number of committals to prisons has more than halved, from 17,206 in 2015 to 8,079 in 2018. But other IPS figures show there has been a significant increase in the average daily prison population, rising from 3,646 on December 31, 2017 to 3,911 on the same date last year a trend that has continued this year, with 4,028 people in custody on March 29 (up 10% in 15 months). This is because committals, excluding for fines, have increased from 6,660 in 2016, to 7,026 in 2017 and to 7,616 in 2018 14% over two years. The reversal in committals for fine defaulting followed the introduced of the Fines Act (Payment and Recovery Act) 2014, but the full force of the legal changes did not take place until after the introduction, in January 2016, of provisions enabling payment of fines by installment. Committals for fine defaulting had jumped from 2,250 in 2008, to 7,514 in 2011, reaching a peak of 9,883 in 2015. It fell to 8,439 in 2016, before collapsing to 2,261 in 2017 and to 455 last year. Fiona Ni Chinneide of the Irish Penal Reform Trust said: The significant decrease in committals to prison for fines default is very welcome, but masks a worrying return to rising numbers in prison, including increasing use of pre-trial detention. She said the IPRT is seriously concerned at rapidly increasing prisoner numbers and the consequent impact on safety and rehabilitation. Numbers in prison custody averaged 4,026 last week, with up to six closed prisons meeting or exceeding safe custody limits established by the Inspector of Prisons, she said. Eoin Carroll, of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, welcomed the positive impact of the fines legislation, including on overall committals to prisons. But he described the drop as masking the reality that, other than a reduction in the number of people being sent to prison for fines, the overall picture is an increase in committals. IPS data also shows the number of females in custody has increased, from 108 in 2017 to 153 in 2018, rising further to 169 by the end of last January an overall jump of 56%. It shows that female committals, excluding fines, were up 59% between 2017 and 2018. Mr Carroll said a detailed analysis is needed as to what is happening in relation to female offenders. He added: The continual increase in the daily prison population, particularly the increase in women, is a worrying trend. He said release programmes like community return and community support need to be expanded. An applied maths graduate caught with five deals of heroin last year was caught on another occasion stealing ice cream. Judge Patricia McNamara imposed a suspended jail term of two months on Mark ORegan, aged 37, who pleaded guilty to two charges of having drugs for his own use and theft. ORegan, who is presently living at St Vincents hostel, Anglesea Terrace, Cork, has taken on a methadone treatment course, his solicitor, Eddie Burke said. The solicitor said ORegan went to London, where he attended college and got a degree in applied maths. He returned to Ireland and went to live at home in Ennis, Co Clare. He lost a very good friend two and a half years ago and this brought back a drink addiction and he unfortunately fell into heroin, said Mr Burke. He is now off that and engaging with Arbour House. Judge McNamara said: If he does not get treatment, he will reoffend. Mr Burke said the accused was on a methadone treatment programme and clear of heroin. Judge Patricia McNamara said she would impose a two-month sentence suspended on condition that ORegan would continue with his drug rehabilitation. Sgt John Kelleher outlined the background to both offences at Cork District Court yesterday. On September 5, 2018, Garda Aisling Murphy attended at Centra, Victoria Cross, Cork, where the manager reported a man stealing ice cream valued 5. ORegan pleaded guilty to that. On April 17 2018, Garda Ed ODonoghue stopped ORegan, at Killydonoghue, Glanmire, Co Cork, and conducted a search under the Misuse of Drugs Act. ORegan had five wraps of diamorphine in his possession for his own use. British MPs last night rejected four options to try and resolve the Brexit deadlock. This included proposals for a softer Brexit tying Britain to the EU customs union as well as proposals for a second referendum. It came after MPs held votes on four alternatives to again try and resolve the Westminster deadlock over Brexit. The option for a Brexit leaving Britain aligned with a customs union was close, being defeated by just three votes with 276 votes to 273. A proposal for a second vote was defeated by 292 to 280, while an option for a so-called common market option was beaten by 282 votes to 261. One conservative MP resigned last night in the wake of the votes. There was also speculation last night that UK prime minister Theresa May will try and bring her own deal back to the House of Commons this week-after three failed attempts to pass it. Nothing that is said today will bring back the young people whose lives have been so cruelly taken by serious violence. What we can do is send a very clear message that this must stop.#SeriousViolenceSummit #KnifeFree pic.twitter.com/qwCupmNtYw Theresa May (@theresa_may) April 1, 2019 According to some reports, this could be tied to a confidence vote in the Conservative-led government, a move which may force her critics in the parliament to back the deal. Meanwhile, a British request for a Brexit deadline extension as well as consequences of a chaotic no deal will be discussed between Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and French president Emmanuel Macron tomorrow. The Government has so far declined to say what checks or trade arrangements could fall into place if Britain leaves without a deal and there is no border. However, Mr Macron is expected to discuss this with Mr Varadkar tomorrow, when the two meet in Paris. The bilateral meeting in Paris comes ahead of talks between Mr Varadkar and German Chancellor Angel Merkel, who is due to visit Dublin on Thursday. A spokesman for the Government said the meetings were a demonstration of strong and unwavering EU solidarity with Ireland over Brexit. The Taoiseach and President Macron will take stock of the latest developments in Westminster, and discuss the scenarios which may arise, including the possibility of a request for an extension, or ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement, in advance of the extraordinary meeting of the European Council on 10 April. They are also expected to discuss the forthcoming EU summit in Sibiu, Romania, as well as the EU budget for the period after 2020. Speaking ahead of the meeting, the Taoiseach said he was looking forward to meeting Mr Macron at this critical juncture in Brexit. I will thank him for the ongoing solidarity from France, including the clear commitment that the Withdrawal Agreement must include an operational backstop to avoid a hard border. Bullying, unemployment and mental health difficulties are some of the main difficulties facing people who are autistic. The issues are being highlighted as part of World Autism Day. Sinn Fein will today put forward a motion in the Dail calling for the development of an autism empowerment strategy in Ireland. Advocacy group, AsIAm, is one of the groups that has worked on the proposal. "On World Autism Day, we are urging the Government to support Sinn Feins private members motion to be debated in the Dail tonight on the creation of an all-party Oireachtas committee to deliver an autism strategy within six months, said AsIAm CEO Adam Harris. "Furthermore, we are calling on Government to urgently put in place the supports required to enable autistic people to access the workplace and live happy lives in their local communities this requires investment in further and higher education supports, access to keyworkers for autistic adults and concerted efforts to educate frontline education, health and social service officials about autism." Mr Harris says that despite 86% of autistic children now attending mainstream school, there are still problems to be addressed. "While some autistic children currently benefit from special schools, there is a growing trend towards educating autistic children in mainstream schools, sometimes in special classes within those schools. However there is still a significant minority of people who do not believe mainstream schools are responsible for supporting autistic students. "This requires further work in light of Irelands ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities." Research by AsIAm shows that attitudes towards autistic people are quite positive. Younger people are more likely to believe they have a good understanding, and they are also more likely to be aware of having an autistic person among their friends. 25% of people say there is an autistic person among their friends, but this rises to 33% within the 18-25 age group. A British request for a Brexit deadline extension as well as consequences of a chaotic no-deal will be discussed between Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and French President Emmanuel Macron today. The Government has so far declined to say what checks or trade arrangements could fall into place if Britain leaves without a deal and there is no border. However, Mr Macron is expected to discuss this with Mr Varadkar today. In a statement ahead of travelling to Paris, the Government said the two leaders would discuss the latest developments in Westminster. Other sources said the issue of what happens with a no-deal would be on the table at the Elysee Palace meeting. Mr Varadkar said: Im looking forward to meeting President Macron at this critical juncture in Brexit. "I will thank him for the ongoing solidarity from France, including the clear commitment that the withdrawal agreement must include an operational backstop to avoid a hard border. I am keen to discuss the possible scenarios arising from this week, particularly how the European Council should respond to a request for another extension, should there be one, and ongoing efforts to secure ratification of the withdrawal agreement. "As I have indicated, it is now up to the UK to show how it plans to proceed and avoid a no-deal scenario. We are preparing for all outcomes, and have prepared intensively for a no-deal. "But no one should under-estimate the difficulties that a no-deal will present, for all of us. Mr Varadkar will also meet German chancellor Angela Merkel in Dublin on Thursday, at which similar issues are expected to be discussed ahead of another emergency EU leaders summit in Brussels next week. The Government continues to say that it will not seal the border if there is a no-deal Brexit but that there is still no fallback plan on how to protect the EUs single market. EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said in January that there would be inspections on foods or goods moving through Ireland with a disorderly Brexit: How should we control animals crossing the border? There will have to be checks. Nonetheless, specifics on this have yet to be made public by the Government. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has only said to date that discussions have been had on the issue and nothing has been documented. Irish interests must be protected - deal or no deal #Brexit pic.twitter.com/rpsHdssiAW Mary Lou McDonald (@MaryLouMcDonald) April 1, 2019 Meanwhile, Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald met Mr Barnier in Brussels yesterday over the need to protect Irish citizens and the economy in the event of a disorderly Brexit. Despite this, she also said it is not clear what would happen with a no-deal Brexit. Elsewhere, Labour finance spokesperson Joan Burton has expressed surprise at a lack of estimates from the Revenue Commissions of tax and duty losses from smuggling in the event of a no-deal Brexit. This follows a series of Dail questions tabled by Ms Burton, which returned no detail. She said: I have been asking the minister for finance and the Revenue Commissioners a series of questions about the number of customs officers, their training, and the potential losses in the event of a no deal Brexit. "As the worst outcome becomes possible, we have no certainty on the type of controls or checks that will happen with cross border trade or whether it will be carried out in ports, and at factory gates. Cannabis believed to be worth almost a 250,000 has been seized in West Dublin. Revenue officers seized approximately 12kgs of herbal cannabis with an estimated street value of 240,000. 'Candy Warhol' has worked with everyone from the queens of RuPauls Drag Race to Irelands own Panti Bliss. Now she's running masterclasses in Cork. Caroline O'Donoghue signs up. It is 9.30pm on a wet Monday evening in early March, and I am a living doll. To specify: I am not the Barbie doll that I so often see upside-down in my nieces toy chest, who is generally naked, covered in magic marker, and sporting a homemade haircut that felt like a good idea at the time but now she deeply regrets. I am the kind of doll made for careful, polite children. My head is bowed from trying to stay steady under my huge black wig. My eyes are half-closed from the weight of my 401 lashes. My limbs are articulated with great care as I watch the world from the inner folds of this costume, watching as three men put the finishing touches on three hours of work. They are Candy Warhol, Mia Gold and Victoria Lodge. Sisters from Corks very first drag family, Mockie Ah. Oh my god, Mia says, stepping back from the finished product. Candy, she looks just like you. Mia then pauses for a second. ...but pretty. The four of us scream laughing, Candy whacking Mia with the heel of her fan in mock-horror. To be clear, I am Candys creation. Her drag daughter, to use official parlance. Candy Warhol is the mother of the House of Mockie Ah, a title which means that she essentially is responsible for everything the family requires. From organising shows, to managing new recruits, to ensuring peace and harmony among the queens, the buck stops with Candy. Mockie Ah is unique in that it is Corks premier drag family: one that, for the sake of this article, I am temporarily initiated into. I like being a Mom, Candy says playfully, drawing on my eyebrows, which start two inches above where my original ones sit. Ish. Although at 28 she seems young to be a single mum of a dozen drag queens, the Cork native has racked up a decade in the industry. She has worked with everyone, from the queens of the Emmy award-winning RuPauls Drag Race to Irelands own Panti Bliss. Unusually for a drag queen, Candy doesnt have a figurative family relation to drag a mother who schooled her through wigs and eyelashes, the way she is doing for me right now but a literal one. Candy is the grand-nephew of Danny La Rue, the legendary queen who, during the 1960s, commanded one of the highest salaries of any UK entertainer. Growing up I was aware of it but it was one of those things that just became normalised to the point that I forgot about it. "Then a year into my drag someone said oh, just like your grand-uncle! It was surreal, she says, drawing thick brown lines of contour down my skin, carving light and shade into my face. The only time I saw him perform was when I was nine. He was mostly based in the UK but he came back on this tour and did the Everyman Palace, and my dad brought me. "To be honest, no one in my family was really that close to him. I never got one-on-one time with him, which is what I always wanted. He passed away just as I was starting. A drag family is not a new idea in itself. They were a staple of the culture that grew out of the 1970s ball scene, where primarily black and Latinx LGBTQ+ kids would walk in contests that were designed to playfully subvert the poverty they generally lived in. They walked in ball gowns they spent months sewing sequins onto; tailored suits for job interviews they would never actually be invited on. These kids were often rejected by their blood families, so found drag families in the wild. The House of Xtravaganza and The House of LaBeija dominated the New York drag scene. Now, Mockie Ah dominates the Cork one. One of the first questions I ask Candy is whether, in a post gay-marriage world, theres still a need for drag families. She maintains that solidarity is still a thing that drag queens desperately need. All three of the queens maintain that when they started drag, their parents were shocked, even linking it to prostitution. Victoria Lodge, a young queen from Tipperary who is a walking encyclopedia of camp references, says that his parents still dont know about his drag career. I started drag a year before RuPauls Drag Race was even out, says Candy. My parents were terrified. The first they heard of me doing drag was, ironically, in The Irish Examiner. It was the first time I had ever been photographed in drag. It was when I was runner-up in The Alternative Miss Ireland. The show, which used to be hosted by Panti Bliss and held annually in the Olympia, became a defining moment for Candy. I started in art college, through performance art and using drag as a subject matter. I was recreating all these Andy Warhol films, frame for frame, and I invented Candy Warhol as his art creation who would come to life. I put a video on Youtube and I got contacted by Alternative Miss Ireland to be in the show. I was 19. Such a baby, I didnt know what I was doing! "There was no make-up tutorials. I had my Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse and I was surrounded by all these Dublin queens who had been doing it years. "I had only performed twice. My drag was just a white face, my whole body white, black hair extensions, and a blazer from Penneys with strings hanging off it. Candy might have been a green performer, but this first appearance got her noticed. Especially when she jumped off stage, landing squarely on the camera crew. From then on, I just had to do crazy stunts because all the clubs that were hiring me were just asking 'what is she going to do next?' "I would go to the butchers and just sit on stage and eat raw meat. Id smash glasses, jump off stage, and then I was like: Im not even enjoying this! After that came a residency at The George, Dublins most famous gay club, where the hyper-competitive atmosphere became the inspiration for Mockie Ah. I remember someone saying at The George: When you leave the dressing room, everyones going to bitch about you, so just get used to it. Thats how it is. "I remember thinking, why does that have to be how it is? says Candy. Thats why on Mockie Ah, I have rules. Clean up after yourself, be friendly, that kind of stuff. But my main thing is, were a family. "We dont tolerate any diva behaviour. We dont tolerate bitchiness, and if I see it, youre out. Were there to have fun, and were there to work. Drag doesnt have to be a bitchy competition. Since the founding of Mockie Ah in 2017 after Candy hosted a vogueing competition in the The Village Hall in Patricks Quay, the house has gone from strength to strength. Candy is approached by drag-admirers as young as 13 right up to people in middle-age, all asking if they can join the family. But theres no official application process: you simply turn up to one of Candys new performer nights, do your thing, and wait to be invited back. Unlike some drag mothers, Candy includes bio queens (cis-gendered women who do drag) in the show. Mockie Ah currently has two: Maude Gonne Wrong and Denise Devereaux. I dont care what you are, as long as youre talented, and as long as youre original, Candy says. Theres a misconception that its just about make-up and copying drag queens you see on social media. You can get away with that with the audience, but not with me, and not with the other queens, she says staunchly. Drag is about punk, originality, and the underground. Drag queens are fearless, and they dont care about the norm. Whether its freaky-deaky drag or pretty-girly drag, its all still a f*ck you to the norm. If youre doing drag properly, it means youre taking everything you know about society and pop-culture, boiling it down, and then throwing it back in their face. At this point, I have been hanging out with the queens for three hours, and have been utterly transformed in the process. My usual make-up style of lip balm and eyeliner has given way to an utterly different creature. Along with my huge black wig and enormous lashes, I have been given a gown of red velvet and peacock feathers to wear. I look like I run a brothel in the old South. I dont feel like I do when Im dressed up for a wedding or a formal event which often feels like Im playing a tricky game of femininity and losing but like a different creature entirely. The art of drag is that you are exaggerating the stereotypes of gender so much that you feel like you transcend them completely. Not a woman trying to look pretty in make-up, but a funny joke about a woman looking pretty in make-up. A joke where you are the the teller, set-up, the punchline, and the banana peel all at once. Not quite a woman, not quite a man, but 100% queen. I am transfixed. I touch my lip. Have my lips always been this huge? Dont touch your face, Candy says, smacking my hand away. Because after all, mother knows best. Bill Shanley owns 18 guitars, a number he feels is just about right. I have Gibsons, Strats, acoustics, bass guitars, Dobros: Ive one of everything that I need and theyre all a bit different, he says. They are, in other words, the tools of his trade. Shanley, from Clonakilty, Co Cork, has carved out a niche for himself as one of Irelands top session guitarists and record producers, touring and recording with everyone from Ray Davies to Mary Black to Roy Harper, as well as co-founding Dublins Cauldron Recording Studios, where artists including Hozier, The Waterboys, and The Cranberries have recorded. In between times, hes released two studio albums himself, with a 12-year gap between his first, Fingerpainting, and his latest, Midnight Mission. A lot of my time is spent playing with other artists as a side-man or producing for other people or being a musical director or guitarist, and these solo projects are something you really need to set time aside for, he says. Midnight Mission is, like his debut, an album of instrumental songs, part of Shanleys vision to produce music harking back to an era when the guitar was king. In the mid-fifties, when the electric guitar first came out, it was a very exciting style of music and there were all these new sounds like reverb. "You could have instrumentals as hits, climbing up the charts. That continued right up until the Beatles and then it became all about song-writing and singing. I didnt want to make an album to showcase guitar-playing and extended solos. I wanted to keep the songs three to four minutes long, to make lyrical pieces of music that feel dynamic and make people want to move: With instrumental music, it can be really difficult for it not to become background music or muzak. Assembling a studio dream team to record his album, Shanley was able to call on long-time collaborators including Paul Brady, who plays mandolin, as well as The Kinks frontman Ray Davies, who adds the albums only vocal embellishments. Shanley has worked closely with Davies since 2006; in 2012, they performed Waterloo Sunset at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics. Hes a brilliant artist with an amazing legacy of songs and work, says Shanley. A quest to highlight the guitar as king might be timely: Last years news that famed guitar company Gibson had filed for bankruptcy prompted a discussion about the decline of the guitar in pop. With electronic production tools like Ableton at their disposal, were young people bypassing the time-consuming elements of having to master instruments like guitar? Guitar playing demands a lot of dedication, and maybe if kids arent seeing stars they really like playing, maybe they arent incentivised to put in the work. But it will come back. Even people like Ed Sheeran are a positive influence there because he actually can really play. You have to put in a lot of time to learn to play. Shanleys own childhood was spent in the family pub, fabled Clonakilty music venue Shanleys Piano Bar, honing his skills in the company of players like Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding, under the watchful gaze of his father Mossie, himself a musician. Basically, from 10 or 11, I was playing all the time, with visiting musicians and with Clons great local players, he says. Thats where I learned to do what I do. Mossie Shanley passed away in the mid-2000s, but the bar is still run by family, and Dublin-based Shanley makes frequent return visits, including, when possible, for the Clonakilty Guitar Festival. With a band lined up to tour his solo material over the summer, is Shanley moving into the spotlight? He hums and haws for a bit. I guess I am, a little bit, yes, he says, reluctantly. It was funny, the night Midnight Mission was released, I heard it on the radio and I did think, wow, thats cool. "Ive heard myself on the radio loads down through the years on other peoples work, but it was really nice to hear something Id written and created being played. Midnight Mission is out now. Upcoming gigs: June 3, Shanleys, Clonakilty; June 4, Whelans, Dublin; June 6, Coughlans, Cork Johann van Graan has admitted Joey Carberys latest hamstring injury is a big concern as he failed to give a timeframe on his first-choice fly-halfs recovery with a European semi-final date less than three weeks away. Carbery, playing his first game last Saturday following a six-week lay-off with a hamstring issue sustained on Ireland duty in February, lasted 35 minutes of his comeback in Munsters Heineken Champions Cup quarter-final victory in Edinburgh. Carbery, 23, was ruled out of this Fridays PRO14 clash with Cardiff Blues in Cork and was yesterday set to undergo further medical tests to ascertain the severity of this latest setback, with the Champions Cup semi against Saracens on April 20 now clearly a doubt. It is very early to say, van Graan replied when asked how bad Carberys injury was. Obviously, the fact that he came off in the first half is a big concern from our side. He will go through some more tests with our medical team today. Im not going to put a timeframe on it. He was out six weeks the previous time, it is difficult to say at this stage because it is a hamstring, whether its worse or its less, so we will just take it from day to day but I can say he will definitely not be ready for this weekend. The Munster boss insisted Carbery had been good to go for the Edinburgh clash. He was perfect the whole week. He did everything our medical team asked him to do. He trained the whole week, full out. There was no sign of anything. I think you saw the beginning of the game, he went up for that high ball, made his tackles, kicked a goal so there was no indication that something might happen, so from our side no regrets, there was no sign of anything, he was 100% confident he was ready to go. Munster also lost flanker Jack ODonoghue in the first half of their 17-13 win, following a failed head injury assessment. He must now complete return-to-play protocols before he is made available for selection to face Cardiff on Friday night. Van Graan said loosehead prop James Cronin (leg) would return to some training this week, but was unlikely to feature against Cardiff, but centre Sammy Arnold (leg) trained fully last week and could be in contention for selection. GAA podcast: Quirke and Dalo's Allianz League Review, with Ger Cunningham and John Divilly Once upon a time, everyone assumed that there was a single phenomenon called globalisation, whereby cross-border flows of financial capital drove innovation, industrialisation, development, and trade, writes Harold James. But Chinese president Xi Jinpings Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) advances an alternative vision of globalisation, based on an integrated system of physical infrastructure. The material world of ships and trains will replace the immaterial world of financialisation. But while Xi conceived the BRI as a straightforward way to consign the old, unstable Western-led globalisation to the dustbin of history, it is also meant to address a particular domestic challenge: Namely, the concentration of economic development along Chinas coast, where a wealthy, sophisticated seaboard elite has emerged. Social stability demands that the gains from Chinas extraordinary growth be distributed more evenly throughout the country. This is not just a Chinese issue, of course. Historically, globally significant cities have almost always been littoral located either on coastlines or navigable rivers. Centuries ago, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Genoa, and Venice served as the worlds commercial hubs. Today, metropolises such as London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Dubai, Sydney, and Rio de Janeiro perform a similar role. In the BRI division of labor, the road refers (counterintuitively) to maritime connections, whereas the belt describes interconnected projects across the Eurasian landmass. The idea is that inland territories such as Central Asia and Eastern Europe can and should be just as connected to the rest of the global economy as coastal hubs are today. Outside China, the BRI appeals particularly to countries that fell victim to the 2008 global financial crash and the subsequent eurozone crisis. For example, during the darkest days of its sovereign-debt crisis, Greece attracted Chinese investment by selling 51% of the port of Piraeus to the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company. Similarly, Serbia suffered from a dramatic sudden stop in capital inflows during the crisis years and now hopes to turn itself into a transportation hub, even though it is not a member of the EU. Meanwhile, Portuguese prime minister Antonio Costa has welcomed Chinese investment, and recently warned against pursuing sweeping protectionist measures against Chinese firms operating in the West. Italys populist coalition government has just signed a memorandum of understanding with China endorsing the BRI. And even the UK, mired in the chaos of Brexit, may see Chinese investment and economic engagement as a new geopolitical lifeline. Chinas attempt to link unglobalised regions through infrastructure is not unprecedented. More than a century ago, Britain was the worlds leading power, but Germany was catching up in terms of wealth and development. Like China today, Germany wanted to project power both on land and at sea. Yet, to compete with Britain, it could not rely on its merchant navy alone, so it launched its own equivalent of the BRI: A railroad stretching from Berlin to Baghdad. Like the BRI, these rail links connected remote areas over land and appealed to the losers of that period of globalisation. Chief among these was the Ottoman Empire, which had struggled through the 19th century as the sick man of Europe, proving incapable of reform and financial and economic modernisation. Foreign powers controlled the empires customs administration and seized the governments revenue. Also, like the BRI, Germanys Berlin-Baghdad infrastructure plan relied on government pressure to secure generous financing by private-sector banks (above all Deutsche Bank). The Ottomans, of course, would have to pay dearly for such borrowing. But at the time, German loans seemed to offer an escape from a debt trap set by Britain and France. In the event, the railway plan seems to have been informed more by German ambition than by realities on the ground. When it was finished, the last leg through the driest stretches of Anatolia carried little traffic. The BRI also exhibits the potential for large-scale misinvestment. Its critics have already identified a Chinese-financed bridge over the Moraca canyon in Montenegro as a classic example of a bridge to nowhere. Though it was designed to link landlocked Serbia to the Adriatic coast, it currently doesnt connect anything at all, nor will it for the foreseeable future. With French president Emmanuel Macron pushing for a European renaissance, one can imagine a future in which Europe is integrated not just politically but physically, through physical infrastructure such as high-speed railroads, electricity grids, and oil and gas pipelines. Strictly financial globalisation has ignored that kind of connectedness for far too long. Yet European countries are divided over China. Many governments and corporations are rightly worried about the theft of intellectual property. However, others see Chinese investment as a welcome new source of financing, or as a way to counterbalance the influence of northern European countries within the EU. Chinas approach to globalisation should prompt Europe to explore alternative development paths of its own. That could mean going beyond the limited Juncker Plan, and pursuing a far more ambitious agenda. The global financial crisis confronted Europe with the challenge of building a more stable financial system. But that will not be enough to create a durable form of globalisation. Xis recent European tour pointed to one possible path forward. It is now Europeans turn to decide how they will establish connections and channel investment to areas that have been ignored and impoverished for too long. Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation. Finian McGrath is an able cynic, not an amiable fool, writes Gerard Howlin We have the worst prime minister since Anthony Eden; the worst leader of the opposition in the entire history of the Labour Party; and the worst parliament since Oliver Cromwell, said the former deputy leader of the Conservative Party, Ann Widdecombe, on BBCs Newsnight on Monday. She has had a magnificent political afterlife and proves Susan Sontags view that pure Camp is always naive. Widdecombes salsa on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010 was her career transformation from a Tory MP of predictably strict and Brexit views to becoming an enjoyably loose cannon. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (camping) is usually less satisfactory, said Sontag. That contrived knowingness spotlights Finian McGrath, the Independent Alliance minister of state who sits at the cabinet table. There is nothing naive about McGrath. He is an able cynic, not an amiable fool. His attack last Sunday on the politics of breathalysing for drink driving was a deep dig into a staple of Irish political populism. Gardai did enough self-harm to create the stereotype which the minister then happily reused. He knows that Fine Gael in Government sees his Independent Alliance ally, Shane Ross, as a bugbear politically in rural constituencies. A scapegoat was required. Politicalised policing was pointed to. Worse was the functional use of an immediate apology, countermanding views which he voiced veritably in his previous breath. McGraths aptitude for functionality was more seriously deployed in Irelands ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In a knowing way he has mastered to make it look almost like innocence, he promised ratification, before the legislative basis was in place. He positioned himself not as the minister responsible for ensuring Ireland is compliant, but as the politician determined to have the kudos of ratification, regardless of how reality free it is. So, because he insisted, and those around the cabinet table who knew better, wouldnt face him down, we did ratify. But we havent complied. Required mental health legislation protecting the rights of people who are involuntarily detailed is still deep in the ether. It is an essential pillar of the ratification McGrath insisted on, but utterly lacked a sense of responsibility as a minister with collective responsibility to deliver on. On the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Ireland is occupying a parking space for which we dont have a permit. My legislation (No consent No Sale) to be voted in Dail in January will make it mandatory for banks to get permission from borrowers before they can sell their loans on the vulture funds. pic.twitter.com/4CBV70KGN2 Pearse Doherty (@PearseDoherty) December 28, 2018 Amid Irish hubris about Britains difficulty, and I admit it is a test of restraint, another conniving knowingness looms into focus. If the State is so able at Brexit, why is it so awful at almost everything else? This bent-out-of-shape wire hanger is brought from the back of the wardrobe to rehang its authors single transferable political position that we are the victims of a failed state. We are let down repeatedly. No matter that we move on from one apology to the next with such regularity that we can arrive at the fluency of a Finian McGrath. We are held to own innate victimhood and there is a they who are the them who can do Brexit to beat the band, but cant give us a country we can be proud of. That level of cynicism almost allows a McGrath genuinely enjoy naivete. The connivance required is to enable the commentator perfectly imitate the politicians he excoriates, by adapting the same populism they deploy. Except it is vulgarised by an intellectual overlay and poisoned with censorious contempt. There is nothing of the happy warrior which some politicians have the self-awareness to know and shamelessness to enjoy. That at least makes them good company. There is the redeeming fact, too, that every politician must be elected. But from those who as a class professionally scorn them, their scent is the perfume of self-regard. A deeper truth is that Irish governance, perhaps bizarrely, is marked by conspicuous success. Why? The truth that wont be faced is that, by and large, we, the Irish people, have gotten exactly what we asked for. If the consequences are often appalling, its a bit rich now to package it up in hindsight and, unbelievably, as a failure of governance. Failures of governance are symptomatic. Our democratic choices are the systematic cause. If another apology is called for, it should be from the people to politicians, who force them, for fear of eviction from their seats, to tell half-truths because it is as much as we are prepared to digest. Yesterday, the joint committee on finance discussed Sinn Feins No Consent, No Sale Bill. It has a catchy title and passed second stage in the Dail. It means mortgages cant be sold from one financial institution to another without the consent of the debtor. It is to protect the vulnerable from the vulture, apparently. But the facts are more complex. Borrowers contracts explicitly allow the lender to sell on mortgages. Unpaid mortgages are paid for by every other variable rate mortgage. In putting assets out of reach of lenders, in this case, Irish banks, who internationally would then lend to them? Those Irish banks who could lend if this bill is passed will factor the additional cost on top of what are already high Irish variable mortgage rates. What this is, like opposing water charges and Finian McGraths political policing and grandiose ratification of UN charters, is not politicians failing the people, but appeasement of them. This is how Brexit began. A culture of commentary around versions of a failed state, the EU there and our republic here, and nonsense about lions led by donkeys led us via Widdecombes demarche from parliament to dancing to her damning analysis on Monday. If destabilising the mortgage market in a housing crisis is this weeks example, think of last weeks. Brid Smiths bill to ban all further exploration for oil and gas in Irish waters, from people who oppose carbon charges on you and I and which had been bottled up in committee, was unleashed again. And as I write, a report from RTE suggests the Cabinet is considering postponing for yet another year a review of the local property tax. Its less than 1% of our tax take. In a country with no water charges, no effective carbon charges yet, and a burgeoning but top-heavy tax base dangerously revolving around dependency on corporation tax, this is, in truth, more about us failing our politicians, than them failing us. But, if in a republic you put responsibility where it lies, on the people, you would have to abandon your old tropes about failed republics and tell home truths. But who would first, remove the beam out of your own eye so that then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brothers? Brexit too will pass, or at least eventually become past tense. It is a long stultifying interlude, however. Hubris is not patriotism. Neither is offloading responsibility for our wrong on politicians we delegate to do our bidding. Update 10.45pm: Michel Barnier has warned the UK that if they don't support Theresa May's deal in the next few days their options going forward will be limited. Speaking in Brussels, EU chief Brexit negotiator said: "If the UK Parliament does not vote in favour of the Withdrawal Agreement in the coming days only two options would remain. "Leaving without an agreement or requesting a longer extension of the Article 50 period." Mr Barnier said it "would be the responsibility" of the UK Government to choose between leaving without an agreement or seeking an extension. He added: "No deal was never our desired or intended scenario. "But the EU is now prepared. He said no deal "becomes day after day more likely". Mr Barnier said: "The UK may ask for another extension. Such an extension would carry significant risks for the EU. "Therefore a strong justification would be needed. "Many businesses in the EU warn us against the cost of extending uncertainty. "There would also be a political cost." Mr Barnier said that the EU would be willing to enter a relationship with the UK similar to the arrengement between Europe and Norway. He said: "We have always said that we can accept a customs union, or relationship along the style of the Norway model. "In fact, however, the Political Declaration today can accommodate all of these options already. "It leaves the door open for a variety of outcomes. "But if the UK so wishes we are ready to rework the Political Declaration." Mr Barnier later told the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs that no-deal would disrupt EU/UK security co-operation. "We need to be aware of the implications of a no-deal for our security partnership," he told MEPs. "There will be a break in the level of talks, less mutual commitment, risks to intelligence pooling. There might be inconsistencies in applying sanctions regimes because of a low level of co-operation. "The UK would no longer be taking part in EU operations or in the European Defence Agency's capacity-building programmes." Mr Barnier said: "No-deal for some time poses the threat of there being no organised framework... Come what may, we must fend off the risk of strategic divergence." Michel Barnier said the UK was in a "crisis" which went beyond the question of Brexit. He told the Committee: "I don't think I need to go on at great length about the nature of what is going on in the UK, the impasse or political crisis they might be experiencing. "More deeply, it is not just about the question of Brexit. I don't think it's just about the question of Brexit and the agreement that's on the table and the backstop for Ireland. "It is more broad than that. Somewhere along the line, it is a crisis that equally could have sprung up in another country. "In my country as well, there are questions about what our relationship is to the world, what is our place in the EU, what is our economic model. These are all things coming out as a result of the British debate as well." Mr Barnier warned that a no-deal Brexit would not mean an end to wrangling over the Irish border, citizens' rights and the UK's financial liabilities, which he predicted would restart in a more difficult atmosphere. In response to a question from a British MEP on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, he said: "If there is no deal, the atmosphere will be different. The lack of a deal means a lack of faith, a lack of deal means a rupture in confidence between us. "I think we have to have confidence in order to build a future relationship. Your country will have to have relations with us and we with them. "There won't be many months passing before the UK will start asking for negotiations on a free trade agreement or other issues, like transport. "The topics of Brexit will still be there - Ireland, the financial resolution, the legal obligations of the UK, the issues of citizens and citizens' rights. These are questions we will put again and again. "If there is no deal and the UK wants to discuss trade or other subjects, we will put the same subjects back on the table." Mr Barnier told the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Relations: "We are not yet at the end of the process. President (Jean-Claude) Juncker has said our patience has reached an end, but I think we are a little bit from the end. We still have a little bit of patience. "We hope that the British Parliament will do what it can to ratify this agreement. "Perhaps they may ask us to amend the Political Declaration, perhaps improvements can be made. This can be done over a period of days or weeks, this is possible, we can be more ambitious in all of the areas of this Political Declaration. "But I really hope that we won't just abandon all the work that has been done, because for a withdrawal to take place in an orderly manner, this is the only possibility." The Committee's chairman, German MEP David McAllister, told Mr Barnier that the message to Westminster was "keep calm and carry on indicative voting". Mr McAllister added, his tongue apparently in his cheek: "We are following procedures in the House of Commons with utter admiration." No-deal Brexit 'nearly inevitable', says McGuinness The vice-president of the European Parliament has said "it does look like" a no-deal Brexit is "nearly inevitable". Mairead McGuinness was commenting on a tweet sent by the European Parliament's Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, in which he said that after Monday's Commons votes "a hard #Brexit becomes nearly inevitable". "It does look like that, given what happened yesterday, and the fact that the Withdrawal Agreement which is on the table for ratification has not been ratified by the House of Commons," she told BBC Breakfast. The House of Commons again votes against all options. A hard #Brexit becomes nearly inevitable. On Wednesday, the U.K. has a last chance to break the deadlock or face the abyss. https://t.co/iixDhr5t6N Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) April 1, 2019 "When you look at the timelines there is concern here in the European Union that the failure of the House of Commons to rally around any particular option leaves us with that thought: that there is this lurching, perhaps by accident, towards a no-deal scenario." She added that, while a no-deal Brexit was not the desire of the EU, "these things can happen by accident rather than design". PA The British Parliament rejected all four Brexit amendments. Motion C, which would have kept the UK in the customs union, giving them a similar relationship with the EU than Turkey, was only beaten by three votes, 276-273 However, the confirmatory public vote, which would mean any decisoin from Parliament would have to be ratified by the public, got the most votes, 280 but lost by 12. The votes went as follows: Motion C: Customs union Yes 273 No 276 Motion D: Common market 2.0 Yes 261 No 282 Motion E: Confirmatory public vote Yes 280 No 292 Motion G: Parliamentary supremacy Yes 191 No 292 Nick Boles, a former minister, was applauded by some MPs after he quit the Conservative Party after his Brexit alternative plan was defeated for a second time. Raising a point of order, he told the Commons: I have given everything to an attempt to find a compromise that can take this country out of the European Union while maintaining our economic strength and our political cohesion. I accept I have failed. I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I regret therefore to announce I can no longer sit for this party. Earlier: Labour MP says party must try to break deadlock; DUP won't back any amendment Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer advised MPs, particularly Labour colleagues, to consider supporting options other than their own preferred option in order to break the deadlock. He added of Labours position: We will whip support for: amendment C, which is the customs union as a minimum in the name of (Mr Clarke); amendment D, Common Market 2.0 in the name of (Mr Boles); and amendment E on the confirmation public vote in the name of (Mr Kyle). Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay was earlier asked if he was among the 170 Tory MPs who signed a letter to Theresa May which seeks to retain no-deal as an option. He replied: I have not signed any letter of the sort to which he refers. I have the opportunity to meet with the Prime Minister most days and if I have a point to raise with her obviously I would do so. Mr Barclay noted a Withdrawal Agreement is required as part of the plans outlined in the customs union, common market and second referendum motions. During the debate Sammy Wilson, DUP Brexit spokesman, said the DUP will not be voting for any of the amendments tonight. He said they did not safeguard the union and would not deliver Brexit, as the public's approval of how the British government is handling the negotiations fell to an all-time low Earlier: Climate change activists strip in Commons as MPs debate Brexit votes Police have arrested 12 people on suspicion of outraging public decency after climate change activists stripped off to stage a protest in the House of Commons while MPs debated Brexit. Picture taken with permission from the twitter feed of James Heappey MP of the Extinction Rebellion protest in the public gallery of the House of Commons (James Heappey/PA) Some of the activists dressed only in underwear used superglue in an attempt to stick themselves to the glass which separates the gallery from the chamber. MPs were seen taking a glance up at the protest and Speaker John Bercow maintained that the debate on the second stage of the Brexit alternatives would proceed despite the protest. Scotland Yard said officers were sent in an attempt to negotiate with the activists, before adding: 12 arrests have been made for outraging public decency. Some of us did try to warn that no good would come of the Speaker allowing people into the House of Commons chamber without a neck tie ... Lord Walney (@LordWalney) April 1, 2019 Extinction Rebellion, which describes itself as a non-violent direct action and civil disobedience group, said the protest was an attempt to draw politicians attentions to the climate and ecological crisis. British MPS to vote on four alternative Brexit options British MPs will this evening vote on four Brexit options in the second round of the indicative vote process. None of the eight alternatives to Prime Minister Theresa Mays plan considered last week won a majority. But four of the ideas considered then will be considered again by MPs after Speaker John Bercow made his selection of motions to be put to the vote. Italian politician Alessandra Mussolini has branded actor Jim Carrey as a b***** after he tweeted a drawing of the hanging of her grandfather, Benito Mussolini, and Claretta Petacci. The actor expressed his views on fascism by tweeting an original sketch, with the text: "If you're wondering what fascism leads to, just ask Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta." Asia Cambodia Urged to Boost Funding for 'Bride Trafficking' Pacts A flower decoration is seen in a bride's hair before her wedding in December 2017. / Reuters PHNOM PENHNew agreements reached between Phnom Penh and Beijing to combat the trafficking of Cambodian brides to China will be useless without fresh funding and stricter enforcement, anti-trafficking groups warned on Monday. Cambodias Interior Minister Sar Kheng on Sunday announced a series of deals to fight transnational crimes, including human trafficking, however no details were made available. Chou Bun Eng, deputy head of the ministrys National Committee to Counter Human Trafficking, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation she had no new funds to address the issue and referred further questions to a ministry spokesman who said he had no information to share. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of Southeast Asian women have been lured to China by criminal networks promising lucrative jobs, only to be sold as brides as China grapples with a gender imbalance of tens of millions of men. Its happening every day, this bride trafficking, said Dy Thehoya, senior program officer at the Centre for Alliance of Labour and Human Rights, a Cambodian charity that helps repatriate trafficking survivors. The government creates mechanisms to address the problem but they are only on paper. In reality, they are ineffective due to poor implementation, he said. In 2016, Phnom Penh said it had identified 7,000 Cambodian women living in forced marriages in China but anti-trafficking groups said the real total could easily be double that. In recent years, Cambodia has introduced a number of policies to help address the problem, including heavier screening of Cambodian women who apply for travel visas. This drove the trend further underground, human rights groups said, with an increasing number of women travelling overland through Vietnam and then across its mountainous northern border to China. It seems that the traffickers have relationships with officials from all sides, Thehoya said, adding that officials at Cambodian missions abroad had often been uncooperative when contacted for assistance. They share the benefits. Cambodian women who have returned from China often describe experiences of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, confinement, torture and forced labor. Some escaped and made their way home while others have been sold on or discarded after producing a child for the man who bought them, usually for between $10,000 and $20,000, according to researchers. Five Cambodian charities who work to locate, repatriate and rehabilitate women forced into marriage said that they received a new call asking for help every other day in 2018. But finding the women and getting them out is almost impossible, as they do not understand the local language or know where exactly they are, have little or no access to phones and internet, and usually have their passports withheld. Sometimes, we simply cannot help the victims said Sa Im, who works on womens issues at the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, a human rights group. Im said that her organization often lost contact with victims while trying to raise funds to bring them home, and called for the government to allocate more funds for repatriation. Officials and anti-trafficking police on the ground know and understand the problem but have no budget support, she said. Asia China Grapples With Forest Blaze That Killed 30 Firefighters Members of a forest fire brigade take part in a training session in Tongliao, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China, on Aug. 26, 2017. Picture taken August 26, 2017. / Reuters BEIJING Firefighters are struggling to douse a forest fire that broke out in the mountains of southwestern China at the weekend and killed 30 firefighters, state media said on Monday. The fire broke out on Saturday in Muli County of Sichuan Province, perched at an altitude of more than 4,000 meters, with poor transport and communication links. Images broadcast by state media showed flames and thick white smoke rising from a mountainside. It was not immediately clear whether there were any civilian casualties. By Sunday afternoon, authorities had sent nearly 700 firefighters to put out the fire, but 30 of them went missing after a surge of flames fed by a sudden shift in the wind, state media said. All the missing fighters were confirmed dead on Monday, state television said, adding that their bodies had been retrieved. Burma Curfew Imposed in 5 Townships in Northern Rakhine Children walk near Htuk Kan Thein temple in the ancient city of Mrauk-U in northern Rakhine State in March 2019. / Moe Myint / The Irrawaddy YANGONThe Rakhine State government imposed a curfew in five townships in the north of the state on Tuesday afternoon in response to the intensifying conflict between Myanmar Army troops and the Arakan Army (AA). On Monday evening, Rakhine State Border Affairs Minister Colonel Phone Tint sent a letter dated April 1 to the regional administrative committees of Sittwe and Mrauk-U, as well as the heads of the five administrative committees in the affected townships: Ponnaygun, Rathedaung, Kyauktaw, Mrauk-U and Minbyar. The letter stated that a series of violent incidents against police and soldiers in Rakhine from January to March 26 had resulted in the deaths of members of the security forces and the destruction of state property. It requested the authorities impose a curfew in line with Section 144 of the Criminal Code in five townships in order to maintain law and order, stability, and economic and social stability. U Win Myint, the National League for Democracy (NLD)-appointed state minister for municipal affairs, confirmed to The Irrawaddy over the phone that the Union government had authorized the Rakhine State cabinet to impose the curfew. He declined to comment further as he had been traveling the whole day with other state cabinet members in southern Rakhine. The curfew order bans residents of both rural and urban areas in the aforementioned five townships from leaving their homes between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. starting Tuesday. Union lawmaker U Aung Thaung Shwe, who represents Rathedaung constituency for the Arakan National Party (ANP), said the entire northern region was in a state of anarchy at the moment; he said that on almost every issue facing Rakhine, the administrative body and the legislature were generating plans without cooperating with each other. The authorities here have been doing whatever they want. The state is now completely lawless and the newly imposed curfew is virtually an unofficial declaration of martial law, MP Aung Thaung Shwe said. Aung Thaung Shwe said such a curfew was nothing new to the residents of his township, as the military and authorities had implemented the same order in 2016 after Border Guard security outposts were attacked by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). The military operation against ARSA in 2017 prompted more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Rights groups have since demanded that Myanmar military commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court as having had ultimate responsibility for the crisis. Aung Thaung Shwe feared the curfew would put ordinary people living in the five townships in danger, as it would make it hard for them to seek transportation for emergency medical treatment at hospitals at night. According to him, more than 10,000 displaced residents of 20 villages in his township are sheltering in five temporary IDP camps. Among the 20 villages, five are in Rathedaung and are home to Rohingya residents. They have sought refuge in two IDP camps, while the rest are Arakanese sheltering in three IDP camps as well as in neighboring villages. Local authorities as well as relief groups are currently unable to provide accurate and timely information on the IPD population for all of northern Rakhine, according to MP U Aung Thaung Shwe, though according to one estimate their number could be around 20,000. The government isnt looking after the IDPs, U Aung Thaung Shwe said. Local ethnic affairs expert U Maung Maung Soe corroborated the view of U Aung Thaung Shwe that the restriction on traveling at night posed a health concern for local residents. He added that the order had brought Mrauk-Us entire tourism sector to a screeching halt. He suggested local authorities and security forces set up an appropriate mechanism to handle health emergencies and make exceptions for those who need to travel due to urgent matters. The curfew, which covers almost the entirety of northern Rakhine, comes after a recent press conference in which Presidents Office spokesman U Zaw Htay said martial law would not be necessary in Rakhine State. The U.S Embassy in Rangoon announced on Tuesday afternoon that it is deeply concerned about harm to civilians during clashes between the AA and the Myanmar Army in Rakhine and Chin states. It urged both sides to renew their efforts to end the fighting and work toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The embassy also expressed concern about restrictions on access to humanitarian aid for more than 17,000 civilians currently displaced. It said that while the authorities had granted partial access to relief groups, which had allowed food assistance to reach some displaced people, significant humanitarian gaps remain. The blocking of humanitarian aid has prevented at least 95,000 additional civilians from receiving essential services, such as health care, education and clean water, in five Rakhine State townships since January 2019. Burma NLD Dominates Yangon Municipal Election; USDP Routed A voter dips her finger in indelible ink after casting her ballot in the Yanogn municipal election on Sunday. / Htet Wai / The Irrawaddy YANGON Candidates for the National League for Democracy (NLD) dominated Sundays Yangon municipal election, winning 89 of the 105 seats up for grabs. The NLD won 51 township-level municipal committee seats, 32 township committee chairmanships and all six open seats on the executive board of the Yangon City Development Committee (YCDC), from among whom a deputy mayor will be elected. Of the 105 seats filled on Sunday, 26 nearly a quarter went to female candidates. The Yangon Municipal Election Commission announced the results over the course of Sunday and Monday. A total 273 candidates contested the seats, of whom 160 were independents, 90 were with the NLD, and 23 were with the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). The independents grabbed all 16 seats the NLD did not, leaving the USDP without a single win. U Soe Win Oo, deputy chairman of the NLDs Yangon chapter, said the results clearly reflected the peoples will. The party with the most public support won the election, he said. Our people know clearly what to do. If the USDP does not win, it means the people dont like them, he added. More than 3 million people were eligible for vote on Sunday. But the Peoples Alliance for Credible Elections (PACE), an independent election monitor, said turnout was under 10 percent. PACE and others also reported that at some polling stations people whose names were not on the voter rolls were not allowed to cast ballots in some places but did in others. Lower House lawmaker U Bo Bo Oo told The Irrawaddy that more than 100 people were not able to cast ballots in San Chaung Township alone and that he had informed the YCDC. On Monday, the election commission said it did not count any of the approximately 40 ballots cast at two of San Chaungs 52 polling stations were some people reportedly voted even though their names were not on the voter rolls. Commission Chairman U Aung Khine said those ballots were all invalidated. He said the commission would investigate and take action against anyone found to have broken the rules. On This Day The Fall of the Danubyu Bastion A British military officer saluting Maha Bandula. YANGONToday marks the 194th anniversary of the fall of Danubyu Fort to the British one day after the death of Myanmars historic general Maha Bandula during the first Anglo-Burmese war in 1825. Following his successes in leading his commanders to push back British forces in Rakhine State, the commander-in-chief of the Burmese army, Maha Bandula, was ordered by King Bagyidaw to command the Myanmar troops in Yangon, where thousands of British had entered by water. Due to the superior weaponry of the British, the general was forced to retreat and instead created a defense fort at Danubyu, a small town in the Irrawaddy delta. Within one month, he had a strong stockade built along the riverbank of the Irrawaddy River, and along with 10,000 troops, prepared for defense. Maha Bandula displayed his strong commanding skills and the British failed to take down the fort even after almost one month of fighting. Eventually, the British reinforced their troops and pounded the town with heavy weaponry. General Bandula was killed by a mortar shell as he was commanding his troops. He was 42 at the time. The fort fell into the hands to the British on April 2. The British kept his military outfit as well as his sword and spear. After his death, Myanmar was forced to surrender Rakhine and Taninthayi states to the British signaling the beginning of the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War. Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019 (8:12 am) - Score 1,681 A little known Bude-based fixed wireless access ISP called Cornwall Broadband, which serves homes and businesses across parts of Cornwall and Devon in England, is said to be considering the possibility of expanding their rural network coverage by harnessing local church spires. According to a recent statement by the Conservative MP for North Cornwall, Scott Mann: After discussions with the Church Commissioners officer, I am aware that there are no reasons why church spires cannot be used for boosting broadband signals in rural areas. I recently had a good meeting with Cornwall Broadband, a local provider, which would like to open a dialogue with the churches in Cornwall to utilise their spires. At this stage the idea is only at a very early stage and any decision is likely to be a matter for the diocese (administrative head), although the UK Government did last year reach a related accord with the National Church Institutions (NCIs) of the Church of England (here). The accord provided a framework for churches to help facilitate such networks but there have been disputes over hefty access charges in some areas (here). Meanwhile Cornwall Broadband itself claims to offer broadband speeds of up to 500Mbps for businesses, although their residential plans max out at 60Mbps. Prices for their home packages range from 19.99 per month for a 10Mbps (1Mbps) upload service with a 128GB data allowance and rise to 49.99 for their top 60Mbps (6Mbps upload) plan with 512GB usage. Each package includes the necessary hardware and comes attached to a 24 or 18 month contract term, although the installation charge is subject to survey but typically costs around 100 to 200 (one off). On top of that its possible to add unlimited data usage to any package and the monthly extra cost for this ranges from +9.99 to +6.99, depending upon the plan. However we note that a Fair Usage Policy (FUP) applies, which is said to prohibit Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing at certain times and generally discourage it at others. Cloud computing and platform virtualisation vendor VMware has deployed VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure which gives more than 10,000 students at the University of Technology Sydney the flexibility to access applications and workloads online. VMware says students can access the platform on any student device from home, on campus or wherever they have Wi-Fi. Previously, engineering and IT students were required to complete coursework on campus, due to the availability and complexity of the software required for their courses. VMware says that now,students can log into their virtual desktops wherever they are and begin working with their software of choice all within minutes. The efficiency of the VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure solution even enables students to access their virtual desktop from overseas or in high latency connectivity areas without any downtime," the company said. By running VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, UTS is able to host, manage and scale out its digital tools and software over VMware virtual desktops. VMware says Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure has successfully handled more than 50,000 software and application load requests with zero downtime, and the cloud deployment had also significantly reduced operations and maintenance time for the universitys IT team, while better guarding UTS network against data breaches or attacks. Our priority is to have our students prepared for todays highly digital and connected society, something a cloud-first approach to self-directed learning can provide, says Rob Jarman, associate dean, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, UTS. VMwares virtual desktop solution hosted on Microsofts public cloud platform Azure is helping us create an environment where students can gain that confidence in digital working, learning and collaboration which will take them even further in the workforce. Its a valuable milestone in our digital transformation journey and one that we believe will positively impact students well beyond what they experience today. VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure is far more stable and consistent than anything we could have deployed on-premises. Moving applications and desktop infrastructure to the cloud has resulted in reductions to operational costs by 40% - freeing up not only ITs budget, but also the space once used to house server infrastructure, said Peter Gale, deputy chief information officer, UTS. The engineering facultys coursework and research involve immense amounts of processing power that can stretch even the most powerful workstations. VMwares cloud solution allows any engineering student to run their complex calculations or rendering tasks from home or even public Wi-Fi areas without compromising performance. This means UTS can expand its deployment to other less compute-intensive faculties with total confidence. Andrew Fox, director, end user experience, VMware ANZ, said, VMware works alongside UTS to deliver services that will help the university reach its vision of becoming a world-leading facility. VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure has enabled the university to differentiate its student experience, allowing students to access digital tools at any time, from any location, from any device. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has again said that her country has not banned Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies from playing a role in its 5G networks. At a media conference with New Zealand publications in Beijing, Ardern denied that her country had followed Australia in banning Huawei from participating in the 5G rollout. Ardern was on a one-day visit to China on Monday during which she met President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. In November, New Zealand's General Communications Security Bureau, the country's main spy agency, said it had refused telco Spark permission to use Huawei equipment in its 5G network after the two companies demonstrated the technical implementation of access and core separation for 5G. The AustralianArdern as saying: "Obviously we have Huawei products in New Zealand. This is simply an application around 5G that has been brought by Spark. It will be helpful for me to explain that process and the fact that there has been some misreporting. In February, Ardern made a similar statement during one of her regular weekly news conferences, saying the said the GCSB had given Spark options to mitigate the security concerns over the use of Huawei equipment. "The ball is now in their court," she said. In a related development, Huawei's deputy chief executive in New Zealand, Andrew Bowater, told the New Zealand Herald that the company was willing to have its staff banned from Spark's 5G mobile network, or to have only a few GCSB-vetted engineers tend to it, if that would make the GCSB look favourably on it again. When the newspaper asked him about the recent UK review, that blamed Huawei for poor engineering processes, Bowater said, while it made for uncomfortable reading, it was important to note that no backdoors or malicious code had been found. China is New Zealand's biggest trading partner, with exports worth NZ$15.3 billion to Beijing and imports of NZ$11.9 billion in 2018. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has been allocated another $38.3 million over three years from 2019-20 to ensure that there are no stuff-ups with the 2021 Census, according to Tuesday's Federal Budget papers. The additional funds have been specifically directed to fixing issues identified during a Senate Inquiry and a review by Australian Cyber and Security Centre chief Alastair MacGibbon. The Senate Economics Reference Committee report recommended that any privacy impact assessment into the census should be handled by an external party and the outcome published on the ABS website a year before the census to which it relates. The panel also recommended that if such assessments called for changes, consultation should be made across Australia and the outcomes documented on the ABS website at least six months before the census in question. The ABS was told to publicly commit to reporting any breach of census-related data to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner within a week of becoming aware of the breach. The 2016 Census turned into a farce when the website for submitting data went down on the night of the count. The site was taken offline on 9 August 2016 at about 7.30pm, with claims that a distributed denial of service was to blame. No proof has ever been offered to back up this claim. The 2016 census was run by IBM which satisfied the requirement to hold data locally by having its local arm run the show. There has as yet been no announcement as to who would run the 2021 Census, but, as iTWire has reported, Microsoft could be one of the contenders. The company's representatives attended an industry briefing on the Census in 2018. Bid were due by the end of October 2018. The Redmond giant is part of the group that will be involved in the next US census in 2020; the contract has been won by Hortonworks and, apart from Microsoft providing cloud services, Amazon and IBM will be involved too. Network and endpoint security vendor Sophos has appointed 30-year IT industry veteran John Donovan as managing director for Australia and New Zealand. Based in Sydney, Donovan was most recently ForgeRocks Asia Pacific and Japan senior vice-president. Before joining ForgeRock, he spent five years at VMware ANZ, developing the partner and general business markets. Donovan also spent 12 years at Symantec in various roles, including vice-president of channel sales for APJ, managing director Symantec Pacific, and the management of distribution marketing in the US and Canada. He served on the boards of the Business Software Association of Australia and Australian Information Industry Association, and has been a member of the Australian Federal Governments Critical Infrastructure Taskforce. He also provided guidance on the development of legislation relating to cyber crime in Australia. John is an extremely experienced and well-known executive within the ANZ and APJ IT industry, said Gavin Struthers, regional vice-president, Asia Pacific and Japan for Sophos. With his in-depth industry knowledge, particularly in cybersecurity, and deep understanding of the channel, we are excited to welcome John on board to help drive Sophos channel-first strategy for our ANZ business. Im excited to be joining Sophos as it continues to meet the demands of a constantly evolving security landscape, Donovan said. I believe Sophos synchronised security vision uniquely positions it in the local market and this, coupled with its 100% channel approach, provides the right programs for ANZ channel partners to deliver the security solutions local customers need. Cyber attacks are increasing in volume and sophistication, causing regular security breaches affecting 89% of organisations, according to a newly released survey of Australian organisations. The survey, commissioned by cloud endpoint security vendor Carbon Black, and undertaken by research company Opinion Matters in January, reveals that the average number of breaches per organisation is 4.28 over the past 12 months, while 81% of surveyed organisations reported seeing an increase in attack volumes The report notes that of the 81% of surveyed Australian businesses reporting an increase in cyber attacks, 28% said the volume had grown by 51% or more in the past year. And 88% of surveyed businesses said theyve witnessed an increase in attack sophistication, with over a quarter of respondents (29%) saying adversaries had grown significantly more sophisticated in their approach, and 88% of attacks had become more sophisticated. In addition, 90% of Australian organisations surveyed said they were planning to increase spending on cyber defence in response to the escalating threat landscape. Our first Australian threat report indicates that organisations in Australia are under intense pressure from escalating cyber attacks, said Rick McElroy, head of Security Strategy for Carbon Black. The research indicates increases across the board in attack volume and sophistication, causing frequent breaches. In response, an encouraging number of Australian organisations are adopting threat hunting and seeing positive results. As threat hunting strategies start to mature, we hope to see fewer attacks making it to full breach status. According to the survey, malware is the most common attack type in Australia, with 29% of organisations naming it the most commonly encountered. But Carbon Black says the survey found that the human factor plays a big part in the attacks that lead to breaches. Phishing attacks are at the root of 12% of successful breaches, the survey noted, with process weakness the identified cause in 13% of breaches, and Carbon Black indicates that basic security hygiene should still be considered a priority by organisations. The survey found that 65% of Australian organisations said they are actively threat hunting, with over a quarter (26%) having threat hunted for more than one year. In addition, over one-third (38%) said they have started in the past year. A very encouraging 92% of those organisations report that threat hunting has strengthened their defences, Carbon Black observes. The Federal Government has allocated an unspecified amount in Tuesday's Federal Budget to improve cyber security arrangements for the forthcoming election. The amount was not specified due to what the government said were national security reasons. The Budget papers say the money will be for mitigating potential threats through enhanced monitoring and response capabilities. It will also be spent towards the creation of cyber "Sprint Teams" within the Australian Cyber Security Centre and a Cyber Security Response Fund. In February this year, it wasthat the network of the Australian Parliament had been breached by hackers whose affiliations have not yet been revealed. The networks of the three major political parties Liberal, Labor and National were also infiltrated. Last month, the Australian Signals Directorate said the investigation into the hack was still ongoing and that there would be no comment at this stage. Commenting on the fund allocation, Bede Hackney, ANZ country manager of security outfit Tenable, said: "Rising geopolitical tensions and an expanding attack surface have left governments and businesses vulnerable to targeted cyber attacks. Cyber crime is relentless. "In fact, the 2018 Global Business Risks report from the World Economic Forum ranks cyber attacks as the No. 3 global risk in terms of likelihood, behind extreme weather events and natural disasters. "A recent report by the Ponemon Institute, on behalf of Tenable, found that 60% of organisations represented in the study had suffered two or more business-disrupting cyber events in the last 24 months alone. The threat of a major cyber attack in Australia cannot be overstated. This funding will bolster Australias cyber security capability and go a long way in delivering the solutions which ensure the safety of its businesses and citizens. "Cyber security must be a strategic focus and the government should be commended for acting now." Communications service provider MyNetFone has launched a new solution which allows its Virtual PBX phone system to be operated via a mobile app, enabling access to the system by users on the move. MyNetFone says the launch of the new app is the latest in a string of continual improvements, based on studies of how customers uses of phones are changing. According to MyNetFone, the Virtual PBX App has been developed as more and more businesses, in particular within the small and medium business sector, have become increasingly mobile. As business hours become more flexible and staff embrace remote working, fixed desk phones are no longer suitable as the sole communications base. Replacing a fixed line number with a mobile phone, or remembering to divert phones whilst in the office, isnt a sustainable solution for most businesses. The app eliminates this problem by allowing users to divert numbers on the go, ensuring they have total control wherever they are, notes MNF. The ability for the business to provide one contact number to customers is becoming more important in an age where employees tenures at organisations can be quite fluid. The customer base can be jeopardised when the main contact point is via an employees personal mobile number, Rudra Chaudhury, MNF Group SMB product manager, said. Our Virtual PBX App means companies can go back to supplying company numbers instead of having to give out employee-owned numbers. Businesses now have constant control over where an incoming call to those numbers will be forwarded to and can also maintain staff work-life balance by ensuring calls outside of work hours are routed appropriately. Microsoft's Edge last month posted its first ever double-digit browser share, while Google's Chrome slid for the third month straight. Mozilla's Firefox once again held steady, keeping its head above water. According to data published Sunday by California-based metrics company Net Applications, Edge's October share climbed by 1.4 percentage points, ending the month at 10.2%, the first time Microsoft's browser broke through that psychologically important barrier. The gain was the largest ever for Edge in a single month, almost double that of the previous record set in December 2019. The increase was so large that it immediately raised suspicions that it was a miscount by Net Applications rather than a reflection of reality. Bolstering that was an even greater boost to the share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), the obsolete browser the Redmond, Wash. company has started to strip of some of its support. IE's share for October 5.6% was 1.7 points higher than the month prior, a jump so out of character as to be unbelievable. Edge's gain was understandable, at least. Microsoft relaunched that 2015 browser earlier this year when it recast Edge with the Google-dominated Chromium technology, the same that powers Chrome. Not only did Microsoft make Edge a Chrome copy, but it also expanded support to versions of Windows other than 10, as well as macOS and, more recently, Linux. Since January, Edge has slowly been adding share; 3.2 points since the Chromium-based Edge went final in the Stable channel. In the past 12 months, Edge has gained 4.1 percentage points, for an average of a third of a point per month. At that pace, Edge should sit at almost 11% by year's end and at 15% by December 2021. Of course, that assumes Edge can maintain growth, which in turn requires one or more rivals continues to give up share. The most likely loser? Chrome, mostly because of its titanic share but also because Edge is, well, Chrome wearing a different outfit. Microsoft's launch of Windows 10 20H2 the H2 signifying the year's second feature upgrade last month may assist Edge as it continues to climb: 20H2 includes Chromium Edge. That should accelerate the replacement of original Edge, the version introduced in mid-2015 that ran only on Windows 10, with the sounder Chromium browser. Chrome down for third consecutive month Chrome dumped seven-tenths of a percentage point in October, falling back to 69.3%. The decline was the third in as many months, an unusual run that's occurred only four times in the browser's 15 years. (The last time it happened before this was in September-December 2019.) Whenever Chrome suffers losses in two or more straight months, it's tempting to wonder whether the browser has peaked. Computerworld has tentatively pegged more than a couple such milestones before but been proven wrong each time. The browser could easily bounce back as it has before. Computerworld's latest forecast as always, based on Chrome's 12-month average stayed with growth, albeit pared significantly from 30 days ago. Chrome should return to 70% by March 2021 and reach 71% by September 2022. (The latter was three months later than last month's forecast, showing how present declines quickly impact future gains.) Edge remains Chrome's most dangerous competitor, primarily and this is Google's own doing to some degree because the former is the latter, what with both relying on Chromium. But Microsoft has cards to play here that Google cannot match; Microsoft will leverage its enterprise management reputation and expertise in an attempt to wean commercial customers from Google's browser. Microsoft's strategy, then, would be the opposite of Google's. The latter pushed Chrome to consumers until its share reached tipping point, and employees demanded the right to run the same browser they'd become familiar with at home. Microsoft would instead hope to win over business users in the expectation that they might want to run the same browser on home PCs, tablets or even phones. Firefox: Not dead yet! Firefox didn't move its share needle last month; it stayed at the same 7.2% mark it earned in September. That meant Firefox didn't gain any ground. It also meant it didn't lose any, probably its most important goal for now and the foreseeable future. Mozilla's browser also stuck to the bad news forecast of last month, although Computerworld's current prediction puts it under 6% in August 2021, two months later than last month's estimate. At its 12-month rate of decline, Firefox will dip below 5% in May 2022. Elsewhere in Net Applications' numbers, Apple's Safari slumped by two-tenths of a percentage point in October, sliding to 3.4%. Opera Software's Opera fell by a slightly-larger three-tenths of a point to end the month at an all-time low of seven-tenths of a point. Net Applications calculates share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers used to reach the websites of Net Applications' clients. The company counts visitor sessions to measure browser activity. Or it used to. At the same time it published October's share numbers, Net Applications announced that it's pulling the plug on the data source. "October 2020 is the last month of data," the firm said. "Why? An upcoming change in browsers will break our device detection technology and will cause inaccuracies for a long period of time." The change Net Applications cited would remove much of the agent string information used not only to compile analytics such as browser and operating system share, but also by advertisers and/or scammers to "fingerprint" individuals so that they can be more thoroughly tracked as they conduct their online lives. Computerworld has not yet decided whether to continue the "Top web browsers" series, and if so, which alternate data source might be used. Stay tuned. Register with JOC.com and receive 5 free pieces of content for the first thirty days. After thirty days, you will receive 3 pieces of content and after sixty days you will receive 1 piece of content. To receive full access, Subscribe Today . You can also subscribe to our daily newsletter. Register For a better experience on our website and avoid any trouble, we strongly recommand to activate Javascript ( click here ). Hello and welcome to Journal des Palaces You are a communication or the PR manager? Click here You are an applicant? Check out our questions and answers here ! OAKVILLE, Ontario, April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Giyani Metals Corp. April 1, 2019 (TSXV:EMM) (FRANKFURT:KT9) (WKN:A2DUU8) (Giyani or the Company) announces an extension to the previously announced non-binding term sheet (Term Sheet) it executed with Traxys Africa Trading (Pty) Ltd. (Traxys). The Term Sheet was signed on January 25, 2019 and provided a 60-day period to complete due diligence and definitive documentation. Due to operational reasons, Giyani and Traxys have mutually agreed to extend the duration of the Term Sheet to May 17, 2019, or such other date to be mutually agreed upon, to allow for the completion of the on-going technical and legal due diligence by both parties, and completion of definitive documentation. All other terms and conditions of the Term Sheet, including the proposed terms of the convertible loan facility and marketing agreement, are unchanged. About Giyani Giyani Metals Corp. is a Canadian junior exploration company focused on creating shareholder value by accelerating the development of its battery-grade manganese project in the Kanye Basin, Botswana, Africa. Additional information and corporate documents may be found on www.sedar.com and on Giyani Metals Corp. website: http://giyanimetals.com/. On behalf of the Board of Directors of Giyani Metals Corp. Robin Birchall, CEO Contact: Giyani Metals Corporation Robin Birchall CEO, Director +447711313019 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) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. Forward Looking Information This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, that address events or developments that Giyani expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words expects, does not expect, plans, anticipates, does not anticipate, believes, intends, estimates, projects, potential, scheduled, forecast, budget and similar expressions, or that events or conditions will, would, may, could, should or might occur. Specific forward-looking statements and forward-looking information herein includes statements regarding the size of and completion of the private placement and the intended use of the net proceeds from the financing. Forward-looking statements in this press release include the establishment and drawdown of the convertible loan facility, including the timing thereof, as well as the proposed terms and conditions of the convertible facility. All such forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of the relevant management as of the date such statements are made and are subject to certain assumptions, important risk factors and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Giyanis ability to control or predict. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on estimates and assumptions that are inherently subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In the case of Giyani, these facts include the results of negotiations, their anticipated operations in future periods, planned exploration and development of its properties, and plans related to its business and other matters that may occur in the future. This information relates to analyses and other information that is based on expectations of future performance and planned work programs. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking information, including, without limitation: inherent exploration hazards and risks; risks related to exploration and development of natural resource properties; uncertainty in Giyanis ability to obtain funding; commodity price fluctuations; recent market events and conditions; risks related to the uncertainty of mineral resource calculations and the inclusion of inferred mineral resources in economic estimation; risks related to governmental regulations; risks related to obtaining necessary licenses and permits; risks related to their business being subject to environmental laws and regulations; risks related to their mineral properties being subject to prior unregistered agreements, transfers, or claims and other defects in title; risks relating to competition from larger companies with greater financial and technical resources; risks relating to the inability to meet financial obligations under agreements to which they are a party; ability to recruit and retain qualified personnel; and risks related to their directors and officers becoming associated with other natural resource companies which may give rise to conflicts of interests. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect Giyanis forward-looking information. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in the forward-looking information or statements. Giyanis forward-looking information is based on the reasonable beliefs, expectations and opinions of their respective management on the date the statements are made and Giyani does not assume any obligation to update forward looking information if circumstances or managements beliefs, expectations or opinions change, except as required by law. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. For a complete discussion with respect to Giyani and risks associated with forward-looking information and forward-looking statements, please refer to Giyanis financial statements and related MD&A, all of which are filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. GIYANI METALS CORP. 277 LAKESHORE ROAD EAST, OAKVILLE, ONTARIO L6J 1H9 T: 289-837-0066 F: 289-837-1166 www.GIYANIMETALS.com TSX.v-WDG HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Erdene Resource Development Corp. (TSX:ERD; MSE:ERDN) ("Erdene" or the "Company") is pleased to announce financial and operating results for the year ended December 31, 2018 and to provide an update on progress and plans for its Khundii Gold Project. This release should be read in conjunction with the Companys 2018 Financial Statements, MD&A and Annual Information Form, available on the Companys website or on SEDAR. Our objectives are clear, complete the various studies and permitting to advance the Khundii Gold Project to development for a minimum 50,000 ounce per year high-grade open pit mining operation while continuing our exploration and acquisition efforts to expand the operation to more than 100,000 ounces per year, said Peter Akerley, Erdenes President and CEO. The past year has been very productive in advancing us towards these goals led by the September maiden mineral resource estimate followed by the December announcement of the Khundii Gold Project Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA), which demonstrated the robust economics of the modest, low-risk development that anchors our Khundii Gold District. Mr. Akerley added, Continuing on this path we recently awarded the Khundii Gold Project Pre-Feasibility Study (PFS) contract to Tetra-Tech, Inc. and the mining license applications are underway. We will also commence drilling in April to support the PFS and explore high-priority targets within the Khundii District. Over the past five years, Erdene has discovered and defined two, near surface, high-grade gold deposits, within a portion of one of the worlds most fertile gold belts that has received little modern exploration. We see significant potential for further discoveries, and we will continue our extensive exploration in the region in an effort to build our resource base. 2018 Project and Financial Highlights and Subsequent Events Khundii Gold Project 100% Erdene Delivered the National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101) PEA in December 2018: After-tax Net Present Value at a 5% discount rate (NPV5%) and a US$1,200/oz gold price of US$99 million and an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 56%. Pre-tax NPV5% of US$135 million and IRR of 70%. Initial capital expenditure of US$32 million, using a contract mining fleet. All-in sustaining cash cost (AISC) of US$714/ounce for gold recovered. Life of mine head grade of 3.42 g/t gold. Average annual gold production of 51,200 ounces (oz). Eight-year mine life plus one-year pre-production and two-year mine closure periods. Payback period of 1.8 years. Reported the Projects maiden mineral resource estimate: At a cut-off grade of 0.7 g/t gold, Measured and Indicated (M&I) resource of 751,000 oz gold at an average grade of 2.3 g/t gold and Inferred resource of 291,000 oz gold at an average grade of 1.8 g/t gold. At a 1.4 g/t gold cut-off, M&I resource of 642,000 oz of gold at an average grade of 3.7 g/t gold, and an Inferred resource total of 250,000 oz at 2.3 g/t gold. Drilled 4,900 metres at the Bayan Khundii license to support the maiden mineral resource: Extended gold mineralization north with the intersection of 81.4 metres of 2.6 g/t gold and 17 metres of 9.2 g/t gold at hole BKD-254 in the North Midfield Zone. Received independent recognition for stakeholder engagement excellence: Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) confirmed Erdenes community engagement as best practice for the stage of development (link to report). Regional Exploration Drilled 25 holes over 3,452 metres at seven targets along the 11.4 kilometre Bayan Khundii license, focused at Altan Arrow and Khundii North prospects: Approximately 70% of the regional drill holes on the Bayan Khundii license intersected anomalous gold (>0.1 g/t), with three intersecting over 20 g/t gold over 1 to 2 metre intervals. Extended Altan Arrow 500 metres west over a 1.2 kilometre trend (open along strike). Concluded a scout drill program at the 51% owned Ulaan license totalling 1,050 metres in three widely spaced holes over a 1.3 kilometre area in the central portion of the license: Intersected volcanic rocks hosting sheeted to stockwork quartz-pyrite veining. Assembled the largest proprietary geologic database in southwest Mongolia and have identified 22 high-priority targets for acquisition that the Company will pursue aggressively: Participated in the first land tender in southwest Mongolia in almost a decade. Financial Performance - Year-End Financial Results Summary Recognized a net loss of $3,656,990, or $0.02 per share for the year ended December 31, 2018, compared to a loss of $4,027,465, or $0.03 per share in 2017. Incurred exploration expenditures, including capitalized costs, of $5,958,692 in 2018 compared to $10,244,775 in 2017, as Erdene focused on the NI 43-101 PEA and resource estimates for the Khundii Gold Project in 2018. Corporate and administrative expenses, excluding non-cash share-based compensation and depreciation were $1,401,342 for the year ended December 31, 2018, largely in line with expenses of $1,495,106 in 2017. Financial Position and Financing Became the first company to cross-list on the Mongolian Stock Exchange in June 2018: Approximately 6,000 Mongolian shareholders added to registry. More than 1,500,000 shares traded in Mongolia since the listing. Erdene raised $4.12 million in a concurrent June Private Placement. Raised $2.53 million in February 2019 to fund the NI 43-101 PFS, mining license applications, potential acquisitions and general working capital: Erdene has current working capital of $3.20 million. Notified Sandstorm Gold Ltd. of intention to buy-back 50% of the NSR Royalty (1%) on March 26, 2019 for $1.2 million: The transaction is expected to close by April 14, 2019. 2019 Operating Plans Erdene is focused on two strategic priorities advancing the Khundii Gold Project toward production and expanding precious and base metal resources in the Khundii Gold District through exploration and acquisition. The development of the Khundii Gold Project reached a significant milestone in March with the commencement of the NI 43-101 Prefeasibility Study (PFS) with Tetra-Tech, Inc. a global engineering firm, engaged to lead the project. Erdene has also contracted Blue Coast Research to perform metallurgical testing to support the PFS and Sustainability East Asia LLC to conduct the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment. The Company continues to advance the process to convert the Khundii Gold Project exploration licenses to mining licenses with the submission of all necessary reports and documents for the Bayan Khundii license, including the registration of the mineral resources and a preliminary economic evaluation, to the Ministry of Mining and Heavy Industry. This process is expected to be finalized in Q2 2019. Erdene will commence two drill programs in April; a 2,000 metre exploratory and infill program, including 1,400 metres at the Khundii Gold Project and a water resource drilling program. Tetra-Tech, Inc. will incorporate these results in an updated mineral resource estimate supporting the PFS for the Khundii Gold Project. The remaining 600 metres of the April 2019 drill program will be focused on exploratory holes on the Bayan Khundii license to follow-up and expand gold mineralization identified to date as well as some geotechnical drilling. The water resource program will include 11 drill holes (1,375 metres) within approximately 5 kilometres of the Bayan Khundii deposit following geophysical and hydrogeological mapping programs that identified high-priority targets. While sufficient water resources have been identified in the nearby basin, 25 kilometres to the northwest of the Bayan Khundii deposit, the current water exploration program is designed to identify sufficient resources closer to the proposed Khundii Gold Project processing plant. Researchers from UBC will partner with Erdene on the next phase of their research to ensure effective stakeholder engagement during the mine design process. As well, the Company is working with stakeholders to support local economic participation enhancement, including scholarships, vocational training and early supply chain development work in the local community. Over the past decade Erdene has developed a proprietary geologic database of southwest Mongolias precious and base mineralization that has led to the identification of 22 high-priority targets for acquisition. Mongolias Ministry of Mining and Heavy Industry re-opened the region to tenders in 2018 and Erdene intends to be active in the tender process for these high-priority targets in 2019. Background on the Khundii Gold Project Erdenes deposits are located in the Edren Terrane, within the Central Asian Orogenic Belt, host to some of the worlds largest gold and copper-gold deposits. Although epithermal gold and porphyry copper-gold deposits are well documented across the border in China and along the Belts westward trend, exploration in Mongolia was limited until the mid-1990s, when the country opened its lands to foreign exploration. Exploration since that time in southeast Mongolia led to the discovery of the world-class Oyu Tolgoi gold-copper deposit. Erdene has been the leader in exploration in southwestern Mongolia over the past decade and is responsible for the discovery of the Khundii Gold District. The District is comprised of multiple high-grade gold and gold/base metal prospects, two of which are being evaluated for development: Bayan Khundii and Altan Nar. The Company has to date invested US$17 million in exploration and resource development on the Bayan Khundii and Altan Nar projects which are referred to collectively as the Khundii Gold Project. Qualified Person and Sample Protocol Michael MacDonald, P.Geo. (Nova Scotia), Vice President Exploration for Erdene, is the Qualified Person as that term is defined in National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release on behalf of Erdene. All samples have been assayed at SGS Laboratory in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. In addition to internal checks by SGS Laboratory, the Company incorporates a QA/QC sample protocol utilizing prepared standards, field and laboratory duplicates, and blanks. About Erdene Erdene Resource Development Corp. is a Canada-based resource company focused on the acquisition, exploration, and development of precious and base metals in underexplored and highly prospective Mongolia. The Company has interests in four exploration licenses and a mining license in southwest Mongolia, where exploration success has led to the discovery and definition of the Khundii Gold District. Erdene Resource Development Corp. is listed on the Toronto and Mongolia stock exchanges. Further information is available at www.erdene.com. Important information may be disseminated exclusively via the website; investors should consult the site to access this information. Forward-Looking Statements Certain information regarding Erdene contained herein may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements may include estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, guidance or other statements that are not statements of fact. Although Erdene believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Erdene cautions that actual performance will be affected by a number of factors, most of which are beyond its control, and that future events and results may vary substantially from what Erdene currently foresees. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, exploitation and exploration results, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. The forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The information contained herein is stated as of the current date and is subject to change after that date. The Company does not assume the obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. NO REGULATORY AUTHORITY HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS RELEASE Erdene Contact Information Peter C. Akerley, President and CEO, or Ken W. MacDonald, Vice President and CFO The houses along the quiet tree-lined street look just like the normal homes found all across the Rwandan capital. But behind the walls of the three adjoining villas in Kigali are the headquarters of a global operation involving investigators and prosecutors who are working to track down the very worst killers of Rwandas 1994 genocide. Inside, French investigators have come to talk to witnesses and to gather evidence. A Norwegian team is also on site. All are supported by Rwandas Genocide Fugitive Tracking Unit (GFTU), a special team created in 2007 to prosecute the architects behind the slaughter of some 800,000 mostly Tutsi victims. The mandate was to investigate and compile case files for the fugitives who were still at large, said Faustin Nkusi, spokesman for the National Public Prosecution Authority, which oversees the unit. After the bloodshed, many perpetrators escaped. Some were arrested and taken to the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), based in Tanzania. That court closed in 2015 after several dozen convictions. For many of those who carried out the killings, justice has been at a local level through community tribunals known as gacaca courts. Between 2005 and 2012, these courts put nearly two million people on trial, with some two-thirds of cases resulting in a conviction. But the search for justice continues. 72,000 convicted in absentia A quarter of a century after the genocide, Rwanda is as determined as ever to make sure the key suspects are arrested and put on trial over the killings. Many are still at large, scattered all over the world. The GFTU has issued 1,012 international arrest warrants for suspects in 32 countries. Several are in neighbouring nations like Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Tanzania. Others are further afield in places like Kenya, Malawi and Zambia. And still others fled to Europe, North America or even Australia. Key suspects on the run include Felicien Kabuga, once one of Rwandas richest men who is accused of financing the genocide, who was reportedly spotted in Kenya. Another is Augustin Bizimana, a former defence minister believed to be hiding in DR Congo. The team is having an impact: 19 people who were allegedly involved in plotting the genocide have been arrested and returned to Rwanda for trial, while 22 others have been tried abroad. But this is only a drop in the ocean. When the gacaca process closed in 2012, the courts handed the GFTU a list of nearly 72,000 fugitives who had been sentenced in absentia. And tracking down all those people along with other remaining suspects is tough. Its not easy, Nkusi said. We dont have the upper hand in investigating and arresting. We have to work together with other institutions from those countries. The GFTU team, which involves both investigators and prosecutors, works with teams across the world, including their judicial counterparts in countries where suspects are hiding. It also works with UN experts and the international policing agency, Interpol. Justice has to be done Investigators face many challenges: by now, suspects have grown much older and have had years to perfect their changed identity as well as to slip across borders. Some have obtained political asylum. After Rwanda abolished the death penalty in 2007, countries were encouraged to send suspects home. In recent years, suspects have been extradited from United States, Canada and The Netherlands. Other nations, however, argue that they do not have extradition treaties with Rwanda while also demonstrating a reluctance to try suspects themselves. We wish they would be brought back to the country, to the scene of crime, said Nkusi, but pointed out that some countries were not politically willing to do that. France, which denies Kigalis accusations of supporting the Hutu regime that planned the genocide, has refused multiple requests from Rwanda to extradite suspects. So far, only one former Rwandan army officer and two mayors have been sentenced in France. They have an obligation to judge these people, said Nkusi. With Rwanda set this month to mark a quarter of a century since the genocide, Nkusi hopes the speed of extraditions will increase. Justice has to be done, Nkusi said. People have to be arrested. People have to be tried to either be found innocent or be convicted. A Palestinian wounded three days ago during clashes along the Gaza border died Tuesday, the health ministry in the strip said, bringing to five the number of fatalities from the day. Faris Abu Hajaras, 26, was shot by Israeli fire in his stomach east of Khan Yunis Saturday and succumbed to his wounds Tuesday, the ministry said in a statement. Tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered in different spots along the Gaza border Saturday for the first anniversary of the often violent protests there. Four other men, including three 17-year-olds, were killed by Israeli fire Saturday, according to the ministry. At least 263 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the protests and clashes began a year ago. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed over the same period in Gaza-related violence. Israel says its actions are necessary to defend its borders and accuses Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip, of orchestrating violence there. But a UN probe has said Israeli soldiers intentionally fired on civilians in what could constitute war crimes. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 SALEM, Ore. Speaking before the Oregon Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, state Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum voiced her support for a bill that would strengthen a number of gun laws. While the omnibus gun bill (SB 978) includes a number of changes to Oregon laws pertaining to firearms, Rosenblum focused on the issue of "ghost guns." AG Rosenblum testified today with @OregonGovBrown to support stronger gun laws: "I am increasingly concerned about untraceable guns that can be built by downloading online tutorials or by purchasing the physical parts and using common tools to build your own gun. #GhostGun #orleg pic.twitter.com/YT1U0fAYOQ Ellen Rosenblum (@ORDOJ) April 2, 2019 Midway thru 2019 #orleg session no shortage of gun bills remain to resist. As usual the Dems going after people who follow the rules. Bills like these target the compliant, while the #2A suffers death by 1000 cuts. These bills only breed cynicism in responsible gun owners #orpol pic.twitter.com/ZFW0pFuaJC Carl Wilson (@Rep_LDR_Wilson) April 1, 2019 Like many of you, I am increasingly concerned about the growing incidents of undetectable and untraceable guns that can be built with a 3D printer, or by purchasing the physical parts and using a few common tools, to build your own ghost gun, said AG Rosenblum. What I am talking about is a person who can build a semi-automatic weapon all in the privacy of their own home. And, the scariest part? Both of these classifications of guns have no serial number, do not require a background check, and there is no way they can be traced by law enforcement. In addition to adding new restrictions on gun storage, transfers, liability, and minimum age, the bill would require that anyone who builds a 3D-printed gun would have to pass a background check. The bill would also require that "ghost guns" receive serial numbers. Ghost guns are a real and dangerous menace, and allow individuals to lawfully purchase or manufacture a firearm despite a prior violent felony, all without a background check or serial number, testified AG Rosenblum. Senate Bill 978 closes this dangerous loophole by imposing the established background check requirements and serialization expectations on both 3-D printed firearms and unfinished receivers. It also enhances expectations of safety by outlawing the possession of any firearm built to avoid metal detectors. These are important and common sense protections that will enhance our public safety, and I urge the Oregon legislature to support this bill. According to Rosenblum's office, plans for 3D-printed guns can easily be found online and downloaded, allowing anyone with a 3D printer to make one. The term "ghost gun" describes a similar, but distinct item where a person can purchase parts and instructions for common firearms "such as the AR-15" and then assemble them at home without having to incorporate a serial number or pass a background check. Having watched the process of constructing an AR-15 in a video, Rosenblum remarked on the apparent ease of the process. Even I could do it, she said. Governor Kate Brown threw her support behind both House (HB 2013) and Senate versions of the bill on Tuesday afternoon, urging lawmakers to pass both bills. "Gun violence tears apart our communities, devastating families and households throughout Oregon. We all know that while mass shootings make headlines, it is all too common that gun violence occurs behind closed doors," said Governor Brown. "Every session, I am proud that we are able to make progress to ensure that every Oregonian can be safe from gun violence. We have accomplished a lot, but we have more work to do." State Republican lawmakers have trumpeted their disapproval of the bills, calling them "both disturbing and unwarranted" in a statement released on Monday. As usual, the Democrats are going after people who follow the rules," said House Republican Leader Carl Wilson (R-Grants Pass). "Bills like these target the compliant, while the Second Amendment suffers death by a thousand cuts. These bills only breed cynicism in responsible gun owners. Opposition to the bill has primarily taken aim at the gun storage, transfers, and minimum age aspects of the bill, rather than the "ghost gun" aspect underlined by Rosenblum. SPRINGFIELD, Ore. -- There are still more questions than answers about what happened in Springfield Sunday night -- an incident that sent two officers to the hospital after a fatal shooting. Those officers were treated for their non-life-threatening injuries and released on Monday. RELATED: ONE PERSON DEAD, TWO OFFICERS INJURED IN SPRINGFIELD SHOOTING It's been less than 24 hours, but the District Attorney's office is asking the public to give them time to make sure their office gets this right. "We'd rather know everything in advance, have a chance to test it and compare it to the evidence, and give what appears to be the most accurate version of events," said Chief Deputy District Attorney Erik Hasselman. It's because of that need to make sure they get it right that Hasselman and the District Attorney's office are asking the public for patience. Hasselman said they are pushing the Interagency Deadly Force Investigations Team (IDFIT) for quick action. "That's something that we've worked very hard with our partner agencies to say, listen, if you're going to send a detective out to the scene, send us one that can be working on this with a short turn-around," Hasselman said. "I think the community deserves it. I think the involved officers deserve it." While they want a quick resolution, Hasselman said it could still take some time. "That will take a week-plus to do. That's actually pretty quick to conduct these type of investigations," Hasselman said. "Lane County takes it pretty seriously, making sure we get a thorough investigation done up-front." Hasselman said the investigation is moving along. However, an autopsy on the subject was scheduled for Monday, but he believes that was postponed until Tuesday. SALEM, Ore. -- Friday was a key day in the Oregon legislature, with any bill not scheduled to have a work session now considered to be dead for the session, as the Oregonian first reported. Among them were a mix of gun control bills brought forward by student activists and the faith group Lift Every Voice though an omnibus senate bill may still resurrect some restrictions favored by them. Others gained high public notice through media coverage that advanced into social media interaction with readers and viewers. Gov. Kate Brown, Senate President Peter Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek can still revive these bills. RELATED: Gun control bills up for debate in Oregon's 2019 legislative session Money measures are exempt from the Friday deadline, the Oregonian reports. And they could still suddenly reappear in the give-and-take moves of the second half of the 2019 session, with the Democrats holding a super majority lock in the House and Senate. Plus there is the classic ploy as the session nears its end of the "gut and stuff" where a bill unrelated to a measure under consideration is added to it regardless. The nearly dead bills: Senate Bill 501: This bill laid down the strictest gun control moves. It limited magazines to five rounds, ammo purchases to 30 rounds a month and tightened background checks. It also required safer gun storage. READ MORE: Bill would require permits to buy guns, limit ammunition It was brought forward by the group "Students for Change," who held rallies statewide and in Salem following a nationwide gun safety walkout after the Parkland, Fla., mass school shooting. Senate Bill 801: This bill engaged the public in a big way a week ago. It would have allowed schools to conduct gun safety classes for first graders. No real guns allowed. House Bill 2251: Introduced at the behest of the governor, it limited assault rifles purchased to those age 21 and over, restricted gun access to minors, and stiffened access to guns for people convicted of domestic violence. Senate Bill 87: Ammunition purchases at gun shows would be limited to those 21 and over. Also not making the cut were bills to create a voluntary "do not sell" secure database to alert sellers to purchasers with mental health alerts; one to allow reciprocal agreements with other states' concealed weapon permits; and one that allowed gun safety classes on campus. The gun measures still alive: House Bill 2505: This bill requires firearms to have trigger or cable locks and be stored in a secured container. MORE: Proposed gun storage bill triggers debate in Oregon House Bill 2013: This adds more specificity to a 2015 law that restricted access to firearms to those convicted of domestic violence. Senate Bill 979: On its surface, the bill directs the Oregon State Police would be required to conduct a study on the reporting of unlawful firearms transfers and report back to the legislative committee by Sept. 15, 2020. The omnibus bill also addresses a retailers discretion in what they can sell, a requirement FOR safe storage, increasing background checks and outlawing untraceable 'ghost guns.' Other high profile bills that appear dead: House Bill 2015: This bill allows non-residents to get driver's licenses. Activists have pushed heavily for its passage. Senate Bill 7: It lowers the blood-alcohol reading from .08 to .05 to constitute drunk driving. House Bill 2758: Violators who pretended an animal was an assistance animal would be fined $1,000. Senate Bill 822: This bill called for mandatory free condom availability in public high schools. House Bill 2683: This would have prevented landlords from charging an additional fee or rent for tenants with pets. The contract for the design team for the new fire station for Urlingford was officially signed by Chief Executive, Colette Byrne and Martin Peters of Martin Peter and Associates Consulting Engineers in the presence of Cathaoirleach of Kilkenny County Council, Cllr. Eamon Aylward and Elected Members of the Castlecomer Municipal District on Monday, 1st April, 2019. The old fire station in Urlingford is in operation since the early 1970s and is in need of replacement to meet all the demands of a modern fire and rescue service. The proposed new site is adjacent to Urlingford Garda station in the town centre. The new design will incorporate a two-bay station with a training yard, lecture room, canteen and staff facilities. Specific training installations will include a drill tower, an underground water tank and breathing apparatus compressor room. Cathaoirleach Eamon Alyward said: Kilkenny County Council continues to invest in the Fire Service in upgrading and developing the facilities and equipment of Kilkenny Fire and Rescue Service. Over the last number of years we have provided new fire stations in Graiguenamanagh and Castlecomer and we have also recently provided two sets of structural firefighting clothing to all fire Personnel at a cost of just under 180,000. We look forward to the continued development of our service with the development of a new station at Urlingford. Cathaoirleach of Castlecomer Municipal District Michael McCarthy said: This is a very positive step in the delivery of the fire services in north west Kilkenny and will be well received by the fire fighters and communities of the Urlingford area. He added that it will strengthen the delivery of the fire service into the future. Mary J Mulholland, Director of Services, stated that all going well with both the design and the planning stages that construction of a new fire station on the site would commence in in 2019. Chief Fire Officer, John Collins was delighted that another one of the seven fire stations in our county is being upgraded, he pointed out how important it is that the stations, fleet and equipment in place for our firefighters is up to the very highest standard. The existence of a professional fire and rescue service is fundamental to public and personal safety. The Fire Service plays a crucial role in making our Communities safer, whether it be preventing and protecting people from fire and other risks or responding swiftly and effectively to the incidents and emergencies that occur 24 hrs a day/7 days a week/365 days per year. The majority of fire deaths continue to occur in domestic premises and Kilkenny County Council is encouraging people to ensure they fit and maintain a working smoke alarm in their home. Concern Worldwides first consignment of emergency aid to assist people forced to flee their homes in Malawi due to severe flooding was delivered this week. Emergency kits were distributed to people in temporary camps in Nsanje, southern Malawi, one of the worst affected areas. They are among the 87,000 people whose homes have been swept away, damaged, or submerged by flood waters. In many cases they have lost most of their possessions, their livestock and their crops. Some villages in the Nsanje district are still submerged under flood water. The kits contain essential items such as plastic sheeting, cooking utensils, mosquito nets and soap. These supplies are supported by Irish Aid and will assist 4,500 people who are currently in desperate need, Concern Worldwides Country Director Yousaf Jogezai said. We are also working with the World Food Programme to begin food distributions in the camps this week. Over 800,000 people have been affected by the flooding in the wake of Cyclone Idai in Malawi, with 87,000 displaced, 59 dead and 672 injured. Mr Jogezai warned that once the flood waters recede sufficiently to allow people return home, they will have a short time period to plant a winter crop. If they do not plant by March/April (for a crop which will be ready in June/July) they will have to wait until September/October to plant the summer crops which will not be ready to harvest until this time next year, he said. Concern will start distributing seeds and tools to people as they begin to return to the land in the next two to three weeks. They will also provide cash transfers to assist people with rebuilding their homes and getting small businesses back and up running. Meanwhile, Concern Worldwide staff are also working with Cyclone Idai victims in neighbouring Mozambique. The emergency team expects to commence distributing emergency supplies to support 25,000 people later this week. These emergency kits will include tarpaulin, blankets, sleeping mats, mosquito nets and cooking utensils. Concern Worldwide Chief Executive Dominic MacSorely today thanked the public for their generous support for the charitys Cyclone Idai appeal. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has supported the appeal to date but we urgently need to raise funds to support people in Mozambique and Malawi who are in desperate need in the wake of the cyclone, he said. The publics donations are enabling us to directly help some of the worlds poorest people recover from one of the worst weather events to hit the southern hemisphere. Kilkenny students can continue to avail of funding for Erasmus+ as the programme continues to grow and develop. The European Parliament has proposed to increase the budget to over 40 billion for the future period (2021-2027) and this will triple participation in the programme, to around 12 million Europeans, including many from Ireland. The Erasmus+ programmes are among the most popular programmes for students in Ireland. Ireland South MEP Deirdre Clune said: The Erasmus Programme is a fantastic initiative for young people in Ireland and across all of Europe and I am delighted to see it continue and grow. EU Feedback reports say that most people who have done an Erasmus have said that their experience has encouraged them to be more open-minded and confident in their newly-acquired skills. Erasmus is by far one of the most popular EU programmes operating in Ireland and it really is one of the EUs success stories. In Ireland more than 88,000 Irish students and teachers have had a chance to study and train in other EU countries with the support of the Erasmus networks and grants from Europe. These days, Erasmus Plus, as it's now known, is not only for university students but has expanded its reach to vocational training, apprenticeships and youth workers, said MEP Clune. Statistics show that more than twice as many EU students come to Ireland on Erasmus, as Irish students go to other Member States. Recent figures show that about 3,500 Irish students a year go through Erasmus to other EU countries to study, while about 8,000 EU students a year come here to Ireland. The top receiving Irish colleges are UCD, followed by the University of Limerick and UCC. The EU countries sending the most students to Ireland for their Erasmus placements are France, Germany and Spain. Erasmus has been the EUs flagship programme for education, training, youth and sport since 1987. Millions of young people and thousands from Ireland have enjoyed living in another country, seeing how different and diverse the EU is. This makes Erasmus one of the most popular EU programmes and one of the EUs success stories. The geographical scope of the programme has expanded from 11 countries in 1987 to 33 currently (all 28 EU Member States as well as Turkey, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). The current Erasmus+ programme, running from 2014 to 2020, has a budget of 14.7 billion and will provide opportunities for over four million people to study, train, gain work experience and volunteer abroad. 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! Ever since platinum prices plunged well below gold prices in 2014, some analysts have argued that platinum is due for a rebound. This usually seemed based on a view that platinum is naturally more rare and therefore it should command a higher price than gold. I argued then, as I do now, that platinum is largely an industrial metal. The fact that it was relatively cheap wasnt enough to make its price rise. I was right. Since then, platinum continued to drop, while gold traded sideways and palladium tripled in price. Now, as noted in recent articles, I have to admit that I missed the opportunity in palladium last year. Ive been right all along in seeing it as an industrial metal just like platinum. Demand for both is mostly for use in catalytic converters (pollution-control devices) in cars and trucks. Both work equally well on the exhaust of gasoline engines, but platinum works better at the higher operating temperatures of diesel engines. What I didnt see coming back in 2014 was dieselgate. When the Volkswagen emissions scandal broke in 2015, it changed demand trends for car engines. Consumers shifted away from diesel and toward gaspermanently. I could see that happening, but I remembered that platinum works in gas engines too, and automakers had been slow to switch to palladium, even though it had been much cheaper since 2001. Why? Because theyd tried before, in the late 1990s. Then, as now, most of the worlds palladium came from Russia. After the switch to palladium, Russian supply was disrupted, and palladium prices soared. As you can see on the chart above, carmakers switched back to platinum. Palladium tanked and stayed down, even when platinum prices soared, and the price gap between the two metals widened dramatically up until 2007. Carmakers were once bitten, twice shy. Enter China. Increasingly, wealthy people in China started buying more and more cars. Given the pollution issues in China, its no surprise they prefer gas-powered cars over diesel. Theyre also frugal enough to opt for the cheaper metaland they arent afraid of doing business with Russia. I had, in fact, been persuaded of this case for palladium years ago and wrote about it when I worked for Casey Research. But when I launched The Independent Speculator last year, palladium seemed to have already risen a great deal and be more likely to retreat. I was right about thatuntil last August when a supply shortage kicked in and sent prices much higher. Now, in writing about why I think palladium has likely peaked, I said I think carmakers can switch from palladium back to platinum faster than most analysts seem to expect. The financial incentive is certainly there. But does this mean that its now platinums turn to shine? I dont think so. First, notice in the chart above that platinum prices did not surge at the same time that palladium prices tanked last week. This price data clearly does not show carmakers switching back to platinum. Second, palladium remains in a supply deficit, and platinum faces a supply surplus. According to Norilsk, the worlds largest palladium producer, the palladium deficit will increase from 600,000 ounces in 2018 to 800,000 in 2019. At the same time, the platinum surplus will increase from 400,000 ounces in 2018 to 800,000 ounces in 2019. I hear from sources that platinum miners in South Africa are warehousing the stuff because they dont want to flood the market. This means that even if carmakers were already switching to platinumsomething we dont yet know is trueit would take a while for it to show up in prices. We might not see higher prices until well into 2020. Or we might not see them at all, if China just sticks with palladium until they go electric. My friend Rick Rule likes to say that the cure for low prices is low prices. Thats true as long as demand doesnt go away. If platinum never recovers market share before electric cars displace both diesel and gas cars, prices may never recover. One more thing: Ive included gold on the charts above for reference. It is, of course, not just an industrial metal like platinum and palladium. Its a safe-haven asset and a monetary metal. Thats why people say, Good as gold! and not Good as platinum!, and certainly not Good as palladium! I bring this up because I wouldnt expect either platinum or palladium to rise with gold in the case of a major economic slowdown putting fear rather than greed in the drivers seat in the global marketplace. In short, I wouldnt touch platinum plays with a 10-foot pole until I see clear evidence of a shift in its fundamentals. What am I buying instead? Youre welcome to sign up for my free Speculators Digest weekly email and track my take on various metals and commodities. I dont make stock recommendations, but I do tell you what Im investing in and why. And I promise not to bombard readers with a daily barrage of sales pitches with ridiculous headlines. Drop by IndependentSpeculator.com to sign upits quick, easy, and free. Caveat emptor, L ISLAMABAD/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Pakistani social media campaigner Hanzala Tayyab leads about 300 ultra-nationalist cyber warriors fighting an internet war with arch-foe India, in a battle that is increasingly sucking in global tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook. Tayyab, 24, spends his days on Facebook and encrypted WhatsApp chatrooms organizing members of his Pakistan Cyber Force group to promote anti-India content and make it go viral, including on Twitter where he has more than 50,000 followers. That ranges from highlighting alleged Indian human rights abuses to lionizing insurgents battling Indian security forces in Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan region at the heart of historic tensions between Pakistan and India. Tayyabs job became harder on Monday when the Pakistan Cyber Forces Facebook account was taken down, one of 103 Pakistani accounts the social media giant said it had deleted because of inauthentic behavior and spamming. Some Indian nationalist accounts have also been suspended in recent weeks. Portraying himself as an online combatant defending Pakistan from Indias attempts to destabilize his country, Tayyab plans to continue playing his role in the broader information war being fought between the nuclear-armed foes. We are countering the Indian narrative through social media, we are countering the enemies of Pakistan, Tayyab told Reuters in the capital Islamabad. With a combined population of 1.5 billion, India and Pakistan are hot growth markets for Facebook and Twitter, say analysts. But with many rival ultra-nationalist and extremist groups in the region using Facebook and Twitter platforms to advance their political agenda, both companies face accusations of bias whenever they suspend accounts. Facebook has been buffeted by controversies across the globe in recent years, including for not stopping the use of fake accounts to try to sway public opinion in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and Britains vote to leave the European Union, and for not acting to stamp out hate speech on its platform that was fuelling ethnic violence in Myanmar. Four Facebook and more than 20 Twitter accounts belonging to members of the Pakistan Cyber Force have been shuttered in the past two months, according to Tayyab, who is still angry at Twitter for shutting down his previous personal account in 2016. A Twitter spokeswoman said: We believe in impartiality and do not take any actions based on political viewpoints. A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters the company did not remove the Pakistani accounts because of Indian government pressure, but because people behind them coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves. When we disrupt these networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior, its because of their deceptive behavior and not because of the content theyre sharing, or the ideology or political leanings of the people behind them, Facebook said. FLARE-UP Pakistan and India flirted with war in February, when they carried out aerial bombing missions against each others territory for the first time since the 1971 war and fought a brief dogfight over the Kashmir skies. That flare-up was accompanied by a fierce propaganda war on social media. This online battle of political and ideological narratives is one that Pakistans military believes it must win at all costs, analysts say. Military spokesmen often warn unconventional fifth generation warfare is being waged against Pakistan. Facebook said on Monday the 103 accounts removed were part of a network linked to employees of the Pakistani militarys public relations arm. Tayyab denies the Pakistan Cyber Force is linked to Pakistans military, saying the group is made up of volunteers. But analysts say such cyber armies work directly either for Pakistans military or civilian state organizations, acting as de facto proxies or militias in the online battlefields. These groups who are being resourced and organized are actually a kind of a line of defense for this fifth generation warfare, said Shahzad Ahmed, from Pakistani digital rights group Bytes for All. Pakistans military did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. CASE OF TREASON In India, similar nationalist groups are popping up and pushing to purge and punish those who they perceive to be critical of India or supportive of Pakistan on social media. One such group, Clean the Nation, says its actions have resulted in more than 50 people who had posted what it called anti-India comments and remarks critical of Indias armed forces being arrested or suspended from work or education. This is our motherland and if someone is abusing people who are protecting our motherland, actually fighting on the ground, I dont believe they should be allowed to work here or allowed to live here, Rahul Kaushik, one of co-founders the group, told Reuters. This is a clear case of treason, in our view. Kaushik said Clean the Nation had no formal links with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), though one BJP leader praised the group when it was founded in late February, following an attack by a Pakistan militant group in Indian-controlled Kashmir that killed 40 paramilitary police. Two of Clean the Nations founders, Siddharth Kapoor and Ashutosh Vashishtha, are followed on Twitter by Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Others including Kaushik have posted pictures on social media of meetings with Modi and other members of his cabinet. Amit Malviya, the BJPs head of social media, did not respond to a request for comment. Clean the Nation said some of its accounts had been banned or suspended by Facebook last month. That action was unconnected with the 549 accounts and 138 pages linked to Indias opposition Congress Party that Facebook said on Monday had been taken down. 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! Gold has some factors in its favor, yet may not be able to mount much of a rally in April considering these influences provided only a temporary lift in the recent past, says INTL FCStone. Prices rose early in the year, but subsequently eased. INTL FCStone points out that Chinese and Indian physical demand remain historically soft. Analysts say the factors that helped gold in early March are still present a weaker U.S. dollar, falling global interest rates, deteriorating macroeconomic data, and dovish central banks including the Federal Reserve. This could give prices a bit of a lift going into April, INTL FCStone says. However, gold has capitalized on these variables before only to subsequently stumble and so we do not expect much in the way of an upward push and see a fairly restrained $1,275-$1,325 trading range prevailing this month. By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com MKS: Range-Bound Gold Poised To Test Support Gold is range-bound at the moment but prices are acting as if they want to make a test to the downside; nevertheless, a couple of long-term moving averages could offer support, says MKS. Shortly after 8 a.m. EDT, spot metal was up 80 cents to $1,288.10 an ounce. Gold initially was weighed down in the Asia-Pacific session by a stronger dollar and regional equities, but drew support into the Chinese open, with Shanghai opening at a premium $15 above spot metal in London, MKS notes. The yellow metal remains firmly entrenched within the $1,280-$1,300 range; however, it is beginning to look increasingly likely that the downside support will be tested over the near term as global equities see interest following recent positive data releases out of the U.S. and China, MKS says. Underlying growth concerns do however remain, as does the ongoing Brexit saga to provide interest in the metal. The 100 DMA [100-day moving average] cuts in at $1,281.70 and will be the key support level, with a break through here potentially extending as far as the 200 DMA at $1,248.33. Resistance remains formidable through $1,295-$1,300. By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com CME Group: March Metals Volume Down From Year Ago CME Group reports that metals volume averaged 592,000 contracts per day in March, down 13% year-on-year. Still, the exchange operator reports a number of highlights, including record copper options open interest of 68,000 contracts on March 25. Average daily volume in precious-metals options rose 29% to 68,000 contracts, while gold options average volume increased 33% to 62,000 contracts. Platinum futures and options volume grew 12% to 30,000 contracts daily. Total metals volume averaged 561,000 lots in the first quarter, down 21% from 713,000 for the same period a year ago. By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com Commerzbank: Palladium Recovering But Look For More Weakness Commerzbank looks for another downdraft in palladium even though the metal is currently showing signs of stabilizing. Spot palladium fell as far as $1,335.10 an ounce Thursday after trading as high as $1,613.90 on March 21. As of 8 a.m. EDT Tuesday, the metal was at $1,407.45. After previously chalking up considerable losses, palladium is continuing on its countermovement and has climbed to over $1,400 per troy ounce again, Commerzbank says. It appears to be bottoming out after the technically important 100-day moving average held firm last week. That said, the price is still $200 away from its record high. We believe that the correction will continue this is also suggested by the fact that palladium ETFs [exchange-traded funds] recently registered sizeable outflows. (Kitco News) - Romanians plan to repatriate its foreign gold reserves continues to move forward as the nations Senate adopted a draft law proposed in late February, according to media reports. The draft legislation, which was voted on Monday, proposes bringing back 95% of the countrys gold, which is currently held in Bank of England vaults. The legislation was initially brought forward by Romania's Social Democrat Party (PSD) leader Liviu Dragnea and PSD senator Serban Nicolae. The proponents of the legislation have said that because of Romanias stable economy, there is no reason why the government should pay to hold its gold abroad. According to the draft law: The National Bank of Romania can deposit gold from the established reserve abroad exclusively for the purpose of obtaining income through trading and other specific operations. The gold deposited by the National Bank of Romania abroad cannot exceed 5% of the total gold reserve. However, the government could be in for a difficult fight as the central bank has come out against the proposed legislation. According to reports, the central bank will hold a special meeting to discuss a response to the Senates vote. The opinion we will send will be done professionally and with our commitment to keeping Romanias credibility. From my point of view, there is no need for a law in this respect, BNR governor Mugur Isarescu said on Tuesday in a press briefing. The reserve is a reserve; its not an investment. Reserves reduce your funding costs and bring you more benefits than repatriation. We dont gamble the reserve, the governor of the National Bank added. The National Bank of Romania currently holds 103.7 tonnes of gold in its official reserves, and about 65% of that gold is held in London. If the country moves forward with its plan to repatriate its gold, it will join the ranks of other countries like Germany, Hungary, Austria and the Netherlands that have moved their precious metal closer to home. Gold analysts have been watching central-bank gold demand closely as official gold demand is expected to continue to support prices through 2019. According to the World Gold Council, central banks collectively bought 651.5 tonnes of gold in 2018, the most purchases in more than 50 years. The Herald reports: National Leader Simon Bridges is backing the Governments plans to review New Zealands hate speech law but is warning against limiting free speech in the process. Over the weekend, Justice Minister Andrew Little said he would fast-track a review of the Human Rights Act, which could see a crackdown on hate speech. He said the current hate speech laws were not strong enough and needed to change. Bridges said he agreed with Little having a look at the law and told RNZ: I think he is doing the right thing having a review. But he warned against fast-tracking legislation that would change the law. Bridges said that this type of legislation was so fundamental to society that it cant be rushed or fast-tracked. Freedom of speech is so incredibly important to us as a society. Massey University regards Don Brash advocating against Maori seats as hate speech. If the law was changed, Brash would no doubt end up with multiple complaints laid against him with the Police, because people disagree with his advocacy. Act Party Leader David Seymour is also advising caution on any changes to rules that might impact free speech. When the Government makes it its role to start working out which opinions are right and which are wrong and which ones should be punished, thats when you get into real difficulty, he told RNZ. He said a new hate crime law would exacerbate divisions and fail to stamp out prejudice in New Zealand. Does anyone think the UK is a less divided country, despite having had hate speech laws for a couple of decades? Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp More Pinterest Print Tumblr Stuff reports: It is one of our most important and far-reaching relationships, said Ardern. She said the New Zealand Labour Party, in particular, was really proud of its record of engagement, with China. We are particularly invested in the comprehensive strategic partnership, agreed during President Xis visit to New Zealand in 2014, and we are committed to advancing our ties, Ardern said. The PM is there as PM of New Zealand, not as the Leader of the Labour Party. And note who was in Government in 2014 when the comprehensive strategic partnership was agreed? The New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement has significantly benefited both countries. China is now our largest trading partner and two-way trade recently exceeded $30 billion dollars for the first time, a significant milestone in the trading relationship. And all credit to Clark and Goff for their finest foreign policy achievement one that Winston Peters of course campaigned against despite being Foreign Minister at the time. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp More Pinterest Print Tumblr Team models cocaine trafficking response to counternarcotic efforts For five decades, the U.S. government's mission to intercept or seize cocaine and other drugs entering the United States originating from South America and going through Central America on the way to Mexico has been largely ineffective, and the volume of drugs coming into the United States continues to rise. According to a University of Wyoming researcher, that's because the focus of law enforcement agencies to identify transportation routes for drugs and seize them caused a ripple effect of drug trade organizations and cartels looking for new points of entry in a game of "cat and mouse." This, in turn, created an unintended spread and fragmentation of existing trafficking routes, leaving in its wake widespread collateral damage, including corruption, violence, deforestation, displacement of communities and laundering of drug profits through other types of businesses, including cattle ranching. Zoe Pearson, an assistant professor in UW's School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies, was part of a research group that created a computer model called NarcoLogic. The computer model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool to assess different cocaine interception scenarios and predict how drug smugglers react to attempts by authorities to intercept their narcotics. Development of the model relied on multiple theories, empirical studies, media reports and several of the authors' own years of field research in the region, she says. "Interdiction (intercepting), in and of itself, is always going to be problematic. We need a new approach to drug policy," Pearson says. "We obviously care about the health consequences of drug abuse. We would hope to see new policies address the ill effects of drugs on some people's health, and policies that wouldn't cause collateral damage across the hemisphere." Pearson was a co-author of a paper, titled "Modeling Cocaine Traffickers and Counterdrug Interdiction Forces as a Complex Adaptive System," that was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The journal is one of the world's most prestigious multidisciplinary scientific serials, with coverage spanning the biological, physical and social sciences. Nicholas Magliocca, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Alabama, was the paper's lead author. Other contributors to the paper were from Ohio State University, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, Texas State University, Oregon State University and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The model produced realistic predictions of where and when drug traffickers move in and around Central America in response to law enforcement intervention. The model demonstrated that narcotics trafficking is as widespread and difficult to eradicate as it is because of the interception and seizure of drugs. Additionally, the model showed increased seizure of drugs will continue to spread traffickers into new areas. The drug transit zone in the Western Hemisphere grew from 2 million square miles to 7 million square miles between 1996 and 2017, according to the paper. This has made it more difficult for law enforcement to track and disrupt drug trafficking networks, the paper says. When major drug kingpins, such as Pablo Escobar and Joaquin Guzman Loera, a.k.a. "El Chapo," are killed or arrested, and taken out of play, this seems like progress -- at least on the surface. But, in reality, Pearson says such action creates the "cockroach effect," in which other drug traffickers rise up to fill the leadership void. For eight years, Pearson has been part of a team of researchers looking at the environmental, social and political effects of drug trafficking policy in Central America. For nine years, she has been conducting research on drug control policies in Latin America more broadly. Her role in the new paper included "contributing information we needed to create the model. It included some fieldwork I conducted in Honduras that would impact the model, and I added detail based on drug literature," Pearson says. As an Ohio State University graduate student working on her Ph.D. on drug policy in Bolivia, Pearson traveled to Honduras in 2011 with her faculty adviser, geography Professor Kendra McSweeney. Pearson recalls taking a two-day trip by canoe down a river in a remote area known as the Mosquitia region. There, the two came across an area that had been deforested to make way for an airstrip and learned that people had been displaced due to violence and drug traffickers running them off from where they lived. "We saw so much deforestation, and one entire town was completely emptied out," Pearson recalls. "Someone we met wanted to exchange dollars for Honduran bills. He had crisp U.S. $20 bills in the middle of nowhere." Pearson says money from drug profits is often laundered through cattle ranches and oil palm plantations -- both of which flourish on deforested land. "We were very careful not to ask direct questions about drug trafficking," Pearson says of her time in Honduras. Additionally, the research team used data compiled by the Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB), which documents, over many years, cocaine movement through the Western Hemisphere. "Outside of the government, we think we're the first team to use this CCDB data," says Pearson, who has been at UW for three years. The work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Magliocca and McSweeney, another co-author of the paper, received additional funding from an NSF Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research Project. The researchers' hope is that Congress and government agencies will review their paper and use it in creating future drug policy. "We hope our research is being read by people with the potential to make policy change," Pearson says. ### This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Early in the morning on Monday, March 11, dozens of Democratic district leaders shuffled upstairs to the county clubhouse, perched above a shuttered C-Town grocery store in Forest Hills. Before the workday started, they rubber-stamped the predetermined outcome: Rep. Gregory Meeks would be the new Queens County Democratic Party chairman. The Queens Democrats are an insular group, often criticized for acting like an exclusive fraternity youve got to know someone to get in. There wasnt any sort of a public process to elect Meeks, and the meeting wasnt publicly announced. The roughly72 district leaders didnt sit through any debates among the contenders in fact, there werent any other contenders, since nobody but Meeks admitted to having an interest in the job. For the rest of the 800,000 registered Democrats in Queens, heres the process of picking a new county boss: 1) Former Rep. Joseph Crowley resigns as county chairman to focus on his new lobbying job with the Washington, D.C.-based Squire Patton Boggs. 2) A few outlets report that Meeks is the leading contender to replace him. 3) Word spreads that Meeks will be elected. 4) Meeks is elected. The Queens Machine works. Meeks does represent change for the county party, but only in certain ways. Hes the first black man to lead the Queens Democrats, and hes the first boss from the traditionally black, middle-class neighborhoods of Southeast Queens. But the breakthrough is not enough to quiet critics of the county party. Meeks is the establishment, a party line insider who has been in office with county support for more than 25 years. Hes a capitalism-embracing moderate, and he has fended off numerous allegations of corruption over his years in office. If the county party wanted to signal political change, he would be an odd choice. Yet change is already coming for the Queens Democratic Party. The borough, or at least its western reaches, is the physical epicenter of the capitalism-skeptic wing of the Democratic Party. Its where Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset Crowley last summer. Its where committed activists, fearing gentrification and furious over secretly negotiated subsidies for a hugely profitable corporation, defeated Amazons HQ2 plans. And its where the seven Democrats running for Queens district attorney are arguing over who can jail the fewest people. This growing crop of voters might leave Meeks no choice but to reform the county party. But he said hes not that guy. I still dont use the term, necessarily, reformer, he said when asked if that description would apply to him. I say now, what I want to be is a bridge builder. Photo by Sean McCabe Meeks domain is far from the country club set in Forest Hills, and even farther away from the growing progressive influence of Western Queens, where some elected officials say they barely know the congressman. Meeks is now the county boss of those neighborhoods too, but he was already the de facto boss in Southeast Queens. Meeks has been organizing monthly breakfast meetings, inviting all the elected officials whose districts overlap his: state legislators, New York City Council members, district leaders a couple dozen in all. (New York City Councilman Eric Ulrich, the sole elected Republican in the deep-blue borough, is not invited though he gets along well with Meeks.) Such geographic cohesion is relatively rare in politics, where the brassy horns of competitive elections can often drown out the soft strings of cooperation. My colleagues are like, You guys do that? You guys talk to each other? said New York City Councilman I. Daneek Miller, a frequent attendee. Soon after meeting Meeks, you get the impression that the answer to that question is no the congressman does all the talking. Meeks, 65, is a gregarious, backslapping politician who talks as loudly as he dresses often in double-breasted suits with busy shirts and bold ties. That recipe has made him a favorite on cable news, where he has been appearing frequently in recent months. While hes dynamic on screen, hes even more animated to an audience of one. A week after he was elected county chairman, we met at his district office in Jamaica, Queens, and talked about his plans for the new job. Im scheduling! he said with a mirthful laugh. Im scheduling to meet people, to get to some of these events. Im trying to get out and to reach people. Those people, Meeks made clear, are mostly elected officials, particularly the district leaders who picked him from among their ranks. Meeks said hell rely on elected officials to share their neighborhoods concerns. Politics is about organization and being organized, Meeks said. And the county organization, if theyre not organized, how are you going to organize someone else? Its a team concept. J Scott Applewhite/AP/Shutterstock Its an open secret that Meeks has inherited a weakened county party. A county endorsement means less than it once did, as a shrinking number of party regulars lend their hands petitioning and canvassing. Its a party that couldnt even get its own boss, Crowley, re-elected. But the organization still wields influence. Its ability to coordinate the boroughs council members helped Crowley play a central role in elevating Corey Johnson to the council speakership last year. The boroughs overwhelming Democratic voter enrollment advantage lets the county party effectively pick the winner in every special election. It has also maintained a hold over the judicial system. As journalist Ross Barkan documented in 2017, judges as a rule only get elected with the partys blessing. The law firm of Sweeney, Reich and Bolz, a trio of Long Island attorneys who have held top positions in the Queens Democratic Party, raked in some $30 million over a decade administering cases in Surrogates Court. Gerard Sweeney, Michael Reich and Frank Bolz also serve as election lawyers for county-endorsed candidates, successfully kicking opposing candidates off the ballot.These three white male partners have been a powerful force in the party since the 1990s, when then-county Chairman Thomas Manton worked in the firm. The Democratic Party in one of the most diverse counties in America was, until last month, effectively run by four white men, which critics say doesnt represent the borough. Theres no discussion, theres no debate, theres no chance for debate, said Jesse Rose, an attorney from Astoria who serves as treasurer and de facto spokesman for the New Queens Democrats. The group, known as NQD, was spun out of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. Like the New Kings Democrats in Brooklyn, NQD is the latest entrant in the centuries-old practice of reform Democratic organizations decrying the clubby atmosphere of regular county organizations and demanding more access from the Boss Tweeds of their day. We live in an age where its really easy to foster debate, communication and come to a consensus, Rose said. But the Queens County Democratic Party is not moving into the age of information. The New Queens Democrats stated goals are all about increasing transparency and participation in the party,but the reformers real goal appears to be moving the party to the left. NQD shares some membership and political interests with other groups that want to see political change in Queens, such as the Queens branch of the Democratic Socialists of America and the newly formed Queens United Independent Progressives. The three dont overlap perfectly many Democratic Socialists of America members in particular are skeptical of working within the official Democratic Party structure at all and theres some of the petty infighting expected in any political organization. The three groups are all working hard to harness the political energy around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and, along with progressive stalwarts the Working Families Party,have endorsed Tiffany Caban, the leftist, queer, Latina public defender in the June primary for Queens district attorney. Meeks and the Queens Democratic Party, by contrast, endorsed a more mainstream Democrat: Queens Borough President Melinda Katz. Same as the old boss? Rep. Gregory Meeks succeeded former Rep. Joseph Crowley as the leader of the Queens County Democratic Party. Both men represented Queens in Congress for years, but thats not all that they have in common. Aaron Aniton Electing Katz will be Meeks first real test as county chairman, and he said its his main focus until Election Day on June 25. But that could be a challengewith a weakened machine, New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer told City & State. "The center of gravity is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her microphone is louder than anyone elses in the borough. New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer The central Democratic figure in Queens right now is a woman from the Bronx! The center of gravity is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her microphone is louder than anyone elses in the borough, Van Bramer said. Ocasio-Cortez has yet to endorse in the race for district attorney, and since entering Congress, she has largely avoided county politics. But shes still seen as the heart of the county partys opposition, which Van Bramer said poses a real threat to the Queens Democratic Party. You have one of the most prominent and powerful elected officials not just in Queens, not just in New York City, but in the country who is decidedly and declaredly opposed to the county organization, Van Bramer said. So where is the influence to get other elected officials and other people on your side? There are stark differences between the two congressional colleagues. AOC is the vanguard, representing what is new and exciting about the Democratic Party. She symbolizes resistance and taking power away from those who have traditionally held it. Ocasio-Cortez represents the opening up of electoral politics to anyone, even bartenders. Many of her supporters hardly followed politics before Donald Trump was elected president and had never dreamed of going to a meeting at their neighborhood political club. Clearly, Im not a socialist. Im a capitalist. I think thats good. - Rep. Gregory Meeks Meeks, by contrast, is the old guard, representing seniority and stability in the Democratic Party. He symbolizes hardworking union families who became New York City homeowners. He is about letting corporations and Wall Street thrive, lifting up New Yorkers with their prosperity. Meeks represents working your way up in local politics, paying your dues and gaining influence. Meeks was in office when Ocasio-Cortez was still a toddler. Ocasio-Cortezs office declined to comment for this story, and Meeks said there wasnt any personal tension between him and his congressional colleague, even if they werent particularly close. Weve never had any conversation directly about the county organization. I presume that we will, Meeks said. But there are stark disagreements. Amazon (is) one of the big ones, said Meeks, who backed the tech giants plans in Queens. Clearly, Im not a socialist. Im a capitalist. I think thats good. Meeks congressional career has featured the endless mingling of money and power. Meeks got a job as an assistant district attorney in Queens after graduating from Howard University School of Law. It was a solid public servant post that helped Meeks and his family move out of the public housing development in East Harlem where he was raised, and into a house with a yard in Far Rockaway, Queens. Like many political upstarts, Meeks got into politics by challenging the Queens Democratic Party, backing Simeon Golars failed bid against county-backed candidate Joseph Addabbo Sr. in a 1984 congressional primary. Then Meeks himself tried running, challenging the partys candidate, Juanita Watkins, for City Council in 1991. Meeks lost that race, but impressed the county machine. He won the 1992 Assembly race with countys backing and has been in their good graces ever since. When former Rep. Floyd Flake resigned from Congress in 1997, Meekswas essentially handed the seat in a closed-door county party vote. He hasnt had a serious electoral challenge since. Meeks still listens to Flake preach at the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral of New York on Merrick Boulevard. Meeks is one of the manypoliticians who claimshe cant be defined politically: I dont want to be in anybodys box, he said. Hes a consistent Pelosi-aligned, antiTrump vote in Congress, and is a proud member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has traditionally backed liberal policies. But hes also an honorary co-chairman of Third Way, an organization for centrist Democrats. And with his seat on the House Financial Services Committee, hes a notable opponent of legislation to tax financial transactions. Many progressives love the idea of taxing Wall Street, but Meeks said the bill would hurt New York. Hes listening to ideas to introduce a single-payer health care system, and backed the resolution to support a Green New Deal. In a pair of CNN appearances, Meeks proudly endorsed reparations for African-Americans and American Indians, but hes absolutely not on board with Sanders presidential campaign, saying he should run as an independent. While candidates like Sanders are obsessed with courting small-dollar donors and a growing number of Democrats are rejecting corporate donations to avoid even the appearance of possible corruption, Meeks is raising money the traditional way. His list of campaign donors could be mistaken for a list of Fortune 500 companies. Just about every financial and insurance firm youve heard of gave him money last year, presumably hoping for kind treatment on the Financial Services Committee. Bank of America, KPMG, Deloitte and BlackRock all gave him campaign donations during the 2018 cycle, when Meeks faced only token opposition. Some firms doubled up, like PricewaterhouseCoopers and Goldman Sachs, which gave money both to Meeks campaign committee and his leadership political action committee, Build America PAC. Meeks used that PAC to support many candidates who needed a boost, including Anthony Brindisi, who won a House seat in Central New York, and Dana Balter, who failed to unseat Republican Rep. John Katko. Meeks crisscrossed the country to raise money, flying to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., Minnesota and Las Vegas on the PACs dime. Meeks backyard has a hard-earned reputation as an unethical cesspool. In the past six years, an assemblyman, a city councilman and twostate senators representing Southeast Queens have been sent to prison on corruption charges. Meeks has never been implicated in any crimes, but he has walked on the edge of the muck since his early days in Congress. The Federal Election Commission fined him $63,000 in 2008 for using campaign funds for personal expenses. He has reportedly been the subject of at least four federal or congressional investigations. One into the alleged misuse of funds by a local development nonprofit co-founded by Meeks. One into a campaign donor who built and sold Meeks a St. Albans mansion at an apparent $200,000 discount. One into a congressional junket to Azerbaijan paid for by that countrys government. And one into a $40,000 loan allegedly masquerading as an illegal gift from Queens businessman Edul Ahmad, who was later sentenced to prison in an unrelated mortgage fraud scheme. None of the cases resulted in charges or sanctions against Meeks, but they left a lingering stench.Google Greg Meeks, and the third result reads: Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) Named One of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress. It links to a 2011 report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning think tank that, until 2014, published an annual list of the most corrupt members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike. Meeks made the list again in 2012 and in 2013. The reports detail many alleged ethical missteps, but maybe none as interesting as Meeks favor forR. Allen Stanford, the financier who was sentenced in 2012 to 110 years in prison for running a massive Ponzi scheme. Meeks was not reportedly involved with the scheme in any way, but he admits to traveling to Venezuela in 2006 to talk to then-President Hugo Chavez as a favor for Stanford. Hey, can you help out my company? Meeks said Stanford asked him at the time. Of course Im going to help an American company. Thats my job! None of the allegations have been proven, Meeks said, blaming some of them on the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-leaning ethics watchdog that has kept a close eye on Meeks for more than a decade. Meeks said he isnt embarrassed by the lengthy list of corruption allegations. No, he said. Because its not accurate. Photo by Sean McCabe Despite the years of allegations, Meeks has never faced a serious challenge for his seat. In a telling moment of Southeast Queens politics, state Sen. James Sanders Jr. briefly launched a primary challenge to Meeks ahead of the 2016 election on an anti-corruption platform. But Sanders dropped his campaign after Meeks campaign accused him of corruption, reportedly leaking a story that Sanders had solicited a bribe from a nonprofit. The claims against Sanders were never substantiated, and he ended up getting re-elected to his Senate seat, despite the Queens Democratic Party backing his opponent. Meeks faced only token opposition in the 2018 Democratic primary but could face a more energetic challenge in 2020. A Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidate is rumored to be weighing a run against Meeks. Anybody challenging Meeks would face an uphill battle. Hes not just the county chairman. Even critics admit that Meeks has his finger on the pulse of the district, where the typical Democratic voter is more moderate than those in Western Queens. As New York City Councilman Donovan Richards, who also represents Southeast Queens, put it, the Ocasio-Cortez effect means nothing in our district. Oh, Ive got to change some things. Joe is great. My friend. But Im not Joe! - Rep. Gregory Meeks Meeks knows hes tempting fate by taking over the county party, raising his profile boroughwide while shouldering the institutions baggage. But he said hes eager to take on the tough job of uniting the borough politically. In doing so, is he putting a target on his back? If that means I have to debate folks on my positions, et cetera, Im willing to do it! But Meeks doesnt just have to protect his own seat now. He also has to protect the power and reputation of the Queens County Democratic Party. And after the disaster of Crowleys 2018 defeat, both allies and critics are expecting some party reforms from Meeks. Oh, Ive got to change some things, Meeks said. Joe is great. My friend. But Im not Joe! That means bringing more young people into the party and reinvigorating the boroughs system of district-level political clubs, Meeks said. Hes setting up meetings with groups that arent represented in the county party, and sitting down with reformers. Hes open to calling more meetings for the county party, and even advertising that online. Would he loosen up Sweeney, Reich and Bolzs hold over the party, opening up Surrogates Court opportunities to other law firms? I am going to look at that very closely. I havent had the chance to look at everything, but I am going to look at all of that, he said. Im going to look at what the people are saying and asking for. Meeks is the patriarch of apolitical family. His mother was a tenant association president, and his sister, Janella Meeks, works at the New York State Nurses Association. Meeks wife, Simone-Marie, is an assistant commissioner for New York State Homes and Community Renewal. One of their daughters, Ebony, works for Johnson, the council speaker. Another, Aja, is in New York City Comptroller Scott Stringers office. Meeks youngest daughter, Nia-Aiyana, is still in college. If anybody was to run against them, then youre running against the team. Its my job to protect the team. - Rep. Gregory Meeks The congressman has long been the patriarch of another political family made up of his fellow elected officials in Southeast Queens. Some people I endorsed when they first ran. Some people I didnt. But once the election was over, we had to work together! Meeks said. That doesnt just mean cutting ribbons and passing bills. It means supporting incumbents. If anybody was to run against them, then youre running against the team! And Im going to protect the team, he said. Its my job to protect the team! Today, that political family has expanded, featuring a borough president, six House members, seven state senators, 18 Assembly members, 14 City Council members and all those district leaders who elected him. Some are conservative. Some are more moderate, and others are progressives. One congresswoman is even a democratic socialist. Some of them will soon get challenged by candidates representing new perspective, new voices. Meeks is stepping right into the middle of it. Its inspiring to see the kind of debate that we have here, Meeks said. Some good for me, some bad for me! Lets have it. Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Democratic legislators all seemed to agree that they wanted to eliminate the use of cash bail in New York state, but as the ink dries on the fiscal year 2020 state budget, cash bail will remain as an option available to judges in limited circumstances. Laws passed as a part of the budget package early Monday morning will shake up the process of getting arrested and ticketed in New York. Its expected that fewer New Yorkers will be sent to jail to await trial. And fewer people will be arrested at all, with the laws rewritten to encourage officers to give people they arrest tickets to voluntarily come to court at a later date, rather than be hauled in front of a judge after an arrest. But many groups agitating for more extreme reforms of the system were left disappointed, particularly around the issue of cash bail the practice in which defendants are asked to pay a deposit, refundable if they attend all their court dates, in order to be released from jail. We cannot fully celebrate todays budget, Scott Roberts, criminal justice senior campaign director for Color of Change, an African-American-focused criminal justice reform organization said in an emailed statement. Legislators in Albany failed to take this once-in-a-generation chance to eliminate cash bail in its entirety. Cash bail in Judges are still able to set bail or simply send the defendant to jail without bail for defendants charged with violent felonies, crimes of witness intimidation or tampering, violating an order of protection against a member of your household, or various other crimes. The bill language encourages judges to be deliberative if they fix bail, insisting they make an individualized determination for the defendant, and justify the choice on the record. That represents a legislative win for the New York State Justice Task Force, a group of judges, prosecutors and other members of the criminal justice establishment whose desire for discretion when it came to bail reform appeared to have swayed budget negotiators. While the governor and certain Democratic legislators had each proposed the total elimination of cash bail this year, the task forces February report called for the more incremental approach included in the law. But cash bail wont be an option at all for most defendants up to 90 percent of those arrested, according to some advocates. That includes most people arrested for drug possession, or even most property crimes like theft and burglary. Instead, the law provides more options for ensuring their attendance at court dates, such as text alerts or supervision by a pre-trial services agency. Skipping out on a court date wont automatically earn the defendant a warrant for arrest the new law gives the benefit of the doubt, and most defendants will get a 48 hour window to appear in court voluntarily. Some defendants will still be watched closely pre-trial though, as the new law allows for wearable electronic monitoring in certain cases. That, and all other provisions of the law, will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2020. Dangerousness out Legislators, the governors office and criminal justice system stakeholders have been debating for months over the specifics of how exactly they wanted to reform the arrest process. One of the major sticking points had been whether judges could consider a defendants dangerousness in deciding whether he or she would be detained pre-trial. Advocates of that approach called it a common sense measure to keep violent individuals off the streets. Opponents said such a subjective measure would just perpetuate racial biases against people of color. The law in the budget doesnt include the so-called dangerousness standard. When determining whether to detain somebody pretrial, judges are only allowed to consider evidence relevant to whether the defendant is expected to attend court dates out of his or her own volition. The new law also cuts out old language which let judges consider the defendants probability of conviction if the case were to go to trial. A giant leap Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie praised the reforms in a series of tweets, saying that Correct(ing) the tilted scales of justice for New Yorkers has been his personal mission. This years budget agreement makes a giant leap toward realizing these goals. Likewise, state Sen. Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris, who had sponsored a bill to fully eliminate cash bail, said in an emailed statement that he was proud to have helped usher in the most historic and dramatic reforms our troubled criminal justice system has seen. But advocates for fully eliminating cash bail pledged to keep pushing for that goal, however unlikely. We are holding the legislatures to their promise to end cash bail for all offenses in New York State, said Tina Luongo, attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Societys criminal defense practice. We will not rest until the presumption of innocence is truly provided to everyone. Twenty-five billion dollars. A skyscraper with the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere. Hudson Yards described as a city within a city is the largest private real estate development in U.S. history, praised by some as the citys latest architectural attraction and economic boon, and criticized by others a dystopian playground for the wealthy. A labor fight over the project became one of New Yorks bitterest real estate disputes, with the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York assailing the Related Cos. use of nonunion labor but shortly before its unveiling on March 15, the two sides reached a truce. In our inaugural Real Estate Power 50, we recognize Relateds Stephen Ross and Jeff Blau, labor union boss Gary LaBarbera, and 47 other leaders reshaping New York, plus 10 up-and-coming industry professionals. We reached out to insiders and experts to compile this list, ranking each person based on their achievements and their political clout. Since we cover elected officials on a day-to-day basis, we limited this list to those who influence policymaking from the outside. Without further ado, were pleased to introduce the 50 most powerful people in New York real estate. 1. Stephen Ross & Jeff Blau Related Companies Related Companies Chairman; CEO, Related Cos. Last month, Related Cos. unveiled Hudson Yards, a project so massive that New York City stretched the No. 7 train all the way to the Hudson River for it no small feat in a city where subway expansions can take decades. Hudson Yards the magnum opus of 78-year-old billionaire Stephen Ross is the largest private development in U.S. history: a $25 billion, 28-acre mixed-use ecosystem whose tallest tower will reach 1,100 feet. Ross even stepped down as CEO to focus on its completion, handing the reins to heir apparent Jeff Blau, who has worked at the company since Ross recruited him out of college. Ross wanted to build a centerpiece that would make Hudson Yards the citys main attraction, and Blau helped carry out plans for the hive-like structure which, he says, is going to be to New York City what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. The duos influence is demonstrated by their ability to tangle with one of the citys largest unions and win even when it also pits them against Gov. Andrew Cuomo. 2. Steven Roth Submitted Chairman and CEO, Vornado Realty Trust Not only does Vornado Realty Trust control the largest amount of private property in New York City nearly 30 million square feet but the company is staying relevant by courting big tech players like Facebook. Some speculate that the Farley Post Office project next to Penn Station could bring more tech companies to the table, but Steven Roth says he is keeping his options open. Although hes a major donor to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Roth has had an up-and-down relationship with the governor. Roth waffled on Cuomos push for the Gateway rail tunnel, and the governor temporarily dropped Vornado from the Farley Post Office project. Roth, who founded Vornado in 1980, has played a significant role in shaping the citys landscape including installing an eight-story LED screen in Times Square in 2014. The developer enjoys a long-standing business partnership with President Donald Trump, co-owning with the president a skyscraper described as Trumps most valuable New York City building: 1290 Sixth Ave. He served as one of Trumps top economic advisers during the 2016 presidential campaign. 3. Douglas Durst The Durst Organization Chairman, The Durst Organization Douglas Durst helped oversee the development of One World Trade Center, the crown jewel of the family-owned real estate companys portfolio. The Durst Organizations 13 million square feet of office space across the city include the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park. A board member at the Real Estate Board of New York, The New School and the Trust for Public Land, Durst says urban density helps preserve the environment and built 4 Times Square, billed as the nations first sustainable skyscraper. The Durst Organization is not shy about getting involved in elections, last year donating (through several LLCs) $150,000 to Rep. Sean Patrick Maloneys campaign for state attorney general and $10,000 to Letitia James campaign. The company was the largest donor to Gov. Andrew Cuomos 2018 re-election campaign, contributing $75,000. The family hasnt avoided controversy, including the high-profile murder case against Douglas brother, Robert. Douglas Durst whose father put up the National Debt Clock in Times Square in 1989 has criticized President Donald Trump for driving up the countrys debt. 4. John Banks REBNY President, Real Estate Board of New York John Banks faces an uphill battle as Real Estate Board of New York president in 2019 thanks to an empowered Democratic state Legislature poised to pass major rent reforms. In Albany, lawmakers have moved to close the LLC loophole, and will likely tackle preferential rent and the vacancy decontrol threshold and maybe even pass universal rent control. Its not any better in New York City for the states pre-eminent real estate trade group, with the City Council targeting commercial landlords, broker fees and security deposits, while changing trash pickup zones. Banks is warning New York City officials to tighten their belts, telling Real Estate Weekly that good economic times cant last forever, and another period of downturn will inevitably come. Yet Banks, the first black president of the 120-year-old real estate board, has the benefit of experience as he navigates these challenges. He started out in then-Mayor Ed Kochs administration, worked for the New York City Council, and later was in government relations at Con Edison. He has sought to work with Albany Democrats on issues like congestion pricing. 5. Scott Rechler MTA Chairman and CEO, RXR Realty An outspoken business leader, Scott Rechler uses his bully pulpit as head of a firm that manages over 20 million square feet of commercial real estate space in the New York City metro area to promote issues like get-out-the-vote efforts, fixing the subways and reducing gun violence. He was effective in pushing for better transit and infrastructure as an appointee of Gov. Andrew Cuomo on important governmental bodies: As a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, Rechler led efforts to streamline the unwieldy procurement process; and as a board member of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, he helped oversee the World Trade Center redevelopment. Rechler, who chairs the Regional Plan Association, has even lobbied President Donald Trump. He has reportedly met with the president to advocate for local infrastructure, such as the Gateway rail tunnel project, for which funding remains in limbo. On Long Island, where Rechler is based, RXR Realty is building the Nassau Hub, the mixed-use project surrounding the refurbished Nassau Coliseum. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) After netizens called it out, the multimedia travel guide Lonely Planet corrected an error on its website stating that the world-famous Banaue Rice Terraces in northern Philippines were built by the Chinese. "We now recognize that our claim that they were introduced 2000 years ago by the Chinese is misleading," it said in a tweet on Monday. It also posted a Facebook video on the "World's Greenest Places" featuring the rice fields of Ifugao last Sunday. It described the Banaue Rice Terraces as "first built around 2,000 years ago by the Chinese." It said it is working on rectifying that mistake. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the famous landmark known as the "Eigth Wonder of the World" said the rice terraces of the Cordilleras is "all the product of the Ifugao ethnic group, a minority community that has occupied these mountains for thousands of years." The agency added, "The Ifugao Rice Terraces are the priceless contribution of Philippine ancestors to humanity, built 2000 years ago and passed on from generation to generation." The rice terraces were named a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in 1995. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) Embattled Rappler CEO and journalist Maria Ressa posted her eighth bail on Monday for the alleged violation of the anti-dummy law. Online news agency Rappler said she paid P126,000 for her temporary freedom after Pasig City Regional Trial Court Branch 158 Judge Rowena Modesto San Pedro found probable cause to charge Ressa and 6 other directors of Rappler Incorporated for alleged violation of the Securities Regulation Code of the Philippines. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) previously said Rappler violated constitutional limitations on ownership and control of mass media entities because of funds coming from its foreign investor Omidyar Network. Only Filipino citizens can own media entities in the country. "Arrested on Friday. A new arrest warrant on Monday. 8th time to post bail. And the week's just starting!" Ressa tweeted. On March 29, Ressa posted a P90,000 bail over charges of violating the anti-dummy law. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) The Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Solicitor General Jose Calida to provide copies of all police reports on the government's controversial anti-drug war to the petitioners in a case questioning the legality of Oplan Double Barrel, also known as Oplan Tokhang. The order, which the judges approved unanimously, is an apparent to seek transparency on President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody anti-drug campaign. The Office of the Solicitor General had previously denied the SC's previous request to submit the drug-war related documents, citing issues of national security. In 2017 the Free Legal Assistance Group and the Center for International Law had filed cases before the SC challenging the legality of the administration's flagship anti-drug campaign, which has led to the death of thousands of suspected users and dealers. In a statement, CenterLaw welcomed this development in their case. The group represents 29 individuals from San Andres Bukid who sought protection against Manila policemen for the deaths in their community which they linked to the anti-drug campaign. "These documents are the first step towards the long road for justice for the Petitioners and to thousands of victims of the 'war on drugs' and their families. CenterLaw extends its gratitude to the Supreme Court for upholding the basic and fundamental right of the Petitioners to due process, and for promoting transparency and integrity in the proceedings," CenterLaw said in a statement. Former police chief and senatorial candidate Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa said that he is willing to release the documents but added that those might open up policemen to harassment. "Prone na prone yung kapulisan natin sa harassment. Pag maharass yang mga pulis na yan, wala nang kikilos. Wala na magtatrabaho. Dahil pag ikaw pinaylan ng kaso, isusupinde ka, saan ka kukuha ng pangkain? Wala ka na sweldo," the police chief who was in charge during the height of Oplan Tokhang said during a campaign sortie. [Translation: Our policemen are prone to harassment. When policemen are harassed, they don't move. They don't work. If a case is filed against you, you get suspended, then where will you get money for food? You don't get paid.] CNN Philippines' correspondent Anjo Alimario and senior correspondent Ina Andolong contributed to this report. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 2) Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro "Teddyboy" Locsin Jr. said Tuesday he "fired off (a) salvo of diplomatic notes" against China over the swarming of its vessels in Philippine waters. In a Twitter post responding to a blogger's tweet, Locsin said he sent the diplomatic notes to Beijing before his first official trip there on March 18 to 21. "Before going to successful China visit I fired off salvo of diplomatic notes so I would not be accused of insincerity if, as suggested, I fired them off after the visited (which) is sioki. Instructed shot over massing of moving vessels because circling establishes nothing," Locsin said. The blogger in the tweet asked for confirmation of diplomatic protests against China over the presence of Chinese vessels near Pag-asa Island, which is part of the hotly contested Spratly Island group in the West Philippine Sea. Hours later, he posted again: "I sent notes verbales versus swarming before my China trip. You have my word on it and that is all you all get. Manigas na kayo nag da-doubt pa [Those who continue to doubt this should shut it]." In an earlier tweet, Locsin responded to another Twitter user who asked if the protests can be made public. He replied, "No way Jose. So the ignorant will react self-importantly?" The military confirmed the presence of ships near Pag-asa on Monday, but could not pinpoint as to how many were in the area. Earlier reports said there were more than 600, but Armed Forces of the Philippines Western Command Chief of Public Affairs Captain Jason Ramon said there were only 275. Earlier, Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jianhua said the groups near the island may only have been Chinese fishermen. Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo, however, believes Chinese militia are near the island as reported by the military. Curiosity is Susan Orleans superpower. Hundreds of L.A. firefighters fought the devastating fire.at downtowns Central Library on April 29, 1986. Thousands of people contributed to the Save the Books campaign afterward. Millions heard the news that the library was burning and then that it was caused by arson. But more than three decades later, only Orlean was asking who did it and why, and wondering whether anyone today should care. In a reverse Fahrenheit 451, Orlean took a fire and turned it into a book. Titled aptly and ingeniously The Library Book, it tells the story of the mysterious fire that burned 400,000 books while also tracing Orleans love of libraries, from trips with her mother to taking her son. Along the way, she relates the unexpectedly colorful history and future of the L.A. Public Library. My first interest was writing a book about the day-to-day life of a big city library. I could have done that anywhere, she said over lunch after we visited the library together. I liked the idea of doing it in L.A., out of this contrarian idea that people don't associate libraries with L.A., which made it kind of delectable. That said, the 1986 fire (forgive me) was the spark. A longtime staff writer for the New Yorker, Orlean had begun living in Los Angeles part of the year (she and her husband also maintain a home in New York). While exploring the citys institutions, she visited the flagship of the L.A. Public Library and learned of its catastrophic fire. Although no people were seriously injured, the fire destroyed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more, causing $22 million in damages more than $50 million today. It remains the largest library fire ever in America. This is an amazing story, she said. As we walked through the library, Orlean petite, stylish and with electric auburn hair was greeted by staffers shed gotten to know during her research. Tapping a concrete wall, she explained where the fire had started, in the stacks. Built as two secure concrete chutes within the original 1926 building, the stacks held hundreds of thousands of books and were connected by a catwalk for librarians. After the fire started leaping across the catwalk from the first stack to the second the chutes served as dual furnaces, books trapped inside with the fire. Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened and then sprang away from their bindings, a ream of sooty scraps soaring on the updraft. The fire flashed through fiction, consuming it as it traveled, Orlean writes in her book. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks burned up. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. Every book in its path bloomed with flame. If you, like me, care about books, reading her brilliant, awful description of the conflagration feels like watching a snuff film. Orlean agrees. There's something that we feel deeply about books that we don't feel about other objects you know, its an object! It was as if she were trying to convince herself. And nowadays, it's an object that can be replaced pretty easily. Even so. There is something about it that feels raw and vicious and aggressive. Wreckage after the fire in L.A.'s Central Library. Larry Bessel / Los Angeles Times She is a lifelong journalist, known for her careful, in-person research, showcased in her New Yorker pieces and books, including Rin Tin Tin, a history of the Hollywood dog; The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; and (despite Charlie Kaufmans fabrications in Adaptation) The Orchid Thief. So I was surprised to hear what she said next. It was so mystical. I think we have some association with books that feels like there was a soul in there, Orlean said. That there's a being in there, whether it's because writers have poured themselves onto the pages, whatever it is, I think there's something ineffable, mysterious about what makes books special, and I'm glad of that. This is one of the underlying ideas of The Library Book that books, as both objects and ideas, are essential to the human project; that libraries are a vital destination that holds them safe. So who would want to torch one? That was a question L.A. authorities thought they had answered on Feb. 27, 1987, when they arrested 28-year-old Harry Peak on suspicion of arson. Peak was released three days later after the district attorney declined to file charges against him. It is a fine mystery: Fire officials said there was an arsonist; Peak claimed, then disavowed, responsibility for the fire; no one else has ever been arrested in connection with the blaze. Whether Peak was the actual culprit is one of the central questions of Orleans book. Harry Peak emerges into the glare of TV lights after being released from jail on Mar. 2, 1987. Jack Gaunt / Los Angeles Times Orlean describes Peak as the consummate storyteller. Handsome and underemployed, he was a little bit rootless and quite a big talker; some news reports called him a part-time actor. He matched a sketch of the suspect. According to some (but not all) accounts, he was downtown at the time. There were two big storytellers in the book, Orlean tells me. One was Harry Peak and the other was Charles Lummis, who was an incredibly admirable and important figure in the history of LA. Its an unexpected pairing. Lummis was the first city editor of the L.A. Times and founded the Southwest Museum; more pertinent to this story, he was also L.A.s city librarian, a tenure Orlean details in the book. His hand-built stone home, which is now a museum on the southern edge of Highland Park, was known for the rowdy parties he called them noises he threw there. By any measure, Lummis was a significant figure in the history of Los Angeles, while Peak, apart from being the arson suspect, passed through barely leaving a mark. But, Orlean says, Lummis was a bit of a fabulist, and he would tell stories that his friends didn't always believe. So did Peak. We tell stories to ourselves, to each other, Orlean says, as though forgiving the fabricators. It's the lifeblood of being human. Susan Orlean at L.A.'s Central Library. Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times Perhaps she is sympathetic to the tale-spinners, because to be a writer in 2018 means to side with art. Right now, looking at this, you could Google Harry Peak or library fire and easily read the nuggets the internet spits out at you. Orleans project is bigger. It has to be. I think that one of the great burdens of being a nonfiction writer is this feeling that anybody could go look this stuff up, she said. I'm not delivering any information that no one else can access. I've gone on a trip to the pyramids and you're sitting around the dinner table and people say, How was your trip? What were the pyramids like? Well, they could go look it up online, but that's not the point. Pyramids in Egypt or a 32-year-old news story in Los Angeles, the point is elevating the narrative so it tells us something about ourselves or the world, making it something worth noticing. The history of the library is fascinating, and reminding people that libraries are kind of cool and interesting is exciting, Orlean said. I got very charged up about it. Fire Capt. Don Stukey examining the damage after the 1986 fire, which was determined to be arson. Boris Yaro / Los Angeles Times She admits that editors are rarely convinced by her story ideas on the surface. There is some kind of pleasure that I find in saying, I know you think that this couldn't possibly be interesting, but it really is. Give me a minute, I'll persuade you. That awareness that I'm having to prove to people every sentence of the way that this is something worth their time. Seriously, this is super interesting. No, no, wait, wait, no. There's more, she demonstrated. And then there's more, and you're not going to believe. That's how it feels to me, that I'm tugging on somebodys sleeve saying, Wait, wait, one more second. Let me just tell you one more thing, you're not going to believe it. From where we sat at lunch, we could see the library building. I asked our server if she knew that it was the site of the biggest library fire in American history. She didnt. Ooh, I just got the chills, the server said. She turned to Orlean. And you wrote a book about it? Whats it called? What caused the fire? For generations of Angelenos, this will be the first theyve heard of the fire, the massive fight to contain it, the thousands of books frozen in an effort to preserve them, the water damage, the stop-start effort to restore and expand the library where its visionary architect put it at the corner of 5th and Flower in downtown Los Angeles, of the man who may have set it aflame, maybe even of libraries around the world destroyed by fire through the ages, taking untold stories with them. Its all there. They just have to borrow The Library Book. Susan Orlean inside the Los Angeles Central Library. Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times Support our journalism Please consider subscribing today to support stories like this one. Get full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks. Already a subscriber? Your support makes our work possible. Thank you. carolyn.kellogg@latimes.com @paperhaus Former Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett has a compelling family history: her great-grandfather Robert Robinson Taylor became the nations first African American accredited architect and designed much of Tuskegee University. Her grandfather Robert Rochon Taylor was the first African American to chair the Chicago Housing Authority; although the city later named housing projects in his honor that were anathema to his approach to housing, Jarrett laid groundwork that led to their demolition. Her mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, was a leader in early childhood development and a founder of the Erikson Institute. Her father, James E. Bowman, was a renowned pathologist and geneticist ... only after moving the family to Iran for five years because there more more opportunities for black doctors in that dictatorship than in 1950s America. Jarrett was born in Iran and spent her early childhood there. Her new memoir, Finding My Voice, tracks this story and the racism and sexism she faced back in Chicago a city where she eventually became a lawyer, then a power player in City Hall, on the Chicago Transit Board, and in other municipal roles. But readers know whats coming and it arrives later in the book , with a resume from a young job seeker named Michelle Robinson who wont accept a job until Jarrett also meets with Robinsons fiance. That young man, Barack Obama, inevitably becomes a focal point for much of the final 200 pages of Jarretts memoir she becomes like a big sister to both Michelle and Barack, helps advise in his early political career and then in his presidential campaign. Most notably, of course, Jarrett stays by his side for eight years, becoming the longest-serving senior adviser to any president in American history and thus one of the countrys most influential behind-the-scenes figures. Advertisement She recounts key moments like being one of only two black staffers in the meeting discussing how to deal with the Rev. Jeremiah Wrights incendiary speeches during the 2008 campaign; the white senior staffers were concerned about confronting the situation head-on, but Jarrett encouraged Obama to give what became known as the race speech, which proved crucial to his success. Later, in the White House she writes that she saw that the macho atmosphere was causing women to feel unwelcome so she raised the issue with the new president who then hosted a dinner for senior female staffers. It led to dramatic change in tone in the White House. L.A. Times Festival of Books is back! Check out our 2019 lineup for massive literary bonanza launching April 13 and 14 at the USC campus. Jarrett is modest and engaging, someone who does not seek nor relish confrontation nor celebration. These days she is committed to various causes gender equity, voting, reducing gun violence and eagerly anticipating the arrival of her first grandchild in July. But for the moment, she is briefly stepping out into the spotlight. You thread details about racism and sexism your family and you faced throughout your story. Was it vital to emphasize these experiences, and was it tricky to avoid becoming didactic? It is a delicate balance. I tried very hard not to be preachy but to tell the story from my perspective, of an African American woman growing up in a time of much change across the country and the world. I think its better when you hear it through a story instead of Here are 10 lessons about what people need to do. I wanted to inform people but also to motivate them to look at their lives differently. I want them to see that diversity is a strength and inclusion, looking at what we have in common, is better than focusing on our differences. I also dont want this just to be a book for women just because its a womans story. Its important to talk about things we havent talked about like menopause because it helps us understand each other better. When youre trying to focus in a meeting and you have sweat pouring down your face its hard, just like when youre pregnant and going to the bathroom all the time. Back then I was trying to pretend there was nothing happening beneath my neck. We do ourselves a disservice when we do that. How did your background and experiences inform your approach to politics in Chicago and in the White House? My life was one of enormous privilege. I was a young, single mom but one with resources and parents who lived a mile away, and yet I still felt like I was hanging by my fingertips so imagine what it is like for the single mom working a second shift without a safety net of support. I became sensitive to them because of my experience. My parents raised me to take a very realistic look at the world: It isnt fair, and as an African American youre going to have to work twice as hard. But, they said, if you do and you have a little luck then theres no limit to what you can achieve although they said bad things can happen too. They helped me appreciate the art of the possible. Right after the 2008 election, my mother asked me why I thought Barack Obama could win. I said because of how they raised me. She told me she never believed any of that. It was such a shock. I was shaped by their life experiences and the obstacles theyd faced, but they also raised me very aspirationally. A young Valerie Jarrett with her father, James Edward Bowman Jr., a physician and specialist in pathology, hematology and genetics. He was a professor of pathology and genetics at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. (From Valerie Jarrett) You and Barack Obama had similar childhoods, spending time growing up overseas and then coming back to America. Was that an important bond? Yes. We talked about it the first time we met. I told him about growing up in Iran and playing with children from all over the world where we didnt even let language be a barrier we found something in common. My father also taught me that we can learn a great deal outside of our shores, that were not just here to tell the world what to do. That was an important lesson I took into the White House. Do you worry that admirers of the Obamas will jump ahead to when you first encounter them? Thats a very good question. Its possible. But Ive given the book to people whose opinions I trust and the early sections were the most interesting to them. Im not selling this as a tell-all the Obamas are two of my dearest friends and I never marketed it as the back-room stories of the White House. Theres no index, by design. My editor and I both agreed to send a message that this book is not just about looking up certain parts. Was it difficult showing your impact on Barack Obamas campaigns and presidency without feeling immodest? It was the hardest part. I picked the story about the race speech and about the dinner for the women staffers to show why diversity is a strength thats the point I was trying to make. If he didnt have diverse views talking about whether or not to give the race speech, maybe he wouldnt have given it. It was helpful to have people affirming what he wanted to do the other people couldnt see that. With the women in the White House, people were thinking things were going perfectly fine and werent noticing the voices were shrinking. Being the person who could provide a different perspective is important. Valerie Jarrett is the author of the new memoir Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward. (Viking) What do you hope readers take away from the book? I hope they are inspired to find their voices and use them to be a be a catalyst for change, to feel motivated to be a part of our democracy, to do something to strengthen our country. I still feel optimistic about the potential of ordinary people to do extraordinary things. We shouldnt cling to the safety of the straight line but to have the courage to embrace the adventure of the zigzag. I was afraid. I was painfully shy. I wasnt terribly passionate about my career and so I made a change. I hope people take ownership of their own lives and find a willingness to take risks and have confidence in their resilience. :: Finding My Voice Valerie Jarrett Viking; 320 pp., $30 Valerie Jarrett at the Festival of Books: Jarrett appears at 12:30 p.m. April 13 at the Bovard auditorium as part of the ticketed Ideas Exchange, interviewed by Times White House editor Jackie Calmes. Boeing Co. and U.S. aviation regulators say the company needs more time to finish changes in a flight-control system suspected of playing a role in two deadly crashes. The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday that it expects Boeings final software improvements for 737 Max airliners in the coming weeks. Boeing was expected to complete the work last week, but FAA spokesman Greg Martin said the Chicago company needs more time to make sure it has identified and addressed all issues. Boeing offered the same timetable as it works to convince regulators that it can fix software on the planes. Advertisement Safety is our first priority, and we will take a thorough and methodical approach to the development and testing of the update to ensure we take the time to get it right, Boeing spokesman Charles Bickers said. Boeing needs approval from not just the FAA but also regulators elsewhere, including Europe and China, where safety officials have indicated they will conduct their own reviews. The planes have been grounded around the world since mid-March. The news from the FAA suggests that airlines could be forced to park their Max jets longer than they expected. Airlines that own Max jets are scrambling other planes to fill some Max flights while canceling others. We are aware that the resumption of service for our 737 Max aircraft may be further delayed, and our team will work with all customers impacted by any flight cancellations, American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said. How a 50-year-old design came back to haunt Boeing with its troubled 737 Max jet American Airlines had been pointing toward a late-April return of its 24 Max 8 planes. Over the weekend, Southwest Airlines announced that its 34 Max 8 planes will be removed from the schedule through May instead of mid-April. United Airlines has idled its 14 Max 9 planes through June 5. Separately, U.S. regulators and Boeing are awaiting a preliminary report from Ethiopian investigators into the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 jet shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa. The report will be scrutinized for information from the planes data recorders that might suggest similarities between the doomed flight and the Oct. 29 crash of a Lion Air Max 8 into the Java Sea off Indonesia. The two crashes killed a total of 346 people. Data from the Indonesian plane indicate that pilots unsuccessfully fought the automated anti-stall system for control of the plane, which plunged into the sea shortly after takeoff. According to news reports, the same system activated on the Ethiopian Airlines flight. Boeing is making changes in an automated system that is designed to prevent the planes nose from rising, which can lead to a dangerous aerodynamic stall. The changes include relying on readings from more than one sensor before the anti-stall system activates and pushes the nose down, and making the systems actions less severe and easier for pilots to handle. Boeing has said it will pay to train pilots on the technology. Two American Airlines pilots who attended a session with Boeing experts last week expressed satisfaction with the manufacturers changes. Americans chief 737 pilot, Roddy Guthrie, said Boeing added some checks and balances in the system that will make the system much better. Rebecca Esparza works with homeless people and, having once lived in a shelter herself, knows what its like to navigate the U.S. economy if you dont have much money. For most of her clients, cash is king because they lack access to the financial tools many Americans take for granted checking accounts, debit cards, payment apps. Esparza worries that the growing number of cashless stores and restaurants around the country will further marginalize low-income people at a time when inequality is already the highest in more than half a century. We just forget just how poor the poor can actually be in this country, said Esparza, who works at the Lawrence, Kan., affiliate of the nonprofit Family Promise and once sold her blood to support herself and her five children. I could totally be part of that cashless system today, but it would totally discriminate. Legislators around the country agree with Esparza and are taking steps to halt or slow the march toward a cashless society. Last month, New Jersey passed legislation banning many kinds of cashless stores, joining Massachusetts, which has a 1978 law prohibiting discrimination against customers opting to use cash, and Philadelphia, which adopted a similar law in February. Advertisement San Francisco has proposed a ban on stores like Amazon Go and Nestle-owned Blue Bottle, which has stopped accepting cash as a test at some of its coffee shops. Ritchie Torres of the New York City Council is leading efforts to ban cashless retail there, and lawmakers in Chicago and Washington, D.C., have considered similar proposals in recent years. Proponents of cashless stores tout various benefits. Electronic payments save employees the time it takes to collect, store and transport cash. Theft is less likely. Customers typically move faster through checkout lines because they dont need to count out their cash or wait for change. Some argue that technology, having helped usher in cashless payments, can provide a solution. Companies such as Square Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. offer payment services that dont require a bank account; theyre gaining some traction with the working poor and could eventually provide an alternative to banning cashless stores outright. The vast majority of U.S. retailers and restaurants accept cash. And those that dont often cater to wealthier customers. The best-known example is Amazon Go, a chain of cashierless convenience stores that carry upscale fare such as artisanal cheeses and locally made chocolates. Amazon.com Inc. operates only 10 Go stores in three cities, but it eventually could open as many as 3,000, according to people familiar with the matter. The fear is that if cashless shopping catches on, more and more retailers will follow suit. Many local restaurants no longer accept hard currency because handling cash can add as much as 10% to overhead costs, said Richard Crone, chief executive of payments expert Crone Consulting. In five years, he said, a third of all retail will be cashless, up from about 17% today. About 10% of brick-and-mortar stores will be cashless, up from less than 1% today, he said. A trillion-dollar behemoth like Amazon has the ability to spread widely throughout the country, said Torres, the New York City Council member. So a trend that might start at the margin can proliferate overnight. In 2017, 6.5% of U.S. households were unbanked, lacking a checking or savings account, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.s latest available national survey. And 18.7% fell into the broad underbanked category, meaning they had a bank account but used at least one alternative service such as money orders, check cashing or payday loans. There are a variety of reasons Americans use cash. Even with a steady income, people living paycheck to paycheck may not have enough money to keep in a bank account. Some dont want to pay the fees; others dont trust banks or are concerned about privacy. The homeless are especially vulnerable. If they lose their documents, they often have trouble getting replacements. Michelle Jones, 37, who arrived in Seattle in 2001 as a homeless youth, lost her Social Security card three times and said it was stolen once. Even just to get a bank account, of course you need to have an ID, said Jones, who now works for the Metropolitan Improvement District, a nonprofit helping the homeless population in Seattles downtown. Getting an ID can take months. And during that time they cant get any work at all. And at that point they are falling more into the pattern of listlessness. Another barrier to opening a bank account: lack of steady income. Some receive cash only from panhandling and dont have enough money to put in a bank account anyway. Plus, many banks require secondary proofs of identity, such as a utility bill which homeless people dont have. For people trying to climb out of poverty, forgoing cards is also often a necessity to staying afloat. Kat Lilley, who along with six children, ages 18 months to 12 years was homeless from summer 2013 to early 2014, often had to make ends meet with $761 a month. She used envelopes and cash to better budget expenditures. When you are on a shoestring budget, a little hiccup can lead to a snowball of overdraft fees, she said. So a lot of families resort to cash. She encourages the homeless families she now helps as executive director of Family Promise of Colorado Springs, Colo., to use envelopes to learn how to better manage money. For technologists, a cashless society is a cherished dream, one thats already becoming a reality in other countries even ones with large populations of low-income people. Almost half of Chinas population already uses mobile phones for cashless payments, according to EMarketer. The Indian government is promoting digital payments to stamp out endemic corruption, and local payment services such as Paytm have been signing up millions of people. In Sweden, often described as the most cashless society on earth, just 25% of Swedes paid in cash at least once a week in 2017. Now local authorities wonder if money is disappearing too quickly and could hurt people, such as the elderly, who havent yet joined the digital age. Swedish legislators are expected to adopt a proposal forcing banks to keep offering cash to customers who require it. The U.S. is just weird historically, in that we have a lot of competition and banks dont give accounts to a lot of low-income people, said Mehrsa Baradaran, author of How the Other Half Banks. We also have a lot of areas in the country where banks arent locating any more. We have a more stratified society, poverty is more pronounced here than in other places. There are some poorer countries that are mobile; we just have not built that infrastructure. Many homeless and low-income people use Green Dot reloadable prepaid debit cards. But they come with heavy fees: a $7.95 monthly charge on low amounts, plus as much as $4.95 for every reload and $3 for ATM withdrawals. Several digital payment services are becoming a go-to for the working poor. Squares Cash mobile payment app enables users to send and receive peer-to-peer payments, arrange to have paychecks directly deposited and spend their balances using a free Visa debit card. It stores money electronically without linking to a bank account. PayPal has introduced similar capabilities on its platform. Although the Square service wasnt designed specifically for low-income Americans, its becoming a boon to the unbanked and underbanked. People are using this as their primary spending device and primary banking account, and in some cases, their only banking account, Square CEO Jack Dorsey said at a conference last year. Were reaching an audience which is consistent with how we started the company that is underserved, No. 1, and even to the point of unbanked completely, which wasnt a stated goal initially but something that we really love and want to lean into more. Chime, a San Francisco-based fintech startup, is one of a growing number of challenger banks disrupting the status quo by doing away with the fees charged by traditional consumer institutions. The online service targets people who live paycheck to paycheck, offering savings and checking accounts without minimum balance requirements, monthly service fees or overdraft charges. Chime makes money by collecting part of the interchange fee on its debit card. The company says it added 2 million accounts in the past year, bringing the total to 3 million since its founding in 2013. The banks kick them while theyre down with these fees, said Zach Smith, Chimes vice president of product. Were a bank in your pocket. Weve built everything from the ground up. That allows us to operate with extremely low costs and then pass those savings onto our members in the form of no-fee services. The technology is improving, and at least one advocate for the working poor acknowledges that the likes of Square and Chime are making a difference. Darren Liddell, director of program innovation at the Financial Clinic, a New York nonprofit that teaches clients how to manage money, said the innovations are a step in the right direction, although navigating financial tech and apps can still be difficult for customers. To issue a debit card, Cash and Chime each require some personal information, including a mailing address, birth date and Social Security number. That can still be a deal-breaker for the homeless and for people concerned about privacy. Know Your Customer rules require financial institutions to verify account holders identities. Other drawbacks include fees associated with depositing or loading cash onto some debit cards, for which third-party merchants often charge, although Chime is looking at ways to make even that free for members. So while there is progress, a representative from the Financial Clinic testified at a February hearing in support of Torres proposed ban on cashless stores in New York. The tech solutions that are coming up are innovative and amazing, but they havent reached our customers in numbers where we think that its OK for businesses to stop taking cash, Liddell said. I suspect that there will be a time in America where well start to have those conversations. I just dont think were there yet. Writer-showrunner Ted Humphrey, whose credits include The Good Wife and Incorporated, is ready to relinquish his Beverly Hills home of seven years. The private retreat is up for grabs at $2.989 million. Thats about $1.15 million more than he paid for it in 2012, records show. Tucked behind gates and foliage on a quarter-acre, the 1960s residence got some work done during Humphreys stay. Oak floors and recessed art lighting breathe life into the interior, which offers four bedrooms and four bathrooms across 3,101 square feet. 1 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 2 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 3 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 4 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 5 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 6 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 7 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 8 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 9 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 10 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 11 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 12 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 13 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 14 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 15 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 16 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 17 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 18 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 19 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 20 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 21 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 22 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 23 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 24 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 25 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 26 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) 27 / 27 Ted Humphreys Beverly Hills home (Keller Williams Realty) Advertisement A three-sided fireplace anchors a step-down living room adjoined by a formal dining room. Farther in, a remodeled kitchens adds custom cabinetry, built-in booth seating and a wine cooler. Upstairs, the master suite expands to a private balcony, and its bathroom takes in leafy views through bay windows. An office and two-car garage used as a gym fill out the rest of the floor plan. A covered patio lines the homes backside, opening up to a private landscaped backyard with a swimming pool, spa and fire pit. In addition, a detached studio with wood walls, beamed ceilings and built-ins adds 100 square feet of flexible living space. Jeff Yarbrough of Keller Williams Beverly Hills holds the listing. In addition to The Good Wife, Humphrey has produced and written for dramas such as The Unit and Shark. More recently, he was the creator and showrunner of Wisdom of the Crowd. jack.flemming@latimes.com | Twitter: @jflem94 The streets of Downtown Mexico City are never silent during the daylight hours thanks to the nostalgic melodies played by organ grinders, whose presence in the capital seems to be anchored to the past. Their pervasive and strident music blends in with the mixture of sounds that is everywhere in the capitals downtown, including the raucous noises produced by the knife sharpeners or the whistling of the little chimneys on the sweet-potato vendors carts. The organ grinders create an atmosphere of melancholy that is in danger of extinction, even though for many of them - by family tradition - it is their sole livelihood. Since they started showing up in this city, standing still among the myriads of pedestrians walking through the historic city center, the organ grinders have gone through many ups and downs but they have managed to hang on. Luis Roman Dichi is one of the survivors and also serves as general secretary of the Mexican Organ Grinders Union, the only union that still represents the profession and the only entity with which those who want to get started in it have to register. He inherited the profession from his in-laws and said that the business could get complicated if youre doing something you dont like, but if you can keep your income well-organized and, above all, if youve got a passion for it, you can have a pleasant life. Holding his 26-key Harmonipan brand street organ, Dichi told EFE in an interview that the very first organ grinders appeared in 1890 with the arrival of circuses, which used them to announce their shows around the city. At the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, the organ grinders established themselves in the capital and began making their livings playing music for others in exchange for tips and the tradition continued developing as they changed their circus melodies for typical Mexican songs that - for the most part - referred to the Revolution. Mexican philosopher and essayist Hector Zagal agrees with this version of history and attributes the prominence acquired by organ grinders early on to the lack of ways in which people could listen to music in those years. Now we have access to Spotify and everyone has more music available than (Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain in the mid-1500s) Carlos the Fifth himself in all his glory, Zagal told EFE. There are different theories regarding the origin of their costumes, which are reminiscent of those used by Pancho Villas army during the Revolution. Their attire, according to Dichi, may stem from the mid-1960s, when total anarchy reigned in Mexicos street jobs and the city government was demanding that some kind of order be imposed. However, Zagal said that the most widespread theory suggests that in Villas army there was an organ grinder who cheered up the troops with his music and theres probably a relationship between this and the uniforms that resemble those of the revolutionary forces. The outfit is distinguished by its color - between beige and khaki - and includes a round cap of the same hue that is usually used to collect coins from passersby. After this golden era, during which the organ grinders rose in popularity and earnings, shortly after World War Two the German factory that manufactured the instruments - Wagner & Levien - stopped building them. However, there were people who acquired the street organs and rented them out, and thus the profession managed to survive. But during the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Mexico City government launched a project to restore the historic city center, and the plan called for preserving the organ grinders as an institution. Dichi mentioned that the number of organ grinders operating throughout the downtown area has been declining, but only very slowly, in part thanks to the support of local government. Until now, the characteristic street organs sound - produced by a crank that drives a bellows and rotates the organ and is considered by some to be pleasant and by others to be out of tune - continues to be heard on many of the capitals busiest street corners. Juan Daniel Tepozotlan, a 24-year-old organ grinder who said he decided to embark on this musical adventure to have time to continue studying, plays in parts of the city where not many of his colleagues perform. Tepozotlan told EFE that at first, he felt a little embarrassed when he was out on the street but he soon began to connect with the instrument and with the people who love it. I am very grateful for this job. It has given me many things like being able to move up professionally, in knowledge, in beautiful experiences and in achieving goals. I feel very comfortable with it although I have other plans in life, Tepozotlan said. By Ines Amarelo. Early on in the London stage production of All About Eve, Gillian Andersons Margo Channing removes her stage makeup in a bright dressing room mirror. As she swipes away the layers, Andersons face is projected in close-up on massive video screens, which magnify the actual lines and dark circles under her eyes. Its a moment of realization for the audience: This is no straightforward production. This is a story about seeing the truth in ourselves. A couple people have said, Youre so brave, said Anderson, sitting in her basement dressing room at the Noel Coward Theatre. So much of what we see of people these days is Photoshopped and filtered, so the fact that Im allowing the audience to see all the nooks and crannies of my face is unusual. And I hadnt thought about that until someone said it. I didnt feel brave in doing it, at all. Anderson arrived at the role of Margo, the aging theater diva faced with a diminishing career and a potential rival in her young assistant, Eve Harrington (Lily James), by happenstance. Andersons boyfriend, writer Peter Morgan (The Crown, Frost/Nixon), had suggested she look into whether the 1950 Bette Davis-Anne Baxter film had ever been translated to the stage when she discovered theater director Ivo van Hove was already adaptating Joseph L. Mankiewiczs screenplay. Advertisement SPRING ARTS PREVIEW: Critics recommendations and emerging artists to know now I was trying to find out what his plans were for how he was going to cast it, Anderson recalled. Then I found out that Cate Blanchett was doing it, and so I slowly backed into the shadows and thought, Man, do I want to see that. Blanchett, it would turn out, had a scheduling conflict. Anderson signed on, and her thoughtful performance has earned her a lead actress nomination for the Olivier Awards on Sunday. The recognition comes despite the fact that the cast, which includes Monica Dolan and Julian Ovenden, had just four weeks to rehearse. Actors were instructed to arrive off-book on Day 1. There was almost no discussion of the text, so Anderson slowly worked out Margos mindset and motivations along the way, well into previews in early February. Part of the challenge was working with a camera crew that filmed the stage action live to be projected on the aforementioned video screens. (Van Hove did something similar in last years adaptation of Network.) I wasnt nervous about the cameras, but what was very clear when we started out was that none of us quite knew what it was that we had, Anderson said. I know thats always slightly the case because ones never in the audience looking back, but for some reason with this I think we didnt quite know how it fit together, or whether it all fit together, or what it was that we had until wed been doing it properly for a while. And then something seeped in and we understood it. Gillian Anderson with Julian Ovenden in All About Eve in London. (Jan Versweyveld) This version of All About Eve has vintage and contemporary touches. The set and lighting design, created by Van Hoves longtime collaborator (and partner) Jan Versweyveld, reflect a span from the 1950s to today, as do the glamorous costumes. The story, very much a product of its time, needed to resonate with a modern audience, a sentiment that was essential to Anderson as she considered Margo. The film is known as being an iconic feminist tale, and yet in the film Margo very much is beholden to men, the actress said. She has a speech where she says women are not women unless they have men. From the very beginning, it was important for me to open that conversation up. The way I ended up making it work was having her speak from her own experience. Not saying women but saying I shes talking specifically about her boyfriend Bill and how, up until that point, she has chosen her career as her focus and love. She realizing how much she suddenly values him and the relationship, and that she is more of who she is with him in her life. Thats still an OK thing to own and to accept and to embrace. She added, thinking back, It did make a difference, because all women have different experiences. Some women are not validated by men or interested in men, and some women dont identify as womanly. It felt like it was making it more relatable. All About Eve is often seen as a story of female rivals, but in Van Hoves production its more about the way in which people see and are seen, an idea thats reinforced by the video screens and mirrors. Anderson plays Margo as an excitable, out-of-touch celebrity and also as a woman sincerely grappling with her identity. If her career is coming to an end, what then is her currency? It does feel particularly topical, Anderson said. The fact that it is such a female-led story is important today. Or at least, theres more of a desire to see female-led stories and listen to female characters, so its fallen at the right time. Women reach a point, Anderson said, where they wonder: What have I done with my life? Where has it all gone, and whats next? With this it took me longer to figure her out, Gillian Anderson said of her character, Margo Channing. (Perou) MORE THEATER: Age 28, going on 12. How adult actors pull off playing children onstage The Olivier nomination is Andersons third, following nods in the same category for A Street Car Named Desire in 2015 and A Dolls House in 2010. The latest nomination came only a few weeks into the plays run, which surprised the actress given that she was still perfecting her performance. With Streetcar I felt like I showed up already having known who she was for 30 years of my life because it was something Id wanted to do for so long, Anderson said with a laugh. But with this it took me longer to figure her out. All About Eve debuted a few weeks after Andersons Netflix series Sex Education, which has generated an overwhelmingly positive response. She was drawn to the role of Jean Milburn, a sex therapist whose son has some sexual issues of his own, primarily because it was funny and would allow her to showcase a lighter side of herself. Its a vibe shes maintained on social media since the show premiered, and Anderson posts a yoni of the day on Twitter in celebration of female sexuality. I dont often get offered comedies, she said. I laughed out loud many, many times over reading the scripts. A good fifth of the episodes we did on [The X-Files] were comedy episodes. So I feel like Ive shown that I can. But yet people just dont think about me that way. That stuff just doesnt come my way, so I exacerbate it by then choosing things like The Fall, which is not comedic at all. Hopefully something like this will change that and there will be more of a range. Once All About Eve wraps May 11, Anderson will take a few weeks off before shooting the second season of Sex Education. She has a few other projects lined up that may or may not include The Crown a casting rumor that is not official, according to Anderson all of which keep her home in the U.K. In the meantime All About Eve will be broadcast in movie theaters around the world by National Theatre Live on April 11, with occasional encore performances after that. Ask Anderson about prospects of the play transferring to New York or elsewhere, and shell say she isnt ready to think about that. Shes still working through Margo, finding new ways of playing her every night. Sometimes the performance feels good, sometimes it feels like her best effort yet, and sometimes it just feels weird. And thats fine. In a few months, Anderson will look back and shell see yet another reflection of herself. I feel like I dont necessarily figure my characters out until after Ive played them, she said with a shrug. Its almost like my version of them informs me who they are rather than me knowing. All About Eve What: National Theatre Live will present the London production broadcast to select movie theaters starting April 11, with encores presented occasionally into July. Check the website for specific dates. Where: Southern California theaters include James Bridges at UCLA, Irvine Barclay in Irvine, Reading Cinemas at Cal Oaks Plaza in Murrieta, Tristone Palm Desert 10, and Angelika Film Center Carmel Mountain and Reading Cinemas Town Square in San Diego Info: NTLive.NationalTheatre.org.uk Support our coverage of the arts scene by becoming a digital subscriber. See all of our latest arts news and reviews at latimes.com/arts. Within weeks, the County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on releasing $117.5 million in taxpayer funds to help build a much-needed new home for the imposing permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The total price tag to replace four crumbling and inefficient buildings is $650 million, with the lions share privately funded. I do not envy the supervisors their task. Once assured, viewed almost as a slam-dunk, the vote is now a gnawing puzzlement. Thats because of some startling news that broke last week. We learned on the eve of the decision that the ambitious construction plan at the Wilshire Boulevard campus has been radically downsized. What was once a project designed to add nearly 50,000 square feet of critically needed gallery space committed to showcasing the museums impressive and still-growing permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other global works of art has been turned on its head. Now, rather than enlarge the capacity, the scheme is to reduce the existing gallery square footage by more than 10,000 square feet. Advertisement Adding 50,000 square feet might not even have been enough. Subtracting 10,000 is absurd. LACMA has become the Incredible Shrinking Museum. I couldnt name another art museum anywhere that has ever raised hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on reducing its collection space. Peter Zumthor, 75, the celebrated Swiss architect chosen almost a decade ago for the job by LACMA Director Michael Govan, is known as a slow, deliberate designer whose aim is to craft evocative, atmospheric spaces. The museum, his first building in the United States, is easily the largest he has tackled. Zumthors building would replace three existing structures erected when LACMA opened in 1965, plus a fourth completed in 1985. Together, they contain 120,000 square feet of collection galleries. The size of new gallery space has been a moving target from the beginning. In 2013, as a debut exhibition of preliminary building designs was being readied, a LACMA spokesman explained to The Times that the new facility would essentially replicate the existing square footage of what was being torn down, rather than giving the museums collection additional room. The following year, in the run-up to the Board of Supervisors vote on earmarking project funds, Govan told a meeting of editors and reporters at The Times that the display area had changed. The designs newest iteration would enlarge space for the permanent collection by 50,000 square feet. Barely a year later, as LACMA prepared celebrations for its 50th anniversary, that number had already been trimmed. The expansion was pegged at an additional 40,000 square feet 10,000 less, but still roughly the size of LACMAs newly built Resnick Pavilion, the hall where temporary exhibitions are shown. And there the number stood until the completed environmental impact report was filed with the county on March 22. Eagle-eyed William Poundstone, who writes at his ironically named blog Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, named for a famous Ed Ruscha painting, waded through the 577-page report. He discovered that the plan for galleries had shrunk to 109,900 square feet a precipitous drop from the 170,000 square feet contemplated in 2014, and smaller than whats there now. From nearly 42% more gallery space when the Board of Supervisors gave preliminary approval to the rebuilding plan, there will now be about 8% less than LACMA has today. Frankly, thats a disaster for adequate display of the permanent collection. From nearly 42% more gallery space when the Board of Supervisors gave preliminary approval ... there will now be about 8% less than LACMA has today. LACMAs collection is something of a miracle, the bulk of its roughly 125,000 objects acquired just in the last six decades. Encyclopedic in range, with superlative holdings in Dutch Golden Age painting, South Asian sculpture, ceramics from ancient West Mexico, Korean ancestor portraits and Joseon dynasty vessels, modern German Expressionism, Safavid dynasty art from Iran and much more, it compares favorably when measured against encyclopedic museums of much older vintage. That collection will continue to grow. LACMA last year reported adding art valued at more than $35 million, most of it from gifts. But the new building cannot grow with it. Zumthors design is self-contained. A single-story, curvilinear structure is raised on massive piers to span Wilshire Boulevard at Spaulding Avenue. Additions are out of the question. Why the shrinkage? Sluggish fundraising is one speculation. However, a dubious shift in museum philosophy is just as likely. Given vast L.A. sprawl, the museum has promoted developing satellite facilities. A small one is in place at the Vincent Price Museum at East Los Angeles College, and two more are planned for South L.A. Fine with me except, not for the permanent collection. An encyclopedic or universal museum is distinct from other kinds for its diverse global holdings. Uniquely valuable because that diversity is pulled together in one place, it reflects the cosmopolitan urbanity of a modern city. A rendering of the proposed museum interior (Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner) Creating such a collection has been labored over for half a century by countless LACMA curators. Balkanizing it into satellites defeats the purpose. Satellites only work for temporary exhibitions, not permanent collections. LACMA, however, is also planning to remove permanence from its new Wilshire Boulevard collection galleries. Instead, works culled from the collection will be assembled as temporary theme shows. The strategic change was illustrated by a recently closed example at the Resnick To Rome and Back, a thin and ineffective look at ancient Rome as an artistic inspiration over centuries. The show was an embarrassment. Presumably those collection theme shows might someday circulate among LACMAs future satellites a local version of the Guggenheim Museums failed effort to franchise the New York institution in a host of global cities. Govan was deputy director at the Guggenheim from 1988 to 1994, when initial plans were drawn for its branded satellite in Bilbao, Spain. Bilbao has a brilliant, now-famous Frank Gehry building and a generic, barely noteworthy art collection. The hapless Rome show, a sample of whats to come, confirmed my skepticism about the unique and risky plan, which I expressed to Govan in conversation a few years back. Not to worry, he reasonably argued; if thematic collection installations dont work out, nothing prevents a future return to standard encyclopedic displays based on simple geography and chronology. Except, now something does. Diminished gallery space prevents it. There is no turning back. Another view of Peter Zumthors revised LACMA building spanning Wilshire Boulevard, with the nearby high-rise providing rental office space for museum staff. (Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner) THROUGH THE YEARS: LACMAs five decades on Miracle Mile Other practical problems plague the museum design, starting with the absence of curators offices. The collections custodians, along with most of the remaining professional staff, will be housed in a skyscraper across the street, occupying five full floors of rental space. Curators in exile? Ideally, curatorial offices should open directly onto galleries, so that staff has daily interaction with the collection in its public domain. Its true that art museums are more expensive to build than routine office space, but rental expenses in perpetuity more than eradicate any upfront savings. The initial outlay is simply the cost of doing effective museum business. The $600-million price tag presented to county officials in 2014 for their initial project greenlight soon bumped up to $650 million. With a reduced building plan now, LACMA is offering less art for more money. Is an Incredible Shrinking Museum really worthy of taxpayer support? Sometimes it takes a village. Specifically, one made of aluminum shipping containers. Photoville, New Yorks largest photography event, is rolling into Los Angeles for the first time in late April. The free pop-up photography festival will rise in a veritable village of repurposed shipping containers, immersive photo cubes and giant LED boxes at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City. The event, created by the Brooklyn-based public art nonprofit United Photo Industries, has been running for seven years in New York in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Expansion was inevitable, said Photoville co-founder Laura Roumanos, though L.A.s recent art-fair blitz was not necessarily the impetus. Photoville is not an art fair, its a celebration of visual storytelling, Roumanos said. Its about bringing the photography and visual storytelling community together, not about commerce and business. Its free. Were inviting people from all over Southern California. Its about making this kind of work accessible to all people. Advertisement Annenberg Space for Photography Presents Photoville L.A. will host more than 55 exhibitions and installations over two weekends, April 26-28 and May 2-5. About half of the 200-plus visual artists involved are based in Southern California. Some of the work on view is fine art, but theres an emphasis on documentary photography, Roumanos said, and storytelling across all different kinds of mediums, including animation and short films. The Los Angeles Times is an exhibiting partner at the event. California Calamities: A State of Emergency will showcase environment-related visual stories by Times photographers. SPRING ARTS PREVIEW: Critics recommendations and profiles of the emerging artists you should know In other parts of the show, L.A. photographer and writer Oriana Koren will explore the Underground Chefs of South Central, and local photographer Estevan Oriol will show This Is Los Angeles, about the citys lowrider culture. A retrospective of photojournalist Joseph Rodriguezs work will showcase more than two decades of his imagery covering gang life. Photoville L.A. marks the Annenberg Space for Photographys 10th anniversary. Weve admired United Photo Industries Photoville for many years, Annenberg Foundation President Wallis Annenberg said via email how they create their festive photography village, an immersive atmosphere where visitors can appreciate and learn about the work of world-class photographers who challenge us to see the world in new ways. Longevity, Roumanos added, is a goal. We want our artists and curators and partner organizations to reach bigger audiences in L.A., she said. The idea is for the L.A. arts community to start reaching out to each other now, start cross-promoting and working together not only once a year, but all year long. Photoville L.A. Where: Annenberg Space for Photography, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, L.A. When: April 26-28 and May 2-5 Admission: Free Info: www.photoville.la The late blues musician B.B. King forged one of the most enduring relationships in music history with his guitar Lucille. Its the name the 15-time Grammy winner, who died last week at age 89 in Las Vegas, gave his beloved Gibson ES-355, one of the most famous instruments in history. But there was more than one Lucille in Kings life. The first guitar to take the name was nothing fancy. In 1949, King rescued his $30 Gibson L-30 acoustic from a fire at an Arkansas venue that started with two men fighting over a woman named Lucille. King named the guitar after her. The bluesman played many different guitars over the years (mainly Gibsons), but the instrument most associated with him is the Gibson ES-355 semi-hollow body electric he played for decades. A variation on Gibsons ES-335 semi-acoustic, the ES-355 had been Kings instrument of choice since 1959. Advertisement Henry Juszkiewicz, chief executive of Nashville-based Gibson Guitar Corp., said the association with King has been a boon for the company and its image. Weve acquired a bit of his halo, Juszkiewicz said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Plenty of musicians have strong associations with the guitars they play Eric Claptons Stratocaster and Angus Youngs red Gibson SG come to mind but few have built the legacy of Kings Lucille and her sweet, stinging wail. PHOTOS: B.B. King | Life in Pictures King even wrote a 10-minute song about his guitar called Lucille. Released on a 1968 album of the same name, it tells the story of the prized guitar, and also chronicles his own rise from Mississippi plantation worker to King of the Blues. King often played stock guitars, sometimes stopping by a Gibson showroom on the day of a set to pick one up. In the early 1980s, King and Gibson teamed up for a special Lucille model, removing the f-holes to limit feedback. As he got older, he developed a taste for more ornate guitars to go with his colorful jackets and black bow tie. Gibsons black B.B. King Lucille 2015, which lists for $4,199, features gold-plated hardware, mother of pearl inlays, and, of course, the Lucille signature on the headstock. Juszkiewicz admits the company doesnt sell many Lucille guitars, but noted that interest could pick up in the wake of Kings passing. A 2007 Guitar Player magazine article quoted King explaining how he settled on his trademark instrument. Fenders, Gretsches, Silvertones you name them, Ive probably had one, the guitarist told the magazine. When I found that Gibson with the long neck, that did it. Thats like finding your wife forever. Juszkiewicz said Gibson was considering various ways to honor King in the near future and would discuss options with his family. The company may put on an event at Gibsons factory in Memphis, Tenn., off Beale Street, and probably create something more permanent at the location. Fittingly, the building is just a short walk from a B.B. Kings Blues Club. Juszkiewicz said King will be best remembered for his soul and his sound, which is inextricably linked with Gibson. King and his guitar produced a tone that was his, alone. It was like someones voice, Juszkiewicz said. You can hear one note played by B.B. and you know its B.B. Follow Ryan Faughnder on Twitter for more entertainment business coverage: @rfaughnder ALSO: The quotable B.B. King Tributes pour in for B.B. King The B.B. Boxs influence on guitarists Five tracks to hear beyond The Thrill Is Gone B.B. King on dying: I pray to God itll happen one of three ways Follow Ryan Faughnder on Twitter for more entertainment business coverage: @rfaughnder Joe Biden has friends in Hollywood, with Alyssa Milano and the cast of The View chief among them. Whoopi Goldberg, Meghan McCain and the rest of the View gang defended the former vice president Monday after Nevada politician Lucy Flores said that Biden made her feel uneasy in 2014 by getting too close on the campaign trail. Later that day, actress-activist Milano chimed in on Bidens behalf as well, with a thread on Twitter. Flores, while not accusing the possible presidential candidate of sexual harassment, told a story in a Friday essay for the Cut about when Biden showed up to support her bid for the Nevada lieutenant governorship. As they waited to go onstage, lined up in order of introduction, he came up close behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, inhaled her hair and then kissed her on the back of the head, she said. Advertisement [H]e made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused, Flores wrote. The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners and I felt powerless to do anything about it. The women of The View all agreed that she should have said something in the moment if she was uncomfortable, though Joy Behar noted briefly that any kind of reprimand is hard to say to somebody whos sniffing your hair. Then Behar said, I feel it would be really unfortunate if we got rid of everybody who was just an affectionate kind of person. Those are nice people too. Goldberg and McCain both personally vouched for Biden, with Goldberg calling him a hands-on kind of guy. McCain likened him in some ways to her father, the late Sen. John McCain, in that he and Biden were the only politicians who shook hands with everyone in the audience when they visited The View. Ive had concerns about the #MeToo movement from the beginning, co-host Abby Huntsman said, about getting to this place where you cant have normal interactions with each other. Its not every day you see The View crew enthusiastically agreeing with one another, thats for sure. Biden referred to himself in a March speech as a tactile politician, and on Friday he issued a statement saying that while he and his staff didnt remember the event, Flores had every right to share her own recollections. RELATED: Cory Booker and Rosario Dawson should have a White House wedding, says Ellen DeGeneres Flores, incidentally, had explained her lack of immediate response in her essay. My brain couldnt process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused , wrote Flores, who attended a rally Saturday for 2020 candidate Beto ORourke and supported Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016. I couldnt move and I couldnt say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience. Later on Monday, via Twitter, Milano chimed in, and drew attention to Bidens work with Its On Us, which was created in 2014 to help end sexual assault. I am proud to call Joe Biden a friend. He has been a leader and a champion on fighting violence against women for many years, and I have been fortunate to accompany him to events with survivors where he has listened to their stories, empathized with them, and comforted them, the actress said in a series of tweets. I respect Lucy Flores decision to share her story and agree with Biden that we all must pay attention to it. But, just as we must believe women that decide to come forward, we cannot assume all womens experiences are the same, Milano added. I believe that Joe Bidens intent has never been to make anyone uncomfortable, and that his kind, empathetic leadership is what our country needs. Especially now. Biden hasnt officially thrown his hat into the Democratic presidential ring yet, but one thing seems clear: Hollywood will be there waiting for him if he does. I am proud to call Joe Biden a friend. He has been a leader and a champion on fighting violence against women for many years, and I have been fortunate to accompany him to events with survivors where he has listened to their stories, empathized with them, and comforted them. pic.twitter.com/cI0jsKlu3P Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) April 2, 2019 cdz@latimes.com @theCDZ on Twitter and Instagram Claire Denis is a filmmakers filmmaker. Though the French writer-director has never had a commercial breakthrough in the U.S., she has been a steady presence in international cinema circles from her debut feature Chocolat in 1988 through such titles as 1999s Beau Travail, 2010s White Material, starring Isabelle Huppert, and Let the Sunshine In, which starred Juliette Binoche and was released in the U.S. last year. In part, Denis is so well-regarded because she remains so unpredictable. There is no signature style to her work and it remains surprising with each and every film. Her latest, High Life, which opens in New York and Los Angeles this week via A24, arrives with higher than usual commercial expectations. Long in the works, the film is a lo-fi sci-fi story that finds Denis working for the first time in the English language. She also has as a star Robert Pattinson, who continues his post-Twilight run of working with truly singular filmmakers. Advertisement Pattinson plays Monte, a man alone on a spaceship with his daughter Willow. Except they werent always alone Monte was a death-row inmate sent into space with other convicts. The narrative jumps around in time to reveal how the unusual intervention of an on-board scientist (Juliette Binoche) leads to Willows birth and sets in motion their future course. Robert Pattinson stars in Claire Denis High Life, which is having its world premiere at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. (Wild Bunch) In a recent interview, Pattinson recalled that he was in Louisiana shooting one of the Twilight movies when he first discovered Denis, coming across White Material on TV late one sleepless night. He immediately emailed his agents about her. Though it took some time, they eventually met in Los Angeles. I was expecting a kind of philosophy lecturer or something, I was absolutely terrified for the meeting, recalled Pattinson. And then almost immediately, shes got the most perverse sense of humor and shes like a little weirdo. Shes really witty and odd. The way I always describe her, she seems like a genuine kind of punk to me. A very sensitive punk. Working with Denis, Pattinson appreciated the way in which so many of her films exist as a world unto themselves. High Life is brimming with peculiar rules and ideas, motivated by an internal logic that makes its own idiosyncratic sense. Reading the script, I was trying to understand how Claire approaches things, even the way the dialogue was written, so that I could understand it in some kind of cerebral way, said Pattinson. And then after a while I realized the bits that I liked the most are the bits which you dont understand at all. In conversation, Denis is much like one of her movies spinning vivid tales with their own internal narrative flow. Ahead of the films world premiere at last years Toronto International Film Festival and straight off a flight from Paris, Denis sat down to discuss High Life over a glass of red wine and a cup of hot water. And also just like her movies, there was an air of international adventure, at once sensuous and somewhat austere. Filmmaker Claire Denis is so well-regarded because she remains so unpredictable. (Wild Bunch) There has been a lot of expectation around High Life. Did it feel for you that this movie was more difficult to make? No, its a very strange thing because it came so easily. I mean I met this English producer Oliver Dungey, and like seven or eight years ago he showed up at my agents and he said he wanted to meet with me and he said, Claire, I have a project I would like so much to make with you. Would you consider possibly to work on a project that I could call Femme Fatale? And I liked the fact that he wanted to work with me. It was flattering, you know. But also he was very gentle, and he expressed so well what he wanted. And I said, Look, the only way for me to have a femme fatale is in the real sense of the word, which means its the last one. Its the end. And I think probably it could be a man alone in space, in a spaceship where everybody died and hes alone with a baby girl and he knows there is no return because they are so far away from the solar system. Its a poor ship. Its not a very elaborate ship. And this is a femme fatale because it is the tragedy of those two people, the baby and the man, that they are going to be the only alive human being for all their life. And the only thing hes afraid of maybe is to die too early because she might be alone as a baby in a ship. And then suddenly she is a teenager and shes almost a woman. And there comes another danger of attraction. This was the very beginning, like I told him that, and he said, Of course I am surprised, it was not at all what I thought, but if youre interested then lets do it. Tell me about casting Robert Pattinson. Of course everyone thought it should be a science fiction actor, like an action movie actor. And I thought exactly the opposite. And then I met Robert and I must say Robert really wanted to meet me, which was very nice, but I was also a little bit surprised because for me he was a young, iconic actor and I thought its exactly the opposite of what I had in mind sort of 40 years-ish actor, exhausted. And maybe I hesitated a little bit, it took me a few months and then I realized his wanting to be in the film was interesting. I was not flattered, on the other end I was a little bit afraid because as I said, he is an iconic actor and I wanted a sort of mysterious film, not an iconic film. But then I realized Robert was so ready to go anywhere with me. And then I realized he is a very mysterious young man. And have you been wanting to make a film in English? I told the producer, for me in space in my generation there is only two languages, Russian and American. So I thought it was better for me to do it in English because my Russian is not better than my English. And thats it, you know? I said you should have a good reason to do an English-speaking movie. Space is a good reason, I guess. Did this film feel more ambitious to you in the size of the production and that you had to work on sets? No. Its the first time I had a set, but it was so nice; its just for me. This story belonged so much to me that, for me, its not an expensive movie or a stylish movie. Its mine. Nothing else. Do you feel that way about all your movies, that they belong only to you? Maybe this one a little bit more because its like a box. I own the box and inside I have nine characters, you know, and its more like mine. Maybe, Im not sure. When I shoot on location, Im always aware that I am part of the world. My characters are part of the world. They are part of the story, but they are surrounded by the real word. It was the first time I was surrounded by void. There was nothing else but us. Robert Pattinson stars in Claire Denis High Life (Wild Bunch) This film has some additional writing credits, and Ive read that there was a draft of the film by Zadie Smith and Nick Laird you did not use. Is that something you can talk about? I can. No problem. The drafts were by Jean-Pol Fargeau and me. It was written in French, and Geoff [Cox] made it in English. Its not a new translation. I needed to speak with someone so I was sure it was like in French had the same feeling of the words. And then during shooting, because of the schedule, I wanted to make sure I had Andrew [Litvak] with me on the set to be able to correct the accent on the words. But the thing with Zadie Smith is different. My producer Oliver Dungey, he liked Zadie Smith a lot and he introduced me to her. We met in a pub in London. I had read her two novels in English and in French. And I thought, shes not really the type of writer I would care for, but shes great and it would be great to work with her and then it turned immediately down. She hated the story. She disliked the casting and she wanted to change the story and she wanted to work with her husband. So I asked her, Tell me the story you want. It was so different. It was so unsexy for me. So its not a fault, you ask someone to enter in my world, she did not. So there was not even a draft. There was nothing but a nightmare. A nightmare because it was a loss of time and painful. Do you consider the movie sexy? I think filmmaking is sexy. So every film is sexy for me. If a film is not sexy, its a little bit embarrassing, you know? Even if its very stern, even if its Mouchette by Bresson, it is sexy. A film that has no relation to sex, I dont know what it is. Given that High Life is a science fiction film and stars Robert Pattinson, would you hope that this movie gets you a new audience, a bigger audience? For people who havent seen your other films, this might be a way for them to discover your work. I dont believe in this kind of thing. I think if I was a kind of director using Robert to get a bigger audience, I would puke on myself. Its disgusting. I worked with Robert because Robert is great. Thats all. And just this sort of using him to get a greater audience is obscene to me. Really obscene. A number of recent filmmakers like Barry Jenkins and Greta Gerwig have talked about you as someone who really matters to them. What does that mean to you to hear a younger generation of filmmakers point to you as an influence? I dont consider its a generation thing. I think when I met Barry Jenkins, I never saw it like I was the teacher to someone. I think my films are made with a lot of irrational emotion, always touching the sensations and maybe I rely on that and maybe thats what some other directors younger, yes are interested in. I dont think I invented a style. I think I care for sensation, and many directors dont care anymore for that. And so maybe directors turn to me when they are like me. Review: Robert Pattinson takes a dark, thrilling space odyssey in High Life La Fruteria Fernando Villagomez, the owner of Villa Moreliana and La Tostaderia, opened La Fruteria on March 29 in Grand Central Market. A celebration of Mexican street fruit carts, the tile-framed stand offers granola-topped fruit salads known as bionicos, fruit smoothie licuados, aguas frescas and creatively topped cucumber chalupas. 317 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, lafruteriala.com Ceviche Project Advertisement Octavio Olivas will open Ceviche Project April 3 in a bright, tiny raw bar-strapped space in Silver Lake, seven years after launching the Mexican-inspired seafood pop-up. The opening menu includes striped sea bass aguachile with key lime, melon and serrano, Santa Barbara ridgeback prawn with pickled mustard seed and habanero oil, and Hawaiian kanpachi with pineapple, jalapeno and plantains on young coconut. Oysters at Ceviche Project. (Dylan + Jeni) 2524 Hyperion Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 522-5744, cevicheproject.com Coin & Candor Coin & Candor opens April 3 for breakfast, lunch and dinner at Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village. Chef Jose Fernandezs brasserie menu includes wood-fired cabbage with bacon jam and peanut sauce and a whole Baja red snapper with adobo grilled on red oak. An open pastry kitchen makes sourdough using house-milled wheat and 33-layer croissants. 2 Dole Drive, Westlake Village, (818) 575-3044, coinandcandor.com Buddys Hash Burger with veggie patty of roasted cauliflower, mushroom and farro, caramelized onion and American cheese from Buddys. (Gabriel Sweet) Buddys is open in downtown. The nostalgic diner comes from the owner and a general manager at neighboring Bernadettes. The menu is overseen by DTLA Cheese chef Reed Herrick and includes deep-fried cheese dogs, patty melts, shakes and cheeseburgers. 363 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, (213) 265-7022, instagram.com/buddysdtla/ Taco Bar Taco Bar is open on Pico Boulevard in Mid-City. The family-owned restaurant focuses on traditional North American hard shell tacos with ground meat options including turkey, beef and tuna. 5815 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 433-7000, instagram.com/tacobarla/ Loupiotte Kitchen A Parisian-style cafe named Loupiotte Kitchen is now open in Los Feliz. Expect cafe noir and cafe au lait with madeleines and quiche, plus pain perdu with strawberry, lime and basil, and fregola sarda risotto with octopus, from a menu that changes frequently. 1726 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, loupiottekitchen.com/ Nocturnal Eats A pickup-and-delivery concept known as Nocturnal Eats is operating out of Pico-Union. The Boynton Beach, Fla., export keeps late weekend hours, offering chicken cordon bleu burritos, steak-and-tot quesadillas and bacon, pickle and cheese-smothered moon fries until 3:30 a.m. through Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash and Postmates. 1842 W. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 260-1097, nocturnaleats.com CLOSINGS Taste Chicago, opened 15 years ago by actor Joe Mantegna, closed March 22 in Burbank. General Porpoise, James Beard-winning chef Renee Ericksons doughnut shop from Seattle, has closed in Pacific Palisades after five months. EXTRAS Tickets are now available for an April 28 tasting event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Michaels in Santa Monica. Participating chef alumni include Jonathan Waxman, Mark Peel, Roy Yamaguchi, Sang Yoon, Miles Thompson and Brooke Williamson, as well as the restaurants new chefs, Jeff Lustre and Matthew Wilson. 1147 3rd St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-0843, michaelssantamonica.com/40th-anniversary-tix Revelator: Bar Avalon is opening this summer in Echo Park with executive chef Joshua Guarneri, a veteran of the Hearth & Hound. The restaurant comes from Revelator Coffee Company in Atlanta, a roaster opening individual cafe concepts around the country. 2134 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, revelatorcoffee.com/pages/bar-avalon Bao Hiroo is eyeing an opening later this month in the Arts District downtown. Hiroo Nagahara, the Charlie Trotter veteran behind the Chairman and Nomica in San Francisco, will serve bao with unexpected fillings such as croque monsieur, brisket and even a housemade ode to Oreos fashioned from Tahitian vanilla and Guittard chocolate. 905 E. 2nd St. Ste. No. 109, Los Angeles, baohiroo.com/ Shannon Mustipher, the resident rum expert at Gladys Caribbean in Brooklyn, has just published Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails, the first cocktail recipe book written by a working African American bartender and released by a major publisher in more than 100 years. Mustiphers book is what she calls a theater for the senses where, as in her home bar, calypso, zouk and mambo tunes meet verdant plants and colorful decor, and cocktails come alongside plates of curry goat, jerk chicken, and ackee with saltfish. The book gives a nod to the tiki canon and a new frontier of island-inspired drinks, from the earthy Martiniquais Ti Punch with white agricole blanc, to the bright Parasol made with banana syrup. Mustipher hopes her book will transport readers. She can rest easy anywhere her drinks are is a place you want to go. In 90 recipes, Mustipher puts her stamp on tiki. Theres something for everyone. She goes big in Port of Call, a boozy overproof combo featuring arrack, allspice dram and tangerine juice. Her Wingman features brown butter-washed rum, Campari and lime leaf-infused falernum poured into a can of good pineapple cider, a delightful turn. Even shochu and vodka make elegant appearances. I wanted to make tiki recipes more forward-looking, to signal to the reader this was a fresh take, but still within context, Mustipher says. A project like this doesnt just emerge from the ether. For the past five years, Mustipher has developed the rum-focused bar program at Gladys, becoming a go-to authority on cane spirits in the process. Before that, Mustipher was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting and art history an education put to use art directing this, her first book. Advertisement A Charleston, S.C., native raised in Atlanta, Mustipher grew up visiting her Gullah Geechee relatives in the Lowcountry, hearing their creole and enjoying massive crab boils and cookouts. Food was always social in her family, so it wasnt a leap for her to be swept along with the rising wave of New York cocktail bars in the mid-2000s. By 2014, shed made a name for herself as a barwoman. Gladys came calling. Rum would be the backbone of its new bar program: Could she build it out? A quartet of tropical cocktails. (Noah Fecks) Mustipher knew that even inquisitive drinkers didnt know much about rum. They worried the spirit was too sweet, and on the tiki side, Mustipher was concerned her drinks would be perceived as syrupy fillers. But culturally, rum was a good fit for Gladys, a Crown Heights restaurant serving Afro Caribbean fare. And back then, many of their regulars were residents in the neighborhood descended from Jamaica, Trinidad or Barbados. People could see things that they recognized and understood. I started in the traditional south with Appleton, Wray & Nephew, Mount Gay. I didnt have to explain a lot. Rum is a spirit category that still eludes widespread affection in the U.S. Its made in more than 90 countries, which makes it the most diverse spirit, she says. Rum is distilled from fermented sugarcane juice, syrup or molasses and its global variation can make it tricky to pin down. From India and the Philippines to Martinique, Haiti and Peru, cane spirits reign. A rum from Barbados can evoke caramel thanks to higher sucrose levels than one from Jamaica distilled from sugarcane molasses that might present with a hint of fermented funkiness. Its taken time, but rum is experiencing the appreciation that previously eluded now-prized spirits like gin and mezcal. When people find out about mezcal in terms of its quality, they start to wonder if thats going on in other categories as well, she says. Mustipher wants her drinks to send you off, even if just for a moment. She determined that the best way to showcase rum in its pleasantries and complexities was to let the spirit speak for itself. Every pour had to be sippable neat. No masking if she couldnt savor the rum with nary an ice cube present, it was not at the bar. Isla de pina cocktail from the book Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails. (Noah Fecks) She developed rum flights so customers could learn that the spirit was multifaceted, a thing apart from the cheeky gimmicks to market industrial versions of the stuff on TV. Early drinks at Gladys were dry and light, often served with pressed-to-order juices. The approach worked. Over time, she saw less skepticism, more engagement. When Mustipher began she struggled to find 50 high-quality rums she could serve unadulterated. Today, she could easily bring in 50 more, if she had the space. In her years of research, Mustipher noticed that following the rum and cane spirit trail meant less reading about how rum tastes and more reading about how sugarcane was produced. Thats how she came to understand the role that centuries of forced labor played in the cultivation of sugar; how she came to realize that rum as we know it wouldnt exist in the Americas without the enslavement of millions of Africans and their descendants. Sugar in this country, and especially in the colonized Caribbean meant unspeakable wealth for business owners, no surprise when the work was free. Mustipher compares the impact of the sugar industry to the effect of striking oil. It was the basis of our modern economy, she says. And that of the global economy, too built on a cutthroat system of forced mating, devastated families and such brutal work processes that the life expectancy of a newly arrived enslaved worker on sugarcane plantations was seven years. People made sacrifices or were sacrificed, I come right out and say that when Im serving someone, she says. If anything, this history inspires me to treat rum with respect and reverence. Mustipher integrates the complex history of cane spirits in her work, even during service. She wants her drinks to inspire new memories, but she cant ignore the past. In her early research she came across Tom Bullock, a St. Louis barman whose self-published 1917 work The Ideal Bartender helped ground her in the historic role African Americans held in beverage service. Bullocks is the first known cocktail book to be published by a black person (facsimiles are now in print); it doesnt escape her observation that if she were his peer, as a woman she wouldnt have been permitted to mix drinks for a living. Mustipher isnt the only African American bartender to be inspired by this history. Johnny Caldwell and Taneka Reaves, who blog under the name the Cocktail Bandits, cover Charleston cocktail culture in their indie publication Holy Spirits. In Oxford, Miss., Saint Leo bartender Joseph Stinchcomb earned his restaurant a James Beard Award semi-finalist nod for outstanding bar program. Throughout the country, a robust community of black beverage professionals are pushing for more inclusion and fairer representation. Mutiny on the Bounty cocktail from the book Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails. (Noah Fecks) Mustipher hopes readers actually make her drinks and that the the book is seen like really seen, she says. Many people dont see others who look like them behind the bar, she says. But were here. Shannon is a true inspiration, says Nicole Taylor, author of The UpSouth Cookbook. Taylor introduced Mustipher to Noah Fecks, who photographed both books. She chartered her own course, she blazed trails for young, black, queer women and created a book that speaks to her roots as a fine artist. An understated fact of tiki cocktails is that theyre incredibly easy to get wrong. In Tiki, Mustipher delivers a reliable guide to transporting and inventive drinks, like a tropical vacation that continues each time you open the book. Following in the footsteps of actor George Clooney, Los Angeles city leaders are calling for a boycott of two hotels that are popular with Hollywood royalty, because the business owners are part of a foreign government that punishes homosexuality and adultery with death. Councilman Paul Koretz, L.A. Controller Ron Galperin and head of Equality California Rick Zbur said in a news conference Tuesday that they will work to implement formal measures that would discourage city residents and tourists from staying at the hotels. Koretz will introduce a resolution at an upcoming City Council meeting, he said. Starting April 3, the small, oil-rich monarchy of Brunei, located just east of Malaysia, will implement Islamic criminal laws that would lead to punishments such as stoning for gay sex and amputation for petty theft. Brunei Investment Agency, an arm of the Brunei government, owns the Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air. Advertisement This is sickening and its unacceptable, Galperin told reporters at the news conference. When the gravity of this decree set in, it hit me hard, not just because Im a member of the LGBT community. What kind of world do we live in where a country wants to put someone to death, wants to stone them just for being gay? RELATED: Can George Clooney persuade Hollywood to boycott hotels over Bruneis antigay laws? Its not the first time city leaders have called for a boycott of the hotels. Protests and boycotts sparked in 2014 and 2015, when a first wave of criminal codes based on sharia law was implemented in Brunei at the direction of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah. That first phase of the new legal code allowed for those failing to attend Friday prayers and those who become pregnant outside of marriage to be be jailed or fined. A second phase allowed the severing of limbs and flogging for those who commit property crimes. Unfortunately, peoples memories are sometimes short, Galperin said. There have been a number of attempts on an international level and otherwise to talk some sense into them, but thats not something that has been successful. But as city leaders revive the effort, actors across Hollywood are hoping to give it some clout. Hotel Bel-Air is owned by the sultan of Brunei. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP/Getty Images) Theyre nice hotels, said actor George Clooney in a Deadline.com column on Thursday. But lets be clear, every single time we stay at or take meetings at or dine at any of [Bruneis] hotels, we are putting money directly into the pockets of men who choose to stone and whip to death their own citizens for being gay or accused of adultery. Many celebrities have since joined Clooney in expressing disdain for the hotels they have grown to love over the years. The Beverly Hills Hotel has been a lavish refuge for celebrities for decades. Elizabeth Taylor celebrated six of her eight honeymoons there, and Frank Sinatra was a patron of its famous Polo Lounge. Ellen DeGeneres, Jay Leno and Elton John have all publicly condemned the Brunei governments laws and stopped staying at the hotels. On Friday, Nancy Sinatra, Frank Sinatras daughter, said she hasnt stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel in years, despite the fact that it had become a big part of her life. Holidays, brunches & my younger daughters wedding! she said on Twitter. Most of all I miss the Polo Lounge, great bar, but I wont go back. Koretz, Galperin and Zbur said they would search for ways to reach the Brunei governments pocketbook in other ways, including discouraging local meetings and events from being held at the hotels, pursuing legislation and asking the Trump administration to take steps to stop the Brunei governments cruel punishments. Here are the hotels to boycott: The Dorchester, London 45 Park Lane, London Coworth Park, UK The Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles Le Meurice, Paris Hotel Plaza Athenee, Paris Hotel Eden, Rome Hotel Principe di Savoia, Mi Elton xx Elton John (@eltonofficial) March 30, 2019 I've boycotted The Beverly Hills Hotel for years, even though it has been a big part of my life, starting with Mrs. O'Kane's ballet class when I was 4 years old. Holidays, brunches & my younger daughter's wedding! Most of all I miss the Polo Lounge, great bar, but I won't go back Nancy Sinatra (@NancySinatra) March 29, 2019 alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com Twitter: @r_valejandra Nathan Jackson has never met his 4-year-old son, Navaun, but he is hoping for the chance this week as the toddler fights death from a gunshot wound to the head. I dont know how to it feels to be a father because Ive never had the opportunity to be there, said Jackson during a phone interview Monday from Salinas Valley State Prison, where he is incarcerated. It hurts me a lot because I feel like I owe my son for not being there. Jackson is asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to allow him to visit Navaun. Jackson is serving a nine-year sentence at the maximum-security facility for assault with a firearm, and has another conviction that makes it a second strike. Navaun, who turned 4 in March, shot himself in the head Wednesday after finding a loaded gun under a pillow at his home in Oakland, according to his great-aunt, Jamilia Land. Advertisement The gun was owned by his mothers boyfriend, Terrence Leavell Wilson. Wilson has been arrested and charged with three felonies for child abuse, possession of a gun by a felon and first-degree criminal firearm storage, according to court documents. Police said Wilson told them that he had illegally purchased the weapon in San Francisco about two weeks prior, and had slept with it loaded under his pillow the night before, forgetting to remove it in the morning. Navaun apparently found it while watching television alone in the bedroom. Land said Navaun is on life support with no sign of brain activity. The bullet entered his forehead and surgeons removed part of his skull and brain, said Land. Doctors at UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospital will taper medication keeping him in a coma in coming days, she said. We would like to have Nathan able to be there through that process, Land said. We dont have time to wait. Land said Jackson was allowed to use Skype to do a video call to the boys hospital room Wednesday. Monday, she held a press conference on the steps of the Capitol to ask Newsom for help. Jackson said gun violence has hit his family before. Two of his brothers were fatally shot in 2010 and 2011, and his sister was murdered in Oakland last year. His mothers uncle was also killed by gun violence, Land said. Im hunted by tragedy, my family, said Jackson, who grew up in east Oakland and was homeless at times. My whole life I grew up around gun violence, he said. I feel that where Im from, a parent shouldnt have to raise their child in an environment like that. Where Im from, its easy to be killed but harder to survive. Jackson is currently cellmates with Maurice Price, the uncle of Navauns mother. Jackson said that family connection behind bars is helping him cope. I feel like I need him because hes the [great] uncle of my son and we are trying to be in the process of being strong, said Jackson. Without him I feel like I cant take it, I will break down. The governors office referred questions to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The department is aware of the request made by Mr. Jacksons family, and we are thoroughly reviewing the circumstances of this very unfortunate situation. Ultimately, we are looking at all the case factors to ensure they meet CDCRs policy, and maintain public safety. We are also evaluating other options of communication available to us to try to assist the family during this difficult time, a CDCR spokeswoman said. Jackson said he remains hopeful. It takes a toll on my heart. It hurts a lot for me to experience a son on life support and me having no control to be by his bedside, he said. All I can do is pray that they grant me the opportunity to see my son. California is in an earthquake drought. It has been almost five years since the state experienced its last earthquake of magnitude 6 or stronger in Napa. Southern California felt its last big quake on Easter Sunday 2010, and that shaker was actually centered across the border, causing the most damage in Mexicali. Experts know this calm period will eventually end, with destructive results. They just dont know when this well-documented geological pattern will shift. Earthquake rates are quite variable: We have a decade or two where we dont have many earthquakes, and people expect thats what California is always like, said Elizabeth Cochran, seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Eventually, were going to dramatically see a change in earthquake rates. Advertisement Scientists have been warning California of seismic dangers, be it the Big One on the San Andreas fault or catastrophes that could come from lesser-known faults, such as Hayward or Newport-Inglewood. RELATED: Get ready for a major quake. What to do before and during a big one One reason for the urgent alerts: Memories of a truly destructive quake in many urban areas have faded. And with that, some fear, the urgency of pushing seismic safety has also faded. Experts say California ignores these realities at its own peril. Along the main plate boundary faults, we are in a deficit of earthquakes in the last 100 years, said Tom Rockwell, a San Diego State paleoseismologist. At some point, thats going to change. Were going to have some big earthquakes. Consider how much quieter California has been in regard to earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater: Earthquakes shown occurred in California and within 30 miles of the states coast or border since March 1, 1969. The size of the circles indicates the amount of shaking energy released in the earthquake. (Jon Schleuss / Los Angeles Times) In the last 25 years, there have been 11 such temblors statewide. In the preceding generation, there were 32. In the last quarter-century, there have been three such earthquakes that shook Californias 10 southernmost counties. In the prior generation, there were nine, including the Sylmar temblor of 1971 (magnitude 6.6) and Northridge of 1994 (magnitude 6.7). The greater San Francisco Bay Area has been particularly quiet. Since the great 1906 earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco, there have been only three earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater. But in the 75 years before that catastrophe, there were 14, according to geophysicist Ross Stein. Earthquakes must happen at some point to relieve the immense tectonic forces that are pushing part of the state northwest toward Alaska and the rest southeast toward Mexico. On average, theres about 12 feet of movement per century along the 730-mile San Andreas fault system between Point Arena in Mendocino County and the Mexican border, Rockwell said, but, except for a 90-mile section that creeps in San Benito and Monterey counties, there has been no significant movement along this primary boundary of faults between the Pacific and North American plates in a century. There may be periods where things get kind of all locked up and no earthquakes happen for a while. You store a lot of strain in the Earths crust, said Tom Jordan, USC professor of geophysics. Once it gets going, its like a set of dominoes. You might get multiple events if you have enough strain energy stored in the crust, because its been a long time since an earthquake. Earthquakes shown occurred in California and within 30 miles of the states coast or border since March 1, 1969. The size of the circles indicates the amount of shaking energy released in the earthquake. (Jon Schleuss / Los Angeles Times) When a time of elevated seismic activity will come is hard to say. Some thought the 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed 63 people, would mark the end of decades of seismic quiescence in the Bay Area. Instead, the lack of extreme shaking has largely persisted, save for the Napa temblor of 2014. Scientists have been particularly focused on the lack of major seismic activity on several California faults that as a group produce the most frequent earthquakes on the plate boundary the San Andreas, San Jacinto and Hayward. They are the ones seen as most likely to cause trouble in our lifetime. Yet theyve been exceedingly quiet. A USGS analysis published in the journal Seismological Research Letters Wednesday finds that, based on an analysis of sites where seismic data are known for the past millennium, the century between 1919 and 2018 is in all odds the only 100-year period in the past 1,000 years where there have been no earthquakes strong enough to break the ground on those three faults. Ordinarily, there are roughly three to four of these earthquakes on these faults every 100 years. The next century is unlikely to be as quiet as this one. Its hard to beat, said USGS seismologist Glenn Biasi, the lead author of the study. The 1800s, by comparison, was a far more active time for earthquakes. That century saw six large temblors on this trio of faults; between 1800 and 1918, there were eight. Thats an average of one major quake on those faults every 16 years. Earthquake scientists have been buzzing for years about Californias hiatus in supersized earthquakes, thinking the chances of such a 100-year gap between ground-shattering seismic events to be improbable. Did Someone Forget to Pay the Earthquake Bill? was the title of a talk by UCLA geophysicist David Jackson at the Seismological Society of America conference in 2014. RELATED: Say a major earthquake will hit in seconds. How do you protect yourself? Scientists focus on earthquakes that literally break the ground along the main plate boundary because theyre the ones that actually do the job of relieving centuries of tectonic strain. A famous example of the ground breaking was during the great 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of San Francisco; at Point Reyes in Marin County, a fence that intersected the fault was suddenly cut in two, separated on each side by the San Andreas by 18 feet. Some quakes dont do that job. The 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, while near the San Andreas fault, actually occurred on a neighboring sub-parallel strand, according to USGS research geologist Kate Scharer, a coauthor of the USGS study. Earthquakes of 1992 in Landers and 1999 in Hector Mine broke faults at the surface, but didnt do it at the main plate boundary, Biasi said. Only sections of the San Andreas, San Jacinto and Hayward faults that have 1,000 years worth of data on earthquakes were included in the analysis because the authors needed that data to look for periods of seismic activity and inactivity. Although the 1968 Borrego Mountain and other earthquakes at the extreme southern edge of the San Jacinto fault system have broken ground, those sections of the fault are not included in the study; there are no records available to determine if those areas produced many earthquakes over the last millennium, and as a result, are among Californias most worrisome. There have been more mild seismic storms in recent memory. The earthquake storm in the 80s and 90s is clearer in hindsight, said Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson. It began with the Whittier Narrows temblor in 1987 (magnitude 5.9), which killed 8; followed by Pasadena in 1988 (4.9); Montebello in 1989 (4.4); Upland in 1990 (5.2); Sierra Madre in 1991 (5.8), which killed a woman; before ending with Northridge in 1994, which resulted in the deaths of at least 57 people. In the 75 years before the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, there were 14 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater in the Bay Area, according to geophysicist Ross Stein. Since 1906, there have been only three. (Temblor.net geophysicist Ross Stein) More severe periods of earthquake activity were seen in the 19th century. Mission San Juan Capistrano endured shaking and suffered damage from two earthquakes both greater than magnitude 7 within a span of just a dozen years. The first came in 1800 from a quake on the San Jacinto fault east of Temecula. Then, in 1812, movement of the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults through present-day cities like San Bernardino, Rialto, Loma Linda, Yucaipa and Highland brought down the missions Great Stone Church, killing more than 40 people inside. The Inland Empire would be strongly impacted if those quakes repeated today, Scharer said. There are other examples of frequent major earthquakes. In the 1500s, for instance, three major San Andreas fault earthquakes hit along the Grapevine, according to Scharer, possibly all within 30 years. And over the last 1,000 years in the southernmost 100 miles of the San Andreas fault system, there have been three periods of increased seismic activity between 900 and 1100, 1200 and 1400, and 1600 to 1800, according to Rockwell. In that section, it has been relatively quiet for the last 219 years. If this pattern continues, we could well start a new phase of activity, Rockwell said. Turkey shows how a region can be affected by an above-average rate of earthquakes that persists for generations. A 1939 earthquake was the start of a series of 11 large temblors on the North Anatolian fault lasting at least 60 years, generally moving westward toward Istanbul, according to Stein, chief executive of Temblor.net and a former USGS geophysicist who has written extensively on the Turkish quakes. Sometimes there was a 30-year gap between big quakes; sometimes, only one. RELATED: California earthquake early-warning system will mean false alarms. Still worth it, experts say The most recent catastrophic earthquake was a magnitude 7.4 that caused more than 17,000 deaths. The 1999 temblor struck the industrial heartland and densely populated areas. And theres concern Istanbul is next. Istanbul has been kind of on tenterhooks ever since the 1999 Izmit earthquake. They have an early warning system. Theyve done billions of dollars of infrastructure upgrades a good job, considering its a very old city with lots of frail buildings, Stein said. While Istanbul might be on alarm for a future big one, many Californians are out of practice. The last time California has seen an earthquake as powerful as a magnitude 7.8 was in 1857 in Southern California and 1906 for Northern California. No one alive today has first-hand experience with that kind of quake in the Golden State. For instance, the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake of 1994, which severely shook just a fraction of Los Angeles County, would pale in comparison with a magnitude 7.8 quake on the San Andreas. That would produce 45 times more shaking energy than the 1994 temblor, and a plausible scenario would not only send strong shaking to much of L.A. County, but also parts of five others: Kern, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. The magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake produced severe or violent shaking (shown in orange or red) in only a part of Los Angeles County. (U.S. Geological Survey) A plausible future magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault in Southern California would produce severe or violent shaking over a much larger geographical area than the 1994 Northridge earthquake, affecting six counties. (U.S. Geological Survey) If we had earthquakes as frequently as we had prior to 1906 within the last 50 years, people would be a lot more in tune with what earthquakes can do, and have a lot more interest in earthquake preparedness, said Tim Dawson, senior engineering geologist at the California Geological Survey. A sudden jump in how often earthquakes come can make recovery difficult. New Zealands South Island has faced elevated seismic activity for 16 years and its still not over, even after a magnitude 6.3 Christchurch earthquake of 2011 caused the deaths of 185 people and collapsed many buildings. Four months after the Feb. 22, 2011, earthquake, a magnitude 6 hit southeast of Christchurch; then a 5.8 and a 5.9 on the same day half a year later. Valentines Day in 2016 brought a magnitude 5.7 quake. Its definitely on the high side of numbers of aftershocks, said Matt Gerstenberger, principal seismologist for New Zealands seismic monitoring agency, GNS Science. The constant shaking caused significant impact to peoples mental and social health. Rates of things akin to PTSD started showing up amongst people, said Sara McBride, a public information official for the regions emergency management agencies between 2006 and 2011. Its a constant reminder of that which you have no control over. Experts say its important that Californians are psychologically prepared for the prospect of a new era of earthquakes. That means not only having an emergency plan and supplies, said McBride, now a social scientist for the USGS earthquake early warning system, but mentally imagining what that will mean not just putting a flashlight and shoes next to the bed, for instance, but understanding that will mean dealing with broken glass on the floor and a power outage that may last weeks or more, and planning for how your family will get through it. If we accept that there will come a time that the Earth is going to be more active than usual that this is a natural process going on, and plotting how you might react, McBride said, that gives you a sense of psychological preparedness. ron.lin@latimes.com Twitter: @ronlin The Los Angeles Police Department provided more details about the chaos at Mondays memorial for slain rapper Nipsey Hussle, saying a man with a gun appears to have sparked a stampede that left several people hurt. Officials attempted to dispel rumors and incorrect information regarding the violence. LAPD Chief Michel Moore said at a news conference Tuesday that no shots appear to have been fired at the vigil. Two women who arrived at a hospital at around 11 p.m. that night said they had been shot, Moore said. Advertisement They initially reported that they were at a different location, then said they were at the vigil. An LAPD commander who was at the vigil did not hear any gunfire, Moore said. But a man in the crowd was armed with a handgun and may have set off the stampede by brandishing it. He did not shoot it, but someone attempted to disarm him, and people who caught sight of the weapon ran, Moore said. A Los Angeles Fire Department official said at least 10 people were taken to hospitals, including two patients in critical condition, after an inaccurate report of shots being fired. In the panic, some tripped and fell, suffering cuts and sprains, Moore said. One person may have been stabbed. Moore praised the restraint of the police officers who tried to control the situation. Bottles were thrown at some officers, and a sergeant had to have sutures on a wound to his hand, Moore said. The LAPD is working with community leaders to clean the area, protect the memorial and make it safe for visitors, Moore said. While a member of the crowd shared some words on the late rapper, dozens of people who had gathered outside Hussles store started running away. People fell on top of each other as they tried to flee amid the dense crowd, many of whom lost their shoes along the way. Numerous police cars and ambulances raced to the scene as officers yelled at people to leave the area. The Los Angeles Fire Department took 19 people to hospitals. A Los Angeles Times reporter at the scene was also trampled when the crowd ran. California regulators voted Tuesday to strengthen state safeguards for thousands of wetlands and streams that are about to lose federal protections in a Trump administration rollback of the Clean Water Act. Nearly 90% of Californias historic wetlands have been filled in or plowed under, and the state has said it is vital to preserve what remains. The new state rules will insulate California from Washingtons efforts to drop regulations that prevent the destruction of isolated wetlands and seasonal streams. The looming federal rollback increased pressure on the State Water Resources Control Board to adopt protections that have been under consideration for more than a decade, ever since a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings left authorities confused about which waters are covered by the federal law. Advertisement In December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched the formal process of repealing Obama-administration-era regulations that broadened the Clean Water Acts coverage of wetlands and seasonal bodies of water that are common in California and the arid West. The extent of federal wetlands protections has long been a subject of legal and political dispute. Farmers, the building industry and mining interests have filed lawsuits and lobbied Washington to rein in the rules, arguing that they cover marginal waters and reach far beyond the laws original intent. The Clean Water Act allows states to adopt pollution standards that are more stringent than what the federal government requires, and under state water law California has always had the authority to restrict wetlands development. But regional water boards have exercised that authority unevenly. The rules adopted Tuesday set statewide standards and define what constitutes a wetland, boosting safeguards for streams and isolated wetlands that are not wet the entire year but still provide valuable ecological services and contribute to river headwaters. Farm groups objected to the new state criteria because they are broader than the federal definition. They also complained about the cost and amount of time required to comply with the regulations. Environmental groups, on the other hand, complained that the rules contained too many exemptions and did not ensure the state wouldnt lose any additional wetlands. In the end, speakers on both sides of the issue told the board Tuesday that they had compromised and were willing to support the new rules. Kim Delfino, California director for Defenders of Wildlife, said it gave her and her colleagues at the conservation group heartburn to support protections that are weaker than environmentalists have long sought. That said, she added, we are realists and we see the changes at the federal level. After hearing several hours of public comment, the board voted with little discussion to adopt the regulations, which will not take effect until next year. After the U.S. Supreme Court muddied the Clean Water Acts definition of wetlands, environmental officials in Sacramento directed the water board to develop a wetlands policy for California. The 11-year effort has been fraught with delays and rewrites. Its been a very painful process, said board member Tam Doduc. The boards unanimous vote is one of several actions California is taking to thwart the Trump administrations attacks on water protections. State agencies are refusing to issue permits the federal government needs to raise Shasta Dam in Northern California because the project would drown portions of the McCloud River, which is protected under Californias Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The water board can also use state water-quality standards to limit Washingtons ability to boost irrigation supplies for Central Valley agriculture by relaxing federal safeguards for endangered fish. bettina.boxall@latimes.com Twitter: @boxall When USCs trustees tapped Rick Caruso last May to lead the university out of the crisis brought on by sexual abuse allegations against a campus gynecologist, his first act was to hire a prestigious law firm to conduct a thorough and independent investigation. He pledged that the inquiry by OMelveny & Myers would conclude by the time students returned for the fall semester. Much has changed at USC since then, including the resignation of one president and the appointment of another. But that highly touted investigation into Dr. George Tyndall remains unfinished, and its unclear whether any of the law firms findings will ever be shared with the physicians alleged victims. FULL COVERAGE: USC former gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall accused of inappropriate behavior Advertisement That news was delivered Monday at a federal court hearing after a judge overseeing a class-action lawsuits pressed an attorney for the university about the status of the investigation. To my knowledge, that report has not been completed, USC attorney Shon Morgan told U.S. District Court Judge Stephen V. Wilson. Morgan did not provide a timeline for when OMelveny would wrap up its investigation but said that ultimately USC may keep the results confidential, arguing that it is covered by attorney-client privilege. The status of the OMelveny report was one of several issues Wilson raised about a proposed $215-million class-action settlement between USC and thousands of Tyndalls former patients. The judge declined to grant preliminary approval of the deal, saying he needed more information from lawyers before making a final ruling. I have carefully considered the proposed settlement, and I have serious concerns regarding the settlement as presented, Wilson said at the start of the 90-minute hearing. Caruso told The Times on Monday that the OMelveny investigation was taking longer than expected, and he said the university was being sensitive to the ongoing criminal inquiry into Tyndall by the Los Angeles County district attorneys office. Caruso said that he still plans to make part of the eventual report public. Meanwhile, he and other trustees have received a briefing on OMelvenys findings and recommendations for reform. Its not yet done, Caruso said of the firms review. My intent and promise was that the board and university would be transparent and I plan on living up to that promise. USC negotiated the settlement with a group of plaintiffs attorneys last fall that would provide guaranteed payouts of at least $2,500 to every student who saw Tyndall for womens healthcare from 1989 to 2016. During that time, an estimated 15,000 to 17,000 students and alumnae saw Tyndall at USC. Tyndall has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. After the hearing, USC said in a statement that it would work to address the issues identified by the judge. We continue to believe that the federal class action settlement offers a fair and reliable alternative to individual litigation in state court, the statement said. The agreement has come under fire from a band of other lawyers who represent about 650 women suing USC in state court. They have called the settlement too small and premature, given that plaintiffs have not conducted an exhaustive review of USCs internal files. Wilson denied their attempts to intervene in the class-action case at the hearing but said he was taking into account their arguments. Among his concerns was how the parties arrived at the $215-million figure. An attorney for the plaintiffs, Steve Berman, said he had sought more, but that USC drew a line. Morgan, the university lawyer, said USC conducted focus groups and asked hundreds of women about what they felt was fair compensation for various hypothetical misconduct allegations. The settlement pays all women who saw Tyndall for gynecology $2,500 even if they had no complaints about their care. Lawyers for USC and the plaintiffs said the base compensation was to acknowledge that given the allegations against Tyndall, simply being his patient amounted to damage. Wilson referred to the gynecologists alleged misconduct during his career as the act of a monster doctor. Women who accuse Tyndall of misconduct, from off-color remarks to inappropriate pelvic exams, are eligible for larger awards, with the specific payout to be determined by a special master. The maximum amount any former patient can receive is $250,000. In response to The Times reporting last year, USC acknowledged that Tyndall had been the subject of multiple complaints from students and staff. So far the university has declined to reveal the specifics of those reports or give detailed accounts of how administrators responded. In negotiating the class-action settlement, the university provided plaintiffs attorneys with a set of internal documents, including some complaints and internal reviews of Tyndall by administrators. The documents were filed under seal in Wilsons court but have not been provided to Tyndalls patients or the public. The Times filed a motion last week, arguing that the public had a right to see the documents and asking him to unseal them. Wilson is expected to rule on the newspapers request later this month. Lawyers who oppose the class-action settlement have seized on the lack of disclosure in arguing that the deal is flawed because it does not hold the university accountable. In the hearing, Wilson asked attorneys how many complaints USC received during Tyndalls 27 years at the student health clinic. Berman told the judge the number was 18, prompting rows of attorneys suing USC in other courts to shake their heads and sigh, in exaggerated disagreement. USCs lawyer, Morgan, suggested the figure was much lower and after the proceeding, Berman said 18 was a ballpark figure and he did not know the exact number. John Manly, one of the lead lawyers in the separate state court cases against USC and Tyndall, blasted their comments as uninformed and deceptive, saying there were dozens of complaints. To tell the court theres five, or six or 18 is a misrepresentation. There were many women that complained, Manly said. If I were USC, Id be very, very concerned that what I told a federal judge is the truth. When it was commissioned last year, the OMelveny review was to specifically examine reporting failures that allowed Tyndall to remain employed. USC only forced him out of the clinic in 2016 after a nurse reported him to the rape crisis center. She told The Times she had repeatedly complained about him to supervisors. As proof that it wanted a serious and credible investigation, USC noted that OMelveny partner Apalla Chopra would lead the investigation. Chopra had done high-profile work on sexual assault allegations for the University of Virginia and Wynn Resorts. She did not return messages seeking comment Monday. Class-action plaintiff Shannon OConner, a 1995 graduate who said she complained to a nurse about Tyndall but was ignored, traveled from Texas to attend the hearing. She said she left feeling that Wilson was asking good questions and not rushing the process It gave me a lot of confidence in the judge, she said. Ralph Fertig, a 1960s Freedom Rider who went on to become one of the nations most ardent defenders of the marginalized, the misunderstood and the neglected from Selma, Ala. to L.A.s Skid Row has died after a long battle with Parkinsons Disease. He was 89. Fertig fought for equal rights in the Deep South, advocated for the homeless in Los Angeles and took on the Patriot Act fighting all the way to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Kurds, whom he saw as perhaps the most marginalized people in the world. A founder of the Humanitarian Law Project in L.A., Fertig served as a federal administrative law judge and, for years, was a USC professor of social work, inspiring students to embrace pacifism and battle for human rights. He retired in 2016. Nearly 80 when his fight to advise the Kurds ended up in front of the Supreme Court, Fertig acknowledged that the ruling put him at risk of being jailed even for something as benign as urging a terror group to be peaceful in this case the Kurdistan Workers Party. Advertisement And if Im arrested, he said, it would not be the first time. Fertig died Thursday at his home in Westwood. He had been suffering from Parkinsons Disease for the last nine years but, until recently, had remained active in the community, his son David said. Born Feb. 24, 1930, in Chicago, Fertig grew up in a home that put a premium on tolerance. His parents were German Jewish immigrants and hosted refugees from Germany during World War II. Fertig said he had vivid memories of his childhood home being a way station for families fleeing Nazi Germany. Ralph Fertig , a retired judge and professor at USC at his home in Westwood holds the scales of justice (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) Hed read the comics to their guests, trusting that in the process theyd pick up a casual understanding of English. I grew up sharing my bed with whoever the refugee of the week was, he told Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison in 2010. I grew up exposed to an awareness of the atrocities. And I swore at an early age that I would devote my life to fighting that. Filled with the belief that America stood as the great savior after World War II, a beacon of peace, democracy and justice, Fertig went to bat at a young age for those who were denied their equal rights. While young, Fertig saw a picket line of white parents protesting the admission of a black student whose parents had moved to the community. Fertig said he demanded that he and the black student be registered together. Fertig was registered the other student was not. And there collapsed my dreams of America, he said. In 1961, Fertig became secretary and treasurer of the Chicago Freedom Action Committee, a civil rights group that dispatched busloads of activists through the Midwest and Deep South. In Selma, Ala., a place Fertig had never heard of at the time, he was confronted by the citys sheriff who swaggered onto the bus Fertig was riding. You a nigger lover, son? he recalled the sheriff as saying. I lied and said I love all people. Im not sure I loved him at that moment. Tossed in jail, Fertig said he was beaten by white prisoners while the warden egged them on. He was beaten with such fury that each one of his ribs was broken, he said later. Fertig earned a masters degree in sociology from Columbia University and a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago. He moved to L.A. in 1973 to become executive director of the then-troubled Greater Los Angeles Community Action Agency. He also went to law school at UCLA, earning his juris doctorate. For years he worked at a civil rights lawyer, an administrative law judge and a professor. His battle with the government on behalf of the Kurds tested the limits of the First Amendment, and became a legal bellwether. Pitted against the interests of national security, which became even more intense after the 9/11 terror attacks, Fertig argued that the 1st Amendment protected his right to advise the Kurds, which could possibly include members of the Kurdistan Workers Party, on how to take their grievances to the United Nation. How could advising someone to be civil and non-violent even a group such as the Kurdistan Workers Party identified by the U.S. as a terror group possibly hold up against the broad protections of the 1st Amendment? Court after court agreed with his reasoning. The Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland, had suffered in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, their assigned countries at the end of World War I. In Turkey, Fertig said, the intent of the governments policy was to eliminate the Kurds. The reach of the Patriot Act, Fertig said, was so broad that something as basic as providing humanitarian aid following a natural disaster could be illegal if the country was identified as a terrorist stronghold. But in 2010, decades after he first took up the first, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that human rights advocates like Fertig could be prosecuted if they offered advice to a foreign terror group, even if that advice was to settle disputes peacefully. The ruling was a sharp warning to international aid groups and charities that even goodwill gestures could put them at legal risk. In the name of fighting terrorism, the court has said that the 1st Amendment permits Congress to make it a crime to work for peace and human rights, said Georgetown law professor David Cole, who represented Fertig. That is wrong. There is no evidence that teaching human rights would further terrorism. Fertig was buoyant, however. Progress often came in small steps, he said. I do believe in the basic goodness of most people, he said in 2010. Its been proven that when we bring the realities of justice to the American public, they respond with the conscientious commitment. Fertig is survived by his children, Jill, David and Katie; son-in-law Ananda; and five grandchildren, Laura, Thomas, Ravi, Melissa and Thea. He was predeceased by his wife Madeleine Stoner, a USC professor and expert on homelessness, and two children, Karen and Jack. In an almost uniform response to the impending exit of Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, city and county public health officials are urging the Trump administration to go bigger in its response to adolescents growing use of e-cigarettes. The issue, they say, is reaching crisis levels and many worry the FDAs much-touted efforts are falling short. Gottlieb, whose almost two-year tenure heading the agency won praise for advancing key regulations in an administration geared toward deregulation, plans to leave April 5, with his farewell tour emphasizing his work on e-cigarettes. His departure, though, highlights a complicated, two-track story. In Washington, Gottlieb has been credited with taking on Big Tobacco and the e-cigarette industry. But health officials on the front lines say they want more federal action. Advertisement We were encouraged by some of the statements and actions of the [outgoing] FDA commissioner, said Bill Snook, a spokesman at the health department in Kansas City, Mo. But Dr. Sara Cody, who runs the Santa Clara County, Calif., health department, views the steps taken by the FDA as too little and too late. She pointed to proposed regulations that havent taken effect and to limits on how flavored vapes are sold that she and others argued did not go far enough. Gretchen Musicant, who heads Minneapolis health department, agreed. Their action so far is not demonstrable, she said. Now, they are waiting to see what Gottliebs permanent successor who has yet to be named will do. (Dr. Norman Ned Sharpless, director of the National Cancer Institute, will fill Gottliebs role on an interim basis and has been a vocal supporter of efforts to curb e-cigarette use.) Experts see youth vaping rates at epidemic levels: In 2018, about 1 in 5 high school-age students were reported to use electronic cigarettes, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Theres an entire generation of youth becoming addicted to nicotine, Cody said. And the consequences are vast. Jerry Berkson, an assistant principal at Palo Alto High School in California, said his desk is full of vapes he has confiscated from students. For more than a month this school year, the administration had to shut down certain bathrooms during class time so that students wouldnt go there to smoke. Increasingly, students have missed large chunks of class because illicit e-cigarettes keep setting off the fire alarm. Its a complex issue for federal regulators, though. E-cigarettes, which dont burn tobacco but do contain nicotine, have found champions among adult smokers trying to quit. Many say the devices provide a less damaging alternative and are more effective than nicotine patches or nicotine gum. But use by adolescents, who appear to be lured by the flavored juices that fuel these vapes, poses a concern. Even without tobacco, nicotine addiction and exposure can severely damage a young persons brain. Plus, some users will, medical experts say, end up transitioning to tobacco-filled products. As vaping rates among teens climb, the FDA has made a high-profile effort to address the public health concern without trampling on adults rights. The agency in 2016 classified electronic cigarettes as tobacco products that fall under its regulatory jurisdiction. Gottlieb has threatened e-cig manufacturers, saying the FDA would ban their products if companies didnt take steps to combat youth vaping. His declaration that youth vaping constituted an epidemic has brought attention to the issue, said Samir Soneji, an associate professor of health policy at the Dartmouth Institute. And, during a recent wide-ranging interview with KHN, Gottlieb reiterated his expectation that the FDA is prepared to look at banning these products, specifically mentioning the products that use flavored pods, or cartridges, because those are the ones kids are abusing. Last week, the agency put out a draft guidance that would bar the sale of fruit- and candy-flavored e-cigarettes in places easily accessible to young people. It would also require manufacturers to submit documentation by 2021 showing that flavored products meet public health standards in order to gain the FDAs approval. Until then, those flavors could stay on the market. Those steps have won praise from some experts. These actions show an appropriate response to the rapidly escalating youth e-cigarette epidemic, said Steven Kelder, an epidemiology professor at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Austin. But others worry this is part of a broader pattern: federal action that takes too long and is too narrow to have the needed effect. Critics say that giving manufacturers until 2021 to get a federal OK and leaving flavored products on the market until then means more years for children to develop nicotine addictions or transition from electronic cigarettes to conventional tobacco products. Theyre proposing things and putting them off into the future. But the actual enactment of their recommendations has not happened yet, said Minneapolis Musicant. Also, the restrictions on flavors dont touch menthol- or mint-flavored products, which are used by more than 50 percent of young vapers, according to CDC data. Multiple local public health advocates highlighted mint and menthol flavors as a major concern when it comes to youth use but note that federal regulators have not addressed the issue. This was a theme at a recent gathering in Washington, D.C., of the Big Cities Health Coalition, an organization of health departments from around the country. They need to be included in the ban, said Snook, of Kansas City. Other health lobbies, such as the American Heart Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, have made the same argument. In a statement, Gottlieb suggested that the FDA would take a harder look at those flavors if they continued to pose a problem and said the agency is not restricting them, for now, because of their appeal to adults trying to quit tobacco. We wont ignore data regarding the popularity of mint- and menthol-flavored [vapes] among kids, should the concern rise, Gottlieb said. Well continue to use all available resources to monitor the rates and use patterns among youth and adults for these products, and well reconsider our policies with respect to these products, if appropriate. States and counties have taken steps on their own. The FDAs response so far, Musicant said, spurred Minneapolis to take action restricting the sale of flavored products to stores where only adults 18 and older can enter and raising the tobacco age to 21. But there are limits to what the city and even state can do. (Online sales, for instance, are a major vape source for young people and cant be addressed without federal input.) San Francisco has banned the sale of any flavored tobacco product, a law encompassing e-cigarettes and conventional ones, and it is weighing a ban on e-cig sales altogether, until the products have FDA approval. In Santa Clara County, only adult vape shops can sell e-cigs, Cody said. Locally based policies will quickly hit a ceiling, Soneji said. They create a potential for a black market a San Francisco resident could pick up e-cigarettes in neighboring Oakland, for instance. That problem doesnt exist if the federal government steps in, he added. And delays matter substantially, especially given the speed with which adolescent vaping has taken off. The pace at which this epidemic is developing is shockingly fast, Cody said. That means the response has to be so fast and its not. Luthra writes for Kaiser Health News. Former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot was elected Chicago mayor on Tuesday, becoming the first black woman and first openly gay person to lead the nations third-largest city. Lightfoot defeated Toni Preckwinkle, who served in the City Council for 19 years before becoming Cook County Board of Commissioners president. Lightfoot promised to rid City Hall of corruption and help low-income and working-class people who she said had been left behind and ignored by Chicagos political ruling class. It was a message that resonated with voters weary of political scandal and insider deals, and who said the citys leaders for too long have invested in downtown at the expense of neighborhoods. Chicago becomes the largest U.S. city to elect a black woman as mayor. When Lightfoot is sworn in May 20, she will join seven other black women serving as mayors in major U.S. cities, including Atlanta and New Orleans. Advertisement Lightfoot, 56, has never been elected to public office. She and her wife have one daughter. She emerged as the surprising leader in the first round of voting in February when 14 candidates were on the ballot to succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who decided against running for a third term. Lightfoot seized on outrage over a white police officers fatal shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014 to launch her reformer campaign. That was even before Emanuel announced he wouldnt seek reelection amid criticism for initially resisting calls to release video of the shooting. Im not a person who decided I would climb the ladder of a corrupt political party, Lightfoot said during a debate last month. I dont hold the title of committeeman, central committeeman, boss of the party. Preckwinkle countered that her opponent lacks the necessary experience for the job. This is not an entry-level job, Preckwinkle has said repeatedly during the campaign. Its easy to talk about change. Its hard to actually do it. And thats been my experience being a change maker, a change agent, transforming institutions and communities. Chicago mayoral candidate Toni Preckwinkle campaigns in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago on March 24. (Teresa Crawford / Associated Press) Joyce Ross, 64, a resident of the citys predominantly black West Side who is a certified nursing assistant, cast her ballot Tuesday for Lightfoot. Ross said she believes Lightfoot will be better able to clean up the Police Department and curb the citys violence. She was also bothered by Preckwinkles association with longtime Alderman Ed Burke, who was indicted this year on charges he tried to shake down a restaurant owner who wanted to build in his ward. My momma always said birds of a feather flock together, Ross said. Truly Gannon, a 39-year-old mother of four who works as a dietitian, said she wasnt bothered by stories that portrayed Preckwinkle as an insider aligned with questionable politicians like Burke. She supported Preckwinkle, based on her experience. Im not sure Lightfoot would be able to handle the job like Preckwinkle, she said. The campaign between the two women got off to a contentious start, with Preckwinkles advertising focusing on Lightfoots work as a partner at Mayer Brown, one of the nations largest law firms, and tagging her as a wealthy corporate lawyer. Preckwinkle also tried to cast Lightfoot as an insider for working in police oversight posts under Emanuel and police oversight, procurement and emergency communications posts under Mayor Richard M. Daley. In one ad, Preckwinkle criticizes Lightfoots oversight of the emergency communications in 2004 when a fire killed four children. A judge ordered Lightfoot to preserve 911 tapes after questions were raised about how the emergency call was handled. The ad notes some of the tapes were destroyed, prompting the judge to rebuke Lightfoot. The ad sparked a backlash from the family of three of the children killed, with their sister accusing Preckwinkle of trying to take advantage of her familys tragedy. Lightfoot also responded by scolding her opponent for being negative while also airing ads pointing out Preckwinkles connection to powerful local Democrats, including one under federal indictment. Preckwinkle spent much of her time during the campaign answering for her ties to Chicagos political establishment. She and her supporters asserted her rise to Democratic Party leadership did not hinder her ability to oppose policies promoted by the citys ever-powerful mayors. My whole career has been about change, and change is action and results, not simply words, said Preckwinkle, who argued that her experience made her better positioned to lead a city with financial problems and poorer neighborhoods that are racked by gun violence. Despite the barbs on the campaign trail, the two advanced similar ideas to boost the citys deeply troubled finances, which include an estimated $250-million budget deficit next year and billions in unfunded pension liabilities. Both candidates expressed support for a casino in Chicago and changing the states income tax system to a graduated tax, in which higher earners are taxed at a higher rate two measures lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully for years to pass. Lightfoot said that as mayor, she would focus on investing in neighborhoods on the West and South Sides and bring transparency and accountability to City Hall. She said she also wants to restore peoples faith in government. Election officials said turnout was approaching 30% just before polls were scheduled to close. The first #MeToo allegations of the 2020 presidential race hit over the weekend, letting the general public in on a secret that apparently was already known in political circles: that former Vice President Joe Biden can be a bit too handsy with women and girls. In fact, theres plenty of photographic documentation of this. But Bidens behavior didnt draw much scrutiny until an essay appeared in New York Magazines The Cut on Friday in which Lucy Flores, a state assemblywoman in Nevada, described an encounter when she was running for lieutenant governor in 2014. During a political rally, she said, Biden came up behind her, put both hands on her shoulders and gave her a long, slow kiss on the back of her head just before she headed to the stage. If it was meant, as some have suggested, as a show of avuncular encouragement, it didnt work. Flores said she felt embarrassed, shocked and confused. Since then, several other people have recounted similar experiences. With more than a year and a half to go before election day, its hard to imagine there wont be more such unsavory disclosures involving the large field of presidential candidates. So perhaps we as a society can use this time to think about how we respond to such allegations. As this page has noted many times, the #MeToo movement is a healthy one for a society that has for far too long ignored these serious issues. Womens complaints should not be ignored or pooh-poohed or dismissed out of hand; sexual harassment should be taken seriously and addressed on a case-by-case basis. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute Advertisement There is, of course, a spectrum of bad behavior; not every offense should be career-ending; not all transgressions are equally unforgivable. Some require a reprimand while at the other extreme, some require criminal charges. Meanwhile, the useful and important discussion about how men should, and should not, treat female colleagues, co-workers, subordinates and service workers should continue. Its important to note the incident Flores reported was in 2014. This is not to offer an excuse for Biden, but to acknowledge that since then there has been a seismic cultural shift that has recalibrated societal norms and colored past behavior in new shades of gray. Men of all ages have been confronted with the reality that behavior they might have seen as inoffensive might instead have been taken as patronizing, offensive or creepy. Biden seems bewildered by the outcry over what he called expressions of affection. After all, he says, hes been an advocate for the rights of women and authored the Violence Against Women Act. But he also said wisely that he will pay better attention in the future. Thats a good idea. Check your behavior before you get checked, because the days in which a president or a presidential candidate could blithely massage the shoulders of another world leader or rub noses with a volunteer or kiss a state assemblywoman on the back of her head are happily gone. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook The president has once again been going into paroxysms of rage and anxiety over migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and as usual, it has led him to some bad decisions. Not only is he expanding his legally dubious policy of forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico as their claims proceed, but he is freezing humanitarian aid that was supposed to improve living conditions in Central America, and he is even threatening to shut the border entirely unless Mexico somehow miraculously finds a way to stop migrants from moving north. The president is flailing. His moves endanger the safety of people exercising the legal right to seek asylum, and will only worsen conditions in Central America that have sent so many migrants fleeing in the first place. Whats more, it could put a big hit on the U.S. economy by disrupting the flow of $1.5 billion of goods a day across the border. All of this is predicated on a lie. Its true that border agents are apprehending thousands more unaccompanied minors and migrant families at the border, the vast majority of whom are intentionally seeking out border agents so they can apply for asylum, a right recognized by U.S. law and international agreements. But the number of apprehensions 320,000 so far this year remains a fraction of the 1.5 million a year during the Clinton administration. Border crossers formerly were predominately Mexican men seeking work. Now border crossers tend to be unaccompanied minors and families fleeing violence and poverty. That calls for a different response than wholesale deportation. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute Advertisement Whats more, many experts argue that improving the dangerous conditions in the home countries is the best way to address the problem. Yet the president has ordered a freeze on more than $500 million in humanitarian aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala because those governments, he says, have failed to keep migrants from leaving. How does shutting off aid help? The U.S. immigration system is broken, and was long before Trump became president. Congress has failed to meet its responsibility to fix the problems, from updating visa categories and work permits to reconsidering priorities for whom to let in to revamping the immigration courts so that they can handle the work they are charged with performing. But presidents play a role in this, too, and Trumps failure to make any meaningful moves to work with Congress, or to craft reforms of his own, tells the nation that his interest lies not in fixing immigration, but in narrowing it as far as he possibly can. His draconian policies are inhumane to those he targets, and bad for a nation that owes so much of its success to those who have come here to mesh their futures with ours. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs report on his Russia investigation which we now know is nearly 400 pages long is still under lock and key. President Trump, his critics and his defenders have had to base their takes on a four-page summary of Muellers principal conclusions by Atty. Gen. William P. Barr. Last week Barr promised that he would release the actual report by mid-April, if not sooner. But it wont be the whole document. In a letter to the chairman of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Barr said he and Mueller would redact Washingtonese for black out the following categories of information: (1) material subject to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) that by law cannot be made public;(2) material the intelligence community identifies as potentially compromising sensitive sources and methods;(3) material that could affect other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other [Justice] Department offices; and (4) information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties. These restrictions are more extensive than many people, including members of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, believe are necessary given public interest in the investigation. Democrats are right to tell Barr that the less redaction, the better. Advertisement Democrats must be careful about needless confrontation and actions that suggest a purely partisan motive. Even some grand-jury information should be made public. As Barr noted, Rule 6 (e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure provides that government attorneys may not disclose what occurs before a grand jury. But there are exceptions, which may go beyond the examples listed in the regulation. (That said, prying loose grand-jury information may be difficult.) In his response to Barrs second letter, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) urged the attorney general to join with Congress in asking a federal court to release any and all grand jury information to the House Judiciary Committee as has occurred in every similar investigation in the past. Thats a smart move, and Nadler can cite bipartisan support for transparency. On March 14, the House voted 420-0 in favor of a resolution calling for the release to the public of Muellers complete findings with an exception for classified material. Even Trump himself said he thinks the report should be made public, though he has seemed to hedge on that position recently. (Last week he tweeted: The problem is, no matter what the Radical Left Democrats get, no matter what we give them, it will never be enough. . . . So maybe we should just take our victory and say NO, weve got a Country to run!) But Democrats must be careful about needless confrontation and actions that suggest a purely partisan motive. For example, Nadler is planning a vote on Wednesday by his committee to authorize a subpoena for the Mueller report. Given Barrs promise in writing to deliver the report by the middle of the month, that may be needlessly precipitous. And if the vote breaks down on party lines, Trump will be able to portray the request for the report as Witch Hunt 2. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute Its not a secret that many Democrats hope that ventilation of the details in Muellers report will make Trump and his campaign look bad. According to Barr, Mueller did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. But the actual report might contain enough evidence of improper contacts that Democrats can spin the collusion issue the other way. Then there is the fact that Mueller punted on the question of whether Trump committed obstruction of justice by engaging in actions most of which have been the subject of public reporting. Barr and Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein concluded on their own that Muellers evidence is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. But Democrats can hope that the actual Mueller report, as opposed to Barrs bare-bones account of its principal conclusions, might lend itself to a more incriminating interpretation. Democrats motives in seeking release of the Mueller report may be a mixture of principle and partisanship. Even so, they would be wise to emphasize the principle. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook The upside of Pacific Gas and Electrics enormous bankruptcy crisis is that it gives California officials an unparalleled opportunity to turn the states largest utility into an engine of decarbonization, a conduit for changes needed to carry out Californias ambitious climate goals. Wrangling among the companys creditors, shareholders and fire victims is likely to dominate public attention for the next two or three years, but decisions during that time about how to reorganize the utility will affect many more Californians. These decisions, in the form of actions taken by Gov. Gavin Newsom, regulators, legislators and the bankruptcy court are likely to help the company by limiting its future fire liabilities and allowing it to raise rates to cover fire costs. Such concessions should be granted only in return for reshaping the utility into a platform big enough and nimble enough to take on climate change at the scale it requires. It is climate change, after all, that helped bring on PG&Es bankruptcy, in the form of catastrophic fires that have left it with an estimated $30-billion liability. Global warming has also upended its business model, with nearly half of PG&E customers, according to the utility, lured away by community electricity sources that rely chiefly on renewable technologies, a shift that is likely to continue. PG&E or whatever entity replaces it must be required to refit its infrastructure in the urban-wildland interface to curb fire danger. Advertisement Whether the states comprehensive carbon-cutting goals can be implemented remains uncertain. Senate Bill 100, passed in September, requires that Californias electricity be carbon-free by 2045. An executive order issued by former Gov. Jerry Brown commits the states entire economy to reach carbon neutrality by the same date, which means converting California vehicles, buildings and industries to zero-net-carbon emissions within a quarter-century. Given the destructiveness of the wildfires, PG&E or whatever entity replaces it must be required to refit its infrastructure in the urban-wildland interface to curb fire danger. At the same time, it should build or remodel transmission and generation equipment to support clean energy, foster building and residential retrofits and wind down its natural gas business to nothing. For starters, the utility can help with the replacement of fossil-fuel vehicles in the state with all-electric vehicles. The switch is essential because transportation accounts for 37% of the states end-use carbon emissions, making it the biggest contributor to carbon pollution of any sector. PG&E (and other utilities) can install or support electric charging stations, which must become more common than gas stations are now. Changes in electricity infrastructure can also transform the grid to enable the two-way transmission of electricity, so that, for example, cars can act as a kind of giant collective battery storing and sending electricity as well as consuming it in a renewables-intensive system. Buildings and homes are second only to the transportation sector in statewide end-use carbon emissions, and like vehicles, they also will require a rapid all-out shift to electrification. PG&E can encourage building owners and consumers through rebates and incentives to shift from gas to electric appliances and heating. In addition, PG&E must complete a conversion to a time-of-day rate structure, so that consumers are rewarded for using and storing electricity when demand is low, typically late at night, and limiting use when demand is highest, in the late afternoon. Incentivizing the installation of devices like electric water heaters that can keep water hot for hours until its needed can expedite this transition. While electrification spreads, natural gas consumption must wither. As Panama Bartholomy, director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, puts it, Nobody has been able to show any path to meeting Californias climate goals that includes burning gas in buildings. One advantage for the remaining gas-less utility is that it would have to maintain only one energy infrastructure, not two. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute The shape of PG&Es bankruptcy reorganization would be crucial to this change. For example, a split of the company into separate gas and electric utilities could be disastrous if the new gas company is allowed to pursue profits in a conventional way it would then be likely to resist its necessary devolution into a stranded asset. But if its eventual dissolution is built into its structure, it might prove an acceptable approach. For a hint of whats at stake, consider that before PG&E filed for bankruptcy relief, it signed agreements to buy electricity from dozens of planned renewable energy projects one of them, a San Jose energy storage project, alone would enable three natural gas plants to close. Now all these projects are in limbo because its uncertain that PG&E will honor the agreements. Bankruptcy, says Bruce Nilles, a senior fellow at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainable energy advocacy group, is a pretty horrendous way to make policy. But it affords PG&E a chance to repair its tattered reputation for civic-mindedness and given the urgency of addressing climate change, it presents California with a last-ditch chance to help bring the states energy goals within reach. Jacques Leslie is a contributing writer to Opinion. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook To the editor: Do U.S. census categories, which some people feel do not accurately reflect their race, really erase identity? Frank Sinatra certainly never forget his Italian ancestry, nor did George M. Cohan forget his Irish heritage. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo did not forget his Jewish roots. Their cultural backgrounds were vastly different. Yet those cultural differences were not marked on the census. And that was actually progressive and very different from Europe, where such labels as Irish race, Anglo-Saxon race and Jewish race were used to ostracize people. Would we really prefer a census where each of these men would have been placed in a different category? Would someone Jewish be in the proposed Middle Eastern category even though his or her ancestors may not have lived in the Middle East for centuries? Advertisement What we need are fewer categories, not more. David L. Saffan, Santa Barbara .. To the editor: Samira Damavandi, quoted extensively in this article, feels left out because, being of Iranian heritage, she fits none of the options for race on the census. Sadly, my wife of Italian ancestry also feels left out since there is no option for Calabrese. My Korean friend does not want to be lumped into the same class as Japanese Americans, after what the Empire of Japan did to Korea before and during World War II. The identity game is rapidly making the American unum more and more pluribus, defeating one of the great ideas of the United States. David Goodwin, Pasadena Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook To the editor: Im impressed with Swedish student Greta Thunbergs success in rallying 1.6 million young people to march against climate change. Thats a huge accomplishment. I attended the march here in Los Angeles two weeks ago, where about 500 mostly high school kids and a few of us graybeards marched in the hot sun waving signs and chanting. The young folks seemed genuinely sincere. Mixed in with the giddiness of skipping school on a sunny Friday was a palpable tinge of fear. These kids understand the science. No one there suggested an action to take, so allow me to offer one in two parts. The fix for climate change is to stop using oil, coal and gas. The students should convince their parents to buy 100% clean electricity for their homes. And, if their parents drive gas cars, they need to switch to electric vehicles. This will have an actual impact on climate change. Marching and chanting is fun, but the oil companies will continue drilling as long as people keep giving them money to do so. Advertisement Paul Scott, Santa Monica Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook To the editor: Regarding the plan for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the ever-shrinking building that was originally intended to expand and update an aging campus, taxpayers not to mention those of us who are also devoted to LACMA as a vital cultural institution are now faced with the prospect of funding a structure that provides less space, flexibility and architectural interest than what we had been promised at the outset. The March 29 front-page piece by Carolina A. Miranda and other articles on LACMA last month all throw into serious question the wisdom of the current project as proposed. Let us hope that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors steps up to the task and confronts the critical questions about form, function and financing that it has been avoiding for years and puts an end to this ill-advised plan. Its time to go back to the drawing board. We may need a new building for LACMA, but this is not it. Margaret Bach, Santa Monica Advertisement The writer is founding president of the Los Angeles Conservancy. The views expressed here are her own. .. To the editor: As a designer, Ive always believed that a strong concept underlying a project provides cohesion and understanding. But I learned early on that allowing the concept to single-mindedly drive the design process can lead one down the road to a quagmire or possibly a tar pit of compromise. This appears to be the pit architect Peter Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan have fallen into. Adhering to the single floor, tar-pit shaped concept now results in a structure occupying more exterior space with less exhibition space than what it will replace. Since the new building will use all the remaining space on LACMAs campus, the loss of exhibition space cannot be rectified by future construction. Theres still time to fix this. Its an art museum. Its about the art. John Sherwood, Topanga .. To the editor: Im sure officials at the Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are duly chastened to learn that despite their collections, their institutions cannot be considered great museums since their main buildings are not horizontal. As for LACMA, I am sure that visitors will be thrilled to learn that the replacement building, though erected at great cost, will be considerably smaller and able to display even less of the museums collection, and that they are supposed to be impressed by a building resembling a mediocre motel one passes when driving along a meagerly populated portion of the interstate. After reading the article, I wasnt sure whether I was depressed or outraged. Patricia M. Wolfe, Los Angeles Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook To the editor: If the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has a Trump problem, as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) writes, every organization should have such a problem. Schiff doesnt mention that Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, has praised President Trump. Stoltenberg said Trump is helping us adapt the alliance, which we need, because we live in a more unpredictable world. And you have to remember that the increase we now see in defense spending by European and NATO allies comes after years of decline. So before they were cutting billions. Now theyre actually adding billions. Stoltenberg credits Trump with obtaining $100 billion more in defense spending for the alliance. Thats not exactly the picture Schiff is painting. P.J. Gendell, Beverly Hills Advertisement .. To the editor: Schiffs article speaks to the vital importance of our historical alliances. His concluding statement that the U.S, together with our NATO allies, must carry the torch of democracy and human rights at a time when both are increasingly at risk, should be a rallying cry throughout the country. However, nothing says it better than the photo published with this article in print, showing German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron eyeing each other in disbelief, probably about the man who is coming between them and NATO, oblivious in his lonely pout. Bridget Tucker, Laguna Hills Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook A woman carrying two Chinese passports and a device containing computer malware lied to Secret Service agents and briefly gained admission to President Trumps Mar-a-Lago club over the weekend during his Florida visit, federal prosecutors allege in court documents. Yujing Zhang, 32, approached a Secret Service agent at a checkpoint outside the Palm Beach club early Saturday afternoon and said she was a member who wanted to use the pool, court documents said. She showed the passports as identification. Agents said she wasnt on the membership list, but a club manager thought Zhang was the daughter of a member. Agents said when they asked Zhang if the member was her father, she did not answer definitively, but they thought it might be a language barrier and admitted her. Zhangs story changed when she got inside, agents say, telling a front desk receptionist she was there to attend the United Nations Chinese American Assn. event scheduled for that evening. No such event was scheduled, and agents were summoned. Advertisement Agent Samuel Ivanovich wrote in court documents that Zhang told him she was there for the Chinese American event and had come early to familiarize herself with the club and take photos, again contradicting what she said at the checkpoint. She showed him an invitation in Chinese that he could not read. He said Zhang was taken off the grounds and told she could not be there. Ivanovich said she became argumentative, so she was taken to the local Secret Service office for questioning. There, he said, it became clear Zhang spoke and read English well. He said Zhang said she had traveled from Shanghai to attend the nonexistent Mar-a-Lago event on the invitation of an acquaintance named Charles, whom she only knew through a Chinese social media app. Ivanovich said she then denied telling the checkpoint agents she was a member wanting to swim. Ivanovich said Zhang carried four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive and a thumb drive containing computer malware. She did not have a swimsuit. Zhang is charged with making false statements to federal agents and illegally entering a restricted area. She remains in custody pending a hearing next week. Her public defender, Robert Adler, declined comment. There was no indication Zhang was ever near the president. There is also no indication that she is connected to Li Yang, a Chinese native, Republican donor and former Florida massage parlor owner. Yang recently made news after it was learned she was promising Chinese business leaders that her consulting firm could get them access to Mar-a-Lago, where they could mingle with the president. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is moving to change Senate rules to further speed up the confirmation of low-level judges and administration nominees, the latest example of scaling back long-standing Senate rules designed to give political power to the minority party. Democrats tried to block the move in a vote Tuesday afternoon, but it failed, 51 to 48. McConnell is expected to make the rule change over their objections as soon as Wednesday. Under the new plan, McConnell would eliminate 28 hours of debate that the minority can currently demand before the Senate votes on a nomination. The new rule two hours of debate instead of 30 would apply to district court judges and low-level administration appointees, such as sub-Cabinet posts and nominations to some federal boards. The rules covering higher-profile nominations, such as Cabinet posts and Supreme Court and circuit court appointees, would remain in place. Advertisement Republicans blamed Democrats for slow-walking well-qualified Trump administration nominees for partisan purposes. McConnell pointed to seemingly noncontroversial nominees whose appointments have languished on the Senate calendar for months because Democrats demanded that the 30 hours be used. In the past, the 30-hour rule was frequently waived by the minority party as a courtesy, but such niceties have evaporated amid growing partisanship. The White House and McConnell have made judicial appointments a priority, particularly now that Democrats control the House, making any legislative efforts exceedingly difficult. Because of the lifetime appointments of judges, the effort could dramatically move the direction of the courts to the right for generations, a legacy that would long outlast the Trump presidency. So far, President Trump has gotten 37 appellate court judges confirmed, a point McConnell has referred to as a badge of honor. President Obama got 55 appellate court judges confirmed during his entire eight-year term. Democrats, who oppose the change, say the record GOP appointments are proof that the rules dont need to be changed. On the one hand, theres too much obstruction. On the other, we have supported a record amount of judges, said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), in a mocking reference to the GOP argument. The Senate needs to do its job. We should not be a conveyor belt for President Trumps radical and unqualified judicial nominees. For nearly a decade, the minority whether Republicans or Democrats has increased the use of Senate procedural tools to block the majority partys agenda. That has prompted the majority to change the rules. In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, changed the threshold for advancing nominations of federal judicial nominees except the Supreme Court and executive-office appointments from 60 senators to 50. It was derided at the time by Republicans as a nuclear option. Four years later, McConnell used his own nuclear option to lower the threshold in the same way for Supreme Court nominations, clearing the path for Trumps two appointments to the high court. But other Senate precedents have gone by the wayside as well. In 2017, McConnell refused to consider the confirmation of Obamas nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. Republicans have also done away with the custom of allowing senators to effectively block judicial appointments in their home states, a process known as a blue slip. Republicans say Democrats are taking advantage of the rule governing 30 hours of debate. They cite 128 instances during the first two years of the Trump administration in which Democrats have insisted on using the full amount of time. During the six presidencies before Trump, it was demanded only 24 times on nominations. And they cited instances in which Democrats after insisting on all 30 hours of debate time then only debated for a few hours, or even minutes. The rest of the time, the Senate floor was largely empty, with no other work able to be done. This is not about actual debate, said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), citing one nomination that was debated for 4 minutes and 22 seconds. This is about preventing President Trump from getting nominees by blocking up the floor. He said that since Republicans would also demand 30 hours of debate the next time they are in the minority, it made sense to simply limit the time to prevent the Senate from becoming bogged down over low-level appointments. The rule change Republicans are expected to pursue would be permanent unless a future Senate majority decided to undo the change. A somewhat similar rule change limiting debate time was adopted during Obamas second term, but only on a temporary basis. The latest from Washington More stories from Jennifer Haberkorn Steve Scheffler, who represents Iowa on the Republican National Committee, has a warning for anyone in the party hoping to deny President Trump the 2020 GOP nomination. We want to protect the integrity of the caucuses and give people the ability to make their case, he said, referring to the balloting that kicks off the election season next February. But, Scheffler went on, there will be zero tolerance for any Republican who comes to Iowa and starts bashing the president and his policies. That, he said, will be dealt with. As Trump looks ahead to his reelection bid, the president enjoys a vise grip on the GOP and its machinery, as well as overwhelming support among Republican voters, with a sky-scraping 90% approval rating. Even harsh critics see little chance Trump will be denied his partys nomination, barring a dramatic change in fortune. Advertisement But some, like Marylands Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, see no harm in trying. What are they so afraid of? he said during a recent Iowa swing, even as he denied any personal White House ambitions. Its like we have to swear allegiance to the Dear Leader. Why dont you let us go out there, he continued, let people go out there, and challenge and get their brains beat in [if] youre so all powerful? Given Trumps irredeemable penchant for controversy and a myriad of political and criminal investigations probes that extend beyond Robert S. Muellers inquiry several potential rivals are eyeing a primary challenge. Or at least theyre not flatly ruling one out. Mueller finds no Trump-Russia conspiracy but doesnt exonerate Trump on obstruction Hogan plans a trip later this month to New Hampshire, which holds the first primary, the kind of move that stokes presidential speculation. Bill Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, has formed an exploratory committee and made the rounds of radio and TV chatting up his possible candidacy. Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich is considering a repeat run, though hes mindful of the long odds. Plenty of people come and say, Please run, so we could put some torpedoes underneath the water line, said John Weaver, a Kasich advisor and fierce detractor of the incumbent. But those people have never been through a presidential campaign and dont know how hard it is. However unlikely it may seem, Trump has good cause to worry about a primary brawl. Since 1968, four presidents have faced serious opponents who sought to wrestle away their partys nomination: Democrats Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter and Republicans Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush. Each was gravely wounded by the fratricidal fighting and all failed to win another term. By contrast, the presidents who avoided strenuous primary opposition Republicans Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won reelection. Waste your money, waste your time and go ahead and lose. Ronna McDaniel, Republican National Committee chairwoman, daring Republicans to challenge President Trump for the GOP nomination Inside the White House, aides say Trump has been far more focused on his potential Democratic rivals and especially the public reception they have gotten than the prospect of a GOP challenge. He has got his base so unified behind him, theres so little room for an opponent to operate, said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which accorded Trump a rapturous reception at Marchs annual gathering of the advocacy group. Schlapps wife, Mercedes, is a White House communications strategist. When Trump ran in 2016, he was a political outsider regarded with thinly veiled contempt by much of the Republican establishment. Now that very same establishment the leaders of the GOP in Washington and states across the country has fallen in lockstep behind the president and begun marshaling efforts to ensure him a second term. In January, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution of undivided support for the president after reaching an unprecedented agreement to merge the party and Trumps reelection team into a single unit. Weeks later, the partys chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, taunted any would-be contestant. Have at it, she said at the Conservative Political Action Conference put on by Schlapps organization. Waste your money, waste your time and go ahead and lose. Around the country, Trump allies are well positioned to guard his interests. The former co-chairman of his New Hampshire campaign, Stephen Stepanek, is now head of the state GOP. In South Carolina, which has traditionally held one of the most crucial Republican primaries, there is talk of cancelling the vote, thus sparing Trump a contest. Why have taxpayers pay for a primary? state GOP chairman Drew McKissick said on CNN. Our party totally supports the president. Even those professing neutrality, like Iowas Scheffler, dont hide their desire to shield Trump from attack. While vague about the consequences I cant tell you that right now Scheffler cited two of the presidents well-known nemeses, former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and the states late Sen. John McCain, as crossing a line that would not be tolerated ahead of the 2020 caucuses. Its OK to have public policy differences, Scheffler said of Trumps would-be opponents, but not to be very negative in tone. The biggest indictments, guilty pleas and dramas in the Russia investigation Others, however, welcome the prospect of a Republican alternative to the president, as a fallback in the event of a mortal blow from one of several ongoing investigations, or a politically fatal disaster of Trumps own making. Its not a bad thing, said Craig Robinson, a former Iowa Republican Party strategist and publisher of a blog on GOP politics. In four, five, six months, Republicans may be happy theres another option. The prospect generating the most notice of late is Hogan, who just romped to reelection in a state Hillary Clinton carried by 26 points. Some detected presidential aspirations in his inaugural address, in which Hogan praised McCain, who was laid to rest at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and celebrated his father as the first House Republican to vote for Richard Nixons impeachment. No man, not even the president of the United States, is above the law, he quoted the late congressman saying. (Hogan notes he also mentioned his father at his inauguration four years ago.) Whatever his thoughts regarding Trump the governor did not support him in 2016 there was no mistaking his disdain for those just down the road in Washington. Lets repudiate the debilitating politics practiced elsewhere, he said, where insults substitute for debate, recriminations for negotiation and gridlock for compromise. Appearing in Des Moines, where he spoke at a National Governors Association employment workshop, Hogan offered a notable contrast to the president, in both form and style. Balding and a bit roly-poly, he has the unpretentious air of a suburban dad-next-door. His jokey self-deprecation Hogan said hed planned a subzero walking tour and introduced himself as the filler between others on the program displayed the kind of modesty that Trump distinctly lacks. In an interview afterward, Hogan insisted he was not laying the groundwork for a 2020 bid, or even giving a White House bid much serious thought. But he left the door conspicuously ajar. I just dont know what the lay of the land is going to look like and, while its not something Im focused on, things can change, he said. In the circumstances were under right now, who knows what its going to look like next month, this summer. In the fall. He hopes someone challenges Trump, Hogan said, even if hes not the one to do so. I think theres a significant portion of people that are concerned about the direction of the party, the future of the party, the future of the country, Hogan said. And somebody needs to give voice to that. Barabak reported from Des Moines and Stokols from Washington. mark.barabak@latimes.com @markzbarabak A massive emergency aid bill for victims of hurricanes, wildfires, flooding and other natural disasters was defeated in the Senate on Monday amid a fight between Democrats and President Trump over relief for Puerto Rico. Senate Democrats opposed the $13.45-billion legislation, saying the $600 million included for Puerto Ricos food stamp program is inadequate to meet the U.S. territorys needs as it attempts to recover from Hurricane Maria. The Democrats are embracing a House-passed relief bill containing hundreds of millions of dollars more for Puerto Rico than the GOP version, but it, too, failed to advance Monday as Republicans opposed it. Trump opposes sending any additional aid to Puerto Rico apart from the food stamp money, funding Republicans convinced him to accept as the price for passing the long-pending disaster bill. RELATED: Trump complains to senators that Puerto Rico gets too much hurricane relief money Advertisement The vote on the GOP bill was 44 in favor and 49 against. The House Democratic bill failed on a vote of 48-46. Sixty votes would have been needed for either piece of legislation to advance. Its unclear whether Congress and the administration will move forward to revive the emergency package, and the impasse risks indefinitely delaying disaster funding nationwide amid partisan sniping. Support for disaster aid is often bipartisan on Capitol Hill, but the dispute over this legislation has become increasingly bitter, despite the evident need around the country. Ahead of the vote, Republicans accused Democrats of holding up much-needed aid for a range of disasters, from flooding in the Midwest and tornadoes in the south to volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, so they could use Puerto Rico as a political issue against the president. This is no time for our colleagues across the aisle to prioritize a political fight with the president ahead of the urgent needs of communities across our country, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the floor of his chamber Monday. This does not need to be a difficult partisan decision. Trump weighed in on Twitter earlier Monday in support of the legislation, which was authored in part by Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), one of his closest allies in the Senate. Democrats should stop fighting Sen. David Perdues disaster relief bill. They are blocking funding and relief for our great farmers and rural America! Trump wrote. But Democrats are furious over Trumps reluctance to send assistance to Puerto Rico, a stance the president has articulated in private meetings with aides and repeated last week in a closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans. Trump contended in his meeting with Senate Republicans that Puerto Rico has already gotten more disaster relief than many states. He cited a figure of $91 billion in aid, though that sum reflects an estimate of how much funding the island could receive over time and is more than twice as much as federal agencies have actually obligated or approved thus far. Republicans must remember that just as we leave no soldier behind on the battlefield we help our fellow Americans when theres a disaster, wherever the disaster strikes, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote in an opinion piece published in the New York Daily News over the weekend. We do not abandon them. Period. The president and Senate Republicans actions on Puerto Rico can be described in only two words: cruel and nasty. OPINION: Puerto Rico needs more than an AOC-inspired morale boost to recover from its disasters Trump said last week that hes taken better care of Puerto Rico than any human being living. Puerto Ricos governor, Ricardo Rossello, a Democrat, recently described Trump as a bully and threatened during an interview on CNN to punch him in the mouth. Rossello has publicly called on Congress to approve House Democrats version of the bill although without specifically opposing the Senate GOP version. The House Democrats bill does not include funding for the historic flooding that swept through Iowa, Nebraska and other Midwestern states in mid-March; that measure was completed and passed in January. That gap has allowed Republicans to argue that their bill, which would make billions of dollars available to the Midwest, is the only piece of legislation that addresses the nations disaster needs in their totality. Democrats, however, say they support adding Midwest flood aid to the House bill, and they tried to offer an amendment to do so Monday but were blocked by Republicans. As a number of Senate Democrats campaigning for president visit Iowa, some Republicans have argued that opposing major disaster aid for the state could be politically risky. The emergency legislation, which has been pending in one form or another since last year, addresses an array of disasters that have befallen different parts of the nation in the past of couple years, among them: an earthquake in Alaska; volcanoes in Hawaii; California wildfires; last years hurricanes that hit North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and the central Northern Marianas Islands; the 2017 hurricanes in Puerto Rico; tornadoes in Alabama and Georgia; and flooding in Iowa, Nebraska and other Midwestern states. The congressional impasse has already led to cuts of about 25% to the food stamp benefits received in March by the 1.3 million Puerto Rico residents 43% of the islands population who rely on the program. If Congress does not pass the funding soon, those people will again have the reduced food stamp allocation. The islands government has also had to cut the size of a supplemental cash benefit to the food stamp program that many elderly Puerto Ricans say they use to buy basic necessities, such as detergent and toothpaste. Rossello says that the food stamp money is critical for Puerto Rico and that other federal assistance is also necessary, such as money for reconstruction projects and debris removal, and other measures that were included in House Democrats legislation. The House-passed legislation also included $849 million in Environmental Protection Agency funding for Puerto Rico, as well as a measure that would ensure FEMA picks up the tab for reconstruction projects on the island, as the federal government did after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. In a letter in January, the Trump administration derided the extra EPA funding as excessive and worried the FEMA money would go to projects unrelated to the hurricane. It also initially opposed the extension of emergency food stamp aid as excessive and unnecessary. The lack of funding for Puerto Rico comes as the island grapples with a recession that has lasted over a decade and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee to the states since Hurricane Maria made landfall. Maria caused more than $90 billion in damage to the island and killed thousands of people while knocking out power for many of the islands residents for months. Werner and Stein write for the Washington Post. There used to be a lot of health insurance horror stories like Charley Butlers. After the Montana truck driver was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2016, his insurer balked at paying tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills and then moved to cancel his coverage over a preexisting medical condition. These practices were largely banned by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which set new national health insurance standards to protect consumers and bar discrimination based on preexisting conditions. But as the Trump administration has pushed to relax many of these rules, skimpier short-term health plans like the one Butler bought are roaring back, threatening to subject consumers to many of the ordeals patients endured before the healthcare law. Advertisement Unfortunately, companies are taking advantage of the fact that consumer protections required by the Affordable Care Act dont apply to these plans, said former California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, who participated in several national investigations of short-term plans. The kind of things we are seeing with these short-term plans look like what we used to see across the board. This includes misleading advertising, exclusions for preexisting conditions and often outright fraud. Nearly every company involved in Butlers health plan has paid settlements to regulators in recent years, according to regulatory filings from around the country and a review of hundreds of pages of records in a lawsuit Butler has filed in federal court in Montana. In December, Health Insurance Innovations Inc., a Florida firm that promotes short-term plans, including the one Butler bought, agreed to pay $3.4 million to settle a 43-state investigation of the companys sales and marketing practices. These plans can sound good, said Sandy Praeger, a former Republican state insurance regulator in Kansas and onetime president of the National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners. Like a time-share apartment, you may think you are getting a good deal. But if people get sick, they find theyre not covered. Butler, 36, said he had no inkling of his plans shortcomings when he was contacted in early 2016 by a representative from National Brokers of America Inc., a Pennsylvania company that sells short-term plans and has been sanctioned by insurance regulators in at least four states. The broker who unbeknownst to Butler had been convicted of assault and theft, according to Pennsylvania court records assured Butler that the 11-month plan would protect him if he got sick. The monthly premium was just $146, far less than more comprehensive plans available on HealthCare.gov, the insurance marketplace created by the healthcare law. It seemed pretty straight-up at the time, Butler recalled in an interview. Misleading assurances are common, according to researchers who have found that marketing for short-term plans often obscures the limitations of the coverage. In many cases, consumers dont even think to ask if plans cover preexisting medical conditions, said Dania Palanker of the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms. We are at a point now where people assume that all health insurance covers preexisting conditions, Palanker said. In the same way, you wouldnt think to ask if a new car you are buying has seat belts. But short-term plans dont have to offer the full set of benefits required under the 2010 law and can turn away sick customers by refusing to cover their preexisting conditions. The plans also often cap how much medical care they will pay for, a practice that was banned on insurance marketplaces created by the health law. At the end of Butlers 25-page policy were 45 exclusions and limitations. These included no coverage for any preexisting medical condition, non-emergency joint replacements, foot care, mental health or substance abuse treatment, kidney disease or injuries sustained at work. Such limitations make these short-term plans substantially cheaper than plans offered on the more regulated marketplaces. And Trump administration officials have billed them as a reliable option for Americans struggling to afford high premiums. Despite warnings from patient advocates, physician groups and state regulators, the administration last year took a major step to promote short-term plans, issuing rules that allow consumers to renew them for up to three years. That reversed an effort by the Obama administration to phase out the plans by limiting them to just three months, a move President Obama made shortly before leaving office. Butler assumed he would be safe with his policy when he enrolled in February 2016. His insurance card, which he received from Health Insurance Innovations, identified his coverage as a Premier plan that offered services through a MultiPlan Complementary Network, which appeared to be the plans network of physicians and hospitals. Butler didnt know that the company that actually provided his plan Kansas-based Unified Life Insurance Co. a year later would agree to pay $2.8 million after an investigation by Massachusetts regulators into the deceptive and unlawful sale of its plans. Nor did he know about the investigation of Health Insurance Innovations. Butlers troubles began in August 2016 when he went to the doctor with pain in his groin and was diagnosed with testicular cancer that was ultimately found to have spread to his lungs. Over the next six months, Butler underwent two surgeries and aggressive chemotherapy. It was a stressful time, Butler recalled, made worse when medical bills started arriving with no indication the insurance plan was paying anything. Chole Butler goes through the cancer box with her husband at their home in Sidney, Mont. (Jim Urquhart / For The Times) He and his wife, Chole, were told they owed more than $3,000 to Butlers surgeon, nearly $1,700 to the anesthesiologist and more than $20,000 to the hospital. Altogether, the bills would add up to more than $43,000. Chole Butler, who was trying to navigate the deluge, tried calling the number on Butlers insurance card. I knew it wasnt good when they started sending me from one department to another, she said. She was told claims were still being processed, the insurer needed more information or the medical providers didnt file the right paperwork. Then, more than two months after Butler started his treatment, Butler received a letter from the claims administrator working with Unified Life that demanded more information about his medical history. The Butlers would learn later this was a so-called rescission review, a practice that insurance companies once regularly undertook to avoid paying customers medical claims by unearthing evidence of preexisting medical conditions that consumers failed to disclose when they bought the policy. Rescission reviews were effectively eliminated by the 2010 healthcare law for more regulated plans, which cannot deny care for preexisting conditions. Customers with the kind of short-term plan Butler bought are still subject to the practice, however. Unifieds claims administrator acknowledged in court papers that it routinely conducts rescission reviews on customers who get sick, during which medical bills are not paid. The Butlers would also learn that his Unified plan had no network of doctors and hospitals, despite what his insurance card suggested. That meant that any doctor or hospital where Butler sought care could bill him for the shortfall between the list price it charged for a service and the amount his insurer would actually pay, a practice known as balance billing. Customers who buy more regulated marketplace plans that must offer a network are protected from balance billing. We didnt know what the heck was going on, Butler said. Fortunately, Butler fared better with his medical care, and in 2017 his cancer went into remission. But as the dispute with the insurers dragged on, the Butlers were forced to hold a community fundraiser to pay off medical debt. Chole Butler was treated for stress. Unified and its administrator finally began to pay bills more than six months after Butler was diagnosed, and only after the Butlers complained to Montanas insurance department and hired an attorney. Its inexcusable that a health insurance company would take premiums from someone like Charley Butler and then not even process the claims for months and months after he is diagnosed with cancer, said the Butlers attorney, John Morrison, a former Montana insurance commissioner. Cancer survivor Charley Butler is training for strongman competitions at his Sidney, Mont., home. (Jim Urquhart / For The Times) Obamacare 101: A primer on key issues in the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act Unified declined through an attorney to publicly discuss details of the Butler case or the companys short-term business, instead providing a statement that noted that Butler was never denied care for his cancer. Unified is pleased that Mr. Butlers successful cancer treatment resulted in complete remission, the company said. An attorney for National Brokers of America, which also would not discuss Butlers case, said in a statement that the company and its representatives comply with all laws related to the sale of insurance products. Health Insurance Innovations did not respond to inquiries about the case. However, former Oregon and Pennsylvania insurance commissioner Joel Ario, now managing director of Manatt Health, said stories like Butlers offer a warning to those pushing to relax insurance rules even further. Some healthy people will benefit in the short run, but there are ugly trade-offs, Ario said. They include shady marketing that leaves people with unexpected bills trying to avoid bankruptcy or, worse, unable to even get care for themselves or their loved ones outside the emergency room. Insurance regulators will see a lot more of these heart-breaking cases. Butler is now paying $322 a month for a comprehensive plan on Montanas insurance marketplace. That is twice what his short-term plan cost. But he said hes done with skimpy coverage. As much as I like to whine about Blue Cross Blue Shield, Ill take them every day over what I had, Butler said. White House spokesman Hogan Gidley twice referred to Puerto Rico as that country during a television appearance Tuesday in which he defended a series of tweets by President Trump lashing out at leaders of the U.S. territory. In two bursts of tweets one late Monday night and another Tuesday morning Trump complained about the amount of federal relief money going to the island and called its politicians incompetent or corrupt. He also claimed that Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, a figure that actually reflects a high-end, long-term estimate for recovery costs. Only a fraction of that has so far been budgeted, and even less has been spent. As he pressed to defend Trumps contentions, Gidley sought to make the case that the leaders of the territory, whose residents are U.S. citizens, had mishandled the aid theyd received thus far. Advertisement With all theyve done in that country, theyve had a systematic mismanagement of the goods and services weve sent to them, Gidley said in the interview on MSNBC. Youve seen food just rotting in the ports. Their governor has done a horrible job. Hes trying to make political hay in a political year, and hes trying to find someone to take the blame off of him for not having a grid and not having a good system in that country at all. Gidley later attributed his misstatements to a slip of the tongue. During the interview, Gidley was also asked about a tweet in which Trump said Puerto Ricos leaders only take from the USA. Asked to clarify how Trump viewed the status of Puerto Ricans, Gidley said Trump was supportive of its people, noting that he traveled there after Hurricane Maria hit in September 2017. He gave them a lot of money, Gidley said. They have mismanaged and misused that money. It hurts their people. Thats what hes upset about. A process that began in early November resulted in Los Angeles Loyola High School alumnus Scott McLarty being named Providence High Schools next Head of School. The Providence High School board of regents unanimously voted on March 14 to accept the recommendation of its search committee, led by co-chairs Erica Menke and Tim Chan. The search committee worked in conjunction with the Rhode Island-based firm Educational Directions, which began the search process shortly after current head of school, Joe Sciuto, announced on Nov. 1 he would be stepping down to take a similar position at Pasadena Mayfield Junior School. Providences board and Providence St. Joseph Health released a statement on March 20 announcing the decision, followed by school officials making the announcement via social media on March 22. To our delight, the extensive national search surfaced a strong candidate pool, wrote board chair Stuart Posin, along with Menke and Chan, in the joint statement. Taking into consideration the various aspects of private independent Catholic school administration, the board, in consultation with the search committee, determined that Scott is the most qualified applicant for the position. Although McLarty has accepted the job, he wont officially begin until July 1. Three things stand out to me: the mission, vision and community at Providence High School, McLarty said in an email to the Burbank Leader. The most important thing for me in choosing Providence High School is its mission to promote the common good, especially for the lives and well-being of the poor and vulnerable. This is a conviction of mine. McLarty is currently an independent consultant with Lake Arrowhead-based Lifelong Learning & Associates, an educational consultancy group. His last executive position was as head of school and chief executive of San Francisco Mercy High School, an all-girls institution, from July 2016 to June 2018. At least one former colleague sang his praises. I really enjoyed working with Scott, said Anna Adams, theology department chair at Mercy. He was a very forward-thinking leader with great ideas. I always found him to be grounded and approachable. The community at Providence is lucky to have him as head of school. Endorsements such as those stood out during the selection process. An important responsibility of the search committee was to speak to Scotts references, Posin, Menke and Chan wrote in Providences statement. Scott is described as an energetic visionary with the ability to take a refreshing look at all facets of school life. He is inclusive, clear with expectations, and collegial, while maintaining his focus on mission and vision. McLarty was also previously director of admissions at San Jose Bellarmine College Preparatory, a teacher at San Francisco St. Ignatius College Prep and an adjunct professor at DePaul University in a career that spans 16 years in Catholic education. His first job was as a teacher at Loyola High, where he graduated in 1997. In some ways, Catholic schools havent changed at all they are still about offering an excellent education and forming the heads, hearts and hands of students, McLarty said in his email.At the same time, Catholic education looks remarkably different than it did 20 years ago. He added, The best Catholic schools, like Providence High School, have transformed teaching and learning to better prepare students to succeed in a rapidly changing world and solve complex real-life problems. andrew.campa@latimes.com Twitter @campadresports An article published on Big Think last month makes the argument that four major religions were founded on principles of anarchism. Jesus Christs Sermon on the Mount may have inspired Leo Tolstoys call to end all governments, the article posits, while Kibbutzim, a communal-living movement in Israel, is said to have had strong anti-authoritarian roots. A 15th-century Muslim revolutionarys words led to a revolt against the Ottoman state in the 1400s, the article explains, and the Buddha is said to have advised followers to be critical and question things and people like religious dogma, news sources, experts, authorities and even oneself. An entry on Britannica.com says anarchy isnt just a rejection of government but an effort to return human beings to an innate cooperative social order. Anarchists, the entry explains, would argue that their denial of constitutions and governments leads not to no justice but to the real justice inherent in the free development of human sociality the natural inclination, when unfettered by laws, to live according to the principles and practice of mutual aid. Q. Do the worlds major religions reflect anarchistic aims to replace centralized governments with structures that would offer communal benefits and peace on Earth? I can only respond with authority regarding Christianitys teaching on this subject, and it is most assuredly not anarchistic. The Book of Romans chapter 13 affirms the Christians responsibility to obey our governmental officials: Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; or it is a minister of God to you for good (:1-4). Notably, this applies to Christians who live under every form of human government, including dictatorships. It applies to Christians in America who are told by others that they must resist our President. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught: Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two (Matthew 5:41). This was a direct reference to a Roman soldiers authority to conscript a Jewish passerby to carry equipment for one mile. Simon of Cyrene was pressed by the Romans into this service when Jesus could no longer carry his cross due to extreme exhaustion. I suppose Simon could have objected or practiced passive resistance against the Roman authorities, but instead he complied. And to this day he is honored by people around the world every Good Friday. Yes, there may be times when a Christians commitment to Jesus Christ would force him to disobey a human government. Examples of this might include smuggling Bibles into a hostile country or sharing the good news about Jesus Christ when it is forbidden. But apart from this exception Jesus Christ teaches his followers to obey human government while it exists and to hold onto the hope of his return to reign eternally in love and righteousness. Pastor Jon Barta Burbank As religions are of this world, they are worldly means of making sense of the ineffability of our existence and purpose. And, while we make a great show of separating the worldly from the godly, we continue to seek out comfortable hierarchies while pretending were not. Jesus told followers to render to Caesar what is Caesars, and 1 Corinthians establishes a clear hierarchy with God being the head of Man as the husband is the head of his family. While the testaments definitely tell us that Man is fallible, they are all about submission to authority, both earthly and celestial. And thats fine. The greatest musicians, from Bach to Miles Davis, employed a mathematical approach to their improvisations, knowing that music thrives within defined structures and patterns. And we can ask any of our local friends whove been kibbutzim, cultists or intentional livers to comment on how these community systems break down without fairly rigid hierarchies and leadership. The worlds toasty places, from Californias High Desert to the Negev, are littered with the ruins of utopian communities that didnt quite deliver on long-term communal benefits and peace on Earth, so, while we pretend at a Lockeian paradise of government by our own innate reason and tolerance, we actually tend toward the stern teachings of Lockes wiser elder, Hobbes, who knew that all systems are entropic unless carefully guarded. Religion and government are just swapping one hierarchy for another, which is why we faithful gleefully mix and match each weekend. Marty Barrett President, Unitarian Universalist Church of the Verdugo Hills (UUVerdugo) Religion and government are just swapping one hierarchy for another, which is why we faithful gleefully mix and match each weekend. Marty Barrett, President, UUVerdugo Christianity (the worlds largest religion) does not; at least not this side of Heaven, and our Western Culture is based on Christianity (which is why it flourishes on Capitalism and is not without governance). The Bible speaks to the maintenance of attainable earthly peace, but anarchism is not promoted; rather, God teaches us to pray for our governors and to be good citizens. And distinguishing between centralized or federal governments does not diminish the fact that either has some sort of hub out of which all law disseminates. What does the Bible say (i.e., God say)? First, that government is Gods servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, because it does not carry the sword for no reason (Rom 13:4). God establishes law for our proper ordering and good thrivance. Sans government, lawless people will kill, steal, rape and pillage, without regarding those of loftier ideals. We need the Marshall to come to town, and we need the hanging judge. Secondly, the Scriptures go on to teach that Anyone who does not want to work for a living should go hungry (2Th 3:10). There are people who would rather defecate on the sidewalk, get the free lunch, and camp in a tent under a bridge smoking crack rather than work a job and abide the law. Likewise, the whole world is very self-serving, and despite the do-gooder perception that mankind might best flourish without governmental interference and live in harmony as wonderfully peaceful contributors, it just isnt reality. No, we need law if we want peace, and we need to work or we default to our lazy, selfish, gimme state. If you have a commune and Fedora doesnt want to pick weeds, whos going to make him/her? You have no central authority, right? So youll still owe the bum an equal peace of the ungoverned pie. Jesus did not advocate anarchy. Others may clamor for anarchy while believing that all the cons in State Prison really just need a nice opportunity for sharing and cuddling, but true world peace comes only from the Prince of Peace (Isa 9:6) Jesus Christ, who died for our sins to make us right with God and our fellow man. Genuine peace comes only through allegiance to him and by his divine transformation of our fallen human nature. Rev. Bryan A. Griem, MA, MDiv Tujunga To me the rejection of secular authority and a total embrace of communal sharing and mutual aid, all to be carried out without violence as anarchy envisions, would seem to go hand in glove with religion. Instead the relationship of anarchism to the worlds major religions has often been an inverse one. It is true that quite a few anarchists have emerged from religious traditions, beliefs which many of them rejected or which rejected them. Anarchists in early Christianity were dissenters, for instance within the medieval Catharists and the Anabaptists of the Renaissance. A disproportionate number of modern (19th- and 20th-century) European anarchists, such as Emma Goldman, Martin Buber and Noam Chomsky, were born Jewish and rejected religion entirely for atheism and radical politics. English Protestantism produced notable anarchists including Gerrard Winstanley, a Church of England dissenter with ties to Quakerism, a not uncommon combination in his 17th century. He founded the True Levellers, or the Diggers, as their contemporaries nicknamed them. Wanting extreme land reform, they took direct action by removing hedges and other barriers around farmland, filling in the ditches for maximum community cultivation, hence their name. William Godwin, whose 1793 book, Political Justice, is a foundational text of anarchism, was a former minister. Religions have not been at all tolerant to the relatively few anarchists within their midst. Take the example given in todays In Theory question Leo Tolstoy, 19th-century author of great novels (including War and Peace, a prescient explanation of the futility of nearly every U.S. war since 1945), believed that the logical extension of Jesus command to turn the other cheek is complete pacifism. Because every government in history had waged war, to Tolstoy the entire concept of government was therefore inconsistent with Christianity. He further declared that any other conclusion is misinterpreting the teachings of Jesus, a view that got him excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. My take is that anarchisms rejection of all privately owned property they, not the communists, were first to declare that property is theft hasnt appealed to institutionalized, land- and building-owning religions any better than it has gone over with governments and, unsurprisingly, property owners. Roberta Medford Atheist Montrose With a lengthy criminal background, Jesse Nielsens job search seemed hopeless. Recently released on parole, and desperately trying to find a way to provide for his family, the 35-year-old sought help from Chrysalis, a nonprofit that helps poor and homeless individuals attain jobs. Nielsen rode the bus nearly two hours every day to the organizations new Anaheim office, where he learned how to fill out his first resume. Nielsen was offered a job at the United Parcel Service a few weeks ago. I figured I had no future, then I learned that I did, Nielsen said. The office is the nonprofits first in Orange County. There are three others in Los Angeles County. Mark Loranger, Chrysalis president and chief executive officer, said the organization chose Orange County for its newest location in 17 years because it has a deficit of service providers despite a spiraling homelessness crisis. An office in downtown Anaheim next to City Hall seemed like an appropriate location. With job preparation classes, counseling and other assistance, Chrysalis seeks to remove barriers preventing the poor and homeless from landing jobs. During a recent class, a few clients were guided through a workbook that taught how to craft a cover letter, email dos and donts and how to respond to common interview questions. For clients who lack access to the necessary technologies of the modern workforce, the organization has a dozen computers with internet access and provides access to phones. Theres also a room with work attire for clients who cant afford their own. Chrysalis also has a transitional jobs program, where clients work until they find a permanent position. The nonprofit partners with the California Department of Transportation to provide transitional roles in litter abatement and landscaping. A lot of our clients havent worked in forever, Loranger said. This teaches them the ins and outs, like waking up at 7 a.m. every day. The average client, generally middle-aged, stays for four to six weeks, but there is no clock on anyone. Between 60 to 70% of clients find work. Most go into the construction, hospitality or logistics industries. Its a tradition at Chrysalis for clients to ring a golden bell when they get hired. Nielsen rang his a few weeks ago, but Loranger said the bell is still too shiny and pristine. We need some more scuffs on this one, he said. Where other organizations may shy away from working with people with troubled backgrounds like Nielsen, Chrysalis seeks them out. We want the people with the biggest challenges, Loranger said. We judge on what you can be, not what you have been. Nielsen said he received nothing but support from the nonprofit. Our job is also to change perceptions, Loranger said. Our clients can be some of the hardest-working employees in the community, yet so many write them off. Chrysalis office hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 8 a.m. to noon Friday at 290 South Anaheim Blvd. For more information, visit changelives.org. benjamin.brazil@latimes.com Twitter:@benbrazilpilot In response to direction from a federal judge presiding over litigation that threatens to imperil Costa Mesas ability to enforce its anti-camping laws, city officials have committed to securing 62 emergency homeless shelter beds, 12 of which would be in a local hospital and available to those suffering from a mental health crisis. Though there are no concrete plans for the 50 other beds and it remains to be seen whether those would be in one facility or spread among different locations officials hope to firm up details in the next month or so, according to city spokesman Tony Dodero. Finding 50 emergency shelter beds in Costa Mesa or by partnering with surrounding cities is going to take a tremendous amount of civic engagement and support by elected leaders and the greater Costa Mesa community, as the citys goal will be to ensure any impacts are minimized, Dodero said in a statement. The city has begun working with College Hospital an acute care facility at 301 Victoria St. to provide the mental health beds. Such an arrangement, Dodero said, would enable law enforcement and firefighters to quickly refer people they encounter on the streets who are a threat to themselves or the community. It also would result in fewer individuals with mental health issues on Costa Mesa streets, which will make the community safer, he said. The citys hope is the combined 62 beds will satisfy U.S. District Judge David Carter, who is overseeing a federal lawsuit filed in January against Orange County and the cities of Costa Mesa, Anaheim and Orange on behalf of homeless people cleared from a former encampment along the Santa Ana River. Carter has called for county cities to develop enough emergency and transitional housing beds to accommodate 60% of the 2,584 unsheltered people tallied during a 2017 countywide count. That survey documented 103 unsheltered homeless people in Costa Mesa down from 158 recorded during a similar effort by Vanguard University in 2015. Carter also has threatened to consider an order preventing cities from enforcing their anti-camping ordinances or citing the homeless for sleeping in public if theres no resolution for these men and women. No community, whether its Costa Mesa, Irvine, Laguna Niguel, Huntington Beach, wants to be the regional site for an emergency shelter, Costa Mesa City Councilman John Stephens said this week. But when were talking about taking care of our own and doing our fair share, thats a lot more doable and thats something I think the community can wrap their minds around, especially ... if the consequence of not doing that is not being able to enforce our anti-encampment ordinance. Stephens who is chairman of the Assn. of California Cities-Orange County Homelessness Task Force said another consideration is a recent ruling from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which determined it is unconstitutional to prosecute homeless people for sleeping on public property when they dont have access to shelter. When faced with the choice of having encampments in our city or controlling a limited amount of shelter beds, [the latter] seems to be the wise thing to do, he said. As the wider debate about homelessness in Orange County continues, Costa Mesa officials have regularly said theyre willing to do their part to tackle the issue but that other cities need to step up too. Current efforts in Costa Mesa include the Network for Homeless Solutions, a collaboration of city staff, local churches, nonprofits, private organizations and volunteers to identify and provide resources to the homeless. Officials say that effort has helped house almost 300 people and reconnected more than 120 others with family or friends outside the city. luke.money@latimes.com Twitter @LukeMMoney A plan to create a 50-bed homeless shelter near McFadden Avenue and Springdale Street in Huntington Beach was scrapped Monday after city officials received pushback from several community members, including school officials and parents from Marina High School. The city proposal developed in closed meetings and made public last week called for a three-year, $330,720 lease agreement for a half-acre property at 5770 Research Drive, just behind Marina High. But within the first few minutes of Monday nights City Council meeting, City Manager Fred Wilson asked to pull the proposal from the agenda and said staff will continue to search the city and work with Huntington Beach Union High School District officials to find a more appropriate location. Its clear to me and all of us that this site isnt going to work, he said to applause and cheers from the audience. We heard from all of you. (Bing Maps / Daily Pilot) Wilson said in an interview that he decided to pull the proposal earlier in the day after overwhelming comments from the community. He said there will be more public vetting and that information will be shared on the citys social media pages. The city is eyeing two new potential sites, he added. The City Council will discuss potential sites during a study session April 15 before a formal proposal goes to the council later that day. Mayor Erik Peterson said U.S. District Judge David Carter granted the city time to search for a new spot. Carter is presiding over a lawsuit filed in January 2018 against Costa Mesa, Anaheim, Orange County and the city of Orange by homeless advocates who sought to halt the removal of an encampment along the Santa Ana River trail. He tasked cities with identifying potential shelter sites after a county proposal for temporary ones in Huntington Beach, Irvine and Laguna Niguel was scrapped amid protests from residents and city leaders. Though Huntington Beach hasnt been sued by homeless advocates, Wilson said the city had been scrambling to find a suitable site for a shelter since March, when Carter requested that representatives of all Orange County cities attend a hearing Tuesday to report any updates on emergency or transitional shelter sites. Duane Dishno, president of the Huntington Beach Union High School District board, said in an interview Tuesday that the district was informed about the citys proposal two days before the council was scheduled to act on it. He said he hopes the city will establish a group of representatives of major organizations to look at possible sites and make a recommendation. We were surprised because weve always had a close relationship with the council and the city managers office, said Dishno, who attended Mondays council meeting with two other trustees and the superintendent. Something fell through the cracks this time. Dishno said district officials arent insensitive to homelessness but they didnt like the idea of a shelter close to a high school that is dealing with homeless people loitering on campus and congregating on the fields. Weve had to call city police on various occasions to remove homeless individuals from that campus, he said. We do not think its appropriate for a shelter to be adjacent to a school campus where we have kids who are 12 to 13 years old up to 17. Theres also a city park adjacent to that school, and they have issues with [homeless]. The 50-bed shelter was expected to bring a long evening of debate Monday, but Wilsons announcement triggered a mass departure of people from the council chamber. Of the 65 speakers who had signed up to comment, fewer than than half addressed the council about the plan. The majority including students seemed to favor helping the homeless population. But whatever the decision Monday night, residents made it clear they were upset with what they considered the citys lack of transparency. Kevin Alt, a 20-year resident, said the city should have given residents more time to process the information instead of rushing it behind closed doors. Resident Ann Hough said it was pretty clear this has nothing to do with humanitarian [efforts] but is a way to avoid litigation and put something up so we can enforce anti-camping laws. So I dont want to be patronized. According to a 2017 ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, its unconstitutional to prosecute homeless people for sleeping on public property when they dont have access to shelter. Until cities like Huntington Beach provide a shelter, they cant enforce their anti-camping ordinances. Anthony Tran, a senior at Marina High, said several of his classmates volunteer at shelters and support the city proposal. We have to put a shelter somewhere, and if we want to help others, we have to accept some sort of change in our life, he said. According to a city staff report, the 2017 Point-in-Time Count of the homeless population identified 119 people in the city as unsheltered. Seventy-three were male and 46 were female. Officials expect the number to increase when new Point-in-Time Count numbers are released later this year. Shirley Dettloff, a former Huntington Beach mayor, commended city officials for taking on the homelessness issue, on which she said past councils have allowed churches and nonprofits to take the lead. Youve done more than any council has done and I applaud you, Dettloff said. I hope when the next site becomes available to you, youll move forward on it and itll be a site that can be accepted by people in the community. Its going to be difficult, but courage is making hard choices. Pat Goodman, a longtime resident, said she was truly disappointed the proposal was scrapped. She urged people to remember when they were down on their luck and received help from a family member or friend. Peterson said the city would keep residents informed. He also thanked speakers for sharing their opinions, saying were here for that sometimes thats how we get the message. UPDATES: This article was originally published at 7:15 p.m. April 1 and was later updated with additional information and comments. Its a perfectly logical thing to do: You need an answer to a grammar question, so you fire off an email to your friendly neighborhood grammar columnist. After all, you may not have anywhere else to turn. The dictionarys a great help sometimes, like when you want to know the past tense of a verb like lay or hang. But its not a one-stop grammar shop. When you need answers that cant be found in a simple alphabetized list of words, resources are scarce. Often, people turn to hearsay the overconfident advice of a grammar-enthusiast friend or relative. That can be a mistake. People who think they know grammar rules off the top of their heads may have instead memorized mythical rules that get passed down from generation to generation. An oh-so-confident English teacher tells you that its wrong to start a sentence with and. A seemingly knowledgeable friend tells you irregardless isnt a word. Your own mother tells you its a mistake to say, Im done when you finish dinner. Those are all wrong, I regret to report. Sadly, even Mom can lead you astray. So with this serious shortage of alternatives, it makes perfect sense to reach out to that columnist whos spent years citing countless grammar resources youd never heard of. Most of the time, youll get good information. But every once in a while, youll get this surprising response: Dont ask me. Ask your mom. A recent email from reader Amy is the perfect example. Amys boss had written a letter that seemed odd. One sentence in the letter noted that an employee at the company will have a dual reporting relationship to both me and John. This wording struck Amy as a potentially bad call. Is that correct grammar? I was told that you always put the other person first. Me, too. And I do. But not for any reason having to do with grammar. English has no rules on the order of pronouns. In a prepositional phrase such as to me and John, theres simply no grammar rule saying that me and John should be John and me. Even as the subject of a sentence, the rules of grammar dont tell you which order to put coordinate pronouns in: John and I will supervise is syntactically identical to I and John will supervise. Theyre equally grammatical. So why does I and John sound so very bad? And why does to me and John sound inferior to John and me? The answer brings us back to Mom. The idea that you put the other person first may not be a grammar rule. But its a pretty well-established etiquette rule. Its a courtesy so common that straying from it can strike the ear in a most unpleasant way. So if your mom or another well-meaning parental figure told you to put the other person first, in speech or in life, that was simply a lesson in good manners. If you noticed another problem with the letter written by Amys boss, youre not alone: to have a dual reporting relationship is pretty bad no matter what pronouns follow. This doesnt break a grammar rule, either. But grammar can give us a bit of insight into why its bad. When you turn an action like to report into an abstraction like the gerund reporting, its called a nominalization. Often, though not always, nominalizations are bad because actions are better than vague, abstract concepts. In this case: will have a dual-reporting relationship is just a lame and unclear way to say, will report to. Jane will report to John and me is simple, has a clear action and leaves no one wondering why you couldnt just speak in plain English in the first place. JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of The Best Punctuation Book, Period. She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com. Los Angeles Times columnist Chris Erskine is known for giving readers candid glimpses into his life as a husband, father and suburbanite through his Middle Ages columns and in distillations of that work, like the recently published Daditude. Since the book came out in April, the La Canada Flintridge resident has been on a whistle-stop tour of book signings, public talks and book club appearances, even sharing the joys and absurdities of modern fatherhood during La Canadas own One City, One Book community-wide read-in last October. But as Daditude rounds out its first year of literary life, Erskine is finding his social calendar more packed than ever as organizations invite him to stretch the mantle of columnist/author across several new and varied roles. The 62-year-old father of four served as emcee for the Jan. 30 annual meeting of the La Canada Flintridge Sister Cities Assn., which convened local dignitaries with their Spanish counterparts from sister city Villaneueva de la Canada. And Erskine will soon try his hand at guest conducting the Burbank Philharmonic as members perform The Star Spangled Banner to start off a special free concert Feb. 23 in La Canadas Lanterman Auditorium. Well find out what a conductor can bring to the national anthem can we get some fireworks going? he joked by phone. Ill have a home-field disadvantage. But thats not all. On Memorial Day, Erskine will lead a local tradition as grand marshal of the 46th annual Fiesta Days Parade, a highlight of the La Canada Flintridge Chamber of Commerces Fiesta Days Memorial Weekend festivities. News of the columnists selection was announced during the chambers installation gala and awards ceremony on Jan. 17, at which time officials announced the parades theme Family First. Chamber president and chief executive Pat Anderson said members scour local rosters in search of potential marshals who are well-known in the community and who fit that years parade theme. He certainly is a family man, as evidenced in his years of column writing for the L.A. Times, and recently this was underscored by his book, Anderson said of Erskines selection. It all seemed like it was coming together and the right thing to do. The local author said he was surprised and thrilled to hear hed been chosen grand marshal of a parade he, himself, regularly attends. In a tumultuous year the author lost 32-year-old son Christopher in a vehicle accident last March and then wife Cathy, aka Posh, to cancer nine months later Erskine says he draws comfort in the small-town treasures of friendship and tradition. Theres something about the sameness of it that is reassuring. In a world that changes every minute, I think the traditions are really great, he said. Typically, grand marshals have the option of selecting the vehicle theyd like to ride down Foothill Boulevard for the Memorial Day parade, with most favoring vintage, convertible options. But Erskine pondered a different, more family-centered approach. I have a red minivan Ill be standing on top of, he quipped. sara.cardine@latimes.com Twitter: @SaraCardine Officials with Target Corp. have confirmed that the 45,865-square-foot small-format retail store being planned for La Canada Flintridges Town Center, in the former site of the locally founded Sport Chalet, is anticipated to open its doors to shoppers in July 2018. The La Canada retail space will be the 11th of 130 scaled-down stores being planned for use in dense suburban and urban neighborhoods across the nation through the end of 2019, according to a release issued Friday, which included renderings of what the space will look like. We look forward to providing the many residents in the San Gabriel Valley with a more convenient option to shop Target closer to home, said Mark Schindele, Targets senior vice president of properties, adding the stores offerings will be curated to meet the quick-shopping needs of the local neighborhood. The location plans to offer family apparel and accessories, beauty products, home decor and back-to-school items and will maintain a grocery selection. An on-site CVS pharmacy, with pick-up service, and a Starbucks coffee shop are also being planned. Currently, the Target store closest to La Canada is located in Eagle Rock Plaza, about 6 miles south off the Glendale (2) Freeway. Others in the general vicinity include one in the Glendale Galleria and two in Pasadena, near the Foothill (210) Freeway. A smaller 24,750-square-foot store is expected to open on Burbanks Magnolia Park in March of next year. Rob Fuelling, senior vice president of Town Center property owner IDS Real Estate Group, said in the Aug. 18 release the lease with the national retailer completes a five-year strategic plan to reposition La Canadas Town Center area as a preeminent neighborhood shopping center within the San Gabriel Valley. Combining quality restaurants with our retail tenants provides neighboring residents with the opportunity to shop, dine and socialize in one community-centered location, he said in the statement. Reactions to last weeks news of Target moving into town have been mixed, with many La Canada residents taking to social media to lodge complaints about foreseen congestion, traffic and compounded parking issues in the Town Center. La Canada Community Development Director Robert Stanley confirmed the area contains a total of 478 parking spaces, including 147 rooftop spaces on the store building itself, while the former Sport Chalets office building and future site of a new City Hall next to the retail property has 104 dedicated parking spaces. Target spokeswoman Kristy Welker said Monday the company intended to make full use of the current structure and its square footage. Our store design team is currently working through the design of the interior, Welker said. The exterior of the store will remain as the current footprint, except for the addition of a second elevator to the roof parking. Welker said the new tenants have not yet decided what they will do with Sport Chalets pool area, located on the west side of the property. sara.cardine@latimes.com Twitter: @SaraCardine ALSO A Target store tailor-made for La Canada Flintridge will occupy former Sport Chalet Residents push for withdrawal of drug rehab facility from La Canada neighborhood Paradise Canyon students will experiment with tech in reimagined computer lab The television cameras lined up horizontally every 15 feet, facing the Santa Anita racetrack with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background, a view that for the horse racing industry has become an unwelcome staple of morning television. It was here Monday morning that track operators, trainers, jockeys and media specialists once again tried to convince viewers that every possible thing was being done to stem the rise of horse deaths at Santa Anita. Less than 24 hours earlier, the 23rd horse since Dec. 26 died at the track. Sundays fatality occurred on the dirt crossing of the turf course, a unique layout that goes from the top of the hill behind the track, takes a slight right turn, then, near the top of the stretch, swings left as the horses transition from grass to 80 feet of dirt before returning to the turf. A 5-year-old gelding named Arms Runner fell, apparently after injuring his right front leg. A trailing horse tripped over the fallen horse but got up and was fine. Both jockeys were OK. Arms Runner was euthanized. You look at that horse; he was a low-risk horse, said Tim Ritvo, chief operating officer of The Stronach Group, which owns Santa Anita. He won last time out. Hes had three really good works since his last race. Hes been over the course many times. Advertisement Its really gut wrenching that you are trying to do all these things right. Everyone here in the community can feel it. Its just a tough time for everybody. The sudden rise in fatalities has baffled everyone. Explanations are in short supply. I think its just an anomaly, said Bob Baffert, trainer of 2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah and 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify. We just have this black cloud over us for some reason. I thought things were going good and then what happened [Sunday]. I dont think anyone can really put the finger on it. Here weve been running for last 40 to 50 years, the same whips, medication. Now all of a sudden, boom, were having problems. They are trying to find something. Im just hoping we can get to Saturday where weve got some good horses running, and hopefully the fans are still excited when they come out. Saturday should be the biggest day of the tracks winter/spring meet, with the $1-million Santa Anita Derby, whose winner could become a favorite for the Kentucky Derby, and the Santa Anita Handicap, one of the most prestigious races in the country for older horses. A bad step in front of a big audience would exacerbate problems for the track and horse racing. It has reached a tipping point, said Jim Cassidy, president of the California Thoroughbred Trainers. This is Santa Anita. Its not like the Chattanooga Blue Devils; this is the New York Yankees or the L.A. Dodgers. Things happen here and they are going to get reported on. Social media has gone crazy. Most of the people talking about [these problems] dont understand the sport or how much we care about the horses. But they enrage other people. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has called on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to form an independent panel to examine training and veterinarian practices in the state. The Humane Society said it was critical of the decision to resume both training and racing at the Santa Anita racetrack before the necropsies of all [23] horses have been completed, analyzed and made public. Cassidy, who in his position with the trainers group has at times been at odds with the track, had nothing but praise for what Santa Anita has done. They have done more than Ive ever seen any racetrack do, and Ive been in this business over 50 years, Cassidy said. Theyve got people at the gaps; theyve got people at the barns checking horses. They go through a list of horses and make sure they are OK before they work. Ive never seen anything like it. They got rid of race-day medication. I dont know what else they could do, if there is anything else that can be done. Ritvo, however, is fearful for the future of the sport. This is going to have a ripple effect everywhere, he said. Unfortunately, Id like to say [a horse death] will never happen again, but it will. It seems with each one of these, [the outcry] gets stronger and stronger. The one message that is hard to convey is the people who take care of these horses love these animals more than anything else. Its a passion-driven sport. Baffert, referring to this usually exciting period leading up to the Kentucky Derby, summed up the mood. This is our March Madness, but were having the wrong kind of madness. Sign up for our horse racing newsletter With President Trump threatening to shut down the southwest border because of the surging number of migrants showing up there, his normally outspoken Mexican counterpart might be expected to raise his voice in protest about the prospective economic damage. But hes not. I prefer love and peace, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Monday at his morning news conference, sidestepping questions about Trumps warnings. We are not going to get into a confrontation with the government of the United States. Lopez Obrador, a leftist known for speaking his mind, has been quick to denounce domestic critics as snobs and recently demanded that Spain and the Vatican apologize for the Conquest, an event that happened five centuries ago. But he has consistently refrained from engaging in a war of words with Trump. Advertisement Lopez Obrador doesnt want to have problems with Trump because he knows that the only thing that could derail his government and affect his project is the chief of the White House, wrote columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio in El Financiero newspaper. Spain and the Vatican dont matter. Last year, as president-elect, Lopez Obrador even thanked Trump publicly for toning down offensive comments about Mexico. In recent days, however, Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric, declaring a national emergency and threatening a border shutdown as a punitive measure against a nation heavily reliant on cross-border trade. Mexico refused to help with illegal immigration & drugs! Trump tweeted last week. Mexico must stop illegals from entering the U.S. Lopez Obrador has cited the need for prudence and said he wasnt going to get involved in what he characterized as U.S. electoral polemics. We are helping to regulate the flow of U.S.-bound migrants, Lopez Obrador said on Monday, adding that he sought a policy of friendship with the government of the United States. The Mexican press reported that Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law and advisor, met here privately with Lopez Obrador and top aides on March 19 and relayed Trumps threat not only to close the border but also to cancel the newly negotiated U.S.-Mexico-Canada free-trade accord, a mainstay of Mexicos economy. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. U.S. authorities have reported escalating numbers of migrants from Central America, including many children and families, arriving at the border after crossing from Guatemala into Mexico and making their way north. Though organized caravans of U.S.-bound Central Americans have captured headlines, officials say most migrants rely on well-organized smuggling networks. In recent years, citizens of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have eclipsed Mexican nationals as the majority of immigrants apprehended while trying to enter the U.S. illegally. That shift has posed a growing dilemma: Mexican nationals who are in the U.S. illegally can generally be quickly returned to Mexico, but many Central Americans are released in the United States pending the outcome of applications for political asylum. The issue of immigration remains extremely sensitive in Mexico, where venturing to the United States illegally has long been a way out of poverty. Trumps campaign denunciations of Mexicans in the United States as criminals and rapists drew rebuke here, as has his insistence on building a border wall. Since taking office on Dec. 1, Lopez Obrador has endeavored to cooperate with U.S. officials on an array of fronts. His administration agreed to a controversial plan whereby some Central American asylum seekers have to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard in U.S. immigration courts. But his government has also angered U.S. officials by handing out thousands of humanitarian visas to Central Americans, many of whom are headed to the United States. Lopez Obrador, sensitive to criticism of doing Washingtons dirty work, also appears to be moving away from the deportation emphasis of his predecessor. Deportations of Central Americans during the first three months of Lopez Obradors term are down almost 16% compared with the same period a year earlier in the previous administration, official figures show. From Lopez Obradors standpoint, the main drivers of illegal immigration are the lack of opportunities for Central Americans in their homelands and widespread violence there. But Trump hasnt endorsed Lopez Obradors calls to join Mexico in an economic stimulus plan for Central America. On the contrary, the Trump administration said Saturday that it was planning to cut aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador a move that migrant advocates said would probably increase the undocumented flow, not diminish it. Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and Kate Linthicum in Mexico City and Cecilia Sanchez of The Times Mexico City bureau contributed to this report. The children of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received million-dollar houses in the kingdom and monthly five-figure payments as compensation for the killing of their father, according to current and former Saudi officials as well as people close to the family. Khashoggis two sons and two daughters may also receive much larger payouts possibly tens of millions of dollars apiece as part of blood money negotiations that are expected to ensue when the trials of Khashoggis accused killers are completed in the coming months, according to the officials and others who spoke on condition of anonymity in discussing sensitive talks. The previously undisclosed payments are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to reach a long-term arrangement with Khashoggi family members, aimed in part at ensuring that they continue to show restraint in their public statements about the killing of their father by Saudi operatives in Istanbul, Turkey, six months ago, the officials said. The Khashoggi siblings have refrained from any harsh criticism of the kingdom, even as their fathers death provoked global outrage and widespread condemnation of the heir to the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Advertisement The delivery of homes and monthly payments of $10,000 or more to each sibling were approved late last year by King Salman as part of what one former official described as an acknowledgment that a big injustice has been done and an attempt to make a wrong right. But the royal family is also relying on its wealth to help contain the ongoing fallout from the killing and dismemberment of the prominent Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist who was targeted for articles that were often critical of the government. A Saudi official described the payments as consistent with the countrys long-standing practice of providing financial support to victims of violent crime or even natural disasters and rejected the suggestion that the Khashoggi family would be obligated to remain silent. Such support is part of our custom and culture, the official said. It is not attached to anything else. As part of their preliminary settlement, the Khashoggi children were each given houses in Jidda worth as much as $4 million apiece. The properties are part of a shared compound in which Salah Khashoggi, the eldest son, occupies the main structure. A banker in Jidda, Salah is the only Khashoggi sibling who intends to continue living in Saudi Arabia, according to people close to the family. The others reside in the United States and are expected to sell their new Saudi properties. Salah Khashoggi, who has been responsible for financial discussions with Saudi authorities, declined to comment on the matter when reached by phone Monday. His desire to remain in Jidda with his family has contributed to the siblings deference to the authorities and caution in their public statements over the last six months. In October, the Saudi government released photos of Salah Khashoggi shaking hands with Mohammed, an image that was meant to show the crown prince offering condolences but was widely seen as an indication of the coercive power the royal family was exerting on the Khashoggi children. The writers two daughters, Noha Khashoggi and Razan Jamal Khashoggi, published an essay in the Washington Post last year in which they described their fathers hopes for changes in Saudi Arabia but emphasized that he was no dissident and did not accuse the crown prince or other Saudi officials of being culpable in his death. Noha did not respond to a request for comment, and Razan could not be reached. The monthly schedule of payments and prospect of eventual multimillion-dollar settlements would appear to give the Khashoggis a long-term financial incentive to remain quiet even as human rights organizations and critics of Saudi Arabia continue to demand accountability from the kingdom. Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan said in an op-ed Monday, six months after Khashoggis death, that the Saudis have adopted a strategy of evasion that has scapegoated expendable officials, seeking to quell international furor by staging a sham trial. Khashoggis second son, Abdullah, declined to comment when reached Monday. William Taylor, a Washington lawyer who has represented the family, also refused to discuss any compensation the family has received. The negotiations with the family have been led by the outgoing Saudi ambassador to the United States, Khalid bin Salman, brother of the crown prince. The CIA concluded with medium to high confidence that Mohammed had ordered Khashoggis killing, but President Trump has refused to accept that verdict about a close ally, saying, Maybe he did, maybe he didnt. Saudi officials have strenuously denied that Mohammed was involved, describing the slaying as a rogue operation carried out by a team that intended to subdue Khashoggi and bring him back to Riyadh but killed him after a struggle at the consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi came to the diplomatic facility to collect paperwork needed to remarry. U.S. intelligence agencies, relying in part on eavesdropping equipment placed in the Saudi Consulate by the Turkish government, have concluded that Khashoggi was strangled or smothered. Saudi officials have yet to explain what happened to Khashoggis body. His killers are believed to have dismembered and disposed of it. Officials who have heard audio of the operation said that one of the Saudi operatives who has a background in forensic crime-scene work can be heard warning other operatives to play loud music to mask the sound of an electric device. Saudi authorities have announced investigations of 21 people in connection with Khashoggis killing, including Saud Qahtani, an enforcer for the crown prince suspected by some of orchestrating the operation against Khashoggi. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for five operatives who traveled from Riyadh to Istanbul and were in the consulate when Khashoggi was killed. They include Maher Mutreb, a former colonel in the Saudi intelligence service who knew Khashoggi when both worked in London at the Saudi Embassy. If the men are convicted and sentenced to death, the Saudi system of justice could allow the Khashoggi family members to grant their fathers killers clemency as part of a blood money arrangement in which they might then be entitled to tens of millions of dollars. It is unclear whether Khashoggis children would be required to forgive or absolve the killers to collect the payments. Former Saudi officials and experts said that the royal court and government have incentives to seek such an agreement and avoid a situation in which only low-level operatives are executed for their role in a plot that was developed and orchestrated from high levels of government. The issue of how far to go in protecting their fathers legacy has been a source of tension among the Khashoggi siblings, according to people close to the family. The daughters have at times pushed to be more outspoken about their fathers life and the kingdoms ruthlessness, while the brothers have focused on maximizing the amount of money the family will collect. At one point in the weeks after their fathers death, Abdullah Khashoggi told advisors working with the family that he wanted to punish the royal court by going after one of the crown princes prized possessions. I want the Da Vinci, he said, referring to a painting by the Renaissance master that the crown prince paid $450 million for in 2017. Miller writes for the Washington Post. Souad Mekhennet contributed to this report. About a year ago, on April 5, 2018, Yasser Murtaja, a 30-year-old photographer living and working in the Gaza Strip, took his drone-mounted camera and set out for the tiny enclaves border with Israel to take some aerial shots in anticipation of major protests scheduled for the next day. Facing mounting economic pressure and a restive population of about 2 million, Hamas the militia governing the territory early last year called on Palestinians to gather along Gazas border with Israel every Friday for what it termed the Great March of Return. The first of the demonstrations took place on March 30 of last year. On Friday, April 6, the day of the second protest, Murtaja donned his dark-blue bulletproof vest marked PRESS on top of his street clothes and headed to the dusty boundary area to cover the march. Shortly after noon, in bright daylight, working in a cloud of tear gas and in the midst of thousands of largely peaceful protesters, and among an estimated few hundred violent rioters, Murtaja was struck in the abdomen by a bullet shot by Israeli army snipers from across the divide. Advertisement We were all together, Rushdi Sarraj, his close friend and business associate, remembered in an interview with The Times. Each one of us was following a particular scene or incident with their camera. Suddenly, we heard people yelling, A journalist was wounded! When he found Murtaja, Sarraj said, he was lying down in agony, wearing his reporters vest. About 12 hours later, Murtaja was declared dead, the first journalist killed in protests that have gone on for a year, in which close to 200 Gazans have been killed in clashes with the Israeli army. A year later, Murtajas story appears to be at a dead end. After announcing it would investigate the circumstances of his death in response to an international outcry, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has gone silent. Asked about the 11-month-old investigation, a spokesman for the Israeli army replied that the matter of Yasser Murtaja is being examined by the General Staff Fact Finding Assessment Mechanism. When the probe concludes the data will be transmitted to the Military Advocate Generals Office. In a statement April 7, 2018, the Israeli army said it does not intentionally shoot at journalistsand that the circumstances in which the journalist was allegedly hit by IDF gunfire are unknown and under investigation. Yet almost immediately, even before a probe could be launched, Israeli officials began claiming, with no evidence, that Murtaja was a Hamas militant. Nearly 1,000 Palestinians injured in Gaza-Israel border protests Murtaja and Sarraj never planned on becoming journalists. Murtaja, who studied accounting, and Sarraj, an engineer, loved photography. While still in their 20s, they launched a Facebook page titled Ain Ala Gaza (Eye on Gaza) as a platform for the lives they documented as residents of the beleaguered Gaza Strip. That hobby brought us together, Sarraj, now 35, recalls. And our passion kept evolving. We used to film all the time and we were always up to date when it comes to filmmaking. Eventually, in 2012, the pair decided to turn their pastime into a business, calling their enterprise Ain Media. At first, they shared a single camera. But within four years Ain Media had acquired high-end equipment, orders from international press organizations and hired 15 employees. In March 2018, the U.S. State Department had sent Ain Media a letter informing them that it had been awarded a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grant of $11,700 for equipment and technical assistance. Sarraj said the award, meant to help Ain Media establish a graphics department, was granted under the auspices of USAIDs Compete project, a program which helped develop the Palestinian private sector and which was canceled by the Trump administration during the past year as part of its withdrawal of all U.S. aid to Palestinians. On March 24, 2018, an ebullient Murtaja posted an aerial shot of Gaza Citys port on his Facebook page, writing, I wish that the day would come to take this shot when Im in the air and not on the ground. My name is Yaser Murtaja. Im 30 years old. I live in Gaza City. Ive never traveled! Murtaja, married and the father of a 2-year-old boy, never left Gaza, a 140-square-mile seaside territory that has been under an Israeli-Egyptian blockade since 2007, when the Islamist militia Hamas wrested control from the Palestinian Authority in a bloody coup. On April 8, the day after Murtajas death, Israels then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said, We have seen dozens of cases of Hamas activists disguised as medics and journalists. We also saw a journalist approach the border and operate a drone, we do not take chances in those cases. In the march of terror there were no innocent civilians, Lieberman said. They were all Hamas. Murtaja and Sarraj occasionally used drones for some of their work, including film for the BBC and images used in a documentary by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. But, according to Sarraj, Murtaja left the drone in the office on April 6, the day he was shot. On April 10, David Keyes, then a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, tweeted, Turns out the photographer killed in Gaza was an officer in Hamas, a terrorist org that seeks Israels destruction. On Hamas payroll since 2011. Used his drone to collect intel on Israeli positions. Countless reporters called him a journalist. Will they correct the record? On April 12, Israeli army spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said in a statement that Murtaja was an officer at the equivalent rank of a captain in the security forces of the Hamas terrorist organization. According to the intelligence in our possession, he was active in the Hamas security forces and supported their activity on a daily basis, including during the last days prior to his death. Murtajas family and colleagues categorically deny he had any ties to Hamas. The State Department grant was authorized only after Ain Media successfully navigated stringent U.S. government vetting requirements before consideration for USAID-funded aid programs. A few weeks after Murtajas death, Netanyahu spokesman Keyes told The Times, [A]s for his connection to Hamas, you can quote me: Murtaja was 100% a Hamas officer. I saw the intelligence myself. There is not a scintilla of doubt. He and other Israeli officials declined to produce or describe the evidence against Murtaja. In August, Ofir Gendelman, another spokesman for Netanyahu, told The Times, We have been clear from the start that Murtaja was an officer of the al-Qassam Brigade and served there for years. He was not a journalist. The Izzidin al-Qassam Brigade is the official name of Hamas armed branch. In an exchange of written messages with The Times, Gendelman said that Hamas lies outright when it serves their PR purposes, adding, they say that members of their armed wing are innocent civilians and hope that unaware journalists buy this lie. Murtaja was a captain in Hamas. Almost a year after Murtajas death, Israel has yet to address the circumstances in which he died. The authorities have not substantiated the claim that he used a drone and have not presented or otherwise explained any evidence linking Murtaja to any terror organization. The State Department declined to comment. Sarraj is convinced that Israeli snipers targeted Murtaja specifically, shooting at him with an explosive bullet, and that the army is intentionally not investigating the incident. A year has passed and there has been no official professional investigation made regarding his death. Until now, he says, the Israeli army continues to target Palestinian journalists everywhere. Special correspondents Tarnopolsky and Abu Alouf reported from Ashkelon, Israel, and Gaza City, respectively. - The Nigerian Police Force (NPF) in Rivers, ahead of the collation of results on Tuesday, April 2, is making a some preparations - The police spokesman in the state, DSP Nnamdi Omoni, said that the command has deployed some officers to be on red alert in some strategic locations - Omoni said that areas like Waterlines and GRA Junction axis of Port Harcourt/Aba Expressway will be shut to traffic during the exercise The police command in Rivers state on Monday, April 1, said it has commenced the deployment of personnel at strategic areas and collation centres for election results collation scheduled to begin in the state on Tuesday, April 2. The commands spokesman, DSP Nnamdi Omoni, made this known in a statement issued in Port Harcourt on Monday, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had on March 21, announced the resumption of collation and announcement of results in the state between April 2 and April 5. According to Omoni, the decision to deploy personnel at strategic locations was reached following a meeting between the state police commissioner and the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security. He said: ICCES agreed to put in place adequate security measures to ensure that the entire process is transparent and seamlessly carried out. Part of the security measures that were agreed upon include massive deployment of Police personnel and other sister security agencies to the venue and the outer perimeter of collation centres." Omoni said that Waterlines and GRA Junction axis of Port Harcourt/Aba Expressway would be shut to traffic during the duration of the exercise. He said that both lanes of the road would be closed to motorists, advising road users to divert to Olu Obasanjo and Polo Club Roads. "The police note with concern the temporary hardship the closure will cause. We appeal to the public to show understanding and bear with us. The closure is done in the overall interest of the public, as well as to provide a conducive atmosphere for the collation. Politicians, candidates and, indeed, unauthorised persons are warned to steer clear of the collation centres, he said. PAY ATTENTION: Get the Latest Nigerian News Anywhere 24/7. Spend less on the Internet! The police spokesperson warned that any individual or group seen undermining the process would be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with the Electoral Act. Omoni solicited for the cooperation and support of the public towards a successful conduct of the exercise. Meanwhile, Legit.ng reported that some police officials on Thursday, February 14, barricaded the entrance to the Rivers state headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Port Harcourt. Added to this, security agents mounted a blockade across the road near INEC's office in the state, Sahara Reporters reports. The development, as it is claimed, may be linked with the proposed protest of members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Rivers following the nullification of the party's primaries by court order, leading to the exclusion of their candidates from the general polls. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! 6 things that may happen on Election Day | Legit TV Source: Legit.ng Lately, young Nigerian actress Regina Daniels has been in the news for one thing or the other. The actress has been trending for a while over her new found wealth as she continues to acquire expensive and luxurious things. Many Nigerians are happy and excited for the actress' new found wealth. Her fans have praised her on her continued success and prayed that she would continue to receive God's blessings. Others have, however, been curious about her source of new found wealth. A report published by e-NIGERIA has claimed that a Nigerian politician is the source of the wealth enjoyed by the young actress. According to e-NIGERIA, former House of Representatives member, Ned Nwoko, is the one financing Daniels. The report claims that Daniels' mother, Rita, is aware and in support of her daughter's connection to Nwoko. READ ALSO: After buying 2nd Benz and a house teenage actress Regina Daniels sends note to haters PAY ATTENTION: Read best news on Nigeria's #1 news app Nwoko is from Idumuje-Ugboko in Anioma North, Delta state. He is a lawyer, businessman and a politician. He owns one of the biggest resorts in Africa, Camp Ned. Camp Ned sits on 43,000 hectares of land in Idumuje-Ugboko, and it is said to be a meeting spot for Daniels and the politician. READ ALSO: 90s Rage: Celebrities Whose 90s Look You've Never Seen Before The politician is married to four women and has children with all of them. e-NIGERIA claimed that Nwoko recently married a young lady identified as Nwakaego Ukachukwu, who is his special adviser on legal adviser. PAY ATTENTION: Get your daily relationship tips and advice on Africa Love Aid group He reportedly bought her a N20 million BMW car as well as a mansion in a high-brow area in Abuja. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda Meanwhile Legit.ng had earlier reported that the young actress had bought herself a brand new Mercedes Benz. Daniels acquired the Benz days after buying her mother a luxurious mansion to show how much she loves her. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have upgraded to serve you better Nigeria Celebrities: How Much Do They Spend On Luxury Life? - on Legit TV Source: Legit - The popular Aba Road in Port Harcourt, Rivers state would be shut to traffic by the police - The Rivers state police spokesperson said the decision follows the collation of the gubernatorial election in the state which is scheduled to begin in the state on Tuesday, April 2 - Nnamdi Omoni said the police have also deployed personnel following a meeting between the state Police Commissioner and the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES) The Rivers Police Command on Monday said it has commenced the deployment of personnel to strategic areas and collation centres for election results collation scheduled to begin in the state on Tuesday, April 2. The Commands Spokesman, DSP Nnamdi Omoni, made this known in a statement issued in Port Harcourt on Monday, April 1. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had on March 21, announced the resumption of collation and announcement of results in the state between April 2 and April 5. According to Omoni, the decision to deploy personnel was reached following a meeting between the state Police Commissioner and the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES). ICCES agreed to put in place adequate security measures to ensure that the entire process is transparent and seamlessly carried out. Part of the security measures that were agreed include massive deployment of police personnel and other sister security agencies to the venue and the outer perimeter of collation centres. Omoni said that Waterlines and GRA junction axis of Port Harcourt/Aba Express Road, would be shut to traffic during the duration of the exercise. READ ALSO: Senate rejects trade and investment ministry's 2019 budget, gives reasons He said that both lanes of the road would be closed to motorists, advising road users to divert to Olu Obansanjo and Polo Club Roads. The police note with concern the temporary hardship the closure will cause. We appeal to the public to show understanding and bear with us. The closure is done in the overall interest of the public, as well as to provide a conducive atmosphere for the collation. Politicians, candidates and indeed unauthorised persons, are warned to stay clear from the collation centres, he said. The police spokesperson warned that any individual or group seen undermining the process would be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with the Electoral Act. Omoni solicited for the cooperation and support of the public towards a successful conduct of the exercise. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said it will not be conducting fresh governorship and House of Assembly elections in Rivers state. The electoral umpire made the disclosure at a meeting held at an event centre, located along Eastern Bye-Pass, Port Harcourt, Leadership reports. Legit.ng gathers that the INEC national commissioner in charge of Bayelsa, Rivers and Edo states, May Agbamuche-Mbu, said the objective of the meeting was to brief stakeholders on the activities and schedule of the collation by the electoral body. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have updated to serve you better Suspected political thugs hijack ballot materials in Rivers state | Legit TV Source: Legit.ng In what could be described as a laudable development, a well-known Nigerian cleric, Pastor Sam Adeyemi, has donated of a huge sum of money to a United Nations agency to help support Africans forced to flee their homes. Legit.ng reports that the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), revealed that the agency received a N10 million donation from Daystar Christian Centre, a faith based organization in Nigeria. Jose Antonio-Canhandula, UNHCRs representative to Nigeria said that the donation would be used to provide life-saving emergency assistance to families forced to flee their homes. He said the donation would help support people who have been forced to flee their homes owing to reasons anchored around conflict, violence or persecution in the continent. He said: "Today, we received a N10 million-naira donation from the Daystar Christian Centre, a benevolent faith organisation based in Nigeria. "This donation will support people forced to flee their homes because of conflict, violence or persecution in Africa.'' See the tweet below: READ ALSO: Woman sobs after pastor donates entire Sunday church offering to her (video) Gabriel Adeyemo, assistant communications officer, UNHCR, Nigeria, said the donation, which was about $30,000 was handed over to the UNHCR team in Lagos by the church at a brief ceremony on Tuesday in Lagos. Jose Antonio-Canhandula, UNHCRs representative to Nigeria was quoted as saying the donation would be used to provide life-saving emergency assistance to families forced to flee their homes. Nigeria is unfortunately affected by this phenomenon, not only in north-east, but also the Middle Belt. Many displaced persons do not have where to sleep; no access to water; and access to healthcare facilities is very limited. They do not participate in the economy and cannot fend for themselves, Antonio-Canhandula said. He said that the commitment of Daystar Centre to help uprooted families was truly appreciated and also demonstrated the spirit of sharing. He said that the centre had paved the way for other civic organizations to support our brothers and sisters fleeing due to conflict. The representative added that Africa had vast potential to finance the needs of its displaced persons through its rich spirit of giving and human solidarity. Antonio-Canhandula noted that the worlds displaced persons had reached 68.5 million, adding that an unprecedented level of over 25 million of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. He said that 76 per cent of the 68.5 million were women and children. Some social media users took to the comment section to react to the news, with many praising the man of God for his commitment to bettering the lives of other people. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda In another tweet that surfaced on the agencys page, Adeyemi was quoted to have said: When people flee their homes, their needs become critical, and their coping mechanisms compromised - @DastarNG donation is a commitment towards restoring the resilience of families forced to flee across the continent, See the tweet below: PAY ATTENTION: Read best news on Nigeria's #1 news app PAY ATTENTION: Get your daily relationship tips and advice on Africa Love Aid group A tweet on the official handle of the church quoted Adeyemi as saying: "We are deeply affected by what our displaced brothers and sisters are going through. We recognize the great works of UNHCR and we hope other faith based organization see the importance of being a part of this cause" In other news, Legit.ng had previously gathered the report of a kindhearted woman who has become well-known for using over N200k of her money to feed about 400 children every month. According to the woman, she grew up in unpleasant circumstances and for this reason she can easily relate to the sufferings of the less privileged kids. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have upgraded to serve you better Meet Port Harcourt-based Nigerian pastor who is changing the lives of the poor nationwide | Legit TV Source: Legit - A group from north central has protested over the zoning of speaker of House of Reps to southwest - The leadership of APC has zoned Senate president to north east and the speaker of House of Representative to southwest - But the group said since south west has produced vice president, the speaker of Reps should be zoned to north central A group of All Progressives Congress (APC) stakeholders on Tuesday, April 2, staged a protest at the national secretariat of the party in Abuja, demanding zoning of the House of Representatives speaker to the north central zone of the country. This Day reports that the group, under the auspices of north central APC ambassadors, in a letter dated April 2, which was addressed to the national chairman of the party, insisted that the zone should be given the opportunity to produce the speaker of the House of Representatives as a reward for the 2.4 million votes it gave President Muhammadu Buhari during last presidential poll. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda Legit.ng gathered that the letter was jointly signed by the coordinators from five states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) - Muyideen Yusuf (Kwara), Rita Longjap (Plateau), Muhammad Ibn Muhammad (Niger), Lucas Cassius (Nasarawa) Yahaya Dauda (FCT) and Shehu Araga (Kogi). The leadership of the APC had openly endorsed Senator Ahmed Lawan from northeast for Senate president and Femi Gbajabiamila from the southwest as the speaker of the House of Representatives. The national leader of the party, Bola Tinubu, had declared his support for the Lagos state-born lawmaker, Gbajabiamila. But the north central group in the letter, argued that since the president is from the northwest, the vice-president is from the south west and the Senate president has been zoned to northeast, the speaker must be zoned to north central. The letter partly read: North central should be rewarded for its performance in the 2019 election. With 2.4 million votes for President Muhammadu Buhari, north central came third behind north-west and northeast. Even though south west has the VP, it didnt perform as well as NC in the last elections. So, who should be rewarded? North central has consistently been loyal to the party. Since 1999, NC has never occupied the position of speaker or deputy speaker while all the other zones have occupied these positions. Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that House of Representatives leader, Femi Gbajabiamila, officially joined the race for the speaker in the 9th National Assembly over the weekend. READ ALSO: Supreme Court will determine our final action on Zamfara APC candidates - INEC The Lagos lawmaker had already being endorsed by the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the position last week. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! Nigerians set 2nd term agenda for President Buhari | - on Legit TV Source: Legit.ng One of the Lehigh Valleys most iconic treats is a now a featured flavor in Dunkin coffee and doughnuts. Peeps popular marshmallow flavor debuted Monday at participating locations of the chain, now called Dunkin after dropping Donuts" from its title. Customers can get it in coffee, espresso drinks and in a doughnut that comes with white icing, a green and egg-shaped sprinkle blend and a mini Peep yellow chick on top. Other new menu additions for April includes the Chocolate Cherry Cold Brew, a smooth, full-bodied Cold Brew featuring the classic combination of chocolate and cherry; Iced Tea Lemonade and Frozen Lemonade, which is made from real lemon juice; and the Sweet Sriracha Bacon Breakfast Sandwich, which includes egg, American cheese and four strips of sweet Sriracha bacon, served on a croissant. Throughout April, guests can enjoy the chains Cold Brew flavors for $2 from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. each day. The chain also is hitting the road to surprise fans with free coffee and doughnuts. On Monday, Dunkins custom-sculpted coffee car began traveling alongside a Peepsmobile, starting from Bethlehem and traveling to Dunkins birthplace of Quincy, Massachusetts. Along the route, both cars plan to stop at six Dunkin restaurants, handing out free Peeps flavored coffees, doughnuts and other giveaways to the first 250 customers. The vehicles are expected to finish the road trip by Thursday. Bethlehem-based Just Born Quality Confections in February announced a new lineup of Peeps flavors, in addition to other Peeps-inspired items for spring. Nationwide, fans now can try Peeps-flavored pancakes and syrup, cotton candy or orange sherbet dipped in creme flavored fudge. Target is exclusively carrying vanilla creme and chocolate caramel swirl chicks, while Walmart is carrying blue raspberry and Kroger stores have the root beer float variety. While Peeps date back to 1953, the chocolate-dipped and -covered variety were introduced in 2010. Peeps-flavored jelly beans also have joined International Delights yellow Peeps-flavored creamer and Kelloggs Peeps marshmallow-flavored cereal, both of which were announced in January. Where to go: Locations across northwest Jersey and the Lehigh Valley include the following restaurants: Dunkin' Donuts, 54 Centre Square, Easton. Dunkin 'Donuts, 1300 Northampton St., Wilson Borough. Dunkin Donuts, 700 Philadelphia Road, Suite 101, Easton. Dunkin' Donuts, 4460 Easton Ave, Bethlehem Township. Dunkin' Donuts, 3606 Linden St., Bethlehem. Dunkin' Donuts, 1910 Stefko Boulevard, Bethlehem Township. Dunkin' Donuts, 2926 William Penn Highway, Palmer Township Dunkin' Donuts inside Wal-Mart, 3722 Easton-Nazareth Road, Bethlehem Township. Dunkin' Donuts, 2500 Nazareth Road, Palmer Township. Dunkin' Donuts, 3055 Schoenersville Road, Bethlehem Township. Dunkin' Donuts, 213 W. 4th St., Bethlehem. Dunkin' Donuts, 848 Nazareth Pike, Lower Nazareth Township. Dunkin' Donuts, 107 E Main St., Bath. Dunkin' Donuts at Forks Plaza, 225 Towncenter Blvd, Forks Township. Dunkin' Donuts at Speedway, 3283 Easton Ave., Butztown. Dunkin' Donuts, 855 South Broadway, Wind Gap. Dunkin' Donuts, 439 Blue Valley Drive, Bangor. Dunkin Donuts, 712 Memorial Parkway, Phillipsburg. Dunkin Donuts, 853 Memorial Parkway, Phillipsburg. Dunkin Donuts, 1312 US 22 East, Phillipsburg. Dunkin' Donuts, 112 North 6th St., Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts at American Plaza Mall, 215 W. Hamilton St., Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts at Speedway, 1043 Lehigh St., Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts, 1427 West Tilghman St., Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts, 1174 Macarthur Road, Whitehall Township. Dunkin' Donuts, 1928 Hamilton St., Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts at Speedway, 733-51 Hanover Ave., Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts, 1547 Lehigh St., Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts, 402 West Emaus Ave, Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts at Speedway, 824 Union Blvd., in Allentown. Dunkin' Donuts, 170 Mountain Ave., Hackettstown. Dunkin' Donuts, 885 State Route 57, Suite 343, Hackettstown. Dunkin' Donuts, 156 Route 31, Washington, Warren County. Dunkin' Donuts, 2437 State Route 57, Stewartsville. Dunkin' Donuts, 345 State Route 31 South, Washington. Dunkin Donuts, 484 Hope Blairstown Road, Hope. Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Bethlehem officials sought Tuesday to address community concerns about any effects on air quality resulting from next months planned demolition of Martin Tower. The former headquarters of Bethlehem Steel Corp. has been remediated for asbestos, Mayor Bob Donchezs office said in a news release. "Public safety's always been a very high priority for Mayor Donchez," his assistant Kelley Andrade said. "We're just trying to reassure our residents that we're on it. We're going to keep their safety and their health as the top priority." Developers of the Eighth and Eaton avenues site are scheduled May 19 to bring down the 21-story tower through a controlled demolition, described as an implosion. The time has yet to be determined, but it will most likely occur during early morning daylight hours, according to the city. Martin Tower opened in 1972 as world headquarters of the now-defunct Bethlehem Steel and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Under the property's zoning that permits the tower's demolition, property owners Lewis Ronca and Norton Herrick plan to redevelop the 53-acre property into a $200 million mix of apartments and retail plus a medical office building and 132-room hotel. At least one resident, posting on Facebook, has asked how much residents should be concerned about the implosion. Should chimneys, ducts, windows and other openings be covered at home near the site, asked resident Nalyn Russo Marcus, who is a chiropractor. In response to an inquiry from lehighvalleylive.com about air-quality concerns, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Protection stated: "The DEP will be meeting with the owner of Martin Towers and its contractor, in the coming weeks, to discuss their plans to contain any dust and debris from the site during the implosion and any impact to surrounding properties. The DEP regulations require that reasonable actions are taken to control dust. The city describes Martin Tower as "a shell of what it once was," reduced to concrete and steel. On the day of demolition, the DEP will be on site, the mayors office says in Tuesdays news release. "The property owners, City of Bethlehem and demolition experts, are working together on defining safe areas for viewing as well as restricted areas where no one shall be permitted," Tuesday's announcement continues. Bethlehem has launched a website, martintowerbethlehem.com, to keep the public apprised of updates on the towers demolition and redevelopment. A map is planned for release prior to the implosion with all street closures and restricted areas, according to the city. The city says to look for additional information in mid-April. Editors note: This article was updated with changes Bethlehem made to its news release about the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protections role in monitoring air quality related to Martin Towers demolition. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Firefighters from two counties contained a fire in a patch of woods in Lower Saucon Township on Tuesday afternoon, and the risk of wildfire was expected to worsen Wednesday across the region. No one was injured in the fire reported shortly after noon along Wassergass and Wilhelm roads just east of Hellertown, Lower Saucon Fire Rescue Chief Ty Johnson said. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources was investigating the cause. Johnsons department was assisted by Steel City Volunteer Fire Co., Dewey Fire Co., Williams Township Fire Co., Springtown Volunteer Fire Co. in Bucks County, Freemansburg Fire Co. and Bethlehem Township Volunteer Fire Co. It was mountainous terrain. Thats why we needed the extra manpower, Johnson said. Crews cut a fire line around the head of the fire, to maintain control from there. Firefighters cleared about 3:15 p.m. Around that same time, Lower Saucon Fire Rescue posted to Facebook a warning against outdoor burning: "High fire danger means all fine dead fuels ignite readily and fires start easily from most causes." Please Do Not Burn today - 4/2/19 High fire danger means all fine dead fuels ignite readily and fires start easily... Posted by Lower Saucon Fire Rescue on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 Lehigh, Northampton and Warren counties were included in a fire weather watch in effect from 10 a.m. until 9 p.m. Wednesday, the National Weather Service said from its Philadelphia region forecast office in Mount Holly, New Jersey. Here are more details from the advisory: AFFECTED AREA: The Poconos, the Lehigh Valley, Berks County and southeastern Pennsylvania. Also, northwestern, central and southern New Jersey and the entire state of Delaware. WINDS: West 20 to 25 MPH with gusts of 30 to 35 MPH. RELATIVE HUMIDITY: Dropping into the 20 to 30 percent range. TEMPERATURES: Highs mainly in the 60s. IMPACTS: Gusty winds and very dry air will create conditions that may promote the rapid spread of wildfires. A Fire Weather Watch means that critical fire weather conditions are forecast to occur due to a combination of strong winds, low relative humidity and dry fuels, the weather service stated. A Red Flag Warning may be issued. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Lets taco bout the latest festival being offered at SteelStacks this year. The inaugural TacoFest, celebrating the myriad of combinations between flour or corn tortillas, is scheduled for June 9. The free event will run from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. at SteelStacks in Bethlehem, where visitors can buy tacos from several food trucks along First Street. Drinks for purchase will include margaritas, mojitos and various Mexican beers, and live music will include bands Zaire, Flowers for Taco and Jimmy the Whale. Confirmed vendors include: Clubhouse Grille, Take a Taco, Fud Truck and Grumpys BBQ Roadhouse. Two special VIP sessions will be ticket-only, and will have margaritas and unlimited steak, fish and vegan tacos. The sessions will run 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., and 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., and will include Urbano, Mixology Masters and Copperhead Grill. Ticket holders will be able to vote on their favorite drink. Tickets are $45 each through May 26, and will increase to $49.99 per person May 27-June 8 and $59.99 the day of the festival. They can be purchased at steelstacks.org and 610-332-3378. If one day of tacos isnt enough, there are plenty of taco festivals to enjoy this year. Eastons Cinco de Mayo Taco Fest is scheduled for May 4 in the citys Downtown. Berks County is offering its inaugural Taco Fest on May 18 in Reading. Pittsburgh is celebrating its third annual Taco Festival on June 1, followed by the 3rd annual Philadelphia Taco Festival June 29. In the fall is the NJ Taco Festival, scheduled Sept. 7 in Sussex County. Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Easton Arts Academy Elementary Charter Schools chief administrative officer is now on leave, according to the schools chief executive officer. CEO Joanna Hughes confirmed on Monday that Chief Administrative Officer Shawn Ferrara is on leave. She declined to comment on the reason for the leave or how long it will last. The confirmation comes two weeks after the school lost its third principal in two years, Joanellyn Joey Schubert. It also comes after former principal Susan Bostian sued the school, accusing Ferrara of rigging grades and forging employee evaluations. Bostians lawsuit was filed in December in Northampton County Court. Hughes confirmed Schuberts resignation on March 22. School board President Michelle Zattoni confirmed she conducted an exit interview with Schubert on March 25 with the school board vice president. She said she toured the school and talked with Schubert and others about the schools operations. She declined to provide details on those discussions. Ferrara was not reachable at the school on Thursday, March 29, on Friday, March 30, or on Monday, April 1. Hughes confirmed his leave status Monday evening. Ferrara could not be reached via email. A listed number for his home was unavailable. The charter school at 30 N. Fourth St. in Easton opened in 2017. It serves children in kindergarten through fifth grade. Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook. An Easton man with close to 10,000 images of child pornography on his computer pleaded guilty last week to distributing and possessing the images, court records say. Scott Wayne, 60, pleaded guilty March 27 before U.S. District Court Judge Edward G. Smith, court records say. Records say officers found about 9,900 images of child pornography on the computer in December 2017. Some of them involved children ages 10 to 14, records say. The records say Bethlehem Police Chief Mark DiLuzio initiated an investigation in November 2017 that traced the images to a computer at the home where Wayne was staying in Easton. He was living in the attic of a friends home, court records say. Wayne faces a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and a maximum of 40 years. Hell be sentenced July 27 by Smith. He was indicted in federal court in June 2018. Defense attorney Mark Wilson didnt immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter@RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook. Pennsylvanias lieutenant governor has announced a second opportunity this weekend to be heard on whether the state should pursue legalizing recreational marijuana. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is continuing his statewide listening tour from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Saturday in Seegers Union of Muhlenberg College, at 2400 Chew St. in Allentown. Thats in addition to his tour stop 5 to 6:30 p.m. Sunday in the ArtsQuest Center at SteelStacks, 101 Founders Way in Bethlehem. Fettermans also holding a listening session on weed 1 to 2:30 p.m. Sunday in the Innovation Center at East Stroudsburg University, 562 Independence Road in East Stroudsburg. There is no advance registration required to speak, and residents who are unable to attend Fettermans listening tour are invited to visit governor.pa.gov/recreational-marijuana-feedback/ to comment. Fetterman plans to visit all 67 counties to gather input and comments about legalizing recreational marijuana. Democratic lawmakers in the Republican-controlled state Legislature have announced bills in both the state House and Senate during the 2019-20 session to permit recreational marijuana sales and use. No votes have been taken on sending a bill to Gov. Tom Wolf for consideration. Pennsylvania is wading into the debate over legalizing a drug that remains illegal at the federal level as lawmakers in neighboring states like New Jersey and New York do the same. Including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, 34 states plus the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have medical marijuana programs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, D.C. and Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory, also approved recreational use by adults ages 21 and older. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A 52-year-old Easton man, using a fake ID and a credit card in another mans name, tried to withdraw money from that mans bank account, Palmer Township police report. Jeffrey Washington on Friday told those at the bank -- and, eventually, responding township police officers -- that he was Mahir Abass, who had an account at the TD Bank, police said. But the ID card appeared fraudulent to a bank employee, police said. So when officers called the real Mahir Abass on the phone, he confirmed he wasnt at the bank, police said. Washington was identified by live scan at the township police department, showing a New York City address, police said. He was charged with forgery, two counts of identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit theft by deception, two counts of possession of an instrument of crime and one count of false identification to a police officer, records show. He was arraigned that night before District Judge Douglas Schlegel and housed in Northampton County Prison in lieu of $125,000 bail. He remained jailed on Tuesday morning and tentatively faces a preliminary hearing at 9:30 a.m. April 11 in District Judge Jacqueline Taschners court in the township, records show. Court records do not indicate an attorney for Washington. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter@TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A 55-year-old East Stroudsburg woman was trapped immediately after striking a parked car and rolling a Toyota RAV4 on Monday night in Washington Township, Warren County, police say. Marie Moliere said she freed herself through the rear of the vehicle after the 10:53 p.m. wreck in the first block of Washburn Avenue. She was taken for treatment to St. Lukes Hospital in Phillipsburg, police said. (Rich Maxwell | lehighvalleylive.com contributor)Rich Maxwell | lehighvalleylive.com contributor Airbags went off in the SUV. Township police continue to investigate and they were assisted at the scene by the township fire department, the Washington Rescue Squad and paramedics from Hunterdon Medical Center. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter@TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Representatives of Laois County Council were in New York for the St Patricks Day period where they met with senior executives from Tourism Ireland. Tourism Ireland say they briefed the delegation on the extensive promotional programme in the United States for 2019, which is in full swing right now. Tourism Ireland says it has prioritised North America, as a market which offers a strong return on investment, in terms of holiday visitors and expenditure. Laois County Council's Cathaoirleach Cllr John King and Director of Services Gerry Murphy traveled to the big apple. We were delighted to meet with the representatives of Laois County Council and to have the opportunity to brief them about the extensive promotional programme we are undertaking in the United States this year, said Alison Metcalfe, Tourism Irelands Head of North America and Australia. In 2018, we welcomed a record 2 million North American visitors to the island of Ireland. Looking to the year ahead, we are confident that our strategy combined with more airline seats than ever before from the US, as well as the strength and competitiveness of the vacation experience right around the island of Ireland will deliver further growth. St Patricks Day traditionally marks the real start of the tourism season for us; our aim is to bring a smile to the faces of people everywhere and to convey the message that Ireland offers the warmest of welcomes and great fun, as well as wonderful scenery and heritage. We are using every opportunity to capitalise on Irelands heightened profile this week; the saturation coverage about Ireland at this time of year across the airwaves, in newspapers and digital media is an invaluable boost for our overall tourism marketing drive in 2019, she said. Tourism Ireland participated in and promoted the island of Ireland at a range of St Patricks Day events across the United States during the St Patrick's Festival. An elderly man who is serving a prison sentence in Portlaoise for raping his granddaughter is to be assessed to determine whether he was fit to be tried at the time of his trial more than a year ago. Christopher Redmond, (75), of Rathvilly Drive, Finglas, Dublin 11, had pleaded not guilty to four counts of rape and five counts of sexually assaulting his granddaughter at the Tolka Valley pitch and putt club, where Redmond worked, in Finglas on dates between January 2002 and May 2004. He was found guilty by a Central Criminal Court jury following a trial in early 2018 and sentenced to five years imprisonment by Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh on April 27, 2018. Prior to Redmonds sentence hearing, he was assessed by a consultant forensic psychiatrist from the Central Mental Hospital, who found him to be suffering from a significant cognitive impairment. It was likely to have been present for a number of years, that report stated. However, the question of whether Redmond was fit to be tried, specifically under Section 4 of the Criminal Law (Insanity) Act 2006, was not addressed in the report as he had already been convicted and that ship had sailed at that point. The report concluded that Redmonds cognitive decline could leave him vulnerable to other prisoners. An earlier report, prepared prior to his trial, found him to have a mild cognitive impairment but there was nothing to suggest he was unfit to be tried. The Court of Appeal heard that Redmond did not initially respond when he was asked to plead to the first count on the indictment. He had to be prompted and then pleaded not guilty. His barrister, Andrew Sexton SC, submitted that the safety of Redmonds conviction had been placed in doubt by the report prepared so soon after his conviction. In a motion to adduce the report as new evidence, Mr Sexton said the report would have addressed the question of fitness to be tried if it had been sought prior to or during the trial. President of the Court of Appeal Mr Justice George Birmingham said the report produced in the context of Redmonds sentence hearing very understandably didnt address the question of fitness to plead but the court required more information specifically addressed to the question of fitness to plead. He said opinions should be sought from consultant forensic psychiatrists. Obviously, there was a difficulty in asking them in 2019 to express a view on matters related to early 2018, the judge added. The case was put back for mention on June 21 next. Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Paddy McGrath SC, said it was the States intention to have Redmond assessed by an expert from the Central Mental Hospital. Mr Sexton said Redmond was currently in the Midlands Prison in a cell with another individual. His granddaughter now aged 24, who had waived her right to anonymity so that Redmond could be named, was aged between seven and nine at the time of the abuse. Sentencing Redmond to five years imprisonment in April 2018, Ms Justice Ni Raifeartaigh mitigated the headline sentence on account of his progressive cognitive impairments. A 19-year-old man who assaulted two gardai and threatened to rape a female garda and her family before he spat all over them and later urinated on the floor of the garda station wasnt in the right state of mind due to drink and drugs, Portlaoise District Court heard. Jordan Mallon of 6 Meehan Court, Portlaoise, was charged with three counts of assault, obstructing the gardai, and criminal damage, at Meehan Court; and criminal damage at Portlaoise Garda Station, namely urinating on the floor. Sgt JJ Kirby told the court that this was a very serious matter. On January 1, 2018, at 5am, the gardai attended the scene of a domestic disturbance, where the accused and his father were roaring and shouting and threats to kill were made. The gardai went to break up a struggle, but Garda Roy Cooper was hit on the forehead by the accuseds elbow before he was headbutted, kicked and punched. Garda Erica Sweetman went to his assistance and the accused threatened to rape her and rape her family. He also called her a tramp. The accused was pepper-sprayed and back-up was called, and when he was placed in the patrol car he kicked the headrest and the radio and spat all over the gardai and the interior of the car. He continued in this aggressive manner, said Sgt Kirby. 459 damage was caused to the car and Garda Cooper was out of work for six weeks. Sgt Kirby said the gardai were deeply traumatised by the incident. Judge Catherine Staines noted that the DPP had directed the charge be dealt with by summary disposal, but said the incident seemed more serious than that. Sgt Kirby confirmed that those were the DPPs directions. Garda Cooper gave victim impact evidence, in which he said he suffered headaches for a week afterwards and had a laceration to his forehead. He also said he had lost out on overtime at work as a result. Judge Staines said she was sorry this had happened to him. Sgt Kirby said that Garda Sweetman had been very upset by the incident. In addition to the threats to rape her, the accused kicked out at one point and knocked her over, plus she was covered in spit. The accused had no previous convictions. Defence, Mr Barry Fitzgerald said the accused did not get the best start in life, to which Sgt Kirby said that the accuseds father was well known to gardai and the accused had a dysfunctional background. Mr Fitzgerald said his client was undergoing drug rehabilitation and anger management. He said the accuseds parents had both been drug users and his mother lost her life due to drugs, with the accused going to live with his grandmother. Defence handed in testimonials, with a Youthreach officer describing the accused as a well mannered and popular student. In relation to the offence, Mr Fitzgerald said the accused had drank up to 16 cans of lager and spirits, resulting in a blackout. He said the accused appeared genuinely contrite and had letters of apology. Mr Fitzgerald also said the accused was a great assistance to his grandmother and would compensation for the damage caused. The accused himself told the court he was under the influence of drink and drugs and could not remember the incident. He said he felt horrible about it and wished to apologise. Im generally a nice person, I wasnt in the right state of mind, he said. Judge Staines said it was an extremely serious incident which merited a prison sentence. However, she said that reports on the accused seemed completely at odds with what happened on the night and the incident seemed to be an aberration for him. A letter from his grandmother said this behaviout was out of character for him. The case was adjourned to June 6 next, for a probation report and victim impact statements. A former solicitor gave a mobile phone to a convicted rapist serving a sentence in Portlaoise Prison after he made threats against her family, including a threat to fillet her and rape her child. Todays (Tuesday, April 2) sitting of Portlaoise Circuit Court heard that Joanne Kangley (41), formerly of Bailieborough, Co Cavan, but now residing outside of Ireland, also bought a SIM card for the phone and topped it up for the prisoner, after giving him the phone during a visit at Portlaoise hospital. The accused pleaded guilty to supplying a mobile phone to an inmate of Portlaoise Prison on November 6, 2014. Evidence was given by State barrister, Mr Sean Gillane SC, along with Detective Garda Daniel Treacy, of Dun Laoghaire Garda Station, that in November, 2014, the accused was acting as solicitor to a prisoner serving a sentence in Portlaoise Prison for rape and false imprisonment. Ms Kangley, who was a practicing solicitor since 2004, had not represented him in the rape case, but was representing him by 2014. On November 6, 2014, the prisoner was transferred to the Midlands Regional Hospital in Portlaoise where he was put in a room in a supervised capacity, with prison officers in attendance. Ms Kangley attended at the hospital for a private visit with him while the prison officers waited outside. On February 10, 2015, the prisoner spoke to an assistant chief officer at the prison, informing him that he had a mobile phone hidden up his rectum. The prisoner said he had been given the phone by his solicitor in hospital, with Ms Kangley removing the SIM card first. The phone contained private material relating to the accuseds family and the prisoner used the phone to make threats against certain individuals. The prisoner also said that the accused had topped up the phone for him. He refused to give the phone to prison staff, saying he would only give it to the gardai. The prisoner told a prison officer that he wanted to shaft his solicitor. When the phone was eventually recovered by the authorities, it was found that the prisoner had used it for online searches relating to his former solicitor and the victim of his rape and false imprisonment conviction. He also used the phone to leave threatening messages with persons associated with this case. The phone was also used to make regular contact with a number belonging to Ms Kangley. The phone was being used with a SIM card that was bought in Navan on November 10, 2014. When arrested and questioned, Ms Kangley told gardai that the prisoner had threatened her and her family. The court heard that the prisoner threatened to fillet Ms Kangley and rape her child and so she gave him her work phone for her own protection. Ms Kangley told the gardai that during visits with him he would drop in bits of information about her, or her family, and there was fear on her part. She said he had asked her for phones before and she said no, which had angered him. On this occasion, he asked her for a phone and she said no. To this, the prisoner told her to remember what he was serving a sentence for and then mentioned her child, so she handed the phone over. She also admitted buying him the SIM card and topping up the phone. She said that the prisoner told her if she did not take his case he would tell everyone about the phone and ruin her. Ms Kangley has now moved abroad. She has no previous convictions. Defence for the accused, Mr Paul Greene SC said that Ms Kangley was not unique in being the target of threats from the prisoner, to which Det Treacy confirmed this was correct. Mr Greene said Ms Kangley had since lost her business and was now living abroad with her children, trying to set up a new business. Defence handed in a number of testimonials relating to the character of the accused. Mr Greene described her as a woman of good character who fell into a situation where she was manipulated. Judge Keenan Johnson said this was a serious and unusual case and he wanted time to consider the matter. Sentencing was adjourned to this Friday, April 5. Criminals tried to stay connected behind bars at Midlands and Portlaoise prisons in Laois, as almost 150 mobile phones were seized last year. As well as 149 mobile phones seized from the Portlaoise and Midlands prison campuses there were 23 litres of home-brewed alcohol known as hooch seized and 127 drug seizures. Some of Ireland's most dangerous criminals are in the maximum security Portlaoise Prison, where 22 mobile phones were seized. This accounts for one phone for every ten high-security prisoners, according to the Portlaoise Prison population of 241 on Monday, April 1, 2019. Figures obtained by the Leinster Express from the Irish Prison Service under a Freedom of Information request reveal that a total of 149 phones were seized between the Portlaoise and Midlands prison campuses in 2018. The Midlands Prison is Irelands largest prison with a population of 838 on April 1. Some 127 mobile phones were seized at the Midlands Prison campus last year, meaning one in every six prisoners tried to stay connected to life outside of the medium security prison. As well as mobile phones, alcohol, drugs, weapons and other items were seized on both prison campuses which exist side by side at the Dublin Road, Portlaoise. Just one litre of alcohol, referred to as hooch by the prison service was seized from Midlands Prison, while 22 litres were seized from Portlaoise Prison. Drugs were seized 97 times in the Midlands Prison and 30 times in Portlaoise Prison in 2018. The Irish Prison Service said it loosely classifies materials seized as drugs like tablets or powder but it is not in a position to state if any of these items are illegal drugs as no testing is conducted on substances found within the prison. Weapons were seized 92 times from the Midlands prison last year and eight times from Portlaoise Prison. Common prison weapons may include a shiv which is a handmade knife using a filed down toothbrush with something sharp like a razor embedded in it. A total of 160 other items were seized between both prisons with 127 from Midlands and 33 from Portlaoise. The number of seizures reported does not include statistics exclusively for items confiscated from prisoners alone. These statistics represent all seizures made across the prison estate from prisoners and other sources like security nets and visitors. The total population of Midlands and Portlaoise prisons on April 1 was 1,079. MORE: Drugs worth over 80,000 seized at Portlaoise in parcels from Kenya and Thailand Laois County Council is to design road safety measures for the N80 at Oakvale Cemetery in Stradbally. The update from the councils road section was delivered to councillors at the Portarlington Graiguecullen Municipal District meeting. Cllr Tom Mulhall asking what safety measures are planned. Engineer Farhan Nasiem said this site has been discussed with the Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) safety engineer. This will be progressed to design stage later in the year for submission to TII for approval, he said. Cllr Mulhall said that TII officials came have met the council's road design staff. The ball is in road designs hands to progress this further. I think its a step in the right direction, said Cllr Mulhall. Cllr Paschal McEvoy seconded Cllr Mulhall's motion. I agree. Ive been following this for five years and this is the most positive answer to date. I am delighted there is some progress. It will probably take a while. I hope a footpath will be part of it, he said. The area engineer Darren Coss replied that it was. A tractor blockade was threatened recently residents at the cemetery due to concerns over road safety. An exciting new link has been formed between Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of America's most prestigious universities, an Irish University and St Mary's CBS in Portlaoise. The CBS is one of three Irish schools chosen for the BLOSSOM project created by MIT near Boston, the leading college in STEM education worldwide. It is introduced in Ireland through the University of Limerick. Former St Marys CBS mathematics teacher, Dr Brian Carroll, is leading the project through his post at Hibernia College, a nationally recognised leader in teacher education. The Blossom project teaches STEM subjects using practical methods of thinking that include videos. The four-week maths project chosen for all of CBS's 75 Transition Year students is midway completed. The boys have been considering problems like how averages can be misleading, such as the average depth of a river if one was planning to walk across, using videos made by MIT. Their final project will analyse why the population of Portlaoise has mushroomed, including doing interviews with locals who moved here both recently and generations ago. Teacher Paul Cahillane explains what the boys will be doing. They will have to do research in groups, to talk about the consequence of population growth, and look at hard and soft policies that caused it, like decentralisation of the Dept of Agriculture, and better access by road and rail. They will be applying maths to real life, he said. It is 'blended learning' with students from all levels of maths working in teams together. Mr Cahillane said the new methods of learning maths have had an instant positive reaction from students. Some lads took to it easier who are in ordinary level maths, it's just a different way of thinking. You could see the reaction straight away, he said. CBS already uses videos as part of their teaching processes. We use them for teaching revision, we send students our videos through an app. It is a great use of technology and we can see the results already in Junior Cert results, Mr Cahillane said. The fact that MIT knew we use videos already as a teaching aid, and we are strong on technology with using iPads, made them excited because they knew we were a school that could use this new method, Mr Cahillane said. Feedback from the CBS teachers to MIT will then be used to refine the teaching method for use in secondary and university level around the world. They will interview the teachers and students and get our feedback to alter the lessons. Then they can use this technique with secondary schools or universities, Mr Cahillane said. Following a hugely successful year of tourism in 2018, Into Kildare are once again on the search for a new Chief Experience Officer. Stephen Maher, winner of the CEO competition 2018, said he had a blast throughout the year, sampling the best of Kildare with his young family in tow. It was an honour being chosen as the CEO last year. Kildare is such a beautiful part of Ireland, and it was a pleasure being chosen to help advertise the county to such a big audience, said father-of-two Stephen. I attended a calendar of events throughout Kildare and brought my family along for the ride. It was great to show my kids what a fun place their home county can be. Into Kildare, the go-to website for tourism in the thoroughbred county, are looking for a Kildare native to be a digital brand ambassador for the countys best attractions. An honorary title, the Chief Experience Officer (CEO) will spend the year travelling Kildare, staying in luxury hotels and attending events, while documenting their experiences on social media for the world to see. The first activity will be a day at the Punchestown Festival and an overnight stay at Killashee House Hotel on Saturday, May 4, 2019 and the selected winner must be available this date. To be considered for the title of CEO, entrants must post a photo to Instagram or Twitter using #IntoKildare showcasing what they love most about their county. Entrants to the competition are open to everyone in Kildare over the age of 18, who has a passion for their county and wants to share it with the world. We are looking for a social media-savvy local with a love of all things Kildare, said County Kildare Tourism Development Manager Aine Mangan. Your photo should show off what you love best about Kildare or what you feel would be most attractive to people deciding to visit your county. Our brand ambassador will play a big part in bringing that message to a global audience through our Into Kildare channels. The best entries will be showcased on the Into Kildare website and the winning photo will be selected by a team of tourism professionals. The competition will run until April 30, 2019 with winner announced on the same date. It is inconceivable that gardai would have failed to find an assault rifle and ammunition during a search of a Kildare house over two years ago, a defence barrister has told the Special Criminal Court. If they had been there, they would have been found, Dominic McGinn SC told the three-judge court today. The non-jury court has previously heard that a landlord's nephew found an assault rifle, ammunition and a large amount of drugs in the base of a bed whilst clearing out his uncle's house, just four days after gardai carried out a search of the premises. Michael Brady (54), with an address in Blackrock, Co Dublin is charged with possessing 1.5 million worth of cocaine and 1.26 million worth of heroin and more than 180 rounds of ammunition at a property at Sallins Bridge, in Sallins, Co Kildare on January 24, 2017. He has pleaded not guilty to all seven counts on the indictment. The accused man was found not guilty of possessing an assault rifle by direction of the court last Friday. Another charge accusing him of possessing three ammunition magazines was withdrawn by the State on the same day. It is the States case that forensic evidence links Michael Brady to some of the items found at Sallins Bridge and to the address itself. In February Declan Brady (52), a brother of the accused, pleaded guilty to possessing 15 firearms and more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition at Greenogue Business Park, Rathcoole, Co Dublin on January 24, 2017. He is awaiting sentence. Closing the prosecution case today, Fiona Murphy SC said the court can be satisfied that Michael Brady was in possession of the drugs at Sallins Bridge on January 24. There is no way his fingerprint could be on "a bar of the drugs" without his knowledge and there is strong support from an expert witness that this was his print, she said. Ms Murphy submitted that the court has heard evidence that the accused man was seen emerging from the premises at Sallins Bridge in a car at 2pm on the day in question. He was stopped and arrested under the Road Traffic Act in Naas, where he provided a false name "Declan Brady", she said. Ms Murphy asked the court to take cognisance of why Michael Brady had given a false name saying: This is someone with a guilty mind. There does not appear to be any reason why he could not give his own name. During the trial, Ms Murphy said that Garda Marguerite Reilly gave particular relevant evidence that she took part in the initial search of a small bedroom at Sallins Bridge on January 24 but said that she did not go near the bed. Furthermore, Ms Murphy said that Michael Brady testified that he was living at Sallins Bridge for the purpose of looking after dogs. Counsel said it was incredible that a house would be rented for the purpose of giving dogs somewhere to live. In conclusion, Ms Murphy said the court could draw a reasonable inference that Michael Brady had "knowledge and control" of the items found in the house. Addressing the three-judge panel, defence counsel Dominic McGinn SC said no evidence had been adduced that his client was involved in any other type of criminality, specifically the serious arsenal of 17 firearms, which had been found at Greenogue Business Park, Rathcoole, Co Dublin that morning. He [Michael Brady] doesnt have trappings of criminality, the way his brother has, submitted Mr McGinn. The barrister pointed out that his client was an unknown figure when he was arrested by gardai that morning and had a legitimate reason to be at Sallins Bridge on January 24 as he was looking after dogs. Mr McGinn further stated that it was inconceivable that Michael Brady would have given his brothers name when he was stopped by gardai knowing that he [Declan Brady] was under arrest at the time. If he [Michael Brady] was the mastermind that the prosecution assert he is, it would be the last name he would give as his brother was up to his neck in very serious crime, he added. The barrister said his client chose to give Declan Brady's name to gardai as he had no drivers licence and the car was insured in his brother's name. The court has heard that gardai found Michael Bradys fingermarks on 12 items including a "bar of drugs" and a windowsill in a bedroom, where the firearms were also found. Counsel said there was no evidence given in the trial that fingerprints are unique or not common in families. We dont know if Declan Bradys fingerprints are similar to Michael Bradys, he argued. Mr McGinn said there was no proof that the drugs were in the house when Michael Brady was there. There was a gap of four days between when the accused man left the house on January 24 and when he returned on January 28, when the drugs were found, he said. The barrister said it was "interesting" that one witness gave evidence that there had been a meticulous initial search carried out by gardai at Sallins Bridge on January 24. It was inconceivable that gardai did not find firearms and ammunition that day if they were there, he argued, adding that if these items had been there they would have been found. In conclusion, Mr McGinn said other people had visited Sallins Bridge between January 24 and 28 and the drugs could have got into the premises during this "interval". There is no evidence to prove that this is not a reasonable hypothesis, he outlined. There was no better place to hide the firearms and ammunition than in a house which gardai had already searched, he emphasised, adding that it was unlikely that gardai would return to Sallins Bridge for a second time. Counsel said this case demanded a not guilty verdict for his client. Mr Justice Paul Coffey, presiding, sitting with Judge Gerard Griffin and Judge David McHugh, remanded Michael Brady in custody until June 19, when the court will deliver judgment on the case. PEOPLE from Tullamore, Leixlip and other places came together to unveil a special memorial plaque in the Kildare town last Tuesday, on 15 May. PEOPLE from Tullamore, Leixlip and other places came together to unveil a special memorial plaque in the Kildare town last Tuesday, on 15 May. The event, run by the Leixlip Parish Council, highlighted the Eucharistic Congress of 1932 and a similar event being run this year. On 27 June 1932, a lorry owned by Tullamore based company, Williams Waller, was returning from Congress in the Phoenix Park, when it crashed through the railings of the Salmon Leap bridge. There were 31 people on the lorry and the crash claimed two lives. The local people of Leixlip came to the rescue of the injured. the deceased were Patrick Kenaney (23) and Edward Daly (28). Aid was given by locals in the Salmon Leap pub, which is now currently closed. Twenty four others were injured but survived with varying injuries. Last Tuesdays ceremony saw a plaque, created by Celbridge artist/sculptor, Jarlath Daly, unveiled on the bridge. In attendance also were Leixlip Town Council chairperson, Joe Neville, and Tullamore Town Council chairperson, Sinead Dooley as well as Regina Daly and Michael Kenaney, a granddaughter and a nephew respectively of the deceased men. Well known Leixlip teacher, Eva Buckley, a relative of Patrick Kenaney, also attended as did Nellie Scully, whose father, Patrick Gorman, lost his left arm in the accident, which saw the lorry fall into the river. Paul Carey, chairperson of Leixlip Parish Council, addressed the crowd and Leixlip parish priest, Fr. John McNamara, who was joined by Rev. Scott Peoples, Church of Ireland, led prayers and reflections. There was also a warm welcome for former parish priest, Fr. Michael Hurley. Mr. Carey thanked Cllr. Frank ORourke for his help in the planning process for the plaque. He said the Parish Pastoral Council became aware of the tragedy when preparing for the Eucharistic Congress and commissioned the plaque. Traffic was stopped temporarily for the ceremony, which started at the Church of Our Ladys Nativity. It involved the carrying of the Congress bell in a procession to the bridge, where it was rung for the last time before being sent to continue its pilgrim journey. Kildare TD James Lawless, who is the Fianna Fail Spokesperson on Science and Technology, was part of a political delegation who met Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today. Fine Gael TD and Chair of the Oireachtas Communications Committee Hildegarde Naughton and Green Party leader Eamon Ryan met Mr Zuckerberg during his trip to dublin. The Deputies, who are members of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News, discussed their concerns in relation to the regulation of social media, greater transparency in political advertising and the wellbeing of both users and content moderators. They also impressed upon Mr Zuckerberg the need to engage with legislators and updated him on initiatives from Ireland's Communications Committee. Deputy Lawless said, It was a welcome opportunity to meet with Mr Zuckerberg today and discuss many of the issues which have been to the fore over recent times. It was particularly helpful to meet with him in relation to my Bill, the Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill, and to discuss the progression of legislation aimed at making the internet a safer place for all. Facebook recently put in place new regulations which seek to provide greater transparency in political advertising. This is a welcome and positive move especially in the run up to the EU elections in May but I believe it must go further with transparency measures placed on a statutory footing. I agree with Mr Zuckerberg that there is a need for governments to take a more active role and that it cant be left to social media giants alone to regulate and police the internet. Leitrim is preparing for another final next month - the All Ireland Drama Final in Athlone from May 2-11. The Corn Mill Theatre Group from Carrigallen are delighted to be heading back to Athlone to battle it our for the trophy in May. Director Ronan Ward, who was also the director when the group last won the prestigious title in 2014 said they are busy making preparations. The Corn Mill won four out of eight local drama festivals, also earning three second places and one third place. Just over two wins are necessary to qualify for the final. Ward explains that he is currently perfecting the play after taking on board advice from adjudicators and hopes to have the winning formula in place for the final. The adjudicator for the All Ireland Drama Finals is Imelda McDonagh, Ward says "this is her first time, we have met her a few times." He said it is hard to know if you have the winning piece as it is based one person's opinion. This is the first outing for Dermot Healy's On Broken Wings for the Irish festival circuit and Ronan said they are delighted to have the support of the writer's widow Helen. The cast of 18 includes some stalwarts of theatre in Carrigallen as well as some newcomers, taking in Carrigallen, Killeshandra and Belturbet. They have been delighted with the reaction to the play and hope to put on a few shows in Carrigallen before they line out in Athlone. Watch| Leitrim manager Terry Hyland insists Leitrim have the ability to Croke Park next week Fine Gael Senator Frank Feighan has paid tribute to Marian Harkin, MEP, who has decided not to contest the upcoming European Parliament Elections. Senator Feighan said: As both an MEP and TD, Marian always cared passionately about the West of Ireland. She is a politician for whom I have always had huge admiration and respect. I served as a Senator from 2002-2004 when Marian was first elected to Europe. I always found her extremely helpful, very diligent and always gave great advice. As a politician, Marian was always on top of local, national and international issues and I want to wish her very well into the future. Matt Carthy MEP echoed those sentiments saying: "I want to send my sincere best wishes to Marian Harkin for the future and to thank her for her goodwill and cooperation as a colleague in the European Parliament and as fellow MEP for the Midlands North West constituency. "While we did not always agree on the role of the EU or on the solutions to the many issues facing people in our constituency, we did work well together on issues of common concern. "Whether in politics or the voluntary sector Marian has always made a positive contribution and Im sure she will continue to do so in the future. I wish her all the best." There have been glowing tributes paid to the popular MEP following her announcement yesterday not to seek re-election. Marian Harkin. An amazing teacher many moons ago and the hardest working most conscientious MEP. Thank you for all your hard work Marian. Enjoy time to yourself... and your family. https://t.co/LlRKEOsMdJ Gillian Coughlan (@GillianOranswel) April 2, 2019 Thanks for everything Marian, I remember the day you drove to Galway to speak to @spunout.ie on your weekend home from the parliament. You'll be missed. Sarah Clancy (@sarahmaintains) April 2, 2019 We were privileged to have you as our MEP Marian. It must be an emotional time for you to announce this after 15 years...your work rate and influence as an MEP has been phenomenal and unsurpassable and it's an honour to have been with you for a little part of that journey..x Cllr Marie Casserly. (@Marie_Casserly) April 1, 2019 It's been a pleasure working with you. You're a strong & effective voice for civil society and will be missed in the #EP Jean Lambert MEP (@GreenJeanMEP) April 1, 2019 All the best in the future Marian. You were a capable and responsible servant to your constituency and your country. John McCartin (@mccartinjohn) April 1, 2019 Very sad to hear Marian Harkin will not be contesting the next European election, having worked for her in Brussels I know she is an extremely hard working MEP and always fought tooth and nail for Ireland, big loss Diarmuid Hugh (@alliance_irish) April 1, 2019 I want to extend my best wishes to @MarianHarkin for 15 yrs of dedicated hard work for the people of the North West. You have served with the utmost dedication &professionalism since first being elected to the European Parliament.All the best as your European term comes to an end https://t.co/UM3166XO5H Eamon Scanlon TD (@EamonScanlonTD) April 1, 2019 The Social Innovation Fund Ireland (SIFI) has announced a new 550,000 Ignite Fund which will support the most innovative charities and social enterprises in Ireland. The Fund has four Awards to which organisations can apply: Empowering Families, Music to Impact, Harnessing Ability and Youth Resilience. Organisations which SIFI already support include; Social Farming Ireland which coordinates social farming activities in Ireland, by providing placements on farms for a range of people including people with disabilities, those recovering from mental ill health and brain injuries, young people, older people, long-term unemployed, and asylum seekers as well as many others across Connaught including Meals 4 Health and Ready Steady Circus! as examples of the 86 Social Innovation Projects they have supported to date. The Ignite Fund is created by Social Innovation Fund Ireland and supported by several private philanthropists and the Department of Rural and Community Development from the Dormant Accounts Fund. Applicants have the potential to win Awards packages (including cash grants and business supports) worth between 50,000 to 75,000. The Empowering Families Award is open to applications from innovative projects or organisation's working with families experiencing disadvantage and that provide training and support to parents or guardians of children aged 6-12 years, in order to develop their parental capacity. The Music to Impact Award is open to innovative projects or organisations which use music as a means to enhance wellbeing or promote social inclusion for children, young people or adults. The Harnessing Ability Award is open to organisations whose mission is to create economic opportunity for adolescents or adults with disabilities through innovative programmes that enhance skills, drive leadership potential and provide job opportunities. The Award is supported by the W2 Foundation and also Ralph and Maureen Parkes. The Youth Resilience Award is open to innovative projects focused on the mental health of young people in Ireland in the context of increased social and digital media use. The Youth Resilience Award is also supported by W2 Foundation and Ralph and Maureen Parkes. Deirdre Mortell, CEO of SIFI, said; Through the Ignite Fund, we are delighted to partner with a number of ambitious Irish private philanthropists who want to support non-profit organisations in Ireland addressing a range of social issues we face today. Last year, the Department of Rural and Community Development committed to continue matching SIFI funding up to 25 million, creating a potential 50m fund for social innovation in Ireland. We are calling on individuals, families, SMES, foundations, and trusts to take example from the philanthropists who have got behind the Ignite Fund and to join us on our mission to create the worlds best eco-system for social innovation in Ireland. Social Innovation Fund Ireland are also calling for applications to (1) Children and Youth Education Fund which is open to all innovative projects offering either preventive supports or interventions for children and young people and their mental health, (2) Children and Youth Mental Health Fund which is open to all innovative projects offering either preventive supports or interventions for children and young people and their mental health and (3) Mna na hEireann, Women of Ireland Fund which is open for applications from organisations that support and empower women to progress their education or progress into new or more sustainable employment. The closing date for applications is May 6, 2019. For more information please visit www.socialinnovation.ie or attend one of SIFIs Roadshows in Galway or Dublin. Register for your event of choice by visiting www.socialinnovation.ie/open-for-applications/. THE IRISH Nurses and Midwives Organisation has set up an online petition, urging the UL Hospitals Group to reopen a ward at University Hospital Limerick amid significant overcrowding. The petition was launched on Tuesday afternoon, just days after UHL announced the closure of Ward 1A, comprising 17 beds. On Monday, there were 72 patients on trolleys at UHL, which dipped to 68 patients this Tuesday. In the petition, the INMO states: University Hospital Limerick is overcrowded and understaffed. This is bad for patients, nurses, and all hospital staff. Limerick needs more hospital beds, not fewer. That is why we are calling on management to reopen a much-needed 17-bed ward, closed in the last week in March. Closing beds will only worsen Limericks overcrowding crisis. Limericks overcrowding is the highest in the country. We regularly see over 60 patients a day forced to wait without a proper bed. It simply does not make sense to close further beds when faced with such a problem. Were standing united and strong for a safer hospital and service. Stand with us. As of Tuesday 6pm, there were over 400 signatures. A spokesperson for the UL Hospitals Group said that five bed spaces in the vacated acute medical assessment unit opened this Monday. The 15-bedded medical ward 4C will be fully staffed at weekends. The UL Hospitals Group has previously explained that Ward 1A is to close to facilitate the completion of works on a new fracture unit. The spokesperson added that the plan to close the unit is offset by recently-opened 12-bed surgical short stay unit; three extra cardiology beds opened last week; five bed spaces are being looked at the vacated former acute medical assessment unit. ITS only through people power and direct action that Irish Cements controversial plans for Mungret will be defeated. Thats according to opponents of the 10m scheme, which will see the firm phase out the use of fossil fuels in the burning of cement in favour of used tyres and solid recovered waste. More than 150 people were at a public meeting in the South Court Hotel for an event hosted by Limerick Against Pollution (LAP), which has fought against the proposals for more than three years. Irish Cement has cleared all but one hurdle towards implementing its reforms at Mungret, with the final step being the awarding of a licence from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And there was a strong feeling in the room that this will happen. On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Limerick Soviet, there was a summonsing of the spirit of protest at that time, with Dr Angus Mitchell, LAP, saying: A century ago, the people of Limerick stood up to the Competent Military Authority in Ireland because that power had violated the fundamental rights and will of the people. Its not difficult to make the connections that brought on a sense of righteous anger in April 1919, with the same sense of righteous anger that brings us here tonight. Local election candidate Seonaidh Ni Shiomoin said there should be a protest at the gates of Irish Cement on the first day of its new operation. In Limerick, we have a great tradition of people power. I would be asking the public to ask politicians in light of the local election to be sure to ask them are they willing to take direct action, and stand on pickets with us at Irish Cement. Id love to see the mayoral chain to be put to good use, to stick it to the gates of Irish Cement and refuse to let lorries transporting tyres in, she told the meeting. The main concerns the anti-incineration lobby has is an increase in emissions into the local environment. However, a spokesperson for Irish Cement said: The fossil fuel replacement programme in our Limerick cement factory will not negative impact on the amenities of the area or the air quality in Limerick. Willie ODea meanwhile, pledged that Fianna Fail will bring forward plans to remove the immunity which protects the EPA from prosecution and legal action. Despite recommendations dating back to 2011, he said the government has not acted to address this, saying: Can you imagine a situation if the law in this country stated the gardai cannot be sued for anything, the hospitals cannot be sued, or CIE cannot be sued? The EPA is the last bastion of unaccountability in this country and I think its time that be removed. His stance was backed by Fine Gael Senator Kieran ODonnell. Meanwhile, one of the other speakers at the event was 13-year-old Saoirse Exton, who has taken time out of school each Friday to stage regular demonstrations to warn of climate change. She said: Ive been scared of climate change most of my life. But I constantly suppressed that feeling. I kept telling myself it would be okay, but when I saw Greta Thunberg protesting, I realised it wont be okay. And this is why I knew I had to start protesting: so that people with power will listen. Meanwhile, another member of LAP has warned if the reforms are cleared, it could lead to a cluster of similar dirty industries in the area. Derek ODwyer, an industrial engineer by trade, was warned this could see major employers quit the city as a result. Maria Corbett, another member, added: In case you think we are scaremongering, and that we are in good hands with the HSE and the EPA and the full support of the County Council all having our health ad top of the list of their priorities remember, we thought that was the case with the recent cervical check programme, only to discover otherwise. See page 19 for pictures IN years gone by if John Shinnors found himself in a situation he was uncomfortable with, he would utter the words, que sera sera, remind himself it is not going to last forever, that there is always something better around the corner. And thats the way life transpired for the Limerick artist who admits to being very poor at one stage, having so much money at another stage that he didnt know what to do with it, before finding himself poor again and then comfortable. Born in Limerick in 1950, John Shinnors was a student at CBS Sexton Street primary and secondary schools before studying drawing and painting at Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD). All children draw, points out the Limerick native who was reared on Merchants Quay. Well, the vast majority of them and some children just draw a bit more than others. Wearing his trademark cream fishermans hat with matching blazer, the 68-year-old - whose hands have produced paintings which commanded up to 70,000 during the boom - sips coffee in the lobby of Limericks Clayton Hotel. Hes just been presented with the Limerick Person of the Month award, a very pleasing honour for the man who was told as a boy hed amount to nothing. As a young child John Shinnors discovered that he was able to copy drawings faithfully. What I mean by that is, he explains, I was actually able to depict an image as it is. And I enjoyed doing it. Humans, by their nature, if they do something and they do it well they derive enjoyment out of it so it just evolved. Late last year John published the book, Adult Reading at Artists Bedtime - a stunning collection of illustrated stories from his sketchbooks. His paintings often combine the figurative and abstract at once, the drawings and paintings in the sketchbooks are more figurative as they illustrate personal stories that are poignant, humorous and surreal. Despite going on to become one of Irelands foremost artists, Johns parents were totally indifferent to his talent when he was growing up. His father tore up some of his paintings in later life because he thought they were obscene. John, in turn, threw away his fathers favourite pipe. Im vengeful by nature, he jokes, I threw it into the Shannon when I was walking over Sarsfield Bridge. His father thought that artists were the people who dress up the windows in Todds - sort of effeminate men, or they were bloody mad, cutting off their ears. Did it hurt him that his father couldnt recognise his talent? Absolutely not, comes the quickfire response, none whatsoever. I didnt look up to my father for anything. I was, how would I put it, more conscious of my mothers presence than my fathers. And did she recognise his talent? No, she was totally indifferent too. But you must remember I was the dunce of the family. My brothers and my sister were far more clever than I was. They used to call me Poor John when I was a kid because I would never amount to anything. I suppose they werent really indifferent as to what I did, just so long as I didnt get chucked in jail. John was, in fact, very good at school. He went on to show his work in many solo and group exhibitions in Ireland and has been involved in supporting the visual arts in Ireland through the Shinnors Scholarship for an MA in Curatorial Studies in partnership with LIT, LSAD and Limerick City Gallery of Art and the Shinnors Drawing Award at LCGA. A typical day for John begins at 2am when he goes to bed. He wakes at 11am and at around 4pm he becomes active and I do a small bit. Then I eat. I work in two studios. My best hours are between eight and half past ten at night. In the big studio in OConnell Street, I work there on Thursdays or Tuesdays if Im working on a large scale. He doesnt draw every day but I wouldnt say Id go weeks (without drawing). When he goes away somewhere his paints travel with him. While working he has to have music playing - Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky, anything big and heavy. If youre familiar with my pictures, most of them, theyre rather dark, dramatic, so I like that deep thud while Im painting. From where does he draw inspiration? Aine, he starts, I see life through a picture frame. Right now, when Im looking at you, theres a frame around you. You cant see it, but I do. Im looking at you as a talking picture. For inspiration, for example, I was recently revisiting Loop Head lighthouse. Thats an inspirational place for me. Does he still charge hefty prices for his works? Of course I do. He does admit however that since the boom went bust, he hasnt sold paintings for tasty sums like 70,000. Having lived in London for a time, John is very content residing in Limerick, a city he loves. You know the My Limerick column (in the Limerick Leaders free sister paper The Leader), well if I read that once more Im going to...the question, what do you do on a Saturday morning? Everyone says I go to the Milk Market. He sips some coffee. Im a Limerick nationalist. I actually love the city. I wouldnt live anywhere else. King Johns Castle means an awful lot to me. I was born and reared around there. The view outside there you would not find in many cities in Europe. I treasure that. I feel very privileged to live in Limerick. Anything that brings out the best of Limerick, he rejoices in it, be it art, rugby or hurling. Limerick winning the All-Ireland he describes as tremendous even though it did cause the Wallers Well resident to endure the worst eight minutes of his life. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I dont have much hair but.. I went out the back. I keep a longbow, he says, motioning drawing back the bow string with his arms. At he closes in on 70 years, John describes his health as excellent. If hes not drawing, youll find the vociferous reader stuck in a book - everything and anything from PG Wodehouse to Dickens, or drinking porter. I find its very important to me, drink, he explains. For the simple reason, when I drink a pint of stout, I dont drink it for the love of it, it tastes fecking awful. What I find is, and the writer Colin Dexter was exactly the same, he said in one of his Morse works, when Morse was asked, Well, why do you drink? Morse said, I drink to think. John can sit at a bar for hours with a notebook in his pocket. For example, I had a problem with a composition for a painting Im working on for LIT, a portrait, and after a few drinks, it widened the thought process, and that was the answer and I jotted it down straight away as to how to approach the portrait, and that was drink- induced. As the interview draws to a conclusion, a man who had been sitting close by in the hotel lobby, throughout the interview, approaches. Sorry to interrupt, but I overheard...are you John Shinnors, the artist? I am! Well Im the owner of The Baby! The Baby, oil on board, signed and dated 1980 in an original frame was acquired in 2006 by Galway businessman Declan Dooley. It was at a time when Johns paintings were fetching 60,000 to 70,000. The artist and owner pose for a photo together before talking art. Its an incredibly interesting and highly thought-provoking piece that intrigues, says Declan. It challenges the viewer and never fails to stimulate conversation. Indeed, much like the artist himself. ABBEYFEALE councillor Seamus Browne has reiterated his concern that services at St Itas Voluntary Housing and Day Care Centre in the town will be cut when the Community Employment scheme finishes this Friday. The clock has run down on the CE scheme at St Itas, Cllr Browne said this week. I am very concerned that no solution has, so far, been arrived at. The Limerick Leader understands that a meeting called by officials in the Department of Employment and Social Affairs last week in a bid to try and find a way out of the dilemma did not go ahead. My continuing concern is that the services will be lost and that the people who rely on those services will suffer as a result. These services play an important role in combatting rural and social isolation and in many cases, offer the only social outlet to some users. The people in question are fining it very difficult to understand why these services are being lost or at risk. I have advised St Itas to talk to West Limerick Resources and they are at present in talks, Cllr Browne said. I am hopeful there will be some kind of solution but I am not confident there will be. AUCTIONEER Joe Wheeler should have been roaring on Munster in Edinburgh on Saturday but instead he was receiving booking deposits. The launch of homes in Laurelville, Mill Road, Corbally was due to have taken place on Saturday, March 23. However, as the showhouse wasnt ready it was postponed until last Saturday leaving Mr Wheeler with a dilemma. I gave up a trip to Edinburgh. I had flights and accommodation booked and two tickets for the match, said Mr Wheeler. I gave away the tickets to two very grateful friends, he smiled. At least it was worth his while as the eight houses released were snapped up. Laurelville is made up of 12 four bedroom semi-detached and 12 four bedroom detached houses. The semi-detached ones cost 335,000, while the detached are available for 385,000. Deposits were paid for four of each on Saturday. That amounts to close to 3 million worth of sales. The viewing time was from 11am to 2pm but the first people were there at 9.30am. It was done on a first come, first served basis. We had big footfall. We had around 100. There was a steady flow all day. We released eight and sold eight. They were gone by noon, said Mr Wheeler. He said those in attendance were mostly young couples. They were very impressed by the showhouse. We have had four requests this morning to see if we can sell the showhouse but so far we havent decided to release it, said Mr Wheeler, who spoke to the Leader at 10.30am on Monday. He said a lot of people expressed interest in phase two. We are taking names but were not releasing any more for the moment, he said. Mr Wheeler expects the eight houses sold to be occupied in July. It is hoped the whole development will be completed by February 2020 For more contact Wheeler Auctioneers on 061 383 403 LIMERICK businessman Kevin Meaney is celebrating this week after winning a prestigious business award. Kevin Meaney, who heads up International Digital Marketing Agency AGENT Digital, based at Howleys Quay, was awarded the Thought Leader in Digital Marketing award at this years All-Star Business Awards in Croke Park. Established in 2007, AGENT Digital is a full-service digital agency based in Limerick and Dublin. AGENT Digital listens to clients goals; creates strategies to achieve those goals, and delivers those strategies through their range of services, such as website design, development, support and digital marketing, which includes search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media marketing. Mr Meaney said: I am honoured to receive the accreditation from the All-Ireland Business Foundation, This really is an award for all the AGENT Digital team who share my passion for digital marketing and delivering for our clients." He added that the AGENT Digital team are digital change agents pushing the capabilities of digital to the limit, to deliver the best for its clients, which include multinationals, universities, institutes and SMEs, nationwide and internationally, including The Body Shop, Smurfit Kappa and RTE. The All-Ireland Business Foundation is a national body which accredits best-in-class Irish businesses as Business All-Stars. The Foundation believe best-in-class companies should be clearly identifiable so consumers can purchase with confidence from All-Star accredited businesses. For more details visit the AGENT Digital Website at http://www.agentdigital.ie THE GLORIOUS spring sunshine didnt last long, as there have been sightings of heavy snowfall, hail and rain in County Limerick this Tuesday morning. Temperatures in Limerick peaked at 17 degrees last week, the warmest temperatures so far this year. However, after Met Eireann issued a snow-ice warning for the northern part of the country from Monday night to Tuesday lunch time, Limerick has been hit by another cold spell. While there was no sight of snow in Limerick city, there was a short spell of heavy hail around 9am. There was heavy snowfall spotted in Newcastle West, Kilfinane and Abbeyfeale, according to locals. Castletroy College posted a picture of a Ms Knight enjoying the wintery weather in Kilfinane this Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, our reporter David Hurley captured the abrupt change of weather out in West Limerick. The Limerick Leader can confirm that there were no serious road traffic incidents as a result of the weather, as of 10.30am. IT IS a good news day for Limerick holidayers who are looking for a sunny getaway, as Shannon Airport has announced a new direct flight service to Ibiza this week. Shannon Airport has also announced a twice-weekly service to the East Midlands in the UK until the end of October this year. A spokesperson for Shannon Airport said Ryanair will operate the flights to Ibiza every Wednesday and Sunday until the end of October, and increasing holiday capactity to 21,000 seats. Shannon Airport managing director, Andrew Murphy said that it is an exciting time for the airport, stating that 2018 was the best year in over a decade for the Clare airport. Ibiza is known as a party-island but is so much more than that, with quieter parts of the island offering some stunning locations for a sedate and luxurious holiday. Its a brilliant addition to our summer sun schedule. We have already seen the success of the year-round Ryanair service to Alicante and with other sunshine destinations including Tenerife, Lanzarote, Barcelona-Reus, Fuerteventura, Faro and Malaga. Holidaymakers need to look no further than Shannon for the most comfortable travel experience in Ireland. Commenting on the new UK flights, Mr Murphy said that the East Midlands is a gateway to a really interesting part of the UK. Its an excellent addition to our UK schedule and a real statement about the importance and potential of the UK market, despite Brexit uncertainty. The flights will depart at 8.20am on Mondays and 9.10pm on Fridays, strengthening its regional connectivity by another 22,000 seats. The timing and days of week allow for great flexibility for a weekend break or for a week long business trip Our top-class facilities, parking, and shopping make flying in and out of Shannon less stressful. Passengers can pass seamlessly through the airport and in 20 minutes they can be home in Limerick or an hour in Galway. We have invested massively over the past number of years in offering our passengers the most accessible and convenient travel experience, and our hard work is paying off. We have received excellent feedback from our passengers who know that flying through Shannon makes travelling easier. MEMBERS of the National Ambulance Service in Limerick have returned to the picket lines for a fifth time over an ongoing dispute over union recognition. The National Ambulance Service Representatives Association (Nasra), a branch of the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA), have staged their fifth strike so far this year this Tuesday, from 7am to 5pm. This follows a protest outside Dail Eireann last Wednesday, which included a number of Mid-West members. A spokesperson for the Mid-West Nadra branch told the Leader: The support from the public and our supporting TDs, senators and councillors has been truly remarkable. It is clear that the will of the public and our supporters is to see our National Ambulance Service staff represented by their union of choice. Limerick staff are standing strong with their heads held high. We are as resolute as ever and we will see this through. On a previous day of picketing on February 28, branch secretary Liam Moore said: Its not backgrounds we are going; its forwards. There is some forward momentum at the moment. Nasra member Derek OBrien and his union colleagues have consistently made assurances to the public that all emergency cases are being covered by the crew at the St Nessans Road base. There are around 30 members of the Mid-West branch, out of a total of some-600 nationally, comprising paramedics, control room staff, dispatchers, and emergency medical technicians. A High Court challenge has been brought over the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to grant an industrial Emissions Licence to a chicken rearing plant in Co. Limerick. The action has been taken by environmental activist Peter Sweetman in respect of the EPA's decision of February 6 last to grant the licence to Mr Michael Noel O'Connor to operate a facility that rears 74,000 broiler chickens at Rathcahill West, Templeglantine. At the High Court James Devlin SC, instructed by solicitor Gabriel Toolan, for Mr Sweetman said it is his client's case that the EPA's decision is flawed and should be set aside. It is alleged the EPA failed to consider relevant matters, lacked jurisdiction to make the decision and failed to properly take into account the EU Habitats, Waste Water and Environmental Impact Directives when it decided to award the licence. Counsel said that his client has concerns about 'poultry litter' from the facility which produces broiler chickens, which are chickens that are used as meat. This litter is cleared from the sheds every six to eight weeks when straw bedding is removed and the shed floors are washed down with water, counsel said. These emissions, counsel said, are then used as compost at a mushroom facility, but most of it is spread on land. Counsel said that the licence was granted by the EPA, which does not know the location of the land where the litter is being spread. It is also his client's case that the EPA's finding when assessing the application that the spreading of the litter will not affect the integrity of any protected site is not a justified conclusion. In his action against the EPA, Ireland and the Attorney General Mr Sweetman seeks an order quashing the decision to award the licence. He also seeks various declarations including that EPA erred in law and acted contrary to the EU Directive on waste by failing to quantify or make provision for the proper management of waste from the operation. He further seeks a declaration that the decision was based on an assessment that does not contain complete, precise or definitive findings capable of removing all doubt to the effect of the site on protected sites. Mr O'Connor is a notice party to the proceedings. Permission to bring the challenge was granted, on an ex-parte basis, by Mr Justice Seamus Noonan. The judge made the matter returnable to a date in June. ATLANTA Cancer is over one hundred different diseases hiding under one name. That's why, just as there isn't one universal way to treat cancer, there also isn't one universal way to detect it. But that doesn't mean scientists aren't trying: If researchers can find a unique signature or "biomarker" of cancer meaning a characteristic that all cancerous cells share but healthy cells do not they may be able to create a simple test to detect it. One unique cancer biomarker could be DNA. Of course, DNA isn't something that's unique to cancer cells every cell in the body has it. But according to a team of researchers from Australia, cancer DNA takes on a different structure than healthy DNA, and that's something scientists could target. [7 Diseases You Can Learn About from a Genetic Test] That was the premise of a paper that the team published last December in Nature Communications. They found that because of its unique shape, DNA from cancer cells bound tightly to gold nanoparticles, whereas the DNA from healthy cells did not. Matt Trau, a professor at the University of Queensland's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and the senior author on the Nature paper, discussed those findings at a presentation March 31 here at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). To illustrate how cancer DNA acted differently, Trau held up some "DNA" one of his daughter's toys, a long, colorful train of little plastic pieces linked together. This is how DNA would look once you take it from people's cells, purify it and start to examine it in the lab, Trau said. But it's not how DNA looks when it's circulating around in people's blood. To illustrate that, Trau crumbled up the toy. This knotted tangle of DNA, which crumples up differently when it comes from cancer cells than when comes from normal cells, is now the target for the team's cancer tests. In the December study, the researchers said that they were able to achieve a 90 percent accuracy rate in detecting cancer at least the types of cancer that they tested in 10 minutes' time using gold nanoparticles. That means that the test successfully detected cancer in 90 percent of the samples used (all of which contained cancer DNA). Robert Kovelman, a senior director at Biological Dynamics, a San Diego-based biotech company, who was not a part of the study but attended the talk, said that the technology Trau described is "very exciting and it certainly has potential." However, "I think it's still in its early days ultimately, it's a question of how [the technology] will be applied," Kovelman told Live Science. The key metric for a universal biomarker test will be that it can detect cancer at its early stages, before symptoms begin, Kovelman added. Trau and his team haven't yet tested their approach on detecting the earliest stages of cancer, when there wouldnt be a lot of cancer DNA circulating in the blood. Rare cancer detection Tests that detect cancer in its early stages do already exist, of course there are screenings for common cancers such as colorectal and breast cancers. "The difficulty is when it's a rare cancer, you're never going to have a population screening, because it's simply uneconomical," said Viive Howell, an associate professor at the University of Sydney School of Medicine, who was not a part of Trau's research. [The 10 Deadliest Cancers and Why There's No Cure] And then there are the cancers that are simply difficult to detect. Take brain cancer, for example. The only thing that can be done to detect this cancer is to monitor for symptoms or take an MRI, which is very expensive and not something that would be done as a screening, Howell told Live Science. And because the brain is protected by the blood-brain barrier, which prevents most compounds in blood from flowing into or out of the brain, cancer DNA rarely exits the brain into the bloodstream, Howell said. That means it would be really difficult to detect brain cancer through a blood test. Trau and his group have tested their methodology on a variety of cancers, but none of them were particularly "rare" cancers or those that are hard to detect in the first place. Howell said that she's not sure if their method would work for such cancers. But, "if you can detect something early by something nonspecific that doesn't discriminate against rare cancers such as brain cancer, pancreatic cancer and ovarian cancer then that would be amazing," she added. Early days Trau's team is working on several other potential cancer biomarkers, such as those involved in different protein pathways. The reason is because "no marker is perfect," said Trau. "You get a lot of bang for your buck if you use multiple markers to mitigate its potential weaknesses." Other labs around the world are also taking a crack at this. Shiran Shapira and Dr. Nadir Arber, researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel who were not part of Trau's study, are working to develop a blood test that might be able to detect multiple types of cancer, based on differences in proteins found on the surface of the cancer cell. Arber told Live Science that there's still a long way to go before reaching a truly universal biomarker. There are many factors to consider, such as how these cancer cells look in different genders and age groups or even after taking medication, he said. During the talk, Arber also raised a question about inflammation: Because some of the pathways that lead to cancer are also involved in inflammation, how do you know the tool can accurately distinguish between the two? Others raised a point about age: Some of the structural changes to healthy DNA that occur with age can look similar to what happens to cancer DNA. Trau told Live Science that the team tested for the effects of aging in their research. Though there are a few signals that come from the aging process, approximately 90 percent seems to come from the cancerous process, he said. As for inflammation, "my suspicion is that it's probably not going to be an issue," he said. "If it was an inflammation signal, then it would have knocked down our accuracy much earlier." But these are all things he wants to thoroughly test, he added. "It's still early days." Originally published on Live Science. The New Yorker recently described a so-called dinosaur graveyard as holding the remains of an astonishingly diverse trove of dinosaur fossils, including hatchlings; it caused quite a buzz in the media. But even though the site is potentially groundbreaking, the New Yorker article is out of step with the study describing the find. There's no question that the site in North Dakota (part of the fossil-rich Hell Creek Formation) is an incredible paleontology bonanza; crammed with Cretaceous fossils that were all buried at once, it offers an unprecedented snapshot of the minutes and hours following the asteroid impact that extinguished much of life on Earth around 66 million years ago. On March 29, prior to the study's publication in a scientific journal, The New Yorker reported that the site contained fossils of pterosaurs, mammals and "almost every dinosaur group known from Hell Creek." However, the study published online Monday (April 1) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes no mention of dinosaurs, apart from an isolated and incomplete hip bone. [Crash! 10 Biggest Impact Craters on Earth] "There seems to be a disconnect between what is described in The New Yorker with what is actually in the peer-reviewed paper," Stephen Brusatte, a reader in vertebrate paleontology at the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email. Brusatte, who was not involved in the new study, said that the claim would be "awesome" if it were true, but for now, the data simply isn't available. "I hope there are other dinosaur fossils at the site, and I look forward to hearing more about them," he said. Lead study author Robert DePalma, who conducted the research as a doctoral candidate in geology at the University of Kansas (KU), told Live Science that "the only information that anyone should be talking about is what's in this published paper, because that's the only thing that can be freely evaluated based on the scientific data." Densely packed fossils The Cretaceous period (145.5 million years ago to about 65.5 million years) literally ended with a bang. Scientists cite a massive asteroid impact in waters near Chicxulub, Mexico, as the prevailing explanation for the sudden disappearance of most of Earth's animal species including all dinosaurs except birds. When the asteroid struck, it ended the Cretaceous and ushered in the Paleogene. The newly described site lies between layers of Cretaceous and Paleogene rocks at the Hell Creek Formation, one of the world's richest fossil deposits, which spans parts of Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota. The site contains densely packed fossils of animals that died at the same time "on the last day of the Cretaceous," said DePalma, who is currently a researcher at the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, and an adjunct professor at Florida Atlantic University. "Their presence there, and the presence of all the other details in sediments, is helping us to tease out all the little, tiny details that occurred in the first moments after the impact that were unclear before this discovery," DePalma said. DePalma dubbed the site "Tanis" after the city that hid the ark of the covenant in the film "Raiders of the Lost Ark," according to The New Yorker. The fossil deposit appears to contain something equally as remarkable and unprecedented as its namesake: evidence of mass death directly linked to the Chicxulub impact. A partially exposed fish fossil at the Tanis site is exquisitely preserved. (Image credit: Courtesy of Robert DePalma) Fish and ammonites In the study, DePalma and his colleagues described a deposit about 3 feet (1.3 meters) thick, holding fossil evidence of freshwater fish, marine vertebrates, ammonites (extinct relatives of today's nautilus), vegetation and animal-made burrows. More than 50 percent of the freshwater fish at Tanis died with tiny glass balls called spherules embedded in their gills; in fact, the site was riddled with spherules ranging in diameter from 0.01 to 0.06 inches (0.3 to 1.4 millimeters). Also known as tektites, these glass beads formed from droplets of melted rock that were sprayed into the atmosphere after the asteroid's impact. These objects rained down on North America minutes later, and the Tanis fish probably inhaled and choked on the tektites before a wave of debris buried the creatures, the researchers reported. A micro-CT image shows a cutaway of a clay-altered spherule, with an internal core of unaltered impact glass. (Image credit: Courtesy of Robert DePalma) Researchers also found spherules embedded in amber adhering to bits of branches and tree trunks; the amber coating prevented these tektites from deforming and preserved their original shapes. The glass beads are "geochemically nearly indistinguishable" from glass found at the Chicxulub site, and thereby "directly correlate with the Chicxulub impact," the scientists wrote in the study. In the marine area around the Chicxulub impact, spherules are commonly found "many layers below the mass extinction and many layers above it," Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, told Live Science. Kelly, who was not involved in the study, explained that storms or a drop in sea level can shift spherules into younger geologic deposits, so that they appear to have originated there even if they are older than the rocks around them. But at Tanis, spherules were stuck in amber and in the gills of dead fish, suggesting that spherules and fish were all buried at the same time, the study said. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Mass Extinctions] A deadly surge After the rain of tektites, the water came. Clues in Tanis' sediments and in the positions of the buried fossils hinted that an enormous wave more than 34 feet high (11 m) surged into the river valley from the nearby sea. Sand and mud carried by the wave swiftly buried animals and plants at Tanis, DePalma said. The surge swiftly traveled inland, flowing from west to east the opposite direction of the ancient river's flow so the scientists quickly ruled out typical river flooding as the cause of mass death, DePalma said. Only a tsunami or a seiche, a towering wave that forms in large bodies of water, could create the deposit that the scientists found. It was likely caused by the seismic waves generated by the Chicxulub asteroid, the researchers reported. At Tanis, tree logs (L) and multiple fish carcasses (R) were tossed together. (Image credit: Courtesy of Robert DePalma) Dozens of sites around the globe exhibit a geologic layer marking the end of the Cretaceous. That layer, rich in spherules and minerals that drifted to Earth after the asteroid impact, draws a stark division between global diversity as the Cretaceous was winding down and the dramatic disappearance of numerous plant and animal species that followed, Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., told Live Science. What makes the Tanis site exceptional is that it preserves a moment in time "during the catastrophe itself," as the disaster unfolded 66 million years ago, said Johnson, who was not involved in the study. "That's the incredible thing about this it gives you some texture on what was happening on that day when the asteroid hit," Johnson said. Tanis has only begun to yield its long-buried secrets to the study authors and other research teams, DePalma said. The mass extinction that followed the Chicxulub impact wasn't the first in Earth's history, and it likely won't be the last; nevertheless, the Tanis site offers a rare perspective on what can happen during a global extinction event, which could inform how we cope with similar challenges to come, DePalma said. "If we can understand how the world responds to things like that, we can understand how we might begin to deal with an extinction-level event today," he said. Editor's Note: The article was updated to reflect Robert DePalma's affiliation at the time that the research was conducted. Originally published on Live Science. Six Neanderthals who lived in what is now France were eaten by their fellow Neanderthals some 100,000 years ago, according to gruesome evidence of the cannibalistic event discovered by scientists in a cave in the 1990s. Now, researchers may have figured out why the Neanderthals, including two children, became victims of cannibalism: global warming. While prior studies have interpreted Neanderthal remains to find proof of cannibalistic behavior, this is the first study to offer clues as to what may have led Neanderthals to become cannibals. Scientists found that rapid shifts in local ecosystems as the planet warmed may have extinguished the animal species that Neanderthals ate, forcing them to look elsewhere to fill their bellies. [25 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries] The researchers examined a layer of sediment in a cave known as Baume Moula-Guercy, in southeastern France. There, excavations in 1999 by another team of scientists had uncovered 120 Neanderthal bones from six individuals that showed signs of being cannibalized. Later, in 2014, another group of researchers analyzed the cave deposits to a depth of 26 feet (8 meters), dividing them into 19 layers associated with three climate shifts. For the new study, the authors turned their attention to layer 15, a silty sediment layer about 16 inches (40 centimeters) thick, covering approximately 98 to 131 feet (30 to 40 m) of the cave floor. In that layer, charcoal and animal bones were so well-preserved that scientists could reconstruct an environmental snapshot representing 120,000 to 130,000 years ago. They discovered that the climate in the area was likely even warmer than it is today, and that the transition from a cold, arid climate to a warmer one happened quickly, "maybe within a few generations," study co-author Emmanuel Desclaux, a research associate at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in France, told Cosmos magazine. As the animals that once populated the landscape vanished, some Neanderthals ate what they could find their neighbors. Cannibalism is by no means exclusive to Neanderthals, and has been practiced by humans and their relatives "from the early Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age and beyond," the study authors reported. The behavior adopted by the starving Neanderthals in the Baume Moula-Guercy should therefore not be viewed as "a mark of bestiality or sub-humanity," but as an emergency adaptation to a period of severe environmental stress, according to the study. The findings were published online in the April issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. Originally published on Live Science. On a frigid January night, a Harvard genetics professor with a billowing white beard stood stage left in a theater on Manhattan's Upper East Side, an icon of the environmentalist movement in a fleece vest beside him. Both men were staring down a toothy problem: How could they convince their counterparts on the stage, along with the 300 people who'd filed into Hunter College's Kaye Playhouse for a debate, that the world should bring back velociraptors or, at the very least, an extinct pigeon? The theme from the 1993 blockbuster "Jurassic Park" was playing in the background, chiseling away at their argument before the debate even began. In the film, based on the 1990 Michael Crichton bestseller, dinosaurs are brought back from extinction to fill a theme park. "That film took sides. The experiment blows up. People get hurt," moderator John Donvan told the crowd during introductions. "But not before actor Jeff Goldblum declares, 'Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.' And then, a dinosaur eats Jeff Goldblum." Actually, a dinosaur does not eat Goldblum's brainy and brawny mathematician character, but chaos certainly reigns in the movie and its myriad sequels because of de-extinction. Those images are what George Church, 64, of the billowing white beard, who helped launch the Human Genome Project, and Stewart Brand, 80, of the fleece vest, who is a founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, would need to overcome to win this evening's debate. The official motion for the night, "Don't Bring Extinct Creatures Back to Life," was chosen by Intelligence Squared, a nonprofit that turns academic-level debates into popular live events and podcasts. The Jeff Goldblums of the evening, arguing for the motion - and against Church and Brand - were Lynn Rothschild, 61, an evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist with NASA, and Ross MacPhee, 70, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History across Central Park. Brand started on the offensive. Controversy around de-extinction, he said, is "made up." He wasn't arguing they should resurrect carnivorous dinosaurs. Instead, he said, de-extinction could be achieved through hybrids, animals created from both living, endangered species and extinct ones, using CRISPR - an acronym for a relatively new tool that has been likened to "playing god" because it allows scientists to remove and replace genes. Eventually, CRISPR could be used to bolster agricultural production or to replenish wildlife that's slowly disappearing. That is the goal of the Revive & Restore project, a California nonprofit co-founded by Brand that seeks to "enhance biodiversity through new techniques of genetic rescue for endangered and extinct species." The group is working to reintroduce the extinct passenger pigeon back into the wild by removing genes from modern band-tailed pigeons and replacing them with passenger-pigeon genes. Restore & Revive would like to do something similar with woolly mammoths, editing the extinct creature's genes into those of modern Asian elephants. In that case, though, the goal is to help increase the population of endangered Asian elephants, which has been decimated by a herpes virus. "We're not just curing extinction," Brand told the audience. "The technology that de-extinction is leading the way in is now being used by us and by others to prevent extinction." In 2018, Brand and Church traveled to northeast Siberia, where Russian scientists are attempting to re-create a grassland ecosystem known as the mammoth steppe, named after its predominant and extinct herbivore, the woolly mammoth. As the number of mammoths dwindled, dense foliage took root and erased grassland. To restore it, scientists have used bulldozers to knock down trees and shrubs, and brought in herbivores, including elk and moose, to graze and to keep the foliage at bay. Church said mammoth-and-Asian-elephant hybrids could once again inhabit Siberia. He also urged everyone to "loosen up" about the prospect of hybrids. "There's a lot of hybridization that occurs in mammals. ... I am partially Neanderthal," he said, referring to estimates by scientists that about 20 percent of Neanderthal genes can be found in modern humans. (Oddly enough, no one mentioned during the debate that Jack Horner, a Montana State University paleontologist and science adviser on the first "Jurassic Park" film, is also working on a hybrid called "chickenosaurus." "As far as I'm concerned, we should discover everything. There shouldn't be any limits on it," he told NBC News in 2018. "After we discover something, then you can put some limits on it.") But a hybrid mammoth, roaming Russia once again, raises all sorts of questions, Rothschild and MacPhee said: Could a breeding population ever be established? Would this hybrid be released into a world with no natural predators? How would a mammoth know how to be a mammoth without other mammoths around? "You've got all the problems of not having a mom, and not having people - other organisms to learn from, and not having the right microbiome and so on," Rothschild said. "And so, each of these individuals, I believe, will be suffering for something that we could be solving a different way." During a Q&A, an audience member asked the four onstage if someone with great wealth could be moving forward with the technology, possibly for commercial purposes, while scientists were still debating whether they should. Brand said there was "exactly nothing" happening in the de-extinction world that had commercial purposes. MacPhee, in response, said he was pleased he wasn't "the most naive person on the panel tonight." He asked: "You don't think there's a future in having saber-toothed tigers that you can use for hunting purposes?" Rothschild took the argument even further, wondering whether someone could attempt to de-extinct a Neanderthal for commerce or simply in the name of science. The idea, Rothschild said, was "morally repugnant." "We have enough trouble with humanity recognizing that we have roughly equal intellects across the races. And to purposefully re-create a species that we know is going to be inferior in some way is just asking for enormous trouble," she said in her closing argument. "So back in the day when the Homo sapiens was interbreeding with Neanderthals, you would have discouraged that?" Brand joked. The audience laughed. But in the end, based on the votes tallied before and after the debate, more people came around to MacPhee and Rothschild's side than Church and Brand's. For once, the Jeff Goldblums won. I circled back to Brand a month later in search of a serious answer to Rothschild's ethical concerns about bringing back Neanderthals. "I'd guess that Neanderthals would be accepted as humans today (at least in our open-minded and nurturing communities)," he replied in an email. But he was skeptical anyone would want to revive them because it would be a step back instead of forward for humanity. I asked if he planned on seeing the next "Jurassic Park" film, which is due out in 2021. He was a maybe. He said he prefers science films that are less "dystopic," but added: "Engaging the public with any scientific details is good." --- Nark is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. As the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau prepares to move its offices closer to the Outlet Shoppes along the river, City Council on Monday voted to convert their current office space into a police substation in order to better serve downtown nightlife. This could include an annexed booking area as well. LPD Chief Claudio Trevino said this would definitely service the Police Department, as their current downtown office is out of the way. CVB currently resides at 501 San Agustin Ave. across the street from the Laredo Center for the Arts. Police have identified an increase in traffic downtown due to a recent growth in bars, restaurants and general nightlife in the area, Trevino said. To have a substation here would make police more visible to these patrons. READ ALSO: Laredo officials begin planning for detox center To incorporate booking space here would involve new equipment and security measures, Councilman Roberto Balli noted; and the people held there would not be those posing a substantial threat. But this way police wouldn't have to drive suspects all the way to their headquarters in north Laredo and then back to the jail downtown. Trevino said this is something they can definitely do and will look into. City Council approved for this all to be addressed in next year's budget, once CVB has left the building. Last budget year, council approved CVB's move to El Portal at 1600 Water St. CVB Director Aileen Ramos said this department has essentially outgrown its office space on San Agustin Avenue, where they have been located since 1996. CVB has double the employees now, and has therefore lost much of its display area. RELATED: City of Laredo to use metal detectors at council meetings At El Portal they will have room for retail space, and better capture visitors from Mexico who may be going to the outlet mall, but not travel further into downtown. There will also be a small plaza outside the building for small events. Nine-thousand pedestrians cross the bridge daily, one way, City Bridge Director Yvette Limon noted. CVB is six months away from the move, Ramos said. Balli noted that the new location is very spacious and attractive. The city will be able to provide more services for visitors there, Ramos said. Laredo police are asking for the community's help in the fatal shooting that occurred early Sunday. Investigator Joe E. Baeza, Laredo Police Department spokesman, said Monday that detectives were canvassing the area of the crime scene, speaking to people who may have information about the shooting. As of late Monday, police had not yet released the identity of the 28-year-old male victim, pending the notification of next of kin. READ MORE: LPD reports second homicide of the year Officers were dispatched to the shooting at about 5:20 a.m. Sunday at an apartment in the 4300 block of Santa Maria Avenue in west central Laredo. Laredo Fire Department crews said they found a man behind the apartments. He was alert and oriented, first responders said. He had a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He was administered advanced life support and taken to Laredo Medical Center, where he was later pronounced dead. READ ALSO: Two men indicted in human smuggling crash that killed mother, daughter in west central Laredo Police said the suspect fled the scene before officers' arrived. The slaying marked LPD's second recorded homicide of the year. No arrests have been made. To provide information, call LPD at 795-2800 or Laredo Crime Stoppers at 727-TIPS (8477). Information provided through the Crime Stoppers may be eligible for a cash reward. Opening statements in the trial of the man accused of sexually assaulting a child began Monday in the 111th District Court. Edgar Mario Moreno was indicted on one count of sexual assault of a child and three counts of indecency with a child. If convicted, Moreno faces up to 20 years in prison. In her opening remarks, Webb County Assistant District Attorney Julia Rubio told the jury that the story of Moreno and his relationship with the victim, known by the pseudonym of Maria, began months before she said he had sexually assaulted her. It began when Moreno moved in with Maria and her family in Rosenberg, Texas, she said. "You'll hear throughout the course of this trial plenty of evidence that will show you that the defendant took advantage of his access to Maria in those months and he groomed her," Rubio said. READ ALSO: LPD: Man accused of punching elderly woman after she refused to take him to buy drugs Rubio told jurors that Maria's testimony would show them that she trusted Moreno and thought they were friends. She said Maria had two younger siblings, ages 8 and 2, and she was 15 at the time. Moreno was the closest thing she had to a brother at the time, Rubio said. "She'll tell you that (Moreno) gave her special attention by offering her food and snacks but not the other two kids. That he got her jewelry," Rubio said. "She'll tell you that all of that interaction changed when she got her first boyfriend." A few months before the sexual assault, Moreno stopped acknowledging Maria, Rubio said. It was a drastic 180-degree turn from the relationship they had before, she said. "You'll learn that when that little relationship ended, as they often do in teenage years, the defendant's attention magically reappeared," Rubio said. "That he began talking to her again, hanging out with her again. She'd only been back in his good graces for a short while when the abuse in this case occurred." She told jurors what to expect from testimony that will be presented during the trial, and at the end, it is up to them to determine how much they will believe the witnesses. "We ask that you listen carefully and intently because this is an important case and we are confident that at the end of our trial we will have proven every count beyond a reasonable doubt and you will find the defendant guilty of sexual assault of a child and indecency with a child," Rubio said. Roberto Balli, Moreno's attorney, said in his opening statements that the story that will be presented to the jury is not believable. "You're going to hear in this case about a lousy investigation and about how there's no signs in this case that (the incident) even happened," Balli said. Balli told the jury that Moreno doesn't have any background information that would show he did anything he is being accused of. Moreno doesn't even drink alcohol, Balli said. Balli said that on the night of the alleged incident in April 2016 during a celebration at Moreno's mother's house, he went to his room to sleep hours before the alleged incident. "That night there are many people in that bedroom and not one person heard or saw anything," he said. "Nobody heard or saw anything even though they were an arm's length away or closer." He told the jury that Maria was not happy because Moreno returned with her and her family to Rosenberg and the first time she outcried was the next morning at school. Balli said the investigation was not done well because police took days and months to recover evidence. "They picked up a bra in July and we don't even know the circumstances of how they picked it up. They didn't pick up Maria's underwear. they didn't pick up my client's underwear. They didn't pick up bedsheets," Balli said. He told the jury that of the 30-plus people in the house on the night of the alleged incident, police only interviewed Moreno, Maria and another family member. He said that nothing was done in this case in regards to DNA or any other kind of testing. "We are going to ask you to listen to all of the evidence in the case," he said. "We are going to ask you to be skeptical. ... We know that if you do your job and listen to the witnesses against Maria that you're going to come to the conclusion that either Maria is making this up or that there is just not enough there to believe her. But either way, you're going to come to the same conclusion: that Mario is not guilty." Prosecutors' first witness was Laredo police investigator Charlie Rosales. He testified that other than taking photographs, the only item gathered three months after the incident was Maria's bra. He also stated that he referred Maria to the Children's Advocacy Center for counseling. Rosales stated that he video-recorded an interview he conducted with Moreno and his brother, but the videos were damaged when there was a malfunction with the system a month after the interviews took place. The criminal complaint states the alleged sexual assault happened April 23, 2016 in the 4600 block of Cassata Lane. RELATED: Convicted S. TX child rapist gets 8 life sentences Moreno told the girl that they had a "weird relationship and (he) loved her very much," the complaint states. When she began crying, Moreno allegedly told her "that it was a way to relieve stress," according to court documents. Police spoke to Moreno. He told investigators he was "shocked" to hear what he was accused of, records state. "Mr. Moreno continued saying that he promised to refrain from sex, so that God would protect his family," the complaint states. Testimony will resume today in the 111th District Court. The Fine Arts Society of Liberty, Texas (FASOLT) announced on Friday they have selected the Liberty Opry in downtown Liberty as the venue for their annual expo scheduled this year on June 15. They are still fine-tuning the times for the various presentations, and a schedule will be announced at a later date. The marriage of the two arts organizations seems like a natural fit for both. The decision came out of a recent meeting between Jay and Nina Cantu, owners of the Liberty Opry, and Linda Street-Ely, board director and treasurer for FASOLT as they were discussing the arts in the county. They are very supportive of the arts in the county and particularly here in Liberty, Street-Ely said. We were talking in general about the work of the expo and Jay offered for us to host it at the Opry, she said. The treasurer told the Cantus they really didnt have a budget to rent the Opry, but Cantu insisted that be their donation. Street-Ely went to work and secured the First Liberty National Bank Corner, just two doors down from the Opry, as another piece of the puzzle for presentations by artists and artisans of their visual art. Thats owned by the First Liberty National Bank who graciously donated that space for us to use for the day, she said. Street-Ely said they hoped that Generations Cafe would also be a part of the festivities and FASOLT would have all but secured the block for a day of festivities that out-rivals their previous events. For their third year, the Fine Arts Expo is seeking talented individuals around the county to showcase their music (voice, piano, instrumentalists), visual arts (painting, sculpture), dance, theater arts, spoken word poetry, or literary arts (authors) skills. Wed love for teachers and their students to be involved and those in the community as well, she said. The organization originally promoted fine arts throughout the city of Liberty but last year expanded to include the Dayton area as well. Each year they award scholarships to promising talent headed for post-secondary education. With increasing donations, we were able to add Dayton to our coverage area last year, the treasurer said. The 501(c)3 organization is the only one in the county with the Candid (formerly Guidestar) Platinum Seal of Transparency. The designation is the highest level earned by non-profits who seek to demonstrate their commitment to openness and at the same time, tell their own story to gatekeepers of organizations nationally. It allows us the opportunity to receive more grants and donations because of our openness and providing metrics from our organization for all to see, she said. There are few other organizations that even offer scholarships for arts students outside of FASOLT and the rodeo organizations for their paintings. We want to continue to grow and offer more for our community, she said. Anyone wishing to participate is invited to email Street-Ely at info@fasolt.org. For more information about the Fine Arts Society of Liberty, Texas, please visit them on Facebook, Twitter, and their website at fasolt.org. dtaylor@hcnonline.com Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro offered a far-reaching plan to remake the nation's immigration policy Tuesday with a new call to end criminal penalties for migrants entering the country without permission and a plan to remove detention as a tool for most immigration enforcement. Castro's proposal, the first detailed immigration policy blueprint from any of the Democratic candidates for president, is a clear sign that the party's leaders will be pressured to move beyond simply condemning President Donald Trump's policies over the coming months to offer their own detailed solutions to a surging influx of migrant families seeking asylum at the southern border. Like other candidates, Castro, who is the only Latino in the race, calls for a wholesale rejection of Trump's approach. But his plan is the first to offer specifics that would amount to a more permissive environment for undocumented immigrants than existed under the Obama administration. "My hope is that this presents Americans with a different vision for how we can get this right," Castro said in an interview with The Washington Post. "There is a better way." Democrats have long characterized Trump's focus on the threat of immigration as both immoral and fanciful, dismissing the president when he declared an "invasion of our country" by migrants during the midterm elections and criticizing him for a "manufactured crisis" when he demanded funding for a new border wall. But the recent spike in asylum-seeking families from Central America crossing the border has changed the calculation. At the same time, Democrats are hoping to refocus the national debate to set conditions for a major immigration reform bill after the 2020 elections, which could provide a path to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants and decrease the number of Central Americans fleeing north. Some Democratic strategists are wary of turning off white voters in swing states of the upper Midwest who Trump has been able to sway with anti-immigration rhetoric. Castro says his plan is premised on the idea that the southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. The former head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and mayor of San Antonio would end border wall construction, allow deported veterans who honorably served to return to the United States, increase refugee quotas and make it easier for family members to be reunited with relatives who are U.S. residents. He would ask Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including young people who received protections under the Obama administration and those covered by the temporary protected-status program. He said he would also create a "21st Century Marshall Plan" for Central America to attack the woeful conditions there, the root cause of the recent increase in asylum seekers. For those who reach the country's interior, he would reconstitute the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, by reassigning its interior enforcement functions to other agencies, including the Department of Justice. He would also reprioritize Customs and Border Protection efforts to focus on drug and human trafficking instead of interior law enforcement. By repealing the criminal code that allows the Trump administration to prosecute people who enter the country, Castro would remove the mechanism that previously allowed the administration to separate asylum-seeking parents and children after detention. Trump has since stopped those prosecutions, though single adults continue to face criminal penalties. Castro said he would impose a civil legal process for sorting out refugee applications and deportations, with an emphasis on jailing and removing those with criminal records. "Unlike this administration, we would prioritize deportation," Castro said. "Of course we would continue to have the power to deport." Trump announced last week that he would stop about $500 million in aid payments to Central American countries and has threatened to close the U.S.-Mexico border, perhaps as early as this week. The number of people crossing the border has picked up significantly in recent months. As a result, border facilities have been overwhelmed in recent weeks, with images of children and families being kept in fencing under bridges underscoring the breadth of the growing problem. House Democratic leaders have been discussing two possible responses to Trump's latest actions, according to a senior House aide, who requested anonymity to speak about internal discussions. One plan would involve new legislation to rescind and re-appropriate money for the Central American countries, with new restrictions that could prevent Trump from diverting the money. That bill, if it passed the Senate, would likely face a veto threat from the White House. Another possibility discussed by House leaders is to hold a floor vote later this month on a resolution on whether to close the southern border, in an effort to force Republican border state members to take a position. No decision has been made on whether to go forward with the vote or, if so, when to hold it. "The President's approach is entirely counterproductive," wrote a group of Democratic leaders, including New York Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Eliot L. Engel and California Rep. Zoe Lofgren last week. "We will work with our colleagues in Congress to do everything in our power to push back." Since Trump took office with an immigration platform that cast migration as a criminal and national security threat, Democrats have been hesitant to put forward their own reform agenda. The party's Senate and congressional candidates mostly steered clear of the issue in the 2018 midterm elections even as Trump sought to fan fears of a southern invasion. A Gallup poll last fall found that 37 percent of Republican voters thought immigration was the country's most important problem, compared with 10 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of independents. Since then, the 2020 presidential candidates have focused their immigration answers on denouncing Trump's approach - particularly his plan for a new border wall, his child separation policy and his ban on travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries. Several candidates have also called for more foreign aid for Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala to prevent migrants from heading north. A shift to more policy specifics has been welcomed by liberal immigration advocates, who hope to separate the current crises of Central American families seeking asylum from the long-standing issue of what to do with the millions of undocumented immigrants currently living in the country. "Democrats and advocates have rightly criticized the failed deterrence-only strategy of the Trump administration," said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America's Voice, which supports a path to legalization for those without papers living in the United States. "We would be wise to spell out a practical and workable set of solutions that will contrast what Trump has failed to do with what Democrats promise to do." Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., echoed that call in an interview Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation," saying he hoped Congress would take action. "Well, you can stop it by overriding what he is doing and making sure that we fund these programs," Sanders said. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who is considering a presidential campaign launch in the coming weeks, has also signaled that he would make his work in 2014 to improve living conditions in Central America a central part of his message. He helped lead an effort that created new funding that Trump has promised to freeze. "What we should have done was follow through on this commitment, which was bipartisan," Biden said at a February event in Philadelphia. "This president came along and essentially let it all blow up." Former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-Texas, 46, who formally kicked off his candidacy Saturday, also has promised to make immigration central to his campaign, though he has been scant on policy details so far. After saying in February that he wanted "take the wall down" on the southern border, he later said he supports barriers in some places. "If we truly believe that we are a country of immigrants and asylum seekers and refugees, and they are the very premise of our strength, of our success, and yes, our security, then let us free every single dreamer from any fear of deportation," O'Rourke said Saturday, referring to people brought to the United States illegally as children or who overstayed their visas as children. "Let's bring millions more out of the shadows and onto a path to contribute to their maximum potential to the success of this country." Castro, 44, the second youthful Texan in the race, echoed the same call of returning the country to its more uplifting ideals. "We see this administration's approach to immigration is a total failure," Castro said. "Instead of marching forward with cruelty, I believe we should choose compassion." EDWARDSVILLE A full-service Carrollton Bank branch celebrated their grand opening Monday with a ribbon cutting in the Madison Mutual building at the corner of Buchanan and Park streets. Were excited to be opening here, said Tom Hough, CEO of Carrollton Bank. When we open a new bank, its based on finding really good bankers, with deep roots in their community. And weve found several outstanding Edwardsville bankers to build our bank around. Bill Barlow will serve as president of the Edwardsville Carrollton Bank. Barlow, along with Dan Abegg, Shannon Bond, Nikki Woelfel, and Matt Warren, have more than 75 years of Edwardsville banking experience. Our team has worked with hundreds of businesses and families in the Edwardsville community for decades. Carrollton Bank feels very familiar, Barlow said. We can take care of our customers the way we used to. Barlow, a longtime fixture on the Edwardsville banking scene, is happy to be part of the Carrollton Bank family. Ive known of Carrollton Bank for quite a few years being a competitor with them at other community banks in the area, Barlow said. Ive always had great respect for the bank. I had taken a two-year leave of absence from banking after working through a non-compete (clause) after First Clover Leaf Bank was sold to First Mid (Bank & Trust). Before that, I was at theBank of Edwardsville for 10 years. When my non-compete was up, I wanted to get back into banking and I always knew that Tom Hough at Carrollton Bank would be the first one I would call. I truly appreciate the business model that he had. Barlow feels that Carrolltons commitment to local communities will help it gain a foothold quickly in Edwardsville. Its a true community bank and its hard to find these days, Barlow said. We started talking late last summer and I knew that Tom had always wanted to come to the Edwardsville market. He was already on both sides of it in OFallon and Alton in the Metro East, but he wanted to be here. We had talked about it over the years, but it was never the right time for me. One of the other local banks sold out its local ownership a couple years ago and the last locally-owned bank here in town recently announced its sale, so we thought it was a good time to come to town. With the community bank business model that we have, we felt it would be well-received here in Edwardsville. Carrollton Bank, 222 E. Park St., Suite 400, is subleasing the fourth floor of the Madison Mutual Building from the Flint Law Firm, which had previously used the space. Flint is still located on the fifth floor of the building. We have 6,400 square feet here and all we had to do was a little bit of tenant finishing, Barlow said. Most of the furniture was already here and the offices were all done. It was pretty much ready for us to move in. Hours for the Edwardsville branch will be 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Barlow describes the new facility as a non-traditional bank. It is a full-service bank, so we can do commercial lending, consumer lending, open up accounts, make deposits and do anything that we can do at our other locations, Barlow said. We dont have a drive-up facility and we dont have tellers windows, but we have two desks with customer service reps where people can cash checks and make deposits and anything else that a teller would normally do. We will have a full-service ATM in the lobby on the first floor of this building. That will be here sometime in May. Edwardsville will be Carrolltons 11th bank, including offices in Alton, OFallon, Jerseyville and Carrollton. Hough is the fifth generation in an unbroken string of family members to lead the bank since it was founded in Carrollton, Illinois, in 1877. Carrollton Bank is a privately held, employee-owned bank with $1.7 billion in assets and also has offices in St. Charles, Clayton, Des Peres, Creve Coeur, St. Louis Hills and Springfield, Ill. El Metro said Monday it is pleased to partner with Google Maps to offer enhanced trip planning capabilities across the City of Laredo. Google Transit is a feature of Google Maps that allows people to plan a trip using public transportation. Our El Metros integration of Google Transit (at no cost to the city) into the day-to-day operations of our public bus system will enhance the predictability of when buses will arrive at the over 1,200 bus stops throughout the city. This is a big step in making mass transit a viable option for those that want to ride the bus and not just those that are forced to. Get on board and let El Metro do the driving while you focus on your education or business and save money along the way, said Laredo City Councilman George Altgelt. Google Transit is evidence of the companys continued effort to place travel information directly in the hands of customers, making each trip even more convenient, El Metro said. Google Transit offers a number of features that benefit El Metro Transit customers, including: Suggested trips with next available departure and arrival times Ability to select desired departure or arrival time and date Estimated trip duration Reverse trips Transfer times and locations Visual depiction of the route on geographical map Integration with other tools such as Google Maps for driving directions and Google Local for searches of nearby businesses and local landmarks Joining Google Transit gives our passengers another option for planning their trip, easily comparing travel times with driving and seamlessly integrating with local transit on each end, said Claudia San Miguel general manager for El Metro. El Metros Mission is to promote and provide high quality, cost-effective public transportation services that address the needs and demands of the citizens of the City of Laredo. For more information, check El Metro App or contact El Metros Customer Service Department at 956-795-2280. WASHINGTON - An environmental adviser to the Trump administration projects that its attempt to reverse Obama-era fuel-efficiency standards could have a steep long-term toll on the U.S. economy and eventually cost the country hundreds of thousands of jobs. The research by an outside adviser picked by former Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt - and funded by grants from the auto industry - is sure to fuel critics of the Trump administration's attempts to stall rules meant to reduce the amount of climate-warming and illness-causing pollution produced by the nation's automobiles. While cutting the car regulations would give the U.S. economy a short-term jolt, it would forestall job-creating automotive innovation in the long run while putting less money in the wallets of motorists who would have to spend more on gasoline, according to the adviser John Graham, who is dean of Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and his four colleagues. The Trump administration's proposal to freeze standards on tailpipe emissions for new cars and light trucks at 2020 levels, or otherwise watering down their stringency, would create 236,000 fewer jobs by 2035 than if the Obama-era standards stayed intact, according to the paper published late last month in the peer-reviewed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. "The final result of our paper is that the possible Trump administration changes to the standard will reduce the short-term loss but it will also significantly reduce the long-term benefit," said co-author Sanya Carley, associate professor at Indiana University. Still, Graham, a former head of regulatory affairs in President George W. Bush's Office of Management and Budget, stopped short of offering an overall opinion on the Trump administration's proposal. "We have not analyzed the full range of impacts that are relevant to offering an informed opinion," he said. The Obama-era rules, which compel automakers to build cars that get increasingly more miles per gallon of gasoline, constituted a cornerstone of that administration's efforts to reduce the nation's overall greenhouse-gas emissions. But the Trump administration, in trying to roll back those rules, argues that forcing carmakers to manufacture more expensive fuel-efficient vehicles jeopardizes the safety of drivers. They contend that some consumers will forgo buying the pricier vehicles and keep driving older cars that perform less well in accidents. The result, according to a statement from President Donald Trump's EPA, would be the prevention of "thousands of on-road fatalities and injuries as compared to the standards set forth in the 2012 final rule." But top Trump administration officials at the EPA, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and White House are still wrangling over how exactly to undo the Obama-era rules. After initially suggesting freezing the standards at 2020 levels, administration officials are now exploring the idea of gradually ratcheting up fuel efficiency standards between 0.5 percent and 1 percent a year to address the automakers' call for annual increases. For months, the Trump administration has been at loggerheads with California and other blue states over their efforts to freeze standards on the tailpipe emissions. After months of negotiation, the administration broke off talks with California in February. The end of those talks paves the way for California to set its own standards, which under a half-century-old law it has the authority to do. But having two sets of tailpipe rules nationwide for new cars is a worst-case scenario for the automotive industry, which fears a higher cost of complying with that patchwork of regulations. Early in Trump's administration, automakers called for revisiting the rule, but have now expressed concern about how a rollback could fracture the U.S. auto market. Starting in 2015, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a group of leading automakers, paid the Indiana University researchers nearly $800,000 to prepare a study of fuel-economy standards put forward under Obama. Graham's team published a study in March 2017. That spring, they briefed government analysts in Washington and Ann Arbor, Michigan, on its findings, Graham said. But after the Trump administration came up with its own proposal to weaken fuel-efficiency standards, the team followed up with its most recent analysis of the potential economic effects of that proposal. The team's research does not quantify any health benefits stemming from reducing auto pollution. Auto Alliance spokesperson Gloria Bergquist said "the release of the study last week was a surprise." The researchers also emphasized that the Auto Alliance did not have any influence on the outcome of the studies. "We were so careful to make sure that this funder didn't have any input on what our decisions were," Carley said. The involvement of Graham in the study is significant because the former Bush administration official was tapped in 2017 by Pruitt to join a key research advisory panel. While in office, Pruitt named a cadre of industry-connected scientists to the Scientific Advisory Board and other panels, which help guide the EPA's research objectives and make recommendations that form the basis for new regulations. Critics of the Trump administration note that freezing the pollution standards would be a boon for oil and gas producers allied with the president. Indeed, Graham's study found that while the U.S. economy as a whole stands to benefit from the fuel-efficiency standards, a handful of southern oil-producing states - including Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas - would likely lose economically because of it. "The effects are not even across regions," Carley said. "Some regions take a bigger hit." ISTANBUL - President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party said Tuesday that it had submitted challenges to election results that showed its candidates had been defeated in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey's largest cities, in local elections two days earlier that dealt a rare setback to Erdogan at the ballot box. The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has repeatedly prevailed in elections since 2002 and was the leading vote-getter on Sunday. But its losses in major cities - including Istanbul, Turkey's financial capital - were a significant symbolic defeat for Erdogan and threatened to weaken his powerful party machine, analysts said. The election came in the midst of an economic downturn that had focused voter anger on Erdogan's handling of the crisis, analysts said. Urban voters may have also bristled at his caustic campaign rhetoric, they added, and his frequent attempts to link his political opponents to terrorism. The AKP challenged vote tallies in all of Istanbul's 39 districts, where Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayoral candidate from the main opposition Republican People's Party, or CHP, was leading by about 25,000 votes. On Tuesday, AKP Deputy Chairman Ali Ihsan Yavuz asserted that the gap between Imamoglu and his opponent, Binali Yildirim, had narrowed to just over 20,000 votes. The gap would continue to close, he said, calling the elections "one of the biggest stains in our history." But the head of the Istanbul chapter of the CHP said it also had challenged results in 22 districts and expected its share of the vote to rise, according to the Reuters news agency. As the AKP plastered posters across Istanbul thanking the city in what was widely interpreted as a victory lap, Imamoglu called the spectacle "a shame" and suggested he would continue to fight. "My determination is just as high as my patience," he told reporters, shortly before he traveled to Ankara, the capital, where he visited the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state. Imamoglusigned a guest book there as "Mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality." The AKP said it was also challenging results in Ankara that showed the CHP candidate there had prevailed. As tensions mounted, Erdogan - who kept a punishing schedule in the run-up to the election, giving multiple speeches every day - did not comment on the standoff. Ibrahim Kalin, a top adviser to Erdogan, on Tuesday dismissed speculation that the election setbacks signaled "the beginning of the end" of the president's political dominance. The president's party and its coalition partner had won a majority of the votes, Kalin said on Twitter, and Erdogan would not face another election until 2023. "They will never learn," he wrote of the president's critics. Germany's armed forces will have rabbis in their ranks for the first time in about 100 years, as the Bundeswehr looks to expand pastoral services for Jews serving in the military amid signs of a resurgence of anti-Semitism. Germany's Jewish Council will propose candidates for consideration and those selected could serve in military missions outside Germany, the Defense Ministry said Tuesday. A low single-digit number of rabbis will be recruited for an initial trial phase. As world powers struggled for leadership and dominance during the last century, the United States saw itself fending off challenges from rivals such as the former Soviet Union and Japan. This century, however, is witnessing an entirely different scenario, as the country engages in a full-spectrum competition with China. Craig VanGrasstek, adjunct lecturer at Harvard Universitys John F. Kennedy School of Government, will discuss these hegemonic struggles in the context of inter-American trade for the IBC and Commerce Bank 2018-2019 Keynote Speaker Series at 6 p.m. on Wednesday at Texas A&M International Universitys Student Center Ballroom. A reception will begin at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Translation services will be available. In his presentation, titled, Hegemony and the Hemisphere: An Historical Perspective on Inter-American Trade Relations, VanGrasstek will review how these successive battles of hegemony have shaped inter-American trade relations, with special emphasis on events leading from the past to the present and where things may be headed. VanGrasstek has been a trade consultant since 1982. He has worked in over four dozen countries on five continents, with his clients including government agencies, corporations, and such international organizations as the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization of American States, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. He received his doctorate in politics from Princeton University, holds a master of science in foreign service from Georgetown University and earned a bachelors degree in international relations from the University of Minnesota. VanGrasstek is the author of The History and Future of the World Trade Organization and Trade and American Leadership: The Paradoxes of Power and Wealth from Alexander Hamilton to Donald Trump. He is also the author of numerous other books, chapters, journal articles and monographs. For more information, contact Amy Palacios, associate director, Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade, at 956.326.2820, or amy@tamiu.edu or visit offices in Western Hemispheric Trade Center, room 221. Additional information is available at facebook.com/tamiucswht Laredo College says it is proud to announce that the Accelerate Texas Grant IV, or ATX IV, Integrated and Training Grant will be offered to qualified students beginning this month. Those interested in enrolling in certificate level I and continuing education programs, such as welder assistant, logistics technician, nursing assistant, phlebotomy certification, network and data security, electrocardiograph technician and dental assistant, will have the opportunity to receive scholarships to complete their desired career. The Continuing Education Department has housed ATX grants aimed at expanding these career pathways. ATX is a joint effort by higher education agencies and the Texas Workforce Commission to promote and instill the necessary abilities to thrive within an ever-expanding demand for trained professionals. In 2018, LC offered ATX III, which assisted in the training of 120 individuals to successfully approach a professional career or post-secondary education as pharmacy technician, dental assistant, accounting, small business management, medical administrative support, as well as an Excel certification course. LC says it has worked closely with professional partners within the community in order to provide hands-on training and lectures for individuals seeking post-secondary education or workforce training. The job market is expanding and the demand for trained professionals will only increase with time. Through this scholarship, students will receive the tools to succeed in their careers, leading to better living conditions, advancement in their current positions or even transitioning into higher education. In order to qualify for this scholarship, prospective students are required to be eligible to work within the United States and possess the proper identification information, possess a GED or high school diploma, take the TABE test to become eligible and must assist certification support courses. For more information, contact the Continuing Education Department at 956-721-5374 or visit us at the Eloy Garcia Building in room 102. ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) A New Mexico archbishop is renewing his call for Catholics to stop worshipping the skeleton folk saint known as La Santa Muerte, or "Our Lady of Holy Death," saying he fears some mistakenly believe the Grim Reaper-like figure is a Roman Catholic Church-sanctioned saint. Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester recently told The Associated Press he believes some Catholics may be fooled into venerating Santa Muerte even though the focus on death runs counter to the church's teachings. 'POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA:' Flight attendant with DACA released after a month in detention, at HoustonChronicle.com "It's really wrong," Wester said. "I think in part, it's (because) people are looking and searching. It's a symptom of a search looking for answers." But the devotion to death is not in line with the church's teachings, Wester said, and Santa Muerte is misleading to people. "Our devotion is to the God of life," Wester said. Popular in Mexico and sometimes linked to drug cartels, La Santa Muerte in recent years has found a diverse following north of the border: immigrant small-business owners, artists, gay activists and the poor, among others many of them non-Latinos and not all involved with organized religion. Shrines and statues of the skeleton figure typically depicted wearing a black nun's robe and holding a scythe can be found in New Mexico, California, Louisiana, Texas and elsewhere. People pray to Santa Muerte for all manner of otherworldly help, from fending off wrongdoing and exacting revenge to landing better jobs and stopping lovers from cheating. Others seek her protection for their drug shipments and to ward off law enforcement. Wester is one of only a handful of U.S. Roman Catholic bishops who have denounced Santa Muerte. In 2017, he joined El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz and San Angelo Bishop Michael Sis in Texas in urging Catholics to avoid honoring to the folk saint. Sis said La Santa Muerte is "spiritually dangerous" and has no link to Catholicism. "It should be completely avoided. It is a perversion of devotion to the saints," Sis said. But so far no other high-ranking Catholic church officials have publicly criticized the worshipping of Santa Muerte, according to Andrew Chesnut, author of "Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint" and Bishop Walter F. Sullivan chair in Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. "In Latin America, church officials rebuke Santa Muerte almost weekly," Chesnut said. Chesnut said he believes U.S. Catholic officials have been reluctant to aggressively attack Santa Muerte because of their focus on defending migrants' rights and concerns about portraying Mexican immigrants as "dangerous and all connected to drug trafficking." ___ Contreras is a member of The Associated Press' race and ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/russcontreras Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said Monday that President Donald Trump opposes the early release next month of John Walker Lindh, the American man who pleaded guilty in 2002 to fighting for the Taliban and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The news comes amid an outcry from members of the family of CIA officer Johnny "Mike" Spann, who have argued that Lindh played a role in Spann's death in Afghanistan in November 2001. Spann's relatives are Alabama residents. In a tweet, Shelby said that he spoke with Trump on Monday night and that the president "stated that he supports my call for Lindh to serve his full sentence." "Lindh's activities are deserving of a strong and strict punishment. Thank you, Mr. President," Shelby said in the tweet. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, Lindh is an inmate at the Terre Haute Federal Correctional Institution in Indiana, with a release date of May 23, 2019. Details on the reason for his early release were not immediately available. Credits for good behavior can reduce an inmate's sentence by up to 15 percent, which would amount to three years in Lindh's case. The White House did not respond to requests for comment Monday night. Lindh, who grew up in Maryland and California, was 20 years old when he joined a Taliban unit in Afghanistan in 2001. He was later captured, returned to the United States, and eventually struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors that spared him a life sentence in the case. Spann was the first American killed in the Afghanistan War. He was fatally shot during a prison uprising in Mazar-e Sharif that took place the same day he was questioning Lindh. At the time of Lindh's sentencing, some of Spann's family members voiced displeasure with the agreement, which they said was unfairly lenient. They have spoken out in recent weeks in opposition to Lindh's early release, and Shelby sent a letter to Trump last week, saying members of Spann's family in Alabama had been in touch with him to voice their concerns. "Mr. Lindh admitted to supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and pled guilty to those accusations in July 2002," Shelby wrote to Trump in the letter. "I believe that a 20-year sentence is a small price to pay for his participation in terrorist activities against his own country." He added that according to the National Counterterrorism Center, Lindh had "continued to advocate for global jihad and to write and translate violent extremist texts" as recently as 2016. Foreign Policy magazine appears to have first reported on the National Counterterrorism Center document in 2017. The report also states that Lindh obtained Irish citizenship in 2013. Shelby's office confirmed Monday night that the senator and Trump had a phone conversation in which the president "informed Senator Shelby that he has his support in regard to calling for Lindh to serve his full sentence - 20 years." It was unclear whether Trump plans to take any action. - - - The Washington Post's Tom Jackman contributed to this report. WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump on Tuesday assailed House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler for his demand to see the full special counsel report on the Russia investigation, noting that the New York Democrat had opposed the release of the 1998 Starr report on the investigation of then-President Bill Clinton. "In 1998, Rep. Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton. No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM!" Trump tweeted. The morning tweet by Trump followed a conversation about this issue on "Fox & Friends." On Monday, the Washington Examiner published a piece highlighting Nadler's decades-old comments after the conclusion of the Clinton investigation and noted that they seemed to conflict with what he says today about Trump. Trump continues to claim that special counsel Robert Mueller found "no collusion" between Trump associates and Russia, even though Attorney General Robert Barr's summary of Mueller's findings simply states that the special counsel did not "find" or "establish" a criminal conspiracy. According to Barr, Mueller did not make a determination on whether Trump had obstructed justice. Nadler's committee plans to vote Wednesday to subpoena the Mueller report in its entirety. After Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Clinton, delivered his report in September 1998, Nadler, D-N.Y., immediately rejected calls from Republicans to make the entire thing public. "It's grand jury material. It represents statements which may or may not be true by various witnesses. Salacious material. All kinds of material that it would be unfair to release," Nadler said on Charlie Rose's show. The Starr report included graphic details of Clinton and Lewinsky's sexual relationship. Ultimately, however, the report was released in full. "In 1998, the debate was not about Congress receiving evidence. Congress had already received the full, 445-page report and 17 boxes of additional documents, including grand jury material. In 1998, the debate was about what type of material from the underlying evidence in the Starr report should be made public," said Daniel Schwarz, Judiciary Committee spokesman. "Our expectation is that Attorney General Barr will be as forthcoming now as Mr. Starr was in 1998," Schwarz added. Nadler's resistance to the Starr report being released in full also involved privacy concerns. Barr has voiced a similar justification for why he might redact certain aspects of the Mueller report. Nonetheless, Nadler had remained very critical of Clinton's behavior. He told Rose that even if it didn't rise to the level of a criminal or impeachable offense, the president had "clearly engaged in reprehensible, unfortunate and immoral conduct." "I'm not taking any position at this point, but I could end up taking the position that he shouldn't be impeached but still think he did something really terrible that I don't want to defend in an election campaign or any other forum," Nadler said. Few Republicans have similarly criticized Trump's conduct. Michael F. Barry, the assistant dean at St. Marys University School of Law in San Antonio, has been named president and dean of South Texas College of Law in Houston. The school is a very successful and strong institution, and Im looking forward to working with the staff, faculty, students and alumni, said Barry, who will officially become the 11th president of the private downtown Houston law school on Aug. 11, four years ahead of its centennial. His focus, he said, will be to continue the law schools mission of ensuring that its diverse student body receives an excellent education that prepares them to adapt to a changing legal market and landscape. Another goal will be to see to it that students pass their bar exams and obtain meaningful employment, Barry said. My responsibility is to ensure that the entire organization continues to serve our students, our alumni and our community, and ultimately, the buck stops with the president and the dean to make sure that were doing that, Barry said. Donald J. Guter, who has served as dean and president for the past decade, said in a statement that he is confident in Barry, describing him as a proven and successful leader, businessman, and scholastic innovator. His impressive track record of integrity, leadership, and ingenuity will serve STCL Houston and its students well as they approach the law schools 100th year of excellence in legal education, Guter said. Barry, who earned a law degree from Yale School of Law, worked at St. Marys for years, serving as dean and practitioner in residence. There, Barry designed and spearheaded several initiatives, including Law Success, a three-year program that aims to help students excel in law school, on the bar exam and in practice. He created a database that has tracked student performances and identified strengths and weaknesses to provide tailored programs. Barry previously worked for legal and corporate companies such as financial services company USAA, for which he served as senior vice president and deputy general counsel, and Capital One Services, where he served as director, assistant general counsel, and associate general counsel while also teaching as an adjunct professor of law at University of Richmond in Virginia. We look forward to implementing his forward-thinking ideas and strategic plans as we build on the strong foundation established by President and Dean Guter, J. Ken Johnson, chairman of the South Texas College of Law Houston board of directors, said in a statement. brittany.britto@chron.com Two men are facing federal charges after authorities found 14 AK-47 and M-4 rifles in their vehicle during a traffic stop Friday in South Texas, officials said. Epigmenio Palomo was charged with felon in possession of a firearm and Jodie Rocha was charged with making false statements after Jim Wells County sheriff's deputies pulled them over for a defective license plate light, according to federal documents. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Rocha was driving, Palomo was in the front passenger seat, and a woman and her young child were sitting in the back of the car, according to court documents. Rocha initially refused to allow deputies to search his car, but then he admitted to having marijuana in the car and told deputies where to find it, authorities said. While deputies searched the vehicle, they noticed a tan-colored firearm sticking out of the trunk. Palomo, a convicted felon, told deputies the guns were his, according to the court document. Rocha told investigators that they were coming back from a trip to Arlington and that he had no knowledge of the guns being in his car, officials said. But cell phone evidence allegedly showed that the group traveled to Houston and not Arlington, as they had told investigators, which resulted in Rocha's charge of making false statements. The woman and her child were released and not charged in connection to the weapons seizure. Both suspects have yet to appear in court, federal court records showed. Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | fsabawi@mysa.com|@FaresInSA The upcoming presidential election is arguably the most important in our countrys history, demonstrated by the number of Democratic candidates who have thrown their name in the hat for a chance to challenge Donald Trump in 2020. For many, the options are so ample that it is hard to choose a candidate to root for. Some could be attracted to Bernie Sanders platform but turned off by his age. Some could favor Beto ORourkes youth and energy, but fear his lack of experience. The perfect combination of candidates for the 2020 Democratic ticket seems to be ORourke and Sen. Kamala Harris regardless who is in the presidential position and who would be vice president. Heres why: After nearly unseating Republican Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate race in Texas, ORourke has become the superstar of the Democratic Party. His youth, transparency and Obama-esque way of speaking have made him popular among Democrats across America. In a recent article in Vanity Fair, however, ORourke reiterates that he is a white male when many members of the Democratic Party are looking to bring diversity to the executive office. Then we have Harris, the perfect yin to ORourkes yang. While also among the younger Democrats vying for the presidential nomination, Harris is a woman of color whose resume speaks volumes. A law degree from University of Californias Hastings College of Law, former district attorney of San Francisco, former attorney general of California and a U.S. senator from California since 2017 make her, on paper at least, an undoubtedly qualified and ideal presidential candidate. ORourkes and Harris signature policies and experience are different yet complementary. A prosecutor for years, Harris spent that time trying to reform the criminal justice system, and her signature policy revolves around taking money from the top 1 percent and giving it to working class, struggling families. ORourke, on the other hand, grew up next to the border in El Paso and his ideas center on immigration reform, while he also expresses Americas need for universal health care. Ultimately, what truly makes Harris and ORourke a compatible duo is their shared intention to bring the country together. While touring Texas during his Senate campaign, Beto stated time and again that he would work with and listen to anyone, at any time, in any place, regardless of party affiliation, to move the country forward. Likewise, in her book, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, Harris speaks of working with the late Republican Sen. John McCain and states, for all of our differences we are still one American family, and we should act like it. It seems a Harris-ORourke team would consider the needs of the American people as a whole regardless of political party when making decisions and would work to end the extreme polarization that has characterized America since 2016. At the end of the day, each voter must decide who to cast a ballot for to lead America, but in my opinion, you cant have more of a dream team other than a woman of color with an impressive resume and a former punk rocker with big dreams to handle our countrys most pressing needs. Courtney Mason, a recent graduate of Baylor Universitys school of journalism, worked as a field organizer on Beto ORourkes Senate race in 2018. New York private equity firm Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners bought Permian Basin-focused pipeline operator Oryx Midstream in a $3.6 billion deal. The two companies announced the deal on Tuesday with Stonepeak buying all of Oryx's assets. With more than 1,200 miles of pipeline and 2.1 million barrels of storage, Oryx is touted as the largest privately-held crude oil pipeline and storage terminal operator in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico. "As we begin our next chapter and new partnership with Stonepeak, we look forward to the operational and capital support they will provide our team as we continue to aggressively grow our footprint in the Permian Basin," Oryx Midstream CEO Brett Wiggs said in a statement. Midstream Moves: Magellan scraps plans for Permian Gulf Coast Pipeline Under the deal with Stonepeak, Oryx will be able to keep its name and headquarters in Midland. Oryx was in the middle of an expansion project at the time of the sale. Once complete, the company will be able to move 900,000 barrels of crude oil per day for its 20 customers. In a statement, Stonepeak partner and energy business head Jack Howell described Oryx as the most attractive Permian Basin midstream company that the private equity firm had evaluated. "Our critical focus will be on continuing to provide Oryx's diversified customer base with best in class service offerings to accommodate their growing production while also pursuing new commercial opportunities across the value-chain," Howell said. Fuel Fix: Get daily energy news headlines in your inbox Oryx was launched and owned by affiliates of Quantum Energy Partners, Post Oak Energy Capital, Concho Resources, WPX Energy and other investors in 2013. The Midland pipeline operator recently completed construction on the first phase of a crude oil gathering system in an area of the Permian Basin known as the southern Delaware Basin, which includes parts of southern New Mexico and West Texas. Too many choppers Mark Putnam, Stanmore Bay Can anyone tell me who I should be aiming questions at regarding the increase in helicopters flying over Stanmore Bay at all time of day or night? I am not talking about rescue or police units, but private helicopters that think its fine to fly over residential areas at any time, shaking the house with the down draught and generally not giving a hoot for those they disturb. We used to get the occasional helicopter but over the last 12-15 months we have had a marked increase. If you can afford to use a helicopter to get to your luxury pad in Leigh or some other monied enclave then you can afford the fuel to fly out at sea and leave the rest of us in peace. A Civil Aviation Authority spokesperson responds: We have forwarded this complaint to Information Safety Services at CAA, however, we advise that in the first instance the resident should direct their compliant to the local helicopter companies. It is not against the law for helicopters to fly over residential areas as long as they are operating in accordance with the Civil Aviation Rules. There is also no noise violation that can be upheld when aircraft or helicopters are flying. Cafes swallow tables Andrea Small, Orewa I was wondering whether anyone else has noticed that several of the public seats on Orewa Boulevard have been swallowed up by cafe tables and chairs? I can still sit on them when I need a bit of a rest but its a bit strange sitting among the diners. In one cafe, someone was using the public seat because it was right beside her table while she had lunch. Gayle Hill of Destination Orewa responds: As Orewa and the Orewa population have grown in the last few years, we often encounter issues. The public seats were originally placed in areas that were appropriate at the time and now some of them are in areas being partly used by businesses in the summer period. While it is difficult to move the seats, we at Destination Orewa have initiated specific actions. We have spoken to the local businesses and asked them to, where possible, keep a reasonable distance between the seats and their tables. Council people have been out and visited some the restaurants in question. We will suggest to council that they look at relocating some of the seats to avoid conflict with the local businesses. In the meantime, maybe we share the public areas, just like we share the road with cars, pedestrians and cyclists. Speed reductions cost Michael James, Orewa I along with many others have received a pamphlet from Auckland Transport outlining proposed speed reductions. It states that 10 percent of the 700km of roads will have speed reductions and, of that, 90 percent is for rural roads, leaving only 7km for the city centre (which I take as Queen Street and surrounds), town centres and residential roads. Quite a large proportion of these kilometres appear to be in Orewa, which makes me think this area is being targeted. There are so many elderly people driving at less than 40kph anyway that we all have to slow down. Apparently 64 people died in 2017 because of being hit by a vehicle how many in Orewa? Of these whose fault was it, the pedestrians inattention, or the driver? Part of the cost is from the Regional Fuel Tax, the rest from what? Oh no not from rate increases, again for no benefit to anyone. Editors note: Funding for the speed reductions comes from Government, Auckland Council and the Regional Fuel Tax ie, taxpayers and ratepayers (HM September 5, 2018). Figures for the Hibiscus & Bays area show that road safety has worsened, with deaths and serious injuries up 29 percent (2013-17). Locally, 48 percent of those people were vulnerable road users, such as cyclists, motorbike riders and pedestrians. Park and ride delays Our front page story, March 13 edition, about further delays in completing the Silverdale park and ride struck a chord with many readers. AT has said it is so far unable to award a contract for the work that is within its budget. Park and ride users are voicing their frustration via social media and by calling our paper, with many comments focused on the need for better public transport and the lack of investment in this area, despite the contribution local drivers are making to the petrol tax. Some were of the opinion that more people are using the Silverdale facility now that there is a charge for parking in the streets near the Albany park and ride. To join the conversation, or view the story, visit the Hibiscus Matters Facebook page. Wainui School got behind the Paper Doll project, which began in Tauranga and aims to make the longest paper doll chain ever, as a symbol of unity in the face of the Christchurch mosque attacks. Wainui students, pictured, made around 2700 paper dolls for the chain and then showed their own unity by holding hands. The regions students were quick to get behind various national initiatives in support of the victims families. Many also came up with their own ideas to spread a positive message and raise funds. Probably the most widely circulated image of support from this area came from Orewa College. The school sent out its message on Monday, March 18. Principal Kate Shevland says prefects and teachers came in the day before and pegged it all out. It took around half an hour to get the whole school, including staff around 2100 people in place. A video is at tinyurl.com/kiakahafromoc. As well as fundraising, the students of Dairy Flat School made 50 paper hearts for the 50 victims of the shooting. Each had a message about aroha and standing strong. Several local schools, including Orewa Primary, pictured, took part in the Colour Your Day mufti day fundraiser on Friday, March 22 this was a national initiative organised by 24-7 YouthWork and Christchurch City Council. Whangaparaoa College held a formal assembly on March 18, which included a moving performance from the schools Kapa Haka. This can be viewed on the colleges website. The college also made contact with two schools whose students were directly affected by the shootings and offered ongoing support. When a man with a semi-automatic and a warped sense of right and wrong opened fire on Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, killing 50 people and injuring almost as many, New Zealanders were shocked into the realisation that this country is not immune to the horrors of terrorist attacks. And why should we be? Terrorism is, after all, a totally indiscriminate, extreme and irrational form of violence. And bigotry, unfortunately, is everywhere. Going forward it is more important than ever to acknowledge these things, to take a good hard look in the mirror and try and be better as individuals, as a community, and as a nation. That is one of the challenges laid down by these sorts of atrocities. In the weeks since the shooting, on Friday, March 15, the outpouring of love and support for the families affected, the countrys Muslims and the wider community has been summed up in the Maori phrase Kia Kaha be strong. Many found that strength in taking part in gatherings and fundraising activities. Around the Hibiscus Coast, this included Colour Your Day, the Paper Doll project and other fundraising events at schools, pausing for silent contemplation with others at work or in neighbourhoods, and a big walk/run around Orewa Estuary last Thursday. What follows is a celebration of just some of those creative and generous local projects. Event brings community together Around 300 people took part in the Get Moving Run/Walk Together For Christchurch around Te Ara Tahuna last week, raising $3693. The event was put together, in just one week, by Maree Leith, organiser of the MTF Get Moving Festival, and David Kayes of Run NZ. Individuals, community groups, businesses and families, all came together for the run. on March 28. Hibiscus Matters staff also took part. Participants paid $5 each, although many donated more, to run or walk a portion, or all, of the 7.5km route around Orewa Estuary, starting at Metro Park East. Funds went to the Victim Support Givealittle page set up for the Christchurch families affected by the shooting. At the same time, local runner Brad Luiten ran 50km (one for each victim of the shooting) with six laps of Te Ara Tahuna and two of Millwater Parkway. He was joined by others at various stages. The Gabriel family of Silverdale took part in the run. They say they appreciate everything the community is doing in the wake of the Mosque shootings. 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 Dear Editor, I was delighted to see quite a few Save the Animals and Protect Wildlife slogans amidst the forest of placards and banners demanding action on climate change. As the dominant species on the planet we have responsibility to our fellow beings. Not just the large, like the whale with its belly full of plastic waste, or the elephant blasted to death for its ivory, or the exotic; such as the flamboyantly plumed birds of the Amazonian jungle; or the iconiclike the Polar Bear, sitting forlornly on a shrinking ice floe; nor just creatures elsewhere in the world. Here in Ireland, the curlew is on the brink of extinction, and it wasn't until 2012 when its numbers had plummeted by up to 96%, that a long-overdue ban on shooting this bird was put in place. The hen harrier has declined by a devastating 50% in numbers over the past forty years, and a band of reckless vote-conscious TDs support the cutting of turf in the few bogs that havent disappeared from the land. These ecological treasures ought to be completely off-limits to human interference. Its a change in Irelands political climate we need if we are to preserve our wonderful flora and fauna for future generations. Unfortunately, there is scant evidence to suggest that the nod and wink self-serving politician is even endangered as a species, let alone facing extinction. Thanking you, John Fitzgerald Yesterday it was announced that rapper and community hero Nipsey hussle was shot and killed outside of his Los Angeles clothing store, he was 33. The hip-hop community has been in mourning for the last 24 hours, with tributes flowing in from all over the world. We can't imagine the pain and hurt Nipsey's family and close friends are going through right now, so we send our most sincere condolences to Nipsey's loved ones. Kendrick Lamar was amongst those who really felt the impact of Nipsey's death, learning the news just before taking the stage at Lollapalooza Argentina last night. After being informed of the tragic passing, Kendrick chose to hold a short moment of silence as a tribute to the late rapper. "Before we got on stage, we got wind that our brother, our warrior, our soldier Nipsey Hussle passed away," said Kendrick Lamar. The crowd reacted with shock, instantly dipping in energy before Lamar asked his audience to join him in a moment of silence. "We wanna take this time-out, truly, to give a moment of silence. Can we do that?" Catch the full tribute up top: During a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, President Trump explained why the vote for the GOP health-care plan would be delayed until after the 2020 general election. Photo: Getty In modern-day Croatia, sectors such as the garment, shoe and leather industries are marked by hard labour for minimum wages, coupled with non-existent workers rights and constant pressures from management. The trade union for textiles, garments, leather and rubber (TOKG) is making sure that things get even worse. This article, originally published at Radnicki Portal, describes five cases in which TOKG served as managements right-hand, and was an ally in the destruction of companies, ramping up exploitation and undermining workers. Naprijed factory The Naprijed (Forward) garment factory was based in Radnicka 42 in Zagreb, and once employed about 1,000 workers. This formerly successful company entered a downward trajectory, starting with its privatisation in 1992, when it was sold to Zvonimir Gucic, who was also responsible for the downfall of many other companies that he owned (for example, Vesna and Sportska obuca Novska). It is clear that the destruction of the companys production capacity was deliberately planned if we look at what is currently based at its former location. Namely, the Green Gold business center, which is more profitable for the Privredna Banka (Commercial Bank), which owned the factory when it was a garment company. The oligarchys machinations can also be witnessed in the planned destruction of the company. One of Gucics first moves in Naprijed was forming a new company: NIK, with no property in its name. Then the first swindle came: workers were transferred to the new company without knowing it. According to official records, workers had received eight days of stoppage, but they actually had not stopped working because they knew nothing about this transfer. And the guilty party for this is TOKG and its then-president Josip Zidanic, as TOKG was the only trade union in the company until the bankruptcy. After transferring the workers, the company continued to function normally for the next 10 years. But then at the start of the 2000 problems began, and a notice for bankruptcy was filed. At that time, bankruptcy manager Miroslav Bors and the company management advised workers to sign an agreed break from their contracts, and then sign new contracts with the mother company. The reason was that the bankrupted company had no property, so the workers would not be able to get their wages. But in reality, by signing this agreement, they were also giving up their rights as employees effectively losing the right to severance pay. Workers sought advice from TOKG, where they were coldly advised to sign the deal because it was, in the opinion of TOKG, good for the workers. A straight lie. At roughly the same time, New Union (Novi sindikat) started functioning in the company (at the time it was called Union Zagrepcanka). They noticed that work on Saturdays was not being paid under the explanation that, during the week, production quotas were not met, and that workers would have to finish their work on Saturdays in order to get paid. In conversation with the bankruptcy manager, Union Zagrepcanka emphasised the illegality of this, but the manager and TOKG said that this was the usual practice, which is not surprising as TOKG had never taken any steps against it. The practice was stopped after a labour inspection confirmed that it was indeed illegal. At around the same time, Union Zagrepcanka started accepting new members and warned them not to sign the agreement to break their contracts, but by then around 90 percent of all the workers had already signed it. Still, the workers began organising with the help of Union Zagrepcanka, then took over the factory and won a deal. The agreements were annulled and they received severance pay for the 10 years they spent at daughter company. If TOKG had reacted quickly enough, the workers would have got severance pay for the whole duration of their employment (some had spent up to 30 years at the company). Zagrepcanka had no means to correct this damage, but they have shown with their actions in the factory that trade unions can be fighting organisations that can change the law when it becomes an obstacle. In short: an illegal transfer of workers from one factory to another took place under TOKGs nose, Saturday work went unpaid, and when the company was in trouble, the union advised workers to act in a way that was obviously contrary to their interests. Kamensko Factory Established in 1949, Kamensko was a textile giant of socialist Yugoslavia that employed several thousand workers and was a successful exporter of goods. Transforming Kamensko into a shareholder company during the 90s opened the doors to the land-grabbing profiteers and parasites that would eventually destroy it. Considering that paychecks were downgraded to the minimum wage, the workers were forced to sell their shares at extremely cheap prices, and they were bought primarily by oligarchs. One of them was Miroslav Kutle, who had the loyalty of some members of management, especially then-head manager, Antun Crlenjak. TOKG at Kamensko allowed management not to pay workers, avoid health insurance and pension contributions, and actively dissuaded workers from striking / Image: Radnicki Portal At the end of 2010, the situation for workers became desperate. Pension contributions and health insurance were not paid for, and then the paychecks also stopped, although production continued as normal, with orders coming in daily. When this happened, the workers planned to strike in order to force management to pay them, but TOKG, together with its president Zeljko Sengin, persuaded them not to strike, claiming this would be illegal. Nonetheless, sometime after that, on the square of Franjo Tuman, the workers announced a hunger strike, after which they were called by Kresimir Sever, president of the Independent Trade Unions of Croatia (Nezavisni hrvatski sindikati, NHS). But he only warned them that they were breaking the law and eventually called on them to quit striking and go back to work. A hunger strike eventually started on 20 August and lasted until the end of the year. 426 workers were fired without receiving their lost wages or severance pay. In March 2016, the Kamensko premises were sold to the company Radnik D.D., whose director and biggest shareholder was Marko Habijanec, member of and generous donor to the HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union, the biggest right-wing party in Croatia). For many years, TOKG allowed management not to pay the workers, not to pay health insurance or pension contributions, and when even the paychecks stopped, and the workers started to fight for their rights, TOKG not only failed to organise them in taking strike action, but tried to actively dissuade them. In the end, part of workforce even started a hunger strike, but with no results. This is what an anti-workers union led to: the workers inflicting harm upon themselves without any advancement. Inkop shoe factory At the beginning of summer 2016, workers of the Inkop company rebelled after their paychecks were not paid for months. The workers themselves were in an extremely difficult position as most of them were not a part of any trade union, nor did they even know there was a trade union at the company, so they were unable to negotiate with a unified voice and threaten to strike, even in the event of missing paychecks. Radnicki portal visited on the first day of the protests and talked to protesters in order to find out their problems and demands. Our first piece of advice was to insist on union-based organising, because trade unions are the only legal means that workers have to defend their rights. TOKG was active in the company, so part of the workforce contacted the representative of that trade union in order to enrol in the organisation. Even at this early stage, TOKG showcased its wrecking role. At first, their representative was not answering his phone, and when he finally showed himself he advised workers to start a mediation process with management without striking and without any alternative strategy. The company was in such a bad condition at that moment, and its financial obligations towards workers were such, that the only solution was bankruptcy, even from the perspective of the workers. However, there were two possible scenarios in this eventuality: either the workers would be partially paid from the bankruptcy settlement on mass, as in Ivanec, or they could demand their claims be turned into shares. For the latter, a workers and trade union organisation was needed. And this is exactly what was missing. Instead of opting for the bankruptcy, the trade union representative Savo Smitran stood on the side of the management without the knowledge and permission of the workers and agreed to a pre-bankruptcy deal. In the process, he committed a number of seemingly amateur mistakes (in fact, these were deliberate, anti-workers actions) such as the misfiling of the documentation form (which led to it being dismissed), organising a meeting in which only a small number of workers were present, together with the director of the company; squashing the kernel of workers unity by agreeing to make a deal for some of the paychecks be paid directly to workers that were not striking; and also accepting the promises of management without any form of insurance. He even said that he trusted the director of the company because he was a human being and a social partner. Radnicki portal demanded an explanation for these destructive moves. We asked then-president of TOKG, Nenad Lecek, Vice President Ljubica Hosni and Kresimir Sever, President of the Independent Trade Unions of Croatia (one of the five union confederations of which TOKG is a part). We never received direct answers, though we did see in other media sources that the vice president said she was in support of the pre-bankruptcy deal because it was, so she claimed, the only way to preserve jobs and the continuation of production. She also added that there is no reason not to financially back Inkop if, at the same time, millions of kunas are being spent backing the shipbuilding industry. Evidently, the actions of TOKG did not only go against the interests of the workers of Inkop, but also against class interests of all the workers in Croatia. Orljava textile factory TOKG also functions in the Orljava textile factory, located in Pozega. Workers receive minimum wage and paychecks are regularly considerably late. For example, the paycheck for May was only paid on 27 July. Beside this, overtime work is not being paid. From our sources, we have been able to find out that Union Zagrepcanka managed to initiate two rounds of legal processes regarding unpaid overtime: overtime work up to 2017 has already been paid, and legal hearings for the period later than 2017 will be initiated soon. In the Orljava textile factory, located in Pozega, where wages are miserable and paychecks are regularly considerably late, TKOG has done nothing / Image: Dusko Mirkovic TOKG did not initiate any legal actions and has even misled its members into believing that this issue might be overcome through peaceful negotiation, which is obviously the wrong course of action. Furthermore, not even members of the Works Council are taking any action in the name of the workers, and we also found out that members of TOKG are having difficulty in getting advice from their own trade union. It should be noted that TOKG won elections to the Works Council (held a year and a half ago) only by initiating a huge campaign, and even calling workers directly into their offices, advising them on how to vote and, in the end, discriminating against Union Zagrepcanka as an organisation that is planning to bring down the whole company by which they mean actually fighting for the rights of workers. Ultimately, the only thing that TOKG has done after these elections is move their trusted members to less-labour-intensive workplaces. Boxmark Leather Company The Austrian company Boxmark Leather is one of the worlds largest producers of leather seats for cars, planes, cruise ships and household interiors. At the moment, it has production lines in seven countries (Croatia, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, Mexico, China and Argentina) and its workers produce 14 million square meters of leather fabric annually. This is a major industry, with enormous profits that are being created by the hard work of its labourers. Sindikat Boxmark, which works as part of TOKG, is a faithful ally of managements exploitation of workers at Boxcar factories / Image: Croatia Boxmark arrived in Croatia in 2001, when it opened a production line in Trnovec Bartolovecki a place that was, after several years, transformed into a free zone with special conditions, i.e. various incentives for investors, such as complete or partial exemption from taxes or communal expenditures. In time, Boxmark opened two other production lines: in Zlatar Bistrica in 2012 and in Slavonski Brod in 2015. Today, it employs around 4,000 workers, mostly women workers, that are producing leather seats for leading automobile companies BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, WV, Audi and so on. The anti-worker Croatian government is also providing Boxmark with substantial subsidies for modernisation of its production lines. Last year Boxmark received up to 3,700,000 kunas (about 500,000 euros), and when they opened their lines in Zagorje, local governments provided them with free infrastructure. Boxmark workers subsist on close to the minimum wage, with constant abuses, pressures, insults and work-related illness as testified on Nova TV by a family doctor. She said that she treated a large number of Boxmark workers with psychic problems (anxiety, insomnia, apathy), for which she prescribed them tranquilisers. Additionally, she testified to various work-related ailments (affecting the spine, shoulders, neck and fingers). She explained that certain groups of the workers muscles, joints and tendons are becoming inflamed and burnt out from overuse. Finally, she testified that a large number of Boxmark workers rejected her advice and refused to go on sick leave for fear of losing their jobs. Furthermore, the usual practice in this company is not to extend contracts after an initial three-year period (which is the legal maximum one can be employed without being taken on full time), but to throw workers onto the street when their short-term contract is up. The Boxmark Union (Sindikat Boxmark), which works as part of TOKG, is a faithful ally of managements exploitation of workers. When asked to comment on this on TV, the president of the Boxmark Union, Anica urinec said that she had no comment, as the workers in question were not members of her union. The Boxmark Union and TOKG also took part in a ridiculous and cynical display for International Womens Day when, together with top Boxcar manager Tomislav Cesarec, they handed out roses to women workers. To conclude, after years of being robbed, disempowered and abused, workers at Orljava, Boxmark and others must come to conclusion that TOKG is not their ally, but rather their enemy. It has not acted to support workers, which is supposed to be its objective, but has rather served as a tool of management to pacify the workers. In Croatia, there are a number of such trade unions in other sectors (trade, metallurgy etc.) and they ought to be criticised. The solution is not giving up on trade unions all together, but rather a mass abandonment of those unions that are incapable of doing what true trade unions should do: fighting for better conditions and rights in the workplace. Update: State police said the search was suspended at 11:30 a.m. --------------------- Authorities are searching for a man who ran off after a pursuit in Beverly Tuesday morning. Massachusetts State Police said it is using K-9s and the Air Wing to help Beverly police search for the man in the area of Shaws Plaza on Route 1A. Police said units are saturating the area and the mans identity is known to authorities. No further information was immediately available. A Milton woman has been accused of running a black-market marijuana delivery service that exceeded $14 million in revenue during a two-year period, authorities said. Deana Martin, 51, was charged Tuesday with conspiring to distribute more than 100 kilograms of marijuana, according to the office of U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling. She is slated to appear in federal court in Boston later Tuesday. Martin is accused of owning and managing the black-market marijuana delivery service, called Northern Herb, from 2015 to 2018 in Massachusetts, Lellings office said in a statement. Northern Herb had a website offering sales of marijuana, including pre-rolled cigarettes and marijuana edibles, officials said. The website had a $100 minimum per order, according to a federal affidavit filed in the case. From May 2016 through July 2018, Northern Herbs total revenue was more than $14 million, Lellings office alleged. Martin is accused of keeping an income of $80,000 per month. The company claimed to provide medical marijuana but did not require customers to provide proof of a medical marijuana card, according to the statement. Northern Herb was not licensed as a medical with the states Department of Public Health, according to the affidavit. In fact, Northern Herb repeatedly advised potential customers that Northern Herb did not require its customers to possess a medical marijuana card, the affidavit reads. For example, an undercover law enforcement officer made two purchases of marijuana from Northern Herb without being asked to show proof of a medical marijuana card. Asked about whether a medical card was required for purchases, Northern Herb on two occasions in 2017 emailed buyers that we deliver recreationally and we deliver to anyone 21 plus for recreational use, according to the affidavit. Authorities say Northern Herb would deliver marijuana to unattended locations, like a front door or hallway, where unknown third parties could have access to the product. Northern Herb utilized locations in Canton, Milton, Foxborough and the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston to store and distribute marijuana. The company employed at least 25 workers, officials said. It is further alleged that Martin planned for Northern Herb to use a sales team that would be incentivized based on monthly marijuana sales, the statement read. One such incentivized tier, for instance, would be for selling more than 10 pounds of marijuana per month. Authorities say Martin controlled several bank accounts in which funds from Northern Herb sales were laundered. Martin is also accused of using several bank accounts in another persons name to hide her control of the money. Martin allegedly used Northern Herb sales to pay more than $300,000 to her house mortgage and to buy a 2017 Porsche Boxster, among other things, according to Lellings office. Additionally, authorities say Northern Herb did not withhold or pay taxes on the millions of dollars in marijuana sales. The company did not remit or pay employment taxes in connection with its workforce or issue its employees W-2s or 1099s, Lellings office said. In an email referencing marijuana taxes charged by one state government, authorities say Martin wrote: Zero taxes is still better. The last time Laverne Cox came to Boston was in October, when the television star urged Massachusetts voters to uphold the states transgender anti-discrimination law. Voters did uphold the law, but the obstacles facing transgender people are apparent as ever, Cox said, pointing to the new transgender military ban by President Donald J. Trump that will go into effect on April 12. We are in a very contested space now with, as trans people become more visible, theres a backlash happening, Cox, an Emmy-nominated actress best known for her role in Orange is the New Black Netflix series, said at the Simmons Leadership Conference in the Boston Seaport on Tuesday. Trans people have existed throughout time, Cox said while answering a question from a woman who said her relatives have been unsupportive to a family member who is preparing to medically transition genders. "We have a right to exist and flourish in the world too, Cox added. The actress spoke to the Boston crowd of about 3,500 professionals -- mostly women -- on her own upbringing in Mobile, Alabama, where she felt shame and fear for feeling like a woman and being attracted to men. Cox said she was sent to therapy in third grade after a teacher told her mother, 'Your son is going to end up in New Orleans in a dress if we dont get him into therapy right away,' according to Cox. Cox went to the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Mobile with her family every Sunday growing up, which she said also caused her to internalize a lot of shame. The shame prompted Cox, as a sixth grader, to swallow a bottle of pills in an attempt to kill herself, the actress said. When she survived, Cox said she convinced herself she would push away any thoughts of being attracted to men. It was not until she attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts in high school, where she studied dancing, writing and acting, that the actress was able to discover her preferences for make up and womens clothing (she called her style Salvation Army couture, or Salvation Armani). Later on, Cox said a move to New York City sparked a magical time in her life, where she met other transgender people, which inspired her to start her own medical transition in 1998. Cox opened up about her years of therapy, which has helped her unpack years of trauma and shame caused by bullying and an initial lack of acceptance by her loved ones. She said she believes transgender people are specially anointed, and are here for something beautiful and divine. A lot of trans people have experienced being turned out of their homes, being discriminated against in the work place, disowned by family, Cox said. She added, A lot of us have experienced that, and in the face of all that, we find a way to survive. Correction: A previous version of this article said Laverne Cox attended the AMZ Zion Church as a child in Alabama. This article has been reflected to update that she attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Officers with the Transportation Security Administration found a loaded handgun at Boston Logan International Airport on Sunday at a routine checkpoint. Security officers found a loaded handgun in a checkpoint X-ray machine on Sunday and contacted Massachusetts State Police, who confiscated the gun, according to a statement from the TSA. The X-ray revealed a .22-caliber handgun loaded with 10 bullets, including one in the chamber, the TSA reported. Authorities detained the man, who was identified only as a Weymouth resident, and questioned him before allowing him to leave and take his gun home. The incident marked the fourth gun TSA officers have found at Logan airport in 2019. In 2017, authorities found 14 firearms, and in 2018 that figure rose to 21. Even travelers with concealed firearm permits are not allowed to bring guns onto airplanes, the administration said in a statement. A first offense for carrying a handgun into a checkpoint is $3,900, and the TSA has the authority to penalize offenders up to $13,000 for weapons violations. The legal procedure for traveling with a firearm requires a passenger to transport it unloaded in locked, hard-sided containers as checked baggage only. The Massachusetts Gaming Commissions investigation into Wynn Resorts and the sexual misconduct allegations against company co-founder Steve Wynn was released Monday. The more than 200-page report goes into the companys history and how the company handled the allegations. The commissions Investigations and Enforcement Bureau officials spoke with former and current Wynn officials - minus Wynn himself, who declined investigators requests. The IEB made requests in writing through Attorney Brian Kelly, Mr. Wynns local (Boston) counsel, for a sworn interview of Mr. Wynn, but Mr. Wynn declined at each tum, the report states, adding that Wynn offered to consider answering written questions, which gaming officials believed to be lacking in sincerity, as he had made the same offer to the special committee investigators, but then declined to answer their written questions. The investigation began following an explosive report in the Wall Street Journal in which multiple women accused Wynn of sexual harassment and assault. One case led to a $7.5 million settlement in 2005. Following the articles publication, other women came forward sharing similar allegations and Wynn resigned as chairman and CEO. He vehemently denied the allegations, claiming the article is riddled with inaccuracies and may very well be the subject of future legal proceedings." Such a response is common for the casino mogul, Wynn officials told investigators. Matt Maddox, the companys former chief financial officer who was promoted to CEO following Wynns resignation, told investigators Hes quite litigious," of Wynn. Maddox said Wynn has a defamation attorney on a continuous retainer" and that he had recently filed several defamation actions related to the types of allegations raised in the WSJ article, according to the report. Since the publication of the Wall Street Journal article in 2018, Wynn has entered into six settlement agreements. Investigators say Wynn Resorts waived its rights under the confidentiality provisions in various settlement agreements but the companys co-founder declined to, limiting certain information to investigators. As a result, parties to those settlement agreements may face potential damages claims for very substantial sums, should they make disclosures to the IEB investigators, the report states. Investigators imply Wynn used fear of potential litigation" as a potential tactic in deterring alleged victims, targets, and witnesses from cooperating with the Massachusetts gaming regulators investigation. The report states that investigators interviewed over 100 individuals with information about the alleged misconduct and related matters in addition to reviewing extensive documents. After the announcement of the investigation into the suitability of Wynn opening a casino in Massachusetts, Wynn sued the Massachusetts Gaming Commission and the director of the Investigations and Enforcement Bureau seeking injunctive relief and monetary damages. Tuesday marks day one of what is expected to be a multi-day hearing into the companys suitability to hold a gaming license to operate in Massachusetts. Following the public hearing, the gaming commissioners will deliberate and issue a decision in writing. The burden is on the licensee to prove continued suitability, Gaming Commission Executive Director Edward Bedrosian told reporters last week. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission released its investigators report analyzing whether Wynn Resorts is suitable to hold the sole gaming license in eastern Massachusetts, following sexual misconduct allegations against former CEO Steve Wynn. The commission released the report an hour before its suitability hearing is scheduled to begin Tuesday and weeks before the opening of the companys $2.6 billion Everett casino, Encore Boston Harbor. The commissions investigation and enforcement bureau looked into whether the company was aware of the allegations, how the company addressed them and what information the company kept from the commission applying for the sole eastern Massachusetts casino license. The report is expected to be released Tuesday morning. The hearings start two months before the scheduled opening of the companys $2.6 billion casino. Wynn Resorts already started accepting reservations. According to settlement released last month, Massachusetts gaming investigators found that some individuals who were members of management at the time the (Wynn Resorts) Special Committee issued its report were aware of those allegations but failed to report or investigate them, contrary to Company policy." The documents mention a 2014 complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The details of that complaint have not been made public. That same year, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in 2014 awarded Wynn Resorts a license to build the resort casino in Everett. The company was well on its way to building the Everett casino in January 2018 when the Wall Street Journal published a story alleging sexual misconduct by Steve Wynn. Wynn has since left the company. The name of the casino was changed to Encore Boston Harbor to distance it from Wynn. In a settlement with the Nevada Gaming Control Board, Wynn Resorts admitted that top executives knew of sexual misconduct allegations against its founder and former CEO and failed to report or investigate them. The company agreed to pay an unspecified fine but kept its gaming license in Nevada. The Massachusetts hearing is supposed to include testimony from more than a dozen executives and other managers. After the hearing, commission members will meet privately to determine whether Wynn Resorts is suitable, not suitable or deemed suitable based on certain conditions. I think to the extent that there are witnesses, and theres evidence, people will see it being sort of consistent with what they think about happens in the courtroom," said Edward Bedrosian Jr., executive director of the commission, "but it is different in the sense that it is a regulatory hearing, Wynn Resorts has taken laudable steps to transform a culture that allowed sexual misconduct complaints against its founder to remain hidden for decades, womens rights advocates and business experts say. And while the company is making progress more than a year after casino mogul Steve Wynn became the first prominent CEO to resign over allegations of sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era, experts say the company could do more to create a new workplace environment. The experts praised Wynn Resorts for elevating more women to key leadership posts, including its board of directors. They also applauded the company for ousting every executive who knew about allegations but failed to report them, and creating an independent committee to review sexual harassment claims led by a former Boston police commissioner. "That sends a message that you're not going to tolerate enablers. That being silent is going to come back and haunt you," said Kabrina Krebel Chang, a business law and ethics professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. The company's new controls are summarized in an 18-page document Wynn Resorts submitted to Massachusetts casino regulators ahead of a critical series of public hearings this week. Under the new reforms, Wynn Resorts no longer enforces confidentiality in sexual harassment claims, meaning current and former employees can now go public with their claims. Chang said that's a move in the right direction, but noted Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other prominent companies now give employees the choice to resolve their case publicly in court rather than through the private arbitration process typical at many companies, including at Wynn. Private arbitration is problematic because the company tends to have the upper hand, she said. "There are very few rules in arbitration, and research has shown that the business wins the majority of the time," Chang said. "Payouts are also usually lower than awards in court, so the victim will not get as much in damages most likely." Wynn Resorts spokesman Michael Weaver acknowledged the company's approach differs from those other companies but believes it will be "equally effective." "Our goal of not protecting sexual harassers is the same," he said. The experts said Wynn Resorts should also spell out how it will be measuring and assessing its new policies and make those findings public. Gambling regulators could even require Wynn and other casino companies file regular reports, suggested Jason Schloetzer, corporate governance expert at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. Weaver said the company has enlisted Great Places To Work, a firm that conducts workplace surveys and research, to evaluate its progress on improving the workplace environment and employee satisfaction. He also said the company has received 22 substantiated cases involving employees or guests, which were resolved through some form of disciplinary action or removal since it conducted sexual harassment trainings in June. To be sure, the experts said Wynn Resorts should be commended for new efforts meant to encourage more female leaders in the company, such as launching an internal "women's leadership council" and commissioning studies to analyze pay differences between male and female workers. But it also should take other steps, such as making sure women have access to key "stepping stone jobs" that can lead to leadership roles, said Jennifer Chatman, a management professor at the University of California-Berkeley business school. "The hospitality business doesn't have some of the gender pipeline inequities of other domains like high tech and investment banking," she said. "This should be a place where women should have been excelling for some time." Weaver noted a third of the company's executives are women, compared to the 25 percent average for other major companies listed on the S&P 500 stock market index. And as it makes internal reforms, Wynn Resorts should make sure it's not addressing sexual misconduct in isolation, but tackling other common workplace problems, such as racial discrimination, said Maya Raghu, of the National Women's Law Center, which helped create a legal fund to help women litigate sexual misconduct complaints in the wake of the #MeToo movement. "These things are connected," she said. "They're symptoms of a larger workplace culture problem." Weaver said Wynn Resorts recently brought in an outside expert to conduct separate trainings on "unconscious bias," or discrimination based on a person's race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Starting Tuesday, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission is holding hearings to release and discuss findings from its months-long investigation into how the company handled the misconduct allegations, which Steve Wynn has strongly denied. The hearings have implications for the company's state casino license and the $2.6 billion luxury resort just outside Boston it's slated to open in June. Wynn Resorts recently went through a similar process in Nevada, where it was handed a record $20 million fine but allowed to keep its license. Regardless of what happens in Massachusetts, only time will tell how much the company has truly changed, said advocate Gina Scaramella. As director of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, she was among the prominent local voices calling for the company to remove Steve Wynn's name from its Massachusetts casino. The company ultimately did, re-christening the Everett development Encore Boston Harbor. Since the scandal broke, Scaramella's organization has hosted harassment trainings and helped review internal harassment policies for Wynn's local casino staff. She said she's encouraged by what she's seen so far. I get the sense that they want to do this right, Scaramella said. The proof will be in how its implemented. Well be watching. Wynn Resorts employees interviewed by Massachusetts Gaming Commission investigators say a former executive of the Everett casino would insert himself into his employees lunch plans and insist they spend their weekends with him, among other actions investigators called inappropriate." The redacted report did not name the executive but said he was accused of touching an employees shoulders. Although the report doesnt name him, the very specific incident described in it matches an incident at a Starbucks mentioned in a harassment lawsuit filed against former Encore Chief Information Officer Thomas Dillon in June 2018 by Mary Jayne Brackett-Kelly, the wife of a Watertown police detective. The harassment lawsuit accuses Dillon of making lewd comments, leering at her and rubbing her shoulders inappropriately until she told him to stop, according to The Boston Globe. My investigation revealed that the reason why this particular person was there on the Everett site was because he had a specialized knowledge of how to get the job done on casinos," said Denise Murphy, an attorney who conducted an independent review in the investigation. Murphy, who testified in Tuesdays hearing, described the 2017 incidents as part of her review of Wynn Resorts anti-harassment policies. She said the companys anti-harassment training was not enough to safeguard misconduct caused by an executive or manager exerting power over a co-worker or employee. The Massachusetts Gaming Commissions Investigation and Enforcement Bureaus report states that it interviewed a manager who was accused by an employee of touching her shoulders. The manager admitted to touching her shoulders, but only as he watched her make travel arrangements on her computer screen," according to the report. According to the report, that employee discussed the complaint with executive, who told her thats just how the manager is. Murphy, who prepared the report into this incident, reiterated those claims when she testified Tuesday afternoon. It is not appropriate ever to say its just them being them. Its against the law, Murphy said. The investigation described the manager as socially awkward, needy and a person who tried too hard to make friends and that he appeared to have no concept of boundaries with his co-workers or subordinates. His attempts at jokes were considered crude and not well-received, the report states. These employees said he inserted himself into Las Vegas employees lunch plans, insisted that they dine and participate in weekend activities with him and asked about his employees private lives. They also said he was detail-oriented, inflexible and demanding. According to the report, a supervisor who heard the employees complaint did not report the managers alleged behavior because he did not want to betray the employees confidentiality by reporting the incident. Massachusetts Gaming Commission investigators called the response inadequate. Wynn Resorts gave the manager a written warning because he had no history of prior complaints, and hosted a refresher anti-harassment course for its Massachusetts employees, according to the report. Investigators detailed a second incident involving the same manager at a Starbucks. The report states the manager approached another employee from behind, putting his hand on her mouth. In her lawsuit against Dillon, Brackett-Kelly states Dillon grabbed a co-worker with one arm around her waist and put his other hand over her mouth at a Starbucks when she declined to let Dillon pay for her drink, according to a Forbes report. The Massachusetts report states Wynn Resorts human resources supervisors investigated the complaint, finding that the manager admitted to approaching the employee from behind. According to the report, To their great surprise, not only did he admit the allegations, but he chose to demonstrate his actions by repeating the behavior on the lone female in the room during the investigations interview. " Wynn Resorts officials found that the manager had no concept of appropriate behavior and fired him. Those employees are among dozens that Massachusetts Gaming Commissions Investigations and Enforcement Bureau interviewed as it investigated how much Wynn Resorts knew about sexual misconduct allegations against the founder, how the company addressed those allegations and how much was disclosed to Massachusetts when the company applied for a gaming license in 2014. The report was released shortly before the beginning of suitability hearings on Tuesday. The commission is expected to hear from more than a dozen executives and managers before determining whether the company should be allowed to keep its license and continued with the June opening of its Everett casino, Encore Boston Harbor. Wynn Resorts wrote in a statement that the company has instituted several reforms, including a separation agreement with Wynn, separating the roles of CEO and chairman and changed up its board. Wynn Resorts has changed from a founder-led organization to a global enterprise overseen by a capable, independent and accountable Board of Directors, the company wrote. The Massachusetts Gaming Commissions report, which spans more than 200 pages, states that while the complaints raised by the Encore Boston Harbor employees were handled much differently than the complaints raised against Wynn. The report states that there is a striking contrast between the manner in which the two Encore Boston Harbor complaints were treated on the one hand, compared to the manner in which the allegations against Mr. Wynn ... were treated on the other hand." Western and Eastern floral art are juxtaposed in The Springfield Museums new exhibit, In Bloom: Floral Works from the Collection, on display April 4 through Sept. 1 in the Starr Gallery of the DAmour Museum of Fine Arts. Artists represented in the exhibit include American printmakers Asa Cheffetz, Barry Moser and Margaret Jordan Patterson and Japanese artists Ando Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. It includes woodblock prints and wood engravings as well as botanical sheets from the science museum that show how botanists from the Pioneer Valley took an artful approach to collecting, cataloging and arranging their specimens. The exhibition includes 18 works on paper and four objects (botanical sheets and a book) and shows how artists, especially printmakers, studied the flowers that they depicted with a nearly scientific approach to observation as well as the overlap between scientific and artistic study of plants in the 19th and 20th centuries. Acting Curator of Art Maggie C. North wanted the exhibit to explore how science and art complement each other and how Eastern and Western methods influence each other. Flowers have inspired and fascinated artists for hundreds of years, she said. This exhibition explores flowers as a natural element that has inspired artists in the 19th and 20the centuries and also acknowledges appreciation of flowering plants from a scientific perspective. By viewing American prints alongside Japanese works, this exhibition aims to view flowers in art through both a local lens and more global lens. In East Asian art, the theme of birds and flowers in art is more than 1,000 years old. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Japanese woodblock printmakers reinterpreted the genre and did so with knowledge of the Western, realist approach to depicting the natural world. The Japanese bird and flower prints, therefore, have roots in natural history as well as East Asian artistic tradition, North said. The collection at the D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts includes numerous floral works, especially works on paper, which infrequently are on view. And the Springfield Science Museum includes a collection of botanical sheets that were collected and cataloged by Luman Andrews around the turn of the 20th century as well as other objects relating to the natural history of flowering plants. Flowers have different symbolic significance across cultures and are rarely depicted or gifted without underlying meaning, North said. The peony, as represented in Hiroshige's Peacock and Peonies, is a favorite flower in Chinese and Japanese cultures and represents good fortune. It is also associated with summer, whereas the plum blossom, for example, is a flower associated with spring. The exhibit will be on display until late summer, and North encourages people to go inside to see it. Although in the summer we are lucky to have flowers all around us, we rarely have the chance to consider their role in our lives and in the history of art and science, she said. Visitors to this exhibition will discover the artistic, symbolic and scientific significance of flowers in addition to having the opportunity to enjoy beauty. She hopes this display will encourage visitors to look at flowers in a new and unusual way, with the attention to detail that artists did. For more information, visit springfieldmuseums.org Almost $400,000 will be given to several Cape Cod towns that were most affected by great white sharks over the summer, including one community where a Revere man lost his life during a shark attack. The Cape Cod Times reports the state will be giving $383,000 in state money to towns from Chatham to Provincetown. The money will cover the cost for communication equipment such as emergency call boxes and phones for lifeguards, as well as emergency equipment such as first-aid kits and stretchers. State Rep. Sarah Peake and state Sen. Julian Cyr presented a list to Governor Charlie Bakers administration detailing the items needed for the beach in February, the Cape Cod Times reports. This comes following the death of Arthur Medici, a 26-year-old Revere man who was killed by a shark about 30 yards off shore at Newcomb Hollow beach in Wellfleet. Medicis death marked the first fatal shark attack in the state since 1936, when a swimmer was bitten in Buzzards Bay. Multiple other beaches were evacuated over the summer due to shark sightings close to shore. Peake told the Cape Cod Times that the money should come soon and was glad the towns could come up with detailed needs. This is the result of months of hard work and collaboration of the Outer Cape towns, she told the Cape Cod Times. The owner of two Massachusetts automotive repair shops was caught on video damaging clients cars with a sledge hammer, mallets and other tools so he could inflate repair costs in a widespread insurance scam, according to an indictment against him announced Monday. Adam Haddad, 42, of Shrewsbury, was indicted by a statewide grand jury on 18 counts of motor vehicle insurance fraud, 15 counts of larceny by false pretenses over $1,200, three counts of attempted larceny and six counts of malicious destruction of property, Attorney General Maura Healey said in a statement. Haddad, who owns businesses in Everett and Worcester, is accused of enhancing damage or causing new damage to inflate appraisal repair quotes at his businesses. In some cases, he would pocket payouts by insurance companies and not complete necessary repairs, Healey said. In addition, ADH Collison of Boston Inc., owned by Haddad and located in Everett, was indicted on 10 counts of motor vehicle insurance fraud and eight counts of larceny by false pretenses over $1,200. Accurate Collision Inc., owned by Haddad and located in Worcester, was indicted on eight counts of motor vehicle insurance fraud and seven counts of larceny by false pretenses over $1,200. The defendants will be arraigned in Middlesex County and Worcester County at later dates, Healey said. The Insurance Fraud Bureau initially referred complaints about the companies to the Attorney Generals Office, which began an investigation in 2017. The examination was jointly conducted by agents for the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts, Massachusetts State Police assigned to the Attorney General and the Everett Police Department, she said. The investigation uncovered the alleged theft of more than $170,000 from 11 insurance companies, she said. In total, the Attorney General's Office alleges that he stole more than $170,000 from 11 different insurance companies, she said. The investigation is continuing. Anyone who believes they were a victim or has any information relating to others who may have been victimized by the scam are asked to contact the Attorney Generals Office Insurance Fraud Tip Line at 617-573-5330. PALMER The municipality is searching for a new town manager, and has advertised the position with a salary of $140,000 per year. The goal is to have a new individual in place by June 30, when Charles Blanchard, who has held the position since 2011, retires. The successful candidate should hold a minimum of a bachelors degree in Public Administration or a related field and five years relevant experience or a masters degree in Public Administration or a related field and three years relevant experience. Massachusetts experience is preferred, but not required, the job posting says. The nine-page document was prepared by Paradigm Associates, which is screening applications on behalf of the Town Council, the appointing authority. It includes data about the community: there are 150 miles of streets to maintain; Baystate Wing Hospital is the largest employer in town with 500 employees; the total assessed property value is $950 million, of which 81 percent is residential; and median household income is $71,000. More than 52 percent of the Towns population is low to moderate-income and 12 percent of households have incomes below the poverty level, according to U.S. Census data, the job profile says. Palmer holds a Moodys rating of A1. ... Moodys noted that the Town has a very solid financial position, a healthy wealth and income profile, a modestly sized tax base, and moderate debt and pension liabilities. Local property taxes generate about 48 percent of revenue, while state aid is 32.57 percent, local receipts brings in 13.06 percent, and other available revenue brings in 6.63 percent. April 15 is the deadline to apply to: Bernard Lynch, Principal, Community Paradigm Associates, Blynch@communityparadigm.com. For years, executives at Wynn Resorts knew about allegations of sexual misconduct by company CEO Steve Wynn, but disregarded company policies on sexual harassment and took steps to ensure the incidents remained secret, according to a report released Tuesday by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. The Gaming Commission is holding a three-day hearing to decide whether Wynn Resorts is still suitable to hold a casino license in Massachusetts in light of the allegations against Wynn, who has since left the company. The company did not disclose the allegations, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, when the Gaming Commission initially determined that Wynn Resorts was suitable for a license. Steve Wynn did not participate in the Gaming Commissions investigation, but Wynn Resorts did cooperate. Many of the high-ranking executives who were aware of Wynns behavior have since resigned or been fired. The company installed a new board chairman and improved its human resources policies. Here is a look at the specific allegations against Wynn and why they are important to the licensing hearing, based on the report. Investigators spent several hours on the first day of the hearing reviewing the allegations. The 2005 alleged rape, pregnancy and settlement The allegations: Central to the report is Wynns alleged rape of a manicurist at his hotel, Wynn Las Vegas, in 2005. The manicurist, identified by the pseudonym Amy, told her supervisor that Wynn raped her in a massage room attached to his office. Amy told her supervisor that it was ugly, and she feared for her job, as her familys sole provider. Amy said she had sex with Wynn twice and was pregnant with his child. Amy told her supervisor she did not want to return to Wynns office for another appointment. Amys supervisor informed Wynn Resorts then-vice president of hotel operations, Doreen Whennen. Amy met with Whennen and Wynn Las Vegas CEO and Wynn Resorts Chief Operating Officer Marc Schorr. The next day, Amys employee records say she resigned. An attorney for Wynn and the company negotiated a $7.5 million settlement with Amy and her husband, with the money paid out over 10 years. Amy withdrew her allegations and signed a non-disclosure agreement. Wynn set up a limited liability company to pay the settlement, which he paid from personal funds, so it could not be traced to him or his company. Wynn later admitted to having sex with Amy, but said the manicurist initiated it, and that he paid to avoid damaging his reputation. Why this is important to the Wynn Resorts license: The same outside attorney represented Wynn and his company, showing their confluence of interests. That attorney did not inform the companys general counsel about the settlement, although the general counsel later discovered some details. There were steps taken to conceal the settlement, and the companys board of directors was never informed. Four company executives knew of the allegations, but the company did not investigate or place a note in Wynns file, contrary to its own sexual harassment policies. Wynn was never trained on sexual harassment policies. When the Gaming Commission was investigating Wynn Resorts suitability for a license, neither the companys outside attorneys nor the executives who knew about the settlement reported it. None of those executives remain with the company. Wynns ex-wife, Elaine Wynn, a company shareholder and board member, learned of the rape allegations and settlement in 2009 and says she told the companys general counsel. The general counsel says she learned of the settlement around 2011 but not the rape allegations. Neither work for the company today. Wynn Resorts also did not disclose the settlement to Nevadas Gaming Commission, which fined the company $20 million for failing to investigate. The 2006 cocktail waitress settlement The allegations: A former Wynn Las Vegas cocktail server and her parents signed a $975,000 settlement with Steve Wynn in December 2006. The cocktail server, referred to as Beth, told the hotels chief human resources officer, in an email forwarded to Wynn Las Vegass general counsel, that she was wrongfully engaged in a sexual relationship with Wynn. A 2018 letter from Beths attorney said she felt pressured into continuing a sexual relationship with Wynn. In a deposition in another case, Wynn said he did not remember the settlement. Why this is important to the Wynn Resorts license: Similar to the 2005 case, there is no evidence the company ever investigated. The settlement was not reported to the companys Board of Directors. Wynn was never trained in sexual harassment policies, and a note was not placed on his file. The same attorney represented Wynn and his company. The 2008 cocktail waitress settlement The allegations: Wynn Resorts reached a $700,000 settlement with a cocktail server at Wynn Las Vegas who was fired after negotiations over severance pay. In a demand letter, the cocktail server said Wynn pursued her, and they then engaged in a year-long relationship. After she ended the relationship, Wynn said he would take financial care of her. The server signed a statement as part of the settlement saying she never had a sexual relationship with Wynn. She later told Gaming Commission investigators that she had consensual sex with Wynn while working for him. Why this is important to the Wynn Resorts license: The alleged sexual relationship happened before the formation of Wynn Resorts, though Wynn later brought the woman to work at the company. The two company executives to know of the allegations Wynn and Wynn Las Vegas former general counsel Kevin Tourek no longer work there. The company failed to inquire about the incident even though Tourek was already aware of the 2006 settlement. The 2014 cocktail waitress settlement The allegations: A cocktail server who was fired from Wynn Las Vegas in 2013 filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against the company. During mediation, the server said she was raped by Wynn in 2005. Wynn denied the allegations. The company and the server reached a $9,000 settlement. Why this is important to the Wynn Resorts license: Wynn Las Vegas general counsel, then-president and compliance officer were informed of the allegation, but it was not investigated. None of the officials remain with the company. The spa complaints The allegations: In 2014-2015, two massage therapists on three occasions complained to the spa director about Wynns inappropriate conduct during massages at Encore Spa, which Wynn Resorts owns. The massage therapists said Wynn wanted to be covered in inappropriate ways during massages, such as asking for no covering or using only a small towel. In one case, he repeatedly exposed his genitals to the massage therapist, while his wife was present. Another time, he asked for more massage on his inner thigh and implied that he wanted the masseuse to touch his genitals. He asked for a sensual massage. He called a massage therapist on her personal cell phone. He gave another therapist a $1,000 cash tip after making comments that made her uncomfortable, such as urging her to close your eyes and feel the music while asking her to massage closer to his genitals. Why this is important to the Wynn Resorts license: The complaints were reported from the spa director to Brian Gullbrants, now executive vice president of Encore Boston Harbor, to former president of Wynn Las Vegas Maurice Wooden to Matthew Maddox, now president of Wynn Resorts. Wooden said he spoke to Wynn about the conduct. No one further investigated or documented it. Other allegations The allegations: A former employee told gaming investigators that Wynn repeatedly sexually harassed her and grabbed her breast. When she refused his advances, he once grabbed her arm and shoved her against a wall. She said she reported the conduct, but her supervisors denied getting a report from her. She said Wynn offered a bribe not to speak to Wall Street Journal reporters, but her claim was undermined by evidence discovered by investigators. Gaming investigators also interviewed 12 other alleged victims of Wynns sexual misconduct, nine of whom worked at Wynn Resorts. Reported misconduct included Wynn making unwelcome sexual advances, exposing himself at massage appointments or at a salon, inappropriately touching and making sexual comments to manicurists and pressuring employees into sexual conduct. Some complaints were reported to supervisors; others were not. Wynn said in a statement given to an internal investigatory committee at Wynn Resorts that he had multiple consensual relationships during his time at the company. He denied that any relationships were nonconsensual. Why this is important to the Wynn Resorts license: Gaming regulators took steps to independently confirm the sexual misconduct reported in the Wall Street Journal investigation. BERNARDSTON A Massachusetts State Police trooper pulled over a BMW with a loud exhaust and a broken license plate light and ended up arresting two Vermont residents for trafficking in cocaine and fentanyl. Trooper Michael Leslie noticed the 2002 BMW as he was patrolling Interstate-91 in Greenfield early Saturday morning. As he followed the car he saw the driver weaving over lane markings and pulled over the car when it crossed into Bernardston, State Police said. When he approached the driver, Leslie said he felt the two people were moving in a suspicious way and then discovered, while talking to the driver, there was a loaded handgun in the car, police said. The driver and passenger did not have a firearms permit and were arrested. Leslie, with the assistance of a Greenfield Police officer, two other troopers and a trained dog, then searched the car and discovered 34 grams of crack cocaine, powdered cocaine, fentanyl, multiple prescription pills, more than $1,400 in cash, a Hi-Point 9mm pistol, 8 rounds of 9mm ammunition and drug paraphernalia, police said. Steven Hull, 50, and Jennifer Sasso, 51, both of Brattleboro, were charged with trafficking in cocaine and fentanyl, conspiracy to violate drug laws, possession of a Class B drug and possession of a Class E drug, police said. Hull is also charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm and ammunition without permits, carrying a dangerous weapon, improper storage of a firearm and possession of a Class A drug. Sasso is also charged with possession of a Class B drug with intent to distribute, police said. Hull was held over the weekend on $50,000 bail and Sasso was held on $25,000 bond at the Franklin County House of Correction. They were arraigned on Monday in Greenfield District Court, police said. Former Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn first learned the details of his companys sexual harassment policy in 2017 and almost immediately tried to weaken it, according to the Massachusetts Gaming Commissions investigation of the companys handling of sexual misconduct complaints. In October of that year, Wynn was being deposed in a shareholder lawsuit. During that deposition, his companys Zero Tolerance sexual harassment policy was read to him. Wynn appeared surprised and outraged by its requirements -- and made his displeasure clear. Was this [policy] dated? When was this ridiculous document, this overreaching -- if I knew about this before today, it wouldnt exist in its present form for five minutes, Wynn said in the deposition, according to the Gaming Commissions investigative report. Wynns objections were in conflict with accepted standards for corporate sexual harassment policies. He complained about rules that required managers to report sexual harassment they witnessed. And he expressed outage that a manager could be suspected of criticizing someone because supposedly that person didnt go on a date or that person stared at them, describing the policy as confusing legalese. And after leaving the deposition, he attempted to change the policy to allow relationships between supervisors and subordinates, company attorneys told investigators. "He said, This policy is stupid. You cant prohibit consenting adults from having relationships.,' " Wynn Las Vegas General Counsel Stacie Michaels told investigators with the Gaming Commissions Investigations and Enforcement Bureau. Wynn also attempted to strip the mandatory reporting requirement from the policy, according to Michaels. I think his phrase was, Youve deputized every supervisor in my building to be a nar[c] about what they see, Michaels told investigators. Michaels learned about Wynns displeasure after receiving a phone call from former Wynn Resorts General Counsel Kimmarie Sinatra after the deposition, she said. What followed were meetings at Wynns villa, in which company attorneys attempted to convince Wynn that the policy was not only justified, but legally necessary. "Bryan [Cohen] and I initially spent 45 minutes to an hour with Steve, trying to explain to him the law... and why the policy was the law requires and he said, Thats stupid. We should fight it, " Michaels said. Sinatra confirmed to investigators that Wynn objected to the prohibition on supervisor-subordinate relationships, saying she and other attorneys tried to explain to him why it was necessary. Meetings continued until early November, with Michaels bringing in outside counsel Gregg Kamer to help change Wynns mind, she said. Wynn continued to to object to the harassment mandatory reporting requirement, but the policy was never changed, Michaels said. Less than three months later, the Wall Street Journal published an explosive report on sexual assault and harassment claims against Wynn, leading to his exit from the company. Wynn, the companys public face for decades, resigned from the company he founded and gave up his ownership stake in the months after the report. I had multiple consensual relationships during my tenure at Wynn Resorts and made no attempt to document them. I do not believe that the specific details of any of these relationships are material to the issues I understand are being reviewed by the special committee. I recognize some of the names contained in the lists of questions, but have no memory of ever meeting or having any relationship with many of the women identified in your questions, Wynn said in a statement read aloud during a Massachusetts Gaming Commission hearing Tuesday morning. I deny ever, however, having any relationship that was not consensual. During the time that I was employed by Wynn, I was aware the company had a code of conduct and related policies. I was not, however, familiar with the details of those policies. Wynn Resorts is currently building its $2.6 billion Encore Boston Harbor gaming resort in Everett. The Journal reported that Wynn paid out a $7.5 million settlement after a manicurist at one of his casinos alleged that he pressured her into having sex against her will in 2005. Dozens of other people who worked at Wynns casinos told the Journal of a years-long pattern of sexual advances toward female employees, including exposing himself to and requesting sexual services from massage therapists at his casinos. Wynn denied the allegations, claiming they were instigated by his ex-wife during a bitter divorce settlement dispute. Wynn Resorts has told regulators it has implemented major reforms since Wynn was cut loose from the company he founded, including turning over much of its board, implementing enhanced sexual harassment training and launching programs to promote gender equity in the workplace. The Massachusetts Gaming Commissions investigation is the second regulatory probe of the company following the allegations. Wynn Resorts was fined $20 million by Nevada gaming regulators in February, after their investigation found that former executives had known about the allegations but failed to properly report them. No one has ever fled his native land because the United States was sending too much financial aid there. No one. Ever. People leave their homeland for America for any number of reasons: In hope of making a better life for themselves and their family members. To get away from gangs and crime and oppression. In search of real liberty. Those are only a few on a long list. There are, of course, many others. But there's one that surely isn't a reason why people flee El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and risk everything to come to America: because the United States is sending too much foreign aid to their homeland. Nope. It's never happened. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump has decided to cut aid to those countries -- for some reason that perhaps makes sense to him, and to him alone -- because of the refugees leaving those lands for the United States. By any reasonable measure, this is wrongheaded in the extreme. It will take a terrible situation and only make it worse. Although administration officials, as per usual, worked to defend the, um, logic of the president's move, which he announced, from out of the blue, late last week. That's no surprise, of course, as that's their job, and it's just how things go in this White House. But at the same time, one hopes that there are some behind the scenes who are working to get the ill-informed president to understand that what he is doing is counter-productive in the extreme. An imagined conversation might go something like this: White House official: "Mr. President, why are people leaving El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras?" Trump: "Because they are -- oh, wait, I've been told to get out of the habit of using that word so casually -- let's call them blankety-blank countries." Official: "OK, that's an improvement. And is cutting the amount of aid we send them -- which we've already done, by the way -- going to improve conditions and make folks more likely to want to remain at home?" Trump: "I've always felt this way, and I'm not about to change my mind now. Plus, Obama liked to help out these countries, and I try to do the opposite of what he did whenever I can." Official, suppressing an eye-roll: "OK, we'll talk more about this tomorrow." Though this administration has been making wrongheaded decisions from even before it moved into the White House, some can still surprise. Mainly, for the obviousness of their foolishness. And this is one of those. Big time. If Trump wants to take concrete steps to lessen the refugee crisis, he should be moving to boost aid to troubled nations in Central America, and to do so dramatically. That alone wouldnt end the crisis, of course, but, unlike what he wants to do, it wouldnt be certain to make things so much worse. Former Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley will join the government affairs team at Juul, according to Politico. Coakley, who has consulted for the e-cigarette company as a partner at law firm Foley Hoag, is set to take on a new role in April. She will focus on educating people on what Juul is doing to fight underage use of their products. Juul makes slim e-cigarettes that vaporize cartridges made with nicotine salts and tobacco. A Juul pod has about the same amount of nicotine as a pack of cigarettes and offers 200 puffs. In a statement to WBUR Coakley said she believes in Juuls ability to switch adult smokers from cigarettes to vaping devices. "I believe in JUUL Labs' commitment to eliminate combustible cigarettes, the number one cause of preventable death in our country, and to combat youth usage," Coakley said in a statement. "JUUL has an incredible opportunity to switch adult smokers and I look forward to working with stakeholders from the private and public sectors as we fulfill that mission and prevent youth from ever using vapor products like JUUL." Politico notes that Juul has increased lobbying spending in Washington from $210,000 in the second quarter of 2018 to $750,000 by the last quarter of the year. When Coakley was the Massachusetts Attorney General she called on the FDA to ban sales of e-cigarettes to kids and pushed back against advertising that targeted youth. In 2014 she was the co-chair of the National Association of Attorney Generals tobacco committee and joined with 28 state attorneys to call on retailers like Walmart to stop selling tobacco products. Coakleys new job was first reported on the same day her successor Attorney General Maura Healey is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a community forum on vaping in Newton. The evening will include a panel of speakers providing health, wellness, and prevention education on the topic of vaping, according to a Newton schools announcement. Healey launched an investigation into Juul and whether the company intentionally markets to minors last year. Theyre engaged in an effort to get kids addicted, to get them hooked so they will have customers for the rest of their lives, Healey told MassLive in July. U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark is calling on Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to resign over a decision to eliminate school discipline regulations formed under the administration of President Barack Obama. What Betsy DeVos did that I object to and find disgusting is she rescinded civil rights policy and cherry-picked racist research to back it up, Clark said Monday morning on MSNBC. I'm calling on @BetsyDeVosED to resign. She has failed to protect our student. She revoked a policy to address racial discrimination in school discipline practices and then cherry-picked racist research to back it up. She needs to reinstate this policy and apologize, or go. https://t.co/u7ewDeCsdw Katherine Clark (@RepKClark) April 1, 2019 The call for DeVos to resign comes days after Clark, a Melrose Democrat and House Democratic Caucus vice chair, questioned the education secretary last week on her decisions to rescind the regulations. The Melrose representative clashed with DeVos last week over a 2014 report by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights which reported data on school disciplinary measures. Clark has responded to the dispute on Twitter, using hashtags #FireDeVos and #ResignDeVos. The Rethink School Discipline guidelines in question are a 2014 regulation that asks schools to reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions of students of color and students with disabilities, and a 2016 regulation that standardizes methods for how states measure the threshold at which the number of black students are categorized as disabled -- a statistic that impacts federal funding for school districts. Both regulations created under the Obama administration aim to curb the school-to-prison pipeline" for students of color and disabled students who, according to data from the Department of Education, suffer disciplinary actions at disproportionately higher rates. A December 2018 report by Devos federal school safety commission describes the regulations as creating a chilling effect on classroom teachers and administrators use of discipline by improperly imposing, through the threat of investigation and potential loss of federal funding, a forceful federal role in what is inherently a local issue." Clark criticized DeVos decision as being rooted in racist research." The education secretary backed her claims using research published in the Journal of Criminal Justice by John Paul Wright, a professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, and four others, according to U.S. News. The driver pulled from a submerged vehicle Tuesday morning in East Longmeadow died, according to Massachusetts State Police. The Hampden District Attorneys Office said the driver is a 32-year-old man from East Longmeadow. The driver was pulled from the vehicle by firefighters and rushed to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. The man was then pronounced dead. Members of the East Longmeadow Fire Department were able to swim out to the vehicle where they discovered a single passenger inside, the district attorneys office said. Firefighters were able to gain entry into the vehicle and extricate the victim who was unresponsive. Local and state emergency responders were called to Heritage Park in East Longmeadow after a vehicle became submerged overnight. A caller reported the vehicle had driven into the pond off North Main Street around 3 a.m. The vehicle was partially submerged approximately 30-to-40 feet from shore. Unsure if the operator was the sole occupant of the vehicle, a further search was conducted in the pond by the East Longmeadow Fire Department and the Massachusetts State Police Dive Team, which did not locate any other victims, the district attorneys office said. State police divers helped with the removal of the vehicle from the pond. The vehicle was in about 8 feet of water, authorities said. The death remains under investigation. For the third year, family, friends and the public will remember Vanessa Marcotte with a 5k run and walk on Wachusett Mountain. Marcotte was a 27-year-old Google employee visiting her mothers home in Princeton in 2016 when she was attacked and killed while taking a jog. In the years since, Marcottes friends and family have started the Vanessa T. Marcotte Foundation, a non-profit to honor Marcottes memory and empower women. This years 5k run and walk starts at 10 a.m. on June 15 at Wachusett Mountain. Registration for the 5k is online. Marcotte would have turned 30 on June 17, 2019. The Vanessa T. Marcotte Foundation envisions a world where women live free from harassment. We strive to achieve this goal through education and advocacy on safety awareness and gender equality, the Foundation wrote on the 5k registration page. Since our establishment in 2017, we have funded grants that educate and mentor youth on challenging the gender stereotypes that often lead to objectification against women, and have educated hundreds of girls and women on safety awareness. Vanessa inspires our mission and fuels our continued efforts. A new running and walking-friendly course offers participants a chance to set a new personal record or just enjoy the scenery, according to the foundation. The race will be held rain or shine. More than 1,000 people attended the second annual 5K last year and more than $90,000 was raised for the foundation. Its just really a testament to Vanessas character, but also to the strength of our mission, Marcottes cousin and co-founder of the Vanessa T. Marcotte Foundation, Caroline Tocci, said in a recent interview. Angelo Colon-Ortiz, a Worcester man who used to work for a third-party logistics firm delivering FedEx packages to Central Massachusetts post offices, including in Princeton, has been charged with Marcottes killing. On the day of Marcottes August 2016 killing, witnesses spotted a man matching Colon-Ortizs description driving a dark SUV on Brooks Station Road, where Marcotte was running when she disappeared, authorities said. DNA from a cheek swab test that Colon-Ortiz consented to matched DNA collected during Marcottes autopsy. Colon-Ortiz is awaiting a murder trial in Worcester Superior Court. Global Hepatitis C Diagnosis & Treatment market Information, by diagnostic tests (Enzyme Immunoassay (EIA), Chemiluminescence Immunoassay (CIA), Point-of-Care Rapid Immunoassays and Recombinant Immunoblot Assay (RIBA)) Forecast to 2022 Key Players for Global Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment Market Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, Gilead Sciences Inc, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis AG, Abbvie Inc, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Johnson & Johnson, BMS, Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, and Merck & Co., Inc are among the leading competitors included in the reports competitive analysis which includes market shares of each competitor and the various growth strategies they employ. Latest Industry News Pharmac in New Zealand has decided to fund Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment Diagnosis and Treatment Market which is being hailed as a potential cure for the disease. Get Free Sample Copy of Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1569 Global Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment Market Overview Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment is a common inflammatory condition which targets the liver and affects function. Although it is highly treatable, Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment is not easily diagnosed as many patients do not display many symptoms until the condition has become somewhat severe. Possibly fatal depending on the time of diagnosis and progress of the diseases, Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment is preventable if stringent sterility practices are followed with concerns to needles. Market Research Future has delved into the global Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment market to uncover various figures and facts relevant to the markets growth over the forecast period from 2016 to 2022. Highly common in developing and underdeveloped economies where healthcare standards are low, Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment can also be contracted by drug users who share needles, and non-sterile tattooing equipment, making it prevalent in developed economies as well. Global increase healthcare expenditure and an increasing focus on developing healthcare in developing and underdeveloped economies are expected to have a significantly positive impact on the global Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment market. Moreover, an increasing number of autoimmune diseases are also expected to have an impact. According to various studies, more than 1 million deaths occurred due to the disease in 2015, making it a significant cause of death across the globe. Recent developments in the healthcare sector have made Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment curable and as such treatment rate has increased substantially. New product launches, R&D investments, and rapid healthcare reforms are expected to yield market growth opportunities in the coming years. Government policies regarding the use of sterile needles are likely to become more stringent and reduce incidences of Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment in the future, thus affecting market growth. Global Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment Market-Competitive Analysis October, 2013 Janssen (Parent organisation Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc.) acquired investigational NS5A Inhibitor for the treatment of Hepatitis C from GlaxoSmithKline. According to company reports, GSK2336805 is an investigational NS5a replication complex inhibitor in Phase 2 development for the treatment of chronic hepatitis C in adult patients with compensated liver disease, including all stages of liver fibrosis. October, 2013 Bristol-Myers Squibb to presented range of new Hepatitis C data at the 2013 American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). According to company reports, Bristol-Myers Squibbs hepatitis C includes compounds with different mechanisms of action, biologics as well as small molecule direct-acting antivirals. These compounds were being studied as part of multiple treatment regimens with the goal of increasing SVR rates across different patient types. Segments for Global Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment Market MRFRs analysis of the market segments it on the basis of diagnostic tests, and region. Diagnostic tests used to determine Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment in a patient includes chemiluminescence immunoassay (CIA), enzyme immunoassay(EIA), point-of-care rapid immunoassay, recombinant immunoblot assay (RIBA), and others. Regions that have been covered in the report span global geography and include four key regions, namely the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa. Regional Analysis for Global Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment Market The Americas due to their inclusion of the US have achieved a leadership role in the global Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment market with European region following closely. These regions have drug use statistics and a popular tattoo culture which contribute to the cases of Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment. Moreover, the presence of well-developed healthcare sectors which significant investments and the presence of stringent government standards concerning needle sterility in hospitals are expected to impact these markets. Meanwhile, the Asia Pacific is growing at a rapid rate. The regions healthcare segment is growing and improving significantly. However, various underdeveloped parts of the region have high cases of Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment which impact the market substantially. Moreover, countries such as India and China are growing at the most rapid rate due to the high demand for efficient healthcare, the presence of untapped potential and rapidly reforming healthcare sectors. The MEA region is likely to witness sluggish growth despite a significant presence of Hepatitis C Diagnosis and Treatment due to unsanitary health practices in underdeveloped regions of the MEA region. Browse Complete Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/hepatitis-c-diagnosis-treatment-market-1569 Some Brief Table of Contents of Report Chapter 1. Report Prologue Chapter 2. Market Introduction 2.1 Definition 2.2 Scope Of The Study 2.2.1 Research Objective 2.2.2 Assumptions 2.2.3 Limitations Chapter 3. Research Methodology 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Primary Research 3.3 Secondary Research 3.4 Market Size Estimation Chapter 4. Market Dynamics 4.1 Drivers 4.2 Restrains 4.3 Opportunities 4.4 Challenges 4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators 4.6 Technology Trends & Assessment Chapter 5. Market Factor Analysis 5.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis 5.1.1 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers TOC Continued Get Exclusive Discount on Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/1569 About Market Research Future: At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Statistical Report, Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. Contact Us: Market Research Future Hadapsar, Pune 411028 Maharashtra, India Phone: +1 646 845 9312 The report comes out as an intelligent and a thorough assessment tool as well as a great resource that will help you to secure a position of strength in the global Advanced Wound Care market. It includes Porters Five Forces and PESTLE analysis to equip your business with critical information and comparative data about the global. We have provided deep analysis of the vendor landscape to give you a complete picture of current and future competitive scenarios of the global Advanced Wound Care market. Our analysts use latest primary and secondary research techniques and tools to prepare comprehensive and accurate market research reports. North America is the largest consumption of Advanced Wound Care, with a sales revenue market share nearly 35.14% in 2016. The second place is Europe region; following North America with the sales revenue market share over 34.34%. Asia Pacific is another important consumption market of Advanced Wound Care, enjoying 15.53% sales revenue market share in 2016. Advanced wound care products are designed to treat more complex wounds andin order to be covered under insuranceusually require a doctors order. This includes hydrogels, hydrocolloids, alginates, and film and foam dressings. Advanced wound care treatments revolve around the principle of moisture therapy, which provides moisture to the wound site to encourage natural cell repair while giving the wound room to breathe. Products utilized in moist wound care generally fit better around different wound shapes and sizes and are more resistant to environmental inhibitors and foreign particles. There are three kinds of Advanced Wound Care, which are Advanced Wound Dressings, Bioactives and Devices Mineral. Advanced Wound Dressings are wildly used in the Advanced Wound Care, with a consumption market share nearly 47.35% in 2016. Request a PDF of this report on the global Advanced Wound Care market: https://www.qyresearch.com/sample-form/form/963964/global-advanced-wound-care-industry-professional Briefly speaking, in the next few years, Advanced Wound Care industry will still be a highly energetic industry. Sales of Advanced Wound Care have brought a lot of opportunities, there will more companies enter into this industry, especially in developing countries. Key players of the global Advanced Wound Care market: Acelity Smith & Nephew Molnlycke ConvaTec Coloplast Organogenesis Integra Lifesciences Corporation Medline Industries 3M Hollister Incorporated Human Biosciences Medtronic Hartmann Group B.Braun Melsungen BSN Medical Urgo Medical Mimedx Group, Inc. Nitto Denko Winner Medical Group Global Advanced Wound Care Market by Type Segments: Advanced Wound Dressings Bioactives Devices Global Advanced Wound Care Market by Application Segments: Acute wounds Chronic Wounds Surgical Wounds Report Highlights Comprehensive pricing analysis on the basis of product, application, and regional segments Detailed assessment of the vendor landscape and leading companies to help understand the level of competition in the global Advanced Wound Care market Deep insights about regulatory and investment scenarios of the global Advanced Wound Care market Analysis of market effect factors and their impact on the forecast and outlook of the global Advanced Wound Care market A roadmap of growth opportunities available in the global Advanced Wound Care market with the identification of key factors Exhaustive analysis of various trends of the global Advanced Wound Care market to help identify market developments Table of Contents Report Overview: It includes six chapters, viz. research scope, major manufacturers covered, market segments by type, market segments by application, study objectives, and years considered. It includes six chapters, viz. research scope, major manufacturers covered, market segments by type, market segments by application, study objectives, and years considered. Global Growth Trends: There are three chapters included in this section, i.e. industry trends, growth rate of key producers, and production analysis. There are three chapters included in this section, i.e. industry trends, growth rate of key producers, and production analysis. Market Share by Manufacturer: Here, production, revenue, and price analysis by manufacturer is included along with other chapters such as expansion plans and merger and acquisition, products offered by key manufacturers, and areas served and headquarters distribution. Here, production, revenue, and price analysis by manufacturer is included along with other chapters such as expansion plans and merger and acquisition, products offered by key manufacturers, and areas served and headquarters distribution. Market Size by Type: It includes analysis of price, production value market share, and production market share by type. It includes analysis of price, production value market share, and production market share by type. Market Size by Application: This section includes consumption analysis by application. This section includes consumption analysis by application. Profiles of Manufacturers: Here, leading players of the global Advanced Wound Care market are studied based on sales area, key products, gross margin, revenue, price, and production. Get Full Report Now at USD 2,900: https://www.qyresearch.com/settlement/pre/8f5ff023f768b980f4cbefa29b3c3a9c,0,1,Global%20Advanced%20Wound%20Care%20Industry%20Professional%202019 Value Chain and Sales Channel Analysis: It includes customer, distributor, value chain, and sales channel analysis. Market Forecast Production Side: In this part of the report, the authors have focused on production and production value forecast, key producers forecast, and production and production value forecast by type. About Us: QYResearch always pursuits high product quality with the belief that quality is the soul of business. Through years of effort and supports from huge number of customer supports, QYResearch consulting group has accumulated creative design methods on many high-quality markets investigation and research team with rich experience. Today, QYResearch has become the brand of quality assurance in consulting industry. Contact QY Research, INC. USA: +1 626 428 8800 China: +86 1082 945 717 Japan: +81 9038 009 273 India: +91 9766 478 224 Emails enquiry@qyresearch.com Web www.qyresearch.com North America Geriatric Care Services Market Size 2017 by Service Type (Home care, Adult Day Care and Institutional Care), by Country and Forecast 2018 to 2025. The study covers the North America geriatric care services market value for a period ranging between 2012 to 2025, where 2012 to 2017 imply the actual annual revenue with forecast between 2018 and 2025. The North America geriatric care services report also includes qualitative insights of the market such as drivers, restrains, PEST analysis and regulatory framework. The market will be growing at a substantial rate driven by the increased number of baby boomers entering the retirement years and the changing demographics of the country. Furthermore, modifications in the federal regulations, specifically for the Medicaid and medicare payments, is permitting flexible and increased payment alternatives. Request Sample Copy of This Research Report: https://adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/request-sample/591 North America Geriatric Care Services Market: Key Players are Brookdale Senior Living Inc., Extendicare Inc., Gentiva Health Services Inc., Kindred Healthcare Inc., Senior Care Centers of America, Sunrise Senior Living Inc., Genesis Healthcare Corp., Home Instead Senior Care Inc. and GGNSC Holdings LLC. The Market growth is attributed to improvements in the existing care models. Healthcare giants are becoming costumer centric by focusing on improving service quality rather than just increasing the revenues. Also, private owners are operating various small scale nursing homes and residential homes for elderly population. Mergers and acquisitions are also playing a major role in the growth of the Geriatric Care Services Market in North America. For instance, Genesis healthcare acquired Sun healthcare group which created the largest skilled nursing provider in US. The North America Geriatric Care Services Market is witnessing vivid opportunities owing to increasing consumer spending and per capita disposable incomes coupled with significant economic growth especially in Canada. Moreover, rising number of adult day care centers as well as increasing investments by governments of various economies especially on the development of adult day care centers is some other key aspects fueling the growth of the market. In addition, increasing life expectancy and increasing geriatric population is further anticipated to bolster the growth. Get more details about North America Geriatric Care Services Market: https://adroitmarketresearch.com/industry-reports/north-america-geriatric-care-services-market Who should buy this report? This study is suitable for industry participants and stakeholders in the geriatric care services industry. The report will benefit: Executives of geriatric care services companies that are engaged in the distribution and marketing Managers within financial institutions looking to publish recent and forecasted statistics pertaining to geriatric care services. Government organizations, regulatory authorities, policymakers and financial organizations looking for innovative solutions. Analysts, researchers, educators, strategy managers, and academic institutions looking for insights into the market to determine future strategies Some Key Highlight Points from TOC: Chapter 1. Executive Summary Chapter 2. Research Methodology Chapter 3. Market Outlook Chapter 4. North America Geriatric Care Services Type Overview Chapter 5. Company Profiles For Any Query on the North America Geriatric Care Services Market: https://adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/enquiry-before-buying/591 About US: Adroit Market Research is an India-based business analytics and consulting company. Our target audience is a wide range of corporations, manufacturing companies, product/technology development institutions and industry associations that require understanding of a markets size, key trends, participants and future outlook of an industry. We intend to become our clients knowledge partner and provide them with valuable market insights to help create opportunities that increase their revenues. We follow a code Explore, Learn and Transform. At our core, we are curious people who love to identify and understand industry patterns, create an insightful study around our findings and churn out money-making roadmaps. Contact Information: Ryan Johnson Account Manager Global 3131 McKinney Ave Ste 600, Dallas, TX 75204, U.S.A Phone No.: USA: +1 (214) 884-6068 / +91 9665341414 by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 2, 2019 Too often these days, TV dramas will add pop music to scenes in which producers apparently feel the drama is not heightened enough or otherwise expressed adequately. This new drama coming to the CW this Thursday called In The Dark lays the music on especially thick at least four times in the premiere episode in scenes that should have been dramatic enough on their own, but were not. You know the drill: A grown child reconciles with a parent, and sad music begins to play. Or two friends are having a heart-to-heart talk while strolling purposefully down a city street or through a leafless woods in winter. Cue music. It is the TV Blogs belief that if such scenes were better acted, written and choreographed, there would be no need for any of them to be enhanced musically this way. advertisement advertisement Much of the premiere episode of In The Dark, even the scenes in which music was not added, plays as if it just misses the dramatic mark. The show is about an unhappy young woman who is an addict. Her addictions include alcohol, drugs and sex. To put it mildly, she has low self-esteem. She also happens to be blind. So, while we have had plenty of addicted protagonists in TV dramas over the years (not to mention countless movies), this would seem to be the first such character who cannot see. Thus, her unmanageable addicts life carries this added burden that makes her life especially chaotic. And of course, theres a metaphor here too, if one chooses to look for one: She cannot see the chaos she has created in her life and in the lives of those close to her. In the premiere episode, she hits bottom, and seems to gain the ability to at least metaphorically visualize what she has done to harm others, in this case her parents. Whether she seeks help in future episodes either in therapy or a 12-step program remains to be seen. There is no sign of either in Episode One. The character, named Murphy, is played by Perry Mattfeld, an actress who is not sightless. Playing blind must present many challenges for an actor because at times in In The Dark, Mattfelds performance is not wholly persuasive. It is not entirely her fault. For example, in one scene, a man she is conversing with makes a gesture with one of his hands that is meant to illustrate something that he is saying. Judging by Murphys reaction, you cannot help but believe that she saw what he did. Writing the scene to include this hand gesture was careless. The shows first episode wandered all over the place. At various points, Murphy was a sex addict who said yes to anyones request to go to bed with her. At other times, she was a stone-cold drunk. Once sober, she was seen heading straight to the front of a drugstore line in front of other customers. She even demonstrated little or no affection for her seeing-eye dog. In addition to all that, she is a drug addict who habitually visits the same dark alley (or perhaps a blind alley) to meet a young African-American drug dealer whom she befriends. Then when he goes missing, she turns amateur sleuth and turns up a vital clue that eluded the clueless police department. All this, plus she works as a receptionist at her parents place of business -- some sort of facility for the blind that also trains and places guide dogs (or at least this is what I think they do; this was not entirely clear). The problem is, Murphy is generally seen at her workplace sleeping off her last binge, and in the process, behaving rudely to people who visit the facility. Two of them are a couple who wish to donate $10,000. After they encounter Murphy sleeping one off on the bench of an outdoor picnic table, they gladly entrust her with this $10,000. The scene makes no sense, which can also be said for this show in general. In The Dark premieres Thursday (April 4) at 9 p.m. Eastern on the CW. by Sarah Mahoney @mahoney_sarah, April 2, 2019 Betting that American women are currently craving a dose of comedy at least much as they long for new shoes, DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse is launching an ad campaign with actor Mindy Kaling spoofing all the moods supposedly made better by the right footwear. The footwear retailer says the campaign stems from research among its loyalty members, with 64% saying the right pair helps them feel more confident. The campaign, created by Translation, includes both 60-second and 30-second spots, directed by comedian Neal Brennan. A spokesperson says they are running in New York, Washington D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, where the company is headquartered. Theres also a 15-second video aimed just at its VIP Loyalty Club members. advertisement advertisement In the videos, Kaling riffs on shoes ranging from snakeskin booties (These make me want to get back together with my ex-husband -- and I dont even have one!) to sneakers that make you want to stand up and do theoretical lunges. Ads are also running on digital and social media platforms. Kaling has more than 11 million Twitter followers. If it seems as if Kaling is everywhere these days, youre not wrong. Shes also appeared in ads for McDonalds and Nationwide. Late Night, starring Kaling and Emma Thompson, is due in theaters in June, and last week, Netflix said it's teaming up with her for a coming-of-age comedy series based on her life. She's also in the midst of adapting Four Weddings and a Funeral for Hulu. Parent company Designer Brands recently released financial results posting its best fiscal year ever, with sales crossing the $3 billion mark, and same-store sales rising 6%. And the company is benefitting from the bankruptcy of rival Payless Shoe Source. But the fourth-quarter results alarmed investors, with U.S. sales slipping nearly 2% to $655.7 million. And instead of the expected profits, it posted a loss of $45.7 million. LITTLE ROCK, Ark. April 2, 2019 April 1, 2019 Arkansas John Ryan Arkansas Foster Care /PRNewswire/ -- Arkansas Health and Wellness announced today that, following the receipt of all required regulatory approvals, its parent company Centene Corporation has completed its acquisition of QCA Health Plan Inc., and QualChoice Life and Health Insurance Company, Inc.This transaction, effective, will expand Centene's footprint inthrough its local healthcare entities Arkansas Health & Wellness and Arkansas Total Care. These organizations combined provide healthcare to over 200,000 Arkansans through their health insurance marketplace (Ambetter), Medicaid (Arkansas Total Care), and Medicare Advantage (Allwell) products."We are pleased to welcome QualChoice into our family. This transaction allows us to expand our efforts in improving the lives of our fellow Arkansans, and will ensure QualChoice customers continue to enjoy the same high standard of care through quality, affordable health coverage." said, President and CEO of Arkansas Health and Wellness. "Our organizations have a shared mission of providing accessible, affordable healthcare, and we look forward to continuing to serve the healthcare needs of our community."QualChoice customers will continue to be served through the Arkansas Health Insurance Marketplace individual market and the group segment, which serves employers of all size throughout the state ofArkansas Health & Wellness offers affordable health care solutions to help fulfill our primary purpose: Helping Arkansas Live Better. We serve under-insured and uninsured populations through our Health Insurance Marketplace and Medicare Advantage products. Arkansas Health & Wellness is one of three partner organizations that form Arkansas Total Care, providing whole health solutions for Medicaid beneficiaries with IDD and Behavioral Health needs. Arkansas Health & Wellness is a wholly owned subsidiary of Centene Corporation, a leading multi-national healthcare enterprise. For more information, visit ARHealthWellness.com.Centene Corporation, a Fortune 100 company, is a diversified, multi-national healthcare enterprise that provides a portfolio of services to government sponsored and commercial healthcare programs, focusing on under-insured and uninsured individuals. Many receive benefits provided under Medicaid, including the State Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), as well as Aged, Blind or Disabled (ABD),and Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS), in addition to other state-sponsored programs, Medicare (including the Medicare prescription drug benefit commonly known as "Part D"), dual eligible programs and programs with the U.S. Department of Defense. Centene also provides healthcare services to groups and individuals delivered through commercial health plans. Centene operates local health plans and offers a range of health insurance solutions. It also contracts with other healthcare and commercial organizations to provide specialty services including behavioral health management, care management software, correctional healthcare services, dental benefits management, commercial programs, home-based primary care services, life and health management, vision benefits management, pharmacy benefits management, specialty pharmacy and telehealth services.Centene uses its investor relations website to publish important information about the Company, including information that may be deemed material to investors. Financial and other information about Centene is routinely posted and is accessible on Centene's investor relations website, http://www.centene.com/investors. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/arkansas-health--wellness-parent-company-completes-transaction-with-qualchoice-300822532.html SOURCE Arkansas Health & Wellness JACKSONVILLE, Fla. April 2, 2019 Hugh Durden Geoffrey Rogers Richard Walsh Wilmington, Delaware Orlando, Florida Larry Moss Florida Board Delaware June 1999 Washington Delaware Harvard Business School's Washington Florida Trend Central Florida Orlando University of Central Florida $500 million Enterprise Florida Wilmington, Del. Orlando, Fla. /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Robert G. Riney, Chairman of the Board of The Nemours Foundation, and, Chairman of the Alfred I. duPont Charitable Trust, today announced the election ofandto The Nemours Foundation Board of Directors. Mr. Rogers is a Regional Managing Director for Glenmede Trust Company,and Mr. Walsh is Chairman and CEO of the Knob Hill Companies, a media, investment and strategic consulting firm in"The professional experience and commitment to children that Rick and Geoff bring to the Nemours Board are a terrific asset," said Dr., president and CEO of Nemours Children's Health System. "Rick has served on ourof Managers for several years. His knowledge of Nemours, community partners, and the needs of the state of Florida make his contributions especially meaningful. Geoff is a member of the Alfred I. duPont Charitable Trust, the entity designated by our founder, and whose vision launched Nemours more than 80 years ago. Geoff brings that very important connection to the Board and to our work, in addition to his understanding of the needs of the communities we serve in the Delaware Valley. We look forward to continuing to do great work together on behalf of children."Mr. Rogers oversees the day-to-day operations of Glenmede'soffice, which he launched in. He brings more than three decades of estate planning and financial services experience to this position. Prior to joining Glenmede, Mr. Rogers was a vice president for Scudder Private Investment Counsel, responsible for new business development. He has also served as a vice president with the Wilmington Trust and Delaware Trust Companies, now operating as Wells Fargo.He is a member of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Nominating Committee, a board member ofCollege, Winterthur Museum (emeritus), Operation Warm and the Delaware Business Roundtable. He serves as a co-trustee of the Alfred I. duPont Charitable Trust. Mr. Rogers is past chair of the Board of the Delaware Bankers Association, the Sanford School, and the Estate Planning Council of, the planned giving committee of the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, Wilmington Renaissance and the Wilmington Tax Group. He is a graduate ofAdvanced Management Program and received his Bachelor of Arts fromCollege.Mr. Walsh joined the Nemours Florida Board of Managers in 2012, bringing experience in corporate governance, strategic business planning and regulatory requirements, and a personal commitment to health care delivery, higher education, and community. Prior to founding Knob Hill, Mr. Walsh was senior vice president, Corporate Affairs of Darden Restaurants, and a founding member of the leadership team that took Darden public in 1995. He also served as a member of Darden's Executive Committee and as a trustee of the Darden Restaurants Foundation. At Darden, Mr. Walsh helped establish health care plans and wellness initiatives for all employees.He has been recognized as Orlando Business Journal's "Businessman of the Year," one of "Florida's 100 Most Influential" bymagazine, one of the "25 Most Powerful People in" by the Orlando Sentinel and of the "50 Most Powerful People in" by Orlando Magazine. Mr. Walsh serves on the Board of the Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation, Seaside National Bank and Trust, Blue Orb Software Inc., ABC Fine Wine & Spirits, and LSQ Holdings. He also serves on theFoundation Board, and is leading theUCF Ignite Capital Campaign. He is a past chair of the Florida State Chamber of Commerce and chairman emeritus of the UCF Board of Trustees, served on the Governor's Florida Tourism Council, the Governor's Task Force on Affordable Healthcare,About Nemours Children's Health System Nemours is an internationally recognized children's health system that owns and operates the two free-standing children's hospitals: the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in, and Nemours Children's Hospital in, along with outpatient facilities in five states, delivering pediatric primary, specialty and urgent care. Nemours also powers the world's most-visited website for information on the health of children and teens, KidsHealth.org, and offers on-demand, online video patient visits through Nemours CareConnect. Nemours ReadingBrightstart.org is a program dedicated to preventing reading failure in young children, grounded in Nemours' understanding that child health and learning are inextricably linked, and that reading level is a strong predictor of adult health.Established as The Nemours Foundation through the legacy and philanthropy of Alfred I. duPont, Nemours provides pediatric clinical care, research, education, advocacy and prevention programs to families in the communities it serves.SOURCE Nemours Foundation SAN ANTONIO April 02, 2019 Austria Belgium Netherlands Luxembourg Australia David Spencer Heath Canada United Kingdom France Germany David G. Baer Todd Rasmussen Jonathan Eliason /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Prytime Medical Devices Inc., an innovative medical device company that designs, develops and commercializes minimally invasive solutions for hemorrhage control, today announced global expansion of their flagship ER-REBOA Catheter (Resuscitative Endovascular Balloon Occlusion of the Aorta), and mobilization of distributors inandGlobalization of the ER-REBOA Catheter is part of the company's plan to expand the commercialization in support of physicians, healthcare practitioners and their patients. Designed, developed and researched with the military, the ER-REBOA Catheter is a 7 Fr compatible, guidewire free balloon catheter designed to support rapid and immediate hemorrhage control in the emergency and critical care environments."Formalizing new distribution channels is another positive step in our global expansion plans," said, President and Chief Executive Officer of Prytime Medical Devices. "As a small company, we are proud of the impact our product has made providing medical personnel a tool to stop bleeding." Spencer is co-founder of the medical technology company, and known for his passion for technology commercialization and economic development.The ER-REBOA Catheter was 510(k) cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2015, granted CE Mark approval in 2016, and licensed byin 2017. These approvals opened the door for expansion into the global markets. Today, the ER-REBOA Catheter is available to clinicians in more than 15 countries including U.S., Canada,and"Our company's strategic alliance with distributors expands availability of the ER-REBOA Catheter in the global marketplace," said, Ph.D., Vice President of Market Development at Prytime Medical Devices. "We are enthusiastic about our global expansion and are just getting started." The company has plans to expand to other parts of the world where healthcare technology like the ER-REBOA Catheter is needed.With the ER-REBOA Catheter, designed for 7 Fr sheath compatibility, the innovative device reduces the need for surgical repair at the access site, while the guidewire free design supports rapid placement of the device. This unique device can help clinicians improve patient care by stopping the bleeding, and allowing time for medical personnel to gain definitive hemorrhage control.The company's rapid global expansion and alliance with distributors may help save more patients' lives when the ER-REBOA Catheter is used within the overall management and resuscitation of the patient."We look forward to our partnership with dynamic companies that also believe no one should bleed to death; the sooner you stop bleeding the better," said Spencer.About Prytime Medical Devices, Inc. Prytime Medical Devices, Inc. designs, develops and commercializes minimally invasive solutions for hemorrhage control. We are proud to be a part of bringing military medical innovation to the civilian marketplace. We believe no one should bleed to death. The sooner you stop bleeding the better. The underlying intellectual property for the ER-REBOA Catheter was conceived by experienced military vascular and trauma surgeons, COL.and Dr., based on lessons learned on the battlefront during combat.About REBOA Resuscitative Endovascular Balloon Occlusion of the Aorta is a minimally invasive technique using a balloon catheter to temporarily occlude large vessels in support of hemorrhage control. In trauma, hemorrhage is the leading cause of potentially survivable death: Non-compressible truncal hemorrhage is of particular interest, because there are limited clinical options to temporarily occlude large vessels during truncal hemorrhage. Similarly, clinicians report REBOA use in other emergent hemorrhage control situations, such as postpartum hemorrhage, adjunct during surgical procedures, interventional radiology and pre-hospital settings.SOURCE Prytime Medical Devices, Inc Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs Sia Anagnostopoulou spoke on Euronews before Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras first formal visit to North Macedonia, following signing of the Prespa Agreement. Ms Anagnostopoulou stressed, among other things, that: This culture of understanding and mutual trust which can be seen in the Prespa Agreement materialises in practice. This is because the agreements that will be concluded are to the mutual benefit of both peoples. It is of great importance, because we see that this was the wish of the local communities which now, thanks to the Prespa Agreement, are involved in the larger picture. Referring to the issue of commercial designations, the Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs commented: We are well aware that companies of North Macedonia were using the trade name Macedonian etc. up to the signing of the Prespa Agreement, but mainly they indicated that they originate from the Republic of Macedonia, as was its constitutional name at the time. For example, there was quite a buzz about China. Yet, nobody is aware that, since 2000, at least up to the signing of the Prespa Agreement, at least 10 Greek companies were unable to obtain the commercial designation Macedonian since, of course, there was no agreement between the two countries. SANILAC COUNTY A billboard that sparked controversy around the Thumb and entire state of Michigan this past weekend will be taken down, according to health officials. On Friday, a billboard sponsored by the Sanilac County Health Department, started being shared on social media due by users who felt it was too controversial. The billboard showed a teenage pregnant mother on one side, and a teen with her high school diploma on the other side. In between the two, the billboard stated "You can choose, this, or this. Take control of your future." The Right to Life of Michigan Facebook page posted a photo of the billboard, claiming the message "seems to be that young women should be ashamed to be pregnant and have to choose between motherhood and their education. This is the abortion mindset that pits mother against child." Health officials didn't expect viewers would interpret the billboard as being pro-abortion. "It came as a bit of a surprise to us that people thought that it was anything but a teenage pregnancy prevention billboard," said Bryant Wilke, environmental health director at the Sanilac County Health Department. "Not to get confused with any pro-choice movements or anything like that, this was specifically meant for teen pregnancy prevention." Wilke noted the billboard had been in circulation for about 18 months in the county, and he was surprised it drew controversy all of a sudden. Many mothers, who were pregnant teens in the county, and across the Thumb, shared their success stories on Facebook over the weekend, including Destiny Drain of Sandusky. "I am a graduate of Sandusky Jr/Sr High school," Drain posted on Facebook. "I got pregnant my junior year and was still able to walk and graduate with my class. I was accepted by six colleges my senior year and am now attending Saginaw Valley State University as a pre-med major." "Having a baby wasn't ideal at the time sure, but I never once thought that I couldn't be successful if I went through with it," she added. "My daughter is my inspiration, my little extra push when I need it." In 2018, Sanilac County had a birth rate of 22 births per 1,000 females in the 15 to 19 age range. "You can look at public health statistics in our area," Wilke said. "Typically, when you look at the statistics, if you get pregnant between the ages of 15 and 19, you drop out of high school. When you look at the billboard, obviously there are no percentages or any types of statistics up there. There should have been more on the billboard to explain it." Wilke wanted to make clear that the Sanilac County Health Department works with the best interests of the public in mind and that they hope to continue to inform the public about teenage pregnancy. "After we got so much input from the public, we took a look at it and decided that it was not sending the right message that we wanted to send, so we're pulling it," Wilke said. "We hope that they know that we're sincere in wanting to create a better environment for Sanilac County residents, including our teenagers, our mothers, fathers and children. That's what we stand for. By all means, if through this, it starts to educate about teenage pregnancy in our community, that's a great thing, but we want to do it with appropriate messages." BAD AXE A handful of Thumb residents are speaking out against the militarys proposal to expand its airspace in the Thumb area for training purposes. The Air National Guard wants to modify and create new Military Operating Areas (MOAs) in the Alpena Special Use Airspace Complex. Modifications to the airspace would include new low-altitude MOAs in parts of Huron, Sanilac and Tuscola counties. The MOAs are not set in stone and can be modified. Residents voiced their concerns during a recent Huron County Board of Commissioners meeting. The discussion was spearheaded by Port Austin resident Terry Ross, who presented information he obtained from the militarys website www.alpenacrtc.ang.af.mil. The lowest an aircraft can currently practice maneuvers at is 6,000 feet, but under the current proposal, that level would be lowered to 500 feet. I have enjoyed the peace and quiet in Huron County. Its one of the things that attracted us to this area, Ross said. I would not like to encounter this sort of aircraft activity. Resident Ann McBride told commissioners she recently became aware of the proposal and is still gathering information. However, she felt it could make an impact on the Thumbs tourism. Will our windows rattle? Will our dishes and restaurants rattle? Will our teachers have to pause teaching as they fly over? McBride asked. Are people going to have more heart attacks because whoever is prone to them might be startled? At this point, Im opposed to the expansion because I dont know all the information, she said. All I can think is the negative. Oliver Township resident Richard Krohn recalled two jets colliding in a crash in Oliver Township years ago. Two F-16A fighter planes collided during a training flight in March 1992, killing one pilot while the other parachuted to safety, the Associated Press reported. Debris covered a 6-mile area, but no injuries were reported on the ground. Debris was scattered around nearby residents yards and a 4-foot-long pipe crashed through the roof of a house. Pieces came down on one of our farms,Krohn said. I seen these pilots hanging from the trees So there is danger. If they want to play games and practice, it should be a lot higher than 500 feet especially with all these wind turbines. I think its going to be a big danger. Id be against it, he added. In November 1991, the AP reported a jet went out of control and crashed near Port Hope during a training mission. The pilot drowned when he and his parachute were blown into Lake Huron. We have to have our military, Harbor Beach Dennis ONeil said. Should they train here in Huron County? They can. Just go up higher. Thrushman later asked commissioners what options, if any, the public has to slow down the militarys timeline. Can we have more informational meetings? Can we have even bring it to some type of vote? she questioned. During the boards final comment, Commissioner John Bodis said he previously spoke with military personnel about the proposal. The military said they would be very flexible and accommodating, Bodis said. A 45-day opportunity for the public to voice any concerns or questions is expected to become available later this month. It will be available by visiting www.alpenartc.ang.af.mil. UPPER THUMB Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has responded to letters from state lawmakers requesting a meeting to discuss the curtailing of construction of the new $115 million state hospital in Tuscola County. Your letter has been received and I have asked the lead agency Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to respond. Should you need any further assistance, regarding this or anything else, please do not hesitate to let me know, states a letter from Whitmer in response to an invite from Sen. Kevin Daley and Rep. Phil Green to visit Caro and see how important it is to keep the state hospital in Tuscola County. Robert Gordon, Department of Health and Human Services director, called for a reassessment of the former decision on the Caro Centers reconstruction because of concerns about staffing shortages; a lack of new staff recruitment and active permanent psychiatrist on staff; and water accessibility. The city of Caro and Indianfields Township were unable to come to an agreement on spending $2.4 million to extend a water line 1.9 miles to the center. Tuscola County commissioners hired an engineer to determine if a viable solution can be found by using wells that are on site at the Caro Center. The engineers have determined it is viable to use the water that is there with some upgrades and at a much lower cost, said Tuscola County Controller Mike Hoagland. The state has spent more than $3 million toward building the new hospital in Caro, and Gordon wants to hire an outside consultant to review the proposed hospital project to determine what is in the best interest of those needing services. Hoagland said all of that information was given to the state last year when it was decided Caro would be the location of a new state psychiatric hospital. At recent Tuscola County Board of Commissioners meetings, officials discussed the option of contracting with a lobbying firm. Quotes have been received from Clark Hill and Capital Services the countys legal counsel. Public testimony will be heard on April 8 regarding the Department of Health and Human Services appropriations budget, and there is an appropriation meeting regarding the 2019-20 budget on April 10. Commissioners unanimously authorized signing an agreement with Capital Services for a three-month retainer to represent Tuscola County in regard to the Caro Center. The Caro Center brings an estimated $54 million in revenue to the county. It has 349 employees, and another 398 jobs indirectly benefit from it. While this issue is being worked out, commissioners urge letters of support for keeping the state hospital local to be sent to: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, P.O. Box 30013, Lansing, MI, 48909. Constituents can also call Whitmer's office at 517-373-3400 or 517-335-7858. Letters also can be penned to Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Robert Gordon, 333 S. Grand Ave, P.O. Box 30195, Lansing, MI, 48909, or residents can call 517-373-3740. The State Board of Education has canceled its Wednesday meeting because Gov. Ned Lamont hasnt yet appointed enough members for the board to have a quorum. Last month, six of the members terms expired, leaving five remaining board members. The board vacancies have also been an impediment in the selection of a new education commissioner. Lamont has a preferred candidate, but under state law the Board of Education recommends a candidate or two to the governor. Then the governor nominates his choice to the Connecticut General Assembly. Paul Mounds, Lamonts chief operating officer, said the governor will be appointing new members to the board soon, possibly including reappointments of some of the board members who retired last month. Laura Stefon, chief of staff and legislative liaison for the state Department of Education, said the lack of a quorum this month is not causing a problem for the state agency. Theres nothing we cant push off until next month, Stefon said this week. Were not at a critical point. Allan B. Taylor, chairman of the board and one of its five remaining members, said earlier this year that he thinks it makes sense to have the new board members in place before the board recommends a candidate for commissioner. State Education Commissioner Dianna Wentzell has agreed to stay in her post on an interim basis until a new education commissioner is selected. MIDDLETOWN Work on the project to create sidewalk extensions along the length of Main Street launched Monday, the first day of the states street improvement season. This is the first of three state Department of Transportation projects intended to increase pedestrian safety, allow traffic downtown to move more efficiently, and address Middletowns Route 9 access by removing stoplights, something engineers hope will reduce accidents. The latter project will take into consideration concerns from the public following a third public meeting later in the year. Were going to keep plugging away, coming up with solutions and trying to explain them to everybody, said state Transportation Supervising Engineer Erik A. Jarboe. The first two sessions took place in July 2016 and March 2018, during which dozens of concerned citizens voiced their opinions. Eighty percent of the $70 million costs would be borne by the federal government and 20 percent by the state. Expenditures are broken out between sidewalk bumpouts ($1.8 million), intersection improvements ($3.25 million) and traffic signal removal ($65 million). The most recent three-year traffic accident statistics, from Jan. 1, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2017, show there were 528 collisions, which caused 121 injuries, including a single fatality, on state roads within the project limits of all three projects, according to the DOT. Eighteen bumpouts, along with drainage areas, which eventually will be in place from Union to Green streets, were originally supposed to be part of intersection improvements on Main Street at St. Johns Square and Washington and Main streets, Jarboe said. We got a little bit of pushback from the bumpouts, because trucks cant make turns, so we want to make sure there is a designated right-turn lane at Route 66 and Main. As a result, curb extensions will not be constructed there, Jarboe said. Its a lot safer for pedestrians. This will put pedestrians in a visible location, instead of being tucked way back at the front of parked cars, way out of the sight line, Jarboe said. It prevents a car from cutting to the right and turning on red, said John Hall, chairman of the citys Complete Streets Committee, as well as executive director of the Jonah Center for Earth and Art. The committee pretty easily agreed that was a good idea based on best practices for urban street design, and what you see in other communities where its pleasant to walk, such as parts of New Haven, West Hartford, Northhampton, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis, as well as Europe, Hall said. We separated the pedestrian phase rather than doing them concurrently, Jarboe said, pointing to places such as New York City, which has found pedestrians enjoy a big benefit when the crossing signal length and distance between sidewalks is shortened. Presently, at Washington and Main, there is a 28-second wait as walkers make their way along a 97-foot distance. If someone hits the cross signal, for instance, and crosses before the walk light engages, cars at all four intersections just sit there waiting. Curb changes mean walkers will have a maximum of 14.5 seconds to make their way 55 feet from one corner to the other, Jarboe said. The result is less exposure to traffic, adding to pedestrian safety. Hall acknowledged some people hes spoken to are uneasy about the curb project, which was minimally addressed at the public session a year ago at Middletown High School. The majority of the focus was on the Route 9 improvements and how it will affect the North End. The Complete Streets Committee feels its a positive thing. Itll create a nicer place downtown, Hall said. The big problem is the congestion on Main Street. The pedestrian cycles are so long. Often drivers are stuck at the intersection waiting while nothing is happening, Hall said. Its a long wait for the clock to tick down. In a letter to the editor published Monday in The Press, Hall outlined what he feels are the pluses of the project. The approaches to crosswalks are aesthetically pleasing, make pedestrians more visible through improved sight lines, add space for plantings and other amenities, reduce illegal parking at corner crosswalks, and reduce vehicle turn speeds by narrowing the roadway, Hall wrote. The places where its nicest to walk, feel the safest to walk, are places that have these bumpouts, islands of refuge, and different things so the pedestrian can stand where vehicles cant go, added Hall, who said hes optimistic about the changes. The effect is itll move traffic more efficiently and at slower speeds. One of the problem in urban areas is when drivers are frustrated and stopped, and waiting more periods of time. They want to go fast because theyve killed so much time waiting, Hall aid. If traffic moving steadily and the waits are shorter, it seems to have a calming effect on the whole environment. The Alca Construction Co. is taking the lead on work downtown. As such, Joe Calafiore has been tasked as project engineer by the state. Curb work will take place during off-peak hours, he said. They really want to go in there and hit it hard, and get out, so traffic wont be bottled up, Calafiore said. This is a chance for a significant improvement for downtown Middletown. Its not an irreversible measure that were taking. Lets give it a try see how it works, Hall said. For project information, visit ct.gov/dot. MIDDLETOWN The jury in the Whiting Forensic Hospital abuse trial is expected to get the case Tuesday. The defense for Marc Cusson, a nursing supervisor at the facility, rested its case at 4:30 p.m. Monday. The trial began March 25. Middlesex Superior Court Judge Jose A. Suarez told lawyers both sides to be ready Tuesday to go over the charge for the jury with him and then make their closing arguments. Suarez said it is his intention to give the case to the jury by noon Tuesday. Cusson is the most senior of 10 health aides at the hospital indicted in the alleged abuse of a severely mentally ill patient at the facility, which is located on the grounds of the Connecticut Valley Hospital. Cusson, a Southington resident, faces eight counts of cruelty to person, a felony that carries three years in jail for each count. He also faces eight counts of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. Cusson and the other nine employees are accused of targeting William Shehadi, who was acquitted of killing his father in Greenwich in 1995 because of mental disease or defect. In all, nearly three-dozen Whiting employees were implicated in the abuse case. A number of his fellow defendants have either pleaded guilty or been convicted in the abuse case. Cusson is the only one of the 10 defendants to plead not guilty and demand a jury trial. He testified all day Friday as lawyers Norm A. Pattis and Kevin Smith opened their defense. Under questioning by Smith, Cusson repeatedly denied harming Shehadi, as he watched some two-and-a-half hours of surveillance video. Actions the prosecution said were cruelties Cusson said were benign efforts on his part to de-escalate developing crises or deflect Shehadis often violent reactions. He acknowledged putting both his legs around Shehadi but said that was simply a means of swaddling Shehadi, who suffers from a host of mental illnesses including paranoia. He is also on the autism spectrum. His brother and conservator, Al Shehadi, has acknowledged his brother is prone eruptions and anger that can include spitting, biting and scratching. But in none of the videos that were played for the jury was Shehadi the aggressor, Al Shehadi said. When he finished testified Friday, an emotional Cusson described Bill Shehadi as his friend. Monday, it was prosecutions turn to confront Cusson about various images on the videos. On cross-examination by Assistant States Attorney Jeffrey Doskos, Cusson frequently said I dont remember to a variety of details. Cusson admitted the swaddling he said he had practiced on Shehadi was not an authorized form of treatment but rather something he came up with on his own. Doskos repeatedly pressed Cusson to admit that placing one leg behind Shehadi and the other in front was a form of restraint. Cusson denied the contention. His freedom is restricted by your legs, Doskos said, which is the definition of restraint. The prosecutor also bore in on the fact that several of the techniques Cusson said he created to handle Shehadi were never mentioned in the daily reports he filed on Shehadis care. When Cusson said Shehadi had repeatedly used a racial epithet or told him F you, Doskos demanded to know exactly how many times if any Shehadi had said those things. One frame taken from a video showed Cusson walking into Shehadis room holding a cup of water or juice (Cusson couldnt remember which). Doskos said Cusson poured the liquid on Shehadis head and then used a mop to mop Shehadis head. He also challenged Cussons assertion that he used the same mop to mop Shehadis urine-stained bed and removed the sheets from the bed without putting on gloves. On more than one occasion the video showed what Doskos said was quite a struggle but which Cusson did not mention on his daily report. Doskos ended his cross-examination at 12:20, and Smith asked Cusson follow-up questions designed to show that Whiting did not provide training for nurses on a wide range of issues including how to deal with people on the autism spectrum. After the obligatory lunch break, Smith called more than half-a-dozen character witnesses who testified to Cussons reputation as a peaceful man. Peter Henry served as a unit director at Whiting for 10 years. He described Cusson as a very caring and gentle person and someone very well suited to the role of nursing supervisor. Henry agreed when Smith said Cusson was not Nurse Ratched, the villainess in Ken Keseys book One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. jmill@middletownpress.com 'Truly Not Alone': Air Force Spouse Trying to Improve Mental Health for Military Families on Okinawa Mental Health Peer Alliance meets at Kadena twice a week for activities like art therapy, exercise for mothers and small... The U.S. Air Force has once again halted deliveries of its new KC-46 Pegasus tankers. Speaking to members of the House Armed Services Committee, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson revealed the service recently stopped deliveries because more foreign object debris, or FOD, was found in the aircraft. "The Air Force again halted acceptance of new KC-46 tanker aircraft as we continue to work with Boeing to ensure that every aircraft delivered meets the highest quality and safety standards," spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said in a statement following Wilson's comments. "This week, our inspectors identified additional foreign object debris and areas where Boeing did not meet quality standards. The issues are unrelated to design or engineering specifications," she said. Related content: Air Force leaders, including Dr. Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, have been meeting with Boeing to establish "additional corrective action plans" before the service can again accept aircraft into its inventory, Stefanek said. The decision to halt acceptance was made March 23, she added. Roper has called foreign object debris -- trash, tools, nuts and bolts, and other miscellaneous items found scattered inside the aircraft -- "simply unacceptable." "Debris translates into a safety issue," he said during a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces hearing March 14. All aircraft under assembly are supposed to be swept routinely for debris. Loose objects are dangerous because they can cause damage over time. That same week, Roper told audiences at the McAleese and Associates conference in Washington, D.C., that Boeing needs a culture change at its assembly-line facilities. "I have big concerns about the FOD issue because that's simply adherence to process," he told reporters after his speech at the conference. "It has nothing to do with design; it has nothing to do with production. It's simply following processes that Boeing has on the books, and having a culture all the way down to the mechanic level that embraces them." He added, "[The aircraft] should be clean on delivery. If we don't see progress, we'll have to raise the stakes." In February, the Air Force stopped accepting deliveries of new tankers over FOD problems only weeks after the first aircraft was transported from Boeing's Washington state facility to McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas. The Seattle Times first reported that the debris led to a week-long grounding of the tankers and safety concerns from top service officials. Deliveries resumed March 11. The continued FOD issue comes as the Air Force grapples with other problems with the aircraft. The service said in January said it would accept the tanker, based on the 767 airliner, despite the fact it has a number of deficiencies, mainly with its Remote Vision System. The service currently has seven KC-46As in its inventory. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214. President Donald Trump's nominee to head NATO and U.S. forces in Europe backs canceling F-35 sales to Turkey if the NATO ally continues with plans to buy a Russian anti-air system designed to shoot them down. Turkey's commitment to acquiring Russia's advanced S-400 anti-air system, despite its intention to buy 100 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, is unacceptable, Air Force Lt. Gen. Tod Wolters said Tuesday at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. "I concur with this committee's belief that the S-400 and the F-35 are not compatible, and if Turkey proceeds down a path to procure and operate the S-400, they should not get the F-35," he said. "I would contend that we all understand that Turkey is an important ally in the region, but it's absolutely unsustainable to support co-location of an F-35 and S-400." In addition, the S-400 system is not interoperable with NATO air defenses. The Russian system "speaks a different language than NATO English, and it certainly is not interoperable," Wolters said. Related content: He made the remarks a day after the Pentagon announced that shipments of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s fifth-generation F-35s to Turkey had been suspended. "The United States has been clear that Turkey's acquisition of the S-400 is unacceptable," said acting Pentagon spokesman Charles Summers Jr. Until Turkey cancels delivery of the S-400 system, "the United States has suspended deliveries and activities associated with the standup of Turkey's F-35 operational capability. Should Turkey procure the S-400, their continued participation in the F-35 program is at risk," Summers said. Turkey took delivery of two F-35s at Fort Worth, Texas last June, and Turkish pilots have been training on the F-35 at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona. The U.S. had offered the Patriot air defense system to Turkey, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pressed ahead with acquiring the S-400, adding to the increasingly fractious relationship between the U.S. and its NATO ally. Erdogan has aggressively pursued closer relations with Russia and Iran, and has also repeatedly threatened to attack the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces backed by the U.S. in northeastern Syria. Turkey has shown no signs of backing away from the deal with Russia. Last week, at a joint news conference in Turkey with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said, "We have an agreement with Russia, and we are bound by it." Wolters, currently commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, spoke at his confirmation hearing for promotion to four-star rank and to succeed retiring Army Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti in the dual role as supreme commander of the 29-member NATO alliance and U.S. European Command. He was joined at the hearing by Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, who has been nominated to succeed Marine Gen. Thomas Waldhauser as commander of U.S. Africa Command. At the hearing, both Wolters and Townsend said their main concerns are a resurgent Russia seeking to counter U.S. influence and undermine allies and China's growing strategic and economic ties in Europe and Africa. China's interest in Africa is primarily economic, but it is also after "access and influence," as shown by the establishment of its first overseas military base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, a few miles from the main U.S. base in the region, Townsend said. He said the Chinese are seeking "access and influence, to our detriment." Both Townsend and Wolters were warmly endorsed by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, the committee chairman, and Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, the ranking member. There appeared to be little opposition to their swift confirmations. Editor's Note: This story has been updated to correct the timeline regarding when Turkey took delivery of its first two F-35s. -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. The Marine Corps identified the two officers killed when their AH-1Z Viper helicopter crashed during a training mission in Arizona on Saturday night. Maj. Matthew M. Wiegand, 34, and Capt. Travis W. Brannon, 30, died in the crash, Marine officials said Monday. The two were conducting routine training at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma as part of the semi-annual Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course, which prepares pilots for real-world missions. Wiegand, from Ambler, Pennsylvania, was assigned to Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One, based at Yuma. Brannon was assigned to the Hawaii-based Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 367. "It is a somber day for the entire Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command (MAGTFTC) as we mourn this tremendous loss," Brig. Gen. Roger Turner Jr., head of the command, said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers remain with their families and loved ones during this extremely difficult time." The Marine Corps is investigating the cause of the accident. The helicopter crashed at about 8:45 p.m. on Saturday, but no additional details about the incident have been released. Wiegand joined the Marine Corps in 2008 and held qualifications in the AH-1W Super Cobra and AH-1Z Viper helicopters. He had deployed to Okinawa, Japan, and was previously based at Naval Station Pensacola in Florida and Camp Pendleton, California. Brannon was attending Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course at the time of the crash. He had deployed to Australia as part of Marine Rotational Force-Darwin and was also previously based at Pensacola and Camp Pendleton. "We join the families of Maj. Wiegand and Capt. Brannon in mourning the loss of a loved one," Col. Kelvin Gallman, Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One's commanding officer, said in a statement. "Our most valued assets are the individual Marines and our primary focus is supporting the families during this difficult time." -- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins. A court case that challenges the authority of the Feres doctrine in cases of military medical malpractice was not among the 150-plus petitions rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday. The Feres doctrine is the controversial 69-year-old court ruling that prohibits service members from suing the federal government for injuries deemed incidental to military service. The case, Daniel v. United States, was to be distributed to the Supreme Court justices for conference on March 29, meaning they were set to discuss it Friday and to announce their decision to accept or deny it on Monday. But when the order was released this morning, the court had accepted one new case and rejected hundreds of others. The Daniel case was not among the rejections. A spokeswoman for Daniel's attorney said he awaits word as to whether the case is being rescheduled for conference. Attorneys who favor reconsideration of the Feres doctrine say the delay offers hope that the "Supreme Court has taken an immediate interest in revisiting" the ruling. Related: "It's absolutely critical for the Supreme Court to revisit this issue because it is unfair to our service members," said Lloyd Bell, an Atlanta-based malpractice attorney and former major in the Army Judge Advocate General Corps. "This is real injustice to military personnel because what it says essentially is that U.S. military personnel are not entitled to the same rights that civilians are entitled to when they've been harmed by medical malpractice, he added. The plaintiff, Walter Daniel, is a former Coast Guard officer whose wife, Rebekah "Moani" Daniel died during childbirth at Naval Hospital Bremerton, Washington, in March 2014. The lawsuit alleges that the doctors failed to provide prompt medical treatment when Daniel, a Navy lieutenant who worked as a nurse at the hospital, began bleeding excessively. She died four hours after giving birth. As a result of the Feres ruling -- a decision that encompasses three separate court cases dating back to 1950 -- U.S. military personnel can only sue the government in limited circumstances under the Federal Tort Claims Act. They cannot sue for injuries sustained on active duty or resulting from the negligence of other military personnel -- a prohibition seen as vital for protecting those who make crucial battlefield decisions, including operational commanders and combat doctors and medics. But Feres extends beyond the battlefield. Troops can't sue the government for medical or legal malpractice. Bell said changing the ruling to allow service members recourse in their own medical malpractice cases would address several issues: it would give them the same rights afforded family members harmed in the same military medical facilities, and it would hold military physicians accountable, improving safety for other patients. "If people have immunity, there's less incentive to practice to the standard of care if you are not faced with potential financial consequences of malpractice," Bell said. Bell said while he has professional concern for the Daniel case, his interest is also deeply personal: his brother Noland Bell, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who served in the Army National Guard, died of Stage IV lung cancer after physicians failed to do initial tests when he first exhibited symptoms. "My personal experience when I was active duty is the quality of physicians in the overall hospitals was very good," he said. "But my brother's case was completely preventable if they had diagnosed him a year and a half earlier when he first exhibited symptoms. There needs to be a recourse, a consequence, to ensure these things don't happen again." -- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @patriciakime. As the Navy advances plans for a 10-ship "ghost fleet," leaders are assessing how much decision-making power to give large unmanned vessels that can operate without any humans aboard. The Navy wants $400 million in fiscal 2020 to build two "large unmanned surface vessels." Budget documents show service leaders plan to request $2.7 billion to build 10 of the ships over the next five years. But with the programs still largely in the research and development phase, the plans raise questions about what the Navy is actually planning to buy, and how those ships would function in the real world. Not only is it unclear exactly what these future unmanned ships will look like, but also what capabilities they'll have. "Doing [research and development] and figuring out exactly the capabilities that we need, it's critical," James Geurts, the Navy's assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition, recently told lawmakers. "...The real R&D is in a lot of the guts: the autonomy, the decision-making, how are we going to control it, how are we going to do those things?" The service has completed the first phase of testing on its large unmanned surface vessel, Geurts said, but much about those plans is shrouded in secrecy. Earlier this year, the Navy's 132-foot-long medium-unmanned vessel named Sea Hunter sailed from California to Hawaii and back again, mostly without anyone aboard. Officials declined to talk to Military.com about the transit, citing operational security while it's in development. Rear Adm. Randy Crites, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, told reporters last month that the large unmanned surface vessels will serve "as both a sensor and a shooter." And since they're smaller than conventional ships, he added, the 200- to 300-foot vessels should be cheaper to produce and operate. The Navy's budget also requests funding for dozens of underwater drone vehicles and unmanned aircraft. Navy leaders are pushing funding for projects like the Sea Hunter as it faces new threats at sea from more sophisticated adversaries. The service's 2020 budget request has some in Congress questioning the decision to push an aircraft carrier into retirement early, but leaders say it's essential to use the savings the ship's retirement would provide on newer cutting-edge technology, such as a self-driving ghost fleet. "[That] led to some tough choices," Geurts told lawmakers. "One of those is to retire that ship early in favor [of] looking at other technologies, other larger cost-imposing strategies." The Navy's future aircraft carriers will include a mix of manned and unmanned aircraft and boats that can operate on the surface or underwater as the service prepares to counter more high-tech threats at sea, leaders have said. Geurts said he expects to see the development of large unmanned vessels pick up quickly over the next year. "It's less about the ship design, because you could make a lot of different ship designs autonomous," he told reporters last week. "The capabilities you would put on there could be fairly flexible and fairly mobile, so our real emphasis, and where I think you're going to see an acceleration versus a traditional shipbuilding program, is you're going to focus more on the autonomy technology -- the capabilities you want to strap onto the ship -- and less about the ship hull form." The Navy is proving its ability to sail unmanned vessels with the Sea Hunter transit, Geurts said. "We learned a lot from that," he said. -- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins. U.S. Army training officials say the new marksmanship qualification course will likely require the service to make upgrades to its ranges. The Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Georgia, is poised to publish TC 3-20.40 "Training and Qualification, Individual Weapons," the new manual that will guide units in active, National Guard and Reserve components as they implement the new marksmanship qualification standard that will replace the current, Cold War-era test. The new course of fire will feature a four-phase test designed to challenge soldiers with a more realistic scenario than the current, pop-up target range. But there is still work to be done before the majority of soldiers begin qualifying under the new standard, training officials say. Related content: "The biggest challenges have been with regard to the ranges across the Army," Melody Venable, training and doctrine officer for the Infantry School, told Military.com recently. "We have learned that we are probably going to have to make some adjustments to a lot of the ranges across the Army." The new course of fire uses the same pop-up targets as the current one, but the software that controls the target lifters may have to be adjusted or updated because the new course will feature multiple target exposures at the same time, while the current test consists of many single exposures, marksmanship officials said. The bigger challenge, however, is that many of the targets themselves may have to be adjusted so they meet Army standards, said Sgt. 1st Class John Rowland, Marksmanship Program director for the Infantry School. "The big thing is target exposures not being set to the proper standard," he said. "They are supposed to [be set] at 90% exposure, and a lot of the times we are finding far less -- somewhere in the range of 50%-to-70% exposures for targets." This places the shooter at a disadvantage, Rowland said. The average target is 40 inches long by 20 inches wide. "Ninety percent of that would be 36 inches," he said. "A lot of the times, we are getting a target on an average lane that is only 28 inches exposure for all the targets. "It causes issues for the shooter because their holds are off, and they aren't aware of it. They are told to aim center of this mass, and they are, and they are [shooting] over the shoulder because the target's height exposure is not proper." Once TC 3-20.40 is signed by Brig. Gen. David Hodne, commandant of the Infantry School at Benning's Maneuver Center of Excellence, and published, unit leaders have a year to send back feedback on any challenges they face with putting the new qualification standard into action. It's difficult to set an implementation date, Venable said, until Benning receives that feedback. "We haven't had the same requirements of these ranges as we are going to have now so, in some cases, they just need updating or they just need some maintenance," she said. -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. As a new policy restricting transgender people from serving openly in the U.S. military goes into effect this month, advocates are on Capitol Hill to protest the change and support those currently serving. TransMilitary, a 2018 documentary by Gabriel Silverman, Fiona Dawson and Jamie Coughlin about transgender military service, will be screened Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-California, and other lawmakers expected to attend. The film centers around four transgender service members -- Air Force Staff Sgt. Logan Ireland, former Army Cpl. Laila Villanueva Ireland and Army Capts. Jennifer Peace and El Cook -- as they navigate Pentagon transgender policy pendulum swings. The 90-minute documentary captures everyday moments with families and struggles they've faced, including conflicts with their birth genders, discrimination and combat deployments. In one scene, Ireland's father, Todd Ireland, discusses the stress of having a child in Afghanistan and not feeling free to talk to coworkers about Logan's service because his colleagues think he has a daughter. Related content: "I don't know where the mix-up was, if you want to call it that," Todd Ireland says of Logan's male gender identity, which was evident in childhood. "But I know God created this person and we're to accept that person for what that person is." In another scene, Peace is transferred to an infantry training unit where she is concerned how the command will react to her gender identity. But three months into the assignment, she realizes her command knows -- and doesn't care. "I may be the first transgender woman sleeping in a female barracks in the Army," Peace says in a self-shot video during an exercise. "It shouldn't be any more complicated than that." Laila Villanueva served in the Army from 2003 to 2015, enlisting as a male. While she dressed as a woman privately, at work she had to "pretend" -- her words -- to be a male soldier. "Every morning before I head to work, I have to spend at least 20 to 25 minutes fixing my hair. I carry around a printout out of AR 670-1, the hair regulations for males, because I know someone is going to say something to me. ... This face doesn't even say male. It's crazy." Transgender people were barred from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces until 2016, when then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter lifted the ban after a six-month study of the issue. In July 2017, however, via a series of tweets, President Donald Trump announced he would reintroduce the ban, saying the military must be focused "on decisive and overwhelming ... victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail." The administration issued a policy in August 2017 effectively barring all transgender troops from serving, a rule that was to be implemented in March 2018. A series of court rulings, however, temporarily halted enactment. A new version was later introduced that excluded from service transgender persons diagnosed with gender dysphoria, as well as those who have transitioned. Transgender personnel already serving are exempt from the new policy, which goes into effect April 12. Speaking with Military.com about TransMilitary and the pending restrictions on transgender service, Peace, who has nearly 15 years of military service, said she plans to continue serving until retirement. She encourages transgender people to enlist, even if they can't serve openly. "There's a fight to be had here. This ban certainly is going to be contested. People like myself are going to continue to fight it," Peace said. "Everyone who is qualified and capable to joining the military and willing to join the military should, because you can't fix the system from the outside." Zeke Stokes, chief programs officer at GLAAD, the gay-rights advocacy group sponsoring Wednesday's screening, said the event is designed to show policymakers and military leaders that transgender personnel simply want to "serve this country alongside other brave patriots without discrimination." "TransMilitary tells the story of transgender service members fighting for our country, while unfortunately, they fight for their careers in the midst of a proposed ban on their service by the president," Stokes said. "Their stories -- and their service and sacrifice -- are undeniable." -- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @patriciakime. Bob Dole Promoted to Army Colonel at 95 Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas has been promoted from captain to colonel for his service in the Army during World War II. Both chambers of the U.S. Congress have unanimously passed a bill promoting the 95-year-old Dole. He earned two Purple Hearts and two Bronze Stars for valor for his service in the war. Dole was an infantry lieutenant in 1945 when he was wounded by German machine gun fire, which left him with limited use of his right arm. Dole represented Kansas in the U.S. House and Senate for a total of 35 years and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1996. Read more about the promotion on Military.com. German crime novelist Norman Ohler rocked the boat with historians when he published "Blitzed," his well-researched and compelling argument that Adolf Hitler was high as a kite during World War II. "Nazi Junkies" (out now on DVD and Digital) is a documentary series that relies heavily on Ohler's research for "Episode 1: Hitler the Junkie," digging deep into the Fuhrer's relationship with sketchy doctor Theodor Morell, a man whose "vitamin shots" were laced with cocaine and Eukodal, a German version of oxycodone. Ohler appears in the documentary, which uses excellent footage from the war years to support the case that Hitler's questionable military decisions were fueled by the sense of invincibility his drug habit caused. We've got an exclusive clip from "Hitler the Junkie" below. "Episode 2: Nazi Junkies" explores the widespread use of methamphetamine in the German military. After its introduction in the 1930s, Pervitin became widely used all over Germany and was even sold mixed into chocolate bars. Meth supported the booming economy, and historical records indicated that it fueled the troops during the Blitzkrieg. The use of drugs in battle by the Nazis is far more established in WWII historical literature, and this episode seems to have been made before Ohler's research into Hitler caused such a stir. His book also tells this story, but the novelist-turned-historian didn't participate in this part of the documentary. The filmmakers make a point of emphasizing the fact that German doctors insisted that troops have their access to Pervitin severely curtailed before they began fighting on the Eastern Front. The size of the territory they aimed to conquer was far bigger than they'd tackled in Poland and France, but could their effectiveness have also been undercut by a lack of access to drugs? Both episodes make the case that drugs were a critical part of Nazi Germany's rise and fall. The conclusions are logical, and the arguments are coherent. "Nazi Junkies" takes these arguments from history books and shares them with the audience that loves WWII documentaries. It's worth a look. How to use the mindat.org media viewer Click/touch this help panel to close it. Welcome to the mindat.org media viewer. Here is a quick guide to some of the options available to you. Different controls are available depending on the type of media being shown (photo, video, animation, 3d image) Controls - all media types Zoom in and out of media using your mousewheel or with a two-finger 'resize' action on a touch device. Use the mouse or your finger to drag the image or the view area of the image around the screen. < and > at the left and right hand side of the screen move forwards and backwards for the other images associated with the media you selected. Usually this is used for previous/next photo in a gallery, in an article or in search results. Keyboard shortcuts: use shift + the left and right arrow keys. < and > in the bottom center are used for switching between the photos of the same specimen. Keyboard shortcuts: use the left and right arrow keys. > in the bottom center, raises the information box giving details and further options for the media, < at the top of this box then hides it. Keyboard shortcuts: use the up and down arrow keys. ? opens this help window. Keyboard shortcuts: use the H key or the ? key. Other keyboard shortcuts: 1 Fit image to screen 2 Fill screen with image 5 Display at full resolution < Make background darker > Make background lighter space Hide/dim titles and buttons Scalebar If the field of view (FOV) is specified for the photo, the scalebar appears in the left bottom corner of the viewer. The scalebar is draggable and resizeable. Drag the right edge to resize it. 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The button, or the P key will start playing the animation directly, you can interrupt this by using the mouse or finger on the image to regain manual movement control. Controls - 3D Stereoscopic images If a stereoscopic 3D image is opened in the viewer, the 3D button appears in the bottom right corner giving access to "3D settings" menu. The 3D images can be viewed in several ways: - without any special equipment using cross-eyed or parallel-eyed method - with stereoscope - with anaglyph glasses. - on a suitable 3D TV or monitor (passive 3D system) For details about 3D refer to: Mindat manuals: Mindat Media Viewer: 3D To enable/disable 3D stereo display of a compatible stereo pair image press the 3 key. If the left/right images are reversed on your display (this often happens in full-screen mode) press the 4 key to reverse them. Controls - photo comparison mode If a photo with activated comparison mode is opened in the viewer, the button appears in the bottom right corner giving access to "Comparison mode settings" menu. Several layouts are supported: slider and side by-side comparison with up to 6 photos shown synchronously on the screen. On each of the compared photos a view selector is placed, e.g.: Longwave UV . It shows the name of currently selected view and allows to select a view for each placeholder. Summary of all keyboard shortcuts Righty Brandon Kintzler will exercise a player option to remain with the Cubs, according to Jesse Rogers of ESPNChicago.com (via Twitter). That had been the expected outcome for the veteran reliever. Kintzlers contract, signed last winter with the Nationals and traded to the Cubs at the 2018 trade deadline, included successive option clauses. The club first had a shot at a $10MM option. If that was declined as it was, by the Chicago organization then Kintzler got a chance to take a guaranteed $5MM salary rather than returning to free agency. Given his struggles down the stretch, its no surprise that Kintzler elected to keep the money in hand. In 18 frames over 25 appearances, he coughed up 14 earned runs on 27 hits while managing just a dozen strikeouts against nine walks. Thats not to say that there isnt any hope of a rebound. After emerging as a late-inning presence with the Twins, Kintzler had been productive with the Nats. In his 68 2/3 frames in D.C., between the trade deadlines of the 2017 and 2018 campaigns, he worked to a 3.54 ERA. In spite of consistently marginal strikeout numbers, Kintzlers heavy sinker has typically produced excellent groundball numbers and allowed him to avoid the long ball. 7:30pm: This move has now been announced. 6:37pm: The Mariners have struck a deal with the Rangers to acquire righty Connor Sadzeck, according to Jeff Wilson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Fellow right-hander Grant Anderson will go to Texas in return. The intra-division swap arose after Sadzeck was designated for assignment recently. Hes out of options, so hell head onto the Seattle 40-man and active rosters. While Sadzeck is young and controllable, and possesses a live arm, the Rangers elected instead to carry veteran reliever Jeanmar Gomez, untested lefty Kyle Bird (who has since been optioned), and Rule 5 pick Kyle Dowdy. For all the potential that comes with his big frame and upper-nineties heater, Sadzeck has yet to show hell be able to deploy his arsenal effectively at the MLB level and ended up on the chopping block. The Ms will surely be prepared to live through some more growing pains from the 27-year-old. He surrendered 11 walks while recording seven strikeouts in his first 9 1/3 MLB innings last year and then gave up eight free passes with eleven strikeouts over 8 1/3 frames in camp. But Sadzeck hasnt been irredeemably wild in the minors. Last year, for instance, he worked to a 4.03 ERA with 10.2 K/9 and 3.8 BB/9 over 38 innings at Triple-A. As for Anderson, the 21-year-old was plucked in the 21st round of last years draft out of McNeese State. He has only a dozen pro innings under his belt, but did impress enough to earn a quick (but brief) promotion to the Class A level. He allowed just four hits and two earned runs while posting a 13:7 K/BB ratio last year. BARAGA COUNTY, MI An 84-year-old man was killed when he fell from a tractor in the Upper Peninsula. Troopers from the Michigan State Police Calumet Post responded to a residence in Baraga Countys Covington Township around 2:30 p.m. on Monday after a family member called 911. Upon arriving on scene, they found Thomas Disney trapped underneath. He was pronounced dead at the scene due to his injuries, according to police. Disney was apparently trying to pull a vehicle that was stuck on his property when he fell, police said. No other information was immediately available. The MSP were assisted at the scene by the Baraga County Sheriffs Office, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Bay EMS, Covington EMS, Covington First Responders, LAnse Fire Department and Covington Fire and Rescue. As President Donald Trump continues to consider closing the U.S.-Mexico border, economists and experts in the auto industry are warning of serious repercussions if the idea is implemented. Detroits Big Three in Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler all pointed to a statement from the American Automotive Policy Council when approached for comment on Trumps threats. Any action that stops commerce at the border would be harmful to the U.S. economy, and in particular, the auto industry, Matt Blunt, the councils president, said in a statement. Access to Mexicos marketplace and North American integration are critical to operations in the U.S. In addition, politicians, business leaders, analysts and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have warned of the severe economic harm such a move would cause. Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research, sent out a more dire warning when asked about the potential closing of the border. In all, it is estimated that about 37 percent of all automotive parts imported stateside come from Mexico. You cant sell cars with missing pieces, Dziczek told CNN. Youve got to have them all. I see the whole industry shutdown within a week of a border closing. Mexico is one of the United States' most important trading partners, ranking second among U.S. export markets.;AP Trump has threatened to close the U.S.-Mexico border within a week as an answer to stop illegal immigration without touching on the severe economic consequences. CNN reports that members of the Trump Administration have attempted to warn the president of the potential impact, but that the pondering of shutting it down carries on. A.P. reports the president first mentioned the thought of closing entry points of the southern border back on Friday, and kept the thoughts rolling on Twitter over the weekend. Trump cited the increase of Central Americans seeking asylum as the reason behind closing the border down. Mexico must use its very strong immigration laws to stop the many thousands of people trying to get into the USA. Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border! This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2019 After many years (decades), Mexico is apprehending large numbers of people at their Southern Border, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They have ALL been taking U.S. money for years, and doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for us, just like the Democrats in Congress! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 For a White House that can legitimately claim significant economic accomplishments and has reportedly considered softening its stance in trade negotiations with China to calm markets, such a move would be as counterintuitive as it would be counterproductive, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce writes in a blog post on the issue. "Thats because a quick look at the numbers reveals that sealing off the southern border could lead to economic consequences even more devastating than a trade war with the Chinese. It might surprise some that annual U.S. goods exports to Mexico exceed those to China by more than $140 billion ($265 billion vs. $121 billion in 2018). In fact, U.S. goods exports to Mexico reached the highest level on record in 2018. And according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, nearly 80% of these exports $207 billion were shipped to Mexico via truck or rail. The nations chamber adds that closing the southern border is not an option, and that if Trump proceeded with this idea that it would represent an unmitigated economic debacle. One way to tank markets and the U.S. economy? Close the border with Mexico https://t.co/qzEkUl6JVW pic.twitter.com/RD8UwN1hi1 U.S. Chamber (@USChamber) March 29, 2019 Lets hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools joke, Dan Griswold, an economist at George Mason University, told A.P while calling Trumps threat the height of folly. If trade was interrupted, U.S. producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and U.S. exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market. The news organization reports that more 60 percent of all Mexican winter produce sold and consumed in the U.S. crosses at Nogales, Arizona. Between 11,000 and 12,000 semi-trucks cross the same border each day with an estimated 50 million pounds of produce. Laredo, Texas Mayor Pete Saenz, who is also chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, told A.P. that closing the border would cause an immediate depression in border state communities and, depending on the duration, a recession in the rest of the country. President Trump: "I will close the border if Mexico doesn't get with it, if Mexico doesn't stop it." pic.twitter.com/16vovuXRpx The Hill (@thehill) March 31, 2019 DETROIT, MI -- In a nondescript Detroit warehouse, the FBI in 2013 found fetuses, piles of dead flies, frozen clumps of severed heads, saws and bins filled with icy arms, legs, torsos and organs. But why were they there? What were they for? This is the story of Arthur Rathburn and his unusual body broker business. In the first episode of season 2 of Michigan Crimes Stories, we investigate how bodies donated to science create a pipeline of profit for certain companies and how that Detroit warehouse of horrors was mostly legal. Listen to the Michigan Crime Stories podcast episode about Rathburn, his business and its eventual downfall, as well as past episodes of Michigan Crime Stories on iTunes and SoundCloud. Tips for Michigan Crime Stories podcast episodes can be sent to hosts Darcie Moran at dmoran@mlive.com or Gus Burns at fburns@mlive.com. After sitting idle for years, the Arthur M. Anderson - one of the most famous freighters on the Great Lakes - will be prepped for a return to service, its owners said this week. The Anderson is a favorite among ship enthusiasts, and earned its place in Great Lakes lore when its captain and crew stayed in contact with the Edmund Fitzgerald during a violent Lake Superior storm in 1975 that sent the latter freighter to its doom. It was the last ship to have radio contact with the Fitzgeralds captain. The Andersons crew was also the first to turn around and lead the search for the Fitzgeralds crew after it sank. No survivors were found. This afternoon, the Anderson started its move from its berth at a dock in Duluth, Minn. A video below shared by Paul Scinocca shows the move. The freighter is headed to the Fraser Shipyards for drydocking and work to meet the requirements of the five-year survey certification, according to the Duluth News Tribune. She moving ; Posted by Paul Scinocca on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 Mitch Koslow, vice president of Anderson owner Key Lakes Inc., told the news site that an improved shipping economy means more cargo needs to be moved, prompting the freighters return to service. The freighter has been docked since the end of the 2016 shipping season. Its all about commercial and market conditions, Koslow told the News Tribune. Things have improved to the point where we can use (the Anderson) to meet the needs of our customers. Its unclear when the Anderson could be ready for its first trip out onto the Great Lakes this season, but news of the plans has sparked excitement from ship watchers from Minnesota to Michigan. Launched in 1952, the 767-foot vessel is considered a classic laker." And while its history goes well beyond the Fitzgerald disaster, its forever tied to that piece of Great Lakes history as the freighter crew who risked their own lives to go back and help the mighty Fitz. The Anderson had been the first to raise the alarm when the Fitzgerald vanished from radar - and from the crews sight - on Nov. 10, 1975. Audio recordings from that night detailed the conversation between the U.S. Coast Guard at the Sault Ste. Marie station talking to Capt. Jesse Cooper from the nearby Arthur M. Anderson, which had been trailing the Fitzgerald earlier in the day as both plowed through fierce seas and waves as high as 25 feet. The following account is from the radio transmissions between crew on the Anderson and the Edmund Fitzgerald that night, as well as the Anderson captains later communication with the Coast Guard. This last communication is shared courtesy of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum on Whitefish Point in Paradise, Mi. Last radio communication between the Arthur M Anderson and the Edmund Fitzgerald was at 7:10pm ... Fitzgerald, this is the Anderson. Have you checked down? Yes, we have. Fitzgerald, we are about 10 miles behind you, and gaining about 1 1/2 miles per hour. Fitzgerald, there is a target 19 miles ahead of us. So the target would be 9 miles on ahead of you. Well, answered (Fitzgeralds) Captain McSorley, Am I going to clear? Yes, he is going to pass to the west of you. Well, fine. By the way, Fitzgerald, how are you making out with your problems? asked Clark (on the Anderson). We are holding our own. Okay, fine, Ill be talking to you later. Clark signed off. The radar signal, or pip of the Fitzgerald kept getting obscured by sea return. And around 7:15 pm, the pip was lost again, but this time, did not reappear. Clark called the Fitzgerald again at about 7:22 pm. There was no answer. Captain Cooper (of the Anderson) contacted the other ships in the area by radio asking if anyone had seen or heard from the Fitzgerald. The weather had cleared dramatically. His written report states: At this time I became very concerned about the Fitzgerald couldnt see his lights when we should have. I then called the William Clay Ford to ask him if my phone was putting out a good signal and also if perhaps the Fitzgerald had rounded the point and was in shelter, after a negative report I called the Soo Coast Guard because I was sure something had happened to the Fitzgerald. The Coast Guard were at this time trying to locate a 16-foot boat that was overdue. With mounting apprehension, Captain Cooper called the Coast Guard once again, about 8:00 pm, and firmly expressed his concern for the welfare of the Fitzgerald. The Coast Guard then initiated its search for the missing ship. By that time the Anderson had reached the safety of Whitefish Bay to the relief of all aboard. But the Coast Guard called Captain Cooper back at 9:00 pm: Anderson, this is Group Soo. What is your present position? Were down here, about two miles off Parisienne Island right nowthe wind is northwest forty to forty-five miles here in the bay. Is it calming down at all, do you think? In the bay it is, but I heard a couple of the salties talking up there, and they wish they hadnt gone out. Do you think there is any possibility and you couldahcome about and go back there and do any searching? AhGod, I dont knowahthatthat sea out there is tremendously large. Ahif you want me to, I can, but Im not going to be making any time; Ill be lucky to make two or three miles an hour going back out that way. Well, youll have to make a decision as to whether you will be hazarding your vessel or not, but youre probably one of the only vessels right now that can get to the scene. Were going to try to contact those saltwater vessels and see if they cant possibly come about and possibly come back alsothings look pretty bad right now; it looks like she may have split apart at the seams like the Morrell did a few years back. Well, thats what I been thinking. But we were talking to him about seven and he said that everything was going fine. He said that he was going along like an old shoe; no problems at all. Well, again, do you think you could come about and go back and have a look in the area? Well, Ill go back and take a look, but God, Im afraid Im going to take a hell of a beating out there Ill turn around and give er a whirl, but God, I dont know. Ill give it a try. That would be good. Do you realize what the conditions are out there? No reply from the Coast Guard. Captain Cooper tries again. Affirmative. From what your reports are I can appreciate the conditions. Again, though, I have to leave that decision up to you as to whether it would be hazarding your vessel or not. If you think you can safely go back up to the area, I would request that you do so. But I have to leave the decision up to you. Ill give it a try, but thats all I can do. Apparently, you earn Americas love when you beat Duke. At least according to Twitter. Tom Izzo, Cassius Winston and Michigan State took down top-seeded Duke on Sunday to advance to its 10th Final Four in school history. The Spartans will be joined by Texas Tech, Auburn and Virginia in Minneapolis where the green and white is sure to have plenty of support. But according to betonline.ag, the Spartans have plenty of fans throughout the United States as well. According to geotagged Twitter data, more states are rooting for Michigan State than any other team. Twenty-seven of them to be exact. Betonline analyzed more than 20,000 tweets for fan hashtags such as #gogreen to arrive at the conclusion. As you can see by looking at the map, Michigan State is the team of choice throughout much of the Midwest, East Coast and West Coast. Even states that are home to the Spartans Big Ten rivals, like Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota and Indiana are pulling for them. Louisiana, the home state of LSU who Michigan State beat in the Sweet 16, is also rooting for MSU. As is North Carolina, the home state of Duke, however that state is also home to Dukes ACC rivals North Carolina, North Carolina State and Wake Forest. GOD BLESS MICHIGAN STATE #3 UNC Barstool (@UNCBarstool) March 31, 2019 Texas Tech, Michigan States opponent in the Final Four, was next on the list, winning 10 states. Auburn won eight states, mostly in SEC county, and Virginia won just 5 states including Hawaii. Its also worth noting that Michigan was the most-supported team heading into the 2018 Final Four. Data says 22 states are rooting for Michigan, more than any other Final Four team Auburn and Virginia will kick off Saturdays Final Four at 6:09 p.m. Michigan State and Texas Tech will follow. Tip is scheduled for 8:49 p.m. Both games can bee seen on CBS. CADILLAC, MI A Michigan woman overdosed when she consumed an unknown fluid during a struggle over a syringe with the Michigan State Police. Fortunately, the quick actions of the troopers on scene saved her life. The incident occurred when troopers from the Michigan State Police Cadillac Post stopped a car for speeding on E-34 road in Wexford Countys Haring Township at 5:25 p.m. on March 31. The car was was occupied by a male driver and a female passenger. The female was identified as 41-year-old Kelly MacDonald of Cadillac, who was wanted on outstanding warrants from other agencies. As the troopers advised MacDonald of the outstanding warrants and ordered her out of the car, she produced a needle/syringe containing an unknown fluid. Alleged drug dealer tried to swallow heroin, crack cocaine during arrest, police say MacDonald refused to exit and refused to drop the needle. Assisted by the male driver, troopers attempted to take physical control of MacDonald as police said it became clear she intended to harm or inject herself. As the struggle continued, MacDonald was able to consume a portion of the substance orally and quickly became unresponsive, authorities said. The troopers immediately administered two doses of Narcan, with a third being administered by a backup officer. EMS arrived on scene and transported MacDonald to Munson Medical Center in Cadillac, were she was treated for an overdose and eventually released and transported to the Wexford County Jail. MacDonald was charged with one count of Resisting and Obstructing a Police Officer. She was arraigned in the 84th District Court in Cadillac on Monday. LANSING, MI A critically endangered rhino at Michigans Potter Park Zoo is believed to be pregnant. Staff at the Lansing zoo collected fecal samples from the rhino, Doppsee, for several months to send to the Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife at the Cincinnati Zoo for analysis. Based on her hormone levels, they are confident she is pregnant. Dr. Ronan Eustace has also confirmed the pregnancy via ultrasound because of the fluid in her uterus. However, a fetus wont be visible for months. Doppsees pregnancy is a huge deal for the black rhino species, which has only 5,000 remaining in the wild and about 60 at zoos in the United States, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Doppsees pregnancy comes after zoo staff spent months introducing her to a male, Phineus. But getting two 2,800-pound animals to mate isnt as easy as it might sound. Endangered black rhino may breed with female at Lansing zoo Staff monitored Doppsees estrus cycle by watching the behaviors of both rhinos to estimate the dates she would readily accept his presence. Fecal hormone testing indicated her cycle averaged 23.6 days, and when staff thought their behaviors were indicating she might be coming into estrus, they put the rhinos together The rhinos spent multiple times together in the same space under strict observation. When Doppsee was finally ready to accept Phineus attention, she would allow him to rest his head on her rump before mating with her. This occurred on three occasions: May 11, June 4, and Aug. 25, but due to weather and other constraints staff was unable to introduce the rhinos again in the fall of 2018. Animal care and veterinary staff will continue to monitor Doppsee throughout her pregnancy. Check the zoos social media accounts for updates. Potter Park Zoo mourning death of beloved snow leopard, Little Girl YPSILANTI, MI -- A group of Ypsilanti high school students is raising funds to help young girls travel to the nations capital. The United Way Club at Washtenaw International High School, founded in 2017 by student Lisa Mathew, organizes educational and leadership opportunities for students in need. Last summer, the club raised $26,000 and sent 46 middle school girls from Detroit and Ypsilanti to Washington D.C. In 2019, the clubs goal is to raise $45,000 to send 90 girls to D.C. in two separate, five-day trips. Students in inner-city schools often have limited resources and opportunities to pursue their interests and their future careers, Mathew said. Through connections with teachers from Ypsilanti and Detroit public schools and local nonprofits, the club finds students with the potential to benefit most from this opportunity, she said. Through this trip, our goal is to maximize the girls potential by making the girls believe that a woman can accomplish anything, and why it is important for women to work hard toward their career goals and voicing their opinions in politics," Mathew said. Teachers can nominate students to take part in the Washington trips based on leadership, service and character. From there, 12 students are selected to respond to essay questions. After reading the responses, United Way Club leaders choose students to go on the trip. Last year, the students visited four presidential memorials, six Smithsonian museums and government buildings, including the White House. Michigan-based members of Congress, including U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing; U.S Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township; U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Southfield; U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn; U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Midland, and U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Cascade Township, also met with the students. Students who attended the 2018 trip wrote letters to thank donors and talk about their experiences. I feel so inspired being around so many female leaders that encourage me to not give up and never lose hope. Meeting Debbie Dingell and Brenda Lawrence made me feel important and made me believe how much I could accomplish in this world, wrote Ayieshah Abduf-Rafee, 14, of Joy Preparatory Academy in Detroit. Many of the politicians who meet with the students encourage determination in pursuing education, Mathew said I learned that if you put your mind to it you can do anything. This trip has inspired me to go to college and be a leader like Brenda Lawrence, said Destiny Bullock-Allen, 11, from George-Crockett Academy in Detroit. Anyone interested in donating to the Female Empowerment Washington D.C. trip can visit the clubs GoFundMe page and read more about the details of the trip. Update: This story has been updated with details from police. SALINE, MI - One person was critically injured in a crash that closed a major Washtenaw County roadway Tuesday morning. At 7:07 a.m. April 2, paramedics responded to US-12/Michigan Avenue and South Industrial Drive for a rollover crash involving a semi-truck, according Matt Rose of Huron Valley Ambulance. The injured person was taken to St. Joe Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Rose said. Eastbound and westbound US-12/Michigan Avenue was closed from the time of the incident until about 9:43 a.m., according to the Michigan Department of Transportation. A Saline resident was driving was eastbound on Michigan Avenue and went into the westbound lane to pass vehicles, Lt. Sean McCormick told The Ann Arbor News. At that time, a semi-truck was westbound on Michigan Avenue, saw him coming (and) attempted to swerve out of the way," McCormick said. The trailer of the semi-truck was still in the westbound lane, which the passing driver struck. That pushed him into the eastbound lane, where he got hit from the rear, McCormick said, adding the driver rolled three times. The driver was extracted out of the vehicle with assistance from the Saline Fire Department and is facing non-life threatening injuries. GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- A 31-year-old Grand Rapids man was charged with four felony counts including open murder in the death of his girlfriend in Grand Rapids. Jamar Terrelle Purdle was arraigned Tuesday afternoon, April 2, on charges of open murder, possession of a firearm by a felon, felony firearm, and carrying a concealed weapon. The charges were read to him during a video arraignment in 61st District Court in Grand Rapids. Purdle is accused of killing Mikeya Sheniece Day, who died at an area hospital Sunday evening, March 31. Day arrived at the hospital with what police said appeared to be a gunshot wound, and died a short time later. The boyfriend, who drove Day to the hospital, was arrested and booked in the Kent County Jail on Sunday evening. Police first received a 911 call shortly after 8 p.m. Sunday from a resident in the 800 block of Hancock Street SE. The caller said a woman covered in blood had been banging on their door. At the end of the call, the caller indicated that the woman left the residence in a vehicle. A short time later she showed up at the hospital. Police said Purdle didnt have any physical injuries when he arrived at the hospital. The vehicle he was driving was impounded as evidence. The Kent County medical examiner conducted an autopsy Monday and determined that Days manner of death was homicide. Anyone with any information regarding the case is asked to contact Grand Rapids police detectives Amanda Johnson or Josh Cornell at 616-456-4112 or 616-456-4459, respectively. Purdle was denied bond Tuesday due to his prior criminal history -- hes charged as a fourth-offense habitual offender -- and the seriousness of the charges hes facing. He served less than a year in prison in 2006 and 2007 for a larceny from a person conviction in Kent County, according to Michigan Department of Corrections records. Then in 2016, he was imprisoned for more than two years on charges of larceny from a person and possession of a firearm by a felon. He was released from prison Feb. 13. TRAVERSE CITY, MI -- A Northern Michigan pastor has been arraigned on three felony charges related to accusations that he sexually assaulted two men after they were given drugs. Christopher Cox, 41, was arraigned Monday, April 1, on two counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and one count of delivering or manufacturing methamphetamine. The alleged assaults occurred March 12 and in October at Coxs Traverse City home, AP reports. The March 12 accuser -- a 19-year-old man -- told police his life was threatened if he told anyone about the incident at Coxs business office in Garfield Township. Cox is lodged at the Grand Traverse County Jail with bond set at $100,000. His attorney, Paul Jarboe, told AP that he has not been provided with any law enforcement reports to reply to the allegations. The pastor of Long Lake Church in Traverse City was arrested Friday, March 29, in Muskegon. At the time of his arrest, police said he was in possession of a package white crystalline substance suspected to be crystal meth. Cox joined Long Lake Church in January 2016, according to the churchs website. While there is no current evidence that his work at the church was involved in these incidents, it is believed his influence as a pastor may have played a role, police said. Police ask anyone with more information, including potential other victims, to contact the Michigan State Police post in Cadillac at 231-779-6040. GRAND RAPIDS, MI A new banquet and event hall is coming to downtown Grand Rapids. Susan and Loren Hansen, a couple who lives in the city and are making their first foray into the business world, plan to open The Rutledge at 120 Ionia Ave. SW this fall. Located across the street from Studio Park, the venue will specialize in hosting wedding receptions, corporate gatherings, holiday parties and other events. It has capacity for 299 people, but likely wont host events for more than 280 people, said Susan Hansen. We really hit the nail on the head, said Hansen, 51. We have a great location, a great team were working with, and this has been my dream. Were pretty excited. The building is registered to a limited liability company connected to Grand Rapids-based Rockford Construction. Hansen said her business is leasing roughly 7,000-square-feet of space on the first floor of the building, which also houses several other businesses A mother of two, Hansen has long had a passion for party planning. She first honed the skill during her childhood when she helped organize the annual Fourth of July party at the New Presque Isle Lighthouse Park and Museum, where she and her parents lived for a time as caretakers of the property. Later, while raising her children in the Holland area, she helped plan school events and homecoming celebrations, as well as church and neighborhood gatherings, she said. Its something Ive wanted to do forever, Hansen said, referring to her goal of owning her own event business. She hasnt formally worked in the hospitality industry but recently took a few courses in the area at Grand Valley Sate University while her son was working towards his degree in hospitality and tourism management. The Grand Rapids Planning Commission last week approved a special land use permit for the business. The permit was needed because the property is currently zoned for office space, said Hansen, whose husband Loren works for Gill, a manufacturing company based in Plainfield Township. Hansen, who named her business after her grandmother, said she believes The Rutledge will be a success. She says she researched event venues in downtown Grand Rapids, and other than the JW Marriott and the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, there are few places with space for more than 175 people. Once people got over that 175 market they had to go a little further out of town ore they had to go someplace formal like JW or Amway, she said. Renovations on the building, being undertaken by Rockford, began this week, Hansen said. The work should be wrapped up by July, but she expects to spend a few more months painting the interior and making other artistic improvements. The building wont have a kitchen, and all food will be provided through catering companies. Hansen said shes working through the process of obtaining a liquor license. KALAMAZOO, MI -- Aspiring social media professionals in the Kalamazoo area will have the opportunity to meet with experts in the field during a week dedicated to social media education this spring. Kalamazoo Social Media Week runs Monday, May 6, through Friday, May 10. Featuring a lineup of experts ready to discuss the current and future of social media marketing. The theme this year is From Inspiration to Action. The event will include 16 sessions, two networking mixers, two lunches and a competition where teams of participants will develop social media strategies for local nonprofits. The five-day event will take place at locations throughout Kalamazoo, including Fetzer Center, KVCC Center for New Media and the Stamped Robin in downtown Kalamazoo. For a full list of events and registration information, visit the Kalamazoo Social Media Week website. Representatives from Public Radios Science Friday, MLive, Bells Brewery, Kalamazoo State Theater and more will speak at events spread throughout the week. Created in 2009, the focus of Kalamazoo Social Media Week has been to develop, sustain and elevate social media talent in the community by bring together local experts and aspiring social media professionals. MUSKEGON, MI The city of Muskegon has plans to demolish a former prison complex that it is purchasing for $2.16 million. But some of the buildings on the 62-acre parcel that housed the former West Michigan Shoreline Correctional Facility could be salvaged if a potential new business tenant is interested in using them, according to a city official. The city is in the process of finalizing its purchase of the former prison complex at 2500 S. Sheridan Drive, culminating a nearly year-long effort to expand the citys Port City Industrial Park. State officials closed the prison in March 2018 due to a decline in the statewide prison population. The state prison previously known as the Muskegon Temporary Facility included nine buildings. Muskegon City Commissioners on March 12 approved the purchase agreement with the states Land Bank Fast Track Authority and authorized officials to close the deal. City Manager Frank Peterson said he expects both parties to sign the document by mid-April. In the meantime, the city has been in talks with a potential food processing and manufacturing business interested in the parcel, Peterson said. Muskegon Economic Development Director Jake Eckholm said he plans to meet on April 10 with representatives from that business to discuss their vision for the property. Depending on how they want to use the space, Eckholm said some of the buildings could be salvaged. This map shows the location of the defunct West Shoreline Corrections Facility, located at 2500 S. Sheridan Dr.Courtesy of Google.com If the potential tenant has no use for any of the nine buildings, the city plans to pulverize the entire complex. Commissioners on March 26 voted to approve a demolition contract with Melching Demolition for $338,910, which includes the cost to raze each of the nine buildings and miscellaneous structures. It also includes the removal of fencing, asphalt and site restoration, according to city documents. The nine buildings include a storage building, a transportation depot, two administrative offices, a classroom, a chapel, a food service facility and a housing complex. Infrastructure updates and road improvements also are planned. Muskegon officials agreed to purchase the property for $2.16 million, which covers the land sale, demolition costs, new fencing and other expenses at the time of closing. The land itself cost $1.4 million, according to the purchase agreement. The city is to pay the lower amount at 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 grant also covers the cost of demolition. 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. Four Su-30 jets flown by the world-famous Russian Knights aerobatic team performed a simultaneous loop in the Malaysian skies, to the excitement of countless onlookers watching the stunt. Flying in a tight formation, the Su-30s were filmed traversing the sky over the Malaysian city of Langkawi, where the International Maritime and Aerospace exhibition (LIMA) took place. The Russian Knights chose to do a loop, an extremely difficult maneuver first performed by aerobatics enthusiast Petr Nesterov in the early 20th century. A camera mounted on one of the jets shows the pilots making a low pass over the Langkawi airfield. They then pull their jets up into the vertical while keeping minimal distance between the aircraft. The Su-30s are seen continuing around and heading back in the same direction, making a 360 turn. The pilots briefly released the brakes and retracted the undercarriages to slow down. The Russian Knights loop looked equally impressive from the ground. The Russian Knights are a world-renowned aerobatic team which frequently performs at airshows in Russia and abroad. They have already taken part in the LIMA 2017 show. Also on rt.com Legendary Russian Knights dazzle Bahrain airshow with stunning aerobatics (VIDEO) In 2016, their Su-27 Flanker jets were replaced by the newer Su-30SMs. This jet is designed by Suknoi for all-weather, air superiority, and air-to-surface missions. Malaysia, a host nation of LIMA, has a number of Su-30s in its air force fighter fleet. Like this story? Share it with a friend! Sardinian firefighters used a helicopter to winch a cow trapped at the bottom of a rocky cliff in a dramatic rescue operation. The bungling bovine had been grazing on the cliffside above the Coscia di Donna beach in the north west of Sardinia, presumably taking in the spectacular views, when it slid and fell down the rocks, miraculously surviving. The udderly ridiculous rescue operation was filmed by the fire and rescue services to commemorate the a-moo-zing and rare event. The cow was placed in a harness and airlifted to safety where it was immediately taken to a vet for a checkup. READ MORE: Rats running rampant in Rome as city suffers rodent population explosion Italy's fire and rescue services, the Vigili del Fuoco, have previous experience with cattle emergencies, having rescued a fallen cow on a mountain in Verona in 2017. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! A suspected Islamic State terrorist, who sought asylum in Europe, reportedly received a prepaid debit card meant for refugees from the European Union. The incident reflects a dangerous new period for Europe, an analyst told RT. Hungarian counter-terrorism officers apprehended a Syrian national, in Budapest last week, who had been identified as a high-ranking member of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). The suspected terrorist, posing as a refugee, reportedly received a prepaid debit card from the EU upon his arrival in Europe one of 64,000 individuals to receive the taxpayer-subsidized cards. While the EU insists that a strict screening process is used to ensure the euro handouts reach the right people, the Hungarian government has argued that the embarrassing discovery highlights grave the security threat facing Europe, as jihadists fleeing the Middle East seek refuge abroad. Also on rt.com Discovered files reveal IS plans to launch revenge attacks in Europe, Syria reports Philip Ingram, a former British military intelligence officer, agreed, telling RT that Europe must become more diligent as Islamic militants flee Syria and Iraq. Were seeing a time of transition. Theyll transition into something different. This is a very, very dangerous and difficult period, and we need to monitor that transition very closely, to be able to identify and track known jihadists that are coming through, he said. Like this story? Share it with a friend! Sanctions unilaterally imposed by Washington have hindered efforts to provide relief to Iranians affected by a series of deadly floods, Irans Foreign Ministry has claimed, describing US posturing as economic terrorism. Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said on Monday that the US decision to block bank accounts belonging to Irans Red Crescent has prevented donations from abroad from reaching Iranians who are in desperate need of aid. At least 45 people have died in the past two weeks after torrential downpours in Iran resulted in 23 of the countrys 31 provinces being hit by floods. With more flooding expected in Irans southwest province of Khuzestan, Tehrans appeals for international assistance have been hampered by US efforts to cut the country off from the global economy. Also on rt.com A crime against humanity: Rouhani says Iran will file legal case against US over sanctions Since all the accounts of Iran Red Crescent have been frozen [by US sanctions], no one can send their financial aid from overseas, Ghasemi said on Monday, as cited by Mehr News Agency. Earlier on Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused Washington of impeding aid efforts as Tehran scrambles to provide relief to communities devastated by the unprecedented floods. By depriving Iran of much needed resources and equipment, the US is guilty of economic terrorism, Zarif said. Tehrans anger over the sanctions is far from unfounded: The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) signaled last week that it was prepared to offer help to Iran, but US sanctions could place restrictions on the UN response. Tehran has ordered the evacuation of 70 villages in Irans southwest, amid fears of more flooding to come. Also on rt.com US cant stop Iran oil exports, Persian Gulf will shut if they try Rouhani US President Donald Trump re-imposed sanctions on Tehran after pulling the US out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which provided sanctions relief in exchange for restrictions on Irans nuclear capabilities. The unilateral decision has strained Washingtons relations with its transatlantic allies, who invested heavily in Irans reintegration into global markets and confirmed that Tehran still played by the rules. Like this story? Share it with a friend! They havent seen each other since 2015, but a clever robot swiftly recognized Dmitry Medvedev as the PM stopped at technology park during his visit to the Siberian city of Perm. Hello, Dmitry Anatolyevich, the robot said as it welcomed the prime minister at the entrance to Morion Digital technology park on Tuesday. We last saw each other 3 years 10 months 6 days 7 hours 15 minutes and 40 seconds ago. Promobot companys CEO, Aleksey Yuzhakov, then specified to Medvedev that the meeting took place at the opening of the technology park, which the head of the government used to attend. The robot understood that he was taking to someone he already knew thanks to its face recognition system, he added. The machine, meanwhile, continued boasting, telling the high-ranking guest that he got smarter [during this time] and can now work not only as a promoter, but also a consultant, administrator, guide and even a police officer. A Promobot is currently employed as a robocop in Kazakhstan, Yuzhakov said. Hope, he doesnt have a gun, Medvedev laughed, while the CEO explained the machine is only used to host a database of criminals and carry out facial recognition tasks. Also on rt.com Pandora, anyone? Russia plans to set up moon base inhabited by avatar robots The PM then witnessed a whole concert, prepared by the Promobots especially for him. One of the machines was on the drums, while the other rocked the keyboard. The robots learnt to play music thanks to the software, which was programmed by the students of the Perm Polytechnic University. Another machine danced to a folk tune to entertain the prime minister. Medvedev was also shown the various stages of the Promobot production as well as the concept of the companys brand new robot, which will be officially unveiled in mid-April. Promobot is the largest manufacturer of autonomous service robots in Russia and Eastern Europe. Since 2013, the company released 450 such machines, which were sold to 33 countries, including the US, Australia and Chile. The price of a Promobot in base configuration stands at 1.2 million rubles ($18,300), with the developers saying the machine needs from two to three years to pay for itself. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! Tourists in Iceland were forced to flee the oncoming waves after a huge chunk of the Breiamerkurjokull glacier broke off. Thankfully, multiple cameras managed to catch the moment of collapse. The peaceful stillness of the famous Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon in southwestern Iceland was shattered Sunday as the massive ice break (known as calving) bombarded the shore with huge, rolling waves after the thunderous crash of the ice shelf into the lagoon. The footage was captured by Stephan Mantler, a mountain guide with the private tour company Hafjall, who just happened to be mapping changes in the glacier at the exact moment the calving took place. Also on rt.com Mystery behind emerald green jade icebergs solved (PHOTOS, VIDEO) Due to the sheer size and proximity it was a bit of a close call but everybody was safe and stayed dry,said Stephan Mantler, who works for the travel company Hafjall. They were not scared, but rather very excited. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! Seven Pakistani military outposts across Kashmirs Line of Control were destroyed as retaliation for recent cross-border shelling, Indian officials have said. Pakistan confirmed three of its soldiers were killed in the fighting. The attack on Pakistani military positions comes a day after three people were reportedly killed and two dozen others were injured by Pakistani shelling targeting forward areas along the Line of Control (LoC). India claims it neutralized seven military posts in Rakhchikri and Rawalakote, in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) of Pakistan acknowledged on Tuesday that three soldiers were killed by unprovoked fire from the Indian side. The agency claimed that Pakistans army had responded effectively to the attack and had inflicted casualties, but did not provide further details. Also on rt.com 3 troops killed, 1 injured as Indian forces open unprovoked fire in Kashmir Pakistani Army The incident marks a flare-up in cross-border violence, after several weeks of comparative calm along the LoC. Tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals reached a boiling point after a suicide attack killed 40 Indian troops in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir in February. India blamed an Islamist terrorist group based in Pakistan for the attack and swiftly launched a cross-border air raid against the insurgents. Also on rt.com 4 militants killed in Kashmir following gun battle with Indian security forces The operation sparked a brief air battle between India and Pakistan, with New Delhi claiming it had shot down a Pakistani aircraft, while also admitting to losing one of its Mig-21 fighters. Tensions cooled after Pakistan released an Indian pilot who had been captured during the skirmish. Like this story? Share it with a friend! Irans Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh arrived in Moscow on Monday for senior-level talks regarding the global oil market and energy cooperation between Iran and Russia, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported. Zangeneh has met Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak to discuss energy-related issues. Russia, the leader of the non-OPEC group of nations part of the OPEC+ deal, was reportedly the deal broker that convinced Iran to agree to the wording of the production cut deal that began on January 1 and currently expires in June. Also on rt.com United States squabbles over new Iran sanction waivers Iran, alongside Libya and Venezuela, was exempted from the production cuts at the OPEC/non-OPEC meeting in December, due to the US sanctions on its oil industry. The visit of the Iranian oil minister in Moscow comes a month before the United States is due to decide whether to extend all or some or none of the waivers it had granted to key Iranian oil customers when it re-imposed the sanctions in early November. The US waivers for eight key Iranian oil customers, including China, India, Japan, and South Korea, expire in early May. While the US 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. Also on rt.com 'Perfect storm' of tight supply & global demand drives oil prices higher Russian oil companies, on the other hand, are currently sticking to the production cuts through June. The firms have not discussed production plans for the second half of the year and have decided that they would do so after April, Vagit Alekperov, president and CEO of Russian oil producer Lukoil, said last month. Last week, reports had it that Russiaalways the reluctant actor in OPEC+ cuts extensionsmay not support an extension of the deal for the full six months until the end of the year. This article was originally published on Oilprice.com Ireland wont accept checks on Irish goods at EU ports FM Ireland wont accept checks on Irish goods at EU ports FM Ireland will not allow its desire to keep the Irish border open if Britain leaves the EU without a deal to result in checks on Irish goods at ports on the European mainland, Foreign Minister Simon Coveney has said. We have to find a way of ensuring that we protect the single markets integrity and that we avoid physical infrastructure on the Irish border, Coveney told parliament on Tuesday. The minister was referring to meetings that had begun at official level with the European Commission on how to manage the border in a no-deal Brexit, Reuters said. Ireland is not going to allow a situation where the UK leaving the EU without a deal drags Ireland out of the single market with it, according to Coveney.Source : RT - Daily news It isnt just unwanted kissing threatening Joe Bidens bid for presidency, his past strong-arming of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor probing a company his son sits on the board of is also rearing its head again, the Hill reports. The former vice president boasted at a January 2018 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) meeting that he had threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk into firing prosecutor Viktor Shokin in March 2016. Biden said he gave them a six-hour deadline to fire him or he would pull $1 billion in US loan guarantees. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired, he said. Also on rt.com Son of b***h got fired: Joe Biden forced Ukraine to sack prosecutor general in six hours While Bidens boast implied the US threatened the Ukrainian government in a single day, Ukrainian officials say the pressure was applied over months, starting in 2015. The Hill reports that Ukrainian officials revealed that Shokin had been conducting a wide-ranging corruption probe into natural gas firm Burisma Holdings at the time. Bidens son Hunter, a lawyer, former hedge fund president and Washington lobbyist, was a member of the board and, it has since been revealed, appeared to receive a series of payments from the gas company. Shokin confirmed to the Hill that he had plans to conduct interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden, before he was fired. Also on rt.com Dem 2020 favorite Biden rebuffs awkward kiss allegations The investigation into Burisma largely stopped when Shorkin was fired, but in 2018, after Biden had made his comments at the CFR, the current general prosecutor, Yury Lutsenko, started to look into the Burisma case again. He discovered members of the board and Rosemont Seneca Partners had obtained funds for consulting services, he told the Hill. Lutsenko said some of the evidence he has could interest US authorities. Money Burisma paid over $3 million to an account linked to Hunter Bidens investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, between April 2014 and October 2015, financial records filed in an unrelated Manhattan federal court file revealed. Rosemont Seneca Partners usually received two transfers of $83,333 a month (amounting to $166,000) from Burisma, and on the same days, the account then paid Hunter one or more payments ranging from $5,000 to $25,000. The Ukrainian probe into Burisma had identified Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer, who had also been appointed to Burismas board, as potential recipients of the money Burisma sent to Rosemont Seneca. When Hunter was appointed to the board in 2014, some raised concerns of a conflict of interest, in light of Bidens previous comments urging Ukraine to not be as dependant on Russia for gas. Burisma is a private company headed by former Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch banker Alan Apter. Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski sits on the board. Like this story? Share it with a friend! Florida Senator Marco Rubios social media output is a real mixed bag. In between odes to regime change in Venezuela and paeans to border security, Rubio dropped in some words from the good book, to mixed reaction. Though nations rage and kingdoms totter, HE utters his voice and the earth melts. The LORD of hosts is with us; our stronghold is the God of Jacob, the Republican Senator tweeted, citing Psalm 46. Amidst the amens, some commenters insisted that Rubio concern himself less with Biblical affairs, and more with the various problems facing Florida. Although Rubio seemingly finds refuge in God when nations rage and kingdoms totter, the Florida Senator seems determined to use his own rage to totter Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power, even if it means roping Russia into a cataclysmic conflict too. Megalomaniac @marcorubio is directly threatening war with nuclear-armed Russia over its military alliance with Venezuela which has existed since 2001, Tweeted journalist Dan Cohen. It's impossible to overstate how dangerous this is. Rubio should be reprimanded for abuse of power. Hours before leading Twitter in Bible study, Rubio had warned that the arrival of Russian troops in Venezuela a show of support authorized by a 2001 treaty between the allied nations can lead to miscalculation, escalation & even war. While war between the US and Russia would be on a Biblical scale, stoking and encouraging it doesnt seem to be a very Christian thing to do. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! Actress, #MeToo advocate, and all round woke feminist Alyssa MIlano has stepped in to defend her friend Joe Biden, after accusations of inappropriate touching and groping have mounted against the former vice president. I am proud to call Joe Biden a friend. He has been a leader and a champion on fighting violence against women, Milano tweeted on Monday, adding thats who Joe Biden is - a warm, generous individual who believes its on all of us to pay attention to womens stories and experiences. As vice president, Biden spearheaded the Its On Us campaign against sexual assault on college campuses. However, the 76-year-old has also built up quite the highlight reel of his own inappropriate moments; becoming far too familiar and handsy with women and children at Washington events. Most recently, Biden was accused of unwanted kissing by former Nevada legislator Lucy Flores, who said the former VP planted a big slow kiss on the back of her head at a rally in Las Vegas; and Connecticut woman Amy Lappos, who alleges Biden put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. Biden denies any wrongdoing, saying it was never his intention to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Milano, who reinvented herself in recent years as a vocal feminist and founder of the #MeToo movement, agrees. I respect Lucy Flores decision to share her story and agree with Biden that we all must pay attention to it, she tweeted. But, just as we must believe women that decide to come forward, we cannot assume all womens experiences are the same. Believe women, but is certainly a change of tune for Milano, who led the crusade against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, last year. Milano said that his confirmation in the face of uncorroborated sexual assault allegations served to institutionalize sexual violence, and hashtagged her anti-Kavanaugh tweets#BelieveWomen. Biden has not yet announced a run for the presidency in 2020, but is considered a likely candidate and a frontrunner among a crowded field of Democrats. Although progressive godfather Bernie Sanders remains a favorite among young voters, Biden topped a recent Quinnipiac University poll, with 29 percent of Democrats rating him as their first choice. With Sanders dangerously close in the polls, a certain few journalists in the mainstream media have stepped in to downplay the accusations against Biden. Is is okay to bring up this could be politically motivated? MSNBCs Mika Brzezinski asked on Monday. Are we allowed to bring up that Lucy Flores is a huge Bernie person? And she has political connections that might be counter to Bidens goals? Brzezinski then laughed off Bidens wandering hands, describing her friend as extremely affectionate, extremely flirtatious in a completely safe way. Still, others are more puzzled. Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked former Clinton Adviser Richard Goodstein have you ever sniffed a strangers hair? What is that? Even liberal late-night comedian Stephen Colbert piled on Biden. Generally, the only people who come up from behind, put their arms around you, smell your hair and kiss your head are dead husbands teaching you pottery, he jibed. to RT newsletter to get stories the mainstream media wont tell you. A Norwegian suspect detained in Russia on espionage charges was gathering crucial intelligence on the Navys nuclear-powered submarines, a Russian state prosecutor has said. Frode Berg, a Norwegian citizen, got in touch with a Russian informant to collect the intelligence, state prosecutor Milana Digayeva told Russian news agencies. The informant, she said, was monitored by Russian secret services. Berg was detained in Moscow back in 2017 during an FSB operation. At the time, he was allegedly receiving documents containing classified information. Now, the indictment alleges that the man channeled the data to a Norwegian intelligence service, Digayeva told. He could face up to 20 years behind bars if found guilty. The suspect brushed off the spying allegations, while his lawyer insists he may be the victim of a frame-up. In September 2018, Norway detained Mikhail Bochkarev, a member of the Russian Upper House staff. The Russian citizen was accused of gathering data at an event hosted by the European Center for Parliamentary Research and Documentation. Local media said the charges against him revolved around the fact that he moved through the building where the event was being held, rather than staying in one place. Moscow called the charges the theater of absurd and demanded that Oslo bring official apologies. Washington has blocked the final report on the prevention of an arms race in space without any reasonable explanation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said as a UN Group of Governmental Experts fails to come up with a joint document. Experts from 25 states held talks in Geneva in the end of March. Established by the UN General Assembly in 2017, the Group of Governmental Experts was set to lay the basis for a treaty that would ensure peace in space. Little progress, however, was made as the participants were unable to agree on a joint document. In a statement issued on Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry pinned the blame for the failed talks on the US expert who blocked the final report without any reasonable explanation. Moscow, however, was not surprised with the dismal outcome. Such scenario was essentially predictable given the US policy [aimed at] ensuring its one-sided domination in space by any means. So far, the legal framework for controlling the arms race is restricted to the Outer Space Treaty a Cold War era document signed in 1967 which prohibits the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in Earths orbit, on the Moon, or other celestial bodies. Also on rt.com US will 'quit all treaties' & 'make militarization of space inevitable' with new Trump doctrine However, the treaty does not explicitly prohibit the transit of weapons of mass destruction if launched by ballistic missiles, and the use of conventional weapons something that has become a growing concern since huge strides in technology have been made over the past 50 years. The US military recently announced plans to enhance and expand its existing missile shield. The missile defense review released by the Pentagon in January 2019 recommends adding new capabilities, including space-based sensors. Also on rt.com Space war between US & Russia will trap humanity on Earth, no matter who wins analysts Russia and China advocate a treaty that would ban weapons in space. In 2008, both nations proposed a joint draft of the document to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. An updated version submitted in 2014 was, however, rejected by the US. Like this story? Share it with a friend! Oil markets woke from a five-month slumber with prices hitting a 2019 high above $69 a barrel after Saudi Arabia cut more than it had agreed with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies. On Tuesday, Brent crude grew 0.42 percent to $69.30 per barrel by 09:58 GMT, briefly touching $69.50, the highest since mid-November. WTI Crude Oil was up 0.65 percent at $61.99 per barrel after rising above $62 for the first time since early November. Also on rt.com Venezuelas oil production in jeopardy after new blackout Apart from the significant cutback from Saudi Arabia, crude prices received a significant boost from pending sanctions against Iran and potential disruption in Venezuelan oil production due to sanctions pressure on the countrys energy sector. Washington is mulling more penalties against the Islamic Republic, whose crude exports have dropped more than twofold due to existing measures, according to an official as quoted by Reuters. Further declines in supply from Iran and Venezuela might magnify the effects of oil production cuts agreed by OPEC-members and allied producers in late 2018. The measure, aimed at preventing a price-sapping rise in inventories, came into force in January. Also on rt.com Russia, US compete for Asian LNG market share Last month, oil supplies from OPEC-producers hit a four-year low due to the excessive production cuts by Saudi Arabia, a survey carried out by Reuters reveals. In April, the oil-rich kingdom is expected to slash export supplies by a further 10 percent, according to analysts at HFI Research. The reduction could send shockwaves through the oil market, as global refinery maintenance season officially concludes at the end of April. For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section Dutch police have responded to the discovery of an explosive device, the second such incident this week in the Netherlands. The explosive device, resembling a grenade, was discovered at about 8:30am local time at the Nieuw Zeist cafe, in a residential area in the town of Zeist, near Utrecht. Reports by local media suggest the device had been left there deliberately, however, this was not confirmed by police. Police responding to the discovery said in a statement on Twitter that the device was successfully defused by attending law enforcement and a police cordon remains in place on the street while a forensic examination takes place. The incident is the second such discovery of an explosive device in the province this week. In the early hours of Monday morning, police removed and destroyed a device after it was discovered on Utrechts Vlampijpstraat. Also on rt.com 37-year-old Turkish terror suspect who killed three in Utrecht shooting arrested (VIDEO) to RT newsletter to get stories the mainstream media wont tell you. A prominent Iranian womens rights activist has sparked heated debate online after she condemned Western women who wear the hijab when they visit Iran and slammed them for supporting a discriminatory law. Masih Alinejad, who is the founder of the White Wednesdays movement, which encourages Iranian women to remove their headscarves in protest, said that calling the hijab part of Iranian "culture" and wearing it out of respect was really an "insult which sends the wrong message to women activists fighting against the compulsory head-covering law. She said that Western feminists were leaving Iranian women "on their own" in the fight and specifically called out female politicians from other countries who dutifully wore the hijab during their official visits to Iran. There were three female politicians from the Netherlands they went to Iran the same day when one of the women of the White Wednesdays movement put her headscarf on a stick and waved it in public, she got arrested, Alinejad said. The same day there were three female politicians from the Netherlands in Iran obeying compulsory hijab law without challenging it. The comments have invited both praise and criticism online, with many supporting Alinejad and calling Western women out for hypocrisy, while others have said her comments were insulting to women who wear the hijab by choice. One Twitter user accused Western women of treating the hijab like cultural haute couture. Another female activist said it was painful to hear people say that the hijab was part of Iranian culture and urged people to look at photographs from Iran before the 1979 revolution when women were not forced to wear a head covering. Others pointed out that some women choose to wear the headscarf and that not all women feel oppressed by it. One male commenter said that women activists fighting for the choice were part of the problem and immoral because they were judging what people chose to wear for religious reasons. Some didnt blame Western women for obeying the law while in Iran, saying they were probably just afraid of being turned away from the country or facing some kind of punishment. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern sparked similar debate recently when she wore a hijab to visit victims of the recent mosque shooting. Some praised Ardern as a real leader for the move, while others said that supporting modesty culture was not the way to show solidarity. Like this story? Share it with a friend! Former US intelligence hackers helped the United Arab Emirates spy on Al Jazeeras chairman, a BBC host, and other media figures as part of a secret Emirati intelligence program called Project Raven during the blockade on Qatar. At least 9 former National Security Agency (NSA) and US military operatives worked within Project Raven, which was exposed in January after spying on US journalists and a British activist, along with dissidents and opponents of the UAE royal family. The targeting of Arab media figures began during the 2017 diplomatic dispute with Qatar, which saw the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and others turn against the small Gulf nation after accusing it of supporting terrorism. The countries imposed an air, sea and land blockade on Qatar and demanded it shut down Al Jazeera, which is funded by the Qatari government. Also on rt.com Blockade blowback: Qatar bans Saudi imports as it eyes closer economic ties with Turkey, Iran It was then that Project Raven hacked into the iPhones of at least 10 journalists and media executives to see if they had ties to the Qatar government or the Muslim Brotherhood in order to uncover something that would show Qatar royal family influence over Al Jazeera and other media outlets, a Reuters investigation has revealed. They used a program called Karma, which gives access to a targets phone by simply inputting their email and phone number. There is no need for the target to click a link or download anything to gain access. They then passed the data gathered on to UAE intelligence. Among those targeted were BBC Arabic host Giselle Khoury, Al Jazeera host Faisal al-Qassem, and Al Jazeera chairman Hamad bin Thamer bin Mohammed Al Thani. Also on rt.com Spyware sheik-down: UAE government accused of hacking phones of a prince, emir and other rivals Abdullah Al-Athba, editor of Qatar newspaper Al-Arab, Al Araby TV director Abdulrahman Elshayyal and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed founder Amzi Bishara were also targeted, along with journalists from London-based Al-Araby TV and Al-Hiwa media outlets. The revelation that former US government employees are working with a Gulf monarchy to spy on the media raises questions about US oversight over its former employees, who are sharing the hacking capabilities they learned while working for the US government to assist a foreign government to spy on media and dissidents. Project Raven was set up in 2009 with the assistance of former George W Bush White House officials and US intelligence contractors, it was originally meant to track terrorism but soon evolved into spying on opponents. Like this story? Share it with a friend! Venezuela's Supreme Court of Justice has urged MPs to strip Juan Guaido of his immunity from prosecution, a move which could lead to criminal charges brought against the US-backed opposition leader amd self-declared president. "[The court] orders to hand a certified copy of this decision to the head of the national Constituent Assembly in order to recall the parliamentary immunity of Juan Gerardo Guaido Marquez," Supreme Court Justice (TSJ) Maikel Moreno announced on Monday, explaining that the opposition leader had violated the January 29 ban on leaving the country. Guaido, who declared himself interim president in January, visited several Latin American neighbors in an attempt to muster support for regime change in Venezuela. The opposition leader holds immunity as head of the National Assembly, but stands accused by Caracas of inciting violence and engaging in an illicit financial activity. In February, he travelled to Colombia to lead the so-called US humanitarian aid convoy into Venezuela. While in Colombia, the 35-year-old met with US Vice President Mike Pence. After touring Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Ecuador, Guaido returned to Venezuela only on March 4 to a large reception of foreign ambassadors and cameramen. Following the homecoming, the government went on to arrest Guido's chief of staff, Roberto Marrero, before charging him with being part of a terrorist network. President Nicolas Maduro also accused Guaido of developing a plot to assassinate him. Prior to Monday's call to strip Guaido of his immunity, the Maduro's government has barred the US-backed leader from holding public office for 15 years over irregularities in financial records. Also on rt.com Hundreds march in Washington, DC to protest against NATO, US interference in Venezuela Guaido has received backing from Washington and its European as well as many Latin American countries. However, some two-thirds of the world still recognizes Maduros government, or has remained neutral. Russia, China and Cuba have been among Caracas most vocal advocates on the international stage, cautioning Washington against meddling into the internal affairs of Venezuela. Like this story? Share it with a friend! Expanding its 'Make in India' portfolio, Apple has now started making its iPhone 7 model in India. This move will help the government's agenda of promoting India as a manufacturing hub. The company already makes iPhone SE and iPhone 6s locally. "We are proud to be producing iPhone 7 in Bengaluru for local customers, furthering our long-term commitment in India," Apple told The Economic Times. Since the beginning of March, Taiwanese contract manufacturer Wistron has been producing iPhone 7 models from its Bengaluru facility. Manufacturing iPhones in India costs the company lesser than expenditure involved in importing, because of the duty concessions from the government. However, this does not mean lower prices though, as analysts said the company will invest the money made from these devices to push sales and marketing. Wistron recently got the Centre's approval for its proposal to widen its manufacturing capacity worth Rs 5,000 crore to manufacture high-end Apple devices. Navkender Singh at IDC India believes that iPhone 7 is a low-risk product for Apple to make in India. "To that extent, the local manufacturing is about revalidating Apple's India manufacturing capability before they scale up to other models," he said. 2018 was a tough year for the iPhone maker as sales took a hit. Apple overhauled its management and sales strategy and is focusing on India. Analysts said the company wants to make India a manufacturing and export hub, in the backdrop of US-China tensions. Due to stiff competition from Chinese phone makers like Xiaomi, Apple's market share in India dropped from 2.4 percent in 2017 to 1.2 percent in 2018. Singh said that local manufacturing is not going to help regain market share, which will still be low in 2019. However, the company will be able to test the manufacturing segment for its high-end models. Just last week, Apple launched a host of services including credit card, content subscription service and a digital video game platform. Eyeing India's multi-billion dollar fighter jet market, Boeing has offered to build a 21st century aerospace ecosystem in India for co-developing F/A-18 Super Hornet upgrades as part of the country's advanced medium combat aircraft (AMCA) programme. Two major American fighter jets manufacturers - Boeing and Lockheed Martin - are in the race for the Indian fighter jet market. Lockheed Martin has offered to shift its entire F-16 manufacturing base from US to India. "What we're talking about is a complete ecosystem of capability it's building up supply chain, it's building up engineering capacity, technical mechanical capacity. It is bringing the build, not the kit, to India," Marc Allen, president of Boeing International and a member of the Boeing Executive Council, told PTI. Last month, Allen was named senior vice president of Boeing and president of Embraer Partnership and Group Operations. Boeing has offered that future F/A-18 Super Hornet upgrades can be co-developed with India, maximising performance, affordability, indigenisation for decades. The McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet is a twin-engine, supersonic, all-weather, carrier-capable, multirole combat jet, designed as both a fighter and attack aircraft. As a result, Allen argued, the impact will be transformational - building a next gen warfighter in India and a 21st century aerospace ecosystem with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Mahindra along with Boeing industry's partners (GE Aviation, GKN Aero, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon). "And that's why the idea of being able to service, both the Indian Navy and the Indian Air Force requirements together is so vital because it creates a volume that supports industrial development at a massive scale," Allen said in response to a question. Boeing says that the 'Make in India' programme for the Super Hornet has been envisioned for aircraft made in India for India. The Super Hornet production line will exist in the US to meet the immediate needs of its American and international customers. India is to build an entirely new line, leveraging Boeing's commercial and defence experience, Allen said. The Super Hornet is the airplane that fits the requirement of both the Indian Navy and Airforce, he asserted. Boeing says that the Super Hornet offering for India co-opts the expertise of a public-private partnership with HAL and Mahindra to make the F/A-18 Super Hornet in an advanced Factory-of-the-Future in India. The partnership, it asserts, will harness productivity opportunities in India to deliver more-for-less (more capability for less cost) to its Indian customers and worldwide. Noting that its current F/A-18 production involves 60,000 jobs and 800 suppliers in 44 US States, Boeing officials say that this can be replicated in India. This partnership will create jobs and industrial capacity in India and also helps Boeing stay globally competitive. The future production with Indian partners will involve maximising indigenous content and producing the F/A-18 in India thereby creating a 21st century aerospace ecosystem, Allen said as he refuted giving a direct answer to the question of minimum number of fighter jet orders it needs from India to develop that ecosystem. "We have not framed up our responses to the government's request for information around a minimum order now, but what we've done is that show us your requirements and we'll show you what's possible inside your requirements. But certainly, the government recognises the programmatic constraints that the more it's able invest in a broader program that can cover multiple services, the more capacity for industrial development it will get, he said. "We will shape our bid to the number. There's less we can do at a lower number in terms of what's Made in India. And to get to the full up ecosystem, the more the purchases, the more that can be done. It's a sliding scale. And remember it's also a sliding timescale," he said. But at the same time, Allen said that Boeing is not waiting for the competition to begin building the ecosystem. Boeing, Allen said will continue to invest millions of dollars in supplier development, training, tooling and quality systems and skill development at its Indian suppliers. Allen said Boeing plans to expand its footprint in India from 3,000 engineers to 5,000 in the next couple of years. "We're on our incredible trajectory of that growth. We've also opened up the Apache fuselage manufacturing operation. It's a joint venture - Boeing and Tata that works out of Hyderabad," he said. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Tata Steel's European unit may have to put its UK facilities on the block as it works with partner thyssenkrupp to get their proposed joint venture cleared by the European Union Commission. The Commission, which is probing if the JV harms competition, on April 1 said that the two companies have offered 'concessions' to address its concerns. The agency though didn't give details, and has extended the deadline to give its decision on the deal from May 13 to June 5. "Much of the concession may happen in the UK operations of Tata Steel, which could end up having minimal presence there," said a senior executive from the industry. The joint venture will be the second largest steelmaker in Europe, behind ArcelorMittal. It will have annual revenues of 17 billion euros and will produce 21 million tons of steel a year. The Commission had identified three industry segments - automotive steel, coated steel used for packaging and electrical steel - where the JV may harm competition. In packaging, the Welsh business of Tata Steel UK could be on the block. A similar unit in Netherlands, where Tata Steel Europe has a major presence, is profitable, and so is thyssenkrupp's unit. So it will be the Welsh unit that will look out for new owners. In electrical steel segment, Tata Steel has already put its Cogent unit, again in Wales, on the block. thyssenkrupp's electric steel unit is highly profitable and may be retained under the JV. "For automotive steel, Tata Steel could shift or sell some of its product line, which will be again from Wales. This would mean that Tata Steel UK will have nominal presence post this," said an official. Reports from European media have said that thyssenkrupp may also offer some of its glavanising units to clear the EU probe. The JV, which will be called thysenkrupp Tata Steel BV, will be led by Andreas Goss, who is currently CEO of the German company's steel division. The prospect of these units coming on block has already evoked interest. Germany's steelmaker Salzgitter AG has said that it will look at assets that will be divested by the Tata Steel UK-thyssenkrupp JV. "We would certainly look at it with interest," Reuters quoted its chief executive Heinz Joerg Fuhrmann as saying. Institutional Investor Advisory Services Peter Drucker, the renowned management consultant, had once surmised that CEO pay should not exceed 20 times the pay for the average worker in the company; anything beyond that may dent employee morale, reduce productivity and undermine the companys internal dynamics. Closer home, similar views have been espoused by Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys and one of the early torchbearers of compassionate capitalism. And while there is no empirical data to support this hypothesis -- especially in todays scenario where business dynamics have undergone significant changes -- it does set the stage for a closer review on the prevailing pay gaps between various sections in organisational hierarchies. An IiAS study finds that in Sensex companies, the CEO pay aggregates to more than 150 times the median employee salary. In the BSE 500, the ratio is more than 100 times. This is lower than what we find in some other markets (for example, S&P 500 companies have a CEO to worker pay ratio of 347:1), and is clearly out of sync with globally accepted thresholds. At these levels, such practices run the risk of alienating employee communities and incentivizing individual performance at the cost of downplaying the collective efforts of the team. Another metric which stands out is the pay gap between CEOs and other executive directors (EDs) on the board. CEOs in India are now getting paid almost twice as much as other executives. This can be partially attributed to a change in the recruitment mindset. With search committees now looking externally to bring in talent, compensation benchmarking has become more lateral. CEO pay is compared to industry and global peers which creates an upward bias in pay scales. At some point, boards need to revisit this process and stack up the CEOs pay against other executive directors reporting to them. This will level the playing field and reduce the power distance across the board. Promoters get paid higher than professional CEOs Almost two-thirds of the listed companies in India are promoter (family) owned. While some have professionalized management, most of them continue to be run by family members. In such companies, remuneration becomes a form of related party transaction and needs closer monitoring. Especially because currently, the pay for top promoter directors is considerably higher than that of professional directors. While the gap has reduced during the year, it continues to remain substantial. Seven of the top 10 highest paid CEOs belong to promoter families. Further, the highest paid professionals are generally awarded through long term incentives or stock grants which get vested over time and whose value is determined by market performance. In contrast, promoters are given cash handouts which are commission-based and short-term in nature. Women are underpaid and under-represented A large part of the debate is also shifting towards gender pay disparity. This is another area where India Inc. needs to catch up. In FY18, the median pay for male CEOs was much higher than that of women CEOs. At the ED level, men were paid more than 1.5 times as much as their female peers. This inequality is observed in almost all industries. And while all of it may not be attributable to occupational segregation or direct pay discrimination, it does merit a review. Representation from women at the CXO/ED level continues to remain low at less than 8 percent. Companies need to understand the need and value in increasing women presence across leadership ranks numerous studies have shown that it is not just a feel-good argument but makes sound business sense for the bottom line. Conclusion Executive pay is already a recurrent theme in governance discussions. The reason why the subject resonates among market participants is because it touches upon a motley of societal issues, most notably the gap between the haves and have-nots. In the end, an equitable and inclusive culture is at the heart of any successful organization. To get there, boards need to proactively address some of these discriminatory practices and ensure fairness in pay polices. Note: Data for this report has been sourced from IiAS proprietary pay analytics platform, comPAYre, which contains historical remuneration and performance data for executive directors across BSE 500. The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) February 12, 2018, circular on bankruptcy proceedings, in a major relief to stressed power and sugar companies. The RBI circular had made it mandatory for banks to ensure that a resolution plan (RP) is in place within 180 days of a default of accounts, with exposure of Rs 2,000 crore or more. Failing this, such accounts were to be directed to the NCLT for insolvency proceedings. The central bank had set the deadline of August 31, 2018 for banks to comply with this norm. A two-judge bench of justice Rohinton Fali Nariman and justice Vineet Saran pronounced the judgement while hearing a bunch of petitions on the maintainability of the RBI circular. The companies had earlier argued that "As per RBI, 157 companies were directly affected by the February circular and not one company has been resolved in the said timeline." The circular also underscored IBC's status as the cornerstone of the bad loan resolution framework, superseding all previous mechanisms. The circular imposed a one-day default rule. Banks have to treat a company as a defaulter even if it misses repayment schedule by a day. However, these norms have been criticised as being harsh in various quarters, including by a parliamentary committee. Here we explain RBIs new framework and its impact. Timelines for Large Accounts to be Referred under IBC: For loan accounts of Rs 2,000 crore or more, banks will have to ensure that a resolution plan is in place within 180 days after a default. If not implemented within the timeframe, the account must be referred to the insolvency courts within 15 days. For accounts with exposure of Rs 100 crore to Rs 2,000 crore a timeline for resolution will be announced over a two-year period. Impact: This will strain the balance sheets of banks as the disclosure on their books has to be made much earlier than before. Identify stress early: SMA Sub-categories Basis for classification Principal or interest payment or any other amount wholly or partly overdue between SMA-0 1-30 days SMA-1 31-60 days SMA-2 61-90 days Lenders must report credit information to Central Repository of Information on Large Credits (CRILC) on loans of Rs 5 crore and above. Any default in such loans needs to be reported to CRILC every Friday starting February 23. The CRILC-Main Report will need to be submitted on a monthly basis effective April 1, 2018. Lenders must identify emerging stress loans as special mention accounts (SMA) in three categories based on their default period: Impact: Reporting of such nature will deter borrowers from defaulting for the fear of their names being known to the RBI. It will also alert other lenders while providing another other forms of finance. Implementation of Resolution Plan: All lenders must put in place Board-approved policies for resolution of stressed assets under this framework, including the timelines for resolution. As soon as there is a default in the borrowers account with any bank/lender, all lenders singly or jointly shall initiate steps to cure the default. Impact: Lenders will get on their toes to be forced to take action against the defaulters sooner than later as was the case previously. Regularisation of the account by payment of all overdues by the borrower entity Sale of the exposures to other entities / investors Change in ownership Restructuring Implementation Conditions for Resolution Plan the borrower entity is no longer in default with any of the lenders if the resolution involves restructuring; then The plan or the RP in respect of borrower entities to whom the lenders continue to have credit exposure, shall be deemed to be implemented only if the following conditions are met: In case of restructuring/change in ownership in accounts of Rs 100 crore and above, an independent credit evaluation (ICE) of the residual debt by credit rating agencies (CRAs) specifically authorised by the Reserve Bank, is required. Accounts with exposure of Rs 500 crore and above shall require two such ICEs. Only such evaluated plans will be considered for implementation. Impact: This is aimed at alerting the bankers on the underwriting norms while considering financing to the borrowers. Further, it also provides the current status and true picture of the borrower's financial strength and actions. Prudential Norms In case of restructuring, the account will be immediately downgraded to sub-standard and can be upgraded only when all the outstanding loan / facilities in the account demonstrate satisfactory performance of no default at any time during the implementation period. Impact: This is also aimed at providing the current status and true picture of the borrower's financial strength and actions. Penalty if banks do not follow Any failure on the part of lenders in meeting the prescribed timelines or any actions by lenders with an intent to conceal the actual status of accounts or evergreen the stressed accounts, will be subjected to stringent supervisory / enforcement actions as deemed appropriate by the Reserve Bank, including, but not limited to, higher provisioning on such accounts and monetary penalties. Impact: High provisioning and monetary penalties may impact the banks' profitability Existing accounts under Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. Last year in two tranches, RBI identified around 40 NPA accounts to be taken to courts under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. List 1 in June RBI identified 12 large accounts, with 25 percent share of total bad loans. RBI identified 28 large and mid-sized loan acco live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Cyient shares slumped on April 2 following a delay in delivery of order worth $5 million. Ajay Aggarwal, CFO of the company, spoke to CNBC-TV18 about the company's business plans and growth prospects. "Q4 has been a softer quarter than what we had anticipated," Aggarwal said. "We will see a growth of about 1-2 percent in case of services and to that extent in terms of the outlook for the full year we are looking at 7.5 percent of constant currency growth in services," he added. Talking about the margins, Aggarwal said, "There should not be any material impact on the operating margin outlook. We should be close to flat outlook of margin year-on-year." "We were looking at 3-5 percent growth this quarter on the services side and we are ending up with 1-2 percent. The gap has not come because of any event which is structural in nature; there is no order that we have lost, there is no customer that we have lost. It is only that some of the execution has got delayed," he added. Source: CNBC-TV18 PS Jayakumar, MD and CEO of Bank of Baroda (BoB), spoke to CNBC-TV18 about what the capital adequacy after its integration with Dena and Vijaya Bank. It was 9.86 on the CET1 level that was the capital that has remained same for BoB and the consolidated company. The infusion of Rs 5,000 crore increases the capital adequacy by 1.02 percent. We still have to recognise the fact that we all work out a different accounting standard and there will be a need to harmonise the standards, so some amount of Rs 5,000 crore would get adjusted in the harmonisation process. We also have the profits for this year flowing into a balance sheet. We are also planning to raise about Rs 1,500 crore or thereabouts through additional tier 1 (AT1) and we are trying to raise another Rs 1,000 crore or thereabouts through the issuance of shares for the employee purchase programme. When we put all of these things together and then assuming some amount of divestiture we can do, it seems to me that we have capital adequate to fund growth for this financial year, Jayakumar said on April 2. Talking about the lender's growth, he said, We still talk about 14-15 percent but sometime in Q3 of this year, we would like to go to the market. I am making an assumption here that we will be able to show continued growth. I am also making an assumption here that the amalgamation process would be going smoothly. I think we would be able to raise capital. We had made about Rs 13,000 crore of combined profits of all the three companies closing December, just taking that number and extrapolating it further I would think we would make an operating profit anything between Rs 18,000 crore and Rs 20,000 crore next year. The credit growth remains robust. We stay with the direction of 15 percent credit growth through the next financial year, said Jayakumar. Speaking about non-performing assets (NPAs), he said, As a part of the competition of the tax swap ratio, we did have a fair amount of work to look at the relative NPA recognition. It doesnt mean that BoB does not have loans which needed to recognise, there was some recognition that was required so we looked at the whole thing together. So we have a reasonable grip on the extent of provisions required in relation to that. As far as incremental loans are concerned, we had a task force that was multiple taskforces, 18 of them working under executive directors, that essentially rolled out a common product programme for all the three banks together and so starting today except for the pipeline transactions, we are underwriting under the same set of rules or will be underwriting the same set of rules across all the three banks starting tomorrow. Source: CNBC-TV 18 Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused the United States of impeding aid efforts and "economic terrorism" on April 2 as authorities ordered the immediate evacuation of flood-stricken cities in western Iran. US sanctions are "impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedcrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods," Zarif tweeted, referring to search and rescue operations being conducted after huge rainfalls triggered vast flooding. "Blocked equipment includes relief choppers," the tweet read, adding that "this isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM." The evacuation was ordered after rivers burst their banks, dams overflowed and vast areas were cut off from communication. A chronic shortage of rescue helicopters in Iran, due to US sanctions, has forced the emergency services to request help from military helicopters and amphibious armoured personnel carriers to assist in the rescue operations. The authorities declared a "situation red", the highest level of alert, in Lorestan province with four or five cities "completely critical", state television news network IRINN reported from Khorramabad, the region's capital. "In Khorramabad the water has risen by as much as three metres (nearly 10 feet) in parts... and reports are coming in of regions... completely submerged with residents stranded on their rooftops," it added. The Red Crescent's provincial director, Sarem Rezaee, said his organisation had lost contact with much of the region. "Telephones are not working, our radio communications are down... at this moment we have no news of other cities and villages," he told IRINN, adding roads were flooded and helicopters were unable to take off due to the bad weather. "We have requested emergency help from neighbouring provinces but at the present no one can do anything." The airport in the western city of Khorramabad was flooded, with images showing water submerging the runway and cutting the province's main air link to the rest of the country. Authorities in Lorestan ordered evacuations in many regions, bringing in the armed forces to forcibly remove those who do not comply, local media reported. Deepanshu Mohan In the beginning of the 19th century, when the French army under Napoleon subjugated other powers in Europe, Britain continued to dominate the seas and generate substantive financial resources through maritime trade operations with the rest of the world (including its own colonies). To erode Britains comparative advantages in trade at sea, Napoleonat the peak of his military mightin 1806-07, erected the Continental Blockade, restraining any territory he ruled to trade with Britain. It became extremely difficult for the French to implement the Blockade in Europe, particularly in Northern Europe, where local economies pre-dominantly depended on British goods. At the same time, Russiathe only power that Napoleon had not defeatedwas forced to accept the Continental Blockade and not trade with Britain. When Russia refused to do so and opened its ports to Britain, Napoleon ended up starting a war by invading Russia, and the rest is history. More than two centuries since the Napoleonic Blockade, something similar is being seen now with the US administration under Donald Trump re-negotiating its regional trade agreements with the EU and NAFTA (now called USMCA: US-Mexico-Canada). Each of the renegotiated US trade agreements includes a clause for nations to notify the US about any trade arrangement with China and thereby, restrict Chinas trade partnership with these regions (as was targeted against Britain by Napoleon). In its proposed trade arrangement with the EU, the US wants to secure a mechanism to ensure transparency and take appropriate action if the EU negotiates a free-trade agreement with a non-market country. The non-market country is a sure reference to China and if the EU agrees to thisstill a long shotwhat it means is that every time the EU discusses its trade agreement with China (or thinks of renegotiating it), it would have to inform the US for transparency purposes. A similar clause was earlier renegotiated by the US in its revised NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico, where Canada was asked to accept similar conditions. In more recent times, a US-UK trade proposal (in the post-Brexit scenario) expects the same position to be maintained by the UK against China (if it signs onto the agreement). Such an unprecedented level of interference, reflected by the Trump administration with clear third-party ramifications (on Chinas own trade interests) seems indicative of the US own insecurities and self-doubt to lead trade partnerships across major trading blocsat a time when China is almost about to overtake the US economy in GDP terms. In a way when a bilateral trade dispute with the Chinese couldnt yield significant economic success to the US (ignoring the political rhetoric it did generate), the imposition of such indirect measures appears to be another political route for Trump to inhibit Chinas trade reach with other US trade partners. However, using such subtle clauses in trade agreements to (re)direct with third parties isnt something new. Over the past two decades, the proliferation of RTAs across the globe have empirically resulted in three key concerns on third parties owing to their discriminatory nature of trade preference (i.e. giving preference to one nation over others): (a) increase in trade diversion with third parties to accommodate concerns of special interest groups of trade partners; (b) a near-end of multilateral trade arrangements and (c) increase in unequal trade liberalization levels across and within regions (entering or not-entering in a given agreement). A preferential trading arrangementfor some viz-a-viz othershas led to what Jagdish Bhagwati earlier termed- The Spaghetti Bowl Effect. The Effect, further makes it difficult to ascertain rules of origin for manufactured goods and services that get entangled in complexities of intermediate production (via assembling) or legal norms under intellectual property laws. Despite these reasons, one must also acknowledge that the motivation for Trump to restrain Chinas proliferating trade reach with major trading groups-EU, UK, Canada is also, to a certain extent, mutually echoed by other nations. A lot of trade actorsincluding EU nations and Indiahave voiced concerns on Chinas unfair trade practices and pushed for reciprocal trade reforms in China for a number of reasons. Some of these include: imposition of high tariff and non-tariff barrier structures for foreign firms operating in China; restrictions imposed by the Chinese state on foreign ownership of domestic firms, a dismal record of sharing intellectual property knowledge by Chinese firms with foreign multinationals (operating in China) and so on. The real question here is: Whether an anti-China approach by Trump restraining Chinas trade partners via RTAs with partners like the EUseems to be an appropriate move? Like Russia disregarded Napoleons conditions of Continental Blockade, quite similarly, the EU too, can call Trumps bluff and decide against any such clause to avoid bartering its autonomy in (re)negotiating its trade relationship with China. A scenario like this is possible considering the trade dynamics between US-China-EU. EUs top five exports to China include motor vehicles, machinery and equipment, chemicals, medical instruments and transport equipment, which is pretty much the same basket of goods (or trade substitutes) that China predominantly imports from the US. For EU manufacturers and exporters, trade complementarity ensures both the US and Chinese markets feature as good prospective trade partners, requiring the EU Trade Commission to maintain a flexible, more autonomous trade relationship with both these countriesand that seems difficult with Trumps Napoleonic move. If Trump continues with the same path he has embarked upon in his trade policy, to avoid meddling in US-China tensions, it is quite possible that the EUfor future prospectsmay ignore Trump (and the US) altogether and maintain a greater degree of trade autonomy with China and other South-East Asian nations. At the same time, the EU has good enough reason to avoid getting entangled in any tri-lateral trade dispute, given its own intra-regional concerns and a messy divorce arrangement on the table with Britain. Amidst all the political uncertainty that prevails and whatever scenario plays out in the months to come, one may safely assert that Trumps imperial overreach in his trade policysimilar to Napoleonis more likely to do more harm to US trade ambitions (with EU and other partners), possibly resulting in disastrous consequences. The Supreme Courts (SC) judgement quashing RBIs 12th February circular has come as a bolt from the blue. The circular was aimed at early recognition and resolution of stressed assets and making the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (IBC) pivotal in the entire framework. Post the February 12 circular, all pre-existing categorization of standard stressed assets SDR, S4A, CDR restructuring, and flexible restructuring under 5:25 scheme stood abolished, leaving IBC as the only resolution mechanism. Prior to the 12th February circular, the Banking Regulation Act was amended and under Section 35AA, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) got the authority to direct banks to initiate insolvency resolution process in respect of a default, under the provision of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), 2016. Before assessing the probable impact of the SC judgement, it is important to understand the nuances of RBIs February 12 circular. RBIs February 12 circular The circular directed banks to identify incipient stress in loan accounts immediately on default, by classifying stressed assets as special mention accounts (SMA) as per the following categories, SMA-0 (1 to 30 days), SMA1 (31 to 60 days) and SMA-2 (61 to 90 days). Lenders were required to report SMA to Central Repository of Information on Large Credits (CRILC) on all borrower entities having aggregate exposure of Rs 5 crore and above on a monthly basis and all defaulting entities on a weekly basis. While encouraging lenders to go for resolution, bankers felt that the conditions attached with the resolution plan (RP) were onerous. An RP was deemed to be implemented only if the borrower entity was no longer in default with any of the lenders. For restructuring, the relevant documentation had to be completed by all lenders and the new capital structure had to get duly reflected in the books of all the lenders and the borrower. For large accounts, post restructuring, the residual debt required independent credit evaluation by credit rating agencies authorised by the RBI. For large accounts with aggregate exposure of over Rs 2000 crore, a reference day was set on March 1, 2018. If a resolution was not implemented within 180 days of the reference day or default day (if default day was later than reference day), lenders were required to file insolvency application under IBC within 15 days from the expiry of the said timeline. Why the need for the February 12 circular? Even in the face of mounting bad assets, banks were initially reluctant to refer even defaults to IBC and were resorting to different types of restructuring that in most cases made little sense. It neither nurtured the borrowing entity to health nor did it do any good to the lender except for postponing the problem. The February 12 circular had put a definitive timeline by pushing defaulting cases to IBC. However, under the IBC framework, promoters cannot bid if he/she has furnished personal guarantee and if the period from default to admission into IBC exceeds one year. Section 29A under IBC virtually closed the doors of defaulting promoters to gain access to their companies. Section 29A was introduced to ensure that persons who were responsible for the default of a company, or certain undesirable persons, did not acquire or regain control of a company by participating in the resolution process. It is interesting to note that recently the Supreme Court has upheld all provisions of IBC including Section 29A, but it has quashed the February 12 circular. The way forward What this essentially means is that banks have more time to restructure a loan. However, the Supreme Court judgement doesnt prevent a bank from referring a defaulter to IBC should it wish to do so. For a defaulting promoter, it perhaps gives more time to enter into a restructuring arrangement with the lender without the onerous timeline of 180 days. For companies that have been impacted by adverse macro developments, this could provide some respite. Finally, while the first list of NCLT cases has met with reasonable success, the same cannot be generalised for the long list of stressed companies. Many of them would be without tangible assets to find takers and for many smaller companies, there would be no takers beyond the promoter, as the real value of the business is best understood by the promoter. The normal IBC route would have resulted in liquidation of many smaller firms, with the attendant impact on jobs. Whether the SC judgement provides a genuine breather remains to be seen. The follow-up action from RBI, should it come out with fresh guidelines on resolution and restructuring outside the IBC, would be keenly awaited. Image for representation Vipul Prasad Every time India approaches its general elections, a lack of focus on political parties election manifestos becomes more conspicuous. In a democracy, the idea behind elections at a certain frequency is to empower citizens to elect a political party or a candidate of their choice for a term, and to give them the option to reject the party for the next term. Inherent here is the assumption that people will cast votes as per the partys performance in the last term and the expectations for the future. Future expectations understandably are often embedded in the past performance of the candidate whether in power or otherwise. Thus, for voters to be steered by facts, it is important to provide them with a framework to assess the earlier governments performance. This is where election manifestos come into the picture. Election manifestos are essentially a list of strategic goals and priorities of the political parties if they are elected to form the government. In India, unfortunately, people rarely take elections manifestos seriously. Indeed, even political parties do not give due importance to it. Voters end up being too generous by not demanding an unambiguous and holistic action plan; nor do they hold the politicians accountable for those promises. The majority of the citizens do not bother to compare or debate manifestos of different parties before making their voting decisions. For example, even a cursory glance at 2014 general elections manifestos of the two large national parties the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC) reveals those to be too general in nature, largely top-down, and lacking in detail. Even in the rare areas where the intentions were clearly specified, there was no mention of the yardstick on which the governments performance was to be judged in case the party came to power. In no section in the two manifestos was a timeline mentioned over which a certain goal was sought to be achieved. The result of this lackadaisical approach is ad hocism in policy making and plan execution. This, in turn, might be the root cause of Indias relatively slow pace of improvement in the quality of life of citizens, poverty alleviation, and infrastructure development- especially in comparison to many other developing countries that got their independence around the same time as India. A much better and fairly practicable process should start with every political party announcing a goal oriented and measurable manifesto much before elections say, at least three months. Perhaps, to begin with, some apolitical citizens groups should nudge the larger political parties on this path. The CEC (Central Election Commission) or some other neutral institution should then organize public and media debates around these manifestos of the various parties. This should facilitate a public feedback which the political parties can utilize to give shape to their final manifesto around 3-4 weeks before the polling takes place. Having thus nailed down a set of straightforward and measurable targets, the new government should move closer to performance-based budgeting system post the formation of the cabinet. This method of budgeting for outcomes, rather than just for allocation as has been the case traditionally, engenders more transparency, accountability, financial discipline, and better prioritization of expenditure. Linking it to the election manifesto also ensures what is being achieved on the ground is more aligned with peoples wishes. In the beginning of its first year, the government ought to lay down a performance-oriented budget for the entire five-year duration of the government to achieve the targets delineated in its pre-election manifesto. This, in turn, should form the basis of yearly government budgets as per the targets lined up in the five-year plan. Now, it is no ones case that the government should not leave any scope for contingencies, or short-term requirements, or even for expenditure/investments based on political considerations. However, the main thrust should be on long-term deliverables which can make it easier to execute those plans to achieve high priority outcomes. The governments annual budgets should not just make allocations for various plans as has been happening so far. It should also indicate the actual deliverables and the rationale for such plan allocation. It should also mention the prior years shortfall in target achievement vis-a-vis the last years budget. Most importantly, it should quantify and explain the progress versus the five-year targets set out in the first budget. Let us take the example of one key development area for the country - healthcare. In the 2014 election manifestos, both the BJP as well as the Congress did have some discussions around this topic. However, the targets/promises were largely directional and unquantified in nature. What the voters and thought leaders in the country would have liked to see was statements like the infant mortality rate and the maternal mortality rate to be reduced from x per 1,000 to y per 1,000 in five years, the number of hospital beds per 1,000 to be increased from p to q in five years, the number of doctors enrolling for MBBS degree programs to be increased from m to n in five years etc. After five years, as the elections approach again, citizens will get to see for themselves the governments performance in clear terms, and thus the loop gets completed. This approach will make the worlds most populous democracy more inclusive and participative apart from making the government more responsible. For sure, it can streamline and accelerate the development process too. Interestingly, at the time of writing this piece, the two big parties the BJP and the Congress - are yet to release their manifestos even as the first phase of elections is just about a fortnight away. (Vipul Prasad is founder and CEO, Magadh Capital) Representative image Investors are convinced of a strong certainty on returns on their investments from the real estate in India as the positive but disruptive policies have resulted in transparencies, according to industry executives. Foreign funds, including sovereign and pension funds, are looking at investment in India, following recent investments by Canadian Pension Fund, Qatar-funds, GIC and Temasek of Singapore, said Sanjay Dutt, Chairman of Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry Real Estate Committee. "Now we have the right policies in place," said Dutt, pointing out that developers have track records to show, investors can understand the regulatory and taxation environments, study demand and work out currency risks. Investors can make an informed decision and hedge their dollar to manage currency risks, he said of the system that is being shaped up by the policies such as the Real Estate Regulatory Act and the Goods and Services Tax, among others. "A lot of investors are now convinced that there is a certainty of investment returns in India and potentially higher returns given the risk of emerging market and certainty has become more stronger because of this ability to make an informed decision," said Dutt, who is leading a FICCI Real Estate delegation in a series of meetings with Singapore-based investors from April 1-3, 2019. However, India's massive infrastructure development including real estate cannot be funded through internal resources. Foreign investment is required, added Dutt, also the Managing Director and CEO of Tata Realty & Infrastructure Ltd. "After RERA and GST implementation, all developers are working in corporate-style with no delays in delivery of projects. This gives the banks the confidence to extend loans," added Mohit Goel, chief executive of The OMAXE and part of the delegation. In about three years, when RERA and GST are absolutely streamlined and dealings are made "very transparent", banks will start funding developers' land acquisitions, believes Goel. He sees the real estate industry in a strong position in the coming decade, with 10-12 developers in each of the country's four zones north, east, west and south. Over 80 per cent of the real estate industry has consolidated, shaken by the positive but disruptive policies such as RERA and GST, according to Goel. "The land owners are now approaching developers for a very attractive venture models which make it asset-light for developers," added Getamber Anand, chairman and managing director of ATS Infrastructure Ltd. "Price of land has rationalised over the last five years because of these disruption and changes by the policies," he said of the industry's biggest challenge in gathering good quality land for commercial, residential and industrial developments. "I see businesses taking off very aggressively. We are in the election year and if we get a very stable government which we are expecting, the business will boom for the next 10 year," he said after addressing investors on "Opportunities in Indian Real Estate" on Monday. Anand urged foreign investors to partner with the right developer as 100% FDI is allowed in the Indian real estate. "I would advise funds to do a due diligence on their promoter. More than feasibility of the project, you must see the blood line of the promoter," stressed Anand, also a member of the FICCI delegation. The industry has begun to see serious equity infusion by foreign funds, he said, calling on other institutions to start dialogue with the people they think they like to partner with for the next 10 years. "The next 10 years will be a golden period for anybody who is associated with real estate in India," assured Anand who has spent over three decades in the real estate business. "The public sector banks are flushed with capital and in a very healthy state. Funds are flushed with capital, but it is only that people are little skeptical about identifying the right partner to deploy money," said Anand. But he called on banks and financial institutions to review their lending rates which varies from 12-15 per cent from Banks and Non-Banking Financing Service companies. "We want it down to a single digit at around 9 per cent," he said of the need to support developers as pace of development accelerates. The investors meet and delegation visit was organized by FICCI and Enterprise Singapore, a state agency promoting Singapore investors globally. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Cash-crunch hit private carrier Jet Airways on Tuesday said it has grounded 15 more aircraft due to non-payment of rentals to lessors, taking the total number of grounded planes to 69. The fleet strength in the airline has, however, has come down to 20 now. Till last month, the Mumbai-headquartered airline, which is now under the new ownership, had taken 54 planes out of operations due to lease rental defaults. ".... an additional 15 aircraft have been grounded due to non-payment of amounts outstanding to lessors under their respective lease agreements," Jet Airways said in a filing to the stock exchanges. Last week, the airline had informed the government it has 35 aircraft in operations. On March 25, Jet Airways' board approved a resolution plan formulated by SBI-led domestic lenders. Under the plan, lenders decided to take control of the airline and make a fund infusion of Rs 1,500 crore. Highlights - Gujarat Ambuja had a strong Q3- Focus on maize processing aiding margins and return ratios- Capital allocation continues to improve - Trading at single-digit FY19 estimated earnings ------------------------------------------------- Maize-processing company Gujarat Ambuja Exports (GAEL) continues to witness strong performance, aided by favourable supply-demand dynamics from its key end market. The company appears to be on a strong footing considering the uptick in maize prices, improving capital allocation, and available production capacity. Q3 earnings highlights - The topline growth for Q3 was strong at 16 percent year-on-year (YoY), the operating margins further expanded 70 bps YoY on the back of higher capacity utilisation and increased contribution from manufacturing capacities. EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) for the quarter came in 23 percent higher in comparison to last year. - Stellar performance from the maize processing division led the strong performance in Q3 for Gujarat Ambuja Exports. Higher capacity utilisation coupled with firm realisations drove the revenue growth of 55 percent and EBIT growth of 41 percent in the quarter gone by. - Cotton yarn segment, which engages in the spinning, knitting and weaving of cotton, had another subdued quarter and reported a negative bottomline. The volumes as well as profits of agro processing division were hit by a combination of change in business mix and volatility in underlying commodity prices (mainly soybean). Other Developments - The Chalisgaon maize processing unit has seen a sharp ramp-up in capacity utilisation, which has moved higher to 80 percent within 12 months of initiation. Further, the company is planning to set up 1,000 TPD maize processing Greenfield plant at Malda in West Bengal at an estimated cost of 300 crores. - Rainfall deficit and worm attack have impacted the production of maize in the kharif season, the supply continues to be tight and the spot prices of maize (corn) have moved higher to 17-18 Rs per kg. Amidst tighter supplies, the prices of starch (and derivatives) have also moved in line with corn. Given the constraint supply environment, prices are likely to remain firm upto Q1 FY19 until the arrival of the new crop in May-June. - The return ratios continues to improve as the incremental capital is being directed towards maize processing division. The leverage also continues to be reasonable and the debt-equity ratio stood at 0.4x at the end of Q2 FY19 (vs 0.6x in Q4 FY18). Outlook and Recommendation - We remain optimistic on long-term prospects of GAEL as the business has delivered solid results in the few quarters. The near term earnings visibility remains strong on the back of strong realisations and available spare capacity. Further, the new capacity at West Bengal would enable it to pick up revenue share in Eastern region as well as tap export opportunities in as well fortify its presence in the South East Asia export market. - Post the recent capacity expansion, GAEL (CMP: 221, Market cap: 2,535 crores) has emerged as the largest maize processor in India with total capacity of 3,000 MTPD and a market share of 21-22%. While the business has been performing well, the valuations seem equally attractive at current levels (9 times FY19 estimated earnings) considering the long headroom for growth and earnings visibility. Read: How to identify long term winners in the consumer durables space? Follow @Sach_Pal For more research articles, visit our Moneycontrol Research page Disclaimer: Moneycontrol Research analysts do not hold positions in the companies discussed here Rajan Anandan, Vice President Google India and South East Asia, is quitting the company to join Sequoia Capital India as an investor and mentor for startups. There cannot be a better role for someone who has shown keen interest in nurturing startups. In addition to investing in multiple startups, Anandan was the President of Delhi Chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs, a non-profit organisation that nurtures entrepreneurship. If Anandan mentored and encouraged early-stage tech startups as an investor, he has spearheaded several initiatives that boost ecosystem in the country as the vice president. Next Billion Users initiative is one of those. The initiative is aimed at developing products specifically for emerging markets such as India. Since the launch happened a couple of years back, the tech major has come out with India-only applications such as Neighbourly, a social network platform for the neighbourhood, where you can get your queries answered. First launched in Mumbai, it was expanded to five more cities. The tech giant launched Solve for India initiative to reach out to entrepreneurs in tier II and III towns in 2017. Through this initiative, the entrepreneurs from smaller towns would be able to gain access to direct mentoring and support from Google. While most of these initiatives were directed globally, Anandan played a significant role in taking it a notch further for which he was awarded the IMPACT person of the year in 2018. The initiatives include Navlekha, Googles platform for Indian users who are not conversant with English, Google Internet Saathi, an initiative to bring more rural women online, and the Indian Railways high-speed Wi-Fi project, providing free Wi-Fi to consumers at railway stations across the country. When he addressed entrepreneurs to announce Googles partnership with 91Springboard last year, his enthusiasm while interacting with entrepreneurs was contagious. He explained how the partnership network could help companies that are suffering from critical issues such as sanitation education and mobility space. For Anandan, developing the ecosystem was as important as nurturing startups, and he clearly believed that the technology was necessary to solve problems India had been facing. It was not just about entrepreneurship though. Google Payments was launched last year. YouTube in India grew, and there were significant product developments such as Maps. When Anandan became the managing director for Google India in 2011, he grew the business steadily. In 2016, Google booked Rs 5,904 crore in revenue, helped along by e-commerce companies and apps spending on acquiring customers, according to a Factordaily report. The company saw its bottom line increase from Rs 306.6 crore in 2016-17 to Rs 407.2 crore in 2017-18, going by a BusinessWorld report. If there is one thing that Anandan was not successful in, it would be his role in establishing responsible social media. The tech giant has been accused by MakeMyTrip and BharatMatrimony of manipulating search results (the case with latter is still going on in NCLAT). While the company has continuously declined the allegations, it has not taken any concrete steps to address those either. With Anandan quitting, his successor has his task cut out. Google should play a significant role in responsible social media, where none of them has come forward, Sachin Taparia, CEO - LocalCircles, said. Twitterati Ashish K Mishra said in a tweet that the successor would have to make sense of payments business, understand Reliance Jio and build more products for Indian users. Representative image Investor-friendly reforms, positive sentiment following India's first REIT and firm market fundamentals will continue to steer investments into commercial property assets over the next 12 months, a recent survey said. According to a survey conducted by property consultant Colliers International, nearly 63 percent of the investors interviewed opted for office assets as their top investment preference. "Investors are confident about Indias robust commercial office market in 2019, even though the residential sector may see a slowdown. Investment in residential assets may be hampered due to the upcoming general elections and an ongoing crisis in the NBFC industry," Colliers International India managing director Joe Verghese said. He said the commercial office sector is on the upswing with top developers backed by global investors like Blackstone, Brookfield and GIC. As per the survey, from 2014 to 2018, institutional investors invested in excess of USD 10 billion (around 7,000 crore) in office assets. This is driven in part by strong commercial office leasing, which touched a new peak in 2018 at 50.2 million sqft. "We expect gross absorption to hover around 46.8 million sqft per year thorough 2021, ahead of the average annual leasing of 42.6 million sqft between 2014-2018," the report stated. Verghese further noted that some investors are aggregating assets with a view to list them as REITs, following the successful offering of the Embassy and Blackstone REITs which got listed on bourses on April 1. "Investors are scouting for investment-ready assets in core office locations in Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, which together accounted for about 77 percent of the total leasing in 2018," the report said. About 72 percent of investors expect a return of higher than 16 percent from office assets that are under construction. "We foresee higher investor interest for greenfield projects in southern cities, especially Bengaluru and Hyderabad, which are witnessing pent-up demand in key office corridors," Verghese added. The report further stated that in the coming year, around 63 percent of the investors said they are likely to invest up to 20 percent of their investments in distressed assets. "Developers' cash flows and financing have been hit since demonetisation, and the RERA. While distressed assets are a good opportunity for investors to acquire assets below cost, it is often fraught with legal challenges in India, and therefore, can be a risky proposition." "We believe that now with the government's IBC taking shape, investors will be more open to snapping up distressed assets. Over the next 12-24 months, we expect to see funds announcing or raising funds specifically for distressed assets," he added. Representative image Shares of power, bank and sugar companies reacted positively as the Supreme Court (SC) struck down RBI's February 12 circular. The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) February 12, 2018, circular on bankruptcy proceedings in a major relief to stressed banks and power companies. The RBI circular directed lenders to refer loan accounts of over Rs 2,000 crore under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code if they are not resolved in 180 days of default. Also Read - SC strikes down RBI's February 12 circular on NPAs A two-judge bench of justice Rohinton Fali Nariman and justice Vineet Saran pronounced the judgement while hearing a bunch of petitions on the maintainability of the RBI circular. Sameer Kalra - Equity Research Analyst & Founder Target Investing said, "This is an important judgement as the circular was a big overhang on power sector and lenders of the sector. Relief from this circular will give big benefit to Power Finance Corporation which have recently taken over REC as well." "Also this will provide breather to PSU Banks especially SBI as it is big lender to the sector. We have buy rating on SBI," he added. At 10:58 hrs State Bank of India was quoting at Rs 326.55, up Rs 3.75, or 1.16 percent and Power Finance Corporation was quoting at Rs 123.25, up Rs 3.65, or 3.05 percent. KSK Energy Ventures was quoting at Rs 0.91, up 4.60 percent, and RattanIndia Power was quoting at Rs 2.96, up Rs 0.25, or 9.23 percent. Triveni Engineering and Industries was quoting at Rs 65.00, down Rs 1.25, or 1.89 percent. Thyssenkrupp and Tata Steel have offered concessions to address EU antitrust concerns about their planned steel joint venture, the European Commission said on Tuesday. The EU competition regulator, which did not provide details of the concessions, extended its deadline for a decision on the deal to June 5 from May 13. It has previously voiced concerns about the deal's impact on steel for car parts, packaging such as food and aerosol cans and electrical steel for engineering products including transformers. Tata Steel may sell parts of its European packaging activities Tata Steel Europe which makes packaging steel for food, paint and aerosol cans, as part of this package of concessions, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters last month. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on the Congress, saying governance goes into reverse gear when the grand old party and its allies are in power. Addressing an election rally in Jamui where LJP leader Chirag Paswan, son of party president Ram Vilas Paswan, is in the fray, Modi accused the Congress of having neglected B R Ambedkar like no other party did. He also claimed that his rivals were spreading the canard that the BJP, if voted to power again, will do away with reservations for the backward classes. "Governance goes into reverse gear when the Congress and its allies are in power. Terrorism, prices, violence, corruption, black money rise when Congress is in power; the country's prosperity, its credibility, the morale of the armed forces, respect for honesty decline," he said. He accused the Congress of having done everything to "defeat" Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution. "The Congress did everything possible to have Babasaheb defeated. It conspired to have his momory erased from the public mind. The 'family' remembered honouring its own members with Bharat Ratna but forgot Ambedkar," the prime minister said. He said it was because of the BJP's efforts that Ambedkar was bestowed the highest civilian award years after his death. Claiming that his detractors were spreading the rumour that the BJP will do away with quotas in government jobs and educational institutions if voted to power again, Modi declared, "Nobody can even touch reservations for the backward classes." "We introduced 10 per cent quota for the economically backward people among the unreserved category...we did it without causing strife in society," he said. The Indian National Congress on April 2 released its manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections. The document was released by Congress President Rahul Gandhi in the presence of former prime minister Manmohan Singh and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi. Speaking at the launch event, Rahul Gandhi spoke about a range of issues and key points promised in the partys manifesto. Here are the top promises made by the Congress in its manifesto named We Will Deliver: > Congress has promised to fill 22 lakh government vacancies by March 2020 and increase job guarantee under the MGNREGA scheme from 100 days to 150 days. Plus, 10 lakh youth will get jobs in gram panchayats. > The party has promised to have a separate Budget for farmers, similar to what used to be for the Railways. > Youngsters will not have to take any permission while setting up a business for the first three years. > The party has promised to roll out the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) scheme, under which Rs 72,000 would be deposited in bank accounts of the women belonging to poor families, annually. > Congress has promised that 6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will go towards education. > Farmers loan default will not be considered criminal offence. > On the issue of Jammu and Kashmir, Congress has said they would review deployment of armed forces and Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts (AFSPA). It has also promised to appoint three Interlocutors. > The party has promised to establish a strong public healthcare system. The focus will be that even the poorest will have access to high-quality health treatment, the manifesto states. > The party has promised to review and replace the current Goods and Services Tax (GST) with GST 2.0. GST 2.0 will be based on a single and standard tax rate on all goods and services, the manifesto adds. The single tax rate will be revenue neutral to the current indirect tax revenue of the Centre and the state governments. The 'GST 2.0' regime will levy a special rate of duty on demerit goods. > Congress promises to immediately withdraw the Citizenship Amendment Bill introduced by the BJP-led government against the wishes of the people of the Northeast. It also promised to ensure that no citizen of India is denied inclusion in the final National Register of Citizens. > The party has reiterated its promise to introduce 33 percent reservation for women in government jobs. > Congress has promised scrapping of NITI Aayog, safeguarding minority status of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and constitutional status of National Commission for Women (NCW) as well. In a scathing attack on the Prime Minister, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao accused him of lying on central allocation to the state and said his campaign speech was "below the level of sarpanch". Rao also said he does not have a desire to be the Prime Minister. Taking exception to Modi's criticism against him that he consulted astrologers, the TRS president asked "if this is what the Premier should talk about". Alleging that the Prime Minister did not speak the truth about allocation of funds to the state, Rao, also referred as KCR by many, demanded that Modi apologise to the people. "What does Narendra Modiji speak? KCR sees horoscope... Is this what is to be spoken, for the Prime Minister to speak? Should persons running the politics of the country speak like this? In this country, the Prime Minister speaks going below the level of a sarpanch," he said. Rao, who was speaking at an election rally at Warangal, was alluding to Modi's comments on him at a rally in Telangana last week that Rao consulted astrologers which affected governance. "Narendra Modi ji, you are speaking absolute lies today. (You) are bragging that you are giving Rs 35,000 crore (to Telangana). You did not give Rs 35,000 crore. My brothers and sisters should know. Delhi is not taking care of us. We are taking care of Delhi," he said. Telangana gives about Rs one lakh crore to the Centre annually in the form of customs duty, income tax, centre's share in GST and others, he said. What Telangana gets from Delhi is only Rs 24,000 crore, he said. BJP leaders should answer if Telangana is surviving on Central funds, he said. Telangana is among five-six states that support the country, he claimed. Rao said he does not fault the Centre over using the funds. "You are taking and using Rs 75,000 crores of income which is generated from our state. We are not saying it is wrong. But lying after coming here, speaking unwanted things... don't speak like that. I demand that the Prime Minister apologise to the Telangana people. I request (him) not to speak such lies," he said. Saying that both Congress and BJP which does 'golmaal' (bungling) are not useful to the country, he said that a non-Congress, non-BJP federal front government should come to power at the Centre. The national parties do not address issues like farmers not getting remunerative price and problem with Pakistan, but does politics in states, he alleged. Citing media reports, he said non-Congress, non-BJP parties would come to power at the Centre. He alleged that both the Congress and BJP failed to ensure the country's development as it should have been. Referring to the comments of a state minister that those who addressed people at the venue in Warangal went on to become Prime Minister, he said he has no desire to be PM. "I don't have the desire to be Prime Minister", he said. In what is being termed as a welcome move, women will no longer have to skip voting due to the absence of someone to take care of their children at home. They can now get their children to the polling booth as the Election Commission (EC) will be running creches at every booth in Maharashtra on the days it goes to polls. The facilitate this, the election officials will need more manpower and are making arrangements for it. Speaking to Mumbai Mirror, an official of the state election commission said: Creche for kids accompanying their mothers will be run at each polling centre and a trained assistant will be appointed to take care of the children. We dont want women to stay back at home just because they dont have anyone to look after their children. Every vote is important in a democracy and we want to give extra focus to women. Even pregnant women will get special assistance, if needed, at the polling booths. Additionally, the poll body has also announced an all-women polling booth in every constituency in the state. All such booths will be handled completely by women, including the ground workers, poll officials, and even the police personnel deployed. There will also be special services to transport the visually impaired. Confirming the same, a poll official said, Visually challenged persons will be ferried from their homes to the polling centre and back. In case no public transport is available, private vehicles will be hired to ferry them. The EC will also make special arrangements for physically challenged persons and senior citizens. Statistics sow that in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, barely 58 percent women had turned up to cast their votes, as against 62.5 percent men. For this term, a total of 8.73 crore people have registered to vote in Maharashtra, of which 4.16 crore are women, while 4.57 crore are men, and the remaining 2,083 are transgenders. File Image PDP chief and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti on April 2 said BJP president Amit Shah was "daydreaming" about abrogating Article 370 of the Constitution that provides special status to the state. Mufti said the Constitutional provision is a bridge between the people of the state and India. "I want to tell Amit Shah that you are daydreaming if you think you will abrogate Article 370," Mufti said while addressing a workers' meet in Handwara area of north Kashmir's Kupwara district. The former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister said if the constitutional provision was removed, then mainstream politicians, including her, will have to reconsider their future course of action. "If you break this bridge, then mainstream politicians like Mehbooba Mufti, who swear by the Constitution of India and the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, will also have to reconsider our future course of action because we have upheld the Indian flag and if you touch (Article) 370, then this flag will not remain in our hands or on our shoulders," she said. Article 370 grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir and limits Parliament's power to make laws concerning the state. Mufti was reacting to the reported remarks of Shah underscoring the BJP's commitment to abrogate Articles 370 and 35-A. Asked about what the Narendra Modi government had done to meet the BJP's promise to repeal Articles 370 and 35-A, Shah had told a news channel on Sunday that his party remains firm on its commitment, but cited lack of majority in the Rajya Sabha as the reason behind not fulfilling it so far. Arunachal Pradesh will head for polls on April 11 to elect a new Legislative Assembly and two Members of Parliament for the Lok Sabha. The voting for the state polls and the general election will be held simultaneously in the states 60 Assembly and two Lok Sabha seats. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the state led by Chief Minister Pema Khandu is seeking re-election. Politics in the hill state has been dominated by Congress since its inception. However, there have been governments led by the Janata Party, Peoples Party of Arunachal (PPA), Arunachal Congress (Mithi) and United Democratic Front. In 2014, the Congress had emerged victorious after winning 42 seats. The BJP came second with 11 seats. The PPA managed to win five seats while two Independents also won. Although Congress had formed the government in 2014, the party lost power after many of its MLAs joined PPA. They eventually joined the BJP. Since February 2016, Arunachal Pradesh has seen three chief ministers and Presidents Rule making the states political landscape unstable. However, Khandu has led a largely stable government since early 2017. Also read | Sikkim Assembly Polls 2019: Pawan Chamling eyes 6th term as CM amid fractured challenge The contenders The state is set to witness a three-cornered fight between the ruling BJP, NPP (which is a member of the BJP-led Northeast Democratic Alliance) and the Congress. BJP: The incumbent party is hoping to retain power. It currently has 48 MLAs in the 60-member Assembly. Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led BJP already has an advantage as it is set to win three seats uncontested. It will be contesting all 60 seats. In fact, it is gunning for Mission 60+2 winning 60 Assembly seats and two Lok Sabha seats. The BJPs vote share in 2014 was just under 40 percent in the state. National People's Party (NPP): The party, founded by former Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader PA Sangma, is now led by his son Conrad Sangma. NPP is the second largest party in the states Assembly with seven MLAs. However, three of them have joined the Congress. NPP will be contesting at least 30 seats. This will be NPPs electoral debut in the state. In March, around 20 senior BJP leaders, including eight MLAs, joined NPP. This included BJP state general secretary Jarpum Gamlin, state home minister Kumar Waii and tourism minister Jarkar Gamlin. They were reportedly unhappy with the ticket distribution. However, on March 30, Conrad said NPP would support the BJP if the latter falls short of the half-way mark. Congress: The Rahul Gandhi-led party is the key Opposition party in the state even though it has three MLAs in the Assembly. The party has fielded 46 candidates. While Congress has just a handful of members in the outgoing Assembly, it had secured 49.50 percent of the votes in the previous election. The party is banking on this voter base and diverse demography to win the election. Also read: Opinion | New challenges for BJP in the Northeast Issues Some of key issues in the state include the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and the issue of Permanent Resident Certificates (PRC) to six not-native communities. BJP has been pushing for The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill that seeks to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955 to make illegal immigrants (Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan) eligible for Indian citizenship. As the bill was already passed in Lok Sabha, it only had to be pushed through Rajya Sabha. However, as the 16th Lok Sabha concluded its final scheduled sitting on February 13, the bill now stands to officially lapse on June 3. However, the party has said it would reintroduce the Bill if they retain power. Congress President Rahul Gandhi, at an election rally in the state, said his party will scrap the Bill if voted to power. Also read - BJP's Look East policy | Northeast: Saffron party's push for Citizenship Bill may upset leads in the region In February, it was announced that the state government has decided to not accept the recommendations of a high-level committee to grant PRC to six communities, and blamed the Congress for "instigating" a section of people. Congress has raked up the issue of police firing on local residents. The move came after widespread violence was witnessed in the state capital Itanagar and other places, leading to the death of at least two persons, injury to several and destruction of properties and vehicles. People in some parts of the state have been protesting after the state government announced that it was considering issuing PRC to six non-Arunachal Pradesh Scheduled Tribe (APSTs) communities living in the Namsai and Changlang districts and to the Gorkhas living in Vijaynagar. Amongst those communities are Deoris, Sonowal Kacharis, Morans, Adivasis and Mishings. Most of these communities are recognised as Scheduled Tribes in neighbouring Assam. Opinion polls While there have been no major opinion polls for the assembly polls, a Republic TV-CVoter survey from January suggests that the BJP would win both the Lok Sabha seats. In 2014, the Arunachal Pradesh (East) constituency was won by Congress Ninong Ering and the Arunachal Pradesh (West) seat by BJPs Kiren Rijiju. Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said though the BJP claims to end terrorism, it was the saffron party's government that released terrorist Masood Azhar and escorted him to Kandahar in Afghanistan. Addressing an election rally of the Congress in Murad Nagar near Ghaziabad, Azad said not a single leader of the BJP has sacrificed their lives for the nation, while the Congress has a long list of such leaders who happily gave their lives for the country. "BJP claims to end terrorism. On the other hand, the BJP government had released and escorted terrorist Masood Azhar, head of Jaish-e-Mohammed, to Kandahar," the leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha said. Taking on the BJP, he said 4 crore 41 lakh industrial units have suffered losses due to ill implementation of the GST and their owners had to shut them down. "BJP government is anti-farmer due to which cultivators are not getting actual price of their crops. Diesel and petrol prices have been increased and as a result cost of everything has gone up," Azad said. "Modi's promise of providing two crore jobs was like painting a rosy picture, the consequences of which the youths are facing today," he added. The Congress leader said rape cases and other crimes have also escalated under the current government and communalism is at its peak. The Badal dynasty consists of everything that makes up a political family in India: internal feuds, family businesses, rich history in state politics and a patriarch/satrap who, despite or because of his age, holds a firm grip over the family's dynamics in state and national politics. The family line started with Raghubar Singh Badal, and then seeps down to Sukhbir Singh Badal, Raghubar's grandchild, via Parkash Singh Badal, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) supremo. From youngest sarpanch to oldest Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal's father was a landlord in the Malwa belt of Punjab when Parkash was born in 1927. Raghubar became the sarpanch of his village in 1960, while his son carried on his legacy by becoming the village head in 1963. This legacy of the Badal family assuming the position of the sarpanch reportedly continued until 1998. But even before Independence, according to Parkash Badal himself, his father and grandfather were actively involved in the freedom struggle. Parkash Badal, who studied at the FC College, went on to become the youngest sarpanch in India, and then got elected to the Block Samiti. According to a report in Hindustan Times, when Parkash requested an influential relative, who was a minister, to make him a tehsildar, the relative reportedly told him that he should become someone who appoints tehsildars. Parkash Singh Badal went on to become someone who appoints ministers in state cabinet, assuming the position as the Chief Minister of Punjab for the first time in 1970. During his first term, Badal led a coalition government along with Jana Sangh, where, observers indicate, the seeds of a future alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were sown. BJP has called SAD one of its oldest allies. Also Read | The Chautalas of Haryana battle infighting and hurt egos going into LS polls Parkash Badal has headed Punjab five times, and continued to win from Lambi assembly constituency since 1969, except in 1992, when he boycotted elections. In 2017, Parkash Badal managed to win again, defeating current Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, in what was being pegged as a battle of stalwarts. Badal, according to observers, has led the state through troubled times, including militancy, by assuming a middle path. He became the oldest chief minister in India in 2016, a year before he was dethroned by Congress. The politics of business The Badals are the one of the most influential families in Punjab, and they have firmed up their influence by marrying into the Majithias and the Kairons, two other powerful dynasties in the state. Parkash Singh Badal's son, 54-year-old Sukhbir, entered politics in 1996. He was elected to Lok Sabha and has served as a Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament (MP) as well. Sukhbir has also been a minister for industry during the second regime of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. While the family has a stake in at least four transport companies transport being a family business Parkash Singh lists agriculture as his primary income. Farmers are Badal senior's primary vote bank, and he has been known to hold rallies with farmers even despite his age. In 2015, the transport business put the Badals in trouble when a teenage girl died and her mother was injured after being molested and thrown off a bus in Monga district. The bus, according to reports, belonged to the Badals, and the chief minister had reportedly offered a bribe to the girl's father to buy his silence. The Badals have been accused of corruption, malpractices and monopoly due to its transport business before as well. Sukhbir, with his MBA from California State University, has handled the business while juggling it with politics. Also Read | Naveen Patnaik: Known as 'Mr Clean', Odisha CM gunning for 5th straight term Cloudburst The Badals entered the Punjab assembly poll arena in 2017 mired in controversies and charges of corruption. The SAD managed to win only 15 seats, while Congress bagged 77 seats. What was even more humiliating was that new entrant Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won 20 seats. SAD's partner, BJP, won three seats. In 2012, SAD had won 56 seats while the BJP had won 12. The Akali Dal also faced internal party problems. Manpreet Singh Badal, the rebel Akali Dal leader who is a minister in the Punjab government, is Sukhbir's cousin. Manpreet was sacked from the party and the government in 2010, reportedly for "acts of indiscipline". Another family member, Bikram Singh Majithia, brother of Harsimrat Kaur Badal, a Union minister and Sukhbir's wife, has also been bickering. The Majithias have also been publicly put down by Badal Sr, and he had, at the same gathering, put down his son by saying it is the leader that wins elections, not just performance. Key figures in Badal clan: Parkash Singh Badal: The Akali Dal patriarch and five-time Chief Minister of Punjab. The youngest sarpanch and the oldest CM in India. Sukhbir Singh Badal: Parkash's son and former Deputy Chief Minister of Punjab. He has held posts in the state and the central governments, and was also the youngest chief of the party. Harsimrat Kaur Badal: Union minister in the BJP government and Sukhbir's wife. She comes from the powerful Majithia family of Punjab, and married Sukhbir in 1991. Bikram Singh Majithia: Currently the president of the SAD youth wing, and formerly a minister in Punjab cabinet. He is Harsimrat's brother. The estranged Badal, Parkash Singh is his uncle. He was sacked as the Finance Minister of Punjab in 2010. Manpreet retained his ministry in 2017, after Congress government came to power. He had joined Congress in 2016. Election campaign vehicles for LDF candidate Veena George, at Panachikara, in Pathanamthitta LS constituency Panachikara junction is a small, non-descript, sleepy two-shop road intersection which has not caught up with the chaos and noise that signifies urban India. Tucked in the hills of the Western Ghats, this village within the forest range hardly features on Keralas political map. However, today it is buzzing. The junction is covered in a sea of red flags and its bus stand is chock-a-block with people. The lone tea shop is doing brisk business. This is usually a quiet place. Now, since it is elections, such noise is expected, the manager who doubles as the tea master says. Suddenly from one side, a convoy of vehicles carrying Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) flags cuts through this sea of red. Both parties raise the pitch of sloganeering, but after a few minutes, the cacophony dissolves and the tension subsides. The BJP convoy was heading to a nearby village where the partys candidate is expected to address a gathering. In the midst of this, like a child lost in a mela, a man wearing a hat featuring the Congress symbol appears from nowhere. Imagine during an Indian Premium League (IPL) match between the Delhi Capitals and Mumbai Indians, you see a spectator wearing a Chennai Super Kings yellow jersey with MS Dhoni written on it! A few minutes later, the sloganeering fervour again picks up and this time it is to welcome Veena George, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) candidate. George, who is also a sitting Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), gives a quick speech where she highlights the reasons why she should be elected and appeals to the people gathered there to protect democracy. After her speech, she greets the crowd, speaks to a few people and is off to the next junction. In about 10 minutes Panachikara junction returns to being a small, non-descript, sleepy two-shop road intersection. Why is Pathanamthitta important Panachikara falls under the Pathanamthitta Lok Sabha constituency a constituency set for a stiff three-way battle between the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF), the LDF and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Traditionally, Kerala has seen a bipolar electoral contest between the LDF and the UDF. Over the years, the BJP has emerged as the third front and today can give the two old parties in the state a run for their money. To understand why the three fronts are hopeful of winning the seat, it is important to recap the recent past of this district. Air quality in Pathanamthitta is among the best in India and the district does exceptionally well on various health indices. However, whats kept it in the news in the recent months is the protests surrounding the entry of women between the age group of 10 and 50 into the Ayyappan temple at Sabarimala, in Pathanamthitta. Over the past few decades, women in this age group have been discouraged from entering the temple. Following a Supreme Court order in September 2018 permitting the entry of women into the temple, protests broke out across the state. While the Congress and the BJP were quick to side with the protesters and demand that women be denied entry into the temple, the CPI(M)-led government was in favour of the SC order. In the weeks and months that followed the SC order, the protests grew, Left party leaders started speaking in different voices and many of the steps taken by the Pinarayi Vijayan-led government came under harsh scrutiny. Many interpret the governments actions in the Sabarimala case as those against a belief system and tradition this is an emotive issue which is expected to find resonance across religious lines. It is expected that the BJP, and to a lesser extent the Congress, will benefit from the stand they have taken on this issue. It is widely believed that the Left will face a backlash, especially in the southern/central districts of Kerala for its handling of the protests. Church withdraws support This, along with the state government's far-from-satisfactory implementation of flood relief work, could work against George at the polling booth. Another factor which could work against her electoral prospects is the apparent withdrawal of support from the Orthodox Church. It is widely believed that the church played a major role in supporting George during the 2016 assembly polls. This time, however, that support is missing. Support from the minority community is crucial at a time when it is expected that the Hindu majority in the district will not back Left candidates. The anti-incumbency hurdle Under normal circumstances, the Lefts disadvantage should work in favour of the Congress. This time, that might not be the case. In the two elections (2009 and 2014) that have been held since it became a parliamentary constituency, the Congress has won the Pathanamthitta seat. The Congress feels it can win a hat-trick and has fielded its sitting Member of Parliament Anto Antony. However, over the years, Antony has earned the tag of a non-performer. Even Congress workers this author spoke to found it hard to defend Antonys case. Under normal circumstances, Antony would have had an easy win after all, both in 2009 and 2014 Antony polled more than 40 per cent of the votes but, as said earlier, this time its a three-way fight. In such a scenario, if the Hindu vote was to unify and go to the BJP candidate, it is feared that the minority vote in the constituency could be split between George and Antony. Only Ayyapan The NDAs candidate is K Surendran, a BJP general secretary. Surendran has been the BJPs face in the Sabarimala protests and was sent to jail on charges of attacking a 52-year-old woman at Sabarimala. At an election speech by Surendran on March 31 at Aranmula, an important temple village in Pathanamthitta, it was evident that the Sabarimala issue was his main focus. We focus on development and other important issues too, but today, since we were short of time, I kept the focus on Sabarimala, Surendran told this author. What works in the BJP candidates favour is that his main two rivals are facing anti-incumbency George for her role as an MLA and Antony for his as an MP. Another important factor thatll work in his favour is that Surendran has won the support of PC George, a six-time MLA from Poonjar, an assembly constituency which falls in the Pathanamthitta Lok Sabha constituency. PC Georges support is bound to increase the BJPs vote share in this election. Where Surendrans campaign lacks is that other than the Sabarimala issue, there isnt much to put on the plate. A general anti-BJP sentiment coupled with a perceived injustice the Centre did towards Kerala during the floods by refusing to accept aid from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will most likely act as a headwind against Surendran. Also, if local reports are to be believed, there is infighting within the BJP and between the party and the local RSS leadership. This could dampen the NDAs chances. Traders anger Pathanamthittas trader community has been hit by one blow after another. First it was demonetisation. When the traders were trying to get back on their feet, we were hit by the GST implementation. Then came the floods which wreaked havoc across the district. More than 80 per cent traders were severely affected by the floods. A few months later, when we were preparing to welcome the 10 million-plus devotees who visit the Sabarimala temple, the protests erupted. If the Left government was insensitive in handling the protests, the BJP turned it into a communal issue, says AJ Shajahan, district President of the Vyapari Vyavasayi Ekopana Samithi, the principal traders association in Kerala. Its too early to determine which way the political winds are blowing but to paraphrase the earlier mentioned lone Congress support in Panachikara, the people are smart; they are not interested in the noise political parties make; they are waiting to see who makes sense among these candidates. June 02, 2019 / 09:01 AM IST Welcome to the Lok Sabha election 2019 coverage. This blog tracks the latest developments from the general election. The BJP reacted with jubilation at the exit polls, which forecast a return of the NDA government, saying that they show a huge positive vote for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but opposition parties rejected the forecast. Narendra Modi is returning to power with a bang, Rajeev Sharma With 40 Lok Sabha seats, Bihar is crucial for any political party that has a serious claim to form a government at the Centre. The stakes are higher for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance which won 31 and 32 Lok Sabha seats 40 in the 2014 and 2009 general elections, respectively. Indeed, the BJP and allies need to further improve their 2014 tally if they want to see Narendra Modi retain power, though there doesnt seem to be much scope for improvement. But thats a tough task. One must not forget the important fact that the Janata Dal (United) and its leader Nitish Kumar were part of the LK Advani-choreographed NDA in 2009. The NDA had won 32 seats in Bihar after ensuring that Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, didnt enter the northern state. It was thus entirely a Nitish Kumar show in 2009. Effectively, it means that this will be the first time that Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi fight the polls together and on the same platform. One should not also forget how Kumar overnight dumped his RJD-Congress coalition partners, embraced a new partner, the BJP, and retained the chief ministership in July 2017. He could do this because the arithmetic of the 243-member Bihar assembly was favourable for such a switch-over: JDU (71), RJD (80), Congress (27) and BJP (53). There may well be a strong undercurrent among the voters of Bihar against the turncoat Kumar which, needless to say, will be exploited by the RJD-led grand coalition. Yet, the NDA has a perfect pitch to bat and pull off a victory in the Bihar test match. Its largely because of the fact that the opposition mahagathbandhan" or grand alliance is like a boat with several holes. One reason is that the RJD, the mother ship of the grand alliance, is facing a revolt within, much like the Shiv Sena of Bal Thackeray's last days and the two main Dravidian parties -- DMK and AIADMK. Though Tejaswi Yadav has taken control of the RJD, his elder brother Tej Pratap has of late been on a path of revolt, upset over the party giving ticket to his estranged wife's father Chandrika Rai. Though Tej Pratap won't be able to do much, his revolt does trigger negative vibes about the party in public perception. The RJD is contesting 20 seats, the Congress is fighting on nine, the RLSP (Rashtriya Lok Samata Party) five seats, Hindustani Awam Morcha (S) and Vikashsheel Insaan Party (VIP) are three seats each. One seat has been offered to CPI-ML (liberation), a major Left force in Bihar, from the RJDs own quota. The two national Left partiesCPI and CPMhave been left out. The 134-year-old Congress party is trying to piggy back on the RJD to stop the NDA juggernaut which decimated the non-BJP coalition in past two general elections. The Congress had first pitched for 16 seats, but it scaled down its demand to 13 seats and then to 11 seats. Finally, the Congress agreed to just nine seats, while giving up its claim on the traditional Aurangabad seat (which Congress wanted to be allotted to its candidate Nikhil Kumar, a former governor) which has gone to HAM(S) led by former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi. The RJD-Congress deal also includes the first Rajya Sabha seat to Congress from Bihar whenever it falls vacant. The RJD-Left parties deal breaker was over the Begusarai seat from where the CPI is fielding high-profile and controversial student leader Kanhaiya Kumar. The RJD wasnt interested in backing the CPIs candidate over its favoured contestant Tanveer Hasan who got almost 4 lakh votes despite the Modi wave in 2014, though he lost to BJP's Bhola Singh by a margin of over 55,000 votes. CPI's Rajendra Singh was a distant third with nearly 1.92 lakh votes. The absence of the Left parties from the anti-BJP grand alliance means that votes in their pockets of influence will be divided, which will inevitably help the BJP. Overall, the poll scenario in Bihar may offer a slight advantage to the NDA even if the opposition grand alliance seems well poised to deny the latter a free run. A similar situation seems to be prevailing in the neighbouring Uttar Pradesh as well where the BJP had won 71 of 80 Lok Sabha seats on its own steam, apart from two seats won by ally Apna Dal. A below-par performance by Modi's BJP in Bihar and UP would only rock the BJP boat. Rajeev Sharma is a political analyst and columnist who tweets @Kishkindha. Subir Roy Since the last general elections which saw the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win 10 seats in the northeast against the Congresses eight, the BJP was on a roll. By the end of last year the North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), led by the BJP, had made the northeast Congress mukt. But recent developments have, if nothing else, made the scene quite confused. This has cast doubt on the claim by Amit Shah that the BJP will this time bag 21 out of the 25 parliamentary seats in the northeast. A key issue is the BJPs failure to convert the NEDA, which is a political alliance, into an electoral one. The party has been able to forge an alliance with two parties in Assam and one in Nagaland but parties in the six other states have decided to sidestep the BJP. A key fallout of this is the BJP central leadership denying a ticket for the parliamentary elections to Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assams finance minister, who had been a symbol of the assertive BJP. The official reason is that he is a key resource and the party would like to have him supervise the entire northeast and not let him get bogged down in his own constituency. But being a young man in a hurry, he is reported to be in low spirits. A significant development is the National Peoples Party of Meghalaya, led by Conrad Sangma, chief minister supported by the BJP, deciding to field its own candidates in 14 of the 25 constituencies in the northeast. This is because of the absence of an electoral alliance with the BJP. The feeling is that NPP will benefit at the cost of the BJP from the disillusionment in the northeast over the citizenship law amendment bill. The BJPs counterargument is that in the absence of the NPP candidates these votes would have gone to the Congress. Nothing prevents the NPP from supporting a post-poll alliance with the NDA should that become necessary. Political labels are lightly worn in the northeast, as in Goa, and ministry making depends not so much on the final outcome of elections but the clout of leading political forces. In such a situation, to what extent development issues and the record of those who have been in power play a role in electoral outcomes and post-election government formation is wide open. Issues which matter in the northeast are infrastructure, the future of the youth and identity. The NDA government has been able to highlight its achievement on infrastructure by inaugurating two key bridges which will be of immense logistical help. Train services have also been expanded. On the other hand, the northeast today has gone back a little on air services. The future of the youth is critical in the region as disaffection strengthens the ability of separatists forces to make new recruitments. The availability of jobs plays a key role in shaping the mood of the youth. The Assam jobs scam has become an electoral issue with opposition parties demanding an enquiry into nearly a thousand government appointments allegedly going to relatives and supporters of the BJP and ministers. This issue is also being cited to ask what happened to the chief ministers promise of a corruption-free administration. By far the most important long term issue in the northeast is over identity and it has been brought back to the front burner with the publication of the draft national register of citizens and parliament passing the citizenship amendment bill, which thereafter lapsed with the dissolution of parliament. BJP leaders, national and regional, are realizing that the consequences of these two exercises go far beyond disenfranchising and deporting illegal Muslim migrants and making it easy for Hindu refugees to have proper residential status. Arunachal Pradesh has recently been rocked by violence against its BJP-led government because of its plan, now shelved, to give permanent resident status to six tribes and Gorkhas who dont belong to the state. (They are neither Muslim migrants nor Hindu refugees.) The deputy chief ministers house was set on fire and the police fought to stave off mob attacks on the chief ministers home. The protests are by those who fear the move will change the demographic character of the state and create too many claimants for jobs under reservation quotas. It is similar demographic fears which have driven agitations in Assam against allowing Hindu (who will be Bengali speaking) refugees from the neighbouring country. Additionally, the BJPs many political allies in the northeast are realizing that the Hindutva credo at the national level may not have a place in the sun for Christians but they are both numerically and culturally important in the northeast. So the issue is: are the BJP and sections in the northeast natural allies? There are no clear or easy solutions to these issues in a region with diverse linguistic, religious and cultural identities. The way to go beyond them is to encourage people to live in peace side by side and hope that over time identities will get to be shared. It is not at all clear if the elections will yield a dispensation that will encourage inclusion and not exclusion. If it is the latter then there will be further strife and misery for the poor. Maharashtra Assembly Election Results 2019 LIVE updates, Haryana Assembly Polls: Check constituency-wise poll-results, candidates, winners, losers Ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, over 200 writers from across the country have appealed to Indian citizens to caste their votes in favour of a "diverse and equal India", and help eliminate the politics of hate. In an open letter published on the Indian Cultural Forum, writers including Girish Karnad, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Nayantara Sahgal, and Romila Thapar said hate politics was being used to divide the country, create fear and increasingly exclude more number of people from living as "full-fledged citizens". "Writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians and other cultural practitioners have been hounded, intimidated, and censored. "Anyone who questions the powers-that-be is in danger of being harassed or arrested on false and ridiculous charges. All of us want this to change ... The first step, the one we can take soon, is to vote out hate politics ... and this is why we appeal to all citizens to vote for a diverse and equal India," the statement read. According to the letter the country was at "crossroads" in the wake of the impending polls, and urged all Indians to support the idea of a nation that renewed the "promises made by the Constitution". "Constitution guarantees all its citizens equal rights, the freedom to eat, pray and live as they choose, freedom of expression and the right to dissent. But in the last few years, we have seen citizens being lynched or assaulted or discriminated against because of their community, caste, gender, or the region they come from," it read. The writers said they didn't want rationalists, writers and activists to be hounded or assassinated, and demanded "stern measures against violence in word or deed against women, dalits, adivasis and minority communities". "We want resources and measures for jobs, education, research, healthcare and equal opportunities for all. Most of all, we want to safeguard our diversity and let democracy flourish," said the letter that was published in English, Hindi, as well as regional languages including Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Bangla, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. Last month, a group of 103 indie filmmakers including Anand Patwardhan, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan and Devashish Makhija also came together to issue an appeal to "defeat fascism" in the 2019 elections. File image The Congress accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of dividing the country on the basis of religion and culture and demanded his apology even as it asked the Election Commission (EC) to take "decisive action" against him for violating the law. The opposition party also accused Modi of insulting democracy by trying to segment Indians in terms of castes and communities. Congress's chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala charged the prime minister with indulging in "cheap politics by sowing the seeds of hatred" among people and alleged that Modi had now gone to the extent of insulting India's composite culture and the sacrifice of the people of south India during the freedom struggle. "Prime Minister Modi has indulged in a corrupt practice under section 123 of the Representation of the People Act, besides violating the dignity of the office he holds and every other yardstick that is necessary and impeccable in public life. He must apologise to the nation. "He has insulted the freedom movement, he has insulted the entire southern India, he has insulted the composite culture of India, he has insulted the India that is unified by its multiple cultures and also languages, religions, castes and creeds, and the EC must take note of this and take decisive action against Modi," he told reporters here. The Congress leader demanded that Modi should apologise to the people of the country, saying he had insulted them, and claimed that the prime minister knew nothing about the geographical or social description of Wayanad in Kerala, which had a 50 per cent Hindu population. Congress president Rahul Gandhi will contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Wayanad, besides Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. "This shows that the PM does not have information about history, geography or society and this is an insult of entire south India and that of our Constitution and India's Ganga-Yamuna tradition. "He should apologise for insulting the entire south India. If the EC does not take note of it, we will move the poll body," Surjewala said. He added that by dividing people on religious lines, Modi had violated section 123 of the Representation of the People Act that defined corrupt practices. "This is a corrupt practice and the EC should take note of it and take decisive action against the prime minister. "Modi wants to divide the country on the basis of religion, culture and languages. He is indulging in cheap politics by sowing the seeds of hatred. Modi has gone to the extent of insulting India's composite culture," the Congress leader said. Party spokesperson Manish Tewari said it was unfortunate that Modi saw Indians in terms of their communities as he stated that the Congress was scared to field its leaders from constituencies dominated by the majority community voters. "It is unfortunate that the prime minister of India has spoken such words. Unlike the PM of India, who sees the citizens of the country in terms of their communities and not as citizens of India, the Congress sees each and every of the 135 crore citizens as Indians. "....By trying to segment the Indian democracy in terms of castes and communities, the prime minister has insulted the democracy that we are," he told reporters here. Tewari said when the country adopted the Constitution in 1950 and the people of India gave to themselves universal adult suffrage, it meant that "irrespective of which caste, community, region, religion you come from, you have an equal right to vote". He also hit out at Modi and termed his comment that the Congress had coined the phrase "Hindu terror" as "lies". "Prime Minister Narendra Modi is clearly speaking a lie. Hindu terrorism was defined by his ministerial colleague, who was then a home secretary. This definition was given by him. As far as the Congress is concerned, it always believes that terrorism does not have any religion or caste and it needs to be fought. "It is unfortunate that the prime minister is trying to speak a lie to deflect the attention from his own failures. He should talk to his colleague and he would know who had defined Hindu terrorism," Tewari said. He added that Gandhi contesting the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from a second seat -- Wayanad -- was in keeping with the tradition of top party leaders contesting elections from south India. "What stops the prime minister of India, if he cares for that India which is in the south of the Vindhyas, from contesting a seat in south India? We have not stopped him," the Congress leader said. To a question on whether the Congress would file a complaint with the EC over Modi's remarks, he said, "We will examine the PM's speech and after that, take appropriate action." Tewari added that it was sad that the prime minister, instead of focussing on his track record and "answering to the people of India for all the lies he had told in the 2013-2014 election campaign, is trying to deflect issues once again". Earlier in the day, slamming the Congress over the "Hindu terror" metaphor, Modi charged the opposition party with insulting the "peace-loving" followers of the religion by linking them to terrorism. The Hindus had woken up and the country had decided to "punish" the Congress, the prime minister said at a public rally in Maharashtra's Wardha, adding that the opposition party was scared to field its leaders from constituencies where the majority community dominated in terms of the voter-base, without naming Gandhi. File image Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh's remarks supporting the return of Narendra Modi as prime minister are violative of model code of conduct, the Election Commission has concluded. Sources said since Singh holds a constitutional post, the EC will write to President Ram Nath Kovind, flagging the issue. The poll panel had examined the remarks made by the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister in the light of model code violation as holding a constitutional post makes him "apolitical". Addressing BJP workers at his Aligarh residence on March 23, Singh reportedly said, "All of us are BJP workers and we want the party to win. We want Modiji to become the prime minister. It is necessary that Modiji becomes the PM again." The Governor made these remarks to placate some agitated BJP members who gathered outside his house over ticket distribution. In the 1990s, the EC had expressed displeasure to then Himachal Pradesh Governor Gulsher Ahmed for campaigning for his son. He later quit. Congress president Rahul Gandhi on April 2 claimed people in South India "feel hostility" from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said he decided to contest from Wayanad in Kerala to send out the message that he stands with them. The Congress announced on March 31 that party chief Gandhi will contest from Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala, besides his traditional stronghold of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. "There is a feeling in South India, a very strong feeling in South India, that they are not being carried (along) by the current government. South India feels hostility from Mr Narendra Modi, they feel that they are not being included in the decisions of the country," Gandhi said. "So, I wanted to send a message to South India that we are with you and I am standing with you. That is why I am standing from Kerala," he said in response to a question after the launch of the party's manifesto. The Congress' announcement that the party chief will contest from Wayanad evoked sharp reactions from the Left and Right of the political spectrum. The CPI(M) and CPI said the move signalled the Congress wanted to take on the Left which would work towards defeating him in the elections from Wayanad. BJP chief Amit Shah reacted to the development saying Gandhi has "fled to Kerala as he fears that Amethi voters will seek an account from him". Addressing a rally in Wardha, Maharashtra, on April 1, the prime minister said the Congress is scared to field its leaders from constituencies where the majority dominates in terms of voter-base. He, however, did not name Gandhi. The Congress is hoping to further consolidate its position this time in Kerala. Top Congress leaders have contested from the South earlier as well. Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi has in the past contested from the Bellary Lok Sabha seat in Karnataka, while Rahul Gandhi's grandmother, former prime minister Indira Gandhi, contested from Chikamangalur in Karnataka. Wayanad district is in the north eastern part of Kerala and houses various tribal groups of the state. The area was badly affected due to last year's floods. Suresh Sankaranarayanan, CTO of Kotak General Insurance has a remarkable experience of over two decades in Information Technology domain across Insurance, Manufacturing and Software sectors under his belt. He has worked with organizations like SBI General, ICICI Lombard, & Polaris Software Labs before coming on-board with Kotak General Insurance. In this exclusive interaction with Moneycontrol, Sankaranarayan sheds light on how the role of CTO has changed over the years and how it would evolve further. Q: How has the role of the CTO changed in the recent years, amidst changing technology and business landscapes? Sankaranarayanan: Historically, the CTO covered areas of Project Management, Procurement and was a pure technologist. Since then, the CTOs role has undergone many significant transitions. In todays world, most of the business ideas are conceived with the innate understanding that the it will be delivered on a technology platform. The various business problems are resolved by technology intervention only. Organisations are willing to invest in IT since one can derive huge savings in costs due to such investments. This places the technology platform at the centre of the organisation thereby pushing the CTO into a quasi-business role. CTO are now fully engaged in business and understand the intricacies very well. Responsive organisations and CTOs have been engaged with the field force and customers to understand the shift in market dynamics. The CTO therefore wears two hats at the least. One of a Technologist where he understands the technology and the implementation and second of a leader who understands where the technology will deliver the maximum results for business. Q: What are the new responsibilities and challenges that come along with this quasi-business role? Sankaranarayanan: I think one of the biggest challenges for the new CTO is bringing all the business stakeholders as project partners. Since technology solution cuts across various stakeholders, their management has become an integral part of the CTOs job definition. It is very important to have all stakeholders on board for any successful implementation. An Implementations can be faster only with an all department buy-in. Todays technology platforms are complex and require multiple integrations, therefore, communication management of changes across the rank and file is very important. Continuous cost reduction is another area of focus. Every organisation looks at cost reduction to enable better pricing and value to be delivered to its customers. Initiatives around cost reduction has to be mostly implemented through technology intervention. So, the question that runs in a CTOs mind is How do I achieve the same business outcome at a lower cost Q: How does the CTO facilitate innovation and ensure it doesnt fail? Sankaranarayanan: Every organisation needs to innovate and innovate smartly i.e. without impacting the current setup and systems. Innovations, by its very nature, are unpredictable as to whether they will meet the desired outcome or not. Its the responsibility of the CTO to sandbox the innovation so that there is no negative fallout and only the successful ones make it to the main stay of the organisation. Here one sees the CTO playing the role of an experimenter by embracing Cloud-based solutions and trying the new workloads. Q: What will be the next wave of technologies that will disrupt the insurance sector in India? I think Cloud, AI and robotic process automation will continue to drive innovation and disruption in the insurance sector. Cloud will soon become the preferred destination for infrastructure and platform as a service, as companies move more critical workloads. While the entire Data Centre movement to the cloud could be some time away, I believe that companies will start shifting the new initiatives to the cloud for the following simple reasons Co-existing with the current production setup, Lower Cost, & Scalability. Technologies like AI and machine learning will have greater use cases within the insurance sector, especially in eliminating frauds in claims, which is pressing issue currently. There are still multiple processes that require intensive processing through human intervention in insurance companies. RPA will help automate these processes to a large extent in the coming days. Another emerging trend is the use of IoT data for effectively delivering wellness programs. Wellness requires the integration of people, IoT devices and their health data, with trust being the most critical bonding factor. This is an emerging space and I expect it to mature over the next 3-5 years. When Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray went to Ayodhya on November 25, observers noted how the leader managed to hit two birds with one stone. On the one hand, Thackeray raked up the Ram Mandir issue, challenging ally BJP on its promise, while on the other, it postured itself as the torch-bearer of Hindutva ahead of Lok Sabha and assembly polls. This was, observers noted, astute and wily Thackeray's way of facing the challenge of tackling the BJP's rising influence on its turf, Maharashtra, while also wading through the complicated dynamics of alliance politics. Also Read | How Shiv Sena capitalised on devpt projects to gain the upper hand on BJP Taking over the throne According to observers and Sena leaders, after the death of his father Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray Uddhav faced the dual challenges of coming out of his shadow, as also handling the BJP's rising influence. While his rivals, such as Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS) chief and estranged cousin, Raj; the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the BJP itself, were hoping for Uddhav to stumble, he managed to grab a grip. He also managed to negotiate a line with BJP, its partner, a task that many were skeptical Uddhav would be able to achieve. "According to me, Uddhav had two immediate tasks ahead of him after Bal Thackeray's death. First, the fact that the senior Thackeray was considered Hindu Hriday samrat, and the second was that the BJP was projecting Narendra Modi as the next Hindu Hriday Samrat," Prakash Pawar, HOD of political science at Kolhapur University, told Moneycontrol. "Uddhav had to build his image on the background of all this," Pawar said, adding that had he tried pushing himself as the leader of the Hindus while Modi was trying to fill that vacuum, he would have failed. "But he picked up an alternative to that. Instead of running after a new image, he chose to firm up his existing image. And he was flexible. At that time, Sena was struggling with seats, but he managed to increase Sena's seats in Lok Sabha," Pawar said, adding that Uddhav exercised flexibility and firmness according to circumstances, which worked in his favour. "He could carve out his own identity due to this," Pawar said. Also Read | Lok Sabha Polls: Its a season for defections in Maharashtra Backroom strategist, frontline leader By the time Thackeray took charge of a party jostling for space and identity in a rapidly changing political space, he had been around the corridors of power long enough to understand how things work. He made his first public appearance in 1995, but had largely been a backroom manager and sharp observer of Sena while the party ceded space to his cousin Raj, who liked to believe that he was, if not direct, then the natural heir to the Sena throne. A wedge between Raj and Uddhav, in the making since 1999 and reportedly created by senior Sena leaders themselves, finally burst out in the open in 2006, when Raj went his way to form the MNS. Uddhav reportedly had been nursing his own plans for the party, and as the differences with his brother began to grow, he forced Bal Thackeray to declare him as Sena's working president, thus managing to get formal blessings. This was a symbolic gesture that went a long way in drumming up support of the rank and file. But the cadres have always bemoaned the Congress for its dynastic politics, and Thackeray Sr used choicest words and expressions to launch attacks against the Gandhis. That didnt stop him from handing his son the top berth, though. "But who would lead the party if not Uddhav sahib?" a shakha pramukh asked. "He knows the party in and out. And only Balasahebs son could have carried forward his legacy, no one else," he said. Also Read | Mallikarjun Kharge: Understated, undefeated and Congress' go-to man Cadre speak A complaint that Shiv Sena functionaries, in Mumbai at least, have against their chief is that the man has a limited presence on the space where all news is made these days social media. "He has to realise that the days of street battle are over, it is time to take the Sena on social media, ramp up its presence," a Sena functionary told Moneycontrol. While the functionary said that Thackeray needs to be surrounded by a team of strategists that look at taking the partys politics to new frontiers, Thackeray, he said, doesn't seem to be taking steps towards that front anytime soon. "Sena has a strong street-based cadre which functions in a particular way, where the leader is held in high regard. If he (Thackeray) can firm up that connect through social media, where a lot of Sena workers are active, it will work wonders," said a Shakha pramukh, who added that simple things, such as a selfie, or a birthday wish by Thackeray will go a long way in connecting with his supporters, especially party workers. That, according to observers, is important, since Sena depends largely on its loyalists on the street who complete the door-to-door tasks for the party. While that is a Sena legacy which was established and improved upon by its former supremo, Bal Thackeray, this is an age to take it forward, Sena workers say. Odisha will head to polls in four phases throughout April. The first phase is scheduled for April 11, while the second, third and fourth phases will be held on April 18, April 23 and April 29 respectively. The coastal state, helmed by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik for 19 years now, will head to polls simultaneously along with the general elections. Odisha has 147 assembly constituencies and 21 Lok Sabha constituencies. During the 2014 elections in the state, Patnaik's Biju Janata Dal (BJD) had won 117 seats, while the Congress was the second largest party with 16 seats. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had managed to win only 10 of the 147 seats. Odisha's politics The politics of Odisha, before Patnaik's entry, was dominated by Congress, and Congress stalwarts like Janaki Ballabh Patnaik, Biju Patnaik, Hemanand Biswal and Giridhar Gamang among others. However, Biju Patnaik left the Congress in 1969 to form the Utkal Congress, which was later merged into the Janata Party. Congress' rule reigned supreme in the state, with leaders like Janaki Patnaik making a personal fortress out of the state. The state had a non-Congress government thrice before the BJD came to power. Congress governments in the state were widely accused of being corrupt and inefficient, with crime and poverty on a rise. It was against this background that the reign of Naveen Patnaik started in 2000, when he resigned as a Union minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government to become the chief minister of Odisha. While it may be argued that the base for Patnaik's entry into politics was laid down by his father, Biju, who served twice as the CM of the state, the Patnaik family story is a little different. Also Read: Know Your Leader | Naveen Patnaik: Known as 'Mr Clean', Odisha CM gunning for 5th straight term According to reports, after the death of Biju Patnaik in 1997, Naveen's two siblings were asked whether they would like to enter politics, but both declined. It was then that Naveen expressed his wish to contest, and was elected from Aska parliamentary constituency in the by-election that followed his father's death. Naveen founded the BJD in 1997, and stormed to power in 2000. The BJD was in alliance with the BJP for nine years from 2000, but Patnaik had pulled out from the alliance before the 2009 polls. BJD has dominated Odisha's political discourse for the past two decades. The Congress, meanwhile, has been effectively sidelined, and the BJD even managed to dodge the 'Modi wave' of 2014 to retain the state. Also Read | The Badals: Electoral might, financial strength and marital ties make them Punjab's first family Key Parties Biju Janata Dal (BJD): The BJD first came to power in 2000, and has remained in government ever since. The BJD's success is attributed largely to Patnaik. With 19 years in power, the 72-year-old Patnaik, has recognised the threat of anti-incumbency and is working to prevent a BJP surge in the state. One of the first things he did was to announce 33 percent reservation for women candidates in his party for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. This was to cater to his primary vote bank: the women of Odisha. Patnaik has, however, remained non-committal on whether the same quota can be applied by the BJD for the assembly elections. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): The BJP had set its eyes on Odisha from as far back as 2014, when it got 10 seats in the assembly polls and one seat in the Lok Sabha polls. That one seat, however, was the sole seat that the BJD had lost in its sweep of the state. The BJP also held its two-day National Executive meeting in Bhubaneshwar in 2018, a signal to the BJP cadre that Odisha was one of its top priorities. The BJP also has reasons to believe that it can improve its tally in the assembly. During the panchayat elections held in 2017, the BJP won 473 of the 853 zila parishad seats. The BJP believes that this is an indication of what is to follow during the assembly and the general elections. Congress: Once a bastion, Congress is now a pale shadow of itself in the state. According to reports, the party is battling infighting. Even though it had come in second after the BJD during the 2014 polls, Congress had failed to win even a single seat from Odisha in the Lok Sabha polls. The panchayat elections also saw Congress being reduced to a third position, managing to bag only 60 seats, down by 50 percent. Zalmay Khalilzad US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad was in Kabul on April 1 to meet with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and other officials, as part of an ongoing drive to find a way out of Afghanistan's 17-year-old war. The Afghan-born US adviser said on Twitter he had spoken with government representatives and "discussed the urgency of making progress on intra-Afghan dialogue." Khalilzad's visit to Kabul comes ahead of an expected new round of talks with the Taliban in Doha, reportedly due to begin in mid-April. Previous talks in the Qatari capital, where the Taliban has a political office, concluded last month with Khalilzad saying "real strides" had been made. On the table were proposals to get foreign armed forces out of Afghanistan, and for the Taliban to guarantee the country cannot be used as a springboard for terror groups to launch future attacks. The State Department last week said Khalilzad's trip was "part of an overall effort to facilitate a peace process that brings all Afghan parties together in inclusive intra-Afghan negotiations". So far, however, US-Taliban talks have not included the Kabul government. The Taliban have long refused to speak with Kabul, deeming the administration of Ghani -- who is seeking re-election this year -- puppets of the West. But a senior Taliban official told AFP they may consider meeting Afghan government officials in future Doha talks "as independent politicians". Afghanistan remains on edge ahead of a new fighting season in the spring, and fears abound of an increase in Taliban attacks to gain leverage at the negotiating table. On Saturday, Taliban fighters attacked a convoy carrying Afghanistan's vice president Abdul Rashid Dostum in the northern province of Balkh. The attack killed one of Dostum's bodyguards, but the former warlord escaped unhurt. A spokesman for Dostum said he would not be attending the Doha talks -- but representatives from his political party would go. Khalilzad's trip has already seen him stop in London and Brussels as he seeks global support for a peace deal. The top US auto safety regulator said it will open an investigation into 3 million Hyundai Motor Co and Kia Motors Corp vehicles after reviewing reports of more than 3,000 fires that injured over 100 people. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the investigation is in response to a petition seeking a probe filed in June by the Center for Auto Safety. The auto safety agency since 2017 has been investigating some Hyundai and Kia vehicles for fire risks. The South Korean automakers have recalled more than 2.3 million vehicles since 2015 to address various engine fire risks. The probe covers the 2011-2014 Kia Optima and Sorento; and 2010-2015 Kia Soul, along with the 2011-2014 Hyundai Sonata and Santa Fe. Hyundai said in a statement it was cooperating and added it has been in "frequent, open and transparent dialogue regarding non-collision engine fires." Kia said it will continue to work with NHTSA and "openly shares information and data with NHTSA on all matters pertaining to vehicle safety." NHTSA said the decision to initiate the probe was based on its analysis of information received from multiple manufacturers, consumer complaints and other sources. The agency said prior Kia and Hyundai vehicle recalls covered by the probe are primarily related to engine fires the new probe "is not limited to engine components and may cover additional vehicle systems or components." Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, said it was "long past time for the full power of the federal government to be brought to bear to answer why so many thousands of Kia and Hyundai vehicles have been involved in non-crash fires." He added he hoped the probe will quickly lead to new recalls. "The evidence is now clear a Hyundai and Kia should have acted to recall these vehicles far earlier," he said. Last month, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said a group of U.S. states is investigating Hyundai and Kia for potential unfair and deceptive acts related to reports of hundreds of vehicle fires. In November, Reuters reported federal prosecutors had launched a criminal investigation into Hyundai and Kia to determine if vehicle recalls linked to engine defects had been conducted properly. In January, the automakers agreed to offer software upgrades for 3.7 million vehicles not being recalled. A South Korean whistleblower in 2016 reported concerns to NHTSA, which has been probing the timeliness of three U.S. recalls and whether they covered enough vehicles. In 2015, Hyundai recalled 470,000 U.S. Sonata sedans, saying engine failure would result in a vehicle stall, increasing the risk of a crash. At the time, Kia did not recall its vehicles, which share the same aTheta IIa engines. In March 2017, Hyundai expanded its original U.S. recall to 572,000 Sonata and Santa Fe Sport vehicles with those Theta II engines, citing the same issue involving manufacturing debris. On the same day, Kia also recalled 618,000 Optima, Sorento and Sportage vehicles, all of which use the same engine. The Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) has arrested Hari Sankaran, former chairman of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS), in connection with the ongoing investigations into the affairs of IL&FS and its group entities. This is the first arrest in the fraud-hit IL&FS scam. Hari Sankaran has been arrested on the grounds of abusing his powers in IL&FS Financial Services Ltd (IFIN), through his fraudulent conduct and in granting loans to entities which were not creditworthy or have been declared non-performing assets and caused wrongful loss to the company and its creditors. It may be worth noting that IL&FS Financial Services had borrowings of more than Rs17,000 crore from debt instruments and bank loans. Provident funds, pension funds, gratuity funds, mutual funds, public and private sector banks, are among those who have invested in these debt instruments. After the arrest, he has been granted SFIO custody till 4 April 2019. Earlier in December 2018, the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA), in its submission before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), had revealed details of its finding on several instances of misreporting of income, dubious transactions, conflict of interest, ever-greening of loans and rampant personal enrichment of key employees, including Ravi Parthasarathy, Hari Sankaran, and Arun Kumar Saha, besides others. In the interim report, the SFIO had stated,"...it is evident that IL&FS procured funds from the market through short-term instruments and invested in its group companies by way of giving long-term loans and advances, which was prejudicial to the interest of IL&FS, in terms of financial solvency. During these distressed times, IL&FS and its key subsidiaries such as IFIN and IL&FS Transportation Network Ltd (ITNL) were contained to raise short-term market funding through commercial papers or inter corporate deposits based on its bogus and fictitious but good credit rating and these short-term loans were passed to its project special purpose vehicles (SPVs) or group companies, for helping them service their debt obligations, management fully aware, thereby hid and avoided possible defaults resulting into increasing indebtedness on a standalone basis." "This is virtually an act of fraud causing indebtness of IL&FS to over Rs91,000 crore. This indebtness is deliberate, wilful, fraudulent act of directors who were the mind controlling the affairs of IL&FS with intention to defraud creditors, who too had failed in their due diligence. An increasing level of indebtness of IL&FS, year after year, was sufficient red flat for the creditors to prevent further loans and advances. Such discriminator acts of lenders have provided long rope to the directors in control of affairs to put IL&FS in coma," the report added. Last year, the government superseded the management of the beleaguered company, which has around Rs91,000 crore in long-term debt, through a National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) order and appointed a six-member board led by Uday Kotak, MD and CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank, to restore its financial solvency. As if taking a clue from the loan melas organised during Congress regime, public sector banks (PSBs) have doled out crores of rupees under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY), reveals a reply received under Right to Information (RTI). State Bank of India (SBI) has sanctioned loans worth Rs86,293.37 crore, followed by Bank of Baroda, which granted loans of Rs14,974.32 crore. While the state-run banks are on a spree to provide loans under PMMY, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had raised a red flag on spike in non-performing assets (NPAs) under the scheme. In addition, all these loans under PMMY are collateral free loans and to mitigate the issue MUDRA or Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency Ltd, offers credit guarantee fund for micro units (CGFMU). Interestingly, most of the PSBs who have replied to the RTI application have stated that they have no information or do not maintain data on total number of loan proposals received under the PMMY. United Bank of India, however, replied that it had received 3.04 lakh applications under the loan scheme. Here are the points on which information was sought from PSBs under RTI. Total number of loan proposals received under the Prime Minister Mudra Yojana (PMMY) Total number of loans sanctioned out of the loan proposals received Cumulative amounts of the loans sanctioned under PMMY Maximum amount of loan sanctioned under PMMY to a single beneficiary Minimum amount of loan sanctioned under PMMY to a single beneficiary So far, seven lenders have replied to the RTI. All banks have made sure to follow the rules of loan under PMMY and sanctioned loans ranting from Rs5,000 to Rs10 lakh to an individual borrower. Here are the questions asked and replies received from seven PSBs under the RTI Act We had mentioned in Mondays closing report that Nifty, Sensex would continue to move in a range. The major indices of the Indian stock markets were range-bound on Tuesday and closed with gains over Mondays close. On the NSE, there were 826 advances, 899 declines and 364 unchanged. The trends of the major indices in the course of Tuesdays trading are given in the table below: The benchmark Sensex traded on a flat to positive note on Tuesday. At the close of trading there were small gains in all the major indices. The Congress manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections released on Tuesday aims to focus on "a forward looking economy" and spells out how to get rid of chronic poverty, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said. "The manifesto's purpose is to focus to move towards a forward looking economy. All would like India to be a prosperous country, a country where prosperity and productivity go together," he told the media here. Air passengers may have to spend more as oil marketing companies have increased the price of aviation turbine fuel (ATF). ATF now costs Rs63,472.22 per kilolitre in Delhi, up Rs677 (over 1%) from Rs62,795 per kl last month, according to the notification by the Indian Oil Corporation. A similar hike in the prices was seen in Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai. The aviation sector is seeing flared-up fares due to capacity constraints caused by reasons like shortage of aircraft in the wake of grounding of Boeing MAX 737 globally over safety concerns. Jet Airways might feel the pinch more given its ongoing struggle to stay afloat. Coal India Ltd (CIL) said it has, for the first time, breached the 600 million tonne (MT)-mark in its production and off-take, clocking a 7% and 4.8% growth, respectively, during 2018-19 fiscal but missed the annual targets on both fronts marginally. Coal India shares closed at Rs236.00, down 0.17% on the NSE. The Delhi High Court sought responses of the National Housing Bank (NHB) and the PNB Housing Finance Limited (PNBHFL) on a plea seeking to protect interests of home loan customers who have become victims of corporate malice. A Bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani asked the NHB, the agency promoting housing finance institutions in the country, and the PNBHFL to file responses by August 9, the next date of hearing. In his public interest litigation (PIL), Abhijit Mishra alleged the PNBHFL was engaged in "malicious and illegal predatory lending practice" and sought its audit by the NHB. The petitioner has also sought action against the PNBHFL under the provisions of the National Housing Bank Act for failing to comply with the NHB's master circular. He said the PNBHFL had been disbursing housing loans, sanctioned to individuals, without closely linking them to the stages of house construction. Innocent people, who had not complied with the mandatory norms of the NHB, the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA), the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Securities Interest Act, 2002 (SARFAESI) and the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority were becoming victims of PNBHFL's malpractices. The top gainers and top losers of the major indices are given in the table below: The closing values of the major Asian indices are given in the table below: The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down as ultra vires, the controversial circular issued by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that mandated resolution of loans of Rs2,000 crore and above even for a default of a single day within the window of 180 days. The RBI circular had said that in the pre-insolvency and bankruptcy code (IBC) stage, the moment a commercial entity is in default on a loan of Rs2,000 crore or more even for a day within 180 days default, the bank would initiate steps for resolving, including restructuring the loan. RBIs previous guidelines had given banks the freedom to initiate resolution process after 60 days of default or within 240 days. Pronouncing the judgement on a batch of petitions by the industriespower, fertiliser and sugarchallenging RBI's 12 February 2018 circular, a bench of Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman and Justice Vineet Saran said, "We have declared RBI circular ultra vires." The SC verdict would have a bearing on Rs2.2 lakh crore of bad loans. It also raises questions on the central banks authority on issuing orders to banks for initiating loan recovery after a default. The Indian government through an amendment in the Banking Regulation Act has authorised RBI to issue directions to lenders for proceeding under IBC. Power, shipping and sugar companies have challenged RBI's 12 February 2018 circular which has identified about 30 companies that have loans over Rs2,000 crore and are stressed. Many of them were power companies and they have already challenged the RBI's circular in various courts. The regulated sector companies of fertiliser, power and sugar had contended that their prices are regulated by the government and they do not get paid on time and, thus, they are not able to pay the banks on schedule and they are not wilful defaulters and can't be treated as such. They have contended that under IBC the resolution plan gives then 270 days but the RBI circular has reduced it to 180. As many as 34 power companies have accumulated Rs1.4 lakh crore of non-performing assets (NPAs) for Indian banks while 41 corporates across sectors, including those from infrastructure, textiles, telecom, sugar, steel, energy, power and fertilisers have Rs84,000 crore piled up NPAs which have taken the bad loan total to astronomical Rs2.24 lakh crore. Quoting a report of the 37th standing committee on energy giving NPA details of 34 power plants, the petitioners told the apex court that these plants, which have number of banks ranging from 2 to 19, have accumulated over Rs1.40 lakh crore. These power companies were seeking Supreme Court's intervention in setting aside or quashing an RBI order of 12 February 2018 where the apex bank laid down strict norms for NPA resolutions within 180 days, among other rules. Earlier this month, RBI defended its 12 February 2018 circular, and told the SC that intention behind the circular was to give banks more powers in resolving stress and the one day default rule is to ensure banks and borrowers put a risk management framework in place. The one day default rule of RBI states if a defaulter fails to pay even one day after the deadline of loan payment, then banks have to come up with a resolution plans and, if they do not approve the resolution plan within 180 days, then the banks will have to take the company to insolvency. This rule was mostly criticised by companies. The prominent corporates where payments are due are Adani Power Maharashtra (Rs9,463.29 crore), Damodar Valley Corp (Rs9,756.42 crore), Jaiprakash Power Ventures (Rs8,719.16 crore), KSK Mahanadi Power Co (Rs14,165.12 crore), Jindal Thermal Power (Rs5,594.21 crore), Prayagraj Power Generation (Rs9,883.28 crore), Jaiprakash Power Ventures (Rs8,719.16 crore), GNR Chhatishgarh Energy (Rs5,325.28 crore) and DB Power (Rs5,930.56 crore) among a host of others. Among the consolidated NPA list of other corporates, VOVL, formerly known as Videocon Oil Ventures Ltd, having a 17-bank consortium of lenders, owes Rs21,657.54 crore to them. Matrix Fertiliser and Chemicals owes 11 bankers Rs4,135.12 crore. Essar Bulk Terminal, an infra company, owes Rs1,088.82 crore and Rolta India has a debt of Rs3,400 crore. The new framework of RBI prescribed a strict 180-day timeline over which banks are required to unanimously agree on the resolution plan, failing which the stressed account would have to be referred for resolution under the IBC. Power companies argued that the circular would push even power assets that were close to achieving loan restructuring into insolvency. Power ministry officials also spoke out against the 12 February 2018 circular seeking some relaxation in norms, especially with respect to the one-day default rule, attributing the stress in the sector to delayed payments by electricity distribution companies of India (discoms), lack of power purchase agreements and irregular coal supply. Today, Walkabout Resources Ltd [ASX:WKT] executed the formal signing of the first binding offtake term sheet with Inner Mongolia Qianxi Graphite or IMQG, a Chinese graphite producer. At time of writing, Walkabout Resources share price is trading at 16 cents, up 6.45%. The agreement secures up to a 50% sale of scheduled yearly production for the next three years. But offtake discussions are still ongoing with end users, upgrading facilities and traders. Related: 10 Aussie mining stocks you should be watching in 2019. Walkabout Resources seizes graphite market excitement The agreement with Mongolia shows encouraging recognition for Walkabouts product and development timeline in the graphite market. According to todays announcement, the binding terms are set to carry a minimum of 10,000 tonnes and a maximum of 20,000 per annum of flake graphite to IMQG for a period of three years following the commencement of production. Therell be a final offtake agreement which will replace the term sheet. At this stage, the fine points of the terms of agreement are still commercially sensitive. Walkabout Resources production outlook for 2019 Executive chairman of Walkabout Resources, Trevor Benson commented on the offtake agreement: Signing the first binding offtake term sheet is a significant milestone for walkabout. Its clear that end-users and upgrade facilities who have recognised our premium product, can now see a more definite timeline to production. This has prompted them to take action to secure supply from what is Africas standout large-flake graphite deposit. The agreement is the result of months of testwork and discussions and we are delighted to be able to make this announcement so quickly after releasing the upgraded reverse and the improved DFS. Shareholders should keep an eye out for further share updates within the market, as Walkabout Resources is continuing to keep discussion open on additional offtake agreements and this could impact the companys share price. So, investors may want to keep an on stocks like Walkabout Resources, as the emerging graphite market grows. Regards, Ryan Clarkson-Ledward, For Money Morning PS:Take a look at these in-house small-cap stocks that Money Morning experts are watching in 2019. Read more about it here and claim your copy today for free. 1858 Geosphere Some of the best exploration takes place after the sun goes down, and that calls for a very special edition of the Montblanc 1858 Geosphere. To honour exhilarating nights out in the city, a distinct black coating is applied to the bare stainless steel case, and is then manually washed and brushed, giving every piece its own patina and appearance in the same way that every good urban adventure results in its own unforgettable moments. For proof that B-20 wreaked havoc on small Canadian towns far from the bright lights and blaring horns of Toronto and Vancouver, look no further than Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. We have 41 realtors in Prince Alberta and our trade area, which is down from 94 almost four years ago, so 60% of our realtors have left the industry, said Jesse Honch, a realtor with Coldwell Banker Signature. Getting hit with the full realm of the stress test, not just the initial changes in 2016, was pretty tough for us to handle in combination with the weak western economy where weve lost so many jobs. Its also resulted in a combination of fewer buyers and desperation in the industry. In fact, there were 80 realtors in Prince Albert in 2017 and only 51 today, according to the Saskatoon Region Association of Realtors. Statistics Canada said that January registered increases for 18 of 20 industrial sectors surveyed. Real estate and brokerages blazed upward with 4.1% growth, although February might see some reversal of the trend, StatsCan stated. Builders enjoyed a 1.9% performance increase in January, propelled by 3.1% growth in residential activity. This is the first gain that the construction sector had in eight months, as well as the largest in nearly 6 years. In late March, Finance Minister Bill Morneau allayed fears that Canada is running headlong towards a recession or worse, is already in one. This, after various observers warned that recent declines in housing-related activity will be harmful for the national economy in the long run. They would be incorrect, Morneau said the morning after the release of the latest federal budget, as quoted by the Financial Post. That would be technically wrong and certainly not in line with our expectations. Two new office towers currently under construction in Saskatoon might just be the further boost that the citys commercial market needs, according to a recent report by CBRE Research. The analysis came in the wake of CBREs 2019 Canadian Real Estate Market Outlook, which indicated that Saskatoon currently benefits from a relatively healthy commercial/industrial vacancy rate of 7.7%, with rents at $9.25 per square foot. The study noted that the citys commercial/industrial sector has enjoyed sustained recovery in 2018, after the last large wave of construction (which ended back in 2013) that led to half a decade of supply glut and soaring vacancy rates. 3 1 of 3 James Durbin / Midland Reporter-Telegram Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Google Maps Show More Show Less 3 of 3 Members of the Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously approved zoning requests that will have the shopping center that houses Kohls, Maurices, Natural Grocers, Ashley Home, Cracker Barrel and much more sporting a different look in the future. Commissioners unanimously approved a request by Maverick Engineering for a zone change from PD, Planned District for Shopping Center to Amended PD, Planned District for a Shopping Center on 7.789-acres at Wadley Ave. and Loop 250 West. This will pave the way for Crunch Fitness to take over about 35,000 square feet that was once part of the Kohls department store. The new fitness center will be owned by Brian Hibbard and John Armatas and expected to open later this year. Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree | Journal-Courier Texas Roadhouse mascot Andy the Armadillo helps teach students how to line dance Monday at Virginia Elementary School. The chain restaurants Springfield location will help raise funds for the school by donating a portion of todays proceeds to the school. Rose Ann Sharp of Del Mar is one of 17 women from across San Diego that were honored as 2019 Women of Distinction by 78th Assembly member Todd Gloria, at the Womens Museum of California in Liberty Station on March 20. The 78th Assembly includes San Diego County, Coronado, Del Mar, Imperial Beach and Solana Beach. This is an opportunity to honor the women that make San Diego a better place to live, Gloria said. We are celebrating Womens History Month in March and want to take this opportunity to recognize the outstanding contributions of women across this country because men didnt just build the United States, women are a part of it as well. There would be no America without women. Each year, the California Legislature holds an annual Women of the Year ceremony in Sacramento, where each of the states 80 assembly district members honors one woman. And locally, San Diego expands on that to recognize multiple women. We know the 78th Assembly District is home to a number of truly phenomenal women, so thats why we wanted to honor them here at home, Gloria said. In the community service category, Del Mar resident Sharp was recognized for her founding of the Never Again CA group, which advocates for gun control. If there is one word to describe Rose Ann in my book, it would be fearless, Gloria opened. This woman is fearless because she founded the local Never Again CA chapter as part of the national Never Again movement to end gun violence following the horrific shooting in Parkland, Florida. At hearing this, someone yelled from the crowd thank you! Gloria continued, Her tireless leadership and dedication has encouraged the City of Del Mar and surrounding cities to move to end gun shows at the Del Mar Fairgrounds and state-owned property. When confronted by angry and hateful opposition, she is not afraid to expose the danger of gun shows and to stand up to gun show owners, all with the sole purpose of making our community a safer place for all of us. Particularly, our children. Its Rose Anns courage and devotion to Never Again CA that inspired me to author legislation this year to prohibit the sale of fire of firearms and ammunition at the Del Mar fairgrounds. Six days after the Women of Distinction awards, Glorias office announced the Assembly Public Safety Committee would hear legislation to prohibit the sale of guns and ammunition at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. I said she is fearless because we have to take on the NRA, but we have something they dont have: The fearless Rose Ann, Gloria said. The 2019 roster of awardees also included: Linda Tu, Roz Winstead, Stephanie Benvenuto, Diane Peabody Straw, Tracie Jada OBrien, Laurie Black, Rose Ann Sharp, Jen LaBarbera, Tessa Williams, Darcy Pavich, Steph Johnson, Cristina Marquez, Marlena Balderas, Nicole Capretz and Vernita Todd. Calaveras Community Foundation Office View Photos San Andreas, CA Calaveras Community Foundation (CCF) selected nearly two dozen senior, are youth and community enrichment initiatives to receive its 2019 grant monies. CFF officials on Monday stated that 11 groups serving the countys aging senior population will split more than $66,000, courtesy of the Federlein Family Fund at the San Francisco Foundation. Among the entities are four community food pantries in Valley Springs, Copperopolis, and Angels Camp and the Common Ground Senior Services Meals-on-Wheels program. Other senior service-oriented recipients are Calaveras Humane Society, which offers seniors preventative/emergency veterinary care for their pets; Mark Twain Medical Center Foundations project offering health screenings for men; Central Calaveras Fire Protection District, which installs smoke alarms, reflective street signage and provides chimney cleaning; DRAIL, which makes home modifications, installs ramps and is a source for medical equipment. Calaveras Senior Center also received funding to repaint its building and make long-delayed repairs. Additionally, Hospice of Amador & Calaveras got a grant to provide respite care for Calaveras County caregivers. Three youth initiative project will split over $14,000. Calaveras Sings Theatre Arts Repertory (CSTAR) will purchase performance microphones with theirs, thanks to funding from the Martha and Paul Moeller Fund. Funds from the Calaveras County Employee account, Jackson Rancheria Casino Resort Fund and Calaveras Youth Fund helped to support grants to Columbia College Foundations Promise program, which allows qualified local high school graduates to attend Columbia College fulltime, tuition free, for up to 30 units the first year after high school graduation; also to reopen Rail Road Flat Ballpark and add a play structure and parking lot signage. CCFs Community Enrichment Initiative gifted six projects nearly $30,000. The Community Betterment Fund fully funded Murphys Creek Theatres project of replacing Black Bart Playhouses aging sound system. Also included in the enrichment funding awards are Gold Rush Writers, for its 14th annual Gold Rush Writers Conference; Friends of Calaveras Animal Services (FOCUS), for spay/neutering and rabies vaccinations; Calaveras County Office Of Education Youth Mentoring, for a mural at the county government center; Arnold Rim Trail Associations Signage Enhancement Project, for distance markers and You Are Here maps; and Manzanita Writers Press, for debilitated or disabled seniors who cannot attend classes to participate in its Voices of Wisdom print anthology. Since its inception in 2000, CCF has provided over $2,300,000 in competitive grants, scholarships, and assistance. To learn more about CCF, click here. Harold Humphries was a member of the Texas Defense Guard (TDG) and the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) both of which were addressed in previous articles. Humphries taught pre-glider students at Clent Breedlove's Plainview Pre-Glider School during the late spring and summer of 1942. According to Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO), the Texas 47th Legislature created the Texas Defense Guard by House Bill 45 on Feb. 10, 1941. It was to be organized by the governor whenever "any part of the Texas National Guard was in active federal service (as they were during the emergency beginning prior to Pearl Harbor and extending to 1947)." A total of 51 battalions were formed in the TDG over time with each battalion having a headquarters, along with a headquarters detachment, a service detachment, and a medical detachment and four to eight companies. Both Lubbock and Hale counties were listed in the same battalion, number 39. In addition, the legislature authorized up to 15 Air Force squadrons along with two battalions of field artillery. One unit of the Texas National Guard that was called into service by the governor of Texas was the 131st Field Artillery. Company C of the 131st had ties to Plainview and Lubbock. Because the Texas National Guard was called into service in February 1941, the Texas Defense Guard was organized to take its place for security on the home front. The Texas National Guard became federalized as the 36th U.S. Infantry Division in WWII. According to National Guard of the State of Texas official history from 1940, the 131st Field Artillery was originally organized by General Cecil Lyon in January 1916, when he "began a recruiting campaign for the organization of a battery of field artillery at San Antonio, to be designated Battery B, First Texas Field Artillery." Captain Ralph Fairchild was the original recruiting officer. Lieutenants Burney, McIlheny, Rannay and Beauregard assisted Fairchild in his duties until he resigned to join Texas troops located on the Mexican Border. By June 1, 1916, the unit had more than 90 men and became a part of the Texas National Guard with Captain Claude V. Birkhead commanding. A year later with the U.S. now at war with Germany and the threat of Pancho Villa and his paramilitary Mexican raiders taking a back seat, Captain Birkhead received orders to travel to Houston to assist in the organization of division of Texas state troops. Battery B became the core of the Second Texas Field Artillery and Birkhead was authorized to create several companies. Birkhead eventually was promoted to colonel and took command of the unit on Aug. 4, 1917. On Oct. 15, 1917, the artillery regiment was designated 131st Field Artillery, 61st Brigade, 36th Division, with Brigadier General George Blakely in overall command. The 131st Field Artillery Regiment trained at Camp Bowie in Texas before heading for Camp Mills, New York where it received equipment. On July 29, 1918, it sailed for Brest, France arriving on Aug. 12. In France, it went through more training and eventually was inspected by General John F. Stephens, 61st Brigade Commander, on Nov. 3, just before the Great War's end with the Armistice on Nov. 11. The regiment returned to the U.S. on March 13, 1919, landing at Newport News, Virginia and by April 2, 1919, the 131st Field Artillery no longer existed. However, it was not long before the regiment was active again. In 1922, several units of the 36th Infantry Division including the 131st Field Artillery was organized again with Colonel John B. Golding in command. Training during the interwar period included trips to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Camp Stanley, Leon Springs Military Reservation; and, since 1926, annual field training at Camp Hulen, near Palacios, Texas. In 1938, however, training took place with Third Army maneuvers at Camp Bullis, Texas. Battery A of the 131st Field Artillery was organized at Plainview. It was recognized at the Federal level on April 7, 1922. Col. Golding died in 1925 and Col. Charles A. Davis commanded the unit until the age of 64 in 1935, when Col. Harold J. Weiler took over. When the regiment was re-organized after WWI, the headquarters were located at Amarillo and remained there until 1925 when it was moved to Corsicana. In 1931, Col. Davis moved to Lubbock and the headquarters followed him to that station. When Col. Davis retired, the headquarters of the regiment moved to Corpus Christi until 1939, when it was moved again to Austin. A photograph of several of the men in Battery A, 131st Field Artillery, Plainview gives a real indication of the drain of young men from the Plainview population for military service at the Federal level; thus, precipitating the need for other men many times much older men to serve in the Texas Defense Guard to help maintain order on the home front during WWII. Altogether, 84 men were listed in Battery A from Plainview. Captain Robert W. McDaniel commanded with First Lieutenant Rexie R. Wishard assisting him along with Second Lieutenants Richard Cross and Lowell Sitton. George A. McWilliams was First Sergeant. Plans are underway now to have a site marker from the Texas Historical Commission in Austin placed along highway 788 north of Plainview to mark Finney Field and commemorate Clent Breedlove's Plainview Pre-Glider School. The HCHC needs to raise about $2,000 for a large-size marker from the THC in Austin. If the marker application is approved, the HCHC looks to implant the Finney Field marker around June 2020. If you would like to contribute to the funds for this marker, please mail your check to Kim Horne at 401 Mesa Circle, Plainview, Texas, 79072. Please make your check payable to the Hale County Historical Commission. Your donation is tax deductible. Bob Brinkman of the Texas Historical Commission in Austin assisted significantly with the research performed in the recent articles about the Texas Defense Guard. This is the 69th article about Clent Breedlove's Plainview Pre-Glider School at Finney Field. Readers are asked to visit www.silentwingsmuseum.com for more details about the glider program of WWII. Anyone with information about the Plainview Pre-Glider School at Finney Field should contact John McCullough at (806)793-4448 or email john.w.mccullough@live.com. Plainview Area United Way is trying to figure out ways to make up for the loss of what used to be its biggest contributor. During a board of directors meeting Friday morning, Treasurer David Wilder mentioned the budget is feeling some strain after the loss of donations from Reagor-Dykes and Bart Reagor, himself. The former car dealer at one point donated $10,000 out of his own pocket, Wilder said. The organization was fortunate have received most of that pledge, he added. Now with fewer large donors like Reagor, the organization is getting by and scraping money together for its recipients, but only just, Wilder said. Prior to that report, Ron Hanby, CPA, presented a clean audit report, which also mentioned the financial strains. But new Board President Brandon Ahrens said it's even more of a reason for United Way volunteers to work harder to get donations this year. The Board met at IHOP for breakfast and about an hour-long meeting. After talks of the budget, outgoing President Ken Coughlin presented the new board members and expressed his thanks to those who helped him through his year as president of the Plainview Area United Way. New officers include: President Brandon Ahrens, Second Vice President Teresa Young, Secretary Janis Roberson, Treasurer David Wilder who has served Plainview Area United Way for 45 years, Rachel Foster, Regan Manning and Laura Villarreal. Foster and Villarreal did not attend the meeting. The board has three open positions, though public relations chair, budget chair and president-elect, which acts as campaign chair. Before adjourning the meeting, Ahrens encouraged board members to volunteer to fill those positions and/or to direct individuals around the community who might be interested to volunteer for them. Ellysa Harris/Plainview Herald The Plainview Planning and Zoning Commission approved changes to a zoning ordinance that will consolidate and reduce the number of zoning districts around town. The next step for the changes to go into effect is to get them approved by City Council. A Dallas County man scheduled to die this month for a 1989 triple killing is now lobbing a last-minute appeal arguing that his trial lawyer relied on "racist ideology" to purposely boot black would-be jurors from the panel. Mark Robertson, who was convicted of slaughtering a friend and his 81-year-old grandmother after a night of drugs and fishing, is slated to die on April 11. But on Tuesday, his legal team filed a motion arguing that then-attorney Michael Byck "engaged in purposeful discrimination" against potential black jurors based on the belief that they would be less sympathetic to a white defendant. "In the end, Mr. Byck succeeded in his discriminatory plan - Mr. Robertson was tried by an all-white jury," defense attorney Lydia Brandt wrote in her motion this week. "At best, the State turned a blind eye towards Mr. Byck's discrimination; at worst, they were a willing co-conspirator." DEATH ROW REACTION: Texas inmate's son arrested after outburst during father's execution Before trial, Byck told prosecutors he "didn't want to have any blacks on the jury" unless they agreed to a life sentence and later claimed that they'd both agreed to "indulge each other" in their "prejudices." The former Dallas attorney, who died last month according to defense counsel, "brazenly recounted" his racially slanted juror selection strategy during a 1997 hearing as part of the appeals process. In court that year, Byck said that in an effort to save his client he would be "more than happy to violate anybody else's rights," according to transcripts of the hearing. Citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision that prohibits using race as the sole reason to remove a juror, Robertson's current legal team denounced the former attorney's handling of jury selection and asked for stay. "Mr. Robertson's trial attorney testified under oath that it was his 'conscious desire' to keep African Americans off the jury," attorney Jeremy Schepers told the Houston Chronicle. "And, through a variety of methods he succeeded in doing just that. By now there should be no confusion on this matter racial discrimination in the administration of justice is intolerable. The courts should not hesitate to denounce this unacceptable behavior." The appeal also raises concerns that a retired judge improperly considered - then denied - an earlier appeal, and that the state appeals court didn't get all of the earlier transcripts and exhibits to review. The Dallas County District Attorney's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The crime that started it all took place in August of 1989, when Robertson went to his friend's house to do some crank and smoke some weed. Afterward, the then-21-year-old and his friend, Sean Hill, went fishing in the creek out back. They caught seven catfish, and then Robertson pulled out a gun and shot Hill in the head. "After I shot him, Sean fell in the water," Robertson wrote later in a confession. "I then ran in the house through Sean's bedroom and into the bathroom where I splashed some water over my face. I then walked into the den where (Edna Brau), Sean's grandmother, was watching TV and I shot her once." There, he swiped her purse and Hill's drugs before driving off in the grandmother's Cadillac. The next day, he watched the evening news report about investigators finding the bodies, so he ran off to Las Vegas. When police caught him later that month, he confessed in gruesome detail. ART FOR ADVOCACY: "Open Letters" project tells stories of death row inmates During his 1991 trial, the jury also heard about how he murdered a 19-year-old 7-Eleven clerk over $55 a week before the killing that landed him on death row. He was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of Brau, and netted two life sentences for the killings of Hill and store clerk Jeffrey Saunders. Early in the appeals process, his attorneys argued that he'd had an abusive childhood and suffered untreated mental illness, so he didn't deserve a death sentence. But the jury never heard about that, in part because his trial team allegedly failed to investigate their client's history. "Mark spiraled out of control in the weeks immediately preceding, and culminated in, the murders of Saunders, Brau and Hill," his lawyers wrote in a 2014 appeal. "Had the jury known the real Mark Robertson, they would not have sentenced him to death." In 2003, his then-attorney won him a last-minute stay based on claims of false testimony as to his future dangerousness behind bars. He later won the chance at a new punishment, based on bad jury instructions - but the retrial still ended in a death sentence. A Dallas County judge last year signed off on this month's execution date. Robertson still has a clemency application in front of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and a pending appeal in the federal courts. If his execution goes through as scheduled, he will be the third man put to death this year in Huntsville. Four more dates are on the calendar, including one for Houston-area killer Dexter Johnson. 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 president and CEO of KMCO, a specialty chemical company, apologized Tuesday afternoon after one of its facilities caught fire in Crosby. At least one person was confirmed dead with two others injured in the fire, which also resulted in shelter-in-place orders for residents within a 1-mile radius of the plant at 16503 Ramsey Road. A man convicted last week of raping a 7-year-old girl whose mother found video evidence of the assault will have to serve 140 years in prison before he is eligible for parole, according to the Bexar County District Attorneys Office. Jose Trinidad Gonzalez, 36, received eight life sentences Friday after a jury in the 226th District Court found him guilty on all 11 charges he faced, a DAs news release said. Gonzalez was convicted on two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, two counts of indecency with a child by contact, three counts of sexual performance of a child, three counts of possession of child pornography and one count of violation of sex offender registration, the release said. A man was arrested Monday evening moments after he was alleged to have fatally shot his wife on the Southeast Side. Brian Ramos, 38, was charged with murder in the death of Josephine Ramos, 36, police said. Organizers of the first-ever Movin On Main in Schertz last year feared a cold front that brought rain, high winds and cold temperatures in the days leading up to the event. But then the sun broke through at mid-morning and the crowds turned out for the inaugural fitness event, set along Main Street where portions of the roadway are cordoned off to traffic to serve as a walking, jogging, pedaling and exercise center for a few hours. The biggest surprise was definitely the turnout, said Schertz Public Affairs Director Linda Klepper. We were really pleased to see so much interest from our community. Klepper and the citys parks department are eager to see the turnout and participation during the second annual Movin On Main, set for noon to 4 p.m. Sunday over a five-block stretch of Main Street. The event was designed to help people get active outdoors and build the community to be a healthy and livable environment. Klepper and city organizers want to build on the success of last years inaugural event. Dozens of vendors, from fitness and workout clubs to gyms and wellness facilities, will line both sides of the street from Schertz Parkway to Curtiss Street and offer advice, handouts and freebies for the fitness-and-exercise-oriented day. The focus of the event is getting everybody out and active in their community. We do focus on vendors that have some sort of tie-in to health and well-being, Klepper said. Four stages will be set up along the path, with a Senior Zone in the Schertz Bank and Trust parking lot and a Kids Zone across the street, at the intersection of Main and First streets. The Schertz YMCA will use one stage for demonstrations of classes it offers. The community stage will give other organizations the opportunity to showcase their fitness and dance classes through performance and public participation. There will be live music, food will be available, and we want people out there walking and biking, Klepper said. Bring your family, bring your kids, bring your dogs. Schertz Animal Services will be out there with their adoptable animal trailer doing adoptions. An addition to this year event is the Little Wheels Parade, with prizes for Family Entry, Individual Entry, and Loudest Entry. Its designed to get people thinking creatively, decorating their bicycles, scooters and pull wagons, she said. Little Wheels Parade participants must register by Friday by calling the Schertz Parks Department at 210-619-1635 before it closes. Participants will assemble at 1:30 p.m. at 611 Main St. prior to the start of the 2:30 p.m. parade down the Movin On Main route. City staffers will join members of the parks department, volunteers from the Schertz YMCA and the community in walking up and down the Main Street path, answering questions and participating in various events. Anyone wishing to volunteer can contact the Parks Department at at 210-619-1635. jflinn@express-news.net The woman accused of fatally running over the owner of a San Antonio bicycle shop early Monday has been identified. Linda Collier Mason, 67, faces charges of intoxication assault and driving while intoxicated, according to online jail records. Officials said Tuesday afternoon they expect the charges to be upgraded to intoxication manslaughter. According to police, Mason fatally struck Tito Harry Bradshaw, 35, at about 12:30 a.m. as he rode his bike in the 1900 block of East Houston. RELATED: Popular San Antonio bike shop owner dies after critical injury in crash Bradshaw was riding a bike equipped with a flashing rear light when Mason allegedly struck him. The driver told police she saw the light but could not avoid running him over, authorities said. After police conducted a field sobriety test on her, she was arrested and jailed. Paramedics took Bradshaw, the owner of Bottom Bracket Bicycle Shop, to San Antonio Military Medical Center with a severe head injury. He was later pronounced dead, according to the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office. "Rest In Peace, Tito. Your body may be gone but your spirit will remain in our community forever," tweeted Mayor Ron Nirenberg. "Our work will be in your memory." FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox A memorial bike ride was organized Monday night at the Hays Street Bridge. A GoFundMe page was created for his medical expenses and surviving family members. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | cdowns@mysa.com | @calebjdowns A man and woman were arrested Friday after they took two people from Austin to San Antonio in an attempt to force them into prostitution, police said. Kenneth Noel, 28, and Ciria Chavez, 17, face charges of aggravated promotion of prostitution. They were booked into the Bexar County Jail and their bail set at $75,000. A former Bexar County jailer who was accused of collecting drug debts for an inmate she allegedly fell in love with was arrested for a second time Tuesday in connection with the same incident, according to the sheriff's office. Rita Alvarez, 33, was arrested by the sheriff's office's fugitive apprehension unit Tuesday on suspicion of engaging in organized criminal activity. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Alvarez was first arrested on Aug. 2, 2017, after sheriff's deputies became aware of her alleged behavior at the jail, but those charges were dismissed in November 2018. "There was a problem with the previous indictment for Rita Alvarez, so the case was dismissed in 2018," according to Christian Henricksen, the chief of litigation in the Bexar County District Attorney's Office. "Earlier this year, the case was reviewed. It was presented to a grand jury today and Alvarez was indicted on a charge of engaging in organized criminal activity." Sheriff Javier Salazar said he and District Attorney Joe Gonzales are committed to holding public servants accountable if they've done something illegal. "District Attorney Joe Gonzales and I are in constant contact regarding anticipated cases that pertain to public servants," Salazar said. "Both he and I share the same stance of holding everyone accountable, especially public servants who have made the decision to break the law." Alvarez was given a dishonorable discharge and resigned from the sheriff's office after her initial arrest. She was taken into custody after a months-long investigation into a suspected drug dealing operation allegedly led by Cristobal "Buddha" Perez, who was arrested after authorities said they found more than 400 grams of block tar heroin and 200 grams of cocaine and hashish at a stash house in the 100 block of Monclova Alley. READ MORE: Court records reveal new details about alleged drug ring conspiracy involving Bexar County deputy Officials said Alvarez and Perez spoke on a regular basis while she was a jailer, and she allegedly even professed her love to him. On July 1, 2017, Alvarez collected a $1,000 drug debt owed to Perez, deputies said. Investigators believe she used half of the money to buy fireworks for her children and the other half was placed in Perez's commissary account. Alvarez posted her $20,000 bail and was released from jail Tuesday afternoon, jail records showed. Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | fsabawi@mysa.com|@FaresInSA A bicyclist struck and critically injured early Monday by a suspected drunken driver has died, according to the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office. Tito Harry Bradshaw, 35, was riding a bicycle around 12:30 a.m. in the 1900 block of East Houston Street when a Toyota Corolla struck him from behind, San Antonio police said. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox The driver, a 67-year-old woman, told police that she saw the bicyclist and his flashing light but could not avoid striking him. The woman was arrested on suspicion of intoxication assault, police said. She was not identified as of Monday afternoon. Paramedics took Bradshaw to San Antonio Military Medical Center in critical condition with a serious head injury, police said. Bradshaw died later on Monday, according to the medical examiner's office. RELATED: Ex-megachurch employee accused of inappropriate behavior arrested Bradshaw owned the popular Bottom Bracket Bicycle Shop and was well-known around San Antonio. By Monday afternoon news of the crash had spread and social media was full of well-wishes and prayers. Mayor Ron Nirenberg tweeted before midnight: "Rest In Peace, Tito. Your body may be gone but your spirit will remain in our community forever. Our work will be in your memory." A ride and vigil also was organized Monday night in Bradshaws honor. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | cdowns@mysa.com | @calebjdowns Andre McDonald, the San Antonio Air Force officer charged with tampering in his wife's disappearance last month, has posted bond and is expected to be released from the Bexar County Jail soon. McDonald, 40, was initially booked into the jail March 3 on a third-degree felony charge of tampering with evidence. A judge set his bail at $2 million, but it was later lowered to $300,000. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox He was still in jail at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday. McDonald's wife, Andreen McDonald, was last seen alive Feb. 28. She was reported missing the following day, and law enforcement authorities now believe she is dead. According to the sheriff's office, the couple was last seen arguing in their home in the 1000 block of Solitude Cove. As part of his restrictions upon release, a judge prohibited McDonald from visiting his home on Solitude Cove or contacting his 6-year-old daughter, whom he had raised with his wife. He will also wear a GPS monitoring device and remain under house arrest. According to court records, investigators discovered blood and hair in McDonald's bathroom after Andreen McDonald's disappearance. They also found a fresh burn pit in the back yard, as well as a shovel, heavy duty trash bags, an ax and gasoline canisters. EXPRESSNEWS.COM: San Antonio Air Force officer charged with tampering in wife's disappearance gets lower bond He was arrested on the tampering charge after the investigators discovered two receipts for the items that McDonald had tried to destroy. Following his wife's disappearance, large search parties scoured areas around the McDonald home and Joint Base San Antonio-Camp Bullis, where McDonald was said to have traveled sometime after his wife went missing. The searches resulted in no new evidence. Crime Stoppers is offering up to $5,000 for information on Andreen McDonald's disappearance. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | cdowns@mysa.com | @calebjdowns Andre McDonald, the husband of Andreen McDonald, who disappeared more than a month ago, was released from the Bexar County Jail Tuesday. Andre McDonald, 40, is charged with tampering with evidence, a third-degree felony. He was booked into jail March 3 and a judge initially set his bail at $2 million. Last week that was lowered it to $300,000. In lowering the bond, State District Judge Frank Castro ordered McDonald to wear an electronic monitoring device and put him under full house arrest. He also prohibited McDonald from visiting the home he shared with his wife on Solitude Cove or contacting their 6-year-old daughter. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Andre McDonald walked out of the jail at about 12:45 p.m. Tuesday. Surrounded by a scrum of cameras and glancing down at a book in his hands, he walked over to a waiting pre-trial services van and was driven away. Andreen McDonald, 29, a local businesswoman, was last seen alive Feb. 28. Law enforcement officials have said they believe she is dead. According to court records, investigators discovered blood and hair in McDonald's bathroom after Andreen McDonald's disappearance. They also found a fresh burn pit in the back yard, as well as a shovel, heavy duty trash bags, an ax and gasoline canisters. ON EXPRESS-NEWS.COM: Employee: Missing San Antonio woman and her husband had a history of fighting He was arrested on the tampering charge after the investigators said they discovered two receipts for the items that McDonald had tried to destroy. Weeks of searching, including on Joint Base San Antonio-Camp Bullis, where authorities believe Andre McDonald went after his wife's disappearance, have yielded no answers. A reward of up to $5,000 is being offered for information that leads to the arrest of the suspect responsible for McDonalds disappearance. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com San Antonio police are searching for the gunman who shot another man in the stomach Monday at a bar on the near North Side and then fled on a motorcycle. The shooter opened fire on the victim at about 9:45 p.m. at the Speedway Bar in the 8800 block of Grissom Road. He then fled on a motorcycle. Wanna know the reason Republicans have had so much trouble coming up with a replacement plan for Obamacare? Because if Republicans actually tried to devise a health care system that fulfilled both conservative principles and their public promises, theyd probably propose something that looks too much like Obamacare. For reasons few can fathom, President Donald Trump has revived the GOPs disastrous, nearly decadelong effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act. In a legal brief filed last month, his administration told a federal court that it believes the entirety of the 2010 law should be declared unconstitutional not just the now-neutralized individual mandate but also all the popular stuff, too, including protections for those with preexisting conditions, letting young adults stay on their parents insurance until age 26, individual-market subsidies, Medicaid expansion and so on. Trumps own health and human services secretary and attorney general reportedly opposed the move, as did Republican congressional leaders. They must recognize that past Republican threats to health care coverage helped power Democrats wave election in 2018. And they likely foresaw that attacking the ACA would unify the left which had become divided over single-payer even as it divided the right on what the heck to replace the repealed law with. Nonetheless, Trump boldly proclaimed the GOP the party of health care and subsequently instructed Republican lawmakers to come up with a plan that is far better than Obamacare. In fairness, its a near-impossible task, assuming this requires (a) adhering to Republican principles; (b) fulfilling Trumps promises to protect those with preexisting conditions and guarantee everybody gets covered; and (c) not producing a near-facsimile of Obamacare. Despite the constant accusations of socialism, after all, the basic framework of the ACA uses market-based mechanisms to expand coverage and keep cost growth down. It preserves the private insurance industry, which is still the largest provider of insurance, and relies on private hospitals and providers. One of the legs of Obamacares three-legged stool the individual mandate for people to carry health insurance was also featured in a health reform proposal once promoted by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Trump and his co-partisans have now explicitly committed to protecting another of those legs preventing insurers from denying coverage or raising premiums for those with preexisting conditions at least in rhetoric, though not in practice. To be sure, there are parts of the law that Republican officials are less keen on, including subsidies to make insurance more affordable (that third leg) and the Medicaid expansion. But these are now quite popular, too, even among Republican voters, according to polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation. So good luck killing them. The ACA is by no means a perfect law. It did a lot to expand insurance coverage but not enough to reduce costs. As written, it was too vulnerable to sabotage from those with political motive to do so. Republicans could have spent the past decade working with Democrats to make the law stronger; instead, they worked to destabilize markets by abruptly changing the rules on insurers and cutting funding for implementation of the law. Besides subtracting elements of the ACA, Republican officials have also made some additions to the U.S. health care system that have not exactly proved successful. In fact, Trumps administrative efforts to add work requirements to Medicaid were blocked by a federal judge last week specifically because, the judge determined, the programs in question (in Kentucky and Arkansas) did not advance Medicaids basic purpose of providing health coverage. The Big Government bureaucracy necessary to correctly ferret out the tiny population of supposedly undeserving Medicaid beneficiaries targeted by such programs is also arguably not terribly conservative; if promoting work was the objective, there are much more effective ways to do so than ripping away access to health care, which often enables people to work. Republicans have demagogued themselves into a corner, and they know it. The late Republican senator John McCain arguably saved the party from itself by killing the last legislative attempt at repeal and replace; now that Trump has foolishly revived this losing battle, Republicans will be forced to return to shouting Free markets! into the wind, as though that will somehow produce a real policy. crampell@washpost.com The South San Antonio Independent School District boards decision to go against the recommendation of its superintendent by moving forward with the reopening of three shuttered schools and rejecting an $10 million offer from the city for a community center does not bode well for the taxpayers in this beleaguered district. The votes by board members Homer Flores, Shirley Ibarra Pena, Connie Prado and Gilbert Rodriguez to proceed with the school projects will cost taxpayers in this cash-strapped district millions of dollars they can ill afford. The boards position on the community center is baffling. Shunning an offer to explore the investment of future municipal bond funds in their community makes no sense. Such offers dont come around often. Regrettably, these most recent board actions will also likely set in motion a revolving door at the administration building. Going against the advice of the superintendent on such an important decision sends an alarming message to the administration. Superintendent Alexandro Flores has six months on the job and has not been allowed to lead. A new board majority elected in November came armed with a political agenda they are determined to pursue at all costs. South San ISD is in the hands of a runaway school board intent on fulfilling a campaign promise to reopen closed campuses despite the lack of any evidence this would be in the best interest of the district or its students. Pleas from dozens of students and community members asking the board to reconsider and instead allocate the funds to other pressing needs did not sway the board. The three campuses were closed due to declining enrollment and budget woes. The district continues to lose students and does not have money to adequately fund three additional schools next fall. The board majority behind the reopening of the schools is of the mindset that if the campuses come back online, they will draw students who have left the districts schools and enrolled in charter schools. Pushing forward with an expedited plan to reopen three campuses by next fall offers a short timeline for such a massive plan and only sets up the administration for failure. More troubling is that much of the discussion on the reopening of the campuses has occurred at budget committee meetings chaired by Rodriguez, who had the camera for livestreaming the proceedings removed. It would not hurt the district to accept City Councilman Rey Saldanas offer to study the repurposing of the closed Kazen Middle School campus into a multigenerational center that would be built with future bond money. The councilman was not asking for a firm commitment, just an opportunity to do some preliminary groundwork that would allow the funding to be included in the citys next bond election. The winners in all these shenanigans are the other South Side communities that would benefit from the bond funds the city was hoping to funnel into the South San area. Both the Palo Alto community college and Texas A&M-San Antonio communities have expressed interest in partnering with the city. This type of project between the city and a school district is not new. The city has a partnership with Southwest ISD for the construction of a $21.2 million natatorium off Loop 410 and Pearsall Road. Its a shame the South San board wont even explore the possibilities. Governance has always been a big problem in South San. Dysfunctional boards in the past have caused a high turnover in the superintendents office and prompted intervention by the Texas Education Agency. Its disheartening to watch the South San board moving back in time on multiple levels. TEA needs to step in before this board bankrupts the district. THE Speaker of the National Assembly Advocate Jacob Mudenda has defended the proposed appointment of Justice Loice Matanda-Moyo as chairperson of the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission saying the High Court Judge was competent and qualified for the job. Advocate Mudenda, who is also the chairperson of Parliaments Committee on Standing Rules and Orders (CSRO), said this in a statement yesterday while responding to a story in a weekly newspaper last week casting aspersions on the committees decision to propose Justice Matanda-Moyo for the post. The publication of the story by the Zimbabwe Independent is again a brazen attempt at agenda setting by the media and some unprofessional members of the CSRO with the intention of manipulating public opinion against the proposed appointment of Justice Matanda-Moyo in the vain hope of influencing the decision of the CSRO, Advocate Mudenda said. This is apparent in the one-sided slant of the story which chooses to focus on Justice Matanda-Moyos marital status while conveniently ignoring that she is eminently qualified for the post a fact which the CSRO unanimously agreed on. It is hardly surprising therefore, that no reference is made to her rich resume, undoubted professional competence and impeccable character. Justice Matanda-Moyo is wife to 2017 coup announcer and Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Minister Rtd Lt-General Sibusiso Moyo. Adv Mudenda also denied that the CSRO was directed to approve the appointment. The CSRO would also like to dismiss the insinuation that the committee was under instructions to approve the appointment of Justice Matanda-Moyo with the contempt it deserves. One of the founding values and principles on which our nation and our constitution are based is the observance of the principle of separation of powers. Parliament and by extension the CSRO is this empowered by the Constitution to make its own decisions independent of the Executive or any other arm of the State, Advocate Mudenda added. He also said the CSRO would continue doing its work as dictated by the law. The CSRO remains stoic in its resolve to ensure a credible appointment process grounded in the requirement of the supreme law of the land and national interest, Advocate Mudenda added. The reconstituting of ZACC follows the resignation of the old commission that was led by Dr Job Whabira in January and which President Mnangagwa once described as rotten to the core. The other commissioners were Dr Nanette Silukhuni, Mr Goodson Nguni, Mrs Christine Fundira, Mr Denford Chirindo, Ms Cathy Muchechetere, Ms Farai Mashonganyika and Mr Boyana Ndou. It had been in office since February 2016. Chronicle Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News A strip tease dancer has been arrested after she allegedly raped a mentally unstable man in Chinhoyi. The dancer who has been identified only as Evernice works for Harare based Nice & Exotic dance group. According to local publication, H-Metro, Evernice was apparently attracted to the mans huge organ which he had been exposing while she was on stage. A source who was at the club told the publication, It was on Friday last week at around 5 pm when the man was making some funny moves. He was exposing his privates and he has a big private organ which Evernice got attracted to and she then got interested to get close to the victim. She wanted to see kuti munhu wacho anogona kuchishandisa here chinhu chake. She then took him to a room where she slept with him. After she finished having s_x with him, mukomana wacho akabva atanga kunyara nyaraShe was advised to run away since she had committed an offence by sleeping with a person who is mentally challenged but she refused to run away saying that he was the one who had slept with her. Dancers Association of Zimbabwe (DAZ) Harpers Mapimhidze confirmed the matter to H-Metro and condemned the dancers behaviour. Said Mapimhidze, We condemn such behaviour by a dancer and we dont expect this in the future. She took advantage of the mans condition to quench her appetite. Mashonaland West Police Spokesperson Inspector Clemence Mabgweazara confirmed the arrest but said that he was unable to confirm the exact details when he was called. HMetro Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News FIREBRAND independent legislator for Norton, Temba Mliswa has demanded the immediate resignation and further prosecution of Vice President Kembo Mohadi who reportedly stormed the home of his estranged wife weekend and threatened to shoot her. Mohadi doubles as Minister in charge of national peace and reconciliation in the country. The VP and Tambudzani Mohadi have been involved in a protracted wrangle over property after they parted ways few years ago. Things came to a head weekend when Mohadi, accompanied by 25 police officers and aides, reportedly stormed his ex-wifes home and seized cars. Mohadi is said to have used an axe to break doors and went on to poke his former wife with a steel bar. The VP was not arrested despite committing the alleged abuse in front of police officers. However, in an interview with NewZimbabwe Monday, Mliswa demanded the arrest of the VP for domestic violence. The President must issue a statement on that. The law must take its course because no one is above the law in this country. We do not expect anyone to put a report on this because the evidence speaks for itself. The laws are clear, he said. The VP must appear before the courts or we will call for private prosecution as what happened to (former Zanu PF MP) Munyaradzi Kereke. Mohadi deserves to be in Chikurubi (Maximum prison). No wonder why Robert Mugabe never wanted that man to be a vice president. He is a murderer and must ship out. Mliswa added, His behaviour is criminal, deplorable to say the least; it is barbaric, unheard of. Abusing a woman, abusing a mother in that regard in front of the children too. You will hasten to think where is the wisdom in appointing a person like him into that portfolio? It is not the first time he has done this but, several times. His records show that he has always abused his office from Minister of Home Affairs and influencing ZIMRA officials and also committed a lot of crimes ranging from rape, smuggling and changing the entire police unit at Beitbridge Border Post. Mliswa questioned polices commitment to upholding the rule of law in the country after faiing to arrest the VP. He said Police Commissioner General Godwin Matanga should issue a statement on the polices apparent in action in the wake of the violence. The Police Commissioner General must respond to why so many police officers were deployed to go and intimidate and take action against a woman in that regard. VP Mohadi has disregarded the courts of this country. There is a court order which gave the wife a right to have those properties. He has been known to grab what does not belong to him, threatening whites outside the land reform programme; he has judgments against him for taking what was not his. VP Mohadi is always short of what is expected of him in this country yet he is the leader who is supposed to be a role model. We are lobbying for the sanctions to be removed and he is certainly dancing to the tune of the Americans in saying there is no rule of law in Zimbabwe he said. NewZimbabwe Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News Which one is the Norway model? pic.twitter.com/hvogBzBq6E Tom Peck (@tompeck) April 1, 2019 Quite honestly, Im not sure anything of lasting importance happened in Brexit-land yesterday, save the UK used up one of its very scarce days before the EU Council meeting on April 10 demonstrating the UKs confusion and disarray. So I am offering a few observations and treating today as an open thread. Theresa May has planned five hours of Cabinet meetings so expect leaks and declarations! In the meantime, as you have almost certainly heard by now, Parliament again voted down all four of the motions that Speaker John Bercow allowed to be considered. The one that came closet to being approved was Ken Clarkes customs union handwave, which lost by only 3 votes. Oh, and Tory whip Nick Boles resigned the party due to its second refusal to support his soft Brexit plan. Thats because a no deal faction is at war with the EU friendly types. The Telegraph claims today that 14 of Mays ministers favor a crash out. Not that Labour is doing much better on the party discipline front. Labour whipped in favor of Common Market 2.0 (Boles plan) but only 185 members backed it and 25 even voted against it. The big reason for the split was that backing that plan meant repudiating Labours promise to halt the free movement of EU citizens. Its hard to see how EU leaders can watch what is happening in the UK and not conclude that the UK is a tar baby. That would seem to strengthen the case for not giving the UK a long extension, since the UK looks to be incapable of understanding what its options are, let alone choosing among them. How is another year of faffig about going to change anything? Some examples: How does a super hard Brexit become a soft Brexit? The motion that may finally pass Wednesday is the customs union scheme. Thats being pitched to MPs as a soft Brexit even though its just about as hard as a crash-out. The fudge is that the customs union will be a component along with other things that will get to a soft Brexit. Why should EU pols have any confidence that Parliament can accept what those yet to be named pieces will be? They already rejected Theresa Mays deal, and for many, it was because it was too soft, as in still tied the UK too much to the EU. Why should the EU have any confidence that the UK is prepared to live with a non-unicorn Brexit? How can the EU negotiate a deal with a party that wont live up to even short term plain English agreements? Remember, Theresa May is still trying to get her Withdrawal Agreement passed even though the EU Council made clear the last day for that was March 29. Richard Smith sent along a short legal analysis by Prieskel & Co. on the messiness of re-setting the exit date if the UK needed to do that as of April 11 or 12. But its set-up was a reminder that Theresa May is poking a stick in the eye of the EU by trying again to get her Withdrawal Agreement passed..and the press doesnt even take notice. The exchange below also illustrates the lack of professionalism of the UK side, yet another obstacle to coming to an agreement: As it happens the United Kingdom decided to seek an extension of the Article 50 period. This request was made to the European Council on 20 March 2019 and the full letter is here. You will see the letter is wordy and rhetorical, and it gets to its point only at the end: I am therefore writing to inform the European Council that the UK is seeking an extension to the Article 50 period under Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union, including as applied by Article 106a of the Euratom Treaty, until 30 June 2019. This, of course, was the only sentence that mattered, the rest was waffle. The European Council, in turn, regarded this letter as little more than an invitation to treat. On 22 March 2019 the European Council made a reasoned and unanimous decision (here), which offered the UK two possible extensions: In the event that the Withdrawal Agreement is approved by the House of Commons by 29 March 2019 at the latest, the period provided for in Article 50(3) TEU is extended until 22 May 2019. In the event that the Withdrawal Agreement is not approved by the House of Commons by 29 March 2019 at the latest, the period provided for in Article 50(3) TEU is extended until 12 April 2019. In that event, the United Kingdom will indicate a way forward before 12 April 2019, for consideration by the European Council. The United Kingdom accepted this offer the same day, in a letter far less wordy and political than before (here): I refer to the draft European Council Decision taken in agreement with the United Kingdom extending the period under Article 50(3) TEU, as attached to this letter. I am writing to confirm the agreement of the Government of the United Kingdom to the extension of the period under Article 50(3) and to this decision. Offer and acceptance; the extension took legal effect. The point here is that the Government has demonstrated yet again that it isnt agreement capable. Recall that it repudiated the backstop that it had committed to in the Joint Agreement of December 2017, and reversed itself only after the EU applied a lot of fudge (for which it has not been given credit). And as dreadful as May has been to deal with, its not clear there is anyone better in the offingcharitably assuming she leaves before the next general election, which is now set for 2022. Remember, she has committed to depart only if her Withdrawal Act is approved, as well as to not lead the party in the next GE. So I would not assume May is leaving any time soon. What will the EU make of the Governments relationship to Parliament? The Parliament has made it apparent it wants to have a lot of say over Brexit, even though, as reader David and others point out, treaties are clearly the purview of the Government. May could go to the EU Council next week and largely ignore Parliaments wishes. But even worse, not only is the EU faced with the drill of having the Withdrawal Agreement ratified by EU27 member states plus the UK, the UK is now proposing to make that harder by requiring a confirmatory referendum on top of that. This would create an additional layer of Brexit uncertainty and delay if the UK were to insist on it as part of an extension process (which is why the EU, if it does grant an extension, will proceed as planned and let the UK worry about if and how a public vote figures in). The bottom line is if the UK asks for an extension next week, which seems probable, the EU will determine what if any relief it will give. And the UKs conduct keeps reminding the EU as to why it might not be so smart to be generous. These tough-looking monkeys eke out a living at 11,000 feet National Geographic City watchdog ordered to probe London Capital & Finance collapse FT How to Deal with Chaos in Climate and Politics Scientific American Report on devastating Canadian climate change a far bigger issue than Jody Wilson-Raybould: Neil Macdonald CBC Flooded Farmland: Should You Adjust the Lease? Farm Journal In Florida, Doctors See Climate Change Hurting Their Most Vulnerable Patients NPR FAA says additional work needed for Boeing software fix FT Suspicions of Bribery Cast Shadow Over Airbus Der Spiegel Brexit Things getting off to a weird start today. Tory Brexiter Richard Drax makes a personal statement to the Commons: "I should not have voted with the govt on Friday afternoon". Ian Dunt live tweets the House of Commons debate (RS): Alright were off. Another day of spirit-sapping emotional disintegration awaits. Thread: Venezuela Trump has a Russia problem in Venezuela WaPo Syraqistan India India is about to hold the biggest election in history. Here are the numbers Los Angeles Times EC Has Asked Modi Govt for Power to Act Against Voter Bribery 4 Times and Been Rejected The Wire Nine months after floods devastated Kerala, paddy farmers in Kuttanad reap bumper harvest The Scroll (J-LS). Not even one in 10 Indian techies wants to join a startup, survey shows The Scroll Yves here. After the great job American financiers did in almost destroying the financial system and nearly taking down the global economy with it, one has to wonder why making the world safe for Big Finance is such a priority. One of the reasons I am skeptical is I had a ringside seat upon what happened in Japan when the US forced Japan to embrace extremely rapid bank deregulation in the 1980s. Similarly, the World Banks International Finance Corporation has been working since the 1980s (if not earlier) to promote the creation of capital markets in emerging economies. Yet the last thing developing economies need is highly liquid markets. They need sticky investments, like foreign direct investment. Hot money inflows and outflows are destabilizing. And on a higher level, the model of mobile capital that the World Bank keenly promotes is a lousy idea. Carmen Reinharts and Ken Rogoffs work on financial crises found that high levels of international capital flows are strongly correlated with frequent and severe financial crises. By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was Assistant Director-General for Economic and Social Development, Food and Agriculture Organization, who received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007. and Anis Chowdhury, Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University & University of New South Wales (Australia), who held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok. Originally published by Inter Press Service The World Bank has successfully legitimized the notion that private finance is the solution to pressing development and welfare concerns, including achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through Agenda 2030. A recent McKinsey report estimates that the world needs to invest about US$3.3 trillion, or 3.8 per cent of world output yearly, in economic infrastructure, with about three-fifths in emerging market and other developing economies, to maintain current growth. The world financing gap is about US$350 billion yearly. If new commitments, such as the SDGs, are considered, the gap would be about thrice the currently estimated gap as available public resources alone are not enough. Thus, for the Bank, the success of Agenda 2030 depends on massive private sector participation. Maximizing Finance The Banks Maximizing Finance for Development (MFD) strategy marks a new stage. It presumes that most developing countries cannot achieve the SDGs with their own limited fiscal resources and increasingly scarce donor overseas development assistance (ODA). Bank prioritization of financial inclusion presumes that fintech-powered digital financial inclusion would increase growth, create jobs and promote entrepreneurship in developing countries. The MFD purports to respond to the G20s April 2017 Principles of MDBs strategy for Crowding-in Private Sector Finance for growth and sustainable development. The G20 has offered the Roadmap to Infrastructure as an Asset Class for energy, transport and water inter alia. The 2017 MFD strategy recycled the Banks 2015 Billions to Trillions: Transforming Development Finance, arguing that MDBs should increase financial leverage via securitization to catalyse private investment, thus promoting capital markets by transforming bankable projects into liquid securities. The MFD presumes that public money should mainly be used to leverage private finance, particularly institutional investments, to finance the purported US$5 trillion SDG funding gap. Financialization Coalition The MFD strategy seeks to enable financialization and transition to securities-based financial systems in developing countries, complementing other initiatives by the Bank, IMF and G20. Such initiatives are expected to encourage investors to use environmental, social and governance criteria to attract, mobilize and sustain needed financing. The MFD presumes that public money should mainly be used to leverage private finance, particularly institutional investments to finance the funding gap. Government guarantees are deemed necessary to de-risk projects, especially for public-private partnerships (PPPs). Meanwhile, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a Bank subsidiary, is helping subsidize capital market involvement in infrastructure development; the MFD strategy envisages capital markets in green bonds, social impact bonds, infrastructure bonds and so on. Securities markets are supposed to enable institutional investors to make desirable social and environmental impacts. MFD advocates claim that capital markets provide new solutions to development challenges such as inadequate infrastructure, and poor access to schooling, clean water, sanitation and housing. The Financial Stability Board has also proposed measures to transform shadow banking into securities-based finance, while the European Commissions Sustainable Finance initiative seeks to similarly reorient institutional investors and asset managers. Cascading Financialization The Banks Cascade approach seeks to institutionalize this bias for private financing. It seeks to facilitate securities lending by enabling repo market financing and hedging, and rehypothecation, i.e., allowing securities to be used repeatedly for new lending. The Cascade approach seeks to accelerate financialization with measures to accommodate new asset classes, enable banks to engage in securities and derivatives markets with minimal regulation, deregulate financial institutions creating tradable assets from PPP projects, and facilitate capital flows ostensibly for development. It presumes market imperfections and missing markets deter the private sector from financing sustainable development projects, and proposes to address such bottlenecks by internalizing externalities and providing subsidies and guarantees to de-risk investments. Tito Cordella notes that it prioritizes private finance even when a project is likely to be profitable if undertaken with public funds. He notes the tensions between maximizing private financing and optimizing financing for development, and some implications. Public options are only to be considered after all private options are exhausted or fail. Thus, the Cascade approach presumes that the private sector is always more efficient, despite actual experiences. Clearly, it not only reflects an ideological preference for private finance, but also seeks to promote securities and derivatives markets, as market liquidity is among the core G20 Principles of MDBs strategy for crowding-in Private Sector Finance. Hijacking Development Finance The strategy would thus commit scarce public resources to de-risking such financing arrangements to transform bankable development projects into tradable assets. This means that governments will bear more of the likely costs of greater financial fragility and crises. Such government measures will inadvertently undermine needed financial institutions such as development banks. There is no reason to believe that MFD will somehow create the capital market infrastructure to improve finance for SMEs or needed development transformations. Once a projects future revenue streams are securitized, the multilateral development banks environmental and social safeguards no longer apply. Contracts to repay securitized debt held by investors would be disconnected from the underlying project financed and its consequences. Holders of these securities have no incentives to prioritize social or environmental goals. Private equity and hedge funds that have short-term incentives for profit-taking, including by asset-stripping, are not concerned with social, environmental or other public interests. Not surprisingly, considerable doubt exists as to whether private capital markets and institutional investors can be incentivized to finance long-term public goods as these mechanisms serve the profit motive, not public welfare. Yves here. A little walk through Memory Lane shows how even on the propaganda front, Silicon Valley is relying on old wine in new bottles. By Yasha Levine,the author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. Originally published at Substack What a Western Electric advert from 1944 can teach us about Google and Facebook I was in the New York Public Library recently doing research in the archives when I stumbled on a 1944 pamphlet from Western Electric, the old American techno-telephone monopolist. Its called Circuits for Victory and its 40 glossy, slickly produced pages are dedicated to one thing: celebrating all the ways that the companys telecommunication technology helps the United States government fight and win wars. The pamphlet is a historical document, but if you squint at it right and replace Western Electric with, say, Facebook or Google or Amazon, you actually get an accurate sense of what Silicon Valley monopolies are today: privatized extensions of American Empire. Since the dot com boom, Silicon Valley has been selling itself to the world as a new breed of global corporation neutral platforms that sit on top of the world, unconcerned with and totally removed from American geopolitical and national security interests. The public believed it. Even Silicon Valley people believed it. It was the dawn of a new depoliticized corporate internationalism. It was all about a utopian technological revolution that would connect and empower people, regardless of their nationality or language. Indeed, Silicon Valley was supposed to make the nation obsolete. Of course, this was always a transparent sham. And perhaps the one positive thing thats come out of RussiaGate and the ridiculous mainstream belief that Russia attacked American democracy with Internet memes is that no one believes this Silicon Valley global utopianism anymore. RussiaGate forced Silicon Valley to publicly admit something that Ive been saying for years something that is at the core of the thesis of my book, Surveillance Valley: American Internet companies are not abstract global platforms, but privatized instruments of American geopolitical power. Its out in the open now. Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai admits it and Donald Trump blasts it out to the world: These days, the industrys corporate utopian internationalism is being gradually replaced with something much closer to the politics that have always been in the background: a politics of patriotism and militarism. And our political and media class is right along with them, and driving this change: Democrats, Republican, diplomats, intelligence officials, journalists, and thinktankers of all types are now in full agreement: the Internet is a dangerous weapon that needs to be restricted. It is too dangerous to not be regulated under a National Security regime. Not that long ago, Senator Dianne Feinstein berated attorneys from Google, Facebook and Twitter for allowing the Russian to turn the Internet into an anti-American weapon: What were talking about is a cataclysmic change. What were talking about is a major foreign power with the sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election You bear this responsibility. Youve created these platformsand you have to be the ones to do something about it. And she followed up with a threat: either Silicon Valley finds a solution voluntarily, or the government will. Or, as Fred Kaplan Slates national security man put it: Openness allows the free exchange of ideas and expression of dissent but also leaves the system, and everyone in it, prey to criminals, terrorists, and, in this case, foreign spies and propagandists: all of them shrouded in anonymity It may be time to impose some regulations on this system. Censoring the Internet because its too free and doesnt protect us from the Russians this is the acceptable elite opinion in American politics today. And Silicon Valley has done exactly that. On top of racking up military contracts, theyve started opaquely self-regulating and policing their platforms like the geopolitical tools that they are. Theyve increased cooperation with intelligence agencies and are now partnering with all sorts of shady national security thinktanks and outfits including New Knowledge, Atlantic Council, and the German Marshall Fund. They censoring and moderating their platforms in defense of American national security which, in todays political reality, means going after the Russians and silencing voices that oppose Americas corporate and military power. That includes American anti-fascist groups: So thats where we are today. Its pretty clear that the way things are trending, it wont be long until Facebook and Google start putting out public relation materials filled more and more with the proud militarism on display in Western Electrics Circuits of Victory. And they should. It would be the honest thing to do. Today, in the full tide of victory, men and women of Western Electric are engaged in their greatest jobproducing the communications weapons of war, the radios, radar, the switchboards, telephones and cable that help our fighting men win battles, help save American lives and help maintain the vital home front communication network. This book tells you something of what we of Western Electric have contributed toward victory in this war. Western Electrics President, Clarance G. Still. Check it out: Communications One of the Foremost Military Tools Replace COMMUNICATIONS with THE INTERNET and you basically get Google, Amazon and Facebook. The Telephone Basic Communications Weapon of War When I interviewed former ARPA Director Stephen J. Lukasik, who oversaw the build-out of the ARPANET in the 1970s, he explained to me the meaning of a military command and control system: Command means you will do what I say. Control means dont do what I dont want you to do. And you cant do either of those without a telephone! Now, you cant do any of that without the Internet. How Military Communications Works This is actually all about radio and telephone communication, but it might as well be a chart of the secure Internet that the Pentagon uses today to link up into a single fighting force. Looking at this chart, you could see why the military began to develop digital networks not long after WWII and why the Internet was ultimately built and deployed. How else you gonna run a complex modern fighting force? Cable Heavy-duty Word Carriers of War Today, its Internet backbones and satellites. Switchboards Nerve Centers for War Messages This is what a pre-Internet router looked like. Two shirtless recruits punching cables. Radio In the Air On Land At Sea A hint at why the U.S. is fighting China on 5G tech deployment. (Natural News) When most people hear the phrase Deep State they often correctly think of a person who is likely associated with federal law enforcement, the political establishment, or the U.S. intelligence community. Rarely do they consider that American media figures are part of a Deep State cabal seeking to undermine the will of the people. And yet, certain mainstream media figures are not only members of the Deep State, but they are also co-conspirators in some of the worse political scandals of our times, including especially the Spygate scandal. For two years, Americans either read about the Russian collusion scandal or were treated to endless stories regarding various aspects of it on cable and network news channels. But last month special counsel Robert Mueller finally put an end to it when he proclaimed officially that no election collusion between members of President Trumps 2016 campaign and Mother Russia occurred. Mind you, there was no other finding that Mueller could have made, realistically, because the entire Russian collusion narrative was a hoax. And most everyone in the nations capital knew itincluding the media. Some of the worst offenders were, as tabulated by Liberty Nations Leesa K. Donner: David Corn of Mother Jones: This hack reported with certainty that Vladimir Putins regime plotted its information warfare campaign against the U.S. specifically to get POTUS Trump elected. He wrote that during the effort The Trump crew tried to collude covertly with Moscow, sought to set up a secret communications channel with Putins office, and repeatedly denied in public that this assault was happening, providing cover to the Russian operation. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. There wasnt any secret backchannel to Putin. No collusion attempts let alone actual collusion. And nothing at all to the charge that the 2016 Trump campaign was covering for Russia. Chuck Todd, NBC News: During a single episode of Meet the Press, which Todd hosts, he used the word crime four times in connection with the president. Heres a sample of his hoax-mongering: You have the Justice Department, if you will, in the Southern District of New York, pretty explicitly implicating the president in a crime. Pretty explicitly? Either there is an explicit implication of a crimeor there isnt, Chuck. And there wasnt. Aaron Black, Washington Post: The second-place Russian collusion hoaxer behind CNN is the Washington Post, where democracy dies period. He recently rehashed all of the fake news stories attempting to tie Team Trump to Russia, including the never-materialized Trump Tower deal in Moscow, the NYC Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer (who was working with Fusion GPS, the Russia dossier producer, at the time), and Paul Manaforts Russia ties, which dont exist. Joe Scarborough, MSNBC: About the only thing anyone on this network can do to get noticed is to say outrageous things, and Scarborough is the king of tin-foil hat Trump-Russia collusion conspiracies. He once claimed, Anybody that writes an op-ed and suggests that Donald Trump has not put himself directly in the target of an obstruction charge is just fooling themselves and some very, very stupid, ill-informed readers. Stupid meets ill-informed on Scarboroughs set. Chris Matthews, MSNBC: Matthews once observed that Mueller reminds me of the starfish which gets itself tightly around the clam and uses all its stuff to weaken and pry open the clam. Hownautical. He was using this metaphor to pretend that Mueller was set to crack open Trump and have him for lunch. Not. Joy Behar, ABCs The View: I think theyre all going to end up together in prison and maybe thats a good thing. Joy, its more likely you will go to prison for something before POTUS Trump or his family does. Finally, Dan Rather, MSNBC: A political hurricane is out there at sea for him [Trump]. Well call it Hurricane Vladimir. What is it with MSNBC and nautical metaphors? Maybe its because the network is drowning is a sea of better competition? Sea what I did there? Sources include: LibertyNation.com NewsCartels.com (Natural News) Plagiarizing Nazi-era oppression almost verbatim, Rockland County, New York, located to the northwest of New York City, has decided to ban all unvaccinated children from public places, citing public health concerns as the impetus behind this heinous affront to civil rights. At the direction of Rockland County Executive Ed Day, anyone under the age of 18 in Rockland County will now be prohibited from leaving the house unless he or she is fully up-to-date with all CDC-recommended vaccinations, including the highly controversial MMR vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella. The temporary 30-day ruling is said to be the first such effort of this kind nationally and the circumstances we face here clearly call for that, Day is quoted as saying during a recent press conference about the ruling. Similar to what occurred in Nazi Germany back during World War II, Day and his police state cronies intend to target those who reject the state-sanctioned doctrines of vaccination by implementing a papers, please? scenario, in which vaccine-checkers apparently now have free reign to pull people aside without probable cause or due process, and demand that they procure evidence of vaccination otherwise they might get a giant anti-vaxxer star patch affixed to their arms. Anyone who is unwilling to placate the demands of this vaccine police state will potentially be fined and prosecuted or as Day himself stated unequivocally, turned over to the district attorney for handling. Parents will be held accountable if they are found to be in violation of this state of emergency act, Day openly admitted during a recent press conference. And the focus of this effort is on the parents of these children. We are urging them once again, now with the authority of law, to get your children vaccinated. If we have a situation where it comes to our attention that a parent is willingly, knowingly, not allowing a child to be vaccinated, under the emergency order, it will be referred to the district attorney, he further stated. For more news about how vaccine fanatics are forging full-steam ahead with violent efforts to turn our country into a vaccine police state, be sure to check out PoliceState.news. Rockland officials are actually going door-to-door to enforce vaccine compliance Not only are people apparently now being stopped on the streets in Rockland County and having their vaccine status verified, but officials there are also reportedly going door-to-door in an effort to deal with the alleged measles epidemic. Our inspectors have begun to meet increasing resistance from those they are trying to protect, Day lamented about the local community not exactly welcoming this newfound police state presence thats interfering in their personal lives. Our health inspectors have been hung up upon or told not to call again. Theyve been told were not discussing this do not come back, when visiting the homes of infected individuals as part of their investigations This kind of response is not acceptable, and frankly, irresponsible, he added. Since things arent going exactly how he wants them to, Day added that hes planning to introduce new legislation that would extend this 30-day ban and make it a permanent fixture of the local community meaning anyone who isnt vaccinated and lives in Rockland County will instantly become a criminal. Were in the process of drafting a local law to provide for the protection of county residents and visitor[s] in the events of outbreaks of communicable diseases for consideration of our partners in government, the Rockland County legislature, hes quoted as saying. We owe this to the residents of our community so that we never have to go through this again. Neither Ed Day nor anyone from his office has responded to requests from Natural News for clarification about the ban, its constitutionality, or how this all aligns with the civil rights of Rockland County residents and visitors. For more news about the dangers of vaccines, be sure to check out Vaccines.news. Sources for this article include: NBCNewYork.com VaccineImpact.com NaturalNews.com (Natural News) A new warning from the White House has underscored the fragility of our society. As the Trump administration cautions, an EMP attack could easily take down the United States in a single shot. As such, Trump has now issued a presidential EMP order, with the aim of protecting vital infrastructure from total destruction. EMP, or electromagnetic pulse, attacks have been a known threat to the United States for decades. In spite of this, little has been done to insulate the nations most vulnerable and necessary structures like power grids from being destroyed by such an event. As The Hill reports, the Congressional EMP Commission has been discussing EMPs as a major threat to the United Since since the Cold War. Now, President Trump has issued an executive order to get the ball of national preparedness rolling. Under this new directive, key recommendations of the Congressional EMP Commission will finally see the light of day. The White House reportedly plans on having a comprehensive strategy on EMPs ready within the next 12 months. Trump issues executive order on EMPs While EMPs have been on the federal governments radar for at least 20 years, it is only now that we see that risk being taken seriously. As The Hill contends, federal agencies have failed to adequately acknowledge and prepare for a potential EMP threat. Trumps order directs the secretaries from the Energy and Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to develop a plan to mitigate the effects of EMPs on the vulnerable priority-critical infrastructures. DHS and Energy are also being directed to work with other federal agencies and the private sector to make this plan. The Hill contends that one of the defining features of Trumps EMP order is a new requirement which will ensure critical areas of the nations infrastructure are tested via EMP simulators, allowing for vulnerabilities to be assessed. As reported: The presidents order recognizes that an EMP attack, in adversary military doctrine and planning, is a dimension of cyber warfare. Worst-case cyber attack scenarios that could kill millions of Americans by, for example, causing a protracted blackout of electric grids through cyber-induced over-voltages, or by manipulating controls to destroy transformers can be addressed by many of the protective measures long recommended by the Congressional EMP Commission. Trumps plan to safeguard the U.S. against EMP attacks has been met with both praise and scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, a number of leftist publications have derided the very notion that EMPs are an actual threat with some even trying to insinuate they are nothing more than a conspiracy theory. The threat of EMPs The mainstream media really enjoys poking fun at preppers (and anyone else who enjoys being self-sufficient, really), but we all know how that story ends. One of these days, preppers arent going to be the crazy people theyre going to be the people who survive. The EMP Commission has been warning about the threat of EMPs for decades. In 2014, a panel of experts testified before Congress and concurred that an EMP attack could potentially wipe out over 90 percent of the nations population. Some would say its low probability, but the damage that could be caused in the event of an EMP attack, both by the sun, a solar event, or a man-made attack, would be catastrophic, commented Rep. Michael McCaul, R-TX. In 2017, the EMP Commission Chairman confirmed that an EMP attack would cause grievous harm to the population. While skeptics may say that the probability of an attack is low, the fact remains that the harm an EMP attack will cause is quite high. Learn more about EMP attacks and how to survive one at EMP.news. Sources for this article include: FreeBeacon.com TheHill.com (Natural News) A legitimate bombshell of a story exploded this week when a female 2014 Democratic candidate for Nevada lieutenant governor spilled the beans about an episode she had with Creepy Joe Biden, who was, at the time, still vice president of the United States. Writing in The Cut, Lucy Flores claimed that when Biden showed up in her state for a campaign event on her behalf, he behaved likeBiden: As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me? I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, I didnt wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual f**k? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair? He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. Flores claims she was embarrassed, shocked, and confused by the overt sexual affront, but for some reason, she waited until now, as Biden considers a 2020 presidential run, to bring this up. Well leave it up to you to decide what her motivations are/were. Interestingly, and this goes to the political intrigue about Flores motivations because they are both Democrats, the mainstream media is picking up on the story as well. Thats really odd because Biden has been Creepy Joe Biden for years, as the independent media have reported. In fact, if you do a search for creepy joe biden videos youre going to come up with compilation after compilation; some are funny, some are sick, some are both, but all prove that Bidens been a creep for decades, not just in 2014. (Related: Joe Biden pulls a George Bush Senior, calls for new world order during speech.) As Jim Treacher writes at PJ Media regarding Democrats sudden interest/shock/disgust at Bidens behavior: Its odd how a persons bad behavior can be common knowledge for decades, and then suddenly it becomes an issue. Bill Cosbys treatment of women was an open secret for decades, until comedian Hannibal Buress talked about it in his stand-up act. For whatever reason, that got the ball rolling. Now Cosby is in jail. He didnt change. The world around him changed. No big deal because Bidens just a gregarious guy Enter whats going on with Biden all of a sudden. Treacher, like so many Democrats, have come out and said clearly that they believe Flores. Democrats are all into the #BelieveWomen campaign, perhaps, but Treacher says he buys the story because he knows Biden and, as weve stated, Bidens been a creep for decades (and the Washington Beltway establishment has known it; hes gotten a pass, however, because he was an Obama ally and water-carrying Dem). Biden does the creep act with young women, older women, kids so often, in fact, that it was expected. Theres even one clip online showing former U.S. senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions swatting Bidens hand away from a young girl: But in the past, the fake news media has blown off Bidens behavior as gregarious, going off script, acting too jolly, etc. Thats how the Today Show reported Bidens behavior at a Christmas party in 2013 when he was essentially grabbing a womans breasts while he stood behind her: Hes a gregarious guy. It doesnt seem all that inappropriate to me but I dont know what the moment was, said former host Matt Lauer. You remember Lauer, right? He was the guy who was fired from that show for being too sexually gregarious. Biden is a creep, straight up. Hes always been one and, if Democrats nominate him as their 2020 presidential candidate, hell continue to be creepy. Sources include: PJMedia.com Today.com TheNationalSentinel.com (Natural News) Many people who care about things like clean, organic food; compassionate health care for all; a pollution-free environment; and prosperity for all are falling hook, line, and sinker for the so-called Green New Deal, which promises all of these things and more. But as explained by Richard Sacks from Lost Arts Radio during a recent episode of his show, the Green New Deal is a fraud, and will never actually work. While much of whats in the Green New Deal sounds fantastic on the surface, including universal health care, a higher minimum wage, no pollution, and essentially a planetary utopia, its all just an empty pipe dream. The Green New Deal as its written now, we have to be smart enough to realize its horrible, warns Sacks. No little kid should support it; no old kid like me should support it; nobody should support it, and it should just go away. Its an insult to the intelligence of America and the world. Be sure to watch the full segment at Brighteon.com below: Universal health care is worthless if the government is just peddling drugs and surgery as medicine On the health care issue, Sacks agrees that it sounds nice on the surface. But to anyone who has any understanding about the current health care system and how it works, the whole thing is a malicious joke that was started by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations shortly after 1910. The true purpose, explains Sacks, was to monopolize the medical industry with drugs that make people sick, keep them sick, make their minds foggy so they dont know whats going on, and just eventually outlaw all of the competing and especially natural forms of real health care so nobody has a choice. You dont want health care defined and managed by an organization that is administering health care thats killing at least one million Americans per year because thats exactly what its doing, he warns, adding that real medicine is found in nature. For more related news, be sure to check out MedicalChoice.news. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an actress and a fraud, warns Sacks As for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, as shes popularly referred to, Sacks explains how shes just an actress. Shes acting the part of a congresswoman right now but she doesnt understand any of this stuff, he reveals, adding that shes a total fraud. Its not her fault. She was a bartender, and her brother got her into a casting call for a company called Justice Democrats that was looking for somebody who could be a convincing representative in Congress and say whatever they told her to say. She was one of the winners, he adds. Will America be prosperous if everyone is just handed free money? Then we have the free money solutions proposed in the Green New Deal, which promises a higher minimum wage and potentially a universal banking income to be funded from somewhere. There is no plan, whether its from the president, from OCA, or from the Green New Deal, or the secret backers of that, any of these plans thats going to work to make good results for the country, unless you get rid of this giant leach that is controlling the economy of the country since about 1913, says Sacks, referring to the private Federal Reserve bank. In the end, the Green New Deal is simply communism repackaged, and its an empty pipe dream that will never actually be implemented and that, if its tried, will only function to bankrupt the country entirely. Be sure to watch the full segment with Richard Sacks of Lost Arts Radio at Brighteon.com. Sources for this article include: Brighteon.com NaturalNews.com (Natural News) Just when you thought Google couldnt possibly get any scarier, The Intercept is reporting that the company is still working in secret on the controversial Chinese search app it claimed to have abandoned last year. The search app, which has the code name Project Dragonfly, is still very much alive, even though the company claimed last December that it was not planning to launch it after all in the wake of widespread condemnation. The search platform is designed to blacklist information the Chinese government doesnt want its people to see about topics like democracy, human rights, peaceful protests, and religion. It will also link the searches people carry out to their phone numbers so the government can keep tabs on them. Some of the terms that would be blocked include human rights, Nobel prize and student protest. Right now, Googles search service cant be used by most Chinese internet users because the communist countrys Great Firewall has blocked it. The new app will adhere to the strict Chinese censorship laws; the government blocks its people from reading information online about news, academic studies, political opponents and sex, among other topics. Many popular Western news and social media sites are also censored, such as the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the New York Times, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The effort attracted condemnation around the world from human rights organizations and members of Congress when it was first exposed by The Intercept, and outraged employees who wanted nothing to do with the project voiced their moral and ethical concerns to their employer, with some quitting over it. Those who worked on it were told by Google management to keep quiet about it, cover up paper trails, and deflect questions about it. Google then announced that they would no longer be working on the project and moving team members to new projects. Work on project continues in secret However, sources from inside Google have told the Intercept that execs are currently conducting a secret internal assessment of the platform. Although the company carries out performance reviews each year, theyre generally carried out in an open way and subject to peer review. Thats not the case with Dragonfly, with executives taking the unusual approach of setting up closed review committees made up of senior managers to assess work on the project. Amnesty Internationals Patrick Poon pointed out the implications of the search engine for all of us when it comes to internet freedom and freedom of information. He said: The biggest search engine in the world obeying the censorship in China is a victory for the Chinese government it sends a signal that nobody will bother to challenge the censorship any more. Of course, Google must also be eager to gain access to Chinas gigantic internet user base, which numbers 750 million and equals the population of Europe. The data they could collect and money they could potentially earn is apparently too good for them to pass up. This leaves us with a lot of questions. Why is evil Google still working on this project, and why are they so desperate to keep people from finding out about it? Why are they partnering with a communist country known for its censorship and tyranny, and what elements of this privacy-violating search engine will be incorporated into the searches that millions of Americans and people around the world use every day? What other entities will use the technology to prevent people from seeking information? Will Americans one day be blocked from searching on terms like vaccine dangers and have their identities revealed to authorities for daring to look it up? Were afraid that we might be getting the answers to these questions very soon. Sources for this article include: TheIntercept.com TheIntercept.com (Natural News) Despite its strong Christian origins, the United States of America is rapidly descending into total amorality and godlessness, with statues openly honoring Satan now appearing on government property all across the country. Back in December, for instance, it was reported that the Chicago chapter of the Temple of Satan was given permission to place a Satanic statue in between a Christmas tree and a menorah at the Illinois statehouse during the holiday season, in open defiance to both Christianity and Judaism. According to reports, the four-foot sculpture depicted a black-colored fist clenching an apple, which was meant to represent the sin of Adam and Eve when they ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in violation of Gods edict placing the tree and its fruit off-limits. Below this Satanic statue was a placard stating, Knowledge is the Greatest Gift, along with a Baphomet-embedded pentagram just to ensure that everyone viewing the statue knew that it was there to honor Satan. Under the Constitution, the First Amendment, people have a right to express their feelings, their thoughts, stated Dave Druker, a spokesman for the Illinois Secretary of State, in defense of the statues grotesque presence. This recognizes that. Satanists erect massive Baphomet statue in front of Arkansas Capitol building Several months prior to this, a much larger Satanic statue depicting Satan himself was erected in front of the Arkansas Capitol building, with cheers and celebration from free-speech activists. Reports indicate that the giant, eight-foot-tall bronze statue depicted Satan in the form of Baphomet, a transgender rendering of Lucifer as the goat monster, holding up its two fingers below a giant pentagram. The Satanic Temple had been trying for three years to get permission to place the statue in front of the Arkansas Capitol as part of an effort to find a permanent home for the blasphemous, human-goat avatar. In this case, proponents of the hermaphroditic Baphomet statue had previously attempted to have it placed next to the Christian Ten Commandments placard in front of the Oklahoma Capitol building, only to have the Supreme Court strike down the monument for violating state law governing the separation of church and state. Thats when the Satanic Temple moved on to Arkansas, where a similar Ten Commandments monument was set to be built in Little Rock, and where the Baphomet was intended to be placed as a direct affront to Christianity. While both of the aforementioned statues ended up only remaining on their respective government properties temporarily, the boldness with which the Church of Satan is now demanding that its Satanic paraphernalia be openly displayed for the world to see suggests that the moral decline of this country is accelerating. Big Tech is also embracing Satanism Satan-worship is also infesting the digital realm throughout America, with U.S.-based corporations like Apple now censoring information thats critical of Satanism and Satanic practices like abortion, which is a form of human sacrifice to Molech, an ancient Canaanite demon to whom pagan cultures would offer up the lives of their children. Theres also the U.S.-based Amazon corporation, which no longer offers anti-vaccine films like Vaxxed on its platform for public good purposes, but that gladly sells books that teach young children how to become Satanists. The stunning truth is simple and self-evident: Like all the other evil tech giants Apple, Google, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, etc. Amazon is actually run by Satanists who actively seek the murder of children via abortions and vaccines, warns Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, about the encroaching threat of Satanism into every aspect of American life. For more related news about the spread of Satanism in America today, be sure to visit Evil.news. Sources for this article include: BBC.com WashingtonPost.com NaturalNews.com NaturalNews.com While proper information about the conservation status of tiger gecko species is largely missing, these Asian lizards are already particularly vulnerable to extinction, as most of them have extremely restricted distribution. Furthermore, they have been facing severe declines over the last two decades, mostly due to overcollection for the international exotic pet market. Such is the case of the Cat Ba Tiger Gecko, whose tiny populations can only be found on Cat Ba Island and a few islands in the Ha Long Bay (Vietnam). In their study, a Vietnamese-German research team, led by PhD candidate Hai Ngoc Ngo of the Vietnam National Museum of Nature in Hanoi, provide an overview of the evidence for domestic and international trade in tiger gecko species and update the information about the abundance and threats impacting the subpopulations of the Vietnamese Cat Ba Tiger Gecko in Ha Long Bay. By presenting both direct and online observations, interviews and existing knowledge, the scientists point out that strict conservation measures and regulations are urgently needed for the protection and monitoring of all tiger geckos. The research article is published in the open-access journal Nature Conservation. Tiger geckos are a genus (Goniurosaurus) of 19 species native to Vietnam, China and Japan. Many of them can only be found within a single locality, mountain range or archipelago. They live in small, disjunct populations, where the population from Ha Long Bay is estimated at about 120 individuals. Due to demands in the international pet trade in the last two decades, as well as habitat destruction, some species are already considered extinct at the localities where they had originally been discovered. However, it was not until very recently that some species of these geckos received attention from the regulatory institutions in their home countries, leading to the prohibition of their collection without a permit. Only eight tiger geckos have so far had their species conservation status assessed for the IUCN Red List. Not surprisingly, all of them were classified as either Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered. Nevertheless, none is currently listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which could be the only efficient and reliable method to monitor, regulate and police the trade of the species on a global scale. "Tiger geckos are neither sufficiently protected by law nor part of conservation programmes, due to the lack of substantial knowledge on the species conservation status and probably due to the general lack of public as well as political interest in biodiversity conservation," they explain. "To date, exact impacts of trade on the species cannot be identified, as data of legal trade are only recorded for species listed in the CITES Appendices". During their survey, the researchers tracked local traders in possession of wild-caught tiger geckos representing all five Vietnamese species en route to foreign exotic pet markets, mainly in the United States, the European Union and Japan. The species were also frequently found to be sold in local pet shops in Vietnam, as well as being offered via various online platforms and social media networks like Facebook. Having spoken to local dealers in Vietnam, the team found the animals were traded via long and complex chains, beginning from local villagers living within the species' distribution range, who catch the geckos and sell them to dealers for as little as US$4 - 5 per individual. Then, a lizard either ends up at a local shop with a US$7 - 25 price tag or is either transported by boat or by train to Thailand or Indonesia, from where it is flown to the major overseas markets and sold for anywhere between US$100 and 2,000, depending on its rarity. However, many of these delicate wild animals do not arrive alive at their final destination, as their travels include lengthy trips in overfilled boxes under poor conditions with no food and water. Indeed, although the researchers reported a large quantity of tiger geckos labelled as captive-bred in Europe, it turns out that their availability is far from enough to meet the current demands. In conclusion, the team provides a list of several recommendations intended to improve the conservation of the Asian geckos: (1) inclusion of all tiger geckos in the Appendices of CITES; (2) assessment of each species for the IUCN Red List; (3) concealment of any currently unknown localities; and (4) improvement/establishment of coordinated ex-situ breeding programmes for all species. California's attorney general says high-capacity magazines of ammunition are likely to start flowing into the state for the first time in nearly two decades because of a federal court order tossing out a statewide ban. Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Tuesday that he's asked a federal judge to delay the ruling while he appeals it to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. San Diego-based U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez on Friday declared unconstitutional a law that bans possessing, buying or selling any magazines holding more than 10 bullets. California has prohibited buying or selling such magazines since 2000. Those who had them before then were allowed to keep them. With the ban lifted, even temporarily, Becerra and a lawyer for gun owners say there is evidence sales have begun. A Berkeley engineer is facing multiple felony charges, including attempted murder, after allegedly poisoning a co-worker's food on at least two occasions, according to a report from Berkeleyside citing court records. David Xu, 34, of Lafayette was arrested last week and charged with trying to kill a colleague by mixing a toxic substance into her food and water multiple times since 2017, Berkeleyside reported. The pair worked at Berkeley Engineering and Research at 808 Gilman St. Departamento de Policia de Berkeley Court papers reveal Xu's fellow engineer, who was not identified, had noticed strange tastes or smells in her water and food left unattended in her office and experienced "immediate and significant health problems" after consuming the food and water. There were times she sought emergency care at the hospital, police told Berkeleyside. Police obtained surveillance video from the womans office showing Xu adding a substance to her water bottle on two occasions, once on Feb. 11 and again on March 4. Water samples taken from the bottle on those dates tested positive for a toxic amount of cadmium, according to police. Xu faces charges of attempted murder, with a special allegation of great bodily injury and a poisoning enhancement, according to records. He remained in the Berkeley City Jail late Monday night. The San Jose Diocese on Tuesday released the names of additional clergy accused of sexually abusing children. According to the diocese, one name was added to the Diocese of San Joses original clergy abuse disclosure list. An additional 23 new names were of non-diocese clergy who ministered within Santa Clara County. Most of the 23 are dead or already removed from the ministry. In October 2018, the Diocese of San Jose released the names of its clergy who have been "credibly accused" of child sex abuse. That original list named 15 priests, most of them already dead. With this updated list, the Diocese acknowledges and expresses our sorrow over the failings of the past and the damage done, said Bishop McGrath. I hope that this list demonstrates our commitment to do everything in the Diocese of San Joses power to confront the evil of clergy sexual abuse, to support and help victims, and to prevent abuse from happening in the future. According to the Diocese, "the additional names are the result of recent disclosures by other arch/dioceses and religious orders" as well as an independent review of our clergy files that was undertaken by Kinsale Management Consulting beginning in November 2018. The original list, which mostly contains accusations made decades ago, was released after the bishop held four listening sessions for survivors and members of the church. McGrath said the meetings were informative and painful. He also defined credible accusation, a term some abuse victims feared would lead to an incomplete list because the Church would be the ultimate arbiter of an accusers credibility. Several priests included in the original list continued to serve in parishes around the Bay Area, even after credible allegations of sexual abuse, specifically: Rev. Don Flickinger, Rev. Arthur Harrison, and Msgr. Alexander C. Larkin. What to Know This museum the second of its kind in the US, but there are 108 worldwide, with the first in Russia The museum is located in Fisherman's Wharf, and is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily Tickets are $25, with VIP photographer service and tripod rentals available for extra fees First, there was the Museum of Ice Cream, then there was Candytopia, and now the Museum of 3D Illusions is poised to be the latest social media attraction on every San Francisco visitor's must-do list. "They're more than just paintings," said Maria Velasquez, a shift leader and photographer who spoke to us as crowds of students on spring break crowded into the small lobby. "Here, people have the opportunity to become part of the paintings." Set in the heart of Fisherman's Wharf, the museum is the second of its kind in the U.S. Hollywood's was the first and if it does well, Velasquez says the next two locations will be in Miami and Orlando, Florida. But the U.S. is late to this party: there are 108 Museums of 3D Illusions all over the world, with the very first located in Russia. Just as global as the museum itself are the artists who paint the illusions. They fly in from Europe and South America, or drive from across town, to paint each one-of-a-kind illusion directly onto the museum's walls and floors. Every museum is different, and the art found in each one features iconic local scenery. "It's all handmade," Velasquez said. "Here, we show landscapes of beautiful San Francisco, Lombard Street." The museum is meticulously maintained cleaning crews were everywhere during our visit and at least once a month, painters come to touch up the artwork. It's a good thing, because visitors are encouraged to crawl and jump all over the paintings to get the full effect. "Coming out to the museum is a workout," Velasquez said. "We have a lot of customers getting out of here sweating, because it's a lot of movement, a lot of interaction." Each illusion has a "camera spot" marked with colorful icons on the floor from which the 3D effect will look best when photographed. Some require photos to be turned sideways or upside-down after they're taken. With celebratory music playing, and visitors busy pretending to skydive, surf, and cling to the ledges of towering skyscrapers, it's easy to forget about the world outside for an hour or two but the very last painting might bring you back. It depicts a person immersed in an aquarium with a smartphone bolted onto one eye, and the icons of popular social media apps floating in the water above. "He's a Spanish artist," Velasquez explained. "And he's trying to explain how we're drowned in social media as a society." With health care a top issue for American voters, Congress may actually be moving toward doing something this year to address the high cost of prescription drugs. President Donald Trump, Democrats trying to retire him in 2020, and congressional incumbents of both parties all say they want action. Democrats and Republicans are far apart on whether to empower Medicare to negotiate prices, but there's enough overlap to allow for agreement in other areas. High on the list is capping out-of-pocket costs for participants in Medicare's popular Part D prescription drug program, which has a loophole that's left some beneficiaries with bills rivaling a mortgage payment. The effort to cap out-of-pocket costs in Medicare's prescription plan is being considered as part of broader legislation to restrain drug prices. Limits on high medical and drug bills are already part of most employer-based and private insurance. They're called "out-of-pocket maximums" and are required under the Obama-era health law for in-network services. But Medicare has remained an outlier even as prices have soared for potent new brand-name drugs, as well as older mainstays such as insulin. "The issue has my attention," said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare. "Out-of-pocket costs are a concern of ours, particularly at the catastrophic level." His committee has summoned CEOs from seven pharmaceutical companies to a hearing Tuesday. While Grassley said he hasn't settled on a specific approach, the committee's top Democrat, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, recently introduced legislation that would cap out-of-pocket costs at about $2,650 for Medicare beneficiaries taking brand-name drugs. One co-sponsor is Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic presidential candidate. In Des Moines, Iowa, retired special education teacher Gail Orcutt is battling advanced lung cancer due to radon exposure. Although she has Medicare prescription coverage, she paid $2,600 in January for her cancer medication and will pay about $750 monthly for the rest of the year. She said it cost more last year for a different drug $3,200 initially and then about $820 monthly. Someday her current drug may stop working, said Orcutt, and then she'd have to go on a different medication. "What if that is two or three times what I'm paying now?" she said. "It's not sustainable. The country needs more problem-solving for the common good and not the corporate bottom line." At a recent House Ways and Means Committee hearing, three expert witnesses with varied policy views concurred on limiting drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries. "This is still the only program that does not provide that protection to its beneficiaries," testified economist Joe Antos of the business-oriented American Enterprise Institute. The House committee also oversees Medicare. Before the hearing, the committee's chairman and top Republican released a joint statement unusual in polarized times: "We agree that the time is now to take meaningful action to lower the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. health care system," said Reps. Richard Neal, D-Mass., and Kevin Brady, R-Texas. John Rother of the National Coalition on Health Care is a longtime participant in national health care debates, and his organization represents a cross-section of interest groups. "There is a common recognition of a problem, and also a sense that they want to move something this year," he said. At issue is the Medicare prescription benefit's "catastrophic" protection. Experts say it was intended as a safeguard but isn't working that way, either for beneficiaries or taxpayers. Catastrophic protection was enacted before the advent of drugs costing $1,000 a pill. It kicks in after beneficiaries have spent about $5,100 on medications, under a complex formula. After that, the beneficiary is only responsible for 5 percent of the cost of the medication, and taxpayers' share rises to 80 percent. The patient's insurer covers the remaining 15 percent. The problem for beneficiaries is that there's no dollar limit to what they must pay. For example, 5 percent of a drug that costs $200,000 a year works out to $10,000. Numerous experts also say there's a problem for taxpayers. Generally, the Medicare prescription benefit is financed with a mix of government subsidies and beneficiary premiums. But in the catastrophic portion, most of the bill is passed directly to taxpayers. That neutralizes the incentive for insurers to negotiate lower prices with drugmakers. Catastrophic is the fastest growing cost for Medicare's Part D. The administration has supported an approach recommended by experts that would shift most of the responsibility for high-cost medications onto insurers, while capping what beneficiaries must pay. That would force insurers to seek lower prices. But it may well raise premiums. About 3.6 million Medicare beneficiaries with Part D coverage or 9 percent had "catastrophic" costs in 2015, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Of those, about 1 million had to pay their share in full because they didn't qualify for financial assistance provided to low-income beneficiaries. "This affects people with serious conditions such as cancer and multiple sclerosis," said Tricia Neuman, a Medicare expert with Kaiser. "People on Medicare can still face huge expenses for their medication because the Medicare drug benefit was designed without a hard cap on out-of-pocket costs." A Florida mayor accused of shooting at deputies trying arrest him on allegations of practicing medicine without a license has been removed from office. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order Friday suspending Port Richey Mayor Dale Massad. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco says Massad fired on deputies during an early morning raid Thursday before surrendering. No deputies were hurt. The sheriff says Massad has a history of drug use, violence, threats and owns several guns, which prompted deputies to raid the home. State officials say the 68-year-old mayor was treating patients at home though he lost his physician's license in 1992. Besides illegal medical practice charges, jail records show, Massad faces five counts of attempted murder. Jail records didn't list an attorney for Massad. Port Richey is 40 miles north of Tampa. Casino magnate and GOP donor Sheldon Adelson has cancer and has not been at his company's offices in Las Vegas since around Christmas Day. Adelson's poor health was revealed earlier this week by one of his company's attorneys during a court hearing in a years-old case brought by a Hong Kong businessman. The founder and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp. did not participate in the casino operator's conference call with analysts and investors following its earnings report in January. Attorney James Jimmerson told the court Monday that he learned last month "of the dire nature of Mr. Adelson's condition, health." The comment from the attorney came when discussing whether Adelson could sit for a deposition in the case and was first reported by The Nevada Independent. Las Vegas Sands Corp. on Thursday told The Associated Press that Adelson has cancer. "Mr. Adelson is still dealing with certain side effects from medication he is taking for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma," company spokesman Ron Reese said in an emailed statement Thursday night. "These side effects have restricted his availability to travel or keep regular office hours." The effects haven't prevented Adelson, 85, from fulfilling his duties as chairman and CEO, Reese said. The company expects he'll return after he completes treatment. Adelson also suffers from peripheral neuropathy, a condition that affects the nervous system. The billionaire and his wife, Miriam, gave President Donald Trump's campaign $30 million in 2016. They followed that by contributing $100 million to the Republican Party for the 2018 midterm elections. Adelson is Las Vegas Sands' largest shareholder and regularly participates in the company's earnings calls, but was absent when it reported results on Jan. 23. Sands President Robert Goldstein said at the time that Adelson was "a little bit under the weather." "We met with him yesterday," Goldstein said of Adelson during the January call. "He's taking some medications making him a bit drowsy, so he decided this morning to take a rain check on this one." Adelson was expected to testify in the case brought by Hong Kong businessman Richard Suen and his company, Round Square Co. He testified in 2013 and 2008 in the case's two previous trials. Suen has been seeking compensation because he said he helped Sands secure business in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau. Sands has argued Suen didn't help get crucial approval to build casinos in Macau and deserves nothing. Dr. Julio Castro, who works at the Central University of Venezuela and is one of the leaders of the nonprofit Doctors for Health, told NBC News the situation in Venezuela was growing more dire as the blackouts have dragged on. The first blackout began March 8 and lasted for several days. The second began on March 25 and has continued on and off throughout the last week. Castro said at least 46 people died in hospitals as a direct result of the first massive power outage. He said at least six others have died so far because of the second one. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced a plan Sunday to ration water and power for the next 30 days. The blackouts wont stop, and the lines for water keep getting longer, according to NBC News. The new honorary mayor of Fair Haven, Vermont a 3-year-old goat named Lincoln was officially sworn into office this week. Lincoln was dressed in a sash reading "Mayor" for the Tuesday ceremony at the Fair Haven town offices. Town Clerk Suzanne Dechame and the select board were present to deliver the oath of office. Fair Haven, a town of about 2,500 along the border with New York just west of Rutland, does not have an actual mayor. Town Manager Joseph Gunter says the honorary pet mayor idea was conceived as a fundraiser for a playground, but it turned into a civics lesson for kids. On the way out of the offices, the honorary mayor defecated on the floor leaving clean-up to the police chief and other attendees. Election Day in Chicago is here and voters across the city are quickly becoming a part of history. Voters are casting ballots in the runoff election for a new mayor, a new treasurer and in some cases, for their ward's City Council seat. 10 Races to Watch in Chicago's Municipal Runoff Elections Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle advanced to the runoff in February from a field of 14 candidates - the largest number in Chicago history - meaning that for the first time, the city will have a black, female mayor. You can find live election results as they come in here. Here's a live look at how Election Day is unfolding across the city: 8:10 p.m.: Melissa Conyears-Ervin defeats Ameya Pawar in race for Chicago city treasurer, AP projects. 7:50 p.m.: BREAKING: Lori Lightfoot to become Chicago's first black female mayor, the AP reports. 7:20 p.m.: With 17 percent of Chicago wards reporting, Lightfoot takes a commanding early lead with 62,840 votes to Preckwinkle's 19,910. 6 p.m.: Turnout stands at 457,517 ballots cast, which is 28.7 percent, with about two hours left before polls close. 3 p.m.: 370,513 ballots have been cast so far, according to the Chicago Board of Elections, including early voting and vote by mail ballots. That equates to 23.2 percent turnout. The leading age group is 55-64, with 81,000 ballots cast. Next is 65-74 with 74,000 votes, then 45-54 with about 61,000 votes. Roughly 53,500 voters between the ages of 35 and 44 cast their ballots, and about 42,000 between 25 and 34. 2 p.m.: Election officials received a call for an incident at Hamilton Park, which is the polling place for Precinct 10 in the 6th Ward, located at 513 W. 72nd St., Board of Elections spokesman Jim Allen said. There was an allegation of an assault by a supporter of Ald. Rod Sawyer's campaign on a campaign worker for his opponent, Deborah Foster-Bonner, according to Allen. Chicago police said an "unknown offender" struck a 26-year-old male in the face following a verbal altercation. The victim refused medical attention and the offender fled the scene, according to police, who continue to investigate. Election officials are still investigating the incident, which had multiple witnesses and was the subject of a video posted to Facebook, he said. Malcolm Bonner, Foster-Bonner's son who works for her campaign, said he was the one who was hit and posted the video on Facebook. He declined to offer comment on behalf of the campaign, saying they were "pending legal proceedings." Kenny Sawyer, who identified himself as a member of Ald. Sawyers family who has been helping out the campaign, said, "A member of our campaign staff got into it with a person from her campaign." "It was a scuffle from what I understand. It's an unfortunate incident, it got a little heated," he added, declining to identify the alleged attacker. "This is not a staff member. Im not exactly sure what happened. Were just getting information ourselves," Kenny Sawyer said. 1:56 p.m.: The Board of Elections dishes out a little sports history with today's politics. The last time a Chicago leader was selected on April 2 was in 2008, when the Bears acquired Jay Cutler. Chicago voters were not consulted on this. Today, you have a say...#YourVoteMatters #EveryVoteCounts #ChicagoVotes #twill pic.twitter.com/O5z3nfscdW ChicagoElection (@ChicagoElection) April 2, 2019 1:10 p.m.: As of 1 p.m., more than 157,000 voters have cast their ballots, according to election officials. 11:30 a.m.: Chicago Board of Elections reports that Precinct 27 in the 39th Ward opened "exceptionally late," but noted "it appears that all voters are going to be able to return by close of polls." Officials said the delay was caused by judges not showing up on time. 11:15 a.m.: Election officials say voting so far on pace with February election, though more millennial voters are out for the runoff. As of 11 a.m., totals by age include: Ages 25-34: 33,000 votes Ages 35-44: 42,000 votes Ages 45-54: 47,000 votes Ages 55-64: 61,500 votes Ages 65-76: 55,600 votes Ages 75 and older: 35,500 votes "Its clearly a lot easier for people to make up their minds in this round and people are doing so and have been doing so," said Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Jim Allen. "Whether that means there are going to be more people participating remains to be seen." 10:57 a.m.: Toni Preckwinkle casts her ballot in Chicago. She told reporters she voted for "moi," then chuckled. Says shes feeling good, has no regrets about how she campaigned. "Its all in the voters' hands now," she said. Mayoral candidate Toni Preckwinkle casts her ballot in the runoff election in Chicago. But who did she vote for? 9:10 a.m.: Chicago Board of Elections reports voter turnout as of 9 a.m. sits at 65,496. 8:10 a.m.: Voter turnout as of 8 a.m. sits just over 38,500, Chicago election officials said. 7:48 am.: Reports of a polling place in Ward 1, Precinct 30 not opening on time. Election officials say they reached out to the location and apologized for the delay. 7:10 a.m.: Even pets are flocking to Chicago polling places! 6:47 a.m.: At the 42nd Ward polling place in Chicago's Loop, snacks are offered for voters. The polls are open! The 42nd Ward location in the Loop offers snacks to voters. #ElectionDay #Chicago @nbcchicago pic.twitter.com/elLkV7dKvg Lisa Chavarria NBC5 (@LisaChavarria) April 2, 2019 6:40 a.m.: Voters began casting their ballots in Chicago. At one location in Palmer Square, a small group of voters came out early. Workers, however, say the turnout is much smaller than during the November election, when lines were out the door before 7 a.m. 6:25 a.m.: Reports that scanners are broken at some polling locations. Votes being placed in ballot boxes until scanners are fixed, voters said. 6 a.m.: Polls are officially open! If you are casting your ballot on Election Day, you have just one option: your designated polling place. If you don't know where that is click here to find out. 5 a.m.: Election officials reveal Chicago's early voting numbers for the run-off elections are "statistically comparable" to the February election. The total, however, is lower than in the April 2015 run-off. Meanwhile, vote by Mail returns are ahead of the February totals and the April 2015 runoff totals. For a complete guide to the April runoff election click here. Dan Davies, the driver who police say rammed an Illinois State troopers squad car while driving the wrong way on the Tri-State tollway early Saturday morning, should not have been driving a car anywhere. After all, officials of the Illinois Secretary of States Office say they cannot find any evidence Davies ever got a drivers license. Despite that fact, Davies was stopped by police dozens of times - receiving over 70 tickets - including repeated citations for driving without a license. Each time he was cited for having no license, a suspension was added to his record at the secretary of states office, which would make it more difficult for him to get a license, if he ever applied for one. He also was arrested twice for drunk driving. This case is outrageous, said Dave Druker, spokesman for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White. Its a tragedy. Investigators say Davies was driving the wrong way on the Tri-State tollway near Libertyville early Saturday, when he rammed a squad car driven by Trooper Gerald Ellis. Both were killed in the crash. Records obtained by NBC5 Investigates show that Davies first citation for driving without a license was in 1996. Since then, he had received 71 tickets during 25 traffic stops. The Secretary of States office had used every tool available to them, including placing him under revocation following his second DUI arrest last November. That would have required him to go to an administrative hearing if he ever wanted to obtain a license in Illinois. But it appears nothing was ever done by local authorities to stop Davies from getting back behind the wheel. The only alternative is to put someone in jail, Druker said. They have no respect for the concept of law or a drivers license. That didnt happen. After his November drunk driving arrest, Davies case was eventually transferred to Cook County Criminal Court, where he faced multiple charges of aggravated DUI. But in that case, he was granted a $3000 I-bond, meaning he had to post no cash, and he was never jailed - despite what authorities say was one of the worst driving records in the state of Illinois. And remember he had no license in the first place. I dont know that I have a vocabulary to say how it would rate, Druker said. It would be on the bottom - its miserable! A spokesman for Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx did not respond to NBC5 Investigates repeated inquiries about what position prosecutors took to try to keep Davies in custody. Davies was no stranger to the Cook County Criminal Court. NBC 5 Investigates has learned that since he was a teenager, in addition to his dozens of traffic stops, he also was charged in 22 additional criminal cases... where he faced repeated charges of criminal damage to property, assault and battery - including battery on a police officer and domestic battery - drug-dealing, and drug possession. Davies was found guilty in seven of those cases, but served a total of only 53 total days in jail less than two months, including a sentence of just ten days for a conviction stemming from his first DUI arrest in 2010. There are still a lot of questions about what caused two vacant mills in South Windham and East Killingly to go up in flames early Saturday morning, within hours of one another. Officials said the causes of both the mill fire on Machine Shop Hill Road in South Windham and the former Acme mill on Bailey Hill Road in East Killingly are still under investigation. I worked in the back. I was working on first aid kits for the military. That was back in the early 70s, said Donald Barber about the former Acme mill. Barbers East Killingly yard gave him a clear view of the flames spewing into the air and water being pummeled onto his former workplace early Saturday. Mill fires are always hard to find a cause based on the size of the structure and depending on how much is involved on arrival, said Killingly Fire Marshal and Emergency Management Director Randy Burchard. It posed a challenge for Burchard and responding firefighters. Killing Town Manager Mary Calorio said it was difficult for him to get into the building because of the structural damage. The historic nature of these mills, the character of the mills isnt something we can ever replicate, Calorio said. She calls it a loss for the town. The mill, which dated back to 1846 according to the town clerks office, is leveled. Hazardous material was a big concern after asbestos was found in roofing material. At the time of the fire, residents were advised to remain indoors. The advisory was lifted later in the day. DEEP said no toxic chemicals detected in the air. But debris from the fire was found on some surrounding downwind properties. DEEP mapped the debris field and spokesperson Lee Sawyer said as of Sunday, their clean-up was complete. Killing residents concerned about fire debris on their property were encouraged to call a hotline set up by QVEC 911. Operations Manager Travis Irons said in the first three to four hours, they received more than a dozen calls from residents about material on their property. Our primary concern is security for the site, Calorio said. It is a large site, it is a hazardous waste site at this point. Because of that, the property owner arranged for a fence to be put up around the mill, she added. The owner of the former Acme mill is listed as Shennecock Realty LLC according to the Killingly Clerks Office. NBC Connecticut called and emailed an agent for the property owner about the fire and did not get a response by the time this story aired. Calorio said the mill has been vacant, but the current owner was planning on developing residential units and was actively abating the property. Its sad for a number of reasons, Calorio said. This is part of our history. We are a region of mill towns really our history is with these mills. Another mill, in South Windham, also caught fire Saturday morning and also had asbestos in the roofing material. More than 80 firefighters from over a dozen departments helped battled the flames. Sawyer said in this case, the fire debris was mostly contained to the mill site. DEEP will continue to be involved in ongoing efforts to clean up both sites and will work closely with the owners to make sure theyre taking necessary steps to secure and clean-up the damage, according to Sawyer. State police said neither of the fires have been determined to be criminal in nature, but major crimes is assisting. Burchard said seeing two mill fires within hours of one another is unusual. New England has a large amount of mills so anything is possible, Burchard said. A Milford, Connecticut, woman says Joe Biden touched her inappropriately at a 2009 political fundraiser in Greenwich when he was vice president. Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Himes who now works as a grant writer for non-profits, alleges that Biden touched her face with both hands and rubbed noses with her. She is the second woman to share an account of an interaction with the former vice president that she said made her uncomfortable. The story was first reported by the Hartford Courant. Lappos said she had her run-in with Biden when she was a new staffer volunteering at a fundraiser for Dannel Malloy, who was announcing his gubernatorial run. She said as volunteer staff she was inside while the event was outside. According to Lappos, Biden came through the room as he was leaving the event and someone pointed out that they were staff. "He came over to tell us how much he appreciated his congressional staff and what an important role we play and we were over-the-moon excited," she said. Lappos said there were other staff and Biden's Secret Service detail in the room, and he stopped to take pictures with them. "He just slid his hands behind my neck and pulled me close. I was thinking I had 10 minutes of thoughts in two seconds because I was thinking, Is he going to kiss me? What is he doing?" she told NBC Connecticut. "Our noses touched and then he rubbed noses with me for like 10 seconds, 15 seconds, he was saying something to me - I don't remember what," she continued. She said the whole interaction was uncomfortable, but Himes was not in the room when it happened and she didn't report it. "He's the vice president. Who do you complain about the vice president to? I was freshman staff ... for a freshman congressman?" Lappos said she never shared the story until she heard the story of Lucy Flores, who wrote an essay accusing the former vice president of acting inappropriately with her in 2014. She has since spoken with Himes chief of staff and said they have been very supportive. "I never really thought anything of it other than it was uncomfortable and weird until I saw Lucy's story and Lucy described perfectly how she felt and how it wasn't sexual but how it was crossing a line. And I thought, My gosh, that's, like, I've been trying to find the words for this for so long," Lappos said. In an article published in New York Magazine Friday, Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor, wrote that she and Biden were waiting to take the stage during a rally in Las Vegas before the 2014 election. She says the vice president put his hands on her shoulder and planted a kiss on the back of her head. Lappos said she was motivated to speak out when she saw the treatment Flores was getting in response to her story. "This is the platform for me to be able to say, This happened. I believe Lucy, and hey party, we're progressive, let's not set the bar this low. Let's hold men accountable. Let's nominate men and women in our primary that represent the way we want women to be treated," she said. She said that if the same thing happened to her again, she would speak out, because people need to be held to a higher standard. "I don't feel violated. I don't feel victimized, but I do feel he crossed a line. I feel like it was wrong. I feel like he did not respect my boundaries because I'm a woman, and that disappoints me," she said. Biden's team has not specifically addressed the Lappos allegations at this time. On Wednesday, Biden released a video on Twitter and wrote, "Social norrms are changing. I understand that and I've heard what these women are saying. Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future. That's my responsibility and I will meet it." Social norms are changing. I understand that, and Ive heard what these women are saying. Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future. Thats my responsibility and I will meet it. pic.twitter.com/Ya2mf5ODts Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 3, 2019 Lappos responded with a statement Wednesday, saying: "Id like to point out you can make personal connections without crossing the line. Men and women do it everyday. Not everyone wants to be touched and its not sterile or disengaging or cold to respect boundaries. "That being said, anyone who can hear women and change behaviors is taking the right steps. "I hope he can influence others to keep raising the bar and have women at the table when setting that bar. Biden spokesman Bill Russo has acknowledged Lucys essay, saying in a statement, "Neither then, nor in the years since, did he or the staff with him at the time have an inkling that Ms. Flores had been at any time uncomfortable, nor do they recall what she describes." Russo said Biden "believes Ms. Flores has every right to share her own recollection and reflections, and that it's a change for the better in our society that she has the opportunity to do so." NBC Connecticut has not verified Lappos account. NBC Connecticut did reach out to Rep. Himes office but has not yet heard back. There has long been talk that Biden may decide to seek the White House, though an official decision hasnt been announced. A four man, two woman jury will now decide the fate of a former forensic nurse in a high profile patient abuse trial. NBC Connecticut Investigates broke the story of abuse at our states maximum security mental health hospital two years ago. It resulted in 10 arrests at the Whiting Forensic Hospital in Middletown. Four of those employees have already received sentences. The essential question for the jury is a simple one. Did former forensic nurse Mark Cusson abuse patient Bill Shehadi, or was he making the best of a bad situation with an exceedingly difficult and dangerous patient? In closing arguments, Cusson attorney Norm Pattis told jurors His moods can get to explosive points to rage in just a moment! And if youre sitting next to him, in that bed, you have guess which its gonna be. The nice Bill, or the Bill that wants to get ya! Cusson is fighting 16 counts connected to the alleged abuse of Shehadi, incidents the state says are all on surveillance video, one even showing Cusson putting a dirty mop on shehadis head. Cusson has denied putting a mop on Shehadis head, and says for well over a decade of caring for Shehadi, he had to come up with unorthodox ways of treating a violent patient, with little direction from hospital management. Pattis said, Its arguable that Mr. Cusson could have made close judgement calls and be guilty of no crime. In summation, the prosecution questioned how, if Cussons techniques were so successful, why did he ever put them in the patient notes filed after every shift? Assistant States Attorney Jeff Doskos said of Cusson, He went rogue. He developed his own way handling of handling Mr. Shehadi clearly in conflict with the policies and rules of the hospital. The jury started deliberating after the lunch break, and was dismissed for the day after three hours. Cubans were asked Sunday to send an overwhelming message of approval for the country's communist system as its founding generation of geriatric former guerrillas cedes the public spotlight to a new class of middle-aged bureaucrats. Voters were expected to overwhelmingly approve the draft of a new constitution that preserves the single-party socialist system and centrally planned economy while making some updates. The new constitution recognizes private and cooperative businesses alongside state ones, creates the posts of prime minister and provincial governor, and introduces the presumption of innocence and habeas corpus to the justice system. The only open question was how overwhelming the "yes" vote would be. The current constitution was approved by 97.7 percent of voters in a referendum in 1976, the peak of a system dedicated to displays of national unity achieved through a blend of consensus-building and coercion. Forty-three years later, Cuba is one of the world's last communist nations, its economy is faltering, its population shrinking and the percentage of "no" votes is expected to be small but significant when results are released Monday. President Miguel Diaz-Canel's government waged a non-stop campaign promoting a "yes" vote and tarring those voting "no" as counterrevolutionaries and enemies of the state. "I came to vote for the constitution of my country, for the rights we Cubans have to defend, for continuity and our revolutionary process," said one voter, Januarys Molina, 34. Aside from a few independent websites, all Cuban media is state-run and the airwaves were filled with messages urging people to approve the new constitution for the sake of continuity on the island. In recent days, those messages were mixed with words of support for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as tensions rise between Cuba's main ally and the Trump administration, along with Latin American allies who support the Venezuelan opposition and its attempt to force aid into the country. "We're living a moment of imperialist menace," Diaz-Canel told reporters after voting Sunday morning. "What they're applying in Venezuela can be applied in any place in the world." Diaz-Canel's predecessor, 87-year-old Communist Party head Raul Castro, was shown voting in footage on state TV that didn't include comments to state media on the scene. The largest block of "no" votes could come from the growing ranks of evangelical Christians in Cuba, who object to language that eliminates a requirement for marriage to be only between a man and woman, paving the way for a future legalization of gay marriage. Cuban dissidents reached out to the growing number of people who have internet access on the island, urging them to vote "no" or boycott the vote altogether. Both Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Vice President Mike Pence attacked the vote as illegitimate in Twitter statements Sunday. In Miami, many Cuban exiles gathered Sunday to protest the referendum. "We're here to protest the mega fraud that the Cuban regime is committing with the constitution," said Ramon Saul Sanchez, a Cuban exile. "We've been suffering for six decades from this regime that deprives us of all rights and divides us as a nation." The Cuban community also stood in solidarity with the people of Venezuela and Nicaragua. "We will not stop here in the United States supporting the efforts of Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans to try and find liberty in their own countries," said Mayor Francis Suarez. Authorities say an off-duty Indiana State Police trooper has been shot and wounded by his son at the trooper's home in northern Indiana. The St. Joseph County prosecutor's office says the trooper was shot late Thursday in Granger and was taken to a hospital in semi-stable condition with a single gunshot wound. The prosecutor's office says the trooper's son, who is 11-years-old, was detained on a preliminary charge of attempted murder pending a review by prosecutors and juvenile authorities. The Associated Press isn't reporting the name of the trooper to avoid identifying his son. The shooting is under investigation and the prosecutor's office says it planned to release additional information later. Aides to Joe Biden struck a more aggressive tone on Monday as the former vice president faced scrutiny over his past behavior toward women. In a statement, Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted "right wing trolls" and "smears" from "the dark recesses of the internet" for conflating images of Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends in his official capacity during swearing-in ceremonies with uninvited touching. The move came on a day in which a second woman said Biden had acted inappropriately, touching her face with both hands and rubbing noses with her in 2009. The allegation by Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, followed a magazine essay by former Nevada politician Lucy Flores, who wrote that Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014. The developments underscored the challenge facing Biden should he decide to seek the White House. Following historic wins in the 2018 midterms, Democratic politics is dominated by energy from women. The allegations could leave the 76-year-old Biden, long known for his affectionate mannerisms, appearing out of touch with the party as the Democratic presidential primary begins. Lappos told The Associated Press that she and other Himes aides were helping out at a fundraiser in a private home in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2009 when Biden entered the kitchen to thank the group for pitching in. "After he finished speaking, he stopped to talk to us about how important a congressional staff is, which I thought was awesome," Lappos said. She said she was stunned as Biden moved toward her. "He wrapped both his hands around my face and pulled me in," said Lappos, who is now 43. "I thought, 'Oh, God, he's going to kiss me.' Instead, he rubbed noses with me." Biden said nothing, she said, then moved off. She said the experience left her feeling "weird and uncomfortable" and was "absolutely disrespectful of my personal boundaries." The Hartford Courant first reported Lappos' assertion. Russo didn't directly respond to Lappos, instead referring to a Sunday statement in which Biden said he doesn't believe he has acted inappropriately during his long public life. The former vice president said in that statement: "We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will." Biden hasn't made a final decision on whether to run for the White House. But aides who weren't authorized to discuss internal conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity said there were no signs that his team was slowing its preparations for a campaign. Asked by the AP about the accusations against Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "I don't think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all." She declined to elaborate. Biden's potential Democratic rivals haven't rushed to back him up. Over the weekend, presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand came closest to calling out the former vice president. Warren said Biden "needs to give an answer" about what occurred. Gillibrand said, "If Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic he'll have to engage on further." Ultraviolet, a women's advocacy group, tweeted: "Joe Biden cannot paint himself as a champion of women and then refuse to listen and learn from a woman who says his actions demeaned her. Good intentions don't matter if the actions are inappropriate. Do better, Joe. And thank you @LucyFlores for coming forward." Julie Pace contributed to this report. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown said Thursday he will not run for president in 2020, becoming the latest Democrat to bow out of the White House race. His decision comes after recent visits to several early-voting states to highlight his worker-friendly policy agenda. Brown said he believed his "dignity of work" tour succeeded in putting the struggles of average Americans on Democrats' 2020 radar and that he "can be most effective" by remaining in the Senate. "I fight best when I bring joy to the battle," he told home-state reporters. "And I find that joy fighting for Ohio in the Senate." Several other Democrats, including former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and former Attorney General Eric Holder, announced this week that they would not join a presidential primary already packed with a dozen candidates. Democrats are awaiting word from former Vice President Joe Biden and former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke about whether they will undertake highly anticipated campaigns that could reshape the race. Brown said he will continue to call out President Donald Trump's "phony populism" from his perch in the Senate and will "do everything I can to elect a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate in 2020." The 66-year-old had emerged as a potentially strong challenger to Trump after winning re-election in November in a state that Trump carried by nearly 11 percentage points in 2016. Brown's victory was powered by strong support in many blue-collar areas of the state where Trump had prevailed. Well-known for his progressive populism, Brown had pledged to be the most "pro-union, pro-worker" candidate in the Democratic field if he ran. But he would have faced a steep climb to the upper tier of the 2020 field. Brown's comfort in relating to Midwestern, working-class voters is a key element in the political appeal of Biden, who is seen as leaning heavily toward running. Also, Brown's political brand has some similarities to the anti-corporate liberalism of two high-profile senators already in the race, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Even so, Brown proved himself less willing than those possible rivals to embrace the litmus-test politics of the left: He declined to sign onto Sanders' "Medicare for all" single-payer health care plan or the Green New Deal , an ambitious framework to fight climate change. Brown said he was not deterred from running by the large number of Democratic candidates, money concerns or his status as a white male in a party that prizes diversity. He said has never aspired to be president and, in the end, decided he could do the most good in the Senate. Citing his record on worker issues, Brown said, "I think my message has been strong enough that other candidates are picking it up." Texas lawmakers today heard testimony from a long list of people in support of a proposed bill that would clear the confusion over whether CBD is legal in the state. Witnesses packed into a hearing room at the state capitol to also speak out in favor of legalizing hemp farming in Texas. The testimony ranged from predictions that farmers would benefit if allowed to grow hemp the main component of CBD, while others talked about the health benefits from CBD. No action was taken Monday on the bill, sponsored by state Rep. Tracy King, who represents farming communities in south Texas. King said the hearing helped people understand the differences between hemp and its cannabis cousin, marijuana. The hemp used to make CBD contains only a small fraction of THC, which is the ingredient in marijuana that produces a high. Kings bill, if passed, would require testing to ensure that hemp did not surpass the legal limit of THC. Also, CBD companies would have to provide consumers with lab results showing the ingredients of their products. Those in attendance included Steven Thompson, CEO of a national CBD company that is headquartered in North Texas. Thompson said current laws prevent his company from processing the hemp for CBD in Texas. "And so, while we are proud Americans, we would rather be providing for the farmers here in our state," he said. In arguing for border wall funding, President Donald Trump claimed without any evidence that only 2 percent of those apprehended crossing the border and released pending immigration hearings appear in court. Actually, Trump administration officials put the figure at about 50 percent, while immigration experts say it is even higher. The president made his remarks on Day 24 of the partial government shutdown, which began because Congress would not agree on Trumps request for $5.7 billion in funding for a proposed border wall. The president was speaking at the American Farm Bureau Federations annual convention in Louisiana. --Trump, Jan. 14: Somebody comes into our country, they touch one foot on the ground, and we have to catch them. Its called, catch. We then take their names and we bring them to a court can you believe this? and we release them. And they go into our country, and then you announce these are the laws then you say, Come back in three years for your trial. Tell me, what percentage of people come back? Would you say 100 percent? No, youre a little off. Like, how about 2 percent? (Laughter.) And those people, you almost dont want, because they cannot be very smart. (Laughter.) Two percent. Two percent. Two percent come back. Those two percent are not going to make America great again, that I can tell you. (Laughter and applause.) Crazy. It is important to note first that most people apprehended at the border are quickly returned to their home country. In an August 2018 report, the Department of Homeland Security said that 52 percent of the 479,000 people apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol for crossing the border illegally in 2014 were returned to their home countries within three days. Overall, DHS repatriated 65 percent of aliens encountered in 2014, with the majority (80 percent) of these repatriations occurring as expedited removals or reinstatements of previous removal orders, according to the DHS report, which tracked the enforcement outcomes over time for people trying to cross the Southwest border legally and illegally in 2014. Mexican nationals, in particular, are often immediately processed and removed, as are those with criminal records, the report said. Existing enforcement measures are highly efficient at repatriating Mexicans, convicted criminals, and single adults who do not seek humanitarian relief, according to the report, which noted that 97 percent of those with criminal records were repatriated. However, DHS has criticized current laws and court rulings that favor the release of unaccompanied children and families from noncontiguous countries until their immigration status can be resolved in court a process that can take years. The DHS report said that more than half of those from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who were apprehended at the Southwest border in 2014 remained in the U.S. after three years, and about half of all those apprehended from those countries were unaccompanied children and families. But we found no evidence to support Trumps claim that only 2 percent of those released return for court hearings, and no one from the administration provided us with any evidence, either. We contacted the Department of Homeland Security, which referred us to the White House. Hogan Gidley, the White House deputy press secretary, promised to respond in a minute, but never did. However, two administration officials testified about the subject before Congress, and both officials put the figure for no-shows at around 50 percent not 2 percent. At an Aug. 16, 2018, hearing, Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, questioned James McHenry, director of the Justice Departments Executive Office for Immigration Review, specifically about unaccompanied children who are released and then fail to show up at immigration hearings. Im trying to figure out how many that we actually know are showing up to hearings or are still engaged in the process, Lankford said. Do you have a number on that at all? The closest estimate we have is the in absentia rate, the number who receive an order of removal for not showing up at the hearing, McHenry replied. (In absentia is Latin for in the absence.) McHenry said a little over 50 percent of cases involving unaccompanied children crossing the Southwest border are decided in absentia. A chart on the website of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which McHenry heads, shows the in absentia rate in fiscal year 2018 for unaccompanied alien children, or UACs, was 50 percent. Similarly, Matthew T. Albence, executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told senators at a Sept. 18, 2018, hearing that 53 percent of cases involving family units encountered at the Southwest border in FY 2014 were decided in absentia. One immigration expert told us Trumps 2 percent figure is highly unlikely. As usual, I have no idea where he is getting his figures from and would suggest it is highly unlikely. This is so because those who are processed through the border are released from detention on an ankle monitor and have to follow a number of different procedures to help track them, all found to be highly effective alternatives to detention, said Ayodele Gansallo, an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who is a senior staff attorney with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of Pennsylvania. Lenni B. Benson, who teaches immigration law at New York University, also questioned the 50 percent figure cited in congressional hearings by Trump administration officials. In a phone interview, Benson said the fact that a deportation order is issued in absentia does not mean that the person will be or should be deported. Too often, she said, noncitizens dont know when to appear in court because they are given inadequate notices to appear. Benson cited the case of Wescley Fonseca Pereira, who was ordered removed in absentia because he missed a removal hearing in 2007. The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in June that Pereiras notice to appear was inadequate because it lacked both time and location. In the majority opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Department of Homeland Security almost always serves noncitizens with notices that fail to specify the time, place, or date of initial removal hearings, and instead state that the time, place and date are to be determined. The government acknowledged in a court filing that almost 100 percent of notices to appear omit the time and date of the proceeding over the last three years. If given inadequate notice, noncitizens may seek to reopen their immigration proceedings, even though a deportation order was filed against them in absentia. Benson argued that the 50 percent figure cited by the Trump officials is inflated, because it is a snapshot in time. In other words, some who failed to show up and received a deportation order in absentia may nevertheless continue to work through the judicial system. When asked about the best available data on case outcomes, several immigration law experts referred us to a study published last year in the California Law Review that analyzed government data from immigration court cases initiated between 2001 and 2016. The study led by Ingrid Eagly, an immigration law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles found that [f]amily members released from custody attended all of their hearings in 86% of cases during the 15 years covered by the study period. The percentage was slightly lower 81 percent for nonfamilies. One group in particular families seeking asylum had a very high rate of showing up for court hearings. We find that family members seeking asylum who were released from detention attended their hearings in 96% of cases that began in family detention since 2001, the study found. The president frequently complains about what he calls catch and release. Last year, he claimed only 3 percent of those released show up in immigration court, while on other occasions he has said the released immigrants never show up in court or nobody ever shows up. But there is no evidence to support any of these claims. Interpol is facing a pivotal some say possibly fatal moment in its history as members decide whether to hand its presidency to a man who represents Vladimir Putin's Russia. Kremlin critics fear they could soon face arrest wherever they go. Western governments worry that Russia could use the post to undermine the rule of law. Interpol, which elects a new president Wednesday , has weathered many challenges in its 95 years. While Hollywood has portrayed it as a hive of swashbuckling agents, in reality it's an organization sometimes tangled in red tape and clashing geopolitical interests. Nazis took it over in the 1930s, and authoritarian governments have long tried to use it to hunt down fugitive dissenters. But the latest storm of criticism comes at an exceptional time just as Russia is trying to expand its global clout and as some powerful countries are questioning whether they need multilateral organizations like Interpol at all. Interpol's general assembly is choosing the agency's new president at a meeting in Dubai where the front-runner is Alexander Prokopchuk, a general in Russia's Interior Ministry who is currently an Interpol vice president. Interpol's interim president, South Korea's Kim Jong Yang, is also seeking the post. Two prominent Kremlin critics warned Tuesday that electing a high-placed Russian would undermine the international law enforcement agency and politicize police cooperation across borders. Bill Browder, who runs an investment fund that had once operated in Moscow, and oligarch-turned-dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky told reporters in London that Putin has tried to use Interpol to hunt down critics such as themselves. Having a Russian lead the agency could intensify such efforts to silence dissent, they said. Activists argue that the organization needs to increase recent efforts at muscular reform, and this won't happen if Prokopchuk becomes president, because of his ties to Putin. "It was his government that organized a terrorist attack in the U.K. using chemical weapons in Salisbury. It was his government that shot down MH17, killing 298 innocent individuals. It was his government that cheated and hacked in elections in the United States and Europe," Browder said of Putin. "To put his representative in charge of the most important international crime-fighting organization is like putting the mafia in charge." To Moscow, the complaints are all part of a Western-led campaign to weaken a resurgent Russia. Russia denies accusations of foreign interference and announced new charges against Browder this week in a long-running legal battle against him. Russian Interior Ministry spokesman Irina Volk accused critics Tuesday of running a "campaign to discredit" Prokopchuk, calling him a respected professional. Browder has pressed for sanctions against Russian officials charged with human rights abuses after his former lawyer died in custody. Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon, spent a decade in prison after exhibiting political ambitions. Both said their places in the public eye would make them poor targets for abuse, adding that they were motivated to speak out because many other campaigners who are less well-known would be silenced if governments are allowed to export repression. The White House came out Tuesday against the election of Prokopchuk, with National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis saying that "the Russian government abuses Interpol's processes to harass its political opponents." He said the U.S. "strongly endorses" Kim. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added: "We encourage all nations and organizations that are part of Interpol and that respect the rule of law to choose a leader with credibility and integrity that reflects one of the world's most critical law enforcement bodies. We believe Mr. Kim will be just that." Interpol's general assembly is made up of its 192 member states, each of which has an equal vote. Based in the French city of Lyon, Interpol is best known for issuing "red notices" that identify a suspect pursued by another country, effectively putting them on the world's "most-wanted" list. Critics argue that countries like Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and China have used the system to try to round up political opponents, journalists or activists. The watchdog group Fair Trials International detailed in a report last month the strides Interpol has made in reducing political abuse of red notices. The group's chief, Jago Russell, said a Russian official as Interpol president could stall or reverse those reforms. "We're at a pivotal moment for Interpol," he told The Associated Press. "Either countries back away from it and find other ways to cooperate, or Interpol fixes its system so that it can be trusted. ... Already there are noises about pulling out of Interpol" and creating a separate agency just for democratic countries, he said. The U.S. seems committed to Interpol for now, but has pulled out of UNESCO and international accords under President Donald Trump. Britain is pulling out of the European Union and has expressed concern about management of international bodies funded by taxpayers. Interpol itself won't comment on the upcoming vote. The Interpol presidency is more of an oversight position, compared with the hands-on leadership role of the secretary-general. Interpol's charter explicitly proclaims its neutrality, and two years ago it introduced measures aimed at strengthening the legal framework around the red notice system. As part of the changes, an international team of lawyers and experts first check a notice's compliance with Interpol rules and regulations before it goes out. But the possibility of a Putin loyalist in such a prominent role has prompted concern among those critical of the Russian president's leadership. Four U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio, have urged the Trump administration to oppose the Prokopchuk candidacy. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who on Monday stated that Russia was "rooting for the Russian candidate," said that amounted to meddling in the vote. Fair Trials International warned that a Russian president of Interpol could try to limit the money spent on staff needed to vet red notices, for example, or get rid of a recent measure to protect refugees from unfair arrest. This is far from the first time that Interpol's votes are causing controversy. Human rights groups raised the alarm two years ago when Interpol's general assembly approved Meng Hongwei, a longtime senior Chinese security official, as president. Amnesty International criticized "China's longstanding practice of trying to use Interpol to arrest dissidents and refugees abroad." Meng is now under arrest in China as part of a possible domestic political purge hence Wednesday's emergency vote to replace him. Interpol's general assembly also votes on membership, like they did on Tuesday when they rejected admitting Kosovo . Interpol members voted last year to admit Palestine as a member, creating an uproar in Israel. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Sunday joined the growing group of Democrats jostling to be president and positioned herself as the most prominent Midwestern candidate in the field, as her party tries to win back voters in a region that helped put Donald Trump in the White House. "For every American, I'm running for you," she told an exuberant crowd gathered on a freezing, snowy afternoon at a park along the Mississippi River with the Minneapolis skyline in the background. "And I promise you this: As your president, I will look you in the eye. I will tell you what I think. I will focus on getting things done. That's what I've done my whole life. And no matter what, I'll lead from the heart," the three-term senator said. Klobuchar, who has prided herself for achieving results through bipartisan cooperation, did not utter Trump's name during her kickoff speech. But she did bemoan the conduct of "foreign policy by tweet" and said Americans must "stop the fear-mongering and stop the hate. ... We all live in the same country of shared dreams." And she said that on first day as president, she would have the U.S. rejoin an international climate agreement that Trump has withdrawn from. Trump responded to Klobuchar's announcement with a tweet mocking her stance on global warming, a phenomenon he has disputed in the past. He wrote that Klobuchar talked proudly "of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures. Bad timing. By the end of her speech she looked like a Snowman(woman)!" Trump often overlooks evidence of record global warming and conflates cold spells and other incidents of weather with climate, which is long-term. Klobuchar also spoke of the need to "heal the heart of our democracy and renew our commitment to the common good." Asserting Midwestern values, she told a crowd warmed by hot chocolate, apple cider, heat lamps and bonfires: "I don't have a political machine. I don't come from money. But what I do have is this: I have grit." Klobuchar, who easily won a third-term last year, has pointed to her broad appeal across Minnesota as she has discussed a 2020 run. She has drawn support from voters in urban, suburban and rural areas, including in dozens of counties Trump won in 2016. She has said that success could translate to other Midwestern states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, reliably Democratic in presidential races for decades until Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton. She said the country's "sense of community is fracturing" today, "worn down by the petty and vicious nature of our politics. We are all tired of the shutdowns and the showdowns, the gridlock and the grandstanding." The list of Democrats already in the race features several better-known senators with the ability to raise huge amounts of money Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. The field soon could expand to include prominent Democrats such as former Vice President Joe Biden of Delaware and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. A Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll conducted by Selzer & Company in December found that Klobuchar was largely unfamiliar to likely Iowa caucus-goers, with 54 percent saying they didn't know enough about her to have an opinion, while 38 percent had a favorable opinion and 8 percent had an unfavorable opinion. "She starts out perhaps with a better understanding of Midwestern voters, but I think she faces the same hurdles every one of them face, which is: Are Iowans going to find them either the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump or the candidate that most aligns with their ideologies and issues?" said John Norris, a longtime Iowa-based Democratic strategist. "I don't know that coming from Minnesota gives her any advantage with Iowans." Klobuchar, 58, is known as a straight-shooting, pragmatist willing to work with Republicans, making her one of the Senate's most productive members at passing legislation. The rally took place not far from the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi. The span was built after the previous bridge collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people. Klobuchar had worked with then Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., to help fund the new bridge and get it completed at a faster-than-usual pace. "We worked across the aisle to get the federal funding and we rebuilt that I-35W bridge in just over a year. That's community. That's a shared story. That's ordinary people doing extraordinary things," she said. Klobuchar's focus in recent months has included prescription drug prices, a new farm bill and election security. She supports the "Green New Deal," a Democratic plan proposed this past week to combat climate change and create thousands of jobs in renewable energy. But her legislative record has drawn criticism from both the GOP and some fellow Democrats. Some Republicans say Klobuchar is able to get things done because she pushes smaller issues. Some progressives say she lacks the kind of fire and bold ideas needed to bring significant change and excite voters. Klobuchar on Sunday also responded to reports in BuzzFeed and HuffPost that she has mistreated staff, saying she "can be tough" but has many staff members who've worked for her for many years. "I can push people. I know that," she told reporters after the event. "I have I'd say high expectations for myself, I have high expectations for the people who work for me, but I have high expectations for this country. And that's what we need. We need someone who is focused on getting things done for this country." Klobuchar, a lawyer and the former prosecutor in Minnesota's largest county, raised her national profile during a Senate Judiciary Committee last fall for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman when they were both in high school. When Klobuchar asked Kavanaugh whether he ever had had so much to drink that he didn't remember what happened, he turned the question around. He asked Klobuchar, "Have you?" Unruffled, Klobuchar continued as Kavanaugh asked again. Kavanaugh later apologized to Klobuchar, whose father is an alcoholic. "When you have a parent who's an alcoholic, you're pretty careful about drinking," she said. "I was truly trying to get to the bottom of the facts and the evidence." Among the other Midwestern lawmakers who could also seek the nomination are Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who has been visiting early voting states, and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who established an exploratory committee last month. Klobuchar campaigned with Democrats in Iowa last fall, and in December spoke to progressive farmers and activists about the importance of bridging the divide between urban and rural areas. She said the lesson learned after the 2016 election was "we are not going to leave the Midwest behind." "This is the moment for the Midwest," she said, "and we don't want to be forgotten again in a national election." ___ AP Polling Editor Emily Swanson in Washington contributed to this report. President Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was in touch as far back as 2015 with a Russian who offered "political synergy" with the Trump election campaign and proposed a meeting between the candidate and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the special counsel said Friday. Court filings from prosecutors in New York and special counsel Robert Mueller's office lay out previously undisclosed contacts between Trump associates and Russian intermediaries and suggest the Kremlin aimed early on to influence Trump and his campaign by playing to both his political aspirations and his personal business interests. The filings, in cases involving Cohen and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, cap a dramatic week of revelations in Mueller's ongoing investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. They make clear how witnesses previously close to Trump Cohen once declared he'd "take a bullet" for the president have since provided damaging information about him in efforts to come clean to the government and in some cases get lighter prison sentences. One witness, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, provided so much information to prosecutors that Mueller this week said he shouldn't serve any prison time. The interviews with prosecutors have yielded intimate information about episodes under close examination, including possible Russian collusion and hush money payments during the campaign to a porn star and Playboy model who say they had sex with Trump a decade earlier. In one of the filings, Mueller details how Cohen spoke to a Russian who "claimed to be a 'trusted person' in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign 'political synergy' and 'synergy on a government level.'" The person repeatedly dangled a meeting between Trump and Putin, saying such a meeting could have a "phenomenal" impact "not only in political but in a business dimension as well." That was a reference to a proposed Moscow real estate deal that prosecutors say could have netted Trump's business hundreds of millions of dollars. Cohen admitted last week to lying to Congress by saying discussions about a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016 when in fact they stretched into that June, well into the U.S. campaign. Cohen told prosecutors he never followed up, though the offer bore echoes of a proposal presented by Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who raised the idea to other advisers of leveraging his connections to set up a Putin encounter. In an additional filing Friday evening, prosecutors said Manafort lied to them about his contacts with a Russian associate and Trump administration officials, including in 2018. The court papers say that Manafort initially told prosecutors he didn't have any contact with anyone while they were in the Trump administration. But prosecutors say they recovered "electronic documents" showing his contacts with multiple administration officials. The officials are not identified in the court filings. Manafort, who has pleaded guilty to several counts, violated his plea agreement by then telling "multiple discernible lies" to prosecutors, they said. Prosecutors in Cohen's case said that even though he cooperated in their investigation into the hush money payments to women he nonetheless deserved to spend time in prison. "Cohen did provide information to law enforcement, including information that assisted the Special Counsel's Office," they said. "But Cohen's description of those efforts is overstated in some respects and incomplete in others." Cohen, dubbed Trump's "legal fixer" in the past, also described his work in conjunction with Trump in orchestrating hush money payments to two women adult actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal who said they had sex with Trump. Prosecutors in New York, where Cohen pleaded guilty in August in connection with those payments, said the lawyer "acted in coordination and at the direction" of Trump, suggesting they had implicated him in Cohen's crime. Despite such specific allegations of Trump's actions, the president quickly tweeted after news of the filings: "Totally clears the President. Thank you!" In addition, the filings reveal that Cohen told prosecutors he and Trump discussed a potential meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in 2015, shortly after Trump announced his candidacy for president. In a footnote, special counsel Robert Mueller's team writes that Cohen conferred with Trump "about contacting the Russia government before reaching out to gauge Russia's interest in such a meeting," though it never took place. In meetings with Mueller's team, Cohen "provided information about his own contacts with Russian interests during the campaign and discussions with others in the course of making those contacts," the court documents said. Cohen provided prosecutors with a "detailed account" of his involvement, along with the involvement of others, in efforts during the 2016 presidential campaign to complete a deal to build a Trump Tower Moscow, the documents said. He also provided information about attempts by Russian nationals to reach Trump's campaign, they said. However, in the crimes to which he pleaded guilty in August, he was motivated "by personal greed and repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends." Prosecutors said the court's Probation Department estimated that federal sentencing guidelines call for Cohen to serve at least four years in prison. They said that "reflects Cohen's extensive, deliberate and serious criminal conduct." Prosecutors say Cohen "already enjoyed a privileged life," and that "his desire for even greater wealth and influence precipitated an extensive course of criminal conduct." One lied about his knowledge of Russian-hacked emails, another about a Russian real estate deal, a third about dialogue over sanctions with a Russian ambassador. A pattern of deception by advisers to President Donald Trump, aimed at covering up Russia-related contacts during the 2016 campaign and transition period, has unraveled bit by bit in criminal cases brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. The lies to the FBI and to Congress, including by Trump's former fixer and his national security adviser, have raised new questions about Trump's connections to Russia, revealed key details about the special counsel's findings and painted a portrait of aides eager to protect the president and the administration by concealing communications they presumably recognized as problematic. The false statements cut to the heart of Mueller's mission to untangle ties between the Trump campaign and Russia and to establish whether they colluded to sway the election. They concern some of the central questions of the investigation, including why the incoming Trump administration discouraged Russia from retaliating over sanctions imposed for election hacking; who knew what when about illegally obtained Democratic emails; and how plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow came together and fell apart. "I think you can draw a conclusion that these false statements generally relate to an effort to protect the president of the United States in connection with his dealings with Russia," said Washington lawyer Daniel Petalas, a former Justice Department prosecutor. "That's what makes them material to the investigation that Mueller is pursuing, which is a necessary element of a false statement claim that it has to be material." The most recent example came Thursday, when Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about negotiations he had on Trump's behalf for a real estate deal in Moscow. Though he told lawmakers the talks were done by January 2016, he admitted they actually lasted as late as June after Trump had secured the Republican nomination and after Russians had penetrated Democratic email accounts for communications later released through WikiLeaks. He also said he had briefed Trump about the project's progress and members of his family. Cohen said he lied out of loyalty to Trump, who insisted throughout the campaign that he had no business dealings in Russia, and to be consistent with his political messaging. Though the Cohen plea didn't directly connect to Trump's campaign, other cases have. George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about April 2016 conversations with a Maltese professor who told him Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails." Papadopoulos told the FBI he wasn't part of the campaign when he encountered the professor, Joseph Mifsud, even though he had joined weeks earlier. His lawyers said Papadopoulos, now serving a 14-day prison sentence, "lied to save his professional aspirations and preserve a perhaps misguided loyalty to his master." Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is being sentenced later this month after admitting lying to the FBI by saying he didn't discuss sanctions against Russia during the transition with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time. That deception was flagged for the White House in January 2017 by Obama administration holdover Sally Yates, who as acting attorney general told White House counsel Don McGahn that officials were misleading the public by falsely declaring Flynn hadn't discussed sanctions. Flynn's guilty plea was especially significant in that it made clear other transition officials were aware of his Kislyak conversations and discussed with him what he would say. And while Flynn was fired in February 2017, his importance to Trump became evident when ex-FBI Director James Comey said Trump had encouraged him during a private meeting that same month to end an investigation into Flynn. More lies followed as prosecutors this week accused former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of lying even after his guilty plea, though they have not said about what. And a draft plea agreement against another Trump supporter, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, accused him of misrepresenting a conversation with Trump confidant Roger Stone about WikiLeaks, which published thousands of stolen emails ahead of the election to harm the Clinton campaign. A false statement charge can be a powerful cudgel for prosecutors, especially in investigations like this one where witnesses are recalcitrant and openly defiant. In the Mueller investigation, perhaps emboldened by Trump's antagonist stance, witnesses have increasingly lashed out against the government's authority. Trump and Stone have publicly attacked Mueller's investigation, while Corsi rejected a plea offer and accused prosecutors of trying to bully him into saying what they want to hear. "You've got a system where you're trying to take evidence from people, get their testimony under penalty of prosecution if you lie," said Duke University law professor Sam Buell. "And that's what you do when you have uncooperative people (who are) trying to conceal something that you're trying to get to the bottom of." More false statement charges could be coming. Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the panel has made referrals to prosecutors and cited Cohen as an example. "It's a loud message to everybody that is interviewed by our committee, regardless of where that prosecution comes from, if you lie to us, we're going to go after you," Burr said. Though Trump regularly complains about Mueller's style, there's nothing unusual about prosecutors pursuing false statement charges to send a message and using their lies for cases against higher-level targets. "This is what happened to the mob, this is what happened to the drug cartels," Buell said. Not to mention, he noted, past Washington investigations like Watergate. What to Know Brian Kennedy, 34, is charged with killing his ex-wife inside a Delaware County Wawa store during a scheduled custody exchange Police say he gunned down the 37-year-old victim with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle as other people shopped at the store The victim had previously been granted a protective order against Kennedy Michael D'Arco had bought an engagement ring for his girlfriend Stephanie Miller. He never got the chance to propose. Miller, a 37-year-old occupational therapist, was gunned down inside a Radnor Township Wawa store. Investigators in the Philadelphia suburb say her ex-husband, 34-year-old Brian Kennedy, shot and killed her with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle during a scheduled custody exchange. "She was a selfless person that was the happiest soul that you could imagine," a heartbroken D'Arco told NBC10 in an exclusive interview Sunday. "Regardless of all the adversity in her day to day." The deadly shooting occurred inside the Wawa on 151 Sugartown Road around 8:20 p.m. Thursday. According to an affidavit of probable cause, Kennedy shot Miller "at point blank range" in the head and stomach. Kennedy was scheduled to exchange the couple's child at the store, but he apparently arrived alone, Delaware County District Attorney Katayoun Copeland said. A cashier at the store told police that when Kennedy arrived, he appeared "agitated," had a "stern" look on his face and "said nothing," according to the affidavit. "With an ArmaLite 15, he brutally murdered the mother of his child in a public place in cold blood, placing numerous others at risk. He then cowardly fled the area," Copeland said. Kennedy fled the scene in a black BMW, according to witnesses. Multiple agencies searched for Kennedy. A SWAT Team and Pennsylvania State Police troopers eventually found him in Thornbury Park in Glen Mills, investigators said. He was taken to Crozer-Chester Medical Center for what police determined to be a drug overdose, according to the affidavit. He faces first- and third-degree murder, criminal homicide and related charges once he's released from the hospital. Kennedy hasn't yet been assigned a public defender, according to court records. Kennedy was previously arrested by Radnor Township police in 2016 after being accused of threatening to kill Miller at the exact same Wawa store where she was killed three years later. Miller had previously been granted a protective order against her ex-husband, but it expired in September of last year, the district attorney said. D'Arco told NBC10 he had been in a relationship with Miller since she divorced Kennedy. "Every day we lived in fear that he would come to kill us," he said. D'Arco also said he had to spend $7,000 in legal bills just prior to the protection from abuse order expiring. "That is why it was not renewed," he said. "Because Stephanie had been a victim of a judicial system that she got caught up in with no advocates. No help." D'Arco told NBC10 Kennedy created a nightmare riddled with paperwork and baseless accusations. "He wasn't considered an escalated situation because he wasn't considered a felon," D'Arco said. Miller sent an email to Tredyffrin Township police just six hours before she was killed, according to D'Arco. The email said in part, "I do not feel safe around this man who has been found guilty of simple assault and harassment against me. Now he is trying to get me to meet him in person tonight at 8 p.m." D'Arco said Miller reached out to police around 2 p.m. that day and informed them of Kennedy's threat against her. He claims they never heard back from them. "We need to have a system that links together the facts," D'Arco said. "It's all presented in front of us and we need to have the due diligence. We need to be thoughtful. And we need a 21st century process." Now all D'Arco can do is remember the love of his life as best as he can. "She purely focused on helping others. That was her main goal," he said. "Her quote was, 'Let the light shine through.' Because that's what she felt. That this world has darkness and she can extend the light to shine through." A GoFundMe was created for Miller's son. Chaos and confusion shattered the peaceful calm at the site of a memorial Monday night for slain rapper and philanthropist Nipsey Hussle. A crowd that had gathered to mourn Hussle outside his store in Los Angeles' Hyde Park area rushed to get out of the area after a man brandished a handgun, police said at a Tuesday news conference. The stampede left 19 people hospitalized. At least one person was stabbed at the vigil, law enforcement sources told NBC News. The Los Angeles Fire Department said 19 people were taken to hospitals, with two of them in critical condition, two in serious condition and 15 considered to be non-life threatening. Firefighters initially said the department was responding to reports of shots fired at approximately 8:30 p.m. The Los Angeles Police Department said that reports of the shots fired were inaccurate a short time later, but law enforcement sources familiar with the matter told NBC News Tuesday that two women struck by gunfire showed up at hospitalized. Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday he could not confirm that the two people were shot. He said panic ensued after someone in the crowd noticed another individual with a handgun, then tried to disarm him. "We have no information that he shot anyone with it," Moore said. "Another individual there attempted to disarm him. That caused panic in the group and a cascade or stampede of people as they fled the location." People fell and tripped as they tried to leave, Moore said. A witness at the vigil said he heard no shots prior to the melee. "Somebody panicked and people started to run," David Groce said. "No shots were fired, nobody was fighting, people panicked and a group of people ran." Newschopper4 Bravo was over the scene and observed the crowd scatter multiple times, with several people visibly injured and receiving medical attention from paramedics. "Is the area we in," said a community member present at the vigil, "until things get better, it's going to keep happening, regardless of any situation that goes down." Police proceeded to create a skirmish line and dispersed the crowd that had gathered to pay respects to the slain rapper.. At approximately 9:45 p.m., the LAPD issued a citywide tactical alert, NBC News reported. A tactical alert provides police departments the option of re-distributing officers to respond to a major emergency. The crowd later dispersed, leaving memorial items scattered and trampled on the ground. Volunteers cleaned up the site and replaced items overnight. The memorial was held at the location where Hussle was shot Sunday, a clothing store in the neighborhood where the Grammy-nominated rapper was from. The 33-year-old's legal name was Ermias Asghedom. Hussle "was a big figure in our community," the man at the vigil explained. "But unfortunately," he said, "everybody doesn't receive the message, or some people don't even like the message." "The community is killing the community," local activist Jennifer Rivers said, "and Nipsey fought against this, you know, and now he lost his life." Late Monday, police identified Eric Holder, 29, as a suspect in Hussle's killing. He is believed to have fled in a white 4-door Chevy Cruze. Two other people were injured in the shooting. NBC4's Jonathan Lloyd contributed to this report. Divided in debate but mostly united in a final vote, the House passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and other bigotry Thursday, with Democrats trying to push past a dispute that has overwhelmed their agenda and exposed fault lines that could shadow them through next year's elections. The one-sided 407-23 vote belied the emotional infighting over how to respond to freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar's recent comments suggesting House supporters of Israel have dual allegiances. For days, Democrats wrestled with whether or how to punish the lawmaker, arguing over whether Omar, one of two Muslim women in Congress, should be singled out, what other types of bias should be decried in the text and whether the party would tolerate dissenting views on Israel. Republicans generally joined in the favorable vote, though nearly two-dozen opposed the measure, one calling it a "sham." Generational as well as ideological, the argument was fueled in part by young, liberal lawmakers and voters who have become a face of the newly empowered Democratic majority in the House. These lawmakers are critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, rejecting the conservative leader's approach to Palestinians and other issues. They split sharply from Democratic leaders who seemed caught off guard by the support for Omar and unprepared for the debate. But the leaders regrouped. "It's not about her. It's about these forms of hatred," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said before the vote. The resolution approved Thursday condemns anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against minorities "as hateful expressions of intolerance." Omar, a Somali-American, and fellow Muslims Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Andrew Carson of Indiana, issued a statement praising the "historic" vote as the first resolution to condemn "anti-Muslim bigotry." Some Democrats complained that Omar's comments on Israel had ignited all this debate while years of President Donald Trump's racially charged rhetoric had led to no similar congressional action. The seven-page document details a history of recent attacks not only against Jews in the United States but also Muslims, as it condemns all such discrimination as contradictory to "the values and aspirations" of the people of the United States. The vote was delayed for a time on Thursday to include mention of Latinos to address concerns of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. It was inserted under a section on white supremacists who "weaponize hate for political gain" over a long list of "traditionally persecuted peoples." An earlier version focused more narrowly on anti-Semitism. The final resolution did not mention Omar by name. Getting this debate right will be crucial for Democrats in 2020. U.S.-Israel policy is a prominent issue that is exposing the splits between the party's core voters, its liberal flank and the more centrist Americans in Trump country the party hopes to reach. "What I fear is going on in the House now is an effort to target Congresswoman Omar as a way of stifling that debate. That's wrong," said presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent. "Anti-Semitism is a hateful and dangerous ideology which must be vigorously opposed in the United States and around the world," the senator said. "We must not, however, equate anti-Semitism with legitimate criticism of the right-wing, Netanyahu government in Israel." Other Democratic presidential contenders tried to walk a similar line. California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris said "we need to speak out against hate." But she said she also believes "there is a critical difference between criticism of policy or political leaders, and anti-Semitism." A statement from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said, "Branding criticism of Israel as automatically anti-Semitic has a chilling effect on our public discourse and makes it harder to achieve a peaceful solution between Israelis and Palestinians." She said threats of violence, including those made against Omar, "are never acceptable. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said, "Everyone is entitled to their opinion, they are allowed to have free speech in this country," Gillibrand said. "But we don't need to use anti-Semitic tropes or anti-Muslim tropes to be heard." Another member of the new crop of outspoken young House freshmen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, said the final product, as well as the way presidential candidates are now talking about the issue, showed "there's been some really great progress we've made." But Omar's rhetoric is taking Democrats to a place that leaves many uneasy. The new lawmaker sparked a weeklong debate in Congress as fellow Democrats said her comments have no place in the party. She suggested Israel's supporters were pushing lawmakers to take a pledge of "allegiance" to a foreign country, reviving a trope of dual loyalties. It wasn't her first dip into such rhetoric. The new congresswoman has been critical of the Jewish state in the past and apologized for those previous comments. But Omar has not apologized for what this latest comment. Pelosi said she did not believe that Omar understood the "weight of her words" or that they would be perceived by some as anti-Semitic. Asked whether the resolution was intended to "police" lawmakers' words, Pelosi replied: "We are not policing the speech of our members." Instead, she said, the goal was to condemn anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and white supremacy. Some of the House's leading Jewish Democrats wanted to bring a resolution on the floor simply condemning anti-Semitism. But other Democrats wanted to broaden the resolution to include a rejection of all forms of racism and bigotry. Others questioned whether a resolution was necessary at all and viewed it as unfairly singling out Omar at a time when Trump and others have made disparaging racial comments. There remained frustration that the party that touts its diversity conducted such a messy and public debate about how to declare its opposition to bigotry. "This shouldn't be so hard," Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., said on the House floor. Among the Republican dissenters, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a member of the GOP leadership, called the resolution "a sham put forward by Democrats to avoid condemning one of their own and denouncing vile anti-Semitism." In part, Democratic leaders were trying to fend off a challenge from Republicans on the issue. They worry they could run into trouble on another bill, their signature ethics and voting reform package, if Republicans try to tack their own anti-Semitism bill on as an amendment. By voting Thursday, the House Democratic vote counters believed they could inoculate their lawmakers against such a move. President Donald Trump's threat to shut down the southern border raised fears Monday of dire economic consequences in the U.S. and an upheaval of daily life in a stretch of the country that relies on the international flow of not just goods and services but also students, families and workers. Politicians, business leaders and economists warned that such a move would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping. "Let's hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools' joke," said economist Dan Griswold at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. He said Trump's threat would be the "height of folly," noting that an average of 15,000 trucks and $1.6 billion in goods cross the border every day. "If trade were interrupted, U.S. producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and U.S. exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market," he said. Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point. Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict "severe economic harm." In California's Imperial Valley, across from Mexicali, Mexico, farmers rely on workers who come across every day from Mexico to harvest fields of lettuce, carrots, onions and other winter vegetables. Shopping mall parking lots in the region are filled with cars with Mexican plates. More than 60 percent of all Mexican winter produce consumed in the U.S. crosses into the country at Nogales, Arizona. The winter produce season is especially heavy right now, with the import of Mexican-grown watermelons, grapes and squash, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas. He said 11,000 to 12,000 commercial trucks cross the border at Nogales daily, laden with about 50 million pounds of produce such as eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, cucumbers and berries. He said a closing of the border would lead to immediate layoffs and result in shortages and price increases at grocery stores and restaurants. "If this happens and I certainly hope it doesn't I'd hate to go into a grocery store four or five days later and see what it looks like," Jungmeyer said. Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, said a closure would be catastrophic. "Closing the border would cause an immediate depression in border state communities and, depending on the duration, a recession in the rest of the country," he said. "Our business would end," said Marta Salas, an employee at an El Paso shop near the border that sells plastic flowers that are used on the Mexican side by families holding quinceaneras, the traditional coming-of-age celebrations. Salas said her whole family, including relatives who attend the University of Texas at El Paso, would be affected if the border were closed. "There are Americans who live there. I have nephews who come to UTEP, to grade school, to high school every day," Salas said. Meanwhile, the Trump administration said Monday as many as 2,000 U.S. inspectors who screen cargo and vehicles at ports of entry along the Mexican border may be reassigned to help handle the surge of migrants. Currently, about 750 inspectors are being reassigned. That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border. The effects were evident Monday: Sergio Amaya, a 24-year-old American citizen who lives in Juarez, Mexico, and attends UTEP, said it normally takes him two minutes to cross the bridge. It took an hour this time. "The Border Patrol agent said it's going to get worse," Amaya said. Instead of ensuring the flow of goods across the border, the inspectors are being put to work processing migrants, taking their applications for asylum and transporting them to holding centers. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the reassignments are necessary to help manage the huge influx that is overloading the system. "The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it," Nielsen said. In addition to reassigning inspectors, Nielsen has asked for volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress requesting resources and broader authority to deport families faster. The administration is also ramping up efforts to return asylum seekers to Mexico. Apprehensions all along the southern border have soared in recent months, with border agents on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry there in March, more than half of them families with children. Associated Press writers Colleen Long, Elliot Spagat, Nomaan Merchant and Anita Snow contributed to this story. The student accused of stabbing two other students in a campus apartment at the University of Hartford on Sunday was arraigned at Hartford Hospital Monday. UHart commuter student Jake Wascher, 21, of San Diego, California, is facing charges of first-degree assault and criminal attempt to commit murder, police said. Witnesses told police that Wascher and two other students were in a campus apartment when the stabbing happened. According to court documents, Wascher and the victims were filming a class assignment when the stabbing happened. During the filming Wascher stabbed a 19-year-old man and a 21-year-old man with a kitchen knife before fleeing the apartment on foot, the documents said. Detectives say a University of Hartford student rehearsing a stabbing scene from a movie turned violent in real life. The 19-year-old remains in critical condition after undergoing an operation and is currently in the intensive care unit. The 21-year-old is in serious, but stable condition. Both men are being treated at St. Francis Hospital, officers said. The 21-year-old had a puncture wound to his chest and four to his back. The 19-year-old had a single puncture wound to his chest and back, according to police. Police said Wascher was spotted in the woods a few hours after the incident southeast of the main campus and was arrested shortly after. According to court documents, he told police that he was curious what it would be like to stab someone and that he was not provoked or in danger when he attacked. The documents state he told police he stabbed the victims because he was "into his character" and "my emotions got the best of me, and I acted a little to (sic) hard." Wascher was looked at by medical professionals at the scene, but was not injured, police said. On Monday, police said Wascher was transported to an area hospital. "The University of Hartford campus community is deeply saddened by the serious incident involving the assault of two students on campus this afternoon," the university said in a statement. The initial post on the University of Hartford Facebook page said there was police activity in the area of Village quad 2. "The University will continue to work closely with the Hartford Police Department in their ongoing investigation," a spokesperson for the university said. The university said they will provide counseling to members of the campus community that are in need of support or assistance after the incident. Wascher is being held on a $1 million bond. The investigation is ongoing. Ah, April Fools. A day to join the fun of tricking the gullible, annoying the jaded and testing the limits of your Photoshop skills. This year, social media blew up with posts by everyone from Tom Brady to the citys biggest food joints. Even sea otters got in on the action. While Sea Otter Savvy, an environmental non-profit out of Central California, may have fooled some folks online with that one, the trickery doesn't end there. April Fools' Day is a celebration, and everyone is invited to the party no matter how well you pull off the joke. Admittedly, some pranks are little less subtle than others. Take the Temecula Police Department (TPD) and the "new" canine racks mounted to their motorcycles. Some took the bait on Facebook and shared concern over the department's treatment of the dog in the photo possibly triggered by the "release buttonthat allows the K9 to be deployed from the motorcycle." Either way, the TPD had to clarify that canine in the photo is "perfectly fine, we promise." While not a lot of people fell for this one, a huge presence was made by California's national parks. Super Bloom, for example, was captured in full effect on Instagram by Death Valley National Park as rangers rode mutant bumblebees and cowered at 20-foot flowers sprung by growing season. Death Valley clarified the post by adding, "in all seriousness, check out our website." A little less on-the-nose was Zion National Park, who gave us some false hope by announcing plans for a zip line that would be installed at Angels Landing. The new feature, they explained, would let visitors repel from the top of the trail and "soar like a California condor," to avoid congestion with other hikers on their walk back. The park also was sure to mention, however, that actually putting in a zip line would "distract from the significance and could not improve these magnificent places." Still not fooled? Maybe you bought into the fake bat signal posted by the Lava Beds National Monument, or the announcement by SecretLA that Runyon Canyon would be closed every Saturday to anyone that isn't a social media influencer. Don't worry, that last one scared us a bit, too. By this point, you may have gotten your fill in April Fools-related content clogging up your timeline. But for those with insatiable appetites, restaurants and other food companies gave us an eclectic menu to choose from. Thirsty? Maybe you saw the new cold brew from Peets Coffee: The company clarified that "The Eekhojorntjesbrodord," comes with a tasty combination of salty licorice and Boerenkaas cheese to celebrate their "founders Dutch heritage." As a main course, Trejo's Tacos announced their expansion into Korean Barbecue: Or perhaps you wanted a little more bang for your buck taking home a complimentary puppy with your Dog Haus hot dog. To top things off for desert, Oreo's unveiled their newest "Cookie & Cremes" cookie as a way to put a spin on a snacking classic. We really made these. (Or did we?) [We didnt.] *Or did we?* pic.twitter.com/Hez3ioNQ3e OREO Cookie (@Oreo) April 1, 2019 After all this, youre probably stuffed. The jokes, the trickery, the deception its all so exhausting. Is Justin Beiber really a father? Does San Bernardino have a new area code? Who even knows anymore! You deserve a break. To relax, Queen Mary suggests kicking back and renting out one of the rooms at their legendary hotel. Just a warning, though, weve heard some spooky stuff has been going on over there. Happy April Fools! A man wanted in the shooting death of rapper and philanthropist Nipsey Hussle outside his clothing store in Los Angeles' Hyde Park area has been arrested, police said Tuesday. Eric Holder was arrested in the shooting of the 33-year-old rapper, whose legal name is Ermias Asghedom, the Los Angeles Police Department said. Holder is now being held on a $7 million bail. A 911 caller's report of a person believed to be Holder in Bellflower led to the arrest, the LAPD said in a news release. He was taken to a LAPD lockup where he was expected to be booked for murder, officials said. The shooting Sunday also wounded two other people outside Marathon clothing store that Hussle owned. The store was part of a revitalization effort in the community about 10 miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles. On Tuesday, LAPD Chief Michel Moore said the victim and suspect were in some type of argument before the man left the area and returned with a handgun. "We believe this to be a dispute between Mr. Hussle and Mr. Holder," Moore said. "It appears to be a personal matter between the two of them. I'll leave it at that." Details about the dispute were not immediately available. The coroner's office said Hussle died from gunshot wounds to the head and upper body. The shooting took place on Sunday afternoon at around 3:20 p.m. in the 3400 block of West Slauson Avenue, police said. The suspect ran to a nearby alley where a getaway vehicle was waiting, police said. A vigil outside Marathon Monday turned into chaos after a fight broke out, apparently between a person armed with a handgun and another individual in the crowd. In the confusion, hundreds of people stampeded from the area, trampling candles and other items left in tribute to Hussle. At least one person was stabbed and multiple others were injured, authorities said. Volunteers and residents restored memorial items early Tuesday. Actress and activist Angelina Jolie says promoting equality for women, combatting injustice, and helping refugees are the most important parts of her life after her six children. "But in many ways, they go hand in hand," she said in an interview late Friday with The Associated Press. "It's what I hope my children know is important." Off camera, the 43-year-old Oscar-winner is focused on trying to help millions of people caught up in the world's crises and conflicts, a passion that began in 2001 when she started working for the United Nations refugee agency and traveling to camps for displaced people often in poor developing countries. "There are simply so many people around the world suffering, and with so little and in so much pain, and to not be spending our time conscious of them and finding solutions for them it's an empty life," she said. In the search for solutions, Jolie in 2012 launched the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative with former British foreign secretary William Hague. It is now supported by 156 countries. Jolie said the initiative's work helped produce the first international protocol on how to document and investigate sexual violence, and national action plans to combat the scourge adopted by some of the worst-affected countries, including South Sudan, Congo and Colombia. "We tried to move the needle and we have ... because we are working with many governments, non-governmental organizations, civil society around the world and we are listening," she said. Jolie said sexual violence is important for her because it is seen as "a weapon of war." "It was not seen as a sexual act," she said. "It costs less than a bullet. It is something that is done systematically, not only to destroy the individual but their family, their community." What's worse, Jolie said, is that perpetrators are almost never brought to justice. Now, Jolie said, she is pressing for the United Nations to create a permanent, independent investigative body with a mandate to collect and assess evidence in cases involving alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and other grave human rights violations. During a whirlwind day Friday in which she gave a keynote address to a ministerial meeting on U.N. peacekeeping, this was one major issue she raised at high-level meetings, including with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the General Assembly president, Germany's foreign minister, Canada's defense minister and campaigners against sexual violence. "We're getting support," Jolie said. As part of another campaign to promote the importance of women's participation to peace, Jolie is teaching a master's degree course at the Center for Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics where she is a visiting professor. She said she has "extraordinary young students who see the issue as it should be seen ... and are committed to making change." Jolie said she is also working with ministers of defense and NATO on changing military doctrine and training practices to make the prevention of sexual violence a priority, and to increase the number of women in peacekeeping operations. Looking at the world today, Jolie said, "there is such an imbalance, when certain conflicts are addressed, and certain peoples are cared for and other peoples are dismissed, their rights denied, the fight for justice and accountability for the crimes against them not even in discussion." Despite the world being richer and more technologically advanced than ever before, she reiterated that "we seem incapable of upholding minimum standards of humanity in many parts of world." As examples she pointed to missile strikes on schools and hospitals, families bombed in their homes, chemical weapons dropped on neighborhoods and mass rapes of women, children and men. She noted the sharp rise in displaced people from less than 20 million when she started working for the refugee agency UNHCR to 65 million today and rising. When Jolie was asked if this was reversible, she recalled spending time with primatologist Jane Goodall, a U.N. Messenger of Peace, who told her "you can never lose hope ... because it is an active thing that you must have in order to continue a fight." "So I think we have to simply focus on what can be done and believe that things can be improved," she said. "I have a lot of faith in the younger generation, I do. I see these children around the world standing up and speaking about climate change. I hear my own kids questioning." Jolie said this generation is more connected "than we ever were," and despite possible complications "the more we know each other, the more connected the world is, and the more aware we are of what is happening and what is needed, I believe people will step up. I believe people are fundamentally good." As part of her focus on young people, Jolie is partnering with the BBC World Service to produce a global English-language current affairs television program for children to help them access impartial information and understand the world around them. For Jolie, education is key. "I spend so much time every day trying to understand what is happening, trying to get an education, trying to learn from colleagues around the world what is happening," she said. "It's difficult. It's a very complicated situation, and I'm not an expert as to why these things continue except I believe that we all know that we are failing people around the world." For her flight back to Los Angeles on Saturday, Jolie said her reading material includes the 20-page U.N. Security Council resolution adopted Friday to extend the U.N.'s biggest peacekeeping force in Congo, which is still plagued by fighting in the mineral-rich east and sexual violence. President Donald Trump is facing escalating criminal investigations in Washington and New York that are examining not only whether his campaign coordinated with the Kremlin but also whether he illegally bought the silence of two women who say they had sex with him. A look at the nearly three dozen people charged by special counsel Robert Mueller and unanswered questions about what may lie ahead for the president labeled "Individual-1" in court papers and his administration: WHAT'S THE LATEST? President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, says he bought the silence of two women because Trump was "very concerned" about how their stories of alleged affairs with him "would affect the election." Cohen told ABC News he's angry with himself for the deals and that he "gave loyalty to someone who, truthfully, does not deserve loyalty." Cohen was sentenced Wednesday to three years in federal prison. He pleaded guilty to several charges, including campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. Federal prosecutors in the case connected Trump to a federal crime, accusing him of orchestrating the hush-money payments during the campaign. Prosecutors have said Trump directed Cohen to arrange the payments to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal in the run-up to the 2016 campaign. Trump has denied he directed Cohen to break the law. A source told NBC News Thursday that Trump was in the room in August 2015 when Cohen discussed with the publisher of the National Enquirer could help counter negative stories about Trump's relationships with women. The tabloid's parent company has admitted to federal prosecutors that publisher David Pecker "offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate's relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided." The company admitted making a $150,000 payment "in concert with the campaign," and a person familiar with the matter told NBC News that Trump was in the meeting where the offer was made. Former assistant U.S. attorney Daniel Goldman told NBC News that if he were in the room, prosecutors may be able to argue Trump was the middle of a conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud." The White House didn't respond to NBC News' request for comment. UNANSWERED QUESTIONS Did the Trump campaign collude with Russia? That remains unclear, though there is mounting evidence of direct contact throughout the campaign between Trump associates and Moscow and evidence that individuals in Trump's orbit were discussing a possible email dump from WikiLeaks before it occurred. American intelligence agencies and Mueller have said Russia was the source of hacked material released by WikiLeaks during the campaign that damaged Democrat Hillary Clinton's presidential effort. Additional ties between Russians and Trump aides were alleged within the last week. Prosecutors revealed that a Russian contacted Cohen in 2015 and offered "political synergy" between Russia and the Republican campaign. A person familiar with the matter confirmed that that person is a former Russian Olympic athlete named Dmitry Klokov. Trump and his lawyers have returned a list of written answers on the collusion question to Mueller, but it's unclear whether investigators will return with more questions. Did the president obstruct the investigation? That is another unresolved question that Mueller is pursuing. Investigators have examined key episodes such as Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey and his fury over the recusal from the investigation of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. THE AMERICAN DEFENDANTS Paul Manafort: He 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. Although the charges don't directly touch Trump, he's nonetheless remained a figure of considerable intrigue and enjoys the continued sympathy of the president, who has left open the door for a pardon. Rick Gates: The longtime associate of Manafort and key Trump campaign aide was indicted last year alongside his mentor but months later split from him by pleading guilty to unregistered foreign lobbying work and agreeing to cooperate with Mueller. No sentencing date has been scheduled for Gates, indicating that his cooperation with investigators is continuing. Michael Flynn: He has admitted 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. He's since become a vital cooperator for Mueller, having met 19 times with investigators. Prosecutors aren't recommending any prison time when he's sentenced next week. Michael Cohen: He's at the center of not only Mueller's investigation but also a separate investigation into hush-money payments. In Mueller's 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 he "acted in coordination and at the direction of Individual-1" Trump. George Papadopoulos: The former foreign policy adviser recently finished a 14-day prison sentence after admitting lying to the FBI about a 2016 conversation with a Maltese professor who told him Russia had "dirt" on Clinton in the form of emails. 25 RUSSIANS Twelve military intelligence officers were charged in July with hacking the email accounts of Clinton's 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 American intelligence officials say was a broad conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf. That indictment did not accuse any Americans of participating in the conspiracy, though it did include an eye-catching detail: The Russian hackers, prosecutors say, made an attempt to break into Clinton's network just hours after Trump appeared to invite them to do so. In a July 27, 2016, speech, Trump urged Russia to look for emails that Clinton said she had deleted from her tenure as secretary of state. "Russia, if you're listening," Trump said, "I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing." A separate indictment charges 13 Russians with using 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 relied on bogus social media postings and advertisements fraudulently purchased in the name of Americans to try to influence the election. OTHER DEFENDANTS Marina Butina: The Russian woman accused of being a secret agent who admitted Thursday that she conspired to infiltrate the American gun-rights movement to gather intelligence on conservative political groups as Trump rose to power. The case isn't being brought by Mueller but it covers similar themes to his probe into Russian election interference. Konstantin Kilimnik: The Ukrainian native, who U.S. authorities say has ties to Russian intelligence, was indicted on obstruction of justice charges involving Manafort. The men are accused of trying to persuade two witnesses to lie about the nature of political consulting and lobbying work they carried out for Ukrainian interests. Richard Pinedo: The California man was sentenced in October to six months in prison for unwittingly aiding the Russian troll farm by selling stolen identifications and bank account numbers that were used by Russians to establish PayPal accounts and purchase advertisements on Facebook. Alex van der Zwaan: The Dutch attorney became the first person punished with prison in the Mueller investigation when he was given a monthlong sentence for lying to investigators about his contacts with Gates and Kilimnik and about a report prepared by his law firm about the trial of a former Ukrainian prime minister. OTHER NAMES YOU MAY HAVE HEARD Roger Stone: The longtime Trump confidant and self-proclaimed "dirty trickster" of Republican politics has been under investigation for months as prosecutors try to establish what knowledge he may have had about plans by WikiLeaks to release the stolen Democratic emails in the weeks before the election. Although a 2016 Stone tweet "Trust me, it will soon the Podesta's 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. Jerome Corsi: A conspiracy theorist and Stone friend, he's been under intense pressure from Mueller and even turned down a plea offer that would have required him to admit intentionally lying about a 2016 conversation he had with Stone about WikiLeaks. It's unclear when or if he will be indicted, but based on draft documents Corsi has released, prosecutors appear to believe that he misled them about email exchanges involving Assange and the purloined emails. Julian Assange: 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. Assange, under Justice Department scrutiny for years for WikiLeaks' role in publishing government secrets, has been an important figure in the Mueller probe as investigators examine how WikiLeaks obtained the stolen emails and whether any Americans were involved in coordinating that effort. Donald Trump Jr.: The president's 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 didn't receive anything interesting from the attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Both he and his father have suggested that anyone in that position would have taken the 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. Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report. "Warrior," a new Cinemax series inspired by martial arts icon and actor Bruce Lee, is readying for its premiere. But the show, some 50 years in the making, runs much deeper than just action sets and fight scenes. The drama follows Chinese martial arts prodigy Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji from Fast & Furious 6) after he emigrates to 1870s San Francisco in search of his sister. Instead, he finds himself embroiled in the citys mounting racial tensions and Chinatowns Tong gang wars. Despite its 19th century roots, the 10-episode shows executive producers said that Warrior brings important takes on Bruce Lees legacy, the Chinese-American experience and current immigration discussions to the table. Bruce Lees daughter, Shannon Lee, who also serves as executive producer, said her father first pitched the idea to studios in the early 1970s. In the original pitch, The Warrior, Lee was supposed to be cast as the lead. But he was told he couldn't be cast because he was Chinese, and American audiences wouldn't accept that, she said. There was a lot stifling of this [idea] as a possibility in my father's life and, in reality, to be able to make this is really something. Instead, "The Warrior" was retooled into the show "Kung Fu" with Caucasian lead David Carradine, who, according to reports, actually wore prosthetics to add a squint to his eyes to play the role. In a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times Carradine downplayed any controversy saying, "What I know is that I was sent a script and I said yes. What was I supposed to do, say no? I didn't even know at the time that Bruce Lee had been considered." Although Lee was both discriminated against and marginalized by Hollywood executives, he had a widespread influence on children of the 70s, 80s and later generations, including two other Warrior executive producers. Show creator and executive producer Jonathan Tropper (Cinemaxs Banshee and This Is Where I Leave You) became enamored with Lee after he started learning martial arts in the sixth grade and began watching Lee classics like 1972s Return of the Dragon (originally released as "Way of the Dragon") and 1973s Enter the Dragon after the actor had already died. Executive producer Jason Lin who has worked on projects like the Fast and the Furious franchise, HBOs "True Detective and NBCs Community has been a long-time Bruce Lee fan. After his family emigrated from Taiwan when he was 8 years old, Lin would often sit in front of the TV and watch shows like Kung Fu, a 1970s show whose Caucasian lead cast as a half Chinese character deeply confused the young Lin. "I didnt understand why there was a Caucasian man speaking in broken English, and no one ever explained it to me. When I got older, I heard about the Bruce Lee story about how he had pitched and they didn't want to cast an Asian to play an Asian-American role, which made no sense to me." Its because of shows like Kung Fu that Shannon Lee said her fathers lifetime goal was to bring an authentic portrayal of his cultures, of the Chinese experience and of his martial art to the world, and in particular the western world. Not only will Warrior inform viewers about Chinese-Americans past and Bruce Lees philosophies, but Tropper said the series will also become a real mirror on the racial issues were having today. Many of the shows anti-Chinese politicians and characters make comments like Put real Americans back to work. We definitely find some of that "Make America Great Again" stuff in the mouths of some of our politicians, Tropper said. As weve moved on, weve become a little more bold about inserting some of the rhetoric from political debates today into our script. With a plot that speaks to both Chinese American and white American perspectives and boasting a diverse cast from around the world, Warrior also adds to conversations about diversity and representation in Hollywood. Thats something Lin, who described his own struggles to break into the industry, was acutely aware of. We wanted to make sure we created an environment where we were able to go around the world, have people read the script and come and really earn the roles, Lin said. I am so proud of this cast...I felt like everybody, the whole cast, committed to these characters and you can feel that when you watch it. Tropper hopes that Warrior inspires people to watch the Bruce Lee classic films. Obviously, production values have changed, but the magnetism and the pure swaggering grace of Bruce Lee, there still hasn't been anyone who comes close to that, Tropper said. I would hope it just inspires people who see 'From the writings of Bruce Lee' to go back and watch 'Enter the Dragon,' 'Way of the Dragon,' 'The Chinese Connection' and 'The Big Boss' just to discover the source material. "Warrior" premieres on Cinemax on April 5. Eight people were injured after a construction crane crashed into Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas cruise ship at a shipyard in the Bahamas. The incident happened Monday afternoon at the Great Bahama Shipyard in Freeport. The ship was in dry dock and there were no passengers on board, said Royal Caribbean spokeswoman Melissa Charbonneau. "We are aware of damage to the dock structure and to construction cranes," Charbonneau said in a statement. "We are assessing damage to the ship." Eight people working on the ship were transported to a nearby hospital for treatment, according to the Royal Bahamas Police Force. All of them had non-life threatening injuries and most of them have been treated and released. It's unclear what caused the crane to crash and fall. The "Medicare for All" legislation that's become a clarion call for progressives has two little-noticed provisions that could make it even more politically perilous for 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. The legislation from White House hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with a similar measure in the House, lifts curbs on government health insurance for people in the country illegally and revokes longstanding restrictions on taxpayer-funded abortions. Embracing the changes will give Democratic candidates a boost with the party's liberal base in a wide-open primary fight. But such divisive issues could complicate things for an eventual nominee seeking voters in the middle. President Donald Trump has denounced Medicare for All as "socialism," and immigration and abortion are issues that energize Trump's political base. "It seems like the writers of the bills are just trying to pander to the Democratic activists," said Janet Robert, president of the anti-abortion advocacy group Democrats for Life. "You don't see this coming from Democrats who run in communities in more rural areas. You don't just need votes from Democratic activists to win the election." But Kristin Lynch, a spokeswoman for 2020 Democratic hopeful Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, said the senator believes "it is imperative that all residents of the U.S. have affordable, quality health coverage," including "comprehensive reproductive care." Booker is a co-sponsor of Sanders' bill. Other Democratic senators running for president have also signed on to their Vermont colleague's legislation: Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, and Elizabeth Warren of New York. Their offices did not respond to requests for comment. Beyond the Senate, a spokeswoman for 2020 Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg said he supports lifting current restrictions on taxpayer funding for abortion. Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, generally supports covering immigrants even if they are in the country illegally, but she said he'd have to see specifics. Neither Sanders' bill nor the similar measure in the House has a realistic chance of becoming law, with the Senate controlled by Republicans and Trump in the White House. But the House bill will get committee hearings this year, and supporters are pressing for votes. So far, the debate has centered on the bill's promise of quality care with no premiums or copays versus its potentially huge costs. Adding immigration and abortion take it in a different direction. The words "immigrant" and "abortion" don't appear in Sanders' bill, which is expected to be re-introduced soon, or in House legislation from Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Debbie Dingell of Michigan. Instead the legislation refers to U.S. "resident" and "comprehensive reproductive" care. Both Medicare for All bills would extend coverage to every U.S. resident, delegating the health and human services secretary to define residency. The House bill also prohibits the government from denying benefits because of "citizenship status." Both bills call for steps to deter immigration for the "sole purpose" of getting free medical care. That's different from former President Barack Obama's health care law, which limited benefits to U.S. citizens or nationals, and "lawfully present" immigrants. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates there are about 6 million people in the U.S. without legal permission who are uninsured. "Everyone, no matter who they are or what services they need, must have access to quality affordable health care," said Dingell. She said she's looking to start "conversations across the country to build the consensus that will ensure every person gets the health care coverage they need." On abortion, both bills essentially would sweep away the Hyde amendment, the term for federal laws stretching back more than 40 years that prohibit taxpayer money for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the woman. Such restrictions would not apply to Medicare for All and comprehensive reproductive care would be a covered benefit. Sanders' and Dingell's offices confirmed that abortion would be covered. Supporters of abortion rights say that's a long-overdue recognition of shifts in society and the power of women in the Democratic Party. "You had this election where women in particular showed up because health care is front-and-center in their minds," said Leila Abolfazli, who specializes in federal policy for the National Women's Law Center. "It makes sense that if you are going to do a new type of health care system it would include the full range of reproductive health services." Polls show Americans generally support abortion rights, but are divided on whether the government should pay. About 6 in 10 said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last fall. A Public Religion Research Institute poll earlier in 2018 found that 51 percent of Americans said government insurance programs for low-income women should not pay for abortion services, while 46 percent said they should. On immigration, a recent Gallup poll found about 4 out of 5 Americans support letting people living illegally in the country become citizens if they meet certain requirements. "We are not going to split hairs forever over your immigration status," said Sonya Schwartz of the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates on behalf of immigrants. But R.J. Hauman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports immigration curbs, said Medicare for All would just become a "pull factor," drawing more immigrants to the U.S. ___ Associated Press writers Sara Burnett in Chicago and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this story. The surge of migrant families arriving at the southern border has led the Trump administration to dramatically expand a practice President Donald Trump has long mocked as "catch and release." With immigrant processing and holding centers overwhelmed, the administration is busing people hundreds of miles inland and releasing them at Greyhound stations and churches in cities like Albuquerque, San Antonio and Phoenix because towns close to the border already have more than they can handle. Relief organizations in some cities are struggling to feed and house the migrants and warning that a public health crisis is taking shape, especially with sick infants and children among the many immigrant families who need medical attention. "We're asking volunteer doctors and nurses and community members to step up and do what the government should be doing. If this was a hurricane, FEMA would be on the ground helping," said Jim Gannon, CEO and executive director of Catholic Charities in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For many years, families arriving at the border were typically released from U.S. custody immediately and allowed to settle in this country with family or friends while their cases wound their way through the courts, a process that often takes years. Trump has railed against the practice, tweeting in November that it was over: "Catch and Release is an obsolete term. It is now Catch and Detain. Illegal Immigrants trying to come into the U.S.A., often proudly flying the flag of their nation as they ask for U.S. Asylum, will be detained or turned away." But in recent months, the number of families crossing into the U.S. has climbed to record highs, pushing the system to the breaking point. As a result, the government is releasing families faster, in greater numbers and at points farther removed from the border. Since Dec. 21, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set free more than 125,000 people who came into the U.S. as families. Customs and Border Protection is also overloaded, and instead of holding families for up to 72 hours before turning them over to ICE, it has started releasing them directly into the U.S. "The numbers are overwhelming right now," said Gregory Archambault, ICE director of enforcement and removal operations in San Diego. "Everybody is stressed. The agency is stressed, the (local governments) are stressed, the law enforcement agencies. Everybody is stressed because there are these mass numbers of people." ICE has been releasing asylum-seeking families so quickly that they don't even have time to make travel arrangements. Families are given court dates, a head of household is often fitted with an ankle monitor, and they are dropped off at a charity-run shelter or bus station. San Antonio received part of that surge in recent days, forcing the city to open a help center with food for migrants. In El Paso, where shelters and churches are at capacity and seats on buses headed out of the city are getting harder to find, authorities briefly resorted to holding migrants in a pen lined with concertina wire under the shade of a bridge that connects the American city to Juarez, Mexico. They closed the makeshift holding area over the weekend and moved the migrants to a place with more shelter. "They treated us like animals," said Herling Jerlyn, a teenager from Guatemala. Eduardo De Jesus Bermudez Florez waited for a Greyhound bus Tuesday to take him to Arlington, Texas, after spending time held under the bridge, where he said women cried through the night in cold temperatures. The immigrant from El Salvador himself teared up as he described his ordeal. He became separated from his wife and their 10-year-old daughter in Mexico before crossing the border, and he still doesn't know where they are. As De Jesus cried waiting for a bus, his 13-year-old son held the charger for his ankle monitor battery. "He'd say 'dad, I want to leave this place,'" said De Jesus, whose wife was once attacked with machetes by gang members. "I just told him that from here we can't go back. Your future is here. Our country is too violent." In Albuquerque, nearly 280 miles from the border, faith-based organizations have helped roughly 1,000 migrants since mid-February. The groups were small at first, but they have been growing and the arrivals have become more frequent. San Diego County recently opened a shuttered downtown courthouse slated for demolition to house up to 150 asylum seekers. A coalition of religious and civic groups that manages the shelter said it has helped more than 11,000 members of asylum-seeking families since authorities began large-scale releases in late October. About 22,000 immigrants have been released in Arizona in the past three months. In the Phoenix area, the nonprofit organizations and churches taking them in have a capacity of only 700 a week, said Connie Phillips, president and CEO of Lutheran Social Services in the Southwest. That means immigration authorities have to drop off families by the busload at places not designed to take them in, like the Greyhound station in Phoenix. The bus company is no longer allowing anyone without a ticket to wait inside, so immigrant families, including little children, stand outside until a volunteer can get them in touch with a relative to buy them a ticket. That sometimes takes hours. "The federal government is saying, 'This is not our responsibility,'" Phillips said. "And the cities and states have not stepped up to provide any kind of emergency funding." She added: "This is going to be a public health disaster. These are small children, these are families, these are babies, and we cannot have people just out in the heat." Authorities said family arrivals along the U.S.-Mexico border reached an all-time high in February of 45,827 arrests or denials of entry. "We didn't have family groups for years and years, like we have now," ICE's Archambault said. "Our facilities are not made for this. We have diapers and baby formula and all this stuff, like a nursery." In another sign of how U.S. authorities are being tested as rarely before, figures released Tuesday show a significant drop in prosecutions for illegal entry, even as arrests have climbed sharply. The numbers are at odds with Trump's vow to prosecute everyone who enters the country illegally. In February, Customs and Border Protection referred 8,998 illegal-entry cases to prosecutors along the border, a drop of 12% from January and 23% from October, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat, Nomaan Merchant, Colleen Long and Susan Montoya Bryan contributed to this story. What to Know Aides to Joe Biden struck a more aggressive tone as the former vice president faced scrutiny over his past behavior toward women Measles continues to spread with outbreaks in four states infecting more people in the first three months of 2019 than all of last year A man has been identified as the suspected shooter in the killing of rapper Nipsey Hussle, whose legal name is Ermias Asghedom, police say Get the top headlines of the day in your morning briefing from NBC 4 New York, Monday through Friday. Sign up for our newsletter here. Joe Biden Team Blasts 'Trolls' Amid Scrutiny Over Behavior Aides to Joe Biden struck a more aggressive tone as the former vice president faced scrutiny over his past behavior toward women. In a statement, Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted "right wing trolls" from "the dark recesses of the internet" for conflating images of Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends in his official capacity during swearing-in ceremonies with uninvited touching. The move came on a day in which a second woman said Biden had acted inappropriately, touching her face with both hands and rubbing noses with her in 2009. The allegation by Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, followed a magazine essay by former Nevada politician Lucy Flores, who wrote that Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014. The developments underscored the challenge facing Biden should he decide to seek the White House. Following historic wins in the 2018 midterms, Democratic politics is dominated by energy from women. The allegations could leave the 76-year-old Biden, long known for his affectionate mannerisms, appearing out of touch with the party as the Democratic presidential primary begins. Trump's Threat to Close Border Stirs Fears of Economic Harm President Trump's threat to shut down the southern border raised fears of dire economic consequences in the U.S. and an upheaval of daily life in a stretch of the country that relies on the international flow of not just goods and services but also students, families and workers. Politicians, business leaders and economists warned such a move would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping. Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point. Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict "severe economic harm." Disaster Aid Stalls in Senate Amid Fight Over Puerto Rico Senate Democrats blocked a Republican disaster aid bill, saying it doesn't do enough to help hurricane-torn Puerto Rico. The move tossed long-sought relief for victims of hurricanes, floods and western wildfires into limbo. The vote escalated a fight between Democrats and President Trump, who opposes further rebuilding aid for the U.S. island territory, which was slammed by back-to-back hurricanes in 2017. The 44-49 vote fell short of a majority, much less the 60 votes required to overcome a Democratic filibuster. It sent GOP leaders back to the drawing board but seemed unlikely to kill disaster aid efforts outright, since there is much political support to send aid to Southern farmers, wildfire-ravaged California towns and Midwestern flood victims. Trump allies such as Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., are among the strongest backers of the legislation, which has already faced significant delays. US Measles Cases Surpass Last Years Total in Just 3 Months Measles continues to spread across the U.S. with outbreaks in four states infecting more people in the first three months of 2019 than all of last year, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has confirmed 387 cases across 15 states from Jan. 1 through March 28, compared with 372 cases all last year. The health agency updates the statistics weekly. There are now six outbreaks, defined as three or more cases, across four states: New York, Washington, New Jersey and California, according to the CDC. This year is shaping up to be the worst year for measles since at least 2014 and is already the second-worst since the virus was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000. Measles has been making a comeback as parents increasingly refuse to vaccinate their children and unvaccinated travelers bring back the disease from other countries. In 2014, there were 667 confirmed cases, according to the CDC. Police Identify Suspect in Nipsey Hussle Killing A man has been identified as the suspected shooter in the killing of rapper Nipsey Hussle, whose legal name is Ermias Asghedom, the Los Angeles Police Department said. Eric Holder, 29, is wanted for homicide in the shooting of the rapper, along with shooting two other people, the LAPD said. Holder was last seen in a 2016 white 4-door Chevy Cruze with California license plate 7RJD742, police said. The shooting took place at around 3:20 p.m. in the 3400 block of West Slauson Avenue, police said. The suspect fled from the scene into an adjacent alley where a vehicle was waiting, the LAPD said. Detectives are asking for the public's help to find the suspect. Anyone with information related to his whereabouts or this deadly shooting is urged to contact South Bureau Homicide at 323-786-5100. Anyone wishing to remain anonymous can call the LA Regional Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS. Police made the announcement after dispersing a crowd that had gathered for a vigil of the slain rapper earlier in the evening. Magician David Blaine Under Investigation by NYPD Sex Crimes Magician David Blaine is under investigation in New York over sexual assault allegations, the NYPD confirmed. NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea confirmed during an unrelated press conference that there is an active investigation by the Special Victims Unit into the accusations against Blaine. According to a published report by The Daily Beast, detectives have taken statements from two women, although one of the claims may fall outside the statute of limitations. One of the women told investigators that Blaine, 45, sexually assaulted her inside his Manhattan apartment in 1998, The Daily Beast reports. Blaine has not been charged with a crime. He told The Daily Beast he has not been approached by police, who would not comment on whether detectives are seeking to interview him. What to Know A jury found a 22-year-old man guilty of murdering a woman when she went out for a run in Queens in 2016 Chanel Lewis faced murder charges in the death of 30-year-old Karina Vetrano A judge declared a mistrial last November when jurors couldnt agree on a verdict A jury found Chanel Lewis guilty on all counts at his retrial for the murder of New York City jogger Karina Vetrano, a case that stirred urban fears, helped change the state's DNA-investigation rules and raised questions about race and police procedures. Lewis was found guilty of murder and sexual abuse in connection with the death of the 30-year-old, who vanished while out for a run in her Howard Beach neighborhood in August 2016. Video from inside the courtroom shows Vetrano's loved ones erupting in cheers as the verdict was read. Lewis, however, didn't have any visible reaction. "Jubilation. Justice. Justice has been served," the victim's father, Phil Vetrano, said while leaving court. The jury reached the verdict on Monday evening, after five hours of deliberation. Closing arguments wrapped up in the afternoon, after a nearly three-week-long retrial. In a statement issued on behalf of Queens District Attorney Richard Brown Monday evening, Chief Assistant District Attorney John Ryan called Vetrano's death "a horrifying case." "It is my hope that as this case draws to a close, it will give the family of the victim some closure and comfort knowing her killer will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars," Ryan said. Lewis' attorneys, the Legal Aid Society, called the outcome "a complete miscarriage of justice." They had unsuccessfully sought a hearing Monday after getting an anonymous letter saying that police had pursued two white suspects before taking DNA samples from hundreds of black men - in what the defense called a "race-biased dragnet" - and coming to focus on Lewis. "Our client did not receive a fair trial," the Legal Aid Society said, adding that it would appeal. A previous trial ended in a hung jury in November. Although the retrial consisted of information and evidence presented in the first trial, startling allegations and new testimony were also presented in court this time around. Attorneys for Lewis dropped a bombshell allegation in court Monday, asking for new hearings based on an anonymous letter that suggested "possible alternate suspects" in the case. Prosecutors argued the anonymous letter writer was trying to "derail the trial." The judge denied the defense motion, but the team was submitting other applications to dismiss the case against Lewis. Responding to questions about the letter, the NYPD released a statement early Monday denying any investigative misconduct in the Vetrano probe. The department said that the murder has been painstakingly investigated and that the evidence shows Lewis is responsible for her death. Despite DNA evidence that authorities said linked Lewis to the scene and a taped confession, the first trial ended in a hung jury in November. Unlike the first trial, Vetrano's mother testified against Lewis. Cathie Vetrano took the stand last month and testified that she last saw her daughter alive when the 30-year-old checked up on her after she returned home from Sloan Kettering after undergoing a procedure. She described how she screamed in the street after she learned her daughter was dead. I was screaming in the street and an ambulance tried to put me in because I just had surgery. I saw my husband coming down the block and we just grabbed each other crying, Cathie said. During opening statements, the defense returned to its previous arguments, saying the confession was coerced by detectives who wore Lewis down until he finally gave them what they wanted, "a story," and that the DNA evidence was suspect. Vetrano was brutally strangled and sexually assaulted when jogging alone in Spring Creek Park, just blocks away from home. Seven months later, Lewis, 22, from Brooklyn, was arrested and charged after being linked through DNA evidence found under Vetranos nails. The prosecutions case during Lewis' first trial built on the alleged DNA and Lewis confession. However, the defense has said the mistrial went on to show there were issues with the DNA, including quantity and quality. His mother and family have insisted Lewis did not kill Vetrano. Lewis is set to be sentenced April 17 and faces up to life in prison. Joe Biden on Monday forcefully rejected comparisons of his embrace of colleagues, friends and their families during swearing-in ceremonies as vice president and the 2014 allegation he says he can't recall involving a Democratic candidate in Nevada. The questions about whether Biden's long history of physical expression, with heightened scrutiny in the #MeToo movement, prompted Biden to defend his actions, arguing he doesn't believe he ever acted inappropriately. But Biden's team likened associating images of Biden hugging or leaning in to speak to colleagues, friends and their family members to "smears" by "right wing trolls." Biden has defended his interactions with women, saying he doesn't believe he's ever acted inappropriately. But a Nevada politician's assertion that Biden's kiss on the back of her head made her feel uncomfortable prompted some Democrats to question whether the 76-year-old is too out of step with his own party to run a successful 2020 presidential campaign. The episode, recounted by Democrat Lucy Flores , highlighted an aspect of Biden's persona that has been publicly known for years: the affectionate whispers, hugs and shoulder squeezes he has long doled out to women, often on camera and at high-profile public events. In a moment of national reckoning over sexual harassment and the treatment of women by powerful men, some Democrats said Biden's actions have taken on a new light. "It looks different in 2019," said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist. Cardona said that while Biden's behavior is not automatically disqualifying for the presidency, "it all depends on how he continues to respond to this. He has to acknowledge that his behavior made some women uncomfortable." In a statement on Sunday, Biden said it was never his intention to make women feel discomfort and if he did so, "I will listen respectfully." And in light of photos circulating of Biden embracing or leaning in toward women during official ceremonies as vice president, Biden's team forcefully pushed back on comparisons to them and what Flores' alleged. "In other words, the familiar characterizations of these two photos that have been uncritically perpetuated, turn out to be very false," Biden spokesman Bill Russo said in a statement. Several women who worked for Biden stepped forward over the weekend to vouch for his character. And Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, disputed characterizations of her interactions with Biden during her husband's swearing-in ceremony. Pictures of the then-vice president whispering in Carter's ear and placing his hands on her shoulders ricocheted across the internet at the time. "The Joe Biden in my picture is a close friend helping someone get through a big day, for which I will always be grateful," Carter wrote in a post on the website Medium. Flores' account of the 2014 incident comes at a crucial moment for Biden. He's been wrestling for months with a final decision on whether to run for president, blowing through several self-imposed deadlines. Advisers are now eyeing an announcement later in April. But the Democratic primary has sped on without him, with more than a dozen candidates in the race, including a record number of women and minorities. Veterans like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have shown surprising strength, while newer White House hopefuls like California Sen. Kamala Harris and Texan Beto O'Rourke have drawn big crowds and displayed early fundraising prowess. Biden still leads most early polls, buoyed by broad name recognition and the goodwill he generated during eight years as President Barack Obama's No. 2. Given his experience and appeal with white working-class voters in Midwestern battleground states, he's also seen by some Democrats as the best-positioned candidate to defeat President Donald Trump. Nancy Bobo, an Iowa activist who was among Obama's earliest supporters in the state, shares that view. She fears the episode with Flores suggests Democrats may try to tear down their most-qualified candidate. "I can just see what's coming at him," Bobo said. "And it's going to come at him from the Democrats." None of Biden's potential rivals defended him following Flores' allegations. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she believed Flores and that Biden "needs to give an answer" about what occurred. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said, "Lucy Flores felt demeaned, and that is never okay. If Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic he'll have to engage on further." Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said, "I believe it's important to listen and take seriously any incident like this." White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Flores was "quite bold" to "go up against the highest levels of her political party" with the allegations and suggested that Biden should consider apologizing to Flores. Conway deflected questions about the numerous women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, allegations he denies. Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor, told The Associated Press on Sunday that she had been mulling coming forward for years. She said she approached New York Magazine about publishing her story and that the magazine had fact-checked her piece after she submitted it. According to Flores, the incident with Biden occurred in 2014 as the two were waiting to take the stage during a rally in Las Vegas. "I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. 'Why is the vice president of the United States touching me?'" she wrote. "He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head." Spokesman Russo said the former vice president doesn't remember kissing Flores. The AP tried to contact several advisers and aides from Flores' 2014 campaign but was unable to obtain any independent verification of her account. Flores, who endorsed Sanders in the 2016 campaign, said Biden's team has not been in touch with her since her story was published. She said she would be satisfied if Biden simply acknowledged the discomfort the episode caused her. Biden has been warned by advisers that his past statements and actions, including his long history of hugging and showing affection to women, would face fresh scrutiny in the 2020 campaign. In some cases, Biden's policy positions, such as his support for the 1994 crime bill that is blamed for mass incarcerations of minorities, are out of step with a party that has shifted to the left. But at other moments, like when he touts his ability to forge compromises with Republicans, he can appear to be speaking about a political era that many Democrats believe no longer exists. Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, said Biden's team needs to answer a key question before launching a White House bid: "Do they feel confident in their ability to understand this electorate and campaign in 2020, which is already different than 2016?" Even before Flores made her allegations, some Democrats were wondering whether Biden was meant for this moment. His team was widely panned following reports that they were considering tapping a younger Democrat or a minority like 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams as a running mate early in the primary in an attempt to counteract questions about Biden's age. While Biden's team denied that he was considering that step, Biden did float the idea to Abrams over a recent lunch, according to a Democrat with knowledge of the discussion. The Democrat was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and insisted on anonymity. Democratic strategist Rebecca Katz said that while Flores' descriptions may feel familiar to those who have watched Biden hug and hold hands with women for years, she put the focus on the women who were on the receiving end of his affections. "What Lucy Flores so bravely did is say, 'This is the way he made me feel,'" Katz said. "No one has ever done that before with Joe Biden." Read Biden's full statement below: "In many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once - never did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention. I may not recall these moments the same way, and I may be surprised at what I hear. But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. I will also remain the strongest advocate I can be for the rights of women. I will fight to build on the work I've done in my career to end violence against women and ensure women are treated with the equality they deserve. I will continue to surround myself with trusted women advisers who challenge me to see different perspectives than my own. And I will continue to speak out on these vitally-important issues where there is much more progress to be made and crucial fights that must be waged and won." Associated Press writer Stephen Braun contributed to this report. The cost of healthcare is rising. Nowhere is that more true than in the rising costs of air ambulances. A federal study conducted in 2017 found that the cost for medical flights nearly tripled from $15,000 in 2010 to $40,000 in 2016. It is costly, a very cost-intensive industry, said Don Wharton, the director of business strategy for Reach Medical Air, one of the leading air ambulance providers in California. Two Northern California families learned that fact the hard way. I was terrified, I didnt know what was going to happen, said April Harais, who watched as her one-year-old son Connors health deteriorate during an allergic reaction. She told NBC Bay Area that doctors ordered a helicopter to fly him 500 miles to a Childrens Hospital. That flight cost Harais $51,000 despite her having insurance. Northern California father David Rodriguez and his wife were hit with a $140,000 air ambulance bill after their twin boys developed a life-threatening blood condition. They too had health insurance. As was the case with April Harais, their insurance did not cover the transport. Reach Airs Don Wharton says those costs could be reduced if large public and private insurance agencies paid their fair share of the costs. It comes down to reimbursement -- actual reimbursement per patient, said Wharton. What we have found, again, there have been no adjustments on Medicare. So, what should families do when it comes to ensuring their children and loved ones can get the care they need without getting grounded in debt? First and foremost, said Wharton, is call your insurance company and find out if air ambulance flights are covered. If not, air ambulance companies such as Reach Air offer membership plans just in case of an emergency. Its kind of like Triple AAA, you buy it and for a nominal fee, in our case, it's close to $80, and well cover the entire family for the entire year, said Wharton. Wharton told NBC Responds that the plans are useful for residents living in rural areas where ground transportation is limited and ambulance rides could take time. But for April Harais and David Rodriguez, they had to learn about the rising air ambulance costs the hard way. Theres got to be a better way they can make better use of their equipment without having to overcharge everyone that flies, Rodriguez told NBC Bay Areas Responds Team. Mainstream medicine says there's no question that childhood vaccines save lives and prevent outbreaks of serious disease. But despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, skeptics still insist vaccines are dangerous and can actually cause autism and other illnesses. Those parents can in some cases get a medical exemption from vaccinations required to attend school in California. Public records reveal that Dr. Tara Zandvliet has written nearly one-third of those exemptions submitted to the San Diego Unified School District. On Tuesday she told NBC 7 she's not an "anti-vax" doctor. In fact, she said she administers vaccines every day and that her own children are fully vaccinated. NBC 7s media partner, the Voice of San Diego (VOSD), found that the San Diego Unified School District has approved 486 medical exemptions to the vaccine requirement, since 2015. Referring to her patients, she said, They are paying me for my time, they are paying me for my opinion they are not paying me for a result. According to Zandvliets website, children will be considered for an exemption if four relatives in their extended family have one of several autoimmune conditions. Hives, food, bee sting and other allergies might also qualify a student for an exemption. Critics say Dr. Zandvliet's basis for an exemption is based on an unproven theory that a family history of allergies or autoimmune disease is a medically acceptable reason to avoid a vaccine. Its another example of somebody basing a decision -- in her case to issue a medical exemption -- based on a theory with no evidence, said Dr. Mark Sawyer, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Rady Childrens Hospital. In the meantime, Ive got lots of evidence that by letting our immunization rates drop, shes creating a problem, because were seeing these outbreaks of disease, Dr. Sawyer told NBC 7. Dr. Zandvliet, whose office is in South Park, said shes being unfairly vilified for helping families navigate what she said are the complicated medical issues surrounding childhood vaccines. She noted that she rejects seven of every 10 requests for vaccine exemptions and said she often counsels patients to have their children vaccinated for some or all childhood diseases. Dr. Zandvliet also said she has vaccinated close to 100 children for measles so far this year. Diseases kill, vaccines can too. Thats science. You cant eliminate either risk, so we are going to have medical exemptions, we are going to have vaccines. Dr.Zandvliet also said part of the reason she approves more exemptions than other doctors is that she is in private practice. I have more freedom to do what is medically necessary for each of these patients. I don't have an administration telling me what may be appropriate or may or may not be supported by the higher-ups. One outspoken anti-vaxxer told NBC 7 that Dr. Zandvliet refused to give her children a medical exemption, based solely on her childs asthma diagnosis. Watch more with Dr. Zandvfliet on Politically Speaking this Sunday. The USS Decatur returned to San Diego after several months at sea. In the past NBC 7 would be there to show you the happy homecoming, the hugs and the kisses, but thats changed following a new security policy. In the last several months, the Navy has not publicized all of the military deployments or homecomings in San Diego or other parts of the world. So, our cameras were not there to capture all of the welcome home signs brought by family and friends in this military town as weve done for years. Visuals that Nicole Nyffenegger said she enjoyed seeing on television. Just to be able to see the expression of like the family members waiting being so surprised, Nyffenegger said. The Navy said the lack of notice for these deployments and homecomings is due to operational security reasons, according to U.S. Third Fleet spokesperson Lt. Rochelle Rieger. This is part of the 2018 National Defense Strategy put in place by the Trump administration and then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It called for the military to be less predictable and more agile. Part of the dynamic force employment concept will change the way the department uses Joint Force to provide proactive and scalable options for priority missions. Don't you think people should know that servicemen are coming home to recognize their service? said San Diego resident Daimon Mussell. Some military families told NBC 7 they wished we were there, but that they also understand. Safety first. Especially in our homeland, we have to be careful what we do now. That's just the way the world is now, said Navy veteran Godfrey Ramirez. But Mussell thinks by keeping the cameras away sends a different kind of message to those who want to do us harm. I don't think you should change your way of life because of that. That's were fighting against, right? he said. USS Decatur's commanding officer, Cmdr. Bob Bowen, spoke with NBC 7 about the guided missile destroyers time at sea. This deployment highlighted every capability that dynamic force employment provides, Bowen said. I am extremely proud of my crew for their hard work and dedication, and we are excited to be home. As for future homecomings, Rieger said, information on when and where forces are will be released on a case by case basis. At an Oval Office gathering earlier this year, President Donald Trump began touting his administration's new real estate investment program, which offers massive tax breaks to developers who invest in downtrodden American communities. He then turned to one of the plan's strongest supporters. "Ivanka, would you like to say something?" Trump asked his daughter. "You've been pushing this very hard." The Opportunity Zone program promoted by Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner both senior White House advisers could also benefit them financially, an Associated Press investigation found. Government watchdogs say the case underscores the ethical minefield they created two years ago when they became two of the closest advisers to the president without divesting from their extensive real estate investments. Kushner holds a big stake in a real estate investment firm, Cadre, that recently announced it is launching a series of Opportunity Zone funds that seek to build major projects under the program from Miami to Los Angeles. Separately, the couple has interests in at least 13 properties held by Kushner's family firm that could qualify for the tax breaks because they are in Opportunity Zones in New Jersey, New York and Maryland all of which, a study found, were already coming back. Six of the Kushner Cos. buildings are in New York City's Brooklyn Heights area, with views of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline, where a five-bedroom apartment recently listed for $8 million. Two more are in the beach town of Long Branch, N.J., where some oceanfront condos within steps of a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant and a Lululemon yoga shop list for as much as $2.7 million. There's no evidence the couple had a hand in selecting any of the nation's 8,700 Opportunity Zones, and the company has not indicated it plans to seek tax breaks under the new program. But the Kushners could profit even if they don't do anything by potentially benefiting from a recent surge in Opportunity Zone property values amid a gold rush of interest from developers and investors. Ivanka Trump's advocacy for the Opportunity Zone program "creates a direct conflict of interest with her spouse's investment in Cadre," said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Jared Kushner's interests are Ivanka Trump's interests and vice versa." Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner's financial disclosures show their personal financial empire is worth between $200 million and $800 million, with much of it in real estate, including Kushner's stake of between $25 million and $50 million in a holding company with an ownership stake in Cadre. Kushner previously had Cadre-related management positions, but he terminated those roles when he joined the Trump administration, holding onto his passive stake. The disclosures require recusal from dealing with policy matters that touch on real estate and "would have a direct and predictable effect on Cadre." Ivanka Trump also has interests in Trump Organization properties which are not located inside Opportunity Zones. "Ms. Trump has divested assets, set up trusts, removed herself from businesses and decisions about her investments," Abbe Lowell, ethics counsel for the couple, said in a statement. "In addition, she adheres to the ethics advice she has received from counsel about what issues she can work on and those to which she is recused." The Kushner Cos. did not respond to requests for comment. Ivanka Trump continued her promotion of Opportunity Zones in a series of tweets Wednesday. "Opportunity Zones will catalyze private sector investment that will create jobs + economic growth in overlooked communities nationwide," she wrote. But neither she nor her father commented on the AP investigation later Wednesday during a White House event where the president ordered the establishment of a council headed by Housing Secretary Ben Carson to aid the Opportunity Zone program. "All America regardless of zip codes should have access to the American dream," the president said. An administration spokesman earlier told the AP that individual state governors nominate communities for Opportunity Zone designation based on need and the White House "has nothing to do with those decisions." The Investing in Opportunity Act, which became law last December as part of the Republican-sponsored tax overhaul, never gained traction when it was first proposed during the Obama administration, but it quickly found favor in a White House headed and dominated by real estate developers and investors. A significant moment came when the law's key GOP sponsor, South Carolina U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, met President Trump after the violence-plagued white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017. Trump promised Scott his support for Opportunity Zones as a way to show his administration's outreach to minority communities. But Scott had already found a supporter weeks earlier in Trump's daughter, in conversations that grew out of previous meetings about passing a child care tax credit. Political sponsors and lobbyists told the AP that Ivanka Trump played an important role in promoting the legislation, while Kushner was also quietly supportive behind the scenes. "Ivanka was on board with it," said Sean Smith, Scott's communications director. After their first conversation, Smith said Scott and Ivanka Trump talked by phone and in person nearly a dozen times. He added that Scott also spoke to Kushner about the program, but noted, "It was much more Ivanka than Jared." A team from Economic Innovation Group, or EIG, a Washington think tank that pioneered the Opportunity Zones concept, met with top Kushner aides Reed Cordish and Chris Liddell two weeks before the tax reform bill was passed. Funded by Napster founder and early Facebook investor Sean Parker, EIG spent more than $1.4 million on lobbying over the past two years, both before and after the Investing in Opportunity Act passed. The group met with White House officials every quarter since the start of the Trump administration, and also met with frequently with officials from Treasury and other White House agencies, records show. "Creating the incentive to bring capital into communities that are currently being overlooked is just a tremendous opportunity," Ivanka Trump said as her father and a crowd of supporters nodded during the White House session February 14. Last month, at a dinner in Washington put on by the conservative Kemp Foundation, Scott singled out Ivanka Trump as his point person on the initiative. "When we were looking for help to get the tax bill across the finish line," he said, "I kept looking to the same person for help in the White House." There is no indication the couple directly intervened in the shaping of the Opportunity Zone program specifically to advance their financial interests. And public officials say there is no evidence that any actions were taken to influence the selection of Opportunity Zone boundaries. But backers of the program acknowledge that Ivanka Trump's out-front role drummed up interest from public officials and financial stakeholders. Along with the Kushner-tied Cadre Opportunity Zone funds, more than 50 real estate and private equity interests have made plans in recent weeks to create investment funds under the program, including several with ties to the couple and the Trump administration. Last month, former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci launched an opportunity zone fund tied to his Skybridge Capital investment firm, aiming to build projects worth more than $3 billion. Opportunity Zone funds have also been set up recently by New York-based Normandy Real Estate Partners and Heritage Equity Partners, two firms that have worked with Kushner Cos. on real estate ventures. They are flocking to what financial analysts say are some of the most generous tax benefits they have ever seen. Investors who plow capital gains from previous investments into Opportunity Zone projects can defer taxes on those gains up to 2026. If they decide not to cash out their investment for seven years, they get to exclude up to 15 percent of those gains from taxes. And they can permanently avoid paying taxes on any new gains from investment in the zones if they hold onto the investment for a decade. With capital gains taxes as high as 23.8 percent, the savings can easily add up. Government officials have estimated the program would cost $1.5 billion in lost tax revenue over 10 years, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has estimated the zones would attract up to $100 billion in renewal efforts. While the Opportunity Zone program mostly targets census tracts of high poverty and unemployment, it also allows "contiguous" tracts that might not be low-income, but are close enough to deprived communities to be eligible. Critics say that could allow developers to cash in by targeting zones already teeming with investment and gentrified neighborhoods. Amazon's recent decision to locate a new headquarters in the bustling New York City neighborhood of Long Island City, for example, drew rebukes following reports it was in an Opportunity Zone. A study by the Urban Institute in Washington found that nearly a third of the more than 8,700 Opportunity Zones nationwide and all 13 of the ones containing Kushner properties were showing signs of heavy investment and gentrification, based on such factors as rent increases and the percentage of college-educated residents. The most immediate advantage could come from the investment in Cadre. CEO Ryan Williams announced late last month that Cadre was starting up an Opportunity Zone fund that would aim to build major development projects in designated areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Miami. The company said the program "fits with Cadre's commitment to identifying opportunities in less-advantaged areas that are primed for growth." What to Know A cop was seriously injured after being run over by the hearse during a well-known rabbi's funeral in Borough Park, Brooklyn, sources say The cop allegedly fell during crowd control and then had his leg run over. The officer's condition is unclear Sources also say there was another injury when a drone that was flying overhead apparently hit another police officer in the head A hearse ran over the leg of an NYPD officer working crowd control at a huge funeral for a well-known rabbi in Brooklyn Tuesday, while another officer was hit in the head with a drone that had apparently run out of gas, police say. The cop apparently fell while working crowd control at the Borough Park funeral, which was attended by tens of thousands of people, and then got run over by a car in the funeral procession. He had a possible broken ankle, NYPD police commissioner James P. O'Neill said in an afternoon press conference. Another cop also suffered minor injuries from an errant drone."There was a drone that came out of the sky and hit a police officer," O'Neill said. "The drone apparently ran out of gas... and it landed on the officer's head." O'Neill said the drone was being looked at by police and at this stage no charges were being laid. The funeral was for Rabbi Yisroel Avrohom Portugal, who died at the age of 95. He was born in 1924 in Romania to Rabbie Eliezer Zusia Portugal who founded the Skulen Hasidic dynasty. Father and son settled in Bucharest following World War II and in 1959 they were imprisoned for teaching Torah and helping Jewish children, according to Assembly Member Simcha Eichenstein. They left Romania for the United States in 1960 after intervention by the U.S. State Department and Sen. Robert Scoop Jackson, Eichestein said. As a community we mourn the petira of the Skulener Rebbe zatzal, one of the last surviving remnants of the pre-Holocaust generation - a leader that was deeply respected by all, Eichenstein said in a press release. Rabbi Portugal was a truly inspiring and special individual that we should all aspire to be like. Law enforcement sources also say there was another injury when a drone that was flying overhead apparently hit another police officer in the head. Thousands were expected to show up for Rabbi Portugal's funeral. Images from the scene captured an immense crowd lining the streets. The youngest victim was 6, the oldest 89. Relatives said one extended family lost 10 members. The 23 people killed in the nation's deadliest tornado in nearly six years came into focus Tuesday with the release of their names by the coroner. They included 6-year-old Armando Hernandez Jr., known as "AJ," torn from his father's arms two days after singing in his first-grade class musical; 10-year-old Taylor Thornton, who loved horses and was visiting a friend's home when the twister struck; and Jimmy Lee Jones, 89, who perished along with his wife of six decades, Mary Louise, and one of their sons. "Just keep those families in your prayers," Lee County Coroner Bill Harris said, two days after the disaster. The search for victims, pets and belongings in and around the devastated rural community of Beauregard continued amid the din of beeping heavy machinery and whining chain saws. But Sheriff Jay Jones said the list of the missing had shrunk from dozens to just seven or eight. "We've got piles of rubble that we are searching just to make sure," said Opelika Fire Chief Byron Prather Jr. "We don't think we'll find nobody there, but we don't want to leave any stone unturned." Four children were killed, ages 6, 8, 9 and 10. The youngest, AJ, had taken shelter in a closet with his father and older brother when the tornado hit, said Jack Crisp, the boy's uncle. The punishing winds tore the family's home apart, Crisp said, and pulled both boys from their father's arms. "He had them squeezed tight, and he said when it came through, it just took them," Crisp said. "It just demolished the house and took them." The boy's father and brother both survived. AJ did not. Jackie Jones said she and her siblings rushed to her parents' house after the storm passed and nobody answered the phone. "They usually answer on the first ring," she said. The siblings found the home reduced to its foundation. One of their two brothers who lived at the house survived and was taken to a hospital. But Jimmy Lee and Mary Louise Jones, married for more than 60 years, had died along with their 53-year-old son Emmanuel. Those three deaths meant cousins Cordarrly and Demetria Jones lost their grandparents and an uncle. They said seven others killed were their cousins by blood and marriage. "Everybody in this area just about was related," said Demetria Jones, 28. "It's devastating." The body of David Wayne Dean, 53, was found by his son in a neighbor's yard after the twister demolished his mobile home. He was known as "Roaddog" because of his love for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. "He was done and gone before we got to him," said his sobbing widow, Carol Dean, who was at work at Walmart when the storm hit. "My life is gone. He was the reason I lived, the reason that I got up." The tornado was an EF4 with winds estimated at 170 mph (274 kph) and carved a path of destruction up to nine-tenths of a mile (1.4 kilometers) wide in Alabama, scraping up the earth in a phenomenon known as "ground rowing," the National Weather Service said. It traveled a remarkable 70 miles or so through Alabama and Georgia, where it caused more damage. Ninety people were injured in the Beauregard area, authorities said. Most have been released from the hospital. President Donald Trump said he will visit Alabama on Friday to see the damage. "It's been a tragic situation, but a lot of good work is being done," he said at the White House. In a news release Tuesday night, Trump approved a federal disaster declaration and ordered federal aid to assist state and local recovery efforts. Along the two-lane country road where some of the victims died, firefighters used heavy machinery to overturn pieces of houses that were blown into a gulley. A car sat atop the remains of one house. A red-brick foundation was all that was left at another lot. The search took its toll around Beauregard, an unincorporated area of roughly 10,000 people near the Georgia line. Church chaplain Ike Mathews walked down a road lined with broken trees and debris as he went to check on members of his congregation and emergency workers. "Yesterday I talked to some team members who had found bodies. They're hurting. The community is torn up. They started crying talking about it," said Mathews, an associate pastor at Rising Star Missionary Baptist Church. Many of the people living in the area are senior citizens who moved to the country after retiring from textile mills or an old magnetic-tape manufacturing plant that closed years ago, Mathews said. "They start with a mobile home and hope they can build a house someday. They invest in their homes, and they have a sense of legacy. It's something to leave their kids and grandkids," he said. It was the deadliest tornado to hit the U.S. since May 2013, when an EF5 twister killed 24 people in Moore, Oklahoma. Government teams surveying storm damage confirmed that at least 20 tornadoes struck on Sunday in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Cindy Sanford said one of her neighbors in Beauregard died in the storm, and another neighbor remained missing Tuesday. "I pray to God that they find her," Sanford said as picked through remains of her home, which tumbled in the wind and is now scattered across neighbors' land. Sanford said she left home with her 5-year-old grandson about five minutes before the storm struck after she got a feeling it was unsafe. "It was God," she said. "And then I heard the siren." Residents and business owners who sustained losses can begin applying for help by registering online at DisasterAssistance.gov or by calling 1-800-621-FEMA (3362). HOW YOU CAN HELP: Donate to the United Way of Central Alabama's Lee County Disaster Fund. The organization says 100 percent of your donation will be sent to United Way of Lee County to help those in need. For more information, visit the website here. Donations to the Red Cross Disaster Relief fund can be made at Redcross.org or 1-800-RED-CROSS. Donations can also be made to the Red Cross of East Alabama. The Alabama Governor's Emergency Relief Fund, created after Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina hit the region, supports individuals and families recovering from natural disasters and severe weather in Alabama. More information here. Associated Press writers Kate Brumback and Jeff Martin in Atlanta and Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this report. 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. 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 A growing list of Democratic presidential contenders want the U.S. government to legalize marijuana, reflecting a nationwide shift as more Americans look favorably on cannabis. Making marijuana legal at the federal level is the "smart thing to do," says California Sen. Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor whose home state is the nation's largest legal pot shop. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a prominent legalization advocate on Capitol Hill, says the war on drugs has been a "war on people." Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke, who appears poised to join the 2020 Democratic field, has written a book arguing marijuana legalization would hobble drug cartels. In an email to supporters this week, he called again to end the federal prohibition on marijuana. "Who is going to be the last man more likely than not a black man to languish behind bars for possessing or using marijuana when it is legal in some form in more than half of the states in this country?" O'Rourke wrote. It's a far different approach from the not-so-distant past, when it was seen as politically damaging to acknowledge smoking pot and no major presidential candidate backed legalization. In 1992, then-White House candidate Bill Clinton delivered a famously tortured response about a youthful dalliance with cannabis, claiming he tried it as a graduate student in England but "didn't inhale." And two decades before that, President Richard Nixon unleashed a war on marijuana and other drugs and it helped carry him to a second term. This year, leading Democrats hold similar positions supporting legalization. Presidential hopefuls in the Senate who have co-sponsored Booker's legislation to end the federal prohibition include Harris, New York's Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Vermont's Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on decriminalizing pot in his 2016 presidential bid. Another 2020 Democratic candidate, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, supports legalization and believes states should have the right to determine how to handle marijuana regulation within their borders but hasn't signed on to Booker's legislation. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who entered the contest this month, said in his announcement speech it's "about time" to legalize the drug nationally. During his 2012 run for governor, Inslee opposed the ballot initiative that made Washington one of the first two states to legalize so-called recreational marijuana. As governor, however, he has frequently touted what he describes as Washington's successful experiment with regulation and has urged the Obama and Trump administrations not to intervene. He recently began pardoning people with small-time marijuana convictions. The widespread endorsement for national marijuana reform among Democrats tracks the nation's evolving views. In the late 1960s the era of Woodstock and Vietnam 12 percent of Americans supported legalization, according to the Gallup poll. By last year, the figure hit a record 66 percent. About 75 percent of Democrats support legalization, along with a slim majority of Republicans. Most Americans now live in states where marijuana is legal in some form. Pot dispensaries are familiar sights in cities like Los Angeles and Denver, and conservative strongholds like Utah and Oklahoma have established medical marijuana programs. To Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-legalization advocacy group, it's not surprising there's broad support among candidates to end the federal prohibition. "It's no longer popular to be in favor of marijuana prohibition," Tvert said. But there are limits: "We are not seeing any candidates saying, 'I am currently a marijuana user,'" he added. The trajectory toward legal pot has come with generational change. In a 2003 Democratic presidential forum, candidates John Kerry, John Edwards and Howard Dean acknowledged using marijuana in the past. Former President Barack Obama has been open about his youthful drug use, sometimes with a jab of humor: "When I was a kid, I inhaled. Frequently. That was the point," he said in 2006. In a recent radio interview on the syndicated "The Breakfast Club," Harris recalled smoking pot in her college days in the 1980s. She was an early supporter of medical marijuana but the Los Angeles Times reported that in 2010, the year she was elected California attorney general, that Harris opposed an initiative to more broadly legalize marijuana. How potent the legal pot platform might be with voters in 2020 is only a guess. Polls show some of the strongest support comes from younger voters. In California, millennials are now the largest generation among registered voters. However, younger voters are also the most likely to stay home on Election Day, said Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc., a nonpartisan research firm. President Donald Trump's position on cannabis remains somewhat opaque. He has said he supports laws legalizing medical marijuana but hasn't offered a definitive position on broader legalization. In a departure from his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, new Attorney General William Barr has said he will "not go after" marijuana companies in states where cannabis is legal, even though he personally believes the drug should be outlawed. Standing somewhat apart from the Democratic field is the man who presided over one of the first legal recreational marijuana marketplaces in the nation, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper opposed the ballot measure that fully legalized marijuana in Colorado in 2012. But he said he accepted the will of the voters and won praise for implementing the measure. He says his "worst fears" about legalization haven't been realized and considers the system better than when the drug was illegal. Still, Hickenlooper isn't willing to go as far as some competitors. Rather than calling for national legalization, he wants the drug to no longer be a Schedule 1 controlled substance so it can be studied. He doesn't think the federal government "should come in and tell every state that it should be legal," believing states should make their own determinations. "I trust this process by which states should be the models of, or laboratories of, democracy," he said. ___ Associated Press Writer Gene Johnson in Seattle contributed. An Illinois congressman has been deployed with his Air National Guard unit to the U.S.-Mexico border. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, of the 16th Congressional District serves as a reconnaissance pilot and holds the rank of lieutenant colonel, his office said. U.S. active-duty troops from dozens of units around the country are flowing to the southern border, as part of the latest plan to send 3,750 new forces to beef up surveillance and install more wire barriers, the Associated Press reported. Wednesday. As of this week, the military had installed about 105 miles of wire barriers along the border, and plans to put in another 140 miles of concertina wire. The bulk of that will be in California and Arizona, in locations between ports of entry that are identified by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as vulnerable. Many of the troops who have been serving on the border mission are going home. As of Monday, there were a bit more than 2,000 active-duty forces there. That number is expected to go up to more than 4,300. Kinzingers office said he was humbled to serve the 16th District both as a congressman and as a pilot in the Air National Guard. In both of these roles, Congressman Kinzinger fights to make our national security stronger, our border more secure, and our communities safer, his communications director, Maura Gillespie, said in a statement. The congressmans D.C. and Illinois offices will stay open in his absence, Gillespie said. One year out from the start of the 2020 census, Census Bureau officials set out Monday to demonstrate the importance of the head count for all Americans. President Donald Trump offered a different message, saying the count will be "meaningless" if it doesn't include a citizenship question. In a tweet Monday, Trump blamed "Radical Left Democrats" for opposing the "all important" question on citizenship. The Trump administration wants to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census. But the idea faces court challenges from Democratic-leaning states and communities that argue it would make immigrants and their families less likely to respond to the constitutionally mandated tally and thus make the count less accurate. The official counting begins on April 1 next year. To mark the date one year out, Census Bureau officials held a briefing Monday to begin raising awareness and project confidence that they're up to the monumental task. Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham declined to answer a question about the president's tweet, saying "we really want to restrict our comments to talking about the great job we're doing, where we are and how it's going to help this nation." Dillingham noted that the census for the first time will give people the chance to respond online. People can also respond by telephone and mail. He cited how easy it will be to provide requested information and to assure that the information will be secure and confidential. "But probably the message we really want to emphasize is how important it is," Dillingham said. "We now live in an information age where accurate data improves the quality of our lives and supports our thriving economy." The decennial census is used to help determine how about $675 billion in federal dollars is distributed each year. State and local governments use it to make decisions about where to locate schools and health clinics and provide social services and improve roads and bridges. The survey results are also used to distribute electoral college votes and congressional district seats. The citizenship question has been caught up in litigation in federal courts, where lower courts have ruled that the administration's haste to include the question violated federal law and the Constitution. Trump tweeted that without a citizenship question, the "Report would be meaningless and a waste of the $Billions (ridiculous) that it costs to put together!" Against the advice of career officials at the Census Bureau, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decided last year to add the citizenship question to the survey for the 10-year headcount, saying the Justice Department requested the question to improve enforcement of the federal Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court is hearing the Trump administration appeal of a federal judge's ruling in New York that the decision violated federal law. Since then, a judge in California has said a citizenship question also would violate the Constitution. A resolution of the citizenship matter is needed soon to allow the government to start printing the census questionnaire. House Democrats are also investigating the decision by Ross to add the citizenship question. A congressional panel will consider issuing subpoenas on Tuesday if it doesn't get a commitment from the Commerce Department that it will provide certain documents and witnesses. A Commerce Department official asked Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, to hold off on considering or issuing the subpoena "while our good-faith dialogue continues." Cummings warned the department on Friday that his committee wanted to know by Monday whether it would produce the documents and witness interviews his committee has been seeking. Michael Platt Jr., an assistant secretary at the Commerce Department, said in a letter obtained by The Associated Press the department believes "the rush to issue a subpoena is premature." Platt said the department's staff is working at full capacity on "both its normal business and its multiple Congressional engagements, and I believe your one-day response demand is inconsistent with your constitutional obligation to accommodate the department." "We respectfully request adequate time to consider your letter and requests," Platt wrote Monday. What to Know Meek Mill and several state lawmakers unveiled new legislation aimed at reforming Pennsylvanias probation and parole system. The bill would reduce probationary periods and minimize restrictions on technical violations. A local lawmaker said they hope to have the legislation written and filed within the next few weeks. Philly hip hop star Meek Mill and several state lawmakers unveiled new legislation aimed at reforming Pennsylvanias probation and parole system. Mill, along with 76ers co-owner Michael Rubin, news commentator Van Jones, state Reps. Jordan Harris (D-Philadelphia) and Sheryl Delozier (R-Cumberland) announced the proposed bill Tuesday afternoon outside the municipal services building in Center City. "I'm only here to use my platform and my voice to speak for the people who dont have a voice," Mill, born Robert Rihmeek Williams, said. "It's a lot of young men actually locked behind the walls and stacked up with probation and trying to do well with themselves and move forward, but they cant because the odds are so great against them. The legislation would prevent the courts from sentencing a person to consecutive probation sentences, prevent the court from extending a persons time on probation or parole due to nonpayment of fines and fees and establish a system of incentives that would reward good behavior. The bill would also ensure that people under supervision wouldnt be re-incarcerated for testing positive for marijuana, associating with someone with a criminal history or traveling outside their jurisdiction, unless it was proven they were trying to escape supervision. Mill was jailed for violating his probation and has become one of the most famous faces behind the criminal justice reform movement since his release. Both he and Rubin are co-chairs of the REFORM Alliance, a collective aimed at passing probation and parole bills at the state level to reduce the number of people under the criminal justice system. With this proposed legislation, we want to put people on probation and parole in positions to succeed not to wind up back in prison and perpetuate an ongoing cycle, Jones, the CEO of the REFORM Alliance, said. The issue of how long those convicted of a crime should spend in the justice system outside of prison has received scrutiny across the country. Its an issue all too familiar with Philadelphia native Darrell Briddell. If you go and do how many years you have to do, that should be your debt to society, Briddell said. Briddell is under supervised release after serving time in federal prison for bank robbery. He told NBC10 it could impact his job with a demolition company. Lets say my job says weve got a job in Pittsburgh. I cant just pick up and go with the job to Pittsburgh, Briddell said. Now I have to call my PO. Listen, I have a job in Pittsburgh, this that and the third. Shes going to have to do her diligence for me to be able to go to Pittsburgh, and to her it might be like, Its not worth it. No, you cant go. Now that eliminates me from working at this job. A local lawmaker supporting the bill told NBC10 they hope to have the legislation written and filed within the next few weeks. Johns Hopkins University will be allowed to create its own armed police force, under a measure that received final approval by the Maryland General Assembly on Monday night. The Maryland Senate voted 42-2 to pass the bill. That sends the measure to Gov. Larry Hogan, and a spokesman for the Republican governor said he will likely sign the bill. "The governor looks forward to reviewing the final legislation, but he appreciates the support the Johns Hopkins police force initiative has received from both sides of the aisle, and strongly believes it will help make Baltimore City a safer place," said Michael Ricci, Hogan's spokesman. The measure has sparked debate between those who want to increase campus safety as Baltimore struggles with violent crime and those who fear police profiling. The legislation would allow the private institution to have its own police force at its academic campuses and main medical campus in Baltimore. In addition to support in both chambers of the General Assembly, which is controlled by Democrats, supporters have included billionaire alumnus Michael Bloomberg and Democratic U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings. Opponents have included a group called Students Against Private Police, which has led multiple protests, and faculty members, as well as people who live near the university. Sen. Mary Washington, a Democrat who is one of two Baltimore senators who voted against the bill, said Monday night that she thought the measure created a foundation for campus policies and new police forces, but she said she still had concerns that an accountability board should be broadened. "And I do fundamentally believe that policing should be a publicly controlled entity and that privatization is not the way to go," Washington said. Efforts to create a police force for the university in Baltimore began after a spate of robberies in late 2017. Researchers at the school examined trends at Baltimore universities equipped with armed police and found Hopkins had a disproportionate number of aggravated assaults, according to Ronald Daniels, the university's president. While state law allows public institutions to have police departments, a private institution like Hopkins needed the legislation. The university said in a statement that the institution's work is just beginning, with many steps to come in the process of building a Johns Hopkins Police Department. "We also understand that differences of opinion remain on this topic, and we are firmly committed to working with our students, staff, faculty and neighbors to consider varying viewpoints and ensure public accountability, public transparency and public input within a JHPD," the university said. A police officer suffered a medical emergency while investigating a shoplifting incident at a Maryland mall Tuesday. The Montgomery County police officer was investigating the theft inside Westfield Wheaton when the suspect ran. The officer chased the suspect and called for backup but collapsed. Other officers responded, and the suspect was arrested, but the responding officers noticed the original officer was struggling with a medical issue. He was rushed to Holy Cross Hospital, where he is in critical but stable condition. Upon the arrival of other officers their arrival was very quick it was recognized that he was in medical distress, acting Police Chief Russell Hamill said. Our officers rendered immediate aid to him and were quickly assisted by Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service personnel. The officer was conscious and alert when he was taken to the hospital. I really owe a great debt of thanks to our officers who jumped on their brother officer, immediately provided him aid, Hamill said. Police seized documents and bodies of dead animals from a pet store in Virginia after an undercover investigation by the Humane Society of the United States revealed the bodies of 14 dead rabbits in the stores freezer. Over a period of months, HSUS investigated the Petland, Inc. location at 9404 Main St. Suite A in the city of Fairfax, using hidden cameras to document possible animal abuse. Their findings included a freezer full of more than a dozen dead rabbits, which Petland staff claimed got sick and they just let ... die, according to a HSUS press release. The dead rabbits had accumulated over a period of two months. HSUS said it uncovered it is a regular practice of the Petland staff to not administer veterinary care to sick or dying rabbits. A HSUS investigator also found a dead rabbit in a plastic basket under a table in a back room, according to the press release. When asked why the dead rabbit was there, an employee said, Thats where we hide them. In another instance, a customer returned a rabbit to the store after it seized and died shortly after it was purchased. Petland staff simply added the dead rabbit to the body pile in the freezer, and made no inquiry into the cause of death, according to HSUS. HSUS also traced the main supplier of Fairfax Petland locations rabbits to Wagners Farm in Centreville, Maryland. The farms owner told HSUS that they sell about 60 rabbits per month to the Fairfax Petland location. This would require the farm to obtain a USDA license, which HSUS could not find any record of the farm holding. Petland is the largest chain of U.S. pet stores that still sells puppies and rabbits, according to HSUS. Its heartbreaking to see gentle rabbits treated as if they are no more than stuffed toys. No pet deserves to be treated like a disposable product, and its time for Petland to change its business model to reflect that, said John Goodwin, senior director of HSUS Stop Puppy Mills Campaign, in the companys press release. City of Fairfax police have not placed any charges yet, as the case is still under investigation. Greece is still grappling with the fallout of the 2008 debt crisis and a continual flow of migrants arriving on its shores, which have left an already-stressed welfare system struggling to cope, NBC News reports. Meanwhile, one migrant opted to return to his war-torn homeland after facing extreme hardship in Greece. My family will sell some gold so I can go again, said Khasim. They say I must go again. Liza Schuster, an expert on return migrations to Afghanistan at City, University of London, said families often will have made a significant financial sacrifice to send someone to Europe and can be angry if they later show up on the doorstep. You can find two, three, four, five, very angry brothers saying, 'Weve put all of this together to save you and now not only are you not safe ... but weve got no future, we have nothing,' she said. Declaring it's "very clear" President Donald Trump obstructed justice, the chairman of the House committee that would be in charge of impeachment says the panel is requesting documents Monday from more than 60 people from Trump's administration, family and business as part of a rapidly expanding Russia investigation. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the House Judiciary Committee wants to review documents from the Justice Department, the president's son Donald Trump Jr. and Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former White House counsel Don McGahn also are likely targets, he said. "We are going to initiate investigations into abuses of power, into corruption and into obstruction of justice," Nadler said. "We will do everything we can to get that evidence." Asked if he believed Trump obstructed justice, Nadler said, "Yes, I do." Nadler isn't calling the inquiry an impeachment investigation but said House Democrats, now in the majority, are simply doing "our job to protect the rule of law" after Republicans during the first two years of Trump's term were "shielding the president from any proper accountability." "We're far from making decisions" about impeachment, he said. In a tweet on Sunday, Trump blasted anew the Russia investigation, calling it a partisan probe unfairly aimed at discrediting his win in the 2016 presidential election. "I am an innocent man being persecuted by some very bad, conflicted & corrupt people in a Witch Hunt that is illegal & should never have been allowed to start - And only because I won the Election!" he wrote. Nadler's comments follow a bad political week for Trump. He emerged empty-handed from a high-profile summit with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un on denuclearization and Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in three days of congressional testimony, publicly characterized the president as a "con man" and "cheat." Newly empowered House Democrats are flexing their strength with blossoming investigations. A half-dozen House committees are now probing alleged coordination between Trump associates and Russia's efforts to sway the 2016 election, Trump's tax returns and possible conflicts of interest involving the Trump family business and policy-making. The House oversight committee, for instance, has set a Monday deadline for the White House to turn over documents related to security clearances after The New York Times reported that the president ordered officials to grant his son-in-law Jared Kushner's clearance over the objections of national security officials. Nadler's added lines of inquiry also come as special counsel Robert Mueller is believed to be wrapping up his work into possible questions of Trump campaign collusion and obstruction in the Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. In his testimony, Cohen acknowledged he did not witness or know directly of collusion between Trump aides and Russia but had his "suspicions." House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Sunday accused House Democrats of prejudging Trump as part of a query based purely on partisan politics. "I think Congressman Nadler decided to impeach the president the day the president won the election," McCarthy said. "Listen to exactly what he said. He talks about impeachment before he even became chairman and then he says, 'you've got to persuade people to get there.' There's nothing that the president did wrong." "Show me where the president did anything to be impeached...Nadler is setting the framework now that the Democrats are not to believe the Mueller report," he said. Nadler said Sunday his committee will seek to review the Mueller report but stressed the investigation "goes far beyond collusion." He pointed to what he considered several instances of obstruction of justice by the president, including the "1,100 times he referred to the Mueller investigation as a 'witch hunt'" as well Trump's abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey in 2017. According to Comey, Trump had encouraged the then-FBI director to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump has denied he told Comey to end the Flynn probe. "It's very clear that the president obstructed justice," Nadler said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has kept calls for impeachment at bay by insisting that Mueller first must be allowed to finish his work, and present his findings publicly though it's unclear whether the White House will allow its full release. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who chairs the House intelligence committee, on Sunday also stressed that it's too early to make judgments about impeachment. "That is something that we will have to await Bob Mueller's report and the underlying evidence to determine. We will also have to look at the whole body of improper and criminal actions by the president including those campaign finance crimes to determine whether they rise to the level of removal from office," Schiff said. Nadler and McCarthy spoke on ABC's "This Week," and Schiff appeared on CBS' "Face the Nation." ___ Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report. Northgate Public Services makes three acquisitions to strengthen its international healthcare screening offering London & Tokyo, April 2, 2019 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) and Northgate Public Services (NPS), a wholly owned NEC subsidiary, today announced that NPS acquired three EMIS Group plc businesses for 14.9 million, to strengthen its growing screening and preventative healthcare offering. The three acquired EMIS Group plc businesses, Digital Healthcare Limited, Medical Imaging UK Limited and MIDRSS Limited, have 25 years' experience in diabetic eye screening, assessing around 50,000 patients every month in 1,200 different locations. NPS already has a significant presence in this sector, helping to screen 10 million babies for the Newborn Hearing Screening Program in England and Northern Ireland and testing 500,000 patients with diabetes for retina damage and sight loss under Scotland's Diabetic Screening Programme. These acquisitions will give NPS a screening presence in eight countries across the globe, including the rapidly growing healthcare market in India. The total cash consideration for the acquisition was 14.9 million, made up of 14 million paid on completion (inclusive of 5 million of intercompany debtor balances settled in cash by EMIS Group on completion) and 0.9 million of contingent consideration. Stephen Callaghan, chief executive officer of NPS, said, "Uniting our extensive experience in healthcare screening will bring the best possible preventative technology and care to the public, initially in the UK and subsequently in other parts of the world. We are very proud of our existing screening programmes in UK, Ireland and India and are very much looking forward to extending our offering to secure the best possible patient outcomes. Preventative measures, such as screening, will have an increasing role to play in improving health in both the UK and worldwide." Lydia Saunders, director and general manager of EMIS Care, said, "Joining the NPS team brings new and exciting prospects for the detection and prevention of serious health conditions to protect the public internationally." About NEC Corporation NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. The NEC Group globally provides "Solutions for Society" that promote the safety, security, efficiency and equality of society. Under the company's corporate message of "Orchestrating a brighter world," NEC aims to help solve a wide range of challenging issues and to create new social value for the changing world of tomorrow. For more information, visit NEC at https://www.nec.com. About Northgate Public Services Northgate Public Services (NPS) has a proven history of creating game changing software for the public sector. Our ability to put vital information into the hands of those that need it is the reason why 95% of local authorities work with us to deliver better services. It's why 15 different police forces have chosen our CONNECT software to improve decision making at the frontline. It's why 200 housing providers use NPS systems to manage their two million homes efficiently and it's why the NHS choose our technology to help them screen every baby in the UK for hearing loss. Based in the UK and working around the world, our 2,300 employees help improve the services that matter most. NPS is part of the NEC Corporation ("NEC", TSE: 6701), a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people worldwide https://www.northgateps.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nec/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/NECglobalOfficial Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nec.global/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/NEC_corp NEC is a registered trademark of NEC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Other product or service marks mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. NEC Corporation. Joe Biden isn't a presidential candidate yet. But with two key rivals already getting out of the way, the former vice president has more space to court voters who could help him claim the Democratic nomination. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown said Thursday he wouldn't run for president, following an announcement earlier this week from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that he would also sit out 2020. Both men have vastly different political profiles. Brown has deep connections to blue-collar, union-friendly voters in the Midwest while Bloomberg saw his path to the nomination run through centrists uncomfortable with the party's move to the left. But together, their decisions could give Biden a greater opportunity to appeal to the middle-America voters who sided with President Donald Trump in 2016 and could be crucial to Democratic hopes of winning back the White House. "I think it certainly creates a whole new constituency for the vice president that might have been split otherwise," California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has vowed to support Biden if he runs, said soon after Brown's announcement. "So, that's good." Chris Coons, elected in 2010 to fill the Delaware Senate seat Biden occupied for 36 years, said Brown's decision not to run "absolutely" strengthened the former vice president's case. Brown "comes from and connects to the heartland in a remarkable way. He's a real guy," Coons said, likening his appeal to Biden's. Bloomberg's aides said their internal polling suggested his path to the Democratic nomination was narrow, particularly if Biden who shares some of Bloomberg's moderate positions decides to run. Brown, in contrast, denied that the former vice president had any effect on his choice to opt out of the primary. "His getting in or out had zero impact on this," the 66-year-old senator said of Biden. Brown told reporters that he and Biden talk "from time to time" but had last connected before his Senate re-election win in November, "when he was in Ohio campaigning with me or for me." Biden spokesman Bill Russo declined to comment on either Bloomberg or Brown's decisions against running in 2020. Of course, if Brown had sought the presidency, he would have faced a steep challenge in climbing ahead from the back of the pack in a field with a dozen candidates already declared. Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders consistently lead in early surveys of the 2020 Democratic field, and former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke could shake up the race if he decides to run. Brown's departure also provides a possible boost to Sanders, given their shared distaste for free-trade deals and vocal criticism of Wall Street. Although Brown leans further left on policy than Bloomberg or Biden especially when it comes to trade the senator and former vice president have a parallel appeal to working-class voters who fled their party for Trump. Biden's ties to his hardscrabble hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, have made him a compelling messenger for the plight of blue-collar workers whose jobs and livelihoods remain under threat by globalization and outsourcing. His role in an Obama administration that poured billions of dollars into rescuing the U.S. auto industry from the 2008 financial crisis also gives him a unique opportunity to connect with Midwestern voters. "It's a mantle that is open to be grabbed by people who are willing to talk to these voters in an authentic way, in sharing their frustrations," said Tom Russell, a Wisconsin-based Democratic strategist who aided the party's successful effort to topple GOP Gov. Scott Walker in 2018. "Biden has a history of being able to do that," Russell said, though he added that Brown's absence from the race creates potential advantages for O'Rourke, who has elements of the more centrist profile that Biden and Bloomberg would bring, as well as for Sanders. Brown "was Bernie without some of the Bernie baggage," Russell said. Still, Biden will have to confront several vulnerabilities. He is famously prone to gaffes and angered some in the LGBT community last week when he called Vice President Mike Pence a "decent guy." The decades in public life that he often portrays as an asset also carries challenges. The Washington Post, for instance, reported on Thursday that Biden opposed bussing children in the mid-1970s as schools sought to further integrate classrooms. Russo said Biden is a longtime civil rights advocate who supports equal housing, education and job opportunities. But such comments from decades ago could seem tone-deaf in a Democratic primary heralded for its historic diversity. Ultimately, Democrats are weighing how to keep their grip on progressives without alienating Midwestern voters. Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper said Brown has proved that's possible by winning over some voters in his battleground home state in 2018 who backed Trump in 2016. "Any candidate can" succeed in Ohio "if they are focused on the right issues, and if they come across as someone who will fight for the everyday Ohio worker," Pepper said. "Certainly, Joe Biden is somebody I think would have a very good chance of beating Trump in Ohio. But I'm quick to say I don't think other candidates couldn't do the same thing." Associated Press writers Tom Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Julie Pace in Washington contributed to this report. Advocates for clean water marked what they called "April Stools Day" Tuesday in Winooski, Vermont. Thats the name the Lake Champlain Committee gives to regular cleanup projects targeting dog poo that pet owners fail to pick up. More than a dozen members of ECO AmeriCorps -- a green jobs and environmental leadership training program and their community partners fanned out across a trail area in Winooski to pick up poop. The group said the waste could easily wash into the nearby Winooski River, and eventually make its way into Lake Champlain. There, it can worsen water quality, and in the summer, even contribute to the closure of beaches to swimming and recreation. "I think a lot of dog owners have the idea that itll peacefully decompose into the soil, but the problem is dog poop is full of bacteria and nutrients," said Laura Pratt, an ECO AmeriCorps member working with the Lake Champlain Committee. "And that can easily get into the water through storm runoff, snow melt especially at this time of year. So we like to encourage dog owners to pick up all of their dog poop to keep our waters clean." The April Stools Day cleanup was also part of a national service appreciation day, with Winooski city leaders thanking AmeriCorps members for their work to strengthen the community and environment. New Hampshire authorities have issued an arrest warrant for a man in connection with the shooting death of a woman last year in Rochester. Attorney General Gordon MacDonald said the warrant was issued on charges of second-degree murder for 19-year-old Justin Belanger. He's serving a sentence in Maine on an unrelated charge, and he's scheduled to be released on April 5. It wasn't immediately known if Belanger had an attorney who could address the New Hampshire charges. Authorities said 24-year-old Billy Ahearn, of Rochester, was shot while walking last June. She died of a single gunshot wound. Massachusetts State Police said a driver who was in a car that landed into a pond in East Longmeadow overnight Tuesday has died. State police said local police and firefighters responded around 3 a.m. to a vehicle submerged in about eight feet of water in a Heritage Park pond. A preliminary investigation suggested at least one person was in the car, according to officials. The person was taken to Baystate Medical Center by local paramedics and was declared deceased, according to state police. State police divers assisted in rigging the car for removal from the pond. It is unclear what led to the car being submerged into the pond. Springfield police assisted in the initial response and crime scene services section also responded to the scene, state police said. The investigation is ongoing. A judge has given new life to a class-action lawsuit accusing Poland Spring of selling water that's sourced from wells, not springs. The same federal judge in Connecticut last year dismissed the lawsuit, but he ruled last week that an amended complaint can proceed with claims in eight states: Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Poland Spring's corporate parent, Connecticut-based Nestle Waters North America, reiterated Tuesday that it's a "meritless lawsuit" and said the judge's decision doesn't undermine its confidence. Nestle Waters says Poland Spring meets Food and Drug Administration's guidelines that allow "spring water" labels if the water is drawn from the same source as a natural spring and meets certain requirements for chemical composition. A quick-moving and potent nor'easter will slide by south of the 40N/70W benchmark Wednesday morning. This means most of the damaging winds and rough surf stay farther offshore. Most of the heavy rainfalls across the southeastern corner of New England. Cape Cod and the islands look to get wind gusts of 40-50 mph from the northeast to north Wednesday morning, with heavy rain around 1-1.5 inch of accumulation. Boston to Providence to Worcester may see around half an inch of rainfall and northeast, north wind gusts around 30 mph. Wet snowflakes will mix into the rain across much of southern New England, but mostly across higher elevations around dawn. We have plenty of upward vertical motion plus rain-cooled air that can flip the rain to snow, and this occurs before the sun comes up and when we hit our coolest temperatures of the day with lows in the 30s. Boston and most of southern New England could see scattered coatings of snow accumulation early in the morning on grassy areas. A coating to 2 inches is possible across the Berkshires, Worcester Hills, and southern New Hampshire. This snow won't last long at all once the sun rises and temps warm. Two to four inches of snow is likely through Wednesday afternoon across Maine. Then upslope snow lingers as our wind turns west Wednesday afternoon across the Green and White Mountains. Wednesday afternoon will feel like a completely different season, with highs around 60 degrees and sunshine. West winds pick up to gusts between 40 and 50 mph across most of New England. Cooler temperatures move in Thursday as high pressure builds back in with sunshine and highs in the low 50s. Friday into Saturday a system brings a chance for light snow, flipping to rain as temperatures warm. Friday's highs before the front moves through will cool to the upper 40s, then will be in the upper 50s Saturday with late day clearing. Sunday night into Monday another system brings in rain and scattered showers stick in the daily forecast through at least Thursday next week as the forecast becomes more uncertain but more unsettled. Highs range in the low 60s to 70s inland Monday, to mid-50s by Wednesday and Thursday. [NATL] Extreme Weather Photos: Record Heat Threatens Europe Warrants have been issued for a Massachusetts man who state police say fled on foot after a traffic stop and pursuit in Beverly on Tuesday morning. Authorities said Andrew Murley, who was driving a Chevy Silverado pick-up truck, was stopped by an officer on Brimbal Avenue at about 10:30 a.m. for operating with a suspended license. After the officer spoke with Murley, police said he fled the scene. Murley was pursued onto Route 128 south and onto Dodge Street where his pickup truck jumped the curbing into the North Beverly Plaza parking lot. He then fled through the lot where he exited onto Tozer Road and police lost sight of him. Police said Murley's truck was later located in a nearby condominium complex but he had taken off by foot. State police sent in K9 units and their Airwing unit to scour the area but the search did not turn up any results. Warrants have been issued for Murley for operating after license suspension, reckless operation of a motor vehicle, refusal to stop for police, and several other motor vehicle infractions. Police have arrested a man after an alleged break-in prompted a SWAT situation Tuesday in Methuen, Massachusetts. A SWAT was called in to help resolve a standoff with a possibly armed suspect who allegedly broke into an apartment and stole various items. The standoff began around 10:30 a.m. on Broadway. Although police cleared the scene without the suspect in custody, thanks to surveillance footage, they knew who they were searching for. The wanted man was identified later Tuesday as 44-year-old Jouseph Caraballo of Methuen. Around 8:45 p.m., police announced Caraballo had been arrested after a resident recognized him from the press coverage. Just last week, another SWAT situation took place at the same house for a report of a man with a gun. People in the area are frustrated. "I really hate to say that Methuen's a little too far gone at this point," said neighbor Kaylie Demurs. "I mean, it's kind of been years of dealing with this kind of stuff around here." Methuen Police Chief Joseph Solomon said he was working on solutions, and that he met with the city Tuesday morning about nuisance properties. A helicopter's hard landing at the municipal airport in Taunton, Massachusetts, left the aircraft on its side Tuesday afternoon. Emergency responders arrived at the scene just after 12:30 p.m. for a report of a helicopter that had crashed upon takeoff. Neither the helicopter's pilot nor its passenger were injured in the hard landing. They were checked out by paramedics, though, officials said. "One of the operators said he might be sore, but no transport to the hospital and no significant injuries at this time," said Taunton Police Lt. Eric Nichols. "I'm fine," said pilot Richard D'Auteuil. "My ego is hurt." The helicopter's cab and rotor blade were both significantly damaged in the incident, but D'Auteuil was able to shut the down the aircraft, which had originated in New Bedford and landed in Taunton as part of a training program. Authorities say the instructor was piloting the helicopter as they were heading back to New Bedford when the crash happened. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident. The trial of a Maine woman charged with killing her fiance's granddaughter is underway. A judge will hear testimony this week in the trial of Shawna Gatto, of Wiscasset, who's accused of fatally beating 4-year-old Kendall Chick in December 2017. Gatto, who pleaded not guilty, was the youngster's primary caregiver. Her attorney asked for the case to be heard by a judge, not a jury, because it's emotionally charged. The trial got underway Monday. Police say Gatto told police she was alone with Chick and that evidence indicates she tried to clean up blood. The death of Chick and another child, 10-year-old Marissa Kennedy, spurred investigations into Maine's child protective services. Since then, there's been an increase in spending and the hiring of more caseworkers. Tributes have been paid to amazing St Georges Norwich parishioner and former Test cricketer, Eileen Ash, who was Norfolks oldest woman and has died at the age of 110. Tributes have been paid to amazing St Georges Norwich parishioner and former Test cricketer, Eileen Ash, who was Norfolks oldest woman and has died at the age of 110. Dereham church celebrates Christmas with wreaths Lyn Milns from Dereham Baptist Church has been developing a Christmas wreath festival in the church and through the town. Read more Car Park Christmas for Sheringham church Lighthouse Community Church in Sheringham has held two of its Christmas services in the open air, including a joint carol service with Sheringham Salvation Army band. Read more Kingsley gifts support Lowestoft Christmas lunch Kingsley Healthcare has presented gift bags to the Salvation Armys Lowestoft Citadel to be given out at the churchs Christmas Day lunch this year. Read more The Wonder performed just for Norfolk school Pupils and teachers from The Clare School were treated to a special performance of The Wonder, Soul Church's Christmas spectacular, on Wednesday 8th December. Read more YMCA Norfolk needs a Project Lead Wellbeing Matters YMCA Norfolk is looking for a Project Lead Wellbeing Matters, to build relationships of trust with vulnerable and marginalised parents and families across Norfolk. Read more Norfolk author sheds light on US abortion debate A book about respect for life, written by a parishioner from St Johns Cathedral in Norwich, sheds light on the current US abortion debate being considered by its Supreme Court. Read more Music outreach boost for South Norfolk church St Marys Church in Attleborough has been awarded a grant from Youth Music to employ a music outreach worker for two years as part of the churchs music and building project. Read more Christmas news and opening times at Revelation Merry Christmas from the staff, volunteers and trustees at Revelation Christian resource centre in Norwich. Read more The joy of getting a booster! Andrew Frere Smith reminds us how much a word of encouragement can boost our spirits. Read more Sister Wendy gives a voice to Julian of Norwich A recording of Sister Wendy Beckett reading Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love has been released to the public 28 years after it was first made. Read more Could you support Yarmouth area youth outreach? As they go through a period of change, East Norfolk Youth for Christ are urging people to support them, both in prayer and by getting involved. Read more Christmas and Advent events in Norfolk A roundup of some of the Christmas services, carol services, Christingles and other festive events organised by Norfolk churches this month. Read more Festive highlights at Norwich Cathedral this Christmas From Christmas concerts to Midnight Mass and Carols in the Cloister, there is lots to look forward to at Norwich Cathedral this festive season. Read more Norwich Youth for Christ jams for Christmas Norwich Youth for Christ is organising a Big Jam to launch their Christmas content. Nick Blanch reports. Read more Care home careers at MHA Cromwell House, Norwich MHA Cromwell House in Norwich has career opportunities for a Care Assistant and Senior Care Assistant. Read more Salvation Army in Diss gives out Christmas Toys and Tins As the countdown to Christmas begins, people in Diss are being asked to support The Salvation Armys annual Toys and Tins Appeal. Read more The light shines in the darkness Philip Young urges us to remember how much God loves us as we light our Advent candles this year. Read more The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today posted warning letters to four companies who produce homeopathic drug products for significant violations of current good manufacturing practice (CGMP) regulations, including a letter to King Bio Inc. of Asheville, N.C. The FDA previously warned the public about the agency's serious concerns with the quality of drug products produced by King Bio. "In late 2017, the FDA proposed a comprehensive, risk-based enforcement approach to drug products labeled as homeopathic and marketed without the required FDA approval. While the agency continues to examine this approach, the homeopathic industry has continued to grow, and we need to continue to address, consistent with our current enforcement policies, situations where products labeled as homeopathic are being marketed for serious diseases and/or conditions where the products haven't been shown to offer clinical benefits. We're committed to continue taking appropriate actions when we believe patients are being put at risk by products that contain potentially harmful ingredients or have significant quality issues. One company that continues to concern us because of the low quality of their operation and the threat their products pose to consumers is King Bio. Despite previous actions we've taken, our concerns remain. The warning letter we're sending is a formal notice to King Bio outlining a number of ongoing, serious violations with their manufacturing operations that must be corrected," said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D. "Today we've also posted warnings letters to three other homeopathic drug manufacturers for additional concerns we've observed from the use of toxic substances like snake venom that has the potential to cause harm and does not have demonstrated benefit, to other firms whose products we've found to be contaminated. These actions build on similar steps we've taken over the past year, as we continue to see products labeled as homeopathic that are being marketed without approval for a wide array of diseases and conditions, from chronic pain to cancer. In addition to our concerns with contamination, some products labeled as homeopathic may not deliver any benefit and may have the potential to cause harm. That's why we've proposed a new regulatory approach to prioritize additional enforcement and regulatory actions against certain products labeled as homeopathic. We're focused on products that have the greatest potential to cause risk to patients, including products for vulnerable populations like children. The actions we've taken recently, and over the course of the past year are further warning to all companies that these types of products must be manufactured and labeled appropriately. We're working to finalize our draft guidance in the coming months to help ensure that products that reach consumers are not harmful to their health." Products labeled as homeopathic have not been approved by the FDA for any use and may not meet modern standards for safety, effectiveness and quality. Products labeled as homeopathic can be made from a wide range of substances, including ingredients derived from plants, healthy or diseased animal or human sources, minerals and chemicals. These products are often marketed as natural, safe and effective alternatives to approved prescription and nonprescription products and are widely available in the marketplace. These unapproved drugs may cause significant and even irreparable harm if they are poorly manufactured, which can lead to contamination, or may contain active ingredients that aren't adequately tested or disclosed to patients, such as belladonna, which the agency has previously warned against. The warning letter to King Bio Inc. provides details of flaws in manufacturing operations and quality assurance systems found during a July 2018 FDA inspection of the facility. Beyond the violations found during the inspection, the FDA collected and tested samples of finished homeopathic drug products; results revealed inordinately high microbiological contamination. Additionally, evidence collected during the FDA's inspection indicated recurring microbial contamination associated with the water system used to manufacture drugs. The microbiological contamination of the water system led, in part, to a voluntary recall of more than 900 potentially homeopathic drug products manufactured by King Bio. Following the July 2018 inspection, the FDA alerted consumers and pet owners not to use drug products, including homeopathic drug products, made by King Bio and labeled as Dr. King's, as these products may pose a safety risk to people (especially infants, children, pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems), as well as pets due to the high levels of microbial contamination identified at the manufacturing site. The company recalled all drug products made with water marketed for humans and animals. King Bio manufactures a range of products including those for children, adults and pets. Since August 2018, more than 900 potentially contaminated products manufactured by King Bio have been recalled, including those labeled as Aquaflora, Canada, Dr. King's Natural Medicine(s), Natural Pet, People's Best and SafeCare. Additionally, other products manufactured by King Bio and distributed by other companies under different brand names were also recalled due to contamination. These include products sold under the brand names Sprayology, Silver Star Brand, HelloLife, Beaumont Bio Med and BioLyte Laboratories. Today, the FDA also posted warning letters to additional companies for products labeled as homeopathic due to various quality and misbranding violations. Red Mountain Incorporated, Oakland Park, Fla. -; warning letter for lacking quality oversight while manufacturing homeopathic drug products containing ingredients with potentially toxic effects for consumers, including snake venom. -; warning letter for lacking quality oversight while manufacturing homeopathic drug products containing ingredients with potentially toxic effects for consumers, including snake venom. Tec Laboratories Incorporated, Albany, Ore. -; warning letter for releasing products marketed for use with children, without conducting testing to ensure they were free from objectionable levels of microbial contamination. The company also did not adequately investigate test results that found high microorganism levels in its water system -; warning letter for releasing products marketed for use with children, without conducting testing to ensure they were free from objectionable levels of microbial contamination. The company also did not adequately investigate test results that found high microorganism levels in its water system B. Jain Pharmaceuticals Pvt. Ltd., Rajasthan, India -; warning letter after FDA investigators observed insects in the facility and in ingredients used to make its products. The FDA has taken similar actions this year, including a warning letter to Nutra Pharma Corp., Boca Raton, Fla.; as announced earlier this month, the FDA issued a warning letter regarding the company illegally marketing unapproved products labeled as homeopathic with claims about their ability to treat addiction and chronic pain; the agency also alerted consumers to this health fraud scam. In February, the FDA issued a warning letter to Pure Source LLC, Doral, Fla. for distributing drugs made with contaminated raw materials. In December 2017, the FDA proposed a risk-based enforcement approach that prioritizes enforcement and regulatory actions involving drug products labeled as homeopathic and marketed without the required FDA approval that have the greatest potential to cause risk to patients. Given the concerns about the proliferation of potentially ineffective and harmful products labeled as homeopathic, the FDA stated when it issued the draft guidance that it would consider taking additional enforcement and/or regulatory actions, consistent with its current compliance policies, in the interest of protecting the public. We expect to finalize this guidance soon. The FDA encourages healthcare professionals and consumers to report adverse events or quality problems experienced with the use of any of these products to the FDA's MedWatch Adverse Event Reporting program. Complete and submit the report online at www.fda.gov/medwatch/report.htm; or Download and complete the form, then submit it via fax at 1-800-FDA-0178. For reporting adverse drug events in animals, please see How to Report Animal Drug Side Effects and Product Problems. Hologic, Inc.s Cynosure division announced today it will partner with key opinion leaders to present 19 scientific abstracts on its industry-leading medical aesthetics technology at the 39th Annual Conference of the American Society for Laser Medicine & Surgery (ASLMS). The conference will take place March 27-31 in Denver. The presentations underpin the Companys commitment to scientific innovation in medical aesthetics and will detail data collected through multiple clinical research projects conducted over the past year. Key topics include innovations in treatments for skin, body contouring and womens health, as well as research and development and engineering. Leading doctors, including plastic surgeon Dr. Barry DiBernardo of New Jersey Plastic Surgery and opthamologist and dermatologic cosmetic surgeon Dr. Raminder Saluja of Saluja Cosmetic and Laser Center, will present the latest clinical findings in their fields. Were proud to lead our industry with groundbreaking innovation, and our commitment to clinical research and scientific data will always be at the core of Cynosures mission to enhance lives. Each year for the last decade, weve shared our latest findings and data at ASLMS, surrounded by the industrys best and brightest minds. This year, we will present research on diverse laser technology and energy-based applications for medical aesthetics, and were confident these findings will help industry leaders grow their practices, maximize their success and remain ahead of the curve in this ever-changing space. Kevin Thornal, Divisional President of Cynosure at Hologic Highlights of the presentation schedule include: Standardization for Novel Radiofrequency Device Evaluation Dr. Barry DiBernardo will discuss Cynosures TempSure Surgical RF technology, a new offering of the versatile TempSure radiofrequency (RF) platform that provides clinicians the ability to perform both surgical and non-surgical aesthetic procedures across a variety of specialties, on a single device. TempSure Surgical promotes quicker recovery and better healing through a 300-watt and 4-MHz radiofrequency platform that enables precise incisions with minimal lateral thermal damage to surrounding tissues. In this session, Dr. DiBernardo will present the TempSure platforms wide variety of applications and the value it can hold for clinicians and patients. TempSure Surgical is revolutionizing my practice. We are now harnessing radiofrequency energy instead of scalpels to perform surgical procedures and the results we have seen are beyond expectations. The clean cut achieved with the powerful energy of the TempSure Surgical promotes quicker recovery and better healing for our patients, as demonstrated on scanning electron microscopy. The innovative technology also results in lessened sparking and charring during these procedures as compared to older technologies. Plastic Surgeon Dr. Barry DiBernardo of New Jersey Plastic Surgery Clinical Study to Assess the Non-invasive 1060NM Diode Laser in Combination with a Non-invasive Radiofrequency Device for the Treatment of the Submental and Abdominal Areas for Unwanted Fat Removal and Tissue Tightening This study showcases two of Cynosures leading products: the SculpSurea laser, which is intended for lipolysis and body contouring, and the TempSure treatment for wrinkle reduction and tissue heating. Dr. Raminder Saluja will present a multiple-device approach to addressing patient concerns. In her session, Dr. Saluja will explain how a versatile portfolio of technologies can have major impact on practice success and patient outcomes. With SculpSure and TempSure as the treatment examples, she will detail how the use of these two devices could be beneficial in non-invasive body contouring to address both subcutaneous fat and laxity. The versatility of Cynosures product offering means that I can provide a range of solutions for my patients diverse concerns, said Dr. Saluja. By partnering with Cynosure, my practice has been able to leverage the power of a multi-treatment offering and enhance flexibility when developing a treatment plan. Clinical Study to Assess a Radiofrequency Device in the Treatment of Loose Tissue in the Eye Orbital Area - Non-Surgical Blepharoplasty In this study, unwanted loose tissue in the eye orbital area was treated once using the TempSure device with a single needle coagulation handpiece. Dr. Saluja will present her results and clinical experience, which showcase how the TempSure platform can be used with a minimally traumatic, minimally invasive technique to induce coagulation and tissue tightening safely and effectively. Cynosure will also display their products in-booth. These products include the SculpSure body contouring treatment and the TempSure radiofrequency platform. Booth attendees will have the opportunity to discuss the technology with Cynosure leadership and leading doctors who leverage the products in their practices. Metrion Biosciences Ltd, the specialist ion channel contract research and drug discovery company, announced today that it has completed a fully subscribed funding round on 14 March. Metrion will use the funds to support the broadening of its ion channel screening capabilities, and continued research into novel Kv1.3 inhibitors for the treatment of auto-immune conditions. The new equity investment round was led by the recently launched o2h Ventures Therapeutics Fund, acting via Reyker Securities plc, and supported by existing shareholders. The o2h Ventures fund invests in early-stage biotech therapeutic and related AI opportunities in the UK and focuses, in particular, on emerging companies in the growing Cambridge biotech cluster. We are pleased to welcome both o2h Ventures Therapeutics Fund as a new shareholder and Sunil Shah, Managing Partner of o2h Ventures Ltd as an observer on the Metrion board. Keith McCullagh, Metrion Chairman The NHS England diabetes team has partnered with Oxford Medical Simulation to train doctors using virtual reality. Doctors can now practice in virtual reality medical emergencies, to improve care for patients with diabetes in the real world. Combining clinical expertise from the NHS, volunteer patient input and world-leading virtual reality software, doctors can now put on virtual reality headsets and practice taking care of patients as often as they want, without risking lives. The system is being piloted through Health Education England in a multicenter trial in the South of England, with development funded by Novo Nordisk. If supported by evidence from the pilot there are plans for further roll-outs nationwide throughout 2019. People with Type 1 diabetes have more chance of developing life-threatening complications when in the hospital than outside it. For people with diabetes, extreme highs and lows in blood sugar can be fatal. These emergencies can be difficult for doctors and nurses to recognize but can be fatal if not treated quickly. High-quality training for frontline staff is vital to improve patient care in these situations. When I was in training wed learn on the wards. It was called see one, do one, teach one. I had never practiced managing a diabetic emergency until I had to do it in real life. You wouldnt expect a pilot to fly a plane full of passengers without having practiced first. Why do we think thats acceptable for doctors and nurses? Dr Jack Pottle, Co-founder, Oxford Medical Simulation Embracing technology is at the heart of the NHS Long Term Plan and training doctors using virtual reality is another example of modernizing the NHS to help improve care for patients with diabetes. Dr Partha Kar, NHS England Clinical Director of Diabetes Religious and cultural beliefs may discourage many Latinos in the United States from seeking treatment for depression and other mental health disorders, a Rutgers University-New Brunswick study finds. Mental health providers and researchers should therefore engage with faith-based organizations and other community venues to help them address the stigma associated with mental illness and to encourage people to seek help, said Susan Caplan, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Nursing. The study appears in the journal Hispanic Health Care International. Latinos report experiencing mental health issues at about the same rates as white non-Hispanics in the United States, but they are only half as likely to seek treatment, largely due to stigma influenced by cultural and religious views, according to the study. "Religious faith is an important source of strength for people who experience stress and mental illness," Caplan said. "But beliefs that mental illness is caused by sin or a lack of faith or that it can be cured by prayer alone can discourage people from seeking help, add to their suffering and even contribute to suicide." While she was developing a mental health literacy and engagement program for faith-based settings, Caplan surveyed Latin American members of three churches in the northeastern United States about the ways their religious and cultural values influence their beliefs about mental illness. Many respondents recalled growing up in communities where mentally ill people were ostracized and where families refused to talk about mental illness or even acknowledge it might exist within their family. Many expressed the belief that depression and other disorders were caused by a lack of faith or prayer, the influence of evil spirits or a parent's wrongful actions. On the other hand, some recognized that attributing suicide to a lack of faith is stigmatizing and can prevent people with depression from seeking help. One pastor shared the story of a respected Christian and Native American leader who suffered from depression, felt unable to talk with anyone partly due to fears of discrimination, and committed suicide. The study concluded that efforts to encourage Latin Americans' to get mental health treatment should begin with a deeper understanding of cultural and religious factors that may prevent them from getting help. In the past three decades, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has gone from an experimental procedure to being more common. Pregnancies enabled by IVF frequently have more difficulties, with children born earlier and smaller even among singleton births. University of Minnesota researchers conducted the largest study of childhood cancer after conception by IVF to date. This population-based cohort study had nearly 2.5 times the number of children conceived by IVF than prior studies of the subject in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. The results were recently published in JAMA Pediatrics. Researchers first linked records of live births reported to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology Clinic Outcome Reporting System between 2004 and 2013 to the birth and cancer registries of 14 states, comprising 66 percent of births in the United States and 75 percent of IVF-conceived births. These records were then linked to the cancer registries of the same states to find cancers diagnosed between 2013 and 2015. Researchers then randomly selected 10 children conceived naturally for each child conceived by IVF. The final dataset consisted of 275,686 IVF children and 2,266,847 naturally conceived children. The study found: - the overall cancer rate (per 1,000,000 children) of IVF children was about 17 percent higher than for non-IVF children; - the rate of hepatic tumors was over 2.5 times higher among IVF children than non-IVF children; - the rates of other specific cancers did not differ between the two groups; - there were no associations of childhood cancer with specific IVF treatment techniques. "The most important takeaway from our research is that most childhood cancers are not more frequent in children conceived by IVF," said Logan Spector, a professor in the Medical School and Masonic Cancer Center member. "There may be an increased risk of one class of cancers in children; however, due to the nature of our study, we could not distinguish between IVF itself versus the parents' underlying infertility. Overall, these results are reassuring to parents who've had children through IVF." Hairlessness in dogs can be the result of deliberate breeding or, in certain breeds, a defect. A recent study completed at the University of Helsinki describes a gene variant in the SGK3 gene, which causes hairlessness in Scottish Deerhounds. The gene defect results in puppies born with thin fur that lose all of their hair in a few weeks. SGK3 is also a candidate for association with non-hormonal baldness in humans. The quality of dog fur has been a significant target of breeding, which is why the trait varies greatly between breeds. As a result of selective breeding, gene variants that influence coat quality have accumulated in different dog breeds, making their coat either short or long, straight or curly, or entirely hairless. Hairlessness may also be associated with harmful features, such as the absence of teeth and dental malformation. Currently, a handful of genes have been linked with canine hairlessness. Of these, variants in the FOXI3 and SGK3 genes are associated with hairlessness maintained as a breed trait. "Normally, Scottish Deerhound have coarse, longish hair, but every now and then there are hairless individuals in litters. We found that hair loss is connected to the SGK3 gene, but to a variant different from that identified earlier in another breed. However, the end results are similar, as the puppies are born with sparse coats and lose all their hair in a matter of weeks. No other significant disabilities yet seem to be associated with the functional disturbance of the SGK3 gene," explains University Researcher Marjo Hytonen, PhD, from the University of Helsinki. SGK3 codes for an enzyme that affects the regular hair cycle, the exact mechanisms of which are yet to be determined. Studying dogs that are hairless due to a dysfunction in the SGK3 protein may help find out the details. Another variant of the SGK3 gene has previously been associated with the hairlessness of the American Hairless Terrier, a desired trait in that breed. "In certain breeds, hairlessness is desirable, but not, for example, in Scottish Deerhounds. In both cases, gene tests will provide new tools for breeders. Another important finding in this study is the substantiation of the role of the SGK3 gene in human non-hormonal thinning of hair, early hair loss and baldness. Further research on the gene's role in human baldness should be carried out," says Professor Hannes Lohi from the University of Helsinki. A sizeable number of Canadian adults are either in or would like to be in an open relationship, suggests new research from the University of British Columbia. That's one of the key findings of a new study published today in the Journal of Sex Research. The study is the first outside of the United States to assess the prevalence of open relationships using a representative sample. Researchers analyzing data from a nationally representative survey of about 2,000 Canadian adults found that four per cent of those in relationships reported being in an open relationship, while 20 per cent reported having been in an open relationship in the past. Meanwhile, more than one in ten (12 per cent) reported that open relationships were their "ideal relationship type." "Our findings suggest that more people would like to be in an open relationship than already are, possibly because of the stigma associated with these types of relationships and the difficulty of broaching this subject with partners," said Nichole Fairbrother, the study's lead author and assistant professor in the UBC department of psychiatry. "Even with the stigma, however, it still appears that a sizeable number of Canadian adults are either in or would like to be in an open relationship." Open relationships are those in which individuals agree to participate in sexual, emotional and romantic interactions with more than one partner. Examples include polyamory (engaging in multiple romantic relationships) and swinging (engaging in multiple sexual relationships outside of a relationship, alone or together, with minimal or no emotional or romantic involvement). For the study, the researchers had market research firm Ipsos administer an online questionnaire to a representative sample of about 2,000 Canadians between the ages of 18 and 94. Nearly equal numbers of men and women responded to the survey. Fifty-five per cent of respondents were married or living with a romantic partner, while 31 per cent were single, 10 per cent were separated or divorced and nearly four per cent were widowed. Among the key findings, the researchers found that people engaging in and preferring open relationships tended to be slightly younger. Men were also more likely to have reported being in an open relationship and to identify open as their ideal relationship type. Relationship satisfaction didn't differ significantly between individuals in monogamous and open relationships. Rather, having a match between one's actual and preferred relationship type was associated with greater relationship satisfaction, the researchers found. As for why greater numbers of men tend to prefer open to monogamous relationships, the researchers suggest it could be partially due to the greater prevalence of open relationships among same-sex male couples. They say more research is needed to fully understand the factors behind men preferring open relationships more than women. Fairbrother said the findings have clinical implications for mental health providers, especially for those who provide couples therapy. "Given that a significant minority of respondents say they prefer open relationships, it may be useful for mental health providers to consider ways of making it easier for couples to talk about their relationship preferences in therapy," she said. The researchers have also collected survey answers from hundreds of UBC and Ryerson University students to analyze the characteristics of people who prefer different relationship configurations. They are analyzing this data now. Tobacco use causes a field of precancerous cells, increasing the risk of developing head & neck cancer. But exactly how this precancerous field influences cancer has been often overlooked. Now a University of Colorado Cancer Center study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2019 offers an exciting idea: Maybe these precancerous cells "fertilize" nearby cells with cancerous changes to grow and resist therapy. "We wanted to understand how these precancerous cells may impact neighboring cancer," says Christian Young, PhD, research instructor at CU Cancer Center and the study's senior author. The current study explores this communication between precancerous and cancer cells in the context of an enzyme called PI3K. The enzyme PI3K is activated in many or even most cancers, with some researchers considering PI3K over-activation an essential feature driving the disease. Attractively, PI3K is a "kinase" and the class of drugs known as kinase inhibitors has proven effective against a host of cancer types, for example erlotinib against EGFR+ cancers and crizotinib against ALK+ cancers. Kinase inhibitors have been developed against PI3K as well, and by and large they do a lovely job of killing cancer cells in dishes. The ongoing question has been why PI3K inhibitors do not necessarily work in patients - what are cancer cells doing to resist this therapy that should kill them? The current study offers an intriguing hint: "These cancer cell lines in culture are sensitive to PI3K inhibition, but when you put them next to precancerous cells, they become resistant," Young says. To explore this observation, Young and colleagues including first author Khoa Nguyen, an undergraduate student at CU Boulder, grew head and neck cancer cells in the same dish as precancerous cells (called NOK cells), and then hit the cells, alone and together, with PI3K inhibitors. Cancer cells grown with NOK cells grew faster and resisted PI3K inhibition compared with cancer cells grown alone. When the researchers grew NOK cells alone, then removed the cells, and "fertilized" cancer cells with the culture medium in which NOK cells had grown, they saw similar cancer cell growth and PI3K inhibitor resistance. Additionally, the NOK cells were stimulating cancer stem cell-like features in the recipient cancer cells. This means that in addition to resisting PI3K therapy, cancer cells that sit alongside precancerous cells may themselves become more dangerous, for example, more able to restart the disease. "What this means is that some properties of cancer cells may not necessarily be intrinsic. In our study, cancer cells were given some of their cancer-like and stem cell-like properties by nearby, precancerous cells," Young says. Continuing the line of study, Young and his team asked what these precancerous cells were giving to head and neck cancer cells that allowed them to resist PI3K therapy and gain cancer stem cell-like traits. Using the SomaScan proteomics platform at the CU Cancer Center Microarray Shared Resource, the team was able to analyze more than 1,300 proteins found in dishes in which NOK cells were grown. What they found is a dramatic increase in EGFR ligands - think of PI3K like an engine driving cancer growth. EGFR is another engine that can work alongside PI3K. In this analogy, EGFR ligands are like fuel, allowing cancer cells, in the absence of PI3K, to power their growth and survival through the engine of EGFR instead. "It was the precancerous cells that were providing this fuel," Young says. Continuing work is moving Young's basic science into mouse models of head and neck cancer. Eventually, the goal may be to inhibit EGFR along with PI3K, perhaps negating the EGFR escape route that precancerous cells seem to be providing to cancer cells. Source: https://coloradocancerblogs.org/aacr-tobacco-use-makes-precancerous-cells-that-fertilize-cancer-growth/ After 10 years in remission, Derek Ruff's cancer returned, this time as stage IV colon cancer. Despite aggressive rounds of chemotherapy, palliative radiotherapy and immunotherapy, his disease progressed. In February 2019, as part of a phase I clinical trial at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health, Ruff became the first patient in the world to be treated for cancer with a human-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cell therapy called FT500. "This is a landmark accomplishment for the field of stem cell-based medicine and cancer immunotherapy. This clinical trial represents the first use of cells produced from human induced pluripotent stem cells to better treat and fight cancer," said Dan Kaufman, MD, PhD, professor of medicine in the Division of Regenerative Medicine and director of cell therapy at University of California San Diego School of Medicine. "This is a culmination of 15 years of work. My lab was the first to produce natural killer cells from human pluripotent stem cells. Together with Fate Therapeutics, we've been able to show in preclinical research that this new strategy to produce pluripotent stem cell-derived natural killer cells can effectively kill cancer cells in cell culture and in mouse models." The off-the-shelf, iPSC-derived natural killer (NK) cell cancer immunotherapy received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to move into clinical trials in November 2018. Kaufman has been collaborating with Fate Therapeutics over the past four years to bring iPSC-derived NK cells to patients with cancer. NK cells are specialized immune cells that are very potent at killing cancer cells. While NK cells can be isolated from the blood of donors or patients, this trial uses NK cells entirely produced in the lab from human iPSCs. Since human iPSCs possess the unique dual properties of unlimited self-renewal and differentiation potential into all cell types of the body, these cells can be used as starting material to mass produce NK cells at significant scale in a cost-effective manner. Work in Kaufman's lab, in collaboration with Fate and investigators at the University of Minnesota, defined conditions to efficiently produce NK cells at a scale suitable for clinical use. Since FT500 does not need to be matched to a patient like other T-cell therapies, researchers say FT500 can be administered in the outpatient setting as an "off-the-shelf" cell product, reducing the time and resources needed to treat patients. The FT500 clinical trial is a two-arm study with up to 64 patients for the treatment of advanced solid tumors. It is designed to assess the safety and effectiveness of multiple doses of FT500 administered over multiple cycles as a monotherapy and as a combination treatment with one of three checkpoint inhibitor-based immunotherapies -- nivolumab, pembrolizumab or atezolizumab -- in patients where previous treatments have not worked or who have confirmed disease progression on checkpoint inhibitor therapy. Ruff said he was a bit apprehensive at first about being the first patient in a new therapy, but is now enthusiastic. "Everyone is excited and optimistic about this trial and it spilled over to us," said Ruff nodding to his wife from his bed at Moores Cancer Center, San Diego's only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. "Coming to a NCI cancer center means a lot to me. My options aren't otherwise good. Some people may not opt for a clinical trial, but for me, I want a chance at a cure." Sandip Patel, MD, principal investigator for the FT500 trial at Moores Cancer Center and lead physician for Ruff's NK cell therapy treatment, is excited by the prospect of cell-based immunotherapy in solid tumors. "We are interested in expanding our armamentarium of immune cell types we target in solid tumors, which to date have mainly been T-cell directed therapies, and expanding to other cell types, such as natural killer cells, which may have unique advantages in treating certain cancer types," said Patel, who specializes in cancer immunotherapy and early phase clinical trials. "The ability to work on a truly novel therapy with an innovative local San Diego company such as Fate Therapeutics and with collaborators such as Dan Kaufman at UC San Diego is particularly exciting." Kaufman began focusing on NK cells while working at the University of Minnesota. His original goal was to make early human iPSCs for use in blood and marrow transplant as a supplement or substitute for donor cells. As the cancer field grew, it spurred his interest into moving into a cell therapy application. The advancement of FT500 into clinical investigation is a result of a collaboration between Kaufman and his colleague Jeffrey S. Miller, MD, of the University of Minnesota, with Fate Therapeutics to develop FT500 along with several other iPSC-derived NK cell product candidates. "It's really exciting to participate in the clinical launch of this first iPSC-derived cell product, and this approach really represents a new era for patients seeking cell-based immunotherapies. There are numerous advantages associated with using iPSCs rather than relying on an individualized approach, which requires repeatedly sourcing cells from patients and donors," said Kaufman. "We are continuing to collaborate with Fate Therapeutics to develop additional versions of iPSC-derived cancer immunotherapies, including the first engineered iPSC-derived product candidates to move into clinical testing later in 2019." For now, Ruff, Patel and the rest of the team will wait patiently to see if fate will intervene and halt the progression of his cancer. One University of Texas at Arlington researcher is working to understand the relationship between cardiovascular disease and depression in a National Institutes of Health-funded project. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S., killing more than 600,000 people each year, and the approximately 16 million Americans affected by depression have a high risk of developing the disease. "Adults with depression have an accelerated risk of developing cardiovascular disease," Jody Greaney, an assistant professor of kinesiology at UTA, said. "Not only are they more likely to develop the disease in the future, but it also happens at an earlier age; the risk is excessive and premature compared to an adult who has never had a history of depression." Greaney is using a $248,000 NIH award to study the effect depression has on the human brain's control of blood pressure and how it can cause long-term detrimental changes to a person's cardiovascular system. "The hope would be that the findings from these studies could inform the development of innovative therapeutic strategies to minimize the risk of developing cardiovascular disease in adults with depression," she said. Greaney completed the first phase of this two-phase grant at Pennsylvania State University as a postdoctoral fellow. Building on a series of studies in rodent models of depression, phase one of the project attempted to translate these findings from pre-clinical rodent models to the human manifestation of the disease. Greaney tested blood vessel function and examined the specific mechanisms that cause them to function poorly in otherwise healthy young adults with depression. Phase two will investigate these same mechanisms as they relate to blood pressure regulation. Both phases of the project have been supported by the NIH, with a three-year award funding the second phase at UTA. Greaney joined the faculty at UTA in January 2019 and said the university's leadership, resources and position in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex played a major role in her decision to bring her research to the urban research university. "I think the Department of Kinesiology has grown tremendously and in a very impressive way with leadership setting forth a vision for growing the research profile of this department," Greaney said. "I was able to see immediately how I could fit into that framework." Greaney also praises the newly constructed Science & Engineering Innovation & Research, or SEIR, Building as encapsulating a high-caliber, modern clinical research environment. "Jody's innovative research explores new territory in understanding the physiological dysfunction that appears to accompany this critical condition [depression] affecting our population at alarming rates," David Keller, associate dean of the College of Nursing and Health Innovations and chair of the Department of Kinesiology. "Her work will contribute greatly to expanding UT Arlington's research portfolio and directly supports our mission to enhance health and the human condition." Greaney aims to begin collecting phase-two data in the coming months. Currently, she is networking with other researchers in the area interested in the topic, which she said presents "limitless" opportunities for collaboration. Election Tracker: BJP president Amit Shah on Tuesday dubbed the Congress's election manifesto a "pack of lies" and said it was an insult to the country's people and its brave soldiers. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday claimed that his critics were spreading the rumour that the BJP will do away with quotas in government jobs and educational institutions if voted to power again. "Nobody can even touch reservations for the backward classes," Modi said at a rally in Jamui in Bihar. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday attacked the Congress party and its manifesto released earlier in the day, claiming that Rahul Gandhis friends in the tukde-tukde gang had drafted parts of it. Some of the ideas are positively dangerous in the Congress manifesto, said Jaitley. They are for an agenda for the vulcanisation of India. Addressing a poll rally in Odisha, BSP chief Mayawati has hit out at both Congress and BJP, saying one was embroiled in Bofors scam while the other now faces Rafale scam. The way PM Narendra Modi's government implemented GST and demonetisation, in haste, it affected small businesses. This also led to increase in unemployment. The Congress was involved in Bofors and now BJP government is involved in Rafale, she said. Congress president Rahul Gandhi, meanwhile, released the partys manifesto for upcoming general elections, promising wealth and welfare for all sections. Apart from NYAY, the partys minimum income guarantee promise, the manifesto promises increased employment and a separate budget for farmers, dubbed the Kisan Budget. Congress chief Rahul Gandhi had already announced that NITI Aayog, which replaced the Planning Commission, would be scrapped if the Congress comes to power. News agency ANI has also quoted Bhalchandra Mungekar, a member of Congresss manifesto committee, as saying that the document promises probe into the Rafale fighter jet deal. When we come to power, on the first day, we will initiate an inquiry into Rafale deal and we have included this in the manifesto (sic), he said. Meanwhile, Facebooks decision to take down 687 pages and accounts linked to the Congress and a smaller number of pro-BJP accounts has added a new twist to the general elections less than 10 days before the first phase of polling. The action led to a war of words between the BJP and the Congress, with the former calling the move a "desperate" attempt to claim support and the latter disowning the accounts. While accounts/pages linked to the Congress party appeared to be large in number, the following or reach of pro-BJP accounts was several times more. In a rare action against a prominent political party in a country that is home to 300 million users the largest number of users in the world Facebook said its investigation found individuals used fake accounts to disseminate views on local news and political issues and "criticism of political opponents including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)." It also shared two examples of such posts - one that sought support for Congress president Rahul Gandhi by highlighting his idea of universal basic income for the poor, and the other that criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for opposing Congress' plan for giving poor an income of Rs 72,000 a year. "While the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our review found that it was connected to individuals associated with an INC IT Cell," Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy at Facebook, said. Facebook said it has also removed 15 pages, groups and accounts, whose owners "used a combination of authentic and fake accounts" to root for the government and the BJP and post content on alleged misconduct of political opponents including the Indian National Congress (INC). "Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found that this activity was linked to individuals associated with an Indian IT firm, Silver Touch," it said. While Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the Congress was resorting to "dubious means" to claim support, the opposition party retorted back saying no official pages run by the party or its verified volunteers have been taken down. In a statement on Twitter, the Congress said, "This is to clarify no official pages run by INC have been taken down. Additionally, all pages run by our verified volunteers are also unaffected. In the meantime, we are awaiting a response from Facebook to provide us a list of all pages/accounts that they have taken down." On the other hand, Prasad said Facebook removing pages linked to the Congress is "a very historical development". "When inquiry was done, it was found that those individuals were linked to Congress IT cell. Congress is desperate therefore resorting to these types of dubious means to claim support but people are sure of what they have seen of Narendra Modi govt," he said. Asked to comment on the issue at an AICC briefing, Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said: "We don't react off the back to news reports which may just be coming in. We would need to verify the veracity of this whether there are any Facebook pages which are linked to us." Separately, Facebook said it had also removed another 227 pages and 94 accounts in India for violating its policies against spam and misrepresentation. Gleicher said Facebook has removed 687 Facebook pages and accounts - the majority of which had already been detected and suspended by its automated systems - that engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" in India and were linked to individuals associated with an IT Cell of the INC. "When we remove one of these networks, the reason we remove them is because of their coordinated inauthentic behaviour, that they are using a network of fake accounts to conceal their identity....to mislead who's behind them. That's the basic reason for removal," he told reporters. "We are constantly working to detect and stop coordinated inauthentic behaviour because we don't want our services to be used to manipulate people. We're taking down these pages and accounts based on their behaviour, not the content they posted," he said. Facebook, which has been facing flak globally for instances of a user data breach, has been ramping up efforts to ensure that its platforms (that includes WhatsApp and Instagram) aren't misused to spread misinformation, especially ahead of polls in India. It has recently started providing details of political ads on its platform in a bid to enhance transparency. It is also strengthening its team of fact checkers and deploying technology tools to flag fake news. In a blog post, Facebook said pro-Congress pages and accounts removed had spent around USD 39,000 for ads on Facebook while Indian IT firm Silver Touch spent $70,000 on ads. GamesRadar+ is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more How did Venom become Venom? Find out in the new prequel series Lethal Protector Time to go back to the early days of Venom Sorry! This content is not available in your region New Delhi: Eicher Motors has announced Rs 700 crore capital expenditure plan for Royal Enfield in the current financial year. The capex will be used for the construction work of the Technology Centre, Phase-2 of the Vallam Vadagal plant in Tamil Nadu and towards the development of new platforms and products. Also, for 2019-20, Royal Enfield plans a production of 9,50,000 motorcycles, Eicher Motors said in a statement on Monday. "This year Royal Enfield will focus on the upcoming transition to the BS-VI emission norms along with strengthening our product development capabilities and working towards new global platforms," Eicher Motors MD & CEO Siddhartha Lal said. The second phase of our Vallam Vadagal plant near Chennai, Tamil Nadu is progressing well and is expected to commence commercial production in the second half of this financial year. The construction of the Technology Centre in Chennai is also nearing its completion, he added. "With a wide distribution network in India, growing international presence and building state-of-the-art capabilities in product development, Royal Enfield is well on its way to grow the middleweight motorcycle segment globally in the coming years," Lal said. In FY 2018-19, Royal Enfield announced formation of its wholly-owned subsidiary in Thailand. To further strengthen its presence in the ASEAN region, it recently announced its upcoming assembly operations in Thailand, its first outside of India. The initial response to Royal Enfield in the ASEAN region, which is one of the largest two-wheeler markets, has been very encouraging, Eicher Motors said in the statement. With the upcoming assembly operations expected to come onstream in H1 FY2019-20 and plans to further expand dealer presence in the region, Royal Enfield is well poised to fill the gap in the mid-sized segment in the region, it added. New Delhi: Bank of Baroda (BoB) surpassed Punjab National Bank (PNB) to become the country's largest nationalised lender after the merger of Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank with Vadodara-based bank became effective Monday. The consolidated entity started the operation with a business mix of over Rs 15 lakh crore on the balance sheet, with deposits and advances of Rs 8.75 lakh crore and Rs 6.25 lakh crore, respectively. BoB, the second largest public sector lender after State Bank of India (SBI), now has over 9,500 branches, 13,400 ATMs, and 85,000 employees to serve 12 crore customers. The largest nationalised bank now has an expanded capital base and will be in a position to have deeper banking relationship with customers. To make merger a smooth affair, the government last week decided to infuse Rs 5,042 crore in BoB to enhance its capital base to meet additional expenses. Meanwhile, BoB completed share allotment to shareholders Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank as per the scheme of amalgamation. Shareholders of Vijaya Bank got 402 equity shares of BoB for every 1,000 shares held. In the case of Dena Bank, its shareholders received 110 shares of BoB for every 1,000 shares. The bank on Monday issued and allotted equity shares at approved share exchange ratio pursuant to 'Amalgamation of Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank with Bank of Baroda Scheme, 2019', BoB said in a regulatory filing. Shares of BoB closed at Rs 132.85 per unit, up 3.14 per cent on BSE. The first three-way amalgamation is the first step in the consolidation of public sector banking industry recommended in 1991 by the Narasimham Committee report. Through this merger the government has created an institution of global scale and size, thereby providing significant benefit to all stakeholders. Consolidated entity will be able to realise multiple synergy benefits both on cost and revenue sides. Post-amalgamation, the bank will have a 22 per cent market share in Gujarat and 8-10 per cent market share in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the bank has said. All customers of Dena Bank, which is under prompt corrective action (PCA) framework of the RBI, will have renewed access to credit facilities immediately. The government in September last year announced the first-ever three-way consolidation of banks in India, with a combined business of Rs 14.82 lakh crore, making it the third-largest bank after State Bank of India (SBI) and HDFC Bank. The announcement of the three-way merger was among several reforms initiatives undertaken by Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar to make public sector banks (PSBs) healthy, robust and globally competitive. As part of the reform process, the government had also announced transfer of majority 51 per cent stake to Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) in IDBI Bank in August last year to transform the Mumbai-based lender. Besides, the Department of Financial Services made a record capital infusion of Rs 1.06 lakh crore in the PSBs in the fiscal 2018-19. As a result five public sector banks including Bank of India, Corporation Bank and Allahabad Bank were out of the prompt corrective action framework of the RBI earlier this year. Non-performing assets (NPAs) showed a negative trend in 2018-19 and reduced by Rs 23,860 crore between April-September 2018. Following the merger, the number of PSBs has come down to 18. For all the Latest Business News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The Delhi government has raised objection with the Centre over the latter's approval of only three of the six metro phase-IV corridors and change in the ambitious project's funding pattern, an official said on Monday. "The government has sought clarification over the number of corridors approved by the Centre. The Delhi government had approved all the six corridors of the phase IV, while the Centre gave clearance to only three of them," a senior government official said. "Even in the three corridors approved by the Centre, the funding pattern has been changed. So, clarification was sought how and why the number of approved corridors were reduced and funding pattern was changed," he said. The Aam Aadmi Party government has also sought clarity over the compensation to be paid for land acquisition, the official said. The Centre had approved three corridors of phase IV at an estimated cost of Rs 24,948 crore. The share of the Centre and the Delhi government in it was pegged at Rs 4,154 crore each, while rest of the funding is to be done through support from lending agencies. The Delhi government paid Rs 200 crore as balance amount of its share this year for the project and has sough clarification on the above points, the official said. The AAP government had approved six corridors of the project last December. The Union housing and urban affairs ministry had objected to two conditions imposed by the Delhi government while clearing the project at its end. It had asked for sharing of operational losses with Centre at 50:50 basis, while refusing to have any commitment regarding loan to be taken for the project. The three corridors cleared by the Centre are Aerocity-Tughlakabad (20.2 km), RK Ashram-Janakpuri West (28.9 km) and Maujpur-Mukundpur (12.5 km). Apart from these, Rithala-Narela (21.72km), Inderlok-Indraprastha (12.58km), Lajpat Nagar-Saket G-block (7.96km) are the rest three corridors that have yet to be approved by the Centre. New Delhi: A Ghaziabad man was arrested for allegedly molesting a US-based freelance journalist of Indian origin near Shipra Suncity in Indirapuram on Friday night. The accused has been identified as 31-year-old Nishant Kaushik, who worked in a private firm in Noida and lived in the same housing society as the journalist in Indirapuram. The police said that Kaushik allegedly followed the 38-year-old journalist in his car for around 50 minutes, making lewd remarks all the while. At one point, he allegedly even asked her, 'Chalti hai kya nau se baarah?' (which roughly translates to, do you want to come with me) Kaushik was arrested later that night after she filed a police complaint. But the woman said that the incident had left her so shaken and terrified that she had decided to return to the US. She and her sister, also a journalist, had come to India in January and rented a flat in Indirapuram as they wanted to cover the general elections. The incident happened around 10 pm on Friday. The accused followed her in his car for some time and passed comments. He molested her as well. We have arrested him, said a police officer. I visited three shops in the locality and the man followed me in his Swift Dzire. This went on for nearly 50 minutes. He even tried to stop the rickshaw, I was travelling in, a few times. When I encountered him, he touched me inappropriately, the woman said in her complaint as reported by ToI. She called the guards of the housing society when she was near her and also made a phone call to her sister for help. I rushed to the gate and called the police control room. The accused was drunk and misbehaved with us when we tried to resist. He tried to flee, but the guards caught hold of him and handed him over to police, the sister said. Sandeep Singh, station house officer of Indirapuram police station, said, Based on the womans complaint, an FIR under sections 354 D (assault or criminal force to a woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman) of the IPC has been registered at Indirapuram police station. The accused has been arrested and sent to jail while his car has been seized by police. For all the Latest Crime News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Telangana Board Class 11 and Class 12 results to be declared on the 2nd week of April. According to a result portal, Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) would be releasing the result for the TS Inter 1s Year 2019 and TS Inter 2 Year 2019 examinations on April 08. According to manabadi.com and schools9.com, the result would be released on April 8, 2019. The results would be available on bie.telangana.gov.in. Interestingly, while one website suggests that the Telangana State Inter results would be released on April 8, 2019, the other website suggests that the 2nd year result 2019 would be released on the said date. The examinations for Class 11 were conducted from February 27, 2019 to March 16, 2019. Examinations for Class 12 or TS Inter 2n Year were conducted from March 1 to March 15, 2019. Approximately 4, 36, 000 candidates have appeared for the TS Inter 2nd Year examinations. A similar number of students have appeared for the Class 11 examinations from the state. Students are advised to keep an eye on the official websites as the official notification is released by the board only 24 hours ahead of the actual declaration. Last year, TS Intermediate Results were released on April 14, 2019. Also, the results would be made available online. The official result website, however, is bie.telangana.gov.in. The results would also be made available on tsbie.cgg.gov.in. In 2018, the Telangana Board Class 12 exams were conducted from March 1 to 19, 2018. Over 4.29 lakh students appeared for the exam of which 67.06% cleared the Telangana Board 12th exam. About Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) The Telangana Board of Secondary Education and Telangana Board of Intermediate Education were established in the year 2014. The State Board of Telangana or Telangana Board is divided into two sections. While the Telangana Board of Secondary Education conducts the SSC exams, the Telangana Board of Intermediate Education conducts the Intermediate exams i.e. 11th and 12th. The Telangana Board of Intermediate Education regulates and supervises the system of intermediate education in Telangana State. It executes and governs various activities that include prescribing syllabus, conducting examinations, granting affiliations to colleges and providing direction, support and leadership for all educational institutions under its jurisdiction. Honourable Minister of the State for Secondary Education acts as chairman and secretary of Government, Secondary Education as vice-chairman of the board. The secretary of IAS Rank acts as the chief executive of the Board. New Delhi: Amid rising speculations of an alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi ahead of the Lok Sabha elections 2019, Delhi Congress chief and former chief minister Sheila Dikshit met party president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday. The meeting, which last for around 20 minutes was also attended by AICC in-charge of Delhi PC Chacko. Dikshit, who has been opposing an alliance with the AAP, had said on Sunday that the decision on tie-up for Lok Sabha polls will be declared in a few days. The decision from Rahul Gandhi on an alliance is expected "anytime" now, sources said. The Delhi unit of the party has been divided over an alliance with the AAP. Four former Delhi Congress presidents -- Ajay Maken, Subhash Chopra, Tajdar Babar and Arvinder Singh Lovely -- favoured an alliance with Kejriwal's party. On the other hand, Dikshit and three working presidents, Devender Yadav, Rajesh Lilothia, and Haroon Yusuf, maintained their stand against the alliance. Amid the dilly-dallying over forging an alliance, NCP chief Sharad Pawar had also intervened, asking both the parties to join hands to unitedly defeat the BJP. Soon after the meeting on Monday, Arvind Kejriwal had declared that the Congress had rejected an alliance and he was "fed up of trying to convince the party". The AAP has been seeking an alliance with the Congress in Delhi saying that a division of votes will help the BJP in all seven constituencies in the city. The BJP had won all Lok Sabh seats in Delhi in 2014 parliamentary polls. The Lok Sabha elections on the seven seats in Delhi will be held on May 12. The counting of votes will be done on May 23. Umerkote (Odisha): BJP chief Amit Shah on Monday cautioned the people of Odisha not to repeat the mistake of electing an English speaking chief minister who cannot understand their feeling. Shah was targetting Naveen Patnaik whom he alleged of being unable to speak Odia language despite being chief minister for 19 years. "While returning from this rally, take a pledge not to elect an English-speaking CM. You may be Odia or Telegu. But, keep it in mind that the English-speaking CM cannot understand your agony and feeling," the BJP president said. Shah, who addressed two election meetings on 'Utkal Diwas' at Parlakhemundi under Berhampur Lok Sabha seat and Umarkpote under Nabarangpur Parliamentary constituency going to polls in the first phase on April 11, invoked Odia pride and called upon people to choose a chief minister who can speak the language and understand the sufferings of the masses. Assembly election in Odisha is also scheduled to be held along with Lok Sabha polls in four phases on April 11, 18, 23 and 29. Noting that Odisha was created as a separate state out of Bengal-Bihar-Orissa province on the basis of the language, Shah repeatedly appealed to voters to not commit the same mistake. You have tolerated a lot. He appealed to people to elect a "young" Odia chief minister who can speak in your language and feel the problems of the people. However, he did not reveal the name of the "Young" leader who will become BJP face in the state. I appeal to voters to give BJP a chance to form a government in Bhubaneswar. While BJD has been ruling the state for 19 years, you have also elected Congress governments for years. Please give the BJP a chance to rule Odisha and we will make it the number one state in the country, Shah said. People of Odisha must bring a "double-engine" government by voting BJP to power both in the state as well as the Centre as it will ensure speedy development all over. While dubbing the BJD government as a "fused" transformer (jala hua transformer), Shah said this government has created unemployment for which a large number of youths have been migrating to other states in search of jobs. Shah promised to reverse the trend if BJP is voted to power in the state. He said over 30,000 migrant labourers had attended his rally in Surat last Saturday. Why is it that the youths have to leave their families back home and travel to far off places in search of jobs? We will ensure opportunities are created within Odisha to check migration, Shah promised. The BJP chief also alleged that corruption was rampant under BJD rule in the state and no work is done without payment of bribe or commission. Claiming that the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre has ensured central allocation of Rs 5.58 lakh crore for Odisha during last five years in comparison to Rs 80,000 crore given during previous UPA rule, Shah said the money did not reach the villages because the state government had posed obstacles in resource allocation. New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday rejected the Congressas manifesto, saying Rahul Gandhi-led party is amaking dangerous promisesa. A aSome of the ideas are positively dangerous in the Congress manifesto. They are for an agenda for the balkanisationA of India,a he said. aEven though there was a drafting committee, but it appears that some of the important points have been drafted by the Congress president's friends in 'Tukde Tukde gang' when it deals with Jammu and Kashmir,a Jaitley said at a press conference in the BJP headquarters in New Delhi. The senior party leader said the Congress does not deserve "even a single vote" for its promises, such as doing away with sedition law He also said even tokenism has not been done on farm loan waiver in the five states where the Congress is in power.A A The Congress on Tuesday released its manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls, making a slew of promises, including giving Rs 72,000 each to five crore poor families under the 'Nyay' scheme, filling up 22 lakh government vacancies, bringing a separate budget for farmers and fixing a single moderate GST rate. #ElectionsWithNewsNation | "I seem to have read the manifesto more than Congress president": @arunjaitley takes a jibe at @RahulGandhi over employment promise in #CongressManifesto Follow LIVE updates here: https://t.co/U4qxZNkxAc Watch LIVE: https://t.co/8BhJ6kHL2g pic.twitter.com/7DgrQHzKd8 a News Nation (@NewsNationTV) April 2, 2019 aFor the 10 years that we were in Opposition, I would never believe the budget issued by the Congress party because I knew that the devil was always in the details. You have to read the complete annexures to understand their intent which was never clear,a Jaitley said. The 55-page document titled 'Hum Nibhayenge' (We will deliver) focused on addressing the issues of joblessness, farm distress, safety of women and boosting the rural economy, with stress on building a narrative on "real issues" faced by people. The manifesto was released by party president Rahul Gandhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and senior leader P Chidambaram among others. For farmers, Congress promised to put them on the path from "Karz Maafi" (loan waiver), to "Karz Mukti" (freedom from loans). This will be done through remunerative prices, lower input costs, and assured access toA institutional credit, the party said, adding it will present a separate "Kisan Budget" every year, if voted to power. Speaking on the occasion at the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, Gandhi said the Congress will allocate 6 per cent of GDP to education, strengthen government hospitals and give high-quality healthcare access to poor if voted to power. The party also promised to enact the Right to Healthcare Act and guarantee every citizen free diagnostics, out-patient care, free medicines and hospitalisation, through a network of public hospitals and enlisted private hospitals. The Congress president alleged that the BJP government had spread hate and divisiveness in its five-year rule and his party will work towards uniting India by bringing people together. #ElectionsWithNewsNation | If Congress wants to replace the rule of law with the rule of insurgents and terrorists, this is not acceptable to the people of India, says @arunjaitley. Follow LIVE updates here: https://t.co/U4qxZNkxAc Watch LIVE: https://t.co/8BhJ6kHL2g pic.twitter.com/i37dGQJ7vV a News Nation (@NewsNationTV) April 2, 2019 "Our manifesto process reflects our commitment to a higher vision, that of listening to the 'jan awaaz'. It is not the 'mann ki baat' of one individual but the collective voice of lakhs of people," he said in a preface of the manifesto. With this manifesto, Gandhi said the Congress has offered to people "the only national alternative -- a distinct alternative that is unwavering in its commitment to truth, freedom, dignity, self-respect and prosperity for our people." On the party's showpiece minimum income guarantee scheme or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), the party's manifesto promised to give Rs 72,000 per year to the poorest 20 per cent households in India. "Nyay, in the manifesto, has now become a joint scheme of Central and the state governments. Thereby, diluting the initial announcement that Nyay will be over and above existing schemes. It is visible through manifesto that aNyaya is an all-time big Congress bluff," said Jaitley at the press conference.A To the youth of India, Congress pledged to make jobs its top priority, saying it will ensure 34 lakh jobs in the public sector by filling all 4 lakh central government vacancies before March 2020, persuading the state governments to fill 20 lakh vacancies and creating an estimated 10 lakh new Seva Mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local bodies. The party said it will also provide a fillip to private sector by incentivising businesses for jobs creation and employing more women. On GST tax, the Congress said it will radically simplify the GST regime with a single moderate rate of tax, zero-rating of exports, and exemption for essential goods and services. It also promised panchayats and municipalities a share of GST revenues.A A A A A "The Congress manifesto promises Single Rate GST. This effectively means that luxury items, Aam Aadmi commodities, and food items, all should be taxed at the same rate. Rahul Gandhi got this wisdom from Singapore which has no poverty. So, the manifesto does not care about the poor," said Jaitley.A A A The Congress, it said, will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government, and increase it to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces. "We will expedite allA modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces in a transparent manner. We will improve social security, education and health facilities for our Paramilitary Forces and families," the party said. On education, Congress promised that school education from Class I to Class XII in public schools shall be compulsory and free. The party promised to pass in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha the Women's Reservation Bill reserving 33 percent of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies.A (With PTI inputs) New Delhi: The Congress party on Tuesday released its much-awaited manifesto for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Terming the manifesto a marriage of "wealth and welfare", the Congress party said that it will "address the concerns of the farmers, youth, women, industries, minorities, healthcare, foreign policy, national security among others." In the manifesto, which was prepared after taking inputs from over 62 lakh people, the Congress party announced a separate budget for farmers. "The manifesto is a massive step for Congress. When we started this process a year back, I told them that this manifesto should reflect the wishes of the people and whatever is present in the document should be truthful, Rahul Gandhi said during the launch event. Below are the highlights of Congress party's 2019 general elections manifesto 13:24 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress manifesto website down due to heavy traffic. "We're experiencing heavy traffic on our Manifesto website right now - we'll be back up soon," tweeted the party. 12:52 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "This is not a manifesto made in closed rooms. NYAY, jobs and farmers are among our focal points. NYAY will help the economy. We will deliver money to the poorest people in the country," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:51 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "Rich people like Anil Ambani gets bank loan easily but when farmers go to banks, they face a lot of hurdles. And when they are unable to pay their loans, it becomes a criminal offense. If the Congress party comes to power, it will be changed to the civilian offense," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:56 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "I asked our manifesto committee to tell me the truth about the jobs as I didn't want to make fake 2 crore jobs promise like Narendra Modi. I have been told that 22 lakhs government posts are vacant. Congress party will fill those vacant post by 2020," announces Rahul Gandhi. 12:42 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "Whatever is going to be there in the manifesto has to be true. I don't want anything to feature in the manifesto that is a lie," says Rahul Gandhi. 12:41 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Now comes the Congress president Rahul Gandhi. He begins his speech by thanking party seniors. 12:36 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "The real issues are unemployment, 4.70 crore jobs were lost under the Modi-led government. Farm distress is the second biggest issue. The third is the security of women," says Chidambaram. 12:36 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "You will find there is enough in the manifesto which addresses the concerns of Dalits, youths, minority, the state of healthcare and education and that concerns the internal and national security," says Congress manifesto committee incharge P Chidambaram. 12:30 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "Today is a historic day. Todays Congress manifesto will help to make a strong and developed India," says Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala. 12:29 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "Rahul Gandhi said he wanted something different this time in mainfesto, he said go out and listen to people of India and reflect it in manifesto. We took our mission very seriously, this manifesto reflects the ideas and hopes of people of India," says Gowda. 12:27 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "More than 62 lakh inputs were received from people across the country for the manifesto," says Congress Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Gowda. 12:00 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In How Congress party prepared its manifesto: Last year, the Congress had reached out to the people seeking suggestions for the manifesto. Besides, suggestions from the people of the country and behind the door consultations, the party had also used social media to take inputs. 11:57 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress general secretary in-charge Uttar Pradesh East Priyanka Gandhi reaches party headquarters in Delhi. 12:20 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In What may feature in Congress' 'crowdsourced' manifesto 1. NYAY scheme: Already announced by Congress president Rahul Gandhi, NYAY scheme is very likely to feature in Congress' election manifesto. 2. Reservation for women. Rahul Gandhi has long been demanding the Narendra Modi government to bring the woman's reservation bill in the parliament. It is highly likely the issue may feature in the party's manifesto. 3. Farm loan waiver: When the Congress party won Assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the first thing their respective governments did was they waived farm loans. Rahul Gandhi has also spoken about the growing agrarian crisis and may announce loan waiver up to Rs 2 lakh to give to farmers. 4. Jobs for youth: Employment has been one of the many issues on which the Narendra Modi government failed to deliver. While the BJP is fighting 2019 elections on nationalism, the Congress has made unemployment their key poll issue and Rahul Gandhi is likely to make a major announcement for the youth of the country. 5. Probe in Rafale deal: Irregularities in Rafale deal has been a major political issue the Modi government had face. Congress chief has been demanding a probe in the deal and a promise related to the issue will probably feature in the Congress' manifesto. New Delhi: Congress leader former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijaya Singh on Tuesday said that it was not proper to remove security provided to the RSS office in Bhopal. Taking to micro blogging website Twitter, Digvijaya wrote, aIt is not fair to remove the security from the Bhopal National Volunteer Association Office, I request the Chief Minister, Kamal Nath, to immediately give an order to provide adequate security again.a aaaaa aaaaaYaaaa aaaaa aaaa aaa aaaaaaaa aa aaaaaaa aaYaaa aaaaaaa aasaa aaaa aa aaa aaaaa aaaaaa aaa aaa aa aa aaaaaa aaaa aaa aa aaaaaa aaa: aaaaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaa aa aaaa aaaa a digvijaya singh (@digvijaya_28) April 2, 2019 Earlier, security personnel were withdrawn from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) office in Bhopal for deployment for election duty. However, ASP (Zone-I) Bhopal said that Special Armed Forces (SAF) Guard has been removed and the security not been removed. aSAF is needed for elections, we removed the guard from 6 places, including, RSS office. There wasnat any order. It was just a routine thing,a news agency ANI quoted him as saying. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath announced that Digvijaya Singh will contest the 2019 general election from the Bhopal constituency. Bhopal is a stronghold of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress has not won the seat since 1984. Earlier, Digvijaya Singh said he has no objection to veteran Congressman and ex-PresidentA Pranab MukherjeeA sharing the dais withA RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat. aIf the RSS had invited me, I would have also gone. Whatas wrong in sharing the dais with RSS sarsanghchalak? I would have gone and shown them the mirror, put forth our ideology,a Singh, a fierce critic of the Sangh, had told Economic Times. aBut I disagree with what he said about [RSS founder KB] Hedgewar being a great son of India. He wasnat great,a he had said. This was when former President Pranab Mukherjee shared RSS stage.A New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on TuesdayA hit out at National Conference leader Omar Abdullah for advocating a restoration of the post of Prime Minister in Jammu and Kashmir, saying "can any country have more than one PM. I would like the Congress and the RJD, which are part of the same 'mahamilavat'A gang, to come clean on the issue". He also lambasted the opposition parties for seeking proof of military operations against terror camps and remarked they appear spokespersons for Pakistan more than political parties representing India. Addressing his maiden rally in Bihar after the announcement of Lok Sabha polls, Modi said the electorate must decide whether they want the madadgars (helpers) of Pakistan to be in power..those who are out to destroy the morale of armed forces by seeking proofs. The PM has been mocking 'mahagathbandhan' (grand alliance) of opposition parties as "mahamilavat"A (highly adulterated). "They appear more like spokespersons for Pakistan than political parties representing India," the PM said launching a scathing attack at the rivals for their comments post-Pulwama terror attack. The Prime Minister alleged that whenever the Congress has come to power in the country, whether on its own or heading an alliance, governance has gone into reverse gear. Growth rate has dropped while there has been a surge in terrorist activities, violence and accumulation of black money. In a veiled attack on parties like Lalu Prasad'ss RJD, Modi said those who always swore by the name of JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) are now sitting in the lap of the Congress. In an apparent rebuttal of the RJDs repeated the allegation that his government was planning to do away with reservations to forward the RSS agenda, he said let alone Modi, nobody can abolish quotas. We have provided 10 per cent reservations for the economically weaker sections among the general category, but we have done so without diluting reservations for SCs, STs and OBCs, he pointed out. With elections approaching, they have begun to scare you with the false propaganda that Modi is out here to do away with reservations. The fact is, we granted constitutional status to the OBC commission despite hurdles created from their side, the Prime Minister alleged. It is a matter of pride for all of us that after getting the constitutional status, the first person to be heading the body Bhagwan Das Sahni hails from this state, he pointed out. They have suddenly discovered the virtues of Ambedkar on whom they had only heaped insults during his lifetime. The father of the Constitution got Bharat Ratna, in recognition of his invaluable contribution to the making of modern India, by our government, Modi asserted. Five places associated with Ambedkar, including London, are being developed as Panch teerth (five places of pilgrimage) by my government, Modi added. Modis maiden election rally in the state was held in the Lok Sabha segment represented by Chirag Paswan, son of Union minister Ramvilas Paswan and the heir apparent of BJPs alliance partner Lok Janshakti Party. You know what depths Bihar had sunken into under the RJDs rule. The team of Nitish Kumar and Sushil Kumar Modi had made great efforts to pull Bihar out of the deep rut. A lot more still needs to be done and for that, we need your blessings, he said. In keeping with his rousing style of oratory, Modi ended his brief address by making the crowds chant along with him "Main bhi Chowkidar, gali gali mein chowkidar ", an obvious riposte to Congress president Rahul Gandhi's oft-repeated slogan 'Chowkidar Chor Hai'. (With inputs from agencies) This Page Is Under Construction - Coming Soon! Why am I seeing this 'Under Construction' page? New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address public rallies at Jamui and Gaya in Bihar. Both these constituencies are going to polls in the first phase on April 11 and are being contested by BJPs alliance partners LJP and JD(U). He will then address a public meeting at Bhawanipatna, the district headquarters town of Kalahandi in western Odisha. Congress president Rahul Gandhi will release the party's polls manifesto for Lok Sabha Polls 2019 today. The Congress Central Election Committee will meet to discuss names of candidates for Punjab, Jharkhand and Bihar. 21:22 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Bharatiya Janata Party releases a list of candidates for parliamentary constituencies of Mahesana and Surat in Gujarat and Thrissur in Kerala. Bharatiya Janata Party releases list of candidates for parliamentary constituencies of Mahesana and Surat in Gujarat and Thrissur in Kerala. pic.twitter.com/gRfDPPz3wT ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 19:49 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In PM Modi in Gaya, Bihar: There are two kinds of people who have a problem with 'Chowkidar.' One type includes 'Maha Milawati' and the second includes all those who sponsor terrorists. 19:23 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Coimbatore, Tiruppur and many other cities were declared Smart City under the NDA: BJP president Amit Shah. 18:32 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Odisha: Biju Janata Dal (BJD) releases list of 9 candidates; 2 for Lok Sabha polls and 7 for Legislative Assembly polls. Mahesh Sahu to contest from Dhenkanal Lok Sabha seat and Chandrani Murmu from Kendujhar Lok Sabha seat. 16:57 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Election Commission has sent notice to the Ministry of Railways over 'Main Bhi Chowkidar' teacups. 16:34 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In I seem to have read the manifesto more than Congress president: Arun Jaitley takes a jibe at Rahul Gandhi over employment promise in Congress manifesto. 16:35 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to accompany Congress President Rahul Gandhi to Wayanad in Kerala for the filing of his nomination from the parliamentary constituency on April 4. 16:24 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress names Babi Bagkar as its candidate to contest by-election from Mandrem (Goa) legislative assembly seat and Atal Shukla (UP) to contest by-election from Nighasan legislative assembly seat. Congress names Babi Bagkar as its candidate to contest by-election from Mandrem (Goa) legislative assembly seat and Atal Shukla (UP) to contest by-election from Nighasan legislative assembly seat. pic.twitter.com/UgQMEPstuj ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 16:23 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In If Congress wants to replace the rule of law with the rule of insurgents and terrorists, this is not acceptable to the people of India: Arun Jaitley. 16:21 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In They (Congress) say they will amend and review Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts (AFSPA). What is AFSPA? Disturbed Areas Act deals with internal subversion. Armed Forces of the Union and Central Forces, excluding Navy... a sanction is needed to file a case against a member of the forces, says the finance minister. 16:20 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The manifesto states that The Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC ) would be amended, that bail becomes a norm. It is the judiciary prerogative. Those who kill members of the forces, this provision has been entered to protect Maoists and enemies: Arun Jaitley. 16:18 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In No nation over the last 72 years has dealt with terrorism like India, says Jaitley. 16:18 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In From 2004 to 2014, I never believed Congress's budget declarations, I knew the devil was always in the detail: Jaitley. 16:16 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In When out of ignorance, he makes unimplementable and dangerous promises, I am sure the nation would not be in a mood to oblige him, for implementing the kind of promises which are contained in this manifesto, says Jaitley. 16:16 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The Congress manifesto contains a statement of Congress President that whenever he makes a promise, he never breaks it: Arun Jaitley. 16:15 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In They (Congress) are saying the law of sedition will be removed, the party who makes such promises does not have the right to get a single vote: FM Arun Jaitley. 16:13 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress is moving forward on the agenda of the Nehru-Gandhi family's historic blunder on Jammu and Kashmir, says Jaitley. 16:12 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Nehru-Gandhi family committed a historic mistake regarding Jammu and Kashmir and the nation can't forgive them for that: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. 16:09 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In In its entire chapter on Jammu and Kashmir, Congress manifesto has nothing on the plight of Kashmiri Pandits: Arun Jaitley. 16:05 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Our fight against terrorism did not start from 26/11, people who wanted to break India were active in the country since long: FM Arun Jaitley. 16:05 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress party has an agenda in its manifesto that would break the country: Arun Jaitley 16:00 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Even though there was a drafting committee, but it appears that some of the important points have been drafted by the Congress president's friend in Tukde Tukde gang when it deals with Jammu and Kashmir, says Jaitley. 16:00 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Some of the ideas are positively dangerous in the Congress manifesto. They are for an agenda for the vulcanization of India: Arun Jaitley. 15:36 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Karnataka: Tejashwini, wife of late Union Minister Ananth Kumar, appointed vice president of the BJP. Karnataka: Tejashwini, wife of late Union Minister Ananth Kumar, appointed Vice President of the BJP. (file pic) pic.twitter.com/0zeDHdU1aT ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 14:42 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Union minister Shripad Naik, who is contesting from North Goa Lok Sabha seat, on Tuesday said the BJP has incorporated inputs given by late chief minister Manohar Parrikar for its poll campaign in the coastal state. We are certainly going to miss Parrikars presence in the poll campaign. He was one of our main speakers at rallies and a crowd-puller, Naik told PTI in an interview. 14:40 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In BSP Chief Mayawati in Bhubaneswar: The way PM Modi's government implemented GST and demonetization, in haste, that affected small businesses; that also led to increase in unemployment. Congress was involved in Bofors and now BJP govt is involved in Rafale. 14:39 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The Election Commission writes to President Ram Nath Kovind to bring it to his notice that Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh's remark that Narendra Modi should be re-elected as the Prime Minister is violative of the Model Code of Conduct. 14:39 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The announcements made by the BJP in the last days of their government are just for electoral gains," says BSP chief Mayawati in Bhubaneswar. 14:23 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The Election Commission on Tuesday issued notification for phase four of Lok Sabha elections to be held on April 29 in which 71 seats across nine states will go to polls. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal will head for voting in all the seven phases of the general elections. 13:07 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In In last 5 years, BJP govt has spread hate, divisiveness; Cong will work towards uniting India, bringing people together: Rahul Gandhi. 13:04 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Rahul Gandhi at Congress' election manifesto release: I also said that whatever is going to be in this manifesto has to be truthful, I do not want a single thing in this manifesto that is a lie because we have been hearing large number of lies spoken everyday by our PM. 13:04 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress President Rahul Gandhi: PM had spoken about MGNREGA. He mocked and said it is a bogus and useless scheme. Today everyone knows how much it helped the country. So now we want to guarantee jobs for 150 days, instead of 100 days, under the scheme. 12:49 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In If a farmer can't repay loan, it will be a civil offence and not a criminal offence, says Rahul Gandhi in manifesto. 12:46 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In TDP spokesperson in Telangana joins TRS In a setback to TDP in Telangana, one of its spokespersons, B N Reddy joined the ruling TRS on Tuesday. Reddy joined TRS in the presence of its working president K T Rama Rao, TRS sources said. 12:44 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Purpose of Cong manifesto is to spell out the vision of moving towards forward-looking and inclusive economy, polity: Former PM Manmohan Singh. 12:44 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, ex-PM Manmohan Singh, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, release party's manifesto for Lok Sabha polls. 12:44 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Real issues in country are unemployment, farmer distress and women's safety, among others: Chidambaram at Cong manifesto launch. 12:43 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In BJP trying to take narrative to hyper nationalism; Cong has to bring narrative to real issues: P Chidamabaram at Cong manifesto launch. 12:34 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In P Chidambaram says, You will find there is enough in the manifesto which addresses the concerns of Youths, minority, the state of healthcare and education and that concerns the internal and national security. 12:34 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In MP Rajeev Gowda says, Rahul Gandhi said he wanted something different this time in mainfesto, he said go out and listen to people of India and reflect it in manifesto. We took our mission very seriously, this manifesto reflects the ideas and hopes of people of India. 12:33 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala says, Today is a historic day. Todays Congress manifesto will help to make a strong and developed India. 12:22 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Jammu & Kashmir: Northern Command Indian Army chairs joint key security meeting at Srinagar to review current situation ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Jammu & Kashmir: Northern Command Indian Army chairs joint key security meeting at Srinagar to review current situation ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. pic.twitter.com/cE4P3hAY2K ANI (@ANI) April 2, 2019 12:20 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Former prime minister Manmohan Singh arrives at Congress office ahead of the release of the manifesto. 12:12 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In During long years of Congress rule at Centre there was no tribal affairs ministry...only in Vajpyeee government separate tribal affairs ministry was created. Congress and BJD have treated poor as vote bank. Rajiv Gandhi had told here in Kalahandi that if he is sending Rs 1 only 15 paise reaches poor. I can proudly say that if the central government sends Rs 1 for the poor the full amount reaches the poor: PM Modi 12:05 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Tej Pratap, the son of Lalu Prasad said, What will the party do if there are no people, Tejaswi should understand that we are demanding seat for our party members they are not from outside. If a situation arises I am also ready to fight, he (Tejaswi) is younger than me he should listen to me. We have to save the constitution of India, need to fight BJP and RSS as quoted by the CNN News18. 12:02 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Addressing the rally in Odisha's Kalahandi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asks, In the state, for the first time since Independence, who provided electricity to the villages in the state. He also said, BJP provided sanitation facility for poor and women. 50 lakh toilets were built for the safety of women. Our government also provided banking facilities for the poor. 11:58 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In "In the past 5 years, without taking a single holiday as much as a single body can work, I have worked day and night for the change that is happening today," says PM Modi. 11:58 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Priyanka Gandhi Vadra reaches Congress office ahead of manifesto release. 11:52 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In BJP candidate BR Waghe and Congress nominee Atum Welly will vie for Pakke-Kesang seat in the newly created district in Arunachal Pradesh, which was earlier a part of the East Kameng district. The state is going to simultaneous Lok Sabha and assembly polls on April 11. 11:50 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Prime Minister Narendra Modi is addressing an election rally at Kalahandi in Odisha. 11:36 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Preparations underway for the release of the Congress' manifesto, SEE PICTURE 10:53 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Supreme Court declines urgent hearing of Patidar leader Hardik Patel's plea seeking a suspension of his conviction in a 2015 case relating to rioting so that he can contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. 10:41 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Bihar: Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey has been granted bail by a local court in connection with a matter where he had misbehaved with SDM KK Upadhyay in Buxar after the official had stopped his convoy for violating the model code of conduct. The incident had taken place on March 30. 10:17 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's 3-day tour of Bundelkhand has been cancelled for now. She was supposed to tour the area from April 3 onwards. The new schedule will be out soon. 09:30 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In A sari with AICC general secretary (East) Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's image being sold outside the Congress' headquarters. Picture here: 09:29 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In RJD leader Tejashvi Yadav to hold a press conference today. 09:21 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In BSP chief Mayawati will visit Uttarakhand's Roorki on April 6 and Congress president will tour the Piran Kaliyar constituency in the hill state. 09:21 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot to campaign in Haridwar's Manglaur on Thursday. Congress leader Sharmishtha Mukherjee to campaign in Uttarakhand's Udham Singh Nagar on April 6. 09:21 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In BJP might just give the Bhadoi and Jaunpur seats in Uttar Pradesh to Nishad Party as allies are pressuring BJP. 06:51 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Agartala: Electoral officers of the West Tripura constituency took part in a one-day technical training on the Commissioning of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) & Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPATs) on Monday. Agartala: Electoral Officers of West Tripura constituency took part in a one-day technical training on the Commissioning of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) & Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPATs) yesterday. #LokSabhaElections2019 pic.twitter.com/3ITZ8tFVBo ANI (@ANI) April 1, 2019 06:49 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Tamil Nadu: Urging people to vote in the upcoming elections, Coimbatore-based miniature artist Raja has carved 18 election party symbols in one gram silver, and milligram gold in a miniature EVM, a compass and a pencil in which a person raises his hands with the black ink-mark. 06:38 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress president Rahul Gandhi will release the party's polls manifesto for Lok Sabha Polls 2019 today. 06:38 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The Congress Central Election Committee will meet to discuss names of candidates for Punjab, Jharkhand and Bihar. 06:38 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The prime minister will also address a public meeting at Bhawanipatna, the district headquarters town of Kalahandi in western Odisha. New Delhi: Rajasthan Governor Kalyans March 23 remark where he had talked about Narendra Modis return as Prime Minister has landed him in controversy. Latest media reports say that the Election Commission is likely to write to President Ramnath Kovind against the Governor over poll code violation. On March 23, Singh had said on camera, Hum sabhi log BJP ke karyakarta hai aur iss naatey se hum zaroor chahengey ke BJP vijai ho. Sab chahengey ek baar phir sey kendra mein Modiji pradhanmantri banein. Modiji ka pradhanmantri banna ye desh ke liye avashyak hai, samaaj ke liye avashyak hai (We are all BJP workers, so we will want the BJP to win. Everyone will want Modi to become PM again. Modi becoming PM is necessary for the nation and society). Addressing BJP workers at his Aligarh residence on March 23, Singh had reportedly said, "All of us are BJP workers and we want the party to win. We want Modiji to become the prime minister." Singh, a former Uttar Pradesh chief minister, reportedly made these remarks to placate some agitated BJP members who had gathered outside his house over ticket distribution. After that, the Aligarh district magistrate on March 30 had submitted "evidence" to the Election Commission regarding Singh's reported remarks supporting the return of Narendra Modi as prime minister. The Election Commission had examined his reported remarks in the light of possible violation of the Model Code of Conduct, as holding a constitutional post makes the Governor "apolitical". According to the PTI report, the details and clip of the comments were submitted to the Uttar Pradesh chief electoral officer Friday last week. In the 1990s, the Election Commission had expressed displeasure over Himachal Pradesh Governor Gulsher Ahmed campaigning for his son in elections. He had later quit. The Election Commission declared the schedule for the Lok Sabha Elections 2019 on March 10. The Lok Sabha Elections 2019 will be held in seven phases, starting from April 11. The results will be declared on May 23. The Election Commission said 91 constituencies will go for polls in the first phase on April 11, followed by 97 constituencies in the second phase on April 18. The second phase will be held on April 18, third on April 23 and fourth on April 29, fifth on May 6, sixth on May 12 and seventh phase on May 19. In the first phase, 91 constituencies will go for polls, 97 constituencies in the second phase, 115 constituencies in the third, 71 in the fourth phase, 51 in the fifth phase, 59 in the sixth phase and 59 in the seventh phase. Mumbai: The Bombay High Court on Monday refused to interfere with the release of the Vivek Oberoi-starrer biographical drama on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A bench of Chief Justice Naresh Patil and Justice N M Jamdar noted that the Election Commission (EC) has already issued a notice to the makers of the film 'PM Narendra Modi' over allegations of breach of the model code of conduct in view of the Lok Sabha elections. "The Election Commission has already taken note of the issue and shall deal with it," the court said. The bench disposed of a Public Interest Litigation filed by Satish Gaikwad, national president of the Republican Party of India (I), who said the film, if permitted to be released for public viewing, would violate the model code of conduct imposed by the EC. The plea questioned the timing of the film's release and said if released, it was likely to earn the prime minister electoral mileage. The petitioner urged the court to pass orders ensuring that it is not released this Friday, April 5, as scheduled. The EC, however, told the court that it had already sought replies from the filmmakers. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) told the court, through its counsel Advait Sethna, that it had already granted requisite certificates for the film's trailer on March 20. He submitted that the film is scheduled to be examined for certification this Wednesday and would be cleared for release, if it meets all the requisite criteria. Advocate Birendra Saraf, who appeared for the film's producers, argued that biopics on several politicians have been released for public viewing from time to time, and there would be no breach of the code of conduct if the movie was released. For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: As Shraddha Kapoors director for her upcoming film Street Dancer, celebrates his birthday today, the actress extended her warm birthday wishes by thanking him for being the most important person of her life. Shraddha Kapoor reunites with Remo DSouza for Street Dancer after the striking success of ABCD 2. The actress who is currently shooting for the film, took to social media to wish her director. Sharing the picture, Shraddha Kapoor said, How can I ever thank you enough for being the most important person because of who I do 1 of the things I MOST LOVE to do? Dance @remodsouza Happy Birthday!!!!!! Wish you only the most amazing things that life has to offer! Keep Shining!!! With her impeccable dancing skills, Shraddha Kapoor surprised the audience in ABCD 2 as she outshone in her dancing shoes. Owing to the much love she garnered for the film, Shraddha was roped in for the upcoming Remo DSouza directorial. Impressing the audience with her exemplary dancing skills, Shraddha Kapoor is shooting for Street Dancer. The elegant and graceful actress adds charm to her moves with her vibrant personality. Last month, Shraddha had a working birthday as she ringed in her day in a flight from London to Mumbai, a post which she headed directly to the sets of Chhichhore. The actress is simultaneously juggling the shoot of Saaho in Hyderabad and will soon begin her prep for Baaghi 3 which marks her return to the franchise. On the work front, the busy actress has Saaho, Chhichhore, Street Dancer, as well as Baaghi 3 on her platter and is seen hopping from one set to another succumbing to her work commitments. For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Tania Mallet, who played James Bondas girl alongside Sean Connery in the 1964 classic Goldfinger has reportedly died at the age of 77.A No further details have, however, been revealed about her death. Sharing the sad news on theA demise of one their agirlsa, the official James Bond took to Twitter account to share the devastating news. "We are very sorry to hear that Tania Mallet who played Tilly Masterson in GoldfingerA has passed away. Our thoughts are with her family and friends at this sad time," the post read. We are very sorry to hear that Tania Mallet who played Tilly Masterson in GOLDFINGER has passed away. Our thoughts are with her family and friends at this sad time. pic.twitter.com/gMkqqheGJ7 a James Bond (@007) March 31, 2019 Mallet is the cousin of Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren who began her venture in the silver screens with an audition for the Bond girl Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love.A While she did not end up with the role of Tatiana, she will later appear as Tilly Masterson opposite Sean Connery in the third James Bond film Goldfinger. Fan site Bondstars.com also posted a tribute to the Bond girl on Twitter, writing, "Unfortunately we must share the very sad news that our dear friend Tania Mallet has sadly passed away. "She was a very classy and beautiful lady inside and outaa, the post read. Unfortunately we must share the very sad news that our dear friend Tania Mallet has sadly passed away. She was a very classy and beautiful lady inside and out. We will cherish the memories of the infamous trips to Holland with her and Eunice. pic.twitter.com/rWENPSWPnA a Bondstars (@Bondstars) March 31, 2019 For all the Latest Entertainment News, Hollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Tamil film-writer, filmmaker and actor J Mahendran, who is known for directing evergreen films like 'Uthiri Pookal' and 'Mullum Malarum' breathed his last today, April 02. He was 79.His death came as a severe blow to the Tamil film industry. The veteran director was admitted to a hospital in Chennai in a critical condition on March 27. John Mahendran, son of the ace director, took to social media to share the sad news about the demise of the 'Nenjathai Killathey' director. The former head of the direction department of BOFTA Film Institute in Chennai made his breakthrough as a screenwriter for the film Naam Moovar in 1966. He also wrote the script for Nirakudam starring Sivaji Ganesan. He announced that he was working on a new film in 2014 starring newcomers, for which Ilaiyaraaja would score music. He has also worked as an actor for films like Kamaraj (2004), Theri (2016),and Nimir (2018). His Nenjathai Killathe won three National Film Awards including the award for the best regional film. He was last seen in Boomerang. Mahendran is credited for mentoring Rajinikanth during his initial days in the film industry. His 1978 Mullum Malarum came as a breakthrough for Rajinikanth, who plays a delightful rogue there. During several occasions, the 'robot' actor has gone on to credit the legendary director for his success. Many filmmakers like Mani Ratnam and Shankar, credit his 1979 film Uthiri Pookal as one of the finest Tamil films to be made and their inspiration to make films. Mahendran helmed a total of 12 films with Saasanam, the Arvind Swamy-Gauthami starrer, which released in 2004 being his last. Recently, the filmmaker joined the Blue Ocean Film and Television Academy (BOFTA) in Chennai as the head of the filmmaking and direction course to hone the skills of the next generation of filmmakers. New Delhi: One of the most awaited upcoming films, SS Rajamoulis RRR will be shot at real locations across the nation, unlike Baahubali which was shot at a grand set. The directors next, RRR will be produced by DVV Danayya having an enormous budget of nearly 400Cr. The RRR team has already started their preparation with full swing. The actors will have an extensive Gujrat - Maharashtra schedule. Rajamouli will work on his 10-day schedule in Gujrat then fly down to Pune for another 20-day schedule. SS Rajamouli recently revealed that RRR will be a PAN India project and will be shot at multiple locations. The director said, Unlike Bahubali, RRR is getting shot at various real locations and Rajamouli is building huge sets at real locations. After Alia Bhatt expressed her desire to work with the prolific filmmaker SS Rajamouli, the director fulfilled the wish by roping her in for the much talked about upcoming film RRR. The actress recently shared that she feels grateful that the director has opted to work her in his next project RRR. Also Read | Jatin Sarna aka Bunty from Sacred Games joins 83' to play Yashpal Sharma RRR is a grand periodic action-drama which will feature a heavy star cast from featuring N.T.R. Junior, Ram Charan, Alia Bhatt, Ajay Devgn, Samuthirakani and Daisy Edgar-Jones in lead roles. The acclaimed filmmaker is known to be a perfectionist with his works. The director has won the hearts of audiences with an extravaganza experience with the series. The movie became a mammoth with the Box-office breaking all records of collections. Rajamouli is planning to wrap up the film by the end of the year. At the press meet, which was held a couple of days ago, the team announced that RRR will hit the theatres on July 30, 2020. New Delhi: The Indian Air Force and the Indian Army will destroy three to four unexploded bombs fired by the Pakistan Air Force in the Mendhar area along the Line of Control in Jammu & Kashmir. The Pakistani bombs were fired on February 27 and didn't explode after release from their Mirage-III combat planes, news agency ANI quoted sources as saying. The report came a day after sources told the news agency that the Indian Air Force'sA Sukhoi-30MKIs and Mirage jets pushed backed aA large-sizedA UAV and a package of four Pakistani F-16 jets flying close toA the IndianA border in Khemkaran sector in Punjab at 3 am on Monday. After the Indian response, the Pakistani jets retreated further into their territory. On March 8, India shot down an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), also known asA drone, in Rajasthan's Sri Ganganagar sector around 7.30 pm. This was the fourth time Pakistani drone destroyed by India along the IB since February 26 air strike on Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror camp in Balakot inside Pakistani territory. A fewA days earlier, a Pakistani drone was detected by a ground-based radar station in Rajasthan's Bikaner and minutes later one of the Sukhoi-30 jets deployed in the area to keep an eye on Indian air space shot it down. The Pakistani military drone was targeted at around 11:30 am in Bikaner-Nal sector in Rajasthan. It was the second unsuccessful attempt by Pakistan to send a spy drone inside India in the last six days. On February 27, a day after the air strike, a Pakistani drone was shot down by India along the Indo-Pak border in Kutch district of Gujarat. The Indian Air Force has kept all its bases in the Western sector on maximum alert after the Balakot strike. 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. Several reports claimed that the aSurgical Strike 2.0a decimated Jaish's Alpha 3 Control Rooms located in Balakot, Muzaffarabad and Chakothi in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. A 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 a day after Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held a high-level meeting with all three service chiefs. Following the strike, the Pakistani Air Force also entered the Indian air space and dropped bombs on military establishment in Kashmir. However, IAF planes scrambled the Pakistani jets and destroyed one of them. In the intense aerial battle, an Indian jet was also downed by Pakistani fighter planes.A A Meanwhile, on Monday, the Pakistan Army rejected that Indian claims that a Pakistani F-16 was shot down in an air battle on February 27. aReference repeated Indian claims about shooting down of Pakistani F-16 by India and use of F16 in air battle on 27 February. The event of 27 Feb is part of history now. No Pakistani F16 was hit by Indian airforce,a said the Inter ServicesA Public Relations (ISPR). ISPR added that Pakistan Air Force (PAF) strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) were carried out by JF-17 from within Pakistan airspace.A aLater when 2 Indian jets crossed LOC they were shot down by PAF. Whether it was F16 or JF17 which shot down 2 Indian aircrafts is immaterial,a added the statement. aEven if F-16 have been used as at that point in time complete PAF was airborne including F16s, the fact remains that Pakistan Airforce shot down two Indian jets in self-defence. India can assume any type of their choice even F-16."A A For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Nisar Ahmed Tantray, who was absconding in the 2017 Lethpora CRPF terror attack case, from the UAE. He had escaped to the UAE on February 1 this year. Nisar is the younger brother of Jaish commander Noor Tantray. The government of India brought him back to the country on March 31, according to news agency ANI. Tantray is being interrogated by the NIA at present. The terrorist attack on the CRPF group centre in Lethpora was carried out on the intervening night of December 30-31, 2017, by three terrorists of the proscribed terrorist organisation, the NIA said. During its investigation, the terrorists were identified as Fardeen Ahmad Khandey and Manzoor Baba, both from Pulwama, and Abdul Shakoor from Rawalakot area of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. All three were killed in the encounter. In February 2019, the NIA arrested an operative of the JeM in connection with the attack. According to an NIA statement, the accused, Fayaz Ahmad Magray, is a key conspirator who gave logistical support such as providing shelter to the terrorists and conducting reconnaissance of the CRPF group centre in Lethpora before the attack. He was detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA) by the Jammu and Kashmir Police earlier in 2001 and he remained under detention for 16 months, it said. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Day after a BSF officer was killed in mortar shelling in Jammu and Kashmiras Poonch, over 10 Pakistani soldiers were killed across Line of Control, latest media reports said on Tuesday. While a report in Hindi daily Jagran put the number of Pakistani soldiers killed at 7, another report said that over dozen Pakistani troopers were killed in last 48 hours. In a rare confession, Islamabad admitted that the Pakistani soldiers were indeed manning the LoC forward posts. A Indian troops resorted to unprovoked fire in Rakhchakri, Rawalakot Sector along Line of Control( LOC). Subedar Muhammad Riaz, Lance Havaldar Aziz Ullah and Sepoy Shahid Mansib embraced Shahadat, while one soldier got injured. Pakistan army responded effectively. #PakistanArmy a Dr Mohammad Faisal (@DrMFaisal) April 2, 2019 Pakistan foreign ministryas spokesperson Md Faisal took to Twitter and said, aIndian troops resorted to unprovoked fire in Rakhchakri, Rawalakot Sector along Line of Control ( LOC). Subedar Muhammad Riaz, Lance Havaldar Aziz Ullah and Sepoy Shahid Mansib embraced Shahadat, while one soldier got injured. Pakistan army responded effectively.aA 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. Yesterday, there were reports that the Indian Air Force's Sukhoi-30MKIs and Mirage jets pushed backed a large-sized UAV and a package of four Pakistani F-16 jets flying close to the Indian border in Khemkaran sector in Punjab at 3 am on Monday. After the Indian response, the Pakistani jets retreated further into their territory, according to news agency ANI. This incident came days after the Indian Army on March 8 shot down an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), also known as drone, in Rajasthan's Sri Ganganagar sector around 7.30 pm. This was the fourth time Pakistani drone destroyed by India along the IB since February 26 air strike on Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror camp in Balakot inside Pakistani territory. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Pakistan resorted to multiple ceasefire violations across the Line of Control with shelling artillery, mortars and firing of small arms in Jammu and Kashmirs Nowshera Sector in Rajouri district on Tuesday. According to the Indian Army, the ceasefire violations occurred at around 11:30 am earlier in the day. The statement comes amid reports of killing of Pakistani soldiers in massive retaliation by the Indian forces. Seven Pakistani posts across the LoC were destroyed as the Indian Army retaliated to cross border shelling by Pakistani troops who targeted border areas in Rajouri and Poonch districts, officials said Tuesday. There have been several casualties to Pakistani troops too, they said. Yes we have info we are waiting for more confirmation, BSF DG RK Mishra said on Pakistani soldiers killing. As a precautionary measure, all schools along the borderline in Poonch and Rajouri districts have been closed by authorities in view of the Pakistani shelling. On Monday, a BSF inspector and a five-year-old girl were among three persons killed while 24 others were injured as Pakistani troops heavily shelled forward areas along the Line of Control in Poonch district, prompting the Indian Army to retaliate "befittingly", said officials. There was heavy mortar shelling and firing along LOC in Poonch district and Nowshera sector of Rajouri district till Tuesday morning", officials said. There was also firing and shelling by Pakistan troops in Shahpur sub-sector in Poonch and Nowshera on Tuesday, they said. In the retaliation carried out by Indian troops, seven Pakistan posts across the LoC in Rakhchikri and Rawalakote forward areas of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) were destroyed, they said adding there have been several causalities on the Pakistan side. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) of Pakistan has said three Pakistan Army soldiers were killed on Tuesday in retaliation carried out by Indian forces along the Line of Control (LoC). Pakistan has been using heavy weaponry and 120 mm mortar bombs to target civilian areas along the LoC in Poonch, triggering panic among villagers, they said. Amid the ongoing shelling by Pakistan, people have been advised to stay indoors, the officials said. Meanwhile, the Northern Army Commander, who is on a two-day visit to the valley, chaired a joint key security meeting at Badami Bagh headquarters of Chinar Corps, an Army official said. He said the meeting was attended by senior officials of various security agencies, including Army, J-K Police, CRPF and BSF. The meeting reviewed the current situation in the valley and evolved a strategy for the summer months, including security-related strategy for the forthcoming Parliamentary elections, the official said. The Army commander, Northern Command, Monday began his two-day visit to Kashmir valley to review the security situation in the backdrop of recent counter-militancy operations and the forthcoming polls. On the first day of his visit, Lt Gen Singh visited the forward areas in the frontier district of Baramulla in north Kashmir, where he was briefed by commanders on the ground about the current situation. During the visit, the Army Commander was briefed on the counter infiltration grid and operational preparedness of the formations apart from various developmental works being undertaken to improve the life of the people residing in remote areas. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Washington: Arctic warming weakens the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles, resulting in less precipitation, weaker cyclones and mid-latitude westerly wind flow -- a recipe for prolonged droughts, a study has found. The temperature difference between the tropics and the poles drives a lot of weather, according to the study published in the journal Nature. When those opposite temperatures are wider, the result is more precipitation, stronger cyclones and more robust wind flow. However, due to the Arctic ice melting and warming up the poles, those disparate temperatures are becoming closer, researchers said. "Our analysis shows that, when the Arctic is warmer, the jet stream and other wind patterns tend to be weaker," said Bryan Shuman, a professor at the University of Wyoming in the US. "The temperature difference in the Arctic and the tropics is less steep. The change brings less precipitation to the mid-latitudes," Shuman said. "Importantly, when temperatures have changed in similar ways to today (warming of the Arctic), the mid-latitudes -- particularly places like Wyoming and other parts of central North America -- dried out," he said. "Climate models anticipate similar changes in the future," said Shuman. Currently, the northern high latitudes are warming at rates that are double the global average. This will decrease the equator-to-pole temperature gradient to values comparable with the early to middle Holocene Period, that began 12,000 to 11,500 years ago, according to the researchers. Shuman said his research, using geological evidence, was helping to estimate how dry conditions have been in the past 10,000 years. "Lakes are these natural recorders of wet and dry conditions. When lakes rise or lower, it leaves geological evidence behind," Shuman said. The analysis included 236 records from 219 sites. During the past 10,000 years, many of the lakes studied were lower earlier in history than today, he said. The research group looked at the evolution of the tropic-to-pole temperature difference from three time periods: 100 years ago, 2,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago. For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine on Tuesday called India's destruction of one of its satellites a "terrible thing" that had created 400 pieces of orbital debris and led to new dangers for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. He said this while addressing employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week announced that India successfully test-fired an anti-satellite missile by shooting down a live satellite, describing it as a rare achievement that puts the country in an exclusive club of space super powers. The test made India the fourth country in the world after the US, Russia and China to acquire the strategic capability to shoot down enemy satellites. Not all of the pieces were big enough to track, Bridenstine explained. "What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track -- we're talking about 10 centimeters (six inches) or bigger -- about 60 pieces have been tracked." The Indian satellite was destroyed at a relatively low altitude of 180 miles (300 kilometers), well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit. But 24 of the pieces "are going above the apogee of the International Space Station," said Bridenstine. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station," he continued, adding: "That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight." "It's unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is." The US military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk for the ISS and for satellites. They are currently tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10 centimetres. That includes about 10,000 pieces of space debris, of which nearly 3,000 were created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007 at 530 miles from the surface. As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44 percent over 10 days, Bridenstine said. But the risk will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere. The mission, led by the Defence Reseach and Development Organisation, was code-named "Mission Shakti" in which an anti-satellite weapon ASAT successfully targeted a live satellite on a low earth orbit (LEO). For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Former Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is being treated in a state hospital after being taken there from the centuries-old jail where she has been imprisoned since a corruption conviction, official said. The director of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, Brig Gen A K Mahbubul Hoque, says Zias condition is not life-threatening but there were complications. Earlier, Bangladesh court doubled her jail term to 10 years in a corruption case, piling pressure on the Opposition ahead of general elections. The verdict comes a day after Zia, the leader of the Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), was sentenced to seven years in prison in another graft case. A High Court bench comprising Justice Enayetur Rahim and Justice Mostafizur Rahman had announced the verdict after accepting the Anti-Corruption Commission's review petition to increase 73-year-old Zia's imprisonment in the Zia Orphanage Trust corruption case from five to 10 years. Zias party says the sentencing was politically motivated. A Dhaka court had sentenced Zia to five years in jail in the orphanage corruption case on February 8 2018. Zia has been imprisoned at the former central jail since then. No lawyer for Zia and other accused of the case was present in the court room. The bench did not say anything about other convicts of the case as they did not file any appeal and they are absconding. In her 35 years of political career, Zia went to the jail several times. During the 2007-2008 tenure of the army-backed caretaker government, she was in jail for about a year on charges of corruption. Zia was made vice-chairperson of the BNP in March 1983 after the assassination of her husband. She became chairperson of the party on May 10, 1984, a post she is holding till now. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Pakistans interior ministry ordered investigations into six journalists who had posted pictures online of murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Monday. The investigations had been ordered in a letter dated March 13 from the cybercrime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency, part of the interior ministry, the group said in a statement. According to RSF, the FIA letter named the journalists as part of what it called a targeted social media campaign against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman during his visit to Pakistan in February. RSF said it was appalled to learn of the investigations, adding that it condemns this latest case of intimidation, especially given the Pakistani polices past behaviour towards dissident journalists. Earlier there were reports that some members of the team that brutally killed Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi received training in the United States. Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi regime, was killed and dismembered on October 2 in the Saudi consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul by a team of 15 agents sent from Riyadh. His body has not been recovered yet. After having denied the murder, Saudi Arabia said the operation was carried out by agents who were out of control. A trial of 11 suspects opened earlier this year in Saudi Arabia. But much of the case remains shrouded, beginning with the role of countrys powerful crown prince and de facto ruler Salman. The US Senate, after a closed-door briefing by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), adopted a resolution naming the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) as responsible for the murder, while US President Donald Trump has refused to publicly take a stand. According to David Ignatius - Washington Post columnist, a Saudi who closely read the transcript of a recording from a bug placed in the consulate by Turkish intelligence said it indicates the plan was to kidnap Khashoggi and bring him back to Saudi Arabia for detention and interrogation. A note in the transcript says an injection was administered to Khashoggi, which the Saudi source said was probably a powerful sedative. A bag was then placed over his head, and Khashoggi screamed: "I can't breathe, I have asthma. Don't do this." According to the Post, he died soon after. The transcript describes a buzzing noise, perhaps an electric saw used to dismember the journalist. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. NEW HAVEN New Haven is looking to Cleveland and a successful program implemented there in which a commercial laundry was opened and eventually became employee-owned and now is serving needs of its area hospitals while growing jobs in an underserved neighborhood. The Board of Alders will receive information on the project at its meeting tonight in a communication from Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, executive diretor of the Livable City Initiative. The plan is to purchase the former commercial building used for years by the state as the area welfare office on Bassett Street, as well as a large parking lot, for an estimated $900,000. Neal-Sanjurjo is asking alders for permission to negotiate and enter into a contract to purchase the property at 188-206 Bassett St., as well as the land at 218-222 Bassett St., which are close to the Farmington Canal Trail in Newhallville. We have been working on this for years, Neal-Sanjurjo said in a phone interview. We were figuring out a strategy for stabilizing that building. She said Mayor Toni Harp was introduced to the Evergreen Cooperative model when she visited Cleveland. The usual course is for such proposals to go to an aldermanic committee for review and a public hearing. The laundry is also only one aspect of what the city envisions for that site. The proposed future use for the property will be to create economic growth through microenterprise and small business development, commercial light industrial development, job creation, job retention, and job training activities, Neal-Sanjurjo wrote in a letter to the alders. The developing re-use of the property is intended to transform a blighted abandoned building into a thriving employee owned and operated laundry, fitness facility for the commumity offering community wellness and healthy options for living, a satellite training facility for job training and placement services and potential office space for local non-profit neigborhood development services, Neal-Sanjuro wrote. Neal-Sanjurjo said she has been talking to the community management teams about the citys hopes for the property. Part of the vision is to put together a community development corporation that would work generally on revitalization in Newhallville, such as the longstanding one in Dwight that brought in Stop & Shop, as well the Montessori School in that neighborhood. The Bassett Street property is owned by Bassett Properties Inc. out of New York, according to the assessors office. The 188 Bassett St. property is appraised at $2.9 million, while the parking lot is appraised at $54,740. Now privately owned, conversion to a city property would result in a loss of $88,597 in annual taxes, according to the material sent to the alders. Neal-Sanjurjo envisions the new community development corporation working with ConnCorp, a subsidiary of ConnCAT, to help it get off the ground. The property would be acquired by the city with multiple spaces within the large building leased to businesses and training centers. Eventually, the goal is for the businesses to be employee-owned. Harp, on WNHH radio Monday morning, said she impressed with the Evergreen Cooperative model in Cleveland, where workers are paid a living wage and over time become investors in the business as it increases capacity. Harp said the city has the resources to buy the property. The material sent to the alders said $500,000 would come from special funds and $400,000 from capital/bond funds. The annual maintenance was estimated at $9,500. The mayor said in Cleveland the laundry project started with 28 employees and now has hired 140 workers as it covers the laundry needs of University Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic. The mayor said in addition to Neal-Sanjurjo, Andrea Scott has been working on the plan. The property consists of a vacant, two-story, 70,953-square-foot brick commercial building containing 46,119 square feet of usable commercial space along with a 7,000-square-foot parking lot which has been fenced and paved. Neal-Sanjurjo wrote that New Haven is authorized under Title 1 of the Housing Community Development Act of 1974 to carry out activities in areas that benefit a majority of low to moderate-income residents. The property qualifies for an expenditure through the Community Development Block Grant, according to Neal-Sanjurjo. An article in Next City in May 2018 said the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry in Cleveland, which is 100 percent worker-owned and managed, had announced an expansion to take over 19 million pounds of laundry to process for the Cleveland Clinic. It said it is an example of leveraging the buying power of major institutions to create wealth for communities around them that have long been locked out of such opportunities. A decade ago, the Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Foundation, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, the Democracy Collaborative and the city of Cleveland launched the Evergreen Cooperatives, Next City reported. After the laundry cooperative, there is now a construction cooperative focused on renewable energy and an urban agri-business cooperative. The median income in the targeted neighborhoods in Cleveland is $18,500, according to Next City. mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com DANBURY Its that time of year again when roadways are littered with potholes and motorists are not happy. The News-Times asked readers to report potholes in their home towns. According to the responses theyre all over the place. Potholes were reported across the city of Danbury from Franklin and Main streets in city center to Westview Drive on the east, and Joes Hill Road on the west. One person described a pothole on Westview Drive as a crater [that] shows up every year. Another said Brushy Hill Road is a continuous series of potholes. One motorist said she almost got hit head-on by a driver avoiding potholes on West Redding Road. The entire eastbound lane is full of potholes, forcing drivers to cross the yellow line into oncoming westbound traffic, she said. Another motorist said the area near the corner of Brushy Hill Road and Old Post Road is in horrendous condition. Mayor Mark Boughton said the city has six crews as well as a weekend skeleton crew that work throughout the pothole season. We also have a truck that we share with Bethel that drives around, fixing potholes, he said. When you have warm days and cold nights, along with a bunch of moisture, its not uncommon to get ... buckling of roadways, Boughton said. The citys biggest problem right now is that hot asphalt is not available this time of year and it wont be for a couple weeks, he said. Hot asphalt plants usually dont open up until mid- to late-April, said Boughton, so the city is left with cold patch material to fill the holes in the roads. The cold patch is not the best material, he said. Its really a temporary fix, and it can wash away in a bad rainstorm or something like that. The mayor said there are several ways in which the city finds out where pothole work needs to be done. We have foremen in each each sector of the city who drive around and observe; drivers will tell us, the public notifies us we pretty much get it from everywhere, he said. We get tips and leads on them, and then we go out and fill them as soon as we can. As far as he knows, Boughton said, there is no pothole-preventing alternative to asphalt that can be used on roadways. I wish there was, he plaintively said. Boughton said Danbury has a really busy paving season coming up and he encourages people to report potholes they see. We do everything we can to get out there as fast as we can, he said. Two months ago, the mayor announced that he wanted to spend $1.7 million received through a state grant last year to get an early start on the citys annual road paving program this spring. The $1.7 million will supplement the $3.7 million the city already set aside for paving in its current budget and give crews more funding to begin drainage and prep work in April and May for paving this summer. New Milford Potholes were reported on 10 New Milford roadways, including huge, unavoidable ones on Grove Street and potholes big enough to swallow [a Honda] Civic on Route 109. They were also reported on Lovers Leap Road, Still River Drive, Carmen Hill Road, Candlewood Lake Road South, Mist Hill Road and Wellsville Avenue in New Milford. The town has spent about $20,000 on cold patch this winter, said New Milfords highway foreman, Michael Boucher. Weve ordered probably almost double than what wed normally order in a winter because its been cold and wet, and the holes have opened up a lot more than usual, Boucher said. New Milford recently got a new pothole truck that will go into use starting next week. The truck is equipped with a 300-gallon hot emulsion tank and a machine that blows emulsion and stone out of the truck, Boucher said. Its high volume, low pressure, so it presses it in real tight, he said, adding the truck can be used in all four seasons. Other towns In Bethel, potholes were reported on Payne and Taylor roads. A New Fairfield resident reported potholes on Gillotti Road that vehicles have to swerve [to] just get around. She said her car is in need of a four-wheel alignment because of them. One Newtown motorist said there are potholes all across town, and the streets are horrible for the taxes they pay. Potholes were also reported between 25 Hundred Acres Road and Phyllis Lane and the entire length of Boggs Hill Road. There are numerous potholes on Poverty Hollow Road in Redding, according to a resident, who described the road as a narrow and dangerous one thats traveled by many get to and from Joel Barlow High School. Ridgefield residents reported potholes on Whipstick, Ridgebury and Long Ridge roads. According to one resident, the entire stretch of Long Ridge Road is torn up, causing drivers to cross [the] yellow line into oncoming traffic. kendra.baker@hearst.com WASHINGTON Rep. Rosa DeLauro is optimistic the third time actually will be the charm for her Paycheck Fairness Act, which passed the Democratic-controlled House last week for the third time since 2008 but faces an uncertain future in the Republican-controlled Senate. We are on our way, she said to cheers at a meeting of the Democratic Womens Caucus at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. It is about giving women the power to gain economic security for themselves and their families. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal to pay unequal wages to women for the same job held by men. DeLauros Paycheck Fairness Act, which she has introduced 12 times dating back to 1997, would close loopholes that employers use to pay women less than men who perform the same work. DeLauro cited U.S. Census data that women are paid 80 cents for every dollar earned by men in the same positions. So many Americans are stuck in jobs that do not pay them enough to live on, DeLauro said. Its not a partisan issue. It is a matter of right and wrong, and simple fairness. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-Fla., introduced DeLauro as the Godmother of pay equity. In her 15th term on Capitol Hill, DeLauro has proposed a laundry list of bills aimed at uplifting workers particularly women on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Among them are paid family medical leave, paid sick days, and schedules that work a bill that would bring greater predictability and stability to low-wage workers subject to abrupt and disruptive work-schedule changes. Tuesday was Equal Pay Day, calculated each year to mark the day on the calendar when the average woman finally is paid the total of what an average man earned in the previous year for the same work The National Committee on Pay Equity started observance of the day in 1996. The Paycheck Fairness Act would allow workers to compare notes on salaries without fear of retaliation. It would also prohibit employers from requiring prospective workers to provide salary histories, or screening applicants based on salary history. It would also give women charging pay discrimination new legal leverage to challenge employers in court. Women filing wage-discrimination claims would the same remedies as plaintiffs charging racial or ethnic discrimination under federal civil rights law. Among those at the meeting Tuesday was Hollywood star Michelle Williams, who entered the fray on pay equity after finding out that a male co-star, Mark Wahlberg, made $1.5 million for reshoots of a film ironically titled All the Money in the World. Williams was paid $80 a day. Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, Williams said. This is a critical moment. Please dont let it pass unpassed. The House last week approved the bill by a vote of a vote of 242-187, with eight Republicans voting yes. But passage of the bill in 2008 and 2009 did not result in enactment. In 2009, the measure got dropped at the last minute from the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which overruled a Supreme Court decision that restricted the time period allowed for filing wage-discrimination complaints. Notwithstanding House passage this year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., may choose not to bring it to a floor vote at all. Even so, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., spoke on the Senate floor on Tuesday in favor of the Senate version, which she introduced. Its outrageous that we still dont have equal pay for equal work in the United States in the year 2019, Gillibrand said. A large construction crane fell onto Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas cruise ship, according to news reports. The incident happened Monday in the Bahamas when the ship was dry docked, WPLG-TV and WSVN-TV reported. Eight people were injured, but no passengers were on the ship at the time of the crash, according to the reports. The company is assessing damage to the ship, which can carry more than 6,000 people, according to a statement, news outlets reported. A person captured video of the incident, and a voice could be heard saying, "I was right there on the dock ... Just miss it by the grace of God." Packing the Supreme Court remains as radical and unrealistic an idea in 2019 as it was when Franklin Roosevelt tried it in 1937, derailing the start of his second term, but several of the liberals running for president have jumped on this bandwagon as they lurch leftward and seek to pass unexpected new purity tests. Not Bernie Sanders. The senator from Vermont might be the only Democrat running for president who doesn't need to pander to the left to be able to win the nomination. He has credibility with the base, he's near the top of the early polls, and he doesn't need to climb out on limbs to get coverage in a crowded field. His campaign announced this morning that it raised $18.2 million during the first quarter from 525,000 donors - who gave an average contribution of about $20 - and that it has $28 million cash on hand. All of this liberates him to be more circumspect. Sanders was one of eight presidential candidates who appeared on Monday at a forum in Washington that was sponsored by a coalition of labor, immigration, environmental and abortion rights groups. It was the largest cattle call thus far of the 2020 cycle. Ebony Wiggins, a Planned Parenthood activist from Nashville, Tennessee, expressed concern that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade after Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland from getting a hearing and then changed the rules of the Senate to confirm Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. She wanted to know what Sanders will do "to restore legitimacy to our federal courts." "Some people have said that maybe we need to increase the seats on the Supreme Court from nine to 11 to even maybe 13 to bring that balance back," said Wiggins, 27. "Here is my concern about expanding the numbers," Sanders responded. "My worry is the next time the Republicans are in power, they will do the same thing. So I think that's not the ultimate solution." He nodded to Wiggins' concerns by suggesting that perhaps justices could be cycled onto appellate courts after a certain number of years, but then he said the only real solution is to increase voter turnout to take control of the government democratically. - Sanders' answer was startling on a day when all his opponents appeared intent on telling all their questioners exactly what they wanted to hear. "Every candidate who was asked expressed support for abolishing the electoral college, restoring voting rights to felons and naming Election Day a national holiday," the Post's Matt Viser observed. "They all agreed to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and end privately financed prisons. And they all pledged to reenter the Paris climate accord on their first day in office." Other senators in the race, including Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, have said they are open to adding justices to the court, in contravention of a long-cherished norm that dates to the dawn of the republic. Moderates like Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who is returning to New Hampshire this weekend and is expected to formally launch his campaign soon, have said it's a terrible idea. - In recent weeks, Sanders has also bristled at the push from the left to get rid of the filibuster that requires 60 votes to pass major legislation, and he's declined to join the parade of candidates calling for reparations. During a televised town hall on Feb. 25, a woman asked Sanders whether he supports reparations for the descendants of slaves. He said he supports a plan by Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., to focus more federal resources on "distressed communities with high levels of poverty" and "to do everything we can to end institutional racism in this country." But Bernie wouldn't be baited into backing reparations. When CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer told Sanders that Warren, Harris and Julian Castro all support reparations, the Vermonter shot back: "What does that mean? What do they mean? I'm not sure that anyone's very clear. . . . Again, it depends on what the word means." On Feb. 19, he said the focus from activists on ending the legislative filibuster is a distraction from more systemic problems. "I'm not crazy about getting rid of the filibuster," he said on CBS. "The real issue is that you have in Washington a system which is dominated in Washington by wealthy campaign contributors." - Sanders' unwillingness to follow the herd on the filibuster and court-packing reflects an abiding respect for governing institutions, guardrails and the rule of law, as well as the wisdom that comes from serving 28 years in Congress. He won a House seat in 1990 and a promotion to the Senate in 2006. The 77-year-old has served in the majority and the minority in both chambers, so he understands the long-term value of protecting the prerogatives of the party that's out of power when the pendulum swings. Sanders pointed out on Monday that he also knows what it's like to lose and that this indelibly shaped his worldview: He joked about the early races in which he garnered just 1 or 2 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate before pointing out that he just got reelected with 67 percent. - To be sure, Sanders has certainly evolved on some major issues as he turned his attention from rural Vermont to the national stage.Gun control and immigration are the two most notable examples. - Contrary to his public persona, however, GOP lawmakers who have worked with Sanders - including John McCain before he died - have often described him as a results-oriented realist and a savvy negotiator. Sanders has said that he sees the job of a legislator as lawmaking, not protesting. He's voted for many bills that he complained didn't go far enough on the grounds that incremental progress is better than nothing. As chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee in 2014, Sanders negotiated a bipartisan VA overhaul with House Republicans. - As the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for eight years, he talked a lot about international issues but governed as a pragmatist. Sanders filled potholes, rebuilt the downtown and worked with Republicans to advance his agenda. In one famous episode during the 1980s, he supported the arrest of antiwar activists who were blocking the entrance to a General Electric plant that made Gatling guns in his city because he wanted the unionized workers to be able to get to their jobs. - In his stump speech, Bernie now makes the case that neither he nor his ideas are radical, but that he's just been ahead of the curve and the time has finally come for Medicare-for-all, tuition-free college and a $15 national minimum wage. - Make no mistake, Sanders really could be the Democratic nominee in 2020. He has a path to victory at the convention in Milwaukee. His second bid has gotten off to a much stronger start than many expected. - Sanders' willingness to call it like he saw it during the forum on Monday, even though he knew what his questioner wanted to hear, did not hurt his standing with the crowd. He received the longest applause, the loudest cheers and the most spirited chants of anyone who spoke at the Warner Theatre. More than 100 people streamed out of the ballroom as soon as he finished speaking, even though two more presidential candidates were waiting in the wings to speak. Warren probably got the second-best reception of the eight candidates. Organizers started playing Aretha Franklin's "Respect" to force her to wrap up her speech, but the senator from Massachusetts kept talking. "They're going to play me off here, but I'm going to say two more things," she said, undeterred but talking a little faster. It just so happened that one of those two points was about the importance of organized labor. The union activists in the room lapped it up. The moment made Warren look like a fighter, and she got a big standing ovation. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned Sunday's local elections into a referendum on his increasingly authoritarian leadership. He feverishly barnstormed the country, attempting to rally his base with claims that Turkey's existence as a nation was at stake. He even played videos of the recent massacre of Muslim worshipers in New Zealand. Fortunately, the result was a decisive rebuff. According to results reported Monday, Erdogan's party lost the mayorships of Turkey's two most important cities, Ankara and Istanbul, for the first time in a quarter-century, along with city halls in almost every other large city. Erdogan's own position is unaffected: His term in the powerful presidential post has four more years to run, and his coalition still has a majority in the national Parliament. But the defeat of his hand-picked nominees in the big cities, driven by a massive turnout of voters, sent an unmistakable message that Turks are tiring of his strongman style - and that the country's democracy, while on life support, still breathes. Five aspirants to the Democratic presidential nomination took the stage on Saturday in Storm Lake, Iowa, before a house packed with farmers inundated by flooding and knocked flat by a trade war with China that has tanked some already-weak commodity markets. Busloads of Farmers Union members had rolled in from across the Great Plains to rally and to press the candidates: former housing and urban development secretary Julian Castro, former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio (who has not formally announced) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Antitrust was much in the air at the forum on the campus of Buena Vista University. Warren described with glee a "rabble-rousing rally" with Family Farm Action and Farm Aid in the morning at a high school where she railed against Washington and Wall Street cronyism. "This is the fight of my life," she said. Klobuchar cited the Grange, the farmers alliance of the late 19th century, in calling for expanded resources for antitrust enforcement. Seeming intent on positioning herself less as a fighter than as a nuanced and pragmatic candidate, she paid homage to Iowa for having the first antitrust laws on the books, in 1888. Ever since the railroads came through, Iowans have been barking about busting trusts. "We are now entering what is essentially a new Gilded Age," Klobuchar said, "and we need to take on the power of these monopolies." But no one really had an answer about what to do to help farm country right now. Net farm income has dropped by half since 2013. Trade disputes and tariffs on products from China, Mexico and Canada have shaved as much as $2 off the price of a bushel of soybeans. The federal checks sent to farmers harmed by the tariffs have been spent. Farm loan delinquencies are at their highest rate in nine years. Inaction from Washington is the rule. There is no telling when President Donald Trump and China will come to terms. Congress has yet to approve the package to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico - Iowa's two largest export markets in an export-sensitive state. Congress can't even agree on disaster funding to relieve the flooded Midwest because Democrats and Republicans are hung up over the president's opposition to additional aid for Puerto Rico. Questions from the audience and moderators, including me, offered candidates openings to talk about trade. But none took the bait. The Democratic Party remains of two minds on the issue: the Clinton-Obama wing that tends toward freer trade, and the more-protectionist Sanders-Warren wing. Delaney, a health care finance entrepreneur, talked about bolstering Medicaid to reduce rural hospital and nursing-home closings by paying the actual cost of patient care, not the typical 80 percent. He suggested expanding federal funding for preschool to include child care, which is in short supply in rural areas. Ryan said that to know Youngstown, Ohio, is to understand the economic struggles of Appalachia and farm country. The congressman envisions a political coalition of Rust Belt and rural communities that would promote innovation to wrest the Midwest back from Trump in 2020. Ryan touted Iowa and Ohio as potential global leaders in renewable-energy production, and he cited progress in moving digital jobs to rural areas through partnerships with local community colleges. Democrats must show rural Americans that government can work for them, he said, because they are beginning to wake up to the Trump administration's policy toward them: "It's a scam." When Storm Lakers Jose Ibarra, who is a member of the City Council, and Emilia Marroquin, who sits on the school board, pleaded for immigration reform that embraces refugees and recognizes workforce demands in rural environs, the candidates all jumped to agree. Castro, with strong immigrant roots in Texas, was especially passionate about the need for reform. "The lesson I have is: Don't wait," he said, adding, "We are going to take the targets off the backs" of immigrants. Nearly 3,000 immigrants work in Storm Lake and depend on Tyson Foods for their jobs slaughtering hogs and turkeys. As it happens, Tyson is the only U.S.-based company among the three big meat processors (the other two being in China and Brazil), and the company is on Warren's shortlist for corporate breakups. Trustbusting can be complicated - how do you make sure workers' families don't get hit by flying debris? The candidates speaking at the forum were frequently interrupted with applause. But once many of the farmers were back on the buses and rolling home, their thoughts may have turned from political promises to worries that a note from the bank might be awaiting their return. - - - Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, is the author of "Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper." He moderated the rural forum Saturday. TORONTO, April 2, 2019 /CNW/ - First Quantum Minerals Ltd. ("First Quantum" or "the Company") (TSX:FM) will publish its first quarter 2019 financial and operating results on Monday April 29, 2019 after the close of the Toronto Stock Exchange. The Company's President, Clive Newall, will host a conference call and webcast to discuss the results on Tuesday April 30, 2019. Conference call and webcast details are as follows: Date: April 30, 2019 Time: 9:00 am (EDT); 2:00 pm (BST); 6:00 am (PDT) Webcast: www.first-quantum.com Dial in: North America (toll free): (877) 291-4570 North America and international: (647) 788-4919 United Kingdom: (toll free) 0-800-051-7107 Replay: Available from noon (EDT) on April 30, 2019 until 11:59 pm (EDT) on May 21, 2019 North America (toll free): (800) 585-8367 North America and international: (416) 621-4642 Passcode: 4757109 ANNUAL MEETING OF SHAREHOLDERS The annual meeting of shareholders will take place on May 9, 2019, at 10:00 a.m. EDT at the Gallery of the TMX Broadcast Centre 130 King St. W. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. For those unable to attend the meeting in person, an audio webcast of the meeting, including slide presentation, will be accessible through the Company's website. ANNUAL DISCLOSURE DOCUMENTS The Company also today advised that its 2018 Annual Report and the 2019 Notice & Access Document, Combined Notice and Management Information Circular, Proxy Form, Financial Statements Request Form and Voting Instruction Form are now available online at https://www.first-quantum.com/Investors-Centre/--2019-Annual-Meeting-of-Shareholders-Materials/default.aspx. On Behalf of the Board of Directors of First Quantum Minerals Ltd. G. Clive Newall President For further information visit our website at www.first-quantum.com SOURCE First Quantum Minerals Ltd. For further information: North American contact: Lisa Doddridge, Director, Investor Relations, Tel: (416) 361-6400, Toll-free: 1 (888) 688-6577, E-Mail: [email protected]; United Kingdom contact: Clive Newall, President, Tel: +44 7802 721663, Fax: +44 140 327 3494, E-Mail: [email protected] Related Links http://www.first-quantum.com Established Oregon Platform currently in development in California and Michigan MEDFORD, OR, April 2, 2019 /CNW/ - Grown Rogue International Inc. (CSE:GRIN | OTC: NVSIF) ("Grown Rogue" or the "Company"), a vertically-integrated, multi-state cannabis company, with licenses and operations in Oregon, California, and now Michigan, has released its financial and operating results for the three months ended January 31, 2019. The Company's financial statements and related management's discussion and analysis for the period are available on the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com and on the Company's website at www.grownrogue.com . All amounts are expressed in United States Dollars unless otherwise indicated. Certain metrics, including those expressed on an adjusted basis, are non-IFRS measures. First Quarter F2019 Highlights First quarter revenue grew 388% year-over-year to $834,309 and is expected to continue as the Company proceeds with its expansion plans in Oregon , California and Michigan . and is expected to continue as the Company proceeds with its expansion plans in , and . Gross margin improved to 31% compared to negative gross margin Q1-F2018. Grown Rogue products in over 220 dispensaries in Oregon . . Launched innovative nitrogen sealed 3.5g glass jars inspired by Grown Rogue's patent pending nitrogen sealed pre-rolls Achieved Oregon outdoor THC potency record and won the prestigious Growers Cup in two of three categories. outdoor THC potency record and won the prestigious Growers Cup in two of three categories. Established partnership with international award-winning chocolatier Management expansion including the addition of Adam Wolf as Chief Operating Officer as Chief Operating Officer Expanded into California Signed MOU to expand into the Michigan market through strategic partnership Grown Rogue current multi-state presence Expanding presence to its third state, the highly populated, limited-license state of Michigan through a partnership agreement through a partnership agreement From 3 licenses in 1 state Q1-F2018, to control of assets with opportunity for 22 licenses in three states at the end of Q1-F2019. Oregon Operations Cultivating 90,000 sq. ft. of canopy in Oregon including two outdoor farms and a state-of-the-art indoor facility including two outdoor farms and a state-of-the-art indoor facility Increased outdoor yield from 2018 to 2019 by over 50% Increasing market penetration and sales revenue California Operations Expanding into California with a 16,000-square-foot microbusiness facility in Eureka with retail, processing and distribution licensing partnership spanning San Francisco to Los Angeles . with a 16,000-square-foot microbusiness facility in Eureka with retail, processing and distribution licensing partnership spanning to . Secured state and local approval for distribution license and type 6 manufacturing (non-volatile), and local approval for type 7 manufacturing (volatile). Michigan Operations Subsequent to the close of the first quarter a binding agreement was signed with Michigan partners and includes two strategically positioned retail centres ("provisional licences") in Hazel Park and Midtown Detroit as well as a 19,000-square-foot cultivation centre in Detroit . Additional licence acquisitions under review. "Our Fiscal 2019 Q1 represents the first full quarter for Grown Rogue as a public company and marks the Company's 5th consecutive quarter of revenue growth since launching first in the state of Oregon in late 2017," said Obie Strickler, President and CEO of Grown Rogue. "To have gained this brand recognition and sales traction, in what is arguably the world's most competitive legalized cannabis market, bodes very well for our expansion into California and particularly the newly legalized market in Michigan. We've grown very quickly from controlling just 3 licenses in one state a year ago to assets allowing us to have 22 licences in three states today." Selected Financial Information (Complete financial tables have been filed on www.sedar.com ) Three Months Period Ended January 31, 2019 2018 (in $000s except per share amounts) Sales 834 171 Gross profit 256 (314) Expenses Operating Expenses 1,191 676 Other Expenses 140 347 RTO Transaction 3,724 - Net loss (4,799) (1,337) Net loss per share (0.08) (0.35) Cash & cash equivalents 532 1,363 Weighted Common Shares Outstanding 61,324 3,774 For the first quarter of fiscal 2019 Grown Rogue revenue grew to US$834,309 (C$1.11 million), an increase of 388% from revenue of US$170,960 (C$227,592) in its fiscal first quarter ended January 31, 2018. Since the Company's first products began selling in late 2017, Grown Rogue has demonstrated meaningful sales traction in one of the world's most competitive cannabis markets. The increase is a result of continued addition of the internal sales force, third party distribution, as well as an increase in awareness of the Grown Rogue brand. Grown Rogue's award winning flower production (indoor and outdoor) represents approximately 55% of total sales with the remainder coming from concentrates (oil cartridges and extracts), pre-rolls, 3rd party products, and a new edibles line launched in December of 2018 that is produced in partnership with an award winning chocolatier. Demand for Grown Rogue branded products that exceed current internal production capacity, is supplemented with quality products from other qualified purveyors and manufacturers inside of Oregon. Grown Rogue products typically receive premium pricing at retail over the Oregon state average. F2019 Q1 gross margin was $256,330, or 31% of revenues, a substantial improvement from negative gross margin of ($314,205) for the same period last year. A significant component of the difference relates to a substantial adjustment related to the fair market value of the Company's biological assets during the quarter ended January 31, 2018. While the Company did not have such an adjustment during the quarter ended January 31, 2019, gross margin improved as a result of the efforts of the Company over the past year to refine its cultivation processes to be more efficient resulting in lower cost of goods. F2019 Q1 operating expenses of $4,915,040, include non-recurring costs of $3,723,724 related to the Company's Reverse Take-Over Transaction (the "Transaction") pursuant to its public listing on the Canadian Securities Exchange during the quarter. Of this transaction cost, $2,700,682 was a non-cash component related to the fair value of shares issued to effect the Transaction. Excluding Transaction costs, operating expenses for the three months ended January 31, 2019 were $1,191,316, compared to expenses of $676,277 for the first quarter of fiscal 2018. The increase in expenses was primarily related to the increased the scope of operations, resulting in increased salaries and benefit expenses as the Company continued to increase its number of staff, marketing and promotion, capital markets and travel expenses. After Transaction costs, Grown Rogue's net loss from operations amounted to $4,798,562 for the three months ended January 31, 2019, compared to a loss from operations of $1,337,095 for the three months ended January 31, 2018. The primary component of the loss for the three months ended January 31, 2019 are the Transaction costs of $3,723,724. These expenses are not expected to recur in the future. The Company's cash and cash equivalents position was $531,908 as at January 31, 2019 and working capital of $840,575. About Grown Rogue Grown Rogue International (CSE: GRIN | OTC: NVSIF) is a vertically-integrated, multi-state cannabis company curating innovative products to provide consumers with the right cannabis experience. Each of Grown Rogue's products and strains are categorized and marketed based on unique effects and designed for the full range of a consumers' lifestyle. Grown Rogue is scaling the vertically integrated model into multiple states by incorporating best-in-class manufacturing facilities and a proprietary distribution platform based on Microsoft technology. Grown Rogue's diverse cannabis product suite includes premium flower, patent-pending nitrogen sealed pre-rolls, oil and concentrates, and edibles featuring a partnership with world-renowned chocolatier, Jeff Shepherd. Subscribe to Grown Rogue investor news alerts. This press release contains statements which constitute "forwardlooking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including statements regarding the plans, intentions, beliefs and current expectations of the Company with respect to future business activities. Forward looking information is often identified by the words "may," "would," "could," "should," "will," "intend," "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect" or similar expressions and include information regarding: (i) statements regarding the future direction of the Company (ii) the ability of the Company to successfully achieve its business and financial objectives, (iii) plans for expansion of the Company into Michigan and securing applicable regulatory approvals, and (iv) expectations for other economic, business, and/or competitive factors. Investors are cautioned that forwardlooking information is not based on historical facts but instead reflect the Company's management's expectations, estimates or projections concerning the business of the Company's future results or events based on the opinions, assumptions and estimates of management considered reasonable at the date the statements are made. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forwardlooking information are reasonable, such information involves risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on such information, as unknown or unpredictable factors could have material adverse effects on future results, performance or achievements of the combined company. Among the key factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forwardlooking information are the following: changes in general economic, business and political conditions, including changes in the financial markets; and in particular in the ability of the Company to raise debt and equity capital in the amounts and at the costs that it expects; adverse changes in the public perception of cannabis; decreases in the prevailing prices for cannabis and cannabis products in the markets that the Company operates in; adverse changes in applicable laws; or adverse changes in the application or enforcement of current laws; compliance with extensive government regulation and related costs, and other risks described in the Company's Listing Statement available on www.sedar.com. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forwardlooking information prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. Although the Company has attempted to identify important risks, uncertainties and factors which could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be others that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update this forwardlooking information except as otherwise required by applicable law. Safe Harbor Statement: This press release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act"), including all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of the Company, its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things: (i) the Company's financing plans; (ii) trends affecting the Company's financial condition or results of operations; (iii) the Company's growth strategy and operating strategy; and (iv) the declaration and payment of dividends. The words "may," "would," "will," "expect," "estimate," "anticipate," "believe," "intend" and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Also, forward-looking statements represent our management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date hereof. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's ability to control, and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors including the risk disclosed in the Company's Form 20-F and 6-K filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company is indirectly involved in the manufacture, possession, use, sale and distribution of cannabis in the recreational cannabis marketplace in the United States through its indirect operating subsidiaries. Local state laws where its subsidiaries operate permit such activities however, these activities are currently illegal under United States federal law. Additional information regarding this and other risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's business are disclosed in the Company's Listing Statement filed on its issuer profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com . Should one or more of these risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information or forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. SOURCE Grown Rogue International Inc. For further information: on Grown Rogue International please visit www.grownrogue.com or contact: Obie Strickler, Chief Executive Officer, [email protected]; Jacques Habra, Chief Strategy Officer, [email protected]; Investor Relations Desk, Inquiries, [email protected] OnScale, a Redwood City, CAbased provider of cloud-enabled engineering simulation software, raised $10M in Series A funding. The round was led by Intel Capital and Gradient Ventures, Googles AI-focused venture capital fund, with participation from additional investors Thornton Tomasetti, Stage 2 Capital, Cultivation Capital, and CampbellKlein. The company intends to use the funds to drive global expansion, respond to increasing demand, and accelerate development of its Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) solutions for complex, real-world engineering applications. Spun out of Thornton Tomasetti in 2017 and led by Chief Executive Officer Ian Campbell, OnScale provides an on-demand scalable engineering simulation software platform which allows engineers to accelerate innovation across multiple industries, including next-generation technologies such as MEMS, Semiconductor, 5G, Biomedicine, and Autonomous Vehicles. The companys CAE tools, which combine multiphysics solver technology with cloud High Performance Computing (HPC), were architected for highly parallel mainframe computers to handle very large engineering simulation problems. Current OnScale solutions address the simulation needs of Semiconductor and MEMS, 5G mobile, next-gen biomedical, infrastructure safety, and autonomous vehicle markets. FinSMEs 01/04/2019 TORONTO, April 2, 2019 /CNW/ - Sleep Country Canada Holdings Inc. ("Sleep Country" or the "Company") (TSX: ZZZ) will hold a conference call on May 7, 2019 to review first quarter financial results for 2019. The results will be released after the market closes on May 6, 2019. The details of the call are as follows: Date: May 7, 2019 Time: 8:00am Eastern time Toll Free (North America) Dial-in Number: (888) 231-8191 International Dial-in Number: (647) 427-7450 This conference call will be recorded and available for replay until May 14, 2019 23:59 ET. To listen to the replay, please dial (416)849-0833 or (855)859-2056 and use passcode 2335789. About Sleep Country Sleep Country is Canada's leading sleep retailer. Sleep Country is the only specialty mattress retailer with a national footprint in Canada. Sleep Country operates under three retail banners: Dormez-vous, the largest retailer of mattresses in Quebec; Sleep Country Canada, the largest mattress retailer in the rest of Canada; and Endy, Canada's leading online mattress brand with the most Canadian 5-star reviews. As of April 2, 2019, Sleep Country has 265 stores and 16 distribution centres across Canada. All of the Company's stores are corporate-owned, enabling it to develop and maintain a strong culture of customer service, resulting in a consistent and superior in-store and home delivery experience. Sleep Country also works closely with Canadian charities to donate new and gently used mattresses to families and children in need. SOURCE Sleep Country Canada Holdings Inc. Investor Relations For further information: Robert Masson, Chief Financial Officer, (289)748-0206 / [email protected] Related Links www.sleepcountry.ca This is one college side hustle a recent Yale grad might be regretting. Omar Zaki, 21, ran a hedge fund while enrolled at the Ivy League university, saying his firm relied on an algorithm that had produced eye-popping returns over a 10-year period, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That would make him roughly 11 years old when trading got started. The lie is one of many that Zaki allegedly told investors, the SEC said in a Monday complaint. In reality, the fund never used the algorithm, misled investors about how much money it managed and wrongly reported returns in excess of 80 percent from December 2016 through early March 2017, according to the SEC. Zaki, who told investors he managed $3 million, raised $1.7 million from 11 clients from January 2017 to February 2018 by marketing a biotechnology trading strategy. He settled the SEC's allegations without admitting or denying its findings, agreeing to pay a $25,000 fine. Perhaps in sympathy to Zaki's financial status as a recent college grad, the SEC is letting him pay in installments of $2,083.33 over three years. In the settlement, the regulator said Zaki is currently unemployed. Zaki's lawyer, Bradley Bondi, declined to comment. If Zaki is going to follow in the footsteps of Ken Griffin, who famously started trading convertible bonds from his Harvard dorm room, he will have to be patient. As part of the SEC settlement, Zaki agreed to a bar on working as an investment adviser, with the right to reapply after three years. An alumni database shows he graduated from Yale last year, earning a bachelor's degree in economics and physics. --- Bloomberg's Max Abelson contributed to this report. Burger King, whose quarter-pound Whopper pushed its competitors a half-century ago to create their own two-fisted hamburgers, now plans to roll out a vegetarian version of its signature sandwich, relying on plant-based patties developed by San Francisco Bay area start-up Impossible Foods. The Impossible Whopper will be introduced this week at Burger King restaurants in the St. Louis area - in the very state that last year banned the use of the term "meat" for any vegetarian or cell-based substitutes for animal-raised meats. Burger King's plan could be the impetus that motivates the highly competitive fast-food burger industry to push for more meat alternatives at a time when beef production has raised countless alarm bells for its contributions to methane production and climate change. A Burger King spokesperson told the New York Times that if the Impossible Whopper succeeds in the Show Me State, the company will expand distribution to all 7,200 restaurants nationwide. Such a move would make the chain the undisputed king of the fake-meat burger. White Castle sells an Impossible Slider at its 370-plus locations. Red Robin has just introduced an Impossible Cheeseburger at its 570 locations, and this year Carl's Jr. rolled out the Beyond Famous Star, a vegetarian version of its signature burger featuring a plant-based patty from Beyond Meat, at more than 1,000 locations. But Burger King will have a few difficult tests to pass before deciding to expand the Impossible Whopper to locations across the country. For starters, the veg version will cost nearly a dollar more than the original Whopper, a significant increase in the price-sensitive fast-food market. The Impossible Whopper will also have to deal with consumer skepticism as larger companies move into the meat alternatives market. What's more, Impossible Foods took heat last year from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for the start-up's seemingly contradictory stance on animals: Impossible Foods wants to save the lives of countless livestock, but the company simultaneously tests the heme molecule - which is responsible for the "beefy" taste of the vegetarian patty - on laboratory rats. Yet Burger King does have one advantage as the chain introduces the Impossible Burger: The patty will be based on Impossible's 2.0 formulation, which the company announced this year, according to CNET. The new formulation, according to the tech magazine, can better withstand the rough treatment that patties, beef or otherwise, receive in a fast-food environment. The company's latest vegetarian patty is also, apparently, good enough to fool taste testers. A CNET reporter sampled the Impossible patty after it was grilled on one of Burger King's flame broilers and substituted for the meat in a Whopper purchased from a bricks-and-mortar location. "The remarkable thing was how unremarkable they were: Nothing gives away the fact that this Whopper contains a different main ingredient," Brian Cooley wrote. Should Burger King make a success of the Impossible Whopper, the billion-dollar question is: What will McDonald's do in response? McDonald's has more than triple the sales of Burger King in the United States, according to a QSR magazine chart based on 2016 sales. McDonald's has a McVegan burger available only in Finland and Sweden. But if history in any indication, McDonald's could be pressed to introduce its own veg burger, should the public take a shine to the Impossible Whopper. In his 1977 autobiography, "Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's," Ray Kroc, the man who transformed McDonald's into a fast-food behemoth, wrote, "The Big Mac resulted from our need for a larger sandwich to compete against Burger King and a variety of specialty shop concoctions." Could history repeat itself? A Louisa County, Va., judge has upheld a jurys recommended sentence of life in prison for former Milford resident Gregory Veres on a first-degree murder conviction in the death of his girlfriend. Veres, 31, was convicted in December of first-degree murder and hit and run in the death of his girlfriend, Dawn Marie Meade, 40, who grew up in Fairfield. Veres was convicted of running Meade over with a car on Sept. 22, 2017. A jury recommended the maximum sentence of life plus 10 years. The judge last week sentenced him to life plus an additional 11 years for two other charges. According to court officials, Veres got into an argument with Meade over a restraining order she had filed, and Meade left Veres to walk home. The defendant hunted her down and drove all four wheels of his grandmothers car off the road and struck the victim going 60 mph, according to a statement issued by Robert M. Wood, Louisa County Deputy Commonwealth attorney. This is a tragic case where the defendant killed his girlfriend and treated her worse than a dog, Louisa Commonwealths Attorney Rusty E. McGuire said in a prepared statement when Veres was convicted. He killed her in the middle of the night and left her alone, cold and in the dark, on the side of the road. After the sentence was imposed last week, McGuire said that while nothing could bring the victim back, justice was done for her and her family. According to an obituary notice, Meade had lived in Norwalk, and was a graduate of Fairfield Warde High School. Dawn had a contagious laugh that could turn any frown. She loved acting silly with her friends and family, but mostly enjoyed spreading joy and warmth wherever she went, the notice says. Last year, Meades son raised money on Gofundme to bring his mothers body from Virginia to be buried. I lost my mother unexpectedly to domestic violence, Joseph Muratori wrote on a Gofundme site in 2017. She was taken from this world tragically and way too soon. Following the sentencing, Muratori said the past year has been very hard. Him going away forever isnt going to bring my mom back, Muratori said. But it will stop him from hurting someone else. Veres grew up in Milford and over the years had a number of run-ins with police in Connecticut. According to the Connecticut Judicial website, he was charged three times between 2011 and 2013 for reckless driving, in 2011 for possession of narcotics, in 2013 for interfering with an officer, in 2014 for failure to carry insurance, and in 2016 on a sixth-degree larceny charge. The website says the verdict finding in all the cases was guilty. Burzenski & Company employee Lee Rackliff recently presented 35 cat collars to Rachel and Cheryl of the Greater New Haven Cat Project (GNHCP), a nonprofit volunteer staffed organization dedicated to improving the lives of stray, abandoned, and feral cats in the Greater New Haven area. The collars will be presented to people who adopt a cat. The donation to the GNHCP is part of our 35 for 35 campaign - a celebration of the firms' 35th year anniversary. *** West Haven Community House Executive Director Patricia W. Stevens, received a Community Service Award plaque Feb. 4 at the Community House from Robert S. Morton, director of the West Haven Interagency Network for Children, and Viola Waldo, co-chair of WHINCs Parent Support Group for special needs children. Stevens was nominated for her continued support of WHINCs Spanish Parent Support Group and Children with Special Needs Program. Her generosity has provided space for both of our support groups and a safe and secure space for child care for parents who attend our meetings, said Morton, who is also the director of West Haven Youth and Family Services. *** University of New Haven chemistry professor Chong Qiu, Ph.D., has been awarded a five-year, $700,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Award for his groundbreaking research on aerosols - tiny particles suspended in the air - in the atmosphere. Qiu is the first University of New Haven faculty member to receive this National Science Foundation award. Qiu will use the funding to advance his research that has the potential to shape understanding of the impact of air quality on climate change, weather forecasting, and human health. A popular womens fashion magazine recently celebrated voices trendsetters and change makers with an star-studded award ceremony earlier this month. Did they deliver? You bet they did. When a fashion magazine recognises and respects diverse voices, including ones that propagate feminism and body-positivity, they need to be congratulated. In fact, said fashion magazine even commended voices in the tech space. Now this is where it gets strange. When a magazine awards every kind of voice there is, how do they applaud the countrys queerscape? With complete radio silence. And its the same everywhere. Over the weekend, the countrys leading mens magazine lauded content creators in the fields of style and culture. And yet again, they forgot to send queer voices a memo. Why is this even more disheartening than it should be? Because over the same weekend, many a thousand miles away, the GLAAD Media Awards honoured various branches of the media for their outstanding representations of the LGBT community. This side of the Indian Ocean, the problem lies in the complete indifference with which the media deals with homosexuality in general. Like the (now disgraced) king of Pop once sang, they really dont care about us. How do I know? After a three-month-long email exchange with the (then) lifestyle editor at the aforementioned mens magazine, she wrote back saying that the magazine (digital or print) didnt have space for queer content. Activism isnt the scope of the brand, she drawled. We arent sure how our audiences would react to something as sensitive as queer pieces. This was in 2017. For a magazine that regularly objectifies adrenaline-pumping men on its cover, doles out fashion and beauty advice, has an audience that consumes queer culture, and a taskforce of gay men thats larger than my list of starred favourites on Grindr, what really counts as hetero-sensitive? What counts as important? What counts as a voice that needs to be seen, but not heard? Sadly, things havent changed much in the last decade. Half a decade ago, I got a call asking me whether I wanted to be part of a label-breaking advertisement. Conceptualised by an award-winning director known for his indie work and independent voice, it was a #TimeToBreakStereotypes video campaign for a high-end luxury brand. They needed an openly gay man for a bit role, and here I was, fresh out of the closet. It was Pride Month, and I was bursting to do my bit for the community (and more importantly, my 15 seconds of fame). On the day of my shoot, I rushed over to the set with a fresh haircut and fresher hopes. Between a hurried costume change and makeup session, I excitedly peeped over the ADs shoulder to read my characters description on the call sheet; there were only two words: Gay Two. The fact that I wasnt important enough to be Gay One aside (in my defense, it was an androgynous supermodel), was this really what we had come down to? Because if the urban intellectual can be so unsympathetic to an entire sexual minoritys problems, what can we really expect from the rest of the country? See, because the Urban Intellectual is supposed to be smart and opinionated (but obviously not in a weary sort of way). The Urban Intellectual gives regular discourses on toxic patriarchy through their Instagram stories. The Urban Intellectual has lot of gay friends accessories. The Urban Intellectual supports the #MeToo movement (until one of their own is called out). The Urban Intellectual posts memes about misogyny. (S)he is your online best friend. Your voice of reason. Your ally. And they are everywhere. At a meeting with one of Indias top internet media companies, I had the pleasure of being offered a freelance gig by the (then) editor. They needed new voices, she said to me more inclusion leads to more introspection for the audience. I tittered. Was this finally our day of reckoning when queer voices werent just typecast, but cast as frontrunners instead? And you know, we could really use you at the office, she giggled, Our office is so heteronormative, it gets really boring with all these straight boys, she laughed. I blinked. I thought she was joking solely because one of the main reasons I wanted in was cause all the straight boys seemed so much fun. She wasnt. And thats when I felt like the joke. Because it doesnt just stop at intellectuals and (the occasional) Instagram influencers. See, queer men and women have forever been paraded in campaigns and draped in click bait. Ive personally been asked to be gay (for the camera) and write gay more times than I can count. Can you write something bitchy? Can you write something scandalous? Can you ruffle some feathers? Can you shock our audiences? Can you be the person we want you to be? Im not denying that being fabulous is fun; I am just saying theres more to queer culture than our sartorial choices and sass. The truth is that people really arent looking for queer voices; they are looking for queer click bait. Gay culture will always be trivialised and tokenised, treated as a SEO trend right around the time of Pride Month (and marches) or worse, Valentines week. Which means that as you read this sentence, thousands of companies have taken down their rainbow flags and pushed their glitter glue supplies back into their office back rooms. Queer campaigns have been dismissed (much like queer folk), or pushed to June when LGBTQIA+ rights suddenly gain traction with International Month of Pride. Two years ago, a popular bar franchise turned my date and I down at the door, because only couples were allowed, and no stag entries were accepted. Well, that seemed like it. I meekly shrugged and told my out-of-town date that wed have to find another bar that sold alcohol at fluctuating low prices. But he wouldnt have it. Drawing himself upright, he stared the testosterone-pumped bouncer (who was twice his size) down and told him that we were two boys on a date. The man sneered at us, saying rules were rules, and unless we found a girl, they wouldnt let us in. I hastily muttered an apology, and pulled my friend to a friendlier bar; the drinks werent cheap, but neither was the staff. This is ironic, because a year-and-a-half later, they celebrated the Section 377 verdict with a #LoveIsLove offer on the day of. Touche, right? Ill tell you a secret. Queer voices dont necessarily need appreciation, they need to be acknowledged. We dont necessarily need a provision for an inclusion rider, we just need more inclusion (that goes beyond the norm of introducing one queer archetype in your videos for the sake of checking the diversity quota). See, we arent asking for a spotlight, we are just asking for a platform. Theres a whole world of queer content out there that goes beyond the story of how we came out (side note: Ive come out so many times for the media, my coming out story has a coming out story). Its going to be a long, arduous journey, I know it. But the least we can do is hope. Until then, you can just hand us the microphone. I promise we wont drop it. Illustration courtesy Amrai Dua NEW HAVEN Alder Aaron Greenberg, D-8, submitted his resignation from the Board of Alders Tuesday as he prepares a move to California next month for a job. Greenberg, who was elected after beginning as a graduate student in political science at Yale University, has been active in aldermanic leadership, including serving as chairman of the Education Committee and as facilitator of the Affordable Housing Task Force, which had the recommendations in its final report approved as the full boards own Monday. Greenberg was not at the meeting when the resolution passed. A New Haven man is charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon after he was allegedly found New Years Day with a loaded .40 caliber Glock 27 pistol, federal authorities said. Connecticut U.S. Attorney John H. Durham said a federal grand jury in New Haven returned the indictment charging Mariano Irizarry, 35 with the gun offense, according to a release. Irizarry pleaded not guilty Tuesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert M. Spector in New Haven, the release said. Also according to the release, as alleged in court documents and statements made in court, on Jan. 1, New Haven police officers assigned to a New Years Eve crime prevention detail responded to a disturbance and report of an armed person in front of a nightclub on Hamilton Street in New Haven. A bystander identified Irizarry as having a gun, and, after ignoring various commands from officers, Irizarry opened the drivers side door of his vehicle and made furtive movements in the area of the steering wheel, the release said. He then closed the door and surrendered to officers. A subsequent search of the area beneath the steering wheel revealed the Glock. The Glock had been reported stolen from a home in New Haven in March 2015. Authorities also alleged Irizarrys criminal history includes felony drug convictions in 2000 and 2010, and a felony conviction in August 2000 for illegal sexual contact with a minor. It is illegal for a person convicted of a felony offense to possess a firearm or ammunition that has moved in interstate or foreign commerce. If convicted, Irizarry faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Irizarry is free on a $50,000 bond. The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New Haven Police Department. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael J. Gustafson. Courtesy of Connecticut State Police WEST HAVEN A 20-year-old New Haven man is facing weapons charges after state police pulled him over on the highway for allegedly driving without his headlights activated. Troopers out of Troop G-Bridgeport were conducting motor vehicle enforcement on Interstate 95 north around 3 a.m. on Saturday in the area of Exit 42 when they saw a red 2011 Toyota Prius traveling without any head lights illuminated, according to a Facebook post by police. NEW HAVEN The Board of Education is feeling the pressure as the fiscal year comes to a close with a budget deficit of about $5.3 million remaining. Monday night, Superintendent of Schools Carol Birks and district staff presented the boards Finance Committee with what they believe it would take to close the gap before the end of the year: more than $5 million in combined certified, uncertified and part-time staff layoffs; $180,000 could be saved through other means, they said. This would be majorly disrupitve to our children and our families and is not the recommendation of the superintendent, Birks said. It would be very irresponsible and very disruptive. Birks presented the plan which committee members noted was light on specifics, such as how many jobs the cuts would impact after being asked by board members to lay out what it might look like to close the deficit. The district began the school year with a nearly $20 million deficit, and officials are saying they dont believe the remaining $5.3 can be crunched without taking drastic measures. If we mitigate the $5.3 (million) its going to cause a lot of pain throughout the system, said Assistant Superintendent Keisha Hannans. Without any other options, the school board would ultimately pass on its deficit to the city. Budget Director Juanita Mazyck said the school board has done this several times before, so its not unchartered territory for the district. Members of the committee expressed concerns about taking either options. Board member Joe Rodriguez said he felt stuck in between upending the districts instructional services and passing on a financial burden to the city. I am uncomfortable telling our friends on the city side that this is where we are, but Im also equally uncomfortable telling my daughters teacher or your daughters teacher gesturing at board member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur that in 30 days theyre going to lose their jobs, he said. Jackson-McArthur adamantly pursued an answer on how much could be saved if all school employees accepted one furlough day, where they would miss work but also miss out on pay. Hannans said it is difficult to calculate, and more difficult to accomplish considering how many school employees belong to unions that also represent city employees, but she estimated it would be $1 million in savings if all unions agreed. Jackson-McArthur argued that all employees knew the district was in dire straights financially and said she believes the public has a right to know that about $1 million in savings could have been recuperated if all unions agreed to one furlough day. Birks assured the board that the teachers union in particular had been helpful partners in negotiating about 130 position eliminations and she sees them as willing partners. New Haven Federation of Teachers Vice President Pat DeLucia declined to comment following the meeting. Rodriguez, a former alder, said from his experience that what the Board of Alders wants to see more than anything is likely a conscious effort to reduce the deficit. We have much more work to do, he said. The committee ran through several other possibilities for savings, none of which seemed to offer much promise for the remainder of the fiscal year. The brightest bit of news was reported by COO Michael Pinto, who said the district would likely save $30,000 from what was allocated for snow removal this year. Two weeks prior, staff discussed the possibility of co-locating a school within the new Barack H. Obama School, which is slated to open in January 2020, a few months into the school year. Pinto revealed that the school under consideration was West Rock Academy, but the district would stand to lose just about as much as it would gain in savings. For one, he said, one school is an interdistrict magnet school while the other is an intradistrict magnet school. By moving West Rock Academy, suburban students would be returned to their home districts and New Haven would lose the state and federal dollars it receives for educating those students. Rodriguez said he also awaits the findings from a deficit reduction task force launched by a board vote one year prior, which will combine 15 community members to look for ways to find additional ways of reducing costs or finding revenue. The task force is slated to present its findings on May 1 to the Finance Committee. At the same meeting, the school board voted to freeze all general fund spending for the remainder of the year in an effort to eliminate a projected $5.3 million deficit for the current fiscal year. All of the contracts before the school boards Finance Committee Monday were to be paid by grants or from next years general operating budget. Last week at a number of community forums on the districts budget, Birks claimed the city confirmed that there is a projected deficit of $30 million for next year, despite Mayor Toni Harp expressing skepticism about that number to the New Haven Independent. brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com NEW HAVEN As the school district is facing an upcoming $30 million budget deficit, Superintendent of Schools Carol Birks is looking to end the lease of the districts last alternative school. Chief Operating Officer Michael Pinto told the Board of Educations Finance Committee that the district informed the owner of the Ella T. Grasso Boulevard plaza, where Riverside Academy is housed, that it would vacate the building within 90 days of April 1 to save on the $332,000 annual lease. Were going to look at programming for students who have untapped potential, said Birks, putting forward her intention to reframe the language the district uses, similar to an announcement last year that she would call alternative schools opportunity schools. Birks said staff would work to create individual plans for the approximately 130 students at Riverside, citing a number of programs that could be used in place of alternative schools, such as internship programs, a Gateway Community College dual-credit program and out-of-district special education placements. Board member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur was startled when Pinto said the students would be mainstreamed when he meant to say streamlined, but without a central alternative school building. It is unclear how many students at Riverside Academy may in fact be placed back in their high schools. Wherever they go, I guess Im worried theyll be by themselves, said Jackson-McArthur. Theyre not together anymore. She also pointed out that a number of the students likely have individualized education program plans, so the district would know what services those students need. Were looking at each individual child based on academic needs, Birks said. After the district voted to close two of what then were three alternative schools in the district a move that was overshadowed by the simultaneous decision to close Creed High School that brought a large and active contingency from that school to board meetings students at New Light High School said they had concerns about whether the consolidation would work. One student said he would not mix well with students from different city neighborhoods and another said he liked New Lights quiet location right off Wooster Square Park and its intimate, student-focused class sizes. Matt Wilcox, a parent of an alternative school graduate who was appointed to the school board by Mayor Toni Harp, pending aldermanic approval, said, Its going to be intriguing to see what plan they put together and what programming they come up with. Members of the Finance Committee advised Birks they would need to have a more in-depth discussion of Riverside Academys future. Although closing it could make an immediate impact on the operating budget deficit for next year, the district is still facing a $5.3 million deficit for the current fiscal year. brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com NEW HAVEN No they didnt post a $2.45 million bond. And yes, there is another appeal. The legal effort to evict Scores, a strip club, to make way for 130 units of affordable housing at the long-shuttered clock factory on Hamilton Street, has been delayed again with a motion filed with the Appellate Court. Attorney Anthony Dicrosta, who represents Funn House Productions LLC, the holding company that owns Scores and is a tenant at the former factory, is arguing that the bond and the five days to find the money was unreasonable. If the court agrees, the bond and timeframe could be sent back to the Housing Court for a new bond amount. Taom Heritage New Haven LLC has been trying to evict the club since July 2018, arguing that the lease held by Scores had lapsed based on documents provided by the former owners, TSJ Inc. Taom Heritage is the holding company for Reed Community Partners of Portland, Ore., which bought the 130,000-square-foot contaminated factory and lined up a complex list of funders which included federal, state and city money. Reed won the eviction argument before Superior Court Judge John Cordani, who ruled on Feb. 15 that Scores had to get out by the end of March. That was halted when Dicrosta filed an appeal argung that a verbal extension of the lease by three years by another member of the family represented by TSJ Inc. remained in effect, causing Cordani to issue a stay of his eviction ruling. The validity of the oral agreement is one of the things the Appellate Court would look at, when and if that question advances. While Cordani would not lift the stay, as requested by Reed, which specializes in these kinds of reclaimation projects, but he did order the high bond as a way to provide some relief for Reed if it ultimately prevails in an appeal of eviction issue. The argument on the bond and the timeframe for posting it is a simpler question for the court, but it again delays the housing project, which would transform that part of the city and add to the affordable housing stock. Josh Blevins, director of historic redevelopment and government affairs at Reed, told the court, in a story in the New Haven Independent, that there is a 50 percent chance that the whole project will collapse if these delays continue, as the environmental grants are time sensitive. Once they go away, they dont come back, Blevins had said previously. Dicrosta argued the high bond renders the appeal moot and denies their right to appeal. The unreasonable and excess amount of the bond ordered is not supported by the facts of this case nor the evidence presented at hearing. Mandating that a surety bond of such staffering proportion be posted within an arbitrarily chosen five-day period of time insures defendants noncompliance with its orders, Dicrosta wrote. He said Scores takes up less than 10 percent of the factory complex, but the $2.45 million covers the developers entire carrying costs, which he said was fundamentally unfair. Reed Community Partners officials have said that they cant proceed with the cleanup with a tenant still in the building and to pass federal scrutiny it has to be remediated 100 percent. They have accused Scores of filing appeals to simply drag out its tenancy. Scores has also filed for bankruptcy under Chapeter 11. The developers have also explained in the numerous hearings and negotiations with the city on the property that traditional financing is not available for this kind of remediation. Dicrosta, who represents Peter Forchetti, the owner of Scores, said his client has put $480,000 into upgrading the strip club based on the oral assurance that his lease could continue. For Reed Community Partners the cost of the undertaking is $38 million, a project it estimates has so far cost them some $5 million. On the amount of the bond, it would not be a stretch to think even President Trump would be incapable of complying with the posting of a bond of such staggering amount within a five-day period, Dicrosta wrote. mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com;203-641-2577 WEST HAVEN The City Council may have found a way to get long-awaited answers on a timeline out of the developer of The Haven, a planned high-end shorefront outlet mall. City Council Chairman Ronald Quagliani and others want to hear directly from the developer before the council votes to pave the way on the citys request to abandon Water Street and parts of both Richards Place and Center Street. Quagliani, who said he hopes a representative of The Haven will be at the next City Council meeting April 8 to answer questions; many in the city want a more definitive timeline. The abandonment matter was put off at a council meeting last week when a representative for The Haven changed a plan to be there. Meanwhile, state Rep. Dorinda Borer, D-West Haven, also is urging the city and council officials to hold off on abandoning Water Street a major access road in and out of West Haven until there are some answers on a timeline for development once The Haven project gets state Department of Transportation approval. All I am asking is the same question that 55,000 other residents are asking, Borer said Monday in a telephone interview. What is the timeline? Mayor Nancy R. Rossi said that since taking office in December 2017 her administration has done everything possible to facilitate the Haven project and will continue in that respect until the project is complete. I thank state Rep. Borer for the letter and understand the frustration of the residents, Rossi said. Most residents I have spoken with would like to have the Haven project begin as soon as possible and the road closures are another step in that process. City Attorney Lee Tiernan, who defended the developer in an email answer to Borer and wrote, in part, that the site would be more secure if the roads were abandoned, emphasized that The Haven is waiting for DOT approval. He also said in the email to Borer that the developer is still waiting on the state Department of Economic and Community Development for $5 million in financial assistance after some language is worked out and for $1 million to be released back to the developer from a court related to the eminent domain process, if approved. State and city lawmakers say they understand the developer is waiting on a certificate from the Office of State Traffic Administration or OSTA but want to know how soon after that certificate comes through the developer will start demolition. Residents have questions about The Haven at just about every municipal meeting, many expressing doubt it will ever become reality in a city with such big financial struggles. Perhaps no one gets more questions and complaints than 3rd District Councilman Aaron Charney, whose district would be home to The Haven. Charney said he agrees with the need for the closures to be based upon conditions, such as which date the site will be secured, how it will be secured, if there will be continued security, how it will be accessed in case of emergency, and most importantly what day the project will start with the buildings being knocked down. Residents have put up with a lot. We have put up with blighted conditions for years, a lack of communication, and recently two fires. Before we give another inch, we need answers, Charney said. Borer, in her email to Rossi and City Council members, requested any closing of Water Street be conditional and contingent upon certain triggers such as a very specific documented and public timeline of next steps for the Haven Project. She wrote that residents in surrounding neighborhoods have been extremely patient with the progress of this project. While it is understood eventually Water Street will be closed, prematurely closing it will cause yet another burden to the residents of the 115th District as it will cause congestion on First Avenue and Elm Street, Borer wrote. The developer of The Haven in recent months hired a security company to monitor the area of boarded-up houses. Although those parts of Center Street and Richards Place to be abandoned have not been done so officially, they are essentially closed to traffic with Jersey barriers. The street closure process for the project is required as part of the city development agreement with The Haven Group and it may make the project more secure, Rossi has said. There are 57 properties within the 24-acre project area, which is bounded by Main Street, First Avenue and Elm Street. The project includes what is now Water Street, which will be eliminated as The Haven is built. The site plan application for the 265,000 square feet of retail and restaurant development has approval of the Planning and Zoning Commission. At one time, a representative of the developer said the target date for The Haven to open was June 2020. Rossi has said she is very excited about The Haven project, and at the time of approval called it a game changer. The plans include 80 stores and five full-service restaurants. The Haven spent years in the acquisition stage as the developers negotiated with 57 property owners. City officials and the developers have said The Haven would pay $2 million in annual property tax and create more than $15 million in incremental sales tax for the state, as well as 800 full-time and 400 part-time jobs, plus 800 construction jobs using all Connecticut-based contractors. Tiernan also said in his email to Borer that the developer allows our public safety entities to use the site for training. Tiernan noted in the lengthy response the Planning and Zoning Commission and Board of Police Commissioners have approved the road abandonment at the Haven site. Tiernan took a swipe at former Mayor Ed OBrien for announcing The Haven project prematurely. I dont know why Mayor OBrien chose to announce the project to the public in 2014, before all the necessary real estate was secured. I dont know why that announcement indicated demolition would take place in March 2015, with an opening in the Fall of 2016. OBrien responded to the remark later Monday. If Lee Tiernan did his homework or at least asked the question as to why The Haven Project was announced when it was, he would have known that the developers investing $200 million dollars in my hometown asked me to announce it at that time, OBrien wrote. They were starting to talk to the State Department of Economic Development and wanted them to know it was a real project. They were also starting the acquisition process and did not want to keep the residents uniformed. Funny how the Rossi Administration talks about the importance of transparency but wonders why I did not keep the people that this project affects the most in the dark. NEW HAVEN Yale Universitys chief investment officer, David Swensen, was confronted by more than 40 members of the Yale Endowment Justice coalition Tuesday during an interview with National Public Radios Chris Arnold. About a half-hour into the interview in Linsly-Chittenden Hall on High Street, the protesters stood and asked Swensen when he would respond to their demands that Yale divest from fossil fuel companies and end its holdings in Puerto Ricos massive debt. Earlier, 20 students from the coalition and Fossil Free Yale staged their third sit-in of the academic year in the lobby of 55 Whitney Ave. The Yale Investments Office is on the fifth floor of the building. The 20 students were later given citations when they refused to leave the building. Swensen appeared with Arnold as part of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, advertised as A students guide to making wise financial choices and other tips from NPRs Life-Kit Podcast. Arnold is lead reporter and editor of Your Money and Your Life about personal finance. Swensen, widely seen as among the top-ranked institutional investors in America, oversees Yales endowment, which on June 30, 2018, totaled $29.4 billion. Lorna Chitty, a junior and member of the Yale Democratic Socialists, told Swensen the sit-in was occurring and that he has been asked repeatedly to answer calls for change in Yales investments. When will you respond? she asked Swensen, who remained silent. Arnold suggested that the protesters allow the program to continue. If you stay at the end, maybe we could have a civil exchange of questions, he said. Chitty responded, Instead, we will be leaving and joining our comrades who are sitting in the Investments Office. If youd like to have a discussion, we would love to meet you there. Much of the audience then marched out, chanting, Hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go! At 55 Whitney Ave., the students began their protest by saying We acknowledge that we are sitting in on Quinnipiac land, which they said had been taken taken from the Native American tribe to create Yales campus, Adriana Colon-Adorno, a junior from Puerto Rico, listed the groups demands that Yale divest its holdings in companies that are contributing to climate change or that are profiting from Puerto Ricos debt. Im from Puerto Rico myself. I was born on the island and my family still lives on the island, she said later. I see the way this kind of economic oppression affects people in their daily lives. Colon-Adorno, a member of Despierta Boricua, the Yale Puerto Rican students association, said Yales investment policies are not apolitical. They have real-world impact and Yale needs to acknowledge that and really face it. She said the effects on her family include pension insecurity and health care issues. Many on the island have respiratory ailments from pollution caused by carbon emissions. Jamie Chan, a first-year student from Hong Kong, said she came to Yale to major in environmental studies, and said that her education was funded by continued climate destruction is appalling to me. I hope that Yale realizes that were not to be ignored. They have been condescending to us and antagonistic but that Yale students and city residents are supporting them. Were not going away and they cant ignore us any longer, she said. Fossil Free Yale and other groups have held similar sit-ins this school year, with 48 protesters, mostly students, arrested on Dec. 7 and 17 on March 4. Nora Heaphy of Fossil Free Yale said that Yale has actually made no commitment to divest from fossil fuels. Instead it has asked its fund managers to consider the effects of climate change when making investments. Asked for a comment about the protest, Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said, Our policy has not changed. In 2014, Swensen wrote a letter to Yales outside investment managers, stating, Yale asks that when making investment decisions on the Universitys behalf, you assess the greenhouse gas footprint of prospective investments, the direct costs of the consequences of climate change on expected returns, and the costs of policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions on expected returns. Simply put, those investments with relatively small greenhouse gas footprints will be advantaged relative to those investments with relatively large greenhouse gas footprints. Then on April 12, 2016, Swensen issued a statement to the Yale community citing the success of the universitys policy to invest in companies that are environmentally friendly. It was also in that year that Yale cut ties with a few fund managers who were unwilling to abide by Yales guidelines, totaling $10 million in investments, Heaphy said. Since the distribution of my August 27, 2014 letter, new investments made by the Universitys investment partners have been in keeping with the spirit of the approach outlined in the letter, Swensen wrote. We believe the lack of new investment in greenhouse gas intensive energy companies confirms a common understanding between Yale and its external managers. According to a May 2017 report by Fossil Free Yale and Local 33 Unite Here, the graduate students union, between March 31, 2015, and June 30, 2016, Yale bought $230.5 million worth of stock in Antero Resources Corp., a natural gas producer and one of the fastest-growing fracking companies in the United States. Its one of the only times that Yale has made a direct investment in a fossil fuel company without going through a chain of hedge-fund managers, Heaphy said. The stock, which stood at $29.03 on May 1, 2016, had dropped to $9.39 on Dec. 1, 2018, according to Yahoo Finance. The Yale Daily News reported March 1 that, according to the universitys most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Yale had sold almost all of its holdings, reducing its investment to $357,000 in the last quarter of 2018. The groups are protesting Yales holding of Puerto Rican debt under the repayment schedule passed by Congress as the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. The commonwealth defaulted on its debt after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in September 2017. The bond holders were suing Puerto Rico to repay before any recovery could happen, Heaphy said. According to a document from the Yale Investments Office, The ACIR concluded in January 2018 that divestment from Puerto Rican debt is not warranted when an investor is abiding by the applicable legal framework in a process in which the debtors interests are appropriately represented. PROMESA has placed the Commonwealth under federal court protection to enable the suspension of payments and a workout with creditors. In early February, the debt was restructured, but in a way that critics say benefits large debt holders, while saddling Puerto Ricans with an 11.5 percent sales tax, the highest in the nation, according to a column in the American Prospect. According to The Nation, the largest holder of the Puerto Rican bonds is the Baupost Group, which is Yales fifth-largest fund manager. Swensen sits on its board. edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382 HARTFORD Despite a lack of momentum from majority Democrats in the General Assembly, Gov. Ned Lamont on Tuesday predicted that his singular initiatives - highway tolls, recreational marijuana, paid family leave and a $15 minimum wage - will pass this year in the General Assembly. But with focused opposition from Republicans, only eight weeks until the legislatures statutory adjournment, and a lack of solid legislative details for each of the proposals, Lamonts ability to push the bills across the finish line is being challenged. For up-to-date information on public policy issues, sign up for the CT Politics newsletter I cant be any more open, Lamont said in response to a question on tolls during a news conference with reporters. We passed a lock box. Anything we do with tolling is subject to federal authorization. That money has got to go to transportation by federal law. He said that while the marijuana bill is currently in the hands of the legislature, he has been in contact with Rhode Island Gov. Gina Marie Raimondo, whose legislature is debating similar issues. Im saying lets do something like this on a regional basis, Lamont said. Lets regulate it on a thoughtful basis. Lets make sure that were not going to advertise it. The bill is going to come out of the legislature. I want to make sure its something that parents will have confidence that this is the right thing to do. Retail cannabis outlets in Massachusetts have been attracting customers from Connecticut for months. The exact legal language for tolls, cannabis, paid leave and the minimum wage have not yet emerged in the majority caucuses in the House and Senate. There are few details on tolls, including how much they would cost motorists and where they would be located. J.R. Romano, chairman of the state Republican Party, said Tuesday that many Democrats are beginning to understand the potential backlash over controversial legislation. The devils in the details, he said of the quartet of legislative packages. Romano was particularly critical of the recreational cannabis bill, for which there is no easy test for police to check for roadside intoxication. He said the paid leave and $15 minimum wage could actually hurt the middle class with higher consumer prices. These newly elected Democrats believe they received some kind of mandate, Romano said. They are grossly underestimating the ability of the voting public to split their tickets in the 2020 election. Ned has a tendency to say things that he doesnt understand, Romano said. The retail-cannabis legislation needs a variety of major details that could sink it this year, not the least of which is that the social problems of full legalization could outweigh the estimated $180 million a year in tax revenue, estimated at 20 percent of total sales. I think the idea of leaving that to the black market would be irresponsible and dangerous, Lamont said. I think to do it on a carefully regulated basis is the safest way to do it going forward, and our neighbors are doing it and were going to do it as well. Critics centered in the business community say that the paid family leave bill would take too much money from weekly paychecks; and that a four-year phase-in of the $15 minimum wage, up from the current $10.10, is too much, too soon. Pathways to success could possibly make the family leave program optional and a five-year phase-in for $15, rather than four years. Were going to pass paid family leave, said Lamont. Im going to work my heart out to make sure that that gets done. And Im going to do it in the most fiscally responsible way so the taxpayers know this is going to be managed in an efficient way going forward. Youve got to give families a little bit of flexibility when it comes to taking care of a sick one. On the minimum wage, Lamont said hes been in communication with business leaders. Were going to phase this in over a responsible period of time. Give people a chance to plan accordingly. Were going to get this done. kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT Newsfrom Japan Tokyo, April 2 (Jiji Press)--Japan's agriculture ministry said Tuesday that live African swine fever virus was detected in two pork sausage products brought into the country from China, marking the first case of the virus being confirmed in a contagious state in Japan. In further efforts to prevent the invasion of the virus, the ministry plans to take strict actions against malicious cases of meat products being carried into Japan illegally. The undercooked sausages were found in luggage of passengers who arrived at Chubu Centrair International Airport in Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, from China in January, according to the ministry. African swine fever infects pigs and wild boars, but is different from the swine fever that is spreading in central Japan prefectures including Gifu. The African swine fever virus is highly contagious, and there are no effective vaccines against the disease. The disease does not spread to humans, and consumption of meat from infected animals is harmless. [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.] Atlantic City Airport could use some more options for flights, but this isnt the kind most people have in mind. If a bill introduced in the New Jersey legislature gets traction, a group would be created to study the possibility of turning the small airport into a spaceport, capable of lateral launches think spaceplanes with really expensive airfare, that take you on sub-orbital flights to destinations around the globe. The proposal was quietly introduced in the state Senate earlier this year, by Sen. Chris Brown, and Assemblymen Vin Gopal and Jim Beach, but it hasnt moved since it was referred to the Senate Transportation Committee. What it calls for is the creation of an Atlantic City International Airport Spaceport Feasibility Study Commission a nine-member group that would study the licensing costs for a launch and re-entry site at or near the airport, the economic impact to South Jersey, and how the spaceport would affect residents and businesses in the area. A report would then be sent to the governor within of a year of the bill becoming law. Brown says the resources that are available in and around the airport could make it worthwhile to see if the Atlantic City Airport could support space transportation. With private companies like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and Orion Span investing millions of dollars in new technologies and infrastructure to create a space tourism industry, it just make sense to explore the possibility of marrying our local tourism industry with the FAA Tech Center and the National Aviation Technology and Research Park to bring in new, hi-tech jobs for our local families, Brown told NJ Advance Media. The nine-person commission would consist of a mixture of people from different backgrounds, including the South Jersey Transportation Agency (SJTA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) William J. Hughes Technical Center, Stockton University, an aviation or aerospace engineer, and businesses and residents who live within 10 miles of the airport. The Economic Revitalization Advisory Committee, a group Brown created to help develop legislative goals for a four-year plan to diversify Atlantic Countys economy, recommended the idea. A spaceport could allow for new businesses to come to the airport and utilize the facility for tourism and cargo launches to take place. Vertical launches think rockets shooting up from Cape Canaveral wouldnt be part of the options to explore, the bill states. New Jersey officials arent the first to think optimistically about what the future of space travel might have in store. There are 11 facilities in the United States with Active Launch Site Operator Licenses, according to the FAA. Two are located in the states of California, Florida, Texas, and there are also ones in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Alaska, Virginia and Colorado. However, in the past five years, launches have only occurred at four of those. Under the umbrella of Virgin, Virgin Galactic sent a passenger in one of its vehicles, SpaceShipTwo, into space in February, from the Mojave Air and Space Port in the deserts of California. According to a December 2018 Reuters story, Virgin Galactic was charging $250,000 for a 90-minute trip. Cecil Airport in Jacksonville, Florida, has been a license holder since 2010, and allows horizontal launches, meaning the spacecraft would take off similar to a commercial airplane. But it hasnt done any yet. The facility, just like the Atlantic City Airport, is host to both commercial and military flights, and is not far away from populated areas. Leslie Lake works for RS&H, an architecture, engineering, and consulting firm who helped with the planning of the spaceport at Cecil Airport. Lake, who was born and raised in New Brunswick, says while the idea of spaceports around the country may seem premature to some people, there has been a lot of momentum generated by private investors. We have more progress now than weve ever had in the past, Lake said. Not just technically, but in terms of the policymakers and the legislative issues and other things away from the ability to physically do it with our science. The cost is also driving it, and it is not limited to defense payloads or satellite missions. It may not be far-fetched to believe the airport would be used for space travel. The airport served as an emergency landing site for STS-121, a 2006 Space Shuttle Discovery mission to the International Space Station in part because of the extended runway and proximity to water, according to NORAD. Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam is keeping an open mind about the idea. Anything that brings a new and diverse industry to our area will always be viewed as a positive, especially if that industry is technology, the mayor said. Chris Franklin can be reached at cfranklin@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @cfranklinnews or on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us.nj.com/tips A 16-year-old passenger was killed Monday night in Atlantic County when a car veered off the road, struck a utility pole and burst into flames, authorities said. The teen, a resident of the Newtonville section of Buena Vista who was not identified, was pronounced dead following the 9:45 p.m. crash on the westbound Black Horse Pike near the Route 50 entrance, Hamilton police said. He was riding in the back seat of the car, Det. Larry Fernan Jr. said. The driver, an 18-year-old Newfield man, was brought to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City to be treated for injuries not considered life-threatening. No one else was in the car. Anyone with information is asked to call Hamilton Det. Christine Armitage at 609-625-2700, extension 572. 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 Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. A quadriplegic claiming Camden police officers broke his neck during a 2014 arrest is one step closer to a civil trial after a judge rejected defendants attempts to toss the suit. U.S. District Court Judge Jerome Simandle ruled Friday that most, but not all, of the counts of the lawsuit could continue against Camden County police, the county, the police chief and the three officers who were involved in the arrest. He also said medical experts for the paralyzed man, Xavier Ingram, 20, would be allowed to testify at trial that his neck was likely broken when the officers kneeled and stepped on his neck, and his injuries were exacerbated when they continued to move him and ignore his cries that he couldnt feel his legs. Camden County police maintain that no excessive force was used and Ingrams injury occurred when he fell while running from police. They have expert witnesses who will also testify that this is what happened. The fall was captured on a surveillance video, but Simandle said the countys assertion that the video exonerates the cops was incorrect. The court has reviewed the surveillance video and finds that it is of such low quality that it cannot be used to definitively ascertain the amount of force that Officer Defendants used in arresting Plaintiff Ingram, Simandle wrote. Beth Baldinger, Ingrams attorney, said her client, who remains in a hospital bed, was pleased to get news of the decision. Hes look forward to having the case brought to trial, she said. She hopes the judge will set the trial for this fall. Hes been suffering with this every day for five years. Police spokesman Dan Keashen called Ingrams allegations baseless and frivolous and said the department "wholly expects that its officers will be found to be exonerated at trial. Ingrams arrest and injury on June 12, 2014, were precipitated either by an illegal handgun or planted evidence, depending on who you believe. Police said they chased Ingram after believing he had ditched a gun under a parked car. He denies the criminal charges against him, and they have never been resolved. His criminal lawyer in February asked a superior court judge to dismiss the charges because his client, who will spend the rest of his life in a hospital bed, cannot physically make it to court to be tried. Xavier Ingram in an undated photo before his injury June 12, 2014. (Photo provided)SJN According to depositions in his civil suit, Ingram was with a group of men in Sycamore Court apartments June 12, 2014, when then-Sgt. Jeremy Merck, 32, and two rookies, Nicholas Marchiafava, 30, and Antonio Gennetta, 31, came to check the area for suspected drug activity. Merck said in his deposition that as Ingram left the area, Merck saw Ingram stoop between cars and heard a noise. Merck then found a gun on the ground in that spot and sent Marchiafava and Gennetta to arrest Ingram, he said. Ingram maintains that the gun wasnt his, but was planted by Merck. He took off running when he saw the officers because he had warrants, he said in deposition. The police departments eye in the sky camera captured Ingram running and falling, but it is hard to tell what is happening after the two officers descend on Ingram on the ground. He swore the two officers beat him and kneeled on his upper back and neck, and that he told them he couldnt feel his legs. He said that Merck walked up, told him to shut up, and stepped on his neck until he heard it crack and felt blinding pain. Marchiafava and Gennetta reported using only compliance holds and placing their knees on his back, while Merck denies using any force. The two rookie officers testified that they heard Ingram say that he was hurt and couldnt feel his legs, but they they still tried to sit him up until he fell back to the ground. Then an ambulance was summoned. The officers also said they found heroin on Ingram, but each of the three officers told a different story about who found the drugs, when and where, according to Ingrams police expert. In his rulings Friday, Simandle allowed the suit to go forward, noting that if viewed in the light most favorable to Ingram, it was plausible that a jury could decide the suit in Ingrams favor on multiple counts, including excessive force and violations of his constitutional rights. He did dismiss all counts of excessive force, failure to provide medical care and constitutional violations against the police department and the county, though he allowed those counts to remain as to Police Chief J. Scott Thomson and the individual officers. He also dismissed all claims against then-assistant police chief Orlando Cuevas. Simandle also ruled that Ingrams co-plaintiff, Darren Dickerson, can continue suing for excessive force and violations of his civil rights in connection with the same incident. Dickerson alleges that he was one of several witnesses who saw Ingram being beaten and that he swore at police and was ordered to leave. While he was walking away, he alleges Officer Nigel Shockley asked him to repeat his profane comment and then tackled, beat and arrested him. Shockley and police allege Dickerson was told he was under arrest but ran, requiring Shockley to chase and tackle him. However, Simandle did reject Dickersons claim of false arrest because the Camden man later pled guilty to a municipal offense. Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccajeverett. 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. Mad Money provocateur Jim Cramers former New Jersey home, which he sold to his ex-wife for $1 in 2010, recently sold for nearly $3.7 million, according to its Zillow listing. Located on a tree-lined street among other million-dollar homes in Summit, the 5,032-square-foot home has five bedrooms and is located on more than one acre. The Cape Cod-style home was built in 1891, according to its listing. Cramer and his then-wife, Karen, bought the Union County home for a little more than $2.3 million in 1999, according to property records. The couple divorced in 2009, according to previous reporting by NJ Advance Media. The hedge fund manager turned television host then sold the home to Karen for $1 in 2010, according to property records. Jim Cramer's former house in Summit sold for nearly $3.7 million recently.Google Maps A year before his divorce, Cramer purchased a a 5,274-square-foot home in Summit for $4.7 million, according to property records. He also owns a home, according to property records, down at the Jersey Shore. Cramer, who is known for his brash, in-your-face style on television, has been the host of CNBCs Mad Money, a show on the stock market, since 2005. Before getting his start on the air, Cramer was a stockbroker for Goldman Sachs in the 1980s before starting his own hedge fund that he ran until 2000. According to a 2005 BusinessWeek cover story, Cramer said he was worth between $50 million and $100 million at the time. Joe Atmonavage may be reached at jatmonavage@njadvancemedia.com. Follow on Twitter @monavage. 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. Authorities have arrested three people in the murder of a Jersey City high school student who was gunned down on a street corner more than six months ago, Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez announced Tuesday. Two men and a teenager all of Jersey City have been charged with the Sept. 18 murder of Jayden Fondeur, a junior at Ferris High School, as well as weapons offenses, Suarez said. Fondeur was gunned down in front of a convenience on the corner of Old Bergen Road and Pamrapo Avenue just before 6:30 p.m. that night. Isaiah Huggins, 19, was arrested Tuesday at Essex County jail, where he is currently in custody on unrelated charges. Rayquan Carmichael, 18, and the 16-year-old defendant were arrested Monday in Jersey City. A close family friend said Jayden, a junior at Ferris, was the victim of a drive-by shooting, although the Hudson County Prosecutors Office would not confirm that at the time of the shooting. Security video footage shows a car passing on Old Bergen Road as more than a dozen people some whom are standing in front of the store and others who are across the street react to the gunfire. It is not clear where the gunfire is coming from in the video. At the same time, Jayden, who had just walked into the street and then back to the sidewalk in front of the store, could be seen ducking and then falling to the ground. In the seconds afterward, two people can be seen running and jumping over his body to flee from the gunfire. Huggins was acquitted of all charges, including murder, in January 2018 after being charged with fatally shooting Rondell Rush, 17, in April 2016. JERSEY CITY Seven vehicles all with the keys still inside were stolen from a warehouse in Jersey City, but at least four were recovered less than 48 hours after the theft, authorities and a source to The Jersey Journal. The thefts at 150 Pacific Ave. were reported at noon Monday, but were believed to have occurred sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning. Tuesday afternoon at roughly 3 p.m., four of the cars, including two BMWs and an Audi, were returned on flatbed tow trucks to a Jersey City police lot on Linden Avenue. A source with knowledge of the investigation said that the stolen vehicles were not new, but they were high-end vehicles nonetheless. The source also said that when a worker arrived Monday morning, a garage door was open. The building at 150 Pacific is a massive structure that sits on more than 11 acres, and is home to a number of companies. Authorities did not release the name of the company that was victimized. The recovered vehicles were located in Elizabeth, the source said. More information from Jersey City police on the recovery of the vehicles was not immediately available. This story was updated with new information at 3:57 p.m. Whether it was spitting, punching or kicking, an East Orange woman appeared prepared to take on the world early Sunday morning, Hoboken police said. Jannah Asante, 22, was charged with two counts of third degree aggravated assault on a police officer, two counts of fourth degree aggravated assault on a police officer, aggravated assault on an EMT, resisting arrest and simple assault in a violent spree that left two police officers with minor injuries. Sgt. Richard Torres and police officers Roary Miller and Christopher Barral, and special police officers Matthew Rossi and Jonathan Rodriguez responded at 2:49 a.m. to 76 River St., where police were told Asante had assaulted and spit at several people, Hoboken Detective/Sgt. Joseph Leonard said. Rossi and Rodriguez saw Asante punch a pedestrian in the area of 44 Newark St. and Asante resisted when Torres, Rossi and Rodriguez placed her under arrest. The officers handcuffed Asante, but Asante wasnt giving up, Leonard said. As police placed her in the police car, Asante kicked Rossi in the chest, Leonard said. At headquarters, she became combative and was placed in a cell. Asante grabbed Torres neck when the officers were leaving the cell and she again had to be restrained, said Leonard, who noted that Torres suffered a minor injury. Asantes erratic, aggressive behavior led to a visit from medical personnel and while waiting, Asante became combative with police officers Miller and Barral. Asante started kicking at Miller as he attempted to secure her, and Barral sustained a minor injury helping get Asante under control, Leonard said. While being transported to the hospital, Asante spit in the face of an EMT, Leonard said. Asante was later released from the hospital, given a court date and released. JERSEY CITY A Jersey City panel on Monday declined a request by St. Peters Prep to demolish two York Street buildings it owns, handing a win to residents who opposed the demolition plan and setting up a potential battle over the future of two structures that date to the 19th Century. The decision by the Historic Preservation Commission came at the tail end of a nearly five-hour hearing on the St. Peters request and caps a roughly yearlong effort by school officials to convince the city that the buildings are too dilapidated to be saved. The demolition hearing had been postponed numerous times before Monday. The six-member panel voted in favor of rejecting the demolition request by a 6-0 vote. Commissioners expressed doubt about the arguments from St. Peters officials that the buildings are so dilapidated they must be destroyed and said they concurred with the citys historic preservation officials who recommended against demolition. Commissioner Stephen Gucciardo said he was not convinced by the testimony of St. Peter's Prep engineers. "I dont think its conclusive enough to take this building down, he said. St. Peters was required to seek approval from the commission because the property is located inside the Paulus Hook Historic District. The Jesuit high school can appeal Mondays decision to the Jersey City Zoning Board. The schools attorney, Charles Harrington, declined to comment. One of the buildings dates to 1861 and the other to 1894. Located on York Street near Van Vorst Street, adjacent to St. Peters Prep, the Romanesque Revival structures used to house the original St. Peters parish school and St. Peters Hall and Parochial School. Woodrow Wilson launched his campaign for New Jersey governor in the hall in 1910. St. Peters Prep bought the buildings in 2004. The school has said it intends to put a parking lot on the property. Engineers for St. Peters told commissioners that the older building is leaning nearly seven inches, that there are cracks all over the facades of both buildings, that at least one interior staircase is unstable and more. They said a lot of damage occurred during Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the region in October 2012 and caused extensive flooding and other damage to properties in Downtown Jersey City. Saving this building and the stability of this building would not be practical, said engineer Richard Southwick. Mondays hearing attracted about 50 people, all of whom appeared to oppose demolition. They cheered when commissioners questioned the claims by St. Peters officials that the buildings must be torn down and, in their comments to the board, accused the school of purposely letting the buildings deteriorate. This is an act of demolition by neglect, said Raylie Dunkel. Margaret Cohen said demolishing the structures would set a bad precedent. Tearing down these buildings would make a mockery of historic preservation, Cohen said. Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. JERSEY CITY Described as the face of evil, a Jersey City man was sentenced to 60 years in prison Tuesday for killing his girlfriend and then picking up their 4-year-old son at school and murdering the boy because the girlfriend was dumping him. There is no other way to describe your conduct that day than simply evil, Hudson County Superior Court Judge John Young told Jose Ronald Santos-Alvarez, 29, who will not be eligible for parole until around the year 2070. In December, Santos-Alvarez pleaded guilty to the Oct. 7, 2015 murder of his son, Christopher Potoczniak, and the aggravated manslaughter of Monika Potoczniak, 27, in their home on Lincoln Street in the Heights. Young noted that after killing Monika Potoczniak, Santos-Alvarez drove to the boys school and picked him up, knowing he would kill the child a short time later that day. "You, without hesitation, went down to his school, picked him up with his Spiderman backpack on, took him home, sat him on the couch and killed him, Young said of the boy who was suffocated with a pillow. "You represent the face of evil. Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Keith Travers also did not mince words regarding Santos-Alvarez: No hell hot enough, and no eternity long enough." Young sentenced Santos-Alvarez to 40 years in prison for killing his son, and 20 years in prison for killing his girlfriend. The judge ruled that the terms be served consecutively, saying they were "separate crimes committed at separate times. Santos-Alvarez declined to say anything before being sentenced. At the hearing, defense attorney Michael Robbins called the relationship between Santos-Alvarez and Monika Potoczniak somewhat combustible. The attorney said Santos-Alvarezs homicidal actions still tear at his clients heart. He hopes and he prays that one day, maybe, he still may be able to ask to be forgiven, Robbins said at the hearing, adding that Santos-Alvarezs crimes weigh on him every day and He is never free. Victim impact statements filed by family members were not read in court, so Travers spoke for them. Monica was going to leave for Florida, Travers told the judge. The defendant could not accept that reality and he decided to kill her. He then decided to kill his son. The 4-year-old son could have been someone, could have helped society, could have been a doctor he took him away from us. Santos-Alvarez is an illegal immigrant and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has place a detainer on him. He is expected to be deported to El Salvador should he survive his sentence. The family chose not to speak to the press after the hearing. New Jersey drivers are used to heavy traffic getting into Manhattan but congestion pricing is something different, and potentially even more aggravating. State lawmakers in New York approved a first-in-the-nation plan that will impose fees, still undetermined, on drivers entering Manhattan south of 61st Street, possibly starting in 2021. The stated goal of congestion pricing is to alleviate traffic in the most densely-traveled part of the Manhattan while raising funds for primarily subway improvements, but that will be thanks in no small part to workers and other travelers from New Jersey. Congestion pricing is shaping up as the latest in a long line of turf battles between New Jersey and New York. Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop on Monday floated the idea of state lawmakers in Trenton retaliating by imposing a commuter tax on New York City residents. We can do the same thing, Fulop told NJ Advance Media. If NY does a commuter tax that only funds @MTA + exempts NYC residents from the tax - why should NJ not implement a commuter tax on NYC residents leaving NYC that exempts NJ residents so WE can fund our transit. Reality is any commuter tax should be a regional convo not just NY Steven Fulop (@StevenFulop) April 1, 2019 Fulop added that, rather than engaging in a race to zero for both sides, he would rather see New York working with New Jersey on long-term transportation planning. The potential impact of New Yorks congestion pricing zone on New Jersey is significant. Lets start with shifting traffic patterns. Under the plan, drivers using the Lincoln Tunnel and Holland Tunnel would receive a credit based on what they pay in tolls. However, no break would be offered to motorists taking the George Washington Bridge, as noted Friday by Gov. Phil Murphy in a letter to N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Steve Carrellas, director of government and public affairs for the New Jersey chapter of the National Motorists Association, said the disparity may prompt additional drivers to switch from the GWB to the already crowded tunnels. New York is not going to care, because it is not creating a new problem for them, Carrellas said. Another possibility is that congestion pricing will prompt additional Manhattan-bound drivers to switch to mass transit, such as NJ Transit and PATH. Problem is, all of the revenues will be going toward New York, not to additional trains and infrastructure improvements in New Jersey. This concerns Fulop. Theres a lot of different-type transit issues that are under-funded, not just the MTA, Fulop said, referring to the agency that oversees the subways. Murphy, in his letter to Cuomo, asked Cuomo to consider sharing some of the revenue with NJ Transit and PATH. According to AAA Northeast, which opposes the plan, eighty percent of the revenues will go toward the subways. The Long Island and Metro-north railroads each would get 10 percent. All fall under the umbrella of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA. Cuomo had not publicly responded as of Monday afternoon. That the congestion pricing fees remain unknown is one of the key unresolved details. A breakdown of the plan, provided by AAA Northeast, states that a six-member traffic mobility review board will provide recommendations on rates by Nov. 2020, subject to approval by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. While two major roadways, the FDR Drive and West Side Highway, are south of 61st Street, they will not be included in the congestion zone. Exemptions also will be provided for emergency vehicles as well as qualifying vehicles transporting people with disabilities. Signs will be posted at entrances to the congestion pricing zone in order to alert motorists who might not realize they are being billed, as the system will rely on the same cashless-tolling technology used on the citys bridges and tunnels. Robert Sinclair, a spokesperson for AAA Northeast - the acronym is for American Automobile Association - said his organization opposes New Yorks congestion pricing initiative because it shortchanges drivers. Sinclair said congestion pricing is expected to raise about $1 billion annually in New York, but that not a nickel is going toward road improvements. Theres a ton of money already being contributed by drivers to the MTA. Now were being asked to dig even deeper, Sinclair said. Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@RobJenningsNJ. 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 Calvary Episcopal Church in Flemington has announced the hiring of a new pastor and priest-in-charge, Rev. Nathan Ritter. Fred Galano, warden at Calvary Episcopal Church, said, We are pleased and excited to welcome Fr. Nathan Ritter, our new Pastor and Priest in Charge to Calvary Episcopal Church. He brings fresh energy and ideas to our community and we look forward to praying, working, and growing together. Ritter, who was born in St. Louis, graduated from Truman State University with a B.A. in classical languages and a minor in religious studies. From there, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he earned a masters degree from the Yale Divinity School. While at Yale, he focused on the Old Testament and Semitic languages and studied Aramaic, (Syriac), Ethiopic, Hebrew, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Sumerian and Greek. During his time in New Haven, he also met his future wife, Jessica, and officially became an Episcopalian when he was confirmed at Christ Church. From there, Ritter entered the graduate program in Assyriology at the University of Michigan to study the languages and cultures of ancient Iraq and Syria. In Ann Arbor, he was active at Canterbury House, the Episcopal Student Center at the University of Michigan. In Michigan, Ritter also went to St. Gregorys Abbey, an Episcopal monastery in Three Rivers. While serving on a discernment committee for another student, he discerned a call to the priesthood. The Ritters moved to Jersey City in 2007, where Jess was ordained in the Lutheran Church; she serves as pastor of St. Pauls Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jersey City. Ritter holds a M. Div. from The General Theological Seminary and since graduation and ordination in 2010 has served Grace Church in Newark, St. Pauls Westfield and Saint Thomas Church in New York City. In his free time, Ritter can be found roasting coffee and making soap with his children, Theodore and Esther. He loves to hike with his large format camera and has an insatiable appetite for books. Ritter replaces Rev. Harry Mazujian, who resigned in 2017. COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) A bill has been introduced in the South Carolina Legislature to require Uber and Lyft drivers to have illuminated signs days after police say a college student from New Jersey mistakenly got into the wrong car and was kidnapped and killed. House Speaker Jay Lucas immediately put the bill on the calendar for Wednesday to be debated. Rep. Seth Rose said the bill was in response to the Friday killing of 21-year-old University of South Carolina student Samantha Josephson, a Robbinsville-native. Helping riders avoid psychos is a no-brainer, South Carolina State Rep. Micah Caskey said on Twitter. Nothing is ever going to stop psychos from doing psycho things, but if we can take one step to make it harder for psychos to be psychos, we should do it. https://t.co/x2cUmDw2ca Micah Caskey (@MicahCaskey) April 1, 2019 Services were planned Wednesday for Josephson, an aspiring lawyer who planned to attend Drexel University in Philadelphia. Samantha Josephsons father, Seymour Josephson, of Robbinsville, vowed to work toward improving the safety of ride sharing services. Samantha was by herself. She had absolutely no chance. None. The door was locked, the child safety locks were on. She had absolutely no chance, her father said at a candlelight vigil in Columbia. Police say Josephson had ordered an Uber ride early Friday, but mistakenly got into a similar car driven by 24-year-old Nathaniel David Rowland. Police say he killed Josephson with a sharp object and dumped her body. Rowland skipped a first court appearance, and records do not show if he has a lawyer. NJ Advance Media staff contributed to this report A disgraced pharmaceutical executive serving seven years in a low-security federal prison in New Jersey was moved to solitary confinement last month after officials learned he was still running his business with a smuggled cell phone, according to a report on Forbes.com. So-called pharma bro Martin Shkreli was moved into the the special housing unit at Federal Correctional Institution, Fort Dix a week and a half after the Wall Street Journal reported he had a contraband phone and was still heavily involved in Phoenixus, his private Swiss drug company. Shkreli was previously housed in a 12-man cell at the prison in Burlington County. The Forbes.com report about the move to solitary confinement cited sources. Before his legal woes, Shkreli stirred widespread rage when he boosted the price of Daraprim by more than 5,000 percent. Shkreli has become the public face of the pricing controversy when his company jacked up the price after obtaining rights to the drug. The drug is the only U.S.-approved treatment for a deadly parasitic infection called toxoplasmosis. Possession of a cellphone in a federal prison is a greatest security level prohibited act, according to the bureau. The FBI is also looking into Shkrelis prison activities, the Journal reported. After the article appeared, Shkreli, or someone acting on his behalf, even took to his blog to comment on the story. In this Wall Street Journal article, who do you think is trying to get Your Boy in trouble? Name them in the comments below who you think did it, according to the blog. A WordPress site martin shkreli lacks judgment may be the origin of the reporting on Shkrelis activities, noting nearly real-time social media commentary under his name. The prison at Fort Dix features a range of gym equipment, racquetball courts, horseshoe pits, volleyball, bocce ball lanes, intramural sports, a music room, pool tables as well as hobby crafts. There are no bars, towers or locks on rooms within the community units. NJ Advance Media staff writer Matt Gray contributed to this report. 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 Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. A phone call you cant ignore from your BFF, a delicious coffee in your cup holder or an irresistible doughnut are just some of the things most likely to kill you -- if you succumb to them while driving. Distracted driving was the leading cause of fatal crashes in the state for the seventh straight year, a State Police analysis of 2017 crash data found. And, the number of fatal wrecks blamed on impaired driving has crept up in New Jersey -- defying a national trend that has seen drunk driving deaths on the decline, said the State Police analysis, which was released this March. State Police determined that inattentive driving, also known as distracted driving, was the top cause in 196 fatal crashes. Total, there were 591 fatal crashes in 2017 that killed 624 people in the state. If there is a positive note, its that 21 fewer fatal crashes were attributed to inattentive driving in 2017, when compared to those in 2016. While the drop in distracted driving crashes is promising, the fact that something completely avoidable caused 196 fatal crashes is still alarming, said Tracy Noble, a AAA MIdAtlantic spokeswoman. Any life lost in a traffic fatality is one too many, especially due to preventable human choices behind the wheel. If you're focused on your phone, you aren't paying attention to the road. Distracted driving isn't just dangerous, it can be deadly. Learn more about our campaign at https://t.co/PYEBV425ff #JustDrive #EndDD #HeadsUpPhonesDown #BeStreetSmartNJ pic.twitter.com/UhTKtPU5B8 Street Smart NJ (@njstreetsmart) March 26, 2019 Driving under the influence was the second highest factor in fatal crashes -- blamed for 158 of them -- followed by speeding, deemed a factor in 61 crashes, the State Police report found. Failure to yield was the fourth highest cause, being a factor in 59 crashes. The number of traffic fatalities due to intoxication increased by 28 crashes in 2017, compared to 2016, the report found. We absolutely need to be concerned with the increase in alcohol-related crashes, especially with the prospect of marijuana legalization on the horizon, Noble said. In New Jersey, we are bucking the national trend. Nationally, drunk driving fatalities decreased in 2017, she said. Drunk driving fatalities accounted for 29 percent of all traffic fatalities across the country, which was the lowest proportion of overall traffic fatalities since record keeping began in 1982, Noble said. These latest statistics remind us there is still more work to be done to keep our roads free from impaired drivers, Noble said. UDrive, UText, UPay - the Morris County Park Police will be cracking down on distracted drivers during the month of April. https://t.co/6u49xow3wQ Morris County NJ (@MorrisCountyNJ) March 26, 2019 The most visible campaign against distracted driving is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations U Text, U Drive, U Pay campaign, which New Jersey participates in. That program also provides federal grants to police departments that apply for them for overtime for extra enforcement. For 2019, 207 police departments received $5,000 grants each (a total of $1.072 million) to step up distracted driving enforcement. The texting-while-driving crackdown started in New Jersey on Monday. The most common summons issued to distracted drivers is for using a handheld cell phone while driving. Last year, police issued 55,644 such summonses. Of those, 42,334 motorists either pleaded guilty or were found guilty, according to the state Judiciary. That was down from 61,872 summonses issued in 2017. Keep in mind that inattentive driving is a catch-all for many things, so it doesnt mean everyone was on a cell phone, said Pam Fischer, traffic safety consultant and former state Division of Highway Traffic Safety director. In a recent AAA poll of members, 60 percent said they were very concerned about safety, due to distracted driving, and 76 percent said they believed it is never ok to use a cell phone while driving. Fatal crashes caused by these factors are all avoidable. It comes down to the fact that people died on our roadways because of the choices they or others made, Fischer said. More than 90 percent of fatalities are preventable, but its up to all of us to reflect on what were doing that puts ourselves and others at risk, and change our behavior. Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @commutinglarry. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us at nj.com/tips. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. Ocean County attorney and Republican political boss George Gilmore arrived in federal court Tuesday to face charges he concealed money and avoided paying more than $1 million in taxes, instead using money from his law firm to fund lavish vacations, home renovations and a collection of rare items that ranged from model trains and animal tusks. But his defense says the whole case is a misunderstanding: Gilmore, a partner and shareholder in the Toms River firm Gilmore & Monahan, had a pattern of paying his taxes late along with interest and penalty, but never meant to conceal his earnings. As the Ocean County Republican chairman, Gilmore is among the most powerful party members in the state. GOP hopefuls have often arrived in statewide office by way of Ocean County, the reddest in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1. A federal grand jury in Trenton returned the six-count indictment in January. It alleges the 69-year-old from Toms River evaded tax payments between 2013 and 2015, while also filing fraudulent returns in 2013 and 2014. He also failed to hand over payroll taxes from his law firm for half of 2016, and lied on a loan application from a bank, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. When it came time to pay his federal income taxes, the defendant chose not to pay, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jihee G. Suh told the federal jury at U.S. District Court in Trenton during her opening argument. Even though he could pay. And the defendant chose to lie to the IRS and act as if he couldnt afford to pay. Not only will the evidence show the defendant had the money, the evidence will show that the defendant was spending it on everything else. Suh said Gilmore lied about how much he was making, using law firm money for personal expenses and labeling it as a shareholder loan. But that was income, she said, income that went unreported to the IRS. Meanwhile, he burned through $2.5 million, spending $700,000 on mortgage and property payments, $300,000 on renovations, like an infinity pool, and $400,000 on collectibles, dropping some of that on a $20,000 Steinway piano, $80,000 on collectible trains and animal tusks. While Gilmore did send the IRS nearly $500,000 for 2013 taxes, the check bounced, she said. He is also accused of illegally omitting the tax debt from bank applications when he refinanced a mortgage loan with Ocean First Bank for $1.5 million in 2014. Using a cash-out provision, Gilmore allegedly directly collected and kept $572,000, but did not pay the taxes he owed. By the end of 2016, prosecutors estimate, Gilmore owed the government more than $1.5 million with interest and penalties. Gilmores attorney, Kevin Marino, told the jury late payments had been a regular part of his clients tax record for years, but that he always paid, eventually, with complete interest and penalties. Those loans, he argued, were just that, and Gilmore had paid $7.8 million back into the firm, he said. Despite the money he spent on choo choo trains and copper drains, which he freely admits, hes innocent, he said during his opening argument. He never intended to or did break the laws of the United States. Marino upheld Gilmores reputation in Toms River, describing him as a big-hearted family man, who led the law firm and had spent $400,000 to care for his ill mother-in-law, in addition to some of the lavish and frivolous expenses enumerated by Suh. Hes never even once had the whiff of political scandal touch him, Marino said. Marino said Gilmores check to the IRS bounced after a bank loan failed to come through on time, and that it wast his attention to deceive the agency with a fraudulent payment. He said the case didnt resemble a typical tax fraud one; there were no shady Swiss bank accounts, no properties placed in the names of others to conceal assets and spending. He described Gilmores relationship with the IRS as cordial," and said he had regular contact with representatives, seeing as he was consistently making late payments. Marino also said his client honestly told the IRS when he had money, when he did not and when he expected to have it to pay them. The case is not about, did he spent a lot of money, did he spent it without paying his taxes on time? Yes, he did. He certainly shouldve paid them on time," Marino said. Subjecting yourself to interest and penalties [isnt] evasion." Judge Anne Thompson is presiding over the trial, which is expected to last between two and three weeks. 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. Combine data to improve malaria tracking, say scientists Scientists have identified a way to provide more detailed information on malaria transmission both locally and across borders, according to two new papers published today in eLife. The studies, from collaborators in the US, UK, Thailand, Bangladesh, Namibia and Norway, suggest that combining data on parasite genetics and human movement can provide greater insight on how malaria spreads among populations. This approach, applied to data from Southern Africa and Bangladesh, could allow malaria control programs to strengthen their local and regional efforts for eliminating the disease. A global decline of malaria in recent decades has led to a push for complete elimination of malaria parasites in 21 countries by 2020. But malaria transmission differs among countries and policy-makers must focus on reducing transmission in locations where the disease remains, while protecting areas where it has been controlled from imported infections that threaten to reintroduce parasites. This is a particular concern for countries that share an international border with those that have high-transmission rates. "Countries and regional blocs are working to identify where parasite importations are common and to pinpoint the sources of imported cases to develop more effective and targeted malaria interventions," explains Sofonias Tessema, a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, San Francisco, US, and co-first author of the Southern Africa study. "But routinely collected data, such as malaria case counts obtained from health facilities, may not provide much information on importations. Malaria cases are often classified as either having been infected locally or imported based on the patient's self-report of recent travel. With only travel history data, it can be difficult to assess accurately whether malaria parasites were acquired locally or during travel." To address this, the team used parasite genetic data to estimate the contribution of importation and compared it with human-mobility data to identify relevant sources of malaria parasites in Southern Africa. "We found that parasites from cases near to each other were much more likely to be closely related genetically, providing evidence that the majority of malaria cases were from local transmission," says co-first author Amy Wesolowski, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, US. Using genetic data from malaria parasites, the team also identified more detailed evidence of parasite connectivity over hundreds of kilometers than the other data sources, within Namibia and across the Angolan and Zambian borders. While these data are not yet routinely collected, they suggest the need to strengthen local interventions and regional coordination to successfully eliminate malaria from a critical region of Southern Africa. Meanwhile, for the second study, researchers measured the spatial spread of malaria parasites in southeast Bangladesh. To do this, they analysed epidemiological surveillance data, travel surveys, parasite genetic data and anonymised, aggregated mobile data from their collaboration partners at Telenor Research and Grameenphone, both part of Telenor Group, Norway. "Our combined method gave us detailed insight into the direction and intensity of parasite flow between locations," explains co-first author Hsiao-Han Chang, Research Associate at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, US. Contrary to current beliefs, the team found that frequent mixing occurs in low-transmission areas in the southwest of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region, and elimination will require interventions in addition to reducing imported infections from forested regions. "Unlike risk maps generated from clinical case counts alone, our method also distinguished areas of frequent importation as well as high transmission," adds Richard Maude, Head of Epidemiology at Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), and a co-senior author of this study. Altogether, the findings suggest that the ability to gather useful information from genetic data, using new methods, provides a strong case for the coordinated collection of regional data on parasite genomics in areas where importation of malaria is a potential concern, and where efforts are being focused to eliminate the disease. ### References The papers 'Using parasite genetic and human mobility data to infer local and cross-border malaria connectivity in Southern Africa' and 'Mapping imported malaria in Bangladesh using parasite genetic and human mobility data' can be freely accessed online at https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 7554/ eLife.43510 and https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 7554/ eLife.43481 , respectively. Contents, including text, figures and data, are free to reuse under a CC BY 4.0 license. Collaborators This work was the result of collaborations between researchers at: University of California, San Francisco, US; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, US; Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, US; MORU, Thailand; Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK; University of Southampton, UK; University of Namibia; and various organisations in Bangladesh, including the Bangladesh National Malaria Control Program. Media contact Emily Packer, Senior Press Officer eLife e.packer@elifesciences.org 01223 855373 About eLife eLife is a non-profit organisation inspired by research funders and led by scientists. Our mission is to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science. We publish important research in all areas of the life and biomedical sciences, including Epidemiology and Global Health, which is selected and evaluated by working scientists and made freely available online without delay. eLife also invests in innovation through open-source tool development to accelerate research communication and discovery. Our work is guided by the communities we serve. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, the Wellcome Trust and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Learn more at https:/ / elifesciences. org/ about . To read the latest Epidemiology and Global Health research published in eLife, visit https:/ / elifesciences. org/ subjects/ epidemiology-global-health . This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. By Walter Sosnosky With deepest regret, I am disappointed and saddened in the jurys decision to find East Pittsburgh Officer Michael Rosfeld not guilty in the shooting of a 17-year-old youth, Antwon Rose II. As an officer, deadly force is only used in eminent danger to your being or to that of a citizen. Antwon Rose II, was running away, a threat to no one. This horrific act wrenched my heart for this young mans life was taken away. Now theres a mother without a child, there is no consoling a mothers loss. Because of the trust bestowed upon law enforcement and its responsibilities, it is hard to write about an officer who betrayed that trust. I speak as a retired police officer with 25 years experience in the city of East Orange. Mainly, I was a beat cop. My beat was upper Central Avenue, a commercial and high rise residential. During the course of my duty, I checked the stores, crossed the children and seniors and enforced the law and made arrests when necessary. Through my 25 years, there was a mutual respect and caring. This is what a police officer does; the following is a Law Enforcement Code of Ethics: As a Law Enforcement Officer, my fundamental duty is to serve mankind; to safeguard lives and property; to protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation, and the peaceful against violence or disorder; and to respect the Constitutional rights of all men to liberty, equality and justice. I will keep my private life unsullied as an example to all; maintain courageous calm in the face of danger, scorn, or ridicule; develop self-restraint; and be constantly mindful of the welfare of others. Honest in thought and deed in both my personal and official life, I will be exemplary in obeying the laws of the land and the regulations of my department. Whatever I see or hear of a confidential nature or that is confided to me in my official capacity will be kept ever secret unless revelation is necessary in the performance of my duty. I will never act officiously or permit personal feelings, prejudices, animosities or friendships to influence my decisions. With no compromise for crime and with relentless prosecution of criminals, I will enforce the law courteously and appropriately without fear or favor, malice or ill will, never employing unnecessary force or violence and never accepting gratuities. I recognize the badge of my office as a symbol of public faith, and I accept it as a public trust to be held so long as I am true to the ethics of the police service. I will constantly strive to achieve these objectives and ideals, dedicating myself before God to my chosen profession . . . law enforcement. To the people of cities, towns and boroughs, please dont paint your police officer with a broad brush of anger, mistrust and fear. For this is true: 99 percent of law enforcement officers save lives, mentor youth, deliver children, protect our family, home, church and preserve our first amendment rights. To all my law enforcement brothers and sisters, thank you for your years of service. Be aware of those who would tear apart all the good that we as police officers have done and will do in the future. In closing, to all the citizens, please keep faith in our law enforcement officers. May peace and cool heads guide this country in the direction of brotherhood, understanding and trust. For if we dont, the chilling prediction by young Mr. Abraham Lincoln will come to fruition. Over 130 years ago, a young Mr. Lincoln addressing a group in the State House, stated the following: Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us with a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined with Bonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer that if it ever reaches us, it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be the authors and the finisher of it. As a nation of free men we must live throughout all times or die by suicide. To the family of Antwon Rose II, my prayers are with you and may the Lord look over you. Walter Sosnosky, a retired East Orange police officer, lives in Kenilworth. 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 Junius Williams The Star Ledger called Mayor Ken Gibson a trailblazer, and that he was. By the unwritten law of ethnic succession, when the ethnic group with the largest population matures politically, it will use the ballot to take control of city hall. But the rules were changed when African Americans became the majority in Newark in the 1960s, and history was delayed. Therefore, the journey to elect the first black mayor in Newark in 1970 was indeed a difficult one, and Ken Gibson was the right man to win the support of the majority of all the people. Indeed, he was the only candidate who could have won the election and ease the racial tensions that plagued the city after the 1967 Newark rebellion. As we mourn the death of this American icon, let us remember how he achieved his rightful place in history almost 50 years ago. Ken Gibson was elected because of the work of a coalition of civil rights and black power organizations. He was not selected to run by traditional politicians in smoked-filled backrooms, but from those of us who were well versed in the art and science of confrontation politics, having won citywide resistance movements against a 150-acre medical school, an unnecessary highway (Route 75), and Mayor Hugh Joseph Addonizios attempt to place a high school graduate as the business administrator at the Newark School District, instead of a college-educated black CPA. We converted street protests into electoral politics, first, through the organization called the United Brothers (later, Committee for Unified Newark) headed by Amiri Baraka, the father of current Mayor Ras Baraka; and then through the 1969 Black and Puerto Rican Convention that galvanized the support for Ken Gibson to become the first black mayor. As a result of this truly grass-roots campaign, run without major financial support from conventional sources or support from the Democratic Party (except for Eulis Honey Ward, the Democratic chairman of the Central Ward), Ken Gibson became the mayor of all the people, and executed this commitment accordingly. It was an election that saw a voter turnout of more that 70 percent, a feat that has never been repeated. With 2020 marking the 50th anniversary of Ken Gibsons election as the first black mayor of a major northeastern city, a window of opportunity will be opened to engage popular discussion about Black Power, electoral politics, the role of women in governance, the historic grassroots struggle behind this watershed moment, and analysis of the possibilities and limitations of electoral politics as a strategy for achieving equity based on considerations of race and class. The platform of Newarks black political convention in 1969 provides invaluable insights into black political thought at the advent of Gibsons election and offers a useful means for evaluating the Gibson administrations effectiveness in bringing real change for black and brown people in this urban environment. The Ad Hoc Committee for Newarks History, in conjunction with the Newark Public Library, is currently planning a series of events beginning this year in which the public will be invited to participate in exploring this rich and complex history as a means to evaluate the present and future of Newark. The Center for Education and Juvenile Justice, Inc. is adding Chapter 4, entitled The Ken Gibson Years (1970-1974), to its website, located at RiseUpNewark.com. We had hoped to have the active participation of Mayor Gibson, culminating with a major event in May 2020 to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of his administration. We shall do so in his name, understanding that this legacy should be shared with generations to come. Junius Williams, Esq. is the Official Newark historian, and author of the book Unfinished Agenda, Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power. He was Mayor Gibsons first campaign manager and became the mayors first director of Community Development and Model Cities. 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. When Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop made two big public transportation pledges in his State of the City address last month, our spirits were lifted. This year, he said, the city will complete its study of a Bus Rapid Transit system and it will seek bids in hopes of creating a city-run bus system to connect the south side of the city with the PATH network. The latter is a problem weve noted in the past so our interest was particularly piqued. Last week, the administration announced it is moving ahead with the feasibility study to bring a Bus Rapid Transit system to the city. Whoever wins the contract for the study better be super-creative because a BRT system requires dedicated bus lanes in a configuration similar to the light rail, but for buses instead of trains. The envisioned BRT would be north-south, the city said in a news release. What streets could possibly accommodate such a system? Kennedy Boulevard, maybe, but even there either a lane of traffic each way or precious parking would need to be eliminated. Besides, Kennedy Boulevard already has an array of buses and jitneys. Would a new service there go far enough in the effort to improve connectivity between the citys transit deficient neighborhoods and the job centers, as the mayors release claims? Could such a system really be accommodated on Bergen, Ocean or Garfield avenues? A 2014 report by the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority used a hypothetical route from the heart of the city to Exchange Place as an urban test case of sorts. It posited a route going along Kennedy Boulevard and Montgomery Street, mixing the buses in with traffic at some tight points but otherwise stripping the parking from both sides to accommodate the new bus route curbside. While the portions of east-west Montgomery Street that arent lined with homes could be ideal for a line -- it might even relieve some stress on the Journal Square PATH -- a north-south route isnt practical. It reminds us of an area of Torontos financial district that has recently been given over to mostly streetcars. There are few homes along the stretch, the streetcars are lovely, and the area is beautifully open. But business owners complain that they have lost customers. We can only imagine the uproar, and rightfully so, if Jersey City tries to take away swaths of parking in front of peoples homes. As Jersey Citys population continues to grow, it certainly needs more public transportation, but we fear this idea will never pass muster and is just a waste of time, money and effort. That time, money and effort would be better spent on smaller scale projects that can be up and running soon and without massive disruption to residents lives. We look forward to seeing details of the second prong of the mayors pledge -- maybe a shuttle bus system similar to the Hoboken Hop or a city-run jitney fleet -- that, granted, would be less cutting-edge but would be a welcome addition to the citys transit landscape. Submit letters to the editor and guest columns to jjletters@jjournal.com. Donald Trumps endless effort to destroy health care is his most spectacular scam, in a long and successful career as a con man. His Justice Department has announced that it will seek to kill the entire Affordable Care Act in court, all its hundreds of provisions, with no alternative for the nearly 20 million people who are suddenly left uninsured. Trump has no plan to protect these folks, many of whom voted for him. He never has. Even now, he says he is in "no very great rush" to come up with one. Yet once again, he thinks he can just slap his big brassy name on this boondoggle and sell it, like anything else. Let me tell you exactly what my message is: The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care, he said last week. You watch. We did watch, already, as he made the same grand promise last year of insurance for everybody, regardless of their ability to pay, then presented zero plans to do this while coming within a single vote of repealing the entire health law in Congress. Nearly 23 million would have lost insurance. We watched as Republicans were forced to relinquish control of the House, largely because voters saw through this charade and didnt want to lose their coverage. And now, we are watching Trump tell the same old lie that something better is, as always, in the works. Back in 2015, it was something terrific. Just days ago, it was something really spectacular. Nothing has changed. It is highly unusual for the Justice Department to refuse to defend a federal law, as it is here, after a group of Republican governors attacked Obamacare in court. This is a vanity move on Trumps part, to erase his predecessors legacy. Even his own Vice President, Attorney General and Cabinet secretary in charge of health care reportedly opposed this behind the scenes, because they know for a fact that Trump has no other plan. Its a political time bomb. Think of what will happen if the court doesnt stop him. Virtually all the 20 million who would lose their coverage are working people, many of whom voted for Trump, the self-professed champion of the working class. About 11 million are on the government-run Obamacare exchanges. The federal subsidies Trump is seeking to eliminate cover $525 of a $612 monthly premium on the marketplace, on average. States could never make up the difference. Their insurance would become unaffordable. Another 12 million were newly insured through the laws expansion of Medicaid. This is the largest source of funding for drug treatment, by far. Kill Medicaid, and you kill treatment. Add this cruel twist: Among them are three million children, who became covered when their parents signed up for Medicaid and would also lose their health care. Because New Jersey was one of the states that benefitted most from this health law, vastly expanding its number of insured, wed be among the biggest losers. At least 600,000 people would be stripped of their coverage right away. More would lose it down the line. Roughly 3.8 million in New Jersey have a pre-existing medical condition like cancer or diabetes. If they suddenly lost their jobs and employer coverage, many couldnt afford another plan. Its currently illegal for insurers to deny them coverage or hike their rates; thats an Obamacare protection that Trump would eliminate. New Jersey saw big savings thanks to this law, so dismantling it would rip a half-billion-dollar hole in our state budget. Wed lose another $4 billion in federal funds. It would ripple across our economy in job losses. Trump promised that everybodys going to be taken care of under his incredible plan, and the governments going to pay for it. Some voters still believe him. But did Mexico pay for the wall? Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook. For years, Cory Booker has bashed Donald Trump over his failure to publicly release his income tax returns, something every U.S. president had done for the previous 40 years. But with tax season now underway, Booker is yet to release his own returns, even as several of his fellow Democratic candidates have already done so. That may be about to change. Trump trying to explain why he's the only pres candidate in decades not to release his tax returns and is FAILING miserably #debatenight Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) September 27, 2016 Cory believes that anyone who wants to run for president should release their tax returns," said Sabrina Singh, the Booker campaigns national press secretary. "Unlike Donald Trump, Cory plans on releasing his tax returns. Still, its not yet clear when Bookers returns will be released. Singh declined to offer a timetable. Waiting isnt likely an option. On Monday, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., released a dozen years worth of returns, just days after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, both Democratic candidates for president in 2020, did the same. Last August, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had released a decades worth of her own tax returns, posting them online. Its been a month since U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders pledged to release a decades worth of tax returns at a town hall meeting, and hes now facing increasing scrutiny for not making good on his pledge. Booker has only ever offered a brief glance at his returns: When running for U.S. Senate in a special election in 2013, his returns were shown to just a handful of reporters, but could not be photographed or copied. He also allowed his 2014 returns to be examined in the same restrictive fashion. The returns revealed a near-monastic lifestyle. While he earned more than half a million dollars in 2013, much of it from speaking fees, Booker donated most of it -- $440,000 in cash, property and stock -- to charity, according to the tax returns. Democrats in the Legislature will later this year to advance a bill that would compel any candidate for president -- regardless of party -- to release their tax returns if they hoped to be on New Jerseys ballot. This isnt aimed at any specific individual but it has its roots in the traditional of candidates of major parties making their tax returns available to assist in the voting process, said Assemblyman John McKeon, D-Essex, its prime sponsor. When Trump broke that tradition, it became necessary to create a law so that its no longer an option to hide your (tax) returns. Since 2015, Trump has insisted that his personal tax returns cannot be released because he is in the midst of an ongoing IRS audit. Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. 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. New Jerseys historic move away from cash bail in 2016 slashed the states jail populations, leaving fewer people locked up awaiting trial because they couldnt post small bail amounts, according to a new report from the state judiciary. But the program that props the system up is going broke, and state leaders currently have no plans to fix it. The report was delivered Tuesday to the governor and state Legislature as they hammer out the states budget for the coming year. It contains long-awaited data on the racial and gender makeup of the states jails, as well as a first-ever comparison of the old cash bail system to the new one. Starting in 2017, New Jersey all but eliminated cash bail, moving instead to a system where judges can order defendants jailed based in part on a risk assessment that weighs the suspect's criminal history and the charges they face. The move placed New Jersey in the national spotlight as one of the first states to adopt such sweeping reforms. Lawmakers in the state of New York just passed their own version of bail reform, eliminating cash bail for most non-violent offenses starting in 2020. Critics of the new system including some local police and prosecutors, as well as the bail bonds industry, which lost the vast majority of its business due to the change said it would lead to more crime. The report acknowledges slight increases in the rate of people charged with new crimes while awaiting trial and the rate of people who failed to show up for court dates. But those numbers also coincided with an overall decline in the states crime rate, according to FBI and State Police data. Concerns about a possible spike in crime and failures to appear did not materialize, the report said. In a statement, New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner said the data shows that the reforms reduced the unnecessary detention of low-risk defendants, ensured community safety, upheld constitutional principles, and preserved the integrity of the criminal justice system. The states pretrial jail population fell nearly 44 percent between the end of 2015 and the end of 2018, the data shows. That figure does not include people who were sentenced to jail time instead of prison, federal immigration detainees housed in New Jersey jails. The amount of time defendants spent in jail awaiting trial dropped 40 percent, according to the report, from more than 62 days in 2014 to just over 37 days in 2017. Last year, just 102 of the 44,383 people who moved through the court system were ordered to post bail 90 of whom received the order as a result of violating previous terms of their pretrial release, such as failing to appear for a court date. The rate of people charged with new crimes while awaiting trial climbed from just over 24 percent in 2014 to just under 27 percent in 2017, the data shows. Defendants also showed up at court appearances just over 89 percent of the time in 2017 compared to nearly 93 percent in 2014, before the new system was in place. The judiciarys report notes that because of certain challenges in compiling older data, such small changes should be interpreted with caution and likely do not represent meaningful differences. The report acknowledges lingering racial disparities in the states jails, noting that an overrepresentation of black males in the pretrial jail population remains an area in need of further examination by New Jerseys criminal justice system as a whole." The report also contains grave warnings about the future of the new pretrial services program, which monitors defendants ordered released until trial. Leaders of the states court system have been warning lawmakers since the reforms were put in place that the funding scheme for pretrial services which included a hike in filing fees was not sustainable. Currently, staffing levels are at the bare minimum to meet the programs needs, the report warns, and court officials estimate the program will face an overall negative funding balance in late fiscal year 2020 and early fiscal year 2021. In recent weeks, NJ Advance Media asked officials in Gov. Phil Murphys administration and the Legislature whether they planned to change the funding scheme. Jennifer Sciortino, a spokeswoman for the state Treasury, said the administrations Office of Management and Budgets analysis of the funding system showed there was enough money to last through fiscal year 2020 a different conclusion than the one reached by the judiciary. State Sen. Sandra Cunningham, D-Hudson, who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, said through a spokesman that if the New Jersey courts believe that the funding process that was part of the bail reform law wont support its needs, we will listen to their request when they come before the budget committee as we work on the spending plan for the coming fiscal year. Hearings on the budget are underway, but the court system has been repeatedly raising the alarm, coming before the same committee two years running to ask lawmakers to fix the broken funding scheme. Judge Glenn Grant, the judiciarys acting administrative director, has requested pretrial services be moved under the states regular budget to ensure its fully funded each year, rather than relying on filing fees. State Assemblyman John McKeon, a member of his bodys Budget Committee, told NJ Advance Media "the expected direction of the legislature would be to add additional funding, but that exactly how much funding will be hashed out in coming weeks. McKeon said that while the issue should be addressed, the state also has larger potential financial crises, pointing to school funding issues and the states pension fund. This, in the overall scheme of a $36 billion budget, is not going to be unmanageable," he said. "I would doubt that its going to be decoupled entirely from filing fees. It will have to be supplemented. S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. A Summit-based pediatric gastroenterologist is in jail on charges that he sexually assaulted one of his patients repeatedly over several years. Michael Tyshkov, 62, of Livingston, was arrested and charged with second-degree sexual assault and fourth-degree criminal sexual contact, Union County Prosecutor Michael Monahan said. Between April 2016 and March 2019, Tyshkov assaulted the now 20-year-old female patient whom he treated for more than a decade, prosecutors say. The alleged assaults occurred during the womans medical exams at Tyshkovs practice in Summit. Tyshkov was arrested on the charges Friday and is in the Union County Jail. He could face five to 10 years in prison if convicted on the second-degree charge. The prosecutors office asks anyone with information about Tyshkov to contact Special Victims Unit Det. Jennifer Smith at 908-965-3814 or Summit Det. Christopher Medina at 908-273-0051. Joe Brandt can be reached at jbrandt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JBrandt_NJ. 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. Officials on Monday said oiled birds were found in New Jersey and tar balls have washed up along the New York shoreline after fuel from a ship spilled in the Arthur Kill waterway last week. One domestic duck and two ring-billed gulls covered with oil were captured by Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research in New Jersey, according to an update from the U.S. Coast Guard. The exact locations where the wildlife were found was not immediately clear. Areas impacted by the spill included Elizabethport Reach, Elizabeth Marina and Jacob Riis Park, New York, said a statement from the Unified Command, setup to coordinate various agencies responding to spill. Crews cleaned up tar balls discovered Sunday along Rockaway Beach in New York. New York Department of Environmental Conservation environmental engineer Rick Lin collects tar ball samples March 31, 2019, at Breezy Point Beach in New York. (U.S Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Nicole J. Groll)U.S Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Nicole J. Groll The Coast Guard said 87 responders along with 16 boats are working in the field Monday. Oil leaked from the Hapag-Lloyd container ship Dublin Express while the vessel was unloading Thursday at the Global Marine New York Container Terminal, according to officials. The hole was sealed to stop any more discharge, not far from the Goethals Bridge. Since the mishap was discovered, officials searched by air and ground for any impacts from the spill. Teams checked Long Beach to Sandy Hook, Raritan Bay, and areas of New York, including Staten Island, Brighton Beach, Gravesend Bay, Rockaway Beach, Long Beach and Jones Beach. Assessments conducted from the air and on the beaches revealed little to no oil observed, officials said in a statement. Reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration do not anticipate any product coming ashore further south. Weve seen a lot of progress in the cleanup of the Arthur Kill Waterway, and we continue to work with our Unified Command partners to ensure a rapid and thorough cleanup of all impacted areas, said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jason Tama, federal on-scene coordinator. Our priorities continue to be the safety of everyone involved including the public and responders, and environmental cleanup, the captain said in a statement. Officials asked the public not to approach oiled wildlife. Reports of tar balls, impacted wildlife and damage claims can be made by calling 866-601-5880. The Coast Guard was investigating the incident. Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. 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 Say GOODBYE to that one! Gary Sanchez crushes one 417 feet to put the Yankees on the board! Watch LIVE: https://t.co/EhfqbEvj91 pic.twitter.com/mi4eN4A5iu YES Network (@YESNetwork) April 1, 2019 NEW YORK Watch New York Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez crank a 417-foot home run agains the Detroit Tigers on Monday at Yankee Stadium. It gave the Yankees a 1-0 lead to start the second inning. The blast came off Tigers starting pitcher Tyson Ross spinning slider. And it was Sanchezs second home run in as many days. Below, read the Yankees press release on CC Sabathias latest charity effort: To celebrate his 19th and final season, CC Sabathia will host 52 youth from local Boys & Girls Clubs at Yankee games in each American Leaguecity this season, as well as one National League series. Groups will be invited to the first game of the last away series with all American League opponents, as well as at Oracle Park in San Francisco on April 26th, as a nod to Sabathias Bay Area roots.Growing up in Vallejo, Calif., the Boys & Girls Club offered Sabathia a safe place to go after school. The Club also provided him the opportunity to attend his first Major League Baseball game and to meet his hero, Oakland As pitcher Dave Stewart. To show his gratitude to the organization and mentor children much like his former self, Sabathia and his wife Amber partnered with Boys & Girls Clubs of America, hosting a myriad of events throughout his career, such as holiday parties, baseball clinics and career panels. The Boys & Girls Club was a huge part of my life growing up and a major influence on where I am today, said Sabathia. So many people at the organization touched my life and Im excited to have them be a part of my final season. I hope by doing this that my legacy will inspire a new generation of youth to be unstoppable! Brendan Kuty may be reached at bkuty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BrendanKutyNJ. Find NJ.com Yankees on Facebook. New Orleans police arrested four people, including a 13-year-old girl, in connection with armed carjackings and robberies last month in New Orleans East. Bryon Green, 39, Develyn Smith, 24, Reiontae Ward, 18, and a 13-year-old girl were arrested in connection to an armed robbery that occurred March 10 in the 4400 block of Rhodes Drive in the Plum Orchard area, police said in a April 2 news release. Police also accused Green and the 13-year-old girl of an armed carjacking on March 12 in the 4400 block of Cerise Avenue. Police say Green and Smith were also suspected of committing a simple robbery on March 11 at the intersection of Chef Menteur Highway and Dodt Avenue in the Plum Orchard area. After a St. Johns Parish deputy found them in a car that was believed to be stolen from New Orleans East, the three adults were transported to the Orleans Parish jail and the girl was brought to the Juvenile Justice Center, police said. According to NOPD, the suspects are booked with the following: Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Green faces charges of second-degree robbery, two counts of armed robbery with a firearm and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. Smith was booked with second-degree robbery, armed robbery with a firearm. Ward was booked with armed robbery with a firearm. The girl was booked with two counts of armed robbery with a firearm and two counts of possession for a firearm by a juvenile. Her name was not released by authorities due to her age. Bond information was not immediately available. An employee at Bridge City Center for Youth was arrested Sunday (March 31), accused of inappropriate sexual contact with a juvenile housed at the facility. 42-year-old woman tries to stab 18-year-old in chest, misses, stabs him in thigh: police Rachelle Tate, 31, of Bridge City, was booked with sexual malfeasance in a correctional facility, according to a Jefferson Parish arrest report. Tate did not return a telephone message requesting comment. The Office of Juvenile Justice is committed to providing a safe, therapeutic environment to all youth within its custody, said Executive Management Advisor Beth Touchet-Morgan said Monday. All reports of activity such as this are investigated internally and turned over to local authorities for further investigation and prosecution. The incident occurred about 1:13 a.m. Sunday at the center, located at 3225 River Road, Bridge City, according to Touchet-Morgan. A corrections officer, referred to as a juvenile justice specialist, was performing a security check of the dormitories when she heard voices coming from a laundry room. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The officer opened the laundry room door and spotted Tate, who is also a juvenile justice specialist, standing between the legs of juvenile seated on top of a table, an arrest report said. The juvenile was rubbing Tates chest, the report said. The officer on security rounds reported the incident, triggering an internal investigation. Probable cause was found to arrest the employee and transport her to local authorities at approximately 5 a.m., Touchet-Morgan said. Tate was booked into the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center in Gretna and released Sunday on a $5,000 bond. She has been with OJJ since March 2018. Personnel action is pending the final results of the investigation and in compliance with Louisiana Civil Service policies, Touchet-Morgan said. The former leader of a New Orleans tourism nonprofit pleaded guilty on Tuesday (April 2) to misdemeanor theft and was ordered to pay back more than $70,000 that prosecutors say she stole from the organization. She also was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine, which would go to the organization. Tonnette Toni Rice, who resigned her post as president of the New Orleans Multicultural Tourism Network in January 2017 following a WVUE Fox8 investigation into her credit card spending, was also sentenced to six months of probation, court records show. The same month Rice resigned, the Office of the Inspector General looked into allegations of theft and fraud. The OIGs investigation found that between Aug. 7, 2015, and March 16, 2017, while Rice was president of the nonprofit, she "misappropriated in excess of $70,000" from the nonprofit, "for her personal benefit, arrest records show. In an affidavit for Rices arrest warrant, NOPD Sgt. Frank Denton wrote Rice issued herself 85 checks from the nonprofit totaling $70,581.61, from Jan. 3, 2013, through March 16, 2017. "It was determined that none of those checks were for any NOMCN related activity," a sergeant wrote. Ex-leader of N.O. tourism nonprofit wrote checks to herself totaling more than $70K: NOPD Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up NOPD arrested Rice May 8, 2017. She initially faced charges of filing false public records, theft of $1,500 or more, computer fraud and theft under $1,000. She was later indicted on the theft and computer fraud charges. Some of the funds were spent on local gas purchases, the District Attorney Leon Cannizzaros office said in a news release on Tuesday. Others were spent on lounge chair rentals and pool bar tabs at a Miami hotel, which was hosting a multicultural conference. Orleans Criminal District Judge Tracey Flemings-Davillier sentenced Rice to pay restitution to the nonprofit in the amount of $70,682, and an additional $10,000 in penalty compensation to the nonprofit. Ms. Rice is pleased to have resolved this matter and move forward with her life, her attorney David Courcelle said over the phone on Tuesday. Assistant District Attorney Jacques Landrieu prosecuted the case. New Orleans Multicultural Tourism Network, which seeks to attract minority tourists and conventions to New Orleans, receives about $500,000 in public money per year, Fox 8 has reported.The NOPD warrant application refers to New Orleans Multicultural Tourism Network as a "public nonprofit agency chartered and funded by the City of New Orleans. New Orleans police are seeking the public assistance in locating two sedans seen at the scene of an Algiers homicide Monday morning (April 1). The pictured vehicles left the scene following the fatal shooting, which left a man dead with multiple gunshot wounds around 8:40 a.m. Anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of either of these vehicles should contact Detective Daniel Hiatt or any Homicide detective at 504-658-5300 or call Crimestoppers anonymously at 504-822-1111 and toll-free at 1-877-903-7867. I gotta see my brother, man says at scene of Algiers homicide New Orleans police are searching for a man accused of robbing a Waffle House in St. Roch at gunpoint Monday morning (April 1). The man entered the Waffle House in the 2900 block of Elysian Fields Avenue around 7:10 a.m., walked up to the front register and demanded an employee put money in a bag. The man had a gun, but it was not pointed the employee at the time of the robbery. The man stole money from the register, as well as from two safes inside the business before fleeing toward Abundance Street, police said. This was the second time a person tried to rob a New Orleans Waffle House in the past week. A Waffle House cashier thwarted a mans attempt to rob a Gentilly restaurant at gunpoint Thursday morning. The cashier wrested the robbers firearm from him, prompting him to flee. It was not immediately clear if the two robberies were related. Anyone with information regarding these incidents should contact NOPD Third District detectives at 504-658-6030, or call Crimestoppers anonymously at 504-822-1111 or toll-free at 1-877-903-STOP. A registered sex offender previously deported from the United States was rearrested in Harvey Saturday (March 30), accused of sexually abusing a child, creating sexually explicit images of the victim and uploading them onto the internet. Cantrell secretly turns school zones into speed traps Miguel Angel Fiallos Martinez, 44, of the 1100 block of Orange Blossom Lane, Harvey, was booked with 100 counts of possession of pornography involving juveniles under the age of 13, production of pornography involving juveniles under the age of 13 and sexual battery of a juvenile under the age of 13, according to Jacques Ambers, spokesman for the Louisiana attorney generals office. Internet crimes against children continuously inflict damage, State Attorney General Jeff Landry said in a statement released Tuesday. Every time one of these videos or images is viewed, the child is re-victimized. Martinez, who was living in the country illegally, was arrested following a joint investigation by Louisiana Bureau of Investigations Cyber Crime Unit and Fugitive Apprehension Unit, Homeland Security Investigations and the Jefferson Parish Sheriffs Office. Agents received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding sexual images of young children being uploaded to an email account, according to authorities. The tip suggested that a man seen in many of the images was a known, convicted sex offender from California, the attorney generals office said. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Local investigators identified Martinez and confirmed that he had been deported from the U.S. in 2005, authorities said. No details were available Tuesday about the California charges or Martinezs home country. Task force members were also able to identify a juvenile victim who appears in some of the images, according to authorities. Martinez is booked with the sexual battery of this victim. Investigators tracked Martinez to Jefferson Parish and identified his apartment on Orange Blossom Lane. They obtained a search warrant for the residence and recovered evidence of the crime on Friday, authorities said. Martinez was arrested Saturday at a neighboring apartment and booked into the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center in Gretna. He was still being held there without bond on Tuesday. Homeland Security placed a detainer on Martinez, Ambers said. Additional charges are expected from state investigators and authorities in Mississippi. Voters in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, could decide if dining out is worth a little more money to them. The Mississippi Legislature has approved putting a referendum before the citys voters that would add a 2 percent tax on purchases of food and drinks from restaurants and bars, the Sun Herald reports. The bill now awaits the signature of Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant. The city will set an election date once the bill is signed, the Sun Herald reported. It would require a yes vote from 60 percent of those casting votes, the newspaper reported. Revenues from the tax, which the city estimates at $544,000 annually, would be used for parks and tourism. Bay St. Louis Mayor Mike Favre, noting the areas brisk tourism business, told the newspaper he thinks at least half of the tax would come from out-of-towners. The referendum could come to voters this summer, he said. Bay St. Louis shares a strong connection with the New Orleans area and has long been a popular vacation and weekend-home destination for south Louisiana residents. Weve got Where NOLA Eats picks for food and drinks events around New Orleans. Looking for Lenten fish fries? See our online guide. Wednesday (April 3) The Great Plate Red Bean Madness continues, with restaurants competing in a tournament-style bracket to be named the best red bean maker in town. Eight entrants face off at Make Music NOLA (2150 Ursulines Ave.) with music by the Free Agents Brass Band. Free. 58 p.m. New Orleans Wine and Food Experience The annual festival of food and drink moves to a new week this year. NOWFE kicks off with wine dinners around the city. Reservations are made directly with the restaurants. Prices vary. See www.nowfe.com for a full schedule. Thursday (April 4) An Edible Evening Party under the stars at Langston Hughes Academy (3519 Trafalgar St.) with food from dozens of local restaurants, including 1000 Figs, Carmo, Coquette, Gabrielle and Toups South. Music by George Porter Jr. Trio. The evening benefits the Edible Schoolyard New Orleans. $60. 7 p.m. See esynola.org/edibleevening. NOWFE The wine and food festival continues with a whole hog pig roast and the popular Royal Street Stroll. See www.nowfe.com for more information. Friday (April 5) The Final Fork The final four restaurants compete at the Bucktown Farmers Market (325 Metairie-Hammond Highway) in Red Beans Madness, a tournament-style competition to find the citys best bowl of red beans. Free. 4:30-6:30 p.m. NOWFE The annual wine and food festival continues with tastings, seminars and experiences. See www.nowfe.com for details. Saturday (April 6) NOWFE The wine and food festival continues with tastings and an after-party. See www.nowfe.com for details. Food and restaurant news in your inbox Every Thursday we give you the scoop on NOLA dining. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Sunday (April 7) Pinch A Palooza The 10th annual crawfish festival at Deanies in Bucktown (1713 Lake Ave.) includes a crawfish eating contest, food and music. Benefits The Good Shepherd School. $1. 12-7 p.m. See pinchapalooza.com. Made in Louisiana Learn about and taste products, including pickles, meat pies, oils and beer, from more than 40 Louisiana companies at SoFAB (1504 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd.). $15 in advance; $20 at the door. 12:30-4:30 p.m. See natfab.org. Tip Out Day Bartenders, servers, strippers and baristas across town donate all or a portion of their tips to local charities. Last year, more than $17,000 was raise through Tip Out Day. For an updated list of participants, see www.tipoutday.com. NOWFE The wine and food festival concludes with a brunch at the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute (725 Howard Ave.). $60. 11 a.m.2 p.m. See www.nowfe.com for tickets. Tuesday (April 9) Todd Price Taste Club Join NOLA.com | The Times-Picayunes dining writer Todd Price for a dinner at Couvant (315 Magazine St.), where chef Brad McDonald will cook signature dishes from Michelin three-star French restaurants. Price includes tax, tip and two glasses of wine. $120. 6:30 p.m. See www.ToddPriceTasteClub.com. Mark Your Calendar April 11-14: At French Quarter Fest, restaurants from New Orleans set up to feed the fans out to hear local live music. See frenchquarterfest.org. April 2528: The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival at the Fair Grounds is as much about food as music. See www.nojazzfest.com. May 25: Jazz Fest returns for a second week. See www.nojazzfest.com. Have a food or drink event for the calendar? Email foodevents@nola.com. The Archdiocese of New Orleans Office of Catholic Schools announced Tuesday (April 2) that Shannon Bland has accepted the head of school position at St. Therese Academy, a new school opening this fall for students with exceptional needs or learning differences. The archdiocese said Bland, whose position is effective April 1, will serve as the founding school leader at St. Therese. In a statement, Catholic Schools Superintendent RaeNell Houston said she is delighted to welcome Bland to the Archdiocese of New Orleans. I have confidence that with her gifts and leadership, St. Therese Academy will grow and flourish as a place where students are provided personalized instruction and are recognized for their God-given talents, Houston said. Bland is a native of the New Orleans area who has three decades of education experience, and the archdiocese said almost all of her background is rooted in Catholic schools. She most recently served as principal of Cathedral School in Natchez, Mississippi. She has a master's degree in Guidance and Counseling from Loyola University New Orleans, a masters in Educational Administration from the University of Scranton, and a masters in Dyslexia Therapy from the University of Southern Mississippi. She also received her bachelors from Loyola and is a graduate of the Academy of the Sacred Heart on St. Charles Avenue. De La Salle High School names new president, principal Bland has membership in several education organizations, including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the International Dyslexia Association, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and the National Catholic Educational Association. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up I am so excited and humbled to be given the opportunity to be a part of an incredible institution that will teach as Jesus did, said Bland in a statement. As Jesus demonstrated a variety of methods in his teaching, so will we as we fulfill the mission of St. Therese Academy. The 80-school archdiocese first announced the creation of St. Therese Academy on Jan. 16 when it also announced the closure of two schools, one in the Metairie Delta neighborhood and another in Uptown New Orleans. St. Therese will open at 8617 West Metairie Avenue, which is currently the site of Our Lady of Divine Providence School. Divine Providence will close along with Holy Rosary School, and some of their students will be transferred to St. Therese. Current Holy Rosary students, including those receiving Louisiana state vouchers, will transfer to St. Therese, but the Office of Catholic Schools is also working with families to find another school if families opt against going to the Metairie campus. St. Therese will have the capacity to serve kindergarten through 12th grade, according to the academys website. Tuition and fees for an elementary student for the 2019-2020 school year are $9,250. High school tuition and fees are $11,700 for 8th through 10th grade and $11,955 for 11th and 12th grade. Two Catholic schools in Metairie, New Orleans to close; new one to emerge with new mission 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. Edna Karr High School in Algiers won the first-place prize of $10,000 at the eighth annual Class Got Brass competition for school brass bands, put on by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation in Armstrong Park on Sunday (March 31). Karr won in the advanced category and earned $10,000 worth of instruments for the schools music programs. Langston Hughes Academy was first in the beginner category, winning $5,000 in instruments. Second place in the advanced category went to another Algiers school: Landry-Walker High School. Karr is led by band director Chris Herrero, who grew up in Algiers and once played in the Karr band himself. He returned to his alma mater in 2010 right after he graduated from Jackson State University. Under Herreros leadership, Karrs marching band has achieved numerous successes, including performing in London, being featured in Beyonces Formation video and the Lemonade visual album, and appearing in a T-Mobile commercial. Karr has been competing in Class Got Brass every year since the contest began in 2012. Until now, the schools best results were winning third place in the advanced category in 2015 and again in 2018. Edna Karr band director's impact goes beyond practice and parades Nineteen schools participated in competition, the most in the programs history. Eight schools competed in the advanced category, and 11 competed in the beginner category. Monetary awards were given for first through third place. The schools that didnt place in the top three each received a stipend of $1,000. "The Class Got Brass contest has been put on by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival presented by Shell, since 2012,'' a news release says. The Class Got Brass contest takes the form of a second-line parade, with school bands performing for a panel of judges who are among the most noted musicians and culture bearers in New Orleans. All participants are required to form a New Orleans-style brass band, with instrumentation and dress that models the tradition. To honor the iconic New Orleans jazz funeral, each band is required to perform a dirge followed by an up-tempo song from the classic repertoire." Karr did not have a brass band before Class Got Brass. Herrero said he will use the $10,000 in Class Got Brass prize money primarily to fix broken instruments, the press release says. Herrero has previously told NOLA.com: I believe Im doing what I can to make the city better one student at a time. Making sure theyre staying out of trouble, keeping them busy all the way till 7 oclock at night. The only thing they have energy for is to take a shower, eat, do homework and go to sleep. Complete results are: ADVANCED: First place: Edna Karr High School (Chris Herrero, band director), $10,000; second place, Landry-Walker High School (Wilbert Rawlins, band director), $7,000; third place, George Washington Carver High School (Eric French, band director), $5,000; L. W. Higgins High School (Justin Rush, band director), $1,000; McKinley Senior High School (Frank Williams, band director), $1,000; Riverdale High School (Desmond Venable, band director), $1,000; Rosenwald Collegiate Academy (Karron Brown, band director), $1,000; and West Jefferson High School (Trey Varnado, band director), $1,000. BEGINNER: First place: Langston Hughes Academy (Samuel Venable, Jr., band director), $5,000; second place, Park Forest Creative Sciences and Arts Middle Magnet School (Doretha Williams, band director), $4,000; third place, Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts (Carlyn Glenn, band director), $3,000; Dolores T. Aaron Academy (Andy Bower, band director), $1,000; Kenner Discovery Health Sciences Academy (Ronald Totora, band director), $1,000; Lafayette Academy (Charles Jackson, band director), $1,000; Marrero Middle School (Jeremy Williams, band director), $1,000; Mildred Osborne Charter School (Thomas Grany , band director), $1,000; Renew Sci Tech Academy (Brandon Kelley, band director), $1,000; Stella Worley Junior High School (Edward Johnson, band director), $1,000; Young Audiences Charter School (Matt Bruzzi, band director), $1,000. For winners and competitors in prior editions of Class Got Brass, visit www.classgotbrass.com. Waggaman is ready for its closeup -- but that means traffic disruptions for motorists in the Jefferson Parish community. The Hulu series Looking for Alaska will be filming stunt driving scenes in the 5000 block of Live Oak Boulevard on Friday and Saturday (April 5 and 6), but preparations for the shoot will result in the full closure of both lanes of South Kenner Avenue at 950 Kenner Ave. through 9 p.m. Monday (April 8) and the full closure of both lanes of Live Oak Boulevard from Rivet Boulevard to South Kenner Avenue also through 9 p.m. Monday (April 8), according to the Jefferson Parish film office. Rivet Boulevard will remain open during the shoot. Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies will be stationed at both closure sites for the duration of the shoot. Based on the coming-of-age John Green novel of the same name, the eight-episode "Looking for Alaska" stars Charlie Plummer ("Lean on Pete") as a bookish teenager who sets out to unravel the mysteries behind the death of an alluring young woman -- named Alaska and played by Kristine Froseth ("Sierra Burgess is a Loser") -- who stole his heart. Disney rethinking 'Gambit,' Channing Tatum's Cajun 'X-Men' movie It is scheduled to shoot in the New Orleans area through May. It's one of a number of TV projects either shooting or preparing to shoot in town. Others include: the fifth season of the CBS series "NCIS: New Orleans," currently underway. Mike Scott is the movie and TV critic for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. He can be reached via email at mscott@nola.com or on Twitter at @moviegoermike. The moral of this story is: If your heart stops while zydeco dancing, its good to have a cardiac nurse whose specialty is electrophysiology nearby. Nurse Laura Pizzano, who was visiting from Morristown, New Jersey, set out for a night of dancing recently at Rock 'n' Bowl, but ended up applying a defibrillator instead. Pizzano had flown in to spend a few days with her sister Kathleen Kamphausen, who moved to New Orleans in July. Theyd gotten a late start Thursday (March 28), but decided to check out the zydeco dance night at Rock n Bowl anyway. The two-stepping was well underway when they arrived. Pizzano said shed just come off the dance floor when the tone of the evening suddenly changed. She didnt immediately notice that a man behind her fell to the dance floor. Kamphausen called Pizzanos attention to the fallen man because shes a nurse and she always knows what to do. Pizzano said that a woman had already begun performing chest compressions on the man when she pitched in. Pizzano said she performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and took turns pumping his chest. It wasnt Pizzanos first rodeo. Shed been involved in emergency resuscitations at work. But, she explained, in the hospital there are monitors, IVs, drugs and all the resources you need. She didnt think she had any equipment to fall back on, but she was wrong. The popular bowling alley dance hall had an emergency defibrillator on hand, an electrical device that can shock an arrested human heart back into action. It worked. Kamphausen said it took a few minutes for the crowd to realize that an emergency resuscitation was underway in their midst, but when they did, a huge prayer circle formed around the prone man and his rescuers. Eventually, EMTs arrived to speed the dancer to a hospital. Having the emergency defibrillator handy was key to his survival, Pizzano said. The fallen dancer was able to reach her by phone to express his thanks. He doesnt remember anything Pizzano said. Kamphausen, a photographer by trade, snapped a photo of her tearful sister as she spoke to the man shed helped save. That time I served Wild Turkey to Keith Richards on a riverboat in New Orleans Doug MacCash has the best job in the world, covering 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. Industry groups have warned oil and gas companies could pull their money out of New Orleans, including major corporate sponsorships, because the city has filed a lawsuit seeking damages for coastal wetlands losses. Two major events, the French Quarter Festival and Jazz Fest, have energy companies as their main sponsors. So far, the companies have not announced changes to those arrangements. Mayor LaToya Cantrells legal team filed suit Friday (March 30) seeking damages from Entergy and 10 oil and gas companies for coastal wetlands loss. Chevron, which is one of the defendants, has been title sponsor the French Quarter Festival since 2013. Unnecessary legal tactics threaten the community investment and cultural support the industry has provided for over a century, which they can now potentially lose Tyler Gray, president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, said in a statement Friday. A spokeswoman for Chevron said the company has not made its funding decisions for 2020 but did not give any indication that it may end its relationship with the French Quarter Festival. Details on the current sponsorship agreement were not available from event representatives. Chevrons charitable budget is reviewed on an annual basis, and numerous factors are considered prior to investing in local partnerships and programs, said Veronica Flores-Paniagua, external affairs director for Chevron North America. Chevron is one of the companies named as defendants in New Orleans suit. In addition to the French Quarter Festival and Satchmo Summerfest, the company also provides financial support to the New Orleans Recreation Development Commission, Boys & Girls Club and Youthforce NOLA among other local organizations. New Orleans files wetland damage suit against oil, gas companies Warnings of industry disinvestment have followed other lawsuits similar to the one New Orleans has filed. Six other parishes are seeking damages from the oil and gas industry, which continues to put money into major infrastructure. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Despite those warnings, however, many energy companies have expanded investments in the region. In Cameron and Plaquemines parishes, both of which have cases pending in federal court, oil and gas firms have committed to spend or already have spent several billion dollars on midstream infrastructure. They include liquefied natural gas terminals and several major pipelines to serve those facilities. Shell, which is not named in New Orleans lawsuit, became the first-ever presenting sponsor for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2006. Last year, the company agreed to continue in that role through 2024. In a statement, Curtis Thomas, an external relations adviser for Shell, touted the companys participation in hundreds of coastal restoration and protection efforts. This is our home, and we take pride in partnering with, and investing in, the communities in which we are privileged to operate, Thomas said. We believe the focus should be on expanding collaborative coastal restoration projects across Louisiana, not divisive litigation. In its lawsuit, the city of New Orleans attributes wetlands loss to energy companies that did not restore damage, such as canals and spoil banks, or clean up hazardous and radioactive waste from drilling operations. Their inaction is a violation of the states Coastal Zone Management Act of 1978, according to the complaint filed Friday in Orleans Civil District Court. We are filing this lawsuit to ensure that the residents of Orleans Parish are safe, our economy is protected, and to help restore our coast, City Attorney Sunni LeBeouf said Friday. Defendants in the lawsuit include Apache Louisiana Minerals, Aspect Energy, Chaparral Energy, Chevron USA Inc., Collins Pipeline Co., Entergy New Orleans (and its predecessor companies), EOG Resources Inc., ExxonMobil Pipeline Co., Gulf South Pipeline Co. Southern Natural Gas Co., and Whiting Oil and Gas Corp. Mark Schleifstein contributed to this report. Jefferson Parish animal shelter director Robin Beaulieu and the chief animal control officer have been fired amid reports of rampant mismanagement. A criminal investigation is underway into one allegation, that a veterinarian ordered four dogs euthanized for no valid reason and without authorization, Parish President Mike Yenni said. Yenni said his administration found during a two-month inquiry of animal shelter operations that multiple positions went unfilled for an extended period of time, important operational contracts with individuals or companies were left to expire, agreements between the parish and those doing business with the parish went unsigned and standard operating procedures were ignored or definitely not followed. He announced the findings at a news conference Tuesday (April 2). Contacted later, Beaulieu issued a statement defending her record. Fired animal shelter director defends record after Jefferson Parish fires her The shakeup represents another attempt to reform a minor department that has vexed parish government on and off for decades. While it doesnt enjoy the budget or widespread attention of drainage or streets, the animal shelter does attract dozens of passionate volunteers in a mission that tugs at the heartstrings of pet lovers. That makes the directors job especially difficult. Between 2007 and 2011, five different people held it. Listen to Yennis news conference: Beaulieu arrived in 2011 and garnered praise. Under her leadership, the shelter increased dog and cat adoption rates, reduced euthanasia and mended fences with rescue groups and volunteers. Early this year, however, two employees and some volunteers lodged complaints of workplace discrimination, harassment, retaliation and mistreatment of animals. Some accused Beaulieu and chief animal control officer Melinda Mimi Olsen of practicing veterinary medicine without a license. Jefferson Parish animal shelter director hailed after being suspended Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Another complaint alleged that the contract veterinarian for the West Bank shelter, Nicholas Moraites, ordered four dogs euthanized at the east bank shelter without authorization. Administration officials think the dogs were in good health and well-behaved. The Yenni administration tried in March to terminate Moraites contract, but Parish Councilman Chris Roberts blocked the move, warning that the vet might file a whistleblower lawsuit. The administration is scheduled to ask the council again on Wednesday to terminate the contract. The complaints at the agency escalated after Beaulieu fired West Bank shelter manager Brooke Bourgeois on Jan. 17. Soon the administration suspended Beaulieu and Olsen. Beaulieu was paid $77,543 last year and Olsen $43,301, according to public records. Now theyve been terminated, Yenni said, and a fourth employee was reassigned to another department. At one point, Yenni said, more than 20 positions in the 53-job animal shelter department were open. Now only three remain unfilled, and Yenni said, We are in discussions with an internationally acclaimed animal rescue organization ... to help with everything from evaluating operations at the shelters to screening potential volunteers. Yenni said the administration is taking other steps to clean up the mess: completing overdue personnel evaluations, signing delinquent contracts and agreements, drafting new agreements with animal rescue groups and rewriting procedures. While the administration considers hiring a new director, a management team is running the department. Its members are Yennis chief administrative assistant Diane Roussel, senior parish attorney Debra Miller Yenni, assistant shelter director Paul Bourg, east bank shelter manager Angie Robert and interim west bank shelter manager Charlene Millet. Todays actions should send a clear message that any an all employees will be held accountable, Yenni said. . . . . . . . Drew Broach covers Jefferson Parish politics and education plus other odds and ends. Email: dbroach@nola.com. Facebook: Drew Broach TP. Twitter: drewbroach1. Remember when LaToya Cantrell, then one of 18 candidates running for mayor of New Orleans, boldly announced she would free city motorists from the tyranny of Mitch Landrieus traffic cameras. Standing like Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, Cantrell all but demanded, Mayor Landrieu, tear down these cameras, noting that shutting down the robocops would be a top priority for her administration. We dont know if traffic cameras are making our streets safer, the then-City Council member said in a speech announcing her platform. But we do know those cameras are costing our residents money that could be spent on their families. As your mayor, I will suspend the use of the cameras until it can be proven that they actually work as intended. In a gust of populist fervor, she even threw in a line about how the program was "nickeling and diming our people" to boost the budget under the guise of concern for public safety. That was then ... Not quite 21 months later and less than a year into her term, Mayor Cantrell has apparently decided that some of the money that residents could have spent on their families should be flowing into the city coffers after all and that she needs all the nickels and dimes she can get to make her budget work. Worst of all, her administration plunged their hands into the publics pockets with a tweak to the traffic camera program that was never announced and came to light only when some victims went on social media to complain about unexpected tickets. Confronted with evidence that the city is reneging on its promise to cite only those drivers going at least 6 mph over the 20 mph school zone limit, the Cantrell administration reluctantly confirmed that the rules had been changed. We are tightening enforcement efforts in our school zones to help encourage safer driving," a City Hall spokesperson said in an email, in response to questions from NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. "Going two miles over, or 10 miles over the limit: youre in violation either way. We want people to pay attention and to be safe around our schools. What happened to Mayor Cantrells commitment to rigorous scientific evaluation of whether the cameras were truly making our streets safer? If there is indeed evidence that accidents and injuries go up exponentially in school zones at 22 mph as opposed to 20 mph, then point us to the research, and well do our part for public safety. And why wasn't the change made public? When the Landrieu administration activated 55 new traffic cameras to city school zones Jan. 9, 2017 a change that prompted Cantrell's revolt violators received warnings in the mail for the first month, a grace period that informed the public and allowed for adjustments. The Cantrell administration, meanwhile, seemed perfectly content in concealing the effective drop in the ticket trigger, which is pretty much the definition of creating a speed trap. Given that just about every vehicle currently on the city's streets is being driven by a human being, a modest cushion in speed allowances seems reasonable in the face of the heartless cameras passing their mechanical judgment. Of course, this is a budget calculation even more cynical than what Cantrell accused Landrieu of using. She had managed to salvage some of her campaign promise integrity by removing some cameras and limiting others to school zone hours only. That clearly wasnt going to keep enough dollars flowing, so someone decided that secretly manipulating the traffic camera program was just the ticket, so to speak. And its not exactly nickels and dimes. That citation for going 24 mph in a 20 mph zone will cost you $75. And some people have already wracked up multiple tickets before they even knew they were in violation. And good luck trying to challenge the robot overlords on this one, especially when even a moment above 20 mph any time within the school zone is a violation. This might be easier to stomach if Cantrell had not made such a big deal during her campaign about how she was going to dislodge the oppressive traffic camera regime and if her administration had just been honest in disclosing the new policy before it went into effect. When it comes to cynicism and secrecy, this administration has clearly exceeded the posted limits. Tim Morris 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 to Tim at tmorris@nola.com. The 81st District is one of the more venerable seats in the Louisiana House of Representatives. And its a good example of whats about to happen when legislators sit down in February for the political task of redrawing the lines of districts from After getting dropped by its first consultant, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board has settled on someone new to redraw the boundaries of its election districts but not before a rancorous vote and mudslinging by the two consultants still in Lindsey Hodges is a general assignment reporter at the Aiken Standard and North Augusta Star. Follow her on Twitter at @LindseyNHodges. Image: Shutterstock If voted to power, we will scrap the NITI Aayog. It has served no purpose other than making marketing presentations for the PM & fudging data. We will replace it with a lean Planning Commission whose members will be renowned economists & experts with less than 100 staff. - Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 29, 2019 It has been alleged that the Aayog has become 'political' which is a delicate issue today as any view taken on any economic aspect is interpreted as being 'for' and 'against' the government and hence there is in a way little tolerance being shown on both sides. Any criticism of a policy is viewed as being anti-government while anything being said in favour of the government is 'politically motivated'. The question really is whether having another such institution makes sense given that there are already several government-backed independent institutions that are doing similar jobs in different fields. Also at the end of the day, the deliverables need to be defined and evaluated as to whether or not value is being added. The concept of a think tank is good as it is always useful to have such outfits that can contribute to decision-making from outside. This was the main role assigned to the NITI Aayog where the initials stood for National Institution for Transforming India. The focus was on improving Centre-state relationships so as to ensure that there was cohesion in their operations (something which never happened when the Planning Commission was there where a top-down approach was pursued).Given that the Finance Commission devolutions as well as the Goods and Services Tax (GST) involve dealing with funds between the states and the Centre, it was logical that there be a structure that works also on these aspects.The view of the Congress party is that if elected to power, there would be a decision taken to close down the NITI Aayog and replace it with the Planning Commission which had existed when the National Demorcratic Alliance (NDA) assumed office. Such political decisions cannot be eschewed as the genesis of the NITI Aayog lay in the legacy issue of the Planning Commission being a creation of the Congress government in the past which had ceased to be relevant.The more important question to ask is, whether the job entrusted to the institution is being achieved or not. The name of the institution actually does not matter in the broader scheme of things since if the same set of jobs is being done by different people then the name of the commission is not relevant and can be a political decision - which is fair enough where roads, buildings and development schemes keep getting rechristened.One may recollect that during the regime of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), there was a Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (PMEAC) which was instituted as an advisory council for the prime minister's office. The members resigned when the government changed and the same has been replaced with a new set of advisors.There is nothing amiss here because when it comes to the prime minister's office, the members must be those who have faith reposed in them. The same should be the case with the NITI Aayog or Planning Commission or any other name that we would like to call it.The Planning Commission per se was an institution that was created when we had followed a mixed economy system in 1951 where the public sector had a very important role to play. It drew up elaborate strategies running into hundreds of pages on each sector and then advised the government on what could be done. The Five-Year Plan concept came into being where the document would talk of the funding required and the supply of the same.There would be sections on public sector outlays and the balance from the private sector which was beyond its jurisdiction. Hence, while it would say that Rs x crore was required for getting growth of 8 percent per annum over 5 years, the funding for the public sector would be the one elaborated while the private sector's role would only be stated and not discussed.With the concept of planning becoming outdated once we embarked on reforms and the private sector became more dominant, it made sense to do away with the planning process and hence the Commission. The institution had to be reinvented to keep it at congruence with the changing environment. This has made the reading of a Budget document easier as the earlier plan expenditure was related to the annual plan outlays which were being partly financed by the Budget.Often the reader had to struggle to figure out how this fitted with the rest of the document. But, as the Five-Year Plan was exhaustive the so-called off-budgetary borrowing, which is opaque today, was transparently disclosed.Given the background of these two institutions, should we close down the NITI Aayog and replace it with Planning Commission? This may not be in order as it will not serve any purpose. If it is believed that the institution has not fulfilled its objectives then there is a case for replacing the personnel with another set and clearly redefining the goals.It is true, however, that when the Planning Commission ruled, there were independent views being expressed which were not always in conformity with the government position. But this was accepted. Today, however, with a lot of media space available, every view is made political which does not get restricted to this institution but also others like the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) which is unfortunate. Ideally such an institution should be working in the background and only get into the media glare for reports that have to be made public.Having another body for the government can be defended on grounds of experts putting forward their views. This would be in addition to the PMEAC and chief economic advisor of the DEA. The question is, how lean should be this body as this is another concern expressed by the Opposition? The Planning Commission was criticised for being over-sized and the NITI Aayog was to be a lean organisation.If one looks at the website of the NITI Aayog and counts the number in the directory, it is well over 500 with various classes of employees including support staff. Therefore, there is resemblance with the existing bureaucratic structures in any government department. The erstwhile Planning Commission had more than 1,000 employees and hence this seems to be an improvement.The analogy can be taken to the private world where research must have a customer who benefits from this work considering that such output is non-commercial. This becomes important as various ministries also have such research departments or outsource the same to other government-managed institutions to get inputs.Hence, if a planning concept is now anachronistic and does not have a strong case for resurrection, the same question must be posed for the NITI Aayog which should be evaluated independently. That may be the logical way of going about this task and keeping it apolitical.(The writer is chief economist, CARE ratings)Original Source: This blog covers software patent news and issues with a particular focus on wireless, mobile devices (smartphones, tablet computers, connected cars) as well as select antitrust matters surrounding those devices. MELBOURNE, Australia In the smash hit show Nanette which discussed homophobia, abuse and rape the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby declared she was quitting comedy. Now shes back doing, yes, stand-up. In Douglas, her new show named for her dog, which premiered at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival last week, Gadsby discussed her autism diagnosis, which she received relatively recently, and the clarity it provided. While she found out about her autism before she put together Nanette, it was not until now that she felt ready to talk about it in front of an audience. Her return she will play more sold-out shows here, then begin an American tour April 29 in San Francisco follows the controversial success of Nanette last year. Beginning life onstage before going viral worldwide as a Netflix special, that show set off furious arguments about the nature of comedy. I wasnt expecting global stardom, Gadsby said in an interview on Friday. I wasnt expecting to finish and end up big in India. Now I have everyone watching me. In Melbourne, Douglas drew thousands of fans who agreed to lock away their phones in a special case during the show. Ive never heard such a huge crowd so silent. Shes the most courageous person, said Theresa Bonasera, 52, from Melbourne. But in recent days, the timeline was extended by several weeks. The delay came about through the workings of Boeings so-called non-advocate review, a process in which Boeing employees who are not working on the software fix vet the work before it is submitted to the F.A.A., according to people with knowledge of the process who were not authorized to speak publicly. It is not clear what specific changes the Boeing employees believe needed to be made. On Monday, the F.A.A. made a statement acknowledging the timing had been pushed back. The F.A.A. expects to receive Boeings final package of its software enhancement over the coming weeks for F.A.A. approval, the agency said. Time is needed for additional work by Boeing as the result of an ongoing review of the 737 Max Flight Control System to ensure that Boeing has identified and appropriately addressed all pertinent issues. After the F.A.A. released its statement on Monday, Boeing also acknowledged the delay. Boeing continues to work with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other regulatory agencies worldwide on the development and certification of the MCAS software update and training program, it said. We are working to demonstrate that we have identified and appropriately addressed all certification requirements and will be submitting for F.A.A. review once completed in the coming weeks. The 737 Max will remain grounded for at least several more weeks, prolonging a crisis that has engulfed Boeing. Natasha Lyonne: Working with Deb Amlen to create this puzzle has quite literally been a lifetime highlight for me. I thought I had peaked at being a clue in a New York Times crossword puzzle, so having this opportunity to become a constructor is a clear sign I have crossed over and am writing to you from the afterlife. I have become someone who thinks in clues, who jokes in puzzles and who lives for the answers. Most days of the week. Deb is a puzzler extraordinaire. Working alongside her has stimulated parts of my brains that I hope will remain aglow for years to come. She is definitely the person I would most recommend being blindfolded in a labyrinth with. Should it come up. She was the key that led me to safety and it was a privilege to get to construct under her tutelage. Much like a young, fumbling Richard Dreyfuss in the oft forgotten film, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, I was able to bask in her golden glow and try to make a name for myself amid endless stabs at mastering puzzle making. There was so much to learn, but Deb was patient with my endless enthusiasm and heartbreak at the herculean task. I was like one of those eager puppies you see get lost during a dog show who just keeps running around the obstacle course, having forgotten the rhyme or reason or lessons of their master. But the point is theyre show dogs! What has my dog done lately other than nap on my lap as I fill out more crosswords? Shes done nothing, thats what. I have a true obsession with the crossword. I spend the bulk of my downtime doing them. Theyre my happy place. Where I can hear the click. The white noise sound Im always looking for that feels closest to self soothing. Theyre my personal spa day and I would live in a puzzle if I could. There were points where I thought to myself, Is the crossword a case of Never meet your idols? But once we nailed the Fosse-esque ALL THAT JAZZ theme, things really began cooking. Our shared love of the film kept us going. Seeing BOB FOSSE marry Dr. Dre with 26-Downs Nothing but a G THANG really hits me in all my happy reference places. The film All That Jazz occupies about as much space in my psyche and in Russian Doll as the crossword puzzle itself, so it felt very satisfying to see all the worlds I love so much collide. I plan to buy an awkward amount of copies of this issue to drape myself in on any dark days to come. I welcome you to do the same and hope very much you enjoy the puzzle! Thank you, New York Times, and by proxy, to my personal and wildly intimidating hero, Will Shortz, for allowing this highest of lifetime achievements to benefit two charities incredibly near to my heart, the Lower Eastside Girls Club and the Womens Prison Association. Deb Amlen: Natasha is a joy to work with, and her creativity, energy and passion for crossword puzzles were incredibly inspiring. She even bought the Crossfire software program, so she could learn how to construct and put in her share of the work. The really strange thing about this collaboration was that, even though we had never met before or discussed it, we both had exactly the same initial idea for a theme. I think that freaked us both out a bit, but it also gave us common ground on which to work. We both love the film All That Jazz a semi-autobiographical take on choreographer BOB FOSSEs life which happens to celebrate its 40th anniversary this year. The interesting thing (to me, at least) is that we liked it for different reasons. Natasha is an amazingly well-read philosopher who adored the movies take on the main character moving between life and death. I liked it because I am the sister of a former dancer and have always loved the visual impact of Bob Fosses choreography. Natasha and I focused on filling the grid with as little junk as possible. The only part that was tough to really polish, even after ripping that section apart multiple times, was the eastern part of the grid where Phil MAHRE resides. Sorry, Phil, but if I could have put something else in your slot I would have. Even so, I think were both happy that we could debut some nice theme entries. And Im thrilled that Will and the editorial team kept many of our clues. Im particularly proud of Ghost at the altar? and It might have golden locks. I had forgotten how much fun it is to write a really twisted clue. So thanks, Will, for hauling me out of retirement for this wonderful experience. I hope everyone enjoys our puzzle. To keep our mojo working, Natasha and I have decided to donate part of our fee to two charities, the Lower Eastside Girls Club and the Womens Prison Association. Also dont miss Natashas extraordinary turn as the co-creator, star, writer and director of Netflixs Russian Doll. You will love it. And as far as that golden glow that Natasha mentioned, only my hairdresser knows for sure. (Hi, kids!) Cedric Grolet the award-winning pastry chef at Le Meurice, one of Pariss grand hotels will take up residence at Dominique Ansels bakery in SoHo from Friday through Sunday. He will work with Mr. Ansel and his staff to make some of his dazzling confections mimicking fruits and nuts lemons, strawberries and hazelnuts, with various fillings each an individual serving about the size of a lemon. They will be sold each day until supplies run out. Cedric Grolet pastries, $18 each, April 5 though 7, Dominique Ansel Bakery, 189 Spring Street (Sullivan Street), 212-219-2773, dominiqueansel.com. Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] ALBANY After New York State leaders reached a deal on a new $175 billion budget, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo praised it as the best budget of his tenure. The Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, called elements of it critical and historic. Yet on Monday, as the Legislature finished approving the budget, some progressive lawmakers were furious. Several assembly members who voted for the budget bill listed what they saw as failures and said that there was not a lot we should smile about. A senator wrote on Twitter that she had cried as the votes were being counted. Many spoke on the floor against the revenue portion of the budget, which contained the bulk of the policy; 17 Democrats in the Assembly voted against it a number unseen in the past eight years of Mr. Cuomos tenure. As President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt prepares constitutional changes that could keep him in power until 2034 and enhance military control over the country, President Trump is preparing to welcome him to the White House. This is the second time Mr. Trump will bestow this diplomatic gift on Mr. el-Sisi, one of the most authoritarian leaders in the Middle East. After taking power in a 2013 coup that ousted the countrys first elected president , the Islamist Mohamed Morsi, Mr. el-Sisi, a former army chief, promised his people that he would build democracy and leave office in 2022 after completing a second term. Instead, he has built a reputation for brutality and repression, torturing and killing hundreds of Egyptians and jailing perhaps as many as 60,000 others, including students and American citizens. It is not unusual for American presidents to work with strongmen to advance national interests. But if Mr. Trump welcomes Mr. el-Sisi to Washington now, without pressing him for reforms rather than acquiescing to his power grab, he will be crushing hopes that Egypt could become democratic any time soon. Flores, Lappos and Biden are probably all telling the truth. There are countless photos of Biden behaving in the ways that Flores and Lappos describe: squeezing women, rubbing their shoulders, leaning in too close. All this was open, not furtive, presumably because it never occurred to Biden that he was doing anything untoward. I dont necessarily blame him. In the past few years, women have been calling out daily indignities that previous generations grew up quietly tolerating : lingering hugs from a boss, embarrassing intimate questions, crude office jokes. Individually, these are small acts, and most men probably dont understand how cumulatively draining they can be. Women, after all, have only recently begun to articulate it. I received plenty of unwanted shoulder massages when I was younger, and for a long time I assumed there was something wrong with me when they made me flinch. It was affirming to finally realize that other women also hated routine invasions of their personal space. But if it wasnt always obvious to me that the men were at fault in these awkward encounters, it might not have been obvious to them, either. So I dont think Bidens avuncular pawing is a #MeToo story. (Lappos specifically said the way he grabbed her wasnt sexual.) But if Biden was more oblivious than predatory, his history still puts him out of step with the mores of an increasingly progressive Democratic Party. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that some Democrats are bracing for an extended reckoning about Mr. Biden and gender if he enters the race. The inevitably of such a reckoning should make Biden reconsider getting in. Bidens issues with gender, after all, go far beyond chronic handsiness. His waffling on reproductive choice troubles many feminists; as The Times reported last week, Bidens back-and-forth over abortion would become a hallmark of his political career. He was the chairman of the hearings on Clarence Thomass Supreme Court nomination, where Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, was demeaned and dismissed. Though Biden has expressed sorrow for how Hill was treated, hes never directly apologized to her. Other provisions touted as major victories came with asterisks. The congestion pricing agreement, under which cars will pay tolls for entering the busiest part of Manhattan, directs 80 percent of the revenue raised to the s ubways , where it is most needed. But the plan left unclear how much sway New York City, as opposed to Albany, will have over how the program is run. The budget includes a $1 billion increase in education funding but advocates said state leaders yet again failed to address the inequity in funding to New York City districts, the subject of a 20-year-plus court battle. Legislators approved a transfer tax on the sale of homes worth more than $2 million, with a sliding scale up to 4.15 percent for homes worth $25 million or more. The legislators agreed on the tax after scrapping what would have been a more lucrative, annual tax on thousands of those properties, known as the pied-a-terre tax, after an intense campaign from the real estate industry. In an eyebrow-raising move, Mr. Cuomo gutted the independence of the Public Authorities Control Board the body that had the ability to reject the deal for Amazon to build a major complex in Queens by allowing the governor to remove any board members he decides have acted beyond their powers. Still, despite the messy way the budget was passed, it came with real gains. Public defenders, for instance, say that its criminal justice reforms will keep tens of thousands of people who are charged with nonviolent crimes from languishing in jail before they get a trial. The reforms were inspired in large part by cases like that of Kalief Browder, who spent three years at the city jail in Rikers Island without trial for allegedly stealing a backpack. The charges were eventually dismissed. Two years later, Mr. Browder committed suicide. Justine Olderman, executive director of the Bronx Defenders, a legal aid group, said the reforms enacted by Albany were the most promising she had seen in a 20-year career and could turn the state into a leader in criminal justice. Its historic, she said. Its like Christmas. We are doing everything we can to simply avoid a tragedy in a C.B.P. facility, Mr. McAleenan said. But with these numbers, with the types of illnesses were seeing at the border, I fear that its just a matter of time. In an attempt to ease the problem, Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, signed a compact with officials from the Northern Triangle last week to help curb the complex drivers of irregular migration including crime and gang violence in the region. Mr. Trump, less than a day later, announced he was ending aid to those countries. Nonsensically, Mr. Trump has insisted that the real problem is Mexico, which he suggested is doing nothing to help stop the tide of migrants. Thats despite the efforts by Mexican leaders to intercept migrant groups, providing temporary visas to asylum seekers and allowing some making the trek north to remain in Mexico while they await court hearings in the United States. As with the presidents wall, which would do little to discourage unauthorized migration, let alone illegal drug trafficking, no one with a working knowledge of immigration policy believes that closing the border is a solution to the recent surge. The economic disruption for border communities and the impact on trade would be disastrous. Plus, closing the border wont stop migrants from stepping onto United States soil and claiming asylum, as many of the groups surrendering to border agents in recent months have done in between ports of entry. Ms. Lyonne has been a devoted Times crossword solver for about five years, ever since her boyfriend, Fred Armisen, got her hooked. To hear her tell it, its become something of an obsession. I feel a deep transparency about how true my love of the puzzle is; I feel very clean about it, she said. I spend all of my time with the crossword, like an obscene amount of time. If you see me on set and you think Im texting or something, Im using the puzzle as a coping mechanism. Its a great joy in my life. Shes been open about her fandom on social media, tweeting with some frequency at The Timess Wordplay account. I think, probably, most people who are interested in the crossword are too busy to tweet, because theyre thinking big thoughts, theyre changing the world, she said. But me, I seem to have plenty of time to both do the puzzle and endlessly tweet and interface about the puzzle. She confesses, too, to hoarding screengrabs of favorite clues: Its like my version of taking photos of scenery on vacation. Im like, Look at this great clue! They found a way to get Lenny Bruce in the puzzle! Clearly, Ms. Lyonne was a natural choice for the celebrity series, which began in 2017 as a way to celebrate the puzzles 75th anniversary. The notable solvers Jesse Eisenberg, Isaac Mizrahi and Weird Al Yankovic have all contributed crosswords, too but, the Times puzzles editor Will Shortz said, Natasha took this more seriously than almost anybody else. Starting in January, Ms. Lyonne had a series of meetings with Deb Amlen, The Timess crossword columnist and a seasoned constructor herself. (Ms. Amlens first-ever published crossword, in 2004, was a Sunday puzzle in The Times quite a feat.) Over the course of what Ms. Amlen estimates was 10 to 15 hours in person, plus many more texts, the pair agreed on a theme, brainstormed clue ideas and worked on filling in the puzzle. Often, Ms. Amlen and Ms. Lyonne met at Ms. Lyonnes downtown Manhattan apartment, where her little white poodle Rootbeer kept them company and at least one piece of crossword-related ephemera serves as decoration: an across clue in the Nov. 29, 2018 puzzle, Actress Lyonne of Orange Is the New Black, seven letters. (Ms. Lyonne immediately had it framed.) Facing a growing scandal over payments made to her for a series of childrens books that she wrote, Mayor Catherine E. Pugh of Baltimore announced on Monday that she would take an indefinite leave of absence for health reasons. The announcement came shortly after Gov. Larry Hogan asked Maryland state prosecutors to investigate a $500,000 payment that Ms. Pugh had received from a nonprofit health care company with ties to the state and city governments. These are deeply disturbing allegations, Mr. Hogan wrote Monday in a letter to the state prosecutor, just hours after a new report said that a health care company seeking a contract from the city had also purchased copies of the books, paying Ms. Pugh more than $100,000. On Monday afternoon, a statement from the mayors office said that Ms. Pugh had been suffering from pneumonia in recent weeks and had decided to step away from her duties until she recuperated. WASHINGTON The Senate on Monday blocked billions of dollars in disaster aid for states across the country as Republicans and Democrats clashed over President Trumps opposition to sending more food and infrastructure help to Puerto Rico. Opposition came from both parties for different reasons. Most Republicans refused to endorse a recovery bill passed this year by the House. They cited Mr. Trumps opposition to the bills Puerto Rico funding, as well as their own concerns that the bill lacked money for Midwestern states, like Iowa and Nebraska, that have since been devastated by flooding and tornadoes. For their part, Democrats balked at a separate measure drafted by Senate Republicans that included the money for the Midwest, arguing that a proposed $600 million in nutritional assistance for Puerto Rico was not enough. The Republican legislation had no chance in the House. The votes on both measures were procedural and needed support from 60 senators to advance to a full floor vote. Neither won the support required. It was unclear late Monday how lawmakers would overcome that impasse and end the delay in disbursing the disaster aid. In February, The New York Times reported that the president overruled several senior officials in order to reinstate the security clearance of Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, despite issues raised during his clearance process. John F. Kelly, the presidents former chief of staff, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been ordered to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance. In her interviews with the House committee, Ms. Newbold said that Mr. Kelly and Joe Hagin, the former deputy chief of staff, had been attentive to the national security issues she had tried to raise. Mr. Hagin resigned last June and Mr. Kelly in December. Mr. Trump has the legal authority to grant a clearance, but in most cases, the Personnel Security Office makes a determination about whether to grant one after the F.B.I. has conducted a background check. Democrats on the committee are also demanding information from the White House about Ivanka Trump, the presidents eldest daughter and adviser, who was granted a security clearance shortly after Mr. Kushner got his. In an interview with ABC News in February, Ms. Trump insisted her father had no hand in either her clearance or her husbands. Ms. Newbold, who has a rare form of dwarfism, also accused Mr. Kline, the former director of personnel security, of retaliating against her when she repeatedly pointed out to him that actions he was taking, including overriding recommendations to issue clearances to two senior officials, were violating protocol. Ms. Newbold said that Mr. Kline oversaw a workplace where files including extensive and sensitive background check documents were not secured properly, and stopped the performing of credit checks for potential employees. She told the House committee that she had never seen our office so ill-staffed and with such lack of experience. Last fall, Ms. Newbold filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accusing Mr. Kline of moving office files to a shelf several feet above her, deliberately out of her reach, beginning in December 2017. That month, she hired Mr. Passman, her lawyer. As little as I am, Im willing to fight and stand up for what I know is right, and theyve always respected that about me, Ms. Newbold told the House committee last week. Its humiliating to not be able to independently work and do the job that you need. The United States imported $349.6 billion of goods from Mexico in 2018, and it sent $265 billion back across the border, according to statistics from the Union Nations International Trade Center, making Mexico the United States largest trading partner after China and Canada. Automakers, who have spread their supply chains across North America, would be among those most affected. Shutting the border would lead to sudden disruptions in the supply chains for auto parts, causing car production lines in South Carolina, Michigan, Indiana and Alabama to shutter. The change would begin to affect American auto production in less than one week, said Ann Wilson, the senior vice president for government affairs at the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, which represents auto parts makers. Other industries would be hard-hit as well. Many manufacturers of flat-screen TVs, computer hardware and medical devices are set up south of the border, while the apparel industry sources raw materials like cotton, buttons, zippers and threads from the United States and sews them into finished products in Mexico. Closings would also affect sectors outside manufacturing, including energy the United States supplies much of Mexicos natural gas through pipelines that run across the border as well as the transportation sector, where hundreds of thousands of American jobs are tied to moving goods to and from Mexico through ports and by truck or train. Over all, some of the worlds biggest multinational companies would be affected including Ford, Toyota, Boeing and Caterpillar but so would countless small- and medium-size businesses that depend on trade to make and sell their products. Grocery shoppers and farmers The signing of Nafta prompted a huge reorganization in agriculture on both sides of the border. Now, consumers in the United States depend on Mexican farmers for fresh fruit and vegetables like avocados, tomatoes, strawberries, grapes and mangoes, as well as packaged foods and beer. Mexico relies heavily on American soybeans, corn, dairy products, chickens, beef and other goods. A week ago, 10-year-old Raniya Wright was taken to the hospital, unconscious but breathing, following a fight with another student at her South Carolina elementary school. Two days later, she died. On Monday, her parents demanded answers. I want to find out what happened, how it happened and who was involved, her father, Jermaine Van Dyke, said at a news conference in front of Forest Hills Elementary School in Walterboro, S.C., about an hour west of Charleston. A lawyer for Ashley Wright, Raniyas mother, said the family wanted to know whether there was appropriate supervision in the classroom, and what, if any, steps did school administrators take to intervene in the fight. The lawyer, Margie A. Pizarro, said Ms. Wright trusted the school to keep Raniya safe from harm. She trusted the school to protect Raniya. A memorial dedicated to slaves and African-American workers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was vandalized Sunday, the university said, as the university is still reeling from tensions over a Confederate monument that was toppled by protesters last year. The memorial, called the Unsung Founders Memorial, was vandalized by two people, including one person with ties to a group called Heirs to the Confederacy, the university said. The Unsung Founders Memorial was installed in 2005 to honor those men and women of color enslaved and free who helped build the Carolina we all know and love, according to the university. It features a stone tabletop six feet in diameter that is held up by 300 bronze figurines. At about 1:30 a.m. Sunday, the memorial was defaced with urine and racist language written in permanent marker, the university police said. 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. Not a Good Look Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has not officially announced his campaign for president, but it has already run into its first big obstacle: Biden was accused last week of inappropriately touching Lucy Flores, a former Nevada assemblywoman, during a rally in 2014. The charge has created days worth of headlines, but Jimmy Fallon noted that after President Trump won in 2016 despite more than 20 accusations of sexual misconduct this hardly seemed like a disqualifier. Photo for illustration (Source: toquoc.vn) Under the theme Colors of Vietnamese ethnic groups, activities will contribute to honoring Vietnam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day (April 19th). It will see the participation of Khmer, Hmong, Tay, Si La, Thai, Ha Nhi, La Ha groups as well as tribes from the Central Highlands region. The highlight will be the activities on the occasion of the national holidays of April 30th and May 1st with the theme on Lai Chau mountainous market from April 27th to May 1st. It will be the reproduction of a typical rural market in the northern mountainous province of Lai Chau, offering visitors an opportunity to taste local dishes, explore indigenous culture and handicraft products, and play folk games in the locality. In addition, traditional festivals of La Ha, Ha Nhi and Si La ethnic groups will be reinstated./. Kliuless? Gaming Industry ICYMI #29 Hi, my name is Kenny Liu, and I work in Revenue Strategy at Riot Games. Each week I compile a gaming industry insights newsletter that I share broadly within Riot. This edition is the public version that I publish broadly every week as well. Opinions are mine. See more or subscribe at: https://tinyletter.com/kliuless Business & Revenue Strategy Stratechery: Apple's Services Event Related: Apple unveils Apple Arcade subscription gaming service EA lays off 350 staff in marketing, publishing, and operations Related: Game Industry Layoffs Driven by Past Mistakes, Uncertain Future Twitch Prime users are being gifted a free year of Nintendo Switch Online Bethesda reveals "buddy pass" for Wolfenstein: Youngblood, allowing owner to share game with friends for co-op play aRelated: Risk of Rain 2 is running a buy-one-get-one free launch promo Dota 2 Now Lets You Bet In-Game Currency On Pro Tournaments Heroes of the Storm will remove the ability to buy loot boxes with real money Design Minh Gooseman Le shares how to get the guns right in shooters Flexiscope, the play-time aware dungeon generator in Book of Demons Knocking down design pillars was key to making Destiny 2's Gambit mode really shine PC/Console Twitch debuts Squad Stream to put four streamers in one screen Sweeney commits to human moderators & quality filters for Epic's Games Store WSJ: Nintendo to Launch Two New Switch Models Sony is pulling digital PS4 games from sale at GameStop, other retailers Path of Exile launches on PlayStation 4 Mobile App Annie: Gaming Spotlight 2018 Report Facebook the top network for app-installs, Google and Apple follow 4 Alternatives to Boost ASO in your Mobile Games on Google Play Store Referral marketing for mobile games: How to grow your game with referrals Google Play: Why the first ten minutes are crucial if you want to keep players coming back CD Projekt Red reveals Witcher card game Gwent will come to mobile XR: AR/MR/VR Valve psychologist explores controlling games directly with your brain Oculus founder Luckey: Rift S lenses wont fit 30% of users HTC teams up with Qualcomm for Vive XR mobile devices HTC will sell Vive Focus Plus standalone VR headset for $800 starting April 15 Asia Tencent opens cloud gaming platform START for public testing Steven Ma interview How Tencent is more than just a big game investor Epics war with Steam means gamers in China cant play Epic's exclusives China smartphone maker Xiaomi beats profit view, sees more global expansion India's Muslim gamers boycott PUBG Mobile for insulting holy site Netflix is testing a $3.64 mobile plan in India Tech Intel hopes to clean up toxic speech in game chat with AI and machine learning 9 Reasons Why Disney+ Will Succeed (And Why 4 Criticisms are Overhyped) Q&A: Instagrams New Head of Product, Vishal Shah Overtime See more or subscribe at: https://tinyletter.com/kliuless The third season of This Is Us comes to a close. And The Last O.G. returns for a second run. Whats on TV THIS IS US 9 p.m. on NBC. This is the end for now. (Spoiler alert!) Last weeks episode chronicled the ups and downs Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson) and Randall (Sterling K. Brown) endured to stick together. Back in the present, the couple had an explosive falling-out in which each said some cruel things. Whether that portends the end of their marriage is the crux of this season finale. As for the fate of the show, a fourth season hasnt been announced. But the creator, Dan Fogelman, remains hopeful: In an interview with Deadline in February, he said, Next season is a season of new beginnings and restarts. AMERICAN SOUL 9 p.m. on BET. The first season of this scripted series on Soul Train wraps up with the members of Encore confronting personal hurdles as they inch closer to musical stardom. They were called the ghost rapes. In 2005, Mennonite women living in a secluded colony in Bolivia reported waking up bleeding, with dirty fingerprints on their bodies and fraying rope around their wrists. The elders dismissed their complaints or blamed them on wild female imagination until it was discovered that men from the community had been creeping through windows at night, sedating whole households with bovine anesthetic and raping the women. At least 300 female members of the colony had been attacked, from toddlers to grandmothers. When the eight culprits were put on trial, in 2011, the women were forbidden to testify; their fathers and husbands spoke against the defendants instead. I felt an obligation, a need, to write about these women, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews has said. Im related to them. I could easily have been one of them. Toews was also raised in the sect rigged for compliance, she has put it and is descended from the same Mennonite group as the colonists in Bolivia. Her celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak, or taken such sure aim at fundamentalism and its hypocrisies, as she does in her new book, Women Talking. [ Read our profile of Miriam Toews. ] The novel is set in the aftermath of the crimes. The men have left for the city, to raise and post bail for their brothers. Eight women from two families gather in a hayloft. Forgiveness is dictated by the religion; the women know they must absolve the men or face expulsion, even damnation. They have two days to make a decision for the female members of the community. Should they stay and forgive? Unfathomable; a 3-year-old was raped and infected with venereal disease, an old woman so savagely attacked her teeth crumbled. Stay and fight but with what resources? Leave? Impossible; they cannot read, they possess no maps and they cannot think of abandoning their sons. The women comfort and snipe at one another. One woman, impregnated in an attack and beset by morning sickness, keeps vomiting into a bucket. They smoke, sing hymns together and weep. Did I mention the book is funny? Wickedly so, with Toewss brand of seditious wit. Angela Carter wrote that Grace Paleys women were made of flexible steel; your average Toews character is equal parts Silly String. In her novel A Complicated Kindness, one sets her bonnet on fire while smoking a cigarette and has to be dunked in a water barrel. In All My Puny Sorrows, a woman giving a eulogy is interrupted by her toddler, who opens the urn and scoops the ashes into his mouth. Still, wherever Lopez goes, he is never far from a disquisition on humanitys merciless ways. Rising from his bed one night in the tropical heat of Isla Santa Cruz, in the Galapagos, he walks alone (a frequent habit that makes for some of the books best bits) to the beach and watches a group of brown pelicans asleep on the bay. The birds vulnerability oblivious just now to all that is hidden and potentially threatening in the lightless world we share leads his train of thought to Spanish conquistadores releasing vicious dogs on Indians, and from there to the European bankers who underwrote the slave trade in West Africa, and on to the present horrors of Boko Haram. Its all, ultimately, in the service of pondering the roots of barbarism, and how we ignore the barbarism unfolding in our own society at our peril. Image Clearcutting near Highway 30 in Oregon. Credit... Leah Nash for The New York Times [ Read our round-up of recent books about climate change. ] Strangely, though, these relentless reminders of egregious acts dont diminish the appeal of seeing the world through Lopezs eyes. His reverence for exploring every corner of the world, even the sites of its most shameful histories, is infectious. Rarely does Lopez decline an offer of adventure, no matter how potentially grueling the trip might be. Traveling, he writes, turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity. It helps one understand that all people do not want to be on the same road. Lopezs journeys often start in ways that make you shake your head. (More than a few trips begin with a banal sentence like: In the austral fall of 1987 I was traveling through Namibia with a few people. You know, as one does.) One night he reads a paper in the scientific journal Nature about the discovery of some 4.27-billion-year-old zircon crystals in remote Western Australia. He immediately emails the researchers about visiting the field site because he just happens to be headed to Perth soon, en route from Zimbabwe to the Northern Territory. The scientists initially ignore his request. But he persists, and several years later hes finally on his way to the Jack Hills. He flies from the United States to Sydney, and then goes by train to Perth, persuading the engineers to let him ride in the locomotive. One day, crossing the vast Nullarbor Plain, the train suddenly ran into a wall of water, a drenching rainstorm. When the weather clears, a double rainbow appears. And then a mob of kangaroos arrives, over a hundred of them, leaping across the plain. The sight of it was so exhilarating the three of us in the cab nodded an affirmation to one another. Whatever was wild and lyrical in the timeless world, we were in the middle of it now. Lopez proceeds in a rented four-wheel drive to a sheep-ranching outpost where a geologist has arranged lodging, 120 miles from the nearest town on an unsigned dirt track. When he arrives, the rancher and his daughter have a meat pie in the oven, and he wanted to know whether I took milk with my tea. One day, as Lopez is heading out to the geology site, the rancher offers him a rifle and asks if hed mind shooting any wild goats he encounters. Lopez declines. But through evening chats on the veranda, the two men form a bond; the rancher ultimately visits Lopez at home in Oregon. This knack for making friends in the most unlikely places resonates long after you turn the last page. Are we not bound, he asks, to learn how to speak with each other? Had we mastered that skill 30-odd years ago, would we be where we find ourselves today, grappling with violent xenophobia while forests incinerate, oceans rise and acidify, magnificent organisms everywhere fade away? Where will we be three decades on, if we dont take heed? There is still time, though not as much as there once was, to shape whats coming. Reminiscent of Anne Fadimans The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Clarks book intimately details, with empathy and grace, the tribes value system and the physical world on which they depend. Here hunters shadows dull the sunlight glittering on the whales sea-glossed back as the animal prepares to surrender and make of itself a Gift of the Ancestors. We often think of indigenous groups as living in remote locations, on the edges of the modern world, but Clark reverses this proposition, using the stories of these whalers to help us understand just what it looks like when the earth reaches carrying capacity and how humans might in turn respond. 347 pp. Little, Brown. $30. THE END OF ICE Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption By Dahr Jamail Image Our current environmental crisis is often described in language that makes it hard to appreciate the transformations already underway and the role we played in them. For Jamail, climate change is too ambiguous a term; he prefers anthropogenic climate disruption, which emphasizes human agency while also noting just how unusual it is for a single species to cause such havoc, making the earth uninhabitable for many. In The End of Ice, Jamail, an avid mountaineer and former war reporter, visits a handful of different environments being impacted by anthropogenic climate disruption, or whatever you want to call it from the heights of Denali to the heart of the Amazon hoping to bring home the urgency of our planetary crisis through firsthand accounts. He recalls his conversations with a wide cast of characters from coral ecologists in Guam to indigenous residents of Utqiagvik, the northernmost town in the United States. Each in his or her own right bears witness to the ways in which the places they study and depend upon are already coming undone. Jamail, and his adventurers attraction to far-flung locations, helps hold this string of reporting trips together. Toward the end of the book he suggests that we must sit with our grief for the ever-diminishing planet; to understand how to proceed, we must acknowledge what we have lost and what we will continue to lose. Perhaps what brings him to this place of great mourning is his regular engagement with the worst case scenarios buried deep in the pages of the official reports. Too often climate coverage errs on the cautious side, suggesting that this or that may come to pass. The End of Ice illustrates with an almost overwhelming string of statistics that for many of the worlds glaciers, coral reefs and ancient forests, the end is already here. 257 pp. New Press. $25.99. Marine ecosystem: More than 48 pounds (21 kilograms) of plastic including disposable dishes, shopping bags and a detergent packet with its bar code still visible were found inside a dead pregnant sperm whale that washed ashore on the northern Italian island of Sardinia, the latest reminder of the marine toll of plastic waste. Quebec: A proposed law in the Canadian province would bar public sector employees in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols, including the Muslim head scarf, the Jewish skullcap or the Sikh turban. The proposal has sparked widespread backlash. Sweden: An off-duty, naked police officer who was at a sauna arrested a fugitive last week who was sitting next to him also naked. The situation was as stripped down as it gets, said a deputy police chief in Stockholm. The Arctic: The findings of the only test well ever drilled in Alaskas Arctic refuge have been closely guarded for three decades. Was it dry or a gusher? Our reporters found answers in Cleveland, Ohio. Mars: The planet periodically emits methane, a finding that has been perplexing scientists around the world because, on Earth, the gas is usually produced by living creatures. Equal Pay Day: Women in the U.S. had to have worked until April 2 this year to earn what their male counterparts did in 2018, according to a pay equity group. The Timess gender team breaks down some of the myths about unequal pay. 1. Health care is off the table, but in Democrats war chest. Above, Democrats at a health care rally at the Supreme Court on Tuesday. President Trump announced that Republicans would drop efforts to overhaul health care until after the 2020 election. The move, set in motion by the usually sharp strategist Mitch McConnell, ensures the issue will be central in the campaigning. (Note: A new study found that Americans borrowed $88 billion to pay for health care last year.) Mr. Trump also had words for Puerto Rico. He cast its leaders as incompetent and corrupt, increasing partisan tensions over aid bills blocked in Congress. Democrats object to the limits on aid to the U.S. territory, while Republicans insist on more aid for Midwest farmers. The Senate Commerce Committee is investigating whistle-blower claims that Federal Aviation Administration safety inspectors who evaluated Boeings 737 Max airplane were not appropriately trained or certified. [Boeing Congressional Hearing: F.A.A. warned of 737 Maxs safety before second crash.] On Tuesday, the committee chairman, Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, sent a letter to the F.A.A. demanding information about whether the agency had investigated those allegations or taken any action to remedy the problem. After the fatal crashes of two 737 Max jets in less than five months, there is new scrutiny on the regulators close relationship with Boeing. The F.A.A. relies on Boeing employees to help certify the airworthiness of its aircraft, a system that critics say creates conflicts of interest. In hearings last week, lawmakers pressed Elaine L. Chao, the transportation secretary, and Daniel K. Elwell, the acting administrator of the F.A.A., about federal oversight of aviation safety. Federal prosecutors are investigating the development of the Max plane, which included new software that may have contributed to the fatal accidents. The gap persists because women take time off to have children. Bennett: Womens compensation does often suffer when they return to work after having children. But even in their first year out of college, childless women earn 93 percent of what their male peers do, even if they had a similar G.P.A. and were working in the same fields. Women get paid less because they have less education. Bennett: Actually, more women than men have earned bachelors and masters degrees since the 1980s. And for the past 10 or so years, they have also earned more doctoral degrees. Women dont get paid well because they dont negotiate well. Bennett: That has long been a factor in the pay gap. But a 2018 study, published in the Harvard Business Review found that perhaps as a result of all that talk about women not negotiating women are asking for raises as often as men, though they are less likely to get them. Maybe in part because when women ask, they can be perceived as demanding. (Remember that essay that Jennifer Lawrence wrote, about not getting paid as much as her male co-stars? She said she didnt want to seem difficult or spoiled.) O.K., but were on our way to closing the gap, right? Bennett: If you consider the year 2059 soon, sure. Thats how long it will take in the United States, according to the Institute for Womens Policy Research, at the current pace of change. ______ By the numbers Here are some more figures you might want to know: 80 Cents Thats the median amount that American women who work full time, year-round in the United States are paid for every dollar their male counterparts earn, according to U.S. census data analyzed by the American Association of University Women. When broken down by race and compared with white men, the numbers are: 85 cents: The amount for Asian women 77 cents: The amount for white women 61 cents: The amount for black women 58 cents: The amount for Native American women 53 cents: The amount for Hispanic women $10,169 Thats how much the pay gap costs American women each year, according to the National Womens Law Center, which based the figure on the difference between womens and mens median annual earnings for full-time, year-round workers. Over the course of a 40-year career, that amounts to $403,440. 1 in 3 Thats the number of Americans who are unaware of the wage gap, according to research by LeanIn.org. Congrats! Youre no longer one of them. ______ What else is happening Here are five articles from The Times you might have missed. When the new businesses open, they will join 21 existing vendors from the adjacent Essex Street Market, a city-run site that was set up in 1940 by the administration of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to take pushcarts off the streets. The Essex Street vendors are expected to move to the ground floor of the new market site this spring, while the new businesses will occupy the lower level. Megha Chopra, assistant vice president of New Yorks Economic Development Corporation, predicted that the combined market would attract regular Essex Street customers as well as new shoppers and tourists drawn by the new businesses. We have our own customer base that was nurtured and cultivated over the years, and a lot of those people will still come to Essex, Ms. Chopra said. With this development, there will also be a lot of New York City tourists or international tourists. There will be this incremental customer base coming through the market. The first phase of the Market Line is nearly complete. In the next phase, the space will be extended beneath two new office buildings, and the full market is expected to open in late 2020. When fully occupied, the market will have more than 140 vendors, including new and existing tenants. The completed market will be a 150,000-square-foot space below ground that will also include galleries, art shops and a beer hall. A few floors above, construction is proceeding on office space that will total 350,000 square feet in the two buildings. The first is expected to be complete in the summer of 2020, and the second about six months later. Executives at the casino operator Wynn Resorts helped hide sexual misconduct allegations against the companys billionaire founder, Steve Wynn, the Massachusetts gambling regulator said Tuesday. The finding was included in a report released by the regulator, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, as it began a three-day hearing on whether to allow Wynn Resorts to start operating a $2.6 billion resort near Boston in June as planned. High-ranking company executives knew about the allegations but did not follow company policy including a zero-tolerance rule against sexual harassment in place since 2004 and initiate an investigation, according to the report. The executives also failed to report the allegations either to the full Wynn Resorts board or to the boards audit and compliance committees, the commission found. In some instances, particular company executives, with the assistance of outside counsel, were part of affirmative efforts to conceal allegations against Mr. Wynn that came to their attention, the report states. The layoffs at Community may come in stages, the hospital said, depending upon the need for staff. michael barbaro From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today: for decades hospitals could assume that patients with jobs and health insurance would pay their medical bills. Sarah Kliff on why thats no longer the case and the aggressive new way that hospitals are forcing those patients to pay up. Its Monday, December 2. sarah kliff Hi, Amanda. amanda sturgill Hi! sarah kliff Its been a while. amanda sturgill It has been. Hi. michael barbaro Sarah, tell me about Amanda Sturgill. amanda sturgill Oh, yeah. sarah kliff So Amanda is 41 years old. She lives in this tiny little town in rural Virginia called Norton. amanda sturgill Its very small. I dont even know why its called a city, because its not very big. sarah kliff She has four children. Shes a single mom. michael barbaro Sarah Kliff writes about health care for The Times. sarah kliff She works full time at an audio equipment company, where she processes orders. amanda sturgill So its just like a little freak thing that happened. sarah kliff And a few years ago amanda sturgill I was working sarah kliff Her daughter Michaela was giving one of the other kids a bath. michael barbaro Mm-hm. amanda sturgill And she bent down to pick her up, to get her out the bathtub. sarah kliff She bent down to pick up her sibling and just got this terrible pain in her back. amanda sturgill Kind of go down her legs. And she was just in this horrible, excruciating pain. Took her to the emergency room sarah kliff Amanda, obviously, is worried. She doesnt understand whats going on, so she takes her daughter to the emergency room at the local hospital system, a company named Ballad. They give her a pain shot, go back home, but this pain doesnt go away. amanda sturgill I went back to the pediatrician. It was probably weekly with Michaela to tell them this is not getting any better. sarah kliff They start seeing specialists and doctors. There are M.R.I.s. There are more pain shots. And no one can really figure out whats going on with Michaela, and the pain is getting worse. amanda sturgill Shes just like, somethings not right. Im in really bad pain. And sarah kliff She cant walk without pain. Shes having trouble sleeping, and Amandas like, oh my gosh, is my teenage daughter going to have to live with this terrible pain for the rest of her life? michael barbaro Hm. So what happens? amanda sturgill So it came back on the M.R.I. there was a slight bulge down there. sarah kliff They figure out that Michaela has a degenerative disk disease. amanda sturgill Hes like, your daughters back is the back of a 70-year-old woman. michael barbaro Hm. sarah kliff So its serious, and a doctor recommends that the best course of action is surgery. sarah kliff When you found out Michaela needed surgery, what was going through your mind? amanda sturgill I was terrified, terrified of thinking your young child is going to have to go through this excruciating surgery. sarah kliff And were you worried about money at all, when you found out about the surgery? amanda sturgill No, I honestly didnt care. I was like, I dont care. Run whatever tests you run. I will deal with the bills when they come. I was like, just help her, get her better. sarah kliff So the surgery happens. It goes decently well. It doesnt fully relieve Michaelas pain, so that issue still lingers. But they go home, and then the bills start showing up. amanda sturgill It was just one of those days, where just go check the mail, go walk out to the end of the road. And we get a couple bills that were about 200 here and there. sarah kliff They trickle in, because remember, there have been all these doctor appointments, all these specialists, and M.R.I.s, and shots. So theres a few that are like amanda sturgill 50 something. sarah kliff 100 there. amanda sturgill 200 here. sarah kliff But then the bills get bigger. amanda sturgill I ended up owing like that 500 and something dollars per M.R.I.. And then the surgeon sarah kliff The surgery bill comes, and thats over $2,000. michael barbaro Wow. amanda sturgill And I was like, oh, wow, hello. I wasnt expecting that. sarah kliff For Amanda, she earns $12.70 per hour at her job. This is a really significant bill, and she just does not have the money to pay it. michael barbaro And does Amanda have insurance? sarah kliff She does. Yeah, she has insurance at work. She felt like it was good insurance, but then shes finding that her insurance actually expects her to pay a lot of co-pays, a certain share of the surgery. And its starting to get pretty stressful. amanda sturgill Its like, well, lets just start from what we can and what we cant do. So I just started filling some out and sending them. But theres so many. sarah kliff She really wants to pay the bills. amanda sturgill I pretty much clinch every penny I possibly can. sarah kliff And what is going through your mind about these bills as theyre piling up? amanda sturgill I will go to flea markets, have yard sales, that sort of thing. sarah kliff Shes trying to scrape together the money. amanda sturgill I will sometimes not eat but like once a day, to try to save money, so I dont have to buy food, and just save it all for them. Well have dinner together. And they see me do that, but they have no idea that I do that during the day. sarah kliff But then, during the entire day, you dont eat to save money. amanda sturgill Right, right. [CHUCKLING] Right. sarah kliff How do you feel by the end of the day? I know you work a full time job. amanda sturgill Um, I get pretty emotional sometimes. Ill go and cry and hide in the bathroom, then just come out and be the happy mom that I need to be to make sure that their life is as normal as possible. I dont let them know any of this. sarah kliff So for a while, this works and shes able to keep up with the bills. Shes sending in payments to the hospital. But a few months ago, she falls behind. She just isnt able to come up with the payments that shes supposed to be making on these bills. And then one day, theres a knock at the door. amanda sturgill It was about midday. The kids were home. sarah kliff And the dogs start barking. amanda sturgill And the kids were like, mom, theres a cop on our porch. And I was like, oh, O.K., someone out there. He was in his brown sheriffs uniform. He had his sheriff car that had the lights and the sheriff stickers all over it. sarah kliff And he has a document that he needs to give Amanda. amanda sturgill Weve got you this summons to court. And I was like, wow, O.K. sarah kliff So Amanda takes the documents. amanda sturgill I just, I said, thanks for bringing it to me. So I ended up having to sarah kliff She tells the kids, dont worry, its just some important papers that they couldnt deliver in the mail. amanda sturgill Just so they wouldnt freak out. sarah kliff And then she actually opens it up, and it turns out that the hospital is suing her for the medical debt that she owes them. And this is a court warrant with a court date that theyre asking her to attend. amanda sturgill I was very shocked, and scared, because then Im just like, oh my gosh, I dont know what to do. michael barbaro So she has fallen behind on this bill, and the hospital is now taking her to court over this unpaid bill. sarah kliff Exactly, and things have moved from the billing department into the courtroom. Amanda has a court date. amanda sturgill June 27. sarah kliff But it turns out her court date is actually a day she has an appointment. amanda sturgill I had to go to get checked, because I had a lump in my breast. So we had to go and get that checked out, and I wasnt missing that for nothing, because sarah kliff She had recently found a lump in her breast, and it had taken her weeks to schedule a mammogram. michael barbaro Hm. sarah kliff And where did you have that doctors appointment? amanda sturgill It was in Ballad. Its one of their physicians. sarah kliff And how did that turn out? Is everything O.K. with the lump that they found? amanda sturgill Yes. sarah kliff O.K., good. amanda sturgill Yes, yes, yes. sarah kliff Glad to hear that. amanda sturgill It was just a benign little tumor thing, so yeah, its good. sarah kliff So you were going to get health care from the same provider that was suing you over your medical bills on the same day? amanda sturgill Yeah, because we have nothing else. We have no other options. It really makes you feel uncomfortable, because its like when you go, its like, do they know that Ballad is suing me over this? Are they going to say something to me? Are they going to deny me health care, because I owe them money? It was pretty terrifying. michael barbaro Sarah, nothing about this sounds normal. A mother with a solid job and health insurance suddenly has a sheriff at her door, and she faces legal action over falling behind on a medical bill. sarah kliff It is actually becoming surprisingly common in our health care system. There are thousands of Americans many with private insurance currently being sued by their hospitals. Theyre in big cities. Theyre in small towns. And the reason I know this is actually the story of how I found Amanda. michael barbaro Well be right back. O.K., Sarah, you said that finding Amanda helped you understand how widespread this problem was. So how did you find Amanda? sarah kliff I found Amanda a few months ago, when I went to this tiny little courtroom in rural Virginia, about six hours west of Washington, D.C., where I live. And on the day I went to court, there were 160 cases on the docket. 102 of those cases were being brought by the local hospital system, Ballad. In each of those cases, the hospital was suing one of its patients for outstanding medical debt. michael barbaro Hmph. sarah kliff And Amanda was one of the 102 cases that would be heard that day. michael barbaro So whats happening here? Why is a local hospital suing over one hundreds of its patients? sarah kliff Yeah, so thats something I started to figure out, talking to the people who were in the courtroom, and calling people who werent in the courtroom. It turns out most patients actually didnt show up to their court date. And what I found out is, a lot of these people had health insurance. There was a school teacher, a correctional officer, even a woman who worked at the hospital, who had private insurance, but were responsible for shares of their bills that they just felt like they couldnt pay. And now Ballad was turning to the courts to recoup the money that they were owed. michael barbaro Why is that the case? Why are people with jobs and insurance falling behind on their payments and now being sued? sarah kliff So in order to understand that, I think you need to zoom out from the courtroom and look at a big change that has been happening in our health care system over the past decade or so. What I see in my reporting is patients consistently being asked to spend more and more of their own money on health care, even when they have insurance. A really perfect example of this is deductibles. Thats the amount that a patient has to pay before their insurance will start kicking in and covering their doctor visits and their hospital trips. If you look back to, like, 2006 or so, only about half of people who had insurance even had a deductible. They werent that common. You flash forward to this year, and 82% of people who get insurance at work now have a deductible. The size of the average deductible has about tripled between 2006 and 2018. It used to be about $600. Now its about $1,700. michael barbaro Hm. sarah kliff So you have this moment when health care prices are going up, and up, and up, and patients are being asked to pay for it and pay more through deductibles, through co-payments. michael barbaro And why is that? Why are so many of these plans now asking people to pay such a high deductible? sarah kliff It mostly comes down to the fact that health care prices are growing really quickly. And if youre an employer, if youre an HR department, you have a few ways to deal with this. You could increase your employees premiums. Thats the amount they pay each month. Or you could keep premiums constant, and just ask people to pay more when they go to the doctor. A lot of companies have found that the latter option is the way they want to go. michael barbaro Hm. sarah kliff So thats how employers deal with this problem of rising costs, but then you have someone like Amanda, who does have to go to the doctor a lot, for her daughter, and ends up with this bill she cant afford. And you have the hospital on the other end of this, who is watching hundreds of Amandas in their system, all of a sudden not being able to pay the bills that the insurance company typically was taking care of. michael barbaro Got it. And when a person cant pay that bill, now the hospital is suddenly on the hook. So its cascading through the system. sarah kliff Exactly. And hospital executives, when they see someone who comes in with insurance, theyre thinking, O.K., this is someone who can pay their bills. They have the backing of an insurance company. But thats not really the case. You have this whole new bucket of patients that hospital executives arent really sure how to deal with. Some are dealing with it by coming up with financial assistance for those people. Others are dealing with it by going to court to try and collect the debt that insurance companies used to pay them. michael barbaro So what do hospitals like Ballad say about why theyre making this decision to sue their patients? sarah kliff They say that, look, were a business. We have to stay open. We have to stay afloat. Ballad exists in a pretty rural area, a part of Virginia and Tennessee, and weve seen a lot of rural hospitals closing. michael barbaro Hm. sarah kliff They would argue that the financially responsible thing to do is collect the debts that are owed to them. They say that they only pursue patients in court who can afford to pay but have chosen not to pay their medical bills. michael barbaro Hm. So people who, in their minds, if they prioritized paying back these bills and organized their finances around that, they could pay those bills. sarah kliff Exactly. These are people with jobs, people with insurance. From their perspective, these are people who could pay that debt, and Ballad is serious about collecting that debt. amanda sturgill I just feel sometimes like Im failing my kids, even though I know Im doing the best that I can for them. michael barbaro And what does someone like Amanda say to that? sarah kliff I know youre making about $13 an hour. Youre supporting four kids. How do you think you got tagged as someone who should be able to make their payments? amanda sturgill I honestly have no idea. sarah kliff She does not think she fits that description. amanda sturgill How in the world do you all think that I can pay this off? Its like my paycheck every couple weeks is, I think I clear $806. sarah kliff Amanda feels like shes skipping meals, and shes selling her things to pay. amanda sturgill My mortgage and stuff like that. sarah kliff Then theres kids to take care of. amanda sturgill Its like Ive not paid my water bill yet. I just keep thinking, please dont come turn it off right now. [CHUCKLING] That sort of thing. And then Ive got a payment arrangement with the electric, because I got a disconnect notice. sarah kliff So youve been putting off your electric and amanda sturgill Yeah. sarah kliff water to pay the health bills? amanda sturgill Yeah, yeah. Because I dont want to be taken to jail, if thats what they would do or whatever. [SIGHS] michael barbaro Youve said that this is becoming more common, but just how common is this kind of a lawsuit now? sarah kliff So whats happening at Ballad is pretty representative of a trend were seeing across the country. If you look at Ballads lawsuit volume, theyve been suing patients for a while, but back in 2010, it was about 3,600 lawsuits a year in the court records I examined. Flash forward 2018, theres over 6,700 lawsuits. michael barbaro So double. sarah kliff Doubled in less than a decade. You look at other hospitals, Childrens in Wisconsin is a good example. This is a nonprofit pediatric hospital. Theyve sued more than a thousand patients since the start of 2018. And thats more lawsuits in two years than the entire decade prior. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and New York Presbyterian in Manhattan, they still have pretty low lawsuit volume, but its going up. michael barbaro And is it ever the case that a company like Ballad sues a patient, the patient pays and it all resolves itself? sarah kliff Definitely. So hospitals are finding that the courts are a pretty good way to collect money for a few reasons. The first is that patients typically dont show up to their court date. That means, as long as the hospital sends a lawyer, theyre going to win the case because the other party didnt show up. Once the hospital wins the case, they have the rights to start garnishing their patients wages. You can get a lien on their property. You can even arrest them. It gives the hospital a lot of power working through the court system. michael barbaro So how does Amandas case end up playing out in court? sarah kliff So she doesnt go to the first court date. amanda sturgill I had previously contacted them to let them know that I wasnt going to be there. sarah kliff Theres a second court date that she said she never heard about, where the hospital does get a judgment against her, but her wages have not been garnished. She ended up setting up a $150 a month payment plan. sarah kliff And have you been able to make the payment each month? amanda sturgill Um, I have, up until this past month. I was really trying to. Its just hard. Every time my phone would ring, Id be like, please dont be Ballad calling me. Please dont be Ballad. michael barbaro So what happens once she starts falling behind in these payments? sarah kliff So shes nervous. Shes worried. Theres this court warrant out for me. Could they throw me in jail? And she sees that the hospital is calling her. amanda sturgill I was terrified to answer it, because I hadnt made the payment. I was scared to death. So I let it go to voicemail, but then I called her back and I was like, hey, its Amanda. What do you need? sarah kliff And the person on the other end of the phone says, were just calling to tell you amanda sturgill We had an anonymous donor that paid off your warrant, which was I think it was 2,200, is what it was final down to. sarah kliff Somebody paid you medical bill. You dont have to make payments anymore. michael barbaro Hah. amanda sturgill I was shocked. I said, are you sure? You know, can you just recheck? And she goes, no. She said, it is. She said, we are writing it. Were doing all the stuff to get it taken care of, and its paid off. And it was such a relief. And I was like, you cant tell me who did it, so I can thank them? And shes like, no. I was like michael barbaro So what had happened here? sarah kliff So what happened was, I ended up writing about Amandas story in The New York Times. And between that story running and that phone call, an anonymous donor read about the story, called Ballad and offered to pay off Amandas bills. michael barbaro So she is now without debt from this back problem that her daughter had? Shes kind of scot-free? sarah kliff Well, sort of. sarah kliff So how much do you still owe to Ballad right now? amanda sturgill Um, shoot. Ive got a pile of bills thats about 5,400 and some dollars. Then I know Im paying on another one, which is like $1,000. My ex has a couple that hes paying on, that I just I could not do. So yeah, I mean, its a lot. Its a lot. michael barbaro Sarah, what do you make of what happened to Amanda? sarah kliff I think it shows you something really problematic about the current state of American health insurance. When you think of even the concept of insurance, its supposed to mean protection. Its supposed to mean you have someone else whos going to pay your medical bills, no matter how high they get. michael barbaro Hm. sarah kliff We spend a lot of time talking about the people who dont have health insurance, about 30 million or so Americans at this point, but you also have this class of people who you could think of as underinsured, who are paying premiums, who are buying some kind of product that they think of as insurance, but then when they actually have to use a lot of health care, theyre finding that its not really protecting them in the way that they expected to be protected. amanda sturgill Its not like Im out here trying to live this lavish life and Im just wanting to forget these doctor bills. You know, I dont need to pay them. Theyre a hospital. Its not that. I dont have the means to pay it. What else could I have done? What else could I have done different? sarah kliff Lets say you were in charge of health insurance in the United States. How do you think it should work for someone like you? amanda sturgill Oh, goodness, Ive thought about this so many times, and its so weird that you asked me this. I just feel like, were the United States. We should come together and take care of each other. I would love to see people be healthier and just not have to worry. Everybody can go to the doctor without being afraid to go. michael barbaro O.K., Sarah, right now were in the middle of a national debate about those very questions, the future of American health care. And the concept that is most widely debated in the context of the presidential election is Medicare For All, is the United States government taking on health care and eliminating the kind of private insurance that someone like Amanda has. If such a system were created, how would it address the issues that you have discovered in your reporting? sarah kliff The system being proposed now in the presidential primary would get rid of deductibles. Thered be no premiums. Thered be no copayments. When you went to the doctor, you would not pay a single penny. But the money has to come from somewhere, right? You need a lot of those anonymous donors who paid off Amandas bill to be financing such a system. So youd need to have a big shift in whos paying for health care. michael barbaro Hm. sarah kliff There is going to be a lot of debate around Medicare For All and single payer in the next year. There are a lot of pluses and minuses to that type of system. But what I can certainly say is that if the United States adopted a system like that, I would not have stories like Amandas to write anymore. michael barbaro Sarah, thank you very much. sarah kliff Thanks, Michael. michael barbaro Well be right back. Heres what else you need to know today. donald trump They didnt want to do a ceasefire, but now they do want to do a ceasefire. I believe it will probably work out that way. michael barbaro During an unannounced trip to Afghanistan, President Trump said that the U.S. would reopen peace talks with the Taliban, aimed at ending the 18-year-old war there. Trump had abruptly ended the talks in September, after the Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed a U.S. soldier. donald trump The Taliban wants to make a deal. Well see if they make a deal. If they do, they do, and if they dont, they dont. michael barbaro The United Nations estimated last week that the storm killed about 500 people in Mozambique, about 250 in Zimbabwe, and about 60 in Malawi. Whole villages with thousands of residents were flooded, so more bodies may yet be found. Cholera, usually transmitted in contaminated water , is rapidly spreading. The Mozambique government said Tuesday that it had recorded more than 1,000 cases, including one death. Aid officials privately called that an underestimate, saying treatment centers are seeing hundreds of cases each day. Some victims are already dead when they are carried in. The disease drains the body of fluids and electrolytes. If cholera victims reach help in time, they can almost always be saved with rapid rehydration and one dose of antibiotic. Nine treatment centers with about 500 beds offering intravenous rehydration have been set up, eight of them run by Doctors Without Borders and one by the International Red Cross Federation. Short-term centers with oral rehydration for ambulatory patients have also been created. If the epidemic continues the way it is now, that should be enough, said Dr. Gilles van Cutsem, an H.I.V. specialist with Doctors Without Borders helping out in the crisis. If cases massively increase, well have to increase capacity. The aid group has hired 80 local doctors and nurses, and trained them to treat cholera, he said. The Mozambique health ministry and aid agencies are collaborating on a campaign using radio and local health workers to tell people to seek help at the first sign of diarrhea and to be vaccinated against cholera. The question might seem indelicate. But transplant centers find it is necessary these days to know the answer even before they place a patient on the list for an organ transplant. How will you pay for the anti-rejection drugs? These are patients with insurance they need it to pay for the transplant itself so it might seem obvious that their insurer would pay. But if, as often happens, the patient gets an organ transplant with private insurance and later enrolls in Medicare, she may be in for a shock. Necessary anti-rejection drugs may not be covered under Medicare. And without those medications, the body may reject the organ, with deadly consequences. It is an emerging and alarming problem, according to the American Society of Transplantation another maddening twist in our convoluted, contradictory and confusing health care system. Imagine you could live your life without experiencing pain. Not quite as a superhero, you wouldnt be super strong you just wouldnt feel any pain, physical or emotional. Ever. Would you choose that life? In At 71, Shes Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why., Heather Murphy writes: Shed been told that childbirth was going to be painful. But as the hours wore on, nothing bothered her even without an epidural. I could feel that my body was changing, but it didnt hurt me, recalled the woman, Jo Cameron, who is now 71. She likened it to a tickle. Later, she would tell prospective mothers, Dont worry, its not as bad as people say it is. It was only recently more than four decades later that she learned her friends were not exaggerating. Rather, there was something different about the way her body experienced pain: For the most part, it didnt. Scientists believe they now understand why. In a paper published Thursday in The British Journal of Anaesthesia, researchers attributed Ms. Camerons virtually pain-free life to a mutation in a previously unidentified gene. The hope, they say, is that the finding could eventually contribute to the development of a novel pain treatment. They believe this mutation may also be connected to why Ms. Cameron has felt little anxiety or fear throughout her life and why her body heals quickly. The author discusses how Ms. Cameron was discovered by scientists: The sequence of events that led scientists to investigate Ms. Camerons genes began about five years ago. She was living a happy, ordinary life on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland with her husband, she said. After a hand operation, a doctor seemed perplexed that she was not experiencing any pain and did not want painkillers. I guarantee I wont need anything, Ms. Cameron recalled telling Dr. Devjit Srivastava, a consultant in anesthesia and pain medicine at a National Health Service hospital in northern Scotland and one of the authors of the paper. A few follow-up questions revealed that Ms. Cameron was unusual. At 65, shed needed to have her hip replaced. Because it had not caused her pain, she had not noticed anything was amiss until it was severely degenerated. Cuts, burns, fractures these did not hurt either. In fact, it often took the smell of burning flesh or her husband identifying blood for her to notice something wrong. She also reported that eating Scotch bonnet chili peppers left only a pleasant glow. The article continues: Scientists are also intrigued by Ms. Camerons extraordinarily low anxiety level. On an anxiety disorder questionnaire, she scored zero out of 21. She cannot recall ever having felt depressed or scared. I am very happy, she said. In retrospect, she sees how her genetic disposition may have aided her at work. After years as a primary-school teacher, she retrained to work with people with severe mental disabilities. Erratic, aggressive behavior never riled her, she said. But though having this mutation may sound like a dream, there are downsides. One is that she is quite forgetful; prone to losing her keys and her train of thought midsentence. The other is that shes never felt the adrenaline rush that other people talk about, she said. Students, read the entire article, then tell us: Would you want to live a life without ever feeling pain physical and psychological? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of a life without pain? How do you imagine your life would be different? In what ways might you be happier? What growth or development, stemming from anxiety or pain, might you have missed? Would you choose to live a pain-free life if it meant that you would never experience an adrenaline rush, as Ms. Cameron says she never has? What role has physical pain played in your life? Do you think you have a high or low threshold for pain? Tell us about a memorable experience with physical pain. Were you able to take something positive from the experience? In a related article, The Value of Suffering, Pico Iyer writes: Wise men in every tradition tell us that suffering brings clarity, illumination; for the Buddha, suffering is the first rule of life, and insofar as some of it arises from our own wrongheadedness our cherishing of self we have the cure for it within. Thus in certain cases, suffering may be an effect, as well as a cause, of taking ourselves too seriously. I once met a Zen-trained painter in Japan, in his 90s, who told me that suffering is a privilege, it moves us toward thinking about essential things and shakes us out of shortsighted complacency; when he was a boy, he said, it was believed you should pay for suffering, it proves such a hidden blessing. Do you agree? What life lessons can pain and suffering teach? By some estimates, tens of millions of Americans suffer from chronic pain. The global pain management drug industry is valued at over $58 billion. Should scientists and pharmaceutical companies investigate Ms. Camerons case in hopes of developing more effective treatments for pain? If scientists were successful in developing a pain intervention or vaccine, would you seek out this product? Would you choose to shield your children from physical or emotional pain? Further Resources: How Pain Tolerance and Anxiety Seem to Be Connected A Soldiers War on Pain How to Harness Your Anxiety The thread I found was about how those with Type 4 personality might deal with traumatic events. As I, a notorious overthinker with a vivid imagination, pondered my own feelings of guilt, inadequacy and responsibility, I perused responses that were unafraid of radical self-reflection. I blame myself while at the same time making sure that everyone I know thinks Im O.K., one said. My wife had an affair, another reply read, and I still couldnt pull it together to change for the better. If I could have, I might have been able to save our marriage. The conversations usually felt like being the most melancholy friend at the bar, with the added comfort of knowing that everyone, at least by one metric, knows where youre coming from. When I was an awkward teenager in the era of Web 1.0, message boards provided a similar reprieve from the sometimes-painful realities of the outside world. Id spend hours on skateboarding forums; even if I didnt have many friends in school, I had a whole community online I could talk to. I found the same comfort on Personality Cafe, even though I never actually posted. I became familiar with certain user names, eager to see their commentary. I read through dozens of threads on the site, with titles like Anybody Accept Themselves? and What happens when you get what you long for? Or do you ever get what you long for? I wondered if I could find the closeness that I had lost in my relationship online. With the proliferation of social networks, which incentivize performance over vulnerability, intimacy now seems harder to come by. Maybe the original promise of the internet could be summed up in our ability to read other peoples struggles with love and triumphs over rejection, to feel less alone. I keep screenshots of certain PerC threads on my phone. In my moments of weakness, I look to those posts and the encouragement that the community poured on total strangers going through it. I could feel my own torment loosening as I considered my fellow Type 4s, those of us who answer strongly agree to the statement I am more sensitive than most people. The users most likely will never know me or just how much they helped, but Id consider them to be some of my closest friends. That year, one of her most critically and commercially successful films, Vagabond, about a dangerously unsettled woman, was released in the United States. I distinctly remember being freaked out by Vagabond, which opens on the corpse of Mona (a blazing Sandrine Bonnaire), a drifter who freezes to death in a country ditch. Raw, opaque yet also deeply moving, the film tracks her as she wanders from place to place, person to person, alone and finally unknowable. Shes a startlingly uncommon cinematic creation, partly because she is a woman who says no, including to other people. Varda said she didnt know why Mona repeatedly said no, a refusal that ends in death. I see Vagabond, in part, as a tough, unsentimental exploration about the limits of radical independence for women, which is perhaps what gives it the autobiographical aspect that runs through her movies. Vardas life and work are filled with contrasts between interiority and exteriority, individuals and their worlds, which makes her house on Rue Daguerre, with its pink facade and striped doors, feel like another auteurist creation. For the past few years, my friend Joan Dupont and I would have an annual lunch with Varda at her home, eating and talking while periodically visited by one of her cats. She was predictably funny and warm and brilliant, but also sharp and strong and willful. During our lunch last year, Varda said she was tired. But she was as voluble as ever and filled with plans. She reminisced about her mother, who loved art, and her father, who didnt, and spoke about growing old. Never complain, never explain, she said. She asked me about Ava DuVernay. The next week, Varda was off to the Cannes Film Festival, where she presented a restoration of her 1977 film One Sings, the Other Doesnt. At Cannes, she joined DuVernay and Cate Blanchett on the festivals red carpet, this time to protest gender inequality at the festival. It was gratifying and deeply moving to see her among all these other women, though I wondered how many understood what Varda through her example, her will and her art had done to pave the way for them. In very concrete ways, in film after film, she helped show women that there was a place for them in movies beyond that of the inevitably beautiful, inevitably young star. At the end of The Beaches of Agnes, Varda asks, What is cinema? repeating Andre Bazins essential question. She is standing in one of the witty structures a house of cinema that she had fabricated for her multimedia installations. Cinema is light, images, dark, color, she says, over shots of the edifice with its metal frame and walls of film strips. Soon, she is inside. In here, it feels like I live in cinema, cinema is my home, she says. I think Ive always lived in it. In the last shot, Varda is looking directly at the camera at us framed in an open door that feels like an invitation. [What you need to know to start your day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] A roaring omnivore of a shredding truck was parked Monday morning on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, chewing through centuries worth of paper. It was poised to make a meal of a rare, powerful trove of the history of working-class New York: the archives of the Bowery Savings Bank, which was founded in 1834 for the benefit of its depositors. The papers were among the materials being cleaned out of the basement of a Capital One branch in Brooklyn that is closing next month. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] For years, city officials have worked to promote New York as the safest large city in America. Its transformation from urban war zone in the early 1990s to shining metropolitan destination has long been a point of pride for the Police Department. For two decades, murder rates have continued to plummet. But in the first three months of this year, that trend took a concerning turn in the opposite direction, driven by a steep spike in murders in Brooklyn. As of March 24, the borough had recorded 28 homicides so far this year, compared with 17 in the same period last year, a 64 percent increase. During the same period, police officials said the number of murders in the rest of the city fell slightly, from 43 to 41. Murders went up in significantly in Manhattan, but fell in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island. Crime rates rise and fall periodically and it is too early to tell if the increase in killings foretells a new crime wave that would challenge the sense of security that has become part of the citys identity. Over time the increase may be offset by quieter periods, and trends that appear worrisome in March often level off by August. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] For years, 39 Pearl Street in Dumbo was the embodiment of Brooklyns bohemian renaissance. The rock band Sonic Youth got its start on the fifth floor, while the band Blue Oyster Cult used to rehearse downstairs. Many of the residents have been artists, teachers and filmmakers whose apartments were rent-controlled before they pooled resources and bought the building in 1998. Now a city clerical error threatens to take it away. The error which classified the building as having 11 or more units instead of the eight it actually has vaulted 39 Pearl Street into a different tax category, causing taxes to increase by more than $100,000 over the past five years. Some residents of the building have taken on roommates or are thinking of dropping health insurance in order to afford the bigger bill. In addition to this building in Dumbo, the city could be overtaxing hundreds of other small buildings, a New York Times analysis found, while making it difficult for their owners to fix the problem. These taxpayers must navigate a confusing and opaque appeals process. When the cases land in court, the city fights to keep the taxes it has collected even when they have been collected because of a mistake. We had a place that we could live, we had a place that we could make our art, said Julia Loktev, a filmmaker who lives at 39 Pearl Street. Its the reason the city thrives. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] His slaves name was Betty. She is described in a receipt only by her price: 35 gold coins. The slave owner, Pierre Deyo, would distinguish himself as a member of one of the six families that founded New Paltz, N.Y., a town about 80 miles north of New York City. Deyo House, a student dormitory on the campus of the State University of New York at New Paltz, was named in honor of him and his father. The names of the other founders all of whom were slave owners have graced five other buildings at the college that was established in 1828. Until now. After months of debate and discussion, all six buildings will be renamed in time for the start of the fall semester. Attempted street robbery : Men attack 29-year-old in Bad Godesberg Bad Godesberg Bonn police are looking for witnesses to an attempted street robbery at Bad Godesberg civic hall. Five men wanted to rob a 29-year-old there. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken Bonn police are looking for witnesses to an incident early on Saturday morning. Investigators said five as yet unidentified men allegedly tried to rob a 29-year-old at the Bad Godesberg civic hall. They said the man was walking over the zebra crossing at the Stadthalle bus stop towards Von-der-Heydt-Strae at around 0.55am when the men approached him and asked for the time. When the 29-year-old pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket to check the time, two of the unknown persons demanded he hand over the phone and his valuables. When the man did not comply with this demand, he was physically attacked so that he fell to the ground, according to current police findings. The 29-year-old suffered injuries and was taken to hospital by ambulance. His valuables remained in his possession. A search was immediately started for the men who had fled in an unknown direction but was unsuccessful, which is why police are now asking for information from the public. Two of the suspects are described as follows: The first person is around 1.85 metres tall and has an Afro hairstyle. At the time of the incident, the German-speaking man was wearing a white jacket and dark blue jeans. The second perpetrator was around 1.70 metres tall with hair short at the sides with a dark pigtail. He also spoke German and was wearing white trousers and dark outer clothing at the time of the incident. Those with information should call the police on 0228 150. Between the time I wrote these words and the time that you are reading them, a team of government censors decided how much of what I wrote you would get to see. Fortunately, it was cleared without redactions. But I havent always been so fortunate. There are millions of others like me who face this scrutiny as present and former employees of the armed services and a dozen other government agencies, from the C.I.A. and F.B.I. to the State and Energy Departments. We have faithfully carried out our duties and upheld our oaths of allegiance to the Constitution. Many of us earned the highest trust of our country, serving in roles that brought us in contact with government secrets and classified material. We have honored and repaid that trust, guarding sensitive information and fulfilling the obligations associated with our security clearances. In return, we have been rewarded with what feels very much like a lifetime of distrust. Whenever we want to write about even the nonsensitive aspects of our service and experience, we have to submit our manuscripts and articles for prepublication review by the government. We have to do this even after we retire. I spent 31 years in sworn duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and Im pretty sure this is not how the First Amendment is supposed to work. Thats why I have joined in a lawsuit with four other former federal employees seeking to block the government from enforcing this review process in its current form. One person, who has supported a political competitor to Biden, acknowledges that she is speaking because Biden is considering entering the primaries; the other says that if Biden really respects women, he should not run and clear the field for the capable women candidates. Wait a minute: Is this what gender equality really means? Is this the kind of society we want to live in where right-wingers can do any vicious thing they want to anyone and shrug it off, while people on the center-left are supposed to expel from public life anyone who says a single wrong word or has done something benignly intended in the past that now does not fit changed norms? Not me, that is not the kind of America I want to live in. That is not the kind of Democratic primary I want to participate in. If Biden wants to run, I want to hear what he has to say and compare him, fair and square, to the others. Biden has long been known as an emotional person who hugs just about everyone he feels positively about, male and female. Now the social mores have shifted. He needs to say he realizes this and change his behavior accordingly. Everyone else, meanwhile, needs to get a grip. Anyone who experiences an unwanted word or gesture should tell the person involved that they would like them not to say/do that not wait a decade and contact the media in an expedient moment. And Democrats must keep in mind that they need votes in 2020 from millions of older Americans who are really put off by this kind of out-of-context piling on. [End of Skocpols email.] For more Joe Biden needs to cut it out. And so does the mob that is after him, Karen Tumulty writes in The Washington Post. My colleague Michelle Goldberg says that this is the wrong time for Biden to run and criticizes his reaction to this controversy: In response to Lucy Floress description of his touching, Biden could have told her that he was sorry for making her uneasy. Instead, he focused on his intentions rather than her experience, a faint echo of the way hed ignored [Anita] Hills experience decades ago. This week its Joe Bidens turn in the #MeToo barrel, and like many Democrats, Im torn about what to think. The allegations by Lucy Flores that in 2014, when she was running for lieutenant governor of Nevada, the vice president touched her shoulders and kissed the back of her head cannot exactly be dismissed as an outlier, given that another allegation of guerrilla nuzzling followed just 72 hours later (this time from 2009) and that multiple photo montages online suggest a similar pattern. And so we have another debate about male decency and respect, trying to weigh creepiness against over-exuberant affection, handsiness against glad-handing, all the while remembering that this is Joe Biden were talking about, a retail-politics guy from another era, known for arm grabs and bear hugs (youd see this all the time on the Senate floor the shoulder squeezing, the close-talking). He is, by nature, a physically expressive fellow. Hugs are not unfamiliar to him, and he seems to sense when people are feeling fragile, as Stephanie Carter, the wife of Ash Carter, a defense secretary under Barack Obama, wrote in an essay for Medium, noting that the creepy Uncle Joe photo featuring her as the recipient of a shoulder rub was quite welcome, thank you very much. These gray-zone allegations are of course still worth examining. But because they are salacious because they are embodied, because we can actually see them I wonder if we spend more time discussing them than another gray-zone problem that, in my view, is far more pervasive and often less easily solved with a sharp rebuke or a complaint to human resources: not being taken seriously. To the Editor: Re Dont Let Language Education Slip, by Benedicte de Montlaur (Op-Ed, March 27): Speaking and understanding another language, or several, opens doors to worlds beyond and also deep within oneself. Knowing only a single language is not only a cultural limitation, but even more, a lack of access to other ways of thought and perception. The variety of our world cannot be sampled in a single neighborhood or country. Reality is strangled in such a vacuum. The fruits of multilingualism have enabled this kid from Brooklyn to live and work in a dozen countries. I wonder how foreign literary classics, art, philosophy and politics can be appreciated through a single lens, much less understanding the lives of those with whom one shares no common means of communication. But then what does it matter if one prefers a life surrounded by a wall? Art Rosenberg Cresskill, N.J. This left untouched only assistance to the Palestinian security forces, long popular with both Israeli and American security officials. Yet in October, Congress adopted and Mr. Trump signed legislation that would make the Palestinian Authority, in return for accepting this and any other assistance, subject to the jurisdiction of American courts. This prompted Palestinian officials at the end of last year to reject further aid. The Trump administration has good reasons to be frustrated with both the Palestinian leadership and aid organizations. Unrwa has long been accused of failing to adequately monitor its staff and the curriculum in schools that it runs for extremism, and of inflating the number of Palestinian refugees to perpetuate its mission. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authoritys president, ordered contacts with the United States frozen after the embassy move and has refused to engage with American envoys regarding the Trump administrations efforts to devise an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. The United States has made clear that the decisions on aid are meant to apply pressure on Mr. Abbas to return to the negotiating table a goal consistent with longstanding American policy. Nevertheless, the elimination of American aid to the Palestinians is unlikely to achieve that goal. In fact, in the long run, it will probably undermine both American and Israeli interests. The Trump administration is right that American aid to the Palestinians provides Washington with leverage, but it is applying that leverage to the wrong end. Few observers believe that Mr. Abbas is interested in negotiating with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump, having rebuffed their less conservative predecessors or, even if negotiations resumed, that a peace deal could be reached at this time. Yet aid can be leveraged to advance American aims in other ways. Past administrations have used it to strengthen the authority of Palestinian officials who favor peace and to deter the Palestinian Authority from pursuing Israel at the United Nations and in international courts. Congress has sought through the Taylor Force Act to compel the Palestinian Authority to cease the reprehensible practice of paying the families of terrorists, by reducing aid to the Palestinians by an amount equal to what the Palestinian Authority pays to families of prisoners and accused terrorists. And many supporters of Israel would have liked to see American funding for Unrwa used to compel the organization to reform. These goals have been undermined by the elimination of aid. You cant tie strings to assistance that has already been cut. The desire to crush those who displease him is a defining characteristic of this president. When challenged, his impulse is to lash out preferably with personal, degrading insults. This has been on most vivid display with the myriad investigations into sketchy presidential behavior, but it also has been a hallmark of Mr. Trumps approach to key policy issues. Border security, health care, trade you name the debate, Mr. Trumps answer is to stake out his position, vowing pain and regret for those who do not embrace it. On Sunday, the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went on television to rub Democrats noses in the growing border tumult and defend the presidents closure threat. We hate to say we told you so, he said. We need border security, and were going to do the best we can with what we have. He also dismissed questions about the wisdom of Mr. Trumps plan to end financial aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Complaining about the troubled nations failure to stop their people from fleeing north, Mr. Mulvaney brushed off administration experts who have cautioned that cutting aid would further destabilize the countries, likely worsening the migrant crisis. Translation: Fine. No one will give us a border wall. Well show you the meaning of chaos. The presidents fans cheer his pugilism, as though he was bravely defending himself and them against big, bad bullies. But all too often, the price is paid by the innocent and vulnerable: migrant children snatched from their parents at the border, federal workers thrown into financial turmoil by the government shutdown, farm workers and manufacturers caught up in the trade war, the millions of Americans who stand to lose their health insurance if the administration keeps laboring to kill Obamacare. For Mr. Trump, anyone who stands between him and his objective becomes collateral damage. And pity those considered part of an unfriendly demographic, such as the people of Puerto Rico, whom the president dismisses as a tool of the Democratic Party and mistreats accordingly . As the Senate has worked this week to hash out a comprehensive disaster-relief package, Mr. Trumps contribution has been to fire off a series of obnoxious, dishonest tweets charging that corrupt or incompetent island officials have wasted epic levels of relief funding and are now hot for Democrats to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful! A White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, subsequently appeared on TV with a spirited defense of his bosss broadside against that country. As for those who actively defy the president, the goal is not simply to punish them for a single transgression but to discourage them from future rebellions. Deliver a painful enough lesson, and everyone will fall into line . The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Gail: All the Democratic presidential candidates are not talking about Medicare for all. Some of the ones who did are trying to backpedal, not really having thought about what it meant before they went there. Three-fifths of the adult population from 19 to 64 get their health insurance from employers, and a lot of them like it. Theyre going to get very nervous if they think they might have to give it up. But we need sweeping change. Our current health care system is wildly expensive because its structured in a crazy way that creates piles and piles of stupendously expensive paperwork. We could create a government-run public policy option that would give people the security of Obamacare without the crazy structure. And gradually, if the option was attractive enough, employers might want to get in on it, too. Bret: I definitely agree about the paperwork problem. My own views about health care are pretty libertarian. We need radical price transparency so that people are aware of the huge disparities in price between say, a blood test from Clinic A versus Clinic B. We need tort reform so that doctors dont live in mortal fear of being sued by patients. We need more than just gold, silver and bronze insurance options: Healthy young people should also be able to buy cut-rate plans that cover only catastrophes. As for Medicare, the long-term goal should be to get rid of it. Thats obviously distinct from Medicaid: Even crazy right-wingers like me believe that government has a moral duty to ensure that poor people have good access to quality medical care from womb to tomb. Gail: Doctors do have to pay heavy insurance premiums to protect themselves from lawsuits. But patients also have to be protected from careless or inept physicians. Its tough to find a perfect solution people have been trying for years. But fine by me if you want to work on it, Bret. Ill be cheering from the galleries. Bret: The deeper problem with all of these health care debates is that were discussing something that inevitably generates bad outcomes even under the best of circumstances. But can we switch subjects from tragedy to farce? Im curious to know your take on the Jussie Smollett story, which is what everyone I know was talking about last week (when they werent talking about Mueller). Gail: You do have to thank the guy for taking Donald Trump off our minds. Not every day do you have a TV star making up a story of being attacked by MAGA hat-wearing racist thugs. Everybody was stunned when the prosecutor dropped all the charges. She basically said, well, this is what we always do with first offenders who dont pose a threat to the community. To understand the significance of this, it helps to know the dominant narrative of Turkish politics today. It goes something like this: Throughout its republican history, Turkey has been governed by a secular elite characterized by its impish adherence to Western imperialists. A group of plucky conservatives kept challenging this system until, in 1994, a young Erdogan and his friend (now dismissed) won the mayoralties of Istanbul and Ankara, respectively. Amid the economic crises, weak coalition governments and civil unrest of the 1990s, Mr. Erdogan and his associates were islands of good governance. They served these great cities with distinction and earned a reputation of incorruptibility. In 2002, their movement, now under the banner of the A.K.P., was elected into national office. Under Mr. Erdogans firm leadership, they grew the economy, fixed the bureaucracy and won up to half of the popular vote. Turkey was booming; the world talked about the Turkish model of majority-Muslim democracy. By the mid-2010s, Mr. Erdogan had defanged the coup-prone military and disenfranchised the corrupt elites of old. The jealous opposition parties joined shadowy outside actors in plotting the downfall of Turkeys great revival. Some of Mr. Erdogans friends and allies betrayed him, but the people did not. When the economy slowed down, or the court system got clogged up, he asked people to sacrifice for the cause of what he called New Turkey, a nation unshackled from Western domination and free to soar to new heights. But the myth of New Turkey is paradoxical. It was built on doing practical things in the 1990s, like filling potholes. But to maintain the myth, Mr. Erdogan sometimes asked voters to ignore those practical things and simply to have faith in the cause. On Sunday, there was a major breach in this wall of faith, especially in Istanbul, where Mr. Erdogans love of the people first transmuted into government service. This was probably due to a combination of growing economic problems and an increasingly competent opposition. It is a close count in Istanbul, and the Supreme Electoral Council has asked for three days to check everything. As things stand, it seems that Mr. Imamoglu, the young and stubbornly positive candidate of the C.H.P., will get the job that started Mr. Erdogans great love affair with the people 25 years ago. [Click here to get NYT Parenting in your inbox once a week.] There arent many topics in the parenting space where the research is clear, but spanking is one of them. In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed its position that spanking isnt effective discipline, and physical punishment in general may lead to increased aggression in children. Though rates of spanking have declined over the past few decades, the vast majority of Americans still spank (or feel pressured to spank) their little kids . We have an essay this week from Zuzana Boehmova about how her family thinks shes acting like a snotty, New Age-y hippie because she doesnt spank her children. This piece illustrates poignantly how hard it is to not lash out at a toddler who has driven you to the brink of your patience (and sanity) particularly if you were spanked as a child, and its a default reaction in your lizard brain. As Boehmova put it in her essay, I often feel myself at a loss when dealing with my own kids. When they upset me, I draw a blank on how best to react to their tantrums, frustrations or straight-up naughty behavior. Because many parents feel this way, we asked two pediatricians whose bylines youll see in NYT Parenting in the coming months Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, a pediatrician at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Childrens Hospital of Chicago; and Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine for advice on how to discipline toddlers effectively, and calm yourself down when youre at the end of your rope. Here are their best tips. Stay consistent. If multiple caretakers watch your children, said Dr. Heard-Garris, have everyone enforce the same behavioral standards. Discussing stable, consistent rules are the first step before you talk about the actual approaches to discipline, she said. If Grandma has different rules than Dad, your 3-year-old might get confused (or, in my experience, use the knowledge of different standards to undermine the entire system). For three decades, Winnies, an old-school dive and raucous karaoke bar, lured Chinatown residents and fashionable visitors for boozy singalongs in the shadow of the Tombs (otherwise known as the Manhattan Detention Complex). When it shut in 2015, it became another casualty of a gilded city. But an unlikely resurrection occurred on Valentines Day this year, when Winnies was reborn on East Broadway. On a cold Friday night in March, Teddy Mui, the manager and 40-year-old son of Winnie Mui, the owner, seemed as if he had returned from a lengthy stay on a desert island. Theyre not even calling it Chinatown its Two Bridges, he said of neighborhood newcomers. At the old Winnies, our first crowd was Chinese gangsters. As he reminisced, lyrics from a Journey song lit up the karaoke screen: Strangers waiting / Up and down the boulevard. THE PLACE Winnies is lodged above one of Chinatowns busiest stretches, threaded up a staircase within a knot of cellphone repair shops and jewelry emporiums. The rectangular room has ambiguously underdesigned decor. The dark wood bar is decorated with a ZZ plant and a framed photo of Ms. Mui with Bill Clinton; a small stage and red booths conjure the spirit of its first location. Michael Jackson exhibition : Visitors discuss allegations of abuse Bonn Phenomenon, icon, King of Pop? Visitors to the Michael Jackson exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle discuss the allegations of abuse against the deceased superstar. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken Phenomenon, icon, King of Pop: superlatives surrounded Michael Jackson and there are a whole series of visual artists who have worked on interpreting them. There are, for example, the dance shoes being lifted by their tips by balloons to depict the musicians light-footedness, or the painting of Jackson on horseback like the Spanish King Philipp II long ago. Andy Warhol stylised his friend for a portrayal in Time Magazine. These are the subject of the exhibition Michael Jackson: On the Wall at the Bundeskunsthalle. What it does not deal with is the current discussion about allegations of abuse against the deceased musician that has been rekindled by the documentary Leaving Neverland. The Bundeskunsthalle is aware that this topic cannot be ignored in relation to Michael Jackson, said Beate Marks-Hanen, who was leading a tour through the exhibition and discussing it with her companions at selected exhibits. Michael Jackson exhibition hung in the balance The show in Bonn hung in the balance because of the allegations, but was then put on after all. According to Mark-Hanen, the exhibition is not biographical; it is about Jackson as a subject for other artists. It was also curated before the discussion resurfaced. Visitors have to look for the issue of child abuse in these works themselves. The painting by Kehinde Wiley, commissioned by Jackson himself, leaves a lot of room for interpretation. This depicts him as a king - after all, he called himself the King of Pop. Far removed from reality, commented one participant in the tour. He lived in a fairytale world after all. Wiley finished the work after Jacksons death, but the two cherubs, one with white and one with brown skin, over the superstar in gleaming armour on horseback, were not planned in the original, Marks-Hanen explained. Jil and Marcel, who did not want their surnames in the paper, said there was a lot that could be interpreted into the works. Marcel has been an avid Jackson admirer for twelve years and has had the cover to the album Dangerous tattooed on his back. I had a concert ticket for his last tour, but he died before that. How does Marcel feel about the allegations of abuse and the documentary? It goes in one ear and out the other, says the 26-year-old. Many things have already been refuted. Jil, 21-years-old, felt it was as if his naivety was being exploited. Both liked the exhibition because the issue was not given much space. It is hard to separate his art from his deeds, said Maximilian Blume. He and Carolin Giese could imagnine there was something to the allegations. We will probably never quite fathom what Michael Jackson was really like, said Blume. The exhibition did not help either, but they both thought it was great. AMSTERDAM At an Amsterdam rehearsal studio one recent afternoon, Thomas Mann, the German author who died in 1955, was speaking with the main character of his novella, Death in Venice. I have to get out of here, said Gustav von Aschenbach, collapsing into a chair with his head in his hands. Thats a good idea, said Mann, hovering nearby. But Mann did not let him leave. Instead, he forced his character to stay in Venice, tormented by his obsession with a 14-year-old Polish boy, and to die there. In this new musical production of Death in Venice, created by the internationally renowned Belgian director Ivo van Hove, the author is present. Mann doesnt only converse with his protagonist, but also with his own wife, Katia, who watches from the sidelines as her husband also becomes increasingly distracted by the sight of the beautiful boy. If an airline is able to put you on a connecting flight or another nonstop flight under the threshold, then technically they dont owe you anything, said Jamie Larounis, founder of travel blog The Forward Cabin. Heres what you should know: How can I file a claim for compensation? First, its helpful to know that the type of compensation you can receive depends on the nature of your delay or cancellation. If your flight was delayed by fewer than three hours, then you arent covered under the rule. Also, if your flight was delayed or canceled for extraordinary circumstances, like severe weather or political unrest, then it isnt covered either. Airlines generally have flight compensation information located on their websites (though you may have to look closely to find it). The airlines, according to the legislation, are required to inform passengers of their rights. When you file the claim with your airline or through a watchdog agency such as FlightRight, you will be asked to provide your flight number and booking reference, as well as information about why your flight was delayed or canceled, so its helpful to have that information handy. Does the regulation apply only to airlines with headquarters in E.U. countries? To be eligible for compensation, your flight must be on an E.U. airline only if youre flying into an E.U. country. But if your flight originated in, or if youre traveling within, the E.U., then you are also covered under the regulation regardless of the airline. They quickly learned otherwise. BP allowed Mr. Silverman to conduct a confidential deposition about the well with a BP executive, David Jenkins. Reached by The Times, Mr. Jenkins said his memories were vague, but he recalled the deposition which was sealed by the court and telling Mr. Silverman that there was never any evidence at all, at that stage, that there was anything material within the refuge. Mr. Silverman, similarly, remembered being convinced that either there was no oil and gas there, or the oil couldnt be produced at an economic value. Some of the documents in the case are missing from the court file, perhaps lost over the decades. But in more than 1,000 pages of legal and regulatory filings, The Times discovered other hints that the findings were disappointing. Under oath, a Goldman Sachs banker who worked on the merger testified that BP had led him to believe that the test well results were not particularly encouraging. John Warden, a lawyer who represented BP, said that he had only dim memories of the case but that the well results became a nonissue. Told of The Timess reporting, he added, It looks to me like you have gotten it right. Mr. Silverman hinted at the findings in a memoir he self-published 10 years ago, but has never before spoken out directly about what was said in the deposition. He said he was breaking his silence because of the Trump administrations decision to open the refuge protected by Congress for decades for oil development. This is important for the whole country, he said. One dry hole does not necessarily mean there is no oil to be found, especially since some decades-old seismic tests indicate that the area may hold as much as 12 billion barrels worth. And knowledge of the areas subsurface geology is valuable. But confirmation that the results of the only test well were discouraging could embolden opponents of drilling and prompt second thoughts among potential lease bidders. Two students at the University of Arizona are facing criminal charges after protesting the appearance of United States Customs and Border Protection officers at an event last month on campus, an official said Tuesday. Denisse Moreno Melchor, 20, and Mariel Alexandra Bustamante, 22, were charged on Monday with interfering with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution, a misdemeanor, said Chris W. Sigurdson, a university spokesman. Ms. Moreno Melchor was also charged with making threats and intimidation, he said. The students are scheduled to appear at the Pima County Justice Court on April 22, he said. They have not been barred from campus. The students did not immediately reply to requests for comment. A Class 1 misdemeanor carries a possible sentence of up to six months in jail, Mr. Sigurdson said. Nearly five years ago, Lesley McSpadden appeared distraught before the world after finding out that a grand jury had declined to indict a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in the fatal shooting of her teenage son, Michael Brown, who was black. She stood on top of a car, surrounded by a sea of supporters. Ive been here my whole life; I aint never had to go through nothing like this, she said before sinking her face into her hands. Ms. McSpadden, 39, came up short on Tuesday in an attempt to turn that sorrow and anger into an elected post. She lost the three-way race for a seat on the Ferguson City Council to Fran Griffin, a black woman who has been deeply involved in reform efforts in Ferguson since the death of Mr. Brown, who was 18. Ms. McSpaddens election bid was her latest effort to effect change in the name of her son. She made appearances with other black mothers who lost their children to violence, including on stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2016. She also testified before the Missouri State Legislature. michael barbaro From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Trump has backed away from his call to replace the Affordable Care Act with a Republican alternative. Alex Burns on why the presidents own party talked him out of it. Its Wednesday, April 3. alexander burns So last week was as close to a moment of total happiness as President Trump has had in a long time. [music] archived recording 1 President Trumps legal team as well as many of those who are close to the president are saying they feel the Mueller report fully vindicates the president after nearly archived recording 2 Theres no way to take this letter other than a huge win for the president. archived recording 3 To say White House officials are happily telling the American people I told you so, well, that would frankly be a bit of an understatement. archived recording (donald trump) And after three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead. The collusion delusion is over. alexander burns Thats what makes it all the more surprising that his administration decided to dive right back into one of the most politically damaging fights of his whole presidency, which is health care. archived recording 1 The Trump Justice Department just announced a major reversal on Obamacare. archived recording 2 Today, he called the Affordable Care Act horrible and is mounting a push to kill it off. archived recording 3 Fresh off his Mueller investigation victory, some of his biggest supporters are questioning the timing. archived recording 4 Here you have a huge messaging win for the president and the White House with this Mueller summary. Why now? Why do this? archived recording 5 Why now, maybe even why at all? michael barbaro And how does he dive back into that politically damaging fight? alexander burns He directs the Justice Department to take sides in a lawsuit that has been making its way through the federal courts. It was brought by Republican legal officials in a number of states. It has been ruled on by one judge in Texas that the Affordable Care Act is invalid. archived recording A federal judge in Texas has just struck down Obamacare. True story. Judge Reed OConnor says the individual mandate, the part of the law that requires you to participate, is unconstitutional. And because it cannot be separated from the rest of the law, which it cannot be, the entire law is invalid. alexander burns It is seen as a really long-shot challenge to the Affordable Care Act, something that, in all likelihood, will probably not result in the law being struck down as a whole, but the White House was going to have to decide at some point whether they were going to defend the A.C.A. at the highest levels of the legal system or whether they were going to take sides against a law thats on the books that Congress failed to repeal when it had the chance. And thats what they did. archived recording (donald trump) We think it will be upheld, and we think it will do very well in the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is out, we will have a plan thats far better than Obamacare. michael barbaro And my sense is that under normal circumstances, the White House almost reflexively defends laws put on the books by Congress. alexander burns Its a pretty extraordinary step for the president to take sides, not just against a law thats already on the books, but really the biggest piece of social legislation thats been passed in recent history. And he does it at the urging of some of his most conservative advisers in the White House, including the chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney archived recording (mick mulvaney) And its hard to know where to begin when youre talking about how bad the current health care legislation is for small business. alexander burns who, before he was a member of the Trump administration, was a hardliner in the House of Representatives waging war on the Affordable Care Act from Capitol Hill. archived recording (mick mulvaney) Its almost as if the folks who wrote this piece of legislation last year either have no idea how small business works or they dont care how small business works. Either way, the current health care legislation is a complete disaster for small business, and alexander burns The argument that Mulvaney and others make is that if the president is going to run for re-election as a guy who made promises and kept his promises, especially to conservative voters who still care a lot about getting rid of Obamacare, he has got to take every chance he has to go against it. michael barbaro And given the dynamics of Congress, this is perhaps his best chance? alexander burns Maybe his only chance, because Democrats now control the House. There is really no shot for Republicans to pass a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act. So if theyre going to take it down, theyre going to take it down in the courts. michael barbaro O.K., well, what is the response to this announcement? alexander burns Well, Democrats are totally elated. archived recording (nancy pelosi) This is actually an opportunity for us to speak to the American people with clarity. archived recording (chuck schumer) Its a stark reminder of the difference between our two parties. Democrats are fighting to expand and improve health care coverage and lower costs while Republicans are trying to take it all away and raise costs. alexander burns They have spent, at this point, several days on the defensive about some of the claims that they made about what was likely to be in Robert Muellers report. They are desperate to get away from their own divisive fights about the nature of liberal health care policy. You have had, in the presidential primaries, in the House of Representatives, even in the Senate where Democrats arent in control, just endless tugs of war between moderate liberals, very liberal Democrats, far-left Democrats over what kind of health care system the country ought to have in an ideal world. Should it be European-style single-payer health care? Should it be a system that just totally does away with private health insurance? All these kinds of divisive debates on the left that have had Democrats tripping over each other. But President Trump weighs in the way he does on the Affordable Care Act, and all of a sudden all those conflicts hit pause. archived recording (nancy pelosi) Oh, no, please. archived recording (SINGING) Happy birthday to you! alexander burns And the timing on the Democratic side is sort of comical in that it is literally Nancy Pelosis 79th birthday archived recording Happy birthday to you. alexander burns the morning after this Justice Department announcement comes out. And when you have Democrats singing Happy Birthday to her, there was this sense in the caucus that she had gotten the best gift a president could have given her. michael barbaro What is the reaction from Republicans in Congress? alexander burns Well, real dismay and surprise and sort of horror. archived recording Even Republicans appear bewildered by President Trumps promise to make the G.O.P. the party of health care. alexander burns And not just from the few remaining relatively moderate Republicans. archived recording Some Republicans are nervous about that, including House minority leader Kevin McCarthy. According to Axios, McCarthy called the president and told him the decision made no sense, saying the health care battle helped Democrats win the House and several state capitals last year. alexander burns Every Republican analysis of the midterm elections concluded that they lost the House because of health care more than any other individual policy issue. So if you are Kevin McCarthy, the new House minority leader, you are just appalled at the idea that your members are now going to have to have this fight all over again. michael barbaro Right. We had talked about this with you during the midterms that there had been this huge public shift on Obamacare and that voters who might have previously been against it now do not want it taken away. alexander burns Thats right. It was less of a thank you to Democrats than a punishment for Republicans, that Democrats never got the political boost back in 2010, 2012, 2014 that they hoped they would get for passing a big new social benefit. But what they did ultimately get was the benefit of voters turning against Republicans who wanted to take those benefits away. So Obamacare as a term, as a law, still kind of a mixed bag politically, but there are elements in that law, like protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions, that are enormously popular. And Republicans look back on the last campaign, the one that ended really rather badly for them, and see that as, more than anything else, the fatal political mistake they made. michael barbaro So why would President Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, who had to have watched that same midterm that youre describing, why would he do this if the takeaway of that midterm is that the Affordable Care Act is no longer toxic and might even be liked by a wide cross-section of Americans? alexander burns In the presidents public statements, and as far as we can tell based on his personal thinking, he recognizes that health care is a huge political vulnerability for Republicans, that the last thing they did on health care, that big repeal drive, was politically devastating to them. And his proclamation that they need to become the party of health care clearly reflects an understanding that a problem needs to be fixed. archived recording (donald trump) So were going to get rid of Obamacare. And I said it the other day. The Republican Party will become the party of great health care. Its good. Its important. michael barbaro I guess I can see President Trumps argument there. It feels kind of legitimate. Wouldnt it be smart for Republicans heading into the next presidential election, 2020, to recognize that there are things that voters like about the Affordable Care Act? But in order for it to be a benefit for the Republicans and not the Democrats, they need to convince voters that the Democratic plan is a bad one and that Republicans will give them a better one. alexander burns Right. But giving voters a better version of health care provided by the Republican Party has always had to mean more than just getting rid of the system that currently exists. Its this strange kind of bifurcated mental space that Republicans have been living in politically, where they want to run against Democrats for trying to blow up the health care system and replace it with single-payer, and, on the other side, they want to get rid of much of the existing health care system and replace it with something to be named later. michael barbaro In other words, they dont really have a plan to replace it. alexander burns They dont, and they kind of never have, not a consensus plan thats supported by a broad cross-section of the party and voters. And thats why when the president came out with this position through the Justice Department and then suggested that Republicans in Congress ought to come up with something great, the backlash from Republicans at the highest levels of the congressional party was swift and severe. The view among congressional Republicans was that this was just sort of a total fantasy coming from the president. The idea that they would not only come up with a plan and come up with a plan that would be popular and meet the standards that the president has laid out in rally after rally, but that they would do it within a year and then run on it in 2020 just seemed like it was cut from whole cloth. michael barbaro Is there also a feeling among Republicans toward the president along the lines of, dude, we just want to stop calling attention to this issue. Its a losing issue for us. Stop drawing attention to it. alexander burns Oh, absolutely. And if the concern among folks like Mick Mulvaney is that walking away from the fight looks like surrender, the view from a lot of Republicans on the Hill is theyve already lost. They can talk about how they lost, or they can talk about other stuff, and the president is choosing to talk about defeat. michael barbaro Right. Instead of talking about what I had imagined Republicans would be talking about for the next couple of months and maybe even the next year, which is the Democratic fight over Medicare for all, the Democratic fight over whether private insurance should even exist I had expected that that would be the consuming discussion in the political world and in the political campaigns to come when it came to health care. alexander burns So did I, and I think so did a lot of Republican candidates down the ballot preparing for 2020. There was always going to be tension in the Republican message about Democratic radicalism on health care, because if you are running in 2020 on the idea that Democrats are going to blow up the current system and replace it with European-style medicine, youre kind of implicitly defending the status quo system as it exists under Obamacare. Its an extraordinarily awkward position for Republicans to be in. Can you be opposed to Democratic proposals to make the health care system even more liberal, even more regulated or structured by the government, without essentially defending the system that Barack Obama put in place? We dont know how theyre going to walk that line. We dont know to what extent theyll even try. But the presidents current approach, which is to say that Democrats will do something drastic and bad to your health care, and Im not quite going to tell you what Im going to do yet, doesnt seem sustainable. michael barbaro So what happens in the last 24 hours or so to this Trump-led project to try to strike down, repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? alexander burns Well, after days of other Republicans expressing public discomfort with where the president was headed archived recording (mitch mcconnell) So I made it clear to him we were not going to be doing that in the Senate. alexander burns Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, conveyed in no uncertain terms to the White House that this was a non-starter in the Senate, that the president was free to do what he wanted to do on health care, but that Senate Republicans were not going to be taking the lead on this. It was not a fight they wanted, period, full stop. archived recording (mitch mcconnell) So we dont have a misunderstanding about that. We will not be doing comprehensive in the Senate. alexander burns The president seemed to have gotten the message. archived recording President Trump on the retreat. archived recording (donald trump) No, I wanted to delay it myself. I want to put it after the election. alexander burns And his response was to go onto Twitter and to declare that they are totally going to do all the things that he said they were going to do, but at a much later date, after the 2020 election. michael barbaro Right. He cited the date 2021. We will do all this right after the election. alexander burns Right after an election when, in his construction, he would be re-elected, Republicans would hold the Senate, and they would take back control of the House. So thats not just a delay of game. That is setting a whole bunch of other conditions on what would need to happen to get there. michael barbaro Were you surprised, Alex, that the president backed down on this so quickly? alexander burns I was surprised by how fast it happened. I wasnt surprised that he sort of came up with a really big theory of what should happen next and then eventually let it disintegrate, because weve seen that pattern a number of times. But to pick a fight this big and to stick with it for so little time is the definition of politically counterproductive. michael barbaro So now, we are basically back where we started. The Affordable Care Act is likely to remain the law of the land. So what did we learn from this weeklong ordeal? alexander burns Well, the biggest thing we learned is that the politics of health care have been turned on their head in the last couple of years, and that the Affordable Care Act is no longer a liability for Democrats, and that Republicans, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, have largely abandoned the fight. [music] The fact that you had the senior-most members of the congressional party saying so clearly to a president they helped elect and have loyally supported, we dont want to touch health care it would have been sort of unimaginable to someone five years ago that that would happen with a Republican president in office. michael barbaro Alex, thank you very much. alexander burns Thank you. [music] alexander burns Tomorrows my birthday, so this is like a little birthday special. michael barbaro Yay! Is that on the mic? lisa tobin Happy birthday tomorrow! michael barbaro Well be right back. [MUSIC]: Heres what else you need to know today. archived recording (theresa may) Despite the best efforts of M.P.s, the process that the House of Commons has tried to lead has not come up with an answer. So today, Im taking action to break the logjam. michael barbaro In her latest attempt to rally support for Brexit after a series of embarrassing setbacks, British prime minister Theresa May said she would seek a new delay for leaving the European Union and would begin negotiating a Brexit plan with her political rivals in the Labour Party. archived recording (theresa may) Im offering to sit down with the leader of the opposition and to try to agree a plan that we would both stick to to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal. michael barbaro The attempt to work across the aisle with the Labour Party suggests that May cannot win enough support within her own Conservative Party to pass her Brexit plan. archived recording (theresa may) The ideal outcome of this process would be to agree an approach on a future relationship that delivers on the result of the referendum that both the leader of the opposition and I could put to the House for approval, and which I could then take to next weeks European Council. michael barbaro The legality of the censorship system is unsettled in part because the practice of prior restraint by the government has grown enormously since that case was decided, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Bush administration Justice Department official who has co-written several articles critical of the process. At the C.I.A. alone, the agency went from reviewing about 1,000 pages a year in the early 1970s to about 150,000 in 2014, the lawsuit said, citing documents the A.C.L.U. and Knight Institute obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This is a huge problem, Mr. Goldsmith said. The governments system of prior restraint is wildly overbroad, undisciplined and subject to inconsistent standards. It results in lots of important information that doesnt threaten national security not being made public. It chills people from writing things that would help people understand how the government works. In 2017, as part of the annual intelligence authorization law, Congress instructed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to come up with a new system for the intelligence community that would yield timely, reasoned, and impartial decisions that are subject to appeal. Lawmakers set a deadline of 180 days. But that deadline came and went, and the office still has not completed a new policy, although officials are working on it, an office spokeswoman said on Monday. The plaintiffs asked a judge to rule that agencies cannot enforce any obligation to submit their future writings to review boards. They took no position on whether the solution is to fix the system or make it voluntary which would leave former intelligence and military officials and contractors free to publish without prior review if they assume the risk of being prosecuted if they divulge any dangerous secrets. The plaintiffs include Timothy H. Edgar and Richard H. Immerman, former employees of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Melvin A. Goodman, a former C.I.A. employee; Anuradha Bhagwati, a former Marine; and Mark Fallon, a former counterterrorism agent at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Dozens of women were filmed without their knowledge while receiving medical attention including having surgery and giving birth at a California hospital, according to a lawsuit filed last week in a state superior court. A lawyer for the women said 1,800 patients may have been filmed. The lawsuit alleges that motion-activated cameras were set up in three operating rooms at Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa, Calif., as part of an effort to catch a possible medicine thief. But between July 2012 and June 2013, the cameras also recorded female patients at the hospitals Womens Health Center as they consulted with physicians, got undressed, underwent examinations and went under anesthesia for operations, according to the complaint. Eighty-one women are named as plaintiffs and more are expected to join, said the lawyer, Allison H. Goddard. She said that the videos did not appear to include audio, but that some womens faces were visible. For weeks, Mr. Rossello has asked the White House for a private meeting with Mr. Trump to lay out the islands case for why it desperately needs federal funds for rebuilding after Hurricane Maria. But Mr. Rossellos request has gone unanswered, and he has tried instead to communicate with the president publicly, saying in cable news interviews, in official appearances and on Twitter that he fears Mr. Trump has been misled about Puerto Ricos needs. Mr. Rossellos fight may be an uphill battle with a president who has made it clear that he views more federal aid to Puerto Rico as throwing money away. Mr. Trumps advisers also view the pleas from local officials as part of a campaign to shift the blame for what they view as severe mismanagement of the supplies and money sent after the storm. People familiar with Mr. Trumps thinking said he was skeptical that additional aid would not be used to pay down Puerto Ricos debt. The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who has made it clear that he believes Puerto Rico will need to find its own way out of the debt crisis, is believed to be encouraging the presidents negative view of the island. In Puerto Rico, however, Mr. Trumps stance is being viewed through the lens of race. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Rossello mentioned, unprompted, that Puerto Ricos population was almost entirely Latino and said that historically, there have been ethnic undertones to the treatment of Puerto Ricans by Washington. We dont want special treatment, he said. We just want equal treatment. The governor also has bigger issues to deal with at home: The resignations of two power players in his cabinet became public late on Monday. Julia Keleher, the education secretary, and Hector M. Pesquera, the public safety secretary, had been among the least popular members of Mr. Rossellos government. Their departures dominated the headlines in the local news media, which made little reference to what is widely seen here as yet another episode of presidential bluster. That is not to say Puerto Ricans necessarily disagree with Mr. Trumps criticism of the commonwealths leaders, even if many locals dislike the president himself, or the disdainful way he sometimes refers to the island. Prosecutors in North Carolina and Massachusetts have been in contact with the two women who accused Mr. Fairfax Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson but there has been no public indication yet that a criminal investigation has been formally opened. Republican lawmakers announced plans for an investigative hearing, and both accusers have said repeatedly that they are willing to testify publicly as part of a bipartisan process, but Democratic lawmakers have balked, seeing such a hearing as a fruitless exercise prone to partisan grandstanding. At this point, there are few other obvious options. We are actually engaged in initiating processes that will make the truth known, Mr. Fairfax said at the event in Hampton, speaking over the live jazz music and pleas for him to join in group photos. He declined to elaborate further. On Sunday, a lawyer for Mr. Fairfax issued a news release saying that Mr. Fairfax had undergone polygraph examinations administered by a former F.B.I. agent, and that the results demonstrated that Lt. Gov. Fairfax was telling the truth in denying the allegations. A spokeswoman said these exams were separate from the processes that Mr. Fairfax had spoken of earlier. And so life goes on in Virginia, with the legislature coming back this week for a quick session and with the political jockeying getting underway before the primaries in June. Democratic lawmakers who are asked what may come next on the scandal front have no concrete answer; most say their constituents would rather hear about roadwork, school financing and health care. Those, after all, are matters that state politicians can actually change, as opposed to the things that apparently they cannot. The calls for resignation have not been rescinded, Delegate Jeff Bourne, a member of the legislative black caucus, said a few days before appearing with the governor at a bill-signing ceremony. But I think its one of those things where we are operating in the current state of affairs. And the current state of affairs is that the governor and lieutenant governor are still there. An honor walk is a powerful act of community. Something solemn, even sacred, happens in those 15 minutes in the hallway. We wait and talk with people from all professions and all walks of life. Together, we honor a great sacrifice. We give thanks. We hope to help a grieving family in a moment of fathomless loss. Jennifer DeMaroney is an organ donation coordinator who brought the honor walk to my hospital in an unconventional way. Instead of working the byzantine committees of a billion-dollar hospital bureaucracy, Ms. DeMaroney says she stormed in unannounced to the office of Eileen Whalen, the hospitals president, with a photograph of another states honor walk, asking if we could do the same thing. Ms. Whalen, a former trauma nurse and governing board chair of the Center for Donation and Transplant of New York and Vermont, approved our first honor walk on the spot. Ms. Whalen said it was an easy decision. She wanted to provide grieving families with a way to give back, and for everyone to help those families endure their loss. She agreed with Ms. DeMaroney that the honor walk lets families know we think the people who donate to save a life are heroes. We need those heroes desperately. The United Network for Organ Sharing estimates that more than 113,000 people are waiting to receive organ transplants. More people donate organs each year, but still, in 2017 over 6,500 people died while on the waiting list. I spoke with Missy Holliday, organ operations director at LifeCenter in Cincinnati, where an honor walk garnere d national social media attention. Ms. Holliday said LifeCenter began honor walks in December 2017 in response, in part, to intensive care unit nurses who wanted a way to honor former patients who donated. The staff has learned to place a chair in the hallway the day of an honor walk in case a family member needs a moment to sit and cry and receive support. And the ritual has entered the popular culture as well: Last week an episode of Greys Anatomy adapted the hallway ceremony for a powerful scene involving a victim of sexual assault. PARIS The president of Algeria resigned Tuesday night under pressure from the army following weeks of mass protests, closing out the reign of North Africas longest-serving leader but not ending a political impasse in a country where the street is demanding revolutionary change. The state news agency said that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who is ailing and paralyzed and has not spoken to his countrymen in seven years, had submitted his resignation. His departure followed quickly after a statement from the chief of staff of Algerias army, the traditional arbiter of political life in the country, calling for an immediate declaration from the constitutional council that Mr. Bouteflika was unfit for office. Mr. Bouteflika, who was president for 20 years, had sought to prolong his rule, pushed by family members and others in Algerias ruling elite who sought the preservation of their narrow personal interests, the army chief of staff, Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah, said Tuesday night. Look at the numbers, and something of a mystery emerges regarding the Trump administrations claims of a surge of uncontrolled arrivals. Net migration across the southern border is at historic lows. Border apprehensions of unauthorized arrivals were at the lowest in modern record in 2017 and 2018. Apprehensions are up this spring, but still far below the highs of the 1980s, 1990s or early 2000s. Yet processing centers and detention centers are filling, some to near-capacity, straining to meet even basic medical needs of migrant families. Images from the border show women and children huddling in overcrowded facilities. The answer, immigration experts say, is that the crisis isnt primarily caused by the number of arrivals, but by Trump administration policies that disperse them to a handful of centers and that treat families who voluntarily surrender as invaders creating the appearance of an invasion. What Mr. Haryo was describing, though he did not know it at the time, was a malfunction of MCAS, which automatically forces the planes nose down if data indicates that the jet is angled too sharply upward and might stall. Nurcahyo Utomo, the head of the safety groups air-accident subcommittee, said he first learned of the term MCAS from news reports. People immediately assumed this was a Lion Air problem, an issue with a terrible Indonesian airline, said Gerry Soejatman, an Indonesian aviation analyst. But when a brand-new plane crashes, you have to look at all the factors, including the possibility of a manufacturer problem or defect. And you have to look really carefully when that manufacturer isnt providing all the answers. Days after Flight 610 crashed, Polana Pramesti, the head of Indonesias civil aviation authority, waited for visiting Boeing and F.A.A. officials to talk to her. As head of Indonesias version of the F.A.A., she wanted advice on whether to ground Max 8 jets in Indonesia. But the Americans, who did spend time with transportation safety committee officials, never came to her, she said. The official in her office in charge of airworthiness and aircraft operation, Avirianto, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, fired off messages to the F.A.A. asking for an explanation of MCAS, which at the time was only vaguely understood, even by aviation experts, because Boeing had failed to put information about it in the planes manual. Although he conducted four teleconferences with F.A.A. officials, Mr. Avirianto said he was never given a clear explanation of how MCAS worked or whether it was safe. They kept saying they were still analyzing, evaluating, he said. We never received any guidance because there were never any clear answers for us. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the downing of the satellite last Wednesday, a test launch that put India in an exclusive group of nations along with the United States, China and Russia with the capability to destroy targets in space. Image India said its launch was carried out in the lower atmopshere to ensure that there is no space debris. But NASA says it has identified 400 pieces of orbital debris from the test. Credit... Indian Space Research Organization/EPA, via Shutterstock India stands tall as a space power! Mr. Modi tweeted after the announcement. He said the test had been indigenous, accomplished entirely by Indians. Scientists estimate that the satellite India destroyed was moving around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. Indias Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement that the test called Mission Shakti, the Hindi word for power had been carried out in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris. The statement said that if the test created debris, it would decay and fall back onto the earth within weeks. But Mr. Bridenstine said NASA had identified 400 pieces of orbital debris from the test, including about 60 trackable pieces at least 10 centimeters in size. Two dozen pieces were identified above the highest point of the International Space Stations orbit. The station serves as a research laboratory and has hosted astronauts from 18 countries since it was launched into orbit in 1998. The good thing is, its low enough in Earth orbit that over time this will all dissipate, Mr. Bridenstine said of the debris. MANILA The Philippines highest court ordered the government on Tuesday to release documents relating to thousands of deaths linked to President Rodrigo Dutertes drug war. Rights groups quickly welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, saying it would give closure to many families of the more than 20,000 people they estimate have been killed in the crackdown that Mr. Duterte has justified as necessary to end the drug trade. A court spokesman said the solicitor general had been ordered to submit police and other reports on the killings to the Supreme Court within 60 days and to copy the petitioners. The solicitor general, Jose Calida, had argued that sharing the documents with third parties could jeopardize national security. The court had previously rejected the same argument after the petition was filed last February, when Mr. Calida sought to avoid submitting the documents at all. MONTREAL Maha Kassef, 35, an ambitious elementary schoolteacher, aspires to become a principal. But since she wears a Muslim head scarf, she may have to derail her dreams: A proposed bill in Quebec would bar public school principals, and other public employees, from wearing religious symbols. How am I supposed to teach about respect, tolerance and diversity to my students, many of whom are immigrant kids, when the government is asking me to give up who I am? asked Ms. Kassef, the child of Kuwaiti immigrant parents who worked tirelessly to send her and her four siblings to college. What right does the Quebec government have to stop my career? she added. Religious minorities in Quebec are reeling after the right-leaning government of Francois Legault proposed the law last week. It would prohibit not just teachers, but other public sector workers in positions of authority, including lawyers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols while working. Current public sector workers would get an exemption, though only as long as they stay in the same position within the same organization, according to the bill. This means that a teacher, for example, could not change schools or be promoted if she refused to take off her head scarf. Michel Barnier, the European Unions chief Brexit negotiator, warned on Tuesday that Britains seeming inability to decide on an orderly departure agreement has made a so-called no-deal Brexit more likely with less than two weeks until April 12, the latest deadline. While a further extension of the deadline was possible, nothing was certain. Heres what could happen if Britain leaves the bloc without a deal. Ports could be jammed. Ferries and trains zip back and forth between southeast England and Calais in France carrying food, goods and people between Britain and the rest of the European Union. If Britain leaves without a divorce agreement, many worry that issues with new customs arrangements could lead to miles of traffic jams, forcing trucks to sit for hours on highways as food rots and manufacturing processes grind to a halt. I expect to see long queues at the ports because traders, importers and exporters and the logistics supply chain are not prepared for the new customs arrangements here or in the E.U., said Duncan Buchanan, the policy director at Britains Road Haulage Association. We will get a massive slowdown in the supply chain. No badge, no gun, no handcuffs and no clothes. None of that stopped an off-duty Swedish police officer from making an arrest last week after recognizing the man sitting next to him in a sauna as a fugitive, according to local news reports. Its easier to take action when you have your colleagues with you, and all your tools and equipment, Christoffer Bohman, deputy police chief in the district of Rinkeby in Stockholm, told the Swedish state broadcaster SVT, according to the news site The Local. This was as stripped-down as it gets in more ways than one, he added. Mr. Bohman did not identify the officer or the fugitive, who The Local said had gone on the run after being sentenced to prison for a drug-related crime. The arrest last Friday was potentially dangerous because the fugitive had also been convicted of attempting to assault a public servant, The Local reported, without elaborating. Mr. Bohman congratulated the officer in a Facebook post for keeping a cool head even as the situation heated up. Still, to move forward with this plan, he will have to become involved in the tumultuous negotiation, and share responsibility for the success or failure of Brexit. Some Conservatives expressed dismay that the Labour Party would now be more involved. It is very disappointing that the cabinet has decided to entrust the final handling of Brexit to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, said Boris Johnson, who resigned from Mrs. Mays cabinet and is considered a front-runner to replace her, in an interview with the BBC. I think the result will almost certainly be, if Corbyn gets his way, that we remain in the customs union so that we cant control our trade policy, that there are huge areas of lawmaking we cant control, and Brexit is becoming soft to the point of disintegration, he said. It has never been clear whether Mrs. May was willing to lead the country into a no-deal exit, a threat she raised repeatedly in tough-talking speeches at the start of negotiations. A powerful faction in the Conservative Party, to which she has devoted most of her adult life, has shifted to a hard-line position, shrugging off warnings of severe economic consequences with a no-deal exit, and advocating what they called a clean break. It was unclear whether Mrs. May had shifted as well. Her remarks on Tuesday, however, suggested that she had not. When it came down to it, she was just too sensible, said Rosa Prince, the author of a biography of Mrs. May. Shes got to be thinking of her legacy now, and if people are dying for lack of medicine, if there are food shortages, if Britain goes feral, thats not how she wants to be remembered. Anadolu cautioned that counts were unofficial, and that official results would be released by the High Election Council. The head of that council, Sadi Guven, said in Ankara on Tuesday that it had shared preliminary results with political parties. For now, he said, the council will give certificates of election to candidates whose victories are not subject to appeals, which can be submitted until 3 p.m. Tuesday. The council will rule on those challenges within eight days, he added. Mr. Erdogan, who was re-elected last year, and his party have seen their popularity eroded by Turkeys deep economic troubles. But a spokesman for the president, Ibrahim Kalin, refuted claims that Mr. Erdogans hold on power is waning, noting that the governing party had drawn the most votes in local elections nationwide. They will never learn. AK Party won 44.3 % and the coalition won 51.6 % of the votes, Mr. Kalin posted on Twitter. Erdogan has his mandate until 2023. Stop presenting your wishful thinking as fact and analysis. LONDON British lawmakers endure a lot of distractions when they speak in the unruly Parliament, where their colleagues jeer, wave papers and stop them to pose questions. But one lawmaker faced a very different, harder-to-ignore sort of interruption on Monday. Protesters stripped nearly naked in the public gallery, proclaiming that climate change, not the stalemate over Britains withdrawal from the European Union, was the real emergency facing the country. I encourage everybody to look in this direction rather than another direction, said Peter Kyle, the Labour lawmaker who was trying in vain to hold the rooms attention as he presented a motion for a second referendum on Britains departure, the process known as Brexit. [Read more about Mondays debate.] To his disappointment, most of the people in the elegant, wood-paneled chamber gazed upward, at the spectacle in the visitors gallery. There, a dozen men and women, all with messages scrawled on their bodies, stood in a row, turning their backsides to the protective glass barrier separating the public from the House of Commons, in full sight of sitting lawmakers. BRUSSELS If Britain ever wants an orderly exit from the European Union, it must pass the withdrawal agreement painfully negotiated with the bloc, Michel Barnier, its chief Brexit negotiator, warned on Tuesday. Given how little time remains before April 12, when Britain might have to leave the European Union without a deal, Prime Minister Theresa May emerged from a series of tense cabinet meetings to say that she will ask her European counterparts to grant Britain another short extension to try to pass a withdrawal agreement. Parliament has already rejected her plan three times by margins varying from historic to hefty. A majority in Parliament opposes a no-deal Brexit, but agrees on little else. To show the Europeans that the extension is worth providing, Mrs. May announced that she would try to meet with the head of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, to agree a plan that we would both stick to ensure that we leave the European Union and that we do so with a deal. Mr. Corbyn favors a much closer trading relationship in the future with the European Union than Mrs. May. But if the two leaders can agree on a softer Brexit, then a parliamentary majority might be found to leave the European Union with a deal, initiating a transition period of at least two years while a future relationship is negotiated. Irans Foreign Ministry accused the Trump administration on Tuesday of blocking efforts to aid Iranian victims of calamitous floods through inhumane and cruel restrictions imposed by renewed American banking sanctions on the country. The State Department denied the allegation, asserting that the United States stood ready to help. It said a botched response to the flooding by the Iranian government had contributed to the disaster. The acerbic exchange came against the backdrop of what is shaping up to be some of the worst flooding to strike Iran since the Islamic revolution 40 years ago. Floods have afflicted at least 26 of Irans 31 provinces over the past two weeks, states of emergency have been declared in several provinces, at least 47 people have been killed, and tens of thousands have been evacuated, state media have reported. In life, he was a fiery orator and campaigner who upended nearly three decades of political domination by Israels socialist founders and their Labor Party. Now, 27 years after his death, Menachem Begin the militant Zionist, the founder of the right-wing Likud party and the storied prime minister has re-emerged as an unlikely icon as Israelis prepare to go to the polls on April 9. With an apparent dearth of living visionaries, Mr. Begins legacy as both peacemaker with Egypt and bellicose champion of Greater Israel have turned him into a versatile, if posthumous, campaign prop. Selectively appropriating pieces of his mantle, parties from the right, left and center are declaring themselves as his ideological progeny or invoking his humility and commitment to democratic principles to show how far todays Likud has strayed. The children of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi have received tens of thousands of dollars and millions in real estate from the rulers of the kingdom as compensation for the murder of their father by a team of Saudi agents, according to a person close to the family and a former Saudi official familiar with the arrangement. The payments appear to be part of an attempt to deter the Khashoggi children from speaking out against the kingdoms de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom American and other Western intelligence agencies have concluded ordered the killing. Mr. Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and Washington Post columnist, had four adult children, at least two of whom are American citizens. Saudi Arabia has now provided each of the four with a house in the familys home city of Jidda worth about $4 million in addition to a steady stream of cash payments of $10,000 to $15,000 a month, according to the people familiar with the arrangement. All spoke on condition of anonymity because the arrangement is confidential. The former official said that the crown princes father, King Salman, had ordered the payments shortly after he had first learned that Saudi agents had ambushed and killed Mr. Khashoggi, and that the payments were intended as a form of financial support, without conditions, that would continue indefinitely. Traffic police in the Chinese city of Liuzhou got the shock of their career after pulling over a motorcycle driver only to find that instead of a drivers license he had a handwritten piece of paper with his picture glued to it. Faking official documents is common practice all around the world, but in the vast majority of cases people actually go out of their way to make sure their forgeries look as genuine as possible. Not the protagonist of this news story, though, he just made sure to include all the necessary details on his fake drivers license, even though all he did was scribble them on a piece of paper hoping it would be enough to fool police. Spoiler alert: it wasnt. When police in Liuzhou pulled over a silver motorcycle for a routine check, on March 31, they didnt expect to see the funniest drivers license of their entire careers. The man, surnamed Tang, certainly didnt seem nervous when the officers asked for his documents, and the driver license itself had a regular cover, so there was nothing to prepare police for what they were about to see. He behaved very calmly as he took out the license. The cover of the license was real one, but I was shocked when I saw what was inside, one traffic police officer told Pear Video. Inside the normal-looking drivers license cover was a simple piece of paper that seemed ripped out of a school notebook, with all the relevant information scribbled on it, and an identification picture of the driver glued to it. When the officers asked Tang if he was pulling their leg, he calmly explained that he was too lazy to study for a drivers license and didnt want to spend money on driving classes anyway, so he decided that a handwritten license was better than not having one at all. He added that he got a real-looking cover for his DIY license thinking that if he ever ran into police, he could just shake it in their faces and theyd send him on his way. I didnt expect the traffic police to be so serious, Tang said. Ive been a police officer for many years, but Ive never seen a drivers license quite like this. Its hilarious! one of the traffic police officers said. As it was also long overdue mandatory inspection, Tangs motorcycle was seized by police, and he was asked to report to the traffic department the next day. Photos of Tangs handwritten drivers license went viral on Chinese social media and got thousands of funny comments. What a genius! Why didnt you just draw your own identification photo, one person wrote on Weibo. The man can draw a passport and create a passport number next time, then he can travel abroad with his handmade passport, someone else joked. Catholic priests from an evangelical group in northern Poland recently sparked a heated online debate after staging a controversial protest against occultism, idolatry and sorcery by burning various sacrilegious items, including Harry Potter and Twilight books, traditional masks and idols, and even a Hello Kitty umbrella. In photos posted on Facebook, several priests from the SMS from Heaven Foundation, in Koszalin, Poland, can be seen carrying baskets full of items they consider sacrilegious from their church to a stone fire area outside and setting them ablaze. Footage shows an African wooden mask, a small Buddhist figure, figurines of elephants and popular fantasy books like Harry Potter and Twilight being consumed by flames as the priests and a few altar boys watch. The objects were reportedly brought in by parishioners, who were encouraged by the priests to clean their homes of such evil items. Photo: Katrina_S/Pixabay The SMS from Heaven Foundation posted photos from the bizarre event on its Facebook page along with fiery emojis and a couple of quotes from the Bible: Many of those who had practiced magic collected their books and burned them in front of everyone. So they calculated their value and found it to be fifty thousand pieces of silver (Acts) and Burn the images of their gods. Dont desire the silver or the gold that is on them and take it for yourself, or you will be trapped by it. That is detestable to the Lord your God (Deuteronomy). In a statement, the Catholic group said the book burning was intended to alert parishioners to bad influences that it claims come from anything related to magic and the occult. However, the general reaction from the public was negative, with many Facebook users accusing the priests of being backwards and pointing out that books were burned during the Nazi regime as well. Its hard for me to believe that were so backward! one person wrote. Id like to believe this is a joke Seriously? Are people burning fantasy literature in the 21st century in some kind of sick ritual?! someone else commented. One person even asked if they planned to burn witches next, like in the Dark Ages. However, there were some people who appreciated the priests work. Get rid of everything that does not please God and see how your life will change, one comment reads. Tim Goddard International health and science agency network GLOBALHealthPR has named Tim Goddard president. Goddard succeeds Jonathan Wilson, who currently serves as CEO of GLOBALHealths chair agency, Washington, D.C.-based healthcare shop Spectrum. Wilson transitions into the chair role in light of Goddards promotion. Goddard had served as GLOBALHealthPR executive vice president since 2016, and held the senior vice president title prior to that. He joined the network from New York-based Chamberlain Healthcare PR, where he was stationed for nearly a decade and most recently held a director post in London. Goddard was a reporter prior to his career in PR, serving as a correspondent for the Times Argus, central Vermonts leading daily newspaper. As GLOBALHealthPR president, Goddard will assumes expanded responsibilities including overseeing all aspects of the networks strategy, business development, partner relations and growth. GLOBALHealthPR is the worlds largest partnership of independent healthcare-based communications agencies. The Government is to seek additional supports from the European Commission to boost development in the Midlands, a Fine Gael TD has said. Offaly Fine Gael TD, Marcella Corcoran Kennedy said: Minister Bruton has today confirmed to me that he has written to the European Commission asking that the Midlands region is included on the EU Coal Regions in Transition Platform which would provide vital supports to the region in the context of Bord na Monas decarbonisation restructuring here in the Midlands." The supports would help the Midlands economy transition to a new low carbon economic model which is timely given the publication of the Oireachtas Committee of Climate Change report yesterday," she added. Having proposed to An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, the establishment of a cross-party Oireachtas Committee to examine the Citizens Assembly report on climate change, I am delighted that after many months of deliberations the Committee has managed to achieve mostly cross party consensus on the steps needed across society to move towards a low carbon economy." The response will require difficult decisions and actions will need to be taken across all sectors including our buildings, transportation, industry, heat and most importantly for our local rural economy, the agriculture sector. The key theme of the Committees report is to have a Just Transition towards a decarbonised society. This means that the State must put in place policies and regulations that help to reduce existing inequalities and to protect the most vulnerable members of society." I was determined that the report addressed the unique situation faced by Offaly and the wider Midlands in the context of our long-standing reliance on commercial peat extraction as an economic driver in our local economy. The report makes specific recommendations for a Just Transition in the Midlands and highlights the importance of ensuring that any response taken towards decarbonisation takes into account the impact on the local economy and on the workers and families affected. The Government must be proactive and ensure that the necessary supports are put in place to help regions during this time of huge change." This is one of the biggest challenges facing Ireland and the world and myself and my Oireachtas colleagues have produced a report with far-reaching recommendations that will impact all of our lives over the coming years," Marcella said. The report has been presented to the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and the Environment, Richard Bruton and he has undertaken to consider in detail all of the recommendations contained with this comprehensive report in the context of the Governments own Climate Plan. I am strongly urging the Government to implement the recommendations without delay to ensure that we become a global leader in our response to climate change." I look forward to the publication of the all of Government Climate Plan and I have every confidence that our report will form a central part of this plan. People Claiming To Be Healthcare Employees Are Reportedly Giving Poor Minorities In Kentucky $20 For Their DNA Elijah C. Watson Elijah Watson serves as Okayplayer's News & Culture Editor. When This has been happening throughout neighborhoods across Louisville for more than a month. For more than a month, a group of people operating from an unmarked white van have been taking the DNA of poor minorities in Kentucky in exchange for $20. READ: Former Kentucky Police Chief Instructed Recruit To Shoot Black Teens If Caught Smoking Weed According to Wave 3 News, people claiming to be employees of healthcare providers Passport Health and Freedom Health have been appearing in areas of west Louisville like Portland and Russell, and even homeless camps around Kentucky, to get participants to swab the inside of their cheeks to get samples of their DNA. Some participants were told the samples were a test for cancer. In exchange for their sample, the participant gets $20. When you do your homework on it, you come to a dead end, David, one of the participants, said. David also told Wave 3 that the van came to his street for at least two days in a row. They said, Swab 10 times on each side,' Martha Mask, another participant, said. At the time, I was at my downlow and I needed that change. The people told me they had contracts with Passport, Mask added. Well, they didnt have any Passport papers or nothing on the table. Wave 3 contacted a spokesperson for Passport, who said the organization is not related to the group. News producers also spoke with another group of people in March who identified themselves as employees with Freedom Wave. Those alleged employees gave David a number to confirm their claim but when news producers called the number there was no answer. Theyre taking DNA, then you disappear, and we cant find yousomething is wrong with that, District 4 Rep. Barbara Sexton Smith said. Wave 3 also spoke with University of Louisville Analytical Chemistry Professor Dr. Aleeta Powe, who said swabs can only check for genes that may be connected to certain cancers. Father Of Raniya Wright Has Received Little-To-No Information About Classroom Fight That Led To Her Death Elijah C. Watson Elijah Watson serves as Okayplayer's News & Culture Editor. When A week since the late fifth-graders death and her father still doesnt know much about the classroom fight. The father of a South Carolina girl who died after a fight in her classroom is still seeking answers about what happened to his daughter. Raniya Wright, a 10-year-old fifth-grader, sustained fatal injuries after a fight that occurred in her classroom at Forest Hills Elementary School on March 25. Two days later on March 27, she died at Charleston Hospital. In a report from the Greenville News, Jermaine Van Dyke, Raniyas father, spoke about the situation surrounding her death on Monday. Im here today looking for justice for my daughter, Van Dyke said. I wanted just to find out what happened, how it happened and who was involved. Mark Peper, Van Dykes lawyer, also spoke, saying that the father has been given little-to-no information regarding the classroom fight. He also said that Van Dyke visited with Colleton County School Districts superintendent, but the meeting didnt provide any real updates on the incident or what has happened since. The school district and law enforcement havent stated if a teacher was in the classroom during the fight. But according to Peper and his team, a teacher was in the classroom the day of the altercation. Pepers team spoke with that teacher, as well as parents of other students at Forest Hills. Were still gathering the results of our investigation, Peper said, but its been made pretty clear to us that theres been a pattern of behavior over the last, really four or five years. It would be fair to say that the school was on notice that were some altercations occurring on a very regular basis between individuals in this specific classroom, he added. Another student, a fifth-grader, has been suspended from school. No charges had been filed in the case as of Monday. A funeral for Raniya is set to take place this Wednesday at Saints Center Ministries in Walterboro, South Carolina. Source: Greenville News Chairwoman of the National Assembly of Vietnam Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan and President of the National Assembly of France Richard Farrand (Photo: VNA) Ngan said her ongoing official visit to France aims to maintain and further develop the bilateral strategic partnership and the parliamentary ties, especially realising the commitments reached by the two countries leaders on inter-parliamentary cooperation. She said the Vietnam-France friendly relations have been developing strongly and sustainably, particularly since the two sides set up bilateral strategic partnership in 2013. Vietnam always attaches great importance to relations with France in its foreign policy and hopes the two nations will continuously work together to deepen their collaboration, she added. The economic cooperation is a priority pillar in the bilateral strategic partnership, Ngan said, adding that France is Vietnams third biggest investor with USD2.8 billion and fourth trade partner with USD5.1 billion among the European countries. Vietnam highly appreciates Frances policy of enhancing economic partnership with the Southeast Asian country. More than 200 French enterprises are operating in Vietnam, Chairwoman Ngan said, asking the two sides to support businesses to access to the respective markets. She informed the host about her working session with the France-Vietnam Friendship Parliamentarians Group and 15 major businesses from France, adding Vietnam hopes French investors will expand cooperation in the future because Vietnam is a gateway to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Through meeting with the French businesses, Chairwoman Ngan said they are very interested in Vietnam and ASEAN with many successful investment projects. Airfrance and Safran Frances leading aerospace and defence corporation, signed a maintenance and repair deal worth USD6.5 billion with Vietjet Air. On the occasion, Vietnam Airlines will receive an Airbus A350 aircraft, while Bamboo Airways is also negotiating for its purchase. Considering such result, Ngan stressed French businesses are confident in the Vietnamese market for its stable socio-economic growth and economic openness. She noted that Vietnam has to date signed 12 free trade agreements, adding that the NA recently ratified the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Vietnam will incorporate international commitments it has inked into the national laws in line with international practice, the top legislator said. At the talks, the NA Chairwoman praised cooperation between Vietnamese and French localities as a special feature in bilateral relations. On the occasion, a conference on the collaboration between the two countries localities, its 11th edition, will take place in Toulouse, France, with the participation of 20 Vietnamese localities. It aims at boosting diverse engagement in contribution to the development of the Vietnam France strategic partnership. Appreciating Frances support to strengthening Vietnam EU ties, Ngan asked France, as Vietnams strategic partner, to assist the country in speeding up the signing and ratification of the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), which will benefit all sides involved. She also requested the French side back the lifting of EUs "yellow card" warning to Vietnam, adding that the country is making efforts in implementing related EU recommendations. The NA has approved the revised Law on Fisheries, which responds better to international law on the protection and conservation of aquatic resources. The law came into force on January 1st, 2019. Both leaders expressed their delight at robust growth recorded between the two countries law-making bodies. Bilateral relations were thriving in the recent past, with increased number of visits by their high-ranking leaders taking place. In March last year, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnams Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong paid an official visit to France, while French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe made an official trip to Vietnam in November the same year. And at the moment, the official visit to France by the NA Chairwoman is ongoing. Following his visit to Vietnam in 2018, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe relished his prospects on the Vietnam-French relation development in the coming time, President of the National Assembly of France Richard Farrand said, suggesting both sides work together to identify prioritised sectors and outline rational cooperation measures to boost the bilateral relations in an effective manner. He spoke highly of Vietnams role in the region and the ASEAN, and expressed his support for the collaborative relations at the local level. Regarding the EVFTA, the official stressed that the French Government and National Assembly support the early signing and ratification of the pact, noting that both sides should work more to accelerate the official signing. Hailing the sound cooperation between civil aviation corporations of the two countries, with a line-up of large contracts having been inked, he said that cooperation in the field is a vivid illustration for the Vietnam-France relations. Meanwhile, NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan affirmed that Vietnam stands ready to coordinate with the French National Assembly to bolster bilateral cooperation, making contributions to deepening the good friendship between the two countries. At the talk, Farrand accepted the Vietnamese NA Chairwomans invitation and said that he will visit Vietnam with a parliamentary and business delegation to further the cooperative ties. The French National Assembly always welcomes the Vietnamese NA to come to France to exchange experience, he added./. QUITO, Ecuador, April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Keith Piggott, Director of Core Gold Inc. (TSXV: CGLD, OTCQX: CGLDF) (Core Gold or the Company) today provided details of the undisclosed competing proposal to Core Gold in response to numerous shareholders inquiries. At the recent meeting of the board of directors of Core Gold held March 9, 2019 the board considered and approved a CDN $4,000,000 subscription for 8,888,888 common shares of Core Gold at CDN $0.45 per share from the Ecuador subsidiary of a mining company listed on a major international stock exchange with a market capitalization above US $3 billion. This mining company is an integrated, large scale enterprise with exploration, mining, processing and smelting operations, primarily focusing on the gold industry. The company is a leading gold producer with output of approximately 1 million ounces per annum from mining and smelting operations. The subscription agreement followed two letters of intent between the parties reached via friendly negotiations on February 25, 2019 providing for both the subscription of CDN $4 million to close March 15 and the right of the mining company to increase its shareholding by a further 14.9% for a total of 19.9% of the total issued shares of Core Gold, subject to due diligence within 45 days at a price of CDN $0.45 per share. In addition to the equity placement, this company also proposed to invest directly in the Dynasty goldfield for an upfront payment of US $20 million to earn a 20% interest with the right to earn up to 60% through the expenditure of US $62 million over a period of 3 Years to construct an underground mine and processing plant to process 2,000 tons per day. Under the terms of the agreement Core Gold would retain 40% following the declaration of commercial production. The letters of intent also provided rights of board representation, project cooperation including participation in management, design, construction and finance, preemptive right to maintain shareholder ownership level and a standstill agreement for 3 years. This mining company mobilized significant resources, including approximately 30 mining and exploration personnel and 3 drill rigs to conduct confirmation drilling due diligence on Core Golds Dynasty Goldfields mine as would be expected of any mining company proposing to commit in excess of USD $100 million dollars. This accelerated mobilization was done at considerable expense in order to complete their due diligence within a period of 45 days (i.e. that was within the 60 days go shop period), fully cognizant of the time constraints of the 60 day go shop period. At the March 9, 2019 meeting the board determined to deny this mining company access to Core Golds property to conduct its due diligence by drilling twin holes to verify a sample of drill results as shown in the 43/101 report done by Core Gold (Dynasty Metals and Mining) in 2014. I brought to the board a far less dilutive, shareholder friendly proposal, Mr. Piggott said. The board sabotaged the alternative in two ways, denying the investor access to conduct reasonable technical due diligence at its own expense and by increasing the Titan break fee to $3,000,000 while eliminating the Titan 60 day go shop provision, lamented Mr. Piggott. At the board meeting held March 9, 2019 directors and advisors of Core Gold explicitly threatened to terminate me for cause unless I voted for the Titan amended proposal and agreed to vote all my shares in favour of the Titan merger. I refused, said Mr. Piggott. About Keith Piggott. Keith Piggott is a seasoned mining developer and operator with over 50 years of experience in Africa, Australia, Mexico and South America. Mr. Piggott as CEO, rescued Dynasty Metals and Mining from certain bankruptcy and the loss of all its assets in 2016. He has worked diligently for over two years to take the company, as Core Gold Inc., from a $5 million market capitalization to over $40 million market capitalization before the Titan proposal. He can be contacted at kpiggott100@gmail.com, by phone at 520-247-5753. Are you a current print subscriber? You qualify for online access to the Omak Chronicle. To receive your access, create a website account and then verify your print subscription or e-edition subscription with your subscriber number, which may be found on your bill or mailing label. JKSSB SI Recruitment 2021: Last date to apply for 800 Sub Inspector posts, direct link here A separate PM for J&K: What are your thoughts on this comment? Debates oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Apr 02: National Conference leader Omar Abdullah's comment - that Jammu and Kashmir would one day have a separate Prime Minister and President - has evoked a sharp response from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who demanded an explanation from the Congress on its ally's comment. Abdullah said on Monday that the National Conference will bring back the nomenclature 'Wazir-e-Azam' (Prime Minister) and 'Sadr-e-Riyasat' (Governor) in the state. Abdullah's response came after BJP chief Amit Shah claimed that revoking Article 370 and 35A from Kashmir would resolve its issue. A legal challenge to the Constitution's Article 35A -- which gives Jammu and Kashmir its special status -- has become a matter of huge controversy. While the BJP wants the article scrapped, all key political parties in Kashmir Valley have rallied to preserve the article -- which gives special rights and privileges to the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Most parties had boycotted the recent panchayat polls over the issue. Do you agree with agree with Abdullah's call for a separate PM? Put forth your stand For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 8:34 [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 Goa Congress hit by several resignations on day of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's visit Congress releases manifesto for 2019, focus on NYAY, farmers and jobs India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Apr 02: The Congress on Tuesday released its manifesto for the upcoming general elections with focus on NYAY, farmers and jobs. The manifesto titled 'Congress will deliver' focused on agrarian crisis and unemployment, and the ambitious scheme NYAY guaranteeing a minimum income scheme guaranteeing Rs 72,000 a year to the bottom most or poorest 20 per cent of households. "Manifesto a result of year-long process. There are no false promises made. We are reflecting people's voice. The Congress manifesto promises LGBT rights, rights for minorities, women empowerment, NYAY scheme," Rahul said after launching the manifesto. NYAY: Congress confident of increasing votes but not seats Congress manifesto Key announcements NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojana, a minimum income plan): Under this scheme, India's poorest will receive money directly in their bank account to ensure they have a minimum monthly income of Rs 12,000. Jobs: The Congress will fill 22 lakh job vacancies within the government in an effort to boost employment. Farmers: If farmers default on loans, it will be considered a civil offense & not a criminal offence Education: 6 percent of India's GDP will be spent on education. Health: Will strengthen government hospitals and the public health service. Other announcements Rafale probe on day 1 in power Congress will cause to be investigated several deals entered into by the BJP government in the last 5 years and, in particular, the Rafale deal. Women Empowerment and Gender Equality Congress promises to pass the Constitution (Amendment) Bill to provide for reservation of 33 per cent of seats in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha and in the Rajya Sabha. National Security Congress will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government, and will ensure that defence spending is increased to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces. GST will be turned into a simple tax If the Congress is voted to power, Goods and Services tax will be turned into a simple tax. He added that the party will simplify GST and minimise tax burden. 'CAPF first line of defence' Congress promises to ensure increased representation of women to achieve a minimum of 33 per cent in the force strength of CISF, CRPF and BSF. Cong promises to withdraw Citizenship Bill Congress promises to immediately withdraw the widely resented Citizenship Amendment Bill introduced by the BJP-led government against the wishes of the people of the North Eastern States. Cong promises to ensure EVMs, VVPATs are Tamperproof Congress will ensure that EVMs and VVPATs are tamperproof. Congress promises to review AFSPA, repeal sedition law The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Disturbed Areas Act in the state will be reviewed and 'suitable' changes will be made to balance the requirement of security and 'protection of Human Rights' According to the party's official estimates, at the end of the process, which took more than six months, it had received 31,875 inputs on its official manifesto website. More than 4,038 people sent their inputs via WhatsApp and a total of 876 e-mails were received, giving suggestions for the manifesto. Interestingly, a total of 41 petitions were created on the website Change.org for the manifesto, which received a cumulative 1,61,492 signatures. The manifesto committee, which was chaired by former Union minister P. Chidambaram, was divided into 20 different sub groups which went into specific issues such as economy, agriculture, education and industry, among others. It held consultations in 57 Indian cities and in Dubai, which was a two-day event with participants from other countries as well. CALGARY, Alberta, April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- West High Yield (W.H.Y.) Resources Ltd. ("West High Yield" or the "Company") (TSXV: WHY) is pleased to announce that the Company's board of directors has granted options to acquire an aggregate of 1,375,000 common shares of the Company (the "Common Shares") to certain directors, officers, employees and consultants of the Company, 550,000 with an exercise price of $0.38 per Common Share, and 825,000 with an exercise price of $0.35 per Common Share, exercisable for a period of five years. The options were granted pursuant to the Companys stock option plan and vested immediately. The options are subject to all applicable regulatory and exchange approvals. About West High Yield West High Yield is a publicly traded junior mining exploration company focused on the acquisition, exploration and development of mineral resource properties in Canada with a primary objective to locate and develop economic gold, nickel and magnesium properties. For further information please contact: Frank Marasco President and Chief Executive Officer West High Yield (W.H.Y.) Resources Ltd. Telephone: (403) 660-3488 Facsimile: (403) 206-7159 Email: frank@whyresources.com Dwayne Vinck Chief Financial Officer West High Yield (W.H.Y.) Resources Ltd. Telephone: (403) 257-2637 Facsimile: (403) 206-7159 Email: vinck@shaw.ca Reader Advisory Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release. Not for distribution in the United States. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities in the United States. The securities of the Company will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of U.S. persons except in certain transactions exempt from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act. Hizbul terrorist tried to replicate Pulwama attack, but chickened out India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Srinagar, Apr 01: "He tried to replicate a Pulwama like attack, but developed cold feet", the Jammu and Kashmir police said. The statement comes in the wake of the police arresting Owais Amin, a Hizbul Mujahideen operative who hit a bus carrying Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel on the J&K highway last week. Amin a resident of Shopian confessed he was a suicide bomber, but added that the mechanism was not fool-proof and the second blast could not be triggered. IGP Jammu Zone M K Sinha informed that there were some Improvised Explosive Devices found in the car. He also said that there were detonators too that had been found. SP rank officer to accompany CRPF convoy in aftermath of Pulwama attack The note stated that the driver was a member of the Hizbul Mujahideen and he was taking the extreme step in the wake of the atrocities being committed on Kashmiris since 1947. The authenticity of the letter is currently under verification. The police said that the car was carrying two LPG cylinders, one of which exploded. The other was found at the site. The police are not ascertaining further details such as who his handlers were. Following the incident, the police carefully worked on the clues. The dots were connected with the help of the FSL experts. Abhinandan Varthaman: What a dog fight that was with Pakistan Rafale to S-400 air defence systems all set to add more firepower to Indian Air Force How IAF jets tracked an unmanned Pakistan drone India oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa New Delhi, Apr 02: The Indian Air Force (IAF) scrambled two Sukhoi-30 fighter jets after sighting a Pakistani drone along the Indo-Pak border in the Khemkaran sector in Punjab, official sources said. Two Pakistani F-16 fighter aircraft were also seen close to the border after the incident. The sources said the Sukhoi-30 MKI jets were deployed soon after the Pakistani unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was seen hovering over the border. Pakistan owns up on F-16 used in dog fight with India The drone soon retreated to the Pakistani side after the jets were scrambled. The incident took place around 3:10 PM. There have been a series of incidents of Pakistani drones coming close to the Indo-Pak border in various areas in the last four weeks following the Balakot air strikes. Last month, a UAV which intruded into Rajasthan's Ganganagar was shot down by the Army. Also last month, a Sukhoi-30 fighter jet of the IAF shot down a Pakistani military drone in Bikaner sector of the Indo-Pak border using an air-to-air missile. Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after IAF fighter jets bombed terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)'s training camp near Balakot in Pakistan on February 26. Pakistan retaliated by attempting to target Indian military installations the next day. However, the IAF thwarted their plans. IAF's MiG 27 aircraft crashes on routine mission from Rajasthan's Jodhpur 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. IL&FS former vice chairman arrested by SFIO India oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa New Delhi, Apr 02: The Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) has arrested Hari Sankaran, former vice chairman of crisis-hit IL&FS for fraudulent conduct and causing wrongful loss to the company and its creditors, official sources said. This is the first arrest made by the probe agency in the IL&FS case. Sankaran was arrested in Mumbai in connection with the ongoing investigations into the affairs of IL&FS and its group entities. Sources said Sankaran has been arrested on the grounds of abusing his powers in IL&FS Financial Services Ltd through fraudulent conduct and in granting loans to entities that were not credit-worthy or were declared as non-performing accounts. Such actions caused wrongful loss to the company and its creditors, they added. SFIO arrests former Bhushan Steel MD Neeraj Singhal for alleged fraud The agency has been granted custody of Sankaran till April 4. IL&FS Financial Services had borrowings of more than Rs 17,000 crore through debt instruments and bank loans. Provident funds, pension funds, gratuity funds, mutual funds, public and private sector banks, are among those who have invested in these debt instruments, the sources said. The alleged financial irregularities at the IL&FS came to light last year after some group entities defaulted on debt repayments. The government, which superseded the company's board, is working on a resolution plan. Indore LS ticket suspense continues, Sumitra Mahajan skips PM event, hints she is ready to contest India oi-Madhuri Adnal Bhopal, Apr 02: As the suspense over BJP's candidate for the Indore Lok Sabha seat continued, its 8-time MP and Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan on Monday skipped the party's 'Main Hun Chowkidar' programme on Sunday. On Sunday, Mahajan was not present at the Indore site where the BJP had made arrangements for showing Narendra Modi's 'Main Bhi Chowkidar' event. She is among the few senior BJP leaders to have not prefixed Chowkidar to their names on Twitter. The BJP is yet to announce Mahajan's name for re-nomination. She has represented Indore in Lok Sabha for eight times. Safe seat for Rahul? Amethi has more Muslims compared to Wayanad Earlier, Mahajan had denied speaking on re-nomination, but had said that she was working persistently in favour of her party. Speculations are rife that the BJP is reconsidering Mahajan's candidature citing 'age factor'. She will be turning 76 on April 12. However, there is speculation that like party patriarch L K Advani (91) and veteran leader Murli Manohar Joshi (85), she too might be axed from the BJP's poll list this time. There is also talk that local MLA and Indore mayor Malini Gaud might be given the party's ticket in place of Mahajan. The BJP has so far announced candidates for 18 out of the 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh so far. Meanwhile, the Congress is repeatedly attacking the BJP for not naming Mahajan so far. "We have handpicked five aspirants and would name our candidate within one hour of the BJP announcing its candidates," PWD minister Sajjan Singh Verma said. It can be recalled that during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Mahajan, or "Tai (elder sister in Marathi)", as she is called, had won Indore by 4.66 lakh votes. The margin had been stunning as she had survived a scare in 2009 getting only 11,480 votes more than her Congress rival, though most of her wins before that had been by more than one lakh votes. State vs national issues: Key lessons for the BJP to learn in Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Haryana Lok Sabha Election 2019: Mysuru poised for interesting electoral battle India oi-Deepika S Mysuru, Apr 02: Traditionally, a Congress bastion, the Mysore Lok Sabha constituency with eight Assembly segments throws up both urban-specific and rural issues for political parties in the fray. With 17,23,134 voters in the constituency, of whom 8,55,241 are women and 8,67,893 voters are men, the stakes are high for the Congress-JD(S) coalition in Mysore. Going by the history so far, as many as 13 candidates from Congress and three candidates from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been elected to the Parliament. Safe seat for Rahul? Amethi has more Muslims compared to Wayanad Interestingly, Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S), which is a traditional opponent of Congress, has failed to open its account till today. BJP vs Congress This constituency, all these years, was witnessing a triangular fight between Congress, JD(S) and the BJP since the last 28 years. In a first, the Mysore constituency, which was witnessing a triangular fight between Congress, JD(S) and the BJP since the last 28 years is now witnessing a straight contest between Congress and BJP as JD(S) as part of seat-sharing pact between the coalition partners. Vokkaligas play a crucial role The constituency has a blend of Vokkaligas, Kurubas, Dalits, Lingayats, Naiks and religious minorities, and caste equations. Each party is devising strategies to win over the "Lingayat vote bank'' to neutralise the "Vokkaliga support'' of its rivals or vice versa and secure a majority by winning the "Naika votes'' in conjunction with "Muslim" and "Kuruba" votes. The JD(S), led by former Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy, poses a formidable challenge to the BJP in the region that has a high concentration of Vokkaligas. Part of the old Mysore region also comprises former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's stronghold of Mysuru district. Real issues never gets noticed Mysore-Kodagu Lok Sabha constituency is part of the Cauvery basin. Drinking water scarcity, hortage of fodder, lack of employment, absence of civic amenities, confusion over property tax, inadequate healthcare facilities in rural areas, and the crisis in the agricultural sector are the issues around which the debate should have raged in Mysore district. In the urban belt, the issues revolve around the issues of not only improving the civic governance, but also putting the city on the tourism and industrial map of India. All eyes on NYAY math as Congress set to release poll manifesto today Though non-governmental organisations raise these issues, the political parties make a passing reference. In Mysore, discussions by the elected representatives, including councillors, revolve around caste politics and not real issues. However, no single issue dominates the eight Assembly segments of the Parliamentary constituency. In the rural hinterland of Piriyapatna and Hunsur, issues related to tobacco cultivators engage the attention of the parties, while further west, coffee growers have their say. Its a direct contest between Simha and C H Vijayashankar It will be for the first time in recent decades that the Mysuru parliamentary constituency will witness a direct fight in which the Congress-JD(S) combine will be pitted against the saffron party. Though caste factor plays a key role in Mysore constituency, political analysts feel that Prathap Simha has fair chance in retaining the constituency. The party has good image in urban area, where the BJP can get major share of votes. In Kodagu, hindutva card pays for the BJP. But statistics indicate that the combined vote share of the Congress and the Janata Dal has been numerically higher than what the BJP had harvested in all the elections that it won since 1998. Political observers are of the view that the ensuing battle between the Congress-JD(S) combine against the BJP will be an interesting battle in which the latter cannot have it easy. Going by the past, the Lingayat and Vokkaliga community's voter turnout on 18 April could play a crucial role in determining BJP's fortunes in the Lok Sabha elections. As Mamata Banerjee takes swipe at Rahul Gandhi, Cong says such posturing for personal ambition will help BJP Rahul Gandhi in centre of Cong posters for Jaipur rally; call for him to become party chief again Lok Sabha Elections 2019 updates: Anti-BJP front gains momentum, Naidu meets Sonia Gandhi India oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa New Delhi, May 19: Andhra Pradesh Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Saturday met BSP chief Mayawati and Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow, continuing his efforts to put together a coalition to form the next government at the Centre. He reached Lucknow after meetings in New Delhi with Congress president Rahul Gandhi, CPI leaders G Sudhakar Reddy and D Raja, NCP chief Sharad Pawar and LJD leader Sharad Yadav. The Telugu Desam Party chief has already held several rounds of discussions with various opposition leaders, including TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee, AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal and CPI (M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury. Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his two-day visit to Uttarakhand today with a visit to Kedarnath shrine. The prime minister is also expected to offer prayers at Badrinath tomorrow before returning to Delhi in the afternoon. The prime minister's visit to the holy shrine came a day before the last phase of the marathon Lok Sabha elections. Fifty nine parliamentary constituencies, including Varanasi, will go to polls in the seventh and final phase of the Lok Sabha elections and the results will be announced four days later, on May 23. Stay tuned for the Lok Sabha elections 2019 UPDATES: PM said he wants remove 'dil ki doori and Dilli ki doori': Omar Abdullah after meet on J&K Restore statehood first, if you want elections in J&K: Omar Abdullah to Centre Govt needs to give sense of security to people cutting across religions in J&K: Omar Omar Abdullah deliberately hurting Congress in rest of India ' India oi-Hardeep Singh Bedi New Delhi, April 2: The National Conference (NC) leader and former Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Chief Minister Omar Abdullah is deliberately hurting the Congress in rest of India, say J&K Congress leaders. The Congress and the NC are alliance partners for the Lok Sabha polls in Jammu and Kashmir. J&K Congress leaders tell One India on the condition of anonymity that the alliance with the state parties like, the NC and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has been putting them in a catch-22 situation. The Congress also forged an alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir in the past. "The problem with the Kashmir centric political parties like the NC and the PDP is that they deliberately give provocative political statements, which they also know are impossible to implement. Omar's rhetoric about restoring the posts of 'president' and 'prime minister ' in Jammu and Kashmir is the latest example of it," says a Jammu based Congress leader. [People are fed up, Kashmir needs a single party rule: Omar Abdullah] He adds that such attention seeking statements often leave the Congress in a fix in Jammu, Ladakh, and rest of the country. "We find it difficult in going before the voters while keeping a mum over such anti-national statements. The NC and the PDF have to do politics in Kashmir, but the Congress has a political presence across the country," says the leader. He asserts that leaders like Omar having a presence in six Lok Sabha seats of the state create trouble for the Congress that is present across the country. "Look how Prime Minister Modi has picked up the issue to beat not only the Congress but its other alliance partners black and blue. Omar's one statement has damaged the political prospects of the Congress not only in other parts of Jammu and Kashmir but in the rest of India. He has given ammunition to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Modi that they have been looking for," the Congress leader said. Addressing a rally in Bandipora on Monday, Abdullah said that after accession with India, J&K had Sadr-e-Riyasat (President) and Wazir-e-Azam (Prime Minister) and by the grace of God we shall bring back these posts. Jammu and Kashmir had its own President and Prime Minister until 1965 when these posts were replaced by the governor and the chief minister. [NC's LS candidates will protect J&K's special status, says Omar Abdullah] Prime Minister Modi picked up this issue while addressing a rally in Hyderabad on Monday and cornered not only the Congress but Trinamool chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, and Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar by asking if they agreed with Abdullah. Modi said: "Two prime ministers for Hindustan? Do you agree with it? Congress has to answer and all the 'mahagathbandhan' partners have to answer. What are the reasons and how dare he say that?" Another Congress leader from Ladakh alleges that Omar Abdullah and the BJP have been playing politics to cater to their base and the Congress is left confused. "Omar deliberately kick-started Twitter war over the issue by interacting with the tweet from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's handle. He knew that the more this issue is highlighted is better for the NC and the BJP," the Congress leader said. The BJP has been historically opposed to the special rights provided to Jammu and Kashmir. OMAR TRYING TO CORRECT MISTAKES OF GRANDFATHER A Kashmiri journalist tells this scribe that the Omar Abdullah is trying to correct mistakes of his grandfather Sheikh Abdullah, who for the post of Chief Minister had agreed for an accord with late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 by compromising Kashmiri interests. It is notable that Sheikh had become chief minister of the state with Congress support after the 1975 accord although his party did not have a single legislator in the state assembly at that time. The accord was signed by Sheikh's emissary, Mirza Afzal Beg, and then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's emissary, G. Parthasarthy. The clause 2 of the Accord says: The residuary powers of legislation shall remain with the State; however, Parliament will continue to have power to make laws relating to the prevention of activities directed towards disclaiming, questioning or disrupting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India or bringing about cession of a part of the territory of India or secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union or causing insult to the Indian National Flag, the Indian National Anthem and the Constitution. The journalist questioned if the posts of Sadr-e-Riyasat and Wazir-e-Azam were so important for the National Conference then why did Sheikh not settle them in 1975 itself? Clause 6 of the Accord says: No agreement was possible on the question of nomenclature of the Governor and the Chief Minister and the matter is therefore remitted to the Principals. [Farooq Abdullah faces political greenhorns in prestigious Srinagar LS seat] The journalist said that the terms of the 1975 accord were never fulfilled after the Sheikh came to power and particularly he did not do anything to restore posts of Sadr-e-Riyasat and Wazir-e-Azam. "The Indira-Sheikh Accord was a watershed moment in the Kashmir politics. Therefore, of late the NC leadership is trying to misguide people that Sheikh did not sign the 1975 Accord. In fact, the NC 's lust for power is the main reason behind all the bloodshed in Kashmir. Everyone knows how Farooq Abdullah rigged 1987 Assembly elections with the help of the Congress Prime Minister late Rajiv Gandhi," adds the journalist. The reporter is of the opinion that by raking up issues like President and Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar is inviting troubles for his party only "as if debates over Kashmir start then it would be the National Conference only that will have to answer most of the questions". For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 19:13 [IST] Amarnath Yatra 2021: Registration of pilgrims to start from April 1, How to do online? We will soon take decision on conducting Amarnath Yatra: Jammu and Kashmir LG Manoj Sinha Amarnath Yatra cancelled for 2nd year in a row due to Covid-19 fear; Online 'Aarti' for devotees Registration for Amarnath Yatra begins from Tuesday India oi-PTI Jammu, Apr 02: The registration for the annual Amarnath Yatra through Baltal and Chandanwari routes began on Tuesday, officials said. Nobody will be allowed to undertake the yatra without securing a permit which is valid for a specified day and route, they added. The registration of pilgrims is being undertaken through 440 designated branches of the Punjab National Bank, the Jammu and Kashmir Bank and the YES Bank, located in 32 states and Union Territories. The 46-day-long yatra will begin on July 1, the day of Masik Shivratri, and would conclude on August 15, the day of Shravan Purnima. The insider job that may have helped terrorists attack Amarnath Yatra In addition to the existing ways of registration, the board has approved a proposal for online registration of a limited number of intending pilgrims each day on a pilot basis, the officials said. The website will contain an application form and state-wise list of bank branches which the people can visit for registration. The pilgrims will have to furnish a Compulsory Health Certificate (CHC) while registering. A state-wise list of doctors and medical institutes authorised to issue CHCs has been put on the website of the shrine board to ensure authenticity. Children under the age of 13 years or elderly above 75 years of age and women who are more than six weeks pregnant will not be registered for the yatra, the officials said. Those who plan to travel by helicopter do not require advance registration as their chopper ticket shall suffice for this purpose. However, they will have to produce the CHC in the prescribed format before they are allowed to travel, he added. PTI For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 17:55 [IST] Till when does a father have to take responsibility of his child: SC clarifies What is the urgency? SC declines urgent hearing on Hardik Patels plea India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Apr 02: The Supreme Court today refused the Congress leader's request to put on hold his conviction in a rioting case to enable him to contest the national elections. The matter was mentioned for urgent listing before a bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra. The bench also comprising Justices M M Shantanagoudar and Navin Sinha told the counsel appearing for Patel that there was no urgency in hearing the matter as the high court order was passed in August last year. "The order was passed in August 2018. What is the urgency now?" the bench said while refusing to accord urgent hearing on the petition. Hardik Patel moved the top court after his plea for stay was rejected by Gujarat High Court last week. The Patidar leader, who joined the Congress in March, was awarded a two-year prison sentence by a Visnagar court in July 2018 for leading a mob that ransacked local MLA Rishikesh Patel's office in July 2015. Hardik Patel can't contest polls as HC refuses to stay conviction Patel joined the Congress on March 12 and had reportedly been preparing to contest from the Jamnagar Lok Sabha seat. The Gujarat High Court, however, upheld his conviction. Gujarat votes on April 23. April 4 is the last date for filing nominations for the same. In light of the Supreme Court order, the Patidar leader will be out of the electoral fray since under Section 8 of the Representation of the People (RP) Act, 1951, an individual convicted for an offence and sentenced to a minimum of two years in prison is banned from contesting elections. NEW YORK, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP, a leading national securities law firm, encourages investors in the following companies to contact the firm: Company: Conagra Brands, Inc. (NYSE:CAG) Lead Plaintiff Deadline: April 23, 2019 Class Period: June 27, 2018 through December 19, 2018 Contact Us: www.faruqilaw.com/CAG The case, Estrada v. Conagra Brands, Inc. et al., No. 19-cv-01805, has been filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against the Company and certain of its officers. The lawsuit focuses on whether the Company and its executives violated federal securities laws by failing to disclose that: (1) Conagra inadequately performed proper due diligence in connection with the acquisition of Pinnacle; (2) the performance of Pinnacles three leading brands was not deteriorating due to intensified competition, but to self-inflicted subpar innovation and executional missteps; and (3) Pinnacles business was performing so poorly that it had resorted to pushing promotional deals to retailers in an effort to boost sales. The case has been assigned to Judge Andrea R. Wood. Company: Conduent, Inc. (NYSE:CNDT) Lead Plaintiff Deadline: May 7, 2019 Class Period: February 21, 2018 through November 6, 2018 Contact Us: www.faruqilaw.com/CNDT The case, Employees Retirement System of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority v. Conduent, Inc. et al., No. 19-cv-08237, has been filed in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey against the Company and certain of its officers. The lawsuit focuses on whether the Company and its executives violated federal securities laws by making false and/or misleading representations to investors regarding the Companys transformation phase and whether it had cured inefficiencies caused by operating on multiple information resource platforms. The case has been assigned to Judge Susan D. Wigenton. Company: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. (NYSE:BPI) Lead Plaintiff Deadline: May 10, 2019 Class Period: March 8, 2016 through March 7, 2019 Contact Us: www.faruqilaw.com/BPI The case, Stein v. Bridgepoint Education, Inc., No. 19-cv-00460, has been filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California against the Company and certain of its officers. The lawsuit focuses on whether the Company and its executives violated federal securities laws by failing to disclose that: (1) Bridgepoints processes for recording revenue for its FTG program were inaccurate; (2) Bridgepoint maintained deficient internal controls; (3) due to the foregoing deficiencies, Bridgepoint was prone to and did commit material accounting errors related to revenue, provision for bad debts, accounts receivable and deferred revenue, which resulted in the overstatement of revenue and expenses; and (4) as a result, Bridgepoints public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. The case has been assigned to Judge William Q. Hayes. Company: United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE:UMC) Lead Plaintiff Deadline: May 13, 2019 Class Period: October 28, 2015 through November 1, 2018 Contact Us: www.faruqilaw.com/UMC The case, Meyer v. United Microelectronics Corporation et al., No. 19-cv-02304, has been filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Company and certain of its officers. The lawsuit focuses on whether the Company and its executives violated federal securities laws by making false and/or misleading statements and/or failing to disclose that: (1) UMC conspired with Fujian to steal trade secrets from Micron relating to its research and development of DRAM; (2) UMC hired former Micron employees for the purpose of stealing such information from Micron; (3) the foregoing conduct placed UMC and certain of its employees at an increased risk of criminal and regulatory investigation by the U.S. government; and (4) as a result, UMCs public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. The case has been assigned to Judge Victor Marrero. If you invested in any of these companies, please fill out the form on our website at the links above to learn more. You can also contact us by calling Richard Gonnello toll free at 877-247-4292 or at 212-983-9330 or by sending an e-mail to rgonnello@faruqilaw.com. CONTACT: FARUQI & FARUQI, LLP 685 Third Avenue, 26th Floor New York, NY 10017 Attn: Richard Gonnello, Esq. rgonnello@faruqilaw.com Telephone: (877) 247-4292 or (212) 983-9330 The court-appointed lead plaintiff is the investor with the largest financial interest in the relief sought by the class who is adequate and typical of class members who directs and oversees the litigation on behalf of the putative class. Any member of the putative class may move the Court to serve as lead plaintiff through counsel of their choice, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision to serve as a lead plaintiff or not. Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP also encourages anyone with information regarding the foregoing companies conduct to contact the firm, including whistleblowers, former employees, shareholders and others. Attorney Advertising. The law firm responsible for this advertisement is Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP (www.faruqilaw.com). Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome with respect to any future matter. We welcome the opportunity to discuss your particular case. All communications will be treated in a confidential manner. Kin of farmers who died during protests against farm laws should be compensated from PM CARES Fund: Sanjay Raut Sanjay Raut on chopper tragedy: We claim to have modernised armed forces, how could this happen? Sena MP calls for 'EVM tampering' to defeat Kanhaiya, EC slaps notice India oi-PTI Mumbai, Apr 02: The district election officer of Mumbai has issued a notice to Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut for alleged violation of the model code of conduct over his comments against CPI candidate Kanhaiya Kumar. Raut, who is the editor of Sena mouthpiece 'Saamana', said in the publication on Sunday that Kumar should be defeated in the elections even if it means the BJP has to "tamper with EVMs". Kumar, the former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University's student union, is contesting the upcoming Lok Sabha poll from Begusarai in Bihar. In his column 'Rok Thok' in the Marathi daily, Raut also said that Kumar, "a bottle of poison", must not reach Parliament. In a first, Shiv Sena to contest polls in West Bengal Following his remarks, the Rajya Sabha MP was issued a notice on Monday, asking him to respond to it by Wednesday. Further action in the matter will be decided by the Election Commission. Mumbai city Collector Shivaji Jondhale, who is the district election officer, in the notice said Raut's statement showed "lack of faith in the deployment of EVMs and muddying the electoral process". When contacted, Raut told PTI that he will respond to the notice to clarify his stand. "I have received the notice based on what I have written in 'Saamana'. We respect the EC and I will respond to the notice and clarify my stand in the time provided," he said. Meanwhile, police and flying squads have seized cash and other items worth Rs 75.78 crore across Maharashtra since the enforcement of the model code of conduct on March 10, according to official figures. These include Rs 19.82 crore cash, gold worth Rs 38.36 crore, liquor worth Rs 13.64 crore and narcotic substances worth Rs 3.96 crore. Kumar, the former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University's student union, is contesting the upcoming Lok Sabha poll from Begusarai in Bihar. In his column 'Rok Thok' in the Marathi daily, Raut also said that Kumar, "a bottle of poison", must not reach Parliament. Following his remarks, the Rajya Sabha MP was issued a notice on Monday, asking him to respond to it by Wednesday. Further action in the matter will be decided by the Election Commission. Mumbai city Collector Shivaji Jondhale, who is the district election officer, in the notice said Raut's statement showed "lack of faith in the deployment of EVMs and muddying the electoral process". When contacted, Raut told PTI that he will respond to the notice to clarify his stand. "I have received the notice based on what I have written in 'Saamana'. We respect the EC and I will respond to the notice and clarify my stand in the time provided," he said. Meanwhile, police and flying squads have seized cash and other items worth Rs 75.78 crore across Maharashtra since the enforcement of the model code of conduct on March 10, according to official figures. These include Rs 19.82 crore cash, gold worth Rs 38.36 crore, liquor worth Rs 13.64 crore and narcotic substances worth Rs 3.96 crore. PTI For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 15:28 [IST] As Mamata Banerjee takes swipe at Rahul Gandhi, Cong says such posturing for personal ambition will help BJP Rahul Gandhi in centre of Cong posters for Jaipur rally; call for him to become party chief again South India feels hostility from Modi, says Rahul Gandhi on Wayanad India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Apr 2: Congress president Rahul Gandhi said that the reason behind him to contest from Wayanad Lok Sabha seat in Kerala is because that South India feels hostility from Narendra Modi. Gandhi said,''There was a demand for me. There is a very strong feeling in south India that they are not being carried by the current government. South India feels hostility from Mr Narendra Modi.'' ''They feel that they are not being included in the decisions of this country. So I wanted to send a message to south India that we are with you and we are standing with you. That is why I am standing from Kerala,'' he further said. Congress releases manifesto for 2019, focus on NYAY, farmers and jobs On March 31, Congress president Rahul Gandhi announced that he will be contesting from Wayanad in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Suddenly every political enthusiast in the country was Googling away 'Wayanad'. The Congress, however, clarified that Gandhi's decision to contest from Wayanad did not mean he was going to abandon his home bastion of Amethi, from where he has been elected Member of Parliament successively for three times since 2004. It only meant he will contest from two seats, for the first time in his electoral career. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was quick to accuse the Congress president of being a 'fugitive', who is no longer sure of his success from Amethi, and hence has chosen a second "safe seat". For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 15:03 [IST] Many more leaders are in contact with me: Tejashwi Yadav after former MLA rejoins RJD from JD(U) Tejashwi Yadav corners Modi, says There should be some limit to lies India oi-Madhuri Adnal Patna, Apr 02: Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav on Tuesday has attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of his Lok Sabha election rallies in Bihar's Gaya and Jamui, and said, "there should be some limit to lies". Taking to Twitter, Tejashwi Yadav said,"Modi ji is coming to Gaya once again. Prime Minister @narendramodi, listen to the speech that you gave the last time when you were in Gaya carefully. I am sure you will be embarrassed. Does one exaggerate so much? There should be some limit to the lies, Prime Minister." Sir, Remember what you had promised to Bihar and people of Bihar in 2014 & 2015. Also dont forget its your own NDA govt in Bihar for last 15 years in leadership of U-Turn Chacha (The DNA CM). Putting some videos of Gaya for your kind reference. Hope you dont have memory loss https://t.co/4M8jeZbx99 Tejashwi Yadav (@yadavtejashwi) April 2, 2019 The RJD leader further posted a video, purportedly of Narendra Modi's 2014 address at a rally in Gaya on March 27- wherein he is promising to get water to Bihar and Jharkhand if BJP is voted to power. Mocking his poll promise, the younger son of RJD chief Lalu Yadav mocked the Prime Minister and said, "He was bringing enough water to drown the entire Bihar and Jharkhand." Dear PM @narendramodi Ji, Just reminding what you had promised to Bihar & Biharis on 10-03-2014 in Purnea. You promised to give Bihar- * Special Status * Special Package * Special Attention Before visiting Bihar & to befool Biharis again first see the MIRROR & answer thyself pic.twitter.com/pNj0lAAHS1 Tejashwi Yadav (@yadavtejashwi) April 2, 2019 Bihar's opposition alliance has announced a seat-sharing deal for the Lok Sabha elections and the RJD, the senior partner, will contest 19 of the state's 40 Lok Sabha seats. The Congress party will fight in nine under the arrangement. Tej Pratap Yadav to field his candidate against brother Tejashwi's in Jehanabad Polling in the eastern state will be held in all the seven phases of the Lok Sabha elections scheduled to begin from April 11 and end on May 19. The results will be declared on May 23. Jammu and Kashmir Panchayat polls to be held in 8 phases from March 5-19 Explained: What is Model Code of Conduct, when does it come into equation? Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey granted bail India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Apr 02: Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey on Tuesday was granted bail by a local court in connection with matter where he had misbehaved with Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) K K Upadhyay in Bihar's Buxar after the official had stopped his convoy for violating model code of conduct. Incident took place on 30 March. On March 30, SDM K K Upadhya said that there were about 30-40 vehicles in the convoy and also warned the minister that the action will be taken as per the provisions of law. 'Administration is blind', says MoS Ashwini Kumar Choubey on allegations of his son sparking clashes The FIR has been filed under multiple sections of the IPC for 'assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty among other charges', news agency ANI reported today (April 1). In a video available on social media, Ashwini Kumar Choubey was seen misbehaving and abusing the official after the latter had objected the passing of the convoy. In a heated discussion that followed, the Union Minister had said, "Khabardar, tamasha mat kijiye" (mind you, don't make a scene). The SDM then replied, "jo election commission ka aadesh aaya hai wo manna padega" (I'll have to follow election commission's order). Weather forecast for April 03: Rain likely to hit Odisha, AP India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Apr 02: Let us have a look at the weather forecast for Bengaluru, Delhi, Kolkata, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh on Arpil 03. Bengaluru: The residents of Bengaluru witnessed a sudden change of weather on Tuesday evening after a cloudy weather were observed due to a trough which is seen extending from eastern parts of Jharkhand and adjoining North Odisha up to South-coastal Andhra Pradesh. However, Bengaluru will remain dry with temperatures being on the higher side even at night, settling at around 35 degrees Celsius. Sky will be clear, and remain mostly sunny. Delhi: Beginning with North, no significant weather system is seen over the regions. Delhi has been seeing significant rise in temperatures since a few days now. However, the month of March has been the coldest for the city in last 21 years. As per Skymet weather, day and night temperatures would rise over Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Also, heatwave conditions might develop over Barmer, Jaisalmer and Jalore. Kolkata: In the last 24 hours from 08:30 am on Monday, scattered light rain and thundershower activities occurred over Jharkhand. Meanwhile, Bihar and West Bengal remained almost dry with few spells of light rain in the northern districts of West Bengal. As per Skymet weather, on April 6 and 7, once again we expect scattered light to moderate rain and thundershower activities over many parts of West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand. Odisha and Andhra Pradesh: Intermittent light rainfall activity is being forecast for parts of Odisha and coastal Andhra Pradesh, during the next two to three days. The reason for these rains can be the trough which is seen extending from eastern parts of Jharkhand and adjoining North Odisha up to South-coastal Andhra Pradesh. As per Skymet weather, Rains are expected to pick up pace around April 5 over coastal Andhra Pradesh, Odisha as well as parts of Telangana. The intensity will be more over Coastal Andhra Pradesh and Coastal Odisha during this time. Telangana will only receive isolated rain whereas the weather in Tamil Nadu will remain almost dry. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 18:03 [IST] Civilian drones likely to take to skies from October Will Yashwant Sinha vote for his son? India oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa New Delhi, Apr 02: Union Minister of state for civil aviation, Jayant Sinha, who has been re-nominated by the BJP for the Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat, said he has the blessings of his father Yashwant Sinha and was optimistic about his parents voting for him on May 6. "I have the full blessings of my father Yashwant Sinha. I have no political or personal differences with my father and mother, and had their blessings when I started my campaigning a few days ago, Jayant Sinha told PTI in an interview. After all they are my voters and will vote for me, he said. No guarantee of mahagathbandhan till seat sharing is finalised: Yashwant Sinha He was replying to a question that his three-time MP father extensively campaigned for him in 2014, resulting in his emphatic win and this time he (Jayant Sinha) has to go to the electoral battle alone following Yashwant Sinha quitting the BJP over differences with the party leadership. On February 20, former finance minister Yashwant Sinha had said that time has not (yet) come to answer this question when asked whether he would address any election meeting from Hazaribagh where his son was expected to contest. I am contestimng this election under the dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party president Amit Shah and their guidance and support, and with the support of all BJP workers there won't be any problem to win the seat for second consecutive term, Jayant Sinha said. Elections are not won singularly; but collectively with the vast support base and partys' performance during the last five years. During the last five years the nation made dramatic progress in every sphere under the Prime Minister's leadership, Jayant Sinha said. When asked who will be his main opponent from the Hazaribagh seat, Sinha said the Mahagthbandhan ally Congress is finding it difficult to name a candidate, which is definitely an advantage and plus point for me. The Congress has got the Hazaribagh seat in its kitty as per the Mahagathbandhans seat-sharing formula. "We have started our campaign in full swing (while the) opposition are yet to start their electioneering, which is definitely a minus point for my opponent, Jayant Sinha said. Modi govt playing mischief with statistics: Yashwant Sinha in Kolkata rally Asked what were his main achievements during his tenure as MP, he said successful implementation of six major schemes--- Ujwala Yojana, Ayushman Bharat, Food security Act, Swachch Bharat Mission, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, Kishan Samman Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Awash Yojana and other schemes in his constituency, which was appreciated by the Prime Minister during his visits to Hazaribagh and Ramgarh districts. He claimed that his personal achivements included setting up of Medical College, starting new thermal power station at Patratu, starting Akshay Patro Scheme for midday meals, Railway Line Project and Krishi Anusandhan Kendra at Barhi in Hazaribagh. Asked what were the problems still prevailing in his constituency, he said different irrigation projects, quality education and solving smooth traffic system. He said he would present his manifesto to his voters immediately after filing his nomination. Uttar Pradesh opinion poll: Who will win next elections? ABP-CVoter survey results are here UP CM warns Owaisi: Followers of 'abba jaan', don't try to inflame passions over CAA Yogi dubs Congress manifesto "bundle of lies", says it reflects 55 years of failure India oi-Vikas SV Gorakhpur (UP), Apr 2: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday came down heavily on the Congress over promises made in its manifesto, and dubbed it as a "bundle of lies". Adityanath cornered Congress over the issue of national security and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had adopted a policy of "zero tolerance" towards terrorism. Adityanath said during the UPA government's 2004-2014 tenure, several terror attacks were termed "Hindu terror". Referring to the Pulwama terror attack and the retaliatory air strike by India, at a meeting of BJP's youth workers in Gorakhpur, he said the statements by the opposition parties are helping Pakistan which is highlighting them at the international level. On the Congress manifesto released earlier in the day, he said, "It is a bundle of lies and the party has expressed its failure over 55 years in its 55-page manifesto." "Opposition is making negative statements on Pulwama and Balakot and Pakistan is drawing advantage from such remarks by presenting them at the international level in its favour," the chief minister said. Thousands of soldiers were injured in stone-pelting in Kashmir in this period," he claimed. "Pakistan used to attack many times and even beheaded our soldier," he said. He said the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party - the two opposition parties which have forged an alliance in Uttar Pradesh - supported the Congress then and "looted" the country. [Congress' manifesto is prepared by the 'tukde tukde gang': Arun Jaitley] On Monday evening, he addressed a teachers' conference here, accusing the opposition party workers of being linked to "hooliganism." He claimed when women see people carrying SP and BSP flags, they ask why are they "flags of 'goondas'." OneIndia News with PTI inputs For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 20:38 [IST] Is China the reason why Pakistan opted to skip Summit for Democracy hosted by Biden? Pakistan: Cops find woman in deep sleep next to body parts of 70 year old man Pakistan owns up on F-16 used in dog fight with India International oi-Vicky Nanjappa Islamabad, Apr 02: Pakistan has for the first time indicated that F-16s might have been used to hit Indian fighter jets during the aerial combat on February 27 and said Islamabad retains the right to use "anything and everything" in its self-defence. Pakistan's military spokesman Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor issued a statement with reference to what he said "repeated Indian claims" about shooting down of Pakistani F-16 by India and use of F-16 in the air battle on February 27. "As regard Pakistan Air Force (PAF) action for strikes across Line of Control, it was done by JF-17 from within Pakistan airspace," he said. Did Pakistan use F-16s in the aerial dog fight with India: There is ample proof Later, when two Indian jets crossed the Line of Control, they were shot down by the PAF, he claimed. "Whether it was F-16 or JF-17 which shot down 2 Indian aircraft is immaterial," he said. He further said: "Even if F-16 have been used as at that point in time complete PAF was airborne including F16s, the fact remains that Pakistan Airforce shot down two Indian jets in self-defence." Ghafoor said that Pakistan had right to use anything for its defence. "India can assume any type of their choice even F-16. Pakistan retains the right to use anything and everything in its legitimate self-defence," he said. He also rejected that any F-16 was destroyed by Indian Air Force in the dogfight. "The event of February 27 is part of history now. No Pakistani F-16 was hit by Indian Airforce," he said. Last month, Ghafoor said that only JF-17 was used against India on February 27. Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after the February 14 attack by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pulwama that killed 40 CRPF soldiers. A touch of Cold War: India's MiG-21 upgraded by Russia equal to Pak's US-made F-16, says analyst Amid mounting outrage, the Indian Air Force carried out a counter-terror operation, hitting what it said was a JeM training camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistan on February 26. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in aerial combat and captured an Indian pilot, who was handed over to India later. India has raised objection over the use of F-16s by Pakistan during the aerial raid on February 27 and cited purchasing agreement between Washington and Islamabad. As part of the purchasing agreement, the US had reportedly barred Pakistan from using the F-16s against any third country and it was only allowed to operate the fighter in self-defence and for anti-terror missions. Here is what US will do, if it finds that Pakistan misused the F-16s India has also given proof to America about the use of US-manufactured F-16 jets and AMRAAM beyond visual range air-to-air missile by Pakistan during its aerial raid. The IAF on February 28 displayed parts of an AMRAAM missile as evidence to "conclusively" prove that Pakistan deployed F-16s during the aerial raid targeting Indian military installations in Kashmir. It said Pakistan does not have any other fighters capable of firing an AMRAAM missile. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 5:49 [IST] NASA is launching a spacecraft to smash an asteroid: Here is when and where to watch Who is Anil Menon? One among the 10 selected for future moon mission by NASA Terrible terrible thing to do: NASA on Indias satellite destruction International oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa Washington, Apr 02: NASA has said that India's destruction of one of its satellites was a terrible thing that had created 400 pieces of orbital debris and led to new dangers for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Head of NASA, Jim Bridenstine said that not all of the pieces were big enough to track. What we are tracking right now are objects big enough to track. The Indian satellite was destroyed at a relatively low altitude of 300 km, well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit. 24 of the pieces are going above the apogee of the ISS, he also said. That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight, he further said. ASAT technologies indigenously developed, says DRDO; NSA gave final clearence It is unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact is to us, he further said. In 2018, the UNIDIR proposed three ASAT test guidelines. Under the 'No Debris' guideline, if an actor wishes to test ASAT capabilities, they should not create debris. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 8:10 [IST] India voices serious concern over increasing spread of terrorism in Africa at UN UN peacekeeping chief says India has great potential for more cooperation UN chief Antonio Guterres warns against rising anti-Muslim hatred International pti-PTI Cairo, Apr 2: UN chief Antonio Guterres warned on Tuesday against growing hatred of Muslims, less than a month after a deadly attack on mosques in New Zealand killed at least 50 people. His remarks came during a speech at Egypt's Al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world's foremost religious institution, where he met Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb. "Around the world, we are seeing ever-rising anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia," the UN secretary general said. He cited the March 15 New Zealand mosque attacks by a white supremacist as well as a 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and is believed to be the deadliest against Jews in US history. Guterres warned of a surge in hate speech he said was "entering the mainstream, spreading like wildfire through social media". [Syria urges UNSC to uphold resolutions on Golan Heights] "We see it spreading in liberal democracies and as well as in authoritarian states." Guterres is on a two-day trip to Egypt, Following his visit to Al-Azhar, he was scheduled to meet President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. On Sunday, he attended an Arab League summit in Tunisia. PTI English French Press release Paris, April 2, 2019 Isabelle Allouch is appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Sandro brand Jean-Baptiste Dacquin to succeed her as Chief Executive Officer of the Claudie Pierlot brand SMCP is delighted to announce the appointment of Isabelle Allouch as Chief Executive Officer of Sandro effective April 8, 2019. Jean-Baptiste Dacquin, previously Human Resources Director of the SMCP group, is replacing her as Chief Executive Officer of Claudie Pierlot. Daniel Lalonde, SMCPs Chief Executive Officer, said: We are delighted to announce the appointments of Isabelle Allouch as the new CEO of Sandro, and of Jean-Baptiste Dacquin as the new CEO of Claudie Pierlot. They are both highly talented individuals from the Group who have made a substantial contribution to the development of SMCP, which became a global leader in accessible luxury with revenues of over one billion euros. I have total confidence in Isabelles and Jean-Baptistes ability to keep Sandro and Claudie Pierlot powering ahead and would like to join all SMCPs teams in wishing them every success in their new roles. Isabelle Allouch is taking charge of the Sandro brand after five successful years at the helm of Claudie Pierlot, during which she gained tremendous knowledge of the Group. Under her leadership, Claudie Pierlot sales tripled to over 125 million, it made further headway in its international expansion, especially in Asia and the Middle East, and it accelerated its digital transformation. Today Claudie Pierlot has a presence in 20 countries around the world, generates more than 30% of its sales outside France and has the Groups highest digital penetration. Before joining SMCP, Isabelle Allouch was notably Occitanes Head of European Retail before becoming Managing Director for France, with operational and sales responsibility for all the brands distribution channels. Isabelle started her career at LOreal where she spent 13 years and had various key management positions there. Isabelle, 49, has an MBA from Neoma. Jean-Baptiste Dacquin, previously SMCPs Human Resources Director for seven years, is replacing Isabelle as Chief Executive Officer of Claudie Pierlot. At the SMCP group, Jean-Baptiste has gained extensive knowledge of the sector and has supported, alongside the Executive Committee, the development of the three brands and the expansion of the Group. SMCP has grown from 450 retail stores in 9 countries to over 1,400 in 40 countries, and from 1,200 employees to 5,800. He is passionate about Retail and management and he has contributed to structuring the Group and its teams with a strong business culture. Prior to joining SMCP, he came into the retail sector from consulting, and spent 12 years at Kiabi (Mulliez Group). He held several positions there, including Head of International Development and Head of Franchise, which led him to supervise a network of more than 120 stores. Jean-Baptiste, 45, is a graduate of EM Normandie. ABOUT SMCP SMCP is a global player in the apparel and accessories market with three distinct contemporary Parisian fashion brands, Sandro, Maje and Claudie Pierlot. Present in 40 countries with 1,466 points of sale, SMCP generated 1 bn sales in 2018. Evelyne Chetrite and Judith Milgrom founded Sandro and Maje in Paris, in 1984 and 1998 respectively and continue to provide creative direction for the brands. Claudie Pierlot was founded in 1984 by Madame Claudie Pierlot and acquired by SMCP in 2009. SMCP is listed on the regulated market of Euronext Paris (compartment A, ISIN Code FR0013214145, ticker: SMCP). INVESTORS CONTACT PRESS CONTACT celia.deverlange@smcp.com Brunswick - Hugues Boeton pauline . roubin@smcp.com +33 (0) 1 53 96 83 83 smcp@brunswickgroup.com Attachment 35 taken ill after eating food at wedding in Jaipur Jaipur oi-PTI Jaipur, Apr 02: Thirty-five people, including the bride, were taken ill after eating food served at a marriage ceremony here, a health official said Tuesday. Wedding guests complained of stomach ache, vomiting and loose motions soon after returning to Dausa from the wedding in Jaipur on Monday night. They were rushed to a government hospital. Six of them are still undergoing treatment, Dausa Chief Medical and Health Officer Dr O.P Bairwa said. 15 children fall ill after consuming midday meal in Uttar Pradesh Health officials said guests had consumed non-vegetarian food and sweets during the feast, which apparently had turned stale due to hot weather conditions. The samples of the food items have been sent to a laboratory for testing. PTI Rajasthan: Massive fire breaks out in Mukundra Hills Tiger Reserve in Kota, none hurt Jaipur pti-PTI Kota (Raj), Apr 2: A massive fire broke out on Tuesday in an enclosure of the Mukundra Hill Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan's Kota district, officials said. No casualty was reported in the incident, they said. Six fire tenders were rushed to spot to douse the fire spread in around seven to eight kilometer area of the 82 square kilometer enclosure, but the flames were yet to be doused in about 40 per cent area. Notably, two tigers namely MT- 1, MT- 2 are housed inside and tigress MT-3 is outside the enclosure, Singh said, adding all animals were safe. "The fire spread inside the MHTR enclosure in about 7-8 km of area with the width of about 200 m and joint efforts with the district administration are underway to control the fire," Deputy Conservator of Forests (MHTR) T Mohan said. [Kolkata: Century-old Wari Athletic club gutted in early morning fire] He said the authorities were considering to call an aircraft assistance in the operation. 'The fire in about 60 per cent area near SawanBhado dam has been controlled and efforts are underway to control it in the remaining area," Amit Sharma, a fire fighter from Kota Municipal Corporation (KMC) engaged in controlling the fire, said. In a similar incident, a fire broke out in a wheat field in Baran district. The fire was controlled before it could engulf the wheat crop standing in nearby fields, SHO at Nahargarh police station Dalpat Singh said. The fire has been fully controlled and no loss of life or heavy damage reported so far, he added. PTI Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to reach Lucknow on July 16; Key meetings scheduled in Delhi before visit Members of farmers' body detained in Lucknow for trying to burn effigies of PM Modi, Shah Section 144 CrPC invoked in Lucknow in view of Christmas, New Year Varanasi: Student shot at in BHU, condition said to be critical Lucknow oi-Vikas SV Varanasi, Apr 2: A student of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) was shot at on Tuesday evening, said reports. He has been rushed to the hospital, but the condition is said to be critical. The student has been identified as Guarav Singh. He is MCA student at Banaras Hindu University (BHU). He was shot at by unknown assailants in front of Birla hostel when he was talking to his friends, reported ANI. Gaurav sustained bullet injuries in his stomach and was rushed to the trauma centre of the BHU's Institute of Medical Sciences, where he is undergoing treatment, he said. The police are perusing the CCTV footage and have launched a manhunt to apprehend the criminals, he said. The assailants are said to have fled the spot. JKSSB SI Recruitment 2021: Last date to apply for 800 Sub Inspector posts, direct link here CTET December 2021 admit cards to be out shortly: How to download Delhi: Florist shot dead in Kabir Nagar New Delhi pti-PTI New Delhi, Apr 1: A 40-year-old florist was shot dead after a quarrel broke out between him and the accused in northeast Delhi's Welcome area, police said on Monday. The incident took place on Sunday night and police were informed around 11 pm regarding a firing at Kabir Nagar gali after which police went to the spot, they said. Investigations revealed that one Mehtab working as a florist was brought dead at Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, Atul Kumar Thakur, Deputy Commissioner of Police (northeast) said. [Delhi: 25-year-old held after car runs over minor] Earlier in the day, Mehtab had a quarrel with one Nawazish following which Nawazish and some of his associates came and fired upon Mehtab, he said. A case of murder has been registered, the DCP said. The exact cause of quarrel that triggered the incident will be ascertained after the accused persons who are still absconding are nabbed, he added. PTI Catheters and Bands Market by Product (Catheters, Bands), by Catheter Type (Therapeutic, Diagnostic), by Catheter Shape (Pigtail, Judkins Left, Judkins Right, Bypass, Amplatz), by Band Type (Regular, Long), by Procedure Type (Transfemoral, Transradial), by Application (Acute Coronary Syndrome, Pre-Operative Coronary Assessment, Coronary Evaluation, Pulmonary Hypertension, Peripheral Arterial Disease, Bradycardia), by End User (Hospitals, Clinics & Ambulatory Care Centers), by Geography (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal) Market Size, Share, Development, Growth, and Demand Forecast, 20142024 NEW YORK, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to the market research report published by P&S Intelligence, catheters and bands market in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal is expected to generate a revenue of $96.5 million by 2024, advancing at a CAGR of 6.6% in coming years, the market is driven by rising prevalence of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), increasing government initiatives to raise awareness on CVDs, and improving healthcare infrastructure, across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Request to get the sample pages of the report: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/catheters-and-bands-market/report-sample Based on catheter type, the catheters market in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal is bifurcated into therapeutic and diagnostic catheters. The therapeutic catheters are anticipated to be larger and the faster growing category, propelling at a CAGR of 8.4% during the forecast period. Due to increase in the prevalence of CVDs, the demand for therapeutic catheters has risen considerably, as compared to diagnostic catheters. On the basis of band type, the bands market in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal is bifurcated into regular and long bands. The regular bands are expected to hold larger share in the market during the forecast period. This category is expected to generate $8.6 million revenue by 2024, as compared to an estimated value of around $7.0 million in 2018. This growth can be mainly attributed to the increasing cases of hospitalization due to the high prevalence of non-communicable diseases, including CVDs and pulmonary disorders. In terms of volume, around 438 thousand units of regular bands were sold across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal in 2018, which are expected to reach 658 thousand units by 2024. Based on procedure type, the catheters and bands market in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal is classified into transfemoral and transradial procedures. Transfemoral procedure is expected to lead the market, throughout the forecast period. This category is expected to thrive at a CAGR of 6.4% during the forecast period, generating $52.5 million by 2024. On the basis of application, the catheters and bands market in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal is categorized into acute coronary syndrome, pre-operative coronary assessment, coronary evaluation, pulmonary hypertension, peripheral arterial disease, bradycardia, and others. Application of catheters and bands to treat acute coronary syndrome is expected to constitute the largest demand in the market. The market for this category is mainly driven by the increasing prevalence of acute coronary syndrome in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Browse report overview with 268 tables and 67 figures spread through 243 pages and detailed TOC on "Catheters and Bands Market" at: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/catheters-and-bands-market The catheters and bands market in India is expected to generate around $60.0 million revenue by 2024, progressing at a CAGR of 7.2% during the forecast period. The growth of the market may be attributed to the factors such as growing geriatric population, and increasing prevalence of cardiac diseases. The catheters and bands market in West India is estimated to generate a revenue of $10.7 million in 2018, which is expected to statistically increase up to $17.5 million by 2024, with a CAGR of 8.4%, during the forecast period. Increasing government initiatives are expected to contribute to the growth of the market in this region. For instance, the government of Gujarat launched a healthcare scheme to provide primary healthcare assistance to elderly people at their doorstep in 2018. The plan only charges one-time registration fee of $15 and provides all basic health facilities at their doorstep. Make enquiry before buying the report: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/send-enquiry?enquiry-url=catheters-and-bands-market The catheters and bands market in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal is witnessing rapid evolution with a substantial increase in the number of product launches and expansion. For instance, in July 2018, Medtronic plc received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) approval for implantable system for Remodulin, which is used for the treatment of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension. Similarly, in March 2018, Smiths Group plc launched Delta Med SpAs DeltaVen in the U.S., which is now also used in India. The closed-system catheter is viewed as the next advancement in peripheral intravenous catheters. It offers a needle and extension tubing, and also has an option for a needleless connecter. Terumo Corporation; Becton, Dickinson and Company; Medtronic plc; Teleflex Incorporated; Smiths Group plc; Boston Scientific Corporation; Sahajanand Medical Technologies Private Limited; Merit Medical Systems Inc.; Cardinal Health Inc.; Relisys Medical Devices Limited; and Global Surgimed Industries are some of the key players operating in the catheters and bands market in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. More Related Reports by P&S Intelligence MRI Systems Market During the forecast period, the MRI systems market is expected to witness the fastest growth in the APAC region, with 6.0% CAGR. The market in the region is primarily driven by improving healthcare infrastructure, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, and technological advancements in imaging modalities. According to Cancer Australia, a cancer control agency by the Australian Government, 127,887 new cases of cancer were diagnosed in Australia in 2014, and the number is expected to reach 138,321 by the end of 2018. Surging geriatric population is another key factor driving the growth of the APAC MRI systems market. According to the World Bank, the population of the elderly in the total population of APAC increased from 6.9% in 2000 to 8.7% in 2017. https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/mri-market Sleep Apnea Devices Market During the forecast period, the sleep apnea devices market is expected to witness the fastest growth in Asia-Pacific (APAC), owing to the increasing prevalence of sleep apnea disorders in the region. Furthermore, the large undiagnosed patient pool in countries, such as China and India; and increasing initiatives by the government and other private organizations to raise awareness about the harmful effects of sleep disorders, including sleep apnea, are the factor that will contribute to the regions faster growth in the sleep apnea devices industry. https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/sleep-apnea-devices-market About P&S Intelligence P&S Intelligence is a provider of market research and consulting services catering to the market information needs of burgeoning industries across the world. Providing the plinth of market intelligence, P&S as an enterprising research and consulting company, believes in providing thorough landscape analyses on the ever-changing market scenario, to empower companies to make informed decisions and base their business strategies with astuteness. Contact: P&S Intelligence Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada) International: +1-347-960-6455 Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.com Web: https://www.psmarketresearch.com VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FinCanna Capital Corp. (FinCanna) (CSE: CALI) (OTCQB: FNNZF) a royalty company for the U.S. licensed cannabis industry is pleased to announce the election of Mr. Morris L. Reid to the position of Chairman of the Board. Mr. Reid, who is a Partner at Mercury, a leading high-stakes public strategy firm, is based in Washington, D.C. and London and has been a director of FinCanna for the past two years. Morris has worked with high-profile individuals, government officials and corporate executives, advising on high-level political and corporate issues for more than 15 years. His public affairs advisory work focuses on brand building, international relations and advocacy, and issues, crisis, and reputation management. He has designed and executed lucrative business development plans, including business matchmaking and securing foreign direct investment. A globally recognized strategist, Morris has worked in North America, Latin America and across the Middle East and Africa in both the public and private sectors and advises prime ministers, finance ministers, foreign ministers and health ministers in some of the worlds most prominent emerging markets. Morriss media contributions as an expert in political and business marketing have been featured across all media platforms, including CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX News, BBC, France 24, Sky News and Al Jazeera, as well as the New York Times, USA Today, Financial Times, and Details and Forbes magazines. I am very pleased to take on this new and expanded role with FinCanna, stated Morris Reid, Chairman of the Board, FinCanna Capital. As a director of the company for the past two years Ive seen the team make great progress towards building out a premier royalty model investment platform and portfolio. I believe the company is poised for very substantial growth and look forward to playing a meaningful role in ensuring we collectively realize that potential. We are honoured to have a man of Morriss stature and experience take on the important role of Chairman of the Board, said Andriyko Herchak, CEO of FinCanna Capital. Morris has an exceptional and diverse skill set and has built an impressive global network over the course of his notable career. We look forward to his contribution and leadership as we continue to build our diversified investment portfolio creating long term wealth for our shareholders. About FinCanna Capital Corp. FinCanna is a royalty company that provides growth capital to rapidly emerging private companies operating in the licensed U.S cannabis industry. The Company earns its revenue from royalties paid by its investee companies that are calculated based on a percentage of their total revenues. FinCannas scalable royalty model provides an attractive alternative or complement to debt or equity financing for its investee companies. FinCanna is focused on delivering high-impact returns to its shareholders by way of a strategically diversified investment portfolio. For additional information visit www.fincannacapital.com and FinCannas profile at www.sedar.com. FinCanna Capital Corp. Andriyko Herchak, CEO & Director Investor Relations: Arlen Hansen Kin Communications 1-866-684-6730 CALI@kincommunications.com Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are statements that relate to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", and "intend", statements that an action or event "may", "might", "could", "should", or "will" be taken or occur, or other similar expressions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements about how the developing U.S. legal regime will impact the cannabis industry. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the risks identified in the CSE listing statement and other reports and filings with the applicable Canadian securities regulators. Forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made, and the respective companies undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no responsibility to update or revise forward-looking information to reflect new events or circumstances unless required by applicable law. SAN FRANCISCO, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sqreen, the industrys first provider of Application Security Management (ASM), today announced the close of a $14 million Series A funding round led by Greylock Partners with Y Combinator and previous investors Alven Capital and Point Nine also participating. Greylock partner Sarah Guo joins the board. To date, Sqreen has raised more than $18 million in total funding. Sqreens ASM platform, used to protect more than 500 companies around the world today, is a modern approach to security in production for web applications and cloud workloads. ASM leverages microagents embedded in applications to identify and automatically protect against threats in real time. Sqreen is easy to use and deploy. With no software code modifications, Sqreen can be up and running and protect any web application in under five minutes. Its unique hybrid SaaS architecture allows instant and safe deployment through smart microagents, without having to redirect traffic or install complex on-premises software. Sqreen goes beyond the HTTP layer and uses dynamic instrumentation logic to detect malicious activities within the application. It provides unprecedented visibility into web application security and risk, down to the code level. Dynamic protection modules ranging from runtime application self-protection (RASP), to in-app web application firewall (WAF), account take-over (ATO) protection can be enabled with just one click. Sqreens RASP module is the most broadly deployed in the world. The state of the art for application security is outdated and complex with approaches that dont work in production, slow down app development, and are expensive to use and maintain. Today every company is a software company, and Sqreen supports that by putting a scalable security solution in the hands of developers, operations and security teams, said Sarah Guo, Greylock partner. Just as application performance has become key to every digital business, and APM is embedded in every app that matters, application security will too. Sqreens fresh approach is a paradigm shift -- a unique platform that eliminates the tradeoff between innovation and security. According to technology research firm Forrester , application security spend will double over the next five years at a 16.4% compound annual growth rate, reaching $7.1 billion in annual spend by 2023. Sqreen was created by former leaders of Apples offensive security team. They saw the need for a powerful solution to modern application security challenges, with Apple-quality simplicity, design and ease of use. Security is a must-have for SaaS and internet companies and organizations of any size that ship software for their business, said Pierre Betouin, CEO and co-founder of Sqreen, formerly the leader of Apples security Red Team. Security needs to enable developers and the rest of the company. It cant be a silo that blocks or slows down releases anymore. We bring true collaboration between the developers and security teams. Security is a core component for us, but I felt like a security beginner. Its wonderful to work with Sqreen because I get accurate insights about attacks that were having and its very straightforward to see how we can improve our applications security, said Sacha Morard, CTO, Le Monde Group. Sqreen was very easy for developers to integrate and for a security product, they have a very good feel for the user experience its pretty snappy, said Jack Eisenberg, CTO of Swell Investing, an online investing platform and subsidiary of insurance giant Pacific Life. We used Sqreen to quickly set up rules that let us prevent a lot of shenanigans. Theyve been reliable and we havent had any hiccups. About Sqreen Sqreen is the industrys first provider of Application Security Management (ASM), unifying application security needs into one single platform, giving over 500 companies unprecedented visibility and protection in production. Sqreen enables developers, operations and security teams to scale their security without impacting engineering velocity. The company was founded by security veterans who previously led the offensive security team at Apple. Sqreen is backed by Greylock Partners, Y Combinator, Alven Capital and Point Nine. For more information, please visit www.sqreen.com . Editorial Contact Lonn Johnston (for Sqreen) +1 650.219.7764 lonn@flak42.com HARTSVILLE, S.C., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sonoco (NYSE:SON), one of the largest diversified global packaging companies, announced today that Russell Grissett has assumed the duties of Division Vice President and General Manager of Global Flexibles, effective April 1, 2019. Grissett is a 25-year Sonoco veteran who has demonstrated strong commercial and operational leadership within the Companys Consumer Packaging and Protective Solutions businesses. Most recently, Grissett was Division Vice President and General Manager of Global Protective Solutions. During his tenure at Sonoco, Russell has been a tremendous strength in our Protective Solutions business, said Rodger Fuller, senior vice president, Global Consumer Packaging, Display & Packaging and Protective Solutions. He will bring a fresh perspective to our Flexibles division to drive performance and accelerate growth. About Sonoco Founded in 1899, Sonoco (NYSE: SON) is a global provider of a variety of consumer packaging, industrial products, protective packaging, and displays and packaging supply chain services. With annualized net sales of approximately $5.4 billion, the Company has 23,000 employees working in approximately 300 operations in 36 countries, serving some of the worlds best known brands in some 85 nations. Sonoco is committed to creating sustainable products, services and programs for our customers, employees and communities that support our corporate purpose of Better Packaging. Better Life. The Company ranked first in the Packaging sector on Fortunes Worlds Most Admired Companies for 2019 as well as Barrons 100 Most Sustainable Companies. For more information, visit www.sonoco.com . Contact: Roger Schrum +843-339-6018 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/845c9c47-2fc4-4196-9085-64289da5a37c Minister assisting the Papua New Guinea Prime Minister on Bougainville Affairs, William Samb, has confirmed that the government has released the first K10 million (US$2.9 million) out of K30m (US$8.8 million) for the referendum on Bougainville. He said critics claims that there was reluctance by the national government to support Bougainville were not true. The national government is doing everything within the spirit of the Bougainville Peace Agreement, Samb said. Some international observers have commented that the Bougainville Peace Agreement is one of the best in the world. He said the Coordinating Office on Bougainville affairs had made a submission for K20 million (US$5.9 million) but the deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer Charles Abel gave an additional K10 million in the budget for a total of K30 million. We have got K30 million from the national government but yet we have been hammered that there is no funding for the referendum, he said. Samb said the K10m has been paid to the Bougainville Referendum Commission account. He said K10m has been split, with K8m (US$2.3 million) for electoral and K2m (US$593,000) for non-electoral activities, The deputy prime minister has assured us that the next K10m will go out by the end of this month. And the remainder by next month, he said. The national government is committed to the referendum and I am committed to delivering it to the people of Bougainville. Samb said some people misunderstood dates set in the peace agreement for referendum. We have deferred the referendum from June 15 to October 12, he said. The peace agreement states that the dates for referendum on Bougainville must be between June 15 of 2019 and no later than June 15, 2022. So, we are still within the prescribed time-frame, he said. SOURCE: POST COURIER/PACNEWS Opalesque Industry Update - Tikehau Capital, the alternative asset management and investment group, has appointed Frederic Giovansili as Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Tikehau Investment Management, the company's primary asset management platform, with effect from 1 April 2019. Reporting to Thomas Friedberger, Co-Chief Investment Officer of Tikehau Capital and Chief Executive Officer of Tikehau Investment Management, and Henri Marcoux, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Tikehau Capital and Chief Executive Officer of Tikehau Investment Management, Frederic Giovansili will be responsible for Tikehau Investment Management's sales, marketing and business development. Mr. Giovansili's appointment comes as Tikehau Capital sets two core targets to achieve by 2022: reaching over 35 billion in assets under management, and reporting over 100 million of net operating profit from the asset management activity, over five times the amount recorded in 2018 for this business. Mr Giovansili, 46, graduated from CentraleSupelec and has a Masters degree in Economics. Since 2017, he has been head of Northern and Western European sales across global markets and Client Financing Solutions at Nomura. In this role, he headed up an international sales team based in five offices covering 10 countries, working across both investment banking and global markets. Previously, he was based in London and then Paris for Citi where he was head of global markets for France, Belgium and Luxembourg for 11 years. Appointed managing director at Citi in 2007, he led a team working across the full range of products (equities, FX and fixed income) for financial institutions and large corporates. Before joining Citi, he held several roles at Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan in London. Henri Marcoux, Deputy CEO of Tikehau Capital and CEO of Tikehau Investment Management, commented: "We are delighted to have Frederic Giovansili on board. With over 20 years' experience in global markets in both London and Paris working in various structuring, sales and management roles across a range of products, his arrival is part of our clear and ambitious asset management growth strategy." 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The report provides an in-depth overview of industry and competitive landscape, covering multiple market segments and elaborates market outlook and status to 2026.Get Sample Copy Of This Report @The report contains pages which highly exhibit on current market analysis scenario, upcoming as well as future opportunities, revenue growth, pricing and profitability.Breast Pumps 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 Breast Pumps Market global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 20192026.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.For More Information On This Report, Please VisitThe 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 Breast Pumps Market analysis & forecast 2019-2026 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.Global Breast Pumps Market Segmentation Includes:Region-wise Analysis covers:North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanIndiaSoutheast AsiaOther regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)The Major players include:Philips AventMedela AGAmeda AGLasinohPigeonDr. Brown'sNUKTommee TippeeARDOEvenflo FeedingWhittlestone, IncHygeiaBailey MedicalFreiCare Swiss GmbHProduct Type Analysis:Closed SystemsOpen SystemsApplication Analysis:Hospital GradePersonal UseThere are many other application and segment on which the study has been conducted.Get Sample Copy Of This Report @Breast Pumps Market Analysis and Forecast 2019-2026 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 analysis of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Global Breast Pumps Market Analysis and Forecast 2019-2026 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 Breast Pumps Market analysis and forecast 2019-2026.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. Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market 2019-2026 Market Report - Recent Trends and Growth Opportunities Includes Major players Abiomed, Berlin Heart, Biotronik, Etc. Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market 2019-2026 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/requested_sample/87636 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/enquiry_before_buying/87636 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/requested_sample/87636 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/request_for_discount/87636 www.upmarketresearch.com Up Market Research published a detailed report on Global Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market Size Status and Forecast 2026. The report provides an in-depth overview of industry and competitive landscape, covering multiple market segments and elaborates market outlook and status to 2026.Get Sample Copy Of This Report @The report contains pages which highly exhibit on current market analysis scenario, upcoming as well as future opportunities, revenue growth, pricing and profitability. Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices 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 Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 20192026.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.For More Information On This Report, Please VisitThe 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 Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market analysis & forecast 2019-2026 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.Global Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market Segmentation Includes:Region-wise Analysis covers:North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanIndiaSoutheast AsiaOther regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)The Major players include:AbiomedBerlin Heart GmbHBiotronik SE and Co. KGBoston Scientific CorporationHeartWare InternationalJarvik HeartLivaNova PLCMedtronicReliantHeartSt. Jude MedicalProduct Type Analysis:Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT)Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICDs)Application Analysis:Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD)Right Ventricular Assist Device (RVAD)Biventricular Assist Device (BIVAD)There are many other application and segment on which the study has been conducted.Get Sample Copy Of This Report @Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market Analysis and Forecast 2019-2026 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 analysis of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Global Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market Analysis and Forecast 2019-2026 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 Congestive Heart Failure Treatment Devices Market analysis and forecast 2019-2026.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. Radial Head Resection Implants Market Outlook 2026: Biomet, Inc., Wright Medical Technology, Inc., Smith & Nephew Plc, and Stryker Radial Head Resection Implants https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/110 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-pdf/110 The global radial head resection implants market is less fragmented as major players account for major share of the market. High entry barriers and stringent regulations such as Medical Device Amendments of 1976 requires mandatory FDA approval to obtain reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness before marketing may hamper the entry of new players as only the well-established players can focus and invest on improving their existing radial head resection implants products, which further brings accuracy in the device. Furthermore, in 2013, there was a product recall for DePuy Synthes Companies, a Johnson & Johnson Company. The reason for recall as cited by the manufacturer was loosening trial head from the implant stem during manipulation of the arm during surgery.Get PDF Sample Copy of this Report @For instance, most economies with a sound healthcare infrastructure have an unhealthy lifestyle and vice versa. In 2015, according to the Department of Orthopedic and Trauma Surgery, University of Freiburg Medical Centre, Freiburg, Germany, the radial head fractures contributes to around 4% of all types of fractures, and within all elbow fractures the radial fractures constitutes to around 30%. It is also diagnosed in around 75% of all proximal lower-arm fractures, securing an incidence of around 25 to 30 cases per 100,000 patients among the adult population.Furthermore, studies related to radial head fractures further highlight the importance of the radial head resection by the help of prosthesis and implants. Some such studies are short- to medium-term outcomes of radial head replacement arthroplasty in posttraumatic unstable elbows mentioned in Chang Gung Med Journal in 2010 and resection of the radial head after mason type-III fractures of the elbow mentioned in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery published in 1998.According to National Center for Biotechnology Information, radial head fractures are common worldwide with around 2.5 to 2.8 per 10,000 of incidence per year. Also, due to the patient benefits in terms of no deformity and regaining normal functionality after a relatively short period following the surgery, the radial head resection therapy is gaining wide acceptance across the globe. The use of radial head resection implants are strictly recommended by the orthopedic surgeon by looking at the severity of type III and type IV fractures.Major players involved in the radial head resection implants market include Biomet, Inc., Wright Medical Technology, Inc., Smith & Nephew Plc, and Stryker.Download PDF Brochure of Research Report:Global Radial Head Resection Implants Market TaxonomyThe global radial head resection market is classified on the basis of following segments:Product Type:StandardReconLateralFracture Type:Type IIIType IVMaterialTitaniumSiliconeEnd User:Orthopedic and Trauma CentersHospitalsOrthopedic ClinicsSignificantly accepted radial head implants: CO5 Series (IMECO), Solar (Striker), RHS (Tornier), Evolve (Wright), Explor (Biomet), etc.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.1001 4th Ave,, #3200, Seattle, WA 98154 Casing Centralizer Market Size, Share, Development by 2024 Top Key players like Neoz Energy,Halliburton,National Oilwell Varco,Inc. https://www.marketresearchreportstore.com/reports/355122/global-casing-centralizer-market https://www.marketresearchreportstore.com/reports/355122/global-casing-centralizer-market https://www.marketresearchreportstore.com Market Research Report Store offers a latest published report on Casing Centralizer 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:Casing Centralizer is a device used to place the casing at the center of the hole so as to improve the efficiency of the cementing. It is an important device because if the Casing Centralizer touches the formation at any part of the hole, then cement slurry does not pass through the area of the contact resulting in a poor cementing job.North America has the largest global export quantity and manufacturers in Casing Centralizer market, while the Europe is the second sales volume market for Casing Centralizer in 2017. The price of Casing Centralizer is closely related to the price of the raw materials-steel. Fluctuating with the fluctuation of steel price, the price of the Casting Centralizer is not expected to fluctuate greatly.Casing Centralizer technology is much mature now, and new enterprises can not surpass existing famous brands on reputation or design in the short term. So, the study group recommends the new entrants need to be considered carefully before enter into this field.According to this study, over the next five years the Casing Centralizer market will register a 7.1% CAGR in terms of revenue, the global market size will reach US$ 600 million by 2024, from US$ 430 million in 2019. In particular, this report presents the global market share (sales and revenue) of key companies in Casing Centralizer business, shared in Chapter 3.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversNeoz EnergyHalliburtonNational Oilwell VarcoWeatherford InternationalSummit Casing EquipmentCentek GroupZhongshi GroupSledgehammer Oil ToolsRay Oil Tool CompanyDRK OiltoolsDezhou Yuanda PetroleumMarket Segment by Type, coversSpring Type CentralizerRigid CentralizerSemi Rigid CentralizerOthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoOnshoreOffshoreFor More Information On This Report, Please Visit @Related Information:North America Casing Centralizer Market Growth 2019-2024United States Casing Centralizer Market Growth 2019-2024Asia-Pacific Casing Centralizer Market Growth 2019-2024Europe Casing Centralizer Market Growth 2019-2024EMEA Casing Centralizer Market Growth 2019-2024Global Casing Centralizer Market Growth 2019-2024China Casing Centralizer 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: Chargeable Flexible Battery Market to Witness Robust Expansion by 2024 Top Key players like LG Chem,Panasonic,Samsung SDI,Inc. https://www.marketresearchreportstore.com/reports/241773/global-chargeable-flexible-battery-market https://www.marketresearchreportstore.com/reports/241773/global-chargeable-flexible-battery-market https://www.marketresearchreportstore.com Market Research Report Store offers a latest published report on Chargeable Flexible Battery 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:Flexible batteries are batteries, both primary and secondary, that are designed to be conformal and flexible and rechargeable, unlike traditional rigid and non-chargeable batteries. The increasing interest in portable and flexible electronics has led to the development of chargeable flexible batteries which can be implemented in products such as smart cards, wearable electronics, novelty packaging, flexible displays and transdermal drug delivery patches.The main production regions are Europe, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which account for 10.59%,25.03%, 54.38% and 10.00% market share respectively in 2018. The main driver factor is the growing demand for wearable devices. Asia Pacific is the largest consumption region due to the major wearable devices are produce in China, Korea and Southeast Asia. In the future, China will be the largest demand country of chargeable flexible battery in the worldThe global Chargeable Flexible Battery industry is characterized by several large international manufactures. Therefore, the market share concentration is high. The two largest manufactures account for about 50.27% of total industry revenue in 2017, the key market players include LG Chem, Panasonic, Samsung SDI, ProLogium, STMicroelectronics and OthersAccording to this study, over the next five years the Chargeable Flexible Battery market will register a 37.0% CAGR in terms of revenue, the global market size will reach US$ 220 million by 2024, from US$ 45 million in 2019. In particular, this report presents the global market share (sales and revenue) of key companies in Chargeable Flexible Battery business, shared in Chapter 3.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversLG ChemPanasonicSamsung SDIProLogiumSTMicroelectronicsMarket Segment by Type, covers0.38 mmMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoWearable DevicesIoT (Cards)MedicalOthersFor More Information On This Report, Please Visit @Related Information:North America Chargeable Flexible Battery Market Growth 2019-2024United States Chargeable Flexible Battery Market Growth 2019-2024Asia-Pacific Chargeable Flexible Battery Market Growth 2019-2024Europe Chargeable Flexible Battery Market Growth 2019-2024EMEA Chargeable Flexible Battery Market Growth 2019-2024Global Chargeable Flexible Battery Market Growth 2019-2024China Chargeable Flexible Battery 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: Biomass Power Generation Market Report Forecast 2025 Competitive Landscape - Alstom, Ameresco, Inc., DONG Energy A/S, Drax Group, Forth Energy Ltd. et al Biomass Power Generation Market 2019 https://www.orianresearch.com/request-sample/889630 https://www.orianresearch.com/enquiry-before-buying/889630 https://www.orianresearch.com/checkout/889630 www.orianresearch.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/13281002/ Global Biomass Power Generation Market Report 2019 explains the standing situation and growth predictions of the Biomass Power Generation Industry for 2019-2025.Biomass Power Generation has been organized based on detailed market analysis with Size, Share and recent trends.For Sample Copy of Global Biomass Power Generation Industry Report @In this report, the global Biomass Power Generation market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025. Demand from end use is driving the market growth globally. Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Biomass Power Generation in these regions.Top Key Companies Analyzed in Global Biomass Power Generation Market are Alstom Ameresco, Inc. DONG Energy A/S Drax Group Forth Energy Ltd. Helius Energy Plc Enviva LP ......Global Biomass Power Generation Industry 2019 Market Research Report is spread across 121 pages and provides exclusive vital statistics, data, information, trends and competitive landscape details in this niche sector.Inquire more or share questions if any before the purchase on Biomass Power Generation Industry reportBiomass Power Generation Market Trends by Types: Combustion GasificationBiomass Power Generation Market By End-User / Application Residential Commercial OtherOrder a copy of Global Biomass Power Generation Industry Report 2019@Major Points Covered in Table of Contents:1 Executive Summary2 Methodology And Market Scope3 Global Biomass Power Generation Market Industry Outlook4 Global Biomass Power Generation Market Type Outlook5 Global Biomass Power Generation Market Application Outlook6 Global Biomass Power Generation Market Regional Outlook7 Competitive LandscapeAbout UsOrian Research is one of the most comprehensive collections of market intelligence reports on the World Wide Web. Our reports repository boasts of over 500000+ industry and country research reports from over 100 top publishers. We continuously update our repository so as to provide our clients easy access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, and products. We also specialize in custom research in situations where our syndicate research offerings do not meet the specific requirements of our esteemed clients.Contact UsRuwin MendezVice President Global Sales & Partner RelationsOrian Research ConsultantsUS +1 (415) 830-3727| UK +44 020 8144-71-27Email: info@orianresearch.comWebsite:Follow Us on LinkedIn: Flip Chip Technology Market Focus on Top Key Drivers Globally like Amkor Technology Inc., IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited,Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd Flip Chip Technology Market https://www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=78156 https://www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=78156 https://www.researchnreports.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=78156 www.researchnreports.com A Flip Chip Technology, also known as a controlled collapse chip connection (or C4), is a method of connecting a semiconductor device such as an IC chip and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to an external circuit with a solder bump attached to the chip pad.This Flip Chip Technology market report provides primary and secondary data displayed in the form of pie overviews, professional tables, analysis charts, and reference diagrams. Key market makers with their major developments are introduced in the report. Market research has been aggregated based on several sections, including market overview, classification, applications, trends, technology, geographic analysis, key players and market dynamics.Companies Profile: Amkor Technology Inc., IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited,Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, Texas Instruments Inc., GlobalFoundries U.S. Inc., Stats ChipPAC Ltd, Nepes Pte Ltd, Powertech Technology.Request for sample copy:Global Flip Chip Technology Market report offers a variety of approaches as well as methodologies undertaken by top-level core industry representatives to make well-informed business decisions. Suggests applicable strategies to improve corporate actions. By exploiting better demographics, various global opportunities for the market are explored.Key Questions Answered in Report: What is major factor which lead this market to next level? What will the market Demand and what will be Growth? What are the latest opportunities to Flip Chip Technology market in future? What are the strengths of the key players? What are the key of Flip Chip Technology market?The scope of this research report extends from the basic outline of the Flip Chip Technology market to tricky structures, classifications and applications. This research report also provides a clear picture of the global market by presenting data through effective information graphics. It also provides a detailed list of factors that affect market growth.Get Reasonable Discount on this Premium Report @:Following regions are covered in Global Flip Chip Technology Industry report: North America Europe Asia-Pacific Africa India Latin AmericaMajor Factors: Global Flip Chip Technology Market Overview Economic Impact on Industry Market Competition by Manufacturers Production, Revenue (Value) by Region Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type Market Analysis by Application Manufacturing Cost Analysis Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders Market Effect Factors Analysis Global Flip Chip Technology Market ForecastFor More Information:About Research N Reports:Our research will change the way you think about problems. We provide global consulting that can transform businesses and give you an experience of innovative solutions and outcomes.Research N Reports helps clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. We have successfully guided businesses throughout the world with our market research reports. We are uniquely positioned to lead digital transformations, thus creating greater value for clients by presenting growth opportunities in the global market.Contact Us:Sunny DenisAddress:10916, Gold Point, Dr,Houston, TX - 77064+1 888-631-6977sales@researchnreports.com Lanham, MD, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Thompson Creek Window Company is celebrating its 39th anniversary in business by opening our Thompson Creek Facebook page for a live question and answer session with company president Rick Wuest. The manufacturer and installer of energy-efficient home improvement replacement products will take questions from homeowners and job seekers alike. Were happy to be celebrating our 39th year in operation here in the mid-Atlantic and support our local communities by passing along some of what weve learned in this industry, Wuest said. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that only 14.5% of companies started in March, 1994 (the latest timeframe available) have survived through March of 2018. Thompson Creek was founded in 1980 and Wuest literally grew up in the business founded by his father. With 2018 entrances into both Richmond and Virginia Beach markets, the company continues to grow and look ahead to the future. # # # About Thompson Creek Window Company Headquartered in Lanham, Maryland, Thompson Creek Window Company is a privately owned and family-operated manufacturer and installer of energy-efficient home improvement replacement products. Founded in 1980, the Company has evolved into a leading exterior home improvement manufacturing and contracting company in the United States. Employing a staff of more than 400, Thompson Creek designs, builds and installs top-quality replacement windows and doors, vinyl siding, roofing and a clog-free gutter system to create homeowners proud to show off their homes. Aluminum Sulfate Market Based On Product Type, End-use and Regional Demand Till 2026 || Key Player - GAC Chemical Corporation, Nippon Light Metal Co. Ltd, C&S Chemicals Inc., USALCO LLC, Feralco AB, Drury Industries Ltd. mrrse https://www.mrrse.com/enquiry/17008 https://www.mrrse.com/aluminum-sulfate-market/toc https://www.mrrse.com/enquiry/17008 Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) has recently updated its massive report catalogue by adding a fresh study titled Aluminum Sulfate Market Based On Product Type, End-use and Regional Demand Till 2026. This business intelligence study encapsulates vital details about the market current as well as future status during the mentioned forecast period of 2026.The report also targets important facets such as market drivers, challenges, latest trends, and opportunities associated to growth of manufacturers in global market for Aluminum Sulfate Market. Along with these insights, the report provides the readers crucial insights on the strategies implemented by leading companies to remain in the lead of this competitive market.Request Free Sample Report @This study provides data for 2017 along with the forecast for the period (20182026). The main objective of the report is to identify the dynamics in the market and provide recent updates and insights pertaining to various segments of the global aluminum sulfate market. To provide a better understanding of the market, the report also includes analysis of drivers, restraints, & trends which influence the current market scenario and are expected to impact the global aluminum sulfate market over the forecast period. The study provides data for 2017 along with a comprehensive market forecast for the period 20182026.To understand and assess market opportunities and trends, the global aluminum sulfate market report is categorically split into different sections based on grade, product type, application and regions. The report starts with the market overview and provides market definition and taxonomy along with value chain, drivers, supply demand scenario & pricing analysis pertaining to the market. The sections that follow include global aluminum sulfate market analysis by product type, grade, application and regional/country level analysis. All the above sections evaluate the market on the basis of various factors affecting the market. Each section discusses the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the global aluminum sulfate market. To give a brief idea about revenue opportunities from end-use, delivery form and region/country-wise segments, the report also provides market value (US$ Mn) data, growth rates, market shares and total incremental $ opportunity indices for each segment over the forecast period (2018-2026).In the final section of the report, we have provided a detailed competition landscape with company market shares and performance, to provide report audiences with a dashboard view of key players operating in the aluminum sulfate market along with their business strategies. This would enable clients to assess strategies deployed by market leaders and help them develop effective strategies accordingly.Browse Complete Report with TOC @For market data analysis, we have considered 2017 as the base year, with market numbers estimated for 2018 and forecast made for 20182026. The report considers the market size of the aluminum sulfate market at a global level and splits & evaluates the market at a regional level. The forecast assesses the total revenue (US$ Mn) of the aluminum sulfate market. In order to provide an accurate forecast, we have started by sizing up the current market, which forms the basis of how the aluminum sulfate market is expected to develop in the future. The critical market data, including the base number and segment splits, has been devised through in-depth secondary research. This data is then triangulated on the basis of different verticals, considering both supply side and demand side drivers and other dynamics of the various regional markets, along with primary interviews of aluminum sulfate manufacturers, distributors & suppliers and industry experts operating in the global aluminum sulfate market. The forecast presented in the report evaluates the actual market size (US$ Mn) in 2018 with regard to aluminum sulfate market and the expected market value in the global aluminum sulfate market over the forecast period.We have also analyzed the different segments of the aluminum sulfate market in terms of basis point share (BPS) to understand individual segments relative contribution to market growth. This detailed level of information is important for identifying the various key trends governing the global aluminum sulfate market. The report also analyses the aluminum sulfate market based on incremental dollar opportunity & the global absolute dollar opportunity. This is usually overlooked while estimating the market forecast. However, from a business development perspective, it is essential to identify that market attractiveness in terms of three indices, viz. market share index, CAGR index and incremental dollar opportunity index. Moreover, the market attractiveness index allows clients to understand the key segments in terms of their performance and growth in the global aluminum sulfate market. This market attractiveness index would also help clients to identify real market opportunities in the global aluminum sulfate market.Enquire about this Report @About Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE)Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research Reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.com Pfizer, Nestle Profiled in Silver Food Market 2018-2024 | Top Players DSM, Abbott, Arla Foods Ingredients, ROQUETTE FRERES, Herbalife Nutrition, Sysco, Nutrisystem, Inc., Apetito, COOK Trading Ltd, HomeBistrot Silver Food Market https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/3183 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/silver-food-market https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/3183 https://www.gminsights.com http://l2food.com/ Silver Food Market will likely to surpass USD 18 billion by 2025; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Major growth driver of silver food market is the ageing population. Increasing number of populations above the age of 60 means greater usage of the product in the coming years. According to UN, the number of persons aged 80 or over was estimated to be 137 million in 2018 and is expected to triple by reaching 425 million in 2050.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Company Profiles1. Pfizer2. Nestle3. DSM4. Abbott5. Arla Foods Ingredients6. ROQUETTE FRERES7. Herbalife Nutrition8. Sysco9. Nutrisystem, Inc.10. Apetito11. COOK Trading Ltd12. HomeBistrot13. Mom's Meals NourishCare | Your Nutrition Solution14. Oy Karl Fazer Ab15. Oakhouse Foods Ltd.Europe holds a major market share followed by Asia Pacific and North America. Asia Pacific is likely to exhibit highest gains over the forecast timeframe due to rapid economic and social development in the region coupled with improving disposable income has resulted in increased sale of silver food. For instance, annual average income of urban households in China increased from USD 637.3 in 1995 to over USD 5,425 in 2018.Rising consumer awareness regarding nutritional deficiency and consequent ailments resulting from such deficiencies has resulted in increased demand for the product globally. Another factor supporting the growth of sale in the global market is worldwide development of distribution channel. E-commerce has significantly driven the revenue in the silver food market. Availability of the product in various categories like gluten free, cholesterol friendly, low sodium etc. is likely to propel global market development in the coming years.Browse key industry insights spread across 160 pages with 164 market data tables & 23 figures & charts from the report, Silver Food Market Size By Product (Meal Box, Supplements), By Distribution channel (Senior Care Facilities, Hospitals, Grocery Stores, Online Portals, Restaurants), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait), Application Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2019 2025 in detail along with the table of contents:Supplements occupy a significant market share in the overall silver food market and is likely to generate revenue exceeding USD 7 billion by 2025. Various supplements are available in the market for elderly population like supplements for iron, fatty acids, calcium, all types of vitamins, proteins, magnesium, etc. These supplements are found in the form of tablets, capsules, syrup or powder. Senior friendly food is also available in different varieties depending on factors like age, sex and specific requirements. These products ensure proper intake of essential nutrients and maintains the health of ageing population. High growth in global supplements industry will propel the market development in the study period.Online portal is a key distribution channel in the silver food market which is likely to propel at a CAGR of more than 4% in the forecast timeframe. This distribution channel enables to achieve a greater market coverage with limited cost. Products of companies like Nestle, Abbot laboratories etc. are available at various online portals. Grocery stores is another important distribution channel in the silver food market which significantly contributes to sales expansion.Europe is a key silver food market that is likely to reach around USD 6 billion by 2025. Rising percentage of population over 60 years in countries like Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, etc. will drive the demand for the product in the forecast timeframe. Rising government expenditure on health in the region will also augment product demand to meet nutritional requirements of the elderly.Inquiry of this Report @Some of the global market participants include Herbalife Nutrition, Oy Karl Fazer Ab, Moms Meals, Koninklijke DSM N.V., Arla Foods Ingredients Group P/S, Nutrisystem, Inc., Pfizer Inc. Nestle S.A., Abbott Laboratories, Roquette Freres, Sysco Corporation, etc. Product innovation by market players is likely to be a major strategy to gain competitive advantage in the silver food industry in the coming years.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Explore Our Blog @ Electroosmosis Dehumidifier Global Industry Report - History, Present and Future 2025 Electroosmosis Dehumidifier Global Industry Report 2025 https://www.research2reports.com/report-machinery-equipment/electroosmosis-dehumidifier-market/72407 https://www.research2reports.com/sample-report-machinery-equipment/electroosmosis-dehumidifier-market/72407 https://www.research2reports.com/enquiry-before-buy-machinery-equipment/electroosmosis-dehumidifier-market/72407 https://www.research2reports.com/category-machinery-equipment The global market size of Electroosmosis Dehumidifier is $XX million in 2017 with XX CAGR from 2013 to 2017, and it is expected to reach $XX million by the end of 2023 with a CAGR of XX% from 2018 to 2023.There are 3 key segments covered in this report: geography segment, end use/application segment and competitor segment.For geography segment, regional supply, application-wise and type-wise demand, major players, price is presented from 2013 to 2023. This report coverss following regions:*North America*South America*Asia & Pacific*Europe*MEA (Middle East and Africa)Access more details about this report at:The key countries in each region are taken into consideration as well, such as United States, China, Japan, India, Korea, ASEAN, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, CIS, and Brazil etc.For end use/application segment, this report focuses on the status and outlook for key applications. End users also can be listed.For competitor segment, the report includes global key players of Electroosmosis Dehumidifier as well as some small players. The compnaies include:LG, GE, Friedrich, Mitsubishi Electric, Aprilaire, SoleusAir, Kenmore, Sunpentown et al.Purchase a copy of this premium research report at:The information for each competitor includes:*Company Profile*Main Business Information*SWOT Analysis*Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin*Market ShareInquire further details about this report at:About Research 2 Reports:Research2Reports Market Research Company offers custom syndicated market research reports with market analysis, consulting services Market research reports by Research2Reports depends on survey analysis covers a magnitude of factors, industry research, market size, forecasts, financial growth, pricing trends, competitive insights of market segmentsContact Us:Organization: Research2reportsOffice No. 212/213, B Block 2nd Floor,Parmar Chambers,Sadhu Vaswani Road, Pune 411001Phone Number: 020 - 2612 6969Email: info@research2reports.comRead More Industry News:Research 2 Reports offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe.Office No. 212/213, B Block 2nd Floor,Parmar Chambers,Sadhu Vaswani Road, Pune 411001 Cold Storage Construction Market Outlook With Is Expected To Grow USD 11936 Million Till 2023 | Analysis by Preferred Freezer, Lineage Logistics Holdings, Americold, Burris, Nichirei https://www.businessindustryreports.com/sample-request/113283 https://www.businessindustryreports.com/buy-now/113283/single https://www.businessindustryreports.com/check-discount/113283 The restrictive research report on the Global Cold Storage Construction Market 2019 analyzes the market in detail alongside concentrating on huge market elements for the key players working in the market. Global Cold Storage Construction industry examine report offers granulated yet inside and out examination of income share, market sections, income gauges and different Regions over the globe.Global Cold Storage Construction Market Overview:The Cold Storage Construction industry has also suffered a certain impact, but still maintained a relatively optimistic growth, the past four years. Cold Storage Construction market size to maintain the average annual growth rate of 13.86% from 4200 million $ in 2014 to 6200 million $ in 2018, Market analysts believe that in the next few years. Cold Storage Construction market size will be further expanded, we expect that by 2023, The market size of the Cold Storage Construction will reach 11936 million $.Accessible Exclusive Sample Copy of this Report @The major growth factors of Global Cold Storage Construction Market, such as rising infrastructure, energy and maintenance costs and governmental regulation on refrigerants.The Global Cold Storage Construction Market report also covers segment data, including: Type segment, Industry segment, Channel segment etc. cover different segment market size, both volume and value. Also cover different industries clients information, which is very important for the manufacturers.According Cold Storage Construction types, the production stores segment is the quickest developing storage type segment in the market inferable from sustenance insurance all through the production procedure including crude material, semi-completed, and completed items in virus stores. These are normally situated in territories where the items are fabricated / secured.The food and beverages segment represented the biggest offer of the worldwide Cold Storage Construction development showcase. All inclusive, the food and beverages segment is seeing intense interest because of monetary development and urbanization, alongside refined showcasing channels which have prompted noteworthy changes in utilization designs.Regionally, Asia-Pacific accounted for the largest share of the global market. India, China, Japan, and Indonesia led the Asia-Pacific cold storage construction market. Among all countries in Asia-Pacific, this market in India is projected to grow at the highest CAGR between 2019 and 2023.Purchase this report online with 125 pages list of tables and figures and all around table of contents on @Significant key players:1 Preferred Freezer Services2 Lineage Logistics Holdings3 Americold Logistics4 Burris Logistics5 Nichirei Logistics GroupCold Storage Construction market, by region:1 North America Country2 South America3 Asia Country4 Europe Country5 Other CountryGlobal Cold Storage Construction market 2019-2023: From raw materials to downstream buyers of this industry will be analyzed scientifically, the feature of product circulation and sales channel will be presented as well. In a word, this report will help you to establish a panorama of industrial development and characteristics of the Cold Storage Construction market.Snatch your report @This investigation answers to the underneath key inquiries:1 What will the market size be in 2023?2 What are the key factors driving the global Cold Storage Construction market?3 What are the challenges to market growth?4 Who are the key players in the Cold Storage Construction market?5 What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key players?In the end this report covers information and information on limit and generation outline creation piece of the pie investigation deals review supply deals and lack import fare and utilization and additionally cost value income and gross margin of Cold Storage Construction.Significant points in table of contents:1 Cold Storage Construction Definition2 Global Cold Storage Construction Market Major Player Share and Market Overview3 Major Player Cold Storage Construction Business Introduction4 Global Cold Storage Construction Market Segmentation (Region Level)5 Global Cold Storage Construction Market Segmentation (Type Level)6 Global Cold Storage Construction Market Segmentation (Industry Level)7 Cold Storage Construction Market Forecast 2019-20238 Cold Storage Construction Segmentation Type9 Cold Storage Construction Segmentation Industry10 Cold Storage Construction Cost Analysis11 ConclusionAbout usBusinessindustryreports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media contactBusiness industry reportspune indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940 Rapid Growth of Autoimmune Treatment Market Size, and Share to 2023 | Global Top Key Players Abbott, Amgen, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Roche Autoimmune Treatment Market https://www.businessindustryreports.com/sample-request/142798 https://www.businessindustryreports.com/buy-now/142798/single https://www.businessindustryreports.com/check-discount/142798 Global Autoimmune Treatment Market Report 2019 explores future trends for supply, demand and market growth rate, market size, prices, trading, competition and value chain as well as Key Players of the industrys information with the forecast from 2019 to 2023.Global Autoimmune Treatment Market Synopsis:According to Market Analyst, The Global Autoimmune Treatment Market is expected to grow at an impressive Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2019 to 2023.Get Premium Sample Copy @Autoimmune diseases refer to the damage that is caused to the healthy body tissue by an individual's immune system. The rising incidence of autoimmune diseases across the globe has encouraged drug manufacturers and research companies to introduce effective drugs and treatments. The tie-ups between diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies are likely to supplement the growth of the overall market.Global Autoimmune Treatment Market has been segmented on the Basis of type, Application and Region. On the Basis of Type, Autoimmune Treatment Market can be sub segmented into Glucocorticoid, Methotrexate, Anthralin, Others. Based on application, Market can be sub-segmented into Hospitals, Clinics, Drug Stores, Independent pharmacies, Others.Regionally, North America is projected to be followed by Europe in the next few years, thanks to the rising government initiatives in order to improve the healthcare infrastructure. Moreover, the increasing prevalence of autoimmune diseases and high penetration of innovative technologies, including novel biomarkers and portable diagnostic equipment are projected to fuel the growth of the autoimmune treatment market in Europe.This report focuses on Autoimmune Treatment volume and value at the global level, regional level and company level. From a global perspective, this report represents the overall Autoimmune Treatment market size by analyzing historical data and future prospect. At the company level, this report focuses on the production capacity, ex-factory price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer covered in this report.The complete report on Autoimmune Treatment Market spread across 125 Pages and No. of Table of contents @The Market is segmented and projected on the basis of major key players:1 Abbott Laboratories2 Amgen3 Johnson& Johnson4 Eli Lilly & Co5 Pfizer6 Roche7 Astrazeneca8 Bristol-Myers SquibbMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers:1 North America2 Europe3 China4 Japan5 Southeast Asia6 IndiaRequest for Exclusive Discount @Key Questions Answered in this Report:1 What is the global market size for Autoimmune Treatment market in different countries?2 Which key developments are expected to have a long-term impact on the Autoimmune Treatment market?3 What will be the global Autoimmune Treatment market size in 2023?4 Who will be the top vendors in Autoimmune Treatment market?5 Whats going to be the growth speed?6 Which are the most potential countries and markets?TABLE OF CONTENTS1 Autoimmune Treatment Market Overview2 Global Autoimmune Treatment Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Autoimmune Treatment Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2019)4 Global Autoimmune Treatment Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2012-2019)5 Global Autoimmune Treatment Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Autoimmune Treatment Market Analysis by Application7 Global Autoimmune Treatment Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Autoimmune Treatment Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Autoimmune Treatment Market Forecast (2019-2022)13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixAbout 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 Australia Power Market Outlook to 2030 and Key Players - AGL Energy Ltd, Origin Energy Ltd, Snowy Hydro Ltd, EnergyAustralia Pty Ltd, Stanwell Corp Ltd Australia Power Market http://bit.ly/2CPn3rq http://bit.ly/2YKdaVp http://bit.ly/2YHiMje Australia Power MarketThis report elaborates Australia's power market structure and provides historical and forecast numbers for capacity, generation, and consumption up to 2030. Detailed analysis of the Australian power market's regulatory structure, import and export trends, competitive landscape, and power projects at various stages of the supply chain is provided. The report also gives a snapshot of the power sector in Australia on broad parameters of macroeconomics, supply security, generation infrastructure, transmission infrastructure, degree of competition, regulatory scenario, and future potential. An analysis of the deals market scenario in the country's power sector is also included in the report.Get a Sample Copy Of This Report @The following manufacturers are covered in this report:- AGL Energy Ltd- Origin Energy Ltd- Snowy Hydro Ltd- EnergyAustralia Pty Ltd- Stanwell Corp LtdReport Scope:- Snapshot of the country's power sector across parameters-macro economics, supply security, generation infrastructure, transmission infrastructure, degree of competition, regulatory scenario and future potential of the power sector.- Statistics for installed capacity, power generation and consumption from 2000 to 2017, forecast for the next 13 years to 2030- Break-up by technology, including thermal, hydro, renewable and nuclear- Data on leading current and upcoming projects- Information on grid interconnectivity, transmission and distribution infrastructure and power exports and imports- Policy and regulatory framework governing the market- Detailed analysis of top market participant, including market share analysis and SWOT analysis.Get Discount for this report:Reasons to purchase This Report:- Identify opportunities and plan strategies by having a strong understanding of the investment opportunities in the country's power sector- Identification of key factors driving investment opportunities in the country's power sector- Facilitate decision-making based on strong historic and forecast data- Develop strategies based on the latest regulatory events- Position yourself to gain the maximum advantage of the industry's growth potential- Identify key partners and business development avenues- Identify key strengths and weaknesses of important market participants- Respond to your competitors' business structure, strategy and prospects.Purchase This Report @About ReportsWeb:ReportsWeb.com 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. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.com April 2, 2019 What: A public meeting of the Nurse Staffing Advisory Boards Total Diagnosis Committee. Agenda: Review purpose of committee; discussion of use of the phrase "total diagnoses"; next steps. When: April 8, 10-11 a.m. The meeting is open to the public. A 15-minute public comment period will take place at the end of the meeting. Where: By conference call only. Call-in number 877-336-1829, access code 2075141. The Nurse Staffing Advisory Boards (NSAB) Total Diagnosis Committee advises the full NSAB and the Oregon Health Authority on the use of diagnoses in formulating staffing plans and staffing appropriately. # # # Everyone has a right to know about and use Oregon Health Authority (OHA) programs and services. OHA provides free help. Some examples of the free help OHA can provide are: Sign language and spoken language interpreters Written materials in other languages Braille Large print Audio and other formats If you need help or have questions, please contact Health Care Regulation and Quality Improvement Section at 971-673-0540, 711 TTY, mailbox.HCLC@dhsoha.state.or.us at least 48 hours before the meeting. Yamhill County may be flush with some of Oregons best vineyards and wineries, but an underclass still exists, and Oregon novelist Peter Nathaniel Malae illuminates the stress and the vulnerability of that world in his devastating new novel, Son of Amity (Oregon State University Press , 216 pages, $18.95). Malae creates four indelible characters whose lives have been linked by acts of brutality, and he sets this story in the dont-blink-or-youll-miss-it town of Amity. The irony of the place name is painful, for harmony is in short supply. The story takes place from 2005 to 2010. It begins with Pika, a heavily tattooed half-Samoan who is about to commit a crime that will land him behind bars yet again. His half-sister, Sissy, will open her home to him as a place to land, post-incarceration. Although she and Pika share an abusive, white mother, he is older and they did not grow up together. After a childhood of economic and emotional deprivation, Sissy has developed a bleak philosophy: to her the notion of life had always been about hurt and what one does with the hurt, and to her, even, she sometimes thought that life was a synonym for hurt. Now Sissy is a mom herself, and she has turned to the Catholic faith in the hopes of becoming a better mother to her 5-year-old son, Benji, and a more understanding wife to her husband, Michael, who relies on a wheelchair. Michael also grew up in a contentious, single-parent household. His way of escaping was to serve five tours in Iraq. But this novel asserts that there is no real way to run from post-traumatic stress disorder whether that trauma happened at home, or in prison, or in war. This review wont elaborate on the damage that the characters have done to themselves and to one another as the storyteller, Malae does that in his own deliberate and inimitable fashion. And as the reader, youll need to read carefully through chapters that present incidents and time frames from three different points of view. Mid-book, you may even find that youll need to backtrack, to pick up kernels of story whose significance didnt register the first time. Each in this carefully devised trio of tales contains critical bits of self-reflection and shards of backstory. These piece together and fall apart and piece together again, different patterns in a kaleidoscope of dysfunction and rue. In Son of Amity, life is precarious. Nothing is guaranteed, particularly for these three adults whose early lives were stunted by hostility and lack of love. Yet the one goal these three characters share is their desire not to damage Benji, a bright-eyed kid who is full of questions and always on the move. To varying degrees and in different ways, each resolves to do better for him than was done for them. Son of Amity is a story of rough textures and coarse characters a thoughtfully crafted masterwork and a wholly American tragedy. UPDATED AUG. 7, 2019: A federal judge, at the request of the U.S. Attorneys Office, on Aug. 5, 2019, dismissed all charges against one of the two students, Yangyang Zhou. Zhous lawyer said his client was unaware of any counterfeiting. Two Oregon engineering students from China face federal charges in an alleged counterfeit Apple iPhone scheme that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to court documents. The men are accused of importing more than a thousand counterfeit iPhones, then sending each phone back to the company, complaining it wouldnt power on, in exchange for a new phone under Apples warranty process. They then had the new phones shipped overseas for someone else to sell for hundreds of dollars and got a cut of the profit, according to federal prosecutors. Both Yangyang Zhou and Quan Jiang were in the United States lawfully on student visas, according to prosecutors. Zhou completed his engineering studies at Oregon State University this past winter and Jiang was studying engineering last spring at Linn Benton Community College, according to court records. Jiang and Zhou, who both live in Corvallis, contend they didnt know the phones shipped to them were counterfeit Apple phones, according to court records. Jiang, accused last March of trafficking in counterfeit goods and wire fraud, remains out of custody on GPS monitoring. Jiangs defense lawyer, Celia Howes, declined comment. Zhou, accused of submitting false or misleading information on an export declaration, made his first appearance Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland. He remains out of custody, ordered to have no contact with anyone from Apple while the case is pending. Zhous lawyer, Jamie Kilberg, said Monday that Zhou was not aware of any alleged counterfeiting. We do believe that Mr. Zhou will be vindicated, Kilberg told The Oregonian/OregonLive. Federal agents in Portland began investigating in April 2017 after U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized at least five suspicious shipments from Hong Kong of cellphones with Apple Inc. markings and design features that appeared to be counterfeit. By that December, Homeland Security Investigations agent Thomas Duffy interviewed Jiang at the Customs and Border Protection office at the Port of Portlands Terminal 6 after identifying him as one of the alleged importers of counterfeit phones, according to court records. Jiang told investigators that he regularly received packages containing 20 to 30 iPhones from an associate in China. He said he submitted the iPhones, which didnt power on, individually to Apple for repair under Apple's warranty program. Once he received replacement phones, he shipped them back to an associate in China. In exchange for his labor and efforts, the associate paid Jiangs mother, who lives in China, who then deposited the proceeds into a bank account that Jiang accessed from the United States, Duffy wrote in an affidavit. Jiang estimated that during 2017, he submitted 2,000 telephones to Apple for warranty repairs, the affidavit said. Jiang submitted some of the phones for repair or replacement in person. Other times, he submitted warranty claims using Apple's online service support and then shipped the non-working phone to Apple. Apple representative Adrian Punderson, who was interviewed by investigators, said once Apple receives a phone for repair, an Apple technician will examine the phone to ensure that its a genuine Apple product. If a phone is determined to be counterfeit or altered in an unauthorized manner, Apple will reject the warranty and replacement claim. Once rejected, the submitted phone and a letter explaining the rejection will be shipped to the return address provided. Jiang was associated by either name, email, mailing address or IP address to 3,069 iPhone warranty claims, all saying the iPhone wouldnt power on, according to business records provided by Apple, investigators say in court documents. For one of the claims, Jiang is accused of using his Linn Benton Community College email. Apple replaced 1,493 of those phones and rejected the rest, the business records indicated. The company estimated its loss from Jiangs the phone warranties at $895,800. Investigators said the alleged fraud was possible because Apple cant immediately examine or repair phones that wont power on. Jiang told Duffy he never received notification from Apple that any of the phones he submitted were counterfeit or that what he was doing was unlawful, according the affidavit. Investigators said Jiang paid friends and relatives to use their addresses in Corvallis, Eugene, Portland, Springfield and in Washington state to receive shipments of phones from China and replacement phones from Apple, according to court records. In June 2017 and again in July 2017, Apples legal counsel sent Jiang cease-and-desist orders to an address associated with Jiang in Corvallis, according to the affidavit. Federal agents last year searched Jiangs residence and found more than 300 counterfeit iPhones, shipping records and warranty submission documents, as well as multiple boxes that had been addressed to Zhou, his alleged accomplice, according to court records Customs officials in Portland also intercepted three shipments originating from China that contained 95 counterfeit Apple iPhones addressed to Zhou, court records said. Investigators determined more than 200 iPhone warranty claims were made in Zhous name or other similar derivations from other mailing addresses associated with Zhous name and that Zhou had been receiving warranty replacements phones from Apple, Duffy wrote in a separate affidavit. -- 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. Death penalty opponents told a panel of lawmakers on Monday that capital punish is expensive, leads to decades of delays and offers little comfort to victims families. The Senate Judiciary Committee heard nearly two hours of testimony, most of it from supporters of Senate Bill 1013, which would limit the death penalty to cases involving acts of terror that kill two or more people. The bill is expected to get a committee vote on April 8. I think it has a lot of support, said Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, chairman of the committee. We have a system that is broken. We have people who are still on death row for 30 years. Prozanski said he plans to introduce an amendment that would allow the death penalty in cases where the victim is under age 14 and in killings behind bars by people with previous murder convictions. Aggravated murder now includes crimes such as killing a child under 12, killing more than one person, killing a police officer on duty or killing someone during a rape or robbery. Those crimes are eligible for the death penalty. Most crimes considered aggravated murder under current law would be reclassified under the bill as first-degree murder and would carry a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The proposed legislation also would change one of the four questions juries must decide when considering whether to impose a death sentence. Under Oregons system, jurors must determine that a person guilty of aggravated murder is at risk of being a danger in the future. The bill would remove that question. Proponents of the change say the question of someones potential to be dangerous in the future isnt based on science. That provision in Oregons law is based on the Texas death penalty statute, said Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School and director of the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic. Basically they are asking the jury to make a decision about a future event that may or may not ever occur, Kaplan said after the hearing. I have always argued thats just bad science. What is the standard they are looking at? Its a really unfair question to ask of a jury. Oregon has a long and complicated history with the death penalty. Oregonians voted to abolish capital punishment in 1914. It was reinstated by popular vote in 1920, then repealed again by voters in 1964. It was reinstated in 1978 by voters, knocked down in 1981 by the court only to be reinstated again in 1984 by voters. Oregon hasnt executed anyone since 1997. House Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson, D-Portland, testified that Oregon hasnt used capital punishment as intended for decades. She described it as an expensive process underwritten mostly by taxpayers. In the last 55 years, we have had two executions and there was nothing extraordinary about those crimes or the men who committed those crimes, she said. What was extraordinary is that they volunteered. Thats how they ended up executed. Stephen Kanter, a former dean and retired professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, said the death penalty is opposed by former governors, including Barbara Roberts, John Kitzhaber and Ted Kulongoski. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown also opposes the death penalty and extended the moratorium imposed on capital punishment in 2011 by Kitzhaber. Kanter said the state should stop supporting a broken and costly system that churns on for years and rarely results in executions. In some respects, this is a cruel deception on victims families, he said. There is a cruel deception on the public. We are not going to have the death penalty in a mass way in this state. We are not going to ever go back to executing people on a regular basis. Kaplan also testified, zeroing in on the expense of capital punishment cases. She highlighted a 2016 study done by Lewis & Clark Law School and Seattle University that found that it costs Oregon between $800,000 and $1 million more per case to sentence a person to death. She said most of the expense of death penalty cases comes from the appellate process. Maintaining capital punishment the way we have it now is an expensive choice, she said. Lane County District Attorney Patty Perlow was the lone speaker who didnt support the changes. She spoke in detail about the aggravated murder cases from Lane County that sent three men to death row. She offered disturbing details about each of those cases cases, including the sexual assault, torture and killing in 1997 of preschooler Tesslyn OCull. They were all killed under circumstances that I would suggest to you are aggravated, she said. The longtime prosecutor encouraged the Legislature to allow voters to decide the matter by referring the issue as a referendum. Perlow said if the Legislatures goal is to eliminate or restrict the death penalty, lets have an honest conversation about that and refer it to the voters. -- Noelle Crombie 503-276-7184 ncrombie@oregonian.com @noellecrombie Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. The Vietnamese city ranks number 15 on the US newspapers list, which praises it as a destination for food lovers and beachgoers. The New York Times says Da Nang is probably best known for being a gateway to the nearby UNESCO heritage town of Hoi An, but it has begun to develop its own reputation as the Miami of Vietnam in the last few years. A typical day might start with a morning swim on the sandy, crescent-shaped Non Nuoc beach and perhaps a quick stop at the Han market, suggests the paper. It adds, then, an afternoon visit to the Marble Mountains, where travelers can explore the temples and pagodas that look out over My Khe Beach and, later, dinner back in the city, perhaps at Nen, a new restaurant from the much-followed food blogger Summer Le. Travelers are advised to finish the day with a visit to the highly Instagrammable Dragon Bridge, which is illuminated every night. In its article, the new York Times urges tourists not to leave without sampling a bowl of mi quang, a famous local noodle soup made with a turmeric-infused broth, chicken, pork, local seafood and shredded cabbage, which is available for roughly USD1 at any number of street-food stalls. Among the best places to go in 2019, Puerto Rico, which is rebounding after a devastating hurricane, tops the New York Times list, followed by Hampi, an archaeological site in India, and Santa Barbara, a hip food and wine haven./. New VMware vRealize Operations 7.5 to Deliver New and Enhanced Self-Driving Operations Capabilities for Software Defined Data Center and Hybrid Cloud Environments New VMware vRealize Automation 7.6 Strengthens Customers Hybrid Cloud Management Automation Capabilities PALO ALTO, Calif., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced advancements across its integrated VMware vRealize cloud management platform to help IT enable developers and IT admins to quickly build and deliver applications in hybrid cloud environments with more secure and consistent operations. The new product releases vRealize Operations 7.5 , vRealize Network Insight 4.1 , vRealize Automation 7.6 , and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.1 will combine to provide expanded self-driving operations and enhanced programmable provisioning capabilities across private and hybrid clouds. VMware Introduces New Application Operations and Compliance Capabilities VMware vRealize Operations delivers self-driving operations management from applications to infrastructure to optimize, plan and scale hybrid clouds including on-prem environments. It delivers continuous performance optimization based on operational and business intent, efficient capacity management, proactive planning, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance. VMware vRealize Operations 7.5 will extend self-driving capabilities to help customers achieve: Continuous Performance Optimization : To further enhance application performance based on operational and business intent, this release introduces hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) performance optimization of VMware vSAN clusters via workload rebalancing that is resync-, slack space- and Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM)-aware. Additionally, the platform will introduce placement optimization for vSAN workloads using storage intent definition. : To further enhance application performance based on operational and business intent, this release introduces hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) performance optimization of clusters via workload rebalancing that is resync-, slack space- and Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM)-aware. Additionally, the platform will introduce placement optimization for vSAN workloads using storage intent definition. Efficient Capacity Management : To further reduce costs and risks through optimal utilization, proactive planning and procurement, this new release will add allocation-based capacity management alongside existing demand-based modelling. This release will also include updated vSAN capacity management capabilities including new HCI cost drivers and what-if scenarios to model the impact of increasing the capacity of vSAN clusters. In addition, it will provide expanded what-if scenarios for comparing costs of VMware vSphere-based private clouds with VMware Cloud on AWS , AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. To help customers succeed in their multi-cloud journey, this integrated portfolio combines with CloudHealth by VMware to deliver complete visibility, optimization and governance for a multi-cloud environment. : To further reduce costs and risks through optimal utilization, proactive planning and procurement, this new release will add allocation-based capacity management alongside existing demand-based modelling. This release will also include updated vSAN capacity management capabilities including new HCI cost drivers and what-if scenarios to model the impact of increasing the capacity of vSAN clusters. In addition, it will provide expanded what-if scenarios for comparing costs of VMware vSphere-based private clouds with , AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. To help customers succeed in their multi-cloud journey, this integrated portfolio combines with CloudHealth by VMware to deliver complete visibility, optimization and governance for a multi-cloud environment. Intelligent Remediation : To predict, prevent and quickly troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues, this new release will introduce Telegraf agent-based application and OS monitoring with agent lifecycle management and out-of-the-box (OOTB) application troubleshooting dashboard. It will also provide enhanced capabilities mapping the relationships between applications and infrastructure to decrease time-to-identify root cause of performance and availability issues. : To predict, prevent and quickly troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues, this new release will introduce Telegraf agent-based application and OS monitoring with agent lifecycle management and out-of-the-box (OOTB) application troubleshooting dashboard. It will also provide enhanced capabilities mapping the relationships between applications and infrastructure to decrease time-to-identify root cause of performance and availability issues. Integrated Compliance Capabilities for VMware vSphere: To reduce risk and enforce IT and regulatory standards, this new release will introduce integrated compliance and automated drift remediation capabilities for VMware vSphere . Customers will be able to measure vSphere compliance stature against critical public standards, extend into custom compliance standards as well as automate configuration management with OOTB workflows and vRealize Orchestrator integration. ( Read the whats new in vSphere 6.7 Update 2 blog post ). Emirates Airline uses vRealize Operations for capacity management and planning as well as monitoring and alerting of its private cloud environment. From day one, VMware vRealize Operations has had a positive impact on our private cloud. It has helped us to improve our operational efficiency as well as enable us to achieve significant cost savings by pinpointing and reclaiming wasted compute, memory and storage resourcesequal to 300 virtual machines each averaging 4 vCPUs, 8 Gigabytes of RAM and 200 Gigabytes of disk space, said Fabian Thomas, Datacenter Manager at Emirates Airline. The reclaimed resources and cost savings we achieved helped fund additional IT projects. Introducing Application-Centric Security and Network Analytics for Kubernetes VMware vRealize Network Insight, which is also available as a VMware Cloud Service, will extend visibility for application-centric security and networking in Kubernetes environments. vRealize Network Insight 4.1 will enable organizations running Kubernetes or VMware Enterprise PKS environments to plan security, troubleshoot networking and use advanced analytics for containerized applications. The new release will further help organizations plan and troubleshoot security and networking in an application-centric manner by connecting with ServiceNow and adding application specific dashboards. Additionally, vRealize Network Insight 4.1 will deliver increased visibility across network overlay and underlay by introducing flow latency and F5 load balancer support. Automation and Lifecycle Management Enhancements Ease Hybrid Cloud Adoption VMware vRealize Automation 7.6 will introduce enhanced integrations with VMwares software defined data center stack and management capabilities to make it easier and simpler for customers to automate their hybrid cloud environments. The new release will further extend its integration with VMware NSX Data Center with new on-demand support for private networks as well as VMware NSX-T and NSX for vSphere configuration for different clusters within a single VMware vCenter Server. To simplify building customized and enhanced request forms for catalog items, VMware vRealize Automation 7.6 will deliver enhancements to Custom Forms including API validation and Regular Expression support for DataGrid. Additionally, the release will provide an improved user experiences and support multi-tenancy in VMware vRealize Orchestrator. VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.1 will further help customers to manage and automate their environments via enhanced integration with VMware Cloud Foundation , improved user experiences, more granular deployment options, and expanded content management capabilities including multi-content capture and support for Bitbucket endpoints. New Study Highlights vRealize Operations Customer Cost Savings and Efficiency Gains VMware commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may achieve by deploying VMware vRealize Operations. (1) The study provides readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of vRealize Operations. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks, Forrester interviewed five organizations, each with years of experience using vRealize Operations. Prior to deploying vRealize Operations, these organizations struggled with limited performance, inefficiencies in troubleshooting, and wasted capacity. Their deployments delivered improved visibility, performance and capacity optimization, and faster remediation. According to the study, organizations achieved the following benefits: A 30 percent productivity improvement from intelligent remediation, improved visibility, and faster reporting using advanced analytics to correlate metrics and log data to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot virtual environments. using advanced analytics to correlate metrics and log data to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot virtual environments. A 20 percent reduction in hardware cost savings plus 10 percent reduction in storage costs via capacity optimization that uses predictive analytics to automatically balance workloads and avoid contention. via capacity optimization that uses predictive analytics to automatically balance workloads and avoid contention. A 50 percent reduction in database software licensing costs via continuous performance optimization functionality that enables customers to automate workload balancing and host-based workload placement based on business intent leading to consolidation and separation of software licenses. via continuous performance optimization functionality that enables customers to automate workload balancing and host-based workload placement based on business intent leading to consolidation and separation of software licenses. A 93 percent reduction in unplanned downtime by applying continuous performance optimization based on operational and business intent, optimizing resource usage, detecting capacity shortfalls, and proactively resolving issueshelping to optimize their environments and improve availability. Supporting Quote Organizations are using VMwares self-driving operations and programmable provisioning to radically simplify application and infrastructure management, said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. Customers look to VMware and our vRealize Cloud Management Platform to operate and automate their hybrid cloud environments with a hands-off and hassle-free approach to focus on transforming their business. Product Availability VMware vRealize Operations 7.5, VMware vRealize Automation 7.6, VMware vRealize Network Insight 4.1, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.1 are expected to become available in VMwares Q1 FY20. Additional Resources About VMware VMware software powers the worlds complex digital infrastructure. The companys cloud, networking and security, and digital workspace offerings provide a dynamic and efficient digital foundation to over 500,000 customers globally, aided by an ecosystem of 75,000 partners. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to being a force for good, from its breakthrough innovations to its global impact. For more information, please visit https://www.vmware.com/company.html . VMware, vRealize, vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, Network Insight, vRealize Suite, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, vSAN, vSphere, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Provider, vRealize Orchestrator, NSX, NSX Data Center, NSX-T, vCenter, vCenter Server, Cloud Foundation and vRealize Cloud Management Platform are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. (1) The Total Economic Impact Of VMware vRealize Operations, a March 2019 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of VMware When Dave Turin left fellow Oregonian Todd Hoffmans Gold Rush crew at the end of Season 7, it wasnt with a whimper, but a bang. In a 2017 retrospective episode, Gold Rush viewers saw that a season of tension on the Hoffman team finally boiled over, as Turin and Trey Poulson got into a fight. The brawl, at the Hoffman gold claim in Colorado, was a shocker, especially since Turin had earned a reputation as the level-headed mining expert on Hoffmans crew. Turin may have been done with working on the Hoffman crew, but he wasnt done with mining. And now he has his own spinoff show, Gold Rush: Dave Turins Lost Mine, which premieres on the Discovery Channel on April 5. In a phone interview, Turin, who lives with his wife in Gresham, jokes that it literally took a punch in the face to get him to quit the Hoffman crew. As he says in the show, Turin had been feeling frustrated for a while. What had begun as a group that felt as close as family had changed, he says, with Turin often disagreeing with Gold Rush decisions made by Hoffman, who lives in Sandy. (Hoffman last year announced he was also leaving Gold Rush after Season 8.) He and Hoffman had been very close for years, Turin says. Though the on-camera break wasnt easy to watch, Turin says he and Hoffman still sometimes talk, or exchange texts, though theyre not as tight as they once were. Thats life, Turin says, sounding philosophical. But Turin is excited about the new show, which helps channel his sense of adventure. While he could stay in Oregon and work in the family business -- which does road building, paving and operates a rock quarry in Brightwood Turin says finding gold in a sluice box is more exciting than admiring, as he says in the show, a nice pile of rock. Dave Turins Lost Mine isnt just another Gold Rush spinoff, like Parkers Trail, which debuts a new season on April 5, before Turins show starts. Turins show also marks the first multi-platform series in the Discovery lineup. The first seven episodes of the show premiered on the Discovery GO streaming app and are available on the Discovery website. The episodes, about 10 minutes each, feature more about Turins search for abandoned mines. In the series premiere, we follow Turin as he journeys from the Yukon territory to the American Southwest, exploring abandoned mines and analyzing whether theres enough potential gold to be worth his effort. Though Turin sets out with investor funding, a twist comes late in the series premiere. Without spoiling too much, by the time the episode is over, Turin has decided to finance his mining with his own money. Turin says it was satisfying to be calling the shots, and build a crew that may not be the most experienced, but are people is he respects and who respect him. Adding to the family feeling he was looking to recapture, Turin says, his wife, Shelly, was also on hand, working in the business side of the operation. While Turin was shown on the job in his seasons working with Hoffman on Gold Rush, the new show includes some glimpses of Turin at his home in Gresham, and fishing with one of his grandkids on the Deschutes River. Turin hopes viewers will get a sense of the history of the mines and the impact the industry has had on America, including a tidbit about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. He was happy to get back to gold mining, Turin says. As he notes in the show, "Ive always been the guy that always gets back up, gets back in the fight, puts his boots on, and goes to work. Gold Rush begins with Season 3 of Parkers Trail, which takes Parker Schnabel and his team to Papua New Guinea, at 9 p.m. April 5, with Dave Turins Lost Mine debuting at 10 p.m. on Discovery Channel. -- Kristi Turnquist kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. As Design Portland prepares to launch 350 events, installations and open houses spotlighting design across all disciplines April 6-13, the worlds most prestigious furnishing and design show, Salone del Mobile, will take place April 9-14 in Milan, Italy. Portland design reporter Damon Johnstun recaps some of the people he interviewed at the 2018 Milan fair. Watch for his coverage of furniture and lighting designs unveiled at this years fair. Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma based in Amsterdam during Milan Design Week 2018 Damon Johnstun I had been looking forward to meeting Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi, the industrial design duo of Formafantasma based in Amsterdam. When I had interviewed Dimore Studio a couple of years before, they told me Formafantasma was one of the design teams they most admired. This was big praise from the current reigning kings of interior design. We met up at the Lexus Design Awards during Milan Design 2018, where they mentored the winning team, Extrapolation Factory. Formafantasma was gaining international notoriety. The products they created were both experimental and beautiful. By naming themselves Formafantasma, which translates from Italian as ghost shape, Farresin and Trimarchi referenced the blurry state of ideation at the beginning of the creative process. When I met the pair, they exuded a mixture of intense earnestness and approachability. Farresin, born in Venice in 1980, took the lead in the conversation. He described them as having attended the same school during different years. They were both interested by 1970s Italian design movements that grew up in Florence with radical groups like Studio Alchemy. Unfortunately, by the time they were attending school nearly half of a century later, the fires of design revolution had cooled to embers. Nonetheless, they developed a strong friendship that eventually lead them to apply the unusual approach of applying with one portfolio to Design Academy Eindhoven as a team, and continued their education and collaboration. Damon Johnstun Trimarchi hails from Sicily. He was more reserved at the beginning but as the conversation continued, he unabashedly contributed. The pair had a unified message and point of view that came across seamlessly as they took turns explaining their ideas. Trimarchi and Farresin both felt that they could not progress in Italy, because they felt they were looked on as too young and inexperienced. They found a freedom in the Netherlands that they didnt have in Italy. [The Netherlands] is much more respectful of the younger generation, Farresin said. Its much more radical, much more innovative. Fresh, young and innovative designers are respected in the Netherlands, and they have the opportunity to have a voice and share their methods. Formafantasma challenges the design establishments approach of simply creating aesthetically beautiful products without concern for the waste that goes into product design. Their practice focuses on developing a sustainable future one in which design is not just a final product, but an ethical process that prioritizes environmental consciousness. Although they are less concerned with the styling of a product, they do understand the importance of beauty in the promotion of ideas. If we were to just make ugly, sustainable things, no one would care, said Farresin. Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma during Milan Design Week 2018.Damon Johnstun Although the research-based team pushes boundaries with their work and process, their designs are surprisingly accessible. When asked what Formafantasmas ultimate goal was, Farresin responded, I think were continuously redefining our main goal through our own work. They set out to educate by example, achieving a standard for how the younger generation thinks, not what they create. The pairs education and creative instinct show through in each of their designs. They change the systems and processes of the status quo, so that the same (or better) results can be achieved with a cleaner and more sustainable process. By asking the question how can design make the world a better place, they strive to create a better system that promotes a better world. In 2012, the Rome-based luxury fashion house Fendi asked Formafantasma to create Craftica, a series discovering the many uses of post-industrial waste leather, as well as other organic fibers and materials. The duo researched tirelessly in order to properly demonstrate the complex and ever-evolving relationship between humans and the earth around them. Another unique approach the duo took involved designs that can be created in the aftermath of destruction. The frequent eruption of Mount Etna, near Catania, Sicily, provided materials for an installation by Formafantasma, titled De Natura Fossilium. Farresin and Trimarchi used the stone formed from the lava of the active volcano to create incredible pieces by sampling, melting, blowing, weaving, casting and milling objects that others might consider useless. Their most popular projects were produced in collaboration with the Italian contemporary lighting company Flos. Formafantasma created the WireRing by stripping back until the wall-mounted light fixture was reduced to its most essential components. The result is a minimalist light sculpture delivering the most with the least. Damon Johnstun Trimarchi and Farresin examine the positive and negative aspects of the design universe in an attempt to make a better world. They believe thoughtful design of systems over products can improve and benefit the world. By combining their aesthetics with a passion for environmental awareness, they hope to spread this message of vital sustainability during a time of imprudence. Well, on a longterm scenario, Farresin explained, I think what we want the most is to create a body of work where you could see over time that the thinking is consistent and it could leave behind, if not with products, sort of an interesting attitude toward design. We really care about the discipline in itself we would like to leave behind a model of thinking. The duo currently teach at the Well Being and Contextual Design Departments at Design Academy Eindhoven and head the Design bachelor at MADE Program in Siracusa, Italy. Flos products by Formafantasma are available through Hive Modern in Northwest Portlands Pearl District. -- Damon Johnstun @DamonJohnstun Subscribe to get the Morning Briefing newsletter delivered to your email inbox weekdays at 7 a.m. A three-alarm fire destroyed an apartment complex under construction in Wilsonville early Sunday, then spilled over to destroy neighboring homes in the densely packed Villebois housing development. Authorities said 20 condos were destroyed or suffered significant damage. The fire also torched 14 cars and trucks.Mark Graves WILSONVILLE FIRE FUNDRAISER: Investigators are still trying to determine the cause of a fire that destroyed a Wilsonville apartment complex under construction and damaged or destroyed 20 homes, displacing up to two dozen people. A fundraiser for the affected families will be held today. Read more. TRUCK EXPLOSION: A Franz Bakery truck driver was killed after appearing to intentionally drive into a propane tank at the companys Clackamas distribution center, causing at least one explosion and a two-alarm fire. Read more. I-5 PROJECT CHALLENGED: Metro is criticizing ODOT for an inadequate and potentially misleading analysis of its proposed $500 million I-5 project through the Rose Quarter. Read more. GUN LAWS: Oregon lawmakers may expand gun-free zones and raise the gun buying age. Read more. STAFF FIRED: On Oregon Secretary of State Bev Clarnos first full day in office Monday, three top executives in her department were dismissed. Read more. FREE BURRITOS: Fuego, one of Portlands oldest food carts, will give away free burritos in honor of its 25th year in business on National Burrito Day. Read more. NURKICS BILLBOARD: A crowdfunded billboard supporting the Portland Trail Blazers injured center Jusuf Nurkic will go up this month. Read more. SOUNDS OF SPRING: Michael Buble, Weezer, Buddy Guy and many more are coming to Portland this month. Check out our list of the best bets for live music in April. Read more. Odd in Oregon Colossal Claude (courtesy of NeoMam Studios/CashNetUSA) MYTHICAL BEASTS: NeoMam Studios created an illustrated American bestiary, highlighting the most famous mythical creature in every U.S. state. They gave Sasquatch to Washington. But have you heard the tale of Colossal Claude? Read more. More news Cop impersonator gets probation for confronting woman who stopped to pee along Portland street Canzano: Bol Bol signs with Creative Artists Agency, raises a question for Oregon Ducks basketball Dear Abby: Couples sex life fizzles when husband obsesses over wifes weight Ask Amy: Expectant mom cant believe husband wont be there for babys birth Carolyn Hax: Perhaps a neon sign will spell out whats wrong with your wife Todays comics Click here to see today's comics Todays obituaries Click here to find area deaths reported recently Today in history On April 2, 1956, the soap operas As the World Turns and The Edge of Night premiered on CBS-TV. On this date in 1958, the term beatnik was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen to refer to members of the pre-hippie counterculture; the term was inspired by the Beat Generation and by the Soviet launch of its second Sputnik spacecraft. WILLITS, CALIF. -- The final chapter of the investigation into a coastal California crash that killed a Southwest Washington family of eight begins Wednesday. A special jury will convene in this rural town to hear evidence as part of Mendocino Countys first coroners inquest in more than fifty years. Eight investigators and one pathologist will testify about the yearlong quest to answer why Jennifer Hart drove the SUV carrying her family off the edge of a coastal cliff. In the months and moments before they died, the family increasingly withdrew from the outside world. The parents did not stay in contact with relatives in the Midwest and lived in a rural home where they allowed no visitors. When investigators asked for witnesses to tell them about any sightings of the two white mothers and their six adopted black children during their three-state journey from home to the crash site, no one came forward. The attorney who will oversee the inquest swore in eight women and six men as jurors Tuesday morning at the county courthouse in Ukiah, 20 miles south of downtown Willits, where the hearing will take place. Nearly all of the jurors said they had heard about the crash that turned the nations attention to their county. By weeks end, officials expect the jurors will have determined the manners of death for Hart, 38, her wife, Sarah, also 38, and their six children, Markis, 19, Hannah, 16, Devonte, 15, Jeremiah, 14, Abigail, 14, and Sierra, 12. This just got into peoples minds of wanting answers, said Mendocino County Sheriff Thomas Allman, who decided last year to convene the inquest to present evidence gathered by his detectives and other police agencies. By presenting all the facts, Allman hopes to bring closure to the public, friends and family members -- both relatives of the Harts and the biological relatives of their children who lived their final hours in Mendocino County. Reports of concern about the childrens wellbeing reached child abuse hotlines in Minnesota, Oregon and Washington in the years before they died. Jennifer and Sarah Hart were living in Minnesota when they adopted their six children from foster care in Texas. The family eventually moved to West Linn and stayed there four years before buying a home in Woodland, Washington in 2017. Although child welfare workers in Minnesota and Oregon found evidence to support claims of neglect, the children were never removed from the care of their parents. After a case worker stopped by their Washington home to investigate another report of neglect, the Harts packed up their GMC Yukon and left. The family drove south to the rolling mountains and sweeping coast line of Mendocino County. A security camera recorded Jennifer Hart in a store in Fort Bragg stocking up on groceries March 25, 2018. The next day, a tourist spotted the family's wrecked SUV at the bottom of a cliffside lookout point north of Fort Bragg. Mendocino County's panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean draw tourists to cliffside lookouts. Allman happened to be on the coast that day at a sheriffs substation a half-hour's drive from the crash site. He drove to the point after he heard dispatchers say multiple people were killed. He watched as emergency responders gathered and rappelled down the cliff to the ocean's edge to retrieve bodies. He took photos with his phone as he took in the scene. The photos captured clear skies and the wide expanse of the lookout. "I was of the mindset that this was a terrible, horrible accident, said Allman, referring to the first three days of the crash investigation. This week, as he looked through the images on his phone one year later, Allman paused at two photos of the dirt parking lot. Allman estimated that 100 feet of land separate the cliff's edge from the road. There were no skid marks. There were no tire tracks to show Jennifer Hart had tried to break before driving her family over the edge. The realization was a turning point for the investigation, Allman said. Allman had dual responsibilities to find out what happened. In California, sheriffs also serve as coroners. His agency quickly discovered how difficult that would be. When he asked witnesses to contact the agency if they had seen the Harts as they covered the 570 miles from Washington to the California coast, no one stepped forward. Investigators at Mendocino County alone spent more than 2,000 hours on the case, Allman said. Theres been a lot of tears shed over this case, he said. Troopers from California Highway Patrol and deputies from the familys home county, Clark County, helped piece together the events leading up to the crash. Mendocino County detectives also tracked down the biological mother of the Harts oldest daughter, Hannah, after they found a foot months after the crash and believed it was hers. "Every piece of evidence we got was just that much more shocking," said Undersheriff Matthew Kendall. Allman decided to present the mounting evidence through a coroner's inquest after talking to another sheriff whose county convenes inquests often. By law, California sheriffs, in their role as coroners, can order inquests to take place. Allman had planned to hold the proceedings last fall. County officials settled on one year after the crash in large part because middle son Devonte has still not been found. He is presumed dead. We know what the ocean takes, sometimes it doesnt give back, Kendall said. Devonte gained international attention in 2014 after a photo of him embracing a Portland police officer went viral. Allman believes that photo is one reason news of the familys death has captured the publics attention in a way that he has rarely seen. He compared the attention to just one other case in his 13 years leading the office. A 34-day search for a man suspected of killing two people in Fort Bragg ended when the man was shot and killed by authorities, Allman said. Unlike then, the public interest has never ceased in the months after the crash. Online forums dedicated to discussing what happened still generate comments. Hart family friends from Minnesota camped in a half-dozen tents and combed the beach for remains months after the crash, Allman said. County officials knew that no hearing room could fit the number of people looking for answers in the crash, so the they decided to livestream the inquest proceedings. The county hired attorney Matthew Guichard to preside over the hearing and question investigators. Guichard also oversaw Tuesday's jury selection process. He explained how inquests work and said that he had been involved with more than 100 of them. Guichard recited the names of Jennifer Hart, Sarah Hart and each of their children. He told jurors that it isn't their job to determine who may be criminally or civilly responsible for their deaths. Instead, the jury must conclude how each of the eight Hart family members died: by accident, by natural causes, by suicide or at the hand of another person. "This is a formal coroner's inquest and it is a hearing designed to put out in the open the circumstances of the deaths of those eight individuals that I named to you." Before swearing in the jury, Guichard asked the potential jurors if they heard about the case. Nearly all had. He said they must rely only on evidence "that comes in on the stand." Guichard expects the proceedings will last through Friday. The inquest will conclude after jurors determine what Allman should list as manner of death on each death certificate. "I never intended to close the books on this until the facts are known," Allman said. -- Molly Young myoung@oregonian.com A federal magistrate judge has recommended dismissing two lawsuits that challenge the Oregon State Bars membership fees that several attorneys contend have been used to support political speech without consent. The Oregon Legislature enacted the State Bar Act in 1935, making it a public corporation and requiring lawyers who want to practice in the state to join and pay an annual fee. The bar administers exams for admission to practice law, examines a members character and fitness, drafts and enforces rules of conduct and requires continuing education and training of lawyers. Because the bar is an arm of the state, its immune from suit under the 11th Amendment, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo wrote in her 27-page findings. The judge also cited the 1990 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Keller v. State Bar of California, which permits the use of compulsory membership dues to fund speech related to regulating the legal profession and improving the quality of legal services. Plaintiffs had argued that the bars publishing of a Statement on White Nationalism and Normalization of Violence, which ran in the April 2018 issue of the Bar Bulletin, was blatantly political and violated the 1990 high court ruling. The Supreme Court decision also held that attorneys who are required to be members of a state bar association have a First Amendment right to refrain from subsidizing the organizations political or ideological activities. The bars statement in its bulletin denounced hate mongering, referencing the August 2017 white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the May 2017 stabbing attacks on the Portland MAX train. It called out a current climate of violence, extremism and exclusion that threatens the rule of law. A second statement signed by non-bar specialty groups went further, repeatedly criticizing President Donald Trump for having catered to this white nationalist movement, allowing it to make up the base of his support and providing it a false sense of legitimacy. The two statements were on opposite pages, with one green banner surrounding them both. The bar magazine is mailed to members 10 times a year. The state bar stood by its statement but voted to issue refunds to lawyers who objected to the second statement that decried the rise of white nationalism under Trump. The $1.12 refund was calculated as the per-member cost of publishing that issue, according to the state bars board. Although the Specialty Bars statement included rhetoric critical of the president, the Bar Bulletin routinely publishes statements from a variety of authors with differing political viewpoints and creates a forum for the exchange of ideas pertaining to the practice of law, Russo wrote. This service also is germane to improving the quality of legal services. The judge further noted that even if the statement included political speech that wasnt relevant to the practice or administration of law, it still wouldnt violate the First Amendment because the state bar has adequate safeguards for members to challenge its use of their fees. West Linn lawyer Diane L. Gruber and Klamath Falls lawyer Mark Runnels filed one of the lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Portland. Attorneys Daniel Z. Crowe, Lawrence K. Peterson and the nonprofit group, Oregon Civil Liberties Attorneys, filed a second suit against the bar. Crowe and Peterson asked the court to declare Oregons mandatory bar membership unconstitutional or to order the bar to stop using the mandatory fees for political speech. The lawyers cited the landmark 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees, which said public employees cant be required to pay unions dues or fees if they opt out of membership. But Russo said she was bound to follow the Keller decision, which the last years ruling didnt override. The parties to the case can challenge the judges findings. A federal district judge will consider those challenges before issuing an order, adopting or rejecting all or part of the magistrate judges recommendation. -- 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 KATHLEEN PARKER WASHINGTON -- It may be a truism-in-the-making that one's political career is over when, as a candidate, you must first apologize for your sex and race, which can mean only one thing: Young or old, you're a white guy. Heaven forbid you should also be long of tooth and taupe of hair. The Old White Men meme, usually used to describe the Republican Party, seems to have finally won the day. Because the GOP has become increasingly older, whiter and male the past several decades -- and since the Republican Party recently has done little to recommend itself to women and minorities -- the widely accepted inference is that OWM are inherently bad, if not evil or criminal. Conservative white women don't fare much better, but at least they're female and, as such, may be viewed as having suffered the boot of the white male until relatively recently. Ah, but that's ancient history, right? "Women Rule" today, according to another popular meme. And, in light of the 2018 midterm results, it may well become true. In an unexpected twist in the 2020 election season, even some white male Democrats are facing a newly evolved Court of Prior Offenses, which, apparently, can include being born white. If you were born of white privilege, you're in for a bake sale's worth of humble pie. Plainly, we've crossed a Rubicon of sorts. In this time and place, the emerging battle lines aren't just demographically defined but constitute a historical reckoning. It isn't enough that women and minorities ascend. It is now seemingly necessary that the oppressor pay for the sins of his forefathers. No one reading this needs a lecture about colonialism, slavery, genocide or Jim Crow, to mention a few index items. But all of that history -- combined with the emergence of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, an increasingly diverse society and, notably, the Worst White Guy in Modern America, Donald Trump -- has coalesced to produce a new litmus test for future presidents: Are you a white man? And, if so, are you sorry? So, these two white guys walk into a bar, where Brenda Lee is on the jukebox singing, "I'm Sorry." Not really, but Beto O'Rourke and Joe Biden have both begun apology tours that could become their undoing. In a recent interview, O'Rourke acknowledged "the truth of the criticism" that he was born of privilege and, as a white male, had more opportunities than others. He already had apologized for writing prose as a teenager about running over children. He also apologized for making an offhand remark about sometimes helping his wife with their three children. Note to Beto: This will never end. Once you start apologizing, especially for things over which you had no control, you are more likely to be perceived as weak -- and not real smart. Biden is remorseful for everything -- for supporting a 1994 crime bill, for having called Vice President Pence a "decent guy" -- and especially for his role in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings long ago. Then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden regrets the way Anita Hill was treated -- with tough questioning and, as I recall, a hostile environment. All those white men and this lone, black woman. As they say, it wasn't optically optimum. Additionally, Biden is very upset about what he terms "white man's culture," referring to the environment in which women have been afraid to speak up in cases of sexual harassment. Well, OK, but if we're going to blame White Man's Culture for all of that, then we ought to add a footnote about the genius of the founders, the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and, if we're still allowed to use the term, Western civilization. Trump's success, unfortunately, is based in part upon his attention to white voters who feel marginalized by a culture they increasingly don't recognize, including the blue-collar white guys who used to vote Democratic. This is not calculus, but it was a calculation that Trump got right. With the end of the Mueller investigation and the wackiness emanating from the far left, he may be poised to win again. If Democrats want to woo renegade Republicans and independents -- and evict Trump from the White House -- they'd best focus on uniting their constituents under a banner of shared values rather than encouraging good men to apologize for being born. Besides, as most men know, saying you're sorry is never enough. Kathleen Parkers email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com. (c) 2019, Washington Post Writers Group Kathleen Parker writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2010. SALEM On Oregon Secretary of State Bev Clarnos first full day in office Monday, three executives in her department were dismissed. The departures of Deputy Secretary of State Leslie Cummings, chief of staff Deb Royal and governmental and legal affairs director Steve Elzinga came just a day after Clarno, an 83-year-old Republican former lawmaker, was sworn in. "Looking forward to serving Oregon as Secretary of State!" Clarno tweeted. Clarno succeeds Dennis Richardson, a Republican who died in February of brain cancer. As the state's top election official, Clarno will be responsible for overseeing the 2020 elections. She said via email that she starts work this week and will be requesting briefing materials for all secretary of state office initiatives. She also plans to meet with staff and state leaders. Her office will not comment on any staff transitions as they are personnel matters, her statement said. Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, who has known Clarno for years, on Friday appointed her to the state's second-highest office under the agreement that she won't run for the office in the next election. Richardson's term ends in January 2021. Brown earlier told reporters that she wanted a secretary of state who would focus on overseeing elections instead of running for office. Clarno was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1988, and served as House speaker from 1995 to 1997. She then was elected to the state Senate in 2000, which was split 15-15 between Republicans and Democrats, the Cascade Business News reported in a 2017 profile of Clarno. She became Senate Republican Leader in 2003. In that role, she developed a working relationship with Brown, who was then a top Democratic senator, the Cascade Business News said. Royal, who also served as Richardson's spokeswoman, was taking her dismissal in stride. "It's a political appointment, and in political appointments, you serve at the pleasure of the principal," Royal told the Salem Statesman Journal. Clarno tweeted that she was sworn in Sunday evening by Senior Judge Michael Sullivan, who retired from the Deschutes County Circuit Court in 2012 and is eligible for temporary assignments. A formal swearing in is expected later this week for Clarno, who is from the Central Oregon town of Redmond, in Deschutes County. -- The Associated Press SALEM Oregons projected kicker tax rebate will decrease by $108 million under a bill passed by Democrats in the state Senate on Monday. For individual taxpayers, that would translate to a 14.5 percent reduction to their kicker rebate when they file their taxes in 2020, if state economists most recent revenue forecast holds. In February, economists predicted the kicker could reach $748.5 million. It represents the amount of taxes collected above and beyond what state officials projected they would take in before the start of the two-year state budget cycle. The kicker was put in by the citizens of Oregon as kind of a bumper for not over-expanding our budget, Senate Republican Leader Herman Baertschiger, R-Grants Pass, said in a floor speech. But yet we chew away and we chew away. House Bill 2975 already passed the House and is now headed to Gov. Kate Brown, who must decide whether to sign it into law. Browns deputy communications director Kate Kondayen declined to say whether Brown plans to sign the bill. Under Oregon's Constitution, the states unique kicker rebate is triggered when the general fund largely tax revenues comes in more than 2 percent above economists' forecast made at the start of the budget cycle. Despite Baertschiger and other Republicans objections to the bill during Senate and House floor votes, they went out of their way to thank Democrats for personally notifying them that the bill would reduce the kicker. Legislative analysts made no mention of the impact on the kicker in write-ups of the effects of House Bill 2975, and Republicans on the Joint Committee on Ways and Means with the exception of two who were excused voted unanimously with their Democratic counterparts to pass the bill. After the committee vote, Democrats told Republicans how the bill would cut the kicker. In floor votes, Republicans all voted no. The kicker cut is the upshot of legislative budget maneuvers going back to the 2017 session, when lawmakers were looking for money to patch a budget hole that loomed despite rising state tax revenues. As part of balancing the current budget, they scheduled $108 million from a handful of sources including a state insurance fund and legal settlements won by the Department of Justice to transfer to the state general fund in May 2019. But state tax revenues have exceeded expectations throughout the two-year budget, and Rep. Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, told House lawmakers last month that the state no longer needs that $108 million in the current general fund budget. The catch is that lawmakers expect they will need the money in the next budget cycle that begins in July. Despite having 5 percent more revenue to work with compared with the current $22.5 billion budget, the Democrats who lead the Ways and Means committee proposed 5 percent cuts across much of state government in an effort to get the state on a more sustainable budget trajectory. Rayfield, who is co-chair of the Ways and Means committee, told lawmakers last month that he and other co-chairs of the committee already plan to use the $108 million in personal income tax that wont be paid out in the kicker to fund critical services such as K-12, community colleges, higher education in the 2019-2021 budget. The Democratic co-chairs high-level budget plan calls for the state to spend $100 million, or about 1 percent, more than legislative budget analysts have said it would cost to maintain current K-12 services. It also calls for $141 million less than necessary to maintain current service levels for all other education offerings, including higher education, which could lead to large tuition increases. If the state keeps $108 million socked away in the state insurance fund, DOJ settlement fund and other accounts for the current budget, it could be recycled to help patch higher education or other budgets for the next two years. If the governor signs (the bill), we will re-evaluate those accounts and see if theres even more, Legislative Fiscal Officer Ken Rocco said on Monday. We would assume the bulk of this would still be available And we will be looking at other funds, too. Hillary Borrud | hborrud@oregonian.com | 503-294-4034 | @hborrud Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. SALEM Oregon lawmakers have scheduled about four hours of public hearings on Tuesday to tackle whats shaping up to be this years principal gun legislation. In the morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee will take testimony on a 44-page proposal that would, among other things, penalize some gun owners who fail to lock up their guns and allow gun dealers to refuse to sell guns to people younger than 21. In the afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee will consider a more limited gun safety bill. Leading up to the hearings, most of the rhetoric has been focused on the Senate legislation, Senate Bill 978. Supporters include Cease Fire Oregon, which called the amendment to Senate Bill 978 important legislation that will reduce gun violence. Their perennial opponent at the state capitol, the Oregon Firearms Federation, minced no words: This bill could be the most extreme attack on gun rights in Oregon history, the group wrote in an email to its members. The legislation would allow Oregon gun dealers to refuse to sell weapons to people under age 21. Current state law sets a minimum age of 18 to purchase rifles and shotguns. Some retailers raised their age limit to 21 following the February 2018 mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida. The shooter was 19-years-old. But the change drew a flurry of lawsuits from 18, 19 and 20-year-olds who claimed the higher age limit violates Oregon law, which prohibits discrimination based on age. The proposed change would shield retailers from those accusations, by giving gun dealers the right to set their own age limit, as long as its 18, 19, 20 or 21. The amendment to Senate Bill 978 would also make owners liable for harm caused by someone who obtains a gun that is not locked up, if that harm occurs within two years. If the person who obtains an unsecured gun is a minor, the gun owner can be charged with a misdemeanor. Portions of the porposed law are entitled the Cindy Yuille and Steve Forsyth Act. Both Yuille and Forsyth were killed during the 2012 shooting at Clackamas Town Center. Police said the shooter had stolen the semiautomatic rifle used in the rampage from a friend. Relatives of both Yuille and Forsyth have testified multiple times at the state capitol for stricter gun laws. Another section of the lengthy amendment would allow local governments, including school districts, to ban all firearms from public buildings, including those carried by concealed handgun license holders. Those bans would include the grounds adjacent to those buildings. The ban on firearms could also include the parking lots at Portland International Airport, which means that gun owners who pick up or drop off a passenger could be in violation of the law, even if their weapon is locked in their trunk. However, it would not apply to someone who carries an unloaded firearm in a locked, hard-sided container for the purposes of checking the container onto a flight, in accordance with federal law. The bill would not automatically lead to those restrictions, but it would allow local governments, school districts and the Port of Portland to enact the regulations if they wished. The bill would also raise fees for concealed carry permits, require hospitals to report to the Oregon Health Authority when they've treated someone for a firearms injury, and put in place new regulations meant to reduce the number of "untraceable" and "undetectable" firearms, including those made using 3D printers. On the House side, the bill up for a hearing on Tuesday afternoon, House Bill 2013, is far less sweeping. It would require people convicted of domestic violence or stalking crimes to turn over their weapons. Theyre already prohibited from possessing firearms, but the measure would clarify that they would have to turn their weapons over to a law enforcement agency. Its possible that lawmakers will consider other firearms legislation. The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to advance several measures relating to firearms on Tuesday for the stated purpose of keeping them alive after a legislative deadline next week. That would allow another House committee not subject to the deadline to make changes and send the bill to the floor later in the session. We dont know if were going to need some of those later on, House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, said Monday. A 17-year-old boy died after being hit by a car late Monday in Tualatin, police say. The Sherwood School District identified the boy who was killed as Stephen Ventura, a Sherwood High School junior. He may have intentionally stepped in front of the car, Tualatin police said. Ventura died after being taken to OHSU Hospital in Portland. Police said the driver stayed at the scene at Oregon 99W at Southwest Cipole Road and cooperated with officers. It doesnt appear speed, distraction or impairment factored into the crash, according to a police spokesman, and the driver isnt facing any criminal charges. The Sherwood School District notified students families and its staff of the death Tuesday. Tragedies such as this have a great impact on all of us -- students, staff, and community -- and our priority at this time is to provide support and resources to all those impacted by this loss, Superintendent Heather Cordie said in the districtwide email. Cordie said the district had mobilized a team that would provide counseling and support to Sherwood High students and staff. Counselors were also available Tuesday at each of the districts schools. Our hearts, thoughts, and prayers are with the family and all those impacted by this devastating loss, Cordie said. -- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015 Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. SAN FRANCISCO, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Segment , the customer data infrastructure company, today announced a $175 million round of new funding. The Series D round was co-led by existing investors Accel, GV, and new investor Meritech Capital. Thrive Capital, Y Combinator Continuity, and eVentures also participated in the round, as well as new investor Sapphire Ventures. For years, companies have relied on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to understand their customers, making it the centerpiece of customer data stacks for offline sales models. However, in todays digital era, CRM is no longer enough. Companies must use dozens of business applications in their customer data stack, but they dont have the data infrastructure necessary to integrate these applications seamlessly or respect customer privacy preferences consistently. Segments technology empowers businesses to deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences across every channel and touchpoint, while also respecting user privacy and preferences through first-party data. The funding round brings Segments total amount of capital raised to $284 million and will be used to invest in key areas of growth, including: Accelerating global expansion: The company plans to use the new round to open multiple new offices across North America, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific while significantly growing its team, which currently counts over 350 people in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver and Dublin. The company plans to use the new round to open multiple new offices across North America, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific while significantly growing its team, which currently counts over 350 people in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver and Dublin. Further developing Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI) as the technical foundation for customer-first businesses: Today, thousands of businesses across 71 countries rely on Segment to be the core foundation for their first-party customer data, enabling them to deliver highly relevant, connected experiences through every customer touchpoint. Segment will use the new funds to accelerate the development and adoption of CDI. Today, thousands of businesses across 71 countries rely on Segment to be the core foundation for their first-party customer data, enabling them to deliver highly relevant, connected experiences through every customer touchpoint. Segment will use the new funds to accelerate the development and adoption of CDI. Investing in go-to-market activities and the Segment partner network: The company will invest in customer growth across the board, with a particular focus on expanding its enterprise customer base, which already includes established industry leaders such as Intuit, IBM, 21st Century Fox, Levis, VMware and Meredith. Segment will also invest in further expanding its partner network. CRM Is No Longer Enough In the digital economy, businesses are expected to consistently understand who their customers are. They are also expected to provide highly relevant, contextualized experiences across potentially hundreds of touchpoints while also being consistently respectful of privacy preferences. However, in their efforts to adapt to this new era of privacy, personalization, and the multi-channel experience, businesses are finding that their CRM systems are no longer enough. Many companies are still treading water, building their customer data stacks solely around their CRM even though these systems were built for an era when most customer interactions took place offline. This means that sales forces are still required to manually input information about each customer into their CRM system. This also means that IT must choose between purchasing a one-size-fits-all cloud suite that is not tailored for their business, or building dozens of costly, time-consuming integrations. The result is that companies are stuck with a tangled mess of low quality data powering every customer experience. In the end, the customer ends up suffering the most, as their preferences around everything from product experiences to privacy, cannot be met. Segment solves this problem by providing a new infrastructure that allows companies to regain and centralize control of their own data, delivering the experiences that their customers want and need, without any engineering complexities. A New Infrastructure for the Customer-First Era Segments Customer Data Infrastructure can capture customer interactions from every business touchpoint, ensure that the data is accurate and consistent across the organization, and automatically route that data to hundreds of business applications across a companys entire customer data stack. With a centralized infrastructure to route first-party customer data to whichever application requires it, companies of all sizes are able to build better products, make smarter business decisions, exceed customer expectations, and ensure that the privacy of their customers is consistently met. CRMs and their associated suites are no longer able to deliver great customer experiences, said Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment. With the rapid proliferation of new digital tools and customer touchpoints, the global market opportunity for Customer Data Infrastructure is huge. We are excited about this latest milestone, which will allow us to accelerate international growth and help even more businesses across the world put their customers first. Commentary "Segment transforms the way that businesses collect and manage customer data, with a particular emphasis on first-party data, said Vas Natarajan of Accel. Combined with powerful governance and audience management tools, Segment is the backbone for how great companies sell, market, and support their customers. We are so excited to have led their original Series A as well as this latest round, and to support their continued growth. Dave Munichiello, General Partner at GV said: Segment continues to be a growth machine driven by the rapid adoption of global enterprises with data-driven, customer-centric mindsets. The companys traction among the Fortune 5000, strong international growth, and differentiated product suite solidifies Segments position as the leader in Customer Data Infrastructure. Todays consumers see compelling, consistent, and personalized customer experiences as the new standard," added Rob Ward, Founder and Managing Director at Meritech Capital. "By pioneering Customer Data Infrastructure, Segment is empowering businesses to meet these rising expectations in a way that is fast, efficient, and scalable. The company has had great traction to date, and we look forward to supporting the team through the next stages of rapid growth. There are few crimes, Shawn Schutt points out, where the victim bears some burden of blame from the public. Survivors of sexual assault too often are blamed for the crime committed against them, he says. "They will sometimes be asked, 'How much did you have to drink,' or, 'What were you wearing when it happened,'" says Schutt, a prevention education coordinator at Underground Railroad Inc. "But it isn't the victim's fault." Raising awareness and shifting that burden of blame away from sexual assault survivors is the objective behind a Saginaw Valley State University-hosted exhibition titled "What Were You Wearing?" The exhibition, which will display clothing worn by survivors of sexual assault when those crimes happened, will be in the hallway outside SVSU's Student Counseling Center in Curtiss Hall, room C112, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday to Friday. Staff and student interns in the Student Counseling Center are collaborating on the project with Underground Railroad Inc., a Saginaw-based nonprofit that services victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking and human slavery. Underground Railroad Inc. donated the clothing that will appear in the exhibition. Among the items that will be displayed are children's pajamas, casual attire and swimwear. The idea was inspired by a similar exhibition at University of Arkansas. "We really want to debunk the myth that what they were wearing is the reason a survivor was sexually assaulted," says Ashley Corwin, a student intern at SVSU's Student Counseling Center. Corwin hopes attendees will better empathize with survivors when seeing the variety and common types of clothing worn during those crimes. "The installation, we hope, will allow the viewers to see themselves reflected in the outfits," says Corwin, who received a bachelor's degree in social work from SVSU in 2018 and is pursuing a master's degree in social work there now. Schutt, who earned a bachelor's degree in health science from SVSU in 2016, said he hopes "What Were You Wearing?" connects with attendees. "By asking victims those types of questions -- like 'What were you wearing?' or 'How much did you have to drink?' -- we're making it easier for perpetrators to get away with these crimes," he says. "It's important to raise awareness about this." The initiative also will serve as an educational tool for student interns in the SVSU Student Counseling Center, says Dana Carley Kaczynski, an assistant director with the office helping to supervise the effort. "The exhibit gives the interns an opportunity to participate in an outreach project that involves collaborating with a community agency, and see it from beginning to end," she says. "Ultimately, the message of this particular project is something that hits home for us as counselors as we work with survivors of sexual assault here at our Student Counseling Center every day. It is very important to each of us to share this message with the campus community." The week-long exhibition are free and open to the public. It wouldn't be April Fool's day without a light-hearted prank or two, and the City of Midland decided to get in on the fun. Monday, April 1, the city sent out a press release and published content to its social media making mention of a new mode of transportation. "We figured we have Dial-A-Ride buses, lots of bike lanes, scenic paths and trails ... but what we didn't have? HORSES," the city's Facebook post read. The system in question? A new on-demand horse and carriage system called "Hoofer," which would use two-horse carriages called "swagger wagons." "Sit back, relax, and pretend you're Herbert H. Dow as you stroll through Midland like it's the 1800s," the city stated. The press release and Facebook post prompted users to visit the city's website to learn more. Upon clicking the link, an "April Fools!" message was displayed with a picture of a laughing horse. The Hoofer transportation system is not coming to Midland and there are no plans to implement this kind of system, said Katie Guyer, communications coordinator for the city. Guyer said the prank was a way to get people engaged with the city's website and social media, while also having a little fun. "We put things like this out on social media in particular, just to get more of a relationship built with people online when it gets shared," she said. "Not only does it increase the visibility of our social media channels and get people to actively engage with us, but it keeps everything relevant on their feed as well." She said it was a way to use Facebook's algorithm so that residents were seeing the city's content more. "We want to make sure that people are seeing the relevant information and timely information that's out there as part of their day-to-day lives," Guyer said. "And if they're interacting with our posts, the likelihood of that happening is greatly increased." By 2 p.m. Monday, the Facebook post had 78 comments -- many of which were replies from the city -- 73 shares and more than 200 likes and reactions. Images Sorry, there are no recent results for popular images. WEST DES MOINES, Iowa, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leading insurance and annuity financial services company Midland National Life Insurance Company (Midland National), a member company of Sammons Financial Group (SFG), announced the recent hiring of Marty Kennedy as vice president of distribution and sales, independent broker/dealer. Kennedy is an established financial services professional with over 25-years of experience in sales, recruiting, and marketing. In this role, Kennedy will oversee Midland Nationals development of its independent broker/dealer distribution channel and strategy. His responsibilities will also include broker/dealer relationship management; building and management of a wholesaling team; and working closely with existing distribution teams to maximize opportunities. In addition, Kennedy will work closely with other SFG divisions to leverage future broker/dealer opportunities. Martys diverse sales and recruiting background in both the life and broker/dealer environment will be of immense value to the company, said Jerry Blair, chief distribution officer of SFGs life division. This experience in combination with his past leadership roles makes us excited to have him on our team. Previous to this, Kennedy led the general agency life division sales team at Lincoln Financial. He has held numerous leadership roles with Allianz Life, LPL Financial, and Crump Life Insurance Services. Kennedy is a graduate of the University of North Carolina in Asheville where he received a degree in economics. About Midland National For more than 110 years, Midland National has been an industry leader, crediting the companys strength to its commitment to stability, innovation and dedicated customer service. Midland National is accredited by the Better Business Bureau, and has earned an A+ (Superior) rating from A.M. Best , a large third-party independent reporting and rating company that rates an insurance company on the basis of the company's financial strength, operating performance and ability to meet its ongoing obligations to policyholders. This rating is the second highest out of 15 categories, was affirmed by A.M. Best for Midland National as part of Sammons Financial Group on August 2, 2018. Founded as Dakota Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1906, Midland National Life Insurance Company has protected families and preserved legacies for generations. Midland National is one of the leading insurance companies in America. Midland National is a member of Sammons Financial Group, Inc. With its Annuity Division located in West Des Moines, Iowa, and its Life Operations location in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Midland National operates in 49 states and the District of Columbia through its 12,000 licensed sales professionals. For more information, visit midlandnational.com . A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b44535ad-45d9-4093-b70c-154093116ebc LAUREL BLACK | The Sun Rodney Jones (left), academic program director of mechatronics at Greenville Technical College, leads a tour as McCracken County Judge-Executive Craig Clymer and other members of West Kentucky Community & Technical College's economic development road trip watch. Educators said their visit to Greenville, South Carolina, showed Paducah is on the right path when it comes to workforce development. DAVE THOMPSON | The Sun Former McCracken County Property Valuation Administrator Nancy Bock (left) speaks with defense attorney Emily Roark at Bock's plea hearing in Graves County Circuit Court on Monday. Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire (PANA) - Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara assured members of parliament (MPs) Monday the October 2020 presidential election would go well, calling on politicians to stop scaring one another, official source said here Brazzaville, Congo (PANA) The Congolese government on Monday announced the establishment of a transparency commission for the management of public funds, according to the minister of Justice and Human rights, Ange Wilfried Bininga, in a plenary session at Parliament CHANTILLY, Va., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AMERICAN SYSTEMS has won a spot on a multiple-award indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract to provide training systems support to the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF). The 10-year U. S. Marine Corps (USMC) contract has a potential value of $245 million. Under the terms of the MAGTF Training Systems Support (MTSS) contract, AMERICAN SYSTEMS will vie for task orders to train USMC operating forces on command, control, computer, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) missions. Services include computer-based simulation, combined arms staff training, MAGTF tactical warfare simulation and Deployable Virtual Training Environment training. We have a long history of supporting the Marine Corps and as a premier training services provider, so this is a great fit for us, said Peter Smith, President and CEO of AMERICAN SYSTEMS. We are proud to be able to support and strengthen the readiness of our Marineswe know whats at stake. About AMERICAN SYSTEMS Founded in 1975, AMERICAN SYSTEMS is a government IT solutions provider and one of the top 100 employee-owned companies in the United States, with approximately 1,400 employees nationwide. Based in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Chantilly, VA, the company provides Enterprise IT, Acquisition and Lifecycle Support, Engineering and Analysis, Test & Evaluation, and Training Solutions to DOD, Intel, and civilian government customers. For more information, visit: www.AmericanSystems.com . Contact: Michael Dolton 703.968.5287 Mike.Dolton@AmericanSystems.com Port-Louis, Mauritius (PANA) - Mauritian Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth, on Tuesday told Parliament that the Strategic Planning and Economic Development Directorate of the Economic Development Board (EDB) has, over the past six months, been extensively engaged with stakeholders with a view to finalising the UN-Government of Mauritius Strategic Partnership Framework Harare, Zimbabwe (PANA) - The Zimbabwean Government is working with four foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to choose high yielding soya bean seeds with a potential to boost crop produce by 30% for commercialisation Dublin, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Blockchain in Telecom Market Forecast up to 2024" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global blockchain in telecom market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 77.9% during the forecast period to reach revenue of $1.37 billion by 2024. For increasing the overall revenue, profitability, and addressing the rising customer needs, traditional telecom companies are focusing on adopting blockchain technology to unlock new opportunities. Rising security concerns, demand for fraud management, and 5G implementation are few of the factors driving the growth of the blockchain in telecom market. The increasing number of blockchain consortia, such as Hyperledger, Carrier Blockchain Study Group (CBSG), and many more, is also among the primary factors leading toward the growth of blockchain applications in telecom. For instance, the number of blockchain consortia increased from around 27 in 2017 to more than 60 in 2018. Competitive Analysis The report covers and analyzes the blockchain in telecom market. Major vendors across different verticals are planning for high investments in this market, and as a result, the market is expected to grow at an impressive rate in the coming years. The key players are adopting various organic as well as inorganic growth strategies such as mergers & acquisitions, collaborations & partnerships, joint ventures, and few other strategies to be in the strong position in the market. The report contains an in-depth analysis of the vendors profile, which includes financial health, business units, key business priorities, SWOT, strategies, and views. The prominent vendors covered in the report include IBM, SAP, Microsoft, AWS, Huawei, BubbleTone, Clear, Guardtime, TBCASoft, and Filament among many others. The vendors have been identified based on the portfolio, geographical presence, marketing & distribution channels, revenue generation, and significant investments in R&D. IBM, SAP, and Microsoft are the key players in the blockchain in telecom market. In 2018, Telefnica, a Spanish telecom company, partnered with IBM for using its blockchain technology for managing the international call traffic. IBM is working with Indian telecom firms and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) for offering blockchain solutions and addressing problems of coordination between multiple parties in mobile number portability (MNP) and to Do Not Call (DNC) registries. In 2019, Tech Mahindra partnered with Microsoft in India for creating blockchain-based solutions for combating spam calls. In June 2018, Deutsche Telekom, a German telecommunication company announced that it was working with SAP on blockchain technology for preventing hackers from accessing data on stolen phones. The report also includes the complete insights of the industry and aims to provide an opportunity for the emerging and established players to understand the market trends, current scenario, initiatives taken by the government, and the latest technologies related to the market. In addition, it helps the venture capitalists in understanding the companies better and to take informed decisions. Regional Analysis North America held the largest market share in 2017 and is expected to dominate the blockchain in telecom market during the forecast period. The high presence of key players offering blockchain in telecom solutions such as IBM, AWS, and Microsoft is the main factor leading to the growth in the North America region. The increasing number of partnerships in this region is also among the factors driving the growth of the market. Recently in January 2019, Synchronoss Technologies, a US-based provider of cloud, messaging, digital, and IoT products, and TBCASoft, Inc., a US-based innovator of cross-carrier blockchain platform technology announced their partnership for redefining telecom operators with blockchain. Key Topics Covered: 1 Executive Summary 1.1 Processes, Services and Ecosystems to witness largest impact 1.2 Consortium-led solutions to ensure global reach and faster time-to-market 1.3 Secure Connectivity expected to dominate from growth of IoT, 5G and M2M 2 Industry Outlook 2.1 Industry Overview 2.2 Industry Trends 3 Market Snapshot 3.1 Total Addressable Market 3.2 Segment Addressable Market 3.2.1 PEST Analysis 3.2.2 Porter's Five Force Analysis 3.3 Related Markets 4 Market Characteristics 4.1 Ecosystem 4.2 Market Trends and Impact 4.3 Value Chain Analysis 4.4 Market Segmentation 4.5 Market Dynamics 4.5.1 Drivers 4.5.1.1 Increased security as well as transparency 4.5.1.2 New revenue opportunities and optimized costs 4.5.2 Restraints 4.5.2.1 Lack of understanding and skillset for building advanced solutions 4.5.2.2 Scalability may hinder the implementation of blockchain 4.5.3 Opportunities 4.5.3.1 Increasing investment in the blockchain 4.5.3.2 Increasing use of blockchain technology in IOT and 5G implementation 4.5.4 DRO - Impact Analysis 5 Blockchain in Telecom Market, By Providers 5.1 Overview 5.2 Application Providers 5.3 Middleware Providers 5.4 Infrastructure Providers 6 Blockchain in Telecom Market, By Applications 6.1 Overview 6.2 Smart Contracts 6.3 Streamlining OSS and BSS Processes 6.4 Identity and Fraud Management 6.5 Payments 6.6 Secure Connectivity 6.7 Others 7 Blockchain in Telecom Market, By Organization Size 7.1 Overview 7.2 Large Enterprises 7.3 SME's 8 Blockchain in Telecom Market, By Region 9 Competitive Landscape 9.1 Competitor Analysis 9.2 Product/Offerings Portfolio Analysis 9.3 Market Developments 9.3.1 Partnerships and Collaborations 9.3.2 Product Launches & Exhibitions 10 Vendor Profiles 10.1 IBM Corporation 10.2 SAP 10.3 Microsoft 10.4 Amazon (AWS) 10.5 Huawei 11 Companies to Watch for 11.1 BubbleTone 11.2 Clear 11.3 Guardtime 11.4 TBCASoft 11.5 Filament For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/kbbdjq/global_blockchain?w=12 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. On March 20, during Spring Career Days at the University of Arizona, two Border Patrol officers gave a presentation on their jobs. A female student protested their presence, calling them murderers, an extension of the KKK and Murder Patrol. Two children died while in Border Patrol custody in December 2018, including seven-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, and The Intercept obtained 1,224 complaints of sexual abuse, primarily in ICE custody, filed between 2010 and September 2017, believed to be a fraction of those filed. There are students that pay to be here who need this to be a safe space for them, the student says in the video below. She was joined in her protest by at least one other pupil as they followed the Border Patrol agents to their car, saying in Spanish, A la verga con la migra, which roughly translates to, Go to hell, Border Patrol. During the video, the students walked by a larger protest against ICEs presence on campus. The conservative group Judicial Watch filed a complaint against the university following the incident. Now, two students, including the one who was recording on their cell phone, are being charged with a misdemeanor following their protest. They are specifically being charged for interference with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution, UA President Robert C. Robbins explained in a statement. Do you hear that? Nothing, huh? Thats the silence of every right-winger whos ever railed about freedom of speech on campuses. We dont exactly see them jumping to these protesters defense. Robbins wrote, The incident between the protesting students and the Criminal Justice club members was a dramatic departure from our expectations of respectful behavior and support for free speech on this campus. I have assigned university staff to examine our processes to ensure we are working effectively to help prevent similar incidents in the future while maintaining the 1st Amendment right to free speech and protest, he continued. Student protest is protected by our support for free speech, but disruption is not, Robbins added. In case you, like Robbins, werent aware, protest is by nature disruptive. Thats how it gets your attention. Jeffrey Sachs, a lecturer at Acadia University, pointed out how easily that claim of disruption will come to encompass whatever the universitys administration disapproves of. Thats all there is to it. Thats where we are now. You can speak but not disrupt, and believe me: disruption will include so much more than you think it should. Think Im over-reacting? If it helps, imagine that the person making that call is a crazy SJW like me. Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) April 2, 2019 The charges have not yet been filed, according to an email from UA Police Chief Brian Seastone, AZ Central reports. There may be more coming, though, as the March 29 statement from Robbins implies: The UA Police Department will continue to investigate the incident for additional criminal violations, and the Office of the Dean of Students is reviewing potential violations of the student code of conduct. There also will be a probe into actions involving UA employees. A group led by California's first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, on Monday launched a new campaign to raise awareness of the gender pay gap as part of an effort to achieve pay equality for women. The group announced "13 inaugural corporate commitments to their CA Equal Pay Pledge," including Apple, AT&T and Airbnb. Siebel Newsom stated during a press conference that "California has the strongest equal pay laws in the nation," but but that there's still more work to be done. Ariela Gross, a professor of law and history at the University of Southern California Law School: "Anything that brings attention to the fact that this still exists, and especially gets a high-profile effort to get companies to make the commitment to pay equity, is encouraging." CNBC further reported that "Overall, the national group estimates California women lose on average a combined total of more than $78.6 billion each year as a result of the wage gap. Seven Republicans in the House voted for the Paycheck Fairness Act. However, the legislation faces a less-certain future in the GOP-controlled Senate. Critics of the proposed bill have called it 'misguided.'" The inaugural signatories include: Airbnb; Apple; AT&T Communications Inc.; Autodesk; Salesforce; Shutterfly Inc.; Square; Zynga and others. The press release was issued by the Office of Gavin Newsom that you could review in full here. About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Those using abusive language or negative behavior will result in being blacklisted on Disqus. Patently Apple posted a report in late December 2018 titled "Foxconn will Reportedly Expand its Current Plant in India to Manufacture Higher-End iPhones as early as 2019." The report noted that Foxconn would be assembling the most expensive models, such as devices in the flagship iPhone X family. The Indian Government told Reuters that Foxconn would be investing 25 billion Indian rupees ($US356 million) to expand the plant, including investment in iPhone production. Last month we also learned that Wistron was technically waiting for India's 'Cabinet" to finalize their application for a larger iPhone plant. Looking forward, things are looking a little brighter for Apple in India. The Foxconn and Wistron plants could help Apple gain approval for major flagship Apple Stores which is really needed to get Apple out of their current funk in India. Today Bloomberg is reporting that Foxconn may only be weeks away from starting trial runs of making iPhone X family models. Bloomberg quoted Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Research ignorantly stating that "Seen from Cupertino the India market looks minuscule so Apples strategy has been myopic." I rather doubt that Apple has been myopic about India. Apple has been battling it out behind the scenes in negotiations with the Indian Government which has been relatively negative for years. Now that iPhone plants are gearing up for production in India it will mean plans for flagship stores will accellerate and Apple will finally get the chance to put some muscle into India. That doesn't mean that they'll be dominating India's smartphone market anytime soon, if ever, as Xiaomi, OnePlus, Samsung and others are deeply entrenched in that market and happy selling into the $200-$300 smartphone segment. It will however allow Apple to build a solid base like they have in China and likely grab 8-12% of the market over the next few years. That would be far from their current 1% market share that they've been stuck in for years. 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. Patna: A little over a week after he surrendered before Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Rakesh Dubey in Patna in connection with the communal riot in Bhagalpur, Arjit Shashwat Choubey, son of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey, was granted bail by a Session Court in Bhagalpur district. Along with Arjit, the court also granted bails to eight other accused in the Nathnagar violence that erupted during a Ramnavami procession in Bhagalpur. Acting District and Session Judge Kumud Ranjan Singh, after hearing pleas from both parties in the case, issued the bail to Choubey and others. The court, however, rejected the appeal of one Anup Lal Shah. Arguing for the defense, advocate Biresh Mishra said that the all nine accused in the case were innocent of all charges and yet, they followed each and every instruction of the court and cooperated with the investigation proving they had no intention of defying the law of the land. Government advocate Satyanarayan Sah urged the court to deny their bail plea saying they could be a threat to communal peace in Bhagalpur and other parts of Bihar. After hearing the arguments, the court granted bail to all but one. As reported previously, Choubey, after being on run for about a week, surrendered before ASP Dubey on the night of March 31 after offering prayer at the Mahavir Temple outside Patna Junction in the state capital. Choubey then accused Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leaders of engineering a conspiracy against him because he happened to be the son of a senior BJP leader. "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 had said while surrendering before the ASP. Dublin, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Asia-Pacific Top 10 Mobile Wallet Profiles 2019" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Asia-Pacific is the world leader when it comes to the adoption of mobile payments. In 2019, more than one in two smartphone users in this region are expected to make contactless mobile payments in-store, according to a forecast cited in the report. The number of mobile wallets in China from providers such as Alipay and WeChat Pay surpassed half a billion people in 2017 and is projected to remain on the growth path through 2022. Another fast growing market for mobile wallets in Asia-Pacific is India. The value of mobile wallet transactions is projected to more than double between 2018 and 2021, benefitting the top competitors such as Paytm and PhonePe. Japan has lagged behind the countries such as China, India and South Korea in terms of mobile wallet adoption, but has shown some improvement in the recent years, as reported in this publication. The number of QR-based wallet users in this country is projected to see strong double-digit growth rates through 2021 and companies such as Rakuten, LINE, SoftBank and Yahoo! Japan have already embarked on this emerging opportunity. Furthermore, the ASEAN countries are also gradually adopting digital wallets. The trend is championed by popular ride-hailing services such as GrabTaxi and GO-JEK, which both launched their own mobile wallets. Asia-Pacific tops the world in mobile wallet adoption Asia-Pacific has the world's highest mobile payment user penetration, surpassing 50% of smartphone users in 2019, according to the market data. The largest market in the region, China, has more than half a billion of mobile wallet users and continues to grow. The top competitors in this country include Alipay and WeChat Pay, which combined, processed the lion's share of transaction value in 2018. Another mobile leader, India, is also expected to see strong growth reflected in the doubling of the value of mobile wallet payments by 2021. Local mobile wallet solutions are growing across the region In addition to Alipay and WeChat Pay, other local competitors have emerged to tap into mobile wallets' growth in Asia-Pacific. These include Paytm and PhonePe in India and GrabPay and GO-PAY in Southeast Asia, described in the report. Furthermore, consumers in Japan are also starting to adopt innovative mobile payment methods offered by companies such as Rakuten and LINE. Questions Answered in this Report How is the mobile payment market evolving across Asia-Pacific? Which countries of this region are leading in mobile payment adoption rate? What are the top mobile wallets in the countries of Asia-Pacific? How do Alipay, Kakao Pay, LINE Pay, WeChat Pay and others stack up in different countries? How do they differ in coverage and functionalities? Key Topics Covered: 1. Mobile Wallet Market & Rankings 1.1. Global Proximity Mobile Payment User Penetration, by Region, incl. Asia-Pacific, in % of Smartphone Users, 2017-2022f 1.2. Asia-Pacific Regional Proximity Mobile Payment User Penetration, by Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea, in % of Smartphone Users, 2017-2022f 1.3. China Number of Mobile Payment Users, in millions, and Penetration, in % of Mobile Internet Users, 2014 - 2018 Proximity Mobile Payment Users Number, in millions, and Penetration, in % of Smartphone Users, 2017 - 2022f Third-Party Mobile Payment Transaction Value, in CNY trillion, 2015 - 2020f Breakdown of Frequency of Using Mobile Payments, in % of Users, 2018 Payment Methods Used by Chinese Tourists During Overseas Travel, in % of Chinese Tourists Travelling Overseas, 2017 & 2018 Top 5 Third-Party Payment Services, in % of Users, August 2018 Top 3 Third-Party Mobile Payment Providers by Market Share, in %, Q3 2018 1.4. Hong Kong Share of Bank Customers Frequently Using Mobile Payment Services, in %, January 2018 Top 2 Mobile Wallets Used by Retail Banking Customers, in %, December 2018 1.5. Taiwan Mobile Payment User Penetration, in % of Smartphone Users, 2017 & 2018 Mobile Payment Usage Locations, in % of Mobile Payment Users, Q3 2018 Breakdown of Most Used Mobile Payment Services, in % of Mobile Payment Users, Q3 2018 1.6. Japan Proximity Mobile Payment User Penetration, in % of Smartphone Users, 2018e & 2022f Proximity Mobile Payment Transaction Value, in JPY trillion, and Year-on-Year Change, in %, FY 2017 - 2023f Share of Smartphone Owners Who Have Used QR Code Payment, in %, January 2019 Mobile Payment Users, by E-Money and QR-based Smartphone Payments, in millions, FY 2016 - FY 2021f Locations of Using Mobile Payment, in % of Mobile Payment Service Users, by Rural and Urban, May 2018 Share of Smartphone Owners Who Started to Use a New Mobile Payment Service in 2018, in %, and Top 15 Mobile Payment Services that Smartphone Owners Started to Use, in of %, November 2018 Top 10 Mobile Payment Services Used, in % of Mobile Payment Users, June 2018 Top 10 QR-Based Mobile Payment Services, in % of Users, December 2018 1.7. South Korea Proximity Mobile Payment User Penetration, in % of Smartphone Users, 2017-2022f Overview of Four Selected Leading Mobile Payment Services, incl. Provider, Launch Date, Channels, Number of Users and Cumulative Transaction Value, 2018 1.8. Australia Number of Users of Digital Payment Services, in thousands, and Penetration, in % of Population, 12 Months to March 2018 Top Mobile Payment Services Used to Pay In-Store, in % of Respondents, 2017 & 2018 Breakdown of E-Commerce Transactions by Payment Method, in %, April 2018 1.9. India Proximity Mobile Payment Users Number, in millions, and Penetration, in % of Smartphone Users, 2017 - 2022f Mobile Payments, in USD billion, FY 2018e & FY 2023 Mobile Wallets Transaction Value, in INR trillion, and Year-on-Year Growth Rate, in %, 2016 - 2021f Top Mobile Wallets Used, in % of Young Urban Mobile Wallet Users, March 2018 Number of App Downloads of Selected Mobile Wallets, in millions, August 2018 1.10. Indonesia Mobile Payment App User Penetration, in % of Internet Users, 2017 Mobile Payment Transaction Value, in IDR trillion, 2016 - 2020f Number of E-Money Transactions, in millions, and Value, in IDR billion, 2012 - 2018e E-Money Usage Cases, in % of Mobile Users, by Gender, January 2018 Most Used E-Money Services, in % of Mobile Users, January 2018 1.11. Singapore Mobile Payment Transaction Value, in USD billion, 2016 & 2021f 1.12. Malaysia Non-Cash Payment Methods Used, in % of Individuals Using Non-Cash Payment Methods, 2018 Number of E-Money Transactions, in millions, and Value, in MYR billion, 2013 - 2018 Top 5 E-Wallet Services Used, in % of Users, October 2018 1.13. Philippines Digital Wallet Transaction Value, in USD million, 2018f & 2021f 2. Top 10 Mobile Wallet Profiles Profile of Alipay, February 2019 Profile of WeChat Pay, February 2019 Profile of Rakuten Pay, February 2019 Profile of LINE Pay, February 2019 Profile of Samsung Pay, February 2019 Profile of Kakao Pay, February 2019 Profile of Paytm, February 2019 Profile of PhonePe, February 2019 Profile of GrabPay, March 2019 Profile of GO-PAY, March 2019 For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/wg3fff/asiapacifics?w=12 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Webroot WiFi Security uses SaferVPNs Perimeter 81 to create A VPN service with the security companys own web filtering. The speeds are serviceable enough for the most part, but theres no US streaming option. Its not an ideal VPN for people trying to remain anonymous as best they can, but for the average user who just needs to protect their web browsing itll work. Webroot WiFi Security in brief: P2P allowed: No No Business location: United States United States Number of servers: 500+ 500+ Number of country locations: 32 32 Monthly cost: $40 billed annually for 3 devices, or $60 for 5 $40 billed annually for 3 devices, or $60 for 5 VPN protocol: IKEv2 (default) IKEv2 (default) Data encryption: AES-256 AES-256 Data authentication: SHA-256 SHA-256 Handshake encryption: 2048-bit We rarely review VPNs that use a white label service, because whats the point? If its just the same as a service weve already reviewed with another name slapped on it, theres little reason to revisit it. Were making an exception today by taking a look at Webroots WiFi Security, which is based on an enterprise product called Perimeter 81 from Tel Aviv-based SaferVPN. IDG When you first see Webroot WiFi Security theres no doubt about its SaferVPN roots. The application is almost a carbon copy of SaferVPN, with some minor differences in color and messaging. We wont go into too much detail about Webroots app as weve already taken a hard look at it its foundation in our SaferVPN review. In summary, the app is simple enough to use and lets you choose from a good number of locations. What sets Webroot WiFi Security apart is that it uses its own BrightCloud Threat Intelligence service to keep VPN users safe online. Note: This review is part of our best VPNs roundup. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them. Features and services Webroot doesnt quite have the full server offering of SaferVPN, with just 36 granular location options instead of 40. The difference is that Webroot isnt offering any of SaferVPNs P2P server options, which means WiFi Security is not for anyone who wants a VPN for file sharing. It also lacks SaferVPNs U.S. streaming servers, but it does offer UK streaming. Diving into settings, Webroot doesnt offer the OpenVPN protocol option that SaferVPN does, opting for IKEv2 by default, and then also offering L2TP over IPSec and PPTP. (UPDATE: As of April 2020, Webroot supports OpenVPN) Theres also the option to connect automatically, a whitelist for networks you dont want to use with a VPN, and a kill switch to stop internet traffic when you lose connection with the VPN. Webroots settings also have the option to disable BrightCloud web filtering, which is enabled by default. IDG BrightClouds web filtering can be turned off from Settings > Web Filtering. BrightCloud is the key difference between Webroot and its progenitor. So what is BrightCloud filtering? Its basically a beefed up version of site filtering that acts as an extra layer of protection against malware that you may run across online. If Webroot detects a site as risky, it will throw up a warning similar to the Chrome web browser, but if you still choose to go ahead and visit the site, Webroot will allow you to do so. Webroot isnt the only VPN service to offer this kind of monitoring, F-Secures Freedome and NordVPN also do, but it is uncommon. Performance In our tests, which took place at different times over three days, Webroot scored significantly lower than SaferVPN, retaining around 26 percent of the base speedthats close to half of SaferVPNs performance. That said, speeds were very good in the United States, often around 50 percent of the base speed. Speeds were also pretty good for the UK and Australian connections. Privacy, anonymity, and trust Webroot is based in Broomfield, Colorado. The companys business address is 385 Interlocken Crescent, Suite 800, Broomfield, CO 80021. The CEO is Mike Potts and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is Hal Lonas. All of this information is available on the companys about page. Webroots privacy policy says it does not collect or log IP addresses, the sites you visit, downloaded data, or DNS queries. It does collect logs of app crashes for analysis purposes, and that may include some downloaded data and DNS queries. Webroot also logs the date and time of each session, the amount of data used per session, which VPN server location youre connecting to, the country youve connected from (minus the IP address), and the number of devices youre connecting simultaneously. These are similar to SaferVPNs privacy policiesa mix of good and not-so-good. Its great that Webroots policy says its not tracking your browsing habits (though thats par for the course for most VPNs), but you can find VPN services that do far less logging. To sign up for Webroots WiFi security you need to supply your full name, address, and email address. Thats a lot of information and is by no means the norm for most VPN services. Webroot accepts payments via credit card and PayPal. Conclusion Webroot is a fine VPN. Even though its performance was low I didnt really experience much in the way of incredible delays or poor performance when using it. If you intend to use your VPN for bandwidth-heavy tasks then you might want to look elsewhere. Webroot also isnt ideal for anyone trying to stay as anonymous as possible. If you just need a VPN for casual web browsing, however, or if you like the idea of an extra security layer for your browsing then Webroot is a good choice. Editors note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article. Ruby-throated hummingbirds may have already arrived in Pennsylvania on their annual springtime migration back to their northern breeding grounds. The most recent sightings of the tiny birds reported by Hummingbird Central showed the northernmost hummers late last week in Herndon and Hillsboro, Virginia, and Cape May, New Jersey. The southern state line of Pennsylvania is about 35 miles north of Hillsboro, and migrating hummers can fly as much as 23 miles per day. The first hummingbirds arriving in Pennsylvania are likely males, which migrate ahead of the females by about 10 days. The leading front of the northward migration might be moving a bit earlier than normal. Hummers usually arrive in southern Pennsylvania around April 20 and northern Pennsylvania around May 1, according to Hummingbird Central. Operation Rubythroat, another hummingbird research and tracking organization, places the normal arrival date for southern Pennsylvania at April 10 and for northern Pennsylvania at April 20. Dozens upon dozens of additional sightings have been reported on the heels of those birds, all of them moving north. Some flowers and tree buds are blooming in Pennsylvania as the hummingbirds arrive, but lacking an abundance of blossoms, the birds will find other sources of nectar, such as oozing holes drilled into trees by sapsuckers and hummingbird feeders. Those wondering about the proper timing for cleaning and filling their hummingbird feeders for the first time this year have their answer. Now is the time to get those feeders into action, particularly if you hope to attract more hummers this year than last. Banding studies indicate that many hummingbirds will return to the same sites they departed late last summer or fall, and even visit the same feeders. If they find ready nectar sources, the birds are likely to re-establish their territories from last year. Having ample feeders ready when the birds arrive also can be a means to attracting additional hummingbirds to settle in an area, including birds that found their previous territories lacking on their return this year. If the food then continues to be available in the territories the hummers choose, they usually will remain there throughout the summer, having little incentive to look for new spots to take nectar and insects. Feeders that go up in June or July, when a homeowner begins thinking about visitors commonly associated with summer, like hummingbirds, likely will be too late to attract the birds attention. In addition to getting the feeders in operation now, those wanting to attract more hummingbirds to their backyards this year might want to add red to their landscape at the same time. That can be accomplished with plants that flower in shades of red early in the year, with artificial red-flowered plants or even with red plastic sheets. Red is a very attractive color to hummingbirds and could help to lead them to feeders when they are establishing their territories. However, hummingbird nectar dyed red, or any color, should be avoided. The chemical dyes can do nothing but harm to the tiny birds with the incredibly high metabolisms. Feeders made of red plastic or red glass should provide the visual attraction, rather than the sugary liquid inside them. Humming bird nectar is easy to make at home. A 4-to-1 water to white sugar solution will attract hummingbirds by closely mimicking the nectar they drink from flowers. Bring 4 parts water, such as 4 cups of water, to a rolling boil Stir in 1 part sugar, such as 1 cup of sugar, until it dissolves in the water. Let the mixture cool and then fill your feeders. Any unused portion can be refrigerated for as long as 2 weeks and used as needed. In addition to nectar, hummingbirds eat small insects, which they snatch in midair, pluck from spider webs, dig from oozing sap or grab off plants. After both males and females are back on their summer breeding grounds, courtship behavior will begin, followed by mating and then females building their nests on slender branches, usually of deciduous trees, sometimes pine, 10-40 feet above the ground. Each nest is built directly atop a branch, rather than in a fork. Its made of dandelion and thistle down held in place by spider silk and pine resin, with an exterior decorated with lichen and moss. It measures 2 inches in diameter and about 1 inch deep After 6-10 days of nest building, the female will lay 1-3 white eggs into the nest and will then incubate them for 12-14 days. Each egg weighs about a 50th of an ounce. The nestlings will fledge from the nest when they are 18-22 days old, but the female will continue to feed them for another 3 weeks or so. Most of the young hummingbirds will not survive their first year, but for those that do the average lifespan will be about 3 years. The oldest known ruby-throated hummingbird lived a bit longer than 9 years. Of more than 300 species of hummingbirds on Earth, 17 are native to North America. The ruby-throated hummingbird is the most common species that breeds in the eastern half of the continent. Most states, including Pennsylvania, also have sporadic sightings of rufous hummingbirds and rare sightings of other species. Species recorded at least once in Pennsylvania, in addition to the ruby-throated and rufous, have been Allens, Annas, calliope, Bahama woodstar, and black-chinned. Heres a look at the rarest hummingbird ever documented in Pennsylvania. Two independent yet almost identical attempts to oust AFSCME as the union for a bloc of state employees were shot down Tuesday by a Commonwealth Court panel. On the surface, at least, both bids might have come close to triggering a vote on decertifying Council 13 of AFSCME as the sole representative for more than 1,500 state inspection, investigation and safety services employees. AFSCME the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has been the exclusive rep for those workers since 1972, Judge Robert Simpson noted in the state courts opinions on the cases. At issue were decertification drives mounted by Daniel Angelucci in 2015 and Keith Grube in 2016. Both men appealed to Commonwealth Court after the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board shot down their attempts to spur decertification votes. The PLRB concluded that both failed to obtain the requisite number of signatures from bargaining unit members 30 percent to spur a decertification election. During his decertification push, Grube submitted cards to the PLRB that he said contained the signatures of 457 bargaining unit members who favored holding an election. The PLRB found that fell short. It said Grube needed 458 valid signatures, Simpson noted. The number dispute hinged on the fact that Grube and the board were using two different lists of bargaining unit members. Grube obtained his list through a Right to Know Law request. It contained 1,305 names, Simpson noted, so Grube concluded his 457 signatures exceeded the threshold for a decertification vote. The judge noted that the PLRB sought its own list of bargaining unit members and receive one with 1,524 names. Thats what led it to set the 458-name requirement for a decertification election. Simpson rejected Grubes argument that 30 percent of 1,524 is 457.2, and that the PLRB should have found his 457 signatures made the cut. Besides, the judge observed, the PLRB tossed out an undisclosed substantial number of Grubes cards as being invalid due to duplication, lack of original signatures or because they were filled out by people who werent in the bargaining unit. The PLRB didnt have to tell Grube how many of the cards were rejected or explain why each was ruled invalid, Simpson found. That was also the case when the PLRB rejected Angeluccis 2015 decertification attempt. Angelucci submitted cards that he said bore the signatures of 470 bargaining unit members favoring a decertification vote. The PLRB determined that 455 valid cards were needed to meet the 30 percent threshold at that time. However, Simpson noted, the PLRB found that many of Angeluccis cards lacked acceptable signatures or had other defects and had to be tossed out, so Angelucci did not in fact make the 30 percent cut. Simpson also upheld the PLRBs rejection of Grubes and Angeluccis arguments that only union members should have been counted in the 30 percent calculation. The law states that 30 percent applies to all members of a bargaining unit, not just those who are dues-paying union members, the judge agreed. In a footnote to his opinion on the Angelucci case, Simpson wrote that Angelucci proposed to replace AFSCME with a new, as yet unformed union as the bargaining units exclusive representative. He expected to serve as the new unions president. SAYRE The man who drove his car into the Susquehanna River last month in Bradford County, killing himself and his 1-year-old son, was trying to elude police because his license had been suspended, an investigator says. Derek Marshall, 29, was driving at an unmanageable, high rate of speed on a winding, rolling stretch of wet road when his car went into the river about 9:50 p.m. on March 22, Athens Twp. Police Chief Roger Clink said Monday. Marshall should not have been behind the wheel because his license had been suspended for drunken driving, the chief said. Marshalls girlfriend and the boys mother, Emily Hoye, 31, told investigators she was in the front passenger seat and their son, Maddox, was secured in a child seat in the back seat. Clink said his investigation determined: Marshall drove the others to what is known as The Overlook on Sheshequin Road where the car, with its lights off, was observed by a township police officer on patrol. As the officer approached the car it took off and soon was exceeding the 40 mph speed limit. The officer lost sight of it and was searching for it when he was dispatched for a person in the river. Hoye related for investigators her version of the incident: At some point Marshall saw a vehicle behind him and said: Its a cop. She told him it wasnt the police but he decided to take off traveling north. As Derek got to the bottom of the hill, I told him to slow down because it wasnt the police following us. I turned around in my seat and watched to see if anyone was following us. The only thing I saw were two headlights behind us and they werent chasing us. I could see a long distance and they were way behind us. Hoye told investigators she felt like she was on a roller coaster and remembered telling Marshall to get control of the wheel before the car went airborne down a steep embankment into the river. Hoye was able to get out of the car and make it to shore, where her calls for help were heard and 911 was called. A search for the submerged 2006 Honda CVS coupe and the father and son was unsuccessful that night due to darkness and murky condition of the swollen river. It took divers and other emergency personnel hours the following day to locate the car and bring it to shore. Autopsies determined Marshall and his son died from drowning. Toxicology test results on Marshall are awaited, Clink said. Athens Twp. is near Sayre close to the New York state line. State lawmakers, criminal justice reform advocates and rapper Meek Mill joined forces Tuesday to push for an overhaul of Pennsylvanias probation system. House Democratic Whip Jordan Harris said at an event in downtown Philadelphia that he will soon introduce a bill designed to put fewer people on parole and for shorter periods of time. Mill became a symbol for those who want to change the probation system because he received a 2- to 4-year prison term for probation violations in a decade-old gun and drug possession case. Mill, who spent months in prison before a court ordered his release, recounted his experience with the system and said improvements to the law would prevent others from repeating what he went through. Harris, who represents a Philadelphia district, wants to end the practice of extending probation when fines and fees aren't paid, give defendants credit for good behavior and cut time off supervision for completing educational or vocational classes. He also wants to prevent putting probationers back behind bars if they test positive for the use of marijuana, associate with people who have a criminal history or travel outside their jurisdiction. Harris argues courts should not be issuing consecutive sentences of probation or extending probation or parole over nonpayment of fines and costs alone. "We need to incentivize people who are doing the right thing," Harris said after the event. "And when we know they're doing the right thing, we need to shorten their time." The proposed changes would affect county and state probation and parole. Rep. Sheryl Delozier, a Cumberland County Republican who was part of the announcement in Philadelphia Tuesday, said there ought to be a balance between supporting police and giving people who have served their time the ability to return as productive members of society. "But having too many people on probation would prevent our county probation agents from focusing on those who need supervision the most," Delozier said. "For those who do violate their probation, going back to jail should not be the automatic response." Harris said he was encouraged by conversations with Republicans and law enforcement about proposed changes. He expects to have legislation drafted in the coming weeks. "The fact that we're all at the table discussing this issue is a sign that everybody is committed to getting this done," Harris said. Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said reforms of probation and parole are high on the priority list of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, "and we welcome any legislative assistance to help us continue to improve outcomes for those in supervision and public safety ultimately." A similar proposal to reform probation has been introduced as a bill in the state Senate . State lawmakers last year passed legislation that automatically seals lower-level, nonviolent crimes from public review after 10 years. The "clean slate" legislation also seals records of arrests that did not result in convictions. The convictions are not expunged, and records of them are still available to police, courts and prosecutors. Access to all summary convictions that are 10 years old are restricted, as long as the defendant has fulfilled court-ordered obligations. Pennsylvania has also recently stopped suspending drivers licenses for those convicted of drug offenses unrelated to driving, and expanded the use of DNA evidence for those already convicted. Two other central Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers appeared at the event: Greg Rothman, R-Cumberland; and Mike Jones, R-York. Our goal is to improve the system, making certain the right people are being supervised, and those who need to go back to prison go back and hopefully get and accept the help they need," Rothman said. A federal appeals court has refused to completely free the top officials of a college from a lawsuit by a woman who claims she was gang-raped after becoming completely inebriated at a fraternity party. The woman contends she was sexually assaulted repeatedly after her assailants played Rock, Paper Scissors to determine who got to rape her first, Judge Julio M. Fuentes noted in the opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. The 2014 assaults occurred at Ramapo College in New Jersey. College officials appealed to the circuit court after a federal judge in New Jersey refused to free them from the suit and the womans claims that her rape stemmed from their deliberate indifference to ensuring adequate security at the school. Fuentes did find the officials were entitled to immunity against several counts of the womans suit. However, he declined to grant them immunity against her deliberate indifference claim. The officials didnt specifically ask for immunity on that element, so they cant have it, Fuentes concluded. The woman also is suing the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and five students she claims participated in the gang rape. Fuentes cited the womans claims that a fraternity pledge plied her with alcohol during the party in a fraternity apartment in student housing. When other frat members discovered the sexual assault they evicted the pledge and the woman from the party, forcing her to leave behind her underwear, shoes, jacket and college ID card. The woman claims the pledge then drove her across campus, passing through college security checkpoints, and took her to a freshman dormitory where he and more students raped her again. One female student participated by recording the sex crimes on video, she contends. Criminal charges also were filed against the five students named in the lawsuit. A predicted combination of dry ground conditions, gusty winds and low humidity means that the threat of wildfires will be high on Wednesday in central Pennsylvania, according to officials at the National Weather Service. Those conditions have led weather experts to implement a fire weather watch for nearly three dozen Pennsylvania counties. And according to Matt Reed, chief of wildfire operations with the state Department of Conservation & Natural Resources Bureau of Forestry, there is only one sure way to prevent fire. Dont burn when conditions are ripe for wildfires, he said. Drying/dead vegetation, low humidity & gusty winds will increase wildfire risk in central PA through midweek. Debris burning is the most common cause of wildfires in PA. Check with your township for burn bans & local ordinances on debris burning. @DCNRnews @penn_fire @smokey_bear pic.twitter.com/v4TzCaIK06 NWS State College (@NWSStateCollege) April 2, 2019 The National Weather Services fire weather watch has been issued for the the following counties: Warren; McKean; Potter; Elk; Cameron; Clinton; Clearfield; Centre; Cambria; Blair; Huntingdon; Mifflin; Juniata; Somerset; Bedford; Fulton; Franklin; Tioga; Lycoming; Sullivan; Union; Snyder; Montour; Northumberland; Columbia; Perry; Dauphin; Schuylkill; Lebanon; Cumberland; Adams; York; Lancaster. More severe than a fire weather watch is a red-flag warning," which means that conditions are ideal for wildfires, Reed said. Those ideal conditions include dry ground cover, humidity lower than 30 percent and sustained winds of 20 mph or more, Reed said. Sustained Wednesday winds are likely to range from 15 to 25 mph, with expected gusts of up to 40 mph, according to Craig Evanego, a National Weather Service meteorologist. Its something that can cause fire to spread, he said of the wind. Wind can blow embers from one area to another, and it also can cause existing wildfires to lean, drying out nearby brush and spreading flames, Reed said. Here's today's forecasted #wildfire danger for Pennsylvania. Spring is a popular time for yard clean up, however, its also when 85% of wildfires occur in Pennsylvania. Check for burn bans or ordinances before you burn. #PAWildfirePrevention pic.twitter.com/PQksSytabg PA Department of Conservation & Natural Resources (@DCNRnews) April 2, 2019 Spring, specifically mid-March through early May, is considered fire season, Reed said. Thats because greenery has not yet returned to trees, he said. That greenery traps humidity and shields the forest floor from the sun, he said. Without it, the sun can shine down, drying fallen sticks and leaves, which act as fuel for fire to spread, he said. A similar dryness often is present in central Pennsylvania forests in the fall, Reed said. Homeowners can clear dry debris and dead plants from their properties to lessen chances of fire damage, but Reed again stressed that the main way to fight forest fires is to avoid burning when conditions are dry. About 99 percent of wildfires are caused by humans, Reed said, pointing out that the majority of them are accidental and stem from routine burning of debris. The threat of large, hard-to-contain fires is greater in more rural areas with fewer roads and access points for firefighters, Reed said. Transformational journey: Boyne Highlands Resort unveils plans for future Boyne Highlands Resort announced its 2030 transformational journey during an event on Thursday at the Highlands. First major step-out to north encounters extensive mineralization peripheral to prominent geophysical target with 68.10 metres with 0.26% Cu, 0.36 g/t Au and 10.9 g/t Ag (0.61% CuEq) and 307.60 metres with 0.25% Cu, 0.17 g/t Au and 2.7 g/t Ag (0.39% CuEq) Other holes continue to intersect skarn mineralization in main system 274.00 metres with 0.42% Cu, 0.39 g/t Au and 11.52 g/t Ag (0.80% CuEq) including 35.87 metres with 1.00% Cu, 0.38 g/t Au and 20.36 g/t Ag (1.46% CuEq) VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Regulus Resources Inc. ("Regulus" or the "Company", REG TSX.V) is pleased to announce the results from three additional drill holes at the Companys AntaKori copper-gold-silver project in northern Peru. The drilling campaign is underway in collaboration with Compania Minera Coimolache S.A. (Coimolache or CMC), the operator of the Tantahuatay gold mine immediately to the south of the AntaKori project. Holes reported in this news release are AK-18-028 through AK-18-030 (see Figure 1). Results are only reported herein for the portions of the drill holes that occur within Regulus concessions. All of the holes encountered significant mineralization with the most notable results from hole AK-18-030 which is the first hole to step-out significantly to the northwest of the area of the current resource and encountered an extensive zone of low arsenic copper-gold mineralization in porphyritic intrusive rocks and skarn. Highlights from drill holes AK-18-028 through AK-18-030 AntaKori Project: AK-18-028: -- 274.00 m with 0.42% Cu, 0.39 g/t Au and 11.52 g/t Ag (0.80% CuEq) from 226.60 m depth including -- 18.65 m with 0.44% Cu, 3.47 g/t Au and 42.70 g/t Ag (3.30% CuEq) from 226.60 m depth and -- 25.49 m with 0.71% Cu, 0.24 g/t Au and 31.91 g/t Ag (1.17% CuEq) from 274.00 m depth and -- 35.87 m with 1.00% Cu, 0.38 g/t Au and 20.36 g/t Ag (1.46% CuEq) from 312.90 m depth and -- 67.03 m with 0.28% Cu, 0.13 g/t Au and 3.80 g/t Ag (0.41% CuEq) from 568.47 m depth and -- 94.37 m with 0.37% Cu, 0.08 g/t Au and 1.91 g/t Ag (0.44% CuEq) from 794.50 m depth -- Mineralization is predominantly skarn with increasing breccia at depth AK-18-029: -- 398.45 m with 0.26% Cu, 0.13 g/t Au and 3.66 g/t Ag (0.39% CuEq) from 217.00 m depth including -- 63.25 m with 0.47% Cu, 0.21 g/t Au and 4.19 g/t Ag (0.66% CuEq) from 527.60 m depth and -- 202.05 m with 0.41% Cu, 0.13 g/t Au and 3.43 g/t Ag (0.53% CuEq) from 643.20 m depth including -- 35.15 m with 0.77% Cu, 0.22 g/t Au and 11.85 g/t Ag (1.04% CuEq) from 670.15 m depth -- Mineralization in this hole occurs both as high sulphidation epithermal mineralization in the Miocene volcanic sequence to a depth of approximately 343 m and skarn style mineralization in the underlying Cretaceous calcareous sedimentary sequence with increasing breccia at depth. AK-18-030: -- 68.10 m with 0.26% Cu, 0.36 g/t Au and 10.87 g/t Ag (0.61% CuEq) from 225.70 m depth and -- 307.60 m with 0.25% Cu, 0.17 g/t Au and 2.67 g/t Ag (0.39% CuEq) from 566.00 m depth -- This hole is located approximately 500 m to the northwest of any previous drilling reported by Regulus. The hole was altered and mineralized over the entire length. Although grades are not high, the mineralization is persistent throughout the hole and with notably low arsenic contents in the porphyritic intrusive and skarn mineralization in the lower portion of the drill hole (see table 2 below). John Black, Chief Executive Officer of Regulus, commented as follows: We are excited to report results for the first major step-out hole to the northwest of the known area of mineralization we have been drilling out at AntaKori. Drill hole AK-18-030 is located approximately 500 m to the northwest of our existing drill pattern in an area where we have geophysical data that suggests the potential presence of additional skarn and/or porphyry style mineralization. The hole encountered extensive alteration and low to moderate grade copper-gold mineralization in both the high sulphidation volcanic hosted environment at the top of the hole and also in extensive porphyritic intrusive rocks and minor skarn in the lower portion of the hole. One of the most encouraging aspects of this mineralization is the low arsenic content with the lengthy intercept reported in intrusive rocks containing an average of only about 50ppm arsenic. The location and orientation of the hole was determined by the presence of an existing permitted pad and was not ideally located to test the most favorable geophysical targets, which makes the results even more interesting as they may represent the peripheral expression of the principal targets. Permitting is underway to allow us to complete additional drilling to the north commencing in Q3-2019. Dr. Kevin B. Heather, Chief Geological Officer of Regulus, commented as follows: Although we have become accustomed to longer and higher-grade intercepts during our Phase 1 drilling, the significance of the hole AK-18-030 results should not be underestimated in terms of both the step out distance of about 500m from previously known mineralization, but also in terms of the amount of mineralized and altered porphyry intrusive and skarn rocks encountered. The rock types, alteration and mineralization encountered all bode well for continued exploration to the north and the testing of the previously identified magnetic high (potential magnetite-bearing skarns) and low (potential porphyry intrusive centers) targets. The AntaKori system hosts two principal styles of copper-gold-silver sulphide mineralization: 1) mineralized skarn and breccias (Cu-Au-Ag) within Cretaceous calcareous sedimentary rocks, likely associated with as-yet undiscovered porphyry mineralization; and 2) younger, epithermal high-sulphidation (HS) mineralization (Cu-Au-Ag-As) in overlying Miocene volcanic rocks and breccias that host the adjacent Tantahuatay heap-leach gold mine to the south. The younger high-sulphidation mineralization is characterized by pyrite-enargite and locally overprints the earlier skarn mineralization (pyrite-chalcopyrite-magnetite), particularly along the southern part of the AntaKori system. Drill holes at AntaKori typically encounter the overlying Miocene volcanic rocks and high-sulphidation style mineralization prior to entering the Cretaceous sedimentary sequence and skarn at depth. As the drilling progresses to the north, the volcanic rocks terminate, and drill holes will commence directly in the skarn/porphyry environment within the Cretaceous sedimentary sequence (see Figures 2-4). AK-18-028 and AK-18-029 were collared to test Regulus mineral concessions, within the footprint of the newly reported AntaKori NI 43-101 Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources (see news release of March 1, 2019), to confirm and extend the known, but only partially delineated resource. AK-18-030 is located more than 500 m to the northwest of any drilling to date and encountered extensive mineralization both as high sulphidation epithermal mineralization in Miocene volcanic rocks at the top of the hole and also as lower grade but extensive copper-gold mineralization in underlying intrusive rocks and skarn. Discussion of results Table 1 below provides details regarding the mineralized intercepts encountered in drill holes AK-18-028 to AK-18-030. The locations of the reported drill holes are indicated on Figure 1. The design of the current drilling program is for holes spaced on approximately 150 m centres along drill sections oriented at 045 degrees (SW-NE). Drill Holes AK-18-028 and AK-18-029 were both located within the area of previous Regulus drilling that forms the basis for the recently reported Mineral Resource Estimate (see news release of March 1, 2019). These holes were completed at the end of 2018, after the cut-off deadline for inclusion in the Phase 1 drilling program used for the resource estimate. They are located to fill gaps in the drilling with potential to add to or improve confidence in the resource estimate. These holes will be included in the Phase 2 drilling program projected to consist of approximately 25,000 m of drilling to be completed in 2019. AK-18-028 was drilled on section line 650NW at an azimuth of 225 degrees and a plunge of -85 degrees. The hole cut the altered and mineralized Miocene volcanic sequence to a depth of approximately 228 m and then intersected well developed skarn to a depth of approximately 460 m when extensive breccia units were encountered to the end of the drill hole at 975 m. AK-18-029 was drilled on section line 900NW at an azimuth of 045 degrees and a plunge of -70 degrees. The hole cut the typical sequence of Miocene volcanic rocks to a depth of approximately 350 m and mineralized skarn in Cretaceous carbonate rocks to a depth of approximately 680 m. The final part of the hole cut extensive breccia that is variably mineralized and ended at 1,112m. Drill hole AK-18-030 was drilled from a pre-existing platform allowed under existing permits. The site is over 500 m to the northwest of the previous drilling on Regulus mineral concessions. The hole was drilled at 045 degrees to the northeast at a plunge of -70 degrees. Geophysical data indicates the potential existence of several intrusive centers (magnetic lows) with annular magnetic highs representing potential zones of skarn development in this area to the north and northwest of the main area drilled by Regulus. Hole AK-18-030 is not ideally located to test the principal targets; it essentially tests the boundary between targets. The hole intersected altered and mineralized Miocene volcanic and intrusive rocks to a depth of 411 m prior to entering into the older basement rocks which were predicted to be Cretaceous sedimentary rocks and favorable hosts for skarn formation. However, the hole encountered extensive porphyritic intrusive rock with blocks and remnants of the Cretaceous sedimentary rocks altered to skarn. The porphyritic intrusive rock is pervasively affected by phyllic alteration and hosts low to moderate grade copper-gold mineralization associated with veinlets of pyrite-chalcopyrite-magnetite. The higher ratio of pyrite/chalcopyrite and phyllic alteration suggest a peripheral porphyry environment. Endoskarn is also developed within the porphyritic intrusive, indicating interaction with the calcareous wall rocks. Mineralization in the intrusive is notably lower in arsenic than the high sulphidation epithermal mineralization in the overlying Miocene volcanic sequence with an average of approximately 50ppm arsenic and significant intervals with arsenic levels averaging 25ppm (see Table 2). Figures 2 to 4 show representative geologic cross sections of for holes AK-18-028 through AK-18-030. A complete set of sections for all holes reported to date can be found on the Regulus website: www.regulusresources.com . Table 1. AntaKori Holes AK-18-028 Through AK-18-030 Results Drill Hole ID From (m) To (m) Length (m) Copper % Gold g/t Silver g/t Cu Eq % Au Eq g/t AK-18-028 1.30 23.30 22.00 0.41 0.29 10.90 0.71 0.99 73.40 103.20 29.80 0.62 0.34 4.28 0.90 1.27 126.80 147.35 20.55 0.61 0.38 19.10 1.05 1.48 226.60 500.60 274.00 0.42 0.39 11.52 0.80 1.13 including 226.60 245.25 18.65 0.44 3.47 42.70 3.30 4.63 further including 236.15 244.00 7.85 0.17 7.62 36.93 5.94 8.33 including 274.00 299.49 25.49 0.71 0.24 31.91 1.17 1.63 including 312.90 348.77 35.87 1.00 0.38 20.36 1.46 2.05 568.47 635.50 67.03 0.28 0.13 3.80 0.41 0.57 744.55 761.80 17.25 0.38 0.10 1.89 0.47 0.66 794.50 888.87 94.37 0.37 0.08 1.91 0.44 0.62 910.80 934.90 24.10 0.50 0.11 9.32 0.66 0.93 946.60 960.18 13.58 0.36 0.08 2.63 0.44 0.62 Total depth 975.08 Drill Hole ID From (m) To (m) Length (m) Copper % Gold g/t Silver g/t Cu Eq % Au Eq g/t AK-18-029 129.90 189.95 60.75 0.33 0.08 0.89 0.39 0.55 217.00 615.45 398.45 0.26 0.13 3.66 0.39 0.55 including 527.60 590.85 63.25 0.47 0.21 4.19 0.66 0.93 643.20 845.25 202.05 0.41 0.13 3.43 0.53 0.74 including 670.05 705.20 35.15 0.77 0.22 11.85 1.04 1.45 935.45 951.72 16.27 0.34 0.07 5.03 0.44 0.61 Total depth 1112.40 Drill Hole ID From (m) To (m) Length (m) Copper % Gold g/t Silver g/t Cu Eq % Au Eq g/t AK-18-030 0.00 49.86 Not within Regulus Concessions - not reportable by Regulus 65.40 95.60 30.20 0.32 0.06 10.05 0.45 0.63 127.95 166.60 38.65 0.23 0.04 12.78 0.38 0.53 225.70 293.80 68.10 0.26 0.36 10.87 0.61 0.86 314.20 324.25 10.05 0.18 0.27 3.60 0.41 0.57 461.79 506.30 44.51 0.17 0.20 2.77 0.34 0.47 566.00 873.60 307.60 0.25 0.17 2.67 0.39 0.55 Total depth 873.60 The grades are uncut. Cu Eq and Au Eq values were calculated using copper, gold and silver. Metal prices utilized for the calculations are Cu US$2.25/lb, Au US$1,100/oz, and Ag US$14/oz. All intervals presented above consist of sulphide mineralization. No adjustments were made for recovery as the project is an early stage exploration project and metallurgical data to allow for estimation of recoveries is not yet available. The formulas utilized to calculate equivalent values are Cu Eq (%) = Cu% + (Au g/t * 0.7130) + (Ag g/t * 0.0091) and Au Eq (g/t) = Au g/t + (Cu% * 1.4026) + (Ag g/t * 0.0127). Table 2. AntaKori Holes AK-18-028 Through AK-18-030 Results Presented by Lithology/Alteration Style Drill Hole ID From (m) To (m) Length (m) Copper % Gold g/t Silver g/t Zinc % As ppm AK-18-028 Breccia 1.30 23.30 22.00 0.41 0.29 10.90 0.07 429 Miocene Volcanic (HS) 73.40 103.20 29.80 0.62 0.34 4.28 0.04 1058 Miocene Volcanic (HS) 126.80 147.35 20.55 0.61 0.38 19.10 0.17 1406 Skarn/HS overprint 226.60 371.35 144.75 0.57 0.63 19.43 0.29 574 Skarn 371.35 475.00 103.65 0.23 0.11 2.51 0.04 54 Skarn/HS overprint 475.00 500.60 25.60 0.37 0.19 3.31 0.04 582 Breccia/Skarn/dikes 568.47 635.50 67.03 0.28 0.13 3.80 0.01 286 Breccia/Quartzite 744.55 761.80 17.25 0.38 0.10 1.89 0.01 136 Breccia 794.50 888.87 94.37 0.37 0.08 1.91 0.01 285 Breccia 910.80 934.90 24.10 0.50 0.11 9.32 0.01 489 Breccia 946.60 960.18 13.58 0.36 0.08 2.63 0.02 564 Drill Hole ID From (m) To (m) Length (m) Copper % Gold g/t Silver g/t Zinc % As ppm AK-18-029 Miocene Volcanic (HS) 129.90 189.95 60.75 0.33 0.08 0.89 0.00 1151 Miocene Volcanic (HS) 217.00 343.25 126.60 0.22 0.09 3.11 0.04 701 Breccia 343.20 363.25 19.65 0.32 0.21 6.71 0.15 630 Skarn 363.25 615.45 252.20 0.28 0.15 3.70 0.11 62 Skarn/ HS vein 643.20 681.68 38.40 0.53 0.17 7.14 0.01 1029 Breccia 681.68 845.25 163.65 0.38 0.12 2.56 0.01 152 Breccia /dike 935.45 951.72 16.27 0.34 0.07 5.03 0.03 385 Drill Hole ID From (m) To (m) Length (m) Copper % Gold g/t Silver g/t Zinc % As ppm AK-18-030 Miocene Volcanic (HS) 40.50 52.20 11.70 0.21 0.08 5.91 0.01 460 Miocene Volcanic (HS) 65.40 95.60 30.20 0.32 0.06 10.05 0.01 832 Miocene Volcanic (HS) 127.95 166.60 38.65 0.23 0.04 12.78 0.01 659 Breccia (HS) 225.70 293.80 68.10 0.26 0.36 10.87 0.26 310 Breccia/Porphyry dikes 314.20 324.25 10.05 0.18 0.27 3.60 0.12 596 Porphyry dikes 461.79 506.30 44.51 0.17 0.20 2.77 0.10 123 Porphyry dikes 566.00 638.95 72.95 0.23 0.11 3.18 0.07 125 Porphyry dikes/skarn 638.95 713.20 74.25 0.29 0.17 2.91 0.04 27 Porphyry dikes 713.20 829.40 116.20 0.24 0.19 2.23 0.05 25 Porphyry dikes/skarn 829.40 873.60 44.20 0.23 0.18 2.62 0.06 85 The grades are uncut. HS = high-sulphidation epithermal style mineralisation. CBM = carbonate-base metal style epithermal mineralization. This table reports the mineralized intervals based upon lithology and demonstrates the notable difference in arsenic content between high-sulphidation mineralization in the Miocene volcanic sequence (typically 1000-5000 ppm As) and the lower concentrations found in the zones of skarn mineralization (typically 100-400 ppm As). The true widths of the mineralized intervals reported in Tables 1 and 2 are difficult to ascertain and additional drilling and geologic modelling will be required to better constrain the geometry of the mineralized zones. High-sulphidation epithermal mineralization within the Miocene volcanic sequence is characterized by extensive zones of low to moderate-grade disseminated and fracture-controlled mineralization that enclose zones of higher grade mineralization. These higher grade zones consist of irregular pyrite-enargite veins, veinlets, and open space infilling that exhibit both a subvertical structural control and a sub-horizontal permeability or manto control within the volcanic sequence. The margins of the higher grade high-sulphidation epithermal zones are generally not sharp or planar in nature. Skarn style mineralization in the Cretaceous sedimentary sequence is mainly controlled by the sub-horizontal stratigraphy and reported mineralized intercepts are probably close to true thicknesses as the drill holes are steeply inclined at 60-90 degrees. In addition to high-sulphidation epithermal and skarn styles of mineralization, the project also exhibits zones of irregular veins and veinlets of chalcopyrite-pyrite-anhydrite-quartz that are thought to be more typical of porphyry copper style mineralization and likely occurring as broad zones of stockwork veining rather than distinct veins. This latter style of mineralization typically overprints skarn mineralization and increases the overall grade. Mineralization at the AntaKori deposit also occurs within breccias as both mineralized fragments (post-mineral breccias) or as infilling of voids within the breccia (pre-mineral breccias). Mineralization within breccias tends to be irregular but the majority of the breccias bodies are subvertical and planar in nature. 2019 Drilling Program The three holes reported in this release were completed in late 2018 after the cut-off date for inclusion in the mineral resource estimate presented in March 2019 (see news release of March 1, 2019). They are part of the Phase 2 drilling program to be completed in 2019 and followed by the preparation of an updated mineral resource estimate in early 2020. The Phase 2 drilling program is anticipated to consist of approximately 25,000 metres of additional drilling and has recently recommenced with one rig currently drilling and a second rig ready to start drilling soon (see figure 1 for locations). When the rainy season stops in May the rig count will be incrementally increased to 4 to 5 drill rigs to allow the completion of the planned drilling by the end of 2019. The Phase 2 drill program will initially focus on immediate extensions to the current resource including drill holes in the vicinity of recently reported AK-18-26 and will include drilling to offset the mineralization reported in AK-18-030 in this release. Approval of an additional drilling permit is anticipated by Q3 2019 that will allow drilling further to the north and northwest to test geophysical targets that may represent additional skarn and/or porphyry style mineralization. Appointment of Dr. Stephen Windle The Company is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Stephen Windle to the position of Technical Manager AntaKori Project. Dr. Windle is an Economic Geologist with 25+ years of field experience ranging from exploration in a variety of terranes and climates to mine geology and geometallurgy. Dr. Windle received his PhD. from University of Southampton, UK in 1994, an MSc. from University of Otago, New Zealand in 1989, and BA in Natural Sciences from University of Cambridge in 1982. Dr. Windle was Geology Manager at the Antamina Mine, the giant Cu-Zn skarn in Peru, from 2012 to 2016 and most recently was Geology Manager for the Zafranal copper gold project at Feasibility Study stage owned by Teck and Mitsubishi. Before that Dr. Windle held positions as District Geologist, Xstrata Frieda River Ltd.; Project Geologist, Frieda River, Papua New Guinea; Director, SDP Pty Ltd.; Technical Director, Exploration Research Unit, University of Queensland; and Consultant Geologist, Etheridge Henley Williams (Subsequently SRK). Dr. Windle has extensive knowledge of project management, personnel management and risk-based safety management systems. Dr. Windles technical expertise includes exploration management, exploration geochemistry, remote sensing interpretation, interpretation and compilation of complex datasets and target generation. Additionally, Dr. Windle is experienced in geometallurgy, in-pit drilling and data management, design of drill programs for optimum resource conversion, process automation, optimization of workflows of geological data, QAQC programs, database management and downstream data delivery, resource modelling, and extensive knowledge of intrusion-related copper-gold systems that include porphyry, skarn, epithermal deposits systems. The Company also announces that Dr. Stewart Redwood has stepped down from his role as Chief Geologist Antakori Project for family reasons but will remain with the project team as Senior Consulting Geologist Antakori Project. Having the extensive and varied experiences of both Dr. Windle and Dr. Redwood on the Antakori team, both experts on large porphyry-skarn-epithermal systems, will greatly enhance the companys technical and exploration abilities during next stages of the projects development. Sampling and Analytical Procedures Regulus follows systematic and rigorous sampling and analytical protocols which meet and exceed industry standards. These protocols are summarized below and are available on the Regulus website at www.regulusresources.com . All drill holes are diamond core holes with PQ, HQ or NQ core diameters. Drill core is collected at the drill site where recovery and RQD (Rock Quality Designation) measurements are taken before the core is transported by Company truck to the Regulus core logging facility in Cajamarca, where it is photographed and geologically logged. The core is then cut in half with a diamond saw blade with half the sample retained in the core box for future reference and the other half placed into a pre-labelled plastic bag, sealed with a plastic zip-tie, and identified with a unique sample number. The core is typically sampled over a 1 to 2 metre sample interval unless the geologist determines the presence of an important geological contact. The bagged samples are stored in a secure area pending shipment to a certified laboratory sample preparation facility. Samples are sent by batch to the ALS laboratory in Lima for sample preparation and assay. Regulus inserts certified control standards, coarse field blanks, and duplicates into the sample stream to monitor data quality. These standards are inserted blindly to the laboratory in the sample sequence prior to departure from the Regulus core storage facilities. At the laboratory the samples are dried, crushed, and pulverized and then analyzed using a fire assay AA finish for gold and a full multi-acid digestion with ICP-AES analysis for other elements. Samples with results that exceed maximum detection values for gold are re-analyzed by fire assay with a gravimetric finish and other elements of interest are re-analyzed using precise ore-grade ICP analytical techniques. For Further Information, please contact: Regulus Resources Inc. John E. Black, CEO / Director Phone: +1 303 618-7797 mobile +1 720 514-9036 office Email: john.black@regulusresources.com About Regulus Resources Inc. and the AntaKori Project Regulus Resources Inc. is an international mineral exploration company run by an experienced technical and management team, with a portfolio of precious and base metal exploration properties located in North and South America. The principal project held by Regulus is the AntaKori copper-gold-silver project in northern Peru. The AntaKori project hosts an Indicated Mineral Resource of 250 million tonnes with a grade of 0.48% Cu, 0.29 g/t Au and 7.5 g/t Ag, and an Inferred Mineral Resource of 267 million tonnes with a grade of 0.41% Cu, 0.26 g/t Au and 7.8 g/t Ag (see press release of March 1, 2019). Mineralization remains open in most directions and a Phase 2 drilling program is currently underway to increase the size of the resource. For further information on Regulus Resources Inc., please consult our website at www.regulusresources.com . Qualified Person The scientific and technical data contained in this news release pertaining to the AntaKori project has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Stewart D. Redwood, BSc (Hons), PhD, FIMMM, FGS, Senior Consulting Geologist - AntaKori Project, who serves as the qualified person (QP) under the definitions of National Instrument 43-101. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward Looking Information Certain statements regarding Regulus, including management's assessment of future plans and operations, may constitute forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws and necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, most of which are beyond Regulus' control. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements or information can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate" or "believes" or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Specifically, and without limitation, all statements included in this press release that address activities, events or developments that Regulus expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future, including the proposed exploration and development of the AntaKori project described herein, the completion of the anticipated drilling program, the completion of an updated NI 43-101 resource estimate and management's assessment of future plans and operations and statements with respect to the completion of the anticipated exploration and development programs, may constitute forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws and necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, most of which are beyond Regulus' control. These risks may cause actual financial and operating results, performance, levels of activity and achievements to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, such forward-looking statements. Although Regulus 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. The forward looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date hereof and Regulus does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities law. Photos accompanying this announcement are available at: http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c25f86b1-4172-4b66-ba5d-2c7cefba57f4 http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d6b4816c-0927-48ce-9b41-4bae64fdff6d http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d05f2763-3790-4cf2-a602-0bcfe6a64cfa http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/ce413d68-bac7-49a1-93f2-53d1adbab023 VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wealth Minerals Ltd. (the Company or Wealth) - (TSXV: WML; OTCQX: WMLLF; SSE: WMLCL; Frankfurt: EJZN), announces it has completed the US$2 million option payment for the Companys Atacama lithium project (the Atacama Project), which was due March 31, 2019 (see previous news release, February 11, 2019). Wealth has exercised the Option to Purchase Agreement and has registered its subsidiary, Wealth Minerals Chile SpA (Wealth Chile), as the direct title holder of the Atacama Project. The claim package, comprising approximately 46,000 hectares, was previously registered in the name of the vendor, Atacama Lithium SpA. As a result of this change, Wealth will now be able to finalize negotiations with ENAMI (Empresa Nacional de Mineri; the state-owned National Mining Company of Chile) for the joint venture to develop the Atacama Project. Completion of this option payment and the registration of Wealth Chile as the title holder for the Atacama Project are both significant milestones for the Company, stated Henk Van Alphen, Wealths CEO. With lithium exports valued at $949 million in 2018, Chile is a significant producer with room to grow in this key emerging industry. Wealth leads the way in Chile among lithium exploration and development companies and we will now move forward quickly to solidify this position. The investment climate for lithium development in Chile continues to be very positive. Chiles Mining Minister, Baldo Prokurica, recently commented that, The Pinera government is looking to ensure that both lithium and other battery metals are being exploited. If we have this wealth and this mineral, we obviously want to use it. Source: Reuters - Mar. 6, 2019, Reported by Nichola Saminather following an interview at the Prospectors and developers Association of Canada conference (Toronto). Note that Sebastian Pinera is the recently inaugurated President of Chile. Mr. Prokurica is the chairman of ENAMI. Agreement between Wealth and ENAMI In March 2018, ENAMI and Wealth formed a strategic alliance (Agreement) to develop and commercialize the Companys Atacama Project and the Agreement provides that the parties will have 24 months during which to study and assess the Atacama Project and to form a partnership (the JV) for the exploration, development and mining thereof and for the marketing of the derived lithium products. The Agreement contemplates that the JV will take the form of an incorporated joint venture company in which ENAMI will own 10% of the JV and have a 10% free-carried interest, while Wealth will own the remaining 90% of the JV. The Agreement provides that the parties will enter into a definitive agreement on or before March 31, 2020. About Wealth Minerals Ltd. Wealth is a mineral resource company with interests in Canada, Mexico, Peru and Chile. The Companys main focus is the acquisition and development of lithium projects in South America. To date, the Company has positioned itself to develop the Atacama Project alongside existing producers in the prolific Atacama region, where the Company has a substantial licenses package. The Company has also positioned itself to play a role in asset consolidation in Chile with various lithium properties throughout the country. Lithium market dynamics and a rapidly increasing metal price are the result of profound structural issues with the industry meeting anticipated future demand. Wealth is positioning itself to be a major beneficiary of this future mismatch of supply and demand. The Company also maintains and continues to evaluate a portfolio of precious and base metal exploration-stage projects. For further details on the Company readers are referred to the Companys website (www.wealthminerals.com) and its Canadian regulatory filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. On Behalf of the Board of Directors of WEALTH MINERALS LTD. "Hendrik van Alphen" Hendrik van Alphen Chief Executive Officer For further information, please contact: Marla Ritchie Phone: 604-331-0096 Ext. 3886 or 604-638-3886 E-mail: info@wealthminerals.com Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities legislation, including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, anticipated exploration program results from exploration activities, the Companys expectation that it will be able to enter into agreements to acquire interests in additional mineral properties, the discovery and delineation of mineral deposits/resources/reserves, the closing and amount of the Placement, and the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, postulate and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements by the Company are not guarantees of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including, operating and technical difficulties in connection with mineral exploration and development activities, actual results of exploration activities, the estimation or realization of mineral reserves and mineral resources, the timing and amount of estimated future production, the costs of production, capital expenditures, the costs and timing of the development of new deposits, requirements for additional capital, future prices of lithium, changes in general economic conditions, changes in the financial markets and in the demand and market price for commodities, lack of investor interest in the Placement, accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry, delays in obtaining governmental approvals, permits or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities, changes in laws, regulations and policies affecting mining operations, title disputes, the inability of the Company to obtain any necessary permits, consents, approvals or authorizations, including acceptance by the TSX-V, required for the Placement, the timing and possible outcome of any pending litigation, environmental issues and liabilities, and risks related to joint venture operations, and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Companys latest interim Management Discussion and Analysis and filed with certain securities commissions in Canada. All of the Companys Canadian public disclosure filings may be accessed via www.sedar.com and readers are urged to review these materials, including the technical reports filed with respect to the Companys mineral properties. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements in this news release or incorporated by reference herein, except as otherwise required by law. Bailey Seeker (center) and ensemble in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," through April 21 at the Resident Theatre Company in West Chester. Read more I have to confess that Im a sucker for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Im in good company. After all, the point of this buoyant musical homage to con artistry, insofar as it has one beyond the provision of joy, is that just about anyone even the most sophisticated of scammers is susceptible to becoming a mark. Its all a matter of psychology, as the more suave of the shows two male grifters declares in the opening number, Give Them What They Want. The musical (with a witty book by Jeffrey Lane and equally witty score by David Yazbek) is based on the 1988 film starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin. The intoxicating Broadway production opened in 2005 with John Lithgow as Lawrence Jameson, a debonair, multilingual con artist, and the sensational Norbert Leo Butz in a Tony Award-winning turn as his vulgar acolyte, Freddy Benson. The Resident Theatre Companys version, directed by founding artistic director Kristin McLaughlin Mitchell and running through April 14, doesnt attain that level of magic the sound is thinner, the stage more cramped, and, to be fair, the jokes and twists dont pack the same punch the second time around. But for Dirty Rotten novices, its still a terrific time. The setting (design by Brian Dudkiewicz, candy-colored lighting by Lily Fossner, costumes by Kayla Speedy) is the French Riviera town of Beaumont-sur-Mer, a tourist playground where identities are easily assumed and just as easily cast off. Lawrence (Mark Woodard), posing as a deposed prince, is initially annoyed by the sudden appearance of Freddy (Lukas Poost), a younger, more primitive interloper with only the most rudimentary scams in his toolbox. But their rivalry soon assumes the contours of a Pygmalion story, complete with direct quotation (Hes so deliciously low ) from My Fair Lady. Teach me, Freddy begs Lawrence, the goal being his acquisition of Great Big Stuff. He turns out to be an apt pupil. In the character of the dim-witted, perversely inappropriate Ruprecht, Freddy helps Lawrence escape the Okie heiress Jolene Oaks (Philippa Lynas), whose ensemble number is a hat tip to Oklahoma!. Then the two compete to bilk and perhaps even bed a soap queen, Christine Colgate (Bailey Seeker, radiating innocence). Supplying subplot is an improbable romance between the tourist Muriel Eubanks (Sarah Solie, comically precise and vocally impressive) and police chief Andre Thibault (Jonathan Hadley, oozing Gallic charm), which mainly suggests that love is, in fact, a folie a deux, a shared delusion. Woodard (King Arthur in R.T.C.s Monty Pythons Spamalot) carries off a range of accents and languages, and hes particularly funny in the number The More We Dance, thanks to choreography by Dann Dunn. Poost (Sir Robin in Spamalot) doesnt dominate the show as Butz did, but he sings well and excels at physical comedy. (My companion was reminded of Steve Martins mannerisms in the film.) Mixing high and low, clever parody and broad farce, Lanes book periodically breaks the fourth wall, poking fun at itself. Mitchell similarly directs her characters to stray offstage, engaging the audience more fully in the shows exuberant fantasy. Theater Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Through April 14 by the Resident Theatre Company, Uptown! Knauer Performing Arts Center, 226 N. High Street, West Chester. Tickets: $25-$56. Information: 610-356-2787, rtcwc.org. Previously at PlayPenn, a workshop session for Terence Anthony's play The House of the Negro Insane. Read more PlayPenn, the play development workshop that has helped put Philly on the map in the theater world, has announced the six plays and playwrights chosen for its New Play Development Conference, July 9-28. This years PlayPenn selectees, chosen from more than 700 applicants from around the country, are: Archipelago by Amy E. Witting of New York Cave Canem by A. Emmanuel Leadon of Dallas. Incendiary by West Phillys own Dave Harris. Strange Men by Washington-based Will Snider. The Piper by New Yorker Kate Hamill, one of the top 10 most-produced playwrights in the United States. Wayfinding by Whitney Rowland of Minneapolis. The conference and free staged readings of the selected plays are among the highlights of the Philadelphia theater year, and the plays tend to fare well after PlayPenn. Of the 140 that have passed through the program since it began in 2005, about 60 percent have gone on to be produced. The jewel in the crown was Oslo, the PlayPenn-developed J.T. Rogers play that won the Obie, Tony, Drama Desk, and New York Drama Critics Circle awards for best play in 2017, among many other honors. As in years past, the selected playwrights come from a range of backgrounds and different career stages. New this year is the Haas Fellows program, a result of significant support from the Philly-based Wyncote Foundation. For the first time, all the selected playwrights are Haas Fellows. PlayPenn has always been a dream (seriously Im still pinching myself!), Rowland said. Im hoping to take advantage of the schedule and do some intense rewriting of this play, guided by the feedback from my collaborators. PlayPenn has a storied history, said Snider, adding that he cant wait to get in the room at PlayPenn and begin. And Im eager to share Strange Men with the PlayPenn audience. I learn so much watching an audience watch my plays. All selectees will spend July working on their creations with a director, a dramaturge, and a full cast. The conference includes two free public readings of each of the six chosen works (dates to be announced.). Two other plays-in-progress will also get readings: Esther Choi and the Fish That Drowned, by Philly playwright Stephanie Kyung Sun Walters; and Buffalo Bill, or How to Be a Good Man, by PlayPenn veteran Meghan Kennedy. In this August 2018 photo, family and friends who have lost loved ones to OxyContin and opioid overdoses protest outside Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, Conn. Oklahoma's attorney general announced a $270 million settlement on March 26 with Purdue Pharma. Many counties are suing the firm in Pennsylvania, and their suits are coordinated in Delaware County, Pa. Read more When Oklahoma wrested a $270 million settlement last week from Purdue Pharma for its alleged role in fueling the opioid epidemic, the reverberations were felt about 1,400 miles away in Delaware County. Thats where upward of 40 cases, including Philadelphias, are grouped together in a coordinated action against opioid makers and distributors, and where little progress has been made over the last 18 months. More than a dozen counties are taking new steps to get out of Delco, and get on with litigation in their home counties, citing the cases lack of movement in the Delco courthouse. Its my opinion that we are not getting a fair shake to get our cases to trial in a reasonable amount of time, said lawyer Joseph Cappelli, who represents Bensalem township and 14 counties, largely in Western Pennsylvania. The Oklahoma settlement," he added, was the result of the plaintiffs in that case having an opportunity to push their case and get a trial date. Oklahomas attorney general is still barreling toward a May 28 trial for the remaining defendants in the lawsuit. About 1,600 opioid cases, consolidated in federal court in Cleveland, are heading for a bellwether trial set for October. The companies accused of downplaying the risk of addiction, including Purdue, and of failing to flag suspicious orders of painkillers, are vigorously defending against the claims. At the state level, Cappelli filed a motion Monday in Delco court, asking to break up the proceedings on behalf of 13 counties. One reason for the request, he said, is that Delaware Countys case isnt there anymore. That suit the first opioid case filed by a Pennsylvania county brought all the others to Media, Pa. It has since been transferred to federal court. Another reason: Nothing is progressing," Cappelli said. It would be more efficient to have each and every [case] sent back to their counties for that litigation to go forward. On Friday, Lehigh County District Attorney James Martin submitted a status update to a Lehigh judge, and asked the court to let his case resume there, as well. The update, from the law firm representing the suit, cited the utter stagnancy of the Delaware County action. Theres been no discovery in the cases, the letter said, and no rulings or orders issued by the third judge to oversee the suits despite repeated requests by multiple counsel for various parties. Whereas Oklahomas strategy succeeded, Lehigh Countys similar litigation strategy was derailed, wrote attorney William Platt. The Lehigh case had a court-ordered trial date for March 2020, but the lawyers say theyve lost nine months on that schedule. A spokesperson for the Delaware County court said the timelines for the cases, under two case management orders, have been adhered to, and that a final deadline for certain filings is set for early this month. The court has every confidence that Judge Barry Dozor, who took over the cases in January, will continue to fairly, justly and efficiently preside, said district court administrator Gerald Montella. Paul Hanly, who represents Delaware County, and is one of the lead attorneys in charge of the Pennsylvania state cases, called the Oklahoma settlement a welcome development for our clients in Pennsylvania, because it suggests, but does not guarantee, that at least one defendant appears anxious to resolve cases without the risk of trial. Hanly is co-lead counsel for the block of federal cases in Cleveland, too. But it remains unclear just where Hanlys Delco case will end up. On Thursday, a panel of judges met to review whether to transfer the case from federal court in Philadelphia, to federal court in Cleveland with the other opioid suits. As of Monday afternoon, the panel had not yet issued a decision. Hanly previously told The Inquirer that if the case goes to Cleveland, he will try to convince the court there to send it back to Pennsylvania. Hanly also has maintained that coordinating the Pennsylvania cases in one court is more efficient, and that he, and his colleagues representing Delaware County, are the best equipped to oversee them. But lawyers for other counties, and for Philadelphia, are still trying to land spots on the lead counsel committee. Montella said the Delaware County court will be taking up those petitions, as well. Another one of the lead attorneys for the federal opioid cases, Joe Rice, also has a foot in Pennsylvania. The cases here are bogged down, said Rice, whose firm represents opioid suits for Pittsburgh, and for Allegheny and Erie counties. The Oklahoma settlement in which Purdue denied any wrongdoing was the first, and involved just one company so far. Its a multi-billion-dollar problem, Rice said. But for Pennsylvania to get the benefit from litigation, we need to get the litigation moving. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, whose opioid case is also in Delco, declined to comment on the pending litigation. After 36 years of service to the Pew Charitable Trusts including 30 years as executive director, president and CEO Rebecca W. Rimel announced on April 2, 2019, that she will retire after a successor is in place. Read more Rebecca W. Rimel on Tuesday announced her retirement after 25 years as president and chief executive of Pew Charitable Trusts. During her 36 years at Pew, the organization has evolved from a foundation focused on grant-making to a nonprofit with national scope and its own operations, including the oft-quoted public-opinion surveys from the Pew Research Center in Washington. It has been a privilege and a source of great joy to serve with a talented, generous, and caring staff throughout my tenure, said Rimel, 67, in a statement. Any success we have enjoyed is due to their integrity, creativity, and unflinching commitment to building a world-class institution and advancing an ambitious programmatic agenda." As Pews leader, Rimel has been deeply involved in major cultural and civic undertakings, such as the creation of the visitor center on Independence Mall and the move of the Barnes Foundation to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway from Lower Merion. Rimel, who started at Pew in 1983 as health program manager, became executive director five years later and was named president and chief executive in 1994. She will remain in those roles until her replacement is named. After that she will become a senior adviser. When Rimel joined Pew, the organization had fewer than 10 employees. It now employs more than 1,000, most of them in Washington. Pews remaining Philadelphia operations employ 64. While some in the nonprofit community attribute a shift in Pews tactics to Rimel, the move to a larger stage began before she became CEO. In 1980, Philadelphia-area organizations received 56 percent of the Pew Trusts grant budget. By 1990, it had dropped to 31 percent, according to a 1992 Inquirer analysis of Pew funding. The organizations tax return for the year ended June 30, 2017, shows $21 million in grants to Philadelphia-area organizations, including $12 million to the University of the Arts. Thats 20 percent of the $104 million in total grants to U.S. organizations that year. Pew said it was unable to provide recent data. And Rimel was not available for an interview. Joseph Neubauer, a longtime philanthropic leader in Philadelphia, said that criticism of Pew for abandoning Philadelphia under Rimel was misplaced. Rebecca was very demanding. She demanded facts, and she wanted people to show that they are doing something, that they are changing, said Neubauer, who worked closely with Rimel on bringing the Barnes to Philadelphia, keeping Thomas Eakins painting The Gross Clinic in the city, and paying off the debt of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. The Neubauer Family Foundation and Pew also funded a major survey of Jewish Americans that became a model, Neubauer said. Pew Research really works on real data, which we like," he said. Pews areas of activity include modernization of the civil legal system, protecting life in the arctic, public sector retirement systems, broadband research, and biomedical research. Locally, Pew has the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and the Philadelphia Research Initiative. Janet Haas, board chair of the William Penn Foundation, said that "under Rebeccas leadership Pew has transformed into a national thought leader, conducting research that has informed important work and policy happening across the country as well as in Philadelphia. Robert H. Campbell, the former chairman and CEO of Sun Co., said we are fortunate to have had time to plan for Rebeccas retirement, and the transition to a new CEO, well in advance. While the organization will continue to innovate and evolve, the board of directors is committed to the projects and strategies currently underway, including our support for the Philadelphia region. Pew is the beneficiary of seven charitable trusts established between 1948 and 1979 by two sons and two daughters of Sun Oil Co. founder Joseph Newton Pew and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew. The seven trusts were worth $5.3 billion on June 30, 2017, the latest figure available. The organizations total revenue in fiscal 2017 was $335.5 million, according to its tax return. Update 4/2: Sungard Availability Services, the Wayne-based data infrastructure and recovery provider, said today that it has won the support of most of its creditors for a plan to forgive more than $800 million of the companys $1.25 billion in debt as part of a pre-packaged Chapter 11 filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. The company expects to file around May 1, promised its corporate customers business as usual while its in bankruptcy, and said it expects to exit bankuptcy as a stronger company "very shortly after. Sungard chief executive Andrew Stern said in a statement that the company has polled investors and creditors about the plan in recent days, and has so far won support from over 75 percent of the secured lenders and most noteholders. Read Sungard Availabilitys statements and proposals here. Sungards transfer of ownership to its creditors, accomplished by a pre-packaged bankruptcy filing, is not surprising," given competition from Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, said Eric Snyder, head of the bankruptcy department at New York law firm Wilk Auslander. The writedown is an admission by Sungard Availabilitys blue-chip private-equity investors that they paid too much for the company and piled up too much debt, he added. "Even with this 70% reduction in debt, it is unclear how Sungard will generate profit in this sector after it emerges from bankruptcy. Earlier: Sungard Availability Services, the Wayne-based disaster-recovery and data-infrastructure company that kept Wall Street and major industries computers running during the 9/11 attacks, hurricanes and other disasters, plans to file for bankruptcy reorganization in New York. The private-equity buyout firms that have controlled the company for 14 years will give up control to the hedge funds that have financed its mounting debts. The company, which employs 2,500, including 160 at its Philadelphia backup centers and 260 at its Wayne headquarters, expects to detail its plans in public statements Tuesday, and hopes to be in and out of bankruptcy with the approval of its creditors later this month. Andrew Stern, Sungards chief executive, who joined the firm nine years ago, said Monday that the company, investors and creditors had spent four months negotiating the deal. He expected that the creditors-turned-owners will install a new board, which will decide on who will run the reorganized company. The company emerges far stronger from bankruptcy, Stern added. It will be capitalized appropriately. There will be no impact on customers, moving forward. The creditors understand they dont want to drag anything on that would damage the business. Theres no question the shift to cloud is part of whats challenged us, Stern said. But even before the cloud, by the late 2000s, the approach the company had taken to disaster recovery really hadnt changed in 20 years and the world had moved on. We had been slow in recognizing the business had to change. Stern says Sungard has been adapting to the new market: Forty percent of our revenue comes from new services that didnt exist eight years ago. Sungard initially tried to meet rival remote-server cloud-based systems with its own private-cloud solutions. But its large corporate clients by 2016 were migrating to the large, secure cloud systems maintained by Amazon, Microsoft and other giant companies, Stern added. We suddenly found ourselves competing with much bigger environments at much greater scale. Sungard couldnt beat them, so it signed up as one of 130 Amazon-audited managed service partners, recruiting and customizing Amazon Web Services for corporate disaster-recovery customers, including, most recently, government agencies in England. But that change has taken time, Stern added. Sungards debt totals about $1.25 billion. Thats more than the companys expected sales of just over $1 billion this year, down from $1.4 billion in 2015, when the company was separated from other businesses of the former SunGard Data Systems and turned into an independent firm. The reorganization plan, if approved by creditors, would reduce that debt to about $400 million, and provide $100 million in bankruptcy financing that would convert into expansion capital if the reorganization is concluded quickly, as the company plans. In return for writing off two-thirds of the companys debt, hedge fund creditors including Blackstone Groups LPs GSO debt investment unit, Angelo Gordon & Co., Carlisle Group, and Contrarian Capital Management firms that specialize in turnarounds and liquidations, sometimes dubbed vulture capitalists will take control of Sungard Availability. They will replace a group of buyout investors including Bain Capital LLC, Blackstone Group LPs buyout arm (another branch of the same Blackstone is a creditor), KKR & Co. LP, Providence Equity Partners LLC, Silver Lake, and TPG Capital LP (Texas Pacific Group). These buyout firms had controlled Sungard since buying the formerly publicly traded company for $11.4 billion , 70 percent of it borrowed, in 2005 a period when Sungard Availability failed to keep up fast-changing developments in the disaster-recovery and data-storage business. The buyout artists wont go away broke: The company has sold its financial technology, college systems, and other units in recent years, raising more than $6 billion in equity and paying down at least $4 billion in debt. (Goldman Sachs Capital Partners LP was also part of the 2005 owners group but dropped out after the financial crisis of the late 2010s.) Sungards old model was of shared infrastructure, including well-protected back offices where information technology people from stricken companies set up alternative operations when their main systems were down. SunGard has struggled with competition from cheaper and cloud-based rivals, including Amazon Web Services. Stern says Sungard Availabiility has been adapting to the new market: Forty percent of our revenue comes from new services that didnt exist eight years ago. Sungard initially tried to meet rival remote-server cloud-based systems with its own private cloud solutions. But its large corporate clients by 2016 were migrating to the large, secure cloud systems maintained by Amazon, Microsoft and other giant companies, Stern added. We suddenly found ourselves competing with much bigger environments at much greater scale. Sungard couldnt beat them, so it signed up as one of 130 Amazon-audited Managed Service Partners (MSPs) recruiting and customizing Amazon Web Services for corporate disaster-recovery customers, including, most recently, government agencies in England. But that change has taken time, Stern added. Sungard descends from Sun Information Systems, founded in the 1970s as a backup for early data systems at oil and chemical plants run by the former Philadelphia-based Sun Oil Co. In the 1980s, founder John Ryan diversified the company, offering backup services to the citys then-thriving banks as they computerized deposit, loan and investment records. By the late 1990s an independent, publicly traded SunGard Data Systems (including the original business, which later became Sungard Availiability) was worth more than Sun Oils parent company, Sunoco, and was using its profits to buy dozens of financial, government and college software services across Europe and Asia as well as North America. Sometimes SunGard Data acquired competing systems in the same market sector and let them continue competing for a time. In the late 1990s then-chief executive Cristobal Conde began combining SunGard products into large groups focusing on recovery (Availability), financial, government, education and other major sectors. The Inquirer asked Conde in 1999 why SunGard Data didnt roll out its own trading services, selling directly to investors and traders, and eliminating the expense of the middlemen. Conde said the company was equipped to run its own networks, but didnt want to compete with its big financial clients. The company missed out on much of the profit financial tech firms earned by developing proprietary trading markets in the 2000s. The 2005 acquisition of SunGard Data by the buyout firms was one of the biggest deals of its kind before the 2008 financial crisis temporarily froze tech buyout financing. The buyers at first talked about boosting SunGard Data sales in part by pitching its services to other companies they own, managers said at the time. Three years later, sales peaked at over $5 billion and employment topped 20,000. But with its owners mostly concerned with pulling cash out of the company, it lost what its leaders admitted were a tsunami of corporate customer cancellations as the disaster-recovery market changed, and the company didnt keep up. Conde stepped down to focus on his tech investments in 2011. Also in 2011, SunGard Data sold its main college business to Virginia-based Ellucian for $1.8 billion. In 2014 SunGard Data split in two. The next year the larger piece, Wayne-based SunGard Data Systems Inc., with sales of $2.8 billion and offices in South Jersey as well as the western Main Line, was sold for $5.1 billion (plus $4 billion in debts the buyer assumed) to Jacksonville, Fla.-based Fidelity Information Services (FIS). UPDATE 4/3: SunGard Founder John M. Ryan, who lives with his wife Mary Gregg (of Greater Philadelphia First and the Philadelphia Liberty Medal) in Bala Cynwyd when theyre not wintering around Naples, Fla., writes: "What a surprise to find SunGard making the news again! You did a good job tracing its history, some of which, the recent years, was sort-of new news to me. "I started what became SunGard in 1978 as a possible diversification strategy when I was responsible for IT functions at Sun Oil. During that period there were a number of executive and organizational changes, leading to my getting the opportunity, in the very early days of private-equity investing, to find four PE firms willing to acquire SunGard in early January 1983 for $20 million, $3 million in cash and $17 million in debt. We really had two distinct businesses, the home-grown data-center backup business and the many-systems-for-money-management business built by acquisitions, about 50-50 in revenue growth and margins. We went public in Spring of 1986 and paid off all the debt, $10 million, mostly to Sun. The venture investors got 20X their investment 40 months, with liquidity. And, as you point, SunGard passed Sun Oil in market cap in the 1990s, when I was replaced by Jim Mann as CEO, who drove the company to a sale transaction of $11 billion cash. The private-equity firms that bought SunGard, of course, took out cash and loaded up debt and carved up the company. I had stopped following the trail. Ive spent the last 25+ years investing in and joining the boards of about 25 early-stage technology companies, with mixed results but more wins than losses, and lots of fun and friendships. Those mixed results include SevOne, Health Market Science, and Thermacore, which were acquired by larger companies at fat multiples; and Neoware and eResearch Technology, which went public and then later acquired. Ryans last venture investment is HGE Healthcare, run by Michael Marcus, which uses science developed by Temple Health pulmonologist Dr. Gerald Criner to relieve Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) patients. Besides Temple, Criner, Ryan, Gregg and Markus, backers include about 25 friends of Temple and a Big Pharma firm that has rights if the product takes off. Other than that, Im pretty-much retired. A campus view of Temple University with the well-known bell tower in the background, in 2011. Read more Temple University aims to soon become a tobacco-free campus. The school will make the move "in the coming months, president Richard Englert wrote in a message to the Temple community Tuesday, after a report from a smoke-free-campus task force that suggested a set of recommendations to address the dangers of secondhand smoke and tobacco use on campus. After extensive data collection and review, the task force recommended Temple should join the growing number of universities that are committed to the creation of a healthier working, learning and living environment, Englert wrote in the message. An existing Temple policy bans smoking within 25 feet of a buildings entrance. Officials hope to have the new policy, which will eliminate the use of all tobacco products, including cigarettes, hookah, and e-cigarettes, in indoor and outdoor spaces throughout Temples U.S. campuses, ready by July 1 and implemented for the fall 2019 semester. Temple has campuses in Philadelphia, Ambler, and Harrisburg. The university has overseas campuses in Rome and Tokyo. The task force called for a tobacco-free, clean-air policy and included recommendations such as educational and marketing efforts, introducing new signage, prohibiting ashtrays, and barring the sale of tobacco on campus, according to the report. A survey sent to students, faculty, and staff found that about 64 percent of students who participated said they didnt smoke cigarettes, but 43 percent said they were often exposed to secondhand smoke on campus. The report, which noted that Philadelphia has the second-highest smoking rate among the 30 largest U.S. cities, was submitted in May 2018 and said the university lags behind" schools like La Salle University, Thomas Jefferson University, and the University of the Sciences. More than 2,100 campuses throughout the nation are smoke-free, according to the report. The University of Pennsylvania lists a tobacco-free policy on its website. At Drexel, tobacco use and sales are also prohibited on campus property. Temple University is a national leader in the education of health professionals as well as a provider of a range of healthcare services for individuals in North Philadelphia, the report reads. In an effort to model good professional behavior as well as to promote and protect the health of the campus community and neighbors, it is time for Temple University to offer leadership in this area and become a tobacco-free campus. READ MORE: Turning Phillys cigarette butts into park benches Tova du Plessis, owner of Essen Bakery, is one of the chefs who will cook at the Media Awards on April 26. Read more Seven Philadelphia chefs and pastry chefs will prepare the food for attendees of this years James Beard Media Awards on April 26 in New York, which honor the best in culinary writing and broadcasting. Visit Philadelphia, the citys tourism organization, is the first-ever sponsor of the dinner at Chelsea Piers, which will be hosted by model and television host Tyra Banks. The event is attended by 550 people, according to the James Beard Foundation, most of whom are members of the culinary press. The James Beard Foundation will recognize outstanding chefs and restaurants at the organizations annual award ceremony in Chicago on May 6. Among the 2019 nominees are several local chefs and restaurateurs, including Marc Vetri for chef and Zahav for restaurant. Attendees of the April 26 Media Awards dinner will dine on a multi-course meal prepared by Ange Branca of Sate Kampar, past James Beard award nominees Diana Widjojo and Maylia Widjojo of Hardena, and Andrew Farley of High Street on Market and High Street on Hudson, which are owned by Ellen Yin, a Beard nominee this year for outstanding restaurateur. After the awards ceremony, desserts will be served by local pastry chefs Tova du Plessis of Essen, Kate Jacoby of Vedge and Robert Toland of Terrain in Glen Mills. A line of mostly students wait to enter a vaccination clinic amid a mumps outbreak on the Temple University campus. Read more After a mumps outbreak sickened more than 100 students, Temple University announced last month a new policy requiring incoming students to have the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine. Previously, the university did not require immunizations for admitted or enrolled students. The new policy, which will be developed over the summer and rolled out in fall 2019, adds Temple to a long list of local universities that already require the vaccine. Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, Saint Josephs University, La Salle University, Community College of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State University, Villanova University, West Chester University, Thomas Jefferson University, and Princeton University all require incoming students to have two doses of the MMR vaccine. The CDC recommends children get two doses of the MMR vaccine: the first at 12 to 15 months old and the second at 4 to 6 years old. The vaccine is 88 percent effective when someone gets two doses. Most elementary schools require the vaccine for entry, but exceptions on religious and moral grounds are offered based on the state. Temple officials said they are still working out details on how the policy will be enforced and what exemptions will be provided. It will also require students to have the chicken pox vaccine and the tetanus, diptheria, pertussis (TDAP) vaccine. Laura Siminoff, dean of Temples College of Public Health, previously told The Inquirer that requiring vaccines for incoming students is a smart public health decision. Many universities already require vaccinations, and theres nothing preventing others from enacting such rules, she said. Its probably an oversight when a university doesnt, Siminoff said. Since the mumps outbreak began at Temple in late January, 116 cases have been reported. Eighteen are confirmed and 98 probable, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health said. The majority of cases are in Philadelphia. Six are from surrounding counties. Most of the students who have had mumps symptoms were vaccinated as children, the city health department said. But there is evidence that the mumps vaccine loses strength over time. The CDC recommends a booster shot of the MMR vaccine during a mumps outbreak. Last week Temple offered free vaccine clinics and delivered 4,819 doses of MMR to students and faculty over two days. Temple will continue to make free MMR vaccines available to students and staff through the health center on campus. Starting this week, Medicaid recipients in New Jersey no longer have to wait for approval from an insurance company before a doctor can prescribe them opioid-addiction medication. The states Human Services commissioner announced that New Jersey is ending so-called prior authorizations for medication-assisted treatments (MAT), which research shows gives patients a better shot at lasting recovery. Previously, people interested in MAT had to wait, sometimes for days, as doctors submitted the required paperwork and received the go-ahead from a patients Medicaid managed-care plan. Prior authorizations are generally pitched as a cost-saving measure for insurers to determine whether a patient requires the treatment or if there are cheaper effective treatments available. But for people with an opioid-use disorder, such delays can be deadly. The pain of withdrawal especially from powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which has contaminated most of the regions illicit drug supply is enough to send a person with addiction back to the street, where they risk overdose and death. Over and over again, we had heard from frontline providers that they had gotten someone to a point where they were ready to go on MAT, said Roseanne Scotti, the New Jersey state director of the activist group Drug Policy Alliance. And then it was like, Well, call us back in 48 hours,' while they would wait to get this treatment approved. By then, individuals could have overdosed, or lost that will they had gotten to go to the doctors and been lost again to the street. More than 3,000 people died of drug overdoses in New Jersey last year, up from 2,685 in 2017. Scotti said she was thrilled with the states decision to waive MAT authorizations for Medicaid recipients, and added that a bill is moving through the state legislature to make the change permanent. A law requiring private insurers in New Jersey to waive prior authorizations for MAT is already on the books. The bill is one of several that New Jersey lawmakers are considering to battle opioid addiction; in October a state assemblywoman proposed a bill that would launch a pilot program to open a supervised injection site where people could bring their drugs and use them in the presence of medical staff who could revive them if they overdose. Another bill would require warning labels on bottles of opioid pain pills. Pennsylvania has already waived prior authorization rules, but its lawmakers have not proposed bills on supervised injection sites. But prior authorization isnt the only barrier to MAT. Stigma, especially the misleading notion that MAT is simply replacing one drug for another, keeps many from seeking the treatment at all. In Philadelphia, city officials recently launched a campaign to fill about 3,000 empty MAT slots. Even though Pennsylvania waived prior authorizations for Medicaid recipients last year, and worked with the states major private insurers to do the same, just 3 percent of doctors statewide are authorized to prescribe buprenorphine, an opioid-based medication that is one of the three most common MATs. Only about 1,200 doctors in New Jersey are licensed to prescribe the drug, according to federal data. Carole Johnson, New Jerseys Human Services commissioner, said the state was working to encourage more doctors especially primary-care physicians to get certified to prescribe buprenorphine. The state is improving Medicaid reimbursements for doctors who take on patients with addiction, and paying for navigators at primary-care practices to help people with addiction access social services that can help stabilize them in recovery. Were really also thinking about the social determinants of health as they relate to helping people sustain recovery, Johnson said. We can make all these investments in treatment, but unless people who are in treatment see a path to employment and housing, their recovery is more vulnerable. Portland, OR, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to the report published by Allied Market Research, the Europe pentane market was estimated at $28 million in 2017 and is expected to reach $38.1 million by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 4.1% from 2018-2025. The report provides an extensive analysis of key segments, drivers & opportunities, market size & forecasts, key investment pockets, and competitive scenario. Growth Drivers and Industry Trends Increase in demand for pentane from end-user industries, low cost of pentane and its beneficial chemical properties have fueled the growth of the Europe market. On the other hand, strict government regulations towards the use of pentane have happened to curb the growth to some extent. Nevertheless, surge in use of pentane in fuel blending and formulation has created a number of opportunities in the segment. Request Report Sample at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/5202 Segmentation Analysis of the Industry Based on type, the n-pentane segment accounted for nearly three-fourth of the total market in 2017 and is expected to be dominant throughout the forecast period. This is due to the increase in the demand for chemical intermediates in Europe. These chemical intermediates are used as chemical solvents and electronic cleaning solvents in different end-use industries. By capacity, blowing agents contributed to nearly two-fifth of the total market in 2017, thereby coming out as the largest shareholder in the market. Increasing production of polymer-based compounds such as polyurethane and polystyrene has spurred the growth. By geography, Germany held nearly one-third of the total market share in 2017. Increase in demand of pentanes, which are used as blowing agents in the production of polyurethane & polystyrene foam, has augmented the growth. Industry Key Players Key market players discussed in the report include Brenntag, INEOS Group Holdings S.A., HCS Group (Haltermann Carless UK Ltd.), Inventec, Chevron Corporation, Air Liquide S.A., Phillips 66, Exxon Mobil Corporation, and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. They have embraced various strategies including expansion, mergers & acquisitions, collaborations, partnerships, and others to retain their strong position in the industry. The other players in the market comprise ISOLAB Laborgerte GmbH, Molgroup, SCHARR CPC GmbH (Friedrich Scharr AG), Penta Ing. Petr Svec, and Avantor. Purchase Inquiry at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/5202 About Us: Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business -consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain. We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry. Alexandria Proko and Daniel Kochinsky March 16, 2019, in Cape May Hello there It was late fall of Allies junior year at West Chester University. She was single, and her college bestie Maggie repeatedly suggested a solution to that status. She wanted me to meet her weird brother, Dan, Allie remembered. She said we would work because we were both quirky, but she kept using that word, weird. And I was weirded out. Maggie worked the opposite end of the equation, with the same lack of success. I love my sister, but I was not into the idea of meeting anyone she would set me up with, said Daniel. The close friends decided to have dinner out together to say goodbye for Christmas break. On 12/12/12, Allie drove to Maggies parents home in Phoenixville and hopped into her friends car. Before dinner, Maggie asked whether they could pop in to a local tattoo parlor so she could get a touch-up on her foot. That seemed rather random, but Allie was up for whatever. As the needles did their work, Maggie took out her phone. Im at the tattoo place, she texted her big brother Daniel, a senior at Penn State Brandywine. I forgot my wallet. Can you bring it? He walked in to one awkward introduction. I didnt know Allie was there, Daniel said. I was also blindsided, Allie said. And part of me was mad that he was there it was supposed to be girls night! Daniel was pragmatic his sister had managed to get him to meet this girl. And, hey, she was cute. He might as well talk to her. Allie was shy back then, and at first didnt feel like forcing herself to talk to a guy she had told her friend she didnt want to meet. But the more Daniel talked, the more she thought he wasnt so bad, or so weird. Once the tattoo mission was complete, Allie and Maggie walked to Iron Hill Brewery for dinner, and Daniel went home. When Allie got back to her car, she found a piece of rolled-up paper with his phone number stuck into the door handle. She texted him as soon as she got home. It started lightly enough: She told him about her anthropology and archaeology classes, he told her about his in communication. They moved on to deep analysis of movies from Drive to District 9, and then to art and life in general. Even though our initial meeting had been a little flat, we had both recognized this connection. And when we were talking, it really proved we were right, Allie said. A few days later at Daniels suggestion, they met up at the Granite Run Mall between his classes. We got a couple of slices or something. We walked around, we went into some stores, he said. I remember just having a really good time with her, and her actually enjoying my dry sense of humor, and feeding off of it, and adding to my jokes. As boring as that mall was, all I could think about in the rest of my classes was how much fun we had. In late January, they decided to be exclusive. Shes honestly the nicest person I know, Daniel said. She is the perfect combination of someone who really, really cares about people, but at the same time, shes a goofball. Allie says similar things about Daniel. I didnt feel like I needed to pretend around him. I could just be myself. Daniel, now 28, is an administrator at the Shops at Devereux vocational center in Devon. He is studying online for his masters in clinical counseling through the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky. After graduating, Allie, now 27, took a job at Historic Yellow Springs and soon found her favorite part was planning with couples who married. In 2015, she launched her own event and wedding planning business, Alexandria Catherine Events. Daniel lived in Phoenixville with his parents, Denise and Leon, and Allie in Downingtown with hers, Steven and Michele to save money. In 2017, they bought their Coatesville home, which they share with Rufus, a Yorkie/Jack Russell mix. The engagement On a dreary, wet Saturday in May 2018, Daniel asked Allie to walk Rufus with him. She didnt bother showering or changing out of her weekend grunge. Daniel, not usually the plan-ahead type, had suggested days earlier that they visit Chanticleer, and she deduced something important would happen there. I figured Id come home, get cute, and then go get engaged, she said. They came home, and Daniel slowed his pace slightly to let her get a few steps ahead. When she reached for the door, he called her name. Allie turned to find him kneeling on the porch. I talked about that mall date, and told her that I knew then and there that we had something really special, Daniel said. I went on a little long there was a good minute of me babbling. It was a nice speech, Allie said. But I pretty much blacked out, so I dont remember much of it. She heard him ask if shed marry him, though. And so did Rufus, who, like Daniel, seemed to be waiting for her answer. I did say yes. I got that out, Allie said. The sun came out, and they smiled their way all around Chanticleer. It was so them As the bride had always dreamed, they served wedding waffles at the reception for 70. That meant an 11 a.m. ceremony at Cape Mays Hotel Alcott. Matchmaker Maggie was maid of honor. A family friend who happens to be an officiant presided over the ceremony, which the couple designed to be sacred but not tied to any particular religion. As they took each others hands, Kristy, the brides cousin-in-law, read: These are the hands of your best friend, young and strong and full of love for you, that are holding yours on your wedding day, as you promise to love each other today, tomorrow, and forever. The grooms cousin-in-law Jenn read that love lets one find all the hidden beauty in another person. His Aunt Jeanne also did a reading. Then came brunch, with live jazz, a lot of conversation, and just a little dancing, much of which occurred when the band played their own rendition of the Dropkick Murphys Shipping Off to Boston. Later, the couple had dinner with their bridal party, and all were invited to join them for an after party at Carneys. This was the wedding of the couples dreams and budget, but it was not always easy for the wedding-planner bride to stay true to their own plan. People would say, Youre a wedding planner. I bet your own wedding is going to be epic, Allie said. She was stressing quite a bit until she gave herself the same advice she gives the couples she works with: Make sure this is the wedding you want. Awestruck After the ceremony and reception, the couple and their photographer headed to the Washington Street Mall. I was more relaxed than I had been all day, Daniel said. I felt so great at that moment with Allie. I was just in a state of joy, and totally focused on her and on us, and the fact that we were officially married. Like her new husband, Allie had enjoyed every minute of the wedding but felt so much calm and happiness as the photos were taken. We were able to steal away, to walk around and absorb what was happening, that, Oh, my god, we just got married. It was really fun, and with the after party, there was still more fun to come. The budget crunch A bargain: The couple skipped favors to spend the money elsewhere. A splurge: The Hotel Alcott cost a bit more than other venues the couple could have chosen, but Allie wanted to marry at a place where shes never planned a thing, and she and Daniel fell in love with the historic building and quaint town. Honeymooning A Caribbean cruise to Nassau, St. Thomas, and St. Martin, where they will soak up history and swim with sea lions. Behind the scenes Officiant: John Hayduk, Hayduk Wedding Services, Coatesville. Venue: Hotel Alcott, Cape May. Cake: Amanda Scamoff-Dyas, the Bake Works, Northfield, N.J. Music: Scot Silver, Scot Silver Music, Phoenixville. Photography: Jill Godbout, Emery Jude Photography, Downingtown. Dress: Lord & Taylor. Brides hair: Mel Nguyen, Chester Springs. Makeup and bridesmaids hair: Daneene Jensen of Daneene Jensen & Associates, Doylestown. Planner: The bride, owner of Alexandria Catherine Events Gov. Phil Murphy last year signed the Diane B. Allen Equal Pay Act into law, giving New Jersey one of the strongest equal pay laws in the country. Immediately behind him are Allen (left) and activist Lilly Ledbetter, after whom a federal equal-pay law is named. Read more When Philadelphia city officials went to federal court in March fighting for a law that bans employers from asking job candidates about their salary history as a way to address pay inequity, one judges line of questioning was simple: How do we know this will work? Thats what legislatures do, city solicitor Marcel S. Pratt responded. They try measures based on the evidence, and if something doesnt work, then they tweak it. Thats the situation for many lawmakers across the country as they attempt to tackle the gender wage gap: trying new measures and seeing what sticks. (Federal labor data show that women, on average, make about 82 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make, a rate thats been largely unchanged for the last decade. Women of color make less.) Tuesday is Equal Pay Day, which marks how far into the year women must work to earn what men did in the previous year, and legislation is moving this week in Harrisburg, Trenton and Washington. On Thursday, the U.S. House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would make it harder for employers to justify gender-based pay disparities. Seven Republicans, including Pa. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, joined Democrats in passing the legislation, though the bills path in the Senate is uncertain. Heres a look at what policymakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are doing and not doing to address the wage gap: Salary-history bans Philadelphia City Council in 2017 passed a bill making the city one of the first jurisdictions in the country to ban employers from asking job candidates about wage history. The idea is that inequities are passed on from employer to employer when pay is based on past salary. The laws fate is uncertain the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals is currently weighing whether the ban violates the free speech rights of employers, as the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce has argued. In the meantime, salary-history bans have become the regulation du jour for governments looking to take a whack at the wage gap. Eight states and six municipalities have passed salary-history bans for all employers, and four states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, used executive orders to bar government agencies from asking about past salary. Salary-History Bans by State Other jurisdictions All employers: Albany County, N.Y.; Cincinnati (employers with more than 15 employees); New York City; Philadelphia; Puerto Rico; San Francisco; Westchester County, N.Y. All city agencies: Atlanta; Chicago; Kansas City, Mo.; Louisville, Ky.; New Orleans; Pittsburgh; Salt Lake City SOURCE: American Association of University Women Staff Graphic Last week, the New Jersey Assembly passed a salary-history ban that would apply to all employers. The bill now goes to the state Senate and could be taken up by the bodys Labor Committee as early as May, according to Assemblywoman Joann Downey (D., Monmouth), the bills sponsor. Lawmakers in Harrisburg have introduced similar legislation, though Democrats say they are doubtful that such a bill would pass while the legislature was under GOP control. Rep. Donna Bullock (D., Phila.) said the legislature needs more women before its likely to meaningfully address the wage gap. The state Senate in 2017 did pass a pay equity bill, but it included a preemption provision barring municipalities from instituting their own salary-history bans and could have nullified Philadelphias law. The bill died in the House. Preemption is a real threat, said Amal Bass, staff attorney at the Womens Law Project, and it really is taking away from municipalities their ability to respond to the needs of their constituents. The future of salary-history bans could be decided by the courts before that happens. Last May, a U.S. District judge halted the provision in Philadelphias law that prohibits employers from asking about salary history but he agreed the government could bar employers from actually using that history to set wages. Both the chamber and the city appealed. Attorneys for the chamber say because its attempting to restrict speech, the city must prove the ban will actually reduce the wage gap. The city says that data dont exist because its a new approach. Experts say its common sense that basing a persons salary on a previous wage will perpetuate inequities that data show exist for women and people of color, according to Pamela Coukos, CEO of Working Ideal, a Washington-based firm that consults companies and local governments on pay equity. Employers should instead use market research and the duties of the job to create a pay scale for a position regardless of the candidate, said Deborah Vagins, senior vice president of public policy and research at the American Association of University Women. Updates to state equal pay laws Last year, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a package of legislation that overhauled the states equal pay law by: Extending equal pay protections to all protected classes. Making it illegal to require employees to sign a waiver agreeing not to disclose compensation information. Closing loopholes in how employers can justify gender pay disparities. Increasing relief for employees who bring claims. Requiring companies with public contracts to report compensation broken down by gender and race The picture in Pennsylvania is much different. The states Equal Pay Law passed in 1959 was updated just once since then. In 1968, it was amended to cover fewer workers. Terry Fromson, managing attorney at the Philadelphia-based Womens Law Project, said although the law prohibits paying employees differently on the basis of sex, it allows them to set pay based on such things as pay history and seniority, which she argues are greatly influenced by sex. Last week, Rep. Brian Sims (D., Phila.) reintroduced a bill that would require employers to count time off for maternity leave toward seniority. It would also ban retaliating against the sharing of pay information, broaden the definition of employee, and strengthen protections for workers who bring claims. It would also add fringe benefits to the law, which currently only prohibits discrimination as it relates to wages. Sims said hes hopeful Republican leadership, especially those who plan to run for statewide office and see that equal pay legislation typically polls well, will get on board. Other ways governments can address the wage gap Here are four regulatory changes touted by womens advocates: Faculty members at Glen Mills Schools depart Tuesday, April 2, 2019, after learning many had been targeted for layoff. (ED HILLE / For The Inquirer) Read more The Glen Mills Schools is laying off 250 counselors and staffers this week, with just four students left at the Delaware County campus amid multiple state probes into child abuse and cover-ups. Eighty staff members across various departments were notified Tuesday, said Aimee Tysarczyk, a spokesperson for the school. An additional 170 will be terminated throughout the week. Glen Mills Schools thanks our employees, many of whom have tirelessly served the school for decades, for their commitment to the schools mission and helping to pave the way to a new path in life for countless young men, school leaders said in a statement. The state Department of Human Services (DHS) issued an emergency removal order last week for all boys remaining at Glen Mills, saying its investigation into the nations oldest reform school has discovered rampant abuse and attempts by staff to coerce boys into silence. In February, the Inquirer published an investigation documenting decades of abuse and cover-ups at the Glen Mills Schools. In addition to DHS, the Pennsylvania auditor general and the state inspector general which has subpoena power have both launched investigations. The Delaware County District Attorneys Office is also probing abuse at Glen Mills, which employed 668 people and spent $32.1 million on salaries, benefits, and other compensation in 2016, according to its most recent tax filing. After 20 years of working the same job, and many years of great friends and employees our jobs at Glen Mills school is no more. Everybody is laid off, Michael Merritt, an instructor, posted Tuesday afternoon on Facebook. Needless to say looking for a new job soon. A spokesperson for DHS, which licenses Glen Mills and other residential programs for court-ordered boys, said that two of the four remaining boys are scheduled to leave Wednesday. The agency is working to have the other two relocated as soon as possible." Randy Ireson, the schools executive director, was still employed by Glen Mills, Tysarczyk said. State officials, in ordering the removal of boys last week, said Ireson failed to ensure the safety and protection of youth placed at the facility." Ireson took a leave of absence after the Inquirer investigation published, citing health reasons, but still receives compensation and lives in school-affiliated housing. In fiscal 2017, Ireson received $336,000 in total compensation from the school, which had annual revenues of around $40 million. Meanwhile, an unknown number of Glen Mills employees stand to lose their homes along with their jobs. Some supervisors and longtime staffers have lived in mortgage-free houses near the school. Tysarczyk said Glen Mills leaders were mindful of this and will take any step that we have control over to assist our employees through this process and provide the time and support necessary to help with a proper transition. Glen Mills founded in 1826 as the Philadelphia House of Refuge housed nearly 400 boys last summer. But judges across the country pulled their boys from the reform school in response to the Inquirer investigation, leaving enrollment of 64 last week when DHS issued the emergency removal order. In a letter to the schools board of managers, DHS said conditions at Glen Mills constitute gross incompetence, negligence, misconduct in operating a facility, including mistreatment and abuse of clients, likely to constitute immediate and serious danger to the life or health of the children in care. As the investigation into allegations raised in recent reporting continues, we must do what is necessary to ensure that no more children are at risk of physical and emotional harm," said DHS Secretary Teresa Miller. The agency is currently weighing action against Glen Mills license. In addition to its dissipating student body, Glen Mills learned of another threat to its finances last week: a class-action lawsuit. The complaint was filed Thursday by local civil rights attorney David Rudovsky, in partnership with Berger Montague, a national class-action law firm based in Philadelphia, and seeks unspecified compensation and damages for boys who were abused as students at Glen Mills. Under its veneer of civility, there is a Dickensian culture of violence and intimidation at the school that has severely impacted plaintiffs and other children through systematic excessive force, threats of longer sentences for those who report the abuse, and detention beyond commitment dates for those students with injuries that would be noticed upon release from the school, the complaint reads. It describes the experiences of two teenagers who say they were routinely beaten by Glen Mills staffers. One suffered a broken nose; the other suffered broken ribs. Glen Mills formed a review panel of students, staff, and child-protection experts to investigate allegations of abuse raised by the Inquirer. But without pointing to any specific part of the newspapers investigation, Glen Mills leadership has said it disputes virtually all the allegations and conclusions." After DHSs own probe corroborated the Inquirers reporting, resulting in the emergency removal order, Tysarczyk said Glen Mills was assessing the situation and its impacts and will continue to work with all state and local officials. Last year, during a raid in Richmond, Va., federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents surrounded and detained a person during a removal operation. Carrying out President Trump's hard-line immigration policies has exposed ICE to public scrutiny and criticism. Read more Philadelphia Sheriff Jewell Williams has told federal authorities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents now must identify themselves to deputies if they are on duty inside a city courtroom. His action comes after an Inquirer story this week detailed incidents in which ICE agents entered a city courtroom searching for an immigrant they planned to detain, arrested another man inside the Criminal Justice Center, and apprehended at least three others as they entered or left the courthouse. Unless [agents] identify themselves to the deputy assigned to the courtroom, we have no idea who they are or what their intent is, Williams said. An ICE agent may be perceived as an intruder trying to disrupt or intimidate participants in a proceeding, in which case our deputies would intervene. ICE officials said Tuesday that they have a courthouse policy in place and plan to adhere to it, in accordance with federal law and Department of Homeland Security guidelines. That policy says the agencys courthouse activities are consistent with longstanding, nationwide law enforcement practices, and often are necessitated by the unwillingness of some jurisdictions to cooperate with ICE. In courthouses, the policy says, agents move against specific, targeted immigrants who have criminal convictions, who are gang members, national security or public-safety threats, who have been ordered removed from the United States or who have reentered after deportation. Immigrant advocates say ICE routinely departs from its own policy, arresting people who come to court for traffic violations or to make child-support payments. Williams instruction does not prevent agents from entering courtrooms or, apparently, from arresting people. His statement said that the agents, who typically dress in plainclothes, can confidentially disclose their presence and intentions to the deputy in the courtroom. Still, it marks another step in the sanctuary citys combat against the Trump administrations tough enforcement tactics. It also raises the tension surrounding ICEs increasing moves into courtrooms across the country. Many advocates and judges say ICE agents presence impedes the administration of justice that fear of trouble over their immigration status can lead witnesses to violent crimes to stay away, victims of domestic violence to not testify, and children and families who need court assistance to go without. Last year, nearly 70 former judges from 23 states wrote to ICEs acting director, Ronald Vitiello, saying the arrests were disrupting the criminal justice system and needed to stop. Williams said he learned from the Inquirer report that plainclothes agents had staked out city courtrooms to try to arrest undocumented immigrants or others wanted for immigration violations. In Philadelphia, sheriffs deputies provide security for all courthouses, including the Criminal Justice Center, City Hall, Family Court, Traffic Court, and Philadelphia Parking Authority Court. Our deputies provide security for everyone in the court, he said. They know if police officers are present. Deputies need to know if other law enforcement officers are present. Temple University law professor Jennifer Lee called the sheriffs action certainly a step in the right direction. It helps keep the operations of ICE transparent at the courthouse. It would be great if it could go a step further and be turned into a more official protocol, said Lee, who helps lead the Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple. For example, she said, New York courts require ICE agents to both identify themselves and notify court officers of their specific law enforcement purpose. That information is relayed to the judge presiding over the particular case, with the goal of minimizing disruption to the courts. This year the Sheller Center released a report saying ICE apprehensions in and around local Pennsylvania courthouses have frightened away undocumented witnesses and victims, disrupting the course of justice. In the city, ICE entry into courthouses has led Community Legal Services to accuse the agency of having created an atmosphere of fear that can bar immigrants from justice. CLS, which provides free services to people in need, helped develop a model policy to stop ICE arrests in courthouses. It states, basically, that judges have authority to regulate conduct in the courtroom, the courthouse and its outlying areas to ensure the fair administration of justice, and they should use their power to ban immigration arrests in those places. This weeks Inquirer story detailed how, on March 21, public defender John Lopez sought to introduce himself to a man in a Muhammad Ali T-shirt, seated in the back of Courtroom 906 in the CJC. The man flashed a badge, identifying himself as an ICE agent, and showed Lopez a photo. It was his client. Is this person here? the agent asked. No, Lopez answered, honestly. The client had not shown up to court. The lawyer said in an interview that his client, whom he declined to identify, was scheduled to face a misdemeanor charge of second-degree assault. On Friday, March 29, ICE agents arrested an undocumented Guatemalan man inside the CJC, as the man prepared to face domestic-assault charges before Municipal Court Judge Karen Simmons. Since January, at least three other people have been detained by ICE as they entered or left the CJC, the courthouse at 13th and Filbert. ICE officials say its safer for agents, offenders, and the public when arrests take place in courthouses, because everyone entering the building has been screened for weapons. Courthouse arrests can be necessary in places that refuse to let agents enter their prisons and jails, the agency said. ICE officials say that, generally, witnesses in cases and family members or friends accompanying the target alien are not to be arrested unless they pose a threat to public safety or interfere with ICE. Looking out across the august grounds of Independence Mall, you can see the impressive bronze statue of George Washington in front of Independence Hall, hand on a book, reflective gaze, a suitable pose for a heroic founder of a country. A block away, at Sixth and Market Streets, a memorial to Washington and his noble presidential successor John Adams rises in the stately brick form of the Presidents House. Names and monuments for the ages. And from Friday through Sept. 2, youll be able to see Sara Bermans Closet, with its neatly folded linens and underthings, the first outdoor installation of the National Museum of American Jewish History at Fifth and Market Streets. This is not a joke, although it is humorous. The closet represents, in the words of its creators, artist and writer Maira Kalman and her curator-artist son, Alex Kalman, a small and monumental story. What is anything but a persons life, said Maira Kalman, 69. Theres nothing else. Sara Bermans Closet tells the story of someone not famous, not a nation-builder, not a writer, not a celebrity of any kind, but someone who speaks volumes about the possibilities inherent in all lives and the value of even the smallest things. And she speaks through that most mundane domestic space, the space that most people keep out of sight, the space where who knows what might reside within the closet. The sense of order and clarity was so palpable, Maira Kalman said recently as she and Alex Kalman took a break inside the museum from setting up the exhibition that accompanies the closet and that creates a sometimes-fanciful timeline for Sara Berman, who was born in 1920 in Belarus and died in New York in 2004. The beautiful care of things, the ironing and starching. You open the linen closet and it was a thing of beauty, and that really entered into our thinking about life, she said, recalling growing up. When Alex was young, and Sara would come [and visit], a weekends activity was to arrange closets. And that was considered delightful. Alex said, It was fun. Maira said, It was fun because there was a sense of joy about it. It wasnt stern. It was: Look at how wonderful it is to make everything around you beautiful. And that was important because thats how we look at our life and it makes people feel optimistic and feel a peace of mind. For Sara Berman, her beautifully laid out closet, with its place for the three watches she wore, the sheets, the seven hats, the nine pairs of shoes, the seven bras, the undetermined number of pants, the 13 blouses, the 12 T-shirts, and all the rest must have represented order and clarity. She saw it as attention to detail, said Maira Kalman. Everything you did you did well. You did thoroughly, and you did with a great sense of enjoyment and commitment. Yes, that is the closet reconstructed on the museums Kimmel Plaza, a recreation of Sara Bermans closet as she left it in her studio apartment on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. And those are Sara Bermans socks and undergarments, meticulously ironed (yes, she ironed her socks and underwear) and neatly folded and placed precisely into an ordered universe behind a closed door. The journey to that apartment, chronicled by the exhibition inside the museum, lends texture and insight to the closet outside. Through Maira Kalmans paintings and Alex Kalmans sculptures of daily objects potatoes, spare ribs Sara Bermans life unfolds. She was born in the village of Lenin in Belarus, where her grandfathers six-foot beard once saved her from drowning in the River Sluch (she grabbed hold and pulled herself out), and where a cousin was killed by a bolt of lightning that came through the window as he sat reading at a table in a cabin, and where everyone was murdered in pogroms shortly after Saras family departed. The family moved to Palestine in the 1930s. There, Sara met her future husband, Pesach, who fought in the Zionist underground. They eventually moved to New York. But all was not well in the relationship, and after nearly four decades together, Sara and Pesach separated. She moved to Horatio Street. It was on Horatio Street, living alone for the first time, that Sara Berman fully became Sara Berman. In an epiphany, she decided to wear only white. No one is quite sure why. Perhaps the better question is why not. There she assembled the now-museum-quality cookie press and whisk, the funnel, the ladder, the chair, the broom that are on display, although when she acquired them, these utilitarian objects were just that. Its what she used them for and produced with them theres the magic. We didnt really want to present just a collection of things that represent her," said Alex Kalman, 32. We want to tell a story and have people float through a narrative that starts at the beginning and ends at the end and has very little set [text] type and is very much in the language of the story. Maira Kalman, whose images lend a kind of Chagall-esque quality to rural Belarus and even to life in Tel Aviv and New York City said the exhibition explores Sara Bermans real sense of focusing on the moment and making that splendid. Sara Bermans Closet, she said, is "about a life, the way you live your life. Sara Berman ate a lemon ice while standing on a beach in Israel, waves lapping at her feet, on the last day of her life. In 2015, the first iteration of the closet went on exhibit at the tiny Mmuseumm, an exhibition space founded by Alex Kalman in lower Manhattan. The next year, it moved to the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It traveled to Los Angeles for a run at L.A.s Skirball Cultural Center. And now it is here. What would Sara Berman think about her closet on display on Independence Mall across the way from Washingtons old house and in the shadow of Moses Jacob Ezekiels monumental sculpture Religious Liberty? I think shed be incredulous, said Maira Kalman. Shed think it was very funny and amazing. She is, said Alex Kalman, an unexpected hero. He said, Its actually not so much about what you accomplish for the public in your life, but how you choose to live your life. Said Maira Kalman: A humble narrative is also an important narrative. ON EXHIBIT Sara Bermans Closet Friday through Sept. 2 at National Museum of American Jewish History, Fifth and Market Streets. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, closed Mondays and on April 20 for the first day of Passover. Closing at 3 p.m. on April 19. Admission: $15, adults; $13 seniors, youth 13-21, and students with ID. Free for children under 13. Information: 215-923-3811 or nmajh.org Meek Mill speaks during a press conference on legislation aimed at reforming the Pennsylvania probation and parole system at Thomas Paine Plaza in Philadelphia on Tuesday, April 2, 2019. The press conference included CNN host Van Jones, advocates and members of the REFORM Alliance, and state representatives and legislatures. Read more North Philadelphia native Robert Rihmeek Williams has been on probation for 11 years a seemingly endless, telescoping sentence that has dogged him throughout his ascendancy as Meek Mill, the chart-topping rapper and, lately, activist for criminal justice reform. Now, while still under the weight of Pennsylvanias unusually onerous probation laws which, unlike most other states, allow supervision to stretch as long as the maximum legal sentence for a crime hes seeking to change them. At a highly produced Tuesday afternoon news conference within a corral set up on Thomas Paine Plaza, angled to ensure a soaring City Hall backdrop, Meek Mill, 76ers co-owner Michael Rubin, and CNN personality Van Jones who are together the cochairmen of an advocacy group called the REFORM Alliance stood alongside state lawmakers and business leaders to announce draft legislation to reform probation in Pennsylvania. Im here to speak for the ones that dont have a voice, Mill said. But the actual legislation likely to garner support from this broad coalition may not be as radical as he would like. A bill already proposed in the state Senate would cap probation terms, disallow consecutive probation sentences, and limit jail time for violations that are not new crimes, such as failing to report or traveling without permission. Lawmakers led by State Rep. Jordan Harris, a Philadelphia Democrat, and Sheryl Delozier, a Republican from outside Harrisburg are still hashing out the proposed legislation, but it appears limiting probation terms is not on the table. Instead, the focus is on technical violations, which could include anything from missing an appointment to testing positive for drugs. A staffer for Harris said one goal is to require a hearing with a judge before anyone can be locked up on such a violation (currently, people can languish in jail for a week or, in some counties, for months, before seeing a judge). Also on the wish list: barring judges from incarcerating people for using marijuana; preventing them from extending probation due to nonpayment of fines and fees; and disallowing them from issuing violations to those who travel outside the jurisdiction unless they can show it was to evade supervision. For those convicted of new misdemeanors while on probation, one proposal is to limit any jail time for the probation violations to 90 days. (Currently, violators may be resentenced to the legal maximum sentence for their original crime.) The bill could also create new avenues to get off probation early by allotting 15 days of earned time for every 30 days without a violation, and by ensuring that those who are free of violations after a year have the chance at a hearing to request their probation be terminated. Harris said hes seeking to enact a fundamental transformation of what the probation and parole system is about: to focus on rehabilitation, he said, instead of retaliation. For too long, probation has been the quicksand of the criminal justice system. ... Even as you try to get out, it pulls you back in, he said. Too often, he said, people are reincarcerated just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you are a black male in Philadelphia, the wrong place at the wrong time could be anywhere you find yourself in the city of Philadelphia. ... That was not what the criminal justice system was made for. Delozier, who has also sponsored tough-on-crime bills like Marsys Law and a bill to garnish bail refunds for unpaid restitution, pitched probation reform as a common-sense solution necessary in a state that ranks third in the nation for the rate of people under supervision. There are nearly 300,000 people on probation or parole statewide. We have too many people on probation," she said. "Our probation agents cannot focus on the ones that they need to focus on. The bill in progress is, not coincidentally, designed to address many of the side-effects of probation that Mill experienced firsthand. The rapper described trying to explain his incarceration for noncriminal probation violations to his then-6-year-old son. My son came to see me and asked me what I was arrested for. I had to tell him, Popping a wheelie.' ... People lose their jobs, lose their homes for not even committing a crime." Harris and Delozier said that, while the language of the bill is still in flux, they expect bipartisan support. They already count backing from advocates ranging from conservative groups (the Commonwealth Foundation, Americans for Prosperity) to the ACLU of Pennsylvania. Thats a coalition that has come together around a number of criminal justice reform issues over the last year, and successfully lobbied for the Clean Slate law to automatically seal criminal records in the last session. Even prosecutors are on board with an overhaul, according to Lindsey Vaughan, executive director of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association. We believe there are too many people on county probation and that our laws can be changed to ensure that the right people are being supervised and that only those who ought to be sent back to prison for a probation violation are, she wrote in an email. We have and will continue to be working with legislators to help craft a solid bill that will achieve these goals without having any unintended consequences. The Republican lawmaker chairing the House Judiciary Committee, a crucial gatekeeper for any such legislation, did not return a call for comment. A spokesperson for Sen. Lisa Baker, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the committee will hold hearings on the issue in the coming weeks. Still, bystanders marveled that its not every day that Rep. Mike Jones, a conservative lawmaker from York, would be followed at the lectern by the likes of Pittsburgh Democratic Rep. Ed Gainey. But they found common ground. Jones cited law enforcement resources and familiar Right on Crime arguments about protecting individual liberty and eliminating waste. Every time we incarcerate an able-bodied person, we pay an economic price for doing so. As for Gainey, he spoke on a more emotional level: We dont need criminal justice reform. We need criminal justice reconstruction. We gotta give lives back the lives that weve taken. This undated photo provided by the Columbia Police Department shows Samantha Josephson, a University of South Carolina student who was reported missing after last being seen Friday, March 29, 2019. The university on Saturday confirmed the death of the student. (Columbia Police Department via AP) Read more COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) A bill has been introduced in the South Carolina Legislature to require Uber and Lyft drivers to have illuminated signs days after police say a college student mistakenly got into the wrong car and was kidnapped and killed. House Speaker Jay Lucas immediately put the bill on the calendar for Wednesday to be debated. Rep. Seth Rose said the bill was in response to the Friday killing of 21-year-old University of South Carolina student Samantha Josephson. Police say Josephson had ordered an Uber ride early Friday, but mistakenly got into a similar car driven by 24-year-old Nathaniel David Rowland. Police say he killed Josephson with a sharp object and dumped her body. Rowland skipped a first court appearance, and records do not show if he has a lawyer. Josephson, of Robbinsville, Mercer County, was expected to graduate this spring and begin classes in the fall at Drexel Universitys law school. A 20-year-old Burlington County paratrooper was fatally shot Saturday in a training exercise in Alaska, the Army announced Monday. Spec. Nicholas Peter DiMona III, of Medford Lakes, was participating in a live-fire exercise near Fort Greely when he was shot, the Army said in a news release. DiMona received immediate medical care on site and then was taken by helicopter to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The shooting is under investigation, the Army said. DiMona was assigned to the Fourth Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, U.S. Army Alaska. He joined the Army in July 2017 and trained at Fort Benning, Ga., before reporting to Alaska in April 2018. Nick was an outstanding paratrooper with an infectious personality and an uncanny desire to excel no matter the challenge, said Col. Jason Jones, brigade commander. He will be missed by the entire Spartan Brigade. Our hearts and prayers go out to his family. DiMonas father also died in a training exercise, in 2004. Chief Warrant Officer Nicholas P. DiMona II, 32, had flown in the Iraq War and was a lead pilot during the first combat mission of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. DiMona II, of Barrington, was piloting an Apache Longbow in Georgia on June 22, 2004, when the helicopter crashed, killing DiMona and Warrant Officer William L. Loffer, 25, of Indiana. Nicholas III was 5 years old at the time. This April 17, 2017, photo released by the U.S. Marine Corps shows a AH-1Z Viper preparing to land at the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range, Calif. Two pilots were killed Saturday in an AH-1Z Viper helicopter crash while conducting a routine training mission near Yuma, Ariz. (Cpl. Harley Robinson/U.S. Marine Corps via AP) Read more Two area service members were killed in separate training accidents over the weekend, the U.S. military announced Monday. Spec. Nicholas Peter DiMona III, 20, of Medford Lakes, was participating in a live-fire exercise near Fort Greely, Alaska, when he was shot, the Army said Monday in a news release. DiMona, a paratrooper, received immediate medical care on site and then was transported by helicopter to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The shooting is under investigation, the Army said. Earlier Monday, a Montgomery County man was identified as one of two Marine pilots who died in a helicopter crash during a training mission in southwestern Arizona. Maj. Matthew M. Wiegand, 34, of Ambler, and Capt. Travis W. Brannon, 30, of Nashville, Tenn., were killed in a helicopter crash Saturday night on the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma training grounds in Arizona. The cause of the crash is under investigation. DiMona was assigned to the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, U.S. Army Alaska. He joined the Army in July 2017 and trained at Fort Benning, Ga., before reporting to Alaska in April 2018. Nick was an outstanding paratrooper with an infectious personality and an uncanny desire to excel no matter the challenge, said Col. Jason Jones, brigade commander. He will be missed by the entire Spartan Brigade. Our hearts and prayers go out to his family. DiMonas father also died in a training exercise in 2004. Chief Warrant Officer Nicholas P. DiMona II, 32, had flown in the Iraq War and was a lead pilot during the first combat mission of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. DiMona II, of Barrington, was piloting an Apache Longbow in Georgia on June 22, 2004, when the helicopter crashed, killing DiMona and Warrant Officer William L. Loffer, 25, of Indiana. Nicholas DiMona III was 5 years old at the time. Wiegand, who joined the Marines in 2008, was assigned to the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One in Yuma. His previous duty stations included the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla; the Marine Corps Base Camp in Pendleton, Calif.; and the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma. Marine Corps officials said the AH-1Z Viper crashed while the pilots were conducting a training mission as part of a weapons and tactical instructor course. Marine officials said Wiegand previously deployed in support of a Unit Deployment Program in Okinawa, Japan, and his personal decorations included the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with a gold star. Officials said Wiegand held qualifications in the AH-1Z Viper and AH-1W Super Cobra. This article contains information from the Associated Press. Gerald O'Malley in front of the emergency section of the Lower Bucks Hospital in Bristol last December. O'Malley and 14 of his colleagues at three Philly-area hospitals owned by Prime Healthcare successfully fought to receive the six weeks of wages owed to them. Read more This wasnt a fight that Gerald OMalley was going to back away from. Late last year, OMalley and 14 of his colleagues at three emergency rooms in the region pushed back against Prime Healthcare, the hospitals owner, after losing weeks of back pay during a switch in staffing contractors. The group rejected a proposal by the new company, Progressive Emergency Physicians, to sign a contract and receive the money owed to them as a retention bonus if they agreed to a 20 percent pay cut. In early February, the group reached an agreement with Prime, netting the salaries they were owed collectively more than $200,000 as well as malpractice insurance and legal fees, according to OMalley and two others privy to the settlements details who discussed the outcome for the first time publicly this week. One doctor, who had been fired by Prime, was excluded from the settlement and is mulling legal action. This feels good. It feels like a victory," OMalley said. From the beginning, this was a David-versus-Goliath situation, and 15 of us stood up to these companies to say No, youre not going to take advantage of us. A spokeswoman for Prime, which operates Lower Bucks, Roxborough Memorial, and Suburban Community Hospitals, did not return a request for comment. Progressives chief operating officer, David Calabrese, declined to comment on the settlement Tuesday, saying only that the company is very proud to be giving exceptional care at all three hospitals and stressing that each facility is fully staffed. In the fall, Prime unexpectedly terminated its contract with Legacy Physician Partners, a third-party staffing company it had hired to fill the ERs at the three small community hospitals. Legacy, headquartered in Tennessee, had become insolvent, leaving a six-week gap in the salaries of the ER doctors at the local hospitals. In the interim, OMalley and his colleagues were encouraged, they said, to continue working with the promise of being made whole. Progressive, as Legacys replacement, offered to give the doctors the money Legacy owed to them incrementally as a term in a new contract. Some signed, but others, including OMalley, felt the practice was predatory Progressives contract came with a 20 percent cut in salary. The 15 doctors who left began a public-information campaign, speaking out against the practice they deemed unfair. They hired a lawyer, sought guidance from industry groups, and staged one, effective demonstration. During a January corporate event held by Prime at the Manayunk Brewing Company, OMalley and his colleagues showed up wearing custom T-shirts printed with the words Hey, Progressive! Wheres my money? Two days later, their lawyer received a phone call from Primes legal team. Its a shame that we had to go through what we went through, OMalley said. But if we can bring this to the national stage, and craft some language that other doctors can use in their own contracts to prevent this, itll be worth it. The group plans to present a sample paragraph with that language at the American College of Emergency Physicians convention this fall. LAS VEGAS, NV, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- United Rail, Inc. (OTCPK: URAL), a short line railroad consolidator and owner of the SmartRail brand for electronic Precision Railroading and brand licensor, today announced that it will attend the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association (ASLRRA) Connections Convention and Expo, Saturday, April 6 through Tuesday, April 9 at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, FL. The Company will be meeting with industry organizations and analysts, institutional investors and acquisition prospects. To schedule a meeting, contact Michael Mason, EVP (michael@unitedrailinc.com) at (917) 841-8371. Founded in 1913, ASLRRA proudly represents the entrepreneurial owners and operators of short line and regional railroads throughout North America. The ASLRRA holds an annual convention each spring that encompasses an annual meeting and breakout tracks with an exhibition. The meeting topics are determined by the current trends, changes, or developments within the rail industry that includes timely presentations by industry leaders, safety experts and government officials. Attendees include railroad officials, rail supply representatives and government officials from the U.S., Canada and Mexico. As the only exhibition that is dedicated to short line and regional railroads, the meeting attracts over 1,500 attendees. About United Rail Inc. United Rail, Inc. is in the business of acquiring short line railroads in the freight operations space. The company has been active in this space for several years. It has operated both passenger rail excursions and short line freight operations and plans to develop rail infrastructure projects and terminal operations. Contact: Michael Mason, EVP United Rail, Inc. michael@unitedrailinc.com (917) 841-8371 Media Contact: Success City Online Ms. Maria Bailey Maria@successcityonline.com (702) 271-0591 Sheriff Jewell Williams, who has held office since January 2012, is seeking reelection. Mayor Jim Kenney renewed a call for him to resign. Read more Philadelphia officials have agreed to pay $127,500 to a former employee of the Sheriffs Office who last year sued the city, claiming that repeated sexual harassment by Sheriff Jewell Williams rendered her emotionally broken and caused her to quit her job. The City of Philadelphia was the defendant in this case. The decision to settle was made by the Law Department. The settlement was in the best legal interests of the city after a careful analysis of the case, a spokesperson for the Law Department said in an email Wednesday. Lauri A. Kavulich, a lawyer representing Williams, 61, said Williams had no part in the decision to settle the suit brought by Marlaina Williams (no relation), 35, who was employed in the Sheriffs Office in a variety of assignments from February 2013 to June 2017. The parties in the case decided to settle prior to the case proceeding. It does not mean that the allegations are true. The sheriff was prepared to fight this more aggressively, Kavulich said. The settlement led Mayor Jim Kenney to renew a call for Williams to resign from the office he has held since January 2012 and to which he is seeking reelection. I have previously called for the sheriff to step down following multiple credible complaints of sexual harassment. In light of this latest settlement, my position remains the same. It is extremely important that all women feel safe and respected in their workplace, Kenney said in an email Wednesday. Thats why last year I announced an update to the administrations sexual harassment prevention policy and governing executive order," he said, "as well as an expansion of the sexual harassment training program and a new online complaint form to better protect and support city employees. I urge all independently elected officials in Philadelphia to adopt policies and procedures that are just as strong. The mayor first called on Williams to step down in November 2017, when the Inquirer and Daily News reported on Marlaina Williams allegations and those of Vanessa Bines, a Sheriffs Office employee who filed a lawsuit claiming that Sheriff Williams sexually harassed her from 2013 to 2015. Bines is still employed by the office. The Law Department spokesperson declined to comment about Bines' suit, citing the ongoing litigation in this matter. The Mayors Office of Labor Relations last year substantiated Marlaina Williams' allegations following what it called a thorough investigation involving interviews with the sheriff and other witnesses. The investigation concluded that the sheriff had made inappropriate comments that violated the citys sexual harassment policy. In her statement, the sheriffs lawyer pointed to changes in department policy regarding sexual harassment. Sheriff Williams does not tolerate sexual harassment or discrimination in the Sheriffs Office. To that end, the Sheriffs Office underwent sexual harassment training in January 2018, Kavulich said. Since that time, the office has also commissioned an independent review of the policies and procedures of the Sheriffs Office to ensure the office is doing its best to protect against harassment. In response to the investigation findings, Williams issued a statement denying the allegations. I would hope that people would let due process prevail, because I am sure that I will be vindicated in the final analysis, the statement said. The lawsuits filed by Marlaina Williams and Bines followed a 2011 lawsuit filed by a woman who accused Williams of similar behavior when he was a state representative from the 197th District in North Philadelphia. The Democratic caucus of the state House settled that suit with the woman in 2012 for $30,000. In her lawsuit, Marlaina Williams said the sheriff expressed his sexual interest in her through comments and on multiple occasions summoned her to his office and tried to kiss her. She alleged that by December 2013, the harassment changed after the sheriff became aware she was in a relationship with another employee. The sheriff expressed his disapproval, she wrote, by saying, Im jealous that he gets to go home with you and not me. Other statements attributed to him included You should leave him and be with me, and I havent had sex in two years, so if Im not happy no ones gonna be happy. In a complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in September 2017, her lawyer, Steven Auerbach, wrote: As a result of her employers conduct, complainant suffered a panic attack in June 2016 and was rushed to Thomas Jefferson" University Hospital. "Since then, she has suffered related health issues as a consequence of the discrimination which she was forced to endure. Marlaina Williams, who is Muslim, also alleged that the sheriff made anti-Muslim statements. Bines alleges in her lawsuit that in addition to Sheriff Williams harassing her, so did Deputy Sheriff Paris Washington. She claimed Williams retaliated against her after she rejected his advances. Maria Quinones-Sanchez is calling on law enforcement to investigate results of the 2015 primary headed into the May 21 primary where she will face state Rep. Angel Cruz. Read more Seven weeks before votes are cast, the incumbent in Philadelphias 7th Council District is calling for an investigation of possible fraud in the contest. Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez has asked the City Commissioners Office to review data related to highly suspect ballots cast in 2015 and to add training for election workers to ensure voters are not unfairly influenced during the May 21 primary. Quinones-Sanchez, who is seeking a fourth term, has also asked Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro to review the results of the 2015 primary and any new protocols developed to safeguard the results of this years primary. Quinones-Sanchez points to her challenger, State Rep. Angel Cruz, as reason for the alarm. Cruz, the Democratic leader of the 7th Ward, helped run the campaign of Quinones-Sanchezs 2015 challenger, Manny Morales. She has accused both men of using an influx of money from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98 for a program that illegally influenced voters inside voting booths. Cruz has called the accusations frivolous. The race to represent the Seventh District, which includes most of North Philadelphia, Kensington, and Port Richmond, will again pit Quinones-Sanchez against the party-backed ward leaders with whom she has feuded for years. Quinones-Sanchez, in letters to Shapiro and Krasner, cites the $100,000 Local 98 spread around the district in 2015 but does not mention the union by name. In an email to supporters in February, she linked the money to the union. Local 98 leader John Johnny Doc Dougherty, City Councilman Bobby Henon, and six other union officials were indicted Jan. 30, accused of embezzling more than $600,000 from 2010 to 2016. Each has pleaded not guilty. At the heart of Quinones-Sanchezs concerns is a heavy reliance in her district on voter assistance. Voters who wish to bring someone into the voting booth with them to assist can sign an affidavit for permission to do so. In the 2015 primary, more than 1,000 ballots were cast with assistance in 156 divisions in the 7th District, Quinones-Sanchez said. In all the 1,681 other divisions, she said, only 200 assisted votes were cast. Those numbers could not be independently confirmed Tuesday. Quinones-Sanchez, in a news release, accused Cruz of illegal activity four years ago. In an interview, she said a review of that races results suggested an unusually high number of requests for voting assistance in the 7th and 19th Wards, run by Cruz ally Carlos Matos. She lost both wards. When people ask me why this last election was so close, we had no idea how deep they were going, said Quinones-Sanchez, who won that primary by 868 votes.. Cruz dismissed the allegations, noting Quinones-Sanchez made a similar call for authorities to keep an eye out for election fraud in 2015. We havent even voted. The elections two months away and youre going to say people are stealing the election from you? Cruz said. Councilwoman Sanchez needs to stop playing the little boy who cries wolf and wait to see what happens. Im not committing fraud. Cruz said evidence of more people voting with assistance doesnt indicate illegal activity. The voter decides, we dont. People want assistance and thats what that affidavit is there for," he said. "So shes saying the whole process needs changing? Maybe she should run for City Commissioner. Cruz has made no secret of his friendship with Dougherty and said Tuesday hed gladly accept money from Local 98 or any of the citys unions. He said hes asked all of them for donations. Law enforcement officials would not commit to approving a specific fraud-prevention plan for the 7th District. Joe Grace, a spokesperson for Shapiro, noted the state attorney general had investigated election-fraud allegations in a 2017 special election in the state Houses 197th District, which overlaps with the Council district. Four people were charged with crimes; one pleaded guilty to fraud by an election officer. "We will not hesitate to prosecute election law violations wherever we find them, Grace said. Ben Waxman, a spokesperson for Krasners office, said Quinones-Sanchezs letter is being reviewed. We take any report of election fraud extremely seriously and plan to deploy a robust task force during the primary election in May, not only in the 7th District but throughout the city, Waxman said. Two parents are suing Valley Forge Military Academy after the school's president, retired Major Gen. Walter T. Lord, resigned over a clash with the board of trustees. Read more The battle over the future of the controversy-plagued Valley Forge Military Academy is headed into a federal courtroom in a lawsuit filed by parents of two cadets who are angry over last months ouster of the schools popular president. The suit filed Monday in U.S. District Court by parents Derek James Graham, who lives in New Hampshire, and Scott Keith Newell, a South Carolina resident seeks to bring stability to the grades 6-12 academy after a month of turmoil by removing the current trustees chairman, John English, and replacing him with another school parent. Its our belief that weve watched the decline of our beloved alma mater, said Newell, who added that both he and his father are Valley Forge alumni and that he sent his son there because of faith in then-president Walter Lord, who left last month under murky circumstances. Bad decisions are being made by the board. Newell, Graham, and their attorney, Leno Thomas, said the plaintiffs would like the Delaware County school to at least temporarily bring back Lord a 54-year-old retired Army major general and a Valley Forge alum whod been on the job for only a year if English can be removed from the board. English and current school leaders did not have an immediate response to the lawsuit. Lords attorney, Bryan Lentz, did not return a call for comment. The parents sought an emergency temporary restraining order and injunction that, in addition to restoring Lord until at least the end of the year, would have barred the school from destroying any relevant documents and froze its accounts. But U.S. District Judge Nitza I. Quinones Alejandro denied that request Tuesday in a one-page order. Pennsylvanias last remaining military-style secondary school, which was founded in 1928 and which has produced notable alumni such as writer J.D. Salinger and Iraq War Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, has been racked by discord since the departure of Lord, who was working to address declining enrollment, disciplinary problems, and other issues. Yearly tuition for boarding students at the all-boys academy in Wayne is approximately $45,000. Lord cited philosophical differences with English at the time of his unexpected resignation, and English asked him to leave the school two days later. Many alumni and other stakeholders appeared to side with Lord. More than 2,100 of them signed a Change.org petition urging greater transparency and the presidents return, and about 100 showed up at last months alumni association meeting to press similar demands and call for the boards resignation. The suit lawyer Thomas said it was filed in federal court because the parents live in differing states maintains English violated school bylaws because Lords departure was not voted upon by the entire board in a proper fashion. It also alleges English failed to inform other trustees about a critical report presented in December 2018 by the Healy Educational Foundation that cited dire conditions at Valley Forge and said its endowment was $10 million short of what is needed to fund the school in times of scarcity. There is upheaval there and the chairman thinks that he can do anything that he wants that its his way or the highway, Thomas said. Parents have created a GoFundMe page to pay for the legal fees involved. The suit asks that another Valley Forge parent, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, of Gladwyne, founder of a health-care analytics firm, be placed on the board and be granted decision-making powers to return the school to stability. Newell said in an interview that hes long been concerned about the future of the school and that he only sent his son, currently a high school freshman, there because he was impressed with Lord and his leadership style. Ive watched this school bleed to death over the last 20 years from bad management, poor decisions, he said. I didnt think it was going to survive much longer, until Walt Lord sprang on the scene last year. Said Graham: We bought into his vision. We got it, folks: The new motto for the Democratic City Committee, courtesy of party honcho Bob Brady, sure to send a patriotic shiver down your spine. I know what it looks like. But we just had to do what we had to do. And just what was it that the committee had to do, Brady told my colleagues Chris Brennan and Claudia Vargas? Why, it had to summon the moral resolve to endorse an accused serial sexual harasser for sheriff. Sheriff! Now, Sheriff Jewell Williams with two settled sexual-harassment claims against him, and another one moving through federal court will have the partys official support. Most important, in a primary cycle that typically gets little publicity, Williams will have his name plastered on Democratic sample ballots which are some voters first introduction to candidates. Its not an insurmountable hurdle for challengers, but its a crucial get. Welcome to a depressing rehash of what our Democratic City Committee is willing to overlook in a candidate. This is, after all, the party machine that endorsed Anthony Clark, the city commissioner who oversees voting and couldnt be bothered to vote, or even to show up regularly for his job. In 2015, it endorsed Manny Morales, a party hack, over Maria Quinones-Sanchez, the experienced two-term Council incumbent known for her independence. To be fair, the committee did withdraw its endorsement after Quinones-Sanchez surfaced a slew of racist, homophobic posts from Morales Facebook page, going back years. Great research skills, guys. Phillys Democratic Party system itself is under a microscope this year, and rightfully so. The reams of young, progressive, qualified candidates who have put their names forth in this years races have thrown the old way of things into sharper relief. Look at the very mechanics of the committees endorsements: Each candidate gets three minutes to give a speech to the partys policy committee. Connected candidates are often walked in by an influential ward leader. And whos waiting for them when they enter that room? Veteran ward leaders and committeemen and -women, and even, some who have attended the meetings have told me, marquee names from the latest federal indictments. Like Bobby Henon, the city councilman facing potential federal time, who doesnt vote on endorsements but whose presence is not exactly reassuring. Its never been a level playing field. In this kind of atmosphere, how can the newcomers and desperately needed fresh voices and all those supporting them gain any kind of footing? Williams, in this case, is just the latest, if most glaring, disgrace. Its a measure of how tone-deaf and entitled Phillys party has become when Brady and his colleagues look at the national conversation on sexual assault and harassment, the #MeToo movement, the man in the White House, the groundswell of support for first-time candidates and progressive politics, and think, Yeah, Jewell Williams is our guy. Brady, who, after all, just had to do what he had to do, says that the party has offered a diverse slate, gives new candidates a fair shot and, in fact, conducts a lot of research before that three-minute interview. But talking with Brady about Williams is exhibit No. 1 for why we need new leadership to break up the old guard. Brady said his understanding, from Williams lawyer, was that his accusers were working together on this. And that Williams didnt want to settle he wanted to go to trial. Brady offered this caveat on the allegations against Williams: The complaints said he did something, not touching. (He immediately apologized after I called him out on it. I made a mistake, he said.) And who was he, he asked me, to instill his will on ward leaders, labor bosses, black clergy, and the police union, who all supported Williams? (Hes only the most powerful Democrat in the city, but I digress.) I couldnt take a guys livelihood away because of an accusation, Brady said. Were not judge and jury. No, theyre just the same old Democratic City Committee. Over the past year, a much-needed light has been shed on the issues of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Due to the bravery of survivors sharing their stories, businesses, government agencies, and schools are implementing more effective policies to help prevent these horrific situations. In the face of traumatic experiences, those in need are aided by programs supported by the Violence Against Women Act, also known as VAWA. First signed into law in 1994 with bipartisan support, VAWA lapsed following the prolonged government shutdown earlier this year. This left programs reliant on government funding in untenable positions. Without the reauthorization of VAWA, many domestic violence shelters and womens organizations supported by this law would soon be forced to make difficult decisions that limit the services they are able to provide. Needless to say, VAWA reauthorization demands the immediate attention of Congress. Our bipartisan legislation, which we introduced last month, restores funding to this effective and impactful program while offering several new provisions that protect women, children, and men. In addition to reinstating STOP Grants, which are distributed between law enforcement, prosecutors, victim services, and courts to combat violent crimes, and expanding other grants that assist survivors, our VAWA proposal seeks to eliminate the root causes of sexual violence and harassment through comprehensive prevention education to students at colleges and universities throughout the country. This legislation funds programs to educate children about bullying and trafficking, train campus health centers to recognize and respond to violence, and engage men in violence-prevention strategies. It also requires that the vast majority of appropriated VAWA funds go to states to combat sexual harassment using inclusive and culturally-sensitive measures. Moreover, it addresses the issues of bullying and cyberstalking to improve the physical and mental health of our children. To see the tangible impacts of VAWA funds, we need look no further than our own districts and workplaces. In Bucks County, right outside of Philadelphia, there is just one shelter that services women and children in imminent danger of domestic abuse. While there is only room for seven families at A Womans Place, with the aid of VAWA funding, its staff credits the organization with saving nearly 150 lives just last year. In South Los Angeles, the Jenesse Center helps hundreds every year. VAWA funding has supported the growth of Jenesses legal department, which provides direct legal services that not only assist survivors in securing immediate safety, but also help them achieve long-term goals of stability and self-sufficiency. VAWA funding is integral to Jenesses transitional, or bridge, housing program for survivors. After overcoming the initial crisis phase, people need space and time to rebuild family bonds, secure education and vocational training, and receive the mental health counseling needed to heal from trauma. VAWA is not just benefitting organizations in Philadelphia or Los Angeles it saves lives nationwide. Now is the time for Congress to take action. When lives hang in the balance, enacting policy that protects our fellow citizens from violence must transcend political affiliation and ideology. We urge our colleagues in the House and Senate, along with the president, to work in a bipartisan manner to swiftly reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. Brian Fitzpatrick represents Pennsylvanias 1st District and is serving his second term in Congress. He previously was a federal prosecutor and an FBI supervisory special agent. Karen Bass represents Californias 37th District and is serving her fifth term in Congress. She is chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. (From left) Science Leadership Academy at Beeber senior Amir Curry, 18; Workshop School sophomore Charles Mitchell, 16; and Academy at Palumbo senior Nayeli Perez, 18, stand for a portrait with one of their signs at the Philadelphia Student Union office in West Philadelphia last month. Read more How could any responsible person oppose a measure that might prevent a school shooting? When framed that way, the decision of the Philadelphia Board of Education to require all district high schools to use metal detectors doesnt seem controversial. The fact that the students whom the metal detectors are intended to protect protested the decision illustrates the conundrum that our age of unspeakable violence has created. Last week, the Philadelphia Board of Education voted to require that all schools use metal detectors. While all 49 high schools in the Philadelphia school district have metal detectors, three dont actively use them. The Science Leadership Academy, one of the citys most reputable magnet schools, is one of these three. SLA is moving from Center City to an unused part of the Ben Franklin school on North Broad. The board wanted to set a standard to prevent a situation in which after the SLA move, students in the same facility would be treated differently with some required to go through a metal detector and some not. Student activists, on the other hand, argue that metal detectors erode the trust between schools and students. Because the students themselves are usually the ones being screened, they say that installing metal detectors signal that they are viewed as threats. The two nonvoting student members of the board opposed the decision. There isnt a lot of research about the positive or negative safety or social effects of metal detectors in schools. A review of the evidence published in the journal of the American School Health Association found mixed results. While one study did find that fewer students carry weapons to schools that do use metal detectors than schools that do not, that reduction did not translate to less violence in schools. The sad fact is that metal detectors wont prevent the most frequent form of violence in schools, such as bullying. Some experts believe that they also are unlikely to prevent the most severe, such as a mass shootings. If someone with a semiautomatic weapon is motivated to shoot up a school, the students in line for the metal detector and the operator would likely be the first victims. Its impossible to know what the outcome would have been if places like Newtown, Conn., or Parkland, Fla., had metal detectors, but detectors might have slowed down the path of destruction. Everytown for Gun Safety has tracked at least 431 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in the past six years. Metal detectors, like body scanners in airports and other more intrusive forms of security monitoring, are ugly reminders that something is terribly wrong making them terribly necessary. But as long as there are metal detectors in school, all students should be treated equally magnet or not. The ultimate goal, though, must be to make metal detectors in schools obsolete. That would require interventions, such as addressing the behavioral needs of students. It would also require Harrisburg to enact gun-control measures. Until then, we will continue spending education dollars on security measures, not books. Former US Vice President Joe Biden speaks during the First State Democratic Dinner in Dover, Delaware, on March 16, 2019. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images/TNS) Read more That politics can be a bouncy up-and-down affair is nicely framed by a Pennsylvania poll last week with Joe Biden leading in the Keystone State, and national discussion this week about whether Bidens done before he starts. An Emerson Poll released Friday had Biden, who hasnt formally announced for president, well ahead here in a large Democratic field: 39 percent support him, compared with 20 percent for Bernie Sanders, 11 percent for Elizabeth Warren, and everybody else in single digits or zippo. No surprise, really. Bidens a Pennsylvania native with near-universal name ID. And since the states presidential primary is more than a year away, theres no campaign here. Voters go with what they know. And they know Joe. But hes got problems. Beyond just his coed cuddles. Yes, theres the shoulders-touch, hair-sniff, top-of-the-head-kiss thing alleged by former Democratic Nevada assemblywoman, former lieutenant governor candidate, former congressional candidate, former Bernie Sanders supporter Lucy Flores. Says she got unwelcome Biden backstage snuggling before a political rally in 2014. Got lots of attention. Not good for Joe. And Bidens initial statements didnt help. First, he said he doesnt recall such an encounter with Flores, but believes she should be heard: She has every right to share her own recollection. How generous, right? Then came an admission of his tendency to show expressions of affection (really, we hadnt noticed), accompanied by his assertion that not once never did I believe I acted inappropriately. Thats believable. I mean, its believable he believes he didnt act inappropriately. But when ones actions involve another person, the other person gets a say in whats appropriate and whats not. The Biden pushback also includes revisiting two past expressions of affection. Episodes, well-aired at the time, that sure looked like unwanted Joe. Now, Stephanie Carter, wife of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, says Bidens hands on her shoulders during her husbands 2015 swearing-in was merely a moment between close friends and not, as often portrayed, classic creepy Biden. Same for the seemingly get-me-outta-here response to a Biden close encounter by the then-13-year old daughter of Sen. Christopher Coons (D., Del.) at his 2015 swearing-in. Coons tells the Washington Post his family is close to the Bidens, Joes known the girl all her life, and she wasnt uncomfortable with Joes public display of affection. Fair enough. But, of course, a second woman, Amy Lappos, has come forward with another story of unsought touching. This one at a 2009 Connecticut fund-raiser, a neck-grab followed by a nose-to-nose rub from Biden that she thought was an incoming lip lock. What are the odds there wont be more? Fairly or not, Bidens tactile tendencies, no matter how he (or you) may view them, are far from pluses during #MeToo times, in a party where womens energy and a nominees electability are prime driving forces. The skeezy-touchy issue fades or vanishes in a Biden-vs.-Donald Trump general election. Neither side wants a debate on nose-rub vs. grab 'em by the you-know-what. But its in play if Biden enters the Democratic primary, a contest including several women, as the party aims for a ticket appealing to women to unseat Trump. National Republican consultant John Brabender says, I would not be surprised if this keeps him out of the race. OK, but dont Republicans fear Biden beats Trump, and want Biden out? Maybe. But there are Democrats who fear Biden could keep Democrats home. Their argument is times have changed, the party changed, Bidens got baggage past positions on desegregation, crime bills, abortion, Anita Hill and a not-so-stellar campaign history. Hes got no electoral track record outside one small state [Delaware], and as a running mate to a candidate who engendered wild enthusiasm, says a top Democratic consultant requesting anonymity due to party ties. Also, Bidens prior presidential runs ended quickly: dropped out in January 2008 after getting 1 percent in the Iowa caucus; dropped out in 1987, even before the election year began, following reports he plagiarized speeches. So, the head and shoulders, nose-to-nose news wont help a Biden rollout. But even if that news ends and passes, Bidens got other problems to surmount for a third shot at the White House regardless of his standing in Pennsylvania. Bryce Harper waves to fans during the Home Run Derby at Nationals Park last year. Read more Bryce Harper knows he might hear some boos at Nationals Park. But that didnt stop him from thanking D.C. fans in a heartfelt Instagram post hours before Tuesdays Phillies-Nationals game. If you would have told me 5 years ago I would be walking into Nationals Park as an opposing player, I wouldve told you that you were crazy, he wrote. Five years later, Im doing just that. I remember the first day I walked into Nats Park. my first base hit. My first home run. And, of course, my first standing ovation. Nationals fans delivered that first ovation. It turns out, Harper never wanted to leave D.C. A Washington Post report published Monday revealed that the slugger hoped to remain a National, but the team didnt put together the type of deal he was seeking. He met with the Lerners, the team owners, right before Christmas and thought he could persuade them to reconsider the deal they had offered him at the end of the regular season. He thought he had done it. Im sitting there like: Im going to be a National. Im going to be a National, he told the Post. Theyre going to make me an offer this week. Were going to build off of that, and its going to happen. I told Kayla, Be ready to go back. I flat-out told her. I was psyched. I was like, Be ready to go back, because if we can, were going back. I was pumped. That all changed after he met with John and Leigh Middleton in February. The Phillies ended up offering 13 years and $330 million. The years were important to Harper he didnt want to have an opt-out every year, which the Dodgers offered. I would have been right back like it was in D.C., with everyone saying, Whats he going to do next? Harper said. I didnt want that. Now, Harper and his wife, Kayla, are making good on the promise that theyre turning Philadelphia into their home. They announced Monday that theyre expecting a son, due in August. LISTEN: Will Bryce Harper get booed? Our beat writers discuss. But Harper still has to return to the place he called home, and hell be doing it for the next 13 seasons. Tuesday is the first of 10 games the Phillies will play at Nationals Park this year. So he offered up his gratitude for the city its restaurants and countless other places" that made it feel like home and the team: the staff, the Lerner family, and general manager Mike Rizzo. Im so blessed to have been able to play for a fan base that cared so much about our team each and every night, he wrote. You will always hold a special place in my heart no matter what. Get insights on the Phillies delivered straight to your inbox with Extra Innings, our newsletter for Phillies fans by Matt Breen, Bob Brookover and Scott Lauber. Click here to sign up. Get unlimited access from first pitch through Game 162 (and maybe the playoffs?) by subscribing today: 77 cents a week for 13 weeks. Mayor Jim Kenney, seen here on July 4 during the Celebration of Freedom ceremony at Independence Hall. Read more Mayor Kenney won't renew a controversial city contract that allows federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to access a key law-enforcement database, known as PARS, and use that information against undocumented but otherwise law-abiding immigrants in Philadelphia. "I cannot in good conscience allow the agreement to continue," the mayor said. The decision, announced Friday, follows months of consultation with community groups, lawyers, and immigrant advocates, and weeks of tumultuous protests by anti-ICE demonstrators, who on Wednesday took over and held a City Hall stairway. ICE officials criticized the city's action as "needlessly compromising public safety," and Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Katie Waldman called it "an irresponsible decision that results in the city harboring criminal aliens." "Sanctuary city policies make American communities like Philadelphia less safe by putting the rights of criminal aliens over the safety and security of American citizens," she said in a statement. "Despite the misguided action taken by Philadelphia today, DHS will continue to work to remove illegal aliens and uphold public safety." Kenney made his announcement at City Hall, in a ceremonial room that quickly filled with raucous cheering by pro-immigrant groups that have insisted the PARS agreement must end. Blanca Pacheco came to City Hall surrounded by children, all of whom, she said, now know that raising their voices can create change. "They're part of the work," said the assistant director of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia. Kenney said the loud, public demands of Occupy ICE demonstrators still encamped outside City Hall as he spoke played little role in his thinking. Crucial to him was the city's legal standing, affirmed after a federal court victory last month, and providing basic, humane treatment of people who came here from other lands. "All of us have ancestors who were once immigrants," the mayor said, choking up. "All of us." PARS is an acronym for a real-time computer database of arrests, operated by the city and shared via contract with ICE, the federal agency responsible for finding and deporting people in the country without documentation. Kenney said he had grown concerned that ICE was using the database "in inappropriate ways," including to conduct investigations of undocumented immigrants who had not broken any other laws. That sows fear and distrust in immigrant communities, he said, with the effect of discouraging crime victims and witnesses from coming forward. Discussions with ICE officials did not allay those concerns, but confirmed them, Kenney said. According to the Kenney administration: At a July 18 meeting, ICE officials conceded that the agency's use of PARS can result in immigration enforcement actions against city residents who have not been accused or convicted of a crime. ICE claimed it was impractical to adopt procedures that would prevent agents from arresting law-abiding residents for civil immigration violations when the agency acted on information found in PARS. Each day, ICE probes PARS to find people who were born outside the United States, then targets them for further investigation, even though the database does not list their immigration status. The agency produced no information to allay city officials' concerns about the profiling of residents by race, ethnicity, or national origin. In a letter to the city, ICE officials denied any profiling. Three city entities rely on PARS: the District Attorney's Office, the court system, and the Police Department, which is responsible to the mayor. In the past, consensus among the three allowed the agreement with ICE to continue. Now, both District Attorney Larry Krasner and the mayor have withdrawn their consent, and the court system, officials say, has abstained. Though PARS does not collect information on immigration status, advocates contend the database is dangerous because it notes country of origin and Social Security numbers enough for ICE agents to undertake an investigation. "Data and speed is the perfect combo for ICE to use Philly resources to hunt down immigrants," Juntos spokesman Miguel Andrade tweeted earlier this month. Kenney has been outspoken in support of immigrants, including filing a federal "sanctuary city" lawsuit against the Trump administration over the right to limit police cooperation with ICE. Last month, a federal judge ruled for Philadelphia, saying the city's position was based on policies that were reasonable, rational, and equitable. The PARS matter has simmered since the weather turned warm. This month, as many as 175 demonstrators massed outside the Center City office of ICE, calling for the agency to be abolished, the family detention center in Berks County to be closed, and the PARS agreement to end. Forcibly removed from those environs, an Occupy ICE encampment quickly relocated to the east side of City Hall. "PARS is over," activist Deborah Rose shouted through a megaphone as the mayor spoke inside on Friday. "It's done." The 33-year-old West Philadelphia protester led a dozen others into the street for a victory lap. Others felt the enthusiasm. "It's exciting that this movement has really pushed [the mayor] to recognize the issue and address it," said Michelle Ziogas, 27. ICE was told of the PARS cancellation on Thursday, in an emailed letter from City Solicitor Marcel Pratt. The contract expires Aug. 31. He wrote that the decision was consistent with the administration's "Welcoming City" policies, "which reflect the principle that our city is safer, healthier, and more inviting" when residents need not be in fear about their immigration status. Quetcy Lozada, Philadelphia, spends her last day of two weeks as a volunteer for the Salvation Army delivering water in Cayey, Puerto Rico, Tuesday October 31, 2017. Read more WASHINGTON - A massive emergency aid bill for victims of hurricanes, wildfires, flooding and other natural disasters was defeated in the Senate on Monday amid a fight between Democrats and President Donald Trump over relief for Puerto Rico. Senate Democrats opposed the $13.45 billion legislation, saying the $600 million included for Puerto Rico's food stamp program is inadequate to meet the U.S. territory's needs as it attempts to recover from Hurricane Maria. The Democrats are embracing a House-passed relief bill containing hundreds of millions of dollars more for Puerto Rico than the GOP version, but it, too, failed to advance Monday as Republicans opposed it. Trump opposes sending any additional aid to Puerto Rico apart from the food stamp money, funding Republicans convinced him to accept as the price for passing the long-pending disaster bill. The vote on the GOP bill was 44 in favor and 49 against. The House Democratic bill failed on a vote of 48-46. Sixty votes would have been needed for either piece of legislation to advance. It's unclear whether Congress and the administration will move forward to revive the emergency package, and the impasse risks indefinitely delaying disaster funding nationwide amid partisan sniping. Support for disaster aid is often bipartisan on Capitol Hill, but the dispute over this legislation has become increasingly bitter, despite the evident need around the country. Ahead of the vote, Republicans accused Democrats of holding up much-needed aid for a range of disasters, from flooding in the Midwest and tornadoes in the south to volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, so they could use Puerto Rico as a political issue against the president. "This is no time for our colleagues across the aisle to prioritize a political fight with the president ahead of the urgent needs of communities across our country," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on the floor of his chamber Monday. "This does not need to be a difficult partisan decision." Trump weighed in on Twitter earlier Monday in support of the legislation, which was authored in part by Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., one of his closest allies in the Senate. "Democrats should stop fighting Sen. David Perdue's disaster relief bill. They are blocking funding and relief for our great farmers and rural America!" Trump wrote. But Democrats are furious over Trump's reluctance to send assistance to Puerto Rico, a stance the president has articulated in private meetings with aides and repeated last week in a closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans. Trump contended in his meeting with Senate Republicans that Puerto Rico has already gotten more disaster relief than many states. He cited a figure of $91 billion in aid, though that sum reflects an estimate of how much funding the island could receive over time and is more than twice as much as federal agencies have actually obligated or approved thus far. "Republicans must remember that - just as we leave no soldier behind on the battlefield - we help our fellow Americans when there's a disaster, wherever the disaster strikes," Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote in an opinion piece published in the New York Daily News over the weekend. "We do not abandon them. Period. The president and Senate Republicans' actions on Puerto Rico can be described in only two words: cruel and nasty." Trump said last week that he's taken better care of Puerto Rico than any human being living. Puerto Rico's governor, Ricardo Rosello, a Democrat, recently described Trump as a "bully" and threatened during an interview on CNN to punch him in the mouth. Rosello has publicly called on Congress to approve House Democrats' version of the bill - although without specifically opposing the Senate GOP version. House Democrats' bill does not include funding for the historic flooding that swept through Iowa, Nebraska and other Midwestern states in mid-March; that measure was completed and passed in January. That gap has allowed Republicans to argue that their bill, which would make billions of dollars available to the Midwest, is the only piece of legislation that addresses the nation's disaster needs in their totality. Democrats, however, say they support adding Midwest flood aid to the House bill, and they tried to offer an amendment to do so Monday but were blocked by Republicans. As a number of Senate Democrats campaigning for president visit Iowa, some Republicans have argued that opposing major disaster aid for the state could be politically risky. The emergency legislation, which has been pending in one form or another since last year, addresses an array of disasters that have befallen different parts of the nation in the past couple years, among them: an earthquake in Alaska; volcanoes in Hawaii; California wildfires; last year's hurricanes that hit North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and the central Northern Marianas Islands; the 2017 hurricanes in Puerto Rico; tornadoes in Alabama and Georgia; and flooding in Iowa, Nebraska and other Midwestern states. The congressional impasse has already led to cuts of about 25 percent to the food stamp benefits received in March by the 1.3 million Puerto Rico residents - 43 percent of the island's population - who rely on the program. If Congress does not pass the funding soon, those people will again have the reduced food stamp allocation. The island's government has also had to cut the size of a supplemental cash benefit to the food stamp program that many elderly Puerto Ricans say they use to buy basic necessities, such as detergent and toothpaste. Rosello says that the food stamp money is criticial for Puerto Rico and that other federal assistance is also necessary, such as money for reconstruction projects and debris removal, and other measures that were included in House Democrats' legislation. The House-passed legislation also included $849 million in Environmental Protection Agency funding for Puerto Rico, as well as a measure that would ensure FEMA picks up the tab for reconstruction projects on the island, as the federal government did after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. In a letter in January, the Trump administration derided the extra EPA funding as "excessive" and worried the FEMA money would go to projects unrelated to the hurricane. It also initially opposed the extension of emergency food stamp aid as "excessive and unnecessary." The lack of funding for Puerto Rico comes as the island grapples with a recession that has lasted over a decade and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee to the states since Hurricane Maria made landfall. Hurricane Maria caused more than $90 billion in damage to the island and killed thousands of people while knocking out power for many of the islands residents for months. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) holds talks with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 1, 2019. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen) BEIJING, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang held talks with visiting New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern here Monday, and the two sides agreed to strengthen cooperation and jointly safeguard rules-based multilateral trade system. Li once again expressed his condolences to Ardern over the deadly shooting incidents in New Zealand's Christchurch City. Stating that bilateral cooperation is "always standing at the forefront of cooperation between China and Western countries," Li said that the two countries now face new opportunities. China stands ready to synergize the Belt and Road Initiative with New Zealand's development strategies, tap into the potential and promote bilateral economic and trade cooperation, Li said. "The two sides should create a fair, just, transparent, convenient and non-discriminatory business environment for enterprises from both countries, accelerate talks on upgrading the bilateral free trade agreement and lift economic and trade cooperation to a higher level," he said. Li also called on the two sides to deepen cooperation in agriculture and animal husbandry, finance, taxation and infrastructure construction, and expand tourism cooperation and people-to-people and cultural exchanges. Both China and New Zealand are responsible countries with a tradition of independent diplomacy, Li said. "We are willing to work with New Zealand to strengthen communication and coordination within the multilateral mechanisms, jointly support rules-based multilateralism and the multilateral trade system, cope with global issues including climate change and promote regional and world peace and development." On bilateral ties, the Chinese premier said that the China-New Zealand relationship maintains a momentum of steady development. With the spirit of mutual respect and equal treatment, the two sides have been constantly strengthening political mutual trust, deepening pragmatic cooperation and strengthening people-to-people and cultural exchanges to pursue common interests and promote the advancement of China-New Zealand comprehensive strategic partnership, Li said, adding that this is not only in the fundamental interests of the two peoples but also conducive to the peace, stability and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region. Ardern said that New Zealand, as one of the first Western countries to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and sign a bilateral free trade agreement, pays high attention to ties with China and is firmly committed to the one-China policy. New Zealand welcomes investment from Chinese enterprises, Ardern said, pledging to create a sound business environment without discrimination against any enterprise from any country. "With a tradition of independent diplomacy, New Zealand will make decisions on major issues independently that are in the interests of its own," the prime minister said. She said New Zealand will work with China to speed up the work and advance talks on upgrading the free trade agreement, strengthen cooperation on issues including climate change and reform of the multilateral trade system and jointly safeguard the international order and the rules-based multilateral trade system. The two sides also exchanged views on international and regional issues of common concern. They also witnessed the signing of cooperation documents on taxation, agriculture, finance and scientific research, and issued a statement on climate change. Ardern arrived in Beijing on Sunday, and this is her first official visit to China since becoming New Zealand's prime minister. 3 1 [ Editor: Zhang Zhou ] SAN JOSE, Calif., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Tech CU (Technology Credit Union) announced today that its 2018 Community Relations program had its best year yet. In 2018, Tech CU, along with its employees and members, contributed more than $255,000 (a 34% increase from 2017) in monetary donations. The company also donated more than 400 volunteer hours, 340 school backpacks/school supplies for low income families and students, and more than 35,000 meals (a 42% increase from last year) to Second Harvest Food Bank. At Tech CU, we believe we have a responsibility to help improve the health and wellbeing of the communities we serve. We do this by partnering with great organizations and donating both time and money, said Todd Harris, CEO of Tech CU. We even have a VTO (volunteer time off) program where employees can take a day fully paid to volunteer at their favorite organization. And, if they use all of their VTO hours during the year, we will make a donation to the charity of their choice. The Bay Area ranks as one of the worlds most affluent areas, yet because of the extreme high cost of living in the Bay Area more than 800,000 residents are living at or below the poverty line, said Janikke Klem, Vice President of Community Relations at Tech CU. This means that many in our community cant afford food. Hungry kids often struggle at school. Families who have trouble putting food on the table also cant afford basic school supplies or a backpack. Education is the best tool to eliminate poverty. This is why much of our effort is focused on equipping underprivileged and vulnerable children with the tools needed to succeed at school. Since 2007, Tech CU has invested more than $2 million in Bay Area communities. This money goes towards supporting local organizations in STEM education (science, technology, engineering and math), workforce development, financial literacy, affordable housing, and health and wellness. These organizations include but are not limited to: Breakthrough Silicon Valley, Family Giving Tree, SVLG Foundation, Morgan Autism Center, The Tech Museum of Innovation, Downtown Streets Team, and San Jose State University. Tech CU is also the only credit union participating in the Housing Trust Silicon Valleys Affordable Housing Fund, which supports affordable housing developers in land acquisition and construction. Tech CUs executive team members also sits on a variety of community boards, including the Housing Trust Silicon Valley, Joint Venture Silicon Valley, San Jose Museum of Art and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group Foundation. To learn more about Tech CUs community relations program, please visit: https://www.techcu.com/About-Tech-CU/Community/ . About Tech CU Tech CU (Technology Credit Union) has assets in excess of $2.8 billion, making it one of the 20 largest credit unions in California. It serves more than 115,000 members throughout the San Francisco Bay Area including employees of such companies as Tesla, eBay, Applied Materials, Nvidia and Facebook. As a federally insured not-for-profit organization, instead of maximizing profits to pay company stockholders, we invest our resources to deliver lower rates, outstanding service and member benefits. Founded in 1960 by the innovative employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, today we continue to be an industry leader, providing convenient and easy-to-use financial products for all stages of our members lives, including personal banking, wealth management, private banking, commercial lending and business banking. In 2019, Tech CU was named the best performing credit union in CA, and third top-performing credit union in the U.S. among 552 credit unions by S&P Global Market Intelligence. To learn more, please visit: www.techcu.com . In this March 24, 2019 photo, The White House is seen behind security barriers in Washington. A White House official turned whistleblower says dozens of people in President Donald Trumps administration were granted access to classified information despite disqualifying issues in their backgrounds including concerns about foreign influence, drug use and criminal conduct. Read more WASHINGTON - A White House whistleblower told lawmakers that more than two dozen denials for security clearances have been overturned during the Trump administration, calling Congress her last hope for addressing what she considers improper conduct that has left the nations secrets exposed. Tricia Newbold, a longtime White House security adviser, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that she and her colleagues issued "dozens" of denials for security clearance applications that were later approved despite their concerns about blackmail, foreign influence or other red flags, according to panel documents released Monday. Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances "were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security" and that she faced retaliation for doing so. Newbold's allegations intensify pressure on the White House over its handling of security clearances, a controversy that burst into public view last year with the revelation that dozens of staffers had temporary approvals to access sensitive government information while they awaited clearance approval. Among them was presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who President Donald Trump ultimately demanded be granted a permanent top-secret clearance, despite the concerns of intelligence officials. Newbold alleged that 25 individuals were given clearances or access to national security information since 2018 despite concerns about ties to foreign influence, conflicts of interests, questionable or criminal conduct, financial problems or drug abuse. That group includes "two current senior White House officials," according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee. The panel did not identify the senior White House officials but asked the White House to immediately provide documents related to the security clearances of nine officials, including Kushner, the president's daughter Ivanka Trump and national security adviser John Bolton. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committee chairman, said in a letter to the White House Counsel's Office that his panel would vote on Tuesday to subpoena Carl Kline, who served as personnel security director at the White House during the first two years of the administration - the committee's first compulsory move aimed at the White House. Newbold alleged that Kline, then her direct manager, overruled her clearance denials and then retaliated against her when she objected. Cummings vowed more subpoenas would follow if the White House did not cooperate with his panel's investigation. "The Committee has given the White House every possible opportunity to cooperate with this investigation, but you have declined," Cummings wrote in the Monday letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone. "Your actions are now preventing the committee from obtaining the information it needs to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities." The White House declined to comment, saying it does not comment on security clearances. An attorney for Kushner and Ivanka Trump referred questions to the White House. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on behalf of Kline, who now works at the Defense Department, and referred questions to the White House. In a letter to the committee, Robert Driscoll, an attorney for Kline, said Kline is willing to voluntarily testify but said his testimony may be constrained by executive privilege issues. "Neither Carl nor I are worried about the merits of this inquiry, as facts always win out in the end," Driscoll said in a statement. In a statement, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, accused Cummings of politicizing an issue that should be bipartisan. "Chairman Cummings' investigation is not about restoring integrity to the security clearance process, it is an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants," Jordan said. Republicans said Cummings "cherry-picked" excerpts of the closed-door interview with Newbold, which they said GOP members were unable to attend because they were only told about it the previous afternoon. In a memo sent to panel members Monday afternoon, the committee's Republican staff characterized Newbold as a disgruntled employee with limited knowledge of how security clearance decisions were actually made. The memo also said Newbold testified that of the 25 clearance decisions she made that were overruled, four or five had been originally denied for "very serious reasons." Newbold did not respond to a request for comment. In her interview with the House Oversight Committee, Newbold said she felt compelled to come forward. "I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security," she told the committee, according to a panel document summarizing her allegations. She said she had previously lodged concerns with numerous White House officials, including Kline; his immediate supervisor, Chief Operating Officer Samuel Price; the White House Counsel's Office; assistant to the president Marcia Kelly; and Chief Security Officer Crede Bailey. Newbold added: "I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office." She told the panel that she knew her denials of security clearances could be overruled. But she said she was concerned about a lack of documentation of what went into those decisions and that they were made "without memorializing the risks they were accepting." In the case of one top White House official, described as "Official 1" in committee documents, Newbold said that she and another employee denied the official a security clearance after a background investigation revealed "significant disqualifying factors," including foreign influence, outside business interests and personal conduct. But Kline overruled their determination. In his decision, he "failed to address all of the disqualifying concerns listed by Ms. Newbold and the first-line adjudicator," according to a committee summary of her response. Instead, Kline merely noted that Official 1's activities "occurred prior to Federal service," according to the panel. NBC News previously reported that Kline overruled a decision by two career White House security specialists to deny Kushner a clearance. When Official 1 applied for an even higher level of clearance, Newbold said that another agency contacted her to determine "how we rendered a favorable adjudication," an inquiry she said reflected the agency's "serious concerns." The agency was not identified in committee documents. The CIA is the agency responsible for granting White House officials access to government information classified above top secret. "CIA does not comment on individual security clearances," agency spokesman Timothy Barrett said. Newbold also accused Kline of telling her to, in effect, stand down on concerns about another senior White House official, described as "Official 2." She said a first-line reviewer wrote a 14-page memo describing factors that would disqualify Official 2 from receiving a clearance, including foreign influence and outside activities. But when Newbold told Kline of her plan to agree with her colleague on the matter, Kline "instructed Ms. Newbold, 'do not touch' the case." Kline later approved the security clearance, she said. Newbold also accused Kline of trying to get her to change her recommendation for a security clearance denial for a "high-profile official at the National Security Council" described as "Official 3," with whom she said Kline was in daily contact on the phone. Kline "called me in his office and asked me to change the recommendation. I said I absolutely would not," according to her testimony. Newbold also told Kline that he shouldn't be talking with the individual trying to get the clearance because it was "unprofessional" and "it was opening up the door to hinder him from making a fair, unbiased recommendation." Official 3 never received a security clearance and is no longer at the White House, according to the House committee. Concerns about the White House security clearance process came to a head in February 2018 after the revelation that staff secretary Rob Porter had access to highly classified material after his two ex-wives had told the FBI that he abused them. In the wake of the scandal, then-Chief of Staff John Kelly sought to overhaul the clearance process and revoked the ability of staffers to operate under interim clearances. That downgraded Kushner's access from "Top Secret/SCI" level to the "Secret" level, a far lower level of access to classified information, The Washington Post previously reported. However, Trump demanded that Kelly give Kushner a top-secret security clearance - a move that made Kelly so uncomfortable that he documented the request in writing, according to current and former administration officials. In her interview with the House Oversight Committee, Newbold complimented Kelly, who she said was "very receptive and understanding" of her concerns. Newbold expressed fear in coming forward, telling the panel, "I'm terrified of going back. I know that this will not be perceived in favor of my intentions, which is to bring back the integrity of the office." She said she has already faced retaliation for declining to issue security clearances and challenging her superiors as they sought to implement changes to the clearance process that she disagreed with during the Trump administration. Newbold said she was suspended without pay for 14 days in late January despite "no prior formal disciplinary action" in her nearly two-decade tenure. And when she returned, she was removed from her position as a "second-level adjudicator" on security clearances and was no longer a direct supervisor. The committee in its Monday memo revealed that it has spoken with other whistleblowers about the security clearance process. For now, however, the individuals were too afraid about the "risk to their careers to come forward publicly," the panel wrote. The Washington Posts Alice Crites, Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman and John Wagner contributed to this report. Billboard magnate Thaddeus Bartkowski wants $1.43 million in state funds to help his company, Catalyst Experiential LLC, build an advertising-screen-festooned emergency-services station for Bensalem Township in Bucks County. The Bensalem Emergency Services Building, planned at the 1.1-acre site of whats now a dry-cleaning shop along Lincoln Highway northeast of the Neshaminy Mall, would be the latest ad-supported civic building to enter Catalysts development pipeline. Others include a dog park elsewhere in Bensalem and an outdoor theater in Coatesville, Chester County, both of which are to be fronted by digital screens. Catalyst has said the construction of these projects would be funded entirely through ads that are broadcast on the screens, so will require no public spending. For the Bensalem Emergency Services Building, however, Catalyst is seeking a subsidy from the state Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program, which support projects seen by Pennsylvanias Budget Office as having the potential to substantially boost economic growth in surrounding areas. An earlier version of the building, which would house police and emergency-medical units, could have been developed using ad revenue alone, but costs ballooned after Bensalem officials requested that a nine-lane firearm range be added to the project, Bartkowski said in an interview. Adding this functional piece to the project made the project go beyond the scope of what we had originally proposed and what our business model can support on its own, he said. Bartkowskis plan calls for a 10,000-square-foot, single-story building fronted by 1,200 square feet of digital screens at the 2653 Lincoln Highway site. The RACP support being sought would match $1.43 million that Catalyst plans to invest in the project, according to a copy of the grant application provided to The Inquirer. Bartkowski said he already has approvals to develop the site with landscaping and digital signs, a format he calls a monument. That would cost $1 million and generate the same revenue as the emergency building project, but he was willing to incur the additional expense, he said in the RACP application. In the interview, conducted after the application was filed in late January, Bartkowski said hes no longer considering the monument and will attempt to develop a version of the emergency building without a shooting range if he does not receive the state support. Pune, India, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As per Market Research Future (MRFR)s latest study, the rapid breakthroughs in technology have reduced the size of processors and microchips, making it possible for the masses to gain its advantage. The penetration of smartphones and laptops capable of understanding tactile and haptic gestures are able to accomplish this thanks to 3D sensors. Some of the well-known sensors are Kinect, Asus Xtion, and Intel RealSense. Market Scope The global 3D sensor market is projected to reach a size of USD 5.49 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 27.69% from 2017 to 2023 (forecast period), according to a new report by Market Research Future (MRFR). The expansion of 3D technology is the major driver of the market. The healthcare sector is the biggest advocate of 3D sensors, with the technology finding application in medical imaging. The preference by radiologists and clinicians to rely on these techniques for faster and accurate diagnosis can drive the 3D sensor market over the forecast period. The emergence of robotics and stereo vision are new avenues which can open up growth opportunities for the market. The need for sensing in gaming and security applications is projected to bolster research and development among industry leaders. But high costs of these devices can hamper the market. Get Free Sample Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1104 Competition Analysis Prominent market players include Microsoft Corporation, Intel Corporation, Qualcomm, Inc., Occipital, Inc., PMD Technologies AG, Microchip Technology, Cognex Corporation, Infineon Technology, LMI Technologies, and ASUSTek Computer Inc. Partnerships and agreements are abound in the highly competitive industry. Applications of augmented and virtual reality have created the fervor among enthusiasts to develop the best performing headset and capture the market share. Recently, Qualcomm has partnered with Himax Technologies to develop 3D depth-sensing cameras which has application in surveillance, 3D rebuilding, and biometric face identification. Segmentation Analysis The global 3D sensor market is segmented by technology, sensor type, and application. By technology, the market is segmented into stereo vision, projected light sensor, time of flight sensors, and ultra sound. The stereo vision segment can touch a valuation of USD 2.142 billion by 2023, growing at a 25.83% CAGR during the forecast period. By sensor type, the market is segmented into acoustic sensor, image sensor, accelerometer sensor, and others. The image sensor segment is expected to generate earnings close to USD 2.57 billion by 2023. The segment is predicted to accrue revenue at a 31.18% CAGR throughout the assessment period. Major applications include healthcare, logistics, automotive, industrial, consumer electronics, aerospace & defense, and others. The consumer electronics segment is predicted to touch a value of USD 1.20 billion by the end of the forecast period. This is exemplified by the integration of 3D sensors in the latest offering of the iPhone by Apple. The sensor stores the image of the user using stereopsis and creates a depth map and uses the same to enhance the security of the phone user. Regional Analysis Regions taken under consideration with respect to the 3D Sensor Market include the North America, the Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest-of-the-World (RoW). The North America region is expected to dominate the global 3d sensors market, followed by APAC and Europe. Presence of various technical experts coupled with numerous 3D sensor manufacturers are likely to augur its market demand during the forecast period. Canada and the U.S. are the biggest revenue generators of the North America 3D sensor market. The APAC region is the second largest revenue generator owing to the adoption of 3D sensors across medical, gaming, and consumer electronics. China, Japan, and India possess the market potential to drive its regional market growth during the forecast period. The rising consumption of consumer electronic devices coupled with home assistant devices is expected to bode well for the market. The Europe 3d sensor market can display a strong CAGR during the assessment period thanks to rapid developments in artificial intelligence. Browse Complete Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/3d-sensor-market-1104 Industry News Vayyar Imaging, a premier in 3D sensors, has developed sensors which can penetrate through walls. This will be a pivotal development for consumers looking for high-end security solutions in their homes. Furthermore, the capacity of these sensor to detect multiple people within a room using their faces, thermal signatures, and temperatures. The sensor can revolutionize applications in broadband, cable, and smart homes. Automation in manufacturing has been implemented to expedite the production flow. FANUC, a developer of robotics and computer numerical control (CNC) machines, has developed an area sensor for its robots which can recognize objects easily and play a major role in reducing the expenses of companies. Related Reports Intelligent Sensors Market Research Report, Type (Humidity, Pressure, Motion, Others), Component (Microprocessor, Transducer, ADC, DAC), Technology (MEMS, CMOS, Others), Application (Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Others) - Global Forecast till 2023 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/intelligent-sensors-market-2084 Smart Sensors Market, By Type (Image Sensors, Smart Motion Sensors, Smart Position Sensors, Smart pressure Sensors, Smart Temperature Sensors, Touch sensors), By End-User (Automotive, Consumer Electronics, Industrial, Infrastructure, Medical) - Forecast to 2022 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/smart-sensors-market-2768 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. Tanya, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, has been working at Tick Tock Early Learning Center for about 12 years. She, her husband, a construction worker, and three children, ages 11, 5, and 4, were struggling financially... Martin Kabrhel Wins 2019 WSOP International Circuit Rozvadov Main Event April 02, 2019 Shirley Ang Martin Kabrhel has been crowned as the WSOP International Circuit Rozvadov 1,700 Main Event Champion. For his efforts over the past days, Kabrhel walked away with 190,000, a World Series of Poker Europe Main Event ticket, and his fifth WSOP Circuit Ring. The Main Event attracted a total of 650 entries, falling just short of the 1,103,500 guarantee. Kabrhels previous four rings and two bracelets were all won at the Kings Resort in Rozvadov, the Czech Republic. This victory is his second biggest in what can be called his home town casino. This cash will take him over $8 million in live tournament cashes, according to the Hendon Mob, of which more than half has been won in WSOP events. WSOPC Rozvadov Final Table Results Position Player Country Prize (EUR) Prize (USD) 1 Martin Kabrhel Czech Republic 190,000* $213,349 2 Harry Ross United Kingdom 110,000* $123,518 3 Jakub Oliva Czech Republic 80,000* $89,831 4 Andreas Heider Germany 64,500* $72,426 5 Robert Skopalik Czech Republic 50,780* $57,020 6 Martin Mulsow Germany 39,777* $44,665 7 Daniel Smiljkovic Germany 29,951* $33,632 8 Raz Alon Israel 20,881* $23,447 * plus a WSOPE Main Event Ticket worth 10,350 WSOPC Rozvadov Final Day Action At 2 PM local time, 23 players returned to the felt, and the action was jam-packed from the start. As there were quite a few short stacks coming into the day, the all-in and calls kept coming in. After some big pots and massive showdowns, the unofficial final table started with an average of 36 big blinds, but only three players had more than that. Oliva and Kabrhel both had more than double average after claiming most of the eliminations to their belt. Less than fifteen minutes after all remaining players were moved to the feature table, Philipp Luetkemeier was sent away in a three-way all-in pot. Robert Skopalik came out victorious with his pocket aces against the ace-queen of Luetkemeier and the tens of Oliva and the final table was set. The WSOPC Final Table WSOPC Rozvadov Final Table Action With eight players left, Alon busted with pocket nines against the tens of Kabrhel. After that, it went quiet for a while, also thanks to the 30-minute dinner break in between. Almost two hours after Alon had busted, Smiljkovic couldnt win against Kabrhel either with his pocket kings. Kabrhels ace-deuce found a deuce on the flop and an ace on the turn to deal the final blow to the German player. Mulsow got his last four big blinds in with queen-jack and Andreas Heider held pocket eights, and they stayed ahead throughout the board. Kabrhel kept putting pressure on the table, and Skopalik called Kabrhels shove with queen-trey for his last three big blinds. Kabrhel rivered a pair of tens to eliminate Skopalik in fifth place. Oliva doubled up three times before Heider failed to win his last all-in with king-nine while Kabrhel held ace-eight. Oliva then found his Waterloo when he was almost forced all-in on the big blind and called Kabrhels bet on the river with his last remaining chips with two pair. Kabrhels flush was good, and Oliva exited. The heads-up affair between Ross and Kabrhel didnt last long. Ross first doubled up to about three big blinds but a few hands later, it was over for Ross. Kabrhel limped in with ten-seven, and Ross checked with six-five. On the eight-nine-four flop, Ross moved inf for his last big blind and Kabrhel called with the open-ended straight draw. The turn gave Ross a straight draw too, but a jack on the river gave Kabrhel the nut-straight to close out the tournament for his fifth ring. Kabrhel and Ross hugged it out, posed for pictures with everyone who wanted to, and then went on their way. Martin Kabrhel beats Harry Ross heads up to win the WSOPC Main Event 568 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON (Reuters) The Supreme Court made it clear on Monday that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a prisoner sentenced to capital punishment a painless death, paving the way for the execution of a convicted murderer who sought to die by lethal gas rather than lethal injection because of a rare medical condition. Russell Bucklew, 50, had argued that lethal injection might inflict undue agony by rupturing blood-filled tumors on his body caused by a congenital condition called cavernous hemangioma in violation of the Constitutions Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment. In a decision written by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court ruled 5-4 that Bucklew had failed to present enough evidence for them to let him ask a lower court to allow him to be executed by lethal gas. The courts five conservatives were in the majority and its four liberals dissented. Referencing the history of capital punishment, Gorsuch wrote that the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death something that, of course, isnt guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes. Mondays ruling was in line with a decision from 2015 in which the court rejected a challenge to Oklahomas method of execution by lethal injection on a 5-4 vote. In that case, the court held that inmates challenging a method of execution had to come up with an alternative option that was less painful. There was no evidence that Bucklews chosen alternative lethal gas would be any less painful, said Gorsuch, who was appointed to the court by President Donald Trump in 2017. Gorsuch noted that Bucklew is awaiting execution for crimes committed more than two decades ago. Yet since then, he has managed to secure delay through lawsuit after lawsuit, Gorsuch wrote. The case did not challenge the constitutionality of the death penalty itself as a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The court has curbed the death penalty as applied to juveniles and mentally disabled people, but there are no signs that the conservative majority is inclined to find that capital punishment is unlawful. NO CONSTITUTIONAL WAY Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer in a dissenting opinion repeated his assertion first raised in the 2015 case that if prisoners cannot be executed quickly without violating their rights it may be that there simply is no constitutional way to implement the death penalty. In Missouri, execution is authorized using either injection or gas but the state in practice uses only lethal injection. Bucklews appeal neither contested his guilt nor sought to avoid execution. Lawyers for the state have said that although lethal gas is authorized, it has never been used and there are no protocols for it. The high court in March 2018 blocked Bucklews execution on a 5-4 vote, with four of the courts five conservative justices voting to deny the request. The conservative justice who voted with the courts four liberals to grant the stay, Anthony Kennedy, has since retired and was replaced by President Donald Trumps appointee Brett Kavanaugh. Bucklew was convicted of the 1996 murder in southeastern Missouri of Michael Sanders, who was living with Bucklews former girlfriend Stephanie Ray at the time. Bucklew fatally shot Sanders at his trailer home, kidnapped and raped Ray, shot at Sanders 6-year-old son and wounded a police officer before being apprehended, according to court papers. Bucklews condition has caused large, blood-filled tumors to grow on his face, head, neck and throat, according to court papers. The Supreme Court last week blocked the execution of a Texas inmate whose request that his Buddhist spiritual adviser be present at the execution had been denied by the state.. That came just weeks after the court rejected on a 5-4 vote a similar request from a Muslim inmate in Alabama, saying he had waited too long to file his lawsuit. (Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham) 8.9k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Former attorney general Eric Holder tore into Donald Trump on Monday, saying he is in danger of being the worst president in the history of the United States. In an interview with MSNBCs Ari Melber, Holder said, Weve just got to survive these next 22 months or so until Trump is out of office. When asked about Barack Obama, the former attorney generals remarks were the polar opposite with Holder calling the 44th president one of the best presidents this country has ever seen. History is going to be extremely kind to Barack Obama, Holder said. Hes going to be a top five. Video: .@EricHolder says Barack Obama will rank among the top five best presidents in American history. #ctl #p2 pic.twitter.com/mb8pTJhStM PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) April 1, 2019 Holders thoughts: ON DONALD TRUMP: Weve just got to survive these next 22 months or so. I think he is in danger of being the worst president in the history of the United States. ON BARACK OBAMA: History is going to be extremely kind to Barack Obama. I dont say this because I was his friend or I was his attorney general. I studied American history. Over time he, the estimation of him by historians will rise. Its already begun. He is going to be a top five. Trump will never measure up to Barack Obama It doesnt take a historian to see the differences between the current president and his predecessor, Barack Obama. The 44th president is everything Donald Trump isnt: intelligent, thoughtful, classy, inspiring and hardworking. He was (and is) respected around the world and he was (and is) a good father and husband. Not to mention, throughout the Obama presidency, there were no major scandals and nobody in his administration or campaign was indicted or charged with criminal activity. Trump, on the other hand, is vulgar and embarrassing (at home and abroad), refuses to do the hard work his job entails or learn about the world hes supposed to lead. He repeatedly seeks to divide the country, and he runs one of the most corrupt administrations this country has ever seen. Not only will Donald Trump never measure up to Barack Obama, both in terms of character and presidential success, but he will rank among the worst presidents in American history. Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook and Twitter 680 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard By David Morgan WASHINGTON (Reuters) The Democratic-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee said it will vote on Wednesday on whether to authorize subpoenas to obtain Special Counsel Robert Muellers full report investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Lawmakers will also consider subpoenas for underlying evidence from Muellers investigation and from five former aides to President Donald Trump, including White House counsel Donald McGahn and political adviser Steve Bannon. The committee said on Monday that they may have documents related to the Mueller probe. Democrats have become increasingly frustrated over U.S. Attorney General William Barrs plan to share only a redacted copy of the nearly 400-page investigative report with Congress. The committee will vote on a resolution to allow House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler to issue subpoenas at his own discretion. The Mueller report describes his offices 22-month probe, which did not find evidence of collusion between Trumps campaign and Russia but also did not exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice, according to a four-page summary Barr released on March 24. Barr said Muellers team had not found enough proof to warrant bringing obstruction charges against the president. Trump and the White House have hailed the conclusions as a victory for the president. But Democrats have taken issue with Barrs intervention. Congress, not the attorney general, has a duty under the Constitution to determine whether wrongdoing has occurred, Nadler wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed on Monday. It is not the attorney generals job to step in and substitute his judgment for the special counsels. That responsibility falls to Congress and specifically to the House Judiciary Committee, as it has in every similar investigation in modern history. A week ago, Nadler and the Democratic heads of five other House committees gave Barr until Tuesday to provide the full Mueller report and underlying evidence. Barr said he would issue his redacted version by mid-April or sooner. Trump on Monday took aim at Democrats in the aftermath of the Mueller probe. Now that the long awaited Mueller Report conclusions have been released, most Democrats and others have gone back to the pre-Witch Hunt phase of their lives before Collusion Delusion took over. Others are pretending that their former hero, Bob Mueller, no longer exists! the president said on Twitter. Republicans on the judiciary panel say Congress does not need the unredacted Mueller report to do its job and accuse Democrats of setting arbitrary deadlines as part of a partisan campaign to undermine Trump ahead of the 2020 election. The attorney general has already demonstrated transparency above and beyond what is required, Representative Doug Collins, the top Republican on the judiciary committee, said in a statement. But Democrats say Republicans helped set a precedent for Congress to obtain underlying investigative material during their investigation into Democrat Hillary Clintons use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. The committee said the Justice Department gave Congress more than 880,000 pages of internal investigative records from the Clinton probe as well as classified and sensitive law enforcement information from an early Russia probe that Mueller took over. In addition to McGahn and Bannon, the committee will consider subpoenas for former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former White House deputy counsel Ann Donaldson. The five former Trump aides were among 81 individuals, agencies and other entities that received document requests on March 4 as part of the committees obstruction and corruption investigation of Trump and his associates. (Reporting by David Morgan and David Alexander in Washington; Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld in New York; Editing by Susan Heavey and Jeffrey Benkoe) 3.8k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Advisors to Joe Biden believe that advisors to Bernie Sanders are at least partly behind the allegations against the former vice president. Axios reported: Joe Biden advisers believe coverage of allegations of inappropriate behavior is being stoked by rival Democrats a dynamic that could actually fire up the vice president at a time when others see success as increasingly improbable. Why it matters: Several around Biden think advisers to Bernie Sanders are at least partly behind the anti-Biden campaign. One prominent backer thinks Biden will run, and is ready to kill Bernie. The Sanders supporters have also spread opposition research about Kamala Harris and Beto ORourke so it would not be surprising if they were involved. The Sanders campaign should see Joe Biden as their biggest threat to the nomination because Biden has great appeal with rank and file Democrats, white blue-collar Democrats, moderate Democrats, African-American Democrats, suburban Democrats, and Democratic women. It is clear that somebody is trying to keep Joe Biden out of the Democratic primary field. They are also trying to damage Biden and make him a weaker candidate. Former vice president Biden will be the frontrunner as soon as he enters the race. He will give Sanders problems in ways and with primary voters in ways that Hillary Clinton could not. It is going to be a tussle at the top, as Joe Biden looks like he is ready for a fight. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook 2.6k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard According to The Washington Post this morning, Donald Trump will not attempt to get Congress to pass legislation on healthcare including changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) until after the 2020 elections. The clearly-delusional president said that he believes that in 2020 he will be reelected, and Republicans will control both the House and the Senate. And, according to him, that will make it easy for him to pass a really great healthcare plan. Even though Trump believes that he can eliminate a discussion of healthcare from the 2020 campaign, that is simply not true. The majority of American voters believe that healthcare should be one of the main issues addressed by the federal government right now. And, of course, Democratic candidates in 2020 have promised to keep the healthcare issue at the forefront of voters minds from now until election day, which is November 3, 2020. Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesnt work. Premiums & deductibles are far too high Really bad HealthCare! Even the Dems want to replace it, but with Medicare for all, which would cause 180 million Americans to lose their beloved private health insurance, the president tweeted. The Republicans are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare, Trump continued. In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win back the House. Trumps empty promises came just a few days after his Justice Department endorsed a federal court ruling to eliminate the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. He apparently wants to completely invalidate the landmark health care law which as been growing in popularity despite objections from within his own party. Republicans in Congress want to avoid the appearance that they plan to take away healthcare from 20 million Americans. Even members of Trumps cabinet Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Attorney General William Barr are opposed to the Justice Departments position in the federal case. The recent ruling by District Judge Reed OConnor in Texas said that the Obamacare statute, which has been approved by the Supreme Court, was actually wholly unconstitutional. Trump Is Living in a Fantasy World Through his deluded late-night tweets Donald Trump has once again shown us that he is living in a fantasy world. He doesnt seem to realize that very few people believe him or anyone else in the Republican Party when they make healthcare promises. If Republicans do nothing about healthcare during the 2020 campaign they will be giving Democrats a golden opportunity to own the healthcare issue. And own it they will and it will help them to historically large victories when election day 2020 rolls around. SAN FRANCISCO, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today Amfora, a biotechnology company, announced it has reached a non-exclusive research and commercial license agreement with Corteva Agriscience, the Agriculture Division of DowDuPont, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Through the agreement, Amfora will use intellectual property covering CRISPR-Cas9 and related gene editing tools to develop a portfolio of gene-edited crops with increased protein content. Amfora is developing food and feed products with increased protein content to address growing consumer health and environmental concerns by improving crops most vital to global food security. This is crucial, because the world faces an increasingly significant shortfall in meeting the protein needs of its population due both to population growth and the increasing demand for foods high in protein including plant-based protein. The CRISPR-Cas9 patent estate is a proven technology that we can use to develop our products, said Michael Lassner, Ph.D., Amfora's Chief Science Officer. Securing this license will allow us to effectively use our proprietary technology. Demand for plant-based protein is taking off and we are pleased to see our licenses support Amforas innovations in this exciting space, said Neal Gutterson, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Corteva Agriscience. Its another great example of CRISPRs potential to contribute to foods that are healthier and more environmentally sustainable. One of the earliest opportunities Amfora is focused on is the development of high-protein feed for aquaculture. Aquaculture is unique in animal agriculture because plant feed protein is efficiently converted into an equivalent amount of fish protein. Today, fish meal is a widely-used source of feed for aquaculture, but it is unsustainable as demand for seafood continues to grow. Amfora expects to reduce the financial and environmental cost of feed for aquaculture by supplying to the aquaculture industry ultra-high protein soymeal that rivals the protein content of fish meal. Amforas first food products will be high-protein wheat and high-protein rice. Wheat is a food staple grown on 530 million acres globally and rice, a staple that feeds a majority of the worlds population, is grown on 400 million acres globally. Desirable wheat baking and pasta qualities are dependent on their high protein content. In many growing regions, wheat varieties and cultural practices do not meet the protein content requirement of consumers and end users. The companys technology increases the nutritional density of both crops. Increasing the protein content of crops, such as wheat and rice, reduces their starch content which not only provides a way to address the growing consumer demand for plant-based protein but may help control consumers blood sugar levels by reducing the glycemic response. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently issued a statement providing clarification on plants produced through innovative new breeding techniques which include CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing techniques. Under its biotechnology regulations, USDA does not regulate or have any plans to regulate plants that could otherwise have been developed through traditional breeding techniques as long as they are not plant pests or developed using plant pests. Amfora intends to utilize this approach to optimize development costs and shorten commercialization timelines. About Amfora Amfora is a biotechnology company that is applying gene editing to sustainably nourish the planet. Its primary technology platform can increase the protein density of all crops. Increasing the protein density of feed crops significantly reduces the amount of feed required by livestock and farmed seafood. Increasing the protein density of food crops such as wheat and rice makes these staple crops a more complete source of nutrition. Amfora is a portfolio company of Spruce Capital Partners, a venture capital fund manager headquartered in San Francisco. More information can be found at www.amforainc.com . 1.6k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Six powerful House Democratic committee chairmen will begin the process of subpoenaing the Mueller report and all related evidence on Wednesday. Democrats arent wasting time waiting for Barrs redacted Mueller report Committee chairs House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, Committee on Oversight and Reform Chairman Elijah E. Cummings, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Adam B. Schiff, Committee on Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters, Committee on Ways and Means Chairman Richard E. Neal and Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot L. Engel wrote to Attorney General William Barr: On March 25, 2019, we sent you a letter requesting that you produce to Congress the full report of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and its underlying evidence by Tuesday, April 2, 2019. To the extent you believe the applicable law limits your ability to produce the entire report, we urged that you begin the process of consultation with us immediately to resolve those issues without delay.[1] On Wednesday, April 3, 2019, the House Judiciary Committee plans to begin the process of authorizing subpoenas for the report and underlying evidence and materials. While we hope to avoid resort to compulsory process, if the Department is unwilling to produce the report to Congress in unredacted form, then we will have little choice but to take such action. .. Congress is, as a matter of law, entitled to each of the categories of information you proposed to redact from the Special Counsels report in your March 29 letter. In the attached appendix we provide a more complete legal analysis of each of the potential redaction categories your letter identified. We expect the Department will take all necessary steps without further delayincluding seeking leave from the court to disclose the limited portions of the report that may involve grand jury materialsto satisfy your promise of transparency and to allow Congress to fulfill its own constitutional responsibilities. Full release of the report to Congress is consistent with both congressional intent and the interests of the American public. On March 14, 2019, by a vote of 420-0, the House unanimously passed H. Con. Res. 24, a resolution calling for the full release of the Special Counsels report to Congress, as well as the public release of the Special Counsels report except to the extent the disclosure of any portion thereof is expressly prohibited by law. The American people have also consistently and overwhelmingly supported release of the full report. The President himself has likewise called for its release in full. House Democrats arent allowing Trump to stall and bury Mueller The White House is trying to stall, spin, and bury the Mueller report. The endgame is to run out the clock and hope that people stop caring about the full report. However, early public feedback shows that this tactic is backfiring. Trumps approval rating is down. The White House doesnt understand the basics of political crisis management 101, which is that it is always better to release all damaging information at once than to die a death by a thousand cuts by letting details dribble out and stay in the media spotlight. If Democrats have to go to court, it will delay getting the full report, so the House chairmen arent wasting time. They arent playing Trumps game, and they will get the full Mueller report and make it public for all to see. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook 344 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard In Donald Trumps world, immigrants provide two essential services: as free or nearly free labor and as a political pinata. Of the long list of people and groups of people Trump hates, immigrants have had the most exposure to Trumps authoritarian aspirations. By his own admission, Trumps immigration policy is about deterring asylum-seekers in particular because in Trumps world, asylum is just a con-job. But the horrors are not limited to asylum seekers, as we see due process under attack in immigration courts. This should matter to every American, because once due process is weakened for one group of people, the precedent is there to weaken them for everyone else. I can only say thank God that when my mother was a refugee in World War II she was greeted by a more compassionate government in a more humane country than the one Trump is trying to create. Still, when I look at Trumps horrific and dehumanizing immigration policies, it feels personal. Just this past week, we learned about the result of Trumps efforts to criminalize asylum. Migrants being warehoused in a garage and under a bridge because the influx is well beyond the ability to provide acceptable shelter. The images of children behind barbed wire, in cages, and in prison speak more to the barbarity of Trumps immigration policy than words can adequately describe. Despite that and Trumps hate inciting rhetoric about anyone who isnt white, who wasnt born here, or both, people from Central America would prefer everything he can dish out over what they left. Trumps policies designed to terrorize and deter are an abject failure, as more people are crossing the southern border than for quite some time. And newsflash, Mr. President: even if you could close the border this week which you cant and even if you could get someone to throw money away on your vanity wall, neither of these will stop people from seeking asylum. Moreover, threatening to cut aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador will only make the problem you created worse. Youll never know the horrors these people experienced at the hands of their own government and to some degree as a result of U.S. policy. Thankfully neither do I. In the case of parents, its selflessness a concept youll never understand that drives them to endure that long journey and every cheap, inhumane jab you can dish out. Parents do this in an attempt to take their children to safety from something far more traumatic than transferring from one private school to another in the middle of the school year. As someone who dishonestly blames parents for the neglect by his own agencies that resulted in deaths, you wouldnt know courage if it served you a big Mac. The story of one of Donald Trumps employees being deported to Romania shows that regardless of legal status, immigrants legal rights are under constant assault. He is being deported because decades ago he was convicted of a crime in absentia. Its a sad statement not only because of how Trump can so easily dispense with loyal employees, but also because America used to frown on the violation of a most basic right known in every democratic country: the right to be tried in person and to put on a defense. Its a long standing principle under our law, as reflected in an 1884 ruling by the Supreme Court and reiterated by an Arizona court in 2004. In Hopt v. Utah the Supreme Court said, The legislature has deemed it essential to the protection of one whose life or liberty is involved in a prosecution for felony, that he shall be personally present at the trial, that is, at every stage of the trial when his substantial rights may be affected by the proceedings against him. If he be deprived of his life or liberty without being so present, such deprivation would be without that due process of law required by the Constitution. In the 2004 ruling in State v. Whitley, the Arizona Court of appeals held: A voluntary waiver of the right to be present requires true freedom of choice. A trial court may infer that a defendants absence from trial is voluntary and constitutes a waiver if a defendant had personal knowledge of the time of the proceeding, the right to be present, and had received a warning that the proceeding would take place in their absence if they failed to appear. (My bold italics) Things were bad enough before Trump, with a broken immigration system and the elimination of legal rights for immigrants in general. Other rights like the right to counsel and children having an adult represent their rights did not apply before Trump took a sledge hammer to immigration policy. Before Trump, children were left to defend themselves in court proceedings about concepts they dont understand in a language they dont speak. But now, the numbers make it impossible for the media and our collective conscience to ignore. Aside from all this, Trumps Secretary of DHS is seeking broad new powers to eliminate due process for children designated as unaccompanied, be it a matter of fact or a result of Trumps family separation policy. When someone seeks asylum, they are exercising a human right which means all of this, as it pertains to people seeking asylum, is breaking the law. Trumps proposals to have people seek asylum in their home country, or wait in Mexico for years, as their application gets more vetting than people entrusted with state secrets get, are idiotic. Clearly he doesnt understand what seeking asylum is. But requiring that asylum be sought in a dangerous home country is akin to a Muslim going on bended knee to Donald Trump and asking for his acceptance. And with all due respect to Mexico, the objective of asylum is defeated when people are expected to await processing in places where going about day-to-day life is taking your life in your hands. There are alternatives, like continuing to invest in fixing these countries and we could allow people to seek asylum at US consulates, which in legal terms, are US territory within their country of origin. But, Trump isnt interested in making things better least of all for people who dont look like him. Trumps horror show immigration policy is destroying families and traumatizing children for life. So far, we know of two children seven-year-old Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin and eight-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo, and one adult who died in US border control custody. According to the autopsy, Jakelin Maquin died of a bacterial infection, not as Trump deceptively claims: a result of dehydration or other neglect by her father. Her death could have been prevented had ICE recognized she was a human being and afforded her the dignity and respect every human is entitled to. Many thousands of children have been permanently traumatized as a direct result of the Trump administrations family separation policy a system that was introduced by the Trump DHS by choice. Experts say, the trauma has permanently damaged these children whose only crime was being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its worth noting that there are two ways children can become unaccompanied, meaning without an adult. They might have made the journey themselves. Or, they may have been separated from their parent(s) by US border officials under the Trump administrations family separation policy. If a child is unaccompanied, it means they need a guardian to make basic legal decisions, including those involving their asylum claims. The Trump policy of putting children in cages was, again, about deterrence. The only thing it accomplished was traumatized children. The bad press for Trump and his DHS secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, has been ongoing, like a steady drum beat in the background of ongoing drama and chaos in the Trump administration. But its enough for them to come up with a public relations fix: denying unaccompanied children due process. Just send them back to a danger that could make surviving to adulthood a pipe dream. From Kirsten Neilsons perspective, all this due process stuff is so inefficient. Wouldnt it be better if we just sent them back to whatever danger they escaped? This is not an America I recognize. I firmly believe most of us are better than this. But, I also recognize that the people in charge, at this time, are not. 356 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard An inside report from the White House this morning reveals that staff members are panicking over the prospect of their boss actually going forward with his threat to close the U.S. border with Mexico. On Friday Donald Trump made his initial threat to close the border and since then has repeated it, in effect doubling down on a draconian disaster. If the border closes there would be an immediate multi-billion dollar cost to the U.S. economy, as well as tens of thousands of lost jobs and a dramatic spike in consumer prices. The website POLITICO reports that they spoke to several senior administration figures who described a White House freaked out about the implications of closing the border. A major casualty of such an ill-advised move by the the president would be his top legislative priority, the U.S.-CanadaMexico Agreement (USCMA) which Trump has promised would be a much improved replacement for the NAFTA trade agreement. According to POLITICO: There are people in the White House who are trying to cobble together a plan to present to Congress that would seek to tighten immigration laws a way to beg the president off his close-the-border plan. The people who work for the president are trying to head off what they see as another self-inflicted wound. For many years Congress has been unable to agree on changes to immigration laws, so the fact that White House staff see that as their best bet to dissuade the president from closing the border is a sure sign of their desperation. Realists are very skeptical that any type of immigration reform would get through Congress. Evidence of the Panic Last night in London a U.S. Coast Guard G5 that DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen uses departed from Londons Stansted Airport less than one day after it landed. Nielsen was attending some very important high level meetings in London, but inside the White House, Trumps aides decided they needed to bring her back to the United States to deal with the border closing issue, and possibly convince her boss to change his mind. Donald Trump Is Desperate As Donald Trumps legal and political problems pile up, he is acting increasingly desperate. His threats to close the U.S. border with Mexico are beyond the pale. It would be the dumbest thing he could do because of the damage it would inflict immediately on the U.S. economy. The only reason he would do it is to please his racist base of supporters who hate all immigrants, and because all of his immigration policies have failed. If Donald Trump goes forward with this idiotic plan it will be one more nail in his political coffin, and it will lead surely to his demise in 2020, if not before. 337 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Pete Buttigieg is an unusual presidential candidate with an unusual name. And according to a new report, he has been generating more social media interest than any other actual or potential 2020 Democratic candidate. Even though most people dont know how to properly pronounce his last name, the 37 year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana (who is gay) has been taking the political world by storm ever since he announced his 2020 candidacy. Axios, reporting on data compiled by NewsWhip, a social media company, reported early Tuesday that Buttigiegs Twitter following has grown by 447,000 followers since he appeared on CNN at a town hall meeting in March. Another announced 2020 candidate, former Rep. Beto ORourke (D-Texas) had the second-biggest jump in social media interest during the same period, adding 137,000 Twitter followers. Buttigieg now has 640,000 followers on Twitter while ORourke has about 1.4. Million followers According to Axios, Buttigieg also had more people engaged on his Twitter account than any of the other 2020 candidates during same period, except ORourke. Buttigieg also added 90,000 followers to his Instagram account and 75,000 followers to his Facebook account since his March 10 town hall, which is more than any of his other potential 2020 competitors aside from ORourke, the Axios noted. According to recent data released by Google, Buttigieg and former Vice President Joe Biden, who has yet to officially announce his White House bid, are the most-searched potential 2020 Democratic candidates. In the past week alone, Biden has seen a 100-percent increase in search interest, while Buttigieg saw a spike of 35 percent. Buttigieg also recently disclosed his first quarter fundraising numbers and astounded the political world by reporting over $7 million in contributions. It seems that this unconventional young man may be offering America something it needs right now. Clearly many potential Democratic primary voters are enamored with Buttigieg and what he has to say. Time will tell if he has staying power, but as of right now Pete Buttigieg is a rising star in the Democratic Party. Move over Beto, it looks like Pete may be coming for you and all the other so-called old candidates he is facing for the Democratic nomination next year. Following the first round of Ukraines presidential election on Sunday, March 31, which he led by a wide margin, Volodymyr Zelensiky was asked at a press conference if a date for his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin had been set. Despite winning by a side margin, Zelenskiy still must face President Petro Poroshenko in the second round later in April. Still, Zelenskiy replied: If I meet with Putin, I will tell him: Well, finally you have returned our territories. How much more money are you ready to repay for the territories that you took away, for helping people who participated in the escalation in Crimea and Donbas and helping on all of their terrible, cruel and disgusting way? When asked about Zelenskiys comments on Monday, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the basis of any such talks would be a non-starter. We are ready to explain to any Ukrainian citizen that Russia is not occupying any Ukrainian territories and generally there can be no talk about that," the Kremlin spokesman said. Peskov, who said the Donbass republics "have been torn away by Ukraine itself," was more adamant when it came to the Crimean peninsula. "Moreover, the word occupation or annexation is absolutely not applicable to Crimea either de facto or de jure. All that happened in Crimea was done in strict accordance with the Ukrainian legislation and on the basis of international law," Peskov stressed. Both statements are false. As previously reported by Polygraph.info, as well as many other new agencies, the Russian takeover of Crimea in February 2014 began when Russian special forces, operating without national insignia, seized the Crimea parliament building and raised the Russian flag. The bloodless invasion by the so-called little green men resulted in unmarked Russian soldiers taking control of the Republic. Russias ex-military intelligence officer Igor Strelkov Girkin, a leading self-defense commander in Crimea and later commander of separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, admitted in a 2015 interview that members of the Crimean parliament were herded into a chamber at gunpoint and forced to support the annexation. The referendum, hastily carried out under military occupation, did not allow for public debate or for political leaders from greater Ukraine to visit the Crimean peninsula. And, in accordance with Ukraines constitution, all Ukraines citizens should have been given a vote on Crimeas succession, not only residents of the peninsula. As a result, on March 27, 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 68/262, stating that the referendum, having no validity, cannot form the basis for any alteration of the status of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea or of the city of Sevastopol. The resolution urged all countries not to recognize any alteration of the status of Crimea. Notably, prior to Russias annexation of Crimea, Putin himself had publicly recognized the peninsula as Ukrainian territory, calling any talks of Russia potentially targeting Crimea a provocation. Following the de facto Russian takeover of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the wake of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, the German broadcaster ARD asked Putin if Crimea was the next target for Russian aggression. Putin replied: The Crimea is not a disputed territory. There is no ethnic conflict there in contrast to the conflict between South Ossetia and Georgia, he said, adding: Russia recognized the current borders of todays Ukraine a long time ago The question of targets for Russia only serve as provocation. As for the Donbass republics having been torn away by Ukraine itself, Strelkov, speaking with Zavtra newspaper in November 2014, said that he was the one who pulled the trigger of this war. "If our unit hadn't crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out like in [the Ukrainian city of] Kharkiv, he said. "There would have been several dozen killed, burned, detained. And that would have been the end of it. But the flywheel of the war, which is continuing to this day, was spun by our unit. We mixed up all the cards on the table," he said, referring to the Russian paramilitary forces under his command. And as Polygraph.info previously reported, in spite of numerous denials, the evidence of Moscows involvement in the Donbas war is overwhelming and has been confirmed by numerous open-source investigations, journalistic investigations from international and Russian media outlets, and even Russian officials at times. Specific smoking gun evidence includes: The presence of Russian military equipment in Eastern Ukraine neither produced by, nor purchased by the Ukrainian armed forces, such as the T-90A main battle tanks; The separatists" continued access to large quantities of advanced military technology and the ammunition, fuel, and spare parts to operate them; A Vice report which proved the presence of Russian serviceman of the 37th Motorized Infantry Brigade (Kyakhta) operating in Eastern Ukraine (and likely prompted Russias anti-selfie soldier law"); And, a wealth of open source intelligence (OSINT) produced by groups such as Bellingcat and Inform Napalm demonstrating Russian military movements in Ukraine. On May 24, 2018, the Dutch Joint Investigative Team (JIT) presented its findings on the system that shot down the passenger airliner MH17, which was flying over eastern Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The JIT determined the missile system had been provided from Russia and identified the military unit it belonged to the Russian armed forces 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade. Based on the evidence available, the International Criminal Court in November of 2016 determined that the war in Ukraine was a Russian invasion and not, as Russia claimed, a civil war. In response, Russia withdrew from the ICC. Polygraph.info therefore finds that Peskovs statements regarding both Russias annexation of Crimea and the nature of the conflict in the Donbas to be false. Food editor and chief critic Eating all of the chicken livers just as fast as I can. Paul Bowers is an education reporter and father of three living in North Charleston. He previously worked at the Charleston City Paper, where he was twice named South Carolina Journalist of the Year in the weekly category. Syndicated and guest columns represent the personal views of the writers, not necessarily those of the editorial staff. The editorial department operates entirely independently of the news department and is not involved in newsroom operations. RALEIGH, N.C., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Smithfield Foods, Inc. has donated more than 123,000 pounds of protein to the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina to support their Protein Power Up event. Through this partnership, protein products, a valuable resource for the Food Bank and the clients they serve, are made available to agencies whose supply had not yet recovered following disaster relief efforts in the Food Banks service area. This donation, equivalent to more than 493,000 servings, will also provide support for the upcoming summer season as the food bank and surrounding families prepare for a lack of in-school meal opportunities. Sadly, food insecurity remains a serious problem in central and eastern North Carolina. Across our service area, more than 600,000 people struggle to access an adequate amount of nutritious food necessary for a healthy life, said Peter Werbicki, president and CEO of the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina. Through generous donations, our mission that No One Goes Hungry in central and eastern North Carolina is upheld by partners like Smithfield and its Helping Hungry Homes program. This is the 10th large-scale protein donation made by Smithfield to food banks across the country during its 2019 Helping Hungry Homes donation tour. Helping Hungry Homes is Smithfields signature hunger-relief initiative focused on alleviating hunger and helping Americans become more food secure. Since the programs inception in 2008, Smithfield has provided more than 120 million servings of protein to food banks, disaster relief efforts, and community outreach programs nationwide. Smithfield remains committed to uplifting local communities across the country, especially those communities where our employees live and work, in support of our companys social purpose, said Jonathan Toms, associate manager of charitable initiatives for Smithfield Foods. As a food company we take great pride in the opportunity to feed people and as a major employer in the state, North Carolina stays close to the heart of our hunger-relief cause. We are honored to provide this donation of much-needed protein to the food bank and our neighbors in need that they serve. For more information about Smithfield Foods Helping Hungry Homes initiative and a list of upcoming donation events, visit helpinghungryhomes.com . About Smithfield Foods Smithfield Foods is a $15 billion global food company and the world's largest pork processor and hog producer. In the United States, the company is also the leader in numerous packaged meats categories with popular brands including Smithfield, Eckrich, Nathans Famous, Farmland, Armour, Farmer John, Kretschmar, John Morrell, Cooks, Gwaltney, Carando, Margherita, Curlys, Healthy Ones, Morliny, Krakus, and Berlinki. Smithfield Foods is committed to providing good food in a responsible way and maintains robust animal care, community involvement, employee safety, environmental, and food safety and quality programs. For more information, visit www.smithfieldfoods.com , and connect with us on Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , and Instagram . About Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina The Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina is a nonprofit organization that has provided food for people at risk of hunger in 34 counties in central and eastern North Carolina for more than 35 years. The Food Bank serves a network of more than 800 partner agencies such as soup kitchens, food pantries, shelters, and programs for children and adults through warehouses in Durham, Greenville, New Bern, Raleigh, the Sandhills (Southern Pines), and Wilmington. In fiscal year 2017-2018, the Food Bank distributed nearly 70 million pounds of food (over half of which was perishable) and non-food essentials through these agencies. Sadly, hunger remains a serious problem in central and eastern North Carolina. In these counties, more than 600,000 people struggle to access nutritious and adequate amounts of food necessary for an active and healthy life. foodbankcenc.org . Media Contacts: The Post and Courier provides a forum for our readers to share their opinions, and to hold up a mirror to our community. Publication does not imply endorsement by the newspaper; the editorial staff attempts to select a representative sample of letters because we believe its important to let our readers see the range of opinions their neighbors submit for publication. Gov. Henry McMaster visited Miracle Hill Ministries in Greenville on Aug. 27 to award CEO Reid Lehman with the Order of the Palmetto, the state's highest civilian honor. McMaster has worked in recent months to ensure Miracle Hill can continue denying foster care services to same-sex couples and non-Christian families. File/Jamie Lovegrove/Staff Jamie Lovegrove is a political reporter covering the South Carolina Statehouse, congressional delegation and campaigns. He previously covered Texas politics in Washington for The Dallas Morning News and in Austin for the Texas Tribune. COLUMBIA Drivers for Uber and other ride-booking companies would have to put lighted logos in their windshield to help people identify their ride under legislation being proposed in response to the killing of a University of South Carolina student who authorities say got into an imposter's vehicle. The 2015 state law enabling people to catch a ride through a cellphone app requires a company's logo to be easily visible on the driver's vehicle "so as to be seen in darkness" but gives the option of having a reflective or illuminated decal. Rep. Seth Rose, D-Columbia, said an illuminated logo should be mandatory. He plans to introduce the bill Tuesday. A lighted logo may have made it easier for 21-year-old Samantha Josephson to spot her correct ride when she was leaving a Five Points bar about 1:30 a.m. Friday, he said. "It makes me sick to my stomach that this happened," said Rose, who earned his bachelor's and law degrees from USC and lives near Five Points. "I cant imagine the pain the familys going through. Its a very senseless tragedy and disgusting act." Josephson's body was found late Friday afternoon by turkey hunters in rural Clarendon County. Nathaniel Rowland, 24, of Clarendon County, faces murder and kidnapping charges. Authorities say Rowland was arrested early Saturday after he ran from a car parked at Five Points that matched what surveillance video showed Josephson getting into. Police found her cellphone and her blood in the car, according to arrest records. Rose is naming his proposal Samantha L. Josephson Ridesharing Safety Act as a remembrance due to her parents' request. "Don't ever forget her name," her mother Marci Josephson told the court at a bond hearing Sunday. Rowland had waived his right to appear. Seymour Josephson, the slain woman's father, told hundred of students at a vigil Sunday that he plans to fight for improvements with ride-booking. Lighted ride-booking logos already exist. Uber began rolling out its glowing Beacon more than two years ago. The color changes to whatever the rider chooses when confirming a pickup, according to the company's website. "Beacon's color-matching technology makes it easier for riders to find you, especially at night and in crowded areas," reads the site. Sign up for updates! Get the latest political news from The Post and Courier in your inbox. Email Sign Up! It's unclear where the lighted signs are being used. Uber's website says it's "currently being released in a limited number of markets." In response to a request for comment, an Uber spokesman provided general safety tips for riders but did not answer any specific questions. Five ride-booking companies are authorized to operate in South Carolina. Uber has by far the most drivers, with 13,000 on its rolls as of last year. No. 2 Lyft had less than half that. The other three are limited to certain cities or to riders with disabilities, according to the state Office of Regulatory Staff. Lyft offers a lighted logo only in certain cities and for drivers who reach "gold" or "platinum" status in the number of rides provided monthly. "If there are safeguards put in for other areas, why not all areas?" Rose asked. Rep. Micah Caskey, R-West Columbia, called the bill that he's co-sponsoring a "commonsense solution" for helping riders identify which vehicle is their lift. "Nothing is ever going to stop psychos from doing psycho things, but if we can take one step to make it harder for psychos to be psychos, we should do it," he said. While lighted logos can be helpful, particularly when lots of people in the same area are catching rides, they're no substitute for checking that the license plate of the vehicle pulling up matches the information sent on the app, said Harry Campbell, founder of The Rideshare Guy blog and podcast. Even checking the vehicle's make and model is not enough, he said. "In busy places and times like, for example, if you're getting out of the bars at 2 a.m. when everyone is requesting an Uber there's a pretty good chance the more common cars, there could be four or five of them out there in the same color. That's where the license plate is so important," said Campbell, who's been a driver for Lyft and Uber since 2014 and literally wrote a book about it, called "The Rideshare Guide." It's fairly easy for a scammer to get hold of a logo. Even the lighted logos can be purchased on auction site eBay, Campbell said. Rowland was not an Uber driver, and it's unclear if he had any sort of logo on his vehicle. "When you're extra impatient, that's when sometimes scam drivers can take advantage of riders," Campbell said. "The best and really the only way to ensure 100 percent you're getting into the right car is to check the license plate on the app with the car that shows up." Political Reporter Caitlin Byrd is a political reporter at The Post and Courier and author of the Palmetto Politics newsletter. Before moving to Charleston in 2016, her byline appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times. To date, Byrd has won 17 awards for her work. TORONTO and NEW YORK, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Maropost, the unified platform that simplifies customer engagement for B2C brands and retailers, and leading email solutions provider Return Path, have partnered to offer Maropost customers access to Return Paths email deliverability solutions platform. The partnership will allow Maropost to offer custom pricing and packaging for customers who want access to the most comprehensive source of data on email performance. Additional features include: Inbox Placement Easily differentiate your delivered messages with a comprehensive look into what percentage of your email is going to the inbox, the spam folder, or is being blocked at major mailbox providers around the world. Easily differentiate your delivered messages with a comprehensive look into what percentage of your email is going to the inbox, the spam folder, or is being blocked at major mailbox providers around the world. Reputation and Sender Score Monitor key metrics that drive the sending reputation of your dedicated IP addresses that youve provisioned from Maropost. Monitor key metrics that drive the sending reputation of your dedicated IP addresses that youve provisioned from Maropost. Inbox Preview Preview how your email will look on all devices, email clients and browsers before you hit send, along with guidance on how to fix email rendering issues and how to optimize your creative and subject line. Preview how your email will look on all devices, email clients and browsers before you hit send, along with guidance on how to fix email rendering issues and how to optimize your creative and subject line. Email Client Monitor Get insight into how and where your actual subscribers prefer to view your emails, including data on what time they are opening, where they are opening, and for how long they are reading. In addition to the new email features, Maropost clients will be able to apply for Return Paths Certification program. Certification is the industrys most powerful and trusted whitelist, providing benefits at major mailbox providers and filtering companies to ensure your emails reach your subscribers. Were excited to offer Return Paths rich email data source to Maropost customers, said Joseph Schirripa, COO and CFO at Maropost. Email still provides the highest ROI in customer engagement strategies, and our team is committed to providing the best deliverability scores in the industry. We are pleased to kick off this new partnership, which will allow Maropost to access Return Paths Partner Platform and offer our best-in-class email data and solutions to their customers, said Matt Rausenberger, vice president of global strategic partners at Return Path. Together with Maroposts customer engagement solutions and customer support, our joint customers will now have the best possible deliverability coverage and a 360-degree view of their email programs. Using Return Paths email optimization and deliverability products on a daily basis can help marketers gain the most out of their investment in Maropost, and achieve more value for their marketing dollars. About Maropost Maropost is a fully unified customer engagement platform, designed to provide a single solution for all areas of businessacross marketing, commerce, service, clienteling, referral, and more. Connecting brands with their customers, Maropost unifies customer data to create unified customer experiences. Were changing the way organizations operate through technologybreaking down divides between and within departments, so companies can truly understand and engage their customers. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Maropost is trusted by brands like DigitalMarketer, New York Post, Mercedes-Benz, SHOP.com, and Yext. Learn more at https://www.maropost.com/ . About Return Path Return Path analyzes the worlds largest collection of email data to show businesses how to stay connected to their audiences and strengthen their customer engagement. We help mailbox providers around the world deliver great user experiences and build trust in email by ensuring that wanted messages reach the inbox while spam doesnt. To find out more about Return Path solutions, visit us at returnpath.com or request a demo . Contact info: Katie Pierini Nonfiction kpierini@nonfictionagency.com Anyone visiting Guam for the first time or who is a recurring visitor should be able to appreciate after leaving the air-conditioned hallway Read more Local health insurance companies that are interested in providing coverage for the thousands of government of Guam employees and retirees, and their family members, have until May 3 to submit their proposals. The Department of Administration has published a request for proposals for fiscal year 2020 health insurance coverage. The new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Shortly after the bids are received, the Health Insurance Negotiating Team will begin negotiations, which DOA acting Director Edward Birn said is expected to conclude by the second week of June. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request. Those negotiations will determine whether the roughly 6,000 retirees or survivors and their families, as well as the thousands of employees and their families, will have a choice in health insurance companies. It will also determine how much the health insurance contracts will cost employees and taxpayers. It's unclear how much the final cost will be, as officials have said the true cost of a health insurance contract isn't known until after the fiscal year ends and all the premiums chosen by participants are tallied. There have been some members of the community who have said this upcoming year's contracts may increase by as much as $20 million because of the passage of the controversial Public Law 35-2. Cost The negotiating team, according to Title 4 of Guam Code Annotated, is led by the DOA director and includes members of all three branches to ensure they all are aware of the costs associated with the contract. Birn said the request includes both exclusive and nonexclusive bids, which by law the negotiating team is required to consider, though for years there has been an ongoing debate on the financial cost of both options versus the benefits to participants. In recent years, GovGuam has opted for nonexclusive or multiple providers. From fiscal 2014 to fiscal 2017, GovGuams total medical health insurance premiums amounted to $80 million a year, on average, according to an Office of Public Accountability audit published in 2018. Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero signed Public Law 35-2 on March 7. The new law ensures that any health insurance business providing coverage to the GovGuam employees, retirees, and their dependents will be covered at GRMC, which is owned by Philippines-based shareholders. The Guam Regional Medical City announced it was pleased after the bill became law. Local health insurance provider TakeCare and several of the island's independent doctors cautioned that the economic advantage this legislation gives to the private hospital would harm the financially struggling government-run Guam Memorial Hospital. No cost estimate There was no estimate for the financial impact the bill would have on the government or the taxpayers who fund the governments operations, to include salaries and benefits. Speaker Tina Muna Barnes, and Sens. Joe San Agustin, Regine Biscoe Lee, Wil Castro, Kelly Marsh, Louise Muna, Telena Nelson, Sabina Perez, Clynton Ridgell, Amanda Shelton, Telo Taitague, Jose Terlaje and Mary Torres voted to pass the bill. In its press release, GRMC said it would like to thank Gov. Leon Guerrero, Sen. Tina Muna Barnes, and senators of the Guam Legislature for their hard work and diligence in pursuing this bill to ensure the best health care options for the government of Guam employees, retirees, and their families. Minutes after the GRMC announcement, the governor issued a statement saying, in part, The government of Guam employees should be allowed to expect that their health insurance cover quality health care at whichever hospital, public or private, they may unexpectedly find themselves on Guam. By signing this bill, I join the Legislature in making this expectation a reality." Government of Guam Health Insurance Negotiating Team The negotiating team consists of: Director of Administration Edward Birn, chairperson of the team; The administrator of the Department of Integrated Services for Individuals with Disabilities or a designee; The director of the Bureau of Budget and Management Research or a designee; An employee representative from the judicial branch as appointed by the chief justice; An employee representative of the legislative branch as appointed by the speaker; Guam Department of Education Superintendent Jon Fernandez or a designee; The director of the Government of Guam Retirement Fund or a designee; A retiree who is a member of the Government of Guam Retirement Fund to be appointed by the Board of Trustees of the Government of Guam Retirement Fund; A member of the general public, appointed by the governor, who is not a GovGuam employee or an appointee of the governor to any board, agency or committee; or an employee of a health insurance company, hospital or medical provider; The chairperson of the legislative health committee or a designee, nonvoting member; and The chairperson of the legislative appropriations committee, or a designee, nonvoting. Source: Title 4 Guam Code Annotated LONG BEACH, Calif., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Molina Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE: MOH) today announced details for the release of its results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2019. Molina Healthcare will issue its earnings release for first quarter 2019 after the market closes on Monday, April 29, 2019, and will host a conference call and webcast to discuss the earnings release on Tuesday, April 30, 2019, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. To access this interactive teleconference, dial (877) 883-0383 and enter the confirmation number, 4093086. A telephonic replay of the conference call will be available through Tuesday, May 7, 2019, by dialing (877) 344-7529 and entering the confirmation number, 10130214. A live broadcast of Molina Healthcares conference call will be available on the Companys website, molinahealthcare.com. A 30-day online replay will be available approximately an hour following the conclusion of the live broadcast. About Molina Healthcare Molina Healthcare, Inc., a FORTUNE 500 company, provides managed healthcare services under the Medicaid and Medicare programs and through the insurance marketplaces. Through its locally operated health plans, Molina Healthcare served approximately 3.8 million members as of December 31, 2018. For more information about Molina Healthcare, please visit molinahealthcare.com. EAST COVENTRY A 15-year-old has been charged as an adult for attempted murder after police allege he fired a handgun at another juvenile, injuring him. Lower Pottsgrove Police responded to the area of Porter Road Monday afternoon for a reported shooting, according to the Chester County District Attorneys Office. The scene was near an abandoned railroad bridge by the Schuylkill River in Lower Pottsgrove. While police were on their way to the scene, they received a description and name as well as information that the shooter was a 15-year-old male. A criminal complaint and photo provided by the Chester County District Attorneys Office identified the defendant as Raul Castro of Lower Pottsgrove. When they arrived on the scene, officers found the juvenile on the Montgomery County side of the Schuylkill River. Police say he had visible blood stains on his clothing. Police quickly located the victim, a 14-year-old male, on the Chester County side of the river near an abandoned railroad bridge. He had gunshot wounds to his abdomen and shoulder and was flown to a trauma center, where he underwent emergency surgery, police said. Additionally, officers located a third juvenile who was a witness to the incident. Chester County Detectives assisted East Coventry and Lower Pottsgrove Police. During the course of the investigation, it was revealed that the three juveniles were all friends from school. Over the past weekend there was a dispute between the friends and that on Monday the juveniles decided to cross the bridge into Chester County to find an isolated location for a fight, police said. Before any physical altercation occurred, police allege Castro fired a handgun three times, striking the victim twice. Police recovered the firearm from the scene and determined that it was registered to the address where Castro lives. Officials said the teen was directly charged as an adult due to the nature of the charges. The East Coventry Police, the Chester County Detectives and the Lower Pottsgrove Police worked together to solve this crime. East Coventry is a safe community and this type of gun violence is out of the ordinary, said East Coventry Police Chief Bill Mossman. Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan echoed those remarks. Thirty years ago, this incident would have been a fist fight and nothing else. But the defendant decided to bring a gun to the fight, almost leading to the first Chester County murder of 2019, said Hogan. Chester County law enforcement did an excellent job of working with Montgomery County law enforcement on this investigation. Fortunately for us, we seldom see this type of violence by juveniles in Chester County. In a letter addressed to the school community, Pottsgrove School District Superintendent Bill Shirk said: It was brought to our attention by law enforcement that three Pottsgrove High School students were involved in a shooting after school hours in Chester County on Monday, April 1, 2019. We continue to work closely with the police as this is an active investigation. The police confirmed that the incident has been resolved and we are working to support our students and staff in working through this tragedy. Additionally, Shirk mentioned that support systems have been put in place to assist students, staff and faculty. We will also have the Montgomery County Prepared Crisis Response Team in the district tomorrow (Wednesday, April 3) to provide additional support. Students can access counseling support through their School Counseling Office, the letter read. The defendant is currently incarcerated at Chester County Prison and is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on April 8. He is facing charges of attempted first-degree murder, aggravated assault, simple assault, terroristic threats, recklessly endangering another person, possession of an instrument of crime and possession of a firearm by a minor. Bail was set at $1 million. Anyone with information on this crime is asked to contact Chester County Detective Kristin Lund at 610-344-6866. UPPER POTTSGROVE Despite the fact that it does not own a sewage treatment plant, the township has been approached by two private companies about selling its sewer system, it was revealed during an April 1 work session. The revelation was a while in coming, as Commissioners Chairman Trace Slinkerd began the discussion by talking about the financial challenges the township faces and he made no mention that he was trying to outline how selling the sewer system might alleviate some of those challenges. But Commissioner Elwood Taylor pressed to make it clear to the small audience at last nights meeting. After the meeting, Sewer Committee Chairman and former commissioner John Bealer said the township was approached by Aqua PA and Pennsylvania American Water about selling the system. Ever since the passage of Act 12 in 2016, private utility companies like Aqua and PA American Water have been on a buying spree. The act changes the way the systems are valued and allows municipalities to charge much more to sell the system than they previously did. This makes overtures from private companies much more attractive because the sale prices are much higher. Just last summer, Limerick Township sold its system for more than $75 million to Aqua PA, in a move that allowed the township to eliminate debt and fund several capital projects, but may also mean a rate hike for Limerick customers of as much as 84 percent. To be fair, Limericks annual average sewer rate of about $384 will be frozen for three years under the law. And Upper Pottsgroves annual bill is about $860, one of the highest in the area. That may be because the system has about 1,600 equivalent dwelling units, which is how sewer charges are calculated, that together have to should the nearly $9 million in debt it cost to expand the system to homes with failing septic fields and failing systems, like the Regal Oaks subdivision off Gilbertsville Road. Bearler said about 35 percent of the quarterly sewer bill goes to debt service on the system extension. If the system is purchased, the debt would still be owed by the township, he said, so that would likely be the first place the money from the sale would be spent. Bealer said because rates are often frozen for three years under the tenants of the law, as was the case in Limerick, the system might be attractive to private buyers because of the profit margin of higher rates to pay off a debt that no longer exists. He said he would only support the sale if it could lower rates for customers, which both Krazalkovich and Slinkerd suggested could happen. However, Upper Pottsgrove does not own a sewage treatment system, unlike Limerick. Instead, Upper Pottstown, along with Lower Pottsgrove and West Pottsgrove townships, send their sewage to the Pottstown Wastewater Treatment Plant, owned and operated by the Pottstown Borough Authority. There is no price determined yet and the township commissioners met in closed door executive session at the end of the meeting to discuss the matter. Comments by Slinkerd suggest that the municipal financial firm of PFM may be who he has in mind to determine that price. But even without a price, Slinkerd and Vice Chairman France Krazalkovich were ready to start discussing how that money could be spent, including retiring the sewer debt, as well as funding improvements to the townships buildings. However Taylor warned that once the system is gone, customers would no longer have the ability to complain about or dispute their bills with their local government, and would instead have to contend with a large corporation. Our people will not have a say, said Taylor, noting that local politicians are easier to replace than big corporations. Krazalkovich, pointed out that local government tried to control trash collection in town and that did not work. But people saved money after the townwide contract expired and was abandoned because people had a choice of which hauler to chose. There was competition. That will not be the case with a sewer system, said Taylor. This is a monopoly interested in making money. The local government is not interested in making money, he said. Slinkerd said that Fortune 500 companies like Aqua and PA American Water are better equipped to manage sewer systems than small townships. Profit is not evil, he said. This article first appeared as a post in The Digital Notebook blog. In my view, Joe Bidens kisses and hugs should be a non-story, and would be but for the desire of left-wing Democrats to prevent him from being the partys nominee. Here, though, is what may well be a genuine Biden scandal. According to John Solomon of The Hill, then-Vice President Biden strong armed Ukraine into firing its chief prosecutor who, at the time, was investigating a company that employed Bidens son, Hunter. Biden himself confesses to the strong arming part. Indeed, in 2018 he boasted about it: Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldnt resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor. In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didnt immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. I said, Youre not getting the billion. Im going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: Im leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, youre not getting the money, Biden recalled telling Poroshenko. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time, Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat. Like Obama once said: Nobody messes with Joe. But what was Bidens beef with the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin? It might have been, at least in part, the fact that Shokin was being criticized for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions. It seems very strange, though, that an American Vice President would issue the kind of ultimatum Biden delivered fire a prosecutor within six hours or lose $1 billion in loan guarantees over an internal matter a shortage of corruption prosecutions. Has the U.S. ever intervened in this fashion to remedy defects in a nations criminal justice system? Its particularly odd that a Vice President would make such a threat to an ally that was under siege from Russia. The loss of $1 billion in loan guarantees would have been a huge blow to Ukraine and a boon to Russia, given the state of relations between the two countries. If President Trump even mooted the notion of such a cut-off, it would be viewed in many quarters as evidence of collusion. The other explanation for Bidens ultimatum is that Shokin, whatever corruption he might not have been investigating, was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, a firm that employed Hunter Biden as a board member. According to Solomon: U.S. banking records show Hunter Bidens American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts usually more than $166,000 a month from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. The general prosecutors official file for the Burisma probe shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money. Shokin told me in written answers to questions that, before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made specific plans for the investigation that included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden. (Emphasis added) The ouster of Shokin and his replacement by someone solid at the time pretty much let Burisma off the hook, says Solomon. Only after Biden made his boast did the solid prosecutor revisit the matter. Now that same prosecutor says he has information hed like to present to Attorney General William Barr. Go for it. Did Biden know about the Burisma probe and his sons role in the matter? There can be no genuine doubt that Biden knew about his sons role. His office was quoted in a New York Times article as acknowledging Hunter Bidens role in Burisma. The article appeared four months before Biden forced Shokin out. That same article discussed the Burisma case. Moreover, Biden would not have demanded Shokins ouster without having some knowledge about the prosecutors job performance knowledge that inevitably would come, in large part, from our diplomatic mission to Ukraine. According to Solomon, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev that coordinated Bidens work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutors case against Burisma. Thus, we seem to have a genuine Joe Biden scandal here. Solomon suggests the following questions for Biden: Was it appropriate for your son and his firm to cash in on Ukraine while you served as point man for Ukraine policy? What work was performed for the money Hunter Bidens firm received? Did you know about the Burisma probe? And when it was publicly announced that your son worked for Burisma, should you have recused yourself from leveraging a U.S. policy to pressure the prosecutor who very publicly pursued Burisma? The last of these questions answers itself. I want to reiterate my complaint about the drive-by mugging New Yorker staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells administered to me in the profile of Ilhan Omar that was posted online this past Wednesday. In one paragraph of the profile, W-W defamed me with the straightforward implication that I was peddling hate and conspiracy theory in raising the question whether Omars husband number 2 is her brother. I emailed W-W on Wednesday afternoon asking what factual basis supported his implications. He has failed to respond. Having slimed me with old-fashioned libel, W-W has moved on. When I was a college undergraduate, Noel Perrin was one of my great English teachers. Professor Perrin was a man of enormous learning and wit. He wore his learning lightly, as in his National Book Award-nominated book Dr. Bowdlers Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (1969). Professor Perrin was not only a wonderful teacher. He was also a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Professor Perrin was one of many teachers who taught me never to do what W-W did to me. I think he would be appalled by W-W and his similarly high-handed colleagues at todays New Yorker. TORONTO, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Shawcor Ltd. (Shawcor or the Company) (TSX: SCL) announced the closing today of the previously announced plan of arrangement (the Arrangement) under section 192 of the Canada Business Corporations Act, involving ZCL Composites Inc. (ZCL), Shawcor and the holders (the Shareholders) of common shares of ZCL (the Common Shares) and holders of options to purchase Common Shares of ZCL (the Optionholders and together with the Shareholders, the Securityholders). Pursuant to the Arrangement, Shawcor acquired all of the issued and outstanding Common Shares for a purchase price of $10.00 per Common Share payable entirely in cash. Upon the closing of the Arrangement, ZCL and Shawcor intend to amalgamate to continue as Shawcor Ltd. The Arrangement was approved by 99.37% of the votes cast by Securityholders (voting together as a single class) and 99.42% of the Shareholders (voting separately). The Court of Queens Bench of Alberta issued a final order approving the Arrangement on March 29, 2019. We are extremely pleased that the acquisition of ZCL has closed and we welcome ZCLs employees to the Shawcor family. We believe that the strengths of ZCL and its employees are an excellent fit for Shawcor and that this acquisition represents a continuation of Shawcors strategy to broaden its product and service offering. said Mr. Steve Orr, Shawcors President and Chief Executive Officer. ZCL has submitted an application to the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) to delist the Common Shares and an application will also be made for ZCL to cease to be a reporting issuer in the applicable jurisdictions. The Common Shares are expected to be delisted from the TSX effective as of the close of trading on or about April 2, 2019. To deposit and obtain payment for Common Shares pursuant to the Arrangement, a properly completed and duly executed letter of transmittal, together with the certificate(s) representing Common Shares or direct registration system advices representing Common Shares and all other required documents, must be received by AST Trust Company (Canada) (the Depositary) at the address provided in the letter of transmittal that was previously mailed to registered shareholders of ZCL. The letter of transmittal may also be found on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com under ZCLs profile or by contacting the Depositary. Shareholders will receive the consideration for their Common Shares provided they have sent all of the necessary documentation to the Depositary. About Shawcor Shawcor Ltd. is a global energy services company specializing in products and services for the pipeline and pipe services segment of the oil and gas industry and related products for the petrochemical and industrial market. The Company operates through a global network of fixed and mobile manufacturing and service facilities and is valued for its integrity, technology and proven capability to execute the most complex projects in its industry. About ZCL Composites ZCL is North Americas largest manufacturer of environmentally friendly fiberglass reinforced plastic underground storage tanks for the fuel, water and wastewater and oil & gas markets. ZCL is an innovator in composite tank engineering, with nearly 40 years of direct industry experience. When ZCL acquired Xerxes Corporation in 2007, it brought together North Americas two leading fiberglass tank brands: ZCL (founded in 1987) and Xerxes (founded in 1979). ZCLs product offering includes underground composite tanks and a full complement of accessories. ZCLs six UL-listed or ULC-listed manufacturing facilities across North America ensure that it is able to supply its tanks throughout North America in a timely manner. ZCLs tanks are made of 100% premium resin and glass (no fillers), making them corrosion-resistant, both inside and out. To date, ZCL has installed approximately a quarter of a million composite tanks. Forward-Looking Information This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Words such as may, will, should, anticipate, plan, expect, believe, predict, estimate or similar terminology are used to identify forward-looking information. This forward-looking information is based on assumptions, estimates and analysis made in the light of the Companys experience and its perception of trends, current conditions and expected developments, including the expected amalgamation of ZCL and Shawcor, the expected delisting of the Common Shares, the application by ZCL to cease to be a reporting issuer under applicable Canadian securities laws and other statements that are not historical, as well as other factors that are believed by the Company to be reasonable and relevant in the circumstances. Forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those predicted, expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. The forward-looking information is provided as of the date of this news release and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law. For further information, please contact: Anesthesia Breathing Bags Market Anesthesia Breathing Bags Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 11:13:27 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 733 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Prevalence of respiratory disease such as asthma have increased tremendously following changes to a modern and urban lifestyle. According to WHO, 300 million of all ages suffer from asthma, a disease which leads to difficulty in breathing. Anesthesia breathing bag falls under the category of hand held medical device which is used to provide medical ventilation to patients with difficulties in breathing. Along with an oxygen source, anesthesia breathing bags also monitor tidal volume, control respirations, provide constant positive airway pressures, and sense compliance during ventilation. Improvement in the medical knowledge and ameliorating healthcare infrastructure is propelling the growth of the anesthesia breathing bags market. Anesthesia breathing bags are thin and durable in use. Moreover, these bags are easily gripped which is further expected to bolster the demand of the global anesthesia breathing bags market over the forecast period.Global Anesthesia Breathing Bags Market: DynamicsRising prevalence of bronchial and respiratory diseases is fuelling the demand of anesthesia bags market. Additionally, the increase in the geriatric population globally is also leading to surging demand for anesthesia breathing bags market. Rising adoption of safe health care practices in emerging economies is expected to create ample opportunities of growth for the global anesthesia breathing bags market. The growth of the global anesthesia breathing bags market is marred by the presence of all other alternatives which are being extensively used in hospitals and among other end users.Additionally , certain regions witness the lack of skilled personnel. Not only this, increased risk of cross contamination and strict government regulations concerning the efficacy and safety of these bags is expected to hamper the growth of the global anesthesia breathing bags market. High taxation on the healthcare devices is also expected to restrain the growth of the global anesthesia breathing bags market. Use of raw materials that are rendered safe for environment is expected to open up new avenues of market growth for the global anesthesia breathing bags market.Global Anesthesia Breathing Bags Market: Regional OutlookThe global anesthesia breathing bags market is segmented on the basis of the region into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa (MEA), and Latin America. North America is expected to lead the global anesthesia breathing bags market attributed to a high percentage of healthcare expenditure of the region. Asia Pacific anesthesia breathing bags market is expected to witness steady growth over the forecast period due to rising technological innovations among the healthcare organizations in the region. Europe anesthesia breathing bags market is expected to witness moderate growth over the forecast period. The region is expected to grow at a slow pace as compared to Asia Pacific due to declining economy in certain regions. Middle East & Africa is expected to witness sluggish growth due to comparatively low GDP and a low percentage of healthcare expenditure.Request Report for Table of Contents @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-5149 Global Anesthesia Breathing Bags Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in the global anesthesia breathing bags market are Armstrong Medical, Nolato group, Bemis Inc., Qosina Corporation, SunMed Medical, CMVI ltd., Westmed, Inc., Medline Industries, Inc., Tri-anim Health Services, Smiths Group plc and Anaesthetics India Private Limited.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies. Report Highlights : Detailed overview of parent market,Changing market dynamics in the industry,In-depth market segmentation,Historical, current and projected market size in terms of volume and value,Recent industry trends and developments,Competitive landscape,Strategies of key players and products offered,Potential and niche segments, geographical regions exhibiting promising growth,A neutral perspective on market performance,Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprint.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-5149 Bile Collection Bags Market Bile Collection Bags Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 11:12:12 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 733 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Bile collection bags are mainly used for the process of bile drainage. Bile drainage involves the insertion of a tube in the liver to extract the bile juice. Bile collection bags are used across diagnostic centres and pathology labs and are usually made of plastic and elastomers. Apart from the bile juice, they are also used for the collection of gastric secretions. Bile collection bags market is expected to grow over the forecast period due to rising prevalence of liver related disorders. The growth of the global bile collection bags is also expected to expand due to growing demand for laparoscopic cholecystectomy.Global Bile Collection Bags Market: DynamicsSince there is a rising prevalence of chronic diseases worldwide, the global bile collection bags market is expected to be driven by the high demand in surgical procedures. Bile collection bags facilitate the easy collection of bile and other gastric secretions which is further anticipated to bolster the demand of the global market. Additionally, the increase in the geriatric population globally is also leading to surging demand for bile collection bags market. Moreover, the government of emerging economies is providing the facility of an easy access to the bile collection bags which is expected to open up new market opportunities for growth of the global bile collection bags market. The growth of the global bile collection bags market is hampered by an increased risk of cross contamination and strict government regulations concerning the efficacy and safety of these bags is expected to hamper the growth of the global bile collection bags market. High taxation on the healthcare devices is also expected to restrain the growth of the global bile collection bags market. Use of raw materials that are rendered safe for environment is expected to open up new avenues of market growth for the global bile collection bags market.Request Report for Table of Contents @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-5115 Global Bile Collection Bags Market: Regional OutlookThe global bile collection bags market is segmented on the basis of the region into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa (MEA), and Latin America. North America is expected to lead the global bile collection bags market attributed to a well-established healthcare industry along with a health concerned population base. . Asia Pacific bile collection bags market is expected to expand at the highest CAGR over the forecast period due to rising technological innovations among the healthcare organizations in the region. Economy like India in the APAC region represents a high number of liver related disorders wherein the bile collection bags are expected to find their maximum consumption. Europe bile collection bags market is expected to witness moderate growth over the forecast period. The region is expected to grow at a slow pace as compared to Asia Pacific due to down turning economy in certain regions. Middle East & Africa is expected to witness sluggish growth due to comparatively low GDP and a low percentage of healthcare expenditure.Global Bile Collection Bags Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in the global bile collection bags market are Hyupsung Medical Co., Ltd., C. R. Bard, Inc., Medline Industries, Inc., Baxter International Inc., Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co., and Redax.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to categories such as market segments, geographies, types, technology and applications.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies. Report Highlights : Detailed overview of parent market,Changing market dynamics in the industry,In-depth market segmentation,Historical, current and projected market size in terms of volume and value,Recent industry trends and developments,Competitive landscape,Strategies of key players and products offered,Potential and niche segments, geographical regions exhibiting promising growth,A neutral perspective on market performance,Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprint.Request to Report Methodology @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-5115 PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 14:23:35 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 440 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 Deng, Who is Head of Growth at Right Hook Digital, Enjoys Helping Ambitious Entrepreneurs to Reach their Business GoalsLOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / Dee Deng, Head of Growth at Right Hook Digital, has been busy traveling the globe, teaching entrepreneurs his secrets to making a good income from Instagram and Facebook ads.To learn more about Right Hook Digital and the services that they offer, please visit https://righthookdigital.com/ As a company spokesperson noted, Deng's first startup was not a smashing success - in fact, it left him broke. Undeterred by the situation, Deng said the experience changed his life forever by providing him with the perfect platform to learn about sales and growth marketing.''When you're running a bootstrapped startup, every last cent counts. This is really where I cut my teeth with Facebook ads and 'growth hacking,' Deng said, adding that he immersed himself in the subject, learning all he could about how to make good money from Facebook and Instagram ads.Now, through his role at Right Hook Digital, Deng loves spending his days helping passionate entrepreneurs to achieve their growth goals.''I also get to drive sales for our agency - taking us to $1.2M ARR within 6 months,'' Deng said.Deng said he is ''super proud'' of what his team has achieved so far for their clients, which includes growing a men's fashion label from startup to $1M company in 90 days; generating $570,000 worth of new business for a finance client with a $9,000 advertising budget and working with dozens of other clients for whom they are generating a solid return on investment.Recently, Deng has been traveling across the world to teach others what he has learned. One of his most recent stops was in Australia in mid-March, where he spoke at Digital Marketers Australia, one of Australia's top digital marketing courses.The fact that Deng is traveling the globe and has achieved such success will not surprise the many satisfied clients who have worked with him. As one client noted in his review on Right Hook Digital's website, ''If you need someone to manage your total marketing approach and not give you a 'cookie cutter' package, but instead tangible ROI, Right Hook is the team for you.'' About Right Hook Digital:At Right Hook Digital, they partner with growing brands and businesses by providing brand and growth strategy, creative, social advertising and PPC, demand generation and lead nurturing services. Everything they do is to help build their clients' brands and grow their businesses. For more information, please visit https://righthookdigital.com/ Contact:Dee Dengdee@ righthookdigital.com +61 403 142 366SOURCE: Right Hook Digital Dicamba Market: Europe to Remain Market Leader Through 2020: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 2016-2020 Dicamba Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 13:04:15 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 522 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Growing need for broadleaf weed regulation will continue to be the key driver to the demand for dicamba globally. The global dicamba market is foreseen to witness healthy growth, reaching a value worth US$ 313.3 Mn in 2016. North America may outpace the largest dicamba market i.e. Europe, in terms of Y-o-Y growth.Use of dicamba as an herbicide for controlling broadleaf weed in domestic, commercial, and non-commercial applications, will remain the primary factor fuelling the demand.Farmland maintenance is the most prominent driver to dicamba market growth. In addition to easy usage and widespread availability, rising need for food safety and security, and growing awareness about efficient crop protection, are likely to favour the growth of the dicamba market, especially in developing countries. Surging need for maximum crop yield without losing facing significant loss is also identified to be one of the important market drivers. Steadily increasing exports from China are foreseen to push the market growth further.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2556 A number of modern agricultural practices involve replacement or combination of glyphosate with dicamba, which may create lucrative opportunities. Moreover, wide acceptance of integrated pest management is also expected to spur the consumption of dicamba. The U.S. EPAs recent approval for the usage of a non-volatile dicamba-based herbicide by Monsanto is now considered to be a major booster to dicamba market growth. Emergence of innovative applications of dicamba in addressing multiple weed destruction will be another critical factor pushing the market.Drift damage caused due to the volatility of dicamba can remain a longstanding challenge to the market growth. Similarly, reported cases of illnesses and allergies in humans post-exposure to dicamba, will remain a major barrier to mass adoption. Strict regulations regarding approval is another key factor expected to restrain the market growth.With revenues beyond US$ 265.0 Mn in 2016, agriculture will continue to lead the market in terms of application, with over 84% market value share. Lawn and turf segment is also expected to register a remarkable market share of over 12% in 2016. While the Y-o-Y growth of agriculture segment is projected to be of around 8.7% in 2017 over 2016, that of the lawn and turf segment is estimated at 7.3%.Regionally, Europe is currently the largest market for dicamba. However, it may witness a slight decline post-2016. This region is likely to account for over 26% market share in 2016, whereas the revenues can reach beyond US$ 83 Mn. A higher growth rate is expected to be registered by North America, possibly accounting for almost 24% share of the market value in 2016. In 2017, Europe will exhibit a strong Y-o-Y growth of 7.7% over 2016, whereas that of North America is projected to be of 9.2%.Need more information about Report Methodology @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-2556 BASF SE, E I du Pont de Nemours & Company, Monsanto Co., The Dow Chemical Company, Bayer AG, Nufarm Limited, and Syngenta AG are some of the leading companies competing in the global dicamba market. Recently, DuPont and Monsanto Co. announced a multi-year dicamba supply agreement, confined to North America. Long-term Outlook: The global dicamba market is expected to expand at a robust CAGR of 15.4%. Energy Efficiency Gamification Market Energy Efficiency Gamification Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 11:23:15 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 513 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Games are widespread and most powerful ways through which human beings interact, have fun and by which they communicate. Human brains are wired for social bonding, positive feedback and to enjoy the challenges that games provide. Games rise awareness by using visual communication, limits the wastage of electrical energy and collaborative community engagement. This energy efficiency gamification involves games which includes players (either individually or in teams) and are rewarded for various energy savings accomplishments for a particular time of game played. Also, it gives feedback for their actions on actual-time data on players energy use and make maximum use of virtual world. Some of these games are Oroeco, Virtual Energy Advisor, ecoGator, Carbon Footprint Reduction Game, Utilityco, Cool Choices, WeSpire, Vermontivate, JouleBug, Kansas Take Charge and Kukui Cup.As the use of appliances and consumer electronics is increasing so consumption of electrical energy is surging. The governments across various countries, power providers & organizations are looking for the ways to reduce the wastage of energy and help the nation become more energy efficient & globally secured. Hence, the energy efficiency gamification market is estimated to grow at a healthy CAGR during the forecast period.The surging energy prices, government initiatives to save energy consumption, increasing overall user experience of games are driving the global energy efficiency gamification market. Also due to the ever increasing smartphones market it is easier for people to access the different kind of games that further leads to the growth of energy efficiency gamification market. However , some restraints are hampering on the energy efficiency gamification market those are lack of awareness about these games and unpredictable effects on user behavior and attitudes.Request for Table of Contents @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-2372 Geographically, the global energy efficiency gamification market can be divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan, and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). North Americais the leading region for the energy efficiency gamification market due to major adoption of gamification techniques. Asia Pacific is the next major contributor in the global energy efficiency gamification market due to growing adoption of smartphones by the individuals and growing gamification and creative innovation initiatives.Europe is following Asia Pacific and North America in terms of market share in the globalenergy efficiency gamification market because of getting fund support from the European Unions seventh framework programme for research and technological development. Latin America is the further booming region due to UNEPs Efficient Appliances and Equipments Partnership (United for Efficiency) and is expected to save energy consumption by switching to cleaner technologies. The Middle East and Africa are at a nascent stage in the global energy efficiency gamification market.The key players in the global energy efficiency gamification market are Oroeco Inc., Energy In Time, myEcoNavigator, Evolaris, Lockheed Martin Corporation, San Diego Gas & Electric, Opower Inc., Cool Choices Inc., Simple Energy Inc., WeSpire Inc., Creative Roustabouts LLC, JouleBug, and Take Charge Challenge.A sample of this report is available upon request @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2372 Europe advanced aerospace coatings market to receive strong revenue support from the thriving aircraft production and deliveries, coupled with the rapidly expanding aircraft fleet size. Growing aircraft leasing activities to positively impact advanced aerospace coatings market in Europe. Rising demand for aircraft MRO to trigger growth of Europe advanced aerospace coatings aftermarket sales. Advanced Aerospace Coatings Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 13:29:31 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 811 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 The report provides comprehensive information on market trends, value (US$ Mn) and volume (000 Li), competition, recent developments and dynamics in Europe advanced aerospace coatings market for the duration between 2018 and 2028.The Europe advanced aerospace coatings market was valuated at just-over US$ 390 million in 2018, which is anticipated to register the CAGR of 4.9% through 2028. Increasing demand for efficient and lightweight advanced aerospace coatings is expected to be a major factor driving the demand for advanced aerospace coatings in the Europe market during the forecast period.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-eu-82 Rising Aircraft Production & Expanding Fleet Size Continues to Generate Sustained Demand for Advanced Aerospace Coatings in EuropeEuropes increasing air passenger traffic has been leading to an increase in the demand for commercial aircraft. This, in turn, has been leading to an increase in the production of commercial aircraft. The growth of the advanced aerospace coatings market is directly dependent on the total aircraft production and the fleet size.Rising production and sales of aircraft, particularly in developing countries within the region are anticipated to create noteworthy opportunities in Europes advanced aerospace coatings market. Increasing aircraft deliveries by leading manufacturers such as Airbus and Boeing are underpinning substantial additions to the existing aircraft fleet size of Europe.Progressing Scenario within MRO Segment to Majorly Influence Europes Advanced Aerospace Coatings Market GrowthAs the number of aircraft that are in service is increasingly constantly, the report prompts at the subsequent rise in demand for maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) of various aircraft parts, components, and vital systems. This, according to FMI, will trigger the revenue growth of MRO sales channel within Europes advanced aerospace coatings market during the forecast period.The MRO sales channel of commercial segment of the Europe advanced aerospace coatings market is projected to grow at a 5.9% value CAGR during the forecast period. Increasing fleet size of commercial as well as business aircraft and high demand for customized exteriors are some of the other factors driving the growth of the advanced aerospace coatings MRO sales channel.Aftermarket Sales of Advanced Aerospace Coatings in Europe to Gain Uptick with Soaring Demand for Leased AircraftAn aircraft, being one of the most expensive commodities, a number of small airline carriers prefer to lease from major players. While leasing of aircraft helps these airline carriers avoid high capital investments, they generally tend to renovate the entire aircraft before putting it into operation.The entire aircraft cabin is renovated according to specific requisites of respective airline carriers and their customer demands.More often, a leased aircraft is coated with multiple paints and colors, highlighting the symbol and logo of particular airlines. According to the report, increasing rate of aircraft leasing will continue to push the growth of advanced aerospace coatings market in Europe.Rapid Sales of Advanced Aerospace Coatings Continue to Suffer from Relatively Gradual Growth of European Economies, Post CrisisPost the financial crisis, economic growth has slowed down, as compared to the growth registered prior to the financial crisis. Wage growth has been weak and most of the industrial work has been outsourced to emerging economies, which has made industrial investment in developed economies weak. This, in turn, has been restraining the growth of the advanced aerospace coatings market.Democratic uprisings, such as the Arab Spring, economic sanctions against Russia and the involvement of Ukraine in a proxy war, have pushed many countries into an economic turmoil. The market in these nations has been deteriorating exponentially and in recent times, these markets have been exhibiting a moderate growth scenario. Due to the economic crisis, the purchasing in these countries has come down drastically and subsequently, the demand for advanced aerospace coatings has suffered.Advanced Aerospace Coatings Market Competition LandscapeThe Europe advanced aerospace coatings market is consolidated with the top two market players (Akzo Nobel and PPG Industries Inc.) accounting for double-digit market shares as of 2017. The top ten players in the Europe advanced aerospace coatings market are projected to collectively account for between a 50% and 60% market share.Need more information about Report Methodology @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-eu-82 In the recent past, the advanced aerospace coatings market has witnessed significant improvements from a competition perspective. Acquisitions, collaborations and expansion of production capacity are some of the key strategies being adopted by market players to expand and sustain in the Europe advanced aerospace coatings market.Praxair , Inc. and GE Aviation opened a new facility in the U.S. for their PG Technologies business that specializes in advanced coatings and enables jet engines to withstand high stress and temperaturesPG Technologies Ltd. announced that it intends to add a new additional coating capacity in Singapore to meet the ever-increasing demand from the aviation industryAkzo Nobel opened a specialty coatings facility in Dongguan, China, primarily for the production of advanced aerospace coatings for South and North Asia aviation markets High Concentration Photovoltaics Market High Concentration Photovoltaics Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 11:25:05 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 550 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 The CPV (Concentrated Photovoltaics) technology is used to generate electricity by using lenses or curved mirrors to gather huge amount of sunlight on a small area with highly proficient Multi-Junction (MJ) solar cells. HCPV (High Concentration Photovoltaics a type of CPV technology) systems occupies concentrating optics which includes Fresnel lenses or dish reflectors that concentrate sunlight to intensify it, equals to that of 1,000 suns or more. HCPV solar technology is the process through which maximum sun energy is converted into electricity, HCPV can reduce the expenses of the solar cells. Globally, high-concentration photovoltaics market is growing due to high efficiency and upsurge in yearly installed capacity (i.e. from 300 up to 1000 suns).The installations of HCPV systems is expected to grow by double-digit percentage every year. The high-concentration photovoltaics are mostly used in industrial, telecom or mobile towers, rural electrification and government or military sectors. Due to its ecofriendly nature, uninterrupted power supply, high efficiencies for direct-normal irradiance, simple & user friendly integration, rapid deployment solutions, and increased and stable energy production, the high-concentration photovoltaics market is projected to grow at a healthy CAGR during the forecast period.The drivers of the high-concentration photovoltaics market are minimum land space requirement, consistent improvements in its technology, awareness of renewable energy resources, and government assistance program with essential financing schemes. Also reduction in Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) and improved efficiency with low system cost is another significant factor contributing in the surging global high-concentration photovoltaics market. However, some of the restraints hindering the growth of the global high-concentration photovoltaics market are expensive solar trackers required to get sunlight focused on the small photovoltaic area, non-utilization of diffuse radiation, perception and bankability issues, lack of technology standardization, lack of adoption of technology and limited places with high direct normal irradiation.Request for Table of Contents @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-2373 Global High-Concentration Photovoltaics Market Segmentation By Type of Power Generation: Electric power, Electric power and thermal power; By Applications: Industrial, Residential and Commercial rooftop, Telecom or Mobile towers, Rural electrification, Water pumping solutions, Street lighting, Government or Military (mobile off grid), Municipalities, Hospitals, Hotels and RestaurantsGeographically, high-concentration photovoltaics market can be divided into seven regions, namely NorthAmerica, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan, and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America is the prominent contributor in high-concentration photovoltaics market because of the technological advancements in United States for solar power energy utilization. Latin America is the next vital region in the high-concentration photovoltaics market due to some large projects are planned in the Mexico. Asia Pacific is following North America and Latin America for the high-concentration photovoltaics market on account of growing HCPV production in China, Taiwan and Japan. Europe is also witnessing a growing market of high-concentration photovoltaics market because of increase in HCPV installations and Energy Payback Time. The Middle East and Africa (MEA) are at a nascent stage in the high-concentration photovoltaics market, however they are expected to expand at a significant CAGR in the forecast period.Some of the key players working in high-concentration photovoltaics market are: Abengoa Solar, S.A., Cool Earth Solar, ES-SYSTEM, Green & Gold Solar Pty Ltd., Fullsun Photovoltaics, Arzon Solar, LLC, and BSQ Solar, SL.Request For Report Sample: http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2373 Hinged Dispensing Caps Market Hinged Dispensing Caps Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 11:14:49 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 705 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Convenience to the consumer has been the top priority of packaging manufacturers all over the globe. New formats of caps & closures are being introduced in the market, the hinged dispensing cap being one of them. Hinged dispensing cap market is expected to be driven by the demand for added value and premium products. The soaring demand for plastic caps and closures in the beverages sector is allowing the overall hinged dispensing caps market to gain impetus. The spiralling use of PET-based disposable bottles is translating into the greater sales of hinged dispensing caps. Also, higher levels of R & D investment and technical expertise are expected to further fuel the hinged dispensing caps market. The global hinged dispensing caps market is expected to expand at a healthy CAGR over the period of next five years.Global Hinged Dispensing Caps Market: DynamicsGrowing popularity among the end users such as pharmaceuticals where traditional forms of caps & closures were used is bolstering the demand of the global hinged dispensing caps market. Hinged dispensing caps are now being used for various other pouch formats as they promote not only the reusability but also ensure longer shelf life of the packaged product. The regulatory restrictions laid by the government in certain regions regarding the disposal of plastics is restraining the growth of the global hinged dispensing caps market. Introduction of hinged dispensing caps in pouch formats such as spout pouches is expected to bring in ample opportunities of growth for the global hinged dispensing caps market. Introduction of features such as child resistant hinged dispensing caps is a key trend prevailing in the global hinged dispensing caps market. The advent of bio based caps is also expected to create ample opportunities for growth of the global hinged dispensing caps market.Request Report for Table of Contents @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-5184 Global Hinged Dispensing Caps Market: Regional OutlookOn the basis of geography, the global hinged dispensing caps market is segmented into North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe, and Middle East & Africa. North America is expected to lead the global hinged dispensing caps market attributed to its well established end user segments. The cosmetics and beverage end use industry is highly advanced in North America region which is anticipated to bolster the demand of the hinged dispensing caps. Asia Pacific is expected to expand at a comparatively high CAGR, mainly attributed to rising middle class population and disposable income in the region. Consumers in the APAC region are willing to pay for enhanced packaging types. Europe hinged dispensing caps market is anticipated to witness moderate growth due to economic slump in certain regions. Middle East & Africa hinged dispensing caps market is expected to witness sluggish growth over the forecast period.Global Hinged Dispensing Caps Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in the global hinged dispensing caps market are Mold-Rite Plastics, Maynard & Harris Plastics, O.Berk Company, Taplast SPA, Gil Plastic Products ltd., and Berlin Packaging L.L.C.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies. Report Highlights : Detailed overview of parent market,Changing market dynamics in the industry,In-depth market segmentation,Historical, current and projected market size in terms of volume and value,Recent industry trends and developments,Competitive landscape,Strategies of key players and products offered,Potential and niche segments, geographical regions exhibiting promising growth,A neutral perspective on market performance,Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprint.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-5184 PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 15:46:52 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 1000 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2019 / PowerBand Solutions Inc. (TSXV: PBX) (OTCQB: PWWBF) (Frankfurt: 1ZVA) ("PowerBand", "PBX" or the "Company"), a leading online automotive auction, remarketing and sales platform in North America, is pleased to announce the official launch of D2D Auto Auctions ("D2D").D2D Auto Auctions is the realization of the previously announced partnership PowerBand and Bryan Hunt entered into in November 2018 to establish an automotive online remarketing network in the United States. Since that time PowerBand has been customizing its auction platform for the U.S market while Bryan Hunt and his team at 71B Auctions in Springdale, Arkansas have been marketing the D2D remarketing solution to its vast base of existing dealers who currently buy and sell vehicles at their physical auction locations. To date over 1,300 dealers have been registered on the D2D platform and this number is expected to increase as D2D's sales team targets additional dealerships and commercial customers, including leasing, rental and fleet companies, across the southern United States. D2D customers are able to access the online auction platform on their computers at www.D2DAA.com , or on their mobile devices by downloading the D2D App, that is available on either iOS or Android.Mike Moen, President and COO of PowerBand, stated: "In partnership with Bryan Hunt we are excited to have launched D2D Auto Auctions' online platform. D2D's customers will be able to save considerable time and money buying and selling vehicles online versus the traditional physical auction method. D2D's customers will also have access to a greater supply and variety of used vehicles, including vehicles exported from Canada, than they would through physical auction channels. In the U.S. alone over 40 million used vehicles exchange hands each year, with over 10 million vehicles being bought and sold through auctions. Online auctions are growing at a faster rate than physical auctions and we believe D2D has a large opportunity to capture considerable market share in a fast growing market segment of the used vehicle industry, giving PowerBand a solid foothold in the U.S. automotive transaction marketplace." As the rollout of D2D gains traction in the second quarter of 2019, PowerBand anticipates online vehicle auction transactions, and the associated transaction revenue, on the D2D platform to increase month-over-month as more dealers choose to buy and sell used vehicles online. PowerBand's 50% ownership in the D2D partnership gives it an equal share of revenues generated.In addition, the Company announces that it intends to settle an outstanding debt of $705,035.00 owed to the CEO of the Company, as of March 31, 2019, through the issuance of 7,050,350 common shares in the capital of PowerBand ("Common Shares") at a deemed price of $0.10 per Common Share. The closing share price of PBX on the TSX Venture Exchange on April 1, 2019 was $0.09.The issuance of the Common Shares to settle the debt is subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. All securities issued will be subject to a four month hold period which will expire on the date that is four months and one day from the date of issue.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 Development, PowerBandP: 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: 2019-04-02 09:02:03 Temenos Data Lake, first fully embedded big data platform with Temenos banking software, enables real-time analytics at scale at a significantly lower TCO Temenos Launches Data Lake to Fuel Next-Generation AI-Driven Banking Applications Media Contacts Jessica Wolfe Temenos Global Public Relations Tel: +1 610 232 2793 Email: press@temenos.com Alistair Kellie & Andrew Adie Newgate Communications on behalf of Temenos Tel: +44 20 7680 6550 Email: allnewgatetemenos@newgatecomms.com Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the banking software company, today launched Temenos Data Lake and is first to market with a robust, productized data lake that integrates big data analytics into its banking software. Temenos Data Lake delivers out-of-the box data integration, preparation and optimization to power AI-driven banking applications. Banks require a robust big data and advanced analytics capability to compete with the analytically driven new market entrants. Banks struggle with the ingestion, cleansing, blending, and optimization of data to prepare it for analytics and AI applications. Many banks are attempting to build internal data lakes to solve these issues with high costs and high failure rates. With Temenos Data Lake banks can now store and process all the data they need to power smarter applications from a single source and achieve higher performance at a very low TCO as opposed to building data lakes in-house, which is costly with high development and integration risks. Temenos Data Lake is part of the market-leading Temenos Analytics product which is embedded into cloud-native, cloud-agnostic Temenos Infinity and Temenos T24 Transact. Temenos Data Lake supports multiple underlying database and processing platforms including Apache Hadoop and is also pre- integrated with NuoDB, the enterprise-class, distributed, cloud and container native database, offering banks combined Temenos core banking and analytics functionality on a single database architecture. This dramatically accelerates deployment, eliminates complexity and removes integration costs. Temenos Data Lake has a robust set of data engineering tools, allowing banks to blend and enrich Temenos source data with other data sources, including unstructured data. Data engineering workloads leverage the Apache Spark in-memory processing engine which is the leading platform for large-scale SQL, batch processing, stream processing, and machine learning. Temenos Data Lake can be deployed as an enterprise data lake or as a point solution, embedded within the Temenos banking software products. Temenos Data Lake is available on premise and on cloud and is currently live at eight banks integrated with Temenos T24 Transact as well as third party core banking solutions. Banks recognize the value of their data as they seek to personalize customer engagement, improve fraud detection, and mitigate risk. Temenos Data Lake enables banks to meet strategic digital banking priorities, like establishing a real-time 360 customer view, using micro-segmentation to map products and services to appropriate customers and interacting with them in real time to drive revenue growth. For example, by embedding Temenos Data Lake into Temenos Infinity, banks leverage multiple customer data sources, including unstructured data, to gain valuable insights into customer behaviour and preferences. With Temenos Data Lake, banks can also power AI-based applications to tailor recommendations to each customer and offer contextualized advice. In the risk and regulatory space, Temenos Data Lake offers a centralized data lake with pre-prepared data models, populated by complete, accurate and timely data thats available in real time and on-demand. Integrated metadata management tools accelerate compliance with legislation such as BCBS 239, which continues to present an onerous challenge for banks. Temenos Data Lake alleviates the need for banks to engage in lengthy and expensive data integration projects, with a potential reduction in risk and compliance costs of up to 80%. To accelerate Temenos data and analytics strategy, Temenos purchased hTrunk, a fast-growing provider of big data and analytics solutions. Founded in 2015, hTrunk is a company based in Bangalore India, providing big data and analytics solutions, mainly to financial services institutions. hTrunks technology and research and development teams are being integrated with the Temenos Analytics product teams. Fred Cook, Chief Information Officer at BlueShore Financial, said: Temenos Analytics is mission critical for us in executing our unique strategy and differentiating our value proposition. The ability to integrate and combine many types of data is essential to gaining full business insights. The use of Temenos Analytics has enabled us to surgically execute our strategy, by defining customer micro-segments and tailoring our products and services specifically for these segments. This has led to an increase of 138% of assets under management over 8 years. Temenos Data Lake along with their and the integrated data engineering and analytics tools will help us continue this aggressive growth strategy. We will now be able to blend traditional structured banking data with unstructured data such as social and voice, allowing us to find new, untapped, market opportunities. Martin Stiller, Analyst at IDC Financial Insights, said: Business and IT leaders are overwhelmed by the sheer volume and variety of data at their disposal, and the cost of managing all this business intelligence. Fragmented access to enterprise data also creates a major barrier in building connected financial services. Internally aggregated data enriched by second / third party data is going to be crucial to start offering personalized services at scale. Temenos Data Lake announcement brings more innovation to this market and gives banks more options to consider as they decide on their approach to leveraging big data to enhance their business. Max Chuard, Chief Executive Officer, Temenos, said: Many banks are attempting to build data lakes to support their digital banking and regulatory and compliance initiatives. However, the cost and risk of development and integration are very high. Temenos Data Lake provides a productized, banking specific, solution which is embedded into the cloud-native, cloud-agnostic Temenos Infinity and Temenos T24 Transact products and it also successfully integrates with third party core banking products. This dramatically accelerates delivery and lowers costs. By combining Temenos 25 years of innovation building world-class packaged banking software with the latest advancements in big data and analytics, we provide banks the foundational technologies to help them realize the power of data, analytics, and AI to transform their business. Ends About Temenos Temenos AG (SIX: TEMN), headquartered in Geneva, is the worlds leader in banking software, partnering with banks and other financial institutions to transform their businesses and stay ahead of a changing marketplace. Over 3,000 firms across the globe, including 41 of the top 50 banks, rely on Temenos to process both the daily transactions and client interactions of more than 500 million banking customers. Temenos offers cloud-native, cloud-agnostic front office and core banking, payments, fund management and wealth management software products enabling banks to deliver consistent, frictionless customer journeys and gain operational excellence. Temenos customers are proven to be more profitable than their peers: over a seven-year period, they enjoyed on average a 31% higher return on assets, a 36% higher return on equity and an 8.6 percentage point lower cost/income ratio than banks running legacy applications. For more information please visit www.temenos.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005 The growth of the construction and packaging industries in developing countries is estimated to propel the market growth. Market Size USD 15.35 billion in 2018, Market Growth - CAGR of 5.4%, Market Trends Growing demand for consumer goods NEW YORK, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) Market is expected to reach USD 23.70 Billion by 2026, according to a new report by Reports and Data. Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) is the commonly used industry name for rigid material produced from the expanded polystyrene beads. EPS is a rigid, lightweight, plastic foam insulating material made from solid beads of polystyrene. The increasing prominence of insulation property in the building & construction sector of developed economies comprising China and India is anticipated to support the usage of high-quality polymers. Moreover, an increase in spending for enhancing the longevity of residential buildings and commercial complexes in extreme, external environmental conditions is projected to stimulate the market demand for expanded polystyrene. Request for a sample of this research report at: https://www.reportsanddata.com/sample-enquiry-form/1012 Increasing demand for cold chain packaging in the pharmaceutical sector for improving product safety and maintaining the freshness of the packaged products in the food and beverages industry during transportation is anticipated to boost the market growth. Besides, advancement in the frozen food industry in developed economies including the U.S. and Japan is expected to increase the scope of EPS in the packaging sector during the forecast period. In recent years, increase in population and urbanization in emerging economies including Brazil, India and China have resulted in increased government spending on improving the manufacturing sector of packaging, construction, and automotive industries. Availability of better substitutes for expanded polystyrene in the market is a significant restraint that may have a negative impact on the market demand. To identify the key trends in the industry, click on the link below: https://www.reportsanddata.com/report-detail/expanded-polystyrene-eps-market Further key findings from the report suggest White EPS contributed to the largest market share in 2018 and is forecasted to have a growth rate of 5.4% in the forecast period. This can be attributed to the excellent thermal and mechanical properties, easy recyclability, and non-corrosive characteristics of white EPS. The thermal resistance of the white EPS depends on the density of the finished product and it does not diminish with time. The construction sector was a significant consumer of expanded polystyrene in 2018, owing to the several benefits of expanded polystyrene, like enhanced durability, energy efficiency, and improved indoor environmental quality in the constructed buildings. The Asia Pacific region contributed to the largest market share in 2018 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.4% in the forecast period. The market dominance of Asia Pacific region is due to the rapid growth of the construction industry in the region, coupled with the extensive application of EPS in packaging. Key participants include BASF SE, S.C. Adeplast S.A., Sunpor Kunststoff GmbH, Ineous Styrenics, Universal Foam Products, Styro Limited, Nova Chemicals Corporation, the Ravago Group, Synthos S.A., and Versalis S.P.A among others. In June 2018, BASF, a significant player in the market, announced to increase its global production capacity for Neopor (expandable polystyrene containing graphite) by an aggregate of 40,000 metric tons per year. At the Ulsan site in Korea, BASF will switch the plants entire 85,000 metric tons capacity from the classic white EPS (expandable polystyrene) Styropor to the improved insulation raw material Neopor (gray EPS) until end of 2018. This will allow the company to meet the growing demand for the gray material in the Asian market. Make an inquiry for purchasing this report at: https://www.reportsanddata.com/make-enquiry-form/1012 For the purpose of this report, Reports and Data have segmented global expanded polystyrene market on the basis of product type, material, process, application, end-user, and region: Product Type Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; 2016-2026 and Revenue, USD Million; 2016-2026) White Expanded Polystyrene Grey Expanded Polystyrene Black expanded Polystyrene Material Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; 2016-2026 and Revenue, USD Million; 2016-2026) Raw beads Expanded Beads Process Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; 2016-2026 and Revenue, USD Million; 2016-2026) Black Molding Shape Molding Application Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; 2016-2026 and Revenue, USD Million; 2016-2026) Insulation Packaging Foaming Component Manufacturing Chemical Intermediate End-User Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; 2016-2026 and Revenue, USD Million; 2016-2026) Electrical & Electronics Automotive Construction Consumer Goods Food & Beverages Others Regional Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; 2016-2026 and Revenue, USD Million; 2016-2026) North America U.S. Europe Germany UK Asia Pacific China India South-east Asia Latin America Brazil MEA Browse more reports of materials and chemicals category at: https://www.reportsanddata.com/report/category/materials-and-chemicals About Reports and Data Reports and Data is a market research and consulting company that provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. Our solutions purely focus on your purpose to locate, target and analyze consumer behavior shifts across demographics, across industries and help clients make a smarter business decision. We offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a multiple industries including Healthcare, Technology, Chemicals, Power, and Energy. We consistently update our research offerings to ensure our clients are aware about the latest trends existent in the market. Reports and Data has a strong base of experienced analysts from varied areas of expertise. Contact Us: John Watson Head of Business Development Reports And Data | Web: www.reportsanddata.com Direct Line: +1-800-819-3052 Traffic Management Systems Market is driven by Application (Urban Traffic Management Systems, Adaptive Traffic Control Systems, Journey Time Management Systems, Incident Detection & Location Systems) Traffic Management Systems Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 12:15:33 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 632 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Future Market Insights (FMI) has published a new report on the global traffic management systems market. The report has been titled Traffic Management Systems Market: Global Industry Analysis (2013-2017) and Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028). The global traffic management systems market is likely to foresee an extensive growth over the course of the forecast period. This growth can be attributed to the burgeoning congestion levels that offer tremendous potential for traffic management systems.The traffic management systems market is also increasing due to increasing government focus on boosting safety as well as expanding the smart city initiatives along with rapid advancements in technology.In order to capitalise on this opportunity, the players operating in the market are launching new products and entering into mergers and acquisitions in order to acquire new technology and stay competitive in the market.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-6469 For instance, in May 2015, IBM Corporation launched a transportation management solution for the New Jersey Turnpike Authority (NJTA). The launch is aimed at reducing traffic congestions and improving the traffic flow employing enhanced system that assimilates the Internet of Things to provide advanced analytics and predictive capabilities. Moreover, the system provides central management of approximately 900 devices including drum and portable signs, variable messages, traffic cameras and hybrid displays. The other companies operating in the market are Siemens AG, Thales Group Ad, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Kapsch Trafficcom, Iskra, Telegra, SWARCO, and SICE, among several others.According to the report, the global traffic management system market is expected to witness a CAGR of 18.2% from 2018 to 2028. The market is expected to reach a worth of US$ 14, 178.4 Mn in 2018 and touch a valuation of US$ 75,228.8 Mn by the end of 2028.Technological Advancements to Trigger Adoption Rate of Traffic Management SystemsWith the growing traffic congestion levels across cities, the implementation of TMS is increasing exponentially. This growing adoption has induced the development of advanced traffic management system devices as well as software to provide extraordinary capabilities and highly improved performances. For instance, the current technologies in TMS include integrated machine learning, wireless charging sensors, integrated toll management systems, weather monitoring solutions, IOT based ITS, ITS for connected vehicles, IOT for autonomous vehicles, and many more.Owing to the numerous benefits of traffic management systems, governments across various countries in the world are actively engaging themselves in the deployment of smart traffic management systems.This is being done in order to smoothen traffic flow by reducing traffic congestion and reducing pollution levels across cities, by prioritising traffic in accordance with real-time traffic information.For instance, in July 2017, Miami-Dade County signed a smart traffic contract of US$ 11.1 Mn with Econolite Control Products. As part of this contract, the company will install 300 new smart traffic signals that will work on a new technology, namely, changing the flow of vehicles.The traffic signals cover nearly 10% of all Miami-Dade traffic lights. The growing initiatives for successful traffic management and increasing investments are projected to bode well for the global traffic management systems market in the long run.Budget Constraints to Restrain Market DevelopmentNotwithstanding all the benefits offered by traffic management systems, the restricted budgets allocated to the traffic industry remain a serious issue. Local authorities are usually budget-constrained, and try to save costs by avoiding the adoption of advanced traffic management systems.Need more information about Report Methodology @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-6469 Furthermore, the authorities of some developing and underdeveloped regions do not have sufficient budgets to implement the systems across certain countries. Moreover, the additional costs involved in installation, repairs, and maintenance of these systems will increase the overall expenses, eventually deteriorating the situation. Consequently, budgetary restrictions and high costs involved with advanced traffic management systems are impacting the market in a negative manner, thereby encumbering the growth of the market. PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 02:02:02 Tricor Group Appoints Prasad KNVS as Head of the Shared Services Centre HONG KONG (GROUP OFFICE) Sunshine Farzan Tricor Services Limited Group Head of Marketing & Communications Tel: +852 2980 1261 Email: Sunshine.Farzan@hk.tricorglobal.com Tricor Group (Tricor), Asias leading provider of integrated business, corporate, investor, human resources and payroll, corporate trust and debt services, today announced the appointment of Prasad KNVS to lead its Shared Services Centre. Prasad will report to Wendy Wang, Group Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, and will be based in Kuala Lumpur. As department head, Prasad will be responsible for supporting the Groups financial accounting, payroll, IT, corporate services and other shared service centre functions. Prasad will build integrated technology-enabled operations to improve client experience and deliver business value by, among others, optimizing business processes throughout Asia Pacific. Wendy Wang, said: It is with great pleasure to announce the appointment of Prasad as Head of the Shared Service Centre. Were a services company, which means our employees are our number one asset and priority. Im confident Prasad will generate significant value for our clients and staff given his rich experience in the industry and deep knowledge of how to enhance business processes. Joining from professional services firm Genpact, where he was the Lead Solution Architect, Prasad brings over 20 years of experience in process transformation, business process outsourcing consulting, operations solutions, and much more to Tricor. Prasad is Six Sigma trained practitioner, and has experience in a wealth of industries and locations worldwide. Prasad has a degree in Digital Strategies for Business from Colombia Business University, a Masters in Commerce from Osmania University in Hyderabad, and completed a general management program from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. About Tricor Group Tricor Group (Tricor) has a growing global presence and is Asias leading provider of integrated business, corporate, investor, human resources and payroll, corporate trust and debt services. Tricor has had a rapid expansion through organic growth and development as well as partnerships, mergers and acquisitions. The Group today has over 30,000 clients globally, a staff strength of over 2,400 and a network of offices in 40 cities across 21 countries / territories. Our client portfolio includes over 1,300 companies listed in Hong Kong, over 500 companies listed in Singapore and Malaysia, and more than 40% of the Fortune Global 500 companies, as well as a significant share of multinationals and private enterprises operating across international markets. In March 2017, the Permira Funds became the controlling shareholder of the Tricor Group, alongside management. See: www.tricorglobal.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190401005 PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 09:03:03 UiPath Joins AmCham EU to Improve Collaboration with European Institutions for the Future of the Workplace Anna Ghica - UiPath anna.ghica@uipath.com +40 722 296 531 UiPath, the leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company, is today announcing it has become a member of the American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union (AmCham EU). While being aligned to AmCham EUs priority areas (education, inclusion, sustainable development, research and innovation among others), the move has been prompted by the strategic importance of the EU market to the global operations of UiPath. In fact, more than a third of the companys employees are working for its 18 Europe-based offices. Working with other members of AmCham EU on topics such as Digital Economy, Future of Work, Education and Skills, and Gender Initiatives, UiPath will deepen its local and regional efforts to create jobs, increase automation skills, and empower people of all ages for the fully-automated workplace. As part of its mission to democratise RPA, UiPath has recently launched UiPath Academic Alliance, a global programme that will serve more than one million students and one thousand schools in the next three years. University students, educators, and also elementary and middle-school students will have access to automation solutions and teaching resources, as the company aims to make sure the young generation is competitive and will thrive in the workplace of the future. Automation is a global phenomenon that will create ripples of change both on our jobs, and society at large. We take it at heart to be the leaders of the digital revolution, but also to be responsible for preparing the future workforce alongside local and regional governments. We are excited to join the ranks of AmCham EU who acts as a facilitator for an improved interaction between the business class and European institutions, said Tom Clancy, Senior Vice President of Global Learning at UiPath. AmCham EU speaks for American companies committed to Europe on trade, investment and competitiveness issues. It aims to ensure a growth-orientated business and investment climate in Europe. Aggregate US investment in Europe totalled more than 2 trillion in 2018, directly supports more than 4.8 million jobs in Europe, and generates billions of euros annually in income, trade and research and development. About UiPath UiPath is leading the Automation First era championing one robot for every person, delivering free and open training and collaboration and enabling robots to learn new skills through AI and machine learning. Led by a commitment to bring digital era skills to more than a million people, the companys enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform has already automated millions of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for business and government organizations all over the world, improving productivity, customer experience and employee job satisfaction. Recently named by Comparably as the 6th happiest place to work and recognized for having the 11th best company culture among [..], UiPath has become one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in history. The company is backed by over $400 million in funding from Accel, CapitalG, Credo Ventures, Earlybirds Digital East Fund, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Madrona, Meritech, Seedcamp and Sequoia. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005 PR-Inside.com: 2019-04-02 08:32:03 Amsterdam/'s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, 2 April 2019 In the period from 26 March 2019 until 1 April 2019 Van Lanschot Kempen has repurchased 24,753 of its own shares (depositary receipts for Class A ordinary shares). The shares were repurchased at an average price of 20.28 per share for a total amount of 502,029. These repurchases are part of the share buy-back programme for at most 370,000 of own shares, which was announced on 21 February 2019. The total number of shares repurchased to date is 108,891. More information, including a detailed overview of the repurchase transactions under this programme, is available on www.vanlanschotkempen.com/sharebuyback. Media Relations: +31 20 354 45 85; mediarelations@vanlanschotkempen.com Investor Relations: +31 20 354 45 90; investorrelations@vanlanschotkempen.com About Van Lanschot Kempen Van Lanschot Kempen, a wealth manager operating under the Van Lanschot, Evi and Kempen brand names, is active in Private Banking, Asset Management and Merchant Banking, with the aim of preserving and creating wealth for its clients. Van Lanschot Kempen, listed at Euronext Amsterdam, is the Netherlands' oldest independent financial services company with a history dating back to 1737. vanlanschotkempen.com Disclaimer This document does not constitute an offer or solicitation for the sale, purchase or acquisition in any other way of or subscription to any financial instrument and is not an opinion or a recommendation to perform or refrain from performing any action. This document is a translation of the Dutch original and is provided as a courtesy only. In the event of any disparities, the Dutch version will prevail. 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: Van Lanschot Kempen via Globenewswire The legal counsel to BFIGroup, the Nigerian-American consortium declared the winner for the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria (ALSCON) in 2004, has written to the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) to demand the immediate and unconditional compliance with the July 6, 2012 order of the Supreme Court on the ownership of the plant. Patrick Ikwueto, a senior advocate of Nigeria (SAN), wrote to the Director General of BPE, Alex Okoh, on March 27, 2019, frowning at BPEs introduction of strange and unilateral terms to the mutually agreed share purchase agreement (SPA) of June 2004. A copy of the letter obtained by PREMIUM TIMES on Monday in Abuja was titled: Re: Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria Share Purchase Agreement Compliance with the Court of Appeal Judgment Dated 11th Day of January, 2019. The letter was reportedly received in the DGs office on March 28. In the letter, Mr Ikwueto threatened to commence contempt proceedings against Mr Okoh and BPE for alleged conspiracy to frustrate the enforcement of the July 6, 2012 order of the Supreme Court on the ownership crisis in ALSCON. In view of the nature of this transaction, we are constrained to inform you that unless you take immediate steps to forward the complete SPA (Share Purchase Agreement) with the requisite Annexures as enjoined by the Judgment/Orders of the Supreme Court, we shall take steps to issue necessary Forms 48 and 49 to activate committal proceedings against you and the BPE for continued disobedience of Judgement/Orders of Court, he said. Under the Civil Process Act, Cap. 551, Laws of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and the Judgment Enforcement Rules, Form 48 contains a copy of the court order to be served on the respondent. Where the respondent fails to obey, Form 49 is issued for committal for contempt. Backstory The National Council on Privatisation (NCP) declared BFIG winner of the bid for ALSCON with an offer of $410 million. But, the bid was cancelled by the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) in controversial circumstances. After eight years of legal battle, the Supreme Court on July 6, 2012 ruled in favour of BFIG and ordered the BPE to enforce BFIGs right as the winner of the bid. Despite the order, BFIGs Chief Executive, Rueben Jaja, said BPE not only refused to obey, it has continued to frustrate his companys efforts to takeover ALSCON. Last January 11, the Appeal Court presided over by Abdu Aboki reaffirmed the sanctity of the Supreme Court judgment and again ordered its full enforcement by BPE. Specifically, the judge directed BPE to provide the mutual agreed Share Purchase Agreement (Exhibit BPE1) for execution by the parties. The agreement, he said, would enable BFIG to pay the agreed 10 per cent of $410 million (about $41 million) within 15 working days from the date of the execution of the Share Purchase Agreement by the agreement dated May 20, 2004. DOWNLOAD DOCS HERE The balance of 90 per cent of the bid price, shall be paid within 90 calendar days as ordered by the Supreme Court, Mr Aboki said. Following the ruling, BFIG, through its legal counsel, wrote to the BPE on January 14, 2019, to draw its attention to the consequential orders of the Appeal Court. BPEs response On February 4, BPE sent a response to BFIG, accompanied with a 16-page SPA. Mr Ikwueto told PREMIUM TIMES the SPA was not the original approved by the court, as it was not accompanied with any of the 17 annexures, acknowledged as key parts of the SPA. Mr Ikwueto said the SPA ordered by the Supreme Court was accompanied with annexures classified by Section 19.1 include a financial statement of ALSCON for the year ended December 31, 2004; ALSCON Post-Acquisition Plan; List of Liabilities of ALSCON; List of Facilities of ALSCON; List of land Plots of ALSCON; List of Compensation Scheme of Employees of ALSCON, and List of Employee Benefit of ALSCON. The others include: List of Intellectual Property of ALSCON; List of Material Contracts of ALSCON; List of Banks of ALSCON; List of Government Authorities of ALSCON of ALSCON; Exhibit No. 1: Natural Gas Sales and Purchase Agreement; Exhibit 3: Federal Republic of Nigeria Officials Gazette, and Exhibit 4: Power of Attorney. In the latest letter to BPE, Mr Ikwueto accused the agency of serial attempts to frustrate his client from claiming ALSCON on the basis of the Supreme Courts order. He reminded BPE that it was commercially and legally impossible to execute the SPA in compliance with the Supreme Court orders without the SPA as a complete document comprising the annexures.. On February 27, 2019, he said BFIG executed and delivered to BPE for counter signature the mutually agreed SPA (Exhibit BPE 1) with all annexures as provided by BPE in 2004 and reproduced in 2012 pursuant to Supreme Court judgement on July 6, 2012. On March 4, he said BPE executed the SPA, but removed ALL of the annexures, returned an incomplete document to BFIG. On March 5, Mr Ikwueto said BFIG again wrote to BPE to demand the execution of the SPA, along with the agreed Annexures in 2004 and reproduced by BPE on October 16, 2012 after the Supreme Court order. BPE is fully aware the assets BFIG bided $410 million for in 2004 is no longer there, as UC RUSAL/Dayson Holding Limited stripped the value from $1.03 billion in 2004 to less than $100 million in 2013 as reported by KPMG audit firm, Mr Ikwueto said. Besides, he said, ALSCON liabilities has gone from zero to $165 million during same period with no meaningful production while BPE sat on the Board. He said the continued refusal of BPE to allow BFIG takeover ALSCON was as a result of its determination to cover-up the monumental fraud against the Nigerian people. BPE not perturbed I havent seen the letter (from the counsel to BFIG), Mr Okoh told PREMIUM TIMES on the telephone on Monday. But, its a free country. Anybody can initiate any proceeding against anybody. So, he is welcome with whatever action he wants to take. I havent seen the letter. If that is what he is threatening to do, he is at liberty to approach any court of law for whatever relief he seeks. But, I havent seen the letter. When I see the letter, I will respond to him appropriately. DOWNLOAD DOCS HERE British Airways and Air France have asked the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) to grant them a one-month extension to move their operations to the new Abuja international terminal. FAAN issued an ultimatum to all foreign airlines operating at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja to relocate their operations to the new international terminal on or before March 31. The request by the two airlines sighted by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday addressed to the management of the airport, sought the managements approval to continue operating at the old terminal until April 30. Sani Mahmud, FAANs Regional General Manager (RGM), North Central and Abuja Airport Manager, said all other airlines had fully complied with directive with exception of Turkish Air, Air France and British Airways. Mr Mahmud said the British Airways had requested that they be allowed to bring in their IT personnel to carry out checks on their connectivity and other installations before relocating to the new terminal. He said the request has yet to be granted by the management, saying that FAAN had ensured that the terminal was fully ready for all airlines to move in. On Air France, the manager said the request was also similar to that of British Airways, explaining that the authority had provided all the facilities required for smooth operation of the airlines. He disclosed that Turkish Airline had a peculiar case because of their relocation to the new airport it built in Istanbul, Turkey. Mr Mahmud said that the airline had earlier written to inform FAAN that it would commence flight Operations as from April 7 in the new terminal after their relocation to their new airport in Istanbul from April 2. British Airways and Air France have written to ask for extension of time till end of April to enable them to bring in their experts to check the connectivity but the management has not given the approval. Turkish should have moved if not for the relocation to their new airport in Istanbul but they will move in very soon. RwandaAir, African World Airlines and Lufthansa have all moved before the March 31 deadline. The delay is not from us because everything required has been provided, the connectivity, the offices and other facilities are all in place, he said. NAN reports that of the 13 international airlines operating in Abuja, eight have moved into the new terminal while five are yet to commence operations there. Those that have moved are Asky, Ethiopian Airlines, Air Cote dIvoire, Air Peace, Lufthansa, Emirates, AWA and RwandAir. Those yet to move are the British Airways, Air France, Turkish Airlines, Egypt Air and Arik. (NAN) A Connecticut woman said Joe Biden touched her inappropriately and rubbed noses with her at a 2009 political fundraiser. Amy Lappos, 43, became the second person in three days to accuse the former vice president of unwanted physical contact as he considered a White House run. It wasnt sexual, but he did grab me by the head, Ms Lappos told the Hartford Courant of her encounter with Mr Biden at a Greenwich, Connecticut, event. He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth, she added. Ms Lappos posted about the alleged incident in a Connecticut Women in Politics Facebook group on Sunday in response to an account by former Nevada state legislator, Lucy Flores, who recently accused Mr Biden of kissing her on the back of the head at a 2014 event. The allegations could endanger a possible 2020 presidential run by Mr Biden, who was vice president under President Barack Obama at the time of both alleged instances. He has been expected to announce a Democratic White House bid in the coming weeks and has been leading the Democratic presidential field in opinion polls. Asked about the Connecticut allegation, a Biden spokesman pointed to Mr Bidens statement on Sunday, when he said he did not believe he ever acted inappropriately during his many years in public life and on the campaign trail. I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort and not once, never, did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention, Mr Biden said in the statement. Mr Biden has long been known for a warm and intimate campaign style. However, his propensity for hugging and physical touching has come under new scrutiny in the #MeToo era, as awareness about sexual assault and harassment has grown. Ms Lappos, a former aide to U.S. Representative Jim Himes, told the Courant she felt uncomfortable when Biden approached her at a fundraiser for Himes. She said that she was in the kitchen with three or four other volunteers when Mr Biden moved toward her. I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody and theres absolutely a line of decency. Theres a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. Its not cultural. Its not affection. Its sexism or misogyny, Ms Lappos, who is now a freelance worker with non-profit agencies, said. Ms Lappos did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Reuters. Some Biden supporters rallied to his defence. Elizabeth Alexander, a former Senate and White House aide to Mr Biden, wrote in a USA Today column that he supported women and was a champion for their rights even when it was not politically expedient. (Reuters/NAN) Hours after the Senate Committee on Trade and Investment rejected its 2019 Budget proposal of N15.63 billion, the Ministry of Trade and Investment has clarified the status of the Special Economic Zones Company. The Senate committee said it rejected the proposal after it discovered that the company listed as a parastatal under the ministry is a private company. The committee made the discovery when it contacted the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) on how the company was registered. But in a statement signed by its spokesperson, Bisi Daniels, the ministry said the Nigeria SEZ Investment Company Limited (NSEZCO) is a presidential initiative. He said it was incorporated as a special purpose vehicle to deliver Project MINE (Made in Nigeria for Exports). The ministry said the company was approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) in June 2018, with the endorsement of the Economic Management Team, as the holding entity for FGN investments and proprietary interests in existing and future SEZs. The FEC approval also provides that all current and future capital appropriations for Project MINE should be transferred to NSEZCOs account, as soon as opening formalities are completed. With the formalities completed, NSEZCO became the platform through which Federal Governments capital budget appropriations for SEZs are converted into long term value-creating investments. NSEZCO is a public-private partnership (PPP) company to operate world-class standards of governance and management, to facilitate mobilisation of capital and other resources from PPP partners, in order to overcome budgetary constraints to the provision of critical infrastructure for SEZs, the statement said. The ministry said by aggregating and harnessing FGs investment in a strong corporate special purpose vehicle, NSEZCO will facilitate the mobilisation of additional capital from development finance institutions (DFIs) and private investors. It said the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI) holds the FGs interest of 25 per cent being the shareholder in NSEZCO while the balance of 75 per cent is currently held in trust on behalf of other prospective shareholders, pending completion of investors diligence and documentation and approval procedures. The ministry said NSEZCO, on February 8, signed investment agreements with three Development Finance Institutions; Afreximbank, Bank of Industry, and the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA). It quoted President Muhammadu Buhari at the signing ceremony as saying: When we committed to the implementation of the Nigeria Industrial Revolution Plan and launched our Economic Recovery and Growth Plan to fast track implementation, we had a vision of Nigeria as the pre-eminent manufacturing hub in Sub-Saharan Africa and a major exporter to our immediate West African sub-region, the rest of Africa and indeed the World. Already, NSEZCO is a public-private partnership, mobilising capital from the Federal Government and the development finance institution shareholders, for the development of Special Economic Zones across Nigeria. It said the Pilot projects in the first phase are Enyimba Economic City, Abia State, Lekki Model Industrial Park, Lagos State, and Funtua Cotton Cluster, Katsina State. It adds that pre-development studies are ongoing in Benue, Kwara and Sokoto states whilst studies will soon commence in Ebonyi, Edo and Gombe states amongst several others. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) says it has resumed its directive to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) on Do-Not-Disturb (DND), after a temporary suspension. The Executive Vice Chairman, NCC, Umar Danbatta made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sideline of the 87th Edition of the Telecom Consumer Parliament (TCP) on Monday in Lagos. The DND 2442 code gives subscribers the freedom to choose what messages to receive from the various networks. Mr Danbatta said that the suspension was for a period of time which elapsed after the elections, hence, the need to resume implementation. The DND is back, the suspension was for a period of time, and it is to ensure that everyone without distinction of gender, ethnicity, or political persuasion, exercises their franchise, by voting. We do not want any Nigerian to be disenfranchised, that is why that measure was deliberately put in place, after reaching an understanding between INEC and NCC. It was put in place, it has worked very well, as I personally got a message from INEC, urging me to go out and exercise my franchise. So that measure has served the purpose for which it was intended and now the DND is back, he said. He said that the regulatory body would continue to strictly monitor the activities of the MNOs, on compliance to the directive. NAN reports that in February, NCC suspended its directive on DND in order to enable the MNOs disseminate specific information on voter education on behalf of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). (NAN) President Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated former Chief of General Staff, Oladipo Diya, on his 75th birthday on April 3, highlighting his many years of service to the nation. The presidents message was in a statement by his Special Adviser 0n Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, on Tuesday. Mr Adesina said that Mr Buhari felicitated with family members, friends, professional colleagues and associates of the former Ogun State governor. He said that Mr Diyas military career saw him successfully handling sensitive and strategic leadership positions as General Officer Commanding, 82 Division, Commandant, National War College (19911993) and Chief of Defence Staff. The president affirmed that Mr Diyas gallantry, rich intellectual background and penchant for research contributed to the structure and operations of the Nigerian Army, especially in tackling security challenges within the country and the West Coast region. Mr Buhari added that he believed the nation had benefitted from Mr Diyas wealth of knowledge, wisdom and experience and urged him to stay relevant by counselling military formations and officers. He prayed that the almighty God would grant Mr Diya longer life, good health and continue to bless his family. The former chief of general staff served as deputy to the late dictator, Sani Abacha. Born on April 3, 1944 in Odogbolu in Ijebu-Ode Local Government Area of Ogun State, Mr Diya attended Yaba Methodist School, Lagos from 1950 1956 and thereafter proceeded to Odogbolu as a pioneer student from 1957 1962. He joined the Nigerian Army through direct entry, having been exempted from qualifying examination on account of his West African Senior School Certificate result and after three and half years of military training at the Academy, he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in March 1967. Mr Diya, a regular combatant soldier served in various positions in the Nigerian Army since his commission as 2nd Lieutenant in 1967. He was a Platoon Commander of the 6th Battalion, Ikeja, a post he held until 1968 when he became the Commanding Officer of the 101 Battalion of the Nigerian Army. He was also the Deputy Adjutant-General of the Nigerian Army and Director of Personnel Services between 1973 1976, among others. Mr Diya commanded the Nigerian contingent in the Peace Keeping Operations of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon in 1980 and was the Chief Military Personnel Officer for the entire UN Interim Force in Lebanon within the same period. (NAN) VMware Partner Connect to deliver simplified engagement with VMware based on Partners desired business models New Master Services Competency, VMware Cloud on AWS, Focused on Service Delivery The federal government has spent about N300 billion on the National Social Investment Programmes in the last three years. The Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on National Social Welfare Programme, Maryam Uwais said this on Tuesday in Abuja during a joint oversight visit by Senate and House Committees on Poverty Alleviation. The delegation was led by the Chairmen of the committee in the two chambers, Lawal Gumau (Senate) and Mohammed Wudil (House of Representatives). Mrs Uwais said the social investment programmes since inception in 2016, aimed to improve the living conditions of Nigerians through capacity building, investment and direct support. So far we have over 11.5 million direct beneficiaries on all our programmes. We also have about nine million indirect beneficiaries. Right now we have over 700,000 people on the National Social Register but the people we are paying under the Conditional Cash Transfer Scheme are about 300,000. This is because we select only the poorest of the poor in every community and every payment is done through their bank account, so we are able to track every kobo spent, she said. On the school feeding programme, Mrs Uwais said the programme was currently feeding over 9.5 million pupils in 30 states and has empowered 101,000 cooks. We are feeding over 9.5 million children in about 56,000 schools around the country. The value chain in the school feeding programme is just amazing. Not only are the children coming back to school, we are seeing that they are more alert in class and absolutely happy to come to school. We are also seeing that farmers are smiling to the banks. This is because we need at least seven million eggs every week, over 600 cattle, 83 metric tonnes of fish and lots of fruits and vegetables, she said. Mrs Uwais said through the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) the federal government was providing financial support to businesses at the bottom of the financial pyramid. She mentioned Tradermoni, Farmermoni, and Marketmoni as the programmes being executed under GEEP. Tradermoni was created specifically for petty traders and artisans across Nigeria. With Tradermoni, you can receive interest-free loan starting from N10,000 and growing all the way to N100,000 as you pay back, she said. On the challenges in the delivery of social benefits, Mrs Uwais said adequate funding remained a major setback. We dont get our full funding. Only about 25 per cent of our funds have been released, so we have to find ways and means to be cost effective about our spending, she said. Mrs Uwais said the National Social Investment Office was currently leveraging on other agencies like the Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, and the National Bureau of Statistics to carry out its mandate. She commended the World Bank for the grant given to the office for Conditional Cash Transfers, and also ActionAid for its role in monitoring and evaluation of all the social investment programmes. Earlier, Mr Wudil said the visit would help the committees in making informed decisions concerning budgetary allocations to the programmes as proposed in the 2019 budget. (NAN) A 77-year-old grandma who on Tuesday bagged her first-degree certificate at the 50th convocation ceremony of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka, says she enrolled for the programme after her retirement to avoid boredom. Bridget Okonji was among the 1,008 students of the universitys Faculty of Education, who were in the first set of 3,795 students from the Faculties of Arts, Education and Environmental Sciences conferred with the first degree on Tuesday at the ceremony. The graduand, who was invited to the rostrum for a handshake with the universitys Pro-Chancellor, Wale Babalakin, refused to disclose her name while speaking with journalists. She was admitted to the universitys sandwich programme through the Institute of Continued Education (ICE) where she studied in the Department of Educational Foundations, popularly called Guidance and Counselling Education. Speaking with journalists, Mrs Okonji said; I studied Guidance and Counselling and I am most grateful to God Almighty who made me see this day. I will not like my name to be mentioned because I know where I am coming from and what I am protecting. I am a retired officer. I have worked in a lot of countries around the world and also in Nigeria, where I finally retired. She added that she went for the degree programme because she did not want to sit at home after retirement. You know when you retire like that, you will not want to stay at home and be dying slowly, she said. She said no one should feel too old to go to school, saying learning remains a life-long adventure. Education has no limit. It is from cradle to death in order for one to add value to the society. Premium Times learnt that the retired public servant enrolled for the programme about five years ago but without going through the mandatory Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) conducted by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board. Meanwhile, the universitys Vice-Chancellor, Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, said the university will graduate 12,843 students at the three-day ceremonies. Mr Ogundipe said that 7,438 would be awarded first degree and 5,405, postgraduate degrees. This year, the trio of Adeniyi Adeyeye (B.Sc. Insurance), Chinaedum Ogbechi (B.Sc. Business Administration) both of Management Sciences, and Joedicta Ekeh (B.Sc. Pharmacy) have emerged best graduating students with a cumulative grade point average of 4.96, he said. On February 23, millions of Nigerians trooped to the polls across the country to elect their president and members of the National Assembly for the next four years. The elections, in many ways, were like every other since the country returned to democratic rule in 1999. But they were also peculiar in the number of political parties that appeared on the ballot papers. Before the elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said it had registered 91 political parties in the country. Out of this number, 73 fielded candidates for the presidency. This was a remarkable difference from the numbers in previous elections. In the 2015 elections, there were 14 presidential candidates. There were 20 in 2011; 18 in 2007; 20 in 2003; and only two in 1999 when the military conducted the general elections that gave birth to the Fourt Republic. The peculiarity also reflected in the ballot papers which had three columns instead of the two Nigerians were used to. At the end of the 2019 presidential poll, President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was reelected with 15,191,847 votes. His closest challenger and former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), polled 11,262,978 votes. Apart from these two, most of the other contenders struggled to earn four figure votes. For instance, FRESH, a party founded by Chris Okotie, a Chritian church founder, and of which he was also the presidential candidate in 2003, polled about 4,500 votes nationwide in the presidential election. Since its formation, the party has not won any position or legislative seat in Nigeria. Also, the National Conscience Party (NCP) was formed before the advent of the Fourth Republic in 1994 by the late human rights activist and lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi. But it was prevented from standing in elections until 2003, when it won a legal battle to be able to do so. Its registration threw the gate wide open for many other parties and led to the proliferation of parties in the 2003 general elections and since. In the presidential election of that year, the NCP candidate, Mr Fawehinmi, came fifth, polling 161,333 votes or 0.41% of the popular vote. However, in the 2019 election, the party had a little over 3,000 votes. Some of these parties do not have functional addresses or even websites so it is difficult to monitor and evaluate their activities, if any. A PREMIUM TIMES check revealed that 43 out of the 91 political parties scored below 5, 000 votes. The worst of all the parties is We The People of Nigeria (WTPN), which recorded only 732 votes. A sum of the 43 parties scores also showed that they did not receive up to 0.02 per cent of the total votes of the winning candidate. Fate of these political parties Last week,The Punch newspaper reported that the electoral commission said it would review the parties that participated in the general elections. The National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, added that the commission would commence the process of delisting weak parties at the conclusion of the supplementary elections and petitions filed at various electoral tribunals. The INEC chief said while the paramount interest of the commission was the conduct of free, fair and credible elections, the conduct of such elections was a multi-stakeholder venture. A review of the performances of the parties can not be done immediately because any party stood a chance of victory in the reruns or at the tribunals, Mr Okoye said. But the Director of Center for Democracy and Development (CDD), Idayat Hassan, disagreed with INEC on the plan. She advised INEC to instead enforce guidelines for access to ballot. She said this while speaking to PREMIUM TIMES in a phone interview on Thursday. These political parties cannot be scrapped because the court has ruled severally that they cannot be denied freedom of association, she said. All we need is rules on access to the ballot as a political party. How you can exist and the criteria, she said. Ms Hassan said for a political party to have less than 5000 votes in a country, its visibility is questionable. But it cannot be deregistered, she insisted. She said these political parties can be built but as optional parties that will be strong at local level. The director noted that some candidates of these political parties had no intention of winning but rather for the sake of appreciation as a former presidential candidate. Some of them did not campaign. Did you see any posters of some candidates of these parties? They were more or less on the paper, she said. We did not have more than 10 candidates who put up any form of thing they can bring up apart from the two dominant political parties, Ms Hassan said. Also, a research associate at Selonnes Consult, Chima Christian, said the National Assembly should review the constitution on requirements for candidates for elective positions. Speaking in a phone interview, he said the requirements of being a political party should be met before having candidates for presidential position. This is way of setting an agenda for the incoming National Assembly to look at the law that talks about political parties in Nigeria, he said. These political parties cannot have candidates for this particular position, we dont have cause to waste our ballot, he said. There is requirements for registering them, so there should be requirements for fielding candidates so that we dont have people who are not prepared on the ballot, Mr Christian said. Mr Christian said every political party should be recognised in the 774 local government areas in the country. Every political party must have presence in all the LGAs, you must have offices across the wards as well, he said. Below are political parties who scored below 5, 000 in the last presidential election. Party Abbrevation Name of Party Number of Votes ABP All Bending Party 4, 525 AGA All Grass root Alliance 4, 701 AGAP All Grand Alliance Party 3, 073 ANDP All Nigeria Development Party 3, 106 ANP Alliance National Party 3, 588 ANRP Abundant Nigeria Renewal Party 4, 342 APP Action People's Party 3, 587 ASD Alliance of Social Democrats 2, 148 AUN Alliance for a United Nigeria 1, 094 BNPP Better Nigeria Progressive Party 1, 651 CAP Change Advocacy Party 1, 113 CC Collation for Change 2, 393 CNP Change Nigeria Party 1, 876 DA DA Democratic Alliance 2, 771 FRESH Fresh Democratic Party 4, 556 FJP Freedom and Justice Party 4, 176 GPN Green Party of Nigeria 4, 926 HDP Hope Democratic Party 1, 665 ID Independent Democrats 1, 847 JMPP Justice Must Prevail Party 1, 855 KP Kowa Party 1, 913 LM Liberation Movement 1, 440 MAJA Mass Action Joint Alliance 2, 653 MPN Mega Party of Nigeria 2, 754 NAC National Action Council 2, 281 NCMP Nigeria Community Movement Party 1, 194 NCP National Consience Party 3, 801 NDCP Nigeria Development Congress Party 1, 194 NDLP National Democratic Liberty Party 1, 590 NEPP Nigeria Element Progressive Party 1, 526 NFD Nigeria for Democracy 4, 098 NIP National Interest Party 2, 250 PNP PNP 4, 624 PT People's Trust 2, 615 RAP Reform and Advancement Party 2, 974 RP Restoration Party of Nigeria 2, 388 SNP Sustainable National Party 3, 943 UDP United People's Party 3, 172 UP United Patriots 1, 563 UPN Unity Party of Nigeria 1, 633 WTPN We The People of Nigeria 734 YES Yes Electorate Solidarity 2, 396 The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has urged the Senate Committee on Appropriations to submit its report by Friday. He said the Senate will suspend plenary for the week to enable the committee present and lay the report. This, he hoped will help the lawmakers pass the budget by April 16. He said this on Tuesday before the lawmakers adjourned. At the start of plenary, the Senate Leader, Ahmed Lawan, moved that the Senate adjourn plenary to honour a member of the House of Representatives, Mohammed Dantani, who died in March. Mr Dantani, who was a former Speaker of Kebbi State House of Assembly, represented Yauri/Shanga/Ngaski Federal Constituency of the state He reportedly died in Abuja after a protracted illness. The Senate leader prayed that his colleagues observe a minute of silence and adjourn according to their rules. However, before the adjournment, Mr Saraki asked the Vice Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Sunny Obuoji, about the report of the committee. In his response, Mr Ogbuoji asked for one more week as he said the report is not ready because some committees are yet to submit their reports. Our report is not yet ready because some committees are yet to submit. For now, we have less than 10 committees that have submitted their reports. We actually requested that they should submit the report by last week but since we dont have it we are extending it to Friday this week latest. So we are asking for two weeks for it to be ready. If they submit on Friday, we should be able to work on it the following week, he said. The Senate president thereafter directed the committee to submit its report by Friday. Let us agree that they submit by Friday, then we suspend plenary for a week till 9th of April and during that week, latest that weekby Thursday, we should be able to lay the report and pass this budget by 16th of April because we have the Easter break coming as well. We dont have that luxury of time, he said. Mr Obuoji also requested that the Senate empower the committee of appropriations that any committee that doesnt bring their report by Friday, we will go with the executive position and not wait for them. The lawmakers then adjourned plenary till April 9. The Senate had on March 20, suspended plenary for two weeks to enable lawmakers to attend to budget matters. The Senate had passed the budget for second reading. After the passage, the Senate asked its committee on appropriation to work on the N8.8 trillion budget. The case of alleged examination malpractice and certificate forgery filed against a senator, Ademola Adeleke, was on Tuesday stalled due to the absence of the prosecution. Mr Adeleke is a senator and the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the Osun State governorship election of last year. The Federal High Court Abuja presided over by Inyang Ekwo had at the previous date of hearing adjourned to April 2, 3 and 4 to enable the prosecution file additional evidence. Mr Ekwo fixed the date after the prosecution counsel, Simon Lough, called two witnesses, Buhari Moshood and Salamatu Fumilayo. Mr Lough prayed the court for leave to file additional evidence. The application was not opposed by the defence. Following that, Mr Ekwo adjourned the matter until April 2, 3 and 4 for accelerated hearing of the matter. During the court session on Tuesday, Mr Adelekes counsel, Alex Izinyon, told the court that the prosecution called and informed him that he would be in court by 10 a.m. But as at 10: 30 a.m, he was still absent. The judge then adjourned till Wednesday, April 3. Mr Adeleke was arraigned in 2018 on allegations of examination malpractice and certificate forgery. He was arraigned alongside the principal of Ojo-Aro Community Grammar School, Aregbesola Muftau; the registrar of the school, Mr Gbadamosi Ojo; and a teacher in the school, Dare Samuel Olutope, as well as Sikiru Adeleke. The police accused them of fraudulently registering Mr Adeleke and another Sikiru Adeleke as students of Ojo-Aro Community Grammar School in Ojo-Aro, Osun State, for the National Examination Councils June/July 2017 Senior School Certificate Examination in February 2017. The National Christian Elders Forum (NCEF) has condemned the visit of the Christian Association of Nigeria to the Presidential Villa, Abuja. In a statement on Monday, NCEF described the visit as evidence that the Christian Association has unholy ties with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). The NCEF has had a long-standing dispute with the CAN, which resulted in the Christian association denouncing the forum and severing ties with it last December. In its statement on Monday, NCEF accused CAN of partisan politics. It said CAN was treading a path that would destroy the future of Christianity in Nigeria. The statement was published by The Nation newspaper online. NCEF wishes to state that the congratulatory visit to Aso Villa by CAN could not be in the interest of Nigerian Christians who daily bear the agony of thousands of their brethren being killed, maimed, displaced and marginalised in the Jihad launched in the northern parts of the country. It is well known the indifference of the Buhari Administration to the murder of Christians all over the country. This indifference has led many, including foreign observers, to conclude that the Buhari Administration is complicit in the genocide that is taking place in Nigeria, the paper said in its report. With this ill-advised congratulatory visit to President Buhari, it should be clear to every Christian of good conscience that Rev. Ayokunle is running CAN as an appendage of APC which has proven by its religiously biased appointments and policies that it is primarily a religious party that is to the disadvantage of Christians whom Rev. Ayokunle claims to be representing, the forum said. NCEF said CAN has no constitutional rights to participate in politics as it alleged the umbrella body of Nigerian Christian associations did in the recent elections. It would be recalled that during the elections, Rev. Ayokunle presumptuously deployed a 1,000-man CAN Election Observers team to monitor the elections nationwide. The action was presumptuous since CAN does not have the constitutional responsibility of engaging in politics. Christian leaders deliberately established the Christian Social Movement of Nigeria (CSMN) for this purpose in 2001 as the socio-political arm of the Church. Nonetheless, after observing the elections, the 1,000-man CAN Election Observers is yet to release its report before CAN rushed to congratulate one of the contestants. Since all the other observers have since released their reports, where is the report of the CAN Observers Team? NCEF accused CAN of condoning the killings across the country and alleged that the ruling APC connived with INEC to rig the general elections. Presently, Christians are mourning over 200 people murdered in Kajuru and Adara in southern Kaduna. There are increasing reports of Clergy routinely kidnapped and murdered in Middle Belt and parts of the North. These are in addition to genocide in Benue, Taraba, Plateau, and other parts of southern Kaduna. So far, no arrest has been made and no one has been prosecuted. Therefore, for any Christian leader to go and shake the hand of the man who has done nothing to stop the genocide is morally and spiritually reprehensible. In addition to the concerns expressed above, it should be remembered that we all witnessed the debacles during the campaigns for the 2019 Elections as well as the violent conduct of the elections. We witnessed the widespread application of inconclusive elections where the opposition party had upper hand. We saw with regret the way Kano, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Benue, Lagos, Taraba, Bayelsa, and Plateau states election, amongst others, were handled. The campaign debate and presidential interview exposed the competence and capability of the candidates and Nigerians spoke through their votes and expressed their preference. Therefore, the will of the people must not be subverted. It is wrong for anyone, or any group of people, to seek to use CAN to legitimise illegality. That congratulatory visit, we insist, was not on behalf of Nigerian Christians. The Minister of Communication, Adebayo Shittu, says the federal government will ensure free access to the internet in public places across Nigeria. Mr Shittu said this on Tuesday in Abuja at a one-day stakeholders workshop on the role of the Public Internet Access for Economic Development. We are trying to ensure the vision of free Wi-Fi all over, particularly in public spaces, at the airport, schools and all that, Mr Shittu said on Tuesday. Mr Shittu said the government had been trying to ensure that internet accessibility is made available not just for privileged Nigerians but everyone. The Federal Ministry of Communication will ensure the privacy of beneficiaries of the free internet services is protected, he said. He said for this to be a reality, more investments are needed because the government alone cannot handle the financial responsibilities involved. Mr Shittu listed some of the challenges faced by the government in providing free internet services to include high cost of access, low broadband penetration, poor internet infrastructure, and poor enabling environment. The solutions to these challenges are beyond governments intervention, he said. In order to bridge the existing digital divide and encourage more Nigerians to participate in the global digital economy, private organisations and international partners are encouraged to support the government in different strategic ways. One of the models being adopted recently is the provision of free internet access by Public Internet Access Providers (PIAPs) in strategic locations to help more Nigerians connect to the internet in pursuit of social and developmental objectives for a return on investment (ROI) through advertisement or other means. This is expected to fuel some changes especially in creating jobs and help local SMEs compete with global brands. Last year, The Punch newspaper reported that Google Nigeria announced its plans to reach more than 10 million Nigerians with free Internet access in five cities. According to the global content provider, the Wi-Fi will be available in 200 Google stations in Lagos, Kaduna, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, and Abuja by 2019. The communications minister noted that the security of users is very important to the government even though it is an unregulated medium. However, it is an unregulated medium, and users should be aware of this. The security of the user both personally and in the transmission of information is of paramount importance to the government, he said. According to him, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), as the National IT regulator, came up with the Framework and Guidelines on the provision and use of Public Internet Access in Nigeria. NITDA issued the framework and guidelines for Public Internet Access (PIA) in 2018. Also speaking at the workshop, the Managing Director of Backbone Community Network (BCN), Ibrahim Dikko, said the resolution of providing free internet is to transform the economy in Nigeria. He said the organisation was partnering with Google to ensure that high-quality access is given to people in Nigeria. The key thing is to provide high-quality access to people in public places, he said We have five sites in Abuja, we plan to have 64 sites in Abuja, Kaduna, Zaria and Kano, and we are looking forward to spreading it across the North, he said. On her part, the Public Policy and Government Relations Officer for Google, Titi Akinsanmi, said it is a possibility that Nigerians enjoy free internet access across the country. She said Google is committed to providing free access to the country but not working with the local system. We will bring our expertise that can translate to success when we work with existing record partners, we are getting closer to getting it done, she said. She emphasised the safety of online users as a pronouncement was made last year. We had a partnership with Nigerian Educational Research Council, there will be an online safety curriculum to all secondary schools in Nigeria, she said. We have signed an agreement with the board for online curriculum, it will be implemented on 30th September 2019, Ms Akinsanmi said. She also said the platform will be compliant with the existing local laws. We are working with existing local laws and constitution, she said The Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Tambuwal, and the Governor-elect of Imo State, Emeka Ihedioha, joined their former colleagues in the House of Representatives on Tuesday to pay tributes to a former chief whip in the 7th Assembly, Bethel Amadi. The late lawmaker from Imo State died last month after a brief illness. The unusual plenary saw former principal officers of the House and members of the Pan-African Parliament on the floor of the house. Mr Tambuwal said it was with mixed feelings that he came to send off a former colleague to eternal glory. He said he first met the deceased in 2003 on the floor of the lower chambers and worked closely with him on many national assignments. Mr Tambuwal, who was the Speaker of the 7th Assembly, described Mr Amadi as a very resourceful parliamentarian who dedicated time and energy to nation -building. Pointing to the seat the late lawmaker usually sat on, Mr Tambuwal said he approached Mr Amadi in his bid to become Speaker of the house. Mr Tambuwal called on the governor-elect of Imo, Mr Ihedioha, to immortalise Mr Amadi, support his family, and ensure his legacies are protected. In his remarks, Mr Ihedioha said immortalising Mr Amadi is a mission he must achieve when he takes office. According to him, if Mr Amadi were alive, he would play a pivotal role in his administration in the next four years. He described the late former lawmaker as a great ambassador of the state who would be missed by all. The President of Pan-African Parliament, Roger Nkodo, said Mr Amadi was not only from Nigeria but from Africa as a whole. He said the deceased, who was also a former President of the Pan-African Parliament, was brilliant and rose quickly through the ranks in the parliament. Mr Nkodo said that as president, Mr Amadi piloted the affairs of the parliament with great skill and charisma. According to him, members would have voted no to his death if it was a matter to be decided at parliament. Another lawmaker, Henry Nwawuba (PDP-Imo) who took over from Mr Amadi on the floor of the house, said that in everything, thanks should be given to God. He said though it was difficult to give God thanks over the death of Mr Amadi, he and his family would find consolation in he fact that Mr Amadi was a good man. He pledged to support the family and prayed God to be with them in this trying times. While concluding the session, Speaker of the house, Yakubu Dogara said the ultimate measure of a mans life is not in the duration but the mission. He said it was not by how far but by how well and effective, adding that those who lived good lives never die but live forever in the hearts of those whom they had affected. Prayers were offered by the lawmakers for the repose soul of Mr Amadi and they took turns to duff their hats before the casket of the late member, dressed in the national flag. The event was attended by former Speaker, Patricia Etteh, other former principal officers and some serving senators. The Federal Government has lamented the execution of a Nigerian woman on Monday in Saudi Arabia for drug-related offences. The government also condemned the action of four Nigerian citizens who were caught on video carrying out an armed robbery in Dubai, United Arab Emirate (UAE). The Ministry of Interior of Saudi Arabia had announced that a female Nigerian drug trafficker and three other men: two from Pakistan and a Yemeni were executed on Monday for drug trafficking offences. Mondays executions bring to 53, the number of people put to death this year in the country. Speaking with State House Correspondents on Tuesday, the aide to President Muhammadu Buhari on Diaspora matters, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, said the executed woman is the eighth to be executed for drugs related offences in the last three years in the oil-rich Kingdom. She also said 20 others are also in jail with death sentences hanging on their necks. Mrs Dabiri-Erewa said 12 Nigerians are also in various Saudi Arabia jails serving different jail terms. The aide, who said some of those convicted might be innocent. She said the government found out that some airlines work with drug syndicates by putting banned substances in the luggage of some innocent Nigerians, especially pilgrims. So we have had cases where truly they didnt commit the offence. We have appealed to the Saudi Authorities to make the trials fair, open and ensure that justice is done. Even if you are going to die, you will know that you die for an offence you committed. So, while we appeal to Nigerians going to Saudi Arabia, we know it is tough, obey the laws of the land. Even kolanut is treated as a drug. So we will continue to appeal to the Saudi Authorities to treat some of the cases with some form of leniency. As I said, we have 20 of them in Saudi, this is the eighth to be executed, and we are hopeful that maybe we will be able to save the others. Dubai robbers, disgrace to Nigeria Meanwhile, Mrs Dabiri-Erewa described as disgraceful the arrest of five Nigerians, for allegedly robbing a bureau de change in Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates of about Dh2.3 million. The men were caught on camera breaking into the bureau de change and smashing the glass barrier between the customers and the staff before they stole the money and fled. Mrs Dabiri-Erewa, said the men were a disgrace and an embarrassment to Nigeria and their families. She listed their names of the armed robbers as Chimuanya Emmanuel Ozo, Benjamin Nwachukwu Ajah, Kingsley Ikenna Nwonka, Toochukwu Leonard Arise and Chile Micah Ndumodu. These five boys are a disgrace to this country and an embarrassment. So if UAE decides to be hard on Nigerians, then we will complain that they are hard on us. But we will continue to say that one bad apple should not spoil the whole bunch. Nigerians are hardworking, intelligent so these few should not spoil the whole bunch because this has made news all over the UAE now. We are going to continue to name those who disgrace the country anywhere in the world, and we will continue to appeal to Nigerians to be good ambassadors wherever they find themselves, she said. Enlightenment measures On efforts being made by the government to educate pilgrims going to Saudi Arabia following the alleged connivance of some airlines with drug syndicates, the aide said the government is insisting that all those travelling should be made to identify their baggage before boarding. She said the rampant cases of drug smuggling has reduced since the commencement of the inspection procedure. Since this law came into force where you ensure baggage is identified, it has reduced. The case I am talking about happened between 2016-2017. So it is important you identify your bags, take responsibility for your luggage. The Hajj Commission is also working with these airlines to ensure this is done because we do not want an innocent person to be jailed for an offence he or she did not commit, she said. Asked if the Nigerian government is going to write a letter of protest to the Saudi Arabian authorities, the presidential aide said, we have been doing that. The Nigerian consulate in Saudi Arabia has been talking to Saudi Arabia authorities, but I think we need to take it to a higher level now, I mean with 20 on death row, this is the eighth to be killed, we need to engage with the Saudi Arabian authorities more than we have done in the past. With 20 Nigerians on death row, we may be able to save those who did not carry out the crime. We know that drug issues in Saudi Arabia carried (carries) death penalty, but we will continue to ensure that we intervene properly. On the connivance of airlines, she also added, In particular and this is a fact, Ethiopian Airlines and Egyptian airlines, there are always cases of when you get there you see something in your bag. So, it is now mandatory for these airlines and for all those travelling to ensure that you identify your bags before you board. That has helped. It is important that if you are going to Saudi Arabia with any of these airlines, you identify your bags. We have had cases where you just get to Saudi Arabia, and somebody will knock on your door that something was found in your bag. It is mandatory for these airlines to screen these bags before you board the passengers, she said. She said a Nigerian citizen was recently freed because of the intervention of the countrys mission in Jeddah. She said it was found out that he did not carry the drug into the country. The embassy fully intervened, and he was freed. There is one that has a court case, and the embassy is fully involved, and hopefully he too will be freed, she said. On if the embassy was monitoring the trials, the presidential aide said the government is fully monitoring the trials. She, however, said it is difficult because Nigerian officials are not allowed to go to prison to see citizens on trial. They were allowed once, so the embassy is continuously requesting to go to prison and see the Nigerians that are on death row and those that have been sentenced to prison for various offences. Nigerians killing Nigerians in South Africa Mrs Dabiri-Erewa also spoke about the reports of Xenophobia attacks on Nigerians in South Africa. She said the attacks are not restricted to Nigerians alone In the case of South Africa, you need to break it down. We have xenophobic attacks which just happened recently and affected more of Malawians. I am sure you heard the President of South Africa when he came here, it is an embarrassment to South Africa, it is not something they are happy about and he said everything will be done to curb it. A lot of awareness must be put in place. The second case, is Nigerians killing Nigerians. We are having Nigerians taking drugs and cult wars to South Africa. The last killing of a Nigerian was by a fellow Nigerian. We have the names of the various cult groups, and they are drug-related. So, you cannot take that to another mans country and expect that they will not be happy with you. Nigerians killing Nigerians in South Africa, that is another disgraceful act. Nigerian community in South Africa must get involved, they know these organisations, they live among them. Recall the one that happened in Anambra was a fall out of that, she said. The aide said where South African citizens or law enforcement are found to be involved; the government often takes action. She said, four policemen have been charged for their involvement in killings of Nigerians with the intervention of Mr President. President Muhammadu Buhari had declined assent to eight bills recently passed by the National Assembly. The bills are Ajaokuta Steel Company Completion Fund Bill, 2018; Chartered Institute of Training and Development Establishment bill, 2018; Nigerian Aeronautic Research bill, 2018 and National Institute of Credit Administration bill 2018. Others are Small and Medium Entrepreneurship Development Agency Bill, 2018; National Housing Fund Bill, 2018; Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria Bill 2018 and National Biotechnology Development Agency Bill 2018. Reason for rejection His decision to decline assent to the bills was communicated to the Senate via several letters read out by the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, on Tuesday. The president also stated his reasons for rejecting the bills. For the Ajaokuta Steel Company Completion Fund Bill, he said appropriating $1 billion from the Excess Crude Account is not the best strategic option for Nigeria at this time of budgetary constraints, and the nation cannot afford to commit such an amount amid competing priorities. He also said the bill which seeks to make an appropriation of revenues to fund public expenditure, should be consolidated in the annual Appropriation Act, such that these proposals pass through the traditional scrutiny that budget proposals are subjected to by the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Budget and National Planning and the National Assembly. Furthermore, as the Excess Crude Account funds belong to the Federation, it would be proper to consult with the National Economic Council and the States and relevant stakeholders; the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development and the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment were not fully consulted. The inputs of key stakeholders are necessary to create the optimal legal and regulatory framework as well as the institutional mechanism to adequately regulate the steel sector, he said. Other bills For the Chartered Institute of Training and Development Establishment Bill, he said his decision to reject the bill was because there are concerns that the institute does not possess the capacity to undertake the numerous duties and responsibilities imposed under the act. He also said the bill criminalises the practice of training and development without registration with the institute even though no description or definition of the term training and development is provided in the bill. This will lead to an unacceptable ambiguity in the operation of the institute and destruction to the many sectors of the economy on which training and development occurs, he said. For the Nigerian Aeronautic Research Bill, Mr Buhari said there are many inconsistencies in the bill, and it is not in tandem with relevant international civil aviation regulations. He said Section 1 of the bill provides that the principal objectives are to incorporate the Chicago convention into Nigerian law. The convention, he said, is already incorporated by section (3) (1) of the civil aviation act 2006. He also said Section B of the bill establishing NISAR negates the provision for Section 330 of the Civil Aviation Act and part 14 (3) of the Nigerian civil aviation regulation as the proposed content of section 4 are already contained in civil aviation act and civil aviation regulations. The bill is a duplication of the work of NEMA, Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, Nigeria Estate Management Agency and other responsible organisations for research and rescue services in Nigeria especially aeronautic research. We believe a better alternative to the proposed bill will be to leave the operations of the proposed purpose of the bill in the civil aviation act and civil aviation regulations, he added. For the National Institute of Credit Administration Bill 2018, he said the requirement (in the bill) that every member of the staff of banks and other financial institutions should hold a National Institute of Credit Administration licence before they are eligible to practice as credible managers, portends a recipe for crisis. He also said Section 5 of the bill should be deleted in its entirety as the power sought to be conferred on the NICA will be in conflict with the powers of some regulatory bodies such as the powers of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria and the National Insurance Commission. We suggest that the NICA should only be a training or certification provider for credit management professionals in Nigeria with the responsibility to promote its objectives among persons who voluntarily elected to be its members and the creation of a credit management institute such as the NICA. (This) may unintentionally set up an additional layer to credit management as it creates the multiplicity of, regulations which cause more bottlenecks to the ease of doing business, he explained. The Small and Medium Entrepreneurship Development Agency Bill, in Section 32 of the Bill introduces: (i) a 2. 5 per cent levy on the profit before tax of the target companies which will increase the tax burdens of the companies while offering no direct benefit to them; (ii) a one per cent levy on imports which will also add to the cost of doing business in the country (iii) a five per cent levy on luxury goods which duplicates efforts by the Federal Ministry of Finance to raise excise on such goods In a more sustainable manner to the benefit of the Federal Government treasury; Mr Buhari in rejecting the bill said the agency would have similar objectives to the Bank of Industry particularly about the funding of small and medium enterprises. For the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria Bill, he said his decision to decline assent to the bill is because of the failure of those that crafted it to spell out the required qualification and experience threshold of the directors and senior management staff with specific reference to developmental banking, risk management and mortgage loan administration experience. He explained that the provisions in Section 9(2) provided that liabilities of the federal mortgage bank shall be discountable with the Central Bank of Nigeria without specifically stating in the bill that this is subject to usual criteria for normally accessing the rediscounted window of the Central Bank of Nigeria. For the National Biotechnology Development Agency Bill, he said the bill fails to include the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development within the governing board of the agency. He also said there drafting issues and errors in the bill which will affect the interpretation and operation of the bill. For instance, the reference in Section 8(1)a of the bill for the revenue mobilisation allocation and fiscal commission to set the benefits of the board is incorrect and the correct representation should be for the National Salaries, Income and Wages Commission to perform this function, Mr Buhari said. SMITHFIELD, Va., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Smithfield Foods, Inc. is pleased to announce that it has honored multiple facilities and employees with Worker Safety Awards, including Safety Professional of the Year, Outstanding Safety Innovation, Presidents Award, and Presidents Circle Awards. This annual company awards program recognizes outstanding performance in workplace safety, effective implementation of Smithfields industry-leading health and safety management system, and monthly safety scorecard measurements, among other workplace safety criteria. The health and safety of employees is a top priority for Smithfield, and the company is continuously working to improve safety performance across all locations. The employees and facilities honored are vital to Smithfields efforts to create and maintain an exceptional employee environment with injury rates that are significantly better than the industry average. We have seen dramatic worker safety improvements across our company in recent years, said Kenneth M. Sullivan, president and chief executive officer for Smithfield Foods. Those improvements are driven by our hard-working Smithfield Family members. The employees and facilities honored with these worker safety awards relentlessly pursue operational excellence and help to ensure that our company remains a safe place to work. Bryn Jensson, safety manager for Smithfield Hog Production, Midwest, was named the 2019 Safety Professional of the Year for her efforts to reduce workplace injuries. Under Jenssons leadership, Hog Production teams in the Midwest region have gone 230 days without any lost time injuries, or injuries resulting in an employee being unable to return to work. Joaquin Garcia and John Dang, ammonia refrigeration technicians for Smithfields Crete, Nebraska facility, were awarded the Outstanding Safety Innovation Award for the creation of an ammonia valve training station. This new station allows employees to demonstrate competency and to conduct trouble shooting while working in a controlled environment, without impacting production. Our people are our most important asset, and their efforts consistently better our safety performance, said Gary Walters, senior director of corporate safety for Smithfield Foods. We are incredibly proud of these individuals and locations for their exceptional safety efforts, successful records, and for reinforcing our companys culture of workplace safety in all aspects of our operations. The Presidents Circle awards program recognizes locations with outstanding safety performance for the year, including worker injury reduction and other impressive safety achievements. The Presidents Award is given to the individual location with the highest level of safety performance. The Arnold, Pennsylvania facility received this years Presidents Award for safety improvements in several areas, including injury reduction, risk reduction, and exceptional Safety Compliance Audit Process assessment. PRESIDENTS CIRCLE Arnold, Pennsylvania Des Moines, Iowa Elizabeth, New Jersey Elk, Poland Hog Production, Midwest Hog Production, Rocky Mountain Hog Production, West Ilawa, Poland Kansas City, Missouri Kinston, North Carolina Krakow, Poland Morliny, Poland Newport News, Virginia Norson, Mexico Omaha, Nebraska Orange City, Iowa Salt Lake City, Utah Smithfield Ferme, Romania Smithfield Prod, Romania Sioux Center, Iowa Sioux Falls, South Dakota Smithfield Pet, Virginia Starchowice, Poland St. Charles, Illinois St. James, Minnesota Wilson, North Carolina About Smithfield Foods Smithfield Foods is a $15 billion global food company and the world's largest pork processor and hog producer. In the United States, the company is also the leader in numerous packaged meats categories with popular brands including Smithfield, Eckrich, Nathans Famous, Farmland, Armour, Farmer John, Kretschmar, John Morrell, Cooks, Gwaltney, Carando, Margherita, Curlys, Healthy Ones, Morliny, Krakus, and Berlinki. Smithfield Foods is committed to providing good food in a responsible way and maintains robust animal care, community involvement, employee safety, environmental, and food safety and quality programs. For more information, visit www.smithfieldfoods.com , and connect with us on Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , and Instagram . Internally displaced persons in Borno State on Monday expressed concerns over the dangers of having orphaned children growing up in camps without any form of parental or government care. The concerned displaced elders said they are more scared about what the future holds out for them regarding the untamed orphans than the next attack by Boko Haram insurgents. Speaking with PREMIUM TIMES in one of the IDP camps in Kusheri suburb of Maiduguri, TIjani Mustapha, a 60 years old IDP from Konduga Local Government Area said there are nearly a 100,000 orphans that live in different IDP camps across Borno. He said most of them are growing wild and are uncultured while they are conscious of what happened to their parents and how they are living without any kind of love or care they needed. He said the kids are a perfect recipe for disaster, worse than Boko Haram, in the nearest future. Mr Mustapha raised this concern during a public screening of a filmed documentary on the Boko Haram insurgency titled Uprooted. The movie was produced by a local NGO called PAGED Initiative in which victims relate their stories of survival. The film is used as an advocacy tool for giving a voice to the underrepresented people especially in conflict environments. Ticking bomb Mr Mustapha and many others who watched the film were inspired to open up and shared their experiences and concerns. We have to begin to worry about the plights of the thousands of orphans that we have in our society now due to the activities of Boko Haram, he said. Government and indeed we the people must do something urgently to secure the future of these orphans; if we allow them to grow, the way they are being brought up in camps, without adequate love and care, we should as well have to worry about what they will turn out to be in our society. I am talking about the nearly 100,000 unaccompanied children who are presently in camps because their parents have died or killed in the insurgency. Some of the parents died during Boko Haram attacks, some abducted and have never been seen again; some were slaughtered or shot right in front of the children and some were killed by the military especially during raids and shootouts. These kids are everywhere; within and outside the camps; some came in as babies found abandoned because their parents were killed, some came in as toddlers, some grew up in the camps and dont even know where they come from, except they are told. Some knew where they came from but have no relation to live with because all their traceable relations have been killed or are nowhere to be found. They live as unaccompanied children, who go to bed and wake on their own, without any parental care. The aged IDP said he was once a successful local businessman in Konduga but Boko Haram visited his community and took away all that he possessed. We are even worried about children who live in the camps with their parents, who have little or no control on how they behave because both the children and the parents depend on handouts given by government and NGOs before they can feed, he said. So how much more of a child that does not know anything called family. Another male IDP, Muhammed Abuya, said: what may happen in the future could be worse than what they have experienced. We fear for the future because there is greater possibility that we may face even a worse insurgency than the Boko Haram by the time these children grow up with the knowledge or memory of how their parents were killed and nobody cared for them. It would be easier for them to engage in crimes that are even worse than Boko Haram. The same children, if care is not taken, will turn round to start killing all of us because no one is giving them education both Islamic and Western; no one is giving them care. The government seems to have forgotten about them, he said. Statistics In February 2017, Borno governor, Kashim Shettima, released an official figure of 52,311 as the number of children orphaned by the Boko Haram insurgency. The number increased to 56,000 in August of the same year. That figure, though seen by many as conservative, could have doubled especially with the resurgence of hostility in the region. Governor Shettima had in August 2017 said the orphaned would be enrolled in the 20 mega schools that were being built across the state capital. The schools are yet to formally open. The Federal High Court, Maiduguri, Borno State on Tuesday dismissed a case seeking nullification of governorship primaries of the state chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC). The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the case was filed before the court on December 19, 2018; by a chieftain of the APC, Mamman Durkwa. Mr Durkwa challenged the emergence of the Babagana Zulum as the candidate of the party in the primaries conducted on September 30, 2018. Mr Zulum, a professor, emerged winner of the March 9 governorship election in the state. Those joined in the case were the APC and Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Delivering judgment; the trial judge, Jude Dagat, said the court dismissed the case due to the inability of the plaintiff to file it within the 14-day period, as stipulated in the Electoral Act. Mr Dagat said the case is a pre-election matter that must be guided by the provisions of the law. He noted that the case was brought before the court after the expiration of the time frame provided by the electoral act. The judge, therefore, dismissed the case and ordered a 30 day grace within which to appeal. The Defense Counsel, Abdulwasiu Alfa, expressed joy over the judgment, while representative of the plaintiff, Usman Abubakar, said they would appeal the judgment. (NAN) The Government of Japan has released $1.5 million dollars to fund community stabilization activities in Nigerias North-East region through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Nigeria. Lucky Musonda, UNDPs Communications Specialist, made this known in a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Abuja. According to him, the funds will be utilised through an ongoing programme, which was launched in 2016 and implemented by the UNDP in Nigeria. He also stated that the interventions being implemented in the region are aimed at supporting victims of Boko Haram insurgency in the three most affected states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe. He said the projects goal is to support over 2,200 farmers, 500 small businesses, public infrastructure in five communities and provide emergency employment to over 850 community members. He said the funding builds on ongoing activities that the Government of Japan has been supporting, which have facilitated the rehabilitation of 20 public infrastructures. The communications specialist said the funds have also provided emergency employment to more than 2,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and returnees. Mr Musonda said that in addition, more than 4,000 farmers and over 1,000 small businesses were supported with inputs and capital that helped improve and expand their sources of livelihood. He said the Government of Japan has already invested $6.5 million in North-East Nigeria stabilisation activities. He explained that the funds will be utilised within the framework of Integrated Community Stabilisation Programme, which UNDP has been implementing in the region intended to directly benefit 125,000 people in the three states. Mr Musonda said an additional one million people will indirectly benefit from interventions under the project. According to him, Khardiata Lo Ndiaye, acting UNDP Resident Representative to Nigeria, said meeting urgent early recovery needs of the crisis affected communities remained a huge challenge requiring more partners and investment. Stabilisation efforts in North-East are helping families and communities begin to rely less on humanitarian aid and more on themselves. This support from the Government of Japan will go a long way in laying a foundation for development to take place again in the region, Ndiaye said. He said Shigeru Umetsu, Charge d Affairs and interim of Japan to Nigeria, reassured that the Government of Japan would continue to support the efforts of the Nigerian people. Umetsu said the Japanese government would support efforts aimed at restoring stability and livelihoods for the communities in the North-East region. (NAN) At least four persons were feared dead with several houses burnt in a fresh communal clash between Jukun and Tiv ethnic groups in Wukari Local Government Area of Taraba on Monday. But the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) could not immediately confirm the number from the Police as the Commands Public Relations Officer, David Misal, did not respond to a call and the SMS inquiry put across to his line. However, a witness, Jerry Luka, told NAN that trouble started in Kente Village in the evening when youth from both ethnic groups clashed over a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding led to the killing of two people in Kente and this morning two others were killed around General Hospital in Wukari. The argument started over cultural heritage issues between the two tribes which have festered for some time now, he said. Chairman of Wukari Local Government Council, Daniel Adi, who confirmed the outbreak of the crisis, said two people were killed and houses burnt. According to him, trouble started on Monday when some Tiv kinsmen were prevented from bringing goods to Kente Market. One woman who defied their order and brought yams to the market for sale was molested; the action sparked reprisal. I have since reached out to the Chairman of Ukum Local Government in the neighbouring Benue and the Security Adviser to the Benue Governor and we are making efforts to stop the escalation of the crisis. I have visited the area where the crisis started with the Chairman of Ukum from Benue and we have all agreed to talk to our people to give peace a chance, he said. NAN reports that commercial activities have been halted at the popular Wukari Yam Market as commodities were looted and the place deserted after traders fled to safer zones. (NAN) Four persons have lost their lives in Kabba, Kogi State, when the wall of a well collapsed on them. The spokesman for Kogi Police Command, William Aya, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the victims were labourers engaged by a woman to renovate the well. Mr Aya, who spoke to NAN on phone, gave the names of the victims as Kayode Ayeni, Niyi Jimoh, Olusanmi Sunday and Ayo Sunday. According to him, the incident happened at about 6:30 p.m. on Monday in Sango area of Kabba. He said that a distressed call was received by the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) in charge of Kabba who quickly responded by sending a team of policemen to the scene. He said the police team dug out the victims and rushed them to the Government General Hospital, Kabba where they were pronounced dead by doctors on duty. Mr Aya said that the bodies of the victims, whose ages ranged from 30-35 years, were deposited at the morgue of the hospital. The police spokesman said the woman who hired the labourers to work on her 25-feet well also collapsed on learning about the incident and was admitted at the same General Hospital. (NAN) As the race for the 9th Speaker of the House of Representatives intensifies, one of the key contenders for the position, Femi Gbajabiamila, on Tuesday Abdularaheem Olawuyi as his mobilisation coordinator in the North Central. Lanre Agas, the Senior Legislative Aide to Mr Olawuyi, said in a statement that the appointment was to galvanise support from the zone. Mr Olawuyi is representing the people of Ekiti/Irepodun/Isin/Oke-ero Federal Constituency of Kwara State. He said Mr Olawuyi being a grassroots politician, who also enjoyed the support of his colleagues from the zone, would ensure victory for Mr Gbajabiamila. The statement quoted the lawmaker from Kwara State as saying no stone would be left unturned to ensure the mission was accomplished. Mr Olawuyi said Mr Gbajabiamila deserved to be the speaker of the 9th assembly, considering his wealth of experience and having been a majority leader and in the House of Representatives since 2003. Mr Gbajabiamila had on Sunday declared his interest in becoming the speaker of the 9th House of Representatives. He said he was seeking the office of the Speaker to bring our tendencies together and unite us as country. I seek the office of the speaker to bring governance even closer to the people and mentor the next generation. I seek the office of the Speaker so I can use the bully pulpit to galvanise honourable members to make life more abundant for every Nigerian irrespective of tribe, religion background or political persuasion, he said. (NAN) The Osun State Police Command has said it acted in good faith when it deployed its officers to the secretariat of the Peoples Democratic Party in Osogbo, the Osun State capital on Monday. The Police Public Relations Officer, Folasade Odoro, told PREMIUM TIMES that the command acted on a tip off signaling a possible attack on the secretariat. We acted proactively to forestall the breakdown of law and order, she said. Officials of the party had expressed concerns over the deployment of armed policemen and vehicles to the secretariats entrance when there were no actual signs of disorderliness. The PDP state chairman, Soji Adagunodo, told journalists that the heavy presence of police operatives was not at the invitation of the party. He said although the party was not disturbed by the presence of the policemen at the secretariat, it was a surprise since they were not invited. We saw grand mobilisation of police to our secretariat this morning. Whatever way the whole scenario turned out to be , we are not disturbed, we are not afraid. Their presence does not affect us as a political party, said Mr Adagunodo. We received a call from the Deputy Commissioner of Police that we are protesting . In contrary, we are not protesting but only jubilating because of the victory of Senator Ademola Adeleke at the tribunal. We are law abiding party and we will continue to jubilate till the time of judgment from the Appeal Court. The grand jubilation would come when Supreme Court gives final judgment. The APC are jittery after they organised a protest and they thought we were going to organise a counter protest but we said no, we allowed people to react and thank God that they were condemned entirety on the social media for their protest. He commended the police for being professional during their stay at the secretariat, noting that they were doing their job. Ms Odoro added the police actually received information that suspected thugs were planning an attack on the PDP secretariat and steps had to be taken to prevent any crisis. An Osogbo Chief Magistrates Court in Osun on Tuesday remanded a 45-year-old herdsman, Abubakar Bello, in Ilesa Prison, over alleged murder of a farmer, Zachariah Oyebamiji. Magistrate Mary Awodele ordered that the defendant be kept behind bars in Ilesa, pending legal advice from the Office of the State Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). The magistrate, Mrs Awodele, adjourned the case until May 20, for mention. Mr Bello is facing a two-count charge of murder. The prosecutor, Elisha Olusegun, told the court that the defendant committed the offence on March 13, at 12.30 p.m., at Ila-Orangun, Osun. Mr Olusegun said the accused conspired with others at large and killed Mr Oyebamiji on his farm. He said the offence contravened the provisions of sections 324 and 319(1) of the Criminal Code Cap 34 vol. 11, Laws of Osun, 2002. The plea of the defendant was not taken by the court.(NAN) Ngan said her ongoing official visit to France aims to maintain and further develop the bilateral strategic partnership and the parliamentary ties, especially realising the commitments reached by the two countries leaders on inter-parliamentary cooperation. She said the Vietnam-France friendly relations have been developing strongly and sustainably, particularly since the two sides set up bilateral strategic partnership in 2013. Vietnam always attaches great importance to relations with France in its foreign policy and hopes the two nations will continuously work together to deepen their collaboration, she added. The economic cooperation is a priority pillar in the bilateral strategic partnership, Ngan said, adding that France is Vietnams third biggest investor with US$2.8 billion and fourth trade partner with US$5.1 billion among the European countries. Vietnam highly appreciates Frances policy of enhancing economic partnership with the Southeast Asian country. More than 200 French enterprises are operating in Vietnam, Chairwoman Ngan said, asking the two sides to support businesses to access to the respective markets. She informed the host about her working session with the France-Vietnam Friendship Parliamentarians Group and 15 major businesses from France, adding Vietnam hopes French investors will expand cooperation in the future because Vietnam is a gateway to the ASEAN. Through meeting with the French businesses, Chairwoman Ngan said they are very interested in Vietnam and ASEAN with many successful investment projects. Airfrance and Safran Frances leading aerospace and defence corporation, signed a maintenance and repair deal worth US$6.5 billion with Vietjet Air. On the occasion, Vietnam Airlines will receive an Airbus A350 aircraft, while Bamboo Airways is also negotiating for its purchase. Considering such result, Ngan stressed French businesses are confident in the Vietnamese market for its stable socio-economic growth and economic openness. She noted that Vietnam has to date signed 12 free trade agreements, adding that the NA recently ratified the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Vietnam will incorporate international commitments it has inked into the national laws in line with international practice, the top legislator said. At the talks, the NA Chairwoman praised cooperation between Vietnamese and French localities as a special feature in bilateral relations. On the occasion, a conference on the collaboration between the two countries localities, its 11th edition, will take place in Toulouse, France, with the participation of 20 Vietnamese localities. It aims at boosting diverse engagement in contribution to the development of the Vietnam - France strategic partnership. Appreciating Frances support to strengthening Vietnam - EU ties, Ngan asked France, as Vietnams strategic partner, to assist the country in speeding up the signing and ratification of the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), which will benefit all sides involved. President of the French National Assembly Richard Farrand holds talks with National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan. (Photo: VNA) She also requested the French side back the lifting of EUs "yellow card" warning to Vietnam, adding that the country is making efforts in implementing related EU recommendations. The NA has approved the revised Law on Fisheries, which responds better to international law on the protection and conservation of aquatic resources. The law came into force on January 1, 2019. Both leaders expressed their delight at robust growth recorded between the two countries law-making bodies. Bilateral relations were thriving in the recent past, with increased number of visits by their high-ranking leaders taking place. In March last year, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnams Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong paid an official visit to France, while French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe made an official trip to Vietnam in November the same year. And at the moment, the official visit to France by the NA Chairwoman is ongoing. Following his visit to Vietnam in 2018, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe relished his prospects on the Vietnam-French relation development in the coming time, President of the National Assembly of France Richard Farrand said, suggesting both sides work together to identify prioritised sectors and outline rational cooperation measures to boost the bilateral relations in an effective manner. He spoke highly of Vietnams role in the region and the ASEAN, and expressed his support for the collaborative relations at the local level. Regarding the EVFTA, the official stressed that the French Government and National Assembly support the early signing and ratification of the pact, noting that both sides should work more to accelerate the official signing. Hailing the sound cooperation between civil aviation corporations of the two countries, with a line-up of large contracts having been inked, he said that cooperation in the field is a vivid illustration for the Vietnam-France relations. Meanwhile, NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan affirmed that Vietnam stands ready to coordinate with the French National Assembly to bolster bilateral cooperation, making contributions to deepening the good friendship between the two countries. At the talk, Farrand accepted the Vietnamese NA Chairwomans invitation and said that he will visit Vietnam with a parliamentary and business delegation to further the cooperative ties. The French National Assembly always welcomes the Vietnamese NA to come to France to exchange experience, he added. OKOTOKS, Alberta, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (TSX:MTL) Mullen Group Ltd. ("Mullen Group" and/or the "Corporation") intends to release its 2019 First Quarter earnings results at approximately 5:00 p.m. (ET) on Wednesday, April 24, 2019, and has scheduled a conference call and webcast as follows: Date: April 25, 2019 Time: 12:00 p.m. ET Conference Call Dial-in: 1-800-319-4610 (for participants in North America) 416-915-3239 (Toronto or Overseas participants) Webcast: www.mullen-group.com A replay of the call will be available approximately two hours after the completion of the call until Thursday, May 9, 2019, by dialing 1-800-319-6413 or 604-638-9010, access code 3102 followed by the pound sign. Mullen Group is a company that owns a network of independently operated businesses. The Corporation is recognized as one of the leading suppliers of trucking and logistics services in Canada and provides a wide range of specialized transportation and related services to the oil and natural gas industry in western Canada - two sectors of the economy in which Mullen Group has strong business relationships and industry leadership. The corporate office provides the capital and financial expertise, legal support, technology and systems support, shared services and strategic planning to its independent businesses. Mullen Group is a publicly traded corporation listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol "MTL". Additional information is available on our website at www.mullen-group.com or on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. For further information, please contact: Mr. Murray K. Mullen - Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President Mr. P. Stephen Clark - Chief Financial Officer Mr. Richard J. Maloney - Senior Vice President 121A - 31 Southridge Drive Okotoks, Alberta, Canada T1S 2N3 Telephone: 403-995-5200 Fax: 403-995-5296 PDF available: http://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/83fe78c5-cc02-478c-a9e8-ccfd3c3c1bc0 Orlando, Fla., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Orange Lake Resorts, home to the Holiday Inn Club Vacations brand, is pleased to announce today that an affiliate of KSL Capital Partners, LLC, (KSL) has made a significant minority investment in the privately held company. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. KSL has been a leading investor in the travel and leisure industry. We are excited about how this partnership will expand the horizons of our Company and the Holiday Inn Club Vacations brand, said Tom Nelson, President and CEO of Orange Lake Resorts. Our company has experienced tremendous growth, and we are making bold moves to position ourselves for the future, including the recently announced global exclusivity and 100-year extension to our strategic alliance with IHG. Adding KSL, with their expertise in financial markets and travel and leisure, complements our growing capabilities and is another great step toward a bright future for our company and brand. Kemmons Wilson founded both Holiday Inn hotels and then Orange Lake Resorts, establishing a hospitality legacy that has thrived for more than half a century. The Wilson family continues to own and operate Orange Lake Resorts privately. This is the first time the Wilson family has taken on an outside equity partner for the Company. For 37 years, the Wilson family has guided and shaped the growth of the Company. Our passion and desire to invest in this Brand and this great team has never been stronger, as evidenced by recent acquisitions in the Lake Tahoe area, New Orleans and the new corporate campus in Orlando. Partnering with a quality firm such as KSL will enable us to grow farther and grow faster, commented Orange Lake Resorts Chairman Spence Wilson, Sr. KSLs history of investing in, as well as positioning and growing, travel-based businesses are unmatched and we are excited to see what we can accomplish together. Orange Lake Resorts is one of the top vacation ownership companies in the U.S. and fits perfectly into our investment portfolio, said Jared Melnik, Principal at KSL. Our team has more than two centuries of combined investment and management experience in the travel industry. There is great potential in Holiday Inn Club Vacations today, and we see even more success in the future. In the last decade, Orange Lake Resorts has expanded from four to 28 resort properties, while growing its number of owners and Club members from 120,000 to 350,000. Greenberg Traurig LLP acted as legal counsel to Orange Lake Resorts, while J.P. Morgan Securities LLC acted as financial advisor and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP acted as legal counsel to KSL. About Orange Lake Resorts Orange Lake Resorts encompasses 28 resorts and 7,600 villas in the U.S., with more than 350,000 timeshare owners and 5,000+ employees. Orange Lake Resorts, a leader within the vacation ownership industry with more than three decades of proven success, operates Holiday Inn Club. The Holiday Inn Club Vacations brand was created in 2008 through a strategic alliance with IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group), one of the worlds leading hotel companies. The flagship Holiday Inn Club Vacations property in Orlando, Fla., located next to the Walt Disney World Resort, was established in 1982 by Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson. For more information on Holiday Inn Club Vacations or to book reservations, visit holidayinnclubvacations.com. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com/hiclubvacations or Twitter at twitter.com/hiclubvacations. About KSL Capital Partners KSL Capital Partners, LLC is a private equity firm specializing in travel and leisure enterprises in five primary sectors: hospitality, recreation, clubs, real estate and travel services. KSL has offices in Denver, Colorado; Stamford, Connecticut; and London. Since 2005, KSL has raised approximately $11 billion of capital across both debt and equity funds. KSL's current portfolio includes some of the premier properties in travel and leisure. For more information, please visit www.kslcapital.com. 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. IRVINE, Calif., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TRI Pointe Group, Inc. (NYSE: TPH) announced today that it will release its financial results for the first quarter of 2019 before the market opens on Thursday, April 25, 2019. The Company will host a conference call on the same day to discuss the results at 7:00 AM Pacific (10:00 AM Eastern). The call will be hosted by Doug Bauer, Chief Executive Officer, Tom Mitchell, Chief Operating Officer and Mike Grubbs, Chief Financial Officer. Those interested in participating in the call can dial-in toll free at (877) 407-3982, or (201) 493-6780 for international participants. A webcast of the event will also be available under the Events & Presentations heading in the Investors section of the Companys website at www.TriPointeGroup.com. A replay of the event will be available for two weeks following the call toll free at (844) 512-2921 or (412) 317-6671 using the reference #13689424. An archive of the webcast will also be available on the Companys website for a limited time. About TRI Pointe Group, Inc. Headquartered in Irvine, California, TRI Pointe Group, Inc. (NYSE: TPH) is one of the top ten largest public homebuilders by equity market capitalization in the United States. The Company designs, constructs and sells premium single-family homes through its portfolio of six quality brands across eight states, including Maracay Homes in Arizona; Pardee Homes in California and Nevada; Quadrant Homes in Washington; Trendmaker Homes in Texas; TRI Pointe Homes in California and Colorado; and Winchester Homes in Maryland and Virginia. Additional information is available at www.TriPointeGroup.com. Investor Relations Contacts: Chris Martin, TRI Pointe Group Drew Mackintosh, Mackintosh Investor Relations InvestorRelations@TriPointeGroup.com, 949-478-8696 NORWICH, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- BizClik Media, the innovative, Norwich-based digital media firm, had published its latest issue of the Europe edition of Business Chief. For this month's cover feature, the publication examines the cargo unit of Germany's largest airline, Lufthansa Cargo, which is undergoing an intelligent digital transformation. The company's CIO Jochen Gottelmann talks to Harry Menear about how the business is integrating technologies such as the cloud. As one of the world's leading air freight carriers, Lufthansa Cargo provides tailored logistics solutions to customers in over 100 countries, transporting an average of 1.6mn tonnes of freight and mail each year. Sophie Chapman discusses global expansion strategies with Erdem Kizildere, Head of Regional Development at Spanish auto company SEAT. The business is currently leading Volkswagen's production project in Algeria. Business Chief also spoke with The BKW Group, Deutsche Bahn and DSI Underground for the April issue. Each company discusses digital transformation within the respective sectors, such as energy, transport and mining. For this month's city focus, Business Chief looks at the city's architecture, history and businesses, to determine why Vienna has been deemed the most livable city. This month's top 10 looks at the best franchises based in Europe includes companies such as The Body Shop, Europcar and SPAR. The issue can be read here. About Business Chief Business Chief is a media brand fit for the digital age, providing cutting-edge content tailored for company executives, business pioneers and industry thinkers. Divided into eight separate regional titles, Business Chief tells the stories that matter to business leaders and professionals on their way to the top. Through our expertly-crafted digital magazines, websites, videos and social media, those stories reach the right people. Our flagship features are the Leadership Showcases; exclusive interviews with key decision-makers at some of the biggest companies on the globe, documenting their journeys to business transformation and the lessons they've learned along the way. With further themes focused on technology, talent and sustainability, Business Chief has insight on the trends that matter to C and V-level executives, while also delivering consumer-friendly lifestyle content to reflect their interests and wider ambitions. On top of all that and more, Business Chief showcases in-depth digital reports on companies every month, ensuring it covers every angle in the world of business. www.businesschief.com About BizClik Media BizClik Media Ltd is a diverse, multi-platform digital media company focusing on the global B2B marketplace. We have a passion for great content and we collaborate with the world's most inspiring and innovative business leaders to deliver only the best, most engaging and relevant content to you. With a trusted and recognised publishing portfolio that is home to over 16 brands, including e-magazines and web platforms, combined with our social media marketing and data marketing tools, we have the experience, approach and know-how, to deliver your brand in front of the people that matter. www.bizclikmedia.com Media Contact: Sophie Chapman Tel: +44-(0)-1603-215-079 Email: sophie.chapman@bizclikmedia.com https://europe.businesschief.com/ SOURCE BizClik Media CMDM technology to eliminate workplace distractions and boost safety and productivity in expanded sectors LISLE, Illinois, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cellcontrol, the global leader in technology for distracted driving, announced today that it is changing its corporate name to TRUCE Software, effective immediately. The name change reflects the company's vision for improved mobile device management and policy enforcement at work and coincides with its expansion into on-site workplace management and industrial workforce safety using its Contextual Mobile Device Management (CMDM) platform. "In addition to distracted driving, mobile devices are the greatest cause of productivity loss in the workplace and injury risk on the jobsite," said Joe Boyle, CEO, TRUCE. "Today, we expand the reach of our solutions beyond the vehicle for inclusivity of all workplaces where a solution to mobile device distraction is so desperately needed." TRUCE's patented technology offers employers the ability to manage employee access to particular apps at the right time, in the right place using contextual indicators. As a result, employees work smarter and safer in designated "zones," where an individual's mobile device is in use behind a desk, in a meeting room, traveling in the field, working at a jobsite, etc. This drastically reduces the risk of hazardous driving, dangerous job site conditions, confidential information leaks, and other workforce distractions. Operating on both iOS and Android platforms, the first-of-its-kind CMDM platform is flexible and can be configured to meet each company's mobile device policy requirements. "We have a no tolerance corporate safety policy that prohibits mobile devices on our forklifts," said Luke L'Hoste, Production Manager at Builders FirstSource, Inc., a leading national supplier and manufacturer of building supplies. "However, with TRUCE we are now able to mount a tablet to the forklifts allowing our lift operators to safely access the work order system rather than having to walk to the warehouse to print out the next order. With TRUCE, the tablet only works when the forklift is turned off. This has turned our process completely paperless and improved our job throughput and workflow efficiency." Boyle added, "CMDM technology isn't about controlling end-user devices, but rather helping companies to create safer more productive workplaces that enable their employees to do their best work. Best of all, our category defining platform works when you want it to and shuts down when you need it to." About TRUCE Software At TRUCE Software, we believe there's a better way to leverage all a mobile device has to offer in the workplace, while still protecting what's most important your employees, your assets and your IP. TRUCE offers the first Mobile Device Management platform to provide flexible, contextual enforcement of your mobile device policy, allowing companies to temporarily suspend distracting mobile apps based on the work being performed, the work location or even the user or work group. Our patented technology operates on both iOS and Android platforms, supporting more than 100,000 subscribers and some of the largest brands worldwide. Established in 2009, TRUCE Software is headquartered in Lisle, IL with research and development in Baton Rouge, LA. To learn more, go to www.trucesoftware.com. Public Relations Contact: Bryan Spevak Account Director anthonyBarnum Public Relations Office: 512-387-3703 bryan.spevak@anthonybarnum.com Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/707902/Cellcontrol_Logo.jpg Related Links www.cellcontrol.com SOURCE Cellcontrol VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- NRG Metals Inc. ("NRG" or the "Company") (TSX-V: NGZ) (OTCQB: NRGMV) (Frankfurt: OGPN) announces that it has completed a new agreement with the owner of the Hombre Muerto North Lithium Project (HMN Project) in Argentina. The revised Option to Purchase Agreement is as follows: Payment of $ US 500,000 (paid) and the issuance of 1,000,000 common shares (in process) Payment of $ US 500,000 on or before June 24, 2019 On or before March 22, 2020 , Payment of $ US 1,000,000 and the issuance of 2,250,000 common shares On or before March 22, 2021 , payment of $ US 1,000,000 and the issuance of 2,250,000 common shares On or before March 22, 2022 , payment of $ US 2,000,000 and the issuance of 2,250,000 common shares In addition, the vendor's company One Borax S.A. will be positioned as "preferred vendor" for the provision of earthwork and construction services to NRG Metals Inc., subject to a competitive bid process. One Borax has considerable experience in the exploration and development of brine salars, having completed contracts for Millennial Lithium, Eramine and other companies in the area. The experience includes earthworks, platform construction and the installation of pilot plants for the recovery of lithium. One Borax has also completed its own facility which produces borates for the Indonesian and United States markets. All other terms of the original agreement remain the same. Company President Adrian F.C. Hobkirk is quoted, "We are very pleased to have come to a compromise arrangement with the property vendor for the HMN Project. While NRG has been completing a transitionary phase, competition for the project had become significant with various parties familiar with the property desiring to replace the Company in this arrangement. We are looking forward to working closely with the vendor in the future evaluation of the HMN Project." The Company expects to publish results from a Preliminary Economic Assessment on the HMN Project, which is being conducted by Knight Piesold Consulting ("KP") and JDS Energy & Mining ("JDS"), in the immediate future. The HMN Project is strategically located in the Hombre Muerto Salar, an area of active lithium production by FMC at the Fenix lithium mine, some 12 kilometers south of the project area. The project is surrounded by ground now owned by POSCO, a Korean based lithium producer, as a result of its US$280 million purchase of the area from Galaxy Resources Ltd., an Australian-based producer. Galaxy is also moving their portion of the Hombre Muerto Salar, the Sal de Vida Project, to lithium production. The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed the content of this news release and therefore does not accept responsibility or liability for the adequacy or accuracy of the contents of this news release. This news release contains certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 21E of the United States Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Except for statements of historical fact relating to the Company, certain information contained herein constitutes forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based upon 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 which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. We seek safe harbor. On behalf of the board of directors of NRG Metals Inc.: Adrian F. C. Hobkirk, President and C.E.O. T: Investors / Shareholders Call 855-415-8100 Direct to Adrian Hobkirk 714-316-3272 E: ahobkirk@nrgmetalsinc.com W: www.nrgmetalsinc.com SOURCE NRG Metals Inc. There is fast paced development of infrastructure and construction sector owing to the FIFA cup that is to be held in Qatar in 2022 Qatar is planning to make itself a regional logistics hub in the Middle East. This will help achieve self-sufficiency, attract investors, and strengthen economic ties with rest of world GURUGRAM, India, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Upgrading Infrastructure: The country is expected to focus on upgrading its logistics infrastructure especially in the seaports, constructing regional and international logistics service centers, improving the efficiency of connection between Qatar and other countries, thereby becoming a modern logistics hub in near future. Port Development: The ports authority is planning to convert available areas into additional container storage areas to cater to the growing demand. They are also investing heavily in the development of ports and other logistic areas. The ports authority has also acquired additional lands to build special economic zones in the southern part of the country. The Logistics Area Project: The logistics area project with an investment of USD 8.2 Billion is one of the largest projects undertaken by the Qatari Government to improve their infrastructure and to make Qatar a logistics hub. This project is strategically located close to the Hamad Port, Mesaieed Industrial Port and the Orbital highway thus having a positive impact on the overall logistics and warehousing market in the future. Growth Drivers: The market will be driven by expanding industrial activities, growing E-commerce and automotive industry, upcoming infrastructure in the country & continuous investment by the government in development of logistics infrastructure. Analysts at Ken Research in their latest publication titled "Qatar Logistics and Warehousing Market Outlook to 2023 By Sea, Land, Air Freight Forwarding; International and Domestic Freight, Integrated and Contract Logistics Freight Forwarding; By Warehousing (Industrial/ Retail, ICD/CFS, Cold Storage, Others), 3PL Warehousing; By Express Logistics and E-commerce Logistics" believe that increase in infrastructure coupled with the development and construction owing to the FIFA cup that is to be held in Qatar in 2022 will be the major drivers of growth in the market. The market is expected to register a positive CAGR of 16.4% in terms of revenue during the forecast period 2019E-2023E. Key Segments Covered Qatar Logistics and Warehousing Market Qatar Freight Forwarding Market By Mode of Transport By International and Domestic Freight By Flow Corridors By International and Domestic Companies By Type of Commodity By Method of Performing Services By Express and Normal Delivery Qatar Warehousing Market By End User By international and Domestic Companies By Organized and Unorganized Players By Type of Warehouse By Method of Performing Service By Operational Model By Region Qatar Express Logistics Market By International and Domestic Express By Air and Ground Express Logistics By Market Structure Qatar E-Commerce Logistics Market By 3PL and E-Commerce Companies By Time Duration By Destination By Payment Method Qatar Outsourced Logistics Market By Market Type By International and Domestic Companies Qatar Courier Express and Parcel Market Key Target Audience Logistics Companies Warehousing Companies Cold Chain Companies Courier and Parcel Companies Express Logistics Companies E-Commerce Logistics Companies E-Commerce Companies Time Period Captured in the Report: Historical Period: 2013-2018 2013-2018 Forecast Period: 2018-2023 Companies Covered: Aero Freight Airlink International Qatar WLL Ali Bin Ali Aramex Bin Yousef Cargo Britania Freight and Logistics CEVA DHL Expeditors FedEx GAC Gulf Agency Company Gulf Warehousing Company GWC JSL Kuehne + Nagel Milaha Maritime and Logistics Modern Freight Company Naaas Logistics Qatar Logistics Qatar National Import and Export Co. Qatar Post Royalty Logistics Services Seven Sea Freight SkyNet Worldwide Express Speedway Cargo WLL Starline Global Freight Services Super Express Cargo Target Logistics Tokyo Freight Services WLL UPS Western Gulf Agency For more information on the research report, refer to below link: https://www.kenresearch.com/automotive-transportation-and-warehousing/logistics-and-shipping/qatar-logistis-warehousing-market/189101-100.html Related Reports Oman Logistics and Warehousing Market Outlook to 2022 - By Freight Forwarding, Express Delivery, Warehousing Services, Cold Storage, Third Party Logistics and Value-Added Services The report provides a comprehensive analysis of logistics and warehousing services in Oman. The report focuses on overall market size for logistics and warehousing, market segmentation by Service Mix (Freight Forwarding, Warehousing Services and Value-Added Services); Oman freight forwarding market segmentation by Freight Movement (Sea, Road and Air), by Normal and Express Delivery, by International and Domestic Freight Forwarding, by Flow Corridors (Asian Countries, European Countries, North American Countries, GCC and Others), by International and Domestic Companies, Oman Warehousing Market Segmentation by Region (Muscat and Others), by End User (Food and Beverage, Chemicals, Oil and Gas, Electronics and Others), by International and Domestic Companies, by Business Model (Industrial Freight, Container Freight, Cold Storage, Agriculture and Others), Oman Express Logistics market segmentation by Domestic Express and International Express, Oman Cold chain Logistics market segmentation by Cold Storage and Cold Transport, by Industries (Meat and Seafood, Poultry and Eggs, Confectionaries and Others), by Contractor and Logistics Owned. The report also covers the overall comparative landscape in Oman logistics and warehousing market with company profiles for major players. The report concludes with market projection for future of logistics and warehousing services for Oman logistics and warehousing market. Kuwait Logistics and Warehousing Market Outlook to 2022 - By Freight Forwarding/ Transportation, Warehousing and Value Added Services, E-commerce Logistics, Express Delivery, Third Party Logistics The report provides a comprehensive analysis of logistics and warehousing services in the Kuwait. Kuwait logistics and warehousing market has witnessed increasing demand of maritime, aviation and land transport systems to ensure efficient flow of resources and commodities within the country as well as to other countries globally. Kuwait is majorly focusing on improving its trade relations which led to the growth in import and export in terms of value and volume. As trade has a direct correlation with logistics industry, the market has grown positively during the review period. Kuwait logistics and warehousing market augmented positively at a positive single digit CAGR during the review period 2012-2017. Indonesia Logistics and Warehousing Market Outlook to 2023 - Driven by Infrastructure Spending for Airport and Seaports Albeit by Poor Existing Road Network The report covers logistics infrastructure, value chain analysis, the overall market size in terms of revenue; segmentation by service mix for logistics and warehousing market, segmentation by mode of service, mode of freight, flow corridors, end users, third party logistics and integrated logistics for freight forwarding market; segmentation by air and ground express, domestic and international shipments, delivery period, intra city and inter-city shipments, market structure, region and offshore & on-shore shipments for courier and parcel market; segmentation by delivery period for e-commerce logistics market; segmentation by service mix for third party logistics market; segmentation by business model, geography, type of warehouses, third party logistics & integrated logistics and end users for warehousing market; segmentation by cold storage & cold transport and products for cold chain market; industry norms and regulations, trends and developments, issues and challenges, recent mergers and acquisitions, matrix of major companies, competitive scenario, company profiles and cross comparison with other logistics markets. The report concludes with market projection and analyst recommendations highlighting the major opportunities and cautions for the logistics market. Poland Logistics and Warehousing Market Outlook To 2022- By Domestic And International Freight Forwarding, Warehousing, Express Logistics, Cold Chain, Third Party Logistics, E-Commerce Logistics The report provides a comprehensive analysis of logistics and warehousing market in Poland. The report covers Poland logistics market by service mix (freight forwarding, warehousing and value added services), by industries (manufacturing, retail, motor vehicle & parts, food, plastic, furniture, paper and others), Poland freight forwarding market by freight mode (land and pipeline freight, water freight and air freight), by international and domestic freight forwarding, by major flow corridors (European countries, Asian Countries, North American countries and rest of the world), by delivery (normal and express), competitive scenario, future outlook and projections. The report also covers Poland warehousing market by geography (Warsaw, Silesia, Poznan, and others), by business model (Industrial/ Retail/ Agriculture, Container Freight/ inland Container Deport and Cold Storage), cross comparison of various regions in Poland on the basis of headline rent, effective rent and vacancy rate, classification of major warehousing hubs in Poland, competitive scenario, future outlook and projections. The report also covers Poland express logistics market by air and ground express, by B2B, B2C and C2C segment, by international and domestic express logistics service, competitive scenario, future outlook. The report also presents with a snapshot on e-commerce logistics market, CEP (Courier, Express and Parcel) market, cold chain logistics and third party logistics industry along growth drivers and trends, issues and challenges, industry norms and regulations, recent industry activities, competitive landscape of major players (PKP Cargo, DSV Group, Kuehne + Nagel, LOTOS Kolej Sp. Z. o. o, Yusen Logistics (Polska) Sp. z o.o., DB Schenker, DHL Poland, Raben Group and DPD Polska) in Poland logistics market. Vietnam Logistics and Warehousing Market Outlook To 2022 By Service Mix (Freight Forwarding, Warehousing, Cold Chain, Express Delivery, E-Commerce Logistics, Third Party Logistics) The report provides a comprehensive analysis of logistics and warehousing services in Vietnam. The report focuses on Vietnam freight forwarding market by normal and express delivery, by freight movement (sea freight, road freight, air freight and rail freight), by international and domestic freight forwarding and by flow corridors (Asia Countries, European Countries, American and African Countries); Vietnam warehousing market by number of warehouses (Southern Vietnam and other regions), by end users (retail, electronic devices, textile and footwear, wooden products and others), by international and domestic companies and by business model (industrial freight/retail, container freight, cold storage, agriculture and others). The report further provides insight on Vietnam express delivery market by international and domestic express, by air and ground express and by market structure (B2C, B2B and B2C) along e-commerce logistics business by channel (3PL companies and e-commerce merchants), by speed of delivery (2 day delivery, 1 day delivery, same day delivery, within 2 hours and delivery beyond 2 days), by area of delivery (intercity and intracity) and by payment method (cash on delivery and others). The report provides statistics on Vietnam 3PL market by freight forwarding and warehousing and by international and domestic companies. Contact Us: Ankur Gupta Ken Research Private Limited, Head Marketing ankur@kenresearch.com +91-9015378249 SOURCE Ken Research DUBAI, UAE, April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- At the recent Arabian Business Technology Awards, Yardi was honoured to accept the Property Software Company of the Year award. Hosted by Arabian Business, a weekly business magazine published in Dubai, the awards recognize the most accomplished companies and senior executives from around the region. The awards ceremony took place at the Ritz Carlton, Dubai and celebrated top technology performers in the UAE. Drawn from a select group of over 600 companies and individuals, 21 awards were presented. Last year, Yardi was recognized by Arabian Business as the UAE's top real estate technology provider. "Yardi has a proven track record across the Middle East for providing long-term, customer focused solutions that represent innovative use of technology across real estate sectors," said Said Haider, Yardi's Regional Director for Middle East, who accepted the award on the company's behalf. "We are honoured to receive this recognition from Arabian Business." Learn more about Yardi's proven technology solutions for real estate firms in the Middle East and worldwide. About Yardi Yardi develops and supports industry-leading investment and property management software for all types and sizes of real estate companies. Established in 1984, Yardi is based in Santa Barbara, Calif., and serves clients worldwide from offices in Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America. For more information, visit: yardi.com/ae (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/737275/Yardi_Logo.jpg) Related Links https://www.yardi.com/ae/ SOURCE Yardi CRETE, Neb., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Air Methods, the leading air medical service provider, will celebrate the 30th Anniversary of its StarCare base on April 13 at 1:30 p.m. CT at Silverhawk Aviation in Lincoln. A special reception will be held there to honor the clinicians, crew and other staff who have been a part of the base's history. StarCare is owned and operated by Air Methods and serves the Lincoln metropolitan area and southeastern Nebraska. Since it opened in 1989, StarCare has flown more than 13,000 missions and cared for more than 12,800 patients. StarCare is one of Air Methods' longest-serving bases, opening just nine years after the company was founded, and was notably the first base in Nebraska with a dedicated fixed-wing aircraft for air medical missions. "We are tremendously proud of this milestone anniversary for StarCare, especially as it marks 30 years of delivering safe, reliable and high-quality care and transport to the residents and visitors of Lincoln and the surrounding areas," said Air Methods regional business manager Ryan Penrose. "We're looking forward to StarCare delivering excellence in care and air medical services for another 30 years and beyond as the community they serve continues to grow." Proud History of Service StarCare and the region it serves have both seen significant changes since StarCare's founding in 1989. StarCare serves a large and diverse geographical area, including the Lincoln Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has grown from a population of 211,000 in 1989 and to more than 331,500 today. StarCare has added new team members and aircraft in that time to serve its steadily expanding service area. StarCare V began as a joint project between Bryan Memorial Hospital, Lincoln General Hospital, Saint Elizabeth Community Health Center, Eastern Ambulance Service, and LinAire Inc. Over the next 16 years, King Air 100 and 200 fixed-wing aircraft outfitted for medical service were used as the service evolved. In 1994, after years of growth, a BK117 helicopter was put in service on a six-month trial basis and StarCare soon determined the rotor service would become a staple at the base. In 2005, StarCare began using its iconic blue and silver star paint scheme that is now highly recognized in the skies of southeast Nebraska. Most recently, in 2014, StarCare inaugurated a Bell 407GX helicopter painted with the Air Methods' traditional red, white and blue paint design. The base is also highly involved in its community, offering emergency medical training classes to area first-responders, tours to residents and community leaders, and actively participating in fundraisers for local organizations. Editors' note: Members of the media are invited to cover the 30th Anniversary reception on Saturday, April 13 at 1:30 p.m. at Silverhawk Aviation 1751 W Kearney Ave, Lincoln NE 68524. Please contact Ryan Penrose, regional business manager at Air Methods, (402) 380-3252 or [email protected] if you plan to attend. About Air Methods Air Methods (www.airmethods.com) is the leading air medical service, delivering lifesaving care to more than 70,000 people every year. With nearly 40 years of air medical experience, Air Methods is the preferred partner for hospitals and one of the largest community-based providers of air medical services. United Rotorcraft is the Company's products division specializing in the design and manufacture of aeromedical and aerospace technology. Air Methods' fleet of owned, leased or maintained aircraft features more than 450 helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. Media Contacts: Ryan Penrose Regional Business Manager, Air Methods (402) 380-3252 [email protected] Megan Smith Amendola Communications (404) 408-3379 [email protected] SOURCE Air Methods Related Links http://www.airmethods.com RICHMOND, Va., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cuba saw a 33 percent decline in overnight visitors from the U.S. from 2017 to 20181, and a recent annual survey* by leading travel insurance and assistance company Allianz Global Assistance found that Americans' interest in traveling to Cuba in 2019 is still on the decline (75.5 percent are not interested in 2019; compared to 74.7 percent in 2018). That still leaves 14.6 percent of Americans or about 48 million travelers somewhat or very likely to plan a trip to Cuba. This year Cuba will celebrate the 500th birthday of its capital city, Havana, and expects to receive 5.1 million global visitors as a result. Yet according to Allianz's survey, 90 percent of Americans are unaware of the anniversary celebration this November, highlighting an opportunity for boosters of travel to Cuba. The 6.8 percent who were aware of Havana's anniversary said it positively impacts their interest in visiting the destination, while two percent say it negatively impacts their interest in visiting. Travel to Cuba can be confusing, especially in light of U.S. travel restrictions and advisories that often might make people think twice about visiting the island. According to the survey, a majority (63.3 percent) of Americans do not understand current travel restrictions to the island nation, which is likely preventing many from being interested in or planning a trip to the destination. The survey also asked Americans about their preferred method of travel to the island, finding that 18.1 percent would expect to arrive by plane and 6.9 percent by cruise ship. "With Havana making significant infrastructure improvements, including major hotel renovations, and planning cultural activities to celebrate the city's 500th anniversary, it's a great opportunity for Americans to visit," said Daniel Durazo, director of communications at Allianz Global Assistance USA. "Our survey indicates that Cuba scores highly for its resorts and beaches, as well as its cultural attractions, with 34 percent of Americans listing one of these as the top reason for their interest in visiting the island. When traveling internationally, the right travel protection policy may provide peace of mind in case of unexpected travel disruptions or health issues." Response 2017 2018 2019 % change How likely are you to actually plan a trip to Cuba? Very Likely 5% 3% 2% -1% Somewhat Likely 19% 15% 12% -3% Not Likely 76% 82% 86% +4% Allianz Global Assistance offers travel insurance** through most major U.S. airlines, leading travel agents, online travel agencies, and other travel suppliers, as well as directly to consumers. For more information on Allianz Global Assistance and the policies offered for travelers, please visit: http://www.allianztravelinsurance.com. *Methodology: The 2019 10-question survey was administered to the U.S. internet population from March 14, 2019 through March 16, 2019, receiving 1,500. The methodology is explained here and a snapshot of survey findings are listed below: 1. Are you interested in traveling to Cuba? 11.6% - Yes 12.9% - Maybe 75.5% - No 2. Did you know that Havana celebrates its 500th anniversary this year, and does that impact your interest in visiting the destination? 6.8% - Yes, I know about the anniversary, and it positively impacts my interest in visiting the destination 2.3% - Yes, I know about the anniversary, and it negatively impacts my interest in visiting the destination 90.9% - No, I did not know about the anniversary 3. Do you understand the current travel restrictions on travel to Cuba? 15% - Yes 21.8% - Somewhat Familiar 63.3% - No 4. How likely are you to actually plan a trip to Cuba? 2.4% - Very Likely 12.2% - Somewhat Likely 85.4% - Not Likely 5. If you feel likely to take a trip to Cuba, when do you think you will go? 1.1% - In the next 6 months 2.6% - Sometime in the next year 11.5% - Sometime in the next five years 17.6% - I don't know 67.2% - I don't feel likely to take a trip to Cuba 6. If you feel likely to take a trip to Cuba, how do you plan on getting there? 18.1% - Via airplane 6.9% - Via cruise ship 75% - I don't feel likely to take a trip to Cuba 7. What makes you less interested/likely to travel to Cuba? 18.5% - Safety concerns 7.3% - Lack of info on Cuba's travel experiences travel experiences 8.1% - Fear of government 4.1% - Lack of travel infrastructure 2% - Lack of internet/ mobile connectivity 2.7% - Lack of appropriate healthcare facilities 57.2% - Something else 8. What would make you most interested/likely to travel to Cuba? 17.2% - Resorts and beaches 17.1% - Cultural attractions 6.2% - Cuban food and Cuban rum 4% - Classic 1950s American cars 2% - Cuban cigars 3.7% - Family/friends 49.9% - Something else 9. What negative changes do you think opening Cuba to U.S. travelers has had on the country since 2014? 5.6% - Rapid modernization; Cuba's not ready for it not ready for it 5.9% - The next Cancun ; a theme park for tourists ; a theme park for tourists 7.2% - A loss of Cuban culture 3.4% - An increase in all-inclusive resort hotels 3.7% - Overcrowding of world-heritage sites 27% - I don't think negative changes have occurred 47.1% - Other 10. Are you concerned the influx of American travelers over the years will ruin the timeless feeling of the country? 5.9% - Very concerned 6.5% - Concerned 9.9% - Mildly concerned 26.1% - Neutral 12.9% - Not concerned, it will not change 38.7% - Not concerned, it will change for the better Allianz Global Assistance USA Allianz Global Assistance USA is a leading consumer specialty insurance and assistance company with operation centers in 35 countries. In the United States, Allianz Global Assistance USA (AGA Service Company) serves 40 million customers annually and is best known for its Allianz Travel Insurance plans. In addition to travel insurance, Allianz Global Assistance USA offers tuition insurance, event ticket protection, registration protection for endurance events and unique travel assistance services such as international medical assistance and concierge services. The company also serves as an outsource provider for in-bound call center services and claims administration for property and casualty insurers and credit card companies. To learn more about Allianz Travel Insurance, please visit allianztravelinsurance.com or Like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/AllianzTravelInsuranceUS. **Terms, conditions, and exclusions apply to all plans. Plans are available only to U.S. residents. Not all plans are available in all jurisdictions. For a complete description of the coverage and benefit limits offered under your plan, carefully review your plan's Letter of Confirmation/Declarations and Certificate of Insurance/Policy. Insurance coverage is underwritten by BCS Insurance Company (OH, Administrative Office: Oakbrook Terrace, IL), rated "A" (Excellent) by A.M. Best Co., under BCS Form No. 52.201 series or 52.401 series, or Jefferson Insurance Company (NY, Administrative Office: Richmond, VA), rated "A+" (Superior) by A.M. Best Co., under Jefferson Form No. 101C series or 101P series, depending on state of residence. Allianz Travel Insurance products are distributed by Allianz Global Assistance, a brand of AGA Service Company or its affiliates. AGA Service Company is the licensed producer and administrator of these plans and an affiliate of Jefferson Insurance Company. The insured shall not receive any special benefit or advantage due to the affiliation between AGA Service Company and Jefferson Insurance Company. Noninsurance benefits/products are provided and serviced by AGA Service Company. 1 Travel Weekly, Cuba Comeback Predicted by Gay Nagle Myers SOURCE Allianz Global Assistance USA Related Links http://www.allianztravelinsurance.com LITTLE ROCK, Ark., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Arkansas Health and Wellness announced today that, following the receipt of all required regulatory approvals, its parent company Centene Corporation has completed its acquisition of QCA Health Plan Inc., and QualChoice Life and Health Insurance Company, Inc. This transaction, effective April 1, 2019, will expand Centene's footprint in Arkansas through its local healthcare entities Arkansas Health & Wellness and Arkansas Total Care. These organizations combined provide healthcare to over 200,000 Arkansans through their health insurance marketplace (Ambetter), Medicaid (Arkansas Total Care), and Medicare Advantage (Allwell) products. "We are pleased to welcome QualChoice into our family. This transaction allows us to expand our efforts in improving the lives of our fellow Arkansans, and will ensure QualChoice customers continue to enjoy the same high standard of care through quality, affordable health coverage." said John Ryan, President and CEO of Arkansas Health and Wellness. "Our organizations have a shared mission of providing accessible, affordable healthcare, and we look forward to continuing to serve the healthcare needs of our community." QualChoice customers will continue to be served through the Arkansas Health Insurance Marketplace individual market and the group segment, which serves employers of all size throughout the state of Arkansas. About Arkansas Health & Wellness Arkansas Health & Wellness offers affordable health care solutions to help fulfill our primary purpose: Helping Arkansas Live Better. We serve under-insured and uninsured populations through our Health Insurance Marketplace and Medicare Advantage products. Arkansas Health & Wellness is one of three partner organizations that form Arkansas Total Care, providing whole health solutions for Medicaid beneficiaries with IDD and Behavioral Health needs. Arkansas Health & Wellness is a wholly owned subsidiary of Centene Corporation, a leading multi-national healthcare enterprise. For more information, visit ARHealthWellness.com. About Centene Centene Corporation, a Fortune 100 company, is a diversified, multi-national healthcare enterprise that provides a portfolio of services to government sponsored and commercial healthcare programs, focusing on under-insured and uninsured individuals. Many receive benefits provided under Medicaid, including the State Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), as well as Aged, Blind or Disabled (ABD), Foster Care and Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS), in addition to other state-sponsored programs, Medicare (including the Medicare prescription drug benefit commonly known as "Part D"), dual eligible programs and programs with the U.S. Department of Defense. Centene also provides healthcare services to groups and individuals delivered through commercial health plans. Centene operates local health plans and offers a range of health insurance solutions. It also contracts with other healthcare and commercial organizations to provide specialty services including behavioral health management, care management software, correctional healthcare services, dental benefits management, commercial programs, home-based primary care services, life and health management, vision benefits management, pharmacy benefits management, specialty pharmacy and telehealth services. Centene uses its investor relations website to publish important information about the Company, including information that may be deemed material to investors. Financial and other information about Centene is routinely posted and is accessible on Centene's investor relations website, http://www.centene.com/investors. SOURCE Arkansas Health & Wellness Related Links http://www.centene.com DENVER, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CBD of Denver, Inc. (OTC CBDD) is pleased to announce a new brand name for our product line. All our current and future products will be branded "Black Pearl CBD" and will be released within the next couple of weeks. CBD of Denver, Inc. is in the process of rolling out a new web page, www.cbdofdenver.com, which will be more in line with our new corporate image. We are also in the process of relocating our corporate office to a new location in Centennial, CO. CBD Social Network www.cbdsocialnetwork.com is continuing to populate with new members, and we are very pleased with the response. The site is receiving 2,000+ views per day. We invite you to join and keep connected with other CBD users. Our liqueur flavored 0% THC Full Spectrum Whole Plant CBD Tinctures are selling well and limited quantities are still available at www.cbdhealthprofessionals.com. Thank you for your support. We are excited about the future at CBD of Denver, Inc., with our new brand name and exciting products being developed, the future looks bright. SOURCE CBD of Denver, Inc. Related Links http://www.cbdofdenver.com MINNEAPOLIS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Children's Minnesota announced today that it is launching an exclusively pediatric, multidisciplinary Gender Health Program that will provide comprehensive care for youth who identify as transgender or gender-diverse. Children's joins only about a dozen hospitals in the nation with a program dedicated to providing specialized care and support for youth and their families. "Our goal is to become the go-to resource for transgender and gender-diverse children from across the region," said Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd, medical director for the program and vice chief of staff. "Often, families find themselves having to educate their primary care pediatricians, schools, neighbors and family members about how to appropriately care for gender-diverse children. At the Gender Health Program, families can access medical experts they can trust and get the answers they need to help them navigate the complexities they may encounter." Children's is committed to providing equitable, inclusive care to all patients. Yet, despite healthcare industry efforts in recent years to address health disparities, there are still communities experiencing inequities and need additional help, including transgender youth. Through this comprehensive program, Children's will offer compassionate and personalized care, including a variety of services that will support transgender and gender-diverse youth in their health and development. "The launch of the Gender Health Program at Children's Minnesota will help improve health equity and outcomes for children and families who need these services," said Dr. Marc Gorelick, president and CEO of Children's Minnesota. "We know that transgender and gender-diverse children face health disparities and our multidisciplinary clinic aims to offer a robust level of care to kids and their families." The multispecialty clinic will provide an array of services, including: Gender consultation : This involves meeting with a gender-health expert to discuss developmental questions and concerns about gender identity and develop a personalized care plan. : This involves meeting with a gender-health expert to discuss developmental questions and concerns about gender identity and develop a personalized care plan. Pubertal suppression : Treatment includes putting puberty "on pause" for kids in mid to late puberty. This is a fully reversible intervention, and is given as an injection or done as an implant. : Treatment includes putting puberty "on pause" for kids in mid to late puberty. This is a fully reversible intervention, and is given as an injection or done as an implant. Menstrual suppression : This involves medication, shots or implants to stop menstruation for patients as necessary. : This involves medication, shots or implants to stop menstruation for patients as necessary. Gender-affirming hormone treatment : This involves hormones that create changes in the body to align with patient's gender identity. The treatment is for patients in late puberty or post puberty. : This involves hormones that create changes in the body to align with patient's gender identity. The treatment is for patients in late puberty or post puberty. Fertility preservation consultation: This involves meeting with a fertility specialist to discuss options prior to starting gender affirming treatment. To learn more, visit childrensMN.org/genderhealth. About Children's Minnesota Children's Minnesota is the seventh largest pediatric health system in the United States and the only health system in Minnesota to provide care exclusively to children, from before birth through young adulthood. An independent and not-for-profit system since 1924, Children's serves kids throughout the Upper Midwest at two free-standing hospitals, 12 primary and specialty care clinics and six rehabilitation sites. Additionally, Children's is Minnesota's only Level I pediatric trauma center inside a hospital dedicated solely to children. Children's maintains its longstanding commitment to the community to improve children's health by providing high-quality, family-centered pediatric services and advancing those efforts through research and education. This work is made possible in large part by generous philanthropic and volunteer support from individuals and organizations throughout the state and region. An award-winning health system, Children's received Magnet recognition from The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) and was verified as a Level I Children's Surgery Center by the American College of Surgeons in 2018. Additionally, Children's is regularly ranked by U.S. News & World Report as a top children's hospital. Please visit childrensMN.org . SOURCE Children's Minnesota Related Links https://www.childrensmn.org TULSA, OK, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Laredo Petroleum, Inc. (NYSE: LPI) ("Laredo" or "the Company") today announced the retirement of Dan C. Schooley, Senior Vice President - Midstream, Marketing & Subsurface and Kenneth E. Dornblaser, Senior Vice President - Legal & Administration. Concurrently, the Company's Board of Directors has appointed Mark D. Denny as Senior Vice President and General Counsel & Secretary, effective immediately. "The promotion of Mark to a senior leadership position is another step in a continuing succession planning process that began with Karen Chandler's promotion to Chief Operating Officer late last year," stated Randy A. Foutch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "Both Karen and Mark have accepted increasing levels of responsibility during their tenure with Laredo and I am excited to have them leading the Company as we transition our strategy from focusing on net asset value accretion to increasing returns and generating growth within cash flow." "It is hard to express the amount of respect and appreciation we have for the contributions of Dan and Ken to the growth of Laredo," continued Mr. Foutch. "Both applied the expertise they earned through many years in the oil and gas industry to help guide the Company through the early years of the oil shale revolution and horizontal drilling in the Permian Basin. We wish them all the best in their well-earned retirement." Mr. Denny began his career in 2006, practicing corporate law at international law firms Vinson & Elkins and Fried Frank. Prior to joining Laredo, Mr. Denny worked as in-house counsel for Seahawk Drilling, Inc. He joined Laredo in 2013 and most recently served as Vice President & General Counsel. Mr. Denny graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Political Science and received his Juris Doctorate degree from the Georgetown University Law Center. About Laredo Laredo Petroleum, Inc. is an independent energy company with headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Laredos business strategy is focused on the acquisition, exploration and development of oil and natural gas properties and the gathering of oil and liquids-rich natural gas from such properties, primarily in the Permian Basin of West Texas. Additional information about Laredo may be found on its website at www.laredopetro.com . HAIKOU, China, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Representatives from China's southern island province of Hainan and cities and provinces of ASEAN countries signed a joint initiative at the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) annual conference which concluded Friday, making their commitment to jointly building a higher level of China-ASEAN strategic partnership. The joint initiative was signed at the ASEAN-China Governors/Mayors' Dialogue which was held during the BFA annual conference in Boao, a coastal town in Hainan. "BFA has become an important platform for Hainan to participate in the construction of the Belt and Road," said Wang Sheng, director of the province's foreign affairs office. In recent years, Hainan has strengthened connectivity with Belt and Road (B&R) countries with a series of conferences and panel discussions, such as the ASEAN-China Governors/Mayors' Dialogue and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road: Island Economic Cooperation. Last year, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road cruise tourism program was proposed at the dialogue to promote the development of cruise tourism. So far, Hainan has opened a total of 14 cruise routes to Vietnam, the Philippines and other ASEAN countries and cities. The dialogue this year, with the theme "ASEAN-China Connectivity and Hainan Free Trade Port," emphasizes connectivity between China and ASEAN countries both on the sea and in the air. A four-hour flight from Hainan could take one to 21 Asian countries and regions, and an eight-hour flight to 59 countries and regions in Asia, Oceania, Europe and Africa. "We hope to build a platform to push forward the opening of direct flights between Chiang Mai and Hainan," said Viroon Phantevee, vice governor of Chiang Mai, Thailand at this year's dialogue. BFA has also pushed forward cooperation between Hainan and B&R countries, with an array of projects carried out in recent years. For example, projects on sharing the seed production technology of a rice breed have been carried out between Hainan and several ASEAN countries. With the technology promoted at previous ASEAN-China Governors/Mayors' Dialogue, nearly 100 experts now come to Hainan to learn about the breed and related technology each year. So far, 550,000 hectares of hybrid rice has been planted in the Philippines, 2.5 million hectares in India, 330,000 hectares in Pakistan, 700,000 hectares in Vietnam and 200,000 hectares in Indonesia. "Hainan has played an important role in the cooperation on seed production among ASEAN countries," Wang said. At this year's dialogue, a series of cooperation projects have also been reached, including one on industry and information between Hainan and the Republic of Korea and another on animal husbandry with Sweden. With the opportunities that BFA has provided, Hainan has sought more international cooperation, with its number of friendship cities reaching 60 and more to come. BFA will better serve the Belt and Road Initiative and panel discussions will be held on the Hainan free trade zone and the reform, institutional innovation, investment and trade facilitation, business environment, and ecological development of the free trade port, Wang said. "Hainan will continue to hold conferences and discussions to push forward practical cooperation in areas of health, blue economy, tourism, culture, education, technology, tropical agriculture and seed production," he said. SOURCE The Foreign Affairs Office of Hainan Province FREMONT, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CoaguSense, Inc., a subsidiary of i-SENS (KOSDAQ:099190), announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared its second-generation prothrombin time/international normalized ratio (PT/INR) monitoring system. The Coag-Sense PT2 meter, designed for monitoring patients on Coumadin (warfarin), delivers the same proven direct clot-detection technology in a design that can now be carried in a lab coat pocket and connected wirelessly to any clinical network or a patient's Bluetooth home monitoring application. "We are committed to not only providing a very safe and accurate device to monitor blood coagulation levels, but also one that is simple to use and offers a variety of seamless ways to export the test results into virtually any data management system," said Douglas Patterson, President and CEO of CoaguSense. "The Coag-Sense PT2 meter is the result of the continuous innovation of a test system based on the same mechanical principle as the World Health Organization's gold standard tilt-tube method and the research grade fibrometer." The Coag-Sense PT2 meter received 510(k) clearance for the FDA for both professional use in a CLIA-waived setting and patient self-testing at home. The second-generation system offers built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, and wired Ethernet connectivity options. Patient and operator IDs can be captured at the time of testing. This allows the Coag-Sense PT2 meter to directly interface with POCT data management systems such as RALS or TELCOR QML without the expense of a docking station. The PT2 meter can store up to 2,000 test results and 500 QC results. Operator and QC lockout can be easily managed to ensure regulatory compliance in the hospital or clinic setting. An optional barcode scanner is available for easily entering patient and operator information. The Coag-Sense PT2 meter is now commercially available. About CoaguSense, Inc. Based in Fremont, California, CoaguSense was founded in 2008 to bring more accurate and robust anticoagulation monitoring technology to both clinicians and patients. The company's lead product is the Coag-Sense PT/INR Monitoring System, which incorporates a novel direct micromechanical clot-detection technology. This proprietary technology emulates the World Health Organization (WHO) gold standard tilt-tube method while requiring only a very small blood sample. Direct clot-detection technology provides clinicians with the system reliability they demand and patients with the comfort of knowing that proper home testing can provide dependable results like a laboratory. In 2016, CoaguSense was acquired by i-SENS, Inc.a leader in point-of-care diagnostic technology and manufacturing. Further information about CoaguSense can be found at www.coag-sense.com Coag-Sense is a registered trademark of CoaguSense. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. SOURCE CoaguSense, Inc. Related Links http://www.coag-sense.com TORONTO, ON and TAMPA, FL, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Cott Corporation (NYSE:COT; TSX:BCB) ("Cott" or the "Company") announced today that the Company will release its first quarter ended March 30, 2019 financial results before the markets open on Thursday, May 2, 2019. Cott will host a conference call, to be simultaneously webcast, on Thursday, May 2, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time. A question and answer session will follow management's presentation. To participate, please call the following numbers: First Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call North America: (888) 231-8191 International: (647) 427-7450 Conference ID: 6679655 This is a live, listen-only dial-in telephone line. Webcast for First Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call A live audio webcast will be available through the Company's website at www.cott.com. The webcast will be recorded and archived for playback on the investor relations section of the website for two weeks following the event. 2019 Annual Meeting of Shareowners The Company announced today that its 2019 Annual Meeting of Shareowners will be held on Tuesday, April 30, 2019 at 8:30 a.m. (Toronto time) at the Toronto Airport Marriott hotel in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At the meeting, shareowners will be asked to receive the financial statements for the year ended December 29, 2018 and the report on those statements by Cott's independent registered certified public accounting firm, elect directors, approve the appointment of Cott's independent registered certified public accounting firm, hold a non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation, and transact any other business that properly may be brought before the meeting and any adjournment of the meeting. Webcast for 2019 Annual Meeting of Shareowners The meeting will be webcast live from Toronto, ON, Canada on Tuesday, April 30, 2019, at 8:30 a.m. (local time in Toronto). The live audio webcast will be available through the Company's website at www.cott.com. The webcast will be recorded and archived for playback on the investor relations section of the website for two weeks following the event. ABOUT COTT CORPORATION Cott is a water, coffee, tea, extracts and filtration service company with a leading volume-based national presence in the North American and European home and office bottled water delivery industry and a leader in custom coffee roasting, blending of iced tea, and extract solutions for the U.S. foodservice industry. Our platform reaches over 2.5 million customers or delivery points across North America and Europe supported by strategically located sales and distribution facilities and fleets, as well as wholesalers and distributors. This enables us to efficiently service residences, businesses, restaurant chains, hotels and motels, small and large retailers, and healthcare facilities. Website: www.cott.com SOURCE Cott Corporation Related Links http://www.cott.com MONTREAL and NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Delve Labs, the pioneer in AI-Based vulnerability assessment and prioritization, today announced that Norman Menz has joined the company's executive team as Chief Operating Officer (COO). Based in Delve's new New York City office, Menz will be focused on growth and operational effectiveness, further positioning Delve as a leading cybersecurity software company. "At Delve, we are dedicated to helping our clients reduce risk by prioritizing vulnerabilities and focusing remediation efforts to protect their most critical assets," said Gabriel Tremblay, Delve Labs CEO. "Norman not only believes in the importance of this mission, but he brings an extensive knowledge in cybersecurity and enterprise operations to effectively manage every aspect of the operations of a tech-based business. His passion and perspective will help to increase our dedication to the customer-first mentality, ensuring our current and potential customers understand the value of our solution and find success in using it." Menz brings to Delve more than 20 years of software engineering, information security technology and management experience. As a co-founder of the leading Third-Party risk assessment company, Prevalent, Menz has spent much of his career honing his expertise in cybersecurity and risk management. "Delve is a visionary in vulnerability prioritization and is committed to making vulnerability management more effective with a platform that is truly different than any other solution on the market," said Norman Menz, Delve Labs COO. "I'm excited to continue this journey of building our sales and marketing programs, as well as launching new office locations in two of the US' most important tech centers - New York City and San Francisco." Menz will head up Global operations at Delve Labs from its three offices in New York City, San Francisco and North America's AI capital, Montreal. About Delve Labs Founded in 2013, Delve Labs helps our clients reduce risk by providing the first AI-Driven vulnerability assessment and prioritization solution. Recent advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence are at the heart of Warden's ability to work continuously without human intervention. This driverless approach provides organizations with a new level of efficiency in protecting their assets and globally enhance their security posture. For more information, or to try Warden, please visit: https://www.delve-labs.com. For further information: Amanda Johnson, Delve Labs at 844-353-3583 or [email protected]. SOURCE Delve Labs Related Links https://www.delve-labs.com TORONTO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Drone Delivery Canada 'DDC or the Company' (TSX.V:FLT, OTC:TAKOF), is pleased to announce as the Company moves to commercial operations and revenue generation in 2019 in remote Canada and rural Canadian communities, that DDC will also be immediately pursuing eight additional business verticals where the Company sees great growth opportunities. In 2019, DDC will also be actively pursuing opportunities in eight other additional verticals that include Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Oil & Gas, Mining, Agriculture, Forestry, Construction and Courier Companies. Additionally, DDC has released a promotional video that focuses on DDC's commercialization and highlights the need and opportunity in the areas that DDC is additionally pursuing. The video is comprised of a six-minute film with three interviews with Mr. Michael Zahra, Senior Vice-President of Operations & Strategy for Drone Delivery Canada, Mr. Tim Strauss, Vice President of Air Canada Cargo, who sits on the Advisory Board of DDC along with Deepak Chopra, the former CEO of Canada Post who is also a member of DDC's Advisory Board. To view the video, please visit; https://dronedeliverycanada.com/video-repository/ "The opportunities in front of us are not only with the many Canadian First Nations & Inuit remote communities, but also with a broad range of government, commercial and industrial applications globally. We are also seeing an increase in traction with our international customers globally as our drone delivery system continues to be validated globally. Our proven system is seen as a commercially viable delivery infrastructure solution to companies looking to reduce costs and dramatically improve logistics.", commented Michael Zahra VP of Operations & Strategy at Drone Delivery Canada. For more information, please visit www.dronedeliverycanada.com About Drone Delivery Canada Drone Delivery Canada is a drone technology company focused on the design, development and implementation of its proprietary logistics software platform, using drones. The Company's platform will be used as Software as a Service (SaaS) for government and corporate organizations. Drone Delivery Canada Corp. is a publicly listed company trading on the TSX.V Exchange under the symbol FLT, on the U.S. OTC Q B market under the symbol TAKOF and on the Frankfurt exchange in Germany under the symbol A2AMGZ. SOURCE Drone Delivery Canada Related Links http://www.dronedeliverycanada.com HONOLULU and EAST PALO ALTO, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Elemental Excelerator (Elemental), a funder of environmental and infrastructure startups, today announced that California State Senate President pro Tempore Emeritus Kevin de Leon is joining the organization as strategic advisor and chair of its new California Community Council. In this role, de Leon will advise Elemental's portfolio companies working to serve low- to moderate-income (LMI) customers in California's disadvantaged communities and drive Elemental's collaboration with other organizations committed to increasing access to innovative technologies for underserved populations. For more than a decade, de Leon led bipartisan collaboration to advance some of the nation's most far-reaching climate policies, including landmark legislation such as SB 100, which mandated 100 percent clean energy by 2045, and SB 535, which required a quarter of all California Cap-and-Trade auction revenues now totaling over $8 billion be invested in communities most heavily impacted by pollution and the adverse impacts of climate change. As an advocate for disadvantaged communities and with deep roots in some of California's most politically diverse climates, de Leon's unique experience as a labor rights organizer and policy change-maker are well suited to advance Elemental's mission. "We are very excited to work with Kevin, whose policies helped develop the market for technology companies to invest in California's disadvantaged communities," said Elemental Excelerator CEO Dawn Lippert. "Our program to expand access to sustainable market-based innovations in areas disproportionately impacted by climate change is bolstered by Kevin's legislation. His policy expertise and track record of expanding opportunities for communities to thrive will be invaluable to both our portfolio companies and our California Community Council." As part of Elemental's commitment to driving innovations that serve the needs of all people, the accelerator launched its Equity & Access (E&A) Track in 2017. The E&A Track is designed to support startups building strategies to increase equity both within their organizations through diverse hiring, retention and inclusion, and responsible supply chains as well as externally by deploying clean technology projects in collaboration with residents, businesses and policymakers in California's disadvantaged communities. More than 40 percent of the 500 applicants who applied to work with Elemental in 2018 were interested in the E&A track, demonstrating strong business interest in serving LMI customers. de Leon will advise portfolio companies and apply the economic and environmental expertise he gained representing East Los Angeles and leading the California Senate. The new California Community Council will bring together a coalition of stakeholders from the business, non-profit, government, philanthropic and education sectors to identify challenges and deploy innovative solutions. As chair, de Leon will help the council advance Elemental's efforts to increase access to sustainable technologies. "Elemental Excelerator's unique model and focus on serving California's LMI populations dovetail perfectly with my policy work to prioritize disadvantaged communities as an essential element of combatting climate change," said Kevin de Leon, California State Senate President pro Tempore Emeritus. "To ensure that our most vulnerable populations thrive while transitioning to a clean economy, we must accelerate the deployment of technologies that deliver sustainable solutions quickly and at scale across all communities. I look forward to helping Elemental and its portfolio companies demonstrate that building a cleaner, more resilient and more equitable future is a winning business proposition." Since 2013, Elemental has allocated more than $30 million to 82 companies that have since raised more than $550 million in follow-on funding, and funded 59 demonstration projects in Hawaii, California and Asia-Pacific. Applications for its 2020 cohort close on April 12, 2019. To contact Elemental about participation in the California Community Council, please fill out this form. About Elemental Excelerator Elemental Excelerator helps startups change the world, one community at a time. Each year, it finds 15-20 companies that best fit its mission and funds each company up to $1 million to improve systems that impact people's lives: energy, mobility, water, agriculture, and beyond. For more information, visit elementalexcelerator.com . Media Contact: mc2 for Elemental Excelerator [email protected] SOURCE Elemental Excelerator Related Links http://elementalexcelerator.com WASHINGTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler will testify in front of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee about the Fiscal Year 2020 budget proposal for the EPA. The hearing Budget: Environmental Protection Agency is the first opportunity legislators have had to question the administration on the proposed 31.2 percent cut to the agency's budget next year. To properly support our work, the EPA must be funded at around $11 billion with 16,500 full-time workers a far cry from the outlandish $6.1 billion proposed by the president, said American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 President Gary Morton. We are already grossly underfunded and understaffed, and any additional cuts will prevent us from fulfilling our mission to protect childrens health and the environment. "To properly support our work, the EPA must be funded at around $11 billion with 16,500 full-time workers a far cry from the outlandish $6.1 billion proposed by the president," said American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 President Gary Morton. "We are already grossly underfunded and understaffed, and any additional cuts will prevent us from fulfilling our mission to protect children's health and the environment." President Trump's budget for 2020 would cut $2.7 billion from the agency and comes not long after the EPA failed to spend down the funds appropriated in FY 2018. With staffing already down to less than 14,400 nationwide from more than 18,000 at the turn of the century, Council 238 fears further cuts will hinder their ability to invest in infrastructure needs, enforcement, and the life- and cost-saving regulations administered by the EPA. Thankfully for EPA workers and the citizens that rely on them, there are members of Congress who are not happy about the proposed budget. "For decades, Americans have been the beneficiaries of reliable clean water, air, and land," said Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois . "The progress we've made to clean up our environment has been hard fought, and the men and women of the Environmental Protection Agency have been on the front lines, ensuring that our resources stay safe and productive. But the Trump Administration is proposing take the 'cop off the beat' for big polluters. The draconian staffing and budget cuts that they continue to push make the work of the EPA more difficult and threaten the health and safety of every American." of . "The progress we've made to clean up our environment has been hard fought, and the men and women of the Environmental Protection Agency have been on the front lines, ensuring that our resources stay safe and productive. But the Trump Administration is proposing take the 'cop off the beat' for big polluters. The draconian staffing and budget cuts that they continue to push make the work of the EPA more difficult and threaten the health and safety of every American." "The Trump Administration is doing everything it can to permanently damage the EPA's capacity to regulate and hold polluters accountable," said Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine . "Gutting staff levels of the EPA means communities won't get the help they need in order to protect public health. As Vice Chair of the Interior Appropriations Committee, I've made my opposition to these cuts known to Secretary Wheeler and I will fight to restore this funding and for congressional oversight throughout the FY 2020 budget process." of . "Gutting staff levels of the EPA means communities won't get the help they need in order to protect public health. As Vice Chair of the Interior Appropriations Committee, I've made my opposition to these cuts known to Secretary Wheeler and I will fight to restore this funding and for congressional oversight throughout the FY 2020 budget process." "Public health and safety should be the federal governments utmost priority, and unfortunately to the Trump Administration it is not," said Rep. Brenda Lawrence of Michigan . "The employees of the Environmental Protection Agency have been working hard to protect our environment, and as a member of the House Appropriations Committee I will work just as hard to protect them against these unnecessary cuts throughout this process." Morton echoed the members of Congress supporting funding the EPA, saying, "Every year we're able to save 230,000 lives through the Clean Air Act. We provide $30 in health benefits to the American public for every $1 invested in compliance. We work tirelessly to ensure the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we live on is clean and safe for all citizens. If the EPA continues to be underfunded, understaffed, and unable to fully exercise its statutory and regulatory authorities, our communities and environment will be at a greater risk." "We need members of Congress who believe in clean air and safe drinking water to support the agency that protects children's health and the environment before it's too late," added Morton. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union, representing 700,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia, including 250,000 at the Department of Veterans Affairs. For the latest AFGE news and information, visit the AFGE Media Center. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. SOURCE American Federation of Government Employees Related Links http://www.afge.org FAIRFIELD, Conn., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Foundation Source, the nation's largest provider of support services to private foundations, announces its promotion of Katherine Holbrook Biotti to National Sales Executive. In this role, Ms. Biotti will oversee and lead all business development efforts at Foundation Source, which include regional sales, inside sales, and strategic partnerships. Most recently, she served as Senior Managing Director for the company's Northeast and Southeast sales regions. "With Katherine's diverse experience in regional sales, strategic partnerships, brand development, and marketing, she is the ideal leader for our business development efforts going forward," said Susan Friedlander Calzone, chief executive officer of Foundation Source. "Her passion for philanthropy and her deep knowledge of the sector make her an excellent ambassador for the unique offering that Foundation Source brings to the marketplace." Ms. Biotti joined Foundation Source in 2005 as Director of Marketing, a role which helped raise the company's visibility in the marketplace. In 2006, Ms. Biotti transitioned to business development when she relocated to California and has since been building sales territories across the country for Foundation Source. In California, she significantly grew the company's client base and developed important relationships with financial advisors, RIAs, attorneys, CPAs, single- and multi-family offices, corporations, existing foundations, and philanthropically inclined individuals. In 2014, she assumed responsibility for the company's Northeast region, which grew significantly under her leadership. Ms. Biotti's career in philanthropy spans more than 20 years and began with her marketing and business development role at Fidelity Investments in its Charitable Gift Fund (DAF). About Foundation Source (www.foundationsource.com) Foundation Source is the nation's largest provider of comprehensive support services for private foundations. Our complete outsourced solution includes foundation creation (as needed), administrative support, active compliance monitoring, philanthropic advisory, tax and legal expertise, and online foundation management tools. Now in our second decade, Foundation Source provides its services to more than 1,500 family, corporate, and professionally staffed foundations, of all sizes, nationwide. We work in partnership with wealth management firms, law firms, accounting firms, and family offices as well as directly with individuals and families. Foundation Source is headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. SOURCE Foundation Source Related Links https://www.foundationsource.com NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- KEY FINDINGS Global smart shade devices market is estimated to grow with approximately 58.62% CAGR during the year 2019-2027 and is expected to reach $640,427 thousand by 2027. The base year considered for the study is 2018 and the forecast period is 2019-2027. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05484926/?utm_source=PRN Smart motorized shades help in controlling the sunlight and heat loss in home naturally throughout the day by opening and closing at pre-programmed times. The important driver increasing growth in the global smart shade devices market is the increasing adoption of motorized shades. MARKET INSIGHTS With smart home technology, the smart motorized shades can be operated automatically by setting time as when they need to open and close based on temperature and sunlight that maximizes the energy efficiency. Motorized shades adoption is increasing as these motorized shades allow to automate a particular task repetitively. The fact that smart shade devices can be remotely controlled or set the functionality through any handheld devices is increasing their adoption in this segment. Moreover, since the smart buildings are a part of smart cities and therefore, substantial investments in smart cities are expected to boost the deployment of smart shades thereby, driving the global smart shades market growth by Wi-Fi technology segment. REGIONAL INSIGHTS Geographically, the global smart shade devices market has been segmented on the basis of four major regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the remaining countries collectively forming the Rest of World. North America contributed to the largest market share of 38.91% in the year 2018. The dominance of North America is attributed to the presence of the majority of the key market players in the region. However, this market is highly saturated. As a result, the highest CAGR is expected from the Asia-Pacific market. Countries such as Singapore, China, Japan, and India are emerging as lucrative investment destinations for smart shade device markets. COMPETITIVE INSIGHTS Insolroll Inc., Springs Window Fashions LLC, Qmotion Shades, Vertilux Ltd., Hunter Douglas, Coulisse B.V., Denver Shade Company, Somfy Systems, Inc., Guangzhou Misdar Shade Co. Ltd., Loxone, Pella Corporation, Appeal Home Shading, Skyco Shading Systems, Inc., BTX Intelligent Fashion, LLC, and Lutron Electronics, Inc. are the companies that are extensively profiled in the report. Company profiles cover the analysis of important players. These companies are using organic and inorganic strategies for growth. Companies mentioned 1. SPRINGS WINDOW FASHIONS LLC 2. VERTILUX LTD. 3. DENVER SHADE COMPANY 4. COULISSE B.V. 5. APPEAL HOME SHADING 6. BTX INTELLIGENT FASHION, LLC 7. HUNTER DOUGLAS 8. LOXONE 9. LUTRON ELECTRONICS, INC. 10. SKYCO SHADING SYSTEMS, INC. 11. SOMFY SYSTEMS, INC. 12. INSOLROLL INC. 13. GUANGZHOU MISDAR SHADE CO. LTD. 14. PELLA CORPORATION 15. QMOTION SHADES Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05484926/?utm_source=PRN About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com Included as one of the "Best new headphones of CES 2019" by CNET , the Exodus features a 30-hour battery life, the longest for House of Marley headphones to date, extending not only playtime but product life as well by increasing time between charges. Designed and engineered with 50mm hi-definition drivers, the Exodus delivers balanced, acoustic performance with a timeless natural style, offering a premium all-day listening at a more reasonable price for those opting for craftsmanship and sustainable design without sacrificing sound and quality. Bluetooth LE technology allows for quick pairing, extended range and lower power consumption with compatible devices. Memory Foam ear cushions provide premium comfort while the foldable hinge design, remote functionality and onboard mic for hands-free calling offer portability and convenience. "We aimed to design an over-ear headphone that can be listened to for long periods without discomfort or acoustic fatigue, offers premium construction and incorporates sustainable materials while focusing on heritage and retro-inspired design elements," explains House of Marley Director of Product Development, Josh Poulsen. "In the case of the Exodus, sustainability means more than just the materials from which the headphone is constructed. The quality craftsmanship means product life is extended and the emphasis on comfort allows the user to sustain longer listening sessions." As part of their Project Marley environmental give-back platform, House of Marley is honoring the charitable philosophy of its namesake by donating to the planting of trees through non-profit organization One Tree Planted to support global reforestation. In connection with Earth Day this month, House of Marley will contribute to plantings in Colorado, Kenya and Rwanda. This follows the brand's participation in a localized tree planting effort in the Los Angeles, California area last month as part of a larger project to plant trees in order to reduce the urban heat island effect. House of Marley has contributed to the planting of 168,000 trees since 2017 in an effort to bring awareness to the consumption and waste of the plastics-driven consumer electronics market. Reforestation contributes to positive environmental, social and economic impact through carbon offsets, cleaner air, water filtration and greater biodiversity within the world's forests. Supporters can follow current tree plantings on House of Marley's website while monitoring global forest changes through Global Forest Watch . The Exodus is available now at www.HouseofMarley.com , Amazon and select retailers nationwide for $199.99 MAP. Exodus Product Features Materials // The Exodus Bluetoothwireless headphone is crafted from FSC certified wood, stainless steel, recyclable aluminum, natural leather, and includes a premium REWIND fabric stash bag. // The Exodus Bluetoothwireless headphone is crafted from FSC certified wood, stainless steel, recyclable aluminum, natural leather, and includes a premium REWIND fabric stash bag. 30-Hour Battery Life // Powered by an internal 30-hour lithium polymer battery with USB-C charging, going longer between charges extends not only playtime, but product life as well. Enjoy more music and a better wireless experience. // Powered by an internal 30-hour lithium polymer battery with USB-C charging, going longer between charges extends not only playtime, but product life as well. Enjoy more music and a better wireless experience. 50mm Hi-Definition Drivers // Designed and engineered for powerful sound. Designed and engineered for powerful sound. Premium Comfort Memory Foam Ear Cushions // Designed with premium comfort during extended playtime in mind. Designed with premium comfort during extended playtime in mind. Onboard Mic & Remote Functionality // Onboard microphone for hands-free calling and voice command activation. Remote functionality allows you to control volume and playback when your device is out of reach. Onboard microphone for hands-free calling and voice command activation. Remote functionality allows you to control volume and playback when your device is out of reach. Quick Charge // This technology keeps charge time to a minimum, at 2 hours for a full charge. // This technology keeps charge time to a minimum, at 2 hours for a full charge. Aux Cable // Sleek, resilient braided aux cable is included for an optional wired experience. About House of Marley: House of Marley was conceived in collaboration with the Marley family to carry on Bob Marley's legacy, and built on the principles and philosophy of its namesake. House of Marley's core values are rooted in superior quality, sustainable craftsmanship, and a commitment to charitable causes. By combining high-quality materials and innovative design, the eco-conscious audio maker creates state-of-the-art audio products; better for the Earth and for music. House of Marley products are sustainably crafted from socially responsible materials including FSC certified wood, signature REWIND upcycled fabrics, REGRIND recycled silicone and plastics, bamboo, cork, and recyclable packaging. Each year, House of Marley makes a meaningful contribution through their Project Marley give-back platform to One Tree Planted, a non-profit organization dedicated to global reforestation. Sustainable sound. www.houseofmarley.com @HouseofMarley #MaterialsMatter #ProjectMarley Media Contacts: Marcy Fitzpatrick OKAY!!OKAY!! [email protected] 310.927.8548 Miki Barr House of Marley CE Marketing Director [email protected] 424.290.7490 SOURCE House of Marley Related Links https://www.thehouseofmarley.com SAN FRANCISCO, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP alerts investors in Bridgepoint Education Inc. (NYSE: BPI) of the May 10, 2019 Lead Plaintiff deadline in the pending securities class action. If you purchased or otherwise acquired Bridgepoint Education securities between March 8, 2016 and March 7, 2019 (the class period) and suffered losses contact Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP. For more information about the case or to inquire about serving as Lead Plaintiff click https://www.hbsslaw.com/cases/BPI or contact Reed Kathrein, who is leading the firms investigation, by calling 510-725-3000 or emailing BPI@hbsslaw.com . According to the complaint, during the class period Defendants misled investors concerning Bridgepoints revenue and expense recognition practices. On March 7, 2019, Defendants announced investors should no longer rely on the Companys consolidated financial statements for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2018 and disclosed the Company identified errors, relating to revenue, provision for bad debts, accounts receivable and deferred revenue, which resulted in the overstatement of revenue and expenses. This news drove the price of Bridgepoint Education shares down $3.21, or down over 34%, to close at $6.22 that day. On March 12, 2019, Defendants filed Bridgepoints amended financial statements for the periods containing restatements of balance sheet and income statement data. Were focused on investors losses, admitted improper accounting, whether the so-called errors were in fact irregularities, and the extent to which Defendants may have misled investors, said Hagens Berman partner Reed Kathrein. Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding Bridgepoint Education should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 510-725-3000 or email BPI@hbsslaw.com . About Hagens Berman Hagens Berman is a national investor-rights law firm headquartered in Seattle, Washington with 78 attorneys in 9 offices across the country. The firm represents investors, whistleblowers, workers and consumers in complex litigation. More about the firm and its successes can be found at www.hbsslaw.com . For the latest news visit our newsroom or follow us on Twitter at @classactionlaw . Contact: Reed Kathrein, 510-725-3000 NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Hunt Real Estate Capital, a leader in financing commercial real estate throughout the United States, announced today it provided a first mortgage bridge loan in the amount of $17 million to refinance a multifamily property located in Seattle, Washington. The borrower is 423 Terry Partners, LLC, an affiliate of Anew Apartments backed by key Principals, David Sharkey and Brad Padden. Financing was arranged by Greg Piantanida and Ryan Heiberg of GP Realty Finance. Anew Terry Apartments is a 112-unit, mid-rise multifamily apartment complex located in the First Hill neighborhood of Seattle. The property was built in 1911 and redeveloped by the partnership between 2016 and 2018. "Upgrading seismically deficient, unreinforced masonry buildings is critical to the safety and resiliency of our city, and we are delighted to have Hunt as a partner in this endeavor," said 423 Terry Partners Principal, Brad Padden. "The project not only cured the safety issue of a seismically vulnerable building, it also brought the project up to current energy code and created homes for 112 new households." "We were pleased to recapitalize the partnership as they complete their renovation," noted Peter Clasquin, Managing Director at Hunt Real Estate Capital. "Their addition of affordable housing units aimed at residents earning 50-100% of the area median income is core to our mission as an affordable housing lender." Property amenities include a community space on each floor; a digital doorman; work spaces; a fitness center with a yoga room; a dog washing station; a large, outdoor patio with BBQ grills and fire pit; a courtyard; a large, ground-floor lounge; and bike storage with a repair station. Anew Terry Apartments benefits from its attractive location in First Hill, Seattle and its close proximity to employers, as well as the features of the Capitol Hill neighborhoods, including Pioneer Square, the Frye Art Museum, the waterfront, Washington State Convention Center, Safeco Field, and the Seattle Space Needle, all located within a two-mile radius of the property. "This property is well located with numerous employment, dining and shopping destinations located within walking distance," added Clasquin. "We were happy to partner with this experienced sponsor. The property offers Seattle residents an attractive option for their housing needs." About Hunt Real Estate Capital Hunt Real Estate Capital, part of Hunt Companies, Inc., is a leader in financing commercial real estate throughout the United States. The Company finances all types of commercial real estate: multifamily properties (including small balance), affordable housing, office, retail, manufactured housing, healthcare/senior living, industrial, and self-storage facilities. It offers Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA financing and its own Proprietary loan products. Since inception, the Company has structured more than $28.4 billion of loans and today maintains a servicing portfolio of more than $15 billion. Headquartered in New York City, Hunt Real Estate Capital has 244 professionals in 24 locations throughout the United States. To learn more, visit https://huntrealestatecapital.com/. MEDIA CONTACTS Brent Feigenbaum Hunt Real Estate Capital 212-317-5730 [email protected] Pam Flores 773-218-9260 [email protected] SOURCE Hunt Real Estate Capital Related Links https://huntrealestatecapital.com Student Assurance is initially available at Hyundai dealerships in California and the Phoenix, Arizona area from April 1 September 30, 2019 with plans for a national rollout based on dealer and customer feedback. To learn more about Student Assurance and to find a participating dealer, visit http://www.hyundaistudentassurance.com . More than 44 million Americans have student loan debt, totaling more than $1.5 trillion[1]. High student loan debt has far-reaching consequences that not only affect those who owe it, but also the economy at large. A significant number of young adults are putting off life-establishing moves that are traditionally made in their 20's and 30's, including purchasing or leasing a new vehicle. This delay in acquiring a vehicle can often impact their ability to travel to a job (according to Gallup, 83 percent of Americans rely on a car to get to work every day), take vacations and participate in other life experiences that are facilitated by personal vehicle ownership. "We recognize that student loan debt is one of the most significant financial stress points for people and we want to help address that issue, while allowing people to take advantage of the many benefits of owning a new vehicle," said Michael DePaul, director, Retail Operations, Hyundai Motor America. "Making things better is at the heart of everything we do, and that's why we are directly contributing to helping our customers get out from being under the burden of student loan debt." How the Program Works Hyundai has designed the program to make it easy for customers to take advantage of this industry-first offer and has partnered with Gradifi, a leading provider of student loan benefits, to administer the contributions directly to the customers' student loan debts. Customer visits HyundaiStudentAssurance.com to check eligibility and is directed to the Hyundai Student Assurance Center to receive a Reward Code They purchase or lease an eligible new Hyundai vehicle from a dealer in California or the Phoenix, Arizona area They verify their purchase at Hyundai Student Assurance Center using the Reward Code and VIN The customer then receives an email from Gradifi with instructions to create an account and register their student loan for verification Upon the loan being verified the customer will receive up to a $900 contribution directly to their student loan debt Hyundai has a long history of having its customers' backs and responding to cultural or economic factors that are impacting the car industry through its Hyundai Assurance program which consists of Shopper and Owner Assurance (America's Best Warranty, Road-Side assistance, Blue Link Connected Care and Car Care). Past examples include the innovative job loss protection program during the recession, a trade-in value guarantee and many others that demonstrated Hyundai's dedication to making things better for its customers. There is no company better suited to introduce a program that will help customers relieve not only one of the top stressors in America, but also one of the top reasons why people hold off purchasing a new car. Better Idea Generator Student Assurance is a result of Hyundai's internal innovation contest, the Better Idea Generator (BIG), that was launched in late 2017. The Better Idea Generator enables Hyundai associates at all levels of the organization to develop and pitch new and innovative ideas. The overall goal of the program is to make innovation inherent throughout the company regardless of seniority or area of responsibility. Student Assurance was one of 118 ideas that were submitted. To qualify as a BIG idea, the idea must have met at least one of the following conditions: increase sales, provide new revenue, improve quality, enhance the product, and/or improve efficiency. After being reviewed by an expert panel of Hyundai senior leaders, Student Assurance founders Samantha Recchia, an associate in Public Relations, and Martha Mejia, an assistant manager in Quality Data Analytics, developed a business plan and presented Student Assurance to the executive team. It was then approved to proceed to the R&D phase for testing and validation, ultimately leading to the pilot program now available. "It's a great feeling to work for a company that encourages new ideas from employees at all levels," said Recchia. "Developing an idea that revolved around alleviating student debt was the first thing that came to mind when I heard about the Better Idea Generator. Martha and I were determined to come up with a solution that would directly impact the pay down of someone's student loan. Our partner, Gradifi, modified its traditional business model of employee contributions and helped us make the program a reality." "It has been a pleasure to lead the launch of an industry-first program that is aimed at helping peers my age with this debt crisis," said Mejia. "I am humbled by the opportunity that Hyundai has given me to bring forth an idea that has such personal relevance in my own life." Hyundai Motor America Hyundai Motor America is focused on delivering an outstanding customer experience grounded in design leadership, engineering excellence and exceptional value in every vehicle we sell. Hyundai's technology-rich product lineup of cars, SUVs and alternative-powered electric and fuel cell vehicles is backed by Hyundai Assuranceour promise to deliver peace of mind to our customers. Hyundai vehicles are sold and serviced through more than 830 dealerships nationwide and the majority sold in the U.S. are built at U.S. manufacturing facilities, including Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama. Hyundai Motor America is headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, and is a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Company of Korea. Please visit our media website at www.HyundaiNews.com Hyundai Motor America on Twitter | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram [1] CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/15/heres-how-much-the-average-student-loan-borrower-owes-when-they-graduate.html SOURCE Hyundai Motor America Related Links http://www.hyundainews.com PORTLAND, Ore., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IT Revolution, the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today opened its call for papers for DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2019 ( https://events.itrevolution.com/us/ ). Hosted at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas from October 28-30, the DevOps Enterprise Summit is the premier industry event for technology and business leaders to gather for three days of immersive learning about IT transformation practices. Presentation proposals may be submitted through the event website ( http://bit.ly/DOES19USCFP ) before the submission portal closes on May 27, 2019. IT Revolution has also opened blind bird registration for DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas. To get the best price of admission, attendees should register no later than May 27 at ( http://bit.ly/DOES19USBB ). Blind bird registration is highly encouraged as the event is expected to sell out early. "Since the inaugural DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we've continued to document the progress of the ongoing DevOps transformation journeys directly from the technology and business leaders of large, complex organizations," said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. "Our goal is to help companies and the millions of IT professionals around the world use proven DevOps patterns and practices to perform at the highest level, and ultimately win in today's software-driven economy." What is the DevOps Enterprise Summit? DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference for technology and business leaders who are transforming how large, complex organizations deliver software to help their organizations win in the marketplace. Entering its sixth year in the United States, its goal is to accelerate DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those initiatives succeeding, and to help enable the cultural norms, technical practices, and architectures that help organizations achieve the highest levels of performance. Through keynotes, breakout sessions, collaborative workshops, networking opportunities and space to interact within an expo hall, attendees gain insights into the evolving technical and architectural methods needed to lead widespread change efforts in large organizations. Gene Kim and the programming committee are requesting speaking submissions related to the following topics: Experience Reports from Top Global Brands Spanning the Business and Technology Divide Next Generation Operations and Infrastructure Overcoming Old Ways Of Working (e.g. Infosec, Compliance, ITIL, Project Management, Audit) Dynamic Learning Organizations Leadership Lessons, Transformational Leadership, Recognition, and Human Resources For more information about DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, please visit: ( https://events.itrevolution.com/us/ ). Share This: DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2019 Announces Call for Papers and Blind Bird Registration. For more info, visit https://events.itrevolution.com/us/ @DOES_USA #DOES19 About IT Revolution IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of technology professionals. Contact: Jeremy Douglas Catapult PR-IR 303-581-7760, ext. 16 [email protected] SOURCE IT Revolution Related Links http://events.itrevolution.com CHICAGO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cook County Treasurer's Office staff will be at Rainbow PUSH Coalition headquarters every day to assist homeowners with their property tax problems until the Annual Tax Sale that starts May 3, 2019, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas said today. "By teaming up with Rainbow PUSH, we will reach many homeowners, particularly senior citizens, who might not otherwise know that their homes are on the Tax Sale list," Pappas said. "I am grateful to Rainbow PUSH's leaders, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. and the Rev. Janette Wilson, Esq., for this opportunity to be of service." Staff from the Treasurer's Office will be at Rainbow PUSH, 930 E. 50th St., Chicago, Monday through Friday, from noon to 5 p.m., Pappas said. On Saturdays, the hours will be 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 pm. Employees with laptops will help homeowners: Apply for $43 million in missing senior citizen property tax exemptions in missing senior citizen property tax exemptions Search for $86 million in available refunds in available refunds Find out if their homes are on the Tax Sale List for May 3 If you are a senior citizen, you should bring your driver's license or state ID, Pappas said. If you are a senior citizen and your income is $65,000 or less, you should bring your income tax return, she added. SOURCE Cook County Treasurer's Office COSTA MESA, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- J.D. Power, the global leader in data analytics and consumer intelligence, today announced it has formed an alliance with Centric Digital, a leader in digital intelligence, to jointly develop a range of new customer experience measurement and digital intelligence solutions. The collaboration was formed to address the growing challenges businesses face addressing digital transformation. Together, J.D. Power and Centric Digital will harness deep customer experience data to fine tune digital offerings on everything from website and mobile app user interface to the biggest digital stumbling blocks. The focus will be on industries that include automotive, financial services, insurance, travel and hospitality, utilities, technology, telecommunications and healthcare. Drawing on the respective areas of expertise of each organization, the alliance will leverage J.D. Power data and analytics solutions and deep industry expertise and Centric Digital automated data collection technology, machine learning and natural language processing to unstructured data across a brand's digital footprint including web, mobile and social media. The combination delivers a unique solution for generating the digital experience insights companies need to improve operations, raise Net Promoter Score1, raise Customer Satisfaction and compete more effectively against an increasingly disrupted market. "Every company serving customers in every industry today is a digital company," said Bernardo Rodriguez, Chief Digital Officer at J.D. Power. "For some, that transition to larger segments of their customer populations interacting solely through digital channels has been smooth. For others it has been life-threatening. Increasingly over the past several years, we've observed a trend we call the 'digital dilemma,' whereby companies make huge investments in digital technology only to find those investments impede their ability to connect with customers in a meaningful way. Our work with Centric Digital, enables us to bring forth best practices and behavioral insights that are making it much easier for businesses to manage this challenging transition." "J.D. Power data and consumer insights provide a critical customer perspective on a brand's digital experience," said Jason Albanese, Chief Executive Officer at Centric Digital. "When combined with Centric Digital's measurement of hundreds of digital standards across thousands of brands, it creates an unmatched solution that will benefit enterprises around the world." J.D. Power is a global leader in consumer intelligence, advisory services and data and analytics. These capabilities enable J.D. Power to help its clients drive customer satisfaction, growth and profitability. Established in 1968, J.D. Power has offices serving North America, South America, Asia Pacific and Europe. Centric Digital's intelligence platform, DIMENSIONS, measures capabilities across an enterprise's core digital footprintweb, mobile, social, etc.and compares them to industry standards and market leaders. Insights from Centric Digital IQ data powers partner solutions, informs investors and guides C-suite executives through frontline managers to optimize business performance. Over 15,000 brands worldwide and across industries are tracked including the S&P 500. To learn more or schedule a demo, please visit centricdigital.com. See the online press release at http://www.jdpower.com/pr-id/2019083. Media Relations Contacts Geno Effler, J.D. Power; Costa Mesa, Calif.; 714-621-6224; [email protected] John Roderick; St. James, N.Y.; 631-584-2200; [email protected] Brian Manning, Centric Digital; New York, N.Y.; 646-875-8751; [email protected] About J.D. Power and Advertising/Promotional Rules www.jdpower.com/business/about-us/press-release-info ________________________________ 1 Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc. SOURCE J.D. Power Related Links http://www.jdpower.com "Since its formal launch in 2017 with the addition of former FERC Commissioner Suedeen Kelly and General Counsel Max Minzner, our Energy Practice has grown its reach and reputation as a go-to team of lawyers," said firm Chair Craig C. Martin. "Adding these established practitioners builds on our reputation and allows us to immediately expand our offerings to clients." Jenner & Block's Energy Practice, which was named a Law360 2018 Practice Group of the Year, is known for its cutting-edge strategic guidance, nationally recognized litigation track record, public policy advocacy and deep transactional experience. The group has a unique diversity of knowledge and experience from which they draw upon to assist clients with their most significant matters. "Our Energy Practice goal has been to create a destination practice for our clients and we continue to demonstrate that capability by adding a respected team with significant industry experience," said Randy Mehrberg, co-chair of the practice with Suedeen Kelly, who was recently recognized as one of Law360's 10 "Influential Women in Energy Law." Mr. Mehrberg rejoined Jenner & Block in March 2016 following nearly 15 years of combined service as Executive Vice President at both Exelon and Public Service Enterprise Group. "This team is a very strong strategic fit with our practice our Jenner & Block team has successfully worked with its members on common client matters for two decades," he said. Before joining Jenner & Block, the team worked together at a Chicago-based energy law firm. In addition to Ms. Kelly, Mr. Mehrberg and Mr. Minzner, they join long-time firm partners David W. DeBruin, a former US Supreme Court clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens who provides extensive first-chair trial experience and deep proficiency in commercial and appellate litigation in the energy industry, and Matthew E. Price, a former US Supreme Court clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer who is recognized nationally as a Law360 2018 Energy MVP. "I speak for our entire team in saying that we are excited about the opportunity to join Jenner & Block, allowing us to take our experience and skills and immediately add value to a top-tier growing practice, serve common and new clients and be part of a recognized culture of excellence, diversity, inclusiveness and pro bono commitment," said Mr. Rooney. ABOUT THE TEAM PARTNERS Michael Guerra represents natural gas and electric industry clients before regulatory agencies and state courts. Mr. Guerra has multifaceted utility experience that includes presiding over high-visibility cases as an administrative law judge, litigating major rate cases and rulemakings as outside counsel for utilities and developing strategic regulatory direction when he served as vice president of regulatory policy and strategy at Commonwealth Edison Company. Mr. Guerra received his JD from The John Marshall Law School. He received his BA in public accounting from Loyola University Chicago. Anne Mitchell focuses her practice primarily on regulatory counseling, trials and appeals involving clients in the natural gas and electric industries, as well as general business litigation. Crain's Chicago Business recognized her among the "Most Influential Women Lawyers in Chicago" in 2017. Ms. Mitchell received her BA in French and History from Agnes Scott College, with honors, Phi Beta Kappa and her law degree from Northwestern University School of Law. Glenn Rippie counsels electric and gas industry clients concerning strategic, regulatory, operational, and commercial matters and litigates disputed energy issues before state and federal agencies and trial and appellate courts. Chambers USA has consistently named him a #1 rated Illinois energy lawyer; he is the only Illinois lawyer to have been so rated for 10 consecutive years. He received his AB and MA from Northwestern University (mathematics and economics) and his law degree from the Yale University Law School. John Rooney focuses his practice on regulatory counseling, trials, state court proceedings and the development of regulatory and legislative strategies. Chambers USA has recognized him as one of the top Energy & Natural Resources lawyers in the state of Illinois since 2003. He received his BA in accounting from Loyola University Chicago and his law degree from The John Marshall Law School. ASSOCIATES Hanna Conger regularly represents electric, gas and water utilities in traditional and performance-based formula rate cases, applications for certificates of public convenience and necessity, and proceedings seeking approval of major utility asset acquisitions, mergers, and reorganizations. She received her BA, with honors, from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her law degree from Loyola University Chicago. Marjorie Kennedy focuses her practice on utility regulatory matters and commercial litigation. She represents natural gas, water, electric and telecommunications utilities in regulatory proceedings, including gas and electric utility rate litigation, reorganization of a large public utility, cost and revenue reconciliations, acquisition of water distribution and wastewater collection systems, and Certificates of Public Convenience and Necessity for water and natural gas utilities. She also counsels clients in general litigation matters in state and federal court, including personal injury claims, OSHA proceedings, contract disputes and environmental matters. Ms. Kennedy received her BA, cum laude, from Loyola University Chicago and her JD, magna cum laude, from its law school. COUNSEL Of Counsel Carmen Fosco focuses on representing natural gas and electric industry clients before regulatory agencies and state courts. Chambers USA has recognized him as one of the top Energy and Natural Resources attorneys in the State of Illinois consecutively since 2013. He received his BA from Southern Illinois University and his law degree from DePaul University School of Law. Special Counsel Maris Jager focuses her practice on energy regulatory matters and commercial litigation. Ms. Jager was named an Illinois Rising Star by Illinois Super Lawyers magazine in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 in the Utilities and Energy and Natural Resources categories. She received her BA in English literature and political science from Emory University and her JD from the University of Chicago. ABOUT JENNER & BLOCK'S ENERGY PRACTICE Amid high-stakes changes in the energy sector, Jenner & Block provides clients with cutting-edge strategic guidance, a nationally recognized litigation track record, public policy advocacy and deep transactional experience. Our lawyers, who include a former FERC Commissioner, the former general counsel of Exelon Corporation and former president of PSEG Energy Holdings, and the former Vice President of Regulatory and Policy Strategy at ComEd, have experience handling the full range of issues confronting energy companies today. These issues include bankruptcy and restructuring, litigation and investigation matters, and transactional and regulatory counseling, including environmental. We have also counseled energy clients on privacy and data breach response. Law360 recognized the group as a 2018 Practice Group of the Year. ABOUT JENNER & BLOCK Jenner & Block LLP is a law firm with global reach, with offices in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, DC and more than 500 lawyers. The firm is known for its prominent and successful litigation practice and experience handling sophisticated and high-profile corporate transactions. Firm clients include Fortune 100 companies, large privately held corporations, financial services institutions, emerging companies and venture capital and private equity investors. In 2018, The American Lawyer named Jenner & Block to the A-List, which recognizes the top 20 US law firms. The American Lawyer also recognized the firm as the #1 pro bono firm in the United States nine of the past eleven years; the firm has been ranked among the top 10 in this category every year since 1990. In 2018, the publication named the firm its first "Pro Bono Champion." SOURCE Jenner & Block Related Links http://www.jenner.com EDMOND, Okla., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Mach8 has opened it's doors to provide the natural opioid alternative painkiller Kratom to Edmond, Oklahoma residents concerned about the growing opioid epidemic. "Kratom has gone from a little-known herbal tea to a hot topic in pain research," said Taylor Burgess. "It's long been known as an effective painkiller across Southeast Asia and scientists here are discovering that it's an effective alternative to opioid painkillers. It also seems to help people who are already struggling with opioid addiction to overcome it." Chemist Susruta Majumdar at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who is working on Kratom painkiller research was quoted in a recent Scientific American article explaining why he is excited about the herbal drug's properties: "The mitragynine molecules from Kratom seem to activate mostly the 'good' [painkilling] systems, leaving behind the unwanted effects yet keeping pain relief." The American Society of Addiction Medicine reported that 20,101 people died in America in 2015 as a result of prescription opioid painkiller overdoses. Burgess thinks Kratom could lead to a significant reduction in these deaths if it were more widely studied and used. "More than 50 million Americans struggle with chronic pain every day, and a lot of those people end up dependent on opioid painkillers, with the well-studied and publicized addictions and deaths," said Burgess. "On the other hand, Kratom has been used traditionally for hundreds of years and the scientific evidence about its painkilling properties is extremely exciting." Kratom teas and herbal supplements come from the leaves of a Southeast Asian tree related to the coffee plant, and it does have its critics. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration wants the substance controlled nationwide and attributes 14 deaths to the supplement. Upon further investigation reported by National Public Radio, however, those deaths were found to involve other addictive drugs. As of March 2019, Kratom is legal in 44 states including Oklahoma but advocacy and legislative efforts are ongoing to have the states, where it is banned, reversed or modified. "The fact is, we've seen lives changed for the better by using Kratom as a painkiller instead of opioids, and we look forward to helping more people," said Burgess. Mach8 is located at 16 E 4th St, Unit B, Edmond, Oklahoma, down the hall from Earthly Mist. They provide pure, high-quality Kratom and other supplements as natural painkillers. Scientists are finding Kratom a viable, safer alternative to opioid painkillers. To learn more, visit https://mach8.com/ and check out their blog or call 405-471-6699. Contact Mach8 405-471-6699 16 E 4th St Unit B, Edmond, OK 73034 Taylor Burgess [email protected] Photo(s): https://www.prlog.org/12761923 Press release distributed by PRLog SOURCE Mach8 Related Links https://mach8.com LOS ANGELES, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Miracle Mile Advisors, one of California's fastest growing independent investment advisory firms, has been named a 2019 Best Place to Work for Financial Advisers for the second year in a row by InvestmentNews. Miracle Mile Advisors is among this year's class of top 75 best places to work. Employer and employee surveys ranging from company culture, benefits, career paths and more were all taken into consideration in the selection process. "This firm was built upon the foundational belief that all of our team members should love what they do, and love where they do it," said Brock Moseley, founder of Miracle Mile Advisors. "At Miracle Mile Advisors, our team is truly a family, and we wouldn't want it any other way." InvestmentNews partnered with Best Companies Group, an independent research firm specializing in identifying great places to work, to compile the inaugural survey and recognition program. The list is a first of its kind for the financial advisory industry. "InvestmentNews is pleased to recognize firms with supportive cultures where advisors can thrive and are empowered to provide their clients with the best possible investment and financial planning advice," said Suzanne Siracuse, CEO/Publisher, InvestmentNews. "They are role models for other firms in the industry who are striving to improve their own human resource policies and practices." Miracle Mile Advisors will be honored at the Top Advisory Firm Summit on November 13 in Chicago. Miracle Mile Advisors' recognitions further solidify their position as an industry leader in providing a second-to-none culture for team members and clients, unlike traditional Wall Street firms. This recognition is the second "Best Places to Work" from InvestmentNews, followed by last year's Los Angeles Business Journal "Best Places to Work" honor. For media inquiries, please contact Brian Hart of Flackable at 866-225-0920 ext. 101 or [email protected]. About Miracle Mile Advisors: Miracle Mile Advisors is a leader in providing independent investment advice to high net worth families and businesses nationwide. As one of the fastest growing independent registered investment advisors in Los Angeles, the firm is committed to providing sophisticated, customized and objective financial plans using portfolios with low cost and tax efficient strategies for risk management. *Recognitions do not constitute as an endorsement or recommendation of any kind of MMA services, products and personnel. Refer to disclosures.* SOURCE Miracle Mile Advisors Related Links https://www.miraclemileadvisors.com TUCSON, Ariz., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, RightSure Insurance Group announced the opening of Inshurents.com, a new online insurance marketplace tailored for startups and microbusinesses. Based in Arizona, RightSure is licensed to sell personal, commercial and life insurance products in 42 states. The firm made headlines last year when it introduced RATEGuard by RightSure an AI-powered insurance management platform that automatically shops up to 40 carriers in preparation for each client's renewal. Now, RightSure has partnered with a leading carrier to innovate once again this time in the small business insurance space. Most commercial insurance brokers focus on the mid-market and enterprise-level accounts. Inshurents.com was created specifically for startup and small business clients who want to be in control of their insurance programs. Our goal is to provide affordable rates, custom choices and advocacy for the small business owners of America," says President, R. Jeffery Arnold. "In the traditional model, the commercial insurance underwriting process can be very time consuming and stressful. In contrast, our underwriting process happens in real time. Business owners can shop online, select their coverage, accept the quote and print the policy all within a timeframe of 15 minutes," he explains. Startups and small business owners with up to 10 employees can secure property, liability and commercial auto insurance coverage with Inshurents.com. "In today's entrepreneurial environment, accessible small business insurance is a gamechanger," Arnold says. "Inshurents.com is one of the only places you can get business insurance in a few clicks without talking to anyone, but if you prefer to chat with a professional, friendly licensed agents are ready to assist," he adds. Business owners who want to learn more are invited to visit https://inshurents.com, where they will discover a full range of resources including articles and videos to help them make informed insurance decisions. About In-shur-ents, part of RightSure Insurance Group Established in 2019 by RightSure Insurance Group, In-shur-ents.com revolutionizes the small business and startup insurance process by offering instant, online access to commercial coverage. To learn more or to shop for insurance online, visit https://inshurents.com. Headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, RightSure Insurance Group is a full-service independent insurance agency providing insurance products to families and businesses in 42 states. By using a unique, client-centered approach combined with superior technology, RightSure presents clients with a wide range of insurance options and a seamless purchasing process. To learn more, visit https://www.rightsure.com or call 520-917-5295. Media Contact: Megan Kossow [email protected] 520-901-7010 SOURCE RightSure Insurance Group Related Links https://www.rightsure.com LOS ANGELES, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Open Medicine Foundation, the world's leading fundraiser for research into diagnosing, treating, and curing the disease known as ME/CFS, or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, has just launched its third ME/CFS Collaborative Research Center at Uppsala University in Sweden. The new Uppsala Center will be led by OMF Scientific Advisory Board member Jonas Bergquist, MD, PhD, and will work synergistically with the existing ME/CFS Collaborative Research Centers one at Stanford, led by Ronald W. Davis, PhD, and the other at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Affiliated Hospitals, led by Ronald G. Tompkins, MD, ScD, and Wenzhong Xiao, PhD, of Harvard University. All science funded by OMF continues to be under the overall guidance of OMF's Scientific Advisory Board, directed by Dr. Davis. Since its founding in 2012, OMF has funded teams of researchers who openly share their findings with other scientists. OMF sponsors an annual symposium at Stanford University to bring leading researchers together. OMF is now funding the same number of ME/CFS Collaborative Research Centers through private funding as the NIH does with government grants. With up to 2.5 million people in the U.S. and 20 million globally being struck down by this debilitating illness, the main goal for OMF is to urgently raise funds to expand and support the current ME/CFS research network. OMF has already committed a total of $10 million for its three centers. The Stanford Collaborative Research Center is investigating the molecular basis of the disease using several cutting-edge technologies. They are also developing blood-based diagnostics and drug-screening technologies to enable a fast, inexpensive diagnosis of ME/CFS and the discovery of new treatments. The ME/CFS Collaborative Research Center at MGH and the Harvard Affiliated Hospitals is studying the central feature of ME/CFS, the significant exacerbation of symptoms due to mild-to-moderate exertion, by monitoring patient muscle biopsies during their recovery from muscular stress. The new Uppsala Center will continue the search for small markers significant for ME/CFS, including the study of cerebrospinal fluid as a unique source of neurochemical biomarkers, with the goal of building evidence-based strategies for disease interventions. Linda Tannenbaum, CEO/President of OMF, says of this expansion, "OMF is thrilled to launch our third center to accelerate the pace of research to help patients around the world." Founded as a nonprofit by Tannenbaum in 2012, OMF has raised over $18 million to fund research and increase public awareness with the patient and medical communities. The research that OMF fundraises for is guided by a renowned Scientific Advisory Board, including two Nobel laureates and five members of the National Academy of Sciences. www.omf.ngo Contact: Sylvia Paull [email protected] (510) 388-8932 SOURCE Open Medicine Foundation Related Links https://www.omf.ngo MEMPHIS, Tenn., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- First Horizon National Corp. (NYSE:FHN) will announce first quarter 2019 financial results in a news release prior to the market opening on April 16, 2019, followed by a conference call at 8:30 a.m. CT (U.S.) during which management will review earnings and performance trends. The company will also host a live webcast accompanied by a slide presentation. The news release, call, and slide presentation may involve forward-looking information, including guidance. The slide presentation, financial supplement and news release will be available by 6 a.m. CT that morning at http://ir.fhnc.com/Event . Conference call information Analysts, investors and interested parties may call toll-free starting at 8:15 a.m. CT on April 16 by dialing 888-317-6003 (if calling from the U.S.) or 412-317-6061 (if calling from outside the U.S) and entering access code 7877722. The conference call will begin at 8:30 a.m. CT. Participants can also opt to listen to the live audio webcast with the accompanying slide presentation at http://ir.fhnc.com/Event . A replay of the call will be available beginning at noon CT on April 16 until midnight CT on April 30. To listen to the replay, dial 877-344-7529 (U.S. callers) or 412-317-0088 (international callers); the access code is 10129815. A replay of the webcast will also be available at http://ir.fhnc.com/Event by midnight CT on April 16 and will be archived on the site for a year. About First Horizon First Horizon National Corp. (NYSE:FHN) provides financial services through its Capital Bank, First Tennessee Bank, FTB Advisors, and FTN Financial businesses. The banking subsidiary was founded in 1864, has the 14th oldest national bank charter in the country and the largest deposit market share in Tennessee. The company operates more than 250 bank locations across the Southeast and 28 FTN Financial offices across the U.S. FTB Advisors wealth management group has more than 300 financial professionals and about $4.8 billion in assets under management. FTN Financial is a capital markets industry leader in fixed income sales, trading and strategies for institutional customers in the U.S. and abroad. The company has been ranked by American Banker magazine among the Top 10 Most Reputable U.S. banks and as one of the nations best employers by the National Association for Female Executives and Fortune magazine. More information is available at www.FirstHorizon.com . FHN-G CONTACT: First Horizon Investor Relations, Aarti Bowman, (901) 523-4017 First Horizon Media Relations, Silvia Alvarez, (901) 523-4465 OSAKA, Japan and LEVERKUSEN, Germany, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Japanese pharmaceutical company Maruho Co., Ltd. intends to further expand its longstanding strategic partnership with the biotech company Biofrontera AG. Maruho made its first investment in Biofrontera in April 2013 and has since then increased its stake through various capital measures. The Japanese company currently holds around 20.3 percent and now intends to increase its shareholding to 29.99 percent through a voluntary public acquisition offer to Biofrontera shareholders. This will be a so-called partial offer, i.e. the company is not seeking to take over Biofrontera entirely. Junichi Hamada, Corporate Officer for Global Strategy at Maruho Co., Ltd., said: "Biofrontera AG is one of the world's most innovative biopharmaceutical companies in the area of dermatology. We are convinced of the great potential of Biofrontera's medication Ameluz for the treatment of a range of skin diseases. Together with the company, we intend to promote the rapid distribution of this innovative, surgery-free form of therapy. To underpin our partnership, we now want to increase our commitment as a shareholder. The Management Board of Biofrontera has our full support for pursuing its current strategy." Biofrontera is a biopharmaceutical company specialized in dermatological drugs and medical cosmetics. The Leverkusen-based company, which employs about 150 people around the world, develops and markets innovative products that heal, protect and care for the skin. The company was founded in 1997 and reported revenues of about 21 million in fiscal year 2018. Its leading products include Ameluz, a prescription medication that is used to treat non-melanoma skin cancer and its preliminary stages. Ameluz has been marketed in the EU since 2012 and in the United States since May 2016. It is based on the nanoemulsion technology developed by Biofrontera that significantly improves the active ingredient's ability to penetrate the affected skin cells. Maruho is the leading manufacturer of dermatological medications in Japan. The Osaka-based company employs about 1,930 people around the world. In fiscal year 2017/2018 (ending September 30), it generated revenues of 85.2 billion yen (about 685 million). Established as a family-business in 1915, the company today is largely owned by its employees and management team. Another large stake is held by a foundation that promotes dermatological research. Koichi Takagi, President and CEO of Maruho, holds 10 percent of the shares in the company. Drawing on its far-reaching expertise in Japan, Maruho has committed itself to leveraging its dermatological know-how within a global network and improving every stage of the dermatological care cycle (prevention, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up care). To this end, Maruho collaborates with many highly respected pharmaceutical companies and plans to expand its business activities to other parts of the world, primarily Asia, Europe and the United States. Biofrontera and Maruho have been successful partners for years now: Through its subsidiary Maruho Deutschland GmbH, Maruho has held a significant stake in Biofrontera since April 2013. Since then, Maruho has increased its stake to about 20.3 percent through several capital measures. Since taking a stake in Biofrontera, Maruho has actively supported the growth strategy of the company's management team. In July 2016, both companies also started a research cooperation to jointly develop further products based on Biofrontera's nanoemulsion technology. Just a few days ago, Maruho and Biofrontera decided to continue this cooperation and to discuss the details of a planned further cooperation. Moreover, Biofrontera recently acquired Maruho's U.S. subsidiary Cutanea Life Sciences, Inc. and thus substantially strengthened its sales organization in the important U.S. market. "After a period of intensive research and the successful approval of its first self-developed medication, Biofrontera is about to enter the next phase of the company's development," Junichi Hamada said. "Going forward, the company will have to focus primarily on expanding the approval to include other indications and markets, and accelerating growth by intensifying marketing and sales. As a long-term, strategic investor, we want to continue to actively support Biofrontera on this path and participate to an even greater extent in the expected increases in the company's value by enlarging our shareholding." Under the planned voluntary public acquisition offer, Maruho will seek to acquire 4,322,530 registered shares in Biofrontera AG. Biofrontera shareholders will be offered 6.60 per share in cash. They thus get the choice: They can either continue to be investors in Biofrontera and thus participate in the opportunities and risks in the next phase of the company's development. Or they can tender their shares at an attractive price with a premium of 16.61 percent on the XETRA closing price on 1 April 2019 and 15.79 percent on the volume-weighted average share price of the past three months. Compared to the volume-weighted average share price of the past six months the premium is 17.23 percent. If more shares are tendered than intended, the acquisition will be carried out on a pro rata basis. The offer will be made in accordance with the terms specified in the offer document. The planned transaction will not be subject to anti-trust approval. The acceptance period is expected to begin in the second or third week of April following approval of the offer document by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and is expected to end in the third or fourth week of May. The offer documentation will be available online at http://www.pharma-offer.de and also published by a notice of availability (Hinweisbekanntmachung) in the German Federal Gazette (Bundesanzeiger). A non-binding English translation of the offer document, along with other notices and announcements pertaining to the acquisition offer, will also be furnished to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") under cover of Form CB. This information is published on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. Maruho will use cash on hand to finance the purchase of the tendered shares in Biofrontera. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of May. About Maruho: Maruho Co., Ltd. has its headquarters in Osaka and leads Japan in research and development, manufacturing and commercialization of dermatological products. Founded in 1915, Maruho has about 1,930 employees, and net sales were approximately 85.2 billion yen in its fiscal year ending September 30, 2018. Pursuing its long-term corporate vision of "Excellence in Dermatology," Maruho is striving to improve the health and quality of life of people all over the world. For more information, please visit: http://www.maruho.co.jp/english Important information: This publication is neither an offer to purchase nor a request to submit an offer to sell shares in Biofrontera AG ("Biofrontera-Shares"). The definite terms of Maruho's partial acquisition offer for Biofrontera-Shares ("Acquisition Offer"), as well as further information regarding the Acquisition Offer, will be published in the offer document following permission by the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bundesanstalt fur Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht - BaFin) to publish the offer document. The Bidder reserves the right to amend the provisions of the Acquisition Offer insofar as this is legally permissible. Investors and holders of Biofrontera-Shares or American Depositary Shares ("ADS") in Biofrontera AG ("Biofrontera-ADS") are strongly advised to read the offer document, as well as all other documents relating to the Acquisition Offer, as soon as they are published, as they will contain important information. The Acquisition Offer will only be for Biofrontera-Shares and holders of Biofrontera-ADS will not be able to directly tender their Biofrontera-ADS for sale in connection with the Acquisition Offer. Holders of Biofrontera-ADS who wish to accept the Acquisition Offer with regard to the Biofrontera-Shares underlying their Biofrontera-ADS will be entitled to do so but will first need to timely convert their Biofrontera-ADS for Biofrontera-Shares, which can then be tendered for sale within the framework of, in accordance with, and subject to, the terms of the Acquisition Offer. Investors and holders of Biofrontera-Shares or Biofrontera-ADS may also view a non-binding English translation of the documents, notices and announcements pertaining to the Acquisition Offer on the SEC's website (http://www.sec.gov) free of charge as soon as they have been furnished to the SEC under cover of Form CB and have become available on the website. Neither the SEC nor any securities commission of any state in the U.S. has (a) approved or disapproved of the Acquisition Offer, (b) passed upon the merits or fairness of the Offer, or (c) passed upon the adequacy or accuracy of the disclosure in this announcement. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense in the U.S. The Acquisition Offer refers to shares of a German company and will be made exclusively in accordance with the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany and certain applicable provisions of the securities laws and regulations of the United States of America and the respective applicable exemptions, in particular the so-called "Tier I Exemption". As a result of the Tier I Exemption, the Acquisition Offer will generally be subject to the disclosure and other requirements and procedures of the Federal Republic of Germany that differ from those of the United States. Any contract that is concluded on the basis of the Acquisition Offer will be governed solely by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany and is to be construed in accordance with these laws. With the exception of the permission to publish the offer document in Germany and pursuant to German law, no other registrations, approvals or authorizations of the offer document or the Acquisition Offer will be applied for or arranged with securities regulators of other legal systems. SOURCE Maruho Co., Ltd. When dialing 8-1-1, homeowners and contractors are connected to Pennsylvania 811, the local one call center, which notifies the appropriate utility companies of their intent to dig. Professional locators are then sent to the requested digging site to mark the approximate locations of underground lines with colored flags, paint or both. An underground utility is damaged every nine minutes because someone decided to dig without first dialing 8-1-1. Striking a single line can cause injury, incur repair costs, fines and inconvenient outages. Every digging project, no matter how large or small, warrants a call to 811. Installing a mailbox, building a deck and planting a tree are all examples of digging projects that should only begin three business days after a call to 811. "As April marks the traditional start of digging season, we are using this month to strongly encourage individuals and companies to dial 8-1-1 before they begin digging," said Bill Kiger, President & CEO. "By dialing 8-1-1 three business days in advance to have the underground utility lines in their area marked, homeowners and professional excavators are making an important decision that can help keep them and their communities safe and connected." The depth of utility lines can vary for a number of reasons, such as erosion, previous digging projects and uneven surfaces. Utility lines need to be properly marked because even when digging only a few inches, the risk of striking an underground utility line still exists. Pennsylvania 811 encourages residents to visit www.pa811.org or www.pa1call.org for more information about safe digging. SOURCE Pennsylvania One Call System, Inc. Related Links http://www.paonecall.org GENEVA, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- "Raelians have been in negotiations for the past year with the first country to consider hosting an Embassy for Extraterrestrials," declared Daniel Turcotte, Raelian Guide and Rael's assistant for the Embassy Project. "It is now time to ask the United Nations to get involved," he added. Raelfounder and spiritual leader of the International Raelian Movement, and head of the Embassy Projecthas declared the first Saturday of April, "ET Embassy Day," in order to raise awareness about the Raelian Movement's major project: the building of an Embassy to welcome an extraterrestrial civilizationknown as Elohimto Earth. "As we prepare for our Embassy Day, we also intend to solicit the United Nations to organize the first International conference to discuss a new protocol to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, provisionally titled, 'Optional Protocol Concerning Embassies for Extraterrestrials,'" expressed Turcotte. He explained that many countries have replied to their request to host such an Embassy and several of them have shown a genuine interest in this very promising and important project. "More and more countries are showing interest as it becomes obvious that an extraterrestrial civilization is preparing our Humanity for an official contact, through an ever-increasing number of UFO appearances and very complex crop circles all over the world," he continued. Raelians are also preparing a social media campaign that includes a web page where citizens of all countries of the world can express their support for the request to the United Nations. "We are confident that the UN will hear out and acknowledge the growing number of people who care for a proper and formal welcome for an out-worldly civilization," Turcotte added. "While some countries wrongfully anticipate an invasion by an armed extraterrestrial civilization and are preparing to go to war against them, we must offset such an outdated and belligerent position with a worldwide movement of peace, and educate people that only peace can come from the stars. And if the UN doesn't take the lead, then the countries we are in discussions with will,'' concluded Turcotte. Raelians believe that an extraterrestrial civilization, referred to as "Elohim," in the original Hebrew Bible, created all life on Earth including human beings. They believe it is a very peaceful and far more advanced civilization compared to ours, both scientifically and philosophically, and that an official contact with our Creators will usher our humanity into an era of peace and a Golden Age. SOURCE Raelian Movement Related Links http://www.rael.org MERIDIAN, Idaho, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists (ACVO) is proud to announce that registration for the 2019 ACVO/StokesRx National Service Animal Eye Exam event is now open. Service and Working Animal owners and handlers across the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico can register their animal to receive a free eye exam from one of 300+ veterinary ophthalmologists participating in the program through April 30, 2019. Once registration has ended, more than 7,500 Service and Working Animals are expected to receive free sight-saving eye exams during the month of May. The American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists developed the annual ACVO/StokesRx National Service Animal Eye Exam event in 2008 as a national platform to address eye health, which is critical for the safety of the animals and their handlers. Since its inception, the program has provided more than 68,000 free eye exams, including a special dog named Liam. In 2018, Liam, a three-year-old yellow lab Service Dog received an eye exam through the program before being placed with Cody, a college student with cerebral palsy. Now, the pair can be found wheeling independently around the University of Washington campus where Liam carries and retrieves books and medical supplies for his handler. Previously Liam was professionally trained and cared for by inmates for two years through the Prison Pet Partnership, a non-profit which provides meaningful vocational training in Gig Harbor, Washington. "It's super powerful and rewarding," said Beth Rivard, Executive Director Prison Pet Partnership. "The ACVO/StokesRx eye exam program saves so much in providing veterinary care so we can continue to place Service Dogs with no cost to the client while giving back to the community at the same time." A photo of Cody and Liam, other Prison Pet Partnership participants and several Service and Working Animals that have received free eye exams as part of the event, are available for download here. Ophthalmologist, Dr. Nathan Kice, has personally provided eye exams through the ACVO's program for more than 300 Service Animals including Liam in the past nine years at his clinic, Summit Veterinary Referral Center in Tacoma, Washington. He also has a retired guide dog with vision issues in his home named Daisy. "Sight is essential for dogs like Liam," said Dr. Kice. "It is an absolute feel-good experience to clear a healthy dog and provide peace of mind for their handlers. Early diagnosis is key to treating ocular disease." Service and Working animals can be registered through the month of April at www.ACVOeyeexam.org. Approximately 300 board-certified veterinary ophthalmologists will donate their time and resources to provide free screening exams to qualified dogs, horses, miniature horses, donkeys, alpacas and cats. Active working animals include: guide, hearing assistance, drug detection, police/military, search and rescue, therapy and disability assistance animals trained through a formal program. The American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists is an approved veterinary specialty organization of the American Board of Veterinary Specialties that board certifies veterinarians as ophthalmologists. This year's event is sponsored by ACVO and Stokes Pharmacy, as well as several generous industry sponsors. HOW TO REGISTER FOR THE 2019 EVENT: To qualify, Service and Working Animals must be "active working animals" that have been trained through a formal training program or organization or are currently enrolled in a formal training program. The training organization could be national, regional or local in nature. More qualification details are available here. Owners/agents for the animal(s) must FIRST register the animal via an online registration form beginning April 1 at www.ACVOeyeexam.org. Registration ends April 30. Once registered online, the owner/agent will receive a registration number and will be allowed access to a list of participating ophthalmologists. Then, they may contact a specialist to schedule an appointment, which will take place during the month of May. Times may vary depending on the facility and are filled on a first-come, first-served basis, so owners/agents are encouraged to register and make appointments early. About the American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists The American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists (ACVO) is an approved veterinary specialty organization of the American Board of Veterinary Specialties and is recognized by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Its mission is "to advance the quality of veterinary medicine through certification of veterinarians who demonstrate excellence as specialists in veterinary ophthalmology." To become board certified, a candidate must successfully complete a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree, a one-year internship, a three-year ACVO approved residency and pass a series of credentials and examinations. For more information, please visit www.ACVO.org. About Stokes Pharmacy Stokes Pharmacy, has been compounding medications for veterinarians and their patients nationwide for over 40 years and is excited to announce that they are officially a FDA Registered 503B Outsourcing Facility registered as Stokes Healthcare, Inc. As an outsourcing facility, Stokes 503B products meet stringent federal rules and regulations to ensure control over all aspects of manufacturing operations, including raw materials, equipment, containers and more. This control establishes the consistent quality and integrity of our products from batch to batch. Referred to as current good manufacturing practices (cGMPs), these rules and regulations are the same as those followed by the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. The FDA created 503B outsourcing to elevate the level of quality and control over human compounded medication. Stokes is one of the only compounding pharmacies in the veterinary industry to achieve 503B registration. Doctors and patients alike can rely on the quality and integrity of Stokes' medications knowing they have been compounded under exacting manufacturing standards. It is precision compounding at its best - something few compounding pharmacies in the nation can achieve. Media Contact: Jillian Spitz 614-402-0909 [email protected] SOURCE American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists (ACVO) Related Links http://www.acvo.org RACINE, Wis., April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SC Johnson today is announcing its intention to use geothermal energy to power its Racine headquarters, a move that will greatly reduce the company's environmental footprint and positions the company as a leader in the private sector in the transition to cleaner, renewable energy sources. Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8514951-sc-johnson-renewable-energy/ SC Johnson Chairman and CEO Fisk Johnson calls for the increased use of renewable energy. Fisk Johnson stands atop a 415-foot wind turbine at SC Johnsons largest factory. SC Johnson uses renewable energy at its sites around the world. SC Johnson uses innovative technologies to drive efficiency and minimize its footprint. SC Johnson uses renewable energy sources, including wind power, as part of its commitment to environmental responsibility. At SC Johnsons factory in Surabaya, Indonesia, husks from rice grains are burned as a source of energy. SC Johnsons largest factory generates 85% of its energy from cleaner-burning natural gas. In 2017/18, SC Johnson achieved a 62% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions vs 2000 baseline. SC Johnson factories in four countries have solar projects. SC Johnson plans to install a GeoExchange system at its iconic Frank Lloyd Wright-designed campus to provide sustainable heating and cooling throughout the facilities, using the constant temperature of the Earth. The project which is pending city and state approvals is expected to reduce energy usage by an estimated 42 percent. There is a 40 percent reduction made up of decreasing consumption from the implementation of a GeoExchange system, including transforming the current boiler facility to a new energy efficient thermal plant, and an additional 2 percent reduction by utilizing PV for renewable energy. Combined with other sustainable projects, the facility will save another 15 to 20 percent in energy usage, resulting in a total facility-wide reduction of 57 to 62 percent of the current energy load. "As a global company, you think about your footprint in all the places you operate and how to minimize your impact," said Fisk Johnson, Chairman and CEO of SC Johnson. "Leading the industry in an environmentally responsible manner starts at home. For us, that meant taking a look at our operations and finding where we can lessen our impact by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, addressing air quality and increasing the amount of energy offset from renewable resources. Transitioning to geothermal energy at our headquarters goes a long way toward accomplishing those goals." SC Johnson has for two decades been an industry leader in the use of renewable energy in the production of its products. The company's commitment to lowering its carbon footprint and utilizing a diverse, renewables-heavy energy mix is evident in its across-the-board embrace of wind, solar and biofuel: At the company's manufacturing plant in Surabaya, Indonesia , waste husks from rice grains are used as a fuel source for heating water for production. The initiative dramatically cut down on the use of fossil fuels, resulting in a reduction of 7,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually. , waste husks from rice grains are used as a fuel source for heating water for production. The initiative dramatically cut down on the use of fossil fuels, resulting in a reduction of 7,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually. Manufacturing facilities in China , India , Indonesia and Mexico have solar projects for hot water heating. , , and have solar projects for hot water heating. Three of the company's manufacturing sites Bay City, Michigan ; Mijdrecht, Netherlands ; and Gorzow, Poland run on 100 percent wind energy, while facilities in Mount Pleasant , Wisconsin (Waxdale) and Toluca, Mexico , get a portion of their power from wind. ; Mijdrecht, ; and Gorzow, run on 100 percent wind energy, while facilities in , (Waxdale) and , get a portion of their power from wind. Waxdale also generates 85 percent of its energy from cleaner-burning natural gas. Methane gas from a nearby public landfill generates 28 percent of the facility's energy. The other 57 percent comes from a second cogeneration system that uses cleaner-burning natural gas. Altogether, SC Johnson's efforts have resulted in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in its worldwide manufacturing sites by 62 percent since the company's 2000 baseline. "At SC Johnson, we started using renewable energy more than 15 years ago to make products like Windex, Pledge and others," Johnson said. "Today, a third of our global energy use comes from renewable sources. It's an investment, but it's the right thing, now and for the future." SC Johnson's Administration Building which remains the only operational corporate headquarters designed by Wright opened 80 years ago, in 1939. Additionally, roughly 13,000 square feet of photovoltaic (PV) panels (or ~620 panels) will be installed on the building roofs of the company's west campus. A GeoExchange well field will be located under a northwest parking lot, and an existing boiler plant will be converted to a next-generation thermal plant. The installation of the GeoExchange system which repurposes energy in a highly efficient manner but is not considered renewable is the most significant of many efficiency improvements at SC Johnson headquarters. The PV panels will serve the important function of offsetting energy consumption from the grid with self-generated renewable energy. SC Johnson hopes to complete the GeoExchange field installation by the fall of 2019, with the entire campus converted to the new thermal plant by the fall of 2020. Company-owned wind turbines are in operation at Mijdrecht and Waxdale; the Wisconsin facility has two operational turbines, each standing 415 feet tall, and both requiring approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for use. At Mijdrecht, the 262-foot turbine generates nearly half the amount of energy needed to run the 3 million-square-foot site, with the remaining energy as purchased wind power. Though the use of wind turbines in busy urban areas can prove challenging, the positive environmental impacts make it well worth the effort. The Waxdale wind turbines generate 8 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year enough to power 770 homes. Using those turbines saves about 6,000 metric tons of carbon emissions compared to what would have been created using fossil fuels. "SC Johnson has made a commitment to diversifying energy sources and prioritizing the use of renewables whenever possible," Johnson said. "Our work is far from over, and we're excited to do our part at home in Racine with the GeoExchange system at our headquarters. But we also believe that lowering our carbon footprint around the world will make a positive impact on the communities we serve." About SC Johnson SC Johnson is a family company dedicated to innovative, high-quality products, excellence in the workplace and a long-term commitment to the environment and the communities in which it operates. Based in the USA, the company is one of the world's leading manufacturers of household cleaning products and products for home storage, air care, pest control and shoe care, as well as professional products. It markets such well-known brands as GLADE, KIWI, OFF!, PLEDGE, RAID, SCRUBBING BUBBLES, SHOUT, WINDEX and ZIPLOC in the U.S. and beyond, with brands marketed outside the U.S. including AUTAN, BAYGON, BRISE, KABIKILLER, KLEAR, MR MUSCLE and RIDSECT. The 133-year-old company, which generates $10 billion in sales, employs approximately 13,000 people globally and sells products in virtually every country around the world. www.scjohnson.com SOURCE SC Johnson Related Links http://www.scjohnson.com TEL AVIV, Israel and TOKYO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SCADAfence, the global leader in operational technology (OT) security and the most widely deployed OT security platform in Japan, was selected by Mitsui Fudosan, a leader in smart cities digital transformation and innovation, to secure its critical facilities and building management systems (BMS). The SCADAfence platform provides BMS administrators with continuous OT network monitoring for increased visibility, risk management, and threat protection. Its selection by Mitsui Fudosan is in line with the Japanese government's efforts to ensure that hackers don't use IoT devices to launch attacks against Japanese infrastructure during the Olympic games. "SCADAfence enhances our ability to continue and adopt Smart City technologies and will allow us to operate securely as we digitalize our OT infrastructure," said Akira Sugawara of Mitsui Fudosan. "Our building management systems are constantly becoming more digitized and inter-connected due to industrial IoT technologies and securing them requires technology designed for massive, complex networks." In 2018, the Olympic Destroyer malware took down critical systems, sabotaging the preparation for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea. To avoid similar incidents and ensure a smoothly operating Tokyo 2020, SCADAfence will protect the BMS infrastructure from malicious attacks, which can jeopardize the organizers' reputation and even endanger human lives. Such attack scenarios can range from turning off the HVAC systems during Tokyo's hot summer to setting off fire alarms in the early morning, putting affected athletes at a disadvantage when it comes time to compete. "Cyber threats have become a growing concern to BMS owners in various industries such as hospitals, financial institutions, hospitality, and airports," said Elad Ben Meir, CEO of SCADAfence. "Our joint work with Mitsui and our ability to support their growing OT infrastructure ensures they have the required peace of mind as they go through their digital transformation journey." SCADAfence and Mitsui Fudosan will discuss the challenges of securing BMS systems in smart cities and how to secure them during an upcoming SCADAfence seminar about OT security in Tokyo on April 12, 2019. For more details and registration, please click here. About SCADAfence SCADAfence helps companies with large-scale operational technology (OT) networks embrace the benefits of industrial IoT by reducing cyber risks and mitigating operational threats. Our non-intrusive platform provides full coverage of large-scale networks, offering best-in-class detection accuracy, asset discovery and user experience. SCADAfence seamlessly integrates OT security within existing security operations, bridging the IT/OT convergence gap. We deliver security and visibility for some of the world's most complex OT networks, including Europe's largest manufacturing facility. Thanks to SCADAfence, companies in manufacturing, building management and critical infrastructure industries can operate securely, reliably and efficiently as they go through the digital transformation journey. More information is available at https://www.scadafence.com About Mitsui Fudosan Mitsui Fudosan Co., Ltd., a leading global real estate company headquartered in Tokyo, aims to bring affluence and comfort to urban living. It maximizes urban value creation by providing secure, safe and attractive urban spaces and soft services that bring enrichment and comfort to urban living; and provides varied and innovative solutions that stimulate the real estate investment market. https://www.mitsuifudosan.co.jp/english/ Media Contact Amy Kenigsberg K2 Global Communications http://k2-gc.com/ [email protected] tel: +972-9-794-1681 (+2 GMT) U.S.: +1-913-440-4072 (+7 ET) SOURCE SCADAfence CHAPEL HILL, N.C., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- More than 800 cleft and craniofacial care professionals will gather in Tucson, Arizona, April 9-13 for the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association's (ACPA) 76th Annual Meeting. The meeting gives attendees the opportunity to learn from experts across a wide range of disciplines, explore developments in research and network with likeminded colleagues at discipline forums and social events. The health care providers in attendance will have access to more than 300 presentations representing 24 specialties from platform presentations and study sessions to panels and advanced courses. The highlight of the event is sure to be the keynote address from Adil Haider, MD, MPH, active trauma and acute care surgeon and prolific researcher. Haider is credited with uncovering racial disparities after traumatic injury and establishing the field of trauma disparities research. His presentation will focus on his research projects that describe and explain how to eradicate unequal outcomes based on gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age and socioeconomic status. The additional medical, speech and nursing educational opportunities will include relevant topics such as diversity and inclusion, multidisciplinary rehabilitation and virtual reality technology. "The technologies developed and discoveries made in cleft and craniofacial care are truly significant each and every year," said Bernard J. Costello, DMD, MD, FACS, ACPA President. "ACPA's Annual Meeting provides an exciting opportunity for our members to come together to discuss and celebrate those strides forward." To learn more about the association and the Annual Meeting agenda, please visit acpa-cpf.org/annualmeeting. About the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association The American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association (ACPA) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) association of interested individuals and health care professionals who treat and/or perform research on oral cleft and craniofacial conditions. Since 1943, ACPA has worked to optimize outcomes for individuals with oral cleft and craniofacial conditions through education, support, research, advocacy and interdisciplinary team care. ACPA also provides information to affected individuals and families and seeks to educate the public about facial differences through its ACPA Family Services program. For more information, please visit acpa-cpf.org. SOURCE American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association Related Links https://acpa-cpf.org NEW YORK, April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The global insulin delivery devices market is expected to reach US$ 22,830.0 Mn by 2025 from US$ 11,869.0 Mn in 2017. The market is estimated to grow with a CAGR of 8.7% during the forecast period from 2018 to 2025. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05626748/?utm_source=PRN The growth of the insulin delivery devices market is primarily attributed to the rise in obesity and increasing technological advancement in insulin delivery devices are the major factors that are anticipated to propel the growth for the insulin delivery devices market.However, complications and risk associated with the delivery of insulin expected to act as major challenges hindering the market growth. On the other hand, growing product innovations is expected to be prevalent future trend in the global insulin delivery devices market. Global insulin delivery devices market, based on the product was segmented into insulin pens, insulin pumps, insulin syringes, pen needles and others.The insulin pens segment is further segmented into reusable insulin pens and disposable insulin pens segments. The insulin pumps segment is also further bifurcated into tube pumps and patch pumps.Based on pen needle segment, the market is further segmented into standard pen needles and safety pen needles. In 2017, the insulin pens segment held the largest market share among the product segment.This is primarily attributed to its ease of use and its increasing recommendation for its use by the healthcare providers as well as its ease of use, and lesser side effects. The insulin pumps segment is also expected to grow at the fastest rate during the coming years. The global market of insulin delivery devices was classified into patients/homecare and hospitals & clinics segments, by the end user.The patients/homecare segment anticipated to the largest and fastest growing segment in the forecast period. The increasing diabetic population and increasing adoption of the insulin delivery devices are majorly helping in the growth of this market. Moreover, the ease of use, availability, and accessibility of insulin delivery devices has also increased the adoption of self-administration among patients that proportionally upsurge the rate of using insulin delivery devices in patients or homecare settings. The insulin delivery devices market was estimated through extensive primary and secondary sources that included a vast array of government authorized websites such as Chinese Diabetes Society (CDS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), International Diabetes Federation (IDF), National Health Service (NHS), National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and others. The primary respondents included chair-holders and representatives of the demand and supply side for healthcare industries as well as medical professionals at various insulin delivery device manufacturing companies, hospitals, and research centers. Reasons to Buy Save and reduce time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the growth, size, leading players and segments in the insulin delivery devices 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 global insulin delivery devices market, thereby allowing players across the value chain 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 security interest with respect to client products, segmentation, pricing and distribution Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05626748/?utm_source=PRN About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com The results were published today in a report titled The U.S. Healthcare Cost Crisis , based on a nationally representative survey of more than 3,500 American adults on the impact of the high cost of healthcare on personal finances, individual healthcare choices and the level of satisfaction with the U.S. healthcare system. The survey found that despite 45% of respondents reporting fears of bankruptcy if a major health event strikes, 1 in 4 skipping a medical treatment due to costs and Americans collectively borrowing an estimated $88 billion to cover healthcare costs in the past year, most (64%) say they are "completely" or "mostly" satisfied with their personal experiences with the healthcare system. However, respondents' satisfaction drops to 39% when they consider how well the system is serving Americans generally. Assessments of the healthcare system are enhanced or diminished depending on party affiliation and whether the cost of care is considered. While nearly half (48%) of the general population believes that the quality of care in the U.S. is the best or among the best in the world, this swells to 67% of self-identified Republicans compared with just 38% of Democrats. Nonetheless, 76% of all Americans agree they pay too much relative to the quality of care they receive. "While there may be a great political divide in how highly Republicans and Democrats perceive the healthcare system at large, there is very little that separates the groups when it comes to the real-life consequences of the high cost of healthcare on their everyday lives," said Tim Lash, chief strategy officer for West Health. "The time has come to take politics out of the equation and deal with the realities of the healthcare cost crisis with bipartisan and common-sense solutions that serve all Americans." Pessimism about the government's ability to address the crisis, however, is also bipartisan. Nearly equal majorities of Democrats (67%) and Republicans (70%) have no confidence in their elected officials' ability to achieve consensus legislation to reduce costs. Overall, three-quarters of respondents including 67% of Republicans report that government is not currently doing enough to ensure that prescription drugs are affordable. "The impact of out-of-control healthcare costs is indisputable, although Americans' feelings about their healthcare system are complicated and at times conflicted," said Dan Witters, Gallup senior researcher. "At a macro level, large numbers think healthcare in America is among the best in the world, but on an individual basis, most agree they are paying too much and getting too little in return, and they are worried not only for themselves but for the country." In 2017, the U.S. spent $3.5 trillion on healthcare $10,739 per person more than any other country, yet it consistently ranks near the bottom of major health indices among the 36 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Other key survey findings include: When given the choice between a freeze in healthcare costs for the next five years or a 10% increase in household income, 61% of Americans report that their preference is a freeze in costs. 77% of Americans are concerned rising costs will significantly damage the U.S. economy. 76% expect their costs for healthcare will increase even further in the next two years. 15 million Americans have deferred purchasing prescription drugs in the past year due to cost. Nearly 3 million borrowed $10,000 or more to pay for healthcare in the past year. or more to pay for healthcare in the past year. Only about one-third report that doctors discuss costs with them in advance of procedures, tests or treatment plans, or for medicine required to treat their conditions. The survey results will be announced at West Health's 2019 Healthcare Costs Innovation Summit today in Washington, D.C. The survey is available for download here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/248081/westhealth-gallup-us-healthcare-cost-crisis.aspx About the Survey Results are based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 14-Feb. 20, 2019, with a random sample of 3,537 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error will range from + 1.2 percentage points for response percentages near 10% to + 2.1 percentage points for response percentages near 50%. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects due to weighting. The margin of error for subgroups such as gender, education level, income or political identity will be larger, typically ranging from around + 3 to + 5 percentage points. The national sample included a quota of 80% cellphone respondents and 20% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas within each U.S. subregion. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. About West Health Solely funded by philanthropists Gary and Mary West, West Health is a family of nonprofit and nonpartisan organizations including the Gary and Mary West Foundation and Gary and Mary West Health Institute in San Diego, and the Gary and Mary West Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C. West Health is dedicated to lowering healthcare costs to enable seniors to successfully age in place with access to high-quality, affordable health and support services that preserve and protect their dignity, quality of life and independence. Learn more at westhealth.org and follow @westhealth. About Gallup Gallup delivers analytics and advice to help leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems. Combining more than 80 years of experience with its global reach, Gallup knows more about the attitudes and behaviors of employees, customers, students and citizens than any other organization in the world. SOURCE West Health Related Links http://westhealth.org BERLIN, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The founders of envion AG strongly oppose the findings of an investigation report issued by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) regarding envion. FINMA published a press release citing illegal activities related to the companys Initial Coin Offering (ICO). According to the report, envion AG received unauthorized public deposits in violation of regulatory laws. The founders point out that the investigation report is not yet final and remains subject to appeal. Envions ex-board member Matthias Woestmann was quick to announce he was fully exonerated by the report, a claim the founders describe as absurd and untrue. Publication of the findings marks the end of FINMAs investigation of envion co-founder Michael Luckow. FINMAs report alleges that envions prospectus failed to comply with the formal requirements for bond issuance. The Swiss regulator did not address any further issues. The reports allegations, which are not legally-binding, are premised on investors supposed right to repayment of their investment after 30 years such that the investment would resemble a deposit. On the contrary, envions prospectus clearly informed investors there was no right to any repayment claim regardless of company performance. The evidence given by FINMA to support their claim was not included in their public statement. The full report reveals a weakly-supported argument and ultimately contradicts the very plain wording from envions prospectus. FINMA has not formally acquitted envion board member and former CEO, Matthias Woestmann in any legal sense, despite a public statement from the beleaguered CEO announcing that he had been fully exonerated. Woestmann was responsible for establishing the company in Switzerland and drafting the prospectus for the ICO. He engaged legal counsel to advise on regulatory compliance from Swiss commercial law firm Kellerhals Carrard. Michael Luckow, co-founder of envion AG: I am pleased that FINMAs proceedings regarding me have come to an end. FINMA rightly recognized that there was no intentional damage to investors on our part. They also acknowledged that any violations of FINMA guidelines were not deliberate because we relied on the erroneous advice of legal advisors put in place by ex-board member Woestmann." Michael Luckow continues: However, I strongly reject the assertion made by Matthias Woestmann that FINMAs ruling allows him to conclude that he fulfilled his duties. His task was to found envion AG in Switzerland and to draw up a watertight prospectus in compliance with FINMAs requirements for the ICO with consultants appointed by him. Obviously, Woestmann was negligent in carrying out these duties, just as he was derelict of his responsibility to appoint an auditor for envion, which ultimately led to the liquidation of the company. There is no question that Woestmann has not been fully exonerated as he asserts in his press release. His claim is absurd and untrue." Matthias Woestmann and Thomas van Aubel are responsible for millions of dollars in damages to tens of thousands of investors which they will have to answer for in upcoming lawsuits brought by the founders against their companies. The 14th Civil Senate of the Berlin Court of Appeals found collusive behavior between the former board chairman of envion AG, Matthias Woestmann and his business partner Thomas van Aubel. Van Aubel and his wife Jutta Freifrau von Falkenhausen are co-CEOs of Sycamore GmbH, together holding 66 percent of shares in the company listed as a defendant in the upcoming civil suits. Woestmann, managing director of co-defendant Quadrat Capital GmbH, violated a trustee agreement with the founders and unlawfully diluted their majority ownership from 81% to a 31% minority. Thomas van Aubel and Jutta Freifrau von Falkenhausen took over the remaining 61% of the shares via their company Sycamore GmbH and with it a controlling interest in envion AG, just days after the conclusion of the companys blockbuster ICO. The illegal takeover prevented the founding team from exerting any influence toward pursuing the companys concept and the project was forced into a standstill. In a ruling issued on February 26th of this year, the Berlin Court of Appeal described Woestmann and van Aubels conduct as immoral as well as especially reprehensible, and saw a special degree of recklessness towards the injured party, thus confirming the first judgment issued by the Berlin Regional Court from June of 2018. (Berlin Court of Appeal, 14th Civil Senate of 2/26/2019: reference 14 U 72/18. Lower court: Berlin Regional Court, judgment of 6/21/2018: file number 90 O 38/18.) About Trado GmbH "The idea to launch this new fragrance was inspired by the excitement and adventure that comes with every new journey. The fresh and masculine scent has a lot of contrast allowing one to feel sophisticated yet casual," said Frank Voelk, Senior Perfumer at Firmenich. Maritime Journey embodies the energizing power and seduction of the open sea. Its notes include brisk, sparkling apple and an aromatic heart suggesting the allure of uncharted lands that dry into a reassuring, masculine woody base. Fragrance notes: Top Green Apple, Guatemalan Cardamom, Lavender Middle Cilantro, Violet, Wild Orchid Base Tree Moss, Clear Wood, Cedarwood Packaging: The bottle is topped with a nautical rope wrapped around a metal cleat and anchored on a lotus wood. The glass silhouette with its crisp sea blue tint reflects the masculine and powerful nature of the scent The collection is available starting today at 4.2 oz. Eau de Cologne Spray for $80 and 2.5 oz. Eau de Cologne Spray for $65 at all Tommy Bahama stores and Belk. Follow @tbahama and tag the brand on your journey by using the hashtag #ForEveryAdventure ABOUT PARLUX LTD: Parlux LTD, a leading global beauty company, designs, manufactures, markets and distributes prestige fragrances and related products since 1987. It is ranked among the Top 100 Cosmetic and Fragrance companies globally and holds the licenses for notable fragrance brands including: Tommy Bahama, Vince Camuto, Pierre Cardin, Kenneth Cole, Paris Hilton, Sofia Vergara and Jason Wu, among others. Parlux LTD is a wholly owned subsidiary of Perfumania Holdings Inc., an independent national, vertically integrated wholesale distributor and specialty retailer of fragrances and related products. ABOUT TOMMY BAHAMA Tommy Bahama is part of Tommy Bahama Group, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Oxford Industries, Inc. Established in August 1992, with corporate headquarters in Seattle, Tommy Bahama is the iconic island lifestyle brand that defines relaxed, sophisticated style in men's and women's sportswear, swimwear, accessories, footwear and a complete home furnishings collection. The company owns and operates over 160 Tommy Bahama retail locations worldwide, 17 of which offer a Tommy Bahama Restaurant and Bar. The Tommy Bahama collection is available on TommyBahama.com and at the finest U.S. retailers. For more information, please visit www.tommybahama.com. SOURCE Parlux LTD WASHINGTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, two major U.S. synthetic yarn producers Unifi Manufacturing, Inc. ("Unifi") and Nan Ya Plastics Corporation, America ("Nan Ya") filed a "critical circumstances" allegation regarding imports of polyester textured yarn from China in an ongoing trade remedy investigation. The critical circumstances claim charges that imports of the yarn surged into the United States in order to avoid the imposition of duties. If the allegation is proven, importers could face significant duty liabilities. The critical circumstances provision allows the U.S. Department of Commerce (the "Commerce Department") to apply antidumping and countervailing duties retroactively if the agency determines that certain criteria are satisfied. In particular, the Commerce Department looks at whether imports of the merchandise under investigation were shipped into the United States in large volumes after the petitions are filed but before preliminary duties are established. Unifi and Nan Ya filed petitions with the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission (the "USITC") in October 2018 alleging that dumped and subsidized imports of polyester textured yarn from China and India are causing material injury to the domestic industry. The Commerce Department initiated the investigations in November 2018 and the USITC preliminarily determined that imports from China and India are causing injury to the U.S. domestic industry in December 2018. After the petitions were filed in October 2018, imports of polyester textured yarn from China increased by over 27 percent from their pre-petition volumes. The critical circumstances allegation filed by Unifi and Nan Ya asks the Commerce Department to account for this surge by imposing retroactive duties as soon as possible, but no later than the date that the preliminary determinations in the countervailing duty investigations are made. These preliminary determinations are scheduled to be completed by April 26, 2019. The products affected by this case are made by Unifi at its production facilities in Yadkinville, North Carolina, and Madison, North Carolina, where Unifi employs approximately 1,100 and 450 people, respectively, and by Nan Ya at its production facility in Lake City, South Carolina, where Nan Ya employs approximately 900 people. FACT SHEET Antidumping and countervailing duties: Antidumping duties are intended to offset the amount by which a product is sold at less than fair value, or "dumped," in the United States. The margin of dumping is calculated by the Commerce Department. Estimated duties in the amount of the dumping are collected from importers at the time of importation. Countervailing duties are intended to offset the unfair subsidies that are provided by foreign governments and benefit the production of a particular good. The USITC, an independent agency, will determine whether the domestic polyester textured yarn industry is materially injured or threatened with material injury by reason of the unfairly traded imports. Next steps: The Commerce Department is scheduled to reach preliminary determinations in the countervailing duty and antidumping duty investigations on April 26, 2019, and June 26, 2019, respectively, at which point preliminary cash deposit rates will be put in place. The entire investigative process will take approximately one year, with final determinations of dumping, subsidization, and injury likely occurring by the end of 2019. Product descriptions: The product covered by the petitions is polyester textured yarn, which is synthetic multifilament yarn that is manufactured from polyester (polyethylene terephthalate). Polyester textured yarn is produced through a texturing process, which imparts special properties to the filaments of the yarn, including stretch, bulk, strength, moisture absorption, insulation, and the appearance of a natural fiber. The petitions include all forms of polyester textured yarn, regardless of surface texture or appearance, yarn density and thickness (as measured in denier), number of filaments, number of plies, finish (luster), cross section, color, dye method, texturing method, or packing method (such as spindles, tubes, or beams). Petitioning companies: The petitioning companies are Unifi Manufacturing, Inc. and Nan Ya Plastics Corporation, America, represented by Kelley Drye & Warren LLP. SOURCE Kelley Drye & Warren LLP Related Links http://kelleydrye.com LAKE CHARLES, La., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- VeritasAdvantage announced today that they had formally partnered with ShareCor, the Louisiana Hospital Association's jointly-owned shared services corporation to market the VeritasAdvantage application to its membership Statewide. VeritasAdvantage ShareCor Logo Founded by a Louisiana native and based in Lake Charles, LA, VeritasAdvantage is a revolutionary cloud-based application designed to transform the way hospitals purchase medical supplies and devices. Free to hospitals and surgery centers, the VeritasAdvantage application affords its members real-time access to the collective buying experience of the entire membership with a single click. The system electronically connects member hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to the Veritas database of over $17.5 billion dollars worth of hospital purchase order records. Member access to the database affords them the ability to quickly identify pricing disparities for identical medical devices and negotiate with their vendors in real time. The company reports that the ShareCor / Louisiana Hospital Association partnership and similar partnerships around the country like it, will assist them in their mission to develop a modern, healthcare marketplace built around connectivity and pricing transparency as a means of bolstering hospital profitability and sustainability. www.veritasadvantage.com https://youtu.be/YqEdrlELhB4 Media Contact: Ken T. Husted, Chief Operating Officer [email protected] Office: 337-602-6092 Toll-Free: 833-416-4218 ext. 5 Related Images veritasadvantage.png VeritasAdvantage Logo sharecor.jpg ShareCor Logo Related Links www.veritasadvantage.com Related Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqEdrlELhB4 SOURCE VeritasAdvantage, INC Related Links http://www.veritasadvantage.com Washington Federal, an existing MX digital money management customer, has chosen to expand their relationship with MX by selecting MX Helios as part of its ongoing effort to encourage customer advocacy through digital-first banking. Once live, the new-and-improved mobile app will be offered to the bank's customers throughout eight Western U.S. states. "We love the MX vision of financial strength through clean data, and we love the results of that visionnot to mention their 5-star-rated mobile offering," said Cathy Cooper, EVP, Retail Banking, Washington Federal. "We know our bank's future success lies in meeting the rising generation where and how they want to bank. With Helios' flexibility and open API framework, MX is essentially working alongside us to build our own mobile app, while utilizing their support and tools. We expect that happier customers will ultimately deliver an experience to support our goals for organic growth." "Since its foundation as a savings and loan, Washington Federal has a storied history of serving the individual and the community," said Nate Gardner, Chief Customer Officer, MX. "That commitment has only expanded in this quickly evolving digital age, and MX and Washington Federal continue to work as close partners, leveraging MX's powerful data platform and mobile solution to drive financial success and strength to customers." About MX MX helps financial institutions and fintechs utilize their data more effectively so they can outperform the competition in a rapidly evolving industry. As the leading provider of financial data services, MX enables its clients and partners to easily collect, enhance, analyze, present and act on their financial data. Using MX's platform and products, MX clients are able to understand their customers in real time like never before, allowing them to be truly customer-centric. Founded in 2010, MX is one of the fastest-growing fintech providers, partnering with more than 1,800 financial institutions and 43 of the top 50 digital banking providers. For more information, visit www.mx.com. About Washington Federal Washington Federal, Inc. is the parent company of Washington Federal, a national bank with 235 branches operating in eight Western states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. Established in 1917, the bank provides consumer and commercial deposit accounts, financing for small to middle market businesses, commercial real estate and residential real estate, including consumer mortgages, home equity lines of credit and insurance products through a subsidiary. Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender. www.washingtonfederal.com Press contact: Steve Jensen Director of Communications MX 801-669-5532 [email protected] SOURCE MX Related Links http://data.mx.com HADLEY, Mass., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Knowledge Matters, the leading provider of cloud-based, interactive educational business simulations for high schools, colleges, and corporations, today announced the winners of the ICHRIE-Knowledge Matters Hotel Management Competition . The competition winners are: College students around the globe competed in the ICHRIE-Knowledge Matters Hotel Management Competition. The ICHRIE-Knowledge Matters Hotel Management Competition utilized the Case Simulations' Hospitality Collection - immersive, interactive simulations designed to teach Hotel Management & Lodging Operations courses. First place - Emily Zirbes Iowa State University Of Science And Technology Second place - Alexandra Hafner James Madison University Third place - Carlotta Buceti Florida International University In collaboration with the International Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education (ICHRIE), Knowledge Matters hosted the ICHRIE-Knowledge Matters Hotel Management Competition . College students from around the world, who attend an ICHRIE-affiliated university or college, competed in the online, digital competition to test their hotel management and lodging operations skills and knowledge. The competition featured Knowledge Matters' brand-new Hospitality Collection of simulations - immersive, interactive, cloud-based simulations designed to teach hotel management and lodging operations at the collegiate level. "It was exciting seeing the students compete in the ICHRIE-Knowledge Matters Hotel Management Competition , and we congratulate the winners - Emily, Alexandra, and Carlotta," said Peter Jordan, founder and CEO, Knowledge Matters. "As more and more college hospitality professors use the Hospitality Collection of Case Simulations with their students, it was great seeing the competitors challenge other students from around the world." Case Simulations, designed to engage digitally-native students, are the natural evolution of interactive, online teaching curriculum - cloud-based, and accessible from any browser or device. As students take control of their own virtual hotels in the Hospitality Collection of simulations, they see the impact of their management decisions in a rich, visual virtual world. If hotel guests are unhappy with management policies, students will see negative social media feedback within the simulation. The constant feedback loop within the simulations engages students and cements learning of hospitality management concepts and theories. Case Simulations' Hospitality Collection includes 11 Case Simulations that each focus on a specific discipline (revenue management, engineering, front desk, etc. ) and three "General Manager" projects that challenge students to tie them all together. The Case Simulations and projects enable students to go beyond learning a hospitality management concept via a textbook and learn via a simulated, virtual hotel experience. About International CHRIE International CHRIE (ICHRIE), a non-profit professional association, provides programs and services to continually improve the quality of global education, research, service and business operations in the hospitality and tourism industry. ICHRIE offers an unparalleled opportunity for hospitality and tourism educators and industry professionals to come together and affect change for the future. For more information: www.chrie.org . About Knowledge Matters Knowledge Matters is the leading provider of simulation-based educational content for business, marketing, and personal finance. Knowledge Matters' visual sims allow students to control their own virtual businesses - learning valuable business and marketing concepts using simulation game technology. In the past year, Knowledge Matters served more than 3,750,000 simulation-based exercises. The company's Virtual Business line of simulations have been used in over one-third of all the high schools in the United States. The company's Case Simulations are used by leading universities globally. Knowledge Matters also delivers corporate training solutions to Fortune 500 clients. For additional information or to interview Knowledge Matters, please contact: Jeff Rutherford Director of Marketing, Knowledge Matters [email protected] 413-203-4431, ext. 105 SOURCE Knowledge Matters Related Links https://knowledgematters.com HONG KONG, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 29, the HK SAR government officially announced that Ping An Technology and OGCIO had signed a contract on February 29, 2019, to be a service provider for the establishment, support and maintenance of Category A and Category B of the electronic personal identity (e-ID) system to assist the HK SAR government in building e-ID system. The HK SAR government will provide e-ID to all Hong Kong residents to enable them to conduct online transactions via unique electronic identification, to promote a new economic service model directly to citizens, and to provide key electronic infrastructure for HK's smart city project. Ericson Chan, CEO of Ping An Technology, said: "The e-ID project is the framework for building a smart city in Hong Kong. Participation in the project is conducive to helping Ping An Technology further develop the overseas practice of smart city." With 99.8% of the recognition accuracy and the minimum wave amplitude, its face recognition technology has reached the world's leading level. In addition, its face recognition technology has been widely and deeply applied in more than 400 fields, including airport security, community intelligent management, financial risk control, medical insurance, social welfare security, railway facilities connection and a series of high security areas. At present, face recognition technology has been integrated into Ping An Pi-comprehensive identity verification platform, which integrates many AI algorithms such as biopsy detection, OCR recognition, voiceprint recognition and so on. The platform service has been extended to Southeast Asia and other overseas areas. In the bidding process, Ping An Technology always upholds the attitude of legitimacy and compliance, and actively practices the enterprise concept of "Technology made life easier". Ericson Chan further added, "We hope that the application of technology can benefit more people. Ping An Technology has accumulated core technologies in AI, blockchain and cloud computing, and has gained rich practical experience in China. Previous cooperation with the HK SAR government e-ID project prove Ping An Technology's ability and experience in overseas markets. In the next stage, Ping An Technology will apply its landing technology in a wider area to help improve the technology application in local areas. About Ping An Technology Ping An Technology is the core technology arm of Ping An Group, using AI, cloud and other cutting-edge technologies to develop and operate mission-critical platforms and services that support financial services, medical health, automotive services, real estate services, and smart cities. With "Cloud Infinity" as its value proposition, Ping An Technology is actively practicing the corporate philosophy of "Professionalism makes life simpler", and is determined to become a global leading "AI+Cloud" company. Ping An Technology, as the high-tech kernel of the Ping An Group, has applied its technology solutions to more than 400 scenarios, incubating new technology-driven businesses and helping build ecological closed-loop. Ping An Cloud has formed full-stack service capabilities from IDC infrastructure to SaaS. Through Ping An Cloud, the ecological platform has been built to serve 500 million users and enabled a better future with technology globally. SOURCE Ping An Technology DUBLIN, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Power SiC Patent Landscape" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Power SiC intellectual property: leadership of Japanese players, strong presence of automotive companies, and Chinese new entrants The 2016-2018 period has been crucial for the whole SiC industry. SiC MOSFETs, commercially available for several years, is gaining the confidence of numerous customers and have clearly begun to penetrate into different applications. They follow the first commercially available SiC diodes that appeared on the market over 18 years ago and gradually changed the market. The SiC device market is expected to grow steadily, from $302M in 2017 to more than $1.5B in 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 31%. In this report, the author has thoroughly investigated the patent landscape related to SiC-based power electronics, covering MOSFETs, Schottky Barrier Diodes (SBDs) and power modules. Today, there is a dichotomy in power SiC patents, with new activity from Chinese players on one side and leadership of Japanese players and the strong presence of automotive companies on the other. Japanese integrators are leading SiC MOSFET-related patenting activity We witnessed a remarkable acceleration in a patent filing related to SiC MOSFETs between 2011 and 2015, concomitant with the commercialization of the first SiC MOSFET products. Japanese integrators - especially Denso and Fuji Electric - have taken the lead in SiC MOSFET related patenting activity. China has entered the SiC MOSFET patent landscape in recent years, starting with R&D players in 2011, who were followed by major state-owned integrator companies in 2015 such as State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), CRRC and SiC pure player foundry Century Goldray, which was established in 2010 to address the whole power SiC supply chain. A common feature of these new entrants is that they intend to develop IP on both planar and trench MOSFET structures. Taiwan has a long-standing R&D player in SiC MOSFETs with ITRI, but there was no industrial player until 2016, when Hestia Power emerged, focused on cost-effective planar junction barrier Schottky (JBS) diode-integrated MOSFET structures. We note that current leading SiC device makers like Cree/Wolfspeed, Rohm, Infineon, and STMicroelectronics own some key patents but do not necessarily have strong IP leadership. Planar SiC MOSFETs vs. Trench SiC MOSFETs CREE/Wolfspeed has taken the lead in the planar SiC MOSFET IP race, well ahead of its main competitors Mitsubishi Electric and Fuji Electric. The analysis of Cree's patent portfolio shows it can effectively limit patenting activity in the field and control the freedom-to-operate in most countries including Japan. In fact, patenting activity from competitors is not ramping up and does not threaten CREE's IP leadership. The strong leadership of CREE/Wolfspeed, as well as the growing maturity of planar SiC MOSFET technology, could explain a slowdown in patenting activity since 2015. Denso leads the IP race in trench SiC MOSFETs, well ahead of Fuji Electric. However, the latter could seriously challenge in the coming years, provided that a significant number of its pending patent applications are granted. The situation differs from planar SiC MOSFETs, with various patent applicants such as Toyota Motor, Toyota Central R&D Laboratories (CRDL), Sumitomo Electric and Rohm still active. There seems to be more room for challengers in the trench SiC MOSFET IP competition, although Denso is actively strengthening its leadership through the collaboration with Toyota Motor and Toyota CRDL in the context of the acceleration of SiC power technologies' development for electric and hybrid electric vehicle (EV/HEV) applications. CREE/Wolfspeed's IP portfolio is relatively small in trench SiC MOSFETs with respect to planar SiC MOSFETs, but the company owns several key patents as it started to patent important inventions before most competitors. A significant fraction of patents related to trench SiC MOSFETs concerns the protection of the gate oxide material from electric field concentration in certain portions of the gate. In this report, we go through recent developments from major IP players to address reliability issues due to gate oxides. SiC SBDs: revealing the recent patenting activity from key players and new entrants CREE/Wolfspeed and Mitsubishi Electric share the IP leadership in SiC SBDs, and with Fuji Electric and Sumitomo Electric, they are currently the most active patent applicants. In this report, we detail the recent patents from key IP players and new entrants. Most patent applicants address reliability issues related to the edge termination regions, including Mitsubishi Electric, Fuji Electric, Toshiba and Panasonic. Additionally, both CREE/Wolfspeed and Mitsubishi Electric are developing Schottky devices with a superjunction structure. Some new inventions deal with the increasing current capability of JBS diodes, including from Panasonic, Denso, Fuji Electric, and Infineon, and improving the stability when the device temperature rises, in patents from Panasonic and Fuji Electric. New entrants are exclusively Chinese players, including Century Goldray and SGCC. Their patents mainly relate to JBS diodes and are only filed in China for the moment. Full SiC power modules The share of full SiC module-related patents has been growing since 2012. Mitsubishi Electric is leading the SiC power module IP race with key patents mostly focused on hybrid Si/SiC modules. In this report, we detail the patent portfolio of the main IP leaders like Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi, Rohm and CREE/Wolfspeed and the new entrant Danfoss Silicon Power. Rohm's recent patenting activity puts the emphasis on the use of full SiC modules in electric vehicles, stressing solutions to efficient heat dissipation, the reliability of power module assemblies operating at high temperature and the reduction of stray inductance. Danfoss filed four patents related to full SiC MOSFET modules in 2018, focusing on enhancement of performance through the optimized layout of interconnects inside the module. Key Topics Covered 1. Introduction Market trends Scope of the report Objectives of the report Key feature of the report Main assignees cited in the report 2. Methodology Patent search, selection and analysis Terminology for patent analysis 3. Executive Summary 4. SiC MOSFETs 5. Patent Landscape Overview Time evolution of patent publications Leading patent applicants Main patent applicants by country of head office Main IP players: Number of patents and current legal status Time evolution of main patent applicants Most current active players Focus on CREE/Wolfspeed New entrants Focus on Hestia Power Geographic coverage of patent filings and corresponding current legal status of patents Main patent assignees vs. Countries of granted/pending patents Patents recently expired Patents near expiration date Conclusion 6. Patent Segmentation For each planar MOSFET, trench MOSFET and gate oxide: Planar SiC MOSFET Trench SiC MOSFET Gate oxide 7. SiC Schottky Barrier Diode Time evolution of patent applicants IP leadership of patent assignees Key patent families Historical patent applicants and their recent patents New entrants and their patents Conclusion 8. SiC Power Module Time evolution of patent publications Time evolution of main patent applicants IP leadership of patent assignees Full SiC power modules Hybrid SiC power modules Key patent families Review of portfolio for IP leaders Focus on new entrants Conclusion 9. Conclusion Companies Mentioned ABB Beijing Yandong Microelectronic Bosch Century Goldray Semiconductor Cree CRRC Times Electric Danfoss Silicon Power Denso Dynex Semiconductor Fuji Electric General Electric Guangdong Midea Hestia Power Hitachi Honda Motor Hyundai Motor Infineon IXYS Kansai Electric Power Littelfuse Microsemi Mitsubishi Electric Monolith Semiconductor Nissan Motor NXP On Semiconductor Panasonic Philips Renesas Electronics Rohm Schneider Electric Sharp Shenzhen Basic Semiconductor Shindengen Electric Manufacturing Showa Denko Siemens State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) (SGCC) Sumitomo Electric Toshiba Toyota Central R&D Labs Toyota Motor Tyco Tianrun Semiconductor Technology Wancheng Electric Vehicle Operation Wolfspeed Xidian University Yangzhou Guoyang Electronic For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/s2l5cy Media Contact: Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Abattis Bioceuticals Corp. (the "Company" or "Abattis") (CSE: ATT) (OTC: ATTBF) is pleased to announce that its wholly-owned subsidiary, 1185277 B.C. Ltd. (the "Acquisition Subsidiary"), has entered into a share purchase agreement (the "Agreement") to acquire (the "Acquisition") Pro Natura BV ("Pro Natura"), a privately held nutraceutical company based in Oisterwijk, Netherlands. Pro Natura has over 30 years of operations and sales experience in Europe, with over 100 products that have been marketed to both long-term repeat customers and new large groups of distributors. Pro Natura has been supported by a seasoned management team that still includes its original founder and has historically boasted 10M+ in per annum sales. "The Acquisition marks an important turning point for Abattis as we narrow our focus on generating revenues and profits," commented Rob Abenante, President and CEO of Abattis. "It will give the Company unprecedented, direct access to the lucrative European markets as well as a diversified suite of over 100 products to offer our customers and clients. Pro Natura has developed a vast distribution network over the past three decades, which we hope to grow by adding our growing line of products developed by our subsidiary, Vergence" added Mr. Abenante. According to a recent BCC Research market report1, the global nutraceuticals market is projected to reach US$336.1 billion by 2023 from US$230.9 billion in 2018, growing at a CAGR of 7.8% during the forecast period. As noted in a recent Brightfield Group report2, the market for CBD in Europe alone is projected to exceed 1.2 billion by 2023, growing over 400% from the market's estimated value of 318 million in 2018. The Acquisition will allow the Company to leverage Pro Natura's distribution network for CBD sales in Europe, which will be further bolstered by new CBD products introduced by the Company. "We are seeing a trend in both developed and developing countries towards increased self-medication and nutraceutical awareness, especially in respect of healthy and natural based products," stated Brazos Minshew, Chairman of the Abattis Medical Advisory Board. "Growth in the market size for nutraceuticals and bioceuticals has also been supported by an increase in the aging population worldwide and a growing interest in health and wellness in people of that demographic," added Mr. Minshew. The Agreement provides for the acquisition of 100% of Pro Natura's outstanding shares from Catalyst Investment Capital Corp. ("Catalyst") in exchange for the payment of 6,684,200 to Catalyst, which will be paid as follows: (i) 2,000,000 on closing; (ii) 2,220,000 one year following closing; and (iii) 2,464,200 two years following closing. The Acquisition Subsidiary has also agreed to pay Catalyst (i) a 5,000,000 milestone payment within two years of Abattis CBD products being launched through Pro Natura's sales and (ii) a 4,000,000 milestone payment within two years of launch of sales of Abattis' proprietary product, Comfort, through Pro Natura's sales channels. The Acquisition Subsidiary's obligation to make these milestone payments will expire within three years from closing of the Agreement. The Company and Catalyst are actively working to complete the Acquisition and hope to do so by mid-April 2019. Past management of Pro Natura will also continue to support the company in the future as this transition takes place, joining the international team of Vergence Naturals through this acquisition. Further to the Company's news releases dated February 18th and 27th, 2019, the Company is still undergoing its year-end financial statement audit and trading of the Company's common shares on the Canadian Stock Exchange remains halted. During this time, all material disclosures will continue to be disseminated via news release, but for those interested in more frequent general corporate updates, the Company encourages subscription to the Company's newsletter. Subscription is possible at the bottom of the Abattis website (https://abattis.com/). The Company appreciates the ongoing patience and overwhelming support from Abattis investors and stakeholders and will keep providing company highlights and updates via the newsletter. The Company also announces that Kent McParland has been replaced by Francesco Paolini as the Interim Chief Financial Officer and as a Director of Abattis. The Company thanks Mr. McParland for his service over the past year and wishes him all the best in his future endeavours. "The Company is extremely grateful for Mr. McParland's contributions over the past year," stated Rob Abenante. "We also welcome Mr. Paolini to the team, who brings over 35 years of international business, product distribution and entrepreneurial experience to his new role at Abattis," added Mr. Abenante. "These skill sets will play an instrumental role as the Company shifts its focus to global sales." About Abattis Bioceuticals Corp. Abattis is positioned to be a leader in the cannabis industry as a fully integrated medicinal cannabis company. In addition to the Company's flagship cultivation asset located on British Columbia's Gabriola Island, Abattis is aggressively building its portfolio of assets including through the acquisition of 140 genetic strains and a robust portfolio of fertilizers and nutrients, custom formulated for the emerging cannabis market. Abattis' products and services divisions include its Abattis-branded vaporizer line, as well as the proprietary cannabinoid therapeutic, COMFORT, formulated to treat chronic pain and inflammation. Abattis continues to service the cultivation industry through its service agreements with licensed laboratory Northern Vine Canada Inc., and Dicentra Inc., one of Canada's largest regulatory advisory firms. Abattis continues to pioneer cutting-edge research in partnership with the University of British Columbia and Mitacs, to research and develop nanoemulsified cannabinoid-rich hemp oil and cannabinoid-infused products. Abattis has also solidified key investments into XLABS Therapeutics (ONT) Inc., building one of Canada's largest cannabinoid manufacturing labs, as well as blockchain service and cryptocurrency platforms focused solely on cannabis product and service transactions. ABATTIS BIOCEUTICALS CORP "Rob Abenante" Robert Abenante, President & CEO About Canada One Communications Inc. Canada One Communications Inc. ("Canada One") is a full-service Investor Relations and Marketing company that focuses on both private and public sectors within the Canadian markets. Canada One offers timely responses to all investor inquiries over several mediums and effective, thorough market awareness programs that are specifically designed to maximize exposure and bring value to shareholders. Canada One's dedicated and experienced team strives to promote client information to the public and educate potential investors on the various developments of its clients. From basic phone-call and email investor correspondence, to full-scale comprehensive marketing packages which includes industry analysis, website development, corporate videos and other marketing programs, Canada One provides a full suite of services that are fully compliant with Canadian securities regulations. Canada One is driven by an uncompromising dedication to provide publicly listed and private companies with across-the-board investor relations and marketing solutions, directly translating these services into organic growth and increased market value of its valued clients. FORWARD LOOKING INFORMATION This press release contains forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words including but not exclusive to "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "may", "will", "project", "intends", "should", "believe" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this press release include statements regarding: the anticipated closing of the Acquisition; the Acquisition giving the Company unprecedented, direct access to the lucrative European markets as well as a suite of over 100 products to offer its customers and clients; the Company's hope to grow Pro Natura's product line with the addition of Abattis' growing line of products in Vergence; expected size of the global nutraceuticals market and the European CBD market; the expectation that the Acquisition will allow the Company to leverage Pro Natura's distribution network for CBD sales in Europe and that such activities will be further bolstered by new CBD products introduced by the Company; trends towards self-medication and nutraceutical awareness; future obligations to purchase price and milestone payments to Catalyst; and the benefits of Mr. Paolini's past experience as the Company shifts its focus to global sales. 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. Additional risk factors are included in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis, available under the Company's profile on www.sedar.com. The forward-looking statements are made as at the date hereof and the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, where because of new information, future events or results, or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Sources 1. https://www.bccresearch.com/market-research/food-and-beverage/nutraceuticals-global-markets-to-2023-report-fod013g.html 2. https://www.brightfieldgroup.com/press-releases/europe-cbd-market-through-2023 For more information, please visit the Company's website at: www.abattis.com For inquiries please contact +1(808) 650-3007 or at [email protected]. Abattis' investor relations are managed by Canada One Communications Inc. SOURCE Abattis Bioceuticals Corp. "We are delighted to welcome Afsaneh and Kevin to the National Geographic Society board of trustees," said Board Chairman Jean M. Case. "As National Geographic continues to extend and strengthen its global reach, these new trustees will bring their financial, media and global expertise to the board, ensuring that the Society is well-positioned for long-term impact." Added Tracy R. Wolstencroft, president and chief executive officer of the National Geographic Society: "Afsaneh and Kevin are true leaders in the worlds of investment and international business. Their financial acumen and global perspectives will enhance our ability to use the power of science, exploration, education and storytelling to illuminate the wonder of the world, define critical challenges and catalyze action to protect our planet." Previously, Beschloss was managing director and partner at the Carlyle Group and president of Carlyle Asset Management. She was also treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank and worked at Shell International and J.P. Morgan. Beschloss has advised governments, central banks and regulatory agencies on global public policy and financial policy. While at the World Bank, Beschloss led energy investments and policy work related to sustainable investing in traditional, renewable and clean energy and power projects. She also founded the bank's Natural Gas Group to invest in natural gas projects in emerging economies to reduce carbon emissions. Beschloss is on the boards of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the World Resources Institute and the American Red Cross and is the vice chair of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). A member of the World Economic Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations, Beschloss holds a Master of Philosophy with honors in economics from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Before joining Maxply Capital Management, Maroni was a founding principal and senior managing partner of Spectrum Equity, a leading private equity firm providing capital to innovative media, software and information services companies. He continues to be a special limited partner of the firm, which is investing its eighth fund. Prior to Spectrum, Maroni worked at Time Warner in corporate development and was an analyst at Harvard Management Company. Maroni has a long record of philanthropic service, including serving as a member of the President's Council at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he is co-chair of the MGH Fund. He is also a vice chair of Harvard Business School's HBS Fund and a trustee of Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts. Additionally, he is a trustee emeritus of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, where he served on the Executive Committee; a trustee emeritus of the University of Virginia's College Foundation; and a trustee emeritus of The Park School in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he served as board chair. Maroni has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Media Note: Headshots available here. About the National Geographic Society The National Geographic Society is a global nonprofit organization that uses the power of science, exploration, education and storytelling to illuminate the wonder of the world, define critical challenges and catalyze action to protect our planet. Since 1888, National Geographic has pushed the boundaries of exploration, investing in bold people and transformative ideas, providing more than 14,000 grants for work across all seven continents, reaching 3 million students each year through education offerings, and engaging audiences around the globe through signature convenings and content. To learn more, visit www.nationalgeographic.org or follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. SOURCE National Geographic Society Related Links https://www.nationalgeographic.org LINCOLNSHIRE, Ill., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Alight Solutions, a leader in technology-enabled health, wealth and human capital management (HCM) and financial solutions, today announced it has completed substantially all1 of its acquisition of the Workday and Cornerstone OnDemand cloud practices of Wipro Limited. The acquired business has a presence across 11 countries including Australia, India, the United States, and several others across Europe, and deploys Workday and Cornerstone OnDemand solutions for clients of all sizes and across industries. The transaction builds upon Alight's existing HCM deployment and application management services capabilities through the addition of new geographies and critical talent. "We see incredible opportunity in the cloud space as companies across the globe increasingly adopt cloud technologies to support their HR and finance functions," said Chris Michalak, CEO, Alight Solutions. "This acquisition, along with the recent addition of Carlson Management Consulting, adds considerable scale to our HCM and financials business, and positions Alight to take advantage of the growing market for these services." Providing perspective on the deal within the Cornerstone ecosystem, Dave Mortell, vice president of Alliances with Cornerstone offered, "This addition of talent and capabilities for Alight enables a strong deployment partner for Cornerstone, and we are eager to see how this combination of exceptional services, talent, and sales expertise will benefit our thousands of clients around the world." "I am extremely excited to build on our significant cloud expertise in existing geographies and grow in new markets with the addition of former Wipro colleagues," said Colin Brennan, executive vice president, HCM & Financial Solutions at Alight. "Together, our team has exceptional experience across Workday and Cornerstone OnDemand and provides a depth of advisory capabilities that we know our clients need." More than 300 colleagues will join Alight's existing team of over 1,000 certified Workday and Cornerstone OnDemand experts through the transaction. Together, the teams will ensure a smooth transition for clients and continue to strengthen Alight's leadership position in cloud-based HCM and financials deployment and services. About Alight Solutions As a leading provider of human capital solutions, we help our clients and their people navigate the complexity of health, wealth and HR. We combine data-driven, consumer-centered technology with personalized care and service to deliver a superior customer experience. Our dedicated colleagues across 19 global centers help 23 million people and their 11 million family members simplify work and life, both now and in the future. At Alight, we are reimagining how people and organizations thrive. Follow Alight on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alightsolutions Follow Alight on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alightsolutions 1The transaction is expected to close in select EMEA countries on April 30, 2019. Media Contact: MacKenzie Lucas +1.224.737.1153 [email protected] alight.com SOURCE Alight Solutions Related Links http://alightsolutions.com VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mission Ready Solutions Inc. (Mission Ready or the Company) (TSXV: MRS) is pleased to announce that it has completed the non-brokered private placement (the "Offering") described in its news release of March 8, 2019. In connection with the closing of the Offering, the Company issued an aggregate of 10,889,500 units (the "Units") at a price of CDN$0.25 per Unit for gross proceeds of CDN$2,722,375. Each Unit consists of one common share in the capital of the Company (a Share) and one whole transferable common share purchase warrant (a Warrant). Each whole Warrant is exercisable to acquire one Share at an exercise price of CDN$0.40 per Share until April 2, 2020 which is 12 months from the date of issuance. Insiders of the Company acquired an aggregate of 320,000 Units in the Offering, which participation constituted a "related party transaction" as defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions (MI 61-101). Such participation is exempt from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 as neither the fair market value of the Units acquired by the insiders, nor the consideration for the Units paid by such insiders, exceed 25% of the Company's market capitalization. As required by MI 61-101, the Company advises that it expects to file a material change report relating to the Offering less than 21 days before completion of the Offering, which is necessary to complete the Offering in an expeditious manner and is reasonable in the circumstances. The Company plans to use the proceeds of the Offering for advancing the Companys targeted growth initiatives, to expand the Companys sales pipeline and for general working capital. The Company has paid cash commissions of $107,570.00 and issued 430,280 finders warrants (Finders Warrants) to finders as compensation in relation to the Offering. Each Finders Warrant is exercisable to acquire one Share at an exercise price of CDN$0.40 per Share until April 2, 2020. The Offering remains subject to final approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. The securities issued under the Offering, and any Shares that may be issuable on exercise of any such securities, will be subject to a statutory hold period expiring four months and one day from the date of issuance of such securities. About Mission Ready Solutions Inc. Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Mission Ready innovates and manufactures leading tech-centric defense and tactical solutions to prevent injuries and enhance the performance of military personnel, first-responders and all those who protect us by equipping them with the next generation of personal protective technologies. Mission Ready is committed to becoming a global leader in personal protective technologies through the strategic growth of its three synergistic business segments; Innovations & Development, Prototyping & Manufacturing, and Product Sales. Mission Ready trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol MRS. For further information, visit MRSCorp.com or contact: Investor Relations T: 1.877.479.7778 Ext 500 E: IR@MRSCorp.com Mission Ready Solutions Inc. (signed Jeffery L. Schwartz) Jeffery L. Schwartz, President & CEO This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "forecast", "project", "budget", "schedule", "may", "will", "could", "might", "should" or variations of such words or similar words or expressions. Forward-looking information is based on reasonable assumptions that have been made by Mission Ready Solutions Inc. as at the date of such information and is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Mission Ready Solutions Inc. to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable. Although Mission Ready Solutions Inc. has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Mission Ready Solutions Inc. does not undertake to update any forward-looking information that is included herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. PLANO, Texas, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Alliance Data Systems Corporation (NYSE: ADS), a leading provider of loyalty and marketing solutions derived from transaction-rich data, will host a conference call on April 25, 2019, at 8:30 a.m. ET to discuss the Company's first-quarter 2019 results. Hosting the call will be Ed Heffernan, president and chief executive officer; and Charles Horn, chief financial officer. The conference call will be available via the Internet at www.alliancedata.com. Additionally, there will be several slides accompanying the webcast. Please go to the website at least 15 minutes prior to the call to register, download and install any necessary software. Please contact AdvisIRy Partners by e-mail: [email protected] with any questions. About Alliance Data Alliance Data (NYSE: ADS) is a leading global provider of data-driven marketing and loyalty solutions serving large, consumer-based industries. The Company creates and deploys customized solutions, enhancing the critical customer marketing experience; the result is measurably changing consumer behavior while driving business growth and profitability for some of today's most recognizable brands. Alliance Data helps its clients create and increase customer loyalty through solutions that engage millions of customers each day across multiple touch points using traditional, digital, mobile and emerging technologies. An S&P 500, FORTUNE 500 and FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For company headquartered in Plano, Texas, Alliance Data consists of three businesses that together employ approximately 20,000 associates at more than 100 locations worldwide. Alliance Data's card services business is a provider of market-leading private label, co-brand, and business credit card programs. Epsilon is a leading provider of multichannel, data-driven technologies and marketing services, and also includes Conversant, a leader in personalized digital marketing. LoyaltyOne owns and operates the AIR MILES Reward Program, Canada's most recognized loyalty program, and Netherlands-based BrandLoyalty, a global provider of tailor-made loyalty programs for grocers. Follow Alliance Data on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. Contacts: Investors/Analysts Tiffany Louder Alliance Data 214-494-3048 [email protected] Media Shelley Whiddon Alliance Data 214-494-3811 [email protected] SOURCE Alliance Data Systems Corporation Related Links http://www.alliancedata.com WASHINGTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- New technologies that could completely replace the need for passwords. New filters that put an end to scammers and spammers calling your mobile device. New approaches by law enforcers that can lead to arrests of fraudsters. And 15 "golden rules" that any person can follow to best prevent fraud today and tomorrow. These are just some of the vital topics and advice stories in "How We Can Beat Fraud," an 8-page special report on the best approaches now being pursued by companies, law enforcers and entrepreneurs to block fraud. Plus: the four most common phone frauds today, and how to detect and prevent them. Learn how biometric security measures are growing more accurate, from fingerprints and voice recognition to your personal typing and mouse-movement patternsand even your unique blood flow measures. Also discover how the Justice Department has recently cracked down on scammers, and how experts on the front lines recommend you stop fraud every time it calls. Other stories in the April issue: Your Health Sound Advice About Hearing Aids: 80 percent of people who would benefit from a hearing aid don't use one, studies show. This expanded primer on the current state of hearing aids (and what to expect when over-the-counter versions finally hit the market in the next two years) gives all you need to know to make wise decisions and finally take action. Learn how hearing devices are getting smarter, smaller, and easier. At the same time, they do more than just improve sound: streaming audio, smartphone apps and rechargeable batteries are becoming the standard. Your Money Travel Insurance in Plain English: Riders, waivers, disqualifying eventsthe terminology used in travel insurance agreements can be complicated. How do you figure out what to look for in travel insurance, or even if you need it at all? Take a look at our travel insurance guide to point you toward the coverage that works for you. Riders, waivers, disqualifying eventsthe terminology used in travel insurance agreements can be complicated. How do you figure out what to look for in travel insurance, or even if you need it at all? Take a look at our travel insurance guide to point you toward the coverage that works for you. Invest for Free (Or Nearly So): Brokerage services are offering low-cost mutual funds, or even mutual funds with zero costyes, zero-- as a way to bring in new customers. Personal finance expert Jane Bryant Quinn notes that an investment on a zero-fee fund can yield much higher returns than typical mutual funds, and offers advice for how to avoid expenses that may lower your returns on your investments. Brokerage services are offering low-cost mutual funds, or even mutual funds with zero costyes, zero-- as a way to bring in new customers. Personal finance expert notes that an investment on a zero-fee fund can yield much higher returns than typical mutual funds, and offers advice for how to avoid expenses that may lower your returns on your investments. Springtime Savings: Everyone could use some cost-cutting tips when it comes to spring cleaning. Find out how to halve the amount of money you spend on sponges, prolong the lifespan of your wooden deck and replant your perennials for optimal growth. Your Life Q&A with Melinda Gates : The cofounder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has traveled the world and seen firsthand the challenges of women, particularly in third world economies. Learn about her quest to bring more resources and fairness to women, and what she believes the outcome could be if successful. Plus, an inside look into her life with Bill, and her personal priorities. Your AARP Have Fun, Get Fit, Win a Trip: Last year, more than 82,000 people joined AARP's Fit & Fun Health Challenge. The challenge is back this year, and participants will have a chance to win the grand prize: a spa weekend getaway for two. Wellness ambassador Denise Austin again encourages participants to walk at least 30 minutes per day for 8 weeks, beginning May 1 and ending June 30 . Visit aarp.org/challenge to learn how to get started. More information can be found at: http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/ About AARP Bulletin The definitive news source for AARP's members, AARP Bulletin (http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/) reaches more than 23.5 million households each month in print, with additional news and in-depth coverage online. Covering health and health policy, Medicare, Social Security, consumer protection, personal finance, and AARP state and national news developments, AARP Bulletin delivers the story behind the key issues confronting 50+ America. The monthly consumer-oriented news publication has become a must-read for congressional lawmakers and Washington opinion leaders, and it provides AARP members with pertinent information they need to know. About AARP AARP is the nation's largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering people 50 and older to choose how they live as they age. With a nationwide presence and nearly 38 million members, AARP strengthens communities and advocates for what matters most to families: health security, financial stability and personal fulfillment. AARP also produces the nation's largest circulation publications: AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. To learn more, visit www.aarp.org or follow @AARP and @AARPadvocates on social media. SOURCE AARP Related Links http://www.aarp.org SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Arizona School of Real Estate & Business (ASREB), a division of Hondros Education Group (HEG), now offers an online real estate licensing course for students looking to become a licensed real estate professional in the state of Arizona. Similar to the ASREB classroom option, the online real estate course is designed to accommodate busy students in need of a flexible approach to their education. Students now have the option to take their licensing courses in the classroom or online, thus being able to choose the course of study that best meets their needs and learning style. "We're excited to offer an online learning option that gives all individuals the ability to take their real estate licensing courses," said Nate Hoelzen, president of ASREB. "It's the same quality education we've always offered, with the added convenience of an online option." Students can complete their 90 hours of required Arizona real estate pre-licensing education online at their own pace, or in about two weeks in the classroom. ASREB's real estate pre-licensing program includes: 90-hour Principles & Practices Basic Course Real Estate Principles & Practices textbook: Arizona Edition School Exam Career Expo invitation The addition of online Arizona licensing courses aligns with HEG's mission to be the nation's premier provider of real estate education. "We want our students to know their options are unlimited," said Tina Lapp, president of Hondros Education Group. "With our various education options, we can accommodate any individual's schedule and learning style." About Arizona School of Real Estate & Business Arizona School of Real Estate & Business has offered licensing courses for the real estate, mortgage, home inspection, and appraisal industries for the past 50 years. The school also supports a leading industry publication, featuring national and local expert writers and columnists. ASREB's classroom courses are available in Scottsdale, Gilbert, Glendale/Peoria, Prescott, Surprise, and Tucson, as well as online renewal courses tailored for Arizona licensees. For more information, visit asreb.com. About Hondros Education Group Hondros Education Group is a leading national provider of professional education. With over 50 years of experience, HEG has educated over one million students through its family of brands made up of Hondros College, Arizona School of Real Estate & Business, Hogan School of Real Estate, Hondros Learning, CompuCram, Learn Mortgage, Schlicher-Kratz Institute, Hondros College of Business, and Agent Connect. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, HEG offers online and in-classroom courses, exam prep solutions, and textbooks for the real estate, mortgage, appraisal, insurance, and home inspection industries. For more information, visit hondroseducationgroup.com. Name: Sarah Irvin Clark, Irvin PR Phone: 614-296-4057 Email: [email protected] SOURCE Arizona School of Real Estate & Business Related Links http://www.asreb.com BOSTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Society of Appraisers (ASA) is hosting a Fine Arts Connoisseurship class: Appraising Fine Arts Overview at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design "MassArt" in Boston on June 1-2, 2019. Appraising Fine Arts Overview is intended for anyone who is interested in how art is examined, researched and evaluated by appraisers. "I designed the class to cover a range of topics to interest a broad audience from the professional to the merely curious," said course instructor Lela Hersh, ASA, of Museum of Fine Arts Consulting, LLC, an Accredited Senior Appraiser and the current Personal Property International Chair. Appraising Fine Arts Overview explores how professional personal property appraisers approach their work when forming an opinion of an object's value. Appraising a work of art demands a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience in a fascinating combination of areas attributions, history of ownership, forgery detection, tax law and market influences. Arrive early on May 30 - 31 to take the optional 15-Hour USPAP for Personal Property. Stay an extra night and take the Fine Arts specialty exam on June 3 to fulfill accreditation requirements. Course attendees may: Take the class without an exam and still receive 17 credit hours Take the class and the Fine Arts course exam and receive 18 credit hours Take the Fine Arts specialty exam for ASA advancement and accreditation accreditation attendees who select this option must have passed all four Personal Property POV courses (or submitted an approved equivalency) and currently be in the process of applying for their Fine Arts accreditation Take both the Fine Arts course exam and the Fine Arts specialty exam Find out more on how to become an ASA Accredited Personal Property Appraiser by clicking here. For more information, please visit: http://www.appraisers.org/Education/View-Class?ClassID=4075 American Society of Appraisers The American Society of Appraisers is a world renowned and respected international organization devoted to the appraisal profession. As the oldest and only major appraisal organization representing all appraisal specialists, ASA is devoted to providing the highest possible standards in all areas of ethics, professionalism, education and designation criteria. For more information about the American Society of Appraisers, the ASA designation program for appraisers or the Society's free "Find an Appraiser" Referral System, visit www.appraisers.org or call (800) 272-8258. Media contact: Todd Paradis [email protected] (703) 733-2124 SOURCE American Society of Appraisers Related Links http://www.appraisers.org NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 2224, Ascend Pinnacle hosted its third Asian Corporate Directors Summit at The Ritz-Carlton New York, Westchester. This year's Summit featured key topics for corporate boards and placed an additional focus and effort on the pipeline of Asian board member candidates. Ascend Pinnacle Aspiring Directors Academy, held adjacent to the Summit with EY as the lead sponsor, had an over 40% increase in the number of attendees from last year. The Academy is part of the Aspiring Directors Institute, a cohort based program providing touch points including networking events and mentoring sessions during the year. Attendees at the Ascend Pinnacle Asian Corporate Directors Summit Deloitte, founding sponsor of the Ascend Pinnacle Asian Corporate Directors Summit, along with other sponsors, Archegos Capital Management, Equilar, Southwest Airlines, and TPG, support Ascend Pinnacle's goal to increase the number of Asian Americans on public company boards. The Summit panels covered a broad range of topics from corporate governance, diversity, emerging markets to current issues. Highlights included a Fireside chat with Farooq Kathwari, Chairman, and CEO of Ethan Allen Interiors Inc., around Corporate Social Responsibility and the role of corporate boards, with other key topics including maximizing value of the boardroom through diversity; governance in an era of disruptive risks; international corporate boards; and AI in the boardroom. "The discussions and action items at this year's Summit focused on boards elevating diverse voices and being open to accept and integrate directors that come from different backgrounds, both professionally and socially. In 2018, women held 22.5% of board seats in Fortune 500 companies; people of color held 16.1%, so there's a lot of work that still needs to be done. But more encouragingly, over the past two years, women and minorities totaled a solid 50% of new S&P 500 directors. These numbers show that the shift towards board diversity can be achieved and through programs like Ascend Pinnacle we can help to accelerate that shift," said Anna W. Mok, Co-Founder, Ascend Pinnacle; President Elect, Ascend and Partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Board directors play a key role in advancing Corporate Social Responsibility. Throughout my career I've been focused on integrating a values-driven business with employee wellbeing as well as promoting good governance both nationally and internationally. I'm thrilled to have been part of the Ascend Pinnacle Summit and excited about the future of Asian Corporate Board members," said Farooq Kathwari, Chairman, and CEO of Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. Ascend launched Pinnacle five years ago with a focus on Asian American directors on US public company and large private company boards. The four Ascend Pinnacle focus areas are the Asian Corporate Directors Summit, the regional roundtables, professional development and thought leadership. About Ascend Ascend is the largest, non-profit Pan-Asian membership organization for business professionals and executives in North America. Established in 2005, Ascend, a career lifecycle organization, reaches 60,000+ corporate board directors, senior executives, professionals, and MBA/undergraduate students involved in its 50+ chapters in the United States and Canada. Visit http://www.ascendleadership.org for more information. Media Contact: Sofia Poyhonen 212-248-4888 [email protected] SOURCE Ascend Today the brokerage general agency (BGA) community, field marketing organizations (FMOs), financial institutions, agents and advisors are required to use separate quote and illustration platforms for Term and Permanent Life, a highly inefficient practice and expensive platform operation. With Ensight Intelligent Quote, case designers, wholesalers and insurance producers simply enter a client's parameters and case design once and then simultaneously run multiple illustrations for Term and Permanent Life insurance. This streamlines the case design process and can help increase 'Term-Perm' conversion rates by more than 10% annually. "As a leading life insurance brokerage general agency, 'where' and 'how' our marketers spend their time is critical to the performance of our business. With the opportunity to bring together Term and Permanent Life insurance quoting into a single case design process, we can simplify our life insurance platform infrastructure, extend Intelligent Quote's 'single-entry' case design efficiencies across another product class, and help more insurance producers and advisors close more suitable sales that are in the best interest of the client," said Dave Donchey, CLU, President and Principal of Leisure Werden and Terry Agency. "Ensight Intelligent Quote continues its revolution to help transform life insurance distribution into something never seen before in our industry." With Ensight Intelligent Quote, case designers will be able to - Quote Term & Permanent Life products simultaneously in one case design process Template frequently run Term quotes for rapid re-quoting in seconds Streamline "Term To Perm" quotes to increase presentation, conversion & revenue Create visually stunning Term sales concepts, such as Cost of Waiting, Term Conversion, and Laddering "Case designers, wholesalers, agents and financial advisors often work in a highly demanding environment. Quoting term and permanent life insurance policies on different platforms with their own unique workflows and product requirements - not only creates a greater burden, but also takes away from a focus on the client," stated Bill Unrue, Chief Executive Officer, Assurance. "By bringing Term and Permanent life into a streamlined, 'single-entry' quoting process, we can deliver case design efficiencies for the life insurance distribution community, more dedicated time for the client relationship and increase 'Term-Perm' placement, where it best fits the client's needs." With API-based integration with the Ebix platform suite, Ensight Intelligent Quote provides extensive coverage of the life insurance product market landscape, as well as support for the vast majority of insurance carriers. Intelligent Quote can also be fully integrated with SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Ebix SmartOffice, supporting the requirements of BGAs, Financial Institutions, Wirehouses / Banks, Broker Dealers and other firms. About Assurance Assurance (www.assuranceapp.com) partners with insurance carriers and national distributors to provide SaaS-based sales acceleration solutions that make selling life insurance and annuities simpler, more profitable & a stunning digital experience. Our sales acceleration platform, Ensight, helps our clients drive sales growth and productivity, improve product marketing and transform the customer and advisor experience at the point of sale. Since its launch in 2017, Ensight is quickly becoming the dominant insurance sales enablement platform in the life and annuities sector. Ernest Rady is Assurance's principle investor and Chairman of the Board. Mr. Rady is also Chairman, President and CEO of American Assets; founder and Chairman of the Board of Insurance Company of the West (ICW); and Chairman of the Dean's Advisory Council of the Rady School of Management, UCSD. http://www.assuranceapp.com Media Contact: Matt Essick, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), 888-986-8157, [email protected] SOURCE Assurance Related Links https://www.assuranceapp.com CHICAGO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Baggage Handling System Market by Mode (Airport, Marine, Rail), Solution (Check-In, Screening & Load, Conveying & Sorting, Unload & Reclaim), Check-In (Assisted, Self), Conveying (Conveyor, DCV), Tracking (Barcode, RFID) and Region - Global Forecast to 2025", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global Baggage Handling System Market is projected to reach USD 13.7 billion by 2025 from USD 8.4 billion in 2018, at a CAGR of 7.28%. The growing focus on improving air connectivity and the development of intermodal transport will drive the Baggage Handling System Market. Additionally, the rising smart city projects and growing maritime industry are also expected to drive the demand for baggage handling systems. Factors such as complex architecture and high level of initial investments are restricting the growth of this market. However, an increase in passenger and cargo traffic with a limited airport space provides new growth opportunities for the market players. Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=222241953 Browse in-depth TOC on "Baggage Handling System Market" 76 Tables 45 Figures 163 Pages "Conveying and sorting to be the largest segment, by solution." The conveying and sorting segment is projected to lead the Baggage Handling System Market, by solution. According to primary insights, sorting is the heart of the total baggage handling system. The exponential increase in air and marine passenger volume for domestic and international travels worldwide has encouraged baggage handling system manufacturers to find ways to improve existing baggage handling technologies with automated sorting. According to Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques (SITA), with a rise in automation reflected in increasing use of conveyor systems, the rate of baggage mishandling reduced in 2018 compared to 2017. "RFID system to be the fastest growing segment for Baggage Handling System Market, by tracking technology." The airline industry is a customer service oriented industry, which leads to immense competition. Today, the key challenge for the airport industry is to reduce baggage mishandling. Baggage mishandling can lead to customer dissatisfaction. According to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, between November 2016 and June 2018, domestic Indian airlines received 763 grievances related to baggagethe fourth highest after complaints about flight delays, ticket fares, and check-in and boarding. In response to that, companies and authorities are focusing on the development of an effective baggage handling system. For instance, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has been working toward 'Resolution 753'. RFID systems have a better coverage area than barcode systems and do not need to be positioned in the line of sight for scanning. The RFID system segment is expected to show strong growth in the coming years, with Resolution 753 mandates. However, according to primary insights, Resolution 753 will never discard barcode systems completely "Asia Oceania to be the largest market for baggage handling systems." Asia Oceania is expected to provide lucrative opportunities in the Baggage Handling System Market. Factors such as strong economic growth, increasing focus on development of smart cities, and favorable government policies for improving air connectivity have triggered the demand for baggage handling systems in the region. Due to the ever-growing air passenger traffic, China accounts for the highest market share of the total Asia Oceania Baggage Handling System Market. Additionally, with a significant focus of the government on development of new airports, India is expected to play a key role in the baggage handling system industry in the Asia Oceania region. For instance, the Indian government plans to construct 100 new airports with an investment of about USD 60 billion in the next 1015 years. On the other hand, Europe and the Americas have matured markets for the baggage handling systems. Request for Sample Pages: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestsampleNew.asp?id=222241953 The Baggage Handling System Market is dominated by few global players and comprises several regional players as well. The key players in the Baggage Handling System Market are Siemens (Germany), Vanderlande Industries (Netherlands), Daifuku (Japan), Pteris Global Limited (Singapore), BEUMER (Germany), and SITA (Switzerland). Browse Related Reports: Conveyor System Market by Industry (Warehouse & Distribution, Food & Beverage Meat, Poultry & Dairy, Automotive, Electronics, Mining, and Airport), Type (Belt, Roller, Overhead, Floor, Pallet, Crescent, Cable, Bucket) & Region - Global Forecast to 2025 Cargo Handling Equipment Market by Application (Air, Land, & Marine), Equipment (Conveyors, Forklift Truck, Aviation Dolly, Pallet Jack, AGV, Crane, RTG, Loader, Stacker, Straddle Carrier, Terminal Tractor), Propulsion, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025 About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledge Store" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Shelly Singh MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/baggage-handling-system-market.asp Visit Our Website: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com SOURCE MarketsandMarkets "We've created an inclusive environment that speaks to who we are as an employer and embraces the diversity of our team members," said Nandita Bakhshi, President and CEO of Bank of the West. "Our commitment to fostering a culture of respect for all speaks to our employee values and ensures we are a company our people recognize as a great place to work." The bank provides benefits for same-sex partners, regardless of marital status, and transgender benefits in all health plans offered. Employees can be a part of the bank's LGBTQ resource groups that actively volunteer in communities, participate in employee recruitment fairs, and support personal and professional development. The bank also has mandatory training programs and new hire orientations that help identify and manage bias. Learn more about Bank of the West's commitment to positive banking here. "Advancing equality in the workplace helps to ensure employees can bring their authentic selves to work," said Sheri Paulo, Chief Human Resources Officer. "Incorporating diverse perspectives in the workplace spurs creativity, contributes to innovation and fosters belonging." The 2019 CEI evaluates each company's LGBTQ-related policies and practices including non-discrimination workplace protections, domestic partner benefits, transgender-inclusive health care benefits, competency programs, and public engagement with the LGBTQ community. Bank of the West's efforts in satisfying all of the CEI's criteria resulted in a 100 percent ranking and the designation as a Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality. "The top-scoring companies on this year's CEI are not only establishing policies that affirm and include employees here in the United States, they are applying these policies to their global operations and impacting millions of people beyond our shores," said HRC President Chad Griffin. "Many of these companies have also become vocal advocates for equality in the public square, including the dozens that have signed on to amicus briefs in vital Supreme Court cases and the more than 170 that have joined HRC's Business Coalition for the Equality Act. Time and again, leading American businesses have shown that protecting their employees and customers from discrimination isn't just the right thing to do -- it's also good for business." For more information on the 2019 Corporate Equality Index, or to download a free copy of the report, visit www.hrc.org/cei. The Human Rights Campaign Foundation is the educational arm of America's largest civil rights organization working to achieve equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender and queer people. HRC envisions a world where LGBTQ people are embraced as full members of society at home, at work and in every community. About Bank of the West We are driven by our fundamental belief in redefining banking for a better future. At a time when people demand more from companies, we are taking action to ensure our activities help protect the planet, improve people's lives, and strengthen communities. That's why we are investing where we can have a real impact: supporting energy transition, helping enable women entrepreneurs and financing innovative start-ups. As the bank for a changing world, Bank of the West is committed to sustainable finance along with our parent company BNP Paribas. Through Digital Channels and offices across the U.S., Bank of the West provides financial tools and resources to more than 2 million individuals, families and businesses. Deposit and loan products offered by Bank of the West, Member FDIC and Equal Housing Lender. 2019 Bank of the West. Doing business in South Dakota as Bank of the West California. Connect with us SOURCE Bank of the West Related Links http://www.bankofthewest.com WILKES-BARRE, Pa., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Berkshire Hathaway GUARD Insurance Companies recently added a Commercial Package product in Pennsylvania. This new offering includes: Commercial Property with limits up to $120 million per location with an enhanced causes of loss form which includes built-in equipment breakdown and inland marine coverages as well as crime coverage; General Liability with base limits of $1 million to $6 million with even higher limits considered; Employment-Related Practices Liability Insurance (EPLI); and Commercial Umbrella for added protection. According to CEO Sy Foguel, "Our goal is to become a 'One Stop Shop' for our agents and their insureds. We continue to expand our portfolio to supply our network of independent agents with quality products that enable them to grow. While we are only adding Commercial Package in Pennsylvania at this time, more states are soon to follow." Executive Vice President Lyle Hitt explains that this new package product is designed to complement the company's current Businessowner's Policy by "addressing the insurance needs of larger, more complex operations or businesses with multiple exposures." Hitt also notes that "our initial target markets include light-to-medium manufacturing, wholesalers and distributors, truck stops/travel plazas, resorts, and country clubs with plans to expand into additional markets." According to Vice President of Commercial Package Ellen Hauser, "GUARD's coverages are unique and built with a wide range of add-ons and industry-specific endorsements. We take a customized approach to expanding the limits and scope of traditional property and casualty insurance." GUARD's Assistant Vice President of Marketing Elizabeth Hartman says, "We can provide a great service to agents. Our product is competitively priced with discounts available when two or more lines are purchased as well as additional discounts based on unique business characteristics." In October of 2012, GUARD was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. an international holding company with diverse interests that include insurance and reinsurance. In 2013, GUARD unveiled a new identity as Berkshire Hathaway GUARD Insurance Companies. GUARD offers a national footprint with a growing list of insurance products, including: Workers' Compensation, property/liability via a Businessowner's Policy, Commercial Auto, Umbrella, Professional Liability, Disability, and Homeowners. Each of the organization's insurance companies is rated A+ ("Superior") by A.M. Best a leading source of independent rating information on the insurance industry. Agents interested in learning more should visit http://www.guard.com/cpp/ Contact: Elizabeth Hartman, AVP Marketing 570-825-9900, extension 8904 or e-mail [email protected] SOURCE Berkshire Hathaway GUARD Insurance Companies MANCHESTER, N.H., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Birch Hill, Manchester's only Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), and an affiliate of The RiverWoods Group, unveiled a new, limited-edition flexible contract today. This contract is the first of its kind in New England featuring greater flexibility and lower monthly cost. Birch Hill is an affiliate of The RiverWoods Group (TRWG), the largest charitable non-profit family of CCRCs in New Hampshire. "We created this new contract to respond directly to interest we had from prospective residents," said Linda Phypers, Executive Director of Birch Hill. "This provides greater predictability of costs, and the unique advantage of accessing your refundable assets during your lifetime." CCRCs welcome people 62 years or older, to enter as independent residents. Once there, residents enjoy a variety of amenities from housekeeping, laundry service, dining, inside and outside maintenance to educational programs and exercise classes, while making friends and cultivating community engagement. As they age, if a resident needs a higher level of care, it is available to them within the same campus. Several CCRCs in New Hampshire that offer a refundable contract provide a percentage of the original entrance fee to a resident's estate or to a resident, if they leave or when they pass away, and their home is resold. The major innovation in Birch Hill's contract is that residents can access their refundable portion during their lifetime, to pay for health care fees. The difference is in the details: Increased refundability: 70% vs. 50% Lower monthly independent living fees Lower monthly healthcare fees (if and when needed) The opportunity to maintain predictable cash flow through your lifetime The ability to access the 70% refundable entrance fee during your lifetime to pay health care costs This contract option, which is being pioneered in New England by Birch Hill, delivers increased value for couples, increased predictability of cash flow, as well as greater flexibility for residents. Importantly, the ability to dip into the refundable entrance fee during your lifetime is a valuable asset. Birch Hill is an affiliate of The RiverWoods Group (TRWG) , the largest charitable non-profit family of CCRCs in New Hampshire. TRWG affiliates include RiverWoods Exeter, a charitable, nonprofit, nationally-accredited CCRC comprised of three vibrant campuses on 200 wooded acres in Exeter, New Hampshire, as well as RiverWoods Durham, the newest affiliate, opening in Durham in late 2019. For a primer on CCRCs, download the Insider's Guide to CCRCs at: https://riverwoodsrc.org/what-is-a-ccrc/ About Birch Hill Birch Hill began in 1875 and has evolved through the decades to meet the changing needs of seniors in Manchester, NH. In 2009, the organization became a CCRC (Continuing Care Retirement Community), providing independent, assisted living, memory support and nursing care. Press Contact: Jackie Lucas Vera Voce Communication 978-255-1159 [email protected] SOURCE The RiverWoods Group Related Links https://riverwoodsrc.org Donlin Gold received key state permits: Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) granted final Waste Management Permit Alaska Department of Natural Resources (ADNR) granted final Reclamation and Closure Plan Approval Cash and term deposits were $162 million as of February 28, 2019 VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NOVAGOLD RESOURCES INC. (TSX, NYSE American: NG) today released its first quarter 2019 financial results and update on the Donlin Gold project in Alaska, which NOVAGOLD owns equally with Barrick Gold Corporation (Barrick). Details of the financial results for the first quarter ended February 28, 2019 are presented in the consolidated financial statements and quarterly report filed on Form 10-Q with the SEC that is available on the Company's website at www.novagold.com , on SEDAR at www.sedar.com , and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov . All amounts are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated and all mineral resource and reserve estimates are shown on a 100% project basis. In the first quarter 2019, the following milestones were achieved: Donlin Gold received two key state permits and advanced other approvals: ADEC issued the final Waste Management Permit ADNR issued the final Reclamation and Closure Plan Approval and advanced two other state authorizations Division of Mining, Land, and Water issued preliminary land use decisions for public comment, proposing to authorize facilities associated with the projects transportation corridor Division of Oil and Gas, State Pipeline Coordinators Section issued a preliminary decision to authorize the sections of the pipeline on state lands Launched a series of six public meetings on the preliminary decisions With permitting largely complete, there is an increased focus on continuing to integrate scoping-level optimization work into a study that will serve as the basis for an updated project development plan Donlin Gold and NOVAGOLD continued active external affairs and community engagement: Attended the State of Alaska legislative session in Juneau and met with key Representatives, Senators, Governor Dunleavy, senior agency executive appointees and mining program staff Connected with key stakeholders at the first two ADNR public hearings held in McGrath and Tyonek Met with career counselors in the Lower Kuskokwim School District to engage youth in a career fair Participated in the Alaska Forum on the Environment and received the Green Star Certification award that recognizes businesses for their efforts toward sustainable environmental stewardship Hosted the Donlin Gold Safety Expo ahead of the Iron Dog race in Alaska Together with The Kuskokwim Corporation (TKC), organized and participated in a Middle Kuskokwim gathering to discuss health & safety, community healing, mining, workforce development and other matters Presidents Message During the first quarter of 2019, we focused our activities on supporting government efforts in relation to various state permits. In addition, together with our partner Barrick Gold, we continued to advance optimization work on Donlin Gold and began preparing for the upcoming field program. Im pleased to report that in January, we received two state permits: the final Waste Management Permit and the final Reclamation and Closure Plan Approval that were issued by ADEC and ADNR, respectively. Progress was also made on other key state authorizations. ADNR issued preliminary land use decisions for public comment proposing to authorize facilities associated with the projects transportation corridor, including the access road and related material sites, airstrip, and upriver Jungjuk Port. The public comment period for these decisions closed on March 29, 2019. Additionally, ADNR issued the State Pipeline Coordinators Section preliminary decision to authorize the sections of the pipeline on state lands. The comment period for this decision closed on March 22, 2019 after public meetings in Anchorage, Bethel, Aniak, McGrath, Tyonek, and Skwentna Roadhouse. In the first quarter, Donlin Gold representatives provided technical support and responded to questions about the pipeline during the first two ADNR public hearings in McGrath and Tyonek. ADNRs approval of the Alaska Dam Safety certificates for the tailings storage facility and water retention and diversion structures requires a thorough stepwise process to deliver a final construction package to the State. The upcoming field program will be focused on completing a site investigation and collection of geotechnical information for the advancement of the engineering from a feasibility level to the final construction package. The site investigation information will support a preliminary design, detailed design and ultimately the final construction package, each of which will be submitted to ADNR for final approval and issuance of the certificates. We are currently in the advanced planning stage for the field program that will consist of geotechnical core drilling, test pits, overburden drilling, packer tests, hydrogeologic test well installation and pumping tests, and geophysical surveys. The field program will carry into 2020. In the first quarter, Earthjustice filed an administrative appeal of the Reclamation and Closure Plan Approval with ADNR and sent a request to ADEC for an informal review of the Waste Management Permit. In 2018, Earthjustice requested an informal review by ADEC of the State of Alaskas 401 certification. ADNR and ADEC are expected to issue their decisions in the second half of 2019. Given the level of detail and extensive work that has gone into these permits, we expect these permits to remain in place. With permitting largely complete, we are shifting more focus on integrating scoping-level optimization work into a study that will serve as the basis for an updated project development plan. Given Donlin Golds stage of development, this is the right time to advance work such as the Alaska Dam Safety certificates and engineering studies, to have the flexibility needed to proceed with the development of Donlin Gold. With the completion of the recent Barrick-Randgold merger, the Donlin Gold partnership is clearly benefitting from very constructive input from Barricks new technical team. We have a common goal of advancing the project in a financially-disciplined manner with a focus on engineering excellence, environmental stewardship, safety and social responsibility. Deposits like Donlin Gold are extremely scarce and very important, particularly given the industrys rapid decline in gold reserves and grade. A federally-permitted category-killer gold project, primed for development in Alaska - the second largest gold-producing state after Nevada, in a country that is one of the safest jurisdictions in the world - is unique in terms of value proposition for all stakeholders. With approximately 39,000,000 ounces of gold in measured and indicated mineral resources grading 2.24 grams per tonne1, Donlin Gold is more than five times the size of the peer group average2 and nearly double the world average grade.3 With a mine life measured in decades and the extensive exploration potential along the eight-kilometer mineralized trend, the project could operate for a very long time. It is our belief that the Company is truly well positioned to create a lot of value for its shareholders when gold embarks upon the next leg of what we strongly believe to be a long-term secular bull market. For more information, please feel free to reference the 2018 Annual Report we issued in March 2019, which goes into Donlin Golds uniqueness and our strategy regarding its development in greater detail: NOVAGOLDs 2018 Annual Report External Affairs & Stakeholder Engagement A big part of our activities in Alaska is working in partnership with Calista and TKC, our Native Corporation partners, on different health and safety, educational, environmental and cultural initiatives that support a balanced and sustainable development plan for the project and surrounding communities. To that end, with a mining-industry delegation, we attended the State of Alaska legislative session in Juneau and met with Alaska State House Representatives and Senators, newly-elected Governor Michael Dunleavy, senior agency executive appointees and mining program staff. Donlin Gold also met with career counselors in the Lower Kuskokwim School District with the goal of engaging youth in the region in an upcoming career fair. We participated in the Alaska Forum on the Environment where we also received the Green Star Certification award, that recognizes businesses for their efforts in sustainable environmental stewardship. Donlin Gold hosted their annual Safety Expo ahead of the Iron Dog race in Alaska. Together with TKC, Donlin Gold organized and participated in a Middle Kuskokwim gathering of TKC villages to discuss community areas of interest and mining. NOVAGOLD strongly believes that transparent and open communication with local communities is an essential part of our day-to-day responsibilities in the region. Balance Sheet NOVAGOLD is extremely well funded. With approximately $162 million in cash and term deposits as of February 28, 2019, plus the additional $100 million we expect to receive from Newmont in guaranteed payments within less than five years, and a further $75 million contingent payment4, we have enough funds to advance Donlin Gold and meet all of our foreseeable financial obligations with no need to go to capital markets until a construction decision is made. It is my continued belief that NOVAGOLD represents a unique investment opportunity. Being a pure play on one of the worlds largest and highest-grade known open-pit gold deposits - now permitted for development in a geo-politically safe jurisdiction with well-established support for responsible mining - is an incredible value proposition. With time, we believe Donlin Golds scarcity value can only get better as the industry depletes its established endowment in the face of what we expect to be a long wave in gold to rival the first leg that took it from $250 to $1,900 per ounce. For these reasons and more, your management team believes that shareholders will be rewarded for their patience. We are very thankful to our Native Corporation partners, Calista and TKC. Their strong support and commitment to Donlin Gold have been the foundation of our success. Our sincere appreciation also goes to the government agencies that have been working so diligently on Donlin Gold and have shown great professionalism and shared commitment to the well-being of the communities where we operate. Its an incredible amount of work to advance such an important project. And finally, I would like to extend my appreciation to NOVAGOLDs Board and employees for their vision and commitment, to the Donlin Gold team in Anchorage for all their hard work, and to Barrick, our joint venture partner, for its continued engagement with the project. Gregory A. Lang President & CEO Financial Results in thousands of U.S. dollars, except for per share amounts Three months ended February 28, 2019 $ Three months ended February 28, 2018 $ General and administrative expense (1) 4,340 4,685 Share of losses Donlin Gold 1,323 1,841 Total operating expenses 5,663 6,526 Loss from operations (5,663) (6,526) Other expense (303) (1,370) Income tax expense (357) (66) Loss from continuing operations for the period (6,323) (7,962) Loss from discontinued operations for the period (253) Net loss (6,323) (8,215) Loss per share, basic and diluted Continuing operations (0.02) (0.03) Discontinued operations (0.02) (0.03) At February 28, 2019 $ At November 30, 2018 $ Cash and term deposits 161,777 167,004 Total assets 255,461 260,929 Total liabilities 100,243 100,241 (1) Includes share-based compensation expense of $1,531 and $1,949 for the first quarter-ended February 28, 2019 and 2018, respectively. For the first quarter ended February 28, 2019, loss from operations decreased from $6.5 million in 2018 to $5.7 million in 2019 due to lower general and administrative expense and lower costs at Donlin Gold. General and administrative expense decreased by $0.3 million primarily due to lower share-based compensation costs. At Donlin Gold expenses decreased by $0.5 million resulting from a reduction in permitting and optimization activities. Net loss from continuing operations decreased from $8.0 million ($0.03 per share) in the first quarter of 2018 to $6.3 million ($0.02 per share) in the same period of 2019, primarily due to lower operating losses, higher interest income and accretion of notes receivable, offset by higher interest expense on the promissory note payable to Barrick and foreign exchange losses. Liquidity and Capital Resources In the first quarter, total cash, cash equivalents and term deposits decreased by $5.2 million of which $4.3 million was used in operating activities for administrative costs and working capital changes and $0.9 million was used to fund Donlin Gold. Total spending for continuing operations in the first quarter was $1.2 million lower than in the same period of 2018, primarily due to lower permitting and optimization costs at Donlin Gold and higher interest income, partially offset by withholding taxes paid on vested performance share units. Spending in the first quarter of 2018 for discontinued operations included $0.6 million for Galore Creek which was sold in July 2018. We believe that our cash and term deposits continue to be sufficient to advance Donlin Gold, as well as meet our other financial obligations. Additional capital will be necessary if a decision to commence engineering and construction is reached for the Donlin Gold project. The term deposits are denominated in U.S. dollars and are held at Canadian chartered banks. 2019 Outlook We continue to anticipate spending approximately $24 million in 2019, $13 million to fund our share of expenditures at the Donlin Gold project and $11 million for general and administrative costs. NOVAGOLD remains focused on four primary goals in 2019: Continue to advance the Donlin Gold project toward a construction/production decision; maintain an effective corporate social responsibility program; promote a strong safety culture by maintaining a zero lost time accident record; and safeguard the companys treasury. Conference Call & Webcast Details NOVAGOLDs conference call and webcast to discuss these results will take place on April 3, 2019 at 8:00 am PT (11:00 am ET). The webcast and conference call-in details are provided below. Webcast: www.novagold.com/investors/events/ North American callers: 1-800-319-4610 International callers: 1-604-638-5340 The webcast will be archived on NOVAGOLDs website for one year. To request a transcript of the call, please email us at: info@novagold.com . About NOVAGOLD NOVAGOLD is a well-financed precious metals company focused on the development of its 50%-owned Donlin Gold project in Alaska, one of the safest mining jurisdictions in the world. With approximately 39 million ounces of gold in the measured and indicated mineral resource categories, inclusive of proven and probable mineral reserves (541 million tonnes at an average grade of approximately 2.24 grams per tonne in the measured and indicated resource categories on a 100% basis),1 Donlin Gold is regarded to be one of the largest, highest-grade, and most prospective known open-pit gold deposits in the world. According to the Second Updated Feasibility Study (as defined below), once in production, Donlin Gold is expected to produce an average of more than one million ounces per year over a 27-year mine life on a 100% basis. The Donlin Gold project has substantial exploration potential beyond the designed footprint which currently covers three kilometers of an approximately eight-kilometer long gold-bearing trend. Current activities at Donlin Gold are focused on state permitting, optimization work, community outreach and workforce development in preparation for the construction and operation of this project. With a strong balance sheet, NOVAGOLD is well-positioned to continue advancing its Donlin Gold project up the value chain. Scientific and Technical Information Some scientific and technical information contained herein with respect to the Donlin Gold project is derived from the Donlin Creek Gold Project Alaska, USA NI 43-101 Technical Report on Second Updated Feasibility Study prepared by AMEC with an effective date of November 18, 2011, as amended January 20, 2012 (the Second Updated Feasibility Study). Kirk Hanson, P.E., Technical Director, Open Pit Mining, North America, (AMEC, Reno), and Gordon Seibel, R.M. SME, Principal Geologist, (AMEC, Reno) are the Qualified Persons responsible for the preparation of the independent technical report, each of whom are independent qualified persons as defined by NI 43-101. Clifford Krall, P.E., who is the Mine Engineering Manager for NOVAGOLD and a qualified person under NI 43-101, has approved and verified the scientific and technical information related to the Donlin Gold project contained in this press release. NOVAGOLD Contacts: Melanie Hennessey Vice President, Corporate Communications Allison Pettit Manager, Investor Relations 604-669-6227 or 1-866-669-6227 Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements (collectively forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable securities legislation, including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as expects, anticipates, believes, intends, estimates, potential, possible, and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions, or results will, may, could, would or should occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on several opinions, estimates and assumptions that management of NOVAGOLD considered appropriate and reasonable as of the date such statements are made, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include statements regarding the 2019 Outlook; the potential development and construction of Donlin Gold; potential returns to investors and benefits to stakeholders; perceived merit of properties; the advancement of optimization studies at Donlin Gold; potential opportunities to enhance or maximize the value of Donlin Gold; the timing and likelihood of permits; opportunities to reduce capital outlays and improve project economics; the potential completion of an updated feasibility study on the project; mine life and production estimates at Donlin Gold; mineral reserve and resource estimates; work programs; payments from Newmont in connection with the sale of Galore Creek; capital expenditures; timelines; strategic plans; benefits of the Donlin Gold project and market prices for precious metals. In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, intentions, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not historical facts but instead represent NOVAGOLDs management expectations, estimates and projections regarding future events or circumstances on the date the statements are made. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include the need to obtain additional permits and governmental approvals; the timing and likelihood of permits; the need for additional financing to explore and develop properties and availability of financing in the debt and capital markets; uncertainties involved in the interpretation of drilling results and geological tests and the estimation of reserves and resources; the need for continued cooperation between NOVAGOLD and Barrick for the continued exploration, and development and eventual construction of the Donlin Gold property; the need for cooperation of government agencies and native groups in the development and operation of properties; risks of construction and mining projects such as accidents, equipment breakdowns, bad weather, non-compliance with environmental and permit requirements, unanticipated variation in geological structures, ore grades or recovery rates; unexpected cost increases, which could include significant increases in estimated capital and operating costs; fluctuations in metal prices and currency exchange rates; and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in reports and documents filed by NOVAGOLD with applicable securities regulatory authorities from time to time. The forward-looking statements contained herein reflect the beliefs, opinions and projections of NOVAGOLD on the date the statements are made. NOVAGOLD assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law. Cautionary Note to United States Investors This press release has been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the securities laws in effect in Canada, which differ from the requirements of U.S. securities laws. Unless otherwise indicated, all resource and reserve estimates included in this press release have been prepared in accordance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101) and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM)CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, adopted by the CIM Council, as amended (CIM Definition Standards). NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators which establishes standards for all public disclosure an issuer makes of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects. Canadian standards, including NI 43-101, differ significantly from the requirements of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Industry Guide 7 (SEC Industry Guide 7), and resource and reserve information contained herein may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. NOVAGOLDs disclosure concerning Reserve & Resources Estimates remains consistent with NI 43-101. Under SEC Industry Guide 7, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. SEC Industry Guide 7 normally does not permit the inclusion of information concerning "measured mineral resources, "indicated mineral resources or "inferred mineral resources or other descriptions of the amount of mineralization in mineral deposits that do not constitute "reserves under SEC Industry Guide 7 in documents filed with the SEC. Investors should also understand that "inferred mineral resources have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. Under Canadian rules, estimated "inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies except in rare cases. Disclosure of "contained ounces in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves under SEC Industry Guide 7 as in-place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures. The requirements of NI 43-101 for identification of "reserves are also not the same as those of SEC Industry Guide 7, and reserves reported by NOVAGOLD in compliance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves under SEC Industry Guide 7. Donlin Gold does not have known reserves, as defined under SEC Industry Guide 7. Accordingly, information concerning mineral deposits set forth herein may not be comparable with information made public by companies that report in accordance with SEC Industry Guide 7. On October 31, 2018, the SEC adopted a final rule (New Final Rule) that will replace SEC Industry Guide 7 with new disclosure requirements that are more closely aligned with current industry and global regulatory practices and standards, including NI 43-101. Companies must comply with the New Final Rule for the companys first fiscal year beginning on or after January 1, 2021, which for NOVAGOLD would be the fiscal year beginning December 1, 2021. The New Final Rule provides that SEC Industry Guide 7 will remain effective until all registrants are required to comply with the New Final Rule, at which time SEC Industry Guide 7 will be rescinded. While early voluntary compliance with the New Final Rule is permitted, NOVAGOLD has not elected to comply with the New Final Rule at this time. _____________________________________________ 1 Donlin Gold project estimates as per the Second Updated Feasibility Study (as defined herein). Represents 100% of measured and indicated mineral resources, of which NOVAGOLDs share represents 50%. Measured and indicated resources are inclusive of proven and probable mineral reserves. Measured resources total 8M tonnes grading 2.52 g/t Au and indicated resources total 534M tonnes grading 2.24 g/t Au. Proven reserves total 8M tonnes grading 2.32 g/t Au, and probable reserves total 497M tonnes grading 2.08 g/t Au. See Cautionary Note Concerning Reserve & Resource Estimates and Reserve/Resource Table at www.novagold.com 2 Comparison peer group of 17 projects based on large (2Moz P&P cut off), North/South American gold-focused development projects. 3 2017 average grade of open-pit and underground deposits with gold as primary commodity and over 1 Moz in measured and indicated resources, sourced from S&P Global Market Intelligence. 4 Deferred compensation on sale of Galore Creek totals $100M: including $75M on earlier of PFS or no later than July 27, 2021 and $25M on earlier of FS or no later than July 27, 2023. An additional $75M is receivable upon approval of a Galore Creek construction plan by the owner(s). NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, and its New York chapter (CAIR-NY) today announced the filing of a U.S. Supreme Court amicus (friend of the court) brief supporting the challengers in the ongoing 2020 census citizenship question litigation, Department of Commerce v. New York. READ THE BRIEF: http://tinyurl.com/SCOTUSCensusBrief Other amici include the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law, Norman Y. Mineta, a former Secretary of Commerce, and three other American citizens of Japanese descent whose incarceration during World War II was facilitated by the Census Bureau's sharing of confidential census data. Akin Gump is serving as pro bono counsel for the brief. On April 23, 2019, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments pertaining to whether the secretary of commerce's decision to add a citizenship question violated the law. Challengers argue that the government was driven by racial and xenophobic animus and has since invented justifications for the change in policy. Judge Furman of the Southern District of New York ruled that the Department of Commerce added the citizenship question through a process that violated the Administrative Procedures Act and made several findings of fact suggesting that the government's justifications are pretextual. In the brief filed yesterday, amici argue that the Supreme Court should affirm Judge Furman's ruling and reject the government's pretextual reasons for adding a citizenship question to the decennial census. Amici emphasize that the census process works only if the public trusts that the government will not misuse the information. Though the Census Act prohibits the government from using census information for anything other than statistical purposes, past incidents in which the government misused census data support fears that citizenship information could be misused. Amici remind the Court of one of the most glaring and heinous examples of such abuse -- the Census Bureau's central role in targeting Japanese Americans for incarceration during World War II. In that instance, the Supreme Court's deference to the executive branch contributed to an appalling violation of civil and human rights. Today, amici argue, the Supreme Court must impose searching judicial scrutiny to root out any pretext for an unconstitutional census policy. As Professor Robert S. Chang, executive director of the Korematsu Center, explains, "The shameful legacy of Japanese American incarceration during World War II shows what can happen when the courts allow themselves to be fooled by the government's pretexts for unconstitutional policies. We urge the Court to conduct a searching review in this case to determine whether the government's real reasons for adding a citizenship question to the census in a process the trial judge found to be deeply flawedsupport its decision or are simply a mask for a question that could deter the full participation of immigrants and communities of color." CAIR National Litigation and Civil Rights Director Lena F. Masri, Esq., added: "The Supreme Court should reject this administration's latest attempt to marginalize Muslim immigrants and others from the political process." Ahmed Mohamed, Esq., litigation director of CAIR-NY, said: "The Court must protect the integrity of the census. This administration must not be given an opportunity to weaponize the census to suppress the voice of immigrants and minorities. We urge the court to fulfill its duty and block unlawful discrimination." Lead pro bono counsel Pratik A. Shah, co-head of the Supreme Court and appellate practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, states: "By eroding public trust in the process, the Secretary's addition of a suspect citizenship question only undermines the government's ability to fulfill its constitutional census duty." Pro bono counsel on the brief are: Robert S. Chang and Lorraine K. Bannai of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law; Ronald A. Peterson of the Law Clinic at Seattle University School of Law; as well as attorneys from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, including Pratik A. Shah, as Counsel of Record, Robert H. Pees, Alice Hsu; Z.W. Julius Chen; and Geoffrey J. Derrick. CAIR's mission is to protect civil rights, enhance understanding of Islam, promote justice, and empower American Muslims. La mision de CAIR es proteger las libertades civiles, mejorar la comprension del Islam, promover la justicia, y empoderar a los musulmanes en los Estados Unidos. CONTACT: CAIR National Litigation and Civil Rights Director Lena Masri, [email protected], 202-742-6420, CAIR-NY Litigation Director Ahmed Mohamed, [email protected]; 646-481-2103; CAIR Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas, 720-251-0425, [email protected]; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, [email protected] SOURCE Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Related Links https://www.cair.com Le Roch joins GODIVA with nearly 20 years of sales, merchandising, and global leadership experience. She has successfully led businesses in multiple countries across Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. Most recently, she was the Interim Managing Director for L'Occitane, leading a complex, omnichannel business in North America. During her 13-year tenure at L'Occitane, Le Roch demonstrated exceptional leadership in defining the new vision and strategy for the brand. She is a natural leader who is widely recognized for building an inspiring company culture and expanding growth opportunities across multiple channels. "We are excited to add Caroline's incredible leadership and market knowledge to our team," said Annie Young-Scrivner, CEO of GODIVA. "She has extensive experience in building and leading high-performing teams across channels and geographies, which will be invaluable to us as we grow our business fivefold over the next six years. Caroline is also a true believer in developing talent, which aligns perfectly with the tremendous value we place on investing in our people so that they can realize their full potential. Her track record of accelerating growth and her understanding of the Latin America market will also enable us to successfully broaden our reach throughout the Americas." "I am delighted to join the GODIVA team and be part of such a beloved global brand," said Caroline Le Roch. "After many years in the fast-growing beauty industry, I am looking forward to this intriguing change to F&B and bringing my experience and knowledge to GODIVA, especially at such a pivotal time for the brand. I look forward to partnering with the company's talented and passionate teams to ensure the GODIVA brand achieves unprecedented growth and creates more wonderful moments in the lives of our consumers." Born and raised in France, Le Roch holds a master's degree from La Sorbonne in Paris and is fluent in French, English, and Spanish. Le Roch has a passion for giving back to her community and lives in New York with her husband and their two young children. She will be based in GODIVA's New York City headquarters. About GODIVA Chocolatier GODIVA Chocolatier is the global leader in premium, artisanal chocolate. The company was founded in Brussels in 1926 by Belgian Chocolatier, Pierre Draps. Nearly a century later, every piece of GODIVA chocolate is still bursting with quality, Belgian craftsmanship, and the world's finest ingredients. GODIVA has distribution in more than 100 countries across the globe. Customers can experience GODIVA at the iconic brand's chocolate boutiques, chocolate cafes, GODIVA.com, and at many fine retailers. GODIVA is committed to innovative and delicious food and beverage products that exceed consumer expectations and create wonderful moments. From its famous truffles and shell-moulded chocolate pieces to its European-style biscuits, individually wrapped chocolates, gourmet coffees, hot cocoa, soft serve and other indulgences, GODIVA is dedicated to bringing the ultimate chocolate experience to the world. As a socially responsible business, GODIVA has global practices and programs designed to provide meaningful support to cocoa farmers, safeguard our environment, and empower the communities where we live and work. To learn more about these powerful initiatives, visit GODIVA Cares. The legend of our namesake, Lady GODIVA When Lady GODIVA, wife of Lord Leofric, protested against the taxation of his subjects, she agreed to ride through the streets of Coventry "clad in naught but her long tresses," and, so long as the residents remained in shuttered buildings, their tax burden would be lifted. The following morning, she made her famous ride and, despite the temptation, the citizens graciously remained indoors. Leofric kept his word and reduced the taxes to the delight of his subjects, ensuring GODIVA's legendary status throughout the centuries. Inspired by the values of Lady GODIVA passion, generosity, and pioneering spirit -- GODIVA's legendary name has become a universal symbol of luxury, quality and the most delicious chocolate. CONTACT: Nicole Arzoomanian, [email protected] SOURCE GODIVA Chocolatier Related Links http://www.godiva.com TORONTO and MONTREAL, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - CIBC Innovation Banking is pleased to announce the closing of a US$55 million debt facility with Lightspeed POS Inc. (TSX: LSPD) ("Lightspeed" or the "Company"). The standby facility is available to support strategic acquisitions and fuel the Company's multi-faceted growth strategy. Lightspeed's comprehensive easy-to-use and scalable solution, including front-end consumer experience, back-end operations management and facilitation of payments, empowers small and medium-sized businesses to compete successfully in an omni-channel market environment. The Montreal-based point-of-sale software company currently operates in more than 100 countries with eight offices spanning across North America, Europe and Australia. Lightspeed has over 47,000 SMB customer locations and processes over $13.6 billion gross transaction value per annum. The closing of CIBC Innovation Banking's previously disclosed debt facility follows Lightspeed's highly anticipated IPO where the Company recently raised gross proceeds of C$276 million. "We are excited to partner with Lightspeed, a true Canadian technology success story, as the Company continues to strengthen its position on the global stage" said Mark McQueen, President and Executive Managing Director, CIBC Innovation Banking. "Lightspeed has built a scalable and comprehensive platform. The team has successfully added innovative capabilities to continue to meet the growing needs of SMB's, while equipping them with the latest technology and providing a simplified user experience," noted McQueen. About CIBC Innovation Banking With offices in Denver, Menlo Park, Montreal, Reston, Toronto and Vancouver, CIBC Innovation Banking delivers strategic advice, cash management and funding to North American innovation companies at each stage of their business cycle, from start up to IPO and beyond. The team has extensive experience and a strong, collaborative approach that extends across CIBC's commercial banking and capital markets businesses in Canada and the U.S. About CIBC CIBC is a leading North American financial institution with 10 million personal banking, business, public sector and institutional clients. Across Personal and Small Business Banking, Commercial Banking and Wealth Management, and Capital Markets businesses, CIBC offers a full range of advice, solutions and services through its leading digital banking network, and locations across Canada, in the United States and around the world. About Lightspeed Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Lightspeed provides an easy-to-use, omni-channel commerce-enabling platform. The Company's software platform provides its customers with the critical functionalities they need to engage with consumers, manage their operations, accept payments, and grow their business. Lightspeed operates globally in approximately 100 countries, empowering single- and multi-location small and medium-sized businesses to compete successfully in an omni-channel market environment by engaging with consumers across online, mobile, social, and physical channels. Founded in 2005, the Company has grown to approximately 700 employees, with global offices in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia. SOURCE CIBC Innovation Banking ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Community Brands, the leading provider of cloud-based software and payment solutions for associations, nonprofits, schools and faith-based organizations, announced today that it has acquired Attendee Interactive, a Maryland-based company specializing in conference planning and event management. The acquisition adds complementary capabilities to the fast-growing Community Brands event technology portfolio. The integrated software and services offered by Attendee Interactive address several needs of conference planners and organizers. The company provides content solutions for managing event websites, speakers, session abstracts, and continuing education accreditation. These self-service tools are made available to both attendees and exhibitors, allowing event planners to maximize time, staff productivity, and budgets. The company also provides software to help manage the logistical aspects of events. Capabilities offered include management of function requirements, space diaries, staff time and schedules, vendors, as well as the ability to easily create event function books. With the logistical aspects of a conference well managed, event organizers are free to focus more on meeting business and attendee experience goals. "Event planners using our software are better able to address the increasing complexity and cost of live events," shared J. Michael Tydings, President & Co-Founder of Attendee Interactive. "Easy-to-use solutions, smart integrations, and personalized support have all been at the heart of the customer success we've witnessed. The Community Brands and Attendee Interactive teams share that same vision, and we are delighted to now be part of the company. The breadth of event management capabilities at Community Brands is very compelling." This announcement accompanies the acquisitions of Core-apps and TripBuilder Media, announced by Community Brands last week. Core-apps and TripBuilder Media added capabilities for mobile event apps, attendee engagement, digital attendee wayfinding, and attendee tracking to the Community Brands event technology portfolio. Together with the capabilities of Attendee Interactive and the company's existing event management solutions, the combined capabilities present one of the most comprehensive event technology offerings available. "Managing an event is multifaceted, and event planners and organizers are looking for technology solutions that work well together to create greater efficiencies for staff and ultimately a more seamless and compelling experience for attendees," shared Jean-Paul (JP) Guilbault, President and CEO of Community Brands. "Attendee Interactive is right on point with that approach, and I am excited about the new opportunities customers have to use this integrated set of solutions." Attendee Interactive has existing product integrations with both Core-apps and TripBuilder Media. As a part of the integration, speaker and session abstract data from Attendee Interactive is seamlessly integrated into the attendee touchpoints from Core-apps and TripBuilder Media. This integration saves conference planners valuable time and ensures that attendees are accessing the most up to date information about an event. In addition, onsite data gathered from Core-apps and TripBuilder Media can be made available in the online planner tool from Attendee Interactive, ensuring a two-way sync between attendees and planners. Financial details of the transaction and its closing were not shared publicly. Learn more about Community Brands and its Association Solutions, Nonprofit Solutions, K-12 Solutions, and Faith-based Solutions. About Community Brands Community Brands is the leading provider of cloud-based software and payment solutions to associations, nonprofits, K-12 schools and faith-based groups. Through innovation and technology, the company empowers more than 100,000 clients and partners to succeed faster, grow stronger and achieve social good. Organizations adopt Community Brands software to manage memberships, career centers, learning, accounting, mobile giving, peer-to-peer fundraising, donations, admissions, enrollments and events. Using these engagement platforms, customers of all sizes create meaningful and lasting experiences for their members, donors, volunteers and families. Headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, Community Brands serves the social good community in nearly 40 countries. To learn more, visit communitybrands.com or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Media Contact Community Brands Brad Bennett Media Contact [email protected] +1 817.517.9965 SOURCE Community Brands Related Links http://www.communitybrands.com PHILADELPHIA, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CRF Bracket will host a complimentary half-day educational seminar on April 24th in Cambridge, MA, to share industry insights on patient-first technology in clinical trials. As mobile technology use in clinical trials becomes ever more prevalent, most notably in collecting electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) data, best-of-breed vendors are going above and beyond standard industry features to push the boundaries on what is possible. Discussion will look at novel approaches to improving patient engagement throughout an entire study to greatly improve study outcomes, and to help patients receive not only more value from their involvement in the study, but equally importantly feel more valued by the study. With growing evidence that a patient-first approach is not only synonymous with increased patient retention, but part of the actual conduct of study, it is an area that sponsors must make a strategic priority, both to improve the patient experience and their own ROI in clinical trials worldwide. Keynote speaker, Kelly McKee, Head of Patient Recruitment at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, will use her wealth of industry knowledge to discuss how to treat patients as customers. Kelly, well known to Boston audiences for her activity in this area, has over 18 years' industry experience with previous roles at Lilly, Merck, and Sanofi-Aventis. She was named Clinical Researcher of the Year by Pharma Times in 2012 and one of Centerwatch's Top Innovators in 2018. Industry experts from CRF Bracket will present further sessions on: Patient Engagement 3 Reasons Why It Is a Secret Weapon for Clinical Trials eConsent Best Practices Everything About eCOA You Never Thought to Ask (Overview of TrialMax & Rater Station) Driving Adoption Challenges Holding These Three (eCOA, eConsent, Patient Engagement) Back and How They Can Be Addressed "The life science industry has an urgent need for capable, reliable electronic processes that deliver a more patient-centered approach, especially in the context of fully remote, interventional studies which present their own unique set of challenges," said Jeff Lee, Product Lead, Patient Engagement and eConsent, CRF Bracket. "CRF Bracket customers see increased value from new market opportunities like eConsent and Patient Engagement. Significant expansion of strategic relationships with 4 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, several new sponsor relationships, and expanded CRO partnerships have further bolstered our pioneering credentials, and the CRF Bracket's roadmap includes multiple additional enhancements to support current clinical study models and optimized technologies." This seminar is an informative and interactive event where industry leaders can come together to learn about easing the patient burden with technology, as well as interact with other clinical operations experts. Complimentary breakfast, lunch and refreshments will be provided and, with seating limited, interested delegates are advised to register early to secure a place. DATE: April 24, 2019 TIME: 9:00 AM EST to 12:00 PM EST; Optional breakfast at 8:00 AM; Optional lunch at 12:00 PM LOCATION: Royal Sonesta Boston, 40 Edwin H Land Blvd, Cambridge, MA 02142 KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Kelly McKee, Head of Patient Recruitment, Vertex Pharmaceuticals COST: Complimentary. Parking is included. This educational seminar is the first in a series of events to be hosted by CRF Bracket, with another roadshow planned for May in San Francisco. Follow us on social media to stay informed. To learn more about CRF Bracket's solutions for eCOA, eConsent, Patient Engagement, IRT, Clinical Supply Management, and Endpoint Quality scientific and data support services, visit www.crfhealth.com and www.bracketglobal.com. About CRF Bracket CRF Bracket was formed in 2018 by the merger of CRF Health and Bracket to provide life science companies with patient-centric technology solutions that advance clinical research and transform the patient experience. The company's solutions include electronic clinical outcome assessments (eCOAs), eConsent, patient engagement, interactive response technology (IRT), clinical supply forecasting and management, and endpoint quality services that combine advanced analytics and therapeutic area-specific scientific consulting. CRF Bracket's applications are trusted by pharmaceutical companies of all sizes, including all of the top 20 pharmas, as well as CROs, biotechs, and academic institutions on over 4,000 global clinical trials. For nearly 20 years, CRF Bracket has been committed to helping life science companies bring life-changing therapies to patients and communities around the world. To learn more visit http://www.crfhealth.com and www.bracketglobal.com. Contact: [email protected], SOURCE CRF Bracket DENVER, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- DarkOwl today announced the release of a new darknet exposure measurement, DARKINT Scores, which calculates an organization's darknet footprint and converts it to a numerical value. This score is an indicator of a company's darknet posture at the time of calculation and can be monitored over time. Similar to a credit score, a DARKINT Score is a clear and simple data point that will help the users better measure and understand a company's business risk on the darknet. Scores can also be utilized for self-risk assessments, brand monitoring, vendor risk management, and cyber underwriting and risk rating. "With threat actors and security vulnerabilities becoming ever more prevalent and advanced in the darknet, cybersecurity professionals increasingly need defensible metrics on an organization's darknet digital footprint. We believe that DARKINT Scores will help to solve this problem by providing a more wholistic picture of a company's overall cyber risk," said Mark Turnage, President and CEO of DarkOwl. Scores are generated using DarkOwl's extensive collection of DARKINT content from the darknet, deep web and high-risk surface net with the final numerical value representative of a company's overall darknet exposure. The methodology for score calculation uses a formula that takes into account the quantity and latency of darknet data related to a particular organization, as well as the Hackishness of the results, which indicate how likely the company's exposed data could be used for criminal activity. "We're excited to offer DARKINT Scores as means of helping businesses and organizations think about their cyber security posture from the perspective of darknet intelligence," Turnage added. "The information security industry has long understood that the darknet is, for the most part, a haven for criminal activity. Now, by having a viable method to calculate the size of an organization's footprint on the darknet and deep web, we have a means of treating the existence of a company's data on the darknet as the threat indicator we've long known it to be." DARKINT Scores can be accessed and delivered either via DarkOwl's Scores API, or via their DarkOwl Vision web application. For more information, please visit https://scores.darkowl.com or email Leah Meredith at marketing[at]darkowl.com. About DarkOwl DarkOwl is an information security company specializing in darknet (or "dark web") intelligence. Founded in 2009, DarkOwl offers access to Vision, the world's largest commercially-available collection of near-real time darknet content. Vision by DarkOwl enables clients to conduct investigations, monitor for their proprietary information and leaked credentials, and calculate their darknet exposure risk score. Leah Meredith Assistant Director, Marketing DarkOwl [email protected] SOURCE DarkOwl Kaess served as EVP of Robert Bosch GmbH from 2015-2018. Previously, he was CEO of Bosch Korea (2010-2014) and managing director of Bosch Automotive for the UK and Benelux (2004-2010). In 2018, DeepMap announced that Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC), the corporate venture capital company of the Bosch Group, completed an investment in the company. Kaess joins Brian McClendon, Jaron Waldman, and Leonidas Guibas on the advisory board: Brian McClendon has built a career as an entrepreneur and technical leader in geographic information systems (GIS). In 2004, his digital mapping startup, Keyhole, was acquired by Google. During a 10-year tenure at Google, he became VP of Google Maps, Earth, and Street View. He joined Uber in 2015. McClendon is currently a research professor at the University of Kansas. Jaron Waldman is a lifelong entrepreneur. He founded PlaceBase, a location technology company acquired by Apple. After the acquisition, Waldman spent four years at Apple leading a team that developed location-based services across the Apple ecosystem. He is currently the CEO and co-founder of Curbside. Leonidas Guibas is the Paul Pigott Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he heads the geometric computation group, is acting director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a member of the Computer Graphics and Laboratory. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is an ACM and IEEE Fellow. About DeepMap DeepMap's mission is to accelerate safe autonomy by providing the world's best autonomous mapping and localization solutions. DeepMap delivers the technology necessary for self-driving vehicles to navigate in a complex and unpredictable environment. The company addresses three important elements: precise high-definition mapping, ultra-accurate real-time localization, and the serving infrastructure to support massive global scaling. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., with offices in Beijing, China. For more information, see www.deepmap.ai . Contact info: [email protected] SOURCE DeepMap Related Links www.deepmap.ai JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Defense Department's Military Kids Connect program modernized its website with new content and interactive resources for children coping with the challenges of military life. The website militarykidsconnect.dcoe.mil is an online community for military kids around the world facing life changes such as frequent moves, new schools, and family separations. Throughout April, the Month of the Military Child, Military Kids Connect is sharing resources and stories of military kids via social media on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Eli, a 14-year-old Army kid, knows how stressful it can be when a parent deploys. In a video for Military Kids Connect, he shares his experience followed by advice for coping. "I remember whenever my dad left for Afghanistan," Eli said. "I looked out the window and saw my mom drive off with him, and I would stay up, hoping my dad missed something and had to come back so I'd see him again before he left." Military Kids Connect also helps children through difficult family situations, such as learning to reconnect with a family member after a deployment, or adjusting to a military parent's injuries. Change is Good The updated site features new and reorganized content and a more user-friendly experience. Videos of military kids, interactive resources and games, and personalized advice offer help in reducing the stress of life as a military child. The moderated message board provides a safe place for military children to share ideas, experiences, and coping skills with their peers. Noteworthy Sections Military Kids Connect devotes an entire "Military Life" section for helpful and entertaining resources for kids experiencing stress. Other sections include: Feelings teaches children how to cope with stress and talk to an adult about their feelings. Health & Wellness provides tips and information for staying healthy during tough times. Dear Doc an advice column for kids to ask questions. A trained DHA health care provider ("Doc") creates responses to encourage healthy coping. Tough Choices shares resources for children experiencing bullying and prevention tips. New sections help parents, caregivers, and educators better understand and support military kids. "The redesigned Military Kids Connect website is an improved resource for teens, tweens, and children offering positive ways to handle life's disruptions," said Kelly Blasko, counseling psychologist with the Defense Health Agency Connected Health Branch. "It helps them feel less alone because they can see others are going through situations just like them." Visit the Military Kids Connect website to learn more, and follow Military Kids Connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. SOURCE Defense Health Agencys Connected Health Branch DENVER, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Comprehensive Outcomes Management Technologies, LLC (COMT) received a federal grant as part of a musculoskeletal injury rehabilitation research program funded by the Defense Health Agency (DHA). COMT is receiving the grant in conjunction with its participation in the Collaboratory for Musculoskeletal Injury Rehabilitation Research (CMIRR). CMIRR is a four-year, $15 million program funded by the Defense Health Agency, with the purpose of improving the rehabilitative approach to caring for military service members with musculoskeletal injury and ultimately enhancing overall military readiness. CIMRR is based at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) in Bethesda, Maryland and includes interdisciplinary and inter-service (i.e., Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine and Coast Guard) partnerships, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense and several major academic medical centers. The COMT research project will be implemented at Fort Carson Evans Army Community Hospital in Colorado and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland. COMT is one of three private organizations selected to participate in this innovative research program. "We are honored to be a part of this Defense Health Agency program. The challenges facing the military are similar to those that COMT's corporate customers and patients face in the workers' compensation area," said Dr. Scott Primack, Founder and CEO at COMT. Total costs can exceed $500 thousand dollars for a serviceperson with a serious musculoskeletal injury to return to active duty. The system developed by COMT helps the military deliver the right care at the right time, which improves the care to our service men and women and overall productivity of the military, while decreasing costs, Primack said. Founded in 2015, COMT improves care and adds transparency in workers compensation by combining a physical function and behavioral health assessment in a model to provide better care to injured workers and curb run-away health care costs. COMT also offers telebehavioral health through its Sababa Health Group (SHG) joint venture with partner Recovery Help, LLC. About the Comprehensive Outcomes Management Technologies, LLC COMT delivers a health assessment to patients resulting in better care and decreased costs. COMT has demonstrated success in Colorado and other mountain states. COMT in partnership with Recovery Help, LLC formed Sababa Health Group (SHG) to provide telebehavioral health to patients with neuro musculoskeletal injuries. COMT, LLC and SHG are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of COMT, LLC and SHG in the United States and/or other countries. www.comtllc.com About the Uniformed Services University USU trains, educates and prepares uniformed services health professionals, officers and leaders to directly support the Military Health System, the National Security and National Defense Strategies of the United States and the readiness of our Armed Forces. www.usuhs.edu About the Geneva Foundation The Geneva Foundation (Geneva) is a non-profit organization headquartered in Tacoma, WA. Established in 1993, Geneva advances military medicine by delivering full spectrum scientific, technical, and program management expertise in the areas of federal grants, industry-sponsored clinical trials, federal contracts, and event management. www.genevaUSA.org CONTACT(S): Deborah Biggs, (734)-649-1381 SOURCE Comprehensive Outcomes Management Technologies, LLC (COMT) Related Links https://www.comtoutcomes.com Dispensary of Hope works with community programs that are licensed to dispense medication by supplying inventories of the most needed medications. Patients are given medication free-of-charge and may return for unlimited medication fills as long as their prescription remains valid and the patients continue to qualify for the program. To be eligible for Dispensary of Hope medication, patients must have a valid prescription, must be uninsured, and must be earning 200 percent or less of the Federal Poverty Level ($24,980 for a single member household, $33,820 for a household of two, $42,660 for a household of three, $51,500 for a household of four, $60,340 for a household of five). All medication at the Dispensary of Hope is donated through the generosity of prescription drug manufacturers and distributors, and no medication is purchased. Currently, more than two dozen pharmaceutical manufacturers donate medication into the program each month. VAWD accreditation is important for a charitable medication program in that it demonstrates the highest level of compliance to medication distribution practices. Scott Cornwell, Dispensary of Hope's Chief Supply Chain Officer stated, "This is a win for our generous medication donors, who have worked with Dispensary of Hope over the past five years as we have continued to grow our services to larger numbers of patients. VAWD accreditation, and the addition of all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, allows our pharmaceutical manufacturer donors to reach vulnerable patients living across the whole of the United States." The Dispensary of Hope (www.dispensaryofhope.org) provides medication to over 180 dispensing sites across the US. This national program is unique in its goal to create a stable medication list, pre-positioned in clinics and pharmacies close to the uninsured low-income US residents. By 2024, the Dispensary of Hope expects to distribute 2.7 million scripts annually. To find a location, please visit https://www.dispensaryofhope.org/access-site-finder. Dispensary of Hope (www.dispensaryofhope.org) is a Tennessee-licensed not-for-profit wholesale pharmaceutical distributor that works with health systems, safety-net clinics, charitable pharmacies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers to route donated medication directly to areas of need. The Dispensary of Hope has worked with the pharmaceutical industry for over a decade to provide stable access to the most needed medications for those who otherwise cannot afford their care. SOURCE Dispensary of Hope Related Links http://www.dispensaryofhope.org LAS VEGAS, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Continental Realty Advisors, Ltd. ("CRA"), a Denver-based multifamily investment firm, has completed the acquisition of The Onyx, a 63-unit community in the Las Vegas Strip submarket. Occupancy at the property is high due to its proximity to the Strip less than half a mile and the robust workforce at high-profile resorts, as well as nearby University of Nevada, Las Vegas. CRA purchased The Onyx from Copulos Group in March 2019 for $14 million or $222,000 per unit. The Onyx is an irreplaceable asset and location, said Robert Ireland, director of acquisitions for CRA. Originally developed in 2008 to be sold as condos, the property was completed just prior to the downturn. Today it is one of only two conventional apartment properties this close to the Strip. Since 2016, CRA has acquired more than 1,657 units in the Las Vegas market. The company plans to modernize the unit interiors at The Onyx and complete extensive renovations to the common areas. The Onyx features modern lifestyle amenities typical of much larger communities, including a club room, resident lounge, fitness center and leasing center. Residents can enjoy year-round access to the swimming pool with a spa and sun deck, as well as an outdoor grilling area. The property includes 130 secured-access parking spaces in a multi-level structure and the four-story building is served by elevators. All units have kitchens with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops, washer/dryers and patio/balconies. Bedrooms feature walk-in closets, ceiling fans and 10-foot ceilings. The Onyx is a unique and well-built property on top of a world-class resort destination. The Strip has over $16 billion in construction developments underway. These projects are expected to create nearly 45,000 permanent jobs by 2020, said chairman & CEO of CRA David Snyder. Clearly, The Onyx is positioned in the path of future demand. We continue dedicating significant resources to southwest markets like Las Vegas and are thrilled to add this gemstone to our Las Vegas multifamily portfolio. The Onyx would benefit tremendously from a planned 1.14-mile extension of the Las Vegas Monorail from the MGM Grand to Mandalay Bay, providing transit access to the future $1.4 billion Las Vegas Stadium being built for the Raiders. The property is just one block south of the MGM Grand Monorail Station, and the new track would run adjacent to the property along E Reno Avenue. Once the extension is complete, the monorail system will total five miles and eight stations, directly connecting The Onyx to 11 resorts, 35,000 hotel rooms and two of the largest convention centers in the nation. About Continental Realty Advisors Continental Realty Advisors ("CRA"), an owner, asset manager, and institutional fund sponsor, was founded in 1981 and has solely focused on investment in the multifamily segment of real estate. The company is an institutional fund investor and expects to acquire over $1 billion in assets over the next several years. CRA is currently acquiring multifamily assets on a nationwide basis. CRA has the ability to close on an all-cash basis within very quick time limitations. For more information on the company's market focus and acquisition criteria, please visit www.continentalrealtyadvisors.com Media Contacts: Anton Communications Ingrid Jones ijones@antonpr.com Genevieve Anton ganton@antonpr.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/832c48c1-a6ed-44b5-8cd3-ab3c16169d88 SANTA MONICA, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Douglas Emmett, Inc. (NYSE:DEI), a real estate investment trust (REIT), announced today that it plans to release its 2019 first quarter earnings results after market close on Thursday, May 2, 2019. A live conference call is scheduled for the following day, Friday, May 3, 2019, at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time / 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Jordan Kaplan, President and Chief Executive Officer, will host the call along with Peter Seymour, Chief Financial Officer, Kevin Crummy, Chief Investment Officer, and Stuart McElhinney, Vice President Investor Relations. Interested parties can listen to the call via the following: INTERNET: Go to www.douglasemmett.com/investors at least fifteen minutes prior to the start time of the call in order to register, download and install any necessary audio software. PHONE: 888-349-0488 (U.S.) or 412-542-4156 (International) ask to join the Douglas Emmett, Inc. (DEI) call. REPLAY: A rebroadcast of the live call will be available for 90 days on our website at www.douglasemmett.com/investors About Douglas Emmett, Inc. Douglas Emmett, Inc. (DEI) is a fully integrated, self-administered and self-managed real estate investment trust (REIT), and one of the largest owners and operators of high-quality office and multifamily properties located in the premier coastal submarkets of Los Angeles and Honolulu. Douglas Emmett focuses on owning and acquiring a substantial share of top-tier office properties and premier multifamily communities in neighborhoods that possess significant supply constraints, high-end executive housing and key lifestyle amenities. For more information about Douglas Emmett, please visit our website at www.douglasemmett.com. Safe Harbor Statement Except for the historical facts, the statements in this press release regarding Douglas Emmett's business activities are forward-looking statements based on the beliefs of, assumptions made by, and information currently available to us about known and unknown risks, trends, uncertainties and factors that are beyond our control or ability to predict. Although we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, they are not guarantees of future performance and some will inevitably prove to be incorrect. As a result, our actual future results can be expected to differ from our expectations, and those differences may be material. Accordingly, investors should use caution in relying on forward-looking statements to anticipate future results or trends. For a discussion of some of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Stuart McElhinney, Vice President Investor Relations 310.255.7751 [email protected] SOURCE Douglas Emmett, Inc. Related Links http://www.douglasemmett.com DETROIT, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Emerald Growth Partners (EGP), announced today that it received pre-qualification status by the State of Michigan LARA Bureau of Medical Marihuana Board in which it was approved for 12 Pleasantrees retail locations, four class C cultivation licenses, one Class A cultivation license and one processing facility license. This significant step marks movement towards EGP's much-anticipated state retail footprint as they become a cannabis industry leader in Michigan. Lead by CEO and Founder Randall Buchman, Detroit-based EGP is investing in Michigan, which has become one of the largest medical cannabis markets in the country with a population of 10 million people and nearly 300,000 registered patients in its state medical cannabis program. The company is dedicated to cultivating the highest quality cannabis and building a safe, reliable health and wellness culture. Image of Buchman can be found here. "We are thrilled to be taking the next step towards introducing our Pleasantrees brand, store locations and quality products to the Michigan community," said Buchman. "EGP is proud to be vertically-integrated from seed to sale, with a deep commitment to providing quality products, industry knowledge and transparency with our guests." Under the leadership of Buchman, who began his career in the cannabis industry shortly after Michigan legalized medical marihuana in 2009, EGP's cultivation team has decades of combined industry experience. The company has a competitive advantage due to its deep local roots in Michigan, and a hyper focus on the many niche markets within the state. EGP is completing a world class 50,000 square foot cultivation facility in Harrison Township, MI, with plans to build an additional 30,000 square foot facility and a 10,000 square foot processing lab nearby. These facilities, in addition to the 12 Pleasantrees stores planned to begin launching in 2019, are anticipated to create up to 300 new jobs for the state. Rendering of the Pleasantrees retail locations can be found here. About Pleasantrees Pleasantrees is committed to cultivating the highest-quality cannabis and a thoughtful, midwestern approach with our guests working hard so our community can enjoy more of life's pleasures. Parent company Emerald Growth Partners is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. For more information visit enjoypleasantrees.com. SOURCE Emerald Growth Partners Related Links https://www.enjoypleasantrees.com SAINT PAUL, Minn., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- After a record setting winter, spring weather has finally arrived in Minnesota, and our thoughts are turning to the summer days ahead. What better way to celebrate the warmer seasons than with ice cream and talks of a favorite summer tradition, the Minnesota State Fair? For the fifth year in a row, Midwest Dairy is asking the public to vote for one of three new imaginative and delicious concoctions to add to its 2019 Minnesota State Fair menu through the "Flavor of the Fair" contest. Ice cream fans can vote now through April 12 on which malt or sundae flavor will be made and sold exclusively at the Dairy Goodness Bar at this year's Great Minnesota Get-Together. Minnesota's dairy farmers want the public's help choosing a new featured malt and sundae from the following selection of three delectable flavor combinations: MINTesota Nice Just like true Minnesotans, the flavors in this option mingle nicely together chocolate mint cookies, mint syrup and chocolate drizzle over a smooth bed of vanilla ice cream or malt. It's the perfect palate refresher after (or between) your other favorite state fair foods. Birthday Batter Blast This flavor combines the Great Minnesota Get-Together with birthdays two things we look forward to all year round. Celebrate with creamy vanilla ice cream or malt topped with birthday cake bites and rainbow sprinkles. Get the cameras out you'll want to share this colorful creation with your followers. Late Summer Dream You don't have to just dream about this flavor combination the folks at Midwest Dairy have made it a reality. The rich vanilla ice cream or malt topped with zesty orange marmalade and crunchy vanilla wafers will have you thinking of warm sunny days, long after the summer sun has set. Now through Friday, April 12, ice cream-lovers can visit www.MidwestDairy.com/DairyGoodnessFlavor to take the "Flavor of the Fair" poll and choose a favorite. Visitors are encouraged to share their pick online with the hashtag #DairyGoodnessFlavor. The winning addition will be announced in the coming months. Last year's winner That's S'More Like It featured a creamy, crunchy blend of graham cereal, teeny marshmallows and chocolate syrup atop vanilla ice cream or malt. This take on the classic s'more was a huge hit with fairgoers. Previous Flavors of the Fair include "Pie in the Sky" in 2017, "Call it Breakfast" in 2016 and "Salted Caramel Puff", the inaugural "Flavor of the Fair" in 2015. During this year's Minnesota State Fair, fair-goers will be able to once again suggest 2020 "Flavor of the Fair" combinations while they enjoy this year's winning creation and watch Princess Kay of the Milky Way and other program finalists have their likenesses carved in butter. The Dairy Goodness Bar, located in the Minnesota State Fair's Dairy Building (at the corner of Judson and Underwood), will feature a location where visitors can write in suggestions of their own. This year's state fair runs from August 22 through September 2. For more information or to vote in the poll, please visit www.MidwestDairy.com/DairyGoodnessFlavor. Midwest Dairy represents 7,000 dairy farm families and works on their behalf to build dairy demand by inspiring consumer confidence in our products and production practices. We are committed to Bringing Dairy to Life! by Giving Consumers an Excellent Dairy Experience and are funded by farmers from across a 10-state region, including Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. For more information, visit MidwestDairy.com. Follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook at Midwest Dairy. SOURCE Midwest Dairy Related Links http://www.MidwestDairy.com The C Spire Business 2019 Bytes & Bites Technology Solution Summit on Thursday, April 18 will feature Theresa Payton, the first female to serve as White House CIO under former President George W. Bush, as the event's main speaker along with panel discussions, technology vendor booths, food, refreshments and entertainment. A national cybersecurity expert, Payton will cover a variety of topics in her "Hype or Reality? Your Workplace and Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, AI, Machine Learning and the IoT" talk set for 11:30 a.m. in the Electra Room of the Vulcan Park and Museum, 1701 Valley View Drive. Named by Security Magazine as one of the top 25 most influential people in security, Payton is one of America's leading authorities on security and intelligence operations. As White CIO, she oversaw IT operations for Bush and his staff from 2006 to 2008 during a period of fast-paced technological change and escalating cyber threats. Cybersecurity is a growing concern with experts predicting that various forms of cybercrime, including damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement and fraud, will cost businesses worldwide $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015. Payton, who has also held executive roles in banking technology at Bank of America and Wells Fargo, is expected to share insights on how businesses can harness technology to achieve goals while incorporating safeguards to protect enterprises from cyber criminals. Over 1,000 business and IT professionals are expected to attend the summit. The event also will host panel discussions on security and collaboration featuring industry experts from Cisco, DellEMC, C Spire Business, Microsoft and Polycom. Admission is free and the public is invited to learn about the latest trends in technology, view technology demonstrations and enjoy food, refreshments and live music. "As evidenced by the recent cyberattacks on political parties, major businesses and social media companies, executives need to be vigilant by developing and implementing, if necessary, a comprehensive plan to protect their company's valuable data and software programs," said Don Monistere, general manager of C Spire Business. Monistere said C Spire Business offers advanced connectivity, cloud, software, hardware, communications, professional services, cybersecurity, business continuity and technology support in a single, seamless, managed IT solution portfolio. "From desktop to data center, we help customers work smarter, faster and more secure." To learn more about the summit or to register to attend, go to http://blog.cspire.com/. About C Spire C Spire Business is a subsidiary of C Spire, a diversified telecommunications and technology services provider. The unit offers the nation's first full-stack managed IT solutions suite of services, including advanced connectivity, cloud, software, hardware, communications, professional services, cybersecurity, business continuity and technology support in a single, seamless, managed IT solutions portfolio. This news release and other announcements are available at www.cspire.com/news. For more information about C Spire Business, visit www.cspire.com and click on the business tab or follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CSpireBusiness, Twitter at www.twitter.com/CSpireBusiness or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/showcase/c-spire-business. SOURCE C Spire Related Links http://www.cspire.com COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Grossman Law Offices has earned a reputation for providing swift, strategic, and personalized representation to clients facing difficult divorce and family law matters across Ohio, and for being a national-caliber law firm comprised of award-winning attorneys several of whom were recently recognized in the 2019 edition of Ohio Super Lawyers. This year, three of the firm's Attorneys Andrew S. Grossman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, and Anthony R. Auten were named to the 2019 Ohio Super Lawyers list, which they've all been previously recognized in numerous times before. Attorney John H. Cousins IV was also named to the 2019 Ohio Super Lawyers list of Rising Stars for the second year in a row. Managing Partner Andrew Grossman marks his 6th consecutive year being named to the Top 5: Columbus Super Lawyers list a distinction that places him among the very best lawyers across all areas of practice. About Ohio Super Lawyers One of the most anticipated annual attorney ranking publications in the nation, Super Lawyers uses a propriety selection process to vet local attorneys for the benefit of legal consumers searching for the right representation. Each year, Super Lawyers publishes its annual Super Lawyers listing and its Super Lawyers list of Rising Stars, which recognizes up-and-coming lawyers 40 years of age of younger, or in practice for 10 years or less. Because the Super Lawyers selection process is driven by peer nominations, independent research, and meticulous peer review, attorneys who make the final cut are regarded among the top in their fields by practitioners with the insight to provide objective assessments of a lawyer's work. In total, no more than 5% of all practicing lawyers in a state earn recognition from Super Lawyers, and no more than 2.5% are named to the Rising Stars list. Here's more about the attorneys recognized in this year's publication of Ohio Super Lawyers: Jeffrey A. Grossman Jeffrey A. Grossman is the Founder and Lead Attorney of Grossman Law Offices. Over a career dedicated to Family Law, Jeff has been named to the Ohio Super Lawyers list for 16 consecutive years (2004 2019). One of the first attorneys in the state to become an Ohio State Bar Association Certified Family Law Specialist, Jeff has become a trusted figure in the local and legal communities. In addition to Super Lawyers, Jeff has been recognized among the Best Lawyers in America every year since its inception, and in 2009 was honored with the publication's Family Law "Lawyer of the Year" award. Jeff regularly contributes to The Columbus Dispatcher's bi-weekly Wholly Matrimony feature with his son, Andrew. Andrew S. Grossman Managing Partner Andrew S. Grossman has dedicated more than 20 years to focusing exclusively on divorce and family law. A dual-certified trial attorney, Andrew is a Certified Specialist in Family Relations Law (Ohio State Bar Association), and a Board Certified Family Law Attorney (National Board of Trial Advocacy). This year mark's Andrew's ninth consecutive year of inclusion in the Ohio Super Lawyers list, and the 14th time he's been recognized by the publication overall (Rising Stars 2005-2007, 2009-2010). Additionally, Andrew has been the among the top 5 Super Lawyers vote-getters across all areas of practice since 2014, a testament to the respect and esteem he's cultivated among colleagues. Anthony R. Auten Anthony Auten has been named to the Ohio Super Lawyers list every year since 2004. A Columbus Family Lawyer at the Grossman Law Offices, Tony was a former prosecutor, and the youngest prosecutor in the state of Ohio at the time of his appointment, who transitioned into a practice focused on guiding clients through the many complexities of divorce and family law. He is particularly adept at providing counsel on challenging business and financial issues. In addition to his 16-year stint on the Ohio Super Lawyers list, Tony has also been named to the Best Lawyers in America and Columbus Monthly's Top 50 Columbus Lawyers. John H. Cousins IV John H. Cousins IV was selected for inclusion to the Ohio Super Lawyers list of Rising Stars for the second year in a row. A former prosecutor with the Franklin County Prosecutor's Office, John is known as a tenacious trial attorney and negotiator. Having worked on more than 60 appeals in the Ohio Supreme Court and the 10th District Court of Appeals, he also brings a unique perspective to Grossman Law Offices, where he handles matters involving divorce, spousal and child support, prenuptial agreements, and more. Grossman Law Offices is comprised of award-winning Columbus Attorneys who have dedicated their practice exclusively to divorce and family law. Today, the firm is regarded among U.S. News' "Best Law Firms" in Ohio, and is trusted by men, women, and families across the state when they face challenging personal and legal journeys. More information about the firm, its legal team, and the cases it handles can be found at www.grossmanlawoffices.com. SOURCE Grossman Law Offices Related Links http://www.grossmanlawoffices.com/ Among the more than 150 works on view will be seven painted self-portraits by Kahlo, Rivera's Calla Lily Vendor , and numerous portraits of the Gelmans, plus more than fifty photographs that provide insight into Kahlo and Rivera's passionate love affair and how the couple lived, worked, and dressed. Husband-and-wife collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman were glamorous and wealthy Eastern European refugees who married in Mexico in 1941, took part in Mexico City's vibrant art scene, and acquired art mostly from their artist friends. In 1943, Jacques commissioned a full-length portrait of Natasha from Rivera, Mexico's most celebrated painter. "The Gelmans formed close friendships with many artists in this exhibition, often acting as patrons and promoters of their careers and assembling one of the finest collections of modern Mexican art in the world along the way," says Frist Art Museum curator Trinita Kennedy. Born in 1907 in Coyoacan, a suburb south of Mexico City, Kahlo had a difficult childhood, facing a bout with polio at age six and a bus accident at the age of 18 that left her disabled and often bedridden. "It was during her recovery from the accident that Kahlo began to paint, in part because she was bored in bed. She spent hours alone with an easel and a mirror painting her own face," says Kennedy. "She never attended art school, but as she considered a career as an artist, she sought out several of Mexico's leading painters, including Rivera, whom she had met several years earlier." Their friendship became a courtship, with the two marrying in 1929. Unfaithful to each other, the pair divorced in 1939, only to remarry in 1940. In the early twentieth century, Mexico's artistic avant-garde was closely tied to political and social revolution. Following Mexico's civil war from 1910 to 1920, the government enlisted male painters to produce monumental murals in public buildings. Rivera was a revered figure in this muralism movement and an avowed Communist. "Using art, which could be understood by the masses, Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and others helped Mexico fashion a new identity rooted in its own unique history," says Kennedy. Rivera's artistic works, as well as his vocal opinions on the role of art, would shape the development of Mexican culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. "His depictions of Mexican traditions and everyday life soon came to epitomize Mexican culture at home and abroad, including the United States," says Kennedy. Like Rivera, Kahlo infused her work with mexicanidad, an identification with Mexico's distinct national history, traditions, culture, and natural environment, but in a much more personal way. About a third of her paintings are self-portraits, the works for which she is now most celebrated. They accentuate her distinctive appearance, characterized by a v-shaped unibrow, deep brown eyes, mustache, carefully coiffed hair with braids, and indigenous Mexican clothing. In Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana), for example, she crowns herself with a festive indigenous Mexican headdress known as a resplandor. Known primarily in artistic circles during her lifetime, Kahlo's paintings began to attract widespread international attention in the decades following her death. Her work and life story continued to resonate in pop culture with the success of Frida, a 1983 biography by Hayden Herrera, and the 2002 biopic Frida, starring Salma Hayek. The exhibition includes more than fifty photographs of Kahlo, most of which were taken by noted photographers, such as Lola Alvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray, and Edward Weston. There is also a special gallery focused on Kahlo's unique personal style, which offers insight into her wardrobe, hairstyles, and jewelry. The exhibition concludes with haunting black-and-white photographs of Kahlo's crutches, corset, and bed, taken recently at the Casa Azul, her former home in Coyoacan, by contemporary artists, including Patti Smith. "Directly associated with her pain, these objects are venerated as relics," says Kennedy. "As the photos attest, Kahlo's ability to create magical paintings despite the suffering caused by her broken body captivates and inspires many of us today." The works collected by the Gelmans offer an unrivaled opportunity to encounter the chaotic and creative Mexican art world of the first half of the twentieth century in all its complexity. Exhibition Credit Organized by the Vergel Foundation and MondoMostre Sponsor Acknowledgment Platinum Sponsor: HCA Foundation on behalf of HCA Healthcare/TriStar Health Gold Sponsor: The Sandra Schatten Foundation Hospitality Sponsor: Union Station Hotel Education and Community Engagement Sponsor: The Windgate Foundation The Frist Art Museum gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Friends of the Mexican Renaissance. The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Connect with us! #FristMexMod About the Frist Art Museum Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Frist Art Museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit art exhibition center dedicated to presenting and originating high-quality exhibitions with related educational programs and community outreach activities. Located at 919 Broadway in downtown Nashville, Tenn., the Frist Art Museum offers the finest visual art from local, regional, national, and international sources in exhibitions that inspire people through art to look at their world in new ways. For additional information, call 615.244.3340 or visit FristArtMuseum.org. SOURCE Frist Art Museum NASHVILLE, Tenn., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- (SUSECON 2019) As enterprise customers move beyond the software-defined data center to also embrace edge and cloud computing, SUSE is evolving with the market, delivering new hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities and application delivery innovations that help customers transform their digital infrastructures in their own way, as quickly as they need to. "Because our customers have a growing need for computing solutions that span the edge to the core data center to the cloud, SUSE must be able to deploy and manage seamlessly across these computing models, unencumbered by technology boundaries," said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. "SUSE has very successfully delivered enterprise-grade Linux for more than 25 years, and it's only natural that we have expanded to cover the entire range of customer needs for both software-defined infrastructure and application delivery. We are driven to enable businesses to innovate and execute their own digital transformation when, where and how they need, as they support the requirements of their own customers." SUSE works with partners and communities to deliver and support cloud and application delivery solutions that enable customers to create, deploy and manage applications and workloads anywhere on premises, hybrid and multi-cloud via open source container-first technologies. SUSE Cloud Application Platform 1.4 SUSE Cloud Application Platform 1.4 will be available this month, and it is the first software distribution to introduce a Cloud Foundry Application Runtime in an entirely Kubernetes-native architecture via Project Eirini. The new release also increases options for deploying the platform in multi-cloud environments. This latest release of SUSE Cloud Application Platform will: Introduce a 100-percent-Kubernetes-native Cloud Foundry architecture with Project Eirini. Eirini allows users to take greater advantage of the widely adopted Kubernetes container scheduler and deepens integration of Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. It also allows customers to use either Kubernetes or Cloud Foundry Diego as their container scheduler. Whichever is used, the developer experience is the same. Increase multi-cloud flexibility with new support for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google's managed Kubernetes service. This expanded support for multi-cloud environments extends customers' options to use the platform in public clouds (Amazon EKS, Azure AKS or GKE), on-premises with SUSE CaaS Platform, or as a multi-cloud combination. Andrei Yurkevich, president and CTO of Altoros, said, "As a system integrator that helps Global 2000 organizations obtain a sustainable technology-driven competitive advantage, we're really excited about the work SUSE has done to integrate the empowerment that Cloud Foundry brings to developers with the simplicity of Kubernetes for operators. We've seen growing interest from our clients in using both technologies together. By incorporating Project Eirini, SUSE has further optimized the integration and enabled our Kubernetes clients to adopt Cloud Foundry faster." Kubernetes Certified Service Provider To provide exceptional support and service to enterprises using SUSE Cloud Application Platform and SUSE CaaS Platform application delivery solutions, SUSE is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. The KCSP program is a pre-qualified tier of vetted service providers that have deep experience helping enterprises successfully adopt Kubernetes. SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 SUSE's latest enterprise-ready OpenStack Cloud platform will also be available in April as SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9. It is the first release to integrate the best of SUSE OpenStack Cloud and HPE OpenStack technology into one, single-branded release. Based on OpenStack Rocky, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 helps customers to: Enhance business agility through simplified post-deployment cloud operations using the new Cloud Lifecycle Manager day-two user interface. Seamlessly transition to SUSE OpenStack Cloud from HPE Helion OpenStack, giving them a mature, stable and robust production-ready private cloud. Simplify the transition of traditional workloads through enhanced support for OpenStack Ironic, giving the ability to customize bare metal servers for specific workload performance and use case needs. Raju Penumatcha, senior vice president and chief product officer at Supermicro, said, "Supermicro has partnered with SUSE for over two years now and has been closely involved in testing this latest version of SUSE OpenStack Cloud. SUSE's expertise and history in OpenStack is undeniable, and when combined with Supermicro's hardware portfolio, provides the ideal solution for innovation, in addition to helping reduce costs. SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 coupled with Supermicro hardware will enable a mature, stable and robust production-ready private cloud based on truly open source technologies, backed by SUSE's and Supermicro's world-class support organizations." At SUSECON in Nashville this week, SUSE is demonstrating its investment in collaboration and choice for partners, customers and community members as the company has redefined "open" to be more than just open source code. Highlighting the SUSECON theme "My kind of open," SUSE is showcasing that openness in the latest software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that are flexible enough to be deployed anywhere and are fueling digital transformation and business growth. For more information about SUSE, its business or its solutions, visit www.suse.com. About SUSE SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 25 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed today and tomorrow. For more information, visit www.suse.com. Copyright 2019 SUSE LLC. All rights reserved. SUSE and the SUSE logo are registered trademarks of SUSE LLC in the United States and other countries. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners. SOURCE SUSE Related Links http://www.suse.com WAYNE, Pa., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Tax Management (GTM) and Autism Speaks are recognized as honorees in the 2019 Faces of Philanthropy. Each year, this award honors significant philanthropic initiatives between for-profit companies and non-profit companies that have had a meaningful impact on our communities -- through community involvement, monetary donations, and social impact. To align with its company vision of leadership and service, GTM partners with Autism Speaks. For 10 years, GTM employees along with their families and friends have been participating in the Philadelphia Autism Speaks Walk and a series of yearly fundraising events. They have raised over $248,000 for individuals who are on the autism spectrum. GTM also provides work-readiness internships for students who have specialized needs such as autism. Dave Laurinaitis, CEO and Executive Director at GTM shared the reason his company got involved: "Working with a charity that is as passionate as we are to make a difference and spread awareness in the region has been a tremendous motivation for GTM. We are driven and inspired by every child we see at Autism Speaks Walk Day and every family that our donation helps through their lifelong journey on the spectrum. GTM celebrates World Autism Awareness Day today, and we hope our actions encourage future corporate partnerships focused on creating a more inclusive world for people with autism." Autism Speaks has awarded GTM the Spirit Award, and the Top Fundraising Team Award for 3 years. "Support from partners like GTM is vital to the autism community," says Ida Miller Ayala, senior director of field development at Autism Speaks. "Through the efforts of their dedicated employees, GTM takes the lead each year in making significant financial contributions to help Autism Speaks continue enhancing lives today and accelerating a spectrum of solutions for tomorrow. They are also putting their commitment into action by setting an example for better employment opportunities for all. The CDC estimates that 1 in 59 children is affected by autism. This must be everyone's cause. We are grateful to the employees of GTM for making it theirs!" Thanks to the ongoing support of GTM and like-minded corporations, Autism Speaks is steadfast in its commitment to support the autism community. Eighty-five cents of every dollar Autism Speaks spends funds programs and services in science, family services, advocacy, and increasing understanding and acceptance. GTM and Autism Speaks will be honored at the 2019 Faces of Philanthropy Awards breakfast on Thursday, April 11, at the Crystal Tearoom in Philadelphia, PA. About GTM Global Tax Management (GTM) is the largest firm in the Mid-Atlantic region that focuses exclusively on delivering corporate tax services to mid-size and large multinational, public, and Fortune 500 companies. Headquartered in Wayne, PA, GTM is a 100% employee-owned company (ESOP) with five regional offices. GTM is a U.S. partner in the WTS Global international tax network. For more information, visit www.gtmtax.com. About Autism Speaks Autism Speaks is dedicated to promoting solutions, across the spectrum and throughout the life span, for the needs of individuals with autism and their families. We do this through advocacy and support; increasing understanding and acceptance of people with autism spectrum disorder; and advancing research into causes and better interventions for autism spectrum disorder and related conditions. To find resources, join a fundraising walk or make a donation, go to www.AutismSpeaks.org. SOURCE Global Tax Management DUBLIN, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Telecom Analytics Market by Application (Customer Management, Sales and Marketing Management, Risk and Compliance Management, Workforce Management, Network Management), Component, Deployment, Organization Size, and Region - Global Forecast to 2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global telecom analytics market to grow from USD 3.1 billion in 2018 to USD 6.0 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.3% during the forecast period. The growing need to reduce churn and retain customers, increasing demand for streamlined revenue management, and rising network attacks and online data security threats are propelling the growth of the telecom analytics market. However, the lack of awareness of telecom analytics among telecom operators is expected to limit the growth of the market. The need for understanding customer requirements and delivering personalized targeted services to drive the customer management segment Telecom companies across the globe are adopting analytics solutions for customer management, sales and marketing management, and network management. Customer management in the telecom analytics market encompass use of analytics across customer life cycle that includes customer segmentation, satisfaction, loyalty analytics, sentiment analysis, customer experience, customer lifetime value, churn analytics, behavior analytics, delinquency analytics, and credit scoring. With low margins and high competition, telecom service providers need to understand their customers, their changing interests and preferences, and create value-based offerings. Rapid implementation, reduced operational cost, 247 data accessibility, scalability, and ease of use to drive the adoption of cloud-based telecom analytics solutions The telecom analytics software can be deployed on-premises as well as on cloud as per business requirements. Cloud-based deployment provides organizations with increased scalability, speed, 24/7 services, and improved IT security. Cloud-based telecom analytics solutions present a cost-effective and efficient way to handle all analytics requirements of telecom service providers, especially SMEs. Furthermore, the current solution in the market effectively addresses the data governance and security concerns of the heavily regulated telecom industry, leading to an increased interest toward cloud solutions. In the cloud deployment model, the telecom analytics solution is offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and all the data and analytics workloads are cloud-based. APAC to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period APAC is an emerging region in terms of adopting telecom analytics software and services. China, India, Japan, and Australia are the major economies contributing to the exponential growth of the telecom analytics market in this region. The tremendous growth in the market involves the implication of exhaustive telecom analytics by CSPs to manage customer data and undertake better decision-making analytically. The ease in availability of competent analytical tools has enabled APAC countries to substantially contribute to the widespread adoption of telecom analytics. Key Topics Covered: 1 Introduction 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Premium Insights 4.1 Attractive Market Opportunities in the Telecom Analytics Market 4.2 Market, By Application (2018-2023) 4.3 Market, By Organization Size 4.4 Market: Market Share Across Regions 5 Market Overview and Industry Trends 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Market Dynamics 5.2.1 Drivers 5.2.1.1 Need to Reduce Churn and Retain Customers 5.2.1.2 Demand for Streamlined and Efficient Revenue Management 5.2.1.3 Rise in Network Attacks and Online Data Security Threats 5.2.2 Restraints 5.2.2.1 Lack of Awareness of Telecom Analytics Among Telecom Operators 5.2.3 Opportunities 5.2.3.1 Significance of Private Branch Exchange in Internal Operations 5.2.3.2 Use of Customer and Network Data Analytics to Devise Targeted Upselling Strategy for Effective Subscriber Engagement 5.2.4 Challenges 5.2.4.1 Lack of Availability of Mature Solutions 5.2.4.2 Identifying Fraudulent Activities 5.3 Industry Trends 5.3.1 Key Trends in the Telecom Analytics Market 5.3.1.1 AI and Machine Learning Set to Disrupt Traditional Business Processes in the Telecom Sector 5.3.1.2 Convergence of Telecom and IoT 5.3.2 Market: Use Cases 5.3.2.1 Gain Real-Time Insights Into Network Health and Ensure Reliability 5.3.2.2 Improving Customer Experience and Minimizing Turn-Around Time for Customer Issues With Guavus Analytics Platform 5.3.2.3 Track and Analyze Sales Performance On-Demand 5.3.2.4 Identify and Prevent Churn and Generate New Revenue Streams With Micro-Segmentation of the Customer Base 5.3.2.5 Improve Customer Care Services and Deliver the QOS 6 Telecom Analytics Market, By Component 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Software 6.2.1 Need for Sustaining in the Highly Competitive Telecom Industry to Drive the Adoption of Telecom Analytics Solutions 6.3 Services 6.3.1 Professional Services 6.3.1.1 Consulting 6.3.1.1.1 Need for Enhanced Strategic Outlook, Improved Performance Efficiencies, and Business Transformation to Drive the Consulting Services 6.3.1.2 Support and Maintenance 6.3.1.2.1 Complexity of Operations and the Need for Regular Assistance During the Solution Life Cycle to Foster the Growth of Support and Maintenance Services 6.3.1.3 Deployment and Integration 6.3.1.3.1 Rise in the Adoption of Telecom Analytics Solutions With Inherent Need to Align Solution to the Client Environment to Drive the Deployment and Integration Services 6.3.2 Managed Services 7 Telecom Analytics Market, By Application 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Customer Management 7.2.1 Need to Understand Customer Requirements and Deliver Personalized Targeted Services to Drive the Customer Management Segment 7.2.2 Key Use-Cases 7.2.2.1 Customer Experience Analytics 7.2.2.2 Customer Churn Prediction 7.2.2.3 Customer Service Optimization 7.3 Sales and Marketing Management 7.3.1 Need to Retain Existing Customer Base and Increase Market Share to Drive the Sales and Marketing Management Segment 7.3.2 Key Use-Cases 7.3.2.1 Customer Segmentation and Targeting 7.3.2.2 Customer Acquisition 7.3.2.3 Revenue Management 7.4 Risk and Compliance Management 7.4.1 Need to Mitigate Risk and Reduce Cost Associated to Drive the Growth of the Risk and Compliance Segment 7.4.2 Key Use-Cases 7.4.2.1 Compliance Management 7.4.2.2 Fraud Detection 7.4.2.3 Retention Risk and Impact Analysis 7.5 Network Management 7.5.1 Need to Optimize Network Operations to Meet QOS and Qoe Levels to Drive the Network Management Segment 7.5.2 Key Use-Cases 7.5.2.1 Proactive Network Diagnosis 7.5.2.2 Capacity Management 7.5.2.3 Route Optimization 7.6 Workforce Management 7.6.1 Need to Optimize Workforce and Maximize Productivity to Drive the Workforce Management Segment 7.6.2 Key Use-Cases 7.6.2.1 Field Service Planning and Optimization 7.6.2.2 Predicting Future Hiring Needs 7.6.2.3 Employee Attrition Analysis 7.7 Others 7.7.1 Key Use-Cases 7.7.1.1 Quality Management 7.7.1.2 BI and Reporting 8 Telecom Analytics Market, By Organization Size 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises 8.2.1 Need for Viable Cloud-Based Data and Analytics Solutions to Drive the Adoption of Telecom Analytics in SMEs 8.3 Large Enterprises 8.3.1 Increasing Adoption of Advanced Technologies to Drive the Adoption of Telecom Analytics in Large Enterprises 9 Market, By Deployment Model 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Cloud 9.2.1 Rapid Implementation, Reduced Operational Cost, 247 Data Accessibility, Scalability, and Ease of Use to Drive the Adoption of Cloud-Based Telecom Analytics Solutions 9.3 On-Premises 9.3.1 Flexibility to Customize Solutions, and Data Security and Privacy in the Heavily Regulated Telecom Industry to Be the Key Factor Driving the On-Premises Telecom Analytics Solutions 10 Telecom Analytics Market, By Region 10.1 Introduction 10.2 North America 10.2.1 US 10.2.1.1 The US Leads the Region With Significant Analytics Penetration and Investment By Telecom Companies 10.2.2 Canada 10.2.2.1 Canada is Expected to Grow at A Higher CAGR During the Forecast Period With Increasing Need to Retain the Customer Base 10.3 Europe 10.3.1 UK 10.3.1.1 Demand for High QOS Driven By A Large Consumer Base and High Competition to Drive the Market Growth in the UK 10.3.2 Germany 10.3.2.1 Adoption of Advanced Technologies By Local Service Providers and Continued Investments Into the Sector is Fueling the Market Growth in Germany 10.3.3 France 10.3.3.1 Supportive Government Policies and Capital Flow Into the Telecom Sector to Fuel the Market Growth in France 10.3.4 Rest of Europe 10.4 Asia Pacific 10.4.1 China 10.4.1.1 Growing Investment in Advanced Technologies Such as Big Data and IoT Expected to Spur the Growth of Telecom Analytics 10.4.2 India 10.4.2.1 India is Expected to Grow at the Highest CAGR During the Forecast Period 10.4.3 Japan 10.4.3.1 Established Infrastructure and Large Mobile Penetration is Expected to Drive the Market 10.4.4 Rest of APAC 10.5 Latin America 10.5.1 Brazil 10.5.1.1 Need to Diversify and Offer Services at Competitive Pricing to Drive the Market in Brazil 10.5.2 Mexico 10.5.2.1 Need to Effectively Target the Large Subscriber Base and Government Initiatives to Strengthen the Local Telecom Infrastructure to Drive the Market in Mexico 10.5.3 Rest of Latin America 10.6 Middle East and Africa 10.6.1 Middle East 10.6.1.1 Need to Differentiate in the Saturated Telecom Sector for the CSPs and Increase Their Market Share to Drive the Market in the Middle Eastern Region 10.6.2 Africa 10.6.2.1 Rapidly Evolving Telecom Sector and Favorable Government Policies to Drive the Market in the African Region 11 Competitive Landscape 11.1 Microquadrant Overview 11.1.1 Visionaries 11.1.2 Innovators 11.1.3 Dynamic Differentiators 11.1.4 Emerging Companies 11.2 Competitive Benchmarking 11.2.1 Business Strategy Excellence of Major Players in the Telecom Analytics Market 11.2.1 Strength of Product Offerings of Major Players in the Market 12 Company Profiles 12.1 IBM 12.2 Oracle 12.3 SAP 12.4 SAS Institute 12.5 Adobe 12.6 Cisco 12.7 Teradata 12.8 Micro Focus 12.9 Tibco 12.10 Tableau 12.11 Panorama 12.12 Opentext 12.13 Alteryx 12.14 Microstrategy 12.15 Sisense For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/plq524/global_telecom?w=5 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com DUBLIN, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Telecom Towers Market - Growth, Trends and Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The Telecom Tower Market is expected to register a CAGR of over 4.56% during the forecast period 2019 - 2024. The leasing concept has enabled the MNOs to invest heavily in developing their infrastructure and reach across rural regions, thus bringing new revenues to the tower operators, through tower installations. Tower-sharing is one of the major growth drivers for the telecom industry, as it provides benefits like cost reduction and faster data rollout. The telecom tower industry has gained high prominence as an independent industry, mainly in India and the United States. Over the years, millions of dollars have been spent on improving broadband connectivity to the rural areas. The annual data usage via wireless networks has been increasing rapidly, promoting the smartphone penetration considerably. In 2015, the US Department of Agriculture invested around USD 85 million for improving the internet connectivity in the rural areas of the country. However, government initiatives are not the only factors responsible for promoting internet connectivity in the rural areas. The broadband adoption can help improve the economy in rural areas by increasing income, creating jobs, and by lowering unemployment rates. However technology keeps improving, enabling existing wiring to carry more and more data. Alternative techniques are being used to promote broadband in rural areas. For instance, broadband via mobile phone technology or via satellite. Though via satellite is an expensive alternative, it stands as one of the dependable sources of broadband for people staying in rural areas. Despite regular investments from the governments, many rural areas around the world lack access to high-speed internet services. With the introduction of next-generation technologies, such as the Internet of Things, and advanced connectivity spectrums, like 5G, the global telecom tower market is expected to have an increase in demand over the next few years. The environmental impacts of telecom towers have always been a major concern. Radiation from mobile towers has always been an issue, which is recognized as an unseen and subtle pollutant that may be affecting life forms in multiple ways. Installation across a few regions has been stopped, considering the local public's fear of the environmental damage that the presence of the mobile towers may cause in the neighborhood. For instance, the residents of Clear Lake Riviera, California, have cited fire danger as their primary concern toward the installation of a telecom tower. Telecom operators like Verizon and AT&T are finding a need for the tower in the region, however, the concerns of the public has been delaying the process. The tower is ready for set up by December 2018, after the feasibility tests conducted by Horizon Tower, a prominent telecom infrastructure provider. Although in the above cited instance, installation got a nod, the impact of the environmental concerns cited by the public in the setting up of the towers has been evident. Scope of the Report The increasing data usage by consumers has led to a competitive telecom landscape across regions. With tower sharing becoming increasingly popular among the MNOs, the tower operators have been able to reach operational efficiencies. Independent tower companies owned around 70% of the total 4.10 million towers around the world (as of 2017). China has the highest number of telecom towers in the world, owned by the state-run China Tower Corporation. They have around 1,968,000 towers and it was estimated that they are leasing over 550,000 towers. Key Market Trends Lattice Tower is expected to register a Significant Growth Lattice telecom towers are mostly three-legged towers, with tubular leg elements and tubular bracing members. They are used explicitly in case of heavy loads, which makes them suitable for central communication hubs and MW backbone sites in hurricane zones.The primary purpose of setting up a lattice telecom tower in a telecom network is to support more than one antenna for communication purposes. These towers also support the load of supporting apparatus used in communication networks. Lattice telecom towers find their primary applications in radars, video surveillance equipment, and GSM/CDMA equipment. They can be used as electricity transmission towers, radio towers, or as an observation tower. The weight of the lattice tower is spread over a greater area, which reduces the pressure on the foundation and the ground. The modules of a lattice telecom tower can be assembled easily and does not require heavy equipment and cranes, which further optimizes the cost spending of vendors.The truss action and larger base dimensions of this infrastructure help resist the applied loads more effectively, leading to a lighter structural design. Also, wind loads are reduced due to the lattice topology. North America is Expected to Hold Major Share The North American region has been witnessing a significant shift, with the majority of towers being increasingly transferred from MNOs to independent tower companies. Owing to supporting initiatives by the governments, the region is expected to continually strengthen its position in the global market. For instance, the US Department of State's Global Connect Initiative (GCI) aims to bring an additional 1.5 billion people online by 2020, thus creating a demand for more connectivity and network infrastructure. Moreover, aggregate annual wireless capital expenditure in the United States was valued at USD 30 billion, which is expected to augment the market's growth. In 2017, the number of mobile phone users in the United States is expected to reach about 266 million, with mobile internet penetration of about 237.2 million. Mobile internet penetration is expected to cross 275 million by 2023. Increasing wireless data usage continues to compel wireless service providers to improve their networks' quality, and make incremental investments on the coverage and capacity of their networks. Subscriber adoption of advanced wireless data applications, particularly mobile video, advanced devices, and densification of advanced networks by wireless service providers, to satisfy the growing demand for high-bandwidth wireless data, are driving the increased deployment of towers in the region. Competitive Landscape The Telecom Tower 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 prominent share in the market are focusing on expanding their customer base across foreign countries. These companies are leveraging on strategic collaborative initiatives to increase their market share and increase their profitability. The companies operating in the market are also acquiring start-ups working on Telecom Tower Market to strengthen their product capabilities. In April 2018, Crown Castle International Corp. announced that its subsidiary, CCR S.r.l., agreed to purchase a 49% interest in RaiWay S.p.A, a subsidiary of RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) S.p.A., the Italian state-owned television and radio broadcaster, for approximately USD 380 million. RaiWay employs over 750 people and manages over 2,300 broadcast transmission sites across Italy, representing Italy's largest broadcast tower network. Key Topics Covered: 1 INTRODUCTION 2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4 MARKET DYNAMICS 4.1 Market Overview 4.2 Introduction to Market Drivers and Restraints 4.3 Market Drivers 4.3.1 Connecting/Improving Connectivity To Rural Areas 4.3.2 Providing Wider Coverage And Catering To Increasing Data Needs 4.4 Market Restraints 4.4.1 Environmental Concerns About Power Supply Systems To Towers 4.4.2 Tower-sharing Between Telecom Companies 4.5 Value Chain / Supply Chain Analysis 4.6 Industry Attractiveness Porters Five Force Analysis 5 MARKET SEGMENTATION 5.1 By Fuel Type 5.1.1 Renewable 5.1.2 Non-Renewable 5.2 By Type of Tower 5.2.1 Lattice Tower 5.2.2 Guyed Towers 5.2.3 Monopole Towers 5.2.4 Stealth Towers 5.3 By Installation 5.3.1 Rooftop 5.3.2 Ground Based 5.4 By Ownership 5.4.1 Operator Owned 5.4.2 Joint Venture 5.4.3 Private Owned 5.4.4 MNO Captive 5.5 Geography 6 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE 6.1 Company Profiles 6.1.1 Bharti Infratel Limited 6.1.2 Helios Towers Africa 6.1.3 American Tower Corporation 6.1.4 SBA Communications Corporation 6.1.5 AT&T Inc. 6.1.6 GTL Infrastructure Ltd 6.1.7 T-Mobile Towers 6.1.8 Crown Castle International Corporation 6.1.9 China Tower Corporation 7 INVESTMENT ANALYSIS 8 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE TRENDS For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/a2td7k Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com During the reception, the Vietnamese top legislator said her visit aims to further promote the strategic partnership with France, including economic, trade and investment cooperation. While briefing the result of her working session with representatives from 15 French enterprises earlier the same day, NA Chairwoman Ngan said many French firms eye to invest in Vietnam, adding 200 French firms are investing in the Southeast Asian nation. However, she said, two-way trade between Vietnam and France has not matched with their cooperation potential, reaching only US$5 billion in 2018. Representatives from SAFRAN said it is the global leading aviation industry group in France and the world with 92,000 staff. The firm is operating in the two main fields: aviation and aerospace. In Vietnam, SAFRAN set up cooperative ties with partners in 1994 and officially opened its reprensentative in 1997. The groups presence in Vietnam has been stronger since Vietjet Air was formed. NA Chairwoman Ngan thanked SAFRAN for its presence in Vietnam over the last 22 years, and congratulated the group on its cooperation with strategic partners in Vietnam. She suggested leaders of the group consider building facilities for maintaining engines, producing spare parts and essential supplies for the aviation industry in Vietnam; transferring support industrial technology for Vietnam and helping develop human resources working in this industry, towards increasing the efficiency of cooperation. Vietnam pledges to create favourable legal environment for operations of foreign firms, including SAFRAN, in Vietnam, Ngan affirmed. San Diego, Calif., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MIND Research Institute Co-founder Dr. Matthew Peterson will participate as a panelist at the upcoming ASU GSV Summit. Peterson created ST Math, which serves more than 1.2 million students, creating learning environments that can yield the next generation of STEM leaders. The panel, titled Translation Please? How the Science of Learning Can Drive Impact in School, in Tech and at Scale, will focus on bringing science learning into the classroom. WHAT: Researchers today know more about the science of learning than ever before. Yet, a gap remains between learning science principles and high-quality teaching and learning. As an education community, how do we marry the very best of learning science to drive greater outcomes to meet the needs of the whole child? In this session, hear from national innovators, education practitioners, tech leaders and resource providers to learn how it can be done. WHEN: Tuesday, April 9, 2019; 11:00 11:50 a.m. PST WHERE: Harbor F, 2nd Floor at the Manchester Grand Hyatt 1 Market Pl., San Diego, CA 92101 WHO: Moderator: Mike Lamb - Executive Director, Washington D.C., Turnaround for Children Panelists: Dr. Matthew Peterson - Co-founder and Chief Research & Development Officer, MIND Research Institute Chris Liang-Vergara - Chief of Learning Innovation, LEAP Innovations Steve Merrill - Chief Content Officer, Edutopia Dr. Melissa Kim - Deputy Chancellor of Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, D.C. Public Schools About MIND Research Institute MIND Research Institute is a neuroscience and education social impact organization, dedicated to ensuring that all students are mathematically equipped to solve the worlds most challenging problems. MIND is the creator of ST Math, a Pre-K-8 visual instructional program that builds a deep conceptual understanding of math through rigorous learning and creative problem solving. MIND has also developed programs under MathMINDs to provide students, teachers and families dynamic ways to actively engage with math, and to close the experience gap for all learners. MathMINDs includes Family Game Nights, the national K-12 Game-a-thon and MathMINDs Games. For more information, visit mindresearch.org. Attachment PLEASANTON, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The story of one hospital's dramatic reduction in patient pressure ulcers will be showcased at the Illinois Health and Hospital Association (IHA) Quality Advocacy Showcase, to be held April 3 at the State Capitol building in Springfield, Ill. Graham Hospital of Canton, in central Illinois, will tell state lawmakers that it eliminated 95 percent of its pressure ulcer cases after deploying the Leaf Patient Monitoring System. Graham Hospital of Canton, Ill., dramatically reduced the incidence of pressure ulcers by deploying the wireless Leaf Patient Monitoring System, which tracks patient movement and notifies medical staff when a patient needs to be repositioned to alleviate wound-causing pressure. Hospital executives say the system more than paid for itself in six months. "Graham Hospital felt we needed to aggressively address the problem of pressure ulcers the nation's most common hospital-acquired condition by deploying the Leaf Patient Monitoring System to all of our nursing units," said Teresa McConkey, Chief Nursing Executive of Graham Hospital. "The Leaf System notifies our staff when a patient needs to be repositioned to reduce the risk of pressure ulcers. After six months, the system more than paid for itself by protecting our patients, eliminating costs of treating patients who acquire pressure ulcers and helping patients to more quickly return to their normal daily activities." This is the fourth annual IHA Quality Showcase. The event spotlights initiatives undertaken by Illinois hospitals to improve quality and patient care. Nearly 230 quality improvement initiatives were presented during the first three showcases. The Leaf Patient Monitoring System has been used to track the mobility of more than 25,000 patients for more than 2.5 million hours and was recently shown in a published, randomized, controlled trial of over 1,250 ICU patients to reduce the number of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers by 73 percent while promoting early patient mobility. Studies have shown the Leaf System improves patient turning and mobility, reduces pressure injury rates, helps nurses prioritize patient care, improves unit workflow, and saves hospitals non-reimbursed costs associated with the treatment of pressure injuries. The Leaf System, the first FDA-cleared medical technology that continuously monitors patient activity and position to identify those who could benefit from repositioning, has been deployed in healthcare facilities since 2014. It tracks patient movement and activity in bed-bound, chair-bound, and ambulatory patients. The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) recently reported the number of pressure injuries has increased by 10 percent nationally and that they are the fastest-growing hospital-acquired condition. Serious pressure injuries affect 705,000 patients a year and add $10.2 billion to annual U.S. healthcare costs. About Leaf Healthcare, Inc. Leaf Healthcare is a medical technology company dedicated to preventing hospital-acquired pressure injuries/ulcers and other immobility-related complications, which are some of the most common and costly hospital-acquired conditions. Several studies have shown that the FDA-cleared Leaf Patient Monitoring System is a powerful tool that reduces hospital-acquired pressure injuries/ulcers, allows providers to prioritize care, and helps provide a safer environment for patients. The Leaf System is available through Leaf Healthcare and Smith & Nephew. To learn more, visit www.leafhealthcare.com Media Contact: Mark Smith Leaf Healthcare 844-826-5323 [email protected] Jim Martinez 312-543-9026 [email protected] SOURCE Leaf Healthcare Related Links http://www.leafhealthcare.com MEXICO CITY, April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Grupo Aeromexico S.A.B. de C.V. ("Aeromexico") (BMV: AEROMEX), Mexico's global airline, will hold its First Quarter 2019 earnings conference call on: Wednesday April 10th, 2019 11.00 AM ET (10:00 AM Mexico City Time & Central Time) Andres Conesa Labastida, Chief Executive Officer and Ricardo Sanchez Baker, Chief Financial Officer, will host the call and review Grupo Aeromexico's First Quarter 2019 financial and operational results, followed by a question and answer session. First quarter results will be released on April 9th, 2019 after market close. To participate in the conference call, please dial: Toll Free US +1 877-407-9124 Toll International +1 201-689-8584 Registration is required; please dial in at least ten minutes prior to the scheduled start time. The conference call will be available for replay until May 10th, 2019 at 11:00 AM ET, by calling: Toll Free US +1 877-481-4010 Toll International +1 919-882-2331 Replay Conference ID Number: 45489 The conference call replay can also be accessed via Grupo Aeromexico's Investor Relations website: https://www.aeromexico.com/en-us/investors Investor Relations Office Tel: +52 (55) 9132 4257 [email protected] About Grupo Aeromexico Grupo Aeromexico, S.A.B. de C.V. is a holding company whose subsidiaries are engaged in commercial aviation in Mexico and the promotion of passenger loyalty programs. Aeromexico, Mexicos global airline, operates more than 600 daily flights and its main hub is in Terminal 2 at the Mexico City International Airport. Its destinations network features more than 90 cities on three continents, including 43 destinations in Mexico, 22 in the United States, 20 in Latin America, 4 in Canada, 5 in Europe, and 3 in Asia. The Group's operating fleet of 127 aircraft is comprised of Boeing 787 and 737 jet airliners and next generation Embraer 170 and 190 models. In 2012, the airline announced the most significant investment strategy in aviation history in Mexico, to purchase up to 100 Boeing aircraft including 90 MAX B737 jet airliners and 10 B787-9 Dreamliner's. As a founding member of the SkyTeam airline alliance, Aeromexico offers customers more than 1,000 destinations in 179 countries served by the 20 SkyTeam airline partners rewarding passengers with benefits including access to 636 premium airport lounges around the world. Aeromexico also offers travel on its codeshare partner flights with Delta Air Lines, Air France-KLM, Avianca, Copa Airlines and WestJet, with extensive connectivity in countries like the United States, Brazil, Canada, Colombia and Peru. www.aeromexico.com www.skyteam.com http://disfrutaam.tumblr.com/ SOURCE Grupo Aeromexico S.A.B. de C.V. Related Links http://www.aeromexico.com MAPay is poised to expand its payment network first built for the U.S., which spends $3.3 trillion annually on healthcare, with consumer out-of-pocket payments exceeding $515 billion, to capture the worldwide sectoral expenditure of $8.7 trillion. The company projects to have more than $11 billion in transactions processed through the network, with revenues of $471 million by 2021. The company derives revenues from both an enterprise B2B solution set, as well as its consumer-facing MEDspedia portal . Based in New Jersey, MAPay is led by founder and CEO Michael Dershem; a.k.a. "Dersh," a seasoned business entrepreneur who brings an extensive history in the healthcare industry that includes both executive-level roles and ownership of companies. While serving as founding CEO of Pharmasset, an Emory University start-up, he successfully raised more than $25 million in private equity funding and executed $30 million research and development agreements with Big Pharma. Pharmasset subsequently went public and was acquired by Gilead Sciences for $11 billion . MAPay's core business is its healthcare payments solution, which can reduce healthcare transaction costs by as much as 50 percent, while increasing transaction transparency, payment completion rates, and collecting proprietary data. MAPay has a unique patient-centric path to interoperability by way of its payment transaction engine and the trust it builds within its community. "If healthcare providers and the legacy intermediaries who are running transactions were transparent, people would riot," says Dershem. "There is a massive, expressed need in the market for increased interoperability via transparency within the medical encounter. That being said, MAPay offers unique, distinct, value propositions to all of the stakeholders in the healthcare industry. This is what's leading to the momentum of our adoption." "An opportunity exists to eliminate a major portion of the claim processing and transaction costs associated with our own employees receiving care at our owned system network providers. Working with MAPay, we are hoping to create a payment network to streamline processing for our provider to our health system transactions, thereby reducing the historical network access and claims adjudication expense of operating the Plan by at least 20 percent while providing real-time transaction visibility," says Michael Young, the CEO of Temple University Health System. Moreover, the future promise of healthcare depends on the availability and sharing of patient data. Because of business and technology reasons, however, this data remains stuck in silos. Conventional approaches to aggregating healthcare information for impact in research and population health management have been plagued with the business, structural and regulatory conflicts of obtaining and using data. If this data could be accessed and used by a broader community, it could provide price transparency, anonymized data for research and cures, and limit societal medical costs related to fraud and abuse. As Dershem stated in a recent interview with Becker's Hospital Review , a pragmatic approach to how blockchain could affect the future of payment transactions in the healthcare industry, "...is to build hybrid architectures that use legacy database structures with introduction of distributed ledger technologies. This provides a platform where blockchain technologies can be tested and trusted." With the rise of new technology, MAPay's mission is to place healthcare records on its permissionable multi-node blockchain for secure patient-driven use, as well as utilizing this information to impact population health management. For the first time, patients will be able to authenticate themselves into the healthcare ecosystem, not the other way around. Despite the fact that interoperability between these has existed in the industry since the advent of the Commodore computer, until now, these records have been hard-siloed off into institutional and/or business structures that did not communicate with one another. In addition, patients are often granted little or zero access to their own medical records. "This is no longer a technology issue but rather, a business and regulatory issue. Our doctrine on blockchain driven by the patient may be the answer to getting to the trends shaping the discussion of population health management, dynamic diagnosing as well as fraud and abuse," says Dershem. "MAPay has a proprietary technique to aggregate financial, clinical and contextual data through an individual patient-provisioned methodology. I've yet to see anything as transformational as what Dersh and his team have created. Physicians and other healthcare providers will have access to information never before available to drive more customized and effective interventions to treat patients leading to better population health and outcomes," says Jenny A. Witthoff, VMD MS, a global health researcher and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. MAPay has already gained plaudits and recognition for its novel payment technology. The firm is working in collaboration with leading organizations focused on interoperability; has been in discussions with several major US hospital systems for onboarding; and has been in conversations with multiple practice management systems. The company is poised to announce global partnerships with two top-tier technology services and consulting firms, as well as a full-scale international deployment on a countrywide basis of its platform. This will be the first of its kind for any fintech firm in the world. "If we can reduce global healthcare transactions cost by even 10 percent, that would free up nearly $1 trillion dollars," Dershem said at the recent HealthFurther conference in Nashville. That would go a long way to providing vaccines in developing geographic regions, access to care in urban health deserts, and orphan drug research. Not a bad day after all." About MAPay, LLC MAPay is an existing technology company with customers and revenues that deploys distributed ledger technology to power smart contracts, transacting secure medical solutions. The company has developed a hybrid architecture of both centralized and decentralized protocols for multi-party medical payments and HIPAA-compliant data exchange. MAPay is working in association with large-scale hospital networks, top practice management systems, and several insurance payers and government entities. The company is committed to empowering patients and healthcare providers by leveraging blockchain technology to improve and align incentives, reduce costs, and bring increased transparency and data exchange. The company believes in permissionable open-sourced system collaboration, and solution sets that are economically and socially impactful. For more information, please visit https://www.mapaycorp.com/ Media contact: Anne Szustek Talbot [email protected] SOURCE MAPay, LLC Related Links https://www.mapaycorp.com DUBLIN and BOSTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- HealthXL, the leading global platform for digital health intelligence is celebrating its five-year anniversary this week and what makes it all the more special is the addition of two very experienced leaders to our community. Who are they and why are we so excited to have them? Lisa Suennen, currently the Group Lead of the Digital & Technology Business and Head of the venture fund at Manatt Phelps & Phillips joins the HealthXL Board of Directors. "Lisa's extensive experience in the healthcare industry will further strengthen our breadth of talent and background, and we are delighted to have had her in the community over the past 5 years as a friend, advisory board member, supporter and now as an active contributor," said Martin Kelly, CEO of HealthXL. "I am thrilled to be a more formal member of the HealthXL family. Being involved with HealthXL has been professionally and personally rewarding experience and is a truly global enterprise seeking to increase knowledge and positive action at the intersection of technology and health. It is also a place where a large community of healthcare leaders genuinely collaborate in the spirit of collective market improvement," said Lisa. Tamara StClaire, Senior Vice President, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at GuideWell joins the HealthXL Advisory Group. "Digital health is a complex, fast moving space and HealthXL keeps me apprised and connected. The events, platform and communications cover topics around adoption and challenges that help me interpret movement in the market and key players. HealthXL has also built a strong ecosystem of thought leaders and has cultivated a culture that nurtures relationships as well as resources for primary market validation. I'm excited to join the Advisory Group and to support its continued growth," said Tamara. "Tamara brings a unique set of skills and experience to our Advisory Group. She was named as one of Health Data Management's Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT in 2016 - we are honoured to have her join our Advisory Group," said Martin. "HealthXL already has a vast network, by collaborating with Lisa and Tamara's networks the community keeps growing and so does our ability to make valuable change in healthcare." HealthXL provides the data and expertise needed to drive your digital agenda. Connecting those shaping the industry. Our community comprises of healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical device industry visionaries, clinicians, investors, researchers and entrepreneurs. We bring together the information and expertise needed to address complex healthcare challenges by offering a private platform which delivers evidence-based insights from our select community of global experts. Contact us for more information, please visit us at https://healthxl.com or engage with us on Twitter or LinkedIn. Media contact: Maeve Lyons, +353 83 445 9531, [email protected] SOURCE HealthXL Related Links https://healthxl.com Brand Intimacy is defined as the emotional science that measures the bonds we form with the brands we use and love. Top intimate brands in the U.S. continued to significantly outperform the top brands in the Fortune 500 and S&P indices in both revenue and profit over the past 10 years, according to the Brand Intimacy 2019 Study . "Beyond theme parks, the industry continues to struggle to build strong emotional connections with consumers," stated Mario Natarelli, managing partner, MBLM. "Disney Parks is an example of a brand that works to create emotional bonds beyond the commoditized approach many take today, focusing on the experiential, affinity programs and amenities. We firmly believe the industry is underperforming and has an opportunity to leverage strategies and tactics around building stronger bonds with customers to increase its Brand Intimacy." Other significant hospitality & theme parks industry findings include: The gap between the #1 and #2 brand in the industry was larger than in any other: Disney Parks had a Brand Intimacy Quotient of 58.4, while Hilton's score was 34.2 Disney Parks was the #1 brand for both women and men Disney Parks was also #1 for millennials, users over 35, and users with incomes both under and over $100,000 In addition to the findings, MBLM released an article examining why Disney Parks performed so well in its study. The piece, "Making Sense of the Magic of Disney Parks," explores Disney Parks' tie to the #1 overall brand, Disney, and how Disney Parks is able to appeal across age groups and gender to create strong bonds. The Brand Intimacy 2019 Study contains the most comprehensive rankings of brands based on emotion, analyzing the responses of 6,200 consumers and 56,000 brand evaluations across 15 industries in the U.S., Mexico and UAE. MBLM's reports and interactive Data Dashboard, which features a brand ranking tool, showcase the performance of almost 400 brands, revealing the characteristics and intensity of the consumer bonds. To view hospitality & theme parks industry findings, please click here. MBLM also hosted a webinar on the industry, a recording of it can be found here. To download the full Brand Intimacy 2019 Study or explore the Data Dashboard click here. Methodology During 2018, MBLM with Praxis Research Partners conducted an online quantitative survey among 6,200 consumers in the U.S. (3,000), Mexico (2,000), and the United Arab Emirates (1,200). Participants were respondents who were screened for age (18 to 64 years of age) and annual household income ($35,000 or more) in the U.S. and socioeconomic levels in Mexico and the UAE (A, B and C socioeconomic levels). Quotas were established to ensure that the sample mirrored census data for age, gender, income/socioeconomic level, and region. The survey was designed primarily to understand the extent to which consumers have relationships with brands and the strength of those relationships from fairly detached to highly intimate. It is important to note that this research provides more than a mere ranking of brand performance and was specifically designed to provide prescriptive guidance to marketers. We modeled data from over 6,200 interviews and approximately 56,000 brand evaluations to quantify the mechanisms that drive intimacy. Through factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and other sophisticated analytic techniques, the research allows marketers to better understand which levers need to be pulled to build intimacy between their brand and consumers. Thus, marketers will understand not only where their brand falls in the hierarchy of performance but also how to strengthen performance in the future. To read a more detailed description of MBLM's approach, visit its Methodology page. About MBLM: MBLM has invented a new marketing paradigm, Brand Intimacy, delivering expertise and offerings across three areas of focus: Agency, Lab and Platform. With offices in seven countries, our multidisciplinary teams help clients build stronger bonds and deliver optimized marketing outcomes and returns for the long term. To learn more about how we can help you create and sustain ultimate brand relationships, visit mblm.com. RUBENSTEIN PUBLIC RELATIONS CONTACT: KATI BERGOU, 212-805-3014 [email protected] SOURCE MBLM Related Links http://www.mblm.com TEL AVIV, Israel, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- iCAN Israel-Cannabis is pleased to announce that it has issued a secured convertible loan in the amount of CAD $4,000,000 to a group of investors led by Plaza Capital. The principal amount of each Convertible Security, plus accrued interest shall be convertible, for no additional consideration, into common shares of the Company at the option of the holders at any time following the completion of a subsequent Qualified Financing and prior to the close of business on the Maturity Date, at a conversion price equal to the price per share based on a valuation of US$20M. The Convertible Securities shall bear interest at a rate of 8.0% per annum from the date of issue and shall be accrued into the note. Saul Kaye, CEO of iCAN: Israel-Cannabis, stated: "We are excited at the opportunities this financing round will create for iCAN and proud to have Plaza Capital join our solid investor base. With the success of CannaTech Davos and Panama so far in 2019, we are now well positioned to take our premier events to even more countries and continue to push the medicalization of cannabis around the world, with Cape Town already planned for late 2019. Our flagship event in Tel Aviv this week, once again sold out, and brought together the best Cannabis minds from around the world, showcasing Israel's leadership in research and technology. iCAN's unique position at the forefront of this exploding industry creates a wave of opportunities and this strategic financing will grow our iCAN:Serve and iCAN:Incubate portfolios. Jesse Kaplan and Sruli Weinreb, Managing Partners at Plaza Capital added: "We were hugely impressed with iCAN's performance and leadership at the recent CannaTech Panama event and see immense opportunity in their global positioning and pipeline of new technologies. Saul Kaye is front and center of the global cannabis economy and we are thrilled to support him and iCAN." The investment funds will be used to acquire and incubate cannabis-related businesses and anchor iCAN Incubate with a broad portfolio of new cannabis technologies. The funds will also provide an injection into iCAN's conference platform CannaTech to continue to expand the pipeline of opportunities and extend the global cannabis footprint. Shwergold Aharonson & Co. acted as sole legal advisory to iCAN while Plaza Capital was advised by Garfinkle Biderman in Canada and Yigal Arnon & Co. in Israel. About iCAN: Israel-Cannabis iCAN: Israel-Cannabis is building the Global Cannabis Ecosystem. iCAN is committed to accelerate Israel's Canna-Technology industry, capitalizing on Israeli innovation and a leading cannabis regulatory environment to bring premier products to market. iCAN is powered by CannaTech, the premier international cannabis summit held annually in Tel Aviv, and around the world, including London, Sydney, Hong Kong and now Panama in 2019. About CannaTech CannaTech is the only Medical Cannabis event of its kind with a global focus that offers senior industry leaders, medical and scientific experts, and new ventures the platform to come together, drive innovation, form partnerships and promote knowledge exchange. About Plaza Capital Plaza Capital is a boutique merchant bank focused on investing in pre-IPO finance rounds and Private Placements in small cap public companies. We look for strong management teams, healthy balance sheets and companies that are poised for growth. Media Enquiries: [email protected] +972-54-806-8613 Investor Enquiries: [email protected] +972-54-560-4843 SOURCE iCAN: Israel Cannabis SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --The global immune-oncology market is anticipated to rise at a significant CAGR in the forecast period. Immune-oncology market is driven by factors such as manufacturers' emphasis on upgrading immune-oncology drugs as well as increase in R&D to develop anti-cancer drugs. Development of innovative products coupled with product launches is anticipated to propel market growth in the near future. Increasing advances in healthcare settings and use of innovation in medical sector are now emphasizing better services to offer to cancer patients, which in turn has bolstered the immune-oncology market. By Type, the immune-oncology market segmentation includes mAb (Naked, Conjugate), Cancer Vaccines and Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (PD-1, PD-L1, CTLA-4). By Application, the immune-oncology market is segmented as Lung, Melanoma, Leukemia, and Lymphoma. Leukemia and lymphoma account for a higher market due to rise in prevalence and low medical attention. Lung diseases witnessed a remarkable CAGR due to rise pollution and change in lifestyle. Geographical segmentation for immune-oncology market includes North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Middle East and Africa. North America dominates the market growth in the global scenario owing to rise in improvements in healthcare settings and improved medical care. Advances in medicines and mode of drug administration also propels the growth of U.S. market. European market is expected to follow the same trend with a slight difference of reimbursement scenario. Favourable reimbursement for medical and cancer cases fuels the market. Asia-Pacific regions account for a significant market share in the global scenario rise in cancer patients and favourable reimbursements. Prominent players in the immune-oncology market include Amgen, Inc. AstraZeneca Plc, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene Corporation, Pfizer Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis International AG, AbbVie, Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, Merck & Co., Prometheus Therapeutics & Diagnostics, Sanofi S.A., EMD Serono, Inc., Aduro BioTech, Galena Biopharma, Bavarian Nordic, Celldex Therapeutics, ImmunoCellular Therapeutics, Gilead Sciences Inc. and Incyte. Download PDF to know more details about "Immune-Oncology Market" Report 2022. Immuno-oncology is a unique approach that uses the body's immune system to fight cancer. These therapies activate an individual's immune system, making it able to recognize cancer cells and destroy them. Immuno-oncology therapies provide long lasting anti-cancer benefits to patients who previously had very few treatment options available to them. These therapies work against a large number of cancer types. The technological advancements are helping the growth of immuno-oncology market. The biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are striving to launch new and most effective therapies. According to the report "Immuno-Oncology Market, By Type [mAb (Naked, Conjugate), Cancer Vaccines, Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (PD-1, PD-L1, CTLA-4]), By Application (Lung, Melanoma, Leukemia, Lymphoma) - Global Forecast to 2022", the global immuno-oncology market is anticipated to cross US$ 100 Billion by 2022. The report provides a detailed analysis of the global immuno-oncology market. The report also provides the current and forecasted market for immuno-oncology. The report provides insights about the major drivers and challenges, along with the latest trends and developments impacting the industry growth. In addition, the report also highlights various opportunities available for growth of the global immuno-oncology market. Moreover, the report provides the sales of major marketed immuno-oncology drugs. The global immuno-oncology market has been segmented on the basis of type of product into monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic vaccines, and immune checkpoint inhibitors amongst others. According to the report, monoclonal antibodies segment was estimated to account for the largest share in 2016 due to rising prevalence of cancer & rising usage in a number of therapies (antibody-directed enzyme pro-drug therapy and radio immunotherapy). Access 230 page research report with TOC on "Immune-Oncology Market" available with Radiant Insights, Inc. @ https://www.radiantinsights.com/research/immuno-oncology-market The report also sheds light on the geographic segmentation of the global immuno-oncology market. In 2016, North America was estimated to account for the largest share. Presence of major players, increased awareness and better distribution mechanisms are some of the prominent factors that have led to North America being the market leader. On the basis of type of cancer, the immuno-oncology market is dominated by Lung Cancer & Melanoma applications with several companies and academic institutions focusing on novel treatment approaches, thus making the major contribution to the global immuno-oncology market. The report provides the market analysis of major indications along with the forecast till 2022. A major focus has been on the ongoing clinical trials for the development of innovative products. In this context, the report provides information about the immuno-oncology programs at various stages of clinical development. In addition, the report highlights the strategic collaborations amongst the players for enhancing their market share. The later part of the report discusses some of the prominent players in the global immuno-oncology market. Market share analysis of major players is also provided in the report. Furthermore, a brief business overview of each player has been provided along with their product and pipeline portfolios and recent developments. Overall, immuno-oncology is an important and rapidly emerging field. This report will prove as a complete source of knowledge and analysis for clients and potential investors. Browse reports of similar category available with Radiant Insights, Inc.: About Radiant Insights, Inc.: At Radiant Insights, we work with the aim to reach the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Our representatives strive to understand diverse client requirements and cater to the same with the most innovative and functional solutions. Contact: Michelle Thoras. Corporate Sales Specialist Radiant Insights, Inc. Phone: +1-415-349-0054 Toll Free: 1-888-928-9744 Email: [email protected] Web: https://www.radiantinsights.com/ SOURCE Radiant Insights, Inc. DALLAS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Infolob Solutions, a premier digital consulting organization based out of Irving, TX, is celebrating its tenth anniversary yesterday. Infolob was founded in 2009 by Vijay Cherukuri. In 2012 they gained platinum status with the Oracle PartnerNetwork, Managed Platinum Partner in 2016, and Cloud Standard status in 2018. Under the leadership of Tim Fox as Chief Technologist, Infolob's technology solutions business unit served more than 75+ net new customers over the past three years, including nine from the Fortune 100. Oracle named Infolob their Engineered Systems Partner of the Year based on Infolob's ability to both drive new business while improving the efficiency and utility of the Oracle Engineered Systems installed base. Over the past ten years, Infolob Solutions has continually demonstrated their expertise within the IT services space, both with Oracle products and countless others. Under the leadership of Venkat Kovela as Chief Transformation Officer, Infolob's business solutions business unit served more than 60+ customers over last two years, dedicated to solving customer business problems. With primary focus on Oracle Enterprise Applications (SaaS), they were able to service customers with application managed services and BI implementations expanding to the cloud initiatives (both on the cloud infrastructure side and SaaS). On the SaaS front, they solidified Infolob's position by building strong relationships through Oracle channel partners from the ground up. One of the recent major successes to note is an end-to-end implementation of the Oracle SaaS applications suite at Allegheny Intermediate Unit (a K-12 organization in PA) in the public sector space with Oracle Fusion ERP Cloud, Procurement Cloud, and HCM Cloud. They have already started another K-12 project this week in the HCM cloud space. Infolob's business solutions unit has consolidated their base and with a strong sales pipeline and are positioned very strongly this year and for years to come. This business unit currently serves over sixty customers in the enterprise applications and digital transformation space. Infolob is excited to reach this ten-year milestone and eager to continue growing and serving the community. About Infolob Solutions Infolob is a leading technology consulting organization that caters to companies looking for specialists who can help with their digital transformation agenda. Press Contact Carson Collins 919-923-6194 [email protected] https://www.infolob.com/ SOURCE Infolob Solutions Related Links https://www.infolob.com/ NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces it has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of purchasers of the securities of American Renal Associates Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: ARA) from August 10, 2016 through March 27, 2019, inclusive (the "Class Period"). The lawsuit seeks to recover damages for American Renal investors under the federal securities laws. To join the American Renal class action, go to https://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-1533.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [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) issues with American Renal's accounting process for revenue recognition, collections, and related matters would give rise to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") investigation into the same, and increased regulatory scrutiny by the SEC; (2) American Renal's financial statements for the fiscal years 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 contained in its Annual Reports for the years ended December 31, 2016 and 2017, and its condensed consolidated financial statements in quarterly reports from 2016 through 2018 were false and could not be relied upon; (3) American Renal had material weaknesses in its internal control over financial reporting; and (4) as a result, defendants' public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. 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 28, 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-1533.html or to discuss your rights or interests regarding this class action, please contact Phillip Kim of Rosen Law Firm toll free at 866-767-3653 or via email at [email protected]. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: 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. Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 34th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 [email protected] [email protected] www.rosenlegal.com SOURCE Rosen Law Firm, P.A. Related Links http://www.rosenlegal.com DALLAS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Jacobs (NYSE:JEC) -- The fall of 2013 marked one of the costliest natural disasters in Colorado history causing nearly $4 billion in destruction. Extensive rainfall in Big Thompson Canyon resulted in flow surges exceeding the 500-year flood event, completely washing away major sections of roadway, access bridges and retaining walls. The devastation, reminiscent of the 1976 flood that killed 143 people, prompted the Colorado Department of Transportation to not only implement a short-term end solution; rather, they committed to completing emergency, temporary repairs, followed by a flexible and resilient permanent solution for which they engaged Jacobs. Jacobs served as the prime consultant and design lead for the US 34 Big Thompson Canyon Permanent Repair project, a construction manager-general contractor delivery, which included 23 miles of design, construction and traffic control measures. During the flood, damages to the road cut the canyon residents off from emergency services forcing more than 800 people to be evacuated to safe areas via helicopter. "This project was about more than just restoring a 23-mile long section of highway. It was about restoring the community's sense of security," says Jacobs Global Vice President of Transportation Kevin Slack. "Residents in the Big Thompson Canyon experienced an event that took lives, wiped away homes, cars and much of the highway connecting their communities. With the canyon inaccessible by vehicles, the airlift operations that took place in the days after the flood were second only to those conducted for Hurricane Katrina victims." After identifying common areas of damage from previous flood events, the project team, which included Kiewit Infrastructure as general contractor, identified resiliency measures to offer the best long-term public safety. Knowing that flood-proofing the entire canyon wasn't feasible, Jacobs incorporated innovative design and methods such as soil cement mixing, installing matrix riprap, moving the roadway onto bedrock, swapping the alignment of the road and the river and a unique approach to traffic control to preserve at least 15 feet of roadway for getting people in and out of the canyon in the next flood event and achieve maximum resiliency. "The CM/GC delivery model helped drive the design innovation and resiliencies that were implemented into the project," said Jacobs US 34 Project Manager Doug Stremel. "We had to evaluate the river and the roadway as one system. They must coexist. It's a river with a road problem as much as the other way around." On March 21, 2019, the US 34 Big Thompson Canyon Permanent Repair project was recognized as the winner of ENR's Best of the Best Project Awards, which recognizes the pinnacle of design and construction achievement among projects completed in the U.S. The project was chosen from more than 820 projects, deemed best overall in terms of teamwork, safety, overcoming challenges, innovation and quality. The project also received the ENR Best of the Best Highway/Bridge award for 2018 and ENR's Mountain States Region recognized the project with a Judges Special Recognition and as its 2018 Highway/Bridge Best Project. Slack continues, "Receiving ENR's Overall Best of the Best honor is a tribute to the tremendous work of CDOT, the contractor Kiewit and the Jacobs design team. The innovative design and resiliency techniques used on this project, the critical role it's serving to better protect and connect a community and building back that stretch of US 34 better than before are outstanding examples of what truly makes a project one of the best. We're honored to add this distinction to the US 34 Big Thompson Canyon Permanent Repair project." The American Council of Engineering Companies of Colorado (ACEC Colorado) also presented the project with a 2019 Excellence Award. Jacobs leads the global professional services sector delivering solutions for a more connected, sustainable world. With $15 billion in fiscal 2018 revenue and a talent force of more than 80,000, Jacobs provides a full spectrum of services including scientific, technical, professional and construction- and program-management for business, industrial, commercial, government and infrastructure sectors. For more information, visit www.jacobs.com, and connect with Jacobs on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Statements made in this release that are not based on historical fact are forward-looking statements. We base these forward-looking statements on management's current estimates and expectations as well as currently available competitive, financial and economic data. Forward-looking statements, however, are inherently uncertain. There are a variety of factors that could cause business results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. For a description of some of the factors which may occur that could cause actual results to differ from our forward-looking statements please refer to our Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 28, 2018, and in particular the discussions contained under Items 1 - Business, 1A - Risk Factors, 3 - Legal Proceedings, and 7 - Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements made herein. For press/media inquiries: Kerrie Sparks 214.583.8433 Brian Morandi 720.286.0719 SOURCE Jacobs Related Links http://www.jacobs.com EDMONTON, Alberta, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wavefront Technology Solutions Inc. (Wavefront or the Company, TSX-V: WEE; OTCQX: WFTSF), a global leader in the advancement of fluid injection technology for oil and gas well stimulation and Improved/Enhanced Oil (IOR/EOR) Recovery, is pleased to provide this update on the Companys activities. Recently, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Wavefronts Powerwave Odyssey tool was applied to a new application coinciding with a traditional acid stimulation. The application is related to extended reach wells and the function of the Odyssey as a coiled tubing agitator as well as a stimulation tool. Extended reach wells are wells where the horizontal leg of the well extends for distances that are generally two times longer than the vertical depth. In many instances frictional issues prevent the coiled tubing from reaching the total measured depth of the well without the aid of significant friction reduction. Friction reduction is often accomplished by some form of agitation where axial oscillations of the coiled tubing reduces downhole friction allowing the coiled tubing to be run deeper into the well. In its initial application the Powerwave Odyssey was able to successfully reduce the coiled tubing friction factor from 0.4 to 0.15 thus allowing the coiled tubing to reach the wells total measured depth of 13,500 ft. The result is comparable to competitive agitators however the main competitive benefit of the Odyssey as an agitator is that it allows for multiple runs into the horizontal section whereas the leading agitators allow for only one run. From a financial perspective Wavefronts local distributors in the Middle East will be able to apply a premium charge associated with the Powerwave Odysseys use as an agitator where competitive tools are charged out in excess of $30,000 per well. In addition to the use of the Powerwave Odyssey as an agitator and acid stimulation tool Wavefront is also entering the market of multi-lateral wells with the incorporation of a specialty multi-lateral tool system into the Odyssey protocol. Multi-lateral wells are becoming more prevalent in the Middle East as they increase reservoir drainage area and minimize the surface footprint. Until now Powerwave has been limited to the main bore however with the incorporation of the multi-lateral tool system all laterals will have the potential to be stimulated. The addition of the multi-lateral tool system will also allow Wavefronts local distributors in the Middle East to apply a premium charge where competitive multi-lateral tool systems are charged out at approximately $15,000 per well. Through its distribution network Wavefront continues to see opportunity for its suite of technologies. A new order to evaluate the utility of Wavefront drilling tools to optimize drilling operations was received for Iraq. Under the terms of the purchase order financial details cannot be released. Iraq is OPECs second largest oil producer and this opening order for drilling tools is the entry point for the Companys Powerwave line of well stimulation offerings. Wavefront is working with its local distributor to secure initial Powerwave field applications and have targeted the third calendar quarter for implementation. Wavefront is very excited about the new opportunities associated with Powerwave that will help unlock the full promise of a reservoir for a client while at the same time providing the Company with new revenue generating opportunity, said Wavefront President and CEO Brett Davidson. We will continue to seek new applications for current Wavefront technology as well as introduce new tools and techniques to broaden potential future growth, as well as address the growing needs of the Companys distributors and technology end users. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS WAVEFRONT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS INC. D. Brad Paterson (signed) D. Brad Paterson, CFO & Director About Wavefront: Wavefront is a global leader in the advancement of fluid injection technology for oil and gas well stimulation and Improved/Enhanced Oil (IOR/EOR) Recovery. Wavefront publicly trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol WEE and on the OTCQX under the symbol WFTSF. The Company's website is www.onthewavefront.com . For further information please contact: D. Brad Paterson, CFO at 780-486-2222 or write to us at investor.info@onthewavefront.com Cautionary Disclaimer Forward Looking Statement Certain statements contained herein regarding Wavefront and its operations constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Canadian securities laws and the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements that are not historical facts, including without limitation statements regarding future estimates, plans, objectives, assumptions or expectations or future performance, are forward-looking statements. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as may, will, should, expect, plan, anticipate, believe, estimate, predict, potential, believe, continue or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. We caution that such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and future events to differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Such factors include fluctuations in the acceptance rates of Wavefronts Powerwave and Primawave Processes, demand for products and services, fluctuations in the market for oil and gas related products and services, the ability of Wavefront to attract and maintain key personnel, technology changes, global political and economic conditions, and other factors that were described in further detail in Wavefronts continuous disclosure filings, available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Wavefront expressly disclaims any obligation to up-date any forward-looking statements, other than as required by law. 2019 Wavefront Technology Solutions Inc. All rights reserved. From Bit To Last Drop, WaveAxe, Powerwave and Primawave are registered trademarks of Wavefront Technology Solutions Inc., or its subsidiaries, or affiliates. 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. SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kentik, the provider of network analytics for the cloud-native world, today announced integrated support for Microsoft Azure. With Kentik's Azure support, enterprises and service providers gain access to a real-time view of their applications and services running in Azure, as well as into and across multi-cloud environments in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In an industry survey of more than 300 networking peers , Kentik verified that multi-cloud is real and quickly becoming more common than hybrid architectures. Deployment agility, operational efficiency, scalability, and cost are just a few multi-cloud drivers. Kentik's multi-cloud capabilities, combined with its robust network visibility for hybrid and traditional environments, provide the complete, big-picture insights organizations need to keep their cloud applications, networks, and businesses performant, reliable, and secure. "Networking doesn't go away with the move to the cloud. Multi-cloud environments add new network complexities as organizations struggle to understand where applications and services reside and which internal teams and external customers have dependencies on these applications and services," said Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik. "At Kentik, we're focused on addressing these network complexities by bringing end-to-end network insights and business understanding to our customers. Adding support for Azure is another step forward in our efforts to enable comprehensive network visibility for enterprises and service providers." With integrated Azure support, Kentik's SaaS analytics platform now ingests flow data directly from Microsoft Azure's Network Security Group (NSG) Flow Logs. These NSG Flow Logs provide information about incoming and outgoing IP traffic, including byte and packet counts. When combined with other network data sources, including Azure-specific context like instance and region names, and orchestration information from Kubernetes and other sources, Kentik's platform enables organizations to gain real-time insights on performance, security, cost management that make sense to stakeholders beyond the network team. Kentik began ingesting flow data from AWS VPC Flow Logs and GCP VPC Flow Logs late last year. The platform also integrates with other cloud infrastructure data sources, including host-level instrumentation (e.g., per-host real-time telemetry with performance (latency/loss) metrics and layer 7 decodes), virtual network appliances (e.g., standard telemetry like NetFlow, BGP, and SNMP from VM-based appliances), and container orchestration/service mesh (e.g., Kubernetes and Istio). For more information on Kentik for multi-cloud visibility, download the technical solution brief . To see Kentik's modern network analytics in action, request a demo or start a free trial . ABOUT KENTIK Easily the world's most powerful network insight and analytics for the cloud-native world, Kentik uses real-time traffic analysis, uniquely enriched with application, routing, and internet context to power the network operations of leading enterprises and cloud and communication service providers (CSPs). Kentik's SaaS platform is built on a patented big data engine to deliver modern network analytics that is both powerful and easy to use. Kentik is based in San Francisco - learn more at www.kentik.com . SOURCE Kentik Related Links https://www.kentik.com OLD BRIDGE, N.J., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Veteran real estate executive Robert Kwiatkowski has joined R.J. Brunelli & Co., LLC in the newly-created position of Vice President of Tenant Representation. Among his responsibilities, Kwiatkowski will serve as account manager for Jersey Strong, formerly Work Out World, who R.J. Brunelli and Co. have represented for over 25 years. Jersey Strong is currently seeking 25,000- to 40,000-square foot locations in Ocean, Monmouth, Middlesex, Mercer, Somerset, Union, Essex, and Morris counties. Robert Kwiatkowski Kwiatkowski, who has nearly 40 years of experience in the commercial real estate field, comes to the Old Bridge-based retail property brokerage from Toys "R" Us, where he served as Director of Real Estate-New Store Development/Asset Management since 2009. In that role, his responsibilities included evaluating existing assets within the United States and developing a strategic plan to implement the company's initiatives to integrate the Toys "R" Us and Babies "R" Us brands into one store. From his base in the company's Wayne, N.J. headquarters, he was also responsible for evaluating and securing new store sites within the U.S.; managing the chain's lease renewal and restructuring program, and administering site selection and other real estate matters for new and existing distribution centers and a new e-commerce fulfillment center. From 1997 to 2009, Kwiatkowski was Director of Real Estate for National Wholesale Liquidators in Hempstead, N.Y. There, he was responsible for the growth and development of the new store program, which resulted in the total store count increasing from 18 to 60 locations across various markets. Prior to that, he was a Senior Real Estate Negotiator for Pathmark Stores from 1988 to 1997, where he evaluated and secured new store locations in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Earlier in his career, Kwiatkowski served as Director, Real Estate Management for Pasbjerg Development Company, Springfield, N.J., managing and administering a portfolio of five shopping centers totaling approximately 800,000 square feet. A resident of Belmar, N.J., Kwiatkowski graduated from The College of New Jersey with a B.S. in Business Management, did post-graduate work at New York University's Real Estate School, and earned certifications in property tax administration and real property appraisal from Rutgers University. "We got to know Rob well during the years we handled tenant representation for Toys 'R' and Babies 'R' Us and found him to be the consummate real estate professional," said R.J. Brunelli President/Principal Danielle Brunelli. "Rob's strong industry contacts, excellent negotiating skills and long track record of store and warehouse development and real estate management provide the credentials for this leadership role on our tenant representation team." About R.J. Brunelli & Co. R.J. Brunelli & Co. serves as exclusive broker for 37 existing retail properties with a combined gross leasable area (GLA) of approximately 2.0 million square feet, and six properties for sale. The properties are located throughout New Jersey. The firm also serves as exclusive or preferred tenant representative for approximately 20 retail, restaurant and service chains. These include representation in various New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania counties for such major companies as Dollar Tree, Sally Beauty Supply, TCC Verizon Wireless, Jersey Strong, Urban Bricks Pizza, Modern Acupuncture, European Wax Center, and Turning Point. Press contacts: At R.J. Brunelli & Co., LLC, Danielle Brunelli, President, (732) 721-5800; at Parness & Associates Public Relations, Bill Parness, [email protected] or Lisa Kreda, [email protected] SOURCE RJ Brunelli & Co. Related Links http://rjbrunelli.com LAWRENCE, Mass., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- When: Thursday, April 11, 2019 from 2 - 4 Where: Outside Main Entrance to Lawrence General Hospital, 1 General St., Lawrence MA The nurses of Lawrence General Hospital (LGH) have delivered the required 10-day notice to hospital administration of their plan to conduct informational picketing on April 11, in an effort to negotiate a fair contract that will allow the hospital to recruit and retain the staff needed to provide quality patient care. The nurses and management have been negotiating a new union contract for more than eight months, with the last four sessions held with a federal mediator. The nurses are attempting to reach an agreement that includes much needed staffing improvements to ensure optimum patient care. Other items include: improved time off, increased retirement benefits, and a fair wage increase. On March 27, a delegation of more than 70 nurses marched to the offices of the hospital president and chief nursing officer to deliver petitions calling for these improvements signed by more than 80 percent of the nearly 500 nurses at the hospital. "I'm proud to work in this hospital and in this community, but there's room for improvement," said Travis Libman, RN, an emergency room nurse at the hospital and chair of the nurses local bargaining unit with the Massachusetts Nurses Association. "Too many patients are left boarding for an extended amount of time in the emergency room while waiting for a bed in the hospital. With the proper amount of staff, we could help alleviate this congestion and get patients where they need to go much quicker. Delivery of quality care is our top priority throughout these contract negotiations and beyond." According to ProPublica, a service that tracks emergency department (ED) wait times for hospitals across the nation, Lawrence General Hospital patients experience the longest ED wait times in the state (an average of 81 minutes). LGH patients also experience some of the longest wait times in the state to receive needed medication for serious injuries. LGH also ranks near bottom statewide for the time it takes for patients to be admitted to the hospital from the ED (7 hours and 42 minutes). A full breakdown of LGH ED wait times can be found at the bottom of this advisory. A study published last year in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine found that excessive patient assignments and lower staffing levels in hospital emergency departments harm patient care, resulting in longer ED wait times, and the likelihood that patients will leave without being seen. Increasing staffing throughout the hospital will benefit the patients and staff alike. Between January of 2018, through March of this year, LGH nurses have submitted to management more than 140 official reports detailing instances where nurses were forced to take excessive patient assignments that, "poses a serious threat to the safety and well-being of my patients." As an alternative to having patient care units fully staffed with nurses experienced to care for patients in those areas, LGH has also engaged in the mandatory "floating" of nurses. This is when nurses from one area of the medical center are transferred to another where there is a staffing need. The nurse may be unfamiliar with the specific patient conditions, the equipment or procedures on that unit. Patients, as a result, may not be able to receive appropriate care. To improve patient care, the nurses are seeking to increase RN staffing in key areas of the hospital to ensure patients receive the care they need when they need it. This will allow for an efficient flow of patients out of the emergency center and onto the inpatient units. The nurses have proposed to ban mandatory floating of nurses, and to prevent the hospital from making any future cuts to nurse staffing levels. To compensate for the lack of appropriate staff at the facility, the hospital has limited nurse's access to previously agreed upon time off benefits, which is eroding staff morale and preventing nurses from having needed time with their own families. "Nurses are seeking a competitive salary and benefits, including improved retirement and time off benefits that support the retention of staff and fosters a positive work life balance," said Laurie Spheekas, RN, a nurse on the hospital's telemetry unit and vice chair of the nurses local bargaining unit. The nurses believe Lawrence General is well positioned to make a greater investment in nurses and the quality of patient care, given that Lawrence General has been included in the merger of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Lahey Health, which will be the second-largest hospital system in the state, and one of the most profitable. As part of that agreement, BI/Lahey has committed to invest several million dollars in LGH as a safety net provider, and more favorable reimbursement rates. "The nurses of Lawrence General Hospital, many of whom have worked here for several years, are committed to ensure that this hospital is a first-class provider of quality patient care for the residents of Greater Lawrence," Spheekas concluded. "We provide 90 percent of the clinical care delivered by this hospital. This is not only our place of work, but for most of us, this is our community hospital and we have a professional and personal interest in its continued success." Founded in 1903, the Massachusetts Nurses Association is the largest union of registered nurses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its 23,000 members advance the nursing profession by fostering high standards of nursing practice, promoting the economic and general welfare of nurses in the workplace, projecting a positive and realistic view of nursing, and by lobbying the Legislature and regulatory agencies on health care issues affecting nurses and the public. Background on LGH ED Wait Times Below is more detailed information about ED wait times for Lawrence General Hospital in comparison with other hospitals in the state, as published on the ProPublica web site, which is derived from data on ED wait times reported by the federal government. https://projects.propublica.org/emergency/state/MA ED Wait Times LGH 81 minutes Longest in the state Statewide average is 33.4 minutes LGH is 142.5% longer than statewide avg Wait Time Until Sent Home LGH 204 minutes 8 th highest in the state; 47 hospitals have shorter wait times highest in the state; Statewide average is 174 minutes LGH is 17% longer than statewide average Broken bone patients wait until pain meds LGH 61 minutes 12 th highest in the state; 42 hospitals have shorter wait times Statewide average 50.69 LGH is 20% longer than state average Transfer Time LGH 255 minutes (4 hours 15 minutes) 7 th highest in the state; 1 hour and 7 minutes longer than the state average Statewide average is 3 hours 8 minutes Time Before Admission (Average time patients spent in the emergency room before being admitted to the hospital) LGH is 7 hours 42 minutes State average is 6 hours, 32 minutes LGH is 1 hour and 10 minutes longer than state average MassNurses.org Facebook.com/MassNurses Twitter.com/MassNurses Instagram.com/MassNurses SOURCE Massachusetts Nurses Association Related Links http://www.massnurses.org LEVERKUSEN, Germany and SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Leaps by Bayer, the investment arm of the global life sciences company Bayer, and Khloris Biosciences, a biotechnology company, announced today that they have joined forces to develop novel, first-in-class anti-cancer vaccines based on human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). This technology has the potential to address one of today's biggest issues in human health: to prevent and cure cancer. Although initiated a century ago, the field of cancer vaccines is in an early stage of development. Cancer vaccines could be either prophylactic - intending to prevent cancer from developing in healthy people, or therapeutic intending to treat an existing cancer by strengthening the body's natural immune response against it. Khloris Biosciences: Pioneering Cancer Vaccination A study* in mice from Stanford University School of Medicine suggests iPSCs can train the immune system to protect against the development of different types of cancer. Alternatively, as an adjuvant therapy following surgery or radiation, iPSC vaccination could also reactivate the immune system in cancer patients to prevent a relapse and/or metastasis. Human iPSCs have potential as anti-cancer vaccines because they share the same characteristics of cancer cells, such as expression of tumor antigens and the ability to self-renew. Injecting iPSCs that genetically match the recipient, but that are unable to replicate, can safely expose the immune system to a variety of cancer-specific targets. Curing and preventing cancer is one of the main focus areas of Leaps by Bayer, since it still represents one of today's biggest health concerns with limited curative or preventative therapies available. Kemal Malik, Bayer board member for Innovation, said: "We are very impressed with Khloris's approach. It represents a unique opportunity in the development of novel vaccines that ultimately would enable our immune system to successfully fight cancer before it gets out of control the ultimate breakthrough in cancer management." "Bayer's development expertise, commercial reach and worldwide network of R&D sites, combined with our scientific knowledge and technology, will increase the chances to bring this potential breakthrough option to patients in need," commented Prof. Joseph C. Wu, a co-founder of Khloris. "This alliance is in line with our passion for developing truly innovative and disruptive cancer therapies that have a major and lasting impact on disease. Leaps by Bayer offered a unique investment concept that allows big ideas to flourish," stated Dr. Lynne A. Bui, co-founder and CEO of Khloris. The Board of Directors will be composed of two representatives from Khloris - Dr. Lynne A. Bui and Prof. Joseph C. Wu - and two representatives from Leaps by Bayer - Dr. Juergen Eckhardt and Dr. Lucio Iannone. The terms of the investment were not disclosed. Khloris is the 7th investment of Leaps by Bayer, a unit of Bayer investing into solutions to some of today's biggest problems. Previous Leaps investments into potentially breakthrough technologies include Casebia Therapeutics (CRISPR/Cas technology to cure severe genetic disorders), BlueRock Therapeutics (iPSC technology to cure cardiovascular and CNS diseases) and Joyn Bio (probiotics for plants to enable for chemical fertilizer-free farming). *Autologous iPSC-Based Vaccines Elicit Anti-tumor Responses In Vivo. Kooreman, N. et al., Cell Stem Cell. 2018;22(4):501-513. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29456158 About Khloris Khloris Biosciences is a biotechnology startup founded in 2017 developing a novel approach for anti-cancer vaccines using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to trigger a robust immune-response involving innate and adaptive immune cells. The company is located in South San Francisco, California. Khloris is a spinout of the technology that was developed in the laboratory of Prof. Joseph C. Wu, Director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and Professor in the Department of Medicine and Department of Radiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Lynne A. Bui, MD is the co-founder and CEO of Khloris, founder and Chairman of Global Cancer Research Institute (GCRI), and has broad experience in hematology/oncology R&D throughout the industry and academia. For more information, go to www.khlorisbiosciences.com. About Bayer Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of health care and nutrition. Its products and services are designed to benefit people by supporting efforts to overcome the major challenges presented by a growing and aging global population. At the same time, the Group aims to increase its earning power and create value through innovation and growth. Bayer is committed to the principles of sustainable development, and the Bayer brand stands for trust, reliability and quality throughout the world. In fiscal 2018, the Group employed around 117,000 people and had sales of 39.6 billion euros. Capital expenditures amounted to 2.6 billion euros, R&D expenses to 5.2 billion euros. For more information, go to www.bayer.com. Contact Bayer Europe: Dr. Katharina Jansen, phone +49 214 30-33243 Email: [email protected] Contact Bayer U.S.: Christopher Loder, phone +1 201 396-4325 Email: [email protected] Contact Khloris: Media relations, phone +1 650 752-8964 Email: [email protected] Forward-Looking Statements This release may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by Bayer management. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. These factors include those discussed in Bayer's public reports which are available on the Bayer website at www.bayer.com. The company assumes no liability whatsoever to update these forward-looking statements or to conform them to future events or developments. SOURCE Bayer Related Links http://www.bayer.us NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Leesa Sleep has teamed up with Be Social Change, a membership community helping people across all sectors live and work impactfully, and B Lab, a non-profit organization that certifies and serves businesses that meet rigorous verified standards of overall social and environmental performance and public transparency, to offer the New York market the opportunity to engage with purpose-driven companies through a series of monthly 'Bedside Chats'. Moderated by Co-founder and CEO of Be Social Change, Marcos Salazar, the panel-style chats will take the shape of a forum on topics in the world of sustainability, and how businesses are pivoting not only their day to day actions, but global missions to align with better business ethics. The goal is to amplify the message around B Corporations and bring a deeper awareness to their purpose-driven business models. "Lessa is a certified B Corp, committed to leveraging our business as a force for good for our community, employees and the environment." says Jen-Ai Notman, Head of Social Impact at Leesa, "B Corps are redefining what success looks like for businesses, both large and small, and working to build a more inclusive and sustainable economy." The next chat will take place on Thursday, April 4th, and will highlight how B Corp companies are paving the way for environmental stewardship in business. Marcos Salazar, Co-founder and CEO of Be Social Change will moderate a panel discussion including; Tal Chitayat, CEO of Full Circle & Soma Water, Matt Paiton, Marketing at Toast Ale and Ryan Babezien, CEO & Founder of GREATS. Full Circle Home and Soma Water infuse sustainability into everything they do, from their product design and supply chain to their company culture and partnerships. Toast Ale is dedicated to brewing a better planet by tackling climate change, funding food charities and preventing waste. Over the years, GREATS has worked to consolidate their sourcing and manufacturing to a small valley in Italy where they work with the world's best craftsmen and women - all while reducing their carbon footprint. When Leesa was launched, the company made a commitment to donate one mattress for every ten sold to anyone in need of a safe place to rest their heads and their hearts. To date, Leesa has donated over 33,000 mattresses, and this number continues to grow. For more information on the monthly Bedside Chats, visit https://www.leesa.com/pages/bedsidechats . About Leesa Sleep, LLC Based in Virginia Beach, Va., Leesa is a direct-to-consumer online luxury mattress company that offers American-made mattresses delivered directly to consumers' doors. From its start, Leesa has measured its own success not just by the bottom line, but by the company's overall social impact. To date, Leesa's One-Ten program has provided more than 26,000 mattresses to those in need (with 4,000 more committed by September of this year). Leesa offers a 100-night risk-free trial, free shipping and no-hassle returns. In 2016, Leesa was recognized as a certified B Corp, joining forces with more than 2,100 companies using business as a force for good. The company currently offers free shipping to the U.S., U.K., Canada and Germany. For more information, visit www.leesa.com. About B Corporations Certified B Corporations are for-profit companies that use the power of business to build a more inclusive and sustainable economy. They meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. To date, there are more than 2,500 B Corps in 130 industries and 60 countries around the world. About B Lab B Lab is a nonprofit that serves a global movement of people using business as a force for goodTM. Their initiatives include B Corp Certification, administration of the B Impact Management programs, and advocacy for governance structures like the benefit corporation. B Lab's vision is of an inclusive and sustainable economy that creates a shared prosperity for all. About B Social Change B Social Change is a membership community helping people across all sectors live and work impactfully. For its members, B Social Change hosts weekly professional development workshops and social impact events, as well as curates discounts to sustainable businesses to inspire and guide people to make a difference through their careers and lifestyles. B Social Change Membership is $19 a year. Contact: DeVon Haynes, [email protected] SOURCE Leesa Sleep Related Links http://www.leesa.com SAN JOSE, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- OPEN NETWORKING SUMMIT - LF Edge , an umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced growing momentum with new blueprints from Akraino Edge Stack and four new general members including Alef Mobitech Inc., HarmonyCloud Inc., Section, and Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. The Akraino blueprints will debut at the Linux Foundation's Open Networking Summit (ONS) on April 3-5 in San Jose. LF Edge is comprised of projects that will support emerging edge applications in the area of non-traditional video and connected things that require lower latency, faster processing and mobility. Akraino , a project creating an open source software stack that supports high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications, is marking a technical milestone with eight blueprint families with more than 19 under development to support a variety of edge use cases. The Akraino community tests and validates the blueprints on real hardware labs supported by users and community members. The first release of Akraino is scheduled for Q2 2019 and will include several validated blueprints. "LF Edge hit the ground running when we launched in January," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, The Linux Foundation. "Our collaboration for edge solutions across multiple industries in IoT, Enterprise, Telecom and Cloud has been very well received by the community." In addition, EdgeX Foundry , which enables an ecosystem of plug-and-play components to unify the IoT edge computing marketplace, is preparing " Edinburgh ," its fifth code release for Spring 2019 that will include binary data support, automated performance and security testing, new device services and a certification program. EdgeX Foundry will be on-site at Hannover Messe from April 1-5 in Germany with a building automation demo at the Dell Technologies booth (Hall 6, Stand C40) . The demo will highlight the EdgeX framework's ability to bring together a real-world, smart flexible office space environment based on components from a variety of vendors leveraging numerous connectivity standards, operating systems and hardware types. Showcasing the Edge at Open Networking Summit (ONS) LF Edge will make its debut with a booth on-site and several speaking engagements at ONS on April 3-5 in San Jose. The booth will feature demos from Akraino that showcase the emerging blueprints for network cloud integration and industrial automation. Additionally, Project EVE will display a model wind turbine that demonstrates EdgeX Foundry technology for industrial IoT. Experts from the LF Edge community will also present a range of related sessions as part of "The New Edge" track. Key sessions include: Edge Open Source Synergy to Deliver Value-added End-to-end Services , Wednesday, April 3 at 5:10 PM - LF Edge members Ram Krishan, VMware; Kandan Kathirvel, AT&T; Srinivasa Rao Addepalli, Intel; Tina Tsou, Arm; and Rolf Muralt, MobiledgeX will discuss key open source efforts such as ONAP, Cloud Native Kubernetes, Mobile TIP Edge Application Developer Project Group and MobiledgeX, LF Edge, and Akraino. Your Path to Edge Computing Akraino Edge Stack , Thursday, April 4 at 5 PM - Tapio Tallgren, Nokia; Kandan Kathirvel, AT&T; and Tina Tsou, Arm will present edge use cases for Akraino, Akraino blueprints and how users can engage and contribute to the community. Edge Computing League LF Edge Umbrella , Friday, April 5 at 11:10 AM - Tina Tsou, Arm; MyeonGi Jong, Samsung; Roman Shaposhnik, Zededa; Kandan Kathirvel, AT&T; and Janko Isidorovic, Mainflux, will discuss how edge use cases are being addressed to satisfy industry needs, the collaboration between LF Edge projects and how to contribute to each project. For more information about other LF Edge activities or sessions at ONS, click here . The full line-up of ONS conference sessions can be found here . Background On New LF Edge Members LF Edge welcomes Alef Mobitech Inc., Harmony Cloud, Marvell, and Section as new general members working together to make it easy to quickly build, deploy, run, and scale edge computing solutions. These organizations join more than 60 founding member companies that broadly represent the edge computing and IoT landscape providing products and services supporting analytics, telecom, visualization, sensors, security and manageability, cloud and enterprise, among others. Members will support LF Edge projects including Home Edge , a hub for real-time data collected through smart home devices; Project EVE , a new agnostic standard edge architecture; Open Glossary of Edge Computing , a freely-licensed collection that seeks to capture the fast-changing lexicon of edge computing; as well as Akraino Edge Stack and EdgeX Foundry. LF Edge is making significant progress since its launch in January with almost 80 members from around the world joining face-to-face technical steering committee and board meetings at ONS to align on the LF Edge mission and project goals, develop working groups and identify opportunities across key functional areas. Additional information about how to join LF Edge or any of the projects can be found at https://www.lfedge.org/ . Support From New Members "Together, the LF Edge has the opportunity to rewrite the definition of the Internet at the edge," said Ganesh Sundaram, CEO of Alef Mobitech Inc. "We are extremely excited to be joining the LF Edge and working with the entire edge ecosystem. With the proof of our live deployments at the edge, we are committed to creating edge enhanced and edge native applications. The future of applications is being written in front of us and, with the LF Edge, we will be the writers!" "Edge computing, together with technologies like 5G, AI and IoT, will help build the infrastructure of a connected smart world," said Yiqun Ding, CTO of HarmonyCloud. "A whole new generation of applications such as self-driving cars, AR/VR, and smart home will benefit from such a low-latency infrastructure. Harmony Cloud is a long-time open source contributor and solution provider of cloud computing and edge computing. By joining LF Edge, we are pleased to join this industry collaboration and accelerate the development and innovation of edge computing software and its ecosystem." "As a leading provider of innovative compute networking and security solutions for the edge, cloud, 5G and the enterprise, we are excited to be a member of the LF Edge," said Raj Singh, senior vice president and general manager of the Infrastructure Processor Group at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. "We understand and support open source industry initiatives for emerging requirements of edge computing and 5G networks. We look forward to further industry collaborations to provide LF Edge open source solutions." "As a software provider in the edge computing ecosystem, one of our biggest challenges is educating software engineers on how to build for increasingly distributed architectures," said Daniel Bartholomew, CTO of Section. "We see LF Edge playing a fundamental role in defining hardware and software standards that will accelerate adoption and innovation far beyond what we can imagine today." About the Linux Foundation Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org . The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage . Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Media Contact: Maemalynn Meanor (602) 541-0356 [email protected] SOURCE LF Edge Related Links http://www.lfedge.org/ LOS ANGELES, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- HATCHBEAUTY, the award-winning brand incubator, announces it will be partnering with Lion Capital, the firm behind such brand icons as Jimmy Choo, AllSaints and Paige. Lion has chosen to partner with CEO, Tracy Holland, to super charge the next phase of growth. A key strategy, will be reorganizing to better address the evolving needs of the health, wellness and beauty sector by investing in digital, creative and commercial leadership. We would like to thank co-founder, Ben Bennett who played an important role in HATCHBEAUTY's founding and will be stepping back from the company, while Tracy Holland will spearhead the next phase of growth. "Lion Capital has an impeccable track record of developing in-demand consumer brands. They'll be able to provide advisement, infrastructure and technology that will empower HATCHBEAUTY to continue its rapid growth and allow our brands to thrive in the digital space," shares Holland. "I'm thrilled to work alongside them and have access to their vast knowledge, experience and resources, which will help us to expand our role as innovation leaders in beauty industry. Lion is more than an investor, they are strategic partners, smart thinkers and have deep experience in building global brands." Adding to its existing talent pool, three new C-Suite executives will be joining HATCHBEAUTY later this month to manage the sales, digital and marketing teams. "I'm proud that HATCHBEAUTY is a majority woman-owned, women-led company, and I'm anxious to continue building on our heritage of supporting women in business," says Holland. Matthew Nordby, a Partner of Lion Capital said "We're looking forward to supporting Tracy and HATCHBEAUTY during its evolution. Tracy has an innate ability to identify what's missing in the beauty space and use her business savvy to execute big ideas that fill in those gaps. The future is bright for HATCHBEAUTY, and Lion Capital is pleased to be part of it." About HATCHBEAUTY HATCHBEAUTY is a company focused on beauty innovation, specializing in working with brands and retailers on developing co-owned brands. The company develops concepts appropriate for all channels of trade including prestige and specialty retail, direct to consumer, e-commerce and food, drug and mass. HATCHBEAUTY specializes in speed to market, delivering intelligent, inspired solutions in areas of beauty. About Lion Capital Lion Capital is a consumer-focused investor passionate about driving growth through strong brands. With offices in Los Angeles and London, the firm's principals have led the investment of c.$7 billion in over 40 businesses and more than 100 consumer brands across North America and Europe. Lion's focus on market-leading consumer-facing companies has led to investments in such well-known brands as Jimmy Choo, American Apparel, Paige, Perricone MD, and AllSaints. PR Contact: Holly Clarke | [email protected] | 310.561.3368 Erin Kelly | [email protected] | 917.721.8468 SOURCE HATCHBEAUTY NASHVILLE, N.C., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Loma Linda , known for its tasty new line of shelf-stable, plant-based Meal Starters and Meal Solutions created by Atlantic Natural Foods (ANF), announced today that that its Taco Filling Meal Starter was named a winner of Prevention's 2019 Healthy Eating Awards. Loma Linda was selected by Prevention's editorial team from among more than 350 boxed, bagged, frozen and canned goods vying for the honor, and was celebrated in the magazine's March issue. "We are beyond thrilled for Loma Linda foods to be recognized by the esteemed judges at Preventiona credible resource for consumers looking for options and guidance to support better health," said ANF innovation brand manager, Laura Lapp. "It's truly a testament to our mission of democratizing plant-based eating by making delicious, healthy and affordable options easily attainable. With more and more brands entering the plant-based sector every day, it's an honor to be known as one of the best." The editorial team selected winning products that meet Prevention's nutritional standards for being made without excess sodium, less than 10g of added sugars per serving, no trans fats or hydrogenated oils and comprised of real, recognizable ingredients. From there, the Healthy Eating Awards were awarded to the tastiest products. "We loved that [Loma Linda Taco Filling] was vegetarian, versatile, and hearty enough to serve to the family for dinner. The Taco Filling is a super convenient, friendly-favorite dinner option," noted the Prevention editors. Loma Linda Plant-Based Meal Starters and Meal Solutions (MSRP $2.99 to $4.49) are simple, plant-based versions of favorite comfort foods. Varieties include Taco Filling, Chorizo, Pad Thai, Chipotle Bowl, and many more. All are non-GMO and gluten free, offering up to 9g of protein per serving. Loma Linda products are available at more than 5,000 locations nationwide, including Amazon, Walmart, Sprouts Market, Wegmans, and Safeway, as well as at Costco stores in select regions across the U.S. To learn more about Atlantic Natural Foods, please visit www.atlanticnaturalfoods.com or contact the company at (252) 212-9000 x102 or [email protected] or on LinkedIn . About Atlantic Natural Foods Headquartered in Nashville, NC, Atlantic Natural Foods is the leading shelf stable manufacturer and provider of Loma Linda, Neat and Kaffree Roma brand products. Its mission is to provide affordable, sustainable and healthy sources of plant-based protein food for all lifestyles and people to live healthier, longer lives. The company operates its own manufacturing facility in North Carolina, U.S., as well as a joint venture project in Thailand. To learn more about Atlantic Natural Foods, please visit www.atlanticnaturalfoods.com or follow the brand on Facebook , Instagram or Twitter . SOURCE Atlantic Natural Foods, LLC Related Links https://atlanticnaturalfoods.com BOSTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Mad*Pow's Center for Health Experience Design and Health 2.0 Advocates announce a Design Challenge, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for the health and design communities to envision solutions that would reshape everyday life to be healthier by default. The focus of this Design Challenge is to imagine how, in the near future, technology might be used to make health a part of our daily routines. Design Challenge Timeline "Our systems have made it hard to be healthy, and our healthcare system can't keep up. The United States spends far more on healthcare than any country in the world but achieves disappointing results in comparison," said Amy Heymans (Cueva), Mad*Pow Founder and Chief Experience Officer. "How might we design the systems we use every day so they support us in being as happy and healthy as possible, instead of worn down, stressed out, and sick? This Design Challenge seeks the most creative minds to imagine solutions that improve health, not just by focusing on healthcare and medicine, but also by taking a new look at the fundamentals of our daily lives." Design Challenge entries should include ideas that are feasible in five to ten years, change the environment to a healthier default, and incorporate multiple technologies or components. A Q&A webinar is scheduled for May 29, 2019 at Noon ET. Interested participants should register by May 27, 2019, to receive more information about challenge requirements, criteria, rules, and deadlines. Final submissions will be due on August 31, 2019 by 11:59 PM ET. A panel of judges, including Vanessa Mason from Institute for the Future, Judith Anderson from Mass College of Art & Design, Stacey Chang from Dell Medical School, Allison Arieff from SPUR and the New York Times, Jeff Rison from the Gehl Institute, and Amy Heymans from Mad*Pow, will choose two winning solutions: one design that targets specific healthy behaviors and one design that envisions broad, systemic change. These two winning entries will be announced on October 16, 2019 and will share up to $10,000 in prizes. "Many of the tech industry's early attempts to encourage healthy lifestyles rely on prompting people to make healthy decisions in the moment, while doing nothing to address the underlying infrastructure, norms, and culture that guide our behavior," said Stephen Downs, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "This Design Challenge will encourage creative thinkers to envision how technology could shape our everyday routines in ways that make healthy lifestyles the default." For more information on the Design Challenge, visit: https://www.centerhxd.com/collaborations/health-x-design-building-health-into-everyday-life/ About Robert Wood Johnson Foundation For more than 45 years the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has worked to improve health and health care. We are working alongside others to build a national Culture of Health that provides everyone in America a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. For more information, visit www.rwjf.org. Follow the Foundation on Twitter at www.rwjf.org/twitter or on Facebook at www.rwjf.org/facebook. About Mad*Pow Mad*Pow is a purpose-driven, strategic design consultancy working with industry leaders to create social impact. Mad*Pow leverages strategic design and the psychology of motivation to create innovative experiences and compelling digital solutions that are good for people and good for business. Founded in 2000, Mad*Pow has partnered with industry leaders including Cigna, John Hancock, Pearson, Microsoft, and Google, and has received honors for design excellence by the Webby Awards, MITX and the W3C. For more information, visit www.madpow.com The company runs two annual conferences. Their Health Experience Design Conference (HXD) focuses on improving health through human-centered design and innovation. Their Financial Experience Design Conference (FXD) was created in 2017 with a vision of addressing the issues and challenges across the financial services industry in an age of business model disruption and experience-based differentiation. Mad*Pow also recently launched the Center for Health Experience Design which will serve as a conduit for improving the experience of health. About HXD HXD is an annual conference being held on April 2-3, 2019 at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Mass. The event provides a unique crossroads for a diverse community of researchers, designers, creators, and strategists to make connections, help humanize our health system, and accelerate its transformation. Attracting hundreds of visionaries and changemakers from across the health ecosystem, this two-day mix of inspiring presentations, workshops, and discussion will help drive real-world change. For more information on speakers, to view the full agenda, and to register for HXD, visit https://healthexperiencedesign.com/. About Health 2.0 Advocates Health 2.0 Advocates Inc is a 501(c )(3)California-based non-profit corporation. Its mission is to support programs and competitions that promote the development of innovative applications and technologies which improve health and wellness and tackle some of the most difficult challenges in health care. Media Contact: Joshua Milne 617-501-1620 [email protected] SOURCE Mad*Pow Related Links http://www.madpow.com LONDON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Marketing technology firm Concep has just completed a successful MBO. The senior team, led by investors Beaumont Capital, has bought the company from its external shareholders, including former founders, for an undisclosed sum. With offices in London, New York, Sydney and Sofia, Concep currently provides around 300 clients in the legal and professional services industry with digital marketing solutions. More than 50% of Concep's clients are law firms, including a significant number of the global top 250. Dan Morgan CEO explains this was the right time for the MBO as being independent will spur them to take advantage of new opportunities in the marketplace: "Major players are waking-up to the huge opportunity in the legal and professional services tech market. We are seeing the rise of a new breed of marketing technologists who need a simple-to-use platform to connect their marketing activities and arising data more efficiently. The MBO will enable us to increase investment and focus on investing in the areas that matter to clients such as integration, deliverability, security, and speed. We are delighted that Concep is fast-becoming the leading martech partner of choice for legal and professional services." Since Concep was founded in 2002 the platform has developed significantly. It now extends beyond email campaigns providing a comprehensive digital marketing solution. Sector-specific workflows, content automation, event registration management and other easy-to-use tools help marketers work smarter and deliver faster ROI on their high-value content and marketing activity. Concep's platform integrates deeply with CRM systems including Dynamics 365, LexisNexis InterAction and Salesforce as well as with other best-in-breed marketing applications used by the sector. Freddie Hustler, Sales Director, believes that the real value lies in being able to surface data from multiple sources to create useful intelligence using dashboards or Power BI. "Concep's easy-to-use marketing technology and integrations mean that different data points can be connected, creating marketing and BD intelligence that will help our clients become more strategic. We're pleased with the response Concep's engagement platform is receiving both by firms in the global top 250 and the mid-market sectors. With a clearly differentiated offering we are in a stronger-than-ever positionto grow and expand in both spaces, helping our clients transform and grow too." Concep received tax advice from BKL, London and legal advice from Penningtons Manches. SOURCE Concep NEW ORLEANS, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC (KSF) and KSF partner, former Attorney General of Louisiana, Charles C. Foti, Jr., remind investors that they have until May 31, 2019 to file lead plaintiff applications in a securities class action lawsuit against AT&T, Inc. (NYSE: T), if they purchased the Companys 1) securities between October 22, 2016 and October 24, 2018, inclusive (the Class Period) and/or 2) shares issued in connection with its June 2018 acquisition of Time Warner. This action is pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. What You May Do If you purchased AT&T securities as detailed above and would like to discuss your legal rights and how this case might affect you and your right to recover for your economic loss, you may, without obligation or cost to you, contact KSF Managing Partner Lewis Kahn toll-free at 1-877-515-1850 or via email (lewis.kahn@ksfcounsel.com), or visit https://www.ksfcounsel.com/cases/nyse-t/ to learn more. If you wish to serve as a lead plaintiff in this class action, you must petition the Court by May 31, 2019. About the Lawsuit AT&T and certain of its executives are charged with failing to disclose material information during the Class Period, violating federal securities laws. On October 24, 2018, following AT&Ts June 2018 acquisition of Time Warner, the Company disclosed its 3Q2018 results for the first full quarter post-Acquisition that included significant decreases in traditional DirecTV and DirecTV Now subscribers, despite its prior statements touting the expected subscriber growth potential. On this news, the price of AT&Ts shares fell nearly 12%. The case is Gross v. AT&T Inc. et al, 19-cv-2892. About Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC KSF, whose partners include former Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti, Jr., is a law firm focused on securities, antitrust and consumer class actions, along with merger & acquisition and breach of fiduciary litigation against publicly traded companies on behalf of shareholders. The firm has offices in New York, California and Louisiana. To learn more about KSF, you may visit www.ksfcounsel.com . Contact: Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC IRVINE, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) today reported total March sales of 26,934 vehicles, a decrease of 19.1 percent compared to March 2018. Year-to-date sales through March saw a decrease of 15.7 percent, with 70,833 vehicles sold. With 27 selling days in March, compared to 28 the year prior, the company posted a decrease of 16.1 percent on a Daily Selling Rate (DSR) basis. CPO sales totaled 5,555 vehicles in March, an increase of 22 percent compared to March 2018. Year-to-date CPO sales through March increased 18 percent, with 13,857 vehicles sold. Mazda Motor de Mexico (MMdM) reported March sales of 6,031 vehicles, an increase of 46 percent compared to March last year. Year-to-date sales through March increased 22 percent, with more than 16,189 vehicles sold. Mazda North American Operations is headquartered in Irvine, California, and oversees the sales, marketing, parts and customer service support of Mazda vehicles in the United States and Mexico through nearly 700 dealers. Operations in Mexico are managed by Mazda Motor de Mexico in Mexico City. For more information on Mazda vehicles, including photography and B-roll, please visit the online Mazda media center at InsideMazda.MazdaUSA.com/Newsroom. Follow MNAO's social media channels through Twitter and Instagram at @MazdaUSA and Facebook at Facebook.com/MazdaUSA. Month-To-Date Year-To-Date March March YOY % % MTD March March YOY % % MTD 2019 2018 Change DSR 2019 2018 Change DSR Mazda3 6,009 7,760 (22.6) % (19.7) % 15,215 19,655 (22.6) % (21.6) % Mazda6 3,396 3,734 (9.1) % (5.7) % 6,921 7,532 (8.1) % (6.9) % MX-5 Miata 727 876 (17.0) % (13.9) % 1,530 1,966 (22.2) % (21.2) % CX-3 1,201 1,728 (30.5) % (27.9) % 3,253 4,337 (25.0) % (24.0) % CX-5 13,465 16,138 (16.6) % (13.5) % 37,496 42,817 (12.4) % (11.3) % CX-9 2,136 3,066 (30.3) % (27.8) % 6,418 7,688 (16.5) % (15.4) % CARS 10,132 12,370 (18.1) % (15.1) % 23,666 29,153 (18.8) % (17.8) % TRUCKS 16,802 20,932 (19.7) % (16.8) % 47,167 54,842 (14.0) % (12.9) % TOTAL 26,934 33,302 (19.1) % (16.1) % 70,833 83,995 (15.7) % (14.6) % *Selling Days 27 28 76 77 SOURCE Mazda North American Operations Related Links http://www.mazdausa.com DALLAS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- To help students prepare for the annual STAAR Test (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness), McDonald's of North Texas restaurants will continue its STAAR Free Breakfast program, offering free breakfast to 3rd 8th grade students and teachers on Tuesday, April 9 from 5:30 to 10:30 a.m. Students will receive their choice of an Egg White Delight McMuffin Sandwich or Fruit and Maple Oatmeal, Apple Slices and their choice of 1 percent low-fat milk or Honest Kids organic apple juice. The offer is only available to those who go inside the restaurant to order and are accompanied by a parent or guardian. Teachers can also receive the free breakfast offer with proof of a valid school identification card. In 2018, over 20,700 breakfasts were given to students and teachers averaging 63 per restaurant, as a part of the STAAR Free Breakfast program. "Supporting education and giving back to our local communities is at the core of the McDonald's business," said Joe Jasper, local McDonald's Owner/Operator. "We're passionate about providing nutritious food options for busy people, and especially proud of our STAAR Free Breakfast program, which can give kids the morning boost they need to achieve greater academic success." In addition to the STAAR Free Breakfast program, McDonald's commitment to education includes the Archways to Opportunity program, which helps employees further their education and achieve their dreams, including more than 20,400 U.S. restaurant employees who have enrolled since its launch in 2015. McDonald's of North Texas consists of 363 restaurants throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth and Tyler areas. Before visiting the restaurant for STAAR Free Breakfast on April 9, students and teachers in participating markets are encouraged to check with their local McDonald's for final details. About McDonald's McDonald's USA, LLC, serves a variety of menu options made with quality ingredients to more than 27 million customers every day. Nearly 90 percent of McDonald's 14,000 U.S. restaurants are independently owned and operated by businessmen and women. Customers can now log online for free at approximately 11,500 participating Wi-Fi enabled McDonald's U.S. restaurants. For more information, visit www.mcdonalds.com. SOURCE McDonalds USA, LLC Related Links http://www.mcdonalds.com WORCESTER, Mass., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- MindSciences, the leader in evidence-based habit change apps, launched its new consumer-facing identity and portal today, DrJud.com. Going forward, the company's products, information and public health campaigns will be centralized around the DrJud brand. For more information, see: drjud.com. Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8521851-mindsciences-drjud-health-app/ Announcing the new brand, MindSciences CEO Mark Mitchnick said, "Our company was founded by Dr. Jud Brewer, one of the world's leading experts on addiction medicine, neuroscience and habit change. Dr. Brewer's research spurred the development of our three apps, which are aimed at some of today's biggest health challenges: smoking, dysfunctional eating and anxiety. Until now, the apps have been marketed separately. Today's launch brings all of our newly updated products and information to one easily accessed hub." The company's apps are built on over a decade of research, $11 million in funding and the experiences of thousands of users both in clinical trials and real-world use. All three DrJud apps, "Unwinding Anxiety" for anxiety/stress reduction, "Eat Right Now" for dysfunctional eating, and "To Quit" for smoking cessation have been clinically proven effective. "My goal has always been to provide evidence-based health solutions to as many people as possible," said Dr. Brewer. "The issues we tackle are very difficult for people and on top of that, they often feel stigmatized. The truth, however, is that these are common problems and many if not most of us have struggled with them at one time or another. In fact, we refer to them as everyday addictions because they are so ubiquitous. After about 20 years of research, we have a strong scientific foundation for why these everyday addictions form, and how to put effective treatment literally in peoples' hands in a way that is accessible and pragmatic. We believe the DrJud platform will be a welcoming entry point to those seeking to make sustainable improvements in their lives." In the US alone, an estimated 40 million adults experience anxiety disorder and cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable disease and death, accounting for 1 in 5 deaths each year. Binge eating is the most common eating disorder and affects millions more people than are formally diagnosed. The ongoing impact of these health challenges underscores the need for more innovative, accessible and effective tools to help people overcome them. DrJud's near term plans include an accredited video series to educate primary care clinicians on habit formation and practical evidence-based habit change methods and a scholarship initiative to ensure the apps are accessible to all, independent of their financial circumstances. About Dr. Jud Brewer: Dr. Jud Brewer is the lead scientist at Dr.Jud a recognized expert in mindfulness who has appeared on 60 Minutes , gave one of the most-viewed TED Talks of 2016, and has been interviewed for pieces in the Chicago Tribune , the Washington Post and The New York Times . A neuroscientist and psychiatrist, he has used more than 20 years of clinical trials to create three smartphone apps that hack into the brain's habit loop through mindfulness techniques to encourage behavior change. He is currently the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at the School of Medicine at Brown University and the Founder of the DrJud brand (formerly MindSciences). About DrJud, a MindSciences brand: Dr.Jud helps individuals break habit loops and change behavior through evidence-based digital therapeutics for overeating, anxiety and smoking cessation. Developed by Dr. Jud Brewer, the company offers a suite of three digital therapeutics apps that use mindfulness learning techniques to manage addictions, cravings and behavior. See drjud.com for more information. For more information contact: [email protected] SOURCE MindSciences, Inc. DALLAS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Fears Nachawati trial lawyer Matthew McCarley will be featured in an upcoming episode of the true crime show "In Ice Cold Blood," detailing the murder-for-hire of a 69-year-old woman who was killed for her $5 million life insurance policies. In 2014, Anita Fox was found fatally stabbed inside a Colleyville house where she worked as a housekeeper. Bernard "Little Joe" Gorman and his father, Bernard "Big Joe" Gorman, were arrested for the murder, with the police investigation uncovering a complex insurance fraud scheme involving Ms. Fox's daughter and son-in-law, Virginia and Mark Buckland. The investigation revealed that over the course of several years, the Bucklands had taken out a series of life insurance policies on Ms. Fox, naming themselves as sole beneficiaries. Following the recommendation of an insurance agent, the couple brought in the Gormans, members of a nomadic ethnic clan known as Irish Travellers, as third-party investors. Looking for immediate returns, the pair allegedly stalked and murdered Ms. Fox, who has been identified as a member of the English Travellers, another nomadic ethnic group. Represented by Mr. McCarley and Brice Burris of Fears Nachawati, Ms. Fox's son and estate executor, Al Fox III, filed suit to prevent the Bucklands from profiting from the insurance policies. Though the couple has never been charged criminally in the murder, a jury in the 2018 civil case found that they were instrumental in crafting the insurance scheme that led to Ms. Fox's death. Jurors awarded her son $166 million. "Five years after her death, the scheme is still shocking in its sheer audacity," said Mr. McCarley. "They have not faced criminal charges for their role in the murder, but the one thing that Mr. Fox can take comfort in is knowing that his sister and brother-in-law will never profit financially from his mother's death." Hosted by actor and rapper Ice-T, "In Ice Cold Blood" is broadcast on the Oxygen Network. The episode "Gypsy Grandma" will premiere at 7 p.m. CDT April 8. Fears Nachawati represents individuals and businesses in cases involving public entities, private entities, mass torts, serious personal injury, auto accidents, drug and medical device cases, and wrongful death. For more information on the firm, visit https://www.fnlawfirm.com. Media Contact: Rhonda Reddick 800-559-4534 [email protected] SOURCE Fears Nachawati Law Firm Related Links https://www.fnlawfirm.com PLYMOUTH MTG., Pa., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) today announced the recipients of a series of awards honoring individuals whose significant contributions fueled progress in improving and facilitating quality, effective, efficient, and accessible cancer care over the past year. 2019 Awardees: Outgoing Board of Directors Chair Dr. Eberlein was presented with a Board of Producers Award. He was applauded for his reasonable and fair leadership approaches, his availability for advice, and his emphasis on fostering collaboration throughout the greater cancer care community. "I think there are two components that make this organization unique: great leadership and a passionate staff," said Dr. Eberlein. "It's a privilege to be part of the positive impact NCCN has for millions who suffer from cancer all over the world." Another Board of Producers Award went to Dr. Tempero in honor of her long history of contributions to NCCN, which include chairing the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines) Panel for Pancreatic Cancer, membership on various other panels, serving on 11 committees, involvement with the Policy Advisory Group, and helming JNCCNJournal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network as Editor-In-Chief since 2014. "I'm so proud of this organization and feel privileged to have been a part since the very beginning," said Dr. Tempero, while receiving her award. "I have seen impressive innovation over the years while on this amazing journey with NCCN." Dr. Hoppe received the Rodger Winn Award for expert judgment and commitment to excellence in service of the NCCN Guidelines. As the founding Chair of the NCCN Guidelines Panel for Hodgkin Lymphoma and current member of two additional panels, Dr. Hoppe has earned a reputation for his collegial and respectful manner, compassion, thoughtfulness, and preparedness. The award is in memory of the first leader of the NCCN Guidelines program. Dr. Kolodziej was honored as a Partner in Cancer Care in appreciation for his efforts to engage policymakers, employers, payers, and others to improve the accessibility of high-quality cancer care. He described his work with NCCN as "a tremendous responsibility, a tremendous honor, and one of the best parts of my career." Jennifer Burns is a Guidelines Coordinator with NCCN's Clinical Information Operations team. She was named the Pat Daulerio Employee of the Year Award recipient by her peers at NCCN. The awardwhich honors the memory of a longtime employee in NCCN's Meetings departmentis bestowed on a dedicated staff member who particularly exemplifies the Core Values of NCCN. "I'm so grateful to be a small part of the mission I believe in so much," said Burns. About the National Comprehensive Cancer Network The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) is a not-for-profit alliance of 28 leading cancer centers devoted to patient care, research, and education. NCCN is dedicated to improving and facilitating quality, effective, efficient, and accessible cancer care so patients can live better lives. Through the leadership and expertise of clinical professionals at NCCN Member Institutions, NCCN develops resources that present valuable information to the numerous stakeholders in the health care delivery system. By defining and advancing high-quality cancer care, NCCN promotes the importance of continuous quality improvement and recognizes the significance of creating clinical practice guidelines appropriate for use by patients, clinicians, and other health care decision-makers around the world. The NCCN Member Institutions are: Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, Omaha, NE; Case Comprehensive Cancer Center/University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center and Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute, Cleveland, OH; City of Hope National Medical Center, Duarte, CA; Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center | Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, MA; Duke Cancer Institute, Durham, NC; Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA; Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center/Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Seattle, WA; The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, MD; Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, Chicago, IL; Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, Phoenix/Scottsdale, AZ, Jacksonville, FL, and Rochester, MN; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY; Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, FL; The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute, Columbus, OH; Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, NY; Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO; St. Jude Children's Research Hospital/The University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, TN; Stanford Cancer Institute, Stanford, CA; University of Alabama at Birmingham Comprehensive Cancer Center, Birmingham, AL; UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, La Jolla, CA; UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, San Francisco, CA; University of Colorado Cancer Center, Aurora, CO; University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center, Ann Arbor, MI; The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX; University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, Madison, WI; Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Nashville, TN; and Yale Cancer Center/Smilow Cancer Hospital, New Haven, CT. Clinicians, visit NCCN.org. Patients and caregivers, visit NCCN.org/patients. Media, visit NCCN.org/news. Follow NCCN on Twitter @NCCNnews and Facebook @National.Comprehensive.Cancer.Network. Media Contact: Rachel Darwin 267-622-6624 [email protected] SOURCE National Comprehensive Cancer Network Related Links http://www.nccn.org TURN KEY TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION WILL BE PROTOTYPED WITH NORTHERN LIGHTS SUPPLY RETAIL OPERATION IN ALBERTA TORONTO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Nerds on Site Inc. (the "Company" or "NERDS") (CSE: NERD) (FSE: 3NS.F) (QTCQB: NOSUF), a mobile IT solutions company servicing the SME marketplace, having introduced Cannabis IT in a Box, the "Go To" solution, delivered, installed and serviced for SME businesses in the cannabis industry last week, announces its first customer for the solution - Northern Lights Supply retail operation in Alberta. Northern Lights Supply is situated in Nisku, Alberta, at the intersection to Canada's largest oilfield industrial park, along Alberta's busiest corridor, Highway 2 and opposite the Edmonton International Airport. The store provides 6,500 square feet of retail space, making it one of the largest approved retail cannabis stores in Alberta. Northern Lights Supply opened on 23 February 2019. Northern Lights Supply is a Weekend Unlimited brand (CSE: POT). "This is an ideal solution for our start up retail operation. The Cannabis IT in a Box concept is exactly what we needed to ensure, as a small business, that we have the resources and expertise of a highly sophisticated operation when it comes to best practices and applications for our information technology," said Mr. Derek Shields, President and CEO, Northern Lights Supply. The NERDS on Site Cannabis IT in a Box solution will provide the following services to Northern Lights Supply: IT support for existing systems Development and provision of inventory tracking and sales systems Security systems and video systems maintenance and monitoring (access card or fob solutions with multi-level access function, timer and alarm features) IT systems regulatory compliance management Network monitoring and management In store network security and ransomware protection Corporate and multi store network support, management, and ransomware protection Website development e-commerce ready, from simplest to most complex systems Mobile in person support if required, with back up capabilities, remote access and remote support "Derek and his team have seized the early opportunity to work with us in prototyping and launching Cannabis IT in a Box with their solid retail operation," said Mr. Charles Regan, CEO, NERDS on Site. "Northern Lights Supply is an impressive operation, it has been designed to set the standard for cannabis retail operations and its strong customer flow in the first month of operations presents an opportunity for us to design and scale their Cannabis IT in a Box solution for the long-term success of their business." The Cannabis IT division of NERDS delivers the most experienced and agile IT solutions company, serving small and medium sized businesses, to new and existing operators in the Cannabis space. The turn key Cannabis IT in a Box solution is designed to get businesses up and running efficiently, in full compliance, and with instant access to the information they need to serve customers. About Nerds On Site: Nerds on Site, a company founded in 1995, specializes in providing cost effective, leading edge solutions to Small and Medium sized Enterprise (SME), serving as the complete SME IT solution specialists. Nerds on Site was established in London, Ontario with current annual revenues of approximately $10,000,000. The company services over 12,000 clients per year with a superb 96.5% customer satisfaction rating. NOS's business model is based on Nerds sub contracts in Canada and a Franchise model for USA expansion. NOS was hand-picked by Apple Inc. in 2016 to become its mobile enterprise partner, pilot project is ongoing. Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward Looking Statements - Certain information set forth in this material may contain forward-looking statements that involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding future financial position, business strategy, use of proceeds, corporate vision, proposed acquisitions, partnerships, joint-ventures and strategic alliances and co-operations, budgets, cost and plans and objectives of or involving the Company. Such forward-looking information reflects management's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to management. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "predicts", "intends", "targets", "aims", "anticipates" or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases or may be identified by statements to the effect that certain actions "may", "could", "should", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. A number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors may cause the actual results or performance to materially differ from any future results or performance expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company including, but not limited to, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions and dependence upon regulatory approvals. 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. The Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by securities laws. SOURCE Nerds On Site Inc. Related Links www.nerdsonsite.com WASHINGTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- New York state lawmakers have given final approval to legislation prohibiting the sale of tobacco products to anyone under 21. Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed the measure in his budget, and his signature will add New York to the growing list of states and localities that have raised the tobacco age to 21. Thanks to this bold step, New York will prevent young people from starting to use tobacco, save lives and help make the next generation tobacco-free. This bill will help reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and further drive down tobacco use, still the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States. We thank Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal and Senator Diane Savino for their leadership in shepherding this bill through the Legislature, as well as Gov. Cuomo for proposing this and other measures to reduce tobacco use. New York's action provides another major boost for the growing, nationwide movement to increase the tobacco age to 21. Eight states California, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine, Oregon, Massachusetts, Utah and Virginia and at least 440 cities and counties have enacted Tobacco 21 laws. Measures in Illinois and Washington await their governors' signatures, and other states are moving similar bills as well. Increasing the tobacco age to 21 will reduce tobacco use among youth and young adults age groups when nearly all tobacco use begins and that are heavily targeted by the tobacco industry. We know that about 95 percent of adult smokers began smoking before they turned 21. We also know that tobacco companies spend $9.4 billion a year more than $1 million every hour to market their deadly and addictive products, much of it aimed at young people. A tobacco age of 21 will also help counter the industry's relentless efforts to target young people at a critical time when many move from experimenting with tobacco to regular smoking. It will also help keep tobacco out of high schools, where younger teens often obtain tobacco products from older students. A 2015 report by the National Academy of Medicine concluded that increasing the tobacco sale age to 21 would yield substantial public health benefits, with immediate and long-term benefits for the nation's health. Tobacco use kills over 480,000 Americans and costs the nation about $170 billion in health care bills each year. In New York, tobacco kills 28,200 people and costs over $10.3 billion in health care expenses each year. Increasing the tobacco age to 21 is a critical step in reducing and eventually eliminating tobacco's terrible toll. SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids Related Links https://www.tobaccofreekids.org INDIANAPOLIS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- OneCause, a leader in mobile and social fundraising, today announced it is accepting nominations for the 2019 Raise Awards. The annual awards celebrate individual fundraisers and nonprofit organizations who are shaping the future of fundraising with innovative ideas and impactful results. "Fundraising that breaks through the noise and inspires donors takes a certain amount of passion, creativity, and grit," said Steve Johns, chief executive officer for OneCause. "The Raise Awards is our chance to recognize innovation in fundraising and the achievements of those who go above and beyond to build a better tomorrow. These award-winning fundraisers exemplify new ways to connect with donors and expand their respective missions." The annual awards recognize nonprofit achievement in the following categories: Innovative Nonprofit of the Year: Recognizing innovation and creativity in fundraising by organizations who are thinking outside the box and implementing new ideas. Recognizing innovation and creativity in fundraising by organizations who are thinking outside the box and implementing new ideas. Storyteller of the Year: Recognizing excellence in communicating purpose and vision through branding, narrative, and promotion that informs the mind and moves the heart. Recognizing excellence in communicating purpose and vision through branding, narrative, and promotion that informs the mind and moves the heart. Fundraisers of the Year: Recognizing individuals who live out the organization's mission, are dedicated to the donor experience, and always gives 100 percent to the cause. "The landscape of nonprofit fundraising is changing at a rapid pace as we try to keep up with the evolving social and economic climates," said Suzanne Stone, executive director for Susan G. Komen Greater Central and East Texas, Raise 2018 Innovative Nonprofit of the Year winner. "Innovation is the key to solving complex social issues. Recognition from a fundraising leader like OneCause reinforces the belief that change is good and success is possible when we take calculated risk in the nonprofit arena." Last year's inaugural Raise Awards recognized the Innovative Nonprofit of the Year: Susan G. Komen Greater Central and East Texas; Storyteller of the Year: Boys & Girls Club of Noblesville, Indiana; and Fundraisers of the Year: Darcie Wells with March of Dimes in the Greater Houston Area; Susan Bowers with the Helene Foundation; and Heather Burneson with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's National Capital Area Chapter. Nomination Process Award nominations are being accepted online through June 15 at: www.onecause.com/raise/awards/. The Raise Awards are open to both individual fundraisers and nonprofits. Applicants need not be OneCause customers to apply. Submissions should focus on specific achievements, campaigns, and events from the last 12 months. All entries will be reviewed by a committee of past award winners, nonprofit fundraising professionals, and industry experts. Award winners will be announced at the Raise 2019 conference in Chicago, September 16-17. In addition to the award recognition, winners receive a cash donation to their mission on behalf of OneCause. About OneCause OneCause creates user-friendly fundraising software that helps nonprofits engage donors, raise more money and save valuable time and resources. Our full suite of cloud-based fundraising solutions has powered 5,000 organizations, well over 20,000 fundraising events, and helped nonprofits raise more than $1.5 billion. Located in the marketing technology hub of Indianapolis, OneCause has been recognized on the Inc. 500 list of Fastest Growing Companies, received a TechPoint MIRA award for Mobile Technology Excellence & Innovation, and is a five-time Stevie Award winner for excellence and innovation in Customer Service. SOURCE OneCause Related Links https://www.onecause.com ORANGE, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Educators from Orange County and beyond will gather in May for a special forum to address the needs of vulnerable boys and young men within public school systems. Hosted by the Orange County Department of Education and County Superintendent of Schools Dr. Al Mijares, "Know My Name, Face and Story: Saving Our Most Vulnerable Boys and Young Men" will take place from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on May 2 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Anaheim - Orange County. The daylong forum will feature research and insight from renowned academic experts, along with in-depth breakout sessions designed to promote equity, access and opportunity for all students. Speakers will include Pedro Noguera, Ph.D., founder for the Center for the Transformation of Schools at UCLA; Shaun Harper, Ph.D., professor and executive director of the Race and Equity Center at USC; and Victor Rios, Ph.D., professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. "In far too many of our school systems and communities, we have seen widening achievement gaps and cycles of poverty and despair that have persisted for generations," Dr. Mijares said. "It is time that we deeply understand some of the systemic causes of chronic underperformance and embrace our capacity to be change-agents and advocates for our most vulnerable student populations." OCDE has long prioritized educating the whole child in inclusive learning environments that promote excellence, equity and access. In 2016, the department was tapped by the state to help school districts implement the California Multi-Tiered System of Support framework, which aligns new and existing strategies to meet students' academic, behavioral and social-emotional needs. Based on the theme "All Means All," MTSS builds on the strengths of each school, offering core supports for all students, additional assistance for some and targeted interventions for those with the greatest needs. OCDE also established the One Billion Acts of Kindness initiative, which was launched three years ago to promote character, improve school climates and amplify civility. The "Know My Name, Face and Story" forum on May 2 will be held in partnership with Latino Youth Leadership Orange County. Teachers, counselors, administrators and others who educate and support students are encouraged to attend. To learn more or to register, visit link.ocde.us/forum-registration. About OCDE The Orange County Department of Education (OCDE) serves some of Orange County's most vulnerable student populations and provides support and mandated fiscal oversight to 27 school districts serving more than 600 schools and nearly 500,000 students. In addition to providing direct instruction to students through its alternative and special education programs, OCDE administers an array of programs and services that are critical to the operations of local school districts and community colleges, facilitating professional development, legal guidance, payroll, career and technical education support, high-speed internet access, Local Control and Accountability Plan assistance and approval, resources for families, and student enrichment. OCDE's vision, outlined in its most recent Strategic Plan, is that "Orange County students will lead the nation in college and career readiness and success." Department staff are working to achieve this goal in collaboration with educators at all levels of student development, from early childhood through higher education, and in partnership with families, businesses and community organizations. Contact: Ian Hanigan [email protected] SOURCE Orange County Department of Education Related Links https://link.ocde.us/forum-registration Beginning in April through the end of July, Clyde May's campaign will be displayed across eight of OUTFRONT's premium billboards in the Atlanta area, including downtown, at stadiums, and on major highways. The creative is simple and authentic, and captures the brand persona with the tagline, "Most whiskeys have a story. Ours has a legend." "After a long wait, we couldn't be more excited to officially launch in Atlanta and bring our award-winning whiskey to a new market," said Roy Danis, CEO of Conecuh Brands, LLC. "By partnering with OUTFRONT we were not only able to create a campaign that embodies the true spirit of the brand, but are also able to reach a wide audience at the time of our launch in this city." With the goal of informing both trade professionals and consumers of Clyde May's availability in Atlanta, OUTFRONT Studios designed the campaign to encompass the spirit of Clyde May's, complete with a special build that enhances the billboards to include a 4-foot extension to represent the handle of a Clyde May's bottle. "From the very beginning, we understood Clyde May's rich history and crafted a campaign that captured these traditions and values to reveal an authentic, true-to-the-south creative," said Eddy Herty, National Creative Director at OUTFRONT Media. "With this strategically-placed and expertly executed campaign, we can inspire trade professionals and consumers across the Atlanta area to embrace Clyde May's Whiskey and explore new tastes." With its award-winning team of expert creatives and thought-starters, OUTFRONT Studios produces original creative and delivers groundbreaking campaigns that are impactful and engaging. To learn 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 https://www.outfrontmedia.com CAMBRIDGE, England, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Aclara, a leading supplier of smart infrastructure solutions (SIS) to electric, gas and water utilities worldwide, will provide a dual-fuel smart metering solution that includes SMETS2 gas and electricity meters as part of a new contract with OVO Energy, the UK's largest independent energy technology company and supplier. Implementation of the new SMETS2 (smart metering equipment technical specifications: second version) meters is mandated to comply with the UK's smart meter rollout program. Both Aclara's SGM1400 electricity meter and the gas meters it supplies through its strategic alliance with FLONIDAN are SMETS2 Commercial Product Assurance (CPA) certified. This certification, awarded by the UK National Cyber Security Centre, is a fundamental requirement for deploying meters in the UK's National Smart Metering Implementation Program. "OVO is pleased to be working with Aclara for the roll out of the second generation of smart meters in the UK. Both OVO and Aclara recognize that smart meters are key to delivering the energy system of the future; one that will be decarbonized, decentralized and distributed," said Steve Storey, Energy Platform Director, OVO Retail. "OVO is forward-thinking and at the forefront of smart energy solutions, a commitment that Aclara shares. We greatly value our relationship and the trust that OVO has placed in us with this new and important contract," said Allan Connolly, president of Aclara and divisional vice president of Hubbell Power Systems. Founded in 2009, OVO Energy is the leading independent energy retail company in the UK and OVO Group's flagship energy brand, offering an unparalleled scope of digital energy services, solutions and technologies to its pay-monthly customers. OVO Energy redesigned the energy experience to be fair, effortless, green and simple for all customers. Today OVO Energy is a progressive energy company striving to deliver more abundant clean energy for everyone. About Aclara Aclara, now part of the Hubbell Power Systems family of brands, is a world-class supplier of smart infrastructure solutions (SIS) and services to more than 1,000 water, gas, and electric utilities globally. Aclara SIS offerings include smart meters and other field devices, advanced metering infrastructure and software and services that enable utilities to predict and respond to conditions, leverage their distribution networks effectively, and engage with their customers. Aclara won a Frost & Sullivan Global Smart Energy Networks Enabling Technology Leadership Award in 2017 and was named a finalist in three categories of the Platts Global Energy Awards in 2016. Visit us at Aclara.com, follow us on Twitter @AclaraSolutions or read our blog. About Hubbell Power Systems Hubbell Power Systems, Inc. (HPS) is a subsidiary of Hubbell Incorporated and an international manufacturer of quality transmission, distribution, substation, OEM and telecommunications products for a broad range of non-residential and residential construction and electric, gas and water utility applications. With revenues of $1.1 billion, HPS operates manufacturing facilities in the United States and around the world. The headquarters is located in Columbia, South Carolina. Aclara Media Contacts: Nancy Talley Ann Seamonds Aclara Seamonds & Company 440-528-7287 978-764-5528 [email protected] [email protected] SOURCE Aclara Related Links http://www.aclara.com With Panorama Education's new intervention management solution, educators can now easily assign and manage evidence-based interventions across multiple tiers of supportuniversal, targeted, and intensiveand can collaborate with interventionists, support staff, and administrators. This 360-degree insight enables educators to more easily monitor the progress of individual students and groups, and provides guidance on whether more intensive or less intensive interventions are required to meet student goals. Panorama Student Success puts educators one click away from the most up-to-date and holistic information about their students' academic and social-emotional growth in school. "Today, schools and districts are supporting students across a broader set of academic and social-emotional needs than ever before," said Aaron Feuer, co-founder and CEO of Panorama Education. "This requires a new set of approaches to ensure each student is on a path for success. Through Panorama's work with over 900 school districts across the country, we've seen that one of the key challenges for educators right now is prioritizing time and resources to have the most impact on students. Our goal at Panorama Education is to build technology and partner with educators to help solve these pain points, so they can better serve the needs of every child." Panorama Student Success offers a new, fresh way for schools to manage student interventions as part of their implementation of MTSS and RTI frameworks. This system helps educators become proactive, bringing together multiple sources of traditionally siloed data into one place while allowing educators to better track the real-time progress of students who are receiving supports before they slip off track. Additionally, educators have access to a unified platform to help identify students who need additional support, plan and manage interventions, and monitor students' comprehensive progress across academics, behavior, and social-emotional learning. "Since the introduction of the Every Student Succeeds Act, we've seen a growing number of states and districts prioritize their MTSS and RTI frameworks," said Marysa Rochet, head of teaching and learning at Panorama Education and a former educator in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. "Districts are now focused on ensuring that educators are supporting all students with evidence-based, data-driven interventions. However, most districts are still struggling to implement a process that effectively assesses, manages, and tracks the progress of these interventions and support plans. Our mission is to help educators build an effective process for supporting children." In addition to providing critical support for educators, Panorama Student Success also reveals important insight to school and district leaders, providing them with visibility into the status of interventions and supports across grade levels, schools, and across their whole district. As a result, school and district leaders can drive better decision-making and a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of their schools' support for the whole child. "Before I would manually pull up our attendance, behavior incidence and low achievement reports for our students and then have to manually enter it into spreadsheets to identify students who needed extra support given these at-risk factors," said Nichole Goodliffe, dean of students at Mound Fort Junior High School in Ogden, Utah. "This process often took hours and even days to complete. This year, it now takes minutes using the Panorama system. Our student support teams meet weekly and can review our data together while monitoring the progress of our interventions, recording notes daily, and seeing what interventions have been completed for students with other staff in the building. All of this keeps us in the loop in our MTSS process because we know what has been done, when it was done and can go on to better support each student." "Our educators need to know how to select the intervention and how to match it with the student's needs while ensuring adequate implementation integrity," said Kelly Tschudy-Lafean, principal of Forest Lake Area High School in Forest Lake, Minnesota. "We're now able to monitor all of our students academically and social-emotionally with Panorama so that we have a clear picture of where they're at daily. Panorama is the platform that's helping us to streamline our MTSS model, which is improving our system of support for students and their needs." Panorama Student Success was designed to efficiently address some of the most difficult problems schools and districts are facing today. Over the past seven years, Panorama Education has become one of the fastest growing education technology platforms, now serving more than 9 million students in 11,500 schools across the United States each year. About Panorama Education Panorama Education is a team of former educators, engineers, designers and researchers dedicated to helping K-12 schools and districts improve student outcomes. With a best-in-class data analytics platform, Panorama develops advanced technologies that empower educators to foster improved social-emotional learning, school climate, and student engagement. Today, Panorama supports more than 9 million students in 11,500 schools nationwide, and is dedicated to ensuring educators can provide the highest-quality education for every student to succeed. For more information, visit https://www.panoramaed.com or follow @panoramaed. SOURCE Panorama Education Related Links http://www.panoramaed.com Acquisition represents the first acquisition of 2019, solidifying the company's footprint in the UK CLEVELAND, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Park Place Technologies announced it has acquired MCSA Group Limited, a UK-based, business-critical IT services and solutions provider. Park Place Technologies, the world's largest post-warranty data center maintenance firm, will acquire all of MCSA's business, enabling Park Place Technologies to further expand its operations. Park Place Technologies will leverage MCSA's proven track record to deliver a wide range of data center and IT services, including MCSA's core expertise in hardware maintenance, reselling capabilities and its outstanding reputation for servicing customers in the public sector. For 40 years, MCSA has focused on delivering support services (break-fix and IT maintenance), and managed services (including business continuity, monitoring and management). The company is best known for its customer-centric approach. As a result of the acquisition, MCSA's customers will benefit from ParkView, Park Place Technologies' predictive, remote monitoring service. They will also experience greater support throughout their customers' entire product life cycle, as well as global, multilingual 24-hour support centers and a vast, global supply chain. Park Place Technologies' customers will benefit from access to more engineers and greater parts inventory. "MCSA's heritage of providing end-to-end IT services and solutions, makes them a welcome addition to the Park Place Technologies family," said Chris Adams, President and CEO, Park Place Technologies. "MCSA's depth of experience supporting the data center infrastructure of customers is highly regarded. With this acquisition of MCSA, Park Place will be the largest TPM in Europe. We look forward to welcoming MCSA's customers and bringing our award-winning proactive maintenance services and support to MCSA's customers, while expanding our ability to service current and new customers in the UK." "We are excited to join the Park Place Technologies family as we combine our enterprise expertise and service capabilities to support customers worldwide," said Roger Timms, MCSA's founder and chairman. "This is an excellent fit and builds on the service excellence and customer support which is at the heart of both companies. This is the right move for MCSA, the staff and for me personally. We look forward to introducing our customers to all of the advanced technologies and maintenance solutions Park Place Technologies has to offer, including its AI-enhanced, remote monitoring service, ParkView ." With expertise in server, storage and networking and support capabilities extending across physical infrastructure and cloud, MCSA has provided multi-vendor break-fix support for 40 years, giving customers 24/7 access to critical care for their data centers and related infrastructure 365 days per year. The company's network operations center (NOC) enables greater automation and efficiency throughout its service offering. MCSA currently has an operations center located outside of London along with several sales, tech support, testing, warehouses and administrative personnel located throughout the UK. Park Place Technologies will acquire MCSA's six offices in the UK, including one office in Scotland. This is the first acquisition for Park Place Technologies in 2019 and follows four acquisitions in 2018, including Latin America-based CMG-Nicsa, Ireland-based Origina Technology Services, Singapore-based Axentel Technologies and Houston-based Solid Systems CAD Services (SSCS). Together, the acquisitions significantly extended Park Place Technologies' presence worldwide and represent the company's ongoing commitment to servicing the growing needs of its global customer base. About Park Place Technologies Founded in 1991, Park Place Technologies provides a post-warranty alternative to storage, server and networking hardware maintenance for IT data centers. With 24/7 access to a global contact center, support from the industry's most advanced engineers and a wide array of industry leading and award-winning services such as ParkView, Park Place Technologies empowers its customers to improve operational speed and maximize uptime. With more than 15,200 customers, including service of all tier-one OEM equipment, Park Place Technologies' services are spread across 36,000 data centers in more than 141 countries. For more information, please visit www.parkplacetechnologies.com Park Place Technologies Media Simon Bitton | Director of Marketing, Europe Main +44 (0)208 885 9900 | Direct +44 (0)208 885 9656 Michael Miller | Global Content and Communications Manager Main 877-778-8707 | Direct 440-683-9426 SOURCE Park Place Technologies Related Links https://www.parkplacetechnologies.com CALGARY, April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Pembina Pipeline Corporation ("Pembina" or the "Company") (TSX: PPL;NYSE: PBA) announced today that it has agreed to issue $800 million of senior unsecured medium-term notes (the "Offering"). The Offering will be conducted in two tranches consisting of $400 million in senior unsecured medium-term notes, series 12 (the "Series 12 Notes") having a fixed coupon of 3.62% per annum, paid semi-annually, and maturing on April 3, 2029, and $400 million in senior unsecured medium-term notes, series 13 (the "Series 13 Notes") having a fixed coupon of 4.54% per annum, paid semi-annually, and maturing on April 3, 2049. Closing of the Offering is expected to occur on April 3, 2019 and the net proceeds will be used to repay short-term indebtedness of the Company under its credit facilities, as well as to fund Pembina's capital program and for general corporate purposes. The Series 12 Notes and Series 13 Notes are being offered through a syndicate of dealers under Pembina's short-form base shelf prospectus dated July 27, 2017 as supplemented by related pricing supplements dated April 1, 2019. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the notes in any jurisdiction. The notes being offered have not been approved or disapproved by any regulatory authority. The notes have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or any state securities law, and may not be offered or sold within the United States. About Pembina Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Corporation is a leading transportation and midstream service provider that has been serving North America's energy industry for over 60 years. Pembina owns an integrated system of pipelines that transport various hydrocarbon liquids and natural gas products produced primarily in western Canada. The Company also owns gas gathering and processing facilities and an oil and natural gas liquids infrastructure and logistics business. Pembina's integrated assets and commercial operations along the majority of the hydrocarbon value chain allow it to offer a full spectrum of midstream and marketing services to the energy sector. Pembina is committed to identifying additional opportunities to connect hydrocarbon production to new demand locations through the development of infrastructure that would extend Pembina's service offering even further along the hydrocarbon value chain. These new developments will contribute to ensuring that hydrocarbons produced in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin and the other basins where Pembina operates can reach the highest value markets throughout the world. Purpose of Pembina: To be the leader in delivering integrated infrastructure solutions connecting global markets; Customers choose us first for reliable and value-added services; choose us first for reliable and value-added services; Investors receive sustainable industry-leading total returns; receive sustainable industry-leading total returns; Employees say we are the 'employer of choice' and value our safe, respectful, collaborative and fair work culture; and say we are the 'employer of choice' and value our safe, respectful, collaborative and fair work culture; and Communities welcome us and recognize the net positive impact of our social and environmental commitment. Pembina's strategy is to: Preserve Value by providing safe, environmentally conscious, cost-effective and reliable services; by providing safe, environmentally conscious, cost-effective and reliable services; Diversify by providing integrated solutions which enhance profitability and customer service; by providing integrated solutions which enhance profitability and customer service; Implement Growth by pursuing projects or assets that are expected to generate cash flow per share accretion and capture long-life, economic hydrocarbon reserves; and by pursuing projects or assets that are expected to generate cash flow per share accretion and capture long-life, economic hydrocarbon reserves; and Secure Global Markets by understanding what the world needs, where they need it, and delivering it. Pembina is structured into three Divisions: Pipelines Division, Facilities Division and Marketing & New Ventures Division. Pembina's common shares trade on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges under PPL and PBA, respectively. For more information, visit www.pembina.com. Forward-Looking Information and Statements This news release contains certain forward-looking statements and information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of applicable securities legislation that are based on Pembina's current expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "intend", "will", "shall", and similar expressions suggesting future events or future performance. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the offering, including the anticipated closing date and the expected use of the net proceeds of the offering. These forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions that Pembina has made in respect thereof as at the date of this news release, including: prevailing commodity prices, margins and exchange rates, that Pembina's businesses will continue to achieve sustainable financial results and that future results of operations will be consistent with past performance and management expectations in relation thereto, the availability and sources of capital, operating costs, ongoing utilization and future expansions, the ability to reach required commercial agreements, and the ability to obtain required regulatory approvals. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to: non-performance of agreements in accordance with their terms; the impact of competitive entities and pricing; reliance on key industry partners, alliances and agreements; the strength and operations of the oil and natural gas production industry and related commodity prices; the continuation or completion of third-party projects; regulatory environment and inability to obtain required regulatory approvals; tax laws and treatment; fluctuations in operating results; the ability of Pembina to raise sufficient capital to complete future projects and satisfy future commitments; construction delays; labour and material shortages; and certain other risks detailed from time to time in Pembina's public disclosure documents including, among other things, those detailed under the heading "Risk Factors" in Pembina's management's discussion and analysis and annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2018, which can be found at www.sedar.com and with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov and available on Pembina's website at www.pembina.com. In addition, the closing of the offering may not be completed, or may be delayed, if the conditions to the closing of the offering are not satisfied on the anticipated timeline or at all. Accordingly, there is a risk that the offering will not be completed within the anticipated time, on the terms currently proposed, or at all. The intended use of the net proceeds of the offering by Pembina may change if the board of directors of Pembina determines that it would be in the best interests of Pembina to deploy the proceeds for some other purpose and there can be no guarantee as to how or when such proceeds may be used. Accordingly, readers are cautioned that events or circumstances could cause results to differ materially from those predicted, forecasted or projected. Such forward-looking statements are expressly qualified by the above statements. Pembina does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information contained herein, except as required by applicable laws. SOURCE Pembina Pipeline Corporation Related Links http://www.pembina.com ANNVILLE, Pa., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- During the month of April, the Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs (DMVA) will be recognizing and thanking their 2,433 outstanding volunteers for contributing nearly 76,000 hours of service in 2018 to residents in its six veterans' homes. "It is with great pleasure that we recognize these individuals for generously donating their time to help improve the living experience of our veterans and their spouses," said Maj. Gen. Tony Carrelli, Pennsylvania's adjutant general and head of the DMVA. "These gracious volunteers are a vital part of our team and provide quality social time for our residents with friendly smiles and caring attitudes." In 1974, President Richard Nixon, through executive order, established the National Volunteer Week to celebrate and recognize the efforts of all individuals who volunteer. Since then, every year, each president has issued a proclamation for National Volunteer Week. This year it is the week of April 7-13. Thankfully, the number of individuals who volunteer throughout the United States has increased in recent years. National Volunteer Week has expanded into an entire month. Each of the DMVA's six veterans' homes will hold events and activities for their volunteers in April to thank them for their selfless service to our veterans. This year's events include: The Gino J. Merli Veterans' Center (GMVC) located in Scranton will hold an appreciation brunch on April 9 to honor its volunteers. Throughout the year, 145 people volunteered more than 13,000 hours. One individual, Cathleen Goff , reached the milestone of personally volunteering more than 24,000 hours through the years. Joan Millan (19,000 hours) and Sandra Tyler (14,000 hours), also reached volunteer time milestones this year. The home is celebrating 25 years of its volunteer program. will hold an appreciation brunch on to honor its volunteers. Throughout the year, 145 people volunteered more than 13,000 hours. One individual, , reached the milestone of personally volunteering more than 24,000 hours through the years. (19,000 hours) and (14,000 hours), also reached volunteer time milestones this year. The home is celebrating 25 years of its volunteer program. The Hollidaysburg Veterans' Home (HVH) in Hollidaysburg will honor its volunteers at a luncheon on April 10 . In 2018, 679 volunteers donated more than 8,000 hours of their time to assist residents at the home. Tom Smith will be recognized as volunteer of the year, and the VFW Post 4559 Tyrone will be recognized for its continued support of the home. will honor its volunteers at a luncheon on . In 2018, 679 volunteers donated more than 8,000 hours of their time to assist residents at the home. will be recognized as volunteer of the year, and the VFW Post 4559 Tyrone will be recognized for its continued support of the home. The Delaware Valley Veterans' Home (DVVH) in Philadelphia will recognize its 157 volunteers at an April 17 dinner. Collectively, the volunteers donated more than 16,700 hours to serve the residents, which is the largest number of volunteer hours of the six veterans' homes. Seventeen volunteers will be recognized for at least 10 years of service to the home. will recognize its 157 volunteers at an dinner. Collectively, the volunteers donated more than 16,700 hours to serve the residents, which is the largest number of volunteer hours of the six veterans' homes. Seventeen volunteers will be recognized for at least 10 years of service to the home. The Southwestern Veterans' Center (SWVC) in Pittsburgh is recognizing its volunteers with a dinner on April 25 . The 676 volunteers contributed 11,720 hours of service to the residents. Sherry Lauffer will be honored for earning the SWVC Volunteer of the Year Award. is recognizing its volunteers with a dinner on . The 676 volunteers contributed 11,720 hours of service to the residents. will be honored for earning the SWVC Volunteer of the Year Award. On April 26 , the Southeastern Veterans' Center (SEVC) in Spring City is recognizing its 234 volunteers with a luncheon. The SEVC volunteers donated 12,302 hours last year helping residents. The home will recognize Evelyn Thompson (16,000 hours) and Martin Weeks (10,000 hours) for reaching volunteer time milestones after years of service. , the is recognizing its 234 volunteers with a luncheon. The SEVC volunteers donated 12,302 hours last year helping residents. The home will recognize (16,000 hours) and (10,000 hours) for reaching volunteer time milestones after years of service. To honor its 542 volunteers, the Pennsylvania Soldiers' & Sailors' Home (PSSH) in Erie is hosting a luncheon on April 27 , sponsored by the Wesleyville American Legion Post 571. The volunteers donated 14,028 hours of their time assisting residents. "Never a day passes that we don't appreciate the extraordinary work done by the thousands of volunteers at our six homes," said Andrew Ruscavage, director, Bureau of Veterans Homes. "The volunteers treat our residents like family, adding to the upbeat and happy atmosphere that they enjoy every day. There is no substitute for someone who has the passion to donate their personal time to help make another person's life more pleasant." For more information about the veterans homes as well as volunteer opportunities visit www.VeteransHomes.pa.gov or follow DMVA on Facebook at www.facebook.com/padmva or Twitter at www.twitter.com/padmva. MEDIA CONTACT: Joseph Butera, 717-861-2178 SOURCE Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs Related Links http://www.dmva.state.pa.us VALLEY FORGE, Pa., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- PJM Interconnection has joined forces with the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory to support the integration of distributed energy resources such as residential and commercial solar into the power grid serving 13 states and the District of Columbia. Under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, Argonne is supporting PJM's Distributed Energy Resource Ride-Through Task Force, which is developing guidelines for "ride through" and "trip" requirements. These guidelines are important for PJM, which manages the bulk electricity system and wholesale electricity market serving 65 million people, to be able to integrate the increasing number of solar installations into its footprint. "Our primary mission is reliability, and we are preparing our system for the advent of more distributed energy resources so that we can seamlessly operate and understand their behavior, both during normal operations and times of system stress," said Chantal Hendrzak, executive director Applied Innovation & Market Evolution for PJM. PJM coordinates energy resources and ensures reliability for a system stretching from the East Coast to the Midwest and is managing a network with more solar input than ever before. Two states within its footprint, New Jersey and North Carolina, are among the country's top 10 for solar capacity per capita. Solar as a Distributed Energy Resource Much solar energy is considered a distributed energy resource, commonly referred to as DER in the industry. These resources are located on the lower-voltage distribution side of the grid which in the case of solar, could mean a customer's rooftop. DER can also include battery storage, wind turbines, combined heat and power plants, and other resource types. Prior to the arrival of DERs, the distribution system was designed for one-way power flow. Electricity moved from power plants, through a transmission network, stepped down to a distribution system and finally to customers. The fact that generation now also comes from the distribution level creates a new set of design considerations. When an unexpected occurrence like storm damage or malfunctioning equipment disrupts power flow, the system is designed to respond with a delicate balance in mind. DER settings determine whether they "ride through" meaning stay connected or trip offline when there is a disruption at either the transmission or distribution level of the grid. Riding through an event helps keep power flowing reliably, while tripping offline protects against damage and safety concerns. Argonne's Expertise With more than 80 researchers who study the grid, Argonne National Laboratory has long developed modeling and analytics tools that help inform decision makers about issues related to electricity systems. "Our team has directly relevant experience in modeling and usage of simulation tools, and it has conducted similar analyses for DOE and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation that can contribute to this joint effort," said Ning Kang, an Argonne staff scientist who is leading the project with PJM. Argonne sent Rojan Bhattarai, another scientist from the lab, to work onsite at PJM to support the PJM task force. Bhattarai will analyze regional data, develop power system models with DERs and help PJM stakeholders fine-tune DER operational settings to maintain optimum system reliability. The combined PJM-Argonne team will study the impact of DER trip and ride-through settings to help PJM stakeholders reach a consensus and inform technical guidance that utilities and states can apply to DERs across the PJM footprint. Read more about the collaboration effort at PJM Inside Lines. PJM Interconnection, founded in 1927, ensures the reliability of the high-voltage electric power system serving 65 million people in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. PJM coordinates and directs the operation of the region's transmission grid, which includes over 84,236 miles of transmission lines; administers a competitive wholesale electricity market; and plans regional transmission expansion improvements to maintain grid reliability and relieve congestion. PJM's regional grid and market operations produce annual savings of $2.8 billion to $3.1 billion. For the latest news about PJM, visit PJM Inside Lines at insidelines.pjm.com. SOURCE PJM Interconnection Related Links http://www.pjm.com "Every year, we look forward to celebrating our special day with this one-of-a-kind treat as a way to say 'thank you' to our fans for their continued support," said Portillo's CEO, Michael Osanloo. "We couldn't think of a better way to honor this milestone!" Along with Portillo's classic menu items like the Chicago-Style Hot Dogs, Famous Italian Beef, char-grilled burgers and fresh salads, the Portillo's Famous Chocolate Cake is a true fan favorite. Baked fresh each morning, the sweet treat has two homemade layers of moist chocolate cake filled and topped with chocolate frosting. This offer is available at all restaurant locations. Offer is only available on Tuesday, April 9 while supplies last and is valid on online orders. One cake slice per online order. This year, Portillo's will be bringing its iconic menu to several new cities throughout the United States including Davenport, Iowa; Avondale, Arizona; and a third location in Chicago, Illinois at Addison and Kimball. Fans are also invited to sign up for our Birthday Club to receive a free piece of chocolate cake on their birthday, too! Join now. Delivery is available online at portillos.com and via the Portillo's app that is available for download on iTunes or Android. For more information on Portillo's, please visit www.portillos.com or follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. ABOUT PORTILLO'S: In 1963, Dick Portillo invested $1,100 into a small trailer to open the first Portillo's hot dog stand in Villa Park, IL, which he called "The Dog House." Years later, Portillo's has grown to include restaurants in more than 50 locations across several states. Portillo's is best known for its Chicago-style hot dogs, Italian beef sandwiches, char-grilled burgers, fresh salads and famous chocolate cake. The Portillo's brand also includes Barnelli's restaurants that serve award-winning ribs, pastas with homemade sauces, and fresh sandwiches, soups, and salads. Portillo's ships food to all 50 states via Portillos.com. Portillo's Home Kitchen is the company's fast-growing catering business. SOURCE Portillo's Hot Dogs, LLC Related Links http://www.portillos.com WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Work-life balance is more of a joke than a reality in most organizations. With nearly 8 percent of total health-care spending dollars now attributable to unhealthy workplace environments, stress is costing businesses more than $180 billion. Holistic psychologist and consultant Katherine Kelly, Ph.D., M.S.P.H., has found a solution by combining a love of cooking with her passion for helping corporate leaders and employees restore their malnourished souls. Using her 3-step approach to what she calls a "Recipe for Radiant Living," she teaches employees to rebalance their lives as part of their career paths so the organizations they work for, eliminating the need for those organizations to pay for stress-related illnesses. Dr. Katherine Kelly Soul Health: Aligning with Spirit for Radiant Living This arrangement also creates better employees. Dr. Kelly says, "The biggest mistake employees make in corporate America is to consider balance as something separate from work. Those who make a career out of healthy living also make the best leaders and employees." With excess health-care costs reaching all-time highs, (costs estimated at $46 billion due to high job demands, $24 billion related to work-family conflict, long hours costing $13 billion, and low job control nearing $11 billion), Dr. Kelly believes workplace wellness is not just a corporate matter, it is now a personal one. She teaches corporate leaders and employees her "Recipe for Greatness" through identifying: Primary ingredients (personalized "staples" of self-care regimens physical activity, spending time with friends and family, time for spiritual connection, etc.) Broth activities (activities that are fluidnot present every day but necessary for ongoing optimal health; these may include taking notice of nature and animals, playing music while working, and using creative imagery to get a break from daily stress) Spices (unique activities that flavor the lives of leaders and employees at a deep and sustaining level hosting theme gatherings with coworkers or friends, taking up an uncommon hobby, or wearing fun socks, scarves or ties). Dr. Kelly says, "The secret to any good meal is how it appeals to a particular person. The same is true for creating a personalized self-care strategy that ensures employee success." Dr. Kelly thrives on helping corporations reach greatness by showing them how to evolve beyond the limits of workplace stress. About Katherine Kelly Katherine Kelly, Ph.D., M.S.P.H., is a clinical health psychologist and consultant currently practicing in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She has taught in two major medical schools, received specialized training from the Mind-Body Medical Institute of Harvard University, holds a master's of science degree in public health, and recently earned a certification in Integrative Mental Health. She has been a guest on over 300 radio and television shows following the publication of her book Soul Health: Aligning with Spirit for Radiant Living, now in its second edition. Her second book, Recipe for Radiance: Mastering the Art and Soul of Self-Care, is scheduled for an April release. Availability: Nationwide by arrangement and via internet or telephone Contact: Dr. Katherine T. Kelly, Office: (336) 659-3923, Cell: (336) 406-8431; [email protected]; www.drkatherinetkelly.com SOURCE Dr. Katherine Kelly Related Links http://www.drkatherinetkelly.com MALVERN, Pa., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Pyxa Solutions announced a merger with Red Nucleus Enterprises, a portfolio company of Renovus Capital Partners, with the Pyxa principals retaining a significant interest in the combined company. The three key executives of Pyxa SolutionsCarol Rutkowski, Michael Swalina and Dalia El-Sherifwill continue to lead the Pyxa operations. Founded in 2012 and based in Malvern, Pa, Pyxa Solutions provides Life Sciences companies a unique opportunity to obtain regulatory services from industry veterans who "grew up in Pharma." The Pyxa Solutions team is comprised of senior management consultants and subject matter experts who specialize in cross-functional delivery stemming from activities led by Regulatory Affairs. Pyxa's services span the entire drug development life cycle for developed and emerging markets. Through the company's unique team-based approach, Pyxa delivers superior, scalable and adaptable solutions for the management of R&D submissions, information, systems and operations. In a joint statement, the Pyxa Solutions managing partners said, "After bootstrapping the Pyxa operations for the last seven years and experiencing tremendous growth, we are all excited to become part of a larger organization that shares our cultural and professional values. We remain as committed to the success of the organization as we were on the date of our formation and look forward to our journey ahead." Ian Kelly, the CEO of Red Nucleus and Atif Gilani, a Founding Partner of Renovus Capital Partners, added, "We are thrilled to welcome Pyxa Solutions into the Red Nucleus family. We believe that the combination of Pyxa's client-centric delivery model, and the global reach and operational resources of RN will create a market leader in this critical and growing segment of Regulatory Affairs." About Pyxa Solutions Pyxa Solutions is a specialized provider of cross-functional R&D services and solutions stemming from Regulatory Affairs. With deep industry expertise, its subject matter experts work hand-in-hand with their Life Science clients to strategically resolve global R&D challenges and mitigate compliance risk. From global experience in submissions, system implementation, information management, labeling and business transformation excellence, their solutions improve efficiency, streamline operations and enhance productivity. The Pyxa team prides itself on a collaborative approach that instills and reinforces industry best practices in every project delivered. More information can be found at www.pyxasolutions.com. About Red Nucleus Enterprises Red Nucleus is premier provider of award-winning e-learning, digital content and performance solutions for the Life Sciences industry. From its offices in the US, UK, and India, Red Nucleus develops innovative solutions that engage and inspire client-facing teams throughout their continuing education journey. With a science-first focus, its solutions are designed to boost the clinical knowledge base of end users. Red Nucleus works exclusively within the Life Sciences and therefore its team intimately understands the Pharma business model, products, processes and challenges. The Red Nucleus team consists of more than 140 full-time employees whose commitment to creativity, quality and on-time delivery is unrivaled in the space. More information can be found at www.rednucleus.com. About Renovus Capital Partners Founded in 2010, Renovus Capital Partners is a Wayne, Pa based education, training and human capital focused private equity firm. Renovus is based outside of Philadelphia and manages over $500 million of committed capital. To date, the firm has acquired over 20 portfolio companies in areas such as corporate consulting and training, educational technology, classroom instruction and technology services. The firm is an active investor in profitable and growing middle market companies where, in partnership with the management, Renovus seeks to create shareholder value through operational improvements, organic growth initiatives and strategic acquisitions. More information can be found at www.renovuscapital.com. CONTACT: [email protected] SOURCE Pyxa Solutions AURORA, Colo., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Richmond American Homes of Colorado, Inc., a subsidiary of M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MDC), is pleased to debut its brand-new Urban Collection at Cross Creek in Aurora. The notable new neighborhood is the first in the state to model the highly anticipated paired home series. Grand Opening Event (RichmondAmerican.com/UrbanCrossCreekGO) The Boston and Chicago floor plans offer contemporary curb appeal. Prospective homebuyers and area agents are invited to attend a Grand Opening celebration on Saturday, April 6, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Guests will enjoy a complimentary food truck lunch, exciting giveaways and tours of the Boston and Chicago model homes, which offer two and three bedrooms, respectively. More about Urban Collection at Cross Creek (RichmondAmerican.com/UrbanCrossCreek) Two-story paired homes from the low $300s 2 to 3 bedrooms, approx. 1,260 to 1,470 sq. ft. Airy 9' ceilings and covered patios included Easy access to I-70 and E-470 Close proximity to Buckley AFB and large employers Hundreds of personalization options Ask a sales associate about special offers at this exciting community. Urban Collection at Cross Creek is located at 23504 E. 5th Place in Aurora. Call 303.575.4094 or visit RichmondAmerican.com for more information. About M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. Operating under the name Richmond American Homes, MDC's homebuilding subsidiaries have built more than 200,000 homes since 1977. Among the nation's largest homebuilders, MDC's subsidiary companies have operations in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, Florida, Virginia and Washington. Mortgage lending, plus insurance and title services are offered by the following MDC subsidiaries, respectively: HomeAmerican Mortgage Corporation, American Home Insurance Agency, Inc. and American Home Title and Escrow Company. M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "MDC." For more information, visit MDCHoldings.com. SOURCE M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. Related Links https://www.richmondamerican.com Description GIS 02 April 2019: The Strategic Planning and Economic Development Directorate of the Economic Development Board (EDB) has, over the past six months, been extensively engaged with stakeholders with a view to finalising the UN-Government of Mauritius Strategic Partnership Framework. This Framework sets out the strategic priorities of Mauritius which is supported by the UN system and is in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), including the Samoa Pathway and the Africa Agenda 2063. This statement was made today by the Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit, Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, at the National Assembly in reply to a Parliamentary Question pertaining to reports prepared and submitted by the EDB to Government since 2017. The Directorate, said the Prime Minister, has, since its inception, been working across the organisation to advise and advocate policies to Government, including: the Mauritius Artificial Intelligence Strategy; and, the Openness Strategy through a report submitted to the National Economic and Social Council. Several schemes have also been reviewed which comprise the Occupation Permit, the Speed to Market Scheme, the Mauritius Diaspora Scheme, the Urban Regeneration Scheme and the business environment reforms. Furthermore, the Prime Minister underlined that the Directorate is currently engaged with the World Bank so as to develop a national sectoral planning framework under a Reimbursable Advisory Services Agreement. In this context, he added, consultations are currently being held for the development of a national planning framework for the manufacturing and digital sectors as well as the elaboration of a blueprint for the agro industry, including the cane industry. The Prime Minister highlighted that the Directorate is very active on numerous fora such as the Steering committee for the implementation of the Tourism Strategy 2018-2021. It is also advising Government on a regular basis on matters of strategic importance such as Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) regional value chain, the Africa Strategy, improvement of the ease of doing business as well as participating in negotiations on international relations such as the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement with India and the Free Trade Agreement with China, he added. Speaking about the other responsibilities of the EDB, Prime Minister Jugnauth stated that it is engaged in coordinating the activities of the Commission for Economic Affairs of the National Economic and Social Council. The Commission, he indicated, has been mandated by Government to provide a permanent forum for multi-stakeholder dialogue, collaboration, coordination and action to generate economic growth that is distributed across the Mauritian society while creating opportunities for all. BOSTON and PROVIDENCE, R.I., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- In response to the significant need for care for children and families in the region, Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) of Eastern New England and The Ronald McDonald House (RMH) Providence today announce they are merging to strengthen and extend the impact they can have in their communities. The newly formed Ronald McDonald House Charities New England, Inc. will continue the organizations' mission to develop, support and provide programs that directly improve the health and well-being of children and their families. The mission of RMHC New England will be executed under the leadership of newly appointed CEO Michael Fantom. A mission-driven, non-profit leader with demonstrated success building organizations and teams, Mr. Fantom previously served as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the Ronald McDonald House Providence. In this role, Michael grew the capacity of the Providence House program, managing all aspects of the capital and building campaign to add additional bedroom and living capacity, successfully developing and securing $5MM capital campaign funds. "It is an honor to lead RMHC New England as we expand our mission to serve critically ill children across New England," said Fantom. "By contributing to the provision of family-centered care, we will provide more pediatric patients and their families services that will lessen the financial and emotional burden families endure during a medical crisis. Our work ahead is significant, and we look forward to working with the Greater Boston community as we help fill the unmet needs for these struggling families." Ronald McDonald House Charities New England, Inc., will provide a tremendous, comprehensive and supportive network of resources to children and their families through the Ronald McDonald House, Ronald McDonald Family Room and Ronald McDonald Care Mobile programs. 2018 was a record-breaking year for both organizations as they worked tirelessly toward their vision: a world where all children have access to health care and their families are fully supported and actively involved in their children's care. The Ronald McDonald House at Boston Harbor opened in January 5, 2019 and has provided 6,768 overnight stays, and the Ronald McDonald House Providence, established in 1989, has kept families together over 60,000 nights in just the last 10 years. Together, the organizations have saved families $2,007,250 annually in lodging and meal costs alone, helping to remove a huge financial burden while providing a comforting and caring environment for families to be together and close to the medical care their children need. and has provided 6,768 overnight stays, and the Ronald McDonald House Providence, established in 1989, has kept families together over 60,000 nights in just the last 10 years. Together, the organizations have saved families annually in lodging and meal costs alone, helping to remove a huge financial burden while providing a comforting and caring environment for families to be together and close to the medical care their children need. Two Ronald McDonald Family Room programs in Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston, MA , and Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, RI , have served 53,247 families just steps from their child's bedside. , and Hasbro Children's Hospital in , have served 53,247 families just steps from their child's bedside. Collectively, the two Ronald McDonald Care Mobile programs have provided immunizations, preventative medical care, dental services and health education to almost 50,000 children since the inception of the program. "We have personally seen the impact that Ronald McDonald House Charities has on families who are experiencing traumatic events in their lives," said Jay Marshall, Board President of Ronald McDonald House Providence. Paula Wright, Board President of Ronald McDonald House Charities of Eastern New England noted, "We are excited to support our combined organization, bringing this same level of support to some of the strongest pediatric care centers in the world and the communities they serve." We encourage you to take a step inside Ronald McDonald House Charities New England to learn more about the care and services they are providing to families in crisis, and learn how you can show your support as they work to provide programs that will directly improve the health and well-being of children and their families. About Ronald McDonald House Charities New England, Inc. Ronald McDonald House Charities New England, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, governed by a volunteer Board of Directors that serves families from around the United States and the world through our core programs: Ronald McDonald House in Providence, RI, Ronald McDonald House at Boston Harbor, Ronald McDonald Family Rooms at Hasbro Children's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, The RMHC Hospitality a la Carte program and two Ronald McDonald Care Mobile programs. Contact: Nicole Anderson, Chief Advancement Officer Ronald McDonald House Charities of New England (401) 597-0019 [email protected] SOURCE RMHC New England KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Sabah Wildlife Department announces that Chief Minister of Sabah, Shafie Apdal, and the Federal Minister of Primary Industries Malaysia, Ms. Teresa Kok have launched a new population survey on orangutans and elephants in the state. Malaysian Minister of Primary Industries, Teresa Kok, with members of Sabah's Wildlife Rescue Unit The eighteen-month long survey will bring together wildlife experts, scientists and researchers to take part in an extensive study on the populations of the state's iconic wildlife. Using the latest technology available for assessing wildlife populations, the survey will provide information that will be crucial for the future management of landscapes and conservation in Sabah. Speaking at the official launch of the survey, Chief Minister Shafie Apdal said: "With the support of the Malaysian Palm Oil Council and the Malaysian Timber Council, data collected from the survey will be vital to identifying key areas that need protection in order for the iconic orangutan and Bornean elephant to thrive in Sabah." The engagement of major industry stakeholders from the Malaysian palm oil and timber sectors as well as conservation groups and scientists is unprecedented and underlines the Malaysian government's ambition and commitment to protect its wildlife. This is being achieved even as more stringent requirements to achieve sustainable cultivation of oil palm is being pushed through the mandatory Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) scheme. Chief Minister Shafie Apdal called it a historic moment for conservation in Sabah: "This is a historic moment for conservation in Sabah that has been made possible with the certification of our palm oil industry through the Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) initiative. We know the industry stakeholders in palm oil and timber are ready to support the government in this aspect but rather than going out blindly, the Sabah government wants firm science and data behind its decisions to rehabilitate critical areas. Too much time has been lost since the last survey on orangutan and elephants in our state. This time, we must get conservation right." According to Dr. Sen Nathan from the Sabah Wildlife Department, the department has been monitoring the needs of wildlife in the state but the opportunity to do something definitive came around when the Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) scheme was introduced to Sabah. "The wildlife department saw the entry of the MSPO into Sabah as a golden opportunity to create natural habitats so that our iconic orangutans and elephants can thrive. Up to now, voluntary certification of palm oil in Sabah through other business to business schemes has been patchy but since the introduction of the MSPO, we noticed positive impacts as plantation owners started approaching us on what they should be doing to contribute to the bigger issue of conservation in Sabah. That is what inspired the push to have a new survey done, using the latest technology so that we have a clear picture of what needs to be done." The CEO of the Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC), Dr. Kalyana Sundram, called the survey a milestone for the industry's conservation programs in Sabah. "This is an exciting moment in the history of conservation in Sabah. The Malaysian palm oil industry has supported numerous conservation initiatives in Sabah but never have we had a chance to support something on a scale like this. With this survey, we hope to disprove once and for all that orangutans are going extinct in Sabah but that is a minor goal compared to the shared vision of Sabah and ourselves that orangutans and elephants in Sabah can thrive. To be able to do that, we must first know exactly where the threatened populations are so that we can work with the state and various other conservationists to remove those threats." Apart from this survey, Minister Teresa Kok has also pledged to source funding and get the palm oil industry to actively participate in forest restoration programs by planting at least one million forest tree species in Totally Protected areas that may need rehabilitation in Sabah. For media inquiries, please contact: Dr. Sen Nathan Email: [email protected] Related Files Chief Minister of Sabah Speech.pdf Related Images minister-teresa-kok-with-members.jpg Minister Teresa Kok with members of Sabah's Wildlife Rescue Unit Malaysian Minister of Primary Industries, Teresa Kok, with members of Sabah's Wildlife Rescue Unit sabah-wildlife-survey-signing.jpg Sabah Wildlife Survey signing ceremony Signing of MoU to launch the new survey on orangutans and elephants in Sabah. Seated from L to R, Dr. Kalyana Sundram, MPOC. Augustine Tuuga, Sabah Wildlife Department. Standing from L to R, Dr. Tan Yew Chong, Sec-Gen, Ministry of Primary Industries, Honorable Minister YB Teresa Kok, Chief Minister, Shafie Apdal, Minister of Environment, Christina Liew, Minister of Agriculture, Junz Wong SOURCE Sabah Wildlife Department "Scott Nagel is a homerun addition to our board. Scott was instrumental in building an amazing business and world class team at Redfin and we see many parallels in the challenges they have solved in our space," said Ed Petersen, co-founder and CEO of Wrench. "We look forward to leveraging Scott's expertise and experiences as we continue to grow Wrench to its full potential." "I've been very impressed with the team, product and traction that Wrench has achieved in a short period of time," said Scott Nagel. "The company's philosophy and approach to business are similar to the successful model we've built at Redfin and I look forward to contributing to their continued growth and success." About Scott Nagel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottnagel1/) Scott leads real estate operations at Redfin, with responsibility for brokerage and partner revenue, recruiting, and training, and is President of Title Forward, a Redfin owned title company. Prior to Redfin, he was a managing director at LexisNexis, with profit-and-loss responsibility for an $80 million business. Prior to that, Scott served as vice president of strategy and client operations at Applied Discovery, a successful legal services software start-up. Scott worked for many years as an attorney, having graduated with a law degree from Seattle University and a political science degree from the University of Washington. Wrench's maintenance and repair management platform facilitates and deploys automotive mechanics who will come to your home, office or any location of your choice to work on your vehicle. Wrench mobile mechanics can work on every make and model and perform nearly all services in the field saving vehicle owners from the headache and frustration of going to a shop or dealer. Wrench stands behind their services with a 12 month/12,000-mile warranty. The $70 billion U.S. car maintenance and auto repair industry has long been resistant to change despite the fact that research has shown that as many as 90 percent of car owners felt frustrated or inconvenienced by their periodic trips to local shops and dealerships. Wrench is an innovative leader using e-commerce and advanced technology with industry specs to make auto repair and maintenance hassle-free for consumers, business owners and fleet managers. The consistent upward growth and high repeat customer business in existing markets validates that customers are enjoying the convenience Wrench provides. About Wrench: Wrench is a new approach to car repair that allows people to schedule their service online (https://wrench.com/services/) or via their app with fixed-price or customized quotes. The company performs a wide range of services on all types of cars and trucks serviced at the customer's home or office, saving people hours of travel and service time and savings of as much as 30% versus dealer service repair rates. Wrench is a privately held company headquartered in Seattle, WA with major investors Madrona Venture Group, Tenaya Capital, Vulcan Capital and The Alumni Venture Group. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Kristi Bradford 309-532-4522 [email protected] SOURCE Wrench, Inc. Related Links http://www.wrench.com SEATTLE, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 27th, 2019, Security Properties and Pacific Life acquired HANA, a newly constructed 160-unit affordable housing complex located in the heart of Seattle, at the intersection of 6th and Yesler. This is the third affordable housing joint-venture by Security Properties and Pacific Life. Hana Hana HANA is a mixed-use, podium-style, community with over 13,000 square feet of commercial space occupied by Bright Horizons daycare, and 160 apartment units. Apartments feature floortoceiling windows, hard surface kitchen countertops, and vinyl plank flooring that is consistent with Class-A market rate product. Residents will also benefit from a 7th floor rooftop deck with community kitchen and unobstructed views of Puget Sound and Downtown Seattle. The property is minutes from light-rail as well as a wide variety of restaurants, retail amenities, and the Stadium District. HANA was delivered in early 2019 and is presently undergoing lease-up. The property participates in a variety of local affordability programs, including Seattle's Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, which together restrict all units to households earning between 50% and 80% of Area Median Income (AMI). This translates to affordable rents for families earning up to $80,000, for a household of 4 people. "Given the well-documented demand for affordable housing in Seattle, HANA is a being delivered at the perfect time," said Steve TeSelle, Director of Affordable Housing for Security Properties. "HANA will provide high-end units at a significant discount to market rents in the surrounding area." HANA is Security Properties' fourth affordable housing acquisition in Washington State. The company's Affordable Housing Group maintains a national footprint with an existing portfolio of more than 8,000 units across 58 low-income housing assets. Security Properties also owns more than 13,900 conventional units across 54 properties. Colliers International's apartment team of Tim McKay, Dan Chhan, and Sam Wayne represented Security Properties in the acquisition of HANA. About Security Properties Security Properties is a national real estate investment, development, and operating company headquartered in Seattle, Washington. For more than 50 years, Security Properties has provided quality housing to its residents as well as excellent financial performance for its investors. Since its founding, Security Properties has acquired or developed over 83,000 residential units at a cost of over $5.7 billion. Security Properties maintains a focused multi-family strategy supported by integrated teams of professional acquisition, development, construction, investment, and property management specialists. For more information, visit www.securityproperties.com About Pacific Life For more than 150 years, Pacific Life has helped millions of individuals and families with their financial needs through a wide range of life insurance products, annuities, and mutual funds, and offers a variety of investment products and services to individuals, businesses, and pension plans. Whether your goal is to protect loved ones or grow your assets for retirement, Pacific Life offers innovative products and services that provide value and financial security for current and future generations. Pacific Life counts more than half of the 100 largest U.S. companies as its clients and has been named one of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute. For additional company information, including current financial strength ratings, visit www.PacificLife.com. Pacific Life refers to Pacific Life Insurance Company and its affiliates, including Pacific Life & Annuity Company. Client count as of June 2018 is compiled by Pacific Life using the 2018 FORTUNE 500 list. News media contact: Ed McGovern, 206.622.9900 [email protected] SOURCE Security Properties Related Links http://www.securityproperties.com TEL AVIV, Israel, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Segasec has been seen selected to join Start Path, Mastercard's programs for elite later stage startups. Segasec was selected to be among 7 startups from across the globe to participate in the program. Annually, Mastercard evaluates nearly 2,000 startups for possible participation in Start Path. Less than 2% of applications are accepted into the highly competitive program. The six-month program provides startups with operational support, commercial engagement and the opportunity for strategic investment. "Segasec is honored by the opportunity to collaborate with Mastercard, a global leader in payment technology. We are excited about the mentorship by top professionals and the exposure to international markets. Especially in the financial sector, this will help us drive our vision to safeguard millions of customers from being scammed, allowing businesses to safeguard one of their most precious assets, their customers' trust and their brand equity." said Elad Schulman, Co-founder & CEO, Segasec. The rapid progress in digital transformation raises new challenges in cyber security, especially in the area of customer facing phishing. In 2018, 50% of such impersonating phishing attacks targeted customers of organizations in the financial sector followed by ecommerce platforms. In 2017, in the US & UK alone, an average of 443 retailers per month were targeted by phishing attacks. Segasec, the Tel Aviv-based cyber-security company, has developed numerous patent-pending algorithms and offers a consolidated solution that helps organizations tackle phishing attacks targeting their customers. Segasec's unique solution not only monitors the infinite web for brand impersonation, but also traps and takes down and even deceives hackers. "With Start Path, we scour the globe to identify the most promising scaling startups and Segasec is a great example of that," said Amy Neale, Mastercard vice president and startup engagement lead. "We look forward to working together over the next six months to support Segasec to scale globally and work on opportunities to collaborate." About Segasec Segasec is an Israeli based cyber-security startup providing end-to-end digital threat protection against customer hijacking attacks that originate in your blind spot - beyond the enterprise perimeter. Segasec's patent-pending technology provides intelligence of upcoming attacks at the earliest possible preparation stages, running quadrillions of targeted scans that identify even unknown attack patterns. Segasec blocks compromised assets before they become a live risk, because once customer trust is broken, it's already too late. For more information, visit https://segasec.com/ SOURCE Segasec CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Sonic Automotive, Inc. (NYSE: SAH) today announced it will release fiscal 2019 first quarter financial results on Thursday, April 25, 2019 at 7:30 A.M. (Eastern). Senior management will hold a conference call on Thursday, April 25, 2019 at 11:00 A.M. (Eastern). To access the live broadcast of the call over the Internet, go to www.sonicautomotive.com, then click on "Our Company," then "Investor Relations," then the "Earnings Conference Calls" link at the bottom of the page. The conference call will also be available live by dialing in 10 minutes prior to the start of the call at: Domestic: (877) 450-3867 International: (706) 643-0958 Conference ID: 1387216 A conference call replay will be available one hour following the call for seven days and can be accessed by calling: Domestic: (855) 859-2056 International: (404) 537-3406 Conference ID: 1387216 Presentation materials for the Company's earnings conference call will be accessible beginning the morning of the conference call on the Company's website at www.sonicautomotive.com by clicking on "Our Company," then "Investor Relations," then the "Webcasts & Presentations" link at the bottom of the page. About Sonic Automotive Sonic Automotive, Inc., a Fortune 500 company based in Charlotte, N.C., is one of the nation's largest automotive retailers. Sonic can be reached on the web at www.sonicautomotive.com. More information about EchoPark Automotive can be found at www.echopark.com. SOURCE Sonic Automotive, Inc. Related Links http://www.sonicautomotive.com "We're building more than just bikes, we're showcasing one of the core values of our company, which is to ensure that our communities are better off because we're there," said Southern Company Gas CEO Kim Greene. "These bikes will build more than just relationships and skills between these teams today ... they will work to enrich the lives of one of the communities we're privileged to serve." Each day, the Boys and Girls Club of Winder-Barrow supports about 150 kids in a community serviced by Atlanta Gas Light, a subsidiary of Southern Company Gas. Perez Watson, teen coordinator of the Winder-Barrow organization, was there to accept the bikes. "This is great, and I can promise you they'll be put to good use," Watson said. "We couldn't do the important work we do in the community without the strong support of companies such as Southern Company Gas." Southern Company Gas executives from Atlanta Gas Light, Nicor Gas and Virginia Natural Gas participated in the bike build. About Southern Company Gas Southern Company Gas is a wholly owned subsidiary of Atlanta-based Southern Company (NYSE:SO), America's premier energy company. Southern Company Gas serves approximately 4.2 million natural gas utility customers through its regulated distribution companies in four states with 774,000 retail customers through its companies that market natural gas and related home services. Other nonutility businesses include investments in interstate pipelines, asset management for natural gas wholesale customers and ownership and operation of natural gas storage facilities. For more information, visit Southern Company Gas at southerncompanygas.com SOURCE Southern Company Related Links http://southerncompanygas.com Squirrel AI Learning's partner Joleen Liang was invited to the summit and gave a forward-looking summary of the AI+ education industry. According to Joleen, AI+ will be a revolutionary wave more subversive than the Internet+, and the application of AI to education will help to precisely grasp the distribution of various subject knowledge points and students' degree of mastery of knowledge. Adaptive AI education will bring students personalized teaching to greatly improve their learning efficiency and promote the revolutionary development of the education industry. "The Year Ahead" Summit has been successfully held three times in China. Adhering to Bloomberg Businessweek's positioning as "leading, not following", the five themes of "The Year Ahead" Summit, including China and the World, Consumption, Retail and Service, Technology Innovation, and Literary Creation and Innovation, have been continued and renewed in order to thoroughly understand the business status and look forward at the future trends. Present at the summit were, among other distinguished guests, Zhou Hanmin, Vice Chairman of People's Political Consultative Conference and China National Democratic Construction Association; Shu Chang, a chief economist of Bloomberg Asia; Brett Bruen, President of GSR and former Supervisor White House Global Affairs Department; Dr. Rollan Roberts, CEO of Courageous and an advisor to World Governments; Anthony LaMolinara, an American director, playwright, visual effects supervisor, winner of the 77th Academy Award for the best visual effects director and Hollywood movie master; and Joleen Liang, partner at Squirrel AI Learning. Looking back at 2018, a year when business returned to reason, the essence of business can be clearly seen, finding that new technologies are used in order to further improve productivity, because only when technology innovations are fused with business is it possible to achieve business successes. In the field of adaptive education, Squirrel AI Learning's commitment to solving educational problems such as resource imbalance and low learning efficiency through technological means is a revolution that is sweeping the education industry. For this very reason, Squirrel AI Learning's effort has been recognized by all walks of life and granted the Businessweek Business Innovation Award of 2018. What matters the most to the global economy in 2018 is China's economic exchange with the world, as well as the resulting opportunities and conflicts. "The Year Ahead" Summit stood on the past, looking ahead. An insightful discussion was carried out on the global and Chinese political and economic situation among Li Jing, Managing Director of JPMorgan Chase and Vice Chairman of Asia Pacific Region; Li Shanquan, Senior Vice President and Senior Fund Manager of Oppenheimer Funds; Brett Bruen, former Supervisor of White House Global Affairs Department; and Qian Yujun, General Manager of BS Securities Co., Ltd. Shu Chang, a chief economist of Bloomberg Asia, gave an outlook on China's economy from an economic point of view as a profound annotation to the global commercial and financial trends in 2019. The film industry is the most perfect fusion of art with dream-making. During its rapid development in recent years, China's film industry has been trapped in the dilemma of a collision between capital and technology and is thinking deeply about it. Anthony LaMolinara, an American director, playwright, visual effects supervisor, winner of the 77th Academy Award for the best visual effects director, and Hollywood movie master, had a heated discussion on the future development trend and promotion strategy of cinematographic works with a number of senior insiders from home and abroad. 2018 is the year when the AI industry developed "both smoothly and tortuously". According to the statistical data in the Report on China's AI Industry Market Prospects and Strategic Planning and Analysis of Investments released by the Prospective Industry Research Institute, by 2017, the global core scale of AI had exceeded USD3.7 million, and the Chinese core scale of AI had reached USD560 thousand. It is expected that the global core scale of AI will exceed USD13 million in 2020. Under this wave, on the other hand, the icy reality comes with a wintry capital market. Due to the cautious attitude towards the AI industry, capital cannot be put into use casually, causing technologically undeveloped enterprises to be eliminated one after another by the times. However, in such a market, Squirrel AI Learning has, so far, raised a total of RMB1 billion, with its valuation exceeding USD1.1 billion, making itself a unicorn of AI education. At the summit, Joleen Liang, partner at Squirrel AI Learning, gave a speech themed "AI+ is going to be a Wave More Subversive than the Internet+". According to her, AI technology will replace 90% of human jobs, especially in the traditional education industry, where there are many problems. For instance, although new teachers enter the industry in a steady stream each year, there remains a severe shortage of teacher resources in the whole educational market. Moreover, there is a difference in individual working experience and ability and teaching level. Additionally, there is a difference from educational environment to educational environment, as well as in students' starting point and learning capacity. All these have made the educational problem a complex social issue. In this complex situation, there is great demand for an effective tool to improve the industry. Squirrel AI Learning has established itself in the education field and developed an AI technology to make up for the shortage of personalized education and teacher resources, two pain points. Joleen Liang deeply analyzed AI and the AI education industry from the perspective of the four characteristics of AI: omniscience, high identification ability, infinite computing power and self-evolution. The first characteristic of AI: omniscience, with all industry data available For instance, the IBM medical robot Watson can read 3496 medical monographs, 248 thousand papers, 61540 pieces of data and 106 thousand clinical reports within 17 seconds. For a doctor with 30 years of clinical experience, he has to spend all his life reading through so large a data volume, while the AI just needs to spend 17 seconds. When the AI technology can be maturely applied in the medical field in the future, its omniscience will enable it to be held in greater esteem by patients. In the field of education, the omniscient Squirrel AI Learning can quickly recognize the distribution of all knowledge points of each subject, the correlation between knowledge points and how much each student has mastered knowledge points. Through tests, teachers can get a clear grasp of the degree of each student's mastery different knowledge points, and therefore help them avoid traditional experience errors. By deeply analyzing correlative knowledge points, teachers can help each student build a tighter knowledge network to provide them with the most proper learning content and path. Before extensive promotion, Squirrel AI Learning conducted an internal test by asking a student to study systematically through the Squirrel AI system. Before use, because she was quite unclear about the related knowledge points, some of which were acquired more slowly than the others, causing a vicious cycle and she, as a poor student, became weary of studying. Her grades were just 30 or so. After using Squirrel AI, the correlation among the knowledge points was clarified, forming a network-like knowledge system. Learning about her weaknesses, Squirrel AI analyzed her learning data and reported it back to an existing knowledge graph, providing the student with personalized courses and exercises as a custom learning program. Just 3 months later, her grades were raised by 20. Finally, her graduation results were raised to 90 or so, almost the same as that of the rest of her class. The second characteristic of AI: high identification ability, able to draw a picture of millions upon millions of user labels The public is most familiar with Toutiao's personalized accuracy. According to user preferences, such as reading and searching habits, the system can identify every of their tiny labels and accurately provide content that interests them. By accurately analyzing massive data and labels belonging to every student, Squirrel AI Learning can pinpoint their weaknesses and then teach them in accordance with their aptitude, so as to deliver them out of rote learning. After recognizing students' weaknesses, Squirrel AI Learning can, in accordance with their degree of mastery of knowledge points and learning attentiveness, collect multi-dimensional data to make continuous assessments and make a unique learning path to learn more about their conditions to improve their learning efficiency. The third characteristic of AI: infinite computing power, able to figure out massive data quickly A lot of practice in games in the financial market and stock market shows that AI has outperformed talented stock investors. As for data processing, AI can extract information from millions upon millions of research reports in one stroke by mining massive amounts of stock data, and the AI algorithm is also much more accurate than humans. The AI architecture algorithm can help to gain a higher rate of return than that of other prominent hedge funds. Squirrel AI Learning splits a knowledge point into super-nano-scale pieces. For instance, one rational number is split into 20 knowledge points. In real testing, Squirrel AI Learning extracted 10000 knowledge points from 500 test questions, with the accuracy exceeding 90%, increasing the whole test efficiency and learning efficiency by 5-10 times. The tinier a knowledge point is, the more thoroughly Squirrel AI Learning can understand each student's learning situation and the more easily it solves a problem. The fourth characteristic of AI: Self-evolution. Not only does Squirrel AI Learning teach knowledge, but it reasons out each student's learning method and ability and analyzes their number sense, innovative consciousness, thinking mode and reasoning ability in accordance with their degree of mastery of each knowledge point by calculating the distribution of knowledge points. Those abilities are exactly what need to be trained through education. Technology maturity is the core-competitiveness of AI and the source of power for rapid self-evolution. Currently, Squirrel AI Learning has started actively developing cooperation internationally. Squirrel AI's Chief AI scientist Professor Tom Mitchell is the godfather of machine learning and the dean of the School of Computing CMU. Two years ago, Squirrel AI Learning established cooperation with SRI International. Later Squirrel AI founded a joint lab of AI Adaptive Education with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Squirrel AI Learning's technical strength has gained wide acceptance from the international community. In the past year, Squirrel AI Learning has had five of its technical papers collected internationally. Squirrel AI Learning has opened more than 1800 learning centers across China. Latching on to the traditional education industry as an object of reference, human teacher-assisted Squirrel AI teaching has an immediate effect. Last year, Squirrel AI Learning held four human-machine competitions, where the Squirrel AI system and expert teachers taught students with the same learning foundation. The Squirrel AI teaching group defeated the human teaching group. The human-machine competitions drew widespread attention from inside China and abroad, and was reported by more than 100 international media such as CNBC, NHK, CCTV 2, Zhejiang TV and The Beijing News. In August this year, Squirrel AI Learning held "Human-machine Competition in Hundred Cities". On average, each of the students in the Squirrel AI teaching group learned 42 knowledge points within 8 hours, while each of the students in the human teaching group learned 28 knowledge points within 8 hours. Also, Squirrel AI Learning has made great efforts to solve the problem of educational inequity and resource imbalance. Not long ago, Squirrel AI donated 1 million learning accounts to underprivileged families and 10-million RMB worth of learning accounts to students in poor mountainous areas through the "Qingxiyuanshan Educational Charity Foundation". "Definable, quantitatively assessable and teachable" are three standards set by Squirrel AI Learning, which uses a custom learning program to keep students away from rote learning, and cultivates their learning ability to make them well versed in what they have learned. Squirrel AI believes that in the near future, this scientific learning method will be able to help Squirrel AI Learning achieve rapid development in AI education in China and internationally under its slogan "let every student have equal education". SOURCE Squirrel AI Learning DALLAS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Southwest Airlines Co. (NYSE: LUV) and The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) has announced applications are open for the 2019 Lanzate!/Take Off! Travel Program. Each year, this program provides roundtrip air travel to be used by the program recipients for travel home from school. Applicants must write a personal essay addressing questions outlined in the application. In the essay, applicants should demonstrate or discuss socio-economic need such as financial need or cultural considerations. Applicants must be enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate degree program at least 200 miles from home and meet other qualifications. Students can submit applications now through April 30, 2019, at www.hacu.net. This year celebrates the 15th anniversary of the program. Annually, the Lanzate! Travel Award Program provides travel to students and over the years, has helped connect thousands of students who are away from their families during their studies. "Many recipients say this travel award is the reason they were able to stay enrolled in college as it allows them to travel back home to see their families," said Christine Ortega, Southwest Airlines Senior Advisor of Community Outreach. "Southwest's purpose relies on being able to connect people to what's important in their lives and we're proud to support Latino students as they reach their goals." "The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities is happy to celebrate the 15th Lanzate!/Take Off! Travel Award program with Southwest Airlines. This milestone represents the importance of supporting college students in their academic journey," said HACU President and CEO Antonio R. Flores. "In its 15 year history, the Lanzate! Program has made a difference by providing travel awards for students to visit their families. We are grateful to Southwest Airlines for championing Hispanic success in higher education and look forward to a continued partnership." ABOUT HACU The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, founded in 1986, represents more than 500 colleges and universities in the United States, Latin America, Spain and school districts throughout the U.S. The mission of HACU is to Champion Hispanic Success in Higher Education. HACU is the only national association representing existing and emerging Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). The Association's headquarters are located in San Antonio, Texas, with regional offices in Washington D.C., and Sacramento, California. Information is available at www.hacu.net. ABOUT SOUTHWEST AIRLINES CO. In its 48th year of service, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. (NYSE: LUV) continues to differentiate itself from other air carriers with exemplary Customer Service delivered by more than 58,000 Employees to a Customer base topping 120 million passengers annually. Southwest became the nation's largest domestic air carrier in 2003 and maintains that ranking based on the U.S. Department of Transportation's most recent reporting of domestic originating passengers boarded. In peak travel seasons, Southwest operates more than 4,000 weekday departures among a network of 100 destinations in the United States and 10 additional countries. Southwest coined Transfarency to describe its purposed philosophy of treating Customers honestly and fairly, and low fares actually staying low. Southwest is the only major U.S. airline to offer bags fly free to everyone (first and second checked pieces of luggage, size and weight limits apply, some carriers offer free checked bags on select routes or in qualified circumstances), and there are no change fees, though fare differences might apply. Book Southwest Airlines' low fares online at Southwest Airlines or by phone at 800-I-FLY-SWA. SOURCE Southwest Airlines Co. Related Links http://www.southwest.com SUNRISE, Fla., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Sunshine Health is once again supporting the March of Dimes and its March for Babies events to fight premature births. In Florida, approximately 10 percent of babies are born prematurely. March for Babies raises money to treat infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), to fund programs that support mothers and families, and to pay for research to prevent premature births. "Every child deserves a healthy start in life," said Debra Smyers, Sunshine Health's Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and a board member of the Broward March for Babies. "That's why we support these marches and walk alongside families whose lives have been touched by the March of Dimes." Sunshine Health is the presenting sponsor of the May 4, 2019 Broward March for Babies at Nova Southeastern University. Sunshine Health also supports March for Babies in: Nearly 300 Sunshine Health employees walked in marches across the state in 2018. "It's inspiring to see our employees pull together to bring awareness to such an important issue," said Chris Coffey, Sunshine Health President and CEO. "Our employees are dedicated to strengthening the communities we serve, whether it's marching with their families on a Saturday morning or raising funds through bake sales and other creative activities." Sunshine Health Program Coordinator John Cledor knows all too well how important it is to support premature babies and their families, and fund research. His 1-year-old son Jax was born in March of last year weighing just 3 pounds. Now he's happy, healthy and ready to join his first March for Babies event. John, his wife Dominique, and Jax are serving as this year's Sunshine Health Broward March for Babies Ambassador Family. "We are so fortunate," said John. "We look forward to sharing our story and showing others going through similar situations there is hope." In addition to fundraising, the walks also serve to unite communities, said Nicholas C. Sacco, Chair of the March of Dimes Broward Board. "Prematurity is the No. 1 cause of deaths in babies in the U.S.," Sacco said. "March for Babies brings together hundreds of thousands of people all across the nation, from different walks of life, united in the mission to educate expected parents, fund life-giving research and give babies the best possible chance to thrive." You can find a march near you using the Walk for Babies event finder. About Sunshine Health Headquartered in Sunrise, Fla., Sunshine Health is among the largest healthcare plans in Florida. Offering coordinated care and a network of support for its approximately 1 million members, Sunshine Health is transforming the health of the community, one person at a time. Sunshine Health is a wholly owned subsidiary of Centene Corporation, a diversified, multi-national healthcare enterprise focusing on under-insured and uninsured individuals. Sunshine Health offers government-sponsored managed care through Medicaid, Long Term Care, Ambetter (Marketplace) and Allwell (Medicare). Additionally, we offer a specialty Medicaid health plan for children in or adopted from Florida's Child Welfare system and a full pay Healthy Kids plan. For more information, visit www.SunshineHealth.com or follow us on Facebook or Twitter @SunHealthFL. SOURCE Sunshine Health Related Links http://www.sunshinehealth.com CHICAGO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Surgical Theater is proud to debut Precision VR Enterprise at the 10th Annual Becker's Hospital Review Meeting in Chicago, IL. The proven economic value of Precision VR and its scalability utilized as an Enterprise Solution will be demonstrated throughout the meeting. Surgical Theater's Enterprise Solution enables the hospital to achieve deployment on a hospital system-wide scale, including satellite locations. Precision VR may now be connected to the hospital's network while complying with its security policies. All 360 VR cases are stored in the hospital's data center and are accessible to any Precision VR Application on the network. Precision VR offers an intuitive and immersive approach to patient engagement and surgical visualization for Neuro, Spine, ENT, Thoracic, Cardiac, and various Digestive Health applications (i.e.: Pancreatic Cancer). "Surgical Theater's visualization platform is a technology that will transform healthcare," said Moty Avisar, CEO and Co-founder of Surgical Theater. "The ability for a surgeon and patient to immerse themselves fully into the patient's specific anatomy provides an unparalleled and never-before-seen view of anatomical structure that has been shown to improve economic and patient satisfaction outcomes." Precision VR is a 360-degree virtual reality technology that allows patients to walk inside their own anatomy alongside their surgeon. Precision VR models are constructed and rendered based upon the patient's CT and MRI scans culminating in a patient-specific 360 virtual tour for the surgeon and their patient. By putting the VR headset on the patient, the surgeon literally walks with the patient inside his / her own pathology, enhancing their understanding of their condition and treatment plan. This shared walk-through inside the anatomy is proven to increase patient satisfaction, improve patient engagement and improve a hospital's financial performance. To experience Precision VR, stop by Surgical Theater's booth #1216 and learn how top medical institutions are utilizing it for patient engagement, surgical planning, resident education and collaboration and intraoperative navigation. About Surgical Theater Surgical Theater, the market leader in virtual and augmented reality healthcare services, is the first to combine cutting-edge fighter jet flight simulation technology with a patient's own anatomy scans. Rendered from comprehensive combined modalities of CT, MRI as well as advanced post processing images such as DTI and BOLD, the 360 virtual reality fly-through is designed to allow surgeons to walk and fly-through a reconstruction of the patient's own anatomy and pathology. Surgeons literally walk in the space between the white matter tracks and the tumor, being fully immersed, gaining unprecedented situational awareness and clarity of assessment. By simply turning their head, the surgeon can further explore the anatomy and plan the craniotomy, surgical path, trajectory, corridor, and the entire surgical strategy. This "walk-in" inside the pathology is proven to increase patient satisfaction improve patient engagement increase financial performance. Find out more at www.surgicaltheater.net and on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/SurgicalTheater @SurgicalTheater Instagram @surgicaltheater LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/surgical-theater/ SOURCE Surgical Theater Related Links https://www.surgicaltheater.net/ RALEIGH, N.C., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Construction leaders across North America voice strong disagreement on the state of the industry, according to new research. The 2019 People In Construction Report is available from FireStarter Speaking and Consulting, a Raleigh, NC based construction leadership consultancy. Nearly five-hundred non-residential construction professionals responded between December 2018 and January 2019 to questions assessing the quality of leadership and culture in the construction industry. For a complete copy of the report contact [email protected] Wally Adamchik "There are positive results in the report, but huge opportunities exist for the contractor truly willing to invest in people and culture," said Wally Adamchik, president of FireStarter. "The chasm between field and office staff is growing and this disconnect is bad for business," said Adamchik who speaks to major construction trade associations and at events like World of Concrete, World of Asphalt and CONEXPO. "Too many firms pay lip-service to improving leadership. Overall, the quality of leadership in the construction industry is decidedly average and average does not attract or retain talent. The majority of contractors report labor shortages and schedule impacts due to lack of labor but continue to hope for better and throw money at people. That isn't a sustainable solution," said Adamchik who consults to companies like COLAS North America, MYR Electric, Caterpillar, and Kinsley Construction. The lack of alignment in safety from what respondents said was important and what they actually delivered is alarming. Only two-thirds of field leaders said they consistently work safely despite ninety-three percent of them saying it was a top priority. Work life balance is a joke for the field with only fifty percent of respondents saying they were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance. FireStarter asked 45 questions aimed at understanding the quality of leadership, the importance of values, and the impact of culture on retention. Many recent industry surveys confirm the lack of construction labor to do the work available but there is little information on what good culture looks like and how to get it. Insights from this report point firms in the right direction. About FireStarter Speaking and Consulting Wally Adamchik is the President of FireStarter Speaking and Consulting, a Raleigh, NC-based leadership consultancy with a focus on non-residential construction. Since 2003, Wally has written, spoken, consulted, and impacted the construction industry. He is the author of Construction Leadership from A to Z and a regular presenter at industry gatherings across North America. From family-held contractors to the top names in the ENR 400 and 600, the FireStarter team is a trusted partner in the quest to improve the quality of leadership. Contact: Wally Adamchik [email protected] 919-673-9499 FireStarter Speaking and Consulting SOURCE FireStarter Speaking and Consulting Related Links http://firestarterspeaking.com On the lighter side, The Farm Fresh Salad features tricolor quinoa, chargrilled turmeric cauliflower, fresh apple wedges, ripe roasted tomatoes and grilled onion rings served on top of arugula and mixed greens, tossed in a citrus apple vinaigrette. "These two seasonal menu items are delicious in their own right but can be paired for the perfect balance of flavor," said Rachel Cohn, director of marketing for Kahala Brands, parent company of The Counter. "Whether you are looking to indulge in your burger craving with the Juicy Lucy or looking for something on the lighter side with the Farm Fresh Salad, at The Counter we cater to all lifestyles." The Counter offers over a million possible burger combinations, including vegan and gluten-free options, with a choice from eight proteins, 11 distinct cheeses, 33 signature toppings, 20 unique sauces and 11 types of buns or fresh greens. The Juicy Lucy Burger and Farm Fresh Salad are available now until July 1. About The Counter Founded in 2003 by Jeff Weinstein, The Counter's mission was to challenge the traditional burger joint. In partnership with Craig Albert, the Culver City, California-based brand grew into more than 40 domestic and international locations. The Counter offers a fresh, unconventional approach to creating the ultimate burger, offering over a million possible burger combinations with a choice from eight proteins, 11 distinct cheeses, 33 signature toppings, 20 unique sauces and 11 types of buns or fresh greens. The Counter offers a full-service, casual dining experience in an inviting space with industrial decor and upbeat music. Most recently, The Counter was acquired by Scottsdale, Arizona-based Kahala Brands one of the fastest growing franchising companies in the world with a portfolio of nearly 29 fast-casual and quick-service restaurant brands with approximately 3000 locations in 35 countries. For more information about The Counter, visit www.TheCounter.com . For more information about Kahala Brands, visit www.KahalaBrands.com SOURCE The Counter Related Links http://www.TheCounter.com NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research (MJFF), in collaboration with longtime supporter and partner the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, has chosen five academic centers across the United States, Canada and England to host the fifth class of The Edmond J. Safra Fellowship in Movement Disorders. Launched in 2014, the Fellowship annually funds five top-tier academic centers around the world to each train one new movement disorder specialist a neurologist with additional training in diagnosing and managing Parkinson's disease (PD) and other movement disorders over two years. "Increasing the number of movement disorder specialists who can care for patients and lead research studies benefits not only individual patients and families, but also the entire Parkinson's community," said Lily Safra, chairwoman of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation. "The growth and success of The Edmond J. Safra Fellowship in Movement Disorders is a testament to the ongoing and rising need for Parkinson's specialists around the world." The centers selected to train the Class of 2022: Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas in Toronto Western Hospital in Ontario, Canada UAB ( University of Alabama at Birmingham ) in Birmingham, Alabama ) in UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in London, England University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida An advisory committee ranked applicants on several criteria, including the depth and breadth of clinical education and the range of potential research opportunities. Each of the selected institutions will now identify a qualified neurologist to begin fellowship in July 2020. A Direct Link between Patient Care and Research Studies The Edmond J. Safra Fellowship in Movement Disorders prepares trainees for dual roles as doctors and researchers so that in addition to delivering high-quality care, trainees are ready to lead research that can answer questions and meet unmet patient needs. As doctors, they gain insights directly from patients and their experiences to inform research. As researchers, they drive toward disease understandings and new and improved Parkinson's therapies. They can achieve results their patients need, and while doing so, keep their patients updated on and engaged in the latest research. "Connecting patients to research and care is fundamental to The Michael J. Fox Foundation's mission," said Todd Sherer, PhD, CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation. "The Edmond J. Safra Fellowship in Movement Disorders is uniquely structured to build, class by class and year by year, a global network of movement disorder specialists who can meet patients' research and care needs." A Steadfast Commitment to Parkinson's Research and Care Late banker and philanthropist Edmond J. Safra's namesake Foundation has long made Parkinson's disease care and research top priorities. Mrs. Safra, chairwoman of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, has been an MJFF Board member since 2001. In addition to generous gifts to centers and programs providing direct care to people with Parkinson's disease, Lily Safra and her Foundation have driven vital scientific investigation into new treatments. The Fellowship is the latest of many partnerships between the Edmond J. Safra Foundation and MJFF, including the Edmond J. Safra Core Programs for PD Research, one of MJFF's central grantmaking avenues to support high-impact Parkinson's research projects. Applications for the Class of 2023 Now Open The Michael J. Fox Foundation is accepting applications from academic centers worldwide to train the Class of 2023 Edmond J. Safra Fellows. Deadline is December 13, 2019. Learn more and apply. About The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research As the world's largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's research, The Michael J. Fox Foundation is dedicated to accelerating a cure for Parkinson's disease and improved therapies for those living with the condition today. The Foundation pursues its goals through an aggressively funded, highly targeted research program coupled with active global engagement of scientists, Parkinson's patients, business leaders, clinical trial participants, donors and volunteers. In addition to funding more than $800 million in research to date, the Foundation has fundamentally altered the trajectory of progress toward a cure. Operating at the hub of worldwide Parkinson's research, the Foundation forges groundbreaking collaborations with industry leaders, academic scientists and government research funders; increases the flow of participants into Parkinson's disease clinical trials with its online tool, Fox Trial Finder; promotes Parkinson's awareness through high-profile advocacy, events and outreach; and coordinates the grassroots involvement of thousands of Team Fox members around the world. For more information, visit us on the Web , Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. About the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Edmond J. Safra, one of the 20th century's most accomplished bankers and a devoted philanthropist, established a major philanthropic foundation to ensure that individuals and organizations would continue to receive his assistance and encouragement for many years to come. Under the chairmanship of his beloved wife Lily, the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation draws continuing inspiration from its founder's life and values, and supports hundreds of organizations in more than 40 countries around the world. Its work encompasses four areas: Education; Science and Medicine; Religion; and Humanitarian Assistance, Culture and Social Welfare. The Foundation has provided significant funding for Parkinson's disease research and patient care at dozens of hospitals and institutes in places as varied as Natal (Brazil), Toronto, New York, Grenoble, Paris, London and Jerusalem. For more information, visit www.edmondjsafra.org. SOURCE The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinsons Research Related Links www.michaeljfox.org LONDON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- TigerWit Limited, the UK-headquartered global financial technology company, has announced the appointment of Gareth Derbyshire as their Chief Compliance Officer. Gareth has twenty years of regulatory and compliance experience across financial services, including banking, accounting and retail derivatives. He will be responsible for TigerWit's global operating licenses and compliance oversight. Tim Hughes, CEO at TigerWit said: "We are delighted to have someone with Gareth's experience join the TigerWit team. As we continue to grow, his knowledge of the regulatory environment will be invaluable. Our innovative approach to trading requires professionals with both industry and technological expertise." Gareth's early career involved working for the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). During the banking crisis of 2008, he moved into the banking sector as Compliance Manager at Norwich and Peterborough Building Society. He soon moved into the retail trading arena, joining CMC Markets as Head of Compliance for UK and Europe. As well as working as the Compliance Officer for other CFD brokers, including Plus500 and ETX Capital, Gareth was a Senior Manager of Financial Services Risk and Regulation at PwC. "It's very exciting to join such an innovative business and I truly believe they are a game changer. During these times of regulatory change, it's important to ensure that technology advances serve to enhance the trading experience and greater protect clients," said Gareth Derbyshire, Chief Compliance Officer at TigerWit. Throughout his career, Gareth has held FCA CF10 Compliance Oversight and CF11 Money Laundering Reporting functions. His in-depth experience includes managing all aspects of compliance and financial crime for regulated businesses and helping firms to achieve full scope regulatory permission, as well as overseas licenses. Notes to Media About TigerWit TigerWit is a UK headquartered global financial technology company, committed to changing the industry through disruption for the benefit of traders, by bringing innovative trading solutions, such as a pioneering blockchain-based settlement in the form of TigerWit's distributed trading ledger and providing access to key global markets to trade on FX, indices, commodities and metals. The TigerWit Group includes TigerWit Limited (UK), which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), license number 679941, and TigerWit Limited (Bahamas), which is authorised and regulated by the Securities Commission of The Bahamas (SCB), license number SIA-F185. https://uk.tigerwit.com/ https://www.tigerwit.com/ Trading. Evolved. SOURCE TigerWit Related Links https://www.tigerwit.com/ Fall is considered by many to be the best time of the year to travel, whether to hike the windswept hills of Patagonia or to savor the beauty of Iberia's welcoming coast. Travelers seeking small group, culturally-rich adventures at an excellent value will enjoy the awe-inspiring Small Ship Adventures from O.A.T. O.A.T. is distinguished as a leader in small ship cruising by its 16- to 210-passenger, coastal-cruising small ships. These vessels are designed to slip into more remote ports that larger vessels cannot reach, giving travelers greater access to the cultural heart of each region. Itineraries are designed for American travelers and always include a local Trip Leader to ensure authentic and fulfilling traveler experiences. O.A.T small ships "fly free" savings when reserved by April 30 include: Travelers should call 1-800-955-1925 by April 30, 2019, and mention code: FREE FALLAIR to save. Travel + Leisure ranked O.A.T. #2 on its "World's Best" list of small ship ocean cruise lines in 2018. In the past five years, 229,528 Americans 55+ have traveled with O.A.T.all in small groups of 8-16 (with an average of 14) on Small Group Adventures, or 20-25 (with an average of 22) on Small Ship Adventures. For a free catalog or more information about O.A.T., please visit http://www.oattravel.com or call 1-800-955-1925. ABOUT OVERSEAS ADVENTURE TRAVEL Established in 1978, Overseas Adventure Travel (O.A.T.) is part of Boston-based Grand Circle Corporation's family of travel companies, which also include Grand Circle Cruise Line and Grand Circle Travel. In 1992, owners Alan and Harriet Lewis established the nonprofit Grand Circle Foundation to support communities in which Grand Circle works and travels, including some 300 humanitarian, cultural, and educational endeavors worldwideamong them, 100 schools, in 50 countries. The Foundation is an entity of the Lewis Family Foundation, which has pledged or donated more than $169 million since 1981. SOURCE Overseas Adventure Travel Related Links http://www.oattravel.com DUBLIN, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Plant-based Meat Market in US - Industry Outlook and Forecast 2019-2024" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The US plant-based meat market size is expected to reach values of around $3 billion by 2024, growing at an impressive CAGR of over 24% during 2018-2024. The exponential growth of food trucks, delivery, and takeaway and the increasing number of consumers experimenting with new kinds of foods is driving the growth of the US market. Educational institutes have a lot of potentials as parents increasingly go vegetarian or vegan and so do their kids, thereby creating a demand in the market. The US plant-based meat market is driven by plant-based food manufacturers creating foods with profiles that match consumer context of a specific dish to facilitate trial. The introduction of products that are built similar to meat via price and the possibilities of offering a bigger repertoire of flavor profiles will help vendors attract a broader audience in the US market. The market research report provides in-depth market analysis and segmental analysis of the US plant-based meat market by products, storage, and channel. US Plant-based Meat Market - Dynamics The growing traction towards the wellness trend is fueling the demand for all things plant, thereby creating lucrative investment opportunities in the US plant-based meat market. Green beauty is going from a niche to a majority; brands are becoming more health-focused, consumers are developing a likeness for intermittent fasting, they are taking more time out to meditate, get some sun, and focus on happiness in the US market. The consumers are beginning to realize that they have to start with their plate to make a long-term change and live a fuller, healthy life from both a physical and a mental perspective. The increasing focus in health and wellness will boost the demand for vegetarian meat and vegan meat in the US market. The holistic approach to food and widespread education about nutrient quality and dejunking will positively impact the growth of the market over the next few years. The rise in allergies and food intolerances is leading to an inherent belief that eliminating toxins that come in the form of chemicals from meat processes such as chlorine baths and consuming natural foods such as whole grains in the market. Various organizations that are working towards building healthier, stronger and more sustainable communities will fuel the growth of the US plant-based meat market. US Plant-based Meat Market - Segmentation This market research report includes a detailed segmentation of the market by products, storage, and channel. The US plant-based meat market by product is classified into beef, chicken, pork, seafood, and others. The beef segment dominated approximately half of the total market share in 2018, growing at a CAGR of around 25% during the forecast period. The growing use of vegan meatballs in sauces served as a snack on a toothpick, or is being sliced to sandwich in between bread to bring a variety of option for the non-meat-eating population is fueling the growth of this segment in the US market. The growing demand for all-natural, organic, and vegetarian meats is fueling the growth of the US plant-based meat market. The storage segment in the US plant-based meat market is divided into frozen, refrigerated, and shelf-stable. Refrigerated storage is the fastest growing segment in the US market, at a CAGR of over 39% during the forecast period. The changing perception of younger consumers that chilled foods are more premium and fresher than frozen food is fueling the growth of this segment in the global market. The growing demand for flavorsome heat-and-eat products is encouraging the vendors to launch refrigerated meat substitutes in the US market. Companies such as Beyond Meat have witnessed massive success in staging their products in the refrigerated meat department or next to conventional meat. The US plant-based meat market by the channel is segmented into conventional, natural, and specialty gourmet. Conventional channel occupied the majority of the market share in 2018, growing at a CAGR of more than 22% during the forecast period. The increasing number of convenience stores selling new organic or natural products that are plant-based is gaining immense popularity and boosting sales in this segment in the US market. The rapidly escalating demand for better-for-you products is encouraging retailers to stock these products in the US plant-based meat market. Food, drug and mass merchandisers, including Walmart, are the largest distributors in the US plant-based meat market. US Plant-Based Meat Market Vendor Analysis In the US plant-based meat market, leading vendors are drawing the attention of consumers and creating appeal for plant-based meats. Many players are leveraging various possibilities and definitions of meat substitutes and are expected to gravitate towards creating a pull in the US market. The top manufacturers are trying to layer flavor over flavor, color over color, texture over texture to attract the maximum number of consumers in the US market. Strategic partnerships are vital for expansions in the US plant-based meat market. The major vendors in the US plant-based meat market are: Beyond Meat Impossible Foods Greenleaf Foods Hungry Planet Next Level 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 Us Economy 7.3 The Customer Paradigm 7.3.1 Generation Z 7.3.2 Millennials 7.3.3 Baby Boomers 7.4 How The Us Is Eating 7.4.1 Eating Patterns 7.4.2 Food Attributes 7.5 Plant-Based Meat Overview 7.5.1 Plant-based Technology 8 Market Dynamics 8.1 Market Growth Enablers 8.1.1 The Growth of Health Forward and Cost-conscious Consumers 8.1.2 Concerned Citizens Look to Reduce Environmental Ruins 8.1.3 The Rise of Progressive Protein Choices 8.1.4 Development of New Eating Patterns 8.2 Market Growth Restraints 8.2.1 Stiff Competition from Lab-Grown or "Clean" Meat 8.2.2 Psychological and Cultural Barriers 8.2.3 Fight against Fake Meat 8.3 Market Opportunities and Trends 8.3.1 Plant-based Meat is Massively Validated 8.3.2 Wellness Trend Fuels Demand for All Things Plant 8.3.3 Snack-Worthy Faux Meat Gains Traction 8.3.4 Science Gets Leg Up 9 Plant-Based Meat Market In Us 9.1 Market Size & Forecast 9.2 Five Forces Analysis 10 By Storage 10.1 Market snapshot & Growth Engine 10.2 Market Overview 10.3 Frozen Plant-Based Meat 10.4 Refrigerated Plant-Based Meat 10.5 Shelf-Stable Plant-Based Meat 11 By Product 11.1 Market snapshot & Growth Engine 11.2 Market Overview 11.3 Beef 11.4 Chicken 11.5 Pork 11.6 Seafood 11.7 Others 12 By Channel 12.1 Market snapshot & Growth Engine 12.2 Conventional Channel 12.3 Natural Channel 12.4 Specialty Gourmet Channel 13 Competitive Landscape 13.1 Competition overview 13.2 Market Vendor Analysis 13.2.1 Market Ranking Analysis 14 Key Company Profiles 14.1 Beyond Meat 14.1.1 Business Overview 14.1.2 Major Product Offerings 14.1.3 Key Strengths 14.1.4 Key Strategies 14.1.5 Key Opportunities 14.2 Impossible Foods 14.3 Greenleaf Foods 14.4 Hungry Planet 14.5 Next Level 15 Other Prominent Vendors 15.1 Abbots Butcher 15.1.1 Business Overview 15.1.2 Product Offerings 15.1.3 Key Strengths 15.1.4 Key Strategies 15.2 Atlantic Natural Foods 15.3 Don Lee Farms 15.4 Dr. Praeger's 15.5 Gardein 15.6 Good Catch Fish 15.7 Kraft Heinz Foodservice 15.8 Monks Meats 15.9 Morningstar Farms 15.10 No Evil Foods 15.11 Ocean Hugger Foods 15.12 Quorn Foods 15.13 Sophie's Kitchen 15.14 Sweet Earth 15.15 TOFURKY 15.16 VBITES 15.17 Yves Veggie Cuisine For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/gg6wsc Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com SAN JOSE, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Urban Catalyst, a multi-asset Opportunity Zone Fund, announced today that Morgan Mackles has been appointed to the position of SVP of Investor Relations. With more than 15 years of personal sales, sales management, and executive experience, his expertise in building out scalable and repeatable sales processes has resulted in go-to-market success across multiple industries, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. In joining Urban Catalyst, Mr. Mackles returns to the Bay Area from his most recent role as Vice President of Sales at x.ai, a $44M artificial intelligence startup headquartered in New York City. "I'm excited to come back home to the Bay Area to join forces with the amazing team at Urban Catalystmany of whom I've known for decades," says Mackles. "Drawing from my experiences in the world of VC-backed technology startups, I believe we have a tremendous opportunity to build out a scalable and repeatable system for acquiring and supporting our firm's investors." Based in the firm's San Jose headquarters, in his new role, Mr. Mackles will be leading the investor relations team. Reporting directly to Erik Hayden, President of Urban Catalyst, he will be responsible for securing capital commitments, building and maintaining investor relationships, and driving growth of the Urban Catalyst brand across multi-family and commercial channels. "I look forward to leveraging Morgan's technology background and process-driven approach to provide the best possible experience for our fund's current and future investors. His ability to consistently deliver outstanding results speaks for itself," says Hayden. "A lifelong friend of mine, I am personally and professionally thrilled to have Morgan joining the Urban Catalyst team. I am confident he will make significant contributions to our strategic direction, long-term growth, and value creation." Launched in response to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act legislation that created Opportunity Zones and Opportunity Funds, Urban Catalyst assembled an experienced team that understands how to navigate Bay Area construction processes and asset management to ensure the highest return on investment. Their combined experience has amounted to $5.9 billion in total real estate acquisition value, $4.2 billion in total development project value, and 1,500 residential units developed in Opportunity Zones. Utilizing strong relationships with city constituents and decision makers, they are exceptionally qualified to maneuver the development process and are on track to raise $250M over the next year. In fact, Urban Catalyst has already invested in their first project in a local opportunity zone, development of a brand-new office and retail complex on South First Street in downtown San Jose at the site of the old Lido night club. About Urban Catalyst Based in San Jose, Urban Catalyst is the first multi-asset Opportunity Zone Fund in the Bay Area focusing on downtown San Jose and downtown Oakland. Employing a world-class team of experienced local professionals to build out impact investment opportunitiesmulti-family, office, and industrial investment projectsUrban Catalyst is focused on advancing and improving the community while earning investors advantageous financial returns. Learn more at https://www.urbancatalyst.com/ . SOURCE Urban Catalyst Related Links https://www.urbancatalyst.com PLAINVIEW, N.Y., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. based tamper evident seals manufacturer, American Casting & Manufacturing, discusses how to select the right cargo seals for shipping valuable goods. Cargo theft is an increasing concern across the manufacturing and logistics industries. Investing in the right security seal is the best option for increasing the security of your cargo. Here are a few steps to help you select the right cargo seals. Evaluate the type and value of your cargo. A good first step is to understand the value of the goods you are shipping. Some items like pharmaceuticals or electronics are an especially big target for theft because of the high monetary value and relatively small size of many of the products. Other cargo items are less valuable, yet are also likely to be a target because they are easier to remove. The size and value of your goods will impact whether or not you need a hefty barrier seal. Analyze your cargo shipping methods. Second, you should analyze the shipping vulnerabilities of your cargo type, the supply chain, and your carriers. Identifying the specific weak points will help you determine what types of seals are best for your specific needs. Understand all associated regulations. Different cargo shipments are subject to different regulations, especially when they are being shipped internationally. Make sure that if your shipments are subject to ISO or CTPAT regulations, you are choosing seals that comply. Choose the right seal. Based on the previous information, you can now choose a security seal that is best for securing your cargo. First, determine which of the main categories of seals would best suit your needs. One is indicative security seals, which provide tamper evidence but can be removed by hand or with simple tools. The other category is barrier seals, which are also tamper evident, but are stronger and require large tools such as bolt cutters or cable cutters to remove. Within those larger category of seals are different seal types which includes: plastic strap seals, fixed length plastic seals, bolt seals, cable seals, wire seals, metal strap seals, and padlock seals. American Casting & Manufacturing makes a variety of each type of seal that can be customized and layered for increased security. About American Casting and Manufacturing: American Casting & Manufacturing Tamper Evident Seals Supplier is a New York based, family-owned manufacturing company, that produces high-quality customizable security seals, including bolt seals, container seals, and trailer seals, across a wide range of industries. Through innovative production, customer service, and both employee loyalty and respect, the tamper evident seals manufacturer has been producing high-quality seals for over 100 years. The company conforms to the highest standards, meeting the requirements of ISO-9001:2008 quality management systems. SOURCE American Casting & Manufacturing Description GIS 02 April 2019: Mauritius will host the 3rd Meeting of the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement (SIOFA) Compliance Committee and the 6th Meeting of Parties from 27 to 29 June 2019 and from 1 to 5 July 2019, respectively. Some 35 participants from Member States are expected to attend the 3rd SIOFA Compliance Committee whereas 50 participants would attend the 6th Meeting of Parties. The Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement (SIOFA), which is a multilateral agreement, was signed in Rome on 7 July 2006 at the Food and Agriculture Organisation and entered into force in June 2012. To date, SIOFA has nine Contracting Parties, namely Australia, Cook Islands, European Union, France on behalf of its Indian Ocean Territories, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mauritius, Seychelles and Thailand, and one cooperating non-Contracting Party, Comoros. The objectives of this multilateral agreement are: to ensure the long-term conservation and sustainable use of the fishery resources in the waters beyond national jurisdiction in the Southern Indian Ocean region Area through cooperation among the Contracting Parties; and, to promote the sustainable development of fisheries, taking into account the needs of developing States bordering the Area that are Contracting Parties to this Agreement, and in particular the least developed among them and Small Island Developing States. Meeting of the Parties The first Meeting of the Parties was held in Australia in October 2013. Proposals and Working Papers are mainly discussed at these Meetings. The second Meeting of the Parties was held in Mauritius in March 2015 where it was decided that the Headquarters of the Parties will be based in Reunion Island. At the third Meeting of the Parties, held in Reunion Island in July 2016, important administrative steps were finalised to enable SIOFA to become fully operational including the selection of an Executive Secretary, and the selection of Chairperson and vice-Chairperson. Staff regulations, financial regulations, budgets were approved and a Headquarters Agreement was also signed between France and SIOFA. In addition, seven important Conservation and Management Measures were adopted. All these achievements combine to lay the foundations of a management framework to ensure the long-term sustainability of fishery resources and protection the marine Environment in the SIOFA Agreement Area. MILWAUKEE, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Members of the United Steelworkers (USW) union who work at two Harley Davidson facilities in Wisconsin will continue negotiations after voting overwhelmingly on Monday, April 1, to reject the company's most recent contract proposal. "The USW is committed to making fair proposals that address the numerous non-economic and economic issues that these workers are facing," said USW District 2 Director Michael Bolton, who is leading the negotiations. "Unfortunately, the company has continued to make unacceptable demands on these hard-working union members." Issues the USW has worked to address during the negotiations have included seniority rights, temporary workers rights and other issues relating to temporary workers, job security, and scheduling, among others. The USW's contract covers more than 1,000 hourly employees who are members of USW Locals 2-209 and 460 at the company's plants in Tomahawk in central Wisconsin and Menomonee Falls, outside of Milwaukee. As the contract's March 31 expiration date approached, the two sides agreed to extend the contract through the end of the day April 1 to continue talks and give workers an opportunity to vote. Workers voted by a wide margin on Monday to reject that offer. The union and the company agreed to extend the current contract through April 14 while talks continue. The USW expects to hold more talks in the coming days, and members should continue to report to work as scheduled, Bolton said. "We look forward to continuing to work safely and productively and to carrying on our discussions with Harley Davidson until we reach an agreement that is fair to both sides," Bolton said. "These workers deserve what all workers deserve a contract that ensures fair wages, secure benefits and dignity on the job. We intend to keep working until we achieve that goal." The USW represents 850,000 workers in North America employed in many industries that include metals, rubber, chemicals, paper, oil refining and the service and public sectors. For more information: www.usw.org. SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW) Related Links http://www.usw.org ROCHESTER, N.Y., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- VisualDx, the leading diagnostic clinical decision support tool for physicians, has entered into a collaborative agreement with MedChi, a non-profit membership association of Maryland physicians. Under the agreement, MedChi-member physicians will be offered VisualDx at special discount pricing. VisualDx is available on the web, smartphone, or tablet to simply provide answers to clinical questions. Starting with a sign or symptom, MedChi physicians that license VisualDx can build a patient-specific differential diagnosis in seconds. Members can also quickly look up images and information to understand variations of disease to make a more accurate diagnosis at the point of care. The collaborative agreement also allows MedChi staff to personally market and sell subscriptions of VisualDx to its members. "As technology becomes more advanced, clinical decision support tools are equipping physicians with the data they need to improve clinical thinking as well as save time," said Art Papier, MD, CEO, VisualDx. "We are thrilled MedChi shares in our mission to improving diagnostic accuracy and are excited to enhance our reach among its member physicians across Maryland." The discount is immediately available to MedChi members. Throughout the year, VisualDx and MedChi will team up on various marketing opportunities to advance the product and its value to the Maryland market. "MedChi strives to provide efficient and effective resources to our members, and we look forward to working closely with VisualDx to help our members streamline the practice of medicine and improve the health of their patients," said Gene Ransom, CEO, MedChi. VisualDx is currently used in more than 2,300 hospitals, large clinics, and medical schools worldwide and is available for a yearly subscription. For more information, visit www.visualdx.com or www.medchi.org. About MedChi MedChi, The Maryland State Medical Society, is a non-profit membership association of Maryland physicians. It is the largest physician organization in Maryland. The mission of MedChi is to serve as Maryland's foremost advocate and resource for physicians, their patients and the public health of Maryland. For more information, please visit www.medchi.org About VisualDx VisualDx is an award-winning diagnostic clinical decision support system that has become the standard medical professional resource at more than 50% of U.S. medical schools and more than 2,300 hospitals and clinics worldwide. VisualDx combines problem oriented clinical search with the world's best curated medical image library, plus medical knowledge from experts and sophisticated machine learning algorithms to help with differential diagnosis, variation, treatment, and patient communication. Our mission is to improve healthcare decision making and reduce diagnostic errors. http://www.visualdx.com SOURCE VisualDx Related Links http://www.visualdx.com HOUSTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Yuma Energy, Inc. (NYSE American: YUMA) ("Yuma" or the "Company," "we" or "our") announced today that on April 2, 2019, it filed its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). Investors and stockholders may obtain our Form 10-K and other documents filed with the SEC free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. In addition, a copy of our Form 10-K is available on our website at www.yumaenergyinc.com Recent Developments Interested parties are encouraged to access and read the Form 10-K in its entirety. The risk factors and uncertainties described therein for the year ended December 31, 2018, as well as other more recent risk factors which include, but are not limited to, events of default under the Company's credit agreement, declines in production, reduction of personnel, the failure to establish commercial production on our Permian properties, and our substantial working capital deficit of approximately $37.0 million as of year-end, all of which raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern. On March 28, 2019, Mr. Anthony C. Schnur was appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer of the Company, replacing Mr. Sam L. Banks. Mr. Schnur has also served as Chief Restructuring Officer of the Company since March 1, 2019. The Company continues to reduce corporate overhead and operating costs, and is focused on higher margin operations and cash conservation following a comprehensive review of its business and assets. We recently entered into an agreement to sell our California assets for $2.1 million to provide near term liquidity. Similar asset sales are under review and may follow but are undetermined at this time. Other Matters As previously reported, the Company has retained and continues to work with Seaport Global Securities LLC, an investment banking firm, to advise the Company on its strategic alternatives and divestitures. The Company has also engaged Energy Advisors Group (formerly "PLS Divestment Services") to market certain properties. In addition, as previously reported, the Company received a deficiency letter from the NYSE American stock exchange ("NYSE American") indicating the Company's common stock has been selling for a low price per share for a substantial period of time and the Company must demonstrate an improved share price or effect a reverse stock split of its common stock by no later than July 4, 2019, in order to maintain the listing of the Company's common stock on the NYSE American. The Company could be subject to immediate de-listing should the stock price decline to $0.06. The NYSE American notification of continued listing deficiency does not affect the Company's business operations or its SEC reporting obligations. Going Concern Uncertainty The Company's consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2018, included a going concern qualification. The financial statements were included in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, which was filed with the SEC on April 2, 2019. Generally, events of default under the Company's credit agreement, declines in production, reduction of personnel, the failure to establish commercial production on our Permian properties, and our substantial working capital deficit of approximately $37.0 million as of year-end, as noted above, raise a substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern. Please refer to our recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, and all our filings with the SEC for further information. Management Comments Mr. Anthony C. Schnur, Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Restructuring Officer stated, "The Board of Directors and I are committed to address Yuma's financial circumstances on behalf of all stakeholders by reducing operating and administrative costs and improving the cash flow margins of the Company. We have an open and constructive dialogue with our lenders and are fully engaged with the Seaport team to pursue any and all reasonable options for the Company and its stakeholders. We are undertaking a corporate restructuring initiative which may include additional asset sales, one or more acquisitions, restructured debt facilities, equity financings or a corporate merger intended to better position the Company for the future." About Yuma Energy, Inc. Yuma Energy, Inc., a Delaware corporation, is an independent Houston-based exploration and production company focused on acquiring, developing and exploring for conventional and unconventional oil and natural gas resources. Historically, the Company's activities have focused on inland and onshore properties, primarily located in central and southern Louisiana and southeastern Texas. Its common stock is listed on the NYSE American under the trading symbol "YUMA." Forward-Looking Statements This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act"). Any and all statements that are not strictly historical statements constitute forward-looking statements and may often, but not always, be identified by the use of such words such as "expects," "believes," "intends," "anticipates," "plans," "estimates," "potential," "possible," or "probable" or statements that certain actions, events or results "may," "will," "should," or "could" be taken, occur or be achieved. The Company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, recent current reports on Form 8-K, and other SEC filings discuss some of the important risk factors identified that may affect its business, results of operations, and financial condition. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. SOURCE Yuma Energy, Inc. Related Links http://www.yumaenergyinc.com MAUMEE, Ohio, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dana Incorporated (NYSE: DAN) today announced that Zoomlion has selected Dana to supply Brevini winch drives and slew drives for its first line of mobile all-terrain cranes offered in Europe. Designed and manufactured in Italy by Zoomlion, ATC 960 and ATC 1000 all-terrain cranes have been engineered to deliver superior drivability, maneuverability, lifting capabilities, and operator comfort. They are scheduled for production in 2020 and will debut at Bauma 2019 in Munich. "Our new line of ATC all-terrain cranes has been designed with best-in-class features to meet the high expectations of European equipment buyers," said Davide Cipolla, general manager for Zoomlion CIFA Europe. "Dana has been a supplier to CIFA for more than 20 years, which is why we trust their engineers to provide motion products that deliver performance and reliability." Brevini winch drives have a compact, modular design that enables vehicle manufacturers to specify gear ratios and select the optimal transmission size while meeting application needs for line speed, line pull, and braking capability. Suitable for severe-duty use, Brevini slew drives use a planetary design that withstands high torque values in a compact, high-efficiency package. "Dana has decades of experience in helping the owners of construction equipment work in the harshest environments in the world," said Aziz Aghili, president of Dana Off-Highway Drive and Motion Technologies. "We look forward to leveraging our expertise as Zoomlion expands its mobile crane offering across global markets." Zoomlion, Dana at Bauma Zoomlion will exhibit the company's full line of construction and mining equipment at Bauma in outdoor stand FS.905/2, while Dana will present its wide selection of drive and motion technologies in hall A3 at stands 326 and 139. Dana will also present live demonstrations of an aerial work platform and mini excavator with Spicer Electrified drive technologies and high-efficiency Brevini motion products at outdoor stand 45A.9, between halls A4 and A5. For more information, visit www.dana.com/offhighway. About Zoomlion Founded in 1992, Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co., Ltd. is mainly engaged in developing and manufacturing major high-tech equipment in the areas of engineering industry and agricultural industry. With more than 20 years of innovation and development, the company is now a global enterprise possessing 9 major categories and 49 product lines, as well as nearly 800 leading products. Zoomlion is actively promoting strategic transformation, aiming to build a high-end equipment manufacturing enterprise integrating engineering machinery, agricultural machinery and financial services. About Dana Incorporated Dana is a world leader in highly engineered solutions for improving the efficiency, performance, and sustainability of powered vehicles and machinery. Dana supports the passenger vehicle, commercial truck, and off-highway markets, as well as industrial and stationary equipment applications. Founded in 1904, Dana employs more than 36,000 people in 33 countries on six continents who are committed to delivering long-term value to customers. The company reported sales of $8.1 billion in 2018. Based in Maumee, Ohio, USA, it is a people-centric organization and has been named a top employer of choice around the world, including significant honors in Asia, India, Italy, Mexico, and the United States. For more information, please visit www.dana.com. SOURCE Dana Incorporated Related Links http://www.dana.com Mumbai, April 2 : "Thor" star Chris Hemsworth is in awe of India, and says it is one of the best places on the planet. Hemsworth expressed his admiration for the country through a video message, which was played at a fan-event here on Monday. The event was held as part of the promotion activity of "Avengers: Endgame" in presence of film's co-director Joe Russo. "What's up everybody in the beautiful country of India? The countdown has begun. 'Avengers: Endgame' will be in cinemas soon," Hemsworth said. "Our director Joe Russo have come to the beautiful country. I have come myself. It is one of the best places on the planet. Sorry couldn't be there this time. Joe thinks he can handle some spicy food and I have told him to try some rogan josh and some butter chicken... see if he can handle the heat. Lot of love guys and hope to see you soon," he added. Last year, the actor, who has named his daughter India, was in the country to shoot for his Netflix project "Dhaka". He shot in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. "Beyond thankful for the kindness and generosity that the people of India have extended to us while making our little film here," Hemsworth had posted on Instagram along with three photographs in which he is surrounded by fans, especially children. At the moment, he is looking forward to the release of Marvel Studios' "Avengers: Endgame", which is slated to open in India on April 26. Lucknow, April 1 : "I have never contested an election on caste issues and never will. As an individual, I have always pursued the politics of humanity, the politics of iinsaniyat in my entire political career," said Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh as he prepares to seek re-election from Lucknow - a constituency held five times by former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Rajnath Singh inherited Vajpayee's legacy when he won the election from Lucknow in 2014. "I have worked for Lucknow. From the Outer Ring Road to easing traffic congestion and the expansion of Gomti Nagar railway station and modernization of the sewerage system - I have closely monitored the various projects in Lucknow," he said in an interview to IANS. Singh said that projects worth Rs 24,000 crore had been initiated in Lucknow. "I want to develop Lucknow and fulfill the dreams that Vajpayee saw for this constituency," he stated. Singh said that he enjoyed immense support from minorities in his constituency. He was the only BJP Chief Minister in UP to have held Iftar parties for Muslims during Ramzan. "Leaders from all communities meet me regularly and I try to solve their problems to the best of my abilities. Their love for me and faith in me gives me great satisfaction," he added, and said that it was unfortunate that a section of political leaders spent all their energy in painting an anti-minority image for the BJP. The Home Minister said that tremendous development done by the Modi government in the past five years and the Yogi Adityanath government in the past two years would ensure a resounding victory for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh again. But what about the growing resentment among 16-odd sitting MPs who have been denied ticket? "This is not a big issue. The BJP is a family and if any member is unhappy, his feelings will be assuaged. This happens during ticket distribution and the media always plays it up." Talking about issues in the upcoming election, the Home Minister said that while it was understandable that Pakistan was perturbed after the Balakot air strikes, he could not understand why the opposition parties in the country were upset on the issue. "The opposition talks of supporting the Modi government on issues of national security but then they go ahead and demoralize the armed forces by questioning the air strikes. This never happens in any other country and it is not a welcome trend." Singh said that the biggest achievement of the Modi government was that no one could level a single corruption charge against it. "And this is no small achievement," he said. New York, April 2 : An Indian national has been sentenced to eight years and eight months in prison for participating in an India-based call centre fraud in which operators impersonated US tax officials to extort money from Americans. Federal Judge Virginia Hernandez Covington, who sentenced Nishitkumar Patel on Monday in Tampa, Florida, also fined him $200,000 and ordered the forfeiture of cash and his Land Rover. He and four others - two of them Indians - had earlier admitted their guilt in court. Patel and his accomplices used the India-based call centre to make calls to people in the US pretending to be tax officials from the Internal Revenue Service and claiming that they owed taxes, threatened the victims with arrest, according to court filings. They ordered the victims to buy prepaid cash cards to pay what they claimed were back taxes and sent people to collect the cards, deposit the payments into bank accounts they opened and turn over the money after deducting a commission, court papers said. One of the co-conspirators, Alejandro Juarez, was earlier sentenced to 15 months in prison, while Hemalkumar Shah, Sharvil Patel and Brenda Dozier are awaiting sentencing. When they were charged in November, officials said that law enforcement officers executed a search warrant Nishitkumar Patel's home and seized $50,000 in cash, hundreds of bank and wire transfer receipts, and 20 electronic devices. The charges filed in court described Nishitkumar Patel, 31, Sharvil Patel, 22, and Hemalkumar Shah, 27, as "domestic managers" for the fraud who hired people to collect the payment cards. India-linked fraudulent tax extortion through threatening phone calls are rampant. In October 2016, five Indian companies and 56 people, most of them of Indian descent, were charged in a Texas federal court with involvement in a similar racket. Last October, 21 people - at least 20 of them of Indian origin - received sentences ranging between four years and 13 years, with orders of deportation for most of them and revocation of US citizenship of one. Three others of Indian descent were also convicted earlier in the same fraud. Jeff Sessions, who was the attorney general at that time, had said: "The stiff sentences imposed this week represent the culmination of the first-ever large scale, multi-jurisdiction prosecution targeting the India call centre scam industry." (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis) Beijing, April 2 : A kindergarten teacher has been detained for allegedly poisoning 23 children with nitrite in China's Henan province. According to the state media, several children at Jiaozuo's Mengmeng kindergarten were hospitalised for fainting and vomiting. Most of them had left the hospital after recovery, said the report. One parent surnamed Li said that he received a kindergarten teacher's call saying that his child vomited and fainted after eating something on March 25, the Global Times reported. His child was unconscious when he arrived. "The vomit was all over (my child's) pants. There were other children who were also throwing up, and they looked pale," said Li was quoted as saying by the state media. Other children were sent to the hospital and another parent surnamed Hu said that the hospital had to flush his child's stomach. Hu's child was diagnosed with "poisoning by nitrite". Nitrite is a carcinogen and heavy metal, which harms the liver and kidney after mistakenly eating. The victims were all from the same grade. They all ate a certain porridge, which was supposed to taste sweet. "But the children said the porridge tasted salty," said one parent. After an investigation, the police found that a teacher in the kindergarten put nitrite in the children's porridge that day, which may have led to the children's illness. The local public security bureau in Jiaozuo has detained the teacher, said the report. Employees at the Jiaozuo's education bureau are also investigating the case and already sent the children to other kindergartens. New Delhi, April 2 : In a huge relief to the regulated sector, the Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down as ultra vires the controversial Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circular mandating resolution of loans of Rs. 2,000 crore and above even for a single day. "We have declared RBI circular ultra vires," said Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman pronouncing the judgement on a batch of petitions by the industries -- power, fertiliser and sugar -- challenging February 12, 2018 apex bank circular. Justice Nariman is accompanied by Justice Vineet Saran on the bench. The court verdict would have a bearing on Rs 2.2 lakh crore of bad loans. The RBI circular said that in the pre-Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) stage, the moment a commercial entity is in default on a loan of Rs 2,000 crore or more even for a day, the bank would initiate steps for resolving, including restructuring the loan. The regulated sector companies of fertiliser, power and sugar had contended that their prices are regulated by the government and they don't get paid on time and thus they are not able to pay the banks on schedule and they are not wilful defaulters and can't be treated as such. They have contended that under IBC the resolution plan gives then 270 days but the RBI circular has reduced it to 180. New Delhi, April 2 : The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined an urgent hearing of Patidar leader Hardik Patel's plea for a stay on his 2018 conviction in a 2015 rioting case that has all but ended his chances of contesting in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. The Patidar leader, who had joined the Congress on March 12, had sought the stay to pave way for him contesting the general elections that kick off on April 11. A bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra declined to hear the matter urgently observing that the conviction sought to be stayed relates to a 2015 case. The conviction and sentence in the case was pronounced in July 2018. Patel, who was being projected to be a candidate for the Jamnagar seat in Gujarat, has challenged the March 29 Gujarat High Court order rejecting his plea. The High Court did not accept his plea that said "an irreparable loss" would be caused to him if he was not able to contest the Lok Sabha elections. The Patidar leader sought the stay of the Mehsana court decision convicting him for involvement in the rioting and arson case at Visnagar during the Patel agitation in 2015. The Mehsana court had ordered a two-year imprisonment in July 2018. So long as he remains convicted, Patel stands barred from contesting polls. New Delhi, April 2 : Congress President Rahul Gandhi said on Tuesday that he had decided to contest also from Kerala because south India feels "hostility" from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Asked why he was also being fielded by his party from Wayanad in Kerala apart from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi told the media here: "South India feels hostility from Narendra Modi... They feel they have not been included in decision making." He said his candidature would send out a message that "we are with you, I am with you... This is the message." When a journalist queried about lack of alliances in some states, Gandhi said the Congress had teamed up with allies in Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. "We have alliances across the country. I don't know which newspapers you are reading." New Delhi, April 2 : In association with Flipkart, Japanese brand JVC on Tuesday launched six new smart LED TVs in India starting at Rs 16,999. The product suite includes 4K "Ultra HD" intelligent smart TVs and "Full HD" smart LED TVs available in four screen sizes -- 40-inch, 43-inch, 49-inch and 55-inch. The TVs come equipped with features such as "Quantum Backlit Technology", Miracast support, and more than 500 licensed applications and up to 1 million hours of content to view, JVC said. The products will be available on Flipkart from April 6. "The need and hunger for content in the smart TVs is increasing day by day and we assure our customers of providing the largest app base as well as inbuilt content in today's times in these smart TVs," Sharan Maini, Director - Business Development at JVC India, said in a statement. JVC entered India in partnership with Veira Group, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for consumer durables in India, in association with Flipkart. Viera Group said it currently has its manufacturing unit in Noida having a capacity of up to one million units per annum. Bhopal, April 2 : The death of six farmers in police firing in Madhya Pradesh's Mandsaur in 2017 had given farmers across the country a platform to vent their anger that had been brewing over farm distress, and leading to a series of nation-wide protests. Nearly two years on, Mandsaur is now set to see a neck-and-neck fight between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, with the odds seem to be in favour of the saffron party. The Mandsaur parliamentary constituency has been a Jana Sangh-BJP stronghold with its veteran Laxminarayan Pandey having represented it in the 5th, 6th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th Lok Sabhas. In 2009, Meenakshi Natrajan of the Congress snatched Mandsaur from Pandey but lost it to BJP's Sudhir Gupta in 2014. In 2019, Natrajan is once again in the fray. Political observers say national and local issues will play an equal role in influencing the voters this time around. The constituency comprises eight Assembly seats spread over three districts -- Mandsaur, Malhargarh, Suwasra, Garoth (all in Mandsaur district), Neemuch, Manasa, Jawad (all in Neemuch district) and Jaora (in Ratlam district). The BJP had won seven of them in 2018 -- against the widespread belief that it would lose most of them owing to the farm distress. Except in Jaora, the winning margin between the BJP and Congress candidates was over 2,000 votes in six constituencies. In Jaora, the BJP won with a thin margin of 511, while the Congress candidate pulled through in Suwasra by a mere 350 votes. Rebels in the Congress and the selection of wrong candidates, besides higher polling in urban pockets helped the BJP in the Assembly elections, said Ajay Lodha, the editor of a local daily. "Congress-rebels led to the party's defeat on four seats while our calculations say the party chose wrong candidates for the other four. Yet, there was one victory, albeit with a narrow margin," he added. Notably, the voting turnout in the Assembly segments ranged between 79 and 86 per cent, which Lodha said happened due to higher balloting in the urban pockets. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the overall polling turnout was a little over 71 per cent while it was 56 per cent in 2009. "The voting percentage has been consistent in the rural areas. Higher overall turnout means people from urban pockets voted in great numbers," Lodha explained. "So, electoral calculations show the BJP can win if the voter turnout remains high in the Lok Sabha elections. Else, Congress gets to benefit." The voters in urban areas, he said, are more focused on issues such as nationalism that are important in the national perspective while their counterparts in the rural areas are concerned about farm issues such as fall in crop prices and drought. Many farmer leaders, politicians visited Mandsaur after the 2017 firing, which became the precursor for widespread protests against "anti-farm policies" of the BJP government. Several rallies were held in the national capital, which saw farmers participating in huge numbers. The issue also offered the opposition leaders a common ground, perhaps, for the first time, to rally against the BJP. BJP's Sudhir Gupta, a first-time parliamentarian, is approaching voters with the development work he initiated in the area, particularly in relation to the railway facilities, while Natrajan, hoping for a comeback, is banking on her connect with her constituents through a 'padyatra' that she undertook through all the villages in the constituency. (Saurabh Katkurwar can be contacted at saurabh.k@ians.in) Riyadh, April 2 : The children of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received million-dollar houses in the kingdom and monthly five-figure payments as compensation for the killing of their father, a media report said. Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and a critic of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, was killed and reportedly dismembered in October at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul by a team of 15 agents sent from Riyadh. His body has not been found. The Washington Post cited current and former Saudi officials as well as people close to the family as saying that Khashoggi's two sons and two daughters may also receive much larger payouts - possibly tens of millions of dollars apiece - as part of "blood money" negotiations that are expected to ensue when the trials of Khashoggi's accused killers are completed in the coming months. According to the report, the previously undisclosed payments were part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to reach a long-term arrangement with Khashoggi family members, aimed in part at ensuring that they continue to show restraint in their public statements. The Khashoggi siblings have refrained from any harsh criticism of the kingdom even as their father's death led to global outrage and widespread condemnation of the Saudi Crown Prince. The houses given to the Khashoggi children are located in the port city of Jeddah and are worth up to $4 million, the newspaper reported. The delivery of homes and monthly payments of $10,000 or more to each sibling were approved late last year by King Salman as part of what one former official described as an acknowledgment that "a big injustice has been done" and an attempt "to make a wrong right", the report said. A Saudi official described the payments as consistent with the country's practice of providing financial support to victims of violent crime or even natural disasters and rejected the suggestion that the Khashoggi family would be obligated to remain silent. Salah Khashoggi, the eldest son of Khashoggi, is the only sibling who intends to continue living in Saudi Arabia, according to people close to the family. The others reside in the US and are expected to sell their new Saudi properties. The Saudi Crown Prince has been accused of planning Khashoggi's killing, but the kingdom has claimed that he was not involved. The kingdom initially said it had no knowledge of Khashoggi's fate but amid mounting international pressure acknowledged that he was killed at the Saudi consulate in a rogue operation. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded that the Crown Prince had ordered Khashoggi's killing, but US President Donald Trump refused to accept verdict about, saying, "Maybe he did, maybe he didn't." The Washington Post reported that the issue of how far to go in protecting their father's legacy has been a source of tension among the Khashoggi siblings, according to people close to the family. The daughters have at times pushed to be more outspoken about their father's life and the kingdom's ruthlessness, while the brothers have focused on maximizing the amount of money the family will collect. The report said that at one point in the weeks after his father's death, Abdullah Khashoggi told advisers working with the family that he wanted to punish the royal court by going after one of the Crown Prince's prized possessions. "I want the Da Vinci," he said, referring to a painting by the Renaissance master that the Crown Prince paid $450 million for in 2017. New Delhi, April 2 : Smartphone brands will collectively spend Rs 330 crore on digital marketing in India this year, up by 20 per cent compared with the previous year, said a new report on Tuesday. Social media marketing would consume 26 per cent of the digital marketing budgets for smartphones in 2019, according to the forecast by market research firm techARC. At Rs 330 crore, the digital marketing budget constitutes six per cent of the overall marketing budget for the smartphone brands in India which is higher than the five per cent of the marketing budget set aside for print media. "Digital is increasingly becoming the preferred mode in marketing of smartphones as it helps brands to establish an engaging connect with the millennials, who are either the buyers or influencers for smartphones," said Faisal Kawoosa, Founder and Chief Analyst at techARC, in a statement. Overall, smartphone brands will spend 47 per cent of their marketing budget on outdoor campaigns, 21 per cent on TV, 19 per cent on retail, six per cent on digital, five per cent on print and two per cent on radio, techARC said. Bhopal, April 2 : Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath has asked Congress workers in the state to campaign in their own districts only and not venture out. On the instructions of Kamal Nath, the party's state General Secretary Rajiv Singh on Monday issued an order to all party officials and workers that they should work in their respective districts for Congress candidates. It was communicated that disciplinary action will be taken against those who violate these instructions. Mumbai, April 2 : As actor Ajay Devgn turned 50 on Tuesday, his wife and actress Kajol shared a heart warming message for him, saying that he looks "more handsome" now. Kajol on Tuesday morning shared on social media a photograph of herself and Ajay, whom she called a "dauntingly serious husband". "Happy birthday to my dashing, debonair, dauntingly serious husband. I just seriously wish you a wonderful day and year ahead. And I seriously think you are more awesome at 50," she captioned the image. The two got married in 1999 and the couple have two children, Nysa and Yug. Ajay began his acting career with "Phool Aur Kaante" in 1991. He then starred in films such as "Jigar", "Vijaypath", "Dilwale", "Suhaag", "Diljale", "Ishq", "Zakhm", "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam", "Gangajal","Yuva", "Apaharan","Omkara", "Raid", "Drishyam", the "Golmaal" franchise and "Rajneeti". Ajay has won two National Film Awards and was also feted with the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian honour of the country. He owns a production company Ajay Devgn FFilms, which was established in 2000. On completing 50, Ajay treated his fans with the trailer of his upcoming film "De De Pyaar De". He tweeted: "Half century poori ho gayi! Meri taraf se chhota sa gift. 'De De Pyaar De Trailer' (Have completed half century, here's a small present from my side. 'De De Pyaar De Trailer'.") His friends and colleagues took to Twitter to wish him: Abhishek Bachchan: Happy birthday to the big brother. Only Love and respect. Have a great day AJ. Madhuri Dixit Nene: Happy Birthday Ajay Devgn it has been so much fun working with you on 'Total Dhamaal'. Keep shining and making us laugh at your hilarious one-liners. Hope this year continues to be a 'Total Dhamaal' for you. Suniel Shetty: Here's wishing my super Kool super Krazee fabulous friend AJ a very very happy 50th birthday! Stay blessed. Bhushan Kumar: Here's wishing the versatile superstar and one of the most humble human beings @ajaydevgn a very Happy Birthday! May this year be filled with lots of love, goodness and success. Abbas Mustan: Dear Ajay Devgn happy birthday... Stay blessed always.. Lots of love. Divya Dutta: Happy birthday dearest Ajay Devgn! Lots of love have a great one. Mazar-e-sharif : , April 2 (IANS) Eight police personnel were killed and six others wounded after Taliban militants attacked a police camp in Afghanistan's Balkh province overnight, the police said on Tuesday. "The Taliban armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades stormed an Afghan Local Police (ALP) base camp in Shaikhah village of Sholgara district. In an ensuing gunfight, eight police personnel were killed and six others wounded," provincial police spokesman Adel Shah Adel told Xinhua news agency. Several militants were also killed and wounded during the gun battle, but their number could not be specified as the militants evacuated their casualties after the fighting, the official said. An investigation into the incident was ongoing. The Afghan National Defence and Security Forces remain in control of most of the country's population centres and all of 34 provincial capitals, but Taliban insurgents control large portions of rural areas, staging coordinated large-scale attacks against Afghan cities and districts since early 2018. Mumbai, April 2 : Actress Dia Mirza has started preparation for web series "Kaafir", which she has described as a "really special" project. "Here to start something really special... Will tell you what it is soon! Until then, let me soak in the beauty of mere desh ki zameen. #NewBeginnings #WaitForIt," Dia had posted on social media on Monday, along with photographs with scenic snow-capped mountains in the backdrop. Last seen on-screen playing a strong role in "Sanju", Dia will soon begin shooting for "Kaafir", directed by Sonam Nair and produced by Siddharth Malhotra for OTT platform Zee 5, read a statement. Dia will be seen as the protagonist and she worked with director Atul Mongia to bring authenticity to her part. "A workshop is an intense study, an exploration of the character one is playing. For me, personally, getting to know the character is extremely important. The process of discovering the person one is playing is exciting. "Working with Atul was a unique and wonderful experience. This is the most challenging part I have ever played and I feel so lucky to be a part of a story that is based on true events," Dia said in the statement. Washington, April 2 : NASA has slammed India's anti-satellite missile (A-SAT) test last week saying it has increased risk to the International Space Station (ISS) and may launch a race of sort among countries to repeat the feat. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine on Monday said the A-SAT missile's successful targetting of a live satellite on a low earth orbit (LEO) within three minutes, that created at least 400 pieces of orbital debris, has increased risk to the ISS. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the ISS," CNN quoted Bridenstine as saying at a live-streamed NASA town hall on Monday. Of the 60 pieces of debris that could be tracked, 24 went above the apogee of the ISS -- the point of the space station's orbit farthest from the Earth, the CNN reported on Tuesday. "That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight," he said. "When one country does it, then other countries feel like they have to do it as well." "It is not acceptable for us to allow people to create orbital debris fields that put at risk our people," he added. On March 27, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India has achieved a "historic feat" with A-SAT capability and has become a space power joining only three others -- US, Russia and China -- in an elite club. The very next day, Bridenstine told the US House of Representatives Commerce Justice and Science Subcommittee that deliberately destroying a satellite and creating space debris was "wrong". The Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs though had in a statement made it clear that the test was conducted in "the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris" and "whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back onto the Earth within weeks". However on Monday, Bridenstine said the "test has increased the risk of small debris hitting the ISS by 44 per cent over the 10 days immediately afterward", the CNN report noted. "It's unacceptable, and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is," he added. "We are charged with enabling more activities in space than we've ever seen before for the purpose of benefiting the human condition, whether it's pharmaceuticals or printing human organs in 3-D to save lives here on Earth, or manufacturing capabilities in space that you're not able to do in a gravity well. "All of those are placed at risk when these kind of events happen." Bridenstine also contradicted himself saying India's test was conducted low enough and that "over time, this (debris) will all dissipate", with the ISS and all astronauts on board safe. Patna, April 2 : It is a battle of Manjhi versus Manjhi in Gaya parliamentary constituency. In a direct contest, the ruling NDA and the opposition Grand Alliance (Mahagathbandhan) have fielded candidates belonging to the Mushahar Dalit community, considered among the most deprived and marginalised sections of society. For the first time in three decades, the BJP candidate is not contesting the polls as the seat went to its ally JD-U this time under the seat-sharing formula. The reserved constituency of Gaya is considered the stronghold of the BJP. The party has won the seat four times in the last 20 years - in 1998, 1999, 2009 and 2014. With the Gaya seat going to the polls in the first of seven polling phases, the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) chief and former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi is Grand Alliance candidate pitted against NDA candidate Vijay Manjhi of the JD-U. Since 1999, only candidates of the Musahar community, that derives its name from the practice of eating rats after usually hunting for them in paddy fields, have won the seat in successive elections. In last two polls, BJP's Hari Manjhi defeated RJD's Ramji Manjhi. Though there are nearly a dozen candidates are in fray, the stakes are high for Jitan Ram Manjhi. In his early 70s, if Manjhi wins here, he will become an MP for the first time in his four-decade old political career. He had unsuccessfully contested the polls in the past. The BJP, which is supporting its ally JD-U instead of contesting itself, has angered local party leaders and workers, who wanted party to contest polls. Sitting BJP MP Hari Manjhi is reportedly not happy after the party denied him the ticket to favour their ally. There is widespread speculation over whether Jitan Ram Manjhi can break the BJP stronghold, or whether he will meet the same fate as in past. That it will not be easy for JD-U's Vijay Manjhi either, seems the dominant view among people in Gaya, a pilgrim and tourist destination. Scarcity of drinking water during summer is a serious problem both in rural and urban areas of drought-hit Gaya district due to depletion of ground water as a result of over-exploitation for irrigation and drinking. Besides, unemployment is another issue, as despite being a tourist centre, development has lagged behind and people have been forced to migrate outside the state for their livelihood. Vijay Manjhi is hopeful of getting the upper castes votes considered the traditional support base of its ally, the BJP, alongwith votes of the Other Backwward Classes (OBCs), the Economic Backward Classes (EBCc) and other Dalit communities. "We are sure to get the support of the OBCs, EBCs, Dalits and Muslims. Only EBCs and Dalits together make up over 35 per cent of the electorate. Apart from upper castes, if the party manages the support of Muslims, our candidate will be comfortable" JD-U leader Neeraj Kumar said. Jitan Ram Manjhi is confident of getting overwhelming support from RJD's traditional social support base of Muslims and Yadavs, as well as the similar support base of allies like Congress and RLSP among the Koeri other castes. "Our leader Jitan Ram Manjhi is a popular face in Gaya, his home town. He enjoys support of all castes and communities, unlike our rivals," HAM party leader Danish Ruzwan said. The total number of voters in Gaya constituency are 1,329,192, consisting of 705,874 male 623,318 women. The constituency has 6 assembly segments. In the 2015 Bihar Assembly polls, the RJD won 3 seats and one seat was won by its ally Congress. The BJP and JD-U won one seat each. Colombo, April 2 : Sri Lankan authorities have publicly destroyed 769 kg of cocaine which the police seized in nationwide raids carried out during the past few years, the media reported on Tuesday. The heroin valued at over Rs 10 billion ($57 million) was destroyed on Monday in the presence of President Maithripala Sirisena in a warehouse in the outskirts of Colombo, Xinhua news agency reported. Speaking at the event, Sirisena said this was the second time the government was publicly destroying all the drugs seized by the investigating officers in raids conducted throughout the country. He said authorities had publicly destroyed over 900 kg of cocaine in January 2018 and that his aim was to free the future generations from drugs as Sri Lanka had become a transit hub for drug smugglers in Asia. The President said he would soon implement the death penalty on those convicted of drug smuggling and trafficking in a large scale. New Delhi, April 2 : The Congress on Tuesday released a 53-page manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections promising good governance, freedom from indebtedness to farmers, protecting existing jobs while creating new ones and implementing anti-corruption laws without bias. Divided into 'Kaam' - employment and growth, 'Daam' - economy that works for all, 'Shaan' - pride in India's hard and soft power, 'Sushashan' - good governance, 'Swabhimaan' - self-esteem for the deprived and 'Samman' - life of dignity for all, the manifesto was released by Congress President Rahul Gandhi, UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the presence of senior party leaders. The Congress promised to launch MGNREGA 3.0 to address issues of water security, soil quality and similar issues that aggravate farmers' distress. "To this end, we will increase the guaranteed days of employment up to 150 days in cases where 100 days have been achieved in a block/district; and use MGNREGA labour in the Waterbodies Restoration Mission and the Wasteland Regeneration Mission," the manifesto said. It pledged to give the highest priority to protecting existing jobs and creating new ones. The party promised a loan waiver across the country for farmers. "Through a combination of remunerative prices, lower input costs and assured access to institutional credit, we will set our (farmers) on the path to 'Karz Mukti' or freedom from indebtedness." The Congress will provide a Minimum Income Support Programme (MISP) or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) under which Rs 72,000 a year will be transferred to the poorest 20 per cent families in India. The party promised anti-corruption laws "without discrimination". It said a Congress government will investigate several deals entered into by the Modi government, in particular the Rafale deal. It will also probe the circumstances under which scamsters were allowed to leave the country. The party promised a new Ministry of Industry, Services and Employment. It said that it will work to improve the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, including reviewing the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Disturbed Areas Act in J&K. The manifesto promised safety and a right to study or do business anywhere in the country to the students, traders and others from Jammu and Kashmir, saying the party is "deeply concerned about the cases of discrimination and harassment" faced by these people. "We will adopt a two-pronged approach: firstly, uncompromising firmness on the border and ending infiltration; and secondly, absolute fairness in dealing with the demands of the people and winning their hearts and minds," the manifesto read. For North East states, the party promised to restore the special category status and industrial policy. The Lok Sabha elections will be held in seven phases between April 11 and May 19. Singapore, April 2 : Singapore Airlines has grounded two Boeing 787-10 aircraft after routine inspections found issues with the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 TEN engines, according to a statement issued by the carrier on Tuesday. It said that some of the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 TEN engines on Singapore Airlines' Boeing 787-10 fleet were found to have "premature blade deterioration". "Pending engine replacements, two SIA 787-10 aircraft have been removed from service," the statement cited by Xinhua news agency added. Singapore Airlines's 787-10 aircraft are currently deployed to 11 destinations -- Bangkok, Denpasar, Fukuoka, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Nagoya, New Delhi, Osaka, Perth, Taipei and Tokyo. It said it was operating other aircraft for these flights to minimize schedule disruption to its customers. However, it admitted that as capacity may be lower on the substitute aircraft, some customers may be affected. The airlines declined to comment on the number of travellers affected, saying it was "actively getting in touch with customers" to re-accommodate them on various other flights. The statement by the carrier showed that the airline had been in consultation with Rolls-Royce and completed all its engine inspections on its 787-10 fleet while a remaining check will be completed on a 787-9 with its subsidiary Scoot Airlines by April 3. "We regret the inconvenience caused and sincerely apologize to customers whose travel plans are affected and seek their understanding," said the airlines. The grounding followed the suspension of all Boeing 737 MAX flights in its airspace in Singapore on March 12 by the country's Civil Aviation Authority in the wake of two fatal accidents involving Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in less than five months. Panaji, April 2 : Former Chief Minister Francisco Sardinha on Tuesday filed his nomination for the South Goa Lok Sabha seat as a Congress candidate. Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) state convenor Elvis Gomes also filed his nomination for the same seat. Both filed their nomination papers on a day which saw a flurry of nominations for the general elections, as well as the state Assembly by-polls. Sardinha, who broke away from the Congress and served as the Chief Minister of a rebel government supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for nearly a year in 1999-2000, filed his nomination papers in the presence of former Chief Minister Digambar Kamat, Leader of Opposition Chandrakant Kavlekar and state Congress President Girish Chodankar. Sardinha, whose South Goa constituency accounts for the bulk of the 88 mining leases where mining was disallowed by the Supreme Court in February 2018, said: "Resumption of mining is a crucial issue. As an MP I will work towards ensuring that the mining industry in Goa restarts." His key opponent is the BJP's sitting MP Narendra Sawaikar, who filed his nomination papers last week. Gomes, a retired bureaucrat who joined the AAP shortly before the state Assembly polls in 2017, said: "April 23, the day when Goa goes to vote, is the day when the people should resolve to deliver Goa from corruption and vote for the AAP." Joshua D'Souza and Dayanand Sopte, two BJP candidates for the Assembly by-polls, which are also scheduled to held on April 23, also filed their nomination papers on Tuesday from Mapusa and Mandrem Assembly constituencies, respectively. While D'Souza is the son of former Deputy Chief Minister and Mapusa MLA Francis D'Souza who died in February, Sopte quit the Congress in 2018 to join the BJP, therefore necessitating a by-poll in Mandrem. While Sopte expressed confidence about his victory while speaking to reporters after he filed the nomination papers in the presence of Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, the absence of former Chief Minister and former MLA from Mandrem, Laxmikant Parsekar, on the occasion was significant. Sopte beat Parsekar to win the Mandrem Assembly seat in the 2017 polls and the former's entry into the BJP has led to discomfort in the ranks of party workers loyal to Parsekar. Among the other Assembly by-poll candidates who filed their nomination papers on Tuesday was Santosh Satarkar, who filed his papers from the Shiroda Assembly constituency on behalf of the Goa Suraksha Manch, a political party headed by former state Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Subhash Velingkar. Mumbai, April 2 : What could have been an innocent move has landed Boney Kapoor in the midst of a controversy. A video doing the rounds featuring the filmmaker and starlet Urvashi Rautela posing for a photo op at the wedding reception of producer Jayantilal Gada's son Aksshay Gada has gone viral on social media, with netizens discussing how the filmmaker has touched the actress "inappropriately". The video, features Boney and Urvashi standing besides each other, sharing a laugh and chatting. As they exit, Boney is seen patting the "Grand Masti" actress on her derriere. The video spread like wildfire on social media, causing a section of social media users to point out that, "this is what casual sexual assault looks like". One social media user labelled the video "disgusting", while another wrote: "If it had been any other common man, she would have slapped him by now, but clearly not the same reaction towards such a grand producer." The speculation led to Urvashi finally reacting to the video. Sharing a snapshot of a 'news' article which talked about Boney's "inappropriate" touch in the video, she wrote on Twitter: "Presumably one of India's 'supreme' newspaper and this is 'news'? Please don't talk about girl power or women's liberation when you don't know how to respect/honour girls." She also defended Boney's action by calling him a "true gentleman". "I felt appalled and beyond shocked this morning when I saw social media flooded with trolls of me in a video with respected sir. It makes me feel extremely unhappy and miserable because the social sites/media don't even think twice before putting up things or destroying anyone's reputation," Urvashi tweeted on Tuesday, urging everyone to "stop trolling". "I honestly respect sir and stand by him and his dignity," she added. New Delhi, April 2 : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday promised to provide Rs 72,000 a year to the poorest families and fill 22 lakh government vacancies if his party won the Lok Sabha battle and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of wrecking the economy. Unveiling the Congress manifesto, the Congress President also challenged Modi, who he said was scared, to engage in a debate with him on issues such as corruption, foreign policy and national security. "The five main themes of our manifesto (are) NYAY scheme... Garibi par waar, 72,000 (war on poverty with Rs 72,000 cash support), employment to youth by filling 22 lakh government vacancies and employment to 10 lakh youth in gram panchayats, guaranteeing jobs for 150 days under MGNREGA instead of 100 days, 6 per cent GDP will be used in education and no permission required for starting a new business(for three years)," he said after releasing the party manifesto here. Gandhi promised to present a separate budget for the farmers on the lines of the now discarded railway budget and said if his party was voted to power, farmers who fail to return bank loans will no more face criminal but only civil cases. Accusing the Prime Minister of wrecking the economy, Gandhi said that there was an "economic emergency" in the country. Blaming demonetization and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for what he said was an economic mess, Gandhi said his party was determined to set right the situation. To repeated questions, Gandhi said the narrative for the Lok Sabha election had already been set -- and it was all about economic issues and misery. Hitting out at the Prime Minister, Gandhi said that Modi made fun of the MGNREGA scheme dubbing it bogus and useless. "Today everyone knows how much it helped the country. So now we want to guarantee jobs for 150 days, instead of 100 days, under the scheme." Gandhi said the Congress government will allow anyone to start business without permits or clearances with tax holiday for the first three years to encourage entrepreneurship and create thousands of jobs across the country. The Congress President said that he had told the members of the Manifesto Committee a year ago that it should not be drafted in closed rooms but should reflect the wishes of the people of India. "I also said that whatever is going to be put in the manifesto has to be truthful. I do not want a single thing in the manifesto that is a lie because we have been hearing a large number of lies spoken every day by our Prime Minister," he said. Responding on BJP's criticism that the NYAY scheme was "not workable", he said: "I agree it is not doable for the BJP. But it is doable for the Congress." Asked why he was also being fielded by his party from Wayanad in Kerala apart from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi said: "South India feels hostility from Narendra Modi... They feel they have not been included in decision making." He said his candidature would send out a message that "we are with you, I am with you." When a journalist queried about lack of alliances in some states, Gandhi said the Congress had teamed up with allies in Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Jammu and Kashmir. "We have alliances across the country. I don't know which newspapers you are reading." Asked if the journalists were interacting with "a future Prime Minister", he retorted: "Ask the people this question." Washington, April 2 : US Democratic presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, has announced that her campaign raised $12 million in the first quarter of 2019 from more than 218,000 individual contributions. Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, became the second major candidate to announce her first-quarter fundraising total after South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said he raised over $7 million in the first quarter, according to CNN. "A nationwide network of hundreds of thousands of grassroots supporters has stepped up to lay the foundation for a winning campaign," Harris' campaign manager Juan Rodriguez said in a statement on Monday cited by the Hill magazine. "This is a campaign powered by the people, focused on making healthcare a right, putting $500 a month in the pockets of working Americans, and giving every public school teacher in America a raise. We're excited by the support we're already seeing." The campaign's announcement came after Sunday's Federal Election Commission quarterly fundraising deadline. In a news release, Harris said she had received 218,000 individual contributions during the first quarter and 98 per cent of those contributions came in amounts smaller than $100. Harris' aides said that more than 99 per cent of her current donors can contribute again without hitting the limit. Harris did not disclose how much she has spent during the first three months of the year, nor how much cash she has remaining in the bank for the long primary fight. Lahore, April 2 : A Czech model convicted for attempting to smuggle heroin from Pakistan to Abu Dhabi challenged her sentence in the Lahore High Court on Tuesday. An additional district and sessions court in Lahore on March 20 had sentenced Tereza Hluskova to eight years and eight months in jail and fined her Rs 113,000 after she was arrested in 2018 on charges of carrying eight and a half kg of heroin from Lahore's Allama Iqbal International Airport. In her appeal filed before the High Court through her lawyer, Hluskova requested that the ruling of the sessions court be set aside as it negated the true facts of the case, Geo News reported. The 21-year old model said she was innocent and had come to Pakistan on a three-month family visit visa for Islamic studies. During the hearing in March, Additional Sessions Judge Shehzad Raza had pronounced her guilty and handed her an eight year and eight months prison term. The hearing was also attended by the Deputy Secretary of the Czech Embassy. The court in its verdict had said the prosecution was successful in confirming Hluskova guilty of smuggling heroin and that she had failed to prove her innocence. The court had also said she had the right to appeal her sentence. (HedgeCo.Net)The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the former controller of a New York-based not-for-profit college with defrauding municipal securities investors by fraudulently concealing the colleges deteriorating finances. According to the SECs complaint, in recent years, the College of New Rochelle came under considerable financial stress because of declining student enrollment and plummeting revenue from tuition. To hide the colleges deteriorating financial condition from investors, the colleges former controller, Keith Borge, created false financial records, didnt file payroll tax submissions, and didnt assess the collectability of pledged donations that were increasingly unlikely to be received as donors became more frustrated with the colleges operations. Borges misconduct resulted in the colleges financial statements for its 2015 fiscal year falsely overstating net assets by almost $34 million. Borge also falsely certified the accuracy of the colleges financial statements. The financial statements were published by Borge to an online repository in connection with the Colleges continuing disclosure obligations stemming from a 1999 bond issuance, and significantly influenced investors decisions to invest in the bonds. Financial difficulties are no excuse for engaging in accounting misconduct and concealing critical information from investors, said LeeAnn Ghazil Gaunt, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Divisions Public Finance Abuse Unit. Municipal bond investors, including those in the secondary market, depend on the accuracy of financial statements, and the SEC will hold accountable those who take steps to mislead the investing public, said Marc P. Berger, Director of SECs New York Regional Office. The SECs complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, charges Borge with violating, and aiding and abetting violations of, the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws. Borge agreed to a partial settlement that would permanently enjoin him from future misconduct, with potential monetary sanctions to be determined at a later date. The partial settlement is subject to court approval. In a parallel action, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York today announced criminal charges against Borge. Borge has pleaded guilty to those charges. The SEC did not charge the College of New Rochelle after considering the institutions extensive cooperation and remediation. After discovering Borges actions and conducting a preliminary review, the college publicly reported the financial issues, promptly engaged outside expertise to conduct a full internal investigation, and issued restated financial results. The college also promptly and extensively cooperated with the SEC in its investigation and proactively undertook wide-reaching remedial measures to enhance its internal controls and governance. Hyderabad, April 2 : Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) President Asaduddin Owaisi on Tuesday said his party stood by Hindu women who were abandoned by their husbands. "Majlis stood by our Hindu sisters who are victim to the cruel social evil of abandonment without divorce," tweeted Owaisi. His comments came a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi raked up the issue of triple talaq at an election rally in Hyderabad. Modi told the rally that he had to face criticism for bringing a bill in Parliament to protect the country's "sisters and daughters" from the "repressive tradition" of triple talaq. Asaduddin Owaisi and his younger brother Akbaruddin also hit back at Modi for calling MIM a 'big speed-breaker' in the development of the old city of Hyderabad. Addressing a public meeting Tuesday night, Akbaruddin reminded Modi that the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and other defence research laboratories working on India's missile programme were located in the old city. He said the 'chowkidar' should know that the Anti-Satellite (A-SAT) missile successfully tested recently was also developed here. Asaduddin Owaisi, seeking re-election from the Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency for a fourth time, Tuesday tweeted about the works undertaken by his party. He said the MIM ensured the construction of schools, colleges and hospitals. "Majlis contests its elections on its record of five years, not the demographics of Varanasi or Wayanad," he said. Hyderabad, April 2 : A Hyderabad court on Tuesday sentenced veteran Telugu actor-producer M. Mohan Babu to one year imprisonment in a cheque bounce case. The 23rd Metropolitan Special Court, which convicted Mohan Babu in the nine-year-old case, also directed him to pay Rs 40.75 lakh towards the defaulted amount. His production house Lakshmi Prasanna Pictures was also found guilty and the court imposed Rs 10,000 fine on it. Well-known director Y.V.S. Chowdary had filed the case against the actor in 2010 after he allegedly failed to pay the amount. Mohan Babu had issued a cheque for Rs 40.75 lakh to Chowdary towards the payment for movie "Saleem" released in 2009. However, the cheque bounced on account of insufficient funds. As Mohan Babu failed to pay the amount, the director approached the court. According to Chowdary's lawyer Satya Sai Baba, Mohan Babu made an agreement with the director for Rs 1.55 crore to direct the movie. He had paid Rs 1.10 crore in different instalments. Under the final instalment, he issued cheque for Rs 40.75 lakh after deducting the tax. Meanwhile, Mohan Babu said in a statement that he will challenge the conviction in a higher court. He alleged that Chowdary misled the court and claimed that he had paid the entire amount towards "Saleem" and the cheque was issued for another film to be made under his banner. "However as "Saleem' did not do well, I told Y.S. Chowdary that I will not be making the next film. I asked him not to deposit the cheque in the bank but he went ahead resulting in the cheque bounce," said Mohan Babu. He was the producer of "Saleem", starring his son Vishnu Manchu and Ileana D'Cruz. Mohan Babu, who was earlier with Telugu Desam Party and served as member of Rajya Sabha till 2001, joined YSR Congress Party last week. Kolkata, April 2 : Almost half of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) have been commissioned for the first phase polling in West Bengal on April 11, an official said on Tuesday. "The EVM commissioning for parliamentary constituencies Cooch Behar and Alipurduar has started very smoothly," Additional Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Sanjay Basu, told reporters here. Asked whether any of the parties complained about the EVMs, he said: "Almost half the process is complete. None of them had any complaint." He said the Flying Squad, Static Surveillance Team, Video Surveillance Team and Expenditure team have been pressed into service for confidence building and ensuring ethical voting. He added that armed forces will be deployed at all booths. In a bid to prevent environment pollution, the CEO, during the all party meet, had asked the parties to reduce the use of plastic flexes. West Bengal will see seven-phased polling, scheduled from April 11 to May 19. Jerusalem, April 2 : Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, his office said in a statement on Tuesday. Netanyahu's office did not elaborate on which issues the two leaders will be discussing in their meeting. The office said that Netanyahu and Putin spoke by telephone on Monday over "regional issues" that included Syria, Xinhua news agency reported. The meeting will be held five days before Israel's April 9 election in which Netanyahu is seeking to be re-elected for a fifth term. Shifting from a long-held US foreign policy, President Donald Trump last Thursday recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a territory Israel captured from Syria in a war in 1967 and later annexed. The move triggered international condemnations. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is fighting rebel groups in Syria's eight-year civil war, with Russian support. Bhopal, April 2 : Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath on Tuesday ordered reinstatement of security outside the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) office here, after having it withdrawn on Monday night citing election deployment. The Chief Minister issued a statement saying, "I have ordered the reinstatement of security of RSS office. But BJP leaders who are crying hoarse over the matter and raising fears of an attack there, must go through the proper process to ask for it." Kamal Nath said, "We may have ideological differences with the RSS and the RSS may have been opposing us but I am not in favour of removal of security from its office." "The RSS office is one of the six places from where security has been withdrawn. I do not want to go into details but our government does not have double standards on security like the BJP government had. "The Congress office had no security for the past 15 years, when there was permanent security outside the BJP office. We have continued to maintain that security cover," he said. The removal of security personnel from the RSS office on Monday night did not go down well with BJP leaders, who alleged that it was too sudden and they were not informed about it. Congress leader and former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh who is contesting from the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat, too said: "It is not proper to remove security provided to the RSS office in Bhopal. I request Chief Minister Kamal Nath to immediately provide adequate security." New Delhi, April 2 : The BJP on Tuesday hit out at Congress over its poll promises over Jammu and Kashmir and amending the sedition law and Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts (AFSPA), saying these were "dangerous" and will break the country. Addressing a press conference soon after Congress manifesto was released, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said it out of ignorance, the Congress President (Rahul Gandhi) makes "unimplementable and dangerous promises". "I am sure the nation would not be in a mood to oblige him for implementing the kind of promises which are contained in this manifesto," he said. The senior BJP leader claimed that some ideas in the manifesto are "positively dangerous" and agenda for 'balkanisation' of the country. "Even though there was a drafting panel, it appears some of the points have been drafted by Congress President's 'tukde-tukde' friends when it deals with Jammu and Kashmir and national security. The Nehru-Gandhi family committed a historic mistake regarding Jammu and Kashmir and the nation can't forgive them for that. The Congress manifesto takes ahead that agenda dangerously. "There mistakes have dragged Jammu and Kashmir to a situation where it is today. We are establishing rule of law, Congress wants to establish rules of terrorists and insurgents," he said. Jaitley also slammed the Congress over the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits finding no place in the manifesto and said the biggest failure in independent India was the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pundits. On Congress's promise of amending the sedition law and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, he said it was Congress's tradition that they withdrew laws like The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). "No nation over the last 72 years has dealt with terrorism like India. Our fight against terror didn't start after 9/11 Mumbai terror attacks. Punjab, North East, we have seen many struggles. We lost a part of Jammu and Kashmir. "A provision that Nehru, Indira, Rajiv Gandhi and even Manmohan Singh didn't dare touch, they say sedition would be done away with, that treason won't be a crime anymore, such a party doesn't deserve a single vote," Jaitley said. He said the AFSPA was essentially a sanctioning law for disturbed or insurgency-hit areas and deals with internal subversion. "Those who laid lives for the nation, you want them to be prosecuted at the behest of relatives of terrorists, or their friends. Ingratitude is the biggest sin a party can commit," he said. Earlier on Tuesday, the Congress released it's manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls, stressing that dialogue was the only way to understand the aspirations of the people of the three regions of Jammu and Kashmir to find an honourable solution to their issues. It also promised to review the AFSPA and sedition law among others. Mumbai, April 2 : Actress Madhuri Dixit Nene who along with her husband Sriram Nene has made their debut as film producer with the Marathi movie "15 August", says the job is tougher than acting. "As an actress, my job is quite easy. Once I am done with my performance in front of the camera and the shooting is over, I am done for the day. But as a producer, I am working every day till the film is completed, which includes three phases -- pre-production, production and post-production. I would say the job of a producer is much (more) challenging." Having been associated with the business of cinema for several years, did Madhuri made suggestions in the process of film's making? "We (my husband and I) were involved in the process, but did not interfere. I let it be," she replied. "I must say the constant challenges, new creative ventures and innovating new things drive me to keep at it. I want all of it -- my dance, acting, film production to parenting my sons. I enjoy everything that I do," said Madhuri. She will soon be seen in the upcoming multi-starrer film titled "Kalank". "15 August" is streaming on Netflix. Jammu, April 2 : Indian and Pakistani troops traded mortars and gunfire along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri and Poonch districts on Tuesday. The first violation of the ceasefire by the Pakistan Army took place in Rajouri and it then spread to Poonch district, officials said. Defence Ministry spokesman Lt Col Devender Anand said that around 5 p.m. the Pakistanis used mortars and small arms to target Indian positions along the LoC in Shahpur and Kerni sectors of Poonch district. "Indian positions retaliated and heavy firing exchanges are now going on between the two sides," the spokesman said. A 6-year old girl, a woman and an Inspector of the Border Security Force (BSF) were killed and 13 others injured in indiscriminate shelling and firing by the Pakistan Army in the same sectors a day earlier. Authorities closed all educational institutions within a five kilometre distance of the LoC in Poonch district as a precaution. Earlier, firing exchanges started between the two armies in Nowshera sector of Rajouri district at about 11.30 a.m. "The Indian Army is retaliating befittingly," the spokesman said. Mumbai, April 2 : She has always raised the fashion bar with her sartorial sense, and now actress Sonam Kapoor Ahuja is set to unravel some of her style secrets in an upcoming web series. Belgian chocolate ice cream brand Magnum on Tuesday came up with a MagnumXSonam collaboration announcement video, which sees the diva create intrigue about the upcoming style project. Sonam said it is thrilling to endorse a brand which has a "hallmark for indulgence and style excellence", and which "reflects exactly what inspires my style". "It's no secret that I live and breathe fashion. It defines me in more ways than one and I believe in taking my style very seriously. With Magnum, I'm here to co-create a space that encourages fashionistas to make their own style rules and break free from stereotypes. Stay tuned for my upcoming style project that I've taken great pleasure curating," Sonam said in a statement. While fitness is a part of her daily routine, she said ice cream has always been her guilty pleasure. New Delhi, April 2 : Two criminals who robbed a businessman and his son of Rs 1.40 crore at gunpoint here after intercepting their car have been arrested, police said on Tuesday. Aalam Ali, 22, and his accomplice Mustkeem Khan, 19, both resident of Delhi, were arrested on Monday night by the Crime Branch when they came to meet a contact near the Inderlok Metro station. Both were involved in various robberies and were members of the Babloo Khan gang, the police said. Along with their accomplices, they had on March 22 robbed Rs 1.40 crore from a grain merchant and his son near Pitampura, Additional Commissioner of Police Rajiv Ranjan said. "A total of Rs 40 lakh was recovered from their possession. Efforts are on to recover the remaining robbed amount," Ranjan said. The gang members used to follow the victim's vehicle on their scooties and strike when the victim reached an isolate place. They used one scooty to intercept the target vehicle and used firearms to terrify the victim and rob them, the officer added. The gang had robbed Rs 8 lakh at gunpoint on February 15 from another victim, he added. NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan delivered the commitment at a working breakfast with the France-Vietnam Friendship Parliamentarians Group and representatives of 15 major French businesses in Paris on April 1. Ngan said the Vietnamese NA delegations ongoing visit aims to promote and deepen the Vietnam-France strategic partnership, as well as bilateral legislative ties in particular, helping to enhance the multifaceted cooperation between the two countries with economic-trade collaboration as the centre. She highly evaluated Frances policy on strengthening economic cooperation with Vietnam and hoped that French firms will expand their business and investment in the Southeast Asian country. At the working breakfast, representatives of French enterprises such as Air Liquide and Total spoke highly of the Vietnamese markets potential in energy, especially renewal energy. Meanwhile, representatives of other businesses showed their interest in the fields of aviation infrastructure development, logistics, pharmaceuticals, health care, wholesale market building and clean food supply. In the sphere of energy, a representative of the Vietnamese Ministry of Industry and Trade affirmed Vietnams support for projects involving French companies, saying the country will create all possible conditions so that the projects are implemented effectively and on schedule. A representative of the NAs Committee for Legal Affairs said the Vietnamese legislature will continue to further study the Law on Investment in order to make it easier for investors to participate in projects in Vietnam. The Vietnamese NA will also amend the Law on Intellectual Property in May to satisfy conditions of economic integration, the official added. Leaders of Vietnamese ministries, agencies and localities talked about investment opportunities and potential in Vietnam, particularly in aviation and metro, stressing that French businesses and investors are able to take part in these projects. They also committed to creating optimal conditions for French businesses and investors to approach master planning schemes to clearly identify their investment plans. An official of Hanoi city briefed on the progress of some projects involved in French partners, including a hospital exclusively for mothers and children, whose construction will begin in May 2019 and is expected to be completed in October 2020, a centre of emergency aid in combination with firefighting, and a farm produce wholesale market in Gia Lam district. In her closing speech, Ngan said the Vietnamese NA will work harder to complete laws regarding economic affairs, in line with international practices and integration process Vietnam has committed in free trade agreements (FTAs), thus ensuring transparency, publicity and equality for both domestic and foreign investors. The Vietnamese Government will create a competitive, favourable and open investment environment, and carry out intensive and extensive administrative reforms, from the stage of corporate establishment to customs and tax affairs, she said. Vietnam is stepping up infrastructure development and economic investment programmes with high connectivity, towards a digital economy and smart urban cities, Ngan added. Along with e-government, the legislature will build an e-parliament, she said, noting that the legislative agency will accompany businesses and investors, helping remove their difficulties. In an interview granted to French daily newspaper LOpinion about Vietnams economic prospects, the Vietnamese top legislator said that the Vietnamese economy will continue its rapid, sustainable and inclusive growth based on a strong domestic market of 95 million people with increasing incomes. The creativity and aspirations for moving ahead of Vietnamese people, especially young people under 35 years old who account for up to 60 percent of the population, are considered as momentum for the nations development process, she said. Besides, Vietnam is renewing its growth model based on renovation and creativity and digital economic transformation, while encouraging the development of start-ups, taking advantages of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and promoting the private economic sector, Ngan stressed. The country is also improving its legal frameworks towards a modern market economy in conformity to international standards and commitments in new-generation free trade agreements (FTAs), she said. With 12 signed FTAs, including the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) and FTAs with such important markets as ASEAN, China, Japan and Russia, Vietnam has taken a further step in the global integration process, she underlined. Regarding the EVFTAs impacts on Vietnamese trade prospects, the Chairwoman highlighted the importance of the deal, in terms of both strategy and economy-commerce, as it will open various cooperation opportunities for Vietnam and the EU. Both sides need to finalise relevant procedures so as to soon sign and ratify the pact, ensuring that it will take effect as soon as possible, she noted. Regarding Vietnam-France relations, Ngan affirmed that the bilateral ties are enjoying an impetus for further growth, with a line-up of delegation exchanges at all levels and cooperation mechanisms. Particularly, cooperative ties between Vietnamese and French localities have contributed remarkably to the bilateral relations. According to the top legislator, France has remained a big trade partner and an important investor of Vietnam, and both countries, as active members of the international community, have shared a number of common viewpoints, laying the foundation for bilateral coordination at international forums and multilateral cooperation mechanisms. Besides, Vietnam and France are pursuing joint efforts for global peace and stability as well as adaptation to global challenges. Ngan also affirmed that the Vietnamese community in France in the largest of its kind in Europe, and they have obtained achievements in various sectors while many of them have held important positions in the local and central administrations of France. The NA Chairwoman expressed her hope that the Vietnamese community in France will make further contributions to both the host nation and their homeland. We have to curb the increase in electricity transmission prices. The increases cause annoyance and financial difficulties. The current law forces companies to raise the prices so that they can pay off underground cables in four years. Lets halve the price by changing it to eight years, he proposed on Twitter on Monday. PETTERI ORPO (NCP), the Minister of Finance, has proposed that electricity transmission prices be reduced by granting energy companies more time to invest in underground electric cables. Finnish energy companies are obliged under the electricity market act to transition from overhead to underground electric cables and ensure they are capable of restoring electricity to consumers quicker than previously after power outages caused by snow and storms. The deadline for the grid improvements has been set to 2028. Electricity prices caused widespread discussion following the steep price increases introduced by Caruna, one of the largest privately held electricity distributors in Finland, in 2016. The Finnish government responded to the increase by setting a cap on the annual increases in transmission prices. Prime Minister Juha Sipila (Centre) and Antti Rinne, the chairperson of the Social Democrats, expressed their concerns about the price increases in an election debate held earlier yesterday by Kaleva and YLE. We introduced a cap on increases, but transmission prices have increased outrageously all over Finland. Electricity here is affordable, but its transmission costs way too much. If the state has to own something, I think that something should be all electricity grids not just the main grid thats owned by Fingrid, said Sipila. We should think carefully about how to keep the increases in check, he added. The grids must be publicly owned, responded Rinne. Aleksi Teivainen HT Source: Uusi Suomi Mumbai, April 2 : Actor Irrfan Khan, who had been keeping a low profile and maintaining a distance from the media by hiding his face behind a mask, finally faced the shutterbugs on Tuesday as he was spotted outside the airport here. Irrfan was spotted at Mumbai airport in the early hours of Tuesday. The lower half of his face was first covered with a black mask, but he later removed it for the paparazzi. The "Piku" actor, who returned to India earlier this year after getting treated for neuroendocrine tumour at London, looked in the pink of health in a pink t-shirt which he teamed up with a floral print shirt and denim jeans. "Irrfan was leaving for Rajasthan for personal work," a source in the know told IANS. There has been a buzz that Irrfan will soon start shooting for the sequel to his 2017 film "Hindi Medium", opposite Kareena Kapoor Khan in London. Palakkad : , April 2 (IANS) Congress candidate from Kerala's Alathur constituency, Remya Haridas, on Tuesday filed a police complaint against Left Democratic Front convenor A. Vijayaraghavan for his "sexist" and "lewd" remarks against her. "I came to know about the lewd remarks made by Vijayaraghavan aimed at me on Monday night. It is not a slip of tongue but he has been repeating the same comments to malign my image," Haridas told the media after filing the complaint. "The CPI-M on one hand claims to fight for women's rights but on the other hand, a senior party leader like Vijayaraghavan has been spreading abuses about me," she added. "I am surprised that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who often speaks of women's upliftment, is silent on the matter," she said. At a rally near here on Monday, Vijayaraghavan, a Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader, had said that the "lady candidate from Alathur" had called on Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) leaders like Panakkad Sayyid Hyderali Shihab Thangal and P.K. Kunhalikutty and "I do not know what will happen to her now". Kunhalikutty was haunted for over a decade by an alleged sexual assault case, before it was cleared by the apex court. Congress leaders including Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala, State Congress President Mullapally Ramachandran and All India Congress Committee General Secretary Oommen Chandy also demanded strict action against Vijayaraghavan. But Vijayaraghavan and the CPI-M dismissed the criticism. "I am not such a person who will pain anyone by insinuations and I assure Haridas that she need not worry about it. There is nothing personal in it and it was only a political speech," said Vijayaraghavan, who has earlier been a member of both the houses of the Parliament. Haridas' CPI-M opponent, P.K. Biju, who is aiming for a hat-trick win this time, claimed that "baseless things" are being raked up by the Congress as they know they are on a back foot here. Canberra, April 2 : A 99-year-old Australian woman, known to be Prince Harry's "biggest fan", died, just days after receiving a birthday card from the royal and his wife Meghan. Daphne Dunne passed away peacefully on Monday, her family was quoted as saying by the BBC. Australia is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, with the Queen as head of state. Dunne featured heavily in Harry's Australia trips and has pictures on Instagram of several encounters with the prince in recent years. The widow earlier said she'd had "a very special friendship" with the prince, the BBC reported. Just days ago, she received a birthday card from the couple, the report said. "Dear Daphne, my wife and I send our warmest wishes to you on the occasion of your 99th birthday on Friday," the Duke and Duchess of Sussex wrote, according to Australian media, signing the card simply "Harry and Meghan". Dunne was among the cheering crowd and was greeted warmly by the royals during their 2018 Australia visit. After meeting the couple, the Australian said, "it was lovely to meet the duchess, Meghan. Harry is a wonderful man and I'm so happy he had found happiness, they both deserve the absolute world together". Dunne's first husband, Lieutenant Albert Chowne, died in 1945 while fighting in Papua New Guinea and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, which Dunne was wearing when she first met Prince Harry in 2015. She later married John Patrick Dunne. Mumbai, April 2 : Acclaimed actress Tabu, whose upcoming film "De De Pyar De" is about a 50-year-old man's relationship with a 26-year-old girl, says cinema does not work in isolation and it always reflects societal choices and concepts. Tabu was interacting with the media at the trailer launch of "De De Pyar De" along with her co-actors Ajay Devgn and Rakul Preet Singh, director Akiv Ali and producer Luv Ranjan here on Tuesday. Though the age gap has been experimented with as a theme several times in Hindi cinema -- including in Tabu's very own "Cheeni Kum" -- will there be a time in Hindi films when the female character will be shown older than her male counterpart? Tabu said: "If certain things are accepted in society, then I think films will reflect that. I think the older man and younger woman concept is more widely accepted in the world and in society, so, we see more of it on-screen. I am sure that societal choices and the way we live will reflect in cinema because cinema is not happening in isolation." When Tabu was asked if she feels that actresses have less shelf life as compared to actors in today's time, Ajay chose to give an answer. He said: "I think this kind of a question is outdated because the time has changed. Today, actresses have more shelf life or as much life as compared to the male actors. It's not true at all and I am sure everybody will agree with it. There is no difference in shelf life anymore. It was there earlier, but now it is not the case. I think Tabu is here, Kajol is here and there are so many of them who are still working in films. So, things are changing." Ajay is returning to a romantic comedy film after a long time. He said it was a fun experience. "De De Pyaar De", produced by T-Series and Luv Films, will release on May 17. Tura : , April 2 (IANS) The Congress on Tuesday got a shot in the arm after former RBI Chief General Manager Beryl B. Sangma joined the party in support of former Chief Minister Mukul Sangma, who is contesting from the Tura Lok Sabha seat. "Having been a Senior Executive of RBI, I have seen the destructive damages done by the economic and fiscal policies of the BJP and NPP governments and now I am giving awareness to the people about their hollow election promises," Beryl Sangma said. Disclosing that various political parties had approached him, he said: "I decided to join the Congress and support Mukul Sangma after conducting his own studies that this is the only political party which is actually working for the development of Garo Hills and Meghalaya as a whole." Meghalaya's two Lok Sabha constituencies - Shillong and Tura - will go to polls on April 11. Mukul Sangma, currently the Leader of Opposition in the Meghalaya Assembly, is pitted against former union minister Agatha Sangma of the National People's Party and Bharatiya Janata Party's Rikman G. Momin. Beryl Sangma credited former Chief Minister Mukul Sangma for restoring peace in the five districts of Garo Hills which was once hit by militancy. "He (Mukul) has done so much for the state including setting up new districts, civil sub divisions, police stations, opened so many schools, technical institutes, colleges, institutes of higher learning, hospitals, built good roads and bridges and improved communication," the former Reserve Bank of India official said. Patna, April 2 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday attacked the opposition, accusing them of "speaking the language of Pakistan" on terror while his government had cracked down on terrorist activities and ensured security in the country. The Prime Minister addressed two election rallies in Bihar's Jamui and Gaya Lok Sabha seats for candidates of allied parties. At a rally in Gaya, from where Janata Dal-United's Vijay Manjhi is contesting, he alleged that the opposition are helping terrorists "who are in trouble from the 'chowkidar'". "Earlier, bomb blasts were a daily affair but now it has ended after people voted us to power. Every vote matters as it helped to end daily bomb blasts," Modi said. He also said that in last five years, several schemes and development projects were initiated and promised people that if they voted for the National Democratic Alliance, he would do what was left. "You have given me chance to serve and work for development... if you are happy with my work, then give me another chance to complete remaining work," he said. He also questioned former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah's demand to go back told the old title of 'Prime Minister' in the state. "How it is possible that there will be two PMs in one country," he asked, adding that opposition leaders were silent over the demand. Modi attacked the Congress for insulting the Indian Constitution's prime architect B.R. Ambedkar while the his BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government honoured him. "Congress has always insulted Ambedkar. But the NDA government is doing everything to respect and honour him," he said at the rally in Jamui constituency from where ally Lok Janshakti Party's Chirag Paswan, the son of party chief and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, is contesting. Those who consider Ambedkar as an icon and legendary would never support the Congress, Modi added. Accusing the Congress of creating confusion over reservation by spreading lies, he said: "No one can end reservation in government jobs and educational institutions, not even Modi. Opposition leaders are spreading lies on it." The Prime Minister also sought to clarify that the 10 percent reservation for economically weaker sections, brought in by his government, has nothing to do with ending reservation at all. Maymana : , April 2 (IANS) A dozen militants including Taliban key commander Mawlawi Hussain were killed in Qaisar district of Afghanistan's Faryab province on Tuesday, Army officials said. "Security forces in a surprise move against the enemies stormed Taliban hideout in Doshakh area of Qaisar district early Tuesday, killing 12 insurgents including notorious commander Mawlawi Hussain on the spot," Army spokesman Mohammad Hanif Rezai told Xinhua news agency. In the operations that lasted for two hours, five more insurgents including Mawlawi Khalil, a shadow deputy governor of Qaisar district, were captured alive, the official said. Taliban militants who are operational in parts of the relatively troubled province didn't comment. New Delhi, April 2 : Running the annual Glenfiddich Artists-In-Residence programme since its inception in 2002, its Scottish global curator Andy Fairgrieve feels Indian art has scope to expand into more experimental media. During his eighth visit here to announce India representative to the 18-year-old art residency, the mentor shared his vision of art and what makes artists brave. Since 2012, the residency in Scotland's Dufftown has hosted at least one Indian artist. Selected as 'Emerging Artist of the Year', he/she is awarded Rs 10 lakh along with a three-month residency in Scotland. Apart from being the alcohol brand Glenfiddich's residency's sole organiser and curator, Fairgrieve was also a part of the selecting jury for the India participant. He likes artists with a strong signature style and consistency. Known for liking 'ludicrous and absurd' art, the 57-year-old curator feels "art should stir some emotion". "It's not just cooking up any picture. It should make you feel something. One of my favourite emotions is humour and when something is quite ludicrous or ridiculous, I find it amusing," Fairgrieve told IANS. After being involved with music, which he says is a "different style of creativity" and which allowed him to produce posters for concerts and artworks for record covers, Fairgrieve gradually lost touch with painting, but enjoys photography. "I enjoy photographing special places in and around Scotland and visiting normal, banal locations with a significant historical connect." Now involved with at least eight resident artists a year, quality time with art abounds for him. On quality art, he said, "Very often, in a gallery, someone comes up and says 'I could've done that', but saying it is easy. Someone else has already done it. "Photography is a good example. Everyone has a camera on their phone, everyone is on Instagram. Actually, photography is not easy. You've to get the composition, the subject, the lighting right. Everyone can take a photograph, but only a good artist can take a good photograph. When you see quality, you know it." The former Aberdeen University student feels while some artists create art for the market, "true artists create for themselves". "Art itself is a desire to express and if they're bold in that expression and they're able to make that expression, it's their reward. The bravest artists are the ones who make because they need to make. If an artist is making something just to sell, then it's just a product." On the Indian art market, Fairgrieve said Indians are revisiting art as a proper job. "It is being seen like a real job that can be taken on hard, economic terms," he said. "But, art is still biased towards painting and sculpture. I'd love to see more digital art, video art, performance sell, installations -- basically stuff you can't sell. Indian art can expand its growth from conventional media to more experimental and innovative styles," he suggested. A jury with Fairgrieve and other art stakeholders last week selected Baroda-based artist Raju Baraiya for its 2019 edition, which kicks off this summer. (Siddhi Jain can be contacted at siddhi.j@ians.in) Warangal : , April 2 (IANS) Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao on Tuesday said that he has no desire to become the Prime Minister. Addressing an election rally, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) President said that he wants to see a non-Congress, non-BJP government at the Centre to address the real problems of the country which both the national parties have failed to solve in last 70 years. KCR, as Rao is widely known, said he would like to contribute to bring a qualitative change in the national politics. Urging people to elect 16 Lok Sabha candidates of TRS (leaving Hyderabad for its ally MIM), he said only TRS can work to safeguard the state's interests and get the state's rights. KCR demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should apologize to the people of Telangana for speaking lies. He was referring to Modi's claim at a BJP rally in Hyderabad on Monday that the Centre had given Rs 35,000 crore to Telangana for various projects. The TRS chief dared Modi to prove this. He said Telangana was contributing Rs 1 lakh crore to the Centre's share in taxes every year while the Centre was giving only Rs 24,000 crore to the state. "The state is giving you Rs 76,000 crore," he said. KCR took exception to Modi's personal remarks about him and said the Prime Minister had stooped to the level of a village sarpanch. He said both the BJP and the Congress hurl accusations at each other to divert the nation's attention from their failures and also the real issues like poverty, unemployment and remunerative prices for farmers. "One says PM 'chor hai' and the other says 'maa beta zamanat pe hai'. Do people want this?" he asked. New Delhi, April 2 : The Supreme Court on Tuesday reserved its verdict on a batch of petitions challenging the Constitutional validity of the Finance Act 2017 on the ground that it was passed by Parliament as a Money Bill. A five-judge Constitution bench reserved its order on pleas that also included one challenging the Finance Act 2017 alleging that the government was taking over the powers to decide the terms and conditions of tribunal members, including their tenure. The Centre justified the Finance Act 2017 as a Money Bill contending it had provisions that dealt with salaries and allowance to be paid to members of tribunals from the consolidated funds of India. Appearing for a petitioner, senior counsel Arvind Datar pointed to a Finance Act 2017 provision dealing with tribunals that gave the government powers to frame rules overriding the statutory provision relating to the terms and conditions of the members of the tribunals. Datar noted that the provision was detrimental to the independence of the judiciary and said that India was the only place where the top court had allowed it to happen. Referring to overseas jurisdictions in different countries including South Africa and Sri Lanka, Datar said that the core judicial power being exercised by the tribunals can't be taken away. Datar told the court that Part XIV -- dealing with tribunals -- was included 49 days after of Finance Act, 2017 was introduced in Parliament certified as a money bill by the Speaker on February 1, 2017. Part XIV of the Finance Act was inserted on March 22 and this was not certified as Money Bill by the Speaker, he said. However, this was disputed by Attorney General K.K.Venugopal, who said that Part XIV too was certified by the Speaker as a part of Money Bill on March 23, when it was sent to the Rajya Sabha. Pointing out the differing terms and conditions of services of Tribunal members, CJI Gogoi asked Venugopal, "What we have today is lack of uniformity between the tribunals and within a tribunal. Tell us how uniformity can be brought about?" The Attorney General told the court that it could decide on the uniform terms and conditions of the tribunal members. "If the court upholds that Finance Act 2017 is a money bill and there is no excessive delegation of powers, then it can decide on the terms and conditions of the tribunal members," Venugopal told the bench. Kolhapur : , April 2 (IANS) A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi attacked the Pawar political clan in Maharashtra, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) President Sharad Pawar on Tuesday advised him to "not to worry about my family". In a restrained but hard-hitting counter to Modi's tirade, the 78-year-old Maratha strongman reminded him that "the PM's office is like an institution" and he must be extremely careful while speaking about other people. "Wherever he goes, Modi first launches personal attacks on the Gandhi family. He must not forget that the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi taught a lesson to Pakistan and created not only history but geography also," Pawar told an election rally. "After Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, his widow Sonia Gandhi did not leave the country but carried on her duties and responsibilities to the country. Does it behove a person of the PM's stature to keep insulting the Gandhis like this?" Pawar asked. The former Union Minister and three-time Maharashtra Chief Minister also accused Modi of not accepting responsibility or exercising caution by making such utterances. Pawar pointed out that in his five-decade long political career, he had listened to speeches by all Prime Ministers including Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao and others but "there was nothing in Modi's speech" on Monday. "There are so many burning issues at the national and state levels concerning the commoners, farmers, youth, unemployed, women, but Modi did not discuss these. Instead he chose to launch direct personal attacks against the opposition leaders. No other leader in the past has ever done this," Pawar said. "My mother is from Kolhapur and she has imbibed very good culture in me. Modi has no need to worry about my family. Ajit Pawar is also an excellent administrator," Pawar said in defence of his nephew. The Maratha strongman's response came to a sharp onslaught by Modi in Wardha on Monday in which he singled out Pawar, his family and the NCP and asked the people of the state to defeat the Congress-NCP in all the 48 Lok Sabha seats in the state. New Delhi, April 2 : Power companies will immensely benefit from the Supreme Court's Tuesday order striking down the RBI's February 12 circular which stated a time-bound resolution of bank loans, the Independent Power Producers Association of India (IPPAI) said. "Definitely it is going to help the power companies as it will release the pressure of projects being referred to the NCLT (National Company Law Tribunal) for no fault of theirs. Hopefully the government and the policy makers will look up to the power sector again to find solution along with today's relief. "Without fuel supply agreement, a time-bound solution (like the February 12 circular) had no meaning. Now companies can plan for going forward on reviving the stuck projects with fuel and power supply agreements," IPPAI Director General Harry Dhaul told IANS. The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) February 12 circular related to the resolution of the stressed assets, calling it "unconstitutional" and "ultra vires". Power companies such as Essar Power, GMR Energy, KSK Energy, and Rattan India Power, as well as the Association of Power Producers (APP) and the IPPAI had, in August 2018, moved the apex court, challenging the constitutional validity of the circular. Daizy Chawla, Senior Partner, Singh & Associates, said though the judgment, by which the Supreme Court has set aside the impugned circular dated February 12, 2018 on the ground that Section 35AA of Banking Regulation Act under which it is issued is ultra vires, will be a big relief for those companies which were directly hit by the said circular. "However, this does not mean that action against the said entities cannot be taken under the IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code). Moreover, the Hon'ble Apex Court has also not gone into the other issues or decided with respect to other issues which the power companies were emphasizing as the reasons for their stress," she said. Rating agency Moody's, however, termed the Supreme Court order as being credit negative for Indian banks. "Voiding of the February 12 circular is credit negative for Indian banks. The circular had significantly tightened stressed loan recognition and resolution for large borrowers. But, with the voiding, this may now have to be watered down. "The resolution of stressed loans impacted by the circular will be further delayed as the process may have to be started afresh," said Srikanth Vadlamani, Vice President, Financial Institutions Group, Moody's Investors Service. Private power producers had pleaded in the Supreme Court that the RBI circular would further accentuate the already existing grave problems afflicting the health of the sector while challenging the validity of the central bank's order. Several power companies, as well as the APP and the IPPAI, had challenged the validity of the RBI circular in various high courts seeking a stay on insolvency proceedings, arguing that the circular would push even those power assets that were close to achieving loan restructuring into insolvency. In its arguments while challenging the circular, the APP said: "Ministry of Power's admission that non-payment of dues (Rs 40,846 crore) and delay in recovery of amounts from discoms, majority of which are Government-owned impairs the ability of IPPs to service debt in timely manner. "The HLEC (High Level Empowered Committee of the Power Ministry) Report also notes that delay in payments by discoms is a major stress factor." New Delhi, April 2 : Emphasizng the need for inexpensive and expeditious environmental justice to mitigate the effects of climate change, Justice Swatanter Kumar, Former Chairperson of the National Green Tribunal also called for proper environmental impact assessments to address issues relating to climate change. He was addressing a Conference on `Adapting Environmental Laws for Effective Climate Response' organised by the O.P Jindal Global University (JGU) in association with WWF India here. Justice Kumar asserted that climate change is not an abstract concept but a direct consequence of human activity on earth. He expressed serious concern over receding of glaciers, deforestation, toxic waste arising out of ship-breaking and non-implementation of existing laws. Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, Justice Kumar emphasised that we need to hand over the Earth to the next generation in a better state of health. Drawing a parallel between environment and time, he stressed the need for urgent action. Referring to the enormous growth in the urban waste in Delhi from 400 to 600 tonnes in the late 1990s to the present 1,700 tonnes per day, Justice Kumar observed that proper collection, segregation and treatment are required. He expressed serious concern over the fact that 40 per cent of this waste is not collected properly. Justice Swantantra Kumar also stressed the need for sensitisation of judges, bureaucracy and social awareness at all levels. Referring to the increase in temperature on the agriculture sector in India on which over 70 per cent of India's population depends, he underscored the need for coordinated efforts. He also emphasised the need for alternate sources of energy. JGU Founding Vice Chancellor Prof (Dr) C Raj Kumar, underlining the importance of law and its role in fighting climate change said: "The theme of this conference is important for the future of humankind. In many ways, we are facing an existential threat and this threat requires a collective response of humanity, and law as a social institution has always risen up to the occasion in the past." "The hope is that understanding the need for addressing issues surrounding climate through law is a very important way by which we can build capacities to respond to huge crisis that is impending," he added. Providing the global perspective, Justice Michael D. Wilson, a Judge of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, in his keynote address, cited the example of the climate refugees to explain how the issue of environment protection is still awaiting solution. "One hundred and sixty million Bangladeshis have become climate refugees and had to evacuate their own home-ground. Schools stay shut in Delhi in times of extreme pollution. Tigers face threats of deforestation and climate changes too. These are few examples of the situation. To change it, carbon neutrality, energy conservation and environment protection need to be mandated," he said. Justice Sabrina McKenna, a Judge of Supreme Court of Hawaii, too brought up case studies to explain the alarming scenario. But she sounded hopeful, saying: "Green tribunals have been a milestone in environmental justice. People can now sue for a clean and happy environment. When people are aware, active and act together and laws are there too, combating climate changes will be easier." New Delhi, April 2 : Former Indian Army Captain Shalini Singh, also wife of late Major Avinash Singh Bhadauria, who was killed in action in September 2001, on Tuesday joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) here. Along with her, the former Vice President of Delhi BJP Purvanchal Morcha, Shailendra Singh, also joined the party. "We are proud to announce that the country's brave daughter, Captain Shalini Singh, as well as Shailendra Singh are joining the AAP. We welcome both of them," AAP MP Sanjay Singh told the media here. Shalini Singh, who joined the Army just three months after her husband was killed in Doda in Jammu and Kashmir, said she was joining the party as she believed in the ideology of the AAP and wanted to work for the betterment of the country. Speaking to the media, she said she joined the AAP as she had "seen how the party has transformed Delhi in the last four years". Echoing the sentiments, Shailendra Singh, who was part of the BJP for 15 years, said the AAP was doing good work whereas the "BJP has become all about Modi". "The ideology of the BJP was the country came first, then party and then person. But since 2014, the BJP has become all about Modi and party has taken a backseat," he said. He accused the BJP of sidelining those who worked for it for years. Palghar : , April 2 (IANS) In a sharp attack, Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackery on Tuesday demanded that the Congress should be derecognized and banned from fighting the 2019 elections as it was propagating "an anti-national agenda". Reacting to the Congress election manifesto, the NDA ally asked: "What kind of government they (Congress) want - those of traitors and anti-nationals, or of patriots and nationalists?" He said that such a party had no right to contest the elections and the Election Commission must derecognize and bar the Congress from the electoral battle. Terming the Congress manifesto promising to end poverty in India within a decade as "full of lies", he said that even Congress President Rahul Gandhi's grandmother, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had promised 'garibi hatai' but nothing happened all these years. Thackeray also countered the Congress arguments on the need to hold talks with the Kashmiri separatists to resolve the Jammu and Kashmir problems. "There cannot be any talks with such separatists. We have always been against negotiations with them," he said, while attending an election rally for the BJP-Sena candidate in Palghar constituency. Thoothukudi/Coimbatore : , April 2 (IANS) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah on Tuesday said the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) will form a "poor-friendly government" at the Centre, like the ones by former AIADMK Chief Ministers M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) and J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu. He also said the electoral alliance in Tamil Nadu is not just for the Lok Sabha polls, but would also continue for the next assembly polls. Campaigning for BJP candidates Tamilisai Soundararajan in Thoothukudi and C.P. Radhakrishnan in Coimbatore, Shah said: "In 2014, the BJP did not have a big alliance in Tamil Nadu. But we won and gave ministerial berths to two MPs from Tamil Nadu -- Pon Radhakrishnan and Nirmala Sitharaman, daughter of the soil." Stressing that the BJP now had a big electoral alliance this time with parties like the AIADMK, the PMK, the TMC, the DMDK and others, he said a survey had predicted the NDA winning over 30 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu. The alliance will continue for next assembly polls and serve the people, he added. Claiming that from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, people wanted Narendra Modi to become the Prime Minister again, he said: "The NDA will not only win the Lok Sabha elections but also the Assembly polls." Taking a dig at the DMK-Congress alliance, the BJP leader said it had people like Karti Chidambaram, Kanimozhi and A. Raja against whom there were corruption charges. According to Shah, the 13th Finance Commission had given the state about Rs 94,000 crore, but the 14th Finance Commission under the Modi government allocated Rs 5.45 lakh crore. The BJP chief said the new government headed by Modi would provide more funds to Tamil Nadu to implement more developmental projects. The Modi-led government, through its policies, enabled doubling of coconut exports during the past four years. It has also brought the defence industrial corridor and Rs 200 crore has been allocated by the Central government for common effluent plant in Tiruppur, he said, Under the Udan scheme (low cost regional airlines) one can fly between Chennai-Salem for Rs 2,500, he said. Shah also stressed that Kashmir was a part of India and the Modi government would not give it away to anyone. Kolkata, April 2 : Seven companies of Border Security Force have been moved to Northern West Bengal for the first phase election, officials said on Tuesday. "Seven companies (around 800 men) of the BSF out of ten have been moved to Coochbehar and Alipurduar for confidence building measure," Additional Chief Electoral Officer Sanjay Basu told reporters. Coochbhar and Alipurduar are slated to vote on April 11. Ten BSF companies reached the state on March 15. They have been on route marches so instil confidence among people. He said special police observer, Vivek Dube, will meet all the observers including the general, police and expenditure observer of first three phases at Siliguri Circuit House. Asked about a deputation filed by the Confederation of state government employees demanding deployment of Central force in all booths, Basu said: "It is our duty to ensure everyone's security and the deployment will be done as per the commission". The workers' body has highlighted the abnormal death of presiding officer Rajkumaar Rai in Raiganj during the 2018 panchayat election. The commission has plans to ensure surveillance for zones that lack network connectivity, he said. New Delhi, April 2 : To boost border security, the Congress on Tuesday promised to increase the strength of border guarding forces, construct integrated border outposts and accelerate the construction of roads along India-China and India-Myanmar borders. The strength of border guarding forces -- the Border Security Force (BSF), the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and the Assam Rifles -- will be increased and they will be posted on or close to the border to prevent infiltration, illegal immigration and smuggling, said the Congress manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections released on Tuesday. The Congress also said it will construct modern and well-equipped integrated border outposts to provide good working and living conditions for the forces and that the distance between two border outposts will be reduced. Giving relief to the forces, it promised that the period of their posting in high altitude border outposts will be reduced to three months at a time. Noting that India's borders must be secure, Congress promised to accelerate the construction of border roads along all borders of India, especially, the India-China border. "We will enhance the capacity of the border roads organisation and create separate divisions to build roads along the India-China and the India-Myanmar borders," it said. In further relief, the Congress said at any given time, an adequate number of battalions will be on rest, recuperation and training and will not be deployed on operational duties. A Committee will set up to draft new Service Rules for paramilitary personnel, it said. Congress also promised to ensure increased representation of women to achieve a minimum of 33 per cent in the force strength of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the BSF. "Every effort will be made to induct more women into the other border guarding forces, namely, ITBP, SSB and Assam Rifles." "We will enhance the facilities of health, education and housing for the personnel of the CAPFs and their families to bring them on par with the facilities provided for the Armed Forces. We will set up schools on the model of Sainik schools to enhance educational opportunities for their children," said the manifesto. The Congress also promised to enhance the status of the paramilitary personnel and benefits to their families if they die in action. Kolkata, April 2 : A commotion broke out here on Tuesday after police baton charged a large number of ICT school coordinators holding a sit-in demonstration demanding "justified salary" and clearing of "pending remuneration". The protesters accused the private implementing agency - a group company of the crisis-hit Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS) - of depriving them of "justified salary" under the ICT@schools scheme. "As per the government order, a sum of Rs 3,49,356 in a year was allotted per school in West Bengal on account of maintenance of capital infrastructure, and operational expenses and others. We, as ICT school coordinators, are drawing a remuneration of about Rs 4,600 per month which is too low as compared to the government's allocation. We demand justified salary and clearing of pending remuneration," West Bengal ICT School Coordinator Welfare Association President Swapan Pan said. The company which has been "entrusted with the responsibility of recruiting us and giving us salary is paying less than what we are entitled to", they alleged. Some computer teachers including women were agitating and had come to submit a deputation demanding increase of their salaries before the implementing agency's office at city's Minto park area. According to locals, police carried out a baton charge to disperse the agitators after traffic flow was partially affected because of the gathering. A senior police official said the police tried to push them back when they forcibly tried to enter the office. Under the centrally sponsored scheme, many state government aided schools were approved by the centre in 2011-12 for implementation of the scheme in West Bengal under Build Own Operate and Transfer model. For the implementation of the project, state government undertaking Webel Informatics had been engaged for consultancy, management and evaluation of the scheme, which, in turn, selected the private implementing agency through open bidding process. Refuting all the allegations, an IL&FS Group official said: "We are compliant with all the conditions of the contract with the state government." Kolkata, April 2 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold two rallies in West Bengal on Wednesday to give a big push to the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Lok Sabha election campaign in the state. The Prime Minister has, so far, held three rallies in the state -- in north Bengal's Cooch Behar, in Dalit Matua community-dominated Thakurnagar in the North 24 Parganas and in West Bardhaman district's industrial city Durgapur. On Wednesday, he will first address a rally in north Bengal's Siliguri, followed by a rally at Kolkata's iconic Brigade Parade Ground. Modi's Kolkata rally will be the first covered rally in the history of Brigade Parade Ground, that has hosted several rallies over the decades. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's mega anti-BJP rally on January 19, that brought leaders of 23 opposition parties on one stage, was also held here. Three massive stages have been set up along with mammoth metal hangers to provide shade on the ground. The party is expecting 8-10 lakh at the rally. "Nine hangers, each nearly 100x100 square feet, are being installed in three rows. We are arranging hangers to protect party activists and supporters, who would be waiting at the ground since morning to listen to Modi, from falling ill due to the heat. This is the first time a political party has planned a covered rally here," state BJP President Dilip Ghosh. "Modiji will sit on the main dais in the centre along with the senior BJP leaders and MPs from South Bengal. The second stage would be occupied by the party district presidents and district observers, while state office-bearers will sit on the third stage," he said. Enthusiasm is also high in Siliguri for Modi's rally, the venue of which had to be changed following denial of permission by the local administration. The BJP, which won only two seats in Bengal in 2014, aims to substantially increase its seat count in the state under its "Look East" policy. A good show in the region would offset any possible reverses in its strongholds like UP, where the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) have formed an alliance. The BJP leaders are also sceptical of the party repeating its magical performance of 2014 in the Hindi heartland. North Bengal's Cooch Behar and Alipurduar go to vote in the first phase of polling on April 11. Siliguri, which falls under the Darjeeling Lok Sabha constituency, will vote in the second phase on April 18, along with neighbouring Jalpaiguri and Raigunj. New Delhi, April 2 : Even before the dew on the just set up Lokpal could dry up, its members are seeking status of serving High Court judges with pay and perks, including bungalow accommodation, in Lutyens Delhi. Attorney General K.K. Venugopal told the five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi that he has been told that members of the Lokpal are demanding status equal to the High Court judge. "We are in great difficulty. A bureaucrat gets one LTC, but a judge gets four," the AG told the court. At this, CJI Ranjan Gogoi said, "If there is a retired Supreme Court judge heading a tribunal, then other members of the tribunal would be seeking the same perks and privileges." New Delhi, April 2 : A 28-year-old man was arrested for sexually assaulting a teenaged girl here last month, police said on Tuesday. Police said the crime occurred on March 17 but was only reported to them on Monday when the 17-year-old, along with her parents, filed a complaint at R.K Puram Police Station in south Delhi. "The victim, in her complaint, said that she came in contact with the accused Jitender on a social networking site. They regularly chatted with each others and later shared contact numbers," a senior police officer said. "The victim was on March 17 asked by Jitender to come too Lajpat Nagar market. When she came to meet him, the accused took her to a flat where he sexually assaulted her. "During investigation, we have booked Jitender under the POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act and arrested him from his residence in Harkesh Nagar," he added. New Delhi, April 2 : India on Tuesday reminded Pakistan that its request for consular access to civilian Indian prisoners, including Kulbhushan Jadhav, was still pending and conveyed its deep concern over delay in repatriation of prisoners under Islamabads custody despite completion of sentence. Sources said External Affairs Ministry gave a note verbale to the Pakistan High Commission here calling for immediate release and repatriation of 10 Indian civilian prisoners lodged in Pakistan jails who have already completed their sentence and whose nationality has been confirmed. It gave the names of Indian prisoners and the time of completion of their sentence. The prisoners have been in Pakistan jails for varying periods since completion of their sentence with one of them being there for the last five years. Noting that India has been providing consular access in a timely manner to High Commission officials to their prisoners in India, the ministry said that that similar access to Indian fishermen and prisoners in Pakistan jails is inordinately delayed. Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court for alleged espionage in April 2017 following which India moved the ICJ. A 10-member ICJ bench restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav till the case was adjudicated on. Pakistan had stated that "Jadhav was not an ordinary person as he had entered the country with the intent of spying and carrying out sabotage activities" in Balochistan. India denies all the charges and with its officials stating that he was abducted from Iran and taken to Pakistan against his will. Sources said the MEA also gave names of five prisoners lodged in Pakistan jails who have been confirmed to be Indian nationals and called for necessary arrangements for their early release. Pakistan was also told that there are 385 Indian fishermen, whose nationality has been confirmed and conveyed to Pakistan and who have been languishing in Pakistan jails despite completing their sentences. The Ministry called for urgent and concrete steps to repatriate them to India at the earliest, along with their boats. The Ministry also shared its serious concern and protest over "delayed information" of death of Indian fisherman Bhikha. The Indian government, the ministry said, has been consistently raising with Pakistan its concern regarding missing Indian defence personnel, including Prisoners of War, believed to be in Pakistan's custody. However, no response has been received. Islamabad was urged to take necessary steps immediately to locate, release and repatriate the missing Indian defence personnel believed to be held in Pakistan custody. New Delhi, April 2 : In measures aimed at enhancing internal security, the Congress, in its manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections released on Tuesday, promised to set up the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) within three months of forming the government in the Centre, and making NATGRID operational by December 2019. Both the NCTC and National Intelligence Grid, an integrated intelligence grid connecting databases of core security agencies of the Central government to collect comprehensive patterns of intelligence that can be readily accessed by the agencies, was proposed by it earlier but not taken ahead by the Narenda Modi government, it said. The party accused the Modi government of "dismantling the preparatory work" of the two projects and wasting five years. "NCTC was put in the cold storage and NATGRID is yet to be made operational," the manifesto said. Stating that the key to internal security is intelligence, analysis and quick response, the Congress said it had also put in place the Multi-Agency Centre and the National Security Guard (NSG) regional hubs. Terming terrorism, infiltration of militants, Maoism and caste or communal violence as most serious threats to internal security, the Congress said: "We promise an uncompromising approach and hard measures to put an end to terrorism and to the infiltration of militants." In the case of Maoism, the party said it will resolutely fight violent activities and at the same time, address developmental challenges in the areas concerned, enlist the support of the people and win over the Maoist cadres. In the case of caste or communal violence, the Congress asserted that "there will be no room for self-appointed vigilante groups and moral policing brigades". As per its manifesto, the Congress will work with state governments to increase the strength of state police, fill all vacancies within 18 months and to lay down a schedule for annual recruitment, taking into account anticipated vacancies. The manifesto also promises strong action in respect of crimes against women, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and minorities, riots, caste or communal violence, and holding the district administration concerned responsible for such crimes. In police reforms, the manifesto says that as police and law and order are state subjects, the Congress promises to consult state governments and reach a consensus on the sebject directed by the Supreme Court in the Prakash Singh case. Based on the consensus, Congress will pass a Model Police Act that the states will be advised to adopt and enact, it said. The party also said that it will work with state governments to ensure that their police forces reflect the diversity of the population and give greater representation to under-represented sections, while 33 per cent of all vacancies in direct recruitment and promotion are reserved for women constables and officers. New Delhi, April 2 : Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Tuesday told the Supreme Court that the construction of life-size statues of herself represents the "will of the people". The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister, in an affidavit filed in the apex court, said: "The will of the people was expressed by the state legislatures with a proposal to install the statues of her to show their respect to contemporary women dalit leader." The affidavit also mentioned that the memorials and statues of herself and other leaders are intended to promote values and ideals of various sants, gurus, social reformers and leaders among the public and not intended to promote the symbol of BSP or to glorify her. Last month, the Supreme Court, while making an oral observations, said Mayawati should reimburse the public money spent on erecting statues of herself and the party symbol, the elephant, in public places. "Madam Mayawati, reimburse to the exchequer the public money you have spent on the elephants," a bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi said. The SC was hearing advocate Ravi Kant's PIL alleging misuse of crores of rupees of public money spent for installing the statues, including in a park in Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi. Filed in 2009, the PIL sought a restraint order against the installations, which Kant was carried out at the cost of the state exchequer. The advocate had asked for a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe. Mayawati in her affidavit rubbished the claims made in the PIL. Kant's PIL alleged that public money was spent to "falsely glorify" the then chief minister. The statues were installed at a cost of Rs 52.20 crore at public places. The remarks were oral observations directed at senior advocate Rakesh Khanna, who was representing the leader in a 10-year-old public interest litigation (PIL) that alleged misuse of public money for installing the statues. Lahore, April 2 : Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has said that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) could blacklist the country due to "lobbying by India" and that Islamabad would face $10 billion loss annually if it remained in the watchdog's grey list. The inter-governmental body which combats money laundering and terror financing among other things had last year placed Pakistan in the grey list of countries deemed non-compliant with anti-money laundering and terrorist financing regulations. "The Foreign Office is calculating the annual loss if Pakistan is pushed in the black list by the FATF as India is lobbying for this," Foreign Minister Qureshi told reporters in Lahore on Monday. He said the government has calculated that Pakistan will face $10 billion loss annually if it remains in the grey list, Dawn online reported. In February, the Paris-based watchdog condemned the Pulwama terror attack claimed by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) that killed 40 CRPF troopers and said "Pakistan did not have proper understanding of the terror financing risks posed by the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Falah-e-Insaniat, Lashkar-e-Taiba, JeM, (Haqqani Network) and persons affiliated with the Taliban. The watchdog visited Pakistan last month to review its progress in acting against the terror groups in the country. A delegation of the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on money laundering, a regional affiliate of the FATF, maintained that Islamabad did not take effective action against eight major outlawed organisations. The delegation expressed reservations over lack of cooperation among law enforcement agencies and their procedure of taking action against these groups. The APG delegation also expressed concern over government's dual stance on action against the ones collecting donations from mosques. BARA, April 2, 2019 (Xinhua) -- A family works inside a house damaged by a massive storm in Purainiya village, Bara district of Nepal, April 2, 2019. At least 25 people were killed and 400 others injured when a storm devastated villages in two distri Image Source: IANS News BARA, April 1, 2019 (Xinhua) -- An elderly man walks out of his damaged house affected by a massive storm at Bhaluhi Bharwaliya in Bara district of Nepal, April 1, 2019. At least 25 people were killed and 400 others injured when a storm devastated vi Image Source: IANS News New Delhi, April 2 : India on Tuesday said it was saddened by the damage due to the devastating thunderstorm that struck Nepal's Bara and Parsa districts and was ready to provide all assistance required. "We are deeply saddened to learn of the loss of life and damage to property in Nepal following the devastating thunderstorm that struck Bara and Parsa districts of Nepal," the Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement. "Government of India is ready to provide relief assistance as may be required by Nepal. Our Embassy in Kathmandu and Consulate in Birgunj are in touch with the concerned authorities," it added. According to local media, 28 persons, including four Indian nationals, were killed and hundreds injured in Bara and Parsa due to the storm on Sunday night. New Delhi, April 3 : A teenager riding his bike lost his life after he came in contact with a Chinese 'manjha' (thread used for flying kites) that slit his throat in north Delhi, police said on Tuesday. The incident occurred on Monday noon when the victim, identified as Ravi, was on his bike going to take cooler grass wood from a market at Nirankari Colony. "When Ravi reached at GTB nagar area, he came in contact with Chinese manjha and collapsed on the bike. His throat was found deeply cut. He was taken to a hospital where he was declared brought dead," a senior police officer said. "We have registered a case against unknown persons and are investigating," he added. Ravi was a resident of Yograj Colony and worked in a factory. The Chinese manja was banned by Delhi government two years ago after many riders suffered critical injuries and a few of them died in national capital. New Delhi, April 3 : India and Russia had wide-ranging discussions on evolving situation in Afghanistan during Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale's two-day visit to the country. An External Affairs Ministry release said that during the visit which concluded on Tuesday, the Foreign Secretary met Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov for foreign office consultations. The discussions reviewed the implementation of the decisions of the 19th Annual Bilateral Summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi in October last year. Both sides also discussed preparations for the forthcoming high-level meetings, including India's participation in the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in September this year. "The talks covered preparations for the next bilateral summit, cooperation in the formats of SCO, RIC and other bodies. There were wide-ranging discussions on evolving situation in Afghanistan," the release said. The Foreign Secretary also met Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov. Their discussions covered regional and international issues including those relating to disarmament and non-proliferation and cooperation between India and Russia at various multilateral fora. SPONSORED POST With new technology solutions changing the landscape in which real estate operates, Savills Australia has revolutionised their property offerings by entering into a proptech alliance with Queensland-based SA1 Property. In a move to command greater market share in the industrial and occupier services sectors, SA1 Property has enabled Savills Industrial business to tap into geospatial tools and analytics in order to assist clients in making informed property decisions. Savills Australia is the only property agency with access to the recently developed NodeMaster site selection, and the newly developed SA1 Pro information platform, entering into a national agreement which will extend over the next four years. Savills Australias National Head of Industrial and Business Services, Michael Fenton, said the union with SA1 Property has enabled Savills to provide clients with unique insight when making location decisions. By coupling location intelligence with a comprehensive understanding of the property market, this alliance has enabled us to provide our clients with the power to optimise their business position using data which could result in millions of dollars of savings for industrial occupiers overtime and de-risk the investment thesis for investors and developers in transactions, Mr Fenton said. Senior property industry executives, Aaron Bates, a former director of the CBRE and JLL industrial businesses in Queensland, and locational intelligence director Stephen Clark, who has 15 years experience applying geospatial technologies to military, mining, infrastructure and property situations, founded the firm last year after they observed a need for better metrics in the proptech market. We wanted to develop a platform to help investors and developers identify greater investment value as well as assist occupiers in optimising their supply chain networks using locational intelligence. From working alongside Savills, we now have full coverage of the Eastern Seaboard core markets, with Adelaide and Perth to follow shortly, Mr Bates said. The NodeMaster technology has allowed Savills to work with occupiers to determine the most efficient property for their specific use across every major industrial market. The technology works to harness real time traffic modelling to simulate movements across every road network at any time of the day. Moreover, Savills can simulate their clients freight tasks across thousands of points in each city, to determine the most efficient location. They can model their inbound and outbound freight movements using B-double routes to determine the optimum centroid for clients while also measuring the impact each potential location may have on existing staff. Real time data can be shared with key decision makes in a digital story map format at any one time, reducing the time required to analyse operations, relate it to the total marketplace and filter large datasets to identify every possible suitable property. Additionally, Savills is utilising the SA1 Pro platform for property data and analytics, which captures the height, roof area and site coverage of every industrial property across Australia along with live data on land and building availability. Weve centralised and added value to a massive amount of property and market data, and provided Savills operators with an ability to analyse localised markets with a level of speed and efficiency not previously possible, Mr Clark said. The National Industrial & Business Services Team have integrated the platform into their everyday business communications. A recent example of the software at work, has been on a recent land-rich investment transaction at ZILLMERE which was driven by land availability projections. The off market transaction for 38 Pineapple Street was brokered by Savills Industrial & Business Services Director, Callum Stenson for $8.751 million on behalf of private investor. According to Mr Stenson, the Sydney based purchaser was a first time investor into the Brisbane Industrial market. The technology enabled us to demonstrate a tightening of available land in the immediate Northern Brisbane industrial region over the coming years, which highlighted value in the opportunity. The real time insights provided our client with the ability to look outside the normal search parameters and the confidence to make a better investment decision, Mr Stenson said. SA1 Property is currently investigating how their proptech solutions can be expanded to provide further insights for additional markets and industry types to further assist Savills clientele in the near future. Savills is a leading global real estate service provider offering the full spectrum of services from strategic advice to managing assets and projects and transacting deals. Michael Fenton is National Head of Industrial and Business Services. To learn more about Savills, visit savills.com.au. DomaCom Limited has announced that it has partnered with La Trobe Financial to provide property investors using DomaComs fractional property investment fund with a credit facility. An initial $50 million facility has been provided by La Trobe Financial that will allow investors to acquire around $100 million of leveraged property through the DomaCom Fund. The facility will provide up to 60% leverage for investors and Self-Managed Super Funds (SMSFs) at a competitive 5.99% pa. Enabling the use of lending when purchasing investment properties is a key addition to the DomaCom product offering, which places the Company in a strong position to almost triple its Funds Under Management to $150 million. DomaCom CEO Arthur Naoumidis said: This is a significant development for the Australian property investment market as financial advisers can now leverage their clients investment properties at a click of a button. "Were delighted to have the final piece of the jigsaw (debt) in place for DomaCom we have bought over 50 properties to date where almost all are without debt and we are excited to be able to offer advisers ready access to competitive SMSF lending. "The availability of this initial $50 million debt facility has cleared the remaining obstacle for DomaCom. "After many patient years we are now well placed to take our platform to financial advisers and the SMSF sector, with available debt and legal certainty." Chris Andrews, chief investment officer at La Trobe Financial, said the SMSF sector continues to grow. "With more than one million Australians having turned to taking more control of their own super, the growth of the SMSF sector continues," Andrews said. As a specialist in the SMSF lending space since 2009 we are happy to partner with DomaCom to assist borrowers obtain that much needed SMSF finance for property investment purposes. "SMSFs have a significant influence in the overall growth of the $2.3 trillion Australian superannuation industry, with SMSF assets growing by $319.7 billion or 55% in the five years to December 2018 at $726.46 billion in AUM. Andrews said this sector expansion is expected to continue to have an important role in asset allocation debates in the retirement industry. "The majority of the 587,092 SMSFs are formed by self-employed business people who are astute and understand investment risk - having often run their own businesses. "They have a bias towards asset classes with low volatility and assets that have longer term (10+ year) investment horizons and to this end property is eminently recognisable and understandable for SMSF investors. "Currently there is only $42.85 billion of limited recourse borrowings (5.9% of total SMSF Assets). To read more about DomaCom, click here. Multiplex has halted construction work at CBUS's high-rise jewel, the 447 Collins Street project after possible movement in precast structural columns on the half-built twin-tower project. The concerns have triggered an urgent investigation by engineers at Collins Arch. The decision comes after Sydney's Opal Tower issues with precast over the Christmas-New Year period. The exact nature of the Pantscraper problem was not clear, according to a report by Nine Enertainment, with neither Multiplex nor its consultant engineers 4D Workshop giving more than limited details. "A small number of minor column settlements have been identified on the 447 Collins Street project currently under construction," the companies said. "The builder, Multiplex, places the utmost importance on safety and quality and has already commenced a detailed investigation into the cause, with structural design engineers currently inspecting the columns. As a precaution, work has temporarily stopped while that investigation takes place. Rob DiBlasi, 4D Workshop director, assured Collins Street pedestrians that the building was safe. "Theres no issue with the structural integrity of the building," he told The Australian Financial Review. "There are some minor issues with regard to precast columns." CBUS has boasted Melbourne's skyline was to be transformed following the construction of a $1 billion luxury high-rise. Called the "Pantscraper", after its twin towers joined by a sky bridge, Cbus Property's 42-storey mixed-use development comprises 49,000 square metres of premium-grade office space, a five-star W Hotel and 202 residential apartments. Designed collaboratively by Melbourne-based Woods Bagot and New York-based SHoP Architects, the Pantscraper will dominate the skyline given its unique silhouette. Three major legal firms, including King & Wood Mallesons, HWL Ebsworth Lawyers, and Gadens have committed to office space. Completion was anticipated for late 2019. The current design is the third, after earlier plans for a 100-storey tower and then a 47-storey tower were rejected, in part because of the shadow they would have cast on the nearby Yarra River. Heritage groups have criticised the proposed park for being smaller than the 2800-square-metre plaza in front of the previous revered brutalist-style building on the site. Above ground, the two towers meet at level 33. The possible fault of precast concrete on a $1.2 billion project in the heart of Melbourne's CBD will ignite to calls for reforms to Australia's construction industry. The state have yet to implement recommendations of last year's Shergold-Weir Building Confidence report. EXPERT OBSERVER The many positive market indicators Here are some questions that go to the heart of how mainstream media reports residential property:- Why does most of the media ignore the data from the ABS, realestate.com.au, Domain, SQM Research and the REIA? Why are growth figures for Regional Australia markets seldom published? Why are alternative measures of property markets - like vacancies, rents and land prices - seldom published? The answer to all those questions is this: mainstream media is interested in negatives. They publish CoreLogic data because its the most pessimistic. Most other sources contradict CoreLogic figures, providing a different perspective on whats truly happening in our markets. Mainstream media ignores Regional Australia because thats where most of the big growth markets are or because events outside of our major cities are deemed to be unimportant. Media seldom focuses on vacancies/rents because they tell a positive story. Vacancies are falling in most capital cities and rents are up in most city markets. According to recent price data published by Louis Christophers SQM Research, half of our capital city markets are up, compared with a year ago. In some cases, they are up only marginally, but they are up nevertheless. City markets with prices higher than a year ago are: Adelaide houses Brisbane houses Canberra houses Canberra apartments Darwin apartments Hobart houses Hobart apartments Melbourne apartments Most reports on prices exclude regional Australia, which means our most upbeat markets receive little or no airplay. Regional Victoria is, I believe, the strongest market in the nation. Big price growth in being recorded in many of its markets, including Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. Pretty much everywhere in Regional Tasmania has rising prices. In Regional New South Wales, 85% of locations have rising prices, according to our recent location-by-location survey. Parts of Regional Queensland have strong growth markets with the top end of the Sunshine Coast market, including the Noosa precinct, up more than 20% in annual terms (the median price for Sunshine Beach has risen 36% in the past year). This contradicts constant media claims that prices are falling across Australia. The situation is even more positive with the rental markets of the capital cities. Of the 16 capital city markets (each city has a house market and a unit market), 12 have rents higher than a year ago. Only four markets, those in Sydney and Darwin, have rents in decline, according to the SQM Research figures. The latest numbers from rent.com.au have similar conclusions. This reflects vacancy rate figures, which show that most of our major cities have vacancy rates lower than a year ago, with four of them - Melbourne, Canberra, Hobart and Adelaide - having vacancies below 1.8%. The capital city average is a little above 2%. Equally, the ongoing rise in residential land prices in our major cities receives little coverage in mainstream media. If its not negative, theyre not interested. Research shows that most households with mortgages are comfortably handling their repayments. Theres positive news on affordability from our biggest cities. There are growing signs that banks are moving to make borrowing easier. If journalists had a different mindset, they could be writing upbeat articles rather than afflicting consumers with relentless negativity designed to generate clickbait headlines. Terry Ryder is the founder of hotspotting.com.au [email protected] twitter.com/hotspotting Identity verification is a critical component of the funding process today given the steep uptick in various types of fraud and identity theft, said Ken Hill, Managing Director of 700Credit. 700 Credit, LLC, the automotive industrys leading provider of credit reports, compliance solutions, prescreen, and consumer pre-qualification products and services, is now integrated within RouteOnes IDOne solution, a full-service identity verification tool that helps manage compliance tasks and fits seamlessly into a dealers everyday workflow. IDOne from RouteOne makes it easy to help protect a dealership by validating a customers identity and pinpointing potential fraud every time a credit report is pulled within the RouteOne platform. IDOne uses multiple databases in the verification process to identify discrepancies and will automatically generate an authentication quiz in real-time if identity is not initially verified. Identity verification is a critical component of the funding process today given the steep uptick in various types of fraud and identity theft, said Ken Hill, Managing Director of 700Credit. Connecting with RouteOne to provide IDOne enables dealers to have the peace of mind every time they pull credit that if the consumer is attempting a fraudulent purchase or some information does not match up - our solution will flag the process and ask for more identifiable information before the transaction can proceed. RouteOne is proud to offer a robust set of tools to dealers that helps them manage their daily compliance activities, said Amanda George, Senior Vice President, Product, RouteOne. Welcoming 700Credit to our identity verification solutions further enhances our product offering. For more information on the integration, contact: 866-273-3848. About 700Credit 700Credit is the automotive industrys leading provider of credit reports, compliance products and prescreen services. The companys product and service offerings include: credit reports, dealer-facing prescreen and consumer-facing pre-qualification platforms, OFAC compliance, ID Verification solutions, Synthetic Fraud detection, MLA, score disclosure notices, adverse action notices and more. 700Credits goal is to provide its clients with the highest quality data in a compliant framework in the most efficient manner possible. For more information about 700Credit, visit http://www.700credit.com. About RouteOne RouteOne was formed in 2002 by Ally Financial, Ford Motor Credit Company, TD Auto Finance, and Toyota Financial Services to improve the F&I process for automobile dealers and their customers. Connecting thousands of dealers and finance sources in North America for vehicle financing, RouteOnes platform delivers a comprehensive suite of F&I solutions across multiple channels: in-store, online, mobile, and via third-party solutions. Its product line-up includes credit application, eContracting, menu, online/mobile retail services, and compliance. In addition, RouteOne enables dealer choice across a wide variety of best-in-class providers through open integrations with over 170 DSPs. More information is available at http://www.routeone.com. The product expansion includes maternity support bands, compression socks, and postpartum recovery garments. Aeroflow Breastpumps, a durable medical equipment (DME) provider and subsidiary of Aeroflow Healthcare, today announced the addition of new medical supplies available through insurance for pregnant and postpartum women. The product expansion includes maternity support bands, compression socks, and postpartum recovery garments. Aeroflow Breastpumps commitment to our moms has always been to provide the highest quality equipment, resources and support to aid in her journey, said Jennifer Jordan, Aeroflow Director of Mom & Baby. Were excited to build upon that promise by adding a full suite of products that will contribute to healthier mamas, beginning in early pregnancy and carrying through postpartum. Aeroflows selection of Maternity Support Bands were designed by medical professionals for women who want to stay active, comfortable, and supported during pregnancy. These medical devices, which can be used from 3-9 months during pregnancy, work by relieving pregnancy-related pressure from the abdomen, hips, and lower back. Also available to women in the second and third trimester are Compression Socks, which can alleviate pregnancy-related swelling in the legs and feet, promote blood circulation and minimize the risk of varicose veins. For mothers who have recently given birth, Postpartum Recovery Garments can speed up recovery time, reduce swelling, and provide structure to stabilize the abdomen, back and hips. They are recommended for women 1 week to 4 months after giving birth. Some believe postpartum compression garments are only for women who want to lose weight quickly after giving birth, but thats not the case, says Labor and Delivery Nurse Liesel Teen. The main purpose of a postpartum compression garment is to support and align your abdomen until the bodys organs and muscles can do their normal jobs again. These wraps may also help reduce pain, increase mobility, stabilize your pelvic floor, and even help heal Diastasis Recti. Additionally, a compression garment can relieve pressure on c-section incisions while they heal. To learn more about the benefits of maternity compression, or to qualify for these items through insurance, visit http://www.aeroflowbreastpumps.com/apparel/maternity-compression. Similar to breast pumps, these medical devices require a prescription from a healthcare provider. About Aeroflow Breastpumps Aeroflow Breastpumps, a subsidiary of Aeroflow Healthcare, is a Durable Medical Equipment (DME) provider specializing in helping pregnant and nursing women qualify for their breast pump through their insurance and the Affordable Care Act. To learn more about Aeroflow Breastpumps and getting a breast pump through insurance, visit https://aeroflowbreastpumps.com. About Aeroflow Healthcare Aeroflow Healthcare was founded Asheville, NC in 2001 as a home oxygen provider, and has since grown to become one of the leading durable medical equipment providers nationwide. For three consecutive years, Aeroflow has been ranked on Inc. Magazines List of 5000 Fastest Growing Companies. In 2017, Aeroflow was also awarded the HME Excellence Award for Best Home Medical Equipment Provider and has been recognized as a business offering top-notch benefits to employees with the Great Place to Work Award. Aeroflow is an accredited Medicare and Medicaid provider and accepts most commercial insurance. To learn more about Aeroflow Healthcare and getting medical equipment through insurance, visit aeroflowinc.com. Ascension Dental, the oral health startup that provides dentists with thoughtfully designed membership programs, is refocusing its brand identity as membersy, a new name intended to capture the companys rapid growth and innovation. membersy represents what we strive for each and every day, which is creating effective, easy-to-use membership programs for dental practices and their patients, said Eric Johnson, Founder and CEO. Membership dentistry, the dentist-led movement that dramatically improves patient experiences and outcomes, is the future of dental care in the United States and we look forward to providing dental professionals nationwide with the membership tools and support they need to treat their patients like members, not numbers. Since 2015, Ascension Dental, now membersy, has powered the membership dentistry movement with a suite of advanced membership technology, marketing and administrative solutions for independent, small and large dental group practices. Today, more than 850 dental practices across 28 states have membership programs that are powered by membersy. The launch of the new brand emphasizes the companys growth and attention to people. Im thrilled about our name change to membersy, said Heidi Arndt, COO, who joined the company earlier this year when Ascension Dental acquired her dental consulting firm, Enhanced Hygiene. The new name embraces our commitment to designing and delivering top-notch membership experiences for our partners and their valued members." The membersy launch comes just in time for the 2019 Association of Dental Support Organizations Summit held in San Diego from March 28 through March 30. The membersy team, including Eric Johnson and Heidi Arndt will be available for interviews and meetings. To schedule an in-person or phone interview, please contact Mallory Johnson at mj@biginkpr.com. About membersy At membersy, we provide dentists with thoughtfully designed membership programs to make dental care more approachable. Today, more than 1,000 dentists across the United States rely upon membersy for the design, development and ongoing administration of their custom membership program. For more information, please visit http://www.membersy.com. David A. Fernandez One recent case Fernandez has defended was filed in the County Court at Law Number Two in Tarrant County, Texas (Case No. 2018-008511-2) where a defendant, a Texas builder, received financing from a New York company (plaintiff). Court documents state that the Texas builder signed a confession of judgment prior to receiving funding and prior to allegedly defaulting on the loan. The plaintiff filed suit claiming breach of contract and submitted the confession of judgment as proof the Texas builder failed to repay the loan. While confessions of judgment are permissible in New York and can be used to prove non-payment, Texas does not allow this. The plaintiff filed a claim in Erie County New York and used the confession of judgment to make his breach of contract claim. Judgement was granted on behalf of plaintiff. The defendant hired Fernandez, who has been named to the Top 100 Consumer Litigators in Texas, and his firm went to Tarrant County and got the judge to stay execution and transfer the registration to Harris County. Now, according to court documents, the plaintiff appears to have abandoned the registration in Houstons courts. Should the plaintiff pursue the matter further, the defendants are poised to contest the recognition. About David A. Fernandez, Law Office of David A. Fernandez David A. Fernandez focuses his practice on debt defense, bankruptcy, fraud, personal injury, business litigation and wrongful death. He is a member of the Texas Bar Association, Consumer Law Section of the Texas State Bar Association, and State Bar of Texas. For more information, please call 713-893-3244, or visit http://www.yourhoustonconsumerattorney.com. The law office is located at 2190 N. Loop West, Suite 102, Houston, TX 77018. For media inquiries, please call the NALA at 805.650.6121, ext. 361. AVC Corporation announced that it is an official participant in Amazons Packaging Support and Supplier Network (APASS) program. The APASS program was designed by Amazon to direct suppliers and sellers to approved designers, manufactures testing labs. AVC offers direct packaging design and manufacturing services in US and China to vendors and brands, providing them with the Amazon compliant FFP (Frustration-Free Packaging) and SIOC (Ship-In-Own-Container) packaging. Amazon expects that beginning August 1, 2019, most ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Number) must be certified through Amazons Frustration-Free Packaging Certification programs as ready-to ship (Tier 1 - Frustration-Free Packaging (FFP) or Tier 2 - Ships in Own Container (SIOC)). The ASINs that require certification and do not fall under any exclusions will be issued a chargeback of $1.99/unit received beginning August 1, 2019. This rollout includes both Vendors and distributors. To encourage early adoption, Amazon offers a one-time early adopter credit of $1.00/unit to Vendors that certify their items under their Frustration-Free Packaging Program guidelines (Tier 1 FFP or Tier 2 SIOC). The credit is intended to assist in the transition costs associated with this initiative and will be issued as a one-time credit in August 2019. The credit is only applicable for items that are certified under Amazons Frustration-Free Packaging Program guidelines (Tier 1 - FFP or Tier 2 -SIOC) between now and July 31, 2019. We realized the challenges of transforming current packaging to be 100% eco-friendly and are excited to be a part of the APASS network. AVC is determined to create easy-to-open, 100% recyclable packaging solutions for its clients, said Guy Marom, AVCs Executive Vice President. We will work together with you to streamline the process of making your packaging to be compliant and, at the same time, to meet the functional and aesthetic demand of the e-commerce channel. AVC, an ISO 9001:2015 certified company, is celebrating its 30-year anniversary, ensuring you that it has the expertise and design capability so that your packaging will meet the stringent rules that Amazon has outlined in their APASS program. AVC has been working diligently with Fortune 100 companies to design and manufacture packaging that is APASS compliant, enabling these clients to reduce their product packaging material significantly without compromising protection or aesthetics. All research and design is done at AVCs Rancho Dominguez complex, while the packaging itself can be manufactured both in the U.S. or at AVCs China facilities. AVCs proximity to Los Angeles/Long Beach ports provides extra value in minimizing drayage costs for products with a short lead time. AVCs forward (B to B and B to C fulfillment services) and reverse logistics programs, includes sorting, refurbishing and recertifying in a fluid, end to end, supply chain solution. AVCs China facilities offers a flexible and hybrid supply chain solution to AVCs customers that has proved to generate positive financial results. AVC Corporation is based in the Greater Los Angeles, CA area. Barry (Joe) Bentley, Chair, MEA Board of Directors 2019/2020 These are exciting times in the energy industry ... MEA Energy Association (MEA) announced today the appointment of Barry J. Bentley (Joe) as chair and welcomes the full slate of officers and directors for the 2019 MEA Board of Directors. Patrick Van Beek, president of MEA, said, MEA had a strong year under the leadership of outgoing chair Bobbi L. Shroeppel of NorthWestern Energy and we thank her for her service. We anticipate continued growth under Joes leadership. I look forward to working with Joe and the entire board as we empower the energy industry through education, leadership development, and industry connections. Bentley is the senior vice president, U.S. utility operations for Indianapolis Power & Light Company (IPL) and Dayton Power & Light Company. He is responsible for Transmission and Distribution, Customer Service and Asset Management. Joe has been with IPL since 1988 and previously was the Vice President of Fuel and Energy Supply. Joe was also a Senior Investment Associate with IPALCO Enterprises and Principal with EnerTech Capital Partners, a venture capital firm in Wayne, Pa. focused on early stage venture investments in energy and telecommunications. These are exciting times in the energy industry and I am honored and delighted to be assuming the chair role and helping lead MEA over the next year, said Bentley. I am looking forward to the opportunity to lead the MEA board as the organization continues to help empower the success of the energy industry through education and leadership development. The slate of board members elected in 2019 follows: Officers: Chair, Barry J. Bentley, senior vice president, customer operations of Indianapolis Power & Light (Ind.) 1st Chair, Vernon J. Peterson, vice president, Wisconsin field operations of WEC Energy Group (Wis.) 2nd Vice Chair, John C. Webster, director natural gas division of Hutchinson Utilities Commission (Minn.) Treasurer, Tom J. Henkels, chief operating officer of PLH Group, Inc. (Texas) Secretary, Patrick D. Van Beek, president of MEA Energy Association (Minn.) Past Chair, Bobbi L. Schroeppel, vice president of customer care, communications, and human resources of NorthWestern Energy (S.D.) Executive Committee Delegate, Charles C. Crews, vice president gas operations of Consumers Energy (Mich.) Executive Committee Delegate, Benjamin F. Felton, senior vice president electric operations of NiSource (Ind.) Directors: Tamara A. Bewley, natural gas market manager of Border States (Mich.) Michael D. Beatty, vice president, gas operations of Liberty Utilities (Mo.) W. Noble Billingsley III, director, gas operations GRMI of DTE Energy (Mich.) Benjamin F. Felton, senior vice president, electric operations of NiSource, Inc. (Ind.) Gary L. Gibson, associate GM, customer ops and communications of City Utilities of Springfield (Mo.) Dean A. Headlee, manager, pipeline safety and compliance of CenterPoint Energy (Minn.) Kevin P. Joyce, director of gas emergency response of Xcel Energy (Minn.) Jamie S. Kiely, senior director, distribution operations of Evergy (Mo.) Keith E. Moyle, chief operations officer of Upper Peninsula Power Company (Mich.) Keith E. Napier, director of gas operations of Duke Energy (N.C.) For more information about MEA visit MEAenergy.org. About MEA: MEA serves the people that deliver electricity and natural gas to homes and businesses. We were founded as a trade association over 110 years ago by distribution utilities whose vision was to improve safety and efficiency. Today, we fulfill the same purpose through education, leadership development, and industry connections. Energy delivery companies, contractors, and suppliers around the country benefit from our 55 summits, roundtables, and webinars, 400+ online technical courses, safety assessments, evaluator training, operator qualification compliance tools, and leadership courses for field personnel. What began as a better way for attorneys to keep time has evolved into time entry that law firms trust and attorneys love, and we are incredibly proud of that. Bellefield Systems, the providers of the fastest path to revenue through its solutions, announces the launch of its new brand identity. Since founding the company, we have delivered on its aggressive growth strategy year after year, said Gabriela Isturiz, President and Co-Founder of Bellefield Systems. What began as a better way for attorneys to keep time has evolved into time entry that law firms trust and attorneys love, and we are incredibly proud of that. Changes include new logos for iTimekeep and OCG Live, a new tagline and redesigned website, blog and collateral. The new branding reinforces Bellefields commitment to helping law firms and other professional service organizations improve revenue through better performance. It also reflects the companys recently-expanded product line, which now includes a first-of-its-kind full service solution for managing billing compliance at the point of time entry. To experience the new branding, visit http://www.bellefield.com. About Bellefield Systems Bellefield provides the fastest path to revenue by removing barriers to time entry for attorneys and law firms. Through the Bellefield Timelab, Bellefield helps firms improve revenue by increasing attorney timekeeping engagement, providing real-time compliance with outside counsel guidelines and enabling firms to manage their time entry policies. In an area that was long disregarded and accepted as a cost of doing business, Bellefields innovations are bringing about efficiencies that allow firms to achieve the best timecard inventory, leading to less rejections, increased compliance and maximum client satisfaction. Bellefield was founded with one simple (yet powerful) purpose: create better timekeepers. Bellefields flagship solution, iTimekeep, has ranked as the #1 most adopted Mobile (and anywhere) Time Entry solution for attorneys for six consecutive years. Bellefields founding members include the former founders of eBillingHub (now Thomson Reuters), Gabriela Isturiz and Daniel Garcia and software veteran, John Kuntz. Bellefield Systems is an independent, privately held company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. To learn more, visit http://www.bellefield.com. Bennion Ellsworth, a married father of one who works in a residential treatment center for teenagers in crisis and enjoys the outdoors, sports, and anything nerdy, has completed his book The Most Amazing Story: an entertaining story for young readers. Ellsworth writes, Are you good enough? Are you smart, kind, funny, or talented enough to do what life asks? Follow a small girl from a tiny family that lived in a little house on an undersized farm outside an enormous city as she proves to herself, and everyone else, that she is incredible, precious, and the most amazing thing to happen to the world. Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Bennion Ellsworths book is an uplifting fairy tale depicting a young girl from a loving yet poor family who captures the heart of a king searching for an heir. Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchaseThe Most Amazing Story 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. This is a deal that looks toward the future, said Salerno. Blackstone is growing at an incredible rate, and theyre doing it in a very smart and creative way. In a deal that could represent a seismic shift within the publishing industry, Blackstone Publishing, the largest independent publisher in the 2.5 billion-dollar audiobook business, is partnering with The Story Factory to dramatically expand its presence in the print and e-book markets. As the centerpiece of this partnership, Blackstone is inking a three-author deal with New York Times bestselling and two-time Edgar Award-winning Steve Hamilton, five-time New York Times bestselling and four-time Edgar Award-nominated Reed Farrel Coleman, and Edgar Award-winning Meg Gardiner. All three authors are leaving Penguin Random House to join Blackstone. At a time when even well-established authors are seeing their advances and promotional budgets slashed, Hamilton, Coleman, and Gardiner will receive the highest compensation in their careers as part of this significant seven-figure deal. The authors will also be given creative and promotional approvals throughout the publishing process, with a dedicated publicity budget for each book stipulated in their contracts. This marks a new level of commitment to authors that could send shockwaves throughout the industry and draw other major authors to Blackstones doorstep. The deal was closed after several months of negotiation between Josh Stanton, CEO of Blackstone, and Shane Salerno, of The Story Factory, which represents all three authors. For Stanton, its another in a series of transformative, high-profile deals that have dramatically expanded Blackstones presence in the publishing industry. The companys Blackstone Publishing imprint will now be uniquely positioned to leverage its already industry-leading position in the audiobook market to rewrite the rules on how print and e-book titles are acquired, published, and promoted. This is a deal that looks toward the future, said Salerno. Blackstone is growing at an incredible rate, and theyre doing it in a very smart and creative way. Welcoming these three exceptional authors to the Blackstone family is not only a thrill, but its indicative of what weve been working towards as a Publisher, Stanton chimed in. Mr. Salerno and The Story Factorys track record is incredibly impressive, to say the least; I look forward to working together to successfully launch these authors next works, as well as future projects to come. The three authors moving to Blackstone have a combined 60 novels in print, six New York Times bestsellers, and 45 nominations for international literary awards, with 17 winners: Steve Hamilton is the New York Times bestselling author of the Nick Mason series and the million-selling Alex McKnight series. Hes one of only three authors to win Edgar Awards for both Best First Novel and Best Novel. Hes also written two New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and his standalone The Lock Artist is the only book in publishing history to win an Edgar Award for Best Novel in America, an Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller in the UK, and an Alex Award from the American Library Association. Hamiltons books have been praised by such major authors as Stephen King (The real deal), Michael Connelly (As original as any writer I've ever read), and Lee Child (Whatever he writes, I'll read Steve Hamiltons that good). Hamiltons first two novels for Blackstone will be the third installment in the Nick Mason series, already entitled An Honorable Assassin, and the twelfth installment in the Alex McKnight series. The Nick Mason series was sold to Lionsgate in a pre-emptive seven-figure deal, with Nina Jacobson (Hunger Games franchise, Crazy Rich Asians) producing and Shane Salerno (Avatar 2-5, Armageddon) writing the screenplay. Hamilton plans to bring Nick Mason and Alex McKnight together in a future book, as Michael Connelly did with his major characters Harry Bosch and Terry McCaleb. Reed Farrel Coleman is the author of thirty novels, including five consecutive New York Times bestsellers in Robert B. Parkers Jesse Stone series. Hes been nominated for the Edgar Award four times in three different categories (Best Novel, Best Paperback Original, and Best Short Story), and has won the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the Year four times. Coleman has been called a hard-boiled poet by NPRs Maureen Corrigan and the noir poet Laureate by the Huffington Post. Coleman will write his first novel for Blackstone after finishing his current project for the new Michael Mann Books imprint at HarperCollins: a collaboration with Mann on the prequel novel to the filmmakers landmark crime film Heat, which starred Oscar winners Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. The Michael Mann Books imprint, which will launch in February 2019 with Elaine Shannons Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire, marks another significant publishing deal represented by The Story Factory. Meg Gardiner is the critically-acclaimed author of the UNSUB series and China Lake, which won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original and was a finalist for NPRs 100 Best Thrillers Ever. Stephen King has said of Meg Gardiner: This woman is as good as Michael Connelly her novels are, simply put, the finest crime-suspense series Ive come across in the last twenty years. Gardiner was also recently elected President of the Mystery Writers of America for 2019. Gardiners first book with Blackstone will be the third novel in her Barry Award-winning UNSUB series, which received three starred reviews from the major trade publications and was sold to CBS Television. Blackstone Publishing, based in Ashland Oregon, with offices in Manhattan and Portland Oregon, has a catalog of over 14,000 audio titlesfrom authors as diverse as Karin Slaughter, William Landay, Timothy Ferriss, Suzanne Brockman, Ian Fleming, C. S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, Elena Ferrante, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chuck Palahniuk, George Orwell, Don Winslow, Cory Doctorow, Neil deGrasse Tyson, T. C. Boyle, and Mary Kubicaand has also partnered with Disney, Marvel, and LucasFilms on such properties as Frozen, Pirates of the Caribbean, Toy Story, Tomorrowland, and Star Wars 7, to name a few. Blackstone holds 50+ Audie Awards and over 400 AudioFile Earphones Awards, multiple Grammy nominations and wins, not to mention numerous New York Times & USA Today bestsellers. In late 2015, after nearly 30 years as audiobook-industry pioneers, Blackstone expanded into print and e-book publishing. The deal with The Story Factory represents another major step for Blackstone as they continue to grow their core business into the print and e-book marketplaces. It follows an April 2018 deal in which Blackstone acquired the US & Canadian print and e-book rights to the majority of bestselling author James Clavells catalog in an eight-book deal that includes Clavells Asian Saga novels Shogun, Tai-Pan, King Rat, Escape, and Whirlwind, as well as a recent Edgar nomination for Best Novel (THE LIARS GIRL, Catherine Ryan Howard). Artists conception of the newly activated Middle River Depot, upon completion. By reinvesting in this historic site, we can ignite the economic potential of this property and continue to expand opportunity across the Middle River community. Blue Ocean, a burgeoning local real estate investment and management firm, will be acquiring a large and historically-significant property this summer with plans to breathe new life into a once vibrant asset in Middle River, within Baltimore County, MD. The Middle River Depot property, located at the intersection of MD Route 43 (White Marsh Boulevard) and MD Route 150 (Eastern Boulevard), was built in 1929 for the Glenn L. Martin Company, later known as Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. The area was once the proud home to over 50,000 workers who built the world-famous B-26 Martin Marauder bomber aircraft to support efforts in World War II. The buildings, originally designed by renowned Albert Kahn and Associates, contain nearly two million square feet of space along with significant land area. In acquiring this property, Blue Ocean will aim to breathe new life into this very important community asset. Careful consideration will be given to what this site has meant to the Middle River, White Marsh and Essex communities over multiple generations. Formerly known as the Middle River Depot, Blue Ocean will be rebranding to Aviation Station. Although plans to improve the property are still in the development phase, Blue Ocean will be improving the existing structures, which cater largely to industrial users and recreational businesses that require large expansive spaces to operate. In 2018, the State of Maryland strategically designated this site as an Opportunity Zone, which, as part of the 2017 Tax Act, aims to spur economic development and job creation in these designated zones. Additionally, Baltimore County designated this site as an Enterprise Zone, which encourages investment in distressed areas by helping to assist businesses to expand as well as attract new businesses to invest in the area, creating additional jobs. In fact, numerous County, State and Federal officials have expressed strong support for this acquisition and revitalization project. Maryland Senator J.B. Jennings and Maryland Delegate Rick Impallaria have voiced excitement and support, as well as Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, who stated, By reinvesting in this historic site, we can ignite the economic potential of this property and continue to expand opportunity across the Middle River community', said Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski. Building a better Baltimore County means maximizing our Countys amazing assets thats exactly what this project will do. And, Baltimore County Councilwoman Cathy Bevins indicates, I am very excited that Blue Ocean is under contract to purchase the Middle River Depot. The property has been an eyesore for years and the community deserves betterBlue Ocean is a local developer and has already been taking steps to clean up the property and reach out to the community. This is a great opportunity to bring more jobs and positive investment to Middle River. With the success of Greenleigh right up the road on Route Rt.43 the pieces of the revitalization of Middle River are coming into place. Blue Ocean is pleased to create a driving force of vibrancy and opportunity for businesses in this area. The improvement of this important historical property will create a significant amount of jobs in the local community, and the company looks forward to releasing additional details on the improvement plans in the coming months. About Blue Ocean: Blue Ocean is a property management company in Baltimore, MD that is active in syndicating, purchasing and managing investment grade real estate assets in the multifamily, industrial, office, retail and hospitality sectors. The Company was founded in 2004. Since that time Blue Ocean has grown its portfolio to over 25 properties valued at over $400,000,000. The Blue Ocean portfolio consists of approximately 3,500 apartment homes and 2,000,000 square feet of commercial space. Blue Ocean specializes in acquiring, developing and managing investment-grade real estate in Maryland. The company carefully selects properties ripe for repositioning and invests the time, resources and expertise necessary to creatively improve them. As a result, Blue Ocean has delivered extraordinary returns both to its investment partners and to the Maryland-based communities where these properties are located. Teresa brings in-depth knowledge of the Florida construction market to Boyd & Jenerette, said shareholder and construction practice group leader Beth-Ann Schulman. The construction practice now offers expanded service to the Central Florida and Gulf Coast markets. Boyd & Jenerette is pleased to welcome Teresa A. Eyerman as a partner in the firms new St. Petersburg, Florida office. Ms. Eyerman represents general contractors, subcontractors, developers, and design professionals in all areas of construction law in both a litigation and transactional capacity. Teresa brings in-depth knowledge of the Florida construction market to Boyd & Jenerette, said shareholder and construction practice group leader Beth-Ann Schulman. The construction practice now offers expanded service to the Central Florida and Gulf Coast markets, with the opening of the new St. Petersburg location. Ms. Eyerman worked in Travelers Florida staff counsel construction defect ligation practice for the last nine years. She was the Florida representative for national construction alerts and changes, and served on the national construction defect leadership team. She gained experience as general counsel for a Florida-based construction firm, where she worked on private and government projects. Ms. Eyerman also worked with a nationally recognized construction law firm on multi-state construction projects, including the Amtrak Northend Electrification Project and delay claims arising from airport construction projects Ms. Eyerman earned her law degree with honors from The Florida University College of Law in 1996. She holds a 1989 B.A. degree in History from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. ABOUT THE CONSTRUCTION LAW GROUP The Boyd & Jenerette Construction Law Group offers clients a full-service construction law practice throughout Florida. The firm understands the specialized needs of those in the construction industry, from pre-suit intervention when litigation can be avoided, to a full trial when needed. Two attorneys in the Construction Law Grouppartner Michael J. Childers and shareholder Beth-Ann Schulmanare Board Certified by The Florida Bar in Construction Law. They are experts in residential, commercial and roadway construction law matters, from pre-suit through trial or arbitration. Ms. Schulman is also a Florida Supreme Court Certified Civil Mediator, a Florida Approved Arbitrator, and worked as an accountant in the construction industry prior to becoming a lawyer. ABOUT BOYD & JENERETTE, P.A. Boyd & Jenerette, P.A. is a civil litigation law firm with offices in Florida and Georgia. The firms practice areas include civil matters involving insurance defense, construction defects, workers compensation, Longshore and Defense Base Act claims, Admiralty and Jones Act claims, transportation and trucking, aviation law, employment practices liability, property damage, professional liability, coverage and bad faith, and mass torts. The firm is also experienced in handling civil appeals in state and federal courts, and offers alternative dispute resolution techniques such as arbitration or mediation. The firm is AV Preeminent Peer Review Rated by Martindale-Hubbell, and 11 of the firms attorneys are also AV Peer Review Rated at an individual level. Boyd & Jenerette, P.A. is recognized in the 2019 Best Law Firms list by U.S. News & World Report and Best Lawyers in the following two areas: Tier 2 Jacksonville, Insurance Law, and Tier 3 Jacksonville, Personal Injury Litigation Defendants. The firm is honored to have been recognized in Best Lawyers Best Law Firms rankings for nine consecutive years (2011 2019). The firm maintains a commitment to excellence in advocacy when pursuing clients goals through pre-suit resolution, mediation, arbitration or trial. A team of experienced attorneys help insurance carriers, their insureds, self-insured entities and businesses manage risk and reduce exposure through training, counsel, and a commitment to early resolution. If it is not possible to settle the case early, then an aggressive but cost-effective defense litigation strategy is developed. The firms focus on cost effective representation includes alternative attorneys fee structures such as fixed rate options for handling pre-suit matters including coverage opinions. Boyd & Jenerette, P.A. strives to build long-term client relationships through outstanding service, which is reflected in part through attorney credentials and peer recognition. Seven of the firms attorneys are Board Certified by The Florida Bar, including one in the area of Aviation Law, one in Civil Trial, one in Appellate Practice, two in Construction Law, and two in Workers Compensation. Boyd & Jenerette, P.A. was founded by Charles T. Boyd, Jr. and Noah H. Jenerette, Jr. in 1952. The firm maintains Florida offices in Boca Raton, Jacksonville, Orlando, and St. Petersburg, and a Georgia office in Savannah. Attorneys are also available for consultation in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and Tallahassee. Details online at https://www.boydjen.com/. Left to right: Ian Lochore [VP, General Manager - PV Division], Senator Brian Jones, Mike Teresso [President], Kathi McCalligan [Director of Marketing] and Keith Randhahn [Director of Engineering] Baker Electric Home Energy, a leading San Diego company specializing in advanced solar systems, home batteries as well as heating and air conditioning services and smart home solutions, hosted State Senator Brian Jones (Republican, Santee) on Friday, March 22. The Senators visit was intended to gain a greater understanding of solar and home battery technology as well as renewable energys impact on the San Diego job market and economy. Following President Mike Teressos presentation describing Bakers 80 years of history, market and portfolio of products and services, Senator Jones was given a tour of the Escondido offices and extensive warehouse. Baker, ranked #1 in market share in the Southern California service area, has installed over 10,000 residential solar systems. Senator Jones learned about the strategy behind Bakers impressive growth, their diversification and their upcoming April 2019 move to a new facility intended to house their growing workforce. At the conclusion of the tour Senator Jones said, Bakers impressive operations, 223 employees and growing market share have made them one of the most significant local, family-owned businesses in North County. Their solar and home battery systems are helping homeowners in San Diego, western Riverside and southern Orange Counties save on their electricity costs and chart their energy independence. We were honored to share the Baker success story and our company operations with Senator Jones. He has a clear appreciation for the importance of renewable energy to Southern California homeowners and its growing significance to our local job market and the states economy, commented Teresso. Information on all of Baker Electric Home Energys products and services can be found at https://BakerHomeEnergy.com. ### About Baker Electric Home Energy Built on 80 years of electrical contracting expertise, San Diego-based Baker Electric Home Energy has provided home energy solutions to more than 10,000 customers throughout Southern California. Known for exemplary customer services and business ethics, Baker Home Energy designs, engineers and installs solar power systems and home batteries for residences across Southern California. Additionally, the company provides full heating and air conditioning services and smart home solutions. The company is a BBB accredited business with an A+ rating and has been the winner or finalist of the BBB Torch Award for Ethics in the 100-499 employee category four consecutive years (2014 - 2018). In addition, Baker has received the 2017 BBBs coveted International Torch Award in 2017. Baker has also been ranked by the San Diego Business Journal as its No. 31 Fastest-Growing Private Company and has earned Angies List Super Service Award four times (20132016). ### CT Cloud Meeting powered by Zoom delivers the conferencing and collaboration experience our customers are looking for today, CallTower, a global leader in delivering cloud-based enterprise-class unified communications and collaboration solutions, announced today the launch of their CT Cloud Meeting powered by Zoom. CT Cloud Meeting is an effective conferencing solution that delivers crystal clear, face-to-face video, high-quality screen sharing and instant messaging on desktop and mobile. CT Cloud Meeting allows users to stay connected and collaborate from wherever they are, making it one of todays most dynamic and easy-to-use cloud solution for web collaboration, video conferencing and webinars. CT Cloud Meeting is the latest solution in CallTowers CT Cloud Solution Suite solutions and applications designed specifically to empower dynamic cloud communications for business customers worldwide. CT Cloud Solutions enable cost-effective communications and increased productivity in todays dynamic, distributed, mobile workforce. With CT Cloud solutions, network operators can support customers of any size to meet challenges by quickly and reliably delivering feature-rich, high-quality, and secure business communications solutions. CT Cloud Meeting powered by Zoom delivers the conferencing and collaboration experience our customers are looking for today, says CallTowers Chief Revenue Officer, William Rubio. CT Cloud Meeting works the way people work. Users can connect and collaborate, ad-hoc, with scheduled small and large web and video meeting from anywhere at any time. This solution empowers business to schedule high-quality webinars, with registration. CallTower is providing a differentiated stand-alone web meetings solution that can easily expand into our CT Cloud solutions for a full UCaaS experience. About CallTower CallTower exists to enable people to easily connect to transact business communications. Since its inception in 2002, CallTower has become a leading provider of cloud-based, enterprise-class Unified Communications solutions for growing organizations worldwide. CallTower provides, integrates and supports industry-leading, cloud-based, Unified Communications and Collaboration solutions, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Native Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, CT Cloud, CT Cloud Boost, CT Cloud Meeting powered by Zoom, Zoom Video Communications and Office 365 for business customers. CallTower enhances our clients strategic and operational capabilities by integrating VoIP service, mobile applications, email hosting, unified messaging, instant messaging, audio, web and video conferencing, collaboration tools, contact center, cloud services and global networks solutions into one reliable platform. Enjoy Exclusive Visits with World-renowned Cheesemakers "We're so excited for our artisan cheese and beer-focused trip to Vermont this summer," states Anna Juhl, Cheese Journeys founder. "This true road trip to the Green Mountain state offers an exclusive opportunity to enjoy the culture, bounty and all the deliciousness Vermont has to offer!" Curd nerds and growler geeks can now find fulfillment as they travel with Cheese Journeys on its inaugural adventure to northwestern Vermont, August 8-13, 2019, to some of Americas favorite creameries and breweries, including award-winning Jasper Hill Farms & Cellars and the Best Brewery in the World, Hill Farmstead Brewery. The journey will aptly include an exclusive experience at the 11th annual Vermont Cheesemakers Festival at historic Shelburne Farms on August 11, 2019. Officially kicking off the tour in the city of Burlington, food trippers will enjoy a convivial signature cocktail featuring a local spirit and brew, followed by a short introduction to food photography before heading to a leisurely dinner at one of the citys best restaurants. The next day travelers head to Vermonts Northeast Kingdom to visit renowned Jasper Hill Farm, one of Americas most innovative and successful artisan cheese businesses. An exclusive visit to the creamery with founders and brothers, Andy and Mateo Kehler, will not only include tasting some of the most prized cheeses in the US and abroad, but will also provide an opportunity to learn about their philosophy of cheesemaking, affinage, and sustainability. A stop at Jasper Hills Randi Albert Calderwood Cropping Center, the Farms state-of-the-art hay drying facility which allows the company to produce much of their herds own feed, contributing to the true taste of Jasper Hills products, underscores the meaning of terroir. A behind-the-scenes tour of the Burlington Farmers Market will offer an overview of many of Vermonts best artisan producers of cheese, meats, cider, and even veggie fermenters. Mad River Distillers and Lake Champlain Chocolates are just two of the several specialty food makers that will be visited. During an exclusive Vermont Cheesemakers Dinner, including cheesemakers (naturally) and the director of the Vermont Cheese Council, Tom Bivens, guests will learn about the Vermont cheese scene in more depth. At the 11th annual Vermont Cheesemakers Festival, idyllically located on the shores of Lake Champlain, travelers will enjoy VIP admittance as they meet up with nearly fifty cheesmakers as well as local wine, craft beer, and numerous other food and beverage purveyors in attendance. Presentations about farmstead and artisan cheesemaking, cooking demos, workshops, and educational seminars are all awaiting at the festival. A return to Shelburne Farms with a cheese-tasting and tour of the grounds, as well as a stop at Shelburne Vineyards to enjoy their award-wining wines will add to the appreciation of this regions agricultural heritage and diversification. Finally, no cheese venture to Vermont would be complete without a stop at Vermont Creamery, one of the countrys best-known goat dairies. Company president, Adeline Druart, will reveal how co-founders, Allison Hooper and Bob Reese, developed their highly-acclaimed fresh and aged goat cheeses, cultured butter, and other European-style dairy products 35 years ago. Cheese Journeys founder, Anna Juhl, will lead this adventure throught the back country of Vermont, accompanied by two co-hosts: Tenaya Darlington, author and academian who goes by Madame Fromage, and Jeff Roberts, author and one of Vermont's food-scene experts. Believing in the importance of cheese education, Curds & Co (Brookline, MA), The Cheese Shop (Concord, MA), and Fairfield Cheese Company (Fairfield, CT) are collaborating with Cheese Journeys on this trip. FREE travel to and from Burlington, VT is available at each of these three locations. Instagram The organizations ranked at the top of the 2019 LearningElite are not only recognized for achieving outstanding outcomes for their own enterprises but they also provide a significant yardstick against which other companies can assess their own progress..." Chief Learning Officer magazine has announced the 2019 rankings for its prestigious LearningElite benchmarking program, recognizing more than 60 global organizations for their outstanding corporate education strategies. The results of the rigorous peer-reviewed program were revealed April 1 during a gala dinner and awards ceremony that capped off the first day of CLO Symposium Spring 2019, one of the magazines two premier conferences for senior workforce development and talent management executives held annually. For 2019, the top five LearningElite organizations, respectively, are Nationwide, AT&T, EY, Vi and KPMG. The LearningElite has become a highly valued standard for evaluating the true impact of enterprise learning and leadership development on business performance and competitiveness, said Sarah Kimmel, director of research and advisory services for Human Capital Media (HCM), which publishes Chief Learning Officer. The organizations ranked at the top of the 2019 LearningElite are not only recognized for achieving outstanding outcomes for their own enterprises but they also provide a significant yardstick against which other companies can assess their own progress toward turning learning and development into a measurable driver of business results. To learn more about the LearningElite benchmarking program and see the full 2019 rankings, please visit learningelite.clomedia.com. "Our people, core values and culture are the pulse of FrogSlayer." FrogSlayer, a custom software engineering firm in College Station, TX, was recently recognized as one of the 2019 Best Companies to Work for in Texas. FrogSlayer joined businesses around the state to celebrate at the Hilton Austin on March 28, 2019. Along with FrogSlayer, K2Share, Stylecraft Builders, University Title Company, CAPSHER Technology, and Nutrabolt from the Brazos Valley were recognized, with K2Share taking the #1 spot in the Small Business category. All 6 Bryan-College Station companies placed in the top 20, with three companies placing in the top 10 showing that the Bryan-College Station community is an excellent place for growing businesses and careers. Its encouraging to be in the presence of many companies who go above and beyond to create an outstanding work community where people are excited to go to work every day. Thursday nights award presentation confirmed that not only is Texas a great state for jobs, but a wonderful state for exceptional careers. noted Holly Melvin, Marketing Manager. To be considered for the award, companies must submit an in-depth questionnaire and employees volunteer to provide honest feedback by taking part in a company-wide survey. The Best Companies Group analyzes the data to determine what it takes to be the best and uses data to rank qualifying companies. FrogSlayer was noted for granting the entire team full autonomy over work, quarterly wellness adventures and friendly challenges among team members. Devin Rabon, Chief of Staff, remarked, Our people, core values and culture are the pulse of FrogSlayer. We strive to create life-changing opportunities for our team and give people a place they love to work. If we keep getting this right, well continue to find success. Texas Monthly recognizes the top 100 employers in Texas through the Best Companies Awards system each year. FrogSlayer ranked 8th in the Small Business Category (100 or less employees). This is the 3rd year in a row FrogSlayer has received this award and the 4th time they have appeared on the list, with previous rankings being #1, #25 and #16. Best Companies Texas is an awards program created in 2006 by Texas Monthly, The Texas Association of Business (TAB), Texas SHRM, and the Best Companies Group. To find out more about Best Companies, visit http://www.bestcompaniestx.com. About FrogSlayer FrogSlayer provides growing companies with the custom software tools they need to accelerate growth and become the technology or data leader in their industry. To learn more, visit http://www.FrogSlayer.com Stephen Epstein, Managing Director of The Realiste Fund, discusses Qualified Opportunity Zones and how they put an additional squeeze for property development in downtown Nashville. At least 28 cranes rise against the Nashville skyline, heralding major development, including several billion dollar projects underway within a three-minute drive from downtown. Yet, a number of areas in downtown Nashville have been designated as Qualified Opportunity Zones, low-income census tracts targeted for economic development with tax incentives for investors who re-invest into special funds.[1] This puts an additional squeeze on available property for development, according to Stephen Epstein, Managing Director of the Realiste Fund I LP. Per Epstein, Land prices are already skyrocketing in downtown Nashville, so once Opportunity Zone investing becomes mainstream, prices will continue to rise as buy-and hold investors seeking to place Qualified Opportunity Fund cash drive up land costs and squeeze out the land available for condominium development. The bottom line is that Opportunity Zone capital will continue to cause land prices to escalate and apartment buildings to be more and more over-built. There is already a severe shortage of residential condominiums, as well as a scarcity of office condominiums and flex office (small warehouse) space within the Nashville market and opportunity zone capital will only exacerbate this shortage.[4] According to a recent report from the Nashville Downtown Partnership, inventory supply of all residential condominium in downtown Nashville has remained at three months or less since 2012.[2] whereas a balanced market has a six-month supply of units, which is twice the current amount. The scarcity of residential condominium development keeps upward pressure on costs a dangerous deterrent for the Nashville economy which is appealing for its lower cost of living perhaps not for long, notes Epstein. This is a particularly pressing issue because of Nashvilles demographics. Millennialsyoung adults between the ages of 20 and 34make up 22% of the areas population which is higher than the National average.[3] According to the National Association of Realtors, millennials are the most active generation of home buyers; more than a third of all home purchases in 2018 were made by people in this age group. Although there is an overall trend among households to migrate toward urban areas, says the National Association of Realtors, the very low production rate of new condos means there are few affordable options for buyers.[4] Meanwhile, 18 areas surrounding the Cumberland River in downtown Nashville have been designated as Qualified Opportunity Zones (QOZ). Much of the development stemming from these funds will be more apartment buildings.[5] As positive as the goals of the Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ) program are, Epstein observes, one of its effects in Nashville is likely to be a further reduction in the availability of sites and properties available for much-needed condo development. Add to this trend the inherent difficulties in getting condo projects financed through banks without pre-sales, and you get an ongoing condo shortage which is predicted to last for years to come. And while supply is scarce, demand for well situation condominiums in the urban core continues to accelerate from transplants relocating from NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. I relocated from San Francisco in 2012, remarks Epstein, and it is not any easier to find a beautiful condo in Nashville today than it was 6 years ago. Thats tough to believe given how much the city has grown, but true. In order to answer the call for more residential condo units, as well as other under-supplied real estate niches, Epstein launched the Realiste Fund I LP in February 2019. With already $60m of projects under development inside the fund, the fund is expanding quickly. Investor interest in Nashville is at an all-time high, and Epstein feels the Realiste Fund is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the growth in under-served segments of this very hot market. This announcement is not a solicitation to buy or an offer to sell interest in the Realiste Fund; such offers will be made only by distribution of a private placement memorandum and only in compliance with applicable law. Investments and services offered by the Realiste Fund may not be suitable for all investors. Interested parties with any doubts as to the merits of an investment should seek the advice of an independent financial advisor. About The Realiste Fund LLP The Realiste Fund is a private equity fund that backs real estate development projects in Nashville sponsored by CA South Development. The Realiste Fund is unique because it focuses exclusively on ground-up construction and does not hold its investments past stabilization. Realiste focuses on the development of residential condominiums, small to midsize industrial flex office (warehouse and office), and midsized Class A and B office buildings. Realiste also acquires and entitles land which it "flips to Qualified Opportunity Fund buyers in Nashville(QOFs). For more information, visit http://www.realistefund.com/home 1. Website. Opportunity Zones Frequently Asked Questions. IRS.gov. 2018. Web. 2. Half of 505 condos now sold, Nashville Post, 5 February2019. 3. Nashville IT Labor Study, Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development Center/Center for Economic Research in Tennessee, January 2019. 4. DeSanctis, Adam, Millennials Lead All Homebuyers, Even as Some Cant Escape Their Parents, National Association of Realtors, 14 March 2018. 5. Mattson-Teig, Beth, Balancing Nashvilles Skyline with More Downtown Density, Urban Land, 19 February 2019. Mike Roberts We have a responsibility to help lead the industry through important policy decisions over the next few years. Mike has the experience and reputation to be very effective in this role. Crowley Maritime Corp. announced today that Michael Roberts will be returning to Washington, D.C., to serve as the companys senior vice president for government relations. Roberts relocated in 2008 from Washington to Jacksonville, Fla., to serve as the companys senior vice president and general counsel. The move will enhance the companys presence in Washington to better address the important policy and regulatory issues affecting the maritime and logistics industry, and to increase support for the companys fast-growing work on behalf of the federal government. Robertss career in Washington spans nearly 30 years and includes service in all three branches of the government and private law practice. Since 1991, Roberts has represented Crowley on the major issues affecting the industry, including the Maritime Security Program, Jones Act, and economic regulation. He is one of the founding members of the American Maritime Partnership (AMP), a key industry trade association, and will continue to help lead that group. Roberts will also continue coordinating with Crowleys government services team in connection with its public sector work, which has grown more than five-fold in the past few years. "We have a responsibility to help lead the industry through important policy decisions over the next few years, said Bill Pennella, vice chairman and executive vice president. Mike has the experience and reputation to be very effective in this role." Roberts has a bachelors degree with high honors from Michigan State University, and a juris doctor degree cum laude from American University, Washington College of Law. As general counsel, Roberts provided senior leadership for various initiatives in addition to managing traditional legal and risk management functions. These included establishing a cargo insurance business, an employee-led charitable foundation supporting hundreds of nonprofits, and the newly-formed Florida Maritime Partnership. As Roberts transitions to his new role, Parker Harrison will become senior vice president and general counsel and have responsibility for the companys legal and risk management teams. She will be based at Crowleys headquarters in Jacksonville. Both Harrison and Roberts will continue to report to Pennella. Harrison, formerly senior vice president of procurement and risk management, is an experienced admiralty attorney and marine insurance executive. Her expertise will ensure that the legal and risk management teams are properly aligned to the business and continue to provide high-caliber services. Parkers strong experience in the maritime law and insurance industries makes her extremely well suited to lead these critical functions as our company continues to grow, said Pennella. Harrison is the current president of the U.S. chapter of WISTA, the Womens International Shipping & Trading Association, a networking organization for women at the management level in the maritime and trading industries worldwide. She holds bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Virginia, as well as a juris doctor degree, magna cum laude, from Tulane Law School with a certificate in maritime law. Harrison joined Crowley in 2013 as director, claims, in the risk management department, where she managed claims, supported Crowleys growing ship management business, and led the teams risk management and mitigation efforts for the historic West Africa Ebola relief project (Operation United Assistance). In 2015, she was promoted to vice president, procurement, where she led the modernization and enhancement of the procurement function across the various lines of business. She joined the senior leadership team in 2018. Jacksonville-based Crowley Holdings Inc., a holding company of the 127-year-old Crowley Maritime Corporation, is a privately held family and employee-owned company that provides marine solutions, energy and logistics services in domestic and international markets. Crowley operates under four business units: Crowley Logistics, a singular ocean liner and logistics supply chain division; Crowley Shipping, which encompasses ownership, operations and management of conventional and dual fuel (LNG) vessels, including tankers, container ships, multipurpose, tugboats and barges; Crowley Fuels, a fuel transportation, distribution and sales division that also provides liquefied natural gas (LNG) and related services; and Crowley Solutions, which focuses on government services, including vessel management for government agencies, as well as engineering, project management, naval architecture through its subsidiary Jensen Maritime, and marine salvage and emergency response through its 50 percent ownership in Ardent Global. Additional information about Crowley, its subsidiaries and business units may be found at http://www.crowley.com. Cybereason, creators of the leading Cyber Defense Platform, today announced that researchers discovered a triple threat campaign that adapts the popular Emotet and TrickBot banking trojans with Ryuk ransomware to steal sensitive information, encrypt computers and ransom victims data. This costs the victim and business money and the loss of sensitive or valuable information if it isnt recovered. The campaign is targeting businesses in the United States and Europe. This particular attack begins with a phishing email. The file contains a malicious, macro-based code that runs and executes a PowerShell command. Once Emotet has been executed, it continues its malicious activity by further infecting and gathering information on the affected machine. It then initiates the download and execution of the TrickBot and begins stealing sensitive information. Meanwhile, the attackers check to see if the target machine is part of an industry they are looking to target. If it is, they download the Ryuk ransomware payload and use the admin credentials stolen using TrickBot to perform lateral movement and reach the assets they wish to infect. Triple threat mitigation recommendations include: Education on how to correctly handle suspicious emails to prevent initial downloading or dropping of malware. In order to protect against lateral movement, do not use privileged accounts, avoid RDPs without properly terminating the session, do not store passwords in plain text, deploy good authentication practices, disable unnecessary share folders, and change the names of the default share folders used in your organization. Make sure you systems are patched, especially CVE-2017-0144. Disable macros across the environment. Follow Microsofts security advisory update on improving credentials protection and management in your organization. Approach security proactively, perform hunts and search for suspicious behavior before an incident starts. About Cybereason Cybereason, creators of the leading Cyber Defense Platform, gives the advantage back to the defender through a completely new approach to cybersecurity. Cybereason offers endpoint detection and response (EDR), next-generation antivirus (NGAV), and active monitoring services, powered by its cross-machine correlation engine. The Cybereason suite of products provides unmatched visibility, increases analyst efficiency and effectiveness, and reduces security risk. Cybereason is privately held, has raised $189 million from top-tier VCs, and is headquartered in Boston, with offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. Learn more: https://www.cybereason.com/ Follow us: Blog | Twitter | Facebook Media Contact: Bill Keeler Director, Public Relations Cybereason bill.keeler(at)cybereason.com (929) 259-3261 The momentum that we built in the past year shows that non-enterprises are yearning for enterprise-grade security that wont break the bank or require significant maintenance and resources." Coronet, the leader in data breach protection powered by AI and Cloud, today announced that it concluded 2018 with an astounding 733 percent year-over-year increase in worldwide monthly active users. Propelled by major partnership announcements with Lenovo and Dropbox, Coronet grew its user base from 300,000 to 2.5 million small and mid-sized business customers spanning numerous industries and geographic locations. As a result of its rapid adoption, Coronets data breach protection platform automatically prevented more than 62 million security events from manifesting, saving workers an estimated 2.6 million hours in productivity. The complete list of Coronets 2018 milestones includes: Increased user count to 2.5 million, equating to an astounding 733 percent year-over-year growth Automatically prevented more than 62 million security events from manifesting, saving workers an estimated 2.6 million hours in productivity. Established major partnerships with Lenovo and Dropbox Established a threat index, issuing reports on Americas most cyber insecure airports and cities Named to the 2018 Emerging Vendors List by CRN, a brand of The Channel Company In 2018, Coronet took a major step in bringing cybersecurity to small and mid-sized businesses, which became a major attack focus for- cyber criminals on a regular basis, said Guy Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Coronet. The momentum that we built in the past year shows that non-enterprises are yearning for enterprise-grade security that wont break the bank or require significant maintenance and resources. We are in a unique position to fill this enormous demand and anticipate elevating our market presence significantly more in the year to come. Coronets all-in-one data breach protection service provides small and mid-sized businesses with a simple, affordable and instant-on solution offering real-time protection against cyber-attacks. With Coronet, small and mid-sized businesses can accomplish the following: 24/7 monitoring of their business for cyber security threats Automatically block suspicious and abnormal user behavior Identify and prevent sensitive data leakage (such as PII, PHI and PCI) Prevent malware and ransomware spread in cloud applications and email Ensure that employees and companys devices are secured, and connects to safe networks Coronet was recently named a gold winner in the 15th Annual 2019 Info Security Product Guides Global Excellence Awards in the Security Products and Solutions for SMBs and SOHO category. For more information, to sign up or request a demo, visit http://www.coro.net and follow us on social media @coronetworks. About Coronet Coronet is a world leader in providing organizations of every size with security for their cloud applications, bring-your-own-devices, and communications over public networks. With over 2.5 million users, Coronets platform uses AI to detect and mitigate threats, eliminating the need for a security team to chase down security events. Provided as a subscription service, with nothing to install on premises, Coronet brings enterprise grade cyber security to organizations of any size, at an affordable price, eliminating the complexity and laborious nature of traditional security platforms. Data Age | Podium Online reviews are huge. We know that ourselves as a business with thousands of end users. We want to get our customers thinking this way. Data Age Business Systems, the developers of PawnMaster and Buy/Sell Plus, are proud to announce their partnership with Podium, the leading customer review management and interaction platform. Podium is used by over 30,000 businesses worldwide, and Data Age Business Systems is looking forward to taking full advantage of the customer touch technology Podium has to offer. Online reviews are huge, says Len Summa, CEO of Data Age Business Systems. We know that ourselves as a business with thousands of end users. We want to get our customers thinking this way. Well not only be using Podium in-house for our own customer interaction management, but well also get our customers on board with it. That white glove service is key. Future versions of Data Age software will feature a direct integration with Podium, allowing users to manage their reviews and messages in the same place they perform day-to-day business. The trust factor within the pawn industry among consumers is critical says Tom Brough, director of pawn sales at Podium. Gathering more high-quality reviews from your current customer base is a sure way to build confidence in the minds of potential clients. In addition, being convenient to reach creates an optimal environment for better customer acquisition and further separates you from your competitors. For more information on the Data Age suite of products or to schedule a demo of their software, please visit dataage.com, pawnmaster.com, or buysell-plus.com. About Data Age Business Systems Data Age offers industry leading financial transaction software solutions that enable businesses doing non-traditional lending, buy/sell, check cashing and even traditional retailers to scale their organization, deliver exceptional customer service, capture data quickly and accurately, mitigate risk, adhere to regulatory mandates, manage employee challenges, and drive profitability. About Podium Podium is an interaction management platform that enables companies with a local presence to conveniently connect with their customers at critical touchpoints to help them strengthen their business. By conveniently facilitating millions of customer interactions, such as driving customer-generated online reviews and providing improved customer messaging tools, Podium serves more than 30,000 local businesses to create over 4 million interactions with their customers a month. Headquartered in Lehi, Utah, and founded in 2014, Podium is currently backed by IVP, Accel, Summit Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Y Combinator. To learn more, visit http://www.podium.com or contact us at press@podium.com. Matt Charlson, President of DataBank "The appointment of Matt to this important position reflects the outstanding leadership he has shown in his time with DataBank." DataBank, a leading provider of business process solutions and a top reseller of Hyland Software, today announced that Matt Charlson will assume the position of President of DataBank IMX, LLC (a Kyocera Group Company) effective April 1, 2019. The current President and co-founder, Chuck Bauer, will step down to focus on accelerating the company's M&A activities. Matt Charlson has served as the SVP of Sales & Marketing and has led DataBanks professional services, business process outsourcing and software solutions teams over the last five years. He was the co-founder of eDocument Resources which was acquired by DataBank in 2013. Matt has been an instrumental leader in shaping the future of DataBank one where we continue to put the customer first, focus on innovative solutions, and remain dedicated to the long-term growth of the business, said Chuck Bauer. His leadership of our sales, marketing and professional services teams have helped DataBank raise the bar in helping our clients navigate business process transformation along with showcasing his talent, passion, vision and readiness to lead our organization. The business process improvement industry is undergoing a transformational amount of change and Matt is extremely well qualified to position DataBank as a leader through this evolution. On a personal note, it has been a tremendous privilege to serve at DataBank these past 15 years, shaping its growth alongside a talented group of people. DataBank is in great hands with Matt and the entire team. Atsushi Yuki, General Manager for Kyocera, said, The appointment of Matt to this important position reflects the outstanding leadership he has shown in his time with DataBank. We expect Matt to help us build DataBank as a leader in the business workflow solutions industry. His strong understanding of relevant technology, close working relationships with our customers and industry knowledge are highly valued. Bill Priemer, CEO at Hyland Software with whom Kyocera is a top global technology partner said, We have worked with Matt for over 20 years, appreciate his strong customer focus, seen his leadership firsthand, and have been delighted to have him on our partner council. We look forward to working more closely with him and helping DataBank and Kyocera to grow as a valued partner. ABOUT DATABANK DataBank, a Kyocera Group Company, is North Americas leading end-to-end business process solution provider. DataBank offers award-winning solutions that help simplify organizations business processes. Some of these solutions include document scanning, data capture solutions, enterprise content management software, business process outsourcing, staff augmentation and workflow design and implementation. These highly configurable, a la carte solutions can be out-of-the-box for hassle-free deployment, customized to address unique business needs, or completely managed by DataBanks team of experts, allowing customers to focus on their core business. ABOUT KYOCERA CORPORATION KYOCERA Corporation, the parent and global headquarters of the Kyocera Group, was founded in 1959 as a producer of fine ceramics (also known as advanced ceramics). By combining these engineered materials with metals and integrating them with other technologies, Kyocera has become a leading supplier of industrial and automotive components, semiconductor packages, electronic devices, mobile phones, printers, copiers and solar power generating systems. During the year ended March 31, 2018, the companys sales revenue totaled 1.58 trillion yen (approx. USD14.9 billion). Kyocera appears on the Top 100 Global Innovators list by Clarivate Analytics and is ranked #612 on Forbes magazines 2018 Global 2000 list of the worlds largest publicly traded companies. ABOUT HYLAND Hyland is a leader in providing software solutions for managing content, processes and cases for organizations across the globe. For over 25 years, Hyland has enabled more than 19,000 organizations to digitalize their workplaces and fundamentally transform their operations. Named one of Fortunes Best Companies to Work For since 2014, Hyland is widely known as both a great company to work for and a great company to do business with. For more information, please visit Hyland.com. Demetrius Moore, a Firefighter/EMT from Chicago, Illinois, has completed his book Berserk: a mesmerizing adventure in which citizens of a formerly quiet town battle for their humanity and their lives. The small town of Milborough becomes a tragic backdrop to a story of good, evil, and the gray areas that exist in between. A powerful mutagen, distributed throughout the town by the shadowy organization known as Brimstone, results in horrible transformations of the minds and bodies of those unfortunate enough to have taken it. Some people are plagued by a slow descent into insanity caused by an ever-growing desire to consume human flesh, while others are completely reduced to feral monsters, devoid of all that once made them human. As the experiment continues and the body count rises, it becomes unclear who the true monsters are, the broken creatures known as Berserkers or masked men whove quarantined the town and put them in cages. Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Demetrius Moores book is a provocative horror story that questions about what it means to be human, as good people are forced to watch their neighbors sprout wings, grow fur, and feast on the ones they love. Readers who wish to experience this gripping tale can purchaseBerserk 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. DHL Supply Chain announced plans to construct a distribution and warehouse park in Dorchester County, S.C.,that will open in phases. DHL Supply Chain, the Americas leader in contract logistics and part of Deutsche Post DHL Group, today announced plans to construct a distribution and warehouse park in Dorchester County, S.C., that will open in phases. The companys $100 million investment is projected to create approximately 450 new jobs. The company has purchased 125 acres, now called DHL Commerce Park, to construct three new buildings, totaling 1.7 million square feet. The first new facility is expected to be completed in Q1 2020. We have seen significant growth in this area of the country and customers are even asking us to evaluate opportunities in South Carolina specifically, said Steve Hess, Vice President, Real Estate Development, DHL Supply Chain. With that in mind, we got ahead of the curve to offer premier facilities in one of the hottest emerging markets in the country. DHL Real Estate Solutions (RES) is a standalone product of DHL and the logistics industrys largest developer of property solutions. The integrated approach provides customers a single point of contact ensuring that building design, racking and building systems are all coordinated at the onset of the design process, resulting in smoother transitions when operations commence. RES is a global developer, providing both customers and non-supply chain customers with their individually tailored real estate solutions. South Carolina Ports Authority is seeing significant distribution center and warehousing activity in our region, driven by port users who rely on our marine and inland facilities to handle growing import volumes bound for consumers across the Southeast, said Jim Newsome, SCPA president and CEO. DHL Supply Chain will play an important role in supporting the logistics needs of multiple port-related business segments, and we look forward to the opening of their new facility. With a favorable geographic location and robust port and infrastructure assets, South Carolina offers unparalleled global connectivity, said Bobby Hitt, South Carolina Secretary of Commerce. This $100 million investment by DHL Supply Chain is a testament to our unique ability to move products around the world, and I congratulate this great company on this tremendous announcement. DHL The logistics company for the world DHL is the leading global brand in the logistics industry. Our DHL family of divisions offer an unrivalled portfolio of logistics services ranging from national and international parcel delivery, e-commerce shipping and fulfillment solutions, international express, road, air and ocean transport to industrial supply chain management. With about 380,000 employees in more than 220 countries and territories worldwide, DHL connects people and businesses securely and reliably, enabling global trade flows. With specialized solutions for growth markets and industries including technology, life sciences and healthcare, energy, automotive and retail, a proven commitment to corporate responsibility and an unrivalled presence in developing markets, DHL is decisively positioned as "The logistics company for the world". DHL is part of Deutsche Post DHL Group. The Group generated revenues of more than 61 billion euros in 2018. MEDIA CONTACT: Nicole Porter DHL Supply Chain (614) 865-8437 nicole.porter(at)dhl.com I am confident our current and future customers will benefit from the exceptional services and expertise our Port Huron team offers. DHL Global Forwarding, the air and ocean freight specialist of Deutsche Post DHL Group, announced the expansion of its Port Huron, Michigan Customs Processing Center in response to customers growing customs brokerage needs due to increased complexities in global trade and import compliance regulations. The expansion of the Center (which serves as a full-service customs brokerage facility and Hub for Northern Border Customs Brokerage services) enabled DHL to hire 49 local customs specialists, with the potential for more hires in the next year. "At DHL, we are always committed to finding more ways to offer our customers excellent, valuable and convenient services that are founded in local expertise of the highest standard," said David Goldberg, CEO, DHL Global Forwarding U.S. "The Port Huron Customs Processing Center expansion further shows our dedication to customers seeking convenient customs solutions and consulting services as they navigate the ever-changing landscape of customs, tariffs and regulatory changes. The 49 hires are part of the Northern Border and International Automotive sector teams. The Northern Border team largely handles all aspects of the customs process for both Northern Border truck crossing and Automotive Sector-specific International Cargo clearances. In 2018, the Port Huron Customs Processing Center handled more than half a million U.S. entries from a total of approximately 1.2 million processed in the U.S. Like the companys two other major U.S. centers (located in Laredo, Texas and Columbia, South Carolina), the Port Huron Center relies on state-of-the-art technology and experienced customs brokers, while offering scalability and adaptability to customers needs. DHL Global Forwarding U.S., as a whole, offers a complete suite of Customs Brokerage services to large multinational customers, including compliance, consulting, post-entry, Duty Drawback reconciliation and Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) services. As a global company, we understand that to deliver a consistently reliable service to our customers, we must incorporate the best talent at each of our locationstalent that understands the nuances and evolving facets of international trade, said Alejandro Palacios, head of Customs Brokerage for DHL Global Forwarding, Americas. Our expansion lets us continue doing exactly that. I am confident our current and future customers will benefit from the exceptional services and expertise our Port Huron team offers. As an added benefit to DHL Global Forwardings U.S. customers, last year, the company launched Customs Connection, a digital platform that serves as a one-stop shop for all customs processes. Customers can view and download their current and historical information and data, filter through commodities/origin and destination categories, generate reports, obtain invoice information and view a breakdown of their total brokerage costs. The company also regularly hosts free webinars for registered customers and logistics professionals. End You can find the press release for download as well as further information on dpdhl.com/pressreleases Media Contact: Deutsche Post DHL Group Media Relations Verena Gross Phone: + 201.766.2517 E-mail: verena.gross(at)dhl(dot)com On the Internet: dpdhl.de/press Follow us at: twitter.com/DHLAmericas DHL The logistics company for the world DHL is the leading global brand in the logistics industry. Our DHL family of divisions offer an unrivalled portfolio of logistics services ranging from national and international parcel delivery, e-commerce shipping and fulfillment solutions, international express, road, air and ocean transport to industrial supply chain management. With about 380,000 employees in more than 220 countries and territories worldwide, DHL connects people and businesses securely and reliably, enabling global trade flows. With specialized solutions for growth markets and industries including technology, life sciences and healthcare, energy, automotive and retail, a proven commitment to corporate responsibility and an unrivalled presence in developing markets, DHL is decisively positioned as The logistics company for the world. DHL is part of Deutsche Post DHL Group. The Group generated revenues of more than 61 billion euros in 2018. El Chicano is a film that has been at the forefront of spurring change in the industry to include more Latinos in films, and fund more movies with all-Latino casts. We were also especially thrilled to have the City of Hagerstown proclaim El Chicano Day on May 3 which capped off an amazing festival! The Eighth Maryland International Film Festival-Hagerstown ended with the awards ceremony at the Historic Maryland Theatre. Executive Director, Tracie Hovey said, We continue to be impressed by the talent and creativity of the filmmakers that attend this festival. We love the social justice issues that filmmakers bring to our attention, whether it is through narrative film or a documentary. These films stir our emotions and give us stories that make us reflect on what is important in life. El Chicano is one of those stories because it is scripted from life experiences of director Ben Hernandez Bray whose brother died due to street violence. It is also a film that has been at the forefront of spurring change in the industry to include more Latinos in films, and fund more movies with all-Latino casts. We were also especially thrilled to have the City of Hagerstown proclaim El Chicano Day on May 3 which capped off an amazing festival! The first Latino-powered film from end to endis the more than ten-year passion project of Chicano industry veteran Ben Hernandez Bray, who tells a story about the loss of his brother and his redemption from his past. Bray helms El Chicano, his directorial debut, from a script he co-wrote with Joe Carnahan (Smokin Aces, The Grey, Narc). The cast is a multigenerational mix of young and iconic Latino talent that includes Raul Castillo, Aimee Garcia, David Castaneda, Marco Rodriguez, Kate Del Castillo, and the incomparable George Lopez. The full line-up of 155 films from 16 countries around the world ranged from features, shorts, documentaries, animations, local and student films. MDIFF also hosted an exclusive VIP reception and after-parties each night. The Finalists: Best Feature: Turnover/USA Director Linda Palmer Bernadette/USA Director John Psathas Electric Love/USA Director Aaron Fradkin El Chicano/USA Director Ben Hernandez Bray- Winner Best Documentary My Trouble With Wolves/USA Director Collin Monda My Sister Hali/USA Director Paul Sheriff Love Always, Mom/ USA Director Tricia Russo and Craig E. Shapiro-Winner Apache Warrior/USA Director David Salzberg and Christian Tureaud Best Short Film Sac de Merde/USA Director Greg Chwerchak-Winner Hook-up 2.0/USA Director Dana Nachman Tumble Dry/USA Director Delia Kelly and Stephen Riscica Only a Movie!/USA Director Teddy Cecil Best Local Four Points/USA Director R.Cadell Cook II 17 Locust St./USA Director Daniel Wyland Start-up/France Director David Fine Family Medicine/USA Director Joe Kraemer -Winner Best Foreign Final Act /USA Director Marcus Kaatsch Scopophilia/Greece Director Natalia Lampropoulou and Ilektra Aggeletopoulou-Winner Dark Social/USA Director Catharine Isenberg Hope is French/France Director Christopher Mack Animation The Indies: An Animated Short/Director Anthony Lambert Its a Bird Thing/USA Director Luce Grosjean -Winner Hello Jemima/UK Director Peter Baynton Student Mothers Day/Director Alexander Desouza Murder House/USA Director Billy and Richard Chizmar This Ones for You, Alice/UK Director Patrick Hanser-Winner The Eighth Maryland International Film Festival-Hagerstown received more than 420 submissions, and the judges announced that over 150 films were selected. While there were films screened at three venues during the day, the Red Carpet VIP Reception happened with special guest Maryland Governor and Mrs. Hogan. The Friday, March 29th opening night took place at the Historic Maryland Theatre. Other venues during the weekend included the Grand Piano Building, Alice Virginia & David E. Fletcher Library, the University of Maryland Hagerstown, and the Chamber of Commerce. After-parties were hosted at 28 South and Bulls and Bears. All films during the day on Friday were free to the public. For more information about the festival, see: http://www.marylandiff.com. The Maryland International Film Festival-Hagerstown partners with several local organizations, businesses, individuals, and major sponsors. The sponsors include the Ovation PR & Advertising, City of Hagerstown, the Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau, Washington County Government (Office of Grant Management), the Nora Roberts Foundation, Washington County Arts Council, Potomac Case Management, Homewood Suites, Bullitt Point Production, Delaplaine Foundation, Anderson Photography, Tom Riford, Jay Frantz, Mike Fitzgerald, and the Maryland Film Office. Media Contact: Tracie Hovey, Festival Director (p) 916-712-2781 (e) Tracie@ovationpr.net Anna Compton, PR Strategist (p) 301-992-7876 (e) Anna@ovationpr.net We are honored to have been again selected for such a prestigious award. Executive Search Partner, a Michigan born information technology focused recruiting company, has again been ranked by Forbes among Americas best Executive Recruiting firms, according to the newly released Forbes 2019 list. Executive Search Partners was selected on the basis of results from an extensive independent peer review survey, conducted and tabulated by Forbes. Working with trade organizations and company databases, Forbes identified over 4,000 executive recruiters and polled thousands of recruiters, candidates who have worked with recruiters, and HR managers from a number of corporations, who completed the online survey. We are honored to be included on such a prestigious list, says Gary Erickson, Managing Partner. Executive Search Partners is committed to providing quality information technology recruiting services to our clients and are pleased to have this confirmed by Forbes. Executive Search Partners was ranked #1 in Michigan and #85 nationally. About Executive Search Partners Executive Search Partners was formed by and is run by former Chief Information Officers. Each of us "grew up" in IT and understands in detail what it takes to be successful at all levels. We have each functioned as individual technical contributors, middle-level managers and senior executives responsible for IT operations, tactics and strategy. We utilize this unparalleled depth of knowledge and experience while working with our customers to first specify the exact requirements for each position and then thoroughly screen potential candidates. Executive Search Partners understands Information Technology. Executive Search Partners has offices in Michigan, North Carolina, Florida , and Louisiana. We chose to partner with Arizona Helping Hands for the fantastic work they do in aiding foster children in Arizona. We hope that the books we collected will make a positive impact in these childrens lives. FirstService Residential, Arizonas leading HOA management company, recently organized a book drive for Arizona Helping Hands, a local nonprofit organization that provides essentials to boys and girls in foster care. The Emerging Leaders team at FirstService Residential organized the book drive as part of the companys social purpose initiative aimed to help underserved people in our communities. FirstService Residential associates and vendor partners participated in the month-long book drive, collecting and donating a total of 900 books to Arizona Helping Hands. These books will help ease the transition for foster children entering new homes throughout the state of Arizona. During FirstService Residential Arizonas all-company annual meeting held on March 8, 2019, employees made custom bookmarks to include with the book donations. We chose to partner with Arizona Helping Hands for the fantastic work they do in aiding foster children in Arizona. We hope that the books we collected will make a positive impact in these childrens lives, says Patrick McAvoy, regional director and emerging leader at FirstService Residential. We are blown away by the generosity of our associates and vendors. Our goal was 500 books, and we received over 900. We are incredibly thankful for the help and support. FirstService Residential engages in socially responsible activities on a local, regional and national basis. To learn more about our social purpose initiative, please visit http://www.oursocialpurpose.com. About FirstService Residential FirstService Residential is North Americas largest manager of residential communities and the preferred partner of HOAs, community associations and strata corporations in the U.S. and Canada. FirstService Residentials managed communities include low-, mid- and high-rise condominiums and cooperatives; single-family homes; master-planned, lifestyle and active adult communities; and rental and commercial properties. With an unmatched combination of deep industry experience, local market expertise and personalized attention, FirstService Residential delivers proven solutions and exceptional service that add value, enhance lifestyles and make a difference, every day, for every resident and community it manages. FirstService Residential is a subsidiary of FirstService Corporation, a North American leader in the property services sector. In Arizona, FirstService Residential is recognized as the leading homeowners association management company in the state, serving over 270 community associations and more than 90,000 households. We offer a comprehensive range of homeowners association and property management services to communities of all types and sizes throughout the state, including the Greater Phoenix and Tucson areas. Ranking Arizona has named FirstService Residential as Arizonas top choice of HOA management companies for the 13th consecutive year. For more information, visit http://www.fsresidential.com. We selected Pioneer Solutions because it was able to offer us with TRMTracker.com a comprehensive cloud-based ETRM Software-as-a-Service solution that is flexible, scalable and easy to integrate into the new IT landscape, while seamlessly expandable to enterprise-level functionality down the road. Pioneer Solutions LLC announced today that Gasum Oy has selected TRMTracker.com, Pioneers award-winning cloud-based Trading & Risk Management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, to support and enable its expansion into the energy wholesale market and offer more comprehensive services to its customers. Headquartered in Espoo, Finland, the energy company Gasum is a Nordic gas sector and energy market expert. Gasum imports natural gas to Finland and is the leading supplier of biogas and LNG in the Nordic market. The company offers energy for heat and power production, industry as well as road and maritime transport. Gasum provides services and consultancy to its clients throughout the energy market chain. As the Finnish natural gas market will be opened up for competition by 2020, we need state-of-the-art energy trading and risk management functionality in place to scale up Natural Gas, LNG, as well as Power and RECs trading, said Mikko Askolin at Gasum Oy. We selected Pioneer Solutions because it was able to offer us with TRMTracker.com a comprehensive cloud-based ETRM Software-as-a-Service solution that is flexible, scalable and easy to integrate into the new IT landscape, while seamlessly expandable to enterprise-level functionality down the road. Crucially TRMTracker.com provides regulatory reporting functionality for REMIT and MiFID2. Ranked #1 in the category Best Cloud-based C/ETRM System in the 2019 Energy Risk Software Rankings, TRMTracker.com is part of Pioneers award-winning portfolio of modular and integrated solutions for trading, risk management, settlement, and regulatory reporting designed for trading firms, retailers, generators, and utility companies. As Software-as-a-Service it offers a multi-tenant environment that differentiates from other C/ETRM SaaS offerings by providing a standard set of enterprise-grade tools across the Front, Mid and Back office functions, including workflow, data import and innovative reporting capability. With an innovative self-serve configuration approach, it empowers the business users to control much of the process without having to rely on others, thereby delivering unrivaled time-to-value. "We are extremely pleased and proud to support Gasum as it transitions into its new envisioned market role", said Hugo Stappers, Director of Sales and Marketing EMEA at Pioneer Solutions. "A forerunner itself, Gasum's selection of Pioneer provides a compelling next-generation ETRM for a competitive edge in trading and risk management, while reducing IT spend and supporting its corporate digitalization objectives. About Pioneer Pioneer Solutions is a global provider of C/ETRM, environmental management, and financial and regulatory compliance solutions. Serving utilities and trading companies across the globe, Pioneers suite of flexible software applications delivers easy-to-use and integrated functionality for Trade Capture, Position Analysis, Portfolio Management, Risk Reporting and Settlement, thereby providing the insight and granularity to manage operations optimally. The companys pioneering and award-winning software offers a user-configurable environment designed for rapid deployment, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership and enhanced customer satisfaction. Robert G. Riney, Chairman of the Board of The Nemours Foundation, and Hugh Durden, Chairman of the Alfred I. duPont Charitable Trust, today announced the election of Geoffrey Rogers and Richard Walsh to The Nemours Foundation Board of Directors. Mr. Rogers is a Regional Managing Director for Glenmede Trust Company, Wilmington, Delaware and Mr. Walsh is Chairman and CEO of the Knob Hill Companies, a media, investment and strategic consulting firm in Orlando, Florida. The professional experience and commitment to children that Rick and Geoff bring to the Nemours Board are a terrific asset, said Dr. Larry Moss, president and CEO of Nemours Childrens Health System. Rick has served on our Florida Board of Managers for several years. His knowledge of Nemours, community partners, and the needs of the state of Florida make his contributions especially meaningful. Geoff is a member of the Alfred I. duPont Charitable Trust, the entity designated by our founder, and whose vision launched Nemours more than 80 years ago. Geoff brings that very important connection to the Board and to our work, in addition to his understanding of the needs of the communities we serve in the Delaware Valley. We look forward to continuing to do great work together on behalf of children. Mr. Rogers oversees the day-to-day operations of Glenmedes Delaware office, which he launched in June 1999. He brings more than three decades of estate planning and financial services experience to this position. Prior to joining Glenmede, Mr. Rogers was a vice president for Scudder Private Investment Counsel, responsible for new business development. He has also served as a vice president with the Wilmington Trust and Delaware Trust Companies, now operating as Wells Fargo. He is a member of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Nominating Committee, a board member of Washington College, Winterthur Museum (emeritus), Operation Warm and the Delaware Business Roundtable. He serves as a co-trustee of the Alfred I. duPont Charitable Trust. Mr. Rogers is past chair of the Board of the Delaware Bankers Association, the Sanford School, and the Estate Planning Council of Delaware, the planned giving committee of the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, Wilmington Renaissance and the Wilmington Tax Group. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program and received his Bachelor of Arts from Washington College. Mr. Walsh joined the Nemours Florida Board of Managers in 2012, bringing experience in corporate governance, strategic business planning and regulatory requirements, and a personal commitment to health care delivery, higher education, and community. Prior to founding Knob Hill, Mr. Walsh was senior vice president, Corporate Affairs of Darden Restaurants, and a founding member of the leadership team that took Darden public in 1995. He also served as a member of Dardens Executive Committee and as a trustee of the Darden Restaurants Foundation. At Darden, Mr. Walsh helped establish health care plans and wellness initiatives for all employees. He has been recognized as Orlando Business Journals Businessman of the Year, one of Floridas 100 Most Influential by Florida Trend magazine, one of the 25 Most Powerful People in Central Florida by the Orlando Sentinel and of the 50 Most Powerful People in Orlando by Orlando Magazine. Mr. Walsh serves on the Board of the Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation, Seaside National Bank and Trust, Blue Orb Software Inc., ABC Fine Wine & Spirits, and LSQ Holdings. He also serves on the University of Central Florida Foundation Board, and is leading the $500 million UCF Ignite Capital Campaign. He is a past chair of the Florida State Chamber of Commerce and chairman emeritus of the UCF Board of Trustees, served on the Governors Florida Tourism Council, the Governors Task Force on Affordable Healthcare, Enterprise Florida. About Nemours Childrens Health System Nemours is an internationally recognized children's health system that owns and operates the two free-standing childrens hospitals: the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., and Nemours Children's Hospital in Orlando, Fla., along with outpatient facilities in five states, delivering pediatric primary, specialty and urgent care. Nemours also powers the worlds most-visited website for information on the health of children and teens, KidsHealth.org, and offers on-demand, online video patient visits through Nemours CareConnect. Nemours ReadingBrightstart.org is a program dedicated to preventing reading failure in young children, grounded in Nemours understanding that child health and learning are inextricably linked, and that reading level is a strong predictor of adult health. Established as The Nemours Foundation through the legacy and philanthropy of Alfred I. duPont, Nemours provides pediatric clinical care, research, education, advocacy and prevention programs to families in the communities it serves. HD Reach is a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting patients and families affected by Huntingtons Disease in North Carolina to access healthcare, education, and social support in North Caroli HD Reach has given us a community of support where there are shared experiences, she says. Were so grateful to connect with others who have the unique understanding of what it is like to live a life with Huntingtons Disease. On April 6, 2019, HD Reach will host the 2019 North Carolina Huntington's Disease Statewide Education Day at the McKimmon Center at N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C. (1101 Gorman Street, Raleigh, NC 27606). The event, "Looking Back, Reaching Forward," is also a celebration of HD Reachs 10th anniversary. HD Reach is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing access to healthcare, education, and social assistance for patients and families affected by Huntingtons Disease in North Carolina. There is no charge to attend the Education Day. Huntingtons Disease (HD) is a progressive genetic disorder of the brain. HD causes great suffering not only for those it strikes, but also for their families. Despite promising research and advancements in treatment, medical care for HD patients and their families across North Carolina still remains limited and inadequately supported and coordinated. The annual Statewide Education Day is just one way HD Reach seeks to raise awareness and improve opportunities for those impacted by Huntingtons Disease. Susanne Young (from Fuquay Varina, N.C.) is a caregiver for her husband Bill, who was diagnosed with Huntingtons Disease at age 74. She cites HD Reach and events like the Education Day as invaluable resources, HD Reach has given us a community of support where there are shared experiences, she says. Were so grateful to connect with others who have the unique understanding of what it is like to live a life with Huntingtons Disease. Theyre such a great source of information, strength and support that were not able to find anywhere else. Attendees of the 2019 HD Reach N.C. Education Day will learn about living life well with HD and hear from some respected North Carolina HD experts. There will be breakout sessions for everyone in the HD community including: those living with HD those at-risk for the disease caregivers family members anyone interested in learning more about the disease, diagnosis, treatment and research. What: North Carolina Huntingtons Disease Statewide Education Day When: April 6, 2019 - 8:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. (Link to full agenda) Where: McKimmon Center, N.C. State University, 1101 Gorman Street, Raleigh, NC 27606 Who: Speakers and topics include: Ann Lassiter & Debbi Fox Davis (current and future HD Reach EDs) - Welcoming Remarks Dr. Mary Edmondson & Dr. Don Lo - Looking Back Over the Last 10 Years and Specialty Care for At Risk Individuals Dr. Miroslav Cuturic and Dr. Francis Walker - A Hope Filled FutureLatest and Greatest in Clinical Research Darcy Hawkins and Casey Herrington - The FutureA Young Adults Perspective Chandler Swope - How Youth Can Navigate Their HD Journey Ronnie Pulley - Drumming and Wellness Dr. Bonnie Hennig-Trestman - Talking to Your Children About HD Holly Edmondson - Mindful Moments Allison Bartlett - Detangling the Disability Application Cost: No charge Those interested in attending the conference can learn more and register for free at the HD Reach website at https://www.hdreach.org/upcoming-events/2019-education-day.html or call 919-803-8128. HD Reach is a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting patients and families affected by Huntingtons Disease in North Carolina to access healthcare, education, and social support in North Carolina. Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and learn more at http://www.hdreach.org Dave Noble, VP Sales North America, Intrinsic ID Daves spectrum of experience across sales, business development and product development makes him a very good fit for this role. His success developing relationships with strategic customers will benefit us at this stage in the companys growth. - Pim Tuyls, CEO, Intrinsic ID Intrinsic ID, the worlds leading provider of digital authentication technology for Internet of Things security and embedded applications, today announced Dave Noble has assumed the role of vice president Sales, North America. Noble, who joined the company in 2018 as senior director for Strategic Sales, is responsible for all sales activity and customer engagement in North America. He reports to Chief Executive Officer Pim Tuyls. Daves spectrum of experience across sales, business development and product development makes him a very good fit for this role, Tuyls said. His success developing relationships with strategic customers will benefit us at this stage in the companys growth. "What makes Intrinsic ID such an attractive opportunity is the strength and diversity of its device authentication and security technology its a compelling value proposition for any semiconductor, IoT or connectivity OEM needing to secure their connected devices," Noble said. The ability of BroadKey and QuiddiKey to deliver a hardware-based root of trust is the security measure that todays IoT ecosystem requires. Nobles most recent prior position was vice president of semiconductors of Consensia, which provides software and services for optimizing digital IC design, design data and IP lifecycle management. Prior roles include serving as vice president, Sales & Operations at Pulsic, where he established and grew the U.S. subsidiary of the UK-based software company. Previously he was chief operating officer for Rhetorical and was responsible for global sales, which he increased more than 200 percent in just 1 year. He also served as CEO of Spider Software, during which time he guided the company through a successful acquisition by Artesyn Technologies. About Intrinsic ID Intrinsic ID is the worlds leading digital authentication company, providing the Internet of Things with hardware-based root-of-trust security via unclonable identities for any IoT-connected device. Based on Intrinsic IDs patented SRAM PUF technology, the companys security solutions can be implemented in hardware or software. Intrinsic ID security, which can be deployed at any stage of a products lifecycle, is used to validate payment systems, secure connectivity, authenticate sensors, and protect sensitive government and military systems. Intrinsic ID technology has been deployed in more than 125 million devices. Award recognition includes the Cyber Defense Magazine InfoSec Award, the IoT Breakthrough Award, IoT Security Excellence Award, the Frost & Sullivan Technology Leadership Award and the EU Innovation Radar Prize. Intrinsic ID security has been proven in millions of devices certified by Common Criteria, EMVCo, Visa and multiple governments. Intrinsic IDs mission: Authenticate Everything. Visit Intrinsic ID online at http://www.Intrinsic-ID.com. Intrinsic ID, the Intrinsic ID logo, BroadKey, QuiddiKey and Authenticate Everything are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intrinsic ID, Inc., and are protected by trademark laws of the United States and other jurisdictions. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. JW Player, an independent video technology company, today announced it will launch a new OTT Apps offering to current and future clients at this years National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas - from April 6 to 11, 2019. OTT Apps from JW Player will provide current and new clients with a cost-effective and fast way to reach their audiences on connected TVs and mobile devices while providing detailed cross-platform reporting and seamless workflow integration. Were thrilled to launch an OTT product that will get clients up and running in weeks, not months, while also supplying media companies with better reporting and monetization, said Neil Deiter, VP Global Partner & Product Alliances at JW Player. Over the next few years, there will be a massive opportunity for media companies to get their content into audiences living rooms while controlling their brand and revenue streams. OTT apps will be available across Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, and Android devices. The companys new offering will also empower brands to create customized viewing experiences as well as maximize reach and revenue with industry-leading monetization and audience engagement tools. Thus far, leading media companies such as Insider Inc. and Gravitas have turned to JW Player to build their OTT products. JW Player will demo its complete OTT solution at this years NAB Show in Las Vegas, NV. The company will be located in the South Hall Upper Level 10121 (SU10121) of the Las Vegas Convention Center. To set up a meeting with a JW Player representative, please contact the company here. About JW Player: JW Player pioneered video on the web over a decade ago and continues to innovate as the worlds largest network-independent platform for video delivery and intelligence. Media companies including Fox, VICE, Insider Inc., and Univision, in addition to hundreds of thousands of creators of all types and sizes, rely on JW Player to deliver and monetize their content across all devices. JW Players massive global footprint of over 2 billion unique devices creates a powerful data graph of unique consumer insights and generates billions of incremental video views. The company is headquartered in New York, with offices in London and Eindhoven, visit http://www.jwplayer.com. Koombea, a leading software development company announced today that they achieved consulting partner status with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Koombea, a leading software development company announced today that they achieved consulting partner status with Amazon Web Services (AWS); with this status, Koombea is now helping customers design and manage software solutions based in the cloud. AWS level of certification demonstrates and validates advanced technical cloud knowledge and skills, creating new offerings that Koombea passes on to clients through its DevOps team. Koombea has deep expertise in the DevOps software engineering realm and embraces communication and effectiveness between project management, business management, and operations and ensure high-quality apps and programming. Koombea prides itself on being the premier partner for companies ranging from start-ups to large, multinational corporations, said Jonathan Tarud, CEO of Koombea. By becoming an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we have reached a new level in our service and are able to provide greater service and development to current and future clients. As an AWS consulting partner, the Koombea DevOps team helps clients maintain apps that have been developed in the cloud, and ensure that those apps are and continue to run efficiently. The DevOps team uses the AWS set-up to set-up: dev environments, test environments, QA environments, and, production environments these allow Koombea and its team to develop and test apps and maintain the high-level of apps that Koombea is known for with its many clients. Koombeas AWS Advanced Consulting Partner team not only oversees the production and maintenance of a new app or website, but they analyze existing platforms and make them more efficient by inspecting and integrating new code. About Koombea Founded in 2007, Koombea is the leading web and mobile app development partner for businesses of all sizes, and across all industries. Headquartered in Miami with offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Barranquilla, Colombia, Koombea has built hundreds of apps, many of which have been acquired by leading enterprises like Google, Motorola Solutions, Demandforce, Facebook, Skype, and others. eRequirement offers us the ability to now turn these missing forms around within hours,cutting our cycle-times down even further - Kris Wong, LGA Paperless Solutions Group (PSG), the premier provider of digitizing processes in the insurance marketplace announced today that Legal & General America (LGA), a top ten U.S. life insurer, has selected its eRequirement platform to digitally collect forms that were incomplete or missing from the submitted life insurance application regardless of whether the application was originally sent via paper or electronically. LGA will be making the platform available for their internal case managers to send these forms directly to customers on the agents behalf, while notifying both the distributor and agent of the action. In the near future, LGA will allow either the distributor and/or agent to digitally send these forms through the eRequirement platform. Our goal at LGA is to provide the best service possible to our distribution partners, agents and to our customers. Missing forms during the application process traditionally add days or weeks onto the underwriting time, said Kris Wong, AVP Operations at LGA. eRequirement offers us the ability to now turn these missing forms around within hours,cutting our cycle-times down even further all while simplifying the process for everyone involved. Jeff McCauley, President at Paperless Solutions Group, stated that, LGAs adoption of eRequirement is a testament to the need our industry has to solve this problem. With more than 50 percent of all paper applications missing forms or partial data, a large number of policies go not taken each year. We are excited to be leading the charge in this change. eRequirement helps both direct marketing organizations and traditional brokerage agencies quickly and easily collect missing application requirement forms digitally by the consumer(s). Supporting multiple workflows, eRequirement allows the carrier, the distributor, or agent to start the request to the consumer while keeping all other parties in the communication loop. eRequirement offers a single and multi-carrier experience, contact PSG for additional details. About Paperless Solutions Group PSG is a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions for the life insurance and financial services industry. Our products and services provide unparalleled automation and integration for the insurance services industry. These innovative offerings conduct millions of transactions annually by enabling the presale, new business and underwriting, point of sale, and post sale support. To learn more about PSG, please visit http://www.psginc.co Media Contact: Paul Carter, Chief Marketing Officer | pcarter (at) psginc (dot) co | 322.331.6262 x 225 About Legal & General America: Legal & General America (LGA) is part of the worldwide Legal & General Group. For nearly 70 years, the Legal & General America companies have been in the business of providing financial protection through life insurance for American families. The Legal & General America companies are Banner Life Insurance Company and William Penn Life Insurance Company of New York. With more than $53 billion in new coverage issued in 2017, LGA is ranked in the top ten of U.S. life insurers and ended 2017 with in excess of $703 billion of coverage in force with 1.3 million U.S. customers. LGA shares Legal & General's independent financial strength ratings: A+ Superior from A. M. Best and AA- Very Strong from Standard and Poor's and Fitch. To learn more, visit lgamerica.com. Media Contact: Michelle Mead, Caliber Corporate Advisers | michelle (at) calibercorporate (dot) com | 888.550.6385 ext. 7 JL Long Middle School's Zoo Crew cares for many animals, including guinea pigs I love teaching others how to best care for animals, and empowering our youth to learn and love animals as well."Joette White, President of Park Cities Pet Sitter Park Cities Pet Sitter is a local dog walking and pet sitting company that regularly looks for ways to serve the community, usually supporting animal welfare related causes. Most recently, Park Cities Pet Sitter has partnered with JL Long Middle School in Lakewood to promote the schools Zoo Crew initiative. Zoo Crew was started four years ago by JL Long science teacher, Michael Jones. When Jones started the club, his goal was to empower the schools 6th-8th grade students to become conservation leaders by addressing animal conservation issues, and to teach them about various animal environments. Zoo Crew now has 60 student members, who work together throughout the school year to love and care for 15 animals that reside at the middle school. Park Cities Pet Sitters President, Joette White, supports JL Longs Zoo Crew by providing habitats, food and supplies for the animals, in addition to helping coordinate the care schedules for the animals by working with students and their parents. Zoo Crews menagerie of animals currently includes semi-aquatic turtles, a tortoise, a corn snake, a ball python, rabbits, guinea pigs and rats. All of the animals are kept in a single private room at the middle school, and different Zoo Crew club students rotate coming before school every morning at specified times to care for the animals. Not only do club members have to learn about each animals preferred ecosystem and their different biological needs, but participation in Zoo Crew also teaches them responsibility, commitment and time management. Whites eldest son is a student at JL Long Middle School, and was the one that initially alerted her to the Zoo Crew organization and thought she and her company should participate by supporting the club. I have been in the pet sitting industry myself for more than 20 years, so I obviously love learning about and caring for animals, said White. But I also love teaching others how to best care for animals, and empowering our youth to learn and love animals as well. All of the Zoo Crew adult volunteers love seeing the students develop bonds with the animals, and enjoy observing how many of them develop deeper interests in science and animal care because of their work with the club. Who knows, maybe some of the students will decide to become veterinarians, biology teachers or other types of pet care professionals simply because their early experience with Zoo Crew awakened their love for animal welfare and conservation! JL Long Middle Schools Zoo Crew welcomes outside financial support to keep the program running and to purchase needed animal supplies. To donate, please visit https://www.paypal.com/fundraiser/charity/3374619?fbclid=IwAR2RlBkPksCipga9G3JzRrc9vMmO6rCwAMvHjmqCWPYdDhP83fe-P9qWZoI. About Park Cities Pet Sitter: PCPSI has served the Dallas, Richardson and Plano areas 7 days a week, 365 days a year since 1992, and was recently named the 2017 Business of the Year by the National Association of Professional Pet Sitters. Dog walking, pet sitting, pet taxis, overnight sitting, pet supply shopping, and dog training are some of the many services PCPSI offers. Park Cities Pet Sitter is bonded and insured, and all sitters are employees--not independent contractors. A manager is on-call 24 hours a day to handle any emergencies. Go to http://www.pcpsi.com to learn more. The MaintenX ladies enjoyed a day celebrating fashion and Easterseals, which supports families that have children with physical and intellectual delays. Giving back to the community is a core part of MaintenX Internationals company culture. That culture expressed itself on Friday when Tampa-based MaintenX, one of the largest facility maintenance and repair companies in the US, was recognized as a Silver Sandal sponsor of the 10th annual A Pair to Remember Luncheon, which raised more than $158,000 for Easterseals Florida. We love to find new ways to give back to deserving organizations in our community, said Bill Schaphorst, MaintenXs VP of Business Development. The services and resources that Easterseals provides to families dealing with disability make a true difference in their quality of life. In all, MaintenX attendees raised more than $7,000 for the event, and also had a great time. One MaintenX attendee won a raffle basket with a variety of gift cards to local restaurants, while another made the winning bid for a live-auction package that included party planning services and signature to the event a pair of shoes. In addition to A Pair to Remember, in the past year MaintenX has supported charitable organizations including the Humane Society of Tampa Bay, Salvation Army Angel Tree, and Skills Center of Tampa. MaintenX is also currently sponsoring a Habitat for Humanity home in Largo, FL, for which the team will supply more than 200 volunteer hours in addition to financial support. When facility managers need help with their building, whether it be scheduled maintenance or emergency repairs, they trust the skilled technicians at MaintenX. To learn more about MaintenX, visit http://www.maintenx.com. ABOUT MAINTENX INTERNATIONAL: MaintenX International is a fully licensed, facilities repair company. As one of the largest national self-performing facility maintenance and repair companies in the U.S., MaintenX has created a wide network of knowledgeable and professional technicians throughout the country. With their team of well-trained technicians, MaintenX self-performs and manages facility maintenance for their clients. In the event there is not a MaintenX technician in an area, the company has established a network of preferred vendor partners throughout the country for continued superior service for their clients. For more than 40 years, MaintenX has been expertly serving multi-location retail stores, restaurant chains and Fortune 500 companies nationwide. Marasco & Nesselbush, a Providence-based law firm specializing in Social Security disability, personal injury, and medical malpractice, is pleased to announce that three attorneys from their firm have been included in the 2019 Edition of The U.S. News & World Report Best Lawyers in America list. Since it was first published in 1983, Best Lawyers has become universally regarded as the definitive guide to legal excellence. Best Lawyers has published their list for over three decades, earning the respect of the profession, the media, and the public as the most reliable, unbiased source of legal referrals. Its first international list was published in 2006 and since then has grown to provide lists in over 75 countries. "Best Lawyers was founded in 1981 with the purpose of highlighting the extraordinary accomplishments of those in the legal profession. After three decades, we are proud to continue to serve as the most reliable, unbiased source of legal referrals worldwide," says CEO Phillip Greer. Lawyers on The Best Lawyers in America list are divided by geographic region and practice areas. They are reviewed by their peers on the basis of professional expertise and undergo an authentication process to make sure they are in current practice and in good standing. Marasco & Nesselbush would like to congratulate the following attorneys named to the U.S. News & World Report 2019 Best Lawyers in America list: Joseph P. Marasco - Personal Injury Litigation - Plaintiffs Donna M. Nesselbush - Personal Injury Litigation - Plaintiffs Mark H. Grimm - Medical Malpractice Law Plaintiffs About Marasco & Nesselbush Marasco & Nesselbush, LLP is a New England law firm dedicated to providing extraordinary legal results in the areas of personal injury, medical negligence, and Social Security disability in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Since 1999, Marasco & Nesselbush has helped thousands of disabled and injured individuals. The main office is located at 685 Westminster Street in Providence Rhode Island. To learn more about Marasco & Nesselbush, LLP, please visit the firm's website at http://www.M-N-Law.com Our History In April of 1999, Joseph Marasco and Donna Nesselbush joined hands as partners to establish the law firm of Marasco & Nesselbush. Today, their unwavering friendship, old-fashioned work ethic, their commitment to each other and to the pursuit of justice, all continue to propel the firm. In 1999, Joe and Donna established the firm with just one legal assistant. Blessed with success, Marasco & Nesselbush has grown impressively over the years, today boasting an accomplished array of attorneys and dedicated support staff. Our Values Hard work, honesty, intelligence and integrity are the hallmarks at Marasco & Nesselbush. Our unwavering commitment is to quality legal work, attention to detail and extraordinary results. Our legal assistants and attorneys treat each client with dignity, respect, kindness and compassion, while we work vigorously to advocate and favorably resolve your case. When we accept a case, we strive for nothing short of extraordinary results for each client. Matts diverse skillset, can-do attitude, and natural acumen for public relations make him a fantastic addition to Red Banyan. Leading strategic communications firm Red Banyan is pleased to announce the hiring and swift advancement of Matthew Carswell as its newest Account Executive. In this position, Carswell will work with the agencys account teams, conducting research, copywriting, media outreach and contributing to the firms daily operations. Originally hired as an Account Coordinator in September of 2018, Carswells strong skillset and professionalism led to his rapid promotion as an Account Executive. Carswell holds a bachelors degree in English with a minor in Communications from Appalachian State University in North Carolina, where he developed dynamic writing abilities and a passion for communications. He also brings to Red Banyan a professional background in the digital marketing and sales industries. We are thrilled to have Matt join our growing team of communications professionals, said Red Banyans Director of Accounts Pamela Armstrong. Matts diverse skillset, can-do attitude, and natural acumen for public relations make him a fantastic addition to Red Banyan. Carswell added: I am very excited to be working with Red Banyan in its Florida headquarters. The agencys dedicated PR professionals take pride in what they do and deliver tangible results to clients every day. I look forward to further developing my skills and help add value for our diverse array of clients. Carswell joined Red Banyan during a period of substantial growth for the company. In addition to the agencys existing offices in Florida and Washington, D.C., Red Banyan recently launched operations in Dallas, TX and Atlanta, GA, as its diverse portfolio of clients expanded throughout 2018. The firms wide-range of services include media relations, crisis communications, reputation management, litigation support and social media management. About Red Banyan Red Banyan is a top public relations agency with clients across the country and internationally. With offices in Florida, Texas, Washington, D.C. and Georgia, Red Banyan combines a substantive understanding of complex issues with the experience and skills needed to execute campaigns that deliver results. Specializing in crisis communications, corporate public relations, government relations, and legal PR, Red Banyan provides an integrated approach to communications rooted in strategy. Learn more at https://www.redbanyan.com, become a fan on the Red Banyan Facebook page and follow the firm on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Telecom API Market Sizing and Analysis This is the 7th Year of Telecom API Market Coverage by Mind Commerce Application Programming Interfaces (API) are a fundamentally recognized term in all IT-centric industries. Virtually all enterprise verticals use APIs to allow them to collaborate more closely with external partners such as application developers and third-party service providers. The mobile communications industry is no different in this respect. Carriers worldwide are recognizing that collaborating with partners using APIs can be used to generate new sources of revenue, drive innovation, increase competitiveness and retain and attract new customers. In collaboration with Ribbon Communications, AT&T has recently launched a Telecom API based Communication Enabled Application Marketplace, which is something that Mind Commerce has recommended since 2011. Ribbon is also working with Koninklijke PTT Nederland (KPN) to support the KPN API Store. For many larger Telecom API market vendors, a substantial proportion of revenue continues to be generated from SIP Trunking in support of their clients VoIP, UC, and other IP-based communications apps and services. However, many smaller players are innovating in areas that have high growth potential such as analytics data, device information, edge computing, and number management for calls, data, and subscribers. Longer term, Mind Commerce sees CSPs leveraging Telecom APIs and related tools to support a variety of industry requirements in which carriers are amply positioned to leverage their market position. Those opportunities include Internet of Things (IoT) authentication, robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms, and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). IoT in particular represents a huge and largely untapped market for CSPs, which Mind Commerce sees emerging once carriers begin to fully leverage 5G for IoT apps and services. Mind Commerce has identified the opportunity for carriers to act as a orchestrator/mediator within the IoT ecosystem. Edge Computing related Telecom API market revenue reaches $395M in North America by 2023. Total global Telecom API related revenue will reach $442.1.1B by 2024. The study covers all major regions. While smallest in revenue at $48.6B by 2024, MEA is fastest growing region at CAGR 31.7%. Telecom API support of IoT remains a high priority cellular operator-only opportunity The Mind Commerce Telecom API Market Sizing and Analysis Report by Technology, Application and Service Type, Stakeholder, User Type, Deployment (Enterprise Hosted, Public Cloud, Private Cloud), and Platform as a Service Type 2019 2024 provides an in-depth assessment of the global Telecom API market, including business models, value chain analysis, operator strategies and a quantitative assessment of the industry from 2019 to 2024. This report evaluates the current state of the market and outlook for the future including analysis and forecasts for the Telecom API market segmented many ways including: Globally, Regionally, and Countries Stakeholder Type (Carriers and Vendors) Network Technology (2G, 3G, LTE, and 5G) API Category (Presence, Location, SCM, etc.) App Developer (Carrier, Enterprise, Long Tail, and Partner) Deployment Type (Enterprise Hosted, Private Cloud, and Public Cloud) Implementation (Development and Set-up) and by Ongoing Operations Solution (AI, Analytics, Blockchain, Edge Computing, Robotics, WebRTC, etc.) Telecom API Market sizing by Service Type includes: Messaging (SMS, MMS, RCS) API, WebRTC API, Payment API, IVR/Voice Store and Voice Control API , LBS and Map API, Subscriber Identity and SSO, Management API, Content Delivery API, M2M IoT API, IoT Platform Specific API, IoT Authentication API, Blockchain Specific API, AI Platform Specific API, Robotics Specific API, Analytics API, Call screening API, Device Information API, QoS (Quality of Service) API, Do not Disturb API, Edge/Fog Device Specific API. Forecasts by Developer Type include: Enterprise Developer, Internal Telecom Developer, Partner Developer, and Long Tail Developer. Forecasts by Deployment include: Enterprise Hosted, Public Cloud, and Private Cloud. Platform as a Service forecasts include: CPaaS and UCaaS. All purchases of Mind Commerce reports includes time with an expert analyst who will help you link key findings in the report to the business issues you're addressing. This needs to be used within three months of purchasing the report. About Mind Commerce Mind Commerce is an ICT strategy company that has focused exclusively on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for over twenty years. Our ICT reports provide key trends, projections, and in-depth analysis for infrastructure, platforms, devices, applications, services, emerging business models and opportunities. The Mind Commerce ICT consulting practice covers many important telecom and IT topics with a concentrated focus on certain key emerging and highly disruptive technology areas including: Artificial Intelligence, Broadband, Cloud Computing, Data Management Analytics, Edge Computing, Immersive Technologies (Augmented and Virtual Reality), Industrial Automation, Internet of Things, and Robotics. We focus on key emerging and disintermediating technology areas for service providers, technology providers, developers (communications, applications, content, and commerce), systems integrators and consultants, government organizations and NGOs, and the financial community. Visit us at https://mindcommerce.com/ MEDIA: We welcome discussions about our research in support of your news article, blog, or professional industry portal. Contact us via email at Contact(at)MindCommerce(dot)com or Call: +1 206-395-9205 Mobilize.Net hosts #CodeParty with Microsoft and other partners for #VS2019 Mobilize.Net today announced support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 with a new Modernization Starter Kit for Visual Studio 2019 and updated VB Upgrade Companion (VBUC). The Mobilize Modernization Starter Kit includes a code analyzer that shows a gap analysis from old Microsoft legacy code to Visual Studio 2019. VBUC supports Visual Studio 2019 solution files ensuring that developers enjoy full productivity. In addition to the code analyzer, Mobilize Modernization Starter Kit provides code, tutorials, technical documentation, and planning documents to help Microsoft customers with legacy code move to web and Azure. Microsoft Visual Studio is hosting a launch event starting at 9AM PT. At 4PM PT, Mobilize, with Microsoft and other technology partners, is sponsoring #CodeParty on Twitch.tv/VisualStudio where there will be prizes, technical demos, live Q&A and interviews with technology influencers. Heres a synopsis of activities for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Launch #VS2019: Mobilize Modernization Starter Kit for Visual Studio 2019 provides a code analyzer to identify technology gaps, an application migration checklist, tutorials and code to build cloud-enabled web apps, tools to calculate the true cost of software rewrites, legacy application guide for CFOs, real customer stories and more. The Modernization Starter Kit for Visual Studio 2019 can be downloaded at https://www.mobilize.net/modernization-starter-kit-vs. #CodeParty is the virtual attendee party for #VS2019 and will feature prizes including Xbox One, Surface Go and more plus interviews, code demonstrations and technical trivia. The party will start at 4PM PT and will be hosted at https://www.twitch.tv/VisualStudio. Visual Studio Marketplace: Mobilize products support Visual Studio 2019 and can be found on the Visual Studio Marketplace at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/MobilizeNET VBUC: New version of VBUC can be downloaded at https://www.mobilize.net/vbuc-free-trial *Contact Mobilize.Net to talk with real customers. About Mobilize.Net Mobilize.Net accelerates and simplifies the transformation of software applications to .NET, web, mobile, and cloud platforms. Millions of developers have used Mobilize.Net technology to successfully modernize billions of lines of code. Mobilize.Net solutions enable customers to reduce risk, cost, and time while moving applications to the platforms businesses demand today. The privately-held Mobilize.Net is based in Bellevue, WA, and is led by former Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Tom Button. For more information, please go to http://www.mobilize.net. # # # Brahman Cattle for Sale - Moreno Ranches Behind our participation in the International Show, there is a lot of hard work and preparation. Moreno Ranches is announcing successes with respect to Brahman heifers at the 2019 ABBA International Brahmah Show. The show is one of the best national events to show Brahman cattle at https://brahman.org/2019-international-show/. "Behind our participation in the International Show, there is a lot of hard work and preparation, explained Kelvin Moreno, director of Moreno Ranches. We know how much we prepare for this competition, and how much it has cost us to get to where we are. All of this effort makes us proud to know the respect people have for our genetics. It is a great pleasure for us to share with all those who visit us in Houston, and more importantly, that they are all part of our celebration of our 200 years of family tradition. Individuals who were not able to attend the show in Houston can browse the photos and livestock information at https://www.morenoranches.com/. Persons who would like to know more about the Ranch's Red Brahman Heifers, can visit https://www.morenoranches.com/females/red-brahman-females/ or contact the Ranch for either a Ranch tour (in either the Florida or Texas locations), or upcoming shows and sales. SHOWCASING AT THE ABBA INTERNATIONAL SHOW Here is background on this release. The ABBA (American Brahman Breeders Association) International Show in Houston is one of the most most important cattle events in the world, and is considered one of the most important events for all producers of Brahman cattle, including Brahman genetic products such as semen or embryos. The ABBA show is an event in which breeders can demonstrate the results of the hard work that has gone into advancing the Brahman breed. Here are the results of the ABBA show with specific reference to Brahman heifers from Moreno Ranches. On February 28, the Brahman heifer show took place in Houston. Moreno Ranches exhibited a total of 54 Brahman heifers in the following divisions; 25 Red Brahman heifers competing in 14 different classes and 29 Gray Brahman heifers competing in 12 different classes. The friendly competition is very important. Behind every heifer that enters the ring, there is a tremendous amount of work and preparation on the part of the entire Moreno Ranches team. To see those animals in the ring demonstrating all of their qualities is what motivates the Ranch to continue the challenging task of preparing for these competitions. The results, whether positive or negative, serve to continue seeking improvement each day. For employees of the Ranch, something that cant be overlooked is the support of all the families, customers, and friends who visit the employees during the event to appreciate Moreno's advanced genetics. ABOUT MORENO RANCHES Moreno Ranches is a top producer of Brahman cows for sale. Customers come to the company for genetically superior heifers for sale and Brahman semen (seed stock) as well as Brahman embryos. The company produces both Brahman cows and calves for sale, including for use as show cattle or to produce Brahman F1 hybrids. Visit the companys website to browse stock. The company is a trusted source of Brahman cows whether a buyer is in Florida, Texas, or Louisiana Latin America, or anywhere in the world. Web. http://www.morenoranches.com/ Tel. 863 444 8745 eCommerce Businesses Have a Hard Time Managing Social Media Despite widespread familiarity with social media, many businesses find marketing themselves on social platforms a challenge. According to a recent survey, one-third of eCommerce businesses find social media more difficult to manage than any other marketing channel, including SEO, PPC, email, and offline advertising. DesignRush.com, a B2B marketplace that connects brands with leading digital agencies, conducted a survey of over 150 eCommerce businesses to learn about the marketing channels they used. Respondents were asked about which channel gave them the highest ROI, where they invest the most marketing dollars, and where they experience the most difficulty when it comes to marketing channel management. Social media took the top spot in all three of these categories. Why is Social Media Marketing So Difficult? The low costs and high ROI of social media marketing make it an irresistible channel for businesses looking for growth. That said, social platforms require consistent engagement in order to be used effectively. Since the ad targeting of social media is so precise, creating the right custom audiences on an ad campaign can prove to be a major challenge for many businesses. In addition, the daily posting of content and interacting with other users on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other popular platforms, demands significant time and energy. This may explain with two-thirds of businesses surveyed partnered with a marketing agency of some kind, primarily with social media agencies. Not All Businesses Struggle with Social Media Although social media was reported as the most difficult channel to manage over any other channel, many businesses (43%) stated it was the easiest for them. The fact that 75% of all eCommerce businesses said that social media is either the easiest or the most difficult marketing channel to deal with highlights a strong polarization within social media management. To some companies, social media is a natural part of their business model, and managing their social sites is an integral part of the work day. Other businesses, struggling to stay visible on social media, have to seek out solutions for their management challenges. Agencies as a Social Media Solution Its becoming increasing popular to share social login credentials with a marketing agency. Over 46% of businesses surveyed plan on having an agency manage their social media in 2019, up 2% from 2018. Even those that find social media easy to manage often work with marketing agencies to boost their online footprint and strengthen their connections customers. All in all, this study found that social media agencies are worth looking into for eCommerce businesses, whether or not they have a hard time with the channel. Read the full report here: https://www.designrush.com/trends/most-difficult-marketing-channel-for-ecommerce-companies About DesignRush.com DesignRush.com is a B2B marketplace connecting brands with the best local and global agencies. Users can compare agencies by expertise, size, rates, and reviews, in categories including Digital Agencies, Logo Design, Branding, Digital Marketing, Website Design, App Development, eCommerce Web Design Companies, and more. New patented design of the Air Mag Nozzle gives it the highest efficiency and longest working distance of any air nozzle currently known When blowing with compressed air it is still common to see air blasting out of an open pipe or tube because it is easy and cheap. Yet this method is less efficient and can be unsafe for operators. Recently, Nex Flow had a breakthrough in nozzle design and patented the specially engineered Air Mag Air Nozzle. It is currently the unit with the highest force/SCFM available in the market with improvements from the standard bullet and traditional cone shaped designs - https://www.nexflow.com/air-mag-air-nozzle/ Brief Background Compressed air is a subject of great mystery to many factory operations. It is a costly utility; however, its importance is often ignored because air is practically invisible to the eyes. When blowing with open tube or pipe air exits with turbulence, thus taking away the high-pressure effect with force dissipating after a very short distance. Often times - blowing without engineered accessories also violates safety standards with noise level well above 85 dbA. This is why various engineered nozzles were designed. There are basically two types of nozzles available - an older cone shaped design where air exits from the bottom of the cone and a bullet shaped design. The Air Mag modifies the bullet shaped design improving on safety, efficiency and durability. The Air Mag Enhancement Although both the cone and bullet designs reduce energy consumption, noise level and meet the OSHA dead-end pressure requirements - many issues still arise especially with the bullet design. With thorough research - Nex Flow Air Products Corp. developed the Air Mag nozzle range to improve the following features: 1. Thick fins added to the outer body with calculated geometry to make the nozzle more safe and sturdy without sacrificing blow-off force and efficiency. The fins protect the nozzle making it longer lasting and also prevent exiting air from being accidentally blocked by the operators hand. 2. Compact 1-piece design for greater strength. This takes away the chance of breaking and exploding from the traditional 2-piece design. 3. Better engineered surface to boost the Coanda effect providing superior laminar flow and high velocity at less air consumption. Tested to provide between 10-20% more force per unit of air consumed compared to other bullet shaped nozzles. 4. Patented hole design to minimize turbulence and maximize efficiency allowing exit air to reach target with zero drag. The design allows for a wider flow profile with force equal to competitive nozzles even when blowing at a greater distance. 5. Widely spaced fins for easy cleaning and to minimize dusts and other particles from collecting on the unit. At the same time limiting maintenance requirements to work at optimum for longer. As nozzles are not created equal. Factories that use engineered air nozzles are shy to replace whatever is currently used because alternates often do not perform at the same level. The Air Mag nozzle series are designed with the goal of getting the nozzle to perform equal to or better than any alternative engineered nozzle at a competitive and reasonable price. In cases, where drilled or open pipes are still used for blowing with compressed air, any type of air nozzles will definitely help with energy savings, compliance with necessary standards and noise level reduction. About Nex Flow Nex Flow Air Products Corp. (http://www.nexflow.com) was founded by Les Rapchak with the goal of clearing up many misconceptions and often incorrect concepts in using compressed air for blow off, cleaning, drying, cooling and moving. To assist in achieving this goal, Les also posts articles and educational videos on LinkedIn. The company has trained representatives globally to assist in all compressed air applications. Nex Flow also engage in ongoing research with educational institutions to improve the technology and develop new products as well as to create a more knowledgeable next generation in the use of compressed air. Nex Flow is trusted around the globe by many major companies with trained representatives to assist through various distribution channels. Our new product release cycle allows us to build cutting-edge products and features while communicating the status of releases and giving customers the confidence they need to invest in our platform. Nexcess, a global cloud hosting provider, today announced a new product life cycle strategy to accelerate innovation and give customers access to cutting-edge web hosting services. Nexcess often introduces hosting platforms and features that combine the newest technology with unbeatable support and reliability. From today, all Nexcess product releases will follow a predictable life cycle with public beta, limited availability, and full public availability phases. Nexcess' product release life cycle gives hosting customers access to products and features while they are in development. In the public beta phase, upcoming releases are tested and improved before universal deployment, ensuring a seamless roll-out when they enter limited availability and public availability, at which point they are production-ready and fully supported by the Nexcess team. Web hosting technology evolves rapidly, but web hosting customers need predictability. They depend on their website or eCommerce store, which represents a substantial investment, said Chris Wells, President and CEO of Nexcess. Our new product release cycle allows us to build cutting-edge products and features while communicating the status of releases and giving customers the confidence they need to invest in our platform. Nexcess has also introduced a retirement protocol with a clear roadmap and commitments. The company will provide at least six months notice before retiring major hosting products, provide support until the day of retirement, and offer comparable alternatives where possible. In the last year, Nexcess introduced an array of new platforms and features, including auto-scaling cloud hosting for WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and ExpressionEngine. Nexcesss commitment to a predictable release cycle allows the company to innovate while providing customers with strong guarantees about the long-term stability of their hosting platform. About Nexcess Nexcess is a Southfield, Michigan-based managed cloud and managed application hosting company founded in 2000, with data centers distributed throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia. Nexcess offers a variety of performance-optimized and scalable managed cloud and bare metal hosting solutions for Magento, WordPress, Drupal, WooCommerce, ExpressionEngine, Craft CMS, and OroCRM. For more information, visit http://www.nexcess.net. Nimiq recently announced their partnership with WEG Bank AG and Agora.Trade to create a groundbreaking crypto-to-fiat bridge. This strategic collaboration has been further strengthened by Nimiq acquiring a 9.9% stake in WEG Bank. As a result of this partnership and acquisition, Nimiq will continue dedicating their profound technical expertise to execute the projects blueprint for Nimiq OASIS, an innovative crypto-to-fiat bridge. This consumer-driven fin-tech solution is focused on delivering a fast and easy way to buy or sell cryptocurrency for fiat currency. It aims to initially connect a) different cryptocurrencies markets--via non-custodial exchange Agora.Trade, to b) the traditional banking network--via WEG Bank. Value transfers between the two ecosystems are enabled by Nimiq OASIS making fiat currency blockchain compatible. Furthermore, Nimiqs solution allows for the processing of transfers without a single, centralized intermediary (like an exchange or payment processor) controlling the two assets being exchanged, and without entrusting the private keys of the crypto asset to a third party. Nimiq OASIS has the potential to be a substantial win-win for Nimiq as well as WEG Bank, Agora.Trade, the wider crypto market, and other progressive thinking financial institutions. Nimiq OASIS is focused on serving the fin-tech, traditional financial institution, and crypto markets by delivering a more cost-efficient and convenient way to buy and sell cryptocurrencies with a bank account. This could have a direct impact on: Retail banking customers at SEPA instant enabled banks, who want a quick and convenient way to buy and sell crypto assets for fiat currency. Current crypto-payment processor businesses, such as Bitpay, which are widely used by merchants accepting crypto as a payment option. $2.8 billion stable coin market. Over-the-Counter (OTC) market, which is reportedly three times bigger than the crypto exchange market. WEG Bank and Agora.Trade are scheduled to be the first bank and cryptocurrency exchange to benefit from Nimiqs technical expertise, with end of 2019 as a target for the first such fiat-to-crypto transaction. Initially, support will be offered for cryptocurrency transactions in BTC, ETH and NIM, with fiat currency support being offered for the Euro. Nimiqs vision for Nimiq OASIS beyond that is to support other fiat currencies like the USD and additional crypto assets as other banks and cryptocurrency platforms can also be enabled to interface with Nimiq OASIS and provide their customer base with a convenient and cheap way to buy or sell different cryptocurrencies with a bank account. Recently, Nimiq began collaboration with the Binance-owned Trust Wallet, with founder Viktor Radchenko already expressing a deep interest in Nimiq OASIS. Elion Chin, co-founder of Nimiq stated: With Litecoin and Tokenpay as existing shareholders, new clients including Lisk, and other key prospective partnerships, we believe WEG Bank is on the way to reinventing itself as a bank of the future. Its existing stable real estate banking business gives it the stability it needs, while thoughtful expansion into the crypto space sets the stage for modern growth and innovation. Matthias von Hauff, CEO of WEG Bank AG added: "For the past 12 months, we have been looking at various ways to expand our core banking activities into the blockchain community. With Nimiq, we have been able to develop not only a landmark payment interface which has the potential to revolutionize the way we deal with cryptocurrencies, but also an innovative and powerful partnership." Nimiq Nimiq is a decentralized payment system in which the NIM token is transacted as a store and transfer of value. The cutting-edge browser-first blockchain approach means that users can intermediary-free, directly connect to the blockchain with nothing more than a browser. This installation-free, it just works characteristic is combined with a dedication to ease of use and simplicity. NIM is a cryptocurrency for the masses and not just the technologically savvy. The Nimiq ecosystem also has a diverse range of apps, many of which are supported by Team Nimiq. WEG Bank AG WEG Bank AG was established in 2015 by founder and CEO Matthias von Hauff. It is a market-leading institution in German real estate banking for HOA loans and is set to expand its business operations into the retail, corporate account and cryptocurrency sectors. Twenty cryptocurrency projects are due to be selected for corporate accounts with the bank this year, with Lisk as first of them already onboarded. Agora.Trade Agora.Trade is a Swiss-Maltese decentralized cryptocurrency exchange lead by Forbes 30 under 30 listmaker Reto Trinkler. The platform has also partnered with WEG Bank through the Nimiq OASIS initiative. Nimiq and Trinkler Software are also collaborating on research to develop a new proof-of-stake consensus algorithm which performs close to the theoretical maximum for a single chain. The first results of this research led to the Albatross consensus algorithm. Contact: Ricardo Barquero | Email: press@nimiq.com | Website: nimiq.com By utilizing Noble Systems omnichannel inbound/outbound contact technologies, workforce management, conversational analytics, and self-service solutions, companies are empowered to manage the full spectrum of customer communications. Noble Systems Corporation, a global leader in omnichannel contact center technologies, today announced that it would display its analyst-recommended Gamification and omnichannel contact center solutions in booth #534 at the upcoming 2019 HDI Conference & Expo, April 7 12, 2019 at The Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida. Noble Systems award-winning Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) and Gamification solutions motivate and incentivize agents to deliver efficient, meaningful interactions, which solidifies customer loyalty. Using game mechanics, Noble Gamification drives desired behaviors by leveraging science-based motivational techniques to train, provide ongoing feedback to and reward agents for improved business outcomes. WHO: Noble Systems (BOOTH 534) WHEN: April 7 12, 2019 WHERE: HDI Conference & Expo 2019, Rosen Shingle Creek, Orlando, FL With the contact center space constantly evolving, it is crucial for companies to make sure their employees have the resources to adapt. Contact centers are notorious for their high turnover rates, with numbers ranging anywhere from 25% to 40% depending on the industry and time of year. Having an engaged workforce is necessary for agents to develop and grow and in turn, provide better customer experiences. By implementing a tool like Noble Gamification, employees are empowered to strive for success through engaging contests, recognition and rewards. Noble Systems award-winning Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) and Gamification solutions motivate and incentivize agents to deliver efficient, meaningful interactions, which solidifies customer loyalty. Using game mechanics, Noble Gamification drives desired behaviors by leveraging science-based motivational techniques to train, provide ongoing feedback to and reward agents for improved business outcomes. The right solutions can help manage the omnichannel experience and ultimately increase customer engagement. By utilizing Noble Systems omnichannel inbound/outbound contact technologies, workforce management, conversational analytics, and self-service solutions, companies are empowered to manage the full spectrum of customer communications. About HDI For over 30 years, HDI has partnered with thousands of organizations to improve their customer service and service management performance by educating their people, elevating their processes, and empowering their strategy. From C-level professionals to directors, managers, and frontline staff, HDI is the definitive source of industry information, leadership and performance planning. Through events, certification and training, consulting, membership and industry resources, HDI aims to transform service and support organizations and reimagine their approach to delivering exceptional service and value. Learn more at http://www.ThinkHDI.com. HDI is organized by UBM, which in June 2018 combined with Informa PLC to become a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B Events organizer in the world. To learn more and for the latest news and information, visit http://www.ubm.com and http://www.informa.com. About Noble Systems Noble Systems Corporation is a global leader in the customer communications industry, providing innovative solutions for Contact Center, Workforce Engagement, and Analytics technologies. Tens of thousands of agents at client installations worldwide use Noble platforms to manage millions of customer contacts each day. Noble offers a unified suite of inbound, outbound, and omnichannel contact processing, strategy planning, resource management, and compliance tools for companies of all sizes. Our premise, cloud, and innovative premise/cloud hybrid platforms include ACD, predictive dialing, blended processing, recording and monitoring, IVR, messaging, interaction analytics, workforce management, and gamification. With a portfolio of 185+ patents and growing, Noble leads the way in pioneering solutions for the contact center market. For more information, contact Lee Allum at 1.888.8NOBLE8 or visit http://www.noblesystems.com. Tracey Hanover, Senior Director, Advocacy Relations, Novocure; Robert Alec Swayngham, Winner, What Empowers You Award (2019-I); Barbara Swayngham; Dellann Elliott Mydland, President & CEO of EBCI The EndBrainCancer Initiative GBM Patient & TOGETHER Day was a spectacular and unique blend of information and inspiration. The Day was filled with positive connection to the community, individuals and researchers who are committed to ending this terrible disease. - Robin Shapiro, Event Speaker The EndBrainCancer Initiative recently hosted its first ever GBM Patient & TOGETHER Day on Friday, March 15th at the Bellevue Club in Bellevue, Washington. EBCI and its sponsors and partners hosted current and past brain cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, and families in a special event focused on uplifting and inspiring those impacted by brain tumors and brain cancer. The afternoon program flowed with opportunities for participants to dine and enjoy special services such as massages, makeovers, and photography sessions and featured a variety of speakers who shared inspirational insights through stories of their personal experiences with brain cancer. As a new event initiative, GBM Patient & TOGETHER Day enjoyed both local and national underwriting support. National sponsors included Presenting Sponsor, AbbVie, and Silver Advocacy Sponsor Novocure. Local sponsors included The Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) Proton Therapy Center, Seattle Children's, Hospital, Research and Foundation, and Comcast Spotlight Seattle. Education and awareness roundtables at the event were underwritten by a grant from Genentech. Opening the program, Dellann Elliott Mydland, president and co-founder of the EndBrainCancer Initiative, sounded a theme of celebration and hope addressing the patients and caregivers present, Today, we're here to celebrate you! Various brain cancer patients and survivors were introduced including Sam Staatz, a 20+ year survivor of brain cancer, also a patient survivorship ambassador with the EndBrainCancer Initiative. Ashley, a current brain cancer patient, shared her journey publicly as one of the event's speakers. She relayed her process through diagnosis at age 54, surgery and chemo, the extreme difficulties in sharing the news with family, the major adjustments to life, and her recent treatment experience with the Optune device (an externally worn device approved by the FDA in 2011) and now a Standard of Care treatment option for patients diagnosed with GBM. Expressing her hope and optimism, she pointed (with lightness) to the Chicago Cubs winning the pennant after 108 years as a hopeful inspiration for doubling her own lifespan, and then frankly concluding, My life with GBM is very different, but it is very good. I choose to enjoy it. I fill my life with good things and positivity. I love my faith. I love my family. I love my life. I intend to keep it that way. Robin Shapiro (Board Chair of The Washington State Health Advocacy Association (WASHAA), another of the event's speakers, commented afterward, The value in GBM Patient & Together Day was in meeting people who are not just surviving, but thriving. It was inspiring to see those who are managing GBM with grace and humor. I was also grateful to know about new therapies that didnt exist just 10 years ago are now giving patients a new lease on life. The event highlighted women leaders in the Puget Sound area who have been personally impacted by brain cancer. Julie Prince (Wealth Management Advisor, Prince Financial Services, Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company) described the heartbreaking experience of walking beside a colleague who contracted GBM brain cancer, but also the silver lining in how that person resisted a two week prognosis and went on to travel and seek out advanced treatment and trials and build lasting memories for her children, living a full year longer than expected. GBM Patient & TOGETHER Day also sounded a strong call to action in eradicating this disease. Dellann Elliott Mydland sounded that theme in explaining the work of The EndBrainCancer Initiative (EBCI) calling for access for patients to advanced treatments, comprehensive genomic testing of tumor tissue (with related approved insurance payment), to second opinions, and to clinical trials. She highlighted two new related EBCI initiatives called First Step and Team Up developed to advance the EBCI's goals to increase survivorship and find a cure. Stephen Hough, representing the presenting sponsor Abbvie, echoed this call to action, It really does motivate and it makes us think we can all do better for this. It would be really nice to see GBM turn into one of those areas like what happened with HIV which was a death sentence, and now people are living with it like asthma. I am ever hopeful that in future years that we will see major advancements like we've seen in some of the other cancers. My hat's off to all the companies that are bringing things forward. We need this. Patients need this. And frankly our family members need it. The event included two panel discussions with speakers and several breakout sessions with patients who gave input about their needs, direction of research, and important priorities. EBCI also presented its first What Empowers You" Award to the 2019 (EBCI plans to present two of these awards this year) winner, Robert Alec Swayngham who was on hand with his wife, Barbara, visiting from Alaska. Alec's story stood out after review of many nominations of brain cancer patients who shared stories of the ways they are letting their passion lead their lives while undergoing treatment. This 2019 award program is cosponsored by AbbVie and Novocure. Other companies donated (or offered at a reduced cost) resources and services for the event. They include Nieman Marcus offering Jo Malone body products and makeovers using Chantecaille makeup products, The Dream Clinic offering massage services, Charles Cutugno Photography offering portrait photos and prints, and Cavalier Films conducting interviews. Many of the patients present worked in the past with The EndBrainCancer Initiative and its Direct Connect program. Stephen Hough of Abbvie additionally remarked, I can' say enough about what EBCI is doing with its Direct Connect program because you just have no idea when you have this happen in your life where to go. And to have a group that really focuses on hooking you up with the appropriate and second opinions and Brain Tumor Centers of Excellence is what we all need. So, my hat's off to the EBCI. Susan Kellner, a brain cancer patient / survivor (and volunteer social media manager with EBCI) described her experience with EBCI and their Direct Connect program and her commitment, I will forever be indebted to Dellann and Chris Elliott (founders of EBCI) for their vision for the brain tumor community. That vision pulled me out of a very dark and lonely tunnel when I needed it the most. I will never get tired of helping EBCI be known in every doctor's office around the world. The 2020 GBM Patient & TOGETHER Day will be held on Friday, March 6, 2020. About the EndBrainCancer Initiative The EndBrainCancer Initiative (EBCI, formerly the Chris Elliott Fund) is a national brain cancer and brain tumor patient advocacy and services organization and 501(c) 3 social enterprise with offices in Redmond, Washington. Established in 2002 and now celebrating 17 years of service, EBCI is committed to finding a cure for brain cancer and bringing HOPE to the lives of patients and their families through its programs: Direct Connect Patient Support and Services Program Brain Tumor Disease Education, Awareness, and Outreach Program Brain Tumor Patient Advocacy and Access First Step Initiative Team Up Initiative Since its founding, EBCI has helped thousands of patients, caregivers, and their families and has become a credible and trusted resource at all levels in the brain cancer treatment community from patients to research institutions to pharmaceutical and regulatory entities advocating on the National and State level for the approval and reimbursement of new therapies for cancer patients. EBCI also participates as the Patient Voice in clinical trial design, an example can be seen in CNS Oncology (Link to Article). The EndBrainCancer Initiative (EBCI) also participates in a program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute (NCI), Center for Cancer Research (CCR), Neuro-Oncology Branch (NOB) called NCI-CONNECT (Comprehensive Oncology Network Evaluating Rare CNS Tumors). The program aims to advance the understanding of rare adult central nervous system (CNS) cancers by establishing and fostering patient-advocacy-provider partnerships and networks to improve approaches to care and treatment. EBCI supports about 900+ patients, caregivers and families, free of charge annually through its Direct Connect Program, and provides Education/Awareness/Outreach to over 8.7 million annually, including members of the Brain Tumor Community. EBCI is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), Society for Neuro-Oncology (SNO), American Association of Neuroscience Nurses, American Association for Cancer Research, and Life Sciences Washington, among other organizations. If we can help, please contact us at WeCare@EndBrainCancer.org or 425.444.2215. To support EBCIs efforts, programs, and free services, provide a gift today at http://www.endbraincancer.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/EndBrainCancer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EndBrainCancer/ Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChrisElliottfundOrg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chris-elliott-fund/ Creating value for the customers is what the company is rooted in and continues to strive for on a daily basis. Whether that is through creating protective medical device packaging that is intuitively designed to minimize errors during procedures, or injection molded and thermoformed food and retail packaging that excites consumers. Some examples of their work include the Gillette Fusions with Flexball, Justins Snack Packs, implant screws by Wright Medical. We are excited to work with Placon as they continue to grow and expand their business. We are look forward to providing a solution that allows them to better serve their customers, said Neal Goffman, COO at Vanguard Software. Placon will be implementing the Vanguard Predictive Planning for demand planning solution in phase 1, with goals to increase forecast accuracy, and eventually reach full automation in later phases. With Vanguard's legacy in demand planning, Placon immediately saw the value Vanguard brought to the table, and signed with much excitement towards the next step of the implementation process. To learn more about how our demand planning solution could help your business, contact us. About Placon Placon's main concern is customer satisfaction and profitability. For 50 years Placon has been successfully combining experience, new materials, and technology to deliver above customer expectations, ensuring satisfaction and driving profits in the retail, food, and medical device packaging markets. About Vanguard Software Vanguard Software introduced its first product for decision support analysis in 1995. Today, companies across every major industry and more than 60 countries rely on Vanguard Softwares Predictive Planning, an IBP Platform. Vanguard Software is based in Cary, North Carolina. Audits can be fearful things, but often, they can be triggered by avoidable 'red flags'. According to a March 19, 2013 article by CNBC (What the IRS Doesn't Want You to Know About Audits), income underreporting or even rental income can be a red flag. Jeff Schnepper of MSN Money wrote a different perspective in his December 28, 2012 article, 7 Taxes the IRS Won't Make You Pay, claiming that there are some things the IRS just doesn't expend energy to go after on tax returns. Platinum Tax Defenders offers five tips on what can (or often won't) be a trigger for an IRS audit, though it may be an idea for taxpayers to obtain help from a tax resolution service with a tax attorney in especially complicated cases. First, there are the basics of what triggers IRS interest, according to CNBC. While home office deductions may have been an automatic 'red flag' in the past, these have become more common and therefore not as automatic for an IRS letter. However, continual losses could still be noticeable, as well as unusual and large deductions, and self-employment if the owner receive(s) cash or unreported payments from clients or customers. If some income has been overlooked or forgotten, not to worry - penalties assessed can be waived. The waiving of penalties and interest can constitute the bulk of the appeal for obtaining a payment plan or setting up a tax relief agreement. Second, it's not always necessary to have boxes of documents for corroboration, says CNBC. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have copies of voided checks, or third-party verifiable receipts. However, it's also possible to have financial statements reconstructed, and in some cases, oral testimony can be allowed. Of course, it does not hurt to establish a willingness to work with the IRS requests. Third, there is usually a chance of having a decision appealed, if it is not favorable or doesn't seem reasonable. IRS agents have time deadlines and upper management, the same as in any other organization. Fourth, according to Schnepper of MSN Money, the IRS seems to consider some things of minimal importance. Employers can rest easy, apparently, if they compensate their employees via paid lunches (or host group meals), so long as these are irregular enough to be genuine. This is called the occasional basis test. Employees might not know that their employee discounts escape taxation, so long as the product or service is also publicly offered. The value of food, gifts, and a detailed separation of personal and private telephone use is quite difficult to add up, so it's good for taxpayers that the IRS has discontinued the need for keeping strict records of what calls are for business, and which are for personal use. Fifth, according to a March 2013 Kiplinger Article (IRS Audit Red Flags: The Dirty Dozen), it would be unwise to claim 100% business use of a vehicle. This is because of the very human reason that often, business-worthy assets become backup items for running personal errands. Also, it's good to remember that claiming standard mileage disallows the use of maintenance and insurance bills, so take that into account when reviewing records for tax deductions. What can be even more heartening is that even the IRS itself can get into audit trouble. According to a February 19, 2013 Washington Times report (IRS Audit Finds Millions in Waste), a government auditor said Tuesday that the Internal Revenue Service wasted millions of dollars on Blackberrys and wireless modem air cards that employees don't need or even use. After the IRS spent over $11 million on employee air cards and smartphones in 2011, 68 of the Blackberrys and 45 of the aircards went unused by IRS employees. Since no one is exempt from the possibility of an audit, Platinum Tax Defenders encourages taxpayers to have their returns reviewed by a tax resolution office if the IRS sends a letter. Platinum Tax Defenders, begun by President and CEO Sherri Gastelum, operates with a team of at least 10 professionals. (Sherri Gastelum has twenty years' experience in areas of corporate, personal, business, and tax queries.) Taxpayers can bring their audit, back taxes, and Appeals issues to tax resolution specialists, who include a tax attorney, a qualified CPA, and at least one ex-IRS agent. Free consultations often range between 25 to 40 minutes long. For more information from Platinum Tax Defenders on tax-related issues, call 1-800-991-3242. The last-mile delivery challenge has forced retailers and other businesses to look at new options Point Pickup Technologies, a firm offering a single platform that solves same-day delivery challenges for businesses of all sizes and types, announced today that its CEO Tom Fiorita will lead a roundtable discussion on Thursday, April 4 at Home Delivery World, the industrys most important retail logistics conference and exhibition. Point Pickup will also have a presence in the exposition hall at booth #417, where visitors can learn more about the companys smart platform, last-mile options and precision delivery network. The roundtable discussion, titled Carrier engagement understanding the differences between the way carriers operate and how we can utilize their strengths, will include insights from some of the industrys most knowledgeable thought leaders. The last-mile delivery challenge has forced retailers and other businesses to look at new options, said Fiorita. The last mile has always been highly fragmented. By utilizing a smart platform which can precisely match delivery criteria with the most appropriate member of our diverse driver network, we are able to solve this challenge with a reliable, repeatable and highly scalable service. Point Pickups platform, used by some of the top retailers in the U.S., goes beyond the traditional closest match approach of last-mile providers with a precision matching platform that finds not just the closest, but the most appropriate driver and vehicle for each delivery. The smart platform standardizes access to every type and size of vehicle, and eliminates many of the unnecessary and costly steps in the complex last-mile delivery supply chain. Fiorita also joined a logistics panel discussion at the Stifel 2019 Transportation & Logistics Conference in February. Fiorita has been widely quoted in industry publications including CustomerThink, and most recently in the Wall Street Journal offering his insights into solving the biggest last-mile delivery challenges in the industry. Home Delivery World 2019 conference and exhibition will be held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from April 3-5. About Point Pickup Point Pickup (PPUP) brings smart technology to last-mile delivery with a uniquely precise and scalable solution that is being used by some of the country's largest retailers. The technology platform, along with Point Pickup's diverse driver network, solves the greatest challenges of the growing same-day delivery market. Point Pickup is the only platform offering pre-scheduled deliveries with favorite drivers while accommodating on-demand requests. PPUP's same-day platform saves time and money by eliminating the need for a middle layer, offering sophisticated matching criteria and optimized routing and an API that integrates with e-commerce systems. For more information, visit http://www.pointpickup.com. Power Knot LLC designs and manufactures the LFC biodigester, a machine that digests waste food. Resort managers and owners are especially concerned about reducing their carbon footprint, and the proper disposal of food waste is one area where they can make a big difference, At this years Hotelier Maldives GM Forum, Iain Milnes, president of Power Knot, will explain why the proper disposal of waste food is essential for hotels and resorts that are committed to sustainable operations and a low carbon footprint. High-end tourist destinations, which are often located on or near pristine ecological environments, are among the top producers of food waste statistics show that some resorts generate more than 3lbs (1.5kg) of food waste per meal. The GM Forumthe only dedicated gathering for hotel managers in the Maldivesis an annual gathering of general managers and hospitality industry stakeholders. This year, presentations and panel discussions at the GM Forum are themed around hotel safety and security, closing the skills gap in the hospitality industry, and best practices for sustainable tourism. Storing and disposing of food waste is a messy and expensive headache for food service managers at luxury resorts, and traditional approaches to the disposal of waste food can damage a resorts brand reputation and run afoul of increasingly stringent local regulations. During his presentation to GM Forum attendees, Milnes will outline best practices for the disposal of waste food onsite that support a resorts triple bottom line corporate sustainability objectives of people, planet, and profit. Resort managers and owners are especially concerned about reducing their carbon footprint, and the proper disposal of food waste is one area where they can make a big difference, said Iain Milnes, president of Power Knot. A resort that sends 500 kg of waste food per day to a landfill generates 750 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year and this does not factor in labor and transportation costs, nor the unsightly presence and odor of food-waste bins near a kitchen. Onsite food-waste processing is achievable with zero impact on kitchen operations and can pay for itself within months. To reduce food waste in the Maldives, Power Knot is partnering with Dusit Thani Maldives, a luxury resort on Mudhdoo Island in Baa Atoll. The resort has a firm commitment to sustainable operations; it recently unveiled rooftop solar panels on its main buildings and installed a Power Knot LFC biodigester for its waste food. These initiatives reduce the resorts carbon footprint, set a standard for sustainable tourism, and contribute toward the Maldives sustainable development goals. Despite our unique vulnerabilities as a Small Island Developing State, we constantly strive to integrate the three pillars of sustainable development through innovative strategies and empowering people. Building resilience and adapting to the impacts of climate change on our fragile environment depends on the holistic engagement of all national stakeholders and global partners, said Thoriq Ibrahim, minister of environment and energy, Republic of the Maldives. Power Knots Ian Milnes will present to GM Forum attendees at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 3, 2019. About Power Knot Power Knot LLC designs and manufactures the LFC biodigester, a machine that digests waste food. The LFC biodigester, which can be integrated into any commercial kitchen, reduces the expense, inconvenience, mess, and carbon footprint of disposing of waste food that would otherwise be hauled to a landfill. With installations globally, Power Knot offers the most technologically advanced machines available today and is the market leader, offering six biodigester models that process from 25 kg to 1000 kg of waste food per day. Power Knot designs, develops, and manufactures its products in Silicon Valley, California. For more information, visit http://www.powerknot.com. Channel Partners has announced that Powernet is a finalist in the inaugural Channel Partners Excellence in Digital Services Awards. Powernet is a finalist for the White Hat Award & a double finalist for the Master of Disaster Award. Winners will be announced during a networking reception held as a part of the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, April 9-12, at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The Excellence in Digital Service Awards, presented for the first time this year, recognize partners who deliver stellar business outcomes for their clients. Recognition is provided in 10 categories, with two additional awards presented for special achievement among all applicants. The 10 categories are: Cloud Builder Award for excellence in helping customers cloudify their business Vanguard Award for partners that turned their digital transformation expertise inward to revitalize their business Code Controller for partners that help customers with custom code development for deployment Consultant of the Year for excellence in developing, provisioning and managing personalized, specialized IT services Brand Builder for partners that use improved processes and insights to improve their client's end-customer experience and thus increase brand loyalty and profit margins Master of Disaster for partners that take creative steps to protect customers from data loss and the resulting business disruption Next-Gen Telecom Award for excellence in delivering telecommunications and collaboration capabilities including client/user support Purveyor of Productivity for excellence in helping customers wring maximum value out of their investments in people, systems and technology Visionary Award for partners that employed newer, cutting-edge technologies including machine learning, AI, virtual or augmented reality, blockchain or IoT as the primary enablers of their solutions White Hat Award for partners who protect customers from cyberthreats or provide physical security through such means as video surveillance projects The two special awards are: Vertical Virtuoso for excellence in retail, health care or another vertical Digi Master for the partner entry that exhibited maximum digital transformation brilliance The awards are open only to channel partners agents, VARs, dealers, SIs, MSPs, consultants and other partner firms. Applicants submitted case studies of projects they had completed in the previous year. Submissions were judged by the Channel Partners editorial staff and members of the Channel Partners Advisory Board. "We were impressed with the quality of the entries in our first Digi awards," said Lorna Garey, editor-in-chief for Channel Partners. "Being named a finalist is an achievement. Our judges, including CompTIA's Carolyn April, IDC's Sean Riley and Forrester's Jay McBain, are longtime channel watchers who know what it takes for partners to move their customers into the digital future." Powernet was recognized for their work with clients that enabled systems to stay online through challenging circumstances, such Hurricane Michael and its aftermath, in addition to providing cutting edge network solutions that protected data and improved efficiency. About Powernet Powernet enables businesses and communities to connect in the office and globally through our full-service technology lineup featuring Wi-Fi, voice, data and IT managed services, in addition to IP security systems, billing (& back office support applications) as well as domestic and international carrier services. As Woman-Owned business with more than 25 years of experience our expert sales, engineering and support teams, provide our partners and clients the unparalleled service and innovative technology they need to achieve their business goals. We service worldwide with offices in Ohio (HQ), Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and Maryland. About Channel Partners For more than 25 years, Channel Partners has been the undisputed leader in providing news, analysis and education to the indirect sales channels serving the business technology and communications industry. In addition, Channel Partners online delivers a constant content stream of unique and breaking industry news, feature articles and premium downloadable content. As official media of Channel Partners Conference & Expo and Channel Partners Evolution, Channel Partners is the market leader that channel professionals turn to first. James Goettsch, FAIA, chairman and co-CEO of Goettsch Partners, will receive the 2019 Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). The honor for Goettsch, based on his enormous contributions to the design of high-rise buildings around the world, says CTBUH, will be presented at the 2019 Tall + Urban Innovation Conference held in Shenzhen, China, April 8-10. The globally renowned architecture firm Goettsch Partners has announced that the firms chairman and co-CEO, James Goettsch, FAIA, will be honored with the prestigious lifetime achievement award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), a respected international organization devoted to the field of high-rises and sustainable urban design. The honor for Goettsch, based on his enormous contributions to the design of high-rise buildings around the world, says CTBUH, will be presented at the 2019 Tall + Urban Innovation Conference held in Shenzhen, China, April 8-10, 2019. Announced this month by CTBUH, the 2019 Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an individual who has made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment with significant effects extending beyond the professional community to enhance cities and the lives of their inhabitants. The group acknowledged Mr. Goettschs role as design director for tall buildings throughout the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and his recognition as a member and fellow of the AIA. He previously served on the boards of directors for both the AIA Chicago chapter and the Chicago Architecture Foundation. GP, through a progression of leadership transitions, traces its roots to the practice started by Mies van der Rohe in 1938. James Goettsch joined in 1992 and helped guide its transition to Goettsch Partners in 2005. Today, GP is led by six partners all accomplished architects including Goettsch, as chairman and co-CEO; co-CEO and president James Zheng, AIA, LEED AP; managing partner Michael F. Kaufman, AIA, LEED AP; managing partner Joseph Dolinar, AIA; technical partner Lawrence C. Weldon, AIA; and design partner Paul De Santis, LEED AP. I am thrilled to see Jim recognized with this tremendous honor, says the co-CEO and president Zheng. All of us at the firm join him in celebrating a career of tall building accomplishments that continually inspire our work. In addition to his overall leadership role in the firm, Goettsch leads the direction and quality of design for major projects. With more than 40 years of experience, he has personally directed and has been involved in all phases of design and construction for tall buildings worldwide. Noteworthy projects include: the 54-story, core-supported 150 North Riverside tower in Chicago; the 45-story, multi-terraced Park Tower at Transbay in San Francisco; the 33-story original building and 24-story vertical completion at 300 East Randolph in Chicago, also known as the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois Headquarters; and the five-building, 3 million-square-foot Abu Dhabi Global Market Square office complex in the UAE, which features the headquarters building of the Abu Dhabi Global Market. Images of these and other works are available at this link: https://we.tl/t-v1qXeuE1lN. For more information on the awards, Jim Goettsch, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and the firm Goettsch Partners, contact C.C. Sullivan through adam(at)ccsullivan(dot)com or +1.646.838.1033. About Goettsch Partners Goettsch Partners (GP) is an architecture firm with a global perspective. Based in Chicago, with additional offices in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, the firm brings a singular approach to design that combines seasoned experience with a passion for exploration and innovation. Completed projects span five continents and represent a diverse range of types and sizes. Every project design begins with multiple concepts that are evaluated for intrinsic value, constructability and environmental impact. GP projects share a consistent visual language of bold clarity that celebrates highly crafted technical solutions delivering optimal performance. Visit http://www.gpchicago.com for more information. After two of the countrys best-known names in fire protection, suppression and alarm systems, International Systems of America (ISA) and ABCO Fire Protection (ABCO), announced a merger in August 2018, they have together now rebranded under one name Protegis Fire & Safety. Protegis is Latin meaning to protect or to cover. Solidifying its wide-ranging managed service capabilities, the company now has a presence in 43 states and Canada. Protegis employs more than 300 fire protection contractors and safety technicians throughout the country. The company will maintain its primary offices in Louisville, KY and Cleveland, OH. Mike Epperson is the current CEO of ISA and will serve as CEO of Protegis. The new name, Protegis, allows the company to unify its 350 fire protection contractors, safety technicians and employees around the country under one brand. Protegis will continue to provide the same quality, attention to detail, response times and passion-to-protect its thousands of customers throughout the U.S. and Canada. The Protegis name represents the companys three core tenets: Professional, Proactive, Protection. We are thrilled with our new name and feel that Protegis absolutely captures the promise that we make to our customers, says Mike Epperson, CEO of Protegis. We are truly a single source for installing, protecting and monitoring protection, prevention and suppression products, services and replacement parts. As part of the companys rebrand, Protegis has also launched a new website, which can be found at http://www.protegis.com. The website provides a comprehensive overview of Protegis services as well as an online parts store, where parts can be ordered and are typically shipped within 24 hours. ISA was acquired in December 2017 by Align Capital Partners, a private-equity firm with offices in Dallas and Cleveland. The ABCO merger was closed in August 2018. Protegis will continue to seek fire and life safety service providers across the United States as it continues to expand its geographic footprint and service capabilities. About Protegis Protegis (the Company) provides inspection, maintenance, installation, and repair services and sells new, repaired, and remanufactured parts for fire and security systems and equipment. The Companys team of professional engineers/designers and NICET-certified technicians design, install, and program a wide variety of fire and security alarm brands. The Companys national footprint and one-stop solution attract customers seeking to simplify their fire safety services spend and increase service quality through vendor consolidation. About Align Capital Partners Align Capital Partners (ACP) is a growth-oriented private equity firm that partners with business owners and management teams to create shared success. ACP brings experience, resources and a $325 million committed fund to help companies accelerate their growth, to the benefit of management, employees and the firms investors. ACP makes control investments in growth-oriented, lower-middle market specialty manufacturing, distribution and business services companies. For more information, visit http://www.aligncp.com. For Align Capital Partners related media inquiries, contact Katie Noggle at knoggle(at)aligncp(dot)com. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Michael Epperson, CEO mepperson(at)protegis(dot)com 502-499-9485 ### Christian Himmler, Partner Experience Manager Christian brings extensive knowledge in the cloud computing space, and were thrilled to have another industry veteran join the RapidScale sales team. RapidScale, a Cox Business company, welcomes Christian Himmler to the team as partner experience manager. Himmler is based in Irvine. His responsibilities include developing new partnerships, managing and leading existing partners, and building a winning partner experience approach in Southern California. Over the past decade in previous roles, I have been responsible for strengthening partner relationships in the West and building out a successful cloud practice, said Himmler. Im excited to bring my cloud expertise and strong partner relationships to RapidScale and be a part of this awesome team at an exciting time. Prior to joining RapidScale, Himmler spent five years as a regional channel manager, managing partners and assisting in the design and delivery of cloud solutions for their clients. Christian brings extensive knowledge in the cloud computing space, and were thrilled to have another industry veteran join the RapidScale sales team, said RapidScale Executive Vice President, Sales Bob Buchanan. We are committed to attracting top talent. Im positive that Christian will quickly make an impact in the Southern California region and provide a second-to-none partner experience in the cloud services industry. About RapidScale RapidScale, a Cox Business company, is a managed and hybrid-managed cloud services provider that delivers world-class, secure, and reliable global cloud computing. Businesses choose RapidScale as their cloud provider of choice because of its state-of-the-art managed Desktop as a Service platform and other market-leading cloud solutions. RapidScales award-winning 24x7x365 global support and help desk team ensure that organizations receive the most innovative technology backed up by the most highly responsive and knowledgeable service technicians in the industry, freeing up IT leaders to focus on strategy and driving their businesses forward with technology. RapidScales innovative solutions include CloudDesktop, CloudServer, CloudSecurity, CloudRecovery, CloudMail, CloudApps, SD WAN and more. For more information on RapidScale, visit http://www.rapidscale.net. Cox Business is owned by Cox Communications and is a facilities-based provider of voice, video and data solutions for commercial customers. More information about Cox Communications, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cox Enterprises, is available at http://www.cox.com. The company Ringing Cedars of Russia has published a medical article describing the effectiveness of cedar nut oil enriched with cedar resin in the treatment of permeable bowel syndrome, or as it is also called leaky gut. A study conducted by Siberian State University showed that cedar nut oil enriched with resin helps to restore the intestinal walls, as well as detoxify and normalize its work and thus proved the Beneficial Use of Cedar Nut Oil enriched with Cedar Resin in cases of Leaky Gut. Leaky gut is a damaged bowel whose mucosa has excessively enlarged openings for absorption of nutrients and because of which large undigested molecules, bacteria and waste products can pass through these openings into the bloodstream. Permeable bowel syndrome develops as a result of malnutrition and stress. Its symptoms are various allergies, autoimmune diseases, disorders of the digestive tract and a general weakening of the body. "Cedar nut oil enriched with cedar resin is a unique composition of biologically active substances product. It contains a number of vitamins and minerals: B vitamins, vitamins A, D, iodine, phosphorus, manganese, potassium, magnesium, sodium, fluorine, copper, iron , zinc, etc. And the most valuable is the content of omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids." - says Professor Pavel Pletner- Head of the Central Clinical Hospital of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Cedar nut oil enriched with resin (or cedar resin extract) helps detoxify and revitalize the intestinal wall. "Due to the anti-bacterial and anti-parasitic properties, as well as the pectin contained in cedar nut oil enriched with resin, this product is able to clean the intestines from parasites, candida and bacteria, and remove various toxins," says Pletner - "The recovery of the intestinal wall occurs due to the high content of vitamins C and E and essential fatty acids." Being a rich source of polyunsaturated fatty acids and bioflavonoids, cedar nut oil enriched with resin (also turpentine balsam) restores the beneficial flora in the intestine. In particular, a study at Goteborg University in 2015 showed that in the intestines omega-3 provokes the reproduction of beneficial bacteria of the species Akkermansia muciniphila, which reduces inflammation of the intestine and improves glucose metabolism. In turn, bioflavonoid Rutin (vitamin R) contained in cedar nut oil neutralizes intestinal toxins, which are formed by constipation, fermentation and rotting processes in the intestine. A study published by Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, USA says that testing in rats has shown that Rutin can help reduce damage to colon tissue caused by colitis. Important: Cedar nut oil can help only if it is raw, extra virgin and fresh. Any refined or roasted vegetable oil will lead to the opposite result. Ringing Cedars of Russia company specializes in the production of a wide range of cedar products. Among the product line are turpentine balsam, cedar nut oil, cedar nut flakes and nuts themselves. Be aware, there are many companies on the North American market that sell low quality, blended or even fake cedar nut oil claiming that it is extra virgin cold pressed Siberian Cedar Nut Oil, using the fact that majority of North American customers do not know what and how the pure high quality Siberian Cedar Nut Oil should be. We advise you not to take needless risks, and obtain genuine Siberian Cedar Nut Oil from RingingCedarsofRussia.org. Grains by the lb can generally be had for a reasonable price. They also generally qualify for free and flat rate shipping when a retailer offers that. Full 50 or 55 lb sacks of malt are another story altogether. The per lb price of sacks can be tempting, but shipping charges can be confiscatory. Bulk Malt Deal Tips and Tricks Look at Total Cost Price per lb delivered to your door is the most important thing when it comes to value. Biting on a low cost sack of grain with high shipping is equally as bad as biting on a high cost sack of grain with free shipping. Compare total cost. If free or flat rate shipping is an option always makes sure to put together an order that qualifies for discounted shipping. Deals can periodically found on Amazon Offerings and prices can vary wildly, but its worth a quick look when it comes time to buying grain. Buy Local-ish Look for a shop in the same general geographic location. It makes sense that shipping from one state away would cost less than shipping across the country. This isnt always the case, but its a good place to start. Try the following shops, each has general geographic area to help 10 lb Bags at Williams Brewing Williams Brewing has select malt available in 10 lb bags. These qualify for their free or flat shipping. Buy 5 x 10 lb bags and you have the equivalent of a sack of grain. Base Malt in 10 Pound Bags Deal on All Grain Kits Adventures in Homebrewing discounts seasonal homebrew beer recipe kits by 20%. Selections include both all grain and extract options. Shipping is free to many US addresses with a qualifying order. 20% Off Seasonal All Grain Kits | 20% Off Seasonal Extract Kits Make a Friend, Get a Great Deal on Grain Make friends with your local brewery or brew pub and they just might let you purchase grain from them a great price. Bulk Grain Storage Options Vittles Vault Review! Grain Mill Reviews All Grain-Related Reviews: A collection of reviews that weve tagged as directly or indirectly related to all grain brewing Hands on Review: Vittles Vault Stackable Storage Bins for Homebrew Grain Storage! Make sure the components you use are compatible and rated for your intended application. Contact manufacturer with questions about suitability or a specific application. Always read and follow manufacturer directions. top:bulkgrain tag:itsapage tag:tpr For April 2019, Savannah Dental Solutions is offering a free veneers consultation. A bright white smile can make a powerful first impression, but many people have smiles that are structurally healthy but unattractive. Porcelain veneers can correct a host of cosmetic dental issues. For April 2019, Savannah Dental Solutions is offering a free veneers consultation. What Are Porcelain Veneers? Thin shells of dental porcelain, veneers slip over the existing teeth, requiring the removal of very little healthy tooth structure. They are an excellent solution to such common dental issues as: Chipped or broken teeth Severe discoloration Teeth that are misshapen, gapping, or uneven How Long Do Porcelain Veneers Last? Although they will not last a lifetime, porcelain veneers are extremely strong. They can easily last for a decade or more with proper care. More stain-resistant than natural teeth, porcelain veneers are more durable than other cosmetic solutions such as dental bonding. Do Porcelain Veneers Look Natural? Many people are concerned that they will end up with a fake game show host smile, but modern porcelain veneers actually look quite natural. They have a translucency and sheen that mimic those of natural teeth, and they can be color-matched to the existing teeth. In fact, some people choose to whiten their teeth before getting veneers and then matching the veneers to the brighter shade. However, it must be noted that whitening should be repeated periodically to maintain the color match. About Savannah Dental Solutions Married dentists Chad and Alexandra Schnabel welcome new patients to Savannah Dental Solutions. From caring childrens dentistry to high-tech cosmetic procedures and even full-mouth reconstruction, they blend the latest technology with traditional customer-oriented values. Those who are ready to start their journey to better oral health can call today at (912) 354-1366 or visit the website at http://savannahdentalsolutions.com. The office is located at 9A Medical Arts Center, Savannah, GA 31405. "CKR Interactives business model was right in the middle of two of our sweet spots - Human capital and Digital Marketing" TMP Worldwide, a global leader in talent acquisition technologies, has acquired CKR Interactive, a leader in employer branding and recruitment marketing, based in Campbell, CA. Sett & Lucas, a sector focused global investment bank, represented CKR Interactive in the transaction. CKR Interactives business model was right in the middle of two of our sweet spots - Human capital and Digital Marketing. We believe TMP Worldwide is the perfect partner for CKR Interactive in its next phase of growth, says Tyler Block, Managing Director at Sett & Lucas. The combination of TMP Worldwide and CKR Interactive comes at a critical time when companies are searching for the best solutions to recruit top talent, said Michelle Abbey, CEO of TMP Worldwide. This acquisition brings together something very powerful - the expertise of the best and brightest minds in talent acquisition, a deep commitment to helping our customers solve challenges in new ways, and a true passion to deliver value and innovation, better and faster. The company will continue to operate as CKR Interactive, but will be recognized as a TMP Worldwide company and led by its current President and CEO, Curtis Rogers. When two very like-minded entities come together, the results can only mean better outcomes for both our clients and employees, said Curtis Rogers, CEO of CKR Interactive. TMP has grown a fantastic business that helps organizations with the toughest talent acquisition challenges through innovative technology and creative. We are excited to expand our resources and capabilities to continue to deliver an excellent experience for our clients and employees. TMP Worldwide is a portfolio company of Gemspring Capital, a Westport, Connecticut-based private equity firm with $355 million of equity capital under management. TMP was formerly a division of Monster Worldwide, becoming an independent company in 2006. PPC, programmatic software, AI, Automation and social media management are all changing the way firms find and retain talent. Technology and Digital marketing will continue to play significant role in employer branding and recruitment marketing, global acquirers will continue to partner with specialist firms like CKR Interactive to expand into new markets, says Prabhu Antony, Sr. Vice President at Sett & Lucas. About TMP Worldwide TMP Worldwide is a global leader in talent acquisition technologies, committed to finding new ways to leverage the TalentBrew platform, strategy and creative to build talent and enhance our clients employer brands across every connection point. From healthcare to government to retail to technology and everything in between weve revolutionized the way companies and candidates connect. About Gemspring Capital Gemspring Capital is a private equity firm with $355 million of equity capital under management that focuses on making control and structured equity investments in middle market companies headquartered in the United States and Canada. Gemspring partners with talented management teams and takes a hands-on approach to driving revenue growth and value creation. For more information, please visit http://www.gemspring.com. About Sett & Lucas Sett & Lucas (S&L) is a global independent financial institution, over 120 associates working out of seven countries deliver value to clients, by unlocking value (through investment banking and transaction advisory services), creating value (through the fund management business) and protecting value (through the regulatory compliance service Zurik). S&L is a leader in Mergers & Acquisition and capital raise services to the Information Technology and Digital Marketing industries. Sovos - Solve Tax For Good Sovos continues to innovate around procure-to-pay platforms, offering organizations tremendous value by providing coverage for every major form of transaction-level tax compliance in one solution. SAP Ariba Live Global tax software leader Sovos today announced it has extended its embedded tax compliance solution for cloud-based procurement platform users. For more than a decade, Sovos (via the acquisition of several leading tax technology companies and integrations into its core solution offering) has provided global e-invoicing and e-archiving compliance to most of the worlds leading procurement software and cloud services. By extending this support to global tax determination and various forms of complex e-invoice reporting, Sovos empowers businesses to work with their preferred software vendors for procurement and spend management, without having to worry about the ever-changing global tax digitization requirements that apply to accounts payable (AP) processes. Continuous updates to the Sovos solution deliver clearance e-invoicing compliance in Italy, the latest European country to move to this regulatory model, and provide a single compliant e-archiving solution for businesses to use within their P2P platforms and across their entire financial application ecosystems. With full integration into its S1 cloud platform, Sovos now also paves the way for its comprehensive indirect tax compliance solutions to be seamlessly available in procurement processes around the globe. Many multinational companies are struggling with the shifting tax regulatory landscape, said Kevin Permenter, research manager at IDC. Sovos continues to innovate around procure-to-pay platforms, offering organizations tremendous value by providing coverage for every major form of transaction-level tax compliance in one solution. The digital transformation of VAT invoice controls In 2018, Italy introduced the Italian Budget Law, requiring companies to submit and approve all domestic business-to-business and business-to-government invoices through the governments exchange, giving the tax authority real-time visibility into transactions. The Italian government also requires strict compliance regarding the treatment and storage of invoices, making e-archiving a key component of tax strategies, as well. With similar requirements in some 20 countries around the globe and growing rapidly, these mandates are driving a new era of tax compliance. As VAT compliance and real-time transaction controls go through a digital transformation, tax has quickly shifted from an accounting problem to a technology problem, said Christiaan van der Valk, vice president of strategy at Sovos. Every financial process - from procurement to payment to delivery of goods - is being scrutinized like never before, and tax departments must adopt holistic strategies to thrive in this new environment, where tax administrations use locally varying requirements to tap directly into business-to-business data flows. Thats why a centralized solution that seamlessly deals with e-invoicing compliance, digital reporting, e-archiving and tax determination is critical to staying compliant worldwide. Solving tax for good in AP processes With a decade of enabling customers to process e-invoices in compliance with complex European e-invoicing and e-archiving laws, Sovos adds simplicity to the growing global challenges of indirect tax compliance in AP processes. Customers can bring all their invoices together in the compliant Sovos eArchive, safeguarding their businesses with modern tax evidence in compliance with local e-archiving legislation. Learn more about Sovos e-invoicing compliance and VAT reporting solutions by visiting https://sovos.com/solutions/ and at booth P5 at SAP Ariba Live in Austin. About Sovos Sovos is a leading global provider of software that safeguards businesses from the burden and risk of modern tax. As governments and businesses go digital, businesses face increased risks, costs and complexity. The Sovos Intelligent Compliance Cloud is the first complete solution for modern tax, giving businesses a global solution for tax determination, e-invoicing compliance and tax reporting. Sovos supports 5,000 customers, including half of the Fortune 500, and integrates with a wide variety of business applications. The company has offices throughout North America, Latin America and Europe. Sovos is owned by London-based Hg. For more information visit http://www.sovos.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Our team worked hard to help our clients with cutting-edge telecom and cybersecurity solutions. Were honored that Channel Partners has recognized our dedication to empowering our clients and delivering outstanding outcomes. Channel Partners has announced that Stratosphere Networks is a finalist in the inaugural Channel Partners Excellence in Digital Services Awards. Stratosphere Networks is a finalist for the Next-Gen Telecom and White Hat awards. Winners will be announced during a networking reception held as a part of the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, April 9-12, at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The Excellence in Digital Service Awards, presented for the first time this year, recognize partners who deliver stellar business outcomes for their clients. Recognition is provided in 10 categories, with two additional awards presented for special achievement among all applicants. The 10 categories are: -Cloud Builder Award for excellence in helping customers cloudify their business -Vanguard Award for partners that turned their digital transformation expertise inward to revitalize their business -Code Controller for partners that help customers with custom code development for deployment -Consultant of the Year for excellence in developing, provisioning and managing personalized, specialized IT services -Brand Builder for partners that use improved processes and insights to improve their client's end-customer experience and thus increase brand loyalty and profit margins -Master of Disaster for partners that take creative steps to protect customers from data loss and the resulting business disruption -Next-Gen Telecom Award for excellence in delivering telecommunications and collaboration capabilities including client/user support -Purveyor of Productivity for excellence in helping customers wring maximum value out of their investments in people, systems and technology -Visionary Award for partners that employed newer, cutting-edge technologies including machine learning, AI, virtual or augmented reality, blockchain or IoT as the primary enablers of their solutions -White Hat Award for partners who protect customers from cyberthreats or provide physical security through such means as video surveillance projects The two special awards are: -Vertical Virtuoso for excellence in retail, health care or another vertical -Digi Master for the partner entry that exhibited maximum digital transformation brilliance Were very pleased to be among the finalists for the Next-Gen Telecom and White Hat awards, said Steve Melchiorre, CEO of Stratosphere Networks. Our team worked hard to help our clients with cutting-edge telecom and cybersecurity solutions. Were honored that Channel Partners has recognized our dedication to empowering our clients and delivering outstanding outcomes. Stratosphere Networks is an IT managed service provider focused on delivering comprehensive technology solutions and services to businesses across all industries. In addition to IP telephony and managed IT services, Stratosphere offers managed cybersecurity solutions and cloud consulting services. The awards are open only to channel partners agents, VARs, dealers, SIs, MSPs, consultants and other partner firms. Applicants submitted case studies of projects they had completed in the previous year. Submissions were judged by the Channel Partners editorial staff and members of the Channel Partners Advisory Board. "We were impressed with the quality of the entries in our first Digi awards," said Lorna Garey, editor-in-chief for Channel Partners. "Being named a finalist is an achievement. Our judges, including CompTIA's Carolyn April, IDC's Sean Riley and Forrester's Jay McBain, are longtime channel watchers who know what it takes for partners to move their customers into the digital future." Stratosphere Networks was honored for several projects, including a cloud phone system implementation that allowed the client to greatly enhance customer experience, the implementation of a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution that significantly boosted productivity and efficiency, and the provision of a managed IT security detection and response solution with reporting that secured sensitive data and helped the client minimize their data breach risk. About Stratosphere Networks Stratosphere Networks is a Chicago-based multifaceted IT managed service provider focused on delivering comprehensive technology services and solutions to meet and exceed the always-changing, diverse business needs. Since 2003, Stratosphere Networks has grown exponentially and continues to provide the best-in-class and cost-effective solutions to businesses in all industries. Visit http://www.stratospherenetworks.com for more information. About Channel Partners For more than 25 years, Channel Partners has been the undisputed leader in providing news, analysis and education to the indirect sales channels serving the business technology and communications industry. In addition, Channel Partners online delivers a constant content stream of unique and breaking industry news, feature articles and premium downloadable content. As official media of Channel Partners Conference & Expo and Channel Partners Evolution, Channel Partners is the market leader that channel professionals turn to first. For more information contact: Lori Leonardo 847-440-8608 LoriL@stratospherenetworks.com Charging a fee for a single-use cup will hopefully provide more incentive for people to bring their own. We are doing what we can to help each other to think differently about how we all use and interact with single-use cups and other materials. Starting today, customers at Tandem Coffee Roasters two locations in Portland will be asked Do you need a cup? when ordering a drink. Menu prices at Tandem have officially dropped by 25 cents but if a guest needs a single-use compostable cup for a to-go order, they will be charged 25 cents. Tandem will track how many single-use cups are used through their Point of Sale system over the next year with an initial goal of saving 30 percent of approximately 120,000 total to-go cups used annually. Eventually, the business aims to get rid of single-use cups altogether. Since we opened seven years ago, weve given 25 cents off when a guest brings their own cup but we never found that to make as much of an impact as we had hoped, says co-owner Will Pratt, who owns the business with his wife, Kathleen Pratt. Enough is enough. Time to try something weird. In 2018, just over five percent of to-go drinks at Tandems locations received the Own Cup discount, which was just 7,000 drinks out of 120,000 total to-go drinks sold. I think we can do better, says Pratt. Charging a fee for a single-use cup will hopefully provide more incentive for people to bring their own. Most people dont know this but our single-use compostable cups are only compostable if they are composted properly! We are doing what we can to help each other to think differently about how we all use and interact with single-use cups and other materials. The entire Tandem team was initially inspired by Portlands Grocery Bag Ordinance that went into effect April 15, 2015. The ordinance requires stores to charge customers five cents per single-use bag. I found the ordinance to be extremely effective. It obviously isnt about saving 5 cents, says Will, But having to answer yes to whether or not you need a bag is kind of demoralizing and lead me to fill the back seat of my car with totes bags. Tandem is not alone in this initiative. A university in the U.K. saved 34,000 single-use cups in the first year just by asking customers, Do you need a cup today? and charging 25 cents. And in late January of this year, the Berkeley City Council in California passed an ordinance that will require food and beverage vendors to charge 25 cents for a disposable cup starting in 2020. Tandem was bothered early on about the waste the business produced from cups, lids, plastic wrap, and coffee bags, to other packaging. They have made incremental changes, such as switching to carbon neutral shipping, joining the national movement to eliminate plastic straws, and even installing an electric car charger at the Cafe & Roastery location in the East Bayside neighborhood of Portland. We expect to see success come in phases, says Pratt. The initial goal is just to get the conversation going and to raise awareness that drinking out of a single-use paper cup day-in and day-out is just strange. Long term we plan to phase them out altogether. Tandem will be offering $10 off their Joco Cups designed by local Maine artist, Jenny McGee, and selling all ceramic mugs for $8 now through April 9th. About Tandem Coffee Roasters In 2012, after working in coffee in Boston, Martha's Vineyard, San Francisco, and New York, Will and Kathleen Pratt found a home for Tandem Coffee Roasters in Portland, Maine. They built a cozy cafe and roastery in a 1930s-brick building near their home in the East Bayside neighborhood of Portland. In 2014, they opened a second location in Portlands West End: Tandem Coffee + Bakery. The bakery is headed up by celebrated baker Briana Holt. Once a gas station then laundromat, the building is now a lively place to sip coffee, eat delicious baked goods, and catch up with friends. Tandem offers a rotating list of single-origin coffees and seasonal blends. They love sourcing at origin and working closely with the same producers, importers and exporters year after year. For more information, visit http://www.tandemcoffee.com or follow the shop on Instagram: @tandemcoffeeroasters. "...Tony will help speed up the time to funding, provide better direction to companies that come to us, and ultimately source the best investment opportunities for our members." -- Hicham Semaan, president, Tech Coast Angels Orange County Tech Coast Angels (TCA) Orange County recently announced its appointment of Anthony (Tony) Sarris as Executive Director, a newly-created, full-time position. Mr. Sarris brings a wealth of experience of more than 20 years with his direct involvement, encompassing many different roles, in Orange Countys startup ecosystem. He will play a key role in working with both entrepreneurs and investors to ensure deal flow is orchestrated with efficiency and quality. Tonys track record and experience in our community are superb, and we are thrilled to have him on board, said Hicham Semaan, president of TCA Orange County. His knowledge is vital as we continue to increase the value our network and our members bring to our portfolio companies. I am excited to be part of such a highly-esteemed angel network, said Mr. Sarris. My major role will be to put together great deals, to get results at each stage of the deal flow and to make sure that TCA is considered a long-term partner. In addition, as a full-time role, I will be able to ensure agility and fairness in our due diligence. We want to provide entrepreneurs who come to us with meaningful feedback, even when we say no. This may mean that they come back to us and reapply when the concept or idea or company has resolved concerns that emerge during our review and process. As a full-time position, Tony will help speed up the time to funding, provide better direction to companies that come to us, and ultimately source the best investment opportunities for our members, concluded Mr. Semaan. Early stage companies interested in applying to the Tech Coast Angels can visit https://www.techcoastangels.com/entrepreneurs/ for more information. About Tech Coast Angels: Tech Coast Angels is one of the largest and most active angel investor networks in the nation, and a leading source of funding for seed-stage and early-stage companies across all innovation industries in Southern California. TCA members are accredited investors who individually invest in startup companies. Companies go through well-structured, transparent, and time efficient screening and due diligence. As founders and executive-level business leaders, TCA members provide companies with more than just capital; they also contribute counsel, mentoring and access to an extensive network of investors, customers, strategic partners and management. TCA is a catalyst in the growth of the thriving Southern California entrepreneurial ecosystem of innovation. A recent Halo Report rated TCA as #2 nationally in a number of funded deals, and a recent analysis by CB Insights ranked TCA #1 out of 370 angel groups on Network Centrality and #5 overall in Investor Mosaic. Since its founding in 1997, TCA has invested over $218 million in more than 380 companies and has helped attract more than $1.66 billion in additional capital/follow-on rounds, mostly from venture capital firms. http://www.techcoastangels.com We came into the pilot with an expectation that handling workers comp cases with empathy and diligence would have some level of impact, and the results exceeded all expectations." - Joe Rubinsztain, CEO, ChronWell ChronWell, a technology-enabled injury management program for the workers' compensation industry, today announced the extraordinary success of its pilot with California Farm Management (CFM), a self-insured collective of farms. Over a 28-week period, ChronWells services assisted injured workers in recovering and returning to work faster, while bringing CFM significant savings in claims costs. One of CFMs largest employers, Cream of the Crop Companies, deployed ChronWells care navigation solution, Recovry Central, to a pool of several thousand agricultural workers. They experienced 28% fewer workers compensation claims despite an increase in payroll when compared to the same 28-week period the previous year. This also resulted in a one-third reduction in litigated claims over the same period. Cream of the Crop is projected to save over 30% in claims costs for the pilot period*, which includes the ChronWell program and other safety programs initiated directly through Cream of the Crop. In addition to the savings, the ChronWell program has significantly moved Cream of the Crop toward its goal of a completely paperless environment. We came into the pilot with an expectation that handling workers comp cases with empathy and diligence would have some level of impact, and the results exceeded all expectations, said Joe Rubinsztain, CEO of ChronWell. Were lucky to work with a company that embraces innovation and shares our vision to change how injured workers are treated from the moment of injury and throughout their recovery process. The pilot program, which launched in July 2018, deployed ChronWell's Recovry Central, the companys injury management platform, to Cream of the Crop employees. By empowering skilled humans with advanced technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), mobile apps and cloud-based computing, the solution quickly and efficiently delivers a unified care experience for injured workers. The Recovry platform addresses on-site injuries, engages injured workers and helps deliver care throughout the entire accelerated cycle of the claim to minimize the impact of workplace accidents on insurers, employers and injured workers. ChronWells technology allows us to be in sync with our employees, health care providers and insurers to provide the best course of treatment to the injured worker, explained Santiago Martin, Jr., CEO of Trilogy Group, the administrative company for Central Valley Contracting, Cream of the Crop Ag Service and Cal Ag Resources. Treating our workers with empathy, while ultimately saving a substantial amount in claims costs, is an incredible success story and we look forward to working with ChronWell in the future. To learn more about ChronWell, visit http://www.chronwell.com. *Additional costs may continue to come in based on open claims. About ChronWell Based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and founded in 2017 by health care and insurance technology veterans, ChronWell has developed a unified care navigation platform for the workers compensation system in America. Combining breakthrough technology, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and empathy-driven services, ChronWell minimizes the impact of workplace accidents on workers, employers and insurers. ChronWell helps navigate care from the onset of an injury through the resolution of a claim by efficiently establishing lines of communication and bridging the gap between employee, employer and insurance company. ChronWell will also leverage technology to expand adjuster capabilities. For more information, visit http://www.chronwell.com. W Mint Mark Circulating Quarter The United States Mint announced today that it has released the first ever circulating coins with West Point mint marks. Throughout the remainder of the year, two million each of the scheduled 2019 America the Beautiful Quarters will be minted at West Point. The first of these coins bearing W mint marks were mixed in with quarters produced at Philadelphia and Denver and shipped on April 1. As with all circulating coins, the W mint mark quarters will be distributed to banks and financial institutions by the Federal Reserve. The coins will likely begin to appear in circulation within four to six weeks. The announcement of the W mint mark quarters coincides with the 227th anniversary of the United States Mint on April 2 and kicks off a program designed to spark a renewed interest in coin collecting. The release also ties in with the American Numismatic Associations National Coin Week (April 21-27) and parallels a separate initiative that organizers have dubbed the Great American Coin Hunt. The coin hunt is a hobby-promoting event sponsored by participating coin dealers across the nation, who have publicly announced plans to place some of their own collectible coins into circulation by using them in commercial transactions during National Coin Week. We want to encourage Americans to consider coin collecting by making the W mint mark quarters only available in general circulation, said United States Mint Director David Ryder. Were fortunate to be able to feature the W mint mark quarters at the same time dealers around the nation are mounting a similar effort to celebrate and promote the hobby of numismatics. The America the Beautiful Quarters to be released in 2019 will honor Lowell National Historic Park (Massachusetts), American Memorial Park (Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands), War in the Pacific National Historic Park (Guam), San Antonio Mission National Historical Park (Texas), and the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness (Idaho). Beyond the ten million W mint mark quarters, the Mint will produce additional coins as usual at the Philadelphia and Denver Mint facilities to meet the demands of commerce. The Mint last year produced 1.85 billion quarters for circulation, ranging from 289.6 million to 439.8 million across the five 2018 issues. To learn more about the W Mint mark quarter, please visit the U.S. Mint website at https://www.usmint.gov/news/inside-the-mint/mint-releases-first-ever-w-quarters-into-circulation. About the United States Mint The United States Mint was created by Congress in 1792 and became part of the Department of the Treasury in 1873. It is the Nation's sole manufacturer of legal tender coinage and is responsible for producing circulating coinage for the Nation to conduct its trade and commerce. The United States Mint also produces numismatic products, including proof, uncirculated, and commemorative coins; Congressional Gold Medals; and silver and gold bullion coins. Its numismatic programs are self-sustaining and operate at no cost to taxpayers. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: For solution providers, moving to a SaaS business model and targeting new market segments is complex and time intensive, especially as they begin to integrate emerging technologies, legacy data and equipment, Andy Miller - Marina Growth Strategies. Enterprises are aggressively adopting emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning and moving to increasingly popular offerings from companies delivering mission-critical applications over the Internet via cloud based software as a service (SaaS) business models. Moreover this trend is rapidly expanding into more industry verticals, and to geographies outside the US. In response, solution providers are rapidly moving to offer cloud-based SaaS products incorporating those emerging technologies while expanding their go-to-market strategies to effectively target new geographies and market segments. Managing the transition to cloud-based SaaS solutions and developing effective go-to-market strategies can be a challenge for companies using legacy business models or with limited experience entering new geographies and industry verticals. To ensure success, its important to have a trusted, experienced advisor which is exactly what the newly launched - Marina Growth Strategies (MGS) consultancy team is offering. Launched by veteran technology-industry CEO Andrew M. Miller, the team at San Francisco-based MGS leverages Millers decades of experience helping companies transition from conventional software licensing approaches to cloud-based SaaS models. MGS also provides strategic consulting services to companies expanding into new markets such as government, international (EMEA and APAC), and industry-specific verticals. MGS customers include such recognized companies as BroadSoft (since acquired by Cisco), Samsung, Gigamon, Warburg Pincus, Highland Capital Partners, Insight Growth Ventures and others. MGS focuses on the enterprise/mobile and service provider marketplace. For solution providers, moving to a SaaS business model and targeting new market segments is complex and time intensive, especially as they begin to integrate emerging technologies, legacy data and equipment, says Andy Miller. At Marina Growth Strategies, our team is committed to ensuring our clients a smooth transition, delivering the SaaS benefits their customers expect across all targeted market segments and geographies. Besides sharing its cloud-based expertise, MGS helps companies understand and execute growth strategies through both direct and channel based go-to-market approaches, and provides best-in-class expertise for APAC, EMEA, federal, state and local market expansion. MGS has worked with multiple pre- and post-IPO companies, often focusing on specific geographic areas, or vertical markets to expand growth. Miller previously served as CEO of teleconferencing companies Polycom and Tandberg, and in senior positions for technology and telecom companies including Cisco, IPC Systems and Monster Worldwide. He has been a director on four public company boards and collaborated on two successful enterprise communications IPOs. He founded the Andrew Miller Foundation in 2017 to increase awareness and financial support for under-recognized charitable organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Marina Growth Strategies donates a portion of its revenue to the Andrew Miller Foundation. In addition to guest lecturing at UCLA, USC and Stanford, Miller has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos and has given keynote addresses at Microsofts Worldwide Mobile Congress and the Aspen Ideas Festival. For more information about Marina Growth Strategies, visit: http://www.marinastrategy.com For more information about the Andrew Miller Foundation, visit: http://andrewmillerfoundation.org # # # This latest patent represents an important step in implementing our devices into the daily life of our customers, said Abhijit Dasgupta, Ph.D., inventor of the patent and Co-Founder and Chief Data Science Officer at Zansors. Zansors, a wearable tech company based in Northern, Virginia, has added to its growing collection of patents. Zansors was recently awarded a patent for a wearable patch to automatically monitor, screen and/or report health conditions. Zansors next-generation intellectual property (IP) will allow health monitoring devices to detect sleeping or breathing disorders. Zansors is developing and bringing to market, small, wearable and easy-to-use devices that will represent the next generation in sleep apnea and lifestyle technologies. This latest patent represents an important step in implementing our devices into the daily life of our customers, said Abhijit Dasgupta, Ph.D., inventor of the patent and Co-Founder and Chief Data Science Officer at Zansors. This system for monitoring conditions can also be used to monitor and diagnose other medical conditions such as, but not limited to, asthma, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), congestive heart failure, arrhythmias, restless leg syndrome, seizures, falls, metabolic/nutritional levels (e.g. glucose and lipid monitoring) and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Several wellness and fitness conditions can be monitored besides health conditions such as physical activity monitoring (ventilatory threshold, intensity and type, calorie expenditure, and sedentary vs. activity analysis), baby monitoring, from breaths. This utility patent focuses on health monitoring via a wearable biosensor by employing algorithm and signal processing methods for physiological signals. Zansors was also previously issued a patent for specialized protecting adhesive to be used for wearable health sensor patches. These patents underpin the path to commercialization for Zansors R&D investments in wearable tech. Zansors is creating a future that allows remote detection of several health conditions that can be currently monitored only in a clinical setting. Linking subjective information from a mobile application with objective data using this system can provide a holistic picture of health, wellness and activity of the individual, said Dasgupta. Zansors wearable health tech is going to change how well you know yourself. Zansors new patent will lead to monitoring capability in the hands of consumers who can be empowered to monitor more of their health conditions on a continuous basis, instead of episodic screening in a clinical lab setting. The advancement in wearable biosensor technology can be further accelerated by innovations in signal processing for diagnostic purposes, said Dale Lazar of DLA Piper, a global law firm. The patent granted by the United States proves that Zansors is innovating effectively. DLA Pipers Reston, Virginia office supported patent prosecution. For more information on this patent, view the summary: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140276167A1/en Learn more about Zansors technologies at http://www.zansors.com, where you can sign up for email updates, and follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zansors/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/zansors About Zansors Zansors is a Washington, DC metro-based healthcare innovation company delivering personal health analytics into the hands of consumers via wearable bio-sensors and health apps. Driven by our credo of know yourself, Zansors combines evidence-based apps, bioengineering and data analytics, allowing consumers to take charge of their health. Our proprietary biotechnology platform includes micro-sensors and micro-fluidics (also known as lab-on-a-chip) backed by a strong portfolio of patents filed. Zansors has previously received funding awards by NIH. Schaal is on his visit to Vietnam to work with several relevant Vietnamese ministries and agencies on building a multi-dimensional assessment for the host country. At the meeting, Deputy PM Hue emphasised that the OECD multidimensional country review would be an important basis for the Government of Vietnam to consult to formulate strategic policies for the 10-year period of 2021-2030 and towards 2045. Schaal informed that the multidimensional assessment will focus on helping Vietnam build institutions for investment, high technology, inclusive development and anti-corruption. In addition, OECD wants Vietnam to join the Country Programme that the organisation is deploying, in which there are concerned fields that Vietnam is focusing on, including developing tax policies, infrastructure development and human resources under advanced international standards. Welcoming the OECDs invitation, Deputy PM Hue assessed that its Country Programme is necessary for Vietnam, and is also a broader step of cooperation, but with continuing contents from the multidimensional review, helping Vietnam implement its ongoing policies towards OECD-oriented standards for institutional building, transformation of growth and restructuring its economic model. Hue also proposed the OECD to supplement and support Vietnam to develop standards in the management of State-owned corporations, with the main subject is the newly-established Committee for Management of State Capital, while building institutions for market and funds related to start-up on the foundation of technology. If you are new to iQ you can schedule a demo and learn more about this opportunity. PSFK iQ - Where Innovators Turn for Research. Our professional-grade research platform is designed specifically for Retail and CX leaders who want to know whats next. Whether youre staying current on trends or need a real-time research partner to help you get ahead, count on PSFK iQ to deliver the info you need to make your next move. The winners of the 2019 Bologna Prize for the Best Childrens Publishers of the Year were announced at a ceremony Monday night at Palazzo dAccursio. Prizes were given to one publisher in each of six different geographic regions. The awards, which are presented by the Bologna Childrens Book Fair in collaboration with the Association of Italian Publishers, were determined from nominations made by a jury of publishers, and were selected on the basis of creativity, courage, and the quality of the editorial choices. The winners are: Africa: Sub-Saharan Publishers (Ghana) Founded in 1992, the publisher specializes in childrens books addressing environmental issues. Asia: Locus Publishing Company (Taiwan) The publisher, which was founded in 1996, seeks to promote titles that reflect a sense of adventure. Europe: Orfeu negro (Portugal) With a focus on the arts and illustrated books, Orfeu negro ventured in childrens publishing in 2007. North America: Comme des geants (Canada) The Canadian indie publisher specializes in books for infants with an emphasis on narrative and graphics. Central/South America: Limonero (Argentina) Educational publisher Limonero expanded into illustrated books in 2014. Oceania: Scribble Kids Books (Australia) The final prize was given to this eclectic Australian childrens publisher. The 56th annual Bologna Childrens Book Fair got off to a dynamic start on Monday, April 1, as publishing professionals from around the globe gathered in Italy to share new projects, forge connections, and celebrate young peoples literature. If the general atmosphere of the fair has felt different than that of previous years, some of that shift is owing to physical changes in the exhibition space. Many of the attendees PW spoke with commented on the redesigned halls 29 and 30, which were demolished last year, and have been rebuilt as part of a 138 million renovation at the fairgrounds. Nopi Chatzigeorgiou, coordinator of the Thessaloniki Book Fair, praised the rebuilt Hall 29, saying, It is airy and much brighter. Renata Zamida, director of the Slovenian Book Agency, agreed, saying, It is very white and fresh. However, both expressed their preference for their location last year, where they were located closer to the entrance and there were more windows. For her part, Hallie Warshaw, publisher and creative director of Zest Books (now owned by Lerner), pronounced the new halls really beautiful, adding, It makes all the books instantly look more interesting." Empowering Stories The reverberations of the #MeToo movement are still being felt in the childrens world. Leading up to Bologna, Mia Roman, foreign rights associate at New Leaf Literary & Media, told PW, Publishers are actively looking for feminist themes and characters, and that has manifested in fantasy and sci-fi as wellan observation many fairgoers echoed on opening day. Miriam Gabbai, founder of Callis Editora, a Brazilian childrens publisher, remarked that books with strong female charactersparticularly those overcoming obstaclesremain in high demand. Empowering women is a strong theme, she said. Gabbai stated that Callis has had a history of publishing such titles, a fact that has helped generate foreign rights interest in her new and backlist titles. Author Krisin Ragna Gunnarsdottir and Marta Hlin Magnadottir, publisher of Bokabeitan in Iceland, also noted a rise in girl-centric narratives. Bokabeitan has published a series of books, Wolf and Edda, which refashion the Icelandic Sagas in such a way as to put women characters at the forefront. It suits the times, Magnadottir said. Both Gunnarsdottir and Magnadottir said that there also seemed to be a renewed interested in Nordic myths in general. They attributed this trend to the popularity of Game of Thrones and Neil Gaimans recent bestseller Norse Mythology (Norton, 2017). Zamida of the Slovenian Book Agency saw a similar desire for female-driven stories. She noted, Another theme a lot of publishers are asking us about is books about a person who is disabled or impaired, or books in an accessible format. The Thrill of the Chase One YA trend that emerged at last years Bologna was an uptick in teen thrillers, fueled in part by the international success of Karen McManuss novels One of Us Is Lying and Two Can Keep a Secret (Delacorte) and comp titles including All of This Is True by Lygia Day Penaflor (HarperTeen). Thrillers continue to be in demand this year as well. Sourcebooks editorial director Steve Geck, who called the fair very busy, said hed seen a number of interesting projects. Ive especially seen a lot of thrillers so far, he said, and we do very well in that category. Netflix as Trendsetter After the Netflix success of Jenny Hans To All the Boys Ive Loved Before, the quest for content that will translate across media, especially online streaming platforms, is moving the needle in terms of YA trends. Curtis Brown agent Ginger Clark was one of many who cited the presence of Netflix at this years fair. The brand that has been mentioned the most in my meetings is Netflix, she said. People are saying Netflix is really affecting childrens publishing, not only in how much is being optioned and made, but also in how its influencing what people want in YA. Clark said, I am seeing more requests for YA romance and YA romantic comedy than in years past, and I believe that is because of the success of To All the Boys Ive Loved Before. She added, In my first meeting on Tuesday, a Polish editor said that she wanted YA that was like what Netflix is doing. Global Connections The Bologna Book Fair is expanding its international partnerships beyond those it already has with the Shanghai International Book Fair and the New York Rights Fair, and on Monday announced a new collaboration with the Moscow International Book Fair. The goal is to launch a Russian International Childrens Book Fair in 2021. To help get things rolling, this years Moscow International Book Fair, which runs September 48, will host a fellowship program for childrens publishers and a program of events for children, dubbed Childrens Book on Stage. In 2020 the MIBF will also host the IBBY International Congress. Meanwhile, in an effort to raise awareness of global issues among young readers, the International Publishers Association has partnered with the United Nations to launch a book club for children ages six to 12, focusing on books relating to the UNs 17 different sustainable development goals. As part of the project, the SDG Book Clubalso known as the Sustainable Development Goals Book Clubwill release a selection of new titles each month related to one of the goals, to be offered in the six official languages of the UN: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Two global summits were held for top-selling authors at the fair this year, gathering international partners together for discussion and community-building. Scholastic hosted its first Dog Man Global Summit, with publishers from 20 countries in attendance, including Brazil, Italy, India, Japan, and China; they all shared their success stories with Pilkeys mega-selling graphic novel series. And Curtis Brown UK agent Roxane Edouard held a Treehouse Summit for the bestselling Treehouse series by Andy Griffiths, illustrated by Terry Denton, published around the world by Macmillan. The summit, which featured an appearance by Griffiths, allowed his publishers from around the world to hear marketing strategies and share ideas. Diversity Matters U.S. publishers arent alone in championing the We Need Diverse Books movement and its mission of promoting more inclusive stories for young readers. Sarah Odedina, former publishing director of childrens books at Bloomsbury and Hot Key, announced a new partnership with Ghana-based publisher Deborah Ahenkorah, which aims to discover, mentor, and publish writers based in Africa. Ahenkorah, who founded the Golden Baobab Prize for African writers and illustrators, and who has recently launched a publishing house, African Bureau Stories, will pool her talents with Odedinas to work with writers and help develop their stories, so that tales about modern African life can be published and sold abroad as well as in Africa. Adult fiction has seen a little of this, Ahenkorah said, but theres a complete lack of books for children from the African continent. Their goal is to create pathways to readers outside of Africa, she said; they hope to publish six to eight books per year, beginning in 2021, initially through Pushkin Press in the U.K., where Odedina is editor at large. And they were heartened by the number of American and European publishers who have expressed interest in their plans and asked to be kept posted. New Endeavors Not for the first time, the Bologna Childrens Book Fair is ushering in a new chapter for editor Arthur A. Levine. At the 1997 edition of the fair, Levine discoveredand fell in love witha manuscript from Bloomsbury U.K., written by then unknown author J.K. Rowling. After 23 years at Scholastic, where he published Rowlings Harry Potter books among other internationally acclaimed titles, Levine has exited the company to start an independent publishing venture. His new company now has a name. Levine kicked off this years Bologna Fair with an official announcement of Levine Querido, marking a partnership with renowned Dutch publisher Querido. Founder, president, and editor-in-chief Levine told PW at the celebratory kickoff, This represents the kind of collaboration that makes getting the best books of the world to American readers possible. Its something I believe in deeply. Levine Querido will entail two lists. According to Levine, the Arthur A. Levine list will center on diversity, ideally with a mix of 75% minority creators, including people of color, Indigenous people, and LGBTQ individuals. Levine tentatively plans to launch in fall 2020, with a debut list of 20 U.S. titles. In addition, the Em Querido list will feature translations of a selection of the Dutch publishers titles, while also including authors and artists from around the world. The Em Querido list will start with five books per year, and later grow to 10. Formed in 1915, Querido specializes in picture books and fiction for all ages, publishing 50 to 60 new childrens books annually. Named after Dutch-Jewish publisher Emanuel Querido, the list predominantly consists of Dutch and Flemish authors. Another new venture was announced on the eve of the fair: the first childrens list from HarperCollins Italia, headed by editorial director Sabrina Annoni. The list will consist of 25 titles starting in 2019, with plans to grow to 100 books a year. Annoni called the first day of the fair very lively, saying that the announcement of her new list raised a lot of interest from agents and publishers and the whole publishing community, including many Italian authors that we are meeting here. Albert Whitman Turns 100 Celebrating a different milestone, Illinois-based indie publisher Albert Whitman & Company toasted its 100th anniversary at the fair. The company is perhaps best known for publishing the Boxcar Children mystery series, which continues to go strong. Owners Patrick McPartland and John Quattrocchi joined publishing director Sue Tarsky in welcoming visitors to the booth for a celebratory glass of prosecco on Monday night. Tarsky said of Whitmans longevity, Its a publishers dream. WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. Purdue Universitys College of Agriculture and the Brazilian Ministry of Education through CAPES, a public foundation for the development of graduate education in Brazil, have signed an agreement to forge a new educational partnership. Karen Plaut, the Glenn W. Sample Dean of Agriculture at Purdue University, welcomed Mauro Rabelo, Brazilian national secretary for higher education; Connie McManus Pimentel, director of international relations for the Brazilian agency CAPES; and Luiz Valcov Loureiro, executive director of Fulbright Brazil, to Purdue on March 26. The delegation met with Suresh Garimella, executive vice president for research and partnerships, and College of Agriculture associate deans and department heads, and toured campus facilities. The visit culminated with a signing ceremony to establish a new CAPES-Purdue Agriculture Ph.D. Fellows program. The establishment of the new Agriculture Ph.D. Fellows program with Brazil is very exciting, Plaut said. Purdue has a strong track record of engagement with Brazil in the field of agriculture, starting with its capacity-building work with what is now the Federal University of Vicosa, more than half a century ago. This program will further strengthen our academic partnerships in Brazil and help build a cadre of Brazilian Purdue Ph.D.s that will ultimately strengthen joint research collaboration and more. CAPES Pimentel said: For us, partnering with Purdue on an Agriculture Ph.D. program is an obvious choice. Purdues College of Agriculture is world renowned. Purdue is the only university with the distinction of having produced three World Food Prize laureates. Purdue has also shown a historical commitment to collaborating with Brazil in the field of agriculture, including helping with the development of EMPRAPA, Brazils equivalent to the USDAs research service. Per the agreement, the Brazilian government will finance up to 10 doctoral students in Purdues College of Agriculture per year. CAPES will issue a call for applications, and prospective candidates must first be selected through a rigorous pre-selection process. Finalists will then follow the standard graduate admissions process for the Purdue department to which they are applying. The first call for the 10-year agreement is expected to be announced by CAPES in May 2019, with the first cohort of Ph.D. students beginning in fall 2020. Media contact: Maureen Manier, Purdue Agricultural Communication, mmanier@purdue.edu Source: Heidi Arola, managing director, Global Partnerships, harola@purdue.edu Agricultural Communications: 765-494-8415; Maureen Manier, Department Head, mmanier@purdue.edu Agriculture News Page Indias ruling political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has launched its NaMo TV service on direct-to-home (DTH) TV platforms ahead of this month's general elections. NaMo TV will broadcast real-time coverage of Prime Minister Narendra Modis Lok Sabha election campaign on behalf of the Hindu nationalist BJP. The 24 hour channel will broadcast his election rallies and speeches live throughout the campaign.The channel is available on DTH platforms Tata Sky, Airtel Digital TV, Dish TV, as well as cable TV network Siti Networks.Narendra Modi has invited people to connect with him via NaMo TV.The day we were most looking forward to is here! At 5 PM, lakhs of Chowkidars from different parts of India will interact in the historic #MainBhiChowkidar programme. This is an interaction you must not miss. Watch it live on the NaMo App or NaMo TV, Modi tweeted.Political rivals, the Aam Aadmi Party, has filed a complaint to the Election Commission of India against NaMo TV, questioning the cost of the broadcast in the interests of political parity.In its letter to the Election Commission of India, the Aam Aadmi Party said: Supreme Court of India in its various judgments held that there has to be a level playing field for all the political parties and the commission is entrusted with the duty to maintain the same among all the political parties.The intention behind these judicial precedents is to have equal opportunities to all political parties irrespective of money and muscle power, so that all political parties can reach out to the voters. But defying this very cardinal principle BJP has launched 24 hrs channel NaMo TV. Indias national election is scheduled to be held in seven phases from 11 April to 19 May 2019 to constitute the 17th Lok Sabha. The vote count will take place on 23 May and the results will be declared on the same day. The 8 x 30 series, produced by the Swedish company Splay One, which like DRG is part of the NENT Group, follows the popular British chef as she puts her own twist on traditional Swedish dishes in the kitchen of a stuga, an old-style wooden house. Khoo also spends time immersed in the local countryside, making the most of her new way of life, as well as meeting with food producers and other local craftspeople.Mette Kanne-Behrendsen, SVP of acquisitions and executive producer of DRG which retains the international rights for the programme struck the co-commissioning deal with UKTV. When we heard that Splay One, a sister company within the NENT Group, were talking to Rachel Khoo we were very excited, she remarked. Rachel is such a fresh talent and her mouth-watering recipes, combined with the stunning Swedish backdrop, make for a compelling watch. I could immediately see this series finding a home with UKTVs Good Food, so was delighted that they agreed and we were able to co-commission it in partnership.Kirsty Hanson, commissioning editor at UKTV added: Having lived in Sweden for the past few years, Rachel is the perfect person to help Good Food viewers explore the countrys culture and food. The series is not only beautifully shot, but also the Swedish landscapes are breath-taking and escapist. A relatively undiscovered culinary history, the simplicity of the dishes really translates well on screen. Star Indias CEO Sanjay Gupta is set to become country manager of Disney in India, following its acquisition of 21st Century Fox and its lucrative Indian broadcast asset. Gupta will also have direct responsibility for the combined studio business in India, according to a staff memo sent by Walt Disney Asia Pacific president and Star India/Disney India chairman and CEO Uday Shankar Star, which operates 60 TV channels, has a reach of about 720 million viewers a month in India, broadcasting in seven regional languages as well as English. Annually, the Indian media giant generates around 30,000 hours of content.K Madhavan, Star Indias managing director for the South, will lead Star Indias regional language media networks now Disney has taken charge.Elsewhere in Asia, Disneys Luke Kang will lead the North Asia business, maintaining direct country management of Mainland China and Japan, while Amit Malhotra will lead emerging markets and content sales for APAC (except North Asia).Chafic Najia will be country manager of Middle East Media cluster, and Kylie Watson-Wheeler will continue to serve as country manager of the Australian and New Zealand business.However, Zubin Gandevia, who headed Fox Networks Group in Asia Pacific and Middle East, will leave the new combined company, following a transition period in Southeast Asia.Kurt Rieder will lead the companys overall studio business for the Asia Pacific (except India), working closely with the regional business leaders. Rieders boss at 21st Century Fox, head of international distribution Andrew Cripps, was laid off in March.Announcing his leadership team, Shankar - whose position was confirmed by Disney in December - said: We recognise the need for a sharp focus on building deeply local businesses. To achieve this, we are making some changes to the current market structure. This will allow us to serve the strategic agenda in each market and enable our exceptional leaders to build even greater and more successful businesses. Above all, this will facilitate our transformation into a direct-to-consumer company that rests on deep local foundations.Our true strength comes from the quality and diversity of our talent, which combines the best of both Disney and 21st Century Fox, he added. The network will offer audiences streaming access for the first time, across both Telemundo and NBCUniversal digital platforms, including Telemundo.com, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, as well as the Telemundo app. In addition, social-media platforms from sister networks and shows like E!, USAs Queen of the South or Bravos Shahs of Sunset, Mexican Dynasties and Imposters will also showcase the material.We see the high anticipation from La Reina del Sur fans as they continue to increase their social engagement with the brand, said Karen Barroeta, SVP, Marketing and Creative, Telemundo . As the premiere date draws near, this first act is a great way to give them a taste of what is to come, showcasing the amazing production quality and high-action viewers can expect from this series.During the first episode, audiences will be reconnected with characters from the first season of La Reina del Sur, as well as be introduced to some of this seasons new players, particularly Teresa Mendozas daughter Sofia, played by Isabella Sierra.Shot on location in eight countries, the return of La Reina del Sur is set eight years since powerful drug trafficker Teresa Mendoza disappeared into the US Federal Witness Protection Program after bringing down Mexican presidential candidate Epifanio Vargas. Hers is now a life of total anonymity in Italy as Maria Dantes, peacefully raising her daughter Sofia in the Tuscan village of Massa Marittima. However, her life takes an unexpected turn. The US hasn't sold advanced fighter jets to Taiwan since 1992, primarily because it has been wary of antagonizing China. In the eyes of Beijing, of course, Taiwandespite its democratic elections and self-governing statusis part of China. Earlier this month, however, the Trump administration gave its tacit approval (paywall) to Taiwan's request to purchase 60 F-16V fighter jets. A formal request would still need US congressional approval, but the news has already rattled Beijing. The U.S. Navy's first-in-class amphibious assault ship USS Wasp recently arrived in the Philippines for a major annual exercise carrying a U.S. Marine Corps contingent that includes at least 10 F-35B Joint Strike Fighters. This is a larger than average number of the combat jets than Wasp-class ships normally embark, but is a force structure that the Navy and Marines are looking to standardize. It's also one that could help lay the groundwork for a future operating concept that could turn amphibious assault ships into light carriers, as necessary. Wasp entered the Philippine port of Subic Bay on Mar. 30, 2019, ahead of the beginning of Exercise Balikatan 2019. The ship is carrying Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Four (SPMAGTF 4), with the 4th Marine Regiment as the lead unit. The drills have occurred almost every year since 1991, with the exception of a hiatus between 1995 and 1999 due to a protracted dispute over the legal status of American troops deployed to the country during the exercise. The head of Venezuelas opposition-controlled Parliament, Juan Guaido, who has been recognized as the countrys legitimate president by more than 50 nations, said Monday that the Supreme Court s request to lift his parliamentary immunity lacks validity. Theres no lifting of immunity of any kind because ... (such a request) is invalid, the opposition leader told reporters at the close of a public event in downtown Caracas a few hours after the high courts decision became known. Supreme Court (TSJ) Chief Justice Maikel Moreno announced Monday that he had declared Guaido to be in contempt for having flouted a prohibition on leaving Venezuela imposed on him, adding that he had asked the government-supporting National Constitutional Assembly (ANC) to cancel his parliamentary immunity. Guaido said that the TSJs magistrates had not ruled that his immunity must be lifted but rather bounced the matter to the government-backing ANC, a legislative forum that is not recognized by the opposition or by numerous countries. This is persecution, dictatorship ... Have no doubt that they want to see me under arrest. Its clear that they want to do it ... but theres no worry about that, Guaido said. The parliamentary chief said that the TSJ decision came after the Nicolas Maduro government took issue with the dozens of anti-government protests staged on Sunday against the widespread power blackouts that began to come much more frequently starting on March 7. What bothers them is that were calling people to the street and the people (have) turned out ... Were going to continue moving along the path towards freedom, toward the end of the usurpation of power, which is how Guaido and the opposition refer to Maduros inauguration in mid-January to a second six-year term in office. A few minutes before Guaido spoke a group of unidentified people set off a tear gas canister near the site. Later, while the politician was speaking, EFE noted three explosions near the site, although no further details were immediately available about their location or cause. Attorney General Tarek Saab has been pursuing an investigation of Guaido ever since the latter proclaimed himself interim president on Jan. 23, a week after Maduros re-inauguration, invoking constitutional articles against the usurpation of power that he, the opposition and many foreign nations claim has been perpetrated by Maduro. The countries backing Guaido, including the United States and most of the members of the European Union , do not recognize the legitimacy of Maduros second term, given that he won re-election last May in a presidential contest from which key opposition politicos were banned. ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) The Army is investigating the death of a 20-year-old soldier who was shot during a live-fire exercise in Alaskas interior. Army officials in Alaska said Monday SPC Nicholas Peter DiMona III died Saturday after he was shot during the early morning drill at the Donnelly Training area near Fort Greely. Officials say medics at the scene provided care to DiMona. He was flown to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Spokesman John Pennell says the investigation includes looking at anyone responsible for firing the fatal round. Pennell says the exercise is part of ongoing readiness training. He didnt know of any past similar deaths in Alaska during exercises. DiMona, from Medford Lakes, New Jersey, was based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage. He joined the Army in 2017. copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. On Saturday 30 March, Chinese Peoples Liberation Army Air Force dispatched four long-range bombers, electronic jamming and intelligence planes, and two or possibly more fighter aircraft over the international waters of the Miyako Strait, the approximately 175-mile gap between the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Miyako. It cannot be a coincidence that two days earlier the Chinese navy, according to Japans Defense Ministry, sent two guided-missile frigates and a logistics ship from the East China Sea into the Central Pacific. The Strait is a critical passage between the East China Sea and the Pacific. If in conflict, China were to deploy warships into the central Pacific they would likely seek to pass through the Miyako Strait. Japans Self-Defense Force responded by scrambling fighters to intercept the Chinese aircraft. On the following day, Sunday 31 March, two Chinese J-11 fighter jets crossed the Median Line that divides the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and mainland China. Taiwan scrambled fighters to intercept this unusual violation of a long-existing understanding that neither side would cross the Median Line. The last time China deliberately violated this understanding was 20 years ago. Neither with Japan nor Taiwan are the past few days events a new development. China has been increasing its provocations of both states with increasing frequency over the past year. Japan has scrambled fighters to intercept Chinese air force planes earlier in March and February this year in each month since June 2018 in the East China Sea and often over the Miyako Strait. Similarly, China has increased its provocations directed at Taiwan over the last 12 months including naval circumnavigations of Taiwan, one of which included the aircraft carrier, Liaonings passage through the Taiwan Strait. There is insufficient evidence to conclude that China is preparing to initiate hostilities against either Taiwan or Japan. But Chinas rulers have not ruled out force to, as they put it, reunify Taiwan with the PRC. And practice drills that simulate military movements in an actual conflict are standard armed force tactics. They provide an aggressor with important information about a potential opponents intelligence skills, command and control, response times, and tactical dexterity. This year is the 40th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act, the legislation that requires the U.S. to provide defense articles and services to assist Taiwan in defending itself. The act stated that any attempt to dictate Taiwans future by other than peaceful means would be a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific and of grave concern to the United States. Forty years have not changed this fact. They have underlined it as China continues its rapid and well-funded program of military modernization and its growing regional aggression. Taiwan lies at the center of the island chain that follows the curve of Asias eastern littoral. Chinas seizure of Taiwan would give the PRC uncontested access to the central Pacific including Hawaii and allow it to threaten far more dangerously such other island chain allies as the Philippines and Japan. Japan is the only ally for whose defense the U.S. is primarily responsible. Its defeat or submission to Chinese will would end the U.S.s more than a century claim to be a Pacific power as trade flows, technology, and responsibility for security shifted to China. Chinese success in Finlandizing or defeating Japan and Taiwan would shatter any other foreign government that looked to Washington for security. President Trump should act resolutely and swiftly to convince Chinas rulers that the U.S. supports its Asian allies and partners against escalating Chinese provocations in East Asia. Specifically, the Trump administration should immediately finalize and sign the deal to sell 60 F-16V fighters to Taiwan. The U.S. has promised but has not delivered on selling advanced fighters to Taiwan for 27 years. Taiwan needs them, as the events of 31 March and the previous year demonstrate. They will not reverse the enormous gap between Taiwans defenses and Chinas aggressive armaments and provocations. But they will demonstrate the kind of U.S. commitment to Taiwans defense that is critical to deterring China. To show support for both Japan and Taiwan, the U.S. should divert the USS Wasp Strike Group and dispatch the USS Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group from its homeport in Japan to transit the Miyako Strait and then continue their transit down through the Taiwan Strait. Tangible proofs speak much louder than any U.S. government statements. Actions, and not only the ones argued for here, are needed to deter conflict in the South and East China Seas. In the end, Chinas aggressive behavior of the past few days is a test to see what American policy-makers will do. President Trump will advance the cause of peace by answering with resolve. Seth Cropsey is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute and director of Hudson's Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and as Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. President Nicolas Maduro has fired Electric Energy Minister Gen. Luis Motta Dominguez and replaced him with Igor Gavidia, an engineer whose top priority will be dealing with the continuing power outages across Venezuela. I want to thank comrade ... Motta Dominguez, who has gone through four years of constant wars at the head of the Electricity Ministry and Corpoelec. I have asked him to rest for a while, I have asked him to prepare for other responsibilities in the field of revolution, Maduro said Monday. The president said in an address to the nation that the new minister is an electrical engineer with 25 years of experience in the industry. Gavidia will also serve as chairman of state-owned utility Corporacion Electrica (Corpoelec). This is the first time Maduro has appointed someone who is not a military officer to head this ministry. Mottas predecessor was Jesse Chacon, a former military officer. Gavidia took over the post a day after the government launched a power-rationing plan that Maduro said marked the start of the new stage that we have to open to defeat the electric war. The president said he appointed Freddy Brito as head of the Science and Technology Ministry, which has been reactivated as a Cabinet department. Maduro also created the Executive Secretariat of the Electricity General Staff, which will be under Interior and Justice Minister Nestor Reverol. The secretariat must operate 24 hours a day in coordination, review and permanent action, Maduro said. The president said classes would resume on Wednesday. Classes were suspended on March 25 following a series of blackouts across the country. We are returning to class in the schools, high schools, colleges and universities, gradually ... going back to class in resistance, Maduro said, adding that adults needed to tell children about the terrorist attacks we are experiencing. On Sunday, protests broke out in Caracas as residents woke to yet another blackout that affected several regions. Officials have blamed the outages on sabotage against the National Electric System (SEN), which has been dealing with power outages for weeks. The latest power outages come nearly a month after the massive blackout that Venezuela experienced on March 7 that kept virtually the whole country in the dark for five days until the government managed to regain control of the situation and restore electric service. The government said at the time that sabotage at the Guri hydroelectric complex was to blame for the blackout. Maduro directly blamed the United States and the opposition for the alleged sabotage, claiming that electromagnetic attacks had been staged on the electric grid. The opposition, however, blamed the Maduro regime for failures in the system, saying that the governments poor management of the grid was the real cause of the outage. The early March blackout caused about 15 deaths due to the lack of electricity at Venezuelan hospitals, the opposition claims, while officials contend that just two people died. Inside Chinas System of Incarceration and Control of minorities In Kazakhstan, former detainees recount brutal treatment, political indoctrination, forced labour and surveillance. Nathan VanderKlippe reports ahead of human-rights group's visit to Ottawa seeking action The European Union (EU) is entering campaign season. Between May 23 and 26, every EU member state will vote to elect the 705 members of the European Parliament, one of the key Brussels institutions alongside the European Commission and the European Council of heads of states. Ever since the first direct election by EU citizens in 1979, European parliamentary elections have often failed to excite voters. The EU legislative process is complex and Brussels seems remote to many. National parties have often used the opportunity to recycle losers of national elections or distance annoying opponents. In Brussels No One Can Hear You Scream was the title of a Borgen episode in which the fictional Danish prime minister promotes her main rival to the European Commission. This time is different. The 2019 vote is the most important European election to ever take place. Not only because it takes place in a time of deep uncertainty about the European project, but more so because for the first time the campaign is really about differing visions of what the EU should be. Previous campaigns often focused on domestic issues. When European questions emerged, national agendas trumped differences in visions of Europe. This year though, the election pits ideological coalitions that transcend national interests against one another, a consequence of challenges that have affected the Continent as a whole. Consider everything that has happened in the five years since the last European Parliament elections in 2014. Geopolitical crises and political upheavals have rocked the Continent. Relations with Russia dramatically deteriorated following the March 2014 annexation of Crimea and ensuing Russian aggression in Donbas. In 2015, the migrant crisis tested Europes common borders, sparking a nationalist upheaval. In 2016, British voters chose to leave the EU and Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States on an America First platform. Europeans have been stunned to hear Trump describe the EU as a foe, impose economic tariffs on them, and question US security commitments. Europeans have awakened to a dangerous world and uncertainty on the horizon. In Italy, a founding member of the European Community, a far-right populist party, Lega, is de facto in charge. In Germany, Angela Merkel, who has said she will resign in 2021, wont be chancellor at the time of the next European ballot. In France, if President Emmanuel Macron fails to implement his reform agenda he will likely be followed by the kind of populist opposition that the Yellow Jackets movement embodied these last few months. But this could also be a time of renewal for the EU. Its easy to look at divisions among European leaders as one more sign of the degradation of the European project. But what if this moment could spark the birth of a real and much-needed European public sphere that had been sorely lacking until now? The election result will set the tone for the direction the EU will take and determine the political color of the European Commissions president. Many observers fear populist forces will strengthen their presence in parliament and complicate any coalition-building efforts between the center-right European Peoples Party (EPP), the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), and the liberal Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE). Europe is going through a genuine and interesting debate over its model and identity. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini have called for a stop to immigration (although they have come short on concrete proposals on how to address the situation), push a nationalist narrative, and describe Macron as their main enemya title the French president has heartily embracedbecause they see him as advocating for solidarity on immigration and further EU integration on defense and the eurozone. Many of these questions have often been left to bureaucrats or avoided altogether. Now they are being put in front of voters. The challenges that Europeans face cant be left to lawyers and economists. If pro-Europe activists want to win again they need to understand that populists have brought politics back to Europe; they should embrace it and get in the fight. The paradox is that so far nationalists have been better at using the European Parliament to promote their own agenda. Many remember speeches by Nigel Farage, the former head of the UK Independence Party, deriding European Council President Donald Tusk. Pro-Europeans should not be afraid to appeal directly to voters. In a bold move earlier in March, Macron decided to directly address the public with an op-ed published in major newspapers in which he called for a European renaissance. Macrons op-ed signaled an important change of tone from Europes supporters, too often stuck in defensive mode. (If only voters knew the good the EU does for them!) Macrons EU renaissance project is somber and lucid. It shows he understands that pro-Europeans cant just wait Trump out or hope that voters will come to their senses and appreciate all the benefits of Europe. It takes into consideration the EUs failures, such as ineffective immigration policies or lacking economic coordination. It could be tempting to look at Britains post-Brexit referendum woes and be complacent about the EU, but the chaos in British politics has not suddenly erased the EUs difficulties. Macron takes Brexit as a cautionary tale in his op-ed and sees the British vote as a symbol of the crisis of Europe, which has failed to respond to its peoples needs for protection from the major shocks of the modern world. Arguing for common defense initiatives, stronger border control, and a more integrated eurozone, Macron makes the case that European sovereignty can protect Europeans. Instead of ignoring the populists, he attempts to capture their own vocabulary of protectionism and sovereignty by arguing that these challenges can only be met at the EU level rather than divided and isolated national levels. Europe needs politics; it needs its defenders to enter the arena and fight for ideas that cant be left to bureaucrats. Helping Ukraine face Russian aggression, promoting economic solidarity in the eurozone, ensuring European sovereignty, staying open and tolerant to immigration, those arent value-free propositions that can be solved by cost-benefit analysis. European politicians need to make the case for these policies in front of voters. They need to push policies that will protect Europes citizens. A failure to do so means the populists win, and deservedly so. Reprinted with permission from The Atlantic Council. Benjamin Haddad is the director of the Future Europe Initiative at the Atlantic Council. His forthcoming book Paradise Lost: Trumps America and the end of European illusions will be published in French by Grasset in April. He was the Washington representative of Emmanuel Macron's En Marche movement in 2017. Follow him on Twitter @benjaminhaddad. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale Buy real estate. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale in US and Canada. Search Real Estate By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 04/02/2019 ADVERTISEMENT Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. couple Colt Johnson and Larissa Christina Dos Santos Lima 's marriage is over and done with.Colt's attorney Shawanna L. Johnson issued a statement to E! News about the current status of the reality TV star's divorce proceedings with Larissa on Monday. Colt Johnson and Larissa dos Santos Lima have settled their divorce. The motion has been taken off the calendar and an agreement has been reached," said Johnson."Lawyers are in the process of finalizing the written stipulation to sign and submit to the judge."Colt and Larissa's seven-month relationship ended when Colt filed for divorce on January 11, hours after the couple got into an explosive fight in their Las Vegas home.The argument apparently started when Larissa accused Colt of cheating and purchasing pornographic videos, and tension eventually escalated into physical violence.Larissa was ultimately arrested and charged with misdemeanor domestic violence, and she has a court hearing scheduled for April 4, according to In Touch Weekly.After Colt filed for divorce, Larissa responded to the petition on February 8 and requested her ex pay her $1,000 per month in spousal support Although the former couple's breakup was nasty, Johnson told E! News the "matter was settled amicably between the parties and each party will walk away and bear their own costs and fees."Colt's attorney added, "The motion for temporary orders and gag order was vacated today by agreement of the attorneys in anticipation of submitting the final settlement and order to the judge."Colt even reportedly "wishes Larissa the best in her future endeavors," according to Johnson.Colt and Larissa's divorce will be official and finalized once a judge approves the paperwork, but the pair has already emotionally parted ways.In February, the TLC stars hosted separate divorce parties at a Las Vegas club, where both individuals celebrated with friends and strippers.Larissa has also clearly moved on with her Italian boyfriend Eric, a 26-year-old whom she often gushes is "handsome," "special," and "gentlemanly."Colt and Larissa, who got married in June 2018, both starred on Season 6 of .Larissa previously told In Touch she and Colt had finished filming Season 4 of : Happily Ever After? back in December 2018.The fourth season of the Happily Ever After? spinoff is slated to premiere on Sunday, April 28 at 8PM ET/PT on TLC. , We're sorry, this article is not currently available Mexican-born actress Cecilia Suarez and Spanish director Santiago Segura will host the sixth annual Platino Awards for Ibero-American Cinema on May 12 in Playa del Carmen on Mexicos Riviera Maya. Theyll be in charge on a night that is guaranteed to be exciting, said the organization Tuesday in a statement on the gala, to be held at the Gran Tlachco Theater at Xcaret Park for the second year in a row. In addition to hosting the event, Suarez will be competing for best female actor in a television mini-series after her performance in The House of Flowers, while Segura will be hosting the Platino gala, as he did in 2016. Award-winning Mexican film Roma stands out as the favorite among the nominees, with a total of nine nominations, while Spanish-Uruguayan film La noche de 12 anos (A Twelve-Year Night) and Colombias Pajaros de verano (Birds of Passage) have six nominations each. This year, Spanish films have received 34 nominations in 17 categories. Suarez, 47, in 2009 became the first Spanish-speaking actress to receive an International Emmy nomination for best actress for her role in the series Capadocia. She has appeared in a dozen films and is popularly known for her role as Paulina de la Mora in The House of Flowers. She was also nominated twice for an Ariel, Mexicos equivalent of the Oscar. In 2007, Suarez was among the best actress nominees for her work in Parpados Azules, and seven years later she received a best supporting actress nomination for Las oscuras primaveras. Meanwhile, 53-year-old Segura is an actor, scriptwriter, director and producer for the saga Torrente, the highest grossing Spanish film series. He has won three Goya awards (Spains Oscars): 1994 Best Short Film Fiction for Perturbado; 1995 Best New Actor for El dia de la bestia and 1998 Best New Director for Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley, the first installment in the series. He is also known for his appearances in television comedies. This year will be the first time the Platino Awards have been held in a previous location after being hosted by Panama in 2014, Marbella in 2015, Punta del Este in 2016 and Madrid in 2017. The Platino Awards are promoted by the Spain-based Audiovisual Producers Rights Management Entity (EGEDA) and the Ibero-American Federation of Film and Audiovisual Producers (FIPCA), with support from the Latin American Artists Federation (Latin Artis) and the AISGE (Performers Management Company) Foundation. The goal of the Platino Awards has been to promote and disseminate Ibero-American cinema and help ensure that the films success at the most prestigious festivals is translated into outstanding results in commercial theaters. By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 11/24/2021 ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! Which couples are still together and which MAFS couples have broken up and divorced? And where are they now? 's first twelve seasons featured 44 different couples getting married at first sight -- so which couples are still together, who has broken up and divorced, and where are they all now?Each season of -- which premiered in the United States seven years ago and is based on a Danish series -- features couples (previously three couples, but four couples on Seasons 8 and 9, and five couples beginning with Season 10) being matched together by relationship experts and agree to marry when they first meet.Complete strangers become husband and wife in a matter of minutes, and the couples' lives are then documented by TV cameras over the course of the next four to eight weeks (eight weeks, in the case of 's most recent seasons).The couples typically enjoy their first night together in a hotel after exchanging vows -- with some couples deciding to consummate their marriage immediately -- and then embark on a honeymoon, move in together, and simply attempt to deal with the struggles of daily life as man and wife.At the end of the extreme marriage experiment, each couple must decide whether they'd like to stay married or get a divorce on "Decision Day."has experienced very mixed results over the years. While a significant number of couples decide to stay together and continue their new marriage at the end of their season, the real world seems to hit them hard after the cameras leave, resulting in the couple splitting up only months later.Do cast members see a different side of their spouses once cameras are gone, or do the romances naturally fizzle over time?Some couples are still together to this day and are extremely happy. Jamie Otis and Doug Hehner from Season 1, for example, have had two children.Several other couples have also had children -- including Ashley Petta and Anthony D'Amico Shawniece Jackson and Jephte Pierre Danielle Bergman and Bobby Dodd Deonna McNeill and Greg Okotie , and Jessica Studer and Austin Hurd However, there are also relationships that ended badly. Jessica Castro from Season 2, for instance, accused Ryan De Nino of alleged death threats, and she went on to file a restraining order and lawsuit against him.Some couples have also never even made it to "Decision Day" and ended their marriage prematurely, including Season 4 couple Heather Seidel and Derek Schwartz as well as Season 6 couple Molly Duff and Jonathan Francetic Are the remaining couples now lovers, friends or enemies?! What about early season couples like Cortney Hendrix and Jason Carrion, Jaclyn Methuen and Ryan Ranellone, Vanessa Nelson and Tres Russell, Sonia Granados and Nick Pendergrast, and Lillian Vilchez and Tom Wilson?And how about more recent season couples like Danielle DeGroot and Cody Knapek Sheila Downs and Nate Duhon Jaclyn Schwartzberg and Ryan Buckley Dave Flaherty and Amber Martorana , and Tristan Thompson and Mia Bally Keith Dewar and Kristine Killingsworth , and AJ Vollmoeller and Stephanie Sersen Click thelink below to see photos of each couple and find out! BEGIN GALLERY >> Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tuesday that the United States should exercise greater control over arms sales, though he will not discuss the matter with his neighbor until the situation on the border calms down. Theres a lot of arms trafficking from the United States to Mexico, and in fact the gun shops on the US side of the border are selling more than ever, but this is not the time to start an argument, the president told a morning press conference. For that reason, the president and leader of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) said that its obvious there has to be greater control over gun sales on the US side. Were working on a proposal to make that happen but we dont want to mention it right now because theres the dispute about the border and we dont want to bring that up, the president said. He was referring to US President Donald Trumps threat to close the border with Mexico because he believes the Latin American country is doing nothing to stop the caravans of Central American migrants headed for the United States, and which have caused chaos at several points along the border. We have maintained good relations with President Donald Trump despite our differences. I consider it a good relationship and were determined to maintain a relationship of friendship, cooperation and mutual aid, Lopez Obrador said. The Mexican president then repeated his call for dialogue, dialogue, dialogue and more dialogue. We wont fall for any provocation, said Lopez Obrador, who seemed confident that the majority of Mexicans dont want confrontation with the neighboring country. Lopez Obrador said he will keep working on a development plan for Central America in order to stop these migrations of people fleeing their respective countries. The Mexican president seeks the active participation of the United States government in this plan and is also in contact with authorities of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Lopez Obrador said he has invited the president-elect of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, with whom he met on March 12, on a tour around the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas on the Guatemala border. That tour, which could occur this April or May, will serve to show the Salvadoran leader how the governments Sowing Life program is working, as it seeks to power up the economy of that area starting with tree plantations. The geography, climate and nature of Chiapas are similar to those of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and it has the same flora and fauna. This program could be carried across all Central America, he said. Porterville, CA (93257) Today Rain. Low 48F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch. Locally heavy rainfall possible.. Tonight Rain. Low 48F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch. Locally heavy rainfall possible. Vics Vintage first opened the shop on March 31, 2011, but Victor Peel has been selling online on eBay when it was still known as AuctionWeb in the 1990s. Now he has to sell the pieces he has collected at reduced prices since he has to leave the building by June 1. After what feels like a rollercoaster of weather changes over the past few months in Georgia, it finally feels like spring has sprung and summ RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das and Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg are also expected to attend the meetings. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will attend the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington DC later this month, Business Standard has learnt. The meeting will be held from April 12-14 and will be Jaitleys first official overseas trip since his kidney transplant in mid-May last year. Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das and Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg are also expected to attend the meetings, sources said. Jaitley is expected to leave for Washington DC next week, a day or two before the start of the Spring Meetings. Officials said his schedule was still being finalised and hence it still wasnt clear which events he will address and whether he will have bilateral meetings on the sidelines with any of his counterparts from other nations. The minister may leave by April 10. The RBI Governor and the Finance Secretary are also likely to go, an official said. Jaitley underwent a successful kidney transplant in mid-May at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi. He was on leave since April due to kidney-related problems and chest infection, and took charge of the finance and corporate affairs ministries in late August. In the meantime, Railways and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal had held temporary charge of the finance ministry. In mid-January, he had gone to New York for a medical check-up. He had reportedly undergone a surgery in late January and was advised two weeks rest. In his absence, Goyal was again given additional charge of the Ministry of Finance for the second time in eight months. Goyal presented his first Budget, the interim Budget 2019-20, in Jaitleys absence. Jaitley continued being active from New York and wrote a number of blogs on various political and policy issues. Jaitley returned to Delhi on February 9 and took back charge a few days later. Jaitley missed the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings last year as he was keeping unwell since early April 2018 due to kidney related problems and chest infection. This was just before his kidney transplant surgery. The Annual and Spring Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group each year bring together central bankers, ministers of finance and development, private sector executives, civil society, and academics to discuss issues of global concern, including the world economic outlook, global financial stability, poverty eradication, jobs and growth, economic development, and aid effectiveness. Cumulative sale at India's top six passenger vehicle (PV) makers dropped 0.7 per cent to 267,000 units, from 269,000 a year before. Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com March was yet another weak month for automobile companies as car buyers postponed purchases amid uncertainty ahead of the Lok Sabha election and tepid economic indicators. The new financial year seems unlikely to offer relief and sales are expected to remain in the slow lane till a post-election government takes charge. Dispatches at most companies, with the exception of a few, were either muted or fell, amid a pile of unsold stock (auto companies in India count dispatches to dealers as sales). Cumulative sale at India's top six passenger vehicle (PV) makers dropped 0.7 per cent to 267,000 units, from 269,000 a year before. Higher cost of financing, with higher premium outgo on insurance, are among the factors weighing on buyer sentiment. PV sales had also dropped 1.1 per cent in February, the seventh decline in eight months. This has prompted the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers to say they would not be meeting even their scaled-down forecast of a six per cent rise for 2018-19. March sales at car market leader Maruti Suzuki India dipped 0.75 per cent to 147,613 units from a year before, led by a 6.9 per cent drop in sale of passenger cars - Baleno, Swift, Dzire and Ciaz, among other models. However, helped by the new-generation Ertiga, its utility vehicle segment grew at a brisk 12.3 per cent over a year. In an indication of weak macro economic indicators, the growth of India's eight core sectors had slowed to 2.1 per cent in February, due to a fall in output of crude oil and refinery products. Mitul Shah, vice president, research, at Reliance Securities, said he expected 2019-20 to see a rise in only mid-single digit for PV sale, with a slowdown till the next festive season. "Demand is expected to pick up marginally in the second half of the (financial) year as pre-buying takes effect ahead of the BS-VI emission norms from April 2020, he said. The sales drop was higher at other companies than Maruti. Domestic sales at Hyundai Motor India dropped 7.6 per cent to 44,350 units over the same month a year before. Tata Motors' PV sales skid 12 per cent to 17,810 units. The company attributed it to continued low consumer sentiment. New model launches, particularly of the XUV3OO, a compact SUV, helped Mahindra & Mahindra remain on a positive sales trajectory. The maker of the Scorpio and Bolero sold 27,646 units during March, up four per cent over a year before. Honda Cars India was another exception, with sales at a fast pace on the back of new launches such as the Amaze. The local arm of the Japanese car maker saw deliveries to dealers increase 27 per cent over the same month last year. Toyota Kirloskar Motor ended the year on a muted note. It sold 205,279 units in March, up two per cent over the past year. Maaza is the countrys top mango juice drink despite competition from brands such as Frooti and Tropicana Slice growing in the past few years. he worlds largest beverage maker, Coca-Cola, is counting on markets such as India to spruce up its portfolio of global brands. The Atlanta-based major sees growth potential in India, ranked sixth in its pecking order of markets. While part of its India blueprint will involve pushing the local unit up from sixth to fifth position in the next one year, the second part will see the global major increasingly taking some of the popular brands to international markets. Thums Up and RimZim have been taken to neighbouring countries in South Asia in recent months. There is potential to take some of our brands to many more markets. "Maaza is one such product we are exploring after Thums Up and RimZim, said T Krishnakumar, president, India and Southwest Asia, Coca-Cola. Both Maaza and Thums Up are also products that the company is hoping will touch sales of $1 billion (Rs 7,000 crore) each in India in the future for which the firm is investing behind in terms of new launches, innovations and distribution. Last month, Coca-Cola India had revamped the packaging of Maaza for which it had collaborated with UK-based design agency Taxi Studio. The aim was to make the brand more relevant and contemporary for users and help sustain its leadership. Maaza is the countrys top mango juice drink despite competition from brands such as Frooti (from Parle Agro) and Tropicana Slice (from PepsiCo) growing in the past few years. Along with brands such as Sprite and Thums Up, experts say Maaza has helped Coca-Cola India consolidate its position as the countrys leading beverage maker. In recent quarters, variants such as Maaza Gold and Maaza Refresh have been launched to strengthen the portfolio of the mango juice drink. Thums Up, on the other hand, has seen the introduction of Thums Up Charged and its no-sugar variant. Coca-Cola is also investing significantly behind what it calls a fruit circular economy in India to help it source ingredients locally to support manufacturing. Besides mangoes, Coca-Cola is sourcing fruits such as oranges, guavas, and lichi in partnership with players such as Jain Irrigation as it launches regional drinks. James Quincey, president and chief executive officer, The Coca-Cola Company, had recently told Business Standard that the firm would introduce more local innovation of global brands to grow sales. One of the ways that personalisation is coming to light in India is via the local fruits and flavours that are going into beverages. "Our Minute Maid portfolio, for instance, has seen a lot of attention we've paid to this, whether it is getting local flavours such as mosambi or launching a grape-flavoured drink called Colour (under Minute Maid) in Tamil Nadu, he said. Going places Thums Up and RimZim have been taken to neighbouring countries in South Asia Firm hopes to touch sales of $1 bn each from the two brands Along with Sprite and Thums Up, Maaza has helped Coca-Cola consolidate its position as Indias leading beverage maker The firm is introducing more local innovation of global brands to grow sale Photograph; Courtesy, Coca-Cola India Anandan, also an investor in multiple start-ups, is slated to join venture fund Sequoia Capital. Google's India and South East Asia president Rajan Anandan has put in his papers after an eight-year stint at the American tech giant. Anandan, also an investor in multiple start-ups, is slated to join venture fund Sequoia Capital. He will work with Google till the end of this month. Vikas Agnihotri will take on the interim responsibility. He is currently serving as Google's country director for sales. "We are grateful to Rajan for his huge contribution to Google over the past eight years. His entrepreneurial zeal and leadership has helped grow the overall internet ecosystem in India and Southeast Asia," Google president Asia Pacific Scott Beaumont said in an emailed statement. Anandan had joined Google from Microsoft India in 2010. Previously, he was also associated with Dell India and McKinsey & Company. In a tweet, Anandan said: "8 amazing years. 850 million internet users across India and SEA. Many billions of revenue and fastest growing region in the world. Incredible team that thinks big and executes superbly. Thank you @GoogleIndia #GoogleSEA. Loved every minute." Some of the companies in which Anandan has invested include WebEngage, Instamojo, Capillary Technologies, TravelKhana, and EasyGov. Sequoia Capital managing director Shailendra J Singh, in a Linkedin post, said Anandan will join the leadership team at the firm, in addition to the six current managing directors. Anandan will focus on developing 'Surge' programme for start-ups by acting as an investment advisor and mentor to the founders. Surge aims to engineer rapid early progress for startups, by enabling disproportionate access to capital, talent, network and decades of company-building knowledge. "Rajan's deep understanding of technology, significant operating expertise and track record of growing tech businesses across the region will help Surge founders scale and build the transformational businesses of tomorrow," Singh said. Photograph: PTI Photo Last updated on: April 02, 2019 17:37 IST Like *everyone* in Bollywood, Malaika Arora seems to love the Maldives. And why not? The locale makes for much relaxation and such fantastic pictures! A look at some pictures from Malla's most recent trip... (Pssst... as Farah Khan wants to know... who's shooting these amazing pix... Could it be one smouldering hulk from Juhu :))) Malaika gets flirty on the beach. Malaika shows off her best profile. Malaika shows us the perfect way she likes to begin her day. With a pool like that, it makes good sense! The perfect setting for a romantic meal. Blue skies and cool waters make Malaika's day. Malaika welcomes Monday with a headstand. This is how she likes to keep fit. Malaika says goodbye to the Maldives with the perfect shot. Photographs: Kind courtesy Malaika Arora/ Instagram Saisuresh Sivaswamy tells us what we must know from the election news in the print and television media. A must read column, folks! IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi addresses the National Women Livelihood Meet 2019 in Varanasi, March 8, 2019, two days before the dates for the Lok Sabha election was called. Photograph: Press Information Bureau News with some views Television during Prime Time, or as some call it Super Prime Time, is not for the faint-hearted. Every time I get around to watch the shenanigans that unfold beyond 9 pm in the name of News, I find myself wondering if I will have to up the mg of my anti-hypertension pills or spend extra time on the yoga mat. It is a no-contest, usually. And Monday night was no different. While NDTV remained the sole arena for sanity, with Nidhi Razdan's steady hand at the tiller and calm demeanour keeping others in check, the scene elsewhere was a total contrast. Times Now's Navika Kumar was her indignant self, raising questions in line with the prime minister's attack on the Congress president for scooting off to Wayanad etc. In fact, this was the theme for most TV channels, and I was sure it would be the leit motif on the TV station so beloved by bhakts. Republic TV reminds me of Ravan, the 10-headed rakshasa, for that's usually how many talking heads you will find squeezed on to one panel on Arnab Goswami's show, each talking, sorry, shouting at each other, and the viewer unable to figure out who is shouting at who. In the midst of this cacophony, Arnab himself is a picture of calm, speaking only occasionally, but when he does it is with the stentorian authority of, well, Hector himself. And the reason his show was not making mincemeat of Rahul Gandhi and his party was because they had got a bigger, better bone to chew on. Omar Abdullah's declaration that the National Conference will restore the prime ministership and flag in Kashmir had got the gents all worked up, and unable to make out if any sense could be distilled from all that verbiage, I quickly logged out. But not before catching BJP President Amit Shah on some channel, was it News18? To his credit, the candidate from Gandhinagar was taking what seemed like unscripted questions on camera, and answering them reasonably well. Better than his boss? That, we will never know because the said boss is yet to do this. A quick detour to the Hindi networks shows, yet again, how the two media ecosystems operate on different universes. Rajat Sharma on India TV was gleeful over the Lalu-Rabri Manch of Tejpratap, while Raveesh Kumar kept his dirge-like demeanour going on NDTV India, this time ruing the lack of jobs. 2 reasons why Opposition will fail Writing in the Mumbai Mirror, Christopher Jaffrelot, columnist with the Indian Express, offers two reasons why even a reinforced Opposition will not be enough to dislodge the BJP from power. One, he says, despite their efforts at unity, the challengers are not as united, disciplined and organised as the BJP. And two, the BJP's election campaign may ignore the Modi government's report card and focus on identity politics and other such all of which will not work in favour of Rahul Gandhi who cannot compete with Modi in the role of the strong man protecting India from external as well as internal threats. Gujarat Model in Varanasi Coomi Kapoor, unarguably the journalist with her ear to the ground like none other, unfailingly gives the latest goss on Lutyens Delhi in the Sunday edition of the Indian Express, and considering it all comes during Prime Minister Modi's hermetically sealed regime, it is all the more creditable. Her latest instalment has a few nuggets, notable among them being the many connections between Varanasi, Modi's constituency, and his home state of Gujarat. For instance, the architect of the recently inaugurated Kashi Vishwanath Corridor is Bimal Patel, the man behind the Sabarmati riverfront project. C R Patel, the MP from Navsari, Gujarat, is in charge of the two model villages adopted by Modi in the constituency, Coomi points out. That's not all. Modi has also appointed Sunil Oza, the former MLA from Bhavnagar, Gujarat, to oversee the development projects for Varanasi. Patel and Oza in turn have called in many BJP supporters from Gujarat to help out, Coomi concludes. You can read more of her stuff here. NYAY nahi... Through the thicket of serious political news comes, occasionally, a report that brings out a chuckle. Like this one about an Indore man who has told the courts that he will pay alimony for his estranged wife from the Rs 6,000 per month that Congress President Rahul Gandhi has promised the very poor of the country under the NYAY scheme if his party is voted to power. Well, what can we say, except, kya anyay hai yeh! Draw of the 7 sisters Our election coverage is usually and woefully short of reportage from the north east, which sends a respectable 25 members to the Lok Sabha, so it was heartening to read this full pager on the region in The Mint. Patricia Mukhim, editor of the Shillong Times, does a SWOT analysis and concludes that the BJP, which is making a determined push in the region, pushing out the Congress and emerging as the No.1 force there, will do well, bagging 15 seats out of 25. Hemanta Biswa Sarma's dream of 19 to 21 seats will remain just that, a dream. Minority Report Rana Ayyub's article in the Washington Post, 'Modi's India is a living nightmare for Muslims' brought to mind a conversation I had with A, my cab driver on a recent trip. We got chatting during the traffic-laden ride, my perfunctory questions turning more personal on learning he was from Muzaffarnagar. Yes, the same town that seared the nation's consciousness with its anti-Muslim riots in 2013, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. A's family suffered in the riots, and here he was, ferrying me and hundreds like me around. Wasn't he afraid of us Hindus, I asked him.Speaking in Urdu-laden Hindi he replied, 'Saab, aap log hain toh hum surakshit hain.' 'Par humlog se bachke toh aaplog yahaan tak aaye ho,' I told him. 'Kya lag raha aapko, kisne danga-fasaad karwaya tha wahaan,' he countered me. 'Wohi log jo aaj satta mein hain?' He laughed at this and said, with wisdom that can only come from a painful experience: 'Saab, dushman se zyada aapko apne doston ko sambhalna padta. Dushman toh dushman rahega, par dost kab aur kyun dushman banega aapko pata bhi nahi chalega.' The government hopes that President Jair Bolsonaro s push for the modernization and re-equipping of the armed forces will bolster the defense industry and help Brazils economy recover. The new policy was announced by the vice president, reserve army Gen. Hamilton Mourao, as well as by the defense minister, Gen. Fernando Azevedo e Silva, during the opening ceremony of the new edition of LAAD Defense & Security, the biggest defense industry expo in Latin America, being held in Rio de Janeiro. In an address to delegations from 80 countries, including a score of defense ministers, both officials emphasized the importance of the defense industry, which accounts for 4 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of South Americas largest economy. The deals and contacts emerging from LAAD provide an exceptional opportunity for the expansion of many sectors of the national defense industry, Mourao said. Azevedo e Silva, for his part, said the defense industry, which has annual revenues of about 200 billion reais ($52.63 billion), was essential not only for maintaining national defense capabilities but also for boosting the economy. The defense minister said the industry employed about 60,000 people directly and 240,000 others indirectly. The more daring the goals achieved by the defense industry, the more the sector can help the country resume growing, the minister said, noting that Brazils economy has been growing slowly since the deep 2015-2016 recession. The generals said that, among other projects to modernize the military, Brazil was committed to building five submarines, including a nuclear one, and that the government signed a contract on Tuesday for five corvettes and plans to open the bidding for a new vessel. The submarines, the first of which was launched in December, are being built under a cooperation agreement with France signed in 2009 by then-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva . Azevedo e Silva discussed the armys project for the next generation of the Guarani military vehicle and a border defense system with state-of-the-art radar, satellites and sensors. The air force is working Embraer to develop the military KC-390 cargo plane, the defense minister said. He also said that the technological safeguards agreement that Bolsonaro signed during his visit last week to the United States would allow companies from several countries the full use of Brazils space launch center in Alcantara. Among the Brazilian exhibitors at the LAAD expo are Embraer, the third-largest aircraft manufacturer in the world; Avibras, a producer of weapons, armor and ammunition; and Helibras, a helicopter manufacturer. Lockheed Martin , Boeing, Airbus, Thales Group and Saab are among the foreign defense contractors with a presence at the fair. Rahul Gandhi was stunned on hearing the senior leader's angry outburst, but soon relented and asked Mukul Wasnik to announce Karthi's name from Sivaganga, reveals our political correspondent. Karthi Chidambaram was recently nominated as the Congress candidate from Sivaganga in Tamil Nadu, a constituency represented by his father Palaniappan Chidambaram in the 14th and 15th Lok Sabha and from where the son lost in 2014, but not before his father threatened Congress national President Rahul Gandhi with his resignation from the party, sources in the party claim. The Congress party, which is in alliance with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, was allotted 9 seats in the state. But its first list, released on March 23, announced candidates only for 8 seats and left out Sivaganga following protests in the party's state unit over Karthi's possible nomination. Upset over this delay, the former finance minister, Congress sources claim, protested to Rahul Gandhi. The scene unravelled in the presence of three senior Congress leaders -- A K Antony, Anand Sharma and Ghulam Nabi Azad -- who clammed up when asked about it by this correspondent, choosing to neither confirm nor deny the incident. One of them confirmed that former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh argued Chidambaram's case for 10 minutes, saying he was an asset to the United Progressive Alliance and his son must be given a Congress ticket from Sivaganga. Chidambaram reportedly told Rahul Gandhi that while on one hand the Narendra Damodardas Modi government was giving him immense mental tension, unleashing raids on him and his family by various government agencies, there was no support from the Congress party. Not used to such an outburst, the Congress president was stunned for a few minutes on hearing the senior leader's angry outburst, but soon relented and asked General Secretary Mukul Wasnik to announce Karthi's name from Sivaganga. Former Navy Chief Admiral L Ramdas has written a letter to the Election Commission over Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's reference of the Indian Army as 'Modi ji ki sena' during a public rally in Ghaziabad on March 31. "As one of the most senior most former chiefs of the Armed Forces, I consider it my duty and responsibility to bring to your notice the fact we, the armed forces of the country, owe our allegiance only to the Constitution of India," Admiral Ramdas said in the letter addressed to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora, while expressing concerns over the "growing politicisation" of armed forces. Underlining that the armed forces are not a "private force" belonging to any individual or political party, Admiral Ramdas said any suggestions over the same was completely unacceptable. "I am sure that you will take suitable action as soon as possible to arrest such irresponsible actions," he stated. Adityanath courted controversy when he referred to the Indian Army as 'Modi ji ki sena' while drawing a comparison between the steps taken by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government against terrorism and the previous Congress government. "Things which were impossible for the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party, are now possible; it is possible since Modi is here. Congress used to feed biryani to terrorists but 'Modi ji ki sena' gives them only 'golis' and 'golas' (bullets and bombs). This is the difference," the chief minister said in his public address in Ghaziabad. "Congress used to encourage terrorists. The BJP government is breaking the backs of Pakistan and Pakistan backed terrorists by striking their camps, under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi," he added. Adityanath's comments drew widespread condemnation from the Opposition. Indian Army on Tuesday destroyed seven Pakistani military posts across the Line of Control in retaliation to the continued ceasefire violations by Pakistani troops for the fifth day, said officials. There have been several casualties among Pakistani troops, they added. The Pakistani posts were in Rakhchakri and Rawalkot forward areas of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir , they said. Three Indian villagers too were injured at Shahpur border area in Poonch district Tuesday in the shelling by the Pakistani army, the officials added. Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations admitted three casualties among their troops at Rakhchakri in Rawalakot. An Indian defence spokesperson said the Pakistani army began violating ceasefire early on Tuesday. The spokesperson said the Pakistani troops violated the ceasefire at 11.30 am with mortar and artillery shelling and firings by small arms along the LoC in Nowshera sector in Rajouri district. This violation was replied befittingly, he added. "At about 1700 hours Tuesday, the Pakistani army again initiated unprovoked shelling with mortars and firing of small arms along the LoC in Shahpur & Kerni sectors in Poonch district," said the defence spokesperson. "The Indian Army too is retaliating befittingly," he said. Pakistan's ISPR too, in a release, said three of their soldiers were killed Rakhchakri in Rawalakot on Tuesday in retaliation by Indian forces along the Line of Control. The ISPR identified their slain soldiers as "Subedar Muhammad Riaz, a resident of Jhang, Lance Havaldar Aziz Ullah from Noshero Feroz and Sepoy Shahid Mansib from Abbotabbad." The ISPR added one of their soldiers too was injured in the retaliation by Indian Army. A Border Security Force inspector and a five-year-old girl were among three persons killed while 24 others were injured on Monday as Pakistani troops heavily shelled forward areas along the Line of Control in Poonch district, prompting the Indian Army to retaliate "befittingly", said officials. As a precautionary measure, all schools along the Line of Control in Poonch and Rajouri districts have been closed by authorities in view of the Pakistani shelling. With Pakistan using heavy weaponry and 120 mm mortar bombs targeting civilian areas along the LoC in Poonch, people have been advised to stay indoors, the officials said. With a tagline "Congress Will Deliver", Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday released his party's manifesto for Lok Sabha polls, making jobs creation, addressing farm distress, bringing a single moderate rate of GST and giving Rs 72,000 per annum to poor families as key focus if the party comes to power. IMAGE: Congress President Rahul Gandhi, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and former priem minister Manmohan Singh at the release of party's manifesto for Lok Sabha polls 2019, in New Delhi. Photograph: Shahbaz Khan/PTI Photo In the 55-page document, the Congress also promised to come out with separate budget for farmers, fill up 22 lakh government vacancies, allocate 6 per cent of GDP to education, assured 50 more days of guaranteed jobs from current 100 under the MNREGA, boosting healthcare infrastructure and enhance safety of women. "When we started a year ago, I made it clear that nothing in this can be a lie, because we live in a time where we hear a large number of lies every day," Gandhi said, after releasing the manifesto in the presence of former prime minister Manmohan Singh, United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi and senior party leader P Chidambaram. The document, titled 'Hum Nibhayenge', touched upon a range of key issues including national security, situation in Jammu and Kashmir and in the North Eastern region, foreign policy, defence, state of the rural economy, current tax regime and environmental challenges among others. WATCH: 'Congress manifesto reflects the wishes of Indians' Referring to Jammu and Kashmir, Congress promised to review the Armed Forces Special Powers Act as well as deployment of the armed forces, asserting that nothing will be done or allowed to change the constitutional position relating to the border state. "Congress promises the people of J-K talks without pre-conditions. We will appoint the interlocutors drawn from civil society to facilitate such talks," according to the manifesto. IMAGE: Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala, general secretary K C Venugopal, senior leader AK Antony, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, P Chidambaram and Rajeev Gowda at the function. Photograph: Kamal Singh/PTI Photo In another key promises, the party said it will abolish the provision of sedition in the IPC, scrap the "opaque electoral bonds" introduced by the National Democratic Alliance government, replace the Niti Ayog with a modern Planning Commission and enact an anti-hate crime law to deal with incidents of lynchings. The party also pledged to make defamation a civil offence, change law that allows detention without trial and proposed to set up a national judicial commission to appoint judges. The party said, in place of the electoral bond, a National Election Fund will be set up to financially help recognised political parties. On GST tax, the Congress said it will radically simplify the GST regime with a single moderate rate of tax, zero rating of exports, and exemption for essential goods and services, adding panchayats and municipalities will be given a share of the revenues. IMAGE: Congress General Secretary and Uttar Pradesh - East incharge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra during the release of party's manifesto. Photograph: Kamal Singh/PTI Photo For farmers, Congress promised to put them on the path from "Karz Maafi" (loan waiver), to "Karz Mukti" (freedom from loans). This will be done through remunerative prices, lower input costs, and assured access to institutional credit, the party said adding it will present a separate "Kisan Budget" every year, if voted to power. Speaking on the occasion at the Congress headquarters, Gandhi said Congress will allocate 6 per cent of GDP to education, will strengthen government hospitals and give high-quality healthcare access to poor, if voted to power. WATCH: Will provide 150 days employment instead of 100 under MGNREGA: Rahul The party also promised to enact the Right to Healthcare Act and guarantee every citizen free diagnostics, out-patient care, free medicines and hospitalisation, through a network of public hospitals and enlisted private hospitals. "Our manifesto process reflects our commitment to a higher vision, that of listening to the Jan Awaaz. It is not the 'mann ki baat' of one individual but the collective voice of lakhs of people," he said in a preface of the manifesto. With this manifesto, Gandhi said the Congress has offered to people "the only national alternative -- a distinct alternative that is unwavering in its commitment to truth, freedom, dignity, self-respect and prosperity for our people." He promised to make India "strong and united, and a just and prosperous society." On the party's showpiece minimum income guarantee scheme or Nyuntam Aay Yojana, the party's manifesto promised to give Rs 72,000 per year to the poorest 20 per cent households in India. IMAGE: Congress President Rahul Gandhi and senior party leader Sonia Gandhi share a light moment . Photograph: Kamal Singh/PTI Photo To the youth of India, Congress pledged to make jobs its top priority, saying it will ensure 34 lakh jobs in the public sector by filling all 4 lakh central government vacancies before March 2020, persuading the state governments to fill 20 lakh vacancies and creating an estimated 10 lakh new Seva Mitra positions in every gram panchayat and urban local bodies. Armed Forces and Paramilitary Forces Congress will reverse the trend of declining defence spending under the NDA government, and increase it to meet the requirements of the Armed Forces. "We will expedite all modernisation programmes of the Armed Forces in a transparent manner. We will improve social security, education and health facilities for our Paramilitary Forces and families," the party said. On education, Congress promised that school education from Class I to Class XII in public schools shall be compulsory and free. The party promised to pass in the first session of the 17th Lok Sabha the Women's Reservation Bill reserving 33 percent of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies. "Congress will also reserve 33 percent of all posts/vacancies in the Central government for women." The party also promised to "revitalise" institutions like Reserve Bank of India, Election Commission, Central Bureau of Investigation, Central Information Commission, saying Congress will restore their dignity, authority and autonomy while making them accountable to Parliament. Read the full manifesto HERE. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday tore into the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, blaming its "appeasement politics" for the failure of law enforcement agencies to rein in terror activities when it was in power and claiming it raised the "bogey of Hindu terror" to "misdirect" investigation. IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi gestures as he speaks during an election rally, ahead of Lok Sabha polls, in Jamui. Photograph: PTI Photo He also blasted the opposition parties for seeking proof of military operations against terror camps in the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack, saying they appeared more like spokespersons for Pakistan than political parties representing India. Kicking off his Lok Sabha poll campaign in Bihar with two back-to-back rallies in Jamui and Gaya, where candidates of his alliance partners -- Lok Janshakti Party and Janata Dal-United -- are in the fray, the prime minister assailed the Congress over a host of issues, including its failure to quell terrorism and lack of development. He also hit out at National Conference leader Omar Abdullah for advocating restoration of the post of prime minister in Jammu and Kashmir, wondering can any country have more than one PM. "I would like the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal, which are part of the same mahamilavat gang, to come clean on the issue," he said. "They appear more like spokespersons for Pakistan than political parties representing India," Modi said launching his campaign at a rally in Jamui where LJP leader Chirag Paswan, son of party president Ram Vilas Paswan, is in the fray. IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and others, during an election rally, ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, in Gaya. Photograph: PTI Photo In Jamui, the seat reserved for Scheduled Castes, Modi accused the Congress of having neglected B R Ambedkar like no other party did. He also claimed that his rivals were spreading the canard that the BJP, if voted to power again, will do away with reservations for the backward classes. "Governance goes into reverse gear when the Congress and its allies are in power. Terrorism, prices, violence, corruption, black money rise when Congress is in power; the country's prosperity, its credibility, the morale of the armed forces, respect for honesty decline," he said. Addressing another rally in Gaya in central Bihar, once a hotbed of Naxal activities, Modi said the "mahamilavat (great adulteration) gang" was responsible for the surge in ultra-Left insurgency which his government quelled through effective security operations and efforts to reform those involved in such activities. IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Lok Janshakti Party chief Ram Vilas Paswan during an election rally in Gaya. Photograph: PTI Photo He said the country used to be rocked by terrorist bombing with alarming frequency in all corners Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Varanasi. There was a sudden drop in such incidents after May, 2014. The change was not brought about by me. You effected this change through your vote," he told the rally. The government machinery, he said, was the same but what had changed was "style, policy and will" of the government. "Our agencies were not lacking in ability even before we came to power. But they were not allowed to work on account of the appeasement politics of the previous government. And to misdirect the probe (bhatkaane ke liye), the bogey of Hindu terror was raised. In a case like Samjhauta Express blast, the role of Pakistan was completely brushed under the carpet," he alleged. Modi's comments came in the backdrop of all accused, including Hindu monk Swami Aseemanand, being acquitted in the Samjhauta Express blast case by a National Investigation Agency court last month. "Much has been accomplished and much more remains to be done. I assure you that all incomplete works will be completed by this chowkidar of yours... with whom members of the Mahamilavat gang (mahamilavati aur unke pairokar) and sympathisers of terrorists (aatankwadi aur unke madadgar), have a problem," Modi said. IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and NDA candidate from Jamui constituency Chirag Paswan, wave at party supporters during the rally in Jamui. Photograph: PTI Photo Taking on Congress president Rahul Gandhi for his "chowkidar chor hai" barb, the prime minister alleged the opposition party had a disdain for "all those who earn their livelihood through hard work". "These people have only disdain for those who earn livelihood through hard work. Be it a chowkidar, a tea seller or a sanitary worker, when they see that I am wearing the epithet of chowkidar as a badge of honour, they demonstrate their snobbish mindset by calling me a watchman of toilets. "When I wipe the feet of safai karmis at the Kumbh, abuse is heaped on me. Is it not an insult to you?" Modi said in Gaya, also a reserved constituency. Addressing the rally where Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan were also present, Modi lauded the progress made by the state under the National Democratic Alliance, saying "had you not voted out the previous government, Gaya would have needed many more Dashrath Manjhis". Dashrath Manjhi, referred to as the "mountain man", was a famed stone-cutter from the district who carved a road out of a hillock by toiling away single-handedly for years with just a chisel and hammer. IMAGE: Members of the crowd hurl chairs at each other during a ruckus ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modis address in Gaya. Photograph: PTI Photo Addressing the rally in Jamui, Modi accused the Congress of having done everything to "defeat" Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution. "The Congress did everything possible to have Babasaheb defeated. It conspired to have his memory erased from the public mind. The 'family' remembered honouring its own members with Bharat Ratna but forgot Ambedkar," the prime minister said. He said it was because of the BJP's efforts that Ambedkar was bestowed the highest civilian award years after his death. In an apparent rebuttal of RJD's repeated claim that that the BJP will do away with quotas in government jobs and educational institutions if voted to power again, Modi declared, "Nobody can even touch reservations for the backward classes." "We introduced 10 per cent quota for the economically backward people among the unreserved category... we did it without diluting reservations for SCs, STs and OBCs, without causing strife in society," he said. The Election Commission of India has found Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh's alleged remark calling for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's win as a violation of Model Code of Conduct, poll body sources said on Tuesday. The poll panel is likely to write to President Ram Nath Kovind to bring the matter to his cognisance. However, the ECI will take a final call in the meeting to be held today, sources added. On March 25, Singh allegedly said that as a party worker he "genuinely" wanted the Bharatiya Janata Party to win the ensuing Lok Sabha elections, which are going to be held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. "As a worker of the BJP, I genuinely want the party to win. We want that once again Narendra Modi should become the Prime Minister of India. It is important for the nation and society that Narendra Modi should become the Prime Minister again," he told reporters in Aligarh. Singh, who previously served two terms as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (1991-1992 and 1997-1999) was appointed as the Governor of Rajasthan in 2014. A Governor is considered to be a neutral post and the person occupying the office is not supposed to side with any political party. So how do you rate the Congress's jan awaaz released on Tuesday? IMAGE: Congress president Rahul Gandhi at the release of the party's manifesto for Lok Sabha polls 2019 in New Delhi. Photograph: Shahbaz Khan/PTI Photo Setting the narrative for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the Congress party on Tuesday released its manifesto in which a special focus has been put on youth and farmers. From filling vacancies in government jobs to providing a minimum support income of Rs 72,000 per year for poor families, the party went all out to woo the voters. The Congress manifesto also pledged to investigate the Rafale fighter jet deal if it was voted to power. The party has promised 22 lakh government jobs by next March and 100 more days of assured jobs under its flagship MNREGA. It will also introduce a separate budget for farmers, on the lines of the railway budget. Farmers who default on loans would not be sent to jail as it will not be a criminal but civil offence. The Congress also promised in its manifesto to amend the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, or AFSPA, and scrap sedition law if voted to power. So, dear readers, please go through the grand old party's 55-page document titled Hum Nibhayenge (We will deliver) and rate the same. Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday claimed people in South India "feel hostility" from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said he decided to contest from Wayanad in Kerala to send out the message that he stands with them. IMAGE: Congress president Rahul Gandhi addresses the media after the release of party's manifesto for upcoming Lok Sabha polls 2019 in New Delhi. Photograph: Shahbaz Khan/PTI Photo The Congress announced on Sunday that party chief Gandhi will contest from Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala, besides his traditional stronghold of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. "There is a feeling in South India, a very strong feeling in South India, that they are not being carried (along) by the current government. South India feels hostility from Mr Narendra Modi, they feel that they are not being included in the decisions of the country," Gandhi said. "So, I wanted to send a message to South India that we are with you and I am standing with you. That is why I am standing from Kerala," he said in response to a question after the launch of the party's manifesto. The Congress' announcement that the party chief will contest from Wayanad evoked sharp reactions from the Left and Right of the political spectrum. The CPI-M and the CPI said the move signalled the Congress wanted to take on the Left which would work towards defeating him in the elections from Wayanad. BJP chief Amit Shah reacted to the development saying Gandhi has "fled to Kerala as he fears that Amethi voters will seek an account from him". Addressing a rally in Wardha, Maharashtra, on Monday, the prime minister said the Congress is scared to field its leaders from constituencies where the majority dominates in terms of voter-base. He, however, did not name Gandhi. The Congress is hoping to further consolidate its position this time in Kerala. Top Congress leaders have contested from the South earlier as well. Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi has in the past contested from the Bellary Lok Sabha seat in Karnataka, while Rahul Gandhi's grandmother, former prime minister Indira Gandhi, contested from Chikamangalur in Karnataka. Wayanad district is in the north eastern part of Kerala and houses various tribal groups of the state. The area was badly affected due to last year's floods. Group Captain Murli Menon (retd) reveals how India can neutralise the Pakistan air force's combat capabilities without firing a shot. Photograph: Kind courtesy Wikimedia Commons The Cold War ended thanks to the Americans virtually 'outspending' the Soviets. While we should be aiming to do the same in the subcontinental context, there's a golden opportunity presenting itself -- if we wish -- to unravel the mainstay combat capability of the Pakistan air force. The saga of the F-16, (its albeit doubtful AMRAAM capability not withstanding) and relatively superior standing in the comity of modern fighter aircraft, is still playing out in the subcontinent and indeed the world over. Contemporary Pakistani commentator Mosharraf Zaidi had lamented a while ago in the New York Times about how Donald J Trump's new Afghan policy and the expected increased pressures on the Pakistani establishment to do more would likely make that country 'lose America'. His premonition may not wholely be unfounded and his paymasters in the Isloo Military Inc have another think coming possibly . While the wolf wolf story of Pakistani intransigence in international decent behaviour and double dealing vis a vis the Americans is yet to play out fully, the quantum leaps in the India-US defence strategic partnership of late would ultimately, I believe, sound the death knell for the Pakistani armed forces to remain viable fighting entities. More specifically, the vector of the fate of the Pakistani air force is heading to the six o' clock region. The Lockheed-Tata Advanced Systems agreement to produce and export Block 70-72 F-16s under Trump/Modi 'American First'/'Make in India' programmes, could turn out to be India's most 'strategic' defence deal yet. And this needs to be looked at a new in the following light, Trump or no Trump on the scene! America's dependence on India for its 'Asian pivot' strategy and, of course, its need to play up to the home constituency employment data-wise would tilt the odds in favour of India in a future F-16 deal. There is a while to go yet as the flyoff between the F-16 and Swedish Saab JAS39 Gripen (or any other contender) is yet to be concluded in favour of either party. The deal to replace IAF MiG-21s and MiG-27s would involve 126 aircraft initially and several more later should the proposed Lockheed offer to shift its entire production facility from Fort Worth, Texas, to India fructify . India would have critical control over spares supply and servicing support to 27 F-16 operating airforces. The most significant, of course, is what such a deal would do to the Pakistan air force! Fears have been raised in some quarters in India about the obsolescence of the F-16 as an aerial platform. This is unfounded because any machine manufactured anew in India would come with the advantages of zero air frame life and, of course, the first-off-the-block perks of new easily integrateable American weapons and sensors technology. By way of disadvantages care, of course, needs to be exercised about contractual clauses by way of end user agreements and intellectual property rights. Conditions for onward transfer of technology and other employment restrictions would need careful consideration by our planners in the IAF and the defence ministry. Technology wise the F-16s made in India (provided we opt for them!) would have the most updated AESA radar and AMRAAM. Several other state of the art aerial sensors such as FLIR/LANTIRN, advanced data links for accurate satellite enabled targeting, INGPS, Cubic ACMI aerial combat training pods, helmet cueing, updated electronic warfare suite, high resolution SAR, automatic ground collision avoidance system and the latest F119 engine control technology would be on offer. Photograph: Kind courtesy Pexels Needless to say, these could down the line enable adaptation onto other IAF aerial platforms such as the Light Combat Aircraft and hopefully tranfer of technologies indigenisation through our public sector establishments such as HAL, BEL, LRDE, SDI etc. Private industry would automatically stand to gain thanks to the Tata involvement and other offset clauses bound to be built into the deal. The Block 70 F-16s is said to be even superior upgrades wise to the F-16 IN Super Viper which was competing for the IAF's Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) deal earlier (since replaced by Narendra Damodardas Modi's government to government deal with France for 36 flyaway Rafales). It is even statedly better in terms of life cycle costs, which in any event would be factored into our evaluation process. Currently, around 5,000 F-16s are in service worldwide and prospects of catering for such a large fleet would more than offset the costs of setting up the manufacturing hub in India. The overall cost of each F-16 is stated to be around $10 million cheaper than its competitor. Thus, we get a 4.5 generation cost effective fighter plane which is a proven warhorse. Shifting the manufacturing base to India is expected to offer some reductions in maintenance and spare parts costs. What also needs factoring in is that several thousand additional jobs would be retained in the US earlier on and transferred to India later as the facilities take shape. Evaluation of technical parameters, performance data and costing is something the IAF has by now mastered what with the Rafale flyoff and lessons from other inductions worldwide. But a solid strategic pay-off for India would be the fact that our chief adversary, the Pakistan air force, operate around 85 F-16 aircraft, these machines being its mainstay. Should the production facilities be shifted to India, the Pakistan air force would be practically writing off its F-16 fleet, relying mainly on desperate spares from countries such as the UAE, Turkey or Jordan. Smart business deals and contracts by us could virtually scuttle even such avenues for the Pakistan air force to sustain its F-16s. That would leave Pakistan with the Chinese JF-17s (around 85) and outdated Mirage 3s in its fighter inventory. There is no gain saying the difficulties in integrating modern armaments and sensors onto these platforms. Besides the economic bonanza of a large worldwide supply, maintenance orders would provide us with a strategic pay-off by way of stifling and, in due course, grounding the state of the art aerial fighting capabilities of our chief adversary. This would directly contribute to the ambit of our economic warfare against our terror- sponsoring neighbour and neutralise the Pakistan air force's combat capabilities even without firing a shot!! Post Pulwama and our marked political policy shift towards pre-emption, it is to be hoped that defence spending would at least be upped to 3% of GDP -- maybe even higher -- to cater for mandatory capital budgets of all three defence services. Fernando Otero is the only Spaniard recognized by Argentina as a veteran of the 1982 war between the South American nation and the United Kingdom for sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, but his case could set a precedent for another 21 forgotten compatriots. Otero was an engineer on the Usurbil, an Argentine-flagged fishing boat operating in waters of the South Atlantic, when it was militarized and sent to face the enemy fleet, he told EFE. The crew of 27 Argentines and 22 Spaniards was forced to carry out intelligence operations for the Argentine navy, and what was going to be the search and rescue of Argentines fallen in combat turned into an espionage operation to detect and report British fleet movements, the veteran recounted. He still remembers the moments of panic when British helicopters flew overhead and the relief of coming away unhurt, unlike other fishing boats like the Narwal that ended up at the bottom of the sea. Otero kept quiet for 32 years - thinking this was all about a military secret - but what a surprise it was after all that time to discover his erstwhile Argentine crewmates acknowledged as war veterans, pensioned and decorated. Thats when the fight began. The only thing I want is to be treated as their equals. If the government sent us into a war together, its only logical that we get the same compensation, he said. In 2016 he did manage to convince the Argentine government to acknowledge him to be a veteran of the war over the archipelago that Latin Americans know as the Malvinas, and a year later was decorated with medals in a ceremony at the Argentine Embassy in Madrid. Today his demands go further: to make his Argentine pension retroactive from 1999 and obtain the benefit paid to veterans by Buenos Aires province, where Otero lived for two years. The Spaniard zealously kept salary deposits, consular certificates and even telephone bills, but they are apparently insufficient to prove his residency in the Argentine town of Ingeniero White. His struggle could set a precedent for the other 21 Spanish crewmates of the Usurbil, many now deceased or very old, and manage to get all of them accepted and decorated as war veterans. Fernando is the tip of the iceberg for resolving the cases of the other 21 Spaniards, Marcelo Arce, the representative of Otero in Argentina, said in a conversation with EFE. For the same risk, the same pay and the same honors, Arce said about those Spaniards who risked their lives for Argentina. Its shameful, several articles of the Geneva Convention have been violated, because (Spain) was a nation declared neutral and those men were practically used as human shields. Twenty-two Spaniards used but not rewarded. What a miserable case, he said. This Tuesday, April 2, will mark the 37th year of the landing of Argentine troops in the Falkland Islands. Full-fledged fighting in the islands, which have been in British hands since 1833, officially began on May 1, 1982, with the arrival of a British task force and ended 45 days later with the surrender of Argentine forces. The conflict, which was started by Argentinas military regime, claimed nearly 1,000 lives - some 700 Argentines and 255 British soldiers and sailors. TORRINGTON A 5-alarm fire on April 3, 2014, shut down the center of Torrington for the entire day, filling the air with black, billowing smoke and the terrible smell of burning rubber. The fire occurred in a 20,000-square-foot warehouse Toce Brothers was renting for storage from O&G Industries, at 97 Albert St., in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Residents were awakened by firefighters and police pounding on their doors and telling them to evacuate their homes. Later that month, state fire officials and the citys fire marshal said they were unable to determine the exact cause of the fire. The site now remains empty and is planted with grass. Sirens screamed in the streets, as more than 150 firefighters swarmed around the burning building and its adjacent streets and began the mammoth task of putting the fire out. Miraculously, no one was injured in the blaze, but many people, including firefighters suffered the effects of the burning rubber with watering eyes, sore throats and in some cases, difficulty breathing. And the odor of the burn lasted for days. Gary Brunoli, who belonged to the Torrington Fire Department since 1992, remembers the Toce fire very well. He was chief at the time, having taken the post in 2012, replacing Chief John Field. Brunoli retired in April 2015. Five ladder crews worked from overhead to contain the flames from spreading to a cluster of five homes about 25 feet away from the warehouse, along the east side of the building. That was the biggest worry for firefighters at the time, Brunoli recalled. My biggest concern was that we kept the fire in that building, Brunoli said, during an interview this week. The wind was blowing and we needed to keep it in that block. I didnt want it to spread in that residential neighborhood. Thats why we called for quite a few resources (to help us), he said. It was a tragic loss for Toce and O&G, because Toce lost all those tires and O&G lost the building. It was bad. Fires get like that, where they just go on. The 20,171-square-foot warehouse was built in 1930, on .34 acres, and is at 96 Albert St., according to city records. Its 2008 assessed value is $384,500 and was purchased by O&G in 1982. Toce Brothers, previously owned by Dominic Sonny Toce and his cousin, Joseph, has served the city since 1924, before it was sold to Russell Barrett a few years earlier. Crews of firefighters from around the Northwest Corner responded to the scene in Torrington and worked for more than 10 hours to put it out. Members from 25 different departments came from as far away as Hartford. Over the course of the day, there were probably more than 150, Brunoli said. Some came and brought their own apparatus ladder trucks, water, and some were working off site (in the neighborhood). Firefighters worked on the blaze in shifts. We rotated (crews of firefighters) to get fresh bodies in there to help, Brunoli said. After a certain amount of time, you wanted to move them and get new people in there. The fire melted the roof of the warehouse, causing it to collapse, and destroyed a pickup truck, along with hundreds of tires and other equipment. The roof collapsed, and we had to get up in there and remove the roof to get the (fire extinguishing) foam underneath it, he said. That was one of the biggest fires for me, as far as the number of apparatus that were there and the number of people involved. Students from across the school district, including from Oliver Wolcott Tech and St. Peter St. Francis School, were not dismissed when classes broke for the day because the fire interrupted bus service in the area. At elementary schools, recesses were cancelled because of concerns about heavy smoke. High school students were let out early, not because of the fire, but because of an abbreviated schedule from parent-teacher conferences. Southwest School, just blocks from the epicenter of the fire, was particularly hard hit, and about 480 students in all lived near or in the vicinity of the fire. Those students remained at school until they were picked up by parents. For Brunoli, the Toce fire was one of the biggest he had ever dealt with. It was memorable, he said. You always have many in your career, and some of them are like that, really big. Of course, you never want to have one. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the fire was in 2015. It was actually in 2014. TORRINGTON Residents of Building 13 at the Woodland Hills Apartment complex may not be able to move back into their homes for several months after being displaced by a three-alarm fire over the weekend. A claims adjuster, who asked not to be named, inspected the damage Monday. We will do a complete rebuild of the eight-unit wood frame structure. It will take months to fix, he added. He and a contractor cut through a blue tarp nailed to the back of Unit A to peer inside the apartment. When I saw the extent (of the fire) I had to call a contractor to get up on the roof, he said, to install tarp to cover damage on three apartments. The Red Cross helped the 20 adults and 11 children who were evacuated to meet their immediate needs, said Stephanie Archangelo, spokeswoman for the agency. No one was injured in the fire, according to a statement from Torrington Fire Chief Peter Towey As you can imagine, everyone is in a little bit of shock after a fire, Archangelo said. The needs are different for each family, some have family to stay with. Case workers will follow up with the families to make sure they have found longer-term housing support, Archangelo said. Longer-term housing in Torrington is coordinated by the Gathering Place which is the referral organization in Litchfield County for emergency housing assistance. No one could be reached Monday afternoon about future plans for the residents. We are in the process of working with the tenants, to help with future housing needs, said Yivel Cabrera, the manager of the Woodland Hills Apartment complex. It is a Low Income Housing Tax Credit Community, according to its website. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, said Torrington Fire Marshal Edward Bascetta. Were working with the state fire marshal and the Torrington detective unit, he said. Building 13 is somewhat isolated from the other structures in the complex because it is farthest away from the entrance at 330 Highland Ave. The 21/2 story building is adjacent to undeveloped woods that rise steeply behind the apartments. The late-night fire was reported about 9:30 p.m. Saturday , Towey said. The rear porches (were) fully involved ... and the fire was extending within the occupied structure, the departments statement noted. The Torrington Police Department helped to make sure everyone was out of the building after the Fire Department learned some occupants were still inside. It was determined, Towey wrote, that all of the occupants had evacuated on their own. The fire was controlled just before 11 p.m.. according to the statement. TORRINGTON A day before the Torrington Downtown Partners were scheduled to go to trial against a Subway sandwich franchise, the downtown partners withdrew the civil action. At issue was the allegation that Subway Real Estate LLC and Subcon Inc., which had entered an annual lease for the building at 11 Main St. for the 2018 calendar year, had not paid the monthly rent of $1,614 for many months through November, court documents show. Attorney Stuart Margolis of New Haven, who represents the Torrington Downtown Partners, when asked Tuesday afternoon about the withdrawal of the suit, said We have a confidentiality agreement. So have a nice day. The civil suit was the first legal action the nonprofit group has had to bring against a tenant since the company was founded in 2010, co-founder Stephen Timken said in an earlier interview. From December until April, the two parties filed nearly 20 motions in the court case titled Torrington Downtown Partners LLC v. Subway Real Estate LLC. Court documents show the lease on the property was terminated for non-payment. Subway Real Estate denied the non-payment of rent allegations in response to the plaintiffs allegation. Subways attorney, Michael E. Donahue, senior managing corporate counsel, of Milford, did not return a call for comment. The case nearly went to court on March 5, but according to court documents filed the previous day, the lawsuit was settled but not withdrawn. Timken couldnt be reached Tuesday, but the companys real estate agent, David Dean, said the tenant cleaned out all of their equipment in one day, late last month. They were asked to do it, and they did, he added. It was an awkward situation there with their stuff in our space, Dean said. Hes shown the property twice so far. Since it was settled, Ive reached out, he said. The monthly rental price of $1,500 is slightly less than what Subway was charged. Timken said earlier that a potential tenant is a wine bar. Dean said on Tuesday that the company is locally owned. The Finance Committee met with school officials on Monday to review the line item budget. Lanesborough Gets First Look at Mount Greylock Budget The percentages of how much each town pays is swinging more toward the north. LANESBOROUGH, Mass. The town is being asked to spend about $64,000 more this year to support the schools. The Mount Greylock Regional School District is proposing a $22.4 million operating budget for the three schools Mount Greylock, Williamstown Elementary, and Lanesborough Elementary. Lanesborough's assessment is proposed at $5,817,500, which is 1.1 percent more than last year. School officials presented the budget, which was previously passed by the School Committee, to the Lanesborough Finance Committee on Monday night. Superintendent Kimberly Grady said the budget focuses on a few targeted areas including aligning curriculum, increasing technology, and educating students with disabilities. It calls for a new staff member to oversee curriculum, hires specialists for special educational needs, and brings in a person to oversee building and grounds at all three schools. The budget calls for a significant upgrade to Lanesborough Elementary School's internet service as well as repairing the phone and public announcement system. "We have identified some issues at Lanesborough," Grady said of capital needs at the 15 or so year old building. Of particular interest for Lanesborough is a greater shift of the cost burden to Williamstown. School Committee member Joe Bergeron said the state recently dubbed Lanesborough an "above effort" community when it comes to support and Williamstown a "below effort" community. That changes the state's determination on how the costs are split. Further, Bergeron said the equalized valuations of the two towns continued to separate and a swing in enrollment numbers furthered that switch. "It is a continued trend of capital apportionment moving toward Williamstown covering more for the new middle and high school and Lanesborough covering less," Bergeron said. The line budget was given to the Finance Committee, which questioned various aspects of it as it relates to Lanesborough. But, at this point, the committee felt it was too early to give either support or opposition to it. "This is a difficult year for Lanesborough. We are just starting our budget process. This is our first meeting regarding the budget so we don't have a feel of our ability," Finance Committee member Ron Tinkham said. Tinkham noted there could be a potential loss of tax revenue coming to the town in the coming year that he is wary of happening. He told Grady that the town could very well ask for reductions to the budget. "We may have to come back and ask for some help," Tinkham said. Finance Committee Steven Wentworth questioned an expense for out of district tuition. That had been in the town's budget and has since been moved to the school budget. "We're paying it this year. It is not hitting the towns so it is a saving to town," Grady said. Lanesborough will have additional paraprofessionals in the classroom, and the new director of building and grounds will help maintain the elementary school. It will also have some one-time costs for capital repairs. Grady continued that the district needs to improve in reading and math for those with disabilities at the elementary school level. The budget supports bringing interventions to the classrooms earlier to help keep students on track so they don't require special education later. "We are looking to bring in some reading training and getting some teachers there," she said, also adding that the district wants to get more robust reading material for the children. Grady added that moving forward contracts with paraprofessionals and custodians should be settled soon and the district already has an agreement with the teachers in place. That should give some consistency in budgeting in the years to come. This year has been a particularly low enrollment figure for Lanesborough, she said, with 172 students in the school. That trend could lead to a reduction in staff in the future if it continues. "The numbers are getting smaller, smaller than I've seen in the 10 years I've been here," Grady said. Finance Committee member Rebecca Flood questioned an increase in the custodial line. Bergeron said that line had been underfunded last year because of overtime and that the district is bringing on an additional custodian to care for the new Mount Greylock. He said the large increase is both making that budget whole plus the additional person. A few other areas of the budget were questioned because of large increases but those were either a move in how an item is paid such as a human resources professional that was funded out of contractual services being moved to the administration budget or the loss of a grant that paid for a position or program such as summer school. Biblical Site Draws Christians and Controversy The Fellowship | April 2, 2019 While Christians and Jews continue to build bridges of understanding because of our shared faith, our critics just wont stop. This is especially on display at a biblical site in the Holy Land that has sparked controversy even as it grows in popularity. AP News Ilan Ben Zion tells us about Tel Shiloh, the site believed to be where the Ark of the Tabernacle was, which is now cared for by Israeli settlers and visited by Israels evangelical friends: Deep in the West Bank, Israeli settlers have transformed an archaeological site into a biblical tourist attraction that attracts tens of thousands of evangelical Christians each year. Tel Shiloh is believed to have been the site of the biblical tabernacle, but not everyone is pleased at how the ruins are presented to visitors. Like many Holy Land sites, Tel Shiloh sits at the confluence of competing narratives of archaeology, religion, and nationalism. Critics say the site promotes a narrow interpretation of history popular with Israeli settlers and their Christian supporters Because of its biblical significance, the archaeological ruins have become a pilgrimage site for evangelical Christians. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Tel Shiloh with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and settler leaders, calling it Israels first capital. Huckabee, a television host with a strong evangelical following, tweeted that Shiloh is proof from 3000 yrs ago this land was home to @Israel site of ancient Tabernacle. In 2009, Tel Shiloh hosted 30,000 visitors, 60 percent of whom identified as evangelical Christians Chen Jiangang at the Nanning Wuxu International Airport in Guangxi Autonomous Region, in an undated photo. Authorities in the Chinese capital have renewed a travel ban on a prominent attorney who was en route to the United States to take up a prestigious fellowship to study law and human rights. Chen Jiangang was prevented from boarding flight DL128 at Beijing's International Airport on Monday by border guards, who said they had instructions from the Beijing police department not to allow him to leave China, he said in a statement published by the ChinaChange website. Chen said officials refused to give him any written explanation for the ban, but told him that his departure would "endanger national security." He told RFA in an interview that the ban was linked to his acting as defense attorney to fellow human rights lawyer Xie Yang, and also the fact that the Humphrey Fellowship he was traveling to take up is funded by the U.S. State Department. "I think that both of these reasons are illegal," Chen said. "It stems from their regarding the U.S. as a hostile nation." The Humphrey Fellowship Program was announced by then President Jimmy Carter in 1978 to finance studies at U.S. universities and institutions embodying the values of "democracy, social justice and a desire to assist the developing nations of the world," according to the program's official website. More than 4,600 recipients have studied at more than 40 universities with funding by Congress, it said. Chen said he has been banned from leaving China before, and that he, his wife, and the couple's two children were all added to an exit ban "blacklist" in 2017, as part of a nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers and their families launched in July 2015. The family was also detained and forcibly escorted back home from a vacation in the southwestern province of Yunnan in 2017, Chen said. "Pretty much all of the lawyers detained since July 2015 have been banned from leaving the country," Chen said. "Then there's all of the lawyers who defended them ... Apart from me, this has also happened to Liang Xiaojun." Chen said he was told by Beijing police on March 26 that he wouldn't be allowed to leave, but tried to board the plane anyway, "because the ticket had been booked for me by the fellowship, and they were expecting me at the university." He said: "[President] Xi Jinping's daughter was allowed to study overseas, and yet I, as a lawyer and a visiting scholar, am not allowed?" No written notification The Beijing police department declined to comment on Chen's case, and RFA was unable to reach the state security police officer responsible for Beijing-based human rights lawyers. An official at the Beijing Entry and Exit Bureau border guard station said Chen must be on a blacklist, to have been denied permission to board his flight. "The staff on the ground will explain any information that is available on the system, but if they haven't been told about it, then they won't know about it," the official said. "There isn't any written notification." Chen was instrumental in exposing the torture of Xie Yang, who was initially detained on July 11, 2015, then held under "residential surveillance at a designated location" in a government guesthouse belonging to the National University of Defense Technology in Hunan's provincial capital, Changsha. Subjected to abuse including deprivation of food and water, Xie was tortured again after being moved to the police-run Changsha No. 2 Detention Center following his formal arrest on Jan. 9, 2016. Xie was subjected to confinement in a "hanging chair" made of plastic chairs stacked high above the ground for hours at a time, so that his legs swelled up and he was in excruciating pain, he told his lawyers. He was also deprived of sleep and repeatedly beaten, humiliated, and taunted with death threats against his family, according to copious and detailed notes made public from meetings with his lawyers, including Chen. Reported by Wong Siu-san and Tam Siu-yin for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Wang Yun for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. U.S. national security adviser John Bolton has slammed China for an incursion into Taiwans airspace, reminding the Asian superpower of Washingtons commitment to the democratic island that Beijing regards as a renegade province which must be reunited with the mainland. Taiwans defense ministry said two Chinese J-11 jet fighters crossed the center line in the Taiwan Strait around 11:00 a.m. on Sunday and entered the islands southwestern airspace, coming within 185 kilometers (115 miles) of land, before Taiwanese jets were scrambled to warn them off. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen told reporters after the incursion that such acts were part of a bid by China to upset the status quo and posed a threat to regional security, and ordered any further provocation to be dealt with by force. On Monday, Bolton also hit out at China in a tweet signaling Washingtons support for Taiwan amid the tension between Taipei and Beijing. Chinese military provocations wont win any hearts or minds in Taiwan, but they will strengthen the resolve of people everywhere who value democracy, Bolton said. The Taiwan Relations Act and our commitment are clear. Boltons comments were echoed Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Defense and State Department. The United States opposes unilateral actions by any party aimed at altering the status quo, including any resort to force or other forms of coercion and Beijing's efforts to unilaterally alter the status quo are harmful and do not contribute to regional stability but rather they undermine the framework that has enabled peace, stability, and development for decades, the Pentagon said in a statement. Consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. considers any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, of grave concern, the statement added. Taiwan is a reliable partner, a democratic role model, and a force for good in the world. The United States urges China to abstain from coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan. The State Department went a step further, urging Beijing to stop its coercive efforts and resume dialogue with the democratically-elected administration on Taiwan. Under the Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. maintains a policy of supplying defensive arms to Taiwan and reserves the right to intervene militarily if China moves to unilaterally unify Taiwan with the mainland. President Tsai rejected calls from Chinese President Xi Jinping on Jan. 2 to move towards "unification," saying that Taiwan's 23 million people have no wish to give up their sovereignty, and that China should first move towards a democratic system. In the statement, titled Letter to our Taiwan compatriots, Xi was insistent that China must be unified, saying that Beijing would make no promises not to use military force to annex the island. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen (R) hands out military awards to officials during a ceremony in Taipei, Taiwan, April 1, 2019. Credit: Taiwan Presidential Office via AP China responds At a regular press briefing in Beijing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang dismissed Tsais comments on the weekends incident as pure nonsense and indeed infuriating, and referred additional questions to the governments Taiwan Affairs Office. But he took issue with the statements from the U.S. and said the Taiwan Relations Act runs counter to the basic norms governing international relations, as well as the three joint communiques recognized by the U.S. and China when the two nations reestablished diplomatic relations in 1979. We urge the relevant individuals in the U.S. to earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiques, and make efforts to advance our bilateral relations and cross-strait peace and stability instead of doing the opposite, he said. Taiwan was ruled as a Japanese colony in the 50 years prior to the end of World War II, but was handed back to the 1911 Republic of China under the Kuomintang (KMT) government as part of Tokyo's post-war reparation deal. The island began a transition to democracy following the death of Chiang Kai-shek's son, President Chiang Ching-kuo, in January 1988, starting with direct elections to the legislature in the early 1990s and culminating in the first direct election of a president, Lee Teng-hui, in 1996. Official exchanges between Beijing and Taipei have ceased since 2016 when Tsai was elected president and refused to acknowledge the one-China policy. A court in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan has handed down a suspended three-year prison term to a second man who sold liquor with references to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre on the label, following a secret trial. Zhang Junyong was handed a three-year suspended jail term by the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court, which found him guilty of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble" on Tuesday, after a trial that lasted less than an hour, the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch group said via its Twitter account. "Zhang Junyong, the second defendant in the Chengdu liquor case stood trial today, receiving a three-year jail term, suspended for four years, for picking quarrels and stirring up trouble," the group said. It said defendant Luo Fuyu would stand trial on Wednesday, while the trial of the fourth defendant, Chen Bing, is scheduled for Thursday. Teahouse proprietor Fu Hailu was found guilty of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble" in a trial at the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court on Monday and handed a three-year prison term, suspended for five years. The trials came after the four were held for three years in pretrial detention, amid repeated delays and postponements by the authorities. Fus wife Liu Tianyan said he was out of prison, but unable to give media interviews during the five-year suspension period. "There are restrictions; he has to be at their beck and call," Liu said. "But he's doing OK right now." The four were initially detained in May 2016, after they marketed bottles of liquor bearing the words "June 4, 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. Media reports at the time said the Tiananmen-themed liquor had been designed for private circulation among groups of friends on social media, rather than for public sale. Other defendants Luo's wife Gao issued a statement calling on the ruling Chinese Communist Party to face up to the judgment of history on the massacre, which took place 30 years ago. She said Luo had sacrificed more than 1,000 days of his personal liberty to commemorate those who died. Gao said she expects that Luo will also undergo an unfair trial. "This is highly likely, because Fu Hailu and Zhang Junyong were both given suspended sentences," she told RFA. "I don't think Luo Yufu should get a suspended sentence; they should have allowed him to come home anyway, because he is innocent." Meanwhile, Chen Jiahong, sister of Chen Bing, has been taken ill after being contacted by state security police about her brother's trial, Chen Bing's wife Wang Xiaoyan told RFA. "She fainted, and was feeling unwell so she went for a check-up, then she came home," Wang said. "Her health isn't so good, and she has been under a lot of psychological pressure." Sources close to the case said the U.S. consulate had sent someone to attend Fu's trial, but that they were refused entry to the court building. China regularly implements nationwide security measures aimed at preventing any public memorials linked to the June 4 crackdown, which was styled a "counterrevolutionary rebellion" by the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Reported by Wen Yuqing for the Cantonese Service, and by the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. More than 200 Chinese ships have been spotted anchored off the Philippine-occupied Pag-asa Island in the South China Sea in 2019, the government said Monday while announcing a diplomatic protest had been filed. Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said at least 275 Chinese ships were seen anchored near Pag-asa island, a Manila-controlled area where Filipino troops have been refurbishing facilities and repairing its runway. The announcement came on the same day the 35th annual Balikatan (shoulder to shoulder) military exercises involving Philippine, U.S. and Australian forces kicked off. The largest-ever exercise will involve 4,000 Filipinos, 3,500 Americans and 50 Australian forces, according to military officials. The ships, Panelo said, were spotted from January to March by the militarys Western Command based in Palawan, an island province west of the Philippine capital that fronts the South China Sea. The DFA has already made a diplomatic protest over it, Panelo said, referring to the Department of Foreign Affairs. Panelo could not say when the protest was filed. A Philippine diplomat who asked to remain anonymous said the government sent a diplomatic note to the Chinese embassy on Friday to express concern about the ships in the region, the Associated Press reported. On Monday, Panelo met with Chinas envoy to Manila, Zhao Jianhua, who told reporters that Filipino fishermen were welcome in the South China Sea although some areas were off limits. I think we are concerned about the livelihood of fishermen from both sides, Zhao said. He noted both countries have concerns about fishing in the region. For example, if Chinese fishing ships are getting too close to the Chung-yeh island (the Chinese name for Pag-Asa), there might be some concerns on your side, while if fishermen are getting too close to the islands where we have people, there might be concerns on our side, he said. But in general, fishing can go on as usual. Confirmation Defense officials on Monday confirmed the presence of Chinese ships near the Spratlys in the South China Sea. The Western Command has been monitoring continuously, department spokesman Arsenio Andolong said. Just as the Philippines honors our international obligations and protocols, we also expect other countries and their ships to do the same, especially when sailing and fishing in international waters, Andolong said. This is necessary to avoid any misunderstanding and to reduce tensions between countries in the region. China claims most of the mineral-rich South China Sea, including areas that reach the shores of its smaller neighbors. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan also have claims to the region. Reports of the Chinese presence came just days after President Rodrigo Duterte received Song Tao, a senior Chinese communist party leader. The Filipino leader sought to assure Song that the government remained a strong friend to Beijing amid a complaint recently lodged by two former officials with the International Criminal Court against Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Training Meanwhile, China and territorial disputes are not the focus of this years Balikatan exercises, Filipino and U.S. officials said. The goal is to enhance both militaries employment of forces and assistance in the event of crises that threaten the safety and security of the nation, Philippine exercise director Lt. Gen. Gilbert Gapay said, adding that the maneuvers would last until April 12. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Manila and met Duterte and other senior officials. He assured Duterte of his governments military backing should tensions in the disputed sea region escalate. Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun (R), Major General Soe Naing Oo (C), and Major General Tun Tun Nyi of the Myanmar's military information team hold a press conference at the Yangon division military headquarters in Yangon, Feb. 23, 2019. UPDATED at 10:25 A.M. EST on 2019-04-02 The Myanmar military on Sunday cautioned the public not to believe false and fabricated information and propaganda spread by the Arakan Army (AA), whose soldiers it accused of disguising themselves as local residents of areas where government forces are fighting the rebel group in western Myanmars Rakhine state. The AA swiftly reject the assertions as psychological warfare by the military. The armys True News Information Team also urged the public to inform authorities if they come across any AA soldiers as the Myanmar army aims to maintain stability in Rakhine state by eliminating the Arakan force. AA insurgents taking positions in urban wards and villages as cover committed terror acts such as opening fire and committing mine attacks [on] Tatmadaw [Myanmar military] columns which were on security duty, said a statement issued by the information team. Following skirmishes near villages and wards, AA insurgents disguised themselves as villagers and fabricated information while they ordered local Rakhine ethnics from wards and villages under their threats to spread the fake news, it said. Then, they posted such fabricated information on the social network and websites as attempts to propagate fabricated news for causing misunderstanding among the people, the statement said. Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun, secretary of the Myanmar militarys True News Information Team, said villagers residing in areas near to where the AA insurgents are positioned fear the rebel force. Battles recently took place near villages, he said. Forces maintaining security came under attack when they passed near villages, and they fled into the villages. The incidents looked like setups with reports of causalities. We tried to help as much as we could as we followed through, he said. Locals fear the nearest sword [enemy]. The AA sent envelops with bullets and threats [to village authorities]. There were killings as an example. [Locals] were told what to say, so we have to announce [this] to prevent more false stories. Combating 'propaganda' The Myanmar Army will take action against online "propaganda" by the AA and its supporters that is meant to mislead the public, Zaw Min Tun said. The information teams statement concluded by urging locals not to believe false and fabricated information and propaganda by AA insurgents disguised as villagers and to inform relevant administrative bodies and security forces about [their] acts. By way of example, the information team said writer Nwe Thargi, who participated in the fabricated talks during a live broadcast on social networks attempted to cause misunderstanding between the people and the Tatmadaw when she commented on the shooting death of the head of Teinnyo police outpost in Mrauk-U township on March 23. An investigation found that Nwe Thargi, a Rakhine ethnic, does not live in Rakhine state, but in Lashio, the largest town in northern Shan state, the information teams statement said, adding that a lawsuit has been filed to take action against her under Myanmar law. The military also said that fabricated news on social networks and websites indicated that its soldiers deliberately opened fire without cause during a clash in Teinnyo and Aukthakan villages on March 29, killing some local residents and injuring others. Following that incident, AA spokesman Khine Thukha said Arakan soldiers had not engaged in hostilities with the Myanmar Army in the area and accused government forces of concocting the story. RFA could not independently verify whether the shooting was reciprocal. Doing it as usual Khine Thukha dismissed the military information team's latest statement. The psychological warfare department [of the Myanmar Army] is doing it as usual, he said. If the Myanmar Army believes it is protecting the people, then hold a referendum in Rakhine state. A clear answer will come out whether the people support the Tatmadaw or the Arakan Army. The international community and the public will know [the answer]. Khin Saw Wai, a lower house lawmaker from the Arakan National Party (ANP) who represents Rakhines Rathedaung constituency, said it is true that the AA sent envelopes with bullets inside them. There were confessions that they sent those envelopes, she said. Khin Saw Wai also said she has visited some conflict areas in Rakhine and has observed the situation of an estimated 6,000-some displaced villagers who fled their homes in Mrauk-U township during random shooting incidents reportedly by Myanmar forces, who in turn claimed that they were firing during a counterinsurgency against AA soldiers on March 18. Following the shooting, the Myanmar military accused the AA of using human shields and attacking their positions in residential areas and heritage sites in Mrauk-U. In reality, not many people have fled because of fighting between the two sides, and we were told that most attacks were by the military, Khin Saw Wai said. The truth needs to be disclosed. Both sides the Tatmadaw and the AA are now denying it and blaming each other. We dont have a say Fighting between Myanmar forces and the AA, an ethnic Rakhine army seeking greater autonomy in the state, escalated in early January, following AA attacks on police outposts in northern Rakhine that killed 13 officers. In response, the Myanmar government labeled the AA a terrorist group and instructed its forces to crush the ethnic army. Since the deadly Jan. 4 assaults, the two armies have clashed more than 100 times, killing 58 AA soldiers, 27 policemen, and 12 civilians. The Myanmar military has yet to reveal its casualties. Though the government has put the total number of displaced persons at more than 17,000, local relief and disaster management workers have estimated it to be as high as 22,000 with about 16,000 housed in temporary camps across the region. One displaced villager in Buthidaung township who read the Myanmar militarys latest statement on the AA, said, We dont have a say about the statements of the Tatmadaw or the AA. Its up to them [the Myanmar Army] to regard the AA as an insurgent group, he said. People cant take sides. The AA has called the Myanmar militarys attacks against civilians war crimes and said that it will try to have those responsible prosecuted by The Hague-based International Criminal Court. Reported by Kyaw Thu for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Nandar Chann. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Bosnias first-ever gay-pride parade will take place in September in the capital, Sarajevo, and will gather members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community from all over the country, activists and organizers say. "Bosnia will finally have its pride march that will be held on September 8 in Sarajevo," Branko Culibrk, one of the organizers, told a news conference in Sarajevo on April 1. Bosnia's law generally bans any discrimination but it does not recognize rights for gay couples. In 2008 and 2014 hooligans and radical Islamists attacked participants of events in Sarajevo that sought to support the homosexual community. "Pride marches take place everywhere in the region," said Dajana Bakic, an organizer of the Sarajevo march. "The climate has generally changed and we expect that a large number of citizens will come to show solidarity with us," Bakic said. Such events have recently become less controversial in the neighboring former Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. Mainly Muslim Kosovo held its first gay-pride march in October 2017 -- with the participation of President Hashim Thaci. Based on reporting by AFP and Balkaninside.com Foreign ministers from NATO's 29 member countries are scheduled to open a two-day meeting in Washington on April 3 to honor the alliance's 70th anniversary and discuss security threats, including Russia and Afghanistan. Ahead of the gathering, U.S. President Donald Trump met NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg at the White House on April 2 and pressed his demands that the allies do more to pay for their own defense. Stoltenberg is scheduled to address Congress on April 3, the first NATO secretary-general to do so. NATO foreign ministers are due to attend a reception at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where President Harry S. Truman hosted the original 12 member nations that signed the accord establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. On April 4, the foreign ministers will hold meetings at the State Department, with a first session focusing on Russia. They are expected to endorse a set of measures in the Black Sea to improve NATO's defenses in the region. The situation in Afghanistan as well as the demise of a landmark arms-control treaty that the United States and Russia signed in the last years of the Cold War, and NATO member Turkey's decision to buy a Russian surface-to-air missile system, will also be on the agenda. The Russian system is not compatible with NATO systems and is considered a threat to U.S. F-35 aircraft. On April 2, Trump praised member countries for increasing their financial contributions to NATO, but said the United States still shoulders a disproportionate share of the cost of protecting Europe. "We are protecting countries that have taken advantage of the United States," Trump said. "The United States pays for a disproportionate share of NATO," Trump said, adding: "We just want fairness." 'Strong Commitment' Trump has called on NATO allies to increase their defense spending to the agreed level of 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and even much higher. He said during his meeting with Stoltenberg that most nations are missing the target, although he cited progress. Stoltenberg thanked Trump for his "strong commitment to NATO" and for his leadership in getting member nations to increase their commitments. Spending by the 29 NATO countries, which dropped after the end of the Cold War, has actually been on the rise since 2014 -- before Trump took office. After Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, allies agreed to boost defense spending and "move toward" spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. The U.S. spends 3.4 percent of its GDP on defense. Trump singled out Germany, which recently announced plans to increase defense spending to 1.25 percent of its GDP by 2023 -- a revision of Chancellor Angela Merkel's pledge last year to hit 1.5 percent by 2024. "Germany honestly is not paying their fair share," the U.S. president said, sitting next to Stoltenberg. Trump has at times voiced doubts about NATO, in particular Article 5, its mutual defense clause, which stipulates that an attack against one NATO ally will be regarded as an attack against all. With reporting by AP, AFP, and dpa An Afghan official says the Taliban killed at least eight members of the country's security forces after attacking a checkpoint in the northern Balkh Province. Adil Shah Adil, the police spokesman in Balkh, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afganistan on April 2 that five other security service personnel were injured in the overnight clash, which took place in the Sholgara district. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, though Adil blamed the extremist Taliban group. The Taliban is quite active in Sholgara and has struck several checkpoints in that district. Adil said the Taliban also suffered casualties in the long shoot-out that followed the attack, though he did not know how many. The Taliban has stepped up attacks against Afghan officials and security forces around the country despite the group's officials holding talks with U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad in Kabul in an effort to reach a peace agreement to end the country's 17-year war. Meanwhile, Interior Ministry spokesman Nasrat Rahimi said on April 2 that Afghan forces had retaken control of the Arghanj Khaw district in the northeast province of Badakhshan. The district had fallen to the Taliban on March 30 after heavy fighting that killed at least 12 Afghan troops. With reporting by AP and dpa The conference is considered as an important meaningful event, not only tightening the cooperation relations between the two countries' localities, but also an inter-regional activity to implement the results of the Party General Secretary and President of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong's official visit to France in March 2018 and the French Prime Minister Edouard Philippes official visit to Vietnam in November 2018. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Vice Mayor of Toulouse Jean-Claude Dardelet emphasised that this years conference would continue the cooperation between the two countries over the past 30 years. At the conference, the French side will share many experiences on sustainable development including anti-climate change, which is very important for localities in Vietnam. Deputy Minister Nguyen Quoc Cuong and Vice Mayor of Toulouse Jean-Claude Dardelet visited the product of Vietnamese localities. Meanwhile, Deputy Foreign Minister Nguyen Quoc Cuong also stressed that the cooperation between localities of Vietnam and France has really become one of key pillars in the Vietnam-France strategic partnership, helping tighten the exchange, link, share and dialogue between the two countries, he added. The two-day conference focused on discussing five thematic sessions: tangible and intangible culture; the role of localities in cooperation in education and health; climate resistance, warming and climate change; sustainable economy; and from urbanization to sustainable cities. These are currently the important fields in the cooperation between localities. The conference also introduced French financial instruments to help the two countries' localities effectively access and use ODA funds to implement cooperation projects. Ha Giang province introduces products for the first time at the decentralized conference. The conference also brings businesses of the two countries the opportunity to meet, display publications and promotional documents. In addition, a photo exhibition on Toulouse - Hanoi, and a ceremony to honour local couples with typical cooperation in Vietnam - France relations, and a programme on introducing Vietnamese cuisine in France. Israels Rivlin Thanks Canadas Trudeau for Battling Anti-Semitism Stand for Israel | April 2, 2019 The United States isnt the Jewish states only ally in North America. While visiting Canada, Israels president noted that very fact. Israel Hayom reports that President Reuven Rivlin thanked Canadian premier Justin Trudeau for not only standing for Israel, but for standing with her against her many international foes: Rivlin thanked Trudeau for fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred, including the anti-Israel BDS movement, which the Canadian leader blasted in January. Its not right to discriminate or to make someone feel unsafe on campus because of their religion, and unfortunately, the BDS movement is often linked to those kinds of frames, he said. Rivlin also mentioned the Canadian parliaments decision to freeze its relations with Iran and to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Iran is leading the establishment of a Shiite axis in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and its actions are exacerbating Sunni-Shiite tensions. This could lead to regional escalation and threaten the whole world, said the president, noting the world cannot allow Iran to do this. The only way to halt Irans plans is by concerted international pressure and targeted military action whenever needed KABUL -- The U.S. envoy seeking a peace deal with the Taliban has played down recent tensions with the Western-backed Kabul government, telling RFE/RL that he hopes 2019 will be the "year of peace." In an interview in the Afghan capital on April 1, Zalmay Khalilzad said there was a "chance and readiness for peace." Khalilzad has held several rounds of peace talks with the militant group in Qatar. But the Afghan government has complained it is being left out of the negotiations, with the Taliban refusing to deal with what they call a "U.S. puppet." A rift between Kabul and Washington over the talks with the Taliban erupted into public view in March, when Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's national-security adviser harshly criticized Khalilzad, an Afghan-born veteran U.S. diplomat. Khalilzad said relations with Kabul remained "good" and he was doing his "best" to keep the government informed of progress in U.S.-Taliban negotiations. "I have always told the president that he has my phone number, that I'm at his service, and I can address any questions or issues he has," Khalilzad told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan in the interview. Hamdullah Mohib, Ghani's national-security adviser, on March 14 accused the U.S. envoy of "delegitimizing" the government by excluding it from the negotiations, acting like a "viceroy," and harboring personal ambitions in Afghanistan. Reports in the U.S. media said American officials have ended contacts with Mohib, who did not meet Khalilzad during his trip to Kabul on April 1. The U.S. envoy met with Ghani, Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah, and key power brokers during his trip. "I don't want to say anything about the issue with Mr. Mohib," said Khalilzad. "America has made its decision about this." Khalilzad said it was "time" to end the nearly 18-year war. "I hope this year will be the year for peace in Afghanistan," he said. "Afghans are tired of the war. So, too, is the world. The war has raged for a long time." He added: "The Taliban says it cannot win the war and is ready for a political settlement. America says war is not the solution and a political solution is needed. And the [Afghan] government says the same thing. Eventually, there will have to be some give and takes so the sides can come to an agreement and end the war." Basic Framework During a round of talks in Doha in January, U.S. and Taliban negotiators reached the basic framework of a potential peace deal in which the militants would prevent international terrorist groups from basing themselves in Afghanistan in exchange for a withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. After a round of talks that ended in early March, Khalilzad said "real strides" were made on those two issues. Less progress has been made on two other core issues -- a cease-fire in Afghanistan and an intra-Afghan dialogue that would include the Taliban and government representatives. "The Taliban says the issue of a cease-fire will only be addressed when talks among Afghans begin," he said. "But we are hopeful that intra-Afghan talks will start as soon as possible and that we can agree to de-escalate the war." Khalilzad said it would be ideal if a peace agreement could be clinched before Afghanistan's presidential election slated for September. But he said preparations should be made for holding the election in which Ghani is seeking re-election. "It would be good if there was a [peace] agreement between the Taliban and Afghanistan before the election," he said. "And whatever [deal] is agreed among Afghans, including the government, should be applied." Khalilzad's trip to Afghanistan came ahead of an expected new round of talks with the Taliban in Qatar's capital, Doha, reportedly due to begin in mid-April. Before his Kabul trip, Khalilzad visited Britain and Belgium. He is expected to travel to Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Jordan before ending his trip in Qatar. The State Department said that Khalilzad's March 25-April 10 trip was "part of the overall effort to facilitate a peace process that brings all Afghan parties together in inclusive intra-Afghan negotiations." Despite being engaged in talks with the United States, the Taliban continues to stage major attacks on Afghan security forces. At least 19 Afghan soldiers were killed in a series of Taliban attacks in the Badghis and Sar-e Pul provinces, officials said on April 1. The militant group's military success has given them considerable leverage in political talks. NUR-SULTAN -- A court in Kazakhstan's capital has fined Current Time correspondent Svetlana Glushkova 25,250 tenge ($66) on an administrative charge of assault that she rejects as politically motivated. The court imposed the fine on April 2 after ruling that Glushkova assaulted a teenage girl who was preventing her from covering the arrests of demonstrators in the capital on March 22. The demonstrators were protesting against plans to change the name of the capital from Astana to Nur-Sultan in honor of Nursultan Nazarbaev, the longtime president who had resigned three days earlier. Glushkova, who was detained at the airport in Nur-Sultan upon arrival from Almaty late on March 31, denies the charge. She said she would appeal Judge Asiya Doszhanova's ruling and vowed to continue her journalistic activities. Current Time is a Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. Also on April 2, a court in the western city of Aqtau resumed hearings on an appeal by RFE/RL Kazakh Service correspondent Saniya Toiken against a fine imposed by a court in Zhanaozen, a restive city in the Aqtau region. That hearing started on April 1 but was adjourned after the prosecutor requested police officers involved in the case to testify in the courtroom. The court fined Toiken $135 after ruling that she refused to follow police orders last month. Toiken was detained three times over several weeks in February-March while covering protests by residents of Zhanaozen, an oil-industry city, who were demanding jobs. She contends that the case against her is politically motivated. In December 2011, police fatally shot at least 16 people when dispersing protesting oil workers in Zhanaozen. Rights activists and critics say Nazarbaev, who had been president since 1990, persistently suppressed dissent, prolonged his time in office through undemocratic votes or referendums, and used the levers of power to neutralize potential opponents. The 78-year-old Nazarbaev remains head of the ruling Nur-Otan party and is chairman-for-life of the country's Security Council. Toiken is a recipient of the 2017 Courage in Journalism Award of the International Women's Media Foundation. With reporting by Current Time A Russian court has convicted a former military officer of fighting alongside Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria and sentenced him to 19 years in prison. Denis Khisamov was found guilty and sentenced on April 2 by the North Caucasus District Military Court in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. He was convicted of participation in the activities of a terrorist organization and receiving training to carry out terrorist acts. Investigators said that Khisamov, who retired from military service in 2009, confessed to taking part in 10 IS battles in Syria in 2015-16 in which about eight people were killed and 13 wounded in those operations. They said Khisamov confessed that he underwent training for IS recruits in Raqqa, Syria, joined an IS cell consisting of 300 members, and killed four people while fighting alongside IS. The prosecution also said that in December 2016 he moved to Turkey and robbed currency-exchange offices there, stealing some $230,000 that he later channeled to an IS member for use in Syria. There was no way to independently verify the findings of the investigators or the court. The court stripped Khisamov of his rank -- reserve captain -- and ruled that he will be under parole-like monitoring for one year after finishing his prison term. Khisamov was arrested in Turkey in April 2017. He was initially deported to Tajikistan because he had a forged Tajik passport, authorities said, but was later handed to Russia. Russia has given Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government crucial military backing throughout the eight-year war in Syria. Government forces have fought against both IS and rebel groups seeking to oust Assad. Based on reporting by RIA Novosti, Interfax, and TASS Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has received a warm welcome in North Macedonia, just months after the two neighbors settled a decades-long dispute over the former Yugoslav republics name. The one-day trip on April 2 is the first time a Greek leader has visited Greece's northern neighbor since it became independent in 1991. Tsipras was greeted by Defense Minister Radmila Sekerinska at the airport in Skopje airport before being taken to government headquarters to meet Prime Minister Zoran Zaev. As a sign of a potential new era in relations, the two leaders posed, smiling, as they took a selfie outside the building. Zaev called it a "truly historic day" as he posted the photo to Twitter. "Happy moments for an even happier future for the peoples of our friendly countries," he wrote. The two men signed a series of agreements before holding a joint news conference, during which Tsipras said: "We have lost a lot of time and now we must rapidly catch up." "We want to build a strong bond of trust and stability," he added. "It is a milestone to be leaving all these difficulties behind," Zaev said. "We have showed Europe and the world that with bold decisions anything is possible. Tsipras and Zaev reached a deal in 2018 to add "North" to Macedonias name, an agreement that will likely pave the way for Skopjes eventual membership in NATO -- most likely later this year or early 2020 and the European Union. The agreement came into force in February following ratification by both parliaments despite heavy opposition from nationalist critics who said their respective sides were making too many concessions. Greece had objected to its neighbor's use of "Macedonia," because of the northern Greek province of the same name. 'Historic Visit' Tsipras traveled to North Macedonia with 10 Greek cabinet ministers and more than 20 business representatives as the two countries look to increase trade and defense ties. "This visit is historic," Tsipras told the state-run MIA news agency on April 1, saying the future would see the countries as "partners and allies." "It is our responsibility -- mine and Zoran's -- to show that our nations can only benefit from the path that is now open," he said. Prior to the Tsipras arrival, Zaev told the AFP news agency that some 500 million euros in new Greek investment would come to the smaller, poorer Balkan country as a result of the historic agreement and the new relationship. "North Macedonia will have huge economic benefits from the deal that I believe will be seen in every area of the economy," he said. Greek forces are also set to assist in the policing and protection of North Macedonian airspace. Tsipras and Zaev have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize because of their efforts to narrow their countries' differences. With reporting by AFP, The Greek Times, dpa, AP, and the BBC Human Rights Watch (HRW) has condemned the recent arrests of 23 Crimean Tatars by Russian authorities, calling it an "unprecedented move to intensify pressure on a group largely critical" of Moscow's seizure of Ukraine's Crimea region. "The sweeping arrests in Crimea aim to portray politically active Crimean Tatars as terrorists as a way to silence them," said Rachel Denber, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at the New York-based watchdog, said in a statement on April 2. "This has been their approach for several years, and it should stop. These men should be released at once," Denber added. A Russia-controlled court in the Crimean capital, Simferopol, said on March 29 that since March 27, 23 Crimean Tatars had been arrested and placed in pretrial detention until May 15, on a charge of belonging to the Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamic group. HRW said that one man has been charged in absentia and is wanted by Russian law enforcement. Russia banned Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organization in 2003 but the group operates legally in Ukraine and much of Europe. Russian authorities said that 20 of the men were arrested in Crimea, and the other three in a Russian city as part of the same operation. 'Campaign Of Repression' HRW quoted their lawyers as saying that their clients had been transported to the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, some 500 kilometers from Simferopol, where they were being held in isolation. They have been charged with organizing activities of a terrorist organization or with participating in such a terrorist organization, according to HRW. It said that 14 of the men arrested were active participants in the human rights group Crimean Solidarity, while the other 10 had been involved with some of the organization's activities such as attending trials. Rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they describe as a campaign of repression by the Russian-imposed authorities in Crimea who are targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar community and others who have spoken out against Moscow's takeover of the peninsula. Russia took control of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 after sending in troops, seizing key facilities, and staging a referendum dismissed as illegal by at least 100 countries. Moscow also backs separatists in a war against government forces that has killed some 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014. The United States has countered suggestions that its sanctions to try and change Tehran's political behavior are hurting relief efforts amid deadly flooding in Iran, accusing Iranian authorities of mismanaging the current crisis. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an April 2 statement that the floods "once again show the level of Iranian regime mismanagement in urban planning and in emergency preparedness." "The regime blames outside entities when, in fact, it is their mismanagement that has led to this disaster," Pompeo added. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the head of the Red Crescent Society in Iran -- a local partner in the international Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement -- had suggested that U.S. sanctions were hampering humanitarian efforts amid flooding that has killed at least 47 Iranians and displaced residents of dozens of towns and villages. Local Red Crescent head Ali Asghar Peyvandi told the semiofficial ISNA news agency on April 1 that his organization has been unable to receive international help for the victims of two weeks of flooding due to U.S. banking sanctions. "We expected the Red Crescent, which is an aid organization that provides humanitarian services, to be exempted from the sanctions, but this is not the case," Peyvandi said. The United States reimposed tough financial and trade sanctions after President Donald Trump last year withdrew from a 2015 agreement lifting punitive international measures in exchange for curbs on Tehran's disputed nuclear program, contributing to economic and currency woes and chronic shortages of spare parts and other resources in Iran. "Prior to the [latest] sanctions, we had some [bank] accounts [connected to] SWIFT and we would used them to receive international aid, but these accounts are currently subject to sanctions and its not possible to transfer money to Iran from other countries or the International Red Cross Federation," Peyvandi said. Dozens of military and Red Crescent aircraft are said to be involved in ongoing rescue and relief efforts in western and southern Iran, where water from heavy rainfall could wreak more havoc as it courses downstream. The Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Communications (SWIFT) financial-messaging service said last year that it was suspending access for some Iranian banks "in the interest of the stability and integrity of the wider global financial system." That move came after the United States warned that SWIFT could face sanctions if it provided services to Iranian banks blacklisted by Washington. Peyvandi said that, in the aftermath of a deadly 2017 earthquake in the western Iranian province of Kermanshah, his organization had use of the bank account of a hospital that belongs to the Red Crescent to receive aid and transfer it into the country. "We've written to the [United Nations] as well as the Red Cross about the impact of the sanctions on our ability to attract international aid, but we haven't received any response yet," he said. Tehran has routinely spurned U.S. offers of humanitarian assistance after natural disasters like earthquakes amid the mistrust that has bedeviled decades of U.S.-Iranian relations. But after twin earthquakes that killed some 300 Iranians and caused widespread damage in 2012, U.S. authorities issued a temporary general license to ease transfers of aid aimed at easing Iranian suffering. On April 1, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took to Twitter to blast U.S. sanctions, which he said had prevented Iran from getting needed equipment, including helicopters that have been used to rescue residents from flood-stricken areas. "This isn't just economic warfare; it's economic TERRORISM," Zarif claimed. Speaking on April 2, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghassemi said that U.S. sanctions were preventing foreign and Iranian nationals outside the country from sending donations or other aid. Ghasemi said domestic rescue bodies were trying to mitigate the problem but that no foreign aid had been received. Earlier, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement that it was ready to offer help to Iran but "challenges caused by unilateral sanctions will affect the UN response and the accountability of UN to deliver the appropriate support," Reuters reported on March 26. Pompeo said on April 2 that the United States "stands ready to assist and contribute to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which would then then direct the money through the Iranian Red Crescent for relief." On its Farsi Twitter account, the State Department offered U.S. sympathy to the victims of the Iranian flooding and on March 25 said it was ready to help. "On behalf of the U.S., we offer our condolences to the families of the victims of the recent floods in Iran, we also wish a quick recovery for the wounded," the tweet said. "As always, we are ready to help, as we have been on the front lines of such [events] in other parts of the world," it added in a tweet that included an image of the flooding with the word "Condolences" in black. There was no public reaction from Tehran to the offer. The U.S. Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control requires a special license for making charitable donations to Iran. At least one U.S.-based charity organization, the Portland-based Child Foundation, said on its Facebook account that it was collecting donations to help those affected by the Iranian flooding. The foundation, which said its OFAC license through the U.S. Department of Treasury allows it to send up to $3 million in humanitarian aid annually to Iran, said it had so far collected over $200,000 online for a flash-flood emergency fund. Child Foundation said it would send donations to its sister organization in Iran, Bonyad Refah Koodak (aka Child Foundation-Iran). "They will distribute the funds according to the needs of the community based on their assessment of the situation," the foundation said. Irans official IRNA government news agency said several international humanitarian groups have offered to send help to flood victims, including Red Cross organizations in neighboring Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkey, as well as the United Kingdom. German Ambassador to Tehran Michael Klor-Berchtold -- whose country has remained part of the Iranian nuclear deal along with China, Russia, and other EU states -- said via Twitter on April 1 that his country was providing humanitarian assistance to Iran's flood victims. "40 boats and safety equipment will be delivered by #GermanRedCross to #IranianRedCrescent," he said. Iranian President Hassan Rohani, who toured some of the afflicted regions last week, has promised to compensate victims. He said 25 of Iran's 31 provinces had been affected and that the scale of the disaster had overwhelmed emergency services in some areas. A Moscow court has extended the term of house arrest for theater director Kirill Serebrennikov and two associates in an embezzlement trial that the defendants and their supporters contend is politically motivated. In an April 2 ruling, Meshchansky district court Judge Irina Akkuratova left Serebrennikov, producer Yury Itin, and former Culture Ministry employee Sofia Apfelbaum under house arrest until July 4. A lawyer for Itin, Yury Lysenko, told RFE/RL that all three defendants would contest the extension of house arrest. The fourth defendant in the case, producer Aleksei Malobrodsky, is not under house arrest but is barred from leaving Moscow. Serebrennikov's August 2017 arrest drew international attention and prompted accusations that Russian authorities were targeting cultural figures who are at odds with President Vladimir Putin's government. The acclaimed 49-year-old director was initially charged with organizing the embezzlement of 68 million rubles (more than $1 million) in state funds granted from 2011 to 2014 to Seventh Studio, a nonprofit organization that Serebrennikov established. In January 2018, prosecutors raised the amount Serebrennikov and his three co-defendants are accused of embezzling to 133 million rubles ($2 million). All four defendants have pleaded not guilty and Serebrennikov has described the trial, which began in October 2018, as "absurd." A fifth person charged in the case, accountant Nina Maslyayeva, pleaded guilty and has provided testimony used as evidence against the defendants. She is to be tried separately. Serebrennikov's supporters say the case was part of a crackdown on the arts community ahead of the March 2018 presidential election in which Putin, a longtime Soviet KGB officer who was first elected president in 2000, won a fourth term. Serebrennikov had previously taken part in antigovernment protests and voiced concerns about the increasing influence in Russia of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose ties with the state have increased under Putin. Despite being under house arrest, the director has staged an opera that premiered in March in Hamburg, Germany. With reporting by Current Time, RIA Novosti, TASS, and Interfax Three of the eight countries to which Washington granted waivers to import Iranian oil have now cut their shipments from the country to zero, according to the U.S. special representative for Iran. "In November, we granted eight oil waivers to avoid a spike in the price of oil. I can confirm today three of those importers are now at zero," Brian Hook told reporters in Washington on April 2, without identifying the countries. The United States reimposed sanctions against Iran after withdrawing last year from a landmark 2015 agreement under which Tehran agreed to restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The U.S. administration has a stated goal of reducing Iranian oil exports to zero by demanding importers reduce purchases or face U.S. sanctions. However, Washington has granted Italy, Greece, Turkey, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan temporary waivers to import Iranian oil. "There are better market conditions for us to accelerate our path to zero," Hook said, adding that Washington is "not looking to grant any waivers or exceptions to our sanctions regime." On April 1, a senior U.S. administration official said that the United States was considering additional sanctions against Iran. "We just want a continued chilling effect," the official said. "We want businesses to continue to think doing business with Iran is a terrible idea at this point." The official said Washington hoped to take the additional measures in the coming weeks. Based on reporting by Reuters and dpa Pakistani officials say three of their soldiers were killed when India targeted its military in the disputed Kashmir region. The Pakistani military said in a statement on April 2 that several of its soldiers were also injured in the overnight attack. The statement said the Pakistani Army "responded effectively" after the Indian mortar attack on its positions at the border town Rakhchakri, which lies in the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. Indian officials made no comment on the Pakistani report. The latest casualties come weeks after tensions flared between the rival nuclear-armed states after a February suicide bombing killed 40 Indian troops in Indian-administered Kashmir. That led to India launching an air strike inside Pakistan, where it said it was targeting militants responsible for the bombing. Pakistan then shot down two Indian jet fighters and left several Pakistani soldiers injured and forced the civilian population near the border to flee their homes, the military said in a statement. Both Pakistan and India control parts of Kashmir, which they each claim in its entirety. The two neighbors have a history of bitter relations since gaining independence from Britain in 1947. The rivals have fought three wars, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, where the two sides still regularly exchange fire. Based on reporting by AP and dpa MOSCOW -- A Norwegian man on trial on espionage charges in Russia is accused of acquiring classified information on nuclear-powered submarines, prosecutors say. Speaking as Frode Berg's trial began in Moscow on April 2, Prosecutor Milana Digayeva said that the accused was caught red-handed with the documents he had received from an employee of a military facility who was shadowed by Russian intelligence. The case is being heard behind closed doors at the Moscow City Court for secrecy reasons. Berg, 63, pleaded not guilty. The court prolonged Berg's pretrial detention until September 22. Berg's Norwegian lawyer Brynjulf Risnes said that there was a "very great risk that he will be convicted," given the lack of acquittals in Russian spy cases in recent years. Risnes, who is in Oslo awaiting permission from Russia to visit his client, told that AFP news agency that there was a risk Berg could face a jail term of 10 to 20 years. Russian authorities have said Berg was arrested in December 2017. Media reports said at the time that he was caught with classified material he allegedly obtained from a Russian man identified as Aleksei Zhitnyuk. Zhitnyuk was found guilty of high treason in December and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Norwegian media reports said that Berg is a former border inspector, and that the Norwegian Foreign Ministry was working to provide him with assistance. Berg's lawyers have said that he admitted being a courier for Norway's military intelligence, but that he had little knowledge of the operation he took part in. With reporting by AP, AFP, Interfax, TASS, and Reuters. A court in Moscow has sentenced a man to life in prison after finding him guilty of murdering several women. In an April 2 ruling, the Moscow City Court convicted Bakhtiyor Matyakubov guilty of stabbing five women in and around the Russian capital in January-April 2015. The court said that Matyakubov must serve his sentence in a maximum-security penitentiary. Prosecutors said that Matyakubov stalked women and attacked them with a knife in parks and deserted areas. He was extradited to Russia in 2017 from an unnamed country where he faced similar charges. According to investigators in the case, medical experts concluded that Matyakubov suffers from personality disorders including irascibility, vindictiveness, and cruelty towards women. Based on reporting by TASS, RIA Novosti, and Interfax KYIV -- The rockets came in fast and hot and without notice, unleashing a hellish fury over the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk as residents went about their afternoon business. When the attack ended minutes later, at least a dozen people were dead and dozens more were wounded. In the immediate aftermath and under the cover of darkness, President and commander in chief Petro Poroshenko made a surprise visit to the scene. Donning military camouflage fatigues and with representatives of Western allies in tow, he gestured to the spent container of a missile stuck in the frozen ground. "The bombs are blasting from the air, and killing the people down here," Poroshenko told those beside him in English as cameras rolled. With repeated visits to the scene of attacks like the one in Kramatorsk in February 2015 after taking office amid the breakout of war a year earlier, Poroshenko has sought to burnish his image as a strong wartime commander in chief who has reformed the military and rebuffed an aggressive Russia since it annexed Crimea and launched its support for separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. But if the results from 79 special polling stations set up for active-duty soldiers on the eastern front lines are any indication, some of the messaging might have been lost on the troops. A nearly complete vote tally published by the Central Election Commission and analyzed by RFE/RL on April 2 showed Poroshenko receiving 12,925 (38.1 percent) of 33,859 votes from those front-line soldiers, just 591 more than the 12,334 (36.4 percent) for Volodymyr Zelenskiy. In other words, while it beats the more-than-two-to-one advantage that political newcomer Zelenskiy enjoyed in the rest of the country, analysts suggest it was not necessarily a commanding performance for Ukraine's commander in chief. "This means that Poroshenko is not very popular in the army, and that Ukrainians' desire for a 'new face' exists, including in the army," Volodymyr Fesenko, a Ukrainian political and security analyst who heads the Kyiv-based Penta Center, told RFE/RL. That could bode ill for the second-round runoff between those two candidates on April 21. Poroshenko's office declined to comment on the military vote in the east, instead referring RFE/RL to TV presenter Taras Berezovets, who works for a channel that reports favorably of the president's work, for comment. Berezovets said the first-round result was "absolutely not" a referendum on Poroshenko's role as commander in chief and chalked it up to "a lot of soldiers want[ing] the war to stop and to go home." "Poroshenko, on the contrary, says we'll continue fighting Russia [and] that this will be a war for years," he added. Poroshenko has tried to keep Western partners behind Ukraine diplomatically and financially while maintaining domestic support for his pro-EU and pro-NATO policies, all with Russia still in control of annexed Crimea and Ukrainian soldiers dying almost daily. With more than 99 percent of the national vote counted by April 2, Zelenskiy, who stars in a popular sitcom about a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president and stands up to a corrupt political elite, led with more than 30 percent compared to Poroshenko's nearly 16 percent. The Poroshenko 'Myth' Overwhelmingly elected president in a snap vote in May 2014, Poroshenko inherited a country mired in a Kremlin-fueled separatist uprising and deeply unprepared for war. Across the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, weapons caches were being raided and government buildings seized. Only 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers -- one brigade -- were in a state of complete readiness and able to execute the political leadership's orders, according to Mykola Byelyeskov* (also Bielieskov), who researches the military in his role as deputy director of the Institute of World Policy in Kyiv. On May 26, 2014, the day after Poroshenko was elected, Russia-backed forces launched an offensive on Donetsk and captured its international airport in a bloody battle that killed dozens of fighters and marked the start of full-scale hostilities that would last months. Eventually the Ukrainian army, backed by volunteer militias, would turn the tide and hold off further advances. But it came at a significant cost. In the August 2014 battle for Ilovaysk, hundreds of Ukrainian troops were encircled and killed after Russia-backed forces reneged on an alleged promise to provide safe passage back to their barracks. It was a scenario that played out with similarly devastating results in Debaltseve in February 2015. There, hundreds more Ukrainian troops were killed when they were surrounded and bombarded by rockets and tank fire. After those defeats, according to Fesenko, "there was generally great dissatisfaction with the way Poroshenko led the Armed Forces." But the president has earned praise for his role in helping grow the Ukrainian Armed Forces into a fighting force of around 250,000 soldiers, some 204,000 of whom are professional servicemen. And he has overseen an increase in defense spending from $1.9 billion in 2013 to $3 billion in 2018, allowing the country to purchase or modernize tanks, armored vehicles, and other materiel. "Within a short space of time, Ukraine's army has evolved from a depleted, neglected, and underfunded force to one that has contained a Russian-backed armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine," military analyst Valeriy Akimenko wrote last year for Carnegie's Reforming Ukraine project. "The transformation has been painful and an enormous amount still needs to be done to reform the Ukrainian military, but remarkable progress has been made since 2014." But those gains may not have been enough to earn Poroshenko broad respect from the troops under his command, critics say. "It is a myth that Poroshenko is very popular in the army," argued Fesenko. 'Business In Blood' Yet in the lead-up to the March 31 election, Poroshenko, who has been criticized by civil society watchdogs and Western backers for the slow pace of crucial reforms and foot-dragging when it comes to implementing anticorruption measures, played up the image of a tough commander. "Army, language, faith" was his campaign slogan. He described himself as the only one of the 39 candidates who was capable of defending Ukrainian statehood against a Russia that he claims is hellbent on destroying the country. He made several visits to the front lines to meet with the troops, donning a military uniform for photo ops each time. He even went on Army FM, a radio station for the troops, where he said Russian President Vladimir Putin's comments hinting at a negotiated end to the conflict with anyone other than Poroshenko in charge were equivalent to "a seal of approval for the Ukrainian supreme commander in chief." But he also became embroiled in a major scandal in February involving money allegedly stolen from the defense sector. Documents uncovered by Ukrainian investigative journalists appeared to show that presidential allies, including a senior security official with the power to sign off on key military-procurement deals, had stolen millions from state defense companies during wartime. The scheme involved smuggling spare military equipment parts from Russia and then selling them to Ukrainian companies at inflated prices. The scandal sparked protests from nationalist groups who called the scheme a "business in blood." "Poroshenko's commander-in-chief message, even in a country at war, hasn't resonated that much," Byelyeskov told RFE/RL, referring to the president's reelection campaign. 'No One Is Born Commander In Chief' Yet Poroshenko looks set to double down on the strategy as he goes head-to-head with Zelenskiy in over two weeks' time. "It's hard to create a new platform in a short time," said Byelyeskov. Poroshenko told an election-night press conference that he would be going after his opponent's inexperience, warning Ukrainians that Russia wouldn't be sending its comedians to the negotiating table. Putin, Poroshenko said, "dreams of a soft, submissive, gentle, giggling, inexperienced, weak, ideologically amorphous and politically uncertain president." "Will we gift him this?" he added, referring to Zelenskiy. The president also said he was ready to debate Zelenskiy, a challenge that was quickly accepted but with no date set so far. "Poroshenko will likely look more experienced in debates on this issue" of the military if the two debate, Byelyeskov predicted. "More experienced, and a person who is not going to have to spend the first five months [of his presidency] learning about important military things." But Byelyeskov also noted that Poroshenko was himself once a novice in military affairs. "No one is born as a commander in chief," he said. "It is a thing that is acquired." With Change, Perhaps Chances Should the 41-year-old Zelenskiy win in the second round -- and polls that accurately predicted his first-round victory have suggested he might handily defeat Poroshenko once more -- he would face a steep learning curve in military and other affairs. "He will have to learn a lot in a very short time," Byelyeskov said, adding that among other issues, "he would need to learn about the concentration of Russian forces on our border, [the Ukrainian military's] chain of command...[and] how the agencies interact." Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy seeking a peace deal with the Taliban, has said there is a chance of an agreement this year after nearly 18 years of war in Afghanistan. In an interview with RFE/RLs Radio Free Afghanistan in Kabul on April 1, the Afghan-born U.S. diplomat said the best scenario would be to have a peace deal in place before Afghanistan holds presidential elections in September. The United States says it is halting deliveries to Turkey related to the F-35 fighter-jet program in response to Ankara's decision to move ahead with the purchase of Russian air-defense system. "Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey's F-35 operational capability have been suspended while our dialogue on this important matter continues with Turkey," a Pentagon spokesperson said on April 1. Washington has been warning Ankara for months that buying the S-400 system would jeopardize its planned purchase of the advanced fighter aircraft. Ankara has refused to back down on its planned purchase. On March 29, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that his country was committed to the deal to buy the Russian system and was discussing delivery dates. Russia media reported that Turkey intended to buy four S-400 units for a price of $2.5 billion. Washington has also said it could withdraw an offer to sell Turkey the U.S. air-defense equivalent -- the Patriot missile system. Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters Joyce and Raymond Kagels during one of their last trips together in Aruba. A MAN was taken to hospital by air ambulance after falling down stairs. The helicopter landed on the Kings Road field at Mexborough at about 5.30pm yesterday (Monday). A Yorkshire Air Ambulance spokeswoman said: A male patient had fallen down some stairs and was flown to Sheffield Northern General. We have no further details on his condition. It wasnt sexual, but he did grab me by the head, Amy Lappos, 43, told the media on Monday. He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth. Previously, former Nevada state legislator Lucy Flores last week accused Biden of kissing her on the back of the head at a 2014 event. Joe Biden has been expected to announce a Democratic White House bid in the coming weeks and has been leading the Democratic presidential field in opinion polls. I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once never did I believe I acted inappropriately, was Bidens reaction in a statement. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention. Joe Biden and Alyssa Milano Joe Bidens image is defended by many people now. I am proud to call Joe Biden a friend, Actress and womens rights activist Alyssa Milano said in a series of tweets on Monday. He has been a leader and a champion on fighting violence against women for many years, and I have been fortunate to accompany him to events with survivors where he has listened to their stories, empathized with them, and comforted them. Chuck Rein, Don Steinbeisser, Jr., Megan Hedges and Tonya Liles meet with Senator Daines' Ag Legislative Assistant Dan Gerig (second from left) during the recent trip to Washington, D.C. for the American Farm Bureau Issues Advisory Committee meetings. Four Montana Farm Bureau members traveled to Washington, D.C. to attend the American Farm Bureau Issues Advisory Committee meetings and visit with senatorial offices. Members included Tonya Rolf Liles, a cattle rancher from Terry, Animal Care Committee; Megan Mattson Hedges, a grain farmer from Chester, Farm Policy Committee; Chuck Rein, a rancher from Big Timber, Federal Lands Committee; and Don Steinbeisser, Jr., a diversified farmer from Sidney, Environmental Regulations Committee. The Animal Care Committee addressed some of the current national lawsuits including nuisance lawsuits against swine farms and R-CALF USA's beef checkoff lawsuit. "They wanted input from the different states regarding various lawsuits to decide if AFBF should pursue them," said Rolf. "In addition, we talked about cell-cultured protein products and how to ensure the US Department of Agriculture regulates them. We talked about the Green New Deal and how the EPA would handle that. In addition, we covered animal traceability. We agreed there is a need for traceability, but there must be a way to keep personal information confidential." Chuck Rein said the Federal Lands Committee had two prevalent topics. "The number-one discussion was regarding fire: the speakers covered prevention, what to do during the fire and then after. We talked about what caused the problem, as well as how to mitigate getting permits to access an area when there are fallen burned trees across the roads. There wasn't a concrete answer developed, but the meeting provided a good opportunity to voice our concerns. Wild horses and burros were the number-two topic. We learned the BLM has 55,000 wild horses and burros that is costing $48,000 per head, costing a billion dollars a year to feed these horses. We talked about ranchers possibly adopting some of the horses and getting paid to take care of them." The Farm Policy Committee conversation was a continuation of last year's regarding the farm bill. "Last year we were discussing what needed to be in the farm bill; this year there were a lot of questions about implementation, timelines and funding changes," said Megan Mattson Hedges. "There was a lot of talk about growing hemp, such as would there be crop insurance and whether it could be planted on a lot of those tobacco acres." "Having a seat at the table is vital for Montana," said Hedges. "I might not be the expert on all of our issues but I was the only wheat producer at the table. That's imperative for our state." Steinbeisser said one of the main topics discussed by the Environmental Regulations Committee was dicamba and the trouble Arkansas farmers had with lawsuits surrounding that crop protectant. "We talked about making sure there was a way to shorten the time period for completing the Environmental Impact Statement on pesticides. Sometimes it takes 10-12 years. We addressed some of the irrigation concerns in different states. Arizona has a lot of dust trouble. In fact, they're threatening to shut down farming completely in some areas because of the dust." During the time in Washington, the group visited Senator Steve Daines' office. "We visited with Dan Gerig, Senator Daines' Ag Legislative Assistant. Trade was the number-one issue we discussed, and the importance of the U.S. Mexico Canada Free Trade Agreement and what an important issue it is in Montana especially in the northern part of the state with grain," said Hedges. "However, our visit with him really ran the gamut of ag issues." Steinbeisser had the opportunity to visit with Senator Tester's staff. "I told them about the importance of trade, especially the upcoming USMCA, and talked about the importance of funding our Agricultural Research Stations in Montana." Landowners will have an opportunity to discuss their concerns and experiences with brine spills. This is the site of a brine spill in northwestern North Dakota. (NDSU photo) Landowners will have an opportunity to discuss their concerns and experiences with brine spills during a series of informal meetings North Dakota State University Extension is hosting this spring. These meetings are open to all landowners to discuss their concerns and experiences with brine spills. NDSU researchers will provide an update on the current brine remediation research being conducted in the state. The goal of these meetings is for everyone to share information and voice their concerns. Meetings are scheduled in regions of North Dakota that have been impacted by energy development. The dates and locations are: - April 2 - Dickinson, Dickinson Research Extension Center, 1 to 3 p.m. - April 11 - Minot, North Central Research Extension Center, 1 to 3 p.m. Space will be limited to 30 participants, so contact the Extension agent or other contact person for the location you will be attending to reserve your spot: - Dickinson - Kurt Froelich, 701-456-7665 or [email protected]; or Greg Benz, 701-573-5593 or [email protected] - Minot - Paige Brummund, 701-857-6444 or [email protected] The Northwest Landowners Association is providing snacks and refreshments. As climate change continues to influence Montana rangelands, crops and livestock, as well as pollinators, diseases, pests and weeds, scientists continue to look for ways farmers, ranchers and land managers can adapt to those changes. Dr. Bruce Maxwell, director of the Montana State Universitys Institute on Ecosystems, will be discussing some of those options at a special BrownBagger this Friday, April 5, at the USDA- Agricultural Research Services Northern Plains Agricultural Research Laboratory (NPARL) in Sidney. Describing his upcoming presentation, Dr. Maxwell said he will be giving a talk centered on agricultural adaptation to climate change and the important lessons learned from ecology about site-specific knowledge, monitoring and adaptive management. His presentation begins at noon at the Sidney ARS lab, located at 1500 N. Central Avenue in Sidney. Climate change and adaptation are topics of particular interest to Dr. Maxwell, who, in addition to his leadership of the IOE, is also Professor of Applied Plant Ecology/Agroecology in the Land Resources and Environmental Sciences department at Montana State University Bozeman. His current research is looking at how changes in climate, crop price and input management may interact to drive agroecosystems over sustainability thresholds, as well as studying variables influencing the rate of plant invasions. He is also the recipient of several national teaching awards. As part of his duties at the IOE, Dr. Maxwell helped organize the Montana Climate Assessment (MCA) project, developed to assess the states climate to describe past and future climate trends that affect different sectors of the States economy. The first assessment, released in September 2017, focuses on climate issues that affect agriculture, forests, and water resources in Montana. The Agriculture chapter of that report which, in addition to more general information on climate influences, also analyzes climate change effects for some specific commodity crops in Montana including spring and winter wheat, corn, sugar beets, potatoes and organic grains. According to the report, attention is paid to the uncertainties around identifying and predicting climate change effects on agriculture, but also that no Montana producer is guaranteed the status quo - change is happening, even if we cannot yet unravel all its components. To access the full 2017 MCA report in addition to videos, related news, and outreach events, please visit http://montanaclimate.org/ . The MCA project involves university researchers, decision makers, and other stakeholders with the goal of providing timely and relevant information for the citizens of the State. The 2017 Montana Climate Assessment report was developed with support from university faculty and students, state and federal agency researchers, non-profit organizations, resource managers, and the public. NPARL invites all interested persons to join us for what promises to be a very informative discussion this Friday, Apr 5, beginning at noon. Bring your lunch; well provide the dessert! This is the last NPARL BrownBagger for 2019. For questions or more information, contact Beth Redlin at 406-433-9427 or [email protected] (SIDNEY, MT) --- The Sidney-Richland County Library will be closed Tuesday, April 9 through Saturday April 13. Staff will be attending the annual statewide library conference in Helena. The Montana Library Association Conference provides critical training and resources, as well as opportunities for libraries throughout Montana to network and share resources. During the conference the Montana State Library Commission will recognize several libraries throughout the state who have provided outstanding services to their communities. Sidney-Richland County Library will be awarded the Excellence in Library Service Award (ELSA) for the fourth consecutive year. In order to be recognized for outstanding services to their communities, a library must exceed the essential Montana Public Library standards in all 13 categories. Categories include collection development, information access, policies, planning and evaluation, fiscal management, board accomplishments, continuing education for staff and trustees, and outreach to the community. Five businesses will be popping up in the main foyer of the Watford City High School lobby from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 10. This Market Day event is a part of the Youth Entrepreneurs curriculum. Earnings from the sales will go to the student minus expenses and sales tax. Watford City is the first high school in North Dakota to offer this elective course to their students thanks to generous sponsorship by First International Bank and Trust. This event is open to the public. The recent flooding of the Yellowstone River has been the worst in memory for many in Richland County, Montana and McKenzie County, North Dakota. With roads shut down due to flooding and residents still unable to make it home to assess the damage, the question for many remains when things will get back to normal. The Roundup spoke with McKenzie County Emergency Planner, Karolin Jappe, who explained the extent of the damage and expressed that it could be weeks before the damage was properly assessed. Jappe told The Roundup, "The ice jam has broke, and now we're just waiting for the water to go down." When asked how many were displaced because of the flooring, Jappe answered, "I need to bring my list because there are a few more people coming in who didn't at first. I think there's about 60 in total. Not all damage is to homes, however. Jappe included, "Now, not all of them had house damage. Some had barn and farm damage. But there's at least 60 properties damaged in some way, shape, or form." When asked the last time there was a flood of this magnitude, Jappe answered, "I think it was 1994, but there has been nothing quite like this. If so, it was three or four generations ago. But the current farmers and ranchers have seen nothing like this." Jappe plans to do whatever she can to find emergency aid relief for those affected, most of whom did not have flood insurance. Jappe explained, "I'm taking an emergency declaration to the county commissioners tomorrow. Then, that goes on to the state. It all depends on a pot of money at the state level, but that all depends in return on what kind of flooding happens statewide. And if there is a bunch of flooding at the state level, there could possibly be a presidential declaration. It just all depends. Jappe was hopeful there wouldn't be more flooding statewide, leaving funds to assist those affected locally. When asked if more flooding was anticipated elsewhere, Jappe responded, "There could be. It's very possible. I think we're in a good spot, but I don't want to say that 100%." Jappe's plans are to remain in Fairview until all of her immediate work is done. She added, "I am going to be in Fairview regularly. The fire chief has allowed me to use his office for a while. So this week, I plan on being here all week, especially for all the people who couldn't be here for the multiple-area agency center because there are a lot of hands at play. If they have questions, they can come ask. I'd say there are 30 or 40 families that can't even make it to their house yet." Jappe is staying busy offering advice to residents, claiming, "I have an appointment this afternoon about doing damage assessments, but it's hard to do damage assessments because they're still so affected. If FEMA doesn't have a picture, it didn't happen. If you need to take one hundred or two hundred pictures, take them and have them documented." McKenzie County has not decided to take part in the national flood insurance program, which could help those affected by such flooding. However, there is a cost-benefit analysis that residents need to be aware of. Jappe said, "Most of these people don't have flood insurance. FEMA has never come to McKenzie County or this part of McKenize County, but just Watford City and Alexander. When you do sign up to become a national flood insurance program, there are things you can do with your property and things you cannot do with your property. We need to have a meeting some night and I'm sure we need to get people back into their homes first but we don't want to force anything on the people here. We can change it if you want or leave it the same. We don't want to force the national flood insurance program on them. It's a 'give and take thing' and so we want people to know what people will give up it they want to be a part of that program." Jacklyn Damm, Tobacco Prevention Specialist at the Richland County Health Department will be presenting Kick Butts Day hosted by Savage Junior High and High School on April 11. As an annual celebration of youth leadership and activism in the fight against tobacco use, Kick Butts Day rotates around Richland County schools each year. This year Savage will feature five activities to demonstrate important consequences of tobacco use. Posters around the school will inform students that across the nation 1200 people die every day from a tobacco related disease. 100 rubber rats will be hidden around the school for students to find and exchange for prizes. The rats represent arsenic, or rat poison, which is found in tobacco products like cigarettes, spit tobacco, and vapes. A display board showing damage caused by vape devices exploding will demonstrate that electronic cigarettes can damage lungs and may explode in addition to containing a highly concentrated amount of nicotine. A candy store comparing candy flavored tobacco and actual candy will illustrate how Big Tobacco markets towards minors. Mr. Gross Mouth, a display of oral diseases will show students how using spit or smokeless tobacco increases risk for cancer of the mouth, gums, and throat. It also increases risk for gum disease, stained teeth and tooth lossMontanans that use tobacco on average have six fewer teeth than Montanans who have never used tobacco products. Spit tobacco also absorbs into the body faster which also increases risk for nicotine addiction. For more information please contact Jacklyn at the Richland County Health Department at 406-433-2207. The MT Quitline is also available for all tobacco users including vaping. Call 1-800-Quit-Now or go online to QuitNowMontana.com. The Montana Tobacco Use Prevention Program plays an important role in Partnership for Promise, a subcommittee of Communities in Action that strives to work together to with the youth of Richland County to create an ongoing, healthy, and supportive environment. Greetings from Helena. We put in some extra-long days this week, with extra floor sessions. As we near the final weeks of the session we will probably see more of these as deadlines are approaching. HB 2, the budget, was heard in Senate Finance and Claims Committee this past week. We will hear it on the Senate floor sometime this week. In Judiciary Committee, we heard SB 354, Born Alive Act, carried by Senator Olszewski. This bill says that a baby that survives an abortion has a right to live. We passed it out of committee on a party line vote. On the floor, it passed 30-19. All Republican Senators voted for this bill, while all the Democrat Senators, except one, voted against it. This was a very easy YES vote for me to make. In Public Health and Human Services Committee, we heard bills that dealt with what illnesses health insurance companies should be mandated to cover to bills that called for the reigning in of DPHHS. This is an important committee because it deals with an agency that affects the lives of many Montanans and spends over $2.25 Billion a year. We hear a lot of emotional testimonies during these hearings. During Senate Fish and Game Committee, one of the bills we voted on was HB 265. There was some discussion before the vote as to who should be involved in the decision of conservation easements. The Montana Attorney General said the Land Board should have a vote on these decisions while the Montana Supreme Court ruled it should be only the Governors decision, through his appointees and department. With these conflicting decisions within our judiciary system of Government, we, as the Legislature, are doing our duty to clarify the law concerning this issue. In Region 7, there was almost $10 Million of public money initially spent for easements, plus the commitment of managing and monitoring will be thousands of dollars more a year forever. There will be decisions regarding restrictions made on land that will be affected for perpetuity (forever). So, it is a big decision regarding hunters, landowners, and the communities where these easements are located, and we need to get it right. The last couple of weeks I had the opportunity to sponsor Senate Pages, Annika Bennion from Sidney and our granddaughter, Vanessa Splattstoesser. We appreciate their help and I think it is an educational experience for them. It was good to see people from SD 18 again this week. I look forward to hearing from you regarding your questions or concerns. You can contact me by phone 406-989-1372, by e-mail [email protected], or by regular mail Senator Hinebauch Capitol Station PO Box 200500 Helena, Mt 59620-0500. What Does That Mean For Richland County? The Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) is changing the way they allocate funding for conservation work in the state of Montana and in Richland County. To determine the natural resource concerns in Richland County we need your help identifying the top resource concerns. Local Working Group Meeting will be held on April 11 at 3:30 p.m. in the meeting room at MSU Extension Office. Montana Focused Conservation (MFC), County Long range Plans (LRP) and Targeted Implementation Plans (TIP) will determine how and where EQIP funding is allocated in the future. Richland County agricultural landowners, local, state and federal agency personnel will set the priorities of natural resource concerns. Working together we will be able to strategically address our resource concerns by clearly defining our resources concerns, developing a plan to address the concern, projecting a timeline and the funding needs to achieve the goal of Montana Focused Conservation. If you have natural resource concerns you feel need to be addressed, please join us. Local Working Group Meeting Thursday, April 11 at 3:30 p.m. in the meeting room of the MSU Extension building at 1499 North Central Avenue. Sidney, MT. Questions call the Richland County Conservation District 406-403-2103x3001. Richland Economic Development Corp is pleased to announce that the Revolving Loan Fund (RLF) committee has awarded its sixteenth loan for the expansion of a business in Fairview. Tim Neu was approved for a loan to remodel and improve Neu's SuperValu. Tim completed an application in partnership with his lead lender, Chad Molden, of Stockman Bank of Sidney, and presented this project to the RLF committee for review. The funding request was to consolidate loans, remodel and update equipment. Tim purchased the SuperValu from Bill Huft in 2015, and then began upgrading the store as he was able. "I knew that updating the SuperValu was needed and was timely. I'm so thankful to be in business and supported by the area. Many thanks to REDC and the RLF program to make this happen for me." The RLF committee is pleased to assist Tim Neu in this business venture. The intent of the RLF is to offer an additional tool to support new business and business expansion projects. Chad Molden states, "This program is a great resource for borrowers requiring gap funding. Stockman Bank is pleased to coordinate with REDC to think outside the box and get projects like this off the ground." Richland Economic Development Corp encourages existing businesses and new business startup projects to consider the RLF as a resource. The RLF loan pool of $1,000,000 is not free money, but an investment made by the Richland County Commissioners, to assist in the development of business in our economy. The application and review process is achievable, and done in conjunction with the area financial institutions in Richland County. If you or someone you know is thinking of expanding or launching a new business in Richland County, contact any of the local financial institutions or Richland Economic Development Corp today for an application! The Watford City High School Art Department and the Long X Arts Foundation will be home to mural artist, award-winning arts programmer and teaching artist Markus Tracy from April 1-12. Tracy's two week residency at WCHS is focused on working with the junior high, high school and after school art students to design, implement and create a comprehensive mural on the wall in the fine arts wing of the high school. This will be the first piece of public art in the school. Tracy is known for his successful partnerships with schools, museums, civic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and correctional facilities throughout the United States. Along with exhibiting his work nationally, Tracy has been awarded numerous public art commissions, grants, and artist in residencies throughout the United States. "The students are in good hands with Markus," said Jessie Scofield, director of the Long X Arts Foundation. "This year is our first year working with the art department on an after school art club for teenagers, and this mural project was something they really wanted to see through. We wanted to help make it the best possible experience for them so we sought partnerships from some great organizations who believe in the power of art experiences." Tracy's visit is made possible through a grant from the North Dakota Council on the Arts and a generous sponsorship from Oneok, Inc. Meyer's Department Store is providing Tracy's lodging during his stay. Tracy believes that the function of murals should go beyond an aesthetic appeal but bridge a common ground based on social and cultural understanding. Tracy will be in the classroom working with students during his entire residency. The process includes helping them conceptualize the design, present it to the school for approval and then assisting them in organizing a plan to involve other students and volunteers to complete the piece. The idea is to put the process in the students' hands. By the time Tracy leaves on April 12, Watford City High School will be home to a complete piece of art that is unique to the students who designed it. "This project is something the kids have been excited about since fall," said Jane Hadley, WCHS art instructor. "It gives the kids a sense of ownership in the building and pride in being creative. We are very thankful for the support we received to get him here to share his expertise." "This is truly a unique experience for these students and we hope that it opens the door to many more opportunities for the community to be involved and invest in public art," add Scofield. "Watch for your chance to help make this mural come to life in the coming week!" To follow along with the process and learn about how to get involved, follow the Long X Arts Foundation on Facebook, Instagram or visit http://www.longxarts.com. Inquiries or suggestions, contact Jessie at 701-770-8659 or email [email protected] Updated Wednesday, April 3rd: A community work night has been scheduled for Thursday, April 11 from 3:30 until 9. Come for a few minutes or stay all night. Open to all ages and skill levels. Come in the L6 North Door. Snacks available. The area lost a friendly voice and a strong community supporter when Raymond "Maverick" Kent Simonis passed away on March 18, 2019 at the age of 60. He was born on Aug. 19, 1958. For many years, "Maverick" was welcomed in area homes as a host of area radio stations including for Power 95. His enthusiasm for the community could be heard every day through his broadcasts. Prior to his radio career, he worked in seven VA medical centers and ultimately became the Director of Health Administration for the entire country. During his time in health care, he was required to travel a lot which landed him at 172 different hospitals and overseeing more than 1,000 outpatient clinics. After retiring, he started working at a consulting firm in Washington D.C. His career included earning a Secretary of VAcommendation award for his service after an earthquake in Southern California. The award read, "In grateful recognition of truly heroic deeds in risking your life to assist in the evacuation of all veteran patients to neighboring VA facilities in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake." After returning to Sidney in order to spend more time with his mother, Maverick became the first Cherry Creek Media sales person to go on air. His community activities included Sidney Chamber of Commerce events, the Jaycees' Demolition Derby and the Richland County Fair. He always had a pink mohawk during Tough Enough to Wear Pink Night at the fair's rodeo. Services were held at Fulkerson Funeral Home on Tuesday, March 26, 2019. A U.N. expert on human rights said Friday that hundreds of people displaced by the collapse of a dam in Laos last year are facing bleak prospects for recovering their homes and livelihoods. Philip Alston, the U.N. rapporteur on poverty, said Friday in an interview that questions over whos responsible for the collapse of the dam in southeastern Laos are slowing progress toward recovery. There are liability issues. The insurance policy would establish liability and that depends on the technical report, he said after an 11-day official visit to Laos, including the Attapeu area in southeastern Laos where at least 40 people died and dozens went missing when an auxiliary dam of the joint venture hydroelectric project gave way on July 25. Those are things that are capable of dragging on for many years in litigation and so on, he said. For the various actors not to be moving full steam ahead with a permanent solution is difficult. Advertisement The dams collapse amid torrential rains sent a wall of water to rooftop levels in a wide area, wrecking homes and fields and killing livestock. Initially more than 6,000 people were displaced, according to state media reports. Alston said conditions in at least two temporary resettlement villages were really grim and the land authorities are offering the 3,750 people still in limbo is rocky and infertile. Many victims who once supported their families by fishing and farming likely will be forced into contract labor on cassava plantations. People are just really depressed and lethargic, Alston said. There will be trouble. At a news conference given by Alston in the Lao capital of Vientiane on Thursday, a Lao foreign ministry official took issue with the envoys criticisms of the governments commitment to relying on foreign investment in dams and other projects to help drive economic growth. Little official information has been made available about the aftermath of the catastrophe, but recent reports by Laoss state-controlled media have acknowledged that victims of the flooding are still lacking basic necessities, including food, health services, consumer goods and sanitation. A South Korean company, SK Engineering & Construction, was responsible for building the dam in Attapeu under the terms of a joint venture that also included a Thai company and a Lao state enterprise. The company and the South Korean government have provided millions of dollars in aid to the devastated region, but many initiatives are awaiting the conclusion of a probe into the cause of the disaster. The Lao government ordered a moratorium on new dam building after the dams collapse pending a safety review although construction of projects already underway has continued. Altogether 100 dams are supposed to be built by 2020. Alston urged the Lao government to ensure that private companies are held accountable for the harm suffered by people affected by dam projects, including those in Attapeu. In particular, there should be an independent review of the situation of all the persons who have been evacuated after the Attapeu incident and who are currently living in extremely poor conditions and are subjected to great uncertainty, he said in concluding a report on his visit. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Saudi Aramcos net profits reached $111 billion last year, according to an assessment published Monday by Moodys Investors Services that offered a rare glimpse into the state-owned oil firms finances before it issues its first bonds in international markets. That places Aramco ahead of some of the worlds most profitable firms. By contrast, Apple booked a net profit of about $60 billion in its last full year, Royal Dutch Shell had net income of $23 billion and Exxon Mobil $21 billion. Moodys said the oil giants revenue hit $355.9 billion last year and that it produced 10.3 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2018. The figures provide the first look in recent memory at Aramcos revenue and earnings. The company, which began as a U.S. venture with a concession for oil rights in Saudi Arabia, was fully acquired by the Saudi government in 1980. Advertisement I would say that this tells us that Aramco is worth at least one trillion dollars, said Ellen Wald, president of Transversal Consulting and the author of Saudi Inc, a book about Aramcos corporate history. In another assessment issued Monday, Fitch Ratings said Aramco posted profits of $224 billion before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. Moodys said Aramco paid $58.2 billion in dividends in 2018 and $50.4 billion in 2017. It remains unclear exactly how these dividends are distributed within the Saudi monarchy and its ruling family. Fitch said Aramco accounted for around 70% of the Saudi governments budget revenue between 2015-2017, but it wasnt immediately clear if that figure included the dividends mentioned by Moodys. In anticipation of a partial listing of Aramco on an international exchange, the Saudi government in 2017 reduced Aramcos tax rate from 85% to 50%. Such moves are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to create new income streams and lessen the governments dependence on oil for revenue. In their first-ever grade assessment for Aramco, Fitch issued the firm an A+ rating, while Moodys gave the company its A1 rating. The ratings are considered investment-grade level and indicate low credit risk, but the agencies held off on issuing their top grades to Aramco due to strong links between the Saudi state and the company. Specifically, Fitch noted the influence the state has on the company through regulating the level of production, taxation and dividends. Wald said that five years ago, under the late King Abdullah, the governments links to Aramco would not have been a significant concern because the company had essentially complete independence. Thats now changed under King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who have taken a much more active role in controlling various power centers in the kingdom, including Aramco, Wald said. Theres no telling... what kind of demands this king and his son might make on the company in the future that might have impact on its core profitability, she added. The ratings agencies issued their reports on the same day that Aramco said it will start to meet with investors about selling its bonds which, if issued, would be priced in dollars and traded on the London Stock Exchange. The bonds are expected to help pay for Aramcos $69 billion acquisition of majority shares in Saudi petrochemical firm SABIC from the kingdoms sovereign wealth fund. Fitch said its conservative forecasts show Saudi Aramcos net debt rising to around $35 billion by 2021, after incorporating the SABIC transaction. The $69 billion deal with SABIC pumps capital into the Public Investment Fund, which is overseen by the crown prince. Prince Mohammed has transformed the fund in order to back major development projects throughout the kingdom amid delays to an initial public offering of Aramco, which hed touted as a way to raise capital for the PIFs projects. The deal was struck after the crown princes early efforts at attracting Western investors for his social and economic transformation plans suffered a setback following the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents inside the countrys consulate in Istanbul last year. ___ Associated Press business editor Carlo Piovano contributed to this report from London. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Top performances in town this week include Vince Staples, Party Favor, Taking Back Sunday and Ten Fe. 4.2: Vince Staples The Long Beach rapper released his third studio album, FM!, last November. Its once again packed with guest appearances from E-40 and Jay Rock to Kehlani and Tyga. And the whole thing is framed around a running skit featuring longtime L.A. radio DJ Big Boy. @ Observatory North Park, observatorysd.com Vince Staples (Courtesy Photo ) Advertisement 4.3: Gunna The Atlanta-based MC was a featured guest on multiple hit albums from the likes of Travis Scott, 21 Savage, Tory Lanez, Mariah Carey and more last year. In February, the rapper born Sergio Kitchens released his full-length studio debut, Drip or Drown 2. The album hit No. 3 on the US Billboard 200 and features appearances from Young Thug, Lil Baby and Playboi Carti. @ House of Blues, houseofblues.com/sandiego Gunna (Courtesy Photo ) 4.5: San Holo Dutch DJ Sander van Dijck released a slew of singles last year in addition to his highly anticipated full-length debut, the appropriately titled Album1. In February, he released Lead Me Back, the first single from his upcoming Gouldian Finch 3 compilation. @ Observatory North Park, observatorysd.com San Holo (Courtesy Photo ) 4.6: Party Favor Last in the city to shut down OMNIA on New Years Eve, Manhattan-born/L.A.-based DJ Dylan Ragland returns to San Diego in what has been a busy 2019 for the producer thus far. BROHUG and 4B have already remixed his January-released single 2012, and Ragland teamed with graves and GTA, respectively, on latest singles Reach For Me and Work It Out. @ OMNIA, omnianightclub.com Party Favor (Koury Angelo ) 4.6: Bear Grillz The Colorado-based, mask-wearing DJ really showcases a diverse production style with his two latest releases. Februarys Demons (feat. RUNN) is a melodic, vocal-led foray into pop territory, while the March-released single Flow is another hard-hitting, in-your-face dose of dubstep that has become synonymous with the mysterious producer. @ Bassmnt, bassmntsd.com Bear Grillz (Courtesy Photo ) 4.6: Darius Roche Musique, a French House label based in Paris, brings a solid triple bill to Quartyard. Atmospheric headliner Darius released his debut full-length, Utopia, in 2017. And hell be supported by labelmates Zimmer and Kartell. @ Quartyard, quartyardsd.com Darius (Courtesy Photo ) 4.6: Vicetone Dutch DJ duo Ruben Den Boer and Victor Pool have remixed everyone from Bob Marley and The Weeknd to Maroon 5 and Kelly Clarkson, as well as releasing a handful of singles every year since 2013. In February, the pair released their 4-track sophomore EP, Elements, which features appearances from Haley Reinhart, Matt Wertz and Laur. @ Parq, parqsd.com Vicetone (Rutger Prins ) 4.6: A-Trak Canadian DJ, producer and Fools Gold label boss A-Trak, aka Alain Macklovitch, is also half of DJ duo Duck Sauce with Armand Van Helden. The Grammy-nominated turntablist teamed with Young Thug, YEHME2 and Todd Terry on singles last year. @ Hard Rock, hardrockhotelsd.com A-Trak (Jerritt Clark ) 4.6, 7: Taking Back Sunday Last in San Diego as part of the final Vans Warped Tour, the Long Island, N.Y.-based emo punks return to Americas Finest City to celebrate their 20th year together with a two-night dip. A compilation album that coincides with the two-decade milestone, aptly named Twenty, was released in January. @ Observatory North Park, observatorysd.com Taking Back Sunday (Courtesy Photo ) 4.7: Meat Puppets Marking the seminal bands first run with their original lineup since 1995, Curt and Cris Kirkwood, alongside returning drummer Derrick Bostrom, hit the road to promote their March-released latest album, Dusty Notes. Its the bands first release since 2013s Rat Farm. @ Soda Bar, sodabarmusic.com Meat Puppets (Courtesy Photo ) 4.7: Buddy Guy The multiple-Grammy-winner, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and beloved blues legend returns once again to his San Diego home away from home, the Belly Up, for yet another sold-out show. @ Belly Up, bellyup.com Buddy Guy (Courtesy Photo ) 4.7: Ten Fe Starting out as a duo before expanding into a five-piece, these London-based indie poppers released their sophomore album, Future Perfect, Present Tense, last month. Local rockers Creature Canyon open the show. @ Casbah, casbahmusic.com California is in an earthquake drought. It has been almost five years since the state experienced its last earthquake of magnitude 6 or stronger in Napa. Southern California felt its last big quake on Easter Sunday 2010, and that shaker was actually centered across the border, causing the most damage in Mexicali. Experts know this calm period will eventually end, with destructive results. They just dont know when this well-documented geological pattern will shift. Earthquake rates are quite variable: We have a decade or two where we dont have many earthquakes, and people expect thats what California is always like, said Elizabeth Cochran, seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Eventually, were going to dramatically see a change in earthquake rates. Advertisement Scientists have been warning California of seismic dangers, be it the Big One on the San Andreas fault or catastrophes that could come from lesser-known faults, such as Hayward or Newport-Inglewood. RELATED: Get ready for a major quake. What to do before and during a big one One reason for the urgent alerts: Memories of a truly destructive quake in many urban areas have faded. And with that, some fear, the urgency of pushing seismic safety has also faded. Experts say California ignores these realities at its own peril. Along the main plate boundary faults, we are in a deficit of earthquakes in the last 100 years, said Tom Rockwell, a San Diego State paleoseismologist. At some point, thats going to change. Were going to have some big earthquakes. Consider how much quieter California has been in regard to earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater: Earthquakes shown occurred in California and within 30 miles of the states coast or border since March 1, 1969. (Jon Schleuss / Los Angeles Times) In the last 25 years, there have been 11 such temblors statewide. In the preceding generation, there were 32. In the last quarter-century, there have been three such earthquakes that shook Californias 10 southernmost counties. In the prior generation, there were nine, including the Sylmar temblor of 1971 (magnitude 6.6) and Northridge of 1994 (magnitude 6.7). The greater San Francisco Bay Area has been particularly quiet. Since the great 1906 earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco, there have been only three earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater. But in the 75 years before that catastrophe, there were 14, according to geophysicist Ross Stein. Earthquakes must happen at some point to relieve the immense tectonic forces that are pushing part of the state northwest toward Alaska and the rest southeast toward Mexico. On average, theres about 12 feet of movement per century along the 730-mile San Andreas fault system between Point Arena in Mendocino County and the Mexican border, Rockwell said, but, except for a 90-mile section that creeps in San Benito and Monterey counties, there has been no significant movement along this primary boundary of faults between the Pacific and North American plates in a century. There may be periods where things get kind of all locked up and no earthquakes happen for a while. You store a lot of strain in the Earths crust, said Tom Jordan, USC professor of geophysics. Once it gets going, its like a set of dominoes. You might get multiple events if you have enough strain energy stored in the crust, because its been a long time since an earthquake. Earthquakes shown occurred in California and within 30 miles of the states coast or border since March 1, 1969. (Jon Schleuss / Los Angeles Times) When a time of elevated seismic activity will come is hard to say. Some thought the 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed 63 people, would mark the end of decades of seismic quiescence in the Bay Area. Instead, the lack of extreme shaking has largely persisted, save for the Napa temblor of 2014. Scientists have been particularly focused on the lack of major seismic activity on several California faults that as a group produce the most frequent earthquakes on the plate boundary the San Andreas, San Jacinto and Hayward. They are the ones seen as most likely to cause trouble in our lifetime. Yet theyve been exceedingly quiet. A USGS analysis published in the journal Seismological Research Letters Wednesday finds that the century between 1919 and 2018 is in all odds the only 100-year period in the past 1,000 years where there have been no earthquakes strong enough to break the ground on those three faults. Ordinarily, there are roughly three to four of these earthquakes on these faults every 100 years. The next century is unlikely to be as quiet as this one. Its hard to beat, said USGS seismologist Glenn Biasi, the lead author of the study. The 1800s, by comparison, was a far more active time for earthquakes. That century saw six large temblors on this trio of faults; between 1800 and 1918, there were eight. Thats an average of one major quake on those faults every 16 years. Earthquake scientists have been buzzing for years about Californias hiatus in supersized earthquakes, thinking the chances of such a 100-year gap between ground-shattering seismic events to be improbable. Did Someone Forget to Pay the Earthquake Bill? was the title of a talk by UCLA geophysicist David Jackson at the Seismological Society of America conference in 2014. RELATED: Say a major earthquake will hit in seconds. How do you protect yourself? Scientists focus on earthquakes that literally break the ground along the main plate boundary because theyre the ones that actually do the job of relieving centuries of tectonic strain. A famous example of the ground breaking was during the great 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of San Francisco; at Point Reyes in Marin County, a fence that intersected the fault was suddenly cut in two, separated on each side by the San Andreas by 18 feet. Some quakes dont do that job. The 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, while near the San Andreas fault, actually occurred on a neighboring sub-parallel strand, according to USGS research geologist Kate Scharer, a coauthor of the USGS study. Earthquakes of 1992 in Landers and 1999 in Hector Mine broke faults at the surface, but didnt do it at the main plate boundary, Biasi said. There have been more mild seismic storms in recent memory. The earthquake storm in the 80s and 90s is clearer in hindsight, said Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson. It began with the Whittier Narrows temblor in 1987 (magnitude 5.9), which killed 8; followed by Pasadena in 1988 (4.9); Montebello in 1989 (4.4); Upland in 1990 (5.2); Sierra Madre in 1991 (5.8), which killed a woman; before ending with Northridge in 1994, which resulted in the deaths of at least 57 people. In the 75 years before the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, there were 14 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater in the Bay Area, according to geophysicist Ross Stein. Since 1906, there have been only three. (Temblor.net geophysicist Ross Stein) More severe periods of earthquake activity were seen in the 19th century. Mission San Juan Capistrano endured shaking and suffered damage from two earthquakes both greater than magnitude 7 within a span of just a dozen years. The first came in 1800 from a quake on the San Jacinto fault east of Temecula. Then, in 1812, movement of the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults through present-day cities like San Bernardino, Rialto, Loma Linda, Yucaipa and Highland brought down the missions Great Stone Church, killing more than 40 people inside. The Inland Empire would be strongly impacted if those quakes repeated today, Scharer said. There are other examples of frequent major earthquakes. In the 1500s, for instance, three major San Andreas fault earthquakes hit along the Grapevine, according to Scharer, possibly all within 30 years. And over the last 1,000 years in the southernmost 100 miles of the San Andreas fault system, there have been three periods of increased seismic activity between 900 and 1100, 1200 and 1400, and 1600 to 1800, according to Rockwell. In that section, it has been relatively quiet for the last 219 years. If this pattern continues, we could well start a new phase of activity, Rockwell said. Turkey shows how a region can be affected by an above-average rate of earthquakes that persists for generations. A 1939 earthquake was the start of a series of 11 large temblors on the North Anatolian fault lasting at least 60 years, generally moving westward toward Istanbul, according to Stein, chief executive of Temblor.net and a former USGS geophysicist who has written extensively on the Turkish quakes. Sometimes there was a 30-year gap between big quakes; sometimes, only one. RELATED: California earthquake early-warning system will mean false alarms. Still worth it, experts say The most recent catastrophic earthquake was a magnitude 7.4 that caused more than 17,000 deaths. The 1999 temblor struck the industrial heartland and densely populated areas. And theres concern Istanbul is next. Istanbul has been kind of on tenterhooks ever since the 1999 Izmit earthquake. They have an early warning system. Theyve done billions of dollars of infrastructure upgrades a good job, considering its a very old city with lots of frail buildings, Stein said. While Istanbul might be on alarm for a future big one, many Californians are out of practice. The last time California has seen an earthquake as powerful as a magnitude 7.8 was in 1857 in Southern California and 1906 for Northern California. No one alive today has first-hand experience with that kind of quake in the Golden State. For instance, the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake of 1994, which severely shook just a fraction of Los Angeles County, would pale in comparison with a magnitude 7.8 quake on the San Andreas. That would produce 45 times more shaking energy than the 1994 temblor, and a plausible scenario would not only send strong shaking to much of L.A. County, but also parts of five others: Kern, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. The magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake produced severe or violent shaking (shown in orange or red) in only a part of Los Angeles County. (U.S. Geological Survey) A plausible future magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault in Southern California would produce severe or violent shaking over a much larger geographical area than the 1994 Northridge earthquake, affecting six counties. (U.S. Geological Survey) If we had earthquakes as frequently as we had prior to 1906 within the last 50 years, people would be a lot more in tune with what earthquakes can do, and have a lot more interest in earthquake preparedness, said Tim Dawson, senior engineering geologist at the California Geological Survey. A sudden jump in how often earthquakes come can make recovery difficult. New Zealands South Island has faced elevated seismic activity for 16 years and its still not over, even after a magnitude 6.3 Christchurch earthquake of 2011 caused the deaths of 185 people and collapsed many buildings. Four months after the Feb. 22, 2011, earthquake, a magnitude 6 hit southeast of Christchurch; then a 5.8 and a 5.9 on the same day half a year later. Valentines Day in 2016 brought a magnitude 5.7 quake. Its definitely on the high side of numbers of aftershocks, said Matt Gerstenberger, principal seismologist for New Zealands seismic monitoring agency, GNS Science. The constant shaking caused significant impact to peoples mental and social health. Rates of things akin to PTSD started showing up amongst people, said Sara McBride, a public information official for the regions emergency management agencies between 2006 and 2011. Its a constant reminder of that which you have no control over. Experts say its important that Californians are psychologically prepared for the prospect of a new era of earthquakes. That means not only having an emergency plan and supplies, said McBride, now a social scientist for the USGS earthquake early warning system, but mentally imagining what that will mean not just putting a flashlight and shoes next to the bed, for instance, but understanding that will mean dealing with broken glass on the floor and a power outage that may last weeks or more, and planning for how your family will get through it. If we accept that there will come a time that the Earth is going to be more active than usual that this is a natural process going on, and plotting how you might react, McBride said, that gives you a sense of psychological preparedness. ron.lin@latimes.com Twitter: @ronlin The Los Angeles Police Department released new photos of a man wanted in a series of slashing attacks around South L.A. and southeast Los Angeles County. The number of the slashers victims has grown to six in the last two weeks, according to police. In the latest incident, a man riding a mountain bike approached another man and slashed his face with some type of sharp object, police said. The attack occurred around 8:40 a.m. Monday near Florence Avenue and Avalon Boulevard in South Los Angeles. The suspect continued north on his bike on Avalon Boulevard and slashed a woman near 59th Place and Avalon at about 8:55 a.m., severely injuring the left side of her face and ear. The two victims were transported to local hospitals with serious but non-life-threatening injuries, police said. Advertisement Los Angeles police said the same cyclist rode past a man and slashed him with a sharp object March 20 at 59th Street and Avalon Boulevard. An image of the cyclist who authorities say slashed two women and a man in the face while riding a mountain bike with a white sticker near the front tire fork. (South Gate Police Department) One week later, police said, he slashed a woman in the face in front of a bakery on Firestone Boulevard near Hunt Avenue in South Gate around 11:10 a.m. Earlier that same Wednesday, another woman and a man in Lynwood were attacked and suffered superficial lacerations to their faces, Los Angeles County Sheriffs Lt. Paul Patterson said. For no reason at all, he would strike the victims across the face holding something sharp in his hand, Patterson said. Then he would ride away. The first two attacks occurred just before 11 a.m. Wednesday. A man was slashed in the face near California Avenue and Imperial Highway in Lynwood. A woman was attacked less than a mile away, at Abbott Road and San Luis Avenue, Patterson said. Police describe the man as an 18- to 30-year-old Latino with short hair who weighs about 150 pounds and stands about 5 feet, 6 inches to 5 feet, 8 inches tall. The suspect was wearing a dark-colored T-shirt and dark pants. He was last seen riding a black and green mountain bike westbound on Slauson Avenue from Main Street, police said. javier.panzar@latimes.com @jpanzar Hundreds of mourners who had gathered Monday night to remember Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle fled the memorial in droves after inaccurate reports of shots fired in the area. Several police officers worked to control the frightened crowd and track down more information about what had prompted the commotion, which started just after 8 p.m. While a member of the crowd shared some words on the late rapper, dozens of people who had gathered outside Hussles store started running away. People fell on top of each other as they tried to flee amid the dense crowd, many of whom lost their shoes along the way. Numerous police cars and ambulances raced to the scene as officers yelled at people to leave the area. Advertisement Our people are on scene making every effort 2 protect everyone in attendance at the Nipsey Hussle vigil, LAPD Chief Michel Moore said on Twitter. Reports of shots fired at the vigil do not appear to be accurate. We do have injured in the chaos and are attempting to restore order. He added: Our appreciation to those from our community actively working with members at the vigil to quell violence. Their work is vital. Robert Arcos, an LAPD assistant chief, told The Times that a fight appeared to have started the stampede after one person possibly pulled out a gun. The Los Angeles Fire Department took 19 people to hospitals: two people in critical condition, including one hurt in a car accident; two people with serious injuries; and 15 with non-life-threatening injuries. The majority of the patients suffered injuries related to being trampled when the crowd rushed away. Police make a line as the crowd refuses to leave at the corner of Slauson Ave. at Crenshaw Blvd. after vigil for rapper Nipsey Hussle. pic.twitter.com/aKI4Tj6ACn Genaro Molina (@GenaroMolina47) April 2, 2019 A Los Angeles Times reporter at the scene was also trampled when the crowd ran. Reporters in the area said on social media that authorities had said at least six people were stabbed, which is thought to have caused or contributed to the chaos. Hundreds of novena candles left in memory of Hussle who was shot and killed Sunday in broad daylight outside one of his stores in South L.A. in a burst of gunfire that left two other people wounded were crushed as people fled. The shards injured several people, and many were limping as they tried to find their way around police barricades. It remains unclear whether anyone was actually stabbed, or if they were wounded from broken glass. Musician DeAndre Harvey said he was at the memorial and said it had been a peaceful event, with fans and friends passing around a megaphone and sharing stories about Hussle. Harvey said a fight broke out, causing liquor bottles and candles to break, which caused some people in the crowd to think there was a shooting. Panic ensued after some people started yelling, Theyre shooting, Harvey said. Some of the people attending the memorial came from other neighborhoods and cities, and were probably nervous about coming to the area, he said. I dont know who was fighting, Harvey said. I didnt actually see the punches, but you just saw arms rolling and glass breaking and everybody running. Cal State Long Beach professor Alex Alonso was among a group of at least 50 people boxed in by police on Crenshaw Boulevard between 59th and Slauson, trying to find a way out. Alonso said that just as it got dark, a crowd of at least 200 people began to flee the memorial. He saw a man and a woman, both unresponsive, being carried into an ambulance. I didnt hear gunshots, he said. I just saw everyone running for their lives. Emmanuel Janacua stood in the parking lot of a shuttered bank Monday night as a cacophony of police sirens and buzzing helicopters surrounded him. A block away, red and white lights from ambulances and fire trucks illuminated a corner where the memorial for Hussle went awry. People from all over the region gathered at the South L.A. corner to pay homage, but the mourners were pushed behind yellow police tape once the commotion began. Janacua, 32, who drove from Hollywood with his mother, said he was saddened that he could not celebrate a man who never left his community, but instead stayed to make it better. Janacua said he didnt listen to Hussles music, but seeing his towering figure at the barber shop and walking the street gave him a respect for the rapper. Usually when people get famous they move to Calabasas, he said. A few years from now, he will be considered a legend. Cierra Higgins, 25, hung halfway out of the passenger window of a sedan as she shouted to bystanders, Do you know where Nipseys street is? It was beyond the yellow tape. Higgins, who had driven from Las Vegas so her boyfriend could mourn the death of his favorite rapper with other fans, looked defeated when she discovered the street was blocked off. They parked their car. Higgins took her boyfriends hand and strolled to the edge of the tape, hoping to see a piece of Hussles neighborhood. Times staff writers Richard Winton, Brittny Mejia and Frank Shyong contributed to this report. A devastating Taliban attack over the weekend on an Afghan army outpost in southern Helmand province killed 26 soldiers and seven policemen, a provincial official said Monday casualties the countrys defense ministry has refused to disclose. Separately, the United Nations said Monday that a NATO airstrike over the weekend in northern Kunduz province killed 13 civilians, including 10 children. NATO did not comment on the strike and it was not immediately clear if it was related to fighting Friday on the outskirts of the city of Kunduz, the provincial capital, in which two U.S. soldiers were killed. The attacks and the fact they were not reported by the embattled Afghan government underscore the challenges in efforts to resolve Afghanistans 17-year war, Americas longest. The Taliban stage near-daily attacks on Afghan forces, inflicting staggering casualties, even as they hold peace talks with the United States. Advertisement According to Helmand council chief, Attahullah Afghan, the attack on the army outpost took place in Sangin district on Friday. Along with 33 fatalities, he told The Associated Press at least 31 soldiers were wounded. The Taliban claimed the attack a day later but the government remained silent. On Monday, Afghan military spokesman Nawab Shah said only that government jets had aided the besieged troops and eventually sent reinforcements to Helmand, an old Taliban heartland. He refused to discuss casualties. A second Taliban attack in Helmand targeted a public ceremony on Saturday in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, killing at least four people, including a provincial official, said Omar Zwak, spokesman for the Helmand governor. Yet another attack in Helmand, this one on Sunday, killed five policemen, said Zwak. Following the airstrike in northern Kunduz province, residents of the area held a protest, carrying several of the bodies. The airstrike was apparently in support of Afghan troops battling the Taliban, the U.N. statement said. Earlier this month, Washingtons special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban held a 13-day round of peace talks in Qatar, where the Taliban have an office. The next round of talks is expected within the coming weeks. The talks have sidelined Afghan President Ashraf Ghanis government. Also, Khalilzad has been pressing the Taliban to declare a cease-fire, something the insurgents have refused to do. Also Monday, a bomb went off outside a clinic in the eastern city of Jalalabad, wounding six people, all of them women and children, said Attahullah Khogyani, spokesman for the Nangarhar provincial governor. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but both the Taliban and the Islamic State group are active in the area. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. The wife of the detained former Interpol president expelled this week from Chinas ruling Communist Party is reiterating calls for proof that he is still alive. In her first comments about his expulsion, Meng Hongweis wife said corruption allegations leveled by Chinese officials in stripping her husband of his party membership were vague and uncorroborated. Mengs four-year mandate as Interpol president was cut short when he was detained last October during a visit to China from the police agencys headquarters in France. At the time, Meng was also one of Chinas vice ministers of public security. Advertisement Expulsion from the party is usually the last step before trial. His wife, Grace Meng, has remained in France with their two boys. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. The Greek government voiced opposition Monday to the suggestion from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Istanbuls Hagia Sophia a Byzantine-era cathedral that now serves as a museum could be reconverted into a mosque. In a television interview Sunday ahead of Turkeys March 31 local elections, Erdogan indicated that it was possible to change its name from museum to Hagia Sophia Mosque. There have been increasing calls for the government to convert the symbolic structure back into a mosque, especially in the wake of reports that the gunman who killed Muslim worshippers in New Zealand left a manifesto saying the Hagia Sophia should be free of minarets. Erdogans suggestion drew ire in Greece as the cathedral, originally built in the 6th century was the main seat of the Greek Orthodox church. It remained so until it was converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of the city, then-known as Constantinople, in 1453. Turkeys secular founder turned the structure into a museum in 1935 that attracts millions of tourists each year. Advertisement It is not only a great temple of Christendom the largest for many centuries it also belongs to humanity. It has been recognized by UNESCO as part of our global cultural heritage, Greek Foreign Minister George Katrougalos said. So any questioning of this status is not just an insult to the sentiments of Christians, it is an insult to the international community and international law. We want to hope that the correct statements of March 16 by the Turkish leadership will be valid and there will be no change of this status, he added, in reference to a speech by Erdogan when he ruled out its conversation into a mosque. Erdogan himself recited prayers inside the Hagia Sophia last year. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A new power outage spread across much of Venezuela on Monday, knocking communications offline and stirring fears of a repeat of the chaos almost two weeks ago during the nations largest-ever blackout. The outage began shortly after 1 p.m. (1700 GMT) and appeared to have affected as many as 16 of Venezuelas 23 states, according to reports on social media. Officials declared that power had been fully restored by early evening, but hours later the lights went out again in much of the country. As with the previous outage, the government of President Nicolas Maduro sought to blame U.S.-backed opponents, accusing them of sabotaging the Guri dam, source of the bulk of Venezuelas electricity. A macabre, perverse plan constructed in Washington and executed with factions of the extreme Venezuelan right, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez declared on state television, describing it as an electromagnetic assault. Advertisement Officials said the attack had been controlled, but their assurances, similar to ones the last time around, did little to calm the anger of residents in Caracas who filled traffic-clogged streets as they walked home after subway service in the capital was suspended. Their patience grew increasingly thin when a second outage struck late into the night, leaving neighborhoods pitch black. On social media, Venezuelans reported outages in Caracas and much of western Venezuela. Some said residents were banging pots and pans in the darkness in a sign of the nations mounting tensions. The latest outages come as President Nicolas Maduro tries to keep his grip on power amid a revived opposition movement and punishing economic sanctions from the United States. Twenty-seven-year-old restaurant manager Lilian Hernandez said she was bracing for the worst. We Venezuelans suffer all kinds of problems, said Hernandez, who had just recently managed to restock food that spoiled during the previous outage. Netblocks, a non-government group based in Europe that monitors internet censorship, said the early afternoon outage had knocked offline around 57 percent of Venezuelas telecommunications infrastructure. The second failure left nearly 90 percent of the country offline, the organization said. The Trump administration, which has made no secret of its desire to remove Maduro, has denied any role in the outages. Electricity experts and opposition leader Juan Guaido fault years of government graft and incompetence. This outage is evidence that the dictator is incapable of resolving the crisis, Guaido wrote on Twitter Monday. Meanwhile, as Venezuelas economic and political crisis deepens, many seem resigned to continuous disruptions in their daily routines. The important thing is for people not to get desperate, said William Rodriguez, who sells books at a kiosk under a downtown highway overpass. Also Monday, the rift between Russia and the United States over how to resolve the crisis in Venezuela widened following the arrival of Russian military personnel to support Maduro. In a telephone call, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the United States and regional countries will not stand idly by as Russia exacerbates tensions in Venezuela, the State Department said. Pompeo said the continued insertion of Russian military personnel in Venezuela could prolong the countrys problems and urged Russia to cease its unconstructive behavior. Lavrov countered during the call that Washingtons attempts to organize a coup in Venezuela and the threats directed against its legitimate government represent a violation of the U.N Charter and blunt interference into internal affairs of a sovereign nation, according to the Russian foreign ministry. Pompeos call to Lavrov came after a Venezuelan official said Russian aircraft arrived in Caracas this past weekend as part of ongoing military cooperation. Reports that two Russian air force planes arrived could not be independently confirmed. The U.S. and dozens of other countries support Guaido, who says Maduros re-election last year was rigged. Maduro alleges the U.S. and Guaido are plotting a coup. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Algerians took to the streets by the millions for the sixth straight Friday of nationwide protests, trying to push their ailing president from power and bring down an entire political system seen as corrupt and out of touch. Security forces used a water cannon and lobbed tear gas against a crowd that broke through a blockaded street leading to the presidential palace the only break in what have been massive but peaceful demonstrations. For the first time, all three state TV channels showed the protests live a stark difference since the mass marches started on Feb. 22 and news blackouts were ordered. It also reflected the changing balance of power within the ruling class as President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 82 and ailing after a 2013 stroke, loses key supporters. Protesters marched in cities across the North African nation. Advertisement Tens of thousands massed in the boulevards of Algiers, dominated by young people and their families. Police helicopters circled overhead and riot police vans lined sensitive neighborhoods, but the mood was largely festive. Its the first protest since the army chief called earlier this week for the constitutional process to declare Bouteflika unfit for office. Other politicians and parties backed the idea as a solution to the gas-rich countrys political crisis. The protests have turned the tables on the elite power structure, but it remained unclear what lies ahead. A billboard above the Place Maurice Audin in Algiers read Your excellency, The People, capturing the mood. Protesters see the army chiefs proposal as a way for the secretive political elite to keep their grip on power and name a hand-picked successor to Bouteflika, who has been largely out of the public eye since his stroke. Anger at the constitutional process issue was central to Fridays protest. Many held signs calling for the departure of army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah, or referring to Article 102 of the constitution, which Salah proposed using to pave the way for Bouteflikas ouster. One sign accused the political elite of being Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Another read Not Moscow, Not Paris, Not Washington - The Choice should be Algerian, in reference to concerns of foreign interference in the crisis. A former French colony with close ties to France, Algeria was a powerful ally of Moscow in the Soviet era but in recent years has also become a key partner of the U.S. and Europe in fighting terrorism. Frustration also targeted Bouteflikas brother, Said. A small group of protesters started shoving journalists from Ennahar Television, considered close to Said Bouteflika, shouting Shame!, before other protesters separated them. When the protests broke out last month, the demonstrators anger was more focused on Bouteflika himself, and demands that he abandon his bid for a fifth term after 20 years in power. Since then, Bouteflika has dropped his election bid, but also canceled the April 18 vote pending electoral reforms, raising fears he would cling to power indefinitely. Bouteflika is credited with bringing peace to Algeria after the bloody civil war of the 1990s, but some of his most powerful supporters have turned against him this week. The protesters are notably angry at corruption. An Algerian media executive who was detained Thursday and released hours later said he was arrested because he publicly denounced political corruption. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on Monday was one of the most powerful launched ever by Gaza militants, flying nearly 120 kilometers (70 miles) before it slammed into a house in central Israel, wounding seven people. Over more than a decade, the Islamic militant Hamas group has built up a large arsenal of rockets and missiles. It started with crude short-range projectiles and now possesses rockets that can strike virtually anywhere in Israel. Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, prompting Israel and Egypt to impose a blockade on the territory, largely to prevent the militants from amassing more weapons. But the blockade and three wars with Israel the most recent in 2014 failed to prevent Hamas from expanding its arsenal. A network of smuggling tunnels along the Egyptian border is believed to have helped Hamas bring in advanced weapons and raw materials, though Egypt shuttered most of the tunnels around 2013. Advertisement In 2018, Gazas Hamas chief Yehiya Sinwar boasted that the group had not only replenished the rockets it fired during the 50-day war in 2014, but had many more at its disposal. He said that what had been fired in 50 days would be fired within five minutes of any future Israeli offensive. Mondays rocket strike was the furthest a Gaza rocket has landed since 2014, when Hamas struck the northern Israeli city of Haifa, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) away. Hamas doesnt release details about its military capabilities. Gabi Siboni, an Israeli military analyst, said Hamas has a variety of advanced, precise, and effective weaponry. He said this includes guided anti-tank missiles and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, both produced by Russia, as well as some drones. ROCKETS Qassams: In 2001, a year after the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising against Israel, Hamas first fired a cross-border rocket toward Israel, calling it Qassam after the groups military wing. The homemade rockets, aimed at Israeli border towns, had an irregular trajectory and sometimes landed inside Gaza. R-160: Hamas calls this its longest-range home-grown rocket. It was first fired in the 2014 war and at one point hit Haifa. The R in the name refers to Abdel-Aziz Rantissi, a senior Hamas official who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2004. The number refers to the range, in kilometers. J-80: This rocket, also produced locally, is named after Hamas military wing commander Ahmed Jabari, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his car in 2012, setting off an eight-day war. Israel reportedly believes the rocket that hit central Israel on Monday was this model and blamed Hamas. The group has not claimed responsibility. M-75: Hamas unveiled this rocket in 2014, claiming it was homemade. But experts believe it is a version of the Iranian Fajr 5 rocket, which Iran acquired in the 1990s and is based on Chinese technology. Hamas also possess a variety of Russian Grad rockets. These projectiles, with a range of about 20 kilometers (12 miles), are believed to have been delivered via Iran. ___ TUNNELS In recent years, Hamas has built a sophisticated network of tunnels. These include attack tunnels that run under the Gaza-Israel perimeter fence, for use by assailants to infiltrate Israel. Defensive tunnels, located away from the border, are used to store weapons and serve as hideouts. Hamas first used tunnels in a 2006 cross-border attack in which it killed two Israeli soldiers and captured a third. The soldier, Gilad Shalit, was swapped for more than 1,000 prisoners in 2011. Hamas also used the tunnels in the 2014 war, killing five soldiers in one cross-border raid. During the fighting, Israel said it discovered and destroyed 32 tunnels. Since then, it says it has discovered and destroyed several additional tunnels. To combat the tunnel threat, Israel has begun building an underground barrier running the length of the Gaza Strip, and this year it said it was reinforcing the Gaza fence with 20-foot-high galvanized steel. ___ IMPORTED WEAPONS Mortars. Hamas has fired hundreds of mortars at short-range targets just across the border. The mortars are believed to have been smuggled from Libya through Egypt. Laser-guided anti-tank missiles made by Russia. Last November, Hamas fired such a missile, known as Kornet, at a bus from which Israeli soldiers had just exited. One soldier was seriously wounded. In a 2006 war, the Lebanese Hezbollah militia killed dozens of Israeli tank soldiers using these weapons. Drones: Hamas has developed an early-stage drone program, displaying images of Israeli fields purportedly filmed by these aircraft. Its not known whether they have been used for attacks. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. President Donald Trumps threat to shut down the southern border raised fears Monday of dire economic consequences in the U.S. and an upheaval of daily life in a stretch of the country that relies on the international flow of not just goods and services but also students, families and workers. Politicians, business leaders and economists warned that such a move would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping. Lets hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools joke, said economist Dan Griswold at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. He said Trumps threat would be the height of folly, noting that an average of 15,000 trucks and $1.6 billion in goods cross the border every day. If trade were interrupted, U.S. producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and U.S. exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market, he said. Advertisement Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point. Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict severe economic harm. In Californias Imperial Valley, across from Mexicali, Mexico, farmers rely on workers who come across every day from Mexico to harvest fields of lettuce, carrots, onions and other winter vegetables. Shopping mall parking lots in the region are filled with cars with Mexican plates. More than 60 percent of all Mexican winter produce consumed in the U.S. crosses into the country at Nogales, Arizona. The winter produce season is especially heavy right now, with the import of Mexican-grown watermelons, grapes and squash, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas. He said 11,000 to 12,000 commercial trucks cross the border at Nogales daily, laden with about 50 million pounds of produce such as eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, cucumbers and berries. He said a closing of the border would lead to immediate layoffs and result in shortages and price increases at grocery stores and restaurants. If this happens and I certainly hope it doesnt Id hate to go into a grocery store four or five days later and see what it looks like, Jungmeyer said. Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, said a closure would be catastrophic. Closing the border would cause an immediate depression in border state communities and, depending on the duration, a recession in the rest of the country, he said. Our business would end, said Marta Salas, an employee at an El Paso shop near the border that sells plastic flowers that are used on the Mexican side by families holding quinceaneras, the traditional coming-of-age celebrations. Salas said her whole family, including relatives who attend the University of Texas at El Paso, would be affected if the border were closed. There are Americans who live there. I have nephews who come to UTEP, to grade school, to high school every day, Salas said. Meanwhile, the Trump administration said Monday as many as 2,000 U.S. inspectors who screen cargo and vehicles at ports of entry along the Mexican border may be reassigned to help handle the surge of migrants. Currently, about 750 inspectors are being reassigned. That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border. The effects were evident Monday: Sergio Amaya, a 24-year-old American citizen who lives in Juarez, Mexico, and attends UTEP, said it normally takes him two minutes to cross the bridge. It took an hour this time. The Border Patrol agent said its going to get worse, Amaya said. Instead of ensuring the flow of goods across the border, the inspectors are being put to work processing migrants, taking their applications for asylum and transporting them to holding centers. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the reassignments are necessary to help manage the huge influx that is overloading the system. The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it, Nielsen said. In addition to reassigning inspectors, Nielsen has asked for volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress requesting resources and broader authority to deport families faster. The administration is also ramping up efforts to return asylum seekers to Mexico. Apprehensions all along the southern border have soared in recent months, with border agents on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry there in March, more than half of them families with children. ___ Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington, Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Nomaan Merchant in Houston and Anita Snow in Phoenix contributed to this story. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A drama student at a Connecticut university has been charged with stabbing two other students while rehearsing a scene from a movie. NBC Connecticut reports University of Hartford student Jake Wascher was arraigned at Hartford Hospital Monday on first-degree assault and criminal attempt to commit murder. He was being held on a $1 million bond. Hartford police Lt. Paul Cicero says the 21-year-old Wascher, of San Diego, stabbed the other students in a university apartment just after 1 p.m. Sunday while the three were rehearsing for a class project. He did not say what prompted it. A 19-year-old student was taken to the hospital in critical condition and a 21-year-old student was hospitalized in serious condition. Advertisement Police say Wascher fled but was caught two hours later. His case wasnt listed in online court records and it was unclear of he has a lawyer. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. The wrong-way driver involved in a crash that killed an Illinois State Police trooper has been identified as a 44-year-old Calumet City man. Authorities say Trooper Gerald Ellis was on duty in his squad car Saturday traveling home on westbound Interstate 94 in Green Oaks in northern Illinois when Dan Davies, who was eastbound in the westbound lanes, struck him head-on. Lake County Coroner Dr. Howard Cooper says an autopsy performed Monday showed Davies died from multiple injuries due to a car crash. Toxicology results are pending. Ellis is the third Illinois trooper fatally struck by a vehicle since the start of 2019. Advertisement Trooper Brooke Jones-Story was killed Thursday when a truck struck her in Freeport. A vehicle fatally hit Trooper Christopher Lambert in January near Northbrook. Ellis was an 11-year state police veteran with District 15 in Downers Grove. He was a U.S. military veteran and had a wife and two children. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. With encouraging prospects for additional congressional representation and federal dollars, North Carolina needs to do all it can to ensure the most accurate and complete census count next April, state officials said Monday. Gov. Roy Cooper, a Cabinet member and other government and nonprofit leaders held a news conference to mark the one-year countdown to the decennial national census required by the U.S. Constitution. Cooper created a state Complete Count Commission several months ago designed to promote the count so all families and individuals living in the state on April 1, 2020, participate. Good decisions are based on good numbers, and the decisions that will be made best from this census will impact the long-term future of our state, said Machelle Sanders, state Administration Department secretary and the commissions chairwoman. So the bottom line is that numbers matter. The Census Bureau says state and local population totals nationally are used to distribute more than $675 billion in federal funds annually, as well as to reapportion the 435 voting seats in the U.S. House. Advertisement North Carolina now has 13 House seats. Cooper says theres a good chance the states population has grown enough since 2010 when it was 9.6 million to gain a 14th seat for the next decade during the 2021 redistricting cycle. North Carolinas state budget office estimated the population at 10.3 million in July 2017. The recent increases are equal to the state growing annually by the population of the city of High Point, according to Cooper, who said hes been told North Carolina is likely to get an additional House seat. The governor said he understands why every person counted is important. While attorney general in the early 2000s, Cooper represented the state in court during Utahs challenge to the Census Bureaus counting and sampling methods. Those methods ultimately left Utah less than 900 people short of earning a fourth seat. Instead, North Carolina got No. 13. The population count was so very close, Cooper said inside the House chamber at the old Capitol building. Thats why its so important that we get the word out and we get everyone in North Carolina to stand up to be counted. The Complete Count Commission and its nongovernmental partners say theyre focusing on ensuring groups with lower census response rates will be enumerated. They include low-income and rural residents, young children, military personnel and non-native English speakers. Representatives of Latino and American Indian groups mentioned efforts to boost population counts. Other census countdown events were scheduled for Monday in Charlotte, Gastonia and Fayetteville, Coopers office said. ___ Machelle is the correct spelling in the third paragraph. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A man who authorities say killed his girlfriends 1-year-old son by throwing him against a wall has been sentenced to life in prison. Twenty-seven-year-old Nicholas Catazaro was sentenced Tuesday after pleading guilty to an aggravated murder charge last month in northeast Ohios Portage County. Hes eligible for parole after 25 years. Sheriffs deputies went to a mobile home in Nelson Township last October after Leon Chehin-Merrymans mother called 911 to report that her son wasnt breathing. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. An autopsy showed the toddlers skull had been fractured. Portage County Prosecutor Victor Vigliucci says Catazaro was watching Leon while the boys mother ran errands. Advertisement Messages seeking comment were left Tuesday with Catazaros defense attorneys. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. SwRI to conduct largest-ever Hubble survey of the Kuiper Belt SAN ANTONIO -- April 2, 2019 -- NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) recently awarded Southwest Research Institute the largest Hubble Space Telescope (HST) solar system program ever, with 206 of Hubble's orbits around the Earth allocated to the project. The Solar System Origins Legacy Survey (SSOLS) will focus on Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), particularly binary populations. "The Kuiper Belt is a unique remnant of the solar system's primordial planetesimal disk," said Dr. Alex Parker, the SwRI planetary scientist leading the survey. "This cold, calm region has preserved an extraordinarily large population of binary objects, particularly those where the two objects have similar mass." Hubble orbits at an altitude of about 350 miles, circling the Earth every 97 minutes. Most HST time is dedicated to studying interstellar space phenomena. The Kuiper Belt is a distant reservoir of ancient material that lies at the edge of our solar system, beyond all the terrestrial and giant planets. At the present time, the properties of the Kuiper Belt's unique population of binary systems can only be accurately measured with Hubble. SwRI leads this large HST project focused on characterizing the binary and color properties of over 200 unique KBOs. Team members are spread across the USA, Canada and Northern Ireland. "These binary systems are powerful tracers of the processes that built the planets," Parker said. "We will use Hubble to test the theory that many planetesimals formed as binary systems from the get-go, and that today's Kuiper Belt binaries did not come from mergers of initially solitary objects." Binary objects orbit around each other as they collectively circle the Sun. Recent models of small body formation suggest that binaries are leftovers of the very earliest times of our solar system, when pairs of bodies could form directly from collapsing swarms of small-scale "pebbles." Competing theories of planetesimal formation predict different size and color distributions for binary and solitary KBOs. If objects first formed through an accretion process and were merged into binaries later, scientists expect the objects in binary systems to have dissimilar colors and to have a different size distribution than solitary objects. However, if planetesimals formed through a rapid collapse process that produced some solitary objects and some binary systems from the start, scientists would expect objects in binary systems to have a similar surface color and a size distribution similar to that of solitary objects. The SSOLS program builds upon the legacy of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) and Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS), the two largest well-characterized Kuiper Belt surveys ever conducted. By drawing targets from these well-characterized surveys, SSOLS will provide a coherent framework to test leading theories of planetesimal formation and the origin and evolution of the outer solar system's architecture. The SSOLS team will be posting updates, images, and results on its website, https:/ / www. ssols. space/ . ### SSOLS is a Cycle 26 HST treasury program administered by STScI, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and based in Baltimore, Maryland. STScI is charged with helping humanity explore the universe with advanced space telescopes and ever-growing data archives. For more information, visit https:/ / www. swri. org/ planetary-science . This story has been published on: 2019-04-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Addressing the workshop, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Hoai Trung stressed that, in the 2008-2009 tenure, Vietnam performed its role as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for the first time. Over 30 years of renovation, the role and position of Vietnam in the international arena has been increasingly confirmed. Speaking at the seminar, Peter Girke, Representative of KAS Foundations Office in Vietnam, said that Vietnam has been nominated for a position as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for the term 2020-2021 and the vote will be held by the UN General Assembly in June, 2019. The second running for election to the UN Security Council continues to affirm Vietnam's policy in becoming an active member, and a reliable and responsible partner in the international community. Meanwhile, it is an opportunity for Vietnam to contribute to building an importance strategic mechanism for international peace and security, contributing to the maintenance of peace, stability and development in the region and the world at large. The conference is an opportunity for experts and policymakers to discuss what Vietnam can do and what Vietnam needs to do in order to make a difference in the UN Security Council. At the Conference, the delegates raised many ideas around the key contents of the workshop such as the situation of the world and the region in the period of 2018-2019 and the upcoming prospects, the current situation of the UN Security Council and prospects in the period 2020-2021, major issues at the Security Council in the period of 2020-2021 and approaches, in addition to the UN Security Council and regional organisations, promoting ASEAN's role in the UN Security Council and the role of the UN Security Council in the post-conflict reconstruction. Kabul, Apr 2 (IBNS): In an airstrike conducted in Afghanistan's southern Helmand provinc, at least five Taliban militants including a local leader of the group who was in charge of media activities ave been killed, media reports said. The provincial government media office said in a statement that the foreign forces carried out an airstrike targeting a compound of Taliban in Musa Qala which left at least 5 militants dead, including Hafiz Rashid, a local leader of the Taliban in charge of media activities, reported Khaama Press of Afghanistan. Another Taliban leader identified as Takai was injured in the airstrike, media reports said. Taliban has not commented on the issue so far. A woman who plotted the rape, torture and murder of her own teenage daughter pleaded guilty on Friday and was sentenced to life in prison for a crime so barbaric that prosecutors and the judge strained for superlatives to describe it. One day after her co-conspirator boyfriend was sentenced to death, Sara Packer, 44, appeared in a suburban Philadelphia courthouse and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, kidnapping, abuse of a corpse and 16 other offenses in the 2016 slaying of 14-year-old Grace Packer. Evil attracts evil. Evil recognizes evil. And in Jacob Sullivan, you found one of your own, Bucks County Judge Diane Gibbons, her voice dripping with contempt, told Packer in sentencing her to the maximum term. You like rape. You like murder. Thats a fact, said Gibbons, decrying the rot and warped depravity on display in the case. Advertisement Packer, whose crimes were not eligible for Pennsylvanias death penalty, did not make a statement. Prosecutors said Packer and her boyfriend, Jacob Sullivan, shared a rape-murder fantasy and spent months plotting Graces slaying in a vacant house about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Philadelphia. Sara Packer testified that the couple took her adoptive daughter to a sweltering attic and gave her what they intended to be a lethal overdose of medicine. Sullivan sexually assaulted her as Sara Packer watched. They bound her hands and feet with zip ties, stuffed a ball gag in her mouth and left her to die. Grace eventually managed to escape some of her bindings. But she was unable to make it out of the house before Sullivan and Sara Packer returned overnight some 12 hours later and Sullivan strangled her while Sara Packer held her hand and watched her die. Sara Packer and Sullivan stored Graces body in cat litter for months, then dismembered it and dumped the remains in a remote, wooded area of northeastern Pennsylvania where hunters found it in October 2016. Bucks County prosecutor Jennifer Schorn said in court Friday that Sara Packer a former county adoptions supervisor who had fostered dozens of children over the years saw Grace Packer as a source of government benefits and nothing more. Schorn and the judge marveled at how someone who professed to be a mother could have been so cruel. It defies nature, what she did, Schorn said. Sullivan, who pleaded guilty to first degree murder, was sentenced to death by a jury Thursday. Packer admitted in court during Sullivans sentencing hearing that she hated Grace and wanted her to go away. Sara Packer lost her job at Northampton Countys children and youth department in 2010 after her husband at the time, David Packer, was sent to prison for sexually assaulting Grace and another foster child. But child welfare authorities did not remove Grace from the home, despite evidence of abuse. The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services launched an investigation after Graces murder. Its report was sealed while Packer and Sullivan were being prosecuted, but is expected to be made public on Monday. After the sentencing, District Attorney Matt Weintraub called on lawmakers to pass a child protection law called Graces Law. Graces memory will no longer be bound to that of these two predators. She is free, Weintraub said. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Lucy Flores, the former Nevada politician who accused Joe Biden of inappropriately kissing her on the back of the head in 2014, rose from a tough childhood through top Democratic political circles before becoming an outspoken critic of sexism and harassing behavior in politics. Flores was a high school dropout and former gang member who obtained a law degree and served two terms in the state assembly before making unsuccessful runs for Nevadas lieutenant governors office and a Las Vegas-area congressional seat. Shes now in the national spotlight after saying that the former vice president touched her inappropriately. Her assertion has brought new attention to Bidens well-publicized affectionate mannerisms, raising questions about whether hes out of step with todays politics. Flores now runs a Latina-focused media company in Los Angeles. In an interview with The Associated Press, she said she wanted to bring attention to behavior by Biden that has often been brushed aside as a joke. Advertisement Noting that videos and photos have captured Bidens affectionate behavior toward women over the years, Flores said, Whether people want to believe me or not, frankly, I think at this point is kind of irrelevant. In a statement on Sunday, Biden said he has never intentionally behaved inappropriately during his many years in public life. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully, he said. We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will. The incident with Biden isnt Flores first time speaking out about male behavior in politics. In 2017, after several women accused former Nevada Democratic Rep. Ruben Kihuen of sexual harassment, Flores gave several interviews in which she recounted witnessing flirtatious, inappropriately close behavior by Kihuen toward other women. Flores, who was Kihuens high school classmate and a rival in a Democratic primary race for congress in 2016, served with him in the state legislature. He denied any wrongdoing. She also backed allegations of sexism that a former female strategist for Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign leveled against a former male staffer for the Vermont senator. Flores said she only interacted briefly with the man while she was a Sanders surrogate in 2016. But she later worked with the man at another company and said she experienced his demeaning and sexist ways. Reuben DSilva, a former Democratic congressional candidate who lived in the same neighborhood as Flores and campaigned for Sanders with her, said hes known Flores as an outspoken advocate for women. DSilva said he believes Flores and is proud of her speaking out. It doesnt surprise me that shes willing to even take on Joe Biden directly in the most high-profile of ways. Its who she is, DSilva said. Flores, a native of Glendale, California, has described overcoming a hardscrabble upbringing in Las Vegas as one of 13 children in a family with an often absent mother. While serving in public office and campaigning in Nevada, she described joining a gang as a teenager, having an abortion at 16, dropping out of high school at 17 and serving nine months in juvenile detention for leading police on a chase in a stolen car. I was always the smart-assed kid who was telling cops I knew my rights, she told a group of students in 2014. I really enjoyed the law and thought maybe one day I could be a lawyer. She said a second chance from a parole officer set her on a new course, leading her to eventually attend community college, earn a bachelors degree at the University of Southern California and a law degree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2010. That fall, she was elected to the state assembly as part of a group of the first Latinas voted into the chamber. She served two terms, including a stint in leadership, before leaving to mount an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor. Two years later, she lost to Kihuen in a three-way Democratic primary for a Las Vegas-area congressional seat. Flores endorsed Sanders early in 2016 and the Vermont senator responded by urging supporters to contribute jointly to both campaigns. Sanders backing bolstered Flores campaign cache, providing as much as $600,000 of the $1 million she raised, according to Nevada political observers. After losing in the primary, Flores was brought into Sanders political orbit. She was selected as a board director of Our Revolution, a nonprofit political action group created during the 2016 campaign to help fund progressive candidates aligned with Sanders. Flores served on the groups board for more than a year, but grew disenchanted and left, she told the AP, because of the Sanders political organizations failure to bring qualified minority political leaders into his inner circle. In her unsuccessful race for lieutenant governor, Flores tried to improve ties with the states business community. But her campaign organization showed signs of instability, said several Nevada political observers. Two campaign managers departed early in that campaign before Flores settled on a third, Kristina Hagen, who remained for the duration of her Nevada race. ___ Associated Press writers Tom Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Stephen Braun in Washington contributed to this report. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Federal authorities this week arrested another member of an extremist Jewish sect in what the FBI called a new plot to abduct two New York children who recently fled the ultra-Orthodox group. Matityau Moshe Malka appeared in federal court in White Plains, New York, on Tuesday on kidnapping and obstruction of justice charges. The FBI said Malka and other members of Lev Tahor planned to kidnap a 14-year-old girl and her 12-year-old brother three months after they were taken from their mother in upstate New York and later recovered by law enforcement in Mexico. Authorities said Malka gave several cellphones to the girl so she could speak with members of the Guatemala-based sect, including its leader, who is not named in the criminal complaint. Advertisement The groups leader recently vowed to fight the mother of the children until the last drop of blood, the document says, and indicated that there are people in New York prepared to execute another kidnapping. A message seeking comment was sent to Malkas defense attorney. Authorities charged four other members of Lev Tahor in December with abducting the same boy and girl and taking them out of the country. The children eventually were found in the Mexican town of Tenango del Aire and reunited with their mother in New York. The mother had been a member of Lev Tahor her father founded the sect in 1994 but fled the group last year after its leadership became increasingly extreme, according to the FBI. The sect has been accused of subjecting children to physical and sexual abuse. The criminal complaint says Lev Tahor considers the 14-year-old girl to be the wife of Jacob Rosner, one of the men charged in the December kidnapping. ___ This story has been corrected to show that the court appearance was in White Plains, not Manhattan. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Transgender actress and activist Laverne Cox will be visiting Harvard University to talk about gender equity and stereotyping. The Orange is the New Black star is scheduled to headline a campus discussion Tuesday alongside fashion designer Christian Siriano and other panelists. Its part of Harvards 2019 Summit for Gender Equity. The event is being hosted as Harvard prepares to participate in a national survey on campus sexual assault and misconduct. Cox and other panelists will be asked to talk about gender equity and gender stereotyping in the realms of pop culture, advertising and consumerism. Advertisement In 2014, Cox became the first openly transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. Harvard joins more than 30 universities participating in a campus climate survey conducted by the American Association for Universities. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 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 legalization of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Canada has resulted in some people choosing to donate their bodies to anatomy programs, but it has raised profound ethical issues, says McMaster University's head of anatomy. Bruce Wainman, director of the Education Program in Anatomy at McMaster, said the anatomical scientist community needs to establish guidelines around these donations. The use of MAID, also known as 'active voluntary euthanasia' or 'voluntary euthanasia', is legally obtainable in Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and some parts of Australia. As a result, Wainman said, there are issues about the appropriateness of accepting or using MAID body donations; communication with donors including consenting processes, and the transparency surrounding MAID donation with staff, faculty and students. "These are profound questions that scrape at morals and ethics," Wainman said. "I don't think any of us have the answers right now." His article on the topic, co-authored with medical ethicist Jon Cornwall of the University of Otago in New Zealand, was published in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education. advertisement "At this point, it is unclear how many anatomical programs have accepted or are accepting bodies of persons who end their life using MAID, as no reliable information exists on this topic," said Wainman, professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster. "I wrote this discussion paper to raise the potential difficulties and ethical questions facing body donation programs where MAID exists, and to open the conversation. The last thing we would want to do is compromise our association with our community." The McMaster University body donation program has accepted six MAID bodies between the time the legislation was enacted in June 2016 and November 2018. "Right after the law was passed in Canada, the bodies began to arrive," Wainman said. "MAID makes up five per cent of our body donations now, but I can see it easily going to 10 per cent before the end of the year. That makes it five to 10 bodies a year." Wainman said the process of receiving and using bodies from donors who undertake MAID poses many challenges for institutions like McMaster. advertisement "We have a tremendous relationship with many people in the palliative care field, so it comes up as a discussion point: 'Are you interested in donating your body to anatomic study?'" he said. "We find the potential MAID donors are far more likely to want to donate their bodies to science. As a result, we are typically in contact with the donor themselves who reach out to us to talk about donation. "An ethical question I face is that for these people who are so vulnerable, who are at that moment trying to decide if theirs is a life worth living, are we somehow inducing them to want to donate? Are we providing them with additional impetus to donate? It's a serious issue as the last thing we want to do is to bring about any pressure at this difficult point in their lives." Then, there's the complexity about how to communicate the circumstances of these body donations with students in anatomy education programs at academic institutions, he noted. Wainman said he decided upon the arrival of the first MAID body donation that his policy of transparency and openness at McMaster's anatomy program would continue. He said everyone, from faculty members to students, who interact with the body donations know the circumstances. To date, no concerns have been expressed. "We are having discussions -- important discussions -- in our anatomy lab on what it means to receive a body that has not died of natural causes," he said. "On the death certificate it lists the cause which compelled them to seek MAID, not from medical assistance in death, but we are aware of the circumstances beyond that. It's important in every possible way to be transparent. Everyone we train here at McMaster has an interest in human health, and this is an additional ethical issue for them to think about. "Human health is not just about the function of your lungs and kidneys, it's also about the person who lives in that body." There are guidelines around body donation to anatomy facilities, such as those from the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists (2012) and the American Association of Anatomists (2009). However, Wainman pointed out these guidelines do not refer directly to the acceptance of MAID bodies, likely due to the newness of euthanasia laws. As such, the current guidelines are silent on the use of MAID bodies in the anatomical sciences. "Further guidance from local and international recommendations are needed to raise awareness on this sensitive topic and ensure that MAID donors are treated with respect and that good practice around MAID donations can be consistently adopted," said Wainman. Wainman and Cornwall will be presenting on the issue at a summer meeting of the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists in London, England. He said he expects there to be significant discussion as a result of the paper and subsequent presentations. "This is such a new discussion for our field," he said. "I'm sure we're going to ignite a huge discussion, which is exactly the point of this article." Wainman added that the authors consulted with Sabine Hildebrandt, a medical ethicist and associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard University. On Friday, a statement from the US National Security Advisor John Bolton warned "actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying military assets to Venezuela". By AFP March 31, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - MOSCOW - Russia on Saturday warned Washington to stop interfering in the stand-off between Venezuela's government and the opposition movement, and once again defended its decision to send personnel to the country. "We recommend that the United States stop threatening Venezuela, smothering its economy and pushing it towards civil war in open violation of international law," foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement. On Friday, a statement from the US National Security Advisor John Bolton warned "actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying military assets to Venezuela". But Zakharova, in her statement Saturday, said Russia had made it clear it was not sending a military contingent to Venezuela. Two Russian military planes landed a week ago at the main airport outside Caracas and offloaded equipment and troops, ratcheting up international tensions. Russian officials insist the troops came to Venezuela as part of a long-standing agreement on military and technical cooperation. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter But US President Donald Trump has called on Russia to "get out" of Venezuela, with Russia saying its troops will stay for as long as needed. The military specialists are apparently helping to fix a malfunctioning Russian S-300 ground-to-air missile system, US envoy Elliott Abrams said Friday. Russia and Venezuela signed a military cooperation treaty in 2011 involving the sale of Russian weapons to Venezuela. Earlier Saturday, Rosoboronexport, Russia's state arms export company said it has opened a training centre for military helicopter pilots in Venezuela after Moscow flew in troops and equipment. Venezuela, Russia's largest client in Latin America, has already received "a significant amount of Russian arms and military technology", Rosoboronexport spokesman Davydenko added. The United States and more than 50 other countries recognise Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president. Russia, along with China, backs President Nicolas Maduro. Traditional surgery to reshape a nose or ear entails cutting and suturing, sometimes followed by long recovery times and scars. But now, researchers have developed a "molecular surgery" process that uses tiny needles, electric current and 3D-printed molds to quickly reshape living tissue with no incisions, scarring or recovery time. The technique even shows promise as a way to fix immobile joints or as a noninvasive alternative to laser eye surgery. The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. "We envision this new technique as a low-cost office procedure done under local anesthesia," says Michael Hill, Ph.D., one of the project's principal investigators, who will discuss the work at the meeting. "The whole process would take about five minutes." Hill, who is at Occidental College, became involved in this project when Brian Wong, M.D., Ph.D., who is at the University of California, Irvine, asked for help in developing a noninvasive technique to reshape cartilage. Such a method would be useful for cosmetic surgery procedures, such as making a nose more attractive. But the method also could help fix problems, such as a deviated septum, or conditions for which no good treatments exist, such as joint contractures caused by stroke or cerebral palsy. Having suffered through painful deviated septum surgery himself, Hill understands what patients go through, and was excited to join a project to develop a better strategy. Wong was already an expert in one alternative technique that uses an infrared laser to heat cartilage, making it flexible enough to reshape. "The problem is, that technique is expensive, and it's hard to heat the cartilage enough so that it's malleable without killing the tissue," Hill says. To find a more practical approach, Wong's team began experimenting with passing current through cartilage to heat it up. The method indeed allowed them to reshape tissue, but, curiously, not by warming it. Wong turned to Hill to determine just how the new method was working and to refine it to prevent tissue damage. Cartilage is made up of tiny rigid fibers of collagen loosely woven together by biopolymers. Its structure resembles spaghetti that's been randomly dumped on a counter, with the individual strands tied together with thread. "If you picked it up, the strands wouldn't fall apart, but it would be floppy," Hill says. Cartilage also contains negatively charged proteins and positively charged sodium ions. Cartilage with a greater density of these charged particles is stiffer than cartilage with a lower charge density. Hill's group discovered that passing current through cartilage electrolyzes water in the tissue, converting the water into oxygen and hydrogen ions, or protons. The positive charge of the protons cancels out the negative charge on the proteins, reducing charge density and making the cartilage more malleable. "Once the tissue is floppy," he says, "you can mold it to whatever shape you want." The team tested the method on a rabbit whose ears normally stand upright. They used a mold to hold one ear bent over in the desired new shape. If they had then removed the mold without applying a current, the rabbit's ear would have sprung back into its original upright position, just like a human ear would. But by inserting microneedle electrodes into the ear at the bend and pulsing current through them with the mold in place, they briefly softened the cartilage at the bend site without damage. Turning off the current then allowed the cartilage to harden in its new shape, after which the mold was removed. To achieve this outcome with traditional methods, a surgeon would have to cut through the skin and cartilage and then stick the pieces back together. That can lead to formation of scar tissue at the joint. That scar tissue must sometimes be removed in subsequent operations, Hill says. By avoiding this mechanical damage to the cartilage, the molecular surgery technique causes no scarring and no pain. The researchers are exploring licensing options for the cartilage technique with medical device companies. They're also investigating applications in other types of collagen tissue, such as tendons and corneas. In an eye, cornea shape affects vision, with too much curvature causing nearsightedness, for example. Many hurdles must be overcome before this method could be used to correct a person's vision, but preliminary animal experiments have had promising results. The researchers used a 3D printer to make a contact lens. After painting electrodes on it, they put the contact lens on the eye. Applying current allowed them to temporarily soften the cornea and change its curvature. When an act of terrorism or a vehicle or industrial accident ignites fuel, the resulting fire or explosion can be devastating. Today, scientists will describe how lengthy but microscopic chains of polymers could be added to fuel to significantly reduce the damage from these terrifying incidents without impacting performance. The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Spring 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. The project was motivated by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. On that day, passenger planes loaded with fuel were crashed into the Twin Towers at New York City's World Trade Center. The impact set off a chain of events that ultimately brought down the buildings, Julia Kornfield, Ph.D., says. When the planes struck the buildings, their fuel turned into mist. Ignition of the mist blew out hundreds of windows (providing more air to feed the fire), ruptured concrete membranes between floors and stripped insulation off steel beams, she says. If fuel misting hadn't occurred, the initial destruction wouldn't have been as severe, and the buildings might have been able to withstand the lesser damage, says Kornfield, who studies polymers and flow behavior at the California Institute of Technology. After the attack, one of her colleagues suggested that adding small amounts of polymers to fuel could limit misting during a high-speed impact and reduce the risk of subsequent fire or explosion. Prompted by the suggestion, Kornfield and her team began a quest for suitable polymers that could dissipate the impact energy that would ordinarily break fuel drops into a mist. Other researchers pursuing this goal have developed "ultralong" polymers that can diminish the outcome of an impact, resulting in cooler, shorter fires. However, ultralong polymers aren't very practical because they interfere with engine operation, Kornfield notes. They also irreversibly break down into smaller molecules when they run through pipelines or pumps, losing efficacy. As an alternative, her team created polymers that can reversibly link up end-to-end via carboxylic acid and amine groups to form "megasupramolecules," which are as long as ultralong polymers but don't break apart in pipelines or pumps. The researchers, who created videos about the work, cofounded the startup company Fluid Efficiency to further develop the polymers and provide samples for evaluation to petrochemical companies, lubricants producers and pipeline operators. Results have been encouraging. Misting was significantly reduced in fuel treated with the polymers, and after the fuel was ignited, the flame self-extinguished. A recent test suggests that megasupra-molecules added at a refinery or fuel depot would remain active after passing through more than 600 miles of pipeline and hundreds of pumps, Kornfield says, noting ultralong polymers would have lost most of their potency after 50 miles. "This is an important step toward providing an additive that could improve transportation safety for all users receiving fuel through a pipeline network without concern that protection was lost in transit," she explains. Kornfield's molecules have other advantages. They enhance lubrication and flow through pipelines and hoses during fuel distribution. Because the polymer molecules' hydrocarbon backbone resembles that of fuel, they remain soluble even at low temperatures. In addition, the molecules break up into smaller ones when they pass into engines and burn with the fuel, so they don't interfere with engine performance. As an unexpected bonus, the additive reduces soot formation by diesel fuel engines by 12 percent, according to preliminary testing at the University of California, Riverside. At present, the polymers would add a penny or two to the cost of a gallon of fuel, which she says is a bit costly. They would like to collaborate with partners who can reduce the price and test the molecules' performance with a variety of fuels. The U.S. Army plans to study the utility of the additives in scenarios involving various impacts and projectiles such as improvised explosive devices. Biodiversity hotspot Madagascar is one of the world's biggest islands, and home to some of its biggest insects. Now German scientists have discovered two new species of giant stick insect, living only in the dry forests of Madagascar's northernmost tip. One giant female measures a whopping 24cm -- but it is the smaller males that are most striking. At sexual maturity these daredevils abandon their stick-like camouflage for dazzling blue or many-colored shining armor. Writing in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers describe their rare and exciting findings, and wonder at the reproductive success of the least stick-like stick insects on the planet. When two become four "Nearly all of the 3000+ known species of stick insects try to be inconspicuous and just look like twigs," says senior author Dr. Sven Bradler of the University of Gottingen, Germany. "There are a very few, very large exceptions -- and we have just discovered a couple more of them." The authors re-examined specimens they'd previously identified as odd-looking examples of two existing giant stick insect species, whose adult males remarkably are bright blue or multicolored. advertisement "These were similar in size -- 15 to 24cm -- but generally less spiny and a bit differently colored than typical examples of their kind," explains Bradler. "Now genetic tests confirm that the quirky individuals are in fact two new species, distinct from the original two but part of the same group." explains Bradler. Bradler's reclassification places members of this group of species as close evolutionary relatives to other Madagascan stick insects, rather than cousins from overseas as previously thought. This is a potentially major finding, as it challenges the prevailing view that sticks insects colonized Madagascar multiple times. He who dares, wins The discovery also prompted the researchers to wonder: what reproductive advantage do these males gain from their bright colors, that is worth exposing themselves to predators? The first author Dr. Frank Glaw of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich, and colleagues bred the new giant stick insect species in captivity to observe their behavior. advertisement "Males of one species started mating attempts only when they achieved their bright blue color." This might suggest that the males use their bright coloring to attract a mate. However, it is hard to believe the males could find a mate before being eaten -- unless their bright coloring acts as a deterrent to predators. "Males searching for a mate have to move about more, so pretending to be a stick becomes tricky. Better perhaps to plump for the opposite: a brightly colored warning." Bright colors -- suggestive of toxicity -- keep safe vivid members of other typically camouflaged species, like lividly colored Madagascan frogs. "In support of this, all stick insects have neck glands that repellant substances, and these are typically well-developed in brightly colored species. Alternatively, like the Madagascan frogs some giant stick insects may have developed the ability to accumulate toxins from their food." But testing these hypotheses will be tough, admits Glaw. Bradler adds "More than one factor may have played a role in the evolution of this remarkably conspicuous coloration. So even with more data on mate selection, habits, predators, natural food plants, toxins produced by defense glands and possible accumulation of toxins among giant stick insects, finding evidence for these ideas may prove difficult." Colorful stick insects have a bright future Whatever its function, the splendid coloring of the male giant stick insects could make them a strong flagship species to promote the unique biodiversity of Madagascar, and the need for its protection. "Already the once-uncertain future of these two new species seems secured, with their forest habitat in northern Madagascar a hotspot for conservation priorities," says Glaw. "It is vital to maintain awareness and motivation to keep logging at bay. This precious area also harbors the highest density of critically endangered reptiles in Madagascar and is home of one of the most threatened primate species in the world, the lemur Lepilemur septentrionalis." Trump wants to give 62 cents of every dollar to the military. That's immoral A budget shows our values more clearly than any tweet, campaign speech, or political slogan By William Barber, Liz Theoharis and Lindsay Koshgarian April 01, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Donald Trump recently unleashed his dark vision for our nation and our world, in the form of his budget request to Congress. A budget shows our values more clearly than any tweet, campaign speech or political slogan. Its what marries detailed, dollar-and-cents policy decisions to deeper political and moral priorities. One set of moral priorities a different one would end our endless wars and use the vast wealth of this nation to end poverty and lead to true security for all of us. It would invest in healthcare, well-paying jobs, affordable higher education, safe drinking water and clean air for all of us. The proposed Trump budget drops bombs on that vision almost literally. With this budget, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and disperses fully $750bn to the military. Out of every taxpayer dollar, in other words, 62 cents go to the military and our militarized Department of Homeland Security. (Veterans benefits take another seven cents.) That leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clean air, health and science research, and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter The budget also cuts billions from non-discretionary anti-poverty programs outside of this $1tn. Medicaid and food stamps would be cut and disfigured beyond recognition. At every turn, the Trump budget finds vast billions for militarization, while it cuts much smaller poverty and other programs, claiming the goal is to save money. It includes $164bn in war funding, but it cuts $4.7bn in economic development and food assistance to other nations. It finds $14bn for a vanity project military branch called the space force, while it cuts $1.2bn for a program thats built and preserved more than 1m affordable homes. It includes $11bn for contractor Lockheed Martin to build more F-35 jet fighters, but it cuts $3.7bn in heating and cooling assistance for 6m poor households. And it includes more than $12bn for a wall at our border, while it cuts $1bn for Job Corps, the program that provides yearly training and work experience to 50,000 poor (and mostly black) youths. The budget falsely claims to adhere to strict spending limits set by Congress for the military. But it hides an extra $174bn for the Pentagon in plain sight by adding it to a war spending account despite the fact that the president has said he wants to bring back thousands of troops from Syria and Afghanistan. This gimmick brings total military spending all the way up to $750bn, even while the administration claims it is cutting the base Pentagon budget. Saving money is apparently only the goal when its spending on the poor, on justice and equity, and on saving the Earth. Saving money, in other words, is just a smokescreen. Unjust budgets and misplaced priorities arent just a Trump problem. The United States has been addicted to excessive military spending at the expense of true security at home for decades. In our religious and moral traditions, we learn how we treat the immigrant and the neighbor is how we treat God. In our view, this budgets values show not only a deep disregard for human life, but for God. And not to mention for the majority of Americans, who consistently support military cuts and oppose cuts to programs that serve human needs. Thats why the Poor Peoples Campaign is launching our vision for a moral America: a moral and constitutional budget that reminds Americans what decency and democracy really look like. Priority by priority, over the next few months were going to be rolling out a detailed blueprint for how to bring a real moral vision into our national and political budget priorities. To start, our budget will propose ending our fruitless wars, bringing troops home from the majority of the 800 bases in 90 countries where theyre currently stationed, and cutting the annual gift of more than $300bn to Pentagon contractors. Even after cutting hundreds of billions this way, our military budget would still be greater than the military budgets of China and Russia combined. Well be safe. And we will propose investing that money in ways that build true security at home. The current US budget may be shaped by the rich and powerful, but our budget will be brought to the rich and powerful by the people. This June, were convening the Poor Peoples Moral Action Congress, bringing together hundreds of Poor Peoples Campaign members from more than 40 states in our nations capital to make sure the 140 million people in this country who are poor and low-income are included in the national discussion in 2020. For too long, we have had budgets that provide security for a wealthy and powerful few rather than the poor and disenfranchised many. Real security means establishing peace, justice and promoting the material wellbeing and liberty of all, including future generations. Lets bring our country back to these values, enshrined in the constitution and our moral traditions. And lets revive the heart and soul of our nation. The Rev Dr William Barber II and the Rev Dr Liz Theoharis are cochairs of the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies This article was originally published by " The Guardian " - Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here ==See Also== Faulty nuclear propulsion and elevators further delay USS Fords delivery Note To ICH Community We ask that you assist us in dissemination of the article published by ICH to your social media accounts and post links to the article from other websites. Thank you for your support. Peace and joy By Maria Cardona - opinion April 01, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - President Trump has stooped to a new low in what has already become a daily descension into the gutter of inhumanity, uncivil discourse and plain meanness. During a rally Friday in Michigan, Donald Trump took to mocking the poor and desperate migrants who are coming here from Central America in droves to save their families lives. Trump also is resorting to a dangerous and foolish threat closing the southern border if Mexico doesnt do more to stem the flow of migrants traveling through Mexico from Central America to the United States. Both actions the mockery and the threat to close the border are further indication that Donald Trump is uninterested in fixing the problems that stem from our broken immigration system. The president has never taken the issue of immigration seriously. He has never seen it as a problem that needs solving, only a solution for his political problems. He uses immigration as a clarion call to his base instilling fear, inciting division, bigotry and the politics of resentment so they will never leave him. His childish comments making fun of asylum seekers are meant to shock and awe his adoring fans. But they also betray his immense ignorance over the reality that asylum seekers face, and they demonstrate a malicious streak in which he is willing to use their agony for his own political gain. These migrants are human beings. They also are following our laws as they present themselves to immigration authorities to claim asylum. Trump should walk a mile in their shoes before he makes light of their life-and-death situations and uses them as punch lines in a political speech. You cant get more unpresidential than that. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter It is only in understanding the reality of what Central Americans face daily that we will have leaders whose empathy will lead them to fix the situation at its source. If Trump really wanted to solve the issue, he would focus on comprehensive immigration reform. But in the short term, he could deploy more immigration judges and asylum case workers that could hear the cases of each of these families on the border and could decide on the merits whether they can seek asylum in this country. This process will take weeks instead of years, and those that do not meet the asylum standards would be sent back. That will start sending a message about which claims are valid and which ones are not. It would provide a deterrent to those whose situations do not merit asylum, thereby starting to reduce the flow north. Long term, Trump needs to work with the Central American countries to help stabilize their economies and governments, invest in stemming and stopping gang activity and violence and work with governments there to increase real job opportunities to grow a robust middle class. Instead, Trump is doing exactly the opposite as he announced he will take away aid from these Central American countries. We aided Mexico, and it worked. Now the flow of migrants coming from Mexico is net-negative. We can do it in Central America as well. But it will be hard. It will take these kinds of bipartisan policies and a commitment to resolve this in a humane way. Donald Trump does not do hard; nor does he do solutions-based policy; and Donald Trump certainly does not do humane. His threat to shut down the entire southern border is as economically dangerous and nonsensical as his mockery of asylum seekers is mean. Trade along the southern border topped $611 billion last year. American businesses depend on this vibrant trade everyday. Americans and Mexicans on both sides of the border cross back and forth daily to make a living. Mexico is our third-largest trading partner, and it is a vital partner for the U.S. in combating drug-tracking and illegal immigration. The problem is that Donald Trump doesnt know what the problem is. He is threatening to shut down the border because he is saying Mexico will not stop the caravans on their way to the United States. The reality is that Mexican President Andres Lopez Obrador has been an ally of Trump even as he campaigned against him before getting elected. But since being in office, he wants to nurture a good relationship with the Trump administration and has been a willing partner in keeping asylum seekers on the Mexican side of the border facing criticism from human rights activists for good reason instead of letting them cross into the United States. Detaining hundreds of migrants walking through Mexico who are not breaking the law is not a long-term viable option. Neither is shutting down the entire southern border. There is no question that the situation is now at a crisis point. But it is a humanitarian crisis of Trumps own making as he has been impotent in solving the issue. Instead, he has done everything he can to exacerbate the problem from the moment he took office. President Ronald Reagan is the one who described the United States of America as a shining city on a hill, a beacon of hope for everyone around the world who is seeking to be free and to live a better life. Donald Trump clearly wants to extinguish that beacon. That is not leadership. That is a campaign strategy. America deserves better. Maria Cardona is a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a Democratic strategist and a CNN/CNN Espanol political commentator. Follow her on Twitter @MariaTCardona. This article was originally published by " The Hill " - Home Search ICH Reuters Confirms That Bolton Torpedoed the Hanoi Summit By Mike Whitney April 01, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - An explosive report by Reuters confirms that John Bolton sabotaged the denuclearization talks between Kim Jong un and Donald Trump in Hanoi in February. According to a March 29 exclusive by journalists Lesley Wroughton and David Brunnstrom: Donald Trump handed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a piece of paper demanding that Kim surrender all of his nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States. Trump also added a number of unrelated demands including fully dismantling all chemical and biological warfare program(s). and ballistic missiles, launchers, and associated facilities. Trump surprised Kim by demanding complete, unilateral disarmament in exchange for a flimsy promise to lift economic sanctions sometime in the future. Naturally, Kim rejected the offer. Heres more from the same article: The document appeared to represent Boltons long-held and hardline Libya model of denuclearization that North Korea has rejected repeatedly.North Koreans rejected Boltons repeated demands for it to follow a denuclearization model under which components of Libyas nuclear program were shipped to the United States in 2004. Seven years after a denuclearization agreement was reached between the United States and Libyas leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the United States took part in a NATO-led military operation against his government and he was overthrown by rebels and killed (Exclusive: With a piece of paper, Trump called on Kim to hand over nuclear weapons, Reuters) Bolton presented Kim with an offer he knew Kim would reject, the same offer that led to the destruction of Libya and the savage murder of Gaddafi. Bolton wanted the talks to fail so he could push for tougher sanctions that would pave the way for regime change. That was his goal. Kims nuclear weapons were never the target, they were merely the pretext for intensifying the economic strangulation, the relentless belligerence and the threats of war. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter But why would Trump agree to go along with this fraud? And why has Trump deployed more troops to Syria while green-lighting Israel to annex the Golan Heights? Is there a connection between Trumps (recent) foreign policy reversals and the termination of the Mueller investigation? Did Trump make a deal with his deep state antagonists to get Mueller off his back? Its hard to say, but there was no reason for Mueller to wrap up the investigation. The probe was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: Create a 4th branch of government that was empowered to hector, harass and indict anyone it chose in order to keep the administration on the defensive, derail any effort to normalize relations with Russia, and undermine the legitimacy and moral authority of the president. Why would Mueller give up all that if it wasnt part of some undisclosed Grand Bargain? He wouldnt. On a personal level, Trump trusts Kim which is why he probably wanted to cut a deal. An article in last weeks Koreas Hankyoreh news supports this view. Check it out: During the North Korea-US summit in Hanoi last month, US President Donald Trump reportedly had a positive perspective on relaxing sanctions on North Korea provided that there was a snapback clause that would reinstate sanctions if the North failed to implement its agreement. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui made this statement during a briefing to foreign diplomats in Pyongyang on Mar. 15, but her full remarks hadnt been made public until now. According to the text of Choes remarks released on Mar. 25, she said, When we made a practical proposal in the talks, President Trump adopted the flexible position that an agreement would be possible if a clause was added stating that the sanctions could be reinstated if North Korea resumed nuclear activities after the sanctions were lifted. But Choe went on to say that, because of their continuing hostility and mistrust, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House National Security Advisor John Bolton created obstacles to the two leaders efforts to have constructive negotiations, and ultimately the summit didnt produce meaningful results. . According to Choes statement the two leaders appear to have explored the possibility of trading Yongbyons shutdown for partial sanctions relief. Choes remarks imply that the ultimate reason the summit concluded without an agreement was because of resistance from Pompeo and Bolton. (Trump responded positively to relaxing sanctions with snapback clause during Hanoi summit, Hankyoreh News) The Hankyoreh article corroborates much of what is stated in the Reuters piece. Both articles acknowledge that the nuclear talks were scuppered by Bolton. The media has consistently misled its readers about what actually took place at Hanoi and who should ultimately be held responsible for its failure. According to CNN: Kim had demanded total sanctions relief upfront in exchange for only partial denuclearization, leaving the two sides at an impasse.(Wrong) Trump cast his decision to walk away as evidence that he will not accept a bad deal, (Wrong) but the abrupt conclusion of his much-ballyhooed second summit nonetheless amounted to the most stinging setback yet in his effort to achieve North Koreas denuclearization through direct talks with its leader. (Wrong, it wasnt a setback, it was deliberate.) More than anything, the failure to produce results during the second summit called into question the personality-driven diplomacy that has been at the core of Trumps effort to end the North Korean nuclear threat. (Wrong, again) (Takeaways from the Trump-Kim Hanoi summit, CNN) None of this is true. The meetings didnt fail because of Trumps personality-driven diplomacy. They failed because Bolton deliberately blew them up. Thats what happened. As one would expect, virtually everything CNN tries to pass off as evenhanded, thoroughly-researched journalism is nothing more than misleading gobbledygook served up by political activists. (The dismal Hanoi coverage helps to show that the Trump-collusion fiction was not a one off, but a critical feature of media policy which aims to shape the news according to the political agenda of elites.) But if the Trump administration is unwilling to honestly negotiate with the North, then how can Kim possibly move forward with his plan to establish peaceful relations with his friends in the South and his allies in the region? The only way forward for Kim is to bypass the Trump administration altogether and strengthen relations with those who will help him achieve his strategic objectives. He must show that he is a trustworthy partner who is willing to continue along the path of denuclearization regardless of the obstacles and provocations created by the United States. He must continue to seek the input of leaders in Beijing, Moscow and Seoul and prove to them that he is unwaveringly committed to ridding the peninsula of its nuclear weapons in the interests of peace and security. Kim must welcome international weapons inspectors to monitor the decommissioning of his nuclear arsenal and his nuclear enrichment plants. He must increase the frequency of his visits to Seoul where his public approval ratings have skyrocketed and where his efforts for peace and reunification are applauded by nearly 80% of the people. He must promote his own denuclearization timetable and present his case to the UN Security Council for review. He must convince the public that he will not backtrack on his ironclad commitment to dialogue, cooperation, economic integration and peace. According to Hankyoreh News, Kim Jong uns chief of staff and protocol officer made a secret trip to Moscow last week fueling speculation that Kim Jong-un may be about to pay a visit to Russia. At the same time, a senior national security official (Kim Hyun-chong) from South Korea visited Russia as well. Can you see whats going on? What these secret meetings suggest is that regional leaders are now developing a post-Hanoi strategy that will take into account Kims eagerness to cooperate and Washingtons obstinate rejection of any policy that does not further enhance its own vicious grip on power. The Trump team is no longer in the loop. Regional bigwigs are taking matters into their own hands and moving forward. As we pointed out in an earlier piece, Kim is neither a firebrand nor ideological. He is a contemporary man who who wants to make his own mark on the world, lead his country into the modern era, and join the coalition of nations that are fast becoming the biggest trading block in history. Heres how author John Delury summed it up in a recent op-ed in the New York Times: Mr. Kim wants to be a great economic reformer(He wants to) shift the regimes focus, from security to prosperity.He wants North Korea to catch up with and integrate into the region, and its in everyones interest to help him do so(Kim Jong-un Has a Dream. The U.S. Should Help Him Realize It, New York Times) Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com . This article was originally published by " UNZ Review" - Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here ==See Also== Its sad to see US diplomacy reduced to ultimatums and sanctions Lavrov Note To ICH Community We ask that you assist us in dissemination of the article published by ICH to your social media accounts and post links to the article from other websites. Thank you for your support. Peace and joy The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Search Information Clearing House === Click Here To Support Information Clearing House Your support has kept ICH free on the Web since 2002. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load. On March 28, 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the former controller of a New York-based not-for-profit college with defrauding municipal securities investors by fraudulently concealing the college's deteriorating finances. According to the SEC's complaint, in recent years, the College of New Rochelle came under considerable financial stress because of declining student enrollment and plummeting revenue from tuition. To hide the college's deteriorating financial condition from investors, the college's former controller, Keith Borge, created false financial records, didn't file payroll tax submissions, and didn't assess the collectability of pledged donations that were increasingly unlikely to be received as donors became more frustrated with the college's operations. Borge's misconduct resulted in the college's financial statements for its 2015 fiscal year falsely overstating net assets by almost $34 million. Borge also falsely certified the accuracy of the college's financial statements. The financial statements were published by Borge to an online repository in connection with the College's continuing disclosure obligations stemming from a 1999 bond issuance, and significantly influenced investors' decisions to invest in the bonds. The SEC's complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, charges Borge with violating, and aiding and abetting violations of, the antifraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder. Borge agreed to a partial settlement that would permanently enjoin him from future misconduct, with potential monetary sanctions to be determined at a later date. The partial settlement is subject to court approval. In a parallel action, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced criminal charges against Borge. Borge has pleaded guilty to those charges. The SEC did not charge the College of New Rochelle after considering the institution's extensive cooperation and remediation. After discovering Borge's actions and conducting a preliminary review, the college publicly reported the financial issues, promptly engaged outside expertise to conduct a full internal investigation, and issued restated financial results. The college also promptly and extensively cooperated with the SEC in its investigation and proactively undertook wide-reaching remedial measures to enhance its internal controls and governance. The SEC's investigation, which is continuing, has been conducted by Jon Daniels and Wendy Tepperman of the New York Regional Office and Creighton Papier of the Public Finance Abuse Unit. The SEC's litigation will be led by Todd Brody and Mr. Daniels. The case is being supervised by Lara S. Mehraban, Mark R. Zehner, and Ms. Gaunt. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. On February 5, 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission obtained a final judgment against a New York-based broker who was charged with orchestrating a $6.5 million offering fraud. In May 2015, the SEC charged Robert P. DePalo with defrauding over twenty investors by misrepresenting the value of their investments and use of their funds, including by sending the first $2.3 million of investor funds to his personal bank account. The SEC also alleged that DePalo made false statements to SEC examiners in an attempt to conceal the fraud. Based on conduct similar to that alleged in the SEC's complaint, a New York State Supreme Court jury found DePalo guilty of criminal charges, which included grand larceny, money laundering, schemes to defraud, and other charges. DePalo was sentenced to 7-21 years in state prison, and ordered to pay full restitution to defrauded investors. The SEC's final judgment, entered on February 5, 2019, by the Honorable Kimba M. Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, permanently enjoins DePalo from violating the antifraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder and Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, and orders him to pay $6.5 million in disgorgement, which was deemed satisfied by the restitution order in the criminal case. On March 18, 2019, the SEC issued an order barring DePalo from the securities industry. The SEC also obtained final judgments against DePalo's associates and entities controlled by DePalo. The SEC's investigation and litigation was conducted by Andrew Dean, Kerri Palen, and Nancy Brown, and was supervised by Lara S. Mehraban. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the New York County District Attorney's Office, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Financial Conduct Authority in the United Kingdom, City of London Police, and Northumbria Police in the United Kingdom. On March 20, 2019, Kimberly Kitts, a Cape Cod-area investment adviser, whom the Securities and Exchange Commission has charged with fraud, was sentenced in a parallel criminal action to 87 months in prison and ordered to pay $3,085,939 in restitution. On November 19, 2018, Kitts pled guilty to charges filed by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts of wire fraud, investment adviser fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The criminal charges, filed on September 18, 2018, arose from the same conduct alleged in the SEC's complaint. The SEC alleged that Kitts forged her clients' signatures on withdrawal requests to misappropriate money from their variable annuity and investment accounts. Through 82 unauthorized withdrawals from these accounts over six years, Kitts stole $3 million of client funds for personal use. The SEC's litigation is pending. April 01, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Not since the witchcraft hysteria of the Middle Ages have we seen such a display of human idiocy, credulity and absurdist behavior. I refer, of course, to the two-year witch hunt directed against President Donald Trump which hopefully just concluded last week provided that the Hillaryites, Democratic dopes and secret staters who fueled this mania dont manage to keep the pot boiling. This column has said from Day 1 that claims Trump was somehow a Russian agent were absurd in the extreme. So too charges that Moscow had somehow rigged US elections. Nonsense. We know its the US that helps rig elections around the globe, not those bumbling Russians who cant afford the big bribes such nefarious activity requires. What Muller found after he turned over the big rock was a bevy of slithering, slimy creatures, shyster lawyers, and sleazes that are normally part of New Yorks land development industry. No surprise at all that they surrounded developer Trump. Son-in-law Jared Kushner hails from this same milieu. The Kushners are pajama-party buddies with Israels leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. Now that the Muller investigation found no collusion between the Trump camp and the Kremlin, we Americans owe a great big apology to Vladimir Putin for all the slander he has suffered. Too bad he cant sue the legions of liars and propagandists who heaped abuse on him and, incidentally, pushed the US and Russia to the edge of war. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter People who swallowed these absurdist claims really should question their own grasp of reality. Those who believed that the evil Kremlin was manipulating votes in Alabama or Missouri would make good candidates for Scientology or the John Birch Society. They were the simple fools. Worse, were the propagandists who promoted the disgusting Steele dossier, a farrago of lies concocted by British intelligence and apparently promoted by the late John McCain and Trump-hating TV networks. One senses Hillary Clintons hand in all this. Hell indeed hath no fury like a woman scorned. Its so laughably ironic that while the witch hunt sought a non-existent Kremlin master manipulator, the real foreign string-puller was sitting in the White House Oval office chortling away: Israels prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, behind him, the moneybags patron of Trump and Netanyahu, American billionaire gambling mogul, Sheldon Adelson, the godfather of Greater Israel. The three amigos had just pulled off one of the most outrageous violations of international law by blessing Israels annexation of the highly strategic Golan Heights that Israel had seized in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. This usurpation was so egregious that all 14 members of the UN Security Council condemned it. Even usually wimpy Canada blasted the US. Giving Golan to Israel means it has permanently secured new water sources from the Mount Hermon range, artillery and electronic intelligence positions overlooking Damascus, and the launching pad for new Israeli land expansion into Lebanon and Syria. Israel is said to be preparing for a new war against Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. In contrast to this cynical business over Golan, the Trump administration is still hitting Russia with heavy sanctions over Moscows re-occupation of Crimea, a strategic peninsula that was Russian for over 300 years. So Israel can grab Golan but Russia must vacate Crimea. The logic of sleazy politics. We also learned last week that according to State Secretary Mike Pompeo, Trump might have been sent by us by God, like ancient Israels Queen Esther, to defend Israel from the wicked Persians. Up to a quarter of Americans, and particularly Bible Belt voters, believe such crazy nonsense. For them, Trump is a heroic Crusading Christian warrior. This is as nutty as Trump being a Commie Manchurian candidate. We seem to be living in an era of absurdity and medieval superstition. No wonder so many nations around the globe fear us. We too often look like militant Scientologists with nuclear weapons. Fortunately, the cool, calm, collected Vladimir Putin remains in charge of the other side in spite of our best efforts to overthrow or provoke him. Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation Pakistan, Hurriyet, Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia. ericmargolis.com Ramon Laureano charged the ball like a shortstop and threw the ball like a pitcher. An impressive feat considering Laureano is a center fielder. With the reigning Series champion Red Sox in town for the opener of a four-game series, Laureano showed off his mighty arm and bat in the As 7-0 victory at the Coliseum. Khris Davis hit his daily home run, this one a solo shot off David Price, and Aaron Brooks was the latest starting pitcher to compile a collection of scoreless innings. But the man who stood out the most before a crowd of 12,477 was Laureano, who showed signs of an all-around game as a rookie last year and did so again over a two-inning sequence Monday. Laureano prevented a run in the second when fielding Mitch Morelands base hit on two bounces and throwing a strike to catcher Nick Hundley, who tagged Xander Bogaerts. Laureano threw on a fly, guessing Moreland (without much speed) wouldnt take second on the throw, and thats exactly what happened. Those ones are kind of like in the moment, Laureano said. The adrenaline gets you going. Initially, from his view, Laureano thought Bogaerts was safe, but umpire Kerwin Danley called him out, and a two-minute review supported Danleys claim. It was the second time in the inning Laureano made a powerful throw in pursuit of Bogaerts. His sidearm heave from the gap in right-center was in time to catch Bogaerts at second base, but Marcus Semien didnt handle a tough short-hop attempt. An inning later, Laureano smacked his first home run of the year to center field. Along with Davis homer, his fifth in seven games, the As led 2-0 and moved ahead 4-0 on Chad Pinder cleared the wall in the sixth, and Matt Chapman hit the teams fourth homer during a three-run eighth. Davis became the third As hitter with five homers in a seasons first seven games, following Reggie Jackson in 1974 and Mark McGwire in 1992. Sometimes I stay up at night trying to think of superlatives to say about Khris Davis because I know Ill probably have to when I come in here after the game, manager Bob Melvin said, but Im kind of all out of them. ... Its amazing. He just keeps getting better and better. In a development that no one expected, the As rotation is out-pitching Bostons this year. By far. In Bostons first five games, their starting pitchers posted an 11.14 ERA, giving up 26 earned runs in 21 innings. Thats once through the rotation with the likes of Chris Sale, Nathan Eovaldi, Eduardo Rodriguez, Rick Porcello and Price the men who dominated in October. Compare that with how Oaklands starters have pitched the past five games: one earned run in 30 innings, an ERA of 0.30 with the likes of Mike Fiers, Marco Estrada, Brett Anderson, Frankie Montas and Brooks. Obviously, when the first four (starters) go that well, you have to keep the roll going, Brooks said. Obviously, theyre not the easiest lineup to face, and keeping them off balance and guessing is the way to go. It worked. Brooks won the final rotation spot because of the way he finished spring training, giving up one run in his final 12 innings. That included a strong outing against the Giants in the Bay Bridge Series. The competition was between Brooks and Chris Bassitt, who sustained a knee injury in an exhibition game during the As trip to Japan, where they dropped their first two regular-season games to Seattle. Mondays start was Brooks first in the majors since 2015. Brooks has earned a rotation spot, and Bassitt is preparing for Thursdays rehab start with Class A Stockton. The As have beaten the Red Sox 10 times in 15 games and seven of nine at the Coliseum. John Shea is The San Francisco Chronicles national baseball writer. Email: jshea@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnSheaHey BART Police Chief Carlos Rojas will retire from the transit agency on May 6, General Manager Grace Crunican said on Tuesday. Rojas, 50, arrived at BART two years ago from the Santa Ana Police Department, where he had been chief for five years after serving as an officer since 1990. He steered the transit systems police department as it grappled with high-profile violent crimes including last years fatal stabbing of 18-year-old Nia Wilson and tried to build trust with commuters who are peeling away from mass transit. The outgoing chief also helped pioneer BARTs controversial fare inspection program in which teams of civilian officers cite riders who cannot present proof of payment. Records reviewed by The Chronicle show that few people pay the fines, and nearly half of the citations go to African American riders a disparity that troubles some board directors. In December, Rojas settled a lawsuit with the city of Santa Ana for $350,000 over claims that the city manager and mayor had forced him out. He filed the suit shortly after coming to BART, where he now earns just under $263,000 a year. Crunican commended Rojas in a memo to BARTs executive staff Tuesday, saying the chief had helped recruit new officers at a time when the agency was woefully short-staffed. He fast-tracked the hiring process and reduced rank-and-file vacancies from 41 to 20, Crunican said. Rojas also beefed up foot patrols and used the transit agencys surveillance network to increase arrests by 56 percent from 2016 to 2018. Though its still unclear whether the fare inspection program is discouraging cheats, Crunican praised Rojas for tackling an issue that irks BARTs paying riders and siphons an estimated $25 million a year in fare revenue. And she applauded the new four-year police union contract that Rojas helped negotiate, which offered a one-time 6 percent salary increase with annual raises of 2.5 to 2.75 percent. 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. Hes been a rock star for BART, Crunican wrote. Please join me in wishing him well in his retirement. Officer Keith Garcia, president of the BART Police Officers Association, said he and other union members are disappointed to see the chief go. We have a lot of confidence in him, Garcia said. Were wishing him the best of luck. Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan Good morning, Bay Area. Its April 2 and California doctors are worried about a measles outbreak, while an ex-prisoner has built a company to help breast cancer patients like herself. Heres what you need to know to start your day. Highly contagious Measles, one of the most contagious and preventable diseases, has made a comeback across the country this year, with more cases reported in the past three months than all of last year, health officials said Monday. California is among the states with outbreaks with 16 cases since Jan. 1, including six in the Bay Area. Dr. Dawn Rosenberg of San Franciscos Golden Gate Pediatrics tells reporter Jill Tucker she has never seen a live measles case in her 14 years of practicing medicine. But Rosenberg and her colleagues have been reviewing photos of the measles rash, to refresh their memories just in case. Were so troubled by this, she said. Were all on high alert. Aishas comeback Jessica Christian / The Chronicle Aisha McCain had just been released from federal parole after serving time for a drug conviction, and was excited about starting a new life but then she was diagnosed with cancer. Reporter Matthias Gafni tells the story of how after 11 surgeries, McCain built her own company so breast cancer patients, like herself, can heal faster. The king goes veggie in St. Louis Amy Osborne / Special to The Chronicle The plant-based burger battle shows no sign of abating. The latest coup comes from Redwood City-based Impossible Foods, which has inked a new partnership with Burger King to serve a meat-free Whopper at restaurants in St. Louis for six weeks. The company has done trials with other national chains before but Burger King is by far the largest. Its also another way for Impossible Foods to compete with Beyond Meat, which started serving its plant-based burger at Carls Jr. locations in January. Ghost Ship on trial On Dec. 2, 2016, Californias deadliest structure fire in more than a century tore through Oaklands Ghost Ship warehouse, killing 36 people attending an electronic music show. Nearly two and half years later, jury selection is set to begin in the trial against two men criminally charged in the disaster. Writer Megan Cassidy reports on what you need to know about the trial. Meanwhile, Town of Bedrock planning commission elated Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Is there such a thing as too much fun with house decorations? The town of Hillsborough seems to think so theyre suing Florence Fang, well-known Bay Area businesswoman, philanthropist and former publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, over her thematic and gaudy additions outside the Flintstone House including a herd of large dinosaur sculptures. Columnist Heather Knight and photographer Gabrielle Lurie got a tour of the property including inside the house where the modern stone-age family theme continues. Sign up for Bay Briefing Like what you're reading? Subscribe to The Chronicle's Bay Briefing newsletter and get the Bay Area's best journalism in your inbox every weekday. See More Collapse Around the Bay Case proceeds: The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a bid Monday from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco that could have halted a decade-long case by former employees who say the school cheated the government out of millions of dollars in student loans and grants. Career change: Tartines Vinny Eng was just named sommelier of the year. Why hes leaving it all, for a new start in politics. 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. No second day Lyft: Ride-share firm Lyfts stock sank Monday on the first day of trading after its splashy Wall Street debut, casting a shadow over upcoming initial public offerings for Uber and other money-losing unicorns. Over-educated dogs: As it becomes increasingly difficult for people to afford having a family in San Francisco, humans are giving their dogs a formal education that pets living outside cities can only imagine. Disaster vote: The U.S. Senate fails to pass California disaster funds amid a Puerto Rico-related standoff by most Republican senators. Best of fans: Even in the worst of times, Warriors fans at Oracle Arena were always among the NBAs best, Ann Killion writes. In Your Inbox Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle Do you know the story about the blindfolded people attempting to describe an elephant by naming its parts? (Its a tree! No, a snake!) Thats how describing food thats outside the mainstream culture can feel sometimes, restaurant critic Soleil Ho writes in the latest edition of her newsletter, Bite Curious. While dining at the Berkeley pop-up, Cafe Ohlone, Ho writes about the difficulty of describing its valley oak acorn flour bread. The dish defies what I thought I knew about the thing we call bread, she writes. This is one of the unrecognized challenges of a menu writer. ... You want people to get the picture while also hopefully not setting them up to be disappointed: You want them to stretch their imaginations, but not too much. Read more here and subscribe to Soleils newsletter here. Bay Briefing is written by Taylor Kate Brown and sent to readers email inboxes on weekday mornings. Sign up for the newsletter here and contact Brown at taylor.brown@sfchronicle.com A live rodent was abandoned in a freezer for up to two days last summer at a UCSF research lab, according to a letter obtained by The Chronicle in which the university acknowledges that it failed to comply with federal animal welfare regulations. The rodent, a vole used in a research study, was euthanized by lab staff who found it in the freezer. The vole was the fifth animal death tied to Animal Welfare Act violations in less than two years at UCSF, according to a complaint filed Monday with the U.S. Department of Agriculture by the animal protection group Stop Animal Exploitation Now. Two pigs and two voles died in the earlier incidents discovered in 2017 by inspectors with the USDA, which enforces the Animal Welfare Act with unannounced visits. Repeat violations can lead to fines. Since UCSF has a long history of animal abuse which has led to multiple animal deaths and/or injuries, I must insist that you take the most severe action allowable under the Animal Welfare Act, Michael Budkie, SAENs executive director wrote in his complaint, which asked for a $10,000 fine for each violation. In a statement, the university said it takes great care to ensure that as few animals as possible are used in research, and that they are treated well. UCSF seeks to report all instances when research does not adhere to the protocols established by the UCSF Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. UCSF has one of the largest medical research programs in the country and relies on hundreds of thousands of animals including rodents, fish, amphibians, reptiles, primates, birds and rabbits in its search for treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other ailments. It also has a site to report concerns about animal welfare. Researchers reported the freezer incident to UCSFs committee on Institutional Animal Care and Use, and to the lab animal welfare office of the National Institutes of Health, one of its research funders. A single live vole was found in a closed cardboard container in a mouse lab freezer, Associate Vice Chancellor Brian Smith told the NIH on Sept. 11. He noted that after the animal was euthanized and autopsied, it appeared that the vole had been without food for 1-2 days. Despite questioning the lab staff, it is still not known who put the animal in the freezer, he wrote, adding that the vole lab staff would be retrained. In his complaint to the USDA, Budkie cited four other animal deaths in recent years, including that of two pigs. In 2017, lab staff euthanized a pig after researchers gave it 50 times the amount of steam allowed during a gallbladder operation to test whether steam ablation can be a viable alternative to surgery, according to USDA inspectors who discovered the violation. Researchers gave the pig 200 puffs of steam instead of the four permitted by lab protocols. The pig stopped eating, and an autopsy found its stomach had been perforated, the inspectors reported. In the second incident, a pig died mysteriously after a CT scan. The lab staff disposed of the body before determining why. Although Budkie is urging the USDA to punish UCSF to the full extent of the law, he acknowledged that that may not happen under the Trump 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. The agency, which oversees 8,000 labs, zoos and other animal facilities, issued 60 percent fewer citations for Animal Welfare Act violations between 2017 and 2018, the Washington Post reported in February. Last year, the agency issued fewer than 1,800 notices of violation, down from more than 4,000 the year before, the Post reported. The article cited a shortage of inspectors, changes to the agencys enforcement process, and a resistance to public scrutiny that led the USDA to remove violation records from its website in 2017. Some were restored but redacted. Over the years, UCSF has received strong scrutiny from the agency, and in 2005 paid more than $90,000 to settle violations of the Animal Welfare Act. A subsequent Chronicle analysis of federal inspection reports found that between 2005 and 2012, lab errors or negligence led to gruesome examples of animal mistreatment. Among them were rodents and birds enduring surgeries without anesthesia, mice and primates deprived of food and drink for extended periods, and a rhesus monkey that remained in a brain study for two years despite chronic and painful complications. Last year, the research labs accreditor, Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, renewed its authorization with praise that singled out UCSFs excellent program of laboratory animal care, and its comprehensive training program for rodent surgery. Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov People Will Never, Ever Rebel As Long As Theyre Successfully Propagandized By Caitlin Johnstone April 01, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Our predicament is simple to describe. Since the dawn of civilization, powerful individuals have controlled the stories people tell themselves about who they are, whos in charge, how a good citizen behaves, what groups should be loved, what groups should be hated, and whats really going on in the world. When you study what we call history, youre mostly just reading the ancient proto-propaganda of whatever kingdom happened to win the last war during that period of time. When you study what we call religion, youre mostly reading stories that were advanced by ancient governments explaining why the people should be meek, forgiving taxpayers instead of rising up and killing their wealthy exploiters. This continues to this day. We fill our childrens heads with lies about how the world works, how the government works, how the media works, and, on a deeper level, how their own consciousness works, and the entire process is shaped to funnel power toward the people who control our stories. The modern schooling system was largely formed by John D Rockefeller, widely considered the wealthiest person in modern history, in order to create generations of docile gear-turners for the industrial plutocratic machine. Modern schooling is essentially mainstream media in a building; it promotes authorized narratives day in and day out to ensure that children will have a reaction of cognitive dissonance and rejection when confronted with information which contradicts those narratives. This funnels the populace seamlessly into the narrative control matrix of adulthood, where childhood indoctrination into mainstream narratives lubricates the way for continual programming of credulous minds with mass media propaganda. All the print, TV and online media they are presented with supports the status quo-supporting agendas of the same plutocratic class that John D Rockefeller dominated all those years ago. This ensures that no matter how bad things get, no matter how severely our spirits are crushed by end-stage metastatic neoliberalism, no matter how many stupid, pointless wars were duped into, no matter how much further we are drawn along the path toward extinction via climate chaos or nuclear war, we will never revolt to overthrow our rulers. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter Thats three paragraphs. Our predicament is simple to describe and easy to understand. But that doesnt mean its easy to solve. Everyone has at some point known someone in some kind of an abusive relationship, whether it be with a partner, a family member, or a job, and we all know that helpless feeling of being unable to help someone who refuses to walk away from the source of their abuse. Just leave him! we say in exasperation. The doors right there! Its not locked! But its never that simple. Its never that simple because, although the abusee is indeed physically capable of walking out the door, the thoughts that are in their head keep them from choosing that option. This is because no abuser is simply violent or cruel: they are also necessarily manipulative. If they werent manipulative, there wouldnt be any abusive relationship; thered just be someone doing something horrible one time, followed by a hasty exit out the door. There cant be an ongoing relationship that is abusive unless theres some glue holding the abusee in place, and that glue always consists primarily of believed narrative. I didnt mean it. I love you. I just get frustrated sometimes because of your stupidity. You cant leave; youll never make it out there on your own. You need me. Im the only one wholl ever be there for you. Nobody else will ever love you because youre so disgusting. Your children need their father. You have to stay. I need you! Ill die without you! Im not doing that. Youre paranoid and crazy. Your inability to forgive me means something is wrong with you. They seldom say it so overtly, because if they did its malignancy would be easy to spot, but those are the ideas which get subtly implanted into the abusees head day after day after day by way of skillful manipulation. Its her own fault for staying, someone will inevitably say. No it isnt. Not really. The abuser is at fault for the overt abuse, and the abuser is also at fault for the psychological manipulations which keep the abusee in place in spite of terrible cruelty. Its all one thing, and its entirely the abusers fault. Humanitys predicament is the same. I often hear revolutionary-minded thinkers voicing frustration at the mainstream public for choosing to stay within this transparently abusive dynamic instead of rising up and forcing change, and yes, it is self-evident that the citizenry could easily use its vastly superior numbers to do that if it collectively chose to. The door is right there. Its not even locked. But the people arent failing to choose the door because they love being abused, theyre failing to choose the door because theyve been manipulated into not choosing it. From cradle to grave theyre pummeled with stories telling them that this is the only way things can be, in exactly the same way a battered wife or a cult member are pummeled with stories about how leaving is impossible. The difficulty of our times is not that we are locked up; we arent. The difficulty is that far too many of us are manipulated into choosing a prison cell over freedom. The fact of the matter is that a populace will never rise up against its oppressors as long as it is being successfully propagandized not to. It will never, ever happen. The majority will choose the prison cell every time. Youd expect that more dissident thinking would be pouring into solving this dilemma, but not much is. People talk about elections and political strategies, they talk about who has the most correct ideology, they talk about rising up and seizing the means of production due to unacceptable material conditions, they wax philosophical about the tyranny of the state and the immorality of coercion, but they rarely address the elephant in the room that you cant get a populace to oust the status quo when they do not want to. Nothing will ever be done about our predicament as long as powerful people are controlling the stories that the majority of the public believe. This is as true today as it was in John D Rockefellers time, which was as true as when Rome chose to spread the render unto Caesar what is Caesars submissiveness of Christianity throughout the Empire. The only difference is that now the powerful have a century of post-Bernays propaganda science under their belt, and a whole lot of research and development can happen in a hundred years. So whats the solution? How do you awaken a populace that is not just manipulated into choosing its prison cell every time, but is also manipulated into believing that any suggestion that theyre in a prison cell is a crazy conspiracy theory? Well, what do you do when a loved one is in an abusive relationship? It never works to shake them and scream Youre being abused!; that just causes them to tighten up and dig in deeper with their abusers narratives about how this is the only way things can be and anyone who says otherwise is crazy. What works is to lovingly help that sovereign spark within them gather evidence that the narratives theyre being fed by their abuser are lies. Point out every time where reality contradicts the stories theyve been told. Weaken their trust in the old stories while strengthening their confidence in their own perception and their sense of entitlement and worthiness. Help them to see that theyre being lied to, and that they deserve better. This breaking of trust needs to happen within the respective partisan echo chambers of those who are being propagandized. Its useless to increase the distrust of CNN and MSNBC among Trumps base, for example, but its very useful to increase their distrust in right-wing narratives. Its useless to increase Democrats distrust in Trump and Fox News, but its very useful to get them skeptical of the narrative control machine theyve been plugged into. Each head of the two-headed one-party system needs to be attacked in a way that makes sense inside each of its respective echo chambers. Mostly, though, what we need is we need is for more thinkers to be more focused on the real problem. I know some influential minds read this blog; if they can help seed the idea out among the movers and shakers of dissident thought that propaganda is our first and foremost problem, we just might get somewhere. We need a major shift of focus onto the narrative control matrix and the obstacle that it poses to revolution, and everyone can help shift us there in their own way. The propaganda machine wont be adequately disrupted without intensive effort, and until it is were going to keep selecting the prison cell every time. Caitlin's articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast, throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. https://caitlinjohnstone.com Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here ==See Also== Note To ICH Community We ask that you assist us in dissemination of the article published by ICH to your social media accounts and post links to the article from other websites. Thank you for your support. Peace and joy A proposed bond that would fund the creation and preservation of affordable housing in San Francisco grew by $200 million Monday, bringing its total size to $500 million. An updated projection of property tax revenue from the Controllers Office shows that city officials could make the bond bigger. And in a letter sent to City Administrator Naomi Kelly, Mayor London Breed and Board of Supervisors President Norman Yee asked to do just that. Kelly chairs the Capital Planning Committee, which charts the citys course for issuing bonds. Breed has been pursuing the bond since January. She and Yee are co-chairing a working group to craft the bonds language and how the money will be spent. Yee, for example, wants a portion of the money to be spent on senior housing. Voters last approved an affordable housing bond in 2015 for $310 million, which financed the creation and preservation of nearly 1,400 units. Construction costs, however, have gone up since then in San Francisco. The bond still needs the approval of at least eight supervisors before it could be placed on the Nov. 5 ballot. The bond would require a two-thirds majority to pass. Bonds are carefully crafted in San Francisco so the city can raise money for important projects without raising property taxes to pay off the debt. Raising taxes, city officials worry, can stymie a bonds appeal with voters. Still, Supervisor Matt Haney has called for the bond to be raised to $1 billion to confront the citys lack of affordable housing. He said hell be participating in the working group and believes its possible to issue a bond of that size without raising taxes. I think $500 million is a good start, Haney said. We have such a huge affordable housing unfunded gap, Id like to see us push to go higher. Dominic Fracassa Power play: In an effort to keep shrinking San Franciscos carbon footprint, the citys Department of the Environment wants to keep a closer eye on energy consumption at large residential buildings. On Monday, the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee approved an ordinance allowing the department to collect energy usage data for residential buildings 50,000 square feet or larger. A state bill set to take effect this year requires annual energy reports from owners of big residential buildings. The legislation is sponsored by Supervisor Vallie Brown and co-sponsored by Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Gordon Mar and Ahsha Safai. We need to reduce the amount of energy our buildings use if were going to meet our 2050 goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, Brown said in a statement. Existing buildings account for 44 percent of the citys greenhouse-gas emissions, according to Debbie Raphael, director of the Environment Department. There are about 1,000 residential buildings at 50,000 square feet or larger that could have to comply with the new laws. 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. Without the local ordinance, that data would have been sent to Sacramento, making it harder for local officials to get a timely picture of energy usage in the city. If the full board passes the ordinance at its April 16 meeting, it would allow the Environment Department to collect the data and send it to state officials on the building owners behalf. San Francisco has required that commercial buildings 10,000 square feet or larger conduct audits of their energy usage every five years and report their findings since 2011. The Environment Department can use the data to work with building owners to reduce their energy usage and often their energy bills by recommending they switch to things like more efficient appliances. Dominic Fracassa Email: cityinsider@sfchronicle.com, dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfcityinsider @dominicfracassa Aisha McCain knew she had cancer when she saw the expression on the technicians face. She pressed her face close to the image of her right breast and tried to count the white spots. Her immediate thought was: Why now? She had just been released from federal parole and was excited about starting a new life. She had always worried she would get cancer her grandmother died from it and her mother had both breasts removed but the timing seemed cruel. She left Highland Hospital in Oakland, walked home and cried. It was May 28, 2008, a few years after McCain had left prison following a drug conviction that stemmed from a massive federal crackdown on a San Francisco gang called Big Block. Her boyfriend, Douglas Boobie Stepney, had been the leader of the Hunters Point operation, and she got busted for manufacturing crack cocaine at her South San Francisco apartment. She had secured her GED behind bars and found work upon her release. But she had stage two cancer, doctors told her, and it had spread to her lymph nodes. What she didnt know then was the meaning she would find in the metastasized cancer that accumulated under her armpit. That she would not only overcome the disease, but use it to change her life and others lives. That she would invent a product, obtain a patent, gain Food and Drug Administration certification, and start her own company aimed at helping people heal after surgeries. Last week, from her tiny East Bay apartment, McCain launched Casual Recovery, offering a clothing line that allows patients to hide unsightly drains that suck blood and pus from inside their bodies. I speak everything into existence, the 45-year-old McCain said recently, sitting on her living room couch. I still dont know how this s came to be. It was Aug. 31, 2001, when McCain awoke at a friends Oakland house, flipped on a television and watched a news reporter detail a Bay Area-wide FBI raid. Her neighborhood friends were being arrested en masse. She rolled a joint, lit it and waited for the cops to arrive. She was 27. I never considered myself to be in a gang. We were just a group of friends and the leader was my boyfriend, she said. I made bad decisions, but Im not a bad person. McCain was born in Texas, the daughter of a military father who would beat her and her mother, she said. After bouncing from base to base around the world, she moved to San Francisco in the fourth grade. At 14, she left home for good, becoming a runaway in Hunters Point who sold marijuana, developed a loyal clientele and eventually moved into a studio apartment. When she turned 18, she said, she switched to selling cocaine and crack. And she started dating Stepney, who owned Big Block Records, a rap label. According to federal authorities, McCain joined a gang that waged a bloody war with its down-the-street rival, Westmob, over drug turf fighting that killed as many as 20 young men in the two years before she was seized. Stepney, who remains in prison, operated out of neglected public housing on Harbor Road, and the two sides would fight over rap lyrics and record sales, officials said. I was young, and I loved the fast easy money, McCain said. But now I realize there is nothing easy about that money. I was hurting my community and myself. I was risking my life and my freedom for money that was always flowing out of my hands. I had to go to prison to understand just how twisted and stupid my thought process was. Of the 17 people named in arrest warrants, McCain was the only woman. She wasnt accused of violence but faced a stiff sentence. Jail officials isolated her from other inmates as investigators tried to get the gang leaders girlfriend to cooperate, she said. McCain was depressed. She started reading the Bible, grasping for hope. I was very angry at first, very defiant, she said. One afternoon, a pastor visited her cell and the pair began talking through her doors metal food slot. I cant understand why God would do this to me? Im a good person, McCain told her, crying as she recalled the moment. You will never in your life get this much alone time with God, the pastor told her. It was a big turning point for me, she said. Sometimes you dont realize youre learning when its happening. She began taking classes: the How to Become a Responsible Member of Society type. But she wondered: What could she offer when she was released? I told the (class) counselor I didnt have any skills. I only sold drugs, she said. The counselor responded that her skills were evident. She had experience in sales, customer service, and the fundamentals of supply and demand. McCain left prison in 2005 for an Oakland halfway house and found a job driving a bus, escorting elderly patients to errands and appointments. She also worked at a real estate company, cold-calling home sellers in hopes of landing them as clients. But it was three years later, after McCains cancer diagnosis, that her path began to reveal itself. After doctors sent her to UCSF to get a treatment plan, she struck up a conversation with a young emergency-room intern. Annemarie Sheets, who was 26 at the time, had her own cancer story. Before starting her internship on the day after she walked in her college graduation ceremony she got a phone call alerting her she had breast cancer. They cried, hugged and exchanged numbers. We just had a connection, said Sheets, who would become chief medical officer for McCains company. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle In July 2008, doctors removed McCains lymph nodes and the cancer from her breast. Nurses trained her on after care, including the three post-operative Jackson-Pratt drains that would be connected to her ribcage and stomach with plastic tubing. The devices, which look like clear, plastic grenades, suction out serosanguinous fluid or juice, as McCain jokingly calls it to prevent infections. Millions of surgeries a year require drains, and many patients have used safety pins or clips to secure them to their clothing. I was just grossed out, said McCain, who was embarrassed to leave her house with drains dangling off her body. I have a weak stomach and it would make me gag. After numerous surgeries, McCain believed she was finally healthy, but in 2016 doctors found precancerous cells in her other breast. She opted for a double mastectomy. But this time, she vowed to come to the hospital prepared. She found a seamstress in Santa Rosa and explained how she needed a vest with special compartments. I took her a lemon, McCain said, and I told her I needed a lemon to fit in several pockets inside. As she was being discharged from the hospital, she slipped on her new vest, tucking her drains inside. Her doctors were fascinated. It was better than any other product weve ever offered a patient, her surgeon, Dr. Hani Sbitany, recalled. It was a real significant upgrade. The doctors encouraged McCain to turn her invention into a business. Sbitany told her such a garment could revolutionize healing for patients, particularly vulnerable women already sensitive from having mastectomies or breast reconstruction. Having a garment like this makes women more confident, Sbitany said. McCain found another tailor and designed a prototype, a pink vest with four interior pockets on each side. But to create a real business, she needed a patent, even though she was a single breast cancer survivor living on Social Security and disability payments. 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. McCain eventually persuaded friends to help her with the first step hiring a patent attorney, Amir Adibi of Pleasanton. The people investing didnt understand what it was for, McCain said, but they knew it would make me happy. When she first reached out, Adibi said, I realized she was new to the space, but she had real experiences. Still, obtaining patents for clothing is challenging. What swayed the patent investigator, the attorney said, was the utility of the garment based on declarations from doctors describing how many patients could benefit. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle On Dec. 14, 2018, after yet another breast reconstruction surgery one of 11 operations in the last three years a forlorn McCain stood on the curb outside UCSF with three drains stuffed into her prototype waiting for an Uber. Her phone rang. Her patent had been approved. It took 485 days. I cried and laughed. I was just ... happy. I started texting and phoning people, McCain said. I mean, Im in hella pain, but the healing had already begun. Standing in her living room last month, side by side with Sheets, McCain lifted her shirt to show where drain tubes had entered her body after past surgeries. Her torso is a tangle of scars and she has a large, red tattoo across her lower back: He who trusts in his riches will fall but the righteous will thrive like a green leaf. Next to the Bible proverb is a cannabis leaf in a pink ribbon. Medicinal marijuana got her through her surgeries, she says. Her living room walls are covered by dry-erase boards decorated with book ideas, along with key business dates, to-do lists and inspirational quotes. A photo of a bald McCain is pinned to the wall as a reminder. To say that I am proud of her is true, but I believe that her journey, and then our journey, was the outcome of gritty determination to make something good come out of something terrible, said Sheets, who also had a double mastectomy and has been cancer-free since 2009. We used to say, we need to spin this sh into gold. After McCain obtained the patent, Sbitany offered the garments to his patients as part of a medical survey. Women have been unequivocally very, very happy with the product, he said, explaining that healing is improved with increased mobility. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle McCain, he said, is one in a million. Truthfully, I dont think any other man or woman could go through the multiple significant operations she went through and conceptualize this. Its mind-blowing. On March 25, Casual Recovery, which McCain funded almost entirely with credit cards and loans from friends, launched. Salespeople in nine states began pitching the products to hospitals, care homes and other medical facilities, and the company website went live. Her next big step is getting her products covered by insurance companies. She hopes to find an investor, maybe even on her favorite television show, Shark Tank. She has two more patents pending: one for a pediatric drain shirt with a detachable cape, the second for a special bag to hold surgical drains so a patient can shower. I hate cancer so much. It took so much from me. But I have my life, I have my new breasts and I have this new company that is going to help so many people, McCain said. I dont regret it. I wouldnt change anything. Matthias Gafni is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mgafni LOS ANGELES A suspect in the killing of rapper Nipsey Hussle is in custody, authorities said, ending a two-day manhunt. Eric Holder, 29, was arrested in Bellflower on Tuesday afternoon. Los Angeles police detectives went to the L.A. County sheriff's station in Lakewood to verify the identity of the suspect and confirmed to The Times that the man in custody was Holder This comes after a woman who authorities allege was Holder's getaway driver turned herself in. Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday that Holder got into a verbal altercation with Hussle on Sunday afternoon. "Mr. Holder walked up on multiple occasions and engaged in conversations" with the rapper, Moore said. "He came back armed with a handgun" and opened fire, the chief said. Moore said investigators believe the shooting to be the result of a "personal matter between the two of them," but would not elaborate. Moore and Mayor Eric Garcetti both acknowledged a recent uptick in violence, particularly in South Los Angeles, and noted that Hussle's legacy was one of peace. "Nipsey Hussle represents the enormity of the lives we have lost," Moore said. Moore said no one should shelter Holder or the female driver of the car in which he allegedly fled. Moore urged the gunman to surrender. Graphic surveillance camera video shows a gunman walking up to Hussle and two other men standing in front of the shop the rapper owned in a Slauson Avenue strip mall. The gunman then opens fire and Hussle falls to the ground as the other two men run from the gunfire. "Nipsey Hussle was an artist who touched our city and lives far beyond the City of Angels, throughout the country and the world," Garcetti said. The mayor said that the worst way to answer the killing was with more violence and he hopes "the community comes together" to achieve the goals the rapper had set in recent years. "This is about young people of color being able to have opportunities in their lives," he said. Hussle, he said, "was a tireless advocate for the young people of this city and of this world to lift them up with the possibility of not being imprisoned by where you come from or past mistakes but the possibility of what comes in the future." The L.A. County coroner's office said Monday that Hussle died of a gunshot wound to the head. Holder was last seen in a white, four-door 2016 Chevy Cruze, with the license plate number 7RJD742. Police released Holder's name Monday night, when a stampede at a memorial vigil for Hussle led to several injuries. While a member of the crowd shared some words on the late rapper, dozens of people who had gathered outside Hussle's store started running away. People fell on top of each other as they tried to flee amid the dense crowd, many of whom lost their shoes along the way. Numerous police cars and ambulances raced to the scene as officers yelled at people to leave the area. Robert Arcos, an LAPD assistant chief, told the Los Angeles Times that a fight appeared to have started the stampede after one person possibly pulled out a gun. The Los Angeles Fire Department took 19 people to hospitals: two people in critical condition, including one hurt in a car accident; two people with serious injuries; and 15 with non-life-threatening injuries. The majority of the patients suffered injuries related to being trampled when the crowd rushed away. A Times reporter at the scene was also trampled when the crowd ran. Reporters in the area said on social media that authorities had said at least six people were stabbed, which is thought to have caused or contributed to the chaos. 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. Hundreds of novena candles left in memory of Hussle _ who was shot and killed Sunday in broad daylight outside one of his stores in South L.A. in a burst of gunfire that left two other people wounded _ were crushed as people fled. The shards injured several people, and many were limping as they tried to find their way around police barricades. It remains unclear whether anyone was actually stabbed, or if they were injured by broken glass. Moore praised the restraint of the police officers who tried to control the situation. Bottles were thrown at some officers, and a sergeant had to have stitches on a wound to his hand. The LAPD is working with community leaders to clean the area, protect the memorial and make it safe for visitors, Moore said. Hussle made no secret of his early life in a street gang, saying in a 2014 interview with YouTube channel Vlad TV that he had joined the Rollin' 60s, a notorious Crips gang clique, as a teenager. "We dealt with death, with murder," he told the Times in 2018. "It was like living in a war zone, where people die on these blocks and everybody is a little bit immune to it. I guess they call it post-traumatic stress, when you have people that have been at war for such a long time. I think L.A. suffers from that because it's not normal yet we embrace it like it is after a while." Just before the shooting, Hussle tweeted: "Having strong enemies is a blessing." Moore put Hussle's killing in the context of a recent uptick in violence, noting that there have been 26 shootings and 10 homicides in the city since the previous Sunday. "That's 36 families left picking up the pieces," Moore tweeted. "We will work aggressively with our community to quell this senseless loss of life." Hussle had been set to meet with Moore and Police Commission President Steve Soboroff on Monday to talk about solutions to gang violence. "Throughout the years, as he fostered success in his music career, he chose ... to reinvest and try to address the various underpinnings that fostered this environment. It's just terrible," Moore said Monday. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. must comply with a series of new wildfire-prevention requirements or else risk violation of its probation arising from the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion. U.S. District Judge William Alsup decided at a hearing in San Francisco to impose his latest proposal on the utility, which includes making compliance with vegetation management rules a new probation term, among other measures. PG&E had wanted Alsup to let state officials first find it had violated tree-trimming requirements or the companys own fire prevention plan before a probation violation is also triggered. Alsup, who is overseeing the five years probation a different federal judge imposed on PG&E in 2017, rejected the companys request. The truth is, I want to see you succeed, Alsup told PG&Es interim CEO, John Simon, who was at the hearing. I want to see the people of California safe in their homes. I know thats probably what you want. But we got to get there. Alsup noted to Simon the rapidly approaching start of the states traditional wildfire season in a few months, and said that by the end of the year, we will know how many fires your company has started. Im hoping the answer is zero, the judge said. Me too, Simon responded. In a statement after the hearing, PG&E spokesman James Noonan said the company shares the courts commitment to safety. PG&E knows it must play a leading role in reducing the risk of wildfire throughout Northern and Central California, he said. The centerpiece of this effort, Noonan said, is the fire prevention plan the company recently submitted to state regulators and will now be required to comply with as part of its probation. As we informed the court, we remain committed to complying with all rules and regulations and working hard to keep our customers and communities safe, Noonan said in the statement. Additionally, Alsup floated the possibility of extending the term of PG&Es probation by one year but has yet to rule on the idea, instead asking for attorneys involved with the proceedings to respond with written briefings in two weeks. The parties must also respond by that date to a lawyers request that reports from the companys court-imposed monitor be made public. Alsup began considering expanding the utilitys probation terms last year because of its role in recent wildfires that have since led PG&E into bankruptcy court just a few floors down in the same San Francisco courthouse where Alsup presides. The judge originally proposed an ambitious series of proposed conditions that would have required PG&E to inspect and rate the safety of its entire electrical system in the coming months, among other measures. PG&E said that plan was unworkable, estimating the price tag at as much as $150 billion and saying it would require a workforce of more than 650,000 full-time employees. After a hearing earlier this year and a flurry of court filings from various parties, he came back with a more modest proposal. Alsups now-approved plan makes PG&Es full compliance with vegetation management laws part of its probation terms and restricts the companys ability to issue dividends to shareholders. PG&Es tree-trimming program will also be subject to random inspections, along with other requirements. If he finds PG&E violated its probation terms, the judge would have wide latitude to impose even further restrictions on the embattled company, including still stricter government oversight. PG&Es bankruptcy judge has said Alsup could theoretically oust the companys current leadership and put a government trustee in control of the states largest utility. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes At the hearing in January, Alsup found PG&E violated its probation because the company did not properly report a settlement it reached with Butte County regarding a small 2017 wildfire. He has yet to hold a sentencing hearing on that ruling. Alsup has also postponed consideration of requiring PG&E to turn off some of its power lines when dangerously dry and windy weather makes them more likely to start wildfires. At Tuesdays hearing, he said PG&E should consider whether it wants him to make that part of the companys probation terms so that the judge could take the blame if communities complain about the disruptions caused by planned blackouts. Im willing to take that heat, Alsup said. But were not there yet. Earlier in the hearing, the judge had some pointed words for PG&E and its role in the past two seasons of historically devastating wildfires. He accused the company of spending billions of dollars on shareholder dividends in recent years while allowing its vegetation management budget to wither, so that a lot of trees that should have been taken down were not. California is grappling with a wildfire crisis, Alsup said. And PG&E is the single most culpable entity in the mix, he said. Not the only one theres blame to go around for others, too. But PG&E has started way more than its share of these fires. Dario de Ghetaldi, the Bay Area attorney who has sought to make the federal monitors reports public, also wanted Alsup to take a look at the investigation from California Public Utilities Commission staff that said PG&E repeatedly falsified certain gas pipeline safety records for several years. Alsup said he would ask the monitor to evaluate the matter and determine if the court should consider any further probation conditions as a result. J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris NEW YORK (AP) Kellogg is selling its iconic Keebler cookie brand and other sweet snacks businesses to Ferrero for $1.3 billion. The Battle Creek, Michigan-based Kellogg Co. says the brands in the deal generated sales of $900 million and profits of $75 million last year. Kellogg is also selling its Mother's and Famous Amos cookie brands, as well as its fruit-flavored snack, pie crust and ice cream cone businesses. A wave of San Francisco tech companies set to go public is fueling a continued boom in the local office market. Slack, the maker of workplace messaging software, has signed a 205,000-square-foot lease at 45 Fremont St., according to brokerages CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield. The fast-growing company filed earlier this year to go public, joining more than a half-dozen local tech companies aiming to debut on the stock market this year. The Slack deal is the third-largest San Francisco lease this year so far, according to CBRE. Pinterest, which filed to go public in February, signed the biggest deal, taking nearly 490,000 square feet at 88 Bluxome St., an office project that hasnt been approved. Pinterest agreed to pay $420 million in rent between 2022 and 2033, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Uber, expected to be the largest initial public offering with a value exceeding $120 billion, signed a 42,000-square-foot lease at 71 Stevenson St. It also has a new headquarters complex under construction in Mission Bay. Slack declined to comment. Companies collectively leased more than 2.2 million square feet of office space in San Francisco in the first three months of 2019, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Asking rents for the highest-quality office space, known as Class A in the industry, hit a new record high of $84.16 per square foot annually in the central business district, where the vacancy rate is below 5 percent. Other office deals include leases by Google, software company Asana, and Samsara, which builds sensors for vehicles and industrial uses. Companies want to expand here as the Bay Area remains the global center for tech talent, said Robert Sammons, Northwest research director at Cushman & Wakefield. With very little space available immediately, they will all have to consider alternatives unless they are looking toward the middle of the next decade. That future expansion location decision may mean Oakland or San Jose or beyond the Bay Area. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes The cheaper cost of offices and housing is prompting tech companies to expand in smaller cities. Lyft, which went public last week, has its second-largest office hub in Nashville, where rents are under $30 per square foot more than 60 percent lower than San Francisco. Slack has opened an office in Denver after receiving $10.6 million in incentives from the state of Colorado. Other cities are being competitive and aggressive in trying to lure tech companies, Sammons said. We expect to see more of that. Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com A Lafayette man was arrested for repeatedly poisoning his female colleague at an engineering lab, authorities said Monday. David Xu, a 34-year-old engineer at Berkeley Engineering and Research, is accused of adding toxic amounts of cadmium, a heavy metal, to his co-workers water bottle for nearly a year and a half. The Alameda County district attorneys office charged Xu on Thursday with attempted murder and two counts of felony poisoning. The victim told Berkeley police she had noticed unusual tastes and smells in her food and water after leaving them unattended in the office. She had significant health issues right after consuming the food or water, according to court documents. Two other victims related to the woman drank from her water bottle when she brought it home from work on two separate occasions late last year, and both suffered health problems immediately after ingesting the water, officials said. Cadmium is a heavy metal that is a known carcinogen, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If ingested in large doses, it could severely irritate the stomach and lead to vomiting and diarrhea. Long-term exposure could lead to lung damage, fragile bones or kidney disease. Investigators said blood samples from the three victims tested positive for elevated amounts of cadmium. Water from the original victims water bottle tested positive for a toxic amount of cadmium on two separate occasions. The victim reviewed a surveillance camera in her office and located video evidence of Xu adding a substance to her water bottle on two separate occasions, according to court documents. Berkeley Engineering and Research did not immediately return a request for comment. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. The Berkeley Police Department declined to comment. Xu is being held at Berkeley City Jail without bail. He was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday. Gwendolyn Wu is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gwendolynawu In the run-up to trial, defense attorneys for the two men charged in the deadly Ghost Ship fire cultivated a public defense strategy around one central argument: Their clients were scapegoats in the warehouse inferno that killed 36 people because Oakland officials were negligent in enforcing the citys fire code. The centerpiece to the defenses strategy will likely be presented to a jury as well, after presiding Judge Trina Thompson on Tuesday the first official day of the long-awaited Ghost Ship criminal trial said shed allow cover-up arguments, with some limitations. Thompson, sitting in an Alameda County Superior courthouse in downtown Oakland, heard motions on potential witnesses and evidence, while jury selection and opening statements wont begin for weeks. Defendants Derick Almena, 48, and Max Harris, 29, are each charged with 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the Dec. 2, 2016 fire. One of the more contested motions Tuesday came from prosecutor Autrey James, who said the defenses cover-up and scapegoat themes are not relevant to the case. James said the defense wants to extend the cover-up accusations to prosecutors and argue that Almena and Harris were improperly charged. We cant even defend that, James said, noting that prosecutors are barred from discussing charging decisions. Defense attorney Curtis Briggs, who represents Harris, said the defense team Tony Serra is serving as Almenas personal attorney cannot divorce the investigation from the subsequent charges. In our eyes, there has absolutely been a cover-up, Briggs said. Both Briggs and Serra have argued that Oakland officials were negligent in their duties to inspect city properties. They have noted that police, firefighters and other officials visited the Ghost Ship warehouse on multiple occasions prior to the blaze, but no one flagged the space for danger. Almena was the master tenant of the artist collective, while Harris acted as its creative director. There is a smoking gun, in a sense, in the Ghost Ship fire, Briggs said. The deadly blaze, he added, wouldnt have happened if the city did one-tenth of their job. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Earlier in the day, attorneys for Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Facebook appeared before Thompson in an effort to quash subpoenas to testify. Their motions will be heard April 11. Thompson said she would not restrict the defense team from using the cover-up and scapegoat lines in closing arguments, as long as they were reasonable. She cautioned the attorneys not to lose focus on the case at hand against Almena and Harris. Passions are going to run high in this case, thats obvious, Thompson said. The biggest concern is that the sideshow might become the show. The judge granted, in part, the prosecutions motion to restrict mentions during opening statements, and said the prosecution should object in a timely manner if they felt the cover-up arguments were improper elsewhere. Thompson additionally outlined the next months schedule. Jury selection is scheduled to begin April 8, with opening statements following on April 30. Witness testimony is scheduled to begin May 6. Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy Jiggling stacks of Japanese pancakes are about to flood Instagram feeds. Popular Japanese chain Gram Cafe & Pancakes will open its first U.S. outpost in San Franciscos Stonestown Galleria on Friday. Located on the ground floor of the mall near Nordstrom, the all-day cafe occupies a hefty, 2,700-square-foot space, outfitted with a fake tree and a giant stack of plush pancakes primed for selfies. Will there be lines? You bet. The first Gram Cafe opened in Osaka in 2014. Now, there are more than 60 across Japan, Thailand and Hong Kong, with locations planned for Singapore, Indonesia and Australia. San Francisco resident Dorothy Wong, a former pastry chef, owns the Gram franchise in California, licensing the name from the Japanese company. San Francisco has a proven affinity for Japanese restaurant chains like Ippudo and Marugame Udon, which is part of what made it seem like a promising candidate for Grams first American location. Janelle Bitker / The Chronicle On a recent trip to Japan, she tasted the souffle pancakes from Gram and decided it was the perfect thing to bring back to the Bay Area. Everything from Japan is detail and quality, she said. At Stonestown, diners will need to line up for tickets to access those coveted souffle pancakes ($16 for three). Only 30 orders will be available at three times per day: 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Its not a gimmick, Wong said. Its not like we want people to stand in line. It has to be precise, delicate, labor intensive. These souffle pancakes are made to order, and Wong estimates they take about 30 minutes to prepare. The process takes over almost the entire kitchen: Chefs pipe the stiff, egg white-rich batter into tall paper molds on the griddle, then cover each with a dome-shaped lid to create steam. Gram chef Teruyuki Yasumura flew in from Japan to train the staff, demonstrating how to carefully pipe, flip and cover to ensure an evenly cooked, unusually fluffy and extra tall pancake. He places three on top of one another just so, ensuring an eye-catching jiggle without any toppling over. Janelle Bitker / The Chronicle The pancakes are finished with a dusting of powdered sugar, a sphere of butter and dollop of whipped cream. Then, servers will rush them over to guests before they start to slowly cool and collapse. Gram sparked a souffle pancake craze in Japan, and the trend has recently begun to hit the U.S. In San Francisco, Sugarhill Kitchen and Derm Restaurant are already serving them, but Wong is confident Gram will stand apart. This is the original, she said. More Information Gram Cafe & Pancakes: 3251 20th Ave., Suite 172, in Stonestown Galleria, San Francisco. Open Monday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., beginning April 5. Hours are subject to change. See More Collapse Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. When Grams cooks arent busy managing the souffle pancake rush, theyll serve a variety of other pancake and French toast dishes. The regular pancakes are slightly chewier than the classic American style, with a more egg-forward flavor. On the sweet side, they might be turned into a stack of red bean matcha pancakes ($16), layered with matcha mascarpone cream and mochi its a special only available in San Francisco. Savory options include taco pancakes ($17), loaded with spicy beans, lime and chips, and an eggs Benedict ($18) with smoked salmon and turkey bacon. To drink, there are smoothies, beer, wine and espresso drinks using Sightglass Coffee. Wong expects to open a total of 12 locations across California, with a maximum of six in the Bay Area. She hopes the second cafe will land in Cupertino, and perhaps another in Berkeley further down the line. But first, San Francisco. Is the team ready for the crowds to descend? Wong laughed. Were so worried already. Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker Thinking the writer might be receptive to this kind of stuff, Will Durst sent a sprinkling of one-liners that, shall we say, reflected negatively on Donald Trump. But since it is spring and I have been delighted for days at the sight of a blooming tree on my deck, I am going to try to look at the brighter side. The greeting on Dursts email said: Have a terrific spring. Hope its idyllic, bucolic and rustic, all the icks, except soporific, spastic, plastic, caustic and drastic, that is. We sure deserve some nice weather. So, with Earth Day a few weeks away, we turn today to climate change. At a small table at one edge of the reception before The Chronicles VisionSF dinner sat Charlotte Shultz, who was to be honored that night with a lifetime achievement award, and her husband, stalwart Republican George Shultz, alongside retired Marine Maj. Gen. Mike Myatt, a Visionary nominee, and his wife, Wendy. George Shultz has had a distinguished and fulfilling career, tackling major national and global issues military, economic, political and is now settled in professionally at the Hoover Institution and settled in personally at the side of his dynamo wife. Every time I write about him (which is often, because I enjoy talking with him), left-leaning readers still bearing grudges about past GOP administrations write to express their annoyance. If they heard him talk about the issue hes most concerned with nowadays, they might change their minds. There are things that the federal government should be, but is not, doing, so we need to take action at the state level, he wrote in a note sent the day after the dinner. Shultz cited the March 12 tweet of Mr. Trump (theres no reference anywhere in Shultzs letter to President Trump), in which the president approvingly cited a disaffected environmentalist whod tweeted that The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, its Fake Science. There is no climate crisis. Californians emphatically disagree, Shultz wrote. What the federal government will not do, we in California should do. Climate change will mean that with the planet warming, tropical diseases will spread north, he said, attaching a white paper by Stanford medical school Professor of Developmental Biology Lucy Shapiro. Her scenario diseases spreading rapidly as people become resistant to antibiotics, antivirals and antifungals is fairly terrifying, with quarantine being the only response available to us to prevent the spread of epidemic. A day after the uplifting messages of VisionSF nominees, it was jarring to consider this dystopian forecast. Orange County photographer Carolyn Fox, hired to shoot a wedding, asked the groom, Who did your moms beautiful makeup? Oh, the groom said, we had a friend come over. He does the makeup for female impersonators. From a memo by Chronicle managing editor for all things digital Tim ORourke regarding a Google Trends element that reporters could use for stories: Searches for burritos across the U.S. far outpace searches for camels, zebras or crocodiles. (This shouldnt be surprising. If one needs a burrito, a crocodile wont do. On the other hand, if one meets a crocodile, a burrito might be handy.) 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. As to other inside news, Herb Caen was born April 3, 1916, which, says Abe Battat, makes this his one hundred years plus three dots birthday. Herbs friendly ghost, in coat and tie and Panama hat, will be attending the Giants home Opening Day festivities on Friday, April 5. Thomas McGuire was downtown and listening when an earnest young street activist approached a middle-aged passerby. Do you have five minutes to fight white supremacy? the activist asked. I do that every day, said the pedestrian. How do you do that? asked the activist. By being inferior, said the pedestrian. The fourth session of Camp Tawonga in the Sierra this year will include a pilot program establishing two all-gender cabins one for rising fifth- and sixth-graders, one for rising seventh- and eighth-graders for children who do not identify with traditional binary genders. Organizers say the program is the first of its kind in the country. A notice from the camp says the innovation is aligned with Tawongas mission of encouraging all campers to be their authentic selves. ... Tawonga believes there is not one right way to be a girl or be a boy and encourages all campers to be themselves regardless of what cabin they live in. Leah Garchik is open for business in San Francisco, 415-777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik One afternoon, near my tiny deck in the backyard of the Bedlam Bungalow, the California lilacs bloomed. Friends came over, including fellow Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik. Leah told my son about the columnist Adair Lara, who paid her children five bucks every time they were mentioned in the article. As Aidan never read my column, this had not been a problem. Each Thursday I read my next weeks story to Crazy Mike before it goes to press. I do not read it to my husband, Brian, or my sons, Zane and Aidan, nor my dogs, Buddyboy and Bandit. Maybe I should. But Brian remembers these 30-something years differently. He remembers them as a dance, a tango. I remember them as a fairy tale. Nurse Vivian had three boys: Brother Not X, Brother X and me, who the other two call Brother Y. We grew up in a row house in Ozone Park. On that much we agree, but from there the narratives diverge. Pops notion was that no Irishman ever ruined a good story by sticking to the facts. But each boy exaggerated in a different way. Brother Not X writes a blog, and on the other coast, I tell the tales of the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior. Brother X fancies himself the fact-checker, but if theres one thing that Brother Not X and I agree is that Brother X was the one who told the boys to swim in a circle until the whirlpool crashed Jeannie McCormicks pool. What Brother X doesnt get is that memory only makes the outline. Each of us colors in the book differently. In our marriage, Brian and I call this the Maurice Chevalier Effect. Were like Maurice Chevalier, in the movie Gigi. No longer in his prime, he remembers the decades differently than his love, Hermione Gingold, does. We met at nine. We met at eight. I was on time. No, you were late. Ah yes, I remember it well Brian and I remember our first date vividly, but we no longer agree on what we had for dinner last Wednesday. For the record, we met on Oct. 8, 1985, at my cousin Ritas apartment in Jersey City. Brian wore a charcoal angora sweater, belted at the waist, and Catwoman boots. I wore a blue wool blazer, khakis and a striped red tie. We agree that what ruined Ritas lasagna was the cottage cheese, but from there our narratives diverge. I insist that I chose him, and he insists that he chose me. He remembers that we got married illegally in 1987 in a bar in Chelsea by a priest who got defrocked for it. I remember that we got married in 2008, at the top of the marble staircase at San Francisco City Hall, Aidan and Zane serving as ring bearers. We never remember the mundane the same. A few Sundays ago, after Mass at Most Holy Redeemer, he raised his eyebrows at what he thought was me checking out this guy in a kilt. I shrugged because, the truth is, I have no idea what the guy looks like, but I was checking out his beagle. Please dont be shocked. Im absolutely loyal to my husband, but lately my thoughts have been straying from Buddyboy. It started a few weeks ago, when Aidan asked, What would we be like if we were the kind of family who lived with Siberian huskies instead of lapdogs? Well, thered be a lot more fur, but wed have a better shot at the Iditarod, I said flippantly. But it got me wondering: If we had a German shepherd, would it make us more butch? If we got a bulldog or a poodle, would it improve my French accent? 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. Truth is, we dont choose dogs. Dogs choose us. And greyhounds just dont think that we are their speed. Every one of our companions, from Miss Grrrl to Krypto, has chosen the Fisher-Paulsons because, I suppose, we are lap people. The narratives diverge, but the story remains the same: Two men choose each other and run away to San Francisco. Along the way, more than a dozen dogs choose them. Triplets choose them, for a season. Zane and Aidan choose them, for a lifetime. In this chosen family, theres been a lot of loss, but the underlying theme is joy. You wore a gown of gold. I was all in blue. Am I getting old? Oh, no, not you. How strong you were. How young and gay (And Aidan? If Mr. Brettschneider made you read this for English, I owe you a 10-spot.) Kevin Fisher-Paulsons column appears Wednesdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com WASHINGTON Senate Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican disaster aid bill one that would benefit California wildfire victims, among others saying it doesnt do enough to help hurricane-torn Puerto Rico. The move escalated a fight between Democrats and President Trump, who opposes further rebuilding aid for the U.S. island territory, which was slammed by back-to-back hurricanes in 2017. The 49-44 vote fell short of a majority, much less the 60 votes required to overcome a Democratic filibuster. It sent GOP leaders back to the drawing board but seemed unlikely to kill disaster-aid efforts outright, since there is much political support to send aid to wildfire-ravaged California towns, Southern farmers and Midwestern flood victims. Trump allies, such as Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., are among the strongest backers of the legislation, which has already faced significant delays. The amount of money in dispute is relatively small, but Trump has expressed antipathy toward Puerto Ricos government, and Senate Republicans backed him up for now in denying Democratic demands for more aid to rebuild its badly damaged water systems and to ease the requirement that Puerto Rico financially match a portion of the federal governments aid contribution. Democrats say Trump has been slow to release already-appropriated funding for Puerto Rico and has exhibited little urgency in helping the island. Trump poor-mouthed the islands government at a meeting with Senate Republicans last week and suggested Puerto Rico has gotten too much disaster help compared with states such as Texas, using inflated numbers to make his case. Just as we leave no soldier behind on the battlefield, we help our fellow Americans when theres a disaster, wherever the disaster strikes. We do not abandon them. Period, said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Trump weighed in on Twitter on Monday to preemptively attack Democrats for blocking the measure. Democrats should stop fighting Sen. David Perdues disaster relief bill. They are blocking funding and relief for our great farmers and rural America! Trump tweeted. The $13.5 billion Senate measure mostly mirrors a $14.2 billion measure passed by the House in January, combining aid to Southern farmers, California communities devastated by last years wildfires, and hurricane-hit states such as Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Hurricane-damaged military bases in Florida and North Carolina would receive rebuilding funds. Democrats want to add almost $700 million more to unlock further disaster aid for Puerto Rico and several states, including help to rebuild badly damaged water systems. Democrats are also trying to force the administration to release billions of dollars in rebuilding funds that have already been approved. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the measure is the fastest way to get aid to the hurricane-slammed South and the badly flooded Midwest, along with nutrition aid to Puerto Rico, where food stamp benefits have already been cut. Its our only sure path to making a law with anywhere near the urgency these Americans deserve. It is the only bill on the table with any provision for the Midwest flooding, McConnell said. And its the only bill on the table that could earn a presidential signature in time to deliver urgent relief on the nutrition assistance in Puerto Rico. The political momentum for the measure strongly backed by Trumps allies in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, among other states has only been heightened by massive flooding in Midwestern states such as Nebraska and Iowa, whose nominating caucuses are the first test for Democrats hoping to challenge Trump next year. The GOP measure would make Midwestern states eligible for more aid, and by blocking the bill, Democratic presidential contenders in the Senate are likely to face criticism. Trump has yet to veto a spending bill despite some tough talk, and he has signed off on $600 million to ease food stamp cuts in Puerto Rico. I have taken better care of Puerto Rico than any man ever. We have $91 billion going to Puerto Rico. We have $29 billion to Texas and $12 billion to Florida for the hurricane, Trump said last week. They have to spend the money wisely. They dont know how to spend the money, and theyre not spending it wisely. Trumps $91 billion estimate, said a White House spokesman, includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements. Andrew Taylor is an Associated Press writer. Sandy Huffaker / AFP / Getty Images The recent surge in asylum-seeking migrants from Central America has begun to give President Trump the sort of immigration crisis he was once forced to invent. The trouble is that his answer to the problem at hand promises to accomplish as little as his prescription for the one he fabricated. The mounting numbers of migrant families and children seeking asylum in the United States suggest Trumps immigration crackdown, initiated during a historic lull in illegal border crossings, is failing even on its own questionable terms. The president has responded by vowing to cut off aid to Central America and reviving his threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border. Like the administrations effort to wall off more of the border and its infamous family separations, these measures are irrelevant at best and counterproductive at worst. No resident, worker or visitor in San Francisco is unfamiliar with our pervasive and systemic homelessness crisis. Homelessness has consistently ranked as the publics No. 1 priority. I see firsthand the long-term effects homelessness can have on the trajectory of a young persons life. Investing in youth is vital to ending homelessness for all. According to the May 2017 point-in-time count, 20 percent of San Franciscos homeless population is under the age of 25. Yet just 6 cents of every $1 spent on homelessness programming is directed toward young people. Once on the streets, young people face significant obstacles to leading stable, self-sufficient lives, and the effects of this disconnect grow with time. Each year spent unhoused furthers the disconnect from mainstream employment and education systems, making it harder for young people to re-engage with pathways meant to help them make a positive transition to adulthood. About 50 percent of all people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco first experienced homelessness before the age of 25. On Tuesday members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will cast their final vote on two pieces of legislation that would empower our city to address our homelessness crisis with proven solutions. Introduced by Mayor London Breed, these bills have the potential to shave off up to nine months from the lengthy process of opening navigation centers, city facilities where homeless individuals can stay until the city can make other arrangements for them. Since the first navigation center was opened in 2015, the centers have brought more than 2,200 highly vulnerable people off the streets of San Francisco, 46 percent of whom have exited to stable housing. The first bill declares a shelter crisis in San Francisco, freeing the city from obtaining building permits for homeless shelters. Such permits often take months to acquire and open up the city to public appeals, which can add further delay. The second bill simplifies the citys process for choosing providers to plug into Navigation Centers. The city currently must seek contracts in a time-intensive, one-off basis. Under the new law, departments would be permitted to draw from a pool of vetted organizations each time the need for services arises. Adoption of these laws would have both short- and long-term effects. First, if approved, the largest Navigation Center ever proposed may be up and running significantly faster than usual at Seawall Lot 330, providing refuge to 200 individuals who need quality care the most. Neighbors are fighting this potential new shelter vociferously, raising $40,000 to stop the proposal in its tracks. For us to solve homelessness, we need to share responsibility for delivering solutions. Second, these bills highlight the commitment from our Board of Supervisors and the mayor to set bureaucracy aside in the interest of permanently housing those living on our streets. To that end, Im hopeful that with the passage of these bills we will see swift and immediate action from city leaders to make similar steps toward delivering a long-promised Navigation Center exclusively serving transitional-aged youth experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. Sherilyn Adams is the executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services. The Treasure Island luxury marina project now winding its way through the city of San Francisco approvals process is a boondoggle-in-the-making. The stakes involved in the marina controversy are significant. A project default by the Treasure Island developers could saddle the city with a half-built, money-losing private marina. And, significantly, default would block public access to waters in the heart of Treasure Islands Clipper Cove. Previously off-limits to the public during the years of U.S. Navy control, Clipper Cove is one of San Franciscos new-found gems. Clipper Cove is the largest, most well-protected open-water cove on the city shoreline many times larger and better protected than McCovey Cove by the Giants ballpark. Many also consider this treasure to be the citys most beautiful cove. Last month, the state of California released a loan agreement for the proposed marina at Clipper Cove on Treasure Island that explicitly prohibits the kind of financing scheme set out for the project earlier in the month by the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst Office. The state loan documents also refer to a different, much larger marina than the project analyzed by the city (315 slips versus 220). The critical difference between the two plans lies in the amount of revenue available to pay off the projects financing. It seems that the marina project developers, Treasure Island Enterprises, have been telling one story to the city and a very different story to the state. One of these stories, possibly both, looks to be a fairy tale. The appearance of financial improprieties in this project is particularly disturbing, given the finding by a panel of three retired state judges that the lead developer in the marina project committed fraud, engaged in double-dealing and improperly attempted to claim $43 million from a Native American tribe in a North Bay real estate venture gone bad, as reported by the North Bay Business Journal and detailed further by journalist Peter Byrne. In its marina loan agreement, the state Department of Parks and Recreation placed stiff conditions on state financing for this project as a result of the findings of a 2017 state financial feasibility study that deemed the project to be a significant default risk. Wary of a potential default under which developers could exit unscathed while leaving the state with the bills, the state loan agreement prohibits financial schemes that pile on more debt using the marina as collateral the key instrument in the financing plan city staff propose for the project. Unfortunately, while the states financing requirements go some way to protecting the interests of the state, they dont do anything to protect the interests here in San Francisco. The marina project is set up under a limited liability corporation dedicated exclusively to this project; if the project does default, the developers can simply walk away. Given that the state feasibility study indicates this project will bleed money from the get-go, its not immediately clear why the developers would want to build it. The answer lies on Treasure Island, where billions of dollars are at stake in an enormous residential development in the making. The marina, with slips for boats as large as 80 feet, is intended as a luxury amenity for the future tenants of those condos. In that context, a money-losing marina that helps to sell billions of dollars worth of luxury condos isnt really a money loser at all. In the jargon of the industry, its a loss leader. Whatever the real intent of the project developers may be, city leaders should take a closer look at this project. Of course, what should happen is often different from what does happen, which is how boondoggles are made. Hunter Cutting is a resident of San Francisco and the founder of Save Clipper Cove. His two sons learned to sail through the programs of the Treasure Island Sailing Center at Clipper Cove. SACRAMENTO California will extend its travel ban to a 10th state, prohibiting publicly funded trips to beginning April 15. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra cited a South Carolina law that allows faith-based adoption and foster agencies to reject applicants who do not conform to their religious or moral beliefs. He announced the travel ban Tuesday. The state of South Carolina recently enacted a measure that sanctions discrimination against families in the placement of children in need of homes, Becerra said in a statement. The state of California stands strongly against any form of discrimination. After a contentious debate in North Carolina over which bathrooms transgender people should be allowed to use, California legislators passed a law in 2016 banning publicly funded travel to states that discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Assemblyman Evan Low, the Campbell Democrat who authored the law, said at the time that it would send a signal that we do not tolerate discrimination in our state and beyond our borders. The law forbids state agencies and universities from using taxpayer money to sponsor travel to states with discriminatory laws, though it allows some exceptions for state personnel involved in litigation, revenue collection and business with the federal government. Becerra has since banned state-funded trips to Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas. The South Carolina law on adoptions and foster care was enacted in 2018 through the states budget. It protects organizations such as Miracle Hill, a nonprofit that places children only with foster parents who are Protestant. The organization generated controversy last year for rejecting a Jewish woman who wanted to mentor foster children. The law does not explicitly mention sexual orientation, but Becerras office said the language is broad enough that it could be used to discriminate against LGBT people. Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff WASHINGTON When Fremont Rep. Ro Khanna agreed to be co-chair of Sen. Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, he had a requirement: no mud-slinging against fellow Democrats. Khanna signed on early to Sanders campaign, having also backed the Vermont independent in his 2016 run against Hillary Clinton. But Khanna said part of the deal was that he wouldnt attack other Democrats in the race. Those include at least one candidate from his home state, Sen. Kamala Harris, and probably Rep. Eric Swalwell of Dublin, who is expected to run. I said to Sen. Sanders ... when I accepted this position as co-chair that I would only say positive things about other Democrats running, Khanna said. And I wasnt going to disparage other people, who I think are very talented, but I would stick to making the positive case for him. In a conversation with reporters this week in his Capitol Hill office, the second-term Democrat predicted the primary campaign would be less bitter than the 2016 contest was. Noting that Sanders has been drawing large crowds to campaign events several thousand showed up to see him at San Franciscos Fort Mason last month Khanna said the urgency of beating Trump will keep 2020 less divisive than the past cycle. If I were on some other team, I would say, Well, weve got to be probably pretty nice to Sanders, because if we won the nomination, were going to need that base, Khanna said. So I think that theres a recognition both on Sanders team that were going to need to build a coalition beyond just his supporters and for other people that theyre going to need his supporters. Khanna acknowledged that doesnt mean the primary campaign will stay positive, but said he already has detected less acrimony toward Sanders. He credited that to a variety of factors, including Sanders learning lessons from the last campaign and bringing on a more diverse staff with better infrastructure. I think theres been a softening of the tone in the negativity around Sanders from leadership and people in positions of power, Khanna said. Partly I think thats because theyve seen his success. Partly thats because hes still drawing huge crowds and has huge support. He acknowledged that Sanders isnt universally supported, but added, The anger toward him, I think, has mitigated in the party. Although Khanna says he wont attack other Democrats, he is not afraid to draw policy distinctions with them. He was asked about a proposal from presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to break up big tech companies, some of which are located in Khannas district. I dont think thats effective, and I have a more nuanced view, Khanna said. I dont want all the big tech companies to be Chinese, because youre not going to break up Alibaba, Baidu or Tencent. Khanna said federal tech policy should follow the precedent of the U.S. vs. Microsoft antitrust case and bar companies from using their platforms to benefit their other products at the expense of competition. I would say take that same precedent (and) make sure that companies cant privilege their own platform, Khanna said. One example: It means that Amazon shouldnt be able to privilege Amazon Basics. Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan The Vietnamese ministry wants to boost collaboration in law and justice between the two countries as well as the two ministries, Minister Long affirmed, adding that under a Memorandum of Understanding between the two ministries signed in 2015, both sides have conducted numerous delegation exchanges. He expressed his hope that the MoU will be carried out in a more effective manner to boost mutual understanding as well as experience sharing in law-related fields. He wished that the two justice academies, set up under the two ministries, will enhance connections and have practical activities in jurist training. In addition, he suggested both ministries outline specific cooperation activities as well as build a collaborative plan for 2019-2020. Regarding mutual legal assistance, Minister Long said that two rounds of negotiations on an agreement on mutual judicial assistance in civil and commercial matters were conducted between the two ministries, hoping that both sides will accelerate further the negotiation process so that the agreement will be signed as soon as possible as the number of judicial entrustments between Vietnam and the RoK have increased in recent years. Long took the occasion to ask the RoK Government to create favourable conditions for Vietnamese people living and working in the host nation. The same day in Sejong city, Minister Long had a meeting with RoK Minister of Government Legislation Kim Oe-sook. WASHINGTON The Senate failed to advance a disaster-aid package Monday that includes billions for California wildfire recovery, prolonging a state of limbo for victims nationwide who are waiting for federal help. The Senate voted Monday evening on two approaches to disaster relief, and both failed, largely along party lines. Each bill needed 60 votes to advance, but neither reached even 50. The end result was that the Senate failed to move any proposal for more than $12 billion in relief for wildfires and other disasters from 2017 and 2018, a package that has been mired for months in a disagreement over money for hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky made a procedural move to allow the bills to be considered again after more negotiations. But neither side shows signs of budging, with each accusing the other of playing politics. You dont give up, said Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson, who has been leading the charge to pass a GOP-backed bill. He predicted Republicans would have some leverage as negotiations continue, but wouldnt specify what. The Republican bill is the only reasonable choice, Isakson said. Without it, I dont know what the endgames going to be. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the partys ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, accused Republicans of trying to pick and choose which Americans get relief. Democrats and a handful of Republicans rejected a GOP attempt to replace a House-approved version of the relief package with more money for Midwestern flooding victims and less for Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories. Republicans then blocked the Democratic-backed House bill in a separate vote. Individuals and entities affected by California wildfires would be eligible for a total of up to $7 billion in the House bill and up to $9 billion in the Senate GOP bill, according to a Senate Democratic aide who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide background information. The votes leave the Senate back where it started after the House passed its measure in January with no deal and no immediate prospect of reconciling the disagreement over aid for Puerto Rico. President Trump has opposed sending more money to the island territory, arguing it has gotten too much already in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, which killed an estimated 3,000 people. Last week, Trump brought a chart to a meeting with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill to argue that Puerto Rico has received more than $90 billion in relief. Democrats say the total is less than half that and that Trumps opposition to more aid is rooted either in politics or racism. Republicans noted that their package that failed to advance Monday did include $600 million for Puerto Ricos food stamp program, which has run out of money. By rejecting the Republican proposal, which McConnell declared was the only game in town, Democrats prevented it from going to a conference negotiation with the House. Any legislation the Senate passed that did not match the House version would have to be reconciled in such a committee of representatives of the two chambers. Republicans also blocked a Democratic attempt to change the House-passed bill by adding flood-relief money without reducing funding for Puerto Rico. A spokesman for the Democratic-controlled House Appropriations Committee said the House would not accept what Republican senators have proposed. Democrats say it lacks millions for water infrastructure, Medicaid assistance and other federal-funding coverage that Puerto Rico and other territories need. The Republican version won the backing of just one Democrat on Monday, Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein voted against it and for the House-passed bill, which won no Republican support. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., was absent from the Capitol for presidential campaign events in Sacramento and Nevada. Its time to stop playing politics with victims of disasters, Feinstein said in a statement after the votes. Families that lost everything whether in a wildfire, hurricane or flood shouldnt be used as political bargaining chips. ... Its time we pass an emergency supplemental bill that includes funding for all disaster victims. Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan LOS ANGELES A suspect in the killing of rapper Nipsey Hussle is in custody, authorities said, ending a two-day manhunt. Eric Holder, 29, was arrested in Bellflower on Tuesday afternoon. Los Angeles police detectives went to the L.A. County sheriff's station in Lakewood to verify the identity of the suspect and confirmed to The Times that the man in custody was Holder This comes after a woman who authorities allege was Holder's getaway driver turned herself in. Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday that Holder got into a verbal altercation with Hussle on Sunday afternoon. "Mr. Holder walked up on multiple occasions and engaged in conversations" with the rapper, Moore said. "He came back armed with a handgun" and opened fire, the chief said. Moore said investigators believe the shooting to be the result of a "personal matter between the two of them," but would not elaborate. Moore and Mayor Eric Garcetti both acknowledged a recent uptick in violence, particularly in South Los Angeles, and noted that Hussle's legacy was one of peace. "Nipsey Hussle represents the enormity of the lives we have lost," Moore said. Moore said no one should shelter Holder or the female driver of the car in which he allegedly fled. Moore urged the gunman to surrender. Graphic surveillance camera video shows a gunman walking up to Hussle and two other men standing in front of the shop the rapper owned in a Slauson Avenue strip mall. The gunman then opens fire and Hussle falls to the ground as the other two men run from the gunfire. "Nipsey Hussle was an artist who touched our city and lives far beyond the City of Angels, throughout the country and the world," Garcetti said. The mayor said that the worst way to answer the killing was with more violence and he hopes "the community comes together" to achieve the goals the rapper had set in recent years. "This is about young people of color being able to have opportunities in their lives," he said. Hussle, he said, "was a tireless advocate for the young people of this city and of this world to lift them up with the possibility of not being imprisoned by where you come from or past mistakes but the possibility of what comes in the future." The L.A. County coroner's office said Monday that Hussle died of a gunshot wound to the head. Holder was last seen in a white, four-door 2016 Chevy Cruze, with the license plate number 7RJD742. Police released Holder's name Monday night, when a stampede at a memorial vigil for Hussle led to several injuries. While a member of the crowd shared some words on the late rapper, dozens of people who had gathered outside Hussle's store started running away. People fell on top of each other as they tried to flee amid the dense crowd, many of whom lost their shoes along the way. Numerous police cars and ambulances raced to the scene as officers yelled at people to leave the area. Robert Arcos, an LAPD assistant chief, told the Los Angeles Times that a fight appeared to have started the stampede after one person possibly pulled out a gun. The Los Angeles Fire Department took 19 people to hospitals: two people in critical condition, including one hurt in a car accident; two people with serious injuries; and 15 with non-life-threatening injuries. The majority of the patients suffered injuries related to being trampled when the crowd rushed away. A Times reporter at the scene was also trampled when the crowd ran. Reporters in the area said on social media that authorities had said at least six people were stabbed, which is thought to have caused or contributed to the chaos. Hundreds of novena candles left in memory of Hussle _ who was shot and killed Sunday in broad daylight outside one of his stores in South L.A. in a burst of gunfire that left two other people wounded _ were crushed as people fled. The shards injured several people, and many were limping as they tried to find their way around police barricades. It remains unclear whether anyone was actually stabbed, or if they were injured by broken glass. Moore praised the restraint of the police officers who tried to control the situation. Bottles were thrown at some officers, and a sergeant had to have stitches on a wound to his hand. The LAPD is working with community leaders to clean the area, protect the memorial and make it safe for visitors, Moore said. Hussle made no secret of his early life in a street gang, saying in a 2014 interview with YouTube channel Vlad TV that he had joined the Rollin' 60s, a notorious Crips gang clique, as a teenager. "We dealt with death, with murder," he told the Times in 2018. "It was like living in a war zone, where people die on these blocks and everybody is a little bit immune to it. I guess they call it post-traumatic stress, when you have people that have been at war for such a long time. I think L.A. suffers from that because it's not normal yet we embrace it like it is after a while." Just before the shooting, Hussle tweeted: "Having strong enemies is a blessing." Moore put Hussle's killing in the context of a recent uptick in violence, noting that there have been 26 shootings and 10 homicides in the city since the previous Sunday. "That's 36 families left picking up the pieces," Moore tweeted. "We will work aggressively with our community to quell this senseless loss of life." Hussle had been set to meet with Moore and Police Commission President Steve Soboroff on Monday to talk about solutions to gang violence. "Throughout the years, as he fostered success in his music career, he chose ... to reinvest and try to address the various underpinnings that fostered this environment. It's just terrible," Moore said Monday. FERGUSON, Mo. Michael Browns mother could soon have oversight over the police department connected to her sons death, if voters in Ferguson, Mo., elect her to the City Council. Lesley McSpadden, 39, is among three candidates running in Fergusons 3rd Ward on Tuesday. She faces incumbent Keith Kallstrom and Fran Griffin, who has been active on several boards in the St. Louis suburb, where two-thirds of the 21,000 residents are black. Brown, a black 18-year-old, was fatally shot by white Ferguson officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014, touching off months of protests and violence. Wilson claimed he was forced to shoot when the unarmed Brown came at him menacingly after attacking the officer during a street confrontation. A St. Louis County grand jurys November 2014 decision not to indict Wilson sparked renewed unrest. I wanted to go back and do something right in a place that did something so very wrong to my son, and I think thats what my son would want as well, McSpadden said. McSpadden is new at being a candidate but has been at the edge of politics since her sons death. Shes been front-and-center in the national Black Lives Matter movement. She endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in early 2016, at a time when Clinton was fending off a primary challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. She was among seven Mothers of the Movement who appeared on stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2016. Those mothers lost children in police shootings, in police custody or from gun violence. Also in 2016, McSpadden testified in favor of a Missouri Senate bill aimed at increasing use of police body cameras. In the aftermath of Browns death, Fergusons criminal justice system drew heavy criticism for its treatment of poor and minority residents. Police were accused of singling out blacks for unnecessary traffic stops and harassing them on the street. The municipal court was accused of heaping on fines for minor offenses. McSpadden said she wants police to build a stronger relationship with the community and engage with young people, not just when something bad happens and youre pressured to do it, but to be that civil servant in the community that you signed up to be. Jim Salter is an Associated Press writer. Opinion Policies Editorials are longer opinion pieces that are written by a group of community members recruited across campus who address relevant issues on a local, national and international level. Editorials are research-based. The purpose of the Editorial Board is to promote discussion concerning relevant issues in the community while advising on possible solutions. Topics are chosen via relevancy and interests of the members, which are then discussed by the Editorial Board in order to reach a general consensus concerning the topic or issue. Feedback policy If you have a grievance concerning the content or argument of the Editorial Board, please contact either Opinion Editor Peyton Hamel (peyton.hamel@iowastatedaily.com) or the Editorial Board as a whole (editorialboard@iowastatedaily.com). Those wanting to respond to editorials can also submit a letter to the editor through the Iowa State Daily website or by emailing the letter to Opinion Editor Peyton Hamel (peyton.hamel@iowastatedaily.com) or Editor-in-Chief Sage Smith (sage.smith@iowastatedaily.com). Column Policy Columns are hyper-specific to opinion and are written by only columnists employed by the Iowa State Daily. Columnists are unique because they have a specific writing day and only publish on those writing days. Each column undergoes a thorough editing process ensuring the integrity of the writer, and their claim is maintained while remaining research-based and respectful. Columns may be submitted from community members. These are labelled as Guest Columns. These contain similar research-based content and need to be at least 400 words in length. The following requirements should be met: first and last name, email and relation or position to Iowa State. Emails must be tied to the submitted guest column or it will not be accepted or published. Pseudonyms are prohibited and the writer will be banned from submissions. Read our full Opinion Policies here. Updated on 10/7/2020 LOS ANGELES The Beverly Hills Hotel has long been a refuge where Hollywood could both hide and show its true self. Where actors could retreat from scandal, divorce, a botched plastic surgery. From Elizabeth Taylor celebrating six of her eight honeymoons there to Donald Trump holing up with Stormy Daniels in one of its famous curbside bungalows, the Pink Palace on Sunset Boulevard has remained at the heart of Hollywood since the beginning. No one much noticed when the Sultan of Brunei bought the hotel in 1996. Even fewer would have connected that meal at the Polo Lounge with the tiny, oil-rich autocracy halfway around the world. In a recent announcement, Brunei says it will stone to death anyone charged with adultery or homosexuality, in accordance with Shariah law, beginning Wednesday. In a column for Deadline on Thursday, George Clooney called for a boycott of the hotel, the Bel Air Hotel and seven others in Europe owned by the sultan, who holds supreme power in Brunei. Theyre nice hotels, Clooney wrote. The people who work there are kind and helpful and have no part in the ownership of these properties. But lets be clear, every single time we stay at or take meetings at or dine at any of these nine hotels we are putting money directly into the pockets of men who choose to stone and whip to death their own citizens for being gay or accused of adultery. Along with other outspoken stars such as Meryl Streep, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Clooney holds to the view that he should use his high profile to advocate for dis-empowered people around the world. He has fought for gay rights, organized a telethon to help earthquake victims in Haiti and spent over a decade trying to stop genocide and famine in Sudan. A tropical nation roughly half the size of Los Angeles County, Brunei is wedged between two Malaysian states on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo. The former British colony got rich exporting oil and gas starting nearly a century ago, and its royal family invested much of the proceeds overseas, including in iconic hotels. The income has allowed Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, the ruler of Brunei, to provide a high standard of living for his people, including free education and health care, minimal taxes, and government jobs and pensions for almost everyone. Some see the Shariah law push as an attempt to quiet dissent while shoring up the support of a largely conservative citizenry. Joe Mozingo, Shashank Bengali and Ben Poston are Los Angeles Times writers. Apple Pay continues to expand across Europe, and further out, as support for the mobile payment option arrives at banks like Westpac, ING, Bank Millennium, and more. Apple has garnered support for its mobile payment option in a variety of new banks across Europe and in New Zealand recently. One of the more notable new additions is Westpac in New Zealand, because that particular banking establishment has denied Apple Pay access to its customers in Australia in the past. The bank has said in the past that it is open to the idea of Apple Pay support at a later date, though, so perhaps support in New Zealand is an indication things will change in Australia, too. For Westpac customers in New Zealand, if you use Apple Pay five times over the course of the next month, the bank will give you back $10 and donate $10 to charity as well. Meanwhile, across Europe, there are new banks in several different countries. In Spain, for instance, ING now supports Apple Pay for customers. And in Germany, banking customers at Viabuy and Consors Finanz can now use Apple Pay. Bank Millennium in Poland, Arbejdernes Landsbank and Spar Nord in Norway, and Aktia in Finald now support the mobile payment option as well. Monese customers in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom also have support. Danske Bank, where available, will add Apple Support later this year. Back in February, Apple Pay arrived in the Czech Republic. And the mobile payment option is still slated to arrive in Greece, Portugal, Austria, Estonia, and others in the near future. And for customers in the United States who are interested in a brand new Apple-branded credit card, the Apple Card launches later this year. Our Take So, good news for folks who use these banking establishments who have been waiting for Apple Pay support to arrive. The mobile payment option is one of the biggest services that Apple has to offer these days, and it is obviously one of the most popular mobile payments out there right now. We Want To Hear From You How often do you use Apple Pay? Does your bank still not support the mobile payment option? [via MacRumors A resident of New Jersey is moving forward with a class action lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of breaching its warranty with the Apple Watch, as well as fraudulent business practices. According to court documentation obtained by MacRumors, Apple is facing a class action lawsuit brought against it in U.S. District Court, established by NJ resident Gina Priano-Keyser. According to the documentation, Priano-Keysers argument is that in Apple Watch models leading up to the Series 4, the smartwatch is prone to a defect that can lead to the lithium-ion battery inside swelling. That larger battery can then lead the Apple Watchs screen to crack, shatter, or detach from the body through no fault of the wearer, oftentimes only days or weeks after purchase. The plaintiff believes that Apple either knew or should have known that the Apple Watch models were defective before selling them, adding that they pose a significant safety hazard to consumers a number of which have suffered cuts and burns as a result of the scratched, shattered, or detached screens. Priano-Keyser states that she purchased an Apple Watch Series 3 in October 2017. In July 2018, while charging, she alleges that the screen unexpectedly detached from the watchs body and cracked. Her daughter pushed the screen back into place, but the Apple Watch has been unusable ever since. Priano-Keyser says that she booked a Genius Bar appointment in August of last year to look at the swollen battery in her Apple Watch. However, according to the plaintiff, Apple denied the free repair under warranty and quoted Priano-Keyser for a repair that would cost $229. Going further, the complaint cites a variety of other reports from Apple Watch owners who have experienced similar issues in the past. As is par for the course with other class action lawsuits, Priano-Keyser is seeking damages that will be determined in court, not just for herself but for all the other owners who have been plagued by the issue. This particular class action lawsuit covers owners, both past and present in New Jersey, who have owned the Series 1, Series 2, and the Series 3 purchased in the same state. If all of this sounds somewhat familiar, its because this is not the first time that Apple has been sued for defects in Apple Watch models. A class action lawsuit was levied against the company last year, but that one was ultimately thrown out of court for being vague. Its worth noting here that this specific lawsuit was filed by Shepherd, Finkelman, Miller & Shah, LLP the same group that filed that lawsuit back in 2018. Our Take Apple has, for its part, has acknowledged that it is possible for the lithium ion battery in the Apple Watch to swell, which can case damage. However, the companys repair policy should cover any issues. Of course, Priano-Keyser tried to get that done, and when that didnt work out she went down this legal path. Whatever happens next, it will be interesting to see how it goes down. We Want To Hear From You Have you run into any issues, hardware wise, with your Apple Watch? [via MacRumors A Bloomberg report says that Foxconn will start trial production of iPhone X in India within weeks. The trial production run would happen before Foxconn starts mass production of high-end iPhones in its factory located outside of Chennai. While not clearly mentioned in the report, it looks like Foxconn will also be producing the iPhone XS series for Apple in India. Foxconn is Apples largest vendor and will be investing around $300 million for setting up a production line for Apple. It would then expand the production capacity and the investment as demand ramps up. Foxconn and Apple will be using this factory to fulfill the demand for iPhones in India and export them to other neighboring markets. Foxconn already assembles smartphones for a number of Android OEMs in India including Xiaomi and OnePlus. The report also says that Apple has started producing iPhone 7 in India which was confirmed by the company in a statement. Apples manufacturing partner Wistron is producing iPhone 7 from its Bengaluru facility. Wistron has so far been manufacturing the iPhone SE, iPhone 6/6s for Apple in India. We are proud to be producing iPhone 7 in Bengaluru for our local customers, furthering our long-term commitment in India, an Apple spokesperson said in a statement. By moving the production of new iPhones to India, Apple is hoping to enjoy some cost and duty benefits. This will allow it to reduce iPhone prices in the country which should help boost the flagging iPhone sales in the region. The move will also help Apple in diversifying its supply-chain and move it out of China. This will ensure that if the trade war between the U.S. and China intensifies, iPhone pricing would not be affected by much. Our Take The absurdly high prices of newer iPhones in India has led Apple to lose out to the likes of Samsung and OnePlus in the high-end smartphone market in India. iPhone sales in India have crashed to their lowest in years due to extremely high prices of newer models like the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. It remains to be seen as to how much Apple reduces the iPhone prices in India later this year once Foxconn starts mass producing the iPhone X/XS in the country. [Via Bloomberg Its a grim conundrum plaguing communities throughout the state: Everyone agrees that homelessness is a problem and that shelters and service centers would help get people off the streets. But other residents say they dont want such facilities to be built anywhere near them. A version of this problem has sprung up in San Francisco and, because its San Francisco, its been heightened by the influence of tech money. My colleague Mike Isaac, who covers tech, wrote about the fight: It began as a disagreement between homeowners and the city. By late last week, that disagreement swelled into a full-fledged battle between groups of San Francisco residents over what to do with a center intended to provide shelter and resources for the homeless. More for you Homeless man wins fight to use luxury San Jose hotel's restroom The debate is centered around a plan by Mayor London Breed, who has proposed the city should erect a Navigation Center for the homeless on a stretch of vacant land near the city shoreline. The center, which would offer roughly 225 beds and other resources to the homeless, would be situated at Seawall Lot 330, a 2.3-acre parcel currently being used as a parking lot, sitting off the Embarcadero near the Bay Bridge. But a group of homeowners in nearby luxury apartments arent having it. Residents in the Rincon Hill and South of Market areas have banded together to oppose the Navigation Center, claiming that it would turn the area into a dirty, dangerous neighborhood. Members of the group have flooded into community hearings and meetings to voice concerns. To further the cause, the group started an online crowdfunding page under the name Safe Embarcadero for All. The groups GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $80,000 to hire a lawyer to push back against the city. As news of the GoFundMe hit the internet in a San Francisco Chronicle article last week, other San Francisco residents took umbrage with the groups goal. William Fitzgerald, a local community activist and supporter of building resource centers for San Franciscos upward of 7,000 homeless citizens, decided to build his own GoFundMe. Fitzgeralds competing campaign, A Safer Embarcadero for All, intended to raise funds to support the building of the Navigation Center in the area. Fitzgeralds GoFundMe page went up Thursday. By Friday, the group had raised tens of thousands of dollars, and was steadily gaining more supporters as word of the effort spread virally. Marc Benioff, the tech billionaire and founder of Salesforce, donated $10,000 to Fitzgeralds campaign. The co-founders of Twilio matched Benioff with thousands of their own. Hours later, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, donated $25,000 of his own money to the project. The issue is far from settled, as both groups continue to jockey for support both for and against the project. But at least one of them has pulled ahead: By Monday afternoon, the Safer campaign had managed to raise $145,000, outraising the opposing campaign by $60,000 in roughly a third of the time. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A federal judge in San Francisco on Tuesday imposed on PG&E Co. a series of new probation conditions aimed at preventing deadly wildfires. The conditions set by U.S. District Judge William Alsup require the utility to obey state laws and its own plan on trimming trees that could lead to fires, hire enough staff to do so, suspend shareholder dividends until that is done and submit to unannounced inspections by a monitor. Alsup told Interim PG&E Chief Executive Officer John Simon and other utility representatives at a hearing, "I want to see you succeed and I want to see the people of California safe in their homes. I think you want that too. PG&E shouldn't be starting these fires." The judge ordered the conditions as part of PG&E's probation in a criminal pipeline safety case in which it was convicted of violating safety regulations and obstructing a probe of a fatal natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno in 2010. The utility has already suspended dividends since late 2017 because of its potential liability for North Bay wildfires in 2017 and the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, in which 88 people died. PG&E is currently in a federal Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, which enables the company to freeze its debts while developing a financial reorganization plan. PG&E said in a statement, "We share the court's commitment to safety and understand that we must play a leading role in reducing the risk of wildfire throughout Northern and Central California." The utility said it is centering its efforts on its new Wildfire Safety Plan, which it has submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission and to Alsup. "As we informed the court, we remain committed to complying with all rules and regulations and working hard to keep our customers and communities safe," the statement said. Tuesday's order, which was proposed by Alsup on March 5, is scaled back from a more drastic proposal Alsup issued in January. In the earlier proposal, Alsup said he was considering requiring PG&E to inspect its entire electrical service area in Northern and Central California and either remove all trees that could fall on lines and repair all damaged equipment or turn off power during high winds. PG&E responded in January that removing all trees that could bend or break over power lines in its 70,000-square-mile area would cost $100 billion and would not be feasible. The order signed by Alsup on Tuesday delays a decision on whether the utility should be required to turn off power in vulnerable areas in high winds. PG&E and the CPUC have told the judge that turning off power except as a last resort could endanger public safety. The utility's five-year probation was imposed by now-retired U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson during its 2017 sentencing for its 2016 conviction. After Henderson retired, Alsup took over supervising the probation. Alsup charged during the hearing that PG&E gave shareholders several billion dollars in dividends in recent years while letting its tree-trimming budget "wither." He said Cal Fire has found that PG&E's electrical equipment caused most of the North Bay fires in 2017. The agency has not yet announced the cause of the fatal Butte County fire in November 2018, but PG&E has said it believes an equipment failure on a high-voltage transmission tower in the Sierra Nevada foothills will be found to have triggered the blaze. In a separate probation matter, Alsup has found that PG&E violated an already existing condition by failing to report to its federal probation officer that it reached a $1.5 million settlement with the Butte County district attorney in connection with the Honey Fire in that county on Oct. 9, 2017. No one was injured in that fire. The judge said he will sentence the utility for that violation at a later date. He also said he is considering extending the probation for another year because of the violation, and instructed PG&E and federal prosecutors to submit briefs on whether he should do that. 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 40-year-old man was arrested Monday after an alleged carjacking that occurred after he met up with the victim in San Francisco's Mission District to discuss a sale of the vehicle, police said. The theft occurred around 6:30 p.m. in the area of 19th and Capp streets. The 25-year-old victim met with the suspect to discuss the potential sale, but the suspect drove away in the vehicle. Police eventually located the vehicle and suspect, whose name has not been released. The victim suffered a laceration to his hand in the exchange, but declined medical treatment, according 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. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) San Francisco Mayor London Breed kicked off the start of Earth Month on Monday by announcing major milestones in the city's effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Speaking outside of The New Wheel bicycle shop in the Bernal Heights neighborhood, Breed said the city's community energy program CleanPowerSF is set to enroll 250,000 more customers by the end of April, bringing the total number of enrollees to 360,000. Created in 2016, CleanPowerSF provides electricity from renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, biogas and small-hydro. "From the devastating forest fires throughout our state to the historic flooding that is affecting our friends in the north, we know that climate change has real-life and tragic consequences that will only get worse if we don't act," Breed said. "When you combine all of these new residents and businesses being powered by CleanPowerSF, with places like City Hall and the airport, which already have 100 percent green Hetch Hetchy power, the city will meet 80 percent of its electricity demand in San Francisco. That's 80 percent of the city receiving clean renewable energy from a local utility with public oversight. How amazing is that?" she said. Breed said she hopes to have the entire city running on renewable energy by 2050. "Those are really bold commitments, but in San Francisco, over the years, we have backed up all of our talk with a lot of action," she said. Delivering another major announcement for the first day of Earth Month, Breed said, "I'm proud to announce San Francisco has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions 36 percent below 1990 levels. "This reduction has exceeded expectations and has happened at the same time that the city increased its population by 22 percent and our economy has increased by 166 percent," she said. Breed also declared the launch of San Francisco's Inaugural Month of Climate Action, with the San Francisco Department of Environment unveiling a new online database listing environmental activities happening throughout the city this month. That database can be found at www.sfenvironment.org/climateaction. "Taking care of our planet is not just about signing up for CleanPowerSF and other great policies, it's also about the great work to take care of our environment," she said. With PG&E having recently filed for bankruptcy amid accusations that the public utility company is responsible for recent Northern California wildfires, city leaders have been pushing for residents to sign up for CleanPowerSF. Residents and business that sign up are automatically enrolled in CleanPowerSF's Green program, which is made up of 48 percent renewable energy sources. Additionally, for a few more dollars a month, residents and businesses can opt in to the SuperGreen program, which provides 100 percent renewable energy. The New Wheel, which specializes in electric bicycles, is a customer of CleanPowerSF's SuperGreen program. "We really are so optimistic about the future of San Francisco and the future of our earth because we know that the choices that we make make a big difference," said Karen Wiener, co-owner of The New Wheel. 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. Firefighters are still putting out hot spots at a three-alarm business warehouse fire in Oakland that began Monday morning. The blaze impacted power lines and caused about 16,000 Comcast customers to lose service, according to Comcast spokeswoman Joan Hammel. Crews are working on running a temporary service line to affected areas to restore service by 6 p.m. The fire likely spread from a debris pile on Solano Way behind the American Emperor business at 1900 E. 12th St. into the building at about 8:30 a.m., according to Oakland Fire Battalion Chief Melissa Drayton. The entire roof of the building collapsed and there is extensive fire and water damage throughout the warehouse, which is believed to be a total loss. Fire officials have not yet declared the fire completely extinguished as of 4 p.m. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Monday announced an $86,000 settlement with Tesla Motor Co. over hazardous waste violations at the company's electric car plant in Fremont. The violations were discovered during an unannounced visit by inspectors from the agency's regional office in San Francisco in 2017. The settlement includes a $31,000 fine and a $55,000 payment to the Fremont Fire Department to buy emergency response equipment, including a drone with hazardous waste sensors and a second device to detect unauthorized drones that could impede an emergency response. The violations included failing to comply with air emissions standards for equipment leaks; violating management requirements for generators of hazardous wastes; and failing to make an adequate waste determination for certain solid waste generated at the plant, the EPA said. The Sonoma County Sheriff's Office has identified a woman who died when she was struck by a truck near Sonoma State University on Thursday as Ishi Ayita Barron Smith, 44, of Petaluma. Police from Cotati and Sonoma State University responded to reports of a woman running in front of passing vehicles on Petaluma Hill Road between East Cotati Avenue and Curtis Drive in unincorporated Sonoma County east of Rohnert Park. When the California Highway Patrol responded around 9:15 p.m., emergency responders said the woman had died. Smith was struck by a 2004 Dodge Durango driven by a 37-year-old Napa man south on Petaluma Hill Road. The driver stopped at the scene and cooperated with the investigation, CHP Officer David deRutte said. One man died and another was left injured following a shooting Saturday night in San Francisco's Bayview District, police said Monday. Officers responded to the shooting around 8:10 p.m. near the corner of Third Street and Quesada Avenue. There, officers found the two victims suffering from gunshot wounds and they were both taken to the hospital. Once at the hospital, one of the victims was pronounced dead. He's been identified by the city's medical examiner's office as 26-year-old Terrell Blay. The second victim, a 21-year-old man, suffered injuries not considered life-threatening. Three people were injured when a hot air balloon hit a power line near Yountville Monday morning, a Cal Fire captain said. One person suffered serious injuries and was taken to a hospital by helicopter and two people who suffered minor to moderate injuries went to a hospital by ambulance, Capt. Aaron Loscar said. The incident happened around 8:10 a.m. in the area of Ragatz Lane and Washington Street, Loscar said. Oakland International Airport was on a "yellow alert" Monday morning after smoke was reported on a flight to Las Vegas. Southwest Airlines Flight 2541 left Oakland around 8:45 a.m. but had to turn around. Airport spokeswoman Keonnis Taylor said the plane was scheduled to land around 9:45 a.m. No injuries had been reported as of 10 a.m. A 45-year-old man suspected of drunk driving died in a car crash near Santa Cruz on Saturday and his male passenger was seriously injured, the California Highway Patrol reported Monday. The man was driving a 2007 BMW 328i north on Soquel San Jose Road south of Old Turnpike Road around 10:20 p.m. when he lost control of the car, overturned and struck a tree, according to the CHP. He and his 42-year-old passenger were transported to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, where the driver was pronounced dead. A 23-year-old pedestrian fatally struck by a vehicle Friday evening in Concord has been identified as Shane Nygard Jr., according to the Contra Costa County coroner's office. Police responded to Arnold Industrial Way just east of Laura Alice Way around 7 p.m. on a report of a man struck by a vehicle. The Concord resident was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver, a 71-year-old resident of Pacheco, stayed at the scene to cooperate with investigators, who said that alcohol or drugs do not appear to have been factors in the crash. One of the men accused of fatally shooting 19-year-old Anthony Singh outside an apartment complex in Antioch last year has been arrested on a murder charges, according to the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office. Singh was shot at 3:28 a.m. on Aug. 19 in the 2200 block of San Jose Drive and died at the scene, according to police. Another victim who was also 19 was transported to a hospital and survived. Terrence Webb, 40, was identified as a suspect and prosecutors filed charges against him on March 6. He was then arrested March 18. Webb and co-defendant Gale Young, 37, have both been charged with murder in the shooting, as well as attempted murder and street terrorism. A third co-defendant, 37-year-old Victoria Adrienne Collins, has also been charged with being an accessory after the fact and destroying evidence, as well as being a felon in possession of ammunition. Las Vegas police have arrested a 25-year-old woman in connection to the killing of a longtime Monterey doctor, police said. Dr. Thomas Burchard worked at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula for 40 years, and most recently served patients at an outpatient behavioral health center, according to the hospital. On the morning of March 7, Las Vegas police responded to a report of an abandoned vehicle on state Highway 147 in the desert and found Burchard's body in the trunk. Their investigation led them to arrest Kelsey Turner in Stockton on March 21. Turner will be extradited to Clark County to face murder charges. According to social media, Turner was a bartender and model. Police did not specify if the two knew each other or whether additional suspects were involved in the murder. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk starts its spring season this week with rides and games opening at 11 a.m. Monday, according to boardwalk officials. The boardwalk will be open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Thursday, and will extend its hours to 7 p.m. Friday and 9 p.m. Saturday. Starting Monday, a park guest will be honored as a "guest of the day," and will get to press a button to start the rides for the day. They'll then enjoy VIP treatment throughout the boardwalk. Daily operations will continue on April 8, with limited rides during weekdays until the summer season starts on Memorial Day, May 27. The Concord City Council and the city's Planning Commission will hold a joint study session Tuesday to discuss future medicinal cannabis storefront and non-storefront retail dispensary uses and "microbusinesses" in the city. Primary planned topics of discussion are set to be testing and manufacturing regulations, as well as potential land-use regulations for various types of medical cannabis businesses. Adult recreational cannabis businesses are not being considered. Tuesday's meeting will begin at 6 p.m. in the council chamber at City Hall, located at 1950 Parkside Drive. 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 Catholic priest at a church in Fremont has been charged with 30 felony counts of lewd acts upon a child for allegedly molesting a boy over about 18 months in 2016 and 2017, Alameda County prosecutors said Tuesday. The Rev. Hector David Mendoza-Vela, 42, also known as Hector David Vela, had served as a priest in Alameda County since 2013, first at St. John's Catholic Church in San Lorenzo and most recently at Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Fremont, according to the district attorney's office. Mendoza-Vela was set to appear in court for arraignment Tuesday afternoon in Dublin. Last Thursday, sheriff's detectives learned of the allegations and contacted the victim, a boy who was 14 and 15 years old when the molestation occurred between June 2016 and December 2017, according to court documents filed for the charges. The abuse occurred at the boy's home in unincorporated Hayward, an Alameda County sheriff's spokesman said. During a pretext phone call to Mendoza-Vela by the boy that investigators were monitoring, he allegedly admitted to touching the boy inappropriately. Detectives later went to the church in Fremont and arrested the priest, who confessed in an interview to touching the boy inappropriately. He also wrote the victim's family an apology letter, according to court documents. Mendoza-Vela was parochial administrator at the church in Fremont, but Oakland Bishop Michael Barber wrote in a letter posted on the church's website that the defendant "may not present himself in public as a priest or engage in any priestly ministry" while the case is investigated. Mendoza-Vela was born in El Salvador before coming to the U.S., where he is a legal resident, according to the Diocese of Oakland that oversees the churches where the priest served. The district attorney's office has set up a confidential hot line at (510) 272-6395 for anyone who may have been victimized by the priest. 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. SANTA ROSA (BCN) The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will consider approving an urgency ordinance banning the cultivation of industrial hemp in the unincorporated areas of the county. The cultivation of industrial hemp poses a risk to the current legal cannabis in the county, according to a report by the county's Department of Agriculture, Weights & Measures. The unregulated cultivation of industrial hemp presents a potential for unintended pollination of cannabis plants if the hemp is being grown for seed, the county department said. Some farmers in the county are interested in growing industrial hemp and cannabis farmers are concerned about its impact on their crop. The urgency ordinance would prohibit industrial hemp cultivation until local controls are in place to ensure the hemp cultivation is compatible in the county. The proposed ordinance would pass if approved by a four-fifths vote of the board on first reading. Recent changes in federal and state laws will soon allow growing of industrial hemp in California, officials with the Department of Agriculture, Weights and Measures said. Industrial hemp is no longer considered a controlled substance. 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) Police are seeking two men involved in a robbery in San Francisco on Sunday evening in which the victim suffered life-threatening head injuries, police said. The robbery occurred around 7:30 p.m. near Mission Street and Geneva Avenue, police said. One of two suspects punched the victim, a 34-year-old man. The impact caused the victim to fall and hit his head on the pavement and lose consciousness, according to police. The second suspect then took cash from the victim. The victim was taken to a hospital for head trauma. Both suspects fled on foot and remain at large. Police described them as two men in their 20s but more detailed descriptions were not immediately available. 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. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) holds talks with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 1, 2019. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen) BEIJING, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang held talks with visiting New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern here Monday, and the two sides agreed to strengthen cooperation and jointly safeguard rules-based multilateral trade system. Li once again expressed his condolences to Ardern over the deadly shooting incidents in New Zealand's Christchurch City. Stating that bilateral cooperation is "always standing at the forefront of cooperation between China and Western countries," Li said that the two countries now face new opportunities. China stands ready to synergize the Belt and Road Initiative with New Zealand's development strategies, tap into the potential and promote bilateral economic and trade cooperation, Li said. "The two sides should create a fair, just, transparent, convenient and non-discriminatory business environment for enterprises from both countries, accelerate talks on upgrading the bilateral free trade agreement and lift economic and trade cooperation to a higher level," he said. Li also called on the two sides to deepen cooperation in agriculture and animal husbandry, finance, taxation and infrastructure construction, and expand tourism cooperation and people-to-people and cultural exchanges. Both China and New Zealand are responsible countries with a tradition of independent diplomacy, Li said. "We are willing to work with New Zealand to strengthen communication and coordination within the multilateral mechanisms, jointly support rules-based multilateralism and the multilateral trade system, cope with global issues including climate change and promote regional and world peace and development." On bilateral ties, the Chinese premier said that the China-New Zealand relationship maintains a momentum of steady development. With the spirit of mutual respect and equal treatment, the two sides have been constantly strengthening political mutual trust, deepening pragmatic cooperation and strengthening people-to-people and cultural exchanges to pursue common interests and promote the advancement of China-New Zealand comprehensive strategic partnership, Li said, adding that this is not only in the fundamental interests of the two peoples but also conducive to the peace, stability and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region. Ardern said that New Zealand, as one of the first Western countries to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and sign a bilateral free trade agreement, pays high attention to ties with China and is firmly committed to the one-China policy. New Zealand welcomes investment from Chinese enterprises, Ardern said, pledging to create a sound business environment without discrimination against any enterprise from any country. "With a tradition of independent diplomacy, New Zealand will make decisions on major issues independently that are in the interests of its own," the prime minister said. She said New Zealand will work with China to speed up the work and advance talks on upgrading the free trade agreement, strengthen cooperation on issues including climate change and reform of the multilateral trade system and jointly safeguard the international order and the rules-based multilateral trade system. The two sides also exchanged views on international and regional issues of common concern. They also witnessed the signing of cooperation documents on taxation, agriculture, finance and scientific research, and issued a statement on climate change. Ardern arrived in Beijing on Sunday, and this is her first official visit to China since becoming New Zealand's prime minister. The foundation created in College Station by the late first couple George and Barbara Bush announced that it has a new name and will launch a Houston satellite office in hopes of further supporting the couples public service legacy. Alexander Hap Ellis, the foundations board chairman, said the organization formerly known as the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation will now be named the George and Barbara Bush Foundation. It will continue to engage with key organizations that were nearest and dearest to George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, who died in November 2018, and Barbara Bush, who died five months earlier, Ellis said in a statement. Cadet School & College Murree Teaching & Non Teaching Jobs Latest Cadet School & College Education Posts Murree 2021 Qualified and well educated personnel for the positions of Vice Principal, English Lecturer, Math Lecturer, Computer Lecturer, Physics Lecturer, Chemistry Lecturer, Biology Lecturer, Urdu Lecturer, Islamiat Lecturer, Social Studies Lecturer, PT Instructor, ISSB Instructor & Security Guard required for Pakistan Cadet School & College in Murree Punjab 2019. How to Apply on Cadet School & College 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. Social Welfare & Bait ul Maal Department Jobs 2019 in Lahore Latest Social Welfare & Bait ul Maal Posts Lahore 2021 Experienced and responsible persons for the posts of LTV Driver, Naib Qasid, Chowkidar, Watchman, Sweeper, Cleaner & Mali required for Social Welfare & Bait ul Maal Department in Lahore. How to Apply on Social Welfare & Bait ul Maal 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. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday she does not believe the allegations of inappropriate touching against former Vice President Joe Biden disqualify him from being president. The San Francisco Democrat was asked by reporters if the the allegations, brought forward by two separate women, were disqualifying from the presidency. "No," Pelosi told reporters as she walked to the House floor. "No, I do not." On Friday, Lucy Flores, a former Nevada Democratic lawmaker, accused Biden of grabbing her shoulders and kissing her on the back of the head without her consent during a 2014 campaign event. MORE 2020 NEWS: Amy Klobuchar becomes latest 2020 hopeful to release taxes A second accuser came forward on Monday, when Amy Lappos, a former congressional aide to Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn, said Biden rubbed noses with her and made her feel uncomfortable at a fundraiser in 2009. "I don't think that this disqualifies him from being president," Pelosi said. "Not at all." SFGATE reached out to Rep. Pelosi's office for additional comment, but didn't hear back at time of publication. Both of the accusers believe Biden's actions crossed the line. "I felt him get closer to me from behind," Flores wrote in an article published by New York Magazine. "He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified.... He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn't process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused." OPINION: What Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris understand about 2020 "It wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head," Lappos told the Hartford Courant. "He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth." Biden has not officially entered the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries, but is reportedly planning on making an announcement by mid-April. On Monday, a spokesperson for Biden blamed "right wing trolls" for conflating photos of Biden embracing acquaintances and colleagues with inappropriate touching. Eric Ting is an SFGATE staff writer. Email him at eric.ting@sfgate.com and follow him on Twitter Start receiving breaking news emails on floods, 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. In recent hotel openings, InterContinental Hotels Group brings its flagship brand to Houston's giant Texas Medical Center; downtown Chicago gets a boutique Hoxton hotel and a new Home2Suites; another ultra-cool hotel opens in lower Manhattan; Marriott delivers three brands in one building in Nashville; and Marriott's Tribute brand adds a newly opened affiliate in downtown Ft. Lauderdale. Houston's 50 million square foot Texas Medical Center calls itself the world's largest medical complex, and it now has a brand-new InterContinental hotel right next to it at 6750 Main Street. The 21-story, 354-room InterContinental Houston Medical Center's guest rooms come with one king bed or two queens, and it also has 37 suites and a Club InterContinental Lounge. Public amenities include a Mediterranean restaurant, fitness center, and an outdoor pool. The hotel is well equipped to handle groups and conferences, with 18,000 square feet of meeting space ranging from board rooms to a grand ballroom. April rates start at $254 a night plus $43 in taxes and $22 for parking. An April 4 opening is scheduled for the newest U.S. property of the U.K.-based Hoxton group of hotels, this one in downtown Chicago's Fulton Market District at 200 N. Green Street. That's in the West Loop area at the corner of West Lake Street -- a block west of Halsted, just west of the Kennedy Expressway. The 182-room boutique property offers guest accommodations with floor-to-ceiling windows. It features scads of "co-working spaces" in an open layout for busy Millennials, and it has something unusual in Chicago a seasonal rooftop pool. There's also a rooftop Peruvian restaurant (enclosed), a Mediterranean restaurant, and a basement cocktail bar with live music. Hoxton recently opened its first West Coast hotel in Portland and has another one coming in Los Angeles in the months ahead. At the Chicago property, nightly rates in April range from $99 to $279 plus 27 percent tax. Another newly opened hotel in Chicago is the 206-unit Home2Suites by Hilton Chicago River North at 110 West Huron, at N. Clark Street part of the River North neighborhood a few blocks west of Michigan Avenue. It's the 300th property in the Home2Suites brand. Each of its extended-stay guest suites has a fully equipped kitchen with a refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, coffee maker, and six place settings. The hotel also offers free Internet, communal public spaces for guests, a combined laundry/fitness area (work out while your clothes dry), a grab-and-go market, and free daily breakfasts. April rates range from $130 to $215 plus 17 percent in taxes. The Ace Hotels group, with trendy Ace-branded properties in Seattle, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Palm Springs, New Orleans and downtown Los Angeles, has a new affiliated brand called Sister City, and it just cut the ribbon on its first property, in lower Manhattan. The 225-room Sister City is at 225 Bowery, and it was "inspired by the functional perfection of Finnish saunas, Japanese bento boxes, rock-cut cliff dwellings of prehistory and John Cage's 4'33"," the hotel says on its website. (If you don't understand all those references, you're probably not cool enough to stay there.) It's a minimalist kind of place with the philosophy "less, but better." Guest rooms and "intimate" and "efficient" (i.e., not a lot of frills or furniture) and the property has a ground-floor restaurant and of course a rooftop bar. April rates range from $134 to $269 plus 17 percent tax. Don't miss a shred of important travel news! Sign up for our FREE bi-weekly email alerts Hoxton Hotels Just across from Nashville's Music City Convention Center is a new Marriott property where guests can choose from three brands under one roof a 209-room AC Hotel, 136-suite Residence Inn or 125-room SpringHill Suites. It's the first newly-built three-branded location in the Marriott system. At the AC Hotel, the focus is on modern design, and guests can avail themselves of breakfast offerings from the AC Kitchen and evening drinks in the AC Lounge. The hotel also has free Wi-Fi and multiple workspaces. The Residence Inn is intended for longer-staying guests, and suites provide separate living and work spaces as well as fully-equipped kitchens and free Wi-Fi. The property has an on-site guest laundry, 24-hour food and beverage market, fitness center, and even a free grocery delivery service. SpringHill Suites guest units also have separate living, working and sleeping spaces, and the hotel has a grab-and-go market, business services, and free Wi-Fi. The three hotels share a rooftop pool and bar. April weeknight rates range from $166-$783 at the SpringHill Suites, $174-$558 at the Residence Inn, and $191-$699 at the AC Hotel, plus 16 percent taxes and fees. The hotels share a website. Marriott has added a newly opened affiliate property in downtown Ft. Lauderdale a 25-story, 209-room hotel called The Dalmar. It's a member of Marriott's Tribute Portfolio, which makes it part of Marriott's Bonvoy loyalty program and its reservations system. The Dalmar is at 299 North Federal Highway in the heart of town. The hotel's sixth floor check-in area is surrounded by a wraparound sky deck with views of the ocean and the city as well as a pool, and the lobby bar offers live music on weekends. American cuisine is the specialty of the hotel's signature restaurant called The Terrace Grill, and a rooftop bar is due to open shortly. The Dalmar also has 14,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor meeting space and offers guests free shuttles to and from the beach as well as rental bicycles. April rates range from $158 to $221 plus 14 percent taxes and fees and a $15 nightly resort fee. Check the slideshow at the top for photos! 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. Vital BPO Services Jobs 2019 in Islamabad Latest Vital BPO Services Company Call Center Posts Islamabad 2021 Qualified, motivated and dedicated person for the post of Customer Sales Representatives CSR required for a progressive Vital BPO Services Call Center in Islamabad Pakistan 2019. How to Apply on Vital BPO Services Company Job Advertisement Apply as per details in job advertisement. In some cases, you may apply online at vacancies after registering at https://www.jobz.pk online. Note: Beware of Fraudulent Recruiting Activities. If an employer asks to pay money for any purpose, do not pay at all and report us at contact us form. Apply as per instuctions & dates mentioned in official job ad. Govt jobs may not be applied online here. Human typing error is possible. Error & omissions excepted. Tomer Frankfurter wanted an adventurous selfie photo as a keepsake of his Yosemite trip, so he ventured out on a ledge above 594-foot-high Nevada Fall. Hikers shouted for him to come back, that it was too dangerous. But Frankfurter ignored the warnings. The death of the 18-year-old Israeli man in a tragic fall last Sept. 4 made national headlines. But the details were not made public until the Denver Post obtained them through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Post gave this account of the accident: Frankfurter, a Jerusalem math student who was touring the U.S. before starting his compulsory military service, accompanied a group of young tourists up Yosemite's classic Mist Trail, which takes hikers 3.5 miles past Vernal and Nevada falls. The group had lunch above Nevada Fall and was preparing to head back when Frankfurter decided to take a selfie to mark the occasion. He took off his backpack and gave his phone to a woman in the group. Then, despite the warnings of others, he began climbing over the cliff. Soon, he was dangling off the edge. The designated camera woman begin snapping photos. Frankfurter seemed in control, but then he suddenly said, "I need help." As tourists screamed for help, three hikers ran to his aid. They lay on the rock and grabbed his arms and wrists, but couldn't pull him back over the ledge. By now Frankfurter was tiring, and his arms were coated with sweat. He slipped out of their grasp and fell nearly 600 feet onto the rocks below. "The witnesses that attempted to render aid were heroic in their actions," Yosemite Ranger Jesse McGahey wrote in his report on the investigation into the death. "But once Frankfurter descended to hang from the edge of the cliff face, there was nothing they could have done to prevent his fall with the equipment available." The Post reported that Yosemite officials have declined to comment on the case or release photos taken of Frankfurter by witnesses. About a month after Frankfurter's death, a couple died in fall from Taft Point 3,500 feet above Yosemite Valley during an apparent attempt to take a selfie. A tripod was reportedly set up near one of the overlook's edges. Last week at the Grand Canyon, a Hong Kong tourist died when he stumbled while taking a photo and fell 1,000 feet from a cliff at Eagle Point. ALSO: How an expert skydiver happened to fall to her death near Lodi Posting daredevil selfie photos has become so routine on Instagram, Facebook and other social media that people mostly young adult males are increasingly willing to put themselves in danger in order to snap a thrilling photo. According to the Journal of Family Medicine, at least 259 people died around the world while clicking selfies between 2011 and 2017. The actual number may be much greater, the Journal noted, because many selfie-related deaths are not reported as such, but rather as generic fatal accidents. -- Read Mike Moffitt's latest stories and send him news tips at moffitt@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. SAN JOSE, Costa Rica Back in Nicaragua, she owned her own home and made enough as an elementary substitute teacher and lawyers assistant to eke out a stable, if not luxurious, life. Now she spends her days on the streets in and around Costa Ricas capital begging for spare change and clutching a can decorated with Nicaraguas blue-and-white flag, an unmistakable reminder to pedestrians of the political turbulence that has claimed hundreds of lives in her native country. I never did this before, said the 53-year-old woman, who asked to be identified only by her nickname, the teacher, for fear of retaliation against loved ones back home. The fate of the estimated 50,000 Nicaraguans who have fled violence and persecution for exile in Costa Rica over the past year is a central point in fledgling peace talks between Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortegas government and the opposition, which is demanding guarantees for their safe return. But while negotiators in Managua haggle over that and other thorny issues with little progress, many exiles are struggling. Some formerly middle-class citizens are having trouble putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads, while others are reduced to near-indigence. Like many others, the teacher fled during the so-called Operation Cleanup launched by Ortega last July, which the United Nations has termed a witch hunt aimed at suppressing dissent. In her hometown of Diriamba, paramilitary forces aligned with Ortegas government left a trail of dead and wounded, she said. Her offense was feeding and supporting student protesters. While asylum-seekers are guaranteed the right to work, the sheer number of Nicaraguans has overwhelmed Costa Ricas system for processing such requests. So far only 8,000 have secured work permits compared with the nearly 29,000 who have received credentials as asylum-seekers. Mario Negrini and Maria Verza are Associated Press writers. ISLAMABAD Pakistan and India traded fire in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, leaving seven people dead three Pakistani soldiers, a Pakistani villager, an Indian woman and a girl and a member of the Indian paramilitary troops, officials said Tuesday. The fatalities were some of the highest since tensions flared between the rival nuclear-armed nations after a suicide bombing killed 40 Indian troops in Indian-administered Kashmir in February. Pakistans military said Indian troops targeted its military positions overnight in the border town of Rakhchakri in the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. Along with the three soldiers killed, a fourth was wounded, the army said. The statement added that Pakistani soldiers responded effectively. The Indian fire also killed a 70-year-old Pakistani villager in a remote area of Niaza Per on Monday evening, according to Pakistani police official Waheed Qureshi. In India, the army accused Pakistani troops of firing mortars and small-arms fire Monday along the disputed frontier, the highly militarized so-called Line of Control, hitting the sector of Poonch in Indian-controlled Kashmir. It said Indian soldiers retaliated. Indian police officer M.K. Sinha said an Indian paramilitary officer, a woman and a girl were killed while at least 18 civilians and five troops were wounded. The cross border firing resumed Tuesday after a brief lull, he said. Days after the Feb. 14 suicide attack in Kashmir, India launched an air strike inside Pakistan, saying it targeted militants from the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed militant group that had claimed responsibility for the bombing. Munir Ahmed is an Associated Press writer. MANILA The Philippines highest court ordered the government Tuesday to release documents relating to thousands of deaths linked to President Rodrigo Dutertes drug war. Rights groups quickly welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, saying it would give closure to many families of the more than 20,000 people they estimate have been killed in the crackdown that Duterte has said is justified as necessary to end the drug trade. A court spokesman said the solicitor general had been ordered to submit police and other reports on the killings to the Supreme Court within 60 days and to copy the petitioners. The solicitor general, Jose Calida, had argued that sharing the documents with third parties could jeopardize national security. The court had previously rejected the same argument after the petition was filed last February. The petitioners were the Center for International Law (Centerlaw), a rights advocacy group, and the Free Legal Assistance Group, which represents low-income clients. The court has yet to rule on a separate petition by the Free Legal Assistance Group asking it to declare the police crackdown unconstitutional. The group says police have been permitted to kill people suspected of selling drugs rather than arresting them. The government says 5,000 deaths have occurred during police operations. But there are thousands more cases that are classified as deaths under investigation, including many that officials say were killings by pro-government vigilantes. The majority of those killed were residents of poor communities or politicians whom Duterte had personally tagged as drug lords. The presidents critics have accused him of using the drug war to eliminate rivals. Although three police officers were found guilty last year of the murder of a teenager mistaken for a drug dealer, rights groups say the killing spree has continued. Romel Bagares, a lawyer helping Centerlaw in the case, called the Supreme Court decision a big step toward establishing accountability for drug war deaths. Duterte already faces two murder complaints at the International Criminal Court, a situation that led his government to officially withdraw from the court last month. Jason Gutierrez is a New York Times writer. ISTANBUL President Recep Tayyip Erdogans party has lost control of Turkeys two largest cities, Istanbul and Ankara, a complete tally of local election ballots showed Tuesday, but the governing party said it would challenge the outcomes. The loss of Istanbul, the countrys business capital and Erdogans political base, is a particularly sharp setback for a president who has tightened his control of the government and news media, stifled dissent, and, critics contend, manipulated election results. Results reported Tuesday by the semiofficial Anadolu news agency showed the opposition candidate for mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, at 48.79 percent, against 48.51 percent for Binali Yildrim, the candidate of Erdogans Justice and Development Party, or AKP, with all ballots counted. The results also confirmed the victory of the opposition Republican Peoples Party, in Ankara, the capital. Opposition candidate Mansur Yavas won 50.91 percent of the vote, over AKP candidate Mehmet Ozhasekis 47.1 percent, with 100 percent of ballots counted. Anadolu cautioned that counts were unofficial and that official results would be released by the High Election Council. The head of that council, Sadi Guven, said on Tuesday that it had shared preliminary results with political parties. For now, he said, the council will give certificates of election to candidates whose victories are not subject to appeals. The council will rule on those challenges within eight days, he added. Erdogan, who was re-elected last year, and his party have seen their popularity eroded by Turkeys deep economic troubles. But a spokesman for the president, Ibrahim Kalin, refuted claims that Erdogans hold on power is waning, noting that the governing party had drawn the most votes in local elections nationwide. They will never learn. AK Party won 44.3 percent and the coalition won 51.6 percent of the votes, Kalin posted on Twitter. Erdogan has his mandate until 2023. Stop presenting your wishful thinking as fact and analysis. AKP spokesman Omer Celik said Tuesday that the party was lodging objections based on discrepancies between voting tallies at polling stations and the counting centers in both Ankara and Istanbul. The process is legitimate. Everyone should respect it, Celik said at the partys headquarters in Ankara. We will respect the results regardless of the outcome, as it is our peoples choice. Carlotta Gall is a New York Times writer. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. This includes cookies from third party social media websites and ad networks. Such third party cookies may track your use on Sharedots sites for better rendering. Our partners use cookies to ensure we show you advertising that is relevant to you. If you continue without changing your settings, we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on Sharedots website. However, you can change your cookie settings at any time. Learn more This is the heartwarming moment three starving leopard cubs were rescued after being orphaned when their mother died. Farm workers were harvesting crops when they heard the animals whining hungrily from the fruit field in Chumphon, southern Thailand last Wednesday (March 27) morning. The first kitten was discovered shivering in a bush while the other two cubs were hiding behind a boulder. They were estimated to be around two weeks old. Farm owner Jatuporn Pangdamrongpanitch, 39, and his workers said they smelled the body of the dead mother and after finding her immediately began searching for other youngsters. Jatuporn said he carried the orphaned wild animals home because they were very weak and hungry. He said: The cubs looked very frightened and exhausted like they were running away from something. Luckily, they werent afraid of humans and let us carry them. Jatuporn put the cubs in the box to feed them milk, water, and get rid of lice. He later contacted the local wildlife officers for assistance. Officers of the Krom Luang Chumphon Wildlife Sanctuary came to take the wild leopards for a check-up before being handed over to Phang Nga Wildlife Conservation Station for further care. Pornchai Sitthikorn, the Senior Forestry Officer of Krom Luang Chumphon Wildlife Sanctuary, said it was rare to find leopard cubs due to their declining numbers in the wild. He said: Leopard cats are wild animals that are protected by the law. They are nearly extinct since there are only 50 individuals living in Chumphon." Page Content There's good news and bad news about the gender wage gap, the difference between men's and women's average hourly wages across an employer's workforce. The good news: The pay gap has narrowed slightly in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Australia since 2016, according to a new, multicountry study. In the U.S., the gap is smallest in biotech and pharmaceuticals and education, and the health care and insurance industries have seen the most improvement. The bad news: Significant pay gaps persist between men and women around the world, even after adjusting for worker and job characteristics. The adjusted pay gap ranges from a high of 6.6 percent in the Netherlands to 3.1 percent in Australia. Among 22 industries in the U.S., the gap is largest in media and retail sectors. The findings in Progress on the Gender Pay Gap: 2019 are based on more than 500,000 base-pay reports that employees in eight countries shared over the past three years on the employer review site Glassdoor. The U.S. sample contains 426,512 salary reports from anonymous full-time workers. The Mill Valley, Calif.-based company also is one of the world's largest job and recruiting websites. The study looked at both the unadjusted and adjusted pay gap for workers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S. The unadjusted gap is the overall difference in average pay for men and women. The adjusted pay gap takes into consideration an employee's age, education level, years of work experience, occupation, industry, location, company and job title and the calendar year of the reported salary. But even after applying statistical controls for worker and job characteristics, wage gaps remain. Possible Factors for the Shrinking Gap Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. adjusted pay gap can be attributed to occupational sorting and differences in worker characteristics, such as age, Glassdoor said. Women ages 18 to 24 experience a smaller gap than women ages 55 to 64, as older women are more likely to face job discrimination and to have taken time off for childbearing. "Occupational sorting" refers to women gravitating to or being primarily recruited for certain jobs that have different pay scales and require different levels of education and experience. This segregation is not purely by choice, said Daniel Zhao, senior economist for Glassdoor. "Women and men may be pushed into different industries or jobs by a variety of factors, such as an employer's lack of paid family leave," he noted. "Occupational segregation is not the woman's fault; it's not the responsibility of women to solve the pay gap on their own. People should be able to work in whatever industry or job they want and expect to be paid equally." UNADJUSTED BASE GENDER PAY GAP Average Cents/Pence Earned by Women Per Dollar/Pound/Euro of Male Earnings Percentage Male Pay Advantage Australia 0.85 15.1% France 0.88 11.6% Canada 0.84 16.1% United States 0.79 21.4% United Kingdom 0.82 17.9% Singapore 0.87 12.8% Germany 0.78 22.3% Netherlands 0.81 18.9% ADJUSTED BASE GENDER PAY GAP Average Cents/Pence Earned by Women Per Dollar/Pound/Euro of Male Earnings Percentage Male Pay Advantage Australia 0.97 3.1% France 0.96 3.7% Canada 0.96 4.0% United States 0.95 4.9% United Kingdom 0.95 5.0% Singapore 0.95 5.2% Germany 0.94 6.4% Netherlands 0.93 6.6% Source: Glassdoor So what factors may be contributing to the narrowing pay gap? 1. Legislation promoting transparency. In Europe, the gap reduction may be attributed in part to new laws. On April 4, U.K. employers with more than 250 employees will have to publish their second annual gender pay gap reports. The U.K.'s Government Equalities Office has issued guidance on reducing the gender pay gap, and companies have taken different approaches to doing so, such as offering returnships, mentorships and sponsorships. In the U.S., there has been growing public and shareholder pressure on companies to disclose gender pay gaps, and it's an issue that has gotten increased attention since a record number of women were elected to Congress in 2018. 2. Shrinking differences in education and experience. The percentage of the pay gap explained by differences in education and experience shrank from 14 percent to 7.9 percent since Glassdoor's 2016 study as women made up an increasing share of university students and workers gaining experience in the labor force. 3. Women entering male-dominated fields. Women's participation in the labor force has grown faster than men's in recent years. That, along with a tightening labor market leading to more women entering traditionally male-dominated industries, are factors in narrowing the gap, according to Glassdoor. The New York Times reported that women in sectors that are at least two-thirds male are seeing faster employment growth. However, only 11 percent of women work in male-dominated sectors; in those fields, women are not necessarily entering the same jobs that men are occupying; and median earnings for women working full time in traditionally male jobs were lower than men's earnings, the Times reported. Page Content Once an employer knows that a leave of absence qualifies under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), it must designate it as such, even if the employee wants to first exhaust paid-time-off benefits. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) took this position in a recent opinion letter, though its opinion conflicts with a federal appellate court ruling. The DOL noted that an employer may provide more-generous leave by extending job-protected time off beyond the 12 weeks a year that are covered under the FMLA. Any extension, however, should not be characterized as FMLA leave, said Vanessa Kelly, an attorney with Clark Hill in Princeton, N.J. "The opinion letter should serve as a reminder to employers of just how technical the FMLA can be and a warning to continue to be vigilant about employee leaves," she added. DOL opinion letters describe how the agency would enforce applicable statutes and regulations in specific circumstances presented by an employer, worker or other party who requests the opinion. Opinion letters are not binding, but there may be a safe harbor for employers that show they relied on one. No Wiggle Room Typically, employers and employees agree when leave is treated as FMLA leave and there are no issues, explained Josh Woodard, an attorney with Snell & Wilmer in Phoenix. However, in the letter to the DOL in this matter, the writer noted that employers sometimes let workers use their accrued sick leave or other paid-time-off benefits before starting the clock for the 12 weeks of FMLA leave that eligible employees can take for certain family and medical reasons. The DOL said this practice is not permitted. "Neither the employer nor the employee can decline FMLA leave if the leave is needed for an FMLA-qualifying reason," explained Melanie Pate, an attorney with Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie in Phoenix. The opinion letter affirms the DOL Wage and Hour Division's "clear mandate that employers must designate a leave as FMLA leave within five business days of learning of a qualifying reason," Kelly said. Failure to do so can give rise to an FMLA interference or denial claim. [SHRM members-only toolkit: Managing Family and Medical Leave] Some employers have policies that either require or allow employees to use accrued paid time off to replace wages while taking unpaid FMLA leave. The DOL clarified that the paid leave must run concurrently with the FMLA leave. Significantly, under this DOL guidance, employees cannot save their FMLA leave if they need to take leave now for an FMLA-qualifying reason, said Michele Haydel Gehrke, an attorney with Reed Smith in San Francisco. Conflicting Court Ruling The DOL's opinion letter conflicts with a 2014 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Escriba v. Foster Poultry Farms Inc., which held that an employee may decline to designate time off as FMLA leave, even if the reason for the leave qualifies for such job-protected time off. The 9th Circuit includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. So how does the opinion letter affect employers in the 9th Circuit? "This is a somewhat open question, because DOL opinion letters do not carry the same authority as a law, DOL regulation or court ruling," Pate said. However, some employment lawyers consider the Escriba case to be an outlier, because it directly contradicts the FMLA regulations, she said. Still, the DOL follows the opinion letters in interpreting the FMLA, and courts may also use them to guide their decisions in FMLA cases, she added. Technically employers in the 9th Circuit are still bound by the Escriba decision until it is overruled, Gehrke said. "But the DOL opinion letter may give employers persuasive authority to challenge Escriba if they follow the DOL opinion letter and are then sued." While this conflict likely will be resolved at some point, employers may want to seek guidance from experienced counsel as they try to navigate this complicated issue, Woodard said. STATEN ISLAND, N,Y, -- Hundreds have died and thousands have been left heartbroken and guilt-ridden. I knew there something wrong. Why didnt they ask for help? I should have done something before it was too late. About 10 years ago, the Advance began to notice an increasing number of of obituaries for young people with no cause of death listed. Many of them simply said died at home. Initiated by research that showed Staten Island was being flooded with opioid prescriptions, we spent months researching the deaths through the New York State Medical Examiners office. What we found was both shocking and extremely troubling. Many of the deaths were from drug overdoses. THE FIRST REPORTS Then came a ground-breaking Page 1 story in the Sunday Advance about the surge in deaths among young people on Staten Island: it published in May 2009 with the following headline: Prescription drug abuse called epidemic The beginning of the story read: Crisis. Epidemic. Widespread. Those were the words used by members of the medical community and Borough President James Molinaro yesterday morning to describe the grip prescription drug abuse has taken on Staten Islands youth in recent years. This is an epidemic. Theres no question about it, said Molinaro, speaking at a press conference yesterday to formally announce an Islandwide town hall meeting to discuss teenage prescription drug abuse. This report nearly 10 years ago revealed the borough's opioid pill crisis. Further research by the Advance into the number of opioid prescriptions being written resulted in the blaring Sunday Page 1 headline in 2010 PAINKILLER ISLAND. And this is what we reported. "Doctors and medical professionals on Staten Island wrote out nearly 115,000 prescriptions for the painkiller oxycodone last year far more per capita than any other borough, and a sign of just how heavily Staten Islanders are using prescription opiates. Thats essentially one prescription for every four to five people living here, according to an Advance analysis of state Department of Health prescription data." That was almost a decade ago and since then, the crisis has grown relentlessly more critical and deadly. Last year, there were 352 overdoses on Staten Island, 101 of them were fatal. So with all the action that has been taken to stem the opioid crisis, why do the ODs continue at such an alarming rate? The answer is simple and frightening. With the institution of iStop legislation to limit the number of opioid prescriptions to one per person each month, the back market pill business dried up. The impact had an unintended negative side-effect. All those who were addicted to pills were faced with two choices: Get help and get clean, or switch to cheaper and more dangerous street drugs like heroin and fentanyl. We talked to one addict who made the right choice. The pills went from $8 or $10 a piece to $30 or $40, said Paul H. So I started with heroin, but ODd on my third try and ended up in the hospital. So I agreed to go for treatment and it worked, he continued. I just celebrated two years and life is good. I know Id be dead or in jail if I kept doing what I was doing. While many others didnt make the right decision, there has been progress. We have to give District Attorney Michael McMahon a great deal of credit for his strategies ranging from the Overdose Response initiative, which allows the DA to investigate overdoses and go after the drug dealers, to the H.O.P.E. program, which diverts low-level offenders away from jail toward treatment. Theres also a major data-based initiative that was recently unveiled by Borough President James Oddo that aims to closely track overdoses and integrate education and prevention. So why are we still seeing death after death 10 years after this was revealed as a boroughwide crisis? What led to it and the solution is complex and well be tackling it in a periodic series beginning this week and continue for several months. The project -- Decade of Death -- will take a look back at how the crisis developed, how it grew through the years, whats being done to combat it and what still needs to be done. The goal is to shed light on the plague and offer concrete solutions that could save lives this year and those ahead. If you or someone close to you has experience with substance abuse and would like to share your story, please contact reporter Paul Liotta at pliotta@siadvance.com. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Speaking in a muffled, yet rapid voice, a little girl told a justice on Monday she had gone to a Stapleton apartment building one Saturday afternoon 14 months ago for her cousins birthday party. But instead of blowing out candles and eating cake, the child, then 11, said she was soon fighting and running for her life. The girl said a man she didnt know approached her and her friends as they were sitting and playing in a third-floor hallway. He grabbed one of them. That girl, age 9, broke away, the witness said. The man then grabbed her around the waist as she tried to flee, she said. She managed to free herself, the witness said, but the man quickly found her in a nearby stairwell, where she had run, and grabbed her again, she said. I was scared, the witness, now 12, said at Michael Gordons attempted-kidnapping trial. Under cross-examination by defense lawyer Leo V. Duval, the girl also said she had told cops afterward that Gordon, 47, was walking tumbly, acting weird and had been talking to himself when he came up to her and her friends. Prosecutors allege Gordon attempted to abduct the witness and another girl and also tried to lure three of their friends into an elevator at 180 Broad St. at around 3:46 p.m. on Feb. 3, 2018. The building is part of the Stapleton Houses. Duval has said Gordon, the father of four and a grandfather, was disoriented, sleep-deprived and suffered from anxiety, depression and PCP and alcohol use when the incident occurred and never intended to hurt anyone. Gordon, a South Beach resident, has opted for a bench trial before Justice Mario F. Mattei in state Supreme Court, St. George. He potentially faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of attempted second-degree kidnapping, the top charge against him. The witness, whose name is being withheld due to her age, testified for about 25 minutes. She was garbed in jeans and a black jacket, whose collar was raised up near her mouth, often muffling her words. The youngster was clearly uncomfortable at having to testify and face Gordon, whom she identified as the man who had grabbed her. The bearded, bespectacled defendant, who wore a tan suit and striped tie, was seated at the defense table, perhaps 20 feet from the witness. Assistant District Attorney Rhiannon LaTour, who, along with Assistant District Attorney Marina Tricorico is prosecuting Gordon, tried to put the girl at ease. She asked the witness about herself and her family and inquired about her favorite subject at school. ELA, the girl said without hesitation, referring to English Language Arts. But she sat for most of her testimony with her eyes cast downward. With regard to the episode, she said she and her friends were in the third-floor hallway playing and hanging out when they saw the defendant. He waved at them but said nothing, she said. A videotape which prosecutors projected for the judge showed Gordon walking up to the elevator. He pressed the button and then rushed out of the frame toward where the girls had previously walked. The witness said Gordon came toward them, and the girls tried to run. He grabbed the 9 year old, said the witness. One of the other girls tripped Gordon, and they all fell with the defendant landing on top of herself, said the girl. Those events are not on the tape. The witness said several girls ran to the elevator and entered it, which is visible on the video. The tape then shows the witness running toward the elevator. Gordon comes up behind her, grabs her by the waist, and picks her up. She flails with her arms and legs, manages to free herself and then runs out of the frame toward the stairwell. The girl said she was crying. The witness said Gordon followed and grabbed her by the back of the shirt in the stairwell and then by the waist. She said a woman came into the stairwell, and she got loose from Gordon and ran down to the first floor, where she hid. The events in the stairway are not visible on the video. The tape next shows the girl exiting a doorway and heading one way in the first-floor lobby, while Gordon, seconds later, is seen heading the other way toward the front door. One of the other girls had exited via the front door moments earlier. In cross-examination, Duval, the defense lawyer, asked the youngster if there seemed anything unusual about Gordon. She said no. Duval then read a police report and told the girl she had informed cops Gordon was walking tumbly. She confirmed she did, explaining Gordon looked a little off balance. The witness also acknowledged that she told police Gordon was acting weird and talking to himself. Asked what the defendant said, she replied: Dont do this to me. Not now. The girl said she did not know to whom Gordon was talking or what he meant. Prosecutors rested after the girls testimony. The trial resumes Tuesday. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- During the first hearing of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism, Rep. Max Rose pressed the Trump Administration for data to justify the Muslim ban. Rose (D-Staten Island/South Brooklyn), who chairs the committee, is asking the administration to demonstrate with facts and data how the Muslim ban has prevented terrorists from traveling into the United States. The Muslim ban was put in place by President Donald Trump in January 2017 and limits travel from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. I have constituents in my district who are American citizens and have American citizen children, they cant bring their family back from Yemen because of the Muslim ban, Rose said in his opening statement of the hearing, titled Supporting a Fact-Based Approach to Preventing Terrorist Travel to the United States. I sincerely want to know whether this is worth it. Whether its worth it to discriminate against millions of people around the world simply on the basis of their faith, he said. Rose has advocated for the Yemeni-American citizens in his district who have faced hardships with family members visa applications due to the Muslim ban, going as far as asking the secretary of state to personally approve applications for several constituents. I want to be plain, simple and clear about this: the greatest responsibility of a government is to keep its citizens safe. That principle will always be my north star all of our north stares, he said during the hearing. In Fiscal Year 2017, 1,338 individuals were refused visas for entry into the United Staten as a result of the Muslim ban, according to the Government Accountability Office. Rose questioned Director of the National Targeting Center, Passenger Operations Donald Conroy if the Administrations vetting process would have prevented those individuals from entering the United States if the Muslim ban was not in effect. Conroy did not answer the question. They checked all the boxes, they went through a system that you just told me you were confident in, you just said your confident in our system. They checked all the boxes, and then they were denied entry based off the nation that theyre coming from, Rose said. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Newly-appointed MTA Chairman Patrick Foye addressed the media Monday to discuss the recently approved state budget, which includes language to implement a congestion pricing plan to fund the citys mass transit initiatives. Today marks the day that New York makes history, as we mark a true and significant win for our transit system, for our environment, and for our communities and the long-term livability of the New York region" said Foye. Central Business District Tolling is a transformative initiative that will support critical investments in our transit system, reduce pollution and emissions while improving air quality, increase mobility and provide safer streets for cyclists and pedestrians while bolstering New York states economy. As part of the $175 billion state budget approved Sunday, the MTAs Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) will establish the Central Business District Tolling Program, which will charge travelers a variable fee for driving into Manhattans Central Business District, defined as any area south of 60th Street. Setting the price point A six-member Traffic Mobility Review Board will recommend toll pricing next year to the TBTA, which will ultimately determine the toll prices, which may vary based on time of day and potentially offer exemptions and credits to certain travelers. The Traffic Mobility Review Board, which is set forth in the statute, will be six members required to have experience in transportation, transit management and public finance, said Foye. That group will be looking at the MTAs capital plans and the specific terms of Central Business District Tolling Program and will be making recommendations to the MTA. Foye went on to discuss the public outreach that will be involved in determining the toll pricing, similar to the outreach during scheduled fare and toll increases. As part of this process there will be public hearings across the region, including in every borough, Long Island and in the Metro-North area." Foye said. When asked about what a potential toll may look like, Foye deferred comment on the matter until after the Traffic Mobility Review Board makes their recommendations. It would be presumptuous of me to guess and assume what a legislatively-created group that has not been comprised yet is going to recommend, said Foye. Tolls are set to be active by the end of 2020, with the West Side Highway and FDR Drive excluded from the program and exemptions in place for those making less than $60,000 annually and living within the Central Business District. Protections will be in place to ensure drivers will only be tolled once per day. Generating revenue Theres no bigger challenge or opportunity,'' he said. If you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere. Theres nothing more important than the subways, buses, Long Island Railroad and Metro North in New York. This will go a long way towards funding our 2020 - 2024 capital plan for key capital investments in the MTAs infrastructure assets, said Foye. That means necessary funding for state-of-the-art signals, new trains, subways and buses, 50 additional accessible subway stations, and the infrastructure that keeps New York moving. Revenue generated from the new internet sales tax and progressive mansion tax will also be included in the lockbox, adding another $10 billion in bonded funds, totaling $25 billion between the three new revenue streams. Foye said he also expects an additional $7 billion in federal funding, bringing the total funding for the 2020-2024 capital plan to $32 billion. Its actually not 25 [billion dollars], its actually 32 [billion dollars], and heres how you get there," said Foye. In the existing 2015 capital plan, we assumed and are in the process of receiving about $7 billion from the federal government. Our assumption is that we will receive in the new capital plan a similar amount. Taking the new job Over the weekend, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Foye as the new chairman of the MTA, taking over for former acting-chairman Fernando Ferrer, who was serving on an interim basis since the resignation of Joe Lhota in November 2018. As a lifelong rider and a daily customer of the MTA, I can think of no higher honor or more important challenge than serving at the helm of an agency that connects millions of people each day to their jobs, schools, families, and friends,'' said Foye. "There is no question that we have a great deal of work ahead of us, to bring truly innovative and meaningful reform to the agency and provide the service and system New Yorkers deserve. Foye, who served as executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for six years before being appointed MTA president in 2017, talked about wanting to take on the challenge of running New York Citys struggling transit system. Theres no bigger challenge or opportunity,'' he said. If you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere. Theres nothing more important than the subways, buses, Long Island Railroad and Metro North in New York. Ive been riding this network since I was a child, Foye added, noting that his favorite station is 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, "where you get on the 7 train to head to what used to be Shea Stadium. Maria Dolce wrote a compelling letter last month, which was met with mostly negative comments we can expect from Trumps borough. To her credit, 251 people responded. What he has is the inability to ever own his mistakes. . . . she wrote. When asked some years ago if he ever sought forgiveness, Trump responded that there was nothing to apologize for. We are all mortals and sinners in one way or another, including this man, and judgment day awaits us all. If were lucky enough, we will have a chance to ask for forgiveness before the curtain falls. Trump is known for his nastiness, vindictiveness, vulgarity, his endless lies, and attacks on opponents physical appearance, as he did to Carly Fiorina and Lying Teds wife, Heidi. He mocked a disabled reporter, Little Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff, (now pictured as such on T-shirts!) and excoriated John McCain in death, Lock Her Up, his heartless criticism of the Khan family and on and on ad nausem. He has an enemies list; championed the disgraceful birther movement; he detests Mexicans and Muslims and s.h. countries. His vitriol knows no bounds, unfitting for a president of the United States. There is not an ounce of humility or compassion in his being. One of the nastiest political chapters up to this point involved Lee Atwater, campaign manager for candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, when he ran against Democrat Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts. Atwater aroused controversy through his aggressive campaign tactics, such as race-baiting or appealing to racial prejudice in the southern states. In 1976, Massachusetts passed a law banning furloughs for first-degree murderers; Dukakis vetoed the bill. Soon afterward, Willie Horton, serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, was released on furlough and committed heinous crimes. Atwater used an expletive-deleted message that Willie Horton would become Dukakiss running mate. In March 1990, Atwater, at age 39, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. In a February 1991 article for "Life,'' magazine, he wrote in part: My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood . . . I have learned a lesson: Politics and human relationships are separate. It took me a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth. . . The article was notable for Atwaters apology to Michael Dukakis for the naked cruelty of the 1988 presidential election campaign. Atwater converted to Roman Catholicism and, in an act of repentance, he issued a number of public and written letters to individuals to whom he had been opposed during his political career. Atwater died in March 1991 at age 40. Judge not, lest you be judged we know. But, enough with this man! In this season of repentance, it would take a miracle for Trump to put an end to his offensive behavior. He should learn from a dying man and redeem himself for his naked cruelty to those who oppose him and those he detests. (Michele Corelli is a New Springville resident.) STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Victims with ties to Staten Island are among those preparing to file lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Church alleging priestly sex abuse when a special one-year window of opportunity opens in August in New York State, the Advance has learned. Events and other outreach intended to bring attention to the victims already are being done in anticipation of what some experts believe is going to be a controversial summer of filings starting in mid-August. Law firms have been advertising for clients for lawsuits against schools, youth organizations and a variety of religious organizations under the act. The lawsuits are prompted by the Child Victims Act signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Feb. 14. More than 110 Roman Catholic priests and other religious figures in the Archdiocese of New York were accused of sexual misconduct in a list posted on the website of Jeff Anderson and Associates law firm, which represents victims. The roster includes the names of about 30 current or former members of the clergy with ties to Staten Island. Jeff Anderson and Associates has clients who claim they were abused in every diocese in New York State in cases dating back to at least the early 1940s, said attorney J. Michael Reck. He believes that abuse occurred earlier in the last century, but that older victims died or arent pursuing litigation due to their advanced ages. Anderson and Associates is championing the causes of multiple survivors who claim they were abused on Staten Island. More than 100 of the law firms clients are expected to file statewide under the act, Reck said. Michelle Tuegel said her law firm, Seeger Weiss, is representing more than 70 victims in the state who will be bringing lawsuits under the act. Her firm is championing the causes of over 300 adults nationwide who maintain that they were abused as children by priests and others affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. Tuegel said that her firm represents a number of current and former Staten Islanders who maintain they are victims of sex abuse both in our borough and elsewhere in the state. In one recent case, one of her clients held a press conference in the Bronx calling for the removal of a prominent priest with Staten Island ties over abuse allegations. The Advance has chosen to not publish the names of religious figures whose alleged abuse is considered unsubstantiated by the Archdiocese of New York without the formal filing of a lawsuit or action by law-enforcement officials. STAGGERING COSTS The costs of resolving these lawsuits is potentially staggering, but some experts believe that the Archdiocese of New York already has proactively protected itself from financial ruin by implementing assistance and compensation programs for victims and protection plans for children. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, perhaps learned from his experiences as head of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009. The southeastern Wisconsin archdiocese later declared bankruptcy in 2011 due to abuse litigation. Reck is among those who dont think that the Archdiocese of New York will be bankrupted by the lawsuits. The archdiocese, Reck said, has done a very good job of risk management and already has settled hundreds of claims that likely would have been eligible under the act. In 2016, Dolan instituted the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program that awarded nearly $60 million to 278 victims during its first two years of operation, according to a Catholic New York Article in August 2018. However, plenty of other survivors will file, such as people who were abused by religious in various non-archdiocesan orders and others who didnt participate in or rejected settlements from the archdiocesan programs. If the archdiocese files bankruptcy, it will be for strategic reasons as opposed to financial reasons, Reck said, noting that abuse litigation would be frozen during bankruptcy proceedings. Among outspoken Staten Islanders is Anthony J. Raiola, who alleges that he was a victim of clergy abuse. He and Tuegel authored a commentary that was posted on SILive. For decades, the Catholic Church has turned a blind eye to the child predators in its ranks and refused to be held accountable for the thousands of lives it ruined, the Raiola/Tuegel opinion piece said. HOW THE CHILD VICTIMS ACT WORKS The Child Victims Act will allow victims under age 55 to sue their abusers. Previously, survivors only had until age 23 to file a lawsuit in these cases. An additional provision that starts in mid-August is a one-time, one-year window to file lawsuits against alleged abusers, no matter how old the victim currently is or how long ago the attack happened. The criminal statute was extended by five years from age 23 to age 28, according to the Law Journal. However, there has also been some concern among legal experts about the Child Victims Act inducing false claims. The Archdiocese of New York has repeatedly encouraged all victims to report their abuse. The Archdiocese of New York takes seriously all allegations of the sexual abuse of a minor, said a recent statement from Joseph Zwilling, director of communications for the Archdiocese of New York. Our policy and procedures for responding to allegations of abuse include treating anyone alleging abuse with compassion and respect, reporting allegations to and working cooperatively with the district attorney, having the allegation investigated by outside professionals, and turning the entire matter over to our lay review board so that they might carefully examine all the information gathered to determine whether or not the allegation has been substantiated. In response to an inquiry from the Advance, Zwilling said that the accusation against the priest that prompted the Bronx press conference had not been reported to the archdiocese, even though an alleged victim told his story to the media. The archdiocese cannot take action, including the possible removal of a pastor, based merely on newspaper stories or press conferences, Zwilling said. KNOWN STATEN ISLAND CASES The Anderson law firm list identifies monsignors, principals, pastors and parochial vicars who served on Staten Island. Many of the cases on the list which have been deemed substantiated were previously reported by the Advance. Near the top of the list is Monsignor Francis Boyle, the former longtime pastor at Blessed Sacrament R.C. Church in West Brighton. The Archdiocese previously announced that Monsignor Boyle will never serve as a priest again after a church panel substantiated sex-abuse allegations against him. Credible child sex-abuse allegations were levied against another man on the roster, Monsignor Charles Coen, who was a pastor and Irish musician on Staten Island, according to a previous announcement by the Archdiocese. The Rev. Jack Ryan is seen in this photo taken while he served on Staten Island.Staten Island Advance The Rev. Jack T. Ryan is one of four current and former Staten Island members of the Society of Jesus named in the list published by the Catholic orders Northeast Province and also on the Anderson law firm list. Father Ryan served as director of the Mount Manresa Jesuit Retreat House from 1994 to 2002, and then worked with Project Hospitality. He moved to Florida in 2015, according to public records. The Anderson law firm list did not provide specific information about the nature of the allegations, when and where they were made, and whether the Archdiocese deemed them substantiated or unsubstantiated. It posts what amounts to a disclaimer on its website. In doing so, the law firm seems to nod to readers who might be troubled by the lack of proof, specific information about alleged crimes and due process. While lawsuits were filed involving many of these alleged perpetrators, the vast majority of the claims against these individuals have been settled or have not been fully evaluated in a civil or criminal court, the law firm said. Accordingly, the allegations should be considered just allegations and should not be considered proven or substantiated in a court of law. All individuals should be considered innocent until proven guilty. The law firm offers only general information about how and why each name was chosen for the manifest. This list is an attempt to compile information already available from various public sources including the public media,bishopaccountability.org, court filings, press statements, claims filed through the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program in the Archdiocese, lists disclosed by dioceses and religious orders regarding allegations of sexual abuse of minors, and other sources that have attempted to chronicle this information for public use, the law firm said on its website. 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! The 2019 budget has offered some good news for the ABC, with another three years of funding for the national broadcaster's "enhanced news-gathering" program. The broadcaster has been hit with hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts to its base funding since 2014, and management had been sweating over the future of the supplementary local news-focused grant, which has been in place for six years. The budget renews the ABC's local news-gathering funding with $44 million committed over three years. Credit:Jessica Shapiro Despite the ABC's long-held fears for the initiative, the budget renews its funding with $44 million committed over the next three years. The SBS, meanwhile, has received a boost of $30 million over the next three years. The Morrison government has made tax relief the centre of its re-election bid in a federal budget that courts regional voters with the promise of jobs moved from Canberra. A pledge to deliver Australia's first surplus in 12 years, reduce Commonwealth debt, and cut tax for low and middle-income earners were the headline items in Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's first budget. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has pledged to deliver Australia's first surplus in 12 years. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Canberra won infrastructure spending as the Coalition opened government purses in its election pitch, but missed out on planned upgrades to Australia's rail infrastructure. The surge in government spending proposed in the budget was coupled with the prospect of a forecast surplus of $7.1 billion next year, and a promise to eliminate Commonwealth net debt by 2030 or sooner. The federal election is shaping as an "urban congestion war" with Prime Minister Scott Morrison launching a multibillion-dollar campaign to build roundabouts and suburban rail station car parks. Budget figures show overseas migration into the country will grow despite a stated policy to slice immigration numbers. As a result the government has put away money in a series of programs to roll out in the coming weeks of the campaign which is forecast to start at week's end. The Urban Congestion Fund a $1 billion program created in last year's budget, which has been emptied in the past month with up to four in five projects in Liberal-held seats will swell by $3 billion. More than 3.6 million NSW residents will receive immediate tax relief and the state's infrastructure boom will be further boosted with $7.3 billion for new rail and road projects. Funding to health and hospitals in NSW will also increase, while GST payments, which the state government has repeatedly said leaves NSW "short-changed" will also rise this financial year. The first federal budget after the NSW Coalition government was returned for a historic third term has revealed a tax cut of up to $1080 this financial year for more than 3 million residents. More than 1.1 million small- and medium-sized businesses will also be eligible for the instant asset write-off, which is being increased to $30,000. When Gwyneth Paltrow shared a particular mum-daughter pic on social media, it sparked an international debate on whether parents have the right to post photos of their kids. "Sharenting" is the term to describe a parent sharing photos of their kids online. The photo Gwyneth shared shows her fresh-faced and smiling, sitting alongside 14-year-old daughter Apple wearing a ski helmet and goggles. The post which saw Gwyneth Paltrow's teen daughter object to her mother's decision to post it. Credit:Instgram/Gwyneth Paltrow Sounds like a typical proud parent post. Apple however did not like the photo of herself and publicly stated on Instagram, "Mom we have discussed this. You may not post anything without my consent". Paltrow replied: "You can't even see your face!" Domico Speranza, the hijacker shot dead by police. The drama at the airport began at 11:20am when Speranza grabbed Miss Chisholm in the departure lounge of the overseas terminal. It ended at 3:45pm, when he was shot. After grabbing Miss Chisholm, Speranza held a knife with a 10-centimetre blade to her throat and forced her through the departure gates. A customs officer tried to stop Speranza, who threatened to kill his hostage. She pleaded with the officer not to interfere. Speranza then forced Miss Chisholm towards a jumbo jet parked at Bay 7. The jet, a Pan Am Boeing 747, had landed only 10 minutes earlier with 264 passengers on a flight from Los Angeles via Auckland. All the passengers and crew had left the plane and were in the quarantine lounge when Speranza forced his hostage on board the empty plane and into the first-class lounge. Inside the checkpoint, Mr. Martin Slutsky, of Fall River, Massachusetts, was waiting for his ticket to be checked. I heard shouting and turned and saw the guy with the knife against her throat, he said. Then I saw blood trickling down her neck and on to her clothes. Mr. Slutsky said the man was shouting at police and customs officials that he would kill Miss Chisholm unless they let him pass. A policewoman shields the freed hostage, Miss Susan Chisholm. Credit:The Age Archives Pleaded Then the woman pleaded with them to let them through to the plane, he said. The alarm was raised by the customs officer who had tried to stop Speranza at the departure gates. Inspector John Burrows, of the Commonwealth police stationed at the airport, boarded the plane and tried to talk with Speranza. Meanwhile, about 40 State and Commonwealth police, including the State emergency squad and a special anti-hijack force led by Superintendent Jack McNeill, had rushed to the airport. After conferring with Superintendent McNeill, Inspector Burrows boarded the aircraft again and tried to reason with Speranza, who was described as highly agitated. Inspector Burrows managed to edge closer to Speranza as he spoke but it was not until 1:20pm that he was able to make a move. He lunged at Speranza and pushed Miss Chisholm towards the exit. She escaped from the plane as Inspector Burrows grappled with Speranza. Inspector Burrows suffered a minor cut on his hand from Speranzas knife. Detective Sgt Cal Clarke pictured with the satchel carried by the attempted hijacker. Credit:Antony Matheus Linsen Speranza then pulled from his pocket a beer can stuffed with gunpowder, with a powder-filled tube for a fuse. Police said later the bomb had the capacity to blow up the plane and everything within a 10-metre radius. An Italian policeman then boarded the plane and spoke in Italian to Speranza, who held a match close to the bomb fuse as he talked. Speranza demanded the plane by refueled and crewed, and flown to Moscow via Singapore and Rome. He told the police he thought Moscow would be a better place than Australia to live. He said he had had a car accident and had not been given sufficient compensation by an insurance company or the Government. He threatened to blow up the plane if it was not ready to fly by 3:45pm. He also demanded a 12-year-old girl on the plane as a hostage. When Speranza demanded some bread to eat shortly before the deadline, a fire hose was brought to the plane by police. They intended overpowering Speranza with a high-pressure jet of water. As a policeman walked into the cabin with the bread another came in behind him with the fire hose, but Speranza ducked behind a seat to dodge the high-pressure spray. One of the policemen fired two shots, the first striking Speranza in the shoulder and the second hitting him in the forehead. Graphic showing the attempted hijackers path. Credit:The Age Archives He was taken by ambulance to South Sydney Hospital. At the Fairfield home where Speranza lived with his sister and brother-in-law, police found another beer-can bomb. Several months ago he was arrested by detectives at Fairfield when he had a shotgun and 20 cartridges in his possession. He had also been in trouble with police for other offences, including offensive behavior. Can someone please disabuse the PM that we already have a perfectly good replica at the National Maritime Museum, Darling Harbour, capable of long voyages. Has he ever been there? And it was Flinders, not Cook, who first circumnavigated Australia and suggested its name. - Keith Parsons, Newcastle Dying to know what Josh Frydenberg's "congestion-busting infrastructure" actually means. Unless we are getting around like the Jetsons, it can only be a short-sighted fix. - John Swanton, Coogee Morrison wants Labor's climate change policy costed. While he's at it, could he also get the cost of not doing anything costed as well so voters can compare? - Andrew Vivian, Sawtell Your editorial will fall on deaf ears so far as Scott Morrison is concerned ("Time to make social media act responsibly", March 30-31). It is clearly in Morrison's interests to fast-track his anti-racist crusade against social media as he hopes to have Bill Shorten seem weak in comparison, should the ALP rightfully hold up the legislation for greater scrutiny. For Morrison the Christchurch massacre presents a double opportunity, to rewrite history by trying to deflect attention from the stories raised over his character and an attempt to get at Shorten. - Lawrence Di Bartolo, Kedron The Morrison government warns us that house prices will drop if a Labor government is elected. So, what is happening under the current Morrison government? - Tim Cremen, Bomaderry Climate change: Cost of doing something or nothing While the party's plan to save the planet is commendable, perhaps it might also like to elucidate what it plans to do about stagnating wage growth and a gradual decline in trade union membership in the past 30 years, matters central to its platform ("Calls for Labor to reveal plan cost", April 2). - Greg Partington, Quakers Hill Dealing with carbon pollution will come at a cost and business will do its best to shift the cost to someone else, which means the customer, not the company or its shareholders. There is nothing new in that. But this needs to be weighed against the economic and social costs of doing nothing and leaving the planet to continue warming. As recent climatic events have shown, this is not a problem that we are leaving for our children, this is an issue that affects us now. - Philip Cooney, Wentworth Falls The headline screams "Shorten faces calls to reveal climate plan cost". But what is the cost for not planning for climate change? Lost lives? Lost jobs? An uninhabitable planet? Surely the headline should read "Labor to tackle climate change". And no, I'm not a member of the Labor Party. Margaret Grove, Abbotsford Nice to see a politician thinking outside the square and advocating for electric vehicles. Practically, we have serious issues. Firstly, the suggestion to start the car industry again. Can I remind all how much governments had to prop up the industry over the years? Secondly, if we start importing vehicles quickly, how can we get enough recharging stations built to meet the need? Thirdly, how far can these vehicle go without recharging? There are roads in Sydney which have no service stations for many kilometres. Fourthly, how long does it take to recharge? If tradies need to wait any longer than 10 minutes they will not be pleased. Time is money for them. Great idea and suggest we use Canberra as a pilot and change all government vehicles and install enough stations. - Geoff Ball, Worrowing Heights I will consider buying an electric-powered vehicle when Shorten flies to Canberra in an electric-powered aeroplane. Until then, diesel will do. - David Sayers, Gwandalan A portion of superannuation funds should be used to bring Australia to 100 per cent renewable energy with zero emissions. The superannuation sector will soon be controlling capital representing half of Australia's economic output by 2035. A percentage of this should be invested in infrastructure projects which could provide Shorten with an answer as to covering costs to cut greenhouse gas emissions across Australia. - Steve Johnson, Elizabeth Beach Premier's new cabinet offers hope It's welcoming news that Premier Berejiklian has charged a planner, Rob Stokes, with the contentious planning portfolio ("Reshuffled cabinet is not just about personalities", April 2). Stoke's understanding of city planning matters has previously proved insightful. Resurrecting a team of public servants who might advocate, design and oversee much needed improvements in public space is arguably an equally important, though missing, ingredient. The responsibility of providing quality public space has gradually become the providence of the private consultant. Realistically the allegiance of these private practitioners is subjected to the short-term whims of their next client. For public space to rejuvenate and flourish, the establishment of a committed body of talented public servants should be considered. - Cleveland Rose, Dee Why Premier Gladys Berejiklian has made a telling decision in the formation of her new cabinet. The energy and environment portfolios have been merged under the one minister. For NSW this is ground breaking. It marries climate change and energy affordability as two sides of the same coin. Malcolm Turnbull did this in Canberra and resulted in the birth of the National Energy Guarantee. For the LNP this was short-lived. It does seem that the ALP will adopt the NEG and give it a home. It does augur well that a future ALP government in Canberra and the LNP government in Sydney will be on the same page. - Michael Kennedy, West Pymble Your correspondent accused the NSW government of being "Sydney-centric" as though this approach lacks logic (Letters, April 2). Demographers calculated that in 2018 there were 7.8 million people in NSW, with 5.48 million living in Sydney. How can a government's focus on the metropolitan area, the source of the state's overall economic strength be be seen as unfair or skewed? - Glenda Gartrell, Artarmon All citizens have rights While protection of children in Syria should be paramount, I also think those people, including our Prime Minister, who want to keep their parents out are overlooking two things (Letters, April 2). These people are Australian citizens and, like it or not, they not the Kurds' responsibility but ours, even if they are to be put straight into prison on arrival. - Ron Pretty, Farmborough Heights Your correspondent says that they don't care if Mohammed Noor Masri is an Australian citizen. That's the problem when we fail to consistently afford citizens the attendant rights, we devalue citizenship to the detriment of all. The strongest response to tyranny is to uphold the integrity of our democracy just as we oppose the death penalty to uphold the sanctity of human life. - Matthew Benson, Pymble Vision splendid needed More revelations of public figures and their close relationships with developers ("Councillors referred to watchdog", April 2). We can shrug our shoulders or we can decide it's time to demand more from those who hold office at all levels of government. Transparency and integrity has been lost in the rush to attract overseas investors and our nation is just becoming a space or land for foreign interests to invest billions without any thought to how those investments impact on the Australian people. But in the name of economic prosperity all those principles have been cast aside in order for politicians to parade their spurious economic credentials. There appears to be no vision for our country's future beyond what is the next suburban block to be rezoned for development. - Nan Howard, Camden Deadly occupation According to Safe Work Australia, 157 Australian workers were killed at work in 2018, down from 190 in 2017 ("Worker dead, another injured after Sydney scaffolding collapse" April 2). Compare this to the number of deaths as a result of service with the armed forces, from 2001 to the present, which is 63. The only conclusion is that going to work is more dangerous than being a soldier, yet I guarantee that the Prime Minister will not attend the funeral of poor Christopher Cassaniti, who died at Macquarie Park on Monday. His untimely death is why we have workplace safety rules and why they must be stringently monitored. - Tom Orren, Wamberal Heights Can there be anything more devastating for a family than to lose a child who is supposed to be working under safe conditions? And yet there have been many such deaths on construction sites in recent years. Why then is the Coalition so determined to destroy the unions that would endeavour to protect their members with safe working conditions? Ideology? We need unions and we need them to be effective; otherwise we might as well be living in the 19thcentury where lives and working conditions were dictated by the wealthy and the ruthless. - Nola Tucker, Kiama ABC has many friends Revelations that Liberal members of a senate committee inquiring into alleged political interference into the ABC could find no evidence of government wrong doing somehow came as no great surprise ("ABC inquiry splits senators", April 2). They would say that wouldn't they? It was a John Howard advisor who described the ABC as "our enemies talking to our friends". Those Liberals who'd like to see the ABC privatised miss a fundamental point about the national broadcaster most Liberal voters I know are capable of enjoying independent, ad-free ABC without being turned into raving socialists. They would rather have a well-funded public broadcaster than a hollowed out, dumbed down, demoralised alternative sold off to the private sector. - Nick Franklin, Katoomba Of little assistance Please do not praise Victoria's assisted dying laws (Letters, April 2). What Victoria passed is a classic 'Claytons' euthanasia law and has little value for most people. There are simply far too many hoops to jump through to qualify most of which is that you must have an illness that will cause death within six months. For the great majority of people who are most in need of assisted dying, Victoria's legislation will not apply in their case. - Peter Pitt, Potts Point Disposable politicians Peter Hartcher describes Donald Trump as transactional, with no friends or enemies and seeking immediate benefits ("Good, bad and worse of Trump", April 2). This is as we should expect from marketers of consumer durables. They are not repeat purchase items. Marketers of consumable products are more concerned about repeat custom and cannot survive without ongoing loyalty. Thankfully our politicians are consumables. We can use them up and not repurchase every election cycle if they don't live up to our brand expectations. - Rob Barclay, Epping The US has a buffoon for a leader, a comedian may be Ukraine's next president and the Parliament of Australia is looking like clown alley ("Comedian could have last laugh", April 2). No wonder politicians around the world are a laughing stock. - Graham Lum, North Rocks Cecil Rhodes was convinced of the superiority of the white race, so he would be horrified by the direction his scholarship has taken in the 21st century. And that, one African Rhodes scholar said, is "perhaps our best revenge". For more than 100 years, the Rhodes Trust - a scholarship to Oxford University bequeathed by the imperialist Rhodes as a way to promote unity between English-speaking nations - only invited scholars from the English-speaking world and Germany. A statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University's Oriel College. Credit:Chris Ratcliffe Australia's Rhodes Scholars have included prime ministers Bob Hawke, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. But in the past decade, the program has expanded to include students from places such as China, the Middle East, Pakistan and beyond. Late last year, the Rhodes Trust appointed the first female chief executive in its history, American Elizabeth Kiss. Twelve years after north Queensland man Jay Brogden disappeared, police have charged a man with murder after his extradition from Sydney last month. Jay Brogden. Credit:Facebook Jay Anthony Brogden was 21-years-old when he disappeared from Cannonvale, a coastal area in the Whitsunday region, on April 21, 2007. His body was never found. The 33-year-old man was arrested and charged on Tuesday by Queensland State Homicide Squad officers and Whitsunday detectives. He was set to appear in the Brisbane Magistrates Court on Tuesday afternoon to face one count of murder. Principals at several of Queensland's top private schools are taking home pay packets of more than half a million dollars a year. Annual reports for eight private schools tabled in the Queensland Parliament revealed that half employed headmasters on remuneration packages of more than $500,000 in 2018. Toowoomba Grammar School headmaster Peter Hauser made $537,000 in 2018. That is more than Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk makes in a year, with her annual salary set at $399,955. Queensland state school principals start on a salary of about $112,000, while executive principals receive $170,000. With the defeat of the Islamic States last stronghold in Syria, governments worldwide are grappling with how to deal with the innocent family members of foreign terrorist fighters. The Prime Minister has proclaimed that he will not "put one Australian life at risk" to extract the children of Australians who were involved. A number of widowed Australian "ISIS brides" and their children are living in the Al-Hawl camp near the Iraqi border. They include three orphaned children, aged 8, 16 and 17, of Khaled Sharrouf and Tara Nettleton. The eldest daughter, Zaynab, is pregnant and was a child bride, already having two children aged 2 and 3. Innocent Australian children should obviously not suffer for the sins of their parents. They are victims of egregious child abuse by their families. But their situation is legally precarious and highlights major gaps in the protection of Australians. Under Australian and international law, every citizen (and dependent child) has a right to return to their home country. The practical problem is that it is very difficult for Islamic State families to return to Australia under their own steam. They may have no money to travel. They may lack travel documents, including if Australia cancelled their passports (or in some cases, their parents' citizenship). They may be confined for security reasons in Syrian camps. They may be refused permission to transit through other countries because of their association with IS. Australian consular support is understandably non-existent in rebel-held areas of Syria. Loading His grandfather on his father side, George Johnson Carroll, was a member of both the Ballarat and Melbourne mining exchanges. In Carrolls sardonic words George got the megas (megalomania) when he named his last company the Carroll Mining Company and when this company went bust in the 1890s the entrepreneur was consigned to a mental asylum where he died and the family was left to fend for themselves. Carrolls father , also George, was 9 at the time and as restless and enterprising as his father. He followed the gold discoveries to Western Australia and labouring work to New Zealand. He fought in both the Boer War and the First World War and earned a MC campaigning from the Middle East to France. He then settled in Mackay, Queensland, where he became involved in local commerce a pub, shops and, ultimately, a newsagency where Carroll spent his early childhood. A happy life as a boarder at All Souls, Charters Towers, saw Carroll, a cocky youth whod done well at books and sport, leave school to enter the army. He volunteered for the AIF and was sent to New Guinea and, towards the end of the war, to Borneo. Carroll afterwards recalled his respect for the diggers he met, who had suffered through the Depression and whose first job came only when they enlisted to fight the Japanese. He admired their courage, lack of self pity and their sardonic observations about their uniformed and civilian masters. I wanted to understand how this the economic hammer blow of the Depression happened to them, he recalled for this article. After the war he took an economics degree at the University of Queensland and played skilful rugby union, as a fly-half for the University and Queensland . The rugby network, so important in Queensland, got him in to stockbroking. (Whats the Dow doing today he asked a rugby friends stockbroking father, met in Queen Street, Brisbane, and attracted a job offer almost immediately). In 1951 he was appointed finance editor of The Courier Mail and in 1960 joined The Sun-Herald in Sydney as finance editor. Despite the tensions of the relationship Carroll stayed at Fairfax for the rest of his working career, refusing at least one offer from Rupert Murdoch whom he admired but sensibly wanted to keep at arms length. Its a bit staccato over there, he commented. In 1964, though, Murdoch provided Carroll with his greatest opportunity, by launching The Australian, a national broadsheet daily aimed directly at Fairfax and the business and up-market readership of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Canberra Times and the Financial Review. The launch of The Australian and its aggressive competition and its (small l) liberal approach to reporting and commentary was the major impetus in revitalising post-war Australian journalism. Bob Dempsey, National Times production editor, Evan Whitton, Editor, and Vic Carroll, right, look over the first printing of the National Times Business Review. Credit:Gerrit Fokkema Murdoch hired away from the Financial Review, its brilliant, erratic editor, Max Newton, and Carroll was appointed the new editor of the Review, only recently transformed from a biweekly to a daily, as a result of Newtons advocacy. When Murdoch hired Newton and his closest lieutenants to launch The Australian, their plan was to undermine the Financial Review. But as Carroll recalled for this article Max [Newton] left me with the talent those left behind by Newton included Maximilian Walsh, David Love, Alan Wood, John Pierce and Michael Baume. Carroll soon afterwards added to the staff Peter Robinson, who became his deputy, Robert Gottliebsen and Trevor Kennedy. Carroll encouraged Max Walsh and his Canberra staff to analyse the economic implications of government policy and examine the excesses arising from the Liberal-Country Party coalitions political dominance, delivered by the preference votes of the Democratic Labor Party. Sir Warwick Fairfax shows his son Warwick jnr the Fairfax printing presses. Carrolls paper was an aggressive critic of the eras extreme tariff protection, and the political corruption, economic inefficiencies and social inequities it produced. The Financial Review gave a platform for anti-protectionists notably Bert Kelly, the Modest Member whose column despite its light hearted, bantering tone slipped the knife in to the supporters of protection, particularly in the Country Party leadership and laid bare the harm the policies did the rural industries that the Country Party relied on for its electoral base. With his small but talented staff he helped set the agenda for economic reform in Australia that came with the Hawke government in 1983. The paper reported on the excesses and consumer rip offs of the cosy oligopoly in banking, insurance, shipping and consumer finance. These campaigns were one part of an increasingly sophisticated paper that grew from a circulation at its lowest point of 15,000 in the early days of the Carroll regime to become the established financial daily of Australia a rich revenue platform. Many of the targets for scrutiny were close to or had the support of the Fairfax company, board, and family, not least the Bank of NSW, the AMP , the Liberal Party of Bob Askin and Bill McMahon and the foreign policies of the Menzies and later Coalition governments. Carroll weathered many rebukes and threats of discipline. Calls to see Sir Warwick Fairfax or the companys management, he referred to as going to get the cuts though Carroll observed at the time and later that the discipline of having to think through persuasive defences of his papers journalism contributed significantly to its quality. In such tight spots, he was a stubborn and taciturn man, given to formidably long silences, and grudging acceptance of these rebukes. Vic Carroll was a man from whom words, let alone praise, were sparing. David Bowman, the executive editor of the Fairfax papers in 1976 remarked in a typical memo that Carroll responds neither to friendliness nor to kicks. He was a man from whom words, let alone praise, were sparing. When editor of The National Times I once complained that a story idea had failed. It should have worked. It was a good idea, I said. Good ideas work, he pointed out. In 1975 The National Times, which I then edited, published a series written by Evan Whitton that detailed the lies and deception of the Menzies government when it committed Australian troops to Vietnam a policy The Sydney Morning Herald had strongly supported. The Fairfax board considered sacking Carroll, by then managing editor of both the Financial Review and The National Times, as well as myself and Whitton, the deputy editor. The sentence for Carroll was reduced to exile at the magazine subsidiary of the company and in 1980, the chairman James Fairfax and the new chief executive Greg Gardiner readily welcomed Carroll back as editor of the Herald, which was in a moribund editorial and commercial state. The board that approved the appointment included Sir Warwick Fairfax, Sir Vincent Fairfax, John B. Fairfax and Angus McLachlan, all admirers of his editorial skills but critics of Carroll in the past. Elsewhere, only Ranald McDonalds Age and Lord Thomsons Sunday Times in London in the 1970s offered such tolerance for editor/trouble makers and Thomson solved his problem by declaring he took an interest only in the bottom line. That could not be said of the Fairfax family until that dim figure, Warwick junior arrived. In the early 1980s Carroll worked the magic again, beginning the reconstruction of the editorial and commercial fortunes of the Herald by putting together another talented team, led by Chris Anderson, Eric Beecher, Paul Kelly, Valerie Lawson, Ian Hicks and the man he acknowledged as the memory of the Herald, Alan Peterson. Loading Carroll, Anderson and Beecher introduced the daily supplements that gave the paper an extra dimension and additional advertising. Police rounds stories were curtailed, financial and sport coverage expanded. More analytical political coverage in Canberra was introduced and the state government came under severe scrutiny. The activity of the Herald writer Evan Whitton in the early 1980s in deciphering the patterns and reporting the full detail of the notorious corruption of the NSW police was a significant factor in restoring the Heralds credibility and Carroll and his deputy Anderson were the gatekeepers who swung this particular gate wide open, to the anger of the corrupt officers of the government, the courts and the police and the state Labor government of the time. Carroll was one of the first editors to recognise the gold mine of talent represented by women, who until the 1960s were generally kept out of the newsroom particularly of a financial paper. Yvonne Preston, subsequently an influential writer on the Financial Review and The National Times, and Beijing correspondent for the Herald, was hired from the Reserve Bank. Anne Lampe, who later consistently irritated the big insurance companies with her reporting on the dubious investment value of their life insurance policies, wrote a letter for the letters page of the Review and was hired on the strength of that. Southern Cross Station is nearly at capacity due to exploding passenger growth, prompting the stations owners to call for urgent upgrades. Long queues snake through the station during peak periods and platforms have become so overcrowded there are warnings commuters safety could be at risk. About 280,000 people use Southern Cross each day, according to figures from the station's private operators, which includes commuters using trains, buses and people shopping at retail stores. By 2031, the operators expect this will grow by an extra 100,000 passengers a day a projection that matches Victorian government forecasts. The ACT government dismissed Tuesday's federal budget as electioneering, saying Canberra had been ignored in the glut of infrastructure spending on the rest of the country. Chief Minister Andrew Barr said the budget looked "more like a marginal-seats campaign launch than a national economic statement". "Canberrans have missed out on a city deal, investment in faster rail connections between Sydney and Canberra, and investment in stage two of the city-wide light-rail network," he said. Andrew Barr, who dismissed the federal budget as open electioneering. Credit:Elesa Kurtz "From a $100 billion infrastructure budget, all Canberra gets is $52 million, much of which is for a road mostly located in NSW. Instead, we get even more public service jobs shifted out of the city." Ever since Apple released the first unibody laptop more than a decade ago, anodised aluminum has become the defacto material by which premium notebooks are constructed. HP is looking to change all that with the leather bound Spectre Folio that can easily switch between laptop and tablet mode thanks to its unique convertible hinge. The full grain leather covers the entire outside of the device and elegantly borders the display, keyboard and trackpad. HP assures us it is not out there slaughtering cows and instead uses leftover leather from factories. Either way the leather feels extremely high quality. The HP Spectre Folio is covered in leather. There are a number of benefits to using leather over metal or plastic. Firstly, the leather feels pleasant to the touch while also adding a grippy texture, making it more comfortable to hold when closed. The base of the laptop is never to hot or cold on your legs and you can throw it in your bag and move it around freely without worrying about scratches or dents. Leather simply ages better provided you can keep it away from substances that may dye or discolour it such as ink, lipstick, red wine or oils. Outside of the unique look and feel the HP Spectre Folio, which starts at $2999, boasts one of the best convertible PC designs. There's a seam in the leather case behind the display that allows it to transform into various modes from the default laptop mode. Beria, Mozambique: Mozambican and international health workers are racing to contain a cholera outbreak in the cyclone-hit city of Beira and surrounding areas, where the number of cases has jumped to more than 1000. Children play at a watering point in Beira, Mozambique. Credit:AP One person has died of cholera, while 97 patients remain in treatment centres, with the others released, Mozambique's health director Ussein Isse announced. The new figures are an indication that cholera is spreading but is being brought under control, health workers say. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said there is also a high risk of the spread of infectious diseases, including those caused by insects such as mosquitoes, with 276 malaria cases also reported in cyclone-affected areas. The overall cyclone death toll in Mozambique has risen to 518. With 259 deaths in Zimbabwe and 56 in Malawi, the three-nation death toll from Cyclone Idai now stands at more than 830. Authorities warn the tolls are preliminary as receding flood waters will expose more bodies. But it will also put Labour and its leader Jeremy Corbyn in the spotlight to decide whether they can find common ground with the government and support a form of Brexit, rather than push for a referendum or general election. Loading Labour showed signs of flexibility on Monday during votes on Brexit options in Parliament, where it backed several "soft Brexit" options that were similar but different to its own proposals. If May and Corbyn cannot reach an agreed position, Parliament will be asked to come up with a majority decision by choosing between a number of options, and May committed the government to abide by the decision of the House of Commons. May said she would ask EU leaders next week to approve a delay to Brexit, which is otherwise due to happen on April 12. She said she would set a timetable for the process so the Brexit withdrawal could be ratified before May 22 and the UK did not have to take part in European parliamentary elections. Loading May said it was a "decisive moment in the story of these islands [that] requires national unity to deliver the national interest". May addressed the nation after 6pm on Tuesday, local time, having led a discussion of the governments options that began at 9am. Cabinet ministers phones had been confiscated so they could not leak discussions as they went along, or caucus with Conservative factions. European Council president Donald Tusk tweeted "let us be patient" in response to May's statement. The UK will leave the EU, by force of law, on April 12 unless European leaders agree next week to a delay (or if May takes the unlikely decision to revoke Brexit altogether). An April 12 Brexit would be a "no-deal" withdrawal. A leaked letter to ministers from Britains highest-ranking civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill, warned a no-deal Brexit would mean an economic recession, significant disruption to food supply with prices up 10 per cent, and more for fresh produce. The pound would fall further, there would be a credit crunch and companies that trade with the EU would end up on the brink of bankruptcy. The memo also warned of direct rule returning to Northern Ireland for the first time in a decade, and a disruption to national security. Anti Brexit placards outside the Houses of Parliament. Credit:AP The European Commission's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said earlier on Tuesday the UK could not avoid the issues at the heart of the Brexit withdrawal deal. "There won't be many months passing before the UK starts asking for negotiations on a free trade agreement or on other issues, on transport [for example]," he said. "We will put the same subjects back on the table... citizens [rights], Ireland, financial obligations." Barnier said any request for delay at next Wedensday's European Council meeting would require the UK "to explain why". "Is it for a new referendum, is it for a new general election, is it for some political process of a cross-party nature, I don't know," he said. French president Emmanuel Macron said "it falls to the UK to present a credible alternative plan supported by a majority between now and April 10 to avoid [a no-deal Brexit]." "We can't spend the coming months once again sorting out the terms of our divorce," he said. May's Cabinet also reportedly discussed calling an election to break the deadlock. However it was shown internal polling that likely reflected public data showing a collapse in Conservative support and a likely minority Labour government. Andrew Hawkins, head of polling company ComRes, wrote on Monday the Tories would be crazy to call a general election and would lose 10 or more seats. The children of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received million-dollar houses in the kingdom and monthly five-figure payments as compensation for the killing of their father, according to current and former Saudi officials as well as people close to the family. Khashoggi's two sons and two daughters may also receive much larger payouts - possibly tens of millions of dollars apiece - as part of "blood money" negotiations expected to ensue when the trials of Khashoggi's accused killers are completed, according to officials and others who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Credit:AP The previously undisclosed payments are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to reach a long-term arrangement with Khashoggi family members, aimed in part at ensuring that they continue to show restraint in their public statements about the killing of their father by Saudi operatives in Istanbul six months ago, the officials said. The Khashoggi siblings have refrained from any harsh criticism of the kingdom, even as their father's death provoked global outrage and widespread condemnation of the heir to the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. PHILIPSBURG:--- A delegation from St. Maarten headed to New York for a series of meetings which included a meeting with Jet Blue Airways. The Honorable Minister of Tourism, Economic Affairs, Traffic and Telecommunication (TEATT) Stuart Johnson and Interim-Director of the St. Maarten Tourism Bureau (STB) Mayling Chun met with Jet Blue officials late last week at their headquarters. During the meeting, Minister Johnson presented a specially worded letter to signify the support Jet Blue provided in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma and the long-standing working relationship to St. Maarten. Minister Johnson and Ms. Chun also presented special gift bags to the Jet Blue officials with St. Maarten branding and other gift items. Minister Johnson stated in his letter, I would like to take this opportunity to formally extend my sincerest of appreciation to you, and the entire Jet Blue Airways team for your unwavering support and commitment to the island of St. Maarten/St. Martin. This relationship started back in 2008 with the first flight from JFK and has grown to be what it is today; daily flights from JFK, Boston, and Fort Lauderdale (FLL). Johnson added, Just over one year ago, our country faced one of the worse tropical natural disasters in its history, Hurricane Irma." Hurricane IRMA severely affected all facets of life in St. Maarten, with an especial impact on our economy and tourism. In the immediate aftermath of the Hurricane, Jet Blue Airways showed us how dedicated and committed they are to return the island back to normalcy. This support will never go forgotten and will always be appreciated. Johnson went onto to say, It was because of your swift assistance, coupled with the island's commitment to providing the best support to its patrons, Jet Blue Airways returned to The Princess Julianna Airport on November 1, 2017, operating flights twice a week, with a continued increase in frequency with routes being added to Fort Lauderdale. This is a true testament to the confidence and commitment Jet Blue Airways has to our destination. On behalf of the Government, and people of St. Maarten, I wholeheartedly convey that we remain committed to our working relationship and look forward to growing this relationship in the years ahead, Johnson concluded in his letter. Jet Blue officials made clear in the meeting to Minister Johnson and Ms. Chun, So far no complaints are coming from Jet Blue customers regarding the temporary facilities at the Princess Julianna International Airport. Other points for the meeting included meeting with network planning officials, marketing executives and JetBlue vacations executives to inform them of the state of the industry and the airport. Additionally, Jet Blue is satisfied with the recently launched FLL flight from St. Maarten and the load factors are good for the NYC and Boston routes out of St. Maarten. The Ministry of TEATT and STB informed Jet Blue that they will support JetBlue and JetBlue Vacations marketing campaign to cater to the various gateways. It is imperative to support Jet Blue and all our partners in the tourism industry to continue growing our market share and develop sustainability for our tourism, May-Ling Chun Interim Director of Tourism concluded. CUPECOY:--- K1 Britannia Foundations Disaster Relief and Crisis Team K1 Direct will be hosting two consecutive 6-day training course facilitated by Mr. Jacob Sjaak Seen, Multidisciplinary Operational Team Leader of the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) team. The course will run until April 12th and will feature a series of workshops, trainings and bonding activities, that will effectively equip volunteers with the tools and expertise needed to successfully manage emergency disaster situations. Alan Schet, Program Manager elaborated, K1 DIRECT has committed to play specific roles in the disaster planning, specifically in St. Maarten in regards to distribution, first response, and shelters. Additionally, K1 DIRECT has committed to play specific roles in the neighboring countries in order to effectively fill these needs, and therefore the volunteers must be equipped with all necessary trainings. On Sunday March 31st, nine K1 Direct Curacao volunteers and Jacob Sjaak Seen arrived on St. Maarten. On Monday April 1st, they started week one with full day trainings alongside partners such as representatives of the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard, the Windward Islands Emergency Medical services (WIEMS) and a few of K1 DIRECT members from St. Maarten. The trainings are hosted at no cost to the foundation at the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine. In week two, from Sunday April 7th to Friday April 12th, K1 DIRECT will repeat the disaster response mission cycle training in half day sessions with participants such as K1 Direct St. Maarten volunteers, representatives from the Governments Emergency Support Function 7, and the Dutch marines. In total there will be approximately 40 participants that will be taking part in the training. The course will cover everything from Principles of Humanitarian Aid, Disaster & Crisis Management, Search & Rescue Phase, Emergency Logistics and many others. The topics that will be discussed and the expected lessons that will be learned will help all volunteers and others attending the training. Ms. Hakkens elaborated saying, K1 DIRECT is meant to be a holistic response team, meaning that we also know how to organize ourselves and document our processes. The training, which goes through each phase of the mission cycle, and Sjaaks experience in the field is invaluable in this sense as though we are volunteering, we aim to do so professionally & effectively. Volunteers mean well but can sometimes do more harm than good in chaotic situations. By giving this information to our team and following it up with future trainings, table tops, and drills will ensure that we are not only cognizant of the response processes, but have also practiced them within our structure. All participants, including those from other response organizations, will receive a certificate after successfully completing the course. This training course is one of the first international trainings organized by K1 DIRECT, who is looking forward to continuous support and partnerships that will strengthen the team. K1 DIRECTs founding sponsors, who help to make training courses such as this possible, are Carnival Cruise Line and the Dutch Disaster Fund. For more information about K1 Britannia Foundation and K1 DIRECT, visit their website www.k1britanniafoundation.org, their Facebook www.facebook.com/k1sxm, send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call +(1) 721-543-3332. Notice of Availability of AGM Materials Posted by Publisher Internet Caledonia Mining Corporation Plc?(the \Company\ https://www.commodity-tv.net/c/search_adv/?v=298787 ) announces that documents comprising a notice of annual general meeting of shareholders (the ?AGM?) and a management information circular ? solicitation of proxies together with a proxy form are now available at http://www.caledoniamining.com/index.php/investors/shareholder-meeting-documents.? The AGM will be held at the Company\-\-s head and registered office at 3rd Floor, Weighbridge House, ?Weighbridge, St Helier, Jersey JE2 3NF on Wednesday, May 8, 2019 commencing at 9:00 a.m. (UK time).? For further information please contact: Caledonia Mining Corporation Plc Mark Learmonth:?Tel: +44 1534 679 802 Maurice Mason:?Tel: +44 759 078 1139 WH Ireland Adrian Hadden/Jessica Cave/James Sinclair-Ford:?Tel: +44 20 7220 1751 Blytheweigh Tim Blythe/Camilla Horsfall/Megan Ray:?Tel: +44 207 138 3204 Swiss Resource Capital AG Jochen Staiger www.resource-capital.ch info@resource-capital.ch Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with The Elders delegation, led by its chair, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 1, 2019. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin) BEIJING, April 1 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping on Monday met with The Elders delegation, led by its chair, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, in the Great Hall of the People. During their meeting, Xi said the world today was facing unprecedented changes, while the prospect of international cooperation, as well as solutions to global challenges and the future of human society were being thought on by more and more insightful people. "We advocate cultivating the awareness of a community with a shared future for humanity, and better building and caring our common home planet," Xi said, adding that every country bore a responsibility for the future of mankind. China is a major developing country, but it never evades its due international responsibilities. China seeks cooperation with win-win results and helps developing countries realize common progress during its own development process, he said. He said China had always pursued a right approach to justice and interests by putting justice before interests, and given selfless help to African countries when it was still very poor. The Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China is "for mutual benefit and win-win cooperation with all the countries," Xi said. At present, many countries have felt pressure and worries from the impact of unilateralism, but the voice of the international community in support of multilateralism has remained the dominant force. It is important to ensure that existing multilateral processes do not stall and what has been achieved is not reversed, Xi said, reiterating China's commitment in maintaining international nuclear non-proliferation regime and strengthening international cooperation on climate change and other multilateral agendas. "China always holds an open attitude towards the reform of multilateral institutions," Xi said, stressing that the reform should be discussed by all the relevant countries and accommodate the legitimate concerns of all parties in accordance with universally recognized rules, serving the common interests of majority countries. China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative is a major contribution to multilateralism and international cooperation, Xi stressed, adding that China and other participating countries have upheld the principle of consultation and collaboration for shared benefits in the past five years and created many new modes of cooperation. Xi stressed that major countries should shoulder special responsibilities as the relations between major countries concern global strategic stability. China has been committed to promoting coordination between major countries and looked forward to harmony among major countries, with no conflict or confrontation but mutual respect and win-win cooperation, Xi said. Calling China-U.S. ties one of the most important bilateral ties in the world, Xi said he hoped the United States could meet China halfway, manage differences and expand cooperation and jointly promote China-U.S. relations based on coordination, cooperation and stability so as to provide more stable and expectable factors to the world. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Xi said it was Chinese people's choice to adhere to the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The CPC has led the Chinese people in tireless struggle and scored remarkable achievements in many areas, said Xi, adding that China had kept improving its development path and made unremitting efforts towards the "two centennial goals." "China running its own affairs well is in itself a contribution to the world," President Xi said. Mary Robinson, chair of The Elders and former president of Ireland, Ban Ki-moon, co-deputy chair, former Secretary-General of the United Nations and chairman of the Boao Forum for Asia, as well as former President of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo also spoke on behalf of The Elders. They congratulated on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the PRC and the success China had achieved in economic and social development, and spoke highly of the country's efforts made in environmental protection, poverty eradication and the work on ethnic minorities. China has played a responsible and constructive role at a crucial moment when multilateralism is faced with challenges, they said, adding that China had always adhered to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and taken part in the cause of peace and development in Africa. Saying that Xi's speeches on international occasions had sent positive messages, they called on countries to uphold the multilateral system with the United Nations at its core and enhance multilateral cooperation in areas of international and regional stability and climate change. The Elders, initiated by former South African President Nelson Mandela in 2007, is an international non-governmental organization consisting of former leaders of countries and important international organizations. Its goal is to promote the resolution of conflict via dialogue and work on solutions for global problems such as poverty and disease. Earlier Monday, Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, also met the delegation. Georgetown, SC (29440) Today Clear to partly cloudy. Areas of patchy fog. Low 42F. Winds light and variable.. Tonight Clear to partly cloudy. Areas of patchy fog. Low 42F. Winds light and variable. SHERLOC, one of the instruments on the Mars 2020 rover, was cleared to stay on the mission after a termination review earlier this year delayed by the partial government shutdown. WASHINGTON The five-week partial government shutdown earlier this year that delayed elements of other NASA missions may have provided a reprieve of sorts for a troubled instrument on the agency's next Mars mission. During a March 27 presentation to the National Academies' Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science here, Ken Farley, project scientist for the Mars 2020 rover, said that NASA directed the mission last December to conduct a "termination/continuation" review for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC), one of the instruments on the rover. "It had a combination of technical challenges and high cost risk, meaning that it wasn't clear yet what exactly the instrument was supposed to cost because there were technical challenges that had not yet been overcome," he said. Related: Jezero Crater or Bust! NASA Picks Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover That review was originally scheduled for early January, he said, but was delayed by the five-week partial government shutdown that started Dec. 22, curtailing all but essential agency activities. The review eventually took place in late January and early February, after the shutdown ended. "We had actually been able to make a fair bit of progress on solving some of the technical challenges" during that time, Farley said. After the review, NASA leadership directed the mission to continue developing SHERLOC with "relatively minor modifications to the procedures that are used to minimize further cost growth and to minimize the schedule risk." Farley added that the mission looked for "descopes" to the instrument that would reduce its capabilities but also lower its technical risk and cost. "Basically, there was nothing obvious that could be done," he said. The instrument, mounted on the rover's arm, carries a set of spectrometers, a camera and a laser to study Martian rocks. Scientists plan to use the instrument to look for minerals or organic material that could be evidence of past Martian life. Farley, speaking the committee by telecon, that the laser spectrometer component of the instrument is scheduled for delivery to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in this summer for integration onto the spacecraft. There are backup plans, though, including allowing the instrument to be installed on the rover after it is shipped to Cape Canaveral, Florida, next January for a July 2020 launch. He didn't elaborate on the details of the instrument problem but said it had to do with a high-voltage power supply for its laser. "If I could convey one message to the science community, it is to think deeply about high-voltage power supplies on Mars, because they have been a real problem for us," he said. "Mars is a terrible environment for such voltages, so we have trouble with arcing." SHERLOC was one of the reasons cited by NASA for the mission's cost overrun. The agency, in its full fiscal year 2020 budget request March 18, said problems with another instrument, Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, as well as the rover's sample caching system, caused the cost growth for the mission. NASA has not provided further details on that cost growth. During a NASA town hall meeting at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference March 18, Lori Glaze, director of NASA's planetary science division, said the cost growth was less than 15 percent of the overall cost $2.1 billion plus $300 million for its first Martian year of operations and that the costs would largely come out of other parts of the overall Mars program. The agency's fiscal year 2019 operating plan, yet to be released, will contain details of those costs. Other aspects of the mission are faring well. The heat shield that will protect the rover during entry into the Martian atmosphere had to be rebuilt after the original unit cracked during testing last year. "The new build in on schedule," he said, and is scheduled for delivery this summer. Mechanical actuators for various parts of the rover, components that caused problems for the development of the Curiosity rover, have all been delivered to JPL. A key part of the Mars 2020 mission will be to cache samples of Martian rocks and soil for return to Earth by future missions. As planning begins for those future missions, Farley said there's some reconsideration about what Mars 2020 will do with those samples. Previous planning called for the rover to leave the sample canisters on the surface as it roved, requiring a future mission to pick them up with its own rover. Farley said that the mission is now thinking of going back to its original plans to carry the cached samples on the rover. "We are having interactions with the group of people that are thinking about how to actually do that," he said of planning for collecting and returning samples. "In particular, how can Mars 2020 best handle its sample cache? Is it best to leave them in one place, or in multiple places, or to have the samples on board and potentially participate in a handoff?" Farely added there's no urgency in selecting a method for caching samples. "The beauty of this design is that none of that matters now, because the hardware is capable of doing any combination of carrying everything or putting everything on the ground or splitting it up," he said. "We don't have to commit one way or another basically until the moment when we either put them down or we don't when we're on Mars." POTOMAC, Md. Insisting that all options are under consideration, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said April 1 that he hopes to develop an initial plan within the next couple of weeks for getting astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2024. In an interview after a speech at a workshop here on proposed future astrophysics missions, Bridenstine said the plan under development will leverage earlier plans that called for a human lunar landing by 2028, but was open to achieving the new goal of 2024 "by any means necessary." "What we're doing right now is trying to assess very quickly what would be required to achieve the end state of boots on the moon in 2024," he said. "The plan is all there. A lot of the pieces of the architecture are already there. Were just going to have to pull a number of them forward." Related: Can NASA Really Put Astronauts on the Moon in 2024? NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a town hall meeting April 1 that there "is nothing sacred here that is off the table" about how to achieve the goal of landing humans on the moon by 2024. (Image credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA) Since Vice President Mike Pence announced the new goal of landing humans at the south pole of the moon by 2024 in his March 26 speech in Huntsville, Alabama, there have been few details released by NASA about how it can carry out that accelerated timeline. Pence's speech, though, suggested to many that NASA had such a plan already. "But Administrator Bridenstine told me, five minutes ago, we now have a plan to return to the moon," Pence said. Bridenstine said that plan Pence mentioned referred to the earlier goal of humans on the moon by 2028. NASA is working quickly to put together that new plan for a 2024 landing. "We've got to go fast: a couple of weeks," Bridenstine said. NASA will then work with the White House, including the Office of Management and Budget, to develop a "consolidated position from the administration" on that approach, and its cost, before delivering it to Congress. Related: NASA Aims to Accelerate SLS Megarocket for 2024 Moon Push In a town hall meeting with NASA employees earlier in the day at NASA Headquarters, Bridenstine said he was open to almost any approach to achieve the 2024 goal. "I'm taking nothing off the table, and we're not compromising safety," he said. "Anything we don't need to do we can delay. There's future launches, there's future things we can test, but right now, how do we get boots on the moon in 2024?" As an example of "taking nothing off the table," Bridenstine discussed at the town hall meeting the two-week study that looked into commercial alternatives to the Space Launch System for the Exploration Mission (EM) 1 flight. That examined a wide range of options, including use of both United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy and SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, but most suffered from a number of technical or logistical issues that kept them from being able to accelerate the schedule for EM-1. Bridenstine discussed one specific option, involving a Falcon Heavy launching an Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage and Orion spacecraft, that could be revisited in the future. "There is a solution here that could potentially work for the future," he said. "It would require time, it would require cost, and there is risk involved, but guess what? If were going to land boots on the moon in 2024, we have time and we have the ability to accept some risk and make some modifications." "There is nothing sacred here that is off the table," he argued at the town hall meeting. He added, though, that the "best option" to getting to the moon as soon as possible remained the SLS, and that NASA was continuing efforts to find ways to accelerate its development. Bridenstine, in his remarks at The Space Astrophysics Landscape for the 2020s and Beyond meeting here, assured an audience of astronomers that, to carry out the new goal, NASA would seek additional overall funding and not take money from other parts of the agency, like science. "We will need more resources if we're going to the moon in 2024," he said. In both that speech and the earlier town hall meeting, he said he anticipated NASA would start the 2020 fiscal year in October on a continuing resolution, which funds programs at the same level as the previous fiscal year and typically does not allow new programs to start. He said NASA would seek an "anomaly," or exception, in that continuing resolution to allow the agency to move ahead on its accelerated lunar plans. "It has been tried in the past that we 'cannibalize' one part of NASA to fund another part of NASA," he said. "You have my commitment, and if you watched the National Space Council you heard me say, that path does not work. It has been tried before, and you have an administrator who will work as hard as possible to make that is not on the agenda for the future." Bridenstine was speaking to an audience wary about such cuts given that, for the second year in a row, NASA's budget request proposed terminating the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the next large astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. Bridenstine said that decision was linked to cost overruns with JWST and not the agencys exploration plans. "It is in essence the casualty of James Webb," he said of WFIRST. He added, though, that NASA would continue to work on it in the current fiscal year using the funding allocated by Congress. "While the budget request may zero it out, what we do at NASA is we follow the law. And if the law says we're going to do WFIRST, guess what? Were doing WFIRST, and were going to do it with everything we've got." NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft revealed that as much as 22 percent of the material found in Shackleton crater, at the lunar south pole, may be made up of ice. This split image shows an elevation map (left) and a shaded-relief map (right) of Shackleton. When Vice President Pence challenged NASA to put humans on the moon by 2024 during an announcement last week, he targeted the southern lunar pole, an area rich in water as well as science. Landing at that site might help astronauts' long-term survival on the moon and could possibly lay the groundwork for boosting future teams farther out into the solar system. "We have known that the poles of the moon were unique environments for some time," Noah Petro, a NASA lunar astronomer in Greenbelt, Maryland, told Space.com by email. Petro is a project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission currently orbiting Earth's nearest neighbor. Observations from LRO and other spacecraft have confirmed that there's water ice hidden in craters at the lunar south pole. Polar water or ice could provide both air and fuel as well as water for astronauts to drink. Related: The Search for Water on the Moon in Pictures Exploring "the south pole, with the possibility of water and/or ice, has the added benefit of finding a resource for future use," Petro said. Why south pole? When Apollo astronauts visited the moon 50 years ago, it was considered dry and barren. But the samples they returned eventually told a different story. In recent years, scientists have found " significant amounts " of hydroxyl a chemical that includes both components of water in the moon rocks brought home by Apollo 15, 16 and 17 astronauts. While water may be widespread beneath the lunar surface, the last decade or so has revealed that the permanently shadowed regions of the poles hide hydrogen-rich deposits, in some cases confirmed to be water ice , beneath the upper three feet (one meter) of the lunar regolith. While water is a requirement for humans to survive, a cool drink of lunar water isn't the only reason ice could be valuable. Once processed, the oxygen could produce vapor that could be used to supply a needed part of astronauts' breathable atmosphere. It could also be separated into hydrogen and oxygen components to be used as rocket fuel. "These resources mined from the moon could potentially reduce the need for launching resources from Earth, which can significantly reduce the cost of deep space exploration," Debra Needham, a planetary scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, told Space.com. There is already an ongoing discussion about using the moon as a jumping-off point for Mars. By processing lunar ice into fuel, mission planners could help reduce the amount of material lifted into space from Earth, helping drive down costs. That, in turn, could help further human exploration beyond our planet. "The farther humans venture into space, the more important it becomes to manufacture materials and products with local resources," Petro said. Before you visit There are still a number of things that need to be done before humans put boots on the moon again. While water-rich material has been identified at the lunar poles, scientists still want to nail down how much of it might be water and how much is ice. "LRO has done an amazing job of telling us that there is something interesting going on there, but we should know more before sending humans," Petro said. Needham agrees, adding that a lot of uncertainty remains about the distribution and purity of the water-rich material information that could affect how it is extracted and used. Related: How NASA Hopes to Mine Water on the Moon The technology to turn water into fuel is still in its infant stages. One of the cubesats selected to join NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) on its first flight will rely on a water-electrolysis propulsion system. Zapping the water with electricity breaks the bonds between hydrogen and water, creating a readily combustible fuel for the satellite. Once in space, the tiny satellite will test the process in microgravity. Another problem for human explorers is dealing with the lunar day, which is 14 Earth days long. Additionally, the sun will sit extremely low in the sky at the poles, casting deep shadows over the course of the day. Needham said that such shadows would cause wide temperature swings, block communication pathways and complicate the operation of some instruments that astronauts might carry with them. "These challenges require creative solutions that, while achievable, require additional help from orbiting assets," Needham said, adding that they could drive up the costs and complexities involved in planning a mission to the lunar poles. But that doesn't mean that such missions wouldn't be worth it. "The knowledge and resources we stand to gain by surmounting these challenges is vast," Needham said. Before setting up a permanent lunar outpost, engineers must also develop sustainable exploration setups that would safely allow astronauts to escape Earth, travel to the moon, move from orbit down to the surface and return home safely. NASA would also have to establish long-term assets for lodging and mobility as well as sample collection and storage. Needham said that NASA is working its way through many of these challenges, in part through its work with the SLS as well as working with international partners on other components. The results will help astronauts not only explore the moon but also move out farther into the solar system. "There is certainly still work to be done, but we are on our way to exploring new parts of the moon and proving our capability of exploring other deep-space destinations as we push on to Mars," Needham said. A post shared by Greig Fraser ACS, ASC (@greigfraser_dp) A photo posted by on on Mar 18, 2019 at 12:37pm PDT Principal photography has begun on the newest adaptation of Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi novel "Dune." Herbert wrote six novels in the series altogether, with "Dune" (Chilton Books, 1965) being the first. After his death in 1986, the author's son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have co-authored an impressive further 26. The last time someone attempted to bring the story to the big screen came 33 years ago, with director David Lynch's film. That vastly underrated movie was an unparalleled masterpiece in production design, but it altered one or two elements of the source material more than some fans liked. Brian Herbert recently tweeted that the cameras have begun rolling for the new adaptation. Related: Best Space Movies in the Universe Cameras are rolling on the new DUNE movie, so we have a Greenlight. That is a really big step forward for Dune fans all over the world. I know Frank Herbert would be pleased, and I am proud of my father for creating such a great work of literature.https://t.co/oWGjazDdBoMarch 18, 2019 See more Fans are particularly excited for this new movie because the director, Denis Villeneuve, did an incredible job handling the sequel to another sci-fi property that inspires similarly extreme protectiveness from fans: "Blade Runner," directing that film in 2017. Despite serious misgivings over whether a "Blade Runner" sequel could ever be worthy of the original, Villeneuve proved beyond a shadow of doubt that the franchise was in the right hands . In addition, the recent casting announcements have also met with much approval from "Dune's" feverish fan base. Josh Brolin has signed on to play Gurney Halleck, the role previously played by Patrick Stewart; Oscar Isaac will make a formidable Duke Leto Atreides, previously played by Jurgen Prochnow; Jason Momoa will play Duncan Idaho, previously played by Richard Jordan; Dave Bautista will take on the meaty role of Glossu "Beast"' Rabban; Javier Bardem will play Stilgar; Stellan Skarsgard will play the delicious role of Baron Harkonnen and on it goes. It's truly a dream cast. "Dune" is being filmed on location in Budapest, Hungary, and Jordan and is slated for a Nov. 20, 2020, worldwide release. According to IMDb , Villeneuve has confirmed that his adaptation will be split into at least two films so that the original story would be "preserved and not cut into a million pieces." This year's Northeast Astronomy Forum will include several talks about the Apollo program. Space fans will gather this weekend in Suffern, New York, to celebrate astronomy at the Northeast Astronomy Forum and if you'll be attending, be sure to stop by Space.com. The Rockland Astronomy Club has been holding the annual event for nearly three decades at SUNY Rockland Community College in southern New York. This year's gathering will be held April 6 and 7. On April 6, speakers will include astrophotographer Chris Go, NASA chief scientist Jim Green and NASA astronaut Don Pettit . In addition, Kevin Schindler, the historian at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, will speak about the facility's participation in the Apollo program; and Bill Ayrey of ILC Dover, which built the Apollo 11 suits, will discuss spacesuits through the ages. On April 7, Alan Stern , the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, will speak about the spacecraft's recent flyby of a Kuiper Belt object, then Dylan O'Donnell of telescope company Celestron will offer "A Tour of the Southern Skies." The event will wrap up with talks from Neil Armstrong biographer James Hansen and Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunningham. The event will also include giveaways and a children's corner with activities for kids. If you stop by, look for Space.com in the exhibition hall, which will be open both days. We'll have stickers, posters and more for visitors, with managing editor Tariq Malik on hand to talk space with visitors! Tickets are available in advance online or that day at the door. STAMFORD A disputed project to fix a historic downtown bridge will move forward; soon no one within city limits may own a homemade gun; and anyone who wants to weigh in on proposed parking-fee hikes will have a chance near the end of the month. The Board of Representatives decided this Monday night, when members launched into yet another long discussion about the controversial renovation of the 131-year-old West Main Street bridge, which is crumbling into Mill River. The latest in the two-decade debate over the iron bridge in Mill River Park is that an assessment by a contracted engineering firm concluded that the work will cost about $300,000 more than originally estimated. The city will have to pay for that; the rest will be covered using a $2 million state grant obtained by the Mill River Collaborative, a nonprofit working with the city to remake the park. The city also will be on the hook for about $250,000 to cover the cost of installing a temporary bridge so residents may traverse Mill River during construction, expected to take 18 months. Some representatives said the collaborative, which for 10 years has been working on a multimillion-dollar renovation of the park using city, state and federal money plus private donations, should pay the overrun. Rep. Nina Sherwood, D-8, said she asked Mayor David Martin about it, and he told her he would check with the collaborative. The collaborative then sent a letter, Sherwood told the board. They do not anticipate paying any more than the original $2 million. Rep. Charles Pia, Jr., R-18, said the overrun is 15 percent of the total cost, which is not unusual for such a project, and it should proceed. As it is, city engineers close the bridge during heavy rainstorms because they fear the stone-and-cement supports will give way. The reason the estimate grew is that we paid (the engineering firm) to do the research, and they did. And now we are saying thank you but we dont like the answer so were not doing the project? Pia said. Rep. Anabel Figueroa, D-8, said she shares concerns about funding and the nature of the project the collaborative wants to repair the bridge for pedestrians only, in keeping with the character of the park and to preserve the historic elements of the 1888 structure, but some West Side residents and business owners want the bridge to be shored up enough to handle vehicle traffic to better connect their neighborhood to downtown. Its time to provide a safe crossing for residents who use it every day, Figueroa said. I am afraid that the longer we wait, the more it will cost, and the higher the exposure will be to the city that someone will be injured on the rickety bridge, Figueroa said. Why dont we just be the board that does this, after all these years? asked Rep. Bradley Michelson, R-1. The vote was 23-13 in favor of continuing the project. The next step is to put it out for construction bids. Martin has said he will consult the board if the bids come back higher than expected. With much less discussion, the board voted 29-3, with two abstentions, to pass an ordinance that will prohibit anyone within city limits from owning, using or selling do-it-yourself guns made from parts that can be ordered online or created out of plastic using a 3-D printer. Neither the state nor the federal government bans ghost guns, so called because they have no serial number and cannot be traced. So, around the country, cities are doing what they can to stem the growing tide of do-it-yourself gun production. Because cities do not have the authority to impose criminal charges, the ordinance empowers police to seize ghost guns and fine the owner $250 per day of violation. The owner may appeal, but if a hearing officer deems the gun unlawful, police may destroy it. This is a no-brainer, said Rep. Steven Kolenberg, R-16, who holds a pistol permit. The idea that someone might circumvent the (gun registration) process is cause for concern. This is a very simple thing we can do to make people safer. Rep. Eric Morson, D-13, who also holds a pistol permit, was a sponsor of the ordinance. A few cities have passed bans and now the state Legislature is considering one, Morson said. Its a great move for Stamford and Im glad the state may follow our lead, he said. Board members also voted to send to a public hearing three proposed ordinances that would increase parking fees, fines and hours of enforcement. The ordinances, if passed, will increase on-street meter fees from $1 an hour to $1.25, and enforce meters an extra hour to 8 p.m. At city lots and the garages on Bell and Bedford streets, motorists would have to pay for parking on Saturdays between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. At the busy Summer Street garage, the monthly fee for residents would increase from $80 to $90, and non-residents would pay $110 instead of $90. The fee at the Springdale and Glenbrook train station lots would increase from $3 a day to $1 an hour, with a maximum of $6 a day. Monthly permits for Stamford commuters would increase from $45 to $60. For out-of-town commuters, the cost of a monthly permit would rise from $90 to $125. The boards Transportation Committee will hold the public hearing on parking fees at its next meeting, likely to be set for late this month or early May, said Kolenberg, the chairman. acarella@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2296. STAMFORD - Three residents who addressed the Board of Representatives Monday night thanked legislators for censuring Rep. Marion McGarry, charged with posting anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim messages on Facebook. McGarry, who represents District 12, did not react as the residents read statements in the three minutes each is allotted to speak before the start of the boards monthly meetings. Im proud I live in a city that stands up for the best ideals of our nation and Im proud that our city values and supports diversity, Stamford resident Judy Liebeskind said from a podium facing the board. We all know where hate speech can lead and we all know that remaining silent is not a good idea. Liebeskind said McGarry should apologize for creating disruption in our city. Our city would be better off if Rep. McGarry resigned her post, Liebeskind said. The next two speakers, Jay Klein and Diane Dauplaise, took the podium together, saying they are members of the Greater Stamford Young Democrats. I have lived here only a few years but one of the great strengths of Stamford is everyone is welcome here, no matter where you come from, Klein said. Your vote helps make sure we remain a welcoming community. Dauplaise said she is a Stamford native. One of the things we hear from our members is how welcoming the city of Stamford is to immigrants, people who hold different religious beliefs, and people of different sexual orientation, and how they would never want that characteristic to change, she said. When they finished, Rep. J.R. McMullen, R-18, questioned whether such comments are allowed under the rules governing the boards public-participation session. I thought the rules require that these talks be restricted to items that are actually on the agenda, McMullen said. Board President Matthew Quinones, D-16, said his reading of the rules is that residents may speak about any topic, as long as it was not the subject of a prior public hearing. There is some ambiguous language in (the rules) but I have interpreted it consistently since weve been having the public-participation sessions, Quinones said. Several speakers this evening have spoken about items that are not on our agenda. Rep. John Zelinsky Jr., D-11, who last year pushed for representatives to initiate the sessions, said the intent was not to allow comments such as the ones about McGarry. This is setting a bad precedent to have the public come and speak against a sitting representative. Next month a member of the public could come and, because you voted a different way than they liked ... attack you, Zelinsky said. I think we have to have more limits to what the public can say ... this is not an opportunity to come here and attack an elected official. Rep. Benjamin Lee, D-15, chairman of the boards Legislative & Rules Committee, offered to take up the rules again to clarify them, but said the sessions are about free speech. We are either for free speech or were not, Lee said. McMullen moved to strike from the record all the speaker comments that did not address topics on the agenda. Its not a free-for-all, McMullen said. Quinones called for a recess and directed the boards parliamentarians to consult on the rules. They concluded that McMullens motion was out of order. The comments about McGarry remain on the record. The board on March 12 censured McGarry for Facebook posts that disparaged immigrants, Muslims, and even Democrats. McGarry has said she is upset with the party for its stance on abortion. McGarry is free to keep her seat, which she said she will do for the remaining two years of her term. On March 29, McGarry left the Democratic Party and changed her registration to unaffiliated. It was a day after the Democratic City Committee voted to proceed with a hearing that could have resulted in ousting her from the party. McGarry, 75, has represented her Glenbrook/downtown district for 12 years. acarella@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2296. STAMFORD A security guard at a senior housing apartment building who has a troubled past was arrested last week for allegedly exposing himself to a cleaning woman and masturbating in front of her on two occasions. The woman told police it had been going on for months until she was able to surreptitiously film him doing it on her phone camera, according to his five-page arrest affidavit. Rony Pierre-Louis, 55, of Seaton Road, was charged Monday with two counts each of public indecency and breach of peace and was released after posting a $25,000 court-appearance bond. The Hispanic cleaning woman went to police on March 20 to report that a security guard at Post House, 40 Clinton Ave., was masturbating in front of her on a regular basis while she was cleaning his office in the building, that has 60 units for seniors and disabled residents, according to affidavit. The 47-year-old woman said she was scared and upset because the man would just stare at her while doing it and the day before she had been able to film him while in the act. Officers watched the tape that showed a man sitting on a chair with his penis out masturbating while staring at the woman, the affidavit said. The woman told police she put the phone on her rolling work station and positioned it so the phone would point to where he was sitting. She said he masturbated for about 25 minutes while she worked in the room. The cleaning woman said she did not come forward before because she only began working for the cleaning company two months before. She said she was afraid no one would believe her and she wanted to get some proof before she made an accusation. Police reached out to the employer of the security officers at the building, Century Protective Services, and they supplied police with the security officers name. When police checked their records, they discovered that Pierre-Louis was a suspect in two cases involving a masturbater. He came under suspicion in April 2005 when he approached a woman and her 6-year-old daughter with a written note after he had been watching them from inside his car near the volleyball court at Cove Island Park. The woman told police the note said, You both made me come, the affidavit said. No charges were filed. In May 2015 he was arrested for allegedly masturbating in front of a woman in her car parked at Cummings Beach and was charged with public indecency. In that incident, the woman was able to get pictures of Pierre-Louis exposing himself to her while in his car with the door open. Century Protective Services said Pierre-Louis had been working for them since February 2017 and that there has not been any similar incidents reported against him. The security company said Pierre-Louis was checked prior to his hiring and the background check was clean, despite there being a lengthy story about his arrest at Cummings Beach two years earlier. At his arraignment on Monday, Judge John Blawie made it a condition of his release that Pierre-Louis be given a mental health evaluation and that he participate in intensive pretrial supervision, stay away from the Clinton Avenue building and stay away from the complaining witness against him. jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com B ritains biggest investment trust was among the winners of Lyfts bumper New York flotation despite a fall in the taxi hailing companys share price. Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, listed on the FTSE 100, invested around $20 million in the heavily oversubscribed float after becoming one of the UK institutions to receive an allocation of stock. Shares have had a rocky start, falling 12%. Lyft was valued at $24.3 billion. Scottish Mortgage backed Lyft when it was private, taking a stake worth 46 million as of September 2018. It converted these shares into new public stock and invested more, taking the taxi app from 0.5% of assets to 0.8%. In the context of our previous investments into Lyft the day-to-day swings are comparatively minor if exhausting, co-manager James Anderson said. Lyft has thus far exceeded their and our forecasts of progress in building revenue and share. Over the next decade we think it can take on its main enemy- car ownership not Uber. The eventual economics of this are potentially very favourable but there is much to be done and costs to be borne in the meantime. He added the trust, one of the UKs biggest investors in US tech stocks, looks for long-term pay-offs. No one wants Theresa to be the Robert Peel of the 21st century, said one Cabinet minister this week. Rest assured, theres no danger of that. Sir Robert was the towering 19th-century statesman who established the principles of modern Conservatism, gave Catholics rights and created the Metropolitan Police. Mrs May has achieved precisely nothing, unless you count reducing the number of bobbies on the beat who take their name from her predecessor. So why the comparison? Its because one presided over a huge, historic split in the Conservative Partys history; and the other is on the verge of doing so. As we report today, the Cabinet is riven beyond repair, the leadership is shot, Tory MPs are crossing the floor and the leaders of the Right are warning that the Government may be brought down by its own supporters. Step forward another figure from the Victorian age Jacob Rees-Mogg. This week he reminded Mrs May that the previous split was caused because Peel had decided to break his manifesto pledge and passed legislation with the majority of his party voting the other way. Mr Rees-Mogg was warning Mrs May not to do the same by trying to find a compromise with other parties over a softer Brexit, or by seeking the confirmatory referendum that is now emerging as a favoured option for, as last nights votes in the Commons showed, she would be doing so in the teeth of opposition from the bulk of her parliamentary party, now in the grip of a hard-Brexit fever. It may seem like an arcane comparison to what happened in the 1840s, but its actually very relevant to today and its striking that the likes of Mr Rees-Mogg think Peel got it wrong by putting nation before party. Yes, his decision to cut the tariffs on imported food, by repealing the so-called corn laws, did split the Tory Party between its modernising leaders and its more traditional, rural supporters. It put the Tories out of office for much of the next 28 years. But the policy was undoubtedly the right one. It was a huge boost for the rapidly growing working classes because it cut food prices and heralded an age of free trade. It made Britain the global power of its age, led by the progressives like William Gladstone who ended up leaving the Tory Party in disgust at the hardliners. Those who want to leave the EU, especially without a deal, are the equivalent of the opponents of the corn law repeal. They want to break apart free trade arrangements like the customs union and single market. They dont care if the working population pays higher prices for food and other imports. Back in Peels day they were called Young England; today they are Little Englanders. They were led by a flamboyant opportunist with unruly hair called Benjamin Disraeli who didnt believe a word of what he was saying. You dont have to look far for those who self-style themselves on him today, though they would do well to remember that Disraeli only became great decades later when he renounced his former foolishness. Victorian Britain did not indulge them. It consigned them to the political wilderness for a generation. Todays Britain will do the same. A long delay to Brexit is the most likely option, but the Conservative Party cannot duck this choice. Either it ends this political suicide pact with the hard Brexiteers who have brought it to the edge of collapse, or it will hand the leadership of the country over to those in the coming decades who strike out to make the case for the open society that it, just a few years ago, so successfully advocated. Mrs May is not going to be the Robert Peel of the 21st century. But someone will be. TODO: define component type apester Killing Eve returns soon The plot is gripping, the script is smart, and viewers love it. Killing Eve has already won a heap of awards and more will surely follow when the second series arrives on BBC America next Sunday (its expected in the UK later this year). It twists an old format in clever ways. The big stars are women. It is also the embodiment of international co-operation. Made by BBC America, it is British in part, but American too. Fiona Shaw, one of the leading actors, is Irish. A nother vote, another chance to complain that the House of Commons is good at saying what it doesnt want and not so hot on deciding what it does. But viewing the muddle from Brussels, Paris and Berlin is a clarifying experience. The more so after last nights outcome saw the dim-sum options ranging from a confirmatory public vote on Theresa Mays bedraggled withdrawal proposal to a customs union move closer while remaining tantalisingly out of reach. For all the absorption in indicative votes and who controls business in the Commons, it is not really Westminster that has taken control of the Brexit process, but the European Union. Weather-makers in the major member states will now have their own knotty dilemma at the European Council next week what to do about extending Britains departure timetable. It has finally dawned on MPs that the EUs handling of the next stage of the process will be determined by the timetable of the European parliamentary elections and whether Britain takes part or not. Days after the March 29 intended leaving date the Electoral Commission has issued contingency plans for the UK to hold elections to the European Parliament. The EUs position, however, remains that this is a party to which we are firmly uninvited a final decision needs to be made by April 12. Its protocol states clearly that of the 73 seats vacated by Brexit, 27 will be re-allocated to better reflect the principle of degressive proportionality. This is part of a long-running EU tussle to allocate seats more fairly between member states while shrinking an unwieldy (and costly) parliament. Uncertainty over how elections in late May will pan out under the spectre of Brexit has created fretfulness. Not least because the balance of seats in the parliament will help determine the successor to Jean-Claude Juncker, the perpetually outraged head of the European Commission. In many ways Brexit has papered over the cracks in a union which is seeing power see-saw between France and Germany. Matteo Renzi, the former (centre-Left) Italian prime minister and an outrider for Emmanuel Macron these days, told me in an interview last week that Angela Merkel was now weak and a French ascendancy beckons. Macron, he reckons, will be strengthened by winning a stand-off with the gilets jaunes protesters, while Germany, nearing the end of the Merkel-era, is uncertain about how to steer a continent beset by economic gloom and political disruption. Anne McElvoy I would not be so quick to write off Germany, which is still the Eurozones lender of last resort and thus its stabiliser. But Renzi is right that influence over the direction of the EU is more contested than it was. On the face of it Brexit has had what German politicians like to boast of as a consolidating effect (which is to say that the 27-versus-one consensus has brought the fractious family back together). Yet the EUs worry is not that populist-led states in south or eastern central Europe will try to leave. It is far more worried about apostate countries taking the benefits of membership and then behaving badly, in the manner of Poland or Hungary, which have flouted democratic and judicial norms. The prospect of a long Brexit extension plays into this fear. Macron is most strongly opposed to any prolongation, not least because Paris (along with Madrid) will be the major gainer in the reallocation of EU parliament seats but also because he sees Brexit as an object lesson in populism and its failures. "It is not really Westminster which has taken control of the Brexit process, but the European Union" Merkel is more conflicted. Her rhetoric is about not allowing cherry picking, plus some tears, verging on the crocodile variety, about how sad Germany is to see us go. But Team Merkel, while irritated by Mays dithering and mismanagement, is quietly more constructive. Where officials in Brussels vent about cutting out the cancer of Brexit, Berlin is these days more sensitive to the risk of no deal resulting in an avalanche, as one German cabinet member put it, inside the Conservative Party in Britain, with fallout beyond Blighty. A Right-wing Conservative leadership in Britain, the reasoning goes, could bolster the far-Right AfD in Germany and the other nose-thumbing political movements gathering force across Europe. Hardly anyone now banks on the original May deal passing. So a customs union-based transition is emerging as the touted remedy: a Nurofen-plus targeting all-over Brexit pains. Maintaining some form of transitional customs agreement which would look very like the existing customs union until alternative arrangements guaranteeing frictionless trade could be implemented would calm European fretfulness. For one thing, it would help resolve the ornery Irish backstop issue because it would guarantee the temporary nature of any Irish border arrangements. Finally, something the DUP might not say no to, as one senior Irish mandarin wryly put it. Naturally, that means a lot of Tory MPs will find renewed reasons to hate such a deal, even assuming enough Labour MPs would sign up to it. But all of this is just the beginning of a far longer process of restoring relations between Britain and its neighbours. And that is not just about trade arrangements or smoothing the jagged edges of whatever results from Brexit. It means more politicians engaging with Europe, even when the outlook is bleak or unpromising. Such will be the task of the next generation of reasonable politicians, Left and Right, who will inherit the mess. We have flirted with splendid isolation. Now we have just the isolation not a role to covet in the story of Europe. I s it typical that there are endless requests for more layers of government, controls and political positions? For example, Fulham MP Greg Hands wants his borough to have its own directly-elected mayor [Fulham MP launches bid for first Tory borough mayor in London March 25]. What for? The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, doesnt respond to questions from members of the public. Mr Khan uses modern technology to send an automated reply and then it is dismissed. I have waited nine weeks and sent my questions twice and waited the required 20 working days for a reply but all I have received is silence. With parliamentarians behaving, in my view, inadequately, inefficiently and incompetently, they disenfranchise the public. MPs seem to bicker between themselves, with one eye on any opportunity to improve their own position. Will more politicians really help? Caroline Beese EDITOR'S REPLY Dear Caroline Im sorry to hear you have not received a substantive reply from the Mayors office. Theres every chance that, as a result of this letter being published, you now will. Whether the reply will be to your liking is a different matter. City Hall deals with 69,000 pieces of correspondence a year and claims to answer nine in 10 within a month. It also monitors about 60,000 tweets a year (and responds to several thousand directly). As to the issue of a directly-elected mayor for Hammersmith and Fulham, this would replace rather than supplement the current system of borough democracy. The Tories proposing the idea no doubt hope it will make it easier to win the keys to the town hall. Labour says it will win regardless. A directly elected mayor would potentially be more visible, but would this reduce inefficiency and incompetency? These days councils are as likely to be criticised for doing nothing as for doing the wrong thing increasingly, as budgets shrink. Well done, though, for putting pen to paper. We get the democracy we deserve. Ross Lydall, City Hall Editor Eurostar trespass shows weak spot Like a huge swathe of the UKs rail network, Eurostar lacks a robust and rehearsed contingency plan for incidents such as the trespassing this weekend [Eurostar disruption: Trespasser draped in St Georges flag sparks chaos as passengers are urged not to travel, March 30]. Eurostar does have some features that could provide resilience, but clearly these are not as well rehearsed as the established action that South Western Railway takes when services go into meltdown. The missing details that are needed across London (and elsewhere) are alternative routes when lines are disrupted, and well-rehearsed plans that drop into place instantly. Last Mays Thameslink timetable chaos, for example, might have been greatly reduced by running alternative services north and south of the central core as well as a shuttle service between London Bridge/Blackfriars and Finsbury Park/Kentish Town, until the driver-training problems were sorted. Dave Holladay Honours system must be reordered As a city of style gazers, we owe Instagram many things. And not just Christopher Shannons Instagram account a profile packed with more laughs than a Brexit strategy meeting. Undoubtedly, the social media juggernaut has delivered gifts to our wardrobes too. The latest of these is the bandana-style kitten heel, a shoe thats certain to raise a smile. At least, its certain to put a much longed-for spring in your step. With distraction tactics in mind, what could be better than that? Crafted from velvet and leather with satin trims or accents as theyre described by their Italian creators the Bandana Girl is the creation of Florence designer Barbara Borghini, whose label Gia Couture has been quietly building up a following online. A collaboration with boutique London retailer Alex Eagle a former fashion editor who has been growing a globally renowned luxury business of her own from her Soho studio has helped to stamp Borghinis shoes on London pavements this spring. That Instagrams most dedicated among them Scandi Pernille Teisbaek who enjoys 637k followers, and Londons own Caroline Issa, whose digital fans amount to a cool 197k have been quick to give Gia Couture their blessing, has only helped matters further. With influencing, and its positioning as a new media thats more valuable to brands than advertising, among the hot topics right now, the rise of niche labels such as Gia Couture is striking. Certainly, without a broad, widely accessible digital platform such as Instagram upon which to shout about its identity, brands like Borghinis would take far longer to reach us. And undoubtedly, just as long to appear under the inquisitive gaze of department store buyers who now use the tech platform as a valuable research tool. The high street also looks at Instagram with a curious gaze. A fact thats confirmed by the number of Bandana Girl-inspired styles hitting the shelves. Asos has a host of bow-detail loafers and with its sights set on ubiquity; its about standing out from the crowd its a shoe show off, if you will. If youve been following Kate Middletons wardrobe over the past few months, you might have noticed that the Duchess of Cambridges style is undergoing a subtle evolution. While the Duchess is widely regarded as one of the best dressed women in the British monarchy, her recent fashion choices have features some bold, modern additions. From her sparkling mint Missoni dress in Dublin through to a blue caped coat that sparked a million Beauxbatons memes, Kate's new secret weapon appears to be a friend of hers from university. PA The Daily Mail reports that Kate has a new sartorial secret weapon in the form of Virginia Chadwyck-Healey, a reported close friend who attended the Cambridges royal wedding in 2011. Besides her friendship with Kate, Chadwyck-Healey has worked with British Vogue for twelve years - eventually working her way up to Executive Retail Editor - before leaving to become a stylist, brand consultant and freelance journalist writing for The Telegraph and lifestyle site The Grace Tales. A source told the Daily Mail, Ginnie is Catherines secret weapon. She has made a big difference to the Duchesss wardrobe for public engagements and has helped give her a whole new sense of confidence. Catherine has been really impressed and is very grateful for her help. Chadwyck-Healey, who goes by Ginnie on Instagram, has reportedly been drafted in as Duchess former stylist Natasha Archer is said to be on maternity leave. As with Meghan Markle and her close friend/reported stylist Jessica Mulroney, Kate Middleton appears to be putting her faith in a good friend. Kate and Chadwyck-Healey reportedly have a long friendship. The pair both studied history of art at St Andrews University, where they also met their husbands Prince William and Oliver Chadwyck-Healey. Chadwyck-Healey's father is the third Lord Strathalmond and she also has two young daughters, Nancy and Maggie. In her column for The Grace Tales, Chadwyck-Healey revealed she had left her position at Vogue in order to focus on family and develop a better work/life balance. Getty Images Its felt like both a divorce and a rebirth" she wrote of the change, "It has changed how I dress, how I spend, which brands Im following, how I consume media, and mostly its given me the time and energy to be a better mother and wife (I hope). She continued, There is life after Vogue. The heels are lower, the carb count is a little higher, the pace is a little slower, the freebies are a little fewer but Im learning that [one] life is over and a new one is starting. In fact, Chadwyck-Healey is no stranger to dressing for royal events and featured in a number of best dressed round-ups of guests to Kate and Williams 2011 wedding. To my surprise, I found myself included in the fashion reviews as one of the best dressed wedding guests she recently wrote in The Telegraph. In the piece she also shared her tips on wedding guest dressing, as well as navigating the difficult royal dress code. She revealed, Royal protocol had to come first, but I wanted to feel like I had an identity amid the sea of celebrities, friends, military personnel, foreign members of state and, of course, the Royal Family. The monarchy are expected to uphold a number of unspoken style rules, which include everything from wearing nude tights to steering clear of dark or bold nail polish. S ince 1991, the fitness club giant Equinox has embraced a holistic approach to wellness, adopting the brand ethos Its not fitness, its life. Now, Equinox has announced the opening of the first Equinox Hotel in Hudson Yards, New York, and opened the gateway for the first room reservations. Chris Norton, CEO of Equinox Hotels, says that they are uniquely positioned to define an emerging category that is disrupting the entire industry, as health becomes the new wealth. The inaugural Equinox hotel in NYC extends this fitness-based approach to wellness into its accommodation, with health and fitness features of the hotel encompassing world-class service and design with unparalleled fitness offerings, according to Norton. Amenities of the luxury hotel include the largest-ever-built 60,000-square foot Equinox Fitness Club, of which guests will become members during their stay. Features include personal training services, a performance-driven spa, a 25-yard indoor salt water pool, hot & cold plunge pools, as well as a SoulCycle and culinary concept services from restaurateur Stephen Starr. The hotel is also offering what it describes as as the ultimate sleep chamber, with total soundproofing, a total-blackout window system, CocoMat all natural fibre mattresses, and a Scandinavian technique of two separate duvets that enable temperature regulation. Each room comes with a foam roller, yoga mat, blocks and straps, whilst the mini bar contains a juice press and magnesium-based sleep supplements. Other innovative wellness features include guests having access to in-room, on-demand IV vitamin drips for an extra boost of energy or hydration. The first hotel is set to open in July 2019 in New York City, with properties in Los Angeles, Santa Clara, CA, Chicago, Seattle and Houston soon to follow. To celebrate the new booking platform going live, guests who book via the hotel website will be offered a choice of one of the following, free of charge: a one-hour Personal Training session, SoulCycle class, or spa treatment. D uring the first week of April, people all over the UK will be marking Autism Awareness Week. The fundraising event set up by the National Autistic Society encourages people to donate to help fund campaigns that work to enrich the lives of those with autism. According to the society, autism is a lifelong developmental disability that affects how people perceive the world and interact with others. This can mean they see, hear and feel the world differently to others. Autism is what is known as a spectrum condition, meaning it affects individuals in different ways. Some autistic people, for example, also have learning disabilities, mental health issues or other conditions. Heres everything you need to know about Autism Awareness Day: When is Autism Awareness Week 2019? This year, Autism Awareness Day will take place between 1-7 April. The week is arranged around World Autism Day, which is internationally recognised on April 2 every year. What is Autism Awareness Week? Anne Hegerty, who stars in The Chase, has spoken about living with Asperger's / PA During World Autism Week, people are encouraged to take part in activities to raise money and awareness for the NAS. Mark Lever, Chief Executive of the NAS, said: "World Autism Week is a unique time for everyone to learn more about autism, whether it's the general public, teachers or politicians. "Almost everyone has heard of autism now but we continue to hear from autistic people and their families who miss out on an education, struggle to find work or become extremely isolated, often due to misunderstandings about autism could transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of autistic people. "We encourage everyone to visit our website, watch our new film and learn about the big five things autistic people and families tell us what they want the public to understand." What is Asperger syndrome? Aspergers is on the autism spectrum and affects an individuals ability to communicate with others and interact socially. Those who have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome dont have the learning disabilities that many autistic people have, but they may have specific difficulties such as processing and understanding speech, according to the NAS. Asperger syndrome was named after Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger, although there have been calls to change the name of the condition after reports of the doctors affiliation with the Nazis during World War II came to light. Autism facts There are around 700,000 people on the autism spectrum in the UK thats more than 1 in 100. 34% of children on the autism spectrum say that the worst thing about being at school is being picked on. At least one in three autistic adults are experiencing severe mental health difficulties due to a lack of support Only 16% of autistic adults in the UK are in full-time paid employment, and only 32% are in some kind of paid work 17% of autistic children have been suspended from school; 48% of these had been suspended three or more times; 4% had been expelled from one or more schools Famous autistic people Some famous faces with autism include TV presenter Chris Packham, actors Daryl Hannah and Dan Akroyd, and musician Gary Numan. Chris Packham received a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome in 2005 and is now an ardent supporter of the NAS. Last year, The Chase star Anne Hegerty and Niall Aslam from Love Island garnered widespread support after they spoke openly about being diagnosed with Asperger's. 16 year-old Swedish climate change activist, Greta Thunberg, is also 'proud to be on the spectrum'. T he first Briton to face a terror trial for fighting against Islamic State in Syria said he wanted to stop the worlds biggest evil and was willing to use guns and explosives for the cause, the Old Bailey heard today. Aidan James, 28, had no prior military experience when he went to a safe house in Iraq for weapons training, before crossing into Syria to join up with Kurdish forces fighting against the Islamist extremist group, it is said. The father of one, from Merseyside, posted on Facebook before leaving the UK that he would be in Syria fighting side by side with brothers in arms, and he ignored anti-terror efforts to stop him from joining the war. In his diary, James revealed his desire to oppose the sickness of IS, describing it as a calling and writing: If it means me picking up a weapon and fighting for what is right then I will do. He noted that it feels like my only option, and he wanted to be part of a revolution, part of a movement to help humanity and help people live free from oppression and free to practise your faith no matter what it be. Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC said Jamess training in Britain was amateurish at first, but gradually he prepared himself for the conflict in Syria, which he entered in November 2017. Opening the case today, Mr Heywood said people with no prior link to the region who joined the fighting after the war began have fuelled the violence. He added: The prosecution case against Mr James is that he went as an individual to Syria to fight with guns and explosives. In doing so, he set out to advance a political and ideological cause, that of the Kurdish people. Because his intended use or threat of active violence was of that kind and for those purposes, the law says that what he wanted to do was terrorism, even if his eventual fighting was against other terrorists, others who had gone to Syria with their own cause to pursue. When James posted on Facebook about his intention to travel to Syria, Merseyside police warned him he could face prosecution. He was then arrested and his passport seized, but when no further action was taken he restarted his plan to go to Syria. Saturday, March 30 7.02pm: A 45-year-old woman is stabbed in the back in Aberdeen Road, N18. She is taken to hospital in a critical condition. Sunday, March 31 0.15am: A man is stabbed in Park Avenue, N18. He is taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. 3.55am: A 23-year-old man is stabbed in Silver Street, N18. He is found at Seven Sisters Tube station and was taken to hospital, where his condition is described as critical but stable. 9.43am: A man is stabbed in the back in Brettenham, N18 Road. He is taken to hospital with injuries that are not life-threatening but potentially life-changing. Tuesday, April 2 5.05am: Police called to Aberdeen Road where they found a man in his 30s stabbed. He was taken to hospital in life-threatening condition D etectives have been given more time to quiz two men they arrested on suspicion of randomly attacking strangers in a stabbing spree. Four people were injured, two critically, when they were knifed from behind while walking in the Edmonton area of north London over the weekend. Police believe that a single male suspect who may have mental health issues was acting alone in the attacks. Scotland Yard said that the two men arrested on suspicion of GBH remained in custody after officers were given extensions to interview them into Tuesday. Police in Edmonton as they investigate the attacks / PA One, a man believed to be in his 40s, was arrested at a home in Edmonton and the other was arrested in Fore Street. The Metropolitan Police said a 45-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man remained in a critical condition in hospital on Monday night. A Section 60 order was put in place to allow officers in Edmonton to stop and search anyone to prevent further violence. This was to last until 1.50am on Tuesday Police urged people to stay vigilant after the string of senseless and cowardly attacks over 15 hours. Officers said there is nothing to suggest the incidents were terror related. The suspect is described as a black man, approximately 6ft 3ins tall, of skinny build and wearing dark clothing. The 45-year-old woman became the first victim when she was stabbed once in her back at about 7pm on Saturday in Aberdeen Road. T he heartbroken relatives of the latest victim of Londons knife crime epidemic today paid tribute to a beautiful person, with a good heart, from a good family. Calvin Bungisa, 22, was attacked in the street in Kentish Town by a group of masked thugs - the 33rd murder victim in London this year. His uncle Jean said he was well known in the local community and doted on his family. The bus driver said: He was full of life, he was very popular with everyone. He always had a smile on his face. He loved his family so much. His father died a year ago almost to the day. Police and forensics officers in Kentish Town after the stabbing / NIGEL HOWARD He had gone to Haverstock school. He was a good lad. His mother is absolutely devastated. We dont know why this has happened. A murder investigation has been launched after a stabbing in Kentish Town / NIGEL HOWARD These knives are out of hand. Its not gangs, its just young people hanging around. Scotland Yard said police were called at reports of a stabbing in Grafton Road at 8.30pm last night. Paramedics also attended and the man was pronounced dead at the scene. Victim: Calvin Bungisa, 22, was attacked in the street Witnesses said the victims mother came screaming from her home nearby after the attack and friends gathered at the scene to light candles and pay tribute. His cousin told the Standard: He was a beautiful person, he had a good heart. Everyone loved him, hes from a good family and so many came down here. His whole family are completely broken that hes lost. He was a good person, going to uni. His uncle said today the family were originally from Congo and Calvin had three brothers and two sisters. Kentish Town murder probe: Police sealed off the road / @999London He added: He had never been in fights before. When his father died he was so upset. It hit him very hard. Calvins aunt Elaly added: I saw him yesterday he popped in and was laughing with me. He was so happy and full of life. His uncle said he had been living with his girlfriend, and was on his way to meet her when he was ambushed. A friend of the victim claimed that the death was over a petty beef over territory. She said: Its a petty beef things are getting out of control. Its all over silly stuff. She added: Calvin was nice he looked out for other people, he made sure everything was ok. This is not a gang thing its just small stuff, a waste of life. A woman who nearby said she initially believed the victim may have been hit by a car. She said: We saw a blue flashing light and went down there to see if there was any first aid needed. A friend of his had put him in the recovery position, but he wasnt moving. He was half under the car, I thought it was a car accident at first, but one of the young people said that four people had attacked him and stabbed him. A resident said she had seen camera phone footage of three masked men running away after the stabbing before fleeing in a car down Grafton Road. Last nights murder happened just 500 yards from where Sadiq Aadam Mohamed, 20, was stabbed to death last February in a night of bloodshed which also saw Abdikarim Hassan, 17, killed. William Mitchell, a 49-year-old teacher who lives nearby, added: Its just dreadful. I saw what had happened when I was on my way home from work, its so sad. The killing came on the day the Prime Minister hosted a summit on knife crime at Downing Street to address rising street violence. Theresa May said that the issue is deep-seated and will require a cross-society effort to tackle. However police officers, teachers and nurses criticised Government plans to make them accountable for failing to spot warning signs of violent crime among young people. A Met spokesman said there had been no arrests in connection with the killing and investigations continue. A fraudster who convinced colleagues he was a qualified barrister so he could pursue his dream career in law has been jailed for 27 months. Scott Willey, 27, pretended he was a member of the Bar and worked on 18 cases before his two-year deception was uncovered. He even told bosses he had a brain tumour as his fraud began to unravel, a court heard. Willey had failed to pass the required exams when he accepted a pupillage position at 4 Brick Court legal chambers in July 2016. He said he had completed the Bar Vocational Course and was expecting to be called to the Bar later that year. But they were lies designed to cover the fact that he was unqualified for his dream career, Inner London crown court was told. Jailing Willey after he admitted six offences of fraud and pretending to be a barrister, Judge Usha Karu said: It was deliberate and sustained dishonesty. It was a gross breach of trust. Willey, who suffers from seizures, had built up an impressive, yet fictitious, CV, and worked on family law cases appearing as an advocate in 22 hearings. One case has already had to be reheard. He fraudulently received 16,000 from 4 Brick for his pupillage and 757.45 towards his travel costs, prosecutor Alex Agbamu said. After 4 Brick were unable to get a practice registration number for Willey, the fraudster produced a convincing looking email which purported to show that he was indeed provisionally registered, the court heard. Mr Agbamu said: Chambers sent that email to the Bar Standards Board, expecting it to settle matters. But it was immediately apparent to the Bar Standards Board that they had not sent that email. It too was a forgery. Middle Temple, the Inn at which Willey claimed to have been called, confirmed that they had him down only as a student member, while the City Law School said he had failed to complete the course. When the head of chambers Ian Griffin asked for an explanation, Willey eventually confessed. He was arrested last June and admitted he had not passed the Bar exams, as well as accessing the email account of a colleague and supplying false details. Willey had been diagnosed with a low grade neurological tumour in 2008. But the growth was no longer there when he told bosses in May 2018 that a tumour had returned and was growing, the court heard. J ill Dando's brother has said her killer struck lucky ahead of a documentary about her murder outside her London home. Ahead of the screening of The Murder of Jill Dando on BBC One on Tuesday night, Nigel Dando told the Lorraine Kelly Show that he doubted his sisters killer will be found 20 years on from her death. The 37-year-old was fatally shot on the doorstep of her home in Fulham on April 26, 1999. Mr Dando told Ms Kelly: As the weeks have turned into the months, and the months have turned into years, and the years have now turned into decades and nobody has been convicted of Jills murder I tend to think that it wasnt a professional hit. Jill Dando / BBC/PA Archive I think you can rule out the Serbian hitman, a popular theory doing the rounds at the time. "For what its worth, my belief is that it was just a misguided individual who was in that street on the day with a firearm, who knew where Jill lived and who just struck lucky. Nigel Dando speaking on the Lorraine Kelly Show on Tuesday / ITV For whatever reason that person did what that person did, I doubt we will ever know now, because of that passage of time. Mr Dando spoke out ahead of the BBC documentary, airing at 9pm, in which family, friends and colleagues celebrate Ms Dandos life and offer their insights on the circumstances surrounding her death. A man is fighting for life after being hit by a car which was fleeing the scene of a suspected robbery in Kings Cross. Police said the driver of the car refused to stop for officers before driving away at speed. Four men fled the vehicle after a pedestrian was mown down on York Way, at the junction with Copenhagen Street. Two men were arrested nearby, police said. The pedestrian suffered life threatening injuries and was rushed to hospital. Pictures posted on social media showed scores of emergency services vehicles at the scene and police cordons in place. An airbulance is understood to have landed nearby, A Met Police spokesman said: At around 5.30pm on Tuesday, officers responding to a robbery requested a vehicle suspected to be involved to stop. The driver refused to do so and drove off at speed, colliding with a member of the public. Four men are believed to have decamped from the vehicle and fled the scene. Two men were arrested nearby on suspicion of robbery and taking and driving away and taken into custody where they remain The male pedestrian is believed to have suffered life threatening injuries and taken to hospital where he remains." An Independent Office for Police Conduct spokesman said: "We are investigating the circumstances of a road traffic collision in the Kings Cross area in which an elderly man was seriously injured. A paedophile who planned to murder a Labour MP will not face retrial for membership of a banned neo-Nazi group after a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict. Jack Renshaw, 23, admitted to buying a machete in a plot to murder West Lancashire MP Rosie Cooper and a female police officer, but denied membership of banned extreme right-wing group National Action. The British group, founded in 2013, was banned under anti-terror laws in December 2016 over its support for the murder of Jo Cox MP. After a seven-week retrial, and more than 48 hours of deliberations, the jury was discharged having failed to reach a majority verdict on Renshaws association with the group. Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson QC said he couldnt seek a third trial. Jack Renshaw at a National Action rally / PA As she discharged the jury from returning verdicts, Mrs Justice McGowan said: "You have obviously worked very hard. You have obviously been very diligent. You have obviously worked your way through all the material so we understand and respect the decision you have made." Renshaw was remanded in custody and will be sentenced over his terror plot on 17 May. The 23-year-old, from Skelmersdale, Lancashire, announced his plans to kill Ms Cooper and police officer Victoria Henderson in July 2017 at the Friar Penketh pub in Warrington. Jurors at the Old Bailey heard that National Action leader Christopher Lythgoe, 32, of Warrington, and his right-hand man Matthew Hankinson, 24, from Merseyside who were convicted of membership last year were present when Renshaw outlined his plans. Jack Renshaw, 23, of Skelmersdale, Lancashire, has pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to preparing acts of terrorism by plotting to murder MP Rosie Cooper (pictured) / PA Robbie Mullen, a former National Action member turned whisleblower was also in the pub at the time. He informed the anti-racism charity Hope not Hate of the plot, which then told the police. As of today, it can also be reported that Renshaw is a convicted paedophile, who was jailed last June for grooming two underage boys for sex. He had used a fake Facebook profile to groom the two boys -aged between 13 and 15 at the time, but argued that Hope Not Hate had wanted to discredit him so maliciously hacked his mobile phone to send them sexual messages. Jurors at Preston Crown Court did not believe him and he was jailed for 16 months. A Gladius knife, similar to that which Renshaw planned to use in his murder plot Two months earlier at the same court, Renshaw received a separate three-year prison sentence for stirring up racial hatred by calling for the genocide of Jewish people. During the first Old Bailey trial last year, he pleaded guilty to threatening to kill detective Victoria Henderson who was investigating him for sexual offences, and admitted a terrorist plot to murder Ms Cooper with a 19in Gladius knife. P olice and campaigners have praised a Tesco store in north London for locking knives in secure cabinets to stop them being stolen and used in attacks. The supermarket giant has implemented the measure in its store in Edmonton amid a period of violent crime in the capital. Police have now urged other supermarkets to follow suit as they step up patrols in the area, which has been blighted by five serious stabbings in recent days. A man, in his 30s, was left in a critical condition after suffering life-threatening injuries when he was stabbed in Fairfield Road, Edmonton, at around 5am on Tuesday. Investigators believe the latest stabbing is linked to four others that took place over the weekend. MPS Southbury posted images of the see-through cabinet with a metal combination lock and said kitchen knives are frequently used in attacks during the current epidemic in the capital. The force also shared a letter that has been circulated to stores in the local area that read: "London is in the middle of a knife crime epidemic which is making national news. Enfield is having its fair share of knife crimes were people are being seriously injured or killed. "Many of these knife crimes are as a result of kitchen knives being used. The police are doing their best to combat this threat but as you know we are extremely stretched with numbers and are facing an uphill battle." The letter went on to praise the cabinets, writing that the store had experienced several shopliftings of their knives from youths who we all know wont be using them for cooking. However, since the installation of the screen around the blades they have had no thefts and police are now suggesting other stores follow suit. Patrick Green, the CEO of anti-knife crime charity The Ben Kinsella Trust, told the Standard the prevention method was a positive step and he hoped others would copy it. We know that in terms of young people getting knives from shops that these young people will tend to shoplift them rather than buying them, he said. They [knives] should be in a place where you have to ask for them rather than them being on the shelves. We have seen too many deaths in recent years and we know some of these have been stolen knives. Officers at the scene of the latest Edmonton attack / Jeremy Selwyn He said that taking knives away from easy access points is a great step. You dont know how happy this makes me feel, weve been campaigning for this for quite some time, said Mr Green. Tesco said the cabinet in Edmonton is a trial and is a one off at the moment. A spokesman did not confirm if it would be implemented permanently. He said: At Tesco we take the safety of our customers, colleagues and the communities we serve very seriously. We continue to introduce new ways to strengthen how we sell knives responsibly, including exploring more stringent security measures in-store. MPS Southbury has said B&Q, Sainsburys, Morrisons and Dunelm stores in its area have said they will consider similar tactics. T wo young men were left fighting for life after a double stabbing near student halls in Wembley last night. The victims, aged in their 20s, were rushed to hospital after after the incident in Empire Way. Police were called to the scene at Grand Felda House accommodation block at about 8.20pm. A statement from Brent MPS said: "Officers are in Empire Way after two men in their 20s were stabbed this evening. "Both victims in hospital in life threatening condition." No arrests have been made. The area has been cordoned off while a police investigation is carried out. Police later confirmed the victims injuries were no longer life-threatening. A n adorable baby fox has been saved by firefighters in west London after becoming trapped in a cavity wall. The distressed fox cub, named Ian after a soon-to-be retiring colleague, was rescued by fire crews after it was stuck inside a wall in Queensway Market, Kensington. Once saved, emergency workers made the choice to leave the small animal in a box in hopes of its mother returning. Kensington Blue Watch Manager Scott Magdalani said:The baby fox had somehow become trapped in the wall cavity of a ground floor shop. We used a saw to cut a hole in the wall and released him safely. We decided to call him Ian after Firefighter Ian Broomfield who is retiring in a few days time. The RSPCA advised us to leave Ian in a box with some water as his mother will be most likely come back and look for him. I went back after work and saw that the box had gone. I rang an emergency vet to see if anyone had taken Ian into them. They said no and it was most likely that the mother had come back from him just as the RSPCA had said. T he controversial Tulip skyscraper in the City was granted planning approval today despite huge concerns about its impact on historic views of London. The decision by the City of London Corporations planning committee paves the way for the 305.3-metre high structure on Bury Street, which will be western Europes second tallest building after the Shard. It is forecast that 1.2 million people a year will visit the Foster + Partners designed slender tower. In the bud at the top it will have 12 publicly accessible storeys including a viewing platform with rotating pods, a restaurant and sky bar and an entire floor dedicated to education facilities. 'The Tulip' skyscraper 1 /10 'The Tulip' skyscraper The Tulip will be the tallest skyscraper in the City of London DBOX for Foster + Partners The 1,000 feet high concrete and glass skyscraper is set to become the City of Londons tallest tower DBOX for Foster + Partners How the view from The Tulip could look from the inside DBOX for Foster + Partners How The Tulip might look from above DBOX for Foster + Partners How the view across London could look from the new skyscraper DBOX for Foster + Partners How the London skyline would look once The Tulip is built DBOX for Foster + Partners A CGI from inside the new skyscraper DBOX for Foster + Partners Plans show a 12-storey glass bud on top of a 787 feet concrete shaft with eight floors of viewing platforms, bars and restaurants inside with a capacity for 1,500 people DBOX for Foster + Partners Chris Hayward, chairman of the Corporations planning committee, said: After a lengthy and robust debate, the committee agreed to approve this truly unique visitor attraction. One of my key objectives as Chairman of the Planning and Transportation Committee has been to enable the continued transformation of the City of London into a place which welcomes members of the public on weekends as during the week. "This building has the potential to play an important role in realising our vision of the Square Mile as a vibrant 24/7 city. The skyscraper's design sparked a row / DBOX/Foster + Partners However, heritage bosses were dismayed by the decision, which will still have to signed off by Mayor Sadiq Khan. Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said: This building a lift shaft with a bulge on top would damage the very thing its developers claim they will deliver tourism and views of Londons extraordinary heritage. The setting of the Tower of London, a symbol of the city not just to millions of Londoners but to the whole world and one of our most visited places, will be harmed. T housands of people have called for a London council to release a stray dog that faces being put down despite having a loving home waiting for her. Newham council is facing a legal battle over its decision to euthanise Ellie, a mongrel who ran into the Docklands Equestrian Stables on Valentines Day. Stables manager Terry Minns called the councils warden service and spent the evening feeding the emaciated animal. A warden arrived to pick up Ellie the following morning and Mrs Minns said that if no one claimed her she would give her a home. However, she was later informed Ellie was a dangerous dog and would be put to sleep. Mrs Minns hired a lawyer who has taken out an emergency order in the High Court to twice stop the council putting down the dog. An independent assessor said Ellie is not dangerous or a pit bull terrier, Japanese Tosa, Dogo Argentino or Fila Brazileiro breeds banned under the Dangerous Dogs Act. Ellie is unfairly, on death row, the lawyer said. Mrs Minns told the Standard: Ellie isnt a prohibited breed, she hasnt bitten anyone and an assessor has declared she is not dangerous. She was scared and hungry and from the second I found her I said I would take her in. A loving home awaits and she deserves a chance to be part of it. More than 7,000 people have signed a petition to save Ellie and more than 3,000 has so far been crowdfunded to help with court fees. Mrs Minns believes she is part-Staffordshire bull terrier and was used for breeding before escaping. Solicitor James Parry said: We have taken out an emergency order to stop the council killing Ellie on two occasions. We are now working towards judicial review proceedings. An expert found her frightened but not dangerous. She is, unfairly, on death row. My client has offered her a loving home. He added that two charities had offered to rehabilitate the dog before she was rehomed with Mrs Minns, who lives in Beckton with her husband and daughter Olivia, seven. Mike Barnett, a former police officer who spent a decade in a canine unit, inspected Ellie in kennels and said she did not seem dangerous. Newham councils website says it tries to rehome stray dogs with rescue groups and rehoming centres. A spokesman would not comment on the case. J eremy Corbyns struggle with anti-Semitism seems set to continue as old articles resurface in which Corbyn deplores the pressure of the Zionist lobby. In 2011, Corbyn wrote that its time Western governments stood up to the Zionist lobby which seems to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. The timing of the rediscovery of his articles is particularly awkward: only today, deputy Labour leader Tom Watson has urged the Jewish Labour Movement not to disaffiliate from the party. Watson said Labours attempts to deal with anti-Semitism simply havent worked. In his 2011 article, Corbyn was defending Raed Salah, a cleric accused of using the blood libel slur. Corbyn said that Salah was a voice of the Palestinian people that needs to be heard and criticised the then home secretary, Theresa May, of in effect giving an executive detention order against him. Salah had been detained on his entry to the UK that year, though he eventually won an appeal against his deportation. Salah was charged in a Jerusalem court in 2008 with incitement to violence and racism for a speech a year earlier in which he was accused of repeating the claim that Jews used childrens blood to bake bread. He has denied that he is anti-Semitic and told a UK immigration trial in 2011: I have never invoked the blood libel and would not do so. He was later convicted of incitement to violence and racism in an Israeli court in 2014. Corbyns criticism of the Zionist lobby was not limited to how Raed Salah was treated. In articles uncovered by journalist Iggy Ostanin, Corbyn also criticised Judge Richard Goldstone in April 2011 for changing his mind on a report on the 2008-9 Israeli invasion of Gaza. Corbyn, writing a few weeks later, said: There is no doubt that Goldstone was put under huge pressure from Zionist lobbyists and has suffered a great deal of abuse. This morning a Labour source said: Jeremy Corbyn is a determined supporter of justice for the Palestinian people and opponent of anti-Semitism. He condemns support for Palestinians being used as a mask for anti-Semitism and attempts to silence legitimate criticism of Israel by wrongly conflating it with anti-Semitism. There was widespread criticism of the attempt to deport Raed Salah, including from Jews for Justice for Palestinians, and his appeal against deportation succeeded on all grounds." Clooneys in demand A team of Doughty Street Chambers finest, including Amal Clooney, have lost their pro-bono case representing a man sentenced to death in Ghana. Dexter Eddie Johnson was convicted of murder in 2008 and last week an African court upheld this ruling, despite criticism from the UN Human Rights Committee. Amal shares her strong sense of justice with her husband, George. On Friday, the Hollywood actor led calls for a boycott against the Dorchester and other hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei after his country imposed new laws making homosexuality punishable by death by stoning. --- Matthew Elliott, former CEO of Vote Leave, has lost a 50 bet to Will Straw of the Remain campaign. In 2017, the arch-rivals bet that a free-trade deal would be agreed by March 2019. Elliott has dutifully paid the sum to The 3 Million, a grassroots organisation. Im grateful our bet wasnt a naked run down Whitehall, Elliott says. --- The Financial Times toasted hitting a subscriber milestone yesterday by giving staffers mini bottles of champagne. But celebrations for journalists outside the London head office werent quite so sweet. Joseph Cotterill, southern Africa correspondent, says those of us in distant lands get 5 to put through expenses. Silver lining: In rand terms, thats like 23 Negronis. Safe landing for the Gilmour clan Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour was at Simpsons in the Strand with his novelist wife Polly Samson, their son Charlie and their grand-daughter Onika for the launch of You Will Be Safe Here, the debut novel from Damian Barr. Partly set during the Second Boer War, it follows a woman and her son taken to the Bloemfontein concentration camp. We understand Barrs publisher sent a copy to Jacob Rees-Mogg for educational purposes. Back in February, the MP said: Im not advocating people being taken off their farms and put into camps, but there was a war going on and people were being taken there to be fed. More than 27,000 of the 107,000 people interned in the camps died. Also last night, fashion designer Maria Kastani threw a dinner at Mayfair restaurant Momo with Candice Lake and Camilla Rutherford among guests. SW1A Baroness Brady recalls her first away game as managing director of Birmingham City FC in 1993. Asking for directions to the boardroom, she was told by a steward: Directors wives over there. Brady informed him that she was not a directors wife. And this little old boy put his glasses on and looked at me and went, Oh yes. Youre that woman. --- After an interview with an Italian newspaper last week, Speaker John Bercow has now spoken to Germanys Der Spiegel. Seven of my predecessors met their end on the executioners block, he tells the paper. Luckily, we have abolished the death penalty. So whatever else happens to me, Im not likely to lose my head. --- Bercow took numerous points of order after the results of last nights votes were announced, calling session to a halt at 10.29pm. One more point of order would have tipped the debate past the 10.30pm cut-off, which entitles Commons staff to a taxi home. Quote of the day "Over to you now, Uri." Nigella Lawson thinks MPs should take up Uri Gellers offer to stop Brexit via telepathy Spuds youll like if you come dine with Kate P arliament remained in deadlock after MPs again rejected a series of alternatives to Theresa May's Brexit deal. A call for a customs union after was defeated by just three votes, and a referendum on any deal was rejected by 12 votes. The Common Market 2.0 plan lost by 21 votes and cancelling Brexit to prevent a no-deal scenario was defeated by 101. The votes followed a similar rejection of alternative options last week. Loading.... So what happens next? John Bercow announces the results of the indicative votes / EPA Tuesday, April 2 Theresa May has scheduled a five-hour Cabinet meeting instead of the usual 90 minutes. The first three hours will be a political Cabinet in the absence of civil servants - fuelling speculation the senior Tories will consider the prospect of a snap election, the timing of the Prime Minister's departure or the potential for ministerial resignations if there is a change in Brexit strategy. Wednesday, April 3 Backbench MPs will again take charge of the Commons timetable to consider Brexit plans under Tory MP Sir Oliver Letwin's scheme to break the Parliamentary deadlock. Brexit: all four alternatives were rejected by MPs in the Commons vote / EPA Thursday, April 4 After the latest round of indicative votes failed to produce a clear winner, Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said: "If the House were to agree a deal this week it may still be possible to avoid holding European parliamentary elections." That could be an indication the Prime Minister might risk a fourth showdown on her Withdrawal Agreement in the hope that more Tory Eurosceptics will accept the choice is between her plan and a softer Brexit. Wednesday, April 10 An emergency summit of European Union leaders will consider any request by the UK for a longer delay to Brexit. To be granted a further postponement the Government will have to set out what purpose it would achieve and it will almost certainly involve taking part in the European elections. Deadlock: Theresa May leaving the House of Commons after MPs fail to back proposals on alternatives to her EU withdrawal deal / PA Friday, April 12 The UK is scheduled to leave the EU on April 12 after MPs rejected the Prime Minister's deal last week. Thursday, May 23 If Europe's leaders have agreed an extension to the Article 50 process, the UK will elect MEPs to the European Parliament. The breakaway Independent Group of MPs has announced it intends to set up a fully fledged political party - Change UK - to fight the elections on a pro-EU platform. Nigel Farage will seek to continue as an MEP, this time for the newly formed Brexit Party. Sunday, June 23 Mrs May warned MPs before they rejected her deal that a long extension would "at least delay and could destroy Brexit". Three years after the referendum, it is possible the UK will still be in the European Union, have newly elected MEPs and will be contributing to the Brussels budget. A general election? The current make-up of the House of Commons has so far proved unable to agree on any Brexit plan so the Prime Minister could be tempted to call a snap election to break the deadlock. But having promised not to lead the Tories into the scheduled 2022 election and then said she would quit before the next phase of the Brexit process it is not clear if MPs would allow her to fight another contest as leader. A fresh referendum? The call for another referendum was defeated by just 12 votes and campaigners seized on the fact it had more MPs voting in favour than any other option. A "soft" Brexit? The narrow defeat for a customs union will increase pressure on Mrs May to move in favour of the measure. But that would tear the Tory party apart and would be likely to result in Cabinet resignations as critics of the customs union believe it robs the UK of one of the major Brexit prizes - the ability to strike trade deals with countries such as the US. F rench president Emmanuel Macron says the EU must not be "hostage" to the "political crisis in the UK" over Brexit. Mr Macron also pinned any responsibility for a no-deal scenario on Britain, stating the nation chose such a situation "on its own" if it did not find a solution to the impasse. Speaking upon meeting with Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in Paris, he said credible justifications for an Article 50 extension for the UK could be an election, second referendum or alternative proposals for the future relationship, such as a customs union. However, he urged Britain to move the situation forward a day after MPs rejected all Brexit alternatives in indicative votes, and said: "We cannot avoid failure for them." Leo Varadkar and Emmanuel Macron met in Paris / AFP/Getty Images Following on from this, he added: "A long extension involving the participation of the UK in European elections and European institutions is far from evident and certainly not (to be taken) for granted. "Our priority shall be the good functioning of the EU and the single market. The EU cannot sustainably be the hostage to the solution to a political crisis in the UK." Loading.... Mr Macron also insisted the EU did not want to take time going over the divorce deal, which has been rejected three times by the Commons, as this would be "dealing with the past". Commenting on no-deal, which the EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said was becoming more likely, Mr Macron said: "If the United Kingdom is not capable, almost three years after the referendum, of coming forward with a solution that is supported by a majority, it would have effectively chosen a no-deal exit on its own." Varadkar warns no-deal Brexit would be 'particulary difficult' for Ireland Mr Varadkar reiterated the EU should not let itself be consumed by the issue and any further Article 50 extension must be for a "clear plan". "The UK is being consumed by Brexit, but Ireland and France and the European Union shouldn't be consumed by Brexit, we have a positive agenda for the EU which we want to deliver," he said. "At the last European Council meeting, we gave the UK some time and space to come up with a way forward, as it stands they will leave the EU on April 12 without a deal." He also reiterated that it was up to Britain to suggest alternatives, though stated a no-deal would be "particularly difficult for Ireland". Theresa May leaving the House of Commons on Monday night / PA "There is still time for the Prime Minister to come to the council with proposals - proposals that are credible and have a clear pathway to success and we need to be open to any proposals she might bring forward to us. "I'd like to talk about what we can do to assist the Prime Minister to secure the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement including the backstop," Mr Varadkar said. Barnier: No deal becoming 'day after day more likely' He added it is in Ireland's interests to protect the European Union single market and in his opinion there is no better alternative than the Irish backstop. In regards to the contentious backstop, which has been a main sticking point in agreement on the deal, Mr Macron said the remaining 27 EU nations will continue to show "unity and solidarity with Ireland". On Monday night, MPs rejected all Brexit alternatives in indicative votes. However, some came neared to consensus than the first time round and call for a customs union with the EU was rejected by just three votes. A demand for a second referendum was defeated by 12 votes, while a Norway-style deal put forward by Nick Boles by 21. Theresa May has met with her Cabinet for a mammoth meeting to discuss the deadlock. E U Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier has said a no deal Brexit is becoming more likely "day after day" after MPs once again voted against a series of options for leaving the EU. Speaking in Brussels, Mr Barnier said the "only way to avoid a no-deal Brexit is through a positive majority" in the Commons. His comments came after none of last nights indicative votes gained a majority in the Commons. A call for a customs union with the EU was rejected by just three votes, while a demand for a second referendum was defeated by 12 and a Norway-style deal put forward by Nick Boles by 21. Michel Barnier has said there is still hope of avoiding a no deal Brexit Mr Barnier said: If the UK Parliament does not vote in favour of the Withdrawal Agreement in the coming days only two options would remain. "Leaving without an agreement or requesting a longer extension of the Article 50 period. It would be the responsibility of the UK government to choose between these two options." Loading.... He added: "No deal was never our desired or intended scenario. But the EU is now prepared. "Being prepared for no-deal doesn't mean there will be no disruption, not everything will be smooth - there will be problems. Being prepared means that all unforeseen problems should be manageable on the EU side. Theresa May leaving the House of Commons on Monday night / PA "Finally, the UK may ask for another extension. Such an extension would carry significant risks for the EU therefore a strong justification would be needed. Many businesses in the EU warn us against the cost of extending. "There will also be a political cost. In any case if the UK is still a member state on May 23 it will have to organise a European election, the UK would stay longer as a member on its way out. "In short a longer extension could pose a risk on our decision making autonomy." E uropean Parliament's Brexit co-ordinator has said Britain will face the abyss if it fails to break the deadlock in the Commons. Guy Verhofstadts stark warning to the UKs MPs comes after they again rejected all alternative to Thersea Mays deal on Monday. Mr Verhofstadt said a hard Brexit has become nearly inevitable as MPs remain undecided on the best way forward. Tweeting following Monday nights votes, he wrote: The House of Commons again votes against all options. A hard Brexit becomes nearly inevitable. On Wednesday, the UK has a last chance to break the deadlock or face the abyss. Parliament rejects four indicative vote options Backbench MPs will on Wednesday again take charge of the Commons timetable to consider Brexit plans under Tory MP Sir Oliver Letwin's scheme to break the Parliamentary deadlock. It comes after all options on the UKs future relationship with the EU were rejected for the second time in a series of indicative votes for the second time on Monday night. Four alternative plans, designed to establish what kind of Brexit has a chance of winning a majority in the House of Commons, were voted down by MPs on Monday evening. Deadlock: Theresa May leaving the House of Commons after MPs fail to back proposals on alternatives to her EU withdrawal deal / PA They included a "Norway-plus" plan for close UK engagement with the EU after Brexit, or Common Market 2.0, proposed by Conservative Nick Boles. After his plan was defeated by 282 votes to 261, Mr Boles declared that he would no longer sit as a Tory MP, blaming the party for refusing to compromise on a means of leaving the European Union. The other defeated motions included Tory grandee Kenneth Clarke's plan for a customs union, Labour backbenchers Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson's demand for a referendum on any Brexit deal passed by Parliament, and SNP MP Joanna Cherry's call for Brexit to be cancelled if the UK appears to be on course to crash out of the EU without a deal. The closest to passing was Mr Clarke's motion, which was defeated by just three votes, 276 to 273. The customs union went down by 292 votes in 280 while the proposal to block no-deal Brexit lost by 292 votes to 191. Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay told MPs that the default outcome was now a no-deal Brexit on April 12, but said it was still possible to leave with a deal and avoid holding European Parliament elections in May if the Commons approves an agreement this week. Mr Barclay told MPs: "This House has continuously rejected leaving without a deal, just as it has rejected not leaving at all. "Therefore the only option is to find a way through which allows the UK to leave with a deal. The Government continues to believe that the best course to take is to do so as soon as possible." Tory MPs were given a free vote on the options, but cabinet ministers were told to abstain. M P Nick Boles, who dramatically quit the Tory Party over the governments handling of Brexit, has said Theresa May's Cabinet is the "worst collectively in recorded history. In an interview with the BBC following his dramatic resignation in the Commons on Monday, Mr Boles said: There are some fine people in the Cabinet, genuinely people who would have been in a Cabinet in any age. But this is the worst Cabinet collectively, not only in my lifetime but I think probably in recorded history. He continued: Were I still a member of the Conservative Party, one of the contributions I would have made to the debate about the leadership election, that will have to come because Theresa May has announced that she is going to stand down, is that it should not be anyone who is or has been in the Cabinet since 2017. Nick Boles resigns from Tories after MPs vote against customs union "None of them in my view has earned the right to lead the country after Brexit. They are all compromised by their collective failure to lead, to unite, to get behind one plan, to sell that plan, to communicate. "They have all put themselves first, they have all been cowardly when they should have been brave, they have been selfish when they should have been cooperative. None of them should be Prime Minister after Brexit." Nick Boles pictured buying groceries on Tuesday / Jeremy Selwyn But Mr Boles softened his tone following Mr Mays statement on Tuesday in which the Prime Minister said she would ask for a further Brexit extension. He tweeted: I have been very critical of the PM and the Cabinet in an interview with @bbclaurak this afternoon. Soft breakfast: Nick Boles out shopping for hot cross buns, yoghurt and milk on Tuesday / Jeremy Selwyn "I stand by my words. But the PM's statement is very welcome. This is the right approach. Better late than never." Mr Boles quit the party, before storming out of the Commons, on Monday night after his Commons Market 2.0 motion failed. He had said: I've failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I regret, therefore, to announce that I can no longer sit for this party. How EU leaders have reacted to the extension EU leaders have also had their say on the Brexit extension. French President Emmanuel Macron said he had pushed against a long extension "for the collective good". "It is true that the majority was more in favour of a very long extension," he said. "But it was not logical in my view, and above all, it was neither good for us, nor for the British people." (AFP) He added: "I think we delivered the best possible compromise. First because it was the one to preserve the unity of the 27. "Second because we addressed the request from the UK to get more time to deliver a deal on the basis of the withdrawal agreement negotiated a few months ago. "And third because thanks to this agreement we preserve the well-functioning of the European Union." German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who backed a longer extension, said she supported the effort to secure an orderly Brexit. (REUTERS) She said: "In the face of the many problems the world is facing today, it means a lot to us. "And we talked about this tonight that we, as Europeans, send out a signal that even if such a difficult discussion comes up, we are nevertheless capable of ensuring that this withdrawal is an orderly one." She added: "In my eyes it's important now that the European Union does not exert pressure here on Great Britain. We have very clear demands and expectations. "We have to have ways and means to ensure that the withdrawal agreement is adhered to. It's not important whether it's that date or another one." (AP) Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the European Union "is not a prison (and) nobody has to stay, but it's also a home and we're not going to kick anybody out either". Asked if he thought the extension was long enough, he said: "I really hope so. The European Union is imperfect, we took several hours here to make a decision, there were different views, we had to bounce things around for five or six hours this evening but we did make a decision. "It's three years since the referendum now and we really think it's time for the United Kingdom to make a decision, so we're giving them a very long period of time now to make a decision." Mr Varadkar said there was "genuine concern" about the UK remaining in the EU for an extended period of time while it intends to leave in case it disrupts EU business. "Quite frankly that is already the case, with Ukip and (Nigel) Farage," he added. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez warned that a no-deal Brexit was not off the table. He tweeted: "EUCO does not want a disorderly exit, but it is true that it is not ruled out. "The ball is now in the court of the British Parliament." Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the delay gave time to overcome the "crisis" in the Commons. "We moved away the risk of no-deal Brexit for a several months," he tweeted. "It gives a chance to overcome the ratification crisis in UK. It is now up to UK to take this opportunity." Lars Lokke Rasmussen, prime minister of Denmark, said it was down to the UK to find solutions to the Brexit impasse. He tweeted: "One more chance for the UK. Managed to avoid a NoDealBrexit tonight. New deadline 31.10. Up to the UK to find solutions." Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila tweeted: "This mess has been going on for three years. Lets hope prime minister May and the opposition will find consensus." Malta's prime minister Joseph Muscat said the 31 October deadline was "sensible". T heresa May was warned today that up to 20 Conservative MPs could pull down her Government rather than be bulldozed into a Brexit compromise. The warning of a split came as the Prime Minister was put under pressure by a group of Cabinet ministers, including Amber Rudd, David Gauke and Greg Clark, to ask the European Union for a long extension to Article 50, delaying Brexit for months and forcing her to agree to hold European Parliament elections. At the same time, Chancellor Philip Hammond dropped a bombshell by suggesting that a second referendum might be needed to escape from the political deadlock. The Prime Minister was understood to be considering major concessions to Labour MPs, including a customs union and the right to influence future talks, in an attempt to secure backing for her deal in a fourth Commons vote or, alternatively, in a Bill that could be unveiled within days. Soft breakfast: Nick Boles out shopping for hot cross buns, yoghurt and milk today hours after resigning the Tory whip / Jeremy Selwyn Former Brexit secretary David Davis, responding to reports that Mrs May is considering holding a confidence vote on her deal, said such a move would divide the party. I would make one warning to the Cabinet, he told BBC Radio 4s Today programme. Dont be sure that every Conservative MP would vote for you if it was made a confidence vote. One or two of them have said already, and I think probably about 20 of them would say, This actually is so important, its the future of our country, its our destiny at stake, its more than the Tory Party. In key developments: EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier warned that no deal was becoming day after day more likely after the Commons failed for a second time last night to find a majority for any Plan B. Loading.... Government sources disclosed that a withdrawal Bill will be published by the end of the week, which would be open to amendments in order to secure cross-party agreement and avoid the risk of being defeated for a fourth time in another meaningful vote. Britains construction sector contracted again last month, raising fears that Brexit is causing severe damage to the economy. Former minister Phillip Lee, writing in todays Evening Standard, said Mrs May should stay on at No 10 as an arbiter to oversee a Brexit compromise and avoid a general election. Theresa May leaving the House of Commons on Monday night / PA Sir Oliver Letwin, architect of the indicative votes, told the Standard: We will continue to search for a way forward. He is due to introduce a Bill tomorrow that would compel the Government to ask for a delay unless ministers agree to seek an extension. Nick Boles quits the Conservative Party Former minister Nick Boles resigned from the Conservative Party last night, saying that the Tories had failed to enter into the spirit of attempts made at Westminster to find a compromise through the process of indicative votes. He said afterwards: I am resigning the Conservative whip with immediate effect. The Conservative Party has shown itself to be incapable of compromise so I will sit as an independent progressive Conservative. A group of Cabinet ministers, including Amber Rudd, want a long extension to Article 50 / Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images There was a fightback against Brexiteers by centrists who warned of the consequences of a no-deal Brexit. Former international trade minister Mark Garnier said: A no deal is bloody dangerous. We cant afford to risk sacrificing peoples jobs, savings and living standards. If the solution to the problem is an election, that should be a single issue referendum not a multi-issue general election. The Chancellor intervened by making clear through allies he was ready to back a referendum if no winning compromise could be found to avoid a no-deal Brexit. Tory MP Huw Merriman, Mr Hammonds parliamentary private secretary, said separately that he believes a referendum is needed. He told the Standard: I have voted three times for the Prime Ministers deal and twice for no deal. Parliament has voted these down and has failed to deliver a majority for any other solution. It pains me to say it, but Parliament has failed and cannot deliver so the only option is to go back to the people and ask them to get the deal over the line which will see us leave the EU. Former business minister Richard Harrington said: The Prime Minister should put her deal [to a fourth vote], subject to public ratification. He believes the first choice should be between her deal or rejecting it, and if that fails between no deal or remain. Thats fair to everyone, he argued. Labour MP Hilary Benn said it was very disappointing that MPs had not reached a compromise. He said Mrs May needed to ask for a long delay, adding: If that does not happen, we will be leaving in 10 days time without a deal with all the catastrophic consequences there would be for the British economy. If she does not do so there is an option available for the House of Commons to seek to legislate to require her to do so. I would expect her to keep her word. TODO: define component type apester However, Parliament might already have run out of time to pass a Bill to delay Brexit, a former No10 legislative boss warned today. Nikki da Costa, former director of legislative affairs in Downing Street, stressed that peers may torpedo the idea in the House of Lords. They could feasibly delay it for a number of days, she told Today. In last nights votes, MPs rejected a call for a customs union with the EU by just three votes, while a demand for a second referendum was defeated by 12 and a Common Market 2.0 by 21. Mr Barnier complained this morning: There are only majorities against things [in the Commons], and thats not how we are going to manage an orderly withdrawal of the UK. Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said his party would be riven from top to bottom if Mrs May tries to impose a deal that went against what he believed Conservative MPs and the public voted for. The price of no deal was spelled out in a briefing note to ministers. A Conservative MP has said Brexit stress has taken four inches off his waistline. Huw Merriman, a Remain-backing MP, said tension triggered by the ongoing Commons stalemate, as well as abuse from the public, has caused him to lose weight. Mr Merriman, the parliamentary private secretary to Chancellor Philip Hammond, told BBC Radio 5 Lives Drive programme that someone had suggested he should be shot for treason. Speaking of his weight loss, the MP for Bexhill and Battle said: Do you know what? Ive lost a lot of weight, which might be a good thing. Ive gone from over a 34 to almost under a 30 now. Actually, thats purely down to whats going on. In pictures | Pro-Brexit march in London 1 /26 In pictures | Pro-Brexit march in London A man comes face to face with a police officer PA A pro-Brexit protester faces off with police during a demonstration outside Downing Street REUTERS Pro-Brexit supporters burn a EU flag near to Trafalgar Square PA Pro-Brexit supporters stand in the road at Trafalgar Square PA Pro-Brexit supporters confront police officers securing the gates of Downing Street AFP/Getty Images Pro-Brexit protesters face off with police REUTERS Demonstrators march holding flags and placards during a pro Brexit rally Getty Images Pro-Brexit protesters clash with police after their rally in Westminster AP A man takes a photo of a Metropolitan Police officer AP Police officers clash with demonstrators Getty Images Pro-Brexit protesters clash with police after their rally in Westminster, AP The pro-Brexit protest was attended by thousands AP One protester wearing a Guy Fawkes march AP Police officer secure the gates of Downing Street AFP/Getty Images Pro-Brexit protesters stand near police AP Demonstrators clash with police officers Getty Images A far-right protester is detained by police REUTERS A Pro-Brexit supporter wearing a Donald Trump mask in Whitehall PA PA Brexit supporters march in Fulham in the final leg of the March To Leave Rally Getty Images Mr Merriman, who backed Ken Clarkes customs union plan and the Kyle/Wilson motion for a second referendum in Mondays indicative votes, went on: Today I am getting a heck of a lot of abuse because of the way I voted yesterday, even though I tried to explain the way I voted. "I am betraying Brexit, I am the Chancellors tea lady according to Leave.EU. And they are actually trying to get me deselected. You try your best for your constituents, you work really hard. They are not always going to agree with everything I had a public meeting on Brexit in my constituency on Saturday and we had a great turnout, and I think people listened and understood. And then you just get this vile abuse. Someone on the back of that tea lady shout was talking about how those involved in treason used to be taken out, lined up and shot. In a plea to tone down the debate, Mr Merriman added: We need to take a step and be a bit calmer. Faisal Islam argues with Brexiteer shouting behind him live on air A short while later, his comments were echoed by Prime Minister Theresa May, who said the Brexit impasse is putting MPs under immense pressure and is doing damage to our politics. Meanwhile, in an on-air bust-up on Tuesday, Sky News political editor Faisal Islam also called out a Brexit protester for shouting the word treason to describe Mrs May. J eremy Corbyn today faced calls to sack party chairman Ian Lavery after he defied the whip and failed to back Labour plans to support a second referendum. Senior Left-winger Mr Lavery, who is one of the Labour leaders closest allies, broke a three-line whip by abstaining on the so-called public vote motion MPs were asked to consider during indicative votes in Parliament last night. He abstained on a similar vote last week, leading to fury among Labour colleagues who obeyed party orders. It is Labour policy to back a second referendum if they cannot get MPs to agree to their own Brexit deal. Ian Lavery broke the party whip by abstaining on the public vote motion / Getty Shadow minister for civil society Steve Reed said: This isnt a trivial matter, its about the future of our country. Senior frontbenchers who defy their partys position should question whether they can be part of the leadership team if they dont accept the collective responsibility that goes with the job. Labour backbencher Wes Streeting said: It is simply not acceptable for the chair of the Labour Party or any other member of the shadow cabinet to break with Labour Party policy and expect to remain in his job. "If they fail to do the honourable thing and resign they should be sacked. Otherwise, we should all take from this that the Labour whip is now purely advisory. On the close-run public vote motion, tabled by backbenchers Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson, 40 rebel Labour MPs either voted against or abstained. It lost by 280 to 292. Loading.... Shadow cabinet minister Jon Trickett abstained, as did Gloria De Piero, shadow justice minister, and eight other Labour frontbenchers. Many of them are from areas that voted strongly to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. Questions have been raised today about consistency in party discipline after Ruth Cadbury, Andy Slaughter and Catherine West were all sacked from Labours front bench in 2017 for defying party whipping to vote in favour of Britain remaining in the single market. Labour MP Neil Coyle, who backs a second referendum, tweeted: To have shadow cabinet members still not voting for party policy or in line with members views is beyond insulting to our frontline activists up and down the country. Mr Laverys Wansbeck seat in Northumberland voted 56 per cent in favour of leaving. He told his local paper he has always been open about his opposition to a second referendum. E d Miliband has prompted laughs after he was caught goggle-eyed staring at a group of semi-naked protesters who stormed the House of Commons during a Brexit debate. The former Labour leader was seen on camera along with MPs who were staring agog at the nude environmental activists after they stripped off in the public gallery. The scantily clad Extinction Rebellion protesters glued themselves to the front of the public gallery, leaving little to the imagination. They had phrases including "climate justice now" and "eco collapse" painted on their bodies. Mr Miliband looked aghast after seeing the nudity while Labour's Peter Kyle opened the debate for his motion in Monday's indicative votes. After the protesters made their presence known, he continued his speech with the words: "The naked truth is, Mr Speaker..." And when a colleague made a point of order, he added: "I am grateful for the cheeky intervention..." "He is fleshing out his argument very well," Tory MP Justine Greening interjected. Mr Milibands reaction prompted hilarious reactions on Twitter, with some saying he just cant look away. He even joined in the fun himself, tweeting an eyes emoji with a link to a story about the protesters. The Met Police said 12 arrests had been made for outraging public decency after the incident. Police officers were forced to remove protesters, with soap spray required in some cases to peel the activists from the glass. Extinction Rebellion has staged huge demonstrations in London over recent months, often bringing busy roads and bridges to a standstill. The group, which describes itself as a non-violent direct action and civil disobedience group, said the latest protest was an attempt to draw politicians' attentions to the "climate and ecological crisis". Mr Islam: Why did you just shout 'treason'? How is that helpful? Protester: She is acting against the interests of the country! Mr Islam: Shes doing what she thinks is in the interests of the country. You may disagree with that, but why do you shout treason? Protester: Shes a traitor. Thats what the word is, look it up in the dictionary, that's what the word means." Mr Islam: You think that but other people might say you are [a traitor]... youre shouting names at the Prime Minister, who is trying to come up with a solution. Protester: The truth hurts, Faisal, the truth hurts. Mr Islam: No, you think its the truth but we have politics so people can mediate between differences of opinion. Youre saying, in your opinion, they are traitors. How does that help? Protester: We live in a free country, I am allowed to say that. Mr Islam: Yeah, but how does that help the process of coming to an opinion? Protester: Shes working against the interests of the country. Have you noticed how comfortable she is when shes with her friends in Brussels? How more comfortable she is when shes in Europe compared to the place over the road? Mr Islam: I dont notice that at all. Anyway, I just thought I had to pick you up for the language. Sorry about that, Kay. Some protesters here its become quite normal using that language, and I just thought it was worth checking out exactly why people think its OK to call politicians traitors and use words like treason. T he British actress whose casting couch affair ruined the career of one of Hollywoods most powerful movie moguls today insisted she was not a victim. Charlotte Kirk, from Bexleyheath, said her illicit relationship with the married chief executive of Warner Brothers 28 years her senior was not a Me Too situation as sleeping with Kevin Tsujihara was entirely her choice. Mr Tsujihara stepped down last month after texts were leaked revealing their affair and suggesting he would help secure her acting roles. Today Ms Kirk, 26, spoke out and insisted: I dont consider myself a victim then because it was my choice. I wasnt forced into anything and I did what I wanted to do good or bad. Mr Tsujihara, behind films such as Wonder Woman and Aquaman, was forced out on March 18 just two weeks after being given an expanded role in the company. He denied influencing casting decisions but said his leadership was a distraction. Kevin Tsujihara / Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP Speaking to DailyMailTV, Ms Kirk denied she had leaked the texts and said she had begged the Hollywood Reporter not to publish them. She also said she wanted to be judged on the merits of her acting. I have been thrust into the limelight and no one had heard of me before this. My intention was to make a big bang in the world but not for this, for my work. Its terrible but Im trying to reverse that by showing people my abilities. Ms Kirk, a former student at the Italia Conti school of acting in London, was 19 when she moved from her childhood home in Bexleyheath to Los Angeles in the hope of breaking into Hollywood. Within months, however, she had met Brett Ratner, the director of hit movies including the Rush Hour series and X-Men: The Last Stand. He introduced her to Australian billionaire James Packer, who was married. Ms Kirk and Mr Packer embarked on an affair in November 2012 and the following September he introduced her to Mr Tsujihara. The leaked texts suggested he would try to advance her career in exchange for their sexual liaisons. She has had small roles in Oceans 8 and romantic comedy How To Be Single. Ms Kirk, who has been diagnosed with Aspergers, said it was a disaster the texts were leaked, but added: I think its going to help the movies that Im doing. T he son of MI6 chief Alex Younger has been killed in a car crash on a private estate in Scotland. Sam Younger died after being involved in a crash in Stirlingshire on Saturday. Edingburgh University student Sam died from multiple injuries following the accident. The vehicle crash is being investigated by police who said they did not believe there were any suspicious circumstances. Tributes have poured in for the big-hearted and fun loving 22-year-old, who has been described as a wonderful son by his devastated family. He was remembered as "always warm and friendly" and "confident and excited about the future" by lecturer Kieran Oberman. "We are devastated by the tragic news of his death and our thoughts are with his family and friends," he said. Mr Younger was a former pupil of the prestigious Dulwich College boys school in south London, where he played rugby in the first XV. The Old Alleynians Association of former students announced his death with "deep sadness". "Sam died in a car accident in Scotland in the early hours of Saturday morning," said a statement online. "A selfless, big-hearted, fun-loving and committed Alleynian, and Old Alleynian, we offer heartfelt condolences to Sam's family and friends." Police Scotland said Mr Younger's death was being treated as unexplained, although there did not appear to be any suspicious circumstances. The force said: "(We) can confirm that Sam Younger, a 22-year-old student from Edinburgh University, has died following an accident involving a motor vehicle on a private estate in Stirlingshire on Saturday 30th March 2019. "The family have provided that they wish privacy and space to remember and celebrate their wonderful son." A report was being compiled to be submitted to the procurator fiscal. Mr Younger's father has been Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) - the position known as "M" - since November 2014. He had been involved in security for the London Olympics and served as a station chief in Kabul. The appointment came after a career of more than 20 years as an officer in the SIS, which is commonly called MI6. Earlier this year it was reported that the former Army officer was expected to stay in the post beyond his November retirement date in the interest of security stability in the post-Brexit period. Y ouTube has placed new restrictions on Tommy Robinsons channel, banning him from livestreaming and removing him from search results. Politicians from both main parties had called for the Google-owned company to follow in Facebook and Twitters footsteps by banning the far-right activist. YouTube said that although the 36-year-old's videos are not illegal, it decided to apply tougher treatment in response to users flagging his content as potentially violating its rules against hate speech and violent extremism. The restrictions mean that all of the activist's videos now come with a content warning before anyone is able to watch them and are removed from recommendations, while users can no longer comment, suggest or like the videos. Mr Robinson and Mr Batten led a Ukip rally in Whitehall on Friday / Gareth Fuller/PA Mr Robinson, who has more than 387,000 followers on his YouTube channel, will also be blocked from live streaming. Any videos of this kind are blocked from using monetisation tools to earn money, though adverts on Mr Robinson's YouTube channel had already been suspended since January for breaching the site's advertising guidelines. "After consulting with third-party experts, we are applying a tougher treatment to Tommy Robinson's channel in keeping with our policies on borderline content," a YouTube spokeswoman said. Tommy Robinson at the so-called 'Brexit betrayal' rally in December last year. He is 'sponsoring' Ukip's 'make Brexit happen' demo on Friday / Gareth Fuller/PA "The content will be placed behind an interstitial, removed from recommendations, and stripped of key features including live streaming, comments, suggested videos and likes." Mr Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is at the forefront of the UKs far-right movement and has recently worked with Ukip leader Gerard Batten. He appeared at a Make Brexit Happen rally on Friday, telling supporters Nigel Farage doesnt care about you. Robinson also spoke at an anti-Brexit rally in December / AFP/Getty Images Labour deputy leader Tom Watson had called for a ban last month, writing a letter to Google in which he called Robinson a violent, racist, Islamophobic campaigner. Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright urged YouTube to reconsider their judgement after Robinson allegedly turned up at the house of one of his critics. Mr Wright told the House of Commons: We all believe that that freedom of speech has limits. And we believe that those who seek to intimidate others, those that seek to potentially break the law, because the description hes given the house this morning is potentially a description of criminal behaviour that is unacceptable. That is beyond the reach of the type of freedom of speech that we believe should be protected. A second woman has accused former vice-president Joe Biden of touching her inappropriately. Amy Lappos, 43, claimed that Mr Biden touched her face with both hands and rubbed noses with her at a fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, a decade ago. It wasnt sexual, but he did grab me by the head, claimed Ms Lappos, who was then a congressional aide. He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth, she added. Her claim came three days after former Nevada Democratic politician Lucy Flores told how the then vice-president made her feel uneasy, gross and confused at a 2014 campaign rally when he planted a big slow kiss on the back of her head. Mr Biden, a former Delaware senator who served as Barack Obamas vice-president from 2009 to 2017, insisted he has never behaved inappropriately. Barack Obama with former right-hand man Joe Biden / Getty Images In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort, he said in a statement. And not once never did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention. He said he will remain a staunch advocate for women. I may not recall these moments the same way, and I may be surprised at what I hear. But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will, he added. Mr Bidens spokesman Bill Russo took a more aggressive line, blaming Right -wing trolls from the dark recesses of the internet for conflating images of the 76-year-old embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends. The claims threaten to derail Mr Bidens plans to join the race for the Democrat presidential nomination to take on Donald Trump next year. Ms Lappos said she decided to speak out because she was unhappy with Mr Bidens response to the initial accusation and wants a woman to run against Mr Trump. Uninvited affection is not okay, she said. Objectifying women is not okay. Referring to this type of behaviour as simply affection or grandpa-like or friendly is ridiculously dismissive and part of the problem, she told the Hartford Courant. Mr Biden is still said to be planning a presidential run and an aide was reported as saying he was not reconsidering his decision. Two Democrats, who have already announced their candidacy, have called on Mr Biden to answer the allegations more fully. Elizabeth Warren said Mr Biden needs to give an answer, while Bernie Sanders said: I think what this speaks to is the need to fundamentally change the culture of this country and to create environments where women feel comfortable and feel safe. A foie gras salad is likely to have killed five residents at a French retirement home, prosecutors said today. The duck liver pate was served to 20 people before they fell violently ill at the residential care facility in Lhrem, near Toulouse, on Sunday night. Four women and a man were dead within a few hours of eating the meal, while the others were rushed to intensive care units while vomiting and displaying other symptoms of food poisoning. Prosecutors have said the foie gras is now vital evidence in the case that could lead to criminal charges. 2It is under lock and key, and will be examined in great detail, said a source close to the case. The victims, who were aged between 76 and 95, were said to have been in a good state of health. A pregnant sperm whale found dead on a beach with 22 kilograms of plastic inside her has prompted a stark warning over the dangers of pollution in the Mediterranean Sea. The 26-foot whale was found dead off Sardinia with a huge amount of plastic waste in her stomach, including a corrugated tube for electrical works, plastic plates, shopping bags, tangled fishing lines and a box of washing detergent with its bar code still legible. The female whale beached off the northern coast of Sardinia last week, within the vast Pelagos marine sanctuary that was created as a haven for dolphins, whales and other sea life. It is the first time we have been confronted with an animal with such a huge quantity of garbage," Cinzia Centelegghe, a biologist with the University of Padova, told La Stampa. Plastic recovered from the belly of a pregnant sperm whale / AP The whale was also found carrying a foetus that had died. Experts said the mother whale had been unable to digest calamari due to the amount of plastic ingested, filling two-thirds of its stomach. The World Wildlife Foundation said plastic is one of the greatest threats to marine life, killing at least five other whales that ingested large amounts of it over the last two years from Europe to Asia. A spokesman for WWF said between 150,000 and 500,000 tonnes of plastic objects and 70,000 to 130,000 tonnes of micro-plastics wind up in Europe's seas each year. Plastic recovered from the stomach of the sperm whale / AP To combat the phenomenon, the European Parliament last week approved a new law banning a wide range of single-use plastic products, including plates and straws, starting in 2021. Italy's environment minister Sergio Costa lamented the whale's death and said he planned to propose a new law this week to limit the use of plastics. The law will permit fishermen to bring plastics recovered at sea to land for proper disposal, which they currently are barred from doing. A dead whale in the water in Porto Cervo / AP Mr Costa also pledged Italy would be one of the first countries to enact the European single-use plastics ban and appealed to the mayors of Italian cities and coastal towns to adopt the ordinances in advance of the 2021 law. P rince Harrys 99-year-old favourite Aussie Daphne Dunne has died days after receiving a birthday card from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The Australian war widow who affectionately known as a royal super fan of Harrys died after falling ill with pneumonia. She died at the Sydney Adventist Hospital on Monday, three days after her 99th birthday. Her granddaughter, Ms Haywood said: She fought as hard as she could, but it just got too much. Its just so sad, you always want a little bit more heart. Prince Harry meets war widow Daphne Dunne 1 /18 Prince Harry meets war widow Daphne Dunne Harry meets Daphne Dunne (wearing her husbands Victoria Cross) May 7, 2015 in Sydney, Australia Getty Images Getty Images Getty Images Getty Images Prince Harry meets Daphne Dunne, 97 during Invictus Games Launch Event, June 7, 2017 Getty Images Getty Images Getty Images Meghan and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex meet Daphne Dunne during their first tour abroad as husband and wife Reuters Reuters AFP/Getty Images AP AP AFP/Getty Images Reuters Harry and Ms Dunne had met many times but most recently in a heart-warming moment outside the Sydney Opera House, during the royal couples tour. The 2018 meeting was the third time they had met, as Harry ran over to kneel next to her wheelchair and give her a hug. Harry and Daphne in 2015 / Getty Images Speaking to Ms Dunne at the time, he said: I was looking for you earlier and hoped youd be here, its so good to see you again. Meghan Markle also knelt down to hug Ms Dunne and said: Im so glad to meet you. Meghan Markle meets Daphne Dunne for the first time in Sydney / PA The war widows first husband, Lieutenant Albert Chowne, died aged 25 in 1945 during an attack on a Japanese machinegun post in Papua New Guinea. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross which Mrs Dunne wore when she first met Harry. Ms Dunne said: Harry is a wonderful man and Im so happy he had found happiness. Harry hugs Daphne during a walkabout in torrential rain in 2017 / Getty Images She celebrated her 99th birthday with her grandchildren and nieces. Ms Haywood said: She had the most beautiful day, surrounded by so much love and colour and flowers. The card Meghan and Harry sent to her for her birthday meant so much, Ms Haywood added. A kindergarten teacher has been arrested on suspicion of poisoning 23 pupils in central China, police say. Police in the city of Jiaozuo said a teacher identified by the surname Wang is believed to have poisoned the childrens food with sodium nitrate, overexposure to which can be toxic and possibly fatal. The children were rushed to hospital after they began fainting and vomiting after eating porridge on Wednesday, state media said. Police are still looking for a motive for the incident. News agency Xinhua reported that one child remains seriously ill while seven others are being treated in hospital. The other 15 children involved have since been discharged. The school has reportedly been closed temporarily. Schoolchildren in China have been the target of attacks by people bearing grudges or considered mentally ill. P M summons Cabinet for crisis talks after MPs again reject all Brexit options Theresa May will today summon her warring Cabinet for crisis talks after MPs once again rejected all alternatives to her Brexit deal. The Prime Minister seeks to break the deadlock after Parliament last night failed to coalesce behind any alternative to her rejected deal. Mrs Mays move to call a Cabinet showdown has fuelled speculation she is preparing for a snap election. Tory MP Nick Boles, who tabled a motion proposing a Norway-plus style Brexit, dramatically quit the party after it was voted down. Murder probe after man fatally stabbed in north London A murder probe has been launched after man was stabbed to death in north London last night. Police and paramedics were scrambled to Grafton Road in Kentish Town at about 8.30pm. The victim, believed to be in his 20s, was found suffering knife injuries. He died at the scene. Tributes to M16 chiefs son killed in crash Tributes have been paid to the son of MI6 chief Alex Younger after the young man died in a crash on a private estate in Scotland. Sam Younger, who was involved in the smash in Stirlingshire on Saturday, was described as a "wonderful son" by his family. Mr Younger's father has been Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service - a position known as "M" - since November 2014. Methane burp could indicate life on Mars Nasa scientists have detected a methane "burp" which could indicate life on Mars. It has been determined the gas spike, which had been disputed, was picked up by a rover from the space agency in 2013. It had previously been suggested the gas came from the rover itself, though this theory was rejected by experts. Despite the latest developments Mars Express researchers have not directly addressed exactly what produced the methane "spike". Walliams emotional as Ant returns to BGT David Walliams has revealed he was emotional as Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly reunited for the new series of Britains Got Talent. Donnelly hosted last years live shows alone after McPartlin stepped down from his television commitments to focus on recovery from addiction. McPartlin fought back tears as he returned to the ITV talent show earlier this year to kick off the audition process with his professional partner Donnelly. On this day 1792: The Mint of the United States was established, striking its first silver dollars. 1873: British trains were fitted with toilets - but only in sleeping cars. 1877: The first human cannonball act was performed at London's Amphitheatre, when acrobatic Lady Zazal was shot by elastic springs into a safety net. 1954: Britain's first TV soap opera, The Grove Family (named after Lime Grove Studios), was transmitted. 1977: Charlotte Brew on Barony Fort became the first woman to ride in a Grand National. Her mount refused at the 27th fence. The winner was Red Rum, scoring his third win, the only horse ever to do so. I rish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar offered to personally welcome popstar Kylie Minogue to Dublin ahead of her concert date in a newly released fan letter. The message, dated October 3 and written on official Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) headed paper, was released to the Irish Mail on Sunday following a freedom of information request by the paper. The publication reported that their request was blocked two times before Varadkars office agreed to the note being made public. In the letter, Varadkar admits to being a huge fan of the Australian pop princess. Dear Kylie, it reads. Just wanted to drop you a short note in advance of the concert in Dublin. I am really looking forward to it. Am a huge fan! I understand you are staying in the Merrion hotel which is just across the street from my office in Government Buildings. If you like, Id love to welcome you to Ireland personally. He signed off the missive as Leo V Taoiseach. Fan: Varadkar's office initially blocked the release of the letter / PA Minogues Dublin concert was eventually cancelled as the star was suffering from a throat infection, though the Prime Minister was later able to meet the star backstage at her rescheduled tour date in December. Shortly after, he denied reports that he had received a free meal at the gig, writing on Twitter: Ive been made aware of a post on social media saying I had a free meal at a concert the other night. This is not true. There was no meal, we only had drinks and I paid. I have the receipt to prove it too. S andra Oh has revealed Killing Eve will get even darker when it returns for a second series. The Canadian actress said her character, MI5 agent Eve Polastri, will be pushed to the limit. She was speaking at the series two premiere in Los Angeles, where she posed on the red carpet with co-star Jodie Comer, who plays assassin Villanelle. For me, for Eve, its definitely about going darker, really going darker, and being even more pushed to the limit, Oh said. Leading women: Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh / Emma McIntyre/Getty Its almost like season one, shes like, Theres some kind of rabbit hole, what is that?. She plunges into it in season two. Killing Eve: Series 2- In pictures 1 /6 Killing Eve: Series 2- In pictures Jodie Comer in the new series of Killing Eve Aimee Spinks/BBC America/BBC Jodie Comer in the new series of Killing Eve Aimee Spinks/BBC America/BBC Sandra Oh in the new series of Killing Eve Aimee Spinks/BBC America/BBC Sandra Oh in the new series of Killing Eve Aimee Spinks/BBC America/BBC Sandra Oh in the new series of Killing Eve Aimee Spinks/BBC America/BBC Oh, who won a Golden Globe for her role, added: For me as an actor, thats just what you want to explore the limits of where you can go. Fiona Shaw, who plays Carolyn Martens, head of the Russia section at MI6, also attended the premiere with her wife Sonali Deraniyagala. K im Kardashian has revealed that she is considering naming her fourth child after her younger brother, Rob. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live with her sisters Khloe and Kourtney, the reality sensation said that she usually waits three or four days after the birth of a child before deciding upon a name, but said that she was already contemplating naming the new baby in tribute to her sibling. When asked by Kimmel whether the whole family will help to name the new arrival, Kim replied: We all weigh in I definitely take a family survey, but its usually after the babys born and were trying to figure out what the baby looks like. I usually go about three or four days nameless until I feel like it really connects. Tribute: Kim Kardashian is considering naming her new baby after her brother Rob / Getty Images She then went on to reveal that although she had been googling Armenian boys names last night, she does have one name in mind. I was truthfully thinking about just naming him Rob, [after] my brother, she told Kimmel, before admitting that this more traditional choice might not fit in with the names she has chosen for her three children so far. In pictures | Kardashians on Jimmy Kimmel 1 /14 In pictures | Kardashians on Jimmy Kimmel Kim Kardashian says she is going to call her fourth child Rob ABC Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney Kardashian visit with Jimmy. ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC Rob Kardashian (L) and Kim Kardashian Getty Images Rob and Kim Kardashian Then its North, Saint, Chicago... Rob, she said. It doesnt, like, really go. But I really was feeling that, or like Robert, and my brother approved it. So thats our one kind of name. She also specified that the child would be named Rob rather than Robert, telling sister Kourtney: I like Rob West, but not Robert West. The 38-year-old confirmed in January that she and husband Kanye West are expecting their fourth child, a boy, via surrogate, with the baby arriving sometime soon. P iers Morgan has thrown his support behind Mel B after she claimed she hooked up with Geri Horner. Brown made the shock claims during an interview with Morgan for his Life Stories series, admitting that while the whole group slept in a bed together it was like that with Horner. Morgan weighed in on the discussion, saying he is very much on Browns side. 'Awkward': Morgan told how the group are due to kick off rehearsals shortly / Dave Benett Speaking on Good Morning Britain, Morgan said: Mel Bs furious reaction to Geris furious denial.. what makes it a little bit spicy is that rehearsals start in about 10 days and then the tour starts in less than two months. On a positive note ratings for Life Stories are going to be absolutely gigantic. You know what? I believe Mel B. There I said it. I believe Mel B. His co-host Susanna Reid mocked the lack of response to Morgans declaration as she teased: There goes the tumble weed. Spice Girls: The group are due to start their summer tour later this year without Posh Spice / PA Morgans comments come after reports emerged that Brown had been left upset over being made out to be a liar. According to The Mirror, Brown was left feeling perplexed over Horners denials, which has supposedly caused tensions ahead of the groups summer tour. Mel B revealed she slept with bandmate Geri Horner A source told the publication: Mel is totally perplexed by Geris denials. Mel feels Geri is making her out to be a liar. Its almost as if she is trying to erase our history. There is a lot of bad blood simmering away. Its going to be interesting, said a second insider. I t's the news Call of Duty fans have been waiting for - Black Ops 4's Blackout is getting a new map. The Alcatraz-inspired map has launched on Call of Duty's battle royale mode, with gamers eager to get their hands on it. Named after the prison island off the coast of San Francisco, the map will be released on the PS4 first before hitting other platforms later. Here's everything you need to know. When is the new Call of Duty map out? The new battle royale map went live on the PS4 today, on Tuesday April 2. It is expected to be made available on the PC and Xbox One in around a week's time. What do we know about the new map? Not a huge amount, as the map has only recently gone live. However, Alcatraz has previously been used as the setting for a number of Call of Duty Zombies maps, such as the Mob of the Dead map. Unsurprisingly, the map has a strong prison-theme with a trailer showing action taking place both inside and outside the complex. And judging by the trailer it all looks a bit claustrophobic and gloomy, which is fitting as developer Treyarch has described it as the backdrop for "Close Quarters Battle Royale". The map has reportedly designed with close-quarters, fast-paced fighting in mind and the map certainly looks to fit that mould, looking noticeably smaller than maps in the past and featuring long, dark corridors and open hallways. According to the recently-released trailer, flamethrowers could play a big part in any close-quarters fighting and new additions include more cosmetic outfits. It also looks like the "Down But Not Out" mode - where team members can respawn as long as one member is still alive - will be the main type of fighting. As Call of Duty's creator Treyarch said: "The new Blackout Alcatraz map is set in a fog-filled island boasting a variety of environments that all lead up to the big cell house atop the hill. I ts rare that you speak to a head of a company who says one of the goals is to make the organisation irrelevant, but thats what happens when speaking to the UK CEO of Auticon, Ray Coyle. Auticon was established in Germany back in 2011 by Dirk Muller Remus. His son is on the autism spectrum and had faced difficulties when applying for jobs and in the workplace. This is quite emblematic for people on the spectrum: according to the National Autism Society (NAS), only 16 per cent of people with autism are in full-time employment. But Remus knew his son had a lot to offer and so set up Auticon, an IT consultancy business whose sole consultants are people with autism. Theres an understanding out there, particularly in tech, that we need more neurodiversity and an enthusiasm to do something about it, Coyle tells the Standard. The problem is many businesses are not equipped to do it. Thats the idea behind Auticon, we say to businesses: we know you want to do this, but you dont know how or where to start. Heres a good place to start. Creating neurodiverse workplaces Auticon launched in the UK in 2016, and now has 25 consultants in its London office as well as a recent expansion under its belt in Edinburgh. The key to the organisation is that it is not a charity, it turns a profit and its aim is that companies who use its consultants will experience commercial benefits too. Lars Backstrom is a consultant for Auticon, currently working at KPMG on its Audit Data and Analytics Team. He says he finds the work challenging but rewarding. For Backstrom, having autism means he often struggles with interpreting emotions and body language, something he found challenging in offices. This is what led him to Auticon. I had some problems at my previous job to do with autism, and I spoke to a nice counsellor at the NAS. She left NAS to start working with Auticon and suggested I apply there, he tells the Standard. Creating neurodiverse workforces starts with the application and interview process. Interviews are a test of social interaction skills, in a high-pressured, unstructured environment. It puts many people off, they find it stressful and illogical, explains Coyle. Auticon details the cognitive skills it looks for, such as attention to detail, sustained concentration and logical analysis in a clear manner, on its website. Theres no need for a CV, as people with autism often have gaps on their CVs which can put them off applying for new roles. Auticon's UK CEO, Roy Coyle / Grey Corporate It was a thorough and challenging application, says Backstom. At the same time, it was tailor-made for us on the spectrum, involving more problem-solving than bragging at interviews, which we are not very good at. The Auticon recruiters were always on hand to support and assist, it was a positive experience. Applicants are then invited to skills assessments to find out what their skills are and once the company understands their cognitive profile and the support they need, they are then matched up with clients and sent out to projects, such as Backstrom and KPMG. Attention to details and the ability to find solutions to challenging problems are key skills that we look for when recruiting, explains Matt Campbell, KPMGs data science team director. Through Auticon, we have found individuals with these important skill sets who have helped us deliver for our clients. The two organisations worked closely together to ensure everyone feels supported, whether its the Auticon consultants or the management staff at KPMG, something Campbell says was incredibly helpful. It really helped us understand the needs of our new colleagues and also how we could work together to build a fantastic team. This is what Coyle means when he says if Auticon achieves its ultimate goalsof helping workplaces become neurodiverse and understand the ways they can employ people with autismthe organisation wont be necessary anymore. Given the wider emphasis now on diversity and inclusions, people understand that neurodiversity is an important part of this, but theres still a long way to go. Once people start to look at neurodiversity and see there are real benefits here for businesses, [that] this is a different type of brain, a different type of cognition, that your company really needs to tap into. People get interested very quickly, says Coyle. Its a process were at the awareness stage, not the stage of widespread action yet. Ending the skills gap Employing people with autism in the workplace solves another problem: the tech skills gap. Immersive Labs, which provides cyber skills training, established a specific autism-focused stream, named the Neurodiversity Cyber Academy (NCDA) to help people on the spectrum excel in cybersecurity. This also helps to close the current cyber skills gap: recently 63 per cent of businesses said they didn't have sufficient cybersecurity skills. People with autism, Aspergers or ADHD for example often have a unique approach to problem-solving and a higher than average attention to detail which makes them incredibly well suited to the mathematical and analytical complexities embedded in cybersecurity roles, explains Immersives CEO James Hadley. The NCDA was set up last year in partnership with the NAS, with funding provided by the UK governments cyber skills fund. The UKs digital minister Margot James said in a statement: For Britains tech industry to prosper, we need to make sure we have a diverse workforce drawing on a range of experiences and ideas. "Everyone should be able to get the life-changing digital skills they need, and [the funding] is helping to increase the number and diversity of those entering the cybersecurity profession, including training for neurodiverse candidates. Digital minister Margot James wants to close the cyber skills gap by funding training for people with autism (Photo: Parliament) Individuals come to the academy to learn all the skills they need for a career in cybersecurity. Sponsors of the academy are then able to tap into the talent pool and advertise job openings directly to candidates. So far, it is training 200 people across England and Scotland. Whats different about this scheme is were not just preparing the autistic candidates for work, were also working with employers to make sure they understand autism and introduce the right support and adjustments, says Emma Kearns, employment and enterprise manager at NAS. 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Read also: PSD Treasurer Mircea Draghici charged of embezzlement, use of subsidies for other purposes According to the cited source, the training was conducted under the coordination of the Air Force Staff - Air Operational Component, together with Forward Air Control and Joint Terminal Attack Controller elements of the Romanian air and land forces. "The flight activity of a US Air Force B-52 strategic bomber is primarily aimed at proving allied power in the south-east of Europe and helping increase Romania's confidence in the US involvement in ensuring regional security by providing reassurance measures in the southeastern zone of the North Atlantic Alliance," the cited source reads. AGERPRES . The BRUA gas pipeline is fundamental for the European Commission and it is important for the gas to reach Austria regardless of the route to be decided, European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete said on Tuesday in Bucharest. Read also: PM Viorica Dancila: 'Romania - one of important contributors to NATO operations and missions' "BRUA is a fundamental project for the European Commission because it will allow natural gas to reach Hungary and Austria from Bulgaria and Romania. At the moment we are not discussing how the gas reaches Hungary, but we are discussing how the gas might get to Austria and there are divided opinions within the Hungarian Government as to which is the best route, one or the other, the one across Slovakia," Canete said, making a gesture to show that it does not matter which of the two will be the final route. "For the Commission, it is important that this project be carried out," the commissioner said. "For the moment, Phase 1 of the project is already in place and we hope it will be completed as soon as possible. We will continue to support this project and we are in constant contact with governments, transport operators, with everybody, so as to be able to find a rapid solution. The security of energy supply and the diversification of routes and suppliers is a priority of the European Commission, and for Central and South-East Europe to have security, we must have many such interconnectors," the European official said. The Commissioner specified that gas is the bridge-resource among fossil fuels that Europe wants to give up, and renewable energy, which will be the future. BRUA gas interconnector will ensure the supply of gas on the Bulgaria-Romania-Hungary-Austria route. Phase I stipulates the construction on the territory of Romania on the Podisor-Recas route and has as completion deadline December 2019. The project is worth 478 million euro, of which 180 million European money. AGERPRES . Romania's Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu had a formal working meeting with US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo in Washington on Monday to discuss regional security and energy co-operation, according to a press statement released on Monday by Romania's Foreign Affairs Ministry (MAE). The meeting was also attended by Romania's ambassador to the US George Maior, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale and US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Philip Reeker. According to the source, the two officials addressed a wide range of topical issues on the bilateral agenda, highlighting the interest in and joint efforts of both governments to develop and intensify the strategic partnership between Romania and the United States of America.Melescanu underscored the importance of bilateral high-level visits to Washington and Bucharest for the development of the bilateral relationship.The discussion also focused on an assessment of transatlantic security priorities in anticipation of the ministerial meeting dedicated to the 70th anniversary of NATO.Melescanu praised the close partnership with the United States in the area of security, highlighting Romania's strategic role and Romanian-American co-operation in ensuring an integrated approach to NATO's defence and deterrence measures.The head of the Romanian diplomacy also emphasised the importance of strengthening the American and NATO commitment to security in the Black Sea region.Melescanu highlighted the achievements of the Romanian presidency of the EU Council and the agenda for the second half of the six-month tenure, including issues related to the Eastern Partnership, Central Asia and the Western Balkans. It also highlighted Romania's approach to revealing the positive substance of EU-US cooperation.He mentioned Romania's bid to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which he called a major objective of Romania's foreign policy.Melescanu also presented Romania's bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council and highlighted the traditional experience of the nation in the system of this organisation.According to MAE, regional and global efforts were also discussed in the field of non-proliferation, counter-terrorism and asymmetric security threats, with the US Secretary of State noting Romania's important contributions to international organisations and mechanisms, as well as the high expertise of Romanian specialists and professionals.Intensifying bilateral energy co-operation was yet another topic of discussion at the meeting, according to MAE The Ambassador hailed the launch of the new edition of the ARC camp programme, which will have 3,000 participants this year, reads a release of the Ministry for Romanians Abroad (MRP) sent to AGERPRES In this context, the foreign diplomat said he will support the promotion of this project among the young Romanians living in Israel, in order to ensure a high representativeness of the Romanian community in the camps to be established in four Romanian counties, specifies the same source."The Romanian and Israeli sides evoked the special bilateral relation existing between the two countries and also the facilitation of the exchange of good practices for the programmes and projects meant for the members of the Romanian and Israeli communities outside the Romanian and Israeli borders, which are designed to help them preserve their ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity," reads the MRP release Parliament reaffirms its attachment to NATO principles, values and goals and firmly supports a strong Alliance and the strengthening of the transatlantic relationship, indispensable for Euro-Atlantic security, shows the Declaration adopted on Tuesday by the Legislature on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Romania's accession to the North-Atlantic Alliance and 70 years of NATO existence. Read also: American B-52 strategic bomber trains at Cincu, in Romania's airspace "In the context of the 15th anniversary of Romania's accession to NATO and 70 years since the establishment of the North Atlantic Alliance, the Romanian Parliament reaffirms its attachment to the NATO principles, values and goals and firmly supports a strong Alliance and the strengthening of the transatlantic relationship, indispensable for the Euro-Atlantic Security. It upholds the further strengthening of NATO's capability to effectively manage all the challenges and threats to the Member States, regardless of their area of origin, within a comprehensive approach. It hails the notable progress as regards a credible, effective and coherent deterrence and defence posture, and highlights the importance of an advanced allied presence on the eastern flank," the Declaration adopted by Parliament mentions. According to the document, Parliament highlights the implications of developments in the eastern neighborhood of the European continent for the entire Euro-Atlantic security and, specifically, the strategic importance of the wider Black Sea region and the strengthening of NATO's role in this area. The Romanian Parliament expresses its concern over the diversification and intensification of security threats to Allies and supports NATO's demarches in the anti-missile, cyber defence and in addressing the anti-hybrid threats. At the same time, it stresses the importance of continuing NATO's "open door" policy and welcomed the accession of Montenegro and the Republic of Macedonia to NATO, the document shows. Parliament also advocates the strengthening of the Alliance's partnership policy on the basis of shared values and respect for international law and the commitments made, aimed at promoting stability, as well as support for enhancing partner defence capabilities. According to the document, Parliament reaffirms its support for the European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations of Georgia, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, the firm support for the territorial integrity of these states within internationally recognized borders, and deepening their practical co-operation with NATO, based on their specific interests and needs. "The Romanian Parliament underlines the unique importance of NATO-EU cooperation and the need to strengthen the Strategic Partnership between the two organizations. It acknowledges that collective defence begins with national defence and resilience. It will continue to secure 2 percent of GDP for defence in line with commitments assumed at allied level. Romania will continue to contribute to maintaining the Alliance's credibility and capability for action as well as to regional and international security. Parliament reiterates the importance of national parliaments and contributes to the definition and implementation of the objectives of this institution by boosting and developing interparliamentary dialogue, with the partners of the Alliance, included," the Declaration reads. Parliament adopted the Declaration with 238 votes ''in favour". AGERPRES . Romania has been and is one of the important contributors to NATO operations and missions, Prime Minister Viorica Dancila said in the joint plenary of Parliament at the solemn sitting occasioned by the 15th anniversary of our country's accession to the North Atlantic Alliance. Read also: PM Dancila says funds to be allocated to people with autism for access to five hours of complementary therapy "In 2019, we will continue to be among the top five states contributing troops to the Afghanistan mission. We will also contribute to the global coalition. The ultimate expression of Romania's commitment is the sacrifice of Romanian servicemen who have lost their lives in the allied operation theatres. Their gesture must remind us of the lessons learned at every stage of our Euro-Atlantic pathway. Only this way will we be able to give others the option of choosing a new way, and of course, with the knowledge that the everyone's security depends on the individual commitment of each of us," she said. The head of the Executive expressed her conviction that the North Atlantic Alliance will continue to represent "the main guarantor of Romania's security" by acting "anticipatively and pro-actively" on the global security architecture, which is currently facing many challenges. "By implementing the governing program, we will strengthen our country's strategic profile within NATO. Romania will continue to act with dignity within the Alliance to actively and significantly contribute to the decision-making process and to missions and operations alongside our allies," the prime minister pointed out. Viorica Dancila stressed that Europe and North America must act together, "in a manner that ensures a balanced distribution of responsibilities on both sides of the Atlantic." The prime minister underscored that, as far as capabilities are concerned, Romania continues to invest "in modern military equipment" as part of various military endowment programs. She mentioned that Romania will continue to be "an active and responsible contributor for ensuring the security and stability of the Euro-Atlantic area, but also for projecting these values in the neighborhood of the Alliance. The prime minister appreciated that the 15th anniversary of Romania's integration into NATO represents a moment "with a strong symbolic weight and historical value" in the democratic path of the country. The head of the Executive said that, by joining NATO, our country has "obtained the highest degree of security" since the formation of Romania as a national state. AGERPRES . Hainan is offering housing incentives to attract talent to the tropical island province, where the country's 12th free trade zoneits largestis being created. A notice from the provincial government on Friday said the employees of companies that move their headquarters to the island will enjoy the same housing policies and credit support as locals when buying a house, even though they don't have household registration in Hainan. The supplementary measure, which is intended to address problems of new employees settling in the Hainan FTZ, will improve the business environment, attract investors, promote opening-up and development of headquarters, and optimize the living environment, local officials said. In April last year, after the central government said Hainan would become a pilot free trade zone, the island announced it would attract 1 million skilled workers. To accomplish that, it has adopted measures to support free housing for topnotch personnel, child education, spousal employment, medical insurance and car purchases. Hainan also announced an islandwide housing quotaregarded as the strictest in the countryto curb speculation. The new rules required those who do not live on the island but want to buy houses to provide local tax records for the past 60 months from at least one member of the applicant's familymaking it impossible for nonnative residents to buy a home there. "The latest move to help newcomers buy a home will make talented people feel more at ease and work more wholeheartedly," said Xia Feng, director of the economic research department of the China Institute for Reform and Development. "The government should also promote the rental housing market for those who cannot afford to buy, and cultivate more diversified business platforms to attract talent from outside the island," he said. Wang Lu, chairman of Jincheng Consultancy, a Haikou-based real estate information provider, said that because of the province's small population base and weak economic and industrial foundation, investment and talent attraction are two urgent issues for the development of the FTZ. Since April last year, 65,000 market entities have entered Hainan, up 33 percent year-on-year. Twenty-seven of the world's top 500 companies have landed in Hainan, including Ernst &Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomas Cook, Sinopec, Alibaba and Tencent, said Fu Xuanchao, director of the provincial Development and Reform Commission. Minister-delegate for European Affairs George Ciamba, representatives of the European Commission, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), bank directors, representatives of the business milieu and the academia are to attend on Tuesday the 23rd edition of the European Corporate Governance Conference. The event in Bucharest is organised by EY Romania and the Independent Directors Association, under the aegis of Romania's Presidency at the European Union Council. The main topic to be debated by the 30 speakers within the event will be "Corporate Governance as the enabler of sustainable growth." No Collusion But the Cold War Heats Up The defences are up, while the excuses are being trotted out and counter-attacks are gaining momentum. And Washingtons powerful anti-Russia lobby is delighted that Cold War Two is heating up. Donald Trump is a narcissistic boor who tells lies with a casual indifference that might be regarded with amusement or even admiration were he not a malevolent poseur with all the style and attraction of a sock full of wet spaghetti. He is a dangerous buffoon whose views and actions on international affairs are confused and erratic. BUT for once he has been proved to have been right, because he told the truth when he stoutly denied he had colluded with sinister Russians to ensure he would win the presidential election in 2016. A two-year inquiry was conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller at a cost of 25 million dollars for the first eighteen months and on 24 March the New York Times reported that the four page summary of his findings provided by Attorney General William Barr showed Mr Mueller and his team were unable to establish that anyone connected to the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 elections. The Times noted that Mr Mueller is as careful and thorough an investigator as there is. His investigation lasted almost two years, issued more than 2,800 subpoenas and roughly 500 search warrants and heard from a similar number of witnesses. If he couldnt find any links, its doubtful anyone could. But the paper couldnt avoid highlighting the totally unproved allegation that Russia had interfered to help Mr. Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign although the grudging admission that there was no collusion was a step in the right direction. What was expected by those of us ingenuous to imagine there might be honour in the mainstream media was that those responsible for feeding the fires of hatred over the years, and those who stated explicitly, for example, that there was plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy in plain sight should stand up and say, quite clearly, Sorry. We were wrong. I also believe in the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny. This plain sight allegation was by Congressman Adam Schiff, reported in August 2018. He is Chair of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives and repeatedly said that his committee had uncovered plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy. He told Meet the Press two years ago that I cant go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now and in an ABC interview declared that the collusion conspiracy was of a size and scope probably beyond Watergate. He was retailing deceptive garbage, but there are plenty more like him, and their rabble-rousing declarations were devotedly recorded without question by most of the media. The Washington Post now greatly regrets the toxic tribalism thats been tearing apart the countrys civic culture but it was the Post and all the rest of the mainstream media that encouraged tribalism, factionalism, distrust and hatred exactly as so many of the extremist promoters of Brexit have done in the now totally disUnited Kingdom, which is about to plunge to economic and social disaster. But the Post, a major Russia-baiter, must be given credit for publishing an article on 28 March by Marc Thiessen, saying among other things that there are a lot of people in Washington with a lot of explaining to do. That said, it is unlikely that many of us will hold any breath waiting for explanation of their campaign of spiteful malevolence. Freddy Gray of the US Spectator noted that on 25 March, just before release of the Mueller findings, 2020 presidential candidate Beto ORourke said You have a president who, in my opinion, beyond a shadow of a doubt, sought to, however ham-handedly, collude with the Russian government. But he wont be held to account. It is highly unlikely that one single intending voter for ORourke will have a opinion-alteration simply because the candidate made an utter fool of himself and deliberately misled the American people. Former CIA Director John Brennan, a media favourite during the happy collusion years, declared Trump to be wholly in the pocket of Putin and wrote that Trumps claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash. Its reminiscent of the horrible days of the unlamented alcoholic Senator Joseph McCarthy who in the 1950s destroyed the lives of so many innocent people because he wanted to achieve political prominence. In a speech he announced categorically that I have here in my hand a list of 205 [members of the State Department] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department. In later pronouncements he gave different numbers and generally contradicted himself but it didnt matter. As with the Trump-Russia collusion allegations, those who wanted to believe there were thousands of sinister conspiring communists in the State Department, and Hollywood and Voice of America Radio, as stated clearly by McCarthy, simply carried on believing everything McCarthy said, even to this day. They are in similar company, because there are millions of people out there who refuse to be convinced that there was no collusion, no matter what evidence is produced to refute their mistaken conviction. Not only this, but the Cold War campaign against Russia is heating up, with the media trying very hard to deflect attention from their embarrassment about being totally wrong. The New York Times, for example, came up with the devious tactic of attack by means of an anti-Russia major article on 31 March. This piece announced with horror that Russias Military Mission Creep Advances to a New Front: Africa. In shocked tones it revealed that Russia, entrenched in Africa during the Cold Wars violent East-West rivalry, largely retreated from the continent after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in the past two years, Moscow has rekindled relations with Soviet-era clients like Mozambique and Angola, and forged new ties with other countries. President Vladimir Putin of Russia will host a summit meeting between Moscow and African countries later this year. The Times had the effrontery to claim that the Pentagon has a relatively light footprint across Africa with 6000 troops and a thousand military mercenaries (contractors in Newspeak) in the continent but failed to state, as Nick Turse notes, that a recent investigation by the Intercept, based on documents obtained from US Africa Command (AFRICOM) via the Freedom of Information Act, revealed a network of 34 bases heavily clustered in the north and west of that continent as well as in the Horn of Africa. AFRICOMs strategic posture consists of larger enduring outposts, including two forward operating sites, 12 cooperative security locations, and 20 more austere sites known as contingency locations. In other words, Washingtons Defence-Industrial Complex has spread its military tentacles well and truly (and potentially disastrously) over Africa, but the mainstream media, and especially the New York Times, prefer to highlight the Russias modest but effective cooperation with African countries in an effort to further demonise Moscow, while drawing readers away from the important but increasingly downplayed revelation that THERE WAS NO COLLUSION. One of the more preposterous reactions to the Mueller findings was that of the Posts media columnist, Martha Sullivan, who made an attempt to help reporters and commentators out of the disgusting mess they helped to create by writing a piece titled Serious journalists should be proud of not bullied over their Russia reporting. Once readers of that ludicrous headline stopped laughing they were regaled with the argument that the hacks drove forward a national conversation that needed to happen. As Americans saw with their own eyes Trumps bizarre efforts to ingratiate himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, that reporting mattered and provided context. Sure. Even if the reporting was utter and complete baloney. The defences are up, while the excuses are being trotted out and counter-attacks are gaining momentum. Its just like old times, when the Cold War was thriving. And Washingtons powerful anti-Russia lobby is delighted that Cold War Two is heating up. Western Wishful Thinking Excluding Everything That Makes China What It Is The West is no longer the West. There is the belligerent West of Trump, Pence, Bolton and Pompeo and this is the West that is incrementally losing traction across the Middle East, and beyond. In the past few weeks, we have witnessed a mini Belt & Road unfolding across the northern Middle East linking Iran to Iraq, to Syria, and to Lebanon a Belt and Road that, it is envisaged, ultimately will be assimilated into Chinas greater BRI project. And as telling Lebanon, the eternal weathervane for the Middle East wind direction, seems to be cutting a 500-year-old umbilical linking it to Rome and Europe, to look rather to Moscow (to protect the regions Christians, to get its Syrian refugees home to Syria, and to move under President Putins protective wing in preventing Bolton and Netanyahu from detonating chaos on their patch) and to China. More recently, the New Silk Road infrastructure initiative landed squarely in Italy, potentially giving some real substance (i.e. infrastructure) especially in the case of Sicily to the notion of a Mediterranean commonality. Both these events are linked by a single motive: How to return autonomy to these states; how to recover at least a modicum of decision-making and to break free from the strait-jacket of economic stagnation, and the deadweight of stale political shackles. As Christina Lin has noted: China for one takes the view that security follows economic development, and has made it clear that reconstruction comes before political settlement. It is adopting a regional approach to the Levant and now views Lebanon as a platform for reconstruction in Syria and Iraq (emphasis added). The EU naturally frets about China. The EU always has assumed to itself rather, the mantle of being the coming global economic behemoth. But now, the EU has been seized by a very real apprehension at the rise of this other civilisation state, China, which eventually is likely to spell the end of the Wests dominance in every sphere: economic, political and cultural but more especially, since demographic trends show Europe aging, shrinking and controlling a smaller, and smaller share of the world economy. And this what has been on display in the northern tier of the Middle East and in Italy. Both Italy and the Levant are civilisation-states in their own right. They do not need the EU brand to reassure them of their status as civilisation-states. As Lebanons former Minister of Economy noted last year, China doesnt look at Lebanon as a small country of 4 million citizens, but as a country with huge potential given its geographical location. The point here is precisely that the West is no longer the West. There is the belligerent West of Trump, Pence, Bolton and Pompeo and this is the West that is incrementally losing traction across the Middle East, and beyond. And then there is the West of the EU, but that latter West too, is divided, and beset by forces opposed to its millenarian ethos. The West, as the vision for the future, indeed is receding. The EU sees this. It is both gripped by Chinas potential as an economic partner, in these needy times of threatening recession, yet it cannot quite yield up to this changing world, its global ambition to impart to propagate its European liberal values. As a consequence, the EU presents obvious symptoms of schizophrenia. On the one hand, it cannot do without China economically and wants to best friend to the Leviathan, yet, in the other persona the EU, can sound somewhat like Trump, in complaining about unfair trade practices, and standing on its high horse of European values: Competition between China and the European Union is not fair the EU was wrong to hope that China would respect human rights more when economic progress increases The EU should be clear, but more firm with China. Junckers polemic reflects a certain buyers remorse at the consequences to the western Orientalist consensus about China. Expectations have not been realised, writes Martin Jacques: There has been a tacit consensus that, if we treat China nicely, as potentially one of us, Beijing will return the compliment. The result has been very little real discussion of what a world with a dominant China would be like. On one hand, [there are] those who believe China will rule the world, but only if it adopts our Western way of doing things, and on the other, [there are] those who argue that Beijings modernisation will ultimately founder, because Chinas Chinese-ness will get in the way. The conclusion drawn by both schools, however, is the same. We dont need to worry. Strong or weak, China will not challenge our way of life. There is still a widespread view in the West that China will eventually conform, by a process of natural and inevitable development, to the Western paradigm. This is wishful thinking. By concentrating on similarities, rather than recognising difference, the Western world excludes everything that makes China what it is. Ouch! And now that the EU acknowledges the latter point schizophrenia (as politico.eu highlights), takes a hold: BILATERALISM DIES HARD: Tuesday delivered an unprecedented sight: [Macron, Merkel and Juncker] on the steps of the Elysee, welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping to their special quadripartite mini-summit on multilateralism. The image certainly sent the message the Elysee wanted: China must deal with a united European front, rather than its preferred bilateral approach, where the balance of power works in Beijings favour. Macron is known for his penchant for symbolism, but is that all there is? The summit ended with a bilateral joint declaration from France and China. Seven pages of references to the two countries, and not a single mention of Germany or the European Commission. Of course, it is quite true that the EU is under severe pressure from the US. And, as former US Ambassador to China, Chas Freeman has noted: From the US point of view, the objection to Italian outreach to China is just part of hysteria about China that has seized Washington. The US is treating the Belt and Road as a military strategic challenge. The Europeans are treating it as an economic issue that they need to be cautious about The Europeans are scrambling to come to grips with the fact that China is now a global great power, economically the debate for them is less about Belt and Road than it is about the terms of Chinese investment and competition in the technology area. In the US, there is no debate. There is pretty much an anti-China consensus now. The American pendulum has swung from one extreme (China will rule the world, but only if it adopts our Western way of doing things), to the other narrative: US hysteria about the threat, because the West precisely has been guilty hitherto: of excluding everything that makes China what it is. So now we witness the problematic of America with its own very particular, economic model insisting that Chinas economic model (the very something which makes China what it is), be changed: i.e. that Chinas economic model be modified so that American Corporations may do business in Chinas economy just as if they were doing business at home, with another American organisation. The contradictions in this are obvious. There is no one set of rules that fits all sizes (models of economics). The global rules were constructed around a US paradigm and economic models change as paradigms change. So, what does all this mean? For, Middle Eastern states, the shift to the Russian and Chinese sphere offers the prospect of interacting with a political and diplomatic machine that works and still has its all its wires connected to the realities of the region. It also opens the opportunity to acquire sophisticated weapons for defence; and comes with the added bonus of being able to acquire infrastructural investment, and trade corridors, as part of the joint, Russo-Chinese BRI. For Italy with its economy frozen in amber it returns to the state, some aspect of autonomy over its economy a touch of sovereignty. Italy has had enough foreign occupations over the centuries not to fear that somehow its Italian-ness will be lost through accepting Chinese infrastructure investment. Also, China has a love affair with all things made in Italy. It means that whilst Washington fulminates, the reality is that China is quietly eroding global resistance to its rise. We shall just have to adjust to Chinese otherness and its ways of doing business. Is that such a problem (unless Messrs Navarro, Lighthizer and Pence make it one)? TICKERS: FLT; TAKOF Source: Ron Struthers for Streetwise Reports (4/2/19) Sector expert Ron Struthers examines the market forces surrounding the drone delivery industry, and recommends a Canadian firm that is flying high. Amazon Prime Air is mostly hot air. Working with regulators is the key to progress. Google and Drone Delivery Canada Corp. (FLT:TSX.V; TAKOF:OTCQB) are leading the charge. Early movers will own the flight paths. I believe three important elements have contributed to Amazon's great success overall: Choice with a wide selection of goods; Prices that are very competitive with other online or brick-and-mortar stores; Delivery that is consistent and quite fast. Kantar Consulting's 2018 report ranked Amazon at number three in sales among the top retailers, behind Walmart and Kroger, based on 2017 numbers. The Top 100 Retailers have changed very little over the past several years. Last year Amazon was No. 7, and the nine other retailers in the Top 10 remained the same. Five years ago, Amazon was in 11th place, and eight of the Top 10 retailers were the same as this year: Walmart, Kroger, Target, Costco, Home Depot, Walgreens, CVS and Lowe's. In 2008, that same solid eight held the top of the chart, while Amazon was ranked no. 25. Amazon is not far behind Kroger, and just might overtake it when the 2018 numbers are final. Amazon has been climbing steadily, and that is more impressive when you consider that only 9.1% of U.S. retail sales were online as of December 31, 2017, shown from ycharts.com (below). Amazon has been taking advantage of this trend and is no doubt a leader in e-commerce sales. There is a new disruption on the way that will level off this graph in the next few years. We have come from "bricks and mortar" to "online" shopping, and the next wave of change I have dubbed "mobile shopping." Thanks to the higher power of smartphones, and better and higher speed networks, shoppers' mobile devices will allow them to experience both the online as well as bricks and mortar shopping experience at the same time. Shoppers will no longer have to sit in front of the computer screen at home to shop online. New companies that nobody has heard of will lead this chargeprivate companies like Heelo. Heelo has started to deploy its proximity marketing solutions and will likely be a top contender in this new category. That aside, currently Amazon is a leader in e-commerce sales. However, it is struggling to keep its delivery costs under control. It is obvious from the chart below, from Statista, that Amazon's shipping and fulfillment costs have been rising steadily, from around 17% of net sales to over 25%. These rising costs are a real challenge. Amazon is making progress with warehouse automation and gaining more control over its delivery process, but its approach with delivery drones has had a serious flaw from the onset. On December 21, 2018, the Chicago Tribune reported that Amazon will lease 10 Boeing 767 planes, bringing its total fleet to 50, with the goal of getting orders to people faster and more reliably. Amazon's fleet of planes is far smaller than that of UPS and FedEx, whose planes number in the hundreds But Amazon has pushed in recent years to close that gap, which will gain it more control over deliveries. Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million back in 2012, and since then has been steadily investing in a robotic future. According to a September 2018 interview with Brad Porter, VP robotics at Amazon, there has been great progress: "Today we have more than 100,000 drive units deployed throughout our global fulfillment network. But many forget those aren't the only robots we have. We have deployed around 30 palletizer systems, and another popular robot you might see in our fulfillment centers is called RoboStowa 6-ton robot that has the ability to move pallets of products up to 24 feet high and directly onto the larger drive units. " One can find some good results with robotics and inventory management at Amazon, but when it comes to Amazon Prime Air, it is just talk and little results. Amazon Prime Air is a conceptual drone-based delivery system that Amazon announced in 2013. From Amazon's website: "We're excited about Prime Aira delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles, also called drones. Prime Air has great potential to enhance the services we already provide to millions of customers by providing rapid parcel delivery that will also increase the overall safety and efficiency of the transportation system." As of January 2019, Amazon's latest update is that the company is working on a flight management system. "We will always prioritize safety first within our system," said Roth. "People both on the ground and in the air are the most important to protect. We're building a traffic management system with this as our guiding principle." I call Amazon Prime Air "hot air"because I believe the company took the wrong approach. Flying drones is not just another technology that you can develop in any way you see fit to meet your plans or dreams. This is what Amazon has doneannouncing how t wants to use drones, but forgetting the most important aspect. Flying delivery drones falls under the mandate of controlled airspace run by the FAA. This is the most heavily regulated industry on the planet, as it can take years just to get in-flight eating utensils approved. Amazon's drones will have many more challenges as well. Drones have to make controlled landings in nicely spacious areas. City dwellers and those of you in blocks of flats are going to have some issues. Then there are obstacles such as telephone wires, people, birds and narrow streets. The lack of a private landing area is another issue. By the time you get down to the communal courtyard, chances are a drone-tracking crook will have commandeered your abandoned package. Drones also have a performance-restricting flaw called battery life, which is a potential problem for the airborne devices. Amazon's debut drone features a 15-mile range. That's 7.5 miles there and the same back, so if you are not close to a distribution center, forget it. There are weight restrictions too, on what the drone can carry, and that is 5 pounds with Amazon's current drone. Drone deliveries could really help cut Amazon's costs, but don't expect any airborne deliveries from Amazon in the next few years. This is re-enforced by the video on the company website, as it is just delivering to a couple of rural customers in the UK at this time. While Amazon Prime Air is a long ways off from flying, Google and a small Canadian company are far more advanced, and could be a great blueprint for Amazon. Perhaps much easier for Amazon would be just to buy the small Canadian company and integrate it into what Amazon is working on. Drone Delivery Canada (TAKOF): Market Cap US$147 Million Not to confuse its name with the drones, I will call the company TAKOF. TAKOF took a very different approach. Its first targets were more remote communities, where there were less obstacles to overcome. TAKOF's other approach is depot-to-depot deliveries. This made for simpler logistics, so the company could advance all aspects of the platform more quickly and cost effectively. In Canada, remote First Nations communities have a need for drone delivery services; it is not just a nice convenience. This also opens up government funding assistance to the benefit of these communities and TAKOF. While Amazon is still working on a Flight Management System. TAKOF already has a working flight system (FLYTE) that encompass numerous levels of security, redundancy and resiliency. Utilizing industry-leading software, customization and patent-pending architecture, TAKOF has a group of applications that come together under an umbrella to provide a complete solution for the delivery industry. The flight systems cover all aspects of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), from the operational component to the logistics integration. The operational platform, according to the company, includes "full operational guidance, route planning, geo-fencing, alerts, telemetry, maintenance, logs, full preventative maintenance scheduling and tracking." I saw a demo of this system at the company's office last year, and it was quite impressive. The company also tracks other aircraft with feeds from the relevant Flight Information Region. TAKOF is integrating next-generation super materials into its drone designs, including graphene and carbon fiber. Its prototyping and design platform also utilizes 3-D printing systems to expedite concept designs that are patent-pending. TAKOF does not plan to be a drone manufacturer but will vend out manufacturing of its approved drone models as commercial demand increases. TAKOF now has a fleet of four different capacity drones called: The Sparrow X1000, payload 5 kg, travel range 30 kilometers; The Robin X1400, payload 12 kg, travel range 60 kilometers, tethered delivery; The Falcon, payload 22.5 kg, travel range of 60 kilometers; The Condor, payload 180 kg, travel distance of 200 kilometers. The Sparrow X1000 was the first drone that TAKOF developed, and was used for all its tests and certifications. It was the first cargo delivery drone of its kind to be accepted under the Transport Canada, Compliant UAS program in December 2017. In June 2017, TAKOF was the first drone delivery company to achieve BVLOS flights under Transport Canada's oversight. The systems that were tested predominantly include TAKOF's proprietary FLYTE management system, its avoidance technology and communications platform. During the flights,TAKOF's Mission Control Centre in Toronto, 2,500 kilometers (2,500 km) away, successfully monitored and record telemetry in real time for each flight. Robin X1400 In August 2018, Transport Canada granted TAKOF a SFOC (special flight operations certificate), approving the company to commence testing its Robin X1400 cargo delivery drone in Canadian skies. According to the company, the "Robin X1400 is fully integrated with Drone Delivery's proprietary Flyte management system and is capable of both larger payloads and greater flight ranges, of up to 60 kilometers." In addition, the "Robin X1400 will utilize a state-of-the-art dual payload deployment system, which would allow both static and tethered cargo deployments. DDC believes the tethered deployment system is the future for delivery in urban settings. With the tethered solution, the drone never lands. It simply deploys its payload by tether while hovering above at a height of approximately 100 feet in the air," the company states in a press release. The Falcon TAKOF is leaping ahead of any competition with a new long-range and heavy-payload drone called the Falcon, with a lifting capability of 50 pounds of payload and a travel range of 60 km. TAKOF announced on Jan. 30, 2019, that it has commenced test flights in southern Ontario that have been approved by Transport Canada. The Falcon has a wingspan of approximately 12 feet and is anticipated to travel 60 km at a speed of 50 km/hour. The multi-package payload compartment is designed to carry approximately 5 cubic feet of cargo and will be weather resistant. "In response to market demand driven by the burgeoning e-commerce industry, our engineering team was given the task of building out our fleet of cargo drones to address the need for a multi-package payload compartment solution which is applicable in many different geographies. The Falcon is the newest edition to DDC's fleet and meets this particular niche which is being requested by DDC's customers," commented Tony Di Benedetto, company CEO. The Condor TAKOF announced its Condor on Feb. 19 this year. It has a payload capacity of 180 kilograms or 400 pounds, and a potential travel distance of up to 200 kilometers. The Condor pushes the limits in both cargo capacity and distances powered by a next-generation gas propulsion engine. The Condor measures 22 feet long, 5.1 feet wide and 7 feet tall. It has a wing span of approximately 20 feet and is capable of vertical takeoff and landing. It is equipped with DDC's proprietary FLYTE management system, which is the same platform used in all of DDC's cargo delivery drones. This is also the same management system that was used in the fall of 2018, during the company's operations in Moosonee and Moose Factory, Ontario, in support of Transport Canada's Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight (BVLOS) pilot project. DDC will be working closely with Transport Canada to secure the necessary approvals to begin flight testing the Condor in Q3 of 2019, according to the company. On Dec. 5, 2018, TAKOF executed a commercial agreement with the Moose Cree First Nation to deploy its drone delivery technology platform with the Moose Cree First Nation communities of Moose Factory and Moosonee, Ontario, approximately 19 km south of James Bay. TAKOF is permitted to commercially operate its drone delivery platform with its compliant Special Flight Operations Certificate (SFOC), which permits the company to conduct drone operations in all Canadian provinces and territories. TAKOF will start with the Sparrow drone, capable of a five-kilogram payload, to transport goods between the communities including letters, general parcels, medical supplies and other general necessities. Financial terms of the agreement were CA$2.5 million for year one, with the potential to expand services in following years. TAKOF expects that revenues will begin to be received late in Q2/19, once federal funding is received by the Moose Cree First Nations. There are approximately one thousand remote communities in Canada, and, almost all face similar infrastructure and logistics challenges that contribute to a high cost of living. If TAKOF captures 10% of this market, it could equate to CA$250 million in annual revenue. "We have worked closely with DDC for nearly two years and see the many benefits of DDC's Drone Delivery Technology to our community as well as many others like us. Where infrastructure is weak, or at times nonexistent or accessible, DDC's drone delivery platform is a valuable solution to connect remote communities and provide fast and efficient deliveries that were once not possible," commented Stan Kapashesit, director of economic development of the Moose Cree First Nation. In many cases you can relate drone delivery to infrastructure. It can be far more efficient and cheaper than building bridges, roads, rail and commercial air deliveries. The remote communities market is only one segment of the overall total addressable market in Canada, but I see it as a logical place to start with drone deliveries in Canada, and in the remote areas of other countries. In addition to Canada, TAKOF is working with other customers around the globe to license its FLYTE software and drone delivery technology. For example, TAKOF is collaborating with Toyota Tsusho Canada (trading affiliate of the Toyoto group of companies). Collectively, the two groups will look to commence flight testing and identify other international markets to deploy TAKOF's proprietary drone delivery platform as a transportation solution. "This agreement with TTCI is expected to open international markets for us as a company," commented CEO Di Benedetto. "Working alongside a global industrial leader such as Toyota Tsusho also provides us quick access to a very extensive international global network and a breadth of commercial skills." I recently met with TAKOF and asked Di Benedetto what puts his company ahead of the competition and those coming up the ranks? "Ron, we have developed a very unique solution which has been actively tested for a number of years, successfully executing thousands of flights. We are starting commercial operations this year, and 2019 is the year we move out of the lab and into the sky. We have signed commercial agreements with customers. Our capabilities now extend to 400-pound cargo capacity and flight distances in the hundreds of kilometers." TAKOF just completed a CA$10.02 million oversubscribed financing at $1.20 per unit. The stock is currently trading below this price, and at the lowest level since the company got started in 2017. I believe it is excellent timing to take a position. For Amazon and Google, drone delivery is not a material part of their business, so they do not divulge as much public information as TAKOF must do. That said, Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) has been advancing dramatically with its drone delivery solution, and looks to be a major player in the field. This is some of what I could dig up on them. Project Wing is an autonomous delivery drone service aiming to increase access to goods, reduce traffic congestion in cities, and help ease the CO2 emissions attributable to the transportation of goods, according to the company. Wing is also developing an unmanned traffic management platform that will allow unmanned aircraft to navigate around other drones, manned aircraft and other obstacles like trees, buildings and power lines. Light, energy-efficient design enables the drones to fly up to 20 km/hour, driven entirely by an all-electric power system with zero carbon emissions. The most recent drones can carry up to 5 pounds. "Wing completed its first real-world deliveries in 2014 in rural Queensland, Australia, where it successfully transported a first-aid kit, candy bars, dog treats and water to farmers, "according to the company. Then, in September 2016, the team delivered burritos to students at Virginia Tech in what was, at the time, the largest and longest drone delivery test on U.S. soil. Since 2014, Project Wing has flown tens of thousands of flights and it has been refining its aircraft design and communications tools. Wing started with a similar approach as TAKOF, focusing at first in rural areas of Australia. Most recently, it has completed hundreds of deliveries to the yards of several homes in the Australian Capital Territory and Queanbeyan regions of Australia. The goal is to determine how to find the best route to a home and how to find a safe delivery spot in the yard. "The Wing team is also learning how drone delivery might be useful in people's everyday lives by transporting meals, groceries, medicine, and even spare car parts in the event of a breakdown," according to the company. "Wing's UTM platform is designed to support the growing drone industry by enabling a high volume of drones to share the skies and fly safely over people, around terrain and buildings, and near airports." The company also states, "Wing is working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on the Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) system in the United States and with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) in Australia to develop federated, industry-led solutions to safely integrate and manage drones in low-altitude airspace. Last May, the U.S. Department of Transportation selected Wing as one of ten teams to push the limits of drone technology in the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program." Wing will also go commercial this year, with plans to launch its first European delivery service in Finland in the spring of 2019. Wing plans to start with a small service trial in the Helsinki area and hopes to expand as time progresses. The drones are quite small and can only carry 1.5 kilograms with a round-trip range of 20 kilometers. More detail can be found at www.wing.com. Conclusion We are not going to see hundreds of drones in cities delivering pizza and Amazon parcels for many, many years. Amazon is dreaming, or perhaps its strategy is to build a drone patent portfolio. Drone companies will have to establish a safety track record of tens of thousands of flights or more before aviation authorities will consider deliveries in densely populated areas. Drone delivery will be a heavily regulated industry, like all of aviation. What most investors do not realize is that early movers such as TAKOF and Wing are going to establish drone flyways, where they have exclusive rights for their drones on those flight paths. That is going to add considerable value to these companies, like owning freight railways in the sky. On a commercial basis it is ironic, because thousands of Amazon parcels will be delivered by drones from companies like TAKOF and Wing long before Amazon delivers its first one. Amazon and Google are not a very good play for investors to gain leverage to the disruptive drone technology, whereas a company like TAKOF provides great exposure here. I expect TAKOF will be bought out by another major company in the delivery business, like FedEx, UPS, Amazon or Air Canada Cargo, to name a few. Alphabet could eventually spin out Wing with an initial public offering. Ron Struthers founded Struthers' Resource Stock Report 23 years ago. The report covers senior and junior companies with ample trading liquidity. He started his Millennium Index of dividend stocks in 2003 - $1,000 invested then was worth over $4,000 end of 2014 and the index returned 26.8% in 2016. He retired from IBM after 30 years in customer service, systems and business analyst, also developing his own charting software. He has expertise in junior start-ups and was a co-founder of Paramount Gold and Silver. [NLINSERT] Disclosure: 1) Ron Struthers: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Drone Delivery Canada. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company currently has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. Additional disclosures below. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector. 2) The following companies mentioned in this article are sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. 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. 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(c) Copyright 2019, Struther's Resource Stock Report The Living Wage Movement Aotearoa New Zealand has announced the Living Wage will increase from $20.55 to $21.15. The new rate will come into effect September 1 2019. The Living Wage is defined as the income necessary to provide workers and their families with the basic necessities of life. A Living Wage will enable workers to live with dignity and to participate as active citizens in society. This is a major event in the calendar of the Living Wage Movement and for ethical employers, from large to corporates like Westpac, to many small employers who want to do the right thing, says National Living Wage accreditation coordinator Felicia Scherrer. The Living Wage makes good business sense. Not only does Living Wage accreditation support a business reputation as an ethical employers, it also means better staff culture, a lift in productivity, and minimising the costs associated with poverty wages. The New Zealand Living Wage rate is identified each year by Charles Waldegrave of the Family Centres Social Policy Research Unit and Dr Peter King. This years increase of 60 cents is in line with the movement of the minimum wage. Children of Kawerau's established gang families are seeking futures in the police thanks to an unconventional programme at the local high school. With lived experience of crime, drugs and violence, and a determination to protect others from similar trauma, police say these teenagers would make excellent recruits. Two of her brothers are Black Power, and her uncles and koro are Mongrel Mob - but if Olivia* has her way, she will be the first person in her family to join the police. "I just want to go the other way," she says, quietly. Olivia, 15, is one of 12 teenagers enrolled in an NCEA-accredited Introduction to Police Studies course at Tarawera High School. Many in the class come from entrenched Kawerau gang families. For many, it is their troubled childhoods that motivate them. Because of what she has seen and experienced, Olivia wants to specialise in family harm prevention. "I've seen it, and I know what it feels like and it doesn't feel very" She trails off. Olivia says she has never worked so hard on anything as she has in police studies. Her family are pleased to see her turning away from the gangs, she says. "They don't want that for me." On a wet day in Kawerau, geothermal steam clings to the hills. The front of Tarawera High School is an impressive, modern school, but around the back are old classrooms from the former intermediate, which was on this site. This is where the police studies course is held. Heketerangi Te Maipi did logistics in the New Zealand Army but came home to the neighbouring village of Te Teko to run the Defence Academy at Tarawera High School. Selected senior students spend one day a week with her, instead of attending normal classes. That day, they wear a dark blue Defence Academy uniform. The academy introduces students to the Armed Forces; this term, the police studies course was brought in to the school under the academy umbrella. The police studies curriculum was developed by Unitec, based on elements of police recruit basic training. The course offers students 25 NCEA credits, but does not guarantee entry to the Police College. Students have been researching what possible careers they could follow in the police. Keira*, 16, says she wants to become a police dog handler to give back to her community. "There's been a lot happening in Kawerau at the moment, like with all the drugs and the gangs and the shootings and stuff. But I think it can get better in the future." It is five weeks since a Mongrel Mob member from Te Teko was killed in a standoff with police. A firearm had been discharged in a family harm incident and the armed man then robbed a bank in Kawerau. In March last year, 48 people were arrested and $3 million assets seized during a drug raid centred around the Kawerau Mongrel Mob. Keira says she might aim for a policing role in Whakatane, 35km away. She expects it would be too difficult for her to work in Kawerau. "When you come back to your own town, you have a lot of family." Katie*, 15, is researching her dream job: a police prosecutor. She whispers: "I think you need to be brainy". Kawerau is home to 7000 people. It has an unemployment rate of 25 percent. In 2016, there were 1074 people on benefits in the town; 570 of those were on the dole. Tarawera High School principal Helen Tuhoro says some children in the town go days without eating. At the last census, the median income in the town was $18,800, which is $10,000 below the national median. Mrs Tuhoro says community constables and other local officers have a high profile in the school, and - because of that - the attitude towards police has moved in the six years since the high school opened. "When police first came in to the school, they were referred to as pigs. Then they became the cops. And now our youth aid officer's name: George. So that's the change that's happened," she says. "We run a breakfast programme in the school, and they're run by all the different service agencies, so every Monday morning the youth aid and the police officers are down here with the breakfast programme. So that makes a big difference to how kids feel about them, when they're the ones making them their banana smoothies or cooking their toast. "I think the reality for our children now is that they can actually see: I could be a police officer." Acting Senior Sergeant Shane Tailby of Whakatane police wanted to bring the police studies programme to the Eastern Bay of Plenty after learning about a pilot at Rotorua Boys' and Girls' high schools. He hopes it will promote policing as a career, support potential recruits, and increase positive Police interaction with the community. "A lot of students may not have seen police in this way. So if we can get in the schools, show what police can do for the students, for the community and for the school as a whole, I think we can benefit from that." A geothermally-powered dairy factory is due to open this year, creating 28 jobs. When Guangxi Fenglin opens its planned $180m particle board mill, 100 jobs will be created. The school bought a car and supports students to pass their driver's licence because there are good job prospects for truck and forklift drivers in the town. But among the 12 students in the course, it's clear policing is holding their gaze. Ella* wants to join the police to protect families from the pain that's befallen her whanau. She had 12 siblings but now has 10. "I lost my two siblings to drunken driving and reckless driving, and I want to be able to stop that, and help them [the public] to drive home safely." Ella's father is a senior figure in the Kawerau Mongrel Mob, and two of her brothers are patched members. She says her father is proud of her interest in joining the police; even though police had previously "put him in jail", he respects the job they do. What if she caught her father speeding? "Pulled up!" She laughs loudly. "Give him a ticket. He's not special!" *The names of the students have been changed. -RNZ/Keri_Welham Maketu Volunteer Coastguard have reaped the benefits of a weekend spent amongst likeminded volunteers from around New Zealand at the Trustpower National Community Awards. Geoff Oliver and Ian Hurlock represented the group, with Mayor Garry Webber on hand to support the team over the weekend. These representatives took their community project head to head with the countrys best and brightest volunteer groups and projects on a national stage, full of friendly competition. Maketu Volunteer Coastguard came out on top at the Trustpower Western Bay of Plenty District Community Awards last year, which earnt them their spot at the Trustpower National Community Awards. Trustpower Community and Communications Advisor Abbie Siely says although the Western Bay of Plenty District group did not come away as award recipients, they made a strong impression on the audience. Geoff and Ian delivered an impactful presentation that really brought home the crucial role that Coastguard plays in keeping us safe at sea. It was a real pleasure to have them join us to share in the weekend, says Abbie. Amongst the groups there were 27 competing for the title of National Supreme Winner, in amongst a weekend of connection, collaboration and inspiration. The award winners were announced on Saturday evening (March 30) at an Awards Dinner, held at Mills Reef Winery. Matipo Community Development Charitable Trust, representing Whanganui District, was named Supreme Winner, and South Catlins Charitable Trust, a group representing Invercargill City and Southland District, was named Runner-Up. The Whetu Mataiata Award winner (the rising star award for an up-and-coming group), went to Under the Stars from Tauranga, and the winner of the inaugural Trustpower Award was Uso Bike Ride from Porirua, representing the Wellington region. In between a weekend of sight-seeing and networking, the Maketu Volunteer Coastguard volunteers gave an eight-minute presentation on what the group has achieved. The groups were judged on their presentations, along with a 1000 word summary of the organisation, by their peers and a panel of independent judges including Rhodes Scholar and 2017 runner-up in the NZ Youth Volunteer of the Year Awards, Johann Go, co-founder of Good Neighbour, Cam Hill, GM of Tauranga Womens Refuge, Hazel Hape, previous National Supreme Winner, Bruce Knight from the Edgecumbe Volunteer Fire Brigade, Chief Executive of Volunteering NZ, Dr Katie Bruce, General Manager of Exult, Rosie Julou, Trustpower GM of Customer Operations, Fiona Smith, and Trustpower Independent Director, Richard Aitken. Wanting to encourage the next generation of environmental warriors, Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology is sponsoring the Top School award at the 2019 EnviroChallenge event. Delivered by Sustainability Options, EnviroChallenge is a yearlong mentoring programme for secondary students from across the Bay of Plenty that is intended to inspire environmental leadership and action. The challenge started in the Western Bay 11 years ago and its the first time the institute has sponsored the Top School award. Toi Ohomai Marine and Environmental Programme Manager Dean Tully says the institute is keen to support students who show an interest in the environment and could be environmental leaders. Our planet is facing a plethora of environmental challenges including but not limited to climate change, pollution, waste management, and biodiversity loss. Toi Ohomai is committed to minimising its environmental impact. One of the ways we do this is through a suite of education programmes integrating environmental protection and sustainability within the course content. The Certificate in Conservation Operations, Diploma in Environmental Management (Terrestrial or Marine) and Graduate Diploma in Resource Management are great examples of this. EnviroChallenge is designed to inspire and encourage environmental leadership and activity. This is exactly the type of graduate we aim to produce, thus sponsoring this award was a natural and responsible fit for us. Sustainability Options Development Manager Jo Wills says EnviroChallenge provides students, who have a passion for the environment, with an opportunity to learn, share and take action in their school and wider community. As part of this, Challenge Day is held once a year where all students come together to compete in different environmental challenges that are high energy and designed to encourage collaboration and participation. The students drive all the activity themselves based on their passion and understanding of the issues their school and community is facing. Sustainability Options supports the students throughout the year by providing assistance and mentoring to help progression towards the sustainability outcomes the students set for their schools as part of the EnviroChallenge programme. Jo says its awesome to have support from Toi Ohomai because it gives them the financial resources they need. Sponsorship from Toi Ohomai for the school that wins first place is a fantastic contribution to the projects and endeavours of that schools environmental activity. Environmental initiatives often struggle for funding so the prize money gives a much needed boost to the students seeing their environmental goals come to fruition. EnviroChallenge is also supported by the Western Bay of Plenty District Council and Bay of Plenty Regional Council. Tauranga City Council is seeking feedback from the community on a possible coastal pathway connecting Memorial Park and the City Centre via The Strand. The proposed pathway has been identified as a key connection in city centre strategies and walking and cycling plans. Benefits include providing a safe and flat walking and cycling connection and providing the ability to access and celebrate the waters edge. The pathway was considered in 2007 as part of the Southern Pipeline project, however it was not progressed further. More recently, submissions to the Long Term Plan and Annual Plan encouraged Council to revisit this project, as well as submissions that were against the proposal being considered again. A council spokesperson says they would like to understand the range of views the community has on the proposed pathway and to identify issues or opportunities that may need to be considered if it was to progress to the next stage of concept design. Tauranga residents can provide feedback at the community open days listed below or visit the Have Your Say section of the Tauranga City Council website which includes an online submission form. Community Open Days Saturday, 13 April Memorial Park playground (if raining we will be at QEYC foyer, Memorial Park) 11am 2pm Tuesday, 30 April Red Square, Spring Street 11am 2pm Thursday, 2 May QEYC foyer, Memorial Park 4pm 7pm Saturday, 4 May Tauranga Farmers Market, Arundel Street 7:45am 12pm Feedback closes 5pm on Friday, 10 May 2019. The community feedback we receive will be provided to Council in July where a decision will be made on whether to do further investigation into the viability of the proposed pathway. For more information and to provide your feedback, visit https://www.tauranga.govt.nz/coastalpathway Jerred Berner (left) and Sam Schumacher of Dalton Fire & Rescue arrive in Winslow, Nebraska with supplies and donations for flood victims. As the old saying goes, "What goes around, comes around." That's not always a bad thing. Just ask the community of Winslow, Nebraska. Last week, Winslow was one of several towns and cities across the state affected by flooding. Floodwater impaired the town's main roads, making travel in and around the area difficult. House foundations were heavily damaged and streets became rivers of mud. "You just don't expect something like this until it happens," said Zac Klein, Chief of the Winslow Volunteer Fire Department (VFD). "You don't know what all of the community's needs will be." Following the national news of the impact on Winslow, one Nebraska town more than 400 miles away quickly took notice. In 2017, Winslow VFD loaned firefighting equipment provided by the Nebraska Forest Service (NFS) to Dalton Fire & Rescue. The equipment included much needed firefighter protective clothing, also known as "bunker gear." Dalton figured now was as good a time as any to return that favor. Local businesses and community members began to rally in support of Winslow - collecting financial donations, non-perishable food, clothing, and cleaning and pet supplies. "We were just amazed at what our little town of about 300 people was able to accomplish," Dalton Fireman Sam Schumacher said. "They didn't hesitate and it definitely makes you proud." It wasn't long before Schumacher and Dalton Fire Chief Jerred Berner loaded up a large trailer with the supplies, made the six-hour drive, and arrived at the Hooper city auditorium the central hub for Winslow donations and volunteers. "I don't know if you remember this, but you loaned us some pretty important equipment a few years back." chuckled Chief Berner as he opened the trailer gate. Berner and Schumacher were met with hugs as supplies were unloaded, and subsequently transported to the citizens of Winslow, who are beginning the lengthy process of repairing and rebuilding the town's infrastructure and homes. Many Nebraskans are still assessing flood damage and what it will mean as they move forward. Meanwhile, NFS continues to help coordinate efforts between Nebraska's fire departments to get grant-funded equipment to flood-effected communities and the emergency responders who need them most. As Berner puts it, "we're all trying to make the best possible use of the resources available. "You can see just by looking at the equipment and trucks all around us. They're from the Nebraska Forest Service. We rely heavily on them and they help us in times like this." The storm of about two weeks ago hit the Panhandle with an hours-long blizzard. The impact to central and eastern Nebraska continues to be more like the the Dutch Boy pulled his finger out of the dike, and local residents are doing what they can to help their flooded neighbors. The latest of efforts to support flood victims in central and eastern Nebraska came in the form of farm supplies and a pallet or so of home needs. Sidney Feed and Seed and Geiger's Construction teamed up to send hay, fencing, and numerous other necessary items. The effort started at the suggestion of Sidney Feed and Seed customers who voiced concern about their neighbors to the east. "When the flood began, a few customers asked if we were doing anything," said Jessica Eddy of Sidney Feed and Seed. She said the company promoted the idea through social media, and before long it caught on like a... wildfire. "It blew up," Eddy said. "We had all kinds of monetary donations." In addition to the monetary donations, families and other companies donated fencing, food, cleaning supplies and a long list of other necessary products. She said one family purchased a pallet of barbed wire. An employee purchased a pallet of all-stock feed produced at the company. Yet another family donated salt blocks and mineral blocks. Others donated dog and cat food. Others donated food and supplies for residents in the flooded area. Bomgaars donated more supplies for flood victims. Bomgaars and Radio Shack recently combined efforts for donations, sending supplies on a Bomgaars company truck. Pins and Needles of Potter designed a sticker decal with all of the proceeds going toward flood victims. Eddy said a nearly-full pallet of cleaning supplies came from the Kimball community as well. Sidney Feed and Seed also donated rolls of fencing. In all, six pallets of grass hay, 2 pallets of barbed wire, a pallet of horse fencing, a pallet of fencing supplies, three to four pallets of pet supplies, a pallet of cleaning supplies and a pallet of miscellaneous supplies for residents were loaded onto a Geiger Construction truck and delivered to the Aurora Co-op. The plan is to distribute supplies to farmers and ranchers in nearby communities from Gibbon northwest to Burwell. One of the challenges for the flooded area is when fences break - one instance at least two miles of fence down - animals are harder to track; it is a no-brand zone. Consequently, the load includes ear tags. "It is so close to home," Eddy said. "It is just heartbreaking." She said loss of animals due to weather is something every farmer and rancher can relate to. The blizzard hit during calving season. The rain and snow followed by cold is a hard impact on new calves, according to Eddy. Statewide, it is estimated the agriculture industry has lost about one million cattle since the blizzard, she said. Agricultural producers and their supporters filled the hall last week at the Cheyenne Countys Ag Social, one of the Cheyenne County Chamber of Commerces most popular events each year. Highlighting the event was the presentation of the Chambers Agribusiness Scholarships. Each year the Chamber presents two scholarships to deserving high school students who plan to further their education in agriculture. The scholarships, one for $1,000 and one for $500 are awarded by the Chambers Ag Committee. To apply, students tell the Committee why they are pursuing a career in agriculture, and also their vision of the future of ag. We had a lot of excellent applications this year, and it was hard for the committee to decide, Ag Social Chair Regina Narjes told those gathered. The $1,000 scholarship winner, Ashlyn Sutton of Sidney, is the fifth generation of a farm family and as such, she said, agriculture runs deep in my blood. Suttons interest lies in protecting the land, resources, animals and the overall beauty of the state. She plans to attend the University of Wyoming to learn more about the land and how to protect it, hoping to learn how to use different range management techniques to improve on the practices already in place in farming. As for the future of ag, she sees a technological future in the United States. In her application she said protection of natural resources will be of utmost importance, and with more automated practices the land, crops and wildlife will thrive. I am excited to see the difference I can make in the industry with the knowledge I will gain from attending the University of Wyoming, she wrote. Leyton High School student David George, the $500 scholarship winner, has already shown himself a leader in ag cirrcles, as President of the Leyton FFA chapter. Learning about agriculture from his grandfather, George is working toward an Associate of Applied Science Degree in Welding, building on the skills he is picking up in a dual credit welding course at Leyton. George wants to complete all the Applied Agriculture classes offered by Western Nebraska Community College and believes all of the program work will enhance opportunities to work in his familys farming operation. As for the future of agriculture, George recognizes the uncertainty involved. and, he also understands what it takes to make a good run at success. Important items to consider in making the future of farming profitable involve business involve business management skills as much as physical work, George wrote. In addition to the presentations, attendees were treated to drinks and a sandwich supper, along with a host of prize drawings ranging from a toy truck on up to meat packages sponsored by area businesses. A right-of-way road near the Union Pacific Railroad track west of Sidney could potentially provide answers for commuters stopped by trains. When one transportation system infringes upon another, sometimes it is the commuter who loses the battle. Residents just west of Sidney are in that battle, again. In December 2018, John and Kim Phillips addressed the Cheyenne County Commissioners regarding railroad traffic. Their concern was when trains are stopped in such a way as to block the road to their home, they are literally landlocked. There is the possibility, although posted as trespassing, to use the Union Pacific right of way. However, the road is not passable to most vehicles in snow and rain. Kim Phillips told the commissioners Monday they are still experiencing substantial delays from their home to Highway 30. "I think we need to address it again," she said. The problem is their neighborhood is a dead end road accessible from the south only. Phillips said on March 15, her husband John was unable to cross the railroad crossing for 2 hours. Another resident of the area, Jim Pelster, reported he was delayed for about 30 minutes last week. Residents have documented significant delays when attempting to cross the tracks at the north side of Highway 30 on Cheyenne County Road 109 on Feb. 22 and 23, and March 15 and 19. "We're talking about a safety factor here," said Cheyenne County Attorney Paul Schaub said Monday state statutes say it is unlawful to block a crossing, in a village or city. He said Nebraska Revised Statutes (NRS) leave railroad companies and employees nearly immune from wrong doing. However, NRS 74-1337 also says a railroad company and the county board may negotiate changes, alterations, or construction of any crossing. Monday the commissioners passed a resolution instructing Schaub to contact the Union Pacific verbally and by email. In December, Union Pacific Railroad Senior Director of Communications and Media Relations said residents are encouraged to call the 24/7 Response Center at 1-888-877-7267 with complaints of train activity. Syracuse, NY -- Treamon Elmores murder case has taken a bizarre path. Early on, Elmore apparently was seeking a guilty plea, but balked at the 40-year-to-life punishment offered by prosecutors for the shooting deaths of Luis Sepulveda, 21, and Christopher McLaurin, 28, in an Eastwood residence. By all accounts, Elmore signed -- or perhaps even wrote -- a jailhouse confession that was delivered via another inmate. He later claimed the inmate threatened to kill him unless he confessed. He followed that up by calling his own lawyer a racist in court and vowed his innocence. That lawyer successfully got removed from the case. He contacted Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard for a jailhouse interview, peppering his defense with conspiracy theories that couldnt be verified. Now, hes been sent to a one-on-one mental health cell at the downtown jail. His newest assigned lawyer, Ben Coffin, cant talk to him except through a small window in a cell door, with a deputy looking on. And Elmores latest twist: he wants to fire his assigned lawyers and represent himself at a murder trial. But before he can do that, state Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy said he needed to check Elmores mental health. I dont think I can do anything until we get a (mental exam), the judge said today. While serving as ones own lawyer is not recommended by judges, two homicide defendants have won acquittals in the past two years in Syracuse. Dwight DeLee recently convinced a jury to acquit him of manslaughter as a hate crime in the 2008 death of transgender woman Lateisha Green. And Derrick Wilson cast doubt on a snitch who tied him to the 2000 murder of Waliek Hamer. Much of the evidence -- including what the murderer was seeking from the victims -- has not been disclosed in court. Elmores two siblings, Brendell (younger) and Jazzmin (older) were also arrested in connection with the June 2018 murderers on Lynwood Avenue in Syracuse. Brendell is young enough that his case could be handled in Family Court if hes not indicted for murder. His case remains pending. Jazzmin is also being tried in adult court before Cuffy. Her case remains pending, as well. She remains jailed downtown. Treamon Elmore is due back to court April 29. Syracuse, NY -- Everyone agrees that Rochester Judge Leticia Astacio went to Dicks Sporting Goods a year ago today to buy a shotgun. After being denied, she tried at a different Dicks. Now, Astacio -- since fired from her job -- is on trial this week for a felony gun charge, accused of illegally trying to buy a gun while on probation. She could face up to 7 years in prison if convicted by jury. Astacios behavior to this point has included a drunken driving conviction, a second DWI attempt and a trip to Thialand while her case was pending. That, along with antics in her own courtroom, got her removed from Rochesters City Court. But its the rare prosecution of her for a gun crime that has drawn the most attention. Her trial was moved to Syracuse because of so much media exposure in her native Rochester. And, even then, the cameras followed her. A sworn juror was dismissed before the trial even started this morning after admitting that shed heard about the case Monday night on TV news. (The trial judge had told jurors not to watch, read or listen to news during the trial.) Opening statements at noon today, however, made it clear that Astacios simple act of trying to buy a gun may not be so simple. Astacio was on probation at the time she went to buy a gun. Special prosecutor Mark Sinkiewicz argued that a term of her probation made trying to buy the gun illegal. He has store clerks and video evidence that show an emotional Astacio getting turned down at both Dicks stores. But Astacios lawyer, Mark Foti, cast the prosecution as government overreach, for a number of reasons: Probation forbade Astacio from possessing a dangerous weapon. But, at most, Astacio is accused of trying to buy an unloaded shotgun. She said she needed it for protection. How can an unloaded shotgun, used for for defense, be considered a dangerous weapon? Foti asked. Astacio didnt give up her Second Amendment rights by being on probation, he argued. Given the choice between the ambiguous definition of a dangerous weapon and her Constitutional rights, the jury should favor her rights, Foti said. Such a prosecution is almost unheard of. Hes right on this point: what Astacio did is not against the law. No permit is required to purchase a shotgun in New York state. If authorities wanted to allege that she had violated probation, thats a completely different procedure than arresting her for a new crime. Foti told the jury that even Astacios own probation officer would acknowledge that hed never had a case like this before. A probation violation, if proven, impacts only the prior crime -- DWI in this case -- and rarely, if ever, leads to a new criminal prosecution, he argued. Astacio would have had to know she was violating the law, Foti noted. Under the law she was charged, Astacio must have tried to buy the shotgun knowing that she had a restriction (or disability) against buying one. That means she would have had known that trying to buy a shotgun constituted a dangerous weapon" and violated her probation. Left unsaid to the jury -- but argued multiple times before trial -- is the fact that traditional, unaltered shotguns are not considered firearms under state law. Firearms -- pistols and revolvers -- are heavily restricted. Shotguns and rifles are not. Why does that matter? Because the probation terms did forbid Astacio from possessing a firearm. But that doesnt cover a shotgun, so the jury was not allowed to hear the firearm portion of her probationary restrictions. The entire case, both sides agree, comes down to whether Astacio tried to purchase a shotgun, knowing that it was prohibited by her restriction of not having a dangerous weapon under her probationary terms. And, Foti argued, whether prosecutors should have arrested her on a new crime and not simply filed a violation of probation -- the route in virtually all other cases. At no point did a probation officer tell Astacio, "By the way, youre losing your Second Amendment rights here, Foti noted to the jury. In the end, its a case less about the facts of what happened, and more about how 12 jurors interpret the law. The trial, which has attracted a gaggle of media from Rochester, is expected to take a week. Astacio remains free. As trial began this week, Astacio announced her intention to run for Rochester City Council. Syracuse, N.Y. -- A Syracuse man has been arrested in connection with the death of a Rochester-area man whose body was found in a vacant Syracuse home last week. Lamor Britton, 24, was charged Wednesday with concealment of a human corpse, according to the New York State Police records. He also was charged with first-degree hindering prosecution, third-degree criminal possession of a weapon and tampering with physical evidence, records show. State Police spokesman Jack Keller Tuesday confirmed the arrest was connected to the death of Maximillian Cook, 43, who was from the town of Greece, near Rochester. Police have said that Cook was killed at 10 Pennsylvania Ave., Rochester and his body was found in a vacant home on Dearborn Place in Syracuse last week. Britton is the third person arrested in connection with Cooks death. Aries M. Ash, 30, and Charisse N. Walton, 36, both of North Rose in Wayne County, were charged March 26 with second-degree murder. Britton was booked in the Justice Center jail in Syracuse on Thursday. He has since been released. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Syracuse police say they are investigating a shooting with injuries Monday night. Officers were called to the area of 679 W. Onondaga St. for a report of a shooting. When they arrived, they found a female victim with a gunshot wound, Syracuse police spokesman Sgt. Matthew Malinowski said. American Medical Response (AMR) ambulance took the female to Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse. Syracuse police say they do not have any other information about the shooting available at this time, but they are continuing to investigate. Check back for updates. There are lots of fun things to do in Central New York and our calendar can be your guide to find them all. There are literally thousands of events in the guide: [Syracuse.com calendar: A guide to things to do across Central New York] From time to time this year, we will feature items from our calendar. Heres how to submit an event. 5 Calendar Spotlight: Syracuse Fashion Week. SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Twice a year, Syracuse celebrates style and fashion in the city and throughout Central New York through Syracuse Fashion Week. The fashion week highlights the best in couture from local designers and boutiques. The week kicks off this year at 6 p.m. April 11 with Spring Fling 2019. It will be held for the first time at Aloft Syracuse Inner Harbor, 310 W Kirkpatrick St. Models will stroll through the lobby wearing custom CNY creations. Marisas Fortress of Beauty is the scene of the Underground Show at 8 p.m. April 12. This show is a fashion week favorite that sells out yearly, organizers said. It will feature sexy silhouettes from the 1950s to the present. Fashion week concludes with a luxurious gala at the Landmark Theatre. The event takes place at 8 p.m. April 13. Guests may view custom-made couture, formal wear and bridal wear from local CNY boutiques while enjoying hors doeuvres and a cash bar. This years featured model is Keyanna Coleman, who will be walking the runway in all three shows. One of the more than 400,000 people who attended the original Woodstock Music and Arts Festival has a significant souvenir: The stage. Or a peace of it, at least. Steve Gold tells The New York Times that he was 15 years old in 1969 and lived just 15 miles from the iconic concert site in Bethel, N.Y. After the event, he helped his girlfriends father move much of the wood on stage to a nearby bungalow colony for a paddleboard court. Two years ago, he remembered the father told him he bought the wood from the stage at Max Yasgurs farm in the Catskills, and began searching for proof the plywood he handled half a century ago was the actual stage from Woodstock. He recognized distinctive paint patterns seen in photos and video from Woodstock, as well as the stage manufacturers logo, Weyerhaeuser. Gold hired an independent consulting firm, tracked down his former girlfriend on Facebook to verify details, and showed some of the wood to the museum curator at the Museum at Bethel Woods, which sits on the original Woodstock site. They all agreed it was authentic. Its true, original Woodstock promoter Michael Lang, whos preparing a 50th anniversary concert in Watkins Glen, told the Times in a statement. Gold is now selling pieces of the remaining wood on his website, Peace of Woodstock Stage. Stage pieces are available in small, framed pieces for $299 (or larger squares for $499), while smaller pieces have been cut into pendants with peace symbols for $99 each. You can even buy a bottle of sawdust, or Stardust (named after the line We are stardust from Joni Mitchells Woodstock song), for $19.95. Other mementoes from the original festival are on display in the Museum at Bethel Woods special Woodstock 50th anniversary exhibit. Highlights include clothing, equipment, art, photos, and instruments like a bass guitar from Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane. Woodstock 50 will celebrate the anniversary with three days of music featuring some original artists like Santana and John Fogerty alongside newer acts like Jay-Z, The Killers and Miley Cyrus on Aug. 16-18, 2019, at Watkins Glen. Tickets are expected to go on sale April 22. Author Reema Zaman sends her readers a love letter in the memoir I Am Yours. With poetic prose and an arc toward radical love and empathy, Zaman offers her personal journey as political and universal. Zamans I Am Yours has been reviewed by The New York Times and Rumpus, and her work has appeared in publications such as Vogue, Ms., and The Guardian. She visits Central New York this week, with readings and book signings at 3 p.m. Friday at the Community Library of DeWitt and Jamesville and at 2 p.m. Saturday at Barnes & Noble in DeWitt, Zaman talks about books and writing below. Our interview was edited for brevity and clarity. I Am Yours feels like a love letter to both you and the reader. What inspired you to create your memoir in such a way? What was the process like of creating and sharing your personal experience? From the very beginning I knew that I wanted to write a book that was radically empathetic and to have it feel like an embrace and a safe space for the reader. And what is more welcoming and loving than a love letter? It is written directly to the reader because it is written directly for the reader. It is to be a healing balm for any reader who has gone through significant trauma in their life and its also a call to action and a call to empathy for those who want to be allies for survivors. So thats why I structured it as a love letter because I think the world is suffering from a lack of love and connection and so the antidote for that is radical empathy and radical love. You write openly about your personal experiences with trauma such as intimate partner violence, anorexia, and sexual assault. In light of current events in the United States and abroad, your memoir has immediate and visceral familiarity. Its so necessary for us not only to address trauma, but be introduced to a language that allows us to navigate it with clarity and strength...I didnt want it only to touch on hot topic items, I wanted to offer the healing and the conversation for those things so that we can actually move toward progress. To mend together. Theres been so many books that came out in the last year that were about womens anger. I know that there is a space for that and a necessity to be angry. But we have to allow that wound to scar over because if its not scarred over, we dont have any healing and without healing we cannot have any progress as a culture, as a global society. Thats why the voice in the book is so gentle and so loving. Its very direct and transparent but at the same time its the voice of my highest self. My wisest self. Thats what we need right now. To be each other's guardians and friends to navigate the darkness so that we can get to the light. It is so incredibly liberating to give voice to all of these things. Ive never felt nervous because I never felt like I was losing. This is why, so many people, when when they read my book, they feel safe and they feel like theyre in an embrace. They dont feel like theyre traumatized or re-triggered. Thats because I wasnt coming from a traumatized place, I was writing from a very grounded, secure and centered place. Since you started this book in 2013, have recent movements like #MeToo influenced the way in which you interpret your own work? Its really wild, this idea of this memoir. It came to me fully conceived. I could hear it in my head as those it was the soundtrack of a movie. I knew exactly what the book was supposed to sound like. I knew that it was going to be phrased as a love letter. I could hear the voice of radical love in my mind...My job was just to reverse engineer it onto the page... Back then, it wasnt part of our cultural conversation to be talking about these things. So my family was so nervous and they were so daunted by this undertaking of mine. They said, Why are you doing this? And I said, You know, I dont know how to explain it, but I have a feeling that in about five years, there will be a great necessity for this book....Thats what gave me the radical discipline to see this through because I had this really strong sense of purpose driving me. I felt like I was being called to write this book...I didnt write it as a reaction to Trump, I didnt write it as a reaction to #MeToo. I wrote it from this very genuine, organic, grounded place and thats why the language is, as Ive been told, not only timely, but timeless... I Am Yours is as much a contemplation on your journey toward healing as it is a liberation from the practice of silence. What does silence mean to you and what is the significance of speaking out against silence? So theres a few different kinds of silence. There is chosen silence, where we choose to be silent as a way to protect ourselves. Theres also a forced silence...where women or any kind of marginalized person is ordered to silence. And that is deadly. Our words have to go somewhere. Words are energy and if our stories arent allowed to speak, thats how they take on poltergeist residency in our bodies. For me, my anorexia was a direct result of the continual silencing of the trauma I had experienced. Energy has to go somewhere and all of that grief and rage toward the things that had been done to my mother, toward the things that had been done to me started manifesting as anorexia. My body was the one thing I could control. I wasnt allowed to speak so I started to speak out through the starvation of my body. Silence culture is a big attributing cog in the larger architecture of abuse culture. For abuse culture to exist and thrive, it needs our silence. So whenever we speak out we are directly acting against abuse culture and were dismantling abuse culture and were empowering the very voices that have been suppressed and silenced. How has a sense of place and home, or a lack thereof, influenced the creation of your memoir? I use the relationship with the reader as the same as the relationship with my inner voice. The strong relationship that I have with my inner voice comes from always being geographically fluid -- sometimes by my choice and sometimes out of my choice. I had to create a sense of home that was constant. A sense of home became my inner voice and that relationship. My relationship to art and my relationship to my inner voice has been my one constancy in a life of enormous movement and instability. You wrote, The magic of books is they awaken empathy, followed by, One book I really want to read is one that feels like my life. How do you believe representation and the practice of empathy have changed in recent years? Empathy is the exact reason we need representation. Not because it is the correct thing to do but because it is the empathetic thing to do. To see ourselves in media, to see ourselves on the silver screen, to see ourselves in literature, to see ourselves on the proverbial and actual podium...to see ourselves is how we find ourselves. Which is to say, if we cannot see ourselves represented, we start to feel invisible and insignificant and lost in society...And to see ourselves is also to awaken empathy not only toward ourselves as positive self-regard. But also, empathy toward people who are allegedly different. Representation awakens empathy. As you move forward into 2019, what are you hoping to achieve? The book has already been adopted in various curricula in the state of Oregon and is now going into the process of being adopted in other schools in other states. That is a huge passion of mine. That was one of my goals when I was writing this book is I had a goal in writing it in a specific way so that it would beyond positively embraced...because thats how we allow our students, our young people, to feel represented...It equips them with the knowledge and the tools they need to make healthy choices, it also allows them to feel that their voices matter and they can be agents of change in the world...I am also the co-author of the 200-page syllabus between a committee of teachers in Oregon and I - were hoping for that to be published soon in time for the 2019-2020 school year. I am excited for an adaptation of the memoir into a movie -- thats in the process right now. I also have a podcast coming out in June, its called Dear Reema. Its structured as a letter podcast, where readers and listeners send in letters about things that theyre navigating and things that theyre grappling with. A guest star and myself, we tackle those human condition issues...its the next part of what I can do to serve this ongoing conversation that I have started...I am also the first ever author-ambassador for the International Rescue Committee. I have the honor of helping the Rohingya people in Bangladesh, my homeland, giving their voice more application in the global conversation...Ill be going to where the refugee camps are housing over 800,000 refugees from Myanmar and I will be directly working with the Rohingya people and seeing how I can, as a writer and a voice, be of service to them. My second book is called I Am Here: A Shared Homecoming and it will be about my time and work with the Rohingya people. Events: What: Public reading and book signing Where: The Community Library of Dewitt and Jamesville When: 3 p.m. on Friday, April 5 How much: Free What: Public reading and book signing Where: Barnes & Noble, DeWitt When: 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 6 How much: Free If youre charged with a crime in New York state next year, your odds of spending a night in jail just went down. The state Legislature this weekend eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanor and non-violent felony offenses. The law goes into effect in January 2020. New York becomes the third state to stop using cash bail to get people accused of low-level offenses to return to court. Once enacted, most people charged with misdemeanor and non-violent felonies will be automatically released. Its a controversial change that the legislature has up until now steered away from, but that has drawn bipartisan support nationwide. Even one of the staunchest critics locally, Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick, said he supported the idea behind the law and could live with the version that was passed. The legislature approved bail reform, along with other other criminal justice reforms addressing discovery and speedy trial laws, as part of this years budget package late Sunday night into Monday morning. Just how much this will affect people in Onondaga County is in dispute, but one provision is certain to keep more people out of jail before they even appear before a judge: The bill requires police officers to issue appearance tickets for most low level offenses. Thats a game changer, said Emily Singletary, who runs a local criminal justice non-profit Unchained. Thats really huge in terms of keeping people out of our jails, allowing people to continue on with their lives, continuing working, supporting their families, not losing their apartments all the things that happen when people spend even a night in jail. Long time coming, agreed Kelly Gonzalez, regional director for the Center for Community Alternatives. The advocates said Albanys reforms will make the criminal justice system more fair for people living in poverty in places like Syracuse. They say it will allow groups like CCA to help the defendants they work to improve their lives while out on bail and to make wiser choices about their cases (such as if they should accept a plea offer). Advocates say it could even set up defendants to be in a better position to pay restitution to victims -- instead of paying a fee to a bail bondsman. DA Fitzpatrick said he supported the idea behind the law, that poor people should not languish in jail because they are unable to pay bail. He said at least 10 years ago, his office put protocols in place to prevent that from happening: He instructs his assistant district attorneys not to ask for bail in cases where it would only serve to keep a poor person behind bars. He also assigns a chief ADA to review jail records at least once a week. If his office finds someone has been stuck in jail with bail on low-level charges, prosecutors will ask a judge to release the defendant, Fitzpatrick said. Thats really silly," he said. "We dont want to just be penalizing poor people. Fitzpatrick said his biggest concern with the legislation is ensuring defendants from out of town come back to court. He said he expects it might be hard, for example, to get a someone from out of the state or country who is accused of shoplifting from Destiny USA to reappear without the financial incentive of bail. Absolutely, thats something I can live with, he said. The statewide DAs association, of which Fitzpatrick is a past president, is continuing to oppose the legislation. In a press release Monday, District Attorneys Association of New York President and Albany County DA David Soares was critical of what he described as a rushed, behind-the-scenes way to pass the bill. He said the reforms were poorly thought-out and burdensome. ... They have set up unrealistic, unworkable requirements that ultimately will fail the very people and communities they were intended to benefit, Soares said. Gonzalez, the CCA deputy director, argued the laws are necessary to ensure fairness and consistency. You dont want to have a system thats based on either the individual ADAs or even the DA that happens to be in the office at the time," she said. You never want to have something like this be so discretionary. Some advocates have urged legislators to eliminate the cash bail system for all crimes in New York. Even in cases of violent felonies, they argue, a defendants ability to raise funds for bail should not be the determining factor for their release and the publics safety. Singletary, who runs a court watching program with about 50 volunteers, said all defendants who have not yet been convicted of a crime, should be given the assumption of release. She said she hopes the new law will force judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers to take more consideration into the choice to put someone behind bars. Singletary estimates she and other court watchers have sat through about 600 arraignments since September as part of the program. One-third of the defendants charged with misdemeanors had cash bail set, she said. Those same defendants, in 2020, would be presumed to be released under the new law. This really will have a big impact on people, Singletary said. Sheriff Gene Conway said he would be watching to see how much the new law affected jail population in Onondaga County. In the past, he said, its been difficult to gauge how much a reform or law affects the numbers at the Justice Center, because of fluctuations during different times of year and overall decreases in population. Conway said he doesnt oppose the reforms but was disappointed that they did not go hand-in-hand with a mental health bill. He said he sees problems with mental health in the current jail population. Conway said he was disappointed that legislators didnt devote more resources to mental health services in anticipation of the needs of those people, whether they are behind bars or in the streets. How about making an equal effort to expand mental health services? Public Affairs Reporter Julie McMahon covers courts, government, education and other issues affecting taxpayers. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992 SYRACUSE, NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers are cutting $50,000 in funding for the Special Olympics one week after the Trump administration came under fire for its proposal to stop funding the organization. The state budget approved Sunday reduces funding for the Special Olympics by $50,000, according to a report by WGRZ in Buffalo. The budget includes $150,000 for Special Olympics, down from $200,000 provided last year. State Sen. Tim Kennedy, D-Buffalo, told WGRZ that funding for the Special Olympics was completely cut and had to be negotiated back up to $150,000. The cut comes after Education Secretary Betsy Devos set off an uproar by proposing the elimination of $17.6 million in federal funding for the Special Olympics. The Trump administration reversed course and said the funding would be restored. Sen. Chris Jacobs, R-Buffalo, criticized the Special Olympic budget cut in New York. I am appalled that this budget gives pay raises to the Governor and Lt. Governor at the same time that it cuts funding for Special Olympics, he wrote. I am committed to trying to find a way to ensure these cuts are restored and programs fully funded. Stacey Hengsterman, President and CEO of Special Olympics New York, issued the following statement: Special Olympics New York is thankful to the Governor and Legislature for securing $150,000 in the State Budget to support our Unified Champion Schools program, which is creating inclusive school communities throughout New York State. The budget process is always difficult and we are grateful we had so many champions advocating on our behalf. We will continue to work with our representatives in state government to hopefully increase these funds and continue to grow this important program. SYRACUSE, N.Y. In hopes of attracting a new medical examiner, Onondaga County lawmakers today voted to increase the jobs salary more than 30 percent, from $190,000 to $250,000. The legislature also increased the salary for deputy medical examiner to $229,200. County officials have said they are trying to hire an out-of-town doctor to replace the former chief medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stoppacher, who was fired earlier this year. Before todays legislature vote, County Executive Ryan McMahon said he hoped to announce a new medical examiner soon, possibly later today. The county executives office had asked the legislature to increase pay levels to assist its efforts to recruit new leaders for the MEs office. Three legislators -- Republicans James Rowley, Casey Jordan and Ken Bush Jr., -- voted against the measure, saying they objected to raising the salary for deputy medical examiner. The pay increases passed 14-3. Stoppachers departure left the office with only one forensic pathologist on staff, who recently left. The county is currently contracting 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 legislature initially considered increasing the salary of health commissioner Dr. Indu Gupta to keep pace with the salary for medical examiner. Gupta, who earns about $190,000, oversees the MEs office. However, legislators decided not to increase the health commissioners salary now. Instead, they plan to review that salary later this year when they prepare the 2020 budget. Albany, N.Y. This could get ugly. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is hitting back at U.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida with a new op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that bashes Scott for criticism of New York. Scott attacked the states fiscal policies with his own op-ed in the Journal last month. New York doesnt add to Floridas bills - we pay them, Cuomo wrote. The governor noted that Florida, which Scott previously led as governor, got nearly $46 billion more from the federal government than it contributed in 2017. That's second in the nation, Cuomo said. New York, on the other hand, leads the nation among donor states, Cuomo said, sending $36 billion more to the federal government in tax revenue than it got back in 2017. Scotts op-ed ran in March in support of the 2017 Republican tax law and its $10,000 deduction cap on state and local taxes. "The tax reform law stops high-tax states from burdening the rest of us with their irresponsible decisions," Scott wrote. "America is a marketplace where states are competing with each other, and New York is losing. Their loss is Florida's gain - and Texas' and South Carolina's and Ohio's and Indiana's." Scott also said the New York's problems were its own fault, but added that cutting taxes and making government more efficient could allow the state to compete better. Cuomo has argued repeatedly that the deduction cap harms states like New York. He has said it drives some wealthy people from the state by raising their federal tax bills. That deprives New York of the revenue it would have received from those taxpayers, Cuomo has said. In his op-ed, Cuomo said the cap was always about politics and argued the tax law redistributes wealth from blue states to red states. "The law was passed by a Republican president, a Republican House and a Republican Senate," Cuomo wrote. "Its explicit purpose was to weaponize the federal tax system against predominantly Democratic states: President Trump and Republican governors have trumpeted the law as an effort to cause business and individuals to migrate to Republican states. "The hypocrisy is breathtaking." Scott hasnt responded to the governors barbs yet. But like Cuomo, hes not known to be shy about criticizing political opponents. New Yorks $175.5 billion budget passed early Monday. Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-282-8598 Rochester, N.Y. Former Rochester City Court Judge Leticia Astacio is officially running for office again. Astacio filed paperwork Monday with the Monroe County Board of Elections to run for a seat on the Rochester City Council, according to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. The New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct removed Astacio from the bench in October for a variety of legal problems and behavior issues. News emerged in March that she sought petitions to run for City Council or City Court judge again. Astacio is on trial in Syracuse this week on a felony gun charge. The trial was moved to Syracuse when an appellate court agreed she couldnt get a fair trial in Rochester because her case is so widely known. She was charged with trying to buy a gun in violation of her probation from an earlier drunken driving charge. The case has drawn a large contingent of reporters from Rochester. Her attorney argued in court today that the arrest violated her Second Amendment rights. Although Astacio is barred from becoming a judge again due to her removal, there's nothing to prevent her from running for City Council. The seat she is seeking represents Rochester's northwest side, the D&C said. Her trial this week in Syracuse could complicate matters if she wins, the paper added. Though felons can run for public office in New York, they must have completed any sentence before election. Her charge carries a penalty of up to seven years in prison. In addition, state law mandates immediate removal of an elected official convicted of a felony while in office, according to the D&C. Astacio is one of three Democrats who filed petitions with enough signatures to run for the seat, the D&C said. Those signatures are often challenged in court, but the three could end up in a primary. Astacio filed her paperwork with the elections board on the same day jury selection took place for her trial, according to WHEC in Rochester. Astacios problems began in 2016 with an arrest for misdemeanor drunken driving. She cursed at law enforcement during the incident and tried to use her position as a judge to get out of trouble, the judicial commission found. She later skipped a court-ordered alcohol test and failed to appear in court in 2017 after leaving for a trip to Thailand. She was jailed for 60 days when she returned. The attempted gun purchase occurred after that. The judicial commission also found Astacio showed questionable temperament on the bench and made inappropriate comments. Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-282-8598 A man, his mother and his fathers dead body were stopped while trying to cross into Canada through the border in Mooers, NY, on Sunday morning around 2:30 AM. Police are still investigating the death of Fernand Drapeau, 87, after originally calling paramedics to report an unconscious body in a vehicle trying to cross into Quebec, according to Presse Canadienne. Paramedics determined that Drapeau had been dead for at least two days, during which time the family was driving back to Canada from Florida, according to WCAX-TV. Drapeaus wife and son, who have not been identified, told investigators that the elderly man died from a heart attack during the long drive north from Florida. They said they didnt bring him to a hospital or call paramedics due to the high cost of American health care and the cost of repatriating a body from America to Canada. Vice reports that medical costs in the States are known to be a matter of concern for Canadians traveling south. Stories of Canadians being bankrupted after breaking bones, getting in car accidents or even delivering babies while visiting the U.S. are well known north of the border, and travelers insurance hasnt always been enough protection from American health care costs. The case remains under investigation. WASHINGTON (AP) Aides to Joe Biden are striking a more aggressive tone as the former vice president faces scrutiny over his past behavior toward women. In a statement Monday, Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted "right wing trolls" from "the dark recesses of the internet" for conflating images of Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends in his official capacity during swearing-in ceremonies with uninvited touching. The move came on a day in which a second woman said Biden had acted inappropriately, touching her face with both hands and rubbing noses with her in 2009. The allegation by Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Hines of Connecticut, followed a magazine essay by former Nevada politician Lucy Flores, who wrote that Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014. The developments underscored the challenge facing Biden should he decide to seek the White House. Following historic wins in the 2018 midterms, Democratic politics is dominated by energy from women. The allegations could leave the 76-year-old Biden, long known for his affectionate mannerisms, appearing out of touch with the party as the Democratic presidential primary begins. Lappos told The Associated Press that she and other Himes aides were helping out at a fundraiser in a private home in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2009 when Biden entered the kitchen to thank the group for pitching in. "After he finished speaking, he stopped to talk to us about how important a congressional staff is, which I thought was awesome," Lappos said. She said she was stunned as Biden moved toward her. "He wrapped both his hands around my face and pulled me in," said Lappos, who is now 43. "I thought, 'Oh, God, he's going to kiss me.' Instead, he rubbed noses with me." Biden said nothing, she said, then moved off. She said the experience left her feeling "weird and uncomfortable" and was "absolutely disrespectful of my personal boundaries." The Hartford Courant first reported Lappos' assertion. Russo didn't directly respond to Lappos, instead referring to a Sunday statement in which Biden said he doesn't believe he has acted inappropriately during his long public life. The former vice president said in that statement: "We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will." Biden, a Syracuse University College of Law alumnus, hasnt made a final decision on whether to run for the White House. But aides who werent authorized to discuss internal conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity said there were no signs that his team was slowing its preparations for a campaign. Asked by the AP about the accusations against Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "I don't think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all." She declined to elaborate. Biden's potential Democratic rivals haven't rushed to back him up. Over the weekend, presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand came closest to calling out the former vice president. Warren said Biden "needs to give an answer" about what occurred. Gillibrand said, "If Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic he'll have to engage on further." Ultraviolet, a womens advocacy group, tweeted: Joe Biden cannot paint himself as a champion of women and then refuse to listen and learn from a woman who says his actions demeaned her. Good intentions dont matter if the actions are inappropriate. Do better, Joe. And thank you @LucyFlores for coming forward. The Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cyprus approved on 13 February 2019 a number of important amendments to the Citizenship by Investment Scheme, now officially termed as Cypriot Investment Scheme (the 'Scheme'), offered by the country. The most important changes are covered below. A mandatory donation of 75,000 to the Foundation for Research and Innovation. This requirement can be waived under certain conditions, such as investing in an Innovative Business certified as such by the Ministry of Finance or in a certified Social Company. It is also waived where the applicant has made an investment amounting to at least 400,000, under the criterion "Purchase or Establishment or Participation in Cypriot Companies or Businesses", in a company operating in the primary or secondary sectors of the economy, or in one of the fields of research and technology, education, health, and renewable energy. A mandatory donation of 75,000 to the Cyprus Land Development Corporation. This requirement aims to contribute towards the integrated housing policy, including making available affordable housing projects and the implementation of other housing plans and measures. The inclusion of investments in the shipping sector of Cyprus among the eligible investments provided by the Scheme, on the basis of specific measurable criteria. The Scheme already offers the option of combining the criterion related to primary residence with the investment criterion in case of investments in residential unit(s) as long as at least one of the units purchased is worth at minimum 500,000. Under such a scenario the total investment made by the investor is reduced to a minimum of 2 million instead of 2.5 million. The new provision introduced in relation to this option provides that for purchases of residential properties already used for the purposes of the Scheme by another investor in the past (i.e. resale), the option will be valid provided that the total investment, will be at least 2.5 million instead of 2 million. Both for the permanent residence and any other investment in real estate for qualifying with the Scheme the following documents must be provided: a Planning Permission by the Department of Town Planning and Housing a Certificate of Completion signed by the architect of the project. Where a property purchased is under construction, there is a requirement for the seller to provide to the investor with a bank guarantee or deposit in to a designated (escrow) account, equal to 5% of the value of the property. The inclusion of investments in Registered Alternative Investment Funds among the eligible investments covered by the Scheme, as well as the possibility for these entities to invest up to 200,000 in Cyprus Stock Exchange's secondary market. The minimum period for holding the investment/s made in order to qualify for the Scheme is increased from 3 years to 5 years (for citizenships granted after 15 May 2019). The option of investing in Cyprus government bonds, which has been so far available in case of investments in multiple options, as offered by the Scheme, is abolished. In case of a mortgaged property, a waiver from the lending institution should be provided, confirming the waiver of any rights upon settlement of the loan. The applicant must have a Schengen visa in order to be able to apply for the Scheme. An applicant who has applied for the acquisition of citizenship in any other EU Member State and has been rejected, will not be entitled to apply for Cyprus citizenship based on the Scheme. Applicants will be subject to an enhanced due diligence process by an international professional services company to which the Ministry of Interior will outsource this process. It is reminded that the applicant should be in possession of a residence permit in the Republic of Cyprus for at least 6 months prior to naturalization as a Cypriot citizen. If the applicant does not already hold a residence permit, he/she will be able to apply for an immigration permit, together with the submission of the application for citizenship. The 6-month requirement mentioned above will start counting as from the date the immigration permit is issued. According to the decision, the revised Scheme comes into effect from the date of its publication in the official Gazette of the Republic of Cyprus, which was on 26 February 2019, with the exception of the measures covered by the first four points above, which will be put into effect from 15 May 2019. We are here to help If any of the above schemes and incentives are of interest to you or if you have any query about setting up in and/or relocating to Cyprus, we would be more than glad to discuss it with you and work out the best possible solution. At Seamark we have been providing our clients with international business solutions and professional services for almost 15 years now. We provide a comprehensive range of services related to Cyprus, including: Setting up and operating a business in Cyprus Becoming a resident, citizen and/or tax resident of Cyprus Corporate and Secretarial Accounting and Tax Compliance Family Office Trustee Immigration Fund Administration Professional Consultation Payroll and much more. We are one of the very first companies licensed for the provision of Administrative Services and we are a founding member and the first president of the Cyprus Fiduciary Association. In relation to the Citizenship by Investment and Permanent Residency schemes in particular we can offer the following services: Assistance with identification and securing of suitable and qualifying (if applicable) immovable property Services in relation to residence permits/citizenships Draft and submit the required documents (e.g. citizenship applications, applications for immigration permits, permanent residence permits, employment permits, visas etc.) Monitoring the status of the applications and following up with applicants Services in relations to qualification (initial and on-going) with specific tax regimes applicable to qualifying migrants Other administrative and support services (i.e. utility connections, insurance covers, maintenance, educational matters) Running a pre-clearance check with relevant authorities We are at your disposal to discuss any specific cases or issues as well as for any further information or clarification you may require on the matters presented in this article or on any other issue in relation to Cyprus. 11, Apostolou Andrea Street Hyper Tower, Office 101 CY-4007 LIMASSOL T: +357 25 50 40 00 | F: +357 25 50 41 00 W: www.seamark.com.cy | E: seamark@seamark.com.cy Seamark Consultants Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, sorted in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of Seamark Consultants Ltd. The information provided in this publication does not constitute legal, tax or investment advice and no responsibility is accepted for any loss occasioned directly or indirectly as a result of persons acting, or refraining from acting, wholly or partially in reliance upon it. Most of the smart thermostats weve evaluatedfrom the likes of Nest, Honeywell, and Ecobeeare low-voltage devices designed for central HVAC systems (even if not every home has central air conditioning). The Sinope TH1120RF Web Programmable Electric Heating Thermostat is designed for more specialized line-voltage heating systems: Electric baseboard, convector, and radiant (in the floor or ceiling) heaters. Sinope Technologies manufactures several models of this type of thermostat, and this one is available in your choice of 3,000- or 4,000-watt configurations depending on the load your electric heating system presents. I tested the 4,000-watt TH1120RF-4000 ($79.95 at Amazon) in my West Virginia home, controlling a baseboard heater in an attic space Ive converted to a bedroom. (the 3000-watt TH1120RF-3000 is priced about the same at Amazon). Since these types of heating systems are not centralized, each one must be controlled individually. That means youll need one thermostat for each such heater in your home. Sinopes TH1120RF lineup also requires a bridge to connect to your Wi-Fi network (the bridge must be hardwired to your router with an ethernet cable), and from there to the internet. The Sinope GT125 gateway ($89.95 at Amazon if purchased separately) handles that task for multiples of this type of thermostat. And since most homes will need more than one thermostat, it makes more sense to buy them bundled with the bridge in a package deal. The GT125, incidentally, can also be used with Sinopes line of smart lighting controls (the bridge supports up to 250 connected devices on the company's proprietary Mi-Wi mesh network). The thermostat can also be integrated into a broader smart home system, but you have only two choices on that score: Samsung SmartThings or Control4. Sinope Technologies Its not very exciting to look at, but the Sinope TH1120RF offers a smart way to control electric heating systems, such as baseboard heaters. The Sinope TH1120RF is easy to install, since it has only two non-polarized wires. Just turn off the power, take out the old thermostat, and follow the instructions in the box to hardwire the new thermostat to your heater using wire nuts. The TH1120RF measures 4.53- x 5.0- x 1.26 inches (WxHxD) and is equipped with a monochrome backlit LCD display that reports the day of the week, the current time, and the current temperature inside the house and either the temperature target or the outside temperature, depending on how you configure it. Once the physical installation is complete, point your browser to Sinopes Neviweb.com site, establish an account, and sync the thermostat with the hub. The Neviweb interface is currently only accessible via a web browser, but the company is developing a smartphone app that it intends to release later this year. The user interface allows you to establish a heating schedule based on up to six temperature targets for each day of the week. That enables you to save energy by doing things like lowering the temperature minimum to 65 degrees at 11:00 p.m., when you anticipate being snug in your bed; raising it to 68 degrees at 7:00 a.m. while youre getting ready for work; and then dropping it again when you leave for work at 8:00 a.m.; and then warming the room you expect to occupy when you get home from work. You can program separate temperature schedules for Saturday, Sunday, and any other days you'll typically be home. Theres a smart option for early warming as well, in which the thermostat estimates how long it will take for the heater to reach your desired target temperature. It will turn the heater on early enough for the room to reach that temperature by the desired time. Thats about it for smart features, however; there are no motion detectors onboard, and there are no algorithms designed to automatically create heating schedules by learning when the room is typically occupied and when it's typically vacant. Jason D'Aprile Usage monitoring via the Neviweb portal delivers a host of energy-consumption data. Neviweb, however, will track your heaters energy usage, so you can monitor how often it turns on and how much its costing you to operate. Whether youre at home or away, you can log into Neviweb at any time to adjust the thermostats temperature, put the heater in standby or away mode, and establish email alerts based on temperature parameters. If you thought you didnt have a smarter option for controlling your electric heating system, give Sinopes offering a look. Its not as sophisticated or as pretty as some of the smart thermostats designed for centralized HVAC systems, but its leagues better than the dumb solution you might have thought you were limited to. Through the looking glass: In the absence of an explanation from Lenovo, this seems like one of the most blatant examples yet of a foldable device lacking practicality or utility. Just because it can fold doesn't necessarily mean it should fold if it serves no purpose. Samsung and Huawei have taken an early lead in the foldable smartphone race but the competition isnt sitting idly on the sidelines. Motorola is reportedly working on a reimagined version of its popular Razr phone and based on a recent patent, parent company Lenovo looks to be working on something as well. LetsGoDigital recently commissioned a graphic artist to develop 3D renders of the device. The images are based on a design patent registered last September with the World Intellectual Property Office. Whats depicted is a clamshell-style phone that, when folded out, doesnt look much different than your ordinary candy bar style handset. A sizable hinge on the lower half of the phone, however, allows it to fold at different points. This means you can partially fold the phone and still use some of the main screen or fold it further to cover most of the display. ZTE and Oppo have also been linked to similar folding phone patents in recent memory. As always, keep in mind that this is little more than a patent at this stage. Theres no guarantee that a product resembling these renders will make it to market. All images courtesy LetsGoDigital A hot potato: An FCC commissioner is calling out his agency for not taking action against cellular carriers for continuing to sell customer location data to unauthorized companies and information brokers. Democratic Commissioner Geoffrey Starks wrote an op-ed for The New York Times pointing out that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has done little to remedy the selling of private location data. According to the commissions rules, the GPS data of cellphone customers are only supposed to be used for 911 purposes. However, last year the NYT broke a story about how a Mississippi sheriff was facing federal charges for repeatedly tracking citizens without a warrant. He used a company called Securus that provided call monitoring services for inmates. A lesser-known service that the company offered was GPS tracking of specific cell numbers. Securus paid cellular carriers for this data. Shortly after the news broke, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the FCC demanding an investigation into the misuse of location data within the industry. It was also about that time that carriers including the big four, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, pledged to cease selling location data to third-party brokers like Securus and others. However, recent reports of the information winding up in the hands of bounty hunters and others would seem to indicate that carriers have not lived up to their promises. "Federal action is long overdue. The agencys inaction despite these increasingly troubling reports speaks volumes and leaves our duty to the public unfulfilled." Starks is concerned that if the FCC does not take action soon the statute of limitations will expire. Nearly a year after the news first broke, the commission has yet to issue an enforcement action or fine those responsible, the commissioner wrote. This passage of time is significant, as the agency usually has only one year to bring action to hold any wrongdoers accountable before the statute of limitations runs. Whether anything will be done about the matter is anybodys guess. Starks seems to feel that the current chair of the FCC is taking a lenient stance with telecoms, which he sees as partisan and that the rollback of net neutrality rules is also partially to blame. Some may argue that the F.C.C.s authority to take action against wireless carriers for this activity has gotten weaker in recent years, with the repeal of consumer-focused privacy and net neutrality rules during the current administration, said Starks. But I believe that the commission still has ample authority to address these egregious pay-to-track practices. As a Democratic commissioner at the Republican-led agency, I can call for action, but the chairman sets the agenda, including deciding whether and how quickly to respond to pay-to-track schemes. Fish are more than just food or friends for scientists, as marine critters become the focus of a new U.S. military program called Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors or PALS. Marine creatures can naturally navigate the ocean freely and sense objects and movement underwater effortlessly. Humans are far more limited beneath the ocean's surface. In a bid to monitor and keep track of increasing activity in the oceans, the U.S. military is recruiting fishes and other marine creatures as "spies." Fish Are DARPA's New Partners According to a group of researchers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), marine creatures can be the effective and cost-efficient key in improving the Department of Defense's monitoring capabilities. "The PALS program was developed to leverage the great sensitivity that organisms have in the ocean to changes in their environment," Lori Adornato, manager of the PALS initiative, says in Scientific American. Since marine organisms are naturally equipped to sense and respond to even the most minute disturbances in the ocean, researchers can simply tune in to their behavior and detect underwater vehicles. Changes in the movements, light emissions, and sounds of marine animals can be tell-tale signs of a shift in their environments. For example, schools of fish are known to change their swim patterns when they're under attack or there are foreign objects present, according to Discover Magazine. By observing certain species, DARPA can learn to read their movement and swim patters, so they know how it changes when an interloper or unauthorized vehicle is nearby. Bioluminescent organisms can also be observed, since they signal changes in their environment with their light patterns. Snapping shrimps offer a particularly promising possibility, since these animals are plentiful in reefs and they make very loud sounds that hydrophones can easily detect. "The idea is that the sounds that the shrimp create would travel to the object, reflect off of it and we would be able to detect it at our sensors," scientist Alison Laferriere of defense company Raytheon BBN explains to Discover Magazine. Laferriere is conducting research in hopes of developing methods of using shrimp as a natural sonar. A Promising Cost-Effective Surveillance Option With plenty of underwater drones in development by various countries, some of which even carry nuclear weapons, being able to "hear" these vehicles is a huge advantage for the U.S. military. Scientific American reports that five research teams have already been granted a total of $45 million by DARPA to study and observe various marine organisms and their behavior toward underwater vehicles. Not only is the PALS methods believed to be effective and efficient, but scientists say they're expected to be more discreet and affordable options. Sonar sensors are effective, but they're expensive, labor-intensive, and often limited in scope. Living marine organisms do not need external power and offer a much wider scope. Of course, relying on living creatures does have its drawbacks, including the need to install detectors to observe the animals. Installation could face the same cost and technological limitations as solar sensors in the end. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. How many cigarettes are the equivalent of one bottle of wine? It may seem like a strange question to ask, but experts are using the connection to communicate alcohol-related cancer risks to the public. After all, even moderate drinking is associated with an increased risk of cancer. Now, researchers illustrate the risks using the well-known link between cigarettes and cancer. Wine, Cigarettes, and Cancer A team from the University of Southampton, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust and Bangor University estimated the cancer risk of wine and compared it with the cancer risk of cigarettes in a study published in the journal BMC Public Health. "We aimed to answer the question: Purely in terms of cancer risk that is, looking at cancer in isolation from other harms how many cigarettes are there in a bottle of wine?" Dr. Theresa Hydes, the lead author of the study, explains in a statement from the University of Southampton. "Our findings suggest that the 'cigarette equivalent' of a bottle of wine is five cigarettes for men and ten for women per week." The risk of developing cancer associated with drinking one bottle of wine a week is 1 percent in non-smoking men and 1.4 percent in non-smoking women. The risk is associated primarily with gastrointestinal tract cancer in men and breast cancer in women. Furthermore, the findings show that an increase in wine consumption results in an increase in cancer risk as well. Drinking three bottles of wine per week raises the absolute lifetime cancer risk to 1.9 percent in men and 3.6 percent in women. This translates to eight cigarettes weekly for men and 23 cigarettes weekly for women. Using Cigarettes to Measure Cancer Risk Hydes points out that while the connection between heavy drinking and many types of cancer has been established, most of the public is still not aware of it. The National Cancer Institute reports that 3.5 percent of cancer deaths in the United States in 2009 were alcohol-related. Alcohol consumption has been linked to head and neck, esophageal, liver, breast, and colorectal cancers, among others. Since the link between cigarettes and cancer is more widely accepted, the researchers decided to use cigarettes as a measure to calculate the cancer risk of alcohol. "We must be absolutely clear that this study is not saying that drinking alcohol in moderation is in any way equivalent to smoking," Hydes clarifies. "Our finds relate to lifetime risk across the population." 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Comedy show SNL wasted no time in delivering a funny but strong punch against NASA for forgoing the all-female spacewalk due to lack of available right-sized spacesuits. Comedian Aidy Bryant parodied Anne McClain, half of the all-female crew that is supposed to do the spacewalk in the International Space Station on March 29. 'The Dream's Got To Die' Clad in a blue NASA jumpsuit, Bryant's McClain sat down with Michael Che, host of "Weekend Update," to address the questions about the cancellation. When asked about what she felt about the cut, she responded she's only practical. She further sarcastically explained that it is fine that her colleagues Nick Hague and Christina Koch, the other female astronaut, would get to see the Earth, swim in the stars, and look down on the planet and her while she would only stare at the window. Bryant also did not fail to mention the accomplishments of McClain, which include performing more than 200 combat missions during the Operation Iraqi Freedom. She also flew 800 hours as a helicopter pilot during the same period. "But then the space shirt and the pants were the wrong size so, actually unfortunately, the dream gotta die," she said. When Che pointed out she's still able to go to space, parodied McClain responded that she did and enjoyed some "chill stuff" while in the ISS, such as eating steak dust and whizzing inside the tube. Before the interview ended, she had left a fair warning on women dreaming to be astronauts like McClain. "You can all become astronauts, just not at the same time!" she said. Lacking Medium-Sized Spacesuit Earlier in March, NASA announced that both Koch and McClain will do the first-ever female spacewalk before the month ended. To do that, they would have to wear the medium-sized upper-torso spacesuits, which act as space shirts. Unfortunately, there are not enough of them in the ISS. Instead of reconfiguring the other available suits, the mission managers, together with McClain and Hague, decided to change the assignments. On March 29, Koch made her first spacewalk in her career with Hague to replace old batteries. Seven days before that, McClain had done the same, also with Hague. A Long Way To Go For Diversity The cancellation of the all-female spacewalk reignites criticisms on the supposed lack of diversity in the space agency. In 2017, for example, women accounted for only 15 percent of the teams handling planetary missions. In January 2018, the agency pulled out Jeanette Apps from the 56/57 Expedition. She would have been the first female African-American astronaut to become part of the crew. NASA, however, may already be taking baby steps to improve the statistic. The New Frontiers competition highlighted the importance of diversity in the proposals. Both McClain and Koch came from Astronaut Group 21, class of 2013, that had the highest percentage of female finalists. They comprised half of eight members of the group. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The speed of light is often used to describe anything that is ultrafast, rendering it impossible for humans to capture its motion. Now, researchers are able to capture the elusive object in slow motion using the world's fastest camera. YouTubers The Slow Mo Guys teamed up with optical scientists from California Institute of Technology to demonstrate how light actually travels from one point to another. They showcased such feat by recording a laser beam passing through a milk bottle at about 100 billion frames per second. After the capture, Peng Wang, a postdoctoral student at Caltech demonstrated how photons vividly motioned through the bottle like a blue slime from the left to the right. The molecules of the milk aided in scattering the laser beam across. Wang said the light in this experiment traveled in approximately 2,000 picoseconds. The remarkable thing is such measurement is just a fraction of what the amazing camera can capture. Caltech researchers reported that this camera can record objects at about 10 trillion frames per second in a single-shot. Excellent Capture With T-CUP The amazing camera, dubbed as the world's fastest, is called T-CUP. In a 2018 paper, scientists described it as a "single-shot real-time femtosecond imaging of temporal focusing." The researchers said that while techniques to capture ultrafast objects do exist, these require multiple shots that rely of precise repetition during temporal or spatial scanning. Such criterion limits people in cases when temporal focusing must be captured in a single measurement. "We have developed single-shot 10-trillion-frame-per-second compressed ultrafast photography (T-CUP), which passively captures dynamic events with 100-fs frame intervals in a single camera exposure," the researchers wrote. Comparing T-CUP With Typical Cameras T-CUP is a streak camera, which captures images in a single dimension in an unbelievably swift manner. Phone cameras record two-dimensional photographs. While T-CUP is categorized under streak cameras, it still stands out among the rest. Typical streak cameras develop light images by capturing varied horizontal planes of laser over numerous laser pulses. T-CUP can create an image by developing an entire laser pulse in a single frame. The technique is to divert the laser beam to two different cameras at the same time, and then use a computer program to put together the two images. Lihong Wang, Caltech professor and one of the camera's makers, said scientists may one day develop a camera that can capture images at 1 quadrillion frames per second. This could pave the way for experts to be able to observe the human tissues, including the brain, in very precise detail. The original paper for this research was published in the journal Light: Science and Applications. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Cow toilet is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In fact, Dutch inventors are already testing out an innovative bovine urinal in an attempt to reduce the country's ammonia emissions. An average cow produces four to five gallons (15 to 20 liters) of urine every day. If these cows can be trained to use a urinal, not only can it spell a big difference in farm hygiene and maintenance, but it can also make a huge impact on the environment. After all, Netherlands emits high amounts of ammonia as the world's second biggest agricultural exporter. "We are tackling the problem at the source," Henk Hanskamp, the Dutch inventor behind the toilet, explains to AFP. "A cow is never going to be completely clean but you can teach them to go to the toilet." 'Cow Toilet' Shows Promise During Testing The cow toilet is simple and straight-forward, with the urinal placed in a box behind the cow. A feeding trough is placed in front of the cow. After the animal has finished eating, a robot arm triggers a nerve by the udders to stimulate the cow's need to urinate. Tests for the toilet are ongoing in the town of Doetinchem in Netherlands, where seven out of 58 cows have already been trained to use their new toilets without stimulation. Hanskamp says that these animals have already gotten used to the urinals. "They recognise the box, lift their tail, and pee," he recalls. Such technology is making the cow's surroundings cleaner and the ground drier. Veterinarian Jan Velema, who participated in the testing, explains that dry ground is also better for the hooves of the animals. The cow toilet is expected to be available on the market by 2020, according to Hanskamp. If successful, he says, the toilet could decrease ammonia production by at least half. Ammonia Emissions Nitrogen in animal waste as well as fertilizer can turn into gaseous ammonia, according to a report from Ensia. Three-fourths of the total ammonia emissions in the United States and Canada come from agriculture. This has an alarming effect on the public's health. When ammonia gets into the atmosphere, it combines with other compounds in the air and forms particulate matter called PM2.5. PM2.5 poses a great danger to the health when it infiltrates the lungs and gets into the bloodstream. WHO estimates that air pollution kills 7 million people worldwide every year. Large amounts of ammonia also has a negative impact on aquatic life and plants, according to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The measles outbreak in the United States has reached new heights, marking the second-greatest number of measles cases reported in the country since the disease was eliminated in 2000. Measles In The United States In the three-month period from Jan. 1 to March 28, there have been 387 individual cases of measles confirmed in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The highest number of reported measles cases since 2000 occurred in 2014. States with confirmed measles cases are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. Six outbreaks are ongoing in Rockland County in the state of New York, New York City, Washington, Santa Cruz County and Butte County in California, and New Jersey. Outbreaks are classified in areas with three or more cases of the contagious disease. These outbreaks have been traced back to travelers who visited countries with ongoing measles outbreaks including Israel, the Philippines, and Ukraine. Experts Stress Importance Of Vaccination Measles is an extremely contagious viral disease that's spread in the air. CDC recommends the MMR vaccine, which protects an individual against three different diseases: measles, mumps, and rubella. The vaccine is completely safe and effective with a single dose being about 93 percent effective in measles prevention and two doses being 97 percent effective. Before the measles vaccination program began in 1963, 3 to 4 million people get measles every year in the United States. Since the measles vaccine was introduced, there have been an over 99 percent decrease in measles cases in the country. However, unvaccinated people still run the risk of contracting measles from either traveling or contact with a traveler who picked up the infection from another country where measles may still be common. To prevent the further spread of measles, New York's Rockland County has already declared a state of emergency and banned unvaccinated minors from public spaces. Measles, A Growing Problem All Around the World According to NPR, there are two kinds of measles problems: vaccine inaccessibility and vaccine hesitancy. Countries such as Madagascar and Yemen struggle with the disease due to the unavailability of vaccines, whether this is due to prices or location. On the other end of the spectrum are wealthier countries such as the United States, Japan, and many European countries. In these places, the immunity has fallen because of people's hesitation to be vaccinated or have their children vaccinated. Then there are countries like the Philippines, which suffers from both vaccine hesitancy and inaccessibility. "We're going to still need to maintain population immunity for some time until we can actually get vaccination levels high all over the world, so that no one is at risk," Amesh Adalja from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security tells NPR, adding that keeping numbers down is challenging because it's so contagious. "And then the anti-vaccine movement has just set that whole effort back a long way." 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Samsung has officially confirmed the release date of its highly anticipated Galaxy S10 5G. Not only is it going to be the company's first 5G smartphone, but it's also set to be the very first 5G handset on the market. Galaxy S10 5G Release Date Revealed In a press release, Samsung says that the Galaxy S10 5G will launch in Majestic Black, Royal Gold, and Crown Silver on April 5 in South Korea, which doesn't come as a surprise considering that it's the manufacturer's home country. It's scheduled to "expand to additional markets after." Exactly how soon that is isn't clear, but it shouldn't be too long until it lands on U.S. shores, though when it does, it's going to be an exclusive to Verizon first before becoming available from other major carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. According to the Samsung-centric website SamMobile, the brand's carrier partners in the country have already begun accepting preorders and have slapped a price tag of 1.39 million won (about $1,231) on the 256 GB model and 1.55 million won (about $1,366) on the 512 GB model, which won't come in Royal Gold, it seems. Move To 5G South Korea's 5G network is expected to go live on April 5, coinciding with great timing with the Galaxy S10 5G's release date. Technically, it has already been up and running since Dec. 1, but there weren't any commercially available devices that could support it then, so the official rollout was put on hold. Also, the South Korean government and mobile operators have had some issues to iron out regarding the cost of 5G data, delaying the launch of the network even further. Now VentureBeat reports that the South Korean government has finalized pricing plans of 5G connectivity in the country. For the curious, the prices boil down to between roughly $50 and $110 per month, with no unlimited data plans in the pipeline just yet. Meanwhile, in the United States, Verizon is planning on rolling out 5G to Chicago and Minneapolis on April 11. It also intends to expand its coverage to over 30 more cities by the end of 2019. This push makes sense because the carrier does have exclusive rights to the smartphone in question for the first few months in the United States, as mentioned earlier. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Google has released its fifth annual Android security report. According to the findings, the installations of "potentially harmful apps" or PHA increased twofold, but overall, the Android ecosystem "became safer in 2018." Play Store Installs The download rate of PHAs doubled from 0.02 percent to 0.04 percent on the Play Store, but according to Google, it's simply because it included click-fraud apps or adware in the tally. Before this, it treated them only as a policy violation on the platform. In other words, there isn't exactly an increase of malware on the Play Store, per se. In fact, the company says that PHA installs decreased by 31 percent year over year if click fraud was taken out of the equation. Click fraud tops the list of PHA categories at 54.9 percent, while trojan comes in second at 16 percent. These click-fraud apps primarily targeted users in the United States, Brazil, and Mexico. Non-Play Store Installs Back in 2017, Google rolled out its Play Protect services to keep malware at bay. Thanks to this, 1.6 billion attempts of PHA installations of sideloaded or non-Play Store apps were prevented in 2018. Going by the company's numbers, this translates to a 20 percent drop compared with the results from 2017. Put differently, Play Protect blocked 73 percent of PHA installation attempts from outside the Play Store. General Tips To Stay Safe Based on the report, one big risk factor is sideloading apps. As Google states, PHAs affected only 0.08 percent of devices that install apps exclusively through the Play Store. On the other hand, PHAs were eight times more likely to be downloaded in devices that use third-party markets or sideloaded software. An outdated Android operating system also puts users at risk. As Google points out, the PHA installation rates for Android 8 Oreo and Android 9 Pie devices are 0.19 percent and 0.18 percent, respectively. In contrast, PHAs are more widespread in older versions of Android, with Android 5 Lollipop at 0.65 percent, Android 6 Marshmallow at 0.55 percent, and Android 7 Nougat at 0.29 percent. To sum it up, solely using the Play Store for apps and using an up-to-date device are key in steering clear of PHAs. This goes without saying, but the Mountain View company puts in a lot of effort in keeping Android devices safe from malicious software. However, despite that, some still manage to get past the Play Store's security measures, including one that focused on stealing cryptocurrency. Another incident worth mentioning is the spread of the adware dubbed "SimBad," which was found in more than 200 apps with 150 million downloads in total. Google's full 31-page report is available online (PDF). 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Danville, IL (61832) Today Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 31F. Winds light and variable.. Tonight Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 31F. Winds light and variable. The Zhuhai section of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge in Guangdong province. [Photo by Zhang Youqiong/For China Daily] The "Outline Development Plan" for Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, released recently, aims to make the GBA a world class science and technology innovation center. But how can Guangdong province, and the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions, which have different political systems and, to a certain extent, cultures, collaborate seamlessly to create such an innovation center? We believe that while the market will be a key driving force for the GBA's development, the government has to play the key role of coordinator and administrative guide. The market does play a vital role in economic development, but a visionary and determined government is needed to supplement the market and ensure coordinated development. First, a government-coordinated plan will prevent the duplication of infrastructure facilities and cut-throat competition in the neighboring cities. And mutual leveraging and inter-city collaboration will create additional value for all the three regions given the nature of their respective economies. The Tokyo Bay Area, too, faced a similar challenge, which the Japanese government tackled through a coordinated plan. The same is true for the San Francisco Bay Area. But in the latter's case, NGOs such as the Bay Area Council, rather than the United States federal government, helped coordinate cross-county infrastructure projects such as railways and ports with the support of the county governments. Second, technology and innovation are vital areas the governments of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao should play an important role in. They should fund research in higher education, without which budding talents cannot be tapped. And since technological innovation projects carry great financial risks, the governments should shoulder a major part of those risks by acting as de facto insurers. Helping entrepreneurs to get loans and providing them with fruitful advice are two areas in which the governments should play a critical role. By so doing, they can act as a catalyst for the GBA's economic growth. Finance is the blood of any modern enterprise, more so for start-ups. But under the existing system, banks and financial institutions in the GBA may not provide loans to start-ups because start-ups are usually "light in assets". Of course, start-ups can receive funding from venture capital companies. But venture capital companies usually look for very high return within a fixed period of time, which not all start-ups can guarantee. Also, some joint venture companies may demand equity in start-ups either in the form of convertible loans or direct equity investment, which many start-ups may not agree to for fear of losing control of their businesses. To overcome these difficulties, the governments of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao should supplement their support models such as grants, incubation and industry parks and tax incentives by establishing a platform for financing where the government shoulders some of the risk and provides co-investment. They could begin by professionally assessing the development opportunities and market potential of the companies, which will not only help the start-ups to overcome their financial challenges, but also invest in emerging industries in the region. The governments should also treat carefully when it comes to taking measures to bridge the old industries with the new ones and provide guidance and incentives for the two to work together. At the end of the day the governments and the market should not be regarded as two ideologically opposing forces for the GBA. In a recent article in The New York Times, Jamalle Bouie has written: "The institutions which provide health, education and welfare services are wholly exempt from the market. The right to participate in direct management of the work units operating in the market is derived from labor. The right to participate in direct management of the work units exempt wholly or partly from the market is derived proportionally from labor, ownership, and consumption of the provided services and utilities." The only component "wholly exempt from the market" in the GBA's initial phase should be government planning, without which the GBA cannot develop into a science and technology innovative center. Witman Hung is a member of the academic committee of China Silk Road iValley Research Institute; and Liang Haiming is the dean of Hainan University Belt and Road Research Institute and chairman of the China Silk Road iValley Research Institute. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily. Congregants at Greater Union Baptist Church in Opelousas are reeling after fire tore through their house of worship Tuesday the second church fire in St. Landry Parish in one week. The Rev. Harry Richard, the churchs pastor for 16 years, stood on the roadside and watched as the rubble continued to smoke around 10:30 a.m. Richard said he received a call about the fire around 2:15 a.m., and when he arrived at the church in the 1400 block of Highway 742, he found the church building fully engulfed. At that moment I felt like there was no hope, Richard said. The Louisiana State Fire Marshals Office is investigating the blaze. Agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were sifting through the smoking debris Tuesday morning, working to collect potential evidence and help determine the source and cause of the fire. Fire Marshals spokesperson Ashley Rodrigue said ATF assists with any fire investigations when a religious building or religious organization is involved. Its the second historically black Baptist church burned in St. Landry Parish in the past week. On March 26, St. Mary Baptist Church on Saquette Road in Port Barre burned to the ground overnight. The two churches are roughly 15 minutes apart. Officials said the causes of the fires remain under investigation and its premature to link the two. It's far too early in [Tuesdays] investigation to be able to associate it with any other cases. We are still in the early stages of the investigation, Rodrigue said in an email. The fire marshals office and ATF are investigating a third church fire in Vivian, in northwest Louisiana. A small fire burned overnight Sunday in the sanctuary of the Vivian United Pentecostal Church in the 900 block of South Pecan Street. Investigators determined the fire was intentionally set, the fire marshals office said. Richard said he was unaware about the fire in Port Barre but said congregants mentioned the strange coincidence to him as they gathered outside the church. I didnt know what to say, Richard said. I agreed with them that it was coincidental. I cant imagine what happened. Thats very unusual. +3 Officials investigating after St. Mary Baptist Church in Port Barre burned down Tuesday The Louisiana State Fire Marshals Office is investigating after the St. Mary Baptist Church in Port Barre burned down Tuesday. Richard said he and his roughly 100 congregants are hurting and hope for answers. Theyre encouraging one another to keep the faith and are committed to remaining together, he said. Early Tuesday, congregants gathered with him to pray outside the church as it burned. We believe in God and the members are very faithful and committed to serving our God. With their help and continued dedication, were going to come through this, he said. Opelousas residents and sisters Clara Coleman, 58, and Theresa Hunt, 59, stood outside the church Tuesday with their 87-year-old aunt, Pearl Kennerson, whos been a member at the church for more than 78 years. Kennerson said when her sister called and told her about the fire, she was distraught. I just sat down and cried, she said, as she gazed at the churchs charred shell. Top stories in Acadiana in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Kennerson said her father and Richards grandfather were two of the churchs founding members. Many of the congregants are kin, she said, and the church is a family place. Many families have been members for generations. Tucked behind the churchs back wall and across a field are gravestones making up Greater Unions cemetery. Hunt, Coleman and Kennerson said their family members are among the dead buried behind the church. This is all our history that just went up in flames, Hunt said. Our family members are all buried back there. I know theyre turning up in their grave. Richard said several Opelousas area churches have already reached out offering to host the Greater Union congregations Sunday services so they can continue worshiping while they assess and rebuild. He said as of now they will rebuild at the churchs current location. I believe that were going to overcome this. In fact -- I know we will, Richard said. The congregants at St. Marys Baptist Church in Port Barre are similarly resolved. Sandra Smith, of Opelousas, has attended St. Marys for more than 13 years. She said over Facebook Messenger shes visited the church since she was a child and each weekend shes home from offshore she makes the drive from Opelousas to Port Barre for Sunday services. Can't see video below? Click here. Smith was working offshore in Venice when she heard the news about the church. Its killing me that I cant be there with them, but I know God has bigger and better things in store for us, she said. Like Kennerson at Greater Union, Smith said she cried when she learned her church was destroyed. But then she steeled herself. She said shes confident God has a plan. Smith said she wishes she could be with her brothers and sisters in the faith, but shes continuing to work to have funds to contribute to the rebuilding effort. Once back in town in mid-April, she said shes ready to help however she can, whether thats cooking meals for church gatherings or putting on work boots to help clear the church grounds. She said faith is in the heart, and while a building is important for fellowship and coming together as a community, it wont stop the congregants from celebrating the Word together. As God said, where there are two or three assembled together in His name Hes there also, Smith said. 'Picturing Vivian Maier: A Street Photographer Revealed' WHEN: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday,; 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. Through May 22. WHERE: Louisiana Art & Science Museum, 100 S. River Road TICKETS/INFO: $9, $7.50 ages 3-12 and seniors 65 and older. (225) 344-5272 or lasm.org ALSO: The museum will screen "Finding Vivian Maier" at 2 p.m. April 13 and hold a program, "Picturing Vivian Maier," at 5:30 p.m. April 25. Admission is $10 for the art talk. In Louisiana, were just different, right? Even when it hurts us, and nowhere is that more obvious than a problem that is well-known to busine The man accused of calling in a bomb threat to a Ponchatoula school Friday was in custody and on work release when he made the call, according to the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff's Office. Sheriff's Spokeswoman Dawn Panepinto said the suspect, 22-year-old Cadarius Parker, of Hammond, has been transferred from work release in LaPlace to the Tangipahoa Parish jail. It remains unclear how Parker viewed the video posted on social media and made the phone call. Panepinto said details of the investigation would not be released at this time. After video shows white teachers restraining black Ponchatoula student, man accused in bomb threat A 22-year-old man was arrested after police say he called in a bomb threat to a Ponchatoula school Friday, apparently in response to a video c Ponchatoula Police Chief Bry Layrisson said Monday that the threatening call was made to Ponchatoula High School, but police believe it was meant for the junior high. The previous day, a video had been posted to social media showing a black student being forcibly restrained and cursed at by two white teachers. Layrisson said the video showed the aftermath of a fight between two female students, both black. Layrisson said police were investigating the incident to determine whether charges are appropriate for the teachers or students. He said Tuesday that there was no update to the investigation at this time. Parker had been sentenced in January 2018 to five years in prison after pleading no contest to being a felon in possession of a firearm in Tangipahoa Parish, according to court records. The Louisiana Supreme Court will hear arguments May 7 in the case of a St. Landry Parish man whose convictions were reduced in a 2011 alcohol-related road rage crash in Baton Rouge that cost five people their lives. East Baton Rouge Parish prosecutors want the high court to reinstate David Leger's vehicular homicide convictions and eight-year prison term. The state 1st Circuit Court of Appeal reduced Leger's convictions to negligent homicide in 2017 and ordered him resentenced, saying nothing pointed to his intoxication as a contributing factor in the Interstate 10 crash that claimed the lives of five Ascension Parish residents, including three young boys. The appeals court said the purpose of the vehicular homicide law is to curb traffic fatalities caused by alcohol consumption. The law is not aimed to persons involved in vehicular fatalities whose alcohol consumption does not cause but merely coincides with such an accident, the court added. Negligent homicide is the killing of a human being by criminal negligence, and is punishable by up to five years in prison. Leger's appellate attorneys are asking the Supreme Court not to disturb the appeals court decision. The high court agreed in January to hear the case, and set the May 7 hearing date Friday. +4 Louisiana high court to hear case involving 'road rage' crash in Baton Rouge that killed five Louisiana's top court agreed Friday to hear the case of a St. Landry Parish man whose convictions were reduced in a fiery, 2011 'road rage' cr Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Leger, 36, of Palmetto, and Kelsye Hall, 29, of Baton Rouge, were engaged in a high-speed game of "cat and mouse" on I-10 West on March 13, 2011, when Leger tried to pass Hall's SUV on the right shoulder, according to trial testimony. The two vehicles came into contact, and Leger's pickup spun out of control and crossed the grassy median. His truck collided with a car driven by Effie Fontenot, 29, of Prairieville, on I-10 East between the Highland Road exit and the Bluff Road overpass. Fontenot's car burst into flames. Fontenot and her sons Austin and Keagan Fontenot, 3 and 11, respectively, and 7-year-old Hunter Johnson were killed, as was Kimberly Stagg, 19, of Prairieville, who was riding in the front seat of the car. A partially empty bottle of rum was found inside Leger's truck after the crash, and his blood alcohol level was 0.10 percent. A blood alcohol reading of 0.08 percent is considered presumptive evidence of drunken driving in Louisiana for those 21 and older. East Baton Rouge Parish Assistant District Attorneys Christopher Casler and Ron Gathe argue in papers filed at the Supreme Court that the evidence proves Leger's operation of his truck while intoxicated "ultimately resulted in defendant losing control of his vehicle and colliding with the victims." However, Leger's appellate lawyer, Rachel Conner, maintains there is no evidence of a causal relationship between his intoxication and the five fatalities. Leger was convicted on five counts of vehicular homicide. Hall, who was not drinking, was found guilty at a separate trial on five counts of negligent homicide. She was sentenced to two years in prison but served less than a year behind bars. A Baton Rouge physical therapist on Tuesday was arrested for the third time after investigators filed additional sexual battery counts against him, further expanding accusations that he sexually battered women patients for years. Philippe Veeters, a former co-owner and therapist at Dutch Physical Therapy whose physical therapy license is currently suspended, was booked Tuesday after two more women came forward with accounts of sexual battery bringing the total number of credible accusers to nine, according to the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office. +2 Baton Rouge physical therapist arrested again after five more former patients report sexual assault A Baton Rouge physical therapist was arrested again on Monday after five more former patients, all women, accused him of sexually assaulting t In February and March, Veeters was booked on other sexual battery allegations, after seven women came forward with allegations that he touched them inappropriately during physical therapy appointments. Against physical therapy best practices, he treated all of the women alone in a room and would touch them without their consent and without wearing gloves, the arrest reports say. In new allegations filed Tuesday, the women told of similar encounters with Veeters, who was supposed to be treating them for neck and back pain. However, they said,he touched their buttocks, breasts and pubic areas, leaving them feeling uncomfortable and violated. "Veeters would pull her scrubs and panties down then press on her pubic region," one of the arrest reports filed Tuesday said. Another said that Veeters, "without warning, walked up behind her and grabbed her buttocks with both of his hands." Later, he did the same to her breasts, both times telling how her posture would make her breasts look "perkier," the report says. Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Nine women have come forward with allegations the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office found credible against Veeters. Investigators said others have also alleged the therapist engaged in improper behavior with them but their allegations fell outside of the statue of limitations. In prior allegations, the women described how they sought treatment for back or upper body issues, yet Veeters would touch them in their vaginal area, according to his arrest warrants. And in every case, the women reported, Veeters did not wear gloves when he directly touched their skin and no other medical professionals were in the room all violations of physical therapy best practices. Veeters, 54, of 19129 S. Augusta Drive, was booked Tuesday on counts of misdemeanor sexual battery and forcible sexual battery. The state board of physical therapy suspended his license in November after finding one of these allegations credible, noting in their report that they had similar allegation about Veeters reported in 2012, but they did not determined it was worth any discipline at the time. For the first time since he took over as superintendent in 2015, Warren Drake is asking the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board to give him authority to lay off employees to balance the school systems books. The move comes as Drake looks for a way to trim tens of millions of dollars in school spending in advance of the 2019-20 fiscal year, which starts July 1. The School Board on Thursday night plans to consider invoking the school systems Reduction in Force, or RIF, policy. A final vote is planned for April 18 and, if approved, a RIF letter would be sent out the next day notifying school system employees. Board action doesnt necessarily mean there would actually be employee layoffs, but it increases the possibility. In an effort to cut the budget without resorting layoffs, Drake for nearly a year has been leaving jobs unfilled as positions opened. Drake sent an email to school employees late Tuesday morning saying he still hopes to avoid layoffs via attrition and other cuts, saying that about 200 to 300 employees leave at the end of each school year. "The staff, principals and I, including our board, have been working for weeks and months to find ways to accomplish this and we are making great headway toward our goal," Drake wrote. Even so, Drake said, he's not sure yet that will be possible. "After May 18th, we will take a look at the budget and only implement the RIF if we feel that it is needed to reach our goal," Drake said. "Again, I feel like we will not need to do this but it is a possibility." Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Drake added that even if he implements a RIF, "it is possible that only some job descriptions would be affected, and if so, then a separate letter would go out." Prior to Drakes arrival, it was not uncommon for RIF letters to go out each spring, though the school system rarely ended up laying off very many employees. In some cases, they were able to bring them back later. Layoffs used to be largely based on seniority, but the Legislature in 2012 told school districts they could no longer use seniority for laying off educators, although non-educators can still be judged by seniority. Now, East Baton Rouge Parishs RIF policy calls for laying off educators based solely upon demand, performance, and effectiveness, with a lot of weight given to how employees score on annual employee evaluations. Gretchen Lampe, an organizer with the Louisiana Association of Educators, said her organization believes layoffs can be avoided via attrition. She stopped short of saying she was against the school system sending a RIF letter. Its always difficult to see the resolution, Lampe said. Employees hate the uncertainty that comes once it is issued. Drake every year has done ample budget-cutting in his four-year tenure without having to resort to layoffs. However, the budget hole he's facing in 2019-20 could well be his biggest yet. Declining enrollment and increased spending on charter schools are two big factors. Last fall, Drake assembled an in-house team to try to identify $30 to $40 million in spending reductions. In January, Drake presented the board with $21.3 million in trims. The bulk of the proposed savings came from cutting payroll. They included an 8 percent cut in school staff, saving an estimated $14.4 million a year, and a 10 percent cut in Central Office staff, saving an estimated $3.7 million a year. Thousands of Louisiana residents who were affected by severe floods in 2016 and remain in a "duplication of benefits" trap likely wont see a resolution for several more weeks, despite the states congressional delegations attempts to address the issue. U.S. Sens. John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy met Tuesday with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and Office of Management and Budget acting director Russell Vought to figure out why recovery money hasn't started flowing to homeowners, despite the changes Congress made to the federal Stafford Act last fall. The senators came away from that meeting pointing to OMB as the driving factor behind the delay. Its a process we are working through, Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, said after their meeting. Louisiana received more than $1.7 billion from Congress to aid recovery from the catastrophic 2016 floods. The bulk of the money, about $1.3 billion, has been designated to go toward homeowner rebuilding assistance, but a federal rule has prevented those who received Small Business Administration loans from reaping the full benefits of the program. What's the latest on the 'duplication of benefits' trap that's still affecting Louisiana flood victims? Louisiana officials are hoping that a meeting next week will be the final push needed to break through the federal government logjam that has As in previous disasters, affected homeowners who sought SBA loans have been unable to tap into grant dollars that duplicated whatever loan amount they were deemed eligible to receive even if they never accepted the loan money. For example, a homeowner with an estimated $25,000 in damage who qualified for a $20,000 SBA loan would be eligible for only $5,000 in grant money, which doesnt have to be repaid. Meanwhile, a homeowner who took on the same value of damage $25,000 but didnt apply for an SBA loan could potentially receive for the full $25,000 grant if all other qualifications were met. In many cases, SBA loan awards were larger than the value of total damage, leaving homeowners without an opportunity for any grant assistance. The rift has continued to impact communities as residents struggle to recover from the August 2016 floods in the Baton Rouge area and other parts of southern Louisiana and the March 2016 floods in north Louisiana. Officials have repeatedly said the duplication of benefits issue has created the biggest problems for homeowners and spawned the most complaints about the states efforts to rebuild. Members of the Louisiana delegation spearheaded a push last fall to eliminate the requirement that SBA loans count against Restore Louisiana grants, and President Donald Trump signed their legislation into law. But Cassidy said OMB still has reservations about the whole policy, chiefly that the change could drive up disaster recovery costs if people wait for grants, instead of seeking loans that they will repay. 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 If OMB doesnt move toward allowing the recovery dollars to flow to people who applied for SBA loans, then Trump could ultimately have the final say. We thought we were pretty clear in the legislation that we wrote, Cassidy said. Their concern is that people in the future will choose not to take the SBA loan and will wait for a grant. Kennedy said he also is frustrated by the bureaucracy that has blocked the funds and he blames OMB for the holdup. They use language like We are behind because of the shutdown. Were in policy discussions. We have to be careful setting a dangerous precedent, he said. Bureaucrats up here speak very fluent BS. Theyre unelected, they make their own rules, they interpret their own rules and enforce their own rules in a court they appoint, he added. It remains unclear when affected homeowners might be able to tap into the money but any timeline is not soon enough, Cassidy said. It will be several more weeks at least, he said. Kennedy said the federal government has interpreted changes to the Stafford Act in a way that doesn't meet the intent the delegation had navigating it through Congress. I asked (Vought) to look me in the eye man-to-man and tell me if OMB will comply with the law," Kennedy told reporters Tuesday after the meeting. The senators will meet again with OMB on April 16 to discuss the issue. My people deserve an answer," Kennedy said. "Im tired of my people being screwed around by the bureaucracy in Washington. We have our doubts about whether carving a separate city of St. George from southeast Baton Rouge is a good idea. Even so, we applaud how hard St. George supporters have worked to advance their plan. It seems cynical to change the rules for getting such a new city incorporated now that the proposal is gaining steam. Initially, St. George supporters were told they needed certified signatures from at least a quarter of the residents within the communitys proposed boundaries to get the plan on a ballot. They fell short of that goal in 2015, then revived their petition and got enough signatures this year to get the measure on the ballot later this year. Senator defends push for parish-wide vote on St. George: 'It's merely democracy' State Sen. Yvonne Colomb said Friday backers of making unincorporated St. George a city are "secessionists" and allowing the entire parish to Now, state Sen. Yvonne Colomb has filed a bill in the Legislature that would require a majority of voters across the parish, not just in the proposed boundaries of St. George, to approve the measure before it becomes a reality. Whatever the merits of that bill, which is supported by East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome, critics of St. George have had years to propose such a law. Changing the rules now, after petition volunteers did due diligence to meet the existing requirements, isnt a good way to encourage citizens to get interested in public affairs. The best path to resolving this debate is at the ballot box, without moving the goal post at the last minute. Senate President John Alario, R-Westwego, chairman of the Revenue Estimating Conference, center, speaks with House Speaker Taylor Barras, R-New Iberia, right, on Thursday, Jan. 17, 2019. The conference, Louisiana's income forecasting panel, discussed whether to boost the official estimates. In Bill Reeds recent letter, he asked why Louisiana does not embrace toll roads, as Texas does. This was prompted by Robert W. Pooles discussion of tolls versus a gas tax increase to improve the states roads and bridges. Both methods of financing road and bridge projects are paid by road users: tolls for specific, high-volume facilities; and fuel taxes by motorists for all types of road and bridge projects statewide. Its not that Louisiana wont embrace toll facilities; its that toll facilities require very large traffic volumes every day to make them financially viable. Texas and other states such as Florida have those traffic volumes; Louisiana does not. Also, recent voter polls in Louisiana reveal that motorists would support a reasonable increase in fuel taxes if they are assured that those taxes would be used only for road and bridge improvement projects. Letters: Why don't we embrace toll roads in Louisiana? I found guest columnist Robert W. Pooles recent column very interesting today. His discussion centered on whether the sorry state of Louisian In addition, the history of toll bridges in Louisiana is not encouraging for private investors. Motorists who use toll facilities such as the Crescent City Connection in New Orleans and the Sunshine Bridge used extensive political pressure to have the tolls removed. The maintenance and operation costs for those facilities must now come from the states regular highway budget. Toll financing and private public partnerships need to be considered where appropriate, but only an increase in the gas tax, which is paid by highway users, will generate the funds needed to fix our deteriorated roads and bridges. Kenneth A. Perret president, Louisiana Good Roads and Transportation Association Baton Rouge Rosalie Johnson unpacks a cake to celebrate people with birthdays in January and February at the Pontchartrain Park Senior Center in New Orleans, La. Friday, March 22, 2019. A tax for the Council on Aging will be on the ballot March 30. The Council on Aging coordinates and oversees social, recreational, educational, and nutritional services to persons 60 and over in the City of New Orleans. For recycling to come back A Huge, Huge Ass Beer New tires for every car A Christmas Eve visit from St. Freedia A day without Jeff Landry Vote View Results Diversified Foods is seeking a break on property taxes to help offset the cost of expanding its Madisonville plant, the largest of three recent requests made to the St. Tammany Parish Council under new rules that give local governments a say in awarding the generous tax breaks. The food manufacturing and distribution company said its $15.5 million frozen-foods plant expansion is expected to bring an additional 44 jobs to the parish. The company is seeking a 10-year property tax break under Louisiana's Industrial Tax Exemption Program, a state-sponsored benefit offered to manufacturers who promise to create jobs. The request, which was formally discussed by St. Tammany Parish officials on Monday, is the first made in the parish under the recent rule changes that shifted more power over the exemptions to local governments and other entities that are funded by property taxes. Rykert Toledano, chairman of the Parish Council's Finance Committee, told the applicants that they were guinea pigs. What do new Industrial Tax Exemption Program rules mean? More power to states, tax authorities A state board gave final approval Wednesday to changes in the handling of a controversial 80 Diversified Foods' request was by the far the largest of the three, with Dependable Glass Works seeking tax relief on an investment of about $539,000 and Mechanical Equipment Company Inc. on nearly $300,000. Under the program, companies pay only 20 percent of the property taxes that would be assessed on their new investment for a 10-year period. For Diversified Foods, that would be a savings of $1.9 million. Until last year, the program, known as ITEP, allowed the state to grant exemptions to property taxes with little or no input from the local governments that rely on property taxes to fund local services. The Louisiana Board of Commerce & Industry voted in June to let local taxing authorities give a "yea" or "nay" to new tax breaks after the state vets the applications. The council's Finance Committee voted to recommend that the full Parish Council approve all three applications when it meets Thursday. The parish School Board, which also has a say in granting tax breaks, will hear from the applicants at a committee meeting Thursday, with a vote the following week. Chris Masingill, chief executive officer of the St. Tammany Development District, urged the Finance Committee to approve all three applications. While acknowledging that the Diversifed Foods application represents a net loss in terms of tax revenue, Masingill said the expansion will mean the retention of 88 existing jobs as well as the addition of new ones, to the tune of $44 million in payroll over the next 10 years and $7 million in payments to vendors. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up But while the Finance Committee gave its stamp of approval, members questioned Diversified Foods closely about safety at its plant. Members pointed to an ammonia leak in October 2015 that forced the closure of Interstate 12 for six hours and the evacuation of Diversified Foods and Champagne Beverages. Councilman Steve Stefancik asked the company's representative, Scott Budak, if Diversified Foods had constructed a second road out of its property, stressing the safety risk of a leak. "If the wind had shifted, they'd probably all been dead," he said, referring to workers at the plant. Clint Ory, chief of administration for St. Tammany Fire Protection District No. 13, also spoke, saying that the plant creates a unique hazard because of its size and the fact that it uses anhydrous ammonia. Other taxpayers in the fire district who don't have a tax exemption are paying so that officials can be prepared to address that risk, he said. The Fire District receives 29 mills in property taxes, and Ory said that it will lose about $300,000 in revenue over the next decade from this exemption. Diversified Foods also received an exemption when it initially built its plant, Ory said, and that doesn't expire until 2020. The fire district doesn't oppose economic development, Ory said, but the parish must understand that there is a cost to such exemptions. Continued growth in the area is allowing the fire district to get enough revenue to meet its needs, he said, but problems will arise should growth slow. The fire district has answered 59 calls at the plant in 10 years, he said, two of them ammonia leaks. Committee members Gene Bellisario and Toledano urged the company to work with the fire district to address its needs. "There's a chance here for a partnership ... maybe there's a way to defray some of your costs," Toledano said. "I'm imploring you to do that, and I will follow up in a few months." This story was altered on April 3, 2019 to correct the spelling of Chris Masingill's name and the time period for Diversified Foods' payroll. The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger will have heart surgery this week, adding clarity days after the band suddenly pulled out of this year's Jazz Fest lineup. The 75-year-old is expected to undergo heart valve replacement surgery Friday in New York, according to multiple reports. The news was first reported by Drudge Report and then confirmed by Rolling Stone. Rolling Stones will miss New Orleans Jazz Fest due to tour postponement, medical issues The Rolling Stones will not appear at 2019 New Orleans Jazz Fest after postponing their latest tour so Mick Jagger can receive medical treatment. The band announced Saturday it would miss its scheduled and highly anticipated perfomance at the 2019 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, citing then-undisclosed medical issues involving Jagger that required the postponement of their latest tour. Jagger was scheduled to have the surgery this week in New York, according to the report. No additional details of the planned procedure were immediately made public. "Im so sorry to all our fans in America & Canada with tickets. I really hate letting you down like this," Jagger said in a tweet Saturday morning. "Im devastated for having to postpone the tour but I will be working very hard to be back on stage as soon as I can. Once again, huge apologies to everyone." +2 Keith Spera: Rolling Stones cancellation is the most devastating in Jazz Fest history As big as the build-up was for the Rolling Stones' appearance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the disappointment over the band The band's No Filter Tour was expected to start April 20 in Miami. Landing the Rolling Stones for Jazz Fest was, in producer Quint Davis estimation, a Biblical prophecy come true. They were set to headline the second "Locals Thursday" of the event's 50th anniversary, which would have kicked off the festival's second weekend. The festival spans eight days this year, compared to the traditional seven over a two-week stretch. Gates open on Thursday, April 25 with the final day of performances coming 10 days later on Sunday, May 5. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up To cover the Stones multi-million-dollar fee, the festival priced tickets for that day at $185 more than double Jazz Fests regular at-the-gate price, but in line with pricing for other stops on the Stones upcoming No Filter stadium tour of North America. Can't see video below? Click here. Jazz Fest officials said more information will come about ticket refunds and the May 2 music lineup. An initial sale of the tickets quickly sold out, with a line that stretched clean around the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Festival organizers on Tuesday announced additional tickets would be made available for sale. A seventh grader's class project made a remarkable discovery that ultimately prompted administrators to shut down drinking fountains at his New Orleans school. Berr Voss-Potts, a 13-year-old at Homer Plessy Community School, found traces of lead in the school's water using an off-the-shelf test kit. The school took quick action and shut down the water fountains, according to WWL-TV report. The Orleans Parish School District plans to install water filters at Plessy and will keep the fountains offline until then. Plastic covers were placed on the fountains Monday to prevent students from drinking water out of them. Voss-Potts conducted the test as part of a student NPR podcast challenge. "I thought it would be cool to test the water because it's an old building," Voss-Potts told WWL-TV. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Plessy moved two years ago into the 87-year-old McDonogh 15 school building in the French Quarter. Lead in drinking water has harmful effects on children and is becoming a growing concerns for cities across the nation, highlighted by the ongoing crisis in Flint, Michigan. According to the EPA, even low levels of lead in children can cause lower IQs, learning problems, slowed growth and in rare cases, death. The Orleans Parish School Board released a state following the discovery. "Due to the low water pressure in the building, we were unable to install water filtration systems this morning at the Plessy School as planned. However, OPSB delivered more than 2,000 water bottles at the school today and will continue to make sure students have access to drinkable water as we work to install those water filtration systems as a precaution. We've placed an emergency order for booster pumps which are needed in order to fully install filtration systems in school buildings with low water pressure." Bob Owen, a Slidell-area businessman, has announced his candidacy for the District 76 seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. A Republican and lifelong Slidell resident, Owen has spent 15 years in medical administrative work, and currently is executive director of both The Center for Health Management and PresriptFit, LLC. This will be his first run for political office. Owen wants to work immediately to address the state's Coastal Master Plan, which he said leaves Slidell-based District 76 ripe for disaster if faced with tropical weather. "We have great schools, culture, heritage and access to nature, Owen said. However, we are at a crossroads. The Coastal Master Plan leaves the majority of District 76, the economic powerhouse of East St. Tammany, completely unprotected when the next hurricane comes. "It's time that someone stands up for all of Slidell. Owen believes the state's current business tax structure hampers companies looking to relocate here, which has worsened Louisiana's budget crisis. He said the problem can be solved by putting in place a simple and attainable tax system so business owners can anticipate expenses each fiscal year. St. Tammany top stories in your inbox A weekly guide to the biggest news in St. Tammany. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up We have to fix our tax structure so that businesses can operate without the government holding them back," Owen said. "Politicians can talk all they want about attracting businesses to the state and improving economic development, but that will never be fully attained without restructuring our tax codes. Owen also said the state must make a serious effort for "real" tort reform, and he believes his 15 years in medical administrative work provide insight on how to rein in the state's insurance rates, which are among the highest in the U.S. Owen also actively gathered local and regional support against the controversial One Lake project --- a recent U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan which would have dammed the Pearl River in Jackson, Miss. which many believed would have caused significant water flow issues at the river's mouth just east of Slidell. Owen, 42, graduated from Northshore High School and is an alumnus of the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU. He has been married to his wife, Cindy Grashoff Owen, since 2002, and has a stepson Thomas, and a daughter Catherine. District 76 incumbent Kevin Pearson is term-limited from seeking reelection. St. Tammany Parish Councilwoman Michele Blanchard is the only other announced candidate in the House race. Qualifying for the election will be held Aug. 6-8. The election is scheduled for Oct. 12. The homeless man realized he had been caught trying to cash a fake check, so he slid a note over to the Marrero bank employee reading, I am in danger and being forced to do this. The message, frantically written on a deposit slip that August day, didnt help the man avoid an arrest. But it did tip off investigators to a larger case that has ensnared two men accused of recruiting homeless people to cash counterfeit checks, either for a cut of the money or to spare harm to loved ones. New Orleans federal court documents that were unsealed late last week spell out the case against Juan Armstead and Reginald Patterson, both 31. Authorities have arrested the longtime friends, who seem likely to be prosecuted. According to court records, the Jefferson Parish Sheriffs Office began receiving reports of fake checks being cashed at local financial institutions around summer 2017. The account information on the checks had been stolen from the mail. The people who tried to cash them had allegedly been recruited near two shelters serving homeless people in New Orleans: the St. Joseph Rebuild Center on Tulane Avenue and the New Orleans Mission on O.C. Haley Boulevard. An important break in the case came on Aug. 3 of last year, when a man walked into a Regions Bank on Avenue D in Marrero and asked to cash a $1,792 check that an employee quickly recognized as counterfeit, court documents said. As Regions personnel summoned the account holder to the bank and stalled the man trying to cash the check, the man scribbled on a deposit slip: I am in danger and being forced to do this. The Sheriffs Office soon arrested the man, who waived his right to remain silent and explained that two men had approached him near the Rebuild Center with an offer of work. The two then drove him across the Mississippi River, asked him for his identification and ordered him to cash a check. If he agreed, he said he was told, they would pay him through a check; if he refused, they would hurt whoever was at the address on his ID. The man mentioned that one of those who picked him up had tattoos on the right side of his jaw line and his right cheek. A Sheriffs Office economics crimes investigator recalled a prior suspect with similar tattoos: Armstead. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up While the informant couldnt pick him out of a lineup, investigators used data from Armsteads cellphone provider to determine that he was near the Regions Bank when the informant had tried to cash the fake check there. Automated license plate readers also placed Armsteads black Jeep Cherokee with Georgia tags in the area. Then, over a roughly two-month period beginning Oct. 23, four other people allegedly tried to cash counterfeit checks but were arrested. Worth between $1,669 and $1,980, those checks were taken to Hancock Whitney Bank branches in Metairie, Marrero and Slidell, and an Iberia Bank in Elmwood. All four picked Armstead out of a lineup as being involved in recruiting them. One also identified Patterson. One of the four allegedly recalled visiting eight banks, managing to cash checks at two while being unsuccessful at the rest. Another said he was offered 10 percent of the value of any checks cashed, and two others were offered about $200 per cashed check. The documents do not say whether any of the four remaining informants was homeless. One was allegedly approached at a Metairie Waffle House and offered the chance for some extra money. Another said he was led to believe the money was for cash payments to construction workers. Federal agents and local law enforcement officers raided Armsteads car in Metairie and home in Algiers on Jan. 31. They said they found 5 pounds of marijuana, a rifle, 350 tablets believed to be the party drug Ecstasy, counterfeit checks and stolen checks at his home and a typewriter and counterfeit checks in his Jeep. Patterson allegedly drove up during the search on Armsteads Jeep and allowed his gray, two-door Mercedes to be searched as well. Agents said they seized two counterfeit California drivers licenses with his photo on them. The vehicle also matched the description of a car used to drive the man who tried to cash the fake check in Slidell, court documents said. Armstead was arrested on a federal count of plotting to commit bank fraud; he is being held without bail. Patterson, who was arrested on state counts of forgery, posted $10,000 bail. Who is in the market for a used or, in car yard sales-speak, a "pre-loved" bank executive? Companies that are prepared to look past the sticky mud stains of the royal commission and pick up a very high level and experienced manager for a second-hand price - thats who. Seeks chief executive and co-founder, Andrew Bassat, hasnt disclosed what he will be paying former Commonwealth Bank chief executive, Ian Narev, to join Seeks executive ranks but it is sure to be a fraction of what Narev was earning at the bank. Ian Narev is now a digital guru. Credit:Louise Kennerley And Andrew Forrest, who earlier this year recruited former head of National Australia Banks consumer banking and wealth arms, Andrew Hagger, has also snared a highly-experienced executive who has run a very large and complex business. Again the amount Forrest is paying Hagger to look after his charity, Minderoo Foundation and his private investments housed in the Minderoo Group, has not been disclosed. But it wont be a big pile of cash. Both these appointments represent a lot of bang for not a lot of buck. Richmond An owner-occupier has paid $1,475,000 for a Richmond strata retail shell in an off-market deal brokered by Teska Carsons George Takis. Located in Valeo Constructions new 31 apartment Olor development at 306 Swan Street, the 215 sq m ground floor premises had frontage to Swan Street and on-site parking. Mr Takis said the property sold on a very strong $6860 a sq m rate which reflected the location, new build, and opportunity to design a state-of-the-art, product-led fit-out. Springvale Four newly developed office, showroom and warehouse properties in the Princes Business Estate at 556-598 Princes Highway have sold for a total of $5.7 million to individual investors. CVAs John Nockles and Knight Franks Stuart Gill negotiated the sales for an average 5.73 per cent yield. A strong level of inquiry from investors on this campaign and others we have sold this month is demonstrating stable demand from investors on sub $2 million assets, they said. The four showrooms were leased to tenants Iron Chest, NEWG Group Trading, Melbourne Ceramics and Leeway Security. Clayton An owner-occupier has purchased a 175 sq m office in the popular Uni Park precinct at 195 Wellington Road for $762,500. The office came sold with a quality fit-out and included seven car spaces on title. Knight Franks Matthew Romanin and Nick Bisset in conjunction with Colliers Internationals Jordan Lipton brokered the deal. Camberwell A Sydney-based investor has snapped up a two-level building at 849 Burke Road for $1,675,000 on a sharp 4 per cent yield, Fitzroys Chris James and David Bourke said. The two-level 185 sq m building, home to the Camberwell Sewing Centre which occupies both floors on a 5-year lease deal, is opposite the Burke Road walkway entrance to Camberwell train station. Niddrie A retail space leased to Qudos Bank sold at auction for $1.5 million. The building at 397 Keilor Road saw strong bidding with 23 bids by two bidders, each raising the other by $10,000. It fetched $100,000 above reserve, CVAs Anthony Carbone and Craig McKellar said. Leased for $68,640 per annum, it sold on a yield of 4.58 per cent. Newport Growth-focused investors are betting on shopping strips. A first-time investor has acquired a two-storey Newport Village freehold under the hammer for $875,000. Fitzroys agents James Lockwood and James Spencer marketed 23 Mason Street. The new owner also owns the cafe next door. Vacant retail properties have been trading strongly throughout Melbourne, despite tightened lending conditions encouraging investors to seek tenanted assets, Mr Lockwood said. A new warehouse at 38 Halsey Road in Airport West sold for $980,000. Airport West Robert Cubelic and Craig McKellar of CVA have sold a new warehouse at 38 Halsey Road for $980,000. The 361 sq m property was leased earlier in the year for $43,000 per annum on a 3+3+3 year term. The sale equates to a yield of 4.38 per cent. Kew East Strong demand for shops in the inner east has seen a vacant asset in the tightly-held Kew East Village snapped up before auction. Chris James and David Bourke of Fitzroys sold 674 High Street for $1.2 million. The sale reflected a sharp 2.5 per cent yield on a current market rent. Sunbury A fully leased healthcare centre in the heart of Sunburys retail precinct has sold for $4.51 million after a competitive auction. CBREs Sandro Peluso, Josh Twelftree, Jimmy Tat and Rorey James handled the sale of 92-96 OShanassy Street, a property anchored by Tri-Star Medical Group. Astute buyers are identifying now is the best time to buy, Mr Peluso said. Chirnside Park CVAs Stan Dawidowski and Jarrod Moran have sold a an industrial office/warehouse at 4 Bonavita Court for $500,000. LEASES Melbourne Overlooking Melbourne Town Hall, a Level 2 suite in 220 Collins Street was only on the market for three months before leasing to Trunk Tailors, Colliers Internationals Brigitte Doupe said. The boutique 60 sq m office in the well known and historic Manchester Unity building was leased for $700 per sq m gross. Trunk Tailors were attracted to this address due to the quality of the refurbishment, she said. Cremorne La Manna & Sons has leased a ground floor commercial kitchen at 103 Green Street at a $300 per sq m rate in a 2-year deal negotiated by Colliers Internationals Chris Meehan alongside Teska Carsons Matt Feld and Luke Bissett. Mr Meehan said inner fringe locations such as Cremorne were becoming increasingly popular. Meanwhile, Hit IQ has taken 400 sq m at 9-17 Raglan Street in South Melbourne at gross face rent of $450 per sq m, Mr Meehan and colleague Tristan Parker said. Melbourne Security firm Gatekeeper Vetting Pty Ltd has taken a part of Level 9, 179 Queen Street. Canberra-headquartered Gatekeeper signed a 5-year lease over the new 82.50 sq m office space in a deal negotiated by JLLs Alexandra Harper at $400 per sq m per annum. Camberwell Retail wine supplier Oak Road Estate have consolidated their Moorabbin and Camberwell offices and taken up space in a fully-fitted 697 sq m suite at 357 Camberwell Road. Oak Road signed a 3-year least at around $300 per sq m net. Colliers Internationals John Howell and Damien Adkins in conjunction with Gorman Kellys Sam Torrance and Mario Nobrega negotiated the lease. Derrimut Regional public transport operator V/Line has leased an office and storage depot at 61 Castro Way. CBREs Fergus Pragnell, Ricardo Cappelletti and Tom Murphy negotiated a 4-year lease for the 1110 sq m office/warehouse on behalf of landlord Golden Developments, the largest distributor of duck eggs in Victoria who operate from an adjoining building. Campbellfield St Vincent De Paul has leased a corner showroom at 1716-1718 Sydney Road through CVAs Craig McKellar and Stan Dawidowski. The 750 sq m building was leased for $100,000 per annum on a 5-year lease. MOVERS Australian company chiefs have broadly backed a firm stance on national security risks posed by China, saying economic opportunities created by the rising giant must be balanced against potential strategic dangers. The survey by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of leading company executives has found widespread support for the more muscular approach the Coalition government has taken towards China recently, with many saying Australia has the balance about right. Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman summed up a common view that security and economic prosperity were dependent on one another. Credit:Jessica Hromas The government, under former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, took several major steps on national security that deeply irked Beijing, including introducing foreign interference laws and banning Chinese telco Huawei from supplying equipment to the coming 5G mobile network. That posture has continued under Prime Minister Scott Morrison, though analysts detect a softening of the rhetoric around China. Former Liberal Party leader John Hewson and the Olympian taking on Tony Abbott for his job, Zali Steggall, have teamed together to back Australian-made electric vehicles. It came a day after federal Labor launched a new climate change policy, which aims to make half of all new cars sold electric by 2030. Zali Steggall putting the badge on an Australian-assembled electric vehicle at the Smart Energy Conference. Credit:Andrew Burn Photography Mr Hewson and Ms Steggall came together at the Smart Energy Conference in Sydney, on Tuesday, to support the launch of Australian auto manufacturer ACE-Electric Vehicles cargo van. ACE-EV plans to build and assemble electric vehicles in Australia. It currently only assembles flat packed EVs in Brisbane, Queensland. We may raise eyebrows at the Spanish siesta and blame the nation's sluggish economy on the fact that the shops are shut between 2pm and 5pm, but the fact remains that even though only 18 per cent of Spaniards admit to having an afternoon nap, they enjoy a much longer life expectancy than UK citizens as do Italians, who also take an afternoon riposa. Loading There is further research to back this link between loafing and longevity: according to a 2012 report from the Spanish Society of Primary Care Physicians, a regular short sleep after lunch can reduce stress, help cardiovascular function, and improve alertness and memory. However, the fact remains that even though we would all benefit from a nice lie down, culturally, taking a nap in the workplace is frowned on by most firms. This, argues Dr Nerina Ramlakhan, a sleep expert and author of The Little Book of Sleep, is counterproductive. "I said 15 years ago that organisations that allow their staff to nap will have a competitive advantage," she says. "The human body is not designed to be on the go all the time, but work patterns and technology mean that we are constantly active and bombarding our brains with information. Many people never stop during the day or take breaks and they get home in the evening feeling shattered and exhausted. A mid-afternoon nap is a way to withdraw from external stimulus so the brain can rebalance and the working memory can empty itself." She recommends a 20-minute doze between 2pm and 4pm, sitting or lying down. "Avoid going into deep sleep as you might come out of it feeling groggy. You want to get to the early state of sleep where you just start to drift off," she advises. "These power naps help cognitive performance." A few forward-thinking firms now provide "nap pods" and sleeping areas, but, as Dr Ramlakhan concludes, their prevalence remains "a long way off". The result of these dozes yes, even the bathroom ones is a miraculous renewal of energy and focus. Our reluctance to embrace casual slumber is cultural and for liberation we need to look to Asia, where sleep is more of a public affair. Snoozing workers draped over scooters at the side of roads are a common sight in various cities in Vietnam, while in Tokyo and Hong Kong, it is common to see zonked-out businessmen asleep in public places - something the Japanese call inemuri, which means "being present while asleep" and is symbolised by people dozing at their desks, in class and in meetings. Indeed, the Japanese are arguably the masters of casual sleep: dropping off in the day has been recorded as far back as the 10th century. For people not used to the practice, it can be confusing and disconcerting, particularly in business meetings, and it is tricky to understand the nuances of when and where it is acceptable. Loading Dr Brigitte Steger, senior lecturer in modern Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge, explains: "In Japan it's taken for granted that you fall asleep when you are tired. Inemuri describes a social aspect of napping while you officially do something else. For that reason, it is not seen as sleep, although physiologically you might well be fully asleep." Most likely, we have a long way to go until slumping at desks in the UK is viewed positively, but some businesses are keen to practise their own brand of nap-iquette. St Luke's creative agency in London provides workers with a range of benefits focused on wellbeing, including a quiet sleeping area with two beds. Employees each receive their own pillowcase. Neil Henderson, CEO and owner, says staff are often expected to work late nights and be in for meetings in the morning. "Advertising is a demanding industry. If someone's only had five hours' sleep because they've been working late and had an early start, their productivity will be hopeless for the rest of the day," he says. "I can't always change the times they are needed, but I can provide somewhere for them to go and have another hour's kip. A power nap midmorning or midafternoon sets you up for the rest of the day. You are much more alert. It also promotes creativity. Sleep and creativity are closely aligned so it helps us get an edge on the competition." At a time when more than two thirds of adults in all developed nations fail to get the recommended eight hours a night, perhaps the answer is a simple one. Trust me, you'll feel all the better for an afternoon nap. Even if it does take place on the loo. Nap hacks: Dr Ramlakhan's five-step plan to productive daytime dozing Step 1: Get comfortable, but not too comfortable. Avoid getting into bed and pulling the covers up to your neck. The key is to find somewhere you can mentally and physically relax without worrying about being disturbed. Switch off your phone. Step 2: Set an alarm for 10 to 20 minutes. Who wrote the note is anyones guess. Presumably it wasnt McQuillan, given he is overseas and his office says he cant return calls until April 24. But his mates at the bar have confirmed its his Alfa, and that hes rather passionate about the Italian marque. In any event, it could have been the greatest anti-theft mechanism Collingwood has even seen. But sadly, the key scratches are still there. Long live Victoriana, hopefully Oxford University fellow and former warden of Melbourne Universitys Trinity College Donald Markwell promised he would bring significant change to Sydney Universitys most famous boys club, St Pauls College. Less than 12 months after taking up residence in the men's-only college, St Pauls first lay warden appears to be delivering on his pledge. On the agenda? The colleges annual cabaret homage to monarchs and homelands past, Victoriana! which has been a fixture on the buttoned-up colleges events schedule for more than half a century. Its the Blighty-themed and Union Jack-festooned annual revue, featuring no end of tributes to Her Majesty, and a cast of St Pauls past and present residents and women performing Victorian ditties from a tiny stage inside the colleges gothic great hall. Dr Markwell met with members of the production team last week to discuss the mid-year event. St Pauls media spokesman Rohan Watt says the meeting focused on logistics and he was adamant the event would proceed as it has for the past 56 years. Nothing to see here. But as of Tuesday morning, all mentions of Victoriana! had been removed from the colleges website. Sandstone for days: St Paul's College inside Sydney University Credit:Dominic Lorrimer Meanwhile, others familiar with the catch-up said the discussions were broader than logistics, and also covered the repertoire for the evening, which is to be curated from a song book of 43 ditties, each displaying varying levels of bawdiness and patriotism. Another insider said the event should go ahead, there are just some issues to be worked through. G-rated crowd pleasers include Daddy Wouldnt Buy me a Bow Wow, I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside, There Was I Waiting at the Church and Land of Hope and Glory, the finale sung to an audience wielding sparklers and a giant Union Jack. More risque numbers include Nobody Loves a Fairy When Shes Forty, The Pheasant Pluckers Son and Have Some Madeira MDear. How the spectacle will go down on campus in this post #MeToo era, and under the watch of a new warden staking his reputation on reforming the college which has been lampooned as an anachronism remains to be seen. Great fun? Yes. Musically brilliant? Absolutely. Politically correct? Perhaps not. But members of the production team, Paulines (their descriptor, not ours) and regular guests will say thats the whole point. Musical star and former Pauline Peter Cousens was to MC the event this year. His daughter, conservative commentator and talented musical theatre performer Daisy Cousens was also to return to the cast from a famously competitive selection process. Other regular guests include former New South Wales governor Marie Bashir (a regular) as well as NSW Arts Minister Don Harwin, outgoing Cabinet member Prue Goward and more than half of NSW Labor Right. The door's always open at 104 This column revealed on Tuesday how former Liberal party staffer John Osborn had emerged as a prominent face supporting Josh Frydenbergs campaign for Kooyong. Credit:Matt Golding A Queensland teacher has been banned from the classroom for at least 18 months after posting sexist and violent comments on social media, a tribunal has found. The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was investigated after an anonymous tip to the Queensland College of Teachers in 2017. The teacher is prohibited from teaching for at least 18 months. Credit:Jason South He had been operating a Facebook account under a fake name and posted comments which "could potentially harm young people", documents filed to the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal revealed. On one picture depicting a man captioned "those who want total equality between the sexes are criminals", the teacher commented men and women are not equal. If you read this article and reject it, I fear for you. School children as young as five are self-harming, exhibiting significant behavioural issues and suffering anxiety, and primary school principals say they are struggling to respond. Children as young as prep and grade one are having such significant behavioural issues that whole classes of students are having to be removed because they are destroying the classroom, says Anne-Maree Kliman, president of the Victorian Principals Association. I have had students as young as grade two telling me they wanted to die. As the royal commission into Victorias mental health system begins community consultation sessions this week, Ms Kliman met with Education Minister James Merlino and urged him to dispatch mental health workers to primary schools and increase access to primary welfare officers. A woman was attacked with a fire extinguisher during a terrifying carjacking in peak-hour traffic on one of Melbourne's busiest freeways. The woman was waiting in traffic on the on-ramp to the freeway in Dandenong about 8am on Tuesday when a man in a silver car tried to push his way through the queue. A woman was assaulted during a carjacking on the Monash Freeway. Credit:Ten News The man crashed his Mitsubishi Lancer into other cars before ditching his own. Paul Mullett, the former head of the Police Association Victoria, was in his car, several vehicles behind the woman who was attacked. Medical wards can be sad, monochrome places, but Jozsef Tallosis violin playing enlivens the corridors of Footscray Hospital like the aural equivalent of a splash of bright paint. "My favourite man!" is how Lily Mardesic, ward clerk of geriatric ward 3B, greets him as he walks in. Warding off their pain: staff and patients appreciate Footscray hospital's volunteer violinist Jozsef Tallosi. Credit:Eddie Jim "I love seeing you, our lovely Jozsef." Mr Tallosi, 62, has been a volunteer violinist, playing one day a week here at Footscray and one day a week at Sunshine Hospital, for six months. In 1994, a government decided that one of its citizens who had gone abroad to fight some years earlier had become such a menace that he needed to be stripped of his citizenship, leaving him to wander the world in search of sympathisers. Instead of becoming someone else's problem, he became the whole world's problem. His name was Osama Bin Laden. Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden became the world's problem. Credit:AP This week an Australian citizen, Mohammed Noor Masri, spoke to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, making a plea for Canberra to repatriate him and his family. While Masri is unlikely to prove as pivotal a figure as Bin Laden, he and hundreds of others captured in the fall of the so-called Islamic State raise many of the same questions. By his own admission, Masri has committed a crime, having travelled to the IS-held region of Syria around Raqqa in 2015, some months after it was made a "declared area" under Australian law. Whether this was in fact the full extent of his offending, as he claims, is a matter for a court to determine. But where? The government has already made it clear that, at least in the near term, it would rather not answer that question with the word "Australia". A spokesman for Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said Canberra "is determined to deal with these people as far from our shores as possible and ensure that any who do return do so with forewarning". To this end, it has sought powers to ban foreign fighters even if they are minors from returning, despite a warning from the Law Council that the proposed measures are at odds with our legal precedent and our commitments under international law, and it has also waded into an unedifying diplomatic mess in its attempts to prevent Neil Prakash from facing an Australian court. With our major allies advocating and resisting repatriation, what are the alternatives? Those who have argued that IS offenders should be tried in or near the location where those crimes they stand accused of were committed have to reckon with placing judicial responsibility for hundreds or thousands of cases on states that are either recovering from crisis (Iraq), ruled by a dictator whose human rights abuses are widely acknowledged (Syria) or where the independence of the judiciary is highly questionable (Turkey). Many of the IS captives are held by Kurdish forces who represent a putative state and whose institutions are barely formed. Others have suggested a role for the International Criminal Court, which was created to address crimes against humanity of the type routinely committed by IS and its cadres. Australia is a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the court, and if it decided that it was not going to try its citizens it could in theory refer them to the ICC. However this would also set a troubling precedent. The ICC was meant to deal with situations where a nation's justice system proved inadequate; is that where we are with regard to terrorism? Woo Mi-hwa, left, and Seo Yi-sook play Nora Helmer in the play "A Doll's House, Part 2," which is set 15 years on from where Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" concludes. Courtesy of LG Arts Center By Kwon Mee-yoo Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's 1879 work "A Doll's House" is a modern classic. It revolves around an immature and unsophisticated housewife Nora, who is married to wealthy bank manager Torvald. As the play progresses, Nora realizes her strength and eventually walks out on her husband and children, becoming emancipated from an oppressive marital system in a male-dominated society. Written 140 years ago, the play was revolutionary it portrayed the self-actualization of a woman when feminism was a relatively new concept. The play still resonates with today's audiences as many of the issues it raised are still relevant even though women's rights have advanced considerably over the past century. A 2017 Broadway play "A Doll's House, Part 2" by Lucas Hnath picks up after Ibsen's play concludes and unravels a follow-up story of what happened to Nora after she slammed the door on her marriage. The Korean production is helmed by director Kim Min-jung, whose credits include "Venus in Fur," "Hedwig" and "Spring Awakening." The director thinks that Hnath and Ibsen are basically looking in the same direction. "They both talk about confronting suppression and irrationality and raising the issue of the human dignity," Kim said. The new play features only four characters Nora, her husband Torvald Helmer, the family nanny Anne Marie and Nora's daughter Emmy. Veteran actresses Seo Yi-sook and Woo Mi-hwa alternate in the role of Nora; Son Jong-hak and Park Ho-san as Torvald; Jeon Guk-hyang as Anne Marie and Lee Kyung-mi as Emmy. From left, actors Son Jong-hak, Woo Mi-hwa, Seo Yi-sook and Park Ho-san of "A Doll's House, Part 2" pose for a photo. The play, written by Lucas Hnath is set 15 years on from where Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" concludes. Courtesy of LG Arts Center Instead of reliable and regular official statistics, we get piecemeal research projects from private sources. Left-leaning think tank, the Australia Institute, made headlines earlier this month when it produced a report claiming Australia now has more firearms than in 1997, even accounting for population growth. John Howard wears a bullet-proof vest at a rally in Sale in June 1996 to argue for gun restrictions. The national registry that was promised at the time has never eventuated. Credit:Colin Murty The report says the number of licensed gun owners has fallen by a third, but this decline is offset by the fact that gun owners now have an average of 3.9 guns each compared with 2.1 in 1997. Gun figures also made news earlier in the month when lobby group Gun Control Australia revealed the number of firearms in NSW had exceeded a million for the first time since the Port Arthur massacre, meaning there is one gun for every eight people. The Greens have an interactive tool at a site called toomanyguns.org that lets people type in a NSW postcode and find out how many guns are in their area. In Pyrmont where the Herald has its office, there are 40 firearms owners, 161 registered firearms and one person with 32 guns. There is no such website for Victoria. Loading Meanwhile, the most recent publicly available, national data from an official source is from the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission in 2016. The ACIC commenced work on the Australian Firearms Information Network in 2016, which aims to track individual firearms from when they're imported. It relies on the states and territories to provide it with information. The ACIC also put out a report on illicit firearms in 2016 but has not done it since and a spokesman confirmed it did not plan to do it this year. I find this astonishing. Imagine if unemployment figures were calculated by an official body every few years if they felt like it, while think tanks and lobby groups could reliably generate headlines and outrage by estimating the jobless numbers in between times. Inconsistent methodology and an irregular schedule make the unofficial figures less useful, even before you consider the vested interests that come into play. Australians deserve to know exactly how many registered guns there are in the country at all times - the Australian Bureau of Statistics or another appropriate body should simply release the figures without fanfare every quarter or half year. Meanwhile, the ACIC or the Australian Institute of Criminology should be fully resourced to study illegal guns. About 700,000 guns were handed in to Australia's buyback nearly 20 years ago. Credit:Dean Sewell It seems so obvious so why is it not the case? Associate Professor Philip Alpers, who is behind the University of Sydney initiative GunPolicy.org, says some of the states and territories have dragged their heels, in part because of historical aversion to sharing data and in part because they dont want people to notice the shambles their own registries are in. Alpers says the federal Attorney-General tried to get the national registry up for many years, but many states had no interest in making their data compatible with other states. Eventually, the federal government settled for asking the ACIC for a national database - not a registry. Loading Alpers says some states are exemplary - the NSW registry is updated daily and Queensland updates regularly - while other states and territories drag the chain (the Northern Territory), block requests (Victoria) or have deep-seated differences in the compatibility of data (South Australia). In 2016 the Victorian police declined Alpers request for gun figures, citing an exemption from freedom of information laws in the Firearms Act, in a letter obtained by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Its not necessarily in the public interest to be able to look up the number of guns postcode by postcode - broadcasting that one gun owner has a large stash risks creating a magnet for criminals. But we should certainly know how many guns we have nationally, in each state and at a regional level. We should also know what type of guns they are. Im far more worried about the prospect of handguns in cities or any back-pedalling on automatic and semi-automatic restrictions, than low-powered rifles like the type Dad used to own. Loading One of the most dangerous ideas is the promotion of guns for personal self defence. You only have to look at the US to see where that leads. For the past 22 years Australia has stood as a notable international example of the effectiveness of strong gun laws. With each successive mass shooting in the US, our gratitude and pride that things are different here only grows. A child psychologist is set to replace former federal workplace minister Craig Laundy as the Liberal candidate for the Sydney seat of Reid. Fiona Martin is set to be endorsed by the party's state executive as early as Tuesday after receiving support from Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Outgoing member for Reid Craig Laundy. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer Mr Morrison has been desperately searching for a high-profile candidate to parachute into the seat, after ABC broadcaster Stan Grant and former NSW deputy commissioner Nick Kaldas knocked back his advances. Dr Martin has beaten psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed and the state's state election candidate for Kogarah Scott Yung to contest the federal seat next month. WA's prisons watchdog has blasted conditions at Hakea Prison, with a new report finding it is "over-stretched, overcrowded, and overstressed". Inspector of Custodial Services Neil Morgan said the prison was too small and no longer fit for purpose with infrastructure deficits and overcrowding meaning conditions were "not decent or humane". Hakea mostly houses male prisoners who have been remanded in custody. Credit:Fairfax "It is an aged prison, and most of it is too small and no longer fit for purpose," Mr Morgan said. "It is also severely overcrowded, with no signs of reprieve. Tough new measures designed to punish tech companies that fail to stop the spread of violent content on the internet are set to be rushed through Parliament, after federal Labor said it would set aside its concerns and support the legislation. Prime Minister Scott Morrison last weekend announced plans in the wake of the Christchurch massacre to introduce laws would make it a criminal offence for online platforms to fail to rapidly remove "abhorrent violent material", including videos of terrorist attacks and murders. Social media executives could face jail terms under new Australian laws. Credit:Bloomberg Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus confirmed on Tuesday that Labor would not oppose the legislation, despite criticising the rushed timetable for its introduction in Parliament. "Labor has serious concerns that this bill has been poorly drafted and will not achieve its intended purpose," he said. "[But] Labor will not stand in the way of this bill, despite our concerns." The young "god-king" escaped from his war-torn fairytale land with 20,000 Red Chinese troops pursuing him. LONDON, Saturday. The incredible story of how the twenty three-year-old Dalai Lama reached India was being pieced together in New Delhi last night. Headline from the Sun-Herald 5th April 1959, of the Dalai Lama's amazing trek to India from Tibet, to escape the Chinese Communists. Credit:The Sun-Herald Mother in party As he reached safety there were reports that the Chinese were bringing up 100,000 reinforcements in Central Tibet for an all-out attempt to smash the rebellion. For the way the Dalai Lama escaped shows that the Chinese have far from crushed the Tibetans. On the morning of March 17 the Dalai Lama got away from his summer palace in Lhasa and "walked right through the Chinese Army." His mother, the 57-year old Gyuam Chemo, and his 26-year-old sister, Tsering, and 14-year-old brother, Ngari, met him outside the city with a band of devoted followers, including four Cabinet Ministers. The long marchpartly on foot, partly by yak, pony and mulebegan. The escapers, winding their way over mountains and through thick jungle, knew that the worst part of the journey was the first 50 miles. London: The British Parliament has again failed to settle on a Brexit Plan B, with less than a fortnight before the country crashes out of the European Union without a divorce deal. Another extraordinary day in the British Parliament featured a pro-environment protest in the public gallery featuring nudity and superglue, and an emotional Conservative MP who resigned from his party when the results of the vote came through. A Brexit supporter wears the Union Jack colours on his face. Credit:AP I have given everything to try to find a compromise and I accept I have failed I failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise, Nick Boles said, his voice close to breaking, before announcing I can no longer sit for this party. He then walked from the chamber to opposition MPs applause, ignoring his colleagues astonished pleas for him to reconsider. Continental Rewrites Mobility Through Diversity in Technology and Talent AUBURN HILLS, Mich.--Technology company Continental continues to reinforce its commitment to diversity and leadership at all levels. The company believes its innovative areas such as automated driving, connectivity and electrification is enhanced by utilizing diverse minds. The company has engaged in several initiatives to attract top tech talent to its ranks and become the employer of choice among diverse career-seekers. Continental has launched a short film, The Safety of His Dream, that demonstrates the companys commitment to promoting Science-Technology-Engineering-Math (STEM) among youth, women and minorities. The 2-minute video was filmed at Washington Elementary School in Washington, Mich. and features some of the 430 students who attend there. In the film, Continental features its Balance Economy and Ecology (BEE) mobility concept. Here, the electrically-powered BEE vehicle provides tailored, stress-free and comfortable travel within the city of the future. STEM education helps create our next generation of innovators, critical thinkers and leaders. Having companies like Continental engage with our students is so important as they begin to lay the foundation of their futures, said Dana Hepner, Principal, Washington Elementary School. Continentals technology and business growth is fueled by diversity and inclusion. We are committed to fostering opportunities for women and minority leaders in STEM and plan to increase the percentage of diverse leaders in technology management, said Mary Reardon, Continentals Head of Talent Acquisition for U.S. and Canada. Our success comes from creating and maintaining an inclusive culture, a positive work environment and a number of flexible work options so employees can maintain a healthy work-life balance. Continental recognizes the impact of women and minorities on company growth and technology and reinforces the need for work-life balance and flexible work options. The company continues to expand its range of flexible work practices to include: longer paid maternity leave, paid paternity leave, extended telecommuting, part-time positions and unpaid sabbaticals for up to one year. These initiatives coupled with the relationships Continental is building with minority partners is a step toward building an even more diverse team of engineers, makers and leaders who will drive the future of mobility. Diversity is the catalyst for pioneering developments, which is why promoting diversity is critical to our future success. After all, we want to strengthen our innovative competence with diverse, collective intelligence, said Samir Salman, CEO of Continental North America. One of Continentals newest affinity partners to engage top talent is Fairygodboss, a social network for career-minded women that was created by women to help improve the lives and workplace for women through transparency. Here, over 72 million women who make up the U.S. labor force can view Continentals job openings, employer profile, employee benefits and contributed articles.1 Visitors can also view reviews from former and current female employees. Last week, the company participated in a virtual career fair to engage potential candidates. Through participation in female-focused events such as this, Continental aims to increase the proportion of women in leadership roles worldwide. Continental also continues to engage annually with the Women of Color STEM conference and the Society of Women Engineers, reinforcing its pursuit of gender diversity and leadership at all levels. At the National Society of Black Engineers 45th convention held in Detroit this past March, Continental showcased innovative technology and connected with top talent via the conventions career fair. Continental has been named one of FORTUNE Magazines Most Admired Companies for three consecutive years. Forbes has named the company one of Americas Best Employers for three straight years and has been recognized as one of The Best Employers for Women in 2018. The company also received a Diversity Certificate for its diversity engagement from Toyota Motor North America, Inc. (TMNA) in 2018. For more information on Continental Careers or to search for available opportunities, please visit www.continental.com/careersus. About Continental Barrett-Jackson to Sell 16 No-Reserve Vehicles From Renowned Chip Watkins Collection During Palm Beach Auction Palm Beach, Fla. - April 1, 2019 - Barrett-Jackson featuring an LS2 engine, Corvette C4 polished suspension with coilovers, power disc brakes and a Dana 44 rear end. From classic Resto-ModsA toA low-mileage future classics, the Chip Watkins Collection represents an enviable diversity of performance vehicles,a??? said Craig Jackson , chairman and CEO of Barrett-Jackson. aNot only does the collection represent a seven-decade span of makes and models, but the quality of each vehicle is unsurpassed as well. For anybody looking to add an incredible vehicle to their garage, the Chip Watkins Collection should be on the must-see list during our Palm Beach Auction.a??? Classic American performance vehicles from the Chip Watkins Collection include an unmolested 1969 Shelby GT500 (Lot #689 that has been in the care of the Watkins family since it was originally purchased in 1969. It has less than 35,400 original miles and includes the original Shelby owner card, copy of the Shelby work order, Window Sticker and the door/data tag. Another offering is a 1964 Chevrolet Corvette (Lot #734 a beautiful example of a no-expense-spared Resto-Mod that competed in the SEMA Battle of the Builders 2015 and has been stored in a climate-controlled collection since completion. president of Barrett-Jackson. aThatas why weave always built dockets with as much diversity as possible. The Chip Watkins Collection is a natural expansion of our docket, spanning 70 years of some of the finest examples of collector vehicles. Each one is a tribute to their heritage and impact on the automotive culture.a??? Low-mileage future classics, such as a rare 1996 Chevrolet Grand Sport (Lot #361 Designed with the help of GM Vice President of Design Bill Mitchell, this example is number 32 of only 90 Huggers manufactured in 1980. The Chip Watkins Collection also includes a 1972 Datsun 240Z (Lot #132 in the collection was a one-year-only production car with a 5-speed manual transmission. About The Barrett-Jackson Auction Company Established in 1971 and headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, Barrett-Jackson, The Worldas Greatest Collector Car AuctionsA, is the leader in collector car and automotive lifestyle events, which include authentic automobilia auctions and the sale of high-profile estates and private collections. The company produces auctions in Scottsdale, Arizona; Palm Beach, Florida; at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut; and Las Vegas, Nevada. With broadcast partners MotorTrend (formerly Velocity) and Discovery Channel, Barrett-Jackson features extensive live television coverage , including broadcasts in over 150 countries internationally. Barrett-Jackson also endorses a one-of-a-kind collector car insurance for collector vehicles and other valued belongings. For more information about Barrett-Jackson, visit Barrett-Jackson.com or call 480-421-6694. Ryder Honors Top Truck Drivers During 46th Annual Awards SEE ALSO: Ryder News Archive MIAMI-Ryder System, Inc. , a leader in commercial fleet management, dedicated transportation, and supply chain solutions, announced today the winners of its Driver of the Year awards, which honor the top driver in each of its three business units. With more than a century of combined experience and nearly 10 million safe miles driven between them, Kevin Vaughn based out of Lenexa, Kansas; James Mike Williams based out of Corbin, Kentucky; and Kennard Deano Davis based out of Siloam Springs, Arkansas take their places in the Ryder Driver Hall of Fame, alongside just 116 others over 46 years. One of Ryders longest-running and most prestigious recognition programs, a panel of Ryder executives, safety experts, and professional drivers conduct a rigorous review process of more than 150 nominees annually. The winners are role models who demonstrate a profound commitment to safety, performance, dependability, and citizenship throughout their careers. Kevin Vaughn is the winner for Ryder Dedicated Transportation Solutions for which drivers are responsible for operating specialized equipment, overseeing unique product handling, running complex routes, and meeting rigorous customer service level requirements. In his 33-year career, including 24 years at Ryder, Vaughn has logged 2.4 million preventable collision-free miles. As a Ryder Certified Driver Trainer, he works to ensure all incoming drivers share a commitment to safety. Vaughns strong work ethic and reputation for never saying no have earned him the respect of supervisors and peers. James Mike Williams is the winner for Ryder Supply Chain Solutions for which drivers are responsible for delivering customer products in an efficient and timely manner, to help ensure a fully optimized supply chain. Williams supports one of Ryders key customers a globally recognized automotive manufacturer. Since starting his professional driving career in 1979, at the age of 18, Williams has logged an impressive 3.8 million collision-free miles, including three million with Ryder. Hes known for his work ethic and dependability. Kennard Deano Davis is the winner for Ryder Fleet Management Solutions. He drives for Ryder customer Cobb-Vantress, Inc., for which hes logged more than 3.5 million miles without incident in his 28-year career. Davis is known to love the road and his work. His colleagues and supervisors alike say his passion for his work comes out of his impeccable attention to detail, whether that means making sure his equipment and load are safe or providing the highest level of customer service. Were honored to recognize Kevin, Mike, and Deano for their unwavering commitment to safety and excellence, said Robert Sanchez, Ryder Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. This award is an opportunity to celebrate both a vocation that is vitally important to our nations economy and those drivers who have risen to be the best in their profession. Drivers are a critical part of our business and they are integral to our success. To learn about professional driver positions available at Ryder, visit https://ryder.com/careers/drivers. About Ryder System, Inc. Ryder is a Fortune 500 commercial fleet management, dedicated transportation, and supply chain solutions company. The companys stock is a component of the Dow Jones Transportation Average and the S&P MidCap 400 index. Ryder, which provides commercial truck rental, truck leasing, used trucks for sale, and last mile delivery services, has been named among The Worlds Most Admired Companies by Fortune, as well as one of Americas Best Employers and Americas Best Employers for Women by Forbes. The company is regularly recognized for its industry-leading practices in third-party logistics, environmentally friendly fleet and supply chain solutions, world-class safety and security programs, and hiring of military veterans. For more information, visit www.ryder.com or our newsroom, and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Mitsubishi Motors Reports Best Monthly Sales Since 2004 CYPRESS, Calif.--Mitsubishi Motors North America, Inc. (MMNA), the fastest-growing Asian brand in the U.S. for the second consecutive year*, today reported March 2019 sales of 19,599, an increase of 36.9 percent over March 2018. This is the single-best sales month since March 2004, as well as being the best March since 2004 as well. The brands dynamic lineup of crossover utility vehicles (CUVs) led the way for the month with March 2019 sales up over 60 percent compared to March 2018. Through the first quarter of 2019, calendar year sales are 42,067, an increase of 17.6 percent over the same period in 2018, and the best first quarter of the year since 2004. News and Notes: The popular three-row Outlander CUV had its best sales month ever with 7,923 units sold. The vehicle has been on sale since 2002 Outlander Sport posted its best March ever with sales of 5,309 vehicles MMNAs CUV lineup posted combined sales of 16,716 vehicles sold in March, up 60.1 percent over March 2018 2019 calendar year sales of 42,067 vehicles sold represent a year-over-year increase of 17.6 percent compared to the same period in 2018 During March, MMNA added seven new dealer partners to its rapidly growing U.S. retail network MAR YTD 2019 2018 2019 2018 Mirage 2880 3106 6242 5532 Lancer** 3 773 0 2062 Outlander Sport 5309 4674 12457 13430 Outlander 7923 4789 13740 13099 Outlander PHEV 341 373 631 996 Eclipse Cross 3143 604 8997 653 Total 19599 14319 42067 35772 *Based on Motor Intelligence CY2017 and CY2018 Sales by Manufacturer data. Excludes premium brands. **Vehicle production discontinued in 2018. About Mitsubishi Motors North America, Inc. Through a network of approximately 370 dealer partners across the United States, Mitsubishi Motors North America, Inc., (MMNA) is responsible for the sales, research and development, marketing and customer service of Mitsubishi Motors vehicles in the U.S. 2018 marked the brands sixth consecutive year of sales growth. Located in Cypress, Calif., MMNA is a part of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, the largest automaker alliance in the world. Mitsubishi continues to lead the way in the development of highly efficient, affordably priced new gasoline-powered automobiles, while using its industry-leading knowledge in battery-electric vehicles to develop future EV and PHEV models. By Lee Kyung-min Natixis, one of France's major financial services providers, is expected to delay its plan to open a securities branch in Seoul in the second half of 2019, industry sources said Monday. "Natixis was scheduled to open its securities operation in the first half of this year. But the plan has been delayed to the latter half in the wake of its failed investment in Korea's derivatives," an industry source close to the matter said on condition of anonymity. The delay came after the company suffered losses of about 330 billion won ($300 million) stemming from its investment in equity-linked securities (ELS) here in late 2018. "The return of the firm's investment depended largely upon the performance of the benchmark KOSPI with variables including market volatility. But the investment incurred a huge loss due to wild fluctuation of the benchmark index in the latter half of last year," the source said. The source added that the poor performance has affected an overseas business expansion plan pursued by the French company's headquarters in Paris, known for its expertise in securities and ELS brokerage. Natixis' representative office in Seoul gave up its banking business license in May 2018 and has since been going through the necessary procedure to win a securities license. In May 2018, Natixis appointed former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Korea CEO Cho Su-young as chief of the envisioned securities branch, the source said. According to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), the French entity filed for regulatory approval last Sept. 18, seeking to begin its securities operation here. The prospect of license of operation here may also be influenced by a decision by financial authorities in France. Month Sales Vol % CYTD Sales Vol % Model Curr Yr Pr Yr Change Curr Yr Pr Yr Change Compass 882 1,217 -28% 2,414 2,582 -7% Patriot 0 0 NA 0 1 NA Wrangler 2,568 3,839 -33% 6,431 10,492 -39% Gladiator 0 0 NEW 2 0 NEW Cherokee 1,345 2,011 -33% 3,500 5,133 -32% Grand Cherokee 1,933 1,333 45% 4,777 3,696 29% Renegade 70 106 -34% 173 310 -44% JEEP BRAND 6,798 8,506 -20% 17,297 22,214 -22% 300 738 153 382% 1,128 713 58% Pacifica 304 886 -66% 816 2,012 -59% CHRYSLER BRAND 1,042 1,039 0% 1,944 2,725 -29% Dart 0 0 NA 1 2 NA Charger 1,021 610 67% 1,941 1,278 52% Challenger 198 169 17% 651 404 61% Viper 0 1 NA 0 2 NA Journey 271 673 -60% 760 1,387 -45% Caravan 3,370 2,992 13% 8,206 9,013 -9% Durango 957 816 17% 2,615 1,719 52% DODGE BRAND 5,817 5,261 11% 14,174 13,805 3% Ram P/U 7,230 8,972 -19% 19,120 20,667 -7% ProMaster Van 592 464 28% 1,315 1,095 20% ProMaster City 98 22 345% 247 79 213% RAM BRAND 7,920 9,458 -16% 20,682 21,841 -5% Giulia 22 69 -68% 63 132 -52% Alfa 4C 5 8 -38% 9 14 -36% Alfa Stelvio 40 77 -48% 82 209 -61% ALFA BRAND 67 154 -56% 154 355 -57% 500 16 42 -62% 31 70 -56% 500L 0 4 -100% 2 5 -60% 500X 3 4 -25% 13 16 -19% Spider 21 22 -5% 39 51 -24% FIAT BRAND 40 72 -44% 85 142 -40% TOTAL FCA CANADA 21,684 24,490 -11% 54,336 61,082 -11% - FCA Canada today reported March 2019 sales of 21,684."Our dealers are excited to welcome the new Ram Heavy Duty on the heels of a month where the outgoing model saw sales rise nine per cent," said FCA Canada President and CEO Reid Bigland. "Zooming out, Ram 1500 remains the second highest-selling vehicle in the country and anticipation for the 2020 Jeep Gladiator midsize pickup truck could not be higher."Jeep Grand Cherokee sales of 1,933 were up 45 per cent compared with 1,333 vehicles reported in March of 2018. These results earn Jeep Grand Cherokee the claim of number-one-selling full-size SUV for the month and year to date in Canada; it also signifies a March sales record.The Dodge brand saw its sales rise 11 per cent from the prior year with 5,817 vehicles. Dodge Charger led the brand increase with 1,021 vehicle sales, marking a 67 per cent jump from the same month in 2018. Dodge Durango and Dodge Challenger each reported a sales increase of 17 per cent with 957 and 198 vehicles respectively, while Dodge Grand Caravan saw a sales increase of 13 per cent with 3,370 vehicles.Chrysler 300 sales of 738 vehicles were up 382 per cent in March, compared with the same time last year.Founded as the Chrysler Corporation in 1925, FCA Canada Inc. is based in Windsor, Ontario, and celebrates its 94th anniversary in 2019. FCA Canada is a wholly owned subsidiary of FCA US LLC, a North American automaker based in Auburn Hills, Michigan and member of the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (FCA) family of companies. FCA Canada has approximately 440 dealers and sells Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, FIAT and Alfa Romeo brands, as well as the SRT performance designation. The company also distributes Mopar and Alfa Romeo parts and accessories. In addition to its assembly facilities, which produce the Chrysler Pacifica, Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid and Dodge Grand Caravan (Windsor), Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger and Dodge Challenger (Brampton), FCA Canada operates an aluminum casting plant in Etobicoke, a research and development centre in Windsor, and has sales offices and parts distribution centers throughout the country. A nurse takes care of a patient at a hospital in this file photo. Korea Times file By Kim Bo-eun Large hospitals are protesting a credit card fee hike, calling for them to be exempted citing the nature of the services they provide. The Korean Hospital Association (KHA) said Monday that it submitted a petition to the Financial Services Commission containing this request, March 26. The request was made as card firms have begun negotiating with companies this month on raising transaction fees Those subject to the fee hike are hospitals with annual revenue of more than 3 billion won ($2.64 million). Card firms reportedly notified that they would raise fees for large hospitals to 2.3 percent. The automobile, communications and retail industries, which would also have to pay more in transaction fees, have also protested, but only called for the hikes to be reduced. Hospitals claim they should not be subject to the card fee hike, as they provide services that enhance public health. "We are different from other businesses due to the public nature of the services we provide," the KHA spokesman said. "About 90 percent of hospitals are in the private sector, and medical services are services that are covered by the state's social security system," he said. Hospitals say that payment for medical services is fixed, and that they cannot make patients assume the expenses of raised card transaction fees. This is not the first time hospitals have become subject to a card fee hike. In June last year, hospitals' card fees were raised by more than 0.1 percentage point, after the card fee scheme was reorganized. As a result of the hike, general hospitals now pay a minimum of 3.4 million won more in card fees. The hospitals also say a hike to 2.3 percent is unreasonable considering Hyundai Motor agreed with card firms to a rise to 1.89 percent. Card companies had initially called for the automaker to pay between 1.9 percent and 2.0 percent in transaction fees. There are views that card firms' calls for a 2.3 percent raise fee for large hospitals was an attempt to make them make up for the hikes they failed to achieve with clients such as Hyundai Motor. It appears unlikely that financial authorities will allow for an exemption, as this would provide grounds for more subjects of the fee hike to request exemptions. The card fee hike is being pushed forward with, as the Moon Jae-in administration's policy to alleviate the burden of fees for small shop owners by making larger businesses pay more. Offer a personal message of sympathy... By sharing a fond memory or writing a kind tribute, you will be providing a comforting keepsake to those in mourning. If you have an existing account with this site, you may log in with that below. Otherwise, you can create an account by clicking on the Log in button below, and then register to create your account. Bruce Cumings speaks with The Korea Times and KBS World during a joint interview held at the broadcaster in Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, March 29. Korea Times photo by Jung Da-min By Jung Da-min The only way for the United States to steer North Korea in a better direction is to embrace it, giving it a chance to join the world economy, according to Bruce Cumings, a history professor at the University of Chicago. In a joint interview with The Korea Times and KBS World Radio in Seoul, March 29, the renowned Korea expert said the U.S. should normalize relations with North Korea and declare an end to the Korean War as early as possible. Cumings was visiting Seoul as one of the keynote speakers at a forum commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1919 March 1 Independence Movement. "Particularly, it needs to take economic measures to bring North Korea into the world economy, so they can be captured by the same gravity that China and Vietnam have been captured by," Cumings said. "That's the only way North Korea will ever change." Cumings said South Korea could facilitate peace talks with North Korea by inviting its leader Kim Jong-un to Seoul. "For Kim, who allegedly has switched from his military first and nuclear policies to one-end to build up the North Korean economy, it'd be good for him to get a good look at Seoul and immense development here," he said. "North Korea, if it wants to get off the mark economically and develop, needs every kind of help from South Korea." Cumings also shared his critical views about security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump. He said Trump has made a great progress in the denuclearization talks with North Korea, but may do a better job without hardliners. He said Trump could have made an "interim" deal regarding denuclearization at the last summit with North Korean leader Kim in Hanoi without the hardliners. "I think Trump needs to sort out his advisers, particularly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton," Cumings said. "Trump needs to lead (the denuclearization talks) and there's no reason why he couldn't have made that deal in Hanoi as an interim deal. It wasn't a bad deal really." Cumings said this is a very dangerous situation as Bolton and Pompeo have been on record, especially Bolton for more than 20 years, saying the real answer to the North Korean problem is to get rid of the North Korean regime. "This does not help the U.S. dealing with the North Korean leadership. I don't see how Trump can go forward with the third summit or some kind of deal with North Korea until he gets his advisers on board." He said many people have been waiting to overthrow North Korea or for the country to collapse for his entire lifetime and it hasn't happened, showing it is not the way to deal with the country. "The way to change North Korea in a better direction is to bring it out of its isolation," he said. Despite the failure of the Hanoi summit, Cumings said he still gives Trump credit for what he has achieved since he was elected as president. "It's very important that North Korea quit testing in November 2017, right at the point where they had shown that they had nuclear weapons and an intercontinental ballistic missile," he said. He said Trump's innocent approach to North Korea is different from what he had witnessed with past administrations of the U.S. and South Korea and far from the Washington intellectuals. "Most happened in the last 75 years has been very predictable, because of the confrontation between North and South and sometimes it seems nothing ever changes. You get the progress with Kim Dae-jung and Clinton, you get regress with Bush and Lee Myung-bak and so on," he said. "Trump is very different in that he looks at Korea with innocent eyes. There's nothing innocent about Trump but he doesn't really know about history but wants to make an impact and he doesn't like the foreign policy establishment and what it thinks about Korea." Marine Corps Air Station Squadron barracks at the Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) in Yuma, Ariz. on March 28, 2019. (Cpl. Sabrina Candiaflores/U.S. Marine Corps via AP) 2 Marine Pilots Killed in Helicopter Crash in Arizona Identified YUMA, Ariz.The names of two Marine pilots who died in a helicopter crash during a training mission in southwestern Arizona were released on April 1 as the crash remained under investigation. U.S. Marine Corps officials identified the dead pilots as Maj. Matthew M. Wiegand, 34, of Ambler, Pennsylvania, and Capt. Travis W. Brannon, 30, of Nashville, Tennessee. The Marine Corps says the AH-1Z Viper pilots were conducting a routine training mission in southwestern Arizona when they crashed. https://t.co/SSD9cgWuH8 FOX59 News (@FOX59) April 1, 2019 They said the AH-1Z Viper crashed about 8:45 p.m. Saturday on the vast Marine Corps Air Station Yuma training grounds while the pilots were conducting a training mission as part of a weapons and tactical instructor course. Officials said Wiegand held qualifications in the AH-1Z Viper and AH-1W Super Cobra and Brannon was attending the semi-annual weapons and tactics instructor course hosted by the Yuma base. It is a somber day for the entire Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command as we mourn this tremendous loss, Brig. Gen. Roger B. Turner Jr., a commanding general at the base in Twentynine Palms, California. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff Tuesday. Wiegand, who joined the Marines in 2008, was assigned to the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One in Yuma. His previous duty stations included the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida; the Marine Corps Base Camp in Pendleton, California, and the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma. RIP. Our thoughts are w/ the families. Marine Corps officials on Monday identified the 2 pilots killed during a routine training mission Sat. near Yuma as 34-year-old Maj. Matthew Wiegand of Ambler, Pa., and 30-year-old Capt. Travis Brannon of Nashville. https://t.co/7IAHwLZFJz The American Legion (@AmericanLegion) April 2, 2019 Marine officials said Wiegand previously deployed in support of a Unit Deployment Program in Okinawa, Japan, and his personal decorations included the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with a gold star. Brannon was assigned to the Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 367, Marine Aircraft Group 24, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. His previous duty stations included the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, the Marine Corps Base Camp in Pendleton, and the Marine Corps Air Station in Kaneohe Bay. Brannon also participated in Marine Rotational Force-Darwin in Northern Territory, Australia, and his personal decorations included the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and Sea Service Deployment Ribbon. Marine Shields Friend from Grenade Blast with His Body and Lives to Tell the Tale For soldiers in the United States Marines, the difference between life and death can be the matter of a moment. The opportunity to save a life can occur just as quickly. For Lance Corporal William Kyle Carpenter, jumping on a grenade to save the life of his friend was a split-second decision, but it was also an act of bravery that would resonate forever. November 20, the day before I was hit Kyle Carpenter 201334 Kyle earned the prestigious title of Lance Corporal at the age of just 21. In this role, he was sent into war in Afghanistan in 2010 with a unit that included men that had, inevitably, become close friends. The unit had received strict training and the soldiers were strong, prepared, and competent in the roles they had been designated. But life on the front line is unpredictable. 7 years ago today I was bleeding out on top of a dusty roof in Afghanistan. As I laid there, struggling for air, I Kyle Carpenter 20171121 As fighting intensified, Kyle found himself in the midst of a particularly frantic attack in which a grenade was thrown, and landed near to Kyle and his friend, another soldier. Kyle calculated the trajectory of the grenade, and, noticing that his friend was in mortal danger, jumped on the grenade. Using his body as a shield, Kyle deflected the explosion and was able to save his friends life. As I laid there, struggling for air, I thought about my family, said a prayer, and let the world and life fade away, Kyle remembered, in a poignant Facebook post. Kyles instincts told him that his time was up, but his reserves of strength ran deep. He had, however, suffered devastating injuries. He was rushed to Camp Bastion, where he was initially pronounced dead, but, astounding the medical staff, he somehow managed to pull through. Doctors surveyed the damage and quickly diagnosed shattered bones in the face and skull, and a collapsed lung. Kyles body had been blasted with shrapnel. The brave soldier had a rough ride ahead. Over two years, Kyle endured various surgeries to repair the damage caused by the grenade, which included complicated bone and facial reconstructive surgery, and surgery to repair his damaged lung. Kyle went through 40 surgeries in total. His friends and family stood by him and provided him with the support he needed to get through the ordeal. Their care and attention allowed Kyle to recover not only physically, but emotionally, and make sense of the huge decision he had made to jump on top of a live grenade. You mean more to me than I could ever express, Kyle said of his family, with love. Kyle has maintained a positive, stoic attitude, and even a sense of humor, throughout his recovery. So loved. So blessed and so thankful for my family at home and my family at Walter Reed. You mean more to me than I could ever express. Kyle Carpenter 2018127 As a mark of recognition for his extraordinary, quick-thinking action in the line of duty, and as a mark of respect for his sacrifice, Kyle was awarded the Purple Heart. He also received a Medal of Honor, the most prestigious decoration awarded to military personnel, from President Barack Obama himself. Sgt Maj Barrett (Sgt Maj of the Marine Corps) Kyle Carpenter 2012424 Kyle is and will always be a hero; his act of bravery defines him, and he hasnt let his injuries hold him back. After taking the necessary time to endure surgery, heal, and recover both physically and mentally, Kyle is embarking on a brand-new challenge; he is working towards a degree from the University of South Carolina. Kyle has retired from military service. Epoch Times reporter Louise Bevan contributed to this report 2 of 4 People Found Dead in North Dakota Business Identified: Report Two of four people who were found dead inside a North Dakota business have been identified by a family member a day after it unfolded. Police havent identified any of the victims, but Briann Miller told The Associated Press that her stepfather, Bill Cobb, and mother, Lois Cobb, were among those killed. Officials didnt give any details about the Cobbs causes of death. They were found at an RJR Maintenance & Management building in Mandan. Police responding to a medical call at a North Dakota business on Monday find several dead bodies, local authorities say https://t.co/ZVlzMclcQI pic.twitter.com/dc1lXLe0s3 CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) April 1, 2019 I just know that it was an attack, Miller told AP. I dont know how it happened, what it happened with. Im left in the dark still. None of this makes any sense. All I know is my parents are gone. She said there were no indications that they had any problems at work. The couple had moved from Illinois to North Dakota six years ago. Four people were found dead inside an office in Mandan, North Dakota. Police arent saying how they died but are investigating it as a multiple homicide. https://t.co/NW3in2v6bS pic.twitter.com/MxERYzseFm CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) April 2, 2019 Mandan Police Chief Jason Ziegler said the four bodies were found at RJR Maintenance & Management after someone called 911, according to USA Today. The crime scene is contained, Ziegler said. It looks like an isolated incident. Its very [said] that there are people in this world that would do something like what we had to experience today, Ziegler continued. You [dont] wake up early Monday morning expecting to get this phone call. We will be closed today. RJR Maintenance & Management 201941 According to CrimeOnline, a Facebook post was made by RJR Maintenance & Management on the morning of April 1. We will be closed today, it read, without offering any explanation. Its not clear if the post was made before or after the four people died. Miller commented on the Facebook post, saying her sister contacted mandan police. were [sic] just waiting for more details, adding that she didnt understand why bad things happen to good people. She added that if everyone thats following this post could say a prayer for everyones family involved in this tragedy, that would be really nice hug your loved ones extra tight & never let them forget how much you love them. We will be closed again today. We are sorry for the inconvenience. We will be spending this time discussing our process to move forward and grieve the great losses. RJR Maintenance & Management 201942 In another post on April 2, the firm said it is sorry for the inconvenience, adding: We will be spending this time discussing our process to move forward and grieve the great losses. Miller, meanwhile, issued another lengthy comment on Facebook. To whoever made a senseless act & took the lives of 4 innocent people out of anger or whatever it was.. did you know 2 of them were my parents? did you know they were grandparents who are unconditionally loved by 3 tiny humans.. did you know that my step dad would give you the shirt off his back if you had just asked? she wrote, reported the Daily Mail. Horrifying discovery. Daily Mail 201941 She added that her whole world came crashing down after she learned the news. Other details are not clear. 4-Year-Old Girl With Down Syndrome Killed by Mothers Boyfriend, Says Sheriff A 4-year-old girl with Down syndrome was reportedly killed by her mothers boyfriend, according to sheriffs officials. Adam Hughes, 24, was babysitting his girlfriends children at their home in Rancho Cucamonga, California, when the alleged incident took place, said a news release from the San Bernardino Sheriffs Department on April 1. One of the children, Kylie Willis, had Down syndrome, the release noted. At some point on Tuesday, March 26, Hughes allegedly assaulted Kylie because she angered Hughes by interrupting him, the news release said. He then put her to bed. BREAKING NEWS: A Rancho Cucamonga man has been arrested for allegedly causing the death of his girlfriend's daughter, a 4-year-old with Down Syndrome. ABC7 201941 But, several hours later, he noticed Kylie was not responsive and had blue fingers and lips, said the department, prompting Hughes to call his girlfriend, Corrine Blake. At around 7:56 p.m., he called 911, and paramedics took Kylie to a nearby hospital for treatment before she was airlifted to another medical center for severe head trauma, the sheriffs department said. After she spent several days on life support, Kylie was pronounced dead on March 29 by the alleged attack, the news release stated. Adam Hughes, 24, of Rancho Cucamonga, was arrested for the murder of 4-year-old Kylee Willis. Hughes is Kylee's mother's boyfriend. Corrine Blake, Kylee's mother was arrested for Willful Cruelty to a Child. 24/7 Headline 201941 Two days before her death, both Hughes and Blake were arrested on child abuse charges, but Hughes was later charged with murder after the girl died. The criminal complaint had stated Hughes was accused of unlawfully having care and custody of Jane Doe, a child under the age of 8 years, assault that child by means of force that to a reasonable person would be likely to produce bodily injury, resulting in the child becoming comatose due to brain injury and suffering paralysis of a permanent nature, reported the Daily Bulletin. Scumbag! Daily Mail 201942 Meanwhile, Blake, under circumstances and conditions likely to produce great bodily harm and death, willfully caused and permitted a child to suffer, said court documents. No additional information was released by the department, which added that several agencies are investigating. Anyone with information about the case can call Detective Wendi Beaton at (909) 387-3589 or and can contact WeTip at (800)78-CRIME or www.wetip.com. Violent Crime Declined in 2017 In September 2018, the FBI said Americans committed fewer violent and property crimes across the United States in 2017, according to statistics. The violent crime rateincluding offenses such as murder, robbery, and aggravated assaultdropped by almost 1 percent although it is still about 4 percent above the 2014 rate. The murder rate dropped by 0.7 percent. There were more than 1.2 million violent crimes reported to [the FBI] nationwide in 2017. There was a 0.7 percent decrease in murders and a 4 percent decrease in robberies from 2016 to 2017. Aggravated assaults increased 1 percent in 2017. The FBI began collecting data solely on an updated rape definition last year, and 135,755 rapes were reported to law enforcement in 2017, the agency said. Of the estimated 17,284 murders in 2017, more than half occurred in larger citieswith populations of more than 100,000. There are fewer than 300 such cities in the United States, and while they account for less than 30 percent of the countrys population, many of them contribute far beyond their share to national crime rates and have done so for years, even decades. While the national murder rate inched down to 5.3 per 100,000 residents, it spiked by 15 percent in Philadelphia, to a rate of more than 20 per 100,000 residents. Columbus, Ohio, saw a massive 54 percent murder rate increase, reaching nearly 16.3 per 100,000 residents. 6 Million Miles and No AccidentsUPS Driver Retires After 43 Years A United Parcel Service (UPS) driver in Atlanta retired after driving six million miles in a career that spanned 43 years with no record of an accident. Jimmy Howard was 22 years when he started his career as a driver with UPS in 1975. He went from driving a delivery truck to a tractor-trailer and drove hundreds of miles every day. His driving record is laudable, especially considering the Atlanta traffic, reported Fox5Atlanta. Howard, now 66, told Fox5 on the last day of his job that he never thought he would have such a long career with UPS and that it was a rewarding experience. He started with driving for daily deliveries and then graduated to the companys feeder routes. Towards the end of his career, he was driving nearly 525 miles per day from Atlanta to Mississippi. Howards driving record remained accident-free even in his personal life. He considers it to be a lot of luck and said that there were other contributing factors. Happy retirement Jimmy! After four decades of his career with us and an amazing driving record, you will surely be missed. Howard has driven more than 6 million miles in his career and credits good luck and training for never being in a single accident. https://t.co/QwLrFxGpuz UPS (@UPS) April 1, 2019 A lot of luck, but I think Gods been with me most of the way, he said. And great training from our management staff. Howard said hell miss his co-workers and others he met during the span of his career. Rokeia Gravley of Fox5 Atlanta shared a tribute video clip for Howard on his Facebook page. He said, The salute you get after 43 years of service and a perfect driving record at UPS! UPS driver retires after driving 43 years, over 6 million miles with no accidents https://t.co/NjiCv1xsoO pic.twitter.com/HeV3acmCRr FOX31 Denver KDVR (@KDVR) April 1, 2019 Many people applauded Howard on Gravleys post. One user said, Awwwwww that wouldve made me cry! Congrats. Another said, Congratulations to him. He is blessed and Im sure hes got some great stories. Howards wife, Tammy Olivia Howard shared her feelings about his retirement day on her Facebook. I know it is a bittersweet time as you drive your last run and last few miles of the 6 million you have driven in your 43+ years with UPS. I know they are going to miss you, she said. Tammy said therell never be another driver like her husband. Time to celebrate the next stage of your life. You have earned it!!! I love you with all my heart, she said. I am so very proud of you Chris Howard!! I know it is a bitter sweet time as you drive your last run and last few miles Tammy Olivia Howard 2019328 Family and friends sent their blessings to Howard on Tammys wall. This is awesome! To be the only one ever do have done what youve done Chris !!! Thats really something! Congratulations!! one person said. 81 women have filed a lawsuit against Sharp Healthcare, accusing hospital for secretly recording them with hidden cameras. (Screenshot via Google Maps) 81 Women Accuse Californian Hospital of Recording Them With Hidden Cameras, Says Lawsuit More than 80 women have filed a lawsuit against a Californian hospital for secretly recording them with hidden cameras during medical examinationsincluding having surgery and giving birth. The lawsuit, which was filed by 81 patients on March 29, alleges Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa of installing hidden motion-detecting sensor cameras on drug carts in all three labor and delivery operating rooms at the womens center between July 2012 and June 2013. When triggered, the cameras would begin recording and would continue even after motion has stopped, the complaint said (pdf). These cameras have recorded videos of deliveries, birth complications, and other medical procedures, the complaint states. Moreover, cameras also allegedly captured patients when engaging in discussions with their doctors and medical staff, while partially robed on the operating table, or when undressing for procedures. It also said the angle and placement of the cameras caused patients faces to be recorded, making them identifiable. In total, the hospital allegedly filmed about 1,800 patients during that period. Allison Goddard, the lawyer representing the women in the case, told The New York Times that the hospital is still in possession of thousands of videos. The cameras recorded female patients at the hospitals Womens Health Center as they consulted with physicians, got The New York Times 201942 Its universal shock from the patients and disgust, Goddard said. They dont know how their videos might be used or who may have seen them because Sharp didnt make sure that that would be taken care of. The hospital responded to the allegations in a statement to The Epoch Times, saying the cameras were installed and operated in an attempt to catch people stealing drugs from their anesthesia carts. The three cameras were installed and operated to ensure patient safety by identifying the person or persons responsible for the removal of the drugs, the statement said. Although the cameras were intended to record only individuals in front of the anesthesia carts removing drugs, others, including patients and medical personnel in the operating rooms, were at times visible to the cameras and recorded. The complaint also stated that in addition to breaching the womens privacy by filming them without consent, the hospital was grossly negligent with how they maintained the recordings. The recordings were stored on desktop computers that could be accessed by multiple users, some without the need for a password. Sharp did not log or track who accessed the recordings, why, or when, the plaintiffs alleged. The plaintiffs said the hospital has destroyed at least half of the recordings but cannot say when or how it deleted those files and cannot confirm that it took the appropriate steps to ensure the files were not recoverable. Computers that stored the recordings were refreshed or replaced, and Sharp did not ensure proper deletion of recordings on those computers, the complaint stated. Sharp said that they take extensive measures to protect the privacy of our patients. The surveillance methods in the 2012-13 investigation were used for this particular case only and have not been used again. We sincerely regret that our efforts to ensure medication security may have caused any distress to those we serve, the hospital said in their statement. A class-action lawsuit regarding the recordings and privacy of the patients was filed against the hospital in 2016 and still pending, the hospital said. According to Buzzfeed, the court refused to certify the classa process to combine multiple similar lawsuits together so that it proceeds as part of one larger case. Moreover, the court also denied the hospitals motion for summary judgment. As a result, 81 women decided to refile the case last week. More women are expected to join the lawsuit, according to Goddard. Actress Alyssa Milano Comes to Joe Bidens Defense Amid Inappropriate Contact Claims Left-wing political activist and actress Alyssa Milano has backed former Vice President Joe Biden after two women accused him of inappropriate touching. Milano, who is a prominent supporter of the #MeToo movement, posted a series of posts on Twitter expressing her support for the possible 2020 presidential candidate, along with a photo of Biden and herself. I am proud to call Joe Biden a friend, Milano wrote on April 1. He has been a leader and a champion on fighting violence against women for many years, and I have been fortunate to accompany him to events with survivors where he has listened to their stories, empathized with them, and comforted them. I am proud to call Joe Biden a friend. He has been a leader and a champion on fighting violence against women for many years, and I have been fortunate to accompany him to events with survivors where he has listened to their stories, empathized with them, and comforted them. pic.twitter.com/cI0jsKlu3P Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) April 2, 2019 In a subsequent post, Milano described Biden as a warm, generous individual who believes its [sic] on all of us to pay attention to womens stories and experiences. Biden has been accused of kissing Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative, on the back of the head, an alleged encounter which Flores has recounted in an article titled, An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden, published in the New York Magazine. I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. Why is the vice president of the United States touching me? Flores stated. I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head, she added. A second woman, Amy Lappos, accused Biden of grabbing her during a fundraiser for Connecticut Democrat Rep. Jim Himes in 2009, reported the Hartford Courant. It wasnt sexual, but he did grab me by the head, Lappos told the Courant. He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth. Bidens spokesperson, Bill Russo, issued a response on April 1, addressing the allegations. The Vice President has issued a statement affirming that in all the many years in public life that he has shaken a hand, given or received a hug, or laid his hand on a shoulder to express concern, support; or reassurance, he never intended to cause discomfort, Russo wrote. Biden spokesman Bill Russo with a lengthy response to coverage around the Lucy Flores accusation: These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while. pic.twitter.com/OtkUFnBeBi Matt Viser (@mviser) April 1, 2019 Milano also commented on Floress accusation, saying that she respects the former state reps decision to share her story but added that we cannot assume all womens experiences are the same. 5. I respect Lucy Flores decision to share her story and agree with Biden that we all must pay attention to it. But, just as we must believe women that decide to come forward, we cannot assume all womens experiences are the same. Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) April 2, 2019 Her reaction to the accusations is in stark contrast to how she reacted to allegations of sexual misconduct against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. In a video posted to social media, she called for people to bang down [senators] doors to stop Kavanaughs confirmation. In an op-ed published on Variety, she described Kavanaugh as entitled, aggressive, predatory, toxic even though there was a lack of evidence to corroborate California professor Christine Blasey Fords decades-old allegations. Milano wrote that Kavanaughs confirmation continues to institutionalize sexual violence while setting the stage to remove many of the rights that generations of women who came before have won in hard-fought battle after battle. Like Milano, Meghan McCain, who is a columnist, also voiced support for Biden on social media. Joe Biden is one of the truly decent and compassionate men in all of American politics. He has helped me through my fathers diagnosis, treatment, and ultimate passing more than anyone of my fathers friends combined. I wish there was more empathy from our politicians not less, she tweeted. Joe Biden is one of the truly decent and compassionate men in all of American politics. He has helped me through my fathers diagnosis, treatment and ultimate passing more than anyone of my fathers friends combined. I wish there was more empathy from our politicians not less. Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) April 2, 2019 Social Media Backlash After writing the series of posts showing support to Biden, many social media users criticized Milano for the posts. Oh Alyssa no. You can count someone as a friend, have had nothing but positive interactions with them- & they can still have had harassed or assaulted other people. Being an impactful advocate means listening to & believing others ESPECIALLY when its out of your comfort zone, one social media user wrote. Soooooo.. are his two accusers not to be believed? Or are we supposed to listen to all women??? I cant keep all the hypocrisy straight, another wrote. Big # metoo champ until its someone you like? Just because YOU have only had positive interactions w/ him doesnt mean everyone has been fortunate enough to have the same. His intent doesnt [expletive] matter, another wrote. Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev TASS By Park Si-soo Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo speaks to the media at the Time Warner Center after an explosive device was found there this morning on Oct. 24, 2018 in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Andrew Cuomo to Become Highest Paid US Governor in Country Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is set to become the highest paid governor in the United States due to a pay hike approved by lawmakers in the Democrat-led Senate and Assembly. Cuomos salary would gradually increase from the current $179,000 to $250,000 on Jan. 1. 2021, as part of the new state budget. Lawmakers approved the raise in a vote early on April 1. The states new $175 billion budget includes a statewide ban on plastic bags and a new congestion pricing program to help combat the high-traffic areas in the city. New York Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul will also see a pay increase, going up from $151,500 to $220,000 in 2021. Both pay raises were recommended by a state pay commission last year. It needed legislative approval first for it to be implemented. It has been two decades since the governor and lieutenant governor have seen a salary increase. The last time was in 1999. Lawmakers also saw their first pay increase in nearly two decades in January, when their base salary went from $79,500 to $110,000. Their pay will ultimately rise to $130,000 by 2021. The salary increase for Cuomo, a frequent critic of President Donald Trump, marks a stark difference to how the president handles his wage. Trump has donated all of his paychecks$100,000 a quartersince taking office. In March, the most recent quarters paycheck of $100,000 was donated to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump posted a picture of the check he wrote to the department, writing on Twitter: While the press doesnt like writing about it, nor do I need them to, I donate my yearly Presidential salary of $400,000.00 to different agencies throughout the year, this to Homeland Security. If I didnt do it there would be hell to pay from the FAKE NEWS MEDIA! he added. In January, Trump donated his salary from the third quarter of 2018 to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Manhattans Congestion Charge The New York State legislature approved the new congestion pricing program for Manhattan on March 31 as part of the states budget. But the major details, such as how much drivers will have to pay and how it will be implemented, have not been hashed out yet. The program is aimed at lessening the traffic in congested parts of Manhattan by charging drivers who are heading into the citypushing drivers to reconsider using public transportation. New York City now joins other cities outside America who have already employed such a system, such as London, Stockholm, Milan, and Singapore. On March 31, Cuomo told reporters at a news conference that the toll would be set next year by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) once they have a capital plan established. Today weve gotten it done, Cuomo said. First state in the nation. The governor also described the traffic in Downstate New York as a problem that is only getting worse. His office did not respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times. Vehicles, including cars and trucks, would be tolled when they enter the congestion toll zone, a large area with more than 600,000 people. The zone would run from 60th Street, near the bottom of Central Park, all the way down to Manhattans southern tip. The toll amount has yet to be determined, but earlier proposals have suggested a fee of around $12 per day for most drivers and up to $25 for trucks, with possible variations based on time of day and day of the week. The Associated Press contributed to this report A still frame from closed circuit television surveillance footage shows a US tourist and his attacker in Melbourne, Australia, on March 27, 2019. (Courtesy of Victoria Police) Australian Man Arrested on Suspicion of Attacking a US Tourist A Victorian man has been detained for questioning about a terrifying attack on a U.S. citizen on March 27. Victoria Police confirmed on April 2 officers have arrested a man in relation to an assault in Preston, 9 kilometers (6 miles) north of downtown Melbourne. The 27-year-old man with no fixed address was located and taken into custody in the downtown area that same morning, and is already being interviewed. It is alleged the 32-year-old victim was followed after getting off a tram at the intersection of Bell Street and Plenty Road about 11.20 p.m. [local time], a police spokesperson said in a public statement. Closed-circuit television surveillance footage shows the victim walking through a car park, away from his attacker, when his assailant begins yelling and chasing him around the car park. After knocking the victim unconscious, the attacker continued to strike him and then after appears to taunt the victim as he lies on the ground. An American tourist has undergone brain and facial surgery after being attacked on the last day of his holiday in Melbourne. #9Today pic.twitter.com/tLn2lgYyii The Today Show (@TheTodayShow) March 31, 2019 The victim has undergone brain and facial surgery since the incident. Police previously described the suspect as being in his early 30s with a slim build, short dark hair, a dark beard and appears to be balding. At the time of the alleged assault, he was wearing a t-shirt with a white motif on the front and knee length cargo shorts. He was carrying a large backpack. The Epoch Times contacted a police spokesperson, however, police were unable to provide any information on the motive of the attack. The matter is currently under active investigation. We will not be commenting on this incident further as it is now before the courts, Victoria Police media officer Belinda Batty said in a written statement. Media will need to follow the case in court. An American tourist has been left terrified after he was stalked and bashed while getting off a tram in Melbournes north. @NearyTy_9 #9News pic.twitter.com/6i2Ex2Y6ok Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) March 31, 2019 Police are hunting for the man behind a sickening attack on an American tourist who was chased and bashed in Melbourne. Security video shows the 32-year-old victim being beaten unconscious. #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/FWxuarX6Bo 7NEWS Adelaide (@7NewsAdelaide) March 31, 2019 Since the arrest was shared on social media, several concerned citizens have openly expressed their thanks to the police officers who responded. Well done guys. We have the best police force in the world. You always get results, Gary Osborn said in a comment to the arrest footage. It may take a while, [but] you always find the perpetrator. Great work now lock him up never to be released, Ornella Pesavento said. Of no fixed address he can now have a home in jail. Others hoped the suspect would not be released on bail before the investigation could reach a proper conclusion. Great work by police. Now for the magistrate to lock him up and not let him out on parole, Litsa Alfonzetti said. Anyone who may have witnessed the incident, or has any information relating to the identity of the unknown man, is encouraged to contact Crime Stoppers by phoning 1800 333 000 or submitting a confidential crime report online. Beloit College Cancels Conservative Speakers Lecture After Protests School administrators at Beloit College, a private liberal arts schools in southern Wisconsin, canceled a lecture by a conservative speaker after student protesters disrupted the event last week. Protestors banged drums and built a barricade of chairs on the stage where Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL officer and founder of the security company Blackwater, was set to speak. Princes appearance was to be hosted by Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a conservative student organization. On March 27, the day of the protest, the school announced in the evening that the event was canceled. The incident was the latest in a mounting list of conservative speakers who have had their events scrapped over protests, prompting concerns of free speech on college campuses. Prince later spoke at a hotel and said that his free-speech rights had been violated, according to the Beloit Daily News. Its sad the administration of this college lacked the moral courage to enforce free speech and to defend free speech Fortunately, President Trump will defend free speech and I think the college will be hearing from the court soon on this because enough is enough, he told a crowd of about 50 people at Hotel Goodwin. Such concerns didnt go unnoticed by President Donald Trump, who on March 22 signed an executive order that instructed colleges across the nation to protect free speech on their campusesor risk losing federal research funding. One recent high-profile incident that prompted the move involved Hayden Williams, a conservative activist who was assaulted at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley as he was recruiting for Turning Point USA. Trump has said it would be very costly if universities dont comply with his order. The government awards universities more than $30 billion annually in research funds. Public colleges and universities already are legally bound to uphold the First Amendment. Private colleges, meanwhile, will be required to comply with their stated institutional policies regarding free inquiry, a senior Trump administration official told reporters previously. Shortly after the event was shut down, Beloit College issued a statement in which it said that all dialogue is welcomed on campus, but it was forced to cancel to ensure the safety of all participants. As an institution of higher learning, open dialogue on all topics is one of our core principles. Tonights events fell unacceptably short of this core principle, and we condemn the behavior of those who disrupted the event, the statement said. The college will begin an investigation immediately. Chief Communications and Integrated Marketing Officer Tim Jones, noted that the college will investigate to see if policies were violated, in particular, the Demonstrations Policy outlined in the student handbook, in an email to The Round Table. Trumps executive order comes as the debate on the silencing of conservative voices has ramped up in recent years. Specifics on how the federal government will enforce Trumps order were not given by a senior official, who said the details would be figured out in the next few weeks and months. Adam Steinbaugh, director of the Individual Rights Defense Program at FIRE told The Epoch Times on April 2, that its unlikely Beloit would lose funding over the incident. FIRE is a nonprofit focusing on civil liberties in the education sector. Steinbaugh also noted that YAF has a right to invite and hear from speakers of their choice. Beloit can certainly punish intentional, sustained disruption of a speaking engagement, and it appears that some of the conduct here is not protected expression, he said via email. Unfortunately, Beloits recent track record on this front is not promising, given that the school reportedly put a student on disciplinary probation for speech critical of YAFs choice to host Prince. He continued: It is exceedingly unlikely that Beloit could lose its federal funding over this, as the executive order has not yet been implemented, and its unclear whether, once implemented, the order would reach disruptive conduct over which the university has no control. British ISIS Bride Expresses Regret at Joining Jihadis, Admits She Was Brainwashed Formerly unapologetic jihadi bride Shamima Begum has expressed regret about joining the ISIS terror cult and acknowledged she had been brainwashed. Speaking to The Times of London in the al-Roj refugee camp in Syria on April 1, Begum said, I do regret having children in the caliphate and appealed to British authorities to be allowed to return to the UK. I came thinking it would be a place of belonging where I could raise a family safely, Begum was cited by The Times as saying. But it was not a place to have children. Begums reentry to Britain was blocked in February when British authorities deemed her a security threat and stripped her of citizenship. The 19-year-old ran away from her London home in 2015 to join ISIS in Syria, where she married a jihadi recruit from Denmark. Begums husband, Yago Riedijk, joined the jihadi terror cult in 2014 and married her a year later when she was just 15 years old. They had three children, all of whom are dead. Heavily pregnant with her third child, Begum surfaced in a Syrian refugee camp in February after fleeing the battle-scarred Baghuz. There she gave birth to a baby boy, who died on March 8. Since I left Baghuz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again, she told The Times. I was brainwashed. I came here believing everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion. Acknowledgment of Radicalization Begums recent interview with The Times is the first time shes admitted to having been radicalized. When I first came out of al-Dawlah [ISIS] I was still in the brainwashed mentality: I still supported them because of what they told me and what they taught me, she told the publication. In her first interview in February, Begum said that while she did not agree with everything the terror group had done, she had no regrets about joining ISIS and suggested that air strikes against the terror group in Syria somehow justified the Manchester Arena terror attack. Its a two-way thing, really, she told the BBC, adding that the suicide bomber that killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester was a kind of retaliation for bombardments of ISIS-held enclaves, adding, So I thought, OK, that is a fair justification. "I didn't want to be IS poster girl" London teenager Shamima Begum, who fled to join Islamic State group in Syria, says she now wants the UK's forgiveness [Tap to expand] https://t.co/9KwR4TYUqA pic.twitter.com/JWsgeHHppl BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) February 18, 2019 Asked about her take on the particularly graphic atrocities the jihadi extremists are known to have carried out, Begum told The Times that seeing beheaded heads in bins did not faze her. When asked by a Sky News reporter, Did you know what Islamic State [ISIS] were doing when you left for Syria? Because they had beheaded people. There were executions, she replied, Yeah, I knew about those things and I was OK with it. After fleeing Baghuz, she was initially interred at the al-Hol camp, where Begum said there were groups of Tunisian jihadi women who were even more radical than ISIS. She told The Times in the most recent interview that besides being in the grip of jihadi ideology, she also felt pressured not to speak out against ISIS in earlier talks with journalists. Back in al-Hol there was [sic] a lot of dangers that came with not supporting Dawlah [ISIS]. Threatening to burn down my tent and stuff. I knew that everyone was watching my case, what the journalists were saying about me and what I was saying, how I was presenting myself to the journalists, so anything I said against Dawlah, they would immediately attack me, so I was afraid of that. Begum has been moved to al-Roj facility, where she said, I have kind of accepted that I will have to stay here, I will have to make this like a second home. Begums return to Britain was blocked by UK authorities on grounds of her posing a security risk. Her family launched a legal challenge to the British governments decision to strip her of citizenship and effectively prevent her from entering the country. Mob of ISIS Brides Riot at al-Hol A violent mob of ISIS bridessome armedbesieged guards at the al-Hol refugee camp, injuring as many as 30 security staff members. Guards at the al-Hol camp in northern Syria were outnumbered by a large group of rioting black-clad women on March 21, according to The Times of London, and managed to break up the disturbance only after firing warning shots. The women were shouting that if I was in their hands, they would behead me, said 18-year-old Jani, who polices the camp that has seen a large influx of jihadi extremists fleeing the crumbling ISIS caliphate. Camp authorities had initially anticipated about 15,000 refugees would flow in but today that figure stands at about 72,000, The Times reported. Guards said that jihadi sympathizers streaming into the facility have been found with suicide belts hidden among their clothes, knives in their hair, and small guns stashed in their belongings. A senior member of the police was cited by The Times as saying, ISIS is finished so it tries to take revenge here. They can even bribe NGOs to bring weapons inside. Even the shops inside the camp, they can give them money and get them to bring them guns. Potentially Very Dangerous Security experts such as British intelligence service head Alex Younger have warned that would-be returnees like Begum were potentially very dangerous because they were in that sort of position, and people like her were likely to have acquired certain skills or connections. Survivors and other victims of the murderous cults reign of terror, meanwhile, are furious at the prospect of ISIS women getting a sympathetic hearing in the Western press, or worsea free pass. Ali Y. Al-Baroodi, who survived ISISs bloody occupation of Mosul, told The Jerusalem Post that claims on the part of jihadi brides that they were just housewives, as Begum has insisted, are not credible. It was hell on Earth and every single one of them made it so, he said, asking sarcastically if perhaps local victims of the jihadi women should apologize for disturbing their stay there. [ISIS] demolished cities and hundreds of mass graves, [and left] thousands of orphans and widows, he added. Its impossible to muster sympathy for her, author and academic Idrees Ahmad wrote in reference to Begum, according to the Post. She went to Syria as a colonizer, several months after ISIS beheaded journalists and aid workers. Caitlan Coleman Details Night She Fled From Estranged Husband Joshua Boyle OTTAWACaitlan Coleman pulled on three or four layers of socks the night she fled from her estranged husband, Joshua Boyle, she told his criminal trial Monday, April 1. It was late at night on Dec. 30, 2017, and the temperature was dropping to about minus 20 degrees C (minus 4 degrees F) in Ottawa, where the two former captives in Afghanistan lived. Coleman frantically knocked on doors for help in frigid temperatures. She eventually made her way to a hotel where her mother was staying. Before dawn, police had arrested her husband. Boyle, 35, is now on trial on charges that include sexual assault and unlawful confinement, against Coleman and another person. Coleman painted a picture of their roller-coaster relationship, including how she tried to divorce Boyle in 2012, an incident in which she allegedly pushed him on a subway platform in Toronto, and the night of Boyles arrest. Caitlan Coleman details night she fled from estranged husband Joshua Boyle https://t.co/7CSDiU4oyt pic.twitter.com/IdfwRxJkoY CTV News (@CTVNews) April 2, 2019 Under cross-examination, Coleman paused to wipe away tears once when asked about an interview she did days after Boyles arrest. In the interview with the CBC show The Fifth Estate, Coleman said no one forced her to go to Afghanistan or have children she didnt wantlines she said Boyle told her to say. Coleman testified Monday felt Boyle forced her to visit Afghanistan while pregnant. Pressed by defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon about the quote, specifically about the three children born during captivity in Afghanistan, Coleman said she had children she wanted very much. When children are the result of relationships like this, its a hard thing, she said. Coleman and Boyle were kidnapped in Afghanistan in October 2012 and kept imprisoned for years until their high-profile rescue by Pakistani forces and return to Canada in October 2017. They met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shortly after getting back. By then, though, whatever love they had was gone, Coleman said. Testifying in an adjacent room while Boyle sat taking notes in the front row of the courtroom, Coleman gave her account of the breaking point. Coleman is from Pennsylvania, and at the end of 2017 her mother was visiting. After Boyle dropped off Colemans mother at a hotel on Dec. 30, he returned to their downtown Ottawa apartment, ranted at her and forced her into their bedroom. Boyle returned a short while later and the argument renewed. Coleman said she told Boyle he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or brain damage. Boyle punched her on the side of her face and held her mouth closed until she promised to remain quiet. When he let go, Coleman decided to run, knowing it was the last night her mother would be in town. Coleman said she had a $20 bill hidden in her bra that she had taken from Boyles wallet. She grabbed the childrens passports from the top corner of the bedroom closet over fears their father would take them out of the country. There were no shoes in the bedroom, so she put on layers of socks, ran to the back door and up the stairs, pounding on the neighbours door for help. Nobody answered. Boyle followed her and in a very caring tone said he was concerned for her and that she was drunkeven though there was no alcohol in the apartmentand put his hand on her arm. Coleman said she started screaming. Boyle went back to the apartment and quietly told her to come back inside. She instead went quietly down to the driveway, ran to the corner, and knocked on the door of a closed pizza shop. Employees cleaning up for the night let her in and she phoned her mother. Meanwhile, Boyle called 911 to say Coleman had run away screaming and threatening to kill herself, though Coleman testified she never thought of or discussed harming herself. Police officers found Coleman at her mothers hotel room, where she told them her story. I was concerned that they would believe Joshs story over me because Josh had always told me that, you know, nobody would believe me, I was just crazy, but I wanted to express to them what was going on in the hopes that they would believe me, Coleman said. The police told her they would arrest Boyle that night. Later, Greenspon reviewed Colemans emotionally charged posts, dating back to 2002, on a Star Wars fan forum where the two met online. In some, Coleman appeared to describe herself as lashing out when angry, a description Coleman rejected. At one point, Coleman paused and told Greenspon she found the questions very triggering. Im feeling a little bit attacked by your approach. Im not saying that I was ever a violent person and I would not like the court to believe that I was because that would not be correct. She testified that the shove on the Toronto subway platform in 2007 was amid an argument and wasnt an effort to harm Boyle, and that although shed considered a divorce in 2012, she changed her mind. The trial continues Tuesday. By Jordan Press Cause of Death Revealed for Slain College Student Samantha Josephson A slain student from the University of South Carolina who reportedly got in the wrong car on March 29 died from multiple sharp force injuries. An autopsy has revealed Samantha Josephsons cause of death, according to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, ABC News reported on April 1. Its not clear if the weapon was found. Court documents showed that Josephson had numerous wounds when her body was discovered, The State newspaper reported. Her body was found by hunters in Clarendon County about 12 hours after she was last seen. Samantha was by herself. She had absolutely no chance, her father, Seymour Josephson, told ABC, adding: You guys have to travel together. You get into an Uber, you dont know if its an Uber, you dont know anything about it. Josephson, 21, was set to got to law school at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Seymour Josephson was quoted as saying. I dont want anybody else to ever go through this again, he said. I cant tell you how painful this is. On the morning of March 29, the University of South Carolina student was killed after she got into a car that she believed was an Uber cab. The driver of the vehicle, 24-year-old Nathaniel Rowland was charged with murder and kidnapping. Her body was discovered near where he had lived, ABC News reported. Officials also reported that her phone was discovered in Rowlands vehicle. Family Speaks I saw such a clear future with her, her boyfriend, Greg Corbishley, was quoted by ABC as saying at a vigil for her. The mother of Samantha Josephson, who was killed after she mistook the suspect's car for her Uber ride, pleads with the judge to put Nathaniel David Rowland away for life. CBS News 201941 He said, The last words she said to me over FaceTime on Thursday were that I was her person and she loved me and that she could truly be herself around me. And Im just thankful she brought that out of me, too. Unlike him [Rowland], Samantha valued human life, and could never harm another soul, Marci Josephson, her mother, said, according to Fox News. Unlike him, Samantha had love within her heart, and a purpose in her life, the life he brutally ended. At a court hearing for Rowland, Marci Josephson added, I cannot fathom how someone could randomly select a person, a beautiful girl, and steal her life away. There are no words to describe the immense pain his actions have caused our family and friends. Hes taken away a piece of our heart, soul, and life, CBS News reported. It sickens us to think that his face was the last thing that my baby girl saw on this Earth. Does he even know her name? she continued. He should never be given the right to walk free again for what he did to my daughter, or given the opportunity to hurt anybody else My daughters name is Samantha Josephson. Dont ever forget her name. Samantha Josephson. Worried Parents University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides said the school is working to help prevent a future tragedy. We want every college student in America to take a pledge that says they will never get into a rideshare without first asking the driver, Whats my name, to make sure that they are getting in the right vehicle, Pastides told NBC News. Concerned parents have called him and asked how they could keep their children safe while using Uber or other ride-sharing services. This is really a national problem. We thought we had a safe city here and a safe campus, but this might happen again this weekend if a student gets into one of those vehicles and hasnt fully confirmed that its the right vehicle, he said. Grainne Kealy pictured in 2009 (L) just before her ceramic forehead was fitted, which can be seen in a later picture from 2016. (Grainne Kealy) Celebrities With Feet on Dash Spark Warning From Woman Who Lost Forehead in Crash A woman who was left without a forehead following a car crash has issued a warning after seeing pictures shared by celebrities with their feet up on the dashboard. Grainne Kealys knees broke every bone in her face when her boyfriends jeep skidded on a patch of black ice, hit a wall, and triggered the airbag, which fired her legs toward her head. The accident in 2006 left Kealy with a minor brain injury and severe injuries to her face, which was so damaged that surgeons had to remove her forehead. She was 22 at the time. A decade later Kealy summoned up the courage to share the shocking images of herself without her foreheadbefore she was fitted with a ceramic onehoping to warn others. On March 31, she highlighted images taken by several celebrities, including Kim Kardashian, Conor McGregor and Lady Gaga with their feet up on the dashboard, with a message. This breaks my heart to think of how many millions of people have seen these celebrities with their feet on the dashboard, she wrote. I can only hope that people will eventually learn from my mistake. This breaks my heart to think of how many millions of people have seen these celebrities with their feet on the Grainne Kealy 2019331 Kealy, who lives in Ireland, described the crash in a post on Facebook. On the 16th of December 2006, my boyfriend and I left our home in Galway for my home place in Laois. Going through Borris-in-Ossory the jeep skidded on a patch of black ice and crashed into a wall. The jeep was destroyed. Her boyfriend survived with minor injuries. Kealys life, however, was turned upside downall because of where she had put her feet. I had bought a new pair of Ugg boots and knew that I wouldnt dirty the dashboard. Silly when you think about it! By doing this my feet were placed directly on top of the airbag without realizing. When the jeep collided with the wall the airbags inflated as they do but because my feet were on top of mine it actually pushed my feet, knees first, into my face. Kealy explains that airbags inflate at a speed of 200mph. I had multiple facial fractures (my mother was told that I had broken every bone in my face), a CSF (Cerebrospinal Fluid) leak from my brain and oh yeah I lost two teeth! She said that she doesnt remember the three months before the accident and little of the month that followed. One of my first memories is looking in the mirror for the first time. I didnt recognize the face looking back at me. That is one of the worse memories I have and one that I hope with all my heart not many people will ever have to go through. Doctors later told her that her knees had pushed her face inward and upward and that I needed taking apart and putting back together. In 2007 I experienced a setback and had to have my forehead removed. Yesmy forehead! And yes..all of it! I lived without my forehead for two years until the 17th of June 2009 when I got my brand new Italian ceramic forehead. Im sure most of you reading this are a little puzzled by this I know I was when they told me. I had nothing in place of my forehead for two years. My head sunk in and I looked a little strange. Kealy said she plucked up the courage to share her story several years ago. When she still saw so many people with their feet up in their cars, in 2017 she decided to go one step further and published the images. She ends her message by saying, PLEASE KEEP YOUR FEET ON THE FLOOR IN A VEHICLE..FRONT AND BACK PASSENGERS! One of the worse parts about it is that it seems so obvious when you think about it. So please listen to me and learn from my horrible experience. Concordia University's downtown campus in Montreal. The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia held a talk by Uyghur leader Dolkun Isa on March 26. (The Canadian Press/Ryan Remiorz) Chinese Officials Tried to Pressure Canadian University to Cancel Human Rights Event Chinese officials tried to pressure a human rights research institute to cancel an event at Concordia University in Montreal that featured an exiled Uighur Muslim leader, one of the events organizers says. Kyle Matthews, executive director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia, said he was contacted by the Chinese consul general in Montreal on March 25 regarding a conference planned for the next day about the repressed Uighur Muslim sect in Chinas Xinjiang region, reports CBC. The event featured a discussion with Dolkun Isa, a Xinjiang student activist and president of the World Uyghur Congress. Isa, a German national since 2006, is wanted by the Chinese regime. The email to Matthews, written in French, said vice consul general Wang Wenzhang requested an urgent meeting to communicate our points of view, According to the National Post. Matthews chose not to respond to the email and the event went ahead as planned. A few dozen people attended the event, including students, journalists, and representatives from human rights like Amnesty International, the National Post reported. Matthews said he later found out that the consul general also contacted others in Montreal in an attempt to put pressure on the university to cancel the event. I think thats problematic. It goes against freedom of speech, it goes against the rights of universities to talk about complex issues and contemporary issues, Matthews said in an interview with Radio Canada International on March 27. This I think it shows that a university event attracting 30 people was deemed to be a major foreign policy priority for the Chinese government to disrupt and try to end. The Chinese consulate in Montreal and Chinese embassy in Ottawa could not be reached for comment. Human rights organizations report that between one and two million Uighurs are being detained in so-called re-education camps in Xinjiang. There are also reports that families have been separated, and those not in camps live under constant surveillance, are forced to deny their faith, and must pledge allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese regime claims the intent of its de-radicalization program is to crack down on extremists in the region, but human rights activists are calling it a cultural genocide and Turkey has openly called out Chinas behaviour. It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uighur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons, said Hami Aksoy, spokesperson for the Turkish foreign ministry. Uighurs who are not detained in these camps are under heavy pressure. In its 2017/2018 report on China, Amnesty International said that repression conducted under anti-separatism or counter-terrorism campaigns remained particularly severe in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and Tibetan-populated areas. Amnesty also said national security-related laws and regulations continued to be created to give authorities greater powers to silence dissent and censor information. Two other incidents earlier this year also raised concerns over allegations China attempted to interfere with Ontario universities, though the Chinese embassy has denied involvement. Rukiye Turdush, a Uighur activist, gave a speech earlier this month at McMaster University that was critical of the regimes treatment of Uighurs. Her speech was interrupted by filming and shouting by Chinese students in what Turdush said was an attempt by the regime to suppress her message. She said that according to WeChat messages, the students were instructed by someone, and believes it was someone from the Chinese consulate. However, she said she doesnt have explicit proof. In another instance, University of Toronto student Chemi Lhamo, 22, a Canadian citizen of Tibetan descent, received thousands of hate messages after being elected student-union president in February. According to the CBC, many of the messages, posted to her Instagram account, contained hateful, often anti-Tibet, rhetoric. Some were even threatening. Toronto police are investigating whether some of the messages received by Lhamo constitute criminal threats, reports the Ottawa Citizen. At the time, Lhamo wondered whether there was someone coordinating the harassment, though she said she had no proof that Chinese officials were involved in the backlash against her. Correspondent Christiane Amanpour attends the 'Women In The World: Stories and Solutions' global summit at Hudson Theatre in New York City on March 12, 2010. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images) CNNs Christiane Amanpour Suggests Lock Her Up Chant Is Hate Speech CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour asked former FBI director James Comey on Tuesday if he shouldve restricted people from saying lock her up because the phrase amounts to hate speech. Comey asserted during the interview that President Donald Trump targets private citizens with investigations and the power of the executive, citing Trump calling for the locking up of his political opponents, including people like me. Amanpour seized on Comeys use of the phrase locking up, and wondered if the FBI should censor the use of lock her up in reference to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Of course, lock her up was a feature of the 2016 Trump campaign, Amanpour said. Do you in retrospect wish that people like yourself, the FBI, I mean, the people in charge of law and order, had shut down that languagethat it was dangerous potentially, that it couldve created violence, that its kind of hate speech. Should that have been allowed? Comey explained the First Amendment to Amanpour, replying, Thats not the role for government to play. The beauty of this country is people can say what they want, even if its misleading and its demagoguery. by Amber Athey Follow Amber on Twitter Bags of heroin, some laced with fentanyl, are displayed before a press conference regarding a major drug bust, at the office of the New York Attorney General, in New York City, on Sept. 23, 2016. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) US Lawmakers Skeptical of Chinas New Measures to Clamp Down on Fentanyl U.S. lawmakers have reacted with skepticism after Beijing announced a set of measures to curb fentanyl production and trafficking. All fentanyl-related substances are now included on Chinas list of controlled substances, a change from the current list of 25 fentanyl analogs and two precursors, according to a press conference held in Beijing on April 1, held jointly by Chinas Ministry of Public Security, the National Health Commission, and the National Medical Products Administration. The change, which will take effect May 1, aims to block Chinese chemists from continually manufacturing novel forms of the synthetic opioids in order to skirt Chinese regulations. Also announced were stepped-up investigations, including requiring Chinese authorities to locate possible illegal fentanyl production in areas such as chemical industrial parks, as well as having Chinese customs officials step up the effort to check high-risk international mail. Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more powerful than heroin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); as little as two milligrams is considered a lethal dosage for most people. Fentanyl killed 71,500 Americans in 2017, according to data released by the CDC. And China is the largest source of illicit fentanyl and fentanyl-like substances in the United States, according to a 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC). However, U.S. lawmakers urged caution in expecting the latest Chinese policy to have any real impact. This action means nothing without proper enforcement, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said in a statement. Chinese-produced fentanyl has been trafficked into the U.S. and is killing Americans, and China has had the capability to crack down on this drug trade and has not done so. The USCC report identified problems within the Chinese regulatory environment that have abetted the manufacturing of fentanyl, including loose oversight and misaligned incentive structures for local governments that prioritize economic growth and development objective above all else. We have heard soothing, but empty, rhetoric before from Chinas leaders, Smith said. We must continue to monitor developments closely and hold Chinese officials and manufacturers accountable if they fail to take decisive action and enforce this new policy. Meanwhile, China has continually denied its culpability in the U.S. fentanyl crisis. Most recently, Liu Yuejin, deputy director of the China National Narcotic Control Commission, did so while answering questions at the April 1 press conference announcing the new regulations. The U.S. accusation lacks evidence, Liu said. If the United States really wants to solve its fentanyl problem, it must enforce its work domestically. Liu said an example would be U.S. authorities providing more drug prevention education to the public. U.S. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) also expressed concern about holding China accountable, saying in a statement, We must monitor closely how China implements and enforces these new restrictions. Portman called on China to work better with U.S. authorities as part of the Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in November 2018. He was among the senators who introduced the STOP Act in February 2017, to address loopholes in the U.S. Postal Service system that allowed drug traffickers, many of them from China, to ship fentanyl purchases through the postal system. China must also step up to provide the U.S. Postal Service advanced electronic data, so U.S. Customs and Border Protection can target, track, screen, and interdict packages suspected of containing illegal drugs, Portman said. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also addressed the issue during an October 2017 press announcement to indict two Chinese nationals, who are accused of using the internet to sell fentanyl and other opiate substances they manufactured to drug traffickers and individual customers in the United States. They shipped drug orders through the mail. In early March, Smith and Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-N.Y.). introduced the Combating Illicit Fentanyl Act of 2019, which would impose financial sanctions against any individuals identified as being involved with fentanyl production and trafficking. They would also be made ineligible for visas or admission to the United States. President Moon Jae-in, left, delivers his address in Singapore, 13 July 2018, and U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference in Washington. EPA-Yonhap By Kim Yoo-chul The government is discussing with the United States a plan to send a special envoy to North Korea, Cheong Wa Dae officials said Tuesday. Kim Hyun-chong, deputy chief of the presidential National Security Office (NSO) met with U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Charles Kupperman at the White House, Tuesday (KST), and discussed ways to break the stalemate in denuclearization talks between the U.S. and the North, including sending the envoy. Kim and Kupperman also discussed the agenda for next week's summit between President Moon Jae-in and President Donald Trump, the officials said. "One of the main issues at the Kim-Kupperman meeting was how to define denuclearization and to narrow the differences between the U.S. and North Korea," one official said requesting anonymity. "It appears they also touched briefly on the possibility of sending a special envoy to North Korea." On the way back to his hotel after meetings with U.S. lawmakers, Kim told reporters that his talks with Kupperman were "good," but didn't elaborate further. Upon his arrival at the Dulles International Airport, near Washington D.C., March 31, he told reporters his visit was aimed at discussing issues for the upcoming summit. Kim also met with Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Roy Blunt for talks on North Korea. The official didn't specify who the envoy would be, but Cheong Wa Dae sources said National Intelligence Service chief Suh Hoon may fulfil the role. The White House said the prospects of renewed nuclear talks between Washington and Pyongyang will be discussed during President Moon's visit. In this file photo taken on Feb. 27, 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during their summit at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam. Yonhap Democrats Block $13.5 Billion Disaster Relief Because It Didnt Include Enough Money for Puerto Rico Senate Democrats blocked a $13.5 billion bill for disaster relief from recent floods, hurricanes, and wildfires on Monday, arguing that the more than $600 million provided to Puerto Rico was not nearly enough. The disaster relief package combined aid for a variety of natural disasters the country experienced, including support to southern farmers, California towns hit by wildfires and mudslides and states such as Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina that were hit by hurricanes. The legislation would also provide funding to rebuild military bases in Florida and North Carolina that were destroyed during the hurricanes. Republican Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby amended the text to give Puerto Rico $610 million in nutrition assistance, however, Democrats argue Puerto Rico needs additional funds to bolster flood protection and repair the electrical grid, reported Bloomberg. Democrats Block $13.5 Billion Disaster Relief Because It Didnt Include Enough Money For Puerto Rico https://t.co/DwOOytA524 pic.twitter.com/Im3F67egKA The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 2, 2019 The disaster relief package was voted down by a vote of 44 to 49, falling short of the needed 60-vote supermajority to overcome the Democratic filibuster. I have never been more frustrated as a United States Senator than I am right now. This is pure partisan politics, Republican Georgia Sen. David Perdue, who sponsored the legislation, tweeted following the vote. Washington has reached a new lowits been nearly six months since Hurricane Michael ravaged Georgia and other states across the country, and Congress has failed to help the very people it claims to represent, Perdue later said in a statement. President [Donald] Trump reached across the aisle, along with other Republicans, to compromise on disaster relief, but only one Democrat was willing to work with us. Do not be fooled Senate Democrats are using farmers in the Southeast and the people of Puerto Rico as pawns in their political game, he continued. It is hypocritical that Democrats say they want to help Puerto Rico recover, and yet they obstruct this disaster relief. Trump also tweeted his outrage over the disgraceful vote. (RELATED: Protesters Shout Down David Perdue While Hes In The Bathroom, He Fires Back) The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any place in history, Trump said. The people of Puerto Rico are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government cant do anything right, the place is a messnothing works. FEMA & the Military worked emergency miracles, but politicians like the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health, he continued. 91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful! .the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health. 91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019 By Molly Prince Dogs on Social Media Take Responsibility With Little Bits of Help Most dogs just want to please their owners: They protect the home and family, offer company, and some even do all kinds of work to help their people. In several social media posts from Weibo, Chinas version of Twitter, dogs take on unique responsibilities to assist their owners in their daily lives. These dogs prove that a dog is a mans best friend. Cabbage Cart Dog In a short video, a small dog is seen running along the street while pulling a little blue cart, filled with several bunches of napa cabbage. It looks over at the person shooting the footage as it paces along. The dog continues trotting along next to a bicycle, which is riding at a leisurely pace. The cart appears to be custom welded. The Cat Retriever Another video about dogs actually starts with cats. A white and gray cat is seen slowly stalking toward something off screen. The cat is wearing a harness, with a leash dragging on the ground. Another cat is shown, hunched over, looking back at the leashed cat. It appears that a fight may ensue between the two felines. Then, suddenly, a golden retriever comes over to the leashed cat, and uses its mouth to grab hold of the leash. The first cat remained focused on the other cat, and seems to not be bothered by the dog. After grabbing hold, the retriever carries the cat away to the front steps of a shop, where it and another retriever were sitting, seemingly sparing the cat from getting into a fight. The cat is very complicit about being pulled out of the potential confrontation. Another scene in the video shows one of the retrievers laying in the corner on a floor, in what looks to be a kitchen. The cat slowly walks on top of the dog and sits down. The dog doesnt respond, and only moves its eyes around as the cat gets into position. The other retriever comes into the scene, and grabs hold of the cats collar, and carries it off its perch. The other dog places the cat on the ground, and then sits down with the cat in between its front paws. Harvest Hound Another video shows a man harvesting crops in a field. He is using a hand scythe to cut down stalks. A dog watches him intently as he works. The dog then moves forward to one of the stalks, and bites at it, pulling it over. It continues biting and pulling over stalks, similar to the way the man is harvesting the crops. It begins making its own pile with the amount of stalks pulled over. In another similar video, a different dog is seen working completely on its own. It bites down similar looking plant stalks in the same way. The footage then shows a long line of crops that seemingly have already been cut down by its bite. Ontario Premier Doug Ford gives remarks at a car dealership in Toronto on April 1, 2019. (The Canadian Press/Christopher Katsarov) Doug Ford Slams Federal Carbon Tax TORONTOCanadas most populous province and the federal government engaged in a pitched battle for public opinion over the carbon tax as it launched Monday, just six months ahead of the federal election. Ontario is one of four provinces, including Manitoba, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, where Ottawa imposed the levy because they opted not to impose their own pricing schemes on carbon emissions. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau framed the move as a win for the environment, tweeting that its no longer free to pollute anywhere in Canada. But Ontario Premier Doug Ford took the opportunity Monday, as drivers started paying about 4.4 cents a litre more for gas, to hammer his anti-carbon tax message. By the time the federal government is done, the average household will have to pay $648 a year more in carbon tax expenses, Ford said at a news conference celebrating the end of a vehicle emissions testing program. That may not seem a lot of money for lobbyists or activists and economists who designed the carbon tax for the federal Liberals, but it sure is a lot of money to the seniors, the truckers, the waitresses, the hardworking people I meet everywhere I go across this province. Ford, whose government is fighting the tax in court later this month, was citing the expected cost to a typical household by 2022, while this year it is expected to be $258. Residents of provinces with the tax will be getting rebates on their income tax returns that start at $128 annually and increase for people with spouses or dependents at home. The federal government says a family of four in Ontario would get $307 this year. While Ford said he is staying out of the federal election, he took pains to brand the carbon pricing scheme as the Trudeau Liberal carbon tax and cast doubt on Ottawas promises. Nobody trusts the federal government when they cross their fingers and they say they will eventuallyeventually, thats the magical wordeventually give money back to us, said Ford, whose Progressive Conservatives cancelled a cap-and-trade program introduced by the former Liberal government after taking power last year. The prime minister tells us that the carbon tax will be good for us, but then I sit back and say, Really? Why should anybody believe what he says anymore?' Fords comments came after he and his caucus flooded Twitter with photos of themselves at gas stations Sunday, warning that it was the last chance to fill up before the carbon tax took effect. Opposition from Provinces The federal tax is $20 a tonne for this year and is set to increase by $10 annually until it reaches $50 a tonne in April 2022. In addition to increasing gas prices, it will add about four cents to a cubic metre of natural gas, and also drives up the cost of propane, butane and aviation fuel. Ottawa has yet to reveal details about a program to rebate some of the increased costs faced by small- and medium-sized businesses. Saskatchewan, which is also challenging the tax in court, says it has amended regulations so the PST wont be charged on the carbon tax on SaskPower bills. Even as our government is fighting this harmful tax in court, the federal government is imposing their carbon tax on Saskatchewan families, communities, and businesses, said Premier Scott Moe said. New Brunswick is an intervener in Saskatchewan and Ontarios court challenges. This carbon tax is like a very bad April Fools joke, Environment Minister Jeff Carr said in a statement. Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister also criticized the tax, saying Ottawa would be taking money away from households. This is unfortunate and also demonstrates a lack of listening and willingness to co-operate, he said. In Alberta, United Conservative Leader Jason Kenney has already pledged to axe the provincial carbon tax and said if he wins the provinces election, a court challenge of the federal carbon tax will be launched by the end of the month. The Epoch Times contributed to this report. A man allegedly hit a motorcyclist because he was taking too long at a drive-thru, police said. (Waco Police Department) Driver Allegedly Runs Down Motorcyclist for Taking Too Long at Drive-Thru: Police Police are looking for a man who allegedly struck a motorcyclist near a Whataburger in Waco, Texas on March 28. Authorities said in a statement that the driver of an SUV and the motorcyclist began arguing over someone taking too long to place an order at the drive-thru of the fast food restaurant on N. Valley Mills Drive. Assistance Needed in Locating Person of InterestOn 3-28-19 two individuals were involved in a verbal disturbance over Waco Police Department 201941 The suspect, whose photo has been released by police, then followed the motorcyclist and allegedly hit the bike, injuring and knocking the motorcyclist to the ground. The driver then fled the scene. The man appeared to be driving a green Ford Explorer with a roof rack and tinted windows, police said. More Anger at the Drive-Thru Long waits at drive-thrus have caused other customers to become violent in the past. In a similar case in December, McDonalds customer Joshua Emery Noel from South Carolina became impatient while waiting for his french fries. Noel then allegedly took it out on a young employee by throwing hot coffee at her face, reported Fox News. He then fled the scene before police arrived. Someone REALLY wanted those fries KNEK Magic 104.7 2019115 Noel eventually turned himself in at the Camden Police Department on Jan. 16, and he admitted to throwing the beverage on the fast food chain staff. He was then booked at the Kershaw County Detention Center and given a $7,500 cash surety bond. In another case in 2017, an Ohio customer received an earful from a Burger King manager for taking too long to order. The incident was filmed on camera. Lizzie Ramsey told WSYZ that she was trying to order food for her husband, her husbands co-worker, and two young boys when problems started at the drive-thru. The employee offered Ramsey the total three times before she could finish her order and even told her to hurry up, despite the fact there were no other cars waiting in line. "Whopper"of a meltdown: Burger King manager caught in shouting CAUGHT ON CAMERA: A "whopper" of a shouting match as a Burger King manager in Heath unloads an expletive-filled rant at a customer. The woman claims it was because her family took too long placing their order even though no one else was in line.Learn More: http://bit.ly/2nbMoXe WSYX ABC 6 20171127 Ramsey and the other occupants in the car then went inside the restaurant and were surprised to learn that the person they spoke to was a manager. They started recording the manager when she started cursing and threatening to call the police, the news station reported. Ramsey then posted the video to social media. When we uploaded the video, people saw it and said we had the same experience with the same person at the same store,' Ramseys husband told the news station. Ramsey and her husband then made a complaint to the corporate office, which apologized and gave them a gift card. If anyone knows the suspect in the Waco, Texas case, please contact Waco Crime Stoppers at 254-753-4357 or Det. Clark at 254-750-3662. Callers do not have to reveal their identity. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attends a ceremony marking the 104th anniversary of Battle of Canakkale, also known as the Gallipoli Campaign, in Canakkale, Turkey, on March 18, 2019. (Cem Oksuz/Presidential Press Office/Handout via Reuters) Erdogan Faces Serious Setbacks in Turkish Local Elections ISTANBULTurkeys opposition looked poised to win control of the countrys two biggest cities Monday as it dealt President Recep Tayyip Erdogans Justice and Development Party, or AK Parti, one of its most serious electoral setbacks in years. The opposition won Ankara, a ruling party stronghold for decades, and was leading a tight race for mayor in Istanbul, according to unofficial figures Monday. The leader who has dominated Turkish politics for 16 years declared victory despite the opposition gains. Sundays local elections were widely seen as a gauge of support for Erdogan as the nation of 81 million faces a daunting economic recession. They were also a first test for Erdoganwho has been accused of increasingly authoritarian tendenciessince he got widely expanded presidential powers last year. If confirmed, the swings in Ankara and Istanbul could be excruciating for the politician who campaigned hard to retain hold of them. The opposition also retained its hold over Izmir, Turkeys third-largest city. Although Erdogan was not running for office Sunday, he became the face of the campaign, rallying tirelessly for months across Turkey, using hostile rhetoric against opposition parties and portraying the vote as a matter of national survival. The decline in urban support for his conservative Islamic party came despite the fact that Erdogan wields tight control over the media, which hardly covered the opposition candidates campaigns. Behlul Ozkan, an associate professor at Marmara University, said Erdogans loss of ground in Ankara and Istanbul indicated that his socially conservative and construction-driven policies no longer resonated in Turkeys cities. Political Islams quarter-century old hegemony in Turkeys two largest cities is over, he said. The basic problem is that Erdogan is not able to get votes from middle-income earners, who believe that the economy, education and urban administration are not run well. More than 57 million voters were eligible to choose leaders for 30 major cities, 51 provincial capitals and 922 districts in Turkey, as well as thousands of local positions. The election was marred by sporadic violence, with five dead and scores injured across Turkey. Erdogans party and its nationalist allies garnered some 52% of the vote overall but the opposition made momentous inroads. A strategic decision by a pro-Kurdish party to sit out critical races in major cities contributed to the oppositions gains. The opposition also increased its support along the Mediterranean, taking the city of Adana from the nationalists and the resort destination of Antalya from the ruling party. Erdogan acknowledged setbacks in a speech to his supporters, saying his party would work to understand what had gone wrong and fix the problem. Unofficial results reported by the state-run Anadolu news agency after all votes were counted showed a razor-thin win for the opposition in the race for mayor of Istanbul, Turkeys largest city and commercial hub. The opposition vote was at 48.8% support to the ruling partys 48.5% support. Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition candidate in an alliance led by the secular Republican Peoples Party, or CHP, declared that he won Istanbul but his rival, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim of the ruling party, said it was still too early to call. Yildirim accepted that his rival was leading but said his party would file an objection, suggesting a recount of the 319,500 votes declared void in Istanbul. Both Ankara and Istanbul have been held by Erdogans Justice and Development Party, the AKP, and its Islamic-oriented predecessor for 25 years. Erdogans own ascent to power began as Istanbul mayor in 1994. Unofficial results showed Mansur Yavas, the candidate of the CHP-led alliance, winning the top post in Ankara with 50.9% support. The AKP still holds a majority of Ankaras 25 districts. The government had accused Yavas of forgery and tax evasion, which he called slanderous. The AKPs candidate for Ankara mayor, Mehmet Ozhaseki, won 47.1% support and his party said it would challenge the results. Sundays election was a significant victory for the opposition, which displayed good strategies and promising candidates, said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the Ankara director of the German Marshall Fund. This will certainly lead to an emerging new political landscape in Turkey, he said. He argued, however, that a pause in elections until 2023 would benefit Erdogan. This gives the governing party and President Erdogan a window of opportunity to undertake economic reforms, political reforms if they wish, fix Turkeys relations with foreign countries, he said. Andrew Dawson, head of the Council of Europes election observation mission, said Monday his monitors were not fully convinced that Turkey currently has the free and fair electoral environment which is necessary for genuinely democratic elections. In predominantly Kurdish provinces, the Peoples Democratic Party, or HDP, won back some seats from government-appointed trustees, including the symbolic capital of Diyarbakir, but lost several former strongholds to the ruling party. The government has replaced 95 elected officials since 2016 for alleged links to outlawed Kurdish militants. Dawson urged the Turkish government to respect the election results. Political parties have three days to submit objections and official results are expected in the coming days. Five Arrested in Louisiana Sex Trafficking Sting Police in Louisiana have arrested five people accused of sex trafficking minors and branding victims with tattoos. A joint Louisiana State Police and New Orleans Police Department sting netted suspects in New Orleans and St. Tammany Parish, The Times-Picayune reported. Victims reported being beaten, raped, drugged, and pimped out, according to the report. A 17-year-old female was reportedly tattooed by one of the suspects on her forearm and under her eye. One of those arrested on March 25 is Darnell Johnson, 26, who faces two counts of tattooing a minor and one count of contributing to the delinquency of minors. Johnson also faces accusations of possessing an illegal firearm. He has a prior conviction for domestic battery. Two other men identified as Jayson Figueroa and Cordarrell Rudolph have also been arrested, Fox reported. They face charges of trafficking children for sexual purposes, second-degree rape, and felony carnal knowledge of a juvenile. A fourth man, Kortlen Hubbard, was also arrested after confessing to having had sexual relations with a 16-year-old girl. Police rescued a 16-year-old sex trafficking victim from a New Orleans hotel in February, The Times-Picayune reported. A 17-year-old girl was also rescued in the sting. Johnson allegedly tattooed her forearm and face with the word numb. She has also been charged with trafficking children for sexual purposes after allegedly recruiting the 16-year-old into. Louisiana-Texas Human Trafficking Summit Politicians, law enforcement professionals, and community leaders from Louisiana and Texas are collaborating to fight the scourge of human sex trafficking. They met at a summit in Lake Charles to explore ways to crack down on the crime and help victims, KPLC reported. State Sen. Ronnie Johns (R-La.) was one of those in attendance. We want to make sure theres a significant bail put on these traffickers, we want to make sure theyre moved through the court system fast and that the penalties are harsh and that we send a message to these people, were not going to put up with it, Johns said, according to the report. Johns said exposing people who buy sex is a key component of fighting human trafficking. The real deterrent is going to be public embarrassment. To know that my picturemy name is out there in the community as being involved in sex trafficking. You can imagine the embarrassment for the owner of the New England Patriots; incredible embarrassment for he and his family, Johns said. Calcasieu District Attorney John DeRosier said some of the victims come from south of the border between the United States and Mexico. Human traffickers are bringing these young girls and young boys into the United States for that purpose, DeRosier said, KPLC reported. Many of these young people do not know why they are coming over here, but they are being traffickedbut they are being groomed and set up to be commercial sex objects. That is happening along our southern border. DeRosier said one of the ways to fight sex trafficking is by naming and shaming johns. They will not want anyone who knows them to know what they have been doing. It will embarrass them, and it will shame them. Number two, it sends a message to anybody else who is doing this who has not yet been caught. Were going to get you, DeRosier said. DeRosier said another summit is expected in September. Isaiah Washington attends the 50th NAACP Image Awards Nominees Luncheon at Loews Hollywood Hotel in Hollywood, California on March 9, 2019. (Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images) Greys Anatomy Actor Thanks Trump for First Step Act, Criticizes Obama Isaiah Washington, the Greys Anatomy actor, lauded President Donald Trump for the First Step Act and lashed out at former President Obama for a lack of action. I voted for 44 (Obama) twice. I even checked my emails in his Senate Office while lobbying for Salone to be given another chance to rebrand, Washington, who also appeared in Spike Lee films like Clockers and Crooklyn, wrote on Twitter. He added, Not once in 8 years was I given any support regarding Africa or the Black Agenda, but 45 (Trump) invites me to the WH to celebrate the #FirstStepAct. I voted for 44 twice. I even checked my emails in his Senate Office while lobbying for Salone to be given another chance to rebrand. Not once in 8 years was I given any support regarding Africa or the Black Agenda, but 45 invites me to the WH to celebrate the #FirstStepAct Isaiah Washington (@IWashington) April 1, 2019 Washington added that the First Step Act has initiated the end of mass incarceration. Those who know, know that Im not a Democrat or a Republican. I will work w/h anyone as long as things get done, he also wrote. Last year, Congress passed the First Step Act, which gives judges more discretion when sentencing drug offenders while favoring rehabilitation efforts over incarceration. This week, Trump hosted a celebration at the White House with ex-convicts who got an early release under the act. Two months ago, I was in a prison cell. And Im in the White House. Thats continuing to make America great again, said Gregory Allen, one of the ex-convicts, who was introduced by Trump, reported The New York Post. Those who know, know that Im not a Democrat or a Republican. I will work w/h anyone as long as things get done. The #FirstStepAct was passed on December 21, 2018 w/h the hard work of @JessyMichele @LouislReed @VanJones68 and @cut_50 Im proud to stand with them all today. pic.twitter.com/Y1yTIs088g Isaiah Washington (@IWashington) April 1, 2019 Alice Marie Johnson, who had her sentence commuted, was also present at the ceremony on April 1. I want to thank our incredible President Donald John Trump, Johnson said. I also want to thank the media for being so kind to me. So far, according to the report, about 500 inmates have been released. Trump noted that the law undoes a policy under former President Bill Clinton that he said has disenfranchised African Americans. Not even the mistakes of the '90s are safe from Trump Posted by Washington Examiner on Monday, April 1, 2019 Finally, the law rolls back provisions of the 1994 Clinton crime law that was so devastating to so many, and that disproportionately impacted the African American community, Trump said, reported the Washington Examiner. Nobody believes how much, and now they understand it. In less than four months more than 500 people with unfair sentences have been released from prison and are free to begin a new life. Trump hosts ex-convicts freed under the First Step Act https://t.co/lQ8xSU5FeQ pic.twitter.com/QjWCLaDinJ New York Post (@nypost) April 2, 2019 Its happening, and its happening fast, and its a lot for some people to understand, Trump also said at the event, adding that some 16,000 inmates have been enrolled in drug treatment programs. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde speaks at the 13th Annual Capital Markets Summit at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on April 2, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) IMF Chief Warns Global Economic Outlook Is Increasingly Unsettled WASHINGTONWhile there will be no recession in the near term, the global economy is at a delicate moment, according to International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde. Speaking at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lagarde announced that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would be releasing new global growth forecasts ahead of its spring meeting in Washington next week. Today, if you ask me, the weather is increasingly unsettled, she said, adding that since January, global economic growth lost further momentum. Only two years ago, 75 percent of the global economy experienced an upswing, she said. For this year, we expect 70 percent of the global economy to experience a slowdown in growth. Lagarde noted, however, the IMF did not forecast a recession in the near term. In fact, it anticipates a pickup in growth in the second half of 2019 and into 2020. The recent policy responses, such as the Federal Reserves more patient pace of monetary policy normalization and increased stimulus in China, have supported the easing of financial conditions, according to her. Early last year, the IMF chief warned darker clouds are looming after two years of strong global economic expansion. In October, the organization cut its global growth forecast for the first time since July 2016 due to slowing Chinese economic growth, U.S.China trade war, and financial worries in emerging markets. In January, it announced further downward revision, stating that the world economy was growing at a pace slower than expected and risks were rising. In its January report, the IMF projected that the worlds economy would grow at 3.5 percent in 2019 and 3.6 in 2020, 0.2 and 0.1 percentage point below last Octobers projections. The expected growth in the second half of this year and early 2020 is precarious, Lagarde said, as the economy is vulnerable to downside risks that include Brexit, high debt in certain sectors and countries, trade tensions, and sense of unease in financial markets. Impact of Trade Tensions The IMF chief also noted that trade tensions would take a toll on both the U.S. and Chinese economies. Specifically, we have looked at what might happen if tariffs on all goods traded between the United States and China went up by 25 percentage points, she explained. That alone would reduce annual gross domestic product by up to 0.6 percent in the United States and by up to 1.5 percent in China. High-level trade talks between the United States and China will continue this week in Washington. Speaking at the Chamber of Commerce, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said that the U.S. trade delegation led by Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made headway last week in Beijing. The administration expects to make more headway this week, he said. We are focusing heavily on enforcement and intellectual property theft and forced transfer of technology and cyber hacking and that structural group, which is very important as well as lowering tariffs and non-tariff barriers, he said. Last week, Kudlow told a group of reporters that Washington could lift some tariffs on China, without giving up too much leverage in trade talks. The Trump administration believes Beijing has reasons to compromise, as economic woes continue to put pressure on the Chinese regime. Meanwhile, Beijing is expected to implement more stimulus measures to counter the slowing economy. Under the weight of U.S. tariffs, the Chinese economy weakened last year. The economic growth slowed to its weakest pace in nearly three decades. If both sides fail to reach a deal and trade tensions resume, Chinas troubles will deepen, according to analysts. In 2018, China was the worst performing major stock market in the world, with the Shanghai index falling nearly 25 percent. The index has now gone up 27 percent since the beginning of this year after President Donald Trump signaled progress in trade talks. Ducks in cages at a farm in Yanqing District, outside Beijing on Jan. 27, 2010. (OLLI GEIBEL/AFP/Getty Images) In Growing Trend, Chinese Authorities Crack Down on Duck Meat Company, Seize Assets Local Chinese authorities have arbitrarily detained a Chinese tycoon and seized his company, valued at 10 billion yuan ($1.49 billion), as revealed in a recent expose by China Times. The partially state-run China Times first reported on the scheme on March 29, but its reports were soon removed by internet censors. Other Chinese media that had been covering the case eventually deleted their reports. However, some overseas Chinese media have reposted the articles. The case is indicative of a recent phenomenon in the Chinese economy in which local governments have intimidated the private sector with heavy-handed tactics. An Entrepreneur Detained As the richest man in Dezhou City of eastern Chinas Shandong Province for several years running, Zhang Hongbo had become a famous entrepreneur in China. He was one of the torchbearers during the Beijing Olympics in 2008. He also accompanied the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders during a visit to Europe in 2014. In April 1998, he invested 135 million yuan ($20.11 million) to create ZhongAo, a meat company specializing in breeding and raising ducks, producing duck feed, butchering the birds, and processing the meat. Before he was suddenly detained in 2017, Zhang owned 99.98 percent of the companys shares, with his firm valued at more than 10 billion yuan ($1.49 billion), according to China Times. The most valuable assets of the company were export licenses to the European Union. To receive these licenses, ZhongAo invested in high-quality production lines and strict food safety standards. By the end of 2017, Chinese firms owned 37 EU poultry meat export licenses, of which ZhongAo owned two, according to Chinese media reports. On the evening of June 4, 2017, Zhang received a phone call from the mayor of Qingyun County, who told him the local Party boss Zhang Xiaodong would like to meet with Zhang to discuss possible cooperation between ZhongAo and the state-run China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation. When Zhang arrived at around 10 p.m., several plainclothes police were waiting for him there and detained him without due process, China Times reported. The next day, police forced Zhang to sign a bankruptcy filing document for ZhongAo. Then, police sent a notice to Zhangs family that he was charged with running an illegal operation, according to local media. On the third day, the Qingyun court filed an immediate verdict that ZhongAo had gone bankrupt and appointed Shandong Huaxin, a Rizhao City-based trading company, to deal with the bankruptcy process. According to Chinas bankruptcy laws, a company must apply for bankruptcy in court, after which the court and local government will co-organize a liquidation team within 15 days, which includes officials from different departments, lawyers, and accountants. China Times reported that in Shandong Province, courts can appoint a local company as bankruptcy agents to handle the process, but this company must be based in the same city as the bankrupt company and must be approved by officials. The case of ZhongAo did not follow local laws. Zhangs parents have repeatedly asked police to release Zhang in the past 21 months, but all their efforts were in vain. Zhangs charges were also repeatedly changed. No court hearing was ever arranged. Forced Bankruptcy ZhongAo was deemed bankrupt by the local court and became under the control of Qingyun county government and Huaxin on June 5, 2017. China News reported that the local government intended to use this bankruptcy method in order to seize the companys lands for real estate development. EU export licenses are very valuable. But the Qingyun County government cannot arbitrarily close ZhongAos production lines. So the government arranged for ZhongAo to file for bankruptcy. In 2018, Qingyun Xingye, an assets management company, bought partial stakes in ZhongAo, but did not register ownership change within 15 days as required by Chinese customs. So the EU licenses were revoked. After losing the EU licenses, ZhongAo was forced to close down its production lines. The county government then arranged to sell the companys land. Sale of Company Land ZhongAo had 5,000 mu (about 824 acres) of land within the city center of Qingyun County when Zhang was detained. The land is for industrial use. In the middle of January 2019, over 3,000 mu (448 acres) of them went on sale, as well as 180,000 square meters (1.9 million square feet) of buildings on them. The partially state-run China News reported that Qingrong Funding Company bought all the land, at a price far lower than when ZhongAo purchased it. Guo Jin Min Tui From around 2010, a new phrase was coined in China: Guo Jin Min Tui, which means the state-owned enterprises advance, while the private sector retreats. It means the government uses policies to limit the private sectors development and instead push for state-owned firms. Most recently, during this years Lianghui political meetings in Beijing, one particular official brought up the issue. Sun Qian, the deputy prosecutor general of the Supreme Procuratorate, the highest national level agency responsible for both prosecution and investigation in China, said on March 4: The bosses of some individual private businesses were detained by police once they were suspected of a crime. From the perspective of the judiciary, we should not detain people and close down businesses haphazardly. Man Attacked Inside Dennys After Standing up for Restaurant Staff, Says Report A customer at Northern California Dennys said he was viciously attacked after defending employees, ABC7 reported. Frederick Ibonie said he was waiting for his food at around 3 a.m. local time at a Dennys in Fremont when he heard a delivery driver berate the employees because the order wasnt ready on time, the report said. Ibonie, who works as a waiter nearby, said he felt he should defend the Dennys employees from the alleged abuse. Fremont police are investigating the attack and have a surveillance image of the suspect. BUT, they are not confident the suspect was a Door Dash delivery person. They will be looking for more surveillance and evidence tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/MMqKvAFDYv Kate Larsen (@KateABC7) April 1, 2019 You need to calm down. Its Dennys, these people are working their butts off, he told the man, who he claimed worked for DoorDash. The delivery driver then allegedly pushed a customer and punched Ibonie in the face before he ran away, knocking three of his teeth out in the process, he said. Ibonie also suffered a broken nose, and also got ten stitches in his lip, reported ABC7. Police in #Fremont investigating alleged overnight attack- Victim says he was at Dennys when he saw man- he claims works for DoorDash being verbally abusive to employees upset his order wasnt ready. Victim speaks up, gets beaten up. #ktvu 10/11p pic.twitter.com/HQ8Q4RJ6BJ Azenith Smith (@AzenithKTVU) April 1, 2019 A photo posted on social media shows in the hospital with a cloth over his eyes. I feel like I look like a monster right now, Ibonie told the news outlet. We should stand up for each other, but the world is a dangerous place, he added. Im horrified, said Paula Ibonie, the victims mother. Hes a nice guy who cares about everybody. She said he moved back home to help take care of his father, who suffered a brain injury after he was assaulted 10 years ago. Police in #Fremont investigating alleged overnight attack- Victim says he was at Dennys when he saw man- he claims works for DoorDash being verbally abusive to employees upset his order wasnt ready. Victim speaks up, gets beaten up. #ktvu 10/11p pic.twitter.com/HQ8Q4RJ6BJ Azenith Smith (@AzenithKTVU) April 1, 2019 Complicating matters further, Ibonie said he doesnt have health insurance and cant work after the incident. Police are still working to identify the suspect, but they arent sure he worked for DoorDash. Ibonie said he believed he worked for the company because he was saying he was for DoorDash and was here to get the food. This DoorDasher came in and was like, really angry that they werent just taking care of him straight away, Ibonie told KTVU, elaborating on the alleged incident. He was causing a scene in the middle of lobby area. Frederick Ibonie is missing 3 teeth, has a fractured nose/palate and 10 stitches in his lip. He says a DoorDash employee attacked him at this Dennys in Fremont. He says the man was berating Dennys servers for not having an order ready. Ibonie told him to stop and got punched. pic.twitter.com/wd43A1IRTg Kate Larsen (@KateABC7) April 1, 2019 DoorDash issued a statement to the ABC station about the matter. At DoorDash, we take the safety of our community extremely seriously. We are investigating the alleged incident and will take action as appropriate, including deactivating the Dasher from our platform, the firm said. According to the company, in a statement to Yahoo News, DoorDash delivery drivers work as independent contractors and are not employed by DoorDash. A worker catches a catfish weighing nearly 2 kilograms on Monday morning in Haikou, Hainan province, while draining water after the city experienced heavy rainfall. Water had accumulated in many sections of the island. [ZHANG MAO/FOR CHINA DAILY] Convective weather, characterized by strong wind, hail and thunderstorms, is forecast to hit many areas in southern China this month, the national observatory said. On Monday, the central and southern parts of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region and southwestern Guangdong province were struck by convective weather from 5 am to 8 am, with precipitation per hour up to 20 to 60 millimeters, according to the National Meteorological Center. Rainfall in Aotou township in Maoming, Guangdong, reached 127 mm per hour in places between Sunday morning and Monday morning, the Guangdong meteorological administration said. Convective weather, in which warm air currents rapidly push high into the sky and form plumes of thunderclouds, can be destructive. It is widely listed globally behind typhoons, earthquakes and floods for destructiveness. Extreme weather events can happen in an area as small as a few dozen square meters, though it usually affects dozens of or several hundred square kilometers. Convective weather is typically short-lived as well: Some events may last for only a few minutes. As of the end of March, southern China had been stricken this year by seven convective weather events affecting two or more provincial regions, according to Chen Tao, a chief forecaster at the center. "Generally speaking, there are slightly more of the weather events this year, which also came a little bit earlier," he said, adding that it's hard to forecast the frequency of devastating events. More of the extreme weather, however, is on the way. Brief, strong rainfall, with hourly precipitation of 20 to 40 mm was expected to occur in some areas in five provincial regions, including Guizhou, Yunnan and Hainan provinces from 2 pm Monday to 8 am Tuesday, and some areas in these regions will also experience thunderstorms, with strong winds and hail. Two more events are expected to occur in the southern parts of China from Tuesday to Thursday, and from March 8 to 10. The eastern part of Guizhou will be affected by both events forecasters said. Brief, strong winds and rain in a convective weather event can be as strong as in the eyes of super typhoons and may take down buildings of sink vessels. The local strength of a super tornado generated by convection can be far beyond that of the strongest typhoon, Chen said. In convective weather, temperatures in the upper air mass usually lag behind that of lower, moist air, creating strong, upwelling air currents. Spring is high season for convective weather in China, he said. By Matt VanVolkenburg Upon liberation from Japan in 1945, Korea's landscape was less than picturesque. Decades of timber exploitation by the Japanese and use of firewood by Koreans to heat homes had depleted Korea's forests and left most of its mountains barren. To deal with this pressing problem, the first Arbor Day was proclaimed in 1946. April 5 soon became a "holiday" during which officials, students, soldiers and regular citizens were marshalled to take part in tree-planting activities. American officials and soldiers also donated trees and labor. By 1957, 358 million saplings were being planted annually. The government exhorted citizens to plant by urging them to "regain their ancient aura of beauty of the land and to recapture our past remembrance of mild, warm and kind humanity prevalent among our people," and had them sing the "Reforestation Song." A lack of budget and commitment from the Syngman Rhee government, however, led to less-than-stellar results. This began to change after the military coup led by Park Chung-hee in 1961. The military authorities quickly called for the eradication of five major social ills, one of which was illegal logging. The drain on the economy caused by the lack of forests and timber made it clear to them how pressing the need was for reforestation. The lack of homegrown timber required imports surpassing $100 million by the 1970s, while treeless mountains contributed to flooding which devastated farmland, leading to food imports which further diverted capital from industrialization. So important was reforestation to Park Chung-hee's government that it established a 3 billion won forestry fund from money gained by normalizing relations with Japan, and in 1967 established the Office of Forestry, which years later was upgraded to ministry level. One of the most dire problems the government faced was the need for firewood by rural families who had no other source of heating fuel. In 1966, for example, coal briquettes, or "yeontan," were only used in 59 cities and towns, and in the short term there was a need to establish 3 million acres of firewood forests to supply the 2.4 million rural families without access to this fuel. The longer-term solution was to expand yeontan manufacturing and use. Every Arbor Day, editorials in The Korea Times bemoaned the lack of progress but writers hoped for the future and exhorted readers to take part in tree planting so that Korea would one day be as green as wealthier nations. One way to motivate citizens was to "appeal more strongly to patriotism." Park Chung-hee, who once said "A man who does not love trees cannot be called a true lover of the country," clearly understood this. For over a decade he was photographed leading tree-planting ceremonies, and each year he spoke of the need for reforestation. "The green of the countryside is a measure of the wealth of the nation. A poor nation is characterized by a lack of green," he said in 1966. Eight years later, amid frugality drives and crackdowns on decadence, he declared "a well-cultivated forest is a representation of national character full of diligence and thrift." In 1975, he said, "Planting a tree today is planting a hope for the future. And cultivating the tree with utmost sincerity is cultivating national power which will be bequeathed to our descendants in the form of development and prosperity." By this point, Park's Yushin dictatorship had done away with the public ceremonies and urged all-day planting from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. He had also yoked reforestation efforts to the Saemaeul or "New Village" movement which was focused on rural development. Ultimately, this focus led to one of the few reforestation success stories among developing nations. Having reached its goal, the government ended the program in 1992. The degree to which it is taken for granted is reflected in the fact that little protest arose when the government stripped Arbor Day of holiday status in 2005. Matt VanVolkenburg has a master's degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr. A North Carolina man who was diagnosed recently with cancer won a $250,000 lottery prize on April 1, 2019. (NC Education Lottery) Man Diagnosed Recently With Stage 4 Cancer Wins Lottery Prize A North Carolina man who was diagnosed recently with cancer is planning to travel the world after he won a $250,000 lottery prize. Richard Beare of Charlotte couldnt believe his luck when he made a stop at a convenience store to get a Powerball ticket two weeks ago. I rarely play the lottery, Beare told NC Education Lottery. I only stopped because my wife asked me to get a Powerball ticket since the jackpot was so high. While at the store, Beare decided to also buy some scratch-off tickets. He purchased four Carolina Black tickets in total. The fourth one was the winner, the retired automotive mechanic said. When I saw that I had matching numbers, I asked her, What does it mean if I match the numbers? She said it meant I won a prize. I told her, Well, I guess we just won $250,000 then. She was in shock and just kept looking back and forth to me and the ticket. Beare went to the lottery headquarters in Raleigh to claim his prize on April 1. He took home $176,876, an amount after taxes. The $5 ticket launched in the last month with four top prizes of $250,000. Two top prizes remain. This feels great, Beare said. Its such a relief. Beare said he would use the money to travel to Italy with his wife. I recently got diagnosed with stage four liver cancer, he said. I want to travel while I can still enjoy myself. My wife has always wanted to go to Italy, since thats where her descendants are from. Now I can take her. In a similar story last year, an 87-year-old man from New Jersey, who broke his hip while on his way to the store to buy a lottery ticket, ended up winning a share of a $1 million prize after hospital staff took pity on him. Earl Livingston, 87, was going out to buy a lottery ticket when he fell, only for things to take a turn for the richer. Today Show 20181026 While in the hospital, Earl Livingston shared his story with staff at Jefferson Stratford Hospital, who asked him whether he wanted to be included in the hospitals lottery pool. Here's the winning ticket! Get the full story tonight from Joyce Evans FOX 29. #StratfordMillionairesClub Jefferson Health New Jersey 20181024 He told them he was on his way to buy a lottery ticket and he was disappointed that he didnt get it, Livingstons niece, Bobbie Mickle, told NBC10. So they said, Why dont you go in with us? Were also buying a lottery ticket. Livingston then contributed an amount with 141 hospital staff in the pool. They ended up winning $1 million, with each participant taking home about $4,500 after taxes. I want to thank everybody, Livingston told NBC10. I appreciate very much and God bless you and have a happy, happy long life! Congratulations to the newly formed "Stratford Millionaires Club!" 141 employees and one patient from Jefferson Health - Jefferson Health 20181025 Joe Devine, president of Jefferson Health New Jersey, praised his staff for going beyond their duties to help the elderly patient. This is a story of good fortune, but also of great people, he told Today. When this gentleman expressed his disappointment around not having the chance to get a lottery ticket, our staff stepped in to brighten up his day. The team here goes above and beyond for their patients every day. This time, it happened to net an excellent reward for all! The Epoch Times reporter Jocelyn Neo contributed to this report. The Huawei MateBook X Pro laptop presented at a press conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on February 25, 2018. Microsoft recently revealed how it found a backdoor vulnerability within Matebook laptops. (JOSEP LAGO/AFP/Getty Images) Microsoft Finds Backdoor in Huawei Laptops That Could Give Hackers Access Researchers at U.S. tech giant Microsoft recently revealed that they discovered a backdoor in certain Huawei laptop models that allowed unprivileged users to gain access to all laptop data. This vulnerability is similar to the technique DoublePulsar, a malware tool leaked by the hacker group The Shadow Brokers in early 2017. It had infected more than 200,000 computers running on Microsoft Windows software within a few weeks. DoublePulsar was again used for the WannaCry ransomware attack in May 2017 that targeted Windows computers throughout the world, seeking payment in Bitcoin in exchange for restoring the computers. The Backdoor Microsoft published a blog post on March 25 that detailed how researchers found the backdoor on Huaweis laptops and then proceeded to fix the loophole. Microsoft said that after it informed Huawei of the backdoor, the Chinese tech manufacturer released a patch on Jan. 9 to fix the vulnerabilities. Microsoft did not specify when it discovered the backdoor. All computers have a kernel, which is the core of the computers operating system and can completely control everything on the device. After the DoublePulsar attacks in 2017, Microsoft tried to develop tools that can protect users. Starting from Windows 10, version 1809, released on Nov. 13, 2018, Microsoft installed newly-developed sensors to better detect kernel threats like DoublePulsar. But then Microsoft detected an anomalous injected code in the kernels of the Huawei laptop model, Matebook. Upon further investigation, Microsoft engineers traced the code to a device management software called PCManager that is pre-installed onto Huawei Matebooks. The software had included a driver that would allow unprivileged users to upgrade their access level to senior privilege. If these unprivileged users escalate to the highest Ring-0 privilege, they can visit all data on the computer and its connected computing system. If a third party gains access and inserts malware, it could ruin the computers operating system. A computers user privilege has four levels. Ring-0 privilege in the kernel is the highest and allows users to control every hardware and software. Microsoft reported the vulnerability to Huawei, and built a detection mechanism that would raise an alert for any successful privilege escalation in Matebooks, the blog explained. Soon after, Microsoft engineers found another backdoor in the Matebook: the same unsafe driver provided a capability for unprivileged users to directly access all data without having to upgrade privilege levels. On Jan. 9, Huawei released a fix for these two vulnerabilities. U.S. tech media Lightreading commented on March 29: News of the backdoor is a bad look for Huawei. In an emailed statement on April 3, the Chinese company characterized the vulnerability as common in the industry. Huawei vehemently rejects any suggestion or inference that backdoors exist in the development or delivery of any of our products or service, the statement read. Huaweis Record The company, one of the worlds largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, smartphones, and other electronic devices, has come under fire for its close ties to the Chinese regime, which the U.S. and other governments have warned could mean its products have backdoors that allow the Chinese regime access to spy on people overseas. Huawei has continually denied those claims, including by reasoning that no backdoor incident has ever been detected. Though this latest Microsoft incident does not appear to involve the Chinese regime, there have been documented cases demonstrating Huaweis liability. In January 2018, French newspaper Le Monde revealed that data from the headquarters building of the African Union was being transferred to a server in Shanghai every night. The African Unions headquarters is located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The building, which cost $200 million, was built and financed by the Chinese regime as a gift. Huawei is one of the suppliers for the buildings computing system and telecommunication system, according to an analysis by Canberra-based think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute, citing content from Huaweis own website and documents obtained from the African Union, including contracts for the unions IT infrastructure. The think tank pointed out that while it is possible Huawei was not aware of the alleged data theft, the companys obliviousness would itself be cause for a national security concern. Meanwhile, a November 2018 report by the Weekend Australian said that according to an intelligence source, Australia has evidence that Huawei officials have been approached by the Chinese regime and pressured to disclose access codes and network details to hack into a foreign network. The United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan have banned Huawei from its markets, citing security concerns. Several European mobile operators have also recently announced that they would not use Huaweis products for their rollout of 5G network infrastructure. This article has been updated to include a comment from Huawei. Mohamed Fathy Hussein Zayan of Egypt was arrested and charged with a felony charge of attempted abduction after he allegedly grabbed a 5-year-old girl at a mall. He was stopped by her mother who pulled out a gun. (West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority) Mom With Gun Scares Off Man Who Allegedly Tried to Abduct Her Daughter A man has been arrested and charged with attempted abduction after he allegedly grabbed a 5-year-old girl at a mall in West Virginia on April 1. Police alleged Mohamed Fathy Hussein Zayan, 54, from Egypt grabbed the young girl by the hair and attempted to pull her away inside the Old Navy store at the Huntington Mall just after 6 p.m. The victim, who was not identified, then dropped to the floor with the suspect still trying to pull her away, reported WSAZ, citing the criminal complaint. On 4-1-19 at approximately 6:17 PM a call was made to Cabell County 911 from a female inside the Huntington Mall. The Barboursville Police Department 201941 When she saw what was happening, the girls mother said she pulled out a handgun and the suspect left the store and went into the mall, according to a statement from the Barboursville Police Department. The mother promptly alerted mall security, who spotted Zayan near the food court and took him into custody. Officers from the Cabell County Sheriffs Department also responded to the incident. According to jail records, Zayan is currently being held on a $200,000 cash bond. A magistrate said he will need to surrender his passport and stay in West Virginia, according to WSAZ. An Egyptian man has been arrested and charged with attempted abduction after a mom said he tried to grab her 5-year-old daughter at the Huntington Mall. WOWK 13 NEWS 201942 Police said they are currently investigating the incident. At this point in the investigation, detectives believe this was an isolated incident that was quickly controlled and no further danger to the public exists, police said in the statement. Another Kidnapper Faced with a Gun In another case of alleged kidnapping in 2017, a Missouri grandmother thwarted a suspects attempt to abduct her with a gun. Diane McIntire told WQAD that she pulled up at a mall parking lot to do some shopping when a man appeared by her door with a large butcher knife. I did not even see it at first, thats how quickly he was in my space. I kicked him in his chest, pushed him back. I felt the knife cut right below my elbow, McIntire told the news station. The suspect, Floyd May, 61, then forced her to drive her truck for about 20 minutes. What May didnt know was that McIntire had a concealed carry permit and a Glock 380 handgun in the console of her truck. He then ordered her to pull into a gravel parking lot near Port Byron, and she knew she would likely soon get an opportunity to get her weapon. I knew I would live or die right there. He did tell me in the drive, if the police come up behind us, that we were both going to die that day, she told the news station. She continued, He got out of the truck and the butcher knife fell onto the ground and he got out to pick up the knife, I opened the console and grabbed my pistol. I went ahead and got out of the truck. I had the gun at his chest, and I told him do not come near me. I said, if you come near, me, Im going to shoot you. Floyd May, with knife in hand, kidnapped Diane McIntire from the parking lot of SouthPark Mall on Sunday. Little did he know she had a concealed carry permit and a handgun in the console of her truck WQAD 20171013 The 61-year-old suspect then escaped to a nearby house. That was when the grandmother fled on her truck to a hospital and called the police. The grandmother, who needed 24 stitches for the cut on her arm, said she tried to keep calm when May was in her truck. He said he had just got out, I believe it was a mental institution, and hed been living under a bridge for the past two weeks. And, he told me he did prison time and stabbed a man in prison, McIntire said. May was subsequently arrested and charged with several felonies, including aggravated kidnapping and battery. The brave grandmother said she has had her conceal carry permit for about three years, the news website reported. I have a family, I have a life. I want to live. I have grandchildren. My thought at that point was to live to see another day, she said. Mother of Student Allegedly Killed by Fake Uber Driver Slams Accused In Court The mother of a South Carolina student who was found dead after getting into a strangers car thinking it was her Uber has denounced the accused killer in court as being vile and evil. Nathaniel David Rowland, 24, was arrested on suspicion of murder after 21-year-old Samantha Josephson got into his car on the night of Friday, March 29, believing he was her Uber driver. Police said the child safety locks had been enabled on the black Chevy Impala Josephson got into, preventing her escape. Josephsons body was found hours later in the woods by turkey hunters. Officials have so far not said how Josephson died, but arrest records show she had injuries to her head, neck, upper body, leg, and foot, according to The State newspaper. After Rowland was arrested Marci Josephson, the victims mother, read a statement on Sunday, March 31, at Rowlands jail hearing, the Daily Mail reported. Rowland did not attend the hearing. Hes Taken Away a Piece of Our Heart There are no words to describe the immense pain his actions have caused our family and friends. Hes taken away a piece of our heart, soul, and life. Shame on him. We thought he would be here to see his evil face, the victims mother said in court, according to the Daily Mail. I cannot fathom how someone could randomly select a person, a beautiful girl, and steal her life away. His actions were senseless, vile, and unacceptable. It sickens us to think that his face was the last thing that my baby girl saw on this earth. His selfish, unspeakable, and violent actions have created a hole in the universe. She described her daughter as bubbly and full of life and said she was due to graduate college in May and start law school in September. The grieving mother urged the judge to deny bail for Rowland. He should never be given the right to walk free again for what he did to my daughter, or given the opportunity to hurt anyone else, she said. Final Moments Captured on Video Surveillance footage shows the moment Josephson hopped down the curb and into her alleged killers car outside a South Carolina bar, as she apparently mistook it for her Uber ride home. [S]he simply mistakenly got into this particular car, thinking it was an Uber ride, Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook told a news conference on March 30. A witness told the Daily Gamecock student newspaper that Josephson left the Bird Dog bar alone and was seen getting into a car police later identified as belonging to Rowland. In the U.S., a man has been charged with the kidnap and murder of Samantha Josephson, a college student who was waiting for an Uber, but mistakenly got into the wrong car. #TheLatest #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/1lqwb8hAPQ 7NEWS Perth (@7NewsPerth) April 1, 2019 Her body was found later that day in the woods off a dirt road in Clarendon County, about 65 miles away from where she got into the black Chevy Impala. Rowland was arrested early the next day after a police officer noticed the make and color of his car matched the CCTV records. Rowland tried to run, but the officer was able to catch up to him, Holbrook said. When they returned to the car, he said, the officer saw what appeared to be blood in the car, along with bleach, window cleaner, and cleaning wipes. Holbrook told reporters that there were large amounts of blood in the trunk and passenger seat, which was later identified as Josephsons. The police chief told the news conference that the area where her body was found was very difficult to get to unless you knew how to get there. Josephsons cellphone was also found in the car, and investigators found the cars child-locks had been activated, which would have prevented anyone in the back of the vehicle from escaping. On March 30, Josephsons father posted on Facebook that Samantha is no longer with us but she will not be for gotten [sic]. It is with tremendous sadness and of a broken heart that I post this! I will miss and love my baby girl for the rest of [my] life, Seymour Josephson wrote. It is extremely hard to write this and post it but I love her with all my heart. I could continue to write about her but it kills me. I sit here and cry while looking at the picture and write [sic] this. An online funding campaign set up after her death has raised over $50,000 in two days. Epoch Times reporter Simon Veazey contributed to this article. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) listens as acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Justice Department on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 8, 2019. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters) Nadler Argued Against Releasing Full Starr Report One of the loudest voices to push for the release of the full report by special counsel Robert Mueller did the exact opposite when Congress received the special counsel report by Kenneth Starr, according to a decades-old interview, which resurfaced on April 2. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told Charlie Rose in 1998 that Starrs report included grand jury testimony, which cannot be made public unless overridden by the House of Representatives. Nadler is also one of the leading proponents pushing for the full release of Muellers report, which likewise includes grand jury material. Starrs report recommended the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Muellers report exonerated President Donald Trump, a Republican. Its grand jury material. It represents statements that may or may not be true by various witnesses, salacious material, all kinds of material that it would be unfair to release, Nadler said in 1998. Nadler went on to explain that members of the House would need to review the report to determine what is fit for release and what as a matter of decency and protecting peoples privacy rights must not be released at all. Nadler is taking a completely different approach to the Mueller report, going as far as penning a New York Times op-ed demanding the full release of the report and the underlying documents. We have an obligation to read the full report, and the Department of Justice has an obligation to provide it, in its entirety, without delay. If the department is unwilling to produce the full report voluntarily, then we will do everything in our power to secure it for ourselves, Nadler wrote. We require the full reportthe special counsels words, not the attorney generals summary or a redacted version, he added. Nadler was one of six committee chairmen who wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr and set an arbitrary April 2 deadline for the release of the report. Barr has said that he plans to release the report by mid-April or sooner. The House Judiciary Committee, which Nadler chairs, will vote on April 3 on whether to issue subpoenas to obtain the full report. Lawmakers will also consider subpoenas for underlying evidence from Muellers investigation and from five former aides to Trump, including White House counsel Donald McGahn and political adviser Steve Bannon. The committee said on April 1 that it may have documents related to the Mueller probe. Barr issued a summary of the special counsel report in late March, outlining the findings of Muellers investigation. Barr wrote that the special counsel didnt find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Barr also reviewed Muellers arguments for and against bringing an obstruction of justice charge against Trump and concluded that there wasnt enough evidence to bring a case. Nadlers committee will vote on a resolution to allow him to issue subpoenas at his own discretion. Trump has said he would approve of the full report being released to the public but noted that Democrats would not be satisfied. We know by the actions that weve seen from Nadler and Democrats in Congress is that the president is right, they will never be satisfied, said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, adding that the Democrats are sore losers. Reuters contributed to this report. The Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) GSAT-9 on board the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-F09), launches in Sriharikota in the state of Andhra Pradesh on May 5, 2017. (Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images) NASA Says Indias Satellite Destruction Created Threat to International Space Station NASA said Indias destruction of a satellite last week posed a threat to the International Space Station and the astronauts on board. Last week, India intentionally destroyed one of its satellites with a missile, which, according to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, made India a space power. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the test was a terrible thing, creating about 400 pieces of debris in the Earths orbit. He said the risk of the debris hitting the ISS has risen significantly. The head of NASA says India's anti-satellite missile test created at least 400 pieces of orbital debris, placing the International Space Station and its astronauts at risk. CNN 201942 Its not clear how many pieces of debris were created in the test, said Bridenstine, who added that many of the pieces are large enough to threaten the ISS, but theyre not big enough to track, reported Business Insider. What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to trackwere talking about 10 cm (4 inches) or biggerabout 60 pieces have been tracked, he was quoted as saying. Twenty-four pieces are traveling in orbit above the ISS. The satellite had been orbiting above the space station. That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station, Bridenstine added. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight. NASA said that India shot its satellite to pieces, posing an unacceptable risk to astronauts on the ISS. INVENTIONS INSIDER 201942 Modi announced on March 27 that a historic feat had been achieved after India shot down the satellite with a surface-to-space missile, CNN reported. The United States, China, and Russia have similar missiles. Indias Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that the missile test was carried out in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris, and whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back onto the Earth within weeks, according to the network. But Bridenstine added that it is not acceptable for us to allow people to create orbital debris fields that put at risk our people, as reported by Business Insider. We are charged with enabling more activities in space than weve ever seen before for the purpose of benefiting the human condition, whether its pharmaceuticals or printing human organs in 3-D to save lives here on Earth, or manufacturing capabilities in space that youre not able to do in a gravity well, he said, CNN reported. All of those are placed at risk when these kind of events happen. NASA is tracking about 23,000 pieces of space debris that are larger than four inches. Indian officials said the test was done in the lower atmosphere to ensure there are no pieces orbiting around the Earth. The Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi said that India didnt violate any laws or treaties, reported the Hindu Business Line. Bridenstine this week added that a 2007 anti-satellite test carried out by China created a significant amount of debris, which is still in space, according to the Business Line. And were still dealing with it. We are still, we as a nation are responsible for doing space situational awareness and space traffic management, conjunction analysis for the entire world, he said. Nigerians Are Ordering Pizza Direct From London, Says Government Minister Affluent Nigerians are getting pizza delivered 4,000 miles from London. Nigerian Agriculture Minister Audu Ogbeh told the Senate Agriculture Committee that some Nigerians are ordering pizza air-flown six hours from London to Abuja, Nigerias capital, via British Airways. There are Nigerians who use their cellphones to import pizza from London. Buy in London, they bring it on British Airways in the morning to pick up at the airport, Ogbeh complained at a Senate hearing on March 26. A British Airways spokesperson wrote in an email, Its not much dough to get to Lagos on British Airways, our customers can get a slice [of] the action for just 539 [$707]. Minister for Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, says there are Nigerians who use their phones to order pizza from London. According to him, they order for pizza at night and British Airways flies it in in the morning!! pic.twitter.com/gxkifGUCqL Uncle Suru (@unclexofficial) March 27, 2019 During the hearing, Ogbeh was defending his ministrys budget for 2019 which would provide support for local producers. He said foreign imports were seen as status symbols by many people, and the obsession with foreign goods extends even to necessities like rice and tomato paste, according to The Daily Mail. Ogbeh said that this demand for foreign produce is not because the products are better than locally produced goodsits all about status. Nation of Importers Ogbeh described Nigeria as a nation of importers, according to Nigerian-based World Stage Group. For example, Nigeria spends $50,000 on toothpicks and $1 million on tomato paste annually. Importers have hijacked the economy of Nigeria, he said. They have taken it hostage and they have no intention of giving up. This regime is unpopular in part because it is trying to cut down imports, he said. I know what I am saying because I have been in this business for 41 years. We import sugar, handkerchief, toothpaste, even pencils, he added. Ogbeh said that international importers were the biggest obstacle to Nigerias efforts to encourage Nigerians to buy locally produced products. Unfortunately, when you do you make enemies; even the importation of rice that we are trying to reduce is creating for us enemies, heavy enemies, people, who can kill if they have the opportunity because you are spoiling their business, he said. Some locals prefer foreign goods even when they could be produced locally, such as rice. Nigeria is one of the largest producers of rice and yams in Africa, and agriculture was once the countrys main industrial sector. Nigeria is the worlds second biggest rice importer after China. According to the World Bank, Nigerian imports as a percentage of GDP increased between 2015 and 2017. Abdullahi Adamu, chairman of the Senate committee, called on the federal government to address high imports of fruits and vegetables. What is eating deep into our capacity to develop are the little things, he said, according to Nigerian-based The Cable. Go to these major shopping malls in Abuja, Kano, Lagos, go to the sections where they sell vegetables, any of them, they are imported from South Africa. Total imports increased a hefty 48 percent year-on-year in December 2018, mainly driven by manufactured goods (88 percent) and raw materials (12 percent). The bulk of the imports came from China (32 percent) and India (8 percent). Nigeria, Africas most populous country and largest economy, has a population of more than 190 million people, and heavily relies on oil as its primary source of revenue. The Eastern District of New York in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, on Feb. 7, 2019. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) NXIVM Board Member Admits to Enslaving Woman for 2 Years, Threatening Her With Deportation A member of NXIVMs executive board quietly pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges sometime last week and admitted in court to harboring her own personal slave. Lauren Salzman, a top-ranking member of the purported self-help organization and daughter of co-founder Nancy Salzman, told Judge Nicholas Garaufis at the Eastern District Court in Brooklyn that she threatened her slave with deportation and kept her imprisoned in a room between March 2010 and April 2012. The high-profile NXIVM case has gained infamy for egregious sex-trafficking charges. Salzmans hearing was not listed on the court calendar, and a judge soon sealed the transcript until parts of it could be redacted. A spokesperson for the Eastern District Court told The Epoch Times on April 2 that Salzman pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy and racketeering. Salzman, 42, also admitted in court to being a member of the secret society within NXIVM called DOS, or The Vow, founded by the groups leader, Keith Raniere, who is currently being held without bail. Salzman harbored her slave before DOS was officially founded. Prosecutors said the society was created around 2015 and is purported to be an acronym for the Latin phrase dominus obsequious sororium, which translates loosely as master over the slave women. I knowingly and intentionally harbored Jane Doe 4, a woman whose identity is known to me, in a room in the home in the Northern District of New York and threatened to deport Jane Doe 4 back to Mexico if she did not complete labor requested by myself and others, Salzman said, according to Frank Report, the publication run by NXIVMs ex-publicist and whistleblower Frank Parlato, who first broke the story about the groups alleged schemes. During the court proceeding, Garaufis explained to Salzman that the maximum term of imprisonment is 20 years for each of her two charges. He reportedly told Salzman that no one knows today what your exact guidelines range will be. Additional statements from Garaufis were redacted from the official transcript. According to court documents, the secret society allegedly operated as a pyramid scheme, with levels of slaves headed by masters; slaves were then expected to recruit their own slaves, thus becoming masters themselves. Salzman said she was a member of DOS between January 2017 and June 2017, during which time she knowingly and intentionally obtained the labor and services in the form of acts of care from lower-ranking DOS members. She also detailed how she formed relationships with many NXIVM members over the years through her association with the group. Salzman said she believed she was helping to empower people to live their left lives but later admitted that she blindly followed Raniere to engage in criminal conduct. Raniere, the purported master of the DOS inner circle, had access to all the women in the group, court documents indicate. Some of NXIVMs inner teachings also allegedly touted the need for men to have multiple sex partners, but for women to be monogamous, prosecutors say. Some DOS members allegedly were branded with Ranieres initials. The society allegedly recruited members on the condition that they would give up personal, often embarrassing, information about themselves, including compromising images or videos, as collateral. According to the charges, once inside, members were regularly required to provide additional collateral to ensure they kept the groups activities secret. Previously, Salzmans mother, former NXIVM President Nancy Salzman, pleaded guilty on March 13 to one count of racketeering conspiracy. Hours later, prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Raniere that accuses 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. Salzman was one of the four co-defendants in the case against Raniere. The other three are Seagram billionaire heiress Clare Bronfman; former Smallville actress Allison Mack; and the societys bookkeeper, Kathy Russell. The new charges added against Raniere sparked speculation that his co-defendants might agree to cooperate against him, according to The Associated Press. In the wake of the allegations, the company announced the suspension of all operations until further notice. Oklahoma Woman Allegedly Drove on Rim With Margarita in Cup Holder: Police Police in Oklahoma have arrested a woman on drunken driving charges after they said she was spotted driving without a tire and with a full margarita cocktail in her cup holder. Amy Ann Dillon, 28, was pulled over after officers said they heard a loud grinding noise coming from an approaching vehicle, according to the Tulsa Police Department. We could hear her coming from a block away, police said in a social media post. When Dillons vehicle got closer, the deputies realized the noise came from the metal rim grinding on the asphalt. A driver drove up to our stop driving on a rim, the Tulsa Police Department said in the Facebook status update. When asked how much she had to drink, she stated two tequila shots (said this as she could barely stand upright), police later wrote. According to the officers, Dillon also did not do well on field sobriety tests, and when deputies looked inside her car, they allegedly found a full container of margarita in her cup holder. Police said they believe she wrecked her car on something prior to the arrest and assume she was driving on [the metal rim] for some time. Dillon was booked at David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center, where she grinned for a mugshot. A breathalyzer later determined Dillon had a .21 blood-alcohol level. She faces charges for DUI, operating a motorized vehicle with defective tires, transport of an open container, and driving without a license in possession. Police said more charges could be filed against Dillon. She also could be facing hit and run charges if it discovered what she hit, the police wrote. Dillon was released from the Tulsa County jail Sunday after posting $2,000 bail, according to jail records cited by the Daily Mail. Dillon has had previous run-ins with the law, Tulsa World reported. Last year, she entered no contest pleas to charges stemming from another DUI crash and was handed a one-year deferred sentence, according to the news outlet. New DUI Laws in California Devices that prevent people with prior DUI convictions from driving under the influence of alcohol will be installed more widely across California, according to a recent Epoch Times report. After the conclusion of an eight-year pilot project, lawmakers announced the rollout of devices intended to prevent offenders from starting their cars after failing a breathalyzer test. SB 1046 will lead to safer roadways for all Californians, Hill said in a statement when the Bill was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown. Weve already seen this to be true in the four counties conducting the pilot program: ignition interlock devices (IIDs) have saved lives by preventing more than 1 million attempts to drink and drive since 2010. After the initial breathalyzer test on ignition, there are also random tests while driving to deter the driver from drunken driving. Senate Bill 1046, which was passed in 2016 and takes effect at the beginning of 2019, requires all drivers in California who have been convicted of DUI to install the ignition interlock device (IID) on their vehicles for a period of time before receiving a restricted license or having their license reinstated. Each year about 1,000 people die and more than 20,000 are injured in California because of drunken drivers, according to the statement. Epoch Times reporter Zach Li contributed to this report. Police Identify One of Four Suspects in Alleged Kidnapping of Chinese Student Police investigating the alleged abduction of a Chinese student from a parking garage north of Toronto said theyve managed to identify one of the four suspects wanted in the case. York Regional Police Const. Andy Pattenden said Monday that investigators have issued a Canadawide warrant for a 37yearold Toronto man believed to be directly involved in the disappearance of 22yearold Wanzhen Lu. Lu gained national attention after police said he was forcibly dragged into a van near his home in Markham, Ont., only to resurface more than 150 kilometres away three days later. Pattenden said that although Lu was found in good health and remains safe, the investigation into his violent alleged abduction remains active. Our investigators have been working tirelessly on this case, Pattenden told reporters. Even after Mr. Lou was found in good condition, our investigators have kept going. Theyre working very, very hard to figure out who these people are and get them into custody. Pattenden shared few details about the first identified suspect, Abdullahi Adan of Toronto. He did not reveal whether Adan had any prior connection to Lu, nor whether he was previously known to police, but described him as armed and dangerous. UPDATE- WARRANT ISSUED FOR SUSPECT IN ARMED KIDNAPPING IN MARKHAM: A Canada-wide arrest warrant has been issued for Abdullahi ADAN, 37 of Toronto, believed to be suspect #3 involved in the armed kidnapping of a 22-year-old man from Markham. 3 other suspects still outstanding pic.twitter.com/Zmph43EGs5 York Regional Police (@YRP) April 1, 2019 Adan is currently wanted on one count each of kidnapping, forcible confinement, assault and assault with a weapon in Lus disappearance, police said. Lus disappearance drew widespread attention within hours of polices first description of what they characterized as a violent assault. Investigators said the student was walking with a friend toward an elevator after parking his car at his condominium around 6 p.m. on March 23 when a black wheelchairaccessible minivan came up behind him. ARMED KIDNAPPING UPDATE 22yr-old Wanzhen LU was kidnapped just before 6pm yesterday from 15 Water Walk Dr, Markham. If you spot this wheelchair accessible Dodge Caravan with stolen plate:CEAR350 call 9-1-1 immediately. Click the link for more info > https://t.co/vZdrW5pWgW pic.twitter.com/ffnqGH3lEw York Regional Police (@YRP) March 24, 2019 Police alleged three men jumped out of the van while the driver remained behind the wheel, grabbed Lu, shocked him multiple times with a stun gun and dragged him into the vehicle before speeding off. Lus friend, a young woman, was not injured in the incident, but was traumatized by what police called the brazen incident. Security images released by police showed three male suspects wearing winter jackets with their hoods wrapped tight to their faces. UPDATE ARMED KIDNAPPING IN MARKHAM Wanzhen LU was located shortly before 9pm tonight in Gravenhurst. With assistance from @OPP_COMM_CR he was taken to hospital with minor injuries. The search continues for the 4 suspects who kidnapped Mr LU. Any info call 866-876-5423 x7865. pic.twitter.com/fpvVcqOMVy York Regional Police (@YRP) March 27, 2019 Police had issued numerous appeals to the alleged abductors to release Lu, which Pattenden said they likely did three days after driving off with him. He said Lu showed up asking for help at a home near Gravenhurst, in the heart of the provinces cottage country, just over 72 hours after he went missing. Pattenden theorized that the suspects had dropped him off in the area earlier in the evening. Lu was taken to a local hospital and briefly treated for minor injuries before being returned to York Region. Pattenden did not provide further updates on Lus condition Monday, or any potential motive for the alleged abduction. By Cho Jae-hyon Prof. Kim Jong-bok of the Department of English Language and Literature at Kyung Hee University has been honored as the winner of the Humboldt Research Award during a ceremony in Bamberg, Germany, March 29, for his achievements in research on English and Korean syntax. The prize, given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, is awarded to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of Germany. This is the first time that a Korean scholar from the department of humanities or linguistics has been awarded the prestigious award, according to the foundation. His main areas of expertise are Korean and English syntax. "Prof. Kim is an international authority in the field of theoretical linguistics," the Humboldt Foundation said in a statement. "He is working in the framework of Constructional Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. His analyses are implemented in computer processable grammar." In Germany, Prof. Kim will further develop the framework of "head-driven phrase structure grammar" and work on the comparison of Korean and German syntax, it said. Head-driven phrase structure grammar, drawn from such fields as computer science, is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar. Kim received 60,000 euros in prize money and will be invited to Germany to research linguistics for a year. Holding a Ph.D. from the Linguistics Department of Stanford University, Prof. Kim has actively published books and papers on English and Korean linguistics along with Stanford University, and the Cambridge University Press and other global academic institutes. He plans to conduct joint research on English, German and Korean linguistics with professors from Humboldt University. Members of a caravan of Central Americans who spent weeks traveling across Mexico walk from Mexico to the U.S. side of the border to ask authorities for asylum on April 29, 2018 in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico. David McNew/Getty Images President Trump Has Every Right to Close the USMexico Border Commentary As the national emergency fight rages on in Congress, the unfortunate reality is that people continue to enter the United States illegally. One of the primary avenues by which this is happening is through Mexico. As a result, President Donald Trump recently indicated that if Mexico doesnt do more to stop illegal crossings from Mexico into the United States, then he will close the U.S.Mexico border as soon as this week. While some in Congress continue to try to stymie the presidents efforts to build the wall in accordance with the National Emergency Act, the president may still close the border under a separate legal provision. According to Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act: Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. Notably, the law permits the president to take such action when he believes the entry of any aliens would be detrimental to the interests of the United States. This standard is very general and broad. As explained in the Conservative Review, That includes public welfare, health concerns, values, attitudes, etc. In addition, the presidents power under this law is plenary, meaning that it is absolute and the courts shouldnt interfere with the presidents decision. A recent article in the New York Post highlighted some of the risks and dangers that currently exist at the border: Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan warned that the situation on the border was at a breaking point and said that apprehensions are on pace to surpass 100,000 this month. CBP is facing an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our southwest border, and nowhere has that crisis manifested more acutely than here in El Paso, McAleenan said. He said many of the illegal immigrants trying to cross the border arrive with serious injuries or are suffering from diseases like chickenpox and the flu, overwhelming agents and detention centers. This description appears to fit squarely within the detrimental to the interests of the United States standard. Therefore, Trump should be well within his right to utilize Section 212(f) if he decides to do so. Incidentally, he may also refer to Section 215(a)(1), which prohibits any alien from entering or departing the United States except under reasonable rules or regulations and subject to any limitations that the president may prescribe. Together, these two provisions allow the president to close the border or set specific conditions on how people may apply for entry. To date, congressional Democrats and some congressional Republicans continue to object to the presidents emergency declaration stemming from the border crisis. Various lawsuits have been filed relative to the emergency, and the Supreme Court will likely be called upon to end the debate. While the president has strong legal grounds to stand on relative to his emergency declaration, these two sections provide another mechanism with which to deal with the worsening border crisis. Former President Barack Obama utilized Section 212(f) many times, while former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton previously utilized Section 215(a)(1). Therefore, the use of these laws has ample precedent. Given the current conditions at the U.S.Mexico border, Trump should utilize his authorized power and close the border as soon as possible. The United States is a melting pot of diverse cultures and nationalities, and welcomes people from other countries with open arms. However, as the president has stated from the start, immigrants who want to enter the country must do so legally. This condition is not negotiable. In light of Mexicos alleged failure to support or enforce the presidents immigration policies, the current risks at the border, and the unwillingness of some in Congress to build the wall via emergency declaration, Trump should seriously consider utilizing one or both of these sections to close the border and, ultimately, to protect the country. Elad Hakim is a writer, commentator, and attorney. His articles have been published in The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, The Western Journal, American Thinker, and other online publications. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. A voter in Ukraines eastern city of Kharkiv casts a ballot during the first round of the countrys presidential election on March 31, 2019. (Chris Collison for The Epoch Times) Reflecting Widespread Anti-Establishment Sentiment, Comedian Steals the Show in Ukraines Election Top candidate plays a president on television, but is that enough? KHARKIV, UkraineStepping into the voting booth, Tatiana Ovcharova wasnt quite sure who she was going to vote for, even after working as an election observer for the campaign of Ukrainian presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky. But now that the comedian-turned-politician has a strong lead heading into the second round of voting, Ovcharova thinks she made the right choice. He may have bitten off more than he can chew, Ovcharova said. But if it is a choice between a dishonest person and an inexperienced but smart person, I would choose the inexperienced person. Ukraines presidential runoff on April 21 will pit the political newcomer against incumbent President Petro Poroshenko. Zelensky scored a double-digit lead over Poroshenko in the first ballot, reflecting widespread anti-establishment sentiment and dissatisfaction with Ukraines political class. In a popular Ukrainian television show, Zelensky plays a school teacher who becomes the Ukrainian president after a fiery speech about government corruption goes viral online. As the third season of the series debuted in March ahead of the election, it has been at times difficult to differentiate advertising for the show from political campaigning. Zelenskys platform has been short on policy details, but his youthful charisma and irreverent, anti-elite messaging have resonated with many voters. However, his connection to Ihor Kolomosky, a powerful Ukrainian oligarch who owns the television channel that airs his series, has raised suspicion that he would not be as independent-minded as his television counterpart. Some Ukrainians also worry that Zelenskys political inexperience could leave the country vulnerable to manipulation by Russia, which has been locked in a de facto war with Ukraine since 2014. Aleksandr Khriplivyi, a veteran of the war in Ukraines southeast and a Poroshenko supporter, said he approaches the election more seriously than those who chose to vote for the comedian. It is a choice of civilizationsEurope or Asia, said Khriplivyi. Will we either continue until the end of this conflict or we will capitulate. I am afraid that someone else will make a deal with Putin. Poroshenko may not be ideal, but he is the best choice we have. Zelensky has said that he is open to negotiating with Putin over the conflict in the southeast if elected president. As an animator who was hired to manage a startup in Kharkiv despite lack of management experience, Ovcharova doesnt think Zelenskys background is a disadvantage. She also points to the path of another famous politician. We watched a film about Ronald Reagan, and Zelensky did the voiceover, she said. Reagan was also an actor. I think there are some parallels going on. She added that she sees Zelenskys appeal to young people as his biggest asset. A lot of people see themselves in him, as a person who doesnt have a rich father or mother, who rose through his own strength, she said. He provides motivation for young people. Poroshenko has campaigned on his record as presidentnamely, the establishment of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, his support for soldiers fighting in the armed conflict, and the promotion of the Ukrainian language over Russian. But he has also been criticized for a slowing pace of reforms, the rising price of gas, allegations of corruption, and a difficult economic reality, especially among pensioners who have struggled to make ends meet in Europes poorest country. A Sign of Democracy Ahead of the vote, some candidates had expressed concern that the election could be riddled with fraud, vote-buying, or violence. Instead, election observers noted that the process was peaceful and saw a relatively low number of election violations. Kateryna Minkina, a long-term observer for OPORA, a civic election monitoring organization that has participated in the last several national elections, said that violations were mostly limited to confusion among poll attendants over recently introduced identification documents and voters who photographed their completed ballots, which is illegal under Ukrainian law. A dizzying 39 candidates appeared on the election ballot, which stretched nearly 32 inches long. Among them was Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who had topped opinion polls for much of 2018 but failed to secure enough votes to make it to the second round. In a region where election results are all but assured ahead of a vote in many countries, Ukraines unpredictable political landscape stands out. A majority of Ukrainians voted for candidates other than Zelensky and Poroshenko, meaning that more than half of the electorate is still up for grabs in the second round. Since we still dont know who will become president, I think that maybe it is a sign of democracy, Minkina said. That is the main thing we were standing for during the revolution. I hope there will be more positive examples in the next few years. There were not a lot of reforms that were implemented after Maidan [the 2014 revolution that resulted in the ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych], but at least they were launched. That they proceed depends on this election. Mourners carry the casket of Karina Vetrano from St. Helen's Church following her funeral in the Howard Beach section of the Queens borough of New York. (Steven Sunshine/Newsday via AP) Retrial Finds Man Guilty of Murdering New York Park Jogger A man has been convicted for murdering and sexually assaulting a woman as she jogged in a New York park. Chanel Lewis, 22, was found guilty on April 1 of strangling killing 30-year-old Karina Vetrano to death in August 2016. This was a horrifying case, Chief Assistant District Attorney John Ryan said in a statement. A vibrant, young womans life came to an abrupt and violent end at the hands of a then-20-year-old Brooklyn man. Ms. Vetranos death was brutal. She was pulled from a park pathway, sexually assaulted, and in her last moments of life she gasped for air as the defendants hands tightened around her neck. According to trial testimony cited by the district attorneys office, Vetrano was jogging alone in Spring Creek Park in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens County on the evening of Aug. 2, 2016. Lewis, angered by a neighbor playing loud music, also entered the park. Without saying a word, he attacked her, hitting her in the face and sexually assaulting her. The original trial shockingly ended in a hung jury after the judge allowed everyone to go home for Thanksgiving. New York Post 201941 Lewis pressed his knees into her torso as he straddled her and clasped his hands around her neck. With two teeth broken, Vetrano continued to fight back but in the end was strangled to death and her body dumped in parkland. On April 1, a jury found Lewis guilty of first-degree murder, second-degree intentional murder, second-degree felony murder, and first-degree sexual abuse. It was the second time Lewis had been tried. Mistrial declared in case of slain Queens jogger Karina Vetrano https://t.co/tQhGs7sw7W pic.twitter.com/XxtKKf71lP New York Post (@nypost) November 21, 2018 Last year, a jury could not reach a unanimous verdict and the trial ended with a mistrial, said Ryan. Today, following five hours of deliberations and careful consideration of all the evidence, the jury found Lewis guilty. It is my hope that as this case draws to a close, it will give the family of the victim some closure and comfort knowing her killer will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. Lewis had confessed to the crime and his DNA was found on her body. His lawyers had claimed the confession was forced and the DNA contaminated. The Lewis family will appeal the jurys decision, Chris Banks, a spokesman, told the New York Times. We knew he would be railroaded, he said. The evidence was extremely weak and the confession was coerced. His lawyers had tried unsuccessfully to postpone the verdict, after receiving an anonymous letter saying that police had pursued two white suspects before taking DNA samples from hundreds of black men. They claimed Lewis had been swept up in what they called a race-biased dragnet. An NYPD spokesperson said that evidence gathered through the investigation showed Lewis was responsible for Vetranos death, in a statement to Fox News. The NYPD has painstakingly investigated the murder of Karina Vetrano, and as the Queens District Attorneys prosecution demonstrates, the evidence clearly shows that Chanel Lewis is responsible for her death, the statement read. Multiple legal hearings and two criminal trials, over more than two years, have already exhaustively examined the issues in this anonymous, 11th-hour letter, a missive riddled with falsehoods and inaccuracies. Karinas father, Philip Vetrano, said he felt jubilation after the verdict was read aloud in Queens Criminal Court, according to the New York Post. Justicejustice has been served, he said. Lewis will be sentenced on April 17. School Takes Mom to Court Over Childs Unauthorized Mid-Term Holiday An educational establishment in the West Midlands of England has taken legal action against a mother for taking one of her children on a holiday during the school term. Staffordshire mom Rachel Lancaster, 34, was shocked to be summoned to court after she took her youngest daughter, Tinkerbell, on a family trip to Spain without permission from Oxhey First School in Biddulph, 18 miles east of Crewe. Lancaster had hoped to bring her three children on their first overseas holiday to spend time their grandfather in Spain. Because of her sons autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, she had to travel during the term instead of the highly crowded school break. He wouldnt be able to cope with the crowds during the school holidays, and that wouldnt make it a nice experience for the others either, so I wanted to take them for a week in July before the school holidays started, she told Stoke-on-Trent Live. My dad lives in Spain and I really wanted us to go over to see him. I dont get to see him very often I thought, We all need a holiday and there was no other way round it. This was the first holiday wed ever had as a familyhttps://t.co/DxdFI09TjO Bristol Live (@BristolLive) April 1, 2019 Leave requests for her son, Tyreis Hancock, from Loxley Hall School in Uttoxeter, and her eldest daughter Chelsea, from Biddulph High School, were approved without a problem. However, Oxhey First School denied Lancasters time off request for younger daughter Tinkerbell Lancaster. Tyreis school was fine with it, and so was the high school, it was just Tinkerbells school [that was not], she said. I thought they would have been more understanding because her brother has a disability. The mum thinks they should have been more understanding https://t.co/yHxCUUCJLH The Daily Record (@Daily_Record) April 1, 2019 Since Lancaster decided to go overseas anyway, Tinkerbells school slapped the mother with a 60 (US$78) fine several weeks later through the postal service, accusing Lancaster of taking Tinkerbell away on an unauthorised absence. I was angry to receive the fine. I called Staffordshire County Council and was advised how to appeal, the frustrated Mom said. I emailed the person I was told to but I never heard anything back. Then, before I knew it, I had a summons to go to court. The mother was charged with being the parent of a child who failed to attend school regularly and received an even bigger 185 (US$241) fine from North Staffordshire Justice Centre in Newcastle. Lancaster believes the education system should manage leave requests differently so as to avoid unnecessary legal expenses. The whole system should be handled differently. I wonder how other people who have children with disabilities go on, Lancaster said. I understand they have to stop children having a lot of time off school, but I dont know why they couldnt be sympathetic to our situation. Its 6,000 cheaper! Parents leap to defence of mum fined 185 for taking daughter Tinkerbell on term-time holiday https://t.co/UmPTQhYM5p pic.twitter.com/HdtTDGxthQ STAFFORDSHIRE (@DailySTAFFS) April 1, 2019 Oxhey First School defends its decision to decline Lancasters leave request for Tinkerbell to visit Spain. According to the schools attendance policy published online, parents can be fined for any period of unauthorised leave and only the headteacher can only authorize leave during the term. This will apply only in exceptional circumstances, the policy dated December 2018 said. Any unauthorised absence will be referred by your headteacher to the local authority. The school also warns if all attempts to improve the students attendance fail, the education welfare officer has powers to issue penalty notices or use legal action with a maximum penalty of 2500 and three months in jail. The welfare of the children at Oxhey is paramount, Oxhey First School Headteacher Catherine Pointon said. Any decision to grant leave during term time is made after following strict guidelines and the schools attendance policy, taking into account the nature of the circumstances and the childs attendance record. Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a graduation and commissioning ceremony at the West Point Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., on May 21, 2016. (Mike Groll/AP Photo) Second Woman Accuses Biden of Inappropriate Behavior A second woman publicly accused former Vice President Joe Biden of inappropriate touching after a former Democratic political candidate made similar allegations. Amy Lappos, 43, told the Hartford Courant that Biden grabbed her during a fundraiser in 2009 for Connecticut Democrat Rep. Jim Himes. She said she was working as an aide at the time of the alleged incident. It wasnt sexual, but he did grab me by the head, Lappos told the Courant. He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth. Bidens team didnt release a statement after her claims. Lappos said the incident took place in Greenwich in the home of a housing developer. I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody. Theres absolutely a line of decency, she said. Theres a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. Its not cultural. Its not affection. In a Facebook post, she blasted people who think the grossness of men invading womens boundaries to sniff and touch is debatable. It comes a few days after former Nevada lieutenant governor candidate Lucy Flores accused Biden of inappropriate conduct, saying he plant[ed] a big slow kiss on the back of my head. Im just shocked that no one has ever told Vice President Biden, stop interacting with women that way. Youre making them feel uncomfortable,' Flores told MSNBC on April 1. Or, at least we think youre making them feel uncomfortable because that is the perception were seeing from the outside in. I felt him get closer to me from behind, Flores wrote of the alleged encounter. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, I didnt wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual[expletive]? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair? He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldnt process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. After her claims were published by New York Magazine last week, a spokesman for Biden denied the vice president or his staff were aware that she was uncomfortable. On March 31, Biden said his record stands for itself. I will also remain the strongest advocate I can be for the rights of women, Biden said in a statement. I will fight to build on the work Ive done in my career to end violence against women and ensure women are treated with the equality they deserve. I will continue to surround myself with trusted women advisers who challenge me to see different perspectives than my own. And I will continue to speak out on these vitally-important issues where there is much more progress to be made and crucial fights that must be waged and won. The allegations come as Biden weighs whether entering the 2020 presidential race. Early polls had showed Biden had a considerable lead over other Democratic candidates including Beto ORourke and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sanders said there is no reason not to believe Flores, who endorsed him in the 2016 election, NBC News reported. President Donald Trump (C) walks with then-Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) (L), and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) (R) as he arrives at the Capitol on March 26, 2019. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) Senate GOP Fails to End Democratic Delays on Trump Nominees; Nuclear Option Next for McConnell? WASHINGTONExasperated Republicans failed April 2 in their effort to short-circuit Democrats unprecedented obstruction of confirmation of President Donald Trumps executive and judicial branch nominees. A motion to move to a final vote on Senate Resolution 50 to change the upper chambers procedural rules on nominations was defeated 51 to 48, nine votes short of the 60 required for passage. The resolutions failure now means Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) must decide whether to use the so-called nuclear option later this week in order to speed up the confirmation process of two Trump judicial nominees. Under that option, McConnell will file a point of order against the expected ruling of the Senates presiding officer that 60 votes are required to end debate on nominees under the cloture rule. When the rule is appealed, only 51 votes are required to overturn the presiding officer and end debate, thus establishing a new precedent ending the 60-vote requirement. The defeated proposed rule change would have cut debate time on most presidential nominations from 30 hours to a maximum of two hours. The measure was introduced earlier this year by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), after Democrats forced extended debate 128 times on Trump nominees that could only be ended with cloture votes. A cloture vote to limit debate must be supported by at least 60 senators, which is extremely difficult when the GOP has only 53 members. That means at least seven minority party members must agree with the majority. Even then, debate is allowed to continue for another 30 hours after which a final confirmation vote must be scheduled. Its not unusual, though, for several more days to elapse before the process is finally completed. Many of the 128 nominees delayed by Democrats were ultimately approved with few or no opposition votes, a fact Republicans said proved the tactics were strictly political and not based on legitimate concerns about the officials named by Trump. These are individuals that have already gone through vetting at the White House, Lankford told the Senate during the debate before the vote. They have already gone through FBI checks, theyve already come to the committee, theyve done full vetting at the staff level, then a full hearing at the member level, then answered questions for the record, passed out of the committee, had a lapse of time, then the majority vote set up to be able to move them. Just before the vote on the resolution, McConnell described the Democratic opposition in blunt terms, pointing to the historic 128 cloture votes on nominations we had to hold on nominations in this administrations first two years. That is comprehensive, across-the-board heel-dragging like nothing this body has seen before. Its more than five timesfive timesas many cloture votes on nominations as in the comparative periods for Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama combined, he said. In other words, systematic obstruction. Not targeted, thoughtful opposition to a few marquee nominations or rare circumstances. But a grinding, across-the-board effort to delay and obstruct the people this president puts up. Even if they have unquestionable qualifications. Even if the job is relatively low-profile. As I said last week, Im sure every presidential election this side of George Washington has left some senators unhappy with the outcome. But never before, to my knowledge, has the unhappy group so comprehensively tried to stop a new president from assembling the basics of an administration. Former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) defended his partisan colleagues delaying tactics as necessary and described Lankfords proposal as a resolution in search of a problem. It is an erosion of the Senates responsibilityour sworn constitutional dutyto advise and consent to the presidents nominations. Leahy added that passage of the Lankford proposal would be the removal of one of the last guardrails for quality and bipartisanship in our nominations process. It is a short-sighted, partisan power grab. All Senate Democratswith the exception of Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who was absentand both independents voted against Lankfords proposal. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) voted with the Democrats because, he told The Epoch Times, the Senates rules protect the rights of the American people by balancing the competing interests of majorities, minorities, and individual senators. They facilitate the compromise and accountability that are essential to the governing of a large, diverse nation. At this unusually divided moment in our history, Americans need the Senate to serve its deliberative function in our constitutional system, he said. I oppose changing the post-cloture time rule. I certainly oppose breaking the rules of the Senate to do so. The current rules can work for the American people; they simply require us to do the same. Lankfords proposal is similar to another one that was adopted by Senate Democrats with Republican agreement in 2013 as a temporary measure under then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). McConnell was Senate minority leader at the time. The ReidMcConnell deal allowed quicker confirmation of President Barack Obamas nominations. My Republican colleagues and I joined with Democrats in 2013 and supported the same sort of modest changes to our nominations process through the same sort of standing order. Were we overjoyed that President Obama had won re-election? No, but we still thought he deserved to stand up a government, McConnell said before the April 2 vote. Contact Mark Tapscott at mark.tapscott@epochtimes.nyc SANTA BARBARA, Calif.When professional musician Eric Iverson attended Shen Yun Performing Arts at The Granada Theatre on March 30, he was shocked to realize that the music was not pre-recorded, but was from a live orchestra. I was convinced that it was backing track, he said. It seems to be flawless. Theres not one step out of place, not one. With Iversons experience as a member of the band Soul Majestic, performing vocals and the melodica, he was not expecting such an intricate and challenging partnership between Shen Yuns orchestra and the performance on stage. Its beautiful, he said. I think for me the the entirety of the show, it really blew me away, with the sequencing of the music and the vision of the video and the performance all together. In my line of work, a lot of people use in-ear monitors to keep on the beat and they listen to each other and their backing tracks, but this is all organic it seems like. And its pretty amazing. Founded in 2006 in New York, Shen Yun is the worlds premier classical Chinese dance and music company, with classical Chinese dance, a full orchestra with both Western and Chinese instruments, an interactive digital backdrop, colorful costumes, musical soloists, and bilingual emcees who introduce each vignette to the audience. With six separate groups touring the globe with a brand-new program every year, many fans return to the performance multiple times. An Artists Viewpoint Iverson, who also creates graphic arts and web design, was impressed with the dedication that Shen Yuns artists demonstrated during the performance. [They] are really dedicated to their performance and their art, and just a lot of passion, he said. He also appreciated being able to witness the deep history of traditional Chinese culture in California, even though it can not currently be seen within China. I think the ability to bring in music, tradition, dance, color, and story, its pretty beautiful to be able to bring that all together. I could see how it could be a spiritual experience for some, he said. You embody the spiritual being projected through every part of your body. One dance piece that particularly touched his heart was a piece showing the persecution of a Chinese woman for her faith in China, which he said he was not aware of before watching Shen Yun. That was pretty intense, he said. Iverson was originally given tickets to the performance from his mother-in-law, and he came with his wife and two children. However, he had not been sure what to expect. She came I think last year or the year before, and so she told us, Oh, youre gonna like it,' he said. Fortunately, he enjoyed the performance and was pleased with the skill level of the performers. I can see that dedication, that purity in all the performers, and Im guessing that they probably have studied since theyre young children to be able to perform at this level, he said. Its insane the amount of talent, and I said before, theres no missteps, its just like every single one is on point. I havent seen any anything go wrong. Iverson said he would definitely recommend Shen Yun to others, and he summarized his experience, saying, Its vibrant, its educational, its entertaining, and beautiful. With reporting by Marie-Paul Baxiu. The Epoch Times considers Shen Yun Performing Arts the significant cultural event of our time and has covered audience reactions since the companys inception in 2006. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during the We the People" summit featuring 2020 presidential candidates, at the Warner Theatre on April 1, 2019 in Washington. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Summit Starring 2020 Democrats Opens With Chant From the Words of a Marxist and Murderer A summit starring eight prominent 2020 Democrat presidential candidates on April 1 featured a chant repeating the words of an unrepentant Marxist. She remains a convicted fugitive for killing a state trooper. Less than half an hour into the We the People conference in Washington, Jamal Watkins, the vice president of civic engagement at the NAACP, told the crowd to repeat after him as he recited the words of Assata Shakur, also known as Joanne Chesimard. Shakur was convicted in 1973 of killing a New Jersey state trooper. She escaped prison and fled to communist Cuba, where she was granted asylum. Shakur remains on the FBIs list of most wanted fugitives. Im going to actually have you participate with me in repeating some words from a leader by the name of Assata Shakur. So if you could stand upif you cant stand, its OKbut I want you to repeat after me, Watkins said. Watkins then said several sentences by Shakur, stopping several times to let the audience repeat after him. It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains, Watkins said. After the initial chant, Watkins called on the audience to take it as loud as we can get it. He then shouted Shakurs words as the energized audience chanted back. The last sentence of the chant is itself an adaptation of a line from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of All Countries, Unite! it states. While it is unclear whether any of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls recited Shakurs words, several candidates spoke at the summit, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), former Texas Rep. Beto ORourke, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). All Democrats polling above 1 percent are running on platforms composed of largely socialist policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Communist Party USA and Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist group in the United States, are fervently backing both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Sanders is the only candidate who openly identifies as a socialist. A number of prominent Democrats have embraced Shakur, despite her murder conviction, flight from prison, association with a communist regime, and Marxist ideology. In 1998, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) wrote to then-Cuban President Fidel Castro to apologize for voting for a resolution urging the communist leader to extradite Shakur and other fugitives. Sanders, who was then a representative, voted in favor of the extradition. Former Vice President Joe Biden did not attend the summit. Biden has told supporters he plans to run for president but has not officially announced his candidacy. He leads the Democratic field in early polling. Sanders, Harris, and ORourke are in second, third, and fourth place respectively, according to an average of polls maintained by Real Clear Politics. Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army, a communist front group formed as an offshoot of the Black Panther Party. The group engaged in an armed conflict with the U.S. government through acts like robbing banks and killing police officers. Between 1970 and 1971, Shakur was charged with several crimes and was the subject of a manhunt across multiple states. She was wounded in a shootout, arrested, and eventually sentenced to life in prison for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. While serving her life sentence, Shakur escaped prison in 1984 and was granted asylum in Cuba. She is on the FBIs most wanted list under the name Joanne Deborah Chesimard. In Cuba, Shakur praised communist dictator Castro as a hero. Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 11, 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Global Internet Moves Toward Regulation and Balkanized Censorship Commentary Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes his own platform, and the internet at large, should follow the European model for regulating internet companies and data. In a Washington Post op-ed, he called for baselines on forbidden content and systems to minimize harmful content, through a more standardized approach. Of course, the immediate concern for many internet users is whether this standardized approach would include political censorship, and whether the idea of harmful content includes the nearly endless array of topics people online now find offensive. Facebook, Twitter, and other online gatekeepers of information are already on the hot seat for censoring conservatives. In 2016, for example, Gizmodo reported that Facebook staff intentionally prevented conservative news from appearing on its trending news section. In 2018, Twitter engineers were caught on video by Project Veritas explaining how they use algorithms to censor political opinion. This topic has only grown more heated over time. President Donald Trump wrote in an Aug. 18, 2018, tweet: Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we wont let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others. Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we wont let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018 After Facebook briefly deleted Raheem Kassams account through an alleged error, the global editor-in-chief of conservative news site Human Events wrote on Twitter on Feb. 26, 2019: How come it is only right wing/conservative accounts that get removed in error pending investigations? And who watchers the watchers in this regard? #StopTheBias How come it is only right wing/conservative accounts that get "removed in error" pending "investigations"? And who watchers the watchers in this regard? #StopTheBias https://t.co/nxK1uNFyyS Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) February 26, 2019 Its because of incidents like this that conservatives are often wary when people like Zuckerberg start talking about new controls on what can and cannot be said on his platformlet alone for the entire internet. Meanwhile, the internet itself is fragmenting. China, which has maintained its own heavily censored internet behind the Great Firewall, is now building infrastructure for an internet totally separate from the rest of the worlds. Russia is talking about establishing a similar system of internet sovereignty, and the European Union is drifting further along its totalitarian bend with its recent Article 13 ban on internet memes. This is likely where the internet is heading. Its a new direction of global intranets where each country has its own separate infrastructure, and its own regulations; and where companies need to tiptoe around a kaleidoscope of laws and offenses of each respective country in order to run their websites without getting sanctioned. And sanctions on websites are what Zuckerberg seems to be talking about. As Zuckerberg proposes in his op-ed, the new regulations should establish a way to hold companies such as Facebook accountable by imposing sanctions when we make mistakes. Of course, its easy for people like Zuckerberg to call for such things. Massive companies like Facebook could absorb the costs of sanctions without going under, and they also have the staff and finances to implement complex nation-by-nation censorship codesdown to algorithms to check each post. But most other platforms dont have these resources. Much of this ties to encroaching centralization and to the new socialist fascination that the new left has fallen into. Yet these changes also highlight one of the major issues with socialist centralization overall. Vast regulations and high taxes typically dont affect the folks at the top or bottom of society. More often, its the people in the middle who pay the price. And its the internet companies in the middle that would likely go under if Zuckerberg got his regulatory wish. Under such systems, online forums could be held liable in different countries for the political opinions of their users. Independent news sites could go out of business for reporting stories outside the established narrative. And even individuals posting their opinions on websites like Twitter and Facebook could find themselves talking to authorities about their web-based thoughtcrimes. In China, this is already the reality for businesses and internet users; in Europe, it is rapidly becoming the reality; and in the United States, there are groups and businesses looking to make it a reality. Joshua Philipp is a senior investigative reporter for The Epoch Times. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Three Teens Kill Shop Owner Over Fifty-Cent French Fries Three teenagers have confessed to killing a female shop owner because they couldnt pay $0.50 for an order of french fries, according to multiple mainland Chinese news sources. Hu, 48, was allegedly suffocated to death by three teenagers on March 27 at her small restaurant in Sichuan Province, China. Her body was found by her husband and the police the following day. The teenagers were later apprehended by local police. The eldest is a girl named Zhang, a 15-year-old boy named Huang, and the youngest is a boy named Zhan. The case is under investigation. A lawsuit has not yet been filed. Hus death has put her family in a dire situation, as her husband is unable to work due to health problems. The Shop Hu opened the store just over 60 feet away from the entrance to a local school. Hu lived away from her house to operate the shop, and only returned home on the weekends. A local villager, named Tian, said that he spoke with Hu on the evening of March 27, according to Beijing Youth Daily. Tian said he talked to Hu at about 11:20 p.m., and asked why she hadnt closed the shop. Hu said there were still three teenagers eating at her shop. According to the police report, the three teenagers knew that they had no money to eat. When they attempted to leave and refused to pay $0.50 for their order of french fries, a fight broke out between them and Hu, according to Beijing Youth Daily. Three Teenagers Attack The teenagers then reportedly decided to rob Hu, and a struggle followed. Hu was suffocated to death, and the bones in her hands were broken. The three allegedly ransacked the shop. Later, a driver named Zhao received a call from the three suspects. He drove them to another city over 50 miles away. On the morning of March 28, Hus husband, Che, tried to call her but her phone was off. He wanted to ask his wife if she could help him with errands that day. Che then contacted the police and they went to the shop together. When they got there at around 9 a.m., they pried the door open. The shop was a mess, with products scattered everywhere, and Hu was found on the ground, not far from the door. Che was later told by both the police and the courts that his wife had been suffocated to death. The three teenagers were found and arrested on March 29 at about 6 p.m. by local authorities. Che has difficulty supporting his family due to pain in his hips and legs. He is unable to stand for extended periods of time. The family has two sons as wellone born in 1997, and the other a few years later. The eldest son has learning disabilities, and the other is still in school. Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo, center on left, and acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, center on right, talk during their first face-to-face meeting held at the Pentagon in Virginia, the U.S., Tuesday (KST). Courtesy of Ministry of National Defense By Jung Da-min The defense ministries of South Korea and the U.S. have launched a special committee to advance the transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) from the U.S. to the South. The Special Permanent Military Committee (SPMC), which was established in March, is led by ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Park Han-ki and U.S. Forces Korea Commander Robert Abrams, according to the Ministry of National Defense, Tuesday. Earlier in the day, Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo said in his meeting with acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan in the U.S. that the allies launched the SPMC to evaluate the South Korean Army's core military capabilities to lead the ROK-U.S. combined defense command. The newly launched committee is expected to accelerate the conditions-based OPCON transfer which President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to push forward with in their first summit in 2017. The two governments have held a Permanent Military Committee (PMC) meeting on a biannual basis in Seoul since 1978, to support the annual Military Committee Meeting (MCM) held alternately in South Korea and the U.S. Comedian Tracy Morgan performs at "Eddie Murphy: One Night Only," on Nov. 3, 2012. (Chris Pizzello/Invision) Tracy Morgan Slams Jussie Smollett: Racists Dont Jump People In the Polar Vortex Comedian Tracy Morgan poked fun at the controversy surrounding Empire actor Jussie Smollet, who is accused of staging a hoax hate-crime against himself earlier this year. Racist people dont be jumping nobody in the polar vortex, Morgan said on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on April 2. He joked, Its too cold. Theyll be racist in the spring. On the show, Fallon had asked him about a new job. They gave me a role on Empire, Morgan said as the audience applauded. They gave me millions of dollars. Contractually, all I got to do is not fake a hate crime Jussie. Thats all I have to do, he said. The late-night host then asked him if he believes Smolletts story. No, man! Come on racists dont be watching Empire, man, he said. Morgans comments come several days after comedian Chris Rock made jokes at Smolletts expense over the weekend. They said No Jussie Smollett jokes What a waste of light skin. Do you know what I could do with that light skin? That curly hair? My career would be out of here! Id be running Hollywood, said Rock at the NAACP Image Awards in Hollywood, California, according to CBS News. Rock said: What the hell was he thinking? Youre Jessie from now on. You dont get the u no more. That u was respect. You aint getting no respect from me! The actor is accused of staging a racist attack on himself in January in Chicago to advance his acting career. A number of news outlets, celebrities, and politicians echoed his claims before police accused him of lying about the attack. Smollett claimed that two men approached him, beat him, and then threw bleach on him before shouting, This is MAGA country, in reference to President Donald Trumps Make America Great Again slogan. Last week, prosecutors dropped all charges against the actor while Chicago police, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and others decried the move. Bill? Chicago officials said on March 27 that the city is planning to bill him $130,000 for the cost of the investigation, CBS reported. The city feels this is a reasonable and legally just amount to help offset the cost of the investigation, Bill McCaffrey, spokesman for the departments legal department, told Deadline Hollywood. The City of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department take seriously those who make false statements to the police, thereby diverting resources from other investigations and undermining the criminal justice system, the letter from the legal department also said. Ultimately, the Chicago police investigation revealed that you knowingly filed a false police report and had in fact orchestrated your own attack. Emanuel said he believes the incident is a hoax. Given that he doesnt feel any sense of contrition and remorse, Emanuel told reporters. My recommendation is that when he writes the check, in the memo section, he can put the words, Im accountable for the hoax.' A general view of the front entrance of the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing on Sept. 10, 2016. A U.S. billionaire's giant gift to one of China's top universities for a program echoing Oxford's Rhodes Scholarships comes as the country seeks to boost its schools' prestige while tightening ideological control in classrooms. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images) Treatment of Chinese Scholars Reveals Critical Issues of Chinas Educational System A former lecturer of Peking University, Chai Xiaoming, has been under house arrest after the state security police of Nanjing accused him of subverting state power since March 21. Recently, another well-known scholar and professor of law at Tsinghua University, Xu Zhangrun, was suspended from the school and currently under investigation. The main reason is that since July 2018, Xu Zhangrun has published three articles in the name of speaking up for freedom to criticize the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) totalitarian regime and caused great repercussions in Chinese society. In one of the articles, he called on the CCP to redress the June 4th Incident (Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989), and make the salary of public officials transparent, among others, during two important government meetings this yearthe National Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference and the National Peoples Congress. The CCPs treatment of Chinese scholars indirectly reveals two of the most prominent issues of the Chinese educational system. First, deprivation of academic freedom, and second, commercialization of education. The first is deprivation of academic freedom. The CCP promised to guarantee academic freedom in China. But that has not at all been the reality. More than 2,000 Sino-foreign joint venture universities have been established in China since 2003. In 2017, the CCP ordered the establishment of a party branch in all such universities in China, and asked Communist Party officials to have decision-making power, such as senior staff recruitment, budget allocation, etc. The party branch secretary of each school will have the status of vice president or being on the board of directors. Even foreign universities with branch campuses in China are controlled by the CCP, let alone domestic institutions. Academic freedom does not exist in China. According to existing laws of the Chinese regime, Sino-foreign joint venture university is regarded as an independent legal entity, the local partner holds 51% of the shares, and the foreign partner holds 49%. Many of these universities offer their own diplomas. These universities must now establish party branches, which will monitor school operations and have a say in administrative matters. According to overseas media reports, rumors about the establishment of party branch orders have been circulating in the education sector since August 2018. The CCP made a formal implementation decision after the 19th National Congress and said that government, the military, society and schools, etc. are subject to party leadership. Academic freedom has always been a sensitive issue for foreign universities in China. These universities have been criticized for operating in a country with a poor human rights record. The second is the commercialization of education. In recent years, the Top Ten Defiant Industry Ranking has continued to spread via social media platforms like Weibo, and the education industry has always topped the list. Corruption in colleges and universities is manifested in many aspects, including infrastructure, personnel, enrollment, academics, research grants, etc. According to statistics by the Haidian District Procuratorate of Beijing from 2005 to 2012 on the crimes committed by universities and research institutes, the scope of the case covers the department of finance, libraries, museums, catering departments, equipment, textbooks, teams, health departments, etc. for a total of over 40 different departments. According to many China watchers, it is believed that Chen Zhili, who served as Minister of Education from 1998 to 2003, has an unshirkable responsibility for the corruption and chaos as seen in Chinas education system today. Since 1998, following Jiang Zemins instructions, Chen Zhili issued two orders: Enrollment expansion of colleges and universities and industrialization of education. The expansion of enrollment in colleges and universities has made many college students unable to find jobs after graduation, and the industrialization of education has led to complete corruption in the educational system. On Dec.16, 2003, the National Development and Reform Commission of China announced at a press conference that in 2003, a total of more than 12,600 cases of unreasonable fees related to education were found in its special inspection, and the amount of violations was 2.14 billion yuan. For instance, from January 2002 to September 2003, South China University of Technology received a special fee of more than 3.1 million yuan for students who failed a final exam. Primary and secondary schools have also become profiteering industries. Some prestigious schools charge parents high sponsorship fees, school selection fees, etc., in order to gain illegitimate interests, while high tuition fees keep children in a large number of poor areas out of school. In recent years, there has been an overwhelming number of incidents that students have already been accepted to a college but have to drop out because they cannot afford the tuition. When parents receive the admission offer from their children, many chose to commit suicide for the same reason. Education industrialization turns the education sector into an economic industry with a target for profit. In recent years, so called education reform by the CCP has increased opportunities for Chinese students to go to college, but it was not achieved by increasing the amount of national education investment to extend the length of compulsory education by the party, but rather it was achieved at the expense of lowering the quality of education and substantially decreasing education affordability. This educational reform aimed at economic development has almost destroyed Chinas higher education, which has led to a rapid decrease in the quality of students and eventually formed the current state that many doctoral students have the same level of knowledge as masters students despite holding a doctoral degree; graduate students have the same level of knowledge as undergraduate students despite holding graduate degrees, etc. This series of problems in the Chinese educational system is fundamentally caused by the CCPs totalitarian rule. Academics originated in ancient Greece where the philosophers tried to gain a clearer understanding of the world and life through observation, reasoning, speculation, and debate. Lv Bingquan, a senior lecturer at the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University, once said that the political requirements of the Ministry of Education of mainland China are like handing over the human mind and the spirit, only forcing people to go with the CCP and abandon basic academic principles. Indeed, under the CCPs rule, there are only royal Party followers but no independent academics. What is described in this article is only one of the many problems in Chinas educational system. Li Hongyu, a writer based in Beijing, once said that the degree of corruption in the political system correlates with the degree of corruption in the educational system. The de-partyization of colleges and universities should be done immediately. In the past, there was no party branch in the university, and the party could not lead everything. Teachers have traditionally been called engineers of the human soul. It is only with a reform in the political system first would it be possible to rebuild a healthy Chinese educational system and fundamentally solve these issues. Flora Yan is a junior at the University of Washington in Seattle double-majoring in political science and communication. She is conducting research related to the impact of propaganda on public opinion and public policy; the role of propaganda in totalitarian countries; and the connection between human rights and foreign policy. An aspiring China observer, she is particularly interested in human rights issues in China. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Alice Marie Johnson, who had her sentence commuted by President Donald Trump after she served 21 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, speaks during a celebration of the First Step Act in the East Room of the White House on April 1, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Trump Calls for New Focus on Finding Jobs for Former Prisoners WASHINGTONPresident Donald Trump said on April 1 that he wants to follow up on criminal justice reform with efforts that help federal inmates find jobs after they leave prison with a Second Step Act. Congress passed legislation last year called the First Step Act that gave judges more discretion when sentencing some drug offenders and boosts prisoner rehabilitation efforts. The effort drew strong support from Republicans and Democrats worried that mandatory minimum laws had generated unfair sentences in many drug-related cases. Trump said Americans with criminal backgrounds are unemployed at rates up to five times the national average, which stood at 3.8 percent in February. Tonight at the White House, President Trump celebrated the passage of the First Step Act: It was time to fix this broken system . . . and to improve the lives of so many people. pic.twitter.com/yATiHIir1o The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 1, 2019 He said that a Second Step Act will focus on successful re-entry and reduced unemployment for Americans with past criminal records. His goal is to cut that unemployment rate for ex-prisoners to single digits within five years. The president was short on details about what future legislation would include, but the White House said Trumps budget for the next fiscal year proposes more than $500 million to help prisoners succeed after their release. When we say hire American, we mean all Americans, including former inmates who have paid their debt to society, Trump said. Our country can achieve amazing breakthroughs when we put politics aside and put the interests of all Americans first. pic.twitter.com/cb7MC5MsaC The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 1, 2019 Trump was joined on stage by a handful of former prisoners who have been helped through the First Step Act. He asked each of them to speak, sparking a unique level of spontaneity, sadness and cheer in the White House East Room as they recounted their experience. Gregory Allen noted that two months ago, he was in a prison cell and now he was telling his story at the White House, calling it an example of what would make America great again, Allen said, borrowing from the presidents trademark phrase as the audience laughed and applauded. First Step Act Trump signed into law a landmark criminal justice reform bill dubbed the First Step Act, on Dec. 21, last year. The Act gave judges more discretion when sentencing drug and lower-level offenders, while also reducing the recidivism risks of prisoners by expanding on programs such as job training. It passed the House of Representatives the day before by a landslide vote of 358 to 36. Earlier the Senate had pushed the billthat only affects federal prisonersthrough with a similar show of support by 8712. Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner had both lobbied for the measure. Everybody said it couldnt be done. They said the conservatives wont approve it, they said the liberals wont approve it, Trump told reporters at the White House. They said nobodys going to approve it, everybodys gonna be against it. Its been many many years and nobody came close. Co-sponsored by more than a third of the Senate, the act received support from both Democrats and Republicans. It aims to make the federal criminal justice system fairer, reduce overcrowding, and save taxpayer dollars. Certain mandatory minimum sentences were also adjusted. At the signing event, Trump thanked ranking members from both sides of the aisle and commended the bipartisan effort. At one point, he invited his son-in-law to make remarks, adding that Jared has worked so hard on this. Kushner, who spoke for several minutes said that in addition to the many people in the room, This really took an army of a lot of other people. He also spoke about the people drawn to the issue by the pain of the past. We were their lobbyists, Kushner said, while describing the people unable to fight for themselves. Ivanka Trump joked at the times that now the bill had been signed, she might see Jared more often. Maybe Ill get a little bit more time with him now. Under the bill, maximum penalties are maintained for violent felons and drug kingpins. But mandatory minimum penalties are reduced for others. Prisoners can earn time credits toward their release to halfway houses or home confinement. The First Step Act, that took years in the making, represented an easing of tough, law-and-order minimal sentencing requirements imposed on judges that stemmed from a 1980s drive to clamp down on an epidemic of crack cocaine and other illegal drug use in the United States. It was the product of much effort from both liberal and conservative advocacy groups, as well as civil right advocates. The Associated Press and The Epoch Times reporter Bowen Xiao contributed to this report. Unplanned Reaction Shows the Culture War Against Families and Choice Commentary Unplanned, a movie that shows the pro-life side of the abortion argument and takes on Planned Parenthood, is making waves after bringing in $6.1 million on its limited opening day. It now plans to open in more theaters across the country. The film is based on the memoir of Abby Johnson, who worked in an abortion facility, but turned against the abortion industry and became a pro-life activist after seeing a baby struggle for its life in the womb as it was killed by doctors. It was produced by the creators of the Gods Not Dead franchise. Talk around the film, however, is less about its success and more about its subject. Many legacy news outlets have lashed out at it for attacking the sacred cow of Planned Parenthood. TV networks refused to sell ads for the film. Twitter initially banned the films account, but eventually reinstated it. What this really highlights is the culture war that has been ongoing in the United States since at least the 60s. The leftist narrative, mainly fed by communisms concepts of destroying family, tradition, and belief, has introduced a new type of morality: Its a morality of immorality, and anyone who questions it is deemed immoral. Marx and Engels, themselves, wrote in The Communist Manifesto that under their system, the bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course; and stated clearly their goal that Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality. And it was the Marxist scholar, Herbert Marcuse, who introduced the idea in his essay Repressive Tolerance that this new brand of false tolerance touted by communists should only extend to those who agree with their goals. Everyone else should be met with the most severe intolerance. Thus we have the current situation, where the same people preaching choice and tolerance are the ones censoring and attacking anyone who thinks differently. How can women be expected to make a choice so seriouswith such long-term emotional consequenceswithout being able to hear both sides of a debate? The idea of democracy, after all, is based in each persons ability to make informed decisions. It was likely because of this that the founders of the United States made protections of free speech their First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution. Censorship is only deemed necessary, of course, when those who feel the need to censor do so because they cant challenge an argument in calm and rational discourse. The reality is that the debate on abortion is no longer just about abortion. Its now very much a debate around the value of human life. In New York, it is now legal to kill an infant up until the time of birth. These are fully developed infants, fully capable of being born, fully capable of surviving, and fully able to feel pain. Some even push for post-birth killing of infants. Democrat Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam recently proposed on video that if a mother gave birth, the baby could be kept comfortable, and resuscitated if thats what the mother and the family desired. The debate around Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, is now on whether an organization founded in eugenics (and race-based eugenics, at that) should be able to cull the population of a country while also drawing a profit. Yet, as the Unplanned film has now shown, even questioning this organization can get you attacked from all directions, and censored. Something to keep in mind is the trajectory of culture. Twenty years ago, purveyors of abortion claimed that any rumors of wanting late-term abortions, or partial-birth abortions, were far-flung conspiracy theories. Now, not only has this happened, but the purveyors are now even preaching post-birth killing of infants. From the standpoint of socialist and communist goals, discussed earlier, this is merely the dialectic at workthat slow march through the institutions, envisioned to gradually transform a free country into a state of communism. The direction this culture is heading toward should concern most people. And its not far-fetched. Under the Chinese Communist Partys one-child policy, abortion was very much legal, but women didnt have freedom of choice. They were free to abort their infants, but if they had a second child, that child was often taken, after birth, and killed. While China has rolled back its one-child policy to an extent, it should still serve as a warning of what a society can become when human life is no longer regarded as sacredbecause sacredness of life is whats really being debated. Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. The Epoch Times regrets the error. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Myron Brilliant, executive vice president and head of International Affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, speaks at a meeting with Chinese officials (not pictured) in Beijing on February 19, 2019. (Wu Hong/Pool via REUTERS) US Administration, Chamber of Commerce Optimistic About Trade Talks With China The U.S. administration and a trade industry official both expressed optimism for current trade talks between the United States and China. The United States and China have been embroiled in a tit-for-tat tariff battle since mid-2018. For months, the two sides have sought to negotiate a trade deal to end the punitive tariffs. During a speech at an event organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on April 2, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said progress was made during negotiations in Beijing last week. More discussion between the two countries are due to kick off on April 3, with Chinas lead negotiator to arrive in Washington. We expect to do more this week, Kudlow said. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump, while addressing questions from reporters on April 2 after meeting with the Secretary General of NATO at the White House, said that Chinas [talks are] going very well. Myron Brilliant, U.S. Chamber of Commerce head of International Affairs, also said on Tuesday that chances are increasing that the United States and China will secure a deal to end a costly trade war, though discussions this week will be critical to resolving stubborn differences about how the deal will be enforced and whether and when the United States will lift hefty tariffs on Chinese goods. The U.S. administration has imposed import tariffs on Chinese goods to put pressure on Beijing to meet a long list of demands that would rewrite the terms of trade between the two countries. The demands include changes to Chinas policies on intellectual property (IP) theft, technology transfers, industrial subsidies, and other trade barriers. Chinas Vice Premier Liu He will meet with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin this week to try to negotiate U.S. demands that China make sweeping changes to its trade policies. Were getting to the point where its clear that both governments want a deal. The presidents want a deal, and they need to get through the end-game issues. This is a critical week, Brilliant told reporters on April 2. But absent significant process on the tricky issues of tariffs and enforcement, the goal to complete a deal in April may be missed, Brilliant said. The Trump administration and U.S. companies want structural IP and market economy issues addressed, with a way to ensure China follows through on its promises, he said. U.S. officials favor tariffs as a way to maintain leverage on China and ensure those obligations are met. But it is unlikely that China would agree to an enforcement mechanism that included re-imposition of unilateral U.S. tariffs without the current tariffs being removed, he said. By David Lawder and Chris Prentice. Epoch Times staff members Emel Akan and Holly Kellum contributed to this report. Families across the United Kingdom celebrated The Mother's Day on March 31. (Geralt/Pixabay) Woman Receives More Than 100 Mothers Day Cards After Fostering Children A super mother in the United Kingdom has been fostering children for six years and has received more than 100 Mothers Day cards. Fiona Oldfield, 37, grew up in foster care herself, and it was her lifes dream to be a foster mother. Aside from her own biological children, shes fostered 15 children during all these years and treasures every card theyve given her, reported The Mirror. Oldfield celebrated UKs mothers day along with many other mothers from Birmingham on March 31. Families in the United Kingdom celebrate Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday of Lent. She and her husband Pauk foster through Foster Care Associates, an agency that has helped people become foster caregivers for 25 years. Happy Mothers Day to all our amazing caregivers! Meet Fiona, one of our carers from the West Midlands, who has collected hundreds of cards over the years. What lovely gifts have you received today? Foster Care Associates FCA 2019331 Oldfield and Pauk of West Midlands currently foster four brothers, aged six and below, and their three biological children. They also provide a permanent home for 18-year-old Shannon Clifton, whom they fostered as a child in the past. Life as a foster mother is hard work every day. Oldfield drops six children off at four different schools. Meals are no less than a feast14 loaves of bread, 70 bananas, and 12 gallons of milk every week. Meet Midlands super mum Fiona Oldfield who gets 100 Mothers Day cards EVERY YEAR https://t.co/66latPWBDU Birmingham Live (@birmingham_live) April 1, 2019 Even on Mothers Day, Oldfield didnt get to rest. She roasted lamb for dinner for the entire family, plus a few guests, and finally everyone sat down to watch television together. I love Mothers Day, though it gets harder every year to find space for all the presents and cards, Oldfield told The Mirror. She feels very touched and gratified when children she has fostered earlier continue to send her cards on Mothers Day. My most rewarding moment as a foster carer came on Mothers Day a few years ago, when Shannon, who wasnt living with me at the time, sent me a handwritten Mothers Day card. It really meant a lot that she took the time to do so, and now she lives with me full time as an adult. Its great to have impacted someones life so much, she said, adding that her biological children see Shannon as their older sister. She said she feels concerned about the pending need for more foster care families across the country. It breaks my heart to know that there is currently a shortfall of 8,000 foster families across the UK. All you need is to be over 21, with a spare room, and willing to give a child a loving and stable home, she said and urged everyone to think about it. Why is Mothers Day Different in the United Kingdom? Mothers Day in the United Kingdom has a religious origin and is different from International Mothers Day. Its called the Mothering Sunday and was originally a church service to celebrate motherhood and the birth of children, according to The Guardian. Mothering Sunday is always celebrated on March 25 or the nearest Sunday. Traditionally, Christians throughout the country visit their mother church on the holiday, but gradually the day started celebrating mothers, according to the Honey. It was traditionally a day off for servants, and they used it to visit their mothers at home. A lovely day for some but not for others. Be kind #MotheringSunday #Mothersday pic.twitter.com/sENHxF7D46 Mel Burden (@melburd) March 31, 2019 STAMFORD Alcoholic-beverages giant Diageo, which is planning to relocate its North American headquarters from Norwalk to Manhattan, announced Monday that it will open satellite offices early next year in downtown Stamford. Diageo intends to bring about 250 jobs to Stamford, renting about 40,000 square feet at 200 Elm St. The new hub will house a research-and-development center and also host finance, human resources and supply and business-services operations. The company had previously operated in Stamford before relocating the North American headquarters in 2004 to its current address at 801 Main Ave. in Norwalk. We are delighted to partner with (landlord) BLT on this new chapter for Diageo North America and look forward to becoming a member of the Stamford community, while creating the vibrant culture and workplace of the future we aspire to, Erik Snyder, Diageo North Americas president of supply and procurement, said in a statement. Meanwhile, Diageo is receiving $6.6 million in incentives from the state of New York to support the opening of its new headquarters at 3 World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. It plans to employ about 500 in New York and also relocate its current midtown Manhattan offices. Company officials have indicated that the headquarters move was driven by a desire to access a larger pool of managerial talent. With sales of nearly $5.3 billion in its 2018 fiscal year, Diageo North America would just miss the Fortune 500, if it were independent of its London-based parent company. It would rank among the 20 largest companies in Connecticut based on revenues. Diageo brands include Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, Baileys, Guinness, Crown Royal, Captain Morgan and Tanqueray. In Stamford, Diageo will join several other recent recruits to the 600,000-square-foot office complex at 200 Elm St.-695 E. Main St. Late last year, McDonalds signed a lease for about 14,600 square feet at 695 E. Main, a building topped by a clock tower. It would join professional-services firm Deloitte, which has operated regional offices there since late 2014, taking about 120,000 square feet. Also last year, IT firm CA Technologies, hedge fund Tudor Investment Corp., and Webster Bank signed leases at 200 Elm totaling about 75,000 square feet. In 2017, Henkel relocated its North American consumer-goods headquarters to 200 Elm, from Scottsdale, Ariz. It occupies about 155,000 square feet. The same year, professional-services RSM moved its Stamford offices to 200 Elm. It takes nearly 30,000 square feet. In total, BLT has leased about three-quarters of the space at 695 E. Main-200 Elm. BLT acquired the property in 2012 after the relocation of reinsurer Gen Re, which is now headquartered at 120 Long Ridge Road. The Stamford-based developer owns several other office buildings in the city and has also developed more than 3,000 apartments in the past decade in the Harbor Point neighborhood of the citys South End. Positive momentum continues to build in Stamford, and we have helped make it a more desirable place by investing heavily into new and existing commercial and residential building stock, BLT CEO Carl Kuehner III said in a statement. Among other major developments in the Stamford office market, WWE announced late last month that it will relocate its headquarters in 2021 from 1241 E. Main St., to a 415,000-square-foot complex at 677 Washington Blvd. After the 2016 relocation of investment-bank UBS local offices to the neighboring 600 Washington Blvd., 677 Washington had languished as the citys largest office vacancy. But the WWE deal and the planned relocation of professional-services firm KPMGs Stamford offices have revived the property. Include previous reporting from Alexander Soule. pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; twitter: @paulschott Jay Black was a high school English teacher before he decided to bump himself into a new role. He went from head-of-the-class to stand-up comic. It was a good move. Not only has he toured the nation (and Europe) and headlined at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, hes also found success as a screenplay writer and actor. Black started doing screenplays with his friend, Brian Herzlinger, in 2009. That led to successful projects such as 2012s Paulie, with Paul Sorvino, 2014s Meet My Valentine and 2016s Love Always Santa. He played supporting roles in the latter two. The writing partners, whove been pals since fourth grade, have a new script in the works for a Hallmark film called Orchard. But Black still makes time for stand-up, including a gig at Bridgeports Stress Factory on Thursday, April 11. The New Jersey native shared more via email. I fell in love with comedy in 1983 when I saw Bill Cosby: Himself on HBO. (Admittedly, this story was a lot cuter and easier to tell a few years ago.) Three things fueled my love of comedy after that: the 80s stand-up boom, the proliferation of cable stand-up comedy shows, and wildly irresponsible parents who allowed me to watch as much stand-up as I could stomach. Black was like a lot of comedians, in that I was a weird, awkward kid socially. In fact, if any girl had shown interest in me during my formative years, Id be doing something sensible right now like accounting or haberdashery. For me, comedy was a lingua-franca between what was going on in my head and the rest of the world. It still remains my favorite kind of puzzle to solve: How can I take one of my ideas and formulate it in such a way that youll laugh? So what can the audience expect in Bridgeport? Im like Seinfeld, if Seinfeld was less successful, strung out on caffeine, and filtered through a Jersey sensibility. Which is to say, Im an observational comic, discussing my family and the weird things I see every day, but with an edge. Expect to hear a lot about marriage, kids, and the dumb things we all do. I wouldnt bring the kids to my show, but if you have a teenager that you dont mind having an awkward drive home with, theyd be A-OK to bring. Regarding the film, Orchard, Black said, My wife is the Hallmark Movie Master and whenever Im writing something in that space, shes the one that will read the script after every batch of pages is finished and help guide me as to whether what Im writing is on brand or something women would actually enjoy. Im blessed to have her, because if left to my own devices, every movie would be about Jedi fighting Bigfoots on the planet Arrakis. Black said he misses teaching (the helping students part, not the paperwork grind) but hes getting back into it. Ive started teaching some screenwriting classes in my community and I think Id like to do more of that as I ease on into my waiting for death years. So maybe the next interview youll do with me will be under the headline of Old Man Shows Up at Library, Shouts About Three-Act Structure Until Tackled By Swat Team. lkoonz@newstimes.com; Twitter: @LindaTKoonz Kim Chang-son, chief protocol secretary for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un got out of a vehicle as he arrived at Sheremetyevo International Airport, northwest of the central Moscow, to head for Vladivostok, March 24 (KST). Yonhap By Kim Yoo-chul There are signs that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un may soon visit Russia for a summit with President Vladimir Putin, according to North Korea watchers. Kim Jong-un's chief protocol secretary Kim Chang-son arrived in Vladivostok, Sunday morning (KST) after a five-day visit to Moscow. Secretary Kim, also known as the "chief butler" for the North Korean leader, departed from Sheremetyevo International Airport, northwest of central Moscow on Russia's Aeroflot flight SU 1700. "Secretary Kim's visit to Vladivostok is viewed as a necessary step ahead of the upcoming Kim-Putin summit as he was in Singapore and Vietnam shortly before the two Kim-Trump summits and inspected hotels and other accommodation for the North's delegation," a government official here said. On March 4, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow was expecting to finalize the date of Kim Jong-un's visit and added an agreement will be made "in the near future" as contacts have been ongoing through diplomatic channels. Gov. Ned Lamont has recruited two more high profile names from his circle of influential corporate insiders to help woo new businesses to the state. Jim Loree, president and CEO of Stanley Black & Decker, and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Sr., associate dean at the Yale School of Management, have joined the board of the Connecticut Economic Resource Center, a nonprofit corporation that has teamed up with the states Department of Economic and Community Development to improve the states business climate. Sonnenfeld and Loree join CERC co-chairs Indra Nooyi, the retired CEO of PepsiCo, and Jim Smith, retired CEO of the parent of Webster Bank. Their recruitment to CERCs board which will work in lockstep with newly-minted DECD commissioner David Lehman is notable because the state has rarely seen such involvement and collaboration between the private sector, academics and state government beyond advisory roles. The role of CERC isnt to advise the governor, but to actively recruit new companies to the state. All the people that are raising their hands, are people that want to be part of this, Smith said. We havent seen that in a long time in Connecticut: people taking personal responsibility for outcomes in the state ... You have the business community coming together, supporting a governor who is a business person at his core. And Lamont has made it clear hes adept at leveraging his connections in the business world. Whether that translates into companies actually moving into the state is yet to be seen. For up-to-date information on public policy issues, sign up for the CT Politics newsletter The only way to change a bad reputation is by somebody telling you about the state who you have more confidence in than where you heard the last story, said Matthew Nemerson, a former longtime economic development official from New Haven who now works as the vice president of corporate development for Butterfly Inc. Its pretty ingenious to have people who themselves can play a role, he said. They can be actors in making the states economic development strategy work. Sonnenfeld, an expert in CEO behavior, corporate governance and leadership, is known for his own extensive network of chief executives. He is the founder and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute that brings hundreds of chief executives together every year. Hes just amazing in that hes like a walking network of all of the centers of influence that you could imagine, Smith said. He knows everybody and brings people together amazingly. Hell bring hundreds of corporate leaders together and he knows everything about all of them. Hell take tough topics and knit them together in real time in a cohesive and compelling way. Hes great because he can reach out to other people who can be helpful to us. Nemerson called Sonnenfeld a super connector a term coined by author Malcolm Gladwell to describe some of the most influential people in the world. Jeff may well have the single best corporate CEO Rolodex and list of friends in the whole world, Nemerson said. Having him on a board is a big deal for the state ... Theres probably nobody in the world like him. Were trying to become a center for foundations as well as a center for institutes as well as a center for corporations. Its hard to imagine anyone else in the world who is on a first-name basis with the major decision makers in every industry. Loree joined Stanley Black and Decker then Stanley Works as the companys chief financial officer in 1999. Since then, the company has grown its total sales from $2 billion to $14 billion, and increased the New Britain-based companys market value to $21 billion. I think people who are doubling down on Connecticut have the best credibility to make the case for the state, Nemerson said. Having a CEO that has a relatively old line but growing and successful business is a strong statement. Loree served with Smith on the states Commission on Fiscal Sustainability and Economic Growth, which existed from December 2017 to March 2018 and filed a long set if recommendations to improve the states economic outlook. I refer to him as the persistent voice of competitiveness, Smith said. He is continually stressing how important it is to be competitive to have economic growth ... he believes in an industry sector driven approach to both workforce development and business recruitment. Hes iconic in that way and to have him sign on as one of the inaugural business directors is terrific. kkrasselt@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2563; @kaitlynkrasselt WESTPORT Ordinances to ban single-use plastics and the sale of recreational marijuana currently under consideration by the Representative Town Meeting are moving closer to a vote. The ban on single-use plastics, which would prohibit plastic food containers, straws, stirrers and cups in local restaurants, is being spearheaded by RTM member Andrew Colabella along with his eight co-sponsors. Colabella first presented the proposed ordinance at the March 5 meeting, and the ban is expected to come before the RTM for a vote on April 24 meeting, he said. Since the bans introduction, the RTM Ordinance Committee added language to allow some restaurants who cant wash dishes on-site to hand out single-use plastic plates and utensils. The Food and Drug Administration recommends some food establishments provide single-use plastic kitchenware if they cant clean reusable dishes, Colabella said. It would be a facility that doesnt meet minimum dish-washing requirements or doesnt have the facilities to wash plates and silverware. It would be a smaller facility, Westport Weston Health District Director Mark Cooper. Some food shops need to provide single-use dishes instead of reusable ones because they dont have septic tanks with the capacity for water needed to wash dishes or are located near a waterway where dishwashing waste would be a concern, Colabella said. Those establishments who need to provide single-use plastic kitchenware may apply to the Director of Health for exemption after exhausting all viable alternatives, the proposed ordinance now reads. I think the ordinance is hitting everything on the head, Colabella said, noting the text is a near-copy of the single-use plastic ban passed in Seattle in July. The ordinance unanimously passed the RTMs environment and ordinance committees and also has support from several local organizations, including Sustainable Westport. The pot ban, meanwhile, is not as far along. First introduced by co-sponsors Greg Kraut and Jimmy Izzo, the recreational pot shop ban will likely come before the RTM for a vote in May or June. The goal of the ordinance is simply no retail sales of recreational marijuana in Westport and thats what were trying to get with the legal language, Izzo said. Were just saying you cant buy marijuana for recreational use in Westport. The proposed ordinance comes on the heels of the Planning and Zoning Commissions approval last June of a medical marijuana shop in town, which is set to open on the Post Road this summer. All businesses engaged in the retail sale, use or distribution of marijuana and/or marijuana products for nonmedical use are prohibited within the Town of Westport, the proposed ordinance reads. svaughan@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2638; @SophieCVaughan1 WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump summoned Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen back from a conference in Europe on Monday as the White House scrambled to respond to a spike in migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border. But there were no immediate signs that the administration was preparing to follow through on Trump's threats in recent days to close legal ports of entry altogether. At Trump's direction, Nielsen canceled her planned participation in a G-7 ministerial meeting in Paris and returned to Washington, according to a senior official familiar with the internal deliberations. Moving ahead with a plan announced last week, Nielsen issued written orders to U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deploy "emergency surge operations" to the southern border and dramatically expand a program that requires migrants to wait in Mexico as they apply for asylum in the United States. Nielsen directed the CBP to quickly reassign up to 750 blue-uniformed Office of Field Operations officers to assist Border Patrol agents with the soaring numbers of Central American migrants. But CBP officials said Monday that they had yet to receive word about potential port closings. Such a move, which Trump threatened last week as a way to pressure Mexico to tighten the flow of undocumented immigrants, would cut off bilateral trade and tourism and wreak economic havoc on both countries while probably having little impact on the migrants, experts said. "The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it," Nielsen said in a statement. "We will immediately redeploy hundreds of CBP personnel to the border to respond to this emergency." Trump kept a low public profile Monday, having returned to Washington late Sunday after three nights at his private Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. A day after his top aides had warned on the Sunday political talk shows that the president was serious about his border threats, Trump made no new mentions of potential port closings on Twitter or anywhere else. The lack of clarity left the administration in a state of uneasy limbo at a time when CBP officials have said the agency is at a "breaking point," with an estimated 100,000 migrants having crossed the border in March, the highest monthly total in a decade. A DHS official said 545 officers had been reassigned as of Monday under Nielsen's emergency orders, and the secretary is considering a plan to redeploy as many as 2,000 officers from field operations to Border Patrol - a move that could slow pedestrian and motor vehicle traffic at legal ports of entry even if Trump decides not to fully close them. Theresa Brown, a former DHS policy official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, called the situation unprecedented, given the record number of Central American families that have crossed the border in recent months. She noted that border port closings after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks caused widespread harm to the economies of the United States, Mexico and Canada. Brown called Trump's threats a "double-edged sword." "It may have an impact on Mexico, and whether that would get them to do what Trump wants is a diplomatic question," she said. "But it will also have an economic impact on the United States. So the question is, are you hurting Mexico more and in a way that is sufficient to get them to act? I'm generally not a believer in the sticks over carrots approach." Nielsen also ordered the CBP to immediately expand a new policy to return asylum seekers to Mexico to await immigration court hearings in the United States. Three weeks ago, officials said they had sent 240 migrants back to Mexico since January, but on Monday, Nielsen ordered them to return hundreds each day - a labor-intensive effort because, under the policy, officials must interview migrants, provide them with an immigration court date and work with Mexico to shuttle them across the border. Trump has called on Mexico to halt the flow of Central Americans traveling to the United States border. He also threatened to cut foreign aid to the migrants' homelands in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, for not stopping them from leaving - although experts said that could backfire because the economic and security situations in those countries could deteriorate and lead to more mass migration without the aid money. CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said last week that the U.S. immigration system is overwhelmed, with thousands of families and unaccompanied minors surrendering at the border daily, packing holding cells, immigration jails and shelters. Most are funneled into an immigration court system already saddled with an 820,000-case backlog. The Trump administration is urging Congress to increase its power to detain and deport Central American families and minors. Officials say those seeking asylum are virtually guaranteed release into the United States because of limited detention space and a massive immigration court backlog. Immigration policy experts said it is virtually impossible to assess Trump's threats to close the border because the White House has not released any details about plans to do so. The CBP operates 27 ports of entry along the border with Mexico, and the president has not indicated how many he might seek to close - or for how long. "A lot of people are just kind of brushing this off without any details," said David Inserra, a policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Was this just a Twitter threat or something (more serious) - we're not in a position to know that." Operationally, closing ports might be reasonably easy to do, officials said. Many of the ports shut down overnight and reopen each morning, so halting the flow of cargo, cars and pedestrians would involve little more than leaving the vehicle lanes closed and reinforcing them with additional officers and personnel. But the disruption caused by such a move could be enormous, not just halting trade but also potentially stranding U.S. citizens and other authorized travelers in Mexico. At the same time, nearly 90 percent of the 100,000 migrants who arrived last month crossed the border illegally, between U.S. ports of entry, according to CBP officials. That flow could increase if the ports are shut down, experts said. Brown, the former DHS policy official who left the agency in 2011, said the Trump administration's lack of apparent planning on the president's threat to close the border has made the situation appear more chaotic. Previous administrations would generally coordinate new policies among agencies, as well as with Mexico, and then roll them out "in a coordinated way through operational plans," Brown said. "That tends not to be what I've seen from this administration. It's order first, then figure out how to act second." - - - The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey contributed to this report. Yeo Young-guk, second from left, a candidate from the liberal Justice Party, holds hands together with Democratic Party of Korea Chairman Lee Hae-chan, second from right and Justice Party Chairwoman Lee Jeong-mi, left, calling for support during a street campaign in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province, Tuesday. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul By Park Ji-won Voters will elect two lawmakers in by-elections Wednesday, which may serve as a litmus test for the general election next year. Rival parties conducted last-minute campaigns to attract more votes Tuesday in the relevant precincts. The two seats up for grabs are in Changwon and the Tongyeong-Goseong precinct in South Gyeongsang Province. The by-elections are being held following the death of the late Roh Hoe-chan of the liberal Justice Party and the guilty verdict for Rep. Lee Gun-hyeon of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) for Election Law violation. Liberal politicians have received strong voter support in the industrial city of Changwon except in 2012 when Kang Ki-yoon of the Saenuri Party took the seat. Yeo Young-guk of the Justice Party, a former district councilor for Changwon, became the sole left-wing candidate in the region for this by-election as the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) agreed to back him in order to ensure a liberal victory. A recent poll showed Yeo is leading the race with support of 44.8 percent, followed by Kang Ki-yoon of the LKP with 35.7 percent, signaling that there is a higher possibility of the ruling camp grasping the seat. But the result still remains uncertain as Kang is narrowing the gap, backed by the active electioneering of LKP Chairman Hwang Kyo-ahn, who is the preferred prospective presidential candidate. If the Justice Party does win the seat, it is highly possible the liberal party will launch a negotiating bloc with another minor party the Party for Democratic and Peace which will give the minor parties a larger voice in legislative activities. A negotiation group in the National Assembly can only be formed when at least 20 legislators join in. The joint bloc between the two parties was formed April last year but disbanded following Roe's death in July. Korean voters go to polls for by-elections Kang Ki-yoon, right, a candidate from the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP), flashes the V-sign during his street campaign, assisted by LKP leader Hwang Kyo-ahn, in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province, Tuesday. Yonhap Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 08:51 987 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730eca41 1 Editorial #Editorial,#2019PresidentialElection,TNI,2019-presidential-debate,2019-presidential-election,Jokowi,Prabowo-Subianto,politics,Indonesian-Military Free During their televised debate on the weekend, the two presidential candidates contesting the April 17 election, Joko Jokowi Widodo and Prabowo Subianto, displayed equal commitment to strengthening the Indonesian Military (TNI) as a defense force capable of protecting the nation from external threats. While incumbent President Jokowi promised to gradually increase the defense budget to 1.5 percent from the current 0.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), or Rp 107 trillion (US$7.5 billion), Prabowo also indicated his eagerness to allocate more money to the defense budget if elected. A former Army general, Prabowo said the countrys military spending was so low that national defense was vulnerable to attacks from external forces. It is quite easy to understand Prabowos concern about national threats, hence his anger when hearing a chuckle in the audience that he perceived as belittling his warning about the countrys defenseless defense, as he spent much of his military career in combat operations. Similarly acceptable is Jokowis decision to not prioritize military buildup over massive infrastructure development because of suggestions that there would be no imminent military threats facing the country in the coming 20 years. There is no guarantee, however, that TNI modernization to achieve military parity with regional powers would top Prabowos priority list if elected. On the contrary, a civilian and pragmatic politician like Jokowi may craft policies in favor of the military, which he has done so far, if he secures his second term. It is safe to assume that whoever wins the presidency would seek a balance between efforts to fulfill the minimum essential force and improve the welfare of soldiers. With the economy unlikely to fully recover in the coming years, because of both domestic and global slowdown, either Jokowi or Prabowo would have to face the reality that they lack enough fiscal capacity to meet the ideal defense budget to GDP ratio of 2.5 percent, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Both Jokowi and Prabowo failed to elaborate on their commitment to completing military reform. Civilian supremacy is one of the most precious fruits of the reform movement in 1998, but the nations bid to build a professional military remains challenging, if not elusive. Among the major obstacles to the goal are surely budget constraints. Soldiers can only focus on their basic responsibilities if they have no worry about the well-being of themselves and their families, or whether they are equipped with adequate weaponry. The TNI strategic plan for 2015 to 2019 stipulates that by the end of this year the military is to achieve 72 percent of the minimum essential force, with procurement of new submarines, radars and helicopters, among other equipment. Another hurdle to military reform is the penchant for bringing the military back into nondefense functions among civilian politicians. It is the lack of confidence among the politicians that answers why the next goals of military reform restructuring territorial commands and military tribunal law are difficult to achieve. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Duncan Graham (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 Is Indonesia expecting Australia to help rescue the nations education system? Thats not as implausible as it sounds. Outsiders are involved elsewhere in the economy. Transportation infrastructure development relies heavily on massive loans from banks in Japan and China and on technical expertise from the same sources. Think MRT and the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail project. The republic already depends on farmers in Vietnam and Thailand growing enough rice to feed their hungry neighbor, so why not foreigners in technical colleges and universities? The doors are now slightly ajar to what was once a no-go zone. The recently inked Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA) allows Australian campuses to set up shop in Indonesia. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 11:06 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730f5009 4 Art & Culture fabric,exhibition,Museum,festival,bogor,wastra Free The government plans to hold a traditional fabric exhibition showcasing attires and fashion items owned by national female icons and historical figures. The exhibition, dubbed Festival Wastra Nusantara (Wastra Archipelago Festival), is set to showcase around 150 attires made from wastra Indonesian traditional fabrics at the Balai Kirti Museum in the Bogor Palace in West Java from April 8 to 14. The Education and Culture Ministrys Director General Hilmar Farid said he expected the festival to raise awareness about wastra fabrics among the general public. We invite the countrys female leaders to share their exquisite fabrics with the public, Hilmar told a press conference on Monday as quoted by Antara. Read also: Telling stories of Indonesian fabrics for internet-savvy generation Head of Balai Kirti Museum Amurwani Swi Lestari Ningsih said the 150 fabrics set to appear at the festival included those owned by Fatmawati the wife of the countrys first president Sukarno and Iriana the wife of the countrys seventh and current president, Joko Jokowi Widodo. Every attire in the exhibition has an interesting backstory, Amurwani said. Festival coordinator Samuel Wattimena said the 150 fabrics only represented a fraction of wastra in cultures across the archipelago. In addition to renowned designers, we also hope to collaborate with students from fashion schools to transform wastra into an appealing fashion medium in a modern age, Samuel said. Balai Kirti Museum opens from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Visitors are prohibited from wearing t-shirts, jeans or flip-flops. (rfa/kes) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Tue, April 2, 2019 17:09 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa873100695 2 Entertainment Cillian-Murphy,A-Quiet-Place,A-Quiet-Place-2,sequel,Movie,film Free After "Peaky Blinders" and Luc Besson's action movie "Anna," Cillian Murphy could well co-star in alien invasion survival horror "A Quiet Place 2" opposite Emily Blunt and under the direction of the first movie's co-star, John Krasinski. Having survived 2018 horror hit "A Quiet Place," Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe look set to be joined by Cillian Murphy in a May 2020 sequel. Murphy has been linked to the production by The Hollywood Reporter and is to play a newcomer and potential ally for the Abbott family, should negotiations conclude successfully. John Krasinski, who co-wrote and co-starred in "A Quiet Place," remains in the director's chair from one film to the next. Filming is scheduled to begin mid-2019. Read also: 'A Quiet Place' quietly terrifies the audience Murphy, who has appeared in Christopher Nolan movies "Batman Begins," "The Dark Knight," "Inception" and "Dunkirk," returns to TV for a fifth season of British interwar gangland drama "Peaky Blinders," due 2019 and, should previous seasons act as a guideline, debuting towards the end of the year. He's also been attached to an animated adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's shipwreck adventure, "Kensuke's Kingdom." Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Gergely Szakacs (Reuters) Budapest, Hungary Tue, April 2, 2019 22:05 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa873107c44 2 Art & Culture Monty-Phyton,Hungary,Budapest,parade,television,April-Fools Free Hundreds of Hungarians marched through central Budapest in a "silly walk" parade on Monday, copying flamboyant moves from British comedy group Monty Python's famous television sketch to mark April Fools' Day. The participants, including old and young people alike, held a one-minute warm-up session before setting off for a three-lap march near an underground station in the neighborhood of expensive hotels in central Budapest. The sketch by the Monty Python team, who made their name in a 1970s television series, shows British actor and comedian John Cleese as a civil servant walking in unusual ways to the "Ministry of Silly Walks". Many of the Hungarian marchers were planning to improvise. Read also: Thai cave divers, Twiggy, Monty Python's Palin on UK honors list "I will perform a spontaneous silly walk, the outcome will be a surprise even to me," said Borka, a 20-year-old student as her friend Timi, dressed in a neon green crocodile outfit, was finishing her warm-up routine. "Many people walk in a rather weird fashion," Borka said. "There is an enormous variety of options." Benedek Petrok, a 27-year-old education assistant who organised the march, said the event provided an opportunity for people to forget about their daily problems. "I think life is serious enough and every once in a while it feels good to fool around a bit and just let off the steam," said Valeria Meresz, a 68-year-old pensioner. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Magetan, East Java Tue, April 2, 2019 15:43 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730fc5aa 1 Art & Culture Jokowi,reog,East-Java,culture,traditional-dance,traditional-event Free Fifty-year-old Budiono looks very much like President Joko Jokowi Widodo. The Magetan, East Java, resident shares similar facial features with the former Surakarta mayor. However, the two live in totally different worlds. While Jokowi is busy with politics, Budiono has devoted his life to Javanese masked dance reog. He founded the Reog Singo Among Mudo group and frequently performs at cultural events and wedding parties. My face often confuses people, he said as quoted by kompas.com on Monday. One day I performed in Surabaya [East Java]. Some guests shared false info saying that Mr. President was on a blusukan [impromptu visit] there, which then led to many people asking me to take pictures with them, he added. Budiono hoped his face would bring fortune for his group, which he has managed for the past five years. Unfortunately, it remains wishful thinking as business has always been run-off-the-mill, he said. His resemblance to Jokowi only attracts attention on social media or when he attends a wedding. Not so much attention put on the reog dance, he said. Budiono called on the Magetan administration to pay more attention to reog performers and artists in the regency. With only a small number of cultural events being held in the area, the number of young people interested in traditions has dwindled. There are 60 reog groups in Magetan. There has never been a competition. We also dont have a reog community, he added. However, Budiono said he would keep recruiting and teaching young members children and teenagers so that they would grow fond of Javanese culture. (vla/iwa) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Katrin Figge (The Jakarta Post) London Tue, April 2, 2019 18:01 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8731027e7 1 Art & Culture #literature,#book,#LondonBookFair,#art,#Illustration,#Indonesia,#artist,#emte,#MohammadTaufiq Free Mohammad Taufiq, better known as Emte, has worked as a professional illustrator for many years. His works range from watercolor to fine art on canvas and digital comics. Now, the Jakarta-based artist can add live mural paintings to his growing list of accomplishments. During the London Book Fair in mid-March, he adorned the white walls of the Indonesian pavilion with colorful creations that sprung from his own imagination. I was part of the design team that handled all artistic needs, such as merchandise and decorations, to be applied to the Indonesian pavilion at the 2019 London Book Fair, Emte said when asked how this collaboration came about. The idea to make a mural first emerged when we wanted to do something different at the event location. Besides the literature, we wanted to show the visitors that Indonesia also has many other talents, including in the fields of illustration and fine arts. National pride: People gather around Indonesias national pavilion at the London Book Fair, where Indonesia was selected as the "Market Focus" this year. (Courtesy of Ismiaji Cahyono/-) Indonesia was the first Southeast Asian country to be selected as Market Focus for the book fair. Under the slogan 17,000 Islands of Imagination, the national organizing committee put together a program that not only reflected the richness of Indonesias literature, but also the countrys cultural diversity. The sea was used as a common theme: it represents the travel of Indonesian books from the archipelago to unexpected places. The sea is an inseparable part of life for the Indonesian people, Emte explained, adding that this inspired him to create his seafloor-themed mural, for which he used blue as the main color. There is a saying that knowledge is broad, as deep as the ocean, it increases and multiplies many times, there is much that we can learn, and explore to expand our knowledge, he added. I translated this into visual underwater oceans that still hold many mysteries, always inviting human curiosity in acquiring knowledge and books are a human medium to get that knowledge. Emte made the murals spontaneously, without sketching them first something he found very challenging, yet enjoyable at the same time. I let my imagination run free and flow as long as possible, responding to the available space in the Indonesian pavilion from the bottom to the top, he said. His intricate artwork, which took several hours to complete, is already gone again but it doesnt bother him too much. I think when the book fair ended, the organizer dismantled the construction of the pavilion, including the murals that I had made, he shrugged. I don't really think about the fate of the mural. This is quite common when we make works that are both direct and temporary and have limitations, especially regarding the time of their existence. London calling: In addition to the book fair, illustrator and artist Mohammad Emte Taufiq explored London and participated in other events. (Courtesy of Erlan Primansyah/-) Emte not only left his mark at the London Book Fair, but was also involved in an exhibition organized by the National Committee. It was held at Studio 249 and introduced various works made by creative people in Indonesia such as comics, character design, animation, children's book illustrations, games and movies. In addition to the exhibition, the program included discussions about illustrations, licensing and adaptations of books to movies, drawing workshop sessions, storytelling using childrens books and making murals in collaboration with illustrators in London. I took part in two mural sessions with the themes The Unique Universe in Indonesia and Sound of the Wall alongside fellow illustrators Bridget Marzo, Sally Kindberg, Maria Christania, Mayumi Haryoto and Azizah Assattari, Emte said. He was also involved in a discussion called Illustrating Difficult Issues with Evelyn Ghozalli and Dina Riyanti, which was hosted by Emma Wright, as well as a talk with the theme Living on Dreaming with Evelyn Ghozalli and Jane Porter, hosted by Bridget Marzo. On this occasion, I presented my silent and dialogue-free comic book Gugug!, which was just published in November 2018. It follows the life and adventures of a dog and the various characters it meets in the midst of the hustle and bustle of urban cities. Emte grew up reading comic books in fact, it was through comics that his love for drawing first grew as he began to imagine creating his own adventures. When he was in high school, he said, he used to visit a library nearby and discovered that reading books without pictures in it could still fuel his imagination. Emte believes the London Book Fair as well as the programs with a focus on Indonesia beyond the fair have given the country a boost on the global stage. This momentum must be utilized further, given the wealth of Indonesian literary talents, who can be the pioneers of our national creative economy sector to compete in the field of contemporary economics, namely in terms of content, Emte explained. The London Book Fair Market Focus was an important platform in the promotion and opening up of international market opportunities, not only for the publishing sub-sector, but also as a joint collaboration between content-based sectors such as movie, music, video games, food and others. It was Emtes first time visiting London, and he truly enjoyed the experience. I could witness firsthand the magnificent and classic buildings, the atmosphere of Trafalgar Square, dogs running and jumping around in Hyde Park and I could use the legendary tube all the things I had so far only seen in school textbooks or movies, he said. What impressed me most was that I could simply walk around at various locations while enjoying the scenery. This is just a simple thing but it made me happy and kept me healthy, too. After returning to Jakarta, he began the process of completing the sequel for his Gugug! comic book and is exploring other mediums such as animation and merchandise. In May, its time to hit the road again, as Emte will travel to Sofia, Bulgaria, together with 13 other Indonesian artists to take part in the Sofia Paper Art Festival, an event that displays various paper exploration-based works. In July, Emte continues his journey to Seoul, South Korea, to attend the Seoul Illustration Fair. Im also planning to hold a solo exhibition again this year, in addition to several collaborative projects with poetry writers and a fashion brand, Emte added. This year, my work schedule is quite solid but I do enjoy all the different processes. (ste) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Emma Batha (Reuters) London, United Kingdom Tue, April 2, 2019 09:09 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730f14b4 2 World #Britain,#LGBTRights,Cayman-Islands,legalization,same-sex-marriage Free Same-sex marriage has become legal in the Cayman Islands following a landmark court case brought by a lesbian couple which their lawyers said on Monday could have implications in the wider Caribbean region and beyond. Chantelle Day, 32, a Caymanian lawyer, and her partner Vickie Bodden Bush, 44, a nurse, went to court after they were refused permission to marry last year. Chief Justice Anthony Smellie ruled on Friday that preventing same-sex marriage was a violation of the constitution and ordered changes to the law that restricted marriage to heterosexual couples. The ruling could have consequences for four other Caribbean British Overseas Territories which do not permit same-sex marriage or civil partnerships - Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, and Turks and Caicos Islands, the couple's legal team said. Lawyers also questioned whether Northern Ireland could continue to deny same-sex marriage in light of the judgment. Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) welcomed the ruling, which comes after Bermuda legalised same-sex marriage last year. But the FCO said it did not plan to impose same-sex marriage laws on other British Overseas Territories, which are self-governing jurisdictions with their own democratically elected representatives. Jonathan Cooper, a British barrister on the couple's legal team, said in a statement that the FCO should insist all overseas territories recognise LGBT relationships in law. "When will this government put its money where its mouth is and mainstream LGBT equality across the board?" he said. "It's brilliant what Chantelle and Vickie have achieved, but it's also demeaning to have to compel your government to recognise your love." Peter Laverack, another of the women's lawyers, said the couple were "absolutely delighted". "These changes are not an academic exercise. They had serious problems due to not being able to marry," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Bodden Bush, who has British nationality, was denied a spousal visa, and Day was not recognised as the mother of their daughter whom they jointly adopted in England. The couple said last year that they wanted "to set an example for all of the UK's overseas territories, so that no more British citizens need to go to court to marry the person they love". Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Riza Roidila Mufti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 18:10 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa873103c0f 1 Business Airbus,GMF,cooperation Free Aircraft maintenance company GMF AeroAsia, a subsidiary of national carrier Garuda Indonesia, signed an agreement on Tuesday with Europe-based aircraft manufacturer Airbus on aircraft component repairs. This deal will allow GMF to support the operators of Airbus A320 and A330 aircraft in Indonesia and in other Southeast Asia countries in component maintenance. Under the agreement, Airbus will hand over several tools for component maintenance such as landing gear control interface units, static inverters and slat flap control computers and others. It is a list of components basically on landing gear, wings and other components such as braking system components. So, it is a mix of different mechanical components, said head of Airbus customer services Asia Pacific Bruno Bousquet during the signing ceremony. This agreement is in line with the Airbus Flight Hour Services [FHS] commitment to deliver components in a seamless and timely manner, wherever they are needed, added Bousquet. GMF AeroAsia business and base operations director Tazar Marta Kurniawan said the cooperation would bring many benefits for Airbus operators in the Asia Pacific region, especially in saving time and costs in terms of aircraft component maintenance. [With this agreement] the Airbus components do not need to be sent to Europe if they need repairs, Tazar added. Tazar said the agreement was part of the expansion of its long-term relationship with Airbus. The new agreement will also improve GMF AeroAsias capabilities in supporting more airline operators within Indonesia and the Asia Pacific region. Aside from this component maintenance agreement, we plan to collaborate in other lines such as in Airframe maintenance, said Tazar. GMF AeroAsia and Airbus also have a long-term maintenance training partnership. In 2013, GMF AeroAsia was appointed as the training center for Airbus aircraft maintenance. This allows GMF to offer Airbus-certified maintenance training courses to customers in Southeast Asia. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Gemma Holliani Cahya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 20:27 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8731066a5 1 National engineers,infrastructure-development,Research-and-Development Free Amid a shortage of engineers in the country, data has revealed an even bitter reality that engineering schools at Indonesian universities have the highest dropout rates. Biomedical engineering student Gabriela Zurliana, 18, who attends a state university in Surabaya, East Java, was among those determined to quit her engineering program, saying that she could no longer cope with the workload and challenges. She was only in her second semester but she knew she had met her limit. It was my fathers choice, she said, explaining why she chose a program that she felt did not suit her. Gabriela said she had initially aimed to apply for the international relations program but her parents disagreed so she picked a program she was neither familiar with nor had interest in. Im planning to leave. [Engineering] is hard for me because the courses are difficult. It is a multi-disciplinary program so I had to learn basic engineering, medical affairs, technology, electronics, programming,and so on, Gabriela told The Jakarta Post on Monday. Gabriela is not alone in her plan to leave the program. One of her friends quit after one semester while there are three others are thinking about dropping out. All of us felt that we were in the wrong program. Higher Education Statistical Year Book 2018, released by the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry, showed that engineering programs had seen the highest numbers of dropouts, with 4.66 percent of the engineering student population having decided to quit their programs before graduation. Economy majors ranked second after engineering with 3.73 percent of the economic student population, followed by art majors at 3.59 percent. Although the data did not elaborate on the details such as the reasons behind the dropouts, Ismunandar, the ministrys director general of learning and students affairs, said the ratio of college dropouts were not far different from those in previous years. We are currently studying the data [to learn about the problems], Ismunandar told the Post, recently. Responding to the data, the secretary-general of the Indonesian Engineers Union (PII), Robert Sianipar, said the high dropout rates in engineering were mainly caused by the level of difficulty of the studies and the examinations. We lack engineers because studying engineering is not easy and there are other fields [that are not as difficult but] promise better incentives. There must be clear information about employment opportunities and incentives, Robert said. In 2018 alone, Indonesia lacked up to 69,000 engineers. If nothing changes, the deficit will continue until 2024, he said. The [slow] increase [in the number of] engineers cannot keep up with the [rapid] infrastructure development, he said. Read also: Lack of engineers puts infrastructure dreams at risk Robert added that the situation had worsened because not all engineering graduates decided to pursue careers in engineering. Data suggests there were 103,000 new engineers in Indonesia in 2016, up from 87,000 in 2013. However, of the number, only 50 percent actually worked in the engineering field, while the remaining decided to pursue careers in other fields. Meanwhile, Youthmanual, a platform created to guide senior high school students in designing their futures, said the phenomenon had occurred because many students had picked majors not based on their true passions and abilities. Youthmanual founder Rizky Muhammad said the study, which was conducted between 2016 and 2019, had surveyed 400,000 university students across Indonesia. It showed that 45 percent of the respondents thought they picked the wrong program. Meanwhile, 800,000 high school students said they did not know what to study in college after they graduated high school. Every student is unique, but instead of pursuing pathways based on scientific and real data about themselves such as passion, strengths, competency and personal values, they tend to make uninformed decisions based on peers and family influence, he said. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 15:11 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730fb1e7 1 World Foreign-Ministry,Rizieq-Shihab,overseas-voters,2019-elections,Retno-Marsudi,Saudi-Arabia,election-monitoring,diplomacy Free The Foreign Ministry has rebuked a statement by firebrand Islamist Rizieq Shihab, who claimed that Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi had ordered embassy staffers in Saudi Arabia to support the reelection of President Joko Jokowi Widodo. The ministrys director for citizen protection, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, rejected the statement by Rizieq, which was made in a video that is circulating on YouTube. "There is a video circulating today saying that the foreign minister has instructed staff at the Indonesian Embassy in Riyadh and the Indonesian Consulate General (KJRI) in Jeddah to help one particular candidate pair to win the election," he told reporters at the ministry compound in Pejambon on Monday. It is not true that the minister, in one way or another, had asked the [representatives] in Saudi Arabia to help one of the presidential candidates win. In video footage uploaded to FRONT TV, a YouTube channel belonging to the fringe Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) that Rizieq leads, the cleric claims to have gotten firsthand information on the ordeal from a staffer at the embassy. "I remind Mr. President Joko Widodo in Indonesia not to carry out any political propaganda using dirty tactics to intimidate state officials or civil servants, Rizieq said in the video, which began circulating after the foreign ministers visit to Saudi Arabia from March 2 to 3. Iqbal insists that Retnos visit to the representation offices had nothing to do with politics and that it was a routine activity, and that she was there to inaugurate a one-stop public services building that had been built after seven years of neglect. The foreign minister also visited Indonesian schools in Jeddah and met with KJRI staff there, he said, adding there was no specific discussion about election choices. The director said the only instruction was for staffers to keep an eye on electoral conduct, while the ad hoc overseas election committees (PPLNs) host the balloting. The majority of embassy and consulate heads are career diplomats, and almost all foreign ministers since the Reform Era have been nonpartisan. PPLN officials are recruited from the Indonesian population based overseas. The overseas elections run from April 8 to 14 at 130 representation offices worldwide. There are over 2 million eligible overseas voters, according to official records. (tjs) Rep. Hwang Ju-hong, chairman of the Agriculture, Food, Rural Affairs, Oceans and Fisheries Committee, holds the gavel after the committee adopted the hearing report on oceans minister nominee Moon Seong-hyeok at the National Assembly, Tuesday. / Yonhap By Park Ji-won President Moon Jae-in is expected to proceed with the appointment of three minister nominees opposed by conservative parties before leaving for the U.S. on April 10 for his summit with President Donald Trump. Moon asked the National Assembly to adopt confirmation hearing reports for the three by April 7 a procedure to get the Assembly's opinions on nominees for Cabinet posts. Conservative parties last week refused to adopt the reports following confirmation hearings, citing the nominees' ideological bias and ethical lapses. Senior presidential secretary for communication Yoon Do-han indicated Tuesday that Moon will appoint them anyway despite the conservative parties' objection. Later in the day, Moon formally asked the Assembly to adopt reports on the three. They are Chin Young for interior and safety minister; Park Young-sun for SMEs and Startups minister and Kim Yeon-chul for unification minister. If they are appointed, political strife between liberal and conservative parties is expected to deepen. It was largely expected that Moon would appoint them regardless of the parliament's adoption of the hearing reports. He can appoint Cabinet ministers without the reports as they are not legally binding for the appointment. Moon has replaced eight ministerial-level posts without the Assembly's reports in the past. Moon appointed seven minister nominees in a Cabinet reshuffle in early March and withdrew his nomination for Cho Dong-ho as the minister of science for ethical lapses, while Choi Jeong-ho, a nominee for transportation minister, announced he will step down over alleged real estate speculation. Hearing reports on culture minister nominee Park Yang-woo and oceans minister nominee Moon Seong-hyeok were adopted on Monday and Tuesday, respectively. According to law, the parliament needs to adopt the report as a procedural step in response to the presidential office's nomination within 20 days. If the National Assembly fails to do so, the president can ask the Assembly to issue a report within 10 days. If the deadline passes, the president can appoint ministerial nominees regardless of parliamentary adoption of the reports. Opposition parties have called for the withdrawal of Park Young-sun and Kim Yeon-chul as they are disqualified candidates. The parties warned that they will not cooperate with parliamentary activities unless Moon withdraws the appointments and fires Cheong Wa Dae officials who were in charge of the nomination. "Moon's reshuffle is to defend the administration," Rep. Na Kyung-won, floor leader of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP), said during a party meeting Tuesday. "Without dismissing Cheong Wa Dae officials, senior secretary for civil affairs Cho Kuk and senior secretary for personnel affairs Cho Hyun-ok, and withdrawing his nomination of Park Young-sun and Kim Yeon-chul, the Liberty Korea Party will not cooperate with the parliamentary activities from now on." Rep. Kim Kwan-young of the Bareunmirae Party echoed the LKP's view and said: "Moon should communicate with opposition parties. We urge Moon to make the right decision." Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Kharishar Kahfi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 12:12 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730f741d 1 National #Indonesia,#GraftCase,KPK,detained,Golkar,lawmaker,corruption,e-ID Free The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has detained Golkar Party lawmaker Markus Nari, more than a year and a half after naming him a suspect in a multi-trillion rupiah e-ID corruption case. The antigraft body detained the politician after investigators questioned him for more than eight hours on Monday over a case of graft that caused Rp 2.3 trillion (US$161 million) in state losses. Markus will be detained for the first 20 days in the KPKs detention center in Jakarta, KPK spokesman Febri Diansyah said on Monday. Markus is suspected of marking up the budget for an e-ID project at the House of Representatives. He allegedly accepted Rp 4 billion from Home Ministry official Irman. The Jakarta Corruption Court found Irman and fellow ministry official Sugiharto guilty in the case in July 2017. They are each currently serving a 15-year prison sentence. Markus was also named a suspect for perjury and allegedly attempted to obstruct the KPK investigation into the e-ID graft. He allegedly intimidated a trial witness, former Hanura Party lawmaker Miryam S. Haryani, into retracting her testimony. The Golkar politician is the second politician to be named a suspect in the case after former House speaker Setya Novanto. Setya, who was the Golkar chairman, was accused of playing a key role in planning a scheme to rig the Rp 5.9 trillion project. The corruption court later found him guilty and sentenced him to 15 years in prison, Rp 500 million in fines and US$7.3 million in restitution fees. Of the eight individuals named suspects by the antigraft body, seven have been found guilty. The individuals comprise ministry officials, politicians and businesspeople.(jun) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 12:29 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730f74dd 4 Business Lombok-earthquake,tourist-arrivals,February,2019 Free The tourist industry in West Nusa Tenggara home to popular tourist destination Lombok has yet to recover following a strong earthquake in July 2018 that devastated infrastructure in the fast-growing province for tourism. The West Nusa Tenggara chapter of Statistics Indonesia (BPS NTB) said the occupancy rate of star-rated hotels in the province declined to 32.63 percent in February from 32.84 percent in January. West Nusa Tenggara tourism has not shown any progress [since the earthquake], said BPS TTB head Suntono on Monday as quoted by tempo.co.id, adding that in February 2018, the occupancy rate of star-rated hotels was 40.60 percent, meaning the figure declined 7.97 percent year-on-year. Meanwhile, the occupancy rate of non-star-rated hotels in February was 20.60 percent, a decline of 3.77 percent from the rate in January. The average length of stay in the hotel also declined to 2.16 days in February from 3.16 days in January. According to the BPS, hotels in the province welcomed 44,654 guests in February 34,822 domestic tourists (77.98 percent) and 9,832 foreign tourists (22.02 percent). A total of at 3,588 foreign tourists arrived via Lombok International Airport in February. Malaysia contributed the most tourists during that time with 1,517, followed by China with 670 tourists. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 16:23 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730ff42e 1 City fire,fire-accidents,Fire-and-Rescue-Agency,mobile-phones,charging-ports Free A home on Jl. Poltangan in Jagakarsa, South Jakarta, was engulfed in flames on Monday morning. According to a witness account, Ferdiansyah, the fire started in a bedroom on the second floor. "The homeowner's child put their mobile phone on the bed as they were charging it. The phone overheated and exploded, burning the bed," Jagakarsa Police chief Comr. Sujarwo said as reported by tempo.co on Monday. Ten fire trucks were deployed and the fire was extinguished an hour later. Although no casualties were reported, the incident has caused hundreds of millions of rupiah in material losses. In December last year, a girl in Bogor, West Java, died from electrocution while she was using a mobile phone as it was being charged. Bogor Police spokesman Adj. Comr. Ita Puspita said when lightning struck Sanja village, the victim, Salsabila Ayu Putri, 6, was electrocuted and died shortly after. (vla) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 16:00 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730fd69f 4 Business kelor,liquor,East-Nusa-Tenggara Free East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) Governor Viktor Bungtilu Laiskodat has announced that his administration is encouraging the production of moringa liqueur, which experts at Nusa Cendana University (Undana) are currently researching. We are encouraging research on developing sopi [a type of traditional liquor], including sopi that uses raw ingredients from the moringa [plant], said Victor as quoted by kompas.com. The governor attended a ceremony on Monday at which Undana rector Fredrik Lukas Benu signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to start production of Sophia, the branded name for the moringa liqueur. Sophia is to be produced in cooperation between the university's business school and a local company. We will name all NTT liquor products Sophia Sophia 1, Sophia 2, and so on. The [products] include the one that uses moringa as a raw ingredient, said Viktor. He added that Sophia would compete with traditional liquors from other regions, including Cap Tikus from Manado, North Sulawesi, and that the province's liquor products would be exported to Timor Leste and Australia. The Sophia liquor was produced from palm wine, which would be purchased from local suppliers that used traditional methods, said Viktor. Sophia has an alcohol content of 45 percent [90 proof]. Initially, we will produce 12,000 bottles of the liqueur, he said. The moringa liqueur is planned for launch in June 2019 at Rp 1 million (US$70.22) per bottle. Victor said two of the three Sophia liquors were ready for production, while the third was under development. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, April 2, 2019 11:12 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa8730f5c59 1 Business tourist-arrivals,February,2019 Free Statistics Indonesia (BPS) has revealed that tourist arrivals hit 1.27 million in February, 6.12 percent higher than the 1.20 million recorded in the same month in 2018. Meanwhile, in January, tourist arrivals grew 4.80 percent year-on-year. BPS head Suhariyanto said Malaysia sent the most tourists to Indonesia, followed by China, Singapore, Timor Leste and Australia. Malaysia contributed 275,288 tourists. We hope that the tourist industry will spur economic growth, he said. Cumulatively, arrivals in January and February were recorded at 2.48 million, a growth of 8.19 percent from the 2.30 million tourist arrivals in the corresponding period last year. BPS data show that the occupancy rate of star-rated hotels in February 2019 was 52.44 percent, a decline of 3.77 percent compared to the occupancy rate in February 2018 of 56.21 percent. Meanwhile, the occupancy rate of hotels in January 2019 declined by 0.97 percent year-on-year. The average length of stay of tourists at star-rated hotels was 1.93 days in February, an increase of 0.01 days compared to the same month in 2018. Indonesia previously set a target to welcome 20 million tourists this year. Last year, a total of 15.81 million tourists visited the country. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Tue, April 2, 2019 16:44 986 db1d47cf6ffbed4060cffaa873100298 2 SE Asia #Brunei,#humanrights,SultanHassanalBokiah,Conservative,supports,stoning,death-penalty Free Brunei's imposition of harsh sharia laws, including death by stoning for gay sex and adultery, is a bid by the country's ruler to boost support among conservatives and highlights a steady drift away from the West, observers say. The tough punishments, which also include amputation of a hand and foot for theft, will come into force Wednesday when a new penal code is fully implemented after years of delays. The decision to move ahead with the laws has sparked a global outcry, with the United Nations branding them "cruel and inhumane" and actor George Clooney leading calls for Brunei-owned hotels to be boycotted. By making his country the first in East or Southeast Asia to introduce a sharia penal code on a national level, analysts believe all-powerful Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah is seeking to burnish his Islamic credentials among conservative supporters at a time the economy is weakening. Brunei, a resource-rich former British protectorate on Borneo island with a population of about 400,000, was plunged into recession in recent years as oil prices plummeted and its crude reserves declined. "Brunei is becoming Southeast Asia's Saudi Arabia," Bridget Welsh, a Southeast Asia expert from John Cabot University, told AFP. "The regime has increasingly been relying on religious legitimacy, appealing to a conservative Islamic ideology. The weakening economy in Brunei as well as concerns about possible erosion of support underscore this increasing reliance on religion." Shift to China The Muslim-majority nation's implementation of punishments that may scare off Western businesses also signals a shift towards investment from China, which typically refrains from criticising trading partners on human rights, observers said. As in many other parts of Asia, Chinese companies are investing huge sums in the absolute monarchy, part of an infrastructure drive aimed at extending Beijing's economic and geopolitical clout. Initiatives include a multi-billion-dollar oil refinery -- Brunei's biggest ever foreign investment project -- a dam and a highway. Xi Jinping visited the country in November last year, the first trip by a Chinese president in 13 years. Experts say it is hard to gauge the level of public backing for sharia law in Brunei, as most citizens would not publicly voice criticism of the sultan. But it is believed to have substantial support among the country's Muslim ethnic Malays, who make up some 70 percent of the population. Those who speak publicly generally welcome it. "I'm proud, because implementing the law feels like it solidifies the Islamic identity of Brunei," Muhammad Antoni, a 27-year-old oil and gas company worker, told AFP. Others were irritated at the calls for a boycott of nine Brunei-owned hotels in Europe and the United States. "Regarding celebrities calling for a boycott, it's not their place," said Haziah Zainal, a 36-year-old civil servant. "These actions seem ignorant as they have not even been here to experience what it's like." There was some unease online, however, where people can comment more freely. "This worries me so much for Bruneis economy," one user posted on social media platform Reddit, adding that it would mean "losing more business overseas". Global alarm In reality, it is not yet clear if the toughest punishment -- death by stoning -- will be implemented. Brunei has long had capital punishment, and any execution should be carried out by hanging. But the last known instance of someone being put to death in the country was in 1957, according to Matthew Wolfe of human rights group The Brunei Project. While condemning the new penal code, Amnesty International said the country was "abolitionist in practice" when it comes to the death penalty. The burden of proof is high before someone can be sentenced to death by stoning. An accused person must either confess to the offence, or it must be witnessed by at least four people who have to then testify. The sultan, the world's second-longest ruling monarch, has weathered controversies before -- the monarchy was deeply embarrassed over revelations the ruler's brother Jefri allegedly embezzled billions of dollars -- and is unlikely to back down. In a weekend statement, the government defended its right to introduce the new penal code, saying that sharia law "aims to educate, respect and protect the legitimate rights of all individuals". Top Asian finance ministers and central bankers are due to have a summit in northern Thailand this week, and theyll need pollution masks if they want to avoid breathing toxic air. Wildfires and crop burning are blanketing the region with smog, prompting Thailands junta leader Prayuth Chan-Ocha to fly to Chiang Mai -- the areas tourist hot-spot -- early Tuesday to review the crisis. The citys air quality index was 379 as he visited, the worst major urban reading globally and a level thats hazardous, according to IQAir AirVisual pollution data. The air was classed as unhealthy in nearby Chiang Rai, where finance ministry officials and central bankers from Southeast Asian nations as well as China, Japan and South Korea will meet from Tuesday through Friday. The Bank of Thailand has said it will hand out pollution masks to media covering the event. Thai authorities blame crop burning to clear farmland, as well as wildfires in mountainous forests amid a drought and searing heat. Chiang Mai has set up a so-called safe zone for residents in a convention center, while a university in Chiang Rai canceled classes on Monday and Tuesday. "The haze usually comes and goes within a week or two, but its been persistent this time -- its the worst so far," Khuanchai Supparatpinyo, the director of Chiang Mai Universitys Research Institute for Health Sciences, said in an interview. "This can be quite dangerous, and pose health risks." Northern Thailand is a popular destination for visitors during the traditional Thai new year festival in mid-April but the smog is likely to make some holidaymakers think twice. At the start of 2019, the military government was rattled by a second year of spiking seasonal air pollution in Bangkok, exacerbated by traffic fumes, industrial emissions and construction dust. So far the episodes of smog havent damaged tourism but worsening haze could pose a challenge for an industry thats key to economic growth. By Kim Jae-heun American soldiers in South Korea will be allowed to wear masks while in uniform to protect themselves from fine dust, according to the United States Forces Korea (USFK) Tuesday. The USFK has changed U.S Army regulations that banned soldiers from wearing protective gear when in uniform. Two years ago, the U.S. military changed its policy to train soldiers indoors or delay exercises when air pollution reached serious levels, but it did not allow masks while in uniform. Only the 51st Fighter Wing at Osan Air Base permitted servicemen to wear masks when pollution hits a certain level. However, the worsening fine dust issue here has forced the USFK to make an exception for soldiers when the air-quality index (AQI) exceeds 101. The military force follows the air-quality standard measured by the Environment Protection Agency in the U.S., which classifies pollution levels by the AQI. The index shows six levels of air quality with different colors. Orange indicates air pollution between 101 and 150. At this level, it is recommend that people sensitive to fine dust, senior citizens suffering asthma and children stay indoors. American soldiers will be able to wear masks that cover their nose and mouth like the N-95 and KF-94 models. The rule change came after a petition posted on Change.org related to the concerns gained the support of more than 3,400 people. Some family members of USFK servicemen have also expressed concern over the issue. Alexandra Jackson, whose husband is a soldier at the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, told the military newspapers Stars and Stripes last month that her husband should be able to wear a mask during service hours when fine dust hits the country. "But when they're in uniform it's against code," she said. "I feel like the soldiers should be able to have the protection." Grant funding for school safety was given to several Mid-Michigan Schools by the Michigan State Police last week. MSP announced the recipients of the grants in a news release sent out on March 27. Each school was given a varied amount of funding based on the schools needs. The Mid-Michigan schools who received funding, as well as the amount received, are as follows. * Shepherd Public Schools: $61,975 * Beal City Public Schools: $82,092 * Alma Public Schools: $110,132 * St. Mary School in Alma: $48,770 * Farwell Area Schools: $102,794 All these grants were no match grants, meaning they did not have to find fund matching in order secure grant funding. Applications were reviewed by a committee made up of members of the MSP, Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police, Michigan Sheriffs Association, Michigan Department of Education, Michigan Association of Non-Public Schools and other school safety professionals, the release said. Shepherd Public Schools applied for the grant in February in conjunction with the Shepherd Police Department, according to Superintendent Steve Brimmer. The school district applied for the grant last year, but did not receive funding. We applied because we are always looking for ways to improve the safety of our students, he said. Suffice it to say, the funds will add another layer of protection for our students and staff. Brimmer would not say what the funds would be used for, stating that they were advised that it would not be in the students best interest to state the exact use for the funding. He also said that he felt lucky to have been chosen for the grant. Farwell Area Schools applied for the grant on March 1, according to Superintendent Steve Scoville. The district requested $141,557 in funding but received $102,794. Farwell Area Schools has worked closely with our Clare County Emergency Manager to create and maintain and Emergency Operation Plan, he said. The items in this grant are all items that are identified as needs within that program. The grant funding for the district will help fund upgraded doors and door signage that meet safety requirements, digital radios for the districts busses and emergency response team, a secure entrance for Farwell Middle School and an upgraded intercom system that covers all of the Farwell High School building. The only requested item that wasnt funded were emergency go bags for their offices and classrooms. The district has not received the grant in the past, according to Scoville. St. Mary School in Alma, who also applied in March, is planning to improve their classrooms through upgrading windows by making them easier to use, according to Principal Lisa Seeley Our windows from the 1950s when the school was built, she said. Replacing the windows in the classrooms will take all of those funds. Seely said that she feels fortunate and excited to have received the funding due because St. Mary is a non-public school, meaning that they do not get as much funding as public schools. MSP gave $25 million in grant funding to 135 public school districts, 66 non-public schools, 20 public charter schools and nine intermediate school districts/regional educational service agencies, according to the news release. There was a total of 366 applications received, with over $46 million requested for security improvements. By William R. Jones Periodically we are filled with wonder and disbelief upon learning that a particular and sometimes favorite product or service has come under the ownership of another company. Does it matter and do we need to know as long as we are getting what we want without the price going up? I suppose that it doesn't unless you are questioned in a game of Trivial Pursuit, or the acquiring company in which you own stock is involved in a lawsuit, or the company has workers' rights issues, environmental issues, etcetera. Anyway, you probably did hear a little over five years ago that the WH Group (Wanzhou Holdings), the privately owned largest meat producer in China purchased Smithfield Foods, Inc., which was the largest pork producer and processor in the United States. It was the largest ever friendly takeover of a U.S. company by a Chinese company to date. Deals like this represent M&A (mergers and acquisitions) to increase market share and improve business models. Of course, it was not the first time a major U.S. brand that had become part of the common cultural fabric of America had been acquired by a foreign operation. Established American brands take decades to build their reputation and consumer market, thus, they are extremely valuable to foreign companies. Budweiser beer which is made with up to 30 percent rice is another iconic top-selling brand that continues to be marketed as American, but now is foreign-owned. The Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate Anheuser-Busch Inbev purchased it. Unilever, a British-Dutch and the world's third largest consumer goods company has purchased the most American brand products. Two popular examples are healthcare products, Vaseline and Pond's creams. The world's largest convenience store franchiser 7-Eleven, once American, has long been owned by Seven & I Holdings Co., Ltd., a Tokyo-based company that is the fifth largest retailer in the world (boasting 67,480 stores in seventeen countries as of 2018). There is a major presence of 7-Eleven stores in South Korea with over 9,000 locations competing with CU (BGF Retail Co., Ltd.) and GS25. Other iconic brand names that once were American are: Alka-Seltzer, now owned by Bayer, a German pharmaceutical company; Gerber baby food now owned by Nestle of Switzerland; and Firestone Diversified Products (once the exclusive supplier of tires to Ford Motor Company) now owned by Bridgestone Corporation in Japan which is the largest manufacturer of tires in the world. The list goes on and on! "Who Owns Whom 2018/2019 seven regional directories" (total of eighteen volumes) published by GAP Books tells more. The directories feature country of incorporation for millions of businesses worldwide and contact information for each parent company listed (all in alphabetical order) and a guide to the main trading/business activities, plus more. The Far East regional directory comes in three volumes with more than 460,000 entries. South Korea is in Volume 2 of the Far East title. I wanted to buy that volume, but unfortunately, their London man told me that it only sells as a "title set" for a little over $2,000. I've decided that I really don't need to know about the world of company ownership, at least, not until I hit the lottery. The author (wrjones@vsu.edu) teaches English language conversation and is a Chemistry Lab Coordinator and Research Technician at Virginia State University. By Yoon Seong-hoon Yes or no. Why did the Burning Sun scandal erupt in the southern area of Seoul, Gangnam, not in Gangbuk, the opposite side of it? It is a simple question with no intention to harm those who long for "Gangnam style" or are residents there. Gangnam has become an icon of wealth, education and luxury. Many people in Seoul go there not only for daily dates but for the brand identity it can bring to the residents on a lifelong basis. What is most important in real estate investment is "Location, Location, Location," and Gangnam, branded with wealth by anyone's standards, would be an ideal place for investors. I, born and raised in the Gangbuk area, which I want to put "Greater" ahead with again no intention to market it, love it. The biggest difference I feel between these two locations is the level of freedom in the "underground" economy, which I could substitute with "on-the-ground" as it is where it has happened. I may attribute one of the reasons for it to the geopolitical distance. Many government offices including the presidential one are in the northern part and Gangnam is separated by the Han River from that area. It may be a reason why less behavior takes place in Gangbuk as it is physically the front yard of the Blue House, the presidential office in South Korea. Similarly, Washington, D.C's proximity to the White House could explain its lower crime rate. The very first violent incident by a club owner outside of the club Burning Sun, which ignited the burning scandal, is abnormal. An owner of the club violently assaulted one of its customers and not many people tried to stop it. The club seemed like a monarchy or hierarchical society where "customer is king," a business philosophy, is manipulated as the customers were divided into the "kings" called VIPs and the rest based on the price they paid. What is stranger is that the assault happened in public under a surveillance camera, not in a closed room where no one else could know what really happened inside. Did the club owner who showed extreme violence know what he was doing was strongly against the law and would put him behind bars? Yes or no, once again, as he did it in the front yard of his office, far and separated by the river from the executive office in South Korea. "The Big Short" written by Michael Lewis tells the story of star investors behind the global financial crisis in 2008. An investor named Michael Burry in the book defines one of the hallmarks of the bubble as "the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud." He shorted mortgages way before the bubble burst in 2008 and an argument he made based on FBI reports was that fraud in the mortgage market had increased rapidly at that time. A newspaper in South Korea mentioned that there were more than 100 Burning Sun-related incidents reported to the police last year. We now know there was corruption between the club and a police station, and it is why the bubble ballooned and finally burst recently. I want to bring up the broken window theory, which argues serious crimes are the result of a chain of disorders the more broken windows that are seen, the higher the crime rate. This theory was applied by the New York City Police Department in the early 1990s and the city crime dramatically decreased afterward windows were repaired. In Gangnam however, some corrupt policemen let the broken windows of the club remain broken and this malfeasance finally built up to serious crimes. If corruption is fixed through the Burning Sun scandal, it would be a blessing in disguise. If it is not, however, there will be another burning fire left untouched across the river and one might argue that it is time to short the Gangnam area. This article is based on my own experience and has no intention to defame Gangnam, as the word is used rather as a symbol in the article. The writer works in South Korea and currently studies for an MBA at the University of Minnesota. Guangzhou customs officers in Guangdong province will expand cooperation with their counterparts in the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions to curtail the smuggling of frozen meat, a senior officer said on Monday. Tan Junquan, deputy director of Guangzhou Customs' anti-smuggling bureau, said at a news conference in Guangzhou that officers have seized more than 1,800 metric tons of frozen meats and related products, valued at 43.1 million yuan ($6.44 million) after cracking 12 major cases since the beginning of the year. Twelve suspects were detained during a special campaign launched in January, Tan said. Seized products include beef, tripe, cow stomach, chicken feet and pig feet, he added. In one case, customs officers seized 750 tons of frozen chicken and pig feet smuggled from Brazil, Britain and Germany, after investigating a ship at the mouth of the Pearl River on Feb 26. Two suspects were detained. On March 14, customs officers seized 390 tons of frozen beef, tripe, and chicken after investigating a ship. Four suspects were detained in the operation. Two days later, officers seized another 75 tons of frozen pig and duck feet from Germany and Hungary, and detained two more suspects after investigating a suspected smuggling boat. Lin Zhichun, a front-line customs officer with Guangzhou's Panyu customs, said smuggling frozen meat has become a lucrative industry in the region. "The smugglers can now earn up to 15,000 yuan if they successfully smuggle 1 metric ton of frozen beef into the mainland," Lin said. "The big price gap and the large profits have encouraged smuggling in recent years." Many of the seized products had not yet passed health inspections and would pose a serious threat, Lin said, adding that some of the meat might have come from areas with animal epidemics. Tan said that in addition to expanded patrols in the major water channels, and big data analysis, Guangzhou customs will further expand information exchanges with their Hong Kong and Macao counterparts. Top priority will be given to cracking down on major cross-border smuggling gangs active in the region, he added. Cooperation with domestic law enforcement departments, including the police and fishery authorities, will also be advanced to ensure the security of the country's economy, market order and people's health, he said. By Deauwand Myers The recent debacle at the summit in Vietnam between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was to be expected. Trump adores dictators, and wants to be one. Unlike the 45th U.S. president, Kim is an actual dictator. Brutal, venal, and cruel, Kim does have one quality any world leader should have. Simply: he is well prepared and deadly serious. He has been groomed to run North Korea for years, and the Kim regime has been dealing with the West, particularly the United States in relation to sanctions and the DPRK's nuclear program, for decades. Trump's ego, unlike his intellect, is very large. Had he been smart and intellectually curious (a quality he and Bush II lack) he would have read up on the important issues, mechanics, and aims attendant to the ultimate goal of the West and South Korea: the DPRK's complete, verifiable, and irreversible nuclear disarmament. To be fair, Trump is correct on a few points: The status quo of heavy sanctions, stalled talks, the North's perpetual reneging on past nuclear agreements, and more sanctions, hasn't really worked. There's a simple and sad reason this is so: Unlike other autocratic countries such as China, Russia or Iran, North Korea has no concern about its population or their well-being. By "concern," I mean fear of a popular uprising or regime change due to grassroots organizing. Impoverished for so long and brainwashed to adore the Kim regime, many North Koreans do not have the will, and certainly the means, to uproot Kim and company. Starvation is a much more pressing matter for the average North Korean than the lofty goals attendant to a liberal democracy. This generational weakening of the North Korean people means that sanctions only hurt them, not North Korea's political elite, and so the carrot (lifting sanctions) and the stick (more sanctions) loses the former's luster and the latter's bite, especially since this scenario has been played out time and again over decades and several American administrations. The wealthy and well-connected in North Korea live like kings and queens, even by Western standards. They can afford to successfully negotiate international sanctions. Worse, bloviating, blustery, corpulent Trump makes the mistake of believing his own dishonest self-aggrandizing. He knows "more than the generals," because he watches Sunday morning political talk shows. He cannot be counseled on most issues, especially geopolitics, and he often undermines his own administration's policy via fiat and unedited, unfiltered tweets. A wise man knows he knows nothing. A foolish one: Donald Trump. Empty buckets make a lot of noise, so Trump wanted credit and even a Nobel Peace Prize for his failed summits with Kim. The important question, or at least one of them, we should ask about the Singapore and Vietnam summits is this: What did Kim get out of these talks? He was able to have his flag flown next to America's and be seen with the most powerful man in the world on the global stage. Kim was legitimated, in a way, by an illegitimate, immoral, mendacious, petty, malignant narcissist who is, worst of all, I'm sorry, an idiot. Trump's ascendancy to the Republican nomination and the presidency should teach America a lot about the lies it tells itself and the world. There are many, far too many, for me to enumerate an exhaustive list, but the two I'll focus on are illustrative of Trump and his geopolitical blunders: "If you work hard, you will succeed." People of color have been working hard for generations, and have little to show for it in the way of accrued wealth or financial stability. Trump was given hundreds of millions of dollars by his virulently racist father, and squandered his wealth several times over, before stabilizing. "America is a meritocracy." Really? If the recent college entrance bribery scandal in the United States perpetrated by the very wealthy and well-connected is any evidence, America has never appreciated merit. Trump's presidency, shod full of rich, white men and women who inherited much of their fortunes, is a stark reminder that power and privilege produces "merit," where talent and intelligence are woefully absent. Being racist and unenlightened and unmolested by empirical evidence is to be an American conservative, so Trump is in good company in this regard. The problem is, an idiot with a Twitter account is one thing. An idiot with a Twitter account and the nuclear codes is something entirely different. Although America deserves this horrible man as its president, the world does not. If our species is to survive, we need world leaders who believe in science, lest half our cities drown in seawater and our way of live be irrevocably altered. But if Trump is America's president for a second term, annihilation may come much quicker. Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times. All six Patong taxi, tuk-tuk drivers charged for beating tourists denied bail PHUKET: All six suspects charged for beating two tourists from the UAE to the ground and kicking them repeatedly in Patong last Thursday night (Mar 28) have been refused bail and are being held in remand, Patong Police have confirmed. By Tanyaluk Sakoot Tuesday 2 April 2019, 01:05PM All six suspects involved in the attack have been denied bail and are being held in remand. Image: Screengrab / Supplied Patong Police Chief Col Anotai Jindamanee told The Phuket News today (April 2), Five suspects are being held at Phuket Provincial prison right now. The other one suspect is not over 20 years old. He will be handed over to the Phuket Juvenile and Family Court today. They all have already been charged with affray causing bodily harm by attacking two tourists, Col Anotai confirmed. However, police have yet to conclude their investigation, Col Anotai added. We have yet to complete our questioning of six other witnesses, so we requested that the suspects be held at Phuket Provincial Prison for 12 days, from March 30 to April 10. They have been refused bail while the investigation is in process. If police granted them bail, then the suspects might flee the charges, he said. Phuket Immigration have already taken statements from the tourists involved, Col Anotai explained. And Phuket Immigration led the tourists in identifying the suspects, he added. The tourists departed Phuket last Friday (Mar 29), the day after the attack. They returned home on a flight back to Dubai on Emirates Airline Flight EK 2593 on March 29. They thanked everyone involved in arresting all the suspects, Col Anotai said. Meanwhile, Phuket Governor Phakaphong Tavipatan was briefed on police progress in the case at a meeting held yesterday to raise the issue of tourists safety. Present for the meeting were Phuket Vice Governor Thanyawat Chanpinit, and other members of the Phuket Provincial Transport Management Committee, including military officials, Patong Police, Phuket Land Transport Office (PLTO) Chief Banyat Kantha, and Wanchat Choonhathanorm, a senior prosecutor at the Phukets Public Prosecutors Office, which operates under the Office of the Attorney General. Next the Phuket Provincial Prosecutor must discuss this case with investigators to expedite proceedings and to make sure the case is handled quickly and effectively. We must be fair to both sides, the tourists and the suspects, Governor Phakaphong said. At the meeting, Governor Phakaphong and other officials also discussed a range of other public transport issues, including public transport licenses, service standards, public transport parking and prices, noted a report from the Phuket office of the Public Relations Department. However, no further details on those issues were forthcoming. The fight that saw the two UAE tourists attacked on Pracha Nukroh Rd in front of the Malin Plaza broke out at about 11pm last Thursday. Parts of the vicious beating were recorded by a bystander. The footage recorded showed the tuk-tuk drivers and at least one motorbike taxi driver beating two men in the middle of the road. The tourists were beaten to the ground, with several of their attackers kicking both men repeatedly while they were still down. In the video recording a womans voice can be heard screaming for the attackers to stop. Her pleas were ignored. (See story here.) Chinese scam call centre busted in Chalong PHUKET: Sixteen nationals 13 men and three women were arrested in Chalong this afternoon (April 2) for allegedly operating a stock market price speculation call centre scam targetting Chinese victims. Chinesecrimeimmigrationpolice By Eakkapop Thongtub Tuesday 2 April 2019, 07:56PM Some of the suspects arrested in the raid in Phuket earlier today (April 2). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub Immigration Chief Maj Gen Surachate Hakparn at the house in Chalong where the raid took place in Phuket earlier today (April 2). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub Some of the computers seized in the raid in Phuket earlier today (April 2). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub Immigration Chief Maj Gen Surachate Hakparn inspects some of the computers seized in the raid in Phuket earlier today (April 2). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub Immigration Chief Maj Gen Surachate Hakparn explains the arrests to the press in Phuket this evening (April 2). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub Immigration Chief Maj Gen Surachate Hakparn explains the arrests to the press in Phuket this evening (April 2). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub All 16 suspects were arrested at a house in the Baan Maneekram housing estate on Kwang Rd, Moo 1, Chalong, at 10:45am. Present in Phuket today to announce the arrests was Immigration Bureau Chief Maj Gen Surachate Hakparn. We were informed of the operation, and officers surrounded the house before moving in to make the arrests, Maj Gen Surachate said. They tried to escape, but police caught them all, he added. At the scene, officers seized 18 computers, 68 mobile phones and about 100 SIM cards. There was lot of notes with phone numbers and a lot of notes about stock prices, Gen Surachate said. Officers had confirmed through the internet connection account that the operation may have started as early as March 18, he said. A senior -ranking officer with the Phuket Provincial Police told The Phuket News, All 16 suspects are Chinese nationals. Police at this stage decline to reveal their names. The suspects have so far declined to give any statement to police. Gen Surachate explained to the press today, By our investigation, they (the suspects) arrived via Phuket International Airport in the middle of March, but at different times. They rented the house for B45,000 per month, and their elcetirc bill was about B20,000 a month, he said. It was a busy house, Gen Curachate noted. People reported seeing Chinese men always coming and going in and out with foodstuffs, he said. This group of international criminals chose to do this here because it is convenient place to live and has a good internet connection to cheat same people of the same nationality, Gen Surachate said. However, Gen Surachate said that police had yet to formally charge any of the suspects. We need to investigate other details that may be connected to other similar cases, Gen Surachate explained. Visa-on-arrival waiver extension in the works BANGKOK: Plans are afoot to extend the waiver of the visa-on-arrival fee for another three months to ward off an economic slump during the transition to a new government. transporttourismChineseimmigrationeconomics By Bangkok Post Tuesday 2 April 2019, 08:47AM Thailand plans to extend the waiver of the visa-on-arrival fee for visitors for another three months to boost tourism. Photo: Bangkok Post Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak said the Immigration Bureau is scheduled to propose to the cabinet at its April 9 meeting an extension of the exemption of the B2,000 visa-on-arrival fee for visitors from 21 nations until July 31 this year. The fee waiver, designed to give a much-needed boost to the tourism industry, is scheduled to expire on April 30. Investors are expected to take a wait-and-see approach over the next three months while the new government is being formed, said Mr Somkid. The tourism industry will play a significant role in contributing to economic growth during the period. He said infrastructure projects such as the high-speed rail to link Suvarnabhumi, Don Mueang and U-tapao airports; the port expansion of Laem Chabang and Map Ta Phut; U-tapao aviation city; a maintenance, repair and overhaul centre; and Bangkok mass transit projects are expected to continue regardless of which parties form the new government. Surachate Hakparn, the commissioner of the Immigration Bureau, said Mr Somkid acknowledged that the visa fee exemption has helped draw many visitors the past three months. The government waived the visa-on-arrival fee for visitors from 21 countries to help the tourism industry from Nov 15, 2018, to Jan 14, 2019. The measure was then extended until April 30. The fee waiver could help attract foreign visitors to travel to Thailand for Songkran, said Mr Surachate. He said the bureau recently introduced a new service called e-visa-on-arrival to facilitate the immigration process. The new service cuts processing time for visas on arrival at airports to as little as one minute. Mr Surachate said the bureau is scheduled to utilise artificial intelligence in the immigration process over the next 4-5 months. The system, through a collaboration with Britain, will be implemented during the Asean summit in November. Extending the fee waiver was a key agenda item proposed at last weeks Tourism Council of Thailand (TCT) meeting, in which local operators were calling for the scheme to run until October, or another six months. TCT president Chairat Trirattanajarasporn said the extension means current industry growth momentum will stay on track, helping to revitalise business during the low season. The Association of Thai Travel Agents will also offer two optional measures for the ministry to consider, including imposing double entry visas for travellers who come for Mice (meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions) events and re-entry visas for foreign tourists that visit second-tier provinces that share borders with neighbouring countries. Read original story here. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close Should cryptocurrency be a part of your financial portfolio? columns By Jon Healey Between his exclamations of "total exoneration," President Trump has spent much of the week stirring the pot about Obamacare. Here, for example, is what he tweeted Thursday: "The Republican Party will become the Party of Great Health care! ObamaCare is a disaster, far too expensive and deductibility ridiculously high virtually unusable! Moving forward in Courts and Legislatively!" Disregard for a moment how Trump and his top aides have bragged about how well Obamacare has been working on their watch. And while we're at it, disregard the many things the administration has done to discourage people from enrolling and keep premiums higher than they should be. (Sadly, it has been successful on both counts, with enrollment sagging and premiums elevated roughly 16 percent by various Trump policies, according to Kaiser Family Foundation research). Instead, just focus on how Trump is politicizing health care with yet another empty promise of a "great" Republican solution. Speaking to reporters Thursday, Trump acknowledged that he didn't actually have a plan. Instead, he said, several GOP lawmakers are working on one. "I have asked (Sen.) John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who's a terrific health care person, (Sen.) Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and others to take a look, form a really great plan," Trump said. "I mean, we've put together a group of four or five, and Bill Cassidy is a terrific health care person, and they are going to work together to come up with something that's really spectacular, maybe we'll even get support in the House from Democrats. But it's going to be far better than Obamacare." That would be the same Bill Cassidy who co-authored a draconian alternative to Obamacare that would have stripped coverage from millions of lower-income people who currently have it. Spectacular! The problem here, as my colleagues and I on The Times' editorial board argued, is that Trump and congressional Democrats seem to want to score political points on health care more than they want to improve it. Moving past finger-pointing to legislating requires lawmakers and Trump to come to an agreement on a fundamental question they've all been dodging: Do Americans have a right to health care? When Democrats used their control over the House, the Senate and the presidency to push the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, they took it as a given that health care was a right. By contrast, every Republican proposal since then has taken it as a given that health care is a privilege an option for those who can afford it. But we've never had an actual debate over that point. Neither side has been forced to defend its underlying assumption. Democrats whether they're in the shore-up-the-ACA camp or the single-payer faction have to establish a foundation for why health care should be a right. And they have to offer a better argument than "it's the right thing to do," because many Republicans believe it's just wrong to force families living paycheck to paycheck to pay for someone else's health insurance. Conversely, if Republicans want to persuade the country that health care is a privilege, they'll have to come up with an argument that doesn't sound like they're just being cheap and insensitive. House Democrats unveiled a multipronged bill last week to shore up Obamacare's insurance-buying exchanges and reduce premiums. If I were the House leadership, I'd want an amendment to be offered on the floor declaring that Americans have a right to affordable health care. And I'd be ready to back that up with data showing that going without coverage is expensive not just for the uninsured, but more so for the rest of us much of the cost of their care is passed on, leading to higher federal spending, higher prices for care and higher insurance premiums. On top of those direct costs, there's also the indirect cost to the economy of having people delay or skip the care they need to be fully productive members of society. Beyond that, the lack of universal coverage hampers efforts to reform the health care system and slow the growth of overall spending. In short, there's a compelling economic case to be made for treating health care as a right. Democrats ought to try to persuade Republicans with it, because if they can form a consensus around that idea, something really spectacular could, in fact, emerge. Jon Healey is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. His commentary was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Bank of Montreal is getting about half of its U.S. business from outside the companys Midwest stronghold, thanks to a commercial-banking push, chief executive officer Darryl White said. Thats whats driving a lot of the non-Midwest growth the commercial business, White told reporters after the banks investors meeting Tuesday in Toronto. The head of Canadas fourth-largest lender by assets highlighted his U.S. strategy during the annual session, noting that roughly 50 per cent of Bank of Montreals business from the U.S. is from the seven Midwest states it considers its core footprint. Two-thirds of new commercial loans in the U.S. are in industries that are national in scope, he said. The banks BMO Capital Markets division is also boosting company revenue from business across the U.S., and its wealth-management business is a smaller but growing contributor to non-Midwest growth, White said. Hes been pushing to boost the share of earnings that come from U.S. operations, which include Chicago-based BMO Harris Bank, to a third of overall profit in three to five years. In the past 12 months, 30 per cent of earnings were from the U.S., he said. Theres perhaps an impression were over-indexed to the Midwest, but thats not the case, White said, adding that there are limits on the banks national ambitions in the U.S. This isnt to say were going to be all things to all people in all geographies in the United States. White also said hed consider extending the lenders cannabis business to the U.S. if federal legislation makes it possible. Growth in the country isnt predicated, however, on providing financing to pot companies. If we get through to the end of federal legislation thats permissive, well look at it then, White said. But we have nothing in our business plans today that is dependent on pushing our cannabis business into the United States. Read more about: GENEVAThe World Trade Organization has cut its forecast for trade growth this year by more than a percentage point, to 2.6 per cent, due to an economic slowdown and amid a trade conflict between the United States and China. The downgrade from 3.7 per cent forecast issued in September reflects how quickly the prospects for global business are fading as, among other things, the U.S. and China struggle to agree on how to lift tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of trade. Rising trade tensions are the major factor, WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo told The Associated Press on Tuesday after the release of the forecasts. Beyond the trade war, the WTO has cited weaker economic growth in North America, Europe and Asia largely as the effect of fiscal stimulus by the Trump administration wears off. It noted a phaseout of monetary stimulus in Europe and Chinas efforts to shift its economy away from its traditional reliance on manufacturing and investment toward services and consumption. In 2018, trade grew by just 3 per cent far below the WTOs forecast for 3.9 per cent, which had itself been downgraded last year. And next year, the Geneva-based trade body expects only a small uptick in trade growth by volume next year, to 3 per cent. There is potential for a slight improvement in 2020 but that is very much dependent on an easing of the trade tensions, he said. The WTO oversees international trade rules and settles disputes between countries. The Trump administration has also been critical of the WTO, accusing it of being unfair with the United States. The U.S. has slowly squeezed the WTO by blocking appointments to its dispute settlement group, the Appellate Body, which could in December fall below the minimum number of members required. Azevedo pointed to the fundamental importance of the rules-based trading system, saying that its weakening would be a historic mistake with repercussions for jobs, growth and stability around the world. WINDSOR, CONN.Derrith Green calls her daughter, Arabella, the mayor of the eighth floor at the Connecticut Childrens Medical Center in Hartford. Thats because the 18-month-old, who is battling neuroblastoma, can often be found riding in her wheelchair, delivering high-fives and saying hello to visitors and medical personnel. Shes well-known for how friendly she is, Green said. Green and her husband, Justin, began the process of adopting Arabella when she was nine days old. Everything seemed fine for the first 15 months of her life; she was walking, talking and learning skills typical for toddlers of her age group. But then one day she began to cry from intense pain and lost the ability to lift her arm. Her parents brought her to the hospital, where doctors initially thought she might have an enlarged liver and did an ultrasound. By the end of that day we knew it was much worse, said Derrith, a library specialist at Windsor High School. They only see 650 cases a year. Since then, the child they call Ara has only spent one day at home: the day her family, which includes her 7-year-old adopted daughter Julia, celebrated the finalization of Arabellas adoption. She went back to the hospital because she had fluid on her lungs, Derrith said, noting that her daughter has spent more than 100 days in the hospital. Arabellas hospitalization has been highlighted by serious issues. The cancer, which has created several tumours in her body, has also softened her bones, resulting in hip and femur fractures. Derrith said doctors told her that Arabella will be subjected to a minimum of five rounds of chemotherapy. She is also facing surgery to remove the largest tumour in her stomach. There are times, Derrith said, when Arabella screams out of pain or frustration. Justin resigned from his job in information technology at a small company to be there for Arabella around the clock, spends weeknights sleeping in her room at CCMC. Derrith relieves him on weekends. Julia is struggling with the current arrangement because she misses having her sister and father at home. But there is also cause for appreciation, much of it coming from the school and the community, which has stepped up to try and help the Greens, both emotionally and financially. As soon as Derriths co-workers found out about Arabellas situation, staff members started making meals for the family. Derrith said that they received 29 meals. Steve Bianchi, the schools community service co-ordinator and an assistant chief with the Windsor Volunteer Fire Department, arranged for Julia to get a ride on a fire engine. Were trying to do things to make her feel special, Derrith said. The schools Air Force Junior ROTC instructors, Maj. John Spear and retired Sgt. Michael Cross, also created Operation Ara, a co-ordinated campaign to get the school and the community involved in helping the family pay medical bills that arent covered by insurance. Working with Bianchi, they planned a spaghetti dinner at the Hayden Fire Station. Aside from the dinner, Operation Ara T-shirts, designed by two teachers, have raised more than $2,700 for the effort. Another teacher designed and ordered silicone bracelets to raise funds. The school is also planning a student-faculty basketball game. Students at Oliver Ellsworth School also raised $300 for the cause. I was both hoping for and expecting this kind of response, Cross said. I havent been disappointed. Derrith, who received an outpouring of support from the school when she had a serious illness 8 years ago, said shes not surprised. Ive been here 12 years and seen this place in action, she said. I think theres something about Windsor. Theres a strong emphasis on helping and children. REGINAThe Saskatchewan government has changed its rules so legislature members can take parental leave and bring their babies to work. The governing Saskatchewan Party and Opposition NDP collaborated on the changes that were adopted Monday. The move came after NDP member Nicole Sarauer announced her pregnancy earlier this year. Its nice to not have to worry about whether or not ... a maternity leave can be accommodated in my place of business, Sarauer said Monday. Theres always the fear of, for example, having to go on bed rest this session. Sarauer says while public attention on her pregnancy has been uncomfortable, it provided the chance to make the legislature a more accessible workplace. It may also encourage more women to join politics, she added. The changes also allow MLAs to bring their babies into the legislative assembly. And work will be done to install change tables in the legislatures public and MLA washrooms. A high chair will also be brought into the cafeteria. Deputy government house leader Jeremy Harrison says similar provisions are already in place in several other legislatures across Canada. Last year, member of Parliament Karina Gould became the first federal cabinet minister to take a maternity leave. An arbitrator has awarded a four-year contract to Ontarios correctional workers. The union for the workers calls the deal a win for its members and notes it features an average 7.5 per cent wage increase over the life of the deal. Chris Jackel, the chair for the corrections division of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, says the deal is retroactive to 2018. He says the main bargaining issues included wages and psychological benefits. Jackel says a per session cap on psychologist visits has been eliminated, which will help the roughly 20 per cent of workers who are off due to operational stress injuries. The province did not immediately respond to a request for comment. MONTREALMaha Kassef, 35, an ambitious elementary schoolteacher, aspires to become a principal. But since she wears a Muslim head scarf, she may have to put her dreams on hold: A proposed bill in Quebec would bar public school principals, and other public employees, from wearing religious symbols. How am I supposed to teach about respect, tolerance and diversity to my students, many of whom are immigrant kids, when the government is asking me to give up who I am? asked Kassef, the child of Kuwaiti immigrant parents who worked tirelessly to send her and her four siblings to college. What right does the Quebec government have to stop my career? she added. Religious minorities in Quebec are reeling after the right-leaning government of Francois Legault proposed the new law last week. It would prohibit not just teachers, but other public sector workers in positions of authority, including lawyers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols while working. Current public sector workers would get an exemption, though only as long as they stay in the same position within the same organization, according to the bill. This means that a teacher, for example, could not change schools or be promoted if she refused to take off her head scarf. Legault, the Quebec premier, has said the proposed law which has echoes of legislation in France is necessary to uphold the separation between the state and religion. Read more: Quebec Premier Francois Legault defends secularism bill in video message Calgary mayor Nenshi speaks out against unacceptable Quebec bill on religious symbols Groups say Quebec bill on religious symbols violates minority rights But some municipalities, mayors and education authorities in Montreal, a multicultural city with a large, visible minority community, are in rebellion. Several bodies have vowed to refuse to enforce the measure if, as is expected, it passes. At a time when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and cities like New York and London have allowed police officers to wear some forms of religious garb so they better reflect the communities they serve, some municipal officials, including Montreals mayor, Valerie Plante, argued that the law would hamper rather than improve, as its proponents argue the integration of minorities. Beny Masella, mayor of the suburb of Montreal West, who represents an association of 15 mayors, said he and the other mayors would take issue with being asked to refuse to hire police officers or town clerks because they wore conspicuous religious symbols. He said he would ignore such an interdiction. A smart young Sikh with a turban comes into my office, and I am supposed to tell him we cant hire him as a policeman because of his turban? Masella asked. We may lose out on competent employees because of this. This is also a matter of conscience. The English Montreal School Board, which administers English-speaking public schools in the city, said it would also defy the bill. A religious symbol worn by a teacher in no way affects their ability to provide quality education in a secular state, it wrote in a resolution. Some headscarf-wearing student teachers at Quebec universities have expresse54d despair that the law will halt their careers before they have even begun. Some students at the University of Montreal have begun wearing blue felt triangles to show solidarity. As he defended the proposed law, Legault, the Quebec premier, posted a video over the weekend on his Facebook page in which he said the legislation respected our history, our values and was an approach that a great majority of Quebecers want. Some will say were going too far, others will say we are not going far enough, he said, adding, In Quebec, this is how we live. Legaults approach has come under additional criticism from human rights advocates because in order to fend off legal challenges, he has invoked a rarely used constitutional provision known as the notwithstanding clause. That clause, made part of the Canadian Constitution in 1982, enables Canadian legislatures to override basic constitutional rights like freedom of religion and expression to maintain their independence. Legault argues that Quebecers will remain free to practice their religions, and that the notwithstanding clause is a legitimate tool. Still, Irwin Cotler, a leading international human rights lawyer in Montreal who was Canadas justice minister and attorney general, called the proposed law a broad-based assault on liberal values, including the freedom of religion. He said that by invoking the notwithstanding clause to try to insulate the law from legal challenges, the government was displaying disrespect for the fundamental role of the courts in safeguarding constitutionally guaranteed minority rights. He said opponents of the proposed legislation could potentially seek recourse by filing a complaint at the United Nations Human Rights Committee on the grounds the bill undermined the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. While the U.N. committee cannot revoke the legislation, its decisions carry moral and legal weight, he said. Gregory Bordan, a leading constitutional lawyer and a religious Jew, has worn his skullcap to the office for the past 33 years. Soon, he, too, may have to leave it at home if he wants to work for the government or represent his law firm on a government contract. He said the scope of the proposed bill was far wider than many realized and amounted to a political project to marginalize minorities from the judiciary, education and law enforcement. Under the proposed legislation, he noted, lawyers who wear a head scarf, cross, skullcap or turban could no longer be retained as external counsel by the government to represent it before the courts or with a third party. Moreover, a lawyer wearing religious garb could not be hired as an employee of the government, the national assembly or various other public bodies, even if appearing before the courts or a third party was not part of their job description. The message that this law sends is that unless you look like us, you cant participate in public life, said Bordan, who represents Coalition Inclusion Quebec, a group of religious minorities. Bordan, whose great-grandparents came from Ukraine and Poland to Canada in the early 1900s, added that his parents had insisted he become fluent in French, and that he had been raised as a proud Quebecer. Now he felt betrayed. It is an insult to be told I am incapable of being impartial unless I remove my kippah, he said, referring to his skullcap in Hebrew. I did everything to become part of the society, and now I am being told that its all a sham. Public expressions of Muslim identity have been an explosive issue in several European countries, and some defenders of secularism have criticized Muslim head coverings as undermining female empowerment. Similarly, some proponents of the ban in Quebec have sought to frame it as a form of feminist liberation for Muslim women. The preamble to the bill notes that Quebec attaches importance to the equality of women and men. But Quebecs womens federation accused the government of secularizing the oppression of women. It said the law would ghettoize Muslim women by excluding them from professional and social life. Kassef, the teacher and aspiring principal, noted that if she was forced to teach without a head scarf, it would undermine her ability to be an effective teacher. A teacher has to lead by example, she said, and cant give 100 per cent if they feel broken, battered and oppressed. Read more about: A group of current and former officers alleging systemic sexism in a southern Ontario police force is asking the provinces top court to allow them to pursue a proposed class-action lawsuit. The collection of primarily female officers saw their bid to launch a suit against the Waterloo Regional Police Service and its union quashed by a lower court last year after a judge ruled the issues raised were best addressed by a human rights tribunal or a labour arbitrator a position the officers hope Ontarios Court of Appeal will reconsider. The officers allege decades of sexual harassment, bullying, gender-based discrimination and active assaults against female cops with the Waterloo force. The police service has denied the unproven claims and is asking the Appeal Court to uphold the lower court ruling. Two female officers and a retired male superintendent first sought to have the suit certified in 2017, and at least three other past or present female officers have since joined the effort. In documents filed with the Appeal Court ahead of a hearing taking place Tuesday, the officers allege the lower court judge, Justice Deena Baltman, erred by ruling that the matter could not be handled by a civil court. The appeal calls on this court to resolve for the first time the well-recognized benefits of class actions in improving access to justice with traditional judicial deference to labour arbitrations, their factum reads. The system to which the motions judge has comprehensively if reluctantly deferred has provided no remedy to women. The $165-million proposed class action was launched on behalf of all past and present female members of the Waterloo force and their families. An unproven statement of claim filed at the time alleged female staff were subjected to unwanted sexual advances, career sabotage and personal attacks during their time on the force. The suit named the Waterloo Regional Police Services Board and Waterloo Regional Police Association as defendants. The force said it viewed the suit as inappropriate and vowed to challenge it. Court documents name the original plaintiffs as Angelina Rivers, Sharon Zehr and Barry Zehr, whose allegations of gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment spanned from 1988 to the present. In addition to claims of systemic issues, Rivers and Sharon Zehr also levelled specific allegations. Those included allegedly being driven to remote areas and asked to perform oral sex, having equipment removed from their police vehicles, lewd text messages in the middle of the night, and being dragged into a mens change room by male colleagues. The plaintiffs also alleged they were isolated, disregarded and warned of repercussions to their career when they complained to superiors. Baltman found the Superior Court had no jurisdiction in the matter and said the claims should be adjudicated either at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario or before a labour arbitrator. The defendants should not regard this result as a vindication of current practices, she wrote in her ruling. Even on the limited and contradictory evidence before me, it is apparent that this case raises serious, triable issues relating to workplace culture. The allegations are very troubling and will require close scrutiny should this matter proceed to another forum for adjudication. The officers argument to the appeal court said Baltman took too narrow a view of the jurisdictional issue while failing to consider the fundamental questions underpinning the suit. This case presents a dynamic tension between the theoretical benefits of a tribunal or arbitration ... such as informal resolution of charter rights in a prompt and inexpensive manner, and the reality for female police officers in Canada, their factum reads. Labour arbitrations have proven themselves ineffective, not just for these female police officers, but for female police officers across Canada. The police force and its union argue Baltman made the correct ruling. Their lawyers argue that the plaintiffs did not cite a specific law that violated their charter rights, a failure they said should automatically render the case beyond the scope of civil court. They also argue that granting permission for the suit to proceed could prove disruptive on a national scale. The appellants seek a significant shift in the legal landscape governing dispute resolution in labour relations which, if granted, would have an impact on labour relations in unionized workplaces across Canada, their factum reads. The appellants legal position, if accepted, would undermine the legislatures policy choices in establishing distinct labour relations regimes, outside the civil court, in an effort to foster expediency, efficiency and predictability for dispute resolution in unionized workplaces. Asiana Airlines chief takes responsibility for accounting malpractice Kumho-Asiana Group Chairman Park Sam-koo resigned from key managerial posts Thursday, holding himself responsible for the recent controversy over an audit report for Asiana Airlines. Park had bet all on improving the flag carrier's financial structure through a self-rescue plan. Then came the audit report pointing to accounting malpractice and damaging trust in the entire group. He seemed to have no other option but to step down in his last effort to normalize management. Park's crisis began when Samil PricewaterhouseCoopers, Kumho-Asiana's outside auditor, issued a "qualified opinion" on the airline's 2018 annual report four days ago. It led to the suspension of the trading of Asiana Airline's stocks from Friday to Tuesday. After Park's decision, the auditor upgraded its opinion to "unqualified," and stock trading resumed. In the process, however, investors' confidence in the smaller of Korea's two full-service carriers all but vanished. In the revised audit report, Asiana's debt jumped from the initial one while operating profits plunged to a one-third level. Hiding liabilities and overstating profits are typical examples of window-dressing. The pressing circumstances that Chairman Park faced were not incomprehensible altogether. However, it is hardly forgivable if his highly intentional accounting irregularities had confused the market. Aside from putting down all managerial titles, he should take legal responsibility if necessary. It was, however, fortunate that the outside auditor scrutinized the report and found problems. Otherwise, few could say a massive accounting fraud, like that of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering in 2016, would not have occurred. Asiana Airline's main creditor, Korea Development Bank, has expressed an intention to help recover the carrier's management if it succeeds in regaining the market's trust. The carrier ought to strive to restore investor confidence with sheer determination. Above all, it should offer a plausible explanation about what happened and seek shareholders' understanding. Coincidentally or not, Hanjin Group Chairman Cho Yang-ho also lost his CEO title at Korean Air, the nation's first and largest flag carrier, Wednesday, when the company's shareholders voted down his reappointment bid. Other tycoons should learn a lesson from the two cases: Even the owners of major conglomerates can't help but step aside when they make grave managerial mistakes. The Toronto police sergeant facing professional misconduct charges in connection to a 2016 assault allegation against serial killer Bruce McArthur will go to trial this fall. Sgt. Paul Gauthier is facing two counts of misconduct neglect of duty and insubordination stemming from a June 20, 2016 incident involving the now-convicted killer, who murdered eight men between 2010 and 2017. On that evening, a man reported to police that he was in a casual intimate relationship with McArthur, and that while the men were having a consensual sexual encounter McArthur attempted to strangle him. Someone just tried to strangle me to death, the man told dispatcher minutes after escaping McArthurs van, as heard in a 911 call played for the Star in an interview with the man last month. McArthur who fled in his van from the Bathurst St. and Finch Ave. W. parking spot where the incident took place later turned himself in to police. In a video-recorded interview, he told police he thought the man wanted it rough, and appeared genuine and credible to Gauthier, according to police documents. McArthur, who had by then killed six people, was released with no charges. He went on to kill two more men, Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman. The Star is not identifying the 2016 victim because he is a victim of sexual assault and because he is not public about his sexual orientation. Read more: Man who was choked in Bruce McArthurs van shares how he escaped Toronto police officer to be charged with professional misconduct According to police documents released by the tribunal Tuesday, the officer is alleged to have failed to comply with the Toronto police domestic violence procedure. The documents state that Gauthier was the domestic violence investigator in charge of the investigation. The procedure states that the domestic violence investigator shall ensure the needs of the victim are met, effective management of the crime scene, including the gathering of evidence and ensure that a (thorough) and comprehensive investigation is conducted. Specifically, it requires that, when possible, police obtain a video statement from the complainant, and that photos are taken of any injuries within 48 to 72 hours of the incident. Its alleged that Gauthier did neither, though a verbatim written statement was taken from the complainant. The man told the Star last month that his statement was taken on scene, after the incident took place. He said he never heard anything further from police after that night, and only learned that McArthur had turned himself in and given a statement about the attempted strangling after the killer was arrested for murder in 2018. According to the police documents, the man was re-interviewed in January 2018, following McArthurs arrest, and information came to light that a proper investigation was not conducted in 2016 at the time of the incident. None of the allegations have been proven at the tribunal. Gauthier has denied the allegations against him. In a letter written to colleagues and obtained by the Star, he says he has been made the fall guy in the wake of criticism over Toronto polices handling of the McArthur investigation, and that a proper investigation was done. Lawrence Gridin, Gauthiers lawyer, has told reporters that the evidence will show Gauthiers work contributed to the identification of McArthur as a serial killer, rather than detracted from it. He has asked for an independent adjudicator, such as a retired judge, to hear the case. Gauthier has not yet appeared before the police tribunal, due to an unspecified illness. Gridin told the tribunal Tuesday that he has instructions from his client to proceed to trial in his absence. The hearing has been scheduled to begin Oct. 21. One of the four suspects in the armed kidnapping of a 22-year-old international student last month in Markham has turned himself in to York Region police. Wanzhen Lu was abducted shortly before 6 p.m. on March 23 from an underground parking garage of a condo building at 15 Water Walk Dr., near Hwy. 7 and Birchmount Rd., police said. He was with a female friend when three hooded men, including one armed with a stun gun, attempted to grab Lu, police said. Lu was shocked with the weapon when he resisted, police said, and was forced into the van. The kidnappers fled, leaving Lus friend behind unharmed. Lu appeared three days later on the doorstep of a homeowner several hours north of Markham. Lus captors had freed him, police said. He suffered minor injuries and was treated in hospital. Read more: Kidnapped Markham student was released by his captors, police say York police search for 22-year-old man kidnapped in Markham parking garage Abdullahi Adan, 37, of Toronto, was identified as one of four suspects in the kidnapping, and a Canada-wide warrant was put out for his arrest on Monday. York police said Tuesday that he had turned himself in overnight. He is facing charges of kidnapping, forcible confinement, assault and assault with a weapon. He will be appearing in court in Newmarket at 50 Eagle St. on Tuesday morning for a bail hearing. Three other suspects are still being sought by police, but have yet to be identified. One is described as wearing a mask, blue pants and a black jacket. The second is described as six-foot-one with dark skin, wearing a black Canada Goose jacket. The last suspect is described as wearing a green and yellow jacket with a hood. The investigation is continuing. Lu is a Chinese international business administration student at Yorkville University on Steeles Ave. W. in Vaughan. With files from Ilya Banares Would you live out of your landlords office for $1,695 a month? A one-bedroom apartment in the heart downtown Toronto is up for grabs so long as you leave its office furniture as is and let the landlord hold meetings whenever they want between 11:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. According to the real estate agent that posted the unusual listing at Yonge and King Sts., the unit is ideal for a professional who works long hours and needs a place to crash in the city after late nights at the office but tenant advocates say its yet another example of how Toronto is a brutal landlords market. The apartment on the fifth floor of One King West Hotel & Residence has all the appearances of an office. The photos posted with the listing show it comes furnished with a small meeting table and chairs, filing cabinets, at least two desks and an office-style kitchenette stocked with plastic plates and cups. One room includes several printers, file folder organizers, multiple desktop computers and swivel desk chairs. And none of that can be removed from the unit, according to the listing. Rental is based in tenant using live-work furnished unit as is, and arranging a sharing arrangement with landlord regarding use of meeting room (Monday) to (Friday) 11:30-5:30 pm, it says. Read more: Is all this development necessary? Yes, we have a housing shortage How six millennials bought a house together in downtown Toronto and built a community Laneway housing begins to take shape under Torontos new rules The listing describes the unit as a one bedroom suitable for a single family, with Murphy bed included, although it is not featured in the photos. Some people work really hard and very long hours and they just want to stay somewhere instead of going wherever they live, said listing agent Maria Miller, a sales representative at RE/MAX Condos Plus Corp. Miller said that she has received plenty of interest from people looking to rent the unit as a permanent home, but said these types of candidates were unsuitable because they wanted to move the existing furniture out of the unit. A lot of students and a lot of single men, she said. Its not really suitable for just a nice, little apartment. As for the sharing agreement with the landlord, Miller said that the unit is split into two rooms: one that could be used as a living area and the second, main room that is set up as an office. The agreement would allow the landlord to use the office periodically during the day. Under a standard residential lease, a landlord must give at least 24-hours notice before entering a unit but thats not the case if the lease spells out another arrangement. Under the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, a landlord is able to enter with notice for any other reasonable reason for entry specified in the tenancy agreement. Tenant advocates slammed the listing as an example of the challenges that tenants face in Torontos heated housing market. Kenn Hale, director of legal and advocacy at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, said it was shocking that someone would advertise sleeping in somebodys office as residential rental and that the listing was even posted in the first place. I think theres some question as to whether or not it is even covered by the Residential Tenancies Act, Hale said. Because if you share a kitchen and bathroom with the landlord, then youre not covered, leaving the potential renter with few rights, he said. Hale said the listing is above and beyond what he normally sees. According to Geordie Dent, executive director of the federation of Metro Tenants Associations, this type of listing is not uncommon and thats due in large part because its a landlords market right now in terms of supply, with massive lists of people who need housing and prices going through the roof. Generally speaking, he said, tenants should know their landlord is only able to enter a unit for very specific reasons, like inspections and maintenance, but that its your unit you get exclusive access to it. The unit was initially listed at $1,850 a month and was later reduced, according to Miller. The previous tenant was a lawyer who continues to operate a law firm in the building, she said. Stefanie Marotta is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Stars radio room in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @StefanieMarotta A coalition of more than 1,550 independent pharmacies is asking the Ontario government to consider scrapping regulations put in place to keep down the prices of generic prescription drugs. The anti-kickback regulations, first introduced in 2006, ban drug companies from paying pharmacies rebates as an inducement to stock their prescription medications. The government reasoned these payments unfairly inflate the price consumers pay for prescription drugs. In a letter recently sent to the premier, the coalition says a rollback of the regulations would level the playing field if the Ford government goes ahead with its proposal to allow large pharmacy chains to sell their own, private-label, generic prescription drugs. A previous Liberal government had barred private labels when pharmacy chains slap their own logo on generic prescription pills made by other companies because they offered corporations a back door to circumvent the anti-rebate regulations. Small community pharmacies, which dont have the sales volume to justify the expense of a private label, say if the Ford government lifts only the restrictions on private label drugs, they will be at a disadvantage as they will still be handcuffed by the strict rebate rules. Those restrictions are unnecessary red tape regulations that have been introduced in Ontario under the previous government and since then have created a significant burden on pharmacy operators, the independent pharmacies letter reads. Read more: Costco probed in alleged drug kickback scheme Costco pharmacy directors fined $20,000 after admitting to $1.2-million drug kickback scheme Costco pharmacies hit with $7.25M fine after probe of money the chain collected from drug companies The letter encourages Ontario to align itself with other provinces, where there are no restrictions related to the business relationships between pharmacies and manufacturers. One of the architects of the regulations says they have helped public drug plans save hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars. Heres how a rebate worked: If a pharmacy bought a pill from a drug manufacturer for $1 (a price set by the government) the pharmaceutical company could rebate or pay back the pharmacy 80 cents as incentive to stock its product over a competitors. This would make the actual cost for the pharmacy 20 cents about a fifth of what will ultimately be charged to a public drug plan or private insurer. In 2010, the province introduced related regulations, these ones prohibiting pharmacy chains from selling their own private-label prescription drugs that were made by another company. A large chain could essentially give itself a massive rebate behind closed doors while billing public drug plans or other payors full price, the province said. The regulations sparked a high-stakes court battle between the province and two chains: Shoppers and Rexall. In 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the private label ban was a legitimate tool in the quest to reduce drug costs. Fast forward to October 2018, when Premier Doug Fords government proposed reducing the regulatory burden for private label companies by removing the requirement that a private label company must actually fabricate its medications. A spokesperson from the premiers office said no decision has yet been made. The change would make it easier for pharmacy chains to dispense prescriptions under their in-house brands (but which are made by another company) and get those drugs covered under public drug plans. The change would also threaten the commercial viability of independent pharmacies across Ontario, said pharmacist Ben Shenouda, a signatory of the letter and executive director of a buying group representing 360 independent pharmacies. If you allow private label, you must scrap the rebate restriction because wed like to be able to compete with the chains, Shenouda said. The province already protects consumers by regulating the price of medications, he said, so it should leave the market open and let drug manufacturers and pharmacies work out the commercial transaction amongst themselves. In a statement, a spokesperson from Loblaw, which owns Shoppers Drug Mart, said removing restrictions of private labels would result in fewer drug shortages by allowing more companies to bring generic products to market, and offers the potential for significant savings for payors. McKesson, a drug wholesaler that now owns the Rexall chain but also supplies products to many independent pharmacies, said lifting the private label ban would also offer supply stability. Sivem, McKessons private label sold in other provinces, is currently the only generic supplier for three medications currently in shortage, a spokesperson said. The premiers office would not say if the province is also considering lifting the prohibition on rebates. Helen Stevenson, former assistant deputy health minister and an architect behind the anti-rebate and private label regulations, questions how the public would be better served doing away with the restrictions. The policy reason behind it was keeping taxpayers interest at heart, said Stevenson, now the CEO of Reformulary Group, a health care technology company. We, the Ontario drug benefit program, are the largest payer in Canada. If anyone is going to get the benefit of lower prices, it should be us. JAKARTA, INDONESIAWhen a new Boeing 737 Max 8 plunged into the waters off Indonesia last October, a terrifying mystery confronted the aviation industry: What could have caused Lion Air Flight 610, flown by experienced pilots in good weather, to fall out of the sky just 12 minutes after takeoff? But it took the second, equally terrifying crash of an identical aircraft under similar conditions five months later, in Ethiopia, to reveal the climate of mistrust that has plagued inquiries into what caused the first disaster. Interviews with government officials, aviation experts and company executives portray an environment in which Lion Air, Boeing, subcontractors, investigators and regulators erected walls to sharing information that seemed designed more for self-preservation than finding the truth about a crash that claimed 189 lives. As each party involved in the crash focused on passing the blame, rather than trading information about the Maxs new anti-stall system or disseminating important details about the investigation, airlines, passengers and even Indonesian regulators were left in the dark. Indonesias top aviation regulatory official said both Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which certified the Max 8, were slow in responding to requests for help in determining the safety of other Max planes flown by Indonesian carriers. Reached for comment, the FAA said, We are supporting the investigation and are in constant contact with Indonesian civil aviation authorities. Boeing declined to comment. Executives from Lion Air, a low-cost carrier with powerful political backers, have essentially gone into hiding. Lion Airs safety director told The New York Times he could not accept an interview because of an agreement with Boeing. It is not yet clear whether the Ethiopian Airlines crash, in which all 157 people onboard died March 10, could have been prevented if information had been shared more transparently and quickly after the Lion Air accident. Nor is it certain whether the two new Max jets suffered from the exact same problems, although officials believe that the pilots of both planes struggled with an automated stall-prevention system that was introduced in the Max. But the lack of trust and recriminations that have afflicted the inquiry into Flight 610 almost certainly slowed the setting of safety standards for the Max, which remains grounded across the world since last month. Lifesaving lessons are only life saving if we learn from them, said Charles Herrmann, a lawyer representing some families of Lion Air victims in a suit against Boeing. Its absolutely inexcusable that it takes another crash for people to kick this investigation into high gear. The Max is the fastest-selling plane in Boeings history and thousands of these jetliners are still on order. Carriers worldwide will have to decide whether Boeings proposed fixes will satisfy their safety requirements and placate worried consumers. Our passengers, psychologically, they dont trust flying with the Max anymore, said Ikhsan Rosan, spokesman for Garuda Indonesia, the national carrier, after it became the first airline to announce that it wanted to cancel its order of Max 8 jets. Pilots and airlines have complained that they were not informed about the existence of the anti-stall system, called MCAS. Investigators suspect that in the case of Lion Air Flight 610 and later in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 errant data mistakenly triggered MCAS, sending the plane into a fatal nose-dive. In November, Haryo Satmiko, the deputy chief of Indonesias National Transportation Safety Committee, known as KNKT, recounted confusing conversations he was having with Boeing employees who had arrived in Jakarta. Haryo said he brought up whether inaccurate data readings could have prompted Flight 610s sudden descent. What Haryo was describing, though he did not know it at the time, was a malfunction of MCAS, which automatically forces the planes nose down if data indicates that the jet is angled too sharply upward and might stall. Nurcahyo Utomo, head of the safety groups air-accident subcommittee, said he first learned of the term MCAS from news reports. People immediately assumed this was a Lion Air problem, an issue with a terrible Indonesian airline, said Gerry Soejatman, an Indonesian aviation analyst. But when a brand-new plane crashes, you have to look at all the factors, including the possibility of a manufacturer problem or defect. And you have to look really carefully when that manufacturer isnt providing all the answers. Days after Flight 610 crashed, Polana Pramesti, head of Indonesias civil aviation authority, waited for visiting Boeing and FAA officials to talk to her. As head of Indonesias version of the FAA, she wanted advice on whether to ground Max 8 jets in Indonesia. But the Americans, who did spend time with transportation safety committee officials, never came to her, she said. The official in her office in charge of airworthiness and aircraft operation, Avirianto, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, fired off messages to the FAA asking for an explanation of MCAS, which at the time was only vaguely understood, even by aviation experts, because Boeing had failed to put information about it in the planes manual. Although he conducted four teleconferences with FAA officials, Avirianto said he was never given a clear explanation of how MCAS worked or whether it was safe. They kept saying they were still analyzing, evaluating, he said. We never received any guidance because there were never any clear answers for us. The FAA disagrees, saying that it had briefed the Indonesians on several of the advisories and airworthiness directives on the Boeing 737 Max accidents issued to civilian aviation authorities and operators globally. But Polana said, I think they are protecting Boeing. The FAA was the one that certified the aircraft safe to fly, she said. And then they found, no, the aircraft is dangerous. Polana also sent a letter to Boeing in November, asking for guarantees about the Max. But Boeing was not forthcoming, either, she said. Of course, we were worried, Polana said. We wanted reassurance that the Boeing 737 Max 8s in Indonesia are airworthy. Boeing and the FAA have come under scrutiny since the Lion Air crash. The U.S. Department of Transportation is examining the FAAs certification of the Max model, amid revelations that Boeing employees may have facilitated that process. Only after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, Polana said, did the FAA and Boeing become more responsive. On March 22, she had her inaugural teleconference with FAA officials the first time Indonesian officials received a precise explanation of how MCAS worked and how Boeing was planning to fix it, they said. For days before the Oct. 29 Lion Air crash, the airplane had experienced faulty data readings. But no one understood that these problems could force the plane into a sudden and bewildering plunge. The planes handbook had no clear fix and Avirianto was alarmed to find that a new Max flight simulator in Singapore did not simulate MCAS. In the days after the crash, U.S. aviation officials visiting Jakarta cast aspersions on their Indonesian counterparts, even as they refused to speak on the record: Which was more reliable? An airplane manufacturer that was one of the most respected companies in the United States, or a low-cost carrier with a long history of shocking safety lapses operating in a country troubled by corruption and weak regulation? And as the spotlight intensified after the crash of Flight 610, Lion Airs executives retreated from view. Last month, Daniel Putut, Lion Airs director of safety and security, told The New York Times that he could not accept an interview because of a nondisclosure agreement with Boeing. (Such agreements are not unusual, but they do raise questions about transparency in an ongoing investigation.) Indonesian investigators came under criticism, as well. Their preliminary report, released in late November, was marred by inconsistencies and incomplete information, aviation analysts said. Read more about: ALGIERS, Algeria - The Latest on political upheaval in Algeria (all times local): 9:40 p.m. A crowd of Algerians is celebrating President Abdelaziz Bouteflikas resignation after 20 years in power and weeks of mass protests. Several hundred people gathered in front of the central post office in downtown Algiers, the capital, on Tuesday night after his announcement. The crowd was peaceful, singing songs and waving Algerian flags while drivers passing by honked horns in celebration. An official in Bouteflikas office told The Associated Press that the leader resigned, a few weeks before the end of his fourth term. The move came after six weeks of mass protests and soon after the army chief urged him to step down immediately. The constitutional Council is expected to meet Wednesday to confirm the resignation and declare the president of the upper house of parliament as interim leader for 90 days until presidential elections are held. ___ 8:10 p.m. Algerias state news agency APS is reporting that embattled President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has quit, informing the countrys constitutional council of his decision to stand down. The news came shortly after the Algerian Defence Ministry aggressively called Tuesday for Bouteflika to quit immediately. The ministry, which controls the army, had said there is no more time to waste after six weeks of nationwide protests against the chief of state and his inner circle. The 82-year-old Bouteflika has been in office for 20 years. He suffered a stroke in 2013 and has been rarely seen in public since then. On Monday, he said he would resign by the end of his fourth term on April 28, capitulating to growing calls for his resignation. ___ 6:45 p.m. Algerian Defence Ministry has called for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to quit immediately after two decades in office. In a statement sent Tuesday, the Defence Ministry said there is no more time to waste on the constitutional process to have Bouteflika declared unfit for office and to give Algerias people a voice. The 82-year-old president said Monday that he would resign by the official end of his fourth term, April 28. Protests calling for Bouteflika to resign have intensified since February. He first was elected in 1999 and planned to seek a fifth term next month. He postponed the election in response to the protests and said he would not run for re-election. ___ 10:40 a.m. Algerian protesters and opposition leaders say President Abdelaziz Bouteflikas long-awaited announcement of his departure has fallen flat. Protesters and opposition figures say it doesnt go far enough to satisfy demands for dramatic change to the countrys secretive power structure. Former Prime Minister Ali Benflis and a moderate Islamist movement are among leading voices criticizing the move because it would leave the countrys secretive, distrusted power structure in place. A standoff is also intensifying between Bouteflikas entourage and that of the powerful army chief, who turned against the president amid mass protests over Bouteflikas 20-year rule. Bouteflika bowed to mounting pressure Monday and announced he will step down by the end of his term April 28, according to his office. Protesters fear it will pave the way for a hand-picked successor instead of a truly democratic change of power. MEXICO CITY - Mexicos top security official says he twice crossed illegally into the United States in his youth to work. La Jornada newspaper reported Monday that Public Safety Secretary Alfonso Durazo told a business gathering in the northern state of Sonora that out of economic necessity he went to the U.S. to wash cars and dishes. Durazo retweeted the newspapers account Monday. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. President Donald Trump has threatened to close the border with Mexico this week unless Mexico stops the flow of immigrants to the U.S. border. On Sunday, Mexico announced it would begin granting humanitarian visas again on a limited basis to some of the 2,500 Central American and Caribbean migrants currently in the southern state of Chiapas. BOGOTA - Jenny Ambuila lived a lavish lifestyle in Miami that included frequent trips to designer stores, luxury vacations in Europe and jaunts around town in a red Lamborghini. But the fairy tale has ended abruptly for the 26-year-old social media influencer. The University of Miami graduate was arrested Friday while on holiday in Colombia, along with her parents and another customs official. Prosecutors say the arrests could help them untangle a large web of corruption at the Colombian port of Buenaventura, where Ambuilas father worked as a mid-level customs officer and allegedly pocketed millions of dollars in exchange for letting untaxed goods pass into the country. This is a fundamental case in our fight against smuggling, Andres Jimenez, a Colombian prosecutor, told a local radio station. We are going after all of this corrupt structure, and the resources behind them. Jimenez says the investigation underscores recent attempts to stop smuggling in Colombia before markets in the country are flooded with contraband goods. He claims that Omar Ambuila, who earned a modest monthly salary of $3,000 as a ports inspector, received at least $600,000 in bribes since 2012 in overseas payments that have been traced by investigators, but could have received much more. Jimenez says that some of the illicit funds were used to send Ambuilas daughter to the University of Miami, where she studied from 2013 to 2017, earning a bachelors in finance. Jenny Ambuila enjoyed a lifestyle that went well beyond her status as a college student, shopping regularly at designer stores like Gucci and Dolce & Gabanna, while taking luxury vacations to Milan and Paris. She regularly shared photos of her extravagant lifestyle on Instagram and Facebook, where she describes herself as a venture capitalist, foreign exchange trader and social media influencer. But Ambuilas penchant for showing off her lifestyle also led to her familys troubles. Jimenez says that as investigators looked into her social media profiles, they also began to investigate some of Ambuilas purchases, including her 2017 acquisition of a Lamborghini Huracan Spyder, worth more than $300,000. Ambuila shared photos and videos of herself on Facebook posing next to the red sports car, which had her Instagram handle inscribed above its trunk. She also bought a Porsche Cayenne while living in Miami. People assume that because they cant make it you cant make it either, Ambuila wrote in a May 2017 Facebook post where she shows a photo of the Lamborghini. Prove them wrong. Ambuila, who is under house arrest in Colombia, did not immediately respond to requests for comment via social media, but she has told authorities she financed her luxury purchases by developing businesses that included an ice cream shop and a forex trading service. She did set up some companies on paper, Jimenez told Colombias Blu Radio. But they did not make enough earnings to afford her that type of lifestyle. She has been charged with money laundering. Her father and her mother are in prison on additional charges of aiding smugglers and corruption. Jimenez says investigators are hoping to close in on other alleged members of Buenaventuras smuggling network in the following months. The amount of money that smuggling moves in this country is huge Jimenez says. We are hoping this investigation goes all the way to the top. QUITO, Ecuador - Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno is blaming WikiLeaks for recent allegations of corruption in local outlets and the publication of family photos to social media. In a speech to the Ecuadorian Broadcasting Association on Tuesday, Moreno accused WikiLeaks of intercepting phone calls and private conversations as well as photos of my bedroom, what I eat, and how my wife and daughters and friends dance. Moreno provided no evidence, but the speech reflected ongoing tension between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his hosts at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. WikiLeaks in a statement called Morenos charges completely bogus, saying it reported on the accusations of corruption against the president only after Ecuadors legislature investigated the issue. If President Moreno wants to illegally terminate a refugee publishers asylum to cover up an offshore corruption scandal, history will not be kind, WikiLeaks said in a statement. Assanges defence team suggested on Twitter that Moreno was trying to use the scandal to pressure the WikiLeaks founder. SAN JOSE, Costa Rica - Back in Nicaragua, she owned her own home and made enough as an elementary substitute teacher and lawyers assistant to eke out a stable, if not luxurious, life. Now she spends her days on the streets in and around Costa Ricas capital begging for spare change and clutching a can decorated with Nicaraguas blue-and-white flag, an unmistakable reminder to pedestrians of the political turbulence that has claimed hundreds of lives in her native country. I never did this before, said the 53-year-old woman, who asked to be identified only by her nickname, the teacher, for fear of retaliation against loved ones back home. We were modest, she said, but life (there) is cheaper. The fate of the estimated 50,000 Nicaraguans whove fled violence and persecution for exile in Costa Rica over the last year is a central point in fledgling peace talks between Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortegas government and the opposition, which is demanding guarantees for their safe return. But while negotiators in Managua haggle over that and other thorny issues with little progress, many exiles are struggling. Some formerly middle-class citizens are having trouble putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads, while others from the working class are reduced to living in near-indigence. The most vulnerable among them have become the forgotten among the forgotten, said Esteban Beltran of Amnesty International Spain, who recently visited Costa Rica to document their plight. Like many others, the teacher fled during the so-called Operation Cleanup launched by Ortega last July, which the United Nations has termed a witch hunt aimed at suppressing dissent. In her hometown of Diriamba, paramilitary forces aligned with Ortegas government left a trail of dead and wounded, she said. Her offence was feeding and supporting student protesters. One day as she brought them breakfast, gunshots rang out. I dont know how Im alive, she said. They were grabbing everybody. The only thing to do was run. Like many exiles she ended up in La Carpio, a shantytown on the outskirts of the Costa Rican capital, San Jose, where the number of Nicaraguans has swelled since the protests began last April, though nobodys sure by how much. Its a neighbourhood of cement and sheet-metal homes where sleeping quarters and a latrine often occupy a single space. Water is scarce, trash piles up in the streets and sewage flows in open channels. Even before the latest influx of Nicaraguan refugees, half of the estimated 18,000 people in the neighbourhood lived in inadequate homes and 70 per cent of households subsisted on less than $330 per month, according to a government study last year. The $3 that the teacher is able to beg on a bad day isnt nearly enough and like others she relies heavily on aid from churches and help from neighbours who are in equally precarious situations. Still lacking a work permit after eight months, shes sleeping on the floor of a rented, 300-square-foot (30-square-meter) house along with her two adult children, two grandchildren and six others from another family. On a recent day the only things in the pantry were a packet of pasta, a Nicaraguan flag and a Bible. While asylum-seekers are guaranteed the right to work, the sheer number of Nicaraguans has overwhelmed Costa Ricas system for processing such requests. Authorities are able to handle only about 600 asylum applications per week, and securing work permits involves yet another bureaucratic hurdle. So far only 8,000 have secured work permits compared with the nearly 29,000 who have received credentials as asylum-seekers. More than 20,000 are awaiting appointments. Last week Amnesty urged the Costa Rican government to put an aid plan in place for Nicaraguan refugees with help from the international community, including identifying the most vulnerable and fast-tracking access to basic services they have a right to and may not be aware of. Costa Ricas government said the plan is ready and simply awaiting presidential sign-off. Ortegas government did not respond to a request for comment. Ortega officials have had little to say about exiles, though in a recent speech the president compared all opposition supporters to Cain, the biblical figure who killed his brother Abel out of envy. Peace talks between Ortegas government and the opposition Civic Alliance began Feb. 27, but progress has come in fits and starts. The government has freed more than 160 jailed government opponents to house arrest, but hundreds more remain behind bars under a slow release plan thats supposed to take place over 90 days. On Friday the government and the opposition reached two accords, one of which supposedly restored the right to demonstrate freely only for police to forcefully break up a protest the following day during which an apparent government sympathizer shot at demonstrators who sought refuge in a mall. Recently the government also emphatically rejected calls for early elections scheduled for 2021, another central opposition demand. So theres plenty of skepticism among exiles that Ortega officials will abide by another deal struck Friday: that Nicaraguans who fled can return with full guarantees of personal and family security. In Nicaragua we say about Ortega, You may sign, but youll never follow through, said Cesar Gutierrez, 63. Gutierrez is a regular at gatherings where he and fellow exiles plan demonstrations, co-ordinate with government opponents back in Nicaragua, share news of home gleaned from the internet and gossip about the latest from the talks. He said hell believe Ortega is acting in good faith only when all prisoners are released and freedoms of speech and assembly are restored two other core Civic Alliance demands, along with the annulment of trials, convictions and arrest warrants for government opponents. The disarming of the paramilitaries is a must, Gutierrez added, because otherwise they are going to bully us. Then it will be the moment to think about how we return. Gutierrez, a former fighter in the revolution that first brought Ortega to power in 1979, later soured on the president, joined the protests and fled after receiving threats against his life and home. He, too, is living in La Carpio, taken in by a family friend who is letting him sleep in the living room of her modest home where seven others also live. He scrapes by selling homemade cheese to fellow exiles after leaving his family back home and his businesses, a bakery and some billiard halls. At least 168 Nicaraguan exiles are wanted due to their political activities, opposition leaders say. Among them is Sadie Rivas, who slipped across the border in August after being accused of a laundry list of crimes more associated with a narco-kingpin than a 19-year-old college student: torture, terrorism, money laundering, drug trafficking, weapons possession, destruction of public property, disturbing the peace. Such accusations are typical in cases against protesters, and both they and international observers call them groundless. Rivas father and brother remain in hiding in Nicaragua, moving from safe house to safe house. Her mother joined her in San Jose after being targeted for arrest for sheltering and feeding her daughter covering for terrorists, as the government charges. An artist who made artisanal soaps and jewelry back home, Rivas and her mother now clean houses and wait tables. Like Gutierrez theyre fortunate enough not to be living in slum conditions, but its not the life theyre used to. Rivas plans to return but thinks opposition negotiators at the talks need to be more aggressive. They have to be more demanding, she said. We exiles are an important element. ___ Verza reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writers Carlos Gonzalez and Javier Cordoba in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Gabriela Selser in Managua, Nicaragua, contributed to this report. Closer Korea-US cooperation key to breaking deadlock President Moon Jae-in will visit Washington, D.C., for a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump on April 10 and 11. His visit is aimed at putting stalled nuclear talks between the U.S. and North Korea back on track. It is also designed to step up the bilateral alliance with the U.S. Moon and Trump are expected to focus on how to break the deadlock following the U.S. president's failed Hanoi summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last month. We hope the two leaders hammer out a strategy to revive momentum for the North's denuclearization. Given the growing tension between Washington and Pyongyang, resuming the suspended bilateral negotiations is easier said than done. This explains why President Moon needs to be more active as a mediator to keep the denuclearization talks going. No one can do better that Moon to carry out shuttle diplomacy between the two rivals. But Moon's visit to the U.S. will not automatically bring any breakthrough, so he should leave no stone unturned in using his diplomatic skills to facilitate dialogue. For this, he must help Trump and Kim narrow their differences over the terms of nuclear disarmament and sanctions relief. Moon must understand why the second Trump-Kim summit broke down. The U.S. wants a package deal that calls for the North to dismantle not only its nuclear arsenal but also other weapons of mass destruction in return for sanctions relief. This hardened position has only angered the Kim regime which wants most sanctions to be lifted after destroying only its Yongbyon nuclear facility. As long as the sides refuse to compromise, prospects for denuclearization look gloomy. The problem is how to help both countries find the middle ground and reach a viable solution to the nuclear standoff. Most of all, Seoul and Washington should reaffirm their united front to prod Pyongyang to move toward denuclearization. As a matter of fact, the South and the U.S. differ about how to denuclearize the North. The U.S. is taking an "all or nothing" approach with a hard-line stance that sanctions will remain in place until final, fully verifiable denuclearization. But the South prefers a broad deal with step-by-step implementation. The Moon administration wants sanctions to be eased or lifted when the North's denuclearization process reaches a stage of being irreversible. Another issue is Moon's push for inter-Korean economic cooperation projects. Moon wants to reopen the closed inter-Korean industrial complex in North Korea's border town of Gaeseong as well as resume the suspended Mount Geumgang tourism program. He regards the resumption as providing impetus to boost South-North reconciliation, thereby speeding denuclearization. However, Trump is against it. Moon and Trump should overcome such differences immediately, otherwise they may deepen a rift and weaken the alliance. In that case, their shared goal of complete denuclearization of the North will be only a pipe dream. Worse, Kim may seek a "new way" when he meets Russian President Vladimir Putin, possibly in mid-April. PORT-AU-PRINCEBy all accounts, Haitis fledgling national police is considered to be the United Nations one success story in the country following 15 years of peacekeeping. Barely 2,500 officers when the UN returned in 2004 after an armed revolt led to the presidents ouster, the force today is 15,051 officers working out of 376 police stations, with a presence in every major municipality. But as the UN Security Council prepares to be briefed Wednesday on the situation in Haiti, ahead of its decision to finally end the countrys peacekeeping mission, one question remains: Can a volatile Haiti, which has seen more than 200 demonstrations since December including 10 days of violence in February finally take responsibility for its own security? The last events proved it, said Haiti National Police Director Michel-Ange Gedeon, noting that the United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti was only there in support of the police. When you look at all of the videos, all that was happening, it was the police that was taking charge. It has changed, it has learned its lessons, its not going to repeat the same mistakes of the past. A 24-year veteran of the force and its first chief to come up through its ranks and not the Haitian army, Gedeon said everyone recognizes that the force today is much more professional. But he concedes there are weaknesses, from the need for more vehicles and firepower to the lack of logistics capabilities. To illustrate his point, he again turned to February when, on the first day of what would be 10 days of violent civil unrest, officers in the city of Mirebalais found themselves under attack by protesters. The officers were out of tear gas and running low on ammunition. Do not shoot. Do not give into provocation, Gedeon, who was two hours southwest in the capital, warned over police radio. With all of the citys access roads blocked, Gedeon, 46, faced a decision. I had to use a bunch of strategies to control the incident so I wouldnt end up with police officers as victims, he recalled. We had police officers come from Hinche and they took longer to arrive in Mirebalais than the police officers who left from Port-au-Prince for Mirebalais. If I had the resources, like a helicopter, they would have arrived quickly. In his report ahead of whats expected to be a final Security Council vote this month to renew peacekeeping for a final six months, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recommends that the Haiti mission end as scheduled on Oct. 15. It should be replaced, he said, with a small political mission, and its five police units should hand over all of its security responsibilities to the Haiti National Police. Guterres acknowledged that the national police has increasingly become self-sufficient in providing security across Haiti. But he also noted that in the past few months as tensions rose on the streets, UN armoured vehicles and foreign police have had to provide backup. During one demonstration in the Artibonite, for example, the protest became so violent that UN police were fired on and had to help local police remove barricades while treating injured officers. The development of the HNP is an ongoing process, and improvements are made every time we have a chance to assess their capacity form real time experience, such as in the latest periods of unrest, said Serge Therriault, the UN police commissioner. We are working with our international and national partners to better train and equip the HNP. There is one area that remains worrisome: human rights. Last month, 104 members of Congress sent a bipartisan letter to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressing concerns that police used excessive force against protesters during the recent civil disturbances. Those familiar with the letter say it stemmed from allegations about extrajudicial killings in the community of La Saline in November and the Haitian governments overall lack of accountability. Human rights groups in Haiti have reported that as many as 71 individuals were killed, while women and girls were raped and houses looted. The Haitian embassy in Washington has categorically denied that there have been human rights violations, labelling the accusations both baseless and meritless. The UN, however, says human rights violations within the national police remain a great concern. Each reported case of human rights violation is one too many. Each one must be investigated to ensure proper measures are implemented to prevent any further occurrence while offenders are being dealt with, said Therriault. He noted that the overall number of reported human rights violations by police has decreased, including during the February violence. Nonetheless, Therriault said, the high command of the police needs to hold accountable those who commit such violations. Gedeon said protecting human rights, and having the force remain apolitical, have been cornerstones of his tenure as chief. In all of the notes that I published regarding those events, you could see at the centre of those notes, the importance the HNP command gave to human rights, he said. Sometimes I do intervene to (tell) my people how to interact in the field. Dont fire tear gas here. Wait. Talk to the crowd instead. One of my satisfactions is that despite all of these challenges, difficulties ... the police used just the necessary force, he said, referring to the February protests, during which riot police worked 10 days non-stop. They never used excessive force. That isnt to say that of the 34 people the UN said were killed, a police officer couldnt have been behind the fatal shot, despite Gedeons directive to police during the protests to only use rubber bullets, along with tear gas and batons. There are cases that we have our doubts about and we have the inspector general of the police investigating, Gedeon said. Therriault said Gedeon, whose tenure comes up for renewal in August by Haitis president and Senate, has been an essential partner for the mission and the excellent relationship we have been able to establish has contributed to the successes that the (national police) has been able to achieve. Much remains to be done and continuity in approach and leadership are important to be able to manage the security challenges that Haiti will face in light of the persistent political tensions and the upcoming elections, Thierrault said. Gedeon hasnt had it easy as chief in a country where police are more likely to die as victims of armed robberies while commuting on public buses than in the line of duty, and politicians have been accused of trying to undermine his authority and employing officers as armed security and gang emissaries. In July, Gedeon and the force were heavily criticized for being ill-prepared when a government fuel price hike sparked three days of rioting and the cancellation of international flights. He later testified that the police was not informed by then Prime Minister Guy Lafontant about the price hike, and he only learned about it via a text message from his UN counterpart. And then there is the matter of lack of security. The country remains under a Level 4 travel warning from the U.S. State Department, and recent high profile crimes have not helped. Last month, gunmen attacked a motorcade carrying Chiles ambassador to Haiti, wounded two individuals and left three aid workers missing. Shortly after, a Portuguese national who lives in the U.S., Filipe Fernandes, was killed in the city of St. Marc after withdrawing the payroll for his employees at a local bank. The national police is capable of doing the job if the executive and parliament allow it to do its job and not politicize it the way they are trying to do today, said Pierre Esperance, a human-rights activist. All of the big gangs we have had have, its the national police that has dismantled them by themselves. But while the police arrest, there are people in the system who then turn around and free them, so the police cant always do their job. Esperance said the force remains fragile and is very much a work in progress. As for the United Nations, he said, its track record has not been impressive. The peacekeeping mission that was in charge of the country for much of the UNs mandate was a failure, he said. It didnt produce any results ... . we cant even evaluate what it has done in the country, Esperance said of the mission, which was supposed to focus on justice and policing. They dont have any results. Its all been very poor. Read more about: KUAL LUMPUR, Malaysia - The murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Uns estranged half brother at an airport in Malaysia was brazen, intricately orchestrated and, thanks to scores of security cameras, witnessed by millions around the world. The real masterminds behind the killing, however, may never be brought to justice. The murder charge was dropped against an Indonesian woman, who was freed last month. Her co-defendant, a Vietnamese woman who is the only suspect in custody, pleaded guilty not to murder, but to the lesser charge of using a deadly weapon to cause injury and will be freed as early as next month. Her guilty plea and sentencing on Monday concluded more than two years of legal proceedings. But it cleared up none of the mystery. Heres a look back at the crime, the missing masterminds and the ending. ___ THE CRIME On Feb. 13, 2017, when Kim Jong Nam appeared at a check-in counter at a Kuala Lumpur airport terminal, he was jumped by two women who smeared something on his face. He soon began to feel ill, found his way to a medical station and was taken by ambulance to a hospital. He was dead within a matter of hours. The women Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam were arrested soon afterward. Huong was seen on security video wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with LOL across the chest. The video, and video of the chubby, blue jean-clad victim staggering around before his death, went viral. From the start, this was obviously no ordinary crime. Aisyah and Huong were accused of using VX nerve agent, a poison developed for military use, and the victim was the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and half brother of current leader Kim Jong Un. For a time, Kim Jong Nam had been seen, at least by outside experts, as a potential heir to the countrys leadership. But he was caught, and humiliated, trying to enter Japan in 1998 to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He ended up in de facto exile, spending most of his time in Macau, a Chinese territory famous for its casinos. By the time of his death, he wasnt part of the North Korean political scene. But his freedom to reside in Macau indicated he had some Chinese support. Its possible he was seen by some as a viable replacement if Kim Jong Un were ever to be removed from power. Soon after Kin Jong Nams murder, his son, Kim Han Sol, appeared in a YouTube video in which he claimed he, his mother and sister were under the protective care of a group calling itself Cheollima Civil Defence. The same group is believed to be behind an attack on the North Korean Embassy in Madrid last month in which 10 people allegedly shackled and gagged embassy staff before escaping with computers, hard drives and documents. ___ THE MISSING MASTERMINDS Malaysian officials have never officially accused North Korea of involvement in Kims death. North Korea has denied any involvement. But prosecutors made it clear throughout the trial they suspected a North Korean connection. Four North Korean suspects were seen on airport security video discarding their belongings and changing their clothing after the attack. The North Korean Embassy has also been implicated, with an embassy official helping obtain flights out of Malaysia for the four men, and using the name of one of its citizens to buy a car that took the suspects to the airport. At Malaysias request, Interpol issued a red notice for the four North Koreans wanted in connection with the killing. Investigators said the North Korean suspects met the women at the airport and were believed to have provided them with the VX nerve agent used in the murder. The North Koreans are suspected of scouting and training the women, who say they thought they were taking part in a candid camera-style prank show for television. Malaysian police believe the North Korean suspects flew out of the country the day of the killing and returned to Pyongyang. Investigations into Kims death led to a diplomatic spat between Malaysia and North Korea. Malaysia scrapped visa-free entry for North Koreans and expelled North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol after he rejected Malaysias investigation and insisted the victim was an ordinary citizen who died of a heart attack. Kang Chol also accused Kuala Lumpur of colluding with outside forces to defame North Korea. North Korea then banned Malaysians in its country from leaving, entrapping three diplomats and six of their family members. The nine Malaysians were only allowed to fly back after Malaysia released Kims body to North Korea and allowed the North Koreans to leave, including an embassy official and a North Korean Air Koryo employee wanted by police for questioning over Kims death. Following last years summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Malaysias government has said it may re-establish ties with North Korea and reopen its embassy in Pyongyang. ___ THE ENDING With the North Korean suspects missing, the two women were left to face the charges. After some high-level lobbying by Indonesias government, the Malaysian attorney general decided to drop the murder case against Aisyah on March 11. Aisyah, 26, cried and hugged her Vietnamese co-defendant before leaving the courtroom. She was driven away in an Indonesian Embassy car and then flown back to Jakarta, where she thanked the president and other officials for their help. I feel happy, very happy that I cannot express in words, she told reporters at Jakartas airport. After this I just want to gather with my family. Huong, 30, also sought to be released after Aisyah was freed, but prosecutors rejected her request. Both had faced a murder charge that carried the death penalty if they were convicted. Prosecutors on Monday said they were offering Huong a reduced charge, and High Court judge Azmi Ariffin sentenced her to three years and four months from the day she was arrested, telling her she was very, very lucky and wishing her all the best. Vietnamese officials in the courtroom cheered when the decision was announced. Her lawyer, Hisyam Teh Poh Teik, said she is expected to be freed by the first week of May, after a one-third reduction in her sentence for good behaviour. He said four North Korean suspects still at large were the real assassins. As she was being escorted out of the court building, Huong shouted to reporters: Its very good. I love you. She told reporters earlier that she wants to sing and act when she returns to Vietnam. ___ Talmadge, the APs Pyongyang bureau chief, contributed to this report from Tokyo. BEIJING - A kindergarten teacher has been arrested in eastern China after 23 students were sickened in a suspected act of deliberate poisoning, police said Tuesday. The teacher, identified by the surname Wang, is believed to have adulterated the childrens food with sodium nitrite, the Jiaozuo city police said on their official microblog. Overexposure to sodium nitrite can be toxic and possibly fatal. Police said they were still looking for a motive in last weeks incident. Schoolchildren in China have been the target of often fatal attacks by people bearing grudges or considered mentally ill. In 2002, 42 people, mostly schoolchildren, died after eating snacks laced with rat poison in the eastern city of Nanjing. The killer, who apparently was jealous of his rivals thriving business, was swiftly sentenced to death and executed. ISLAMABAD - Pakistan and India traded fire in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, leaving seven people dead three Pakistani soldiers, a Pakistani villager, an Indian woman and a girl and a member of the Indian paramilitary troops, officials said Tuesday. The fatalities were some of the highest since tensions flared between the rival nuclear-armed nations after a suicide bombing killed 40 Indian troops in Indian-administered Kashmir in February. Pakistans military said Indian troops targeted its military positions overnight in the border town of Rakhchakri in Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. Along with the three soldiers killed, a fourth was wounded, the army said. The statement added that Pakistani soldiers responded effectively. The Indian fire also killed a 70-year-old Pakistani villager in aremote area of Niaza Per on Monday evening, according to Pakistani police official Waheed Qureshi. In India, the army accused Pakistani troops of firing mortars and small-arms fire Monday along the disputed frontier, the highly militarized so-called Line of Control, hitting the sector of Poonch in Indian-controlled Kashmir. It said Indian soldiers retaliated. Indian police officer M.K. Sinha said an Indian paramilitary officer, a woman and a girl were killed while at least 18 civilians and five troops were wounded. The cross border firing resumed on Tuesday morning, after a brief lull, he said. Days after the Feb. 14 suicide attack in Kashmir, India launched an airstrike inside Pakistan, saying it targeted militants from the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed militant group who had claimed responsibility for the bombing. Pakistan retaliated and said it shot down two Indian air force planes; one Indian pilot was captured and later released and handed back to India amid signs of easing tensions. Pakistan said Washington, Moscow, Beijing and Riyadh helped avert all-out fighting but tensions remained. Islamabad later claimed no Pakistani was linked to the attack and that Jaish-e-Mohammed had no training camps inside Pakistan. The group was founded by Pakistani militant Masood Azhar after his release from prison in India in 1999 in exchange for 155 hostages held on an Indian Airlines flight hijacked in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Azhar is believed to be seriously ill, living at an undisclosed location. ___ Associated Press writers Aijaz Hussain in Srinagar, India, and Roshan Mughal in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report. AMSTERDAM - The city of Amsterdams latest attempt to rein in the nuisance of over-tourism by banning guided tours of the red light district has run into opposition from some of the people it is intended to protect: sex workers. The Dutch capital plans to ban such tours, saying they are disrespectful and contribute to congestion in the narrow, canal-side streets where scantily-clad sex workers sit behind windows to attract customers. The first step in the new policy was taken Monday night in the red light district, with tours banned from 7 p.m. On a recent Friday night, the problem was clear to see: Tourists bathed in a red glow emanating from the windows and peep shows neon lights were packed shoulder to shoulder as they shuffled through the alleys. But sex workers union Proud questions whether banning tours will reduce tourist numbers and argues that guides educate visitors and encourage them to behave more respectfully toward the women. It could also be that now there are no guides that people just wander into the area themselves and gawk at the women behind the window and take photos because there is no one anymore to inform them how to behave or what the rules of the game are in this area, said a sex worker who goes by the name of Velvet and is the advocacy co-ordinator for Proud. Velvet declined to give her real name, saying that because of the stigma attached to sex work, most sex workers use a working name or pseudonym to protect their privacy and safety. Amsterdams Prostitution Information Center, which is housed in the same building as Proud, offers its own red light district tours. The total ban on guided tours, which is planned to come into full force on Jan. 1, is another step in the citys campaign to reduce the problems associated with over-tourism and part of a broader package of measures reining in tours in the city. Bobien van Aalst of the Dutch tour guide association Guidor slammed the ban on tours, not just to the red light district but to other historic parts of the city. She said it means guides wont be able to explain to tourists where Rembrandt van Rijn painted one of his first famous works or where the painters wife is buried. I mean its like in Paris if youre forbidding (tours) to go to the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower, she said. City Hall says that more than 1,000 tour groups per week now operate around the Old Church Square in the heart of the red light district. Yeah, theres really over-tourism there too crowded. I mean there were evenings where ... residents basically couldnt leave their homes anymore because the alleys were blocked, the citys deputy mayor, Udo Kock, told The Associated Press. People who work in Amsterdams sex industry question whether there are more tourists, or whether similar numbers are squeezing into a red light district that has shrunk in recent years as hundreds of the sex workers windows have been shuttered in an attempt to diversify the narrow streets. Kock acknowledges that not everybody is happy, but says many others are pleased that the city is tackling the tours. The red light district is a tourist magnet, especially after dark, with crowds of people waiting to get into sex shows and visiting the Red Light Secrets Museum of Prostitution, where you can experience the windows from a sex workers perspective by sitting on a stool in front of a window onto which images are projected of men walking past and peering in. The museums manager, Natascha Flipsen, agrees that guided tours help educate the visitors not just about the history of the centuries-old red light district, but also about how to treat the women who work there with respect. And she says that tourism is good for the business. For tourists, this is like the once in a lifetime experience, so they visit the sex work as well of course, Flipsen said. COPENHAGEN - Theres no escape from the long arm of the law in Sweden. Not even sitting naked in a sauna. Police spokewoman Carina Skagerlind says an off-duty police officer found himself sitting in the same sauna in Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb, as a fugitive who had dodged a jail sentence for aggravated assault, among other offences. Skagerlind says after recognizing each other, the naked police officer calmly told the man that he should consider himself arrested. She said Tuesday the officer called colleagues to pick up the fugitive, adding the arrest was undramatic and the wanted man didnt try to flee. The officer was praised for the March 29 arrest and police warned fugitives on Facebook: We are everywhere. Even if you do not see us, we are there. PARIS - French carmaker Renault SAs board will hold a special meeting to discuss recent results of its internal investigation of its former boss Carlos Ghosn, amid reports of suspicious payments under his watch. The board meeting planned for Wednesday will also look into Ghosns 2018 pay as chairman and CEO of Renault, a Renault official told The Associated Press. Ghosn, under investigation in Tokyo, has denied wrongdoing. He was chairman of Nissan and headed the two automakers alliance until his arrest in November in Japan. He was released on bail in March pending his trial in Tokyo. Unconfirmed media reports said the company has handed information about payments worth millions of euros (dollars) to a Renault-Nissan distributor in Oman from its probe to French prosecutors. French prosecutors and Ghosns lawyers in France did not immediately comment. In Tokyo on Tuesday, Ghosns lawyer said he has petitioned a Tokyo court seeking separate judicial proceedings for Ghosn and Nissan Motor Co., who currently are co-defendants in a financial misconduct trial. Hironaka reiterated Ghosns innocence and accused Nissan of working as one with prosecutors who have charged him with breach of trust and with falsifying financial reports in under-stating his compensation. The lawyer declined comment on the reports about Renaults investigation. He said that under a plea bargaining process that is relatively new in Japan, some Nissan executives have escaped prosecution in return for co-operating with the prosecutors, Hironaka said. That has helped prosecutors shape a narrative that suggests Ghosn is guilty, he said. Hironaka, who has a strong track record for acquittals in a country where the conviction rate is over 99%, said he preferred that a different judge hear testimony from the executives who took plea bargains. Having Ghosn and his former employer Nissan face trial together would be unfair, he said. No matter how you look at it, Nissan is not a defendant but a prosecutor, Hironaka said. Hironaka also requested that Ghosn be tried separately from another defendant in the case, Greg Kelly, a Nissan executive accused of facilitating Ghosns misconduct. ___ AP Business Writer Yuri Kageyama contributed to this report. The children of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received million-dollar houses in the kingdom and monthly five-figure payments as compensation for the killing of their father, according to current and former Saudi officials as well as people close to the family. Khashoggis two sons and two daughters may also receive much larger payouts possibly tens of millions of dollars apiece as part of blood money negotiations that are expected to ensue when the trials of Khashoggis accused killers are completed in the coming months, according to the officials and others who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive talks. The previously undisclosed payments are part of an effort by Saudi Arabia to reach a long-term arrangement with Khashoggi family members, aimed in part at ensuring that they continue to show restraint in their public statements about the killing of their father by Saudi operatives in Istanbul six months ago, the officials said. The Khashoggi siblings have refrained from any harsh criticism of the kingdom, even as their fathers death provoked global outrage and widespread condemnation of the heir to the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The delivery of homes and monthly payments of $10,000 (U.S.) or more to each sibling were approved late last year by King Salman as part of what one former official described as an acknowledgement that a big injustice has been done and an attempt to make a wrong right. But the royal family is also relying on its wealth to help contain the ongoing fallout from the killing and dismemberment of the prominent Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist who was targeted for articles that were often critical of the government. Read more: U.S. senators send rebuke to Saudis, Trump over Khashoggi killing CIA concludes Saudi crown prince ordered Khashoggis assassination Saudi Arabia confirms Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside consulate A Saudi official described the payments as being consistent with the countrys long-standing practice of providing financial support to victims of violent crime or even natural disasters and rejected the suggestion that the Khashoggi family would be obligated to remain silent. Such support is part of our custom and culture, the official said. It is not attached to anything else. As part of their preliminary settlement, the Khashoggi children were each given houses in Jiddah worth as much as $4 million apiece. The properties are part of a shared compound in which Salah Khashoggi, the eldest son, occupies the main structure. A banker in Jiddah, Salah is the only Khashoggi sibling who intends to continue living in Saudi Arabia, according to people close to the family. The others reside in the United States and are expected to sell their new Saudi properties. Salah, who has been responsible for financial discussions with Saudi authorities, declined to comment on the matter when reached by phone Monday. His desire to remain in Jiddah with his family has contributed to the siblings deference to the authorities and caution in their public statements over the past six months. In October, the Saudi government released photos of Salah shaking hands with Mohammed, an image that was meant to show the crown prince offering condolences but was widely seen as an indication of the coercive power the royal family was exerting on Jamal Khashoggis children. The writers two daughters, Noha Khashoggi and Razan Jamal Khashoggi, published an essay in The Washington Post last year in which they described their fathers hopes for changes in Saudi Arabia but emphasized that he was no dissident and did not accuse the crown prince or other Saudi officials of being culpable in his death. Noha did not respond to a request for comment, and Razan could not be reached. The monthly schedule of payments and prospect of eventual multimillion-dollar settlements would appear to give the Khashoggis a long-term financial incentive to remain quiet even as human rights organizations and critics of Saudi Arabia continue to demand accountability from the kingdom. Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan issued a statement Monday, six months after Jamal Khashoggis death, saying the Saudis have adopted a strategy of evasion that has scapegoated expendable officials, seeking to quell international furor by staging a sham trial. Khashoggis second son, Abdullah, declined to comment when reached Monday. William Taylor, a Washington lawyer who has represented the family, also refused to discuss any compensation the family has received. The negotiations with the family have been led by the outgoing Saudi ambassador to the United States, Khalid bin Salman, brother of the crown prince. The CIA concluded with medium to high confidence that Mohammed had ordered Khashoggis killing, but President Donald Trump has refused to accept that verdict about a close ally, saying, Maybe he did, maybe he didnt. Saudi officials have strenuously denied that Mohammed was involved, describing the slaying as a rogue operation carried out by a team that intended to subdue Khashoggi and bring him back to Riyadh but killed him after a struggle at the consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi came to the diplomatic facility to collect paperwork needed to remarry. U.S. intelligence agencies, relying in part on eavesdropping equipment placed in the Saudi Consulate by the Turkish government, have concluded that Khashoggi was strangled or smothered. Saudi officials have yet to explain what happened to Khashoggis body. His killers are believed to have dismembered and disposed of it. Officials who have heard audio of the operation said that one of the Saudi operatives who has a background in forensic crime-scene work can be heard warning other operatives to play loud music to mask the sound of an electric device. Saudi authorities have announced investigations of 21 people in connection with Khashoggis killing, including Saud al-Qahtani, an enforcer for the crown prince suspected by some of orchestrating the operation against Khashoggi. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for five operatives who travelled from Riyadh to Istanbul and were in the consulate when Khashoggi was killed. They include Maher Mutreb, a former colonel in the Saudi intelligence service who knew Khashoggi when both worked in London at the Saudi Embassy. If the men are convicted and sentenced to death, the Saudi system of justice could allow the Khashoggi family members to grant their fathers killers clemency as part of a blood money arrangement in which they might then be entitled to tens of millions of dollars. It is unclear whether Khashoggis children would be required to forgive or absolve the killers to collect the payments. Former Saudi officials and experts said the royal court and government have incentives to seek such an agreement and avoid a situation in which only low-level operatives are executed for their role in a plot that was developed and orchestrated from high levels of government. The issue of how far to go in protecting their fathers legacy has been a source of tension among the Khashoggi siblings, according to people close to the family. The daughters have at times pushed to be more outspoken about their fathers life and the kingdoms ruthlessness, while the brothers have focused on maximizing the amount of money the family will collect. At one point in the weeks after their fathers death, Abdullah Khashoggi told advisers working with the family he wanted to punish the royal court by going after one of the crown princes prized possessions. I want the da Vinci, he said, referring to a painting by the Renaissance master that the crown prince paid $450 million for in 2017. Read more about: CAIRO - An Egyptian province on the Red Sea will impose a ban on disposable plastics, prohibiting everything from single use straws to plastic bags in an effort to fight pollution and protect the environment, its governor said Tuesday. The ban will apply to restaurants, supermarkets, grocery stores, pharmacies and on cruise ships that dock off the shores of this province, called Red Sea. It will also apply to the hotels in Hurghada, the provincial capital, and elsewhere in the province. Plastic spoons, forks and knives, cups and dishes will also be among the banned items. Its a fight against the sea of plastic that people carelessly discard, Gov. Ahmed Abdallah told The Associated Press. And it all ends up in the Red Sea. The ban will go into effect from June, he said, adding that it was first proposed by the Hurghada Environmental Protection & Conservation Association to protect the provinces threatened and endangered species. The organization said it will launch campaigns across the province to clean up islands, beaches and famous diving areas around Hurghada, one of Egypts most popular beach resorts and diving centres. Abdallah, who realizes the campaign will be an uphill battle, did not elaborate on how the ban would be enforced. His hope is that by saying no to plastic, Egypt will draw more environment-conscious tourists. In 2017, Egypt launched an EU-funded initiative to encourage people to limit their use of plastic bags and to shift to more environment-friendly alternatives. The country produces 970,000 tons of plastic waste per year. The environmental affairs agency said last year that Egyptians use around 12 billion plastic bags a year, causing severe problems to the Nile River and the countrys two seas the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Single-use plastics, which are used once before they are thrown away or recycled, have added to the problems, as have items like coffee stirrers, plastic bags, straws, soda and water bottles. Egypts vital tourism industry has been hit hard by extremist attacks and political turmoil following the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled longtime autocrat, President Hosni Mubarak. The once multibillion tourism industry, a vital pillar of the countrys economy and source of work for millions of people, has been decimated. The tourism sector suffered a further blow after an Islamic State group bombing brought down a Russian passenger plane over the Sinai Peninsula in 2015, killing all 224 people on board. Egypts government has tried to lure tourists back by promoting new archaeological discoveries and boosting security around historical sites. JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Russia this week for talks with President Vladimir Putin. Their meeting on Thursday will take place just five days before Israels national elections next week. Netanyahus office says he will be visiting Moscow, but doesnt state the purpose of the visit. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday confirmed the upcoming visit, saying that it will be a brief meeting for the two leaders to compare notes. Netanyahu has met with Putin three times over the past year, most recently in February, to discuss military co-ordination between Russia and Israel in neighbouring Syria. Israel and Russia maintain a hotline to prevent their air forces from clashing over Syria. Syrian forces downed a Russian warplane in September while responding to an Israeli air strike. Netanyahu seeks re-election as prime minister in the April 9 balloting but faces possible indictment on corruption charges and stiff opposition in the vote. By Lee Seong-hyon In mid-March, I flew to Hawaii to give a talk at the invitation of the Indo-Pacific Command. From Hawaii, I then flew to Beijing, to meet with Chinese government officials, think tanks, journalists and business people. For a week, I was able to get a sense of the latest update on the U.S.-Chinese trade war. Interesting is the atmosphere in China. In the wake of the trade war, China's economic growth last year dropped to 6.6 percent, the lowest level in 28 years. However, the atmosphere in China was not as bad as one would expect. I saw a much calmer composed China. "We believe that the worst moment of the U.S.-China trade war has passed," said a Chinese media executive. "Don't get me wrong. I am not saying the situation has improved. But now we are certain that the U.S. will continue to adhere to the 'anti-China' crusade." "The trade situation has deteriorated. But at least the predictability of how Washington would act has improved." He said it's psychological. That is, uncertainty has decreased. China's stock market fell 20 percent in 2018, the first year of the trade war, due to the fear of uncertainty in the U.S.-China relationship, he said. "Now, we are certain where things are going from here." Chinese companies have quietly started looking for markets other than the U.S. Strangely, it gave China a new 'sense of direction' and a new goal. Chinese people are accepting the reality of deteriorating U.S.-China relations and there is a collective psychology to adapt to a new environment and survive. China is likely to accelerate its search for ways to survive without the United States market. In the words of one person, I could feel a kind of determination. "We survived the Cultural Revolution in which we killed each other inside China. We can make the conflict with America an opportunity to make China stronger." Huawei, China's largest communications equipment company, has become a symbol of the U.S.-China trade war. In early March, Huawei filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, in a dramatic about-face. Everyone knows that Huawei's doing so will make it harder to enter the U.S. market, by making the U.S. authorities angry. But it still did. What is Huawei's reasoning? It is not about the United States. Huawei has already given up on the American market. Its aim is actually the European market. Unlike the U.S., Europe is less restrictive about Huawei's advances and many decisions are still yet to be made. Huawei's strategy is seen attempting to "shake the plate" by suing the U.S. government. The logic is that by highlighting the unlawful nature of U.S. action, it is trying to send a message, "China may be bad. But the U.S. is also bad." China is also discreetly reminding Europe that the U.S. was the country that bugged Angela Merkel's mobile phone a few years ago. When both the U.S. and China are guilty of technological eavesdropping, Huawei knows that Europe has to choose, in the end, one of them. Huawei is the world leader in 5G communications. Huawei is also reportedly proposing to bid at a surprisingly attractive price compared to that of Ericsson, a European 5G provider. China seems to think that it will inevitably have to sustain a setback for a short-term period in the ongoing trade war with the United States, but in the mid- and long-term, China has a fighting chance, by expanding non-U.S. markets, notably by networking with Europe and Asia, providing them with economic incentives. America's allies are fair game as well. Japan is no exception. China knows that Japan has long eyed China's huge home electronics market. There is room for mutual gains. China believes the U.S. is still declining under the Trump presidency, losing its leadership and alienating its allies. If the current trend continues and if China is able to continue its technological innovation and make market inroads in "global markets that exclude the U.S.," time will be on China's side, in the end. During the just-concluded "Liang Hui" (two annual political events in China) in March, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, "China is ever closer to the world's center stage." In the midst of the U.S.-China trade war, that's a remarkable display of confidence. Lee Seong-hyon (sunnybbsfs@gmail.com), Ph.D., is director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the Sejong Institute. ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Johns Hopkins University will be allowed to create its own armed police force, under a measure that received final approval by the Maryland General Assembly on Monday night. The Maryland Senate voted 42-2 to pass the bill. That sends the measure to Gov. Larry Hogan, and a spokesman for the Republican governor said he will likely sign the bill. The governor looks forward to reviewing the final legislation, but he appreciates the support the Johns Hopkins police force initiative has received from both sides of the aisle, and strongly believes it will help make Baltimore City a safer place, said Michael Ricci, Hogans spokesman. The measure has sparked debate between those who want to increase campus safety as Baltimore struggles with violent crime and those who fear police profiling. The legislation would allow the private institution to have its own police force at its academic campuses and main medical campus in Baltimore. In addition to support in both chambers of the General Assembly, which is controlled by Democrats, supporters have included billionaire alumnus Michael Bloomberg and Democratic U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings. Opponents have included a group called Students Against Private Police, which has led multiple protests, and faculty members, as well as people who live near the university. Sen. Mary Washington, a Democrat who is one of two Baltimore senators who voted against the bill, said Monday night that she thought the measure created a foundation for campus policies and new police forces, but she said she still had concerns that an accountability board should be broadened. And I do fundamentally believe that policing should be a publicly controlled entity and that privatization is not the way to go, Washington said. Efforts to create a police force for the university in Baltimore began after a spate of robberies in late 2017. Researchers at the school examined trends at Baltimore universities equipped with armed police and found Hopkins had a disproportionate number of aggravated assaults, according to Ronald Daniels, the universitys president. While state law allows public institutions to have police departments, a private institution like Hopkins needed the legislation. The university said in a statement that the institutions work is just beginning, with many steps to come in the process of building a Johns Hopkins Police Department. We also understand that differences of opinion remain on this topic, and we are firmly committed to working with our students, staff, faculty and neighbours to consider varying viewpoints and ensure public accountability, public transparency and public input within a JHPD, the university said. ___ This version corrects spelling of university presidents name to Daniels. JUNEAU, Alaska - The Latest on a personnel hearing by an Alaska human rights commission (all times local): 4:25 p.m. Members of the states human rights commission emerged from an extended private meeting Monday with no decision on what was described as a confidential personnel matter. Chairman Brandon Nakasato said the commission was not able to reach a decision based on its discussion in executive session. He says members will try to meet again soon, perhaps yet this week. He confirmed later that the matter was related to an investigation requested by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Dunleavy sought an investigation the day after commission executive director Marti Buscaglia posted on the commissions Facebook page a picture of a Black Rifles Matter sticker on a truck in the commissions parking lot she said she thought was racist. She later removed the post. ___ 10:10 a.m. The state human rights commission plans to meet Monday on a confidential personnel matter. Additional details werent immediately released. The commissions executive director, Marti Buscaglia, faced blowback last month, including from Gov. Mike Dunleavy, for pointing out a Black Rifles Matter sticker on a truck in the commissions parking lot she said she thought was racist. The truck belonged to a company doing work at the building. Buscaglia has said she posted a picture on the commissions Facebook page asking, In what world is this OK? She later removed the post, writing on Facebook that it offended many gun owners who saw it as the commission being against the right to own guns. Dunleavy sought an investigation, which a spokesman said was completed and sent to the commissions chair. OROVILLE, Calif. - An epic winter of rain and snow has refilled Californias reservoirs and pressed into service a spillway at the nations tallest dam Tuesday, a $1 billion structure that drained excess water for the first time since it crumbled two years ago and drove hundreds of thousands to flee the threat of catastrophic flooding. Water flowed down the spillway and into the Feather River as storms this week and melting snowpack are expected to swell the lake behind Oroville Dam in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, said Molly White, principal engineer with the California Department of Water Resources. The spring storms follow a winter that coated the mountains with thick snowpack, which state experts measured Tuesday to determine the outlook for Californias water supplies. It was 162% of average after heavy winter rain and snow left the state drought-free for the first time since December 2011. Were going from flood to drought and drought to flood with very little normal in between, said Kris Tjernell, deputy director of the water resources department. The measurement on a snowy day at Phillips Station near Lake Tahoe found a snow depth of 106.5 inches (287 centimetres) and a snow water equivalent of 51 inches (129.5 centimetres), which is the depth of water that theoretically would result if the entire snowpack melted instantaneously. Just four years ago, then-Gov. Jerry Brown found a field at Phillips Station barren of any measureable snow amid a historic drought. This Feb. 20, 2019, photo shows the Oroville Dam spillway in Oroville, Calif. California officials say the flood-control spillway at the nation's tallest dam is expected to be deployed as early as Tuesday, April 2, 2019, for the first time since it was rebuilt after it crumbled during heavy rains two years earlier, forcing nearly 2000,000 people to evacuate. With the increased rain and a snowpack not seen in years, water managers are beginning to discuss how best to manage and operate reservoirs, said John Paasch, chief of the departments hydrology and flood office. Its been a great winter, but its not all fun and games, he said. Officials opened Oroville Dams main spillway because of the growing snowpack that will melt into Californias waterways and storms expected this week, including one forecast to arrive Thursday, White said. The original spillway on the 770-foot-high (235-meter) dam, which is 150 miles (241 kilometres) northeast of San Francisco, was built in the 1960s. In early 2017, storms drenched the state and the massive spillway broke apart as it carried heavy flows. Dam operators reduced the flow and allowed water to run down an emergency spillway essentially a low area on the reservoirs rim but the flow began eroding the earthen embankment that had never been used. Authorities suddenly had to order an evacuation of nearly 200,000 people living in communities downstream. The threat of a dam collapse that would unleash a torrent of water did not happen, however, and people were allowed to go home days later. In January 2018, an independent panel of dam safety experts released a nearly 600-page report that blamed the crisis on long-term and systemic failures by California dam managers and regulators to recognize inherent construction and design flaws in the dam. The new spillway was designed and constructed using 21st century engineering practices and under the oversight and guidance from state and federal regulators and independent experts, said Joel Ledesma, deputy director of the water resources departments State Water Project. Repairs have cost $1.1 billion. California requested about $639 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the fixes, but the federal government has rejected $306 million of those reimbursements. U.S. officials say the dams upper gated spillway was damaged prior to the heavy rain two years ago. Local water agencies are already paying some of the repair costs, and they would cover anything not paid by the federal government. ___ Rodriguez reported from San Francisco. ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Baltimores acting mayor told legislators Tuesday that the city is in good hands until the mayor decides whether to return after abruptly announcing a leave of absence to focus on her health amid a political scandal about self-dealing book sales. Mayor Catherine Pugh stepped away the same day that Marylands Republican governor asked the state prosecutor to investigate her no-bid book deals, including $500,000 in sales to the University of Maryland Medical System. After meeting with the citys state Senate delegation and House delegation chair in Annapolis, acting Mayor Jack Young emphasized that he would act only as a placeholder for the embattled mayor and plans to run for City Council president again. You know, Ive been doing this for the last 21 years, making the wheels turn, and its going to continue to turn, he said. Sen. Antonio Hayes, a Baltimore Democrat, described the circumstances as frustrating as hell in the last week of the states legislative session, as Baltimore officials often have to overcome tough images and a negative narrative attached to Marylands largest city, which struggles with violent crime. I hope that shes doing some real soul searching, Sen. Bill Ferguson said of Pugh. This is such a distraction from where we need to be and the issues that we should be focused on. The Baltimore Sun reports Pugh repeatedly sponsored legislation during her time as a Maryland state senator that wouldve benefited the University of Maryland Medical System, which paid Pugh $500,000 for 100,000 copies of her self-published Healthy Holly childrens books. Between 2011 and 2016, Pugh sponsored and co-sponsored several bills that wouldve benefited the system where she was a board member. In eight bills, Pugh sought to make suing doctors and hospitals for big judgments through malpractice claims harder and to reduce the financial impact of malpractice lawsuits. Those measures and bills she sponsored to expand the kinds of bonuses insurers can pay health care professionals were not successful. But the legislature did pass three of Pughs bills that allowed telemedicine expansion, a potentially lucrative change. It is a clear conflict of interest, Joanne Antoine, of the government watchdog organization Common Cause, said of Pughs legislative proposals while being paid by the system. This does call into question all of the decisions she made during her term as senator. Pugh, her spokesman and her lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on the issue, but last month the mayor noted her legislative proposals applied generally to the hospital industry, not just the University of Medical System. I didnt carry legislation for UMMS, Pugh said. There was no contract behind UMMS book deal with Pugh, and the hospital network one of Marylands largest private employers described some of the purchases as grants in federal filings. Pugh, who once sat on a state Senate committee that funded the major health network before becoming mayor, has served on the systems board since 2001. One-third of UMMS board members received compensation through the medical systems arrangements with their businesses. Legislation is pending in Marylands capital focusing on board governance. Since the arrangement with UMMS came to light last month, Pugh has stepped down from the volunteer board and returned her most recent payment of $100,000 for the books. Health care provider Kaiser Permanente also spent $100,000 on Pughs books after she became mayor, when the company was seeking a contract with the city. The Baltimore Sun also reported that CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, another city health provider, effectively bought Pughs roughly 20-page illustrated books for $14,500 in 2011 and 2014. In a subsequent email, a CareFirst spokesman said it made contributions to Associated Black Charities, a non-profit that manages the citys Children and Youth Fund, to fund its purchase and distribution of books. Associated Black Charities said in a statement that between 2011 and 2016, five organizations donated $87,180 to pay for the books, of which ABC kept $9,552 to use as general support. Pughs announcement that she would take leave from her post as mayor came the same day that Republican Gov. Larry Hogan asked the state prosecutor to investigate. Attorney Steve Silverman said the mayor looked forward to co-operating with the state prosecutor and providing as much information as possible to put this matter to rest. ___ Information from: The Baltimore Sun, http://www.baltimoresun.com CHICAGO - The Art Institute of Chicago has indefinitely postponed a major pottery exhibit weeks before it was due to open, citing concerns that the culture and voices of indigenous peoples arent adequately represented. Some Native American scholars complained that much of the Mimbres pottery pledged by a Chicago collector to the Art Institute had come from ancestral gravesites. The Art Institute said in Mondays news release that the delay came after officials were given feedback about the need to collaborate with Native American nations who hold connections to the Mimbres people. Worlds Within: Mimbres Pottery of the Ancient Southwest was scheduled to begin May 26. The exhibit displays roughly 70 pieces of pottery from the Mimbres people. The pottery was created around A.D. 1100 in present-day southwestern New Mexico. ___ This story has been corrected to show that a Chicago collector was not personally involved in the removal of artifacts from ancestral gravesites. MINNEAPOLIS - Attorneys and the judge on Tuesday excused six potential jurors from the murder trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman who called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home. Mohamed Noor, 33, is charged in the July 2017 death of 40-year-old Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a life coach who was engaged to be married. Attorneys and the judge said they had examined the questionnaires filled out by roughly half of the potential 75 jurors, and they agreed to excuse six of them based on their written answers. One of the excused jurors wrote that he or she has negative feelings toward Somalis and believed Noor was a fast-track police hire. Noor is Somali-American. Another potential juror said he had already decided that Noor is innocent. Earlier, Hennepin County District Judge Kathryn Quaintance heard arguments on whether jurors at Noors trial should see a fly through exhibit of the shooting scene. The prosecution wants to introduce a 3D scan of the Minneapolis neighbourhood where Damond was shot. Authorities say Noor fired his gun once across his partner through the open drivers side window, striking and killing Damond. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension used the scanner to document the scene. In court, the prosecution played a video showing where Noors squad car was in relation to Damonds body in the alley where she died. The BCA also inserted lines showing potential bullet trajectories. But Noors attorneys contend the video is inadmissible because it inaccurately and prejudicially depicts what a person would actually see. Prosecutor Patrick Lofton told the judge that the videos will help jurors understand what the scene is like. But defence attorney Thomas Plunkett argued that the evidence was novel in Minnesota and that the position of Damonds body had changed over the seven hours that the BCA took the images. Meanwhile, a coalition of media groups filed a motion Tuesday challenging Quaintances plan to keep the media and public from seeing video evidence introduced at trial, including footage from officers body cameras after the shooting. The outlets argued that the move is unconstitutional and wont accomplish Quaintances stated goal of protecting Damonds privacy. As this Court is aware, this is a murder trial involving allegations that a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed an unarmed woman while on duty, attorney Leita Walker wrote for the media coalition. It goes without saying that there is significant public interest in this case, both in Minnesota and around the world. That high degree of interest counsels in favour of greater access to the trial, not less. Jury selection began Monday and resumes Wednesday. JUNEAU, Alaska - An Alaska blood bank is seeking donations in the face of a critical shortage, according to its chief executive. Blood Bank of Alaska is calling on blood donors to help fulfil what it called a critical need in state hospitals, the Juneau Empire reported Monday. Various blood types are needed, according to Blood Bank of Alaska CEO Bob Scanlon, who said the organization strives to provide medical centres with O negative blood because it is the universal donor type that can help guarantee as many residents as possible receive care. We are currently in critical need for several blood types such as O negative and O positive, Scanlon said. On average, 100 donors daily are needed to ensure Alaska hospitals have enough blood and blood products, Scanlon said in a statement. Donated blood helps patients including people fighting leukemia and other cancers, trauma victims, and mothers who suffer complications during child birth, Scanlon said. The blood bank supplies 21 Alaska hospitals and the military with donations from 15,000 Alaska residents annually, according to Scanlon. ___ Information from: Juneau (Alaska) Empire, http://www.juneauempire.com FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - A woman carrying two Chinese passports and a device containing computer malware lied to Secret Service agents and briefly gained admission to President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago club over the weekend during his Florida visit, federal prosecutors allege in court documents. Yujing Zhang, 32, approached a Secret Service agent at a checkpoint outside the Palm Beach club early Saturday afternoon and said she was a member who wanted to use the pool, court documents said. She showed the passports as identification. Agents say she wasnt on the membership list, but a club manager thought Zhang was the daughter of a member. Agents say that when they asked Zhang if the member was her father, she did not answer definitively but they thought it might be a language barrier and admitted her. Zhangs story changed when she got inside, agents say, telling a front desk receptionist she was there to attend the United Nations Chinese American Association event scheduled for that evening. No such event was scheduled and agents were summoned. Agent Samuel Ivanovich wrote in court documents that Zhang told him that she was there for the Chinese American event and had come early to familiarize herself with the club and take photos, again contradicting what she had said at the checkpoint. She showed him an invitation in Chinese that he could not read. He said Zhang was taken off the grounds and told she could not be there. Ivanovich said she became argumentative, so she was taken to the local Secret Service office for questioning. There, he said, it became clear Zhang speaks and reads English well. He said Zhang said she had travelled from Shanghai to attend the nonexistent Mar-a-Lago event on the invitation of an acquaintance named Charles, whom she only knew through a Chinese social media app. Ivanovich said she then denied telling the checkpoint agents she was a member wanting to swim. Ivanovich said Zhang carried four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive and a thumb drive containing computer malware. She did not have a swimsuit. While the Secret Service does not determine who is permitted to enter the club, our agents and officers conduct physical screenings to ensure no prohibited items are allowed onto the property, a U.S. Secret Service spokesperson said in a statement. This access does not afford an individual proximity to the President or other Secret Service protectees. In such instances, additional screening and security measures are employed. Zhang is charged with making false statements to federal agents and illegally entering a restricted area. She remains in custody pending a hearing next week. Her public defender, Robert Adler, declined comment. There is no indication Zhang was ever near the president. There is also no indication that she is connected to Li Yang, a Chinese native, Republican donor and former Florida massage parlour owner. Yang recently made news after it was learned she was promising Chinese business leaders that her consulting firm could get them access to Mar-a-Lago, where they could mingle with the president. DURANGO, Colo. - Crews have started clearing the tracks of a famous tourist railroad in southwest Colorado following the winters onslaught of snow and avalanches. The Durango Herald reported Monday that the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad is scheduled to begin operation May 4, taking passengers through the rugged terrain along the Animas River. Railroad general manager Jeff Johnson says digging out the tracks is a laborious task each spring, but its more daunting this year because of the amount of snowfall. The railroad uses a helicopter each year to survey if avalanches should be triggered with dynamite to avoid potential risk. Crews recently triggered one avalanche that covered the river below. Johnson says crews began work about three weeks ago on the task thats expected to take up six weeks. ___ Information from: Durango Herald, http://www.durangoherald.com ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A driver in a fatal Wasilla crash has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder and manslaughter and one count of driving under the influence of alcohol. Anchorage television station KTVA reports 29-year-old Glen Hamilton III is charged in the March 27, 2018, crash that killed 75-year-old Donna Swanson and 77-year-old Edward Swanson of Big Lake. Hamilton is represented by the Alaska Public Defenders Office, which does not routinely comment on pending cases. The Palmer office did not immediately respond to an email request for comment. Police say Hamilton was intoxicated and speeding when he ran a red light on the Parks Highway and slammed into the Swansons car. Edward Swanson died at the scene and Donna Swanson died later. Judge Kari Kristiansen on Monday set bail at $50,000. ___ Information from: KTVA-TV, http://www.ktva.com Hanjin KAL CEO Suk Tae-soo speaks during the Hanjin Group holding firm's shareholder meeting in Jung-gu, Seoul, Friday. Yonhap By Nam Hyun-woo Hanjin Group Chairman Cho Yang-ho, ousted from the Korean Air board on Wednesday, has managed to keep control on the group after shareholders of de-facto holding firm Hanjin KAL on Friday rejected a proposal that could have stripped Cho of his board seat. Hanjin KAL shareholders also approved the reappointment of Cho's close aide to the board, allowing the troubled aviation tycoon to cling to the group's management until next year's Hanjin KAL shareholder meeting. During the Hanjin KAL annual general meeting, shareholders rejected a proposal to tighten the requirements of the firms' directors, stripping executive status from anybody in the group found guilty of a crime, following the opposition of 49.29 percent of attending shares. The articles of incorporation state that such a proposal requires the approval of two-thirds of the attending shares. The meeting was attended by shareholders owning 77 percent of Hanjin KAL's total shares with voting rights. A combined 28.93 percent stake in Hanjin KAL is held by Cho and his family members, followed by the activist fund Korea Corporate Governance Improvement (KCGI) with 10.81 percent and the National Pension Service (NPS) with 7.16 percent. The NPS proposal could be a critical blow to Cho, who is on trial for allegedly receiving 19.6 billion won in unfair commissions from Korean Air suppliers through a paper company. Including other charges, he is suspected of embezzling 27 billion won. Those charges, along with his family's misconduct including the "nut rage" by Cho's daughter, former Korean Air Vice President Heather Cho played a critical role in the NPS move to spearhead Cho's ouster from the Korean Air board at the carrier's shareholder meeting on Wednesday. Hanjin KAL CEO Suk Tae-soo drinks water during the Hanjin Group holding firm's shareholder meeting in Jung-gu, Seoul, Friday. Yonhap PHOENIX - A former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer in Arizona was sentenced to a year of probation after pleading guilty to lying about his citizenship on a passport application. Marco Antonio De La Garza Campos has acknowledged telling authorities that he was born in Texas, when he was actually born in Mexico. De La Garza, who was sentenced Thursday in Tucson, had worked for the federal agency for six years and had been stationed at the border city of Douglas. He previously served five years in the U.S. Navy. Over the years, the federal government has been criticized for not performing adequate background checks on people seeking jobs as border officers. The issue usually crops up when the government considers adding a large number of officers at the border. In pleading guilty, De La Garza acknowledged that he lied in 2017 on a passport application by saying he was born in Brownsville, Texas, when he was actually born in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Investigators said De La Garza used a false Texas birth certificate to enter the United States. In a letter to the sentencing judge, De La Garza said he was sorry for his crime and accepted responsibility for his actions. He said he lived with his mother in Mexico until he was 19 and that his parents told him when he was growing up that he was a U.S. citizen. I should have pushed my parents more for information instead of dismissing it, De La Garza wrote, adding that he would like to legalize his immigration status in the future. De La Garzas current immigration status is unclear. His attorney, Matthew Green, said in court records that De La Garza will be eligible to apply for naturalization one year after the date of his conviction. Green wrote that if his client is allowed to remain in the United States, hell serve as a stay-at-home father for his two young children, in an effort to reduce family expenses. When they are old enough to go to school, hell seek a job, Green wrote. ___ Follow Jacques Billeaud at twitter.com/jacquesbilleaud. HOUSTON - A tank holding a flammable chemical caught fire at a Texas plant Tuesday, killing one worker, critically injuring two others and sending panicked employees fleeing over a fence to safety. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez confirmed the fatality in a tweet and said the two injured had been taken by helicopter to a hospital. The two injured were in critical condition, said Rachel Moreno, spokeswoman for the Harris County Fire Marshals Office. Authorities shut down a roadway near Tuesdays fire at a KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, about 25 miles (40 kilometres) northeast of Houston, Gonzalez said. Fire crews battled the blaze for about 5 1/2 hours before they extinguished it, according to the fire marshals office. All residents within a one-mile radius of the plant were ordered to stay indoors or shelter in place for about four hours. It was not immediately known how many residents were affected by the shelter in place. Crosby has about 2,300 residents. The fire sent a large black plume of smoke into the air. The fire erupted about two weeks after a March 17 blaze at a petrochemical storage facility in Deer Park , located about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Crosby. That fire at a facility owned by Intercontinental Terminals Company burned for days and triggered air quality warnings. Crosby also is where an Arkema chemical plant was inundated by water during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Some chemicals eventually caught fire and partially exploded. It is disturbing and it is problematic that were seeing this incident in a facility, especially on the heels of the fire in Deer Park, said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the countys top administrator. Samantha Galle lives less than a mile away from the plant and said she heard and felt an explosion Tuesday. It shook everybodys house around here, the 23-year-old said. Gonzalez said a transfer line at the KMCO plant ignited in the area of a tank of isobutylene a flammable colorless gas used in the production of high octane gasoline which then caught on fire. The fire spread to a nearby warehouse where dry chemicals are stored. Moreno said the Environmental Protection Agency has been testing air samples from the area around the plant and has not found any harmful readings. Worker Justin Trahan told Houston television station KPRC that he heard some panic on the radio but no alarms sounding before the plant caught fire. We didnt think anything of it we didnt think it was anything severe, he said. Trahan said employees began running after the tank ignited. He said that he and other colleagues had to jump over a fence to escape because all the gates were locked. Pilar Davis, a product manager with KMCO, said none of the emergency evacuation points at the plant were blocked during the fire. At a news conference late Tuesday afternoon, John C. Foley, chief executive of KMCO, said a cause of the blaze is still being determined. We will conduct a thorough investigation ... and take steps to ensure this doesnt happen again, Foley said. Davis said the fire initially ignited with isobutylene but was fueled by ethanol and ethyl acrylate. All three are chemicals and solvents used to make fuel additives at the plant. Davis declined to comment on the worker who was killed and the two who were injured, only saying they were part of KMCOs operations department. KMCO, which was founded in 1975, is a chemical company that offers coolant and brake fluid products and chemicals for the oilfield industry. The Crosby, Sheldon and Channelview school districts asked students and staff to shelter in place at all their campuses. But later Tuesday afternoon, all three districts lifted those orders to shelter in place. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said that it has dispatched emergency response personnel to conduct an initial assessment of the fire. Foley said his companys number one priority is safety and compliance. We have a long track record of investing in the people, the systems and the assets to operate safely, he said. Meanwhile, the Texas Attorney Generals office filed a petition in state district court in Austin on behalf of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The petition seeks a permanent injunction, civil penalties and reasonable attorney fees, court costs, along with recovery of investigative costs. KMCO has had environmental violations in the past, according to a review of records. In 2016, KMCOs corporate agents pleaded guilty to a federal criminal charge of violating the Clean Air Act. A plea agreement document stated that a plant employee made false entries in logs of air testing of tanks that were known to be leaking chemicals. Another employee then used those falsified logs to submit reports to the federal and state environmental authorities. The document says the violation went on between 2008 and 2012. A year earlier, the EPA cited KMCO for failing to comply with regulations on its risk-management plan for the plant, but settled with the plant for a $2,700 penalty. Texas has served the plant with three notices of violation of a federal clean-air law since last August, the EPA website shows. Harris County had obtained an injunction against KMCO in 2009 that required the firm to pay $100,000 in civil penalties and give investigators easy access to the plant and prompt notification of releases. ___ Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant in Houston, Jake Bleiberg and Terry Wallace in Dallas, Jill Zeman in Little Rock, Arkansas, Adam Kealoha Causey in Oklahoma City and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report. ___ Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70 CHICAGO - A judge said Tuesday that it will be several weeks before he decides whether to make public the court file in the Jussie Smollett case, delaying the possibility for media organizations to read it for clues about why prosecutors, without explanation, announced the decision last week to dismiss the charges against the Empire actor. During a brief hearing, Cook County Judge Steven Watkins said he didnt agree with attorneys representing media organizations, including The Associated Press, that the publics right to see the file represented an emergency. Watkins set a schedule for motions and arguments that he said would result in his written decision in late May. Smollett did not attend the hearing but his attorney said there was no emergency that would warrant an immediate decision. The judges decision keeps the public in the dark about what prompted the Cook County States Attorney to drop the charges just days after securing a 16-count indictment against Smollett that alleged he staged an attack by two men who hurled racist and homophobic slurs at him before beating him and looping a noose around his neck. City officials, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, blasted the decision to strike a deal with the actor without any explanation. Johnson said that Smollett had chosen to hide behind secrecy and broker a deal to circumvent the judicial system. The decision has sparked outrage in the city and across the country. According to the filing by the media organizations, it also put Chicagos government and our criminal justice system squarely in the spotlight. In an op-ed last week for the Chicago Tribune , Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx said while her offices decision to drop the charges does not exonerate Smollett, as the actor has claimed, she indicated that some of the evidence made getting a conviction uncertain. Police maintain Smollett staged the attack to promote his career, and Chicago officials have ordered him to pay more than $130,000 to cover the cost of the investigation. Media organizations said in their filing that because there was no clear explanation why prosecutors dropped the charges, even a temporary delay of the presss First Amendment rights is harmful, and that delaying access stifles the flow of information to the public. WACO, Texas - No one will be convicted or otherwise held accountable for the 2015 shootout between rival biker gangs in Waco restaurant parking lot that left nine people dead and at least 20 injured, prosecutors in Central Texas said Tuesday. In a statement announcing all charges will be dropped in the deadliest biker shooting in U.S. history, McLennan County District Attorney Barry Johnson said any further effort to prosecute the case would be a waste of time, effort and resources. In my opinion, had this action been taken in a timely manner, it would have, and should have, resulted in numerous convictions and prison sentences against many of those who participated in the Twin Peaks brawl, Johnson said. Over the next three years the prior district attorney failed to take that action, for reasons that I do not know to this day. The shooting outside a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco on May 17, 2015, involved rival biker gangs, the Bandidos and Cossacks, and occurred as bikers from various groups were gathering to talk over matters of concern. Fights and gunfire broke out. Waco police officers monitoring the gathering also fired on the bikers, killing at least two. Surveillance footage showed many bikers running from the scene and ducking for cover after gunshots rang out. A smaller number could be seen pointing and firing weapons, slinging a chain or participating in fistfights. Law enforcement officers recovered dozens of firearms, knives and other weapons from the restaurant and adjacent parking lot, many of which officers organized indiscriminately into piles on the pavement and in the back of a police vehicle, dash-cam video showed. Law enforcement officials took the extraordinary step of arresting 177 bikers after the shooting, then charged 155 of them with engaging in organized criminal activity. Many were held on a $1 million bond. Former District Attorney Abel Reyna ultimately dropped charges against all but 24 and re-indicted them on riot charges. Those were the cases that came to an end Tuesday. Only one case was prosecuted in court and that ended in a mistrial. More than 100 bikers have filed civil rights lawsuits alleging McLennan County, the city and others violated the plaintiffs civil rights by arresting them without probable cause after the shooting, Its a travesty that so many people were rounded up and then investigated, instead of vice versa, Mark Snodgrass, president of the Texas Criminal Defence Lawyers Association, said Tuesday. A lot of these peoples lives were put on hold for four years. In a statement, Reyna said he disagrees with the overall result as well as several statements and accusations within Mr. Johnsons press release; however, it is solely his decision on how to proceed with any case in the District Attorneys Office. AUSTIN, Texas - The Texas Senate has approved a resolution supporting President Donald Trumps assertion that there is an immigration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. The non-binding language was introduced on the floor by Houston Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt on Tuesday. Outnumbered Democrats said they were blindsided and complained bitterly during hours of heated debate but they didnt have the votes to stop it. The purely ceremonial resolution stated that the Texas Senate supports the president in his efforts to move forward with emergency action on the border. Still, lawmakers had previously largelyavoided thorny immigration debates, despite Texas 1,200-mile border with Mexico. The U.S. House and Senate voted against Trumps use of emergency power to build a border wall, but he vetoed the resolution and Congress was unable to override him MINNEAPOLIS - The Latest on the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman in 2017 (all times local): 4:35 p.m. Six potential jurors have been excused from hearing the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman who called 911 to report a possible assault. Mohamed Noor is charged with murder in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond. Attorneys and the judge said Tuesday that theyve examined the questionnaires filled out by roughly half of the potential 75 jurors. They excused six of them based on their written answers. One excused juror wrote that he or she has negative feelings toward Somalis and believed Noor was a fast-track police hire. Noor is Somali American. Another potential juror said he had already decided that Noor is innocent. ___ 12:30 a.m. Attorneys will argue Tuesday whether jurors at a former Minneapolis police officers murder trial should see a fly through exhibit of the shooting scene. The prosecution wants to introduce a 3D scan of the neighbourhood where Mohamed Noor fatally shot 40-year-old Justine Ruszczyk Damond in July 2017 after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension used the scanner to document the scene. In a motion, the prosecution says one of the videos shows where Noors squad car was in relation to Damonds body. The BCA also inserted lines showing potential bullet trajectories. But Noors attorneys contend the video is inadmissible because it inaccurately and prejudicially depicts what a person would actually see. Jury selection began Monday and resumes Wednesday. RICHMOND, Va. - The Latest on sexual assault allegations made by two women against Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax: 3:15 p.m. House Republicans say they tried and failed to broker a deal with Democrats that would allow for a bipartisan public hearing in which two women who accuse Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault could testify under oath. Republican Speaker Kirk Cox issued a statement Tuesday blaming Democrats for refusing to participate and blocking a bipartisan hearing. Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson levelled their accusations against Fairfax in February. Their allegations have received new attention after televised interviews this week with CBS News in which they tearfully described their experience. Both women have said they want to testify in front of the General Assembly but want a bipartisan process. Fairfax has said his encounters with both women were consensual. House Democrats say a legislative hearing would inevitably become a partisan brawl. ___ 9 a.m. The second of two women to accuse Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault says she has nothing to gain by going public with her allegation. Meredith Watson said in an interview aired Tuesday with CBS that shes been subjected to intense scrutiny since accusing Fairfax of raping her when both were students at Duke University in 2000. She said shes faced particular criticism as a black woman because her accusations have tarred the reputation of Fairfax, who also is black. Fairfax says his encounters with both Watson and his initial accuser, Vanessa Tyson, were consensual, and he says a polygraph test proved it. Watson said Tuesday that Fairfax held her down during the attack and that if you have to hold someone down, its not consensual. HOUSTON - The Latest on a fire at a Houston-area chemical plant (all times local): 9:45 p.m. The state of Texas has filed a court petition seeking action against a company whose plant caught fire near Houston on Tuesday. One worker was killed and two were injured critically in the fire at the KMCO chemical plant in Crosby. The Texas Attorney Generals office filed the petition in state district court in Austin on behalf of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The petition seeks a permanent injunction, civil penalties and reasonable attorney fees, court costs, along with recovery of investigative costs. Harris County had obtained an injunction against KMCO in 2009 that required the firm to pay $100,000 in civil penalties and give investigators easy access to the plant and prompt notification of releases. ___ 5:55 p.m. The CEO of a company whose plant caught fire in Texas says investigators are still determining the cause. John Foley, president and CEO of KMCO, said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon his company will find the cause of the fire and take steps to ensure this doesnt happen again. Authorities say one person was killed and two others injured at a fire Tuesday at KMCOs plant in Crosby, near Houston. Pilar Davis, a product manager with KMCO, says the fire initially ignited with isobutylene and was fueled by ethanol and ethyl acrylate. All three are chemicals and solvents used to make fuel additives at the plant. Foley says safety and compliance remain his companys number one priority. Records show KMCO has a history of environmental violations. ___ 4:20 p.m. Authorities say a fire has been contained at a chemical plant near Houston and they have lifted an order that instructed residents within a 1-mile (1.6 kilometres) radius of the facility to stay indoors. Harris County authorities say first responders are working to prevent the fire from spreading to nearby tanks at the KMCO chemical plant in Crosby. The Harris County Fire Marshals Office says the order to shelter in place was lifted Tuesday afternoon, several hours after the fire began. Schools near the plant had also sheltered in place but school districts lifted those orders as well. The fire comes about two weeks after a March 17 blaze at a petrochemical storage facility in Deer Park, located about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Crosby. ___ 2:15 p.m. The company that owns a Texas chemical plant where fire broke out has had environmental violations in the past. In 2016, KMCOs corporate agents pleaded guilty to a federal criminal charge of violating the Clean Air Act. A plea agreement document stated that a plant employee made false entries in logs of air testing of tanks that were known to be leaking chemicals. Another employee then used those falsified logs to submit reports to the federal and state environmental authorities. The document says the violation went on between 2008 and 2012. A year earlier, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cited KMCO for failing to comply with regulations on its risk-management plan for the plant, but settled with the plant for a $2,700 penalty. Texas has served the plant with three notices of violation of a federal clean-air law since last August, the EPA website shows. ___ 1:15 p.m. The president and CEO of a company whose plant caught fire in Texas says crews are working with local fire responders to extinguish the blaze. John Foley is president and chief executive officer of KMCO, whose plant in Crosby caught fire Tuesday. Authorities say one person was killed and two others injured. Foley says the company is deeply saddened to confirm the injuries and fatality. He says the company has activated its emergency response team and incident command centre because of the blaze. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says that preliminary information shows that isobutylene initially started the fire, and is still burning. Isobutylene is a flammable colorless gas used in the production of high octane gasoline. ___ 1 p.m. Authorities say one person is confirmed dead after a fire at a chemical plant near Houston. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says two other people were life-flighted after the fire broke out Tuesday at KMCO in Crosby. Their conditions werent immediately known. Gonzalez says preliminary information shows that the chemical isobutylene initially started the fire, and is still burning. Thick plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from the plant. Residents who live within 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) of the plant have been told to stay indoors with their windows closed and heating and cooling systems turned off. ___ 12:50 p.m. Authorities have told residents within a 1-mile radius of a burning chemical plant near Houston to stay indoors. Tuesdays fire at the KMCO chemical plant in Crosby comes about two weeks after a March 17 blaze at a petrochemical storage facility in Deer Park, located about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Crosby. The Harris County Sheriffs Office issued the shelter-in-place order for residents within 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) of the KMCO plant. Emergency officials say people should turn off all fans and heating and cooling systems, and to go into an interior room with no windows. Schools near the plant are also sheltering in place. According to its website, KMCO is a chemical company that offers coolant and brake fluid products and chemicals for the oilfield industry. ___ 12:20 p.m. Fire officials in Texas say early reports show that one person is unaccounted for and two people are injured after a fire at a Houston-area chemical plant. The Harris County Fire Marshals Office says the fire is burning at a KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, a northeast Houston suburb. Thick plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from the plant. One employee told Houston television station KPRC that the plant was in the process of being evacuated because workers were told that there was a leak of some sort. The employee said the plant exploded as about 20 workers were leaving. He said employees had to crawl under a gate because the gate was locked. ___ 12:01 p.m. A fire has erupted at a Houston-area chemical plant, spewing a plume of thick, black smoke into the air, and authorities say two workers may have been hurt. Harris county Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says in a tweet that deputies were shutting down a roadway near Tuesdays fire at a KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, a northeast Houston suburb. Thick plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from the plant. The fire comes about two weeks after a March 17 blaze at a petrochemical storage facility in Deer Park, located about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Crosby. According to its website, KMCO is a chemical company that offers coolant and brake fluid products and chemicals for the oilfield industry. The Crosby and Sheldon school districts have asked students and staff to shelter in place at all their campuses. WASHINGTON - In the first address to Congress by a NATO head, Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday acknowledged serious divisions within the alliance and called for bigger defence budgets to cope with global challenges such as Russian assertiveness, the core reason NATO was created in Washington 70 years ago this week. We have to be frank, Stoltenberg said before a joint meeting of Congress. Questions are being asked on both sides of the Atlantic about the strength of our partnership. And, yes, there are differences. The NATO secretary general credited President Donald Trump with compelling allies to spend more on defence, without noting that Trump also has questioned the value of the alliance and suggested that some members are freeloaders. Trumps criticisms have upset a delicate balance within an alliance that has long counted on Washington to be its leader. Stoltenbergs speech provided a diplomatic counterpoint to Trumps sometimes derisive rhetoric, and the enthusiastic reception he received from both parties in the House was testament to an enduring pro-NATO consensus in Congress. The secretary general delivered to Congress a powerful affirmation of the value of the NATO alliance, said Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican. James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral who was NATOs top commander from 2009 to 2013, called the Stoltenberg address a high point in recent U.S.-European relations. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks during a media conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Monday, April 1, 2019. NATO foreign ministers mark in Washington on Thursday the 70th anniversary of the world's biggest security alliance amid heightened tensions with Russia and years of military stalemate in Afghanistan. Given the presidents evident and frequently vocalized skepticism of the alliance, it is clear that Congress on a bipartisan basis wants to put the full weight of the legislative branch behind NATO, Stavridis said. We will never find a better pool of allies in the world than the Europeans, and this address underscores the importance of the trans-Atlantic bridge, which has been creaking a bit lately. Trumps criticisms are not NATOs only source of friction. The alliance also is at odds with long-time member Turkey over its planned purchase of a Russian air defence system that is not compatible with the allied air defences. The Trump administration is threatening to stop delivery to Turkey of the newest U.S. fighter jet, the F-35, if the Turks go through with their plan to buy Russias advanced S-400 system instead of the American Patriot system. Escalating that fight, Vice-President Mike Pence scolded Turkey at a NATO 70th anniversary event following Stoltenbergs speech. He said the Russian S-400 system poses great danger to NATO, and suggested that Turkey needs to decide between NATO and Russia. Turkey must choose, he said. Does it want to remain a critical partner of the most successful military alliance in the history of the world, or does it want to risk the security of that partnership by making reckless decisions that undermine our alliance? Stoltenberg made a point of highlighting the benefits to the United States of having NATO allies. He noted, for example, that in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, NATO invoked Article 5 of its founding charter to come to the aid of a member under attack. He said allies also provide the U.S. with valuable military support in peacetime, from tracking submarines in the Arctic to providing bases in Europe from which the U.S. can project power. Our alliance has not lasted for 70 years out of a sense of nostalgia or of sentiment, he said. NATO lasts because it is in the national interest of each and every one of our countries. Stoltenberg on Thursday will lead a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, hosted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to mark 70 years since the alliances founding charter, the North Atlantic Treaty. The alliance has grown from its original 12 members to 29, with the Republic of North Macedonia about to become the 30th member country. Stoltenberg, a two-time former prime minister of Norway, is the first head of NATO to address a joint meeting of Congress. He touted the alliances long record of partnership but also noted it has a history of coping with internal divisions, including strong opposition by France, Germany and other members to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Open discussions and different views is not a sign of weakness, he said. It is a sign of strength. So we should not be surprised when we see differences between our countries. Today there are disagreements on issues such as trade, energy, climate change and the Iran nuclear deal. These are serious issues with serious disagreements. Trump has sharply criticized other NATO members, including Germany, for not meeting spending targets. On Tuesday, he praised the generally upward trend among the European allies, but hounded them to pay even more because he believes America still shoulders a disproportionate share of the cost of protecting Europe. In a meeting at the White House, Trump and Stoltenberg had kind words for each other. But in the past, Trump has called NATO obsolete and suggested he might pull the U.S. out of the alliance if member nations didnt significantly boost defence spending. Weve worked together on getting some of our allies to pay their fair share, Trump told reporters. At some point, its going to have to go higher. Trump took credit for the increased spending. However, spending by NATO countries, which dropped after the end of the Cold War, has actually been rising since 2014, before Trump took office . After Russias 2014 annexation of Ukraines Crimean Peninsula, member countries agreed to boost defence budgets and move toward spending 2% of their gross domestic products on defence by 2024. The U.S. spends about 3.4% of its GDP on defence. Since Trump took office, European allies and Canada have added $41 billion to their defence budgets. By the end of next year, this is scheduled to reach $100 billion, Stoltenberg said. Germany remains the main target of Trumps ire because it plans to spend 1.5%, below the 2% guideline, by 2024. Stoltenberg has said the 2% guideline was not invented by the United States and was a target the 29 allies set in 2014. The allies are really stepping up, Stoltenberg said in an interview with The Associated Press. ___ Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Susannah George in Washington and Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report. WASHINGTON - The Trump administration is blaming the Iranian government for damage from devastating floods that have killed at least 50 people. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Tehrans mismanagement of urban planning and emergency preparedness led to the disaster. Hes rejecting allegations from Irans foreign minister that U.S. sanctions against Iran are to blame. Pompeo says the U.S. is sympathetic to the victims and is willing to provide assistance for flood relief efforts but only through the International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif late Monday said U.S. sanctions have prevented Tehran from getting badly needed equipment, including relief helicopters. Iran has seen a decades-long drought but the latest flooding is also blamed on disregard for safety measures and construction near rivers. Former Kolon Group Chairman Lee Woong-yeul speaks during his visit to a Kolon Life Science plant in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province, in this April 5, 2017 file photo. The plant is the domestic manufacturing base of Invossa, the firm's osteoarthritis gene therapy, sales and distribution of which were halted Monday. Courtesy of Kolon Group By Nam Hyun-woo Kolon Life Science's Invossa HAYS, Kan. - A Kansas woman donated 204 pairs of shoes to Nebraska flood victims after buying everything that was left at a closing Payless store. The Hays Post reports the shoes were part of a flood relief shipment taken to farmers in Nebraska by Fort Hays States agriculture sorority, Sigma Alpha, during the weekend. A graduate of Fort Hays State, Addy Tritt, said she wanted to help others because so many people have helped her in the past. When the price at a Hays store dropped to $1 per pair, Tritt negotiated with the business to buy the remaining shoes for $100. They included 162 pairs of baby shoes and two pairs of mens shoes. The rest were womens shoes. The retail price of the shoes would have been more than $6,000. ___ Information from: KAYS-AM, http://hayspost.com The Ontario governments plan to ban cellphones from schools has been met with skepticism from many critics. Can kids really be expected to go to school without their phones? How will such a ban be enforced? While these are all valid questions, they miss the bigger picture. Although our entire society has become addicted to our phones, the problem is especially acute among the young. Checking their phone is the first thing young people do when waking up and the last thing they do before going to bed. Many even sleep with their phone so that they can check it throughout the night. A 2018 survey by Surecall found that among young people aged 18 to 24, 85 per cent check their phone while on the toilet, 43 per cent while in the shower, and 17 per cent while having sex. A 2018 study by the U.K.s Office of Communications found that young people aged 15 to 24 now spend over four hours per day on their phone, with many feeling completely lost without it. What is the impact of all this phone use? The research of San Diego State psychologist Jean Twenge has shown that the cohort of young people who have grown up with smartphones and are much less likely than previous generations to hang out with their friends, go out on dates, or get enough sleep, and are much more likely to feel lonely and left out. Smartphones have also caused a sharp increase in anxiety and depression, particularly among girls, as they are more likely to experience cyberbullying. But what is probably most troubling is that the people who created these digital devices are the ones who are doing the most to keep their children away from them. While most public schools have uncritically embraced devices like iPads and Chromebooks with open arms, Silicon Valley tech executives have been enrolling their children in low-tech private schools and forcing their nannies to sign contracts keeping their kids away from phones, tablets and computers. This has created a huge equity issue as research has shown that low income and minority children are exposed to screens for significantly longer periods of time than their wealthy and white peers. As put in an article in The New York Times, It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valleys elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction. The Big Debate Opposing View: Is banning cellphones an effective policy? No Some have suggested that instead of banning phones, we should be teaching students how to use them responsibly, for example by asking students to turn them face down on their desks during a lesson. But even this approach impairs learning. A 2017 experimental study of 548 students by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and UC San Diego found that even though students verbally reported not being distracted by their phones, simply having the phone on silent in their bag or pocket significantly impaired their working memory and cognitive capacity. Having the phone on their desk degraded their abilities even further. Hence a 2015 London School of Economics study of 130,000 U.K. students that found scores on national exams increased by 6.4 per cent in the schools that implemented a cellphone ban. Academic gains were more than twice as high for the lowest achieving students, leading the authors to conclude: Low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of the mobile phone policy Schools could significantly reduce the education achievement gap by prohibiting mobile phone use in school. THE BIG DEBATE: For more opposing view columns from Toronto Star contributors, click here. So why havent we done it? Probably because we are all complicit. It is common for teachers to bring their own phones to class and for parents to text their children throughout the school day. A successful phone ban would take a collective effort from parents, teachers, school administrators, and students. But if we cannot carve out classrooms as the one place that is phone-free, then we should probably just admit that our collective addiction is too far gone for us to do what is in the best interest of our children. SM Sachin Maharaj is a PhD candidate and Canada Graduate Scholar in educational policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Read more about: Quebec tables religious neutrality legislation, March 29 So, Quebec has tabled legislation banning religious symbols at work in public services. Does that mean Sikhs can longer wear turbans or carry kirpans? Will Jews no longer be allowed to wear yarmulkes or necklaces with the star of David on them? Will Christians no longer be allowed to wear pins or necklaces with crosses or the fish symbol on them? And if you go that way, should atheists be allowed to wear fish symbols with the word Darwin on them, which clearly mocks Christianity, which if pursued, could be deemed hate speech? How about a gay person wearing a rainbow flag symbol? These symbols are an expression of who we are. Why should we have to keep that secret? Banning them would deny us our charter rights, allowing us freedom of religion and speech. The reason is maybe they dont want to offend anyone, which itself shows intolerance and exclusion. Why shouldnt those who are offended show tolerance, or are they given a free ride? Yet, now Im offended and so are people of other faiths. Why cant we be included? If people were proselytizing at work to their fellow employees or customers of government services, that would be understandable. This is not. None of this is doing any good. Quebec is going down a very dark path. Whats coming next? Joe Prochazka, Oshawa Read more about: The climate apocalypse is fast approaching. Thats the word from federal government scientists who Monday issued an alarming report on climate change in Canada. They say that even in the unlikely event that the world meets its global carbon emission targets Canada is at high risk of extreme temperatures, drought and flooding. They calculate that since 1948, mean temperatures in Canada have increased by more than double the world average. Yet so far the report has elicited a ho-hum response. The countrys political class remains consumed with the Jody Wilson-Raybould saga, a political scandal in which little scandalous has occurred. The opposition Conservatives, joined by like-minded governments in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick, attack Justin Trudeaus Liberals for imposing a carbon tax to deal with the global warming problem. But they offer nothing plausible in its stead. Ontario Premier Doug Ford argues that he doesnt need to do anything to reduce carbon emissions that the decision of a previous government to shut down the provinces coal-fired electricity generating plants was sufficient. Read more: Canada warming faster than the rest of the world, says Environment Canada Canadas failure to fight climate change disturbing, environment watchdog says Opinion | Heather Scoffield: Get ready to start paying for climate change Federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, another vociferous critic of carbon taxes, says hell come up with ideas of his own eventually. If the Tories were serious about climate change, they wouldnt criticize Trudeau for doing too much. They would attack him for doing too little. By the federal governments own reckoning, it is not on course to meet even the minimalist carbon emission targets it agreed to in Paris in 2015. But perhaps the most bizarre distraction from the serious business of climate change is the fascination with every twist and turn of the Wilson-Raybould story. I say bizarre because ultimately, this is a story in which nothing much happened. Last fall, Wilson-Raybould was pressed by those around the prime minister to consider offering a form of plea bargain to SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec engineering firm under indictment for bribery. She demurred and eventually was shifted to another portfolio before quitting cabinet entirely. But SNC-Lavalin still faces criminal charges and remains without a plea bargain. On the substantive issue, nothing has changed. Still, the story rages along. A Commons committee investigates and then, when matters get too hot for the Liberal majority, calls the inquiry off. From time to time, Wilson-Raybould and her ally, former treasury board president Jane Philpott, pop up to do no-information media interviews. One week, we hear that Wilson-Raybould is releasing more details about this business. The next week we read that in order to counter her, Gerald Butts, Trudeaus former principal secretary, has done the same. Wilson-Raybould releases an audio recording of her December 2018 conversation with former top bureaucrat Michael Wernick. Although the tape contains no additional information, it immediately gives the story new life. Was it legal for her to tape the conversation without Wernicks knowledge? (Answer: almost certainly yes). Was it proper? (Answer: almost certainly no). As I write this, television is reporting breathlessly that Wilson-Raybould is appealing to her fellow Liberal MPs not to kick her out of caucus even though she has said she has no confidence in Trudeaus government. Will she succeed? Will feminist Trudeau have the nerve to oust a high-profile Indigenous woman from the government benches? Stay tuned. The soap opera continues. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, climate change rolls along. The federal report predicts that if carbon emission growth continues unabated, sea levels on the east coast will rise by as much as one metre. In the St. Lawrence basin, water levels are predicted to rise half a metre. Under the same scenario, the scientists report with medium confidence that, by 2100, periods of drought will become more frequent in the Prairies and the British Columbia interior. This is the grim future Canada faces. If we paid more attention to it and less to every twist and turn in the admittedly entertaining Wilson-Raybould story, we might be able to better deal with whats coming. Read more about: Sometimes it seems like Ontario Premier Doug Fords favourite thing to do is spend money in the name of saving money. For example, he loves to tout his cost-saving prowess and yet last year, he used taxpayer dollars to set up a virtually useless tip line. Im alluding to the notorious government snitch line the Ford administration established for Ontario parents to report teachers they believed had stepped out of line (for example, by teaching elements of the sex-ed curriculum introduced under the Ontario Liberals). The venture was virtually useless because the provincial government doesnt have the authority to discipline teachers directly. (This job belongs to the Ontario College of Teachers.) In other words while Ford likes to rail against red tape, he seems to have no problem creating it himself. Enter this months licence-plate controversy another perfect example of Fordian hypocrisy. The premier has proposed a change almost no one wants or needs. Read more: Opinion: Turning Ontarios licence plates into political billboards is actually no joke Opinion | Edward Keenan: On licence plates and opioid deaths, Doug Ford reveals his approach to governing Ford confirms Yours to Discover will be replaced on Ontario licence plates Ford announced this week that his government will scrap the slogan on Ontarios passenger licence plates and replace it with a new one (to be decided at a later date). As for the provinces commercial licence plates, the premier says its possible his government will replace the slogan Yours to Discover with Open for Business. According to reporting in this newspaper, Ontario Conservatives have already spent more than $100,000 swapping out Yours to Discover with Open for Business on 25 signs near the border. Theres no reason to believe this slogan isnt nakedly partisan. On Tuesday, Ford told the legislature: people across this province want change. They voted for change and theyre getting change. They didnt, however, vote for a change to their licence plates, commercial or otherwise. But thats what theyre getting, and theyre getting it with a Conservative spin. Open for Business is obviously reminiscent of the Conservative partys pro-business message. Unfortunately the phrase is reminiscent of other things, too. For example, Open for Business is what a highly intoxicated teenager might tattoo onto her backside during a spring break vacation (before she spends thousands of dollars getting the thing removed). It is a terrible, embarrassing choice for an official provincial tagline. And it serves no purpose beyond the promotion of the current ruling political party. Nor will it encourage investment in Ontario. What exactly was Fords thinking behind this, if he did any? That upon the change, big spenders will glimpse the back of Ontario trucks, reach for their chequebooks and proclaim open at last! Once again, Ford has introduced an idea steeped in populist nonsense that will achieve absolutely nothing of worth, monetary or otherwise. That said, I have to know: whats with all the social media nostalgia about the current slogan Yours to Discover? Opposition to Fords Open for Business slogan is fierce and funny, as it should be. But social media users in this province are weirdly protective of a 1980s-era slogan that means nothing. Not only is Yours to Discover vague in the extreme: its not even catchy. And yet, an online petition called Keep our License Plates Yours to Discover is already circling. As I type this its reached nearly 3,000 signatures. The petition organizers make a valid point that the Ford government is trying to turn our license plates into a political billboard. I simply wish we could make this argument without pretending to be in love with Yours to Discover. There are decent licence plate slogans out there plates that say something specific about the lands they represent. Ontarios is not one of them. Idahos is. According to the Idaho Transportation Department, the states standard licence plate reads Famous Potatoes, a nod to you guessed it the states famous potatoes. Fun fact: Idahoans can also order special plates depicting a cartoon image of their states claim to fame. (Americans have all the fun.) Of course, Ontario, far bigger, more diverse, and arguably a lot more interesting than Idaho, cant be summed up in an ode to starch. Maybe were too big to be summed up at all. But we can certainly do better than Yours to Discover. And we have to do better than Open for Business, if not for our democracy then for our self-respect. My advice to Premier Ford: if youre determined to change our plates, put it to the schools. Introduce a province-wide contest that allows Ontario students to submit suggestions for a new licence plate slogan. Their ideas, fresh from lessons about the history and geography of our province, would be far better than anything your office comes up with. That is unless youve already asked Education Minister Lisa Thompson to assign students the role of manufacturing the plates themselves between classes you know, to promote resiliency. I may soon get my own plates made, customized for this particular moment in provincial politics. Ontario: WTF Read more about: OTTAWACanada and the United States are closer to renegotiating a border agreement that has governed the treatment of asylum claimants along the shared border for almost two decades. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed Monday it has asked the State Department for permission to negotiate amendments to the Safe Third Country Agreement, but did not say what changes it is seeking. Under the agreement, asylum claimants must make their case to the first safe country they arrive in. Canada considers the U.S. a safe country, which allows Canadian border officials to turn back non-American asylum seekers who attempt to make claims at U.S. border crossings into Canada. Theres a so-called loophole, however: If prospective asylum claimants make it onto Canadian soil outside a regular border checkpoint, theyre entitled to have their claim assessed by the Canadian government. Approximately 40,000 irregular migrants have crossed into Canada that way since 2017, coinciding with the Trump administrations decision to crack down on illegal immigration and revoke deportation protections for a number of minority groups living in the U.S. Bill Blair, the minister of border security and organized crime, confirmed he has been speaking with U.S. officials on how to address the loophole, but said there have been no formal negotiations between the two countries. Read more: Statistics show illegal U.S.-Canada border crossings climbing Canadian monitors say Ukraine election withstood Russian meddling Opinion: Canadas border is secure but renewal of immigration system is essential I think theres a very important conversation now taking place between us and I think its an opportunity for both countries to enhance, modernize and improve the agreement between us, Blair told the Star on Monday. I dont want to negotiate in the media, quite frankly, but there are good conversations taking place between us. Irregular migration became a political flashpoint for the Trudeau government, not just with opposition parties in Ottawa but also with Premier Doug Ford and Toronto Mayor John Tory. Both Ford and Tory have called on the federal government to provide more resources to deal with the higher-than-usual number of refugee claimants who depend on provincial and municipal supports while their claims are assessed. In Ottawa, the opposition Conservatives have put pressure on the Liberal government to close the loophole by making the principals of the Safe Third Country Agreement apply to the entire border. The Liberals have repeatedly said the government cant unilaterally amend an agreement with the United States. But within government, theres long been an acknowledgement that the 2002 agreement has not been working as intended. That was the message in a January 2017 briefing note prepared for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen before a meeting with Kristjen Nielsen, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, which was obtained by the Canadian Press. Blair has been meeting with U.S. lawmakers and security officials on the issue since he assumed the newly created role of minister of border security in 2018, his office said. Beyond the issue of irregular migration, its not clear what other border issues are on the table if negotiations begin in earnest. It would be inappropriate to speculate on how any possible changes might be implemented in collaboration with our American counterparts going forward, wrote Marie-Emmanuelle Cadiuex, a spokesperson for Blair. We do not discuss internal and interagency deliberations, nor do we discuss specific documents or communications that are involved in such deliberations, a U.S. State Department spokesperson told the Star in an email Monday. We are not going to comment on any discussions with Canada on this matter. With files from Tonda MacCharles Read more about: OTTAWAPrime Minister Justin Trudeau has booted Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the Liberal caucus, saying their lack of confidence in his leadership and the party made it impossible for them to remain. In a 12-minute speech to Liberal MPs Tuesday, Trudeau sought to turn the corner on the politically damaging SNC-Lavalin controversy, stamp out caucus turmoil and focus party energies on the election ahead. Trudeau told MPs twice that trust had been broken between Wilson-Raybould and Philpott and our team. Whether its taping conversations without consent or repeatedly expressing a lack of confidence in our government and in me personally as leader, its become clear that Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Dr. Philpott can no longer remain members of our Liberal caucus, Trudeau said. Trudeau said his government had taken every effort to address the concerns of the two former cabinet ministers, who each resigned their posts earlier this year over Trudeaus handling of the SNC-Lavalin file. But ultimately, if they cant honestly say that they have confidence in this team, despite weeks of testimony, face-to-face conversations and phone calls with myself and other members of caucus, then they cannot be part of this team, Trudeau said. He singled out Wilson-Rayboulds decision to secretly record a December telephone conversation with Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick, calling it unconscionable. Wilson-Raybould has been at the centre of a controversy thats dogged the party for weeks, after alleging she was subjected to a sustained campaign of inappropriate political pressure by Trudeau and his officials to persuade her to intervene in the criminal prosecution of Quebec engineering firm SNC-Lavalin. But Trudeau defended his own actions during the controversy, saying he took the unprecedented step of waiving solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidences to allow Wilson-Raybould to speak freely. He also said his decision to remove the two MPs from caucus was motivated, in part, to avoid the kind of divisive infighting he said the Liberal party has been notorious for in the past. When we were elected in 2015, we won because we stood together as a team. Which was, to be frank, a change from past interactions of this party, he said. The team has to trust each other. And with Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott that trust has broken. Our political opponents win when Liberals are divided. We cant afford to make that mistake, Canadians are counting on us, he said to applause. The future of Wilson-Raybould and Philpott in the party has been the focus of intense discussions at regional caucus meetings in recent days and corridor discussions among Liberals. Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott have both been kicked out of the Liberal caucus. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the announcement Tuesday, moments after their fellow government MPs had gathered on Parliament Hill for an emergency meeting to determine their future with the party. Wilson-Raybould, whose explosive allegations of political interference by the Prime Minister's Office appear to have deeply imperilled Liberal hopes of holding on to power in this fall's federal election, wrote to her fellow now former caucus members earlier in the day in hopes of convincing them to let her stay. (The Canadian Press) Read more: Texts between Gerald Butts, Jody Wilson-Raybould show mounting anger, frustration over shuffle Wilson-Rayboulds and Philpotts futures could be decided at Liberal caucus meeting Defiant and unbowed, Wilson-Raybould absolutely ready for next salvo in SNC-Lavalin affair On Tuesday afternoon, Trudeau met with all caucus chairs along with the government whip and deputy whip and made the decision after being told there was a strong consensus to remove the two MPs. He said he met with them earlier Tuesday to inform them of my decision. Wilson-Raybould actually beat Trudeau to the punch, announcing news of her departure from caucus on social media just as MPs were gathering for their session. I have just been informed by the Prime Minister of Canada that I am removed from the Liberal caucus and as the confirmed Vancouver Granville candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada in the 2019 federal election, Wilson-Raybould said on Twitter. In a later tweet, she said she will take some time to talk to family and friends and supporters about what happens next. What I can say is that I hold my head high & that I can look myself in the mirror knowing I did what I was required to do and what needed to be done based on principles & values that must always transcend party. I have no regrets. I spoke the truth as I will continue to do, Wilson-Raybould said on Twitter. Philpott published a lengthy statement on Facebook, saying the decision to expel her without giving her an opportunity to speak was profoundly disheartening as she thought there would have been scope for a range of views within the party. Their expulsions came despite a last-minute appeal from Wilson-Raybould to her Liberal colleagues to allow her to remain. In a letter distributed Tuesday, she offered a mild endorsement of the prime minister and challenged them to choose whether they want a party that prizes partisan advantage over inclusiveness and diversity. Liberal MP Rob Oliphant (Don Valley West) said Jody Wilson-Rayboulds letter not only didnt change any minds, but it struck a sour note. There was a tone of the letter that had an exclusivity to it, that she had a monopoly on truth and that there was not a conversation to be had. It was not about we, it was about I, Oliphant said. The mood in the caucus room seemed to be one of relief and hope that the government may finally be putting the controversy behind it. MPs gave Trudeau an enthusiastic reception with many nodding in agreement and some muttering shame as he detailed the reasons the two MPs were removed from caucus. And they gave him a standing ovation as he laid out the election challenge ahead. But there was unhappiness in the ranks too at losing two MPs who just a short time ago had been senior cabinet ministers. Its something none of us are particularly happy about but we need to move on and get focused on our next election, said Judy Sgro (Humber RiverBlack Creek). Again, its not a celebration for anyone. Its two members of our team but they made a decision and the prime minister had to make his, she said. New Brunswick MP Wayne Long expressed disappointment at the outcome and that neither MP was given the chance to speak to caucus to plead their case. I respect that its his decision to make. I was simply advocating for a different path, said Long (Saint JohnRothesay). Carolyn Bennett, the crown and Indigenous relations minister, said Wilson-Rayboulds secret recording crossed a line for most of us. She said at womens caucus and at Ontario caucus, there was a consensus, that there was no trust, there was a breakdown of trust. This is about whether we can trust one another and when we can speak freely to one another. She downplayed the idea that Wilson-Rayboulds loss is a blow to the governments relationship with Indigenous people, saying that while many felt bad theyd lost a voice at the cabinet table, she had heard support from Indigenous representatives. They know theyve never had such an open door on the path to self-determination and the kinds of investments that our governments made. Democratic Reform Minister Karina Gould said it was extraordinarily concerning that the attorney general would have secretly taped the clerk, and had repercussions for how the public service would operate with the government if it was not condemned. We have to be able to have frank conversations with the public service. Reacting to the decision, Philpott, who said she would serve out the remainder of her term as an MP for Markham-Stouffville, said she regretted that relationships have been so fractured but pushed back at her critics, saying the attacks on her for failing to show loyalty were misguided. Philpott, who spoke briefly to Ontario Liberals earlier in the day, said she had urged the government to acknowledge the inappropriate pressure on Jody Wilson-Raybould, in order to move forward. This was an expression of loyalty, not disloyalty in the same way that Jody Wilson-Raybould attempted to protect the prime minister from the obvious short-term and long-term consequences of attempts to interfere with prosecutorial independence but to no avail. She dismissed those who accused her of plotting to advance her own career. This also isnt about political advantage or strategy. It is frankly absurd to suggest that I would leave one of the most senior portfolios in government for personal advancement or merely out of friendship with Jody Wilson-Raybould. In trying to bridge the gap between her and her fellow caucus members, Wilson-Raybould empathized with their anger and frustration. She claimed she was trying to protect the prime minister rather than hurt him, and presented the stark choice of choosing an exclusive club stuck in old ways of exercising power or an inclusive one that embraces diversity of opinion. She acknowledged that many of you are angry, hurt, and frustrated. And frankly so am I, and I can only speak for myself, she said in her two-page letter to Liberal MPs. In giving the advice I did, and taking the steps I did, I was trying to help protect the prime minister and the government from a horrible mess. I am not the one who tried to interfere in sensitive proceedings, I am not the one who made it public, and I am not the one who publicly denied what happened. Read more about: Barrelling forward with his controversial replacement of Yours to Discover on Ontario licence plates, Premier Doug Ford insists people in the province will welcome the change. And Fords Progressive Conservatives admit that partisan political considerations are one reason for a new slogan. People across this province want change. They voted for change and theyre getting change, the premier told the legislature Tuesday. Changing the licence plates doesnt cost a penny to the taxpayers. They are still producing the plates. Its going to be the same cost. As first disclosed by the Star and Global News on Friday, the Conservative government is changing the motto thats adorned the plates since 1982. Open For Business, is being considered for the black-on-white commercial plates used by trucks and other industrial vehicles. But the Tories are looking at different slogans for the blue-on-white passenger vehicle plates with hopes of unveiling revised designs in Finance Minister Vic Fedelis April 11 budget. Government and Consumer Services Minister Bill Walker conceded there is a political aspect to the change since the Tories won power from the Liberals last June. Have your say After 15 years of disastrous Liberal mismanagement supported, frankly, by the NDP we want to make sure people understand there is a new government. We are actually open for business, said Walker. We want to make sure that Premier Ford just came in (and) 95,000 jobs have been created thats more than the United States. We want to ensure we continue to let the world know that, he said, referring to Ontarios continuing jobs boom that began under former premier Kathleen Wynnes Liberals. I think you always want to look, when you come in after 15 years of disastrous management by the Liberals, to say, Is it time to take a look at things? Is there a fresh breath of air? About 1.8 million new licence plates are issued by the province each year and there are 12.9 million active registered plates. Former premier Bob Rae, whose NDP government retained the Yours to Discover slogan created by Bill Daviss Tories and continued by David Petersons Liberals, panned Fords plan. Ive knocked on thousands of doors over four decades in public life, Rae wrote on Twitter. No one has ever, ever, ever demanded a change in the licence plate, and in particular no one has ever, ever, ever suggested we change it to an empty hot air political slogan. Green Leader Mike Schreiner called the move such a ridiculous waste of taxpayers money. I dont know of anyone who wants to change the slogan on our licence plates and its completely inappropriate if the government does it in a way that promotes one of their own campaign slogans, said Schreiner. Interim Liberal leader John Fraser the Tories are bogged down in a continual campaign instead of focusing on governing. The governments supposed to govern, said Fraser. NDP MPP Taras Natyshak (Essex) blasted Ford for his vanity project. This is probably one of those ideas that sounds good when youre reclining in the back seat of your personal pleasure wagon on the leather couch, said Natyshak, in reference to the premiers offices abandoned bid to get Ford an OPP van equipped with $50,000 in custom upgrades, including a TV and a minifridge. But to people facing the loss of good-paying union jobs in Windsor, it sounds like a tone-deaf premier and a government without a plan. How can the premier tell a working mom who just lost their job that their plan to save jobs is a cheesy catchphrase on a licence plate? As previously reported by the Star, the government is also considering an end to front licence plates, as is the practice in Quebec and many American states. This initiative will see us refresh a licence plate design thats been relatively unchanged since the 1960s and depending on the slogan chosen help to rebrand Ontario as a business-friendly province, according to an internal government document. The Tories have already spent $106,000 to replace Yours to Discover on 25 border-crossing signs with Open For Business. Robert Benzie is the Stars Queens Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie Read more about: It was always suspected, and now it's official. Saudi Aramco is the world's most profitable company. Jealously guarded financial data about the kingdom's prized asset were disclosed to bond investors for the first time on Monday. Aramco's $111.1 billion profit in 2018 easily dwarfed all other businesses on the planet, a stunning result for a company that also paid the Saudi government $102 billion in taxes last year. Here are some insights from Aramco's financial statements: - - - Aramco leads all companies, but it still lags other oil majors in profit per barrel Aramco, which produces about 10 percent of the world's crude, spends just under $3 a barrel to pump its crude but doesn't generate as much cash per barrel as other top oil companies. The culprit: high taxes. The kingdom depends on the company to finance social and military spending, as well as the lavish lifestyles of hundreds of princes. Funds flow from operations - a measure closely watched by investors and similar to cash flow from operations - was $26 per barrel equivalent of oil last year. That's below what Royal Dutch Shell and Total have, at $38 and $31 per barrel, respectively. - - - All that income still doesn't support a $2 trillion valuation Saudi Arabia has long insisted that Aramco would fetch the lofty valuation, even after some investors made it clear in the early stages of the mooted initial public offering that they didn't share that view. The $58.2 billion in dividends paid to the Saudi government last year indicates that the company is worth closer to $1.2 trillion if it's judged by the same metrics as other oil majors. - - - Aramco can easily digest a $69 billion acquisition The state-owned producer, officially known as Saudi Arabian Oil Co., is selling a bond to help buy a 70% stake in chemical-maker Saudi Basic Industries from the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund. Aramco will mostly use its own cash for the deal, with half of the payment due to the Public Investment Fund when it closes and the rest staggered until 2021. The installment plan will cost Aramco $500 million in interest. Aramco's ambition to be the world's top energy company, not just oil producer, will require more large acquisitions, and the Sabic deal is the right first step, said Stewart Williams, vice president for Middle East & North Africa Upstream at consultancy Wood Mackenzie. "With its finances there for all to see, many will be now asking what's next on Aramco's shopping list." - - - Investors are hungry for Aramco bonds "This launch has been eagerly awaited for some time, and strong demand has already preceded it," said Richard Segal, a senior emerging-markets analyst at Manulife Asset Management in London. Aramco may end up paying a small premium to the kingdom's bonds. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia's sovereign-debt yields have declined this year, making it cheaper for Aramco to borrow. Brent crude has also advanced 28%. - - - Aramco has little debt, but its credit isn't stellar Saudi Aramco was assigned the fifth-highest investment grade rating at both Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings. Both firms said Aramco could have ranked even higher but was constrained by Saudi Arabia's sovereign rating. Even though Aramco lags peers like Shell, Total and Exxon Mobil in credit rating, its proposed acquisition of Sabic won't alter its current ranking thanks to its low debt load. - - - Aramco faces risks, including missiles and hackers The bond prospectus detailed risks for investors, including missiles falling on Aramco's installations, the impact of proposed U.S. antitrust laws on OPEC, the fight against climate change, and even fears that Saudi Arabia may break the peg between its currency and the U.S dollar. It also revealed that Aramco was the victim of "successful" cyberattacks. The prospectus showed how reliant Aramco is on high prices. In 2016, when Brent crude plunged to an average of $45 a barrel and OPEC cut production, the company struggled to break even. - - - With assistance from Bloomberg's Javier Blas, Matthew Martin, Anthony DiPaola, Archana Narayanan and Netty Ismail. Two Sigma tapped legendary hedge fund investor Tom Hill to consult for the $58 billion firm, according to people familiar with the matter. Hill, who retired at the end of last year as chairman at Blackstone Group LP's alternative asset management business, began working with Two Sigma in January, said one of the people. The Wall Street veteran, who built the $78 billion Blackstone unit into the world's largest investor in hedge funds, is working with senior leaders and teams across Two Sigma's businesses, including engineering and data, to explore new ventures and commercial opportunities, said the person. Two Sigma co-founders John Overdeck and David Siegel have a long-standing relationship with Hill, 70. The quantitative hedge fund firm has an investment from BAAM, as the Blackstone unit is known, the people said. The three billionaires also worked together on the board of directors at Hamilton Insurance Group Ltd. Hill joined Blackstone in 1993 and served as co-head of its corporate and M&A advisory group before being asked to build out the then-nascent hedge-fund business. Hill built BAAM from about $1 billion of mostly internal capital to the powerhouse it is today, expanding beyond the role of money allocator and into businesses such as seeding and acquiring stakes. The unit managed to flourish during a bleak decade for the fund-of-hedge fund industry, which has suffered 11 straight years of net withdrawals. Middle men have struggled as they delivered paltry performance while charging an extra layer of fees, prompting clients to bypass them. Assets managed by fund-of-funds have plunged by 22 percent from their $798 billion peak in 2007, according to Hedge Fund Research. BAAM almost tripled in size over that span. Investing in hedge funds had been a second career for Hill, who made a name for himself engaging in some of the biggest takeovers of the 1980s and whose work in the battle for RJR Nabisco was chronicled in the best-seller "Barbarians at the Gate." After co-founding the M&A department at First Boston and running a similar group at Smith Barney, Hill ascended to the top of Lehman Brothers, leading the investment banking practice and ultimately becoming co-CEO. He stepped back from BAAM's day-to-day oversight in January 2018, ceding the reins to John McCormick to become the unit's chairman before retiring from the firm. Two Sigma, which was founded in 2001 and is known for using complex mathematical algorithms to trade, has over the years expanded into other businesses. In 2009, it started a securities unit, which is a market maker for more than 8,000 listed securities, according to its website. Its venture-capital group, Two Sigma Ventures, has invested in more than 50 companies, and the private-equity arm, Sightway Capital, makes direct investments and allocates capital to outside managers. The company also has an insurance business. Representatives for Two Sigma and Blackstone declined to comment. Hill didn't reply to an e-mail seeking comment. --- Bloomberg's Alexandra Stratton, Hema Parmar and Melissa Karsh contributed to this report. Washington Post photo by Matt McClain Count Alyssa Milano among the vocal supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been accused by two women of acting inappropriately. The "Charmed" star, who is also an activist in the #MeToo movement, tweeted on Monday night about her friendship with Biden, citing his work fighting violence against women and his "It's On Us" initiative to raise awareness of sexual assault. "I believe that Joe Biden's intent has never been to make anyone uncomfortable, and that his kind, empathetic leadership is what our country needs," she wrote. "Especially now." In the feverish heyday of the "birther movement," conspiracy-hungry readers swarmed to a website called WorldNetDaily for the latest on the specious yet viral theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The site's founder, Joseph Farah - a former newspaperman with a dense, jet-black mustache and a cloak-and-dagger mystique - boasted in 2010 that he was well on the way to generating $10 million a year in revenue. His Northern Virginia-headquartered news site, known by the acronym WND, was having its moment by stoking rumors about Obama. But Farah - a conservative internet pioneer who'd once been labeled by the Clinton White House as part of a right-wing media conspiracy and was known to sport a pistol on his hip in the office - saw bigger things. Years earlier he'd launched one of the first large-scale digital newsgathering operations; now he wanted to be a player in Christian-themed movies and book publishing, churning out titles by big-name conservatives, such as anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and the future House Intelligence Committee chairman, Devin Nunes, R-Calif. He was building an empire. A decade later that realm is being sucked into a tornado of unpaid bills, pink-slipped employees, chaotic accounting, declining revenue and diminishing readership, according to interviews with more than 25 former employees, shareholders, company insiders and authors associated with the firm's flailing publishing units, as well as a review of hundreds of internal documents, including emails and financial statements obtained by The Washington Post. Even though Farah claimed in WND columns and emails to supporters last year to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations - including tax-deductible contributions - some former employees and contractors have been laid off or had their deals canceled without being paid money they say they were owed. Many authors who signed on with the site's publishing arm, including former Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, are fuming about allegedly not receiving royalties owed to them. Coburn recalled in an interview that he had a "very frank and disturbing" conversation last year with Farah about unpaid royalties for his 2017 book, "Smashing the D.C. Monopoly." "I accused him of not being honest," Coburn said. "He doesn't keep his commitments. He doesn't keep his word." Other authors, initially attracted to WND by the image Farah crafted for himself as a devout evangelical Christian, have groused that they paid WND's pay-to-publish division thousands of dollars to have their books printed but haven't received the royalties they were promised or other items, such as audio versions of their works. Their complaints, requests for basic accounting statements and pleas for help were largely ignored, according to emails and interviews with more than a dozen authors. Reached by phone last week, Farah's wife, Elizabeth - the site's co-founder with her husband - declined to discuss the accusations in detail, but added that "the angst of a former employee does not impress me as to the legitimacy of complaints." "It's a he-said, she-said," Elizabeth Farah said. Less than two hours after she was contacted by The Washington Post, WND posted a story saying Joseph Farah had recently suffered a serious, previously undisclosed stroke. Once a niche juggernaut with a devoted following and dozens of employees, WND has undergone a dramatic transformation. The site has left behind its upscale offices in Chantilly, Virginia, and now operates remotely via a small group of staffers scattered around the country. Farah wrote in a WND column in January that most of his staff is gone. "We are struggling to survive," he wrote. For months, Farah has blamed his site's troubles on a supposed cabal of powerful technology companies that he believes are suppressing traffic to WND and other conservative sites. He recently wrote that his company has lost 80 percent of its revenue since 2017 and has stopped publishing new books and making movies. "There has never been a force like the combined power of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon and Apple in the world before - at least not since the Tower of Babel," Farah wrote in a column earlier this year. "I'm talking about real 'collusion' - and having nothing to do with Russia." But interviews and documents show an organization that existed in almost constant crisis mode, chronically late in paying its employees and vendors, and wrestling with internal allegations about questionable spending by its founders and claims they were withholding information from the company's board and using company funds to support a comfortable lifestyle in the Washington suburbs. "Where did the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised by WND in 2018 from readers and other donors go?" said Felicia Dionisio, a longtime WND news writer and editor who ran the books division before being laid off last year. "It didn't go toward author royalties, it didn't go toward rehiring any of the many loyal employees who were laid off, it didn't go toward providing accurate and timely paychecks, and it didn't go toward making those who suffered due to cutbacks at WND whole." --- In the pre-internet era, Joseph Farah was a mainstream newsman, serving as executive news editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a major daily that competed with the much larger Los Angeles Times before shuttering in 1989. Later, as editor of the conservative Sacramento Union, he irked some staffers by taking a pointedly antiabortion stance. He made headlines by defending a decision by the paper's publisher to ban advertisements for movies rated NC-17. "NC-17 films are nothing more than X-rated films with a polite new name," Farah told United Press International in 1990. Farah's tenure at the Union was less than two years. Unmoored from the executive suite, he had a fallback. He wrote punchy columns - a chain-smoking dynamo whose colleagues marveled at how fast he could spin out prose. Farah, now in his mid-60s, was known for his promotion of the theory that deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster might have been the victim of foul play rather than committing suicide. He founded a nonprofit called the Western Journalism Center, then a for-profit venture, WorldNetDaily. Farah's new outfit seemed to some investors like a potential moneymaking internet play. At a time when traditional news operations were struggling to grasp the power of the internet, Farah was ahead of almost everyone, carving a path occupied by few others beyond Matt Drudge. Farah and his wife took an unusual route to cyber-success. They leased a 250-acre ranch in a stretch of rural southern Oregon known as "the imaginary state of Jefferson," according to Farah's book "Stop the Presses!" They invited staffers to move there with them, and called their ranch, with its cabins converted into offices, "the compound." The Farahs lived across the road in a log cabin. Farah was the face of the site. In 2000, he beat the world to the story of Jane Fonda becoming a born-again Christian. He's since described Fonda as a "whacked-out traitor" for her anti-Vietnam War activism. He wrote in his book that he'd served as a bodyguard for Fonda during a peace campaign tour in 1972; in those days he, too, was a Vietnam War protester. A few years after the Oregon move, the Farahs decided to relocate to the Washington, D.C., area. It was a place he called "the belly of the beast." Farah's scoops and his site's Clinton bashing attracted investors who shared his philosophy. But his spending habits, and those of his wife, were setting off alarm bells among some insiders who considered the couple reckless and undisciplined, according to interviews and internal documents obtained by The Post. As the firm's 10th anniversary approached, the Farahs planned a splashy celebration. They signed a contract with the Washington Hilton in 2006 but were saddled with huge cancellation and other costs when they were unable to generate enough interest to pull it offf, according to an internal memo. Executives turned to a wealthy donor to cover the costs. "We needed 200,000+ to bail out the Hilton 10th Anniversary snafu," the memo said. In 2008, Farah bought a book publishing firm, World Ahead Press, which took the name WND Books. In the years to come, he would also launch a filmmaking operation, complete with high-tech studios in Chantilly, and host a film festival. "They ran off in more than one direction," said a shareholder and former board member on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters. "The spending control was less than ideal." A change in corporate structure had stripped minority shareholders of much power, which was further concentrated in the hands of the Farahs, according to one internal document. Some complained that Farah needed to be more transparent about how much he and the rest of his family were being paid, according to emails and interviews. The shareholders said they wanted Farah to focus on his core business: the website, which was drawing up to 4 million unique visitors a month. Obama's election had given Farah the perfect foil: In 2009, the site dug in on the birther theory, publishing hundreds of articles pushing the notion that Obama's birth certificate was questionable. PolitiFact dubbed WND "the conductor of the Birther train." Then and now, Farah has attracted well-known figures to write for the site, including Jerome Corsi, who wrote a book questioning Obama's eligibility to be president and is a key witness in the special counsel probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election; and evangelical Christian leader James Dobson. His daughter, Alyssa Farah - now Vice President Mike Pence's press secretary - wrote for WND briefly in 2013 and 2014. Farah cultivated a secretive persona. He refused to meet at his office for a 2010 interview with the Los Angeles Times, only agreeing to sit down at a Starbucks in Virginia if the name of the town wasn't given. Inside the operation, troubles were percolating. A high-ranking executive had been raising concerns about Elizabeth Farah's spending on a company credit card, citing charges made to a wine shop, a clothing store, a cosmetics seller and a company that supplies materials for home-schooling, according to an internal memo obtained by The Post that lists each charge. "How are these specifically work related?" an internal April 2012 memo states. "Optically, these types of expenses look bad, especially when the company is upside down in terms of cash flow and accounts payable." "Huge red flag," the memo says. In spring 2015, Floyd Brown, an internet entrepreneur who served on WND's board, traveled to Missouri to tour the warehouse that shipped books and other materials sold in WND's online store, which still sells numerous items, including survivalist gear, such as water filtration straws and "Russian gas masks." He found pallets of unsold materials. "Inventory is a stone around your neck," Brown wrote in an email to a top WND executive. "You need to increase your writedowns so the board actually knows how that division is doing." When Joseph Farah found out about the trip, he sent an email to the company executive who arranged it, accusing himof an "inexcusable breach of confidence." "There is nothing materially new in the condition of the company's finances that would require alerting the board," Farah wrote. "We have been consistently behind on payables and obligations for years." Brown confirmed the substance of the exchange with Farah, but added, "I have the greatest respect and admiration for Joseph Farah and what he has done at WND.com." --- In early 2017, an email landed in the inbox of the husband of a stay-at-home mother of three in Wisconsin. It was just what Diane Anthony thought she needed. She'd been working on a novel titled "Supernova" about a worldwide calamity that killed hordes of people but gave super powers to the survivors. The email offered a deal: World Ahead Press, a publishing arm of WND, would publish her book for a fee, promote it for her and give her a share of sales proceeds. Anthony sifted through the different publishing options, each with a different price tag attached. "We thought that if we're helping our fellow Christians, that seems like a good road to go down," she said in a recent interview. "We went for the most expensive package." It cost $9,999. At points scattered across the country, others reached the same conclusion: They could trust WND because of its Christian values. In Florida, Patricia Feijo dug into her dwindling savings for $9,999 to tell her version of her husband's imprisonment for promoting unapproved cancer treatments through their ministry, Daniel Chapter One, in a book titled "Called to Stand: How a Small Christian Ministry Courageously Stood Up to Government Tyranny." In Virginia, Rita Dunaway - an attorney who contributed columns to WND - struck a more traditional publishing deal, in which she would receive royalties but not have to pay for publication. Each of the women would have their expectations shattered. Calls and emails went unreturned. Anthony and Feijo said they hadn't gotten audiobooks they'd been promised. Dunaway felt she was getting excuses about the months-long delay in publishing her book. By January 2018 they got a clearer picture of what was happening. Joseph Farah wrote a column outlining WND's financial woes and saying his company faced an "existential threat." "It pains me to tell you that many loyal WND staffers are working without salary to pull us through a crisis," he wrote. "I'm asking for the help of those who recognize the unique role WND plays in reaching the God-fearing audience that, like us, supports limited government, national sovereignty and the traditional Judeo-Christian values that made America truly great." Within a few days of his January call for help, he announced that he'd raised $100,000. By March he'd announced that $200,000 had been raised in a column headlined "Mission accomplished! Operation 'Save WND' successful." But before the month was out, payroll was late again, according to an email Joseph Farah sent to staff. His wife notified the staff that dental and vision insurance had been cut off. As the crisis worsened, Dunaway found another publisher for her book "Restoring America's Soul: Advancing Timeless Conservative Principles in a Wayward Culture." But not before telling Farah by email that "I really am at a loss to understand this kind of treatment at the hands of someone I considered to be a brother in Christ." WND had a variety of publishing arrangements. Some of the better-known figures such as Coburn did not pay to have their books printed. Instead, they were promised royalties and in some cases received advances, according to internal documents and interviews. Coburn, who says his contract called for royalties but no advance, worked out a deal in which WND sent him copies of his book in lieu of royalties that he said he was owed. "It's been a downhill ride ever since it was published," Coburn said. "Everybody seems to have problem with them." --- While his company was reeling, Farah kept coming up with new plans to salvage it. In late 2018, he became entranced with bitcoin, the digital currency. In a staff meeting, according to Dionisio and another person who participated, Farah outlined his plans to offer bitcoin to the public in return for donations, and he suggested that employees get in on the deal. "We couldn't believe that here we were waiting for our paychecks and here he is asking us to buy bitcoin," Dionisio said. "We were like, 'Oh my gosh, we're in crazytown now.'" Bitcoin couldn't save WND, either. This month, Farah was once again asking for money and railing against the tech companies he blames for his site's troubles. "There is no end in sight," the founder wrote. "There are only three forces on Earth powerful enough to take on this hateful, un-American, left-wing, anti-God monopoly - this new Tower of Babel. Those three forces are God, the U.S. government and you, the American people." --- The Washington Post's Alice Crites contributed to this report. ALTON Alton Catholic Childrens Home welcomed Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of the Catholic Diocese of Springfield Monday afternoon for a blessing and dedication of Our Lady of Fatima. Executive Director of the Catholic Childrens Home Steve Roach said the Lady of Fatima statue, which sits in the front lawn on the childrens home on State Street, was vandalized beyond repair last year and pleased to see the handcrafted replacement receive a blessing and dedication. Shes our protector so it feels like were being protected again, Roach said. The Catholic Childrens Home has a long history dating back to 1816, Bishop Paprocki said. Theres a long great history of caring for children who are in need, its very fitting that children under the care of the Catholic Childrens Home are under the protection of our Blessed Mother Lady of Fatima. Bishop Paprocki stated the with the history of the Catholic Childrens Home in Alton dating back 100 years its only fitting to seek protection from Lady Fatima for children currently being cared for and those who are no longer living. This image will remind us of the close ties of Mary to Christ and his church, Paprocki said. First of all, she is Christs mother, the mother of the visible image of the invisible God. But she is also the image and the model of the church and she is their exemplar. Prior to blessing, a prayer and a psalm were read before Bishop Paprocki sprinkled holy water on the statue blessing the statue and those who look upon it in the name of the father, son and holy spirit. TANABE, Japan - An event will be held in early April at Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Tanabe, honoring the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969), to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. His teachings have spread worldwide, with aikido practitioners active in 140 countries and regions. Ueshiba Morihei Ou Kenshokai, an organization established to honor the aikido founder, will in collaboration with other organizations hold commemorative ceremonies on Saturday and Sunday at Kumano Hongu Taisha in Tanabe's Hongucho district, or elsewhere. "By honoring his great achievements, we want to use this opportunity to further spread his legacy," a person linked to the organization said. When Ueshiba was 19 years old, he moved to Tokyo. A keen interest in martial arts led him to develop the original discipline of aikido. In his teachings, he explained that aikido is not about defeating an opponent, but a way to keep peace in the world. According to the Aikikai Foundation, headquartered in Tokyo, there are about 2,400 aikido dojos and organizations nationwide, and more than 1 million practitioners in 140 countries and regions. Ueshiba's grandson, Moriteru, 68, is the current head of the foundation. Tsutomu Sugawa, 73, the head of Aikido Kumanojuku dojo in Shingu, also in Wakayama Prefecture, said Ueshiba was "god-like and had a good heart." Sugawa, who lives in Hongucho, joined an aikikai dojo when he was 17. He first met Ueshiba when he was 20 years old during a visit to Tokyo's Aikikaido Hombu Dojo. Even after Ueshiba moved to the Kanto region, he was deeply attached to Kumano Hongu Taisha. It is believed he visited the shrine over 100 times. Sugawa said that when he told Ueshiba that he came from Hongucho, Ueshiba was so delighted. According to Sugawa, Ueshiba called himself a child of the god of Kumano Hongu Taisha and said that aikido represents the soul of the god. After that, Sugawa saw a demonstration by Ueshiba. He recalled the scene, saying: "Amazing was the only word to describe what I felt. It really was a blissful moment." In recent years, foreigners come to see the Kumanojuku dojo and some of them take lessons there, Sugawa said, making him feel that the popularity of aikido is growing overseas. "Aikido is not a sport but a martial art. Having the teachings of aikido in mind, we'd like to hold a ceremony to express our gratitude," he said. The commemorative ceremony is coorganized by Ueshiba Morihei Ou Kenshokai and other entities. The ceremony involves many Shinto rituals, but an event to be held at Oyunohara - where the shrine was originally located - will be open to the public. A special training session will be held at the Aikido Hombu Dojo in Tokyo from 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, open to the public. Visitors can see Ueshiba's great-grandson Mitsuteru, 37, and his 100 disciples practice. Republican lawmakers in Virginia blame Democrats for preventing a public hearing into allegations made by two women who say Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, D, sexually assaulted them years ago. In a statement Tuesday, House Speaker Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, said that Republicans had made several attempts to negotiate terms with Democrats over what would be an unprecedented public hearing but that the minority leader, Del. Eileen Filler-Corn, D-Fairfax, "has made clear that she will not agree to a bipartisan General Assembly hearing of any nature." "There should be no mistake about what has happened here: the alleged victims are seeking a bipartisan hearing; Republicans are seeking a bipartisan hearing; Democrats in the House of Delegates are refusing to allow that to happen," Cox said. Filler-Corn, in a March 31 letter to Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle, called the allegations against Fairfax serious and noted that House Democrats have called on him to resign. But she said that the matter was best left to law enforcement professionals and that a public hearing could "easily be exploited for political purposes." This is an election year in Virginia, when all 140 seats in the legislature will be on the ballot. Republicans have already seized on the Fairfax allegation and two other scandals, involving Gov. Ralph Northam, D, and Attorney General Mark Herring, D, in arguing that voters should back Republicans. Earlier Tuesday, Meredith Watson, one of two women who have accused Fairfax of sexual assault, urged the legislature to hold a public hearing during her first televised interview. "I want action from the Virginia legislature," Watson told interviewer Gayle King on "CBS This Morning." "There is no amount of money that could ever compensate what he did to me or what I live with every day. I want the people of Virginia to know the truth, and I would like the Virginia legislature to do the right thing." Watson says Fairfax sexually assaulted her in 2000 when both were undergraduate students at Duke University. Her television appearance came a day after the CBS program aired an interview with Vanessa Tyson, who accused the lieutenant governor of forcing her to perform oral sex during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Fairfax says both encounters were consensual. In a statement, Fairfax said he is a "strong proponent of the rights of women in our society - among them equal rights, reproductive rights, economic rights, the right to be heard and respected, the right to fair access to the criminal justice system, and right to be free from disrespect, harassment, and assault." "At the same time, I also believe that we must find a way to ensure that our justice system and even the court of public opinion provide due process and fairness both to accusers and the accused," he said. "I, for one, stand accused of crimes that I did not commit." The women made their allegations public in early February when it appeared Fairfax might succeed Northam, who was considering resigning after a racist photo from his past came to light and he admitted that he wore blackface as a young man for a dance contest. Through his aides, Fairfax, a 40-year-old lawyer, said he voluntarily took and passed two polygraph tests that prove the allegations are false. Both women want the legislature to hold a public hearing in which they and Fairfax would testify under oath. Republican lawmakers said in late February they would invite the women to testify, but Democrats and Fairfax have resisted the idea. Cox said they tried again in March but could not reach agreement with Democrats. Lawmakers return to Richmond on Wednesday for a one-day session to finish legislative work. Watson, a Maryland resident, said in the interview that she went public with her story after Tyson came forward, in a show of solidarity. "It happened to her after it happened to me," Watson said, fighting tears. "Had I had the strength or courage to say something in 2000, maybe it never would have happened to her. . . . Nobody should have to go through this. And I feel awful. I feel awful." Watson said she was "very good friends" with Fairfax at Duke. She said Fairfax invited her to hang out in his room but then locked the door and turned off the light before advancing on her while she was on a couch. "He did things that you shouldn't do to someone without their permission, and I tried several times to get up and leave and was pushed back down," Watson said. "He forcibly sexually assaulted and raped me." Watson pushed back on Fairfax's contention that the encounter was consensual. "If you have to hold someone down, it's not consensual," she said. Watson said she told two of her closest friends at the time that Fairfax assaulted her. A former Duke student told The Washington Post that Watson described an assault in the spring of 2000 and named Fairfax. Watson's attorney also provided a 2016 email exchange in which Watson declined an invitation to a Fairfax campaign fundraiser from a friend from Duke, saying he raped her in college. There is no statute of limitations for felony sexual assault in North Carolina. The Durham district attorney, Satana Deberry, reached out to Watson's attorney in February, but Watson's team has said she is not interested in filing a criminal complaint. "She has no interest in becoming a media personality or reliving the trauma that has greatly affected her life," Nancy Erika Smith, Watson's attorney, said in a February statement. Fairfax has invoked race while defending against the assault allegations, likening himself to lynching victims at times. Watson and Tyson are black. Watson said she felt some pressure to keep quiet, so as not to damage the reputation of a black public figure. "You are seen as betraying your race. You are seen as betraying black men," Watson said. "But there's no recognition that a black man has betrayed you." EDWARDSVILLE The ongoing battle over financial records between the Madison County administration and the Auditors Office took another turn after a judge granted a temporary restraining order against the administration. The order delays implementation of a County Board resolution requiring Auditor Rick Faccin to release detailed financial information to the administration. On Friday Faccin filed a suit seeking a judgment and injunction against Madison County Board Chairman Kurt Prenzler, Administrator Doug Hulme, Treasurer Chris Slusser and the Madison County Board, to keep them from enforcing a resolution passed March 20 requiring Faccin to turn over detailed financial documents. The resolution passed 13-12 with four members absent, and at the time Faccin said he would refuse to provide the information. At a hearing Monday afternoon, Circuit Judge Sarah Smith granted the restraining order and set a hearing date of April 23 on a preliminary injunction. In the hearing, Tom Rosenfeld, representing Faccin, kept bringing up the ongoing investigation against the administration by the Illinois Attorney Generals Office, while former Madison County States Attorney Don Weber, who was representing Prenzler and Hulme, brought up former Treasurer Fred Bathon and kept referring to the kingdom of Faccin. Smith noted that the investigation, an ongoing issue arising from January 2018 raids on the administration offices by a special task force. A judge later told the Madison County States Attorneys Office to turn the investigation over to the Illinois Attorney Generals Office. Assistant Madison County States Attorney Jeff Ezra was representing the County Board and Slusser. Faccin had argued in county board and committee meetings, and Rosenfeld at the court hearing, that releasing the information could violate the privacy of employees, customers and others, including members of grand juries, because of some of the information contained in the documents. Rosenfeld said the potential unlawful dissemination of information could cause irreparable harm. Once the genie is out of the bottle there is not putting it back in, he said. One issue was that the resolution said information could be sent to a designee, of the administration or County Board, without specifying who they would be. Weber said administrators need the information to fulfill their duties, saying that What we have here is an assertion of the kingdom of Faccin, a phrase he repeated multiple times during the hearing. He said the County Board has full authority to inspect all county financial records. Ezra argued that the County Board has the right to the information, and the resolution doesnt interfere with Faccins duties. In approving the restraining order, Smith said that the factors she was considering were that Faccin and the Auditors Office has a duty to safeguard the documents, and the improper release of the information could cause harm. After some additional discussion between Smith and the attorneys an evidentiary hearing on the request for a preliminary injunction was set for 9 a.m. April 23. Reach reporter Scott Cousins at 618-208-6447. WASHINGTON - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Tuesday offered some advice to former vice president Joe Biden, who has been under heightened scrutiny for his intimate physical style with women: "Join the straight arm club" and shake hands with people as if you both have colds. Pelosi said she doesn't consider Biden's behavior "disqualifying" for the presidency but said "he has to understand that in the world we're in now, people's space is important to them." Her comments came during an interview with Politico reporters in front of a live audience. Pressed about accusations from women who've said Biden made them uncomfortable, Pelosi shared that she has a very different style of interacting with people. "I'm a member of the straight arm club," she said, extending a stiff arm out to demonstrate. She added that she pretends both parties have colds and suggested Biden do the same. Pelosi said she has known Biden for decades and shared that her grandchildren "love Joe Biden," adding: "He's a very affectionate person." Biden, who has appeared to be on the cusp of announcing a bid for Democratic presidential nomination, is facing questions about whether a self-described "tactile politician" is well-suited for the White House in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In recent days, two women have come forward to say they were uncomfortable and offended by episodes in which the then-vice president touched them without their consent. Late last week, Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state legislator, wrote an essay in which she said that Biden acted inappropriately toward her at a 2014 campaign event. In a statement Monday, a former congressional aide, Amy Lappos, said she was speaking out about her own experience at a 2009 fundraiser because she was disappointed in the "ridiculously dismissive" way that Democrats, including Biden, have responded to Flores's account. Biden has said he never acted inappropriately but will "listen respectfully" to women who have been offended. On Tuesday, Pelosi also said it's important in any communication to know how your words or actions are being perceived. "It isn't what you intended, it's how it was received," she said. "It's how it is received, so to say I'm sorry that you were offended is not an apology." EDWARDSVILLE Three veterans from the Alton-Wood River area have filed suit against major drug companies, distributors and drug stores, claiming the firms over-promoted opioids, leading to them becoming addicted. Joel Biship, of Wood River, Dean Colman, of Alton and Pete Lavite, of Wood River, have named major drug manufacturers, such as Purdue Pharma, wholesale distributors such as McKesson and retailers, such as Walgreen Co. The suit claims the companies targeted veterans for their own financial gain, especially after Sept. 11, 2001. They allegedly targeted veterans because they were more likely to suffer from chronic pain. As an example, Purdue allegedly paid $200,000 to the Veterans Affairs Pain Management team to create pro-opioid propaganda, the suit claims. The firms allegedly promoted a publication titled Exit Wounds, which characterized opioids as underused and the gold standard of pain medications. The publication was aimed specifically at returning veterans. In 2009, military doctors wrote four times as many prescriptions for narcotic pain pails as they had in 2001, the suit claims. Bishop was a machine gunner in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2006. After coming home, he sustained injuries to his back, feet and calf, according to the complaint. He was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and was prescribed opioids, such as morphine and oxycodone. After becoming addicted to opioids, veteran Bishop became ensnared in addiction and suffers with that addiction and substance abuse dependence, the suit alleges. The addiction allegedly caused a wide variety of emotional problems. Colman is a veteran of the Marine Corps who served in Desert Storm and Desert Shield in 1989 in Iraq. In 1999 he underwent surgery to repair his cervical spine. He was also given opioids, such as Oxycontin and hydrocodone. He also became addicted and suffered injuries, the suit claims. Lavite was a Marine who served from 1986 to 1990 in Japan. He was prescribed opioids in 2002 and became addicted, the suit claims, After becoming addicted to opioids, veteran Lavite began purchasing opioids through illicit means to support his addiction. Purdue is one of several drug companies which allegedly used deception to market opioids, the suit claims. The plaintiffs claim the firms spread aggressive and false marketing aimed at leading doctors, distributed false and misleading literature about opioids, distributed biased treatment guidelines that called for more widespread use of the drugs than science justified, sponsored continuing medical education programs that spread deceptive messages about the drugs, and otherwise spread deceptive information about the benefits and risks of opioids. Specifically, the firms downplayed the risk of addiction and denied the risks of taking increasingly higher doses of opioids. The suit claims the firms were warned by government regulators on numerous occasions about the lack of support for their claims. The suit claims the firms recruited hundreds of sales representatives and trained them to sell opioids for uses that were not safe. The firms allegedly intentionally stigmatized addicts that the addicts are reckless criminals in order to conceal the drugs true nature. The distributors allegedly ignored state and federal laws aimed at addressing the expanding use of the drugs and supplied them to suspicious doctors and failed to report suspicious orders to the Drug Enforcement Agency. The veterans are represented by Edward W. Unsell of East Alton, Edward M. Tjaden of St. Louis and Greg Shevlin of Belleville. WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump, eager to tout bipartisan accomplishments in a sharply polarized Washington, feted his months-old criminal justice law with an elaborate celebration Monday - while the White House and Congress come under renewed pressure from advocates to adequately fund the programs it created. The passage of the First Step Act in December marked one of Trump's most significant bipartisan achievements in his first two years - as congressional Democrats, Republicans and the administration coalesced behind legislation that reduces mandatory minimum sentences for certain nonviolent offenders while creating programs intended to cut down on an inmate's likelihood to committing new crimes once released. Yet criminal justice advocates were alarmed last month when the administration's budget proposal only requested $14 million to implement the new law in the upcoming fiscal year - a number that fell far short of the $75 million per year as outlined by the First Step Act. The lower figure came in part because the budget process wrapped up before the legislation was signed into law in December, one administration official said. In the past few days, the administration has quietly revised that figure upward to about $147 million, which would include funding to implement not only the new law but related prisoner-rehabilitation expenses, according to advocates. A White House official confirmed Monday that the administration plans to ask for $147 million in the next budget year. The Justice Department, which oversees implementation of the law, said the current budget proposal asks for $16.5 million for implementing the First Step Act but noted that "additional funding will be necessary." "My administration intends to fully fund and implement this historic law," Trump told a crowded East Room packed with advocates, lawmakers and people who have benefited from the legislation. "It's happening, and it's happening, fast." Flanked by people who have already been released under the law, Trump said 16,000 inmates have already enrolled in drug treatment programs through the new law. Advocates for the First Step Act are pleased that the administration has revisited its original budget request. "It's clear that they're actually trying to increase the amount that they will be getting," said Jessica Jackson, the national director and co-founder of #cut50, a criminal justice advocacy group that pushed for passage of the First Step Act. She said she believed the $147 million figure was sufficient and that the "administration takes this very seriously." Both the House Appropriations and the House Budget committees could not confirm the new $147 million number, and the change will likely require the administration to send lawmakers a budget amendment with the revised figures, according to an aide for the appropriations panel. More than once in recent days, Trump has walked back his own administration's budget figures for broadly popular or politically significant programs amid public pressure. His administration initially proposed zeroing out federal support for the Special Olympics, but Trump reversed that late last week after sustained public backlash. And during a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last week, Trump announced that he would back full funding for an initiative to clean up the Great Lakes despite the fact that his own budget slashed money for the effort by at least 90 percent from the current $300 million level. The administration's March budget identified $14 million for expenses related to the First Step Act, which had been requested for the "development of new and innovative pilot programs designed to address the needs of individuals incarcerated in Federal prisons." "It could've been an oversight," speculated Marc Levin, the vice president of criminal justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. "The administration's been trying to rein in federal spending overall, which is admirable, but what we found at the state level is if we don't invest in alternatives to prison or reentry programs, then we aren't able to break the reentry cycle." Advocates made their discontent known once the Trump administration's budget figure for the First Step Act was unveiled in mid-March. "We were deeply frustrated," said Holly Harris, the executive director of the Justice Action Network, said of the initial $14 million figure. "I think it just shows that again, this is just the beginning of this journey." Years in the making, the First Step Act significantly scaled back certain sentencing laws - such as the so-called three-strikes penalty for drug felonies, which was cut from a mandatory life behind bars to 25 years. It also retroactively limited the disparity in sentencing guidelines between crack and powder cocaine offenses, a gap that advocates say disproportionately punished black people. The prison changes allowed certain nonviolent offenders to earn time credits for participating in programs aimed at reducing recidivism, while implementing other changes in federal prisons such as banning shackling of pregnant women and allowing some elderly and ill inmates to be released early. "Obviously, it's a major undertaking so there's bound to be some challenges," Levin said. But "the White House is really committed to making this work." MEXICO CITY - President Donald Trump is threatening to shut down the U.S. border with Mexico because the country "refuses to help with illegal immigration." The reality is much more complicated. Mexico actually works closely with the U.S. government on irregular migration. Mexico deports thousands of immigrants each month, most from Central America. That's continued under a new leftist president who has promised more-humane policies on migration. Authorities have announced plans to deploy security forces to a "containment" belt north of the Guatemalan border. Last year, they agreed to host migrants who are applying for asylum in the United States while their cases make their way through the U.S. courts. Data from the first three months of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's administration shows little change in detentions from the same period a year earlier. Mexican officials detained 25,483 migrants in the three consecutive months that began in December 2018, according to the University of Texas' Mexico Security Initiative, down slightly from the 27,455 detained during the same three-month period the year before. But there appear to be far more migrants crossing the country. That's evident at the U.S. border, where detentions are soaring. "U.S. apprehensions have doubled, suggesting the number of people crossing through Mexico doubled," said Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative. The percentage detained by Mexico, in other words, has dropped. There appear to be a variety of reasons for the decline. One is that Mexican authorities might not be organized to handle the surge. "It's a question of institutional capacity," said Gustavo Mohar, a former top Mexican intelligence and immigration official. Illegal immigration is handled by Mexico's National Migration Institute. "But the Migration Institute has very few resources," Mohar said. "It has few personnel." Another problem is the arrival of migrants from Central America over the past year in caravans of thousands. Mexican authorities initially let them cross into the country. As the migrants attracted global media coverage, officials apparently feared that rounding them up would bring criticism or lead to bloodshed. The Mexican government initially "thought it was only going to be a caravan or two," Mohar said. "But the signal they sent encouraged people," he said, and more caravans formed. Under Lopez Obrador, authorities issued thousands of humanitarian visas to the migrants, allowing them to stay and work in Mexico. The program drew an overwhelming response, and authorities shut it down in late January. Many of the migrants used the visas to travel to the U.S. border. Mexico is now trying to design a system in which would-be migrants would apply for humanitarian visas in their home countries. It's expected to launch in May. In the meantime, authorities announced that they would provide humanitarian visas starting Monday to some of the 2,500 migrants currently in the southern state of Chiapas, giving priority to women, children and the elderly. Most will probably receive visas because they are in families traveling together. Lopez Obrador said Monday that Mexico was helping to control the migrants' passage. "We have to establish order in this migratory flow so that it is legal and, at the same time, human rights are protected," he told a news conference. Mexico is taking other steps to restrict irregular migration. Interior Minister Olga Sanchez Cordero announced recently that authorities would deploy security forces to form a containment belt across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico's narrowest point, about 200 miles north of the Guatemalan border. Mexico's most audacious step might be its agreement to become a sort of waiting room for migrants as they go through the process of seeking U.S. political asylum. That's part of a Trump administration program known as the Migration Protection Protocols. "This is a radical change in Mexican foreign policy," said Jorge Durand, an immigration expert at the University of Guadalajara. One area where Mexico hasn't had much success is in reducing the corruption that allows smugglers to move thousands of people through the country. Smugglers have taken to using express buses to whisk migrants to the border, apparently with the complicity of some police and immigration officials, analysts say. The buses "are facilitated completely by corruption," said Leutert. EDWARDSVILLE Last November, the election booths were filled as people practiced their right to vote. The turnout Tuesday, however, left the voting booths emptier than in the past. I think its the slowest one weve ever had, so far, election judge Tom Finley said. According to Finley and Mendez, another election judge, the April 2 consolidated election was very localized and not many people are as interested in voting in this election as they are others. This is an off, off year. We have aldermen and school board, and thats basically it, Mendez said. I think the school board is extremely important, but a lot of people, if they dont have kids, they dont realize what the school board does. Early voting turnout was also low, while last year many people voted both early and on Election Day. The early voting this time was very, very light and last time early voting was very heavy so we thought we were going to have a light midterm election, but it did not turn out that way, Mendez said. For James Pete Evans, a retired Edwardsville teacher, since voting has not always been a right for African Americans in the United States, it is important for him to get out and vote. I was born and raised in East St. Louis, and in 1968 it was the first national election that all black people were allowed to vote in the 50 States of America. It was supposed to have been allowed, but in the South, it was not allowed; there were a lot of reasons why people didnt vote, Evans said. My parents believed in voting, and they vote. I vote, and I always have. According to election judge Carol Frisse, voting is part of the democracy this country has that many others do not and people do not always realize the privilege of being able to vote. I think anytime you have to vote [is important]. I think we need to realize that in a lot of countries they dont have this opportunity and up until not too many years ago, women didnt ever have the opportunity, Frisse said. Everybody should get out and vote. Reach reporter Breanna Booker at bre.booker@edwpub.net Elon Musk began learning to programme at the age of 9. Mark Zuckerberg started at 10. Bill Gates wrote his first software program at the age of 13. These words come from a commercial used by many coding institutions for children in China. In recent years, an increasing number of parents are enrolling their children in extracurricular coding classes, hoping to give them a head start in today's online and computer-centric world. Robots dance as children look on during an exhibition in an amusement park in Handan City of north China's Hebei Province, Aug. 18, 2017. Children in vacation are attracted to learn more about the AI machines. (Xinhua/Hao Qunying) According to the Chinas Children Programming Industry Research Report released by iResearch, as of October 2018, the market size of the children's programming industry was worth about three billion to four billion yuan (446 million to 595 million US dollars), and the user scale was approximately 15.5 million people. With the expansion of this niche market, the emerging industry of children's programming education has received considerable financing. According to public reports, in 2017, nearly 20 coding education institutions for children in China received funding. The most prominent institution is Codemao. After receiving 120 million yuan (17.82 million US dollars) in Series B financing in November 2017, Codemao got a new round financing of 300 million yuan (44.55 million US dollars) just six months later. Children's interest is the priority for learning In 2013, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other organizations launched the Hour of Code campaign in the United States, which to date, over 100 million students have tried worldwide. In 2014, the UK implemented a national computer course that included coding for children as young as five years old. If you don't understand programming, you will be the new illiterate. If you are unable to code, you will lose your ability to survive. With the rapid development of information technology, some parents are suffering from scientific anxiety. In July 2017, the State Council of China issued the document of the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan. More AI-related and coding courses are expected to be set up in primary and secondary schools, to gradually promote coding, and encourage the entire society to participate in the development and promotion of coding software and games. In 2017, Zhejiang Province issued a new college entrance examination policy, which stipulated candidates' elective subjects, including ideology and politics, history, geography, physics, chemistry, biology and technology, which contains general technology and information technology. In the college entrance examination, students can choose three of these seven subjects. Programming is included in the category of technology. However, when several parents were interviewed, it became clear that scientific anxiety and tough entrance exams were not the main reasons that parents enrolled their children in coding classes. Zhang Xuesha, a Beijing citizen, told Peoples Daily Online that the reason she signed up for a programming class for her child is to help with her child's concentration, logical thinking, and creativity. The content of the coding class must be suitable for the children's learning stage. Destructive encouragement does not have good effects. Therefore, the best way is to follow the children's cognitive growth, Zhang emphasized. Many parents regard LEGO training as a stepping stone to programming training. Another Beijing mother, Jiang Yanhui, told Peoples Daily Online that her child Hanhan began LEGO classes at age 4. In January, a Denver couple received a scam phone call from a man who told them he had kidnapped their daughter. The man was convincing that their daughter was in his possession. In the background, they heard a womans voice begging for help. The call was convincing enough that they tried to wire money to the man. Fortunately, the money didnt go through. Police soon showed up after the wife left a note with the bank teller explaining what was happening. The police determined it was a scam. A 90-year-old friend received a call a couple of years back. The caller explained that he was with the Internal Revenue Service. He alleged my friend was $40,000 behind in his federal taxes and that payment had to be made immediately. My friend didnt owe anybody and had always been a model citizen. The worry and fear for this 90 year old man were more than he could handle. He committed suicide a few days after the call. Several years ago, I received a call after my son had boarded a submarine. I would not be able to communicate with him for several months. The caller in a convincing voice stated my son owed $350 and if not paid immediately he would file charges against him that would be negative toward his military career. I explained he would not be available for awhile. The caller insisted that someone needed to intervene to prevent the black mark against my son. You guessed it. I fell for it and paid the demanded money. Of course, within a couple of hours and some research, I knew I had been scammed. Somehow, somewhere there is someone keeping an eye on soldiers families that they can catch at a vulnerable moment and scam them. When you are scammed you feel like an idiot when its over. Its embarrassing. However, these telephone artists are professionals. This is all they do every day. In places like Nigeria where many of these calls originate from people go to work from 9 to 5 every day like you go to your daily job. Only, their daily job is to come up with real life convincing lies to scam you out of your hard earned money. Some of us have only lost a few hundred dollars but others have lost thousands and in the case of my friend, he ended his life over a very believable telephone call. I remember our first telephone. I was about 9 years old. Telephone calls were cool. I talked to friends on the telephone for hours. When the telephone rang we knew it was family or friends calling and answering it was enjoyable and important. Today, a ringing telephone is a nuisance. Some days I receive five to ten calls from local numbers who end up being people selling health insurance, credit cards, student loan payoffs, car warranties, scams pertaining to taxes owed and numerous others. Thus, I no longer answer the phone if I dont recognize the number. Leave a message and I promise Ill call you back. If the person calling you is real and legitimate they wont mind leaving you a message and a real number to return the call. Glenn Mollette can be reached at at GMollette@aol.com. FYI: Seven out of ten people in the state of Georgia are apparently going to hell. At least thats what Doyle Kelley, a fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher claims. Kelley made this prediction last month while delivering an invocation in the Georgia State House chamber in his capacity as Chaplain for the Day. Admonishing the legislators to Do all in the name of Jesus Christ, he then stated that Seventy percent of the people in the state of Georgia are on their way to Hell. The preacher is quite certain about that figure. The statistics came out that theres seventy percent of the people in the state of Georgia that are lost, Kelley noted. He then attempted to flesh out that percentage by explaining, There are over ten million people in the state of Georgia, which translates into seven million people lost. Georgians were understandably curious about the source of Kelleys seventy percent statistic. Trey Kelley, his son who serves as a Republican legislator, told the media that his father bases this number on a poll that refers to the percentage of people seven out of ten who dont claim church membership or religious affiliation. Kelleys invocation didnt meet with the approval of everyone in the chamber. Josh McLaurin, a Democratic legislator, protested that Kelleys prayer might well have been unconstitutional. His point is well taken. The Supreme Court in its 1983 Marsh v. Chambers case ruled that the state of Nebraskas tradition of opening its sessions with a prayer didnt violate the Establishment Clause. The court noted, however, that the content of the prayer didnt indicate the prayer opportunity has been exploited to proselytize or advance any one or to disparage any other faith or belief. I think we can agree that an exhortation to Do all in the name of Jesus Christ marginalizes Jews and other non-Christians. And to argue that those who dont claim church membership or religious affiliation are going to hell disparages persons of other faiths and beliefs. As a child, I was taught that my fellow Roman Catholics had an inside track to heaven. Non-Catholics could reach heaven only if they were invincibly ignorant and couldnt grasp the truth of Catholicism. This theology argued for a heaven populated only by Catholics and really dumb non-Catholics. Doorbell-ringers from Clifton Baptist Church, a fundamentalist house of God back in the day, once informed me that only Biblical fundamentalists such as the members of their church would enter heaven. Emmett Cox, the churchs pastor, asked me if I knew where Id go when I died. I replied, Probably just up the street to Staten Funeral Home. Cox and his evangelical companion immediately gave me up for lost and moved on to the next house. Christians who have embraced the Calvinist doctrine of predestination believe that God ordained at the beginning of time who would enter heaven. Those predestined for hell cant attain heaven through church membership, professions of faith, good works or any combination thereof. Rev. Frank S. C. Wicks, a Unitarian minister, preached a sermon in 1907 titled Good Men in Hell in which he argued that compassionate persons would never accept the bliss of heaven while other human beings suffered in hell simply because they didnt believe in a particular dogma. Indeed, those who possess empathy and compassion would go to comfort the damned. Fear might drive a man to the acceptance of salvation, Wicks said, but love drives him to the very pit of hell. Ive stood with the marginalized and excluded all my life. If I have the opportunity to stand with them after I die, I fully intend to do so. And I wont be the only one. Psalm 139:8 reads: If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. God, too, stands with the rejected. **** John J. Dunphys latest book, Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials, includes interviews with men who served in the U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group. The USAID fundedRegional Health Integration to Enhance Services North, Lango Project(RHITES-N, Lango) is operating in the nine districts of the Lango sub-region ofnorthern Uganda (Alebtong, Amolatar, Apac, Dokolo, Kole, Kwania, Lira, Otukeand Oyam). RHITES-N, Lango will increase the effective use of sustainablehealth services in the region. The Project is led by John Snow, Inc. inpartnership with African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref), Doctors withAfrica (CUAMM), The Medical Concierge Group (TMCG) and Another Option. Theproject will contribute to measurable improvements in key Ugandan nationalhealth indicators (HIV; tuberculosis [TB]; malaria, maternal, newborn, andchild health [MNCH]; family planning [FP]; water, sanitation, and hygiene[WASH]; and nutrition).USAID RHITES-N,Lango will facilitate the recruitment of qualified Ugandans on behalf of LiraRRH. The hospital is a 400 bed hospital situated in Lira Municipality in Liratown with a catchment population of about 2.3 million people. It is a referralfacility offering both specialized and general services. The Administrative Management Assistant (EXOPlanning Coordinator) is located in the Executive Officer (EXO), USAID/Uganda.S/he is the alter ego to the Executive Officer and thus plays a vital role inhelping the Executive Officer (EXO) to ensure the integrity, efficiency andeffectiveness of administrative operations, identifying processes and areas forstrengthening systems and recommending improvements needed under the theInternational Cooperative Administrative Support Services (ICASS) mechanism. Specifically,the position will perform coordination and planning duties as assigned by theExecutive Officer (EXO), develop work plans, provide advice and guidance onoverall Mission operations/logistical support provided under ICASS includingspace management, supply (EXP), non-expendable property (NXP), procurement andshipping services. In coordination with USAID Office of Financial Management(OFM), monitor service level agreements and expenditures, provide substantialinput into procurement budgets, interpret government regulations. Reports tothe Supervisory EXO. The incumbent will share responsibility with other E~IOstaff for achieving an integrated customer service program for the USAID/Ugandainternational and local staff that continues to grow. The EXO has four (4)customer service divisions namely the EXO/Information Services Division; theEXO/Personnel, EXO/Travel and EXO/Records Management. The incumbent is expectedto contribute to these four service divisions: 1) applying technical expertiseto strategic planning; 2) contributing to and collaborating with otherUSAID/Uganda offices and teams to ensure they achieve their set objectives; 3)cultivating and maintaining effective relationships between EXO and the ICAASservices provider. The USAID fundedRegional Health Integration to Enhance Services North, Lango Project(RHITES-N, Lango) is operating in the nine districts of the Lango sub-region ofnorthern Uganda (Alebtong, Amolatar, Apac, Dokolo, Kole, Kwania, Lira, Otukeand Oyam). RHITES-N, Lango will increase the effective use of sustainablehealth services in the region. The Project is led by John Snow, Inc. inpartnership with African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref), Doctors withAfrica (CUAMM), The Medical Concierge Group (TMCG) and Another Option. Theproject will contribute to measurable improvements in key Ugandan nationalhealth indicators (HIV; tuberculosis [TB]; malaria, maternal, newborn, andchild health [MNCH]; family planning [FP]; water, sanitation, and hygiene[WASH]; and nutrition). USAID RHITES-N,Lango will facilitate the recruitment of qualified Ugandans on behalf of LiraRRH. The hospital is a 400 bed hospital situated in Lira Municipality in Liratown with a catchment population of about 2.3 million people. It is a referralfacility offering both specialized and general services. The Human ResourcesOfficer will have independent responsibility for technical, specialized workincluding planning, organization and coordination, and setting objectives.She/he will deal with a variety of complex issues that are often undefined andinvolve areas of uncertainty and complex inter-relationships. The instructionsreceived are broad and the job holders are expected to consistently demonstratea high degree of responsibility and initiative to respond independently toqueries. Job holders have a level of expertise and knowledge to adapt anddevelop systems and processes in order to continually improve the level ofsupport provided. She/he is expected to motivate and develop a team of supportstaff and/or are responsible for specialized support service(s) where the workis undertaken with the help of specially designed techniques, methods andprocesses. 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 In a world of smartphones and social media, there's an increasing risk of footage showing you doing things you probably shouldn't that is being shared online for all to see. Owners of flashy expensive cars are falling victim to this more so than most. Take the Lamborghini owner filmed crashing his car into a wall - and tree - in London after flying down a congested street lined with spectators on one side and queuing motorists on the other. Clips of reckless driving like this are becoming more commonplace than ever, especially when it results in the write-off of a quarter of a million pound supercar. And readers love to watch it unfold before their eyes. But it begs the question: do insurers pay out on claims made by motorists when their careless antics have gone viral? Should motorists who crash as a result of such driving have their insurance claimed honoured when footage has been shared by millions? We asked insurers Rob Hull, This is Money deputy motoring editor comments: The recent example of the Lamborghini owner crashing in London would seem to be a blatant case of a driver acting dangerously on a public road and endangering all those around them. Almost everyone who's commentated on the footage has condemned the driver - though a small pocket of people have taken to social media to defend their actions. The childish stunt gone wrong - which ironically happened on 'School Road' after luxury car dealer HR Owen's Supercar Sunday meet in North Acton - showed the owner using the 215,000 Huracan Performante's 'launch control' mode to ferociously accelerate away from a cluster of camera-wielding car spotters. A congested capital street is simply not the time or place for its deployment. The mode, designed only to be used on track to achieve the fastest start possible, allows a driver to get the best traction when unleashing the 631bhp of power from the car's five-litre V10 engine and is a feature that helps it blitz from zero to 62mph in just 2.9 seconds. But it takes less than three seconds for things to go horribly wrong - as this particular person found out. A loss of grip sends the pricey supercar careering towards the queue of onlooking traffic, before the driver's attempt to correct the imminent collision sends the vehicle darting in the opposite direction, culminating in the destruction of a brickie's best efforts. The fact everyone escaped unharmed - bar the driver's dignity - was a miracle, especially when you consider the sizable crowds supercar events like this draw these days. The damage done to the high-powered vehicle looks - to our eye - beyond economical repair and it has a high likelihood of being written off. Beyond economical repair: The damage caused by the crash looks substantial. So should an insurer - and law-abiding drivers through higher premium - pay out? But should the insurer have to pay out for these substantial costs when the owner's risky driving is on display to the nation and has been shared by millions? In my opinion, it would seem to be at the end of the day, an obvious infringement of the law, which dictates under Section 2A of the Road Traffic Act 1988 that dangerous driving is determined as: a) when a driver falls far below what would be expected of a competent and careful driver, and b) it would be obvious to a competent and careful driver that driving in that way would be dangerous. I believe the footage is more than enough evidence to deny a claim for the substantial damage caused. If you're willing to put yourself and others at risk of unnecessary and avoidable harm, you should pay the price. However, it appears insurance firms might be a little more sympathetic than me. Adrian Flux, a specialist insurer that offers cover for classic cars and high-value motors like this Lamborghini, said they would likely honour the driver's claim. A spokesperson for the company told This is Money: 'Many accidents happen on our roads as a result of erratic driving - and each insurance claim is assessed individually. 'In this particular case, it is unlikely there will be anything in the policy wording that will prevent the claim from being paid. 'Most if not all insurers would pay out on this, even with the video evidence that has been shared extensively online.' Surprised by the statement? I was. Which is why I asked other providers if they would pay out. Calum McPhail, head of liability claims at Zurich Insurance, said it would be difficult to prove - even with the footage - that the driver has breached the terms of their policy. 'This is not necessarily straightforward and much will depend on the specific policy wording,' he explained. 'If there is evidence of street racing then this may have an impact, however, if the policy does not have any specific wordings in regards to this, then it would probably fall to be considered in terms of whether there was evidence of failure to take reasonable care, which can be subjective and difficult to establish.' Fortunately, any damage caused to others and their vehicles would not be questioned, in Calum's mind. 'There is probably more likelihood of first party (own damage) coverage being affected where there are specific driving behaviour terms and conditions as you might find in telematics related policies the specific policy wording would need to be examined in each case. 'Coverage for third party elements would not be affected in terms of dealing with any claim albeit the insurer may seek to recover losses they have paid in the event that policy conditions have been breached.' We also approached Direct Line - one of the nation's biggest motor insurance providers - for its verdict. It said: 'In circumstances where drivers are recorded, and accidents have taken place, we will look at each scenario and evaluate these against our current policy wording and make an educated judgement on what is believed to have happened at the time of the incident. 'We will continue to look at these on a case by case basis.' Shockingly, it sounds like this hapless motorist is likely to be compensated for their ignorance. And guess who has to foot the bill for their inappropriate actions behind the wheel? A nation of law-abiding motorists who'll be stung with increased premiums, just because someone wanted to show off. Manufacturing has slumped again in the eurozones biggest economies, sparking fresh fears that the bloc is heading for a crisis. Factory output fell in Germany, France and Italy as demand was hit by a crackdown on trade by the US government, falling demand for diesel cars and a darkening picture for the global economy. By contrast, UK manufacturers clocked up their best performance for 13 months as they build stockpiles at the fastest rate on record to avoid disruption from Brexit. Across the eurozone, manufacturers confidence has fallen to its lowest level for more than six years In Germany, the powerhouse of the single currency area, manufacturing output hit its lowest level since July 2012 when the eurozone debt crisis was in full swing. A survey of manufacturing by researcher IHS Markit recorded a reading of 44.1, where anything below 50 means output is shrinking. The situation could get worse. Orders for new German goods fell at their steepest rate since 2009, and employment in the sector dropped for the first time in three years. French manufacturers suffered their first contraction since December, with a reading of 49.7, as the country struggles with both a gloomy worldwide situation and weekly yellow-vest riots at home. And Italy which entered recession last year suffered its eighth straight manufacturing decline with a reading of 47.4. The UK recorded a score of 55.1. Across the eurozone, manufacturers confidence has fallen to its lowest level for more than six years. Along with the US trade row, which has harmed global exports, the sector has also been hit hard by a slump in demand for diesel cars over fears about pollution. It is feared the slowdown will do lasting damage to the eurozone economy and impact Britain too. Chris Williamson of Markit said: The trend could clearly deteriorate further in the second quarter. He added that firms are cutting costs and shrinking their workforces in a sign th e picture is not expected to improve any time soon. Unemployment in the bloc stands at 7.8pc, unchanged on the previous month and its lowest level since 2008. This is twice the 3.9pc in the UK, its lowest since January 1975. The American retail giant behind Boots has warned of possible store closures in the UK as the company seeks to slash costs. The 50billion Walgreens Boots Alliance bemoaned the 'most difficult' three months in its five-year history and said it has fired the starting gun on a review of its 2,500-store Boots chain in the UK. It said it is looking at under performing shops and added that it is taking 'decisive steps' to cut costs, including a possible overhaul of its pharmacy business. Boots stores in the UK are under threat as Walgreens looks to slash costs after a tough quarter The news of possible store closures comes after the firm swung the axe on jobs at its Nottingham head office in February. Up to 350 jobs are at risk as it attempts to trim HQ staff costs by a fifth. Walgreens said its retail sales in the UK slumped 2.3 per cent in the first three months of 2019, while pharmacy sales slipped 1.5 per cent. A Boots spokesperson: 'We currently do not have a major programme envisaged, but as you'd expect we always review underperforming stores and seek out opportunities for consolidation.' The 170-year old UK division is headed up by former Dixons Carphone boss Sebastian James. James joined the company last year and harbours ambitions to give its stores a makeover with new beauty halls, services and magic mirrors. Seb James (above) is the UK boss of Boots The group endured tough trading in the US too, with the firm warning today that its profits are now likely to be far lower than expected - flat on last year compared with previous guidance of 7 to 12 per cent growth. Group boss Stefano Pessina dubbed it the 'most difficult quarter we have had since the formation of Walgreens Boots Alliance'. Pessina accepted that the group has not taken action swiftly enough to offset challenging conditions and unveiled plans to ramp up a global cost cutting strategy. He said: 'Our response was not rapid enough given market conditions, resulting in a disappointing quarter that did not meet our expectations. 'We are going to be more aggressive in our response to these rapidly shifting trends. Walgreens Boots Alliance was formed in 2014 after Walgreens bought the 55 per cent stake in UK and Switzerland-based Alliance Boots that it did not already own. 0.0 Community Rank Outperform Votes Schroders has received 0 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Schroders has received 0 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Schroders and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe PYX will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe PYX will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next WASHINGTON U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik defended her decision to join eight other Republican members of the House intelligence committee in calling for its chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. to step down, saying he had crossed the line and taken it to a new level of partisanship in the first three month of Democratic control of the house. The GOP members' call came less than a week after Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General William Barr. I dont do this lightly, Stefanik said in an interview Monday, four days after she and other Republican committee members signed a letter to Schiff stating that we have no faith in your ability to discharge your duties and urge your immediate resignation as chairman of this committee. I strongly believe we have to be tough on Russia, said Stefanik, a Republican in her third term representing the North Country. But when you have a chairman conducting himself in such a partisan manner, thats concerning. Schiff has been omnipresent in interviews on cable news channels, promoting the view that the Russia connections of President Donald J. Trumps 2016 campaign and perhaps Trump himself run deep. Muellers indictments of 34 individuals included 26 Russian operatives, who allegedly hacked into the Democratic National Committee server and stole emails embarrassing to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But Barr's four-page letter to Congress said Mueller concluded his nearly two-year probe without calls for direct indictments on collusion with Russia. And Barr said that Mueller took a neutral position on whether Trump obstructed justice; the attorney general made the final decision not to take action. Mueller's report has not yet been released as it is reviewed and likely redacted by the Justice Department. Stefanik has shown increasing willingness to put distance between herself and Trump and the predominantly white, male Republican establishment on Capitol Hill. But she joined them in denouncing Schiff as an over-the-top partisan. He has lost the credibility he needs to lead this committee, she said. Prior to release of Barr's letter sharing Mueller's main conclusions, Schiff had stated that he knew of more than circumstantial evidence of collusion but could not go into particulars. And after release of Barr's four-page summary on March 24, Schiff continued to insist Trump and his campaign were involved in collusion. I think its very dangerous, Stefanik said of those allegations. Schiffs actions undermine the functioning of this committee. Stefanik also charged Schiff with talking openly about testimony the committee obtained behind closed doors in its own probe of Trump and Russia. The committees former Republican chairman, Devin Nunes of California, ended the probe last year with a finding of no collusion by Trump. Nunes faced repeated calls for his own resignation as chair from Democrats outraged by his conduct during the investigation. Stefanik, a member of the House Armed Services Committee in addition to Intelligence, said she sees Schiffs focus on the Mueller probe as a distraction from the intelligence work that needs to be done to prevent Russia from interfering in U.S. elections again. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. I believe strongly that we should be focused on opposing Russian aggression, she said, citing examples including her co-sponsorship of the Vladimir Putin Transparency Act, which would direct U.S. intelligence to compile a report on for Congress on Putin and his allies financial assets and secretive networks. Stefanik said she also she supports the release of the full Mueller report, estimated to be almost 400 pages long. But she was doubtful that details in the report would affect its bottom-line conclusion that there was insufficient evidence for indictments on collusion. Upstate progressive opponents of Stefanik said they were not surprised by her stand, saying it proved she is a Trump loyalist despite efforts to go her own way on issues like the GOP tax bill or opposition to the presidents declaration of a national emergency to fund his U.S.-Mexico border wall. For Stefanik to attack Schiff is beyond bizarre, said Joe Seeman of Ballston Spa, who is on the steering committee of Saratoga Progressive Action and the state committee of the Working Families Party. The notion that she is bipartisan is a total lie. She is an extreme partisan. Schiff, a former federal prosecutor who speaks in a calm demeanor, gave an emotionally charged defense at a committee meeting last week after a Republican member, Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas, read the two-page letter aloud. Ticking through the instances of Trump campaign officials encouraging dissemination of dirt against Clinton including the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower with a lawyer described as an emissary from the Russian government Schiff said Republicans might think its OK ... 'Thats just what you need to do to win.' But I dont think its OK. I think its immoral, I think its unethical, I think its unpatriotic," he continued. "And, yes, I think its corrupt, and evidence of collusion. I do not think that conduct criminal or not is OK. And the day we do think thats OK is the day we will look back and say that is the day that America lost its way. ALBANY Gov. Andrew Cuomo was successful in getting a package of tougher laws targeting illegal and unsafe stretch limousines included in the $175 billion state budget that was hammered out over the weekend. Although the state Assembly and Senate originally removed nearly all of the governor's proposed limo regulations from earlier versions of the budget, large portions of Cuomo's original plan and some additions made it into the final budget agreement. That includes a new $85 state inspection fee that has limo operators up in arms. Cuomo spokesman Jason Conwall said the governor "aggressively pursued these common-sense initiatives, and the landmark legislation that is now enacted will enhance safety for all New Yorkers and visitors as they travel on our roads." The most substantial changes to come out of the state budget agreement are tougher criminal and civil penalties on illegal limo operators who circumnavigate state oversight, as has been alleged of Prestige Limousine, the Wilton-based limo company that owned the stretch 2001 Ford Excursion involved in the Schoharie crash last October that killed 20 people. The legislation also gives the state Department of Transportation and the State Police broad new powers to remove license plates from stretch limousines that fail inspections or fail to get state certification. But upstate limousine operators, who had been successful in blocking a total ban on stretch limousines that Cuomo originally proposed, say they are wary of the new $85 fee that will be charged during semi-annual state Department of Transportation inspections of stretch limousines and tour buses. DOT currently does not charge a fee for the inspections under its bus safety program, which stretch limousines and other large for-hire passenger vehicles are required to go through. Cuomo originally proposed a $120 inspection fee. And while the number was lowered to $85, limo industry advocates say it will put smaller companies out of business, along with new requirements for higher insurance coverage on stretch limos that was also included in the budget deal. David Brown, who owns Premiere Transportation in Albany, says insurance carriers are going to hike premiums or even drop coverage of the smaller limo companies with fewer financial resources out of fear they will run afoul of the new regulations. "The mom-and-pops, they are going to get hit on this," Brown said. Kevin Barwell, president of the Limousine, Bus and Taxi Operators Of Upstate New York, said the new inspection fee "just seems like another money grab" and is unrelated to the underlying problem of oversight of illegal operators and a lack of communication by the Department of Transportation and the Department of Motor Vehicles on oversight of stretch limousines. "This can happen again," Barwell said. "There's really nothing in there that addresses safety." Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Although the operator of Prestige, Nauman Hussain, has been charged with criminally negligent homicide for allegedly knowingly renting out a limo that had safety issues, a months-long Times Union investigation uncovered numerous instances where Prestige Limousine was able to remain in business despite side-stepping state regulation and failing roadside inspections by the state Department of Transportation and State Police. The company was also able to illegally obtain a DMV inspection sticker for the Excursion from two Saratoga County inspection stations in clear violation of state law. Because of the number of passengers that they carry, stretch limousines are required to go through DOT's more stringent bus inspection program every six months instead of the DMV's annual inspection program. Cuomo's new limo regulations seek to close those loopholes by giving police the power to immediately seize plates from illegal limos or those that fail inspections. It also makes it a felony for knowingly operating an illegal limo when it results in a death such as in the case of the deadly crash in Schoharie. Brown, the owner of Premiere Transportation in Albany, said the new limo legislation eliminates a lot of "grey areas" that existed in state transportation law that made drastic action against limo and bus companies difficult without a lengthy hearing and appeal process. "Now there is no grey area at all. If there is any doubt, they're going to pull the plates in a heartbeat," Brown said. "It's good for the good guys and it's bad for the bad guys." Limo legislation included in the budget bill would also require state DOT to come up with a standard by which limo companies would provide "conspicuous display" of proof of their state certification, inspection information and driver qualifications to customers. In the case of the Schoharie crash, DOT officials have said that the vehicle owned by Prestige Limousine would have been unable to prove any of that. CLIFTON PARK A Clifton Park marketing call center shorted workers' pay by refusing to cover overtime or pre- and post-shift activities, like logging on and off work computers, and at times required employees to work during lunch breaks, a class action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Albany claims. The lawsuit filed Monday was brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act by three former Resource Marketing Corporation employees on behalf of themselves and other affected workers, according to court filings. The filings showed attorneys in the case are seeking at least $5 million for over 100 plaintiffs. Court records show some employees were deducted up to four to six hours of pay over some pay periods. One plaintiff, Karishma Persaud, worked at the call center from November 2017 to this March. One timesheet included in the filings indicated Persaud worked 82 hours from Jan. 26 to Feb. 8, but her payroll report for that pay period showed she was paid for just 77.34 hours of work. "Because (Resource Marketing Corporation) trains and instructs its Agents not to record time spent performing pre-shift, mid-shift and post-shift work tasks, (RMC's) compensation system fails to properly account for and compensate Agents for all time worked, including their overtime hours, during each day and during each workweek," the suit says. Resource Marketing workers also were required to work through lunch if, at that time, there were not enough workers to manage the phones. But the suit claims workers were not paid for working through their lunch break, and employees who reported working that time on their timesheet were not compensated for it. The lawsuit alleges that the "hours reflected on the Agents' timesheets are not accurate, are contrived by (RMC), and are not related to the hours the Agents actually worked for (RMC)." Employees at the call center use an automatic dialing software to call customer leads, and employees use a series of scripted questions to determine whether to qualify the customer as a "hot lead." If qualified, that customer would then be transferred to a sales person, according to the court filing. Workers are assigned to different call campaigns involving things like mortgage lending, solar energy, debt resolution and others. Weekly hours are typically 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Fridays. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. But the lawsuit states that employees are required to arrive at work five to 10 minutes early so that they can start their computer and log in to the company's auto-dialer program before their 9 a.m. start time. Employees were not paid for that time, but would be penalized if they were late to log on, even if technical problems forced a late start, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit also alleges that employees would be penalized for spending "dead time" logged on to the dialer program, but not on a live call though a lack of live calls out of the control of employees could still cause them to face disciplinary action. Resource Marketing Center did not respond to a request for comment. The office is located off Route 146, just west of Clifton Park Center. Jason Brown, with the Jersey City-based law firm Brown LLC, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon. Kellogg is selling Keebler cookies and other brands for $1.3 billion, about $2.6 billion less than it spent on that brand alone 17 years ago. Food producers are trying to find new brands with more growth potential after sweeping shifts in consumer taste, particularly in the U.S. Cohoes teen Madison VanDenburg earned soaring praise from "American Idol" judges for her rendition of "Domino" by Jessie J on Monday night's Top 20 Solos episode. The judges also offered constructive criticism on the Shaker High School student's performance. ALBANY - Albany County joined more than 150 city and state officials supporting a lawsuit challenging the government's proposal to add a question about citizenship on the 2020 census before the Supreme Court. County Executive Daniel P. McCoy said the county filed an amicus brief, a "friend of the court" legal document, Monday night supporting the lawsuit's plaintiffs. "State and local governments throughout the country rely on over $900 billion in federal funding to implement critical health, education, crime victims and infrastructure programs, all of which are directly tied to an accurate census count, so we need to get this right," McCoy said. "Given the fear that understandably exists in our immigrant communities given the political climate, adding a question on citizenship will only reduce participation to the detriment of our entire community." The county is supporting the first of multiple lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Commerce and Census Bureau, which was filed last April by 17 states, seven cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case in April and issue a decision in June. The Census Bureau has reportedly prepared two versions of next year's census - one without the citizenship question and one with it. President Donald Trump tweeted Monday that the census would be "meaningless" without it. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Albany County's court filing comes a day after New York state's budget was finalized with $20 million in funding for census outreach - only half of what advocates wanted to ensure every New Yorker is counted. Census data can determine political representation and federal aid. In 2016, New York state received more than $73 billion from the federal government to implement at least 320 programs - including $34 billion for Medicaid, $6.6 billion for Federal Direct Student Loans, $5 billion for SNAP, $1.8 billion for Highway Planning and Construction, and $1 billion for the Children's Health Insurance Program. "I'm proud to join this effort and I look forward to working with local partners to ensure that every individual counts in the eyes of the federal government and that Albany County and New York State get their fair share," McCoy said. Forest rangers rescued two injured hikers Saturday in separate incidents in the Capital Region, the state Department of Environmental Conservation said Tuesday. DEC dispatchers called Ranger Katherine Fox at 10:15 a.m. on March 30 to report a 56-year-old man had injured his leg on the Escarpment Trail leading to Windham High Peak in the Windham Blackhead Wilderness Area in Greene County. Eleven rangers as well as members of the Hensonville Fire Department, Windham Police Department, and Windham Ambulance responded. The rangers reached the man by 12:15 p.m. and administered first aid, before packing him into a Stokes basket, the DEC said. Rangers and local volunteer firefighters then carried him to a utility task vehicle that had been driven to the Elm Ridge lean-to. The man was driven to the trailhead, where he was transferred into an ambulance and taken to a local hospital. Rangers were cleared from the scene at 6 p.m., the DEC said. At 4:15 p.m. the same day, three forest rangers were sent to help a 47-year-old woman who had injured her ankle while hiking a trail in the Pilot Knob Preserve in Fort Ann, Washington County. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. The trail, located on Lake George Land Conservancy property, was icy, the DEC said. Rangers administered first aid and then carried the woman out to a waiting all-terrain vehicle, which took her to an ambulance. The woman was at the trailhead and on her way to a hospital at 6:11 p.m., the DEC said. ALBANY A federal judge has upheld the crux of a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by a female attorney who was fired from her job at the state Division of Criminal Justice Services for her testimony in a sexual harassment investigation. The ruling by Senior U.S. District Judge Gary L. Sharpe will allow the lawsuit, filed last year by Gina L. Bianchi, to proceed to the pre-trial discovery phase. It could enable her attorneys to review internal state records in the case and depose witnesses, including high-ranking members of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's administration. In a letter to the Times Union last year, a spokeswoman for the governor trumpeted that the state officials sued by Bianchi had "filed motions to dismiss citing what they say are blatant falsehoods and legal inaccuracies in the suit." The spokeswoman criticized the newspaper for not reporting on the motions in its ongoing coverage of the case. Sharpe, in upholding Bianchi's First Amendment retaliation claim against three state officials, noted that her speech was protected because she had testified as both a citizen and an employee, "to shed light on public employee discrimination and misconduct." "Bianchi's testimony concerned pervasive misconduct by public officials and was part of an overall effort to correct alleged unlawful practices," the judge wrote. "This is not a case where the speech is unprotected because it concerned only Bianchi's personal situation and did not hint at broader problems; indeed, it is the opposite." The case sparked unrest in state government, in part, because the state inspector general's office turned over what Bianchi believed was her confidential testimony in the investigation to DCJS Commissioner Michael C. Green and the agency's general counsel, John Czajka, who are both named as defendants in the lawsuit. Bianchi's lawsuit also targets Karen David, the DCJS human resources director who signed Bianchi's termination letter. Sharpe's ruling dismissed Bianchi's claim against former Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott. Green used Bianchi's testimony to interrogate her, including allegedly berating her for not providing more evasive answers to the investigators who were probing sexual harassment and workplace violence allegations against a former DCJS Office of Forensic Science director, Brian Gestring. Bianchi was terminated after Green questioned her about her testimony for more than two hours. Gestring, who has denied wrongdoing, was fired by DCJS in March 2018 about five days after the allegations against him were revealed in a Times Union story. DCJS claimed he was fired for an unrelated matter involving an inappropriate comment he had made in June 2017 during an off-site training seminar. That incident, however, was reported at the time it occurred but not investigated. Bianchi's attorneys have suggested it was revived so state officials could find another reason to fire Gestring after the agency's alleged mishandling of his case became public. Green's actions, including authorizing the transfer of another female DCJS worker who testified in the inspector general's investigation, have not been publicly questioned by Cuomo, who has declined comment. A spokesman for Cuomo did not immediately comment Monday on Sharpe's decision. The inspector general's investigation of Gestring, a former New York Police Department scientist, revealed a history of offensive and inappropriate behavior that began shortly after he started working for DCJS in July 2012. Records indicate that about four months after Gestring was hired, he received two counseling memos addressing his misbehavior. Gestring signed the memos certifying that had read them, but added handwritten notes claiming he disagreed with the findings, had been forced to sign them, and that staff at DCJS had "agendas," according to details of the inspector general's investigation shared with the Times Union. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Leahy Scott's investigators, who obtained sworn testimony from multiple DCJS employees, said they were also told that Gestring had once encouraged a female manager to file fraudulent sexual harassment charges against a male colleague in an apparent effort to have him terminated. The woman refused. Leahy Scott, who was appointed inspector general by Cuomo in 2013 but was replaced in January, had recommended the agency take action against Gestring and two other officials accused of mishandling the allegations, First Deputy Commissioner Mark Bonacquist and Davis, the human resources director. The agency did not take action against those employees, Instead, DCJS said it had conducted its own investigation and said they could not sustain the allegations against Gestring. After the Times Union exposed the agency's decision to punish Bianchi and another female employee who testified about Gestring's alleged misconduct, Cuomo's office issued a statement saying the governor had asked the state's Joint Commission on Public Ethics to conduct another investigation. That probe by JCOPE has languished. Bianchi and the other female employee, Kimberly Schiavone, have not been interviewed by its investigators. After Bianchi was fired from her senior-level attorney position, state hiring rules allowed her to fall back to a junior-level attorney's position. She suffered a $44,000-a-year pay cut. Schiavone has also filed a federal lawsuit against several DCJS officials, including Gestring. In her complaint, Schiavone said that after testifying in the inspector general's investigation, she was transferred to another job in DCJS against her will, and ordered to move into a new office that had formerly been used as a storage closet. John W. Bailey, the attorney for Bianchi and Schiavone, said he is reviewing Sharpe's decision and declined further comment. Enjoy your avocado toast and guacamole while you can. If President Donald Trump follows through on his recent threats to completely close the border with Mexico, the effects would be wide-ranging. But one lesser-known impact is that the U.S. could run out of avocados in less than a month. Steve Barnard, president of Mission Produce, the world's largest avocado grower and distributor, told Reuters that America's avocado supply would be gone after about three weeks if Trump closes the border. "You couldn't pick a worse time of year because Mexico supplies virtually 100 percent of the avocados in the U.S. right now," Barnard said. "California is just starting and they have a very small crop, but they're not relevant right now and won't be for another month or so." The president's threat comes as he attempts to force Mexico to halt all illegal immigration. "If Mexico doesn't immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week," Trump tweeted on Friday. "This would be so easy for Mexico to do, but they just take our money and 'talk.' Besides, we lose so much money with them, especially when you add in drug trafficking etc.), that the Border closing would be a good thing!" Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. The price of a border closure could be high: The U.S. Department of Commerce reports that in 2017, the U.S. and Mexico traded about $557.6 billion in goods. Losing the avocado trade would be severely felt in the U.S., where avocado consumption has skyrocketed in recent years. A staggering 1.7 billion pounds were exported from Mexico to the U.S. in 2017 alone. Of course, the effect of a border shutdown would hit many other foods as well. According to the Department of Agriculture, 70 percent of our vegetable imports and almost 40 percent of fruit imports were imported from Mexico in 2017. ALBANY With more young women and men delaying parenthood, the demand for fertility treatments such as egg freezing and in-vitro fertilization (IVF) has grown across the country. Legislation and science have lagged behind the trend, and the cost of the treatments can be prohibitively expensive. A new law, enacted in the 2020 state budget, mandates that certain large-group insurance plans cover IVF, and requires all private insurance companies to cover medically necessary egg freezing. It is projected to benefit to up to 2.4 million New Yorkers, according to figures from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's administration, but there are kinks to iron out before it guarantees coverage to the other half of insured New Yorkers, including gay men, Medicaid-recipients, and the self-employed. Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa, the first woman to hold that position, pushed for IVF legislation in the spending plan, citing it as a top priority for the two-year-old Council for Women and Girls. DeRosa, 36, said that she understands the anxiety of women in her age group who are pressured to decide between advancing their careers and starting a family. "There is nothing more personal or life altering than the ability to conceive and making the choice about when to conceive," DeRosa said. "As someone who is currently facing these life-altering decisions, I know firsthand the toll they take emotionally and financially." Last year, Cuomo directed the state Department of Financial Services to study the cost of implementing an insurance mandate on egg freezing and IVF. The report, released to the public in February, suggests that mandating all insurances cover those costs would be too expensive for the state. The Affordable Care Act, due to a quirk in state law, requires New York to absorb mandates on small and medium sized plans. "Limiting an IVF mandated benefit to large group insurance policies mitigates that premium impact and avoids a state fiscal risk," according to the DFS report. Ten states have IVF insurance coverage laws, according to the DFS study, but most include limits on funding, number of cycles, age, and other restrictions. In addition providing access to treatment for thousands of New Yorkers, the bill is "finally a recognition that infertility is a disease not a lifestyle choice," said Barbara Collura, president & CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association. "Quite honestly, having New York do it is going to be a game-changer for the rest of the country." Highlights of the new law: What type of plans must offer coverage? Large insurance plans, providing coverage to 100 employees or more, must cover in-vitro treatments and associated medications and testing. Employees of small and medium-sized companies, companies that self-insure, and those with individual insurance plans are not guaranteed coverage. Approximately half of New Yorkers with health insurance would qualify for the benefit, according to DFS. How many cycles of IVF are covered? Three. Are their age restrictions? No. New York's law gives the doctor discretion to consider the patient's age when deciding if she is an appropriate candidate for IVF. What about egg freezing? The new mandate requires all insurance plans cover cryogenic egg freezing for medically necessary purposes. Women undergoing chemotherapy for cancer are often offered the opportunity to freeze their eggs, but decline when they learn of the cost, according to the DFS report. Other qualifying procedures include sex-reassignment surgery, sickle cell anemia, bone marrow transplant, or surgery for endometriosis. Is surrogacy covered under this plan? Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. No. Currently surrogacy is illegal in New York. Insurers are also not mandated to cover the healthcare of a person outside the family unit. Sen. Brad Hoylman, D-Manhattan, and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, D-Westchester, have introduced legislation updating the state's surrogacy laws. If it passes, the issue will be revisited. "We want to probably seek some guidance from the Department of Health ... and work with experts in making certain that the bill is carefully crafted," Hoylman said. Are single women and gay and lesbian couples covered under the plan? Single women and lesbians are covered. For gay men, it's complicated. IVF mandates in other states have excluded gay and lesbian couples due to narrow medical definitions of infertility. Anti-discrimination language in the bill prohibits discrimination based on marital status, age, sexual orientation or gender identity, and broadens that definition. Infertility, according to the bill, is a condition characterized by inability to conceive "after 12 months of regular, unprotected sexual intercourse or donor insemination." For women above the age of 35, the requirement is six months of regular, unprotected sexual intercourse or donor insemination without conception. Figuring out how to extend the benefit to male couples, who can only conceive through an out-of-state surrogate, has not been worked out, according to Hoylman. "The issue is, for example, a gay couple who is seeking a donor egg, whether fertilizing the egg in the transfer would be covered," Hoylman said. "I'll be looking at the language to strengthen it." What other programs are out there to assist with fertility treatments? In 2003, the state's Infertility Demonstration Program was created to subsidize the cost of fertility treatments for employed New Yorkers. Grants are available on a sliding scale, based on income for families earning up to $195,000. To qualify, patients must be between the ages of 21 and 44 years and have a private health insurance (not Medicaid, Medicare, or Family Health Plus). [April 02, 2019] American Family enterprise adds customers, spreads storm risk with acquisition of Ameriprise Auto & Home Madison, Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance Mutual Holding Company (American Family Insurance) announced today it has reached agreement to acquire Ameriprise Auto & Home (AAH), a De Pere, Wisconsin-based property-casualty insurance provider that primarily sells its products through a partnership with wholesale retailer Costco. The acquisition of AAH, a business unit of Ameriprise Financial, is expected to close during the second half of 2019, pending regulatory approval and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions. American Family Insurance group is acquiring AAH for approximately $1.05 billion, subject to certain post-closing financial adjustments. AAH will become a subsidiary within the American Family Insurance group and operate under its existing name until a new name is identified and approved by regulators. It's planned that all AAH employees will be retained and report to the subsidiary. Current AAH customers will retain their policies with no change in coverage or service. Why is American Family making this acquisition? The acquisition continues American Family's strategy to complement its exclusive agents with distribution channels for customers who prefer to handle their insurance matters in different ways. The acquisition also broadens American Family's business on a geographic basis, which spreads out storm risk and helps further strengthen the company's financial position. "This is about serving more customers through channels they prefer, and strengthening our ability to protect them," said Jack Salzwedel, American Family chair and chief executive officer. "American Family exclusive agents continue to have great success. Our direct-channel companies are growing. And last year, we merged with a company that offers products through independent agents." "With this acquisition, we expand our efforts to reach customers who prefer to acquire insurance through relationships they have with other entities. By doing this and continuing to grow in our other channels, we build scale, capabilities and financial strength to provide greater value to our customers," Salzwedel said. Bringing the companies together The acquisition brings together two Wisconsin companies with similar cultures, values and customer focus. "We know each other very well, with a fair number of employees who have worked at both companies," Salzwedel said. "There are similarities between the companies, but also unique strengths and perspectives we can use to grow and improve the business." American Family Insurance is a multi-line mutual insurance group. It serves customers in 19 states through its American Family agents, and nationally through subsidiaries that sell products through the internet, call centers, affinity partners and independent agents. The group reported 2018 results of $9 billion in equity, $27.5 billion in assets and $9.6 billion of direct premium written. The group employs 12,000 people through its various companies, with American Family-brand products sold through 2,500 independent contractor exclusive agents. AAH sells its products - auto, homeowners, renters, umbrella and some specialty insurance lines - in 43 states and District of Columbia through partners. It reported 2018 results of $89 million in surplus, $1.8 billion in assets and $1.1 billion of annual direct premium written. Approximately 70 percent of its premium is from auto insurance sales. Ameriprise Auto & Home employs 1,800 people. "We are proud of the exceptional value and award-winning service we've provided to Auto & Home policyholders over the last several decades and we sincerely thank each and every employee for their dedication and contributions," said Jim Cracchiolo, chairman and CEO of Ameriprise Financial. "We are pleased to reach this agreement and feel confident that we will be leaving the business in good stead given American Family Insurance's financial strength and reputation for quality products and customer care." AAH makes a significant majority of it sales through a partnership with Costco, which offers Ameriprise Auto & Home policies to its members through its website. American Family and Costco have entered into a Letter of Intent to continue that partnership. AAH also sells its products through referrals from Ameriprise Financial advisors. That relationship will continue after the acquisition. Continuing a tradition of successful acquisitions This transaction continues a history of successful mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, American Family acquired direct non-standard auto insurer Permanent General Companies (The General) and the former Lumbermens Casualty Insurance Company, which was renamed Midvale Indemnity Company. In 2013, American Family acquired direct homeowners provider Homesite Group, and launched AssureStart, a managing general agent that sells commercial insurance online to small businesses, and is the commercial technology platform for American Family agents. AssureStart policies are underwritten by Midvale. American Family group continued its expansion when it converted to a mutual holding company in 2017, allowing it to merge with Main Street America, another mutual holding company, a year later. Main Street America, which specializes in commercial insurance and surety bonds but also sells property and auto insurance, distributes its products through independent agents. The acquisition of AAH further diversifies American Family's storm loss risk by reducing the group's premium concentration in hail- and tornado-prone states. While the merger with Main Street America diversified catastrophe risk with its customer concentration on the East Coast, the majority of AAH's business is in western states. American Family looks forward to California AAH's largest premium state is California, where it reported 2017 direct premium written of $377 million. Of that, more than 80 percent is auto premium. This acquisition will provide access to a very large customer base in a state where American Family group does relatively little business today. "With our proven track record and strong investments in our people, technology and other innovations, we know what it takes be successful in today's market. We're confident we can draw on those qualities, while building on AAH's strengths, to make this new acquisition another high-performing company within our group," said Salzwedel. America Family was advised on legal matters by Foley & Lardner and on financial matters by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, a Stifel Company. About American Family Insurance Madison, Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance group is the nation's 13th-largest property/casualty insurance group and ranks No. 311 on the Fortune 500 list. The company sells American Family-brand products, including auto, homeowners, life, business and farm/ranch insurance, primarily through its exclusive independent contractor agents in 19 states. American Family affiliates (The General and Homesite) also provide options for consumers who want to manage their insurance matters directly over the internet or by phone. Affiliate Main Street America sells insurance products through independent agents. Web www.amfam.com; Facebook (News - Alert) www.facebook.com/amfam; Twitter (News - Alert) www.twitter.com/amfam. About Ameriprise Financial At Ameriprise Financial, we have been helping people feel confident about their financial future for more than 120 years. With extensive asset management, advisory and insurance capabilities and a nationwide network of approximately 10,000 financial advisors, we have the strength and expertise to serve the full range of individual and institutional investors' financial needs. For more information, or to find an Ameriprise financial advisor, visit ameriprise.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005675/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Andersen Global Expands Brazil Presence; Adds Collaborating Firm in Brazil Andersen Global today announced a collaboration agreement with Albieri e Associados, a tax and accounting firm based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Andersen Global now has six locations in Brazil through its member and collaborating firms. Albieri e Associados is a premier business consulting firm in Sao Paulo. Its team of professionals brings decades of experience in accounting consulting, business tax and finance, operational consulting, technology and paralegal assistance. The firm's clients cross a wide variety of sectors, including retail, automotive, food and beverage, and the service industry. The firm has 130 professionals in two offices in Sao Paulo. "We operate throughout the entire accounting, tax and financial chain in a seamless way that is personalized for each of our clients," said Luiz Albieri, Founder and Principal Partner of Albieri e Associados. "Our client-centered approach to everything we do is something I honed at Arthur Andersen many years ago, and now, I'm beyond thrilled it's come full circle and we are collaborating with Andersen Global." Along with colaborating firm Lotti & Araujo, which has offices in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Albieri e Associados will work alongside member firm Andersen Tax, which has offices in Sao Paulo and Campinas. "I've watched Luiz and his team do really excellent business for quite a while. They operate with the highest professional and personal standards, but they also bring highly-specialized business consulting to our Latin American team," said Leonardo Mesquita, Regional Managing Director for Latin America. "This is an integrated solution for Brazil, with a huge potential to bring expanded service opportunities to the corporate market." "Albieri e Associados' approach and unique service offerings complement our tax services in Brazil and the region very well," said Mark Vorsatz, Andersen Tax LLC CEO and Andersen Global Chairman. "Our platform continues to expand exponentially, and Brazil is a key component of our Latin American business strategy. But we aren't going to sacrifice quality for the sake of growth, and with Albieri e Associados, we get to add incredible quality, business acumen, and expand our best-in-class offerings for the region." Andersen Global is an international association of legally separate, independent member firms comprised of tax and legal professionals around the world. Established in 2013 by U.S. member firm Andersen Tax LLC, Andersen Global now has more than 4,000 professionals worldwide and a presence in over 136 locations through its member firms and collaborating firms. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005003/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] EESTech, Inc. Announces Samancor Ferrochrome Reclamation Agreement NEW CASTLE, Del., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- EESTech (otc-pink:EESH) signs a 10-year Ferrochrome Slag Reclamation Agreement with Samancor Chrome Limited. EESTech specializes in the reclamation and remediation of mine site waste and process slag with a patent pending process that delivers highly cost-effective waste management solutions previously thought unachievable. EESTech's services will have a significant positive impact on the world's mining and resource industries by increasing productivity, reducing energy demands, delivering significant economic benefits and environmental sustainability. Samancor Chrome, South Africa, has awarded EESTech an exclusive ten-year agreement, with a five year extension option, granting reclamation rights to the Ferrochrome (FeCr) process slag located at Samancor Chrome's Ferrometals process facility in Emalahleni, South Africa. This facility currently stockpiles in excess of 10 million tons of FeCr slag with new horizons being continuously added. Samancor Chrome produces more than 1.7 million tons of Ferrochrome per annum across five smelting facilities, positioning Samancor as the second largest FeCr producer in the world. EESTech's CEO, Mr. Murray Bailey, welcomes the Agreement with Samancor Chrome and said, "EESTech's unique ability to process up to 900,000 tons of FeCr slag per annum to recover all residual chrome units will establish new industry standards for mine site waste and process slag management." Under the terms of Agreement, Samancor Chrome will purchase all Ferrochrome metal ecovered by EESTech that meets agreed specifications. All EESTech post-process tailings are transformed into environmentally stable, inert, sand-products suitable for a wide variety of commercial applications. All sand products are owned by EESTech, to be marketed as ThermaSandTM, a high-grade foundry sand suitable for export to the worlds metal-casting industry. EESTech transforms 100% of waste into value-added products to deliver zero-waste outcomes. ? Industry benefits ? Government compliance is realised ? Environmental sustainability is achieved EESTech delivers for Industry, Government and Environment. About EESTech: EESTech Inc, promotes Economically Environmentally Sustainable Technologies to the world mining and minerals processing industries. EESTech Inc is publicly traded on the US OTC market, symbol EESH. www.eestechinc.com Released for EESTech, Inc by Elocal Limited. Address all media enquiries to: Mykeljon Winckel [email protected] at +64275977272 Forward Looking Statement: This media release includes statements that may constitute 'forward-looking' statements. The statements can be identified by phrases such as EESTech, Inc. or its management 'believes' 'forecasts', 'estimates' or other words or phrases of similar import. These statements are made pursuant to the safe harbour provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Similarly, such statements herein that describe the Company's business strategy, outlook, objectives, plans, intentions or goals are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements. Factors which could cause or contribute to such differences include but are not limited to our ability to recruit and retain key personnel, the availability of funding for future operating requirements, our ability to protect our intellectual property, our ability to secure contracts for the installation of our products and our ability to develop and operate such projects successfully. We urge you to carefully consider these factors and the information detailing other factors (which may cause actual results to differ materially) included in EESTech, Inc.'s press releases and other historical SEC filings. The forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and neither the Company nor its management assumes any obligation to update these statements. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eestech-inc-announces-samancor-ferrochrome-reclamation-agreement-300822516.html SOURCE EESTech Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Examity Among Massachusetts' Fastest-Growing Companies for 2nd Straight Year NEWTON, Mass., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Examity has been named for the second straight year to the Boston Business Journal's annual Fast 50 list, which recognizes the fastest-growing private companies in Massachusetts. The company, whose AI-enabled online proctoring and learning validation solution is utilized by hundreds of employers, certification providers, and higher education institutions worldwide, doubled in size over the last year alone. "At a time when college cheating scandals are making headlines, institutions are looking to us to help them ensure integrity in the learning experience," said Michael London, Founder and CEO of Examity. "Meeting that growing demand requires both sophisticated technology and an understanding of the unique needs of individual testing providers. Examity's growth over the past year stems from our team's commitment to developing a solution that addresses the increasingly important challenge of learning validation." Recent research suggests that one-third of all college students take at least one course online . Nine in 10 companies offer digital learning to meet the needs of employees who value the flexibility and personalization of online education programs. Examity's rapid expansion reflects the growing demand for secure online assessment solutions among higher education institutions, employers, and certification providers. The Fast 50 recognition further establishes Examity's position as one of the country's leading education technology companies. In 2018, it was recognized by Deloitte's Fast 500 as the fastest-growing Edtech company in North America. The company's platform offers a variety of proctoring styles, from automated through to live, for a diverse cross-section of partners, including Boston University, MongoDB, Penn State University, Dynatrace, and the University of Cincinnati. Examity leverages proprietary technology, including machine learning algorithms, to protect exam content and streamline the online testing experience. Last year the Boston Business Journal ranked Examity in the top ten fastest-growing companies in Massachusetts. The final rankings for this year's Fast 50 will be announced in May. About Examity Examity was founded to meet the needs of the growing number of online education and certification programs looking to ensure integrity. Since its founding six years ago, Examity has partnered with 500+ institutions and certification programs worldwide to provide a cost-effective and flexible online proctoring and learning validation solution. For more information, visit Examity.com or follow the company on Twitter @examity. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/examity-among-massachusetts-fastest-growing-companies-for-2nd-straight-year-300822708.html SOURCE Examity [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] InterSystems IRIS Data Platform Now Certified and Available on Docker Store InterSystems, a global leader in information technology platforms for health, business, and government applications, today announced that the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform Community Edition is now available on the Docker Store and Docker Certified to run on Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE). Docker Store availability and certification enables InterSystems (News - Alert) customers to rapidly build and run their applications on Docker's integrated and secure container platform, at scale. InterSystems IRIS data platform is the company's flagship product for rapidly building data-driven applications, featuring powerful integration, multi-model and multi-workload database management, and embedded analytics capabilities to speed and simplify digital transformation initiatives. InterSystems recently announced the availability of the newest version of InterSystems IRIS data platform, featuring peformance and scalability improvements, additional cloud support and integration capabilities, and enhanced support for Java, Python, and C# development. The Community Edition is a no-cost developer edition available for evaluation. As companies are pressured to innovate and deliver new services faster than ever, an increasing number are adopting container platforms to help power their digital transformation projects. The Docker Store provides InterSystems customers with an enterprise-ready container for developing data-driven applications with the assurance that the product is supported by both Docker and InterSystems. "It's more important than ever to empower organizations with the flexibility required to choose how to deploy their applications to keep pace with evolving market demands," said Carlos Nogueira, general manager for data platforms at InterSystems. "Making our technology available via the Docker Store enables our partners to more quickly access and build important InterSystems IRIS-based applications on Docker's industry-leading container platform. We are focused on providing our customers and partners with every tool they need to efficiently develop data-driven applications that save and improve lives, while also enhancing customer experiences, and driving operational efficiency at all levels of an enterprise." Access the InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on the Docker Store here. InterSystems IRIS is also available on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. About InterSystems InterSystems is the information engine that powers some of the world's most important applications. In healthcare, finance, government, and other sectors where lives and livelihoods are at stake, InterSystems has been a strategic technology provider since 1978. InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 80 countries. For more information, please visit http://www.intersystems.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005199/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Iowa County Begins Using an Automated Breathalyzer Kiosk for Alcohol Screening at the County Jail Minneapolis-based Precision Kiosk Technologies announced today that the Sheriff's Office of Iowa County, Wisconsin, has installed an Automated Breathalyzer Kiosk (AB Kiosk) at the Iowa County Jail in Dodgeville. Deputies have begun using this autonomous system to conduct alcohol screening of offenders participating in the Huber Work Release program as well as people awaiting trial or sentencing for drug and alcohol offenses. Later this year they will also use the AB Kiosks to screen those who pick up Operating While Intoxicated (OWI) offenders at the jail. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005144/en/ Five Wisconsin counties are now using the AB Kiosk for alcohol screening. (Photo: Business Wire) The Iowa County Sheriff's Office and the County's Assistant District Attorney, Matthew Allen, are spearheading the integration of this new technology into law enforcement efforts to improve community safety in Iowa County. Since the A Kiosk was introduced in January 2018, sheriff's offices in Wisconsin have used the AB Kiosk system to autonomously conduct more than 42,500 alcohol-monitoring tests and have achieved a "passed test" compliance rate of 99.6%. Iowa County joins the Wisconsin counties of Racine, Door, Portage, and St. Croix in using the AB Kiosk system. "The AB Kiosk system promotes public safety in Iowa County by allowing us to closely monitor participants in our Huber Work Release and treatment court programs, as well as those offenders who are awaiting trial or sentencing," said assistant district attorney, Matthew Allen. "Automating our alcohol screening program also frees up our law enforcement staff for higher-value work and assists us in tracking the effectiveness of our offender programs." The Automated Breathalyzer KioskTM is a secure, integrated system that autonomously handles alcohol screening from start to finish. It consists of two components: an interactive alcohol-screening kiosk and a robust offender-management software program. The Kiosk uses biometric fingerprint authentication to verify the identity of the individual, captures video as it administers the breathalyzer test, and automatically uploads the test results to the offender's file. Operating without any direct supervision, the Kiosk can test up to 40 individuals per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The system's cloud-based offender-management software simplifies new-client onboarding, coordinates regular and random test scheduling, and handles all test notifications and accounting. Program administrators can initiate a screening program by uploading an entire database in seconds, and deputies can access their offender-management program from any computer, smartphone or tablet. "We are very pleased to have Iowa County adopt the AB Kiosk system to monitor their offender populations," said Patrick McKinney, general manager of Precision Kiosk Technologies. "This system will greatly improve the efficiency of their alcohol-screening programs and increase the safety of their communities." About Precision Kiosk Technologies Minneapolis-based Precision Kiosk Technologies (PKT) leads the electronic monitoring industry in providing high-volume autonomous breathalyzer testing to law enforcement jurisdictions. The company's stand-alone Automated Breathalyzer Kiosk (AB Kiosk) simplifies and reduces the administrative burden of alcohol screening and other court-mandated offender programs, including probation check-in, Huber work release, and pre- and post-trial services. In addition, PKT designs automated testing kiosks for airports and mass transit facilities, and stadiums and arenas. To learn more about the AB Kiosk system and view a video of the testing process, please visit www.abkiosk.com/video. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005144/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] MightyHive Appoints Alexandre Henault to Lead Quebec Office MONTREAL, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MightyHive, the leading media consultancy, today announced the appointment of Alexandre Henault as market lead, Quebec, to oversee MightyHives operations in the French speaking market. Alexandre Henault brings more than 20 years in adtech and martech to this position, with a career spanning a number of Quebecs publishers and startups. After heading one of Montreals first trading desks, Magnet Intell, he went on to become vice president of digital sales and operations at Quebecor, Quebecs largest publisher. Alexandre has extensive experience both on the programmatic buy side and sale side. Alexandre Henault, Market Lead, Quebec We believe strongly in providing local support for clients and are investing in their success by providing on the ground services to meet the growing needsof micro markets, said Tessa Ohlendorf, managing director of MightyHive Canada. We know that there are both established and emerging businesses operating in Quebec and that a dedicated French speaking team will be in the best position to provide successful support for the businesses in the region. Alexandre will be in an exciting position, offering support for all programmatic media, data, analytics, DCO and associated services for Quebec based businesses. In his new role, Alexandre will build a local team to support existing clients and provide local expertise on MightyHive service offerings. Whether providing end-to-end in-housing support, a scope for data, or DV360 platform usage, MightyHive Montreal will fill the gap in the market for regionally focused programmatic services. Throughout the remainder of the year, Alexandre will work with the rest of the Canadian team, led by Tessa Ohlendorf, focusing on transition and increased expansion into the Quebec region. Over the last 20 years, I have had the opportunity to work within great organizations and with clients that have challenged me to offer bespoke business solutions, said Alexandre. Leading my own startup for five years has also helped me understand the different challenges of business owners in this digitally disrupted era. Im very excited to join MightyHive and bring to the Quebec market a unique set of services and skills that are necessary to ensure success for companies seeking to digitally transform their marketing and business. To learn more about Quebec Canada, contact Tessa Ohlendorf or Alexandre Henault. About MightyHive MightyHive is a new breed of media consultancy that partners with global brands and agencies seeking transformative marketing results in a time of massive disruption and opportunity. Recognized as a global leader in advanced marketing and advertising technologies, MightyHive provides consulting and services in the areas of media operations and training, data strategy and analytics. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Auckland, London, Melbourne, New York, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto. In 2018, MightyHive merged with S4 Capital plc (SFOR.L), a new age/new era digital advertising and marketing services company established by Sir Martin Sorrell. Contact Cassady Nordeen Blast PR for MightyHive [email protected] 718-644-0273 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/97f2a159-8ec0-475b-92dc-45bf18047548 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] NetSuite Helps Customers Simplify Global Trade LAS VEGAS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SUITEWORLD 2019 -- Oracle NetSuite today announced a series of new innovations to help organizations across the world achieve the visibility and control needed to navigate change and accelerate growth. The latest innovations within the NetSuite solution include new global financial management capabilities that streamline currency and trade management and localizations to support customers in some of the world's largest economies, including China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Singapore and the UK. "The pace of change around the world is increasing and organizations need to be agile in order to stay ahead of the competition and meet changing customer expectations," said Evan Goldberg, EVP, Oracle NetSuite. "To help our customers manage increasing demands and reach new heights in every market they operate in, we are committed to making the most complex business processes simple through continued global enhancements to NetSuite." New Global Trade Management Capabilities Help customers streamline the management of multi-subsidiary operations, support global compliance and gain real-time global insight. Global trade enablement: Customers can simplify and streamline intercompany trade business processes within NetSuite including transactions, reconciliations and netting. Customers can simplify and streamline intercompany trade business processes within NetSuite including transactions, reconciliations and netting. SuiteTax API: Customers can now streamline compliance with different tax requirements across the globe by eliminating the need to manually monitor tax rate changes across more than 100 countries. The new tax API also supports compliance with U.S. sales tax. Customers can now streamline compliance with different tax requirements across the globe by eliminating the need to manually monitor tax rate changes across more than 100 countries. The new tax API also supports compliance with U.S. sales tax. Foreign currency expense report: Customers can now automatically reimburse employees in their local currency instead of the currency of the company's headquarters. Customers can now automatically reimburse employees in their local currency instead of the currency of the company's headquarters. Installments: Customers can now set and manage scheduled payment due date arrangements with both their customers and suppliers with new capabilities that allow them to adhere to the local expectations of customers in Latin American countries and beyond. New Localizations New localized product capabilities empower NetSuite customers headquartered, or operating subsidiaries in some of the largest economies in the world, to quickly and easily leverage an integrated suite of modern business applications to drive growth, reduce costs and achieve the benefits of cloud computig. India : New tax management capabilities help customers comply with local GST and TDS tax requirements for India . Customers can also leverage localized reports by generating the data required for E-Way Bill documents and filing tax returns in the format specified by the Indian government. New tax management capabilities help customers comply with local GST and TDS tax requirements for . Customers can also leverage localized reports by generating the data required for E-Way Bill documents and filing tax returns in the format specified by the Indian government. Japan : NetSuite now supports the Zengin XML file format, the new requirement from the Japanese Bankers Association (Zengin-Kyo). Customers are now able to increase efficiencies by generating an invoice summary using saved search capabilities and adding transaction fields to the invoice summary. : NetSuite now supports the Zengin XML file format, the new requirement from the Japanese Bankers Association (Zengin-Kyo). Customers are now able to increase efficiencies by generating an invoice summary using saved search capabilities and adding transaction fields to the invoice summary. Mexico : Customers are now enabled to comply digitally with governmental requirements by allowing all information required by the Mexico Tax Authority, including electronic invoicing and electronic accounting, to be within NetSuite. Customers are now enabled to comply digitally with governmental requirements by allowing all information required by the Mexico Tax Authority, including electronic invoicing and electronic accounting, to be within NetSuite. UK: NetSuite is now compatible with Making Tax Digital (MTD), a government initiative that became mandatory on April 1 st , 2019, which requires UK businesses to submit tax returns and payments online while also keeping digital records of taxes. NetSuite can help customers instantly comply with the new regulations by enabling the International Tax Reports SuiteApp. NetSuite is now compatible with Making Tax Digital (MTD), a government initiative that became mandatory on , 2019, which requires UK businesses to submit tax returns and payments online while also keeping digital records of taxes. NetSuite can help customers instantly comply with the new regulations by enabling the International Tax Reports SuiteApp. China , France , Germany , India , Japan and Singapore : SuiteSuccess Financials First is now available for customers in these countries. With Financials First, customers can automate financial and operational processes, improve reporting and gain real-time visibility into key business metrics that support all local tax calculation, reporting and filing requirements. About Oracle NetSuite For more than 20 years, Oracle NetSuite has helped organizations grow, scale and adapt to change. NetSuite provides a suite of cloud-based applications, which includes financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR, professional services automation and omnichannel commerce, used by more than 16,000 customers in 203 countries and dependent territories. For more information, please visit http://www.netsuite.com. Follow NetSuite's Cloud blog, Facebook page and @NetSuite Twitter handle for real-time updates. About Oracle The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications for Sales, Service, Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, plus Highly Automated and Secure Generation 2 Infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous Database. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Safe Harbor The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/netsuite-helps-customers-simplify-global-trade-300822364.html SOURCE Oracle NetSuite [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Ohio-Based Tech Startup Wiretap Rebrands to Aware COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Wiretap, a governance, compliance and intelligence platform known for helping enterprises safely accelerate the adoption of digital enterprise collaboration services, today announced it would rebrand to Aware. "The Wiretap name and shield icon served its purpose of speaking to our security and compliance solution," said Jeff Schumann, Co-Founder and CEO, Aware. "However, at this point in our journey, Aware better speaks to our overall vision, our spirit of collaboration, and is more relevant to our entire family of productsmaking it the natural next step for our story." Cofounded in 2017 by CEO Jeff Schumann, Matt Huber, Shawn Domer and James Tsai, Aware has secured over $11 million in venture-backed funding from Draper Triangle, Ohio Innovation Fund, Rev1Ventures, JumpStart and other strategic investors. Today, Aware offers three free or premium products to its customers. Aware Risk Management provides enterprise-grade solutions to address compliance, data governance and human behavior risk within collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Yammer and Workplace by Facebook. Aware Spotlight offers real-time, qualitative insights and metrics derived from collaboration communications. Aware Digital Signage gives organizations a way to easily display collaboration content for meetings, events and lobbies. "The name Aware speaks to how our customers, including Oxfam and Astraeneca, leverage the product to understand how their organization collaborates, gain visibility into harmful communication and insider threats, as well as understand employee sentiment," said Bill Baumel, Managing Director of Ohio Innovation Fund and member of the Board of Directors at Aware. "We'll continue to offer best-in-class risk management solutions and insights created specifically for enterprise collaboration, in addition to adding new features and products," said Schumann. "We're excited for what the future holds for Aware and our customers." About Aware (formerly Wiretap) Aware's flagship Risk Management suite offers AI-infused governance, compliance and monitoring for enterprise organizations deploying today's leading collaboration and messaging platforms, including Workplace by Facebook, Microsoft Teams and Yammer. Aware offers organizations the ability to control and protect the unstructured conversational data that lives within collaboration platforms, with solutions for legal holds, data retention, eDiscovery, GDPR compliance and data loss prevention. The platform goes beyond DLP and offers organizations the ability to safeguard its employees and reputation through advanced culture protection. Aware serves as an enterprise collaboration unblocker for a wide variety of organizations such as those with front-line employees or in highly regulated industries. Aware proudly serves clients such as Oxfam International, AstraZeneca, AIG and more. As a Microsoft and Workplace by Facebook partner, Aware is both Microsoft Co-Sell-Ready and accounts for two of the 50+ SaaS integrations recently announced by Workplace by Facebook in the integrations directory. Leading research analyst firm Gartner recently announced Aware as a Gartner Cool Vendor based on the September 11, 2018 report titled, "Cool Vendors in Unified Communications and Collaboration Technologies." The company is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio a city recognized by Forbes as the #1 rising city for startups. For more information visit www.AwareHQ.com, or follow on Twitter @Aware_HQ and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AwareHQ. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ohio-based-tech-startup-wiretap-rebrands-to-aware-300822411.html SOURCE Aware [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] President Bruce Stillman wins prestigious Gairdner Award COLD SPRING HARBOR, N.Y., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Bruce Stillman, President and CEO of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), has been awarded the 2019 Canada Gairdner International Award in honor of his pivotal contributions to basic research. The Canada Gairdner International Award recognizes researchers who have made seminal discoveries or contributions to biomedical science. Dr. Stillman is being honored for "pioneering research on the eukaryotic DNA replication cycles including initiation, regulation, and responses to DNA damage." The award is shared with Stillman's collaborator Dr. John Diffley, Associate Director of the Francis Crick Institute and Dr. Stillman's former postdoctoral fellow. Stillman's discovery of the Origin Recognition Complex (ORC) and his research on the process and regulation of chromosome replication have changed how scientists understand chromosomes. The Gairdner Foundation's announcement states that "by describing the exact sequence of events involved in DNA replication, Stillman and Diffley have provided key insights into how our genome is duplicated and how this process is coordinated with many other essential cellular events, which have implications for undertanding genome instability and tumor heterogeneity in cancer." "The entire faculty of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory joins me in congratulating Bruce on receiving this well-deserved and prestigious award honoring his groundbreaking research accomplishments in the field of DNA replication," said CSHL Director of Research Dr. David Spector. "CSHL has benefited greatly from Bruce's dedication to both basic research and his profound role as President and CEO, guiding the institution on a positive trajectory." As an expert in DNA replication, Stillman has been elected to the Royal Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of Science. Stillman and Dr. Thomas Kelly of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center were awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Prize by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation in 2004. Stillman has received the Basic Science award from the Society of Surgical Oncology, the Herbert Tabor Research Award, and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize. He was also recently elected as an American Association for Cancer Research Fellow. The Gairdner Awards are given by the Gairdner Foundation. 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the awards, and the new class of honorees will be presented with their awards at the annual Canada Gairdner Awards Gala in Toronto on October 24, 2019. About Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has shaped contemporary biomedical research and education with programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology. Home to eight Nobel Prize winners, the private, not-for-profit Laboratory employs 1,100 people including 600 scientists, students and technicians. The Meetings & Courses Program annually hosts more than 12,000 scientists. The Laboratory's education arm also includes an academic publishing house, a graduate school and the DNA Learning Center with programs for middle and high school students and teachers. For more information, visit www.cshl.edu View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/president-bruce-stillman-wins-prestigious-gairdner-award-300822429.html SOURCE Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Teads Reports Banner Year, Announces $430 million in Revenue NEW YORK and LONDON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Teads, The Global Media Platform, today announced record results for 2018, reporting a revenue of $430 million which represented 35 percent organic growth year-over-year (YOY). The company was EBITDA-positive for the sixth year in a row and now reaches 1.4 billion users every month globally and 88% of the internet users in the US, according to comScore. "There is a growing need in the industry for brand safe alternatives to user generated content giants like Facebook and YouTube. We're excited that both advertisers and publishers have partnered with Teads as a trusted and powerful alternative," said Pierre Chappaz, executive chairman, Teads. "Our massive reach, new strategic partnerships and expanded vision are a testament to the evolution of premium advertising in 2018." The Global Media Platform As The Global Media Platform, in 2018, Teads continued its mission to unite and empower the world's best publishers. The company renewed 100% of its existing exclusive publisher partnerships and added many new ones including: BBC, VICE, The Economist, O Globo, Nikkei BP, South China Morning Post and Apple News UK, among others. "We're providing a single access point to the world's top publishers, with a unique combination of scale and quality for marketers," said Bertrand Quesada, CEO and co-founder, Teads. "With our Audience Suite, we are also enabling the buy-side to use advanced targeting methodologies without having to sacrifice the quality of environments they are distributing their ads in." Product diversifcation & new technology In 2018, Teads diversified its product offering by scaling viewable display and performance advertising solutions, which, on a combined basis, now represent nearly 20% of the company's revenue. Teads also saw significant adoption of its Ad Manager, a self serve programmatic interface allowing buyers to access its global premium publisher inventory and transact on completed views with guaranteed viewability (CPCV) as well as vCPM. As the programmatic market evolves, Teads remains committed to bringing new innovations to market to follow the needs of the world's largest advertisers with integrity, transparency and third-party verification. Teads Ad Manager is currently being used by several of the largest agency holding companies including IPG, DentsuAegis and Havas. Teads Studio As Teads has continued to develop media partnerships with top global brands, the creative capabilities of Teads Studio have become a core component of Teads' growth. From adapting TV assets for a mobile environment to unique format innovations and in-depth creative insights, Teads Studio has been a significant driver of strategic relationships with its brand clients. "By expanding beyond video with their full-funnel offering, Teads is cementing itself as a key partner for the GroupM agencies and many of our clients. Their focus on high quality media inventory, creative and data is providing great results for our clients," said Tim Castree, North America CEO, GroupM. Company Growth In 2018, Teads added over 130 net new employees. Teads expanded its global footprint opening strategic locations in Hong-Kong and the Netherlands. The company also bolstered advertising services in MENA via its acquisition of Buzzeff and opened locations in Dubai (Teads Middle East) and Casablanca (Teads North Africa). Press Contacts: Karen Germ Director, PR & Content, Teads [email protected] Antonella LaCarpia EMEA & APAC Marketing Director, Teads [email protected] ABOUT TEADS Teads, The Global Media Platform, unites and empowers the best publishers in the world to connect advertisers to an audience of over 1.4Bn people every month. Teads' made-for-mobile ad experiences deliver attention and guaranteed outcomes across the marketing funnel. Through its end-to-end platform, Teads provides demand-side, sell-side and creative technology to deliver better media effectiveness for brands, better monetization solutions for publishers, and better experiences for consumers. Teads partners with the leading marketers, agencies and publishers through a team of 750+ people in 26 countries. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/teads-reports-banner-year-announces-430-million-in-revenue-300822736.html SOURCE Teads [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] USC Aiken Taps AI to Help Students Transition to College AIKEN, S.C., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The University of South Carolina Aiken (USC Aiken) today announced the launch of a new, artificially intelligent chatbot designed to provide prospective students with personalized, on-demand support throughout the admissions and enrollment process. The conversational AI tool was developed in partnership with AdmitHub, which partners with colleges and universities around the country to help students navigate the transition to college. "Today's college students communicate differently, and when we saw email responsiveness begin to decline, we knew we needed a solution that could meet students where they are," said Daniel Robb, Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at USC Aiken. "This cutting-edge AI technology has enabled us to communicate directly with students in real-time via text message -- helping ensure a smooth start to the college experience and giving more students across the United States the chance to pursue a college education." USC Aiken, recently ranked the #1 publc regional college in the South by U.S. News & World Report, launched the chatbot to help address persistent gaps in college access. Across the country, one in five accepted students never arrive on campus, often due to challenges navigating a maze of paperwork and financial aid requirements. Recent research , however, has shown that chatbots can reduce so-called "summer melt" by more than 20 percent. To date, since the launch of USC Aiken's chatbot, 28% more students have committed to enrolling and 58% more have signed up for first-year orientation in fall 2019 compared with fall 2018. "Preparing for college is about more than academics -- and it's often the non-academic factors, from financial aid paperwork to unexpected deadlines, that create the most significant barriers for students," said Drew Magliozzi, Co-Founder and CEO of AdmitHub. "AI can help colleges not only respond to students' questions at the moment of need -- but also learn from thousands of interactions to better anticipate and address common challenges." AdmitHub's popular conversational AI solutions are used by a cross-section of higher education institutions across North America to provide on-demand student assistance via text message and through Facebook Messenger, answering questions in real time and connecting students to appropriate advisors and resources. About USC Aiken USC Aiken, a comprehensive university in the University of South Carolina system, offers undergraduate and master's degrees to more than 3,700 students in 50 programs of study. USC Aiken is ranked the #1 public regional college in the South by U.S. News & World Report's guide "America's Best Colleges." The 2019 distinction marks USC Aiken's 14th time ranked as #1 in this category. About AdmitHub Founded in 2014, AdmitHub is an edtech company committed to fostering college success with conversational artificial intelligence. AdmitHub's chatbots provide on-demand assistance via chat by gathering data, sending reminders, answering questions, surveying students, and connecting students to appropriate advisors. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/usc-aiken-taps-ai-to-help-students-transition-to-college-300822842.html SOURCE AdmitHub [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] vAuto Announces Enhanced Dealer Trade Functionality to Conquest OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- vAuto announced an insights-driven upgrade to dealer trading in the Conquest platform, building on the long legacy of market leading metrics for inventory management developed by vAuto. The enhanced dealer trade functionality seamlessly integrates, at no additional cost, into Conquest. Using third-party data, Conquest's Dealer Trade creates an efficient trade process that identifies which competitors' vehicles would perform best in their respective markets, resulting in faster-turning inventory. In today's margin-compressed environment, every piece of inventory must be evaluated on its potential marketability and profitability. Obtaining a clear, objective assessment on inbound trades was difficult and time-consuming until now. "We know new car managers today have a lot on their plates. So, when a dealer receives an inbound request for a trade, they need to be sure they're getting the right car back, and quickly," said Brian Finkelmeyer, vAuto's Senior Director of Conquest. "Conquest's Dealer Trade gives our clients new solutions to be more competitive and efficientwhether they're trading or proactively playing offense to improve their inventory," continued Finkelmeyer. An independent research study conducted by vAuto determined dealers are making 22 trades per month on average and 17.7 percent of those trades are a loss, according to dealer self-reported data.1 "We talk to dealers and evaluate market trends constantly to determine the product enhancements needed to keep our inventory management solutions performing at the highest level," said Randy Kobat, Senior Vice President of Inventory Software Solutions at Cox Automotive. "New vehicle trading is an important part of the business and ordering restrictions can make it challenging to get the exact inventory eeded for a market. And that's what Conquest helps solve for, enabling dealers to make trading decisions on insights, not gut, to reduce losses and improve their inventory," Kobat continued. Conquest takes out the guesswork, helping dealers solve the loss issue by employing an algorithm comprised of propriety data from vAuto, along with additional data from Cox Automotive, while also leveraging support from vAuto's Performance Management team. Conquest's trading tool saves dealers the time of hunting through websites and OEM platformseven if the dealer making the request is not a Conquest user. "The new Dealer Trade tool in Conquest takes the hassle out of trades by having all of the information and relevant inventory available without having to manage the back and forth often associated with manufacturer-provided OEM tools. Having the necessary information readily available prevents us from taking the wrong vehicle back in exchange and keeps our inventory flowing smoothly, not to mention the overall time it saves with the transaction," said Turner Silk, Inventory Manager at Glenn Ford Lincoln/Glenn's Freedom CDJR. vAuto is currently developing additional enhancements for Conquest, including improved marketing integrations and new metrics, which are expected to launch in 2019. For more information on Dealer Trade, visit vAuto.com/WinTrades or call 888-536-4086. 1 vAuto Fall 2018 Dealer Trades Study November 6, 2018 (page 8) About vAuto vAuto provides innovative technology, tools and business intelligence to thousands of dealerships across the United States and Canada, helping them compete more effectively and increase new/used vehicle sales volumes and profits. Founded in 2005, vAuto revolutionized dealers' used vehicle operations with the groundbreaking Provision suite of tools. Leveraging The Velocity Method of Management, pioneered by vAuto founder, Dale Pollak, Provision helped dealers adopt a more transparent and turn-focused approach to used vehicle acquisition, appraising, pricing and merchandising based on real-time, local market supply-and-demand data. In 2018, vAuto released the Provision ProfitTime metric and methodology to help dealers maximize inventory turn and gross profit based on the investment value or profit potential of each vehicle. The same year, the company expanded its integrations with Cox Automotive's HomeNet unit and acquired iRecon, an online reconditioning workflow platform. The moves extend vAuto's efficiency-focused used vehicle management solutions into vehicle merchandising and reconditioning. vAuto's solutions also include Conquest, a new vehicle inventory management and pricing system, and Stockwave, which enables dealers to efficiently find and purchase vehicles from leading wholesale sources via a single platform. Headquartered near Chicago, Illinois, vAuto is a Cox Automotive brand. About Cox Automotive Cox Automotive Inc. makes buying, selling, owning and using cars easier for everyone. The global company's 34,000 plus team members and family of brands, including Autotrader,?Clutch Technologies, Dealer.com, Dealertrack, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim, NextGear Capital, VinSolutions, vAuto?and Xtime,?are passionate about helping millions of car shoppers, 40,000 auto dealer clients across five continents and many others throughout the automotive industry thrive for generations to come. Cox Automotive is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., a privately-owned, Atlanta-based company with revenues exceeding $20?billion.? coxautoinc.com . View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vauto-announces-enhanced-dealer-trade-functionality-to-conquest-300822878.html SOURCE vAuto [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Washington Federal chooses MX Helios as its mobile banking app SILICON SLOPES, Utah and SEATTLE, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- MX, the leading provider of financial data services, announced that Washington Federal has chosen Helios by MX to power its mobile banking app. Washington Federal chose the MX Helios framework for its open APIs, personalization tools, leveraging of client data, and the platform's ability to grow and scale with the bank. Washington Federal, an existing MX digital money management customer, has chosen to expand their relationship with MX by selecting MX Helios as part of its ongoing effort to encourage customer advocacy through digital-first banking. Once live, the new-and-improved mobile app will be offered to the bank's customers throughout eight Western U.S. states. "We love the MX vision of financial strength through clean data, and we love the results of that visionnot to mention their 5-star-rated mobile offering," said Cathy Cooper, EVP, Retail Banking, Washington Federal. "We know our bank's future success lies in meeting the rising generation where and how they want to bank. With Helios' flexibility and open API framework, MX is essentially working alongside us to build our own mobile app, while utilizing their support and tools. We expect that happier customers will ultimately dliver an experience to support our goals for organic growth." "Since its foundation as a savings and loan, Washington Federal has a storied history of serving the individual and the community," said Nate Gardner, Chief Customer Officer, MX. "That commitment has only expanded in this quickly evolving digital age, and MX and Washington Federal continue to work as close partners, leveraging MX's powerful data platform and mobile solution to drive financial success and strength to customers." About MX MX helps financial institutions and fintechs utilize their data more effectively so they can outperform the competition in a rapidly evolving industry. As the leading provider of financial data services, MX enables its clients and partners to easily collect, enhance, analyze, present and act on their financial data. Using MX's platform and products, MX clients are able to understand their customers in real time like never before, allowing them to be truly customer-centric. Founded in 2010, MX is one of the fastest-growing fintech providers, partnering with more than 1,800 financial institutions and 43 of the top 50 digital banking providers. For more information, visit www.mx.com. About Washington Federal Washington Federal, Inc. is the parent company of Washington Federal, a national bank with 235 branches operating in eight Western states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. Established in 1917, the bank provides consumer and commercial deposit accounts, financing for small to middle market businesses, commercial real estate and residential real estate, including consumer mortgages, home equity lines of credit and insurance products through a subsidiary. Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender. www.washingtonfederal.com Press contact: Steve Jensen Director of Communications MX 801-669-5532 [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/washington-federal-chooses-mx-helios-as-its-mobile-banking-app-300813325.html SOURCE MX [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 01, 2019] proteanTecs Completes Successful Series B Funding and Launches Out of Stealth Mode HAIFA, Israel, April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- proteanTecs, a start-up company that invented a groundbreaking solution for the prediction of failures in electronics, announced today that it has completed a series B financing round of $35 million. Investors include Avigdor Willenz, Intel Capital, ITI Venture Capital Partners, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Redline Capital Management S.A., Viola Ventures, WRVI Capital, Zeev Ventures and others. Electronics are becoming ubiquitous in every aspect of our lives, growing in scale and complexity, yet quality and reliability become harder to achieve. Failures can have a drastic impact, incurring monetary consequences, especially when service is abruptly discontinued. proteanTecs introduces Universal Chip Telemetry, a new language of inferred measurements for chip health and performance monitoring. "We offer a one-stop cloud-based platform, that combines data derived from proprietary Agents embedded in chips, with machine learning and data analytics," said Shai Cohen, proteanTecs' co-founder and CEO. "This significantly improves chip and system production quality, while tracking operational reliability and alerting on faults before they become failures. proteanTecs provides unprecedented insights throughout the value chain, from Chip Vendors to System Vendors and Digital Service Providers." The company was founded by seasoned industry veterans, including three former founders of Mellanox Technologies, with deep knowledge and experience in the semiconductor industry. Shlomo Dovrat, co-founder and General partner at Viola Ventures commented: "proteanTecs, led by an exceptional founding team, is introducing a new category, transforming the electronics industry with a novel approach to quality and reliability. As the fund who led the first round in the company, we are proud to maintain our strong support in Round B as well, demonstrating our continued confidence in the company." "proteanTecs is uniquely positioned to address the ever-growing need for scaling electronics", commented Lip-Bu Tan, Managing Partner of WRVI Capital and Chairman of Walden International. "Reliability and Predictive Maintenance will no longer be a boundless effort and cost, but rather an accessible, accurate and common asset, spanning across the industry." "As chip rocess and assembly technologies become increasingly advanced, they also become increasingly complex," said Yair Shoham, Managing Director at Intel Capital. "proteanTecs' solution has great potential to transform how our industry achieves the essential levels of visibility, quality, reliability and predictability." proteanTecs' solutions are already being used by a diversified range of customers. The company has secured funding of nearly $50 million to date. The funding will be used to further accelerate the development and adoption of proteanTecs' technology. About proteanTecs proteanTecs develops revolutionary Universal Chip Telemetry for electronic systems throughout their entire lifecycle, increasing their performance and reliability. By applying machine learning to novel data created by embedded Agents, proteanTecs provides meaningful insights unattainable until today, leading to new levels of quality, reliability and scale. Founded in 2017 and led by seasoned industry veterans, the company is headquartered in Israel with offices in New Jersey and San Francisco. For more information, visit: www.proteanTecs.com. About Viola Ventures Viola Ventures is a venture capital firm, empowering early stage start-ups to become global leaders. Founded in 2000, Viola Ventures manages over $1B across five funds and managed by six investing partners, solely dedicated to early-stage tech investment. The fund has backed a substantial share of Israel's large technology companies, including: Ironsource, Actimize, Payoneer, Redislabs, Outbrain, Lightricks and others. Viola Ventures is part of Viola - Israel's leading technology-oriented investment group with over $3B assets under management. For more information, please visit: www.viola.vc. About WRVI Capital WRVI Capital is a leading venture capital firm that invests in exceptional entrepreneurs and disruptive technologies that will help shape the future. Our management team and investment professionals leverage over 400 years of accumulated investment and operational experience and bring to our portfolio companies a deep and unmatched network of value added strategic relationships. WRVI Capital invests globally and has offices in California, Israel, India and China. For further information about WRVI Capital, please visit www.wrvi.vc. About Intel Capital Intel Capital invests in innovative startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, datacenter and cloud, 5G, next-generation computers and a wide range of other disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$12.4 billion in 1,554 companies worldwide, and 670 portfolio companies have gone public or participated in a merger. Intel Capital curates thousands of business development introductions each year between its portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world's most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital. Press Contact Tamar Naishlos, Media Relations [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/proteantecs-completes-successful-series-b-funding-and-launches-out-of-stealth-mode-300822178.html SOURCE proteanTecs [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 01, 2019] Intel Capital Announces $117 Million of New Investments in 14 Disruptive Tech Startups at Annual Global Summit Intel Capital, Intel (News - Alert) Corporation's global investment organization, announced today at the Intel Capital Global Summit new investments totaling $117 million in 14 disruptive technology startups. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190401005800/en/ Leaders from the 14 companies joining the Intel Capital (News - Alert) portfolio pose with Intel Capital President Wendell Brooks at the Arizona Biltmore as the 19th annual Intel Capital Global Summit kicks off. The 2019 Intel Capital Global Summit runs April 1-3 in Phoenix. The annual event is the venture industry's premier technology networking gathering. (Credit: Intel Corporation) The 14 companies joining Intel Capital's portfolio are creating powerful artificial intelligence (AI) platforms; new ways to see and analyze materials for the built world and our bodies; more efficient and greener manufacturing technologies; and disruptive new approaches to chip design. "Intel has driven disruption for the last 50 years, changing the way we live by making compute ubiquitous. Intel Capital is continuing that legacy of disruption with these investments," said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital. "These companies are shifting the way we think about artificial intelligence, communications, manufacturing and health care - areas that will become increasingly essential in coming years as the linchpins of a smarter, more connected society." The investments extend Intel Capital's recent strategy of taking larger, more strategic positions in portfolio startups. Each year, Intel Capital puts $300 million to $500 million into innovative companies across a wide range of emerging technologies making the impossible possible. "Our continued goal is to leverage the global resources and expertise of the world's greatest engineering company, and its ecosystem of customers and partners, to help these founders accelerate growth and innovation," Brooks said. Furthering its commitment to diversity and inclusion, Intel Capital and Intel Global Diversity and Inclusion also announced a sponsorship of HBCUvc*, a nonprofit that trains students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) about venture capital and technology entrepreneurship. HBCUvc provides students skills training, mentorship and the chance to build professional relationships with seasoned investors and entrepreneurs. Its Venture Capital Clinic empowers student fellows to put what they've learned into practice and fuel high-growth entrepreneurship on campus. Intel Capital and Intel will partner with HBCUvc to provide mentoring, training and real-world experiences. The Intel Capital Global Summit convenes more than 600 entrepreneurs, venture investors and Global 2000 business leaders for three days of networking, company-building and inspiration. This year's lineup of speakers includes Robert Swan, Intel CEO; Reed Hundt, Coalition for Green Capital* CEO and former FCC chairman; Paul Sciarra, Pinterest* co-founder and Joby Aviation* executive chairman; Aicha Evans, Zoox* CEO; Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence Design Systems (News - Alert) CEO; Bob Young, Red Hat* co-founder; and General Lori Robinson (retired), commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). More details on Intel Capital's new investments in 14 disruptive startups: Disrupting Artificial Intelligence Cloudpick Limited* (Shanghai, China) is a smart retail technology provider. With proprietary computer vision, deep learning, sensor fusion and edge computing technologies, Cloudpick enables highly digitized, intelligent, cashier-free stores with grab-and-go shopping experiences. loudpick has collaborated with e-commerce companies, traditional retailers and payment partners worldwide to upgrade many brick-and-mortar stores' shopping experiences. SambaNova Systems* (Palo Alto (News - Alert), California, U.S.) is a rapidly growing Silicon Valley-based company that is building the industry's most advanced systems platform to run AI applications from the data center to the edge. Founded by industry pioneers and experts in systems hardware and software design from Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Stanford University, SambaNova Systems' mission is to bring AI innovations discovered in deep research to enterprises and organizations in all industries around the world, creating AI for everyone, everywhere. Untether AI* (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is developing ultra-efficient, high-performance AI chips that will be the foundation for the next wave of innovation in AI. Untether AI has invented an entirely new type of chip architecture that is specifically designed for neural net inference by eliminating bottlenecks in data movement. This unique architecture moves data 1,000 times faster than traditional architectures, resulting in extreme performance and efficiency. The company was founded by a team of scientists, engineers and experienced entrepreneurs who have successfully brought to market more than 1 billion chips. Zhuhai EEasy Technology Co. Ltd.* (Zhuhai, China) is an AI system-on-chip (SoC) design house and total solution provider. Its offerings include AI acceleration; image and graphic processing; video encoding and decoding; and mixed-signal ULSI design capabilities. Its AI SoCs targeting video, automotive and smart devices will enter mass-production in late 2019. Disrupting Communications Mighty Networks* (Palo Alto, California, U.S.) is designed for brands and businesses to bring people together by offering community, content, online courses and subscription commerce in one place. The company is unique in serving a new breed of digitally native "creators with a purpose" selling experiences, connections and expertise to their followers - an emerging category of digital services called Experiential Commerce. Pixeom* (Santa Clara, California, U.S.) is redefining how enterprises manage hybrid cloud resources with its edge computing software platform that re-creates and orchestrates cloud functionality on-premise. It makes it easy to deploy and manage large-scale, geographically distributed infrastructure and workloads. Polystream* (Guildford, U.K.) is a deep-tech startup fundamentally changing how video games and demanding 3D applications are delivered via the cloud. Polystream's Software Defined Imaging* technology enables interactive graphics content to be streamed at unprecedented scale, with truly global reach. Tibit Communications* (Petaluma, California, U.S.) is developing next-generation devices to provide a broadband onramp to the home, office or cell site, managed virtually from the cloud to the user. Tibit replaces dedicated hardware boxes in carrier and enterprise networks with a small module connected to a standard Ethernet switch - providing significant savings of cost, power and space. Disrupting Healthcare Medical Informatics Corp.* (Houston, Texas, U.S.) is a software-based monitoring and analytics company. Its revolutionary Sickbay* platform archives, aggregates and transforms otherwise not-recorded, high-resolution waveform data across disparate devices to enable anywhere, anytime remote monitoring across the continuum of care. The same platform can then be leveraged to use machine learning and AI to deploy real-time, predictive, critical care analytics that get ahead of deterioration and risk and enable data-driven medicine and patient-centered care. Reveal Biosciences, Inc.* (San Diego, California, U.S.) is creating a new generation of data-powered pathology to improve global healthcare. ImageDx, a proprietary deep-learning platform, delivers pathologists and scientists a novel class of actionable, quantitative data to accelerate research and enhance patient care. Disrupting Manufacturing Landing AI* (Palo Alto, California, U.S.) provides AI-powered SaaS (News - Alert) solutions and corporate-level AI transformation programs to turn enterprises into AI companies. Founded by Dr. Andrew Ng, the Landing AI team enables companies in industries, including manufacturing and agriculture, to develop and execute cohesive AI strategies. OnScale* (Cupertino, California, U.S.) offers on-demand scalable engineering simulation software, empowering engineers to accelerate innovation across multiple industries, including next-generation technologies such as MEMS IoT, 5G, biomedicine and autonomous vehicles. OnScale combines powerful multiphysics solver technology, used and validated by Fortune 50 companies for over 30 years, with the speed and flexibility of cloud high-performance computing (HPC). By removing the constraints of legacy simulation tools, OnScale allows engineers to dramatically reduce cost, risk and time to market for cutting-edge technologies. proteanTecs* (Haifa, Israel) develops revolutionary Universal Chip Telemetry* for electronic systems throughout their entire lifecycle, increasing their performance and reliability. By applying machine learning to novel data created by embedded agents, proteanTecs provides meaningful insights unattainable until today, leading to new levels of quality, reliability and scale. Qolibri, Inc.* (Roseville, California, U.S.) is a creative technical company developing breakthrough proprietary solutions that address problems in semiconductor subfabs. The Qolibri team has extensive expertise in semiconductor capital equipment technology and renewable energy. Qolibri technologies will change the landscape of the subfab, leading to substantially reduced chip manufacturing costs with positive environmental impact. "We believe in these companies and are excited to help them disrupt their industries by putting the weight of Intel behind them," Brooks said. "Our investment is just the start of our work with each of them." For more information, visit our Intel Newsroom Press Kit. https://newsroom.intel.com/press-kits/2019-intel-capital-global-summit/. About Intel Capital Intel Capital invests in innovative startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous technology, data center and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute, and a wide range of other disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$12.5 billion in more than 1,550 companies worldwide, and 670 portfolio companies have gone public or participated in a merger or acquisition. Intel Capital curates thousands of business development introductions each year between its portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world's most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital. Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190401005800/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 01, 2019] TrustSpot Launches Lootly, a Powerful New Customer Loyalty Platform ORLANDO, Fla., April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Customer loyalty programs are powerful tools to keep an online retailer's customers returning rather than losing them to the competition. However, due to the data complexity and logistics, advanced loyalty programs have mostly been the domain of large-scale corporations and not smaller merchants. That has changed with the launch of Lootly, a powerful and fully-customizable customer loyalty program that is both simple to set up and manage as well as affordable and scalable. With Lootly, a business can create a customized customer loyalty program in minutes, leveraging tools like points, VIP tier rewards and referrals. With one click, Lootly integrates with all of the popular eCommerce, email providers and social media platforms. It is currently available for Shopify and Shopify Plus, with integrations soon to be included for BigCommerce, Magento 1 & 2, and WooCommerce. Lootly has also radically redesigned the pricing structure for loyalty platforms. Unlike other companies that bill their clients based on orders processed each month or by the number of customers a business has, Lootly instead offers an unlimited, flat-rate monthly price ranging from $49 per month for small enterprises up to $1,000 per month for a full custom solution including program management, setup, strategy planning and custom integration development. All plans allow unlimited orders and unlimited customers. There are also no contacts and no setup fees pricing is strictly month to month, with a 10 percent discount for a 1-year subscription. Lootly is a subsidiary of TrustSpot, one of the world's largest review platforms helping over 21,000 global brands collect user-generated content such as reviews, photos, video testimonials, social experiences and product Q&A. Each month, more than 60 million consumers in 98 countries view and interact with a piece of content generated by TrustSpot. "We noticed a trend where clients were looking for solutions to help increase their customer's lifetime value," explained Ryan Haidinger, CEO and Co-Founder of Lootly and TrustSpot. "Since reviews and user-generated content is considered 'post transactional' - after the buyer makes a purchase - we wanted to figure out a way to help the brand before a transaction took place. With Lootly, the goal is to ensure a natural transition from acquisition to retention and continued growth of their lifetime value." Using Lootly, companies of all sizes can: Customize Tier Rewards - Offer entry rewards when customers first achieve VIP status, and lifetime rewards for their continued loyalty with the brand. Lootly also allows businesses to offer Custom Rewards, which are unique perks centered around the brand. Customer Group Segmentation - Lootly makes it easy to create special VIP programs for specific groups of customers such as Retail and Wholesale users which allows a business to create separate rewards that make sense for those customer groups. Incentivize Actions with Points - Create earning actions that allow customers to heavily engage with the brand. Increase social media presence, reviews and blog viewership by encouraging users to interact with the business. Point Expiration & Reminders - Set automated reminders to let previous customers know they have points available that are expiring soon. This level of engagement ensures dormant customers come back and redeem their points. Referrals - Turn customers into brand ambassadors to promote the business to their friends and family Powerful Customer Insights - Discover how customers are interacting with the program and make adjustments in a few clicks For more information and to request a free demo, visit - https://lootly.io. Related Images lootly.png Lootly Launch your Loyalty & Referrals program in less than 5 minutes. complete-brand-customization.png Complete Brand Customization Customize every aspect of your loyalty platform in only a few clicks. Lootly also includes HTML Editors for full design customization. Related Links Visit Lootly Lootly Pricing View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trustspot-launches-lootly-a-powerful-new-customer-loyalty-platform-300822185.html SOURCE TrustSpot Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 01, 2019] The thought leadership conference, On:Chain19, has added speakers from CoinBase, Pantera Capital, Celsius Network, Figure Technologies, and Consensys to their current top-tier roster to speak to the intersection of blockchain and finance. Newport Beach, CA, April 01, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (via Blockchain Wire) ON:chain19, the initial annual thought-leadership conference, to be held on Thursday, May 23, 2019, today announced it has secured new speakers including President of Pantera Capital, William Healy; Founder of Figure Technologies, Mike Cagney; CEO of Celsius Network, Alex Mashinsky; Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase, Brian Brooks; and Managing Director of Consensys, Rahilla Zafar. With a powerful line-up of top figures in the crypto and finance space, the intimate conference and networking event located at the beautiful Balboa Bay Resort in Newport Beach, CA, will be covering a range of topics touching on the impact of blockchain on the financial markets, institutional transactions, portfolio construction, and consumer behavior. ON:chain19 is shaping up to be one of the most compelling new events in finance and blockchain this year, observed Timothy Spangler, the leading FinTech regulatory expert who is co-chairing the conference. The caliber of our speakers is a hearty confirmation that the issues and opportunities we will be discussing at ON:chain this year are incredibly important. At ON:chain19, attendees will learn about the diverse and surprising ways in which blockchain is disrupting our financial system and transforming the way in which people invest, save, transact, and plan for their future. Other confirmed speakers currently include: Hester Peirce, SEC Commissioner George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty and Life after Google Phillip Liu, Bitmain Lee Schneider, Block.one Noreen Clancy, RAND Corporation Scott Purcell, Prime Trust Michael Terpin, Transform Group Vineer Bhansali, LongTail Alpha Travis Kling, Ikigai Asset Management Olga Mack, Quantstamp Marc Goroff, XEEDA Robin Sosnow, Esq. PLLC Matt Gertler, Reserve.org Thomas Meredith, BitMinutes Marc Boiron, Fisher Broyles Mark Moss, Market Disruptors Darren Marble, Issuance Enzo Villani, Transform Strategies Kelley Weaver, MelrosePR Gene Massey, MediaShares Jonathan Reichental, former CIO of City of Palo Alto Topics will include: Why is Blockchain so Transformative?, Financial Inclusion and the Worlds 2.5 Billion Unbanked, Addressing Regulatory Concerns, Millennials and Crypto, Real Estate Disruptors and Women in Blockchain. In order to support the broadest conversations on these exciting topics, a limited number of exceptional, high caliber university students and individuals 23 years old and younger will be invited to attend ON:chain19 in Newport Beach and contribute to the robust discussions. Importantly, a portion of the ON:chain19 proceeds will benefit Girls Who Code, Help for Children, and Challenged Athletes Foundation. For more information, to become a sponsor or speaker, or to register now, please visit www.onchain19.io (Use 20% Discount Code: OnChain20 or email us at [email protected]. For Media inquiries, please contact Sarah Cohen at Melrose PR; sarah(at)melrosepr(dot)com or call (310) 260-7901. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 01, 2019] Empire Cinemas' First Multi-Sensory Movie-Watching Experience, To Open During Summer 2019 LAS VEGAS and RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Al-Rashed Empire Cinema Consortium has just signed a new deal with CJ 4DPLEX, the world's leading cinema technology company, to open 10 4DX theatres around Saudi Arabia by 2023. The agreement comes a year after the association has announced its plans to open as many as 30 theatres in various cities around Saudi Arabia, right after it was granted a license to operate cinemas in the kingdom by the General Authority for Audiovisual Media. 4DX enhances the on-screen visuals of action-packed blockbusters, transcending the traditional cinema experience through special effects including motions synchronized seats, wind, fog, rain, lightning, snow, bubble, vibration, and scents. The result is one of the most immersive cinema format in the industry, drawing fans into the action on the big screen. "Today is a historic day for both CJ 4DPLEX and Empire Cinemas," said JongRyul Kim, CEO of CJ 4DPLEX. "This is the largest 4DX deal yet for Saudi Arabia and will ensure that the format plays a big role as Saudi Arabia opens itself to international cinema. We are incredibly excited to be a part of this huge moment for cinema in the Middle East." "We are incredibly excited to be signing this new deal with CJ 4DPLEX to bring the immersive cinema technology of 4DX to audiences all over Saudi Arabia," said Gino Haddad CEO of Empire Cinemas. "The deal is just the beginning of a great relationship that we hope will revolutionize the theater-going experience in the Middle East." SOURCE CJ 4DPLEX [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 01, 2019] Onchain Custodian, the Cryptocurrency and Digital Asset Custodian Backed by Sequoia, Fosun and DHVC, Launches its SAFE Platform and Value-Added Services Onchain Custodian announced today that it will launch its digital asset custody platform and value-added services at the occasion of the Chain Plus Asia Pacific Blockchain New Finance Summit, 11th and 12th April in Singapore, where ONC will speak and exhibit. The summit and launch event are expected to attract high profile VIP guests from around Asia. Headquartered in Singapore, Onchain Custodian has developed a comprehensive online platform to secure digital asset investments with customisable custody solutions and institutional grade security and controls. The SAFE Digital Asset Custody Platform is flexibly built to meet the possible futures of digital asset custody. It supports mainstream crypto currencies and tokens, and will evolve swiftly to handle securities tokens and stable coins as the regulation and industry develop. The slur of news on theft of cryptocurrencies and lack of institutional grade custody solution in Asia has created increasing demand for a custodian like ONC. Even before the launch of its SAFE Platform, potential customers have knocked on the doors of ONC for discussions around the services. ONC is also researching into the latest tested protocols in terms of securing private keys, so that its customers will lways benefit from secured and efficient custody solutions. ONC's objective is to secure and automate digital asset custody through innovation, but also with industry standardisation in mind. Da Hongfei, Board Chair of ONC: "Third-party custody is one of the fundamental pillars needed to drive mainstream adoption of tokenized assets. Onchain Custodian is contributing this important piece of infrastructure to the digital asset economy." Li Jun, Founder, Ontology (News - Alert) Foundation: "The Ontology Foundation has decided to appoint Onchain Custodian for the independent third-party custody of its crypto reserves. In addition to increasing transparency vis a vis our community, it will allow us to focus all our energy and resources on progressing the Ontology project, leaving the safekeeping of our assets to a strong team of professionals" El Lee, COO ONC: "Trust is vital for the custody business. Customers must be able to trust you as a credible technology enabler and a financial services provider. We are both!" Alexandre Kech, CEO ONC to conclude: "Onchain Custodian aims to bring peace of mind to customers who should only be concerned by the growth of their business. ONC focuses on securing their digital assets to allow them to do exactly that!" For more details on the ambitious plans of Onchain Custodian, visit www.oncustodian.com, LinkedIn and Twitter. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190401005046/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 01, 2019] Integral Ad Science Poised for Growth in the Region, Appoints Laura Quigley as Managing Director of Southeast Asia SINGAPORE, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Integral Ad Science (IAS), today announced Laura Quigley's appointment as the Managing Director, Southeast Asia (SEA). She was previously Director, Publisher Solutions, APAC at IAS. In her new role, she will actively work with brands, agencies, publishers and technology partners in the region to find synergies, drive the media quality agenda for local brands and propel growth at IAS by further unlocking the value of the business. She will be based in Singapore and will report to Stephen Dolan, Managing Director, APAC. Quigley joined the company in 2016 as Sales Director. She played a vital role in creating alliances with Dentsu Aegis in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and has championed IAS's publisher solution across APAC. Prior to joining IAS, Quigley worked in Lonon at Google and ZenithOptimedia. She started her career in New Zealand where she worked for a local publisher NZME. "IAS in Southeast Asia continues to be on a tremendous growth trajectory. This has been and continues to be an incredible journey for me, and I am privileged to work with such a talented team. I am looking forward to being a catalyst in forging long-term partnerships and trust in digital to promote wider adoption of ad verification solutions that drive transparency in the overall digital ecosystem," says Quigley. "To accommodate our growth plans within the region we are rapidly expanding our team across multiple functions and have relocated to a larger space in Singapore. I am thrilled to have Laura move to Singapore and head Southeast Asia operations," said Stephen Dolan, Managing Director APAC, IAS. "She will lead the growth proposition for IAS in the region and has a track record of building strategic partnerships across the markets. Her knowledge and experience in navigating the business complexities within the ad tech space make her the ideal person to lead the team and help build the full-service structure for meeting clients' business challenges in the region." About IAS Integral Ad Science (IAS) is a global technology company that offers data and solutions to establish a safer, more effective advertising ecosystem. We partner with advertisers and publishers to protect their investments, capture consumer attention, and drive business impact. Founded in 2009, IAS is headquartered in New York with global operations in 13 countries. Our growth and innovation have been recognized in the Inc. 5000, Crain's Fast 50, Forbes America's Most Promising Companies, and I-COM's Smart Data Marketing Technology Company. Learn more at www.integralads.com Press Contact For any media inquiries, please contact us at [email protected] Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20190327/2415810-1 SOURCE Integral Ad Science [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 01, 2019] Global Semiconductor Sales Decrease 7.3 Percent Month-to-Month in February WASHINGTON, April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $32.9 billion for the month of February 2019, a decrease of 7.3 percent from the January 2019 total of $35.5 billion and 10.6 percent less than the February 2018 total of $36.8 billion. Monthly sales are compiled by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization and represent a three-month moving average. SIA represents U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research. "Global semiconductor sales fell across the board in February, with all major product categories experiencing drops on a year-to-year and month-to-month basis," said John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO. "Sales were also down across all major regional markets, as the global industry continues to endure a period of slowing sales following record revenues over the last three years." Regionally, sales decreased both month-to-month and year-to-year across all regional markets: Europe (-2.3 percent month-to-month/-3.0 percent year-to-year), Asia Pacific/All Other (-5.1 percent/-7.2 percent), Japan (-5.3 percent/-5.9 percent), China (-7.8 percent/-8.5 percent), and the Americas (-12.9 percent/-22.9 percent). For comprehensive monthly semiconductor sales data and detailed WSTS Forecasts, consider purchasing the WSTS Subscription Package. For detailed historical information about the global semiconductor industry and market, consider ordering the SIA Databook. February 2019 Billions Month-to-Month Sales Market Last Month Current Month % Change Americas 7.31 6.37 -12.9% Europe 3.41 3.34 -2.3% Japan 3.16 2.99 -5.3% China 11.63 10.72 -7.8% Asia Pacific/All Other 9.96 9.45 -5.1% Total 35.47 32.86 -7.3% Year-to-Year Sales Market Last Year Current Month % Change Americas 8.25 6.37 -22.9% Europe 3.44 3.34 -3.0% Japan 3.18 2.99 -5.9% China 11.71 10.72 -8.5% Asia Pacific/All Other 10.18 9.45 -7.2% Total 36.77 32.86 -10.6% Three-Month-Moving Average Sales Market Sept/Oct/Nov Dec/Jan/Feb % Change Americas 9.58 6.37 -33.6% Europe 3.64 3.34 -8.4% Japan 3.39 2.99 -11.7% China 13.82 10.72 -22.5% Asia Pacific/All Other 10.67 9.45 -11.4% Total 41.11 32.86 -20.1% Media Contact Dan Rosso Semiconductor Industry Association 202-446-1719 [email protected] About SIA The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) is the voice of the semiconductor industry, one of America's top export industries and a key driver of America's economic strength, national security, and global competitiveness. Semiconductors the tiny chips that enable modern technologies power incredible products and services that have transformed our lives and our economy. The semiconductor industry directly employs nearly a quarter of a million workers in the United States, and U.S. semiconductor company sales totaled $209 billion in 2018. SIA members account for nearly 95 percent of all U.S. semiconductor industry sales. Through this coalition, SIA seeks to strengthen leadership of semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research by working with Congress, the Administration, and key industry stakeholders around the world to encourage policies that fuel innovation, propel business, and drive international competition. Learn more at www.semiconductors.org. About WSTS World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) is an independent non-profit organization representing the vast majority of the world semiconductor industry. The mission of WSTS is to be the respected source of semiconductor market data and forecasts. Founded in 1986, WSTS is the singular source for monthly industry shipment statistics. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-semiconductor-sales-decrease-7-3-percent-month-to-month-in-february-300822387.html SOURCE Semiconductor Industry Association [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Wirecard Digitizes Payment Processes for Japan's Largest Airline ANA ASCHHEIM, Germany, April 2, 2019 /CNW/ -- Wirecard, the global innovation leader in digital financial technology, has won ANA, a leading Asian airline and Japan's largest carrier with 54 million passengers annually, as a new client for digitalized payment processes. The new cash-free solution will allow ANA passengers in selected European airports to receive quick and convenient compensation for delayed or disrupted flights. Wirecard is providing ANA with a branded, digital card solution that can be loaded with the applicable amounts and distributed to passengers. ANA operates 80 international routes and 118 domestic routes, and has a fleet of 260 aircraft. Based in Tokyo Narita and Haneda airports, ANA currently serves 22 countries worldwide. In the fast-growing business of air travel, customer service is key. Through its digital passenger compensation cards, Wirecard uses its expertise in digital payments to address a crucial need of air travelers. The initial offer will include select European airports serviced by ANA, which is a Star Alliance member and partner of renowned European airlines. ANA has benefitted from the recent yearly increase in the number of international flight passengers, and from a strong business demand originating in Japan. For the fiscal year 2017, ANA reported a 15.6% increase in international passenger service revenue, amounting to a difference of EUR +625 million from the previous year. "Serving our customers is our top priority, and when it comes to air travel, disruptions are unavoidable," said Masahiko Dan, SVP EMEA Marketing & Sales at ANA. "Therefore, we welcome this innovative solution by Wirecard which will allow us to compensate passengers in a quicker and more efficient way. In addition, passengers will benefit from the flexibility offered by the payout cards, which can be used at their discretion." "The solution aligns perfectly with our endeavor to create a cash-free and digitalized environment globally," said Jorg Moller, EVP Sales Travel at Wirecard. "Thanks to our cutting-edge card management application we could smoothly configure the cards to meet ANA's specific needs. We are thrilled to offer our customizable solution to ANA, a leading and modern airline, and look forward to furthering ur partnership." The compensation cards are a convenient and innovative solution for both the airline and affected ANA passengers: the cards can be quickly loaded by airline staff, saving time and cutting administrative costs. Passengers, who in the past would have received cash or limited-use vouchers, will receive instead digital cards which can be used in ATMs, at the POS, and for online purchases. The setup of the cards is powered by Wirecard's innovative proprietary application, in which features of the cards are customized for each customer. For example, the merchant can request that its cards be accepted at particular POS, that transaction fees should or should not be applied and can determine which countries they can be used in. Wirecard configures the cards appropriately so that the customer receives an individual tailor-made solution. About Wirecard: Wirecard (GER:WDI) is one of the world's fastest growing digital platforms in the area of financial commerce. We provide both business customers and consumers with a constantly expanding ecosystem of real-time value-added services built around innovative digital payments by using an integrated B2B2C approach. This ecosystem concentrates on the areas payment & risk, retail & transaction banking, loyalty & couponing, data analytics & conversion rate enhancement in all sales channels (online, mobile, ePOS). Wirecard operates regulated financial institutions in several key markets, holds issuing and acquiring licenses from all major payment and card networks. Wirecard AG is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (DAX and TecDAX, ISIN DE0007472060). Visit us on www.wirecard.com, follow us on Twitter @wirecard and on Facebook @wirecardgroup. About ANA: Following the "Inspiration of Japan" high quality of service, ANA has been awarded the respected 5-Star rating every year since 2013 from SKYTRAX. ANA is the only Japanese airline to win this prestigious designation six years in a row. Additionally, ANA has been recognized by Air Transport World as "Airline of the Year" three times in the past 10 years - 2007, 2013 and 2018, becoming one of the few airlines winning this prestigious award for multiple times. ANA was founded in 1952 with two helicopters and has become the largest airline in Japan, as well as one of the most significant airlines in Asia, operating 80 international routes and 118 domestic routes. ANA offers a unique dual hub model which enables passengers to travel to Tokyo and connect through the two airports in the metropolitan Tokyo, NARITA and HANEDA, to various destinations throughout Japan, and also offers same day connections between various North American, Asian and Chinese cities. ANA has been a member of Star Alliance since 1999 and has joint venture partnerships with United Airlines, Lufthansa German Airlines, Swiss International Airlines and Austrian Airlines. Besides the full service and award winner carrier ANA, the ANA Group has two LCCs as consolidated subsidiaries, Vanilla Air Inc. and Peach Aviation Limited. The ANA Group carried 53.8 million passengers in FY2017, has approximately 39,000 employees and a fleet of 260 aircraft. ANA is a proud launch customer and the biggest operator of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. For more information, please refer to the following link. https://www.ana.co.jp/group/en/ Wirecard media contact: Wirecard AG Jana Tilz Tel.: +49(0)89-4424-1363 Email: [email protected] ANA media contact: ANA Nanako Murakami Email: [email protected] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wirecard-digitizes-payment-processes-for-japans-largest-airline-ana-300822539.html SOURCE Wirecard AG [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] SCADAfence Chosen by Mitsui Fudosan to Secure Building Management Systems Tokyo-based real estate giant selects leading OT security platform to keep its Smart City and digital transformation initiatives secure TEL AVIV, Israel and TOKYO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SCADAfence, the global leader in operational technology (OT) security and the most widely deployed OT security platform in Japan, was selected by Mitsui Fudosan, a leader in smart cities digital transformation and innovation, to secure its critical facilities and building management systems (BMS). The SCADAfence platform provides BMS administrators with continuous OT network monitoring for increased visibility, risk management, and threat protection. Its selection by Mitsui Fudosan is in line with the Japanese government's efforts to ensure that hackers don't use IoT devices to launch attacks against Japanese infrastructure during the Olympic games. "SCADAfence enhances our ability to continue and adopt Smart City technologies and will allow us to operate securely as we digitalize our OT infrastructure," said Akira Sugawara of Mitsui Fudosan. "Our building management systems are constantly becoming more digitized and inter-connected due to industrial IoT technologies and securing them requires technology designed for massive, complex networks." In 2018, the Olympic Destroyer malware took down critical systems, sabotaging the preparation for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South KoreaTokyo 2020, SCADAfence will protect the BMS infrastructure from malicious attacks, which can jeopardize the organizers' reputation and even endanger human lives. Such attack scenarios can range from turning off the HVAC systems during Tokyo's hot summer to setting off fire alarms in the early morning, putting affected athletes at a disadvantage when it comes time to compete. "Cyber threats have become a growing concern to BMS owners in various industries such as hospitals, financial institutions, hospitality, and airports," said Elad Ben Meir, CEO of SCADAfence. "Our joint work with Mitsui and our ability to support their growing OT infrastructure ensures they have the required peace of mind as they go through their digital transformation journey." SCADAfence and Mitsui Fudosan will discuss the challenges of securing BMS systems in smart cities and how to secure them during an upcoming SCADAfence seminar about OT security in Tokyo on April 12, 2019. For more details and registration, please click here. About SCADAfence SCADAfence helps companies with large-scale operational technology (OT) networks embrace the benefits of industrial IoT by reducing cyber risks and mitigating operational threats. Our non-intrusive platform provides full coverage of large-scale networks, offering best-in-class detection accuracy, asset discovery and user experience. SCADAfence seamlessly integrates OT security within existing security operations, bridging the IT/OT convergence gap. We deliver security and visibility for some of the world's most complex OT networks, including Europe's largest manufacturing facility. Thanks to SCADAfence, companies in manufacturing, building management and critical infrastructure industries can operate securely, reliably and efficiently as they go through the digital transformation journey. More information is available at https://www.scadafence.com About Mitsui Fudosan Mitsui Fudosan Co., Ltd., a leading global real estate company headquartered in Tokyo, aims to bring affluence and comfort to urban living. It maximizes urban value creation by providing secure, safe and attractive urban spaces and soft services that bring enrichment and comfort to urban living; and provides varied and innovative solutions that stimulate the real estate investment market. https://www.mitsuifudosan.co.jp/english/ Media Contact Amy Kenigsberg K2 Global Communications http://k2-gc.com/ [email protected] tel: +972-9-794-1681 (+2 GMT) U.S.: +1-913-440-4072 (+7 ET) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] SES Reach Grows to 355 Million Homes Worldwide SES (News - Alert) strengthens its position as the world's leading video distributor via satellite as the number of TV households it serves increased by more than 4 million to over 355 million in 2018. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190401006013/en/ SES Reach Grows to 355 Million Homes Worldwide (Photo: Business Wire) The results from the SES's annual market research highlighted further growth in SES's technical reach and underlined the important role of satellite in delivering video to large audiences directly and indirectly in a reliable and cost-effective manner. The results showed an increase in SES's technical reach in Europe, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Africa. In Africa, this included the addition of Kenya to the survey where more than 2 million TV homes across the country rely on SES for their TV content. In Europe, satellite broadcasting, and especially Direct-to-Home (DTH), remains the leading distribution technology, with SES serving 167 million TV homes across the continent. The SES fleet is also delivering video content to 72 million households across North America, mainly via the important U.S. cable neighbourhoods. Across other markets, SES continues to expand its technical reach, which now totals 102.6 million TV homes served by key video neighbourhoods in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Africa. The results underscore the essential value proposition of satellite broadcasting as a highly attractive platform for reliable and cost-effective video delivery to large audiences. These qualities make it ideal for distributing HD and UHD programming, and SES is today delivering nearly 2,800 HD TV channels and over 40 commercial UHD TV channels - more than ay other satellite service provider. 2018 was the 25th year that SES has conducted the Satellite Monitor survey. The detailed data it delivers about the reach of SES and video viewing trends has proven to be a valuable tool for SES's customers, supporting SES's position as a trusted partner to the world's leading broadcasters and content owners. "At SES, we invest in tools and services to help our customers gather information about markets they operate in so that they can be even more successful in their business. The Satellite Monitor is one such tool that demonstrates the long-term value of SES's core video neighbourhoods and extensive reach to our customers," said Ferdinand Kayser, CEO of SES Video. "Regardless of the shift in consumption habits, it is clear that our business remains an essential tool in delivering a high-quality viewing experience to the world's leading broadcasters and content owners. Through the differentiation of our services, we will continue to support their development and future success." Watch the satellite monitor animation here: https://vimeo.com/327003965 Follow us on: Social Media Blog Media Library White Papers About SES SES is the world's leading satellite operator with over 70 satellites in two different orbits, Geostationary Orbit (GEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO). It provides a diverse range of customers with global video distribution and data connectivity services through two business units: SES Video and SES Networks. SES Video reaches over 355 million TV homes, through Direct-to-Home (DTH) platforms and cable, terrestrial, and IPTV (News - Alert) networks globally. The SES Video portfolio includes MX1, a leading media service provider offering a full suite of innovative services for both linear and digital distribution, and the ASTRA satellite system, which has the largest DTH television reach in Europe. SES Networks provides global managed data services, connecting people in a variety of sectors including telecommunications, maritime, aeronautical, and energy, as well as governments and institutions across the world. The SES Networks portfolio includes GovSat, a 50/50 public-private partnership between SES and the Luxembourg government, and O3b, the only non-geostationary system delivering fibre-like broadband services today. Further information is available at: www.ses.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190401006013/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Dunya Labs Releases India's First Infrastructure Tool for Global Blockchain EOS BENGALURU, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dunya Labs, a blockchain studio in Bangalore, launched its first product today. The product, Eclipse, is an intelligent automated resource management tool for developers and teams building on the EOS blockchain and launched with seven flagship customers from China, Korea, and the US. Dunya Labs is the first company in India to release an infrastructure product for the EOS blockchain. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/799087/Dunya_Labs_Logo.jpg ) (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/845153/Eclipse.jpg ) Eclipse is an infrastructure platform built for a public blockchain called EOS that can be used by decentralized applications (dApp). However, the impact of Eclipse is two-fold: by abstracting away complexity for both users and dApp developers. The design of EOS blockchain allows many benefits, compared to other public blockchains. EOS is extremely fast and scalable, and is written in C++, a language familiar to many software developers. Some aspects of EOS design resulted in bottlenecks for dApp development and use. Eclipse is the first product for EOS to completely solve these bottlenecks and offers an end-to-end solution hich is completely invisible to developers and users, allowing participants to seamlessly make transactions on the blockchain very similarly to how they interact with applications built on the traditional web. "Better user experience and developer tooling is what will drive the real wave of decentralized, blockchain-based application adoption. We are very honored at Dunya Labs to contribute to that process. We believe that in the future, blockchain applications will feel just like centralized applications; and we are providing the bridges to make that a reality," says Cathy Guo, CEO and Co-Founder of Dunya Labs. EOS is a general-purpose smart contract platform developed by Dan Larimer, who also built application-specific blockchain platforms Steemit and Bitshares. Since the EOS mainnet launch in June 2018, the EOS platform has witnessed explosive innovation, activities and community engagement with over 500,000 account holders, more than 5 million transactions made per day, and one of the most exciting infrastructures and dApp development platforms in existence. (http://www.dappradar.com). The Dunya Labs team behind Eclipse comes from top global technology product and infrastructure companies. The team has spent years in the blockchain space, and has hosted several in-person, hands-on developer workshops for EOS for hundreds of participants. In India, less than 1% of the country's developers have exposure to blockchain development, and experience is limited to platforms such as Hyperledger and Ethereum. Dunya Labs aims to bring India to the global blockchain frontier through community participation, developer education, and now products. "Eclipse is just the first step towards lowering hurdles for users that come to blockchain from the traditional web. At Dunya Labs, our goal is to help people use public blockchains with ease and ensure they can focus on solving actual problems versus getting stuck with integration or build issues. We do that with our best-in-class engineering team and practices. We take a lot of pride in these," says Srivatsa Katta, Head of Engineering at Dunya Labs. About Dunya Labs Dunya Labs focuses on building the tooling and infrastructure required to bring decentralized technologies to the masses. Through leveraging an in-house research and development team, we build public tools and proprietary tools that onboard traditional web developers to blockchain networks. Read more at http://www.dunyalabs.io or http://www.twitter.com/dunyalabs Media Contact : Ishwar Gupta [email protected] Dunya Labs India Pvt. Ltd. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Blackmoon Forges Multiple Strategic Partnership to Build New Investable ETx's The goal of the partnerships is to create investable ETx's that track the performance of a multitude of products, services and sentiment indexes VALLETTA, Malta, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Blackmoon Financial Group, a blockchain Financial Service and Fintech firm announces multiple partnerships with reputable firms which include of Daneel.io, Plato Technologies Inc., Dr. Werner & Partner, Jarvis International Ltd., Rivver and FintechSauce. The strategic partnerships serve to assist in the creation of branded Exchange Traded Indexes (ETx). The new partnerships between Blackmoon and these firms will enable them to work very closely together to create a showcase of investable ETx's that track the performance of a multitude of products, services and sentiment indexes that these firms offer. Firms partnering with Blackmoon have an advantage over their competitors as they are able to further monetize their offering by making it an investable product. For example, the partnership with Daneel allows the firm to turn their already successful sentiment API into a feed for an investible ETx, therefore, allowing investors to invest in the hype (or lack thereof) of a particular set of cryptocurrencies. "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. Fintechsauce will roll out a few ETx's with Blackmoon whose goal will be to create investable ETx's that track FintechSauce's investable products. "In order to succeed in almost any project, you need reliable partners. FintechSauce has been working closely with our clients to be the best financial advisors for them. And now, we are excited about finding the right partner for our business, Blackmoon. With their help, we are creating investment products that will bring financial success to people that believe in us," said Anastasia Nizhegorodtceva, Associate Director of FintechSauce On the other hand, the ETx developed with Rivver will track their issued digital assets in real time. "We are very excited to be collaborating with Blackmoon. Blackmoon's innovative ETx approach is unique and necessary for the digitized securities ecosystm and we are very happy to be able to offer this added value to our clients," said David Benizri, CEO of Rivver Jarvis Exchange's ETx tracks the performance of a variety coin sets such as "most-traded" and "most-volatile" on the Jarvis Exchange. "We are very excited to partner with Blackmoon. It is always nice to find companies that share our belief in the collaborative genius. The ETx represent unique investment opportunities. We are happy to bring more value to our users as ETx enhance our offering, and to reveal Blackmoon value proposition to thousands of investors and traders," said Pascal Tallarida, Founder & CEO of Jarvis Furthermore, Plato's "On-the-fly" ETx's aim to provide investors with direct access to Plato's real-time strategies. "We are really excited about what this partnership means in terms of driving institutional crypto adoption while supporting full compliance across an entire basket of proprietary crypto indexes," said Bryan Feinberg, CEO of Plato Dr. Werner & Partner's ETx, on the other hand, will give investors direct access to Dr Werner & Partner' client base. "The partnership with Blackmoon will enable us to extend our (already advanced) crypto advisory services with security token offerings. The amount of interest for that sector is overwhelming and together with Blackmoon we will provide a state-of-the-art-service, that will enable the right client to launch an STO from A-Z," said Philipp Sauerborn, a senior employee at Dr Werner & Partner Blackmoon is still working on more partnerships and will announce them as they happen. 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. "We have seen a surge of interest from firms around the globe, from a variety of sectors, seeking to partner with us specifically to form an investable ETx for them and we are glad that we can fulfil this need. The relationships are mutually beneficial and this serves as the strongest foundation for a long-lasting relationship," 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. Their 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. 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. Site: http://blackmoon.net/ Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/843654/bm_partnership.jpg 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. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Illustrative Mathematics Launches High School Math Curriculum Today, Illustrative Mathematics (IM), the author and developer of the top-rated IM 6-8 Math curriculum and IM Certified professional learning, announced the launch of IM Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2. The new standards aligned, problem-based high school curriculum is specifically designed to nurture a comprehensive proficiency with functions, algebra, geometry, modeling, and statistics. "As with IM 6-8, which meets expectations across all three review categories at EdReports.org, the new high school curriculum is offered through IM Certified partners who provide different options for districts, including free, print, and digitally enhanced," said Dr. William McCallum, founder and president of IM. "This means that schools no longer have to choose between having the highest quality materials or having the opimal user experience for teachers and students. With IM Math, they can have it all." IM Certified 6-12 Math includes embedded supports for students with disabilities and English language learners, and extensions for students who are ready for more. It provides practice problem sets with built-in cumulative review. It is also the only curriculum to offer Algebra 1 full course supports for students who may be struggling. Further, IM Certified 6-12 Math includes supports for teacher learning and understanding of math standards. IM 6-8 Math and IM Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2 are available through IM Certified partners McGraw-Hill Education, LearnZillion, and Kendall Hunt. Each partner provides unique benefits to ensure districts have the flexibility to choose the experience that best meets their unique needs without compromising on IM's high-quality curriculum. The designation of "IM Certified" ensures the curriculum includes the latest enhancements and is aligned to IM's philosophy, mission, and standards, and the professional learning is developed by IM's expert-led authoring team and delivered by IM Certified Facilitators. "IM's decision to partner with a variety of publishers puts districts and schools in the driver's seat for curricular decisions," said Faith Muirhead, senior associate director, mathematics at the University of Delaware, Professional Development Center for Educators. "Without compromising quality, educators can make platform or print decisions based on their needs, resource allocation, and user preferences to design the most productive learning experiences for children." For more information about IM Certified math curriculum and professional learning for middle and high school go to: https://www.illustrativemathematics.org/curriculum. About Illustrative Mathematics Illustrative Mathematics is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a world where learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. We develop and deliver core mathematics curricula along with deeply integrated professional learning experiences that ensure students receive engaging, high-quality mathematics instruction. Learn more at www.illustrativemathematics.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005400/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] ITC Secure Unveils Enhanced US Based Cyber Advisory Business ITC Secure (ITC), the specialist cyber advisory and managed security service provider (MSSP) has launched a new portfolio of cyber security services through its existing Washington D.C. business. A key part of the expansion into the US market will be to bring the existing Washington D.C. based ITC Global Advisors under the ITC Secure brand, aligning the services offered across the US, with the industry leading advisory and managed cyber security services already available in the UK. The ITC Secure Washington team will now offer a full suite of cyber advisory services to clients in the US, covering cyber assessments, cyber due diligence, third-party risk management and other outcome-oriented services that navigate complex cyber challenges and support cyber investment choices. In addition to enhanced advisory capabilities, the Washington team will offer ITC's full range of managed services supported by their world class Security Operations Centre (SOC). The ITC team in Washington will continue to deliver its successful portfolio of advisory services, connecting private sector innovation to global and national security challenges, building federal market strategies, leading crisis communications and navigating complex US government issues. Arno Robbertse, Chief Executive of ITC Secure said "The team in Washington have been a great addition to ITC since joining us in June 2018, their understanding of US markets and current advisory capabilities have enabled this expansion of our US portfolio into dedicated cyber advisory services. This development is a key component of our global strategy and I am delighted that the team have already secured several cyber advisory deals with US clients". Chip Colbert, MD of ITC Secure Washington added "This is a logical step for our team here in the US. We have enjoyed great success with our existing strategic advisory services, to be able to expand this capability to offer world leading cyber capabilities not only enhances the services we can offer to our existing clients, but gives ITC a much broader global reach". ITC Secure is part of the Haven Cyber Technologies Group, a portfolio company of C5 Capital, the leading investment group focused on cyber security, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. ITC is backed by a unique team of individuals from intelligence, enterprise, national security, law enforcement and regulatory organisations. --ENDS-- About ITC ITC Secure provides cyber threat advisory and managed security services to midsize and large enterprise clients. This includes detection and response services, cyber threat intelligence, insider threat analysis, network and user behaviour, vulnerability assessments and the increasing demands around compliance. With capabilities in on-premise, cloud-based and hybrid security, ITC Secure is first choice for some of the world's biggest and best-known brands. https://itcsecure.com/ About Haven Cyber Technologies Haven Cyber Technologies (Haven) is a pan-European industrial holding focussed on delivering a Europe wide Managed Security Solution Providers (MSSP) platform. Haven has a network of organisations that deliver bespoke product solutions to each client supported by world class experts. The companies within the Haven Group benefit from innovation across the shared platform, enabling industry leading services across cloud computing, machine learning and automation. Haven is headquartered in Luxemburg and was launched in October 2018. http://www.havencyber.com/ View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005073/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Ahli United Bank-Kuwait Selects EdgeVerve for its Automation Journey KUWAIT CITY, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- EdgeVerve Systems, a subsidiary of Infosys (NYSE: INFY), has been selected by Al Ahli Bank of Kuwait to automate the bank's operational processes using the AssistEdge RPA platform. Ahli United Bank is one of the pioneering banks in Kuwait to innovate its banking operations using RPA. Leveraging AssistEdge's RPA platform, the bank will be able to improve SLAs (service level agreements), accelerate turnaround time, reduce human dependency and errors by increasing efficiency and efficacy of processes across different business functions. AssistEdge helps businesses become truly digital through process automation. Highly scalable and secure, AssistEdge is a holistic process automation platform offering products across process discovery, intelligent automation and orchestration, catering to multiple industry sectors. It provides integrated software robots to automate high-touch repetitive processes and assisted automation for processes which need manual intervention. Commenting on the solution, Ms. Jehad Al Humaidhi, Deputy CEO Banking Support Group, Ahli United Bank, Kuwait, said, "We are thrilled to implement Robotics. We have been continuously focused on enhancing the overall customer experience and digitalization remains at the core of our strategy. We have always endeavored to introduce new innovations, bringing efficiencies to customer's financial value chain through futuristic technologies like Robotics, Biometric Identification, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. With introduction of Robotics, banking operations will be streamlined and we will derive major cost efficiencies. This initiative is another milestone in our continuous endeavor towards digitizing the financial value chain." Atul Soneja, SVP & Global Head - Edge Products and Infosys Nia, said, "We are excited to partner with Ahli United Bank Kuwait, to work on their strategic initiatives around robotics, AI and automation. AssistEdge has been helping customers drive significant cost, efficiency and quality benefits by taking them through a journey from process discovery to automation and management of digital workforce. We are proud to be the automation product partner of choice for the bank." About EdgeVerve Systems Ltd. EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys, develops innovative software products and offers them on premise or as cloud-hosted buiness platforms. Our products help businesses develop deeper connections with stakeholders, power continuous innovation and accelerate growth in the digital world. We power our clients' growth in rapidly evolving areas like banking, interactive commerce, distributive trade, customer service and enterprise buying and help them navigate their digital journey with our AI enabled Automation and Business Solutions. At EdgeVerve, we are making constant strides towards transforming enterprises by providing AI enabled Business Applications, leveraging the Infosys Nia Platform with capabilities across the Automation continuum. Today EdgeVerve products are used by global corporations across financial services, insurance, retail and CPG, life sciences, manufacturing and telecom. Finacle, our industryleading digital banking solution suite is the choice of financial institutions across 100 countries to service more than a billion consumers and 1.3 billion accounts. To know more, visit www.edgeverve.com About Infosys Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem. Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next. Safe Harbor Certain statements mentioned in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law. Media contacts: For further information, please contact: [email protected] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ahli-united-bank-kuwait-selects-edgeverve-for-its-automation-journey-300822734.html SOURCE Infosys [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused Venture Fund, to Lead Dyndrite Series A Financing to Revolutionize Design and Manufacturing Software CHICAGO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at AMUG 2019, privately held Dyndrite Corporation announced that Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused investment fund and an early Dyndrite investor, will lead the company's $10+ million Series A financing round. Cota Capital joins existing investors, Amplify Ventures, The House Fund, and private investor and former President and CEO of Autodesk, Carl Bass. "With its revolutionary geometry engine and Additive Manufacturing Toolkit, Dyndrite is poised to transform additive manufacturing," said Bass. "It's exciting to be a part of this disruptive step forward." Dyndrite's recently announced Accelerated Geometry Kernel is the world's first fully GPU-native geometry engine. The Dyndrite Additive Toolkit, the first application built on the new kernel, enables a streamlined CAD-to-Print workflow that unlocks the power of GPUs to introduce new levels of productivity and efficiency in the additive manufacturing industry. "We are at a unique point in time where innovative manufacturing hardware has outpaced its software counterparts," said Anna Patterson, VP of Engineering for Google and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures. "Dyndrite is a new platform that takes into account modern computer architecture, modern design needs, and modern manufacturing capabilities." Dyndrite's focus within the $50 Billion design and manufacturing industry is to help boost productivity for additive manufacturing, with specific use cases in aerospace, medical, energy, and automotive applications. In these sectors, thereis particular urgency for addressing the growing gap between 3D printing hardware and the software that supports it. The company comprises a veteran team of computer scientists, mathematicians, and PhD-level practitioners from the computing, CAD, and additive manufacturing industries. The Series A round will enable this team to release the first beta version of the company's product line, which has been under development for over three and a half years. Additionally, this round will enable Dyndrite to hire crucial talent across the company, including team members in engineering, marketing, sales, and support functions -- all working together to help lighthouse and beta customers achieve their goals. The company expects to grow from 15 to approximately 30 employees by the end of 2019. "We are entering the next phase of our company and are excited to play our role in fostering the evolution of the design and manufacturing industries," said Harshil Goel, Dyndrite's co-founder and CEO. "We're proud to be a part of the aspirations of our early lighthouse customers. We look to tell our story in a broader context, inspiring and empowering those who are transforming how people design and make things to propel the human race forward." About: Dyndrite Corporation (Pronounced "Den-drite"), provides the first of its kind "Computational Geometry Engine" and Additive Toolkit (AT) which combine to bring modern performance, capabilities, and productivity to the design, engineering, and manufacturing marketplaces. The full power of Dyndrite is accessible via an integrated Python Application Programming Interface (API) providing unprecedented control and customization to developers, engineers, technicians, and device OEMs. About Gradient Ventures Gradient Ventures is Google's AI-focused venture fund - investing in and connecting early stage startups with Google's resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence. The fund focuses on helping founders navigate the challenges in developing AI-based products, allowing companies to take advantage of the latest techniques so that great ideas can come to life. Gradient was founded in 2017 and is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit Gradient.com Contact: Shawn Hopwood, CMO Dyndrite [email protected] All trademarks, service marks and company names used in this announcement are the property of their respective owners. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gradient-ventures-googles-ai-focused-venture-fund-to-lead-dyndrite-series-a-financing-to-revolutionize-design-and-manufacturing-software-300821662.html SOURCE Dyndrite [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] New Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Version 3 Now Available Veeam Software, the leader in Backup solutions that enable Intelligent Data Management, today announced the new Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3, offering organizations even faster backup, improved security, enhanced visibility and analytics. As enterprises are responsible for protecting their Office 365 data, Veeam's solution delivers secure backup for Office 365 Exchange Online, SharePoint Online OneDrive for Business and Microsoft (News - Alert) Teams, enabling quick recovery of individual items and efficient eDiscovery of backup data for Office 365 or hybrid environments. "A majority of organizations are adopting the Microsoft Office 365 platform and while Microsoft provides management and uptime for the cloud-based services, it is the individual company's responsibility to protect their data. Veeam's innovative solutions give organizations the control to intelligently manage and retain access to their business-critical information for regulatory governance, compliance and recovery purposes," said Danny Allan, Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. "And it is resonating with businesses across the globe. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 has been downloaded by more than 55,000 organizations, representing seven million Office 365 users. This solution represents 549 percent year-over-year growth and now takes the place as our fastest-growing product. With the market acceptance and demand of this solution, we expect version 3 to further accelerate our dominance in this space." The rapid market adoption and growth of Microsoft Office 365 has also created an opportunity for service providers to offer backup solutions to the more than 140 million Office 365 users in a $2.5 billion market. With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3, Veeam Cloud & Service Providers (VCSPs) assist with secure backup of Office 365 Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business data; quickly restoring individual items through a number of flexible receiver options and providing the capability to efficiently automate and scale an Office 365 backup revenue stream. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 eliminates the risk of losing access to business-critical data and ensures the organization remains in control. Version 3 makes it easier to efficiently back up and reliably restore Office 365 Exchange, SharePoin and OneDrive data with: Up to 30x faster backup for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, dramatically shortening Office 365 backup windows from hours to minutes and from minutes to mere seconds. Improved security for Office 365 backup data with support for multi-factor authentication. Enhanced visibility and analytics with Office 365 data protection reports that assist with identifying unprotected mailboxes while managing license and storage use. Pricing and Availability Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 is available immediately in one- to five-year annual subscriptions, with the ability to be billed annually or up-front. The best value is a three-year subscription, billed upfront at a MSRP of $1.20 per user, per month. For additional details on Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 pricing, visit https://www.veeam.com/backup-microsoft-office-365-pricing.html. To download a FREE 30-day trial, visit: https://www.veeam.com/backup-microsoft-office-365.html. Free Community Edition Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Community Edition provides access and control of Office 365 data for free with functionality identical to that of the paid version but is limited to 10 users and 1 TB of protected SharePoint data. Download Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Community Edition here: https://www.veeam.com/free-backup-microsoft-office-365.html. Registration is now open for VeeamON 2019,the world's premier event for Intelligent Data Management, which will take place May 20 - 22, 2019, in Miami, FL. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 will be a key product featured at the conference including deep dive demos, sessions and experts. Nearly 10,000 customers, partners and influencers attended VeeamON 2018 in Chicago, IL and the regional VeeamON Forum events held all around the world. Supporting Quotes: "Adopting Office 365 adds a flexible cloud dimension to storing and sharing business data; however, data protection isn't included. Maintaining a backup that's independent of the Office 365 ecosystem offers assured data access, protection and greater control over business-critical email and documents. Furthermore, the independent backup can serve as a reference dataset for applications such as eDiscovery and analytics." - Steven Hill, senior storage analyst at 451 Research "Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 is significantly faster, providing greater efficiency. With the previous version, the initial full backup for OneDrive and SharePoint site took about 35 minutes running in parallel. Now, we were able to finish it all in five minutes," said Preben Berg, CTO at Cloudio, a Silver Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner "SharePoint Online (and by extension OneDrive) backup times have significantly improved from upwards of five hours to no more than 30 minutes allowing us to run our backup jobs hourly for a greater RPO." - Joshua King, senior infrastructure and automation administrator of Hastings District Council agrees that increased backup speed and quick restoration is an unquestionable benefit. About Veeam Software Veeam is the leader in Backup solutions that enable Intelligent Data Management. Veeam Availability Platform is the most complete backup solution for helping customers on the journey to achieving success in the 5 Stages of Intelligent Data Management. Veeam has 330,000+ customers worldwide, including 82% of the Fortune 500 and 66% of the Global 2,000, with customer-satisfaction scores at 3.5x the industry average, the highest in the industry. Veeam's global ecosystem includes 61,000+ channel partners; Cisco (News - Alert), HPE, NetApp and Lenovo as exclusive resellers; and 21,000+ cloud and service providers. Headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, Veeam has offices in more than 30 countries. To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com or follow Veeam on Twitter (News - Alert) @veeam. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005306/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] WPP Opens New Campus in Amsterdam WPP (NYSE:WPP) today marked the opening of its new Amsterdam campus as it continued the roll-out of its global co-location strategy. Each WPP campus is designed to provide world-class spaces that bring together its people and agencies into one location, encouraging greater collaboration and giving clients easier access to all of WPP's talent and expertise. Refurbished by WPP's architectural and design consultancy BDG, the previously derelict Rivierstaete building has been transformed into a 19,000m2 modern working environment that will act as both an innovative workplace and community space for its 1,500 people in the city. VBAT, an international WPP design studio based in Amsterdam, worked with the agencies housed in Amsteldok to name the campus and develop the co-location's new branding. Amsteldok, which was Europe's largest office building when it was completed in 1973 by renowned architect Huig Aart Maaskant, will be home to 15 WPP agency brands that previously operated from 11 different locations. Located on the river Amstel, the striking, box-stacked structure will be a new centre of creativity in the heart of Amsterdam, boasting impressive new and renovated roof terraces, restaurants, a rooftop bar, a business lounge and an event space. At the official opening, Mark Read, CEO of WPP, said: "'m delighted to open WPP's Amsterdam campus, which demonstrates our continued investment in our people and commitment to the Dutch market, which is one of the most dynamic and forward-looking in the world. WPP campuses help us deliver a simpler, more integrated offer to clients by bringing great agency brands together under one roof and providing easier access to our collective talent. Giving our people modern, world-class working environments allows them to do their best creative work, it encourages closer collaboration and it's an important part of building an open and optimistic culture at WPP." To coincide with the opening of Amsteldok, today Hogarth (WPP's global creative production network that combines technological skills and creative craftmanship) announced the creation of Hogarth Netherlands. As part of its renewed offer to clients in the region, and operating from Amsteldok, it will deliver end-to-end solutions using the very latest innovations in content production. Eric Kramer, WPP Netherlands Country Manager, said: "I'm incredibly proud of the regeneration of Amsteldok into both a fantastic new home for our people and a new creative and social hub for the city. We have an innovative and collaborative culture in Amsterdam, and WPP's market offering, further bolstered by the creation of Hogarth Netherlands, is stronger than ever as we bring our brands together." Redeveloping existing structures instead of constructing new buildings avoids the emission of thousands of tonnes of embodied carbon - equivalent to over 30% of the building's lifetime carbon emissions. The new WPP campus has been developed with sustainability at its heart and is aiming for a BREEAM (the world's leading authority in this area) rating of Very Good or higher. About WPP WPP is a creative transformation company. We build better futures for our clients through an integrated offer of communications, experience, commerce and technology. For more information, visit www.wpp.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005540/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Philip Morris International Bolsters Washington, D.C., Presence with Key Staff Appointments Philip Morris International's (PMI) Washington, D.C., operations are being strengthened with two key personnel moves. J.B. Simko has been promoted to Vice President External Affairs and will relocate from New York to serve in his new role as head of the Washington, D.C., office. Aaron Sherinian, who has been serving in his role of Vice President Global Communications Transformation from Paris since he joined the company in September 2018, will relocate to work in the D.C. office as well. "We are very pleased to have J.B. and Aaron representing PMI in Washington," said Marc Firestone, President External Affairs and General Counsel. "They are both powerhouse team players, and we believe their presence in D.C.-where regulatory and policymakers meet-will send the positive message that we are working to make our vision of a smoke-free future a reality in the U.S. and abroad." Simko has been with PMI since 2001, and he will continue to work for Firestone and Livio Vanghetti, Vice President of Global Partnerships and Cooperation, on external affairs. "We congratulate J.B. on his well-deserved promotion," said Vanghetti. "This strategic strengthening of our Washington, D.C., office will serve as an advantage in building PMI's capabilities for future-facing communications, constructive engagement with civil society and alliances for global social good." "This is a rewarding role, and I am very happy to be continuing in my expanded position as we ramp up our efforts to build a smoke-free future," Simko added. Sherinian will continue to work on transformation for the existing Global Communications team, led by Marian Salzman, Senior Vice President Global Communications, and on regulatory and scientific communications for Moira Gilchrist, Vice President of Scientific and Public Communications, who leads PMI's FDA-related communications. "In just a few months, Aaron has proved himself as integral to our Global Communications division, as we work to bring about one of the greatest corporate transformations in history, with historic potential to generate public health benefits for millions of adults who smoke around the world," said Salzman. "This team is telling the story of PMI's vision of a smoke-free future as part of genuine dialogues that exert intelligent influence." Before being appointed to his current position, J.B. Simko was vice president and associate general counsel, litigation, managing litigation of company-wide significance on behalf of PMI entities globally. In this role, Simko also became deeply involved in developing regulatory strategies related to FDA authorization of new and modified risk tobacco products. During the course of his career with PMI, Simko has provided legal support across many business functions, including Next Generation Products, Research & Development, Communications, Sales, Marketing and Motorsports, Brand Integrity, and Compliance. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School (JD, magna cum laude and Order of the Coif) and a graduate of the University of Iowa (BS, Psychology). Before joining PMI, Aaron Sherinian served as global communications director for the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) from 2017 to 2018, responsible for coordination, messaging, media relations and digital communications for a worldwide network including over 80,000 employees and a mission to help improve quality of life for people around the world. Sherinian served as chief communications and marketing officer for the United Nations Foundation through a period of intense global challenge and change. During his tenure at the foundation (2009-2017), the communications team won multiple awards, including being named "PR Team of the Year" by PR News. Sherinian was named by PRWeek as "Global Communicator of the Year" in 2015. Earlier in his career, Sherinian was managing director of public affairs for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. government development assistance agency administering $7 billion in poverty reduction grants in 40 partner countries, and served as a foreign service officer for the U.S. Department of State. He holds degrees from the Johns Hopkins University (School of Advanced International Studies) and Brigham Young University. Philip Morris International: Building a Smoke-Free Future Philip Morris International (PMI) is leading a transformation in the tobacco industry to create a smoke-free future and ultimately replace cigarettes with smoke-free products to the benefit of adults who would otherwise continue to smoke, society, the company and its shareholders. PMI is a leading international tobacco company engaged in the manufacture and sale of cigarettes, smoke-free products and associated electronic devices and accessories, and other nicotine-containing products in markets outside the U.S. PMI is building a future on a new category of smoke-free products that, while not risk-free, are a much better choice than continuing to smoke. Through multidisciplinary capabilities in product development, state-of-the-art facilities and scientific substantiation, PMI aims to ensure that its smoke-free products meet adult consumer preferences and rigorous regulatory requirements. PMI's smoke-free IQOS product portfolio includes heated tobacco and nicotine-containing vapor products. As of Dec. 31, 2018, PMI estimates that approximately 6.6 million adult smokers around the world have already stopped smoking and switched to PMI's heated tobacco product, which is currently available for sale in 44 markets in key cities or nationwide under the IQOS brand. For more information, see our PMI and PMIScience websites. # # # View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005560/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Business Reporter: Disrupting the Future of Retail LONDON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- OnBuy.com, the marketplace of the future, leverages the advantages of disruptive technology by integrating high street retailers with eCommerce. Although disruption is not new, a 2018 survey found that 80 percent of top executives feared the risk of disruptive market entrants. OnBuy utilises disruptive technology to not only foster innovation, but to enhance user experience for their customers. With a unique partnership with PayPal and a platform that lists more than 10 million products from thousands of sellers, expanding to 140 countries is a vision that is not only viable but imminent. Purchases on the site grew by more than 1,100 percent between 2018 and 2019. Part of this exponential growth is attributed to the fact that their selling fees are cheaper than Amazon, meaning sellers can price competitively whilst buyers can get the best deal. With the potential to host more sellers than any other platform in the world, OnBuy's ambition is to provide the infrastructure all businesses need to deliver products straight to the consumer. The Aazon disruptor is the change that online and high street businesses need. It's the marketplace of the future. Innovation and disruption are essential ingredients in surviving a fluctuating landscape. The future of work in the retail sector is ever changing, which is why disruptive innovation will always benefit business and consumers alike. Read more at: https://www.business-reporter.co.uk/2019/03/28/why-the-future-of-retail-isnt-about-online-versus-the-high-street-but-innovation-versus-stagnation/#gsc.tab=0 About Business Reporter Business Reporter is distributed with The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and City AM, each of our publications reaches an average of 1.5 million people. Content is also published through the Business Reporter and TEISS websites, which includes video debates, online articles, and digital magazines. This content is meant to deliver news and analysis on the issues that are affecting businesses to our global audience. In addition to publications, Business Reporter hosts conferences, breakfasts meetings, and exclusive summits. These events bring together some of the most influential decision makers and innovators in modern business. These exclusive events for business leaders complement the content and direction of editorial projects, allowing them to have direct contact with their readers. Above all, Business Reporter's commitment is to make meaningful analysis for every business owner. Whether individuals are running a small business, the head of a local company or an executive in a multinational corporation, there will be something for them at Business Reporter. https://www.business-reporter.co.uk/#gsc.tab=0 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Bill.com Announces Financing Led by Franklin Templeton Today Bill.com, a business payments and software platform leader, announced an $88M funding round led by Franklin Templeton with participation from Mastercard, Fidelity Investments Canada ULC and others. The small and midsized business segment represents a massive U.S. business payments market that's ripe for disruption. While consumer payments have experienced abundant innovation, business payments have lagged behind. More than $58 trillion in B2B payments are made annually with 80% of them paper checks, which come at a high cost including potential for errors and security issues. "Bill.com is changing how payments are made in the SMB market by defining an industry leading payment and software platform for SMBs. Businesses struggle with conventional payment processes which are complex, manual, paper-based and not always secure," says Rene Lacerte, CEO and Founder of Bill.com. "Our cloud payment platform is changing all that. We automate payments and back office business processes resulting in significant efficiencies and cost savings." "This is the Golden Age of SMB software and B2B payments with a huge market that's ready for adoption. Bill.com is a clear category leader with a mission tomake it simple for businesses to connect and do business," said Anthony Hardy, Franklin Templeton. "The company has the right SaaS (News - Alert) solution, ecosystem partners, significant customer base, and team to scale and capitalize on this significant opportunity." Bill.com is positioned to scale with a network of more than 3M (News - Alert) members paying and getting paid with Bill.com. The company manages more than $60B in annual payment volume and has partnerships with leading U.S. financial institutions and technology companies that reach millions of businesses resulting in increased market adoption of digital B2B payments. More than 70 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms leverage Bill.com to help their clients automate AP and AR and provide client advisory services. In addition to investments by Franklin Templeton, Mastercard and certain funds managed by Fidelity Investments Canada ULC, other participants in the current round include Kayne Anderson Rudnick, Temasek, Cross Creek and FLEETCOR. Bill.com has raised more than $275M to date which has included investments from American Express (News - Alert), Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase. About Bill.com Bill.com is a leading digital business payments company with a network of 3 million members, managing more than $60 billion in payments annually. Making it simple to connect and do business, the Bill.com cloud-based Payment Management Platform automates, streamlines, and controls the payments process, saving more than 50 percent of the time typically spent. Bill.com partners with the largest U.S. financial institutions, more than 70 of the top 100 accounting firms, major accounting software providers including NetSuite (News - Alert), Intacct, QuickBooks and Xero, and is the preferred provider of digital payments solutions for CPA.com, the technology arm of the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). Winner of more than 70 awards, Bill.com is recognized as one of San Francisco Business Times' and Silicon Valley Business Journal's "2018 Best Places to Work." View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005586/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] InMotion Hosting Launches Industry-First Website Solution Based on Open Source and Ensuring Ownership of Digital Assets LOS ANGELES, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- InMotion Hosting, a leader in enabling business websites, announced today the release of Website Creator. The industry's first WordPress compatible all-in-one website builder solution allows customers to easily create and manage a commercial online presence while retaining ownership and control of their functional website assets. "InMotion Hosting is continually enhancing the online experience to support our goal of helping small businesses," said Todd Robinson, co-founder and president, "Website Creator is the first end-to-end solution not to lock customers into a single online provider. Our product grants ownership of all digital assets necessary for a functional website to be relocated to compatible servers and to go live, in minutes, without the cost of rebuilding. Website Creator gives customers options and complete freedom to choose a provider." Website Creator goes beyond simplifying the task of creating a professional quality site. Leveraging WordPress, the industry's most popular content management system and Boldgrid's suite of advanced site creation and management plugins, Website Creator streamlines the web design rocess with a built-in drag-and-drop website builder, automated social media posts and a real-time SEO tool hosted in a commercial-grade environment. Customers can extend and automate website functionality with thousands of paid and free plugins from the WordPress community while leveraging the design and development expertise of an army of WordPress professionals. For more information about Website Creator, visit https://www.InMotionHosting.com/website-creator . About InMotion Hosting InMotion Hosting has helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, startups, and businesses of all sizes succeed online through ultra-reliable website solutions and professional services supported by extraordinary customer support. For more information on InMotion Hosting and its full suite of high-performance digital platforms and value-added services, visit https://www.InMotionHosting.com . Media Contact: Michelle Krasniak [email protected] (612) 405-3602 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inmotion-hosting-launches-industry-first-website-solution-based-on-open-source-and-ensuring-ownership-of-digital-assets-300822680.html SOURCE InMotion Hosting [April 02, 2019] HomeServe Launches HomeServe Cares Foundation Today, HomeServe USA (HomeServe), a leading provider of home repair solutions, launched the HomeServe Cares Foundation, a new, four-pillar Corporate Social Responsibility program. The HomeServe Cares Foundation is backed by a substantial financial commitment to support the mission of "Spreading Hope and Supporting Communities One Home at a Time." HomeServe has a long legacy of giving back to communities and helping homeowners in need. The launch of the HomeServe Cares Foundation will bring together the company's existing Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, as well as many new ones, to make an even greater impact. Details about the HomeServe Cares Foundation are available on the new website, https://www.homeserveusa.com/sc/corporate-social-responsibility. The four pillars of the HomeServe Cares Foundation are: 1. Caring For People - This is an expansion of the existing HomeServe Cares program through which the company completes home repair jobs for eligible homeowners who are not customers, and who find themselves facing a home emergency they are unable to handle financially. In 2018, HomeServe completed 103 HomeServe Cares jobs across 27 states. 2. Caring For Community - Municipalities and nonprofits can apply for grants to help fund community-based projects. Grant applications will be accepted beginning Wednesday, April 10, 2019. At that time, full details will be published on https://www.homeserveusa.com/sc/corporate-social-responsibility and on Twitter (News - Alert) at @HomeServeUSNews. Priority will be given to projects that focus on aging in place, homeles or disabled veterans, low-income housing and residents, and park accessibility improvements. 3. Caring For Vets - HomeServe's newly-launched veterans hiring initiative will be wrapped into the HomeServe Cares Foundation. The initiative connects current and transitioning military men and women with the HomeServe contractor network with the objective of placing veterans into paid apprenticeships in the trades. 4. Caring For Good - HomeServe will launch an employee-directed corporate charitable matching program and implement measures to make it easier for HomeServe employees to participate in volunteer efforts. HomeServe already provides its employees with eight hours of paid leave each year to volunteer. In addition, HomeServe will formalize an existing Helping Hands program to better assist employees faced with a personal crisis. "HomeServe is committed to putting people at the heart of everything we do, and that includes engaging in socially responsible activities," said HomeServe CEO John Kitzie. "With the HomeServe Cares Foundation, we will support communities, improve the quality of life for residents and our employees, and assist veterans and vulnerable homeowners. HomeServe is completely committed to spreading hope and supporting communities, one home at a time." Throughout the month of April, HomeServe will release additional details about the four pillars of the HomeServe Cares Foundation with details posted on https://www.homeserveusa.com/sc/corporate-social-responsibility and on Twitter at @HomeServeUSNews. About HomeServe HomeServe USA Corp. (HomeServe) is a leading provider of home repair solutions serving 3.7 million customers across the US and Canada under the HomeServe, Home Emergency Insurance Solutions, Service Line Warranties of America (SLWA) and Service Line Warranties of Canada (SLWC) names. Since 2003, HomeServe has been protecting homeowners against the expense and inconvenience of water, sewer, electrical, HVAC and other home repair emergencies by providing affordable repair coverage, installations and quality local service. As an A+ rated Better Business Bureau Accredited Business, HomeServe is dedicated to being a customer-focused company supplying best-in-class repair plans and other services to consumers directly and through over 600 leading municipal, utility and association partners. HomeServe is a proud sponsor of This Old House on PBS, working together to provide homeowners expert advice on maintaining, enhancing and protecting their homes. For more information about HomeServe, a Connecticut Top Workplace winner and recipient of thirty-three 2019 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, or to learn more about HomeServe's affordable repair plans, please go to www.homeserveusa.com. To connect with HomeServe on Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter, please visit www.facebook.com/homeserveusa and www.twitter.com/homeserveusa. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005573/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Are First Responders' Radios at Risk of Failing While in Use? WEST MELBOURNE, Fla., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Each and every day, first responders put their lives on the line to protect the public, no matter if it is a routine traffic stop or during a disaster situation. It is vital their radio equipment is working properly providing clear and reliable communication when they need it. Approximately 15 to 20 percent of radios can drift out of alignment each year, causing them to fail at anytime. Many public safety agencies have anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 two-way radios or more, on their land mobile radio (LMR) networks. Technicians don't know which radios are fine and which need to be aligned - without bringing them all in for testing, which can cost an agency hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. LocusUSA's patented DiagnostX technology can eliminate those added expenses. DiagnostX is a long-range over-the-air radio waveform analyzer. It measures the alignment and field performance of portable and mobile radios when they are deployed in the field through a 24/7 real-time network. The device indicates when a radio needs to be brought in for immediate service. This unique technology is non-intrusive to a radio system and can be networked to provide system-wide coverage. Several large metropolitan areas in the United States are already using DiagnostX. They range from Seattle to Washington, D.C., and from San Diego to Orlando with statewide systems in development as well. Chris Pandolfi, communications specialist for the city of Tallahassee, Florida, agreed. "The unit saved us 250-man hours in the very first week," Pandolfi said. Cost-cutting isn't the only benefit derived from DiagnostX. The ability to determine whether communication problems are specifically due to a faulty radio or a problem on the network means fewer issues between users and dispatch. This is a huge advantage for agencies that are located in rural or mountainous areas, where coverage can be spotty. The system has made quite an impression on the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado, since it was installed to monitor the Pikes Peak Regional Communications Network. "Servicing all the radios in the system is immensely time-consuming. I estimate that it would take two people three months of every year to go out into the field and check every radio. It also inconveniences the radio user," said Randy Bell, former communications manager for the city's Department of Information Technology Communications, which oversees maintenance of the 5,500-plus radios in the network. "DiagnostX is another tool that helped us do more with less". DiagnostX has proven to be a powerful tool, ensuring that police, fire and EMS workers can feel confident their radios will work whenever and wherever they are needed. To learn more about DiagnostX by LocusUSA, visit www.locususa.com or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. About LocusUSA LocusUSA is an engineering and software development company located in West Melbourne on the Space Coast of Florida since 2001. It is a leader in radio frequency capture for radio analysis and location. The ability to capture and analyze the actual waveform of a radio transmission led to the development of DiagnostX, a patented system that can measure the alignment and operating characteristics of a radio, over-the-air in real time without user intervention. LocusUSA supports government customers across the United States and Canada on the local, state and federal levels with this first-of-its-kind, proactive tool, ensuring the optimal performance of a radio system. Media Contact: Eileen Cole LocusUSA [email protected] 321.727.3077 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/are-first-responders-radios-at-risk-of-failing-while-in-use-300822681.html SOURCE LocusUSA [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] XpertHR Reports on Nine Ways to Curb FMLA Intermittent Leave Abuse NEW PROVIDENCE, N.J. and LOS ANGELES, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Intermittent leave is one of the biggest headaches for employers administering leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), says a new XpertHR report that provides insights on dealing with unplanned, repeated and sporadic leave requests. Intermittent leave may be taken for both planned treatment and unanticipated medical treatment or medical issues (such as a migraine or a Crohn's flair up). One of the reasons intermittent leave can be a problem is because the absence is unpredictable, and employers may be challenged in finding coverage for that employee's workload. "Intermittent FMLA leave may also be problematic for employers because it can open the door for abuse by employees and more opportunities for an employer to fall short during the notice and certification process to prevent the abuse," says Melissa Silver, JD, Legal Editor, XpertHR. "Since the leave may be sporadic, employers need to be extra vigilant when counting and tracking leave taken to ensure the employee does not take more leave than he or she is entitled. Further, workforce morale may go down if the employer does not crack down on FMLA leave abuse." The first step for an employer is to determine whether the company is subject to the FMLA and if theemployee's leave is covered. If an employer has not employed 50 or more employees for each working day during at least 20 calendar workweeks in the current or preceding calendar year, they are not subject to the FMLA. An employee must satisfy certain criteria as well in order to be eligible for leave under the FMLA. An employer must grant an employee intermittent leave when: The employee has a serious health condition; The employee is needed to care for a spouse, parent or child with a serious health condition; It is medically necessary for the employee to care for a servicemember with a serious injury or illness; or A military exigency arises out of a military member's covered active duty or call to covered active duty, such as making childcare arrangements. XpertHR offers these nine important considerations to manage intermittent leave: Determine Whether the Employer is Subject to the FMLA and if the Employee's Leave is Covered Set up a Procedure for Requesting FMLA Leave Require Certification for Support of an Intermittent Leave Request Obtain Recertifications Require an Employee to Use Paid Time Off If Allowed Enforce FMLA Policy and Call-In Procedures Properly Track FMLA-Related Absences Consider a Temporary Transfer Train Supervisors "Although it may be challenging, the burden of managing intermittent leave will be minimized if employers are prepared at the outset," says Silver. "By being proactive, an employer can prevent the onset of an FMLA headache." To download the free whitepaper 9 Tips to Cure the FMLA Intermittent Leave Headache, visit XpertHR. About XpertHR XpertHR helps build successful workforces by providing practical tools, expert resources and agile HR solutions at the federal, state and municipal level to help businesses stay a step ahead. Editor's Note: Melissa Silver, JD, XpertHR Legal Editor, is available to for interview. If you use any of this material, please include a link to XpertHR. Media Contact: Beth Brody [email protected] 908-295-0600 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/xperthr-reports-on-nine-ways-to-curb-fmla-intermittent-leave-abuse-300822696.html SOURCE XpertHR [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] AMAG Technology Releases Symmetry CompleteView 20/20 TORRANCE, Calif., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- AMAG Technology announces the release of Symmetry CompleteView 20/20, a video management software solution designed to operate as a stand-alone system or integrate with the Symmetry platform that includes intrusion management, access control, identity management, visitor management, incident and case management, command and control software and mobile technology to deliver a complete end-to-end security solution. "Symmetry CompleteView 20/20 provides users with a robust video management software solution that is simple, scalable and secure," said Jim Murray, senior product manager-video, AMAG Technology. "The dynamic feature set combined with Symmetry Access Control and Control Room, deliver an integrated solution unmatched anywhere in the industry." With a newly designed intuitive user interface, Symmetry CompleteView 20/20 uses Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) to automatically scale video transmission for both live and recorded playback streams based on viewing window size in the client for faster transmission. Operators can download and search remote video quickly, aiding in investigations. Symmetry CompleteView 20/20 integrates with the Symmetry Access Control system ad Symmetry Control Room Command and Control software to deliver a unified security platform. The integrated solution delivers many benefits to users: Fast integration setup with bulk camera import Display live and recorded video events from Symmetry and Control Room clients Quickly search tagged video recordings Bi-directional integration No cost for camera integration licenses Search by text Graphical maps support Custom tabs provide quick navigation Symmetry CompleteView 20/20 supports analog, digital IP and hybrid designs, and provides a seamless transition from legacy analog to IP camera support. The software integrates with leading IP camera and analytics manufacturers, transforming video into actionable intelligence to aid in the proactive detection of critical or unusual events. Users can choose from an almost limitless number of camera manufacturers to deploy in their environment. A full range of Symmetry PowerProtect NVRs come pre-installed with the Symmetry CompleteView 20/20 software. For more information about Symmetry CompleteView 20/20, visit www.amag.com or contact your Regional Sales Manager . About AMAG Technology AMAG Technology's Symmetry Security Management Solutions are deployed across a wide variety of market segments from commercial to government, education, healthcare, banking, transportation, utilities, plus many more. AMAG manufactures open solutions that include access control, visitor management, identity management, command and control, video management, intrusion management, and incident and case management. Headquartered in Torrance, California with sales and support located throughout the Americas, EMEA, APAC and LATAM, AMAG provides customers with industry leading unified security solutions. AMAG Technology is part of G4S plc, the world's leading global integrated security company which has operations on six continents and 540,000 employees. As the industry leader, AMAG focuses on delivering the latest technology to meet market needs. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amag-technology-releases-symmetry-completeview-2020-300822063.html SOURCE AMAG Technology [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Insolar among top 100 green energy innovators NEW YORK, NY, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (via Blockchain Wire) Insolar, a leading blockchain company offering enterprise solutions, has been named amongst the top 100 firms by the Start Up Energy Transition (SET), an international initiative which supports innovation in transitioning to greener energy. SET brings together the most outstanding international start-ups in the field of energy with key stakeholders in the sector, such as Shell, E.ON, EDF and the government offices of several countries. The initiative partners with the German Energy Agency (dena) to celebrate and promote green-tech innovation worldwide. Moreover, SET works in cooperation with the World Energy Council (WEC), a UN-accredited global energy body, with member organisations including governments, private and state corporations, academia, NGOs and energy-related stakeholders to make the global energy transition a success. Both dena and WEC are contributing to achieving energy and climate policy objectives set out by the Paris Agreement to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Submissions to SET were evaluated by a panel of esteemed jurors made up of internationally recognised experts from politics, the energy sector and business. The jury members identified and compiled a list of the top 100 of the most innovative, savvy and promising start-ups. Insolars submission utlined a blockchain powered transactive energy platform that seamlessly connects grid operators and owners of distributed energy resources to conduct energy transactions for a smarter, more sustainable, and resilient grid. The transactive energy platform solves the trust issue between stakeholders by using transparent, enforceable business logic to automate energy exchanges that ensure overall grid reliability. We at Insolar are honored to be named by SET as among the top 100 tech innovators facilitating the global energy transition to greener power and a reduction of the factors contributing to climate change. A transactive energy platform based on the Insolar blockchain addresses the pain points of all energy stakeholders by helping them work together for a more sustainable future, noted Insolar CEO, Andrey Zhulin. Insolar recently entered into a cooperation agreement with Canadas Hero Engineering Inc. to develop and test the capabilities of a blockchain-based platform for improving the resiliency and efficiency of energy systems. The project, which is funded in part by the Canadian Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy (NRCAN), will integrate the Insolar blockchain into a transactive smart grid prototype. It is designed to facilitate distributed energy generation from renewables, as well as the effective use of electric vehicles, energy storage systems, and smart thermostats. About Insolar Insolar is building an open source, enterprise-grade blockchain platform that uses distributed trust to enable seamless interactions between companies and unlock new growth opportunities. Insolars 4th generation architecture, which blends the best of cloud, blockchain, and distributed tech, creates cost efficiencies, opens new revenue streams, and powers transformative business models; it is secure, scalable, interoperable, affordable, and easily deployed. In addition to the platform, Insolar offers full-service blockchain consulting and product development to accelerate companies from proof-of-concept to production. Insolar is ranked #1 among blockchain projects worldwide in development activity, according to Cryptomiso. It is a global team of 60+ people in North America and Europe, including 45 full-time engineers, 10 leading blockchain academics from major institutions (York University, ETH Zurich, Princeton), and a founding team of serial tech entrepreneurs and enterprise veterans. To learn more, visit: https://www.insolar.io Lesley Czuma Head of PR & Communications Insolar (915) 011-6322 [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] The devastating forest fire causing 30 deaths in southwest China's Sichuan Province has not been contained as of 5 p.m. Monday, according to the local emergency management authority. A fire breaks out in Muli Tibetan Autonomous County in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province on March 30, 2019. [Photo: Xinhua] The fire broke out at about 6 p.m. Saturday in the mountains in southwestern Sichuan Province at an altitude over 3,700 meters and strong winds blew in several directions, said Zhou Tong, an official with local emergency management department. The fire has burnt around 15 hectares of forest. The complex terrain, thick forest layer and difficulties in getting water to the mountains have impeded the fire fighting, Zhou said. According to preliminary analysis, the fire was possibly caused by thunder. Thirty people, including 27 firefighters and three locals, have been confirmed as having died when fighting the fire. A flashover likely occurred so abruptly that the firefighters could not escape, Zhou said. "Local governments have exerted all-out efforts to put out the fire," Zhou said, adding that the number of firefighters dispatched amounted to over 700 at peak time. Identification of the bodies is also underway. Advertising & Marketing Amscreen ships 3000th digital screen to Clear Channel as digital out-of-home (OOH) advertising business booms 02.04.2019 14:29:23 - Amscreen led by Simon Sugar continues to drive acceleration of the digital out-of-home market Business expands into new international markets including France, Ireland, Denmark, Finland and Poland (live-PR.com) - Amscreen, the leading out-of-home media company today celebrates a major milestone in its production of innovative digital advertising solutions. Amscreen today celebrates the milestone moment of shipping its 3000th digital screen from its UK headquarters in Bolton, Lancashire. Amscreens innovative product is helping drive the growth of the booming digital out-of-home advertising market. This achievement is made all the - Amscreen, the leading out-of-home media company today celebrates a major milestone in its production of innovative digital advertising solutions.Amscreen today celebrates the milestone moment of shipping its 3000th digital screen from its UK headquarters in Bolton, Lancashire.Amscreens innovative product is helping drive the growth of the booming digital out-of-home advertising market. This achievement is made all the more impressive given the increasingly international scope of the Amscreen business. Amscreen specialises in delivering connected displays across Europe and are Europe's No.1 digital solutions provider and innovator. Since being founded in 2008, Amscreen has become one the pioneers in the digital outdoor screen market. Amscreen has been a key driver of the consistent growth demonstrated by the sector with products being installed in major European markets such as UK, France, Ireland, Denmark, Finland and Poland. Amscreen are leaders in wireless monitoring with their latest remote technology allowing them to control thousands of screens remotely. This coupled with their unique remote device monitoring (RDM) system, demonstrates Amscreen's expertise in the market. RDM is innovative technology that brings Amscreen products and services together, making network management easy. RDM works through collecting information from 250 onscreen data points which allows a central hub to track an array of variables such as temperature, brightness, and visibility to issues relating to the internal technology. This information is transmitted to the central hub, where if any issues are identified this can be quickly rectified and someone is dispatched to resolve this. Amscreen have been a key driver of the consistent growth demonstrated by the digital out-of-home sector, now valued at over 500m in the UK alone according to a recent Study by GroupM. Amscreen has a partnership with Clear Channel, a company that uses this next generation product to provide innovative advertising solutions to brands. The strategic partnership between Amscreen and Clear Channel helps the creation of smarter, connected displays to offer up a range of new services to the consumer on the high-street, whether its more appealing advertising, or real-time, location specific services and messaging. Digital out-of-home advertising is a rapidly growing market. A recent report from WARC states that the market is set to grow 10.1% annually between 2018 and 2021. As such, the advertising industries spend on digital out-of-home solutions is expected to far outstrip investment on traditional outdoor solutions such as billboards. According to the Advertising Association, out-of-home advertising is set to grow by 2.6% in 2019, showing that businesses are continuing to invest in advertising, particularly in methods that target consumers on the move. Simon Sugar, CEO of Amscreen commented 'We are thrilled to announce our 3000th screen has just been shipped. It's clear from these numbers that digital out-of-home is growing from strength to strength, and we're incredibly proud to be the technology platform that is connecting consumer with more relevant content. Ultimately, our objective is to help brands and business obtain better out-of-home engagements with their audiences through greater flexibility, reliability and measurement of message delivery - this in turn is creating more valued and relevant interactions for consumers on the streets of Europe. William Eccleshare, Chairman & CEO of Clear Channel International commented Amscreen is a vital partner in enabling us to realise our ambitious digital out of home expansion plans, across the globe. Simon and the team's ability to deliver high quality, reliable products at the scale and pace we need, is unsurpassed. We have thousands of Amscreen units in streets and towns across our markets, giving advertisers all of the rich benefits of DOOH to reach and engage these audiences. more impressive given the increasingly international scope of the Amscreen business.Amscreen specialises in delivering connected displays across Europe and are Europe's No.1 digital solutions provider and innovator.Since being founded in 2008, Amscreen has become one the pioneers in the digital outdoor screen market. Amscreen has been a key driver of the consistent growth demonstrated by the sector with products being installed in major European markets such as UK, France, Ireland, Denmark, Finland and Poland.Amscreen are leaders in wireless monitoring with their latest remote technology allowing them to control thousands of screens remotely. This coupled with their unique remote device monitoring (RDM) system, demonstrates Amscreen's expertise in the market. RDM is innovative technology that brings Amscreen products and services together, making network management easy. RDM works through collecting information from 250 onscreen data points which allows a central hub to track an array of variables such as temperature, brightness, and visibility to issues relating to the internal technology. This information is transmitted to the central hub, where if any issues are identified this can be quickly rectified and someone is dispatched to resolve this.Amscreen have been a key driver of the consistent growth demonstrated by the digital out-of-home sector, now valued at over 500m in the UK alone according to a recent Study by GroupM. Amscreen has a partnership with Clear Channel, a company that uses this next generation product to provide innovative advertising solutions to brands. The strategic partnership between Amscreen and Clear Channel helps the creation of smarter, connected displays to offer up a range of new services to the consumer on the high-street, whether its more appealing advertising, or real-time, location specific services and messaging.Digital out-of-home advertising is a rapidly growing market. A recent report from WARC states that the market is set to grow 10.1% annually between 2018 and 2021. As such, the advertising industries spend on digital out-of-home solutions is expected to far outstrip investment on traditional outdoor solutions such as billboards.According to the Advertising Association, out-of-home advertising is set to grow by 2.6% in 2019, showing that businesses are continuing to invest in advertising, particularly in methods that target consumers on the move.Simon Sugar, CEO of Amscreen commented 'We are thrilled to announce our 3000th screen has just been shipped. It's clear from these numbers that digital out-of-home is growing from strength to strength, and we're incredibly proud to be the technology platform that is connecting consumer with more relevant content. Ultimately, our objective is to help brands and business obtain better out-of-home engagements with their audiences through greater flexibility, reliability and measurement of message delivery - this in turn is creating more valued and relevant interactions for consumers on the streets of Europe.William Eccleshare, Chairman & CEO of Clear Channel International commented Amscreen is a vital partner in enabling us to realise our ambitious digital out of home expansion plans, across the globe. Simon and the team's ability to deliver high quality, reliable products at the scale and pace we need, is unsurpassed. We have thousands of Amscreen units in streets and towns across our markets, giving advertisers all of the rich benefits of DOOH to reach and engage these audiences. Press Information: Amscreen Contact Person: Phone: +44 (0) 1204 664 333 eMail: eMail Web: http://www.amscreen.eu 02.04.2019 14:29:23 - Disclaimer: If you have any questions regarding information in this article please contact the author. Please do not contact Live-PR.com. We are not able to assist you. Live-PR.com disclaims content contained in this article. Live-PR.com is not authorized to give any information about content and not responsible for content posted by third party. [April 02, 2019] CDPQ to Acquire 30% Stake in U.S. Wireless Infrastructure Leader Vertical Bridge MONTREAL and BOCA RATON, Fla., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Long-term institutional investor Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec (CDPQ) today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire a thirty percent stake in the main operating subsidiary of Vertical Bridge Holdings, LLC, the largest private owner and operator of communications infrastructure in the United States. Vertical Bridge will use the investment from CDPQ to continue to expand its portfolio of broadband and broadcast towers, small cells, real estate and other wireless infrastructure assets ahead of 5G deployment. Since its inception in 2014, Vertical Bridge has completed more than 250 acquisitions and grown its portfolio to over 266,000 sites, including more than 16,000 owned and master-leased towers, as well as the nation's largest and tallest private portfolio of broadcast towers. "With this acquisition, we expand our exposure to telecommunications infrastructure by partnering with a first-class operator that is strategically positioned in the market and brings a wealth of knowledge of the industry," said Emmanuel Jaclot, Executive Vice-President, Infrastructure at CDPQ. "We are delighted to work alongside the Vertical Bridge team, and support the company's next stages of development and long-term growth in an attractive wireless infrastructure sector." "Two key goals since the day we were founded have been to be a leader in wireless communications infrastructure and to have longevity as a private company. The commitment from CDPQ as well our current investors' ongoing support will allow us to continue to meet these objectives," said Alex Gellman, CEO and Co-Founder of Vertical Bridge. "We are thrilled to add CDPQ to our investor group, and look forward to working with them as we offer an even broader range of innovative infrastructure solutions to customers in the dynamic U.S. wireless and broadcast markets." CDPQ joins diverse group of long-term investors who have supported Vertical Bridge since its founding. The group includes Digital Bridge, The Jordan Company, Goldman Sachs Infrastructure Partners, Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners, The Edgewater Funds, CalSTRS and Dock Square Capital LLC. The Vertical Bridge executive team also holds a significant stake in the business. "We are pleased to welcome CDPQ to the company's group of investors," said Marc Ganzi, Executive Chairman of Vertical Bridge and Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Bridge. "As the world prepares for the next generation of mobile technology, and coverage and capacity demands rise, their support and guidance will be a vital asset to the Board and to the management team as we collaborate to achieve our goals and support carriers by providing best-in-class digital infrastructure solutions." The transaction is subject to various regulatory approvals. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. ABOUT CAISSE DE DEPOT ET PLACEMENT DU QUEBEC Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec (CDPQ) is a long-term institutional investor that manages funds primarily for public and parapublic pension and insurance plans. As at December 31, 2018, it held CA$309.5 billion in net assets. As one of Canada's leading institutional fund managers, CDPQ invests globally in major financial markets, private equity, infrastructure, real estate and private debt. For more information, visit cdpq.com, follow us on Twitter @LaCDPQ or consult our Facebook or LinkedIn pages. ABOUT VERTICAL BRIDGE Vertical Bridge is the largest private owner and operator of communications infrastructure and locations in the United States. The company owns, operates and master leases over 266,000 tower, rooftop, billboard, utility attachment and other site locations in support of wireless network deployments. Based in Boca Raton, Florida, Vertical Bridge was founded in 2014 by key executives from Digital Bridge Holdings, LLC and former senior officers of Global Tower Partners. The senior management team at Vertical Bridge has over 200 years of collective experience in tower infrastructure and related sectors. For more information, please visit www.VerticalBridge.com. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cdpq-to-acquire-30-stake-in-us-wireless-infrastructure-leader-vertical-bridge-300822891.html SOURCE Vertical Bridge [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Velocity Global Hosts Global Day of Service to Celebrate its Five-Year Anniversary Velocity Global, the leading provider of global business expansion solutions, is hosting its first-ever Velocity Global Day of Service to celebrate its five-year anniversary. The day will be dedicated to giving back to the 10 communities in which the company has offices: Toronto, Yangon, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Singapore, London, Bogota, Dubai, Bangalore, and its headquarters in Denver, Colorado. The volunteer efforts will take place on Thursday, April 4, 2019, and align with Velocity Global's three service cornerstones: local community, leadership and mentorship, and global good. More than 30 employees around the globe will be supporting organizations in their respective communities, including NL Cares in Amsterdam and Willing Hearts in Singapore. Additionally, more than 80 employees in Denver will have the opportunity to support one of three local organizations they are passionate about, including Food Bank of the Rockies, A Precious Child, and Project C.U.R.E. Following the day's activities, Velocity Global plans to host a large celebration to commemorate the company's noteworthy milestone. "Our company is not only defined by our clients, team, and culture, but also our promise to continue to give back to organizations that Velocity Global employees care about," said Ben Wright, CEO of Velocity Global. "We valueour local roots, connections to the community, and making a difference in the places we call home." Wright founded Velocity Global in April 2014 on five key values that employees live by each and every day: Professionalism, Velocity, Integrity, Empowerment, and Service. The Velocity Global Day of Service will give employees an opportunity to embrace all of these values, while giving back and making a difference in their communities. In addition to its Global Day of Service, Velocity Global is regularly active with other organizations that hold significant importance to its team and serve as the core of the company's financial donations and volunteer opportunities. The company recently extended a transformative multi-year financial commitment to First Descents, a Denver-based not-for-profit, to support the development of a new program specifically designed for young adults battling multiple sclerosis. Velocity Global also supports The Cristina M. Weir Foundation, an organization established to honor the life of Velocity Global employee, Cristina Weir, who passed away in 2017. About Velocity Global: Velocity Global is the leading provider of global employment solutions that has reinvented the way companies expand overseas. With unrivaled expertise in over 185 countries, Velocity Global delivers end-to-end services and best-in-class support to help companies confidently navigate the entire lifecycle of international business. To ensure a compliant, efficient, and flexible international expansion, Velocity Global provides a comprehensive suite of global services that includes International PEO, Entity Setup and Support, Global Talent Acquisition, Immigration, and Consulting. Visit VelocityGlobal.com to learn more or follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @Velocity_Global. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005316/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Tyler Technologies to Provide Integrated Software Solutions for Cucamonga Valley Water District, California Tyler Technologies Inc. (NYSE: TYL) announced today that it has signed an agreement with the Cucamonga Valley Water District (CVWD) in California to provide its Munis enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and enterprise asset management solution, Tyler EAM. The CVWD will use Munis to manage all core functions related to financial and human capital management, revenue management, and citizen services. Tyler EAM will help the water district view, maintain, and manage its assets using two applications: Asset Maintenance, for tracking and maintaining physical assets; and Asset Performance, a reporting and analytics tool to help manage budgets and expenses relted to assets. The CVWD's service area includes the city of Rancho Cucamonga, portions of the cities of Fontana, Ontario, and Upland, as well as some unincorporated areas of San Bernardino County. "From a community standpoint, the Cucamonga Valley Water District is getting a solution that will provide transparency to citizens and offer a better platform to manage infrastructure assets, employee activities, and district finances," said Chris Hepburn, president of Tyler's ERP & Schools Division. "Munis and Tyler EAM will support the district's goals over time and provide them with the tools they need to be successful." The new Tyler solutions are currently being implemented and are expected to go live in one year. The CVWD also uses Tyler's ExecuTime time and attendance solution. "We have worked with Tyler Technologies (News - Alert) for more than a year now, and we are confident in the strength of our partnership," said John Bosler, general manager and CEO at Cucamonga Valley Water District. The CVWD serves a population of more than 190,000 customers within a 47-square-mile area, which includes approximately 48,000 water connections and 37,000 sewer connections with an average daily demand of approximately 47 million gallons. About Tyler Technologies, Inc. Tyler Technologies (NYSE: TYL) is the largest and most established provider of integrated software and technology services focused on the public sector. Tyler's end-to-end solutions empower local, state, and federal government entities to operate more efficiently and connect more transparently with their constituents and with each other. By connecting data and processes across disparate systems, Tyler's solutions are transforming how clients gain actionable insights that solve problems in their communities. Tyler has more than 21,000 successful installations across 10,000 sites, with clients in all 50 states, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, and other international locations. A financially strong company, Tyler has achieved double-digit revenue growth every quarter since 2012. It was also named to Forbes' "Best Midsize Employers" list in 2018 and recognized twice on its "Most Innovative Growth Companies" list. More information about Tyler Technologies, headquartered in Plano, Texas, can be found at tylertech.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005077/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Security Innovation CEO to present on Digital Espionage at Horasis Global Meeting Wilmington, MA, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Security Innovation CEO Ed Adams has been asked to speak at Horasis Global Meeting, to be held in Cascais, Portugal 6-9 April 2019. The annual Horasis Global Meeting is one of the worlds foremost gatherings of business and government leaders, offering a platform to explore and foster cooperation, innovation, diversity, and sustainable growth across the world. This year discussions will center around the theme of Catalysing the Benefits of Globalization. Horasis is an independent think tank based founded in 2005 by Frank-Jurgen Richter, former Director of the World Economic Forum, and chaired by multi-national corporations, former political/government employees, and non-profit organizations. Horasis holds invitation-only meetings of global business leaders and the 2019 Global Meeting will have more than 700 attendees. Im honored to be a speaker at Horasis Global Meeting and applaud their commitment to diverse points of view said Ed Adams, CEO of Security Innovation, Inc. It is an amazing collection of policy makers, strategic influencers, and global thinkers and Im excited to offer my uique security expertise to the group. Horasis Global Meeting represents the 5th time Mr. Adams has been selected to address conference attendees from various industry events, including: SACON, Keynote: Scaling AppSec Programs using Cyber Ranges , co-presented with Satish Janardhanan of Accenture , co-presented with Satish Janardhanan of Accenture CISO Platform, Security Concerns Building and Migrating Applications to the Cloud RSA Conference, Connected Cars: A Security and Privacy by Design Study 10 Years in the Making, co-presented with Dr. Larry Ponemon of The Ponemon Institute VigiTrust Global Cybersecurity Summit: Artificial Intelligence: Are We Ready to Let the Robots Code for Us? ABOUT SECURITY INNOVATION Security Innovation is a pioneer in software security and trusted advisor to its clients. Since 2002, organizations have relied on our assessment and training solutions to make the use of software systems safer in the most challenging environments whether in Web applications, IoT devices, or the cloud. The companys flagship product, CMD+CTRL Cyber Range , is the industrys only simulated Web site environment designed to build the skills teams need to protect the enterprise where it is most vulnerable at the application layer. Security Innovation is privately held and headquartered in Wilmington, MA USA. For more information, visit www.securityinnovation.com or connect with us on LinkedIn or Twitter . About Horasis Horasis is a global visions community committed to enacting visions for a sustainable future. It provides a unique platform for companies from emerging and developed markets to globalize their organisations. In addition to the Horasis Global Meeting, Horasis hosts summits with a focus on China, India, and South East Asia. Joshua Milne [email protected] 617-501-1620 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Soracom Backs Smart Tracking Technology Innovator Pebblebee SEATTLE, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Soracom, Inc., a global provider of smart connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced it has funded a substantial investment in smart tracker developer Pebblebee. This investment contributes to an ongoing $10M funding round and marks the third publicly-disclosed investment through the Soracom IoT Fund. Pebblebee, based in Seattle, designs feature rich location tracking solutions and will benefit from Soracoms support in ongoing research and development efforts, new product development and further expansion of its IP portfolio. First established in 2012, Pebblebee has grown from a dramatically successful Kickstarter offering to a leader in the growing asset tracking category. Founders Nick Pearson-Franks and Daniel Daoura collaborated to achieve their vision to help people stay connected to their valuables and loved ones with consumers cell phones. The company raised more than $200,000 in its 2014 Kickstarter campaign, wildly surpassing its goal of $30,000. Soracom is passionate about identifying and supporting companies like Pebblebee that contribute to the growth of global IoT infrastructure in creative and innovative ways. Pebblebee's hardware expertise and impressive patnt library are already advancing the state of the art in the crucial asset tracking category. By providing both smart connectivity and strategic investments, Soracom helps to accelerate IoT development and create a more connected world, said Eugene Kawamoto, CEO, Soracom Americas, who will also take a seat on the Pebblebee board of directors. In addition to the investment, Soracom and Pebblebee are planning future collaborations that will support the development and deployment of IoT tracking solutions. At Pebblebee we are dedicated to helping people stay connected to their valuables and loved ones, it is both our mission and our obsession, said Daniel Daoura, Co-Founder and CEO of Pebblebee. The Soracom IoT fund investment will help Pebblebee to fulfill that mission, adding greater opportunities and technical resources to continually improve and expand our product line. The Soracom IoT Fund program previously announced round-leading investments in resin.io (June 2018, now balena.io) and Unabiz (August 2018). The program was launched in 2018 by Soracoms parent company, KDDI Corporation, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Japan. The IoT Fund program reflects Soracoms dedication to identifying and supporting early-stage companies that have the potential to make meaningful contributions to the global IoT ecosystem. About Soracom Soracom is a global provider of smart IoT connectivity, offering cloud-native wireless service designed specifically for the needs of connected devices. Founded in 2015 to create a more connected world by removing the barriers to IoT development, Soracom now serves over 10,000 customers across all industries, from agriculture, energy, construction and transportation to consumer electronics, manufacturing, real estate and healthcare. From global enterprises to fast-growing startups, customers trust Soracom for affordable, reliable connectivity that accelerates speed to market and makes it easy to connect to the cloud. Soracom is an AWS IoT Competency Partner. More information is available at www.soracom.io. About Pebblebee Pebblebee is a multifaceted trackables company helping people save time with our patented tracking solutions. The Pebblebee idea first emerged in 2012 as a necessary solution to staying connected with a curious toddlers endless ability to hide things like keys and remote controls. After failed attempts at other homemade solutions, both founders, Daniel and Nick, collaborated to find a way to take back control. That meeting resulted in a vision: help people stay connected to their valuables and loved ones. More information is available at www.pebblebee.com. Media contact: Paula Brici Eskenzi PR for Soracom [email protected] +1 949 677 6527 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] TractManager Announces Appointments of Two New Executives TractManager, Inc., the healthcare industry's largest supplier of strategic sourcing and contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions, has announced the recent appointment of two new executives: Graham Barnes, General Manager of the MediTract division, and Rick Solano, Chief Operating Officer of the Newport Credentialing division. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005327/en/ Graham Barnes (Photo: Business Wire) "The addition of these accomplished executives to our management team puts us in an even stronger position to bring real transformation to healthcare," said Trace Devanny, CEO of TractManager. "Their expertise in healthcare, technology, and client services will further advance our suite of contract management and physician credentialing solutions, as we enable healthcare organizations to focus on what they do best: care for patients." Graham Barnes, FACHE, has nearly 30 years of C-level experience transforming organizations in the healthcare technology and communications industries, and more than 10 years as CEO of leading healthcare IT companies including Concerro and Healthwyse. In addition to accelerating the growth of healthcare and information technology companies, Graham's expertise includes product and strategy development. Most recently, he served as Industry xecutive Partner with Inverness Graham Investments, a private investment firm that acquires high-growth, innovative manufacturing, technology, and services companies. Barnes holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, University of London, in the U.K., and an MBA degree from Santa Clara University. Jake Sorg, TractManager's Chief Operating Officer and formerly acting General Manager of MediTract, welcomed the addition of Barnes to the company. "I can't think of a more capable person than Graham to take the reins of our industry-leading CLM solution," he said. "Graham will further advance our contracting, credentialing, and professional services offerings to meet the most pressing needs of the healthcare market." Rick Solano brings nearly 25 years of experience in healthcare IT to the Newport Credentialing division of TractManager. Rick's expertise includes increasing operational efficiency, quality, and capacity as well as developing new revenue models and growth strategies. Most recently he served for five years as president and founder of Turning Point Business Advisors, where he provided business management consulting services across a variety of industries, including healthcare IT. Jake Sorg noted, "Rick's experienced leadership in both domestic and international healthcare technology businesses will be put to good use as we expand our credentialing and CVO solutions across the provider and payer markets." Previously Rick was president and CEO of the Institute for Health Metrics and of Mirixa, a pharmacy-based patient care network. Rick also served in executive positions in product marketing and operations at leading healthcare IT companies, including WebMD and QuadraMed. He received his BA degree in Geography from University of California, Santa Barbara, and his MBA from California Lutheran University. About TractManager TractManager's healthcare-specific application suite serves three out of five U.S. hospitals. Serving the healthcare industry with integrity for more than 30 years, TractManager is the first-mover in strategic sourcing and enterprise contract lifecycle management. Our advisory services wrap around each solution component, optimizing purchasing and service category management, while supporting best-practice, compliant contracting processes. The company's strategic sourcing division, MD Buyline, includes Hayes, the industry leader in providing clinically focused, evidence-based research and analysis to health plans, insurers, hospitals, healthcare systems, ACOs, and government agencies, and MedApproved, a new product approval workflow solution. The MediTract division supports hospitals and healthcare facilities with an enterprise contract lifecycle solution, and includes Newport Credentialing Solutions, the nation's premier provider of cloud-based workflow and analytics software, and cloud-enabled services dedicated to the credentialing lifecycle. Together, we are dedicated to helping our clients reduce their capital and non-labor costs, and conform their contract, policy, and procedure management to meet regulatory requirements. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005327/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Pixeom Announces $15 Million Funding from Intel Capital, National Grid Partners and Others for Its Software Defined Edge Computing Platform Pixeom, Inc., the market leading software defined edge computing company, is proud to announce it has secured $15 million capital funding led by Intel Capital, National Grid Partners and others. The influx of funds will enable the company to continue scaling and deliver its end-to-end edge computing enterprise software platform, which recreates cloud functionality on-premise. Previous investors include Samsung Catalyst Fund. For the past five years, Pixeom has been refining its enterprise software and diligently expanding its client base that includes dozens of large enterprises such as Intel (News - Alert), Google, SK Telecom, Vodafone, and National Grid. Pixeom's software recreates and orchestrates cloud functionality on-premise. The platform's API make it easy to deploy and manage large-scale, geographically distributed infrastructure and workloads. Notably, it offers a seamless developer experience with tools for building and debugging containerized applications that are intended to run on the edge. Pixeom delivers all the power of the cloud with the speed of on-premise edge computing, running a suite of recreated edge-compatible versions of services found in public clouds like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure, with matching APIs (e.g. machine learning, FaaS, stream processing, etc.). Pixeom customers leverage the platform as a highly commercialized delivery vehicle for their edge workloads. Pixeom founder and CEO Sam Nagar noted: "This round of funding will be used as growth capital to augment our client base in several growth areas such as Energy, Telecom, Manufacturing, Smart Retail, Security and Healthcare. To date, we have over a million installations of our software b dozens of Fortune 500 companies. We are excited to enter the next phase of our company." Intel Capital (News - Alert) Managing Director Mark Lydon noted, "In today's global economy, companies are looking for ways to be more efficient, secure and responsive. With its innovative enterprise software platform, Pixeom can help companies address those needs by deploying and managing large-scale, distributed infrastructure globally. The potential benefits of its software platform extend into multiple areas of technology, and Intel Capital is pleased to support Pixeom's development." Lisa Lambert, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Founder and President, National Grid Partners, said: "Pixeom is bringing applications and computation to the edge. Pixeom's solution uniquely allows enterprises to balance workloads and optimize operations. We are thrilled to add Pixeom to our group of portfolio companies." About Pixeom: Since its founding in 2014, the privately owned Pixeom has created the market leading edge infrastructure software company in the world. Today, the company's client list includes some of the biggest technology companies in the world, such as Intel and Google, as well as energy, manufacturing and telecom clients. Pixeom offers a full suite of solutions for companies who manage a high quantity of sensitive data processing and workload information. About Intel Capital Intel Capital invests in innovative startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous technology, data center and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute, and a wide range of other disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$12.4 billion in 1,554 companies worldwide, and 670 portfolio companies have gone public or participated in a merger. Intel Capital curates thousands of business development introductions each year between its portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world's most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital. About National Grid Partners National Grid Partners (NGP) is the venture investment and innovation arm of National Grid plc (LSE: NG; NYSE: NGG). NGP makes and manages strategically and financially attractive investments and leads company-wide innovation efforts. The organization focuses on innovation, incubation, corporate venture capital, and business development providing a multi-functional approach to change the status quo. NGP is based in Silicon Valley with offices and team members in Los Gatos, San Francisco, Boston, London, and New York. Visit NGPartners.com or follow us on Twitter (@ngpartners_) and LinkedIn (News - Alert) (National Grid Partners). About Samsung (News - Alert) Catalyst The Samsung Catalyst Fund is Samsung Electronics' evergreen multi-stage venture capital fund that invests in the new data economy and strategic ideas for Samsung's mobile, device solutions and consumer electronics groups. Investment spans across Artificial Intelligence, Smart Factory and Robotics, Digital Health, Autonomous Systems, and Cloud and Data Infrastructure. Through Samsung Catalyst Fund, entrepreneurs are enabled by Samsung's global brand, manufacturing and distribution, domain expertise, recruiting network, and world-class Innovation Fellows for advice and mentorship. For more information about Samsung Catalyst Fund, visit: https://samsungcatalyst.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005690/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] tZERO Appoints Elliot Grossman Chief Executive Officer of Upcoming Retail Broker-Dealer tZERO, a technology company and global leader in blockchain innovation for capital markets, announced today that Elliot Grossman has been appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of its upcoming broker-dealer affiliate. Grossman, who was most recently the managing director of equity trading at Dinosaur Financial Group, LLC (Dinosaur), a New York-based institutional brokerage firm, will oversee the establishment and management of the anticipated retail brokerage services affiliate. As CEO, Grossman will be responsible for establishing and managing the retail broker-dealer businesses, which includes sales trading, electronic execution and portfolio execution for buy- and sell-side clients. By combining client-first service with innovative products and sophisticated strategies with tZERO's proprietary technology, the new broker-dealer, under Grossman's leadership, aims to be the leading next generation brokerage firm for investors and financial intermediaries. The new brokerage affiliate is in the process of applying for required regulatory approvals prior to commencing operations. "Having worked with Elliot Grossman at Dinosaur Financial Group, I am confident that he is the right person to build on our momentum," said tZERO CEO Saum Noursalehi. "Elliot's 15 years of experience in capital markets will be invaluable in building the next generation retail broker-dealer. His skills in combination with our expertise in automation and building world-class user experiences will revolutionize how investors trade assets." /p> News - Alert) Advisors, an SEC registered investment advisory firm. Over his 15 years at Dinosaur, Grossman pioneered the company's equity business and was also in charge of the firm's electronic trading systems and strategies. While at Dinosaur, Grossman assisted in the development of the company's U.S. private client group as well as launched the firm's international equity trading business. "Leading tZERO's new broker-dealer affiliate is an honor and I'm eager to be joining this effort at such an exciting time. I look forward to continuing to build on the successes that the tZERO team has achieved as we continue to create a truly unique offering for our clients," said Grossman. tZERO is a technology firm that was founded in 2014 with the goal of utilizing blockchain technology to revolutionize Wall Street so that financial processes could become less beholden to traditional institutional market structures and to bolster and enhance market integrity. tZERO is a portfolio company of Medici Ventures, the blockchain subsidiary of Overstock.com. tZERO Group, Inc. is not a registered broker-dealer, funding portal, investment adviser or investment manager and does not provide any brokerage services. tZERO takes no part in the negotiation or execution of secondary market transactions for the purchase or sale of securities and at no time has possession of investor funds or securities in connection with such transactions. Any broker-dealer services are provided through registered broker-dealer partners or affiliates. SpeedRoute LLC and PRO Securities, LLC are subsidiaries of tZERO Group, Inc., and are broker-dealers registered with the SEC (News - Alert) and members of FINRA and SIPC. More information about SpeedRoute and/or PRO Securities may be found at www.finra.org. Any new broker-dealer affiliates or subsidiaries of tZERO are subject to regulatory approval and filings. For more information on tZERO, please visit tZERO.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005673/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] National Geographic Learning Partners with Britannica Digital Learning to Expand Access to Social Studies Content for U.S. Middle Schools BOSTON, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- National Geographic Learning, a Cengage Company, and Britannica Digital Learning are partnering to incorporate primary source and multimedia content into National Geographic Learning's middle school U.S History program, National Geographic U.S. History American Stories. Students and teachers will gain seamless access to Britannica LaunchPacks which include thousands of grade-appropriate video, audio, articles, and primary-source social studies documents, with hundreds aligned to the American Stories learning path. Launched in 2017, American Stories features authentic National Geographic content and National Geographic explorers. It offers a student-friendly record of the history of the United States that helps students become stewards of the past, and learn what it means to be active, responsible citizens. Through the partnership, teachers and students will gain access to content sets curated and compiled to match K-12 social studies curriculum. Teachers will get access to highly-relevant, curated multi-media content that increases student engagement and learning in social studies. Students will benefit from content that both activates critical thinking and inquiry skills, and helps develop primary and secondary source understaning. In addition, Britannica's LaunchPacks provide American Stories teachers the opportunity to differentiate instruction with different article reading levels and various content sets and formats. The alignment of LaunchPacks to each chapter of the American Stories helps teachers spend less time searching for supplemental materials to support learning and unit objectives. "Simplifying the workflow for teachers, while increasing social studies literacy and delighting students are the main objectives for our partnership," said Vincent Grosso, Senior Vice President, National Geographic Learning. "Our partnership with Britannica Digital Learning supports our goal of creating engaged, motivated, global citizens in today's social studies classrooms as students connect to the work of scientists, explorers and world leaders." Karthik Krishnan, global CEO of Britannica Group, shared: "Britannica Digital Learning is excited to partner with National Geographic Learning to deliver an engaging learning experience for students, and save teachers time by providing curated modular content in multiple digital learning formats that are tied to social studies standards. Britannica's mission to inspire curiosity and instill the joy of learning goes hand in hand with National Geographic Learning's goal of bringing the world to the classroom. This partnership is one of many Britannica initiatives to deliver on our brand promise Save time. Learn more. Be sure." Starting Fall 2019, all existing and new customers who use the Cengage MindTap digital platform to access American Stories will get access to Britannica content at no additional cost, reinforcing the company's mission of improving affordable access to quality learning for all students. Visit NGL.Cengage.com/AmericanStories to learn more. Customers can also reach out to their sales consultant for more details by visiting NGL.Cengage.com/RepFinder. About Cengage and National Geographic Learning Cengage is the education and technology company built for learners. The company serves the higher education, K-12, professional, library and workforce training markets worldwide. National Geographic Learning, a Cengage Company, is a provider of quality core and supplemental educational materials for the U.S. K-12 market. Visit us at www.cengage.com or NGL.Cengage.com. About Britannica Digital Learning Our mission is simple: to ignite curiosity and spread the joy of discovery. Future dreamers, leaders, and builders depend on educators every day to help them learn to examine their world more deeply. We partner with over half of all U.S. schools and 1.6 million teachers, reaching over 32 million students, to provide them with effective, enriching, and innovative tools, resources, and ideas to meet the needs of their students and communities. More information at britannicalearn.com. Media Contact: Kristina Massari Cengage (203) 965-8694 [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/national-geographic-learning-partners-with-britannica-digital-learning-to-expand-access-to-social-studies-content-for-us-middle-schools-300822864.html SOURCE Cengage [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] MPHASE TECHNOLOGIES, INC. STRATEGIC OUTLOOK New York, NY , April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- mPhase Technologies, Inc. (OTCPK:XDSL) (the Company) is pleased to issue the following strategic outlook for 2019. The purpose of this commentary is to familiarize shareholders with the changes that are in progress at mPhase and to provide an overview of the strategy and goals for the coming year. Even prior to taking control of the Company, the new management team led by CEO Anshu Bhatnagar came to the realization that mPhase had a valuable portfolio of intellectual property (IP) and patents, the result of more than a decade of effort and $121 million in development costs. The team concluded that some of this technology could be commercialized relatively quickly if it underwent modification and modernization. Management also determined that before monetizing this promising IP, mPhase would need to assemble an engineering team to design, build, test and commercialize such devices, which would need to be smart and connected. Thus, in addition to an engineering team, we would have to assemble a team of experts in such areas as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and other disciplines associated with the internet of things (IoT). These new units will not be cost centers, but profit centers designed to generate revenue within the first fiscal quarter of their formation. The first step in the process is to form a strategic tie-up with an IoT-centric smart automation solution engineering firm. We are happy to announce we have found such a firm and after multiple meetings are working towards a formal affiliation. The formation of mPhase Technology India (MTI) and the associated Center of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning were the next steps in this process. The primary goal is straightforward to establish mPhase as a leading expert in IoT technology, giving us not only the ability to serve in-house development needs, but also to perform outsourced work for firms with similar needs. This will enable MTI to become a profit center within the first fiscal quarter of its formation. Over time, mPhase hopes to build a body of IP specific to the AI/ML space that will span multiple industries and can be licensed or used for ongoing commercialization of mPhase-affiliated products. We are bringing a new culture to mPhase where rapid cmmercialization and revenue generation are the short-term goals of every business unit. As part of that strategy, we want to go beyond the buzz words and build a true reputation as experts in AI/ML. We hope to announce some key hires in the near future who will immediately put mPhase on that part of the technology map, explained CEO Bhatnagar. The age of the smart device has arrived and we intend to benefit from that trend. We are creating an infrastructure under which we can conceive, design, and build prototype products that have commercial potential, with the monetizable software as an important revenue-generating byproduct. We intend to move quickly, so we are also in talks with potential synergistic acquisitions that can immediately boost our talent pool and supplement our engineering skills. For 2019, the Company is targeting the following goals: Assemble the personnel and infrastructure to become a key player in AI/ML/IoT, specifically in machine learning and artificial intelligence, to commercialize the mPhase portfolio Generate revenue within one quarter at each subsidiary Seek out partners to monetize existing mPhase technology and patents Develop outsourcing capabilities to generate additional revenue Explore synergistic acquisitions and merger opportunities to quickly add talent in our areas of need One of our first tasks after taking over the company was to seek outside opinion on the commercial potential of the mPhase technology. The results of our initial vetting process were highly encouraging, said CEO Bhatnagar. Specifically, I can confirm that we are already in talks with an international drug company to monetize the mPhase drug delivery patent and are exploring opportunities with other strategic partners for additional applications. This transdermal, needleless delivery system in particular has blockbuster potential, so I am looking forward to giving investors some insight into our plans in the life sciences space in coming quarters. We have prioritized the revenue potential from within the mPhase portfolio and will move quickly on those opportunities with the shortest timeframes, so this is an example of just one of the targets we are exploring. mPhase is currently completing its initial organizational changes and will begin the process of updating the corporate website and investor presentation in the near future. About mPhase Technologies, Inc. mPhase Technologies, Inc has historically engaged in technology R&D, with a particular emphasis on long-life, battery cell technology. The Company is currently transitioning into a consumer-oriented technology and services company. Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are identified by the use of the words could, believe, anticipate, intend, estimate, expect, may, continue, predict, potential, project and similar expressions that are intended to identify forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Although we believe that our plans, objectives, expectations and intentions reflected in or suggested by the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we can give no assurance that these plans, objectives, expectations or intentions will be achieved. Forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties (some of which are beyond our control) and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from historical experience and present expectations or projections. Actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements and the trading price for our common stock may fluctuate significantly. Forward-looking statements also are affected by the risk factors described in the Companys filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date on which the statements are made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Contacts: Investor Contact: [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Healthcare Payments Innovator MAPay Tackles Inefficiencies in Global Healthcare Transactions PHILADELPHIA, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- MAPay, LLC, a global healthcare technology firm, has deployed a transformational healthcare payment network with an expanding customer base, positive patenting positions, increasing revenues, and multiple industry stakeholder acceptance. The company utilizes distributed ledger technology to power smart contracts to transact secure medical solutions on the MAPay network. MAPay utilizes a hybrid architecture of both centralized and decentralized protocols for multi-party medical payments and HIPAA-compliant data exchange. MAPay is poised to expand its payment network first built for the U.S., which spends $3.3 trillion annually on healthcare, with consumer out-of-pocket payments exceeding $515 billion, to capture the worldwide sectoral expenditure of $8.7 trillion. The company projects to have more than $11 billion in transactions processed through the network, with revenues of $471 million by 2021. The company derives revenues from both an enterprise B2B solution set, as well as its consumer-facing MEDspedia portal . Based in New Jersey, MAPay is led by founder and CEO Michael Dershem; a.k.a. "Dersh," a seasoned business entrepreneur who brings an extensive history in the healthcare industry that includes both executive-level roles and ownership of companies. While serving as founding CEO of Pharmasset, an Emory University start-up, he successfully raised more than $25 million in private equity funding and executed $30 million research and development agreements with Big Pharma. Pharmasset subsequently went public and was acquired by Gilead Sciences for $11 billion . MAPay's core business is its healthcare payments solution, which can reduce healthcare transaction costs by as much as 50 percent, while increasing transaction transparency, payment completion rates, and collecting proprietary data. MAPay has a unique patient-centric path to interoperability by way of its payment transaction engine and the trust it builds within its community. "If healthcare providers and the legacy intermediaries who are running transactions were transparent, people would riot," says Dershem. "There is a massive, expressed need in the market for increased interoperability via transparency within the medical encounter. That being said, MAPay offers uniue, distinct, value propositions to all of the stakeholders in the healthcare industry. This is what's leading to the momentum of our adoption." "An opportunity exists to eliminate a major portion of the claim processing and transaction costs associated with our own employees receiving care at our owned system network providers. Working with MAPay, we are hoping to create a payment network to streamline processing for our provider to our health system transactions, thereby reducing the historical network access and claims adjudication expense of operating the Plan by at least 20 percent while providing real-time transaction visibility," says Michael Young, the CEO of Temple University Health System. Moreover, the future promise of healthcare depends on the availability and sharing of patient data. Because of business and technology reasons, however, this data remains stuck in silos. Conventional approaches to aggregating healthcare information for impact in research and population health management have been plagued with the business, structural and regulatory conflicts of obtaining and using data. If this data could be accessed and used by a broader community, it could provide price transparency, anonymized data for research and cures, and limit societal medical costs related to fraud and abuse. As Dershem stated in a recent interview with Becker's Hospital Review , a pragmatic approach to how blockchain could affect the future of payment transactions in the healthcare industry, "...is to build hybrid architectures that use legacy database structures with introduction of distributed ledger technologies. This provides a platform where blockchain technologies can be tested and trusted." With the rise of new technology, MAPay's mission is to place healthcare records on its permissionable multi-node blockchain for secure patient-driven use, as well as utilizing this information to impact population health management. For the first time, patients will be able to authenticate themselves into the healthcare ecosystem, not the other way around. Despite the fact that interoperability between these has existed in the industry since the advent of the Commodore computer, until now, these records have been hard-siloed off into institutional and/or business structures that did not communicate with one another. In addition, patients are often granted little or zero access to their own medical records. "This is no longer a technology issue but rather, a business and regulatory issue. Our doctrine on blockchain driven by the patient may be the answer to getting to the trends shaping the discussion of population health management, dynamic diagnosing as well as fraud and abuse," says Dershem. "MAPay has a proprietary technique to aggregate financial, clinical and contextual data through an individual patient-provisioned methodology. I've yet to see anything as transformational as what Dersh and his team have created. Physicians and other healthcare providers will have access to information never before available to drive more customized and effective interventions to treat patients leading to better population health and outcomes," says Jenny A. Witthoff, VMD MS, a global health researcher and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. MAPay has already gained plaudits and recognition for its novel payment technology. The firm is working in collaboration with leading organizations focused on interoperability; has been in discussions with several major US hospital systems for onboarding; and has been in conversations with multiple practice management systems. The company is poised to announce global partnerships with two top-tier technology services and consulting firms, as well as a full-scale international deployment on a countrywide basis of its platform. This will be the first of its kind for any fintech firm in the world. "If we can reduce global healthcare transactions cost by even 10 percent, that would free up nearly $1 trillion dollars," Dershem said at the recent HealthFurther conference in Nashville. That would go a long way to providing vaccines in developing geographic regions, access to care in urban health deserts, and orphan drug research. Not a bad day after all." About MAPay, LLC MAPay is an existing technology company with customers and revenues that deploys distributed ledger technology to power smart contracts, transacting secure medical solutions. The company has developed a hybrid architecture of both centralized and decentralized protocols for multi-party medical payments and HIPAA-compliant data exchange. MAPay is working in association with large-scale hospital networks, top practice management systems, and several insurance payers and government entities. The company is committed to empowering patients and healthcare providers by leveraging blockchain technology to improve and align incentives, reduce costs, and bring increased transparency and data exchange. The company believes in permissionable open-sourced system collaboration, and solution sets that are economically and socially impactful. For more information, please visit https://www.mapaycorp.com/ Media contact: Anne Szustek Talbot [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/healthcare-payments-innovator-mapay-tackles-inefficiencies-in-global-healthcare-transactions-300820912.html SOURCE MAPay, LLC [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Hunton Andrews Kurth Promotes 11 to Partner Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP begins its new fiscal year with the promotion of the following 11 lawyers. The firm proudly recognizes these talented individuals for their accomplishments and outstanding client service. Capital Finance & Real Estate Matthew R. Halal, New York Robert A. Rich, New York Conor M. Shary, Houston Corporate James V. Davidson, Richmond David Dumont, Brussels Alex R. Velinsky, Charlotte Beth A. Whitaker, Dallas Energy & Infrastructure Geoffrey C. Lorenz, Washington Litigation Timothy J. Fazio, Boston Abigail M. Lyle, Dallas Tax & ERISA Jessica N. Agostinho, Washington About Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP Hunton Andrews Kurth is a global law firm of more than 1,000 lawyers handling transactional, litigation and regulatory matters for clients in myriad industries including energy, financial services, real estate, retail and consumer products and technology. Areas of practice focus include capital markets, labor and employment, mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, P3, public finance and infrastructure, and privacy and cybersecurity. With offices across the United States and in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, we're aligned with our clients' businesses and committed to delivering exceptional service. For more information, visit HuntonAK.com. The Lawyers Jessica N. Agostinho (Washington) focuses her practice on the complex and evolving area of employee benefits law, including health care reform, tax-qualified retirement plans and executive compensation. She also is highly skilled in handling employee benefits issues arising in corporate transactions. She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service and her law degree from Columbia Law School. James V. Davidson (Richmond) focuses his practice on all aspects of capital markets, mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, and real estate transactions, with a particular emphasis on REITs. An undergraduate of Miami University, Davidson received his law degree from New York University School of Law. David Dumont (Brussels) advises large, multinational clients on various aspects of European Union privacy and data protection law and has worked extensively in preparing clients for all aspects of the new EU General Data Protection Regulation. Dumont received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Brussels. Timothy J. Fazio (Boston) is a trial lawyer who maintains a diverse national practice, concentrating in complex commercial litigation as well as corporate and government investigations. Fazio received his undergraduate degree from Hamilton College and his master's degree from Hofstra University Frank G. Zarb School of Business. He earned his law degree from Hofstra University School of Law. Matthew R. Halal (New York) practice focuses on advising lenders and investors in all aspects of secured financings, with an emphasis on representing institutional lenders in the origination of commercial mortgage and mezzanine loans. Halal is a graduate of Binghamton University, State University of New York, and received his law degree from New York Law School. Geoffrey C. Lorenz (Washington) primarily focuses his practice on the acquisition, financing and development of electric-generating facilities employing both conventional and renewable technologies. He received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and earned his law degree from George Washington University Law School. Abigail M. Lyle (Dallas) focuses her practice on regulatory compliance and defending financial institutions in enforcement actions and litigation related to consumer protection laws. Lyle received her undergraduate degree from Furman University and her law degree from University of Miami School of Law. Robert A. Rich (New York) primarily represents corporate debtors, secured and unsecured creditors, indenture and securitization trustees, lessors, and other parties in interest in Chapter 11 bankruptcies. Rich received his undergraduate degree from Boston College and his master's degree from Fordham University Graduate School of Business. He earned his law degree from Fordham University School of Law. Conor M. Shary (Houston) represents buyers, sellers and developers of commercial real estate, landlords and tenants in office and retail leasing transactions, lenders and borrowers in secured lending transactions and financial institutions in project financings and commercial loans. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and his law degree from Harvard Law School. Alex R. Velinsky (Charlotte) has represented borrowers and lenders on a wide variety of structured finance transactions. His particular focus is on financings involving residential and commercial mortgage loans and related assets. Velinsky received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his law degree from Columbia Law School. Beth A. Whitaker (Dallas) focuses on corporate transactions and securities and regulatory representation of commercial banks, holding company, thrifts and other financial institutions, including mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, debt and equity offerings, and corporate finance transactions. Whitaker received her undergraduate degree from Elon University and her law degree from Charleston School of Law. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005755/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] United Capital Acquires 2 Firms in Atlanta and Quad Cities, Adds More Than $800M in AUM United Capital Financial Advisers LLC ("United Capital"), the country's first and largest financial life management firm, today announces its expansion into the Quad Cities and Atlanta areas with the acquisition of Irongate International, a registered investment adviser (RIA) in Moline, Ill., and Peachtree Investment Advisors, an RIA in Atlanta, Ga. The two firms will join the United Capital team and use United Capital's groundbreaking financial life management technology to offer an improved, modern client experience and drive growth goals. Together, the acquisitions represent more than $800 million in combined assets under management (AUM). "It's gratifying to welcome forward-looking firms like Irongate and Peachtree to our team," said Matt Brinker, United Capital's chief business development officer. "We're eager to leverage our resources to provide the high net worth, multi-generational households they serve with a truly indispensable client experience." Established in 2001, Irongate manages $455 million in assets and serves 56 households throughout the United States, many of them second- or even third-generation, HNW clients with a typical account size of more than $5 million in assets. Iongate's nine employees will join the United Capital team, with Tony Carpita, Ted Baker and Tait Johnson serving as managing directors. Founder Patrick Trimble (News - Alert) will also stay with the team as it transitions to United Capital. Irongate chose a strategic partnership with United Capital to meet the challenges of their growing scale, the complexity of their clients, and increasing back office needs that pulled the firm's team away from client-facing activity. Tools like MoneyMind and HonestConversations will add an invaluable, financial life dimension to Irongate's client relationships, and obtaining them through the acquisition process was a more responsible use of Irongate's resources than tackling the significant cost of developing in-house technology, said COO Tony Carpita. "When we looked at where the industry is headed, we knew we needed to adapt to be responsible financial stewards for our clients," Carpita said. "United Capital is on the cutting edge of behavioral finance technology that may help create enormous value with our next-generation households. This deal gives us the resources to scale up and spend more time serving our clients." Peachtree, situated in the Buckhead district of Atlanta, was established in 2006 and serves 100 HNW households with a focus on comprehensive wealth management. Peachtree's four employees will join United Capital, with Michael Wolf, Wesley French and Mark Stancil serving as managing directors, bringing with them $353.3 million in managed assets. Peachtree's culture of looking at the big picture of their clients' financial lives resonated with United Capital. The firm's three partners, all over age 50, joined United Capital to secure the succession of their business and to leverage United Capital's bench strength, vision and technology. Armed with these resources, Peachtree's advisors can stay engaged with the families they serve in the long run. "United Capital is an innovative company with a financial life management focus that we believe is years ahead of the competition. In terms of its technology and vision for the industry's future, United Capital is head and shoulders above everyone else. We couldn't have built this on our own," Wolf said. "These acquisitions validate our vision of financial life management," said Joe Duran, Founder and CEO of United Capital. "Irongate and Peachtree understand the best and greatest use of their time is to help their clients come to grips with the highly complex, big picture issues that touch every aspect of their financial lives. We look forward to helping them live richly." About United Capital Financial Partners United Capital Financial Partners, Inc., the parent company of United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC ("United Capital") and its consulting affiliate, is an independent financial life management firm, ranked #2 in the Barron's 2018 list of Top 40 Independent Financial Advisors. United Capital is a registered investment advisor (RIA) offering clients objective advice and an open architecture platform that enables a wide array of investment management solutions tailored specifically to client needs. Today, United Capital has approximately $23 billion in assets under management and 95 offices nationwide. For more information, please visit www.unitedcp.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005704/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Nimble Named Market-Leading CRM for Office 365, G Suite for Seventh Consecutive Year, Says G2 Crowd Nimble, The Simple CRM for Office 365 and G Suite, today announced it has been named a CRM Market Leader for Customer Satisfaction for the seventh consecutive year, according to G2 Crowd (the world's leading business software reviews platform). Ratings are based on verified user reviews and market presence. Ninety-five percent of Office 365 and G Suite users rated Nimble (News - Alert) 4 or 5 stars for ease of set-up, administration and use; quality of support; meeting requirements, and ease of doing business with. Ninety-three percent believe Nimble is headed in the right direction, and 91% said they are likely to recommend Nimble. Nimble was the highest-rated CRM in the following categories; Social Network Integrations, Performance and Reliability, and Contact/Account Management. G2 (News - Alert) Crowd also rated Nimble #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction for small business teams and workgroups, as well as a Market Leader in email tracking. The Simple, Smart CRM For Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365 & G Suite Teams "Data-driven buyers are more informed and technology-savvy than ever before, and they expect to engage with your company on their own terms," said Jon Ferrara (News - Alert), CEO of Nimble. "However, the modern buyer customer journey has many touchpoints and conversations that a brand or organization needs to manage. We're grateful to the 100,000+ Nimble subscribers who share their success in growing new customers by consolidating contacts and conversations, irrespective of where they take place." What Customers Have to Say About Nimble Sales teams trying to grow new customers must have access to current customer data whenever they need it, wherever it resides. Nimble CRM is designed to address this urgent challenge, unifying contacts from across the organization and social into a single system of record; automatically enriching and updating records with sales intelligence and engagement history; and making profiles readily available anytime, anywhere employees engage with prospects and customers. " By replacing Salesforce and Pardot with Nimble, we're easily saving $40,000 in development and licensing costs ," explained Eric Brown, founder and CEO of Fulfilltopia. Of the more than 160+ possible Nimble integrations, Fulfilltopia is integrating Nimble with Office 365 and Wufoo, an online form builder, to provide a complete marketing, sales, and relationship management system. explained Eric Brown, founder and CEO of Fulfilltopia. Of the more than 160+ possible Nimble integrations, Fulfilltopia is integrating Nimble with Office 365 and Wufoo, an online form builder, to provide a complete marketing, sales, and relationship management system. "Real estate professionals are constantly overwhelmed by vast amounts of customer data from daily interactions with prospective customers, brokers, mortgage lenders, referral sources, vendors, and more," said Richard M. Hartian, real estate marketing professional at Winning Agent. He uses Nimble to be proactive rather than reactive when approaching the market: " Our success hinges on the ability to quickly capture contact details, schedule follow-ups, and create segmented groups for target marketing, which Nimble delivers ." said Richard M. Hartian, real estate marketing professional at Winning Agent. He uses Nimble to be proactive rather than reactive when approaching the market: "Students have found Nimble to be much easier and intuitive relative to other tools we have used in the past, so adoption has been pretty painless," explained Scott Inks, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Center of Professional Selling at Kennesaw State University. He previously worked with NetSuite and Salesforce but found they had too steep of a learning curve for the time allotted. About Nimble Nimble is the simple, smart CRM platform that Office 365 and G Suite users trust to find prospects, nurture relationships, and close more deals, without the time-intensive busywork. Everyday thousands of people use Nimble to successfully nurture their personal and business relationships across email, social networks, and more than 160 SaaS (News - Alert) business applications. Nimble has been named Market Leading CRM for Customer Satisfaction and Ease of Use by many experts including CRM Market Leader by G2 Crowd in Spring 2019 for the seventh consecutive year; CRM Watchlist Winner for three consecutive years, #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd for the eighth consecutive time, and #1 Small Business Sales and Marketing CRM by Fit Small Business. Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable relationship insights everywhere you work. Try Nimble's 14 day free trial today, or learn more at Nimble.com. Located in Santa Monica, Nimble is in the heart of the Southern California Silicon Beach tech community and was recently voted The Most Loved Santa Monica Tech Startup. For more information, visit http://www.nimble.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005422/en/ [April 02, 2019] FABU's High-Performance, Coarse-grained Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA) Poised to Improve Accuracy of Computer Vision PHOENIX, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FABU Technology Ltd., a leading artificial intelligence company focused on intelligent driving systems, announces the Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA), a custom module in Phoenix-100 that improves the performance of object recognition and image classification in convolutional neural networks (CNN), a key component of computer vision. The DLA can be customized for a broad range of models, including the computation of high data volumes from cameras and sensors to enable high-performance object detection for self-driving vehicles. Convolutional neural networks, which are specialized algorithms that can perform image processing and classification, have revolutionized a variety of computer vision tasks, including object detection and facial recognition. To perform image classification, the CNN takes input image data (usually derived from sensors) and analyzes it for low-level features such as edges and curves. The image data is then passed through a series of convolutional, nonlinear, pooling, and fully connected layers to get an output, which can be a single class (dog or cat, etc.) or a probability of classes that best describes the image. To improve the accuracy of computer vision, new CNN models are evolving with deeper and wider layers to better extract features from the input image. Because these state-of-the-art CNNs require multiple different types of layers with varying layer sizes and branches, acceleration platforms based on generic, one-size-fits-all ASICs find it a tremendous challenge to effectively boost CNN performance. The ever-increasing data volume from high-definition sensors, such as cameras, LiDAR and mm-wave radar, further escalates the problem in resource-constrained systems such as a self-driving vehicle. Therefore, the ability to customize the ASIC layer architecture is vitally important for a DLA if it will be successful in helping achieve higher performance object detection. The FABU Phoenix-100 is a 28nm ASIC design fora coarse-grained DLA which can be reconfigured for a diverse range of CNN models. The key components of the DLA are multiple coarse-grained modules that provide volumetric customization of various CNN computing primitives. The dimension of these modules and the size of the input/output buffers are optimized to balance the computation and memory bandwidth requirements for a set of object detection algorithms that are commonly used in self-driving vehicles. This DLA design presents high inference performance comparable to high-end GPUs, such as the Nvidia Titan X, but with about 40x power consumption reduction [1]. The Phoenix-100 has demonstrated the ability to accelerate the inference of several state-of-the-art deep CNN models used for image classification and object detection applications. As demonstrated by many prior tests, 8-bit fixed point is sufficient for CNN inference to achieve the same accuracy level as the floating point format. The performance on different object detection networks is also compared with the Nvidia Titan X GPU, as shown in Figure 4. The GPU performance of 32-bit floating point are obtained directly from the original works [2][3][4]. To make a fair comparison, the INT8 GPU performance is also estimated based on the results in [5] that INT8 can provide around 1.3x speedup compared to FP32 on Titan X GPU. The FABU DLA test chip is manufactured with TSMC 28nm CMOS technology. The proposed DLA 2.0 is projected to perform object detection at more than 40 frames per second (fps) for 2MP (1920 x 1080) images. The power consumption of the entire SoC is expected to be 5 W. References: [1] Angelini, Chris, "Update: Nvidia Titan X Pascal 12GB Review" https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-titan-x-12gb,4700-7.html [2] W. Liu et al., "SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector," In ECCV, 2016. [3] J. Redmon et al., "YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement," In arXiv:1804.02767, 2018. [4] S. Ren et al., "Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks," NIPS, 2015. [5] S. Migacz, "8-bit Inference with TensorRT," Nvidia, 2017. [6] D. Franklin, "Jetson Nano Brings AI Computing to Everyone," https://devblogs.nvidia.com/jetson-nano-ai-computing/, 2019 About FABU Technology FABU Technology (fabu.ai) is a leader in research and development of driverless technology, artificial intelligence chips, and intelligent scheduling systems. Established in 2017, FABU is dedicated to developing proprietary technology for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Driving (AD) vehicles to usher in a new era of safer roads and intelligent transportation. FABU has offices in Hangzhou, China; Phoenix, Arizona; and San Diego and Silicon Valley, California. For more information, please contact Angela Suen, Head of Marketing, [email protected], +1-408-475-2556. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fabus-high-performance-coarse-grained-deep-learning-accelerator-dla-poised-to-improve-accuracy-of-computer-vision-300822964.html SOURCE FABU Technology [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Kentik Strengthens Network Visibility in Multi-Cloud Era with Support for Microsoft Azure SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kentik, the provider of network analytics for the cloud-native world, today announced integrated support for Microsoft Azure. With Kentik's Azure support, enterprises and service providers gain access to a real-time view of their applications and services running in Azure, as well as into and across multi-cloud environments in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In an industry survey of more than 300 networking peers , Kentik verified that multi-cloud is real and quickly becoming more common than hybrid architectures. Deployment agility, operational efficiency, scalability, and cost are just a few multi-cloud drivers. Kentik's multi-cloud capabilities, combined with its robust network visibility for hybrid and traditional environments, provide the complete, big-picture insights organizations need to keep their cloud applications, networks, and businesses performant, reliable, and secure. "Networking doesn't go away with the move to the cloud. Multi-cloud environments add new network complexities as organizations struggle to understand where applications and services reside and which internal teams and external customers have dependencies on these applications and services," said Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik. "At Kentik, we're focused on addressing these network complexities by bringing end-to-end network insights and business understanding to our customers. Adding support for Azure is another step forward in our efforts to enable comprehensive network visibility for enterprises and service providers." With integrated Azure upport, Kentik's SaaS analytics platform now ingests flow data directly from Microsoft Azure's Network Security Group (NSG) Flow Logs. These NSG Flow Logs provide information about incoming and outgoing IP traffic, including byte and packet counts. When combined with other network data sources, including Azure-specific context like instance and region names, and orchestration information from Kubernetes and other sources, Kentik's platform enables organizations to gain real-time insights on performance, security, cost management that make sense to stakeholders beyond the network team. Kentik began ingesting flow data from AWS VPC Flow Logs and GCP VPC Flow Logs late last year. The platform also integrates with other cloud infrastructure data sources, including host-level instrumentation (e.g., per-host real-time telemetry with performance (latency/loss) metrics and layer 7 decodes), virtual network appliances (e.g., standard telemetry like NetFlow, BGP, and SNMP from VM-based appliances), and container orchestration/service mesh (e.g., Kubernetes and Istio). For more information on Kentik for multi-cloud visibility, download the technical solution brief . To see Kentik's modern network analytics in action, request a demo or start a free trial . ABOUT KENTIK Easily the world's most powerful network insight and analytics for the cloud-native world, Kentik uses real-time traffic analysis, uniquely enriched with application, routing, and internet context to power the network operations of leading enterprises and cloud and communication service providers (CSPs). Kentik's SaaS platform is built on a patented big data engine to deliver modern network analytics that is both powerful and easy to use. Kentik is based in San Francisco - learn more at www.kentik.com . View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kentik-strengthens-network-visibility-in-multi-cloud-era-with-support-for-microsoft-azure-300822979.html SOURCE Kentik [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Petriage to Showcase Its Veterinary Telemedicine Platform at Texas A&M Veterinary Innovation Summit BELLEVUE, Wash., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Petriage, a cloud-based B2B telemedicine service for veterinarians, will showcase its unique app that lets vets deliver remote care to clients and their pets at the Texas A&M Veterinary Innovation Summit, including participating in its Shark Tank-like pitch competition for promising veterinary startups. The third annual conference in College Station, Texas, begins Friday and continues through Sunday. The event presents the cutting-edge of veterinary medicine, focusing on technological innovations and ideas advancing the future of the profession. A collaboration of the North American Veterinary Community, Veterinary Innovation Council and Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, the Summit features keynote speakers, panel discussions and breakout sessions. A highlight is the popular startup pitch presentation, at which founders of select emergent veterinary companies give a seven-minute talk about their business and field audience questions. "We are excited at the opportunity to connect with industry thought leaders and to position Petriage at the forefront of innovation for veterinarians because it is the telemedicine solution designed with vets in mind," said cofounder and CEO Allon Freiman. "We are especially thrilled to be one of the few companies participating in the startup pitch competition, embodying digital changes that are transforming our profession," noted cofounder Shlomo Freiman DVM, a practicing vet for almost25 years. Together, they will relate how they developed the digital company's differentiated health-monitoring platform and the ways in which it helps veterinarians build their practices. Petriage will have a booth in the exhibit hall where attendees can see a demonstration of the telemedicine platform and meet Petriage's mascot Sumo, a French bulldog. Dr. Freiman has been featuring Petriage's sophisticated telehealth solution in his practice for three years and has found that the integrated teletriage platform helps clients assess the urgency of care remotely 24/7, strengthening his client relationships. "The data at my practice shows only about five percent of teletriage cases are genuine emergencies. Because I can advise clients remotely wherever they are, I'm able to capture a significant portion of cases I otherwise would have been unaware of and would likely result in emergency room visits, Dr. Freiman said. "I've found telemedicine has streamlined practice workflow, which improves my own work/life balance. Additionally, my team, who I rely on to assist in monitoring triage interactions, are further empowered, happier, and committed to our patients' care beyond office hours," he added. The Petriage telemedicine platform's symptom analysis tool, developed through artificial intelligence, gives pet owners a real-time recommendation regarding the urgency and need of their pet's symptoms and enables them to seek medical care for their pet from their vet. Following the algorithmic recommendation provided by Petriage, clients can request to interact with a vet during set telemedicine hours and, if necessary, later at the vet's office. Also, clients can upload text, pictures and video via instant messaging within the app, and this provides useful information to the vet, ensures continuous care and averts unnecessary pet emergency room visits. In January, Petriage and WellHaven Pet Health, a leading veterinary health management company based in Vancouver, Wash., announced a veterinary telemedicine partnership under which WellHaven will implement Petriage's platform in its 40 current hospitals with plans to expand to 150 hospitals within three years. About Petriage Petriage is a cloud-based B2B telemedicine service that allows veterinarians to service their clients and engage them in the remote care of their patients. Its unique offering is a telemedicine service highlighted by a proprietary symptom analysis tool, in which pet owners are provided a recommendation in real-time regarding the need/urgency to seek medical care for their pets. The company was founded in 2015 in Bellevue, Wash., by CEO Allon Freiman, Dr. Shlomo Freiman DVM Cornell, Casey Olives, PhD Harvard. Learn more at petriage.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/petriage-to-showcase-its-veterinary-telemedicine-platform-at-texas-am-veterinary-innovation-summit-300822998.html SOURCE Petriage [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] BlackRock to Report First Quarter 2019 Earnings on April 16th BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE: BLK) today announced that it will report first quarter 2019 earnings prior to the opening of the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, April 16, 2019. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Laurence D. Fink, President, Robert S. Kapito, and Chief Financial Officer, Gary S. Shedlin, will host a teleconference call for investors and analysts at 8:30 a.m. ET. BlackRock's earnings release and supplemental materials will be available via the investor relations section of www.blackrock.com, before the teleconference call begins. Teleconference and Webcast Details Members of the public who are interested in participating in the teleconference should dial, from the United States, (800) 374-0176, or from outside the United States, (706) 679-8281, shortly before 8:30 a.m. ET and reference the BlackRock Conference Call (ID Number 5798975). A live, listen-only webcast will also be available via the investor relations section of www.blackrock.com. Both the teleconference and webcast will be available for replay by 11:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, April 16, 2019 and ending at midnight on Tuesday, April 30, 2019. To access the replay of the teleconference, callers from the United States should dial (855) 859-2056 and callers from outside the United States should dial (404) 537-3406 and enter the Conference ID Number 5798975. To access the webcast, please visit the investor relations section of www.blackrock.com. About BlackRock BlackRock helps investors build better financial futures. As a fiduciary to investors and a leading provider of financial technology, our clients turn to us for the solutions they need when planning for their most important goals. As of December 31, 2018, the firm managed approximately $5.98 trillion in assets on behalf of investors worldwide. For additional information on BlackRock, please visit www.blackrock.com | Twitter (News - Alert): @blackrock | Blog: www.blackrockblog.com | LinkedIn (News - Alert): www.linkedin.com/company/blackrock. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005802/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Clickbooth's Michael Hickman Honored as TBBJ CFO of the Year Nominee Clickbooth's (Clickbooth.com, LLC) Chief Financial Officer, Michael Hickman, has been chosen as a nominee of the Tampa Bay Business Journal's 2019 CFO of the Year. Hickman joined Clickbooth in October 2016 to oversee a wide array of strategic financial management for Clickbooth and its divisions. "Having Mike as our CFO has been transformative to our business," said Erin Cigich, Chief Executive Officer of Clickbooth. "He embodies Einstein's idea that 'if you can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it well enough.' His reporting and analysis have enabled our business to confidently acquire businesses and grow organically and, on top of that, he is a pleasure to work with and a true cultural cofounder of our company." Hickman was born and raised in Brandon, FL, and received both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Accounting from the University of Florida. As a Certified Public Accountant, Hickman's specializations range from acquisition integration and accounting, to systems implementation and poject management. His knowledge of acquisitions and mergers has been particularly beneficial for Clickbooth as the company has experienced rapid expansion, acquiring two companies in a nine-month span. "I am honored to be selected as an honoree for the 2019 CFO of the Year Award," Hickman said. "It is humbling to be recognized with this peer group of CFOs. More importantly, I see this as recognition for my family and the Clickbooth team; without their help and support, achievements like this would not be possible." Hickman is an integral part of both Clickbooth's success and unique, fun company culture. CEO Cigich considers Clickbooth's people to be its greatest asset, and this recognition from TBBJ only reinforces the exceptional talent and passion on the team. About Clickbooth: Founded in 2002 and Recognized as the number #1 CPA Network "Worldwide" by mThink's Blue Book 2017, 2018 and 2019. Clickbooth was founded and built with the belief that a Fortune 500 company and a rising entrepreneur should have the same access to acquiring new customers at scale. Today, Clickbooth is actively developing and supporting the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal to shift all online advertising to a performance-based model. For more information on Clickbooth and the Clickbooth family of companies, visit www.clickbooth.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005817/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] OSE Immunotherapeutics Presents New Clinical and Preclinical Data on its Immuno-Oncology Portfolio at AACR 2019 Oral presentation highlights investigator case reports showing early signs of activity of Tedopi in patients with non-small cell lung cancer in third-line treatment after checkpoint inhibitor failure Poster presentation shows new preclinical mechanistic data of BI 765063 (OSE-172), a selective SIRPa antagonist entering Phase 1 clinical development in 2019 NANTES, France, April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OSE Immunotherapeutics (ISIN: FR0012127173; Mnemo: OSE), today announced that new clinical and preclinical data on its products in immuno-oncology, Tedopi and BI 765063 (OSE-172), were presented at the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, held March 29-April 3, 2019 in Atlanta. "We are excited about the interesting preliminary data gathered with Tedopi from investigator case reports of patients with advanced lung cancer in third-line of treatment after failure of checkpoint inhibitors. The data presented show early signs of activity of Tedopi in three patients, with one patient achieving a partial response and two achieving durable stable disease," said Alexis Peyroles, chief executive officer of OSE Immunotherapeutics. The potential benefit of Tedopi for patients who already have failed other treatments, including checkpoint inhibitors, is an encouraging step to show that Tedopi may provide a long-term clinical benefit for those suffering from this devastating cancer with a high unmet medical need. Our second presentation contains additional evidence that the selective SIRPa antagonist, BI 765063, has a positive effect on myeloid cell function and the tumor microenvironment which indicates that it may potentially have strong anti-tumor activity." Early signs of activity of Tedopi in patients after failure from previous immune checkpoint inhibitors treatments were delivered in an oral presentation. The presentation described investigator case reports from three patients with NSCLC who achieved clinical benefit in third-line treatment with Tedopi after progression following previous anti-PD1/anti-PD(L)1 checkpoint inhibitor treatment. Early results showed that one patient achieved a partial response and two other patients achieved stable disease status as measured by RECIST 1.1 criteria. For all three patients, the safety profile was manageable and no patients have withdrawn for toxicity. These data represent initial activity signs in third-line treatment with Tedopi when given to patients who have failed all previous immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy treatments in advanced NSCLC. (Link to the presentation: https://ose-immuno.com/en/publications-scientifiques/?published_year=2019&ose_product=). Tedopi, a combination of neoepitopes, is currently in an open-label Phase 3 trial in advanced NSCLC for HLA-A2 positive patients who failed previous treatments with checkpoint inhibitors. Tedopi is also being studied in an ongoing Phase 2 trial in patients with pancreatic cancer. In a second presentation, data on BI 765063 (OSE-172), the companys first-in-class monoclonal antibody antagonist selectively targeting the SIRPa receptor expressed on myeloid pro-tumor suppressive cells, included results from human ex vivo and preclinical studies. The research concluded that as blockade of SIRP? prevents T-cell transmigration, the selective anti-SIRPa activityof BI 765063 and its ability to promote T-cell infiltration of solid tumors is crucial for its potential success as a novel cancer therapy. In March 2019, French and Belgian regulatory agencies granted Clinical Trial Authorization for a Phase 1 trial intended to characterize safety, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and preliminary efficacy of BI 765063 in patients with advanced solid tumours. In this dose finding study, BI 765063 will be administered as a single agent and in combination with Boehringer Ingelheims monoclonal antibody PD-1 antagonist BI 754091, a lymphocyte T checkpoint inhibitor. The study will be conducted by OSE as part of its collaboration and license agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim. Presentation details: Early signs of activity of Tedopi (OSE2101), a multiple neoepitope vaccine, in a phase 3 trial in advanced lung cancer patients after failure to previous immune checkpoint inhibitors (ATALANTE-1) https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/6812/presentation/2375 SIRPa blockade reinvigorates myeloid cells in the tumor microenvironment and reverses T-cell exclusion https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/6812/presentation/2662 ABOUT OSE Immunotherapeutics OSE Immunotherapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing and partnering therapies to control the immune system for immuno-oncology and autoimmmune diseases. The company has a diversified first-in-class clinical portfolio consisting of several scientific and technological platforms including neoepitopes and agonist or antagonist monoclonal antibodies, all ideally positioned to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases. The most advanced therapeutic-candidate, Tedopi, is a proprietary combination of 10 neo-epitopes aimed at stimulating T-lymphocytes and is currently in Phase 3 development in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) after checkpoint inhibitor failure (anti PD-1 and anti PD-L1) and in Phase 2 testing in pancreatic cancer in combination with checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo. FR104 (an anti-CD28 mAb) has successfully completed Phase 1 testing and has potential to treat autoimmune diseases. BI 765063 (OSE-172) (anti-SIRPa monoclonal antibody) is under a license and collaboration agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim ; this checkpoint inhibitor has received CTA from French and Belgian health authorities for a Phase 1 clinical trial in multiple cancer indications. BiCKI is a bispecific fusion protein platform built on the key backbone component anti-PD-1 (OSE-279) and targeting innovative targets. OSE-127 (monoclonal antibody targeting the CD127 receptor, the alpha chain of the interleukin-7 receptor) is partnered with Servier under an option agreement up to the completion of a Phase 2 clinical trial planned in autoimmune bowel diseases; in parallel, Servier plans a development in the Sjogren syndrome. OSE-127 is currently under Phase 1 clinical trial. Click and follow us on Twitter and Linkedln https://twitter.com/OSEIMMUNO https://www.linkedin.com/company/10929673 Contacts OSE Immunotherapeutics Sylvie Detry [email protected] +33 153 198 757 French Media: FP2COM Florence Portejoie [email protected] +33 607 768 283 U.S. Media: LifeSci Public Relations Darren Opland, Ph.D. [email protected] +1 646 627 8387 U.S. and European Investors Chris Maggos [email protected] +41 79 367 6254 Forward-looking statements This press release contains express or implied information and statements that might be deemed forward-looking information and statements in respect of OSE Immunotherapeutics. They do not constitute historical facts. These information and statements include financial projections that are based upon certain assumptions and assessments made by OSE Immunotherapeutics management in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current economic and industry conditions, expected future developments and other factors they believe to be appropriate. These forward-looking statements include statements typically using conditional and containing verbs such as expect, anticipate, believe, target, plan, or estimate, their declensions and conjugations and words of similar import. Although the OSE Immunotherapeutics management believes that the forward-looking statements and information are reasonable, the OSE Immunotherapeutics shareholders and other investors are cautioned that the completion of such expectations is by nature subject to various risks, known or not, and uncertainties which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of OSE Immunotherapeutics. These risks could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in or implied or projected by the forward-looking statements. These risks include those discussed or identified in the public filings made by OSE Immunotherapeutics with the AMF. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. This press release includes only summary information and should be read with the OSE Immunotherapeutics Reference Document filed with the AMF on 26 April 2018, including the annual financial report for the fiscal year 2017, available on the OSE Immunotherapeutics website. Other than as required by applicable law, OSE Immunotherapeutics issues this press release at the date hereof and does not undertake any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information or statements. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Gristina Joins Great American's Fidelity / Crime Division as Fine Art Specialist Great American Insurance Group's Fidelity / Crime Division is pleased to announce the hiring of Andrew Gristina as Divisional Director to oversee the management and underwriting of the Fidelity / Crime Division's Fine Art Insurance Program. Mr. Gristina is a seasoned veteran, with 20 years of industry experience. His hiring demonstrates the Division's commitment to its fine art insurance offering, including industry-leading products for art collections and inventories through its network of independent agents and wholesalers. Mr. Andrew Gristina is a member of the Inland Marine Underwriters Association Arts and Records Committee, an adjunct professor at Christie's Education, and a member of the Appraisers Association of America industry advisory committee. He is a graduate of George Mason University. Jason Kyd, Specie Unit Divisional Vice President, stated "We are pleased that Andrew will lead this next chapter inthe development of our fine art insurance offering in North America. His experience and commitment to this industry segment will provide exceptional support for all of our underwriters." About Great American Insurance Group Great American Insurance Group's roots go back to 1872 with the founding of its flagship company, Great American Insurance Company. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, the operations of Great American Insurance Group are engaged primarily in property and casualty insurance, focusing on specialty commercial products for businesses, and in the sale of traditional fixed and fixed-indexed annuities in the retail, financial institutions, registered investment advisors and education markets. Great American Insurance Company has received an "A" (Excellent) or higher rating from the A.M. Best Company for more than 100 years (most recent rating evaluation of "A+" (Superior) affirmed August 17, 2018). The members of Great American Insurance Group are subsidiaries of American Financial Group, Inc. (AFG), also based in Cincinnati, Ohio. AFG's common stock is listed and traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AFG. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005188/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Watters Unveils A New Brand and Enters E-commerce With Exclusive Bridal Styles DALLAS, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Watters, one of America's top woman-owned bridal brands, is proud to announce the launch of its highly anticipated e-commerce site and welcome a new brand to its family. The global company known for offering exquisite wedding and special occasion dresses now offers brides the ease of purchasing wedding dresses from its new "By Watters" brand and select bridesmaids looks from Wtoo by Watters online at www.watters.com . "Wedding day shopping can be daunting for some, so we are thrilled to offer our Watters girls a stress-free experience," said Watters' Style Director, Sydney Watters Dunbar. Making its official digital debut to consumers today, the first By Watters collection includes exclusive wedding looks priced at $250+. In an effort to keep the consumer top of mind, new styles will be released frequently throughout the year. Featuring of the moment, ready-to-wear-inspired bridal offerings, the value-conscious looks are suitable for events that take place in, around and beyond a wedding. Each By Watters dress is tailored with limited construction from fabrics that support easy fit and comfort. Styles are available now on the brand's new website, with additional exclusive styles available through BHLDN and Nordstrom. Available for immediate delivery direct to consumers, the offering is intended to satisfy the shopping habits of millenials who are looking for convenience and don't want to wait the typical four to six months for their wedding day look to be delivered. For bridesmaids, the new website features 11 dresses from Wtoo by Watters. The edit of popular styles in contemporary hues like Biscotti, Sage and Evergreen are offered at attainable price points aligned with the bridge category. "Our mission has always been to provide our brides with luxurious products that are accessible to everyone, so this latest venture seemed only natural for us," says Watters' Founder, Vatana Watters. In addition to the e-commerce function, the website now boasts a very distinct, fresh new look. All four brands under the Watters umbrella have been brought to life via new logos, layouts and colorways on their own microsites. Designed with the millennial bride in mind, the new digital platform was built with creative direction from Dunbar, the brand founder's 24-year-old daughter. The overall look, branding and functionality were largely influenced by Dunbar, who is being groomed to take over the family business. CLICK HERE to access hires images from the By Watters Collection CLICK HERE to access hires images from the Wtoo by Watters Bridesmaids Online Collection For more information about the e-commerce launch or the new By Watters brand, please contact [email protected]. ABOUT WATTERS Watters, a global leader in the fashion industry for over 30 years, is comprised of brands offering luxury bridal gowns and dresses for bridesmaids, wedding parties and special occasions: Watters, Wtoo by Watters, Willowby by Watters and By Watters. Watters, the company's premier flagship brand, is best known for raw-yet-refined designs that embody imagination. By Watters, launched in 2019, was created to provide on-trend, accessible looks that are versatile enough to be worn beyond the wedding aisle. Headquartered and designed in Dallas, TX with teams in Europe and Asia, Watters' brands are sold by major retailers and specialty stores worldwide with select collections available online. The By Watters Collection and select Wtoo by Watters bridesmaids styles can be purchased at www.watters.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/watters-unveils-a-new-brand-and-enters-e-commerce-with-exclusive-bridal-styles-300823098.html SOURCE Watters [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Wiwynn Boosts 19" and 21" Servers with New 2nd-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Wiwynn, an innovative cloud IT infrastructure provider of high quality computing and storage products, announced the upgrade of its 19", OCP (News - Alert) (Open Compute Project) and Project Olympus servers to the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors for exceptional performance and flexibility in workload optimization. Combined with Wiwynn's expertise in high efficiency and reliable open hardware, the server fleet can assist data centers to drive leading performance and improved TCO. This portfolio supporting the new Intel (News - Alert) processor family includes: 19" SV300G3 (1U), cost-performance and capacity optimized server for multi-purpose applications at low power consumption SV302G3 (1U2N), high density server with versatile system configurations for compute-intensive workloads SV5100G3 (1U), performance optimized Project Olympus server for multi-purpose applications 21": SV7220G3 (2U3N), OCP -accepted server designed with high power-efficiency and optimized for compute-intensive applications nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Wiwynn server systems provide pervasive performance enhancement including higher per-core performance and CPU frequency compared with prior generation. The new processor also increases memory speed and capacity, supporting up to 2933MHz memory speed and 16Gb-based DDR4 DIMMs. The new Intel Deep Learning Boost (VNNI) empowers Wiwynn servers to deliver significant and more efficient AI inference acceleration without hardware changes. With the support of Intel Optane DC persistent memory, data centers can utilize up to 512GB per module for in-memory database, in-memory analytics or super-fast storage applications at affordable cost. "We aggressively invest in new technologies to meet demands for next-generation data centers," said Emily Hong, President and Chief Executive Officer at Wiwynn Corporation. "We are excited to boost our server fleet using the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors to provide data centers with not only performance improvement, but also flexibility for diverse workloads stemming from AI, big data analysis and autonomous things." "Intel is a founding member of the Open Compute Project and community partner in Project Olympus," said Raejeanne Skillern, vice president and general manager of Cloud Service Provider Group at Intel. "Our 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable platforms, delivered in collaboration with innovators like Wiwynn, are ready to take on today's largest data challenges in the cloud, network or enterprise." *Wiwynn is a registered trademark of Wiwynn Corporation in Taiwan and other countries. * Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States of America and other countries. About Wiwynn Wiwynn is an innovative cloud IT infrastructure provider of high quality computing and storage products, plus rack solutions for leading data centers. We aggressively invest in next generation technologies for workload optimization and best TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). As an OCP (Open Compute Project) solution provider and platinum member, Wiwynn actively participates in advanced computing and storage system designs while constantly implementing the benefits of OCP into traditional data centers. For more information, please visit Wiwynn Website, Blog, or contact [email protected] Follow Wiwynn on Facebook and Linkedin for the latest news and market trends. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005470/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Catapult President Featured in CIOLook Magazine AUSTIN, Texas, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Catapult, a leading IT consulting firm, announced that their president, Terri Burmeister, was featured on the cover of CIOLook Magazine's February 2019 issue. The February 2019 issue focuses on women leaders making a difference, and the cover story titled, "Terri Burmeister: Taking Risks and Ensuring Customer Satisfaction" discusses Terri's contributions as a leader at Catapult and in the technology industry at large. The article takes a deeper look at the attributes that make asuccessful business leader, the challenges or roadblocks women leaders are facing in today's business climate, and why it's essential for an organization to have a wide representation of employees from varying backgrounds. Terri Burmeister also provides further insight on career advice for up and coming leaders and gives suggestions on how to keep up with technological trends and other resources to boost professional growth. Guided by her desire to see others succeed, Terri Burmeister has led Catapult through a great deal of change over the course of her tenure. Most notably, she led efforts to move many of Catapult's services to a subscription-based model and begun offering IP-led solutions. "I've been very fortunate to be a part of such a great company," says Terri Burmeister, President of Catapult Systems. "Through the years, Catapult has seen an immense amount of growth and transformation and I have had the chance to see a number of these changes unfold, while providing me with an opportunity to foster my abilities as a leader." ABOUT CATAPULT Catapult is a digital solutions and services firm that uses technology to solve complex business challenges, delivering exceptional value to our clients. Catapult has consistently been recognized as a leading Microsoft partner for its expertise in digital transformation and cloud-based technologies. Catapult was named the 2018 Microsoft US Partner Award Winner for Azure Compete, the 2017 Partner of the Year Finalist in Cloud Productivity and the 2016 Microsoft Partner of the Year (US). Press Contact: Jessica Cowan Marketing Communications Director Catapult Systems 512-605-3903 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/catapult-president-featured-in-ciolook-magazine-300823241.html SOURCE Catapult [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP Announces the Filing of a Securities Class Action on Behalf of American Renal Associates Holdings, Inc. Investors Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP ("GPM"), a national investors rights law firm, announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of investors that acquired American Renal Associates Holdings, Inc. ("American Renal" or the "Company") (NYSE: ARA) securities between August 10, 2016 and March 27, 2019, inclusive (the "Class Period"). American Renal investors have until May 28, 2019 to file a lead plaintiff motion. 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 March 8, 2019, American Renal disclosed that in October 2018 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC (News - Alert)") had requested documents and information regarding revenue reconition, collections, and other related matters. Also, the Company announced that it would delay filing its 2018 annual report while the Audit Committee investigated the Company's revenue recognition methods and accounting practices. On this news, shares of American Renal fell $2.05 per share, or more than 16%, to close at $10.46 per share on March 8, 2019, thereby injuring investors. Then, on March 27, 2019, American Renal announced that certain financial statements would be restated and that its Chief Financial Officer had resigned. The Audit Committee found that the Company "did not appropriately reconcile its contractual allowance estimates for discounts and price concessions with cash subsequently received in respect of prior period patient claims." The Company also disclosed that the required adjustments would reduce operating income for fiscal 2017 by at least $10 million and would have a cumulative impact on fiscal years 2014 to 2018 in the range of negative $5 million to positive $5 million. Furthermore, the Company stated that it expected to revise related metrics "such as revenue per treatment and days sales outstanding" during the affected financial periods based on the Audit Committee's ongoing review. On this news, shares of American Renal fell $3.69 per share, or 38%, to close at $6.01 per share on March 28, 2019, thereby further injuring investors. The complaint filed in this class action alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) issues with American Renal's accounting process for revenue recognition, collections, and related matters would give rise to an SEC investigation into the same, and increased regulatory scrutiny by the SEC; (2) American Renal's financial statements for the fiscal years 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 contained in its Annual Reports for the years ended December 31, 2016 and 2017, and its condensed consolidated financial statements in quarterly reports from 2016 through 2018 were false and could not be relied upon; (3) American Renal had material weaknesses in its internal control over financial reporting; and (4) as a result, defendants' public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. Follow us for updates on Twitter (News - Alert): twitter.com/GPM_LLP. If you purchased shares of American Renal during the Class Period you may move the Court no later than May 28, 2019 to ask the Court to appoint you as lead plaintiff. To be a member of the Class you need not take any action at this time; you may retain counsel of your choice or take no action and remain an absent member of the Class. 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, of GPM, 1925 Century Park East, Suite 2100, Los Angeles, California 90067 at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, by email to [email protected], or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com. If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number and 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/20190402006005/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] QuintessenceLabs, Tech Mahindra and BT Develop an End-to-End Video Messaging Solution Secured by Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) QuintessenceLabs is proud to announce its partnership with Tech Mahindra and BT (News - Alert) in the development of an end-to-end video messaging application secured by QKD. This capability is part of UKQNtel - the UK's testbed for Quantum Key Distribution, launched last week. The UKQNtel quantum network connects the Quantum Communications (News - Alert) Hub in Cambridge to BT's Global Research and Development Headquarters at Adastral Park, showcasing UK's first practical quantum-secured ultra-fast network. Unlike traditional encryption, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is secured by the laws of physics, making it invulnerable to increasing computational power, new crypto-attacks and quantum computers. Tech Mahindra's Makers Lab developed the peer-to-peer video communication and file transfer application. The solution works by creating a secure room to enable communication protected with keys that are provided by QuintessenceLabs' qCrypt Key Management Server. Once the key is synchronized, any communications are secure and un-hackable. Mike Ashwell, Head of UK Makers Lab said: "Tech Mahindra is delighted to be working with BT and QuintessenceLabs. Whilst this project is in the early development stage, the commercial opportunities are immense; it's a very exciting time to be involved." QuintessenceLabs provides core technology and the key manaement solution, qCrypt. This is the glue that melds the underlying technical QKD system and the application layer on top. The separation of these layers has enabled Tech Mahindra's video application to be developed without any dependency on the underlying QKD system, demonstrating how this advanced technology can ultimately be used. The only interface for Tech Mahindra was an integration based on the KMIP standard to QuintessenceLabs' key management server. "Quantum communications will deliver the highest level of security, keeping our sensitive data secure from sophisticated attacks including those from quantum computers," stated Dr. Vikram Sharma, Founder and CEO of QuintessenceLabs. "QuintessenceLabs is delighted to participate in this ground-breaking deployment demonstrating the power of quantum key distribution to future users." About QuintessenceLabs | www.quintessencelabs.com QuintessenceLabs is a global leader in quantum-enhanced cybersecurity. We provide the strongest protection for data, integrating quantum technology with high-value security. We offer the world's fastest true random number generator, a high performance key and policy manager, as well as advanced quantum key distribution capabilities, keeping organizations secure today and prepared for tomorrow. About Tech Mahindra Tech Mahindra represents the connected world, offering innovative and customer-centric information technology experiences, enabling Enterprises, Associates and the Society to Rise. We are a USD 4.9 billion company with 121,840+ professionals across 90 countries, helping over 935 global customers including Fortune 500 companies. Our design experiences, innovation platforms and reusable assets connect across technologies to deliver tangible business value and experiences to our stakeholders. Tech Mahindra is the highest ranked Non-U.S. company in the Forbes Global Digital 100 list (2018) and in the Forbes Fab 50 companies in Asia (2018). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402006009/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Hotwire and The Hoffman Agency Form Exclusive Partnership in Asia Hotwire (News - Alert), the global communications agency, today announces an exclusive partnership with The Hoffman Agency to collaborate in Asia. The agreement, which is effective immediately, will see Hotwire work with The Hoffman (News - Alert) Agency's wholly owned offices in Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Indonesia as part of its global network of offices and exclusive partners. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005126/en/ Barbara Bates, Global CEO, Hotwire and Lou Hoffman, Founder & CEO, The Hoffman Agency (Photo: Business Wire) Hotwire operates through 11 wholly owned offices across North America, Europe and Australia and supports this with a network of exclusive partners and affiliates in another 21 cities worldwide, including the eight cities represented by The Hoffman Agency. The exclusive partnership with The Hoffman Agency consolidates Hotwire's current multi-agency solution in Asia down to one firm, a move which Hotwire Group CEO Barbara Bates believes will further strengthen its credentials as a true alternative to the established global owned networks. "We are seeing more and more demand for an agile alternative to the owned networks," Bates said. "By partnering with The Hoffman Agency, we add deep capability and experience across Asia in one sweep. Together, Hotwire and The Hoffman Agency can provide a single point of access to any client looking for a eeply experienced, tech focused regional or global agency solution." Bates and The Hoffman Agency founder and CEO, Lou Hoffman, have known each other for more than 20 years. As a result, agreeing the details of the partnership has been plain sailing as both agencies come from a similar place and have similar cultures - a benefit that Hoffman believes will appeal to current and future clients: "Good relationships are based on trust and shared values," he said. "There are a number of reasons why we've come together with Hotwire but it starts with a simple concept. Both organizations put the client first." The partnership offers compelling advantages for both firms. For Hotwire, it completes its global footprint with the addition of eight offices of an award-winning specialist tech agency in Asia. For The Hoffman Agency, the partnership opens up the opportunity to serve an extended client base. Both firms are positioned as mid-size technology-oriented consultancies - small enough to offer deep specialization and hands-on involvement from senior consultants, but large enough to service the needs of the world's most demanding clients. About Hotwire Hotwire is a global communications agency that helps businesses better engage and connect with their customers. From Sydney to San Francisco, we operate with a borderless mind-set across 22 locations including the UK, US, Mexico, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Australia, together with co-branded partners Yellow Communications in the Netherlands and Belgium, Active DMC in the Middle East and VIANEWS in Brazil, as well as other affiliate partners. For more information, please visit www.hotwireglobal.com About Enero Hotwire is wholly owned by Enero Group Limited, a company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX:EGG). The Enero Group is a boutique network of marketing and communications businesses that includes BMF, CPR, Frank PR, Hotwire, Naked Communications, OB Media, Precinct, Orchard Marketing, The Digital Edge and The Leading Edge. For more information, please visit www.enero.com. About Hoffman The Hoffman Agency (www.hoffman.com) is an independent communications consultancy that helps companies communicate their stories across the world. Thanks to a unique global infrastructure and culture, the firm takes a collaborative approach to implementing multi-country programs. The Hoffman Agency comprises 13 offices across the globe, including San Jose, California, and Vancouver, Washington along with Beijing, Berlin, Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Paris, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei and Tokyo. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005126/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Oxford Scholars Announce Report on Citizenship in a Networked Age Scholars at the University of Oxford have announced their new project, "Citizenship in a Networked Age." Funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation, the project will culminate in 2020 in a detailed report of the team's findings and recommendations, which will explore how humans can uphold ideals of citizenship in an evolving technological landscape. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402006015/en/ The announcement took place at Shoreditch Treehouse (London) on 25 March. Attendees-including leading civic leaders, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and artists-discussed what "good" citizenship looks like in the 21st century. The event was hosted by Susan MacTavish Best and featured a short film by award-winning journalist Richard Sergay as well as a panel with Andrew Serazin (President, Templeton World Charity Foundation), counter-extremist Fatima Zaman, and Baroness Philippa Stroud (CEO, Legatum Institute). Andrew Briggs and Dominic Burbidge are leading the research into citizenship in a networked age at Oxford. Their focus is finding spaces where the positive features of social and technological change can be embraced, while also addressing the deep implications for our social obligations and citizenship. To this end, the project aims to draw on the best of scientific insight and spiritual wisdom to improve global quality of life. The project addresses foundational issues such as how citizens will make moral decisions in a networked age, what their privileges and responsibilities will be, and how AI can contribute to enriched citizenship. Andrew Briggs, Professor of Nanomaterials at Oxford, said, "Digital networking and machine learning are already changing how we relate to one another and how decisions are taken on our behalf. There is an urgent need to appraise what new kinds of citizenship we will need, based on a deep understanding of what humans are for and how they can best flourish." With the support of Templeton World Charity Foundation, the project has brought together nearly 200 esteemed experts from consultation groups in Oxford, Rome, Nairobi, Ayia Napa, and Pasadena (California). About Templeton World Charity Foundation Since 1996, Templeton World Charity Foundation has served as a global philanthropic catalyst for discoveries about big questions of the universe in areas at the intersection of science, theology, philosophy, and society. Founded by Sir John Templeton in Nassau (Bahamas), it fosters ambitious thinking and creative communications on diverse topics. Visit https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/ View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402006015/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] 57th Annual R&D 100 Awards Continue Prestigious Legacy in 2019 ROCKAWAY, N.J., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --The R&D 100 Awards , presented annually by R&D Magazine , are now open to submissions for revolutionary ideas in science and technology that launched last year. Since 1963, the R&D 100 Awards program has identified and celebrated the top 100 innovative technologies of the past year. Submitting a product or process to be considered by the panel of expert judges could earn it a place among an amazing roster of finalists and winners from the last 57 years. Past R&D 100 Awards recipients include established Fortune 500 companies, federally funded research institutions, as well as academic and government labs and innovative companies. Their leading products, technologies and services will make a difference in a wide range of industries and together represent a bright future for science and innovation in the years to come. Any new technical product or process that was first available for purchase or licensing between January 1, 2018 and March 31, 2019, is eligible for entry in the 2019 R&D 100 Awards. An organization may nter as many new products as it wishes. Entries for the R&D 100 Awards must be entered under at least one of five general product categories and/or four Special Recognition Awards categories. These are: Mechanical Devices/Materials IT/Electrical Analytical/Test Process/Prototyping Software/Services Special Recognition - Green Tech Special Recognition - Corporate Social Responsibility Special Recognition - Market Disruptor - Services Special Recognition - Market Disruptor - Products "We're so proud of the R&D 100 Awards program and its incredible legacy because these awards give R&D teams a huge boostboth by recognizing the most disruptive innovations and new products of the past year, as well as honoring those exact individuals who worked so hard in achieving dramatic discoveries across industries," said Bea Riemschneider, VP of Content & Events at Advantage Business Marketing and Editorial Director of R&D Magazine. Entries will be accepted through May 6, 2019. Click here to access the 2019 entry platform . For FAQs, click here. R&D thanks you for your participation and wishes you luck in the 2019 competition! About R&D Since its founding under the name Industrial Research, R&D has served research scientists, engineers, and technical staff members at government, academic and industrial laboratories around the world. R&D provides timely, informative daily news and technical articles that broaden our readers' knowledge of the R&D industry and improve the quality of their work. R&D features the latest technology, products and equipment used in laboratory research. Twitter: @RandDMagazine Facebook: @RDMag View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/57th-annual-rd-100-awards-continue-prestigious-legacy-in-2019-300823327.html SOURCE Advantage Business Marketing [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Reinsurance Group of America Announces First-Quarter Earnings Release Date, Webcast Reinsurance Group of America, Incorporated (NYSE:RGA) plans to release first-quarter earnings on Monday, April 29, at approximately 4:15 p.m. Eastern Time. The release will be issued via newswire and will also be available through RGA's website, www.rgare.com. RGA will host a conference call to discuss the first-quarter results beginning at 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, April 30. Interested parties may access the call by dialing 1-800-281-7973 (323-794-2093 international). The access code is 4201888. Participants are asked to call the assigned number approximately 10 minutes before the conference call begins. A live audio webcast of that conference call will be available on RGAs website, www.rgare.com. A replay of the conference call will be available at the same address for 90 days following the conference call. Reinsurance Group of America, Incorporated (RGA), a Fortune 500 company, is among the leading global providers of life reinsurance and financial solutions, with approximately $3.3 trillion of life reinsurance in force and assets of $64.5 billion as of December 31, 2018. Founded in 1973, RGA today is recognized for its deep technical expertise in risk and capital management, innovative solutions, and commitment to serving its clients. With headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, and operations around the world, RGA delivers expert solutions in individual life reinsurance, individual living benefits reinsurance, group reinsurance, health reinsurance, facultative underwriting, product development, and financial solutions. To learn more about RGA and its businesses, visit the company's website at www.rgare.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005861/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Apple Hospitality REIT Announces Dates for First Quarter 2019 Earnings Release and Conference Call Apple (News - Alert) Hospitality REIT, Inc. (NYSE: APLE) (the "Company") today announced that it plans to report first quarter 2019 financial results after the market closes on Wednesday, May 8, 2019, and host a conference call for investors and interested parties on Thursday, May 9, 2019, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time, to discuss the results. The conference call will be accessible by telephone and the internet. To access the call, participants from within the U.S. should dial (877) 407-9039, and participants from outside the U.S. should dial (201) 689-8470. Participants may also access the call via live webcast by visiting the Investor Information section of the Company's website at ir.applehospitalityreit.com. A replay of the call will be available from aproximately 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time on May 9, 2019, through 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on May 30, 2019. To access the replay, the domestic dial-in number is (844) 512-2921, the international dial-in number is (412) 317-6671, and the passcode is 13689113. The archive of the webcast will be available on the Company's website for a limited time. About Apple Hospitality REIT, Inc. Apple Hospitality REIT, Inc. (NYSE: APLE) is a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns one of the largest and most diverse portfolios of upscale, rooms-focused hotels in the United States. Apple Hospitality's portfolio consists of 234 hotels with more than 30,000 guest rooms located in 87 markets throughout 34 states. Franchised with industry-leading brands, the Company's portfolio comprises 108 Marriott-branded hotels, 125 Hilton-branded hotels and one Hyatt-branded hotel. For more information, please visit www.applehospitalityreit.com. For additional information or to receive press releases by email, visit www.applehospitalityreit.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402006028/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] GM Financial to Release First Quarter 2019 Operating Results GENERAL MOTORS FINANCIAL COMPANY, INC. ("GM Financial" or the "Company") will release its first quarter 2019 operating results on Tuesday, April 30, 2019. Management will record remarks addressing the results. This recording, along with the presentation slides and press release, will be posted to the Company's website. Materials can be accessed via the Investor Relations section of the website at www.gmfinacial.com. Questions on the materials should be directed to GM Financial's Investor Relations Department. Earnings Dates through 2019 Dates for the next three quarterly earnings announcements have been set through 2019 as follows: Q2 2019 - August 1, 2019 Q3 2019 - October 30, 2019 Q4 2019 - February 5, 2020 About GM Financial General Motors (News - Alert) Financial Company, Inc. is the wholly-owned captive finance subsidiary of General Motors Company and is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. For more information, visit www.gmfinancial.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402006061/en/ [April 02, 2019] Dover Announces Sale Of Finder Pompe S.r.l. DOWNERS GROVE, Ill., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dover (NYSE: DOV) announced today that it has completed the sale of Finder Pompe S.r.l ("Finder") to Gruppo Aturia S.p.A. Based in Merate, Italy, Finder is part of the PSG business unit within Dover's Fluids segment, and manufactures engineered centrifugal pumps and spare parts for critical applications primarily in the oil and gas market. Finder generated approximately $30 million of revenue in 2018. Dover's President and Chief Executive Officer, Richard J. Tobin, said, "This divestiture is in line with our strategy of reducing exposure to highly cyclical upstream energy markets and focuses Dover's PSG business on positive displacement and hygienic pump technologies." As a result of the transaction, Dover will receive $24 million in cash and will record a non-cash after-tax charge of approximately $40-50 million due to the write off of net carrying value of assets, including goodwill and foreign exchange cumulative translation adjustment (CTA) held in equity. The transaction will be reflected in the first quarter 2019 financials, and will be excluded from adjusted earnings and adjusted earnings per share. The transaction will have no impact on Dover's previously provided FY 2019 adjusted EPS guidance. About Dover: Dover is a diersified global manufacturer with annual revenues of approximately $7 billion. We deliver innovative equipment and components, specialty systems, consumable supplies, software and digital solutions, and support services through three operating segments: Fluids, Engineered Systems, and Refrigeration & Food Equipment. Dover combines global scale with operational agility to lead the markets we serve. Recognized for our entrepreneurial approach for over 60 years, our team of approximately 24,000 employees takes an ownership mindset, collaborating with customers to redefine what's possible. Headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois, Dover trades on the New York Stock Exchange under "DOV." Additional information is available at dovercorporation.com. Forward-Looking Statements: This press release contains "forward-looking" statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. All statements in this document other than statements of historical fact are statements that are, or could be deemed, "forward-looking" statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to numerous important risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors, some of which are beyond the Company's control. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, general economic conditions and conditions in the particular markets in which we operate, changes in customer demand and capital spending, competitive factors and pricing pressures, our ability to develop and launch new products in a cost-effective manner, and our ability to realize synergies from newly acquired businesses. For details on the risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements that may be contained herein, we refer you to the documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, and our reports on Form 8-K. These documents are available from the SEC, and on our website, dovercorporation.com. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dover-announces-sale-of-finder-pompe-srl-300823385.html SOURCE Dover [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Scaling Solutions to Better Our Society: National University System Presents at Education Thought Leader Summit ASU + GSV Education experts representing the National University System (NUS), a network of nonprofit education institutions serving over 45,000 PreK to doctoral-level students nationwide, will be presenting at the 10th annual ASU+GSV Summit - a gathering of global leaders in education and innovation - in San Diego from April 8-10. Discussions featuring National University System Chancellor Dr. Michael R. Cunningham and other NUS leadership and invited guests will center on the future of higher education, workforce education initiatives, and social emotional learning through the Sanford Harmony program, all of which are being expanded nationally by the National University System. Dr. Cunningham - who has extensive experience in both the education and business sectors, having previously founded and led the expansion of a multinational graphics communications company - will be a featured presenter on a panel titled Bending the Arc of Human Potential Through Radical Scaled Online Learning Models. The panel, which focuses on how the nonprofit sector is creating scaled learning delivery systems leveraging online models, will present Tuesday, April 9 at 2 p.m. in Harbor B Room of Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego. The National University System, through its affiliate institutions of National University, City University of Seattle, Northcentral University and John F. Kennedy University, is dedicated to defining new academic pathways toward degree completion through cutting-edge solutions that meet the needs of adult learners and enhance workforce readiness. Dr. Cunningham, who served as Dean of the College of Business Administration at San Diego State University prior to joining the National University System in 2013, will share insights on NUS initiatives that are being scaled nationally as part of a wide-ranging commitment to better society. These include: The national and global expansion of the Sanford Programs, inspired by philanthropist T. Denny Sanford - Sanford Harmony, Sanford Inspire, and the Sanford Institute of Philanthropy - which provide solutions for some of society's greatest challenges in the nonprofit and K-12 sectors and are now reaching more than 6.5 million people. Workforce Education Solutions, an NUS initiative to support quality, affordable education customized to meet market needs and industry standards, designed to also offer credit for prior learning. The acquisition and expansion of online personalized learning aimed at lowering the cost of degree offerings. These include proprietary models being developed throughout NUS, including Precision Education and FlexCourse?, a state-of-the-art learning management system, along with the recent addition of Northcentral University, a leader in online graduate degrees. agenda. Featured guest speakers include Frances Gipson, Ph.D, Chief Academic Officer at Los Angeles Unified School District; Eric Gurna, President and CEO of LA's BEST Afterschool Enrichment Program; Dr. Judy Mantle, Dean of the Sanford College of Education; Chris Graham, President of National Workforce Solutions at National University System, and many more. Panel topics address the following subjects, which are being scaled nationally by the National University System: Social Emotional Learning NUS leadership, experts, and invited researchers and educators discuss ways social emotional learning is transforming society, including how NUS is scaling national partnerships to advance the Sanford Harmony social emotional learning program. These include: Trauma Resilient Afterschool and Summer Learning Programs: A Vision for Transformational Learning Finding a Network of Opportunity in LA Unified A Community Based Approach to Trauma and SEL Demonstrating Social-Emotional Learning in Grades PreK-6 Pupils and Concurrently for Their Teachers Through Impactful University-School Showcase Partnerships Expanding the Vision for SEL: Driving Toward Action Around Research, Policy, and Practice. Healthy Kids Learn Better: Why Social Emotional Learning is Foundational to Children's Health Fundraising for Nonprofits Experts in the nonprofit sector will discuss the core principles of the Cause Selling approach, available through the Sanford Institute of Philanthropy, and featured in the newly-released, second edition publication of the industry-leading book, Cause Selling: The Sanford Way. The Power of Cause Selling: How to Solve the Nonprofit Dilemma, Stand Out from the Competition and Thrive in Any Economy Innovation in Education Education innovators highlight initiatives the National University System is developing to create tech-enhanced, personalized learning opportunities for students, and establishing workforce partnerships designed to reduce the cost and time to complete a degree. They are: Bending the Arc of Human Potential Through Radical Scaled Online Learning Models Precision Education: Delivering A Tailored Educational Experience to Each Student Leveraging Predictive Analytics to Identify, Engage, and Support At-Risk Students Radical Affordability: Strategies and Considerations for Delivering Low Cost Degrees Credentialing Workforce Training Programs: Degrees for Under $5,000 Per Year The ASU + GSV Summit started in 2010 as a collaboration between Arizona State University (ASU) and Global Silicon Valley (GSV). It is now the industry catalyst for elevating dialog and driving action around raising learning and career outcomes through scaled innovation. About National University System/Sanford Programs Established in 2001 to meet the emerging challenges and demands of education in the 21st Century, the National University System is a network of accredited nonprofit education institutions serving higher education and K-12 students that includes National University, Northcentral University, John F. Kennedy University, City University of Seattle, and the Division of Pre-College Programs. The Sanford Education Center at National University System's San Diego headquarters, was established in 2014 through the generous support of philanthropist T. Denny Sanford to provide innovative programs in the nonprofit and PreK-12 sectors. The Center, in coordination with universities around the country, is leading the national expansion of three initiatives: Sanford Harmony, Sanford Inspire and the Sanford Institute of Philanthropy. Learn more at National University System and Sanford Programs. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402006079/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Mobile Logistics Robot Market by Industry Vertical and Function: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2017 - 2025 NEW YORK, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Mobile Logistics Robot Market by Industry Vertical (Healthcare, Factory/Warehouse, Hospitality, and Others) and Function (Pick & Place, Palletizing & DE palletizing, Transportation, and Packaging): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2017 - 2025 Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05757857/?utm_source=PRN Mobile Logistics Robots Market Overview: Robotics technology is a combination of machine tools and computer applications used for various activities that include designing, manufacturing, and others. Use of robotics technology allows consumers to automate processes, increase productivity, enhance quality, and reduce human errors. Integration of warehouse and mobile logistics robot technology ensures accuracy and automation while increasing the warehouse storage space and operation efficiency. For instance, an autonomous mobile robot can adapt to the change in surrounding and its application is expected to increase the efficiency in delivering the merchandise from the shelf to the workstation and can maximize the use of the storage area. North America is estimated to be one of the key markets for mobile logistics robots due to surge in automation in industry verticals such as e-commerce, pharmaceuticals, food & beverage, and automotive. Hence, the warehousing and supply chain has to be efficient to effectively meet the needs of the customers. The long-term outlook for robotics in North America remains very strong as additional companies in all industries become aware of the positive impact robots have on productivity, quality, manufacturing costs, and time to market. Factors such as increase in need for safety among workers in workplace and rise in demand from online retailer are expected to drive the growth of the market in the future. Hoever, high initial acquisition cost and challenges faced while working in untested environments act as major barriers and hamper the market growth. Furthermore, factors such as emergence of industry 4.0 into logistics and warehousing and growth of mobile logistics robots into emerging economies are expected to offer lucrative opportunities for the market globally. The global mobile logistics robot market is segmented into industry vertical, function, and region. Based on industry vertical, the market is classified into healthcare, factory/warehouse, hospitality, and others. Based on function, the market is divided into pick & place, palletizing & depalletizing, transportation, and packaging. Based on region, the market is analyzed across North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and LAMEA. The key players profiled in the report include Aethon Inc., Asic Robotics AG, Clearpath, Fetch Robotics Inc., Kuka AG, Mobile Industrial Robots, Omron Corp Adept Technology Inc., Amazon Robotics, Savioke, and GreyOrange. These key players have adopted strategies, such as product portfolio expansion, mergers & acquisitions, agreements, geographical expansion, and collaborations to enhance their market penetration. Key Benefits for Mobile Logistics Robot Market: This study includes the analytical depiction of the global mobile logistics robots along with the current trends and future estimations to determine the imminent investment pockets. The report presents information regarding the key drivers, restraints, and opportunities. The current market is quantitatively analyzed from 2017 to 2025 to highlight the financial competency of the industry. Porter's five forces analysis illustrates the potency of the buyers and suppliers in the industry. Mobile Logistics Robot Market Segmentation By Industry Vertical Healthcare Factory/Warehouse Hospitality Others By Function Pick & Place Palletizing & Depalletizing Transportation Packaging By Region North America U.S. Canada Mexico Europe UK Germany France Spain Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific China India Japan South Korea Rest of Asia-Pacific LAMEA Latin America Middle East Africa Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05757857/?utm_source=PRN About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mobile-logistics-robot-market-by-industry-vertical-and-function-global-opportunity-analysis-and-industry-forecast-2017---2025-300823176.html SOURCE Reportlinker [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] BCII German Subsidiary Files for Insolvency Bogen Communications International, Inc., (Pink Sheets: BOGN) announced its German subsidiary Speech Design GmbH ("Speech Design") filed an application in Hamburg for preliminary insolvency proceedings on January 10, 2019. The court approved debtor-in-possession management of the business, in conjunction with an insolvency advisor retained by Speech Design and a court appointed preliminary insolvency custodian. On April 1, 2019 formal insolvency proceedings were declared opened by the court. During this phase management, its insolvency advisor, and the insolvency custodian will collectively explore strategic alternatives for the busines and develop a plan of reorganization for approval by creditors and the court. Speech Design is a wholly owned subsidiary of Speech Design International Inc., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bogen Communications International Inc. Please visit Bogen's website at www.bogencommunicationsinternationalinc.com for additional information about the Company. About Bogen Bogen Communications International, Inc., is based in Mahwah, New Jersey. Speech Design is based in Hamburg, Germany. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402006096/en/ [April 02, 2019] BICSI Welcomes Keynote Speakers for 2019 ICT Canada--Presented by BICSI TAMPA, Fla., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- BICSI, the global association leading the advancement of the information and communications technology (ICT) community, is pleased to welcome Wes Johnston and Phill Nosworthy as the Keynote Speakers for 2019 ICT CanadaPresented by BICSI on 8-10 April at the Toronto Congress Centre. Wes Johnston is the CEO of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) with more than 25 years of experience delivering global solutions in ICT. His strategic and financial modeling acumen combined with a solid track record of creating winning sales models and commercializing new products and services have made him an accomplished board member and public speaker. Johnston is driven by a passionate commitment to excellence and by the belief that successful leadership requires the highest levels of integrity, passion, innovation and humility. During his keynote address, he will share his insight on the future of ICT and impart his keen sense of how business, government and associations should work together to drive industry innovation. Phill Nosworthy is an executive advisr, speaker and writer in the subject areas that surround making business and life meaningful. His insights into personal mastery and the future of work have gained him a following of Fortune listed companies such as Apple, ING, Universal Music and the Commonwealth Bank, among others. He has worked in more than 50 cities and 25 countries globally, and is the founder of Switch L+D, a digital-first learning and development practice. In his keynote address Nosworthy will demonstrate how to create impactful experiences that transform teams, imparting techniques and tools that have only ever been reserved for the highest performers of Fortune 500 companies. ICT Canada showcases technical content from industry leaders with five pre-conference seminars, with one featuring an exclusive EduTour of Cisco Canada's headquarters, and 16 conference presentations, including sessions in the Exhibit Hall on the new Tech Innovation Stage. Just a few of the conference presentations include: The Modern Workspace: Wired and Wireless AV Collaboration Intelligent Buildings and PoE Lighting: Unleashing IoT and Opportunity in the ICT Industry for Savings Green Building Codes, Standards, Metrics & Rating/Certification Systems Rise of Machines How IoT Will Transform Our World More information and registration for the 2019 BICSI Winter Conference & Exhibition can be found at bicsi.org/ictcanada. About BICSI BICSI is a professional association supporting advancing the information and communications technology (ICT) community. ICT covers the spectrum of voice, data, electronic safety & security, project management and audio & video technologies. Headquartered in Tampa, Florida, USA, BICSI membership spans nearly 100 countries. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bicsi-welcomes-keynote-speakers-for-2019-ict-canadapresented-by-bicsi-300823419.html SOURCE BICSI [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Robbins Arroyo LLP: Molson Coors Brewing Company (TAP) Misled Shareholders According to Shareholder Complaint Shareholder rights law firm Robbins Arroyo LLP announces that a purchaser of Molson Coors Brewing Company (NYSE: TAP) filed a shareholder derivative complaint against the company's officers and directors for alleged breaches of fiduciary duties and unjust enrichment. Molson Coors manufactures, markets, and sells beer and other malt beverage products in the United States and internationally. View this information on the law firm's Shareholder Rights Blog: https://www.robbinsarroyo.com/synchrony-financial/ http://www.robbinsarroyo.com/molson-coors-brewing-co-apr-19/ Molson Coors Accused of Misrepresenting Its Financial Condition According to the complaint, Molson filed several financial reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission attesting that the documents fairly represented the financial condition of the company and that the company's internal controls were effective. It came as a surprise to investors when Molson revealed on February 12, 2019, that its financial statements for the years ended December 31, 2016 and December 31, 2017, should be restated because the company found a material weakness in its internal control over financial reporting. The company cited errors in the accounting for income taxes related to the deferred tax liabilities for its partnership in MillerCoors, LLC. As a result, Molson would need to increase its deferred tax liabilities and deferred tax expense by $399.1 million, with a corresponding decrease in net income and earnings per share. On this news, Molson's stock fell over 9% to close at $59.19 per share on February 12, 2019, and has yet to recover. Molson Coors Shareholders Have Legal Options Concerned shareholders who would like more information about their rights and potential remedies can contact attorney Leonid Kandinov at (800) 350-6003, [email protected], or via the shareholder information form on the firm's website. Robbins Arroyo LLP is a nationally recognized leader in shareholder rights law. The firm represents individual and institutional investors in shareholder derivative and securities class action lawsuits, and has helped its clients realize more than $1 billion of value for themselves and the companies in which they have invested. Sign up for our FREE portfolio monitoring service, Stock Watch. Attorney Advertising. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402006099/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Novra Adds Broadpeak's Technology to its Next-Gen Video Products for the OTT Market WINNIPEG, April 2, 2019 /CNW/ - At the upcoming NAB show in Las Vegas April 6 to 11, International Datacasting (a Novra Group Company) and technology partner Broadpeak will launch a new version of the Novra S400Pro satellite receiver that includes integrated Broadpeak nanoCDN technology. This new product helps pay TV operators and others implementing ABR (adaptive bitrate) formats, such as HLS or DASH, leveraging their existing network equipment for scalable, low-latency delivery of live streaming video. The combination of the nanoCDN agent and the S400Pro enables delivery of ABR video content via satellite for multiscreen/multidevice playout. Key features include: ABR format video suitable for multiple devices (from big screen to mobile phone) Works with any IP infrastructure at the edge from local Wi-Fi and Ethernet to 4G/5G and cable Uses the latest open standards technologies such as MPEG CMAF for maximum quality and efficiency Novra's S400Pro is a versatile, cost-effective satellite receiver that receives DVB-S/S2 and outputs IP data, including video streams for media players. Novra's family of satellite receivers, with over 80,000 installed globally, are widely used for applications such as weather networks, digital signage, media distribution, IP-TV and many others. The S400Pro is the next-generation in our satellite family and features a Linux OS, dual satellite inputs, dual LAN outputs, a USB port, on-board storage, SNMP and throughput of over 100 Mb/s. A DVB-S2X version will be available later in the year. Broadpeak's nanoCDN makes it possible to deliver adaptive bitrate formats (HLS, DAS) over satellite, and therefore reach tablets, smartphones or other connected devices with a stream that has the quality of DTH broadcast. Adopting adaptive bitrate formats on satellite also allows merging satellite and OTT video offer into one consistent experience. Novra Group CEO Harris Liontas commented, "We are excited to announce this technology partnership with Broadpeak. Novra's S400Pro is our new generation of satellite receivers, developed using our extensive application and domain knowledge and unparalleled ingenuity to create a platform for a family of products that are easily adaptable to diverse and changing customer requirements. Combining this with the efficient and flexible video delivery enabled by Broadpeak's nanoCDN results in a unique product to meet the dynamic requirements of our growing video customer base. The industry is facing big challenges as the way people access video continues to evolve at a rapid pace. Our growing suite of video solutions help our customers turn those big challenges into big opportunities." "We are delighted to partner with Novra to enable the delivery of adaptive bitrate format via satellite. Both products combine perfectly to offer satellite operators the possibility of addressing mobile devices in addition to TVs" said Jacques Le Mancq, CEO of Broadpeak. The S400Pro and nanoCDN will be on display at the National Association of Broadcasters NAB show in Las Vegas, April 6-11. International Datacasting/Novra Group will be in South Hall, booth SU3621, Broadpeak in Booth SU9221. About Novra Technologies Inc.: Novra (TSX-V: NVI) is an international technology provider of products, systems and services for the distribution of multimedia broadband content. The Novra Group of companies includes Novra, International Datacasting Corporation, and Wegener Corporation. The companies in the group are known for a strong focus on applications including: broadcast video and radio, digital cinema, digital signage, and highly reliable data communications. For more information visit: www.novragroup.com About Broadpeak: Broadpeak designs and manufactures video delivery components for Content Providers and Network Service Providers deploying IPTV, Cable, Satellite, OTT and mobile services. Its portfolio of solutions and technologies powers the delivery of movies, television programming and other content over managed networks and the internet for viewing on any type of device. The company's systems and services help operators increase market share and improve subscriber loyalty with superior quality of experience. Broadpeak supports all of its customers worldwide, from simple installations to large delivery systems reaching capacities of several million of simultaneous streams. Broadpeak is headquartered in Cesson-Sevigne, France. For more information visit: https://.broadpeak.tv SOURCE Novra Technologies Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 02, 2019] Softomotive announces Guy Berruyer, former CEO of Sage Group, as Chairman Softomotive, a leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), has announced the appointment of Guy Berruyer as Chairman of the board. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005746/en/ Guy Berruyer, photo credit Getty Images Founded in 2005, Softomotive has been a pioneer in the RPA marketplace and now has more than 8,000 customers worldwide. Last September, it announced its Series A financing round of $25 million, to help build on its strong and growing position. Mr Berruyer is the former Chief Executive of Sage Group, the accounting software firm, and successfully led the company to a subscription software model. He brings his experience not only as a former FTSE-100 CEO but also as Chairman of software company Linaro, Director at Berger Levrault and Non Executive Director at Meggitt PLC. He is also a senior advisor at Warburg Pincus (News - Alert) LLC and former council member at the University of Southampton. "The RPA market is really a new frontier of innovation and growth opportunity. t's a very exciting industry," said Mr Berruyer. He added that he was impressed by co-founders Marios Stavropoulos, Softomotive's CEO, and Argyris Kaninis, COO. Mr Berruyer said: "Softomotive is transforming extremely fast and part of my role as Chairman is to act as a mentor, so I'm looking forward to sharing my experience." Mr Stavropoulos said: "The traditional approach to RPA is not the whole story and we add to the mix by providing a bottom-up approach which we call a People1st approach to RPA. This is a totally different way to deploy RPA by putting the power in the hands of the end user." Mr Kaninis added: "Softomotive has doubled its headcount over the last 12 months and we are looking to double it again in the coming year as we continue to invest in our products. Our global HQ remains in London but we have deepened our presence in the US with our New York HQ, at One World Trade Center, while continuing to develop our presence in Greece and India. We are also looking closely at opening offices in Continental Europe and APAC. Mr Stavropoulos said: "We are very much looking forward to working with Guy. This is an exciting time for us and he brings a lot of experience that we will be able to benefit from." About Softomotive Softomotive is one of the leading worldwide providers of Robotic Process Automation solutions, trusted by more than 8,000 companies worldwide. Both attended and unattended RPA are delivered through powerful, robust RPA technology from desktop installation to server based software which is quick to deploy, easy to use and provides best value for money. WinAutomation is the world's best Robotic desktop automation (RDA) tool and provides a powerful, robust and easy to use Windows based platform for building software robots. ProcessRobot is a leading enterprise RPA platform, including enterprise grade security and controls, with links to best-of-breed AI technologies. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190402005746/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] The Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus has such an immersive 6.8-inch display that you'll sometimes forget you're not watching TV. And the back of the Galaxy Note 10 Plus is just as captivating as the front, especially if you opt for the Aura Glow color. Once you look past the eye candy, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus (starting at $1,099/999) is easily one of the best Android phones. It delivers strong performance, a host of new S Pen tricks including Air gestures and above-average battery life. I also like the fast charging and pro-level video effects. However, the cameras could be better. As I discovered during my Galaxy Note 10 Plus review, it's a great phone for those who prefer larger displays. The newer Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is a better bet for power users, because it offers a smoother 120Hz display, faster processor, a bunch of S Pen upgrades and a more powerful 50x zoom camera. But the Note 10 Plus is worth considering if you want something more affordable. Galaxy Note 10 Plus Cheat Sheet (Image credit: Future) The Samsung Galaxy Note 10s mammoth 6.8-inch AMOLED display is one of the best weve ever seen and tested. I love the Aura Glow color and the way it changes color in the light, but not the fingerprint smudges. The huge 4,300 mAh battery allowed the Note 10 Plus to last an average of 10 hours and 47 minutes on our web surfing battery test, which is better than average. The included 25W charger juices the phone pretty fast, as the battery reached 65% in 30 minutes and 33% in 15 minutes. The new S Pen Air gestures are fun but can be finicky. While the Note 10 Plus' cameras perform well in low light, it's not the best. The lack of a headphone jack is a bummer, though Samsung kept the microSD card slot. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Price and availability Galaxy Note 10 Plus (left) and Note 10 (right) (Image credit: Tom's Guide) The Galaxy Note 10 Plus costs $1,099 for the 256GB version (999 / AU$1,699). You can also opt for a model with 512GB of storage for $1,199. But you should definitely check out our roundup of the best Galaxy Note 10 deals to get the lowest price. We routinely see Galaxy Note 10 sales that knock the price down to $949 or lower with activation. All of the major U.S. wireless carriers are selling the Galaxy Note 10 Plus, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. Samsung also offers trade-in deals for those who order their device through Samsung.com. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Tech specs Galaxy Note 10 Plus Price $1,099/999 Display 6.8-inch Dynamic AMOLED (3040x1440) CPU Snapdragon 855 (US); Exynos 9825 (WW) RAM 12GB Storage 256GB, 512GB microSD Slot? Yes Rear cameras 16-MP ultra-wide (/2.2); 12-MP wide angle (/1.5-f/2.4); 12-MP telephoto (/2.1); time-of-flight VGA Front cameras 10-MP (/2.2) Battery 4,300 mAh Battery Life 10:47 Charging 25W; 45W optional OS Android 9 Pie with Samsung OneUI Colors Aura Glow, Aura White, Aura Black, Aura Blue Size 6.4 x 3.0 x .31 inches Weight 6.9 ounces Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Design I have to give credit to Samsung. It has managed to cram a 6.8-inch display into a design that's both thinner and lighter than the Galaxy Note 9, which had a 6.4-inch display. This is partly because the Galaxy Note 10 has slimmer bezels, thanks to its Infinity-O display with a cutout for the front camera in the top center portion of the screen. (Image credit: Future) Samsung also removed the headphone jack, which at this point feels more inevitable than controversial. It also allows the Galaxy Note 10 Plus to pack a bigger battery. The good news is that Samsung bundles AKG headphones in the box that use USB-C. Make no mistake, the Note 10 Plus looks and feels like a phablet, especially compared with the regular Note 10 and its 6.3-inch screen. This is definitely a two-handed device, but it's a sleek one. If you like your phone to be flashy, I would pick up the Aura Glow version of the Galaxy Note 10 Plus. The iridescent silver design changes colors based on how the light hits the back of the phone. The only issue is that the Aura Glow model picks up fingerprints quickly; I found myself wiping the back of the phone on my shirts and pants to keep the smudges at bay. A close second for me is the Aura Blue in terms of fashion, but you can also get more traditional Aura Black and Aura White. I do have one other nitpick. While I'm glad Samsung ditched the dedicated Bixby button found on previous models, I wish the volume controls and power button were on the right side instead of the left. After all, most people are right-handed. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Display Short of a foldable phone , you won't find a larger screen on an Android phone than the 6.8-inch AMOLED panel on the Galaxy Note 10 Plus. And it is a sight to behold, with the same rich colors and wide viewing angles we've come to expect from Samsung. The screen has the same Quad HD+ resolution as before, but it's certified for HDR10+, compared withHDR10 for the Note 9. When watching the trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, I could make out fine wisps of hair on Rey's head, and Kylo Ren's firey red lightsaber crackled and popped off the screen as he drove it into his enemies. (Image credit: Future) The center cutout or punch hole at the top center of the Galaxy Note 10's screen isn't as offensive as the cutout on the Galaxy S10 Plus. That's because this has a single front camera, compared with two on the S10 Plus that are located on the right side. On our lab tests, the Note 10 Plus' screen turned in some of the best performance numbers we've seen. It hit 686 nits of brightness, which beats the OnePlus 7 Pro (513 nits), iPhone XS Max (606 nits) and Galaxy S10 Plus (625 nits). The OLED panel on the Note 10 Plus hit 212% of the color gamut in Vivid Mode and 124.6% in Natural mode, compared to 123% to the iPhone XS Max and 180% for the OnePlus 7 Pro. The Galaxy S10 Plus wasn't as colorful in Vivid mode (200%) and a slightly higher 136.5% in Natural mode. The one letdown with this screen is that it doesn't offer a refresh rate of 90Hz as some had rumored, which offers smoother performance in phones like the OnePlus 7 Pro . This would have been a welcome upgrade for folks stepping up from the Note 10 to the Note 10 Plus. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Fingerprint security The Galaxy Note 10 has an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, similar to the Galaxy S10. The sensor works pretty well overall, but users discovered that both the sensors on the S10 and Note 10 could be fooled using a silicon screen protector. A subsequent software update from Samsung reportedly fixes this issue. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: S Pen The S Pen has learned some new tricks with the Galaxy Note 10, but I'm not yet sold on how useful they are. The handwriting-to-text feature is designed to let you convert your scribbles and import them, such as into Microsoft Word docs. The functionality generally worked during my brief hands-on time, but the phone sometimes missed a letter. More important, it just didn't feel instant. (Image credit: Future) I like that you can just double tap on words in the Notes app and then tap the convert button that appears. However, I didn't see a way to select all handwritten notes within a note at once, and if you have a longer note the process of double tapping a selection and then dragging the box to enlarge it seems like too much work. If you like the idea of using the S Pen as a pseudo-magic wand, there's Air Actions. This S Pen feature lets you do things like change modes in the camera app by waving the stylus from side to side while pressing the button, or zooming in on a subject by drawing a small circle in the air. I tried the gestures and not all of them worked consistently well. Changing camera modes was easy, as was going from the front to back camera (you just go up and down with the S Pen). However, zooming in and out proved tricky; sometimes I zoomed in and out without a problem, but sometimes I accidentally took a bunch of photos while trying to zoom out. With AR Doodle, Galaxy Note 10 users can draw right on top of people in the camera view, and whatever you draw will follow that person as they move around the frame. It could be fun at parties. At first I thought AR Doodle on the #GalaxyNote10 was pointless. But then I gave it someone who can draw.... thanks @katedylankozuch Full review coming on @tomsguide pic.twitter.com/jHK9GBV9rWAugust 16, 2019 See more I didn't find much use for AR Doodle at first because I'm simply not a very good drawer, but once I put it in the hand of staff writer Kate Kozuch, I could see the potential. She drew an eye patch on fellow writer Adam Ismail, and then added a little parrot on his shoulder. She said she really likes the feature, even though I noticed that the eye patch came away from Adam's face as he turned. Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Cameras With its four camera sensors, the Galaxy Note 10 Plus is definitely an upgrade over the Galaxy Note 9's two cameras. The back of the Note 10 Plus houses a wide-angle camera and telephoto lens like its predecessor, but adds an ultrawide shooter to fit in more of the frame and a depth sensor to achieve more convincing bokeh effects when shooting portraits. Check out the photo gallery below and side-by-side comparisons versus top cameras phones below that to see how the Note 10 Plus' cameras stack up. Image 1 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 2 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 3 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 4 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 5 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 6 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 7 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 8 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 9 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 10 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 11 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 12 of 13 (Image credit: Future) Image 13 of 13 (Image credit: Future) The Note 10 Plus offers Live Focus effects when shooting portraits, similar to the Galaxy S10 Plus. I like the Big Circle and Color Point effects especially, though the bokeh effect looked a bit messy. Big Circle looks good at first glance but blurred out Adam Ismail's hair. Color Point puts the subject in color and the background in black and white, which I could see myself using more often. Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: Future) Image 2 of 3 (Image credit: Future) Image 3 of 3 (Image credit: Future) In our side-by-side shots with the Galaxy Note 10 Plus and Google Pixel 3 and Huawei P30 Pro, the Note 10 Plus held its own but didn't surpass the competition. However, the Note 10 Plus' Night mode did impress. As you can see from this photo taken in near darkness, the Night mode on the Galaxy Note 10 Plus performs quite well. With Night mode turned on, the gloves on the right become a lot more visible, as does the multi-tool in the foreground and the cube on the left. I then compared the Galaxy Note 10 Plus in Night mode against the Pixel 3 XL's camera with Night Sight turned on. Google's phone has an edge, as it delivered a brighter shot with slightly more vivid colors. In this low-light test on a city street, the Galaxy Note 10 Plus snapped a remarkably bright photo with Night mode engaged; you can make out the buildings and cars clearly. However, some areas of the shot look a little more blown out than in the Pixel 3 XL's shot, especially the lights on the left side. And the tan in the Cadillac's roof on the right looks a little more crisp on the Pixel 3 XL. In this shot of a bar in Grand Central station, the Galaxy Note 10 produces a brighter and warmer-looking photo that Id rather share, but the Pixel 3s image features more realistic colors. This round is really no contest. The Galaxy Note 10 Plus really struggles against the Pixel 3 in capturing a portrait of me inside the New York Public Library. The light above me nearly blows out the scene. My teenage daughter called the photo "garbage." Yikes. The Pixel 3's bokeh effect is almost too aggressive but overall it's the superior shot. Once again the Galaxy Note 10 Plus renders a warm-looking photo in this shot of flowers, and the exposure looks pleasant. Still, Id give the nod to the Pixel 3 in this round, as the details in the petals and veins are much more distinct. Turning our attention to cupcakes, the Galaxy Note 10 Plus delivers more details in the shot from front to back. Check out the chocolate one in the background. However, the Huawei P30 Pro gets the color of the pink frosting right on the cupcake in the foreground, and the white-and-yellow flower looks better on the Huawei pic. The Note 10 Plus' shot just looks less realistic. This photo taken outside the New York Public Library provides an interesting contrast between the Galaxy Note 10 Plus and Huawei P30 Pro. I like both shots for different reasons. The Notes pic is more vibrant, especially the green in the tree off to the right; its almost too bright overall, though, as the Huawei does a better job retaining the shadows. Check out the detail in the columns and in the lion statue. Since we tested the Note 10 Plus' cameras, Samsung released its Galaxy S20 lineup, which features much more substantive camera improvements, especially on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. However, some of those capabilities are coming to the Note 10 Plus by way of a software update. Note 10 Plus owners will be able to take advantage of Single Take, in which multiple shots are captured simultaneously from the phone's different cameras, as well as improvements to Hyperlapse that will allow you to capture time-lapse footage in low-light. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Video Samsung says the Note 10 Plus now offers pro-grade video. For example, the phone offers Live Focus video effects, so you can blur out the background or change the background to black and white while the subject is in color. This worked well in my testing; my colleague Rami jumped off some stairs with the Live Focus on and the background of plants and passersby was indeed blurred. I also tried Live Focus on two other colleagues, Adam and Kate, as they walked down a pathway in Bryant Park. The Note 10 Plus did a remarkable job blurring out plants and other people but at times Kate looked a little blurry, too. Still, the whole clip looks pretty compelling and kind of reminds me of a soap opera. I was also impressed with the improved Super Steady mode in the camera. Once you press the little wavy hand icon towards the top of the screen and start recording, the camera can minimize any camera shake. I tested this out by jogging up stairs with the Galaxy Note 10 Plus in one hand and the iPhone XS Max in the other hand. As you can see from the results, the Note 10 Plus' footage looks much smoother, while the iPhone XS Max's video looks a bit shaky. There's also a Zoom-In Mic feature that amplifies the audio in the frame. This feature didn't impress me that much. That's because as I zoomed in on two subject, their words got louder but so did the ambient noise of cars passing by. (Image credit: Future) Samsung backs this all up with an improved video-editing app that's optimized for the S Pen. I appreciated how easy it was to drag the slider tool and trim clips with the pen, and you can choose from multiple effects to spruce up your footage. Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Front camera As for the front 10-MP camera, I didn't love the selfie the Note 10 Plus took of me outside on an overcast day. My skin looks a little washed out, as does the rest of the photo. I do like there's a Night mode for the front camera now, which can come in handy at restaurants, bars, concerts and more. (Image credit: Future) Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Specs and performance With its Snapdragon 855 processor, the Galaxy Note 10 should offer comparable performance to the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus, but the addition of UFS 3.0 storage should provide a speed boost. Still, we were hoping that Samsung would have used the newer Snapdragon 855+ chip to achieve higher clock speeds. Geekbench 4 (Multicore) Galaxy Note 10 Plus (12GB RAM) 11,210 OnePlus 7 Pro (12GB) 11,227 iPhone XS Max 11,515 Galaxy S10 Plus (8GB) 10,732 The Note 10 Plus should have plenty of memory for multitasking, as it offers 12GB of RAM standard, compared with 8GB for the regular Note 10. And you get 256GB of storage standard with the option of upgrading to a 512GB model. Unlike the Note 10, the Note 10 Plus includes a microSD card slot for expansion. In everyday use, the Note 10 Plus is a swift performer. In fact, it loaded apps like Chrome, Twitter and Facebook slightly faster than the iPhone XS Max. This phablet also ably handled long play sessions in PUBG Mobile. It delivered console-like detail without any stuttering even at the highest setting, and the phone remained relatively cool. On Geekbench 4, which measures overall performance, the Galaxy Note 10 Plus turned in a very good score of 11,210, which is comparable to the OnePlus 7 Pro (11,227) but lower than the iPhone XS Max (11,515). The Note 10 Plus beats the Galaxy S10 Plus (10,732), which doesn't benefit from UFS 3.0 storage. The Galaxy Note 10 Plus turned in a fantastic score on the 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme (OpenGL ES 3.1) graphics test. It notched 5,781, which surpasses the Galaxy S10 Plus (5,648) and soundly beats the iPhone XS Max (4,339). Samsung's phone fell behind the iPhone once more on our video editing test, for which we transcode a 4K video to 1080p in the Adobe Rush app. After applying a filter and transition effect and hitting go, the Note 10 Plus took 1 minute and 34 seconds to complete the task. That's good, and a few seconds better than the OnePlus 7 Pro, but the iPhone XS took only 41 seconds. When it comes to gaming performance, the Note 10 Plus has an AI-based Game Booster mode for optimizing performance and power consumption based on the game. And you'll even be able to stream games from your PC to this phone using Samsung's Play GalaxyLink, a P2P streaming service that the company says will be available at launch. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Battery and charging The Galaxy Note 9's battery was the biggest yet in a Galaxy phone at 4,000 mAh, but the Note 10 Plus ups the ante with a 4,300 mAh battery, which is even bigger than the 4,100 mAh pack in the Galaxy S10 Plus. Galaxy Note 10 Plus 10:47 Galaxy S10 5G 10:56 Galaxy S10 Plus 12:35 iPhone XS Max 10:38 OnePlus 7 Pro 9:41 Google Pixel 3 XL 9:30 LG G8 ThinQ 9:29 On the Tom's Guide Battery Life Test, which involves continuous web surfing over 4G LTE (on T-Mobile), the Galaxy Note 10 Plus lasted 11 hours and 46 minutes. That number proved an outlier, as subsequent tests produced results ranging from 10 hours, 15 minutes to more than 10.5 hours. In the end, across four tests, the Note 10 lasted 10 hours, 47 minutes across four tests, beating the average for a smartphone by more than half-an-hour. By comparison, the Galaxy Note 9 had a slightly longer runtime (11 hours and 16 minutes) but the S10 Plus lasted an epic 12:35. The OnePlus 7 Pro lasted just 9:31 on our test, while the iPhone XS Max has a runtime of 10:38. The regular Galaxy Note 10 lasted an average of 9 hours and 25 minutes, so those who want more endurance should opt for the Note 10 Plus. Samsung does sell another phone with a screen size that's nearly identical in the Galaxy S10 5G. That handset packs a 6.7-inch screen and an even bigger 4,500 mAh battery. On our battery test, the S10 5G lasted a good-but-not-great 10:56. However, this was on Verizon's 4G LTE network, which we've found drains phones faster than T-Mobile's network for some reason. (Image credit: Tom's Guide) The Note 10 Plus comes with a 25-watt charger, but there's an even faster 45-watt charger that Samsung sells separately for $50 (it's currently not available in the UK). You may not need the latter, though. The Galaxy Note 10 Plus get to 33% battery capacity in just 15 minutes and 65% in 30 minutes. The OnePlus 7 Pro got to 60% in 30 minutes with its 4,000 mAh battery, while the Huawei P30 Pro reached 70% in the same amount of time on a 4,200 mAh battery. As you'd expect from a Samsung phone, the Galaxy Note 10 Plus supports wireless charging, but this time around it's 15 watts, while the Galaxy S10 supported up to 10 watts. However, the results are disappointing based on our testing. It took 30 minutes of the Galaxy Note 10 to reach just 21 percent using Samsung's $79 wireless charger stand. You can also use reverse wireless charging on the Note 10 Plus, which means you can charge the Galaxy Buds or other phones using the back of Samsung's handset. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: DeX for PC No dock required, the Galaxy Note 10 Plus can easily sync with your PC using a single USB cable. Once connected, you'll be able to drag-and-drop files back and forth and use your laptop's mouse and keyboard to navigate the phone. And with the Link to Windows app, you'll be able to receive notifications and send and receive messages on the desktop. (Image credit: Tom's Guide) I tested out the DeX app out on a MacBook Pro, and I had uneven results. The DeX app found the phone pretty quickly, popping up a desktop atop macOS. And I could easily access photos, make calls and even transfer files from the phone to my Mac. (Image credit: Future) However, I got an error message when I tried to drag and drop files from the computer to the phone. It seems like Samsung still needs to work out some kinks with DeX, at least with the Mac. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: Quick Measure One feature that's exclusive to the Galaxy Note 10 Plus and not available for the Note 10 is Quick Measure, which instantly can give you the dimensions of pretty much any object. (Image credit: Future) It's like an augmented reality tape measure that one-ups the Measure app in iOS, because you get the length, width and depth with a single scan. With the iPhone you have to draw virtual lines on the object before you get a measurement. For example, I pointed the Note 10 Plus at a can and it returned a height of 4.5 inches, a depth of 2.5 inches and a width of 2.5 inches. I verified those numbers using a tape measure and the Note 10 Plus was accurate. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus: 3D Scanner The Galaxy Note 10 Plus does something unique, thanks to its depth sensor on the back. You can scan objects in 3D with relative ease. You just walk around the object and the phone creates a 3D model. Samsung demonstrated this feature during its launch event with a stuffed bear, as you can see in the below tweet. The Galaxy Note 10 doubles as a 3D scanner. Pretty impressive in action. #SamsungEvent #samsunggalaxynote10 #galaxynote10 pic.twitter.com/Jnyr2X7iX0August 7, 2019 See more After the phone is done creating the 3D model, you can embed it into videos and the object can become animated and even mimic dance moves that are on screen. It's a fun demo but I'm not sure how people will use this yet. Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus review: Verdict The Galaxy Note 10 Plus is a fantastic big-screen phone. Although the price is quite steep at $1,099/999, you get one of the best and most immersive displays ever in a phone along with strong performance and long battery life. And while Samsung has not caught up to Google and Apple in photography, the Note 10 Plus is still a very capable camera phone with a compelling Night mode and intriguing video effects. (Image credit: Future) If you really want an S Pen with your phone but don't want to spend as much, the smaller 6.3-inch Galaxy Note 10 should satisfy. It has the same processor and mostly the same cameras (minus the depth sensor on the back) in a more compact design than the Note 10 Plus. But if you want a really big screen, the Galaxy Note 10 Plus is worth the splurge, as it also offers more RAM and microSD expansion, along with longer battery life. Those who want the latest and greatest are better off with the newer Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, which offer better cameras, new S Pen features and other upgrades like wireless DeX mode. Overall, though, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus is an ultra-premium, big-screen phone that you'll be psyched to use. Listen to one of the most beloved elected officials in 3rd District history graciously and humbly accept the accolades of an entire community thanking him for years of selfless dedication. Never a self-promoter, Councilman Reed was always one of the most knowledgeable, conscientious and detail orientated elected officials whodidn't serve as a glorified grocery store clerk for Freedom, Inc. and John Sharp.Checkit: TODAY THE KCMO MURDER COUNT STANDS AT A FIVE-YEAR HIGH 9 shot, 4 killed in violent four days in Kansas City Authorities say nine people were shot and four were killed in a violent four days in Kansas City. Better coverage than most local outlets offers a glimpse of recent carnage on local streets.whilst politicos attempt to make last minute promises to gullible voters. Read more: KANSAS CITY, Mo. - On Tuesday, many Kansas City voters will head to the polls before work, during a lunch break or even on the way home. Port KC is hoping to make voting easier for its employees, while also encouraging them to give back to the community. Kansas City MSM News Hopes To Bombard Low Info Voters Today Election Day: What to know before heading to KCMO polls KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Polling places across Kansas City, Missouri opened at 6 a.m. Tuesday. On the ballot, voters will choose mayoral and city council candidates to advance to June 18's general election. Several school districts have and leadership positions up for vote as well. Kansas City Traffic Update I-49 northbound closed due to incident near Main Street Motorists needing to take I-49 northbound through Grandview should plan on using an alternate route.All northbound lanes of I-49 are closed due to an incident between Main Street and Harry Truman Drive.Debris has also been reported in the roadway.As of 7:45 a.m. traffic was backed up beyond East 155th Street.This story is developing. Local Walker Struck Down Pedestrian dead in I-29 crash near Barry Road A pedestrian is dead after a crash on Interstate 29 just before Barry Road. Golden Ghetto Robbery Update Olathe police search for suspect in aggravated robbery that happened Monday OLATHE, KS (KCTV) - Olathe police are looking for a suspect in an aggravated robbery that took place Monday. Officers responded to an aggravated robbery call around 3 p.m. to the 700 block of South Keeler Street. A suspect with a gun confronted two people on foot in the area. KCMO Needs Info After brothers killed in two different KC murders, sister begs for tips, information KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A metro family is grieving following not one but two murders in less than two years. Both cases remain unsolved, and detectives need more information. Penesha Murrell lost two brothers in 18 months. "With us not being able to get over the first one, it was like just a blow in the face," she said. KCK Murder Aftermath 1 killed in shooting in KCK Monday night, police chief says One person was killed Monday in a shooting near 21st Street and Silver Court, according to Kansas City, Kansas, Police Chief Terry Zeigler.The shooting was reported at 9:22 p.m.No other details were immediately available. KMBC has a news crew on the way to the scene. Refresh this page for updates. Sacrifice In Building Up Downtown Family mourns KC construction worker who died following long fall at downtown work site KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Family and friends are remembering a construction worker who died earlier this week in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. "He loved each and everyone of them and always made sure they knew that," Christina O'Sullivan said, wife of Dakota O'Sullivan. Dakota made sure Christina knew she was loved the day of the accident. Tribute To Gunfire Victime Friends, family remember slain Olathe East student OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - A small memorial now rests near W. 108th Street and Nieman Road in Overland Park. It's where Rowan Padgett and his friends used to spend lots of time. Rowan's friends spent time there Monday remembering their friend. Rowan's family says the young man's life was cut short all because of a gun. ID After Missouri Tragedy Friends identify man, 2-year-old daughter found dead in burning car in Platte County RIDGELY, Mo. -- The Platte County Sheriff's Office and Missouri Fire Marshal continue to investigate after the bodies of a young man and toddler were found Sunday burned inside a car. Authorities were called to the car fire Sunday morning on Highway B, just outside the town of Ridgely. Local Questions Asked Police seeking man and car in connection to shooting death of 16-year-old in Kansas City Kansas City, MO - Police are searching for a man and a vehicle they believe is connected to the shooting death of a 16-year-old.Clinton Holman Jr. was shot to death around 11:30pm Friday near 43rd and Indiana, according to KCPD detectives. Tragic Deadly Crash Today Police investigate after fatal accident on 23rd Street and Blue Ridge Boulevard KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) - Police are investigating a fatal accident where a car struck a bridge embankment. Kansas City police are investigating a single vehicle accident that has left one man dead. It happened at 7 p.m. Monday near the intersection of 23rd Street and Blue Ridge Boulevard. Kansas City Murder Aftermath Man's death Monday morning ruled homicide The death of a man who was discovered dead inside a car Monday morning has been ruled a homicide. Not so long ago, City Hall purchased and shared this iconic Kansas City image and now we use it as a fair use glimpse of this town and some of the news that's worth a click but might not inspire debate . . . An important overview of crime, crashes and memorials from throughout this town . . .Developing . . . Bending to popular demand, BMW has announced it will replace the entirety of its engine lineup with the venerable Toyota 2JZ inline six-cylinder. The announcement follows widespread public resentment over BMWs involvement in the development of the fifth-generation Toyota Supra. From its compact sedans, to its full-size SUVs, all BMWs will now come the legendary Japanese powerplant LISTEN 02:23 Two Jay Zee Engine, No Scheisse When Toyota unveiled the 2020 Supra at the 2019 Detroit Auto Show earlier this year, the public's reaction was mixed. While some applauded the return of the iconic performance nameplate after more than 20 years on the shelf, others felt that the Supras BMW-sourced turbo 3.0-liter engine ruined the whole thing. Nowhere was this sentiment more prevalent than on the Internet, where bold keyboard warriors voiced their disgust on social media and various enthusiast forums. tehy call it a supra but it isnt a supra!!!!!1! posted disgruntled YouTube user CrazeeDriftrSkillz. its just a z4 with toyota bages! no 2jz, and its ugly two!!! As of this writing, the comment had over 1,000 upvotes. In response, BMW has announced it will halt engine production and cancel every one of its engine development programs, and will instead install the Toyota 2JZ across the entirety of its product lineup. Without BMWs support, Toyota is expected to equip the 2020 Supra with the 2JZ going forward. The public has spoken, and BMW has listened, said Harald Kruger, CEO at BMW. BMW has been building engines for more than 100 years, and we spend billions on R&D annually. However, weve now come to realize that what consumers really want is a 30-year-old platform that was featured in a movie once. Looks like well be doing the 2JZ swap for years to come now, Kruger added. We believe this change of course will help us decimate all. Christopher BoostBoy Rawlings, founder and head moderator of the Toyota Supra Appreciation Society, responded to the announcement, telling TopSpeed that he was pleased that BMW has finally seen the light. Im still not gonna buy a fifth-gen Supra, Rawlings explained, but at least I know that BMWs reign of terror has ended. Now I dont have to worry about them ruining the car I love any more than they already have. Further Reading Read our full review on the 2019 BMW Z4. Read our full review on the 2020 Toyota Supra. Jaguar Land Rover has been fighting a lengthy and tedious legal battle against Jiangling Motor Corporation (JMC) from China it initiated when the company launched a model that very closely resembled its Range Rover Evoque. The copycat model is called the Landwind X7, and it has been in production uninterrupted since 2015, but now, a Beijing court has ordered the automaker to stop making the X7. A Big Win for Jaguar Land Rover OVer Jiangling Motor Corportation The first lawsuit against Jiangling was filed by JLR in early 2015, not long after the X7 was first shown to the public at the 2014 Guangzhou Auto Show that took place in November of that year. After the case was quickly dismissed in China at first, neither company gave up and the legal rollercoaster that followed even at one point involved the annulment of both companies exterior design patents. The two companies searched for mutually beneficial ways of solving the matter, even though JLR was on the side of justice, it had to contend with the lack of legal framework within the Chinese judicial system to counteract the creation of copycat products. But over time they started to communicate more, and it is believed that JLR actually had a say in what new design the X7 would adopt after its midlife refresh. And to be fair, the post-facelift X7 looks far less Evoque-like from the front and the rear, although the side profile is still obviously very blatantly copied. So even though JLR was rightfully claiming its design had been copied, Landwind managed to keep the X7 in production for nearly four years at a rate of around 4,000 units per month. Its not hard to understand why Landwind was so protective of its clearly copied X7 - it was able to sell a vehicle that could and can still fool people into believing its an actual Range Rover at a fraction of the price (starting from around $19,000). In China, theres also a huge market for aftermarket parts for these copycat cars that include the logos of the manufacturers the cars are copies of, new grilles, new trim pieces to even better match the copied original. This is certainly what many bought these for and then quickly accessorized them with real Range Rover badges, better imitation grilles, and rim designs. And, you wouldnt be able to spot that one of those is a fake unless it came in really close and you could analyze it. Now, after losing against JLR, JMC will have to compensate the U.K.-based company, although all that money will actually end up in the coffers of Tata Motors, the Indian giant that owns JLR. This triumph for JLR is seen as a landmark victory, and there are still a few blatant copycat models still in production today, so maybe this news will spur other manufacturers affected by the phenomenon to pursue legal action until the matters are resolved. What other copycat models are still in production in China, we hear you say? Well, theres the Changan CS55 that is very similar to the Land Rover Discovery Sport, the Changan CX70 that apes the big seven-seater Discovery, as well as the BAIC BJ80 (Mercedes G-Wagen clone), FAW Besturn X40 (closely resembles a Mazda CX-5,) and an all-electric crossover simply called K-One - it resembles a tall and narrow Mercedes GLA. Further reading Read our full review on the 2020 Land Rover Range Rover Evoque. Source: The Guardian This year, Volkswagen will finally introduce the first model from its much-advertised I.D. family of electric models that are supposed to make us all rethink our lives, ponder on existence as a whole and so on and so forth. To keep the ball rolling and the buzz going, Volkswagen is yet to park the glorious LMP-like I.D. R in a museum and, instead, it will take the 670 horsepower beast all the way to China to compete on a strip of road thats not opened to the public. Volkswagens bespoke electric prototype racer that was the fastest at last years Pikes Peak International Hill Climb event will most likely add another record to its cabinet. Romain Dumas will pilot it in September on the so-called "Road to Heaven" that features 99 bends along 6.83 miles of road, longer than the original Spa-Francorchamps road course. Dumas Will be Back in the 2018 Volkswagen I.D. R for the China Challenge There are purpose-built race cars, and then theres the Volkswagen I.D. R, a car designed from the ground up to show how far Volkswagens got with electric technology on one of the toughest stages in the world: the Race To The Clouds, otherwise known as the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb race. Four-time Pikes Peak overall winner Romain Dumas of France (whos also a WRC champion in the R-GT class, a WEC champion with Porsche and a two-time overall Le Mans 24 Hours winner) was enlisted to drive the I.D. R, and he duly rose to the occasion. Now, the Frenchman has to again tackle a narrow, winding bit of road but, this time, it's not in the mountains of America but on ) Tianmen Mountain, some 932 miles southwest of Beijing, China, The Tianmen Shan Big Gate Road as its known goes all the way up to 3,900 feet, and it features some Stelvio-esque hairpins. The road is only used by buses that take tourist up Tianmen Mountain, so there isnt any current record for Dumas to defend. However, Volkswagen has come up with a way to make the whole thing interesting and make it seem less of a marketing job than it is. How? Well, Volkswagen will let people join in a virtual competition where you can drive on the Road To Heaven yourself and set a lap time in the I.D. R. Then, Dumas will try to beat the fastest time set on the platform but in real life. "The route is one of the most extraordinary and difficult roads in the world another special challenge for the ID. R," said Sven Smeets, Head of Volkswagen Motorsports. "Our goal is to set a new milestone for electric vehicles and, in doing so, to support Volkswagens E-strategy in China, which is really picking up speed this year," he added. Indeed, the road is included on dangerousroads.orgs list and the description there is telling: "The driver should be extra careful during the drive [on the Tianmen Shan Big Gate Road]. Not being overly careful could make it too easy to junk a car, or worse injure and even kill passengers. The scenery looks beautiful, but take your eyes off the road for a second, and youre on the fast way down to the bottom." Its clear that Dumas will ignore at least some of these warnings as he dashes to the At the "natural rock arch that was believed to be the link between the gods and the mortal world." Talking about going fast up Tianmen Mountain, there have been some unofficial record attempts on this dangerous strip of road in the past most recent of which took place last year. In March of 2018, Land Rover brought a Range Rover SVR to Tianmen Mountain and, with Chinese racer Ho Pin Tung behind the wheel, the SVR raced to the top in just 9 minutes and 51 seconds. This was no less than 40 seconds quicker than the previous fastest unofficial run up the road that was recorded in 2016 by Italian Fabio Barone in a supposedly modified Ferrari 458 Italia. The SVR has five horsepower more than Ferraris mid-engined, V-8 supercar in stock trim and also boasts with 516 pound-feet of torque. It has the ability to hit 60 mph in just 4.3 seconds but this shouldnt worry Dumas as the I.D. R with its two electric motors puts out almost 100 horsepower more and, since the car only weighs 2,425 pounds (the Range tips the scales at 4,727 pounds), Dumas can go from naught to 60 mph in just 2.2 seconds. Then there's the fact that the I.D. R runs on racing slicks and benefits from an absurd high-downforce package that puts to shame even some Le Mans prototypes. Why We Love the I.D. R In a world thats shifting towards electric cars, us car guys need to be reassured that this technology can also be channeled to make cars that are fun and engaging to drive, not only economical commuters with as much character as a pencil sharpener. Luckily, were seeing more and more EV supercars emerge such as the NIO EP9, the Rimac C_Two or the Pininfarina Battista to name just a few. But its also cool to see this technology pierce into multiple branches of motorsport. Were already witnessing the constant growth of Formula E that has now spawned a support series in the form of the Jaguar I-Pace e-Trophy but, in my view, no electric car - street-bound or racing-oriented - is as cool as Volkswagens I.D. R. In a constant gallop to try and clean up their act after the Dieselgate scandal, the suits in Wolfsburg greenlighted an amazing car that is part Le Mans racer, part Batmobile with larger-than-large wings all around. The I.D. R is the fun vehicle for all the much more mundane I.D. models that are just around the corner, and its great to see it woosh to life (roar doesnt quite fit here, right?) again come September. For those living under a rock, the I.D. R drew first blood last year when it won the Pikes Peak Hillclimb time attack event in June. Dumas set a record-breaking time of 7:57.148 over the 12.42-mile course, becoming the first car (gas-powered or otherwise) to dip below eight minutes. Sebastien Loebs 8:13.878 seconds run aboard a souped-up Peugeot 208 from 2013 was obliterated by 15 seconds in the process and the previous EV record, set by Rhys Millen with an 8:57.118 run, was almost bettered by a full minute. Being the racer that he is, Dumas wasnt all that ecstatic after the run saying that " Im happy with this, but we could have gone quicker if that middle sector had been dry." Of course, any one of us wouldve been over the moon with achieving this feat, especially since the Pikes Peak Hillclimb is the most famous in the world and one of the hardest (even if its no longer a dirt stage) because were talking about 156 corners and a 4,720 vertical-foot climb as weve explained before. Volkswagen built the I.D. R in 250 days around a steel and aluminum skeleton that was covered by carbon fiber body parts. The thing accelerates quicker to 60 mph than an F1 car and given all the resources poured into the project, Volkswagen brought the I.D. R to the Goodwood Festival of Speed too. There, on Lord Marchs driveway, Dumas [broke the record for electric cars-art181847] with a time of 43.86 seconds, 3.43 seconds quicker than the previous EV record and little over two seconds off the all-time record achieved by Nick Heidfeld in the V-10 McLaren-Mercedes MP4/13 F1 car. Up next, Volkswagen suggested that its bucket list includes the EV record on the Nurburgring-Nordschleife. In 2018, another company within the VAG Group, Porsche, bettered its own all-time lap record around the Green Hell when Le Mans winner Timo Bernhard drove the Porsche 919 Tribute lapped the 12.94-mile circuit in 5:19.55 seconds. As for the EVs, the fastest there was the NIO EP9 which completed a lap in just 6:45.900 seconds in 2017. Volkswagen rented the track last year and, at the time, an insider was telling Autocar that "weve already seen lap times below 5min 30sec in the simulator". That had me think of a potential war over the overall Nurburgring lap record that could be ignited between Volkswagen and Porsche if, in the process of beating the EV lap record, the I.D. R will inadvertently become the fastest car ever around the fabled track in the Eiffel Mountains. What we know so far is that no record was set last year and Volkswagen could be back at the Nurburgring in September, after setting the record on Chinas epic twisty road. Further reading Read our full review on the 2018 Volkswagen I.D. R Pikes Peak. Volkswagen I.D. R Pikes Peak Breaks Electric Record at Goodwood FOS Romain Dumas and the Volkswagen I.D. R Pikes Peak Racer Shatter the Pikes Peak Time Attack Record Pikes Peak, birthplace of the real EV revolution 2019 Nio EP9 The worlds fastest electric car! Read our full review on the 2019 NIO EP9 Culture / Celebrities Mar 30, 2019 | By Jonathan Ho George Clooney is boycotting hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei. This boycott of conscience from the Hollywood star came just days after the Sultan of the small but geopolitically strategic oil-rich nation (ranked 41 out of 99 oil producing nations) announced new laws making homosexual acts and adultery punishable by death. Originally a British colony, Brunei became the first Southeast Asian nation to officially become an Islamic state by adopting Sharia law as the foundation of its legal system in 2014 to widespread condemnation. With a population of less than half a million, other draconian laws include amputation of the limbs as punishment for theft and robbery. In the onslaught of news where we see the world backsliding into authoritarianism this stands alone, George Clooney in an op-ed for Deadline on why hes boycotting Brunei Sultans hotels George Clooney is Boycotting the Sultan of Bruneis Hotels over severe new anti-LGBT and adultery laws Starting April 3rd, anyone found guilty of engaging in homosexual acts or cheating on their spouse could be flogged or sentenced to death by stoning. Clooney called on citizens of the world who oppose these infringements of human rights and civil liberties to boycott hotels owned by the Brunei Investment Agency. Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah owns the Brunei Investment Agency which holds some of the worlds most prestigious hotels under its management. Every single time we stay at or take meetings at or dine at any of these nine hotels we are putting money directly into the pockets of men who choose to stone and whip to death their own citizens, George Clooney on the boycott for Deadline George Clooney joins other Hollywood celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen Fry, and prominent entrepreneur Virgins Richard Branson, who have all been boycotting the Sultan Bolkiahs properties over Bruneis anti-gay laws since 2014. That said, socio-political commentators like host of Real Time Bill Maher and CNN host S.E. Cupp have tarred Clooneys position as hypocritical, pointing to the fact that Hollywood continues to do business with other Islamic states like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Maher felt that the Oscar winners virtue signalling ultimately wont make an impact, going so far as to add that if Clooney really wanted to make his protest felt, he should get people to stop using gas and stop driving cars. Nevertheless, Clooney is aware that his boycott, largely symbolic might be nothing more than pyrrhic, writing in his Deadline column that, Brunei is a Monarchy and certainly any boycott would have little effect on changing these laws. But are we really going to help pay for these human rights violations? Despite Clooneys awareness of the futility of his own boycott of the Sultan Bolkiahs properties like the Dorchester Collection, the Beverly Hills and Hotel Bel-Air, hes pushing ahead with actress Jamie Lee Curtis joining him. The first #StopTheSultan boycott and protest in 2014 led by California politicians, and LGBTQ activists reportedly cost the Sultan of Brunei $2 million in revenue, with cancellations at The Beverly Hills Hotel accounting for almost all of the dropoff. according to NYT. Unfortunately, by 2018, the #StopTheSultan movement had all but petered out, with celebrities and socialites returning to the premier Beverly Hills venue. The Sultan and the Royal family is exempted from Sharia law. A 60 Minutes expose revealed that the $30 billon net worth monarch is himself no paragon of virtue with a Vanity Fair profile calling the Sultan and his brother Prince Jefri companions in hedonism for their penchant for the debauched lifestyle and love of women. In the country, its citizens are largely apathetic with the harsh laws thanks to state funded welfare like free health and education and with most in employment of the state, nary a negative sentiment among them. List of the Sultan of Bruneis Hotels Tourexpi, turizm haberleri, Reiseburos, tourism news, noticias de turismo, Tourismus Nachrichten, , travel tourism news, international tourism news, Urlaub, urlaub in der turkei, , holidays in Turkey, , global tourism news, dunya turizm, dunya turizm haberleri, Seyahat Acentas, This site is best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+, at a minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768. Temperatures in January dropped to -24F and an air source heat pump kept it comfy and cozy. There was a "polar vortex" even in Chicago at the end of January, where the outdoor temperatures sank to -24F (-31C) at night and got all the way up to -18F in the daytime. For many people, this would be a problem, but as the Mayor of Chicago said once, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." Mike Conners certainly didn't; he is the builder of theEllis Passivhaus, a renovation and reconstruction built to the EnerPHit (renovation) standard and he wanted to see how well his house did. He writes: The 2019 polar vortex produced -24 F lows that averaged approximately -17 F for 34 consecutive hours. Ellis Passivhaus maintained an interior temperature of > 71 F throughout, far above the required 68 F comfort standard. The ERV (energy recovery ventilator) continuously delivered fresh filtered air while retaining > 84% of the energy in the extract air stream. Despite the heating systems 140 kW per hour rated capacity (48K BTUs), actual use averaged 7,5 kWh per hour (< 26K BTUs) during the 48 hour event or ~ 90% less than comparable Chicago stock all else equal. All systems performed flawlessly. Ellis Passivhaus And this is while using a Mitsubishi air source heat pump, when everyone has been saying for years that heat pumps are not efficient at such low temperatures and can't cope. Conners notes that "occupancy of Chicagos buildings leads to 73% of Chicagos total annual C02 emissions." Most of that is from burning natural gas for heat. Going Passivhaus reduces the energy consumption by 90 percent, and is useful in events that last longer than the vortex, which caused a spike in the price of electricity: The polar vortex price spike could have been longer and more pronounced and event driven spikes can turn into secular shifts. For instance, a natural disaster, plant failure or regulatory event like a carbon tax might induce a secular price shift. Thats why its always beneficial to need as little energy from the grid as possible. This is the main reason I am such a fan of Passivhaus. You put your money into the stuff that just sits there and works, the Passive stuff like windows, insulation and careful design and construction. Then the active stuff, like the heating system, gets smaller and cheaper and becomes almost superfluous. Conners noted that a couple of cheap space heaters could have done the job, had the heat pump not worked. Another thing I have come to admire about Passivhaus is the air quality. I used to go on about natural ventilation, but these days you wonder about opening a window. According to the American Lung Association, Chicago gets an F grade for pollution. A major active piece of hardware in a Passive House is the Energy or Heat Recovery Ventilator, required to provide continuous balanced mechanical ventilation with energy recovery. Ellis Passivhaus uses a Zehnder ERV that removes 90% of particulate matter greater the 1.0 microns and 75% that is < 1.0 microns. It runs 24/7 at 84% efficiency and uses < 2 kWh per day of electricity. Steve Mann of Passive House Buildings noted that there were other considerations besides the usual Passivhaus requirements, involving what I call Upfront Carbon Emissions. For instance, I didn't know this: In addition to pursuing Passive House certification, the project team paid equal attention to the carbon footprint and greenhouse gas production of the project. It sourced local materials whenever possible. For instance, realizing that most hardwood floor products are made from North American hardwoods that are shipped to China for finishing and then shipped back to the United States, the team located an urban-forest mill that sources felled hardwood trees from local park districts and arborists. The mill supplied rough-sawn white oak that was finished into tongue-and-groove hardwood flooring. Ellis Passivhaus You don't give anything up on the appearance and the amenities for Passivhaus, this house has every comfort. The Vortex analysis is just the latest addition to an extraordinary website that covers the design and construction of the Ellis Passivhaus. Conners is president of Kenwood Construction, but also is Passivhaus certified as a tradesperson and design consultant. Credit also to architects Richard Kasemsarn, Consultant ZeroEnergy Design, and Certifier Andrew Peel. A lot of people try and document their Passivhaus- building experiences; some, like Chie Kawahara, even write books about it. But I have never seen a job documented like this. Every calculation, every detail, every catalog cutting of every piece of equipment, this is a gold mine. Ellis Passivhaus The house is for sale and is pitched as being "planned, optimized and verified. Wellness, sustainability, resiliency and maximum energy efficiency converge in this meticulous reconstruction." And, as is found in most Passivhaus designs, it's "comfy, cozy and quiet!" Come in and get lost atEllis Passivhaus. Pope v. Trump The pope has just warned President Trump about the dangers and evils of a wall dividing our country and Mexico. Doesnt the Catholic Church have enough fires to put out with clergy sexual abuse? How many Syrian refugees did the Vatican take in? Heres a tip for the pope, stay in Rome. Remember separation of church and state. Amen. A reader Funny how Trump supporters yell about separation of church and state when the religious leader is critical of Trump. But its okay for Christian leaders to be involved or advise when they support conservative/Trumpian agenda? I agree that the separation is important, but you cant be selective about it. Ed Note Private public records I see that David Hendersons expunged records were made public. It just shows that Hamilton mayor, you know, and her crew are in bed with the Hamilton Police Department. A reader Funny how an administration that complains about releasing government documents and wants to heavily redact the ones that are released is supportive and actively pushing the story that has a barely redacted copy of an expunged police report. Dont get me wrong, Im supportive of putting the story out there if anyone running for office has a history like this, it should be discussed openly and questioned and explained so that the voters know all of the information before they vote. But there is some hypocrisy there to say that publishing this report is fine, but fighting against the release of other public documents. Ed Note Cars / Yachts The second Yacht Style issue of 2019 includes features on Asias yacht builders and Indonesias luxury charter options ahead of the regions show season Mar 28, 2019 | By Yacht Style Yacht Style 46 has been tagged as The Asia Issue due in large to this time of year being Asias shows season. The worlds leading builders have planned long in advance to get new yachts out from Europe, while local dealers have worked hard to put the regional boat shows, from Singapore to Shanghai, in their schedule for recent arrivals or arranged to move boats within Asia. Other reasons Yacht Style 46 has been tagged as The Asia Issue include a feature on some of the continents top luxury yacht builders. Shipyards in China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and beyond have long proven build quality here can be the equal of anywhere, while many are prioritising innovation and new technologies. The Asia theme continues as Yacht Style introduces a new Owner series, starting with a profile of Cynthia Wong, who followed an introduction to wakeboarding by taking up windsurfing, then bought a Hobie before graduating to skippering and owning sailing yachts. Its an inspiring tale and there are more to come in this profile series. Most of the Review articles feature yachts based in Asia and otherwise theyve cruised here or will arrive very soon. As well as a profile of the Amels 242 Plvs Vltra, our cover story, there are exclusive yacht reviews of the first-ever Sanlorenzo SX76 that recently arrived in Hong Kong, the second Prestige 520 into Asia, the new Beneteau Oceanis 46.1 reviewed in Sydney, and the China-built Aquila 36, which will be at the Singapore Yacht Show. Travel features throw the spotlight on Indonesia with a focus on the latest luxury charter phinisi, Prana, and a profile on the West Papua region, while theres even an intriguing slice of history on the Empress of China, which sailed from New York to Guangzhou in 1784 and kick-started US-China trade. Exciting global launches include the latest 100m-plus gigayachts from Benetti and the Pershing 140, which is headed for Asia later this year and is one of a series of Ferretti Group landmarks in 2019. Yacht Style #47 will hit the bookstands in May and include exclusive reviews of new yachts absolutely fresh into Asia, some of which only had their world premiere earlier this year. We continue our Owner series with an experienced yacht owner based in Malaysia, and interview industry heavyweights while touring boat shows in Asia. We hope you continue to enjoy reading Yacht Style in print or digital. And make sure you follow us on our Instagram account (yacht.style), which has 43,000 followers and counting monicakchauhan@gmail.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 2 The Supreme Court on Tuesday quashed an RBI circular directing banks to initiate insolvency proceedings against companies having bad debts of Rs 2,000 crore or above within 180 days, failing which the corporate debtor would have to be taken to National Company Law Tribunal for insolvency proceedings. We have declared the RBI circular ultra vires, said a Bench headed by Justice Rohinton F Nariman said. The circular mandated that banks will have to disclose defaults even if the interest repayment is overdue by just one day, and will have to put a resolution plan in place within 180 days. However, during the pendency of the matter, the top court had on September 11 last year asked banks to maintain status quo and not to initiate insolvency proceedings against loan defaulting companies. The verdict, which will have a bearing on bad loans running into lakhs of crores of rupees, came on a batch of petitions by companies from various industries power, fertiliser and sugar challenging February 12, 2018 circular issued by the central bank. The regulated sector companies of fertiliser, power and sugar had contended that their prices are regulated by the government and they dont get paid on time and thus they are not able to pay the banks on schedule and they are not wilful defaulters and cant be treated as such. The circular was challenged by petitioners such as Association of Power Producers and Independent Power Producers Association of India which said it failed to distinguish between genuine and wilful defaulters. They said the circular suffered from non-application of mind and failed to draw a distinction between various forms of stressed assets from different industrial sectors. They contended that under IBC the resolution plan gives then 270 days but the RBI circular has reduced it to 180. The circular if upheldwould have taken several power, sugar and shipping companies to insolvency. However, quashing the circular, the Bench said a generic circular directing banks to take recourse to Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code was beyond the powers of Section 35AA of the Banking Regulation Act. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Sandeep Rana Tribune News Service Chandigarh, April 1 The shocking murder of a young drug inspector inside her office at Kharar has sent shock waves among professionals in this field, who have stressed the need for adequate security. Calling drug inspectors vulnerable to threats, experts and a demoralised drug control fraternity have called for measures such as the wireless system, vehicles, security and a barbed fence around the office for them. Officials often conduct raids to keep a check on spurious drugs and illegal transit and sale of habit-forming drugs and intoxicants in the pharmaceutical business, which is on the rise. Thus, they face a big threat from those dealing in illegal activities, particularly from the drug mafia. A former colleague of the victim and Ropar District Drug Control Officer Balram Luthra said, When Dr Neha Shoree was posted in Ropar, she had conducted raids on assailant Balwinder Singhs shop, whose licence was later cancelled. After the murder, the department is in shock. Officials are in fear and demoralised. The mafia is strong and we have nothing in the name of security. Haryana State Drug Controller Narender Ahuja said, We met teams of the department dealing in drugs in Punjab and found there was fear among them. Officials are in shock and have decided to meet the Health Minister to demand security. Even in Haryana, no security is provided. Dr Girdhari Lal Singhal, former Haryana State Drug Controller, said, Besides raids, drug inspectors also depose as witnesses in courts and there are many important samples stored in drug offices. So, they should be equipped with vehicles, wireless system and security. The mafia is active. Even I used to get threats. Those who compromise go easy and those who do not have to walk the tightrope. Drug officials are shattered and are feeling low. The brave girl was killed in the headquarters, imagine the plight of inspectors posted in a jungle area with a peon only. Government officers should hold regular meetings with them. Experts and those in the profession demanded that the police should join them during raids. Expressing shock over the murder, Ravi Uday Bhaskar, secretary general, All India Drug Control Officers Confederation, said, The situation in many drug control offices across the country is similar where we lack security while discharging official duties. The nature of work also involves raids and investigations against the drug mafia and criminals, but many states do not have enough manpower and machinery to tackle such unscrupulous elements. It is a challenging task for the department to monitor illegal activities. Most drug control departments have increased the strength of women officials. Over 30 per cent of total staff now comprise women and the government should initiate steps to provide a safe working environment to all officers, said a member of the confederation. Dr Neeraj, victim Nehas teacher at NIPER, said, It is tough to stay honest in todays time and it is disgraceful that in our country such brilliant and honest officers have to go through this. Aveek Sen Aveek Sen Journalist working on cyber security and geopolitics of Indias neighbourhood AKSHAY Kumars movie Kesari is about the Battle of Saragarhi, fought between Afghan tribesmen and the 36th Sikhs regiment of the British Indian Army in 1897. While the battle showcased Sikh valour, it served British imperial interests and should not have been glorified. The movie starts off with the narration that following the decline and fall of the Sikh empire, which had extended till Afghan lands, the British took control of the three forts of Lockhart, Gulistan and Saragarhi. From time to time, mullahs (Islamic clerics) would incite Afghan tribesmen to wage jihad. Saragarhi is situated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was known as the North West Frontier Province during the Raj. The area is considered to be occupied territory, and till date Afghanistan does not accept the borders the British drew through Afghan and Pashtun land. The region of the Gandhara civilisation had been predominantly inhabited by the Pashtuns not only during the few centuries after the creation of the modern Afghan state by Ahmad Shah Durrani, but also for thousands of years. The Durand Line border drawn through the Afghan heartland is a colonial British creation and Indians should not be sharing the blame for it. Only its colonial masters are to blame for what a colonial army did. The movie has a scene in which Havildar Ishar Singh (Akshay Kumar) laments that they are a slave army of the British. Though the film doesnt outrightly vilify the other(Afghans), one would still identify with the us (the Sikh regiment) due to the style of the narration. There is token secularism as Sikh soldiers help rebuild a mosque of the local Afghans and the Afridi tribal sardar (head) declares that the pag (turban) of the Sikhs wont be desecrated. During the fighting, Ishar Singh lies half-dead on the ground and a mullah tries to desecrate his turban. Ishar Singh stabs him in the throat and then tells the invading contingent that they could kill him but shouldnt desecrate his holy turban. The Afridi tribal sardar then promises him that they wont defile his turban. In a later scene, the Orakzai tribal sardar tells the Afridi sardar that there isnt enough time to attack the other two forts but he wont return just like that. The Afridi sardar tells him that he may do as he pleases but they shouldnt desecrate the turban of any Sikh. The tribesmen then proceed to burn down sections of the fort and pillage it. But are the Afghan tribesmen shown as honourable only as a masquerade? In an early scene, there is a depiction of a tribal jirga (panchayat) where a mullah sentences a woman to death by beheading for running away from the house of her husband, to whom she was forcibly married. Ishar Singh intervenes and saves her. Here the us versus them characterisation is clear. This scene was unnecessary, if not to project the Afghan tribesmen as savages. It is not unlikely that such practices were prevalent then because these exist even now. But there is also the modern way of life among the Pashtuns, a large number of whom are Left-leaning. The major party in the Pashtun belt of Pakistan, the Awami National Party (ANP), is a Left-leaning progressive party. The Afghan politicians, too, espouse the cause of womens rights. Former Ambassador Rajiv Dogra, who has written a book on the Durand Line and British occupation of Afghan lands, says that let us not confuse a battle with the war. A movie on a specific battle will give the impression that the battle is greater than the war. The valour of the Sikh soldiers of the colonial British army is unquestionable, but it has to be seen in the larger context. The Afghan tribesmen were reacting to the British occupying their lands by forcing Afghan king Abdur Rahman Khan to sign the Durand Line agreement. Moreover, Sikhs and Pashtuns have a history of antagonism. The Sikh empires writ didnt go beyond Peshawar when parts of the Afghan territory were under Sikh rule. The British feared the Pashtun and used the antagonism the Sikhs had for them. This took the form of heroism in this battle. The antagonism carried on till Partition when the Pashtuns and Sikhs were at each others throats. A movie cant span centuries and delve into philosophical issues, but this is the larger context. Human rights activist and advocate Tariq Afghan from Upper Dir, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, questioned why only the ills of Afghan society are shown in such movies. There could be a movie on Khushal Khan Khattak, who fought against Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, says Tariq. Khattak was a warrior, poet, writer, politician, tribal chief and a great military leader of that time. Why not glorify him as he was a strong liberal voice during Aurangzebs reign? Aurangzeb imprisoned him in the Fort of Ranthambore. Why not a movie on Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Frontier Gandhi), who was a close aide of Gandhi and fought for the independence of the subcontinent. In Pakistan, people call us Indian agents because we are the followers of Frontier Gandhi, says Tariq. Many books have been written by Indian authors on Ghaffar Khan, but Bollywood has ignored him and his struggle. This is injustice with Pashtuns who supported the Congress before Independence. Indian soft power is projected across the world by Bollywood, which is immensely popular both in Afghanistan and the Pashtun belt of Pakistan. One wonders why a movie like Kesari has been made. Most people whether in India, Pakistan or Afghanistan have a better sense of history through popular culture rather than through books. As such, the film only serves to pin the blame for British occupation of Afghan lands on Indians. Radhika Ramaseshan Radhika Ramaseshan Senior journalist CONGRESS president Rahul Gandhis decision to contest the Lok Sabha polls from two seats Amethi in Uttar Pradesh and Wayanad in Kerala has been interpreted and projected in opposing ways. The two constituencies are separated by over 2,000 km. Traversing the distance will take a traveller through UP, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka before reaching Wayanad, nestling high up in the Western Ghats. Its not just geography that accentuates the contrast between Amethi and Wayanad. The places might as well belong to different countries politically. Amethi lives in a time warp, vastly unchanged since the Gandhis adopted it as their pocket borough. Rahuls move has been celebrated as an affirmation of Indias plurality, as confirmation of the existence of a geo-political entity that transcends the Hindi-speaking cow belt and enshrines an idea of India thats incompatible with the contemporary tropes of temples, cows and Pakistan. Expectedly, the BJP derided it as an act of fear and cowardice, because Rahul, it claimed, was in for a formidable contest against Smriti Irani, its candidate, and was afraid of losing to her. Rahul is pitted against a Left Democratic Front (LDF) rival in Wayanad and to all intents and purposes, the two sides have braced themselves for as fierce a joust as the one Amethis waiting for. The Congress choice effectively seals whatever prospects there remained of a larger Opposition unity of the secular spectrum. The seeds of discord were sown in the protracted negotiations the Congress and the Left held over the seat-sharing arrangement in West Bengal. Wayanad sealed the fate of the half-hearted move. There may be a grain of truth in the conflicting views over Rahuls decision. However, it is not unprecedented. Indira Gandhi, his grandmother, and Feroze Gandhi, his grandfather, nurtured Rae Bareli, Amethis neighbour, as their Lok Sabha constituency. In 1952 and 1957, Feroze Gandhi was elected from Rae Bareli. He passed away in 1958, after which the seat was held by RP Singh, a Congressman, until Indira Gandhi staged her Lok Sabha debut from Rae Bareli in 1967. She won again in 1971, but lost to Raj Narain of the Janata Party in 1977, in a conclusive verdict against the Emergencys imposition. Indeed, the Congress was obliterated in the North, but held its own in the South. Finding the South more hospitable towards the Congress, Indira Gandhi saw an opening in Karnataka where Congressman DB Chandre Gowda vacated his seat, Chikmagalur, that sits pretty among lush coffee plantations and is every bit as picturesque as Wayanad. Indira won the byelection in October 1978, trouncing the Janata Partys Veerendra Patil by 80,000 votes. Chikmagalur mollycoddled her as its little daughter, the appeal she used when canvassing in the rain, on a bullock cart and an AC-less Ambassador car. The then Karnataka Chief Minister, Devraj Urs, was her principal strategist. History bristles with ironies. A big one was when a year after facilitating Indiras electoral comeback, Urs fell out of favour for taking on Sanjay Gandhi. A smaller one was that Indira loyalist Chandre Gowda joined the BJP in 2008. Adhering to the family tradition, in 1999, Sonia Gandhi contested from two places: Amethi, and Bellary, also in Karnataka and a Congress fief at that time. Bellary was the more riveting battle because Sonia had the BJPs Sushma Swaraj for a contender. A polyglot, Sushma mastered Kannada with the felicity of the other Indian languages that rolled off her tongue. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was her mothers main campaigner. As Sushma made her stump speeches in Kannada, Priyanka began hers with a couple of sentences in the language. Sonia won, but gave up Bellary for Amethi, unlike Indira, who was so enraged with the voters of Rae Bareli that she swore never to return. The Gandhis are not an exception to duopolistic electoral contests. Prime Minister Narendra Modi fought from Vadodara and Varanasi in 2014. The first denoted a bonding with Gujarat, his home state and original political turf. Varanasi re-affirmed the significance of Uttar Pradesh as the abode of Indian Prime Ministers (with notable exceptions like Manmohan Singh) and of the state being the fulcrum of the BJPs Hindutva-centred politics. He romped home in both, but forsook Vadodara for Indias most important pilgrimage hub. How valid is the view that Rahul is jumpy about Amethi and Smriti Irani? Ever since she lost the seat to Rahul in 2014 by a little over one lakh votes, Smriti assiduously nursed the town that was used to the Gandhisbenign feudalism, of the 1950s and 1960s vintage. She leveraged her status in the Modi government to bestow projects and grants on Amethi during frequent visits. The BJP, that never took the constituency seriously and lacked an organisational backup, got its act together. In the 2017 UP Assembly polls, the BJPs aggregate vote share in Amethis five Assembly segments was 3,45,280, marking a rise of 44,500. The Congress, then in alliance with the Samajwadi Party, secured 2,36,458 votes from the combined Assembly seats and registered a drop of 1.72 lakh. Even in 2014, when Smriti hit Amethis roads, the Congress turned to the SPs local legislators for a lifeline that they willingly provided. After five years marked by Smritis sorties and the Centres largesse, Rahul probably has reasons not to be smug about his old constituency. But objective circumstances cannot be ignored when taking a holistic perspective. The Congress never performed well in Amethis Assembly segments despite winning the Lok Sabha elections, not even when Priyanka campaigned. It was as though the voter had mentally drawn a distinction between a national and a provincial election and made mutually exclusive choices. In 2019, Rahul will seek votes as the Congress president who would not mind becoming the Prime Minister if the Congress comes up trumps. The Bahujan Samaj Party is unlikely to put up a candidate, though its president, Mayawati, has had a share of run-ins with the Gandhis lately. If Rahul triumphs in Wayanad and Amethi, will he emulate his grandmother or mother when he gives up one? rchopra@tribunemail.com New York, April 2 An Indian national has been sentenced to eight years and eight months in prison for participating in an India-based call centre fraud in which operators impersonated US tax officials to extort money from Americans. Federal Judge Virginia Hernandez Covington, who sentenced Nishitkumar Patel on Monday in Tampa, Florida, also fined him $200,000 and ordered the forfeiture of cash and his Land Rover. He and four others--two of them Indians--had earlier admitted their guilt in court. Patel and his accomplices used the India-based call centre to make calls to people in the US pretending to be tax officials from the Internal Revenue Service and claiming that they owed taxes, threatened the victims with arrest, according to court filings. They ordered the victims to buy prepaid cash cards to pay what they claimed were back taxes and sent people to collect the cards, deposit the payments into bank accounts they opened and turn over the money after deducting a commission, court papers said. One of the co-conspirators, Alejandro Juarez, was earlier sentenced to 15 months in prison, while Hemalkumar Shah, Sharvil Patel and Brenda Dozier are awaiting sentencing. When they were charged in November, officials said law-enforcement officers executed a search warrant for Nishitkumar Patels home and seized $50,000 in cash, hundreds of bank and wire transfer receipts, and 20 electronic devices. The charges filed in court described Nishitkumar Patel, 31, Sharvil Patel, 22, and Hemalkumar Shah, 27, as domestic managers for the fraud who hired people to collect the payment cards. India-linked fraudulent tax extortion through threatening phone calls are rampant. In October 2016, five Indian companies and 56 people, most of them of Indian descent, were charged in a Texas federal court with involvement in a similar racket. Last October, 21 people--at least 20 of them of Indian origin--received sentences ranging between four and 13 years, with orders of deportation for most of them and revocation of US citizenship of one. Three others of Indian descent were also convicted earlier in the same fraud. Jeff Sessions, who was the attorney general at that time, had said: The stiff sentences imposed this week represent the culmination of the first-ever largescale, multi-jurisdiction prosecution targeting the India call centre scam industry. IANS harinder@tribunemail.com A case of medical negligence is made out when the common cataract laser surgery that is meant to restore an elderly patients vision acuity, instead, threatens to turn his world dark in his twilight days. It is grossly so when multiple cases of botched eye operations are reported. Last month witnessed this unfortunate medical shocker. More than 60 eye patients are suffering unforeseen consequences of bungled cataract surgeries conducted at two government hospitals in Kurukshetra and Bhiwani. This is unforgivable as we have failed to learn from such horrifyingly frequent errors. A couple of weeks earlier, at least five patients lost sight because even basic operation theatre care was not maintained in a Mumbai hospital. The memory of December 2014, when 60 patients had gone blind after surgery in Gurdaspur, is agonisingly fresh. Haryana has done well to halt eye surgeries in its hospitals till the root of the problem is identified. An inquiry will fix responsibility for the cause of the shocking infections. But to be effectively deterrent, the large scale of the tragic incident must open the governments eyes to the need for taking strong action against those found guilty. The cavalier attitude of doctors, suppliers of medicine and medical equipment or those responsible for the cleanliness and sterility of OTs is inexcusable. A harsh penalty to the culprits can go a long way in ensuring that a little extra precaution is taken to avoid such botch-ups. Even as reports of irate patients blaming medical authorities for carelessness abound, those of nailing the guilty and taking disciplinary action against them are rare. As per the data of the Medical Council of India, from 2012 to 2018, only 167 errant doctors were blacklisted temporarily. Their medical licence is generally suspended for short periods of three to five months. They are soon seen back in business since hardly anyone has been barred from practice permanently. It would be unfortunate if the poor patients continued to be fated to monetary compensations, with nothing in sight to shake the system out of apathy. harinder@tribunemail.com The Congress decision to field Rahul Gandhi from Wayanad in north-east Kerala, bordering both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, might have ruffled feathers in the ragtag Opposition camp, but its in line with the partys tendency to look southwards whenever the chips are down. Decimated in the 1977 General Election, Indira Gandhi had chosen Karnatakas Chikmagalur to script a dramatic comeback a year later. In 1999, Sonia Gandhi had defeated BJP veteran Sushma Swaraj from another Karnataka constituency, Bellary. Its unreasonable on the BJPs part to accuse Rahul of picking a safe seat as he presumably fears a loss from his pocket borough, Amethi. For the record, Narendra Modi had contested from Varanasi as well as Vadodara in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections even though the saffron surge was all-pervasive at that time. Kerala is ruled by the Left Democratic Front, whose biggest constituents are the CPM and the CPI. The defiant CPI has ruled out the withdrawal of its candidate against the Congress president, while accusing Rahul of weakening the Oppositions anti-BJP fight through an avoidable contest. The Aam Aadmi Party, too, wants to know why the Gandhi scion preferred Left-controlled Kerala to Karnataka or Tamil Nadu. With Rahul in the battleground, the party hopes to counter Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayans strategy to consolidate the Lefts position by dividing Congress voters over the Sabarimala protests. As the party is on a shaky ground in most northern states, primarily Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, the objective of strengthening its electoral base in south India makes sense. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka together account for 87 Lok Sabha constituencies. The Congress is eyeing the lions share of these seats in its bid to regain power at the Centre. The failure to reach an understanding with the Left on seat-sharing in West Bengal has also made it easier for the party to take the southern plunge under Rahuls command. However, placating prospective allies will test the Grand Old Partys mettle. editorial@tribune.com Ravi S Singh Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 1 Former Chief Minister and state coordination committee head Bhupinder Singh Hooda on Monday said the Congress would win all 10 parliamentary seats in the state. Congress nominees for the state will be finalised by the end of this week, Hooda told mediapersons here. He said all senior party leaders in the state should contest the Lok Sabha elections if need be. He said the Congress manifesto for the elections would not have a separate section on the state. He said it would be all-encompassing and address all sections of society, including farmers. He said the document would be released on Tuesday. He said the party had been buoyed by the public response the six-day parivartan yatra received. He said it had touched all parliamentary constituencies and all districts except Panchkula and Ambala. All sections of society gave an enthusiastic support to the yatra, showing their disappointment with the BJP governments at the Centre and in the state, Hooda said, rubbishing reports of factionalism in the Haryana Congress. Asked about the possibility of contesting the Lok Sabha election, he said he would go by the decision of the party. He said all senior leaders of the party should contest. Electoral politics defines a political party. Electoral battles are strong markers of its standing. When the party needs them, it is the duty of senior leaders to respond to the call, Hooda said. The Congress will do an encore of the 2009 elections, in which it won nine of the 10 seats, if not all seats. The BJP in Haryana is sensing defeat, he added. editorial@tribune.com Our Correspondent Kaithal, April 1 Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Monday said the Nehru-Gandhi family had given the slogan garibi hatao, but could not do so. He claimed that the number of poor had increased despite their slogan as they did nothing concrete to remove poverty. He said this while addressing a vijay sankalp rally in Siwan village, 10 km from here. He said Rahul Gandhi was trying to mislead the people by giving the same slogan, but would not succeed as people would give his party a befitting reply in the Lok Sabha poll. He said the country was safe in the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had given a free hand to security forces to deal with terrorists and other anti-national elements. He claimed that terrorists were in panic and fear of the forces as they were facing bullets and failing in their designs. He claimed that the Prime Minister was playing an important role in the international sphere and the voice of India was now being heard the world over with respect. He said countries had extended support to India in the Security Council and other platforms and this had added to the dignity of the nation. He said the government had taken a number of steps to uplift the economic condition of the people, including the poor and farmers. He asserted that many public welfare schemes had been introduced by the NDA government. Meanwhile, addressing the BJPs vijay sankalp rally in Gurugram, Khattar said what made their team unique was their commitment to public welfare rather than any person or ideology. Opposition parties are relentlessly criticising us, but seeing such gatherings, I dont feel the need to issue any clarification. We have our achievements to highlight and plans to discuss, he said. These parties have nothing concrete to say so criticism is their agenda for the campaigning. It will not lead them anywhere, he asserted. We will not talk about what others have not done or how they have failed. We will seek your vote with confidence in what we have done and are trying to achieve, said Khattar. Every resident, be it soldier, farmer, teacher, housewife or unemployed, knows that we fulfilled the dreams lying pending for decades, he claimed. editorial@tribune.com Nitish Sharma Tribune News Service Ambala, April 1 Janta Akali Dal (JAD) president Jagdish Singh Jhinda will contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections as an Independent candidate from the Kurukshetra Lok Sabha constituency. Speaking to The Tribune over the phone, Jhinda said, I have decided to contest the Lok Sabha election as an Independent candidate from Kurukshetra constituency. There is a lot of pressure on me to contest the elections. To honour the sentiments, I will definitely file my nomination and contest as an Independent candidate. So far, there are no plans of having an alliance or extending support to any other political party in the parliamentary election. The JAD is yet to be registered as a political party with the Election Commission of India. The JAD had earlier announced that it would contest four Lok Sabha seats Ambala, Karnal, Kurukshetra and Sirsa and 29 Assembly seats in 11 districts of the state, but it is unlikely to contest the elections as Jhinda has not been keeping well. He had floated the JAD in June 2017. Jhinda is also the president of the Haryana Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (HSGMC). editorial@tribune.com Our Correspondent Hamirpur, April 1 Merger of Pakistan in India is inevitable, said Indresh Kumar, coordinator of Muslim Rashtriya Manch and member of executive committee of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) here on Monday. He was addressing a state-level seminar of Rashtriya Muslim Manch. He said Pakistan was on the verge of division into seven parts and all these parts would merge with India. He said the leaders of Pakistan must understand that the development of their country was only possible if they participate in the peace process in the region. He said hate was never a solution and Pakistan must stop sheltering terrorists on its soil. He said Pakistan leaders must understand that China was trying to capture and use Pakistan as its tool to meet its notorious designs. He said Baluchistan and Sind were fighting for freedom from Pakistan and migrants from India there were demanding a separate state there. Advocating BJPs achievement Indresh Kumar said the BJP had taken major decisions to improve the life of Muslims in the country. The BJP government increased the quota of Haj pilgrims, banned Triple Talaq and started schemes to educate the Muslims and connected them to the mainstream, he said. On the issue of Babri Masjid, he said, it was never there and even namaz was never recited there, hence it was never an issue. 5 editorial@tribune.com Ravinder Sood Palampur, April 1 The state Mining Department made tall claims that there is no illegal mining going on in Jaisinghpur area of Palampur region, but in reality, large scale illegal mining is going on unchecked in the Beas and its tributaries. Dozens of trucks, earth-moving machines and tractor trailers can be seen extracting mining material from the Beas 24x7 in most unscientific manner. Illegal mining in Jaisinghpur has caused extensive damage to 33kV transmission lines passing through the bank of Beas River near Lambagaon. The steel structure of the transmission lines is on the verge of collapse as its foundation has faced heavy damage. Besides, drinking water supply lines have also suffered damage. On the request of local residents and panchayat pradhans, The Tribune team on Monday visited Jaisinghpur and Lambagaon areas, notorious for illegal mining. It was seen that large-scale illegal mining was going unchecked during the day as well. It seems no government agency exists to check the heavy loss being caused to the state exchequer on a daily basis. Residents lodged strong protest over the lackadaisical attitude of the state agencies, who had allowed the mining mafia to loot the rich mineral wealth of the state in the broad daylight. Hundreds of residents, including Parkash Chand Rana, former panchayat pradhan of Talwar, and Mahila Mandal Pradhan Maya Devi, said hundreds of acres of fertile land had gone barren because of illegal mining. Despite the fact that we have time and again called on the district administration and local authorities to check illegal mining and save our land from turning barren, no one has come to our rescue. The mafia has dug deep trenches in the area to extract stones from our land, which has resulted in the killing of dozens of animals, who often fall in these trenches. No compensation has been paid to us as the Mining Department is hand in glove with the mafia, villagers alleged. Meanwhile, SDM, Jaisinghpur, Ashwani Sood said: A massive campaign has been launched against the mining mafia. The police have registered a number of cases. Dozens of vehicles have been seized. On the request of villagers, the demarcation of land has also being done to identify the leased areas given by the government to stone crushers. I have also directed the Mining Officer, Kangra, to personally visit the affected areas and redress the public complaints. The SDM categorically stated that no one would be spared and he was always here for the public cause. editorial@tribune.com Jalandhar, April 1 The district administration will deploy 243 campus ambassadors appointed under the Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) programme and volunteers of the National Service Scheme (NSS) and cadets of the National Cadet Corps (NCC) to assist persons with disability (PwD) voters so that they can cast their votes in the coming Lok Sabha elections in a hassle-free manner. Addressing a meeting convened to review the arrangements for PWD voters, Additional Deputy Commissioner (Development) Kulwant Singh and ADC (General) Jasbir Singh said nodal officers of the SVEEP programme in all nine Assembly constituencies would ensure complete registration of each PWD voter. They would also monitor the pick and drop facility for such voters on the day of polling (May19) personally. They said nodal officers would also create awareness in their respective areas through the NSS volunteers and the NCC cadets so that no PwD voter should be left behind. They could take part actively in the election process. They said the administration was already initiating the process to install ramps. It will ensure availability of wheelchairs and helpers at all 1,863 polling booths. They said to avail these faciliti es, the PwD voters could either apply by downloading the PwD app on their mobile phones or could apply through their respective booth-level officers (BLOs) or could call on 1950. They said there were 11,197 PwD voters across the district and the administration was duty-bound to make special arrangements to facilitate PWD voters. District social security officer Varinder Bains, district guidance counsellor Surjeet Lal, tehsildar (elections) Manjeet Singh, PwD icons Vivek Joshi were among those others present. TNS editorial@tribune.com Majid Jahangir Tribune News Service Baramulla, April 1 The Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency will witness a key contest between a trade union leader, a former top police officer and an old warhorse. While nine candidates are in the fray for the Baramulla Lok Sabha seat, where the elections will be held in the first phase on April 11, the real contest will be between senior politician Mohammad Akbar Lone of the National Conference, trade union leader Abdul Qayoom Wani of the Peoples Democratic Party and former Inspector General of Police Raja Aijaz Ali of the Peoples Conference. Former legislator Abdul Rashid Sheikh, alias Engineer Rashid, who is also contesting the elections as an Independent, has added fervour to the poll campaign. The Baramulla constituency, which is spread over 15 Assembly segments in the three border districts of Baramulla, Kupwara and Bandipora, will see a tough contest between the old and new guard, who are eyeing the seat this time. Akbar Lone, 72, who is known for having taken on counter-insurgent Kuka Parrey, had won the Assembly elections of 2002, 2008 and 2014 from the Sonawari constituency in Bandipora district, part of the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency. He is also a former Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. Lone has been at the centre of controversies. During an election campaign recently, he justified raising of pro-Pakistan slogans and said he would abuse anyone who abused Pakistan. This evoked a strong reaction from the BJP, which demanded an FIR against him and his disqualification from the polls. Lone is not new to controversies. In 2018, as the Sonawari MLA, Lone had shouted Pakistan zindabad in the Assembly. As the Speaker, he had a spat with late PDP leader and Shia cleric Molvi Iftikhar Ansari in the Assembly. Lone sahibs biggest advantage is that he has always maintained a cordial relation with workers, said a NC leader from north Kashmir. Besides, we are up against the PDP and the PC, which were the allies of the BJP till last year. People are well aware of how the two parties have destroyed Kashmir. Former IGP Raja Aijaz Ali of the Peoples Conference is a strong candidate. A Pahari from the border area of Uri, Ali is banking on the community votes and the influence of Sajad Lone in Kupwara district, which does not go with the poll boycott. The PC candidate is also eyeing the Shia votes in north Kashmirs Pattan, which was represented by Imran Ansari, now a senior PC leader. It will, however, be interesting to see if Shia voters turn up to vote for the Sunni candidate. The PDP candidate, Qayoom Wani, 59, a senior trade union leader of the state, who joined the party in February, has given the crisis-ridden PDP a new lease of life in north Kashmir. The sitting MP from Baramulla and PDP patron Muzaffar Baig did not seek re-election and is in fact backing Qayoom in the poll campaign. Though new to politics, Wani, who is from Tangmarg, is popular among the teaching community in the constituency. But it will not be easy for him to translate the support he enjoys among the teaching community in north Kashmir into votes. The PDP has been facing constant shocks after the collapse of the PDP-BJP government in June last year. Its two ministers and a legislator from north Kashmir have quit the party. Candidates in fray Mohammad Akbar Lone of the NC Abdul Qayoom Wani of the PDP Raja Aijaz Ali of the PC Haji Farooq Ahamd Mir of the Congress Mohammad Maqbool War of the BJP Jahangir Khan of the JKNPP Engineer Rashid, Independent Javid Ahmad Qureshi, Independent Syed Najeeb Shah Naqvi, Independent Poll plank editorial@tribune.com Suhail A Shah Anantnag, April 1 Four local Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militants were killed and four security forces personnel, including three Army men, were injured in a gunfight between security forces and militants at Lassipora in Pulwama district on Monday morning. The injured personnel are all out of danger and are undergoing treatment at the Armys base hospital in Srinagar. The slain militants have been identified as Zaffar Ahmad Paul of Dangerpora in Shopian, Aqib and Kumar of Imam Sahib in Shopian, Muhammad Shafi Bhat of Sedow in Shopian and Towseef Aziz Yattoo of Lassipora in Pulwama. Yattoo was a category A militant and was active since 2016. The other three had joined militant ranks in late 2018 or earlier this year. Before joining the Lashkar, Kumar was part of the Al-Qaida offshoot Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind. A senior police officer said the operation was launched about 3 am following inputs about a militant hideout in the area. While the area was being cordoned off, the militants, who were hiding, opened indiscriminate fire, triggering a gunfight. The fire was duly retaliated, the police officer said. The officer said three Army men and a policeman were injured in the initial burst of fire by the militants. They were evacuated to a hospital and are stable, he said. The gunfight continued for at least three hours before the militants were eliminated. The police have called the operation a clean one. They said there was no collateral damage. After identification and medico-legal formalities, the bodies of the militants were handed over to the families later in the day. Despite curbs on civilian movement and an internet shutdown in both Pulwama and Shopian districts, thousands of people reached the villages of the militants to offer funeral prayers. A spontaneous shutdown was observed in the two districts. Clean operation, says police rchopra@tribunemail.com Srinagar, April 2 Army Commander, Northern Command, Lt Gen Ranbir Singh, on Tuesday chaired a joint key security meeting of various security agencies to review the current situation in Kashmir and to evolve a strategy for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls. The Northern Army Commander, who is on a two-day visit to the Valley, chaired a joint key security meeting at Badami Bagh headquarters of Chinar Corps, an Army official said. He said the meeting was attended by senior officials of various security agencies, including Army, J&K Police, CRPF and BSF. The meeting reviewed the current situation in the Valley and evolved a strategy for the summer months, including security-related strategy for the forthcoming parliamentary elections, the official said. The Army commander, Northern Command, on Monday began his two-day visit to Kashmir Valley to review the security situation in the backdrop of recent counter-militancy operations and the forthcoming polls. On the first day of his visit, Lt Gen Singh visited the forward areas in the frontier district of Baramulla in north Kashmir, where he was briefed by commanders on the ground about the current situation. During the visit, the Army Commander was briefed on the counter-infiltration grid and operational preparedness of the formations apart from various developmental works being undertaken to improve the life of the people residing in remote areas. PTI editorial@tribune.com Azhar Qadri Tribune News Service Srinagar, April 1 Syed Salahuddin, leader of Kashmirs oldest militant group Hizbul Mujahideen, on Monday accused Pakistan of adopting an apologetic, confused and defensive position in the aftermath of Pulwama attack, which caused irreparable damage to Kashmirs separatist movement. The video statement of Salahuddin who is based in Pakistan for the past nearly three decades where he heads the Hizbul Mujahi-deen and also oversees an umbrella militant association United Jihad Council is reflective of the impact on militants in the aftermath of Pulwama bombing. The suicide car bomb attack on February 14, which killed nearly 40 CRPF personnel, had sparked a chain of events, including Indian Air Forces aerial strikes deep inside Pakistan, the first dogfight in nearly five decades, and global pressure on Islamabad to crack down on militants. Pakistan authorities should have adopted an aggressive approach instead, they adopted an apologetic, confused and defensive position which caused irreparable damage to Kashmirs cause, Salahuddin said in a video which appeared on social media sites. The stern statement by Salahuddin, who heads a deeply pro-Pakistan militant group, follows a significant policy rollback by Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan who last month said there was no room for jihadi outfits and jihadi culture in Pakistan. Salahuddin said Pakistan cannot bracket Kashmirs separatist struggle with terrorism. We want to say that in the name of terrorism, crackdown cannot be launched against those who are helping the Kashmir cause, he said. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Srinagar, April 1 National Conference vice-president Omar Abdullah on Monday described the laws that guarantee the states special status as the articles of faith and promised that his party would not allow anyone to fiddle with them. In 1947, some assurances were given to us in the form of securing our identity. The assurances were for all times, he said during an election rally in Bandipora district on Monday. Omar said the recent remarks by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and BJP president Amit Shah to abrogate Article 35A and Article 370 the laws which guarantee the states special status were uncouth. Let me put it across that we wont allow that to happen. Article 370 and Article 35A are the articles of faith for us, Omar said. The former CM said the parliamentary elections were significant since they will have a direct bearing on the special status of the state. The states accession with the Union of India was accomplished in lieu of various constitutional safeguards for the state and if the safeguards are tempered with, the entire scheme of accession will be under question, he said. Omar said Jammu and Kashmir was the only state that had executed its accession with the Union of India after securing itself certain constitutional safeguards. We are not like any another state of India. Every other state got merged with the Union of India. We joined our hands with the Union on certain conditions unlike other states of India, he said. Omar said his party would fight any attempt that is aimed at fiddling with our states status. We wont let anyone assail our special status. On the contrary, we will strive to get back what was infringed upon. We will work to get back the coveted posts of Sadr-e-Riyasat and Prime Minister for our state, he said. laxmi@tribune.com In the run-up to the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, The Tribune launches a special series to revisit the epochal tragedy that shaped the course of the freedom struggle Vishav Bharti Tribune News Service Amritsar, April 1 Tek Chands grandfather took a bullet in the chest a century ago when Gen Reginald Dyers troops fired at peaceful protesters on April 13, 1919. He and his father went unrecognised as kin of freedom fighter for 90 years, but he took it all in his stride. What upsets him today is the admission by the Amritsar district administration and the Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Trust that they dont have a list of the martyrs descendants. Eh ki drama hai? Tek Chand asks. He is the grandson of Khushi Ram, whose name appears at serial number 32 on the original list of martyrs. He leads a life of penury in one of the many serpentine lanes of Chowk Pasia. Have we ever asked them for anything? Why do they treat us like beggars? he asks and starts flipping through an old file. He then brings out a laminated paper, and says: Read this! Its a certificate issued by the Department of General Administration of the Punjab Government in 2010. It reads: Tek Chand is the grandson of Khushi Ram, who got martyred at Jallianwala Bagh. This certificate is issued to him as kin of the martyr. He is one among those who have valid certificates to prove they are genuine descendants of the martyrs. However, it seems no effort has been made to contact them ahead of the centenary of the massacre. What further proof do they want? he wonders. Last week, the local authorities had claimed that they didnt have any list of the descendants of the martyrs, so it was difficult to honour them. However, The Tribune team came across three such cases in which both certificates as well as identity cards were issued by the Department of General Administration. In 2007, the state government had recognised the martyrs of 1919 as freedom fighters. Sunil Kapur, grandson of martyr Wasoo Mal, has a long list of names and addresses of the martyrs descendants. The government must tell us what efforts it has made to contact us or others, he asks. Former chairman of the National Commission for Minorities Tarlochan Singh, recently inducted as a member of the Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Trust, accepts that had the efforts started well in time, the situation could have been avoided. The apathy has left Tek Chand and others bitter about the centenary commemoration. Satpal Sharma and Mahesh Behal, grandsons of Amin Chand (No. 310) and Hari Ram (No. 19), respectively, have similar certificates, but none of them has been contacted by the government. They need not worry. I am 82 and wont ask for a government job, Sharma mocks. Mahesh Behal, president of the Shaheed Parivar Samiti, says his grandfather Hari Rams picture hangs in the Trust secretarys office. He just needs to turn around. Governments List of 501 The Punjab Government and Amritsar administration have furnished the list of martyrs on various occasions, including before High Court, where they claimed having a list of 501 who were killed, injured or went missing on April 13, 1919. Titled Kacha File Register No. 117, it was prepared on November 12, 1919. TNS laxmi@tribune.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 1 Ahead of the LS polls, Facebook today removed 687 pages and accounts linked to the Congress, saying these accounts engaged in coordinated inauthentic behaviour by creating fake accounts and peddling misrepresentations. The Congress, however, denied association with the development, saying none of the deleted pages was partys official page or run by its verified accounts. Congress spokesman Manish Tewari said the party had sought details of deleted material and would respond after a proper scrutiny. Facebooks unprecedented move comes at a time when its facing worldwide pressure to prevent political use of its platform. The firm is fresh from the Cambridge Analytica controversy that erupted in the US in which Facebook was accused of allowing its platform to be used for influencing voters. Nathaniel Gleicher, head of Cybersecurity Policy at Facebook, said: We removed 687 Facebook pages and accounts for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behaviour in India. The individuals behind this activity used fake accounts, the majority of which had already been detected and suspended by our automated systems, and joined various groups to disseminate their content and increase engagement on their own pages. The page admins and account owners typically posted about local news and political issues, including topics like the upcoming elections, candidate views, the INC and criticism of political opponents. While the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our review found that it was connected to individuals associated with an INC IT cell. The company, which has 300 million users in India, said it was working to stop coordinated inauthentic behaviour. We dont want our services to be used to manipulate people. Were taking down these pages and accounts based on their behaviour, not the content they posted. We removed two separate and unrelated networks of pages, groups and accounts that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behaviour on Facebook and Instagram in India. The first was linked to individuals associated with the INC IT cell, and the second was connected to individuals associated with an Indian IT firm, Silver Touch, Gleicher said. Silver Touch was recently hired by the Congress for its campaign. It had also created PM Modis NaMo app. Around 2,06,000 accounts followed one or more of the deleted pages, Facebook said, adding that around $39,000 was spent for ads on Facebook with the first running in August 2014 and the most recent in March 2019. The deleted accounts carried election campaign material, mainly anti-BJP posters. Among examples Facebook cited a photo captioned Rahul Gandhis callout for Justice against Modis Injustice, while image text read If a persons income is Rs 5,000, then Congress will credit Rs 7,000 in his account, and another read: They want us to get angry/fight in the name of temple, mosques, but we are not fighting! Thats their defeat. A third instance Facebook cited featured a picture that read, Make the right decision/select the poor Congress party. MNREGA holding 14 million families out of poverty/Modi and BJP had opposed the MNREGA/Now Jaitley, Modi and BJP are opposing the Act of providing Rs 72,000 annually to the poor/Make the right decision. Not official page laxmi@tribune.com Tribune News Service Jammu/Rajouri, April 1 A BSF Inspector and a five-year-old girl were killed, while 18 persons, including five security personnel, injured in heavy shelling by Pakistan on four Indian posts along the Line of Control in Poonch district on Monday morning. Late at night, in fresh Pakistan shelling, a 48-year-old civilian, Shajat, wife of Mohd Yakub of Balnoi village, was killed while three others, including her 13-year-old son Mohd Irfan, were injured. In the exchange of fire in Shahpur, Gulpur, Digwar, Kerni, Mankote and Krishna Ghati sectors in the morning, Sobia Shafiq, 5, of Bandichachian was killed in the Mankote area. BSF Inspector, identified as T Alex Lalminlun of Manipur, was killed in Krishna Ghati sector along the LoC. At least 13 civilians and five security officials, including an Army jawan and four BSF jawans, received injuries. The injured security personnel included BSF Head Constable Raj Pal Panwar and Constables Ajay Tiwari and Vijender Sharma. Sepoy Bahadur Singh of an RR unit, attached with another unit, was also injured in Dabraj. Around 9 am, troops of Pakistan armys Baloch unit used forward post Kabristan to target Indian forward areas in Gulpur sector in which a civilian, Mohd Sharief, was critically injured. Around 4.30 pm, the Pakistan army again resorted to unprovoked heavy shelling and firing in Gutrian, Qasab and Shahpur areas. This is the fourth consecutive day of ceasefire violation along the LoC by Pakistan. laxmi@tribune.com Jupinderjit Singh Tribune News Service Chandigarh, April 1 The Punjab Police today ordered a probe into allegations that a Khanna police team had in a joint raid with the Income Tax Department and Enforcement Directorate pocketed Rs 6.66 crore that belonged to a business establishment of four Christian priests. Punjab Police chief Dinkar Gupta said he had asked IG (Crime) Praveen Sinha to look into the charges and submit a report at the earliest. Meanwhile, the Khanna police have turned silent with Dhruv Dahiya, SSP, not responding to either phone calls or messages. The Khanna police had claimed to have recovered unaccounted money totalling Rs 9.66 crore from six persons, including a couple, during a search at a naka in Doraha. These persons, it claimed, were associated with four priests, including Father Anthony Madaseserry, Father Jose Palakuzha, Father Paul and Father Shine. Father Anthony claimed that the money from various businesses was legal and accounted for and had been taken away following raids on their residences and that the police had under-reported the confiscated money, pocketing nearly Rs 6.66 crore.